Month: July 2020

Should governments even exist? | Thoughts #30

Okay, I’ll admit, I couldn’t think of a better title, it is a short post though. Actually the things I wanted to talk about were kind of dispersed and thus I couldn’t land on an encompassing title. So, I had been noticing the displeasure that people feel from being told that there needs to be an authority, for a long time I thought that it was obvious that authorities (or an authority) are essential. I noticed that whenever the concept of an authority or authorities is thought of, an image comes up in the head, of a tyrant ready to beat whoever doesn’t follow the rules, and a sense of oppression is generated. I reckon the issue is actually with the concept of authority itself.

Think, for a moment, a world without an authority, everyone living their own lives, minding their own business, right? No. There will be chaos, if someone’s business is to murder, they for sure will mind their own business, why shouldn’t we also mind it? But why? Why should we mind their business? Because we have defined our morals such that that can’t be not minded. The question of morality applied with degree of consequences comes to fruition. So, first a moral value is defined and then an authority is made to make sure that that rule is applied. Now this “morality” needs to be defined with its varying consequences, for example; if a juvenile steals from a shop, why should he be sent to reformation institutions and not be hanged to death?

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Is being a soldier just another job? | Thoughts #28

This one can be titled in various ways, “a soldier’s morality”, “why don’t soldiers kill their own” and many others, the reason being that because a soldier is in the field of warfare the morality shifts a bit in relation to murder, and the other obvious reasons. I’ve always thought about why don’t soldiers just shoot their commanders in the head, or rather more specifically militia, what’s stopping them from taking over each other? What’s so different about them that they have a separate court of “justice”? Now exploring this dimension leads to a few other questions about the state of a soldier.

To begin with the dictionary definition – probably one of those dictionary definitions that is quite congruent with the reality – “job” simply means a paid position of regular employment. So a job comprises of it being paid and categorically is a regular employment. Now, just like any other job, to be thinking of becoming a soldier one has had to have an idea of what exactly do they wish to gain from years of physically gruesome training – money? No. Becoming a soldier is one of the least paying jobs in relation to regular employment classification of manners. Let me explain; firstly there are even drafts in army, meaning you’ll just be picked up to go and sacrifice your life out of nowhere, second, being a soldier mostly has you being physically tough and all you do is follow orders of those who are deemed to have more brains than you, that doesn’t necessarily mean that soldiers are dimwits but there’s a strong emphasis on physical power and obviously so, third, you’ll literally be a pawn, a useful one perhaps, but a pawn, fourthly that the sole idea of someone becoming a soldier is in most cases a reflection of their economical struggles.

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Why the young commit suicide over video games | Thoughts #26

I’m sure you’ve seen the headlines, its almost every other week or so we see a detrimental act by a teen or child sometimes even adults committing because of a video game. Now all I see in response to that is shock and confusion, as to why would one kill oneself, or take loans (to buy items) for the game, after all they’re just pixels running around. Firstly I’d like to defunct the reductionist view of the matter, if video games are just pixels running around, well then we’re just atoms running around, that doesn’t mean that we don’t matter and nor do our actions. If it seems like an unfair comparison, well to give you a real life example, in 2019 a popular video game Fortnite held a competition as to who plays the best by eliminating all the other players and the winner of that tournament went home with $2 Million, the total prize pool was of $30 Million. Those pixels created a huge effect in the atom-world. This is nothing, one of the oldest game CSGO has professional players, that are paid to play the game (games like LoL, DOTA have it too), apart from the tournament prize pool they may or may not win, the monthly salary of the average top tier teams is 20,000 Euros, and this is excluding the sponsorships, the contracts (the latest one being of $1 Million), the ads they do, the streaming that some do and so on; just like a sports personality. The eSports (as they call it) is on track to beat the $1.5 Billion net worth mark by 2023, and a single game as League of Legends (LoL) has already crossed the Billion mark in revenue, which I’d say isn’t too shabby for pixels.

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You have an opinion and that’s not fine | Thoughts #25

Ah, don’t we all live in a free society overflowing with the sentiments of freedom of expression and speech. Ample amount of channels capitalising on this exercise exist too, Twitter, Facebook, IG, and the the good old Reddit. We are allowed to express our opinion, with that opinion when needed to be pushed onto the ruling state we have freedom to protest, but it all stops with the nonexistence of freedom to overthrow a government, sounds unsettling I know, but what that entails is that there is an end to all the opinions. Aside from the division in the population of opinion which thus creates a barrier in ever thinking about reformation, nowhere does it say that people are free to overthrow their government, unless of course US intervenes.

If opinions matter such that everyone is entitled to their own opinion that entitlement means nothing for that it will never manifest, but that the ones already in place use the mentioned statement as a disapproval. It troubles me when people think that having opinions is fine, we hypocritically disregard certain opinions for that their merit effects the ground reality, elections are a good example. You don’t vote for a certain party because their opinions will manifest in ways that you don’t want, but, also to consider is the fact that the supporters of that party don’t want your opinions to manifest, this entails to a simple mostly unrecognised fact that just because you have an opinion doesn’t mean its right and neither it is fine to have it if that’s the case, and if it’s the opposite, then well your own opinion was in the wrong and that’s not fine either.

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Why internet is still not a fundamental right | Thoughts #24

…It makes it clear that without internet the full effect of human rights especially freedom of expression and opinion isn’t fully possible, which is obvious given that most of the opinions and expressing of the same is done online now. Even right to education, economic, social and cultural rights come into it.

In India after 10 months of the reading down (which people falsely title as ‘revocation’) of Article 370 the Supreme court finally had some sympathy after delaying the hearing for so long. It declared the access to internet a fundamental right referring to Article 19 (1) (a) in the Indian constitution, which is that all citizens shall have the right to freedom of speech and expression. As noted by the UN internet is an important factor in the facilitation of this right. But what nothing in neither Indian Supreme Court’s statement or UN’s report clarifies is what exactly is internet.

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The false premise of reading | #23

The title is “the false premise of reading” on purpose. If a person reads only newspapers, the general ones, can that person be called a reader? Technically that wouldn’t be wrong, but it still would be wrong. Referring back to the quote of Fuller, the newspaper reading person won’t become a leader even though he/she is a reader, and even if they do, they wouldn’t be a good one. Congruently anyone who reads anything is a reader, and thus anyone who likes to read books of a particular kind is a bibliophile. But words mean nothing, for that this is a weak identity, a facade to cover-up for the literal lethargy, ignorance, and escapism that one has become accustomed to. If the popular answer to the question “what are some of your favorite books?” is a list of fictional drama, comedy, fantasy and thrill of no real sense, well isn’t the society going on the right path, awesome. As a literature student, one who is obliged to read fiction, I can assure you that there are at max a 100 or so books in the entire world of fiction that are written as an abstraction of worldly concepts and not to gain fame and money. I recommend 1984 all the time, and there’s a reason for it; it wasn’t a fictional book made to entertain but rather to explain the concepts of totalitarianism, tyranny of war ridden politics and “doublespeak” that we so profusely watch in today’s world. I would say that is proper fiction.

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