Author: Milan

Mid-term craziness

I wrote another essay today. Taking an hour-long nap during the process probably increased the quality of the final product, but it has not advanced my particularly daunting schedule for the next few days. Nearly adding boiling water to milk in an attempt to make breakfast cereal for dinner revealed both the state of culinary achievement I have reached of late and how addled you mind can become on the basis of sleeplessness and long bouts of reading.1

Now, I just need to proofread this paper (on democratic peace theory) before delivering it to Nuffield tomorrow. Since I am running for an executive position, I should probably attend tonight’s Strategic Studies Group meeting. Then, I need to finish my presentation on the Inuit Circumpolar Council for Thursday. The weekend promises to include the take-home exam for qualitative methods. In addition to that, there is always reading for next week’s core seminar. Of particular importance is that I need to collect information on the two scholarships I am applying for in early March and send it to referees. Also, submit my request for vacation residence time as soon as I know when the trip with my mother will be. They certainly keep us on our toes here: always something new to be done, even if there isn’t necessarily much time for reflection or creativity.

I’m particularly irked by the knowledge that I will need to spend a good chunk of this weekend dealing with the take-home exam. There is a mess of reading for the institutions section of that course that I will probably need to do in order to do a good job of the exam, whatever form it ends up taking. The annoying thing is the confluence of the three days during which the exam absolutely must be done and Louise’s visit. I shall try to balance them as best can be managed.

[1] I got a much better dinner after the strategic studies meeting.

  • Apparently, the provincial government has released a plan to protect 2 million hectares of the Great Bear Rainforest in British Columbia. Good for them. I wonder if this area is connected with the bear research Kate Dillon has been doing. This will be an expansion of the 45,000-hectare protected zone in the Khutzeymateen Valley.
  • This New Yorker article on profiling, to which Bryony originally referred me, is quite interesting. As you would expect from Malcolm Gladwell, it includes connections between quite disparate areas of study. Since I can’t write any more here now, people looking for something to read should definitely have a look at this.

Cartoons and cultural clashes

A quick comment regarding the continuing row about the Danish cartoon depictions of Mohammed. No collective response to an incident becomes this big or carries on this long without some kind of coordination and organization. While the whole situation is clearly based on a great deal of legitimate anger, it is nonetheless sentiment that is being excited and manipulated. That’s not to imply that some kind of global conspiracy is at work, but simply to say that I don’t accept that these protests are spontaneous or free of manipulation. Given their destructive nature, I think it will be instructive to eventually determine what forces have been trying to exploit this issue, through what means, and to what level of success.

As I was discussing with Tristan earlier today, the symbolic character of conflict is an essential dimension for understanding it. It’s one that requires examination both of individual psychology and the ways in which groups of people think. One excellent book I can recall from Brian Job’s security studies class at UBC is Kaufman’s Modern hatreds: the symbolic politics of ethnic war. Those wanting a far better explanation of some of these issues than I can provide should have a look.

Amateur Oxford sociology

St. Antony's LibraryHappy birthday Iason Gabriel

After lectures this morning, I spent much of the day working on the Connolly and Barkawi books. The Connolly book is interesting, but includes a lot of fairly general language and not a lot of direct examples. General points about theory are more memorable, comprehensible, and valid when they can be affirmed through at least one concrete demonstration. You can talk about symbol construction all you want, but one good case study on the construction of ‘Palestine’ as a symbol in contemporary Middle Eastern politics strikes me as quite a bit more worthwhile and useful than a lot of generalization. It’s an anti-parsimonious ideal that may set me outside the ‘discipline’ of International Relations: out amongst the historians, journalists, and policy makers.

Dinner with Alex, Claire, and Iason tonight was an affirmation – once again – of how fun people in my program are. I was meant to meet Emily afterwards, but things once again didn’t manage to work out. It’s interesting to observe the sociology of the M.Phil group: who spends time with whom, what kind of inside jokes develop, and how people conceive of themselves in the program. Personally and intellectually, I feel like I am undergoing a second adolescence here. I am very actively defining my beliefs and personality in a way I can never recall doing before. I think it’s the combination of a new place and having finally reached a level of self-affirmation where I can brush off most criticism. It’s an empowering mix.

