Culture in the Blender

After reading an op-ed piece in the Daily Illini, I find myself wondering what life is like for conspiracy theorists, anti-globalists, and other people who see the world as full of evil and decay. Constantly fighting everything and everyone must be completely and utterly exhausting. It must wear you down and significantly decrease your quality [...]

“In regions in crisis, nostalgia for the past and religious fundamentalism appear as shelters from the storm. In a globalized world, not paying attention to this is tantamount to paving the way for the clash of civilizations.” -Jaques Chirac in the Globalist, 01/13/05 If nostalgia for the past is a major divider of American society [...]

Inspired by smittenbyu’s courage to reveal herself, I decided to take a little leap of my own. I posted a question asking if others had been thrown out of or rejected by a home… and I got almost an immediate response. I am not alone at all. The part of me that I have always [...]

logodaedaly pointed out to me what the culture wars are, and in my happiness over a new-found word I googled for it. I found something interesting: an article that argues that the divide is over modernity, not politics per se. This made much more sense to me than the culture wars as apparently usually thought [...]

The post-Cold War world is one of speed and change. It requires constant re-evaluation, assessment, and flexibility. No set of ideas, religious or not, will be a floating device. You actually have to learn how to swim. And the world is more complex now than it was, so understanding what is going on and even [...]

(Rant warning: I am generally unhappy with the way things are and seem to be going through a mild bout of reverse culture shock combined with uncertainty of where I could be happy.) I think that the US is seriously misreading where the future is going and I think the US is seriously forgetting where [...]

Something even expats seem to have trouble grasping sometimes is that every place on Earth is real. Rather, I’m not saying that people think that some places are made up, but it does seem like many don’t understand that everything they hear about, the news they see, it’s right in front of someone. If they [...]

An opinion article in yesterday’s Aftonbladet by Jan Myrdal argues that holding people who are not informed of what they are accused and against whom the government has no proof prisoners has no place in a civil society with rule of law. He mentions some old examples of when rule of law has not been [...]