Month: November 2015

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*.exe ~ Executions: conversations on code, power & death (version 0.1)

This event in Aarhus, this week, with Wendy Chun and Geoff Cox as ‘keynotes’ looks really good!

Executions: conversations on code, power & death (version 0.1)

Keynote presenters: Wendy Chun and Geoff Cox

Venue: Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies (AIAS) | Høegh-Guldbergs Gade 6b, bygning 1630, Aarhus

When: December 3rd and 4th, 2015

This event investigates the cultural, material and political implications of execution. Software permeates our environment. We co-exist in an increasingly datafied present in which algorithms and abstract coded processes execute across different scales, materialising and operating at the micro and macro levels of our actions.

The aim of this event is to open up the concept of execution, both from a particular perspective of code and its execution, and more generally towards a wider discussion in relation to datafied culture and everyday life. How can we understand the affective, embodied, performative, programmed processes of execution in the world today? By gathering together researchers working with diverse artistic practices, we hope to encourage a critical curiosity and engagement with the theme of execution.
Topics will include:

execution as power / execution as decision / execution as performed instruction set / execution as enunciation / execution as critique / execution as temporal performance / execution as participation / execution as cruelty / indigestion/incorporation as execution / tuning as execution
In autumn 2015 and spring 2016, two-day events will take place (in Aarhus, Denmark and Malmö, Sweden respectively) that include keynote talks by Wendy Chun (Brown University) and Geoff Cox (Aarhus University), as well as workshops on the theme of execution.

These events are instantiations of an on-going discussion by the critical software thing group, a collection of researchers with a common interest in exploring, reflecting on and working with code.

See the dedicated wiki for more…

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Projecting a genuine future for the living? On Latour & Stiegler comments after the Paris attacks

I was quite surprised at how quickly the translation of the short interview with Bernard Stiegler in le Monde spread on twitter, which is not usual for my posts…

Anyway, I have been struck by a similarity in ethos between the comments made by Bernard Stiegler in his interview and the commentary provided by Bruno Latour in an op-ed (translated by Jane Kuntz) for Reporterre, entitled “The Other State of Urgency” [via Installing (Social) Order].

It is an ethos of calling for the casting-off of a short-termism or ‘death-wish’ (pace Latour) focussed on (inadequately mitigating) destruction–destruction of states, of peoples and of our planet–towards affirming what Stiegler calls a ‘genuine’ future and what Latour sees as a taking of fate into our our hands. One might see it as a loosely vitalist ethos: an affirmation of life and its pluri-potency.

It seems to me significant that both Latour and Stiegler frame the issue in relation to the anthropocene and the COP21 talks being held in Paris. For both of them, the affirmation of a ‘genuine’ future entails combining stances towards ecological, economic, political and scientific atmospheres. Such an affirmation of a sustainable path towards a future of the living is set in contra-distinction to a rhetoric of war, which both thinkers reject in their own ways. To submit to war, in the manner of the French government, is to submit to a short-term imperative to (re)act, but to act for whom and to what ends is a question both Latour and Stiegler find troubling. It is analogous to government via catastrophism – such forms of reaction are already presumed in the mode of ‘normal’ operation: the ‘everywhere war’ and ‘state of exception’ is the new ‘normal’.

Who could argue against an affirmation of hope? I certainly would not. Yet, while there is plenty of diagnosis of the ‘state of urgency’, we are left to ponder: what is to be done?

I don’t think I buy Stiegler’s eurocentric call for policy, it is too easy to see how–even with the best of intentions–this would slip into the kind of technocratic malaise that has buggered up the Mediterranean EU countries. Yet, at least Stiegler attempts to offer strategies – and I think the wider outlining of a political-economics of contribution and of a kind of ‘neganthropy‘, while somewhat grandiloquent, remain inspiring. I would be very curious to see what Latour would suggest in order to “invent demonstrations more innovative than yet another march from Place de la République to Place de la Nation.”

It is, of course, excruciatingly hard to offer strategies for action – as Zizek likes to quip: we can see why it has been suggested that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than an end to the ideological milieu of capitalism. Working for a ‘genuine’ future hurts, but as both Latour and Stiegler demonstrate: it remains the task at hand.

