Mozilla Chairwoman Mitchell Baker on #SOPA and #PIPAand what it all means. #readingorder #lesebefehl blog.lizardwrangler.com/2012/01/17/pip…

— yseult (@yseult) January 18, 2012

I twittered this to start of the day of protests that will finally gather some attention from the general public to the unbelievably inefficient ways of the US to try to come to terms with copyright issues throughout the internet.

Mitchell Baker’s piece says it all and you really don’t have to go any further than that, if you’re not interested beyond that. (If you are however and it’s not the 18th Jan, you may read up on SOPA and PIPA and obviously Wikipedia’s awareness page).

I’ll add a small thought to that in general.

The internet is a frontier free zone.

Certainly, our servers are located in certain countries and thus the same civil and criminal laws apply as with any action. However, the internet in itself in inherently independent from country boundaries, civil inequalities and other historically crafted ways to divide people into groups and favouring your own against another.

Any idea, law or technical mechanism that cannot accept this principle and strives to violate it, needs to suffer the suspicion of threatening liberty of speech, liberty of opinion and liberty of act.

Morley has finally made her movie. 8 years after Joyce Vincent’s death and 5 after her discovery by a media public that was just about starting to get the concept of internet content and shared news. At the time they hadn’t gotten blogs or Livejournals yet. The citizen journalists hadn’t really been born by then yet, the internet had not favoured revolutions or changed our way of interacting on such fundamental levels yet.

One reasoning always comes up when you start reading about this woman and her isolation: this would not happen today. Today we have G+, we have Twitter, we have Facebook. Someone would notice. Today, absence would be impossible to miss.

I fundamentally believe that this is a guilty lie that we are telling ourselves to mask our own uncomfortable thoughts. Because there isn’t one person in our Facebook lists that we could immediately think of and say “Hey, it’s been a while since I heard from him.”

Isn’t the truth of the matter somewhere completely else?

What if it wasn’t in the loss of our sense of community today, where we can only dream of neighbours taking care of each others or where community is more often the theatre of conflicting interests rather than exchange and support. If we dare to move beyond the fear of blaming the victim Joyce Vincent here, the truth might be somewhere in between. Maybe she wished to isolate herself the way she did and people/our modern society just made it that much easier.

Moving beyond the nagging feeling that someone should have done something – which goes from blaming the immediate neighbours, to the social services, to the electricity company that didn’t check her bills etc. – you quickly realise that the best system, the best social service, the best support net of friends or family cannot save you if you won’t let them. But again, this is only part of the equation of truth here. The other part is much more painful. Intervening in other’s people’s lives takes strength. It takes time. It is inconvenient and disruptive to your own life and worries. It’s messy, and it’s unbearable at times and you will be rebuked and pushed back more times than taken for a good samaritan.

Why that is?

Because truly, today weakness is not interesting. Showing weakness, showing emotion is a liberty that isn’t rewarded particularly well. Even less in the working place, but the same goes for friendships. Rare are the ones that can really support a crying friend and so, we don’t dare to give oursleves this opening. This weak spot. This blemish on our armour. Because we are much more afraid of what our friends might think of us than we are of dying alone.

Facebook et al. didn’t help with that. Facebook makes that even worse.

It has never been easier to project something completely different from what you are feeling to the outside world than over the internet. Facebook has given us more possibilities to appear happy, fulfilled and well rather than made it easier to span together.
Sure, true friends are more easily reached and average friends can be kept close without having to put in the time to really connect. It’s made it possible to be with people without actually being with them and caring for them. Modern social & friendship media has taken out the ‘messy’ of life. How easy is it today to ignore a digital message by someone? Much easier than a personal visit and a proper face that will tell you that they’re worried about you.

