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Trenches or channels?

March 19, 2015 //
0

Politics were always about getting things done.

Modern politics used to be about dialog. People talked to each other and when a conclusion was accepted by a majority it became a policy and was put into practice.

Contemporary politics seem to be about hiding behind ideological smoke screens – values, rights, political correctness, platforms, you name them – while scheming about how to implement usually self serving and too often very short sighted policies.

I’ve spent the first 30 years of my life – practically my entire youth – under communist rule. The worst thing was the complete lack of alternatives. One ruler, one party, only one opinion that automatically became law. No way to escape the mistakes made by whomever happened to be in power and who, unfailingly, ‘lost it’ gradually as he spent more time at the top precisely because there were no ‘checks and balances’, no real dialogue between the various sections of the society.

The Western part of Europe – the area currently known as the EU and which was the starting place for the most destructive wars in human history – is crisscrossed by water filled channels. Some of natural origin and some build by the people living nearby. In peaceful times they were used as shipping lanes, in wars as trenches.

Political parties evolved as public platforms. Virtual places where likely minded people got together and discussed their opinions before proposing them to the society at large. Now-a-days they seem to have become fortresses where ‘frightened’ individuals congregate so tightly that no outside influence penetrates to their ears.

Bona fide negotiations have all but disappeared and have been replaced by ‘pork barrel’ laced with veiled threats.

What are we going to do from now on? Resume trading in good faith or prepare for war?
And no matter what the ‘talking heads’ are babbling incessantly IT’S UP TO US. After all it’s our own lives that are at stake.

If you think I’m exaggerating click here and read some of the comments. They were posted by regular people, the likes of you and me. For now they are still willing to share their feelings but don’t you think the atmosphere is just a little too tense for our own good and that nobody really listens anymore?

In Romania we have a saying that goes like this: ‘A fish rots from the head and should be scaled/gutted from the tail’.

We need to clean up our own, individual, act first. Only this way we’ll be able to convince the powerful-s of the day that we really mean it.
We can start by paying attention, real attention, to the persons living next to us. To our colleagues, to our employees… Of course we pay attention to our bosses and to our families, that’s how we survive in the short term.
Time has come to pay attention to the rest of the people. If we want to thrive in the long run.

http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/236101-glenn-beck-im-out-of-the-republican-party#disqus_thread
https://d2k9njawademcf.cloudfront.net/post_promo_images/11202/original/scaling_fish.jpg?1409694449

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Categories Choices we make, politics, Psychology, Respect Mutual., The kind of world we live in

“Is the universe independent of observation ?”

March 12, 2015 //
0


This question was asked by a friend of mine on Facebook.

The answer depends heavily on which side of the fence you are when considering the problem.

If one looks from the inside of his conscience and is aware of his own limitations – nobody ever had at his disposal all pertinent information about anything and, anyway, nobody is able to use ‘perfectly’ whatever meager information he is able to amass, for various reasons – one realizes that his representation of the universe, his universe that is, is indeed dependent on ‘observation’.
If, instead, one mentally transports himself on the outside of his conscience – assuming that there actually is anything outside his conscience – then the universe becomes somewhat independent of observation. I say ‘somewhat’ because any action performed on something, and ‘observation’ is an action, transforms – no matter how minutely but it does – the object on which that action has been performed.

So my answer would be ‘Both yes and no depending on which side you are when considering the matter‘ but we have to keep in mind that the (relative) independence that becomes apparent when looking from the outside of our individual conscience (?!?, 🙂 ) ‘depends’ heavily on the huge disproportion between each of us and the Universe.

See also: Politics, a dangerous profession, https://nicichiarasa.wordpress.com/2014/07/02/politics-a-dangerous-profession/

“Observer effect”:
psychology: http://www.aqr.org.uk/glossary/observer-effect
physics: http://www.toktalk.net/2007/12/24/what-is-the-observer-effect/
Heisenberg, the Uncertainty Principle, http://www.aip.org/history/heisenberg/p08.htm

http://statusmind.com/images/2014/03/Smart-Quotes-35348-statusmind.com.jpg

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Categories Choices we make, Psychology

Antifragile for dummies

March 12, 2015 //
0

Antifragile, things that gain from disorder by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, http://www.randomhouse.com/book/176227/antifragile-by-nassim-nicholas-taleb
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Nassim-Nicholas-Taleb/13012333374
https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/236x/40/c2/a9/40c2a958b851bac299b468f956e51d19.jpg

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Categories Choices we make, Psychology, The kind of world we live in

Seeing is believing, right?

