Thursday, December 27, 2012

A New Academic Discipline: Fjordmanology

A professor lecturing

This morning Fjordman sent out the following tweet:

An entire academic Fjordman-industry is now developing. When will Norway produce the first PhD thesis in fjordmanology?

He was referring to an article in På Høyden, the online newspaper of the University of Bergen. I don’t have a formal translation, but using Google, and with additional help from Henrik Ræder Clausen, I was able to piece together the latest news from Modern Multicultural Norway.

A Norwegian professor of “digital culture” named Jill Walker Rettberg has helped midwife a new fellowship that will investigate extremism on the Internet. According to På Høyden:

“22 July forced us to see that there is a lot of extremism on the net,” says Professor Jill Walker Rettberg. Now the Department of Linguistic, Literary and Aesthetic Studies has announced a fellowship that is designated for research on extreme speech on the web.

The new scholarship was added to the Department of Linguistic, Literary and Aesthetic Studies. “There has been little research on extremism on the Internet, at least from a humanist perspective,” says Prof. Walker Rettberg.

Generally speaking, she is positive about the internet:

“The network is global. It’s wonderful if, for instance, one has a very specific disease or a child with special problem — then one can make contact with the few others who are in the same situation. But it is also easier to find other people who have the same and perhaps equally quirky viewpoints as oneself. One talks about a filter bubble or an echo chamber — it means that one only sees those who are similar to oneself,” says Walker Rettberg.

She adds: “Analyses can focus on language, rhetoric, ideology, visual instruments, aesthetics, discourse or social networks… We want to build up expertise in this field. The debate has shown that there are many views — but there is little scientific research.”

Norwegian academics are known to be scrupulously fair and even-handed in their dispassionate scholarly investigations, so we can be certain that the new discipline will take at least a cursory look at left-wing extremists, and maybe even Islamic radicals.

However, the reader is left in no doubt about the real meat of the matter — the dreaded Fjordman:

One of bloggers focused on by the media after 22 July was Fjordman. He was mentioned in Anders Behring Breivik’s manifesto, and it has been said that he was Breivik’s mentor. Fjordman is a radical right-wing anti-Islamist. Among others, Marie Simonsen — the political editor of Dagbladet — has charged that he is an extremist who calls for political violence.

Prof. Walker Rettberg adds, “I knew about Fjordman before 22 July, but I had not made a close examination of what he said.”

All that will change as soon as all that petroleum-backed grant money starts flowing into the Department of Aesthetic Studies. A tireless and fully-funded investigator will leave no stone unturned as he, she, or it gets to the bottom of the dangerous xenophobic right-wing extremist phenomenon known as “Fjordman”.

Obviously, the most qualified candidate for the new position is Fjordman himself. After all, who knows more about Fjordmanology than he does? Just think of the research time and effort that would be saved if he were to take up the fellowship!

I think he should apply for the job.

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

Jill Walker Rettberg talks about the “echo chamber” that all of us right-wing extremists inhabit. And what she says is true enough — I’m certainly preaching to the choir here 99% of the time.

But what would you call the mainstream media, especially in Norway, if not an “echo chamber”? Doesn’t Prof. Walker Rettberg inhabit a “filter bubble” of her own?

After extensive research into the topic of left-wing extremism in the media, I have come to the conclusion that their primary gripe with the Internet is that it has broken their monopoly on the cultural echo chamber. Now all of those “right-wing extremists” and “xenophobes” can establish their own echo chambers, where they are able to send their racist yodels bouncing back and forth across the virtual valleys of the digital uplands.

And the reach of these new filter bubbles is enormous. The echoes resonate across the entire globe, with millions of people on six continents listening in on them.

This must be galling for a tenured professor of digital nonsense, who is only able to be heard by a few thousand like-minded academics because the state delivers dump truck loads of kroner to her department to support all the claptrap and flapdoodle that passes for “research” in the modern Norwegian academy.

Pull out the petrodollars, and all those professors of comparative cultural oppression would be reduced to boning herring in the canneries, as were their foremothers a hundred and fifty years ago.

Let them shovel out the mammon to themselves while they can. Their time is short.

As a wise man named Lao Tzu said more than two millennia ago:

This is not the way of Tao.
Whatever is contrary to Tao will not last long.

Follow Fjordman on Twitter: Fjordman@Fjordman1

The Lao Tzu quote is from Chapter Fifty-Five of The Tao Te Ching.

16 comments:

john in cheshire said...

Sorry to keep repeating myself, but Norway is one sick country.

dymphna said...

Oh wow! I can't wait. And of course to be fair and objective they will of course examine the very far left-wing Hamas, which openly promotes and provides murder and mayhem, right? Right?

I've watched them in action now, and I know what they'll say: "Hamas is not an academically interesting subject therefore we won't examine it".