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Stiegler on Daesh and ‘the age of disruption”

I offer a here a quick translation of an interview for Le Monde published past week with Bernard Stiegler, following the attacks in Paris in which he addresses Daesh/ISIS within the context of his conceptualisation of ‘disruption’, which is the context of his forthcoming book [Dans la Dusruption ~ “In the Age of Disruption”].

Only by planning a genuine future can we fight Daesh

The philosopher Bernard Stiegler develops this thesis in his forthcoming book: “In the Age of Disruption”.

Interview by Margherita Nasi.

For the philosopher Bernard Stiegler “war is economic”. The collapose of employment egenders a dispair that in turn leads to violence. “There is no future without a fundamental reversal of economic value”, he explains.

Since the attacks of the 13th of November the President of the Republic insists” “We are at war”, do you recognise yourself in such a war?

No. What is this “we”? They are at war, not me. War is economic, it is theirs and it creates casualties, including me, who cannot sleep at night, not because of terrorists but because of a lack of future for my children. This is not a war against Daesh, as they suggest, but a global economic war, which takes us into civil war if we do not combat it.

Employment will collapse, especially amongst young people, and dispair breeds violence. We no longer produce reasons for hope today. The attacks of the 13th of November were suicide attacks, which is not insignificant – suicide is developing around the world, especially amongst those young people who know they will not work for a long time.

Both Sarkozy and Hollande failed to provide any kind of prospects for these young people. It is against this stupidity, this madness, that I am at war. A war within myself as well: we are all subject to this tendency to find scapegoats, not to think and not to care. This is barbarism, and that is exactly what Daesh wants: to create civil war. There will be more attacks if we do not change our politics. This is the context of my next book ” In the Age of Disruption”.

What do you mean by disruption?

Disruption is a phenomenon of accelerating inovation which is the foundation of a strategy developed in Silicon Valley: it is a drive to go faster than societies in order to impose upon them models for the destruction of social structures, rendering public powers powerless It is a strategy that tetanises the opponent. In my book, I analyse a text signed by Abu Bakr Al-Naji, as summarised by Ignance Leverrier [former diplomat and journalist], that defines a collective, including former officers of Saddam Hussein that became Islamists. It is a sort of Daesh manual, in the image of corporate bibles that detail the rules to set up a franchise. This book explains how Daesh actors should seize power. One must create chaos and thus exploit the need for some kind of authority.

I compare this strategy with that of the website “Les Barbares attaquent” [The barbarians are coming], founded by Nicolas Colin, a former tax inspector known for his report on the tax system and the digital economy, in which hie highlighted the inadequacy of the tax system for dealing with digital companies, which he describes as the ‘four horsemen of the apocalypse’, in this case GAFA [acronym for: Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple]. He has since moved to the other side, from public service into the economy which he described as so damaging, to create an investment fund that raises money to practice disruption on the French. Yet, repeating the strategy of GAFA, he can only extend their ecosystem and intensify the colonisation of Europe, wrecking transport, housing, education–all sectors–through new models such as Uber. However, such disruptive practices destroy the social balance, what [German Philosopher] Theodor W. Adorno anticipated by speaking in 1944 of a “new form of barbarism” in relation to the cultural industries.

It is not by declaring war on Daesh that this takes place. This declaration is one way of absolving oneself of one’s own responsibilities by scapegoating people that have become extremely dangerous and who we have co-produced with Daesh.

This radicalisation is thus built on the ruins of ultraliberalism?

Yes. We turn radicalism into a question of religion, and this is outrageous, Most recruits of radical Islam have no religious culture. It is not religion in question but despair. Richard Dur, the murderer of eight members of the Nanterre Council in March 2002, prefigures his actions by speaking about his feelings not existing: he wanted to become somebody by these actions.

In 2012 you launched a call for a global economic peace treaty, is this still a possible contemporary solution for eradicating barbarism?

We need to open out a debate in Europe, take things head-on, since the birth of the web we have all been losing. Exploited by the kinds of disruption practised by GAFA, digital technologies have accentuated the environmental toxicity that has been growing since the beginning of the anthropocene – an era in which humans have become the major geological factor – in terms of the climate, the atmosphere and in mental terms.

There is no future without a fundamental reversal of economic value: only the transition to an economy producing sustainable forms of value will overcome the challenges that are the subject of the COP21 next week.

