I’m not OK with businesses refusing flowers/cakes for gay marriages but I can understand their owners’ point. On the other hand, I also understand people who don’t want to wear masks. I’m not OK with it but I understand their quest.
What I don’t understand is the insistence with which some people want to ‘discriminate’ between these two situations. Why should a business be able to refuse to serve a gay couple but not able to refuse to serve those who refuse to wear masks?!?
How can people discriminate between liberties? What makes a liberty more valuable than the other? Specially when love between two people sharing a similar sex is still love while sharing viruses is potentially deadly…
And what’s so ‘progressive’ in calling other people ‘assholes’?!?
When are we going to cool down and start making some sense of what we’re living through?
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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!
The first thing each of us becomes aware of is ‘me’. Not yet “I”, just “me”.
I (?!?) feel myself as somehow separated from the rest. I have the feelings hence it’s “me” rather than “I”. I am cared for by those around me so, again, it’s “me” rather than “I”.
And this goes on for quite a while. That while used to be shorter. I’m not going to tell you how many children worked in coal mines… I’m just going to remind you that in more traditional cultures, the older children are expected to participate in the raising of the smaller ones. Hence become faster more responsible than we had been in our times. Taking care of somebody else teaches each of us a lot. The most important thing being the fact that not all the world spins around you. As each of us had been led to believe in the first months of our lives. During the time each of us had become “me”.
Taking care of others makes each of us aware of the care we have received. Teaches us that ‘give’ is just as important as ‘being given’. Teaches us about ‘give and take’.
Teaches us that ‘you’ are just as important as “me” is.
Having understood that is the only thing which qualifies each of us as “I”.
Behaving as active members of a culture which successfully teaches “I” to its members transforms a collection of “me”-s into “us”.
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‘Survival instinct’ compels us to eat, avoid being eaten and fornicate.
To keep us on the straight and narrow, Mother Nature has invented the ‘stick and carrot principle’.
Forget to eat – or eat something ‘unbecoming’, to you or to your species, you’ll soon be in pain. After a nice meal, you’ll feel good.
Somebody else takes a bite of you? From a tiger to a mosquito? You’ll be in pain. Slap the mosquito, con the tiger into a trap or, the creme de la creme, gain the upper hand in a bare knuckles encounter and you’ll certainly feel good.
Orgasm? Does it ring a bell? OK.
‘Stick and carrot’ worked fine. After all, it has been the engine of evolution. ‘Demise of the unfit’ made it so that only those who were able to survive in a certain environment passed their ‘comme il faut’ to the next generations.
Until consciousness came around, that is. Consciousness as we understand it…. long discussion. Soon.
“And the LORD God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil”
And what did we do with all this knowledge?
Transformed our need to eat into gluttony? Because ‘it tastes so good that I can’t stop eating it’? Transformed our need for safety into the habit of exploiting others? From harnessing beasts to our plows to using child labor to mine the coal used during the Industrial Revolution? Simply because we could? Some of us, anyway… Demeaned love making to prostitution? Because orgasm, like money, is fungible? Feels the same, no matter how it was obtained?
Why? What drove us to reach such horrible pinnacles? What made us steer in this direction after we’ve developed the ability to ‘observe ourselves observing‘?!?
What’s going on here?
“God Arraigns Adam and Eve
And they heard the voice of the LORD God walking in the garden in the cool of the day: and Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the LORD God amongst the trees of the garden. And the LORD God called unto Adam, and said unto him, Where art thou? And he said, I heard thy voice in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked; and I hid myself. And he said, Who told thee that thou wast naked? Hast thou eaten of the tree, whereof I commanded thee that thou shouldest not eat? And the man said, The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat. And the LORD God said unto the woman, What is this that thou hast done? And the woman said, The serpent beguiled me, and I did eat.
And the LORD God said unto the serpent, Because thou hast done this, thou art cursed above all cattle, and above every beast of the field; upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life:
And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.
The Punishment of Mankind
Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.
And unto Adam he said, Because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree, of which I commanded thee, saying, Thou shalt not eat of it: cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life;
Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; and thou shalt eat the herb of the field;
In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.
And Adam called his wife’s name Eve; because she was the mother of all living.”
Let me rephrase what you’ve just read.
God, the father, learns that his creation – the man he had created in his own image, has become “one of us”. When Adam hides his nakedness from his creator, God understands man has become aware.
