While reading, I encountered several horrendously long sentences that just make me so irritated that I didn't feel like finishing the reading. But yes, I finished the reading and have gone on to other readings, only to find that the number of long sentences in my readings are ever-increasing, as if to mock me for thinking that particular EU reading was the first and the last reading which contains incredibly lengthy sentences. As such, I shall include in this post some of the long sentences I came across just now, just to show my readers what I'm going through:
"We need to focus on the ways in which, more or less autonomously, more or less strongly, more or less efficiently, the state acts, not merely as a mediator between internal demands external pressures, but as a shaper capable of moulding its own domestic support of choosing among internal interests and external constraints, of playing some against others, of using the fragmentation of interests and classes in order to fashion --to preserve or to reform-- the social order, of using the challenges of complexity, the expansion of its scope , and the imperatives and constraints of the international system in order to define the common interest."
(Hoffman, 1982)well, do you understand whats gg on in that sentence? i had to read the lines over and over again, i tell u. now here's another long one, from the same reading."Although the traditional model of sovereignty is clearly obsolete, the nation-state today survives even though some of its powers have to be pooled with others, and even though apparently sovereign decisions are seriously constrained, or made ineffective by, the decisions of others as well as by economic trends uncontrolled by anyone."this one not as long as the first, but still a bit too long for comfort. anyway, no prizes given for correctly guessing which module that reading is for. here's one last one, from a different module.
"The social expenses and threat to social harmony created by a large and economically stagnant surplus-population could jeopardize the preconditions for accumulation by undermining the ideology of equality so essential to the legitimation of production relations in bourgeois democracies, diverting revenues away from capital investment toward control and support operations, and providing a basis for political organization of the dispossessed."(Spitzer, 1975)this seems easier to understand, but still, I don't understand the sentence fully. just get the rough idea of what he is talking about.
well, thats all for the moment. just wonder why these authors can be so convoluted. to end off, just ponder over this:
"Indeed, a person is evaluated, either favourably or unfavourably, not because he does something, or even because he is something, but because others react to their perceptions of him as offensive or inoffensive"(quoted in Quinney, 1975)such is the power of perceptions huh?
I painted my dreams at
4:14 AM
