I spoke in a daily abroad 4 years ago against d CBCP blocking the Sex Education Program. Like the Reproductive Health Bill, it was deemed by Church morally objectionable. They consider the modules "pornographic" and vulgar endorsements of premarital sex, maintaining that all talk of sex must stay restricted between children and parents. Illustrations, for instance, of use of a condom (which proves a double moral infraction) were found to be base, instead of honest, explanatory and clinical.
Now herein lies the huge rub: The reason nudity titillates, overexcites, overcrazes in Philippine society—moreover, why tasteless prurience and objectification so thrive—is the very upbringing that fosters malicious prudery about d human body.
If we're truly raised to love, care, value, honor, and dignify the human body—female or male—we'll be allowed to know and confront it. For only by learning and facing it can we care for it out of love, self-valuing and respect. Barring a clinical view of the human body is what is unhealthy. If we do it in the fashion student doctors do, we get to understand the body WITH NO MALICE.
Peevish pets: Ignorant arrogance and arrogant ignorance. Socrates averred that "an unexamined life is not worth living." As though the unlived life were ever worth examining.
20.10.09
16.10.09
Reaction to reaction to BD's essay "Propaganda"
BDalisay's "Propaganda (1)"
NOTE TO BD: lest my comment be split in 2, i'll split it myself hee hee.
PART 1:
hee hee welcome sir =) i'm intrigued though by the comment of Norm.
Hi, Norm. I hope u wouldn't mind my asking, but since u've gone quite a good stretch implying knowledge of critical thought, may I ask you (and I shall, merely, as an inquisitive teacher, writer, theoretician) what notion of this u have in mind? [No need to freak out, i'm but a 27-yr-old philosopher, not working in the philippines; i come in piece, este, peace.]
To what sort of arguing practice or style, if u will, do u refer with d use of terms "critical," "thinking," "critical thinking," and "rational"? Do u catch little reason in the essay on which u've commented? Not to side with anyone with these questions (BD & I had our share of exchanges too--albeit pleasantly, respectfully, honorably, agreeably), but would u pls care to show us, piece by piece, the problems u find in an essay like BD's--i mean, for our own relearning. Ur input is most welcome--as BD's gracious reply to u can evidence.
[TO BE CONT'D/ PART 2 RIGHT BENEATH]
PART 2/ PART LAST:
The value of critical thought is much too easily overlooked these days. But as it is minimally known of hence minimally seen (vice versa), so it is headlong junked and handily belittled--sadly, mostly, by the people who claim fidelity to it, through malpractice, hee hee. Moreover, if not to avert at least work round the horror of proving dullards, we who announce some mastery must always be counted on especially for mastery--whatever it is.
So pls, pls, do oblige us. I'm to find ur input a healthy one if, in the interest of practice improved, u'll deepen ur reaction with insight. I'm sure, how u feel about the words, the "irrational" locutions--certain of which u deem woeful, rather fiercely--bears some extent of airing. But I hope, to the benchmark for "thought," "intellect," "reason" that u say u'd precisely like reached. just ironic sounds to me what u've said--i mean, against all rants--with ur writing being, well, chiefly that--a rant... for every bit of square inch.
thank u, norm. i'm wishing, truly, u grant this request--if u have the time, of course. no fights here needed, just a minor detailing perhaps (and tidying up) of exactly how u like things to be. let's spare it a good look =) after all, in no rigidly rational venture have the ornery and whimsical room--none at all.
thanks mounds, and cheers no end,
bee
ps: bd, great thing certainly u've been well. =)
NOTE TO BD: lest my comment be split in 2, i'll split it myself hee hee.
PART 1:
hee hee welcome sir =) i'm intrigued though by the comment of Norm.
Hi, Norm. I hope u wouldn't mind my asking, but since u've gone quite a good stretch implying knowledge of critical thought, may I ask you (and I shall, merely, as an inquisitive teacher, writer, theoretician) what notion of this u have in mind? [No need to freak out, i'm but a 27-yr-old philosopher, not working in the philippines; i come in piece, este, peace.]
To what sort of arguing practice or style, if u will, do u refer with d use of terms "critical," "thinking," "critical thinking," and "rational"? Do u catch little reason in the essay on which u've commented? Not to side with anyone with these questions (BD & I had our share of exchanges too--albeit pleasantly, respectfully, honorably, agreeably), but would u pls care to show us, piece by piece, the problems u find in an essay like BD's--i mean, for our own relearning. Ur input is most welcome--as BD's gracious reply to u can evidence.
[TO BE CONT'D/ PART 2 RIGHT BENEATH]
PART 2/ PART LAST:
The value of critical thought is much too easily overlooked these days. But as it is minimally known of hence minimally seen (vice versa), so it is headlong junked and handily belittled--sadly, mostly, by the people who claim fidelity to it, through malpractice, hee hee. Moreover, if not to avert at least work round the horror of proving dullards, we who announce some mastery must always be counted on especially for mastery--whatever it is.
So pls, pls, do oblige us. I'm to find ur input a healthy one if, in the interest of practice improved, u'll deepen ur reaction with insight. I'm sure, how u feel about the words, the "irrational" locutions--certain of which u deem woeful, rather fiercely--bears some extent of airing. But I hope, to the benchmark for "thought," "intellect," "reason" that u say u'd precisely like reached. just ironic sounds to me what u've said--i mean, against all rants--with ur writing being, well, chiefly that--a rant... for every bit of square inch.
thank u, norm. i'm wishing, truly, u grant this request--if u have the time, of course. no fights here needed, just a minor detailing perhaps (and tidying up) of exactly how u like things to be. let's spare it a good look =) after all, in no rigidly rational venture have the ornery and whimsical room--none at all.
thanks mounds, and cheers no end,
bee
ps: bd, great thing certainly u've been well. =)
10.10.09
Barack & the Nobel--what gives? Timeliness contra Deservedness?
ADDED NOTE (comment-proper beneath this note):
Comment posted on RC's blog
Hmm, I'd like to help clear up something, ie why Ricky, in my view, called it "preemptive"--it's been lost in the raging wash of pro- and anti-reactions.
Like a friend said, the moment they gave out the Peace Prize to Henry Kissinger, it had already been cheapened. Kissinger, much unlike Obama in politics, was the author, like Milton Friedman, of ultra-right coups and dictatorships in Latin America (even in Greece, Iran, etc). To say that the standards for the prize have, until now, been grossly compromised is to offer a woeful misreading. It's falsehood, quite simply. But the conferment of the prize to Obama, however undeserving he seems of it, has clearly not been concerned with achievement, but the best strategic pitch for the politics of the committee--which, as the title of Ricky already states, is aimed at preempting something. What that is, according to impressions mine and others' in the field, is any conceivable change in what is currently a more peace- and diplomacy-inclined President Obama (far far more so than any of his predecessors). There's that hope from the committee that the US pursues initiatives in the line of its previous impressive efforts--denuclearization, etc, etc.
Is it about any plan already realized? Of course not. That's been obvious enough. What it could be about, though, has for too long been lost in the debates between those who headlong approve of it and those who as handily don't.
The whys are no less crucial (in fact, several times more) than the what.
