kickass Brazilian movie

2006-08-25T12:49:00.000-04:00

2006-08-08T18:51:00.000-04:00

Nancy's fotos of Beirut pre Israel. They're really worth to be seen. Lucky Strike concerns about fishing. Important, even if one cannot see it is.
Nancy's Photos
Fish & Chips

FrankenSteer - The Passionate Eye

2006-08-02T11:32:00.000-04:00

This is at the same time scary and heart breaking. We are breeding these poor animals in a horrible, cruel way, and after we are poisoning ourselves with the garbage we convert them in. I almost could not watch it to the end, but it is important that people do. If you are feeding your children with cow meat, oh well, you better know what you are doing.
What follows comes with the video:

Frankensteer is a disturbing documentary that reveals how the ordinary cow has been turned into an antibiotic-dependent, hormone-laced potential carrier of toxic bacteria, all in the name of cheaper food. Frankensteer exposes the harsh and sometimes frightening realities of how our beef gets to our tables.

According to this compelling documentary, the beef industry, supported by North American government agencies and pharmaceutical companies, has engaged in an on-going experiment to create the perfect food machine. Their goal is to increase speed of production and reduce the cost of manufacture. But there is a price in producing a cheap industrial product. This benign, grazing herbivore has undergone a transformation in how it's raised, fed and slaughtered. And consumers, by and large, are totally unaware of the dangers lurking in their beloved steaks, ribs and, most especially, hamburgers.

According to Mike McBane of the Canadian Health Coalition, "When you bring a package of hamburger home from a supermarket, you have to treat it as toxic materialÃ¢Â€Â¦"

Frankensteer reveals some startling facts: Every year, 50 per cent of the total tonnage of antibiotics used in Canada ends up in livestock. And every year cattle raised in massive feedlots are routinely dosed with antibiotics even if they are not sick.

2006-07-21T21:44:00.001-04:00

photo by Malua

2006-07-20T09:22:00.000-04:00

Levinas and multicultural society

This is a very cool blog. The excerpt below is of just one of the very interesting subjects she writes about.

There is nothing special about being German

Below is a text I wrote after reading “Lust for suffering” (Lijdenslust) from the Jewish writer Marcel Möring. He writes about the nonsense of the television priests and therapists who promise instant happiness. He thinks that we should accept suffering as a necessary part of our life and he even thinks that happiness is just an illusion. Although I don’t agree completely with what he says, I find his views interesting. However, in this post I don’t want to write about his ideas about happiness in general but about what he said about the role of Germans with regard to the post-war generations.

Marcel Möring says that he thinks that the generation of Germans who were born after the war should not take the guilt upon them of the horrors and crimes of the war. People are only responsible for their own actions, they should not feel responsible for what the generation before them did. And it is dangerous to allow the younger generation to romanticize the German feeling of guilt and suffering. When these feelings of guilt don’t stop, something new will grow on it, a feeling of bitterness and a feeling of being special as Germans, with the role they played in the history. This while Möring thinks that young Germans shouldn’t feel special at all. They should realise that they did host the inhuman and destructive ideology of fascism, but that it was in fact by accident that this happened in Germany. This terrible beast, the “Nazi beast”, could have been hosted anywhere, just as well in the Netherlands, in the US or among the Eskimo’s. There is nothing intrinsically beastial in the nature of Germans.

While travelling through Germany, Möring met many young Germans with a very old feeling of guilt, a feeling which is becoming more and more “German”. The idea that the offenders / committers of crimes would bare children who are criminals themselves, by definition, is ridiculous. The children and the grandchildren cannot be held accountable for things they didn’t do themselves. The belief that the destiny of future generations would be determined by past generations, that the new generation would carry the dust of the history, comes from the idea that a free will doesn’t exist, that we would completely be determined and imprisoned by our history, as an inevitable chain of events which we cannot change.
I wanted to make a remark here – Möring does not mention this – that this idea can also be found with Heidegger; the idea that the future is fixed, determined by the past. The idea e.g. that Germans are autochthonous because of their being rooted in the German history, something which doesn’t count for Jewish Diaspora. This makes them totally unfree, a people is determined by the history of that people, there is no way that an individual can liberate him or herself from that. Then a people can have a special mission or role, as opposed to other peoples. Their speciality is based on their ethnicity / roots and it is inevitable. No other people can replace that speciality and the related mission.
Möring protests against this idea, there is nothing special about being German and there is no special German role or mission.

It is good to know the history of your people, including what exactly happened in the Second World War, but Germans should not create an intrinsic inevitable everlasting “German” feeling of guilt. Such a feeling is dangerous, unjustified and incorrect. In fact we don’t have to be afraid when a people feels strong, the most dangerous are feelings of weakness, sufferance and anger about perceived injustice. The embittered suffering in which we don’t consider our pain as a necessary part of our lives, but as something reproachable, is dangerous. When the suffering is abstract and it is impossible to point a clear cause for it, then an everlasting scapegoat with mythical proportions should be appointed. In this way the Jews were appointed as scapegoats before the Second World War. So to prevent a people from being named as scapegoats, these sentiments of drowning in feelings of an endless suffering and frustration should not be accepted. To drawn in such romantic feelings of an endless suffering prepares the ground for a war like the Second World War (at that time in the 30s there was also such a feeling of suffering, frustration and deprivation). The healthy idea that Germany is a normal country with a normal people, like any other, could in the long run be replaced by the unhealthy idea that Germans will for ever be guilty of what they have done in the war, and that through that, they have become victims of their own guilt. This intoxicating perfume of feeling injured and hurt, combined with the feeling of being a special chosen people with a mission, this makes that bitterness and hate can grow very fast.

I think this analysis from Möring is fundamental. Human beings should always consider each other as being completely equal in their humanness, there are no special peoples, not because of their enrootedness, and not because of their role in history neither. We are all equal so it is not possible to consider your own people as special and superior, which could otherwise then be used as a justification to appoint another people as inferior, as scapegoats, which means that their rights can be taken away, they can be discriminated, excluded from society. We are all equal, discrimination based on race, ethnicity, culture or religion can never be justified. Different countries play different roles in history, these roles don’t stick to a people, other countries could have played the same role. There is nothing wrong with being German, there is something very wrong with Hitler because he started the Second World War. It would have been just as wrong if he had been French or English or Jewish Diaspora, for that matter.

In my opinion this is why Heidegger’s philosophy of enrootment is problematic. Germans are determined to be authentic, Jewish Diaspora is determined to be rootless. As a consequence Heidegger refused job applications from Jews at his university. It is this historic determination which makes that different ethnicities are no longer equal and that some peoples can be discriminated, it was this philosophy that Levinas protested against in his commentaries about the philosophy of Hitlerism and Heidegger’s philosophy.

2006-07-12T19:44:00.000-04:00

Post World Cup. My princess with her tattoo of the Italian flag on the face has proved again to be a much beloved child in our Italian neighbourhood.

2005-09-13T14:44:00.000-04:00

ESFP - "Entertainer". Radiates attractive warmth and optimism. Smooth, witty, charming, clever. Fun to be with. Very generous. 8.5% of the total population.

Free Jung Personality Test (similar to Myers-Briggs/MBTI)

That's me, according to Jung.

2005-09-07T19:41:00.000-04:00

Alright. Just learning how to use the thing.
That's me in 1980. Hard times... beautiful too. There's a story here. Wait up, it will come out.

Erebus

kickass Brazilian movie

FrankenSteer - The Passionate Eye

There is nothing special about being German