It is exceedingly hot here today, so have a video of a man strapping fans to himself:
http://ted.com/talks/view/id/2804Musings
Life Outside the Tank
You say we don’t understand your experience.
So we ask.
And you say that it ain’t your job to educate us.
Which is true, but doesn’t help solve the issue.
And solving the issue’s not your job either,
But that don’t mean you aren’t allowed to try if you want.
Which is why there are your stories out there.
Stories we get to read if we find them.
But they aren’t everywhere.
They aren’t common enough that we see the nuance just by breathing.
Because it’s not your job to educate or to fix.
And because of the cheap-shooting, foul-mouthed,
Logical-only-when-it-suits minority.
Those unhappy few who spew hate at anyone who dares to
Not be a bitter little pill
And who deserve
To be treated like human beings.
Because that’s how it works.
If humanity, decency, and virtue are about more than my tribe’s gonna kill yours,
Then that’s how it works.
They don’t have a right to come to your forum and talk shit about your faith.
The don’t have a right to come to your post and make jokes about your mother.
But they do have the right to be treated like a human being.
Because Kant’s idea that we make the rules
So we treat you the way we want to treated
Has problems.
But if you turn it round:
Create some rule about treating others the way you don’t want to be treated?
The clue’s in the name: Tnak.
Because, that’s not just an idea that will tank society;
It’s muddled thinking too.
Because we all share one experience:
Someone smacks you round the head, you want to smack them back.
A Short Broadcast on Behalf of Engagement
Vote!
Vote for the world you’d like.
Vote for someone you trust to counter selfish policies.
Even vote to keep another candidate out if that’s what you choose.
But vote.
And remember, if your vote really were worthless, then you wouldn’t lose anything by casting it.
Welfare Is Cheaper and Smarter
The question of whether there is something immoral about not working for a living is complex addressing partially as it does issues of the soul. However, a basic income for all adults has been shown to save money as well as improve lives, so must feature in discussions of sound economic policy. …
Why Oppose When You Can Embrace?
Elections are won by men and women chiefly because most people vote against somebody rather than for somebody.
– Franklin Pierce Adams
I understand the desire to prevent someone from gaining power, to seek the path of least danger, but if the system isn’t producing candidates you can vote for then you need the system to change. And how do you achieve change by doing the safest thing?
Or to put it another way, as Herodotus says, each part of a binary contains its opposite: so a vote for Labour is a vote for the Conservatives.
Therefore, I’ll be voting for the world I want rather than against only one of the ones I don’t.
Prior Unreasoning
There’s a famous aphorism “Do what I say, not what I do” which is often trotted out either to show one person or everyone is a hypocrite when it comes to morals. And, whichever interpretation you favour, it’s hard to deny that it’s often much easier to suggest a moral choice from the comfort of an armchair than it is to make a moral choice in the moment. The harder question is whether or not someone should be judged harshly for these deviations from higher morals.
The answer to which might begin with whether they are truly choices. As this talk by Robert Saplosky shows, the choice might have been rigged decades earlier:
The Miracle of the Mundane
On Saturday, I played another rather excellent session of 7th Seas LARP. During the course of that, my character ended up in an interesting conversation with a priest over whether miracles were inexplicable and obvious events, or tiny changes deliberately hidden behind rationale explanation to not compromise our free will. The priest remained adamant that they were son et lumière, glorious in their imperviousness to logic, and things moved on.
However, this morning, I went to look up something in my dictionary of quotations and it opened on this quote:
I suspect the truth is that we are waiting, all of us, against insurmountable odds, for something extraordinary to happen to us.
– Khaled Hosseini
Which made me wonder: is the miracle in neither the obvious defiance of natural law nor the hidden influence that we can interpret either way, but in the moment when we are living rather than waiting.
Or perhaps I’ve read too much Colin Wilson.
The Infinity Mainframe by Robert Scott-Norton
Scott-Norton mixes the ordered manner of police thrillers with telepathy and close-future dystopia to create a story that feels like cyberpunk from the side of the law. …
Collapsing an N-Dimensional Cube
I write this in a state of overwhelming terror. Terror that – despite its all-pervading nature – I have managed to utterly repress beneath a belief that I’m bimbling along cheerfully. …
And Justice From All
To mark International Women’s Day, Google+ invited me to share a photograph of a woman who inspires me: I chose Her Honour Judge Brown.
Not because there is something specific about Her Honour that inspires me, but because I found a photograph of her before I found one of one of the another female judge that I’ve appeared before.
Because that’s what inspires me: that there are enough immense intellects who’ve dedicated themselves to justice and equity who also happen to be female that I’ve appeared before too many to pick one on achievements alone.
So, pure alphabetic order wins it.
