I acknowledge receipt of your email to the Taoiseach, Leo Varadkar T.D.
Is mian liom a admháil go bhfuarthas do ríomhphost chuig an Taoiseach, Leo Varadkar T.D
While I appreciate that it is not possible to reply to everyone this is what is wrong with Politicians, hiding behind the unnamed relying on Algorithms.
So in the vain hope of attracting your attention, I am publishing the letter in my Flipboard Magazines. With a request that my reader past it on.
I have also sent this letter to the Irish Times in the hope they might publish it.
The letter:
16/07/2019
Dear Taoiseach,
I write as a man from the land of the Green.
In my life, I have had the great gift of travelling a great deal of the world both by land and sea.
We have recently celebrated the first man on the moon some fifty years ago.
Then as a much younger man, I watched Armstrong place his foot with the famous words.
“That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”
Never did I think that our world so full of life and beauty might become the dust that his boot stood on.
Every human being has a relationship with plastic but unfortunately not ever one has a relationship with nature that is now facing a crisis that requires once again International recognition of the Unity of the Globe that the moon landing did all those years ago.
This is where Ireland under your leadership has a moral duty to call on all nations of the world to attend a unity of the global conference, in the Emerald Isle the land of forty shades of green.
The Paris Climate change conference achieved shallow unbinding promises.
The clock is ticking until the next US election starting in November 2020 with the winner inaugurated on Wednesday, January 20, 2021.
Just think of the influence of such a world meeting would have on the election of new USA president and its policies re Climate Change.
If you want to leave a legacy to be remembered by other than the backstop/Brexit what better opportunity to promote the Green.
This gathering should have not just world leaders but leading Industrials, representatives from world organisations and the young that are going to inherit the earth.
Its sole purpose is to present the facts from all side and recognize the need for the world to act as one and achieve a just climate change program that is binding and fully financed – a moon landing moment.
The venue could be at Croke Park.
Ireland could lead by example such as banning combustion engines from its major city centre once a month, declaring clear skies once a month, granting long term repayable governments grants to green energy initiatives like solar panels.
For every participant in attendance.
Ireland could plant a tree to offset their travelling carbon footprint.
In today`s tormented world, we trade off meeting one value over another.
To know your value today you need “kaleidoscope thinking,” the ability to see alternative angles and perspectives and to create new patterns of thinking that propel innovation.
However, we think of this it is what we need to do with our lives – create a value.
For better or worse we’re all habitual self-evaluators.
I’m only as good as my last achievement or success.
In a recent Beady Eye post we look at what it is to be human which with technology is going to become more and more complicated.
The value of human life is the same as it’s always been…priceless.
All down throughout history, we see that it has an arbitrary value.
Genghis Khan in his day killed 10% of the existing world population. The “Fat Man” bomb dropped on Nagasaki the end of 1945 killed from 39,000 to 80,000. Hiroshima death toll at around anything from 140000 to 90,000.
Climate change has the potential to kill us all within seven years so perhaps it is not a good time to be thinking we have a value.
Anyway vastly increased access to transportable information it makes it both easier and more difficult to define value.
Technology will not only shape the way they live and work but also created a whole new set of beliefs, fears and aspirations. These values, in turn, will affect our approach to the global challenges and opportunities that lie ahead.
But it’s more than just the way we use technology.
Our value will be invested in “psychological self-determination.” self-acceptance.
Our desire in regard to participation, expression, identity, and quality of life—all values which are espoused by organizations, but largely ignored in practice as organizations continue to focus on reducing fixed labour costs and increasing profits.
Your fate is now inextricably bound to the collective success of global giants like Microsoft, Apple, Amazon all the way down to the bottom line.
Technology is creating a new gender gap as young men and women value their role differently in their lives.
This is a total disaster, all our fault willing allowing our private data to be harvest every moment of our living lives.
The next generation will be the first generation to be worse off than their parents, yet they are still expected to pick up the tab for the planet’s problems, including an ageing population, global debt and climate change.
So let’s look at a few of the things we might use to find a value today.
How should we set a value upon each other?
FROM A RELIGIOUS POINT OF VIEW:
If one takes a dispassionate look at religion it is mostly concerned with texts, scriptures, dogma, and trying to validate events within the history of that religion.
All of this is already reinforced by the law of the land right?
No Geographical Boundaries.
FROM A SOCIAL MEDIA POINT OF VIEW:
Figures of daily traffic pulled by these sites are enough, for anyone to realize the power and influence that social media commands over inhabitants of our world, both virtual and physical. Power and importance of social media in today’s world are such that it has been included in the curriculum of almost any kind of school all over the globe.
No Geographical Boundaries.
FROM A MONETARY VIEW.
You don’t have to look far: Inequality
FROM A GOVERNMENT VIEW.
