The Crusades
For some reason, I have a hankering for studying the Crusades. Maybe it's because I'm taking "History of the Crusades" next semester, or because I just spent 20 minutes looking at the imdb forums for Kingdom of Heaven. Regardless, it's time to find some books to read.
Now, I've read a bit about the Crusades, and the one set that I own and also happen to like is Runciman's trilogy. Apparantly however, Runciman's work isn't respected by some, and so I'm curious about that too. Ah...literary criticism in history...so interesting.
This got me thinking about the notion of "unbiased" writings, but I can't articulate those thoughts at present.
*Disclaimer: I don't like the Crusades...any post on them is going to reflect that. But, I like to think I have a deeper understanding of them, so it's not the simplisitc, "it was Christians ["Catholics" if whoever is speaking is slightly more learned] attacking Muslims," reason for disliking them.
posted by adam @ 4:10 PM
3 comments
3 Comments:
I took journalism at the UofM when "objectivity" was still the Holy Grail, but unreachable goal of journalists. Today it is not so what with "participatory Journalism" which can be seen with the imbedded reporters in Irag to the journalists on environmental stories doing the bidding of their tour guides. No they don't have to tell you who's paying for the trip. Anyway, we were taught that one had to try to be as objective as possible about a story, even though it was impossible to be truly objective. Like Quantum Mechanics, where the mere observation of a phenomenon changes the phenomenon. Cool. Being close to a divorce... My parents were divorced, I learned that their was mom's side, dad's side all the kids' sides and the truth which no one knew.
Dn Mark G
Dn Mark
Please never invoke science that you do not understand. Unless you have studied the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle (which was ironically theorized by a Nazi who later went to work for Stalin), you do not have the knowledge to make foolish metaphors about it.
And Adam, power hungry religious zealots starting an unjustified war. As they say, history repeats itself
It is a horrible metaphor. What I find most irritating is that there exists a much more reasonable metaphor in the field of psychology: the Hawthorne Effect.
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