Betweenity

Intellectualize or irrationality?

brain made of dung

To intellectualize is to make a transition towards reason. A person leaves emotion aside by focusing on facts and logic . If only it were that simple! Unfortunately, facts and logic have become almost antonyms of themselves. Facts are often lies and logic is often irrational. The brain needs to be retrained not to think critically. What’s hapeping now is like going back to our simian ancestors, hanging from a tree, beating the chest to show strength, and teaching them to walk on four paws instead of as bipeds.the evoution cartoon from man to ape

The problem is that intellectualization is one of our most reliable psychological mechanisms for self-defense, and comprehension while we make our way through the chaos of reality. Its loss can lead to irreversible damage.

As recently as 2016,

one could intellectualize that the US election system was based upon an electoral college who essentially gets to call the last shot, regardless of what millions of voters have decided. One might easily overlook this paradox when is compared to the notion of the democracy we’ve been sold. We understand that the electoral college is a defense mechanism composed of a tiny number of people (compared to the population of the country, a grain inside a bucket), established to protect the nation from a derailed leader, a crook, an impostor, etc. Instead, with vivid ulterior motives, this tiny group of little individuals served on a platter the election to a looser, based upon misogyny and hate.

The great majority of the nation had to intellectualize the outcome, control themselves for 4 years, hoping to eventually try to change the curse of its destiny. We all know this structured charade was put into law with good intentions. But at this time is a passé idea of protection (as it proved not to accomplish its responsibility), forcing intellectual citizens to obey whatever the outcome, including the purpose of democracy itself.

Millions are still trying to intellectualize the cancellation of their health insurance, drink polluted water with no accountability, welcoming chemicals in the environment, lack of consumer protection, persecution of immigrants, their taxes raised, cruelty to animals, apart from another list of cruel and moral offenses. On the other hand, it became legitimate that the top managerial employees of the federal government can bill the taxpayer their fun jetting around the globe as they please, carrying their families, apart from onther kind of looting the fiscal coffers of the nation.

One can say that the flight to reason became more like the Japanese pilots during WW2, a real kamikaze experience. As a result, I decided to meditate upon the other forms of default psychological self-defense mechanism in their logical sequence, in order to refresh my mind, and see which one of them I still have available to access at this time in case I need it.

In the meantime, I can spend time trying to decide where my betweenity is. I mean I am between intellectualizing it all or becoming irrational.

Shakespeare comes to mind thinking of my memento mori, reminding me when he submits Hamlet into sort of accepting the “consummation” of his life by “questioning” the point of it all. The end is a chain reaction of revenge, death, and nothing is left. At the moment, my own betweenity shows a commonality: they are extreme. I am aware that I will die one day. So I keep on eating chocolate.

what else?

a box of chocolate

I guess the only way to visually explain how I feel is to compare it with a sandwich

I have morphed into a White thin Pepperidge Farm Bread Sandwich filled with shit living inside a geographic shithole.

a sandwich

The final wish is that serendipity shows up with a great solution. But, in the meantime schadenfreude can be handy to hang on to, as events are beginning to feel with pleasure the culprits’ pain. Maybe the ecosystem will end up being balanced as mother nature is wondrous. Predators are beginning to do what nature expects them to do: cleanse each other through the digestive system.

Filled with this giddy thought I feel totally firgunning, joining the elation of friends who are also in the same state as mine, while eating chocolate, of course!

PS: Firgun is a Hebrew word that means to take joy in someone else’s’ joy!

Bread has been a staple as basic food for thousands of years. In case you want to intellectualize which bread you should eat due to content quality and health concerns.

read the list

Fun with typography?

letter design

or disturbed by irrationality?

Song of Myself

A poetic Meditation by Walt Whitman, 1892 version

51

The past and present wilt—I have fill’d them, emptied them,

And proceed to fill my next fold of the future.

Listener up there! what have you to confide to me?

Look in my face while I snuff the sidle of evening,

(Talk honestly, no one else hears you, and I stay only a minute longer.)

Do I contradict myself?

Very well then I contradict myself,

(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

I concentrate toward them that are nigh, I wait on the door-slab.

