21 March 2006
Conservative Fukuyama and Liberal Soros
I just took some time to write a little comment on Soros' book The bubble of American Supremacy - The costs of Bush's war in Iraq, which I had in mind for some time. It was published as a comment to Michael Signer's post on Democracy Arsenal. I think Soros' extension of Popper is very useful in understanding present day issues like Intelligent Design and fundamentalism.
I conclude that Fukuyama's sticking to natural rights still makes him a conservative, not a liberal.
07 November 2005
Fukuyama on the Roots of Terrorism
A summary of Fukuyama's article of 2 November in the Wall Street Journal - A Year of Living Dangerously, registration required - can be found on the EU website euractive.com:
..radicalisation .. is not purely, or even mainly, a religious phenomenon, but is a product of modernisation and globalisation. .. a solution lies in the true assimilation of immigrants into .. a ‘national identity’. This cannot be attained by, for example, Dutch insistence on a command of the language and a knowledge of Dutch history or UK ideas of a ‘citizenship test’ containing questions impenetrable to the average Brit, but by a ‘discussion of the interconnected issues of identity, culture and immigration’.
In addition, I think it rather stupid to request from immigrants to pass an exam that many Dutch or British citizens will fail to pass.
16 October 2005
Tagore settings is back on top of Google! Apparantly, a few days ago Google has indexed the index page for my blog, which was published on 30 September. The rest of the pages still has to be indexed, but, as they are quite new, I presume that by the beginning of November they will also be present in the index.
I guess that missing the "keywords" attribute within the META tag was what caused the low rating, though the keywords themselves were present.
02 October 2005
I repeated my search-engine test for "Tagore settings" from 7 August 2002. Also registered as a zealot for the Directory at LookSmart, after passing the test (wow).
Conclusion: still to register for Open Directory, and Google has disappeared! This is probably related to the lack of updating. For the text between quotes Google gives the result far better rating: 3re! Google also takes "setting" without plural s into account.
On the Dutch biodiversity, one of the world's most investigated.
A just reread an old article by Steve Pemberton on Dutch speling: "An Englishman's Difficulties with the Dutch". Nice if you understand Dutch and English. The Dutch overestimate the simpleness of their language compared to English.
Steve is also chairing the XHTML group of the W3C. He seems to be publishing an awful lot of stuff.
27 September 2005
 Today, I visited FOAM, which had an exhibition on photographer O. Winston Link. The Link museum has a bio on this remarkable figure, who was an excellent engineer, inventor and artist all in one.
Just found out that I missed the opportunity to have a lecture by Francis Fukuyama, one of my heroes, nearby. Title: "The Future of Democracy. Culture and Immigration". The organiser was the Nexus Institute (only in Dutch).
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Lindo's blog
