Some people attribute this quote to the Apache Leader known as Geronimo.
Quoteinvestigator.com says it is highly probable that it belongs to a guy called Alanis Obomsawin.
But what is more important?
Who said it or what we make of it?
Archives for category: Mutual Respect
I’m not a huge fan of the EU but I have a mostly positive opinion about it.
This morning my stance on this matter was about to change, dramatically.
I had found in my email a link towards a newspaper article, in Romanian, which said ‘the European Court for Human Rights in Strasbourg had ordered that starting with March 1 2016 people in Europe are no longer allowed to baptize their under-aged children‘.
Hard to believe something like that, isn’t it?
Are you really sure about that?
Now try to read articles like this – which are reasonably ‘well’ written, using the right lingo and having enough details thrown in to make them sound credible – through the eyes of a guy already worried by the so much hipped ‘migrant invasion’. Who was already pissed off by the various rules and regulations handed over from Brussels and acquiesced by the local, and supposedly sovereign, governments without any fuss.
Most people do not have the exercise of doubting everything they read, specially if the message comes from somebody they trust – a friend, for instance, or if the site where they read it seems legit.
OK, a certain proportion of them – not all, will exert some discretion if money is involved. That’s why phishing has a limited, yet certain, impact.
But when a particular piece of information apparently confirms an already entrenched stereotype – the bossiness of the EU, for instance – quite a large number of readers will fall for it.
Yesterday evening I was reading a comment added by Nassim Nicholas Taleb on his own Facebook wall: “What social media finally did: destroy the press. It is more organic to get information from word-of-mouth, which it accelerated.”
Corroborate that comment with a quote from an excellent article published by the same guy on Wired.com: “I am not saying here that there is no information in big data. There is plenty of information. The problem — the central issue — is that the needle comes in an increasingly larger haystack.” (Nassim N. Taleb, Beware the Big Errors of ‘Big Data’, Wired.com, 08.02.2013) and things start to gain some perspective.
What we’re dealing here is the famous lack of symmetry that currently bothers the strategic planners who presumably shape the future of the humankind.
In the ‘good ole’ days’ – when we had writers, publishing houses (newspapers, magazines, you name it) and ‘specialized’ readers, things were a lot simpler.
The writers had a certain notoriety and most of them didn’t want to jeopardize it by publishing bullshit.
Publishing houses didn’t dare to publish bullshit – except for those that did it on purpose, because most of their readers would no longer have bought their papers.
The specialized readers – those who usually bought a certain kind of magazines or books – were able to recognize most bullshit when they saw it, simply because they had some experience in the fields that used to elicit their interest.
Bullshit was being pushed in those days too, for sure. But it was a specialized job, that had to be done carefully.
And in that era, for bullshit to be effective, you had to have very ‘favorable’ circumstances.
Communism didn’t take hold but in very poor countries and fascism only in war torn Italy, Germany and Spain.
Nowadays, “…any simpleminded partisan with a political ax to grind can find an online community of like-minded whack-jobs who’ll be happy to provide him with plenty of ideological ammunition (e.g., bogus stats, pre-fab arguments, etc.). Before long, what was once a more-or-less harmless, single-issue troll has morphed into something far more monstrous and formidable: a veritable Swiss-army knife of bullshit, a perfect storm of bad ideas, a walking Wikipedia of stupid.” (John Faithful Hamer, From Here (2016) )
And since it’s very hard to police the Internet – even harder if we are determined to preserve the ‘freedom of expression’, we are in a very delicate position.
Is there anything to be done about this? Considering that there will never be a real shortage of ‘simpleminded partisans with political axes to grind’?
I think there is.
I started this post by mentioning three related concepts.
Freedom, responsibility and discretion.
We should not tamper with Freedom. Basically this is everything we’ve got, our most precious achievement.
So, we are left with ‘responsibility’ and ‘discretion’.
How is it that most sites manage to stay on line?
They are either sponsored by somebody or they sell advertising space, right?
Who provides that money? Who buys those advertised products? Who spreads around the news about those sites?
Who reads those bullshit laden articles and swallow them hook, line and sinker, simply because some of the (seemingly legit) arguments presented there happen to be consistent with our previously held convictions?
So, if you wish that your kids will be able to live in a better world, stop distributing bullshit through social media, stop buying things advertised on bullshit peddling sites – or, even better, stop going there altogether, and, above all, learn your kids to think with their own heads.
Even if that means they’ll end up contradicting us. As long as they’ll do it in a respectful enough manner – the second most important thing we’ll have to teach them about, all will be OK.