Who has done his day’s work? who will soonest be through with his supper?

Who wishes to walk with me?

Will you speak before I am gone? will you prove already too late?

Ecclesiastes 10:2 ("The heart of the wise inclines to the right, but the heart of the fool to the left") (????)

Left or right? That is the question. . .

For a long time, people have been trading insults depending on whether their mind gravitates to the right or left. I usually take a stand for what I say or do, even if later on I realize I made the wrong selection. And after long and extensive research into the subject, I have decided that I am a QUECHUA.sitting rabbit

I like the way the Incas called their left-handers QUECHUA, which means “the glorified left-hander.” Mind you, I do not write with the left, but when I use a knife, I do cut with the left. I don’t know if there is a specific name for this.

However, I love being able to use the left to “cut.” (There is something powerful about being able to cut something, don’t you think?) Since I use the right hand to write, I leave it to my mouth to express what my cutting left hand cannot express. This may seem confusing, but in the end all can be explained through anatomy.

It never crossed my mind that I would be defined by the geographical placement of any of my body parts, let alone my hands! I thought we got over all that nonsense during the Enlightenment. Fashion explains with no nonsense the phenomenon: what was old becomes new. Now, if you want to speak with correctness—which, naturally, is connected to the mind’s-geographic-location—you can do it the way fashion does, when every season it sells us the perennial “new black dress” while showing you an orange dress.

This is really doubletalk: a black dress is a black dress, period. If you don’t want to be accused of doublespeak, you should instead say honestly: “Here are the latest design styles for black dresses.” I know, I am as confused as you. A black dress should stand the test of time. That is the reason we buy them.

Deciding to be a Quechua was the result of dizzy research into what left means and where it came from. How did an adverb dating from the early fourteenth century turned into a noun around 1200? Believe me, the literature on the subject will make your mind spin left and right, to say the least. How, for heaven’s sake, did “left” became an euphemism or a pejorative word? How exactly did left-handed people got associated with Satanism, weakness, foolish lameness, worthlessness, twistedness, crookedness, etc.? Who was the damn shepherd who decided sheep would be righteous, and goats represent the fallen on the left?

I ask myself over and over again, how could my mother—when she was such a wonderful woman—have been wrong to teach me since childhood never ever to be a sheep? Sheep were for her copycats, conformists, followers, yes men, yes women.rabbit illustration at ther office talking on the phone They represented what goats where turned into to by Christianity! (I guess the beard did it to them!)

Being a visual rabbit artist, and in love with factual history, I need concrete ways to grasp things clearly. So, I say thank you to Thomas Carlyle (December 4, 1795– February 5, 1881), a Scottish essayist, satirist, and historian whose work was hugely influential during the Victorian era, and who, in discussing the French Revolution, gave a political sense to “left” and “right” by describing the seating of attendees during the French National Assembly in 1789.

The nobility took the president’s right, and the Third Estate was seated on the left. Now, that is clear. It is documented who sat to the right and who sat to the left. Search your conscience and ask yourself which side you would have wanted to sit on, and you will see where your mind is located.

Naturally, since then we have leapt like a rabbit into political correctness, which, I may add, is nothing more than doubletalk. There are plenty of factual, historically documented circumstances in which political correctness has been used to deliberately disguise facts, and reverse the meaning of words! I leave it to you to Google it!

As I am a fact-reading rabbit, I suggest you take a look at an essay by George Orwell (June 25,1903–January 21, 1950): “Politics and the English Language.” His description of political speech is very close to the contemporary definition of doublespeak.

In addition, if you want to understand the subject even better, read Terrence P. Moran (professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University), who in 1969 co-edited, with Neil Postman and Charles Weingarten, the book Language in America. He compares political doubletalk to coining euphemisms and question-begging, calling it sheer cloudy vagueness, and says the great enemy of clear language is insincerity . . .

