DLTQ.org

what comes before
what comes after

we are very used to narratives
like
beginning
tension rising
climax
end

now, what do we remember the most?
it’s like a list of companies in a telephone book.
do we take more notice to what comes first?
a list of names responsible for a project
a list of topics that are important for our world.

what if words drown in words?
what if the questions we have drown in themselves?
what if we pay so much attention on - for instance - form that we lose the juice?

I just made a video:

Click To Play

it is an edited version of this.

frames of mind.

my mind is oozing. not a pleasant feeling. something triggered in me when he beat my head into the floor. tick. ticked. triggered. so i have been trying to see new frames. set new frames for my thoughts and emotions and actions and wishes/hopes. i still like to ask questions, but i realize that i dont proclaim them as much. that is a bad sign, right? soon I might just as well become a bitter man, hunchback, who just sits around waiting for the grave to meet him. bah.

videoblogging to me is just memories recorded. too bad we have this urge to share our memories, while at the same time we want to keep them sacred. to ourselves. they are OURS. don’t you mess with my memory, even if your version is teh truth.

it is summer, it is weekend, but it is raining, and chilly, and i want the sun to come back, and i want to feel like all of this matters, again. like it really matters if i make that one more movie, or a hundred more. so many conversations we just lose track of, because so much comes after them.

I was reading a novel, and I couldn’t continue reading it, so instead I turned to the Danish translation of Amartya Sen’s book “Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny”

I am still only half-through with the book, but so far I must say that I really like it. In a non-pretensious language, but with a tendency to repeat his main points over and over in the different chapters, Amartya Sen lays forth an individualistic view of people that really hits home with my own views. To me, it is absolutely horrendous to speak of a “Clash of Civilizations”, a term that Samuel Huntington coined some years ago with his book. As such, Amartya Sens book can be seen as a direct response to Huntington, but it is also much more than that.

There are quite a few questions that arise while reading the book, and one of them was well put forward by Andrew G. Burridge, a reviewer on amazon.co.uk:

What it doesn’t solve, for me, is what we do when people *do* chose a single identity. Or more that, while we accept that people are free to ascribe different important to their complex and contradictory identities - some identities do have a basic ‘core’ that may be positive, or negative. Being a football fan will tend to involve taking an interest in football. In this, how do we criticise those aspects of faith which appear to have a negative impact? A muslim may not declare jihad every time he goes to the post office, but is that because he isn’t being a very good muslim?

To me, religion is like fire: It can be used for good, or for bad, but it is neither good or evil in itself. One of the points of the book by Amartya Sen is that by giving the religious aspect of people’s identity a far bigger importance than it perhaps deserves, we are doing a disservice to the “integration” we wish so well to achieve. Surely, there are Muslims who are very Muslim in their daily life, just like there are Christians who take things much further than church once a week and the prayer before food at the table, but can we assume that a group of people - hundreds of million of people - can be put into neat boxes based on their religion? Also, how do we effectively meet the threat that religious fanaticism does pose to the world?

I will write more about this book once I have finished it. In the meantime, I was happy to find that Dr. Moira Gunn from ITConversations had an interview with Amartya Sen that you can listen to here.

Yesterday morning I was greeted with this e-mail from Dreamhost, my host during the last 2 years. Now, there are a lot of issues related with this severe security breach, and I am rather worried about aspects of how Dreamhost dealt with this, but to make the story short: DLTQ.org and other sites I host have been down for over 40 hours.

Tonight, I finally managed to get the sites up again by reverting to the back-ups from last week. If I had known how to see hidden files/folders, I would have made this earlier, but alas, I am not a coder. :/

In other news, today has been one of the hottest days in Copenhagen so far this year, and I have been sweating like a pig in bed (been ill the last days). I am still working on a new video for this site, but it is a bit delayed due to - stuff.