Volop voedsel voor verdere gedachten op de eerste dag van het nieuwe jaar, via Abram de Swaan’s eigen website. Kijk vooral in het archief:

De Europese Unie lijdt, zoals zovaak gezegd wordt, aan een democratisch deficit, of liever een òndemocratisch gebrek. Dat ligt aan de verdragsrechtelijke inrichting van de Unie, het is een institutioneel gebrek. Maar het ligt ook aan het ontbreken van een Europese openbare sfeer. Er is geen Europese krant die door lezers uit alle lidstaten gelezen wordt, er is geen tv-station waarop voor een pan-Europees gehoor gedebatteerd wordt, er zijn kortom helemaal geen Europese media en als er al kranten of zenders zijn met een publiek in alle landen van de Unie dan staan die zonder uitzondering onder Amerikaanse of Engelse redactie. Eén oorzaak van dit totaal gebrek aan Europese communicatie is uiteraard de Babelse veeltaligheid van de volkeren van Europa. Maar de Europese gemeente moet zich van haar voorgangers juist gelukkig prijzen met die verscheidenheid. De spraakverwarring wordt door de Commissie en de Raad met opzet nog vergroot door iedereen aan te bevelen om een andere taal erbij te leren, als het maar geen Engels is, maar liefst Friulich, Fins, of Fries.
De burgers van Europa begrijpen elkaar niet eens goed genoeg om het met elkaar oneens te zijn. Zij praten langs elkaar heen, elk volk binnen de grenzen van het eigen taalgebied. En zelfs volkeren die één en dezelfde taal spreken, Duitsers en Oostenrijkers, of Nederlanders en Vlamingen, blijven toch nog van elkaar gescheiden door een barrière van wederzijdse desinteresse.

It’s one of those occasions, like a World Cup or a royal wedding, when it is assumed on all sides that you, too, want to be part of the fun. At any rate, you are counted in whether you fancy it or not. You may even be accosted and asked to tell people what your resolutions for the coming year may be.

My answer is the same as usual. I resolve to lie low, de-carbonise the liver, recharge the batteries, save the money, catch up on the slumber and begin 2004 with a head start on the sorry figures who didn’t have as good a time as they had expected on the night before.

Christopher Hitchens

This year ten questions of the King William’s College Quiz are about Dutch affairs. And I feel a bit stupid not to be able to answer every single one of them.

But on the whole, how would you score? 2 out of 180 is average.

My answers on the Dutch questions [select the space underneath to see them]:
7.1 Arnhem, operation Market Garden in WWII
7.2 Rotterdam has an Erasmus bridge. Erasmus real name was Gerrit Gerritszoon [Gerrit, son of Gerrit].
7.3 Scheveningen
7.4 Amsterdam ?
7.5 Delft, the assassination of William the Silent in 1584
7.6 Eindhoven, the Philips light bulb factories
7.7 Utrecht
7.8 ’s Hertogenbosch/Den Bosch. Jeroen Bosch came from Aken.
7.9 Leeuwarden
7.10 ?

On any important topic, we tend to have a dim idea of what we hope to be true, and when an author writes the words we want to read, we tend to fall for it, no matter how shoddy the arguments. Needy readers have an asymptote at illiteracy; if a text doesn’t say the one thing they need to read, it might as well be in a foreign language. To be open-minded, you have to recognize, and counteract, your own doxastic hungers.

From the 2004 Edge Annual Question.

At the conference in Washington, during the question period, Ehrlich was reminded that after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, scientists were quoted as saying nothing would grow there for 75 years, but in fact melons were growing the next year. So, he was asked, how accurate were these findings now?

Ehrlich answered by saying “I think they are extremely robust. Scientists may have made statements like that, although I cannot imagine what their basis would have been, even with the state of science at that time, but scientists are always making absurd statements, individually, in various places. What we are doing here, however, is presenting a consensus of a very large group of scientists.

I want to pause here and talk about this notion of consensus, and the rise of what has been called consensus science. I regard consensus science as an extremely pernicious development that ought to be stopped cold in its tracks. Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled. Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you’re being had.

A lecture by Michael Crichton

On all but a very few matters for short stretches in our lives, the utmost independence that we can exercise is to multiply the authorities to whom we give a friendly hearing. As congenital amateurs our quest for truth consists in stirring up the experts, and forcing them to answer any heresy that has the accent of conviction. In such a debate we can often judge who has won the dialectical victory, but we are virtually defenseless against a false premise that none of the debaters has challenged, or a neglected aspect that none of them has brought into the argument ….

The people on whom we depend for contact with the outer world are those who seem to be running it. They may be running only a very small part of the world. The nurse feeds the child, bathes it, and puts it to bed. That does not constitute the nurse an authority on physics, zoology, and the Higher Criticism. Mr. Smith runs, or at least hires, the man who runs the factory. That does not make him an authority on the Constitution of the United States, nor on the effects of the Fordney tariff. Mr. Smoot runs the Republican Party in the State of Utah. That in itself does not prove he is the best man to consult about taxation.

