Donald Trump is making big headlines in his bid to conquer the White House.
Covering this subject the Atlantic published a very pertinent question posed by Conor Friedersdorf to Trump’s supporters:
“You’re right to mistrust conventional politicians. But why do you think he’ll treat you any better?”
This is one side of the entire development.
If we dig a little deeper we have to observe that the person who actually occupies the Oval Office – or any other public office, in no matter which democratic country, is important indeed but even more so is the fact that that person has to be voted by a majority in order to accede to that office.
In other words, America has a little over 300 million inhabitants. There must be better contenders out there.
Better than either Trump or Clinton!
What’s keeping the ordinary Americans from recognizing and bringing some of THEM to the fore of the American politics?
PS. Click on this link and read the comments, besides the article. As always, they are are at least as revealing as the article itself, if not more so.
ISIS Enshrines a Theology of Rape Claiming the Quran’s support, the Islamic State codifies sex slavery in conquered regions of Iraq and Syria and uses the practice as a recruiting tool. Written by RUKMINI CALLIMACHI; Photographs by MAURICIO LIMAAUG. 13, 2015
The Root reports that a customer “asked that no black delivery driver be sent to her home” and that a manager decided to “honor” that request.
As most of you already know Maslow’s five leveled pyramid can be simplified into a three three tiered one: Physiological needs, Relational needs (safety, emotion and esteem) and Self Actualization. Maslow said that you cannot skip any one of this levels, for instance you can not deal with your emotional needs on an empty stomach. And who cares about self actualization if he doesn’t know where he’s going to sleep tonight?
Well…intuitively we have to admit that Maslow’s words do make some sense…
Studying this example we can draw some interesting conclusions on this subject.
For instance simply climbing to a certain level doesn’t mean one is mature enough for it.
The customer had certainly satisfied her basic needs yet she has some deep emotional problems.
OK, I can imagine that a person can be so ‘dense’ as to be able to make such a demand but no second thoughts after you produced such a frack-ass?
“”I got a right to have whatever I want and that’s it,” the woman said. “No, I don’t feel bad about nothing.””
But the most interesting examples here are the manager and the driver.
Lowe’s is not at all a small operation. Rising to management level is not a simple thing and should provide some security and self esteem to an individual. Enough for that individual to start thinking with his own head. After all that’s what managers are supposed to do, right? That would also help that individual bring himself up to date – ‘self actualization’, that is…
Was that particular manager capable of fulfilling his duty? Lowe’s didn’t think so… Me neither, on different grounds though.
Let’s see what the driver has to say:
“”To me, it just ain’t right for a business that we work at to go on with the woman’s wishes,” Brooks told the news station.
“It was one of those things like, ‘These guys will get over it, they’re tough guys, they’re delivery guys,’ ” Brooks said. “And that’s kind of where I just had to put my foot down and say I couldn’t do it with them.””
So a “mere” driver has more guts than a manager…
No matter if the manager shared the customer’s racist feelings. He had to have the wisdom to understand that catering for such kind of wishes – specially in this manner, is extremely bad for the company. And for himself as an employee of that company.
So he should have solved that situation properly, not botchedly – he was a manager, remember?
“Despite the letdown, Bradley added that he won’t be missing any time at work.
“I mean, I gotta work,” he said. “I’m going to keep going to work like I’ve always done. But I would think Lowe’s would take it into consideration to think about what they’re doing next time.””
So the driver has a clearer view of the situation – including his own standing – than the manager…
What’s going on here? Did Maslow got his pyramid upside down or the whole world has turned over and is now standing on its head?
Maybe that is the whole ‘self-actualization’ thing. Being able to use wisely the amount of autonomy one happens to have at his disposal.
It seems that people have finally started to understand what rape really means and to care about the victims.
But why rape in the first place?
When considering this subject we need to clearly define the concepts if we really what to understand what all it’s about.
Sometimes people get carried away. Maybe under some ‘influence’, she (half) willingly agrees at first and gets cold feet at some point but he doesn’t stop. That is indeed rape and should be punished as such but that is not the kind of rape I’m concerned about now.
What I had in mind when starting this is the ‘predatory’ rape. That kind of rape that is planned before hand by the perpetrator and cannot, under any circumstances, be treated with any degree of understanding. For instance gang or serial rape.
