Good Morning, Citizen

For your safety and comfort, this blog is dedicated this morning to the topic of fasci democracy. Democracy is blooming around the world, under the robust, healthy rule of our benevolent World Leader, the US. But danger is everywhere! "Liberal" subversives (liberafascists) are spreading their dangerous propaganda. They use "websites" like this, where their insidious propaganda posters are "funny" and "correct" about dangerous topics like Universal "healthcare". While distinctly promoting fascism!

Fascism, as you know, is the scourge of democracy! Sites like this, and the people who read them will need to be re-educated eventually. Don't support them. Make a list of people you know who read websites such as this and give them to your local intelligence agency.

And whatever you do, don't look at the Oreo cookie animation. It may be great infotainment but it's a source of comfort to our terrorist enemies.

That will be all, citizen. You may go about your day. Remember: Peace through security, security through strength.

I will say, and coming from someone who’s made some of the movies and TV I’ve made, it may seem disingenuous—but the hardest thing in the world is to be good and clear when creating anything. It’s the hardest thing in the world. It’s really easy to be obscure and elliptical and so fucking hard to be good and clear. It breaks people. Because you don’t often get encouragement to do that, to be good and clear.

--Steven Soderbergh

New photos in Flickr. The last ones from Berlin, and some wedding shots from Trygve & Lines wedding.

I don't care how you rationalise it, arranging your books by colour is just completely and utterly wrong.

Another great piece on airplane security by B. Schneier. Conclusion: we're doing exactly what terrorists want.

Huckleberry Finn vs. Günther Grass

This is a review of Michael Berube's new book. Inside the review is a paragraph which I find that I completely agree with:

(...) He also advances his theory on why it sucks to teach things like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, because of what he calls the Schindler Effect, where everyone in the audience automatically assumes they’d be a member of the tiny minority of people with the sense and bravery to stand up against an injustice the rest of the community supports. Everyone believes he is Oscar Schindler or Huck Finn claiming that he’d rather go to hell than turn Jim over. Most of us are good Germans, of course, which is why I watched with ill-concealed irritation the people scrambling to condemn Gunther Grass, of all people, for being a teenaged solider in the SS. Choosing to go to hell isn’t as easy as you’d think it is, or else a lot of the people getting high on their horse would be sitting in jail right now for refusing to pay taxes to support the war in Iraq.

And I haven't really been able to get my act together and write that 5-page rant I've been holding in on why I'm upset about the treatment Grass has been getting, so that quote will have to stand for it.

Ok, then, in brief:
My point was that the fact that all these blowhards are shocked, shocked at the fact that Grass has been hiding his past (and for so long!) just goes to show that nobody ever understood what he was saying, and that despite it all, Germany hasn't done anything to get the war out in the light. It has become the great repressed trauma of the collective unconscious of Germany. Despite 60 years of separation, nobody's looked back and understood that Grass' point was precisely that anyone, even him, can be moved by a pervasive totalitarian ideology. It was easy to take sides against Germany in the US or the UK, but it was very difficult in Germany. That's the lesson that failed to be taken from the trauma of the war. We let the populists turn the war into a story of good vs evil, and that mindset is lodged in the minds of everyone, and we see the payoff of it all over the world, and perhaps most spectacularly in the American political mind.

What conservatives see when they read the New York Times. "Come Kill us, Terrorist Comrades!" Heh.

Goddag mann, harpunskaft

Sakset fra BTs artikkel om at årets hvalfangst blir den dårligste på lenge:

- Et bevis på at det ikke lenger er kult å spise hvalkjøtt, hevder kampanjeleder Truls Gulowsen i Greenpeace Norge.

- Tull. Hvalkjøtt er mer populært enn noensinne, sier regiondirektør Hermod Larsen i Norges Råfisklag.

Altså er det rart at man blir lei av å høre sitater fra ideologiske kilder?

- JA!
- NEI!
- JO!
- NIKS!
- JA! JA! JA!
- NEI! NEI! NEI!

Demo!

