France has enacted a Bill that makes any denial of the Armenian genocide punishable by law, with deniers earning up to a year in prison and a EUR 45,000 ($58,600) fine. While most countries recognize the killing of 1.5 million Armenians in 1915 in Turkey to be a genocide, Turkey contests the numbers and, more importantly, that the characterization of the event (as a genocide or not) should be historians, not legislators. Here, I agree with Turkey.
Let's get the political angle out of the way: the conservative government of President Nicolas Sarkozy aims to garner support from the sizable local Armenian population in its run up to the elections next year. Beyond that, sealing the event by law to be of a particular nature heavily influences debate on the subject. I don't deny that the event happened, and going by the scale of things, I can't deny that it was genocidal, but both these facts have been established by reason. Reason is secular. Facts become facts only when established by way of logical reasoning and scientific evidence. When jurisprudential factitude is attached to it, the fact's secular character becomes sidelined. Now, argumentatively, I can't even debate the genocidal aspect of the Armenian genocide.
That well-informed French politicians have voted to pass the Bill unanimously means nothing: when there are political rewards or sanctions become involved, politicians will move guided only by them. On the other hand, that the Bill was drafted in the first place is a dubious act of gaining political leverage because it comes at the cost of the rejection of historical evidence. From this point on, the Armenian genocide in French debate will be a law-point, not a factual point.
What stops the French from labeling future events as genocides even though they may not have been so? It will be making that decision based only on what it chooses to know, not what it should know.
Showing posts with label reason. Show all posts
Showing posts with label reason. Show all posts
Thursday, 22 December 2011
Sunday, 29 May 2011
Ave homo!
Hail man!
Hail the finitude of his beauty and hail the beauty of his finitude!
Hail this good earth whose soil he tills and with whose water he fills the gut of his hungry flesh, the abyssal infinity of his mind with wonders aplenty!
Hail the vessels of iron and wood upon whose steadfast crest he sails the tempestuous depths of the ocean!
Hail the star-studded tunic of the Universe within whose melancholic brilliance lies bounteous journeys—hail the reward of destinations thereupon!
Hail the words of man's creation never to be found in the shadow of an insensate rock or in the tracheae of obdurate mountains!
Hail the eloquence of his discourse that, by the will of its cause, births both good and evil, virtue and vice!
Hail the destinies he charts unto himself and remains lost in the grip of his selfsame foibles, for therewith upon that heaving bosom rest the pages of his histories!
Hail, in the name of trade, the various measures of courtesy he extends to his fellow man for the sake of their gold!
Hail, above all else, that he doth understand the democracy of his faith, for the election of his allegiance follows from the election of his humanity!
Agere sequitur esse, agere sequitur credere, fides probantur ens. Ave homo!
Hail the finitude of his beauty and hail the beauty of his finitude!
Hail this good earth whose soil he tills and with whose water he fills the gut of his hungry flesh, the abyssal infinity of his mind with wonders aplenty!
Hail the vessels of iron and wood upon whose steadfast crest he sails the tempestuous depths of the ocean!
Hail the star-studded tunic of the Universe within whose melancholic brilliance lies bounteous journeys—hail the reward of destinations thereupon!
Hail the words of man's creation never to be found in the shadow of an insensate rock or in the tracheae of obdurate mountains!
Hail the eloquence of his discourse that, by the will of its cause, births both good and evil, virtue and vice!
Hail the destinies he charts unto himself and remains lost in the grip of his selfsame foibles, for therewith upon that heaving bosom rest the pages of his histories!
Hail, in the name of trade, the various measures of courtesy he extends to his fellow man for the sake of their gold!
Hail, above all else, that he doth understand the democracy of his faith, for the election of his allegiance follows from the election of his humanity!
Agere sequitur esse, agere sequitur credere, fides probantur ens. Ave homo!
Thursday, 21 April 2011
Rusty and Sharded
Before I began writing this, I thought to myself how I would begin this entry. That's when it struck me that this is my diary; I can write whatever I want to write - and so I began this entry! Haha! It is difficult to understand why people pour out their sorrows in thousands of words but joy comes out in not more than a hundred words. If it weren't for a "special" relationship I believe I have with the words I put down, I wouldn't think words are oppressed that way. Would they rebel? In a world of words, what would the rebellion be like? Will the world "bloody" be draped across a thousand pages of their chronicles? Perhaps, but words are often used together with the logic that comes with using them - not grammatical but the one accompanying the justice (or judicial capacity) of reason.