At this moment I feel the need to draw your attention to some less obvious kinds of predatory rape. For example the kind of ‘big game hunting’ that is going on now in Africa. Regardless of who does it. Law abiding citizens who pay for their permits and then bend the rules or poachers who act in a completely callous manner.
Another kind of predatory rape that is less discussed about is prostitution. Some of you will tell me that whatever takes place between consenting adults (two or even more) is nobody’s business. True enough but have you considered the role played by the pimp? You know, that guy who under the pretext of taking care of the ‘sexual worker’ exploits her savagely? Have you noticed that most of the prostitutes come from someplace else and have usually been lured under some false pretexts? That so many of them are very young and not so bright?
I can’t stop wondering what kind of satisfaction can be had during or after such an encounter… Specially today when there are so many single’s bars and internet dating services… But there one has to pass a certain exam, the partner has to agree, has to find you at least acceptable. There is a certain risk that you might be found wanting. While when hiring a prostitute there is no such risk. She has no say about her ‘clients’. And that’s why this IS rape.
So could it be that rape, predatory rape, is an action through which the rapist proves to himself that he is in ‘total control’?
And in the case of gang rapes – which are usually initiated and led by one of the gang members, very seldom this kind of things happen ‘spontaneously’ – the initiator does it to prove not only to himself but also to the rest of the gang who is the ‘top dog’.
To be continued.
Some 30 years ago I stumbled upon a book by Desmond Morris.
I read it overnight because next day it had to be returned to its owner. Books published in their original languages were hard to come by in communist Romania…
Little did I know at that time that my interests will slowly shift from Mechanical Engineering to Sociology and then on to decision making… Anyway…
In that book Morris tries to convince us that women have so many periods because in this way they are a lot readier to receive their mates, thus ensuring a tighter bond inside the couple. In turn this is beneficial in an evolutionary sense because a tightly knit couple is better suited for raising the kind of slow growing children that is characteristic for the human species.
In short Morris proposes that monogamy was a step forward in human evolution.
I tend to agree with him and I even have a further argument. Imagine what would happen if a small number of alpha males would ‘corral’ – one way or another – most of the available nubile women, as it’s the case with the chimps or the gorillas. Do you think the rest of the males would be able to cooperate in any way towards the survival of the community they belong to or they’d be constantly obsessing about how to get laid?
Which brings me to my subject.
Emile Durkheim used suicide as a pretext to introduce us to his theory about social solidarity and the social function played by what we consider to be a crime.
Durkheim’s research had led him to see suicide as an individual decision but one which is heavily influenced by the cultural medium to which the decision maker belongs. More over, the same line of thinking produced his conclusion that a society must keep a fine balance between ‘solidarity/intolerance’ and ‘laisez-faire’. One that is too intolerant drastically reduces its own ability to adapt to changes that occur in its ‘environment’ while those that do not care about the fate of their members will eventually auto-dissolve.
What if incidence of rape was to be studied in the same light?
Bill Cosby – a man who, let’s face it, could have had legions of willing women – is accused to have drugged and raped some 40 women in more than 30 years before anything came to public notice.
Jimmy Savile, a British “larger-than-life character”, used “his celebrity status and fund-raising activity to gain uncontrolled access to vulnerable people across six decades” and to unabashedly rape them.
Rape not only occurs randomly in war time but has also been used as a weapon:
“Sexual violence is also used to destabilize communities and sow terror”.
Meanwhile France – Durkheim’s own Motherland – has become the stage for some 7000 ‘tournantes’ every year. The English term for ‘tournant’ being gang rape.
As Durkheim said more than a hundred years ago suicide is indeed an individual act/decision but it’s incidence is heavily influenced by what happens around that person.
Same thing is valid for rape. A rape appears at the intersection between the history/experience/upbringing of the rapist, the social/cultural milieu in which he lives and his ‘on the spot’ decision.
Sex sells.
“It’s been said that as human beings, we have a lizard or reptilian brain that responds to certain primal urges. Food is one. Sex and reproduction is definitely another. This underlying, pre-programmed disposition to respond to sexual imagery is so strong, it has been used for over 100 years in advertising. And the industry, while abusing it more and more, would be foolish to ignore the draw of sexual and erotic messaging.”
