“Freedom is the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”
-- George Orwell

Resistance to change

It has been my opinion for many years now that a human cannot stay permanently the same or to stop developing and maintain the available level. Trying to maintain the existing situation leads to degradation. Once you stop, degradation kicks in. So how could we maintain the resistance to change while avoiding degradation if we really, really want it?

There is probably no way to maintain a permanent status quo over all aspects of life. However, there could be a way if we wanted to maintain the situation in a limited area or in a single aspect of the life. Change and learning could be moved, at the expense of some loss in effectiveness, from one area to another.

Strangely, the nowadays popular “minimalists” have made me think about it. Simply put, they resist clutter in their lives and homes. Leaving aside all the positive effects, many of them basically manage to resist changes in the level of material possessions they have. Some of them go as far as to live with just one hundred things for years. And at the same time they are active, creative people.

There is a difference between passively refusing change and actively resisting it. If you simply refuse to change and stay put, you will not learn anything new and will start forgetting the old, so you go down the degradation path. But you can also start actively resisting the changes, analysing them, finding new creating ways to avoid new things coming into your life. That makes you advance in other areas, like creative living, and certainly would keep you as a whole from degradation.

Basically, it is not the end that matters but the means. As long as we are active, as long as we are analysing, thinking, creating, life goes on. This all comes back somewhat to the well-known: “Live the life, do not let it happen to you.”

Permanent link to this article →

A man and the sea

When I watch the sea I wonder about men. I had this realisation that men are very much like the sea. The sea is ever-changing and still always the same. One can watch the sea for hours in its ever-changing glory and no two waves will be exactly the same. And the sea waves will continue to beat against the shore in this same way long after we are gone.

What does this have to do with men? Men have a lot of resistance to change and inertia. It is very, very hard to make men change. Men rarely learn and often keep making the same mistakes over and over again. And yet, at the same time, men are the most flexible creatures, with a great capacity for learning, adaptation and change. Men keep constantly changing, learning bits and pieces all the time, adapting to this and that while remaining stubbornly entrenched in their ways. Is this not amazing?

The dualism makes men great and at the same time it is the downfall of men. The full spectrum from total conservatism to fluidity is available. Unfortunately, we like getting stuck on one or the other side. Attaching yourself to one or another extreme ensures the downfall like nothing else. Look, we have the freedom to choose from the whole range of behaviour and thinking, there is no inherent limitation, we do not need to get stuck one way or another. We want to maintain the freedom, the ability to be both at the same time.

Only, to choose, to be able to use the choice, man must first become aware. Aware of his situation, aware of the possibilities, aware of the choice.

Permanent link to this article →

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year! Best wishes to all, health and wealth and all!

Permanent link to this article →

The U.S. battle against privacy in U.N.

The Cable reports in their exclusive about the battle being fought by America against on-line privacy in an obscure U.N. General Assembly committee that is looking to constraint the widespread surveillance of the Internet. The proposal by Germany and Brazil spearheads the mounting movement inside U.N. that seeks to uphold the Internet privacy as a basic human right. The Cable notes that “American representatives have made it clear that they won’t tolerate such checks on their global surveillance network.”

Permanent link to this article →

Twitter Quitter or twitterquitter?

Hey, I just came across a wonderful couple of definitions in the Urban Dictionary. They are both about Twitter and both about quitting and they rhyme same but they mean different things. I do not know about you but I caught some luls from this. Check it out: Twitter Quitter and twitterquitter. Eh, what am I? Both!!!

I was actually looking for Twitter Widower Support Group, I heard they give out t-shirts. That turns out to be just a rumour. Or do they exist and I simply could not find them?..

Permanent link to this article →

U.S. Child Exchange

Reuters published an investigative report on the practice of exchanging adopted children on the Internet in USA recently. The parents adopting foreign children in U.S. advertise the kids they did not like on the Internet boards, like Yahoo and Facebook, and find quickly new homes for them without ever verifying who the other people are. Many children change several families in a short time, get lots and lots of abuse and suffer humiliation.

Speaking publicly about her experience for the first time, one girl adopted from China and later sent to a second home said she was made to dig her own grave. Another re-homed child, a Russian girl, recounted how a boy in one house urinated on her after the two had sex; she was 13 at the time and was re-homed three times in six months.

I am happy to know that Russia forbid adoption to U.S. since last year.

More: Russia launches criminal inquiry into U.S. child exchanges

Permanent link to this article →

Automatic language tagging with Polylang in WordPress

I use the Polylang plugin for the multi-language capabilities of the sites written on WordPress. One feature that I implemented and find extremely useful is the automatic tagging of the posts with a language tag (like “en”, “ru”, etc.) when the post is saved. The code that goes into the functions.php file of the theme is as follows:

function tigra_add_polylang_language_tag( $post_id ) {
        global $polylang;
        if (isset($polylang) ) {
                if ( !$polylang->model->get_post_language($post_id) ) {
                        $polylang->model->set_post_language($post_id, pll_default_language());
                }
                $post_lang = $polylang->model->get_post_language($post_id);
                $languages = $polylang->model->get_languages_list(array('fields' => 'slug'));
                $post_tags = get_the_tags($post_id);
                $post_tags = wp_list_pluck($post_tags, 'name');
                $post_tags = array_diff($post_tags, $languages);
                if ( empty($post_tags) ) {
                        $post_tags = array();
                }
                array_push($post_tags, $post_lang->slug);
                wp_set_post_tags($post_id, $post_tags);
        }
}
add_action( 'save_post', 'tigra_add_polylang_language_tag' );

The code verifies that the default language is set (as I heard some reports that the mobile applications sometimes manage to bypass the Polylang capabilities) and sets it if necessary. Then, it extracts all tags from the post, wipes all supported (selected in Polylang configuration) language tags and adds a single tag corresponding to the language of the post.

