An update on the stories mentioned in my entry on Pluralism, Dutch Style.
The Dutch Courts have convicted the murderer of Theo Van Gogh. The BBC reported that Mohammed Bouyeri, who has joint Dutch-Moroccan nationality, was convicted of murder. Another BBC report on the public reactions to the case in Holland mentioned that he is going to be charged with terrorist conspiracy offences.
There are difficult aspects to this story. Bouyeri was a disaffected immigrant youth, apparently involved with drug use and street crime. He found new values in fundamentalist Islam, which made helped him live within a strict moral code, connected him to his cultural roots, and gave him a supportive community. It also indoctrinated him in an ideology of moral and cultural superiority and empowered him to become a terrorist and a murderer.
New Age Link
Wikipedia has an entry on New Age, and uses “New Age” as a category container for related entries.
Wikipedia entries evolve. The main entry seems to have started in December 2001. The current version deals with the New Age, both as a social event and as a set of ideas, in an accurate and descriptive way, catching the main social, economic, ideological and psychological features of the New Age event. Some of the Wikipedia entries within the New Age category are fragmentary, and some of them tend to promote particular New Age systems. The entry on neuro-linguistic programming as presently written, tends to promote a movement that has much in common with Scientology. The entries miss a lot, which is natural. The New Age is an amorphous, fluid movement. Some of the omissions are large. The book stores and Web pages presently are pushing a lot of words about about Energy and Intention. Wikipedia presently only has a stub entry on Spiritual Energy. It has a good page on Intentionality as a branch of the philosophy of mind, but only a stub page on New Age guru of the Power of Intentions, Wayne Dyer.
The Wikipedia steps gently around issues of character and temperament. New Agers try to project an air of detachment, but they protect themselves and the sense of satisfaction they get from their beliefs, practics and associations by avoiding scrutiny and debate, and by promoting beliefs that blame and criticize their critics. The New Age has a smorgasboard (or should I say a dim sum menu) of beliefs and values to insulate New Age believers from conflicting beliefs and values. I noticed an entry on Energy Vampires. I also noticed an entry on Personal Reality – the perfect marriage of New Age beliefs with one stream of postmodern theory.
Summer?
It hasn’t been a good summer for bike rides. Through most of June and early July, it has rained on Sunday. Some weekends we have managed to ride on Saturday afternoon or managed a shorter ride in the 35 k range on Sunday, but we have missed our longer rides. We did a metric century past St. Francis on Canada Day. Mike and I rode to St. Adolphe with Clint on a muggy hot Sunday morning July 10. We finally had a dry day and Mike, Steve and I rode to Lockport yesterday (Sunday July 24).
We have managed to get 2 or 3 evening rides during the week, and we are pushing those into the 35-40 k range, so we are actually getting decent distances and maintaining our fitness, slowly improving our peak and average speeds, riding longer and faster into adverse winds.
I have been concentrating on small adjustments. I change the cleat position in my shoe, raise or lower the seat by half a centimeter. Yesterday I changed the alignment of the seat and the seat angle on my road bike during the ride, and when I was finished I changed the position of the brake levers for a better riding position when I ride with my hands over the levers – a good position for harder riding without going down on the drops. I have been learning what feels right, checking against stress and joint pain, changing things when knees or hips hurt. So far, so good.
July 2005 Blogging
My blogging has slowed down this summer. I have been spending more time cycling and reading, and less time at the keyboard.
The spam situation has improved. There hasn’t been any spam on the blog for a long time. What I mean is that is that the spam attempts also seem to have dropped off. The maintenance on the spam logs was not time consuming, but it was annoying. I run MT Blacklist without getting Blacklist updates. I culled the list to a few dozen strings and a couple of dozen patterns. For a while, the log showed I was getting hits, but it seems to have dried up a few weeks ago. I also run Spamlookup and Keystroke which take care of everything that Blacklist doesn’t block. I think a lot of spam was probably coming from a few sources and they may have just taken me off their lists when they couldn’t get a hit.
Movable Type is beta testing MT 3.2. I am going to wait until they have a stable commercial release, tested to work with the plugins that I use, and then upgrade. I don’t want to move to another platform unless another platform offers clear advantages.
Slings and Arrows
The first season of Slings and Arrows, 6 episodes produced in 2003, was played repeatedly – mainly on Showcase I think – last winter and spring, and a second season has started on Movie Central in Canada. I think the fourth episode airs tonight.
The Doubter’s Companion
The Doubter’s Companion (1994, ISBN 0-670-85536-7) followed Voltaire’s Bastards in Canadian writer John Ralston Saul‘s books on modern economics, politics and culture. His Wikipedia entry identifies him as a philosopher. I see him as a public intellectual and a social critic. His academic background appears to have been in economics. His arguments blend careful analysis with colourful and forceful presentation.
This book is subtitled “a dictionary of aggressive common sense”, which plays out as an alphabetically organized collection of essays running from a few lines to a few pages. His essays explore concerns that are discussed in more detail in several of his other books.
Letters to a Young Contrarian
A few weeks ago I read Letters to a Young Contrarian (ISBN 0-465-03033-5) by Christopher Hitchens. The book is part of a series published by Basic Books called “The Art of Mentoring”. Hitchens has made his career as a journalist, literary critic, political commentator and public intellectual. The pieces in Letters to a Young Contrarian are gems – finely crafted essays on living the examined life in public.
Foucault’s Spirituality
Neat. The English online version of a Turkish paper has a interview with James W. Bernauer, the American author of several books on the French philosopher Michel Foucault, tied in to the publication of a Turkish translation of one of his books. Bernauer teaches at Boston College and many of his books and papers identify him as James w. Bernauer S.J. which indicates that he is a member of the Jesuits, and therefore a Catholic scholar.
Bernauer says that Foucault’s later writings looked at philosophy as a method of care for the self and spirituality as a method of resisting the ideology of power imposed over individuals by society.
Still Not Happy?
Another good article reached through ALDaily. It’s about happiness, published in the Times Literary Supplement, a package of three reviews of books about happiness. The author is a social psychologist who has written her own books on happiness. Unfortunately, the non-subscription TLS site only provides part of the article.
Like my post last week “Happy Now” it relates to Positive Psychology, Flow, and other ideas I have tried to unpack.
WFF 2005 Sunday
Winnipeg Folk Festival, Sunday July 10, 2005. Another hot sunny day, carrying a forecast of possible severe thunderstorms. The storms seemed to arrive around 9:45 PM with strong winds, sending the mainstage crowd surging for the exits. The wind died down, we had some light showers, and made it through the rest of the evening. Many of the patrons who had retired to the campground came back. The crowd was smaller, probably only a couple of thousand people stayed to the end. It started to rain after midnight.