Freedom from oppression is only a reality for a fortunate few women in South Africa, the Democratic Alliance said on Tuesday.
"For the vast majority, challenges such as the scourge of sexual and family violence are their reality," said spokesperson Lindiwe Mazibuko.
"Women still lack satisfactory access to the jobs and economic opportunity that flow from having equal access to skills development and training; women remain more at risk of contracting HIV/Aids than men, particularly as a consequence of being denied rights over their own bodies in a deeply patriarchal society.
"Those of us who form part of the fortunate few beneficiaries of the struggle for equal rights must remember today that freedom is indivisible, and women's rights are human rights. Until all the women of this country are truly able to taste the fruits of freedom, the struggle must continue."
Mazibuko paid tribute to the women who marched to the Union Buildings on August 9, 1956, protesting against the apartheid government pass laws.
The Democratic Nurses Organisation of South Africa applauded the work done by nurses in the country, made up mostly of women.
"Women are a blessing in the lives of those who are unable to take care of themselves; they are mothers, pillars of houses, backbones of nations.
"The struggle however continues for women to play an even more powerful role in decision-making," said Denosa president Dorothy Matebeni.
DA Limpopo provincial leader Desiree van der Walt said women still made up 70% of those living below the poverty line.
From here:http://mg.co.za/article/2011-08-09-freedom-a-reality-for-only-few-women
So how are you getting on with that Cracker dude with motivational tattoos on his arms and his cock? Any plans to go out on a double date some time? Lulz.
Many moons ago before the first signs of approaching middle age dug in around the eyes I used to think Hitchens was brilliant. Before that, many years before my time as a teenager I grappled with the questions of god.
What an amazing truth I thought I had discovered : everything most people believed was wrong. Oh how terrible it was at first this thought that there is no god and no meaning to my life. I went around trying to tell everyone ! And I did a pretty good job of it and still could if I was asked to.
It's easy to dismiss religion. It's easy to understand BASIC physics and the scientific method and put god up and test the idea and find it invalid. So for years that was my DOGMATIC position. Boy I thought I was smart.
Then I really got smart. I started to learn more about the universe. I learned about how human perception was enitely flawed. How things on the quantum level made what we think it's real through observing lumpy 4 dimensional space time entirely silly and absurd. I reached a peak of what I consider the greatest possible intellectual achievement. And it went something like this....
We are not capable for one second of knowing what the fuck is really going on. The world is stranger and more complicated that we can ever know. In the realm of the quantum concepts we hold so valid like "seperation of physical things" and "seperation of time" fall apart entirely. In fact all things are in super position etc. All things really melt into one infinite consciousness...seperated only by the illusion of the seperation of space and time. That describes you're illusion of self. You're really not seperate in any way from anything. Just your mind existing in this plane of the lumpy 4th dimesnional space time convinces you that you are.Almost as if your body is an antenae that is the receptor of consciousness (not the catalyst).
This is futile. I can't summarise years worth of study to explain this profound concept simply. So I'll summarise in some broad statements.
We are all part of the same infinite consciouness. The universe requires us to be because without anyone conscious of it the universe can not exist. If you take away consciousness and the qualia of experiencing matter it simply yields to exist. Some might say the energy remains but energy without conscious experience of it fails to be energy. Energy itself requires as an intrical factor that there is a being capable of being conscious of it to have substance.
A rock floating in the "void" of bootes only exists if I can imagine it exists.
If you can take your mind to the places i am suggesting you are ready to start to talk about the existance of "god".
Someone once said something like this nyone who dedicates their existance to disproving the existance of anything is an interesting subject to study"
If you throw around hate, it will come around to bite you in the arse. Not only that, you will piss a lot of people off. If you are receptive to love and good luck, it will come right to you. Try to enjoy life, ffs.
I may already have an understanding of what you are talking about; I'm just not ready to commit to it yet. Not because I still cling desperately to some outdated mode of philosophy, rather I'm waiting for a few more pieces to be filled in (that, and I can't seem to keep the whole concept in my head at any one time - it just drifts apart). While I have a few ideas bouncing around in there, each as likely as the next, the boys and girls at CERN are getting close to the Higgs and perhaps even a unified field theory, cosmologists are pulling apart telemetry from the cosmic microwave background (and perhaps evidence of other universes), macroscopic quantum superposition has been achieved in the lab for the first time and quantum entanglement remains a lucid proposition. We are getting close - and I for one am salivating at the prospects.
