Arquivo para January, 2025
Urgent: Israeli cabinet approves peace agreement
18
Jan
Israel’s cabinet of ministers has voted in favor
of a ceasefire that will come into effect on Sunday, will initially last 42 days, provides for the phased return of hostages and Israel’s gradual withdrawal from the Gaza Strip.
According to the Times of Israel, 24 ministers voted in favor, while eight voted against approval, Communications Minister Shlomo Karhi did not attend, the note says: “the government approved the framework for the return of hostages”.
Qatari Prime Minister Sheik Mohammed bin Abdulraham al Thani, who mediated the agreement, stated the “need for both parties to commit to the implementation of all phases of the agreement” to avoid “civilian bloodshed”, the details of the second and third phases will be known after the implementation of the first phase.
May this peace spread to other regions in conflict and serious threats from imperial forces.
Evil and our minds
17
Jan
I don’t like the horror genre, but I still went
to see the Argentinian film “O mal que nos habita”, directed by Demián Rugna (Aterrorizados, The Last Gateway) and it made me reflect on the evil that can be found in regions and places where people notice something wrong and go in search of explanations, in the case of the film, after finding a mutilated body.
There are many contemporary mutilations: drugs, drunkenness, cheap pornography, theft and everything that accompanies a society in crisis. In the case of the film, they end up discovering a man with a body infected by the devil and who is about to give birth to a real demon.
It’s not worth discussing the reality of this entity’s existence here, I personally believe it, but the interesting thing about the film is that the community comes together in the face of chaos to try to fight it, and time doesn’t seem to be in their favor.
The metaphor I see is not only wars, but also various thoughts and evils that are already in place and the population searching for this evil “entity” but unable to find it. We are on a dangerous civilizational threshold and the worst thing is what imprisons the mind and soul.
Absence of forgiveness, closure in concentric groups, more than bubbles, are misguided cultural currents where one group seeks to eliminate the other without any possibility of truce and if we could call this “evil” it would be what Freud called “civilizational malaise”, in the case of the film, not eliminating, but treating that infected “man”.
Exclusion and fighting the “other side” seem the most obvious responses, but they only lead us towards a greater evil: war, exclusion and its consequences.
Acknowledging our mistakes is the first step, but it must be complemented with forgiveness for those who have harmed or offended us for some reason. The third step is to verify the origin of the social evil, which is the most difficult because most people, without the necessary wisdom, prefer exclusion.
It’s not about tolerating evil, or even being innocent in the face of it, it’s about bearing witness by living the hope of a fresh start for ourselves, for those around us and for society. We can see this difficult step in the case of Israel’s peace agreement, because spirits are still armed, and yesterday Israel was bombed again.
The world is waiting for peace, but there won’t be any with armed spirits, incapable of taking the first step, because somehow we are all infected by a climate of hostility.
Peace or truce in the Middle East ?
16
Jan
A peace agreement has been celebrated in
the Middle East, but there are still doubts about the real conditions of this agreement, as bad agreements only postpone hatreds and reorganize forces.
A ceasefire agreement only means a new military balance in the region, according to Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, in practice with the United States calling the shots in the region and a retreat by Iran, the fall of a long dictatorship in Syria has contributed to this, but there will be peace without the reconstruction of humanitarian conditions in the region and in Yemen.
Before the October 7 attack by Hamas on Israeli territory, Iran was calling the shots in the region, including well-trained terrorists in the Gaza Strip, where Palestinians live under constant hostility from Israel, and this escalated after October 7.
We need to restore humanitarian conditions in the region, and understand that poverty in Yemen is one of the worst in the world, so a truce is not enough, we need to get to the root of the war.
In more than 40 years, few agreements have been successful and the crisis continues in the region. Since the Six Day War in 1967, agreements signed between Israel and Egypt, between Israel and Jordan, the central issue between Palestinians and Israelis has not been resolved, a direct agreement is needed.
The agreement, officially announced in Qatar by Prime Minister Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, was reached between Hamas and Israeli negotiators, which is a good start because it is direct between the parties.
His words, “hopefully, this will be the last page,” are very significant, but one cannot underestimate the conditions in the medium and long term, in other words, re-establishing humanitarian conditions in the region and not thinking of Yemen as a separate chapter, it’s Houthis’ headquarters, they attacked a “vital” post in Israel yesterday, before the agreement.
Regarding the hostages who are due to be released soon, of the 251 captured by Hamas on October 7, 2023, 94 are believed to be still in Gaza, 60 are alive and 34 are dead.
It is now necessary to disarm the warring spirits, not only in the region, but throughout the planet.