Anyone for dessert? I think the student union is serving Cognitive Dissonance Flambé.

That's a Norwegian specialty, usually served after the main course, Fricaseed Brains. And yes, that organ meat is harvested humanely - mostly from students who fall asleep in class. They never even notice the loss, honest.

Just thought I'd explain that strange phenomenon everyone has noticed, i.e, students in the social sciences are graduating with even less knowledge and native intelligence than they had on entering college...

- oops, pardon me, that's "entering UNIVERSITY". No one goes to collitch anymore.Not at those prices.

Anonymous said...

The counter-jihad is not ALWAYS an echo chamber. I've brought people to critically examine the nature of Islam through occasional posts. The key is incrementalism. Heated rhetoric, even if not in the post but in the commentary, can derail that effort.

I get a lot of information from GoV, but I use http://www.citizenwarrior.com/ as a tool to convince friends. It's a subtle difference.

Don't get me wrong - it's important to keep the core of a movement motivated, and both Vlad Tepes and GoV do that well. But Citizen Warrior is just that much more accessible to the uninitiated.

Marcus

Baron Bodissey said...

Marcus --

Yes, you're quite right, and Europe News serves a similar function. It's more low-key, and never rants and raves like we do.

Vlad and I are part of the molten core of the Counterjihad solar system. What we do must be done, but we are not adept at missionary work among the heathen. Some people are skilled that way, but I am not one of them.

Every now and then this blog captures an errant uncommitted intellectual, but that's the exception.

One of my main functions is to rally the troops, and remind them why they fight.

Anonymous said...



“I knew about Fjordman before 22 July, but I had not made a close examination of what he said.” - Professor Jill Walker Rettberg

Obviously reading Fjordman for research purposes only, with the curtains drawn and the doors locked.

Jolie Rouge

Anonymous said...

But if reading Fjordman is a sufficient condition for becoming a crazed spree killer, then it follows that after reading Fjordman's essays the lovely Jill Walker Rettberg will become a crazed spree killer!

Don't do it Jill! By reading Fjordman's essay on the history of beer, you are putting your sanity at risk!

Nick said...

Seriously though - if these people with to make the assertion that reading Fjordman's essays is a sufficient condition to turn someone into a crazed spree killer, how can they say this without first reading Fjordman's essays so they know what he's said?

If their assertion is true and they read those essays then it follows that they themselves will become crazed spree killers.

On the other hand, if they read Fjordman's essays and they do NOT become crazed spree killers, then they will have refuted their own assertion!

To put this another way: in order to demonstrate that their assertion is true, they will have to read Fjordman's essays and then go completely loopy and shoot all their colleagues!

Anonymous said...

Whirlwinder says:

Jill needs to acquire a muslim boyfriend and begin to learn the muslim culture firsthand. She can then enlighten the world about what a great life Islam is for women and how superior their 'culture' is to western civilization. I am gaging while I write this. Perhaps she could even become muslim and upon seeing the error of her ways, become an apostate with her life hanging in the balance.

Anonymous said...

There is a Fjordman article at the Japanese editon of Uncyclopedia, which describes him as a boss character of 'Megaman 2083'.

The article, written under the name of Norway Progress Party, apparently links Fjordman's essays to the Utoya incident and condemns him for denying the intellectual continuity.

His essays seem to be translated in Japanese through the translation of the 2083, whose Japanese edition is filled with humorous Japanese words derived from various sources including Japanimation.

Since there are no sincere comments of Fjordman in Japanese, the Uncyclopedian article is the front-runner of fjordmanology in Japan.… What a hell!

Anonymous said...

Libtards will do anything to find an excuse to suck taxpayer teat.

Anonymous said...

This Jill Walker Rettberg sounds as if she just might be a lady from an anglophone country married to a Norwegian. In fact I would imagine she might just be English, although she could be from the Antipodes; but probably not from North America. In which case she is probably going to donate the fruits of her research to the British and/or Australian governments as well.

Here three people have just been arrested for putting a pig's head near an Islamic Community Centre in Leicester, England. If somebody had smashed a statue of the Virgin Mary outside a Roman Catholic Church they would probably have been arrested for criminal damage but I doubt if they would have been arrested for a racially ( not possible because only white people are racists ) or religiously aggravated public order offence (not possible because in secularist Britain these days Christianity is not a religion just a fairy tale). Still this won't happen in Leicester for much longer because the indigenous English will have been driven out completely, unless the offenders then will be Hindus or Sikhs.

Regarding Norway, sometimes I think they are getting their come uppance. In 793 it was Norwegian Vikings who attacked the monastery at Lindisfarne off the Northumberland coast, killing some of the monks, drowning others and forcing the remainder into slavery.
This was the start of England's Viking Age which ended in 1066 when Harald Hardrade the king of Norway was defeated by Harold Godwinson at Stamford Bridge. King Harold then went on to be killed by the Norman knights of William the Bastard, Duke of Normandy, a descendant of Ralf the Ganger the Danish Viking who founded the province. The Vikings put an end to monastic life in England for decades.