No. Joyce Carol Vincent would have died the same way today. Because in the end, she had isolated herself from the people she knew. That the people around her that didn’t know her, had not realised her passing, is a different story. I doubt that it really is a story of neglect or disinterest. Much rather of hard times, maybe even respect for someone else’s privacy. And someone who for whatever reason was at a point in her life where new decisions had to be made. She needed a clean slate to make them.

Joyce Carol Vincent never got to make those choices. That’s why Morley’s title for the documentary is so fitting: Dreams of a life.

Often we have dreams that we cannot realise, dreams that remain on our mental top shelf and develop a life apart and sometimes life ends without them ever seeing the light of day.

It doesn’t make them anything less, or anything more.

I profoundly believe that Joyce Carol Vincent is not defined by her death, her own neglect or the fact that nobody missed her for three years. I believe that the traces she left in other people’s lives transcend her dying alone in whatever circumstance. People – through Morley’s insistence and meddling in Vincent’s life – remember her for who she was, care for her memories, and isn’t that what really matters after all?

Whatever really waits for us after death, we cannot take anything with us and we cannot change the unchangeable. But we can strive to leave parts of us with other people. Leave our essence with them and hope that it’s enough to become a change in their lives in turn.

Now, I have been guilty of ranting against Steven Pinker in the past (“A Crisis of Consciousness”-Series). One could even say that I have made this blog the spectacle of Steven Pinker’s descent into unfathomable depths of my contempt when in 2007 his article series in the TIMES ended up being less about consciousness, and more about politics of consciousness, less about finding new sources for human ethos, but more about abolishing Christianity.

Pinker is back in the general eye of the reader with a new book: The Better Angels of Our Nature. While I don’t wish to enter any kind of debate on the book itself – even though I am always wary of argumentation that starts out stating that we’re nearing our Golden Age – I would urge anyone to read the synthesized version and application of considerations taken from the book and applied to the here and now: the author’s article in The Guardian “If it bleeds, it misleads: on violence and misery the Cassandras are wrong” (1st of November 2011).

There are quite a few things wrong with this article. Not so much on what Pinker’s saying, but how he is saying it and a much more fundamental argumentative way. It seems that the brilliant writer that he used to be, the unsung hero of so many well constructed reasonings has swapped his gift for some rather badly thought up interpretations and has lost his way with words.

My main problem with his article is the complete lack of distinction between the feeling of insecurity of a group versus the factual decrease in the number of deaths in wars. The fact that fewer people die in wars is balanced against the general feeling of insecurity of ‘the people’ (which I personally read as ‘the civilised western societies from the northern hemisphere’).  If our everyday society of the western world feels more insecure today than they did 10 years ago, then there really isn’t any proper way to dispute that. Feelings are subjective and they can’t be altered with reason or facts. People feel less secure today than 10, 20 or 30 years ago. Through that alone this situation becomes a fact. The statistical number of less deaths in wars, less wars, less conflicts etc. cannot alter that for the simple reason that both facts have not much to do with one another. It’s like watching someone fit a square into a round hole. Painful.

I would even argue that the wars far off, raise the feeling of cohesion of a societial group rather than threaten it. To come to a proper balance or argument, you would have to set the general criminal rates in a country, a suburn, a city, a region etc. against the general feeling of insecurity of that area and see if it matches.

Enter: the big bad, dulling and manipulative mainstream media. For Pinker, they are at the source of the non-sequitur that the changes in our societies (approaching the null-line of ‘free’ and ‘secure’) should make us all feel better about our societies and much more secure, are none other than the mass media. While I am not unreceptive to the idea of a general media manipulation, this argument does nothing to help balance what Pinker’s already unbalanced. The important thing here is not the wars or open conflicts, but how immediate they are to us. The individual. The building unit of a group.
Through the media these conflicts become more and more immediate. The social network habitus is doing its part in this, as we were all able to witness with the Arab Spring.Going back and applying this reflection onto the past, anybody realises that a lot of conflicts, even battles from the big wars weren’t reported back home immediately, but rather weeks after having taken place. This is also part of the reason why WWI has been such a traumatic event. Battles were stalemates and would drag on. It was the first time where people could get the feeling of being at home, while on the Western front children were killing themselves in the muds of the Somme. Or, who from the greater public in 1870 knew anything about knew anything about the battle of Sedan and Napoleon III subsequent capture until days after it had happened? Today we are taken as witnesses of Muhammar al-Gadaffi’s last moments in the public limelight before the mob exhibits his dead body for everyone (and I mean everyone) to see.
As always, judging from what can be remembered, because it was written down, then moving on to use that as a basis to reconstruc what  actually has happened, is a method that will never give a proper picture of the past.