Espen sier:

LØRDAG klokken 14:00 ved Den Blå Steinen. Stans Israels terror i Palestina. Israel må betale krigsskadeerstatning til Libanon. Hvis du kun går på en demo mot Israel denne måneden, gå på denne.

Si det videre!

Desautomatiseringsautomat

Dagens øvelse i desautomatisering:

Plukk opp en avis. Les en artikkel om USA. Utfør følgende tankeeksperiment:

(Flashback/drømmesekvenslyd. Skjermen blir uskarp. Fade inn:)

Du er i 1996. Håret ditt ser helt forferdelig ut, og Spice Girls er noe du forholder deg til. Det er ikke dagens avis du leser, men en fiktiv avisartikkel i en sciencefictionroman.

Du vil nok komme fram til at du hele tiden tenker "nei nei nei. De smører alt for tykt på. Den der krigen i Irak er helt meningsløs, og ideen om at USA brått skal bli en politistat etter en katastrofal begivenhet er utrolig klisjefylt. Og hva i all verden var det redaktørene tenkte på når de lot den Bush-karakteren slippe igjennom nåløyet? Han er jo en levende satire."

VIKTOR SJKLOVSKIJ (1893 - 1984): (hopper inn fra venstre, iført en bowlerhatt, stokk, sløyfe og cocktailkjole. Fremfører det følgende som et musicalnummer med tilhørende danseensemble, og et 120-manns orkester bak seg)

And so life is reckoned as nothing.
Habitualization devours
works,
clothes,
furniture,
one's wife,
and the fear of war.
"If the whole complex lives of many people
go on unconsciously,
then such lives are as if they had never been."

And art exists that one may
recover the sensation of life;
it exists to make one feel things,
to make the stone stony.

The purpose of art
is to impart the sensation of things
as they are perceived
and not as they are known.
The technique of art
is to make objects 'unfamiliar,'
to make forms difficult,
to increase the difficulty
and length
of perception
because

(Musikken når et klimaks)

the process of perception
is an aesthetic end in itself
and must be prolonged.
Art is a way of experiencing
the artfulness
of an object:
the object is not
important.

(Ballonger og konfetti faller ned fra taket, VIKTOR bukker, faller igjennom en luke i gulvet, dør, og svever et kort øyeblikk seinere båret av vaiere opp av luken, og lander på en posthum-strukturalistisk bjelke i taket sammen med Roman Jakobson, Paul de Man, Roland Barthes og andre eks-teoretikere.)

MARTIN: Vips, instant desautomatisering!

(Heller hvitt miltbrannpulver i en kopp vann. Vannet freser. JACQUES DERRIDA stiger opp fra vannet.)

JACQUES DERRIDA: Og vips! Verden dekonstruerer seg selv! Alt er så absurd at det skal nesten ingenting til!

MICHAEL MOORE:
(dansende inn fra høyre)
WE LIVE IN FICTITIOUS TIMES, WE LIVE IN FICTITIOUS TIMES!

JEAN BAUDRILLARD:
(Skyter MOORE med pil og bue. Tar sikte på VIKTOR som stadig sitter oppunder taket.)

DESAUTOMATISER DETTE!

(DERRIDA hopper opp på ryggen hans. ROMAN JAKOBSON kaster grapefrukter på dem alle sammen. MARTIN prøver å roe gemyttene, men blir most under de tilstedeværendes samlede verker. Teppe. Lyden av tumulter blir ved.)

To paraphrase Karl Marx:

Politics = economics.

As I have been suspecting for a while, Technorati's numbers on how many blogs are active and real are wrong, according to this guy. That means I'm going to have to rewrite a whole page in my thesis. But it should be said that I think Burton is too pessimistic. A lot of blogs are intermittently active, and go on hiatus for a long time.

On another happy note, I just found out that my computer crash seems to have taken Everything with it. I backed up my text documents just before it happened, but that still means that every photo I've taken over the past year and a half that I didn't post to Flickr is gone. Crap. Last hope: hard disc retrieval. I'm not sure it's worth it. I'll find out soon.

