(Fourteen-minute read)

If something is described as shame, it is disappointing or not satisfactory:

I am sure most of us would agree that we all live in a world bombarded by Media which is desensitising our feelings of shame, guilt, and compassion.

Feelings are wholly and solely experienced only by you. They only exist at the moment they arise.

Shame is a nonmoral emotion, meaning that it involves the nonmoral or “aesthetic” facet of one’s self-esteem, which is concerned with the self’s adequacy with respect to its own wishes or aspirations.

However, a flaw of character can elicit guilt rather than shame.

However, in guilt, it is the moral facet of one’s self-esteem – the facet concerned with the responsible harmfulness or beneficialness of the self’s behaviour, attitudes, and dispositions – that suffers a blow, not national guilt.

Shame and guilt have much in common:

They are self-conscious emotions, implying self-reflection and self-evaluation they involve negative self-evaluations and feelings of distress elicited by one’s perceived failures or transgressions. However shame and guilt are distinguishable from each other, and their differences matter in a world that is driven by algorithms.

Why because guilt often plays the role of the “ugly” and anti-social emotion endowed with the power to violate norms and thwart others’ goals, and willing (or inclined) to do so.

But perhaps the worst meta-feeling is increasingly the most common: feeling good about feeling bad.

How morally disoriented can one get?

Think of all we’ve witnessed in the past few weeks alone, examples ranging from the outrageous to the ridiculous – Brexit, (The political and moral choices that England continues to make in response to the identity positioning by their historical legacy is becoming one of the great unfolding stories of our time.) to the suffering of thousands in Africa.

These days there’s no collective meaning attached to our feelings other than things like Red Nose Day and world charities begging to our pockets. Much of the social strife that we’re experiencing today is the result of meta-feelings that are moralizing mobs on both the political right and left who see themselves as victimized.

They think they’re important because they say something about us, about the world, and about our relationship with it.

But they say none of these things.

Sometimes you hurt for a good reason. Sometimes for a bad reason. And sometimes no reason at all. The hurt itself is neutral. The reason is separate.

We are now the powerful absurd who are supposed to be connected than ever before, yet we somehow feel more isolated.

How has society changed to cause this to be a more prevalent problem?

Is it because we can order our groceries online.

One of the main reasons is that we are removed from nature.

We have little or no understanding of the effects of climate other than seeing forest fires, massive flooding on our TV sets (which are only the beginning of the natural disaster to come) along with pictures of the starving, devastation by wars, and terrorism not to mention inequality reflected in shanty squaller.

The internet is not a lifeforce, devouring our lives to feed itself. It is merely a technological innovation, albeit one on which much of our economic, political, and cultural lives depend.

As we have seen in New Zeland there are some of us inhabit, for instance, queer radical insane spaces promoted by racism prejudices and propaganda across Social Media that collectivity can take on toxic and damaging roles and lead to the damnation and ruination of people.

If we were to dissect and see social media more clearly, to see where all the tentacles really come from, to ask simple questions like, “Who is telling us to look in this direction?”, we might see it for what it is: an apparatus made up of many moving parts, all of whose effects can be traced in very material renditions of power and commerce for profit.

We ignore social media at our peril, but can we use it as tools and not let it define us?

Is it time to stop thinking through the forced collectivities of social media and start thinking about the possibility of unbelonging instead?

Can we think outside of the endless sense of timelessness forced upon us by hours of internet life and instead think ourselves into a time of actual history and movements forward?

Can we think about society not in terms of collectivities forged in endless solidarity in public but as the work we put in to create a better world?

We must push back against the screaming online hordes and simply stated, “We understand the anger, but we will first discuss the matter as properly outraged citizens, as people who belong, as people with feelings.

Unfortunately, Social interaction without collective feeling is meaningless.

To achieve change shame has to be scaled up from the individual to an audience that shames governments, corporations and banks.

Social media has brought us all closer together in communication.

Sometimes that’s a good thing. But when it comes to online shaming, it’s a bad thing. People get humiliated on Twitter, savaged in public forums and women get rape and death threats.

