Archiv der Kategorie: oddly enough

Iraq, oddly enough

Stupidity, Inc., press release

So “Miss Deutschland” (who apparently is not “Miss Germany”, but don’t ask me about these subtle differences…) has begun her new job as weapon inspector in Iraq, Spiegel online tells us. And they have pictures, too. The following quote is, in my opinion, the most telling part of the article –

“Dutzende Schulmädchen lagern auf dem Parkplatz und malen Bilder gegen den Krieg. Auch Alexsandra nimmt Platz und lässt sich einen Bleistift reichen. ‘Don’t make war’ schreibt sie auf ein Blatt Papier. Die Schulmädchen schauen verlegen, weil sie kein Englisch verstehen. Die meisten von ihnen haben irakische Panzer gemalt, die feindliche Flugzeuge vom Himmel holen.”

Translation (my own) –

“Dozens of girls are sitting on a parking lot and are painting pictures against the war. Aleksandra [Miss Deutschland] sits down, too, and is given a pen. ‘Don’t make war’, she writes on a sheet of paper. The little girls look puzzled, for they don’t understand English. Most of them had painted Iraqi tanks shooting enemy planes from the sky.”

She also received a bouquet from Saddam’s son Uday. Not bad. Not bad at all. Well, at least my mum thinks she’s brave…

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oddly enough

The Return of the Jedi

A number you probably won’t need. But a funny one nonetheless. From The Guardian’s news dispatch…

“The UK is home to 390,000 Jedi Knights, according to the results of the 2001 census. Following an internet campaign, 0.7% of the population recorded their religion as “Jedi” on the annual survey. The registrar general for England and Wales, Len Cook, said the Jedis had been lumped in with the atheists. “We have put them among the 7.7 million people who said they had no religion. I suspect this was a decision which will not be challenged greatly,” he said.”

Hmm, I wonder what Master Yoda would say…

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oddly enough, Science

Turning Right…

Remember Derek Zoolander, the hyper-intelligent male supermodel that cannot turn right on the catwalk? The Guardian reports that Onur Güntürkün, a professor of biopsychology at the University of the Ruhr, in Bochum, Germany, has just published a short article in Nature concerning Derek’s problem, the subject of “turning right” – albeit paying more attention to kissing than to catwalks.

See? Even these days, there is important news concerned with making love, rather than making war.

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compulsory reading, Iraq, oddly enough

Living Like Weasels.

“Weasel! I’d never seen one wild before. He was ten inches long, thin as a curve, a muscled ribbon, brown as fruitwood, soft-furred, alert. His face was fierce, small and pointed as a lizard’s; he would have made a good arrowhead. There was just a dot of a chin, maybe two brown hair’s worth, and then the pure white fur began that spread down his underside, He had two black eyes I didn’t see, any more than you see a window.

The weasel was stunned into stillness as he was emerging from beneath an enormous shaggy wild rose bush four feet away. I was stunned into stillness twisted backward on the tree trunk. Our eyes locked, and someone threw away the key. Our look was as if two lovers, or deadly enemies, met unexpectedly on an overgrown path when each had been thinking of something else: a clearing blow to the gut. It was also a bright blow to the brain, or a sudden beating of brains, with all the charge and intimate grate of rubbed balloons. It emptied our lungs. It felled the forest, moved the fields, and drained the pond; the world dismantled and tumbled into that black hole of eyes. If you and I looked at each other that way, our skulls would split and drop to our shoulders. But we don’t. We keep our skulls. So.”

– from the American writer Annie Dillard’s essay “Living like Weasels“, taken from her book “Teaching A Stone To Talk” (click here for a NY Times feature reviewing her work.)

I hate that this blog is getting more and more mono thematic. But as you all know, the world’s news agenda is being congested by the whole Iraq thing and some weird spin-off topics that weasel through the web. So now that we in the “old Europe” have finally been given the opportunity to realize which creature in the animal kingdom best represents us, I thought reflecting on the deeper meaning of this little excerpt of Ms Dillard’s essay could be one of the better ways to calm down and stop the useless transatlantic venting for a moment.

Alright, I have to admit – I did have a laugh about “The Axis of Weasel”. It’s not exactly a great joke, and the rhyme is far from perfect, but, yes, it is, in a twisted way, somewhat funny.

But not all that is being said and written on both sides of the Atlantic is funny these days. Long gone the days when the people responsible for published opinion on both sides of the pond actually listened to what those on the other side had to say. Long gone the time when they made an effort to actually understand reasons behind public policy, public discourse, and public opinion and even tried to discern them.

I remember talking to an American friend in May 2002 stating that mutual US-European misunderstanding seemed to be growing – and I thought it was bad back then.