But, while we are contemplating this stranger than fiction, some numbat is busy pushing Noah's Arch at me. Sorry people but your theistic fantasies are just not interesting anymore(unless it's to understand bits of PG Wodehouse); JRR Tolkien has supplanted you years ago. I can't do justice to the amount time and tears I've spent batting away this puerile nonsense - sometimes too close to close to home for comfort. Try attending a boarding school in rural KZN where life is a running battle against this incursion by the absurd and where physical and mental scorn was the Principle offering for dissenters. This is the reason Hitchens appeals to me as an aside; it should be religion treated with ridicule and I don't know of a better man for the job. Now days it's nothing more than high comedy to me and I enjoy tuning in for a good old Hitchslap from time to time (I'm not above a little childish indulgence). Thanks to the rising number of people like Hitchens I can finally spend less time deflecting bronze age fairy tales and more time in interesting conversations (as a layman) about sociobiology, cosmology, theoretical physics and the fine pair of cans on Jessica Rabbit. Can I disprove the existence of a god/s - of course not, I'm not even close and don't expect I ever will be - but so what? I have Planck's Constant to think about.
Personally, I don't believe that quantum mechanics tells us anything useful about consciousness, not yet anyway. I still think it is more plausible that it is a second order manifestation based on evolution through classical particle physics; a type of sense organ for detecting mathematical permutations that manifest through our five(+) senses; although I'm about ready to concede that the separation of the quantum and the classical is just a utility and that the "sum over histories" is what really defines this universe including consciousness - in that case, no dualism could exist.
This renovated mind/body dualism of yours is a grand and deep idea and I can see the appeal but I believe the technical term for this jumping of the gun is called "WOO"; as in, it's rather a result of cognitive dissonance resolving itself than a justified belief. Deepak Chopra and crew subscribe to something similar but I think it's just the Jehovah meme in a Star Trek uniform. Fortunately, one thing we can celebrate is the fact that we can agree to disagree and neither one of us will be burned at the stake.
"If you throw around hate, it will come around to bite you in the arse. Not only that, you will piss a lot of people off. If you are receptive to love and good luck, it will come right to you. Try to enjoy life, ffs."
_________________________________
In keeping with the theme, one of Hitchen's pals gives an idea of why "good guys" might finish first on average:
http://www.iterated-prisoners-dilemma.net/
Try being an ass and you will see your ass. It's not Karma or God, just Game Theory. Two players cooperating will always beat two players defecting. In evolutionary terms, this coud be the difference between survival and extinction.
Two players cooperating will always beat two players defecting. In evolutionary terms, this could be the difference between survival and extinction. _____________________________
Ok here's a case history of my own that might seem inexplicable to some. If you have an explanation for it, I'm open to that.
A couple of months ago we bought and moved into a new house. We'd been living in a furnished company house before and I'd disposed of my old tv set. So we needed a new tv, preferably with 32" screen. There was a competition for a plasma tv of that size, the draw for which was to take place at the local showgrounds over a week end. I don't have a tv licence because the SABC wouldn't accept that I'd sold my tv set even though I gave them the required documentation. If anyone believes in an afterlife then it must surely be the SABC because they send their lawyers there to get licence fees from the dead.
So on the day of the competition I haul my husband to Game to buy a tv licence because he doesn't have penalties loaded against him on the SABC's cyber tentacles. We go to the show and my husband gets bored, so I tell him to take the car and go home, and I will call him later once I've got the tv set in my hands. He thinks I'm totally bonkers. I'm totally convinced I am going to win this tv set, don't ask me how, I just am. So come 6:30 in the evening and I win it. My husband comes to fetch me with the tv, and I calmly install it in the lounge.
I have had this a couple of times, that I just know something is going to happen, without any explanation of how I could know this. I have walked into a house where someone was murdered fifteen years before, and I did not know about it, but I could tell there and then what had happened.
"Ok here's a case history of my own that might seem inexplicable to some. If you have an explanation for it, I'm open to that."
If you had to give a number, how many times, over a lifetime of events (which must be up in the billions), would you think is reasonable to put an even like that down to chance, once, twice, ten times, one hundred? Then give a number for somebody on the higher end - does this describe your experience or are you higher still. You must know many people who are on the lower end of the scale or you would not describe your experience as remarkable. Then consider that memories of such events (especially over time) are often unreliable and exaggerated unless they are well documented and verified (there is good science to back this up). In many cases, what you end up with is nothing remarkable at all, just life playing out as we would expect.
