Halldór Armand

Einu sinni reyndi ég að kenna kærasta vinkonu minnar grunnatriðin í að skrifa söngleiki. Ég vissi ekki að hann væri Tony-verðlaunahafi og að skrifa besta söngleik allra tíma. Sambærilegt við að hitta Michael Jordan og kenna honum að drippla gegnum klofið. ruv.is/frett/2020/11/14/lifi…

Viðbrögðin við Ruslinu mínu í Þýskalandi eru framar öllum vonum. Frábærir dómar í Spiegel og þýska ríkisútvarpinu.📖🗑️❤️

Forsölutilboð á FRELSARANUM eftir STEINAR BRAGA rennur út á miðnætti annað kvöld. Tryggið ykkur eintak af sturluðustu bók ársins á fuglinnutgafa.is

Við Steinar Bragi höfum í mörg ár rætt um höfundaforlag þar sem höfundar fá meira fyrir sinn snúð og það er nú orðið að veruleika. Fuglinn útgáfa gefur út nýjustu skáldsögu Steinars, Frelsarann, sturlaða bók sem fjallar um það sem gerist þegar gervigreind hefur tekið völdin. Frelsarinn glímir við allar stærstu spurningarnar sem mannkynið stendur frammi fyrir í dag. Hún er marglaga og breið, brjáluð og fyndin, vægast sagt, og er vitaskuld uppfull af einstöku innsæi og hugmyndaflugi Steinars. Ég leyfi mér líka að segja að í henni er að finna sterkustu 1. persónurödd sem ég hef lesið í lengri tíma. Umrædd persóna er í einu orði sagt stórkostleg. Maður gapir og hlær upphátt á víxl. Bókin verður á hróplegum forsölukjörum fram á sunnudag: 5.990 kr + frí heimsending. Á tímum þegar nýjar innbundnar bækur eru farnar að nálgast 9 þúsund krónur er þetta gjöf en ekki gjald. Á síðunni er líka hægt að lesa fyrsta kaflann. fuglinnutgafa.is Tryggið ykkur eintök.

Borgarstjórinn í New York vill opna borgarreknar matvörubúðir. Áhrifamiklar raddir á hægri væng bandarískra stjórnmála eru farnar að gangast við hugmyndum sem vinstri róttæklingar hafa talað fyrir í marga áratugi. Í nýlegum Sunnudagsmoggapistli er því haldið fram að þetta sé það sem koma skal í stjórnmálum hérna megin Atlantshafsins. / The mayor of New York wants to open city-run grocery stores. Influential voices on the American right are beginning to embrace ideas that left-wing radicals have advocated for decades. A recent Sunday column in *Morgunblaðið* argues that this is a sign of what is to come in politics on this side of the Atlantic. English below In America, Opposing Worldviews Are Diagnosing the Same Disease When I want to tease my right-wing friends, I tell them that they and their ideological forebears somehow managed to bring home all the worst features of their promised land, the United States — lowest-common-denominator culture, junk food, and cities built around cars rather than people — while leaving the best of America behind: its optimism, its freedom, its creative energy, its impatience with government interference, and its faith in genuine markets and genuine competition. After all, although the political right has more or less run Iceland for my entire lifetime, it has never been easy to find much evidence that it actually wants to make the country freer, reduce the reach of the state, or challenge oligopoly and monopoly. They love the Soviet model. In fairness, my friends generally have little trouble finding hypocrisies to poke at among us in the old MH crowd in return. But what is happening in American politics now is fascinating. The United States is still the leading power in the Western world, and ideas that take hold there rarely take long to wash up on European shores. I remember hearing President Trump describe himself as “a nationalist” in 2018. At the time, almost no mainstream politician talked that way. Eight years later, Western politics is saturated with nationalism. In Iceland today, the national flag seems to fly wherever you look, and it is hard to know who takes greater pride in the country, the Centre Party or the Social Democratic Alliance, which campaigned on “a proud nation” in 2024 and “a proud Reykjavík” in 2026. But what comes next, once all this pride has finally run its course? It has long been said that the American left — meaning, broadly, the Democratic Party — sits further to the right than what passes for the political right in much of Europe. Yet there is now a distinctly radical current within the Democratic Party. This newspaper recently reported, for example, on New York Mayor Mamdani’s plans to open city-run grocery stores. One theme runs through the rhetoric of this emerging American left: ordinary people can no longer afford ordinary life. Everything has become too expensive because the system itself is working against them. What I find even more interesting, however, is listening to Tucker Carlson, the right-wing former Fox News host who is now an enormously influential podcaster. In a recent episode titled “Rethinking America After the Great Betrayal,” he laid out ten principles on which a new America, in his view, should be built. Among other things, Carlson attacked what he called debt capitalism: a society that not only runs on debt but makes it virtually impossible for ordinary people to live without becoming trapped in it, while using the power of the state to serve corporations and oligarchs at the expense of the public. In practice, he argued, this amounts to placing ordinary people in bondage. It turns them into slaves who cannot afford a roof over their heads, much less start a family, because their lives revolve around paying usurious interest to the owners of capital. He then turned on the idea of an economy in which the returns to capital exceed the returns to work; an economy in which finance, usury and property speculation are more richly rewarded than actually making something useful. I could hardly believe what I was hearing. Was this Noam Chomsky? David Graeber, perhaps, in *Debt: The First 5,000 Years*? Not remotely. This was one of the most influential voices on the American right: a conservative acknowledging something that reasonably alert radicals have regarded as perfectly obvious for decades. If I had to identify the difference between Carlson’s position and Chomsky’s, I would wager that Carlson believes what he calls “debt capitalism” is a corruption of real capitalism. Chomsky, by contrast, would say that the horrors of state-backed debt capitalism as we know it are entirely consistent with capitalism as it has actually existed throughout history — that pure, pristine capitalism exists nowhere outside the imaginations of textbook writers. My uncle taught me long ago that societies do not split from left to right but from top to bottom. In the United States, there are now signs that people with radically different worldviews are beginning to diagnose the same symptoms in society. This will come here too.