Hopefully, it will empower me to get a decent draft of my paper for Dr. Hurrell done tonight – after a brief foray to the King’s Arms with Alex, Claire, and some of Claire’s St. Cross friends. I could write much more, but I really should get some reading done now if I am going out again later.

PS. Tristan has a new batch of photos online, including a really odd one of Meaghan Beattie and I. Tristan frequently seems to post more photos of people in a day than I do in several months. Partly, that’s because there have been problems in the past with posting photos of people on the blog. Even so, I will try to show a less de-populated Oxford during the next while.

On travel, a new project, and thesis planning

Spikes near Christ Church Meadows

Speaking with my parents over Skype today, I was reminded of how difficult it can be to communicate through a speech-only medium. It’s especially frustrating when you are making the attempt with someone who you really do want to speak with, but you are having difficulty doing so with any clarity or skill. The extra fraction of a second of Skype-to-phone lag definitely contributes to the difficulty. So plainly, in fact, that when I use SkypeOut to call people, they frequently suggest going on Skype themselves so as to increase the quality of the connection.

Partly for these reasons, I am especially looking forward to seeing my mother in about a month’s time. It’s still not certain whether we will go to Malta, Portugal, or Greece – though the middle option is increasingly looking the most likely. The kind of trip that is being proposed is a package-deal type hiking trip, with 4-10km walks every day and arranged hotels. While quite different from the kind of travel I have generally done, I find the idea to be an interesting one, and one that is likely to be enjoyable. I found travelling with Meghan Mathieson et al to be especially interesting, precisely because it involved traveling in a group and according to a set itinerary that I didn’t control. Hopefully, this expedition will mimic the best attributes of that one.

Oxford life

At the end of this year, I think I should condense the mass of experience I’ve had here into a trio of short guides: one for people considering coming to Oxford, one for people considering Wadham, and one for people thinking of doing the M.Phil in IR. It would offer me a chance to be both balanced and concise, while offering a perspective that people may find valuable. While the information that would be included is already embedded in blog posts, I don’t think anyone is likely to go through the whole collection of hundreds of entries just to gain insights that might be better expressed in three to five pages on each topic.

Thesis planning

I have been investigating the Oxford Environmental Change Institute and it seems like a resource that could conceivably be extremely helpful for my research topic. Their website quotes Dr. Anna Lawrence, of the Human Ecology Program, as saying: “Researchers must find ways to incorporate the experiences and values of other stakeholders in their research.” This is exactly the kind of thing I want to do: look at the means by which such cooperation and outreach is taking place. If I can find some way to get involved with this organization, it might contribute a great deal to my ability to say something new and important on the subject. While it can be difficult to deal with segregation between different areas of academia, the very lack of connections makes it a really exciting place to do work. There is much to be discovered there.

Mohammed comics follow-up

By now, it has become obvious that the response of many people in the Muslim world, and elsewhere, to the Danish comics has exceeded all reasonable bounds. To take umbrage against a perceived slight is perfectly acceptable in a free society. To start burning down embassies and calling for the murder of the nationals of the countries where the comics have been printed is insane. It’s not something that can be defended according to any reasonable system of ethics – by which I do mean to say that a religious ethic that required such a thing would be indefensible – and it’s not something that can be construed as acceptable conduct.

To actually believe that there is a God who would require or encourage such conduct is to effectively close out the possibility of their being a God who is both omnipotent and benevolent to humanity in general. It has always been absurd to say that you could have a God benevolent to all mankind yet still insistent on the practice of a particular faith. A benevolent being would not condemn to damnation worshippers in cultures where a different faith is the norm. Given that the faith of your parents is by far the best predictor of the faith you will adopt, it simply doesn’t hold water to say that anyone could be expected to convert to the ‘one true faith.’ It contradicts good sense and basic ideas of fairness.

A being that required people to adopt a certain faith in order to be treated decently would either be non-benevolent, and therefore not worthy of veneration as such, or simply incomprehensible and equally unworthy of respect or admiration. A being with ethics that cannot be understood or shared by human beings is no more worthy of veneration than a bolt of lightning, which is similarly powerful and lacking in comprehensible ethical purpose. A vengeful God is potentially consistent with the character of the world: a charitable one, much less so – and perhaps not at all.

