Somedays I am reluctant to write a post. Sometimes it is because the caffine has yet to organize my mind. Sometimes it is because there is no news. Sometimes. like today, it is because I do not want to see something slip off the front page above the fold. That something is the bowl of Mr. Tran's excellent Thai noodle soup I had for lunch yesterday. I am confirming all of Pavlov's experiments this morning every time I go past it. Nonetheless, you have needs. So, here are some good reads from elsewhere:
- Junk Store Cowgirl writes about events during a western New York military campaign in 1779.
- Through Rob1 (I have delinked all the other Robs but still like to call him Rob1), I have come across Dina's site, a well-written blog from India.
- Alfons in the Netherlands is thinking about tolerance.
- Living in Dryden continues its comprehensive description of one small US town and does so so well I am starting to think I am actually a shut-in there as long as I leave the TV on channel 5 with its unending ads for apparently unlimited Fuccillo car dealerships of north and central NYS.
- Ian relives the pre-punk, pre-disco world of being an elementary school kid in the early 1970s home with the radio.
Comments
Arthur - November 12, 2004 7:38 PM
<p>I think Alfons' second post is more enlightning (sorry for taking the discussion here):
</p>
<p>"Tolerance is, besides tolerating people with intolerant opinions, about weighing and choosing words carefully. And letting and trusting the court of laws to decide about what to do about damning and differing opinions."
</p>
<p>Also, I find it ironic how everybody has embraced Van Gogh's comments on Islam, while forgetting how vehemently he attacked (and satirized) the Dutch Jewish population in the early Nineties. I hope things will sort out soon.</p>
Alan - November 12, 2004 8:14 PM
The fact of the Netherlands is a funny thing - while being one of the most important furnaces of democracy and tolerance in the world it also suffers because of it. I lived there only ten weeks 18 years ago but I have never been, before or since, in a society which was so civilized to the point I felt like I was culturally rougher. I don't mean the upper-class English concept of civilized or the French-American academic one, but the fact that the working folk I lived with were well-educated, well-mannered, well-paid and polite while being fairly much working joes. I can think with embarrassment a young guy Jerome who worked on the floor of the plant with me who offered on a Saturday to show me other sectors of the industry. I responded that if the boss put him up to it that was fine but he didn't have to. He was quite hurt as it was his own idea. Yes, I was a jerk but I was a 23 year-old Canadian but I really just did not see that kindness coming. <p>And, for the record should someone say that the Dutch as somehow "insulated-from-reality Europeans", this new and bizarre concept, the family I lived with knew well the hardship of living under the Nazis and, as bakers, had baked for the community tulip bulb bread and then grass bread by the end of the years of occupation. I thought they were Jewish because of the menorah on the centre of the mantlepiece. One morning there was bacon on the table and I asked how that could be - I really was not too bright about such things so bear with me - they laughed and said they were Catholics but that the menorah was there to always remember the neighbours, the Dutch Mom and Dad they said who the Nazis divided from them and then killed. <p>Maybe my hosts were gems, a quite stamp-collecting Dad, a laughing big Mom and their two teen daughters, but I learned a lot about the world and a free society in those ten weeks from them. It is a different form of freedom from North American but without the Dutch protecting the free thinkers when they needed the protection I doubt there would have been an American Revolution or a French one.
alfons - November 13, 2004 8:57 AM
The fact of the Netherlands is a funny thing - while being one of the most important furnaces of democracy and tolerance in the world it also suffers because of it.
Yes, and that makes the recent events so frustatingly foggy and fuzzy. I really believe the entire discussion about freedom of speech is pretty safe with artists. I immediately think of Hermans (see my quote), Van Gogh, Celine, Jose Cela, Brecht. Art is about controversy anyway.
I strongly disagreed with Van Gogh's views on islam, judaism and christianity (which he also attacked freely and abundantly). I fully agreed with jewish organisations going to court because of his offending language. He got fined, and made some funny self-censoring statements on this.
But the resort to violence... It's so outrageously dumb.
Perhaps, maybe perhaps, we the Dutch, were more tolerating before 9/11.