Kærar þakkir!🙏

Þegar ég skrifaði þennan pistil árið 2024 byrjaði ég hann á augljósum ýkjum; að mörk á EM í fótbolta væru dæmd af vegna þess að "augnhár leikmanna væru rangstæð" að mati VAR-dómara. Tveimur árum síðar er þetta farið að gerast í alvörunni á heimsmeistaramótinu. Á mótinu var mark nýlega dæmt af vegna þess að skynjari í boltanum nam snertingu við hár leikmanns; snertingu sem nákvæmlega engu breytti. Sami skynjari virðist samt ekki hafa greint neitt þegar boltanum var skotið í myndavélavír í leik Noregs og Englands. Sem leiddi til marks! Eins snilldarlegt og þetta mót hefur verið er það líka fullkominn farsi út af þessari VAR-þvælu, sem er dæmi um þann útbreidda misskilning að líf manna batni við aukna skilvirkni og mælanlega hámörkun. Þessi sama hugsun er ástæða þess að borgin er uppfull af nýjum húsum sem eru svo ljót að enginn vill búa í þeim.

English below: Í ljósi þess að þessi pistill frá liðinni helgi er farinn í dreifingu á netinu birti ég hann hér fyrr en venjulega. Fjallar um mögulega ástæðu þess að jafn lítið samfélag og okkar kýs að byggja sér stórt og flókið opinbert kerfi. "Ef einhver myndi annars finna upp Ísland í dag myndi enginn trúa niðurstöðunni. Hvernig geta tæplega 400.000 manns, samfélag á stærð við meðalhverfi í evrópskri borg, rekið sinn eigin gjaldmiðil og seðlabanka, forsetaembætti og fjölda ráðuneyta, óteljandi ríkisstofnanir og ógnarstórt opinbert kerfi á tveimur stjórnsýslustigum? Höfum við einhvern tímann spurt hvort okkar samfélag sé þess eðlis að þurfa þetta allt? Við lifum í leikmynd af stóru ríki." / "If someone were to invent Iceland today, no one would believe the result. How can fewer than 400,000 people—a community the size of an average neighborhood in a European city—operate their own currency and central bank, a presidency and a dozen ministries, countless state agencies, and a gargantuan public system across two levels of government? Have we ever asked if our society is of such a nature that it actually requires all of this? We are living on the film set of a Great Power." Living on a Film Set Recently, I was asked if I knew a certain man. I didn’t, and to top it off, I had no idea who he was. But when I Googled him, I recognized the face, and with it, the name. Wait, hang on... wasn’t this the guy who...? It checked out. A week earlier, late one evening, I had found this man’s credit card on my street. I’d looked up his number, called him, and strolled over to return it. But that had nothing to do with the inquiry. It was just an Icelandic coincidence: "No, I don't know the man at all, and I wouldn’t have a clue who he was if I hadn't found his card last week." This story teaches us nothing more than what we already know: Iceland is tiny. We aren’t a small nation—we are a micro-nation. Yet, at times, it feels as though we employ every trick in the book to hide that fact. If someone were to invent Iceland today, no one would believe the result. How can fewer than 400,000 people—a community the size of an average neighborhood in a European city—operate their own currency and central bank, a presidency and a dozen ministries, countless state agencies, and a gargantuan public system across two levels of government? Have we ever asked if our society is of such a nature that it actually requires all of this? We are living on the film set of a Great Power. One inevitably thinks this way with municipal elections on the horizon. In the capital area alone, there are 79 elected officials across seven different municipalities. I don’t rule out that my view on this is childishly simplistic, but one imagines that in decades past, things were more straightforward—administration was an extension of the community, something people took on after work as a civic duty. Today, however, the bureaucracy has more or less swallowed society whole. It acts as if nothing is beyond its purview; the system expands because it manufactures its own importance. Municipalities seem to be constantly adding roles that have no connection to basic services, and now the capital has even developed the seeds of its own foreign policy. The sheer weight of the system is so immense that a "dead hand" lies over everything. The stories one hears from people who dare to dream of opening a restaurant are "tragicomic." It seems impossible to install a pedestrian crossing sign by the Harpa concert hall despite the danger to walkers, let alone fix mold-infested kindergartens. Meanwhile, it is surreal to look down Barónsstígur and wonder what Icelanders were capable of building during the Great Depression. It took thirteen months to build the Empire State Building in New York. Today, one suspects it would be unlikely that a bus shelter in Iceland could be moved in that timeframe. In the election campaign, no one seems to doubt that it is the system's job to solve its own problems. But what if the system itself is the problem? Why do we have two levels of administration? Why do we have all these managers? All these endless titles and authorities? Perhaps the answer is found in Xinyu Zhang’s remarkable article, "Real Darkness and Visible Light," published in the journal Mál og menning in 2019. There, he cites the so-called "post-colonial anxiety" that scholars abroad have diagnosed in Icelanders. Zhang writes: "In his view, Icelanders are deeply anxious about not belonging to the so-called First World, an anxiety that can be traced back to the country’s colonial history. Therefore, Icelanders have been preoccupied with confirming and proving their status as a First World nation by positioning themselves as the absolute opposite of the Third World or underdeveloped countries." The guest’s eye is often sharpest. Perhaps the Icelandic worship of administration is rooted in this political subconscious. Colony, dependency, "exceptional-endency"—call it what you will. Why have we established such a complex and expensive public system? Perhaps because its weight and scale are evidence that we are a "real" society, and not a remote island on the edge of the habitable world. Because by manufacturing power, classes, titles, and importance, the system becomes proof that we are not just small-time crofters who have no need for it.