How far are we willing to go in order to make a sale? As far as Dolce and Gabbana went when they published the picture above?
Morris said that our first step towards humanity was to change our very physiology in order to promote (at least an apparent) monogamy. It seems that we are now altering our culture in order to sell more…
Gang Rape taken to the next level… Manipulation went wild…
There are a lot of definitions available for these concepts. I’ve found out that Google offers the blandest ones so I’ll use those. You’ll understand why.
a. “An experience involving the apparent perception of something not present”
b. “An extraordinary and welcome event that is not explicable by natural or scientific laws and is therefore attributed to a divine agency.”
c. “An optical illusion caused by atmospheric conditions, especially the appearance of a sheet of water in a desert or on a hot road caused by the refraction of light from the sky by heated air.”
If we follow the ‘dispassionate’ line used by Google we’ll notice that the ‘real’ problem is us, not a. b. or c.
We are the ones who are not able to figure out the source of the perception in a, the explanation for what happens in b and to reconcile what we know with what we see in c.
More than 35 years ago, while in college, I had to study ‘Marxism’. It was considered a science by the communists and all students had to take that class.
“Marxism is a reaction against the idealist thesis that reality consists entirely of minds or spirits and of their experiences or ideas. The materialist conception of history, Marx and Engels contend, postulates the existence of an objective, concrete reality that is independent of human consciousness and is also its determinant“.
For a future engineer, and one that wasn’t particularly concerned with religion, the concept seemed appealing.
Something was nagging me though. In time I understood that Marx was making a huge mistake when conflating ‘objective’ with ‘real’ and individual consciousness with the collective one.
Also what he termed ‘reality’ is not that independent from consciousness as he would liked it to be.
I’ll start with the second idea.
We coined the term/concept of reality.
How’s that for ‘real’ independence?
Is there anything outside my individual knowledge/consciousness?
A lot.
Do I care?
Sometimes yes but most of it is both absolutely inconsequential for me and way out of my grasp. So my accepting its very existence depends decisively on ‘hearsay’ and faith…
Is there anything outside our collective knowledge/consciousness?
Probably yes. Hard to believe that we already know everything, right? Particularly since we discover something new each moment…
‘We discover’?!?
So it’s us who are ‘conquering’ more and more ‘reality’?!?
Wasn’t it supposed to be independent from us?
OK, you probably got it, I won’t bother you anymore with this.
Let me go back to ‘objective’ versus ‘real’.
“Not influenced by personal feelings or opinions.”
“Actually existing as a thing or occurring in fact; not imagined or supposed.”
If we gather five children who haven’t yet seen a tarmac road scorched by the July Sun and take them to Arizona they’ll tell us, excitedly but objectively, that the road is boiling out there near the horizon.
We, the grown ups, know that’s a mirage. For them, it’s a miracle.
For a single child – one that knows the concept, of course – it might seem a hallucination, specially if he doesn’t have another person to speak to about what he sees.
Some independence… But wait, there’s more.
You are reading this on a computer. (If you call it a smartphone you are deluding yourself. It’s a computer that you can also use as a phone). Is it ‘really’ real?
According to Marx, I mean.
If your consciousness hasn’t yet digested effectively its ‘user manual’ that computer is little more than an useless piece of junk… Not to mention the fact that its processor would still be a little pile of sand if not for an entire string of consciousnesses – from INTEL’s CEO to the driver who delivered it to the assembly plant and they are only a few of those involved in the process.
The fact is that we change the reality around us. We build cities, roads to connect them and power plants so we can cool our homes in summer.
And then we pretend reality is independent from us.
Who’s delusional now?
Western philosophy at it’s best.
Or worse?
I’m gonna admit that I’m ‘mentally deficient’ and that I don’t really care about the why of the matter.
The world exists by pure chance. That’s it.
Get over it and concentrate on doing something nice.
Now that we’re here why waste such a good opportunity?
I’ve just read that
I won’t enter into details now, read the article if you need to.
Then I watched this video:
Suddenly the quantum physics experiment started to make a lot of sense to me.
Duncan Lou Who doesn’t know, the way we humans do, that he’s a crippled mutt. That’s how he’s able to enjoy life the way he does. By the way, have you noticed that the other dogs don’t stare at him?
It’s we who cannot fully understand reality and sometimes pretend it doesn’t even exist.
