Is Pondering Dead?

I wonder how much time the average person spends pondering something abstract or about things in the news? I am sure many people pondering when or what car too buy and other trivialities but what about someone who wants to vote. Do they stop and think about the issues or do they just listen to what the media is saying and the medias line of reasoning becomes their own? Now that's a scary thought, a society of people getting their reasoning from one source without questioning it.

I don't believe a lot of people ponder abstract things since there is almost always a reluctance to discuss these matters. If one thinks about something they usually want to express their thoughts and so I must conclude most people don't think about these things. For instance Religion. If someone spent time pondering aspects of their religion wouldn't they be willing to discuss it? Same with politics, but in our society these are the two major taboos to talk about!

When I see how badly the media can distort information (such as Rev. Al Sharpton's speech at the Democratic National Convention being simply called a rant with no inquiry as to what he said, but an observation that his teleprompter didn't move since he didn't use his prepared speech!! Nice going CNN, oops your colors are showing!) and here people simply regurgitating the line of reasoning, especially when it's irrational such as missile defense, it scares the Dickens out of me. What kind of society do we live in when people stop thinking for themselves and a freethinker is viewed as a trouble maker?

Stupid Missile Defense

In the beginning some people think of this as a good idea, but clearly this is due to a combination of poor information and a lack of pondering the issue. Simply put this is a dumb idea! See here for more:
The Globe and Mail

The simplest argument is the one that states there are Boogie men out there trying to bomb us!?! Most people respond with it can't hurt! Well take a second to think about implementing this. Once you place weapons in space you have to communicate with your weapons. What if the Boogie man get a hold of your communications. He could bomb what you are trying to protect! Or more likely, what if a macro meteoroid (small piece of anything since things in space average 18000km/h+ a pebble can kill) hits some component and the weapons array fails. The list goes on. The fact is there are something you just have to put in perspective: you are thousands of times more likely to die in a car than in any act of terrorism. Not to mention the amount of money needed to put up defenses is so high you could simply buy thousands of friends worldwide by paying for their medicine and helping them build and infrastructure that they would be forever grateful! If the U.S. spent 1% of it's 10 billion/year of missile defense research (that real scientists have said it will not work already) you could build schools and hospitals for the people around the people who don't like you and so they'd eventually stop that's you since you educated and healed their both, cousin etc. But that's not the way the military industrial complex works. Well, Eastasia is starting to take shape so soon Oceania will have an "enemy/ally" to wage "war" with (it's a reference to 1984 by George Orwell, which for a political savvy humanist is like a rabbi reading the original Torah for the first time).

The Jews were (mostly) right

A few weeks ago I heard a rabbi on The Daily Show in a comedic interview (I think he thought it was real) say something in seriousness that hit me. He said in response to the question, "What would Jesus say" referring to the wearing of synthetic hair pieces and he said that there wasn't anything special about Jesus and that Jewish history is littered with people coming back to life. After my initial laughing I thought about this for a bit. If this were true then it should also be happens today. If you think about the way Jesus died he was only crucified. After the loss of blood it is reasonable to assume he would have passed out. But did he die? Well how would they have known he was dead? The didn't know about pulses so they could only tell about his breathing and it is reasonable to assume they could have just made a mistake.

So does it happen today. Yes. People are revived shortly after dying all the time. There are also cases of people spontaneously reviving on the coroners table not by miracle but simply by the fact our definition of death needs refining. It is completely reasonable to assume that the rabbi was correct since back then they could have mistaken death for other unconscious states. So if that's all that is pointing people to Jesus as the messiah, I think the Jews are right, Jesus was just a misunderstanding about the definition of death.

Protesting

I see a lot of protests in the news and get a lot of paper telling me when protests are and so I stated to wonder how effective the protest is? In the past few years I can't recall any government protests that have worked (though I'm sure there have been), fully. I do know of quite a few corporate protests, though, that have succeeded. This seems to be an oddity to me at first, but when I think about it I can start to see why and it's scary.

The corporate protests are usually directed at retail businesses. Now the saying, "any publicity is good publicity probably," should have the tail, "if you can spin it correctly." This seems to be because of the chain of events. First there is a protest about some retailer doing something amoral and it gets published. Then the company decides which road to take, either deny deny deny or make concessions and look like the good guy. Usually the latter isn't financial bad and so some corps opt for it and so the system works. But when this happens to corps who don't fit into a free market system (because they are so big they exert market forces) they don't change and ignore the protest. I guess these don't work because the size of the protest is too small in comparison with the size of the Corp. For instance if McD servers a few million a year then what impact will 5000 make?

But what about governments. They are elected and are suppose to represent the people. Well in my view when it comes to protests they look with an attitude of a parent listening to his five year old about moving out. Now the elected official have to make an important judgment call: do I do what I think is right or what my constituents want? (That's an issue for another post) And it seems to me the most often used logic is: I can please the most people if I do what will make the most money since everyone loves money, especially my corporate sponsors.

The fact is on any decision in government you will make some people happy and get protest from others. It seems to me like the goal of protesting is simply to raise the issue, most of the time, unless you can get a fairly large percentage of the "stakeholders" to come out. So maybe the very fact that we have protests and learn about an issue though it maybe a reflection on how well we are doing our civic duty and managing our society.

Gay Marriage and Democracy

Who cares? Apparently a lot of people. It always seems odd that people complain about being married but what to reserve that misery for themselves. Or they want to keep the status quo so that companies and governments don't have to pay out pensions and benefits to gay couples.

It seems like a feeble attempt of the Conservatives to side-track important issues such as foreign policy decisions, healthcare, education etc!

How can it make sense for the Government to want to have a say as to what goes on in your bedroom, but it also wants us not to know who it's getting money from (corporate donors) and how it's spending it.