March 5, 2015 //
2


But eyes alone are not capable enough.
To see ‘right’ one has to think first about what is actually going on in front of his naked eyes!
And you should also take into consideration that all the tricks shown below have been purposefully put together by people who command intimate knowledge about how our brains work.

http://www.smash.com/10-amazing-perspective-tricks-will-mess-mind/

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Categories Choices we make, Psychology, Respect Mutual.

“Nothing to see here people, move along…”

February 26, 2015 //
0
This was inspired by the title of a Facebook post that shared an article from The Telegraph.
“A Saudi Arabian court has sentenced a man to death for apostasy after he filmed himself tearing up a copy of the Koran.”
The guys ‘in charge’ of Saudi Arabia must be in a terrible situation.
Punishing the guy according to their own laws will further the perception of Islam as a ‘violent religion’ and thus make it less acceptable for the rest of the world.
Not punishing him would mean tacit acceptance of the fact that laws are made and applied by humans, not by any God, thus totally demolishing the brand of legitimacy the Saudi’s have worked hard to build for themselves.
Terrible predicament. I suggest we allow them to settle this among themselves.
Blaming ‘Islam’ indiscriminately for some horrible acts perpetrated in its name by a bunch of zealots would make things worse for everybody. So yes, let’s ‘move along’!
What we can, and definitely should do, is to insist on the ‘humanitarian’ side of the whole business.
PS Here is an interesting article about Sharia: http://www.pewforum.org/2013/04/30/the-worlds-muslims-religion-politics-society-beliefs-about-sharia/
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/saudiarabia/11431509/Saudi-Arabia-court-gives-death-penalty-to-man-who-renounced-his-Muslim-faith.html
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Categories Choices we make, Culture, politics, Psychology, The kind of world we live in

Why keep wasting money on ‘toothless’ constitutional monarchies?

February 25, 2015 //
4

I happened to stumble on an article about the tragic fate of Sophie Chotek.

The beautiful daughter of an impoverished aristocratic family attracts the attention and later becomes romantically involved with the heir of one of the most important European thrones of the time. Looks like a prequel for ‘Love Story’, right? … only worse, unfortunately. The reigning Monarch wasn’t happy about the whole thing and, to make things worse, ‘the law’ wouldn’t allow their union.

After huge complications that involved the intervention of Kaiser Wilhelm II, Tsar Nicholas II and Pope Leo XIII in favour of the ‘young lovers’ Emperor Franz Joseph gave in and yielded to the marriage, on condition that the children of the couple will not be able to inherit the throne and that the bride will never be treated as a queen or attend official functions at the side of her future husband.
And the worse was yet to come. After 14 years, to a day, of happy marriage both she and Franz Ferdinand, her husband, were assassinated together in Sarajevo.

Reading about the treatment she had to endure cannot but make me wonder about why would modern democracies still ‘entertain’ royal courts? Specially after what happened to Lady Di…

“The Emperor expressed his disapproval by not attending his heir’s wedding, as did Franz Ferdinand’s brothers and nearly every member of his family. The Imperial court, led by its chief overseer the Prince of Montenuovo (who was the child of a morganatic marriage himself) continued to humiliate the new “Princess of Hohenberg” at every opportunity. If for example the Imperial family were to hold a ball then Sophie would not only have to sit apart from her husband but be last in line to enter behind every other Hapsburg relation no matter how obscure. All contemporary reports state that Sophie never complained or even show displeasure at this treatment in public, earning the sympathy of many outside the court for her dignified response. Less inclined to forgiveness than his wife, Franz Ferdinand allegedly drew up a list of particularly obnoxious aristocrats for whom he intended payback when he became Emperor.”

So?

Well… It’s not so easy to dismiss the fact that some of the most successful nations, by any standards, are exactly those that have managed to balance the survival of the monarchy with ‘full blown’ democratic government. Not only in Europe.
Great Britain, Sweden, The Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark, Norway, Thailand, Japan … There must be something here!

Two things constitute the common denominator between these countries, besides being run as constitutional monarchies. They have all found their own road to democracy/rule of law and they had traveled this road in a relatively peaceful manner. Don’t be fooled by the fact that Japan had been ‘opened’ up by Matthew Perry and then defeated in the WWII. The Japanese emperor had been powerless since long before Perry and the ‘fathers’ of the Meiji Constitution might have been inspired by the German Imperial one but the transformation was instrumented by the Japanese politicians themselves, not by nor after being prodded by a ‘foreign power’. Furthermore by 1915 the Japanese Constitution was modified to include universal male suffrage.