He was a coward who said a picture was worth a thousand words; he was a coward because he couldn't bring himself to concede that each image is worth hundreds of thousands of words; he was a coward because he chose to remain shielded behind the idea of progress when he could have stepped out and up to realize the continuum of realities that spanned the gap between "the now" and the future. The sheer volume of information is stupendous. How can you stop at a thousand words? The "aphorism" itself seems like a bit of an irony: if the sayer was going for a metaphor, then saying "thousand words" is equivalent to asserting that a picture is worth a million words, a billion words, a zillion words... if you can't stop, then why put them together at all? A picture's a picture and a word's a word; let them bloody be! You don't have to understand everything for it to be a continuum. In fact, if you did, it wouldn't be a continuum! Think about it! I use a million words and, just like that, someone adds or removes a word to give the picture a completely different verbal form.
Anyway, there's one thing I don't understand at all. How can people not think? How is is possible that people haven't thought about of the things I've thought about? How in the Lord's name is it possible for a mind to be at rest? The mental sophistication is so easy to acquire that it's laughable! In turn, thus, it would mean that such people have probably visited all those realms of possibilities and still choose the verboten-addicted reality around us. Guano.
I don't believe that; it's too wonderful an explanation... and so is the "still mind". Why isn't everyone as curious as I am? Why can't the best engineers do with machines and logic-constructs what even an unaccomplished writer such as I can do with words? Or have I not seen it? I don't think such things would've escaped me. And before you, you Faustus!, begin to defend yourself, mind: I will always hold that logic has its own exotic designs. Only yesterday, I had stumbled across this site/page called "But Does It Float", and behold! What an awe-inspiring collection of images! Short descriptions here and there told me most of it was either avant-garde or "deconstructivist". "Deconstructivist"? Really? Why can't you name something with whatever comes first to mind (on an average) amongst the first thousand people who see it? By that suggestion, I'm going to call avant-gardes "rusty" and deconstructivists "sharded".
Anyway, there were hundreds and hundreds of images on display. At first sight, they were ALL excellent. After a few minutes, once the standard of excellence's been raised to accommodate the findings, about 30% of it is simply stupendous and the rest is... well, stupendous. Talk about logic and its designs! Only the truly insane can manage a recreation of chaos, and even then, sporadic manifestations of logic will become observable. Rusty and sharded both captured certain moods splendidly, and by "capture", I mean the freeze-frame trapping of the mind's infinite form-dance. By looking at the perfect painting, you suddenly become aware that your mind is a small individuation of the entire universe that the painting encompassed. That moment of oneness is truly fascinating; moreover, it feels like a release. Imagine an obscurely curved pipe which must be inserted into a bigger shaft; the engineer twists it and turns it and jams it, but when the orientations of the cross-sections match, the pipe just flows in without a complaint.
It's a world sans friction.
Sometimes, the banishing of logic itself seems like a kind of logic, and when you witness a creation fashioned on that basis, you know that rebellion is the order of the day. Literature, I now believe, has a similar, if not the same purpose: some liberation. That liberation, obtained via art of any form, I will always recognize with the individuation - the "charitocratic" vessel within which we sail, and the mind that enables such a journey is therefore not within us but without, at least in that moment. In hindsight, I recall having simplified the writings of Abhinavagupta for a friend. While Abhinava called that mind-universe coupling "God", I choose to call it the mind's awareness of itself, the ultimate permission to think, to keep thinking, to think whatever.
He was a coward who said a picture was worth a thousand words; he was a coward because he couldn't bring himself to concede that each image is worth hundreds of thousands of words; he was a coward because he chose to remain shielded behind the idea of progress when he could have stepped out and up to realize the continuum of realities that spanned the gap between "the now" and the future. The sheer volume of information is stupendous. How can you stop at a thousand words? The "aphorism" itself seems like a bit of an irony: if the sayer was going for a metaphor, then saying "thousand words" is equivalent to asserting that a picture is worth a million words, a billion words, a zillion words... if you can't stop, then why put them together at all? A picture's a picture and a word's a word; let them bloody be! You don't have to understand everything for it to be a continuum. In fact, if you did, it wouldn't be a continuum! Think about it! I use a million words and, just like that, someone adds or removes a word to give the picture a completely different verbal form.
Anyway, there's one thing I don't understand at all. How can people not think? How is is possible that people haven't thought about of the things I've thought about? How in the Lord's name is it possible for a mind to be at rest? The mental sophistication is so easy to acquire that it's laughable! In turn, thus, it would mean that such people have probably visited all those realms of possibilities and still choose the verboten-addicted reality around us. Guano.