----
I guess, from any group anxious for a leadership role much ought to be expected. I wasn’t made a fan of his by his surface charisma. To be fair, he’s being credited for what he’s begun doing (inadequate though it is to merit drunken feting): As US President, he reached out amicably and invitingly to Latin America, accepting that however left-leaning its democracies are, those are bona fide democracies built with resounding approval from their non-token demos; he initiated global denuclearization; he chid the Israelis (finally, someone did); and he sided with freedom against fascist takeovers–an enormous break from and rebuke of a staple American leadership, as history can tell. All this I say of course, however critical I am of a US establishment with global tentacles, simply in order to be fair. A great deal has still to be seen though as far as would go a more radical follow-through and how he might help effect market-steadying controls, emissions decrease, or justice for victims of America’s excesses. Also, to be more fair, he wasn’t eager for the prize, thanks to intelligence and integrity, even admitting ineligibility. Besides, selections for the Nobel aren’t all that stringent; they have a history of choosing on the basis of what best promotes an agreed-upon advocacy or, in the case of the other categories, what feels cogent, what proves brilliant but timely. Timeliness of course has been an effective exclusionary criterion, edging out Gandhi, or Cory and our People, and the far more brilliant and sophisticated lifework in the sciences and literature. Such have been its quirks. IT'S OKAY. The point is not to get devoted to winning awards and ensuring institutional praise, but to creating possibilities of palpable accomplishment--the basis for reward.
Of course, while Obama’s awarded little on the ground of achievement, Noynoy is pushed into the presidency barely if at all on the basis of accomplishment, competency. Some considerations, besides deservedness, just happen to send some distances.
Comment posted on RC's blog
Hmm, I'd like to help clear up something, ie why Ricky, in my view, called it "preemptive"--it's been lost in the raging wash of pro- and anti-reactions.
Like a friend said, the moment they gave out the Peace Prize to Henry Kissinger, it had already been cheapened. Kissinger, much unlike Obama in politics, was the author, like Milton Friedman, of ultra-right coups and dictatorships in Latin America (even in Greece, Iran, etc). To say that the standards for the prize have, until now, been grossly compromised is to offer a woeful misreading. It's falsehood, quite simply. But the conferment of the prize to Obama, however undeserving he seems of it, has clearly not been concerned with achievement, but the best strategic pitch for the politics of the committee--which, as the title of Ricky already states, is aimed at preempting something. What that is, according to impressions mine and others' in the field, is any conceivable change in what is currently a more peace- and diplomacy-inclined President Obama (far far more so than any of his predecessors). There's that hope from the committee that the US pursues initiatives in the line of its previous impressive efforts--denuclearization, etc, etc.
Is it about any plan already realized? Of course not. That's been obvious enough. What it could be about, though, has for too long been lost in the debates between those who headlong approve of it and those who as handily don't.
The whys are no less crucial (in fact, several times more) than the what.
----
I guess, from any group anxious for a leadership role much ought to be expected. I wasn’t made a fan of his by his surface charisma. To be fair, he’s being credited for what he’s begun doing (inadequate though it is to merit drunken feting): As US President, he reached out amicably and invitingly to Latin America, accepting that however left-leaning its democracies are, those are bona fide democracies built with resounding approval from their non-token demos; he initiated global denuclearization; he chid the Israelis (finally, someone did); and he sided with freedom against fascist takeovers–an enormous break from and rebuke of a staple American leadership, as history can tell. All this I say of course, however critical I am of a US establishment with global tentacles, simply in order to be fair. A great deal has still to be seen though as far as would go a more radical follow-through and how he might help effect market-steadying controls, emissions decrease, or justice for victims of America’s excesses. Also, to be more fair, he wasn’t eager for the prize, thanks to intelligence and integrity, even admitting ineligibility. Besides, selections for the Nobel aren’t all that stringent; they have a history of choosing on the basis of what best promotes an agreed-upon advocacy or, in the case of the other categories, what feels cogent, what proves brilliant but timely. Timeliness of course has been an effective exclusionary criterion, edging out Gandhi, or Cory and our People, and the far more brilliant and sophisticated lifework in the sciences and literature. Such have been its quirks. IT'S OKAY. The point is not to get devoted to winning awards and ensuring institutional praise, but to creating possibilities of palpable accomplishment--the basis for reward.
Of course, while Obama’s awarded little on the ground of achievement, Noynoy is pushed into the presidency barely if at all on the basis of accomplishment, competency. Some considerations, besides deservedness, just happen to send some distances.
8.10.09
Some questions like "how do we, in the tropics, embrace our rivers?"
In response to RCarandang's show.
Hi, Ricky. I've been lucky enough to catch your 10:30 show for the past two days. The discussions to do with riverbank communities intrigue me much. While I do agree that the migrating poor shouldn't be allowed to settle too close to ill-managed waterways, I also recognize problems in completing quick flood-remedies like clearing up the banks without addressing the persistent issue not just of poverty but labor surge to market-central Manila. But for the moment, I'll be zeroing in on the question of how we might maximize topography and sustain riverside communities.
Some are of the opinion that it's best to leave the riversides uninhabited. I suppose, if construction and population clogged waterways (canals, lakes, rivers, bays) or are allowed on banks without care for potential rises in water levels, then crises like Ondoy would follow and persist. Problems would also emerge if we build on generously margined shores but the bodies of water behave like Yangtze. If the river-clearance rule were to be followed (is it twice the width of rivers on each side?), the communities by the Thames, the Nile, the Danube, the Rhine, and the Ganges wouldn't be possible (I wouldn't be surprised if the scientists are in much disagreement--the factors to weigh or gauge by aren't constant after all). So my question is, how can we, in the storm-beleaguered tropics, manage our floodways without deserting our bodies of water? Won't feats of engineering (which naturally will need lots of money) tide us over this? Japan had the problem of earthquakes and storms that had to be dealt with if they were to speed up commutes between two far flung islands. They built hanging bridges that were fit to endure the strongest chronicled winds and tremors ever to hit the areas. They didn't abandon their islands and close them off to residents and commerce. I suppose, with the proper amount of well-guarded funding backing up efforts at ingenuous thinking, we can care for our rivers and gain from them without keeping them at too cold a distance.
How do we, in the tropics, embrace our rivers? Here are photos of the Rivers Danube, Nile, Rhine, and Thames.
Many thanks and cheers,
Bee
Hi, Ricky. I've been lucky enough to catch your 10:30 show for the past two days. The discussions to do with riverbank communities intrigue me much. While I do agree that the migrating poor shouldn't be allowed to settle too close to ill-managed waterways, I also recognize problems in completing quick flood-remedies like clearing up the banks without addressing the persistent issue not just of poverty but labor surge to market-central Manila. But for the moment, I'll be zeroing in on the question of how we might maximize topography and sustain riverside communities.
Some are of the opinion that it's best to leave the riversides uninhabited. I suppose, if construction and population clogged waterways (canals, lakes, rivers, bays) or are allowed on banks without care for potential rises in water levels, then crises like Ondoy would follow and persist. Problems would also emerge if we build on generously margined shores but the bodies of water behave like Yangtze. If the river-clearance rule were to be followed (is it twice the width of rivers on each side?), the communities by the Thames, the Nile, the Danube, the Rhine, and the Ganges wouldn't be possible (I wouldn't be surprised if the scientists are in much disagreement--the factors to weigh or gauge by aren't constant after all). So my question is, how can we, in the storm-beleaguered tropics, manage our floodways without deserting our bodies of water? Won't feats of engineering (which naturally will need lots of money) tide us over this? Japan had the problem of earthquakes and storms that had to be dealt with if they were to speed up commutes between two far flung islands. They built hanging bridges that were fit to endure the strongest chronicled winds and tremors ever to hit the areas. They didn't abandon their islands and close them off to residents and commerce. I suppose, with the proper amount of well-guarded funding backing up efforts at ingenuous thinking, we can care for our rivers and gain from them without keeping them at too cold a distance.
