Category Archives: the truth is real too

Where do you draw the line, when asking others to act up – ethically?!

Posted on by PalangL

Where do you draw the line, when asking others to act up – ethically?!

chatty <3

I often wonder myself about what i can ask of others and what i can ask of myself, as when it comes to: what’s ethically ok, what can we do, and what is asked too much for most people (and even understandably asked too much?).

I don’t want to imply in any way with what I am saying here, that the “do whatever you want to” approach would be a recommendable path to seek in our daily practiced ethics.

What I mainly find worth highlighting in the context is this:

How about letting others down who really need my help and I could help them? Ok many of us would think I am talking about things relating to friends and family. but that’s not what I mean. What I mean is – extend your circle: helping “strangers”.

It shouldn’t be provocative to ask, my question is: is having ones “own” kids a form of letting “others” down by denying the “others” the support I could give them if I instead would chose to feel responsible just as much for them as I would for my own kids?

The other day I heard a fellow vegan talk about vegans who don’t care if exploitative “cheap” labor or any oppressive means were involved in the production process of vegan produce bought, that a vegan person’s care should ideally reach out to the questions of human rights inasmuch. This of course is an undeniably important critical point to bring up. Also this vegan person highlighted the need of a stronger awareness in the fields of veganism and environmentalism and how these two go together, and finally she briefly discussed the importance of making your kids aware of speciesism.

Thinking about vegan parenting made me think of the dilemma everybody of us faces when confronted with the decision: my life as how i would (possibly) want it for myself (having kids) or what about the kids that are born but who really don’t have much of a chance in the world for how we all are setting this world up anew every day.

I’ve taken the decision now. I don’t feel extravagant for having decided to put all my support into helping other’s kids,  nonhuman and human alike, primarily.

 

 

on the multiplicity of meaningfulness

Posted on by PalangL

A concern is a concern, and should and can be “of concern” / “something that concerns one”, even if it’s not a concern to many people.

An issue is of importance, even if that issue is not a story that makes the headlines. We get easily drawn into the streams (!) of uniform opinions, thoughts and feelings, when one issue is played up and stands on the main menu of “today’s top stories”. We easily lose out of sight that our individual thinking and actions need more independence and that our thinking and actions should not be a play-ball of the “moods of the masses”.

When our own individual thinking becomes only a part of one big uniform stream of opinions (that heads just in the one “either-or” direction), our existence shrinks to a binary reducedness. We could end up being one of those “zombies” that we run into every day. Those type of people that are straight one of the stupid or one of the smart side. Life however goes beyond us being stupid or smart, I think life is so complex that leaving all our doors of perception open to what we can learn from it, requires us to allow a full multiplicity of a meaningfulness that does cover more than just our own “insight/s of humanity”. We need an outlook onto all concerns. Beyond homocentrism.

 

a linoleum print by Farangis G. Yegane

The Parallel, fragment about the position humans take towards “nature”

Posted on by PalangL

The Parallel, fragment about the position humans take towards “nature”

The homocentrical human considers himself to be in a parallel position to the other natural phenomenons. Nature is felt as if merely producing itself out of an almost passive condition, nature is seen as a huge complex of causalities with interlocked phenomena.

The subsumation: “nature” stands in homocentrist terms for something passive, “nature” has been banned into a virtual state of a “meaningwise” non-existence, while the idea of “the human” is thought to exclusively represent a comprehensive awareness and meaningfulness.

There is an imaginary parallel condition, and on one hand you have the so called passive “natural world” and on the other hand you have the so called “aware” human state of being.

That means in other words that what is external to the human state of being, is localised and being put into the dimension of standing in opposition, in a specific type of way. This type of way is most easily to be compared with the parallel: THE PARALLEL STANDS IN RELATION BUT WITHOUT AN INTERCHANGING (DIRECT) CONNECTION.

A parallel, which represents an ideal circumstance for measuring the one side to the other, seen from the perspective of denying the existence of the others by classifying everything except the “self-concept” as being relatively narrow in function. That what is other, is not simple enough to be fit into the simplicity of the system of homocentricity. The reality of Animals and the Nature is too complex – obviously.

This also means, a highly complex form is subjugated to being translated into the simplifying procedure of scientific proof, to then be considered as a bit more important on its side of the parallel. The complexity remains on its side of the parallel, and cannot jump the line, but can increase in meaning alone by its being existent in the same dimension as the human being is.

The separation, that the parallel creates, stands in dependence of the understanding of “self” (the self-concept), since nothing else would be able as effectively to banish the one immediate reality, that could threaten to run into the acts of definition, human inductions and deductions.
THE REAL could end up dissolving the homocentrical tendency for creating determinisms … .

