Latest on Fri, 06:13 am
Copy from one, it’s plagiarism; copy from many, it’s research.
Yesterday there was this article in the Jakarta Post on how “sculptor Ibnu Nurwanto aims to break the politico-religious discourse on sexuality“.
Well, let’s hope he succeeds. Because muzzling artists would deprive us from what Indonesian painters, sculptors and others can offer. By research ( by googling that is) I got interesting hits. That should be possible in the future also (Btw: the loot came from the JP, the artists Ibnu Nurwanto, Zam Kamil, Willy Himawan, Yadi Juliansyah, Semsar Siahaan and Taman Gallery):
Newsflash: Indonesian Parliament passes anti pornography bill
Great.
The Parliament of Indonesia did abolish pornography. Congratulations to these guards of our libido’s.
Forget about the financial and economical meltdown, about deforestation, about hunger and poverty, about healthcare and infra structure: these MP’s know their priorities. They heroically saved all Indonesians from moral and social deterioration. It’s a shining example to all the world what conservative patronizing and meddling in the name of the Lord can do.
While we, non Indonesians, are jealously watching, the grateful civilians of the archipelago are looking forward to new courageous steps by their government. These vigorous Ministers, MP’s, governors and other men and women of honour, should now abolish by law: air pollution, earthquakes, viruses and ugly fat middle aged men. And they should not forget to forbid, under the penal code, the eruption of volcano’s.
March on, brave soldiers, to a sexless society.
Promote Promiscuity
Whatever you may think, I don’t hate economists. Read this like “I did not have sex with that woman”.
No, actually even some of my best friends are economists. Though I candidly confess that sometimes I have a hard time to keep on loving them. But hey, tensions do inevitably occur in every sound relationship. And on other occasions some of them just thrill me. Especially those who are involved with economy light. Taking their science for what is it: disastrous but not too serious. Maybe they themselves don’t agree with me ( about being economists light). But I think people like S. Levitt who (with help of co-author Dubner) wrote ‘Freakonomics‘, are great. Or Steven E. Landsburg.
Last weekend I treated myself on his book “More sex is safer sex” as an antidote against those intolerable assholes who, in papers and on TV, even now still stick to their gospel of Friedmanian free market economy.  I can forgive and forget however in case it’s someone like Landsburg, who at least not only writes in an easy and digestible way about economy, but first and foremost is sharp, witty and funny. The book consists of a number of original essays on a wide variety of topics which you hardly find in economical textbooks.
To make clear why I enjoyed it, here is the case he makes for eventually making sex safer by promoting more extra and premarital sex by decent people.
The Njai
The njai is one of the heroines in a pretty famous novel. She, njai Ontosoroh, concubine of a Dutchman, and their daughter Annelies, represent a complex and dangerous world to Minke, the leading character in Pramoedia Ananta Toer’s novel “Bumi Manusis”. Ontosoroh proves to be an extraordinary strong and independent woman. Yet as an Indonesian in a colonial society she stays a second rate citizen who even is denied custody of her own daughter after her man dies.
That was fiction.
Now Reggie Baay has published a non fiction book about the njai. It turns out to be a fascinating and moving, but also a very disconcerting account. It confirms the quintessence of Ontosoroh’s condition: the poignant sorrow of the huge inequality, in relationships which were absolutely unbalanced and which implied the women were almost without rights. Plus the immense social isolation they had to endure. Because often they were looked upon with contempt by the people of their village and excluded from the white community in which the man lived.
Baay’s book is a historical study of these usually temporary and sometimes lifetime partners of Dutch officials, planters and military men in Indonesia’s colonial times. The author himself is the grandson of a njai, about whom he knew next to nothing until very recently. Even his father had no reminiscences of this mother and grandmother, who had been send away before her son was four. And who was not allowed to even have any contact with him for the rest of her life. Her existence was kind of erased from the family history. Which started at the moment she was replaced by a Caucasian woman with whom the man legitimately married. Read More
On sex, religion and politics
Thoughts on a early, chilly and misty Sunday morning:
1. The problem with finding a partner fit to mate is that they only come ready made.
2. Nuns are women of genius who long ago got the felicitous idea that they could avoid the trouble of unruly men by marrying God.
3. A successful politician is an entrepreneur who knows how to sell dreams to you which you take for real.