As I have been suspecting for a while, Technorati's numbers on how many blogs are active and real are wrong, according to this guy. That means I'm going to have to rewrite a whole page in my thesis. But it should be said that I think Burton is too pessimistic. A lot of blogs are intermittently active, and go on hiatus for a long time.

On another happy note, I just found out that my computer crash seems to have taken Everything with it. I backed up my text documents just before it happened, but that still means that every photo I've taken over the past year and a half that I didn't post to Flickr is gone. Crap. Last hope: hard disc retrieval. I'm not sure it's worth it. I'll find out soon.

Wordification

Have you noticed how people who regularly use computer software in their work, like designers who use Photoshop or architects who use ArchiCAD or film makers who use After Effects or whatever, nobody writes the names of those programs the way I just did, with capital letters, like a brand name. They write photoshop and archicad or aftereffects. These programs have become such an integral part of their work routine that it would be like writing Pencil or Hammer or Computer. I like the idea that eventually brand names of actually functional objects dissolve into just being the function they perform. McDonalds is superflous to the world, and so it will always be McDonalds (although McJobs and McAnything have become the names of fast and content-free, everything-that-is-bad-for-our-culture things, so maybe McDs service is providing us with a picture of just how bad we are), but Photoshop and ArchiCAD and Google are actually incredibly helpful, functional objects, so they've gone beyond the brand into the vocabulary of everyday life. I like that.

The other day I heard (and Wikipedia confirms) that Google is actually discouraging the use of its own name as a verb. That's incredibly sad, for a company that seemed at times to be very progressive and now, not so much. Where's the desire to create something bigger than yourself?

Oh, hey. New thing I learned today:

The word "google" dates back to the turn of the 20th Century. It is a cricket term, the equivalent of the American "curveball." A "googly" ball curves unexpectedly, and a pitcher (or bowler in cricket) capable of throwing like this is called a "googler."

Note to the artistic types

Listen/pay attention... [very] carefully/polyphonically:

1. Just because you put a slash between two concepts that doesn't make them better/smarter. Slashes should be used cautiously/sparingly/almost not at all/only if you know what you're doing, and more often than you think, you don't.

2. Do not use brackets as though they were parentheses. [They have a specific meaning that you are robbing them of.]

3. Do not use ellipses... Like, ever... Only if you're quoting stuff (...) Or maybe if you're writing actual dialogue and wish to indicate a pause... in the conversation.

4. Do not use big words unless you are absolutely sure what they mean. Otherwise the dialectic representation of meaning might transgress the transculturally performed boundaries between epistomological absolutes, rhizomatic interventions and the free flow of meaning through nodes in a striated space only to express itself by emerging from the flow in the interstitial spaces of your gluteal physiology.

There's nothing wrong with writing complex things using simple words. If the complex forms come easier, you're probably doing something we call ArtCrap^tm. The reproduction of complex theoretical language without actually knowing theory. Step back and take a long hard look at your writing. If it seems like there's an easier route, take it.

Sincerely,
the guy who will eventually have to read and work with your text.

Ole Idar Kvelvane: the remix

Det er utrolig hva man fanger opp i slow motion. F.eks la jeg aldri merke til alle disse skjulte beskjedene i Ole Idar Kvelvanes artikkel i Dagbladet første gang jeg leste den. Jeg har uthevet dem. Ta en titt. Altså, en gang til, i sakte gjengivelse. Take it away, Ole Idar:

Med interesse har eg følgt sommarens kåring av dei beste skjønnlitterære bøkene her i landet, eller skulle eg seie kjønnlitterære? Det ante meg på førehand, og då dei endelege listene var klare, fekk eg det stadfesta: Menn skriv betre bøker enn kvinner. (...) Personleg synst eg at seks kvinner på denne lista er i meste laget. Då relativt ukjente Trude Marstein dukka opp på 24. plass begynte eg å lure på kva slags liste dette skulle bli.

(...)

