Rachel Wolfe_Somme_web-25

Being Real in a Virtual Time

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God was not just a mythological persona used to control populations, the ideas and the stories were also ways to describe a motive that could lead to: 

  • health
  • generating life
  • creating harmony among people, otherwise prone to fighting 

Was the fault of religion to give rise to people who abuse power? In the face of reality, we can see the repeated abdication of responsibility, complicity buttress these avenues for corruption to take place. Corruption also gives rise to other motives, and so in 2019, we see an acceptance and normalisation of an increasing amount of life motives which would have been imprisoned or burned. Human life in certain regions has experienced sharp increases in individual freedom, food availability, and been fed media stories about moral and economical superiority without having the lived experience to back up the claims.

 

In thinking about what is true and real, or what is good as life-giving, there is benefit to gain in approaching ideas to see their contents and results. The study of history can be a leading method of charting the course of future with responsible choices for future generations to reap benefits instead of dire consequences for current missteps.

 

Science fiction and fiction are not the basis of myth, but instead the misunderstanding and appropriation of what people believe is right and good for the individual again. Humans are continually at several intersections of moral, ethical, political, personal, aesthetic choices. As people learn how to read the signs, visual cues, and weigh their intuitive senses with critical thinking, a sense of moral compass can be retained. 

Rachel Wolfe_Cultural Exports-8

Facts Are Boring and Useful

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This past few months, I was hired to write four factual articles. In this experienced I noted two key qualities:

Quality 1. Writing about facts requires effort in checking, re-checking, and re-checking the checking to make sure the facts are up-to-date and cited. Writing about opinions and various perspectives, with use of metaphors and stories requires much less effort. Mind you my cognitive efforts are largely practices in divergent, intuitive, critical thinking for a creative process. Those trained in linear or algorithmic forms of thinking may find fact based writing to require less effort.

Quality 2. Writing about facts involves presenting useful material exempt from personal persuasion tactics. Writing without personal persuasion tactics requires several points of view to be considered while retaining the author’s original voice. The result offers the reader autonomy to decide the best course of future choices for themselves and does not attempt to point or spin the person in a direction the author desires. Such attempts are considered bias and are mentally limiting the reader in the exclusion of information, facts, or perspectives.

In considering these two noticeable qualities, I began to see the contemporary state of media and news as having defended the means to make Quality 1. underfunded or unfunded, and devoid of freedom such as in Quality 2. as media writing attempts to sway people one way the other on a prosed problem or issue.

This style of writing based on persuasion reminded me further of sales-pitch writing from my days as a copywriter. Language can be a powerful tool for convincing people how to think and behave, but language can also be a tool for powerful critical thinking.

For this exercise, I will convey a non-thinking exercise as a proposed routine for you, reader, to do your own thinking and not be swayed by misinformation or persuasion, as a means to weigh reality based on information consistent over time.

Stop.
Look.
Ask.
Think.

Come back and do the process until all the nonsense falls off the page, and see how much reality matches what is written or not.

Consider how much value you would experience in your life had you been offered quality information, and consider paying for services, content, and other ways people rely upon to earn a living.

Consider the cost of excitement, there are great riches in the realms of boredom, great chasms of interest, life, and love.

Please add your proposed steps in the routine, experiences, and results to the comments, or not of course. As one time things used to go without saying, now the internet has given the steam lever to say everything.

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Guns In America

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An early morning in May, I went for a routine walk to enjoy the sunrise and make some photographs in a nearby forest preserve area. On the same route I had gone out on, I returned and found an object in the road. I didn’t know what it was at first. In disbelief, I made a photo on my iPhone, to send to my Dad who confirmed it was indeed a loaded handgun in a holster. He called in a report to the county police, who drove to the site within a 15 minutes. Upon the officer’s arrival, my dad met him there, and the owner of the gun had returned after noticing it was gone when he arrived to work. The owner explained the handgun must have been on the top of his truck, as he backed out of his driveway that morning to take his daughter to school and go off to work. The handgun must have slid off and fallen in the road, where I found it. This man happens to teacher of the concealed carry course in the area. No citations were made. No human is perfect, and this experience perfectly highlights the shocking changes in the quiet, small-town neighbourhood I grew up in.

 

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RachelWolfe_Oct2011058

Freedom

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Words are supposedly made up, but does that mean they lose their meaning? The words still mean what they mean. So is not the words that is the problem but the ideas about the words that seem to be in flux- when does an idea ever justify violence? Vision of complete peace and harmony would say never. So then, how could a motive to peace and harmony inflict a kind of suffering that is also a form of violence?

Words are used to communication, to convey information, and hopefully come to a kind of agreement. When there is not agreement, there is conflict. Conflict of values, conflict of interest, clashing vision, different desired outcomes? Not always. A shared outcome could still result in seeing different pathways toward an outcome. What is the point of discussing the terminology in abstract form? To gain some kind of space-to make make a calm approach towards a volatile subject. The the with volatile subjects is humans are animals and still maintain some kind of instinct to pounce, deal with the thing now. That does not always result in the most generative outcome.

Words can be used as guises for something else. And in an effort to maintain what is what, and the meaning of words used as ideals for cultural values – freedom comes up all the time. The ideal of freedom is supposedly grasp as right for some and not right for others. That there would be a correct understanding of freedom is something worthwhile to sit up straight for. To pay some attention to what is this idea, what is about ideas that posses and drives people, and which of those ideas create the outcomes desired.

being without is not freedom
freedom requires effort
easier as it may seem to do without than to work for what you want
there is a delicate balance between striving and allowing
providing and contentment

at any time one has given grief, uttered contempt, or proclaim a higher order to be knowing -then the Etymology dictionary services as tool to find out what’s really going on at the heart of the matter. It’s not really free to use, though we imagine that-since it’s online. But for anyone who has the privilege to use the resource of the internet- here we are:

From etymology.com 

Old English freodom “power of self-determination, state of free will; emancipation from slavery, deliverance;” see free (adj.) + -dom. Meaning “exemption from arbitrary or despotic control, civil liberty” is from late 14c. Meaning “possession of particular privileges” is from 1570s. Similar formation in Old Frisian fridom, Dutch vrijdom, Middle Low German vridom. Freedom-rider recorded 1961 in reference to civil rights activists in U.S. trying to integrate bus lines.

It has been said by some physicians, that life is a forced state. The same may be said of freedom. It requires efforts, it presupposes mental and moral qualities of a high order to be generally diffused in the society where it exists. [John C. Calhoun, speech, U.S. House of Representatives, Jan. 31, 1816]

Freedom fighter attested by 1903 (originally with reference to Cuba). Freedom-loving (adj.) is from 1841.