"Hey. Great idea. Go for it! I am just putting the final touches (design, typos etc) to my thesis on how the educational programmes of cultural institutes can help foster the creativity and innovation skills of teenagers (and what we mean with these terms). So let me know if you embark on this, I could be of help. And congratulations on your whole initiative. Can't believe it's been a year already... "November 28 2012 on Change the way we educate (Dutch) children: let it change from a...
"Hi Bart. Good question. I'll start with Chinese children working. It is a hard situation working in your childhood, but at the end of the day children have been offering to the family budgets across places and for millenia. To me this is a simple offer and demand case. We ask to pay as little as possible for our products and care not who makes them. And the rest is a simple free-market process. You can say that the government does wrong by letting kids work, but if they actually prohibited them from working, it would mean that they prohibit families from a better quality of life or from saving something to invest toward a better future. To me, if one would want to protest against kids working, they'd better do it at the offices of an exploiting company or at a consumer fair rather than the embassy. Now to the tricky part: the US and Israel embassies. I have been protesting outside their embassies a bunch of times. They have not stopped their attrocities, so it took me a bit to justify why they lost priority over Syria. The reason is of course that the crime in Syria is brutal and is happening NOW and an act of protest is most meaningful at the time of crime. Now, that the hits are the most severe and now that the UN security council pretends to be dealing with the issue There is a follow up question though which might be more interesting. If there is an ongoing crime (famine, palestinians or american wars etc), it only gets the world's attention only for the first few days. Quickly other events occupy out tv sets and consequently our minds. This is sad, unjust and for a while, I felt guilty for focusing solely on a contemporary issue instead of an ongoing one. But then I remembered Kundera's "Grand March of History" (in the unbearable lightness of being). The crimes go on, but the stage of history has only space for one event at a time. The problem is that the event's time in the global stage is disproportionate to its importance... In page 140 Kundera writes: "Franz had the sudden feeling that the Grand March was coming to an end. Europe was surrounded by borders of silence, and the space where the Grand March was occurring was now no more than a small platform in the middle of the planet. The crowds that had once pressed eagerly up to the platform had long since departed, and the Grand March went on in solitude, without spectators. Yes, said Franz to himself, the Grand March goes on, the world's indifference notwithstanding, but it is growing nervous and hectic: yesterday against the American occupation of Vietnam, today against the Vietnamese occupation of Cambodia; yesterday for Israel, today for the Palestinians; yesterday for Cuba, tomorrow against Cuba— and always against America; at times against massacres and at times in support of other massacres; Europe marches on, and to keep up with events, to leave none of them out, its pace grows faster and faster, until finally the Grand March is a procession of rushing, galloping people and the platform is shrinking and shrinking until one day it will be reduced to a mere dimension-less dot." So, accepting the notion of 'the Grand March of History" and the small stage for world events, makes me feel less arbitrary for my choice. What do you think?"February 7 2012 on Chain yourself outside the Syrian embassy.
"@ Katerina. You are absolutely right. In the president's defence, I will point out that he has asked to not to be excluded from the cuts of the public sector already 2 years ago. I don't know if it happened though. @ Philipp. Absolutely, lobbyism is a great cancer but I am afraid that the problem is beyond politicians' reach. Even with not lobbying whatsoever I cannot imagine that anyone would fathom stopping institutions like the derivatives market or the hedge funds. Which brings me to the idea that I wanted to suggest to Maarten all along. "Dear, lost idealist Maarten. Please destroy vital financial market infrastructure. I guarantee and sign in blood that it will make the world a better place.""January 23 2012 on Make a law for European politicians to lower their salaries and fly...
"Politician salaries or their flight expenses are important at a moral level but astonishingly minor for the economy compared to the effects of hedge funds, 'high frequency trading', 'economic hitmen' and the rest of people and devices of economic doom. So, a law towards disabling those would be a gazillion times more effective..."January 20 2012 on Make a law for European politicians to lower their salaries and fly...
"Hello. If "yielding to each craving and temptation takes us actually further away from being happy" fundamentalist monks and nuns must be the happiest people ever. I doubt it (but don't know it). I have food and shelter for the next while, but I find this far too little to make me happy - friends, family, security, drinking, socialising, sex, dance, being in nature, having my efforts recognised etc make me smile far more that eating and lying to a warm bed at night. Even if I could convince myself that a couple of things were enough, it'd be like creating a 'Plato's cave' for myself. Back to the orgies. I think that this has two aspects. Let's name them the 'indulgence' and the 'possibilities' aspects. Non Western civilisations (but also modern collectives at the fringe of our social reality) have (and had) vastly different attitudes towards indulgence. Many of our social constraints would have astonished and dissappointed them. And if you multiplied these views from alternate possibilities, social constraints would end up seeming completely arbitrary. But ok, we live not in another civilisation so, picture yourself in a carousing party. It's late, drunken people dance under low light and loud music. There is shallow but spontaneous familiarity, a unique intimacy created by intoxication, exposed skin, and sharing together a moment that each creates and shares with everyone else. You behave very differently those moments. You open up (maybe too much) and do things you would not otherwise. You experience life and time differently and you would have put different priorities in life if someone asked you on that moment what they were. Social constraints would have made this night an attrocity to my grandmother. And I am glad that today they do not. The morning after, maybe you'd laugh on your yesterday self, but going to work, dealing with the fluff and the world feels different that the day before. This experience of indulgence has a significant (yet temporary) behavioural effect that leaks into your 'normal reality'. Also, having registered the common night marks and shadows your interaction with some of the people present (say the friends that you went to that party to). I used parties as a more common experience, but the analogy does not change the essence. Would orgies make the world a better place? No, but the restructuring of priorities during animistic experiences and the possibilities it would open for human interaction could (and I think would)."January 20 2012 on Initiate orgies.
"I wrote it for fun, but thinking about it more seriously, I think that by liberating the Dionisiac, hedonistic side that we (to different extends) collectively have learned to dampen after centuries of pseudomoral oppression and gentrified ideals in life would bring out this different kind of animal that we all are in bed and release people from their mouse-wheel run - and grumpiness. Yes, I think this would make the world a better place."January 19 2012 on Initiate orgies.