EG SKRIV IKKJE dette for å komme ut av skapet som misogynist. Eg har også noko å melde. (...) difor spør eg meg: Kvifor får så mange kvinner gi ut bøker, når menn vitterleg er betre forfattarar, som har større moglegheiter for å nå eit større publikum?

Eg ønskjer ikkje på nokon måte å sverte kvinnelige forfattarar. Dei aller fleste forfattarar er vel heilt gjennomsnittlege og stort sett ukjente for folk flest, anten dei er kvinner eller menn, men dei forfattarane som er best likt av folket og fagjuryen er i hovudsak menn, og det håper eg forlaga har fått med seg. Etter mi meining bør dei bli meir restriktive med å gi ut kvinnelege debutantar. På den måten vil fleire mannlege forfattartalent sleppe til; talent som i dag får det eine refusjonsbrevet etter det andre.

(...)

Men at dei finst der, dei skrivande genia, det er eg viss på. Ein må bare sjå godt etter.

AT MENN ER betre forfattarar enn kvinner, er noko eg har visst ganske lenge. Eg kan på ståande fot rekne opp eit dusin svært gode mannlege norske forfattarar, nålevande og daude, men eg kan ikkje komme på ein einaste kvinneleg forfattar som eg faktisk har lest. Kvifor har eg ikkje lest Undset, Collett eller Skram (eg kjem diverre ikkje på nokre samtidige kvinnelege forfattarar av same kaliber)? Kvifor blir ikkje deira bøker dytta på meg slik som er tilfelle med dei beste verka til Mykle og Bjørneboe, eller Saabye Christensen eller Ambjørnsen for den saks skuld. Svaret er enkelt: Fordi dei ikkje er like gode.

Det interessante spørsmålet er ikkje om det er slik, for det er det, men kvifor det er slik. Eg trur det har med noko så enkelt som blikk å gjere, måten å sjå verda på. Sjølv etter tretti år med likestilling blir jentungar framleis oppdratt til å sjå på verda med eit passivt blikk, eit blikk som ikkje skal sjå, men bli sett. Difor lærer dei seg å pynte seg og gjere seg til for mannsblikket, slik at dei når tida kjem skal få ein make å formere seg med. Det ligg i kulturen. Det ligg i gena.

Gutungar blir oppdratt til å sjå aktivt, og då helst på det andre kjønnet. Og å sjå er kanskje den viktigaste eigenskapen ein må ha for å vere forfattar og kunstnar i det heile teke. Det slår meg i møte med kvinnelege forfattarar sine tekstar. Det er som om tekstane deira skrik: Er det nokon som ser meg nå, kor godt eg skriv? Og dette blir det ikkje god litteratur av. Den beste litteraturen er heilt fri, den har eit aktivt og grådig blikk. Menn har det, og difor er det dei som står bak storparten av dei siste tjuefem åras beste norske litterære verk.

KVIFOR ER det slik? At det maskuline blikket er så avgjerande for romankunsten, og ikkje innanfor poesi, scenekunst, dans, musikk, fotografi og biletkunst der det finst mange framifrå kvinnelege aktørar? Eg trur desse kunstformene i langt større grad enn romanen gir rom for kvinnelege kunstnarar til å vise fram kvinna i seg. Det verkar som dei er meir på heimebane der, enn dei er i romanen, som for meg alltid har hatt noko maskulint over seg. Det er nesten som eg ser for meg ein litt stiv, svart dress, bowlerhatt og stokk når eg tenkjer på romanen som form, og i alle fall ingen kjole. Kanskje det er så enkelt?

DÅ EG DEBUTERTE var eg godt vant med å bli refusert gjennom fleire år.

My sense of irony appreciation just exploded in tiny glowing shards of molten opportunity.

Most sensible thing I've read about airport security.: "."

Haiku in the information age.

This morning, I woke up (or it seemed like I woke up, anyway) and heard a cock crowing really loudly. On reflection, I think I dreamt it. The nearest farm must be ten kilometers away.

