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Flabbergasted

December 18, 2023 //
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“When we talk about birthing people, we’re being inclusive.
It’s that simple.
We use gender neutral language when talking about pregnancy,
because it’s not just cis-gender women that can get pregnant and give birth.
Reproductive freedom is for *every* body.”
@reproforall

– What’s wrong with these people?

– What do you mean?

– They consider themselves to be reasonable.
Their ability to ‘reason’ is mentioned, by their thinkers, as the single thing which separates them from the rest of the animals. Sets them apart from the rest of those who inhabit this planet.
To me, reasoning is how their consciousness operates. How their consciousness manifests itself.
The real difference between them and the rest of the animals being the fact that their consciousness is far more capable than that of the ‘mere’ animals.

– ?!?

– Just look at them!
Is there any difference, any real difference, between a 3 days old human infant and a chimpanzee of the same age? Or even between a 3 days old baby and a 3 days old foal? Except for the foal being able to run?

– The baby will eventually learn to speak. Will develop consciousness and the ability to think. You said it yourself…

– WILL!!!
Will eventually… if everything goes right!
If that baby is raised by responsible people. Who speak to the future human being. And teach them to be human. Help them develop a functional consciousness.
Children who have no significant interaction with other human beings and fail to learn to speak – or other form of language, until they reach puberty will never be able to ‘recover’. To accede to consciousness.

– OK. But I still don’t understand what has flabbergasted you!

– Not you too!
What drove you to copy them? To misuse language so horribly… “what has flabbergasted you”…

– But it’s so funny!

– Until it no longer is!
Look at them. Just look at them.
20 years ago, they made a movie about a man getting pregnant. A comedy. Everybody laughed.
Nowadays they take sides on ‘pregnant people’…
OK, language can be used ‘artistically’. ‘Stretched’ to obtain something. To explore new meanings, to express emotion, to make fun.
But does it make any sense to use language in order to seed confusion? To cause people to fight each other?
Rather self-defeating, isn’t it?
How much sense does this make? To misuse the medium which made you possible in the first place?

How sensible is it to weaponize language?
Who has anything to gain from this?
Other than a few, very short-term, perks?

“The times when it might be appropriate to use “pregnant people” is when you were talking about the universe of people who can get pregnant, some of whom are actually men, trans men like me, and some of whom are non-binary people who don’t identify as men or women.” (Evan Urquhart, Slate, 2022)

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Categories alternative ways of acquring knowledge, awareness, Bounded rationality, Choices we make, effective communication, evolution, In English, Mutual Respect, Psychology, skin in the game, teleology

“Lucky Punk”

December 15, 2023 //
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Well, from where I stand – 62 years and counting – ‘grouchy’ starts when people forget that truth – even the naked one – can be ‘exposed’ in a polite manner.

Becoming old doesn’t come with a license to stop caring about how the others feel about things.
On the contrary.
At some moment in time, each of us will reach ‘the point of no return’. After which we’ll depend on others. Totally!
For food, for water, for somebody to change our diapers…

After all, we’ve been lucky enough to reach the ‘golden age’.
How about becoming wise instead of devolving into rude punks?

‘Cause the opposite of polite is being rude. Not truthful!

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Categories awareness, Bounded rationality, Choices we make, In English, man as a measure for all things, Mutual Respect, Psychology, skin in the game

Proper, Property

December 13, 2023 //
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The world doesn’t belong to leaders.
The world belongs to Humanity.

Proper = As it should be. As expected. ‘Clean’.
Property=Something which belongs to someone.
A mutually respected arrangement among the members a certain community which establishes boundaries. Which members have the right to go ‘there’ whenever they want while all others have to ask for permission before crossing that ‘boundary’.
A convention among the members of a certain community about what is the proper thing to do in each ‘patrimonial’ situation. A convention about who has the right to do what to the things which happen to co-exist with the members of the above mentioned community.
The above mentioned ‘things’ include the place where the entire community happens to live. ‘Their’ land.

Which brings us to who owns the world.
The leaders? As many of them assume?
Or the humanity, as Dalai Lama has reportedly said?

How about neither?
My point being that we are nothing but guests in this world.
We come empty handed and we leave empty handed.

Yes, we need property while dwelling on this planet.
But only in the sense of who can do what where. And with the limitation that the ‘what’ we do has to be ‘reversible’.
Just as we leave this world with nothing – we leave even our hands here, our presence on the planet has to be ‘discrete’. Has to produce as little disturbance as possible and all that disturbance must disappear in time.

We need to keep the world a proper place.
It’s the only place we have.
No other home for our children.
No other place to spend our last days.
Properly.