And more.
After reading Lippmann I’m left wondering what all the
other social scientists have been up to since 1922.
Everything is already there.

“Der Schlaf ist kein geringes Kunststück, denn man muß den ganzen Tag dafür wachen.”

The problem with telling the truth is that much of what happens in the world is made possible by lies, and so much of the world is actively opposed to truth. We might respond to this with the great ‘So what!’ of modern culture: maybe the world doesn’t need truth, maybe the world is just fine as it is. When I write, I like to remind myself of exactly why it is I’m writing.

Dave Edwards, How to lose friends and be excluded by influential people:
the difficult art of telling the truth on the interesting MediaLens website

The Guardian today:

* Global warming to kill off 1m species
* Scientists shocked by results of research
* 1 in 10 animals and plants extinct by 2050

This website, previously

The timing of the end of the Little Ice Age is especially significant, as it implies that the records used by climate scientists date from a time when the Earth was relatively cold, thereby exaggerating the significance of today’s temperature rise.

” Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under. “

“Europa wil sinterklaas verbieden” - het bericht dat TV Noord-Holland eind oktober brengt, slaat in als een bom. De zender heeft de hand weten te leggen op een protocol waarin de Europese Unie zicht uitspreekt “tegen geaccepteerde discriminatie”. De sinterklaasviering is een “voorbeeld van een culturele viering binnen de gevestigde orde, die impliciet racistisch is vanwege het uitbuiten door sinterklaas van zwarte slaven/gastarbeiders als hulpen”, laat het officiële EU-perscommuniqué weten. [...]

Het persbericht was nep. Het bleek een project van studenten van kunstacademies die wilden onderzoeken “hoe je met nieuwe media pr kunt maken”. Ze hadden hiervoor het juiste onderwerp uitgekozen. “In de pr blijken sommige thema’s effectief. Eén daarvan is de angst voor iets dat zó groot is dat je er geen invloed op kunt uitoefenen”, legde een van de organisatoren later in een interview uit. En Europa, dat 1 mei 2004 uitbreidt met tien nieuwe lidstaten, is zoiets groots.

De reacties op het valse persbericht over sinterklaas staan niet op zichzelf. In de eerste plaats omdat journalisten kennelijk niet weten waar ze evident rare berichten van Europese instellingen moeten checken.

Artikelen uit het themanummer “Angst”
van De Groene staan on-line.

You have a “power square.” Tell us what that is and what you wound up concluding.

This came about because I was trying to persuade my wife, a very skeptical woman, that the argument of the book was worth making. On the back of a paper serves [napkin] in Venice, where we were celebrating our wedding anniversary, I sketched what I thought was the essence of the argument of the book. I drew a square, and I said, “Look, there are four institutions that come about almost inadvertently as a result of war-making and the exigencies of war finance. These institutions are a tax collecting bureaucracy, a representative assembly, a central bank, and some kind of financial markets in which the national debt can be financed. These are the institutions that arise.” They arise primarily out of the exigencies of military conflict, but when they come together, first in Holland, and then spectacularly in England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, they turn out to be the magic key that unlocks economic development.

Niall Ferguson.
On the Conversations with History site.

Theo van Gogh kent een nieuw gerucht over Mabel Wisse Smit. Ze kon weleens in Yab Yum hebben gewerkt.

Walter van den Berg [geen familie] over wie de Yab Yums van deze wereld bezoeken.

De ritsjes onder aan mijn regenbroek zijn altijd dicht als ik het ding weer wil aantrekken. Onhandig, raadselachtig, en vreemd. Vandaag viel me ineens op dat ik bij thuiskomst eerst mijn schoenen uittrek, voor mijn regenbroek uitgaat. En dan hoeven die ritsjes niet meer open. Raadsel opgelost.

. . and there is, on the whole, nothing on earth intended for innocent people so horrible as a school. To begin with, it is a prison. But it is in some respects more cruel than a prison. In a prison, for instance, you are not forced to read books written by the warders (who of course would not be warders and governors if they could write readable books)

G.B. Shaw

More here.

U vertelt managers dat winst er niet toe doet?
‘Natuurlijk niet. Winst is als zuurstof. Je kunt niet zonder. Maar als zuurstof een doel wordt, ben je een longpatiënt.

Fons Trompenaars in Intermediair.

” Why does the widespread proliferation of closed-circuit television cameras in the UK go unchallenged, and even unnoticed? ‘CCTV cameras have a mysterious knack for justifying themselves regardless of what happens to crime’, Rosen explains. ‘When crime goes up, the cameras get credit for detecting it, and when crime goes down, they get the credit for preventing it.’ “

Sp!ked about Jeffrey Rosen’s Naked Crowd

Life is something that happens when you can’t get to sleep.