Meanwhile the XX-th century has witnessed a very mixed performance by the rest of the democracies, with the notable exception of the US. No, I haven’t forgotten Canada, Australia or New Zealand. They are constitutional monarchies too.
Latin America. I don’t think you’re going to dispute the fact that there is no single nation inhabiting this part of the world which hasn’t ‘enjoyed’ at least a few years of dictatorship that has started with ‘free elections’.
Africa. Until very recently there wasn’t a single functional democracy on this continent.
Asia. With the notable exception of India – which has inherited strong democratic values from her imperial power and enjoys special circumstances – no other real democracy besides Thailand and Japan until very recently.
Europe, the birth place of democracy. Hitler and Mussolini were democratically elected before becoming two of the most horrendous dictators in the history of humankind. Eastern Europe countries, including Russia, were governed for many decades as ‘popular democracies’. In reality they were ruled by oligarchies which were hiding their criminal nature behind ideological smoke screens.

Any explanation for this?

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/06/28/1310194/–Franzi-and-Soph-the-personal-tragedy-that-sparked-WWI#
http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/373298/Meiji-Constitution

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Categories Choices we make, Psychology, The kind of world we live in

Know, believe, trust.

February 23, 2015 //
2

“Seeing is believing.”

Yeah, right.

So, do we really know anything?

For instance I know that the Earth exists – I am able to walk on it and I eat things that grow out of it.

I also believe – without ever having seen it from far enough – that the Earth is round. Just as my ancestors used to believe that the Earth was flat. Both I and my ancestors were told what to believe and we did that. Because we believed in those who were offering us that particular piece of information and because the issue wasn’t of any real importance for us, personally.

I do trust that Neil Armstrong did land on the Moon. I’m not going to share with you my reasons for that here, this post is about something else. My point is that belief is casual while trust is active. I did research the matter, as I could, and I considered it carefully before reaching the conclusion that ‘Yes, I am convinced that Neil Armstrong did land on the Moon’.

As we all know ‘know’ is a verb. The corresponding noun is ‘knowledge’, information that we are aware of. And so familiar with that we don’t even remember how we have arrived to accept it as true.

Believe is also a verb. It’s corresponding noun is ‘belief’, information we are aware of and believe it to be true just because we were told so by a seemingly credible source.

Trust is both a verb and a noun. And here comes the really interesting part. While trust as a verb means more or less the same thing as believe, trust as a noun has nothing, but absolutely nothing in common with belief. Trust is a state of mind while belief is a piece of information with a ‘value’ attached to it.
In fact ‘trust’ is something you consciously choose to invest while ‘believing’ is something you are led to, sometimes even without you being aware of what is going on, by a person or even by the circumstances you happen to find yourself in.

Now it is time to introduce another notion. Faith. It exists only as a noun and that’s why I didn’t brought it up from the beginning.
It has something in common with both belief and trust. Similar to belief no proof is usually attached to faith and similar to trust faith is something that the individual has to willingly accept/profess/invest.

Coming back to knowledge we discover there are many kinds of it.
We have factual knowledge, the kind we have either witnessed or otherwise seems so evident that we’d never even dreamed of questioning. So evident that if somebody asks us to be specific and put it squarely in one of the ‘belief’, ‘trust’ or ‘faith’ drawers we’d be at a loss and protest vehemently ‘it’s plain knowledge, what’s wrong with you guys?’
Then we have our beliefs. For instance we know that we love our partners and our kids and we believe that they love us back. We also have faith in a lot of things. Some of us have faith in God, some others put their faith in politicians, market analysts or even the weather-man. For a longer or shorter period of time. When gravely ill we put our faith in doctors and in medicines. And so on.
And finally there is the trust problem. For a real trust to develop we need an actual understanding of what is going on. That’s where science and technology comes is. If we’d done something for a long enough period of time we gradually become confident in our ability to do that thing over and over again with consistent results. If the results are reproducible, if other people can obtain results similar to ours by following our methods then our endeavor is deemed scientific and, hence, trustworthy. Same goes for information gathered following scientific methods.

And here lies the pitfall. Science has to be constantly challenged in order to remain valid. If we reach that point where we start to put faith in science and scientists instead of continuously demanding proof and doing our best to understand with our own heads what is going on then we are doomed. Science morphs not in ‘religion’ – that is something else – but in hoax.

The ‘thing’ with science is that the only trustworthy aspect of it is the method, not at all the results. We’ll never be able to find the absolute truth – no result will ever be 100% accurate – but if we keep using the ‘scientific method’ – consistency and unhidden-ness – then we’ll remain on the safe side.