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Categories 1989, alternative ways of acquring knowledge, awareness, Choices we make, collective identity, effective communication, In English, man as a measure for all things, Mutual Respect, Psychology, skin in the game, teleology

The most powerfool tool

December 12, 2023 //
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“If the only tool you have is a hammer,
you tend to see every problem as a nail.”
Abraham Maslow

Did you recognize him?
Yes, Sigmund Freud. Dr. Sigmund Freud, as depicted on http://www.marxists.org.

“While the different religions wrangle with one another as to which of them is in possession of the truth, in our view the truth of religion may be altogether disregarded.
Religion is an attempt to get control over the sensory world, in which we are placed, by means of the wish-world, which we have developed inside us as a result of biological and psychological necessities.
But it cannot achieve its end.
Its doctrines carry with them the stamp of the times in which they originated, the ignorant childhood days of the human race. Its consolations deserve no trust. Experience teaches us that the world is not a nursery.
The ethical commands, to which religion seeks to lend its weight, require some other foundations instead, for human society cannot do without them, and it is dangerous to link up obedience to them with religious belief.
If one attempts to assign to religion its place in man’s evolution, it seems not so much to be a lasting acquisition, as a parallel to the neurosis which the civilized individual must pass through on his way from childhood to maturity.”
[Sigmund Freud, “Moses and Monotheism”, 1932]

No, I’m not going to argue with Freud.
I’m not going to compare his opinion on religion with that of Durkheim. Which makes more sense to me. You may find them here, at #e., and compare them yourself. If you wish, of course.

What I’m trying to point out in this post is that reason is over-rated.
That reason is an extremely powerful tool but, like all other tools, the consequences of yielding it depend on the yielder.
On the person using reason in order to get somewhere.
To find the intended meaning…

Which is?

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Categories awareness, Bounded rationality, Choices we make, evolution, In English, man as a measure for all things, Psychology, skin in the game, teleology

Don’t worry, be happy

December 11, 2023 //
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The sound of one hand clapping…

While worrying is indeed a waste of time, it is also a very good pointer!
If not the only one…
The only one powerful enough to make us ‘move’!

Worry is a powerful attention grabber. Points us towards the things we feel the need to solve.

What we do after our attention has been pointed… that’s the most important thing!

Continue to worry or start doing things?
Meaningful things…
And the first meaningful thing to do while worrying is to stop.
Now, that the attention grabber had done its thing… to continue would be a waste of energy!

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Categories awareness, Choices we make, In English, man as a measure for all things, Psychology, teleology

Under the radar

December 7, 2023 //
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You cannot learn
what you think you know.
Epictetus

How many times have you been hit by something you didn’t see coming?

Not very often… for the simple reason that these encounters use to end up badly!
Bent fenders, broken bones…
Hence we pay attention. Or get killed… end of story!

But how many times have you experienced bad consequences, really bad consequences, after misjudging a situation?
After a ‘doesn’t matter’ uttered nonchalantly?

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Categories 1989, alternative ways of acquring knowledge, awareness, Bounded rationality, Choices we make, complementary ways of attending knowlege, effective communication, evolution, In English, man induced fragility, Psychology, skin in the game, Trust

Digging the great divide

December 6, 2023 //
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There are no facts, only interpretations.
Friedrich Nietzsche

Simone Weil

I’m afraid the political world wasn’t where this intellectual leprosy had originally came from.
The political world was only the place where this disease had become ‘viral’.
Where this manner of (not) thinking had been weaponized!

Its origin can be traced back to our intellectual arrogance.
To our conviction that ‘I can be right on my own’. Without any ‘input’ from the outside…
Even in spite of whatever information might reach me from ‘outside’, if that information doesn’t fit my already held convictions. My ideology….

In fact, this belief – ‘I’m entitled to my own convictions’ – is exactly what people on both sides of the divide have in common. Intellectually speaking!
A shared disease… a virus infecting indiscriminately…

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Categories 1989, arrogance, awareness, Choices we make, effective communication, In English, limited rationality, man as a measure for all things, Psychology

No! Not again. Please!!!

December 5, 2023 //
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What are the errors of Marxism?

Marxism is an ideology.
Ideologies don’t have errors, they are thought templates used to evaluate a certain situation and to determine what to do next. Ideologies are tools.
They can be used properly or improperly.
Sometimes, the best use for certain tools is to be left alone. Particularly when you understand they are useless. If you understand they are useless…
Hence it’s not Marxism which is full of errors, it’s the Marxists who are barking up the wrong tree.

