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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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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The difference between us and the rest is that we can choose. People – humans, that is, are capable of deciding things while the rest of the animals use simpler mechanisms of determining the way forward.
The ability to decide has consequences. The most important being ‘responsibility’. The most common being ‘blame’.
When confronted with ‘uncomfortable’ consequences of the decision making process, people get to choose between blame and responsibility. Between apportioning blame – and feeling better, and determining responsibility.
I’ve long ago given up ‘blame’. Because blame is driven by emotion. Hence blinds the blamers. Prevents them from checking all the angles. Prevents them from getting as close to the reality as possible.
Let’s go back to the current pandemic. A large number of people have not yet been immunized against Covid -19, despite the vaccine being widely available. In certain ‘jurisdictions’…
Because each of the yet unvaccinated has chosen to pass the opportunity? Or because so much ‘dubious’ information has been floated around that it has almost drowned the sensible voices?
Should we blame the as yet unconvinced or should we ask ourselves what’s going on in the heads of the ‘gaslighters’?
Facts are clear.
WSJ is a highly reputable source, the information is old enough – if ‘fake’ it would have already been ‘debugged’,… Then why isn’t this being hammered down our throats? Constantly?
The vaccine which had been used was Chinese?
Let’s make the same experiment using one of ours! It has been already done? Let’s hear about it!
We are in the middle of a pandemic. Which will continue until we’ll build ‘herd immunity’. Which can be achieved through vaccination or by surviving the disease. Surviving the disease takes longer and costs way more than the vaccine. Lives lost, money spent for health care and money lost because of business interruptions. And if we don’t build herd immunity fast enough, the virus might mutate into a new one. And we’ll be back to the square one.
The only section of the society which has anything to gain from our reticence to get the vaccine is BigPharma. They are the ones who will eventually come up with a vaccine for the new strain of virus. They are the ones providing the treatment given to the infected patients. They are the ones providing the tests.
Want to give the finger to BigPharma?
Go out there and get the jab!
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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!
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!
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!
Let’s recap the events, as described in the NY Times article.
2004 – Ms Constand was raped by Mr. Cosby. According to the 2018 sentence! Please note that the Pennsylvania High Court didn’t say the 2018 jurors had ‘seen things”. Only that the trial shouldn’t have taken place!
2006 – The civil case was settled for $3.38 million. As in Bill Cosby agreed to pay that amount of money for something the prosecution wasn’t sure that it was able to convince a jury that he had actually done it.
2015 – The next district attorney reopened the case. And got a conviction. Despite the fact that the ‘main’ evidence had been provided by the defendant himself. Given after he was promised he wasn’t incriminating himself in a penal way.
2018 – Mr. Cosby is convicted for something he had done 14 years ago.
2021 – The Pennsylvania Supreme Court decides that Mr. Cosby had been practically duped into incriminating himself, found this to be unacceptable and released the former prisoner.
What are we, ordinary citizens, to make out of all these?
Be glad that our individual rights have been upheld? It makes a lot of sense! After all, upholding individual rights is what makes the difference between a free society and an authoritarian one. Between people being free and finding themselves at the whims of the government.
Ask ourselves ‘what about the individual rights of the victim’? That also makes sense. But my experience of living under a dictatorship strongly suggests that letting some guilty people walk free is a small price to pay for making resonably sure that a government – any government, doesn’t accrue too much power over the individuals making up the people.
Ask ourselves ‘what happened to us’? What drives so many of to use constitutional rights as loopholes? Is this OK?
No legislation will ever be perfect! That’s why verdicts are given by ‘peers’, judges are given so much ‘leeway’ and why, in general, the law is administered by highly trained responsible people and not by ‘machines’.
After all, how we use whatever we have at our disposal – legislation included, speaks more about ourselves than about the things we use and the circumstances in which we make our choices.
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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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!
Respecting other people’s opinions means respectfully telling them how wrong they are – when they are, of course, instead of shouting, in their faces, about how stupid they are – in that precise moment.
In this sense, this meme is, actually, inflammatory. Nobody who has paid some attention in high-school – and has maintained a working eye-sight, will ever opine about something like this. Only those who 1. don’t see/know the difference between a ‘factor’ and a ‘base’ and/or 2. don’t care enough to pay real attention – and want to get it over with, would fall prey to this ‘ruse’.
Using this example to demand ‘stop the antiscience movement’ is, in fact, disrespectful! And counterproductive. It will only deepen the chasm between those who believe in science and those who see the ‘science peddlers’ as being arrogant know-alls.
The whole thing raises a poignant question. We have a business here. The sporting tournaments live by selling advertising space. To do that, they need to grab our attention. Given the insistence with which the organizers insist that the athletes have to attend the press conferences, which is the main attention grabber? The ‘athletic prowess’ itself or the ‘big talk’ that follows the actual ‘sports meeting’?
The market had become free. Free for more and more people to search for new ways to meet their needs. This freedom had allowed the market to become efficient enough for more and more people to be able to satisfy some of their wishes, on top of most of their needs.
Agora had become free. So free that politicians had to solve more and more of the real problems encountered by the society at large. Life had become so free that states had become prosperous.
And more and more of the people were happy!
Now, the market is so free that more and more people have started to search for ‘really’ new ways to meet their wishes. Eventually, they came to be known as ‘financial engineers’. The market is no longer the place where people meet to satisfy their needs but the place where some of them accrue huge sums of money while more and more of the rest find it harder and harder to survive.
The Agora is also at its freest. ‘Political marketeers’ have taken over from the ‘the old school’ – and ‘real’ politics have been replaced with ‘give the people what they want’. Political life is no longer about solving problems. It has become a relentless quest for power. Keeping things ‘afloat’ is no longer THE goal, only a cost.
Is this sustainable?
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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!
One of my eyes is short-sighted. Both are astigmatic. Hence my visual relationship with the ‘exterior’ is impaired. Relative to that of a ‘normal’ person…
When I took up photography, as a hobby, there were no such things as self focusing cameras. Pictures as those you are about to see were way ‘out of range’ for me.
Because of my inability to focus a camera fast enough. And because long ranged lenses were too expensive for me, in those times.
Being conscious of my limits was no cure for my frustration!
Thankfully, technology made it possible for me to indulge in my hobby! To overcome some of my limitations.
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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! Another very efficient way to help would be to share my posts.
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 