How do we, in the tropics, embrace our rivers? Here are photos of the Rivers Danube, Nile, Rhine, and Thames.
Many thanks and cheers,
Bee
18.9.09
Rights vs Institut'lized Cultural Relativism & Political Pluralism
The religious are sheer virtuosos at dangling perdition before those they differ with—sad to say, right this very moment, before opportunistic candidates for president and senator.
The subject at the heart of this essay is not religion per se but the conflict generated by a certain democracy that seeks to institutionalize cultural and religious freedom at the level not just of speech and exchange and debate and open political dispute, but at the very level of state laws, while also, on the other hand, attempting to strengthen universalistic rights provisions (like human rights, for instance) which literally are meant to apply in all of society, irrespective of bounds and differences in personal, sectoral belief-systems. Rights and laws embody ideology too; they are perched on values or ideas of things held most important by, ideally, a society that maintains belief in, adherence to, state-rules, or in casual terms, THE LAW. When those rights and laws, coherent as they ought to be in spirit and direction, begin scuffling with the tenets of some or other sub-sect, -culture, sectarian ideas that inform a different (dissident) way of life, created is a social reality where value-difference is not just free to vie for political societal dominance and, in the name of which quest, lure in the majority (such as must be the case in any true democracy), but is also given rein to be practiced however such practice defies other rules, rules FOR ALL, like other liberties well-agreed upon by state-majority. Which multiculturalist freedom is invoked on the basis of legal assurances entitling such sects to the freedoms of belief and its practice. This engenders scenarios where sub-sects of truth- and belief-systems lay claim on pockets in society in which to cocoon themselves from the very jurisdiction of certain universalist laws. This is happening in the United States as it is in much of Europe, i.e. Muslim migrant communities demanding in the name of the very libertarianism, multiculturalism and political pluralism institutionalized in the West, that Sharia law be observed for their faithful, that their own beliefs never be tainted in the enforcement of laws, rights, policies so universalistic as to infringe on distinctive ways of life. This of course exemplifies the sure contradiction that builds as if on its own between the liberty to believe and practice beliefs, and the non-relative, non-waivable liberties such as are ridden into codes for civil rights, human rights (eg women's rights, gay rights, labor rights), animal rights, etc, etc.
Thanks to this twitter thing, I learn so quickly of the news (no plugging meant there). Please do bear with my message for tonight. It concerns a subject much too important (for me at least) to simply let go and shove aside. I hope plainly to share with you some of what I came to know of the new fights the Church has been waging (the CBCP together with the active, noisy laity). If any of you happen to be the devout religious of any faith or denomination, I apologize this early for words that might turn out too coarse to your personal feelings. This is a very important issue. It's to do with reproductive healthcare and the Magna Carta for women. If you have the time I'd love to have with you whatever discussion you feel might be needed, or absorb, hands tied, mouth gagged, your sermons (if there will be such that this shall provoke). Anything at all. Just please first consider. If you have friends you can tell (will listen) about what's taking place as far as these go, you might like to share with them your fresh finds. Having you sit this one out is imposition enough. But I’d be blessed indeed to see you consider. In my take on the matter, I forgot to include some brief words on why RH and MC are, to me and for me, even necessary. I'm assuming you’ll pluck out your reasons for that yourself, that is, if you count them important as well.
There is a chaos of liberties embodied in our laws.
Thank you for the audience. Lying at the bottom of this short note is a news report lifted as is from the Inquirer website, following which is my take. Thank you for browsing or better yet, patiently prettily perusing line by line (if you shall read them at all during breaks, I mean).
beatrixpg
I'd like to say, first, lest you bristle at my tastes, that I believe there's a power much greater than myself, or than anything in life that I can cognize well enough to deal, cope and even go along healthily with. I'm not above all vanity, but I'm well above the vanity of clerics, prelates. The very boundaries of reason/logic tell me this, and most such hard-to-see limits can only be touched and felt when intellect/reason is utilized greatly. I'm an epistemologist and theoretician first. Ergo, logic is my gauge and guide. But the best epistemology, that is to say, the solid one, teaches not that there's no GOD or metaphysics (metaphysis, to be accurate). Logic, driven to the limit, neither illumines nor gainsays divinity, metaphysics. Astrophysics, the Big Bang, are physics; they're not metaphysics. Why is smart epistemology humbler, quieter than your textbook delusional metaphysics? Because it learns to concede, along a tiresome way of trying its utmost to reason with life, that in order to know to a logical sureness that God exists and moulded from nothing all of our universe, in short to know and outknow God both (as the crafter of the universe and of logic included), we must stand on a plane higher than God's and logic's--the paradox of all paradoxes, or the fallacy of all fallacies which we can overcome only by junking logic itself. Metaphysics, by its sheer name, suggests a plane beyond "this one" (physis) from which to peek and poke into not just our world, but into what God does and what God’s done, and how our world appears from the farthest farthest "exterior." I stress I believe there's a higher, higher power, inasmuch as there are such things logic alone can never suffice to thresh out (and I can debate with physicists any given time, people without any sense of self-irony). Unlike Aquinas and unlike the non-sectarian metaphysicians, I shan’t dare for a "fuller" or "fullest" knowing of God. I, as mere human, am in no place to know and outknow this God let alone invoke "God's law" (divine absolute law) and back it up with human reason when simply crusading for my wishes.
The religious—or most I’ve learned about, to be fair—when trapped in a bind of having to justify dogma, battling foremost for power over all of human activity, like applying for a job laden with perks, wheel in God as major character reference. Come to think of it, who beats “God” as endorser, as mentor, trainer? The holy books lend them unequivocal (they believe unassailable) integrity, authority. I concede there are matters, events on earth just so tough to dice up as to be unreadable in the vocabs of reason. In the far almost unreachable past, those took the shapes of miracles which centuries hence, were remade into biblical lore. I'm saying God could be real or unreal/God can’t be/isn’t real or unreal. What proves so inexplicable (like logic's nature plus logic’s origins) has become the feast of eras of mysticism; it may just be a function of a powerful nature/universe Humans aren’t smart enough to probe. What's written lengthily in the bible, though it clashes with the great deal prescribed, say, in the Koran, may be true or untrue. What I’m saying, I and you are in no place at all to state too surely that the so-called will of the so-called divine is any way for real or unreal; most of them, taken down as God's revelations, are ideas I'm in no place to prove or disprove. So what gives me the license to invoke “divine command” while seeking to prevail in a contest between evaluations, a contest for humans who are moved, primarily, by yearning? But let's assume they're for real, that the bushes scorching were indeed sounding off like megaphones: If, fighting off a beating and raping husband, I must subject myself to God-ordained punishment, then so be it for so it shall be. I shall let myself burn in damnation; I'll bring my suntan, even; let's start with my bra. If that's the case, I shall welcome perdition. What do I do? Christians are so so sure fearing as they do what becomes of them in the afterlife more than they worry about fairness in this life. Goodness here is all about reward in heaven. Well, not for me. If God, as the bible says, makes me atone, scalding, torturously for irreverence, then so shall I endure all punishment. And the image of that does not keep me from fighting for the oppressed and choiceless on earth. The bible prescribes that I yield without struggle to a husband (I don't have one, thankfully; I have three—kidding). I've said this before, I'll say it again: Relationships are about love. Love does not concern itself with hierarchies, revolving not round lordships. I can never be with a man who wheels in "God" praying to be obeyed by me at all costs, insisting (respecting himself and God but not me) that he's my master, the last word in the house and my wisest and final handler in the bedroom. Show me IQ and heart, first. If a husband says I’ll burn in hell, so be it, I’ll bring buns and hotdogs. Thing is, I am so damn fortunate I have the power to assert myself this way. Most women in the Philippines do not.