English below Hvað getur Machiavelli kennt okkur um hlutskipti þjálfara Liverpool? Pistill úr Sunnudagsmogganum. .„Það að Slot hafi strax unnið titil hefði ekki komið Machiavelli á óvart – mögulega hefði sigurinn í hans augum einmitt verið vísbending um að ekki væri allt með feldu.“ / Column on understanding the Liverpool manager Arne Slot through Machiavelli. "That Slot won a title immediately would not have surprised Machiavelli; in his eyes, such a victory might have been the very evidence that something was amiss." Understanding Arne Slot Through Machiavelli I was on the bus the other day, the Route 18, when I overheard two young men engaged in a spirited debate at the back of the vehicle. They were clearly agitated. Were they discussing Icelandic politics? The Central Bank’s next interest rate move? The war in Ukraine? Descartes’ Cogito? I pulled the headphones from my ears and listened in. Then, I sighed. Of course. They were talking about Liverpool Football Club—what else?—specifically the team’s dismal performance this season under the Dutchman, Arne Slot. For decades, the storied Liverpool side had been essentially irrelevant, until the German Jürgen Klopp took the helm in 2015. Over the next nine years, he transformed everything, leading the club to both a Premier League title and a Champions League trophy. Beyond the silver, a distinct atmosphere formed around the club—an aura inextricably linked to Klopp’s personal charisma. He stepped down in 2024, exhausted, and his empire was handed to a man few recognized: a Dutchman named Arne Slot. And yet, Slot won the title in his very first season—last year—and it seemed the impossible had been achieved: finding a worthy and capable successor to Klopp. But then the narrative shifted. Ahead of the current season, Liverpool’s owners opened their checkbooks. The coffers were full following the Klopp era, and the directive was to strike while the iron was hot. Numerous high-priced players were bought to fortify the squad. The powerhouse Klopp had built, and Slot had subsequently polished, was meant to become even more formidable. This was to be the moment they reaped the rewards of a decade of prudent decision-making. Fans worldwide were buzzing; the party was only just beginning. Instead, the bubble burst. The team has been a shadow of its former self all year. Who is to blame? Is Slot out of his depth after all? How, then, did he manage to win a title in the first place? This was the crux of the bus-ride debate. A quick search reveals that Liverpool’s owners recently made the controversial decision to retain Slot for next season—he is being given a second chance. I would argue that this is a mistake. To understand what is actually happening, we can look to the workshop of Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527). In his Discourses on Livy, he writes: "A prince of little capacity who succeeds a prince of great ability may be able to maintain himself for a time, because of the ability of his predecessor, and may enjoy the fruits of his labors. But if he be long-lived, or if he be followed by another who does not possess the same ability as the first, then the ruin of that state is certain... David was undoubtedly a man of great ability, being equally skilled in arms, in letters, and in judgment; and such was his prowess that having conquered and subdued all his neighbors, he left to his son Solomon a peaceful kingdom. This Solomon was able to maintain by the arts of peace, and to enjoy the fruits of his father’s virtues. But he could not leave it to his son Rehoboam, who, possessing neither the virtues of his grandfather nor the good fortune of his father, lost the greater part of the kingdom." Through this Machiavellian lens, Arne Slot is no mystery. He did not merely inherit a world-class squad; he inherited an atmosphere—an entire culture—forged by his powerful predecessor. Klopp’s shadow still loomed over everything, and that potent cocktail of fear, respect, and intensity that defined the players' relationship with him was still in the air. That Slot won a title immediately would not have surprised Machiavelli; in his eyes, such a victory might have been the very evidence that something was amiss. The team’s strength was built on false pretenses. Its source lay in the past, and that is a strength that does not last. When Slot finally had to take the reins himself, the wheels came off. One cannot envy a man tasked with sustaining something he did not create. It is often easier to take over a bad team than a great one. Had Slot followed Machiavelli’s counsel, he likely would have started by tearing something down immediately. But that is a subject for my next trip on the Route 18. #liverpoolfc #arneslot #machiavelli

