Author: Raafat

Unto Death: The Folly of a Naturalistic Legacy | #39

It is unbelievable that you’re still here, still working, striving, persevering, resisting and most importantly, and the least surprisingly, still degrading physically; dying. Day by day, moment by moment, from the first line of this piece to the last, you have gotten closer to your demise. Every year you pass the date of your death without even realising, it is there in the vicinity, it is the other half of Ben Franklin’s famed quote.

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Flat earth, the Antarctic, and your motherless self | #38

I won’t be diving into the mess of the flat earth theory, or the enigma surrounding the Antarctic, however the two will be playing a great role in your realisation of the lie that is your mother. We all have certain conclusions about reality, a fine warm state of life is yearning in everyone; careers, prolongation of youth, an impact on society before we die off. Upcoming is an effort to put into the limelight the importance of being consistent in conclusions of the worldview you hold. However, there will be not an elaboration of rules of logic and else in rationality, your own due diligence on matters creating confusion is appreciative. This article is a continuation of my previous piece of writing titled Today or Tomorrow, but Never Never, which’s reading is essential to understand the underpinnings of this particular composition. I mentioned in the aforementioned title that consistency is key in ascertaining a paradigm as logical and true and which would in turn render its forthcoming resultants as properly pragmatic to take oneself out of any impending illusion. I will be expanding on that note, with certain thought experiments, to in brief give an idea of how staying honest with the answers to then reach its branching conclusions would lead to the truth or falsity of a trait of a conclusion.

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Today or tomorrow, but never never | #37

Purpose is what generally defines a preface for any author of any type of text, and I found it to be an important part of this text; what could be the intention behind a writing, what’s perhaps the need for it. For the matter that I am going to draw attention towards in this piece of writing, which I’ve been meaning to write for a long time now, is going to be an annihilation of ideals, structure, meaning, intent and purpose, or perhaps for some few, an affirmation of all that which they’ve previously dealt with. I am not sure if I should provide trigger warnings or not, but I could say that a lot of extremely controversial things are about to be read by you if you decide to continue. The questions that I hope to bring up in this composition should, for all intents and purposes, destroy the system of governance of you as an individual to then be able to (hopefully) pick your broken pieces back up with all sincerity for the answers to those objections that killed your soul.

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Free Speech absolutism does not exist | Thoughts #35

For the past week a lot of ‘stop insulting’ and ‘freedom of speech’ has been going on. There are two observations that are not so conspicuous, first is that what does one mean by ‘freedom of speech’ and second why shouldn’t insults be allowed. Now I’m going to talk about this issue in-line with the recent French controversies, which I’m sure most of you are aware of. I won’t go into the religiosity of it, but will elaborate on the secular premise.

Most people talk about concepts such as ‘Freedom of Speech’ and or ‘Freedom of Expression’ like its a Divine law, as if some deity (with the connotation that a deity is the ultimate source of knowledge) came chanting its song. “Human rights are considered the offspring of natural rights, which themselves evolved from the concept of natural law. Natural law, which has played a dominant role in Western political theory for centuries, is that standard of higher-order morality against which all other laws are adjudged. To contest the injustice of human-made law, one was to appeal to the greater authority of God or natural law.” The reason why you must understand the roots of Human Rights is so that you put on your critical lenses, and not take those laws for granted, as they themselves aren’t free from ideologues.

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The problem of democracy | Thoughts #34

The most widely accepted definition of democracy is as follows; a system of government by the whole population or all the eligible members of a state, typically through elected representatives. “Whole population” is the focal point here. Democracy is older than some religions of the world, it’s traditionalist in some sense, originating according to some in Athens, ancient Greece. Any country in the modern world which isn’t a democracy is considered to be unethical and totalitarian. Now there are some, but mainly two branches of democracy; direct and representative democracy. Before I get into the analysis of a democratic system’s problem, we need to understand the two briefly.

In a direct democracy, people directly deliberate and decide on legislation. In a representative democracy, the people elect representatives to deliberate and decide on legislation, such as in parliamentary or presidential democracy.

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Stop being a sports fan | Thoughts #33

I think almost all of us, regardless of how much sport content we consume, what category of it, support one team or the other for reasons either unknown, unacknowledged or justified. There is something very intriguing about sports that everyone jumps to know which team won. But sports shouldn’t matter, at all for its fundamentals, let me explain why.

I, like many others, have played tons of sports matches, from cricket, to football, to badminton. And I totally understand the importance of playing the sport, but not the importance of the sport. And yes, there is a difference.

Sports has become a “religion”, and this is not an overstatement. Just imagine the “fans”, they buy clothes that represent them in the team’s identity, they have chants that they shout in gatherings, they feel actual pain at a loss, and pleasure beyond comprehension on a nail-biting win, some have passed down the support from one generation to the other, they pray for the team’s success, they spend entire savings to attend the matches around the country, their team goes to “war” with the other teams and so on. Here I’m not trying to mock religion by the way, it is the “religiosity” that has been induced into sports, which creates the issue. A proud “super-fan” rather a fanatic, will buy shirts and chants slogans, go home and drink beer on victory and shout at kids on a loss, and then repeat this over every weekend – which it has become.

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What is the point of intellectual elites? | Politics #31

In this day and age, information spread is rapid, before a theory, a research paper or survey is peer reviewed, the catchy headlines makes its way into the minds of people. Now, not only does this hold true for mere mundane celebrity gossip, or the top tier scientific research but the thoughts of the ones considered to be the elite class in intellectual capability have their thoughts spread much faster. Imagine if Socrates, or Aristotle were alive, with all their subtitled clips spreading on Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, that would be a spectacle to observe.

The “intellectual elites”, most of them have their books in the world, selling millions of copies, and that’s totally fine. In those books are ideas, thoughts, propositions that are catered to a certain area of a problem-ridden world. If one had to classify difficulty levels in any field, difficulty as in the ability required for a certain problem, there would be tiers, we call “elite” to those who tackle with the most difficult of problems, you can’t be an elite football player if you’re playing in ISL as compared to someone playing in the Premier League or LaLiga. There has been this term thrown around about an informal group called the “intellectual dark web.”

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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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