Urgent: According to the Associated Press, Israel’s cabinet has not yet ratified the agreement, says Hamas has imposed “new” concessions: “The cabinet will not meet until the mediators notify Israel that Hamas has accepted all the items in the agreement,” said Netanyahu, fight, pray or think positive for PEACE.
The peace of those who love
15
Jan
I give you peace, but not as the world gives,
says biblical wisdom (John 14:27), and what kind of peace this is, it is clearly not what we call peace between nations and peoples.
We have already mentioned here, the so-called Iberian peace, in Sassanid (527-531), which became without return to war, and in dark periods for human peace it would be altruism or innocence to think of peace
Say what you think, maintain coherence in actions and words, justice and values are not only valid for your group or nation, they must be coherent values that are practical always and with everyone, independent of narratives and political and social polarities, it is necessary to have wisdom in what you say and prudence in what you do, And the pure release of feelings is not healthy and requires a dose of empathy and love from those who always do.
If you correct, correct for love, if you remain silent, be silent for love, it is often wise to be silent, and it does not always mean indifference or omission, it is also wisdom and prudence, the virtues that we have already discussed here and that were treated with propriety by the philosopher Philippa Foot.
Love contains all the virtues, but the word has been emptied in contemporaneity, it is even synonymous with hypocrisy and exclusion, evil is done and “I did it for love”, so it is necessary today to understand the other virtues that are embedded in true love.
There is also the appeal to ignorance, more than an appeal there is a lack of knowledge, misinformation is just a consequence of the lack of wisdom, and it is not just on one side of the narrative.
Modern narratives are in fashion, social media tools help to propagate them with quick reasoning and phrases, it is just a matter of denying what the Other says, it is the result of a long process of ignorance.
The peace we long for is the peace of love, but it must come containing the cardinal virtues: justice (the divine), prudence, temperance and courage (fortitude).
Why evil has spread
14
Jan
It’s true that evil is the absence of good, as
Augustine of Hippo interpreted the essence of Being, which is good, and its absence as what produces it. In our previous posts, we also discussed the cardinal virtues, stating that in addition to Justice, which is relatively little thought of these days, there is prudence and wisdom that should accompany them.
The theological virtues: faith, hope and love should accompany them, but they too have been compromised by the absence of wisdom, rather than disinformation and post-truth, it is a time of ignorance and ignorance, even elementary school ignorance.
Power too, through structural values and authoritarian ways of exercising it, contributes to intolerance and contempt for knowledge and moral values.
Prudence and tolerance then become essential, not secondary virtues.
There is no hope, no love and no faith where intolerance and exclusion are part of everyday life and unfortunately this discourse is even on the lips of those who speak of Love, respect for the Other and inclusion.
his happens because relationships are dualistic and not trinitarian, there should be a third party included in addition to me and the Other, and this has already been discovered in quantum physics as a principle even of matter, so it’s not just divine, it’s reality itself.
At various times in our history, it has been through violence that empires and dictators have imposed their wills and ideologies, not without the consent of a large part of the population, which is why we remember bad education, whether through propaganda campaigns or through poor and ill-formed schooling, the two issues are linked.
We therefore need to be attentive to management at all levels, from our homes, neighborhoods and condominiums to power structures, small illegitimate actions, education for empathy, coexistence, cleanliness and even leisure must be observed and guided by managers and public bodies in order to preserve the common space and public goods.
The zeal for honesty, transparency and respectful dialogue between opinions that are not necessarily opposed, but different, albeit in completely divergent directions, should not be a reason for hatred and violence; dialogue is always possible.
Evil needs polarization, dualistic radicalization (in denial, there is a good sense in going to the root of a problem), but pure disagreement as a way of justifying and spreading violence is just an arrogant form of power.
Between war and hope
13
Jan
Rumors of new wars are growing all over the
world, even peaceful Canada and Greenland have been threatened by incomprehensible speeches from Donald Trump’s new US government, which will soon take office. The fall of the Trudeau government in Canada, which was celebrated by the population, demonstrates the country’s recent weaknesses.
The war in Eastern Europe continues with heavy casualties and now there is a lot of bombing on Russian territory: oil fields and strategic military locations such as Engels, the Rostov do Don air base and the Lipetsk region, and losses in Ukraine.
The bases of the Houthi rebels in Yemen have also been bombed by Israel, sparking protests in several Arab countries, and the conflict continues with several denunciations from humanitarian organizations and anti-Semitic allies.
