Archive for September 25th, 2017
Your origin myths? Manipulation to indoctrinate you to racist tendencies?
Posted by: adonis49 on: September 25, 2017
Dare to refuse the origin myths that claim who you are
We all have the narratives for origin stories, identity myths, our tribal oral stories that give us a sense of security and belonging.
Sometimes our small-group identities can keep us from connecting with humanity as a whole — and even keep us from seeing others as human.
Chetan Bhatt challenges us to think creatively about each other and our future. As he puts it: it’s time to change the question from “Where are you from?” to “Where are you going?”
And I say: If you fail to elevate your human status to humanity, what have you been doing with your life?
This talk was presented to a local audience at TEDxExeter, an independent event. TED editors featured it among our selections on the home page.
people say that origin stories and identity myths make us feel secure. What’s wrong with that?
They give us a sense of belonging. Identity is your cultural clothing, and it can make you feel warm and fuzzy inside. But does it really?
Do we really need identity myths to feel safe? Because I see religious, national, ethnic disputes as adding to human misery.
Can I dare you to refuse every origin myth that claims you?
What if we reject every single primordial origin myth and develop a deeper sense of person-hood, one responsible to humanity as a whole, rather than to a particular tribe, a radically different idea of humanity that exposes how origin myths mystify, disguise global power, rapacious exploitation, poverty, the worldwide oppression of women and girls, and of course massive, accelerating inequalities?
I was brought up in the 1970s near Wembley with Asian, English, Caribbean, Irish families living in our street, and the neo-Nazi National Front was massive then with regular marches and attacks on us and a permanent threat and often a frequent reality of violence against us on the streets, in our homes, typically by neo-Nazis and other racists.
And I remember during a general election a leaflet came through our letter box with a picture of the National Front candidate for our area. And the picture was of our next-door neighbor. He threatened to shoot me once when I played in the garden as a kid, and many weekends, shaven-headed National Front activists arrived at his house and emerged with scores of placards screaming that they wanted us to go back home.
But today he’s one of my mum’s best mates. He’s a very lovely, gentle and kind man, and at some point in his political journey out of fascism he embraced a broader idea of humanity.
There was a Hindu family that we got to know well — and you have to understand that life in our street was a little bit like the setting for an Asian soap opera. Everyone knew everyone else’s business, even if they didn’t want it to be known by anyone at all. You really had no choice in this matter.
But in this family, there was a quiet little boy who went to the same school as I did, and after I left school, I didn’t hear much more about him, except that he’d gone off to India.
around 2000, I remember seeing this short book. The book was unusual because it was written by a British supporter of Al Qaeda, and in it the author calls for attacks in Britain.
This is in 1999, so 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq was still in the future, and he helped scout New York bombing targets. He taught others how to make a dirty bomb to use on the London Underground, and he plotted a massive bombing campaign in London’s shopping areas. He’s a very high-risk security prisoner in the UK and one of the most important Al Qaeda figures to be arrested in Britain.
The author of that book was the very same quiet little boy who went to my school. So a Hindu boy from Britain became an Al Qaeda fighter and a most-wanted international terrorist, and he rejected what people would call his Hindu or Indian or British identity, and he became someone else.
He refused to be who he was. He recreated himself, and this kind of journey is very common for young men and women who become involved in Al Qaeda or Islamic State or other transnational armed groups.
Al Qaeda’s media spokesman is a white American from a Jewish and Catholic mixed background, and neither he nor the boy from my school were from Muslim backgrounds. There’s no point in asking them where are they from. A more important question is where they’re going.
And I would also put it to you that exactly the same journey occurs for those young men and women who were brought up in Muslim family backgrounds. Most of those who join Al Qaeda and other Salafi jihadi groups from Europe, Asia, North America, even in many cases the Middle East are those who have comprehensively rejected their backgrounds to become, in essence, new people.
They spend an enormous amount of time attacking their parents’ backgrounds as profane, impure, blasphemous, the wrong type of Islam, and their vision instead is a fantastical view of cosmic apocalypse.
It’s a born again vision. Discard your past, your society, your family and friends since they’re all impure.
Instead, become someone else, your true self, your authentic self. Now, this isn’t about a return to the past.
It’s about using a forgery of the past to envision an appalling future which begins today at year zero. This is why over 80% of the victims of Al Qaeda and Islamic State are people from Muslim backgrounds.
The first act by Salafi jihadi groups when they take over an area is to destroy existing Muslim institutions including mosques, shrines, preachers, practices.