Þetta var krefjandi tími fyrir hann

Pistill um kvikmyndina Nurnberg og þá staðreynd að afi minn var á staðnum. / A column on the movie Nuremberg and the fact that my grandfather was present. English below. My Grandfather at the Nuremberg Trials The film Nuremberg, now playing in cinemas in Iceland, is perhaps exactly what one might expect from a film of this kind: at once well made and forgettable, gripping and childish, interesting and dumb. Still, it holds together reasonably well. Were it not about the Nuremberg Trials—which the Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn once called “the most important event of the twentieth century”—there would probably be little reason to write about it here or to recommend it in particular. I was especially curious to see the film because my grandfather, Sverrir Þórðarson, was, as far as I know, the only Icelander present at the trials in Nuremberg. He was there on behalf of the distinguished newspaper that publishes these words of mine. At the age of twenty-four, a young reporter, he contacted the American army and flew with a military aircraft to Paris on April 14, 1946. On timarit.is I can see that he and my grandmother Peta had married two days earlier. From Paris he continued by train into Germany. He went to Frankfurt and Munich; he went to Berlin, where he bribed his way into the Reich Chancellery and down into the Führer’s underground bunker with cigars; he went to Dachau, where he saw the blood still fresh on the walls and barrels filled with the ashes of the 350,000 Jews murdered there in the gas chambers; and he went to Nuremberg, where he sat in the press gallery, to the right of the defendants’ dock, so close to the Nazis that he could remark which of them resembled a cloth merchant in Reykjavík, which had a hooked nose, and how Göring and Hess amused one another. This is how my grandfather described Göring, whom Russell Crowe portrays very well in the film: “Göring sat closest to us in the defendants’ enclosure. He was still of heavy build, though his hair had begun to turn slightly grey. He wore a grey uniform but no decorations. He was constantly writing notes, which a guard would take from him and pass to his defence counsel. He appeared to follow the testimony with great interest. Journalists who had long been covering the trial agreed that he examined every detail of the testimony with great care. When he himself testified it sometimes seemed as though he dominated the courtroom with the force of his personality. It was clear to everyone that this was a man of considerable intelligence—but his hands were stained with blood.” It seems almost unbelievable to think that he experienced all this—and not only as a newly married man but on his very first trip abroad. The journey with the American army to Paris was the first time my grandfather had ever left Iceland. The first glimpse he had of the wider world with his own eyes was Europe in smoking ruins: a Paris without electricity, newly opened extermination camps, a shattered Berlin, the Bunker—with a capital B—and finally “the most important event of the twentieth century” unfolding in the courtroom at Nuremberg. How powerful must those memories have been? Perhaps, then, I am being unfair to the Hollywood film I watched on Wednesday evening. Its forced drama, its smooth and handsome actors, and its formulaic screenplay somehow pale in comparison with the thought of a twenty-four-year-old, newly married Icelander—a reporter for Morgunblaðið, “one of the youngest journalists in the country”—suddenly confronted with all these horrors on his first journey abroad, tasked with finding words for them for readers back home in Iceland. I have letters my grandfather wrote to my grandmother during this trip. They are, as you might imagine, extraordinary reading: written by a young man who knows he has seen and experienced something remarkable, yet is still too young to grasp fully how remarkable it is. He stands too close to the flow of events to realize that later generations of thinkers will declare them the most consequential of the twentieth century. When I first arrived in Berlin, I felt strangely as though I already knew the place. The city has been my second home ever since. The last time I saw my grandfather he had grown so old that he no longer recognized me. Someone asked him whom I reminded him of. He looked at me for a moment and answered: “Myself.”