I'm back in Bergen after three long, good weeks of writing in Berlin in scorching weather. I'm now back at work on a translation project which will be helping me get through the autumn grind of finishing my master's thesis.

On the last day of my stay in Berlin, and maybe two hours after I did a backup copy of everything for the first time in three days, I came home from dinner with my friends to find that my computer had crashed. There were no discs to boot, it said. So it's off to the shops. This might influence the frequency of posting, just so you're warned.

As I was walking to the university today, there were all these big groups of fourteen-year-olds criss-crossing campus. They were holding hands with their parents and had these big, wide eyes at everything that was happening. It took me a while to realise that they were the new university students, and it made me feel really, really old. Welcome to the master's program, here's your walking cane.

I totally agree with this article right here, so I will try to manifest it in its most perfect form, which I consider to be the following six-word sentence: Fascism rocks and creativity is bad. Can anyone manifest that perfect article in a more perfect way?

A timeline of early blogging. They've been around for longer than one should think. I would argue that alot of the earliest ones had the form, but didn't really utilize it for much of anything. It isn't until around 1997 that things really start getting interesting.

I think I found the first one I read in winter '99 to 2000. Maybe early 2000. I remember I actually wrote it down in my diary because I thought the idea was brilliant somehow.

Kontra-anti-semittisme

Og mens Gaarder henges ut som antisemitt, så har vi en annen type antisemittisme, hvor en av FrPs stortingsrepresentanter henges ut fordi han erklærer krig imot islamistene. De står for "rendyrket ondskap", skriver han, og snakker om hvordan disse lumske fremmedelementer skjuler seg, og bare later som om de er velintegrerte, mens de i virkeligheten planlegger massemord. Han sier at de må erklæres krig. Hellig krig. Er det så forferdelig?

Jeg er helt 100% enig med ham. Det er da klart at denne trusselen mot vår sikkerhet og trygghet må knuses med all vår makt. Jeg foreslår som første skritt på veien at vi får alle muslimske førstegenerasjonsinnvandrere til å gå med et slags tegn på tøyet sitt (en muslimsk halvmåne kanskje?), som viser at de er muslimer, selv om de snakker norsk og ser "velintegrerte" ut, slik at vi kan være forberedt på det angrepet vi alle vet kommer. Og så er det selvsagt på tide at vi stenger grensene for denne trusselen, og slutter å tilby dem "asyl" fra alle disse "krigene" de har i hjemlandene sine. Det er vel også bare et triks de har for å få komme inn til oss og sprenge bomber. Pakk.

Forresten, visste dere at araberne også er et semittisk folk? Dere gjorde det, altså. Ok.

Over bekken for å tenne bål

- Tror Kjell Magne Bondevik at kronikken kan bidra til å nøre opp under antisemittisme?

- Gaarder har falt i to grøfter. Han må rydde opp i dette kjapt for å forhindre at det bæres ved til bålet, noe han ikke har ønsket å bidra til.

Willoch bærer tørr og god ved til grøften, mens Bondevik går over bekken for å helle kaldt vann i blodet. Gaarder koblet sammen religion og politikk på en måte jeg ikke tror stemmer overens med de svært realpolitiske hensyn til de israelske politikere, men hans tone var den tonen vi alle burde ha imot urett som den vi ser i Midt-Østen.

George Galloway river Sky og Rupert Murdoch i fillebiter. Han gir en uforbeholden støtte til Hezbollah som jeg ikke kan være enig i, men morsomt å se noen som klarer å manøvrere seg ut av intervjuformen og snakke om usynlig retorikk.

The bottom line is, terrorism doesn't kill many people. Even in Israel, you're four times more likely to die in a car wreck than as a result of a terrorist attack. In the USA, you need to be more worried about lightning strikes than terrorism. The point of terrorism is to create terror, and by cynically convincing us that our very countries are at risk from terrorism, our politicians have delivered utter victory to the terrorists: we are terrified.

Well, I hate to say that we told you so, but we've been saying this since 2001. If people had only listened.

