These days I am more active on my other blog about my research activities, mainly cosmopolitanism.
If you came across this blog be sure to go and visit it, even if it is still under development. The goal is to build an entire web site dedicated to the research and diffusion of knowledge on the idea and practice of cosmopolitanism.
Here it is.
Utopia: a political idea that cannot be transformed into policy in the short term, but only in the longer term.
A while ago, I discovered a blog written by an academic I knew only for one of his great books Ringmar, Erik (2008). Identity, Interest and Action: A Cultural Explanation of Sweden's Intervention in the Thirty Years War (Cambridge: CUP, Cambridge Cultural Social Studies). I realised that this impressive academician senior lecturer double Dr. Ringmar serial important book publisher was really more kind of a cool guy you'd like to hang out with at the local pub. He resigned after a year-long controversy for the blog entitled "forget the footnotes" on his academic employer the London School of Economics. He was writing whatever he bloody pleased calling cats cats, some professors "notoriously self-important wanabees", the LSE not better than the London Met, and the head of the school an "anti-intellectual businessman". Of course the kids there loved this rock n' rolling Ringmar dude, but the rock-hard n' ruling establishment a lot less. Anyway the guy got it all planned, since he already had a job guaranteed elsewhere. The point was to demonstrate the hypocrisy of our so-called democratic institutions on free speech. It all got clear to me in the column he wrote for the Huffington Post. Many people got fired for writing, or more rightly lashing out, about their jobs. Why? Because it hurts the shareholders, it ruins the stock-market value of the institutions owned by capitalists. Hence the last taboo remaining in our democracies is the market: "The market has become a threat to freedom. The market is today the only authority that never needs to justify its power over us."
Ringmar calls for a cyber guerilla tactic by blogging against the market to blast this last citadelle against our natural right to free speech. He published a free e-book, and almost free print version, A blogger's Manifesto.
For me this guy is the next coolest academic after Indy (not the last one from the unbaringly long name about crystallic alien skulls movie though), and he's the kind of academic I'd like to become.
I am wondering what the point with IQ tests is. No, I did not just filled in one, and frustrated by the results decided to write a furious post on my blog about how egregiously diminishing and inaccurate they actually are since they may not have recognise my great genius. I have actually never made one. Well, not one that was a serious one. I just filled in some internet questionnaires with multiple choice answers one day I had 15-30 minutes spare time (i.e. when I had an important paper to hand in for the next day).
But I really wonder about them. Ok, I know intelligence is not singular but plural (thanks Derrida). So in any case the tests cannot test all forms of intelligences. But I am wondering how it can even claim to be testing intelligence in the first place, and with what accuracy. Actually, one does not need any test to see if someone is dumb or not dumb, a five minutes conversation will do. So why make a test for that? Furthermore, how can one pretend to measure intelligence? By definition intelligence, from latin inter legere, is about connecting dots. And high intelligence is about connecting dots in a completely new manner. So it is all about creativity. So how does one measure creativity, I wonder? All the tests are usually problems with multiple choice answers where the author knows the answer. So like any test one had in school, it is only measuring up to the level of the author of the test. I have never seen a test actually giving a problem the author would not know the answer, and with a completely free choice of answers. A completely new answer would give a good idea of how smart the guinea pig really is. But how would it be possible to measure then? The answer would be to have the smartest guy on earth make all the tests. But then how do you know he’s the smartest guy on earth since you have no way to measure it objectively?
This is why I rely entirely on my five minutes conversation method, which helps me classify people into dumb/not dumb. I usually only connect with the not dumb category, but I guess I will always be in someone’s dumb category.
I started studying law, then I thought it was really not worth it spending precious hours of my short life-span reading tons of useless books and learning by heart meaningless rules that were in them anyway (not to mention the conceitedly loftiness of the legal scholars) -- although I was saying goodbye to an awful lot of cash. Then I turned to political science, which I thought was way cooler. But in there I realised that nobody was actually doing "political science". Some were continuing law by other means. Some were worshipping economics and its methods of assuming everyone is rational and calculating the maximisation of their equally rational interest, while giving a (third) hand to the greater good. Others decided that history would better inform present situations, since we address present issues based on past solutions, which determine our path for the future. Others argued that institutions were about the people, so one must study the people in society and their behaviour. Others decided that really, all this literature was not worth it and started reading the real one, then imported post-modern views that identity and texts shaped people's interests so one should deconstruct, hermeneuticise or genealogise discourses.
This is why I am now turning to philosophy and the history of ideas -- farewell for ever sweet cash flow!
Actually, doing so, I came across a few ideas about the origins of political science. During the Enlightenment, in France, people started worshipping reason as the universal and objective tool to understand nature. Since there was a natural science based on the observation of nature, there should equally be a human science based on the observation of man. People like Holbach or Mably started the foundations of a "moral science". In 1795, the French "Académie des sciences morales et politiques" was founded to inform and improve our human all too human condition. Ever since, there have been "scientists" to believe in it and search for it with a Kantian lantern. I suspect that what keeps them going on searching in the obscurity is that they cannot light the whole room to realise they might have been turning in circles.
To my surprise, I realised that the most entries on my blog where on my post "UN NCRE 2008", where I described my experience at competing for this exam. No wonder! When I google "UN NCRE" my post appears second right after the official UN web site. I do not know if it is because I was writing that we did not get much information on the exam, but now the UN's site has more information about the whole process. Would that be my very first input on the work of the United Nations?
Update:
Hmm, that's funny. Now my post does not appear anymore in the google results. I guess my subversive post had to be taken down from google. Somebody at the UN must have contacted google. Outrageous abuse of power! Well, internet fame was great so long it lasted. Here I am now, tasting the same sad condition as "star war kid" or "chocolate-rain man".
Update:
Stop the press!! or whatever that is that publishes posts on the internet! I do not understand this google thing, now I am back in second position. Somebody at google must have decided that internet belongs to the people! Or I must check up this paranoid behaviour with my analyst (Eliza). So long star war kid and chocolate rain man!
Observing man, humanity makes me cry. I know that the mature defence mechanism would be to laugh about it. I am trying to grow up.
