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May. 26th, 2005
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imomus on why men are stupid
May. 26th, 2005 11:31 amStarting with a discussion on differences in Japanese and American blogging styles, imomus segues into a rant about men, more specifically about their seriousness and their competitiveness.
I'm not at all sure how wellimomus's gender binaries work, at least in the more enlightened portions of the cosmopolitan early 21st century world, though his identifications of femininity with passivity and masculinity with activity is a conventional observation about gender stereotypes. But man, can he monologue well!
imomus segues into a rant about men, more specifically about their seriousness and their competitiveness.All my life I've been bored and frustrated by men. Don't get me wrong, men are brilliant, they achieve remarkable things, they master difficult skills, driven often, it's true, by ego and testosterone and sheer otaku obsession. Men want to win, to triumph, to vanquish, to hear their names resound. But these very traits also make them rather difficult people to spend time with. Men talk all through dinner, telling you their achievements or dazzling you with their deep knowledge of a subject. But at the end of it all you feel that no exchange has taken place, no conversation has been had. Superiority has been communicated, something has been vanquished, but it hasn't been pleasant. Like someone forced to a Macdonald's after an unsatisfying nouvelle cuisine meal, you're often tempted to make secret rendezvous with the other dinner guests to do some real talking at some future date.
I'm not at all sure how well
imomus's gender binaries work, at least in the more enlightened portions of the cosmopolitan early 21st century world, though his identifications of femininity with passivity and masculinity with activity is a conventional observation about gender stereotypes. But man, can he monologue well!This is the first time I've listened to Feist's Let It Die on my home computer, using Windows Media Player. I'm very annoyed that the person who uploaded the album data to whatever central clearing house provides this useful information to Windows users mislabeled the tracks. I have the playlist before me, but it's still annoying.
[GNXP] New Post Up
May. 26th, 2005 03:20 pmIn "Desperately Searching for Eurabia" (comments here), I continue the theme of my January post, looking for traces of Eurabia on the international scene. Possibly, just possibly, I'm missing huge things. I don't think I'm that blind.
One thing that continues to worry me about Eurabia is how the concept makes having anything to do with Arabs specifically and Muslims generally suspect. If the world ever does descend into a clash of civilizations, Bat Ye'or's name will feature prominently as a leading ideologist of these wars in the post-conflict histories.
One thing that continues to worry me about Eurabia is how the concept makes having anything to do with Arabs specifically and Muslims generally suspect. If the world ever does descend into a clash of civilizations, Bat Ye'or's name will feature prominently as a leading ideologist of these wars in the post-conflict histories.
Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr I. Letter to the Soviet Leaders. Trans. Hilary Sternberg. New York: Harper & Row, 1974. 59 pp.
I am of two minds on Solzhenitsyn. It is certainly quite true that Solzhenitsyn is an excellent author and that he was a courageous dissident against the Soviet hierarchy. His novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is one of the best--that is, both moving and informative--examinations of the Stalin's camp system, certainly a far better work than Adam Hochshild's competent but overanalytical The Unquiet Ghost. It is also true that Solzhenitsyn has failed to find himself a role in post-Communist Russia, that when he is not advocating an unrealistic return to an idealized pre-Tsarist peasant society he is championing a new Russian imperialism--in Kazakstan, in the North Caucasus, in eastern Europe--that can only lead to hardship. Perhaps Solzhenitsyn can be best thought of as a 20th century Tolstoy lacking Tolstoy's Russian audience and--perhaps--Tolstoy's credibility.
Letter to the Soviet Leaders is the work--a non-fiction letter, a philosophical-cum-historical examination of the Russian present and Russia's future that was boldly mailed to the Soviet leadership--that made Solzhenitsyn's exile to Vermont inevitable. It is the definitive statement of Solzhenitsyn's worldview; as such, it evidences both the best and the worst elements of his thought. The Letter is concerned with limits. In the introduction, Solzhenitsyn states that he does not expect his letter's recipients to take note of his ideas, valuably frank as they might be coming outside of the Soviet bureaucracy, but that he hopes--forlornly--that they will share his concern for the future of the Russian and Ukrainian peoples. This conscious awareness of his limits as a writer is matched by his statement of the Soviet Union's limits. Yes, he does agree with the Soviet leaders, it is true that western Europe is unwilling to challenge Soviet might, and that the United States is reeling from the Vietnam experience, and that Western civilization is generally experiencing a spiritual and moral crisis; yes, it is true that the Soviet Union has achieved a degree of power that the hopelessly incoherent Tsarist regime could never have hoped. (Solzhenitsyn wrote in the 1970's, much of the time in internal exile in Estonia. Perhaps he was inspired by his perusal of Western broadcasts.)