Was he proud? Like most parents are when their children ‘grow up’?
OK, let’s forget about God for a minute. Let’s see what our forefather, Adam, had done when confronted with the consequences of his acts. Does he own up? Behaves like a man? Or blames his woman? What about Eve? Is she the real man in the house? or passes the blame along the food chain? Good thing the serpent wasn’t asked to explain himself…
How about God? The omnipotent and omniscient God… does he own up? Omniscient as he was, he must have been fully aware of what was going to happen in the given circumstances… After all, who doesn’t know what will happen if you point something out to a ‘child’ and then tell them that something is off limits… God – the one we wrote about in the Bible, solved the situation by blaming all involved. The serpent for doing what he was supposed to do, Eve for choosing to listen to the serpent and Adam for trusting his woman. Then, to avoid things becoming even worse, he banished Adam and Eve from Paradise.
Yep! All three, God, Adam and Eve – as described by those who had written the Bible, do whatever they can to protect their conscience. Each of them had made decisions, which had proven to be… well, detrimental to their own well being, and now they need to go on. To survive their own decisions!
In this type of situation, the grown-ups take stock, maturely, then take responsibility for their acts. As the first step of the long march out of the dangerous situation into each they had led themselves. By making bad – or inappropriate, choices.
But this is possible only after the individuals have conquered fear.
Fear cannot be conquered alone. That was the Bible written for. As a walking stock. And it served us right. By stating that ‘man had been created in the image of God’ it tells us that we are equal. And each of us is endowed with a divine spark. Hence worthy of respect!
But as any other walking stock, the Bible can take us only this far. From now on we must walk on our own. We must assume our individual – read ‘limited’, nature, shed our fears and find our own ways. Bearing in mind, of course, that only those who fit are meant to survive.
Our go round in circles, knocking at gates which have never been open. Or going to.
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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!
Universal healthcare is anathema to many people. ‘The government has no business to spend my tax money subsidizing other people’s health!’ Hence hose who cannot afford a doctor should either die peacefully or accept charity….
And when a private company sponsors a health care effort that company is perceived, by the same ‘many people’, as having ‘ulterior’ motives…
That’s what I consider to be a ‘perfect’ conundrum.
A self made trap!
On the other hand, let’s face it, this is a very rational attitude! Given some private companies’ past behavior…
See what I mean? ‘Ulterior motives’ are wide-spread enough to having become normalized. ‘Greed is good’ sits high on the social pedestal. People can no longer imagine any of their peers being driven by other motives but the immediate profit. But the immediate financial profit!
Mind you, I’m not pretending Pfizer has suddenly morphed into a virgin knight riding a white horse and sacrificing itself on our behalf.
All I’m saying is we’re in a dire and immediate need to reevaluate our priorities!
The self made trap is 3D, you know…
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None of us had been asked for their ‘informed consent’. Yet all of us are cramped together on Space-ship Earth towards the place where ‘no man had ever gone before’.
Now that this very suggestive image has been published, what is our voyage going to morph into?
Hell on Earth, as so many apocalyptic movies/novels have advertised?
Or are we going to heed to the present ‘wake-up call’? As we already did so many times before?
We have managed to eradicate, through vaccination, the smallpox. Polio, measles, diphtheria, rabies and so many other diseases are no longer a real danger. For those of us who had been vaccinated or have access to the relevant vaccines.
Yet faced with the current challenge, COVID 19, we have ‘doubts’…
Some of us have doubts about getting the vaccine, others about making the vaccine available to the entire ‘crew’.
What’s going on in that collective brain of ours?
What’s the rationale behind making the polio vaccine available for everybody, practically for free, while that for COVID is still out of reach for most of those who need it? Given our current industrial prowess… Why is it so hard to understand that given enough time SARS Cov 2 will certainly mutate far enough from the original version to evade the current vaccine?
The fact that the authors above are working the equity angle speaks volumes. Equity is, indeed, very important. Only it relates more to ‘metaphysics’ than to the immediate reality.
Equity has to do with the perceived reality while people die in the immediate one. The perceived reality will end up haunting us, indeed, only we have to survive the current situation in order to get to that stage.
The real problem with the lopsided access to the Covid vaccines being that while we ‘race to secure doses’ the virus has the opportunity to mutate out of our ‘control’. Our concern with ‘equity’ somehow blinds us to the fact that ‘cutthroat’ is no longer a metaphor. The longer it takes for us to understand that the entire crew of the space-ship Earth must be immunized the longer it will take for us to get ‘out of the woods’.
