After you get used to it, being hanged becomes bearable.
Let me give you some context.
I live in Romania. You know, that country which shot its dictator, Nicolae Ceausescu, on the Christmas Day 1989.
I was drafted to the army in October 1980. When I left home, you could still find food to buy. Soap, chocolate, washing powder, toilet paper… you name it. Nothing fancy but life was ‘normal’. Nine months later, in July 1981, food was already scarce.
In 1985, things were already bad. You had to queue up for anything you needed. For all of the above mentioned items.
By 1988, things had become even worse. On top of what I had already mentioned, rolling blackouts were common. Those of us who lived in apartments connected to central heating were ‘enjoying’ running hot water for only a few hours a day/a few days a week. And shivered during the entire winter.
I’m telling you all these because in December 1989 most of us were hugely surprised when communism had fallen. With a bang.
We’d become so accustomed with what was happening to us that we were convinced our lives were ‘normal’.
Compare that to what you see below. Oh, I forgot to tell you that we had only 1 (one) TV channel. Which was on for 2 hours each working day from Monday to Saturday and 12 hours on Sunday. And 80% of what was churned out was pure propaganda.
Quite a lot of people around the Internet are considering that ‘Ukraine is of little interest for the US’. Even some of the Europeans are considering that isolating Putin’s Russia from ‘SWIFT’ is a too steep price to be paid, by them, for Ukraine’s independence.
I remind them, all of them, of what Martin Niemoeller had to say on this subject.
Having no previous intel about this guy, my ‘jerked’ reaction was simple.
‘Leaving aside any principle, a society which cuts ‘fallopian’ tubes will have a lower birth rate while that which vaccinates its children will notice a decrease in healthcare costs. And a lower mortality across the entire age spectrum!’
OK, let’s calm down and google. To find out who was this Oliver Wendell Holmes, after all.
“In that long span of (30) years on the Supreme Court he became acknowledged as one of the most notable jurists of the age—in the opinion of many the foremost. Often he has been called The Great Dissenter because of the brilliance of his dissenting opinions, but the phrase gives a falsely negative emphasis, and his penetration and originality are seen as fully in the opinions in which he expressed or concurred in the majority view of the court as in those in which he was in dissent.”
“Perhaps his best-known phrase is from Schenck v. United States, where he introduced the ‘clear-and-present-danger’ test as a means of limiting the power of the state to restrict speech and illustrated it by reference to a person’s ‘falsely shouting fire in a theater.’ His later development of this test, coupled with his emphasis on a basically unregulated ‘marketplace of ideas,’ was seminal for the development of modern free-speech law. His retirement in 1932 was a national event, and he has remained, along with John Marshall, among the best known of all those who have served on the Supreme Court.”
“Few American jurists are as revered as Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. A United States Supreme Court justice for close to 30 years, Holmes wrote seminal opinions that were clear and clever and elegantly phrased. It was Holmes who defined the limits of free speech in 1919 by noting that the law did not protect someone “falsely shouting fire in a theater.” And it was Holmes who thoughtfully amended those words a decade later by writing that nothing in the Constitution was more sacred than “the principle of free thought — not free thought for those who agree with us but freedom for the thought that we hate.” By most accounts, Holmes, an upper-crust Bostonian, served the nobler instincts of America’s privileged classes. That is why his reckless majority opinion supporting forced sterilization in a 1927 case remains an enigma. Was it an isolated misstep or something more: an indictment of Justice Holmes and the Progressive movement he appeared to embrace?”
“We have seen more than once that the public welfare may call upon the best citizens for their lives. It would be strange if it could not call upon those who already sap the strength of the State for these lesser sacrifices, often not felt to be such by those concerned, in order to prevent our being swamped with incompetence. It is better for all the world if, instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes. Three generations of imbeciles are enough.“ . . .
Perhaps worst of all, Carrie Buck was not an imbecile. Both she and her mother were deemed “social undesirables” due to a perception of promiscuity which, in Carrie’s case, partially resulted from an illegitimate child who was the product of incestuous rape. This was fairly typical. The linked article describes how “people as young as 10 in North Carolina were sterilized for not getting along with schoolmates, being promiscuous or running afoul of local social workers or doctors.”