I don't believe that; it's too wonderful an explanation... and so is the "still mind". Why isn't everyone as curious as I am? Why can't the best engineers do with machines and logic-constructs what even an unaccomplished writer such as I can do with words? Or have I not seen it? I don't think such things would've escaped me. And before you, you Faustus!, begin to defend yourself, mind: I will always hold that logic has its own exotic designs. Only yesterday, I had stumbled across this site/page called "But Does It Float", and behold! What an awe-inspiring collection of images! Short descriptions here and there told me most of it was either avant-garde or "deconstructivist". "Deconstructivist"? Really? Why can't you name something with whatever comes first to mind (on an average) amongst the first thousand people who see it? By that suggestion, I'm going to call avant-gardes "rusty" and deconstructivists "sharded".
Anyway, there were hundreds and hundreds of images on display. At first sight, they were ALL excellent. After a few minutes, once the standard of excellence's been raised to accommodate the findings, about 30% of it is simply stupendous and the rest is... well, stupendous. Talk about logic and its designs! Only the truly insane can manage a recreation of chaos, and even then, sporadic manifestations of logic will become observable. Rusty and sharded both captured certain moods splendidly, and by "capture", I mean the freeze-frame trapping of the mind's infinite form-dance. By looking at the perfect painting, you suddenly become aware that your mind is a small individuation of the entire universe that the painting encompassed. That moment of oneness is truly fascinating; moreover, it feels like a release. Imagine an obscurely curved pipe which must be inserted into a bigger shaft; the engineer twists it and turns it and jams it, but when the orientations of the cross-sections match, the pipe just flows in without a complaint.
It's a world sans friction.
Sometimes, the banishing of logic itself seems like a kind of logic, and when you witness a creation fashioned on that basis, you know that rebellion is the order of the day. Literature, I now believe, has a similar, if not the same purpose: some liberation. That liberation, obtained via art of any form, I will always recognize with the individuation - the "charitocratic" vessel within which we sail, and the mind that enables such a journey is therefore not within us but without, at least in that moment. In hindsight, I recall having simplified the writings of Abhinavagupta for a friend. While Abhinava called that mind-universe coupling "God", I choose to call it the mind's awareness of itself, the ultimate permission to think, to keep thinking, to think whatever.
Rusty and Sharded
Before I began writing this, I thought to myself how I would begin this entry. That's when it struck me that this is my diary; I can write whatever I want to write - and so I began this entry! Haha! It is difficult to understand why people pour out their sorrows in thousands of words but joy comes out in not more than a hundred words. If it weren't for a "special" relationship I believe I have with the words I put down, I wouldn't think words are oppressed that way. Would they rebel? In a world of words, what would the rebellion be like? Will the world "bloody" be draped across a thousand pages of their chronicles? Perhaps, but words are often used together with the logic that comes with using them - not grammatical but the one accompanying the justice (or judicial capacity) of reason.
He was a coward who said a picture was worth a thousand words; he was a coward because he couldn't bring himself to concede that each image is worth hundreds of thousands of words; he was a coward because he chose to remain shielded behind the idea of progress when he could have stepped out and up to realize the continuum of realities that spanned the gap between "the now" and the future. The sheer volume of information is stupendous. How can you stop at a thousand words? The "aphorism" itself seems like a bit of an irony: if the sayer was going for a metaphor, then saying "thousand words" is equivalent to asserting that a picture is worth a million words, a billion words, a zillion words... if you can't stop, then why put them together at all? A picture's a picture and a word's a word; let them bloody be! You don't have to understand everything for it to be a continuum. In fact, if you did, it wouldn't be a continuum! Think about it! I use a million words and, just like that, someone adds or removes a word to give the picture a completely different verbal form.
Anyway, there's one thing I don't understand at all. How can people not think? How is is possible that people haven't thought about of the things I've thought about? How in the Lord's name is it possible for a mind to be at rest? The mental sophistication is so easy to acquire that it's laughable! In turn, thus, it would mean that such people have probably visited all those realms of possibilities and still choose the verboten-addicted reality around us. Guano.
I don't believe that; it's too wonderful an explanation... and so is the "still mind". Why isn't everyone as curious as I am? Why can't the best engineers do with machines and logic-constructs what even an unaccomplished writer such as I can do with words? Or have I not seen it? I don't think such things would've escaped me. And before you, you Faustus!, begin to defend yourself, mind: I will always hold that logic has its own exotic designs. Only yesterday, I had stumbled across this site/page called "But Does It Float", and behold! What an awe-inspiring collection of images! Short descriptions here and there told me most of it was either avant-garde or "deconstructivist". "Deconstructivist"? Really? Why can't you name something with whatever comes first to mind (on an average) amongst the first thousand people who see it? By that suggestion, I'm going to call avant-gardes "rusty" and deconstructivists "sharded".
