I am a wannabe intellectual or …

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This sounds too good to be true or sounds like something that could get my attention.

Toward a New Compendium of Knowledge

1. Thinkers of the world, start imagining.

There are tens of millions of intellectuals online today. What is possible with tens of millions of intellectuals working together on educational and reference projects? The very thought of that makes me literally quiver with excitement. I am amazed that we, educated people throughout the world, have barely begun to imagine what new reference and educational materials could come into being, if we pool our efforts in the open, collaborative ways demonstrated by open source software hackers. Even less have we begun to take such possibilities really seriously, or actually get to work on them.

Not the last word about Gunter Grass’ recent admissions

I believe that a writer is a whole person, with all of the good and the not so good, but his writing should be viewed on its own merits. Main Stream Media and the “critics” don’t agree.

Ian Buruma’s views about Gunter Grass’ recent admissions

“History, or, to be more precise, the history we Germans have repeatedly mucked up, is a clogged toilet,” the narrator in Günter Grass’s most recent novel, “Crabwalk,” says. “We flush and flush, but the shit keeps rising.” Now the author, a Nobel laureate widely regarded as “the conscience of Germany”—a man who has regularly sermonized against the forces of reaction and the corruptions of power—is up to his neck in it himself.

Just last month, Grass revealed something that he had been keeping to himself during half a century in public life: that he was once a member of the Waffen-S.S. Grass, who was born in 1927, never pretended to have escaped the war unstained. He was open about the fact that, along with many Germans of his generation, he went through the usual ranks: the Jungvolk, the Hitler Youth, the Labor Front, and then the Army. Like most, though not all, of his cohort, he believed that his Führer would achieve a glorious victory, even as Soviet troops and Allied bombers were laying waste to the Third Reich. Many former Hitler Youths, still teen-agers at the time of defeat, were drafted into ragtag units operating anti-aircraft guns. As far as his readers knew, Grass had been one of them.

In a new memoir, entitled “Beim Haüten der Zwiebel” (“Peeling the Onion”), published in Germany this month, Grass explains that the story was a little more complicated. He had volunteered to serve on a submarine, but by late 1944 the Army was running out of men, and so he ended up in the Waffen-S.S., the military arm of Himmler’s élite corps, which had come to be absorbed into the regular German Army. The Jörg von Frundsberg tank division, in which he served, was fighting a disastrous rearguard action against Soviet troops, who killed most of the old men and boys serving with Grass. He was very lucky to have survived.

The surprise is not that he served in such a unit; it’s that he covered up the fact. In a recent television interview, Grass tried to explain why it had taken him so long to tell the truth—not a trivial question, since the Germans’ difficulties in facing the truth have been a constant theme of his literary and political life. “It weighed on me,” he said. “My silence through all those years is one of the reasons I wrote this book. It had to get out, at last.”

How religious leaders talk past each other

BBC NEWS | Europe | In quotes: Muslim reaction to Pope

The comments appearing in the link above clearly show how the Muslim side of this non-discussion set the context for “talking past the other”. While I don’t think that the Pope is as disengenuous as he describes his ‘honest efforts for serious dialogue’, I do give him credit for trying to engage Muslim leaders. They don’t dialogue and maybe they never will. They proscribe after misrepresenting what and how the Pope said and didn’t say, as in:

At this time, I wish also to add that I am deeply sorry for the reactions in some countries to a few passages of my address at the University of Regensburg, which were considered offensive to the sensibility of Muslims.

These in fact were a quotation from a medieval text, which do not in any way express my personal thought.

Yesterday, the Cardinal Secretary of State published a statement in this regard in which he explained the true meaning of my words.

I hope that this serves to appease hearts and to clarify the true meaning of my address, which in its totality was and is an invitation to frank and sincere dialogue, with great mutual respect.

I feel that the Pope chose to quote a medieval philosopher/king in his earlier lecture to bait a thought trap for Muslim leaders to give the world a media lesson about some of the political difficulties inherent in any attempt to engage Muslim leaders in any serious dialogue. They are willing captives of their “street” and all varieties of Muslim religious leaders, some good but most very bad. The fact is that too many Muslims don’t practice serious or honest dialogue.

Let me say that I find the suggestion of “serious dialogue” between religionists ludicrous. Oh, it sounds like a good idea, but how can it ever work. For example read here and consider the philosophical impossibilities of such discourse.