Pistill frá því í janúar um þá speki sem höfð er eftir Goethe að menn fái veikleika sína frá þeirri öld sem þeir lifa á. / A column on Goethe's insight on virtues and weaknesses. English below: Goethe: Virtue Has No Script A thought attributed to the German literary giant Goethe holds that people inherit their weaknesses from the age in which they live, while the source of their virtues lies within themselves. His point seems to be that our faults are historical rather than purely personal. Every era, so to speak, tolerates certain flaws in human character and thereby makes it easier for people to get away with them. These might take the form of a particular kind of moral blindness, fashionable delusions, intellectual laziness that goes unchallenged, or some generalized fear that spreads through society without necessarily being rational. But does Goethe, in saying this, absolve individuals of responsibility for themselves—suggesting that they simply inherit their defects from the spirit of the age without any say in the matter—while giving them a comfortable excuse to boast about whatever they happen to do well? Or is there, perhaps, a deeper key here to understanding the relationship between the individual and society? Goethe is not merely saying that the spirit of the age produces human weaknesses. The spirit of the age elevates those weaknesses into virtues. That is the true weakness of character: the vice that an era allows people’s intellect to call virtue, while ultimately demanding neither sacrifice nor courage of them. The age arms them with the proper language, the right arguments, and even an academic framework. True virtue, seen in this light, is the opposite. It is awkward, unclear, and may even appear immoral in the eyes of the age precisely because it does not fit into any predetermined framework—there is no script for it. In that sense it is individual: it stands out and seems strange. What makes a truly virtuous person admirable is therefore not some romantic cliché about heroism, but the fact that he is not a social chameleon. He cannot adapt himself to circumstances and disappear into the shared and sanctioned language of the time. Goethe’s idea thus contains a warning: the more perfectly a person embodies the moral code of his own age, the more likely it is that he is weak in precisely the way that age demands. Or put differently: if you are perfectly fluent in all the accepted attitudes and speak their language effortlessly, you may not be a warrior of the spirit of the age, but its prisoner. There are countless examples of this. One contemporary instance might be the intense cultural emphasis on self-development and on exploring one’s personal history of trauma. Imagine a well-educated person who can speak knowledgeably about boundaries, explain in psychological terms why they are unable to carry out certain actions, and offer precise explanations for particular patterns of behavior—for example by invoking “triggers.” All of this may be true and valid, and it may even sound like maturity and deep self-insight. Yet such language can also function as an extremely convenient way to avoid one’s obligations to others without bearing any moral responsibility for doing so—in other words, without paying any real price. At the same time, we can imagine a person who weathers the storm when the easiest option would be to run away; who accepts the absence of clear explanations, is not afraid of being misunderstood, and tolerates uncertainty, grey areas, and contradictions in human behavior—at a time when the spirit of the age offers simple and comfortable answers to difficult questions. Another example might be the way unrestrained accumulation of property and wealth is treated as the obvious measure of success in a market society. Those who swim against that current and measure their lives differently, according to their own judgment, naturally have no formula to follow and no external confirmation of their success, since the standard exists only within themselves. As a result, they are often dismissed as naïve. Perhaps this is yet another of the inverted strokes of genius in the design of creation. Perhaps our virtues really are like this: uncomfortable, unscripted, and a little naïve—while our weaknesses are the opposite: comfortable, easily explained, and pre-packaged. The warning lights should not begin flashing when you are unsure what you are doing, but precisely when you believe you know.