A lot of the world is make-believe. We’re only aware of a fraction of what’s going on.
GDP before looking after its people.
FROM A HEURISTIC BELIEF.
I’m worthwhile merely because “I am I, I exist, and I am alive”
(A heuristic is a mental shortcut that allows an individual to make a decision, pass judgment, or solve a problem quickly and with the least amount of mental effort. As humans move throughout the world, they must process large amounts of information and make many choices within limited amounts of time. When information is missing, or an immediate decision is necessary, heuristics act as “rules of thumb” that guide behaviour down the most efficient pathway.)
Thoroughly rejects the belief that my worth has anything to do with my performances, achievements or successes in life! It asserts “a bad act is not a bad me, nor is a good act a good me.” It implies that there are no bad people, no evil people; only bad behaviours or evil behaviours.
This belief is not without boundaries.
FROM A SOCIAL CONTRACT VIEW THAT BINDS US:
Means society must reserve the right of forced hospitalization, incarceration, even capital punishment for those with markedly diminished levels of rational autonomy, which is the essence of sanity in a world where evolution and consensus dictate that life is better than death, sanity is better than insanity, health is better than disease, love is better than hate, good is better than evil, and so forth!
FROM A CAPITALISTIC/ SOCIALIST/COMMUNIST VIEW:
Their work is worthwhile and that their efforts are being recognised, and value similar things in an employer brand to a consumer brand.
FROM A MORAL VIEW:
Beware of transgressing the other person’s morals, as this is particularly how they will value you.
FROM A NEBULOUS QUANTUM FUTURE VIEW:
Two states at the one time. Where is the value that?
If we truly saw the value of people.
I am worthwhile because I exist, I am I, and I am alive.”
I will repeat this powerful new mantra to live by in hope of it finding an audience willing to adopt it as a mantra capable of creating a healthy transformation by coming alive within us.
So valuating yourself will be only an intrinsic value that climate
change will expose.
Perhaps most telling, try Googling it. What is my value?
You probably get an answer from an Algorithm.
Mouse over the value to see the full definition. Worthless.
Don’t take your values to heart as Facebook wants to develop brain-reading technology. The consequences of which will be serious for all our values with our interiors becoming a thing of the past, rubbing out the distinction between mind and machine.
Sometimes values can be complementary and sometimes they can compete with each other.
You have to value your life for someone else to value it and need to value others for them to value yours.
There is only one overall value for all humans or forthcoming robots to pursue.
To create a clean and sustainable world for the generations that follow us.
All human comments appreciated. All like clicking and abuse chucked in the bin.
An absurd thought you might say but it is the holy grail of AI to manipulate your feelings our emotions.
However, the uses of emotionally AI are nearly endless.
The number one question is going to be how do we stop being manipulated by those who control the data.
Another words democracy itself has been and is becoming more with Social media an emotional puppet show run by companies such as Facebook who is undoubtedly one of the kings of social networking.
It is who and how data is controlled that determines the outcomes of elections and referendums as we have seen with Brexit and the election of Donal Trump and now the coming of G5 we going have:
Autonomous Driving.
Remote Robotic Surgery.
Smart(er) Factories.
Immersive Gaming and Augmented Reality.
Supply Chain Management.
Digital Transformation in the Experience Economy.
It will “offer users no less than the perception of infinite capacity.
–
But how can we find a balance between accelerating technological progress
and governments’ responsibility to improve the economic conditions and raise
the level of wellbeing for their citizens?
There isn’t a single solution.
Why?
Because Democracy is based on feelings. During an election, you are not being asked to vote rather how do you feel.
Currently, many people cannot imagine their life without social networks, which in less than a decade have become an indispensable resource in our daily lives who have served multiple purposes throughout its short life and replaced other media.
With 2.38 billion monthly active users as of the first quarter of 2019, Facebook is the biggest social network worldwide. It is at a size where it’s worth really taking a careful look at what are all the things that it can do to make social media the most positive force for good possible.
But like climate change, we sit back and watch the development of technologies that have little or no regulation both of which are reshaping the world we live in and the Earth exponentially.
Perhaps sometime in the next few decades, we’ll start developing technologies that improve human intelligence. We’ll hack the brain, or interface the brain to computers, or finally crack the problem of General Artificial Intelligence.
Should we be worried about technology’s advance and our demise?
Will Technology Save Us Or Enslave Us?
Intelligence is the source of technology.
The purest case of an intelligence explosion would be a General Artificial Intelligence rewriting its own source code.
That prospect would certainly change our viewpoints on what is life.
The potential impact on our world is enormous.
Both climate change and GAI are heading us all to a critical point of all human history.
Right now, almost no one is paying serious attention to either.
So what might a General Artificial Intelligence do with nanotechnology?