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Categories Psychology

‘Baby Girl’.

February 23, 2015 //
1

Do you have any qualms about ‘what’s going to happen when these children grow up’?

Have you considered the fact that it was us who raised them?

That we, their parents, presented them with clothes like these when they were young and that it was a member of our own generation who had fashioned this design and then organized manufacturing and distribution?

That we, their parents, are those who share jokes like the one I just found in my mail?

“Today be my baby girl’s 18th birthday. I be so glad that this be my last child support payment! Month after month, year after year, all those payments!
So I call my baby girl, LaKeesha, to come to my house, and when she get there, I say, “Baby girl, I want you to take this check over to yo momma house and tell her this be the last check she ever be gettin’ from me, and I want you to come back and tell me the ‘spression on yo mama’s face.”
So, my baby girl take the check over to her momma. I be anxious to hear what she say, and bout the ‘spression on her face.
Baby girl walk through the door, I say, “Now what yo momma say ’bout that?”
She say to tell you that “you ain’t my daddy” …and watch the ‘spression on yo face.”

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Categories Choices we make, Psychology, Respect Mutual., The world as described in jokes

Rituals

February 22, 2015 //
4

This post is dedicated to my friends who do not yet accept that rituals still play a huge role in our lives.
No matter if we are religious or not, in the conventional sense of the word, we all feel something special when witnessing rituals being observed.

To me this is a powerful proof that we need to belong, that our need to be an accepted member of a community is ingrained somewhere deep inside us. And for good reason because none of us would be able to survive on its own for more than a very short time.
In fact this is the real meaning of ‘religion’.
“Religion (derived from the Latin religare, meaning ‘to bind’) binds people together.”

From time to time religious teachings become perverted, in most instances by precisely those who were supposed/’entrusted with the divine mission’ to preserve and pass them on to future generations. We shouldn’t allow these manipulators to destroy our livelihood.

Maybe time has come for us to understand the entire process and to rebuild religiosity/togetherness on mutual respect?

https://www.youtube.com/embed/HW3QVLlK-kE?feature=player_embedded
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X0W7YdKYPl0
https://www.wordnik.com/words/religare

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Categories Choices we make, Culture, Psychology, Respect Mutual., The kind of world we live in

To keep or not to keep…mum!?!

February 17, 2015 //
2

broadcast to the Universe

“Professor Stephen Hawking, the Cambridge cosmologist, warned in 2010 that humans should keep as silent as possible because alien civilisations may be attracted to Earth and have the technology to travel here and exploit its resources. “If aliens visit us, the outcome would be much as when Columbus landed in America, which didn’t turn out well for the Native Americans,” he said.”

Let’s accept for the sake of the argument that an ‘imperialistic and inconsiderate’ civilization (like the western Europeans were during the time of Columbus) manages to reach the technological prowess of being able to travel at velocities higher than the speed of light – otherwise no one would bother to leave their native planet except for a real emergency since building an empire in this circumstances is impractical.
Would you think they would wait for an invitation from us? Or that they would even need one to know that the Earth is a ‘hospitable’ planet?
If ‘they’ are as belligerent as we were, and still are, the Universe would be either divided into at least two empires busily trying to bite each other’s throat or a huge one who continuously gobbles up new and new planets.
We are still free after so many eons since the galaxy has been in place so chances are that either ‘they’ are a lot more peaceful or interstellar travel is not a feasible thing. Not in any recognizable – by us – form of animal life, anyway.

What we are left with is another, and for me a lot more plausible, hypothesis.
Long range travel has indeed been mastered, in one form or another. After a prolonged interstellar war or even from the very beginning the ‘travelers’ have understood that peace is a lot more ‘profitable’/nice/cozy than generalized war so they don’t allow ‘beligerant’ civilizations to get out of their planets until the would be new-comers ‘grow up’ from their ‘waring’ pubescence.
For instance by installing monitoring stations around ‘promising’ planets and actually sabotaging their efforts at ‘conquering the space’ until they reach a comprehensively peaceful stage of social development.

I remember that one of the conditions for Romania to be accepted in both European Union and NATO was for it to have good relations/’friendship treaties’ with all its neighbors. If we were wise enough to do such thing don’t you think that a civilization that has mastered space travel should have reached the same conclusion way back in their development?

It seems that our fright about the ‘aliens’ tells more about the way we are than about anything else…

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Categories Choices we make, Psychology, Respect Mutual., The kind of world we live in
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