Apropos that article I wrote in Prosopopeia a few months back, on Wikipedia, William Gibson vaxes Gibsonesque about the same sorta thing.

Go sign the ceasefire petition.

Time warp: remember back when the president of the US was intelligent, charismatic, had some moral feelings and was, y'know, articulate? I mean, goodness knows he had his faults, but I feel myself hit by a wave of longing for better times when I see him on tv.

The age of Freedom Fries. Gone.

(In other news, Victoria's Secret is fading out its line of Freedom Panties and kids at the Republican convention will no longer be Freedom-kissing in the back rooms.)

En god idé: en Flickrgruppe om kulturlandskap Nordland.

Noen som jobber i selve Stortinget var nettopp innom siden min. De visste muligens hvor den var, for det fantes ingen clickthroughs registrert. Eek. Konklusjon: (...) leses på de høyeste nivå i regjeringen. Les den du også! Jeg kommer totalt til å trykke opp en t-skjorte med det som slogan.

Tour de L'Idiots

The thing I don't get about doping, which I'm thinking of since the Tour de France winner now tested positive on both tests, and hence will probably have his win annulled, is what's in it for the athletes? Is the financial and social bonus really big enough for winning that it's worth doing it in a way which robs your own ego of the win? I thought athletes had enormous egos, in addition to supersized lungs and hearts. In the meantime, they're screwing it up for everybody. Fuckers.

Having recently lived and (tried to) work in 40-degree + weather, may I be the first to say Oh, Crap?

Any questions?

Jeg spisset akkurat en blyant i en blyantspisser, og skjønte at jeg ikke hadde gjort det på mange år. Jeg har kun brukt kniv, og har ikke eid en blyantspisser siden 2003, sikkert. Så absurd at det hverdagslige plutselig kan bli fullstendig fremmed.

Ping pong: spectator sport.

The Guardian has a great piece on the difference in media coverage of the war in the Middle East between the US and the UK. It's called "It's Like Watching Two Different Wars". It has some really horrific examples that makes one wonder if journalists in major news media outlets are at all concerned about their ethical responsibilities as reporters.

Protestdemonstrasjon mot Israels terror.

Stans Israels terror mot Palestina og Libanon!

Appellar: Ahmed Aljamal – Den Palestinske Forening Åse Vaksinen Sælensminde – Norsk Folkehjelp

Parolar: Stans Israels terror mot Palestina og Libanon! Internasjonale sanksjonar no! Stans våpensendingar til Israel! Sett fri dei over 10 000 fangane som sit i Israelske fengsel! Anerkjenn den demokratisk valde Palestinske regjeringa!

Sted: Torgallmenningen
Tid: Lørdag, 5. august kl. 1400.

I mean, he might as well have called himself 'Shaft'

Anaïs Nin was a whole lot of things. One of them was a bigamist. She was married to two men for over 30 years, apparently. The last of the two just died.

Bonus items in this article: the fact that Anaïs Nin was married to a man whose last name was Pole, was two-timing a man named Guiler, and that "Pole, 87, (...) was found dead in his Silver Lake home July 15 after a recent stroke"

Phone call for mr. Entendre. Mr. Double Entendre.

This is the most sensible piece of writing on blogs I've seen in quite a while: Steven Berlin Johnson's piece "Five Things All Sane People Agree On About Blogs And Mainstream Journalism (So Can We Stop Talking About Them Now?)" His point number 5 is the linchpin around which my master's thesis turns.

Writing has changed

A really interesting survey by the Pew Project, a non-profit research center studying the social effects of the internet on Americans. The survey is on bloggers. I see some statistical problems and some questions that are misleading in the way they are written, but there are still heaps of interesting and useful facts. It really cements the idea that blogs have changed the way we write, and the way we read. 54% of bloggers had not published their writings anywhere else. And now they have their own mass medium to publish their voice.

Thoughts on infrastructure and monopolisation

This train of thought took me places I didn't like for it to go. I was just going to post this one-liner:

YouTube is taking over the internet. Eek! It's already taking over my life!