Update. A friend of mine, thanks Lucian, has done some digging over the Internet and found out where all this has started from:
Modern England was shaped by a bunch of ‘French immigrants’ led by William II of Normandy. In the following centuries England and France fought each-other bitterly, in one instance for more than 100 years. Yet they ended up being best buddies, close enough to have fought, and won, two World Wars.
France and Germany started as the two wings of the Carolingian Empire. After it was divided in 835, France was the first to become a national state and, for a while, was Europe’s hegemon of sorts. During that period the French culture had influenced heavily the life of the entire German area. Take a walk through the Sanssouci palace in Potsdam and the Schonbrunn in Wien if you need any confirmation.
But none of this stopped a considerable number of French and German leaders from marshaling numerous armies that fought each-other bitterly, for various reasons.
In fact one could say that Europe itself was forged during those battles.
In this context, the Peace of Westphalia – that ended a 30 years long war, can be considered the seed of what we have now: a system of sovereign states that interact according to a set of practices that have been enshrined into international law.
But it seems that one war was not enough for the rulers that happened to gain precedence in both French and German speaking areas of Europe. So others followed. Culminating with the two World Wars that have involved almost the entire planet.
And what do we have now?
An European Union that has been built precisely in the spirit of the Franco-German Elysee Treaty signed in 1963?
So, could we say that Europe is the success story of so many nations, speaking different languages and having various cultural traditions, who have finally learned to live in peace?
Who have finally learned to silence the war-mongering among them?
Who have finally realized that they are “better off together than apart” and that what it takes for this to happen is “Mutual respect, no love, ……but a considerable amount of curiosity“?
Then how come we are not able to extend that wisdom, that literally soaked in blood body of knowledge, to cover the current events?
How can we not find in ourselves an effective way to help the so many people who are literally dying outside our closing gates?
Why is it that so many of us still pay any attention to those who teach us to ‘circle the wagons’ and to ‘leave behind those who didn’t make it’?
This tactic seldom worked, if ever.
As a young adult I understood that there was no real difference between Hitler and Stalin. It didn’t matter that one of them was considered to come from the left while the other was depicted (by the communists but not exclusively) as a paragon of the right. Both of them had in common the absolute disrespect for everybody else. Each of them was convinced that only their opinions mattered and that all others were absolute morons.
That was when I started to have an inkling about what ‘the elders’ wanted to convey to us, green-horns bucking under the communist rule – which was crippling Romania at that time, when whispering:
‘there isn’t much difference between USSR and America. Their leaders want to rule as much of the world as they can grab while the ordinary people, in both countries, don’t have a clue about what’s going on’.
As I’ve become older I’ve started to figure out that the real difference between various activism-s has nothing to do with the ‘hue’ displayed on their banners. All that counts is the intensity of the sentiment that fuels them and the manner in which the activists relate to the other participants in the game.
At first glance the very notion of ‘conservative activist’ would be an oxymoron, given the fact that (most of the) conservatives define themselves as defenders of the existing order.
Who simply react, within the boundaries of the law and using the tenets of the Constitution, to whatever follies the progressive ‘liberal activists’ are trying to bring upon our heads:
“Like the American people I have watched this process for a number of years, and I fear this empathy standards is another step down the road to a liberal activist, results-oriented and relativistic world where — laws lose their fixed meaning, unelected judges set policy; Americans are seen as members of separate groups rather than simply Americans, and where the constitutional limits on government power are ignored when politicians want to buy out private companies… Call it empathy, call it prejudice, but whatever it is, it is not law. In truth, it is more akin to politics. And politics has no place in the courtroom.” (Senator Jeff Sessions (R-AL), speaking at Sonia Sotomayor’s confirmation hearings)
As usual, practice trumps theory. Regardless of whatever the theory says – and some of the pundits pretend, everybody has an agenda and everybody who has an agenda is actually an activist.
Now that we’ve successfully climbed down to the practical level let’s see what’s the real meaning of Trump backing down from his trumped up stance on torture:
Hey, wait a minute! So he actually said that ‘we should go tougher than waterboarding’ and he still has such a strong following among the ‘law abiding defenders of the Constitution’?
Well, I’m afraid things are more complicated than that.
Here’s what he says about those who trust him:
“The people, my people, are so smart…
And you know what else? they say about my people? the polls?
They say I have the most loyal people! Did you ever see that?
Where I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters.”
Well, if this isn’t ‘activism’ then I don’t know what else is.
But what kind of activism is it?