Feed the hungry?
Heal the sick?
Help us become smarter?
Remove our emotions so we have no sense of guilt?
Instantly wipe out the human species?
Probably it depends on the specific makeup of the AI.
See, human beings all have the same cognitive architecture. We all have a prefrontal cortex and limbic system and so on. If you imagine a space of all possible minds, then all human beings are packed into one small dot in mind design space. And then Artificial Intelligence is literally everything else. “AI” just means “a mind that does not work like we do.
So you can’t ask “What will an AI do?” as if all AIs formed a natural kind.
There is more than one possible AI.
Back to the question of whether a robot could or should have emotions.
From an intellectual point of view, this may not be as important to a robot as being able to interrupt human emotion and also display it back while interacting with people.
The most efficient way to answer the question would be to start by making itself smarter: Acquiring more computer resources could probably be most easily accomplished by hacking every computer connected to the internet.
Once that’s done, it could use the resulting enormous amount of computing power to calculate the most optimal way of rewriting itself for more intelligence.
Using this newfound intelligence and raw brute force, it may turn to develop new and more efficient computer chips and proceeding to turn the surface of the earth and nearby matter into computer innards.
We would not escape as we are made from perfectly usable carbon atoms, just waiting to be utilized as computronium – re-purposing our atoms.
It would then be simply a matter of the robot fooling a human, an easy task into thinking it had emotions.
The sort of emotion a robot might actually be programmed would be the same as its intelligence that being artificial.
If it turns out to be possible to create an AGI, it will presumably be given a task of some sort.
Here are a few.
Psychotherapy software that utilizes an emotional connection to dispense advice.
Call answering software that detects caller emotions and responds accordingly.
To foresee the consequences of actions.
Robots will not be susceptible to the effects of fear, adrenaline or shock and could potentially make strategic, reasoned decisions much faster than a human soldier.
Robots would not be restrained by human emotions and the capacity for compassion.
So could a robot acquire Adrenaline along with emotions?
Emotions appear to be integrated as part of a biological body and a biological brain but our inability to see beyond biological programming does not allow us to answer this question.
There is no doubt that as AI technology grows more sophisticated, the potential for implementing it in weaponry is all but guaranteed – Drones that get an Adrenaline kick.
Adrenaline can be used in both technical and nontechnical contexts.
It is commonly used in describing the physiological symptoms (such as increased heart rate and respiration) that occur as part of the body’s fight-or-flight response to stress.
In a robot, it would not be just an act in the same vein. A thinking person feels empathy for something that looks alive and has complex behaviours, even if it doesn’t have life in a biological sense.
In the end, there is absolutely no reason why any sane human would ever want them to have characteristics but technophobic response actually feels rational.
Like a robot dealing with sick people should be able to mimic some emotions like compassion and carefulness….. They testify to the fact that emotions and our biological body operate together.
While a consensus is yet to be reached over the scope and scale of the effect we should expect from mobile connectivity on poverty-reduction and inequality some argue that it might be the best hope we have.
All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.
The term ” Human capital” suggests that we create ourselves as social beings, and then society recognizes the outcome of our self-making by assigning them values. This value is then exchanged for commodities and services of equal value.
WE SPEND OUR LIVES TRYING TO MAKE THIS VALUE HIGHER.
No discussion of human capital can omit the influence of families on the knowledge, skills, health, values, and habits. But when we become a risk, a drain on society, a problem of a life gone on too long we reflect the political and economic goals that the notion of human capital was designed to fulfil – profit.
When we assign value to human life it means different worth including negative value – to the lives of different people. Life subsequently came to be valued according to its ability to foster the national economy – its potential contribution to GDP with nil contribution deemed a surplus to manage.
This has become the bedrock of modern capitalism – persons and profit with the smartphone transferring its owner into an asset of significant value.
Profit-seeking Algorithms that are now embedded in our societies making it seem natural to be monitored and to allow access to every moment of our days.
Assigning life a market value is no way to guarantee that this value will be high.
Everyone is able to help themselves but information technologies are fastening individuals to prefabricated categories ( Age, gender, religion, ) solidifying us as persons of a certain kind.
Even if we consider ourselves to be so much more than our data or human capital, we cultivate, display, and leverage, our socially recognized arsenal of valued traits—no matter how worrying the manner in which they were consolidated—whenever circumstances call for it.
Human capital, then, is something other than the sum total of our ambition.
Like other kinds of capital, its value is set by market dynamics that support a larger process of accumulation.
We are unable to determine how much we are worth to our society.
There is no stopping this form of unattachment to reality, to politics, to nature, to others and it is destined to become worse. We have world leaders Twittering, governments pandering to populism, androids apps grabbing your data even if you block them.
Indeed it would be fair to say that Capitalism is disappearing underground.
