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[FBT] on Safety and Searching

About a year ago I went to an event outside of Istanbul. I made a friend there. Some connections are quick and deep and lasting. Hearty connections. You don’t remember what people say, you remember how they made you feel and all that.

My friend lives in in the middle east and this week sent me a video took from their house. The rockets falling. We texted back and forth a bit, chatted about how sometimes laughter is this mechanism that allows us to continue on, despite everything. Their family goes outside to laugh at the rockets. While they cry.

We have no control, we are not in command. 

Atena Daemi is an Iranian human-rights activist who now lives in Canada after being imprisoned multiple times and then escaping across the border into Iraq. She commented (massive paraphrase here) that we can’t really fight for our freedoms when bombs are dropping on our heads. She does have a point. It’s very hard to see how people can topple their oppressors when they are injured and starving and broken and lost.

But we can laugh when it’s painful. 

My empathetic cognitive dissonance is the source of much of what I do in life. It’s the reason that I choose to work with non-profits, and the reason that I actually give a toss that Amnesty International UK manage to create a space for human rights activists that supports them. I want to help AIUK protect and enable these people, so that they can protect and enable others. 

I feel like it’s getting harder and harder to accept being safe because the civil unrest has, in so many places, become dangerous. It feels like a betrayal that I am probably ok here in Europe, at least for right now. It feels like I should be building a high-powered potato gun out of a can of hairspray and a propane grill ignitor. 

Maybe I’m curious

it’s from Banksy

In writing the above, I sought to credit Maya Angelou for paraphrasing her famous quote:

“People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

And so I searched for a good site to link to, and came across a site called “Quote Investigator”, which was, apparently, started by a guy with a hobby. This guy, Gregory F. Sullivan, is/was a computer scientist and professor at John Hopkins University, he earned a PhD from Yale in 1986, he wrote a book about misquoting and the BBC included him in a piece about fake quotes. He is, according to my 12 minutes of research, legit. So Maya Angelou didn’t say that, a Mormon speech writer did.

But now I’m another 30 minutes into this utter waste of time. Because I, stupidly, wondered whether or not Google had this Quote Investigation as a top hit like DuckDuckGo did.

You wouldn’t find any of this out if you just doing a quick Google Search. Google’s algorithm doesn’t surface Dr. Sullivan’s site until page 2, and even then the metadata doesn’t make it immediately clear that the quote is misattributed. DuckDuckGo gave me the Quote Investigator page as the 1st result. Google’s AI told me indefinitely that Maya Angelou was the undisputed source. I am a curious person. So I checked Bing. Then I tried to remember other search engines in the world.

I asked Yahoo, Baidu (I can’t actually read Chinese AT ALL), Ask.com (answered with absolute gibberish about forgetting your paypal password, which makes me think Ask.com didn’t pay their protection fee to the Paypal Mafia lately), Wolfram Alpha (didn’t understand my query) and Yandex, a search engine popular in Russia and Eastern Europe.

Yandex was the only other search engine, other than Google, that didn’t surface this new information I had discovered.

Ok, so why am I telling you all of this? A) because I wasted my time and now I am wasting yours to restore balance and B) There is truth, even though the world wants to pretend like there isn’t.

We live in a world where context is constantly manipulated. From all slides, in every single way. Maybe truth in this day and age isn’t something that we find through the algorithm at all. Maybe you can only know truth when you’re barefoot in the garden or when your friend sends you a video they made. 

Was Trump sad at his parade because he’s a big baby or maybe everyone was looking serious in that one clip because the narrator over the loud speakers was talking about the first world war? Of course I think the military parade was an absolute waste of taxpayer money, a fucking fascist aesthetic and an ego driven middle finger to most of the American people. But I believe that because I grew up on Bill Hicks and my sense of the world is coloured by having read too many books about too many things.

I still find it incredible that even after Buddhism, Carl Jung and self-help gurus like Eckhart Tolle, some people legit do not reflect on ego or power. It still baffles me that people think it’s in our nature to dominate. That the purpose of life is to win. Win what? What do you win?

There’s no vestige of beginning, no prospect of an end
When we all disintegrate, it will all happen again, yeah
If you came to conquer, you’ll be king for a day
But you too will deteriorate and quickly fade away
Bad Religion

Maybe I need help

In the 1300s, British sumptuary laws said that poor people weren’t allowed to wear nice clothes or eat cheese. They had to wear that scratchy burlap sack stuff, “russet” cloth. So, at least that’s no longer the case.

(header image from Plotbot KEN)

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