Post No. 2,785 - Flawed truths and not listening carefully enough

A few weeks ago I watched a video which proposed three extra senses. The details of those are not relevant to this post so I won't link to the video, but it did prompt recollection of a comment in Brendan  Myers’ free online course “Clear and Present Thinking” along the lines that thinking could be considered a sense. 

I had a mild sense of wariness, which I interpreted as “make sure you credit the original source”, so I tracked down the reference, and posted a comment along the lines of thinking also being a sense, and credited both the original source and that I had found it via Brendan Myers’ course. 

And ignored the residual wariness ... until I quite rightly got jumped on for the white supremacism and other bigotries of the source - specifically, ableism. I didn’t know about all the problems of that person, so it was a useful, if salutary lesson - two actually: one about the person, and another about not ignoring any mild sense of unease ...

Now, I’m not going to give that person, deceased though they are, nor their cause the oxygen of publicity, so I will just refer to them as R_ S_, and you can look up the links if you want to know more (although, in another example of ableism, R_ S_’s ableism is not mentioned ... ). 

All this led to further reflection along the lines of: 

at what stage does a source become so polluted that cannot use anything of theirs?

As an extreme example, the n___’s (mis)use of (a slightly modified) version of the s_ means it cannot be used by most people, despite it being a sacred symbol in several South and East Asian religions (and blogger’s sensitivities mean I am wary of naming the symbols or those who desecrated it).

R__ling has damaged her legacy through her hatred of trans people. 

And in a somewhat greyer example, some of the activist and social change concepts (especially the applications of nonviolent resistance - which is a concept developed by others, including Tolstoy) of Gandhi are still useful - but Gandhi was a sexual pervert - which I discussed here.

Do we need the perspective of chronological distance to assess this?

Maybe. 

I consider there is more to it, though - alignment or not with personal values is an issue covering usage. 

For example, I see Nietzsche getting quoted often, but I consider that person’s values to be terrible. 

I ended my post about Gandhi with the following: 

My key points from those quotes, for the consideration of current leaders, are: 

• the means shape the ends, and leaders have a duty of care for the means used. This obliges one to take the longer term view, and, if the short term outcome will harm the ultimate end, desist; 
• consider the state of being of those one is leading as much as the aims one is trying to achieve; 
• communication has many forms: use that which is most appropriate (not necessarily "most effective", given the need to consider means and ends); 
• pragmatism has many forms: some are good, some neutral, and some harmful. Use the good - that which fights evil (on that, see here); 
• admit to mistakes, and learn from them.
  

Others will, of course, see other lessons, quite likely of equal or greater validity 😊

Right now, despite considering there to be potentially useful information in some of R_ S_’s material, I consider that of insufficient value to justify using that one minor comment relayed by Brendan Myer, so I edited it out of my comment and thanked the person who brought the matter to my attention. 

And I will pay better attention to my feelings, including those of wariness, in future ...  

 

PS - not identifying the source is not, in my opinion, an acceptable option

 

Possible flaws 

Where I can, I will try to highlight possible flaws / issues you should consider:

• there may be flawed logical arguments in the above: to find out more about such flaws and thinking generally, I recommend Brendan  Myers’ free online course “Clear and Present Thinking”;  
• I could be wrong - so keep your thinking caps on, and make up your own minds for yourself.
  

 

If you appreciated this post, please consider promoting it - there are some links below, and there’s also Instagram. 

Remember: we generally need to be more human being rather than human doing, to mind our Mӕgan, and to acknowledge that all misgendering is an act of active transphobia/transmisia that puts trans+ lives at risk & accept that all insistence on the use of “trans” as a descriptor comes with commensurate use of “cis” as a descriptor to prevent “othering” (just as binary gendered [men’s and women’s] sporting teams are either both given the gender descriptor, or neither).

Copyright © Kayleen White 2007-2024     NO AI   I do not consent to any machine learning aka Artificial Intelligence (AI), generative AI, large language model, machine learning, chatbot, or other automated analysis, generative process, or replication program to reproduce, mimic, remix, summarise, or otherwise  replicate any part of this post or other posts on this blog via any means. Typo’s may be inserrted deliberately to demonstrate this is not an AI product.     Otherwise, fair and reasonable use is accepted under Creative Commons 4.0 on an Attribution-ShareAlike basis https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/  

 

Post No. 2,750 - The climate crisis is real, an existential threat, and human caused

I want to make a clear declarative statement so my position is clear:

The climate crisis is real, an existential threat, and human-caused

I get annoyed when views that climate change is caused by other effects are claimed, as: 

(1) that is wrong; 

(2) even if that were to be true - which it is NOT - we would still need to make changes to how we live anyway (doubly so, if the ice age sometimes claimed to be coming does eventuate); and 

(3) we are consuming too many resources as it is, so the wealthier/flashier/more consuming lifestyles on the planet (including in my nation, the so-called “Australia”) have to change - quite apart from the climate crisis - so that we, the human species, have a sustainable future. 