We must launch a new European policy rather than aligning ourselves with the American model that is disruptive and suicidal/ We must invent a new Web in the service of viable marcoeconomic model, rather than developing a completely ruinous economy of data. These are the themes of the “Conversations about a new industrial world”, orgainsed at the Pompidou Centre on the 14th and 15th of December. Only by planning [projetant] a genuine [véritable] future for the planet can we combat Daesh, in other words to combat despair.

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Reblog> Diverse Economies and Livable Worlds

This looks interesting, via Nicholas Crane :

Diverse Economies and Livable Worlds

As part of an infrastructure for the construction of what Mark Purcell recently called ‘Joyful Geography,’ the editors of the Diverse Economies and Livable Worlds Book Series (with University of Minnesota Press) are soliciting book proposals. The recent Making Other Worlds Possible (2015) indicates a direction for the series. I cut and paste Kevin St. Martin’s announcement of the series below.

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Diverse Economies and Liveable Worlds Book Series 

University of Minnesota Press

The Diverse Economies and Liveable Worlds Book Series offers a space where the theoretical and political conversations opened up by an anti-capitalocentric vision of economy can take place. The core concerns of this series are diverse economies as both a mode of inquiry and as actually existing, potential, and transformative economies. The series is explicitly focused on undoing our understanding of capitalism as a conceptual container. Thinking outside this container is what allows us to veer from the singularity, inequities, and degradations associated with ‘capitalism’. The Diverse Economies research program initiated by J.K. Gibson-Graham has carved out a new intellectual territory for interrogating and performing ‘more than capitalist’ worlds that is attracting many scholars. At the same time, on the ground, a plethora of movements are forging forms of post-capitalist politics that imagine and enact liveable worlds in which economies are refocused on meeting the needs of people and the planet. The series will attract established and emerging scholars who are pushing at the boundaries of thinking about how we represent and enact ‘the economy’, how we recognize and theorize economic diversity, and what a post-capitalist politics here and now might be.

The editors of this Book Series are J.K. Gibson-Graham k.gibson[at]westernsydney.edu.au, Maliha Safri msafri[at]drew.edu , Kevin St. Martin kstmarti[at]rci.rutgers.edu, and Stephen Healy stephen.healy[at]gmail.com.

We welcome book proposals from a wide range of fields including Architecture and Design, Anthropology, Assemblage and More than Human Studies, Business and Organization Management, Communications and Media, Economics:, Environmental Humanities, Geography, Philosophy, Political Science, Regional Planning, Sociology and Women’s Studies.

For more information please contact the Series Editors.

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“The dictatorship of data” (on BBC R4)

Just caught up with a programme aired on BBC Radio 4 last week called “The Dictatorship of Data“, presented by their Security Correspondent Gordon Corera. The role of the presenter certainly inflects the tone of the programme. It focuses on the growth in the collection of data, as the wholesale capture of data exhausts and meta-data from our devices and public platforms, and thus how that collection and then aggregation both allows and then presents problems for forms of surveillance.

It is an interesting programme insofar as it offers a general introduction to several key issues. The discussion of the geopolitical responses to the uses of social media platforms and how Russia in particular wants to capture some of that capability (particularly in relation to SORM) is good, and it mostly draws on the authors of a book that sounds good: “Red Web“. Likewise, there’s some entertaining and perhaps disquieting discussion of ‘The Hacking Team‘, purveyors of malware to governments. Again, this is understandably figured in geopolitical terms.

However, I’d say it is slightly wide of the mark in terms of the discussion offered of the prospects of social media enabling some kind of authoritarianism. The way it is discussed takes as it’s assumption that people are faithfully reporting their actual opinions, ‘real’ events and so on and that they are individuals (and not bots) – as though social media are some kind of unproblematic ‘social sensing platform’. Now, some will argue that there is a way to somehow ‘solve’ the ‘biasing’ of the sample represented by a given social media platform’s population and I’m no statistician so… meh. I remain skeptical that any kinds of claim about ‘representivity‘ are particularly meaningful.

I think those who want a more nuanced viewpoint on some of these issues probably ought to checkout Louise Amoore‘s The Politics of Possibility and her papers following on from this, likewise it’s worth checking out both David Murakami Wood and Francisco Klauser‘s work on surveillance too (of course, there’s more – but you have access to a search engine 😉 ).