There’s something about the anonymity of social media has people who probably seem perfectly nice in person, posting vicious, scathing, humiliating comments online.

I am not talking here about Guilt which is an internally generated sense of moral obligation not to repeat past transgressions, like the extermination of a helpless minority within one’s own society.

Nor am I talking about shame, which is externally generated, driven by the “shaming look” of others.

Therein lies a key difference: For guilt, it’s the awareness of the deed and its meaning; For shame, it’s whether others know.

For example, a major identity issue for young Germans is how to deal with the notion of collective guilt or collective shame for the crimes of the Third Reich. While honour-shame cultures have moral codes, their vulnerability to the fear of shame can readily lead to a jettisoning of any moral concerns.

Yet here we are, ironically living in a perpetual outrage cycle that moves so fast, we forget yesterday’s controversy today because a new one has supplanted it.

As a culture, we seem to have divested ourselves of shame — real shame.

Online “communities” tend to resemble ever-shape-shifting amoebae, breaking and dividing into multiple pieces that in turn drift towards new clusters of organisms.

Social media is a disparate set of effects brought about by collusion between corporations, but its mythology occludes those mechanisms of power and currency by installing instead origin stories and tall tales, legends about how “the whole world” was watching.

It’s impossible to overstate what we’re losing.

Shame is crucial in well-functioning societies. It’s an evolutionary adaptation that keeps us cooperating, considerate, and safe.

Feelings are important. But they’re important not for the reasons we think they are.

The internet should be considered simply as a tool, not a substitute for justice or organising?

Long may we continue to expose the various structures through which it and its denizens exert power, sometimes for good but often not.

The internet is a technology, and yet most of our interactions on it are mediated by unfeeling algorithms stripped away or sense of humanity in the most seemingly innocuous ways when we participate in frenzied modes of expulsion.

You might say that we were once sophisticated enough to fake it if we didn’t feel it.

How we use social media is marginalised populations.

The way individuals deal with their nations’ history is closely linked with emotional experiences. 

If both collective guilt and shame can initiate reparative attitudes, the question then arises as to what may mediate the link between each and reparation.

The feelings of personal distress arising from perceptions of illegitimate ingroup superiority rather than empathic concern for the other are the critical antecedents of collective guilt.

Finally, the type of empathy may also be an important factor.

As is well known, empathy can have both cognitive and affective components.

Guilt may be associated with an increased tendency to put oneself in the shoes of the victim group.

It might still be too early to expect much emotional empathy from
the perpetrator group.

It is perhaps indicative of the extreme political sensitivity

And all of this unfolding in a somewhat surreality landscape with our brains doing mental acrobatics to avoid any discomfort.

It is my view that if we are to tackle the effects of the fourth Industrial technological revolution and climate change and address the mistakes of the last industrial revolution we must find a new way to facilitate non-confrontational politics.

There is no shame in the realisation that coming together to make a world worthy of all.

All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.

(Six-minute read)

Extension or not the time is running out for the UK to get a deal on arrangements for its departure from the EU.

It is both blindingly and depressingly obvious that the social fabric of the country is being stretched to breaking point.

An Act of self-harm with no point, no upside.

There is no such thing as sun lite uplands outside the EU.

Why?

It’s because under WTO rules, anything you offer one country you must offer all. (except if you have a free trade agreement).

Its time to get a grip.

If not we will be witnessing civil unrest as an ignorant citizenry lashes out at the EU, Ireland, anything with European in the title.

The will of the people.

Almost half voted one way the rest the other way while those most affected had no vote with Victory won by illegal means.

For decades, gaps in income and respect for the London fraternity have been widening, compounded by the need for free education for all, which has now manifested itself into less fortunate fellow citizens becoming economically and socially detached which is bitterly and understandably resented.

Hence the small majority vote to leave.

Article 50 was enacted without consultation or thought out plan.

A short extension will not help.

What is needed is to contest the forthcoming EU Elections with a long extension and gain some power to change and reform the European Union.

With the current climate in Europen, the new commission would find it hard to refuse a move to reverse the economic divergence of the rich region to poor ones.