Also, have you balanced this against the times you have felt strongly about something and it did not happen?
Or against other peoples experiences? By keeping track of the hits and misses we would be in a better position judge the remarkability of the event playing out in your favour.
Over a lifetime coincidences are bound to happen. To some people it might happen very seldom and to others very often; nothing strange so far. If you are on the higher end of the scale then you might be tempted to attach some sort of mystic to the event but in reality we would expect to see something like this happen quite often in our lives. Pascal would say that it is more likely that the few times over a lifetime that this can happen is more down to luck or coincidence or even inevitability than a halting of the natural laws of the universe (as we know them) in your favour. Your brain is also capable of producing remarkably accurate predictions of the future based on passed events and sometimes the most improbable predictions come to fruition and this takes us by suprise, exacerbating the memory.
From the quantum perspective, by entering into the competition you created a history in which you are eligible to win a TV and all other possible histories are discarded when determining your future. When the quantum wave function finally collapses into the winning of a TV you can trace back through all the events leading up to it (most unknown) to determining the probability and finally end up with a 1:1 probability. There are many other histories where you don't win but after the event these can also be discarded when tracing back your personal quantum history. Sounds like science fiction.
Rooster,I thought you might find this short piece interesting as I know you are a fan of the great man (Kant, that is). "What’s So Great About Kant? A Critique of Dinesh D’Souza’s Attack on Reason"
http://www.skeptic.com/eskeptic/11-08-17/#feature
My take is: "One cannot rely on reason to demonstrate that reason is invalid because doing so presumes that reason is valid." In that case we may as well advance as if reason is valid and redefine reality as that which can be resonably established while acknowledging our ingnorance of a possibly seperate "noumenal world". What other productive choice do we have.
14 comments:
'Freedom a reality for only a few women'
Freedom from oppression is only a reality for a fortunate few women in South Africa, the Democratic Alliance said on Tuesday.
"For the vast majority, challenges such as the scourge of sexual and family violence are their reality," said spokesperson Lindiwe Mazibuko.
"Women still lack satisfactory access to the jobs and economic opportunity that flow from having equal access to skills development and training; women remain more at risk of contracting HIV/Aids than men, particularly as a consequence of being denied rights over their own bodies in a deeply patriarchal society.
"Those of us who form part of the fortunate few beneficiaries of the struggle for equal rights must remember today that freedom is indivisible, and women's rights are human rights. Until all the women of this country are truly able to taste the fruits of freedom, the struggle must continue."
Mazibuko paid tribute to the women who marched to the Union Buildings on August 9, 1956, protesting against the apartheid government pass laws.
The Democratic Nurses Organisation of South Africa applauded the work done by nurses in the country, made up mostly of women.
"Women are a blessing in the lives of those who are unable to take care of themselves; they are mothers, pillars of houses, backbones of nations.
"The struggle however continues for women to play an even more powerful role in decision-making," said Denosa president Dorothy Matebeni.
DA Limpopo provincial leader Desiree van der Walt said women still made up 70% of those living below the poverty line.
From here:http://mg.co.za/article/2011-08-09-freedom-a-reality-for-only-few-women
There are still a couple of hours left for you to get laid on Women's Day.
Ha ha. Touche.
So how are you getting on with that Cracker dude with motivational tattoos on his arms and his cock? Any plans to go out on a double date some time? Lulz.
Been getting a bit of Amazing Atheist action hey? I have not seen that face in a while.
What's your opinion on Hitchens? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQorzOS-F6w
Man's a legend in my humble opinion but he's not to everyones taste.
Not to get too strange on you...but...
Many moons ago before the first signs of approaching middle age dug in around the eyes I used to think Hitchens was brilliant. Before that, many years before my time as a teenager I grappled with the questions of god.
What an amazing truth I thought I had discovered : everything most people believed was wrong. Oh how terrible it was at first this thought that there is no god and no meaning to my life. I went around trying to tell everyone ! And I did a pretty good job of it and still could if I was asked to.
It's easy to dismiss religion. It's easy to understand BASIC physics and the scientific method and put god up and test the idea and find it invalid. So for years that was my DOGMATIC position. Boy I thought I was smart.
