Arquivo para a ‘Social Network’ Categoria
War and Innocence
27
Mar
There are numerous political, economic, historical and even religious reasons for starting a conflict,
but this is not from the perspective of the innocent thought of a child who dreams of a world without conflicts, peace and human dignity for all.
The drawing of a child, we omit the name and the police situation that later involved the case, is a generous and innocent look at the world, and reinforces the idea that there is a sincere feeling of friendship and fraternity still present in humanity.
The situation of the conflict is getting worse, with the Russian threat to send “strategic” nuclear weapons to Belarus, Russia’s allied country, on the battlefield Ukraine “stabilized” the situation in Bahkmut, the most violent front of the war and where they were the forces of the mercenaries of the Wagner group.
The possibility of a third block of negotiations with Russia, announced by China whose president made a recent visit to China and expected the visit of the Brazilian government, however the president presented a picture of pneumonia and influenza and postponed the visit.
They are ideologically closer to Russia, but this third block has this as an asset since it is visible that Putin does not listen to NATO or the UN, see the Hague condemnation of the extradition of Ukrainian children to Russia, which condemned him the prison.
The picture is delicate and requires caution and effort for a possible negotiation of peace, people who look generously at humanity cannot see the world differently, they must not seek justifications and assumptions for war, they must have the generous look of a child.
Between death and non-death
22
Mar
Recovering the concept of a life well lived is one that can be examined, and one must live it to the end, 
there is another issue that is the gaps in life or what I call the intermittents of death, in reference to what Saramago described in “The Intermittence of Death”, see the post.
If we posted there about the intermittent, here we want to talk about non-death, to address non-life, Saramago’s exercise is to think of a country or fictional place where, for a few days, no death was reported, and he goes further thinking of a situation in which people could know in advance of death, after some reflections, think:
“In theory it seemed like a good idea, but practice would not take long to demonstrate that it was not so much. Imagine a person, one of those who enjoy splendid health, those who have never had a headache, optimists by principle and for clear and objective reasons, and who, one morning, leaving home for work, finds the helpful postman from his area, who says to him, Glad to see you, Mr. So-and-so, I have a letter for you, and immediately sees a violet-colored envelope appear in his hands that perhaps he had not yet paid special attention to …” (p. .123) and receives early news of his death.
He thinks he will be able to avoid stepping on a banana peel, not receiving the letter, throwing it away, but someone will politely bring it back thinking he has forgotten it, finally at the apex of the story he finds it fatal.
If in the previous post the “intermittents” were not clear, here the card is this personification, death made Being not only points to an allegorical discourse, but one can see it as it is.
Then he writes: “Death, where was your victory, knowing, however, that you will not receive an answer, because death never answers. and it’s not because he doesn’t want to, it’s just because he doesn’t know what to say in the face of the greatest human pain” (pp. 123-124).
The speech may seem strange, but only those who follow it can understand that its pure personification brings the understanding that there is something beyond life and not just finitude, this is what bothers Saramago, but he does not give in until he reaches his opposite, which is to accept it as fatal
The personification of death letter and the narrative merge, this is an essential element to understand Saramago’s tale, although he does not refer to it when he says in the cellist’s apartment: “Then something never seen before happened, something not imaginable, death left -If she fell to her knees, she was all of her, now, a body rebuilt, that’s why she had knees, and legs, and feet, and arms, and hands, and a face that was hidden between her hands, and shoulders that trembled you don’t know why, it won’t be crying, you can’t ask so much of someone who always leaves a trail of tears wherever he goes, but none of them are yours.” (p. 152).
Even if it is, in my way of seeing the reverse of life, Saramago remakes the sensible and the finite.
SARAMAGO, Jose. (2005) Intermitências da morte ( Intermittents of death). Brazil, São Paulo: Companhia das Letras.
The next strategy could be decisive
20
Mar
While Bakhmut’s battles are still bloody, apparently neither Russia nor Ukraine consider
it more vital, for Ukraine it is a stalemate waiting for weapons from the West: tanks, jets and more ammunition, for Russia a deception that cost many lives, in particular of mercenaries from the so-called “Wagner command”, who criticize Russia for this.
To reinforce this Putin visited Mariupol and the Crimea, Russian rearguard positions, in points already conquered in other battles, with extreme security, but to guarantee the morale of the troop and his own, since he was condemned together with his commissioner Maria Alekseyevna Lvova-Belov for taking 6,000 Ukrainian children for “re-education” to Russia.
With conviction, both could be arrested, but it is unlikely that they will come to the West.
