Watched the news tonight on the national TV channel here. A 30 minute show giving us a summary of the news we need to know. Of this 19 minutes was used for domestic news. The dominating top headline was the marriage of Denmark’s crown prince Frederick (around 10 minutes but it seemed to last forever). The top international news item was the release of detainees in Iraq.
Author: Muninn
Just a few more links
Ok, this procrastination has to stop. A few more links:
- Who’s the master? – Simon at Kikuchiyo talks about his PhD cumulative exams. Two years from now, if I survive, I’ll have to undergo a similar process.
- Timothy Burke has an strongly worded posting on the torture issue and the dangers of abstraction. Together with John Quiggin in this posting at Crooked Timber (as always with Crooked Timber, read the lively exchange of comments attached to the posting), I think we are starting to see the blogosphere get interested in the broader debate over torture in intelligence gathering that I think we all need to think about.
- At the Movies, at Least, Good Vanquishes Evil
- Joel at Far Outliers has an interesting posting about an article in Korean Studies on the Aso Coal Strike. Far Outlers is a great blog in that there is a lot of mention of good academic articles or tidbits on the web on a range of interesting issues. The blog is a good example of how this medium is supposed to work not only for commentary or web links, but to share good sources of interesting information that may exist offline as well.
- Antti Leppänen has an interesting posting on Paeksu, a Korean term for those not engaged in productive work or study.
Claire: Stress types
Claire has a fun posting on different kinds of people as they approach deadlines. She included my own type:
The Avoider: Suddenly becomes very sociable and good at running errands when he/she should be working.
Hmm, I need to get a conference paper out by tomorrow, perhaps that explains all the short postings I’m making to this blog this morning.
Kerim: 撒嬌
Untermenschen
Media Matters, a great source for a little breakfast rage against conservative media madness.
Today, there was an entry about the whack Michael Savage’s comment about the Nick Berg incident,
“Nick Berg, an American, not military, over there building transmission towers, was captured by the Untermenschen the sub-humans, who wrap themselves in a religion. He is seen saying his mother’s name, his father’s name, sister’s name, his brother’s name and then the smiling Arabs cut a living human beings head off as he screams. It’s a blood-curdling scream that you’ll ever hear again. You’ll never get it out of your mind if you’re a normal person, or you’re not given to murder or you’ve never been around murder. Uh, it’s something you’ll never forget, not should you ever forget it and you can thank the Democrats, you can thank the Senate Arms Services Committee for their hysterical hearings. You can thank John Kerry, Chuck Hagel, Biden, The New York Times, the alphabet channels and The Washington Post for this atrocity because they caused it.”
(My bold) My jaw dropped. Untermenschen – is he actually using that term for Iraqis? It has certainly appeared a lot in the media lately, but did he miss the fact that it was popular in Nazi propaganda? It would be the ultimate irony if this term caught on amongst commentators in the US as the term for Iraqis.
Back in Europe
I’m sitting in the airport in Amsterdam, on my way to my hometown, Stavanger, Norway. I haven’t been back in Europe in five years and it feels great. Amsterdam’s airport looks pretty much the same I remember it as last time I passed through on my way back from Japan/Kuala Lumpur with my uncle Thomas.
This afternoon, I hadn’t been on the continent for more than ten minutes before I managed to make an ass of myself. I went to change a few dollars I had at the foreign exchange. I asked the exchange attendant, “Can I get Dutch Gilders or whatever they are called?” (Guilders — Thanks Kerim!)
She tilted her head slightly and gave me a warm smile, she was giving me that unmistakable, “What a cute stupid American,” look. She said, “We don’t have Dutch Gilders here.”
I was about to continue playing my part as the stupid American by responding, “What do you mean you don’t have Dutch Gilders? I’m in Dutchland, ain’t I?” Fortunately, however, she preemptively added, “Here in Europe we use Euros, would you like Euros?”
Doh! I knew that, really I did. Quick, I thought, is there any way I can change this from the “stupid American” routine to the, “smart and sassy, great sense of humor American who was really just joking” routine but nothing appropriate came to mind. As I stood there blushing, the beautiful south Asian bank clerk tried to console me in her flawless, but slightly Dutch accented English, “Hey, at least you know what country you’re in.”
I hope this is my last embarrassing experience for today. Prices seem higher than I remember, or perhaps it is just that dollars aren’t what they used to be. All the prices are more expensive than an equal number of dollars, even though dollars are worth less than a Euro. I paid the equivalent of $10 for a Chicken salad and a small sprite at McDonalds. That is more than even Japan.