But the part I love best is when he compares the use of doublespeak in mass media to laboratory experiments conducted on rats. I am a rabbit, a female rabbit, and the rat is to me worse than the hawk, fox, wolf, etc. During the experiment, one group of rats was fed real sugar and the other a saccharine solution. Now, both where sweetly satisfied. However, the rats fed with saccharine died from malnutrition. Therefore Moran equates saccharine metaphorically to doublespeak! And I am sure you know that saccharine is bad for you.

illustration of rabbit up in armsAs a result of such turmoil, I want to make things clear. I am a LEFTY, QUECHUA rabbit for anatomical reasons. The heart is located on the LEFT. This is clear as a sunny day with a clean blue sky. You can cut anyone open, and see it is so!

I am quite sure that you know the heart functions as the body’s circulatory pump. It takes in deoxygenated blood through the veins and delivers it to the lungs for oxygenation before pumping it into the various arteries (which provide oxygen and nutrients to body tissues by transporting the blood throughout the body). Because the heart points to the left, about two-thirds of the heart mass is found on the left side of the body and, only one-third is on the right.

Conclusion: I’d rather be on the side of the body that gives the most benefit to the rest, since I want to enjoy a long and happy life!

by Mhaer

Logic, the foundation of critical thinking

is it worth defining it?

Logic is the study of the principles of correct reasoning. Provided you leave aside the psychology of reasoning, as it is an empirical matter, and focus on the topic-neutrality of a non-contingent issue. That is: if the sun is shining, well, then, the sun is shining.

Naturally if you are getting all the solar radiation in a clear day with a perfect blue sky. How can any one deny it?
pins The "topic-neutrality-of-a-non-empirical-mater" can be compared with a "Killer shot" while playing bowling! The undoubted reality of the sunny day will knock down all the "irrelevant-standing- pins-of-doubts"!
If only life were this simple . . . Maybe you are trying to convince someone who is under a flash flood warning zone!

The main principles governing the validity of arguments are the following three laws of logic:fish

  • The Law of Identity: says that A is A, that if something exist it has a nature, a single nature.It is what it is.

  • The Law of Non-Contradiction : says that A cannot be both A and not A at the same time and, in the same sense. Truth is not self-contradictory.

  • The Law of Excluded Middle: says that a statement is either true or false.

  • Don't you think there is reason enough to use logic to reach a clear conclusion to any non-contingent-neutral-topic?


    How convincing is the principle of the "golden rule"?

    there is enough of "tradition," "values" being trown aroound . . .

    respet

    Can it be taken as a base for an ethical theory? Tracing back history from a mathematical point of view, it has been quite a minimal percentage.

    The Concept of Respect

    For millennia philosophers have been debating on how to address respect:

    Immanuel Kant, German philosopher to the 18th century, was the first major Western philosopher to put respect for persons as a center of moral theory.

    Kant insistence that persons are ends in themselves, has become the foundation for modern humanism and political liberalism. In recent years the argument has extended to animals, nonhuman things including the environment.

    Dichotomy, metaphors and ellipsis

    roundWhile the world continues to spin round and round, we continue to use visual methods for questioning behaviors versus dichotomies.

    There seems to be a lack of critical thought regarding the "unreality" in a variety of convictions and expectations, summed by the abundance of metaphors to compare these dichotomies. Sadly, we can design a series of ellipsis. Although there are more discrepancies than dots that we can fit inside a page and three is not enough.

    dots

    Then, again: is there

    criticalinter

    quote markTo discover truths is the task of all sciences; it falls to logic to discern the laws of truth. I assign to logic the task of discovering the laws of truth, not of assertion or thought.

    Gottlob Frege (1848-1925). From his 1956 paper "The Thought : A Logical Inquiry" in Mind Vol. 65.

    dots

    Poets have the magic to provide with words direction when we are not quite clear on how to figure out things.

    quote mark“Never be bullied into silence. Never allow yourself to be made a victim. Accept no one’s definition of your life; define yourself.”

    Robert Frost

    the civic mind:

    Do you expect from any leader a non-contingent-neutral-truth? Or, would you rather buy into anything because the price of the truth is too high? Or, you simply give a dam about the cost to others if a leader destroy the lives of millions, as long as he/she say what you want to hear?

    clockIf it is YES to the first question: congratulations!

    if it not to the others . . . don't complain about the consequences

    Critical thinking is not a choice, it's a basic and a necessary non-contingent-neutral-topic.

    Respect yourself!