I’m not asking about where it should be placed in the political spectrum! I’m just wondering how are his proponents, Trump’s people, going to relate with their fellow citizens?
Or with the rest of the world…
And what’s the true meaning of the conservative activists coming out of the closet and assuming such an active stance? So active, in fact, that – as I said before – it is now way outside the realms of typical conservative behavior.
The explanation – as I see it – has little to do with Trump itself and everything with the present situation of the American society as a whole.
First things first.
Trump is nothing but an opportunistic bug, the real problem being how come the American Conservatives have not seen him for what he is and have not thrown him out yet.
I’ll concentrate on this from now on.
The American Conservatives, and not only those ‘loyal’ to Trump, behave as if they have been under a two thronged siege.
‘ The liberals are destroying America from within, the enemies from the outside are growing stronger and stronger yet the American Political Establishment does nothing meaningful about any of these, not even the ‘entrenched’ conservative ‘figureheads’.’
This didn’t start yesterday.
“Whenever you get a group of people together who share certain basic assumptions, there’s a natural tendency for the group to gravitate toward the most uncompromising, extreme, strident, fundamentalist, hard-core positions. Social psychologists call this tendency group polarization. It happens on juries with some regularity. It explains why the Tea Party became so insane, so deeply out of touch with the needs and views of the average American voter. And it explains why the Bush Administration invaded Iraq without an exit strategy (they stopped inviting people who disagreed with their assumptions—people like Colin Powell—to the planning meetings).” (John Faithful Hamer, From Here (2016))
But because of the internet things have gotten even worse:
“These days, any simpleminded partisan with a political ax to grind can find an online community of like-minded whack-jobs who’ll be happy to provide him with plenty of ideological ammunition (e.g., bogus stats, pre-fab arguments, etc.).” John Faithful Hamer, From Here (2016)
“Worse” not because of the ease with which these communities can grow but because too many of the members of these communities tend to give in to the apparent comfort and safety of single-mindedness.
Arguments are no longer able to penetrate the boundaries of this kind of communities.
Walls are erected to keep the odd man out. Then defended fiercely.
And this is why any attempt to cross those walls, be it aggressively or even in good faith, is too often perceived as a mortal threat by those within.
This is the mechanism through which the likes of Hitler and Stalin have managed to dominate for so long their hapless followers, by convincing them that all outsiders, all aliens, are conspiring to destroy ‘Das Vaterland’.
Fortunately the Internet works both ways. It’s true that the members of those communities can chose not to read anything else but the ideas promoted by their insiders but, just as easily, any of them can find out everything that ‘the others’ have to say about the matter.
But what if things are not (yet) as bleak as some of the media venues present them to be?
Not that all the media wants to scare the shit out of us or that all of them are politically biased. No. This happens simply because all of them want to make better ratings and because very few of them understand that ‘he who saws the wind will reap the whirlwind’. (Well, some of them might actually do it on purpose and that’s exactly what activism means but my post is more about those who let themselves be sucked into the whirlwind than about the tempest sowers).
A very short search of the Internet produced two extremely interesting ‘snapshots’.
The first, that the CPAC straw poll placed Trump no higher than the third place, should not surprise us very much. After all most of the participants are either GOP officials or young wannabees and for them Trump is akin to a ragging bull.
The second, though, is rather mind boggling.
Gallup, daily tracking
Four out of the six still running candidates nomination are perceived more or less unfavorably by the American public?
So what is this? A contest for ‘the least un-liked presidential candidate’ title? (The answer to this question might also explain why Trump has backed down on torture. He figured out that that was too much, even for him. And for ‘his people’.)
We couldn’t blame this on ‘activism’, as such – the remaining two candidates are also ‘active’, but shouldn’t we be asking ourselves about what kind of activism deserves our encouragement?
In any way, shape or form?
Well, before answering this we must consider another issue.
What brought us to the present situation, where both sides of the Political Establishment – and not only in America – are acting as if they want to tear everything apart instead of doing their best to make it all work together?
Later Edit
‘Conservative activism’ hasn’t been invented yesterday.
Nor by Trump’s supporters!
Just stumbled upon this meme.
It gave me the creeps.
If such an influential personality like H.L. Mencken had such a warped understanding of the democratic process what can we ask from the proverbial ‘regular guy’?
One question haunts me.
How come so many otherwise bright people fail to grasp the obvious fact that ‘democracy’ is what happens before the voting process?
Voting itself is nothing but logistics, arithmetic and honesty. A process more or less akin to a social survey, one through which the electoral commission determines ‘the will of the people’ at a certain moment. A ‘mechanical’ process that has nothing to do with the living thing encapsulated in the concept of democracy.
