Meghan and Harry had a chat with Oprah. Which had eventually been broadcasted on TV. Basically, there was nothing new nor really interesting there. For me, anyway. Yet there’s a lot of reaction.
I don’t really care about the reason for which the royals have treated Markle the way they did. About the reason which convinced the couple to speak up. The individual reasons for those who comment on the internet to do it as each of them had chosen to do it.
There are two points I need to make here.
The fact that they are rich and famous doesn’t change the fact that the oppression they’re speaking about is real….Maybe they experience it differently… maybe they have it easier when speaking about it… but opression continues to be dealt. Among us, by people like us.
And, secondly but just as important, those three weren’t discussing about mere oppression. They were talking about racist oppression!
Could this be the reason for so many people taking issues on this subject?
I fully agree with Sowell but the fact that Sowell is right doesn’t change the fact that we’re the ones responsible for present day racism.
Imagine having a festering boil. On your ass, for good measure. You may take to the doctor, for treatment. Or you may wait, hoping your organism will be strong enough to heal itself. This being your call. Nobody else but you has anything to say about this situation. Let’s say you have chosen to go to the hospital. Once there, the matter has gotten somewhat ‘out of your hands’. You still have the last word but the doctor calls the more important shots. Pun indended, of course. He can simply open up the boil, put you on a course of antibiotics and send you home. He might decide to check you up and see whether the boil is a symptom of something deeper. He might attempt to rip you off by ordering, all at once, a host of complex tests and of fancy treatments. Or all at once. Cut up your boil, set you on a course of antibiotics, order a decent set of tests and still rip you off. ‘Is there a point to all these?’ Yep! How the ‘good’ doctor will choose to treat you is the consequence of how you have chosen him. And of how the community you belong to had chosen to organise its health system. But the more consequential decision, whether to go to the doctor in the first place, is yours. I’m not going to analyse the factors you have to balance – we’d go back to how the community you belong to had chosen to organise its health system. I’m only going to parade the possible outcomes. A nice scar on your butt and a decent tab for you – or for your insurer, to pick up on your way out. Acompanied, hopefully, by an otherwise clean bill of health. A nice scar, and a clean bill of health, accompanied by an outrageous invoice. These being the ‘good’ outcomes. The doctor might find out, after reading the test results, that you also have, say, a blood disease. One perfectly treatable by modern medicine. But which would have easily killed you if you had waited much longer. The doctor might also find out, after reading the test results, that the boil is the symptom of an incurable disease. One which will kill you for sure. Only now you’ll die in the relative comfort of the available paliative treatment you can afford. Or you might choose to nurse your boil at home. Get out fine. And a lot cheaper! Die of an apparently unrelated disease six months later. Or pass out because of a sepsis which had eventually became untreatable. Due to your own prevarications…. ‘And what has the boil on my ass to do with Covid?!?’ Covid is a boil on our collective ass. We might decide to treat it ‘on the go’, hoping that on the ‘other side’ our lives will return to normal. Or we might decide to use it as an opportunity! An opportunity to clean up our act….
“The Texas educational system inundates the children with the almost mythical stories of Sam Houston, Stephen F. Austin, and other Texan heroes. This perpetuates the feeling that Texans are superior to others. Social Identity Theory claims that in-group biases are a direct need to feel superior to another group. By reinforcing such ideals of Texas history at an early age, they are indirectly making Texans feel superior to other states.”
In fact, Texans are so proud of their state, and so confident in themselves, that their power grid, run by ERCOT – Electric Reliability Council of Texas, has no connections linking it to the outside world. Yes, your eyes are OK. Texas – most of it, anyway, cannot import electric energy. No matter what!
For those who know anything about power management, this is insane. For the rest of the people, this sounds like gibberish.
Who cares where the power comes from?!?
Until it stops coming… exactly when you need it most!
‘OK. But surely, there are also other systems which are independent. And isolated. What about Hawai’i? It’s too far away to connect itself with anybody else and it’s doing just fine.’
True enough. And I can name a few more, easily. Only most of them are independent because they are isolated, not by design. And, exactly because they are isolated, they are run with utmost care. More precautions are taken than in ‘normal’ situations.
‘Precaution’ meaning, in this case, spare capacity. The responsible people running those systems make sure that, when push comes to shove, somebody is there to deliver the goods. The megawatts of power.
Maybe we need to reconsider our infatuation with ‘just in time management’. While ‘just in time management’ maximizes profits by streamlining inventory, it works its magic only when everything goes according to plan. And the stricter the streamlining, the harsher the consequences of anything not going according to plan!