In Solzhenitsyn's view, the Soviet Union is based on the flawed implementation of the flawed Western ideology of Marxism, and like the rest of Western civilization the Soviet Union is faced with the impending arrival of natural limits (ecological, demographic, resource-related) to traditional patterns of unrestrained growth. The West proper is dynamic enough to adjust to the arrival of these limits; the Soviet Union is too inflexible, too committed to the archaic Western concept of growth at all costs and to its messianic ideology, and will likely fall. And then, there is the threat of a war with China, fought over ideological minutiae and sure if previous wars are any evidence to decimate the rising generation of Russians and destroy Russia. Something must be done to save Russia.
Solzhenitsyn counsels, quite simply, that the Soviet Union retreat from its ideological pretensions. Let China take up the burden of global challenger to the United States--with luck, the Chinese will also realize the faults of their messianic Marxism-Leninism, but for the time being Russia must be concerned with its own salvation. Russia, in a 21st century sure (from Solzhenistyn's Limits to Growth-inspired perspective) to be characterized by hunger for land, has ample land in the "Russian Northeast", in uncolonized and under exploited Siberia; through this colonization movement (which might impinge upon the sensibility of the native peoples, but then their existence has always been marginal and sins of the past cannot be righted. In this way, Russia will redeem itself and become a moral exemplar.
Letter to the Soviet Leaders is flawed. Solzhenitsyn was too open to Western predictions of the impending near-term collapse of society after the flawed Limits to Growth simulation, just as he was too open to Soviet and Western predictions of the impending demoralization and collapse of Western society. Moreover, I find his cavalier attitude towards the native peoples of Siberia equally infuriating (if it isn't acceptable for the Soviet regime to destroy Russian traditions why is it acceptable for the Russian regime to destroy Siberian native traditions?) and humorous (in the post-Soviet era Siberia's natives are recovering their heritage even as the resident Russian communities are depopulated by emigrants fleeing for the south).
Perhaps the most significant fault of the Letter lies in its idealization of the pre-modern Russian village in particular and of the past in general. Orlando Figes' A People's Tragedy alone provides ample evidence that the Russian villages to which Solzhenitsyn looks for a model for Russia's future were hardly pleasant places to live. The break from tradition to modernity is never easy, and Russia's break was more difficult than most, but to most moderns and post-moderns (and yes, Russia is peopled by these) the closed static ways of village life are intolerable. Once people have been introduced to the joys of mass culture and urban living, it will be very difficult to get them to become pioneers, unless you forcethem, of course. Solzhenitsyn, it seems, has never made that break.
Some people--like the reviewer Robert Kraychak for the conservative monthly First Things--might acclaim Solzhenitsyn as a moral visionary, a "political Augustinian," who challenges the secular post-modernist status quo. I fear, though, that Solzhenitsyn's thought suffers fatally from a refusal to accept his wilful archaicism and consequent irrelevancy to 21st century Russia. Perhaps it's just as well: Solzhenitsyn's desire to restore Russia to the boundaries of the Slavic-populated areas of the Soviet Union has been described as alternatively "nationalist isolationist" and "imperialistic," and judging by Canada's First Nations I doubt that the Yakut and Chukchi appreciate being colonized so as to save Russia's soul. It's still a pity, though.
I am of two minds on Solzhenitsyn. It is certainly quite true that Solzhenitsyn is an excellent author and that he was a courageous dissident against the Soviet hierarchy. His novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is one of the best--that is, both moving and informative--examinations of the Stalin's camp system, certainly a far better work than Adam Hochshild's competent but overanalytical The Unquiet Ghost. It is also true that Solzhenitsyn has failed to find himself a role in post-Communist Russia, that when he is not advocating an unrealistic return to an idealized pre-Tsarist peasant society he is championing a new Russian imperialism--in Kazakstan, in the North Caucasus, in eastern Europe--that can only lead to hardship. Perhaps Solzhenitsyn can be best thought of as a 20th century Tolstoy lacking Tolstoy's Russian audience and--perhaps--Tolstoy's credibility.
Letter to the Soviet Leaders is the work--a non-fiction letter, a philosophical-cum-historical examination of the Russian present and Russia's future that was boldly mailed to the Soviet leadership--that made Solzhenitsyn's exile to Vermont inevitable. It is the definitive statement of Solzhenitsyn's worldview; as such, it evidences both the best and the worst elements of his thought. The Letter is concerned with limits. In the introduction, Solzhenitsyn states that he does not expect his letter's recipients to take note of his ideas, valuably frank as they might be coming outside of the Soviet bureaucracy, but that he hopes--forlornly--that they will share his concern for the future of the Russian and Ukrainian peoples. This conscious awareness of his limits as a writer is matched by his statement of the Soviet Union's limits. Yes, he does agree with the Soviet leaders, it is true that western Europe is unwilling to challenge Soviet might, and that the United States is reeling from the Vietnam experience, and that Western civilization is generally experiencing a spiritual and moral crisis; yes, it is true that the Soviet Union has achieved a degree of power that the hopelessly incoherent Tsarist regime could never have hoped. (Solzhenitsyn wrote in the 1970's, much of the time in internal exile in Estonia. Perhaps he was inspired by his perusal of Western broadcasts.)