More shocking, of course, would be a Church that eases so readily on reproductive healthcare, homosexuality, divorce, teenage pregnancy, single parenthood, etc, like it’s muting now its scriptural misogynism (yes, it is; Christianisms as practiced now are mostly less murderous of womankind, impertinently editing, correcting "god's" word). POINT IS, why keep believing them? The argument of lobbyists for the RH-bill and the Magna Carta for Women is that the Church and the State are as distinct as separate. Which on closer look seems a wobbly rebuttal. The religious, of all parties, make the valid point: For any of the religious to concede that religion and politics are split is to concede that their ethic is relative and arbitrary, not life-tenets as ordered by their "God"—their assertion being that religion must be a way of life (a value-theory/ideology practiced) setting rules for living as laid down in the strict terms of “God.” The fast rebuttal should be (1) that the word of god is not ours to dictate or impose (not that we know the higher power is a punishing one flailing a whip), (2) that we can't even jibe on who god is let alone what god requires of us (thus the maelstrom of faiths), and (3) that at the most basic level, or at the level we humans can negotiate among ourselves, values contending are all merely politics, or desires, interests, wishes, ambitions, dreams, longing in collision. If politics is also the venue on which the bases of LAWS in society are clinched, then religion can assert stake in politics and law-making, and therefore must participate in them. The Muslims understand this. But here is the CATCH: if they lose in the human contest that we have for centuries labeled "politics," they must accept, grinning, bearing, that, as much as winning is a part of any dispute, any opposition, any battle or combat, losing is its necessary obverse.
Thanks to the gap-ridden cultural/religious/political pluralism that is bequeathed by the West or thoughtlessly seized by the Philippines, we're now faced with a crisis of freedoms. Values as politics naturally compete in order to become the foundation of RULES (rules of any kind, anywhere). This crisis is a case of institutionalized relativism gone messily awry. It's been happening for a decade or so in the West. It's catching on in our country. Pluralism chafes against the simple fact that values and truths, while plural in any given spectrum, differ within such spectrum, each one of them trying to prevail as LAW or at least its base. I don’t disfavor the plurality of values; the plurality of values is a given reality if not possibility. I like values to be able to compete openly and freely. BUT the operative word here is "COMPETE," and from no honest-to-goodness competition would its participants emerge equal winners and losers. Even a synergy of opposing values or ideas which we often call "the middle ground" is but a speckle in a spectrum of gradations of values. In short, it's a value in itself, this so-called middle ground, to which we can try to coax round the differing sides, to neutralize difference, to extinguish the chaotic plurality, to dispose of the bones of crazed contention, to cease temporarily all contest, to rescue discussion from the realm of the confrontational, in short, to unify the camps round a harmonizing value, in turn, much needed order. Clearly, logically, that's not political pluraLISM. Values, if political, are necessarily plural, hence the friction, the opposition, or being political. And the only thing worse than political pluralism and/or cultural relativism, which, both, are fallacious paradigms, is intellectual pluralism/relativism—it is the joyously inane belief that any explanation, any given claim of logical answer, irrespective of strengths and idiocies, is very much valid, with the right to be expressed and taught anywhere. "It's all just perspectives, different perspectives, each adding to knowledge. Free speech, free speech!!!" Too much arrogant talk matched by too ignorant thought.
The subject at the heart of this essay is not religion per se but the conflict generated by a certain democracy that seeks to institutionalize cultural and religious freedom at the level not just of speech and exchange and debate and open political dispute, but at the very level of state laws, while also, on the other hand, attempting to strengthen universalistic rights provisions (like human rights, for instance) which literally are meant to apply in all of society, irrespective of bounds and differences in personal, sectoral belief-systems. Rights and laws embody ideology too; they are perched on values or ideas of things held most important by, ideally, a society that maintains belief in, adherence to, state-rules, or in casual terms, THE LAW. When those rights and laws, coherent as they ought to be in spirit and direction, begin scuffling with the tenets of some or other sub-sect, -culture, sectarian ideas that inform a different (dissident) way of life, created is a social reality where value-difference is not just free to vie for political societal dominance and, in the name of which quest, lure in the majority (such as must be the case in any true democracy), but is also given rein to be practiced however such practice defies other rules, rules FOR ALL, like other liberties well-agreed upon by state-majority. Which multiculturalist freedom is invoked on the basis of legal assurances entitling such sects to the freedoms of belief and its practice. This engenders scenarios where sub-sects of truth- and belief-systems lay claim on pockets in society in which to cocoon themselves from the very jurisdiction of certain universalist laws. This is happening in the United States as it is in much of Europe, i.e. Muslim migrant communities demanding in the name of the very libertarianism, multiculturalism and political pluralism institutionalized in the West, that Sharia law be observed for their faithful, that their own beliefs never be tainted in the enforcement of laws, rights, policies so universalistic as to infringe on distinctive ways of life. This of course exemplifies the sure contradiction that builds as if on its own between the liberty to believe and practice beliefs, and the non-relative, non-waivable liberties such as are ridden into codes for civil rights, human rights (eg women's rights, gay rights, labor rights), animal rights, etc, etc.
Thanks to this twitter thing, I learn so quickly of the news (no plugging meant there). Please do bear with my message for tonight. It concerns a subject much too important (for me at least) to simply let go and shove aside. I hope plainly to share with you some of what I came to know of the new fights the Church has been waging (the CBCP together with the active, noisy laity). If any of you happen to be the devout religious of any faith or denomination, I apologize this early for words that might turn out too coarse to your personal feelings. This is a very important issue. It's to do with reproductive healthcare and the Magna Carta for women. If you have the time I'd love to have with you whatever discussion you feel might be needed, or absorb, hands tied, mouth gagged, your sermons (if there will be such that this shall provoke). Anything at all. Just please first consider. If you have friends you can tell (will listen) about what's taking place as far as these go, you might like to share with them your fresh finds. Having you sit this one out is imposition enough. But I’d be blessed indeed to see you consider. In my take on the matter, I forgot to include some brief words on why RH and MC are, to me and for me, even necessary. I'm assuming you’ll pluck out your reasons for that yourself, that is, if you count them important as well.
There is a chaos of liberties embodied in our laws.
Thank you for the audience. Lying at the bottom of this short note is a news report lifted as is from the Inquirer website, following which is my take. Thank you for browsing or better yet, patiently prettily perusing line by line (if you shall read them at all during breaks, I mean).
beatrixpg
Catholic schools seeks women’s law exemption
By Philip Tubeza
Philippine Daily Inquirer First Posted 14:01:00 09/17/2009
MANILA, Philippines—Insisting on their religious and academic freedoms, Catholic educational institutions are seeking exemption from a provision in the new Magna Carta of Women banning the dismissal of unwed mothers from employment or school.
Monsignor Gerardo Santos, national president of the Catholic Educational Association of the Philippines (CEAP), said the CEAP would ask that a provision on such an exemption be inserted into the new law’s implementing rules and regulations.