In all, more than 60,000 people—including 7,600 in North Carolina—were forcibly sterilized in the United States in the name of “progress.” Progressives of the time lauded the decision in Buck. Individual rights, they firmly believed, should not be allowed to stand in the way of collective progress. Justice Brandeis called Buck an example of properly allowing states the freedom to “meet modern conditions by regulations which a century ago, or even half a century ago, probably would have been rejected as arbitrary and oppressive.””
So. Who was the ‘real’ Oliver Wendell Holmes? That one whose teachings we choose to put forward, of course! Exactly as Justice Holmes had done himself. And why is it our responsibility to choose? Simple. It’s us, and our children, who will bear the consequences. Who will have to live in the environment shaped by those choices.
In physics, ‘temperature’ measures the intensity of the interaction between the elements which ‘inhabit’ a certain place. The more energy exists in a certain place, the more intense the interaction. If the place is inhabited by a gas, each molecule is able to ‘travel’ a short distance before actually hitting one, or more, of its neighbors. If the place is occupied by a liquid, the molecules glide against each-other and if we speak about a solid, the components just shimmy together. The more energy exists inside a place – the higher the temperature, the more intense the interaction between the individual components. And if, for whatever reason, ‘too much’ energy accumulates into a given space the interaction becomes intense enough for ‘change’ to happen. As temperature raises, solids melt, liquids boil and evaporate while gases become plasma.
Adding energy isn’t enough to determine change. Temperature might rise without anything noticeable to happen. Specially when we speak about liquids and solids. If enough outside pressure is applied, the liquid cannot start to boil and the solid stays in place.
Same thing when it comes to a society. High output societies need a very intense social interaction to make things happen. To make so many things happen at once… that being the reason for which those societies need to be democratic. Autocracies are too rigid, they cannot accommodate the continuous adjustments needed to ‘absorb’ the huge amount of ‘social change’ warranted by the amount of energy ebbing through the system.
One way to measure ‘social temperature’ – other than the ‘output’ of that society, is to gouge how vulnerable a society is when confronted with a highly infectious disease which is transmitted through direct contact. Cholera will sweep through an entire community which drinks from the same well, regardless of how much contact individual people have with each-other. Covid, and Ebola, need people to ‘touch’ each-other in order to jump from one to another.
But don’t forget to factor in ‘pressure’. And other things specific to each individual ‘place’. Otherwise the analysis might produce less relevant results.
For knowledge to become actionable, it has to be trusted. It has to be believed as being true!
In order to cooperate with somebody, you need to trust that person.
But trusting a person is far more complicated than believing that a piece of information is true!
Evaluating a piece of knowledge is a uni-dimensional business. That piece of knowledge either corresponds with (what is considered to be) reality – it is ‘true’, or it doesn’t. Hence it is false. And it’s only after you have satisfied yourself about an information being true that you may start to ‘own’ it. To act upon it.
When it comes to trusting a person, you are confronted with a bi-dimensional endeavor. Which makes it a real problem. In order to be able to cooperate with somebody, you need to be satisfied on two accounts. That that person is qualified enough for the business at hand AND that that person ‘means well’.
Not that simple, is it?
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As much as I love writing, I do have to eat. And to provide for my family. Earning money takes time. If you’d like me to write more, and on a more regular basis, hit the button. Your contribution will be appreciated!
As much as I love writing, I do have to eat. And to provide for my family. Earning money takes time. If you’d like me to write more, and on a more regular basis, hit the button. Your contribution will be appreciated!
The amount of fake-news targeted at someone is the best indicator for how many skeletons that person had already unveiled. For how many skeletons that person had dug out from closets belonging to people who were accustomed with being ‘left to their own devices’. Closets belonging to people who considered themself as being ‘above the fray’…
Driven by hunger, trained by habit and enhanced by hope.