In Solzhenitsyn's view, the Soviet Union is based on the flawed implementation of the flawed Western ideology of Marxism, and like the rest of Western civilization the Soviet Union is faced with the impending arrival of natural limits (ecological, demographic, resource-related) to traditional patterns of unrestrained growth. The West proper is dynamic enough to adjust to the arrival of these limits; the Soviet Union is too inflexible, too committed to the archaic Western concept of growth at all costs and to its messianic ideology, and will likely fall. And then, there is the threat of a war with China, fought over ideological minutiae and sure if previous wars are any evidence to decimate the rising generation of Russians and destroy Russia. Something must be done to save Russia.
Solzhenitsyn counsels, quite simply, that the Soviet Union retreat from its ideological pretensions. Let China take up the burden of global challenger to the United States--with luck, the Chinese will also realize the faults of their messianic Marxism-Leninism, but for the time being Russia must be concerned with its own salvation. Russia, in a 21st century sure (from Solzhenistyn's Limits to Growth-inspired perspective) to be characterized by hunger for land, has ample land in the "Russian Northeast", in uncolonized and under exploited Siberia; through this colonization movement (which might impinge upon the sensibility of the native peoples, but then their existence has always been marginal and sins of the past cannot be righted. In this way, Russia will redeem itself and become a moral exemplar.
Letter to the Soviet Leaders is flawed. Solzhenitsyn was too open to Western predictions of the impending near-term collapse of society after the flawed Limits to Growth simulation, just as he was too open to Soviet and Western predictions of the impending demoralization and collapse of Western society. Moreover, I find his cavalier attitude towards the native peoples of Siberia equally infuriating (if it isn't acceptable for the Soviet regime to destroy Russian traditions why is it acceptable for the Russian regime to destroy Siberian native traditions?) and humorous (in the post-Soviet era Siberia's natives are recovering their heritage even as the resident Russian communities are depopulated by emigrants fleeing for the south).
Perhaps the most significant fault of the Letter lies in its idealization of the pre-modern Russian village in particular and of the past in general. Orlando Figes' A People's Tragedy alone provides ample evidence that the Russian villages to which Solzhenitsyn looks for a model for Russia's future were hardly pleasant places to live. The break from tradition to modernity is never easy, and Russia's break was more difficult than most, but to most moderns and post-moderns (and yes, Russia is peopled by these) the closed static ways of village life are intolerable. Once people have been introduced to the joys of mass culture and urban living, it will be very difficult to get them to become pioneers, unless you forcethem, of course. Solzhenitsyn, it seems, has never made that break.
Some people--like the reviewer Robert Kraychak for the conservative monthly First Things--might acclaim Solzhenitsyn as a moral visionary, a "political Augustinian," who challenges the secular post-modernist status quo. I fear, though, that Solzhenitsyn's thought suffers fatally from a refusal to accept his wilful archaicism and consequent irrelevancy to 21st century Russia. Perhaps it's just as well: Solzhenitsyn's desire to restore Russia to the boundaries of the Slavic-populated areas of the Soviet Union has been described as alternatively "nationalist isolationist" and "imperialistic," and judging by Canada's First Nations I doubt that the Yakut and Chukchi appreciate being colonized so as to save Russia's soul. It's still a pity, though.
[BRIEF NOTE] Good one
May. 26th, 2005 06:44 pmWas this one yours, jackwalker? From the Traveller News Service, a supplement for the venerable Traveller RPG.
I agree that you really have to be familiar with Traveller: The New Era to get this bit of history. That makes this all the more fun.
jackwalker? From the Traveller News Service, a supplement for the venerable Traveller RPG.Capital/Core 087-1122
The Office of the Palace has confirmed that Grand Princess Ciencia Iphenegia Guuilbataashullibaa Alkhalikoi is expecting a child, who will be born late this year. Medical examination reveals that the developing fetus is male and appears to be healthy.
The news has provoked widespread celebration on Capital, as it represents the first potential addition to the Imperial line of succession since 1088.
Some habitual Throne-watchers have remarked on the speed with which the Grand Princess has acted to secure the succession. "Of course, you have to consider the alternative," said Countess Vienna Amalfi Zirunkaar of Quildhac, a frequent commentator on Capital society. "If the line doesn't continue through the Grand Princess, eventually one of Duke Dresden's boys will be Emperor. Perish the thought!"
The Office of the Palace responded to Countess Vienna's impolitic remarks with a mild rebuke.
I agree that you really have to be familiar with Traveller: The New Era to get this bit of history. That makes this all the more fun.