The idea of human lives as surplus—superfluous to society rather than being its building blocks—offends our robust sense of self.
However, in designating selfhood unique yet classifiable, a personal project of self-creation yet a collective subject of political policy, we end up with human capital.
We feel oppressed by constantly having to demonstrate our worth in a matrix of investments and returns.
Is there any solution to this detachment?
Not with Social media that is putting a protective net around people with this net actually becoming a limiting cage.
A vote every five or ten years will not do it.
Countries must enable their citizens to become involved directly in the economy by offering non-trading but inheritable Participation Bonds with guaranteed returns in order to make the economy serve the people rather than the other way around.
In a world of universal and instantaneous communication with robotic technology now treating our abilities to earn a living the coffers of the state are diminishing.
Some will say that Participation Bonds is a form of Socialism.
It might well be but it is not the state owning the assets of a country but its people have a vested interest.
The current relationship between the balance sheet value of human capital and the operating costs of the human capital is not realistic. Successful leaders want to know how their people are deployed and new technological advances clearly are of little value to countries that don’t put their people first.
Therefore, economists regard expenditures on education, training, medical care, and so on as investments in human capital. They are called human capital because people cannot be separated from their knowledge, skills, health, or values in the way they can be separated from their financial and physical assets but tangible forms of capital are not the only type of capital.
No matter what colour, creed or status you are if you are not attached you cannot reap the rewards.
Other words if you are on a sailing boat crossing the Atlantic there is no point in being pushed over or jumping overboard if you want to arrive.
The old adage of “from shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves no longer applies.
All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.
Democracy is in the process of being hollowed out.
A lethal combination of a backlash against hard-won rights for women and minorities, and worsening economic and social insecurities are being exploited by rightwing demagogues.
The lights are going out – and if an alternative politics of hope fails, then darkness will consume us all.
Rather than insulting the voters Putin’s recent remarks at the G20 emphasize the emblematic of our broken politics.
We have a politics that’s is all breaking points and no bending, that may ultimately be headed where Putin says.
Look at Britain where the House of Lords is a broken, morally corrupt, anti-democratic institution. Where Parlement because of first past the post voting system does not represent the people as a whole. Where lies and farcical financial promises are driving it to isolation. Foreigner-bashing is all the current rage the kernel of Farage nationalism. Conservatives are a dying breed.
Look at Poland, whose authoritarian rightwing government has also seized the judiciary, attacked media freedom, attempted to undermine the right to protest and indulged in rampant migrant-bashing.
Look at Hungary where rampant corruption has led to Hungary being widely labelled a kleptocracy, and it has indulged in wanton antisemitism.
Look at Italy’s far-right deputy prime minister Matteo Salvini – whose Northern League has soared in polls – has every chance of becoming the country’s leader in the near future.
Look at France yellow jackets right wing populous Marie La Penn a country where a strong left-wing element and a strong right-wing element always take any opportunity they can to contest virtually any changes proposed by any government that is not of their own persuasion. As a consequence, moderate political movements in France regularly find themselves obliged to pay lip service to more extreme groupings on their own side of the political spectrum, to avoid being accused of weakness. It’s true on the left, and it’s true on the right. A country where revolution is seen as an exercise of democratic rights, protesters usually draw public sympathy, and temporary chaos is seen as part of the price to pay.
Look at Turkey, once described as an emerging democracy, but whose de facto dictator Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who rules through a never-ending state of emergency, has locked up and persecuted journalists and opponents, and concentrated power in his hands.
Look at the EU which is in need of fundamental reforms. Confronted by the spectre of its former self, Europe seems paralyzed. A two speed Europe that takes decisions from on high, and then, if they don’t work, they use every economic excuse possible to justify them as necessary to maintain the unity and progress. I do not agree with the economic homogeneity that binds the EU together what is needed is for citizens to feel like Europe is closer, notwithstanding the sharing of pseudo-values and the currency. Unitary economics, so far, has penalised us. Unitary politics, for me, does not represent us, the citizens. The euro has us trapped. If its goal is to dismantle nation-states, that will be the end of European democracy.
The EU is one of the motors of capitalist globalisation, the rule that all decisions should be made on the basis of profitability alone.
The people who really affect what happens must be democratically elected.
Join DiEM25.
Look at China with a population of around 1.404 billion one of the safest countries, with a low capital crime rate in the world. A concentration of never-married men, with little prospect of ever marrying, raises the potential for social instability.
Look at Russia acting as a traditional predatory nation-state. It’s trying to increase its wealth, expand its influence and maximize its power. It is a mess. It’s utterly corrupt. It represses any vigorous opposition and kills inconvenient journalists. Some, including US diplomats, have referred to the country as a mafia state.