But, Steven Pinker has learnt from past mistakes. There is no mention of terrorism as a reality. And that is the main flaw of this article. Wouldn’t that be absolutely fundamental to any kind of argumentation involving aspects of feeling insecure in our modern society? It would be. This feeling of insecurity that ‘the people’ are feeling is in fact a direct result of the terrorism of the last 10 to 20 years and any textbook on the matter would tell you so. Again, Pinker is incapable of moving past his Amero-centric view on the world and the slightest possibility of seeing the part-victory global terrorism has already gained on us and particularly our civil liberties. Even if it was the only way to limit its validity. Even if it was the only way for our modern society to find a way our of the insecurity. (Btw, when will a sociologue declare that what the rating agencies are doing is nothing more than economical terrorism?)

The fundamental misuse of the Cassandra myth in the title is a sad symbol of Pinker’s errors in setting up his reasoning.

Cassandra was right in what she saw. She could forsee the future. That was Apollo’s blessing. Her curse for refusing him was that nobody would ever believe her.

Oh, the irony.

It would suddenly disappear from my Flickr photo feed, then reappear again. It wouldn’t load into my post, but when you’d click on it, you could still see it on Flickr’s page.

Currently my latest Flickr feed plugin shows that the picture is ‘unavailable’ when in the feed it is still viewable.

If this is one of the big clean ups on Flickr as several breastfeeding support groups have seen on Facebook (Petition, and news coverage 2009 and from January 2011), then I am not amused.

This is an old issue of mine: why are people afraid to have an opinion about something they obviously care about?
The answer is probably simpler than we are led to believe and it has nothing to do with being too absorbed, having to much information on a subject – due to the mass of information in the mass media century – or the fact that they can’t be bothered.

In a time where people with conviction blow up market places and bomb refugee camps and after a century where convictions killed millions of people, it is clear that the image of a person with convictions and a strong belief system – and I don’t mean faith here – has been tainted. Today it equals with ‘being zelous’, ‘being intolerant’ or simply with ‘being suspicious’. But that’s not the only reason.

People have become afraid of expressing their opinions and beliefs because the aggressions or disadvantages that they fear being subjected to could test their system. This, of course, ultimately lead to an underlying agreement that certain discussions or debates are off limits. And since debate – in this mindset – is necessarily conceived as a negative thing, every way a person will try to discuss will be interpreted as a casus belli if the enunciation doesn’t present the four-step attenuation markers, such as subjective tense (also known as I-sentences… “I feel…”, “I think…”), conditional tense, question form and a “…don’t you think?” at the end.

Having an opinion, having conviction and explaining what led to these convictions should be something that can withstand questioning. Even more clearer: it should be something we ourselves question everyday and expose it to further outside questioning, because an opinion that remains unquestioned and un-argued will always just remain an opinion, as opposed to a vision or something that could potentially change the world.

There is a series of sayings that push us to suspect opinions and favour a more active approach to life (and a lot of them are rooted in Judeo-Christian culture): “Make it happen”, “Just do it”, “Actions count more than words”, “Do or don’t, there is no trying…” etc.
Actions however need basis. Physical basis for once. You cannot act on air, and when it comes to change for instance you need an object to change. But what if we took conviction and opinion to be the actual basis of action? What if arguing your opinion and conviction is in itself the first act? Then ‘having an opinion’ and confessing to it publicly could become that much more than just ‘having a philosophy’.