And no, I’m not making fun of the ordinary people who suffer the consequences! This being the moment when I feel the need to remind you that the author of this blog – that’s me, tries to asses the consequences of our limited consciousness. Of the fact that none of us knows much. And, furthermore, that very few of us admit that! Which consequences might be – as too often are, tragic.
Specially when those who are not aware that their knowledge is limited happen to be invested with critical decision power.
‘Are you nuts? or something? Isn’t exactly this what the Europeans had been doing all over the world? For the last five centuries? And you attempt to ‘nuance’ it? Aren’t you ashamed of yourself?!?’
Ashamed of what some of my predecessors have done, yes! Also ashamed of what some of my contemporaries are doing. Right now, as opposed to back then.
And since there’s nothing to be done about the past, but to learn from it, and everything to be done about the future, right now, I’d rather have at least some of those statues still standing.
In public squares! Maybe not in the same places, maybe not in the same settings. But still in public! Hiding them in museums would mean taking them out of the limelight. Out of public scrutiny! If we are to learn anything from past mistakes we must focus on them. Putting those statues aside because we feel too strongly about them would only serve those who don’t want to admit mistakes had been perpetrated. Who actually don’t want to own our past.
Those who had promoted Jim Crow legislation had erected the confederate statues as a symbol of their regained public influence. Obliterating the statues won’t make anything suddenly right. The consequences of Jim Crow won’t disappear, as if by magic, along with the statues. They didn’t disappear when the legislation had been abolished and they won’t disappear now. If we want to put the past behind us, we must accomplish what has to be accomplished. We need to make things right, not hide away the prickliest pieces of evidence.
Demolishing statues won’t help any of those living in still segregated neighborhoods. Won’t help the children going to heavily underfunded schools. And so on… Demolishing statues will only help those who will certainly ask, in a few short years, if nothing changes in our hearts and minds:
‘Handicap’ has become a dirty word… Somewhat strange, given the breadth of its meaning. Horses get handicapped in order to even their chances to win a race. Yachts get handicapped so that different makes might participate in the same race… In these situations, its an ‘honor’ to be handicapped…
Then why has this concept, ‘political correctness’, become so ‘popular’?
You might already be familiar with the ‘upfront’ explanation.
“political correctness has reset the standards for civility and respect in people’s day-to-day interactions.”
I’m convinced there was something more. Civility and respect haven’t been invented yesterday. We’ve been polite for quite a while now.
Yeah, only politeness had been invented, and polished, when society was way more hierarchical than in is now. In those times, when a ‘superior’ told somebody ‘you idiot’ that somebody paused to think. The ‘idiot’ could not dismiss what the ‘superior’ had just told him. The ‘idiot’ really had to make amends. He was so busy trying to correct himself that he couldn’t allow himself to feel offended. If anything, he was grateful. The ‘superior’ had made the effort to help the ‘idiot’ improve himself instead of dispatching him altogether. In modern times, even before PC had become fashionable, calling someone’s attention about how idiotic he was behaving only made him angry. Hence dismissive and unresponsive. In an era when all people had become peers, a new ‘manner of speaking’ had to be invented in order for ‘information’ to be made ‘palatable’.
The process had been successful. So successful that the same approach had been used when dealing with other ‘hot’ subjects. Race, gender… ‘inclusion’ in general…
In fact, the process had become too successful for its own good!
Some of the ‘enthusiasts’ have reached the conclusion that ‘everything’ is open for reconsideration. That ‘everything’ should be closely reexamined. According to the ideological lenses worn by the examiners, of course…
Unfortunately, the end result is rather messy.
Instead of facilitating the dialog, the stiffer and stiffer set of ‘appropriate’ ‘rules of engagement’ has almost stifled any transfer of meaningful information.
“Despite this obvious progress, the authors’ research has shown that political correctness is a double-edged sword. While it has helped many employees feel unlimited by their race, gender, or religion, the PC rule book can hinder people’s ability to develop effective relationships across race, gender, and religious lines.”
Ibid.
Not only that people find it harder and harder to understand each-other, ‘things’ themselves become blurry.
Now, do the statues of these two people stand for the same thing? And no, I’m not trying to discern between two villains!
Each of them had done an immense amount of harm and had produced endless suffering. People are still smarting to this day because of what both of them had done. Only there are some differences between them. One had also done some good in his life. While the other had been used, after his death and without his consent, as a symbol. After he had, directly, kept people in slavery he had also been used to further the sufferings of black people.
Are we capable of seeing any of these differences? Or are we too angry to differentiate?
Do you remember why we had invented political correctness in the first place?
Descartes was the first who had introduced a ‘pecking order’ into this mess.
Dubito ergo cogito. Cogito ergo sum.
You’re free to translate this any way you want. Mine goes like this:
My existence is certified only by my doubts.
My existence as a human being, of course. As a conscious human!