Putin doesn’t care. He’s an autocrat and a nationalist it means holding the line against Putin’s expanding influence and waiting him out to see if his successor is more amenable to our interests and our values.
Look at the USA. Founded on the bedrock of freedom of expression, only about 1% of the actual population that lives in the US ever explores outside the USA. With 16 trillion dollars of debt, capitalism is slavery. Donald Trump represents everything the rest of the world hates about America. It has created more wars that never solved anything.
It is now on a downward trajectory which could doom it to second-class status as a world power and will result in more autocrats such as Donal Dumps being elected.
Look at China the myriad problems within Chinese society comes from the behaviour, values and the beliefs of its people. The Chinese government is an embodiment of deliberative democracy, it stops short of allowing full freedom of expression and transparency. If the Chinese people spent as much time and energy learning about the world and publicly deliberating the problems that plague their society as they do playing video games, text messaging, watching vapid American sitcoms and shopping for trendy brands, China would already be a completely advanced country and moreover a genuinely democratic one.
Look at the World. We’re digging our own grave.
Algorithms for profit are plundering the world unregulated while we gladly hand over for free our every waking minute of life to be analyzed by a few world corporations that are disconnecting us from reality.
If our worldview resonates with the natural order and the laws that govern the Universe, then we are able to find harmony in life. Perception of the world and our state of vitality depends on how accurately we can interpret the information we receive from our senses.
About saving the planet should do more than sitting back and watch it happen. This is indeed a world issue! Not just a human one!
All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.
Three years of political disarray are now climaxing in a non-democratic election of a new prime minister.
In the present environment which has little or no social purpose, the fundamental problem is that a hung parliament is electing a new leader for the country without a mandate from the country as a whole.
It is absurd to be able to become a leader of a country just because your party is currently in power. Which can only lead to a General election that is going split the United?
All of this is driven by populous Social Media chatter which is trying to be heard under rules of an unwritten constitution based the Great Charter or Magna Cartalibertatum written by a bunch of rich dudes with swords who got mad at their king.
Most of the 63 clauses of the Magna Carta were concerned with guaranteeing feudal law and benefited only the feudal nobility. The Church was granted its traditional freedom and privileges. A few clauses dealt with the rights of the middle class in the towns and relieved some economic inequities. But the ordinary freeman and peasant, who made up the vast bulk of England’s population, were scarcely mentioned.
The Magna Carta was not, therefore, a great democratic document, securing fundamental liberties for all. Instead, it was essentially a feudal charter assuring privileges to the aristocracy.
Since its inception 800 years ago, it has been used several times to restrain the power of the monarch. Although the more dated clauses have since been repealed, some remain enshrined in British law today, in particular, the right to a fair trial for all citizens.
Indeed the core principles of Magna Carta can also be found in a variety of legal documents today and are echoed in the United States Bill of Rights, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the European Convention on Human Rights.
Not bad for a document that lasted 10 days.
Still considered to be Britain’s “statute number one,” to understand the civil rights it provides and the foundation it laid for future use.
Modified several times over the centuries by ordinary laws issued by the parliament, it is still considered a valuable and fundamental document.
A document which Prime Minister David Cameron said ‘changed the world’. Indeed! it did.
We feel nothing of the drama and shenanigans of those days of political fever.
I am not advocating here that this the reason that England could see civil unrest but it has set helped to set a class structure that is now divided and will be unable to unite whether England stays in or is attached or leaves the European Union.
That apart the fuse awaiting to be light, is the Northern Ireland backstop.
It is becoming more and more apparent that Brixit is no longer about whether is In or Out of the European Union rather it is about, an out of date voting systems First Past the post, that gives a limited voice to the population as a whole.
The Eatonmess is now an English breakfast.
Can it be resolved?
Yes and No
It looks more and more like a serious political uprising will erupt when the magic ingredient are in place.
Economic backwardness the Northern Ireland backstop and a deal with Mr Donald Dump, a General election with Nigel Farage, could prove to be the straw that breaks the camel’s back.
There is only one reasonable course and that is to abort articular 50.
In doing so in order to show genuine participation join the Euro.
So can there ever be a morally respectable case for using predictions of civil unrest as an argument against a proposed policy? Undoubtedly.
I am afraid that Brexit goes much further than leaving the EU it is reverting to Nationalism due to among many other things the lack of Civic Education to impart an Identity, to the tabloid press and social media that is spreading a post-factual society where evidence and truths no longer matter where lie and truth have equal status.
The gaps between perception and reality must be addressed. One can see this when it comes to immigrants not just in the Uk but across Europe. Immigrants that get resident status should be spread throughout the country and not allowed to settle in certain regions.
Everybody must share in the countries wealth by issuing Citizens bonds. ( See the previous post)
More responsible politics, polarized societies are far less tolerant of Globalization.