Then I really got smart. I started to learn more about the universe. I learned about how human perception was enitely flawed. How things on the quantum level made what we think it's real through observing lumpy 4 dimensional space time entirely silly and absurd. I reached a peak of what I consider the greatest possible intellectual achievement. And it went something like this....
We are not capable for one second of knowing what the fuck is really going on. The world is stranger and more complicated that we can ever know. In the realm of the quantum concepts we hold so valid like "seperation of physical things" and "seperation of time" fall apart entirely. In fact all things are in super position etc. All things really melt into one infinite consciousness...seperated only by the illusion of the seperation of space and time. That describes you're illusion of self. You're really not seperate in any way from anything. Just your mind existing in this plane of the lumpy 4th dimesnional space time convinces you that you are.Almost as if your body is an antenae that is the receptor of consciousness (not the catalyst).
This is futile. I can't summarise years worth of study to explain this profound concept simply. So I'll summarise in some broad statements.
We are all part of the same infinite consciouness. The universe requires us to be because without anyone conscious of it the universe can not exist. If you take away consciousness and the qualia of experiencing matter it simply yields to exist. Some might say the energy remains but energy without conscious experience of it fails to be energy. Energy itself requires as an intrical factor that there is a being capable of being conscious of it to have substance.
A rock floating in the "void" of bootes only exists if I can imagine it exists.
If you can take your mind to the places i am suggesting you are ready to start to talk about the existance of "god".
Someone once said something like this nyone who dedicates their existance to disproving the existance of anything is an interesting subject to study"
If you throw around hate, it will come around to bite you in the arse. Not only that, you will piss a lot of people off. If you are receptive to love and good luck, it will come right to you. Try to enjoy life, ffs.
I may already have an understanding of what you are talking about; I'm just not ready to commit to it yet.
Not because I still cling desperately to some outdated mode of philosophy, rather I'm waiting for a few more pieces to be filled in (that, and I can't seem to keep the whole concept in my head at any one time - it just drifts apart). While I have a few ideas bouncing around in there, each as likely as the next, the boys and girls at CERN are getting close to the Higgs and perhaps even a unified field theory, cosmologists are pulling apart telemetry from the cosmic microwave background (and perhaps evidence of other universes), macroscopic quantum superposition has been achieved in the lab for the first time and quantum entanglement remains a lucid proposition. We are getting close - and I for one am salivating at the prospects.
But, while we are contemplating this stranger than fiction, some numbat is busy pushing Noah's Arch at me. Sorry people but your theistic fantasies are just not interesting anymore(unless it's to understand bits of PG Wodehouse); JRR Tolkien has supplanted you years ago. I can't do justice to the amount time and tears I've spent batting away this puerile nonsense - sometimes too close to close to home for comfort. Try attending a boarding school in rural KZN where life is a running battle against this incursion by the absurd and where physical and mental scorn was the Principle offering for dissenters. This is the reason Hitchens appeals to me as an aside; it should be religion treated with ridicule and I don't know of a better man for the job. Now days it's nothing more than high comedy to me and I enjoy tuning in for a good old Hitchslap from time to time (I'm not above a little childish indulgence). Thanks to the rising number of people like Hitchens I can finally spend less time deflecting bronze age fairy tales and more time in interesting conversations (as a layman) about sociobiology, cosmology, theoretical physics and the fine pair of cans on Jessica Rabbit. Can I disprove the existence of a god/s - of course not, I'm not even close and don't expect I ever will be - but so what? I have Planck's Constant to think about.
Personally, I don't believe that quantum mechanics tells us anything useful about consciousness, not yet anyway. I still think it is more plausible that it is a second order manifestation based on evolution through classical particle physics; a type of sense organ for detecting mathematical permutations that manifest through our five(+) senses; although I'm about ready to concede that the separation of the quantum and the classical is just a utility and that the "sum over histories" is what really defines this universe including consciousness - in that case, no dualism could exist.
This renovated mind/body dualism of yours is a grand and deep idea and I can see the appeal but I believe the technical term for this jumping of the gun is called "WOO"; as in, it's rather a result of cognitive dissonance resolving itself than a justified belief. Deepak Chopra and crew subscribe to something similar but I think it's just the Jehovah meme in a Star Trek uniform. Fortunately, one thing we can celebrate is the fact that we can agree to disagree and neither one of us will be burned at the stake.
