Ah well, since you insist. It is on 'ethnification' of Central Europe, why ethnic cleavages persist on the political scenes of SLovakia, Hungary and Czech Republic, and what causes the ethnification - will be looking at historic traumas, manipulation of historical memory by political elites, institutional impacts on ethnic communities and some such exciting and thrilling things. involves contents analysis of party platforms from 1920 until now (uggghhh) and a large public opinion survey (why oh why?!). but i am very very very excited. i'm sure it will be smashing fun!
Essays have it tough in their short and unworthy lives. All are loved only after they're done (if then) and such a miniscule portion of them ever lives that long!
Ohhhhhhhhhh cool!
(I'm overusing "cool".)
Excellent! Interesting!
And congrats!
Sounds absolutely fascinating - and the key question for a number of countries, whose ethnic hostility seems to have gone to sleep one day, and awoken unchanged fifty years later!
Would it be analogous, I wonder, to those cobbled together by westerners countries in Africa, whose intense incompatibilities only became clear at decolonisation?
Soze - my stuff IS cool, too!
The basic mechanisms surely should be analogous, unfortunately, african countries got much more on their plate to chew. a lot more traumas, but also a lot more 'intervention' from the western world. the whole culture was in a way forced on them, through the systems of our rationalism - that was so foreign to them. we (we being the nasty colonizing westerners where i must culturaly count myself into despite the fact that slovakia -ehehe-never colonized anything). we started counting them via censuses (powerful spark for the birth of ethnic identity in and f itself) , put them to schools where we enforced our education system of very different norms and logic,...., and thus it was we who are responsible to some degree for the waves of nationalism that sweapt across african continent and still do. that would be an incredibly challenging and complex topic, i already have a headache from examining the dull politics of pub grumbling and nasty vocabulary of slovaks against magyars - how trivial it seems compared to africa. if i should add severe ethnic violence and dependency and social engineering and all that, i would never finish even researching. maybe a habilitation thesis? (grrrrrr, can't think about it now).
DAG -- I'M SO HAPPY YOU'RE HERE!
Really. Tres cool.
I'm still thinking. I don't know whether to laugh or cry....
TV poll: Friends reruns more popular than war coverage
awww, how can i even go to bed? nobody will tell me such things there, only 'roll over honey please, you were snoring somewhat'. i do NOT snore! anyway. in some way i think it's good people watch friends more than war coverage. it means people feel safe enough to perceive the war as another TV show. that is not very nice, but i think i like the idea that there is a number of non-affected people. they should care i suppose, nah, i cannot decide, should sleep instead.
It started out innocently enough, thinking at parties now and then to loosen up. Inevitably though, one thought led to another, and soon I was more than just a social thinker.
I began to think alone - "to relax", I told myself - but I knew it wasn't true. Thinking became more and more important to me, and finally I was thinking all the time.
I began to think on the job. I knew that thinking and employment don't mix, but I couldn't stop myself.
I began to avoid friends at lunchtime so I could read Thoreau and Kafka. I would return to the office dizzied and confused, asking, "What is it exactly we are doing here?"
Things weren't going so great at home either. One evening I had turned off the TV and asked my wife about the meaning of life. She spent that night at her mother's.
I soon had a reputation as a heavy thinker. One day the boss called me in. He said, "Skippy, I like you, and it hurts me to say this, but your thinking has become a real problem. If you don't stop thinking on the job, you'll have to find another job." This gave me a lot to think about.
I came home early after my conversation with the boss. "Honey," I confessed, "I've been thinking..."
"I know you've been thinking," she said, "and I want a divorce!"
"But Honey, surely it's not that serious," I protested minimizing the situation.
"It is serious," she said, lower lip aquiver. "You think as much as college professors! College professors don't make any money, so if you keep on thinking we won't have any money!"
"That's a faulty syllogism," I said impatiently, and she began to cry.
I'd had enough. "I'm going to the library," I snarled as I stomped out the door.
I headed for the library, in the mood for some Nietzsche, with NPR on the radio. I roared into the parking lot and ran up to the big glass doors ... they didn't open. The library was closed.
To this day, I believe that a Higher Power was looking out for me that night.
As I sank to the ground clawing at the unfeeling glass, whimpering for Zarathustra, a poster caught my eye. "Friend, is heavy thinking ruining your life?" it asked. You probably recognize that line. It comes from the standard Thinker's Anonymous poster.
Which is why I am what I am today: a recovering thinker. I never miss a TA meeting. At each meeting we watch a non-educational video; last week it was "Porky's". Then we share experiences about how we avoided thinking since the last meeting.
I still have my job, and things are a lot better at home. Life just seemed ... easier, somehow, as soon as I stopped thinking.
Old joke, all too appropriate.
don't care or would rather stay ignorant? Or is it that we had enough gore with 9/11?
I was thinking in the shower just now (I do lots of thinking in the shower. I take loooong showers). First I thought about the cross-section of society that is a2k. Certainly we aren't a little micro-world-population. We aren't even a micro US population. We don't have participation of those who can not afford a computer. We don't have members from any arab nations that I can think of. We have limited members from communist nations (Ivvy, where are you?). What are we as a population? Can we make generalizations from our collective perception as any kind of representative body?
Then I was thinking about the whole 'pro-life' movement. I thought about how over-populated the states would become if abortions were illegal. I saw infants in massive dormitories waiting for people to take them home like so many animals in a shelter. I thought - good gawd! What if it comes to that? Surely then everyone would agree that abortion was ok. But then I realized that we have long been keeping the 'unwanted' lonely little babies and children in big dormitories where they await a new mommy and daddy.....
i loved that old thread, Craven - you would do well to mine some of your ideas from there.
Little k, I think that the Friends re-runs thing is denial - and not unhealthy - I am also concerned about watching endlessly the coverage that the war is getting - it is, I believe, horribly, AGAIN being run as some kind of video game or action movie...an unreal entertainment tightly controlled by spindoctors, and as unreal to most as those entertainments.
I think we do need to witness it to some extent -but not in the way it is being presented.
I do not think we, as a2kers, are representative - but I think we are interesting - a sort of focus group perhaps?
Do you really have babies in dormitories in the US? Babies are not to be had for love nor money in Oz!
I am, of course, a recreational thinker....
Dlwoan - I don't watch tv, but I assume it's like the post 9/11 exposure. repetative and uninformative. And, overly stimulating.
focus group of some sort, yes.
we have places for children awaiting foster homes and adoption. I really don't know for sure, but I do know unless a little person is a healthy baby, they are hard to place.
I was just thinking in the shower, ya know....
careful there, kris! you kow what happened to ol' jeremy when he started thinking! his head in the clouds while he was soaping up his toes (as he's a jew he did not have to give them up for lent) and bam! slipped he did and broke one of 'em! and you know what happened to the happy goat....<off to the foreign idioms thread>
LOL Dagmar!
Showers are good for thinking - as is driving and cleaning - love 'em.
used to do lots of me thinking when i was waitressing - wrote many an essay while dispensing plates and drinks - and fending off rude men.
I sort of miss that time a bit - all my thoughts are fully engaged at work - either working or talking to my team - both totally stimulating - that is a major plus, of course, but me thinking time is cut down.
HA! I proudly present myself to the world as a brand new Enthusiast!
