Saturday, October 28, 2017

Dog or coyote?

Dog or coyote? 

Woman posts story of mistaking coyote for a dog and giving it a bath next thing the fact checker scythe say picture is years old and is just that of a tame coyote.. I like the original story a lot better. It has heart that appeals to me.  

If it is not a matter of life and death I prefer my own romance to the sterile words of fact checkers who have no skin in the game no interest except to prove their own superiority...superior to me… fact checking can be way overdone and breaks connections between people. Fact checking does not allow for the power of intuition the ability to know before the scientific studies are published and validated by which time the facts are often no longer interesting, outdated, commonplace and ordinary. 

Worse, fact checking often does not support, even wantonly breaks down, the mythology which is the cultural glue that binds people in communities.

Even when the facts are correct the outcome can be dangerous or cause breakdown in connections between people. A few years ago a social scientist proclaimed the evidence based fact that standing and holding oneself in certain ways would give one more confidence and enable more influence on others.  So what then? What if the influence is evil? Is it a good idea to give matches to babies?? 

In my own life 50% of the supposedly fact checked verified drugs I have been given have been taken off the market only after killing thousands of people when used for a while… so whose facts are useful to me ? The fact that an amanita mushroom is deadly and like examples. Am I not right to ask who has been using this new drug and what has been the effect? No matter what the supposedly evidence based studies say? 

Often the original story is better more fun and interesting tell me this rock came with my Grandfather across the Atlantic from Italy and I prize it, keep it around . Some smug geologist comes along who is only interested in making me wrong and tells me it must have come from Halifax when he got off the boat and I say I wish I had never known you. The rock means far more to me than your “facts” mean to you. 

The great scientists and mathematicians the ground breakers act on their feelings and intuitions in deciding what interest to pursue, often years or generations ahead of their time… In my own life every useful pursuit that led to years of satisfaction started with a completely unverified intuition that only was proven by the outcomes it led me to…


Saturday, July 29, 2017

What is Americanism?

Gist of American (Republican? not only) ism 


My take on current news from the USA…

co-opted for money battening on voter ignorance and frustration with greedy oligarchs seizing ownership of resources creating a revival of medieval economies lords and serfs the GOP legislators have become seriously malicious along with their own long-standing wilful ignorance…

And here is what the Washington Post has to say:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/right-turn/wp/2017/07/14/the-gops-moral-rot-is-the-problem-not-donald-trump-jr/?tid=a_inl&utm_term=.a5437cc502e2


Quote from the above:

“Out of its collective sense of victimhood came the GOP’s disdain for not just intellectuals but also intellectualism, science, Economics 101, history and constitutional fidelity. If the Trump children became slaves to money and to their father’s unbridled ego, then the GOP became slaves to its own demons and false narratives. A party that has to deny climate change and insist illegal immigrants are creating a crime wave — because that is what “conservatives” must believe, since liberals do not — is a party that will deny Trump’s complicity in gross misconduct. It’s a party as unfit to govern as Trump is unfit to occupy the White House. It’s not by accident that Trump chose to inhabit the party that has defined itself in opposition to reality and to any “external moral truth or ethical code.”

my response

No, not just the GOP. “Victimhood” is Americanism at its most fundamental…

The pervasive background to the American psyche, the cloth on which their culture is laid, has always been their individual and collective victimhood.  “National security” is their mantra for nearly every act of governance at every level. When I ask an intelligent well-read well-educated American friend why their government’s vast expenditures and clumsy, intrusive, efforts to secure their borders, already thousands of miles from any possible major enemy, they reply to me “it is because they hate us! “


Their collective sense of victimhood, over their entire 240 years of history, of large segments of the American population,  has led them to the approaching collapse of what is left of their civility and democratic institutions... and this victimhood is an introjection, a “taking within” of the feelings and fears and abuses they projected onto the “black” africans and the “red” indigenous others by their founding morality as slave owners and genocidal colonialists which has persisted to this day. Now they have even with the vast technological capability of their armies, extended this insult to natural morality to wreaking havoc on millions in the Middle East and elsewhere just because they can and have always been motivated to destroy their imagined enemies.. The first thing Americans did , after 1776, with their new navy, was to travel to the Middle East and attempt to subdue it so as to be able to trade and bring back their goods at bargain prices…