There are some voices of moderation on either side – but it seems no one listens to them anymore. Moderation and serious arguments seem to become increasingly unfashionable and superseded by an articficial war of words – The “Axis of Weasel” seems to me like a Blogosphere-adapted version of the Albanian invasion featured in Barry Levinson’s movie “Wag The Dog” – so go and get your “Stop the Axis of Weasels” wallpaper here. Anyone volunteering to write the theme song – “I guard the Iranian border, I guard the American dream” ?

In the end, no joke is going to help those who want to strike to weasel out of their responsibility to make a clear-cut, convincing case that a possible loss of life is a price worth paying for ousting Saddam at the time being. But those who want to strike – as well as many of those who support them – do not seem to care about the world’s opinion that this case has not yet been made. But what I suppose is even more damaging to their argument than what have to say is the way they say it. Just imagine the difference in European reaction had the same case be brought forward by a Clinton administration. See what I mean?

Maybe it is difficult to understand for some Americans that it is the William Safires and Donald Rumsfelds of this world whose rantings give a lot people the impression – not just in old Europe – that it is more important to contain the American administration’s intention to dissolve the concept of national sovereignty not through negotiations but through military might. It is them who lead to the perception that the US today are no longer the good guys but those who have to be stopped. If you are interested in a TIME Europe survey (non-representative, but n~300,000 clicks!) asking people which country they belive which country poses the greatest danger to world peace in 2003, click here. Let me just say that about 83% percent of the respondents share the opinion that it is not Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.

Rationally, it is hard to find arguments to back such a claim. Emotionally, it is sufficient to turn on CNN.

If the whole confrontation is not part of a superbly staged good-cop, bad-cop game to credibly back the weapon inspector’s engagement in Iraq – and I doubt it is – I believe the core of the transatlantic rift is about R-E-S-P-E-C-T. A lot of Americans seem to think they deserve everyone’s support in words and deeds because they regard their actions as moral and opposition to a moral position as logically amoral. Vice versa for those who oppose a war. Europe and the US need to develop a new discourse. “Texan-style” black & white is going to remain an important element of US political fashion even if the next presidential elections should produce a democratic president. Likewise, the the more nuanced European discourse will remain. No Clinton is going to be in the White House anytime soon.

So we have to bridge the gap. It will not be helpful to continue exchanging notes confirming mutual allegations of arrogance or perceived treason. The following part of Annie Dillard’s essay should be read carefully by the powerful American eagle as well as the European Weasel.

“And once, says Ernest Thompson Seton ~ once, a man shot an eagle out of the sky. He examined the eagle and found the dry skull of a weasel fixed by the jaws to his throat. The supposition is that the eagle had pounced on the weasel and the weasel swiveled and bit as instinct taught him, tooth to neck, and nearly won. I would like to have seen that eagle from the air a few weeks or months before he was shot: was the whole weasel still attached to his feathered throat, a fur pendant? Or did the eagle eat what he could reach, gutting the living weasel with his talons before his breast, bending his beak, cleaning the beautiful airborne bones?”

Respect is what it’s all about.

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compulsory reading, oddly enough

Closing The Gap?

There were times when a lot of people on this planet thought that human beings would have all been replaced by intelligent robots by the year 2000. But the operating system you are using right now as well as state of the art research in artificial intelligence (check these MIT media lab resources, for instance) are both demonstrating clearly enough that the complexity of human intelligence has not yet been sufficiently understood in order to technically reproduce it or even go beyond our biological limitations.

Some researchers doubt we will ever be able to understand just why we ‘understand’. And the advances that have been made promptly led to even more complicated ethical questions. Steven Spielberg’s A.I. may not be his masterpiece, but it is a film posing a useful question about the interrelation of artificial life and intelligence. However, those predicting a world run by intelligent robots and androids have been proven wrong until today. The man-machine gap is still huge – usually.

One interesting thing about robots and artificial intelligence is that those creating them always aim at making their machines ‘think’ better, faster and more human-like in order to close the gap with the supposedly superior human brain from “below”. And, usually, this approach clearly makes sense.

But there could be exceptions to that rule. Could the gap be possibly closed from “above”? This is what – I suppose – the producers of the “talking presidents” dolls are intending to demonstrate with their recent release of a talking “George W. Bush – Doll” which is able to utter 17 different phrases. I wonder how many people (certainly in Europe) believe this is the actual number of distinct statements made by the original.

To those in doubt and calculating, it is not. I listened to the samples on their website. And, as just one example, his remarkable confusion of “devaluation” and “deflation” is missing, just as a lot of other famous Bushims…

And while the “patriotic” selection of soundbites (“I come from Texas.”) thus proves that the leader of the free world is not entirely replacable by a 12.5″ doll with a loudspeaker worth US$ 29,99 ex. shipping – which is reassuring to a certain extent – I am still wondering just why I keep thinking the doll actually does have some gap-closing character…

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almost a diary, oddly enough, traveling

Don’t judge a book by it’s cover? Certainly not in Amsterdam.

