Culture in the Blender

Listening to Pandora at work, a song called New American Century by KMFDM came on. The lyrics caught my attention. In context of what I’ve been reading (and re-reading) this seems right on the money. There are strong directions in American politics that could endanger not only democracy and freedom in America, but given America’s [...]

Reuters reports that an ad saluting the mothers of the June 4 天安门广场 (Tian1an1men2 Guang3chang3, Tiananmen Square) massacre got published in the Chengdu Evening News! The person who placed it also tried other newspapers, and the clerks who handled the requests didn’t know what June 4 referred to. The other clerks called a supervisor. This [...]

While waiting at O’Hare recently, I made the mistake of walking into a bookstore to spend some time. (I don’t have gold status with any frequent flyer program, since I fly so little, so I can’t wait in a lounge.) I call it a mistake, because I’m almost incapable of walking into a bookstore without [...]

Today’s scary piece of news: The horrible Soviet legacy of pollution is alive and well. I once read one of the environmentally scariest articles I’ve ever read in National Geographic about pollution in the former Soviet Union. At the time it was written, the Soviet Union had collapsed, of course. Openness and transparency were hardly [...]

I finished Sam Harris’s The End of Faith yesterday. His central thesis is that faith itself – the practice of believing something without proof – is extremely dangerous and ought to end. It was piecewise an extremely scary book. The book emphasizes that it is only by reason and evaluation and discussion of facts that [...]

As always, pretty funny and to the point. I especially appreciate this: “To judge the root problem here, let us first determine how the cartoons became an international incident. Last September, these comics ran beside a story about the hurdles encountered by a Danish author in finding someone – anyone – to illustrate her children’s [...]

The more I think and read about the cartoons, the more strongly I feel that there can be no case made for that the cartoons should not have been published. The same points are made over and over again in commentaries, and regardless of circumstances basic cornerstones of liberal democracy cannot be sacrificed by Denmark. [...]

I wanted to see the cartoons for myself, and although I haven’t found them yet, I did find some other interesting things… “Earlier this week, imam Abu Bashir appeared on BBC World showing a caricature of Mohammed with a pig’s snout and ears to representatives of the Arabic League. Bashir falsely claimed that the caricature [...]

Yesterday, I was reading opinions on the Danish cartoons on BBC, and had some opinions that I wanted to write in my LJ. I sign on today, open BBC – and am greeted by this: “Embassies burn in cartoon protest Syrians have set fire to the Norwegian and Danish embassies in Damascus to protest at [...]

After writing that last post, I realize what exactly feels so incomplete about people with strong convictions about what the world is like – cynics, activists and optimists alike – that don’t have a global focus. How can you claim to understand the world when all you’ve ever bothered trying to understand is a small [...]