Anyway, there were hundreds and hundreds of images on display. At first sight, they were ALL excellent. After a few minutes, once the standard of excellence's been raised to accommodate the findings, about 30% of it is simply stupendous and the rest is... well, stupendous. Talk about logic and its designs! Only the truly insane can manage a recreation of chaos, and even then, sporadic manifestations of logic will become observable. Rusty and sharded both captured certain moods splendidly, and by "capture", I mean the freeze-frame trapping of the mind's infinite form-dance. By looking at the perfect painting, you suddenly become aware that your mind is a small individuation of the entire universe that the painting encompassed. That moment of oneness is truly fascinating; moreover, it feels like a release. Imagine an obscurely curved pipe which must be inserted into a bigger shaft; the engineer twists it and turns it and jams it, but when the orientations of the cross-sections match, the pipe just flows in without a complaint.
It's a world sans friction.
Sometimes, the banishing of logic itself seems like a kind of logic, and when you witness a creation fashioned on that basis, you know that rebellion is the order of the day. Literature, I now believe, has a similar, if not the same purpose: some liberation. That liberation, obtained via art of any form, I will always recognize with the individuation - the "charitocratic" vessel within which we sail, and the mind that enables such a journey is therefore not within us but without, at least in that moment. In hindsight, I recall having simplified the writings of Abhinavagupta for a friend. While Abhinava called that mind-universe coupling "God", I choose to call it the mind's awareness of itself, the ultimate permission to think, to keep thinking, to think whatever.
He was a coward who said a picture was worth a thousand words; he was a coward because he couldn't bring himself to concede that each image is worth hundreds of thousands of words; he was a coward because he chose to remain shielded behind the idea of progress when he could have stepped out and up to realize the continuum of realities that spanned the gap between "the now" and the future. The sheer volume of information is stupendous. How can you stop at a thousand words? The "aphorism" itself seems like a bit of an irony: if the sayer was going for a metaphor, then saying "thousand words" is equivalent to asserting that a picture is worth a million words, a billion words, a zillion words... if you can't stop, then why put them together at all? A picture's a picture and a word's a word; let them bloody be! You don't have to understand everything for it to be a continuum. In fact, if you did, it wouldn't be a continuum! Think about it! I use a million words and, just like that, someone adds or removes a word to give the picture a completely different verbal form.
Anyway, there's one thing I don't understand at all. How can people not think? How is is possible that people haven't thought about of the things I've thought about? How in the Lord's name is it possible for a mind to be at rest? The mental sophistication is so easy to acquire that it's laughable! In turn, thus, it would mean that such people have probably visited all those realms of possibilities and still choose the verboten-addicted reality around us. Guano.
I don't believe that; it's too wonderful an explanation... and so is the "still mind". Why isn't everyone as curious as I am? Why can't the best engineers do with machines and logic-constructs what even an unaccomplished writer such as I can do with words? Or have I not seen it? I don't think such things would've escaped me. And before you, you Faustus!, begin to defend yourself, mind: I will always hold that logic has its own exotic designs. Only yesterday, I had stumbled across this site/page called "But Does It Float", and behold! What an awe-inspiring collection of images! Short descriptions here and there told me most of it was either avant-garde or "deconstructivist". "Deconstructivist"? Really? Why can't you name something with whatever comes first to mind (on an average) amongst the first thousand people who see it? By that suggestion, I'm going to call avant-gardes "rusty" and deconstructivists "sharded".
Anyway, there were hundreds and hundreds of images on display. At first sight, they were ALL excellent. After a few minutes, once the standard of excellence's been raised to accommodate the findings, about 30% of it is simply stupendous and the rest is... well, stupendous. Talk about logic and its designs! Only the truly insane can manage a recreation of chaos, and even then, sporadic manifestations of logic will become observable. Rusty and sharded both captured certain moods splendidly, and by "capture", I mean the freeze-frame trapping of the mind's infinite form-dance. By looking at the perfect painting, you suddenly become aware that your mind is a small individuation of the entire universe that the painting encompassed. That moment of oneness is truly fascinating; moreover, it feels like a release. Imagine an obscurely curved pipe which must be inserted into a bigger shaft; the engineer twists it and turns it and jams it, but when the orientations of the cross-sections match, the pipe just flows in without a complaint.
It's a world sans friction.
Sometimes, the banishing of logic itself seems like a kind of logic, and when you witness a creation fashioned on that basis, you know that rebellion is the order of the day. Literature, I now believe, has a similar, if not the same purpose: some liberation. That liberation, obtained via art of any form, I will always recognize with the individuation - the "charitocratic" vessel within which we sail, and the mind that enables such a journey is therefore not within us but without, at least in that moment. In hindsight, I recall having simplified the writings of Abhinavagupta for a friend. While Abhinava called that mind-universe coupling "God", I choose to call it the mind's awareness of itself, the ultimate permission to think, to keep thinking, to think whatever.
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