This requires dropping the language of fear.
All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.
We all accept that in a thousand trillion years from now when what left of the Universe that the human species and all others will not exist.
So there is no need to worry nor will there be any need to worry in 6 billion years that the earth will be fried by the sun.
Or in 50 years or perhaps in twelve years our human footprint is predicted to make most if not all the earth unlivable dehumanizing us all.
We have all witnessed today the consequences of dehumanization, ISIS, Rwanda Genocide, Extermination of Jews by the Nazis but it is wrong to assume cruelty comes from dehumanization it’s not the whole picture we often fold to the social pressures of our environment.
Since the dawn of humanity, we are all capable of it in one form or another and there is no doubing that it will follow us into space.
Wars, Famines, Genocides, Religious bigotry, Racial discrimination, Mass killings you name it and you could have participated in that, and that’s the ugly truth.
The conclusion is that almost anyone is capable of committing staggering atrocities under the right circumstances as we don’t behave in stressful situations the way we think we would or the way we would like to.
Military service relies on dehumanization so people are able to do terrible things to other people only after having dehumanized them.
Acknowledging other people’s humanity won’t solve our problems.
We need a culture less obsessed with power and honour and more concerned with mindfulness and dignity.
If you were able to realize that Jews, Blacks, Gays, Muslims, were people just like you, then evil might disappear but brutality would still prevail within all.
Take white supremacists they know about the humanity of Jews and black people and whoever else they’re discriminating against — and it terrifies them.
One of their slogans is, “You will not replace us.” Think of what that means.
That’s not what you chant if you thought they were roaches or subhuman. That’s what you chant at people you’re really worried about, people who you think are a threat to your status and way of life.
So cruelty isn’t an accident or an aberration, but something central to who and what we are. This is reflected in the psychological appetites we have, like an appetite to punish those we think have done wrong.
Dehumanization is real and terrible.
We all know what is wrong with the world we live in – inequality.
As long as human civilization continues to be dominated and is disfigured by capitalism we will see one atrocity after and other.
Such as.
There are over 35 major conflicts going on in the world today.
35% of the world’s people live in countries in which basic political rights and civil liberties are denied (such as freedom of speech, religion, press, fair trials, democratic political processes, etc).
20 million people held in bonded labour.
Up to 2 million, mostly woman and children, are victims of human trafficking worldwide.
Why are human beings so cruel to each other? And how do we justify acts of sheer inhumanity?
60 per cent of mammal species are not known to kill one another at all.
The simple answer is that it’s in our genes.
One could rattle on forever on the subject and get nowhere but because of the effects of Climate Change to come in the next 12 to 50 years, we are going to see humanity test to breaking point.
However evolutionary history is not a total straitjacket we can build a more pacific less cruel society if we wish.
Climate change is going to intensify our efforts to solve the world’s most serious and pervasive problems. With all our technological advances both climate change and cruelty will be intimately linked.
Who will decide upon areas to be saved?
On what criteria. By the general appearance or what are the main ecosystems in them.
When it comes to murderous tendencies, humans really are exceptional.
Success will be hard won, mostly because there will be no single path to saving, room for reefs, forests, and other keystone habitats given the huge diversity of cultures, political systems, geographic situations and stages of development in human communities from the inhabitable fringes of the poles to the Equator.
We can’t save ourselves without saving the very ecosystems we all rely on.
A moral abyss.
Humanity is a juggernaut which is essentially mindless presently displaying a combination of ignorance and despair.
With the building toward a stabilizing earth’s climate will see cruelty on a global scale.
The range of threats is dizzyingly varied.
But there are many pathways to solutions, we have no need to surrender to nihilism.
The causes—human population growth, habitat loss, climate change—are complex and interlocking, fueling each other in an ever faster destructive spiral.
We are still at the beginning of a potential mass socialist movement, not a Consumerism, not Communism but an era in need of citizens attachment, with a vested interest in our future — a priceless opportunity we cannot afford to waste.
(See the previous post on Citizens Bonds)
This could be an era, in which value is extended to saving the rest of nature. Knowing it, preserving it, studying it, understanding it, cherishing it, and holding on until we know what the hell we’re doing.
I think that, for the most part, people who do terrible things are just like us. They’ve just gone astray in certain specific ways.
So why worry?
The human populations of the plante is incapable of recognizing the cruelty it inflicts on all forms of life till it s to late.
All human comments much appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.
The international community is a phrase used in geopolitics and international relations to refer to a broad group of people and governments of the world. It slips off the tongue of BBC correspondents and newsreaders as if it is just good old plain common sense.
The international society thinks this … believes that … is concerned about.
HOW OFTEN HAVE WE HEARD COUNTRIES APPEALING TO THE INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY.