Religion treated with ridicle:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j_BzWUuZN5w&feature=channel_video_title
Maybe one day it will be the joke that only stupid people laugh at but until then, Bwaahhhaahaaha!!!!
"If you throw around hate, it will come around to bite you in the arse. Not only that, you will piss a lot of people off. If you are receptive to love and good luck, it will come right to you. Try to enjoy life, ffs."
_________________________________
In keeping with the theme, one of Hitchen's pals gives an idea of why "good guys" might finish first on average:
http://www.iterated-prisoners-dilemma.net/
Try being an ass and you will see your ass. It's not Karma or God, just Game Theory. Two players cooperating will always beat two players defecting. In evolutionary terms, this coud be the difference between survival and extinction.
Two players cooperating will always beat two players defecting. In evolutionary terms, this could be the difference between survival and extinction.
_____________________________
100%.
Ok here's a case history of my own that might seem inexplicable to some. If you have an explanation for it, I'm open to that.
A couple of months ago we bought and moved into a new house. We'd been living in a furnished company house before and I'd disposed of my old tv set. So we needed a new tv, preferably with 32" screen. There was a competition for a plasma tv of that size, the draw for which was to take place at the local showgrounds over a week end. I don't have a tv licence because the SABC wouldn't accept that I'd sold my tv set even though I gave them the required documentation. If anyone believes in an afterlife then it must surely be the SABC because they send their lawyers there to get licence fees from the dead.
So on the day of the competition I haul my husband to Game to buy a tv licence because he doesn't have penalties loaded against him on the SABC's cyber tentacles. We go to the show and my husband gets bored, so I tell him to take the car and go home, and I will call him later once I've got the tv set in my hands. He thinks I'm totally bonkers. I'm totally convinced I am going to win this tv set, don't ask me how, I just am. So come 6:30 in the evening and I win it. My husband comes to fetch me with the tv, and I calmly install it in the lounge.
I have had this a couple of times, that I just know something is going to happen, without any explanation of how I could know this. I have walked into a house where someone was murdered fifteen years before, and I did not know about it, but I could tell there and then what had happened.
"Ok here's a case history of my own that might seem inexplicable to some. If you have an explanation for it, I'm open to that."
If you had to give a number, how many times, over a lifetime of events (which must be up in the billions), would you think is reasonable to put an even like that down to chance, once, twice, ten times, one hundred? Then give a number for somebody on the higher end - does this describe your experience or are you higher still. You must know many people who are on the lower end of the scale or you would not describe your experience as remarkable. Then consider that memories of such events (especially over time) are often unreliable and exaggerated unless they are well documented and verified (there is good science to back this up). In many cases, what you end up with is nothing remarkable at all, just life playing out as we would expect.
Also, have you balanced this against the times you have felt strongly about something and it did not happen?
Or against other peoples experiences? By keeping track of the hits and misses we would be in a better position judge the remarkability of the event playing out in your favour.
Over a lifetime coincidences are bound to happen. To some people it might happen very seldom and to others very often; nothing strange so far. If you are on the higher end of the scale then you might be tempted to attach some sort of mystic to the event but in reality we would expect to see something like this happen quite often in our lives. Pascal would say that it is more likely that the few times over a lifetime that this can happen is more down to luck or coincidence or even inevitability than a halting of the natural laws of the universe (as we know them) in your favour. Your brain is also capable of producing remarkably accurate predictions of the future based on passed events and sometimes the most improbable predictions come to fruition and this takes us by suprise, exacerbating the memory.
From the quantum perspective, by entering into the competition you created a history in which you are eligible to win a TV and all other possible histories are discarded when determining your future. When the quantum wave function finally collapses into the winning of a TV you can trace back through all the events leading up to it (most unknown) to determining the probability and finally end up with a 1:1 probability. There are many other histories where you don't win but after the event these can also be discarded when tracing back your personal quantum history. Sounds like science fiction.
Rooster,I thought you might find this short piece interesting as I know you are a fan of the great man (Kant, that is).
"What’s So Great About Kant?
A Critique of Dinesh D’Souza’s Attack on Reason"
http://www.skeptic.com/eskeptic/11-08-17/#feature
My take is:
"One cannot rely on reason to demonstrate that reason is invalid because doing so presumes that reason is valid." In that case we may as well advance as if reason is valid and redefine reality as that which can be resonably established while acknowledging our ingnorance of a possibly seperate "noumenal world". What other productive choice do we have.
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