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Does critical geography need a shock to thought? On Purcell’s ‘joyful geography’

Over on his blog Path to the Possible Mark Purcell has written a thoughtful and interesting piece diagnosing a slip into a kind of cynicism, or perhaps a rut in ‘critical’ thinking in geography, that the predominant disposition of criticality in ‘critical geography’ is of being against– :  “against colonialism, against capitalism, against racism, etc.”.

Purcell argues that a negative consensus of what constitutes ‘criticality’ has developed that has created an orthodoxy of negation:

“I worry that we have become inordinately attached to singing in this key, that we have become unable to do anything other than cancel what we oppose.”

Indeed, this echoes a criticism of the over-coding of the various readings of what one might mean by ‘neo-liberalism’ by James Ferguson in Antipode that, as Clive Barnett summarises: “identifies a standard style of critique as denunciation of exploitation, inequality and oppression” but that can also be rather limited.

In this way we might understand such an orthodoxy of a perpetuation of an adaption to the contemporary milieu, in the form of a negation of its conditions (such as, for example, labelling everything ‘neoliberalism’) rather than an adoption and then rethinking the practices/processes of the conditions that produce it [I’m riffing on Stiegler’s distinction between adaption (as a tendency towards dis-individuation) and adoption (as a tendency towards co-individuation)]. This ‘orthodoxy of negation’ (as I have chosen to call it) can be characterised as a kind of entropy, a slip from proactive thought into what might be a kind of un-thinking or ‘unreason’  and ‘stupidity’ (as Stiegler has it in States of Shock). Stupidity is a necessary tendency for all of us insofar as it is the precondition for knowledge, but we need a shock to thought in order to reinvigorate our capacities for knowledge. Of course, we are overburdened by shocks (as Naomi Klein outlines in The Shock Doctrine) that appear to arrive with increasing frequency. Rather than submit to simply adapting to the onslaught of ever-more-frequent shocks, following Stiegler’s analysis, we need to engender a therapeutic form of ‘shock’ to our thinking that doesn’t simply confirm a status quo of the orthodoxy of negation.

Reading this together with the argument presented by James Ferguson, who argues:

“what if politics is really not about expressing indignation or denouncing the powerful? What if it is, instead, about getting what you want? … Denunciatory analyses often treat government as the simple expression of power or domination–the implication apparently being that it is politically objectionable that people should be governed at all. But any realistic sort of progressive politics that would seek a serious answer to the question “what do we want?” will have to involve an exploration of the contemporary possibilities for developing genuinely progressive arts of government.”

Thus the habitual ruts of critique that Ferguson calls the “antis” (anti-globalisation, anti-neo-liberalism, anti-privatisation, etc.) in which any exercise of power is considered in some way dubious are, perhaps analogous to the forms of ‘stupidity’ (of entropy) that Stiegler argues against. I am not offering a simple and pejorative sweeping dismissal of any of those so-called “anti–” positions, neither am I making a glib appeal to Marx’s 11th thesis on Feuerbach. Nevertheless, I am suggesting that a more affirmative attitude might be necessary and that we all need to be aware of our own ‘stupidity’ (otherwise there’s simply no hope for individuation!).

I welcome a call for ‘joyfulness’ in research and in ‘critique’, a more affirmative attitude towards the exercise of power in the face of the orthodoxy of negation and all of this reminded me of Clive’s excellent reading of James Ferguson’s paper, upon which some of this post has been based. So, for me (and for what its worth) I guess I would advocate a kind of practical joyfulness – one that aspires to the same precepts of communing, of mutual aid, of solidarity that Purcell discusses in his blogpost and begins from the everydayness of doing geography (as an academic, as a teacher, as an activist and so on).

I’ve hardly slept due to a poorly child but I do think it’s worth reading all of these things I’ve linked here together to formulate a way of moving forward… just my grain de sel”Ž 🙂

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Event> The Politics and Economics of Attention (14/12)

Both Clive Barnett and I will be speaking at the sixth seminar in the Behaviour Change & Psychological Governance series (funded by the ESRC) which is being held at the University of Bristol on the 14th of December.