From hell to hell

Posted on by PalangL

From hell to hell

The slaughterhouse, the „animal farm“, the places of „breeding“, the „animal industries“ are the most atrocious attempts to establish the illusion-of-a-fact, that Man (the human species) is the one who can decide about “heaven” and “hell”, and animals can, without impunity, be condemned by him/her to be to be born, to live and to die in hell – to go through hell. Humans have decided that the animal is predestined to not ever be able to ever escape the Man-given fate, brought about by the defamation and by the homoncestrist philosophy and practice that rules the acts and the thinking in his/her society.

On this basis an artificially established sense of a fake “heaven” can be equally aroused and set up by creating enclaves of “rights shareholders”, a contractualist construction and plotting, to which all humans theoretically belong, on the scale of being more of a “master” or more of a “slave”.

We all are except from the man made hell, and we all destined this not-place to be the place for animal life.

We think, we plot, therefore we CAN be the unpunished culprits, we think … .

What lets you escape the plot of man-made hell, is to understand and to set forth that A BEING IS, AND THEREFORE HE/SHE/IT THINKS, AND THERE FOR YOU THINK because you bond with the worldly phenomenons. The plotters consider such a perspective as invalid, and under his/her terms as “un-objective” – within the frame of reference his thinking allows him the draw. With this perspective onto our shared world, we would indiscriminately share this type of a “thinking” with everything/everyone that/who just IS.

We set up a demarcation line, cemented by that “hell” we create on all scales everywhere where the not-human space IS.

It’s a massmurder on the biological argument.

Another concept of a hell

I reckon that the real hell, that I think humans tried to combat as an idea, by establishing their own game’s rules, the real hell is the consciousness that creates an inner pain in the soul when one knows that one does injustice to others.

The artificial hell of unfair judgement i.e. injustice, destroys the logic of responsibility, respect and love, and it punishes the good and “protects” the wrongdoers or rather evildoers.

But the question will remain forever though. Injustice can never be sold as justice, on the long run. Injustice brings more injustices with it. There is no “human order” such as we hold it for real now. The natural order always encompasses the human concern with it. The natural order is not that what we want to make out of it in pure self-interest and evilwill.

The question remains: where our conscience will take us to: to heaven or to hell, within our own thinking.

From hell to hell – I am. And therefore I think.

The animalesque features of the devil show how much at absurdity our humanity lies with itself, when it comes to who is the evil and who receives the evil.

This is a fragment. I have written a longer and more “prosaic” or structured (or less poetical) essay about how an assumed “human good” seeks to establish itself towards an unjustly attributed “animal(-esque) evil”. I hope I get around translating that text sometime soon. For those of you who can read German, here is the link: http://www.simorgh.de/own_public/pl_vom_guten_menschen.pdf

WHAT ARE “RIGHTS”?

Posted on by PalangL

What makes up a „right“?

Image: Farangis Yegane http://moosh-o-gorbeh.farangis.de

Is it you yourself who decides about what you consider to be your “right”? It’s an inner process, isn’t it, that you believe you ought to have a right to breathe, a right to walk wherever you want to, a right to say whatever you feel like saying.

There is another layer of the term “right” that is not an inner process but that marks instead that what the society, or the whole human world considers to be a “right” or your “right” respectively. This form of a “legal right” – lets ground it upon the basis of a generalized form of all legal human rights taken together as, so to speak, a “generic” type of a right the humans actually “grant” you, themselves as a group, or a group within the human group – this generic type of an exclusively human right (our current “legal right”) can be detached and even really be something different than the type of right you give yourself.

Without the outer form of a right that is given to you as a person or that is in contrast NOT given to any other living sentient being, you or any sentient being still has their inner sense of what I would call a right. It’s not so that a sense of right (which has something to do with rights and wrongs, as strange as we may think this would be) is something that only exists if you are told what is wrong and what is right. A sense of what you personally may consider a right is something dependent on the beings socialization, on its social contexts. And yes, I do call the behaviour of nonhuman animals amongst other nonhuman animals too a form of social behaviour.

Now if people say “rights” are nothing natural in the case of “animal rights”, and Animal Rights can only be granted on a more or less arbitrary basis, they are wrong insofar in which one can easily realize that all rights in the purest form are something that has to be dealt with on a subjective and a socio-ethical plane.

Rights are natural, because rights stem from self-experience and social interaction. Legal rights on the contrast are quite arbitrary.

Palang Latif, Animal Rights and Politics, I had previously posted this specific fragment on our visual opinions workshop blog http://www.farangis.de/blog/what-are-rights