That’s how we, humans – a.k.a. conscious animals – operate.
Hunger must be satisfied. Animals do it instinctively. They can be trained, some of them, only that training is based solely on memory and reward. Their individual contribution to the end result is small.
Humans do it conscientiously. As in ‘on purpose’. They identify first the available food sources – according to their training, rank them – according to their acquired tastes and to the relative ease with which food can be obtained from each of them, and proceed to feed themselves only after all these steps had been performed. However perfunctorily. It is easy to notice that here individuals have a lot more lee-way. Their contributions to the process can be substantial.
In all of those three phases. And beyond.
When choosing.
When ‘training’ others how to choose.
And when determining that we’ve had enough. That time is ripe to let others feed themselves.
Why are all these people fleeing? From their own country? Because the Taliban have arrived?
What made these youngsters – very much similar to those above, to choose the Taliban side of the conflict? And what made the Taliban ultimately more successful than the ‘democratically elected’ Afghan Government? The Americans deciding it was time for the Afghan People to stand on their own two feet?
As I said at the beginning of the post, we, humans, have a lot more lee-way than the rest of the animals. None of us is entirely free but each of us has some agency. Some power to influence the destiny of other people. When exercising that power we’re all influenced by our previously received conditioning and by the present circumstances. When pressed by ‘urgent considerations’ very few of us remain aware of the fact that present day decisions set the scene for what’s going to happen tomorrow. When pressed by what we consider to be ‘urgent’ we forget about ‘primum non nocere’. When caving in to urgency we forget that we are the ones going to live with the consequences of our present decisions.
The Afghans flee their country because they have lost hope. The Afghan soldiers have caved in because they have lost hope. The Afghans who have joined the Taliban have done that because they felt there was no other hope.
Who will have to make do in these circumstances? When are we going to take responsibility for our own fate? When are we going to start building our own hopes?
Bearing in mind that we have only one Earth at our disposal? And that if we play our cards right, the sky is the only limit?
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As much as I love writing, I do have to eat. And to provide for my family. Earning money takes time. If you’d like me to write more, and on a more regular basis, hit the button. Your contribution will be appreciated!
As much as I love writing, I do have to eat. And to provide for my family. Earning money takes time. If you’d like me to write more, and on a more regular basis, hit the button. Your contribution will be appreciated!
Three of the terms involved are relatively clear. We all know – think we know, what ‘fail’, ‘win’ and ‘cheat’ mean. ‘Honor’… on the other hand… is way more relative. Mostly to the company we keep.
For some, being honest is synonym to behaving foolishly… After being educated in such a manner, not making use of every opportunity which presents itself to you – no matter how ‘shady’ it might be, is seen as suicidal. Not only that you loose the potential windfall, you also loose face! You loose whatever public respect you ever had. You actually loose your honor!
Now, that I’ve already dug this far, the whole phrase needs context. We know what ‘fail’ means but without circumstances…. What are we talking about here? Backgammon or a survival situation? An innocuous game or a struggle to stay alive?
Most people will praise those who let themselves be killed for a noble cause. On the other hand, it would be rather ‘bland’ to allow someone to kill you without attempting to ‘fool’ the guy into giving up, right?
On a different scale, history – and, maybe, this was what Sophocles meant in the first place, offers ample proof that communities which value ‘true’ honor last far longer – and their members enjoy far more comfortable lives, than those where cheating is a way of life.
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As much as I love writing, I do have to eat. And to provide for my family. Earning money takes time. If you’d like me to write more, and on a more regular basis, hit the button. Your contribution will be appreciated! Another very efficient way to help would be to share my posts.
As much as I love writing, I do have to eat. And to provide for my family. Earning money takes time. If you’d like me to write more, and on a more regular basis, hit the button. Your contribution will be appreciated!
As much as I love writing, I do have to eat. And to provide for my family. Earning money takes time. If you’d like me to write more, and on a more regular basis, hit the button. Your contribution will be appreciated!
I’ll start by stating that nothing becomes fact before somebody calling it so!