Tensions have also risen with the inauguration of dictator Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela, which continues without any possibility of a peaceful solution to a crisis that is already beyond the ideological, the governments of Chile and Colombia are also contesting the fraud in the elections there, and the government that was apparently elected, Gonzales Urrutia, even threatened to go to Venezuela for the inauguration, but backed down after the arrest and release of his deputy Maria Corina Machado.
The trade war between China and the US has also taken on new contours with the blocking of shipments of Chinese materials to 28 companies considered to be of suspicious use for both civilian and military purposes, especially those helping Taiwan to arm itself.
And the answer will always be yes. It’s good to remember that at such times there have always been leaders who have proclaimed peace: Mahatma Gandhi, the American leader Martin Luther King, sincere religious leaders (those who promote war must be put under suspicion) and all the millions of people who know that war is not beneficial and who ultimately always want the domination of one people over another.
Even if these people seem “idiotic” and naive, literature is full of these characters, as we mentioned last week with Dostoevsky’s characters, and I also remember a movie directed by Argentinian Sebastián Boresztein (A Chinese Tale, photo) which tells of an unexpected friendship between a grumpy hardware salesman and a Chinese migrant called Jun.
Peace is always desired in generous and serene hearts, conflict lives in the minds of people who look at everyone with suspicion, see enemies where there are none, and even though they talk about peace, what they want is to subjugate those who have different worldviews, cultures or religions.
Voices in the desert
10
Jan
In times of crisis there are a small number of 
voices that see beyond the clashing forces, neither the apocalyptic nor the integrated (as Umberto Eco would say), but those who understand the panorama and the roots of the temporal crises and go beyond the temporal, they see the divine civilization.
Dostoevsky’s figure of the idiot is one of these figures who saw a crisis in the society of the time, a decadent feudalism in Russia, and imagined a society with ethics and morals, not just a structural change, but a change in the way of seeing society and the Other.
The integrated people who live under the dominion of ideas that have already been proven to be outdated, almost all of which come from European idealism, which imagined an eternal peace (Kant) without understanding the basis of the conflicts, which was a vision of a warlike and intercessory state in everyday life.
David Flusser’s analysis of the social situation at the time of Jesus in the first century of the Christian era is also similar. His book Jesus deals with the social, political and religious conflicts of the time, and as a Jew he paints a visionary picture of Jesus at the time.
A true prophecy was coming true, and the prophet Isaiah spoke well before that time about a prophet who would come (the last and the greatest, therefore true) according to Mark (Mk 1:2-3): “Behold, I am sending my messenger ahead of you to prepare your way. This is the voice of him who cries out in the wilderness: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord, make his highways straight! “.
John the Baptist was the “idiot” of his time, few understood clearly what he was saying about the coming of the Messiah, some wanted to interpret him politically as a warrior-savior and others as a madman who lived in the desert feeding on honey and locusts.
The religious and apocalyptic people of our time are incapable of understanding him and that’s why they are Pharisees and false prophets. In the midst of a crisis, they announce riches and abundance that are unattainable for the simple people who are exploited by them.
Saviors of the homeland are different from saviors who prepare a divine path for a post-war, post-crisis, post-religious warmongering future and from “partners” (in reference to Paul Ricoeur mentioned in previous posts), we need a worldview that clearly sees the cardinal virtues and does not separate justice and wisdom from them).
The Other and narcissism
09
Jan
The brain rot has a face that is not easily detected:
narcissism. The Greek myth that gave rise to the name of this pathology is that Narcissus thought he was so beautiful that he spurned several suitors until he fell in love with his own image and died of hunger and thirst on the banks of a river that reflected his own image (in the photo, a drawing found in Pompeii).
By sticking to our own convictions, values and customs, we develop narratives that justify our worldview, our position or even despise others that may seem reasonable, but I prefer to follow my own guidelines.
The Other is thus a negativity for the narcissist, in philosophy it’s not just people or a distinct entity in relation to oneself, it can also be the diversity of experiences, cultures, beliefs and habits, in short everything that synthesizes a new worldview, different from Narcissus.
Thus, media trends that emphasize a certain behaviour and way of thinking are a dangerous instrument of brain rot, creating narratives and truths that seem true, but in general they abuse marketing, the use of sounds and images that trap the follower.
At the root of everything is idealism and the idea of “models” to be followed, but at a more advanced stage with the use of media, fixing ideas and concepts depends on a certain marketing skill and the use of reliable, sometimes even intelligent, things, the idea of simplicity and the difficulty of understanding the complex is what makes this methodology possible.
The Other, in a nutshell, is everything that is not a mirror, everything that is far from what we have as a model, whether it’s my worldview, my beliefs or, more complicatedly, different political positions.