I’ll be revisiting some of the things Patrick Crogan and I wrote about back in 2012 in the themed issue of Culture Machine we co-edited following an ESF-funded conference on attention in 2010. My move forward is probably being a little more critical in my thinking about what constitutes the process of valuing attention (critically reflecting on why a Labour Theory of Value might not quite fit) and thinking (with the work of Bernard Stiegler) about how the socio-technical systems that attempt to economise (something that gets called) attention are a kind of pharmakon (an indeterminacy, originating from the idea of a drug as both poison and cure). By looking at some examples I hope to offer some suggestions about how we might understand what’s going on (in networked technology systems in particular) when an attempt is made to place a financial value on ‘attention’.

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Reblog> Several Essays on Deleuze at LARB

Keith Harris highlights:

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Reblog> A time for grieving, a time for analysis

Really excellent piece by Adrian Ivakhiv:

A time for grieving, a time for analysis

Sometimes discussions in social media feel like the internal conversations of a person with severe multiple-personality disorder trying hard to give equal voice, or at least free rein, to their many voices. And I find I can agree with all or most of those voices; and at the same time disagree.

In a facebook debate over whether or not it’s okay to grieve more for Paris than for the victims of similar events in Beirut or elsewhere, someone wrote, “How much better off could the world be if we were not wired to respond more viscerally to that which is close and familiar to us, or could reprogram ourselves to feel equally for strangers, and places we’ve never been?”

I agree that it would be better if we could feel – deeply feel – for the stories and experiences of utter strangers, people from cities we’ve learned to think of as the places where “those things happen”: the Beiruts and Baghdads and Kabuls and Jerusalems. And I agree that there’s a valid political point to be made – about colonialism, Eurocentrism, and the like – in the fact that many of us don’t.

But I also disagree, because I can’t imagine a world in which we would be wired not to respond more viscerally to that which is close and familiar to us. That’s what makes us human, and it’s what gives us the capacity to empathize; everything else is abstract. I’ll take real (instinctual) empathy over abstract compassion any day. Even if I will advocate the latter as a half-way step toward developing and expanding the former.

Writing in Vox.com, journalist Max Fisher provides a thoughtful reflection on the Paris-Beirut comparison meme. While he is quite right that the media covered the Beirut bombings, the amount of coverage they received is significantly less. I counted 17 New York Times paragraphs starting on page A6 for the Beirut bombings (the article he cites reflecting on whether they were undercovered or not appeared three days later) – and over 6 full pages, including the entirety of page A1, of the Sunday edition devoted to the Paris attacks.

But the point is that the media tried to cover them, and that media, in a competitive media environment, play up what they believe their readers want to hear. So Fisher’s arguments largely stand, with the caveat that the causality has become somewhat circular: the chicken of “what will people read?” drives the egg of “what should we give them?”, and vice versa.

Something else in his piece strikes me as extremely revealing:

“France has received 6,700 Syrian asylum claims”¦ In response, European and other Western leaders have convened repeated international summits”¦ Lebanon currently hosts 1.1 million Syrian refugees“¦ In response, the world has given some aid but has fallen far short of the United Nations’ annual funding requests.” 

That western readers – those with the money that could make a difference – are tone-deaf to the non-white world is not news. That there are ways we could make much better decisions about these things should also not be news. 

That’s what makes the social and behavioral sciences and the humanities – including studies of how people make sense of global issues and how new media affect those sense-making processes – so important today. We process things the ways our nervous systems like to process things, amplifying certain kinds of threats (such as those posed by people who look different from us, who might be doing deviant things or wanting to move into our communities) and ignoring others (those that seem distant in time and in space). And those with a stake in our processing help that out in ways that benefits their interests.

What can help?  Education, for starters. That’s why our educational institutions, instead of being subjected to neoliberal cost-cutting and money-making pressures (as they are, increasingly), ought to be transformed into the active and engaged learning communities that would transform society from the ground up. 

As someone who teaches at a public research university that prices many students out of its offerings, or at least keeps them in debt for years afterward, I know how that can seem only a dream. But it’s a dream worth working towards. 

In the end, I have felt like citing Ecclesisastes on there being a season for everything. If we grieve for Paris, let us do that with the attention and emotional acuity it deserves. That doesn’t mean we should not have grieved for Beirut, or any other place. But grieving, when it starts, needs its space.

But as soon as we grieve, we render ourselves vulnerable to one pressure or another. So analysis ought to follow soon after.