Pistill um dauða viðtengingarháttarins, landið Kanilsnúð, rétta íslensku og moskítóflugur. English: On the Land of Cinnamon Buns, “Correct” Icelandic, and Mosquitoes The death of the subjunctive was so sudden that it recalls the unexpected raid of mosquitoes on Iceland. You read about a single case — one mosquito found in a stable — and a week later there are a hundred of them, and you find yourself scanning the walls at home. The same is true of the subjunctive. I first remember reading about its impending demise in 2022, when linguists declared that it might disappear within this century. I was taken aback; I hadn’t noticed anything of the sort and assumed it must be a misunderstanding. But now, just a few years later, the subjunctive is being murdered on the lips of grown adults almost daily. So how should one feel about this? Is it outright wrong Icelandic to say, “Mikið vona ég að sólin kemur upp á morgun”? If everyone understands me, does it actually matter? Languages obviously evolve, and what counts as correct or incorrect changes over time — the rules themselves are not carved in stone; they are not laws of nature. But who, then, decides what is correct? Are there no rules at all, only usage that is always right by definition? Who holds power over Icelandic? What mandate do the people who compile the dictionary actually have? It is not as if they are democratically elected. Late last summer, the Minister of Education himself was diagnosed with a severe case of dative sickness, in addition to allegedly saying “Ég vill” in an interview and inventing the word "einkanir". One could make a friendly joke and say that this is only fitting in a country where, supposedly, every other man is illiterate, that the high priest of education barely speaks his own mother tongue. But is it fair to pick at such linguistic errors? Opinions differ. Various respected commentators asserted that there was nothing wrong with the minister’s language at all — that, precisely, there is no such thing as “correct Icelandic.” The only thing the minister was guilty of, they claimed, was violating what self-appointed language judges consider correct usage. The language accommodates all kinds of variation, and correct Icelandic is simply how it is actually used. Language purists, on the other hand, take the opposite view and consider it both natural and necessary to defend what they call “correct” Icelandic — discipline must be maintained, as the good soldier Švejk puts it. In these opposing attitudes, these two schools of thought, we glimpse something like the fault line of contemporary politics: liberal intolerance of any form of marginalisation on the one hand, and conservative intolerance of uncontrolled permissiveness on the other. Both camps have something to say for themselves, but the solution probably lies somewhere in between. The claim that there is no such thing as “correct Icelandic” is false, and here Wittgenstein’s private-language argument is relevant: at bottom, the meaning of language is social. If there is no external yardstick, no shared criterion — no right and wrong that a community agrees upon — then the door is opened to a kind of private language that exists only in the mind of a single individual. That does not work. I cannot decide that, in my own head, the word “cinnamon bun” refers to a country on the Mediterranean where people eat tapas and attend bullfights. The meaning of words does not arise within us; it emerges from shared use — from the rules a society forms, follows, and revises. The rules are therefore both necessary and mutable. Language purists assume that correct Icelandic exists, but they rarely explain who determines it, or why certain changes are acceptable while others are not; more often than not, the answer depends on how those changes align with particular political attitudes — in other words, language as a tool of power. It is apparently a grave matter not to be able to speak Icelandic in a bakery, and the Minister of Education must not say that he is looking forward to Christmas, yet no one objects to the silent nominal revolution that has taken place in Icelandic public administration — “the enhancement of workforce capability and professional expertise within the human-resources division” — which makes it impossible to read official documents without immediately losing the will to live. Yes, stiff, English-derived bureaucratic language made landfall here long before the mosquito. It drains the blood from Icelandic without anyone lifting a finger, and thus confirms the sound theory that the most successful revolutions are the ones no one notices.

