Author: ErnieS

  • Ding Ling and Ramsey Nasr

    Mr. Sum received the book entitled I Myself Am a Woman and started reading. The title made him wary. As soon as I feel like a peeping Tom I stop, he decided. But he didn’t. First that detailed introduction, and then the stories. The first of these are about young women and men and how…

  • Fiction

    The weather is fine now, but this morning it was snowing, I think with flakes already melting, they fell straight down, close together and quite quickly. A source of desperation. I have to do something, set the brain free. Find out something more about Ding Ling. Born in 1904, she belonged to the May 4th…

  • The radio, Ding Ling, the Internet and Shen Congwen

    Because radio provides a safe border crossing to the outside world in pandemic times, we often listen to it. That goes well until 9:30 in the morning with radio 1 news (Jurgen van den Berg, etc.), but it becomes a risk after that. For some time now we have regularly switched to BBC radio 4.…

  • What kind of political knowledge is useful?

    Yesterday I answered the question of how Rutte could have let the parliamentary drama of 1/2 April happen. Does that answer contain knowledge? And if so, is it useful to us? If political science is aimed at making useful political knowledge available, what is it? What kind of political knowledge is worth seeking from a…

  • Caught by a white lie?

    How to explain that a prime minister who has led governments for 10 years and, shortly after another resounding election victory finds himself back, in full view on national TV and after a 9-hour parliamentary massacre, with a censure motion that was supported wall-to-wall. Wall-to-wall here means: supported by all parties, except that of the…

  • Thinking of Holland …

    Thinking of Holland, broad rivers I see, passing slowly through endless horizons is my clumsy translation of a world-famous quote (in the Netherlands that is, Marsman, 1936). My personal view is anno 2021 more prosaic: Thinking of Holland, epidemic waves I see, passing slowly through many a backyard. I have been tracking the daily numbers…

  • Clashing truths in the Netherlands around April 1, 2021

    I think that the parliamentary meeting of April 1 in the Netherlands showed conflicting religious and scientific truths as they can work in the political debate within Dutch culture. Fractions develop their own identities, which are linked to those of their parties and, if they are part of it, to that of the governing coalition.…

  • Clashing Religious Truths

    My OCT thesis (on clashing truths) is about confrontations between religious and scientific truths. Looking around me learns that serious clashes also take place between defenders of religious truths from the same culture, but also between defenders of religious truths from different cultures. My ocRt thesis (about conflicting religious truths) is the following: Clashes between…

  • The first wave and beyond: China and the USA

    For every jurisdiction, the first encounter with the COVID-19 virus has been a challenge of how to respond to a pandemic. It was China’s turn first. All things considered, I assume that in most places where there has been a first wave, it will have ended after the 26th week of the pandemic. (There are…

  • The COVID-Situation per March 20, 2021

    Below is another global overview of the COVID situation as I can currently make. Worldwide, after all it is a pandemic. I cut the world into 9 pieces: (1) the Far East (where it all started), (2) Europe, (3) the US, (4) the American continents, (5) jurisdictions around the Mediterranean, ( 6) countries around Russia,…