And if we feel closer to one place than another, it’s a good opportunity to reflect on why that’s the case. I know why I feel for Paris: I’ve been there, have friends there, know and love its history – its revolutions, its artistic and philosophical culture. I would want every city to be a bit like Paris. And I know where my idea of Beirut comes from: when I was growing up, it was synonymous with “divided city,” with bombings, with seemingly senseless loss of life, so it’s not only on my inherited list of cities where “things like that” happen – it defines that list.

But a capacious response to such events calls for extending our analysis to the broader contours and contexts that frame them. In the case of both sets of bombings, that means recognizing that there are ideologies that cannot be accommodated within a pluralistic social body, because they are intended to destroy that pluralism and the respect for difference that must be its foundation. Those ideologies must be met, challenged, defused and neutered. (And before that happens, they must be adequately understood.)

But it also means recognizing that at least some of the grievances that fuel them come not from outside, but from within that same social body. That is why connecting Paris to Beirut is useful and sensible, once the grieving has been given its space. They are connected as points on global vectors, some of which can only be understood through a long and probing historical lens (one that requires conceptual tools of analysis like militarism, colonialism, capitalism, patriarchy, and the like).

No one ever said that the prospect of building a peaceable global civilization will be an easy one. Back in the late Cold War era, there were times when it seemed we couldn’t possibly make it to the year 2000. We (or most of us) did. As we have shifted into an ever more unified world of multiple power centers and egregious resource and wealth imbalances, things have gotten wilder and less predictable.

There’s no going back, because there’s no “there” to go back to. There’s only the way forward – a way that will have to address those imbalances, the desires and struggles they represent, and the ever more precarious ecological frame that encloses them – all at once.

Good luck to that. If there’s an alien civilization that can give us any pointers, we could use them now. Failing with that, the only thing that will carry us through is the belief that it’s possible.

That gives me hope. And it makes me feel even more for the people of Paris, and of Beirut, and of all the other places where it hurts today.

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The problematic imaginative geographies of collective ‘grieving’ on social media

This provocative article “Got a French flag on your Facebook profile picture? Congratulations on your corporate white supremacy” on The Independent‘s website makes for a compelling read.

I think is worth reading alongside the excellent letter from Paris by Judith Butler posted to the Verso blog “Mourning becomes the law” – also a must-read, really:

Mourning seems fully restricted within the national frame. The nearly 50 dead in Beirut from the day before are barely mentioned, and neither are the 111 in Palestine killed in the last weeks alone, or the scores in Ankara. Most people I know describe themseves as “at an impasse”, not able to think the situation through. One way to think about it may be to come up with a concept of transversal grief, to consider how the metrics of grievability work, why the cafe as target pulls at my heart in ways that other targets cannot. It seems that fear and rage may well turn into a fierce embrace of a police state. I suppose this is why I prefer those who find themselves at an impasse. That means that this will take some time to think through.  It is difficult to think when one is appalled. It requires time, and those who are willing to take it with you

A few snippets from The Independent article:

So you want to show solidarity with France – specifically, with those killed in Paris this weekend. If you’re a British person who wants to do that because you feel sympathy and sadness for people who are brutally massacred, regardless of their nationality, then fine. I just hope that you also change your profile picture to a different country’s flag every time people are wrongly killed as the result of international conflicts – for example, during the attack on Beirut in Lebanon just the day before.

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Flags are politically and historically charged symbols (just look at the infamous and aptly self-styled Isis flag itself), symbolising states and representing influence, power, segregation, borders, nationalism and identity – some of the most commonly held reasons for armed conflict. It’s important, before overlaying a flag on your smiling face, to think about this.

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I’m guessing you didn’t feel moved to drape yourself in the Tricolore [sic] until Facebook pushed that option out to you, possibly even until you saw how many people had already snapped it up. But paint-by-numbers solidarity when it’s foisted on you by one of the most powerful companies in the world is simply not the way to help a traumatised nation in shock after murder.

I’d just add that apparently the tricolor overlay implemented by Facebook has a setting that allows the user to automatically switch it off after a given length of time… how convenient.

There has, of course, been some interesting academic and journalistic discussion of what has been referred to as ‘recreational grieving’ and ‘mourning sickness‘ that is cognate to this argument, but the article above puts in sharper relief complex issues concerning the kinds of imaginative geographies that are being (re)produced and performed in response to the incredibly sad and horrific events that took place in Paris last weekend and their aftermath… something Derek Gregory has also written about on his blog.