Synchronicity, Dreamwidth, Many Essays, Esoterica and the Mid-East

[tcpip]

A couple of strange moments of synchronicity and coincidence this week. About a year ago, I started reading Salmun Rushdie's The Moor's Last Sigh at a cafe around the corner for work. I know the date I started because I used my ticket from when John Foxx did a movie presentation. Every few days when buying a bite to eat or a coffee I'd read a few pages. Just as I'm about to finish, I discover that John Foxx did the cover for the book.

The second moment of synchronicity was finishing Rolemaster Cyradon, which is almost due for the final draft. About fifteen years ago I did another book for Iron Crown Enterprises. Just as the final draft of this book was due to be sent to the publishes, my hard disk died. This time around, the USB key which I'd kept about nine days of work decided to go belly-up. Fortunately, I discovered a very handy program to recover such things.

I have a Dreamwidth account under the same moniker. This is good because it doesn't have the poor management decisions of Livejournal, but uses pretty much the same technology, plus one can crosspost (like this one). This is a good list of Livejournal features not in Dreamwidth and likewise a list of changes.

Conducted a Philosophy of Economics (Normative Economics) session at the Unitarian Philosophy Forum on Sunday. Have also put up notes for the session on Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast which looks at metaphysics, theology and philosophy. Both of these have been very well received and well attended. Submitted a proposed distance education programme for VPAC as part of my Cert IV in Workplace Training and Assessment.

Visited darviz on Sunday morning, whom I hadn't spent much time with for years. Talked about his band, Darkness Visible, and then apropos, Freemasonry, various forms of esoterica and the politics of the middle-east (he's has a Jewish heritage and a generally pro-Israeli position; I'm probably best described as a secular zionist in that regard). On a related topic, I have finished an essay for isocracy.org on National Self-Determination and Federal Internationalism; comments invited on this oft-tricky subject.

Comments

[mellotron_breakfast]

Nationalism is one of the stickiest subjects I've dealt with in conversation; I learned some interesting things in a course called Postcoloniality and the Nation which I hope Dr. Persram is still running as she is an excellent professor, but some of the ideas which were echoed in your isocracy article have always been ill-received when I say anything similar. I guess it's a way to know how much people care about something.

[tcpip]

That would be this course..

Overcoming the effects of colonialism is, of course, one of the most difficult questions of national self-determination, especially when the colonial population becomes numerically superior to the indigenous.

[mellotron_breakfast]

That looks like it. I don't know if that was the course code back when I went but that was it to a T. Read some things I'd never think to find, or wouldn't find in any other course kit. Got acquainted with some dark writings from one Frantz Fanon. Got an overview of the history of Chinese communism as part of a seminar I had to run, as well as the Cominterns, and I dearly regret selling that particular textbook to a student in the next crop even though it meant helping her get it at a discount.

So few instructors at that institution really fished, really dropped the hammer on slacking and made me stay on my toes (figuratively, intellectually) and actually made me interested in things that might have put me to sleep coming from anyone else. It's something I miss, almost like a book club of heady stuff that left me caring and interested and with a group of people for different views.

Eh, I'll just cut myself off there. :)