Doesn’t make any sense? It’s not enough? OK…
So ‘blue’ had become a fact only after people had invented a word for it… It had existed before hand but we hadn’t noticed it – hadn’t spoken about it, more exactly, until we had a word for it. Until we had learned how to ‘measure’ it…
But what is a ‘fact’? Something which is ‘real’? And how do you determine if something is ‘real’ or not? It either has ‘measurable consequences’ or your experience about it has been confirmed by somebody else. A coffee table becomes a fact in the dark after you hit it with your shin and a meteorite ceases being a illusion the moment your hubby confirms he has also seen it. No so complicated, was it?
‘But what about a propaganda movie? It that real? Can you consider it to be a fact?’
Excellent question, Watson!
The movie itself is real alright! A fact, indeed. The fact that not everything it pretends to be real is true… is also a fact! Savvy?
In fact, there are more facts waiting to be discovered than actual ‘happenings’.
Take the propaganda movie. It has consequences. Some people believe in its message. And act accordingly. Each of those actions becoming facts on their own. Other people smell the rat hiding behind the screen. And act accordingly. Each of those actions being facts on their own. The fact that those exposed to the same message more often than not chose to respond differently is a strong suggestion that facts – and reality itself, are not so straightforward as we’d like them to be. As straightforward as most spin doctors pretend them to be…
‘You’ve been jabbering for sometime now but you haven’t yet come forward. What was the meaning of that ‘elusive’ title of yours?’
Liberty. What is it? A fact? A natural fact? Something which was given to us? Our natural status? Something others want to steal from us? Something we’ve built/discovered together? Or an ideal we’ll never be able to fulfill?
How about all three at the same time?
‘Are you nuts?’
A ball – a foot-ball, for example, has a certain degree of freedom. Put it on a table and it may roll in any direction it may choose. But will ‘never’ be able to fall through the table nor start to fly. ‘On it’s own’… A helium balloon has another kind of freedom. If it’s tied down with a string it has the freedom to oscillate. If it’s ‘free’ it has the freedom to go up. For as long as it manages to hold on on enough helium, but that’s another thing. Another fact, if you will…
A society is free only if its members respect and defend, collectively, their freedoms. Their individual freedom and their collective freedom. For instance, Russia is a free country but its citizens are not as free as their neighbors, the Fins. The moment Hong Kong went back to China, the city was no longer as free as it used to be as a British dominion. Yet its citizens have continued to be far freer than the rest of the Chinese citizens. For a while…..
Somethings – freedom, for instance, cannot be anything more than people think about them.
Others can. Until people had invented X-rays, nobody could know how big were the roots of any given tooth. Until Robert K. Merton had put together a more detailed analysis of it, the law of the unintended consequences was something people intuitively knew it was ‘real’ but nobody was fully aware of its real depth. Now, most of us agree that that depth is unfathomable. Yet some people still behave as if things were under control… Under their control…
Freedom, and all other rights we have enjoyed for sometime now, is only as wide – and only as deep, as we make it to be. As we agree among ourselves to make it. For all of us!
Collective freedom as a fact. In the sense that the freer communities have had a consistently bigger survivability rate than the more authoritarian regimes. Ancient Athens had been able to navigate through more ‘dire straights’ than its arch-enemy, Sparta. The Roman Empire has been established as a democracy, thrived as one for a while then failed abysmally as an autocracy. Yes, the Egyptian empire did survive for millennia… only it had been ruled, succeedingly, by 33 dynasties. Practically, there had been 33 regimes, not one… And since there had been some 3100 years between its unification and it being incorporated into the Roman Empire… an average of 100 years per political regime cannot be branded as a real success… Specially in the early years, when the competition was…
A quick jump to the XX-th century will suggest the very same thing. All major wars – WWI, WWII and the Cold one, had been won by the freer societies.
So collective freedom, or lack thereof, has consequences. Is a fact.
