Tuesday, September 3, 2024

Frogs in a Boiling Pot

  It is understood that if you put a frog into tepid water and slowly raise the temperature to a boil, the frog will not leap out, but stay and die.  Another point about frogs, a large frog will eat a smaller frog; this practice is common amongst frogs, toads, salamanders, and other amphibians.  Considering the current political temperature, with the riots and other disturbances in the Western world, the political pot now seems to have been set to boil for quite some time now.

  People are not frogs and this is a main component of the current situation.  There has been for years now a systemic problem, sticking to the frog metaphor; people have been lied to with regards to what is going on around them.  People have suddenly taken notice that there are other people who want them to not know how to make good choices; be it by omission or by misdirection.

  It has been said: ‘the first man to hurl an insult rather than a stone started civilization.’  If that is true then when the people turn to riot, then discussion, including insults seem to have stopped.  It has also been said: ‘to learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize’; and this statement should be taken as a warning where the warning is to see who seeks to hold back the facts in the name of providing a ‘truth’.  Words have been re-introduced into our lexicon with a bit of a wrapper; the two primary being tossed around these days are misinformation and disinformation.

  It should be noted that Stewart Brand, with his declaration: ‘Information wants to be free’ was right. While open to interpretation, the statement is slightly off the mark, in that it should be reframed as ‘Facts will become free.’  Some facts are not always pretty and when people learn of the facts, those same people are not happy; and yet the facts are still the facts.

   Below this point the conversation slash argument is going to get dicey or spicy.  It is of interest to this author to understand why so many people are willing to work off of a lack of facts and move forward from there.

   Of course there are times when feelings over facts can be beneficial, though there are a few caveats.  The ideal of Love is the best start for feelings to win over facts, so-long as one adheres to the non-aggression principle; else that be stalking.  Alternately, is the case of altruism, some people may be causing miss-directing when they use other people’s money in their acts of kindness.  Consider the phrase - ‘robbing from Peter to pay Paul’, please look up Corinthians 14:37 if you want to understand why this reference has been made.

   As far back as Plato and Aristotle it was known that a democracy would be a tyranny of those who held the most common of beliefs.  Plato strove to ‘fix’ this problem by setting forth the idea of a republic in his writings titled Republic.  Aristotle wrote a dissenting piece, mentioning that too many competing goals will cripple a government’s capability to function and that eventually only a tyrannical state will remain.  Aristotle made another criticism, this time against Plato’s assertion that the city-state was responsible for the poor and the children; thus making Aristotle a member of the Far-Right.

  Aristotle’s comment on tyranny was proven in reverse when the USSR collapsed and the country of Yugoslavia was broken into the Balkan states in 1992. The shift to what that area was to what is today was marred with intercultural conflict coupled with genocidal level killings and rape.  Previous situations happened in the same area when the Ottoman Empire extended its reach northward.  In 711 AD in the Iberian Peninsula was invaded and the concurred local citizens where allowed to keep practicing their religion, so long as they paid the jazya tax.  Sicily in 827 was taken over by one group until it was taken by another country in the 11th century; and then again in 1860 when Giuseppe Garibaldi and his army took the island back in the name of Italia; these shifts in cultural leadership plus the repeated oppression gave rise to the Mafia; which of course brought on a whole bundle of other problems both in Italy and further abroad.

  Post WW2, the League of Nations was rebranded into the United Nations due to failing at the mandate of world peace that was drafted after WW1; the League of Nations lasted only 26 years and was brought to an end after WW2.  The UN has been around for almost 80 years now, and while there has not been WW3, peace on Earth and good will towards all men still seems beyond the reach of the UN, which by the way seems to have mostly given up on those ideals in favour of authoritarianism; there was a recent attempt by the WHO to mandate that it controls the definition of what and when a pandemic is, and that control the mitigation process.

  There is a line of thinking that the world must be looked at holistically when it comes to topics like peace and poverty; this is impossible due to many factors.  On the peace topic, it will be quite difficult to get people harmonized enough, apathetic enough, or to be even disengaged enough in their own truths to create world peace.  Conquest of whatever was the ‘known world’ at the time has always been a fact for most religions, countries and many political ideologies; the Amish and a few others are excluded from the list. What the UN, the EUHC, NGOs and some governments have done was to download and off-load global warfare to locations in the Western World through their policies of mass migration.

  Moving on to poverty around the world, this can never be solved because the Earth does not provide a uniform or consistent condition.  Some countries have soil that is fertile and other countries do not, and some countries have navigable rivers while others do not; for example there is the Mississippi river and the Zambezi River with its Victoria Falls.  The two examples given shows how the world at the country level can never have an equal outcome because some countries can grow more food and ship goods to market at a lower cost.  The most referenced writing promoting equity of outcome for all was Carl Marx’s Manifesto; according to some though it has never been properly implemented.  Though, when one considers the recurring outcomes, one might assume the actual goal of hardcore Communists is simply a form of population control.

 The French, along with many others bought into the ideals of the UN, EU, WEF, and US that every state or country around the world will just get along, by holding hands, singing songs and that all people will just get along.  This line of thinking seems to have been somewhat accepted en masse in the Western world; while other people in other countries seem to have looked at the West as if it was a chicken ready for a plucking; the second group simply saw an opportunity made available to them, much like a common shopper clipping coupons.

   Unfortunately, diplomacy is not mankind’s natural state as the NEWS reports at the local, national, and global levels commonly and regularly.  Those in the collegiate and university institutions provide a plethora of courses in diplomacy and yet few and far between are the individuals who can attend such classes, and yet some political leaders have made the assumption that people in general can tackle such a task regardless of their educational level or any cultural differences. 

  Back to our Frogs and yes this includes the French, along with other Western countries that bought into the ‘all cultures are equally valid’ narrative; both linguistically and logically this quoted statement has a problem.  While it may seem like a nice idea, the slogan lacks specificity and not everyone agrees with it.  A culture is made up of more than just art, architecture, clothing, drink, food, language, laws, religion, or even the style of government; because every culture also comes with a common approach to life an idea of what is right general.  We as human beings look at the world in comparisons and that means that while two things may be ‘equally valid’, that doesn’t mean they are ‘equally best’; for the idea of ‘what is best’ is a matter of acceptable values, and values are the result of both one’s culture and one’s personality.

   

Mongol General: What is best in life? 
Conan: To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of their women.  (From Conan the Barbarian - 1982)