Maatheas verden

2006-05-26T00:05:00.001+01:00

I do not recommend any legislative action against hermeneutics. I am a liberal person opposed to all unnecessary state limitation of individual liberties. Hermeneutics between consenting adults should not, in my view, be the object of any statutory restrictions. I know, only too well, what it would entail. Hermeneutic speakeasies would spring up all over the place, smuggled Thick Descriptions would be brought in by the lorry-load from Canada by the Mafia, blood and thick meaning would clot in the gutter as rival gangs of semiotic bootleggers slugged it out in a series of bloody shoot-outs and ambushes. Addicts would be subject to blackmail. Consumption of deep meanings and its attendant psychic consequences would in no way diminsh, but the criminal world would benefit, and the whole fabric of civil society would be put under severe strain. Never!
(Ernest Gellner, Anthropology and Politics, 1995)

2006-05-01T22:25:00.000+01:00

"If that man's face was a clock, no one would dare look at it to tell the time"
Anonymous Belgian peasant upon seeing Napoleon

2006-04-26T23:09:00.000+01:00

Praise the lord dental - is that good or bad? Took this picture in Harlem, New York recently.

2006-04-13T15:01:00.000+01:00

Two music videos. One is from Palestine, the other from Brazil. "I am not against peace, peace is against me", says the Palestinian rapper and conveys a similar feeling to the Brazilian O Rappa rapper when he says: "My gun is loaded and pointed at the face of tranquility. Peace without a voice is not peace, it is fear. I don't want to keep the peace just to try to be happy."

The Palestinian situation can also be seen from a class perspective: The rich against the poor. And the Brazilian situation can also be seen from the perspective of race, if not ethnicity: It is black against white.

The Brazilian video: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8281411227180747473&q=o+rappa&pl=true

The Palestinian video: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7788337296802591616&q=jihad+rap&pl=true

2006-04-12T00:30:00.000+01:00

2006-03-12T22:33:00.000Z

"That was not funny. You should be ashamed!"

2006-03-11T20:01:00.000Z

Slobo is dead.

A pity in a way because it seems like an easy way to go for him, but on some level might we not still say that justice has been done? I mean, he died in prison being tried for his crimes. I still feel it is an anticlimax of some sort though... If only that trial hadn't taken so long! How long until the first conspiracy theory?

2006-03-02T21:58:00.000Z

Sylvester Stallone about the Vietnam War

"You say I am the Jane Fonda of the Right? Listen, I’m not the right wing. I’m not the left wing. I love my country. I stand for ordinary Americans, losers a lot of them. They don’t understand big, international politics. Their country tells them to fight in Vietnam? They fight. […] The men who fought for us in Vietnam got a raw deal. Their country told them to fight. They did their best! They come home and they’re scorned. People spit at them. […] It left scars, that period, and I’m glad we’ve come out of it."

—Sylvester Stallone

2006-03-01T17:24:00.000Z

Rumsfeld gone soft?

“I don’t know what it means.”
(Rumsfeld September 2003 when asked what he thought of Soft Power.)

“Soft power, in all its manifestations is what is needed and what is appropriate and all of us have to think about, if we are going to navigate through the period ahead…”
(Rumsfeld June 2005 about how to win the war on terror)

The Bush administration seems to be more inclined to prioritising soft power initiatives now. Even US Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld, famous for his contempt for "weakness", seems to have taken soft power into his vocabulary. But to change attitudes to America my guess is that it takes more than public diplomacy. Forbidding the soldiers to bring cameras to Iraq might be a start. Right now I heard someone say they could have the prophet Mohammad doing public relations in the Middle East and it still wouldn't make a difference.

2006-02-24T11:00:00.000Z

Opp med hånda den som ikke tåler en spøk

2006-02-22T18:28:00.000Z

Funny Kosovo music video

Regardless of what the article says that some serbs say; This video is harmless fun.

http://www.aftenposten.no/nyheter/uriks/article1040097.ece

2006-02-21T20:44:00.000Z

Radical Islamism as alienation - how to become a terrorist

"Radical Islamism is a byproduct of modernization itself, arising from the loss of identity that accompanies the transition to a modern, pluralist society." (From John Mueller's The remnants of war)

Maybe this explains why many of the islamists come from Europe, a very modern, pluralist society. And Europe is secular too, a very alienating concept? Like this: As a second generation immigrant to Europe you become lost (like all of us really, only we don't all look to islamism) and you start looking for an identity, maybe you roots or something. And you become an islamist. Simple!

2006-02-20T17:33:00.000Z

Fjortis i en alder av 26

Skal på James Blunt concert. Er det fjortis? Sophie sier han er veldig bra live. Jeg synes det er fin musikk. Også har han vært peacekeeper i Kosovo sånn som meg, så vi har noe til felles liksom. (Der har vi det: Jeg er fjortis.)

2006-02-19T20:49:00.000Z

Iranians as cousins and brothers against the outside world

"The war's supporters seemed to think that democracy was a kind of default condition to which societies reverted once the heavy lifting of coercive regime change occurred, rather than a long-term process of institution-building and reform. While they now assert that they knew all along that the democratic transformation of Iraq would be long and hard, they were clearly taken by surprise." (Francis Fukuyama, Op-ed in New York Times February 19th http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/19/magazine/neo.html?pagewanted=3&_r=2)

I am not overly fond of Fukuyama, but I liked this op-ed. That the Bush administration might have been overly optimistic about the prospects for democracy in Iraq because of how the Cold War ended seems so obvious. The way the Cold War ended under Reagan's tough policies created an expectation that all totalitarian regimes are hollow at the core and will crumble with outside pressure. That kind of thinking seems to dominate international approaches to Iran. But of course the opposite happens to be the case: Outside pressure plays into the hands of the Iranian hardliners and encourages a powerful Iranian nationalism. I lived and worked in Iran for half a year recently and saw this happening for myself. The principle that applies here is not unlike the principle embodied in the famous Arab Bedouin political axiom: "Myself against my brother; my brother and I against my cousins; my cousins and I against the world" (The majority of Iranians are not Arabs, but there is a lot more of Arab influence on Iranian culture than most Iranians like to admit). Iranians will complain a lot in between themselves, but as an outsider you are not entitled in their eyes to make criticisms, and such criticism will often offend. Outside pressure on Iran only makes the Iranians rally around their national leaders and under such circumstances any criticism or opposition will be interpreted in national security terms and harshly surpressed. Not unlike in the US after 9/11 when I come to think of it.

2006-02-18T19:34:00.000Z

Rambo movies, the body count:

Number of bad guys killed by Rambo with his shirt on: 46
Number of bad guys killed by Rambo with his shirt off: 91
Number of bad guys killed by Rambo no matter how attired: 137
Sequences in which Rambo is shot at without significant result: 74