Opinion

Left to right, a depiction of the famous allegorical story of Confucius, Laozi and Buddha each tasting vinegar in a vat, and the interpretation of their results.Today’s Hong Kong could be represented by the vinegar. Now, all three are in mind and spirit, watching over China’s wayward territory.[/caption]There is a great allegorical story about Confucius, Laozi – who was the founder of Daoism – and Buddha gathering around a vat of vinegar to taste it.

Once upon a time, some of the people of this country had independence from rule and they had freedom. That state of liberty began to deteriorate almost immediately after it began, and has all but disappeared over this country’s history. Today, even Orwell would have great difficulty in identifying the scope of the inconceivable tyranny that exists.

Considerate se questo è un uomo
Che lavora nel fango
Che non conosce pace
Consider if this be a man
Who works in the mud
Who knows no peace
— Primo Levi, Se questo è un uomo published in 1947.
Globalization is about many things. It‘s about flows. It‘s about identities. And, perhaps most importantly, it‘s about dreams.

Does Nietzsche have anything important to say to us, we the current inhabitants of a global age?
Nietzsche speaks of spiritual health as a result of the superabundance of the life force, of a Dionysian affirmation of one’s existence of one’s process of becoming what one is.
The courage of laughter is called for. A profound laughter that is in a position to negate what Nietzsche regarded as the worst possible thought: that existence, my existence, repeats itself over and over again without end, forever.

The more reified the world becomes, the thicker the veil cast upon nature, the more the thinking weaving that veil in its turn claims ideologically to be nature, primordial experience.
— Theodor M. Adorno, Critical Models, Columbia University Press, 1963
Year after year
On the monkey’s face:
A monkey’s face.
— Basho (translated by Earl Miner)
Nature contains, though often unnoticed, an extraordinary amount of human history.
— Raymond Williams, Culture and Materialism, 2005

Läs min senaste krönika hos Mårtensson:KD, Adaktusson, aborterna och invandringen »"Adaktusson-affären är märklig. Även om jag personligen ogillar KD-politikern Lars Adaktusson, så finns det ingen ursäkt för att behandla honom orättvist.

On a beautiful, breezy day last week, I spoke to a roomful of Congressional summer interns working in the House of Representatives. The subject was “Corporate Power, Congress and You.” (“You” referred to the interns as the citizenry).

Taiwan has become a new “eastern pivot” for Donald Trump. Against all international laws and UN charters, he is approaching Taiwan, as indicating to the world that regardless of the established world rules which make Beijing, the Peoples Republic of China (PRC), the official and legitimate Authority of China, with Taiwan being a part of China – the self-styled emperor, Mr. Trump, pretends he prefers dealing with Taiwan as an independent country.

In the 20th century, several radical thinkers of considerable stature aimed to rethink, and possibly transcend, the premises of State-oriented, progressive-political ideology.  Pioneering sociologist Max Weber critiqued the massively-encroaching “bureaucratization” of all aspects of everyday life — the diminishment of the unique individual into a “calculable person” (to use Foucault’s phrase).  Like Weber, Michel Foucault valued the rational/scientific legacy of the Enlightenment, but deplored the “management” of “employees/citizens” that came in its wake.  Similarly, Lewis Mumford — anothe

Japan used to be the number one foreign consumer of Iranian oil, slipping to number two as China increased its purchases. Now, obliged to defer to the U.S., Japan purchases none. Germany has been Iran’s largest European trade partner, and was hoping for major deals following the conclusion of the Iran Deal in 2015. These plans have been sabotaged by the U.S. using its control over the international banking system, one of its main weapons to use against free market principles and free trade, to inflict pain on people who do not submit, and to (try to) assert its global hegemony.