I have criticised science: it has problems, including the “publish or perish” rubbish and all the abuses of ethics that that leads to (including not publishing null replications, or twisting alleged replications of studies into something else), but, above all else, it has the fatal flaw of emotional reactions to new outcomes/topics/anything labelled as pseudo-science - and those emotional flaws also allow the bigotries it shows against its own and in making interpretations. 

Yes, a lot of the pseudo-science is rubbish, but there is some good in there - even Carl Sagan considered early childhood of children of previous lives worth investigating. On that, the only link I could find from a quick search is as follows, but I originally read that in one of Sagan’s books: 

• “Childhood past-life memories: 50 years of evidence”   https://europeanacademyofreligionandsociety.com/news/childhood-past-life-memories-50-years-of-evidence/   “According to the famous astrophysicist Carl Sagan, there were three claims in the field of parapsychology that deserve serious study. One of them was the reporting of past-life memories by young children, which turn out to be accurate, and which can only be explained through reincarnation.”   site:   European Academy on Religion and Society   https://europeanacademyofreligionandsociety.com/   which   “aims to foster collaboration between Faculties and Departments of Theology and/or Religious Studies, and to make their knowledge visible to society”  
  

I want you, Dear Reader, to take note of what I wrote above: 

“I originally read that in one of Sagan’s books”  

I am unconventional in many of my opinions and what I hold to be true, but that is, wherever possible, based on my experience and research - such as: 

• the work of Victor Zammit; 

• Dean I Radin’s “The Conscious Universe: The Scientific Truth of Psychic Phenomena” (Harper One (2010), first pub. Harper Collins (2009), ISBN 978 0062029096, Amazon);

• Lynne  McTaggart’s  work, such as “The Power of Eight” (Atria Books, Reprint edition, 26th September 2017, ISBN 9781501115561, Amazon); and 

• the sort of work I wrote about in “Post No. 2,218 - A Commentary on "Superhuman: The Invisible Made Visible" and "A Tear in the Sky" (700 words 3 - 5 min. read)”   https://gnwmythr.blogspot.com/2022/05/post-no-2218-commentary-on-superhuman.html   

But on top of that, I bother to read/view work by science communicators and debunkers. 

I don’t always agree with what they are communicating (and some have occasionally gone of the rails, in my opinion), but I am not afraid of listening to and considering their messages - until they do go off the rails and become dangerous (which I have posted links to elsewhere - one in particular was way off track with autism, and earlier was also off trach with gender identity).

I want to urge you, Dear Reader, not to be afraid of science and scientists - yes, I consider some of them wrong, but I also consider the vast majority of what they do to be correct, good, and valuable to people and this planet. 

And where there are problems, I can try to change them, but only if I know what the problems are - and I won’t know that if I do not know their views. 

Mind you, I will equally do the same with science ... “sceptics”, but fewer of them are, in my opinion, correct or valid enough to give heed to, than on the other side. 

Engaging with science and scientists is not the same as listening to/watching right wing anti-inclusion anti-decency extremists - except for the few who render themselves unfit to be counted as scientific by promoting eugenics, transgenocide, etc ... and I am always mindful of those (probably relatively few) doctors and scientists (and engineers) who cooperated with the evil that held power in Germany in the 1930s and 40s. 

Do not be an intellectual coward: genuinely consider first, noting that having the courage to genuinely consider science may still lead to you rejecting something from officialdom ... 

And deal constructively with emotional issues that doing so raises. Do not be as emotionally dishonest, crippled and incompetent as some scientists are.

Possible flaws 

Where I can, I will try to highlight possible flaws / issues you should consider:

• there may be flawed logical arguments in the above: to find out more about such flaws and thinking generally, I recommend Brendan  Myers’ free online course “Clear and Present Thinking”;  
• I could be wrong - so keep your thinking caps on, and make up your own minds for yourself.
  

 

If you appreciated this post, please consider promoting it - there are some links below, and there’s also Instagram. 

Remember: we generally need to be more human being rather than human doing, to mind our Mӕgan, and to acknowledge that all misgendering is an act of active transphobia/transmisia that puts trans+ lives at risk & accept that all insistence on the use of “trans” as a descriptor comes with commensurate use of “cis” as a descriptor to prevent “othering” (just as binary gendered [men’s and women’s] sporting teams are either both given the gender descriptor, or neither).

Copyright © Kayleen White 2007-2024     NO AI   I do not consent to any machine learning aka Artificial Intelligence (AI), generative AI, large language model, machine learning, chatbot, or other automated analysis, generative process, or replication program to reproduce, mimic, remix, summarise, or otherwise  replicate any part of this post or other posts on this blog via any means. Typo’s may be inserrted deliberately to demonstrate this is not an AI product.     Otherwise, fair and reasonable use is accepted under Creative Commons 4.0 on an Attribution-ShareAlike basis https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/