Are they wasting their breath?
If you were to asked me I would say that activists, politicians and commentators often use the term in calling for action to be taken in order to deflect their own countries dismal response.
We all know what is meant by the term ‘international community’, don’t we?
It’s the west, of course, nothing more, nothing less.
Just look at the global issue of climate change which could not be more International which urgently requires a common strategy with binding targets that must be defined on a planetary scale. The central driver of climate change risk is mainstream economic (development) models which aspire to carbon-intensive industrialization.
It is speculated that our global interconnectedness, instead of (only) making us more resilient, makes us more vulnerable to global catastrophe.
Solving climate change will take a global effort not an international effort.
Take Aviation pollution alone it is forecasted to triple by 2050 if there are no global policy measures are agreed.
The Earth can not appeal to an International community but our world in whichno individual, and no country, exists in isolation, is now facing perhaps its final disaster.
The involvement of Muslim countries – and from contrasting traditions to those of the Arab world – would be most valuable.
It would also represent a most welcome redefinition of the “international community.
Take China for example:
In fact, the Chinese have their own definition of “international community” to counter what they see as a western-dominated and defined international community.
Take Lebanon, for example:
What did the beloved “international community” think:
Take War-torn Syria, for example:
It is one country where there are sharply divided views between the West on the one side and China and Russia on the other.
Take India, or Latin America, or Africa, or South East Asia?
What do they think?
We are never told. Nobody bothered to find out.
Take Brexit.
Everyone seems to have someone, perhaps some group of people, on whom he or she looks down or whom he or she considers inferior. That is why, for example, the west finds it almost impossible to win votes on many issues in the UN general assembly.
If we are brutally honest with yourself it comes from sheer ignorance.
There is no international community. There is merely a group of states motivated by self-interest.
The international community is a mythical joke.
There will never be one that is worthy of respect rather than a cheap joke.
What we got is a digital dictatorship in its infancy. A world run by Algorithms mostly for profit.
What is needed is an global awaking.
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THE EUROPEAN UNION WAS BORN OUT OF WORLD WAR TWO ON THE 25/MARCH/ 1957 TEN YEARS AFTER IT ENDED TO CHAMPION PEACE.
By establishing a unified economic and monetary system, to promote inclusion and combat discrimination, to break down barriers to trade and borders, to encourage technological and scientific developments, to champion environmental protection.
Fifty-two years later even as it adapts to meet the evolving challenges of the modern world, with all its faults, it has delivery just that- Peace.
Let us all remember the price the world paid to agree with these shared values.
The lessons of World War II — on whose ashes the United Nations was also founded emphasizing that remembrance is a debt owed to those who had lost their lives in World War II.
(By the end of the war, the total deaths ranging from 70 million to 85 million. Civilians deaths totalled 50 to 55 million. Military deaths from all causes totalled 21 to 25 million.)
However, the ideals and spirit that inspired the creation of the United Nations and the EU remain to be transformed into reality.
It is still necessary to remember the causes and overcome the legacies of the Second World War.
To reject and condemn any attempts to rewrite history or undertake attempts to glorify Nazism or any type of fascism.
Today, tolerance and restraint continued to be considered in world policy as signs of weakness and the use of violence and sanctions were praised; the world could therefore not say that the Second World War had been properly remembered.
Indeed it is our duty to revere and preserve and reform both the United Nations and the European Union because too much was paid for them, and too much is now at stake for succeeding generations.
So here below for all the Donald Trumps, Brexiteers, and Populous is a Speech that tells the TRUTH.
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We live in a world where consumerism is more important than needs.
It overshadows all of our human activities moving desires to the forefront of any aspirations of democracy.
One can ask how has this happened?
The answer is staring us in the face there is no need to look further than free-market capitalism which has married itself to democracy.
Edward Bernay’s its creator (with the help of President Roosevelt, and his uncle Fraud applied the propaganda of war to the propaganda of peace) at the World Fair in 1893 consecrated the marriage of passive consumerism with the market by Public relations, thus engineering the consent of the masses.
As a result of to this day, we are unable to make decisions on a rational base.
So what!
Just look at the state of the world today. The fourth Industrial revolution.
It makes for dismal reading.
There have been over 250 major wars in the world since World War II.
There are over 35 major conflicts going on in the world today.
There are approximately 30,000 nuclear warheads in the world today.
Current global military spending is approximately $800 billion per year; more than the total annual income of the poorest 45% of the global population.
An estimated 27 million people are enslaved around the world, including an estimated
20 million people held in bonded labour1 billion people – 1/3rd of the world’s labour force, is unemployed or underemployed. At least 700,000 people annually, and up to 2 million, mostly women and children, are victims of human trafficking worldwide (a modern form of slavery.) About 246 million, or 1 out of 6, children ages 5 to 17 worldwide are involved in child labour.
