Category: opinion

  • Nescio, his walks and Bert Verhoeff

    Nescio’s Natuurdagboek (Nature Diary) is for himself. A log. With times and places of trips to where those who have legs and eyes can harvest images. And back. And with keywords that were enough for him, such as “First of all: on the Brink on a bench and looking through the young greenery to the…

  • Freedom Day and a Tentative Prediction

    Today is Monday, July 19, 2021, Freedom Day in the UK. The COVID measures are gone. This led to massive physical fraternization in the streets, parks and clubs. Frenzied hustling crowds that body to body showed and screamed quite stupid texts. I remember that I once attended a Christmas Eve service in Ermelo, the apotheosis…

  • Goodbye to Social Science?

    I neglected this blog for a while because I was asked to give a one-hour lecture to a conference of young computer scientists interested in artificial intelligence and Big Data. Yesterday I delivered it via Zoom. Now, of course, I have to record here, and for myself, what I’ve learned from that job. A first…

  • 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 Truths

    My OCT thesis (on conflicting truths) is the following: Clashes between religious and scientific truths arise either when core cultural values threaten to limit the scope of a scientific discipline or when scientific theorems jeopardize the credibility of a culture’s core values. Is my OCT thesis itself religious in nature and could it be /…

  • Religious and Scientific Truths

    Actually, it is crazy to expect that I could achieve something by reenacting political processes with the help of toy worlds. In different cultures too. The basic literature on the four selected cultures is diverse, old, and new, and almost endless, and often at a high level of abstraction, sometimes so untouchable that depicting them…

  • Cultural diversity

    It is not very difficult to find reports in the press about conditions that characterize culture-bound situations in the US, the EU, Saudi Arabia and China. I give an example of each. The idea is that the government behaviors that are discussed should be explainable with the aid of knowledge about the cultural differences. And…

  • (1895) Gustave Le Bon and Mob Psychology

    While discussing cooperation with Marco Velicogna on what the law means in our COVID-pandemic times for political stability in jurisdictions he mentioned work by Gustave Le Bon on crowd psychology as worthwhile. As this was news to me I began some form of acquaintance by finding his book (1895) on crowds at Gutenberg. I further…

  • Differences (China, Italy)

    In the Netherlands, today, a judge awarded an appeal against the illegality of the COVID curfew. The movement that filed the appeal operates under the motto “virus insanity.” The ruling is based on the observation that there is a lack in the legal ground on which the measure was taken. No formal law behind it.…