If you really need to put your finger on something, if you need to point out a culprit, I give you Marx.
Yes, Karl Marx is your man.
His analysis was brilliant. His diagnostic was spot on.
“Finally, in times when the class struggle nears the decisive hour, the progress of dissolution going on within the ruling class, in fact within the whole range of old society, assumes such a violent, glaring character, that a small section of the ruling class cuts itself adrift, and joins the revolutionary class, the class that holds the future in its hands. Just as, therefore, at an earlier period, a section of the nobility went over to the bourgeoisie, so now a portion of the bourgeoisie goes over to the proletariat, and in particular, a portion of the bourgeois ideologists, who have raised themselves to the level of comprehending theoretically the historical movement as a whole.”
His cure – the mandate he gave to the “bourgeois ideologists who have raised themselves to the level of comprehending theoretically the historical movement as a whole”, and whom he called “communists” – was abysmal.

Which tells us Marx’s brilliant analysis wasn’t deep enough. He had noticed a series of facts but he had failed to notice the bigger picture. He had failed to see that all authoritarian regimes had failed. Under their own weight. Inevitably. And he had failed to notice that all democratic regimes had survived, and thrived, for as long as they had managed to preserve their democratic nature.

Hence the Marxist cure, communism, was stillborn.
A tool to be left alone.
The attempt to impose yet another authoritarian regime – with no matter how generous intentions – after the overwhelming experience of all other authoritarian regimes failing abysmally, is nothing but the compelling proof of social and historical blindness.

And why start this post by quoting Marx himself?
Because that quote is more than enough. More than enough proof for Marx being a bully.
It’s OK to ‘change the world’ if you own it. If it was yours…
But bearing in mind that there are other people living in the same world… wouldn’t it be nice to ask their opinion about the whole thing? About the changes you want to make? Which changes will dramatically affect the world they live in?!?
They are simpletons? Whose opinions are worthless? Because you said so yourself?

“The lower middle class, the small manufacturer, the shopkeeper, the artisan, the peasant, all these fight against the bourgeoisie, to save from extinction their existence as fractions of the middle class. They are therefore not revolutionary, but conservative. Nay more, they are reactionary, for they try to roll back the wheel of history. If by chance, they are revolutionary, they are only so in view of their impending transfer into the proletariat; they thus defend not their present, but their future interests, they desert their own standpoint to place themselves at that of the proletariat.

The “dangerous class”, [lumpenproletariat] the social scum, that passively rotting mass thrown off by the lowest layers of the old society, may, here and there, be swept into the movement by a proletarian revolution; its conditions of life, however, prepare it far more for the part of a bribed tool of reactionary intrigue.”

As I just said.
Bullly!!!

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Categories 1989, arrogance, authoritarianism, awareness, Bounded rationality, collective identity, effective communication, In English, man as a measure for all things, Mutual Respect, Psychology, skin in the game

Don’t mess other people’s minds!

December 4, 2023 //
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For everybody, no matter how powerful, crimes are those that others commit….

The powerful are the ones who have the means to evade the consequences but when it comes to ‘who thinks what’, there’s no difference among variously powerful people!

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Categories awareness, Bounded rationality, collective identity, man as a measure for all things, Psychology, skin in the game, yes but

The exception which tests the rule

December 4, 2023 //
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There is an old ‘rule’ which maintains that even a broken watch may be accurate.
From time to time, if it retains its arms…
Twice daily, to be precise!

Same thing is valid for people.
From time to time, each of us will utter something which actually makes sense!

Sort of, anyway…

The catch being that in order to ‘prove’ the temporary accuracy of the broken watch you need one in good working order. Or, alternatively, you need a good understanding of time.

Same thing with Peterson’s uttering.
On the face of it, the phrase is catchy.
In fact, it’s just as useful as a broken watch.
What solace will be felt by the victim of a tough tyrant when that person realizes that no tyrant, however tough, was ever capable of ‘achieving’ anything without the compliance of the weak? Without the compliance of those who had done, in their weakness, what the tyrant had told them to do…

So yes, broken watches are, sometime, accurate.
And yes, Petersen is right to tell us that both tough and weak people can wreak a lot of havoc.

But neither of these two pieces of trivia will be useful to us until we’ll understand it’s up to us to put them to good use. To understand the temporary nature of the accuracy displayed by the broken watch and the fact that no man, however tough, becomes really dangerous unless condoned, or even helped, by ultimately hapless weaklings.

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Categories 1989, alternative ways of acquring knowledge, authoritarianism, awareness, Bounded rationality, Choices we make, effective communication, In English, man as a measure for all things, Mutual Respect, Psychology, teleology, Trust
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