Corporations

When I think about a corporation I see a slightly different picture than the Corporation (which I strongly suggest to anyone). The Corporation is born from the government's charter and the money of the shareholders. But the entity that appears has only one trait: greed. The shareholders that fund and push the entity forward are in the venture with one desire: greed. So the entity is an amalgamation of all the greed of the shareholders. But who guides this entity? Well its got to be someone who can satisfy the greed of the shareholders and so it must be someone who is greedy. This seems to be the Achilles heel of the entity. The guide(s) (board of directors) is also incredibly greedy and will inevitably try to seize more of the money and the whole thing will come apart (Enron, Worldcom etc).

Imagine that the board of directors are so greedy they topple the very beast they are guiding. That's an impressive amount of greed!

What I don't understand is how powerless the public feels. Corporations may be big and have a lot of money but in the end they are subservient to, not only their shareholders (who most likely won't move unless their profit is challenged), but to it's clientele. If a large chunk of people stopped buying Nike for any reason, Nike would very quickly change and meet their demands. A corporation is single minded and so is very much like a turtle with a carrot in front of it, you can guide it with the carrot and the clients have the carrots. So why are people so passive? Is it that they feel powerless, or do they not know anything is wrong (hear no evil see no evil)? Are people convinced by advertising (most commercial turn me off to a product or aid me in making fun of the company such as MacD)?

Why are oppressive regimes so afraid to give power to the people, except for a few, most people will still let you dictate their lives?

Just because you can say it doesn't mean it makes sense

Baby spout out many sounds that we find cute but don't put any particular emphasis on. This is because we know the baby doesn't have any meaning behind most of those sounds (crying and laughing are obvious exceptions). Once we learn to speak we sometimes ask questions that don't make sense to adults. For instance, "What is fire made of?" or "Which is bigger, pow or caboom?"

In order to give an answer to any question we must first understand the meaning of all the words in the question. But here in lies the problem, some words may have a "meaning" but not a actual definition (such as "mind" which has a meaning to everyone, but don't ask two people to define it) or they have commonly misunderstood "meanings" (so common they wind up in the dictionary) but are very well defined (such as "force"). When the meanings get blurred with the definitions people can start to make nonsensical questions and conclusions.

If one asks, "Does Hell exist?" One must not only define Hell (not just use it's "meaning", is it a place, living condition etc...) but also define "existence" otherwise there are an infinite number of valid answers depending on the chosen "meaning." Clearly the question is no longer a question but an idea to be shaped. That's fine unless you try and reason with it!

One reason to ask questions is to learn but when ill-defined terms are used the questions lose all meaning and so does any answer and you go nowhere. How do I know this? Well this idea is part of the "realism" school of philosophy which is now usually called science which has achieved so much. The other schools are still in session but haven't produced a graduate yet, but they are unlikely to stop since they would then be forced to become scientists and we all know philosophers are wannabe scientist who are bad at math. Just kidding.

But next time you decide to talk or think about supposed questions like,"Does God exist?" or "What is a soul made of?" take a second to ask, "Are these well defined questions?"

Note: Some words that have very well defined meanings for a realist (but the meanings are terribly distorted) are: energy, force, existence, matter, reality and interaction.

Canadian Election

I've waited a while to write my thoughts on the election so that I wouldn't sound too angry. Needless to say I was really disappointed, both with the overall result and my riding result.

In my riding the Liberal candidate won by 18000 votes! The NDP got the best showing in the riding ever but the very fact that the riding with a huge gay population voted for the Liberals to me is a sign that people were voting against the Conservatives. This is because the Conservative agenda is just that "Conservative" as opposed to the Progressive Conservatives that had a more liberal approach to social policies.

As a young voter the question I used to try to answer for an election was: Who should I vote for? Then I got my chance to vote for the 1st time and I didn't answer that question I simply looked at the main party in my region, the Bloc, and looked at one item on their agenda, separation, and said what's my alternative. Now I should have looked at my alternatives but instead I wanted my vote to (hopefully) topple the front runner. So, I am ashamed to say, I voted Liberal (regardless, the Bloc won by a huge majority anyways). So what if I had never got into politics and read anymore about the parties and only heard and watched the news? I'd have probably voted Liberal again. Now I wonder how many people do the same thing, that is come into this complex world or party politics and in an attempt to participate they simply either go with the flow (vote for the ruling party) or vote against the flow without considering almost anything about the policies? From this they easily flow into the pattern of strategic voting, taking the lesser of two evils. To me it seems like a lot of people do this, judging from the election results.

Maybe part of the problem is the fact that it almost impossible to have a discussion about politics with people unless you are both leaning towards the same party. During canvassing many people where simply unwilling to talk about their political views. Why? I know that in the old days everything was censored, but now how is it people are soo quiet about their opinions about who spends their money. People aren't afraid to talk to you about their bank. So why their political party? From what I have gathered the only explanation is there decision is irrationally based and won't stand to questioning so they won't talk about it, such as, "it's what my grandfather, my father voted so now I vote the same way." though the best responses are, "I don't vote because...[something about disapproving of the system]". These people are so lazy they won't even vote for a party that disapproves of the system! (And yes there are a few.) In fact if all those disagreeing voters voted for one of these parties we'd be in a completely different system in 8 years!

Maybe we need to start "practicing" democracy. Open discussions should be more common than talk about what sports teams are doing. People should be ashamed of not being informed (not ashamed of not voting, some people shouldn't vote) not the contrary and most of all we should be "practicing" democracy more than once every few years (voting is not the only part of democracy, issues are raised all the time and people should know about them while they happen not when the next election comes up). Hard to believe people are dying (literally) to get the right to vote.