Archive for April, 2010

Truthout.org needs to ‘Get Real’

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Truthout.org's Dahr Jamail

Truthout.org's Dahr Jamail

Truthout needs help in explaining what they are doing.  Dahr Jamail needs help in explaining what Truthout is doing.

I would like to help Truthout and Dahr Jamail better explain what Truthout is doing, and if ‘they got it’, then I could ‘make a donation’.

Since they won’t** publish my comments on ‘A Special Note From Dahr Jamail’ http://www.truthout.org/a-special-note-from-dahr-jamail58752 I am publishing them herewith.

[[**After two exchanges with a Truthout Technical Administrator, my comment in its original form was indeed published, … Thank you, Truthout!]]

[[**I spoke too soon.  The technical types at Truthout restored my post TWICE  but then it selectively disappears leaving the ‘usual’ sort of comments without mine.]]

Here’s the problem.  Imagine that Truthout is doing a story on the plight of Jean Valjean who was jailed for 19 years for stealing a loaf of bread.  The ‘mainstream media’ is on a ‘law-and-order’ kick and they praise the diligent work of Inspector Javert for bringing Valjean to justice.  Valjean’s testimony that he couldn’t bear to hear starving children crying with hunger, according to Javert, does not justify breaking the law.

Were Truthout to report on this, they would accuse the conservative ‘mainstream media’ of deceit.   (more…)

Pro-Nature or Pro-Choice?

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spatial habitat-inhabitant resonances orchestrating individual and collective behaviour

spatial habitat-inhabitant resonances orchestrating individual and collective behaviour

The argument between the ‘Pro-Life’ and ‘Pro-Choice’ factions might take on a very different complexion if the notion of ‘choice’ were to be examined more closely.

In particular, the notion of human ‘control’ over ‘population’ could be exposed as an artefact of science confusing ‘idealised models’ for ‘reality’.  Human beings are not ‘in control’, not when they are understood as being ‘a strand in the interdependent, mutually supportive ‘web-of-life’.  When they/we label insects as ‘pests’ and attempt to ‘control their population’, we are spitting on the web and in so doing, we spit on ourselves.  When they/we identify and label bacteria as ‘pathogens’ and attempt to ‘control their population’, we are spitting on the web and in so doing, we spit on ourselves (keeping things in ‘resonant’ balance is another matter).  As Pasteur said, in refuting his own ‘germ theory’ which labeled microbes ‘pathogens’, and as Hippocrates had said before him, when one lives in a web of interdependencies within a dynamic space (Nature) that one is merely an inclusion in (man did not invent it but was invented by it), the issue is not ‘control’ but ‘sustaining balance and harmony’. (more…)

Man’s Absurdity Derives From ‘Culture’

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In the sixties, Anthropologist Jules Henry hit the nail on the head in ‘Culture Against Man’ (1963), saying that culture makes us live absurd lives.

Culture has us running around like electrons in a magnetic field.  ‘Tensions’ that we can feel, shape our individual and collective behaviour.  Racial tensions between ‘blacks’ and ‘whites’ (whether they began from intellectual notions of inherent white racial supremacy or whatever) induced blacks to use separate eating places, toilets, seating at the back of the bus and it induced outrage in whites if blacks did not show deference to their (self-declared) ‘superiors’, those of the white race.

‘Tensions’ within a culture shape more individual and collective behaviours than ‘race relations’.  They can also trigger actions in the explosive manner that tensions in the earth trigger earthquakes.   Powerful ‘tensions’ that we associate with symbolic meaning (the quasi-religious meaning of white and black skin, of a national flag, of a cow in India, or a pig in Israel etc.) suggest that homo sapiens should have been called ‘homo symbolicus’.  But since our response to symbolic meaning keeps us living absurd lives, it has also been suggested that homo sapiens should have been called ‘homo absurdus’. (more…)

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