Sometimes we run headlong into these infuriating situations where someones careless incompetence, or neglicence, or pure boredom ends causing more work for us. If you are of the conviction that there is a right attitude to all things and that doing your job right, no matter how small and insignificant it might seem to you, can be a source of pride and satisfaction, then such situations probably tend to annoy you according to their corresponsing level of incompetence, negligence or boredom.

On several occasions I have been witness to an interesting explanation: “Well, face it, love, you’re just way too good (intelligent, genius, efficient etc. etc.) for this job (function, work, us, them, etc. etc.). If only you would accept that, then you could spare yourself a lot of heartache (anger management lessons, chocolate-relieved-frustration induced pounds on your hips).”

The interesting element in this little (freely invented) scene isn’t so much what is being said, but what is not being said, as is often the case in any kind of human interaction. What is said is analysed easily enough: a transfer of fault is executed, away from the person causing the frustration, ot the person being frustrated. It’s a thing we often do (sometimes even without noticing it) in order to deal with emotions that are not our own.
The problem however is, since they are not our emotions, we don’t have to deal with them. Leaving people to their own emotions is something that takes maturity, letting them have their little moment of weakness without feeling compelled to alleviate it by offering a string of solutions that would work for us (that’s what good advice is after all), or trying to reason away their source of frustration or even anger.
Veiling that reasoning into a flattery or into positive words is only meant to pass the bitter pill easier. It’s another form of avoidance. And avoidance of emotions today is what people are so good at. It’s also the reason why there are so many problems of human interaction and social tensions in our western society today. So many resources are geared towards helping people to deal with their own emotions, but rarely are psychologist or therapist working on people’s skills to accept someone else’s emotions that they are faced with.
Here we come to the second element of flattery… not only does it coat and disguise the act of transference of responsibility, but also it’s a pretty good excuse to not take a good look at other people’s (or our own) actions. It’s just another version of the apprentice stating that he can’t possibly do that job, because he’s just not intelligent enough. Or the on from your daughter (after breaking three dishes in as many weeks) that informs you that she can’t set the table anymore, she’ll only break something again.

However, manning/womanning up to your deficiencies, mistakes, our weaknesses and our incapacity to deal with certain people is an integral part of life and accepting them is also part of what usually is called ‘growing up’.

So, just as the stupid person has a right to their stupidity, the intelligent one has a right to be outraged by stupidity being used as an excuse for bullshit.

There probably isn’t anybody in this world who doesn’t dream about changing something in their lives. It can be as small as finally finding a better way to deal with clutter and go as big as becoming a better human being.

Dream about it… talk about it… think about it and paint the future ‘changed’ state in a way that is appealing.

A lot of steps can make up what eventually can become a scary thing: change. If we could see into the future and only have a clear view of what this change can bring into our life… if we just could have some kind of positive reassurance that we are doing the right thing… yes, that would make it all so much easier. But the truly scary part about change isn’t so much the uncertainty, it’s the going out and making it happen part that is so hard. So hard in fact that in numerous situations, we prefer to play it safe. Putting ourselves out there in the world, is a hard gamble. Exposing who we are, what we wish for, running the constant danger of being rejected, of finding doubt where we need assurance and relief, it certainly isn’t something that will bring power or strength. Or so it would seem.

But if we try to look at it from another direction, then maybe change can be the one thing that saves us from becoming what we never wanted. (…) Look at a child that learns to walk. There isn’t anything particular running through their mind when they take the smallest, but surely one of the most important steps of their lives: the first one.
A first step always holds a promise. For the toddler it holds a whole life full of danger, full of injury, full of pain, but also full of discovery, fully of phantasy, full of exhilarating sensations, full of … new.

