Random Citation Watch

I have a search on Google Scholar that lets me know when a paper of mine has been cited. It’s very interesting to see the odd places my work washes up. But every so often there’s a truly mysterious citation, and today’s is a new contender for the bizzaro record holder: Ravshan Rakhmanov and Nigora Safarova Olimovna, Sources Of Violence Seen In Biosocial Nature Of Man, 1 Asian Journal Of Social Sciences & Humanities 142 (2012).

The authors, who identify as being from the Department of Social Studies, Navoi Pedagogical Institute, Republic Of Uzbekistan, have written a short (3.4 page) paper on, well, something. Here is the conclusion:

However, the violence generating terror is effective only for the solution of tactical problems. In the strategic plan, sooner or later it leads to psychological exhaustion: people get tired of being afraid and then a long terror seldom happens to be effective. Anyway never happens to be constant. Any violence should be proved – the nature of human thinking demands it. Especially it is related to political violence. Certainly the relation of a society and a state to violence is defined by many reasons – history and cultural traditions of the people, a certain political and economic situation, personal qualities of those who have power, the level of development or structures of the civil society or on the contrary. However abstracting from concrete conditions and features of this or that country, it is possible to allocate some factors promoting the fact that violence becomes not extreme but a necessary action and norm and a part of official political ideology of the state. The relation of a democratic state to violence is connected with such sight at the person. It is supposed to be only as an exclusive measure in relation to minority of the population. The mass political violence is essentially rejected. An opposite view on a person, disbelief that people are inclined to voluntary follow the standard norms of behaviour and they are silly and aggressive by nature, of course leads to a conclusion about the necessity to constrain the destructive tendencies inherent in people by force or threat to apply it. The consequence of such approach is justification of political violence and, as a whole, orientation to dictatorship. Really, if to agree that historical process is chaotic and leads to destruction and death, the violent measures used to resist such chaos and destruction can be perceived not only as quite comprehensive but also as even humane and necessary and the accompanying violence to the victim – as inevitable.

I’ve read it twice and am afraid to do so again in case I get cross-eyed.

The citations are gloriously multi-lingual (English, German, and something Cyrillic) and I suspect beautifully random. In addition to my Wrong Turn in Cyberspace article the bibliography includes works with titles such as “Network-Centric Operations Case Study: Air-to-Air Combat With and Without Link”, “Handbook of Telecommunications Economics” and — my favorite — “Skew-Tolerant Circuit”.