Such a strategy would sidestep the inevitability of the impending catastrophe of leave or remain and offers a credible strategy for all to unite.

It would allow time for the truth.

It would allow time for the orange/green factor, the Irish Question to be resolved.

Fortunately, up to now the Good Friday Treaty that the UK voluntarily signed created constraints that made a clear-cut Brexit impossible actually because it is predicated on the common membership of both Ireland and the United Kingdom to the same political body called the European Union.

“Ar scáth a chéile a mhairimid” (we live in the shadow of each other.)

Seventeen months ago the germ called the DUP crossed the borderless Irish Sea, found its way to Westminster and contaminated the Conservative Party and British politics.

It has produced a situation where ten DUP members hold the balance of power in Westminster, keeping her minority government in office.

The unavoidable truth about the island of Ireland question did not feature it was bought off with a bribe to the DUP.

The tragedy, so far, is that unionists are not prepared to look beyond their own traditional suspicions. The Republic of Ireland they fear no longer exists.

Membership of the European Union helped to remove centuries old poison and distrust and change the dynamic. Gone are the days of a DUP who built its philosophy on principles of confrontation – No Surrender, Sell-Out, Not an Inch.

The thesis to set DUP pulses racing, however, is the notion that Northern Ireland is about to be cut adrift from the United Kingdom, as part of a cunning plan to facilitate a united Ireland and confine Ulster unionists to a life of subservience.

Nowadays, like much of US President Donald Trump’s antics, often the fear and rhetoric have little basis in reality.

The tragedy of the DUP’s current position is they are not prepared to explore the nature of the Brexit deal on offer to them.

Northern Ireland has been offered unique status within the European Union and the United Kingdom. The DUP and Northern Ireland have indeed been offered a sweetheart deal. Not due to the European Union’s special affection for Northern Ireland but because it is the practical way to structure the withdrawal agreement, the border question included.

Politics in England has indeed become a spectator sport with the House of Commons the Coliseum.

The current turmoil in British politics totally eclipses Suez, totally eclipses everything, we have never been here before.

The lengths of fixation of government on this one issue, the complexity of the problem…20 resignations utterly eclipsing Suez, Falklands, Iraq War, the country more evenly divided, more deeply divided, families, communities, churches, than on any issue.

If you asked me the DUP is attempting to sell loyal Ulster down the river and England up the swanny.

Having sailed into the 20th century as an empire, the U.K. spent the second half of the century shedding nearly all of its colonies — and as a result much of its economic and military might. For the first time in modern history, Britain is small.

The UK better get used to being a middling power.

The U.K. simply doesn’t seem to know how to play the game of giving and take needed to negotiate with a far larger partner.

With the Conservative party more deeply divided in its 200-year history…”Scotland and Northern Ireland’s future in the union are both up for grabs.

I take it all day by day. Don’t jump too far ahead. Let’s see where we are on March 29th and I’ll come back to you!

All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.

The kind of Irish language provisions some campaigners were attempting to introduce in Northern Ireland do not exist south of the border yet the more creative approach it has taken to the language is allowing for more organic growth and popularity.

(Sixteen-minute read)

We all know that the current changes in our planet’s climate are redrawing the world and magnifying the risks for instability in all forms.

Water is one of the most valuable resources on Earth.

Probably every manufactured product uses water during some part of the production process.

It is the source of life on Earth and quite possibly beyond.

It covers over two-thirds of the planet’s surface, makes up around 70% of the human body and is essential for life.

Water is indispensable to human life.

In theory, the amount of water on earth will always remain the same.

How likely are the water wars to arise?

Water has ranked in the top five risks for seven consecutive years in the World Economic Forum’s Global Risk Report.

There is already plenty of evidence to suggests that climate change drives conflict and social unrest, directly linking both in a cause-and-effect relationship.

Water-related challenges such as shortages and sanitation are already increasing smaller-scale conflict and instability within and across national borders.

Its scarcity is playing a role in fuelling the political and security crisis in Yemen.

Afghanistan’s efforts to harness the waters of the Helmand River and the Harirud to support post-conflict reconstruction and development have alarmed Iran.