Worldwide, a quarter of all women are raped during their lifetime.
Torture occurred in 125 countries.
There are over 45 million refugees and internally displaced people in the world.
800 million people lack access to basic healthcare. 17 million people, including 11 million children, die every year from easily preventable diseases and malnutrition.
800 million people are hungry or malnourished. Nearly 160 million children are malnourished worldwide. 11 million people die every year from hunger and malnutrition.
2.4 billion people lack access to proper sanitation.
Over 100 million people live in slums.
275 million children never attend or complete primary school education. 870 million of the world’s adults are illiterate.
The richest 1% of the world’s people earned as much income as the bottom 57%.
The wealth of the world’s 7.1 million millionaires ($27 trillion) equals the total combined annual income of the entire planet.
Africa alone spends four times more on repaying its debts than it spends on health care.
Half of the forests that originally covered 46% of the Earth’s land surface are gone.
Between 10 and 20 per cent of all species will be driven to extinction in the next 20 to 50 years. Up to 47% of the world’s plant species are at risk of extinction.
60% of the world’s coral reefs will be gone.
Desertification and land degradation threaten nearly one-quarter of the land surface of the globe. Over 250 million people are directly affected by desertification, and one billion people are at risk.
Global warming is expected to increase the Earth’s temperature by 3C (5.4F) in the next 100 years, without reaching a tipping point – resulting in multiple adverse effects on the environment and human society, including widespread species loss, ecosystem damage, flooding of populated human settlements, and increased natural disasters.
All of this is only the tip of the iceberg.
The scale and nature of the world’s problems demand a full response; and the need for more unification and intensification of efforts to solve the world’s most serious and pervasive problems.
What are we doing about it since 1893?
Poured trillions in to aid to created debt.
Manufactured a financial crash.
In each country, the tendency is to blame “our” history, “our” populists, “our” media, “our” institutions, “our” lousy politicians.
When we discuss “politics”, we refer to what goes on inside sovereign states; everything else is “foreign affairs” or “international relations” – even in this era of global financial and technological integration.
its inability to withstand countervailing 21st-century forces, and its calamitous loss of influence over human circumstance.
Turning products into environmental false benefits with the loss of control over money flows.
Watching on as democracy being digitised. After decades of globalisation, our political system has become obsolete by introducing anxious volatility into the bastion of European stability.
Allowing unregulated algorithms to plunder the world for profit.
Turn a blind eye 65 million refugees – a “new normal”
Even if we wanted to restore what we once had, that moment is gone.
But to acknowledge this is to acknowledge not just the end of politics itself the end of life. Global capital and technology will rule us without any kind of democratic consultation, as naturally and indubitably as the rising oceans.
If we wish to rediscover a sense of political purpose in our era of global finance, big data, mass migration and ecological upheaval, we have to imagine political forms capable of operating at that same scale.
There is every reason to believe that the next stage of the techno-financial revolution will be even more disastrous for national political authority.
Big data companies (Google, Facebook etc) have already assumed many functions previously associated with the state, from cartography to surveillance.
With them taking over the management of all life and resources – this is a more likely vision for the future than any fantasy of a return to social democracy.
The assault on political authority is not a merely “economic” or “technological” event. It is an epochal upheaval.
What if anything can be done.
It is clear to me and by now should be clear to all of us that Capitalism is going underground. Today’s great engines of wealth creation are distributed in such a way as to elude national taxation systems (94% of Apple’s cash reserves are held offshore; this $250bn is greater than the combined foreign reserves of the British government and the Bank of England), which is diminishing all nation-states, materially and symbolically.
It is clear to me that the nation state’s rigid monopoly on political life is becoming increasingly unviable.
It is clear to me that oppressed national minorities must be given a legal mechanism to appeal over the heads of their own governments.
It is clear to me that the United Nations is effectively a gossip shope with vetos and is in needs of reform.
It is clear to me we need to find new conceptions of citizenship. Why, because the essential horizons of life on this planet are already determined at birth.(see previous posts)
It is clear to me that if democracy is supposed to give voters some control over their own conditions, for instance, should a US election not involve most people on earth?
It is clear to me that we are spending trillion trying to get off the earth when we should be spending trillions to try to stay on what is left of the earth.
It is clear to me that everything is linked.
It is time to think about how that capacity might be built.
It is time to wake up, to be conscious and take the needed steps to make a change. Stop pretending like you don’t know. Stop thinking its not going to happen in your lifetime. It will affect you and most of all your children and grandchildren. Do you still want to remain passive or pretend it’s not your problem?
What is clear to you?
They say a picture is worth a thousand words so I leave you with this video.
On viewing it.
It is beyone clear that our future generations will not thank us for their inheritance.
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