Why had our parents been able to eradicate small pox and almost do the same thing to polio? While we’re still dragging our asses? And not exclusively about COVID… When we have so much information about everything?
What made the anti-vaxxers of those times less powerful than the current ones?
What makes me so sure the erstwhile anti-vaxxers had been less powerful? Small pox had been eradicated, right? I had measles. Before the vaccine had been made available. Never heard about anybody having measles until very recently.
Whoa! What’s going on here? Israel, the country, had made a huge effort to save its people from the misery caused by Covid! Why would the Ultra-Orthodox community need any extra-effort to let itself be immunized?
Why was Israel’s manner of thinking closer to that of our fathers’ than to ours? What makes us so similar, in this respect, to the Ultra-Orthodox?
Well, our fathers had to fight for their rights. And Israel for its place on the map. We, and the Ultra-Orthodox, had our rights granted to us.
Our fathers had to cooperate among themselves in order to get through. Israel had survived, and thrived, as the consequence of a coordinated effort.
We are cocooned in our bubbles. We have become spoiled brats. One way or another.
We really need to start thinking outside our respective comfort zones.
For no other reason that mutinies tend to make matters worse. It so happened that during the last 80 years no major conflict had disturbed the peace on our ship. No thanks to us. We haven’t done anything special. Being aware that a conflict between the major powers would have ended in MAD doesn’t count as ‘doing anything special’. During the last two generations we sorta lost our bearings.
Hopefully we’ll wake up to the fact that the next disturbance will no longer be a ‘top down’ event. Think about it. Ever since the French Revolution – the last bottoms up upheaval, all other ‘disturbances’ had been the consequence of somebody planning for them. Initiating them.
30 years ago, the socialist lager had crumbled. Under its own weight. Nobody had planned that event. Nobody had planned for that event! The democratic world had been stunned by the speed with which things had unfolded.
The socialist lager had crumbled for the simple reason that the people living there had become pissed of. Pissed of by the growing distance which separated them from those living in the ‘capitalist’ world.
Some of that distance has survived to this day. But it’s shrinking! Fast!
Unlike the distance between the ‘civilized’ world and the ‘developing nations’.
This ‘cutthroat race (among nations) to secure doses’ while so many ‘civilized’ people share-antivaxxer propaganda only adds insult to the injury felt by those who don’t have access to vaccines. And demonstrates how far off we have distanced ourselves from the ‘hard core’ reality.
Are we going to make anything of our present predicament?
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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!
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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Having started with a rhetorical question, I might as well continue by offering you some ‘trivia’.
Lytton, BC, is a 249 people strong village, situated just a tad North of the 50th parallel. Which puts it almost 300 miles/450 kms closer to the North Pole… Its inhabitants had had to flee a fire during the hottest weather ever encountered in that area. In modern times, anyway…
During the last 300 years, we’ve been ‘releasing’ – ‘repurposed’? – huge amounts of energy. Solar energy ‘captured’ by plants and stored in the belly of the Earth as ‘fossil fuel’. By releasing that energy we’ve actually changed the composition of the atmosphere.
A third more of something which constitutes only 0.042 of the Earth’s atmosphere doesn’t amount for much, does it?
As already stated, this blog is about how people think. About how we, conscious people, relate to what happens around us through the use of our ‘brain’.
So here we have it. We’ve been doing something for the last 300 years. ‘Naively’ at first and in an increasingly scientific soon after the whole thing had gathered momentum. From a certain point on, an increasing number of the same people who had brain-powered the process – individuals currently known as ‘scientists’, have warned the rest of us about the potential consequences of what we were doing.
And now, that those consequences have started to manifest themselves, so many of us are still in denial. How is it possible for so many to be convinced that it’s possible to back-pedal Earth’s geological clock without having to face any consequences?!?
‘But is anything we can do to change this?’
In the late 1970-ies, we – ‘our’ scientists, to be more precise – have noticed that there was a problem with the ozone layer. The ‘thing’ which shields life on Earth from being ‘burned’ out by the UV radiation coming from the Sun.
After a short while, people from the scientific community have determined that there was something that we could do about it. Stop using ‘Chlorofluorocarbon’ substances. Old style ‘Freon’. It wasn’t easy – we had to find substitutes and retool factories, but we did it! The ozone layer is in far better shape now!