He said the chairman of the Commission on Higher Education (CHEd), Emmanuel Angeles, has said he would support the CEAP’s participation in the writing of the IRR.
“It is important that we respect the religious affiliation of these institutions, the schools, or company the persons [concerned] belong to,” Santos told the CEAP national convention at the Manila Hotel.
Women’s rights activists have said that under the new law, unwed mothers who are kicked out can file a civil case and sue for damages while government officials who dismiss them can be sanctioned under administrative and civil service laws.
Santos insisted on the Catholic schools’ right to have an unwed pregnant student or employee go on leave “after due process,” or to enforce other disciplinary action.
http://globalnation.inquirer.net/news/breakingnews/view/20090917-225651/Catholic-schools-seeks-womens-law-exemption
I'd like to say, first, lest you bristle at my tastes, that I believe there's a power much greater than myself, or than anything in life that I can cognize well enough to deal, cope and even go along healthily with. I'm not above all vanity, but I'm well above the vanity of clerics, prelates. The very boundaries of reason/logic tell me this, and most such hard-to-see limits can only be touched and felt when intellect/reason is utilized greatly. I'm an epistemologist and theoretician first. Ergo, logic is my gauge and guide. But the best epistemology, that is to say, the solid one, teaches not that there's no GOD or metaphysics (metaphysis, to be accurate). Logic, driven to the limit, neither illumines nor gainsays divinity, metaphysics. Astrophysics, the Big Bang, are physics; they're not metaphysics. Why is smart epistemology humbler, quieter than your textbook delusional metaphysics? Because it learns to concede, along a tiresome way of trying its utmost to reason with life, that in order to know to a logical sureness that God exists and moulded from nothing all of our universe, in short to know and outknow God both (as the crafter of the universe and of logic included), we must stand on a plane higher than God's and logic's--the paradox of all paradoxes, or the fallacy of all fallacies which we can overcome only by junking logic itself. Metaphysics, by its sheer name, suggests a plane beyond "this one" (physis) from which to peek and poke into not just our world, but into what God does and what God’s done, and how our world appears from the farthest farthest "exterior." I stress I believe there's a higher, higher power, inasmuch as there are such things logic alone can never suffice to thresh out (and I can debate with physicists any given time, people without any sense of self-irony). Unlike Aquinas and unlike the non-sectarian metaphysicians, I shan’t dare for a "fuller" or "fullest" knowing of God. I, as mere human, am in no place to know and outknow this God let alone invoke "God's law" (divine absolute law) and back it up with human reason when simply crusading for my wishes.
The religious—or most I’ve learned about, to be fair—when trapped in a bind of having to justify dogma, battling foremost for power over all of human activity, like applying for a job laden with perks, wheel in God as major character reference. Come to think of it, who beats “God” as endorser, as mentor, trainer? The holy books lend them unequivocal (they believe unassailable) integrity, authority. I concede there are matters, events on earth just so tough to dice up as to be unreadable in the vocabs of reason. In the far almost unreachable past, those took the shapes of miracles which centuries hence, were remade into biblical lore. I'm saying God could be real or unreal/God can’t be/isn’t real or unreal. What proves so inexplicable (like logic's nature plus logic’s origins) has become the feast of eras of mysticism; it may just be a function of a powerful nature/universe Humans aren’t smart enough to probe. What's written lengthily in the bible, though it clashes with the great deal prescribed, say, in the Koran, may be true or untrue. What I’m saying, I and you are in no place at all to state too surely that the so-called will of the so-called divine is any way for real or unreal; most of them, taken down as God's revelations, are ideas I'm in no place to prove or disprove. So what gives me the license to invoke “divine command” while seeking to prevail in a contest between evaluations, a contest for humans who are moved, primarily, by yearning? But let's assume they're for real, that the bushes scorching were indeed sounding off like megaphones: If, fighting off a beating and raping husband, I must subject myself to God-ordained punishment, then so be it for so it shall be. I shall let myself burn in damnation; I'll bring my suntan, even; let's start with my bra. If that's the case, I shall welcome perdition. What do I do? Christians are so so sure fearing as they do what becomes of them in the afterlife more than they worry about fairness in this life. Goodness here is all about reward in heaven. Well, not for me. If God, as the bible says, makes me atone, scalding, torturously for irreverence, then so shall I endure all punishment. And the image of that does not keep me from fighting for the oppressed and choiceless on earth. The bible prescribes that I yield without struggle to a husband (I don't have one, thankfully; I have three—kidding). I've said this before, I'll say it again: Relationships are about love. Love does not concern itself with hierarchies, revolving not round lordships. I can never be with a man who wheels in "God" praying to be obeyed by me at all costs, insisting (respecting himself and God but not me) that he's my master, the last word in the house and my wisest and final handler in the bedroom. Show me IQ and heart, first. If a husband says I’ll burn in hell, so be it, I’ll bring buns and hotdogs. Thing is, I am so damn fortunate I have the power to assert myself this way. Most women in the Philippines do not.
More shocking, of course, would be a Church that eases so readily on reproductive healthcare, homosexuality, divorce, teenage pregnancy, single parenthood, etc, like it’s muting now its scriptural misogynism (yes, it is; Christianisms as practiced now are mostly less murderous of womankind, impertinently editing, correcting "god's" word). POINT IS, why keep believing them? The argument of lobbyists for the RH-bill and the Magna Carta for Women is that the Church and the State are as distinct as separate. Which on closer look seems a wobbly rebuttal. The religious, of all parties, make the valid point: For any of the religious to concede that religion and politics are split is to concede that their ethic is relative and arbitrary, not life-tenets as ordered by their "God"—their assertion being that religion must be a way of life (a value-theory/ideology practiced) setting rules for living as laid down in the strict terms of “God.” The fast rebuttal should be (1) that the word of god is not ours to dictate or impose (not that we know the higher power is a punishing one flailing a whip), (2) that we can't even jibe on who god is let alone what god requires of us (thus the maelstrom of faiths), and (3) that at the most basic level, or at the level we humans can negotiate among ourselves, values contending are all merely politics, or desires, interests, wishes, ambitions, dreams, longing in collision. If politics is also the venue on which the bases of LAWS in society are clinched, then religion can assert stake in politics and law-making, and therefore must participate in them. The Muslims understand this. But here is the CATCH: if they lose in the human contest that we have for centuries labeled "politics," they must accept, grinning, bearing, that, as much as winning is a part of any dispute, any opposition, any battle or combat, losing is its necessary obverse.
Thanks to the gap-ridden cultural/religious/political pluralism that is bequeathed by the West or thoughtlessly seized by the Philippines, we're now faced with a crisis of freedoms. Values as politics naturally compete in order to become the foundation of RULES (rules of any kind, anywhere). This crisis is a case of institutionalized relativism gone messily awry. It's been happening for a decade or so in the West. It's catching on in our country. Pluralism chafes against the simple fact that values and truths, while plural in any given spectrum, differ within such spectrum, each one of them trying to prevail as LAW or at least its base. I don’t disfavor the plurality of values; the plurality of values is a given reality if not possibility. I like values to be able to compete openly and freely. BUT the operative word here is "COMPETE," and from no honest-to-goodness competition would its participants emerge equal winners and losers. Even a synergy of opposing values or ideas which we often call "the middle ground" is but a speckle in a spectrum of gradations of values. In short, it's a value in itself, this so-called middle ground, to which we can try to coax round the differing sides, to neutralize difference, to extinguish the chaotic plurality, to dispose of the bones of crazed contention, to cease temporarily all contest, to rescue discussion from the realm of the confrontational, in short, to unify the camps round a harmonizing value, in turn, much needed order. Clearly, logically, that's not political pluraLISM. Values, if political, are necessarily plural, hence the friction, the opposition, or being political. And the only thing worse than political pluralism and/or cultural relativism, which, both, are fallacious paradigms, is intellectual pluralism/relativism—it is the joyously inane belief that any explanation, any given claim of logical answer, irrespective of strengths and idiocies, is very much valid, with the right to be expressed and taught anywhere. "It's all just perspectives, different perspectives, each adding to knowledge. Free speech, free speech!!!" Too much arrogant talk matched by too ignorant thought.
