Category: motto

  • Mao and Beatrice

    Let’s see what Mao himself had to say about it. On the role of the arts as part of a special (or not special?) division in the armed forces for the Mao-Lenin ideal, during the civil war with the Kuomintang, which was then briefly on its back for fighting against a common enemy (Japan ).…

  • Rectifications in Yan’an

    I never cease to amaze myself when I think of the degree of hubris it takes to begin building a toy world that can mimic the social forces of Chinese culture on the behavior of the government and the individuals (and vice versa) . Perhaps it helps to see how the actual builders of that…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • MAGA v. DADA?

    Those who plan to investigate the behavior of collectives will encounter the phenomenon of successful mottoes. An example is the MAGA motto: “Make America Great Again.” It is of course not just a political slogan. Given the number of red caps on which it is propagated at rallies, it also has an economic interest that…

  • Rounding up Mottoes

    Now that I am turning to Phase 2 of my COVID-19 project I make my blog useful by collecting all mottoes that I have noted. They are (in sequence of discussion): (source) … those who believe that science and journalism are necessary for their institutional structures to survive, feel inclined to hate populist factions. So…

  • Wittgenstein I?

    Gerben, whom I hold highly, admired Wittgenstein I (or W1). Maybe he still does. W1 represents an intellectual attitude in which one refrains from speaking about what is not knowable. “Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muß man schweigen” is the last proposition (7) from his Tractatus, and can in conjunction with an earlier proposition…

  • To Lie or Not to Lie

    I am a little embarrassed that I use dream thinking and tradition thinking instead of Snyder’s thinking in terms of inevitability and eternity. There is a reason for this. In my brain pan, ‘inevitably’ and ‘eternity’ have landed so close together that they are difficult to label major differences with. Snyder does so. I recognize…

  • A COVID-19 Interim Report (4): R0-Differences per Week

    In interim report (3) I formulated an aphorism and tried to test it. It seemed to work in 8 of the 9 jurisdictions I reviewed before. But not for South Korea. More about that here. First a quote: Aphorism I – Until an effective policy is established in a jurisdiction, the first COVID-19 spread will…

  • A COVID-19 Interim Report (3): R0-differences per country

    When (in March – May) we were still panicking and the intelligent lock-down was announced, I started looking for certainty, for a better picture of the situation. In February and March 2020, COVID-19 gained a foothold in our world, literally everywhere. I deduced from the media that the virus is highly contagious, that it travels…