The ‘pecking order’ being, as far as I figure it out:
I need to exist, as an animal, in order to become conscious. And I need to gain consciousness in order to learn about my existence.
Complicated? Let me elaborate.
Our understanding of the world is incomplete. First of all, there are so many things we don’t know about.
For example, we have no idea what goes on between Mars and Jupiter. We think we know that there’s no major planet hidden in between those two orbits. No object with an important enough mass to disturb either Mars or Jupiter and no object with an albedo big enough to be noticed. To be noticed by us… Other than that… we have no clue about what’s going on there. In fact, we don’t know much about what’s going on in the middle of our own planet… or on the floor of ‘our’ oceans…
But the fact that we don’t know about their existence doesn’t preclude the actual existence of whatever ‘objects’ and/or organisms might happen to be there.
Secondly, there are so many things we don’t fully understand. Not yet, anyway. We are aware of their existence – because we’ve been confronted with some ‘consequences’ of the aforementioned things, but we haven’t yet figured out, exactly, how those consequences have been produced. For example, we’re still learning about viruses. About their ability to bypass our defenses. About how they infect us. About how we might improve our chances of avoiding/surviving infection.
But the fact that we don’t fully understand them doesn’t preclude us – well, some of us, from believing those viruses to be real.
My point being that ‘existence’ is far wider than ‘reality’. There’s no need for us to know about it for something to exist. But for something to be considered ‘real’, by us, that something needs to exist first.
‘But aren’t you contradicting yourself? In a previous post, you argued that ‘the Flat Earth’ was real?!?’
Confusing, isn’t it? I’m sorry if I misled you. All I was trying to say was that ‘the Flat Earth’, as a concept, is ‘real’. In the sense that so many people discussing it – either for or against, make it real. Those very discussions, a direct consequence of the concept’s very existence – albeit only in the virtual space, give consistency to its reality. Don’t get me wrong. The Earth – as I ‘know’ it, continues to be round. The Earth – that we live on, is not ‘Flat’. The Earth doesn’t exist as a flat object.
We are confronted with two facts here. 1. All that we’ve so far learned about it leads us to the conclusion that the Earth is, more or less, round. 2. There still are people who believe – or pretend to, that the Earth is flat.
The second fact exists. The belief which made it possible is false. As far as we know. As far as the scientific community is convinced. Yet the fact still remains. Those people believing in it provide it with ‘existence’. Those people believing in it make it ‘real’.
As for the fact finding mission… I wonder! Given the amount of loyalty extended to Trump by Kevin McCarthy, how many years might pass before the facts will be ‘found’?
5?!? And who would be fingered for ‘starting the whole thing’?
Now, will ‘they’ find a constitutional way to set a precedent? That a guy who had so horribly – and tragically, misused the sacred notion of “freedom of expression” has no place in such a powerful position? Or, by failing to do so – for whatever reasons, will ‘they’ leave open the ‘opportunity’ for an even more callous ‘political animal’ to climb into the Oval Office?
Being an engineer, I’m gonna present you with a more straight-forward version than the philosophical one.
For something to be real, it has to have consequences.
‘But…?!?’
No buts! The only thing which classifies something as being real or not is our consciousness. Without it, without our consciousness, the something we’re talking about now – reality itself, would cease to be ‘real’. Without us pondering about it, ‘reality’ would continue to exist, of course! Only it would no longer bear a name… Without us being concerned enough about it, it would ‘disappear’ from our ‘radar’.
‘Yes, but … you just said that something becomes real as soon as it has consequences! We encounter ‘real’ things in each and every moment of our existence. We need air to breathe, water to drink… food to eat. And a solid earth to walk on…’
True enough. Only for all these things to become ‘real’, we first need to notice them!
See how ironic things are? In retrospect, electrons are real. Despite the fact that none of us can actually see them. Or otherwise ‘feel’ them. In any way, shape or form! But until we had gathered enough evidence about their existence…
And now, that our discussion has reached this subject – evidence, I feel the need to mention the fact that Earth is not yet round ‘enough’. That there still are some people actually believing in the notion of the Flat Earth.
‘Are you implying that the Earth might be Flat?!?’
Excellent question, thank you very much! (If I may say something like that myself. Please excuse my boastfulness!)
You see, we are dealing here with two things. Two very different things.
The roundness of the Earth. Which seems to be real. The ‘Flat Earth’. Which is certainly real.
The roundness of the Earth belongs to the realm of science. Which is ‘wrong by definition‘. At least according to Popper… In the sense that the Earth will continue to remain round only till somebody will prove it to be different. Which had happened already… In ‘reality’, the Earth resembles a potato more than anything else! On the famous ‘other side’, the ‘Flat Earth Theory’ belongs to the realm of belief. Which is also real. Not in the ‘direct’ sense – a concept which describes a real ‘reality’, only in the sense that it has certain consequences.