8.9.09
Response to BD's "Madder Gauguins"
dear BD (in response to your new blog entry)
On a better day, in a better mood, I'd probably not react to this, but here is the best day and best mood for reactions =) I always tell my students that often the onus of understanding rests, for the most part, on the reader. If we always whine of hardships in comprehension then we won't stand a chance at growth. Reading troubles vary from case to case. What some find easy to read, others junk as hard to read. There surely is a certain language virtually purposeful in being impossible for humans. And I've always said, where frilly diction covers for fatuity--of thought, insight, point, topic--the patient reader must learn to detect it; and how else to acquire this rare skill if not by reading and reading and reading (one clearly made rare by the middling importance societies give to study, reading, knowledge). The best to help out a reader--and this I tell students of philosophy and theory--is his/her own effort at comprehension. In other words, the most capable of aid in reading is the reader's own fiery longing to know what's being said, or unpuzzle, as it were, what's going on on paper. Sad that there's much writing that most people think of as "puzzles," unbearable exhibitions that seem to demand unriddling. Much of the prose of TS Eliot was reprehensible; too much decor, too simple meaning. There are after all such things as undesirable syntax and damnable choice of words. But to be fair, is that all Literary Criticisms are about? At least those that we have here? Attempts at simplicity and tight speech are more than welcome if they don't spiral into exercises in facile scrutiny and oversimplification. That some balance needs striking between an interest in depth (which alone does service to complex questions) and an amour for the receivers of critical work goes without defending, naturally. But what sort of balance is this really? IF the problem has chiefly been inability to grasp words, then teaching in schools reveals, by that, how poorly we fledge our youth in reading as a practice--reading after all is no more simply a function of literacy but a skill in itself.
Truth is, criticisms of literature aren't always meant for the creative writers--practitioners of a discipline who rarely if at all would make a point of distilling opinion. It is silly and vain to believe that we write criticisms in the hope of remoulding the writers of texts under review. But criticisms are meant mostly for the students, for the building of discourse, of knowledge itself (though Lit CritS, like Pol Sci, Socio, Psych, Law, etc, are derivative disciplines, they mean precisely to apply the insights conceived by means of critical theorizing and epistemology). It is meant for the people who're willing to learn what speech (or quiet) entails, what discoursing in a certain drift results in, what they make, what they break, matters more epistemological than anything else. That there's too bare emphasis if at all accorded the creative hand that sculpts out literature--which seems often forgone as if to tilt to the "crucial questions"--is a sad state of critical affairs. Sure.
But just as unfortunate seems a too-rash dismissal of disciplined critique as no more than a show of hefty vocabulary. Truth is, however we temper the language of serious critique, its seriousness precisely renders it unpopular. Taking anything too seriously is a fault seen of critics. The species of criticism one finds too often in the dailies, here, abroad, The NYTimes or The Guardian, while at times, incisive, are mostly too brief and cursory--owing largely to restrictions on space or, as is much too usual, on minds barely there. The London Review of Books and the New York Review of Books seem, on the face of (god knows who), more intent on critique. How publications like that can be set up here and how best to strategize for those to gather audience I've still to "uncover" (I've thought of launching one online with friends if just to fill chasms dividing writers and critics, writers and readers, critics and readers, especially, the canonical and the brushed-aside; and we'll see in a year or two).
What I say comes not of an arrogance of a person typified to traffic, like me, in philosophy (I after all do pen some fiction when craving it). It's purely a comment on the case as it bared itself--before the practitioner of lit crit that I once was.
It is silly to think that literary pedants have much to teach writers concerning technique. That is dumb to presume. Classifications being more than terms tag along a baggage of criteria and rules for "attack," no wonder then, that the best critics I know here happen to have command of the rigor vital to critical reading, while also knowing what it takes to write prose or poetry--being fictionists and poets themselves.
That i believe is the ultimate literary critic--one "clever" enough on account of her practice, to identify the tricks, the devilry, the charms, the habits, the moods that fashion phrasing into literature of any labeling, but also analytical enough to like attuning to questions to do with more than surface skillfulness. Any text is a piece of communication, prompting scrutiny for its claim of being, say, art. On the other hand, as it does all that, it occasions at the very least exchange, such as on the currents, cross-currents in the branding of a text or the crafting of the brand itself, and on issues, queries pertaining to the text as a resident in the village of knowledge & life.
To me bad writing is plain (in critique or literature)--horrible diction, horrible syntax, and god forbid, horrific idioms. Infatuation with problem construction is, like all infatuations, fevered silliness. Ezra Pound once fielded a question from Paris Review in regard to content versus form. He said, "Technique is the test of sincerity. If a thing isn't worth getting the technique to say, it is of inferior value."
Now, if we do criticism to assist reception and to dictate which practices need be ceased, writers would scream we don't need such foolish censorship (I won't discuss censorship here, it being always present, contrary to what the misled libertarians think). We do criticism to thresh out areas that may need illumining in a way not done within literature itself--concerned as those areas are with matters literature alone can't confront, challenge. Anything with much at stake once let out to be seen occasions shifting extents of polemic. I dream of a future for literary criticism in which practitioners know the art like they do their moles and the dents on their nose, and the farther-reaching questions it brings with it. If we share a fiery love for literature, the world in which we make it and the world in which literature remakes us, then half the aspiration should be to seize the love from a menacing death and keep its flickers from cooling.
I hope this finds you well, BD =)
Pls forgive me for having to expound... expand... expunge. hee hee hee.
Cheers always,
bee
On a better day, in a better mood, I'd probably not react to this, but here is the best day and best mood for reactions =) I always tell my students that often the onus of understanding rests, for the most part, on the reader. If we always whine of hardships in comprehension then we won't stand a chance at growth. Reading troubles vary from case to case. What some find easy to read, others junk as hard to read. There surely is a certain language virtually purposeful in being impossible for humans. And I've always said, where frilly diction covers for fatuity--of thought, insight, point, topic--the patient reader must learn to detect it; and how else to acquire this rare skill if not by reading and reading and reading (one clearly made rare by the middling importance societies give to study, reading, knowledge). The best to help out a reader--and this I tell students of philosophy and theory--is his/her own effort at comprehension. In other words, the most capable of aid in reading is the reader's own fiery longing to know what's being said, or unpuzzle, as it were, what's going on on paper. Sad that there's much writing that most people think of as "puzzles," unbearable exhibitions that seem to demand unriddling. Much of the prose of TS Eliot was reprehensible; too much decor, too simple meaning. There are after all such things as undesirable syntax and damnable choice of words. But to be fair, is that all Literary Criticisms are about? At least those that we have here? Attempts at simplicity and tight speech are more than welcome if they don't spiral into exercises in facile scrutiny and oversimplification. That some balance needs striking between an interest in depth (which alone does service to complex questions) and an amour for the receivers of critical work goes without defending, naturally. But what sort of balance is this really? IF the problem has chiefly been inability to grasp words, then teaching in schools reveals, by that, how poorly we fledge our youth in reading as a practice--reading after all is no more simply a function of literacy but a skill in itself.