…’living thing encapsulated in the concept of democracy’…
Do you think I’m exaggerating?
Then let’s go back to the Agora (the meeting place where the ancient Greeks congregated to discuss the public matters at hand) and watch carefully what happened there before each issue was decided upon.
Everybody who wanted to say something about a subject of interest had the opportunity to make his voice heard.
Yes, that’s the real essence of the democratic process! That’s why the Founding Fathers insisted so much about ‘The Freedom of Expression’. That’s why ‘the right to speak up’ comes First, before all others!
You see, the right to vote has no real meaning if the voters are kept in the dark, if they didn’t had access to all the information available prior to the deciding moment.
People will make a choice regardless of how much information they have, at a given moment, about something, precisely because they think they know everything that is to be known about that something.
That’s why people privy to more information than the ‘general public’ have come to reach the conclusion that the ‘ordinary voter’ is stupid.
Because instead of putting everything on the table and letting ‘the people’ decide in earnest, for some time now some of the ‘pundits’ have been playing a dangerous game of ‘hide and seek’.
One which has resulted in the profound distrust felt by ‘the people’ about the ‘political establishment’. And in the barely masked contempt displayed by the ‘political elite’ towards the rest of the society.
So, instead of having an open discussion about issues and an atmosphere of trust between the various segments of the social organism we have to pry bits and pieces of information from those who guard it dearly and such mutual distrust that, if we’ll look around carefully, we’ll notice that we’ve been living, for some time now, way inside ‘paranoia land’.
Can we still pretend that our societies are governed in a democratic manner? That each of us tries to shed some light over his area of expertise and by doing so contributes to all of us avoiding as many of the ‘potholes’ as possible?
‘Cause this is the real essence of democracy.
Not finding the best possible solution to every problem but avoiding the known/foreseeable potholes.
No matter how many of us will study a problem we’ll never find the best solution. After five minutes some fresh information will come about and the erstwhile ‘best’ becomes ‘obsolete’.
Compare this situation to somebody stumbling in a pitfall waiting for all of us, coming back to warn the rest and not one of us heeding to his cries…
“Administrators at the Success Academy—a network of high-performing charter schools in the New York area—are standing behind what they call a model teacher, who was caught on camera ripping up homework and berating a first grade student for answering a math problem incorrectly.”
I totally disagree with this kind of behaviour.
Having said that let me offer you a glimpse of what’s going on in the minds of those who accept or even promote it:
“This video depicts a typical day in my elementary school classroom in the late 1970s. All you millennials are a bunch of crybabies. Life is hard and people are shitty. You need a thick skin to get by and it’s fine to start teaching kids that lesson at age 6. “ (PharmaJerk, one of the commenters on Gawker.com)
Can you really blame him? Given the harsh reality that meets the erstwhile students after they leave school?
Shouldn’t we be working at both ends of the problem?
Educate the educators about how to motivate the children to learn without crippling their souls AND educate the employers and their agents (managers) about how treating your work force with due respect would yield way better results than using mockery/belittlement as a motivation tool?
“Dr. McDonald, the N.Y.U. professor, who also sits on the board of the Great Oaks Charter School on the Lower East Side, said that the behavior in the video violated an important principle of schooling.
When is it that any of us should stop learning?
And shouldn’t we also be educating ourselves about the fine difference between spoiling a child and helping him/her into becoming a fully-fledged adult (a ‘man’ in the un-gendered meaning of the word)?
“Saudi women need to ‘think like men’
Gender segregation in Saudi Arabia has sometimes led to “immaturity”, a Saudi businesswoman and member of Jeddah’s municipal council has told BBC HARDtalk.”
“That was done by somebody named John Fugelsang, who somehow thinks he’s funny. At least he has the courage or naivete (you decide) to own up to such stupid overgeneralizing, of a company-line liberal sort that panders to a sycophantic gaggle of Cruz-hating left-wing foamers. [I’ve hosted the image locally in case the creator sees this essay and tries to delete it from his social media out of shame and embarrassment…sorry, man, too late–it’s on the record now!”
“The Candidate is a natural born citizen by virtue of being born in Canada/(Hawaii) to his mother who was a U.S. citizen at the time of his birth,” the board said, explaining Cruz/(Obama) met the criteria because he “did not have to take any steps or go through a naturalization process at some point after birth.”
Wow… That settles it… Both are indeed ‘natural born citizens’ so the only relevant thing here is the manner in which people relate to a ‘delicate’ subject.