And then I got to thinking:

On the one hand, it's a good thing that people are sharing data (besides the fact that it's uncomfortably addictive), but my hands get clammy when traffic and data start to accumulate in single sites. Google, for instance. The idea of there only being a single search engine, like, FOREVER, is scary to me. Or Amazon, for all intents and purposes the only major bookseller, eBay, for all intents and purposes the only online auction house, etc. Particularly since these are all openly traded companies focused primarily on the bottom-line (and thus, inevitably, will have to compromise their now-cemented position as essential parts of the infrastructure of the entire world's information exchange, in favour of making a quick buck to preserve their market standing).

Scary, scary thought: has Google gotten so big that it should be nationalised (or better yet: supernationalised, with the UN as the controlling agent, say?), with a smaller undergrowth of privately owned search engines, each with its own spiel?

Pluralis kissmyassis

Det er interessant at jo eldre vi blir, jo mer irritert blir vi på oss selv når vi oppdager at vi skriver "vi" som subjekt i tekstene våre. F.eks. fant vi dette i en gammel tekst som vi skal assimilere inn i vår masteroppgave:

Når vi prøver å gå utenom, eller prøver å se bort fra, kravet om reproduksjon av historiske kontingente sjangerkriterier, ser vi altså at teksten ofte ikke er leselig på en produktiv måte..." blabla blablabla bla.

Hva mener vi egentlig med "vi"? Det er et personlig essay, og vi står for faen ikke og underviser. "Vi" kan vel egentlig strengt tatt gå og henge "oss."

Det er en etterligning av respekterte filosofers stil inne i bildet her. Folk som snakker til en forelesningssal i sine publiserte forelesningsnotater, f.eks. Eller kanskje det er noe enda mer uhederlig på spill? Vi-formen er en distansert, formell stil, som ofte risikerer å drukne risikoen, eller det destabiliserende ved teksten i en aura av vitenskapelighet. I humanistiske fag er alt synspunkter, og burde kanskje presenteres slik. På den måten kan vi kanskje unngå sannhetsorientert retorikk. Vi må ikke gå rundt og tro vi er vitenskapelige, her.* Legg forresten også merke til hvordan hele dette avsnittet frem til for to setninger siden, har en upersonlig, konstaterende stil. Her bruker vi et annet vitenskapeliggjørende grep.

Det finnes tider der det er nødvendig og passende å skrive sånn, men man må gjøre det på riktig måte, da, tror vi. F.eks. situasjoner der man metaforisk sett tar leseren på en retorisk reise, og prøver å dele begeistringen ved å utvide subjektet. Men disse situasjoner er sjeldnere enn vi tror, og svært mange filosofer og andre humanister gjør det stadig for å etterligne vitenskapenes reproduserbarhet, og det er uhederlig.

Vi kan vel aldri slippe unna behovet for å legitimere tekstene og synspunktene våre ved å liksom-allmenngjøre dem, men vi kan iallefall prøve å bevisstgjøre oss det. Noen ganger er vi nødt til å undergrave oss selv slik at vi kan være ærlige. F.eks. ved å vi bruker jeg når jeg egentlig mener jeg.

* Det må vitenskapene i øvrig heller ikke, men det er en annen historie.

Out of curiosity

Do you most often feel that your ability or desire to continue a debate is limited by

a) Time available in which to debate?
b) The amount of energy or time you wish to devote to a debate?
c) The technical capabilities or noise of the medium, for instance no internet at home, no computer on which to type, loud ambient noise, slowness of newspaper publication, etc.?
d) Fatigue, loss of voice, or other physical limitations?
e) Lack of receptiveness in the opposition?
f) Your own rhetorical shortcomings?
g) Lack of faith in your own cause?
h) Feeling that you are actually being swayed by the opposition?
i) Actually changing your mind, and hence no longer having any need to debate.
j) Several of the above, if so, which?
k) Other, if so, specify.

Bonus question, actually what I'm most interested in: when was the last time a debate convinced you of something you didn't already believe in?