From The (Van)guardian via Marginal Revolution: ‘Chinese tourist who lost his wallet in Germany ends up in refugee shelter‘
‘He spent 12 days trapped in our bureaucratic jungle because we couldn’t communicate,” he said. “Germany is unfortunately an extremely bureaucratic country. Especially during the refugee crisis I’ve seen how much red tape we have.”
You really ought to know a little German:
Maybe this is a two-way street…
‘A respected research institute wanted Chinese classical texts to adorn its journal, something beautiful and elegant, to illustrate a special report on China. Instead, it got a racy flyer extolling the lusty details of stripping housewives in a brothel.’
Back to the States. Via a reader: Umm…yeah…there are probably some games you win by refusing to play:
“I have divided my personality,” the Italian artist says. “There is Vanessa Beecroft as a European white female, and then there is Vanessa Beecroft as Kanye, an African-American male.” She then reveals that she actually took a DNA test as she thought she could very possibly be black. Spoiler alert: she is not.
Oh boy…
If it’s not race…it’s gender…or class…or theory….or something, and that’s despite the weirdness on display here. If it’s postmodern, it’s probably got a lot of ‘bodies juxtaposed in space’ and theory involved.
In my humble experience: Ignorance is often the rule, not the exception. There are reefs of sentiment, pride, love, tradition and pre-judgment and judgment that bind people together, as much drive them apart.
One’s own observations are based on very limited experience, out of which lofty heights of abstraction can be reached, and upon which individuals can stand apart on principle, mistaken or not…bearing much weight, while still possibly being wrong about a good many things.
Be careful what you do with your eyes and your mind.
On that note…a cheery old German, whom I don’t think ought to be the last word on matters of race:
‘Every nation ridicules other nations, and all are right.’
Related on this site: Postmodern generator here, via David Thompson.
Simon Blackburn revisits the Sokal hoax.
Do you remember the Sokal hoax?
“…in 1996 the radical “postmodernist” journal Social Text published an article submitted by Alan Sokal, a mathematical physicist at New York University, with the mouthwatering title “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity.” Sokal then revealed the article to be a spoof…”
Sokal has been busy ruminating since that paper, and Blackburn, a Cambridge philosophy professor, reviews his ruminations.