You certainly know that the idea of not judging something/someone based on appearance is only partly useful.

Covers usually do transmit a significant amount of information about the book’s content. But we also know that looks can deceive, especially concerning human beings. That’s why the headline of this entry can be quite handy: it reminds us to remain open to the fact that the information we receive by decoding the cover does not necessarily convey the correct social rules of interaction. So we have to remain vigilant.

In Amsterdam looks are sometimes almost as deceptive as the fly-over-country-bank featured in Michael Moore’s latest film, Bowling for Columbine. You think it’s just a bank. But it’s actually a bank – and a licensed gun store. In Amsterdam, where a large portion of GDP is made by directly following the idea of making love, not war, people don’t buy guns. They buy porn.

And that’s exactly why you should be careful about looks. A lot of souvenir shops in Amsterdam are conventional souvenir shops only on the outside, featuring the usual displays of postcards, t-shirts and disposable cameras. Inside, their range of products features a slightly different kind of ‘typical’ Amsterdam memorabila.

The kind labelled with a significant number of Xs…

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compulsory reading, oddly enough

A new kind of suicide.
Between two consenting adults.

When I briefly mentioned the cannibalism case revealed by German police in Rotenburg, near Frankfurt, yesterday, I had just heard about it. Normally, I’d say there’s not much more to it than I wrote yesterday. It obviously goes without saying that it is unbelievably sad that things like cannibalism keep occuring on this planet. Most of us would prefer to live on one in which they wouldn’t. But we can’t choose yet. So we have to cope.

Is this the end of the story? Not quite. However tragic, there is probably more to this latest case than a life sentence for the perpetrator and some disbelieving head shaking for the rest of us. It’s about a new kind of suicide, the social ‘contract’, and, at a slightly more abstract level, about transaction costs.

It was quite interesting to see all the psychological experts interviewed on tv at loss of words. Not about the perpetrator’s behavior, which, although fortunately rare, happens frequently enough for psychologists and others to have given it some thought and at least be able to come up with wishy-washy sexual, social or genetic explanations – but they do not have the slightest idea why someone would agree to be killed and be eaten afterwards, as the victim, a gay 41 or 42 year old man from Berlin explicitly did.

Let’s recapitulate: There was a guy who seriously repeatedly posted classified ads on the internet looking for people wishing to be killed and eaten. According to “The Scotsman’s” English coverage of the story, he used the following words (well, in German, I suppose) “Seeking young, well-built 18- to 30-year-old for slaughter”.

And while the crime in all likelihood happened only once, five additional suicide candidates seem to have stood in line. Before being killed, cut to pieces and being eaten or deep fried, the victim agreed to have his penis cut off, which was then cooked and at least tasted by both men – on camera.

While the deed technically qualifies for first degree murder, according to the local prosecutor, I wonder what the legal repercussions of the victim’s taped consent to be killed will be. I suppose, some so far neglected or even undiscovered issues will now attract attention, eg the already questioned human free will (aka real consent), our social norms and abnormal, apparently suicidal sexuality.

Clearly, not everything that goes on between two consenting adults in a bedroom (or basement) should be treated as their own business. But in a society in which mutual consent between adults is de facto the only enforced and probably enforceable sexual convention, I can’t help but wonder what should not be regarded as such? And, more importantly, why – based on which principle?

I don’t know. But I fear these questions will have to be answered more precisely rather sooner than later.

Before the internet, it was probably a lot harder to find like-minded partners for perverse activities such as the one discovered yesterday. But on the web, self-selection processes have become a lot cheaper. If some consensual abnormal transactions have been barred by prohibitive transaction costs (too costly to find a partner) in the non-digital world, reduced transaction costs will by definition lead to an increase of these transactions.

Thus, with transaction costs close to zero (in some ways), we might be forced to witness more and more consensual but clearly abnormal behavior in the future. But let’s hope I’m wrong.

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music, oddly enough

So this is Chrismas.

It happened. Yesterday I heard ‘Wham’s’ ‘Last Christmas’ for the first time this year. But it’s getting worse. It was not even the original. It was a cover version. Can you believe there are people out there making money by covering a ‘Wham’ christmas carol in 2002? That’s almost as strange as the story of the person jailed for cannibalism in Germany today. He apparently found someone through the Internet who was willing to be first killed and then eaten.

In light of this, I am going to repeat some valuable advice once more: In the Internet, you never know who you’re talking to. So please, be careful in case you click on any of those spam-mail links offering digitised female attention. Maybe the Beauty turns out to be the Beast.

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