Library Court Kitchen Cleanup

8 February 2006, 5:00pm

I’ve finally become sick enough of the stench from the fridge, and the shelves full of food that was purchased when Khrushchev was still in power, that I am organizing a purge and cleanup of the Library Court kitchen. Hopefully, I will not be the only one who shows up and people will pay heed to my signs requesting that they remove any food they don’t want discarded for those few hours. I shall have to buy some bleach. A haiku, for the occasion:

Bad prokaryotes
Multiply in the kitchen
Kill them all, with bleach

The plan is to empty the fridge, discard all the random, smelly, moldy food that has been in there all year, and then wipe it down with bleach and hot water. Also, I plan to clear the shelves of the dust and dead insects that have been accumulating there, as well as taking a chisel (as Nora suggested) to the more tenacious bits of dirt on the stove and counters.

Anyone from Library Court or Staircase 19 who wants a more sanitary kitchen is very much encouraged to come help. If someone has access to bleach, that would save me the small annoyance of having to go buy some.

Misty Oxford Wandering

Geese!

This afternoon, between bouts of reading Connelly’s The Terms of Political Discourse, I went for a long solitary walk along the darkening riverside. It was reminiscent of my long wander in the cold in Helsinki and it effected a fairly comprehensive shift in the way I was feeling. In contrast to the increasing gloom, I found my mood progressively lightening. That may be partly because the river is the only place in Oxford where you see significant numbers of animals, aside from police horses. There were herons and Greylag Geese, as well as teams of rowers moving in elegantly coordinated fashion along the Isis. I know this is the second time these particular waterfowl have been the subject of the photo of the day, but I feel a considerable amount of affection towards them. They have a look that I really appreciate, and they are completely fearless when it comes to people, which makes it easier to photograph them.

Walking along the tributary of the Isis that breaks northward towards Merton College, while listening to Vivaldi’s “Winter” (perhaps my favourite piece for strings), I felt almost perfectly at home. Because of the cloud and gathering darkness, I was the only person in the whole vast area, a circumstance that cannot help but conjure a sense of liberation. Returning to Starbucks to carry on reading, I felt like my brain had been completely reset and that everything that had happened in the last few days had taken place a long time ago. Paradoxical as it may be to feel at home in disconnection, it makes sense to me. The times when the world seems most incomprehensible are exactly those where the precise place and time you are at become critically important.

As I mentioned to Bilyana earlier today, Oxford life has reached the point of mental saturation for me. Like the vague feeling of eternal placement you get a few months after returning to school after a break, it has become something so automatically present as to comprise almost everything you can remember or imagine. This isn’t really a positive or negative development, in and of itself. It’s simply reflective of comprehensive immersion in an environment. All this is partly a reflection of comfort: I know the city now and would never think of carrying around a map, as I did during my first few weeks. Also, I know from my first-term evaluations that I am at least meeting the standard for my program – an enormous relief to someone a bit anxious at starting at a new school.

Oxbloggers meeting postponed

On the matter of the bloggers’ gathering initially planned for this Friday, it seems that most people want the date shifted. Since there isn’t really a mechanism for coordinating otherwise, I will just arbitrarily dictate a new date that seems to work for most people. I hope to see many of you there.

New Oxbloggers’ Meeting date: Tuesday, February 21st. 8:00pm. The Turf Tavern.

  • The Sainsbury’s Chunky Vegetable Chili soup is quite good, probably their second best vegetarian soup after Tomato Basil. Given that I’ve eaten about thirty litres of the latter, it’s nice to have something new to try. I appreciate that the chili soup is at least slightly spicy, and that is has beans in it. I can’t even look at the Carrot and Coriander soup, since I bought fifteen of them when they were on sale for 20p each.
  • Some particularly clever articles from The Onion: on endangered species and American politics.

And so, the weekend arrives

Preferences

Happy birthday Gleider Hernandez

I received my examination entry form for the qualifying test today. The page itself is quite cryptic, with boxes containing random looking letter and number strings and no instructions for its completion. I will figure the thing out by Tuesday, when it’s due. I am less worried about the qualifying test before Trinity term now that we’ve had back the results from our quantitative methods course. While I know the upcoming test will cover dramatically more material, I also feel as though I will probably be better prepared for it.

After reading about democratic peace theory for much of today, I went to Jericho with a large group of people from the college to celebrate Gleider’s birthday. It was a good group and a fun few hours. I should probably resist the temptation to do anything lengthy and social tonight. Between the paper due on Wednesday, readings for Tuesday, and the take-home exam being distributed on Thursday, I need to stay on top of things.