Að vera eða ekki vera Kassandra - pistill úr Sunnudagsmogga um goðsögnina um Kassöndru dóttur Príams, skortstöðukónginn Michael Burry úr Big Short og þá erfiðu list að sjá gegnum þoku tímans.

Pistill úr sunnudagsblaði um hvað Víkingaklappið getur kennt okkur um uppruna vestrænnar siðmenningar. English translation The Viking Clap and the Origins of Western Civilization The Viking clap became internationally known as “Icelandic” in 2016, even though just about everyone knows it was borrowed. One theory traces its origin to supporters of the Icelandic club Stjarnan, who picked it up from fans of the Scottish team Motherwell when the two teams met in 2014, from where it spread into Icelandic national football. Another says it comes from the Hollywood film 300, about the Spartans. A third claims it was stolen from Polish handball. Could it be that the Icelandic Viking clap—something no one seriously believes to be an Icelandic invention—has something to teach us about how “Western civilization” itself came to be? It is tempting to believe the story we’ve been told about ourselves: that the values and ideas we follow and believe in—summed up conveniently under the umbrella term Western civilization—spring from Greco-Roman soil. We like to think of ourselves as the offspring of those great minds who built those ancient societies and gave us all kinds of clever tools and concepts, such as democracy, the rule of law, liberty, and the theory of forms. But perhaps this is rather like believing that the Viking clap is Icelandic. Josephine Quinn, professor of ancient history at the University of Cambridge, argues in her book How the World Made the West that this is a shallow understanding of both the modern Western world and the ancient societies of Rome and Greece. In the book, she convincingly rejects the common idea that distinct civilizations evolved independently from one another. According to Quinn, this historical understanding would have been utterly foreign to the ancient Greeks and Romans themselves, who spoke openly about where they had acquired their own culture and ideas. She traces the roots of the modern West all the way back to the Bronze Age: to the Babylonian law tablets, the Assyrian irrigation systems, the Egyptian alphabet, the Phoenician mastery of navigation, Indian literature, and Arabic scholarship. One might say that Quinn’s central thesis is that connections—not distinct, self-contained civilizations—are what shape the course of human history. Ideas travel haphazardly from place to place with the people who move between them, sometimes with noble intentions, sometimes not. The very concept of “civilization” has its own history—it is an invention of the eighteenth century. When it first appeared in France around 1750, it referred to an abstract notion of a “developed society.” Around 1760, Scottish philosophers adopted the term and used it to explain the leaps forward in human development, with Western Europe, naturally, as the highest standard. But well into the nineteenth century, no one imagined that there were fundamentally distinct kinds of civilization. Gradually, the spirit of the age created the idea of a specifically European culture—but the American War of Independence complicated matters slightly. The flexible and convenient term the West slowly took over, which in turn called forth equally vague notions of something called the East. These fault lines hardened after the Second World War, and little by little a worldview took hold in which separate cultural societies were imagined to grow like trees from the ground, each with its own roots and branches. This remains the prevailing view in the twenty-first century, where “Western civilization”—meaning a Christian society with Greco-Roman roots—is set against “the East,” a category that somehow includes such disparate entities as Russia, China, and Islam. As Quinn points out, even liberal ideas of “multiculturalism” rest on the assumption that different cultures exist as self-contained and independent entities. This conclusion is undeniably refreshing. You are not the product of “Western civilization”; your thought is not descended from men who wandered about draped in white sheets, philosophized, seduced young boys, and enjoyed public executions. The world is a simmering stew, a cauldron of human existence in which ideals, yearning, necessity, virtue, and frailty mix under the law of unforeseen consequences. You are what bubbles briefly to the surface and then disappears again. You are not a Greek or a Roman—you are the kitsch Viking clap, a clever idea borrowed because it helped people find their rhythm together.