Some tend to let themselves be driven by sentiment rather than reason while others change their minds according to their most immediate interest.
September 9, 2015, at a rally in Washington against the deal with Iran:
Fast forward to January, 2015.
“Donald Trump doubled down on rival Ted Cruz’s citizenship Monday night, again questioning whether the Canadian-born Texas senator is eligible for the presidency.
“My new battle is with a gentleman named Ted Cruz,” the billionaire real-estate mogul said at a rally in Farmington, N.H. “The Canadian, the man from Canada.””
“Cruz noted that Trump in September said Cruz’s Canadian birth did not disqualify him for the White House since his mother was an American citizen. Now, he has changed his mind.
“Now since September, the Constitution hasn’t changed,” Cruz said, “but the poll numbers have.”
Trump acknowledged as much, saying that Cruz didn’t seem like a threat before, but now is neck-and-neck with him in the Iowa polls.”
During this exchange Cruz brought back into the limelight an almost forgotten movie:
Prophetic words?
For which one of them?
Anyway, my ‘democratic conundrum‘ is still unsolved.
Gov. John Kasich, maybe?
Oscar Hoffman, an excellent Professor of Sociology at the Bucharest University, kept telling us, his students:
“For a proposition to be ‘true’ it is not enough for it to be ‘logical’, it also has to make sense from the epistemological point of view.”
Rather hard to swallow, specially for young individuals… and since most students tend to be … well… at least young at heart… it wasn’t simple for us to follow him.
Here’s a story that might help.
“A young man knocks on the door of a great Talmudic scholar.
“Rabbi, I wish to study Talmud.”
“Have you ever studied Torah?”
“Good. I’m well versed in logic.”
“The burglar with the dirty face.”
“Very clever. Another question please.”
“We established that. The burglar with the clean face washes.”
“I didn’t think of that. Please ask me another.”
“Rabbi, please, give me one more test.”
“But you’ve just given me four contradictory answers to the same question! That’s impossible!”
OK, but where’s the promised link?
Well, who wrote the Talmud in the first place?
A countless number of people who have figured out there’s no such thing as a definitive answer for any question?
That books should be written to help other people develop their minds, not to ‘mold’ them?
That books should be read as an exercise for the ‘thinking muscle’, not in (vain) search for ‘the absolute wisdom’?
Still looking for that link?
Keep reading, only take greater care when choosing them books.
(another version of the same story ends up like this:
“Goldstein is desperate. “I am qualified to study Talmud. Please give me one more test.”
“Neither one washes his face.”
May we all have the wisdom to ask, and answer, the wise questions!)
As an engineer, raised in a communist country by rather atheist parents and heavily influenced by an agnostic grandmother, I am more than skeptic about the mystic side of the religious phenomenon and deeply suspicious whenever people pretend to be able to ‘see’ things – irrespective of whatever method they claim to be using.
However.
When in college I used to read way more than what I was supposed to and to follow, unofficially, some subjects in no way connected with my major.
That’s how I came across a very interesting idea promoted by a literary critic – whose name I unfortunately cannot remember:
‘Whenever trying to asses the value of a text stay focused exclusively on the written word. Do not let other information influence your judgement, for instance those about the life-style of the author‘.
For an engineer this makes a lot of sense, isn’t it?
What do I care if the guy who produced an elegant blue-print was a womanizer, a drunkard or a whore, as long as the machinery depicted there worked as advertised?
Or I can make a step further and ask myself ‘what do I care about the reason behind someone publishing a text which contains something that makes a lot of sense?’
Is he trying to manipulate me (into doing/believing something)?
OK, I’ll figure that out independently, after I’m done evaluating the text itself.
Should I do my best to ascertain if what is said there makes as much sense as it seemed to do when I first glanced at it?
Of course, but shouldn’t that be my standing policy, regardless of who ever wrote it?
After this rather lengthy ‘overture’ I’d like you to read this excerpt:
Does it make sense?
Yes, particularly where it says that “We can’t address a terror problem if we’re insisting on creating a war with every Muslim on earth. That’s not addressing a problem. That’s starting one.”
Is it manipulative in any way?
Click on the link and decide for yourself.
Then should I care about the author, Danielle Egnew, being “an internationally renowned Psychic and Medium”?
Well, I’m sharing her words, don’t I?
After all, who am I to say that ‘something like this cannot exist’ if it’s right here, in front of my very own eyes?
How, and why, did it get there?
That’s something else, but I cannot question it’s existence simply because I’m not sure about, or I don’t agree with, how it came to my attention.
nicichiarasa 