Their main purpose is to control and punish people internally, to dictate the spaces that women may go, their clothing, family relations,beliefs, even the minute detail of how one prays.
And you get the impression in the news that they are after us in the West, but they are actually mainly after people from other Muslim backgrounds.
In their view, no other Muslim can ever be pure enough, so ordinary beliefs and practices that have existed for centuries are attacked as impure by teenagers from Birmingham or London who know nothing about the histories that they so joyously obliterate.
This is what the main Hindu fundamentalist organization in India looks like today at its mass rally.
Maybe it reminds you of the 1930s in Italy or Germany, and the movement’s roots are indeed in fascism. It was a member of the same Hindu fundamentalist movement who shot dead Mahatma Gandhi.
Hindu fundamentalists today view this murderer as a national hero, and they want to put up statues of him throughout India. They’ve been involved for decades in large-scale mass violence against minorities. They ban books, art, films. They attack romantic couples on Valentine’s Day,Christians on Christmas Day.
They don’t like others talking critically about what they see as their ancient culture or using its images or caricaturing it or drawing cartoons about it.
But the people making the strongest possible claims about ancient, timeless Hindu religion are dressed in brown shorts and white shirts while claiming, oddly, to be the original Aryan race, just like the violent Salafi jihadis who make their claims about their primordial religion while dressed in black military uniforms and wearing balaclavas.
These people are manufacturing pure, pristine identities of conviction and of certainty.Fundamentalists see religion and culture as their sole property, a property. But religions and cultures are processes. They’re not things. They’re impermanent. They’re messy. They’re impure. Look at any religion and you’ll see disputes and arguments going all the way down.
Any criticism of religion in any form has to therefore be part of the expansive sense of humanity we should aspire to. I respect your right to have and to express your religion or your culture or your opinion, but I don’t necessarily have to respect the content.
I might like some of it. I might like how an old church looks, for example, but this isn’t the same thing. Similarly, I have a human right to say something that you may find offensive, but you do not have a human right not to be offended.
In a genuine democracy, we’re constantly offended since people express different views all the time. They also change their views, so their views are impermanent.
You cannot fix someone’s political views based on their religious or national or cultural background. (We can obviously, if they adopt them)
These people have very firm ideas about what belongs and what doesn’t belong inside the cozy national cultures that they imagine. And I’m going to caricature a bit here, but only a little bit. I want you to imagine the supporter of some Little Englander or British nationalist political party, and he’s sitting at home and he’s screaming about foreigners invading his country while watching Fox News,an American cable channel owned by an Australian on his South Korean television set which was bought by his Spanish credit card which is paid off monthly by his high-street British bank which has its headquarters in Hong Kong.
He supports a British football team owned by a Russian. His favorite brand of fish and chips is owned by a Swedish venture capitalist firm. The church he sometimes goes to has its creed decided in meetings in Ghana. His Union Jack underpants were made in India.
What about you, now, listening to this? What about you and your identity, because you stitch your experiences and your thoughts into a continuous person moving forward in time.
And this is what you are when you say, “I,” “am,” or “me.” But this also includes all of your hopes and dreams, all of the you’s that could have been, and it includes all the other people and the things that are in the biography of who you are.
They, the others, are also a part of you, moving forward with you. Your authentic self, if such a thing exists, is a complex, messy and uncertain self, and that is a very good thing.
Why not value those impurities and uncertainties?
Maybe clinging to pure identities is a sign of immaturity, and ethnic, nationalist and religious traditions are bad for you.
Why not be skeptical about every primordial origin claim made on your behalf?
Why not reject the identity myths that call on you to belong, that politicians and community leaders, so-called community leaders, place on you?
If we don’t need origin stories and fixed identities, we can challenge ourselves to think creatively about each other and our future.
This is Abu al-Walid Muhammad ibn Ahmad ibn Rushd, a very senior Muslim judge and thinker in Cordoba in the 12th century, and his writings were considered deeply blasphemous, heretical and evil.
Long after he died, followers of his work were ruthlessly hunted down, banished and killed over several centuries by the most powerful religious institution of the medieval period. That institution was the Roman Catholic Church.
Why? Because ibn Rushd said that something true in religion may conflict with something that your reason finds to be true on earth, but the latter is still true.
There are two distinct worlds of truth, one based on our reason and evidence, and one that is divine, and the state, political power, social law are in the realm of reason.
Religious life is a different realm. They should be kept separated.