Nukes and Cartoon Characters
I talked to Sayaka last night. She is busy with her Chinese language studies at ICLP. Last night her homework was to write two essays. The topics she chose I think well represents her uniquely balanced personality, which mixes an interest in security policy with one of the world’s more deeply philosophical cartoon characters. One of her essays was on Nuclear Weapons, the other on Doraemon.
Samantha Power on Hannah Arendt
“Totalitarian solutions may well survive the fall of totalitarian regimes in the form of strong temptations which will come up whenever it seems impossible to alleviate political, social, or economic misery in a manner worthy of man.”
Samantha Power, a professor at the Kennedy school who writes a lot on human rights issues, wrote an interesting article on the philosopher Hannah Arendt for the April 29th issue of the New York Review of Books. Arendt’s famous work The Origins of Totalitarianism has been resting unread on my shelf for a couple of years and the only other time I have really seen much on her was in reading about Heidegger or in a couple movies on the wartime Jewish escape from Europe. I hope to get around to looking at her work more closely.
The Power article is timely and proceeds from an overview and critique of Arendt’s work on totalitarianism, the use of her work by others, and finally (as one might predict) a consideration of how her work is relevant today.
“The reality is that ‘the Nazis are men like ourselves.’…the nightmare is that they have shown, have proven beyond doubt what man is capable of.”
While totalitarianism, and the specter of Nazi and Stalinist rule that is associated with it, lends itself to harsh denunciation, one of the main claims of the article is that Arendt was careful, realistic, and self-critical in her analysis. Quoting Yeats, Arendt is said to be able to, “to hold in a single thought reality and justice.” Power’s article is very moderate, and uses Arendt’s own words of caution against any radical claims about the present or future based on an analysis of the past. She “warns readers against any attempt at ‘deducing the unprecedented from precedents'” in history and adds that, “To view a subsequent happening as predictable bordered on seeing it as inevitable, which a believer in human agency and political action could never do.”
Arendt was also apparently cautious in addressing the claims of optimistic idealists who want to further human rights, “No paradox of contemporary politics is filled with more poignant irony than the discrepancy between the efforts of well-meaning idealists who stubbornly insist on regarding as ‘inaliable’ those human rights which are enjoyed only by the citizens of the most prosperous and civilized countries, and the situation of the rightless themselves.” However, Power doesn’t lose the opportunity in this article to take a critical stance towards the current war on terrorism, “While Arendt valued what today is termed, ‘hard power,’ she also knew firsthand the danger of state overreaching in the name of self-defense, and the prospect that a merciless ‘counter-ideology’ could emerge. Today, in the name of fighting a war of infinite duration, it has again proven far too tempting for our liberal democracy to give security absolute priority over liberty.”
Continue reading Samantha Power on Hannah Arendt
Eating
I think this is unhealthy but I suspect I’m not the only one: Eating is such a nuisance! Here I am, with stuff to do, stuff I want to read and write, and then Wham! I get hungry. Often I don’t notice hunger until I get a little lightheaded or a headache but then I have to do one or more of these annoying things like 1) go to the grocery store for bread and/or supplies 2) make something, or 3) go somewhere and get food. What a distraction! It takes up hours of every day!
Ralph Luker on In Denial
Ralph Luker has a posting at Cliopatria on the book In Denial: Historians, Communism & Espionage.
I have a deep interest in arguments like the one put forward in the book Luker is discussing, which along with Coulter’s Treason, some recent criticism of Kerry’s opposition to Vietnam, and a long history of criticism of the left is something I think we can broadly define as “collaborationist critique” (I think I just made this term up). Yes, I am aware of the fact that, in one sentence, I have mixed a history book, a crazy polemicist’s ramblings, and political attacks on a candidate in election year. Collaborationist critique, or the branding of the left as traitors, anti-American, etc., especially through the focus on the connection between left wing Americans (and recently, Norwegian leftist politicians) and Communists, is an effective political attack in whatever form it may take. It is perhaps the most effective when it is wielded against academics, since the massive time and resources these intellectuals have personally put into their field makes it difficult to counter their scholarship directly without deploying your own researchers.
From my limited study so far, collaborationist critique comes in two often overlapping forms: the critique is generalized to make the claim that 1) the left is clearly lacking in “Patriotism” and is thus unfit to lead the nation, whose interests it will doubtlessly betray, and 2) the left is closely tied to international movements (Communism) or Evil men (Stalin) which are guilty of hideous crimes.
Continue reading Ralph Luker on In Denial