The new strategy expected by the Ukrainians is an invasion to the north by Belarus, but their army is small and would only be effective if supported by Russian forces, the Russians in turn would like to consolidate the positions in Donetsk and Mariupol, gaining a strip of territory in Ukraine.
China and Belarus continue to claim “extreme interest” in peace and an end to hostilities, as they lose a lot commercially with the war, but will certainly support Russian achievements.
The event of interception of an American drone in the Black Sea by a Russian fighter also caused strong tension, the escalation of the “spring” in Ukraine is foreseen by the sending of more weapons.
There is always some encouragement for peace, but since the beginning of the war the scenario has only evolved in the opposite way, there is a suspension of breath about the new war strategies.
About lucidity
14
Mar
We have already posted about blindness, in some essays (such as the one by José Saramago
that became a film by the Brazilian Fernando Meirelles in 2008) and we also made a connection with The plague by Albert Camus, making a relationship with war, 3 things related and analyzed were from our time (the Pandemic, the blindness of the denialist vision and the War), we also posted last week about the clearing.
Now we do the opposite, let’s analyze lucidity and what it means in the history of humanity, starting again with Saramago, let’s look at his Essay on Lucidity, because he makes an interesting game for our development here, an allegory between light and dark.
This relationship is important because Saramago recovers elements from the first essay on blindness (the color white as a symbol, for example, the characters and the tree epidemic), it can be said that it is an extension of the first narrative.
Lucidity speaks of an election where two parties only had about 8% of the votes, with a significant blank vote, contrary to many arguments about this possible depoliticization, Saramago makes a curious counterpoint, he did not experience the current polarization:
“…it is because those blank votes, which came to deal a brutal blow against the democratic abnormality in which our personal and collective life was taking place, did not fall from the clouds or rise from the bowels of the earth, they were in the pocket of eighty-three out of every hundred electors of this city, who, by their own, but not patriotic hand, cast them at the ballot box.”
It was decided to carry out a survey, but the 83% did not manifest themselves until a person decided to send a letter to the leaders, and it was this letter that gave a new direction to the investigation and, no matter how much resistance there was, the government would not give in so easily, it could yourself realize where the problem is.
This upside-down reading of our political scenario, which is not very different from the US and Italy, just to give two examples, is very interesting to understand the political lucidity that seems to go against the grain in contemporary politics.
SARAMAGO, J. “Ensaio sobre a lucidez” (Essay on lucidity), Brazil,SP: Ed.: Companhia das Letras, 2004.
War becomes dangerous and can get out of hand
13
Mar
As the war scene advanced in Eastern Europe, several analyzes were made here showing
an increasingly cybernetic war and with chances of being nuclear, now both international news (such as CNN for example) and the American intelligence services, point out this tragic evolution.
Officials of the US Senate Intelligence Committee spoke last Wednesday (08/03) of this scenario affirmed what is written in the report of the Office of National Intelligence: “degraded Moscow’s conventional land and air capabilities and increased its dependence on weapons nuclear weapons”, so a window for peace is becoming smaller and smaller.
The battle of Bakhmut, which could pave the way for a larger invasion of Ukrainian territory, is costing both sides dearly, but will intensify the war on Ukrainian soil, with losses and unpredictable scenarios.
While the Russians announce victory in Bakhmut, the Ukrainians say that each Ukrainian soldier killed cost the lives of 5 Russian soldiers, propaganda aside, Russia does pay an expensive cost for the dispute in the region and shows that it will be a war step by step and costing many lives, in addition to refugees and material destruction.
At the global level, NATO’s involvement grows as Russia seeks allies beyond China.
The involvement with weapons and even training of troops from Poland and Germany, as well as the already evident involvement of NATO since the beginning of the war, can extrapolate the limits of Russia and Poland and pass to the entire European continent, already a Russian “new Pearl Harbour”. , launching long-range missiles into American territory would start a global tragedy by the power of weapons.
Weapons are available and there is also tension in the East, now with South Korea and Japan approaching Western forces.
Peace is always possible, but it requires an environment of cooperation and understanding between nations.
The forest bordering the clearing
10
Mar
Modern man, victim of ideologies, cultures and religious apostasy lives only with the awareness
of individual freedom, without really understanding who is the Other who is not equal, the Korean/German philosopher Byung Chul Han developed this in “The expulsion of the other : Society, perception” (Editora Vozes, Brazil) in which he talks about the adipose emptiness of fullness.
This emptiness has nothing to do with the phenomenological epoché, opening the mind and soul to dialogue and receive the Other, the different, the discourse and the narrative contrary to ours, to later merge the horizons in the “hermeneutic circle”, the emptiness of soul is positive, it elevates us.