So many occasions come and go, but each and every one of them are a possibility to take a step. A new step, the next step, a faltering one, an assured one. And of course it is a dangerous thing. While toddlers run into a lot of physical dangers while starting their path in this world, as grown ups the pain becomes more hidden, more subtle and so much more devastating. Because we’re supposed to just ‘deal with it’, just ‘get on with it’. Because in a society that only considers a person in terms of performance and buying power, there is no space for ‘not dealing’ and ‘not getting on with it’. Through these eyes, only losers can’t deal with rejection, only underachievers dwell on the bad and the fear.

Reality obviously has a different face. It talks of the hard moments when you don’t know the direction for that first path. When you have the impression of being in a wrong path, but don’t know how to turn back. It talks of uncertainty and of failure. Of never feeling good enough, of never being enough.

Popular belief suggests that knowing what you want is the first step. But that also suggests that you know where to go.

Maybe knowing what you don’t want (such as persisting in a fearful state of mind or an undecided one for instance) is the better way to go. And sometimes it will take a lot of uncertain steps, steps that might seem wrong or out of place or useless to achieve that long sought after change that we wish for and dream about. Change in most cases doesn’t come with a label and it certainly doesn’t come in one giant heap. It takes a first step. And that first step, try to take it without thinking. Just as the child takes that first step into a new and larger world full of wonders and who know what could happen once the first one is done?

We are all subjects, thinking, feeling, breathing, crying and laughing our way through our existence. But to everyone around us, we’re another object in a world that’s just getting fuller and fuller.
Care for another and make him a subject of your affection. But what happens when you’re being cared for and made a true subject of someone’s affection, love and friendship?

It’s possibly one of the hardest things to achieve: let yourself be cared for.

In times where we’re being tought to stand on our own two feet from a tender age, where being independent and self-sufficient, we’ve completely lost the notion of accepting anybody’s help. The idea that we need others in order to get better, be better, get more complete, be more complete has something revolting. Completely out of touch with the modern world and the idea that yes, man is an island and that every man can fight for themselves.

Accepting the care of others isn’t so much a dependency or a disguised profiteurism that only lets you consider others in their worth or what they can do for you. That’s just another way of being self sufficient and using anything and everything that you can for your own gain.
No, what I’m driving at here is the fundamental truth of ‘seeing me through your eyes makes me fuller’.

As someone who had to very early on understand the terrible distance between me and the world and my own incapacity to ‘connect’ or blend in, it’s been the biggest change in myself and my not-so-funny automatisms of auto-derogation to accept that there are people caring for me and that them doing something for me, caring for me helps me be better, fight less to be oh-so-awesome and by admitting to liking it, actually learn to care for others more.

Letting yourself be cared for by others, on their own terms instead of your own, can offer new perspectives. Accepting help, accepting their view of you, of your needs and their ways of meeting them, is not just about you, but about them as well and about what links you to the rest of the world.

The sweet grass bends in anticipation beneath my barren feet,
Somewhere a dead leaf is floating toward the earth,
and here… a sunbeam is crying it’s last glowing tear in my hand.

My heart so full, my words so empty.

I’ve drawn out my soul, pulled out every vein of every feeling,
ripped every shard of every nerve,
every break of every drawn out silence.

In the end I cut out these eyes that were supposed to see so far.

Clap my wings and fly away,
to nothingness and everlasting morning light.

Let me see this end for l am destined to stay
because there is nothing else,
because there is only this… final understanding:
we become the one thing we want to avoid the most,
no matter how many prayers,
no matter how many hours,
how much love, how much heart or conquest.

In the end we’re just another wolf feeding on someone else’s cadavers.
So take your teeth to some other liver, your claws to another lightbearer,
I am all but dead, all but empty, all but used and torn.

This night is not my last, but it truly is my longest.