” Over Christmas, my Auntie took 20 photos of her Brussels sprouts at the dinner table, and every one was awful so she deleted them - what was the point? “

five reasons why digital cameras
make us better photographers

” I taught for thirty years in some of the worst schools in Manhattan, and in some of the best, and during that time I became an expert in boredom. Boredom was everywhere in my world, and if you asked the kids, as I often did, why they felt so bored, they always gave the same answers: They said the work was stupid, that it made no sense, that they already knew it. They said they wanted to be doing something real, not just sitting around. They said teachers didn’t seem to know much about their subjects and clearly weren’t interested in learning more. And the kids were right: their teachers were every bit as bored as they were. “

John Taylor Gatto
Read his book on-line here.

” Professor Bob Burden, professor of applied educational psychology at Exeter University, doesn’t even believe intelligence exists. “Or, if it does, it should be used as an adjective or an adverb only and not as a noun,” he says. “It’s just a hypothetical construct psychologists have used to describe how people behave. How I would behave in the Amazon jungle is a lot less intelligently than I would in this job. And if something goes wrong with my car I open the bonnet and hope someone will come and help me. It just depends on the context.” “

100 years of IQ-testing

The logo of this site is transparant in every browser except Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. Which is of course something I discovered after deciding the transparency was necessary for the design.

Il faudrait faire partie d’une ligue tout seul.

Il y a des hommes auxquels il suffit d’avoir des cors aux pieds comme tel homme intelligent : ils croient par là lui ressembler.

Une espèce de monstre bouffi avec un seul sourcil pour deux yeux rouges, des cheveux comme un hérisson pommadé, une large bouche, et bouffi, et ventru, et des bagues, et pas très propre. Il croit à la guigne, aux pressentiments, au monde des invisibles, aux séries de suicides, à la fatalité, à une espèce de justice immanente.

24 janvier 1905

more here.

According to Technology Review:

Universal Translation
Synthetic Biology
Nanowires
Bayesian Machine Learning
T-Rays
Distributed Storage
RNA Interference
Power Grid Control
Microfluidic Optical Fibers
Personal Genomics

A pity they’re naming universal translation; that may be the only emerging technology from the 1960’s left that still is far from delivering its promise. The mere fact it is mentioned here somewhat degrades the other new developments.

Updike practises, one might say, a sensualist’s pantheism, citing the world into a fuller being. His stories are plush with phrasing and, in them, the nap of the felt world made suddenly and wonderfully palpable. Who else would notice the ‘clean, sad scent of linoleum’, or the ‘hoarse olfactory shout’ of a football stadium, or the ’sizzle of a defective neon-sign connection’? Who else would have a character opens a door on a summer’s day, to find that the ’sunlight falls flat at his feet like a penitent’?

Updike’s genius for image-making, however, is his curse as well as his blessing. At times, his lust for detail thickens into the vulgar. In particular, Updike has never been able to leave his genitals alone. A penis cannot be a penis, it must be ‘that superadded, boneless bit of him, that monkeyish footnote to the godlike thorax’. Testicles must be ‘like dropped fruit, slowly rotting’, the vulva a ’sacred several-lipped gateway’.

At moments like these - and there are many of them - we see Updike succumb to the danger which threatens a writer so improbably able at his job: tanked up on success, facility begins to vandalise felicity.

Robert Macfarlane, in The Observer

Read Updike’s first story on-line

In het publieke debat hierover neemt de positie van vrouwen binnen de islam een belangrijke plaats in. Net als in Nederland. Dit brengt ons terug bij Tillion die, lang voordat de hoofddoek in beide landen een onderwerp werd, hierover een zeer verhelderende studie schreef.

Le Harem et les cousins (Editions du Seuil, 1966) is vooral zo actueel omdat Tillion gevoelige kwesties als sluiers, eermoord en het gebruik om bruiden bij voorkeur uit het land van herkomst te betrekken, niet in verband brengt met de islam, maar met de endogame familiestructuur die sinds mensenheugenis bepalend is geweest voor de verhouding tussen de seksen in de Maghreb. Het gaat daarbij dus om een traditie die niet alleen veel ouder is dan de islam, maar die bovendien kenmerkend is voor beide oevers van de Middellandse Zee: van Palermo tot Alexandrië en van Marseille tot Istanboel.

Het Groene-essay van Ieme van der Poel

I wondered why the consumers of victorious products were so fierce and intolerant. I had encountered the same aggressive tone, the same readiness for a fight to the end, each time I had expressed doubt in the value of any work which has millions of devotees. What is it that unites the million-strong army of lovers of The Alchemist so firmly and so easily divides the small group of lovers of Bohumil Hrabal? What is it that drives millions of people to shed tears as they watch Titanic, and drives a lunatic to deface a well-known painting in a Dutch museum? What is it that drives millions of people all over the world to weep for Lady Di, but to be indifferent when their next-door neighbor dies? I think I know the answer, but I would prefer to keep quiet, for the answer makes me tremble with terror.

“I know perfectly well that the book is shit,” said a friend of mine, a teacher of literature at a European university, about some book. “But I looooove it!” he howled, drawing out the “o.”

“Americans love junk. It’s not the junk that bothers me, it’s the love,” said George Santayana. He said it at a time when he did not yet know that we were all one day going to become Americans.

Dubravka Ugresic