While repairing the ozone layer had been a collective effort, eroded land must be ‘patched up’ patch by patch.
‘OK, maybe there is something that we could do about ‘it’. What would that be?’
I told you already. This is a blog about how we think! Not, in any way shape or form, about what we should be thinking!
Do your own research. See what other people say about this.
And ask yourselves one thing.
We are able to ‘fly’ – by boarding a plane, of course – because ‘modern’ scientists have proven that the old ones had been wrong. But do we – as in me and you – really know how a plane works? Yet we happily board them in droves in each holiday season. We live way longer than we used to. Because scientists have told us how to build sewage and waste management systems, what pills to take when falling ill and what vaccines to use in order to prevent infectious illnesses from taking hold. We lead easier lives. Because scientists have built machines which work for us.
We’ve done all this as a collective effort. We used to trust what they were teaching us and they trusted us to support them in their endeavors.
What happened to all this? What made us so ‘alert’?
Where did all that trust vanish? Why? What will the consequences be?
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The standing girl does it for what she considers to be right. The ones taking a knee, do it for what they consider to be right. Then all play, side by side, as a team.
We, the ‘spectators’, take sides. And tear the society apart in the process.
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Blame is something which is attributed while responsibility is something which is assumed.
Let’s return to rape. The recurring question here being:
As stated by the Chinese proverb above, victim blaming will get us nowhere. For as long as we’ll ‘blame first, ask questions later’ we’ll never understand what’s going on. Remain stuck in ‘status quo’. Where some of the victims will feel entitled to say:
Can you blame them? Should we blame them? After all, the broadness of the accusation ultimately reduces it to a shot in the foot… But haven’t we agreed earlier that blame will not move us forward? No matter how we feel about the whole thing?
How about ‘manning’ up? How about each of us, men and women, assuming responsibility? Each their own!
Why?!? Simply because it is us who have to deal with the consequences! We, the women who get raped. We, the fathers, brothers, partners, sons, friends, etc. of the raped women. And we, the mothers of the raped women.
We, all of us, have ‘condoned’ a society where male children are taught to be assertive. Chivalrous, maybe, but, certainly, assertive. And, simultaneously, a society where female children are taught to behave nicely and to refrain from becoming a ‘nuisance’. These are, roughly, the gender roles our society – read ‘we, the parents’, continue to imprint upon the young generation. The Dolce and Gabbana advertisement above being only one of the myriad examples which illustrates this fact.
What next?
In the name of ‘playing it safe’ are we going to presume that each male (?!?) is a potential rapist? And take the ‘necessary’ precautions?
Ooops! How is a potential victim going to protect herself against a (close) acquaintance? What kind of clothing are they supposed to wear and what kind of a behavior should they adopt in order to avoid being raped by a “current or former spouse, boyfriend or girlfriend (?!?)”
OK, let’s consider we’re done with the ‘blame-game’. Let’s play ‘responsibly’ now. Who should assume it?
We! As in ‘All of us’. For the simple reason that it will always be us who will ‘foot the bill’. Have to deal with the consequences!
From having to overcome the experience of being raped to helping towards healing the wounds to actually bearing the costs – not only the financial ones, of so many people being hurt.
We, the parents, need to educate our children in such a way as to understand that rape – in any shape, way or form, is unacceptable. We, both men and women, need to educate ourselves about what to do when in ‘dire straits’. How to avoid ‘dangerous situations’ – from not going to ‘sleazy’ bars to not taking our dates to ‘unsafe’ places. We, all of us, need to educate ourselves towards openness. Towards coming forward when something like this happens. Towards helping those who suffer it. As in being an ‘active’ participant instead of pretending nothing happened. And, last but not least, we – all of us, need to learn how to overcome this. And how to help the victims to overcome their tragic experiences.
Well, all knowledge is, ultimately, false. Or, at least, incomplete.
Bearing this in mind, we understand there is no such thing as false knowledge. Only people unwilling to adapt their understanding of things to the newly discovered facts… In this sense, it’s not the false knowledge which is dangerous, it’s those who worship ‘self made idols’! Those who are so convinced that what they know is enough. That their understanding of the world is so right and so complete that it has reached ‘perfection’. That their Weltanschauung is, hence, ‘sacred’. ‘Worship-able’, if you’ll allow this word.
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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!
nicichiarasa 