I’ve had bits and pieces of this for a long while waiting in my notebook. Scattered, really. The first few lines that seem so out of tune with the rest for instance are a couple of months old written on my way to work. In the end, every piece is a journey, a projection. The true sense is only revealed when you reread the title after the poem. It’s a confusing piece and yet, I know exactly what every contrasting picture means.

Why do we even have friends? Why do we link ourselves with others when there’s only heartache, abandonment, betrayal and pain to be had from it…?

The question is as old as society itself and probably even as old as language itself. Consequently philosophers, thinkers and good people have produced a varied catalogue of ideas on the subject that range as far as just stating that man is not made to live alone to a completely utilitarian approach: because it serves us.

But even if the simplistic theory that we can have ethical considerations and moral decisions towards our peers and fellow human beings only because we recognise ourselves in them falls short on several accounts, the intellectual approach that we care because we can or must, doesn’t help much more to understand what it is that makes us connect to this person, but not that one.

Quite generally speaking we are brought up with the idea that caring for others is an ideal to aspire to. That stepping out and away from the weight of your own needs and make someone else’s fears imperative for yourself, brings you something more, offers you some kind of insight into your own soul and one step closer to a ‘good life’.
There is no religion and no social system or idea that does not operate on this basic idea either by reinforcing it or by negating it.

But is the abstract idea of some heavenly reward in an afterlife or aspiring to the ideal of a good life or being a good person, really enough to account for the fact that we do against all odds, against adversity, despite rejection, hurt, desolation and frustration reach out, touch others, take up their burdens, listen to their fears, soothe their minds again and again?

Because secretly we hope that the people we care for will do the same for us, for even if I am someone who’s not used to facing the problem of not caring enough, but rather too much even for strangers that cross my path… even I am sort of speechless when in one of my weaker moments I am ignored by my friends.
That fundamental element of ‘shared love and shared burden’ doesn’t make us manipulative or even interested in the way we deal out our affections and our readiness to help, but rather it points to the next even more fundamental characteristics of our human condition: we need care.

We need people taking care of us and our emotions, people noticing us, recognising us for what we are and who we strive to be, listen to what we have to say or teach or even cry about and what makes us passionate. We don’t need it just to feel better or inflate our egos, what I am referring to is much more basic, much more unreflected. It’s not so much different than the impulsive touch towards a pet or a baby and the basic level of need either the animal or the baby feel for that touch and proximity.

Thomas Merton wasn’t the first to use the phrase ‘no man is an island’, but he certainly took the concept to a completely different level. His reaching out seemed to know no boundaries and looking closely at his biography might even suggest that it bore dangerous self-annihilating traits. And yet, his generosity of heart has become an ideal… because, no man is an island.

But what does that mean? Truly? That ultimately we’re flawed and can’t ever be enough on our own, for our own? I shouldn’t think so. I find it much more inspiring to think that our actions, however small they may be cause a light to shine (or ripples across existence, if you prefer that image) that – not unlike a seed – will grow over time, be reinforced by connecting to others and caring for them and it will eventually affect people outside of our immediate range of action… if we cannot believe that our actions influence others around us and our surrounding society, what else keeps us from not shutting down and surfing the ego trip to self destruction?

In times where dehumanisation is something that is so quickly achieved, where the mass of people in our immediate focus has grown exponentially through internet and modern media, where friends can be nothing much more than a few points on a computer screen and a name (maybe just an avatar), the danger of limiting people, shutting them out, casting them off or simply not taking care of them is even bigger than before. Not only does the internet make it much easier to connect with each other, it also makes it much easier for us to lose focus on the most important thing in life: nothing remains. We can’t take anything with us. When we die, all that remains will be the people we’ve loved and the ones that have loved us and the icon of a memory of that love.

So, we better start minding our friends, caring for their hearts, accepting their limits and loving them for what they are. Not because they deserve it or because we might need them one day, but because there is no greater and more effortless gift than love.

Be generous with yourself and someone you haven’t dared to reach out to today. It’ll make their day a brighter one and your heart shine harder.