Idolatry and modernity

I’ve been thinking about the Danish cartoon row during the course of reading today, and I find it a difficult problem to deal with. My automatic response is to side with the Danes and others who are protecting the ideal of freedom of speech. It seems outside all proportion to be threatening violence in response to political cartoons.

That said, I really can’t imagine a mindset from which the simple depiction of a figure in such a way could create such outrage. The satirical modification of various symbols and icons is part of the stock and trade of western media and art. While such depictions can sometimes exceed the bounds of good taste, it’s hard to imagine them creating genuine anger – at least among the relatively level headed. Because I can’t imagine such agitation being a legitimate response, it seems like a contrived or artificial over-inflation to me: a sub-conscious conclusion based upon my own assumptions rather than an understanding of the situation, from the perspective of many of those involved.

The biggest question raised is about the appropriate boundaries on religious tolerance. At what point can we legitimately call a belief that someone holds unacceptable, at least insofar as it isn’t allowable to act upon it. A religious duty to make human sacrifices, for instance, few people would object to curtailing. On a matter like this, where there is a genuine schism of values between different groups, it’s much more difficult to make that kind of a call.

To me, it seems as though mature ideologies – whether political, ethical, religious, or otherwise – need to be able to stand up to legitimate criticism. That’s perhaps the defining characteristic of their maturity. While it may be incredible patronizing to say that Islam needs to develop an internal dialogue about the direction it is to take in the future, it still seems to me that such is the case. I hasten to add that a similar dialogue is necessary on the part of other ideologies that serve as a source of normative directions about how to behave in the world. Just like we need to rethink nationalism (if not abolish it entirely), there must be self reflection and fairness within ideologies that expect respect from those outside of them.

All in all, it’s an area I feel particularly hesitant about. I would be especially interested to hear what people think.

Seventeen days until the equinox

Sheldonian head

During our qualitative methods class today, on institutions, Dr. Ngaire Woods made an excellent point. Each of us has a year to become an expert on a particular subject. There are hardly any people in the entire world who ever have the chance to devote such time and attention to an issue and there is a good chance that, at the end, we will know more about our subject than anyone in the world. This underscores both the importance of choosing a topic well and of really committing yourself to writing something excellent. Producing something that will be read by people beyond the examination committee and people kind enough to edit it for me would also be a big advantage.

The institutions section of the qualitative methods course is much better than the scattershot attempt at foreign policy analysis that came before it. That is welcome, especially since I have a take-home exam to write on the course between the 9th and 13th of this month – most inconvenient timing. Hopefully, I will be able to get the thing mostly done next Friday, leaving the weekend relatively unencumbered.

After class, this afternoon, I had coffee with Claire, Josiah, and another of her St. Cross friends who I am embarassed to be unable to remember the name of. Followed that closely was tea with Joelle Faulkner. We tried the Tieguanyin tea that Neal sent. It’s more subtle than I expected, though not nearly so much so as the Jamine Pearl tea that Kate once gave me. I am going to try making it with bottled water, in the knowledge that the amount of dissolved minerals in Oxford tap water is quite substantial.

Hopefully, tomorrow I will be able to finish most of Tarak Barkawi and Mark Laffer’s Democracy, Liberalism, and War, William Connolly’s The Terms of Political Discourse, and what remains of this week’s readings on institutions. I have a paper due for Dr. Hurrell on Wednesday, evaluating the democratic peace theory. I will also have a new issue of The Economist upon which to complete a preliminary read.

I’ve now finished the first book of The Wind up Bird Chronicle and perhaps the first tenth of Democracy in America. I don’t know if it’s an overly self-serving thing to believe, but I don’t think that any kind of reading is irrelevant or a distraction. While there are certainly things that it is more urgent for me to read, to neglect other areas of interest would ultimately be counterproductive and unwise. Neither American democracy nor Japanese literature are even distantly divorced from the question of democratic peace, and good writing is never irrelevant.

25 things I am:Canoeist, geek, webmaster, environmentalist, caucasian,
student, heterosexual, reader, writer, photographer,
Czech, Ukranian, atheist, Oxfordian, skeptic,
liberal, vegetarian, single, Canadian, hiker,
bilingual, healthy, rich, educated, male.