Truth is, criticisms of literature aren't always meant for the creative writers--practitioners of a discipline who rarely if at all would make a point of distilling opinion. It is silly and vain to believe that we write criticisms in the hope of remoulding the writers of texts under review. But criticisms are meant mostly for the students, for the building of discourse, of knowledge itself (though Lit CritS, like Pol Sci, Socio, Psych, Law, etc, are derivative disciplines, they mean precisely to apply the insights conceived by means of critical theorizing and epistemology). It is meant for the people who're willing to learn what speech (or quiet) entails, what discoursing in a certain drift results in, what they make, what they break, matters more epistemological than anything else. That there's too bare emphasis if at all accorded the creative hand that sculpts out literature--which seems often forgone as if to tilt to the "crucial questions"--is a sad state of critical affairs. Sure.
But just as unfortunate seems a too-rash dismissal of disciplined critique as no more than a show of hefty vocabulary. Truth is, however we temper the language of serious critique, its seriousness precisely renders it unpopular. Taking anything too seriously is a fault seen of critics. The species of criticism one finds too often in the dailies, here, abroad, The NYTimes or The Guardian, while at times, incisive, are mostly too brief and cursory--owing largely to restrictions on space or, as is much too usual, on minds barely there. The London Review of Books and the New York Review of Books seem, on the face of (god knows who), more intent on critique. How publications like that can be set up here and how best to strategize for those to gather audience I've still to "uncover" (I've thought of launching one online with friends if just to fill chasms dividing writers and critics, writers and readers, critics and readers, especially, the canonical and the brushed-aside; and we'll see in a year or two).
What I say comes not of an arrogance of a person typified to traffic, like me, in philosophy (I after all do pen some fiction when craving it). It's purely a comment on the case as it bared itself--before the practitioner of lit crit that I once was.
It is silly to think that literary pedants have much to teach writers concerning technique. That is dumb to presume. Classifications being more than terms tag along a baggage of criteria and rules for "attack," no wonder then, that the best critics I know here happen to have command of the rigor vital to critical reading, while also knowing what it takes to write prose or poetry--being fictionists and poets themselves.
That i believe is the ultimate literary critic--one "clever" enough on account of her practice, to identify the tricks, the devilry, the charms, the habits, the moods that fashion phrasing into literature of any labeling, but also analytical enough to like attuning to questions to do with more than surface skillfulness. Any text is a piece of communication, prompting scrutiny for its claim of being, say, art. On the other hand, as it does all that, it occasions at the very least exchange, such as on the currents, cross-currents in the branding of a text or the crafting of the brand itself, and on issues, queries pertaining to the text as a resident in the village of knowledge & life.
To me bad writing is plain (in critique or literature)--horrible diction, horrible syntax, and god forbid, horrific idioms. Infatuation with problem construction is, like all infatuations, fevered silliness. Ezra Pound once fielded a question from Paris Review in regard to content versus form. He said, "Technique is the test of sincerity. If a thing isn't worth getting the technique to say, it is of inferior value."
Now, if we do criticism to assist reception and to dictate which practices need be ceased, writers would scream we don't need such foolish censorship (I won't discuss censorship here, it being always present, contrary to what the misled libertarians think). We do criticism to thresh out areas that may need illumining in a way not done within literature itself--concerned as those areas are with matters literature alone can't confront, challenge. Anything with much at stake once let out to be seen occasions shifting extents of polemic. I dream of a future for literary criticism in which practitioners know the art like they do their moles and the dents on their nose, and the farther-reaching questions it brings with it. If we share a fiery love for literature, the world in which we make it and the world in which literature remakes us, then half the aspiration should be to seize the love from a menacing death and keep its flickers from cooling.
I hope this finds you well, BD =)
Pls forgive me for having to expound... expand... expunge. hee hee hee.
Cheers always,
bee
2.9.09
Animal Cruelty & the Evils of the Market
Please find out for yourselves how the steaks and barbecues at dinner are produced. I'm all for eating meat, with meat being a food-chain requirement (though thanks to a project begun at Oxford there are now ways to produce meat without making animals suffer). After watching this footage, I also suggest that you look up videos taken of dogs raised in Mills for selling in boutiques. It will serve further to read "Disgrace" written by JM Coetzee and "The Jungle" by Upton Sinclair. Hypocrisy in situations like this assumes either of two
forms: People push for meat's consumption arguing it's natural for carnivores (including humans) to feed on other animals, without bravely confronting the truths about meat massproduction; or people completely denounce cruel massproduction without changing habits of wasteful consumption. How we have come to an era marked by horrific imbalances in our natural environment is easily explained by the abusive habits of humans--the worst of beasts in kingdom animalia. We chain animals, drug them, tether them, forcefeed them, forcemate them, starve them, overfeed them, overstimulate them, dirty them, and let them out in the cold or under the scorching heat. We make money out of them in every possible merciless way. We massproduce swine and poultry and when disease afflicts them because of our errors we gun them down by crates. And we think ourselves superior.
Please help animals any simple way you can, by giving the thirsty a bowl of clean water, the hungry a packet of crackers, the cold and shivering, a blanket or old pillow, and the dirty, a warm gentle bath. Please stop chaining ur pets. Please stop ordering them around. Learn to establish a medium of communication with your pets without making fun of them. Let them run freely and play with you freely. Helping them scratch some areas can offer relief. Those who are cruel to animals, I hope the worst for them, I hope they become flies I can swat off as mercilessly. Eat them if you must. But why hurt them when they don't hurt you? Stop harming animals. If they bother you put them in an appropriate place. Stop kicking kittens. Stop disciplining animals like slaves.
If you take pets to keep them in cages, to let them die in filth and hunger, you have no business having them. Only those who know how to love animals are given the chance to see how happy they can be. They have a right to that happiness, to a feeling of security. If people can't love them, care for them, we should at the very least just let them be.
Save a pet, save a friend.
forms: People push for meat's consumption arguing it's natural for carnivores (including humans) to feed on other animals, without bravely confronting the truths about meat massproduction; or people completely denounce cruel massproduction without changing habits of wasteful consumption. How we have come to an era marked by horrific imbalances in our natural environment is easily explained by the abusive habits of humans--the worst of beasts in kingdom animalia. We chain animals, drug them, tether them, forcefeed them, forcemate them, starve them, overfeed them, overstimulate them, dirty them, and let them out in the cold or under the scorching heat. We make money out of them in every possible merciless way. We massproduce swine and poultry and when disease afflicts them because of our errors we gun them down by crates. And we think ourselves superior.
Please help animals any simple way you can, by giving the thirsty a bowl of clean water, the hungry a packet of crackers, the cold and shivering, a blanket or old pillow, and the dirty, a warm gentle bath. Please stop chaining ur pets. Please stop ordering them around. Learn to establish a medium of communication with your pets without making fun of them. Let them run freely and play with you freely. Helping them scratch some areas can offer relief. Those who are cruel to animals, I hope the worst for them, I hope they become flies I can swat off as mercilessly. Eat them if you must. But why hurt them when they don't hurt you? Stop harming animals. If they bother you put them in an appropriate place. Stop kicking kittens. Stop disciplining animals like slaves.