Through successive tragedies, the pandemic was the first and will not be the last, and this is not about an apocalyptic discourse, but about the social realization of a civilizing crisis in an increasingly profound and dangerous process, not only in the rulers, but also in personal conscience.
Chul Han goes so far as to say these processes are obscene in “hypervisibility, hypercommunication, hyperproduction, hyperconsumption, which lead to a rapid stagnation of the same. Obscene is the ‘connection of like with like’ (Han, 2022) in short, everything translates into an obscene sameness.
He cites a very illustrative example which is the animation Anomalisa by Charlie Kaufmann (photo), which talks about a speaker Michael who goes to Cincinnati for a lecture and there approaches a person by his voice, Lia is a person who already knows him and came to see his talk and fall in love.
But the hell of the same are the employees of the Hotel, all the same and who want to seduce Michael.
The essay emphasizes erotic love, but this also applies to agapic love, without falling in love and dialoguing with what is different, we live in the hell of the same, in our vicious circle, in an environment full of vices and obscenities, in the worst sense of word.
In the biblical narrative, Moses, who was trying to lead his people to a new path, wanted to stone him and blasphemed against the proposal of a different life (Exodus 17,3-7), even asked for the return of Egyptian slavery (any resemblance to the current politics is no coincidence), and also in chapter 4 of John, Jesus goes to meet the Samaritan woman, a woman and “pagan” and dialogues with her
In the week that women’s day was celebrated, this is important, which is not a biblical detail, but the essence of her message, Jesus, when meeting her, finds her interest strange and says “How come you, being a Jew, ask drink to me, a Samaritan woman?” (Jo 5,9).
The obscenity and sameness of the same not only impoverishes each one, but limits the civilizing process that is enriching the more the different can exist with dignity.
HAN, B. C. (2022) A expulsão do outro: sociedade e percepção. (The expulsion of the other: society, perception). Trans. Lucas Machado. Brazil, Petrópolis: Editora Vozes.
Clearing: method and contestation
08
Mar
It is through phenomenology that it is possible to resume the positivity of the being
in relation to the only possible transcendentality, where the thing opens up in the dimension of the transcendental, the one that we developed in last week’s post and which in a certain way is opposed to Kant’s transcendent, which goes towards the knowledge of the object and for this reason it is confused with subjectivity.
In phenomenology, there is an intentional consciousness in its “a priori”, taken in a similar way to the subjective (proper of the subject), however, consciousness as a phenomenon reveals what is hidden, what the Greeks called “alétheia”, but at that moment science and all awareness of it was early.
In the phenomenal experience of the clearing (lichtung) there is the truth of the being that gives itself with a kind of “arch-phenomenon” (Ereignis), this is the very thing of phenomenology, where its intentionality is, but this also remains hidden.
If we create a void in consciousness in a phenomenal way (the phenomenological epoche), we open ourselves to our truth, we can enter a clearing even before an external event clears us up, this is the reason why humanism in both Heidegger and Sloterdijk is tied to history.
It was Hans Georg Gadamer who developed “The Question of Historical Consciousness” in his contestation of the romantic historical truth which is a quasi-determinism defended by many variants of leftist thought (Marx did not defend it), however there is the question of “natural time” in opposition to “human time”, a self-awareness of consciousness itself.
The hermeneutic circle method is a way to break this conception of consciousness that is only “temporal”, but it comes up against what must be “beyond the human”, shrouded in mystery and vices of historical interpretation.
Rüsen (2011) says that there is a type of historical consciousness made through the “intellectual transformation of natural time into human time”, understanding natural time as contingent events and human time as human representations of life itself.
Few are able to see in their own representations distortions of the truth, interpretations and repressed feelings that do not “clear” the conscience, this seen in a civilizing panorama transforms authoritarian, inhuman and destructive concepts into obscurity of the conscience, not to use the Greek alethéia again.
Civilization and the Glade
07
Mar
The merit of Heidegger having written about the clearing in the midst of the period post world
wars was that of returning to contemplate what was essentially obscured: The Being, not just the human being, since his Letters on Humanism was polemicized by Peter Sloterdijk (much later), but mainly for returning to the question of the Life of Being.
The Heideggerian reading says: “”Destiny appropriates itself as the clearing of being, which is, as clearing. It is the clearing that grants the proximity of being. without him being able to experience and assume this dwelling today” (in Cartas sobre o Humanismo, 1967).
This clearing is different from any idea about modernity, such as enlightenment or some mystical process of enlightenment, says Heidegger: “”… , nor with regard to the thing that is expressed with the adjective luminous’, which means ‘clear'”, in another of his writings on the task of thinking.