On the other hand, freedom – the real version, the one that works, cannot be had/enjoyed but in a social context. Nobody can be free on their own. The emperors of yore – and the dictators of today, have been under the impression – illusion, more likely, that they could do whatever they pleased. That they were free. So free that they never hesitated to trample the freedom of their subjects. Only that freedom never lasted for long… it was soon replaced by the liberty of somebody else… And all these successive liberties have been exerted at the expense of those of everybody else.
Hence liberty, individual as well as collective, is not only a fact. It’s also a social construct.
Oops! The only reasonable way to read this is ‘if you want to be free, you need to think straight’. To find out what’s keeping you down and how to free yourself in a sustainable way. How to free yourself in a manner which will add to the freedom of all others!
Cause if your increased freedom means the debasement of your erstwhile peers… things don’t look right…
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As much as I love writing, I do have to eat. And to provide for my family. Earning money takes time. If you’d like me to write more, and on a more regular basis, hit the button. Your contribution will be appreciated! Another very efficient way to help would be to share my posts.
As much as I love writing, I do have to eat. And to provide for my family. Earning money takes time. If you’d like me to write more, and on a more regular basis, hit the button. Your contribution will be appreciated!
As much as I love writing, I do have to eat. And to provide for my family. Earning money takes time. If you’d like me to write more, and on a more regular basis, hit the button. Your contribution will be appreciated!
30 years ago – 32, to be precise, Francis Fukuyama had come up with the notion that people – as in the human race, had finally realized that liberal democracy was the only reasonable way forward. Hence ‘the end of history’. The end of conflict… the end of ‘misunderstanding’ between people…
“WASHINGTON (AP) — The Democrats’ sweeping attempt to rewrite U.S. election and voting law suffered a major setback in the Senate Tuesday, blocked by a filibuster wall of Republican opposition to what would be the largest overhaul of the electoral system in a generation.” “The bill, known as the For the People Act, would touch on virtually every aspect of how elections are conducted, striking down hurdles to voting that advocates view as the Civil Rights fight of the era, while also curbing the influence of money in politics and limiting partisan influence over the drawing of congressional districts. But many in the GOP say the measure represents instead a breathtaking federal infringement on states’ authority to conduct their own elections without fraud — and is meant to ultimately benefit Democrats. It failed on a 50-50 vote after Republicans, some of whom derided the bill as the “Screw the People Act,” denied Democrats the 60 votes needed to begin debate under Senate rules. Vice President Kamala Harris, the first Black woman to hold her office, presided over the chamber as the bill failed to break past that filibuster barrier.”
The end of misunderstanding between people?!?
During the Cold War – the end of which had prompted Fukuyama to draw his conclusion, the ‘misunderstanding’ was dividing the two ideological blocs. Between those who had learned to value of the individual and those who didn’t yet had a real chance at doing this.
Nowadays the misunderstanding had seeped deeper. Way deeper… The two parties of the country which had been the stalwart of democracy during the Cold War don’t see eye to eye as to how the electoral process should be organized. The Guardians of the Revolution and the Supreme Leader do not agree – at least apparently, on who should be approved to run for office.
Meanwhile, Putin enjoys the limelight….
The end of history, eh?!?
Maybe, but not the one envisioned by Fukuyama…
PS Fukuyama must be so fed up about this… Well, I don’t think he was wrong! I do see liberal democracy as the only reasonable way forward. The enthusiasm with which the world had met his work was a very strong signal that things were going in the right direction… The problem resides in the fact that other people had other plans. Had identified other ‘opportunities’. And in the fact that we, the people, have been sleeping with out boots on!
LE. The Moldovan officials in charge with running the 2021 snap legislative elections are tying hard to keep the Moldovan citizens living abroad away from the polling stations.
Last minute edit The Electoral Committee, CEC, had unanimously decided that 150 polling stations will be organized, despite the Foreign Ministry asking for 191 and the Supreme Court ordering them to comply…
Do you see a pattern here? Well. I see a question mark! If things like gerrymandering and voter suppression can happen in America, what chances are that authoritarian wannabees won’t spring up all over the world?
nicichiarasa 