If you would want to defend that you have a certain right, but you would not want to extend that same right to your neigbor, there is an easy strategy to follow: first find a distinguishing quality between you and your neighbor. This should not be too difficult since everybody differs from one another in [...]
I am a lucky person. For some reason I always manage to end up in the most interesting situations. As was the case last Saturday. For the Turkish community their month of fasting came to an end and to celebrate the fast breaking (or iftar) for the last time this year, a dinner was organized [...]
In June this year Adnan Hajizada, a video blogger from Azerbaijan, placed a video on YouTube. Dressed up as “Esel Heinz”, a German immigrant donkey, he explained the gathered press why he was so happy to migrate to Azerbaijan.
The mildly satirical movie was a reaction to a story in Azerbaijani media that the government payed [...]
A little while ago, I was asked to write a one-page opinion piece for a publication of the research institute I work for, since this is their fifteenth year in existence. In the broadest sense, I was asked to give an opinion on where future information systems will or should be going. Below you will [...]
Emma Goldman, a political activist who played a pivotal role in the development of anarchist philosophy in the first half of the twentieth century, was born 140 years ago in Kovno (now Kaunas). An outspoken writer and lecturer on anarchist philosophy, women’s rights, and social issues, Goldman was imprisoned several times after emigrating to the [...]
With the increasing number of blogs, forums and other means of throwing opinions into the public space, the need for tools to sift the wheat from the chaff also increases. This can be done by looking at the arguments that are being used, and check what rhetorical tricks, also known as logical fallacies, are being [...]
Yesterday I published an article on Filip Spagnoli’s P.A.P. blog about the ‘extraordinary rendition’ (or in more down-to-earth language: kidnapping) of Abu Omar, an Italian based imam who was grabbed from the streets of Milan to be transported to an Egyptian jail. Please find the article here.
We were watching T.V.
Watching T.V.
We were watching T.V.
Watching T.V.
In Tiananmen Square
Lost my baby there
My yellow rose
In her bloodstained clothes**
Last week it was 20 years ago that the Tiananmen Square massacre took place. For those of us who are too young to remember: after weeks of continued protests on Tiananmen Square in Beijing, on the 4th [...]
Four days a week it is open, more or less all through the year, the central marketplace in The Hague called the Haagse Markt. Claiming to be the biggest marketplace in Europe, it offers the visitor around 500 different stalls with products ranging from fruit and vegetables to clothing and shoes. It is a [...]
As I’m very busy at the present time, this is not going to be a full-blown blog post. I would just like to share with our readers some very interesting videos that I’ve come across recently.
Firstly, a fascinating one hour talk talk by Andy Thomson in which he explains some of the powerful psychological mechanisms [...]
Gibburt