The idea of “Being”, the fact that we are and that death and war hide is once again important in the midst of war threats (see our previous post), thinking and the desire for political and social transformation cannot be allowed to submerge. this true purpose, which is the life of the Self.
This open free means that we can, faced with a situation of denial of Being, have a vision of what is ex-sistent, not as enlightenment, but as a real vision of what is in our presence, in Greek philosophy our “on”.
It is not a question of revelation, but of “unveiling”, that is, something that is always present in us, but hidden and almost dormant, returning to Parmenides’ reading of Being, Heidegger wrote: “As long as being prevails, from the aletheia, the self-revealing emergence belongs to him. (a-lethe).
Growing barbarism is not only the result of emerging social issues or territorial political disputes, but of the concealment of the Being.
HEIDEGGER, Martin.(1967) Carta sobre o humanismo (Letters on Humanism). Brazil, Rio de Janeiro: Tempo Brasileiro, p. 61.
War and the End of Winter
06
Mar
The Russian strategy was to “freeze” the Ukrainians and their allies in Europe in the winter, so not
only did it limit the shipment of gas but it also bombed several energy sources in Ukraine, with Europe stocking gas before and knowing the Russian strategy, it went to get natural gas in other sources, such as Africa, and now we are at the end of winter there (and summer here in the southern hemisphere).
A possible war tactic now would be the use of biological weapons, there are already reports that this has occurred in Ukraine, they are prohibited by international agreements, but a direct confrontation with NATO would bring enormous wear and tear beyond the possibility of a nuclear catastrophe.
Brazil’s vote and intervention for peace had a negative reaction in Russia, which has already alerted Brazil to a confrontational position, Brazil was the only country to vote against Russian intervention in the last vote that increased the rejection of Russian intervention, there is no other name for the fact.
The end of winter brings a period of great flooding and shifting terrain and the advance of ground forces is not possible, the young people recruited for the war in Russia do not have skills for heavy weapons and aviation for the most part.
What is the path to peace at the moment, Brazil is trying to form a “neutral” bloc that dialogues with both sides, but NATO is a fundamental part of the war in Ukraine and therein lies the difficulty.
The German newspaper Der Spiegel stated that the head of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen said that the time of peace is over in Europe, it is a serious statement, which came in response to Russian threats, also there is already a visible movement (I am aware of some cases) of services that can be done from home are moving outside Europe.
In the event of a biological war, of course we hope it never comes to this point, the evacuation of many services would be inevitable and a completely warlike climate would settle on the continent.
We hope and always believe in possible peace.
The electronic narrative
02
Mar
The rapid evolution of Artificial Intelligence, after a serious crisis towards the end of the
millennium, brings a mystifying aspect to the scenario of scientific dissemination and sometimes even to scientific research itself, which sees it beyond the real possibilities or below what it is able.
That is why we pointed out in the previous post the real evolution and sophistication of Machine Learning algorithms and the growth of Deep Learning technology, this is the current rapid evolution, the evolution of electronic assistants (several of them are already on the market such as Siri and Alexa) is still limited and we commented in a post about the LaMBDA machine that it would have “sentient” capability.
Sentient is different from consciousness, because it is the ability of beings to perceive sensations and feelings through the senses, this would mean in the case of machines having something “subjective” (we have already spoken about the limitation of the term and its difference from the soul), although they are capable of of narratives.
This narrative, however complex it may be, is an electronic narrative, an algorithmic one, with the interaction of man and machine through “deep learning”, it is possible that it confuses and even surprises the human being with narratives and elaborations of speeches, however it will depend on always from the human narratives from which they are fed and create an electronic narrative.
I cite an example of the chatGPT that excites the mystifying discourse and creates an alarm in the technophobic discourse and creates speculations even about the transhuman limits of the machine.
A list of films considered extraordinary, exemplifies the limit of electronic storytelling, due to its human power, the list gave the following films: “Citizen Kane” (1941), “The Godfather” (1972), “Back to the Future ” (1985), “Casablanca” (1942), “2001: A Space Odyssey” (1968), “The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring” (2001), “The Shawshank Redemption” (1994), ” Psycho” (1960), “Star Wars: Episode V – The Empire Strikes Back” (1980) and “Pulp Fiction” (1994).
No mention of the Japanese Akira Kurosawa, the German Werner Herzog or the Italian Frederico Felini, just to name a few, about fiction would not leave out of the list Blade Runner – the hunter of androids, well connected to the technologies of “open AI” or the historic Metropolis (from 1927 by the Austrian Fritz Lang).
The electronic narrative has the limitation of what feeds it, which is the human narrative, even if it is made by the wisest human, it will have contextual and historical limitations.