Social and political life should be governed by our reason, not by religion.And you can see why the church was upset by his writings, as indeed were some Muslims during his lifetime, because he gives us a strong statement of secularism of a kind which is normal in Europe today.
Not feeling I own my property: Facilities fitting rental situation
Posted by: adonis49 on: September 25, 2017
Not feeling I own my property
4 années vécues au Liban. En sus de mon dû à l’État, j’achetais mon électricité mensuellement, et mon Eau à la semaine.
Au quotidien, les frais annexes de mon appartement (dont j’étais propriétaire ) me faisaient dire qu’au Liban , vous avez beau être proprio, tout se passe comme si vous y seriez éternels locataires !
Et si on parlait de l’EAU au Liban. Une citerne par semaine et par famille .
À qui profite cette histoire d’Ô ?
Tout le monde sait que les villes ont 3 ou 4 rendez-vous annuels avec leurs rues devenues pataugeoires sous l’effet des précipitations dont on parle symptomatiquement alors que tous les ans les pouvoirs publics auraient pu en amont faire un travail de canalisation de cet or blanc pour les besoins des Libanais aux saisons sèches .
Hiberner … ou Citerner
N.B . mon IPad me conteste le mot citerner . Je l’amènerai avec moi au Liban en novembre, il comprendra …
Note: We dread the first rain in Lebanon after 7 months of dry weather: Every street is flooded because nothing is prevented before it rains. We should prefer one of those cyclones, devastating those shores stolen by private profiteers and denying us free clean beaches. i
“Facts” on Left-hand people?
Posted by: adonis49 on: September 25, 2017
“Facts” on Left-hand people?
Left-handers are the strange ones. While they make up 10% of the population, it seems like society has forgotten about them.
According to many old wives tales, these people are a gift from the universe. (Probably from Indian tribes? Who attributed special qualities for the minorities?)
While the exact reason behind this phenomenon is still unclear, recent research shows that there might be a link between human genes and the environment and our surrounding. (Wow. Any other factors to add?)
It is also believed that most left-handers come from a family in which some of the members are already ‘lefty’.
The team of researchers found that the brain doesn’t function the same in right-handed and left-handed individuals.
Hence, left-handers are more independent as they are forced to deal with the majority of right-handed world? (Since designs target the vastest portion of population?)
Here are 24 facts about left-handers that you were probably unaware of:
1. It is estimated that 5-10 percent of the world population is left-handed
2. The word ‘left’ dates back to Anglo-Saxon era and it derives from the word ‘lyft”, which means weak or broken
3. Left-handers use the right part of their brain
4. Left-handed people are great in many sports, particularly tennis, baseball, boxing, and swimming
5. More than 40% of the most famous tennis players are left-handed (disturb the play of the right-handed methods?)
6. Left-handers are better in seeing clearly underwater compared to right-handed individuals
7. In fact, left-handers are at 3% higher of being addicted to alcohol intake.
8. left-handed college graduates eventually become richer by 26% more than right-handed ones.
9. Left-handers are late-bloomers, which means that they reach puberty five months later than right-handers.
10. Animals can also be left-handed (left-pawed).
11. In the U.S, 4 out 7 states are left-handed (Meaning they are in majority?)
12. Some of the longest words can be written with the left-hand include sweater, dresses, and tesserae decades.
13. In the past, left-handedness has been associated with criminal, homosexuality, and neurosis. Interestingly enough, it has been linked to musicality and creativity, too.
14. Left-handers are more prone to insomnia compared to right-handers.
15. Currently, there are more than 30 million left-handers in the U.S.
16. Statistics show that women who give birth in their 40s are at 128% higher chance of giving birth to a left-handed child.
17. Left-handers have their special day! August 13th is the International Left-Hander`s Day.
18. Due to their ability to process information more rapidly, left-handers experience emotions differently than right-handers.
19. Left-handed individuals are great in mathematics, spatial awareness, and architecture.
20. Medical experts claim that when a left-handed individual injures their dominant hand, they learn to use the right one very fast. This is much more difficult for right-handers.
21. Left-handers are more prone to allergies and asthma compared to right-handers.
22. left-handedness is a characteristic which runs in the family. For instance, Prince William, Queen Elizabeth II, Queen Mother, and Prince Charles are/were left-handed.
23. Out of the four Apollo astronauts, one of them was left-handed.
24. One of the most notorious killers in human history were left-handers. For instance, Jack the Ripper, Osama bin Laden, and Boston Stranglers were all left-handed.
Sources:
http://healthylivingthread.com/24-facts-left-handed-people-not-know/