The long-standing conflict over water from the Cauvery River between the Indian states Karnataka and Tamil Nadu has recently resurfaced.

However, it is rarely the lack of water as such that fuels conflict, but rather its governance and management.

And if you look at the headline threats to humanity and the planet over the next decade, as pinpointed by 1,000 experts, all but one are linked to water. These include extreme weather, natural and man-made disasters, climate change, biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse.

This is a grim fact of modern life and despite having contributed the least to anthropogenic climate change of anyone, low-income, resource-poor nations will be affected the most.

You can’t escape climate change if your feet are on the ground.

It is widely agreed that a business-as-usual approach cannot address global water challenges in the future, nor will our current strategies sustain the world’s thirst much longer, particularly when the population hits eight, nine or ten billion in the coming decades.

Yet cold, hard data on how our water systems function is still lacking.

The World Health Organization estimates 844 million people lack basic drinking water; some two billion use a source contaminated with faeces.

With a warming of 2 to 4C, most regions in Africa will experience a 60 to 80 per cent reduction of surface run-off by 2100.

Last year, Cape Town came within a few drops of Day Zero when the taps are turned off. A serious drought was only just averted.

There is no need here to draw a picture of what would happen if  New York or any other city with a few million inhabitants suffered fresh water shortages.

With 55% of us already living in urban areas which are forecasted to hit 68% by 2050 many cities and towns that are in low-lying coastal locations are under threat to flooding.

Let’s face it, water is chronically undervalued and, in some cases, not valued at all.

Only by embedding its true financial, social and environmental value into policymaking, governance, and financial and risk reporting can we instil a better mentality.

The resilience of our society, both in terms of economic growth and human security, must be addressed through a water lens.

As the Paris climate change conference showed making pledges, is one thing, delivering on them often another.

The emerging fourth industrial revolution technologies – machine-learning, artificial intelligence, advanced sensors, satellite imagery, robotics and others – have the potential to unlock a wealth of previously unobtainable data about water systems at the global, regional, watershed and local level.

Unfortunately, all this data will achieve little or nothing unless its value is realized and appreciated today.

In 2021, the Surface Water Ocean Topography mission, a joint satellite mission between Nasa and France, will use radar technology to provide the first global survey of Earth’s water, measuring how bodies of water change over time. The satellite will survey at least 90 per cent of the planet, studying lakes, rivers, reservoirs and oceans roughly twice every 21 days.

WHAT THEY WILL DISCOVER IS BY 2021 WE WON’T NEED A SATELLITE TO SURVEY THE EARTH’S WATER. OUR PLANET IS ALREADY SENDING DISTRESS SIGNALS.

Consumers may already be aware of the environmental impact of producing goods in terms of energy or pollution, but they might be surprised to learn how much water is needed to create some daily goods.

Growing coffee beans is a thirsty business, as is growing cotton – 10,000 litres of water in a pair of jeans – and 2,500 litres in the average T-shirt. Avocados, almonds – even bottles of water themselves, are all highly water-intensive enterprises.

Common sense says it’s TIME TO STOP EATING – HAMBURGERS.

A hamburger takes 2,400 litres, or 630 gallons, of water to produce.

Thousands of litres are needed to make shoes and microchips.

Somewhere around 30 litres of water is required for tea itself, 10 litres for a small dash of milk and a further 6 litres for each teaspoon of sugar. This means that a simple cup of tea with milk and two sugars could actually require 52 litres of water – enough to fill my kettle more than 30 times.

Agriculture uses about 70% of freshwater across the globe.

When countries and regions with water shortages pour their water into exports, on the surface it can look as if they are making a profit, but in the long term their reliance on diminishing water resources will be damaging.

WHAT IF ANYTHING ARE WE DOING ABOUT WATER?

There is the same amount of freshwater on earth as there always has been.

Water scarcity is an abstract concept to many and a stark reality for others. It is the result of myriad environmental, political, economic, and social forces.

In essence, only 0.007 per cent of the planet’s water is available to fuel and feed its 6.8 billion people.

At the moment 844 million people do not even have access to a basic water source.