The fact that a new methodology is needed, such as the hermeneutic circle that proposes the fusion of horizons before “dialog”, a new epistemology that escapes the bipolarity of Being is and not Being is not, creating a third included, like the one already pointed out in modern quantum physics.
So it’s not necessarily a convergent dialog, but one that starts from a common point, there is an initial fusion of horizons, in other words, it starts from a certain initial “convergence”.
Considering the Other is essential in order to escape bipolarization and the common sense of simplistic explanations for complex issues. Here too, a certain simplicity may be necessary: the Other, although not a mirror, has something in common, at the very least the fact that we share the same historical moment, the same era and the same desire for peace.
Love: the neighbor and the partner
08
Jan
One of the hardest chapters in the fall of
civilization is the transformation of the concept of love. There are even pathologies that live off the cancellation of this relationship, but the basis is the transformation into interest, where interests matter more than any kind of empathy or affection.
Paul Ricoeur was the philosopher who directly addressed this issue in his book “History and Truth”, which I would say is a complement to Hans-Georg Gadamer’s book “Truth and Method”.
Selfishness, closing oneself off in vicious circles, opens up chasms of separation with the Other, there is no other word that better defines exclusion, it is this that leads to disbelief in love of neighbor and paves the way for relationships of interest, in short, relationships of money.
What might otherwise have seemed unthinkable, now economic relations create concentric circles, power structures and even urban gangs related to money, and it is these that deteriorate the social base, destroy empathetic relations and create relations of dispute and hatred between groups, at the base of the “brain rot” is the whole of these social relations.
To explain this, Ricoeur talks about charity: “Charity does not have to be where it appears; it is also hidden in the humble and abstract post office, the welfare office; it is often the hidden part of the social”, Paul Ricoeur in Le socius et le Prochain (1954), and is translated in the 1968 book History and Truth.
In Gadamer’s book, what we will find is how to make these relationships when reading a text, or in an ongoing dialog on a given topic, we need a “fusion of horizons”, before the dialog, what the Greeks primarily called époque, that is, making a void in order to listen and dialog with the Other.
This exercise is difficult, not to say almost impossible in a polarized society and any discourse on love is mere rhetoric, at the root of which is “segregating” the Other.
So those who remain in charity, in dialogue and in understanding, have the property to speak of Love.
“Brain rot” the word of 2024
07
Jan
According to the University of Oxford website,
a survey conducted in a public vote with 37 thousand people, the word of the year chosen was “brain rot”, translated as “brain rot” a mental state produced by the excessive consumption of low-quality content.
According to the Oxford press website, the first recorded use of the word is from 1854, made by Henry David Thoreau, in the book Walden, which recounts his experiences of living a simple lifestyle in the natural world, the author already criticized in the 19th century the tendency of society to devalue complex ideas, or those that can be interpreted in multiple ways.
It is important to understand that this way of seeing the simplistic nature of everyday life is often an indication of a decline in mental and intellectual effort, as the Oxford text quotes: “While England is striving to cure the potato rot, there is no effort to cure the brain rot – which prevails in a much wider and fatal form”.
This serves to understand that current media technologies accelerate this process, but it comes from long data, and also the biggest criticism of artificial intelligence is due to the fact that we no longer elaborate calculations and analyses of complex issues, so the well-articulated intelligence of a machine becomes superior to the media of low-quality intellectual elaborations, resulting from the consumption of media with content without connection and without truth.
It is important to understand that this is a longer process that has gradually meant the emptying of quality content, reading capacity, and especially of methodologies and epistemologies that seek to simplify methods that are not simple. Take, for example, physical and cosmological theories, which have made a leap from Newtonian to quantum theory.
At the existential level, there is an emptying of the being, this is seen in all literature. Dostoevsky, who we talked about in the previous post, was also an existentialist, Edgar Morin spoke of the complex method, and medicine increasingly talks about holistic treatments that treat the entire body. So the idea that this is due to the emergence of digital devices is very shallow.
They undoubtedly have an influence, but the tendency towards an empty culture has been around for a long time. Nietzsche already talked about it. Theodore Dalrymple, the pseudonym of the psychiatrist Anthony Daniel, who wrote about the emptying of culture, already wrote about it in the 1980s: Coups and Cocaine: Two Journals in South America (1986), Fool or Physician: The Memoirs of a Sceptical Doctor (1987) and Philosopher’s Republic (1989) (under the pen name Thrusday Migwa).
In short, we are experiencing a decline in civilization. There is even talk of communication difficulties (studies on changes in writing carried out by the University of Stavanger, in Norway).