‘The Flat Earth has consequences?!? You admit that the concept – ‘the Flat Earth’, describes something which doesn’t exist yet you pretend that it has consequences?’
Yep!
Can you deny the reality of this whole thing? Six hundred and twenty million hits? In less than point 8 seconds? Can you pretend these are not ‘real consequences’? Can you imagine, for instance, how much energy is spent only to preserve this amount of raw information in the ‘cloud’. How much ‘space’? How much bandwidth is used to transport this ‘fake-ness’ across the ‘globe’!
‘And where does this whole thing lead us? What about the Flat Earth? Is it still a fake?’
Yeah. I’m actually tempted to say ‘obviously’! On the other hand… it’s hard to deny how ‘real’ the whole thing is…
I challenge you to try an experiment. Click the illustration bellow, copy the link and post it to your favorite social media. Then observe the likes you’ll get. I wasn’t surprised to notice that many people on the right side of the political divide were quite fond of it’s spirit…
That there’s not much real difference between the radicals. Between the radical members of both parties. Both are so convinced that they ‘know better’ that neither have any qualms trying to impose their vision upon everybody else. Both are so convinced that they are right that they ‘hate’ all other authority but their own. And they hate each-other’s guts… only that comes with the territory…
Let me start with the beginning.
I grew up under a communist regime. Drowning in propaganda. The education system was finely tuned to raise us, children, as ‘the New Man’. All cultural effort – culture was ‘sponsored’ by the communist state and heavily censored, was meant to achieve the same goal. Immediately after the communist regime had grabbed the absolute political power, the legislation had been altered to reflect the ‘new reality’. And then used to convince the people to change their behavior according to the new rules. According to whatever the new masters had in mind … So that they could control everything. That nobody else could have exerted any authority. That nobody else could have had any real influence over anything.
And, as you might know, the communist regime – most of them, anyway, had eventually crumbled. Under its own weight.
Which teaches us two things.
That whenever a system is run in an authoritarian manner, mistakes keep piling. One on top of the previous one. Constituting the dead-weight which will eventually sink the ship. That no artificial ‘New Man’ will ever survive for long. Yes, you may ‘legislate behavior’ – even against the true wishes of the general population, only the ‘new’ arrangement will not last for long. For a ‘legislation’ to be able to survive for any substantial amount of time it has to reflect the ‘true heart’ of those called to put it into practice. To ‘follow the rules’. That you ‘can restrain the heartless’ but for only as long as the ‘heartless’ remain a small minority.
Want to ‘change’ something? Then open people’s eyes first. Only that way they’ll eventually open up their hearts.
‘What about the spat between AOC and Ted Cruise? Where’s the link between what happened with GameStop and MLK’s attempt to regulate behavior?’
Both AOC and Ted Cruise hate the fact that there are independent agents. Besides them, of course. That there still are people who call their own shots. Private companies they cannot control, media venues, independent authorities… The ‘AOC’-s and the ‘Ted Cruise’-s of this world hate each-others guts but have more or less the same convictions.
That they are right – and everybody else is wrong. And that there must be a way! That there must be a way, a ‘rational’ way, in which their righteousness may be imposed upon the rest of the world.
That ‘rational’ way implying two things. Control over the ‘material’ resources and control over people’s minds.
That’s why the communists had ‘abolished’ private property. That’s why the (no longer free market) contemporary capitalists are OK with extreme wealth polarization. As long as they on the right side of the ‘in-equation’, of course… That’s why education has become such a hot subject. That’s why control over the legislative process has become so important. Why controlling the markets – controlling them, not preserving their freedom, is paramount…
The only bright thing in this whole mess being that the two sides still hate each-other’s guts. Which gives us some more lee-way.
Time to understand that for progress to be possible we need to take care of our roots. To ‘conserve’ them! Time to remember that ‘pruning’ needs to be done carefully.
That we have to ‘cut’ only what’s ‘wrong’, not everything we don’t like.
How to tell those two apart? ‘Humility’ comes very handy in these moments…. Freedom isn’t for free. Nobody is free by itself, only together. Those who really want to be free must start by respecting each-other. That’s how mistakes are avoided. By asking for a second-opinion. By listening to what others have to say on the matter. That’s how normalcy is being defined. And preserved. How we learn what’s ‘wrong’. How to tell what works from what needs to be pruned.
I cannot wrap this up before giving you a fine example of how ‘propaganda’ works. It starts with cutting up the truth. By actually pruning it to fit the purpose. Then let’s our already primed brains to do the rest.
nicichiarasa 