This procedure makes sure that the language tag is always present and that the old tag is wiped when you change the language of the post. Now you can retrieve the posts, sort or do other manipulations based on the tag.

Big kudos to Chouby for the plugin and the help with code.

Permanent link to this article →

Leda Monster Bunny – better than sex text

How often did I wonder what the search results are really based on? I get sometimes really strange things thrown at me all of a sudden. And here I am, looking at some articles about getting the best impression with Google, and what do I find?

Leda Monster Bunny – Better Than Text

You get the best impression with Google simply by being Leda Monster Bunny. Otherwise, it’s hopeless. No, really, she is getting millions of hits on YouTube and all for just, what, being cute? And we are struggling to get our websites well organized and respectful to all those guidelines for webmasters and all, sweating day and night through the little details of our code. I think I cannot help but feel just a little bit envious that someone gets to be in the top for just a bit of good looks and cosmetics.

Now I understand why people turn to those fairly complicated techniques of SEO – they desperately hope that this cosmetics will do wonders for their sites and the sites will sky-rocket like Leda Monster Bunny videos. But, you know what? She works hard too, it takes her time, dedication and effort to look like that. So, that is what it really takes – effort, time, dedication. We will get there.

Permanent link to this article →

Got “social contract”?

I have heard the words “social contract” one too many times lately. My idea of freedom starts with the freedom of thought and I do not like fuzzy concepts that cloud judgement. I decided to find out what “social contract” actually means. Did you know that the concept itself is centuries old?

At its very basic, we are told that the social contract is an implied contract that one enters into by being a member of society. The contract offers the citizen certain protections while requiring that the citizen will be justly punished for breaking the laws of that society. The concept was first fleshed out by Socrates although he himself refuted the concept as the source of justice later arguing that the justice is inherent to men and cannot originate externally.

This contradiction and inconsistency is carried through the later works of Thomas Hobbes that form the ground for nearly all social contract theorists. The inconsistency, presented by Hobbes, could only be resolved again by admitting that the relationship between the society and the individual does not form the ground for morality. On the contrary, the natural morality of men makes the ground for the forming of the society and its rules.

People do not have an inherent desire to kill, rob and rape. Quite the contrary, if the society norms and laws were lifted today, we would likely go ahead just as we did before, cheerfully helping each other and being nice to strangers. People do not steal, rape and murder not because of some ephemeral social contract but because they are not inclined to. However, we do notice that some people have a tendency for misbehaving, right?

On the one hand, we have to admit that people who have the tendency to steal, murder and rape do so whether the society has mechanisms for punishing the said behaviours or not. On the other hand, we notice that these behaviours are tightly coupled to the possession of property. Unsurprisingly, Locke based his concept of social contract on the idea that men only have disputes when property is involved. The relationships within families are pre-social, they are moral agreements entered to and carried out willingly. As soon as people start having property, claims to property and property disputes, the relationships deteriorate and the necessity to protect oneself and one’s property arises.

Recognizing the problem, there were many attempts to remove the property concerns from the lives of men. Ideals of communism, for example, would be well aligned with removing concerns about property. Unfortunately, the execution of the plans to remove the property concerns was always undermined by the property concerns of the executioners themselves.

What does the “social contract” change in this picture? Exactly nothing. The concerns of men not related to property are governed by the inherent morality of men irrespective of not only social contracts but even the law. The concerns of property cannot be removed without changing the nature of thought in the society at large, so no ephemeral social contract is going to change that.

I come to the conclusion that “social contract” is a meaningless concept that has no relevance to my thought. It is a clever exercise used by philosophers later adopted by the politicians to join the arsenal of other confusing tricks.

Additionally, the “social contract”, while being useless, probably has a detrimental effect on the society and the independence of thought and action. If I believed in the “social contract”, I would be less likely to exhibit “fend off for myself” behaviour and more likely to behave like cattle, wouldn’t I?

Permanent link to this article →

Morning news

Want news? – Read blogs!

I have this strange habit of reading news in the morning. Not that I have a newspaper and a cup of coffee, no. But I have a cup of tea and read the news online. Today is one of those silly days when my news feed is jammed with one single news item. Today it is Twitter – security of Twitter was improved in some way and every single newspaper and online publication in the world seems to make it their duty to make a big splash about it. Okay, maybe, just maybe, I want to get a notice of that, somewhere in a corner, three words. I definitely not interested so much as to read the whole morning news about it.

In a word, the morning news reading is spoiled. This happens from time to time. The news in this “networked world” are weird. Either there is a lot of “buzz” – irrelevant small items or everyone is copying each other on the same item all over the place. It does seem like reading the consolidated blog feed of sites you care about is, after all, the best way to get news in today’s world. We have to get used to the fact that most relevant news are not delivered anymore by general news outlets but by very specific people with a passion to write about events that matter to them personally.

Permanent link to this article →