If you take pets to keep them in cages, to let them die in filth and hunger, you have no business having them. Only those who know how to love animals are given the chance to see how happy they can be. They have a right to that happiness, to a feeling of security. If people can't love them, care for them, we should at the very least just let them be.
Save a pet, save a friend.
29.8.09
The Amazing World Number One KIM YU-NA
She's the World Number 1 figure skater, holding the 207-point record (the first to surpass the 200 mark total for short-program and long-program scores combined). A very young genius. Witnessing pure excellence achieved by KIM at the most distant exceptional levels has me in sobs of sheer happiness. Terrific, only terrific. I missed the 2009 World Championships held in March. This video reminds me of the time I began watching figure-skating tournaments because of Michelle Kwan (Ladies) and Kimmie Meissner (Juniors then Ladies).
Kim Yu-Na for the Short Program at the 2009 World Figure-skating Championships
Kim Yu-Na for the Free Skate at the 2009 WC
Total score: Exceeding 200, Marking new world skating record
Kim Yu-Na for the Short Program at the 2009 World Figure-skating Championships
Kim Yu-Na for the Free Skate at the 2009 WC
Total score: Exceeding 200, Marking new world skating record
27.8.09
Response to RC's "Let Them Eat Cake" (w/o chiding anyone)
Response to Mr Carandang's "Let them eat cake"
hey ricky... i hope you don't mind. i hope you consider this tiny tiny insight. i love it that people are rallied round a distaste for GMA's, well, tasty diet. but there's a bigger question escaping critics.
i do appreciate, that for a change, the point in your criticism is an allegation of stealing (pilfering a measly million for a dinner, with romualdez's dirt-wealth covering for it). something i sympathize with, but challenge all the same, is the view of most LeCirque "howlers": i.e. that the choice of dining highlights inequality, that the biggest fault of GMA is her hardened indifference to the chasms in living standards here.
Why are we really angry? Why deserves knowing for sure. If we're mad because there might have been public money filched for the trips, then let's weed out the accountable. If we're mad about the grossness of the living divides that it emphasizes, it's even more substantial but is the criticism substantive? If at the basis of the fury is the reality of gross inequality--not the state theft per se rendered almost customary by GMA--then decidedly, GMA's not unique in her blindness to reality. Anger is apt, but at what truth do we direct our fury? I mean, if you looked around, without misspending too much energy, you'll see lavish living everywhere. If gaps in lifestyle overlie larger gaps in quality of life, then to what exactly need we look for inquisitive meditation? I find the criticism cursory if beneath it is nonetheless a tacit tolerance for the very conditions enabling the grossness of living divides. I'm saying, if the malaise has been turning mainly on inequality, then a government-obsessed critique won't do. Assuming, Suarez and Romualdez did hand the payments (the critics are implacable, saying graft isn't the point), and the cry of the critics is against the insensitivity to the plight of most filipinos, then we ought to be shoving back the frames within which is accustomed our view of social realities. we can't be government-centric when threshing out issues that are issues not only on account of government or of government being that way it is now.
i'm all for protest and criticism of excess & unfairness. but it's critical to the making of our beliefs & our way of responding to questions and issues how wisely we understand why such things happen.
i'm sure, GMA has dined in almost countless posh restaurants--using state, personal, or a friend's money. why does it really anger us, why does discussing it matter to us as a people or to those impoverished to whom critics rightly refer as the majority officials represent--those are the questions.
if we refuse to at least probe the roots of disenfranchisement and famine here then we all share in GMA's blithe callousness to social realities. it would be more productive, i find, if we helped ourselves to a wider appreciation of matters less simple than directly to do with a president's whims. again, i'm all for rebuke of graft and corruption, but is corruption state-centric? who's awake or asleep, hardened or not, to the conditions that breed this very inequality, which because it is maddening, gets our blood up?
a well-considering scrutiny is key. thanks for the space!
hey ricky... i hope you don't mind. i hope you consider this tiny tiny insight. i love it that people are rallied round a distaste for GMA's, well, tasty diet. but there's a bigger question escaping critics.
i do appreciate, that for a change, the point in your criticism is an allegation of stealing (pilfering a measly million for a dinner, with romualdez's dirt-wealth covering for it). something i sympathize with, but challenge all the same, is the view of most LeCirque "howlers": i.e. that the choice of dining highlights inequality, that the biggest fault of GMA is her hardened indifference to the chasms in living standards here.
Why are we really angry? Why deserves knowing for sure. If we're mad because there might have been public money filched for the trips, then let's weed out the accountable. If we're mad about the grossness of the living divides that it emphasizes, it's even more substantial but is the criticism substantive? If at the basis of the fury is the reality of gross inequality--not the state theft per se rendered almost customary by GMA--then decidedly, GMA's not unique in her blindness to reality. Anger is apt, but at what truth do we direct our fury? I mean, if you looked around, without misspending too much energy, you'll see lavish living everywhere. If gaps in lifestyle overlie larger gaps in quality of life, then to what exactly need we look for inquisitive meditation? I find the criticism cursory if beneath it is nonetheless a tacit tolerance for the very conditions enabling the grossness of living divides. I'm saying, if the malaise has been turning mainly on inequality, then a government-obsessed critique won't do. Assuming, Suarez and Romualdez did hand the payments (the critics are implacable, saying graft isn't the point), and the cry of the critics is against the insensitivity to the plight of most filipinos, then we ought to be shoving back the frames within which is accustomed our view of social realities. we can't be government-centric when threshing out issues that are issues not only on account of government or of government being that way it is now.
i'm all for protest and criticism of excess & unfairness. but it's critical to the making of our beliefs & our way of responding to questions and issues how wisely we understand why such things happen.
i'm sure, GMA has dined in almost countless posh restaurants--using state, personal, or a friend's money. why does it really anger us, why does discussing it matter to us as a people or to those impoverished to whom critics rightly refer as the majority officials represent--those are the questions.
if we refuse to at least probe the roots of disenfranchisement and famine here then we all share in GMA's blithe callousness to social realities. it would be more productive, i find, if we helped ourselves to a wider appreciation of matters less simple than directly to do with a president's whims. again, i'm all for rebuke of graft and corruption, but is corruption state-centric? who's awake or asleep, hardened or not, to the conditions that breed this very inequality, which because it is maddening, gets our blood up?
a well-considering scrutiny is key. thanks for the space!
25.8.09
Bundling Love: The Heart in the Throes of Missing
For CAA
(My take, with questions of social status and status projections well enough aside)
Now, I see why those far, who love us, hoard gifts. There's a wistfulness in which one implodes. The care and affection unexpressed, unrelieved, is hurtfully pent-up. All one can do to cope with the absence is to let off what's built up when yearning for presence. I sympathize with those who can't manage merest tokens i.e. soldiers, the exiled, trafficked workers. One piles up presents imagining presence--expressions of love that might've been a hug, shared laughter, kind ear, sweet hello, dinner, passed spoon when one's with the other most cared for.
(My take, with questions of social status and status projections well enough aside)
Now, I see why those far, who love us, hoard gifts. There's a wistfulness in which one implodes. The care and affection unexpressed, unrelieved, is hurtfully pent-up. All one can do to cope with the absence is to let off what's built up when yearning for presence. I sympathize with those who can't manage merest tokens i.e. soldiers, the exiled, trafficked workers. One piles up presents imagining presence--expressions of love that might've been a hug, shared laughter, kind ear, sweet hello, dinner, passed spoon when one's with the other most cared for.
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