I wonder if today's Norwegians can see the irony. Norway was chistianised in about ad 1000, probably the only European country to have this done at the point of the sword. Here we are a thousand years later and the Norwegians are now like the monks of Lindisfarne, ripe for slaughter and too weak or "civilised" to cope with the new barbarians sweeping into their country. Where is their Harold Godwinson?; in exile and public enemy number one.

babs said...

"After more than 11 years of fighting, 56,900 Americans dead"

Where did you get the number 56,900? It seems awfully high. I would guess 15,000 there abouts which would include soldiers KIA and victims of 9/11/01, 9/11/12, Fort Hood, etc.

Anonymous said...



Test for echoes - hopefully in a moment of brilliance Professor Jill Walker Rettberg will realise that it is herself whom is imprisoned in the echo chamber of conditioning.

Jolie Rouge

Jill Walker Rettberg said...

Hey, thanks for linking to the article - we hope to have applications from people interested in examining any kind of extremism, we're not simply interested in right-wing extremism. If you look at the actual job advertisement you'll see that we're trying to be open: http://www.jobbnorge.no/job.aspx?jobid=88851

The whole idea of an echo chamber or the filter bubble is that we're ALL in echo chambers and we have to make an effort if we want to see and hear view points from outside of it. The internet appears to exacerbate that. You can use it to find anything, but studies have also shown that political debate, for instance, is more polarised in blogs than on television (http://journals.cambridge.org/production/action/cjoGetFulltext?fulltextid=7323324). So yes, of course I recognise that I'm also in an echo chamber.

Anonymous said...

Jill Walker Rettberg: Your basic assumption that anti-jihad blogs are right-wing extremist blogs is insulting and incorrect.

Who are YOU to label an anti-jihad point of view - which is backed up by over 1,400 years of EVIDENCE of Muslim violence and jihad war - as right-wing extremism?

Anyone with a grasp of both past history and current events would understand that the real extremism is exhibited by well-documented ACTIONS of Muslims who have always used - and still use - torture, rape, kidnap, mass murder, poll tax, and dhimmi slave status to clear Muslim countries of all non-Muslims - and also to conquer non-Muslim countries for the ummah.

Your reference to the article that claims that 1) blog readers are more polarized than non-blog-readers or consumers of various television news programs, and 2) left-wing blogs inspire more political participation than right-wing blogs, is highly suspect.

First, the term 'polarized' has a negative connotation as if the preferred state of people is that people remain anesthetized rather than polarized - as if having NO opinion - or a state-approved opinion - is somehow better than having a strong or conflicting opinion.

Second, the consumers of various television news programs are simply consuming state-approved and/or state-funded propaganda intended to keep people in the dark about major issues - thus calm and manageable for current leaders. To wit, television news programs are themselves polarized to reflect the goals of left-wing leaders. To claim that television news programs are non-polarized is to beggar disbelief in anyone who watches said shows.

Please note that former Obama czar Cass Sunstein reviewed the article that you referenced PRIOR to its publication so said article can hardly be seen to be neutral.

"Sunstein gained notoriety on a number of fronts. He called for dispatching government agents to sabotage individuals and groups opposed to government – most notably those at odds with the official 9/11 narrative – and suggested the government hold people responsible for the information they post on the internet."

Obama’s Authoritarian Adviser Sunstein Steps Down

Likewise, modern mass media is notoriously left-leaning rather than neutral.

Just the fact that reporters in the left-leaning mass media have omitted to question Obama about the many documented fraudulent activities of Obama and his many criminal cronies is an indication of the left-wing extremism of the mass media.

The best that we can hope is that YOU will learn something factual about Islam while YOU are reading about it.

Please, read the entire site from top to bottom until you understand that extremism is the ACTIONS of Muslims rather than the words of anti-jihadists. Extremism is the Marxist-Islamic partnership to overthrow Western civilization.

Egghead

Anonymous said...

Jill Walker Rettig,

We all know that there will not be any academic rigor whatsoever applied to so-called "hate speech" online by either radical leftists nor by Muslims.

Europe is a place where a former radical leftist terrorist who actively participated in violent actions in the 70s and 8os can put on a suit, change his name to "Green Party member" and rise to become the Foreign Minister of Germany, while no one in the European media or academic establishment bats a single eyelash about it.

You will continue to ignore violent speech as well as actions from the left and from Muslims. We know full well how the leftist-controlled media and academic Marxocracy operates.

You are the 21st Century equivalent of a Witchfinder General; don't kid yourself that you are anything else.

Happy bonfire-building, ma'am.