Month: March 2021

Categories
Fine Arts

Tears in a Paint Brush.

Unlike music, an ephemerous, fleeting art form that can only be appreciated at the moment the composition is interpreted by the artist, a painting is a static representation of reality – a snapshot that remains unaltered no matter how long you look at it. The inner experience of the spectator, however, brings dynamism into the static. His perception brings movement into the unmoving. His imagination makes the painting alive.

True art offers an aesthetic experience, but most importantly, it creates a response in the mind or heart of the perceiver. When I listen to impromptus Schubert, I feel a mixture of deep melancholy with a touch of hope, like a tiny growing plant struggling through thick layers of snow, conquering the harsh winter, bringing along its promise of new life. I feel the souffrance humaine, but also the meaning of it. Schubert shows that life will bring tears, but also smiles that make it worth living. Listening to his music is not entertainment – it is a highly spiritual experience. It is the contemplation of utter inner beauty. It makes me stop breathing, so I won’t miss a note.

Although I don’t feel the same ecstasy when looking at paintings, they do trigger a whole array of emotions. ‘The Scream’ of Münch, for example, brings about a malaise. The wide-open mouth of the protagonist betrays his horror. The spectator is left guessing who is pursuing him, and why. Maybe Münch depicted the anxiety of his mentally ill sister. But a survivor of the Shoah might see something very different.

The Death of Marat’ depicts a murdered revolutionary in a bathtub, but David’s masterpiece doesn’t make me ill at ease. The soft colour palette and harmonious composition turn the lugubrious subject into an almost peaceful scene. Only the bloody water gives away something horrendous has taken place.

The expressionist artist aims to highlight, literally and figuratively, the inner world of his subject, the public, and himself. The goal is not a truthful representation of objective reality, like it was for the naturalist painter Caravaggio. He was brought to trial at least eleven times for his in-your-face realism. Instead, the expressionist wants to convey a specific sentiment, sometimes through exaggeration of facial traits, like Münch’s screaming fugitive. Other expressionist tools are the non-naturalistic use of colours, free brushwork, and a highly textured application of paint.

In his unique book The Story of Art, art historian Gombrich illustrates these differing goals with a fitting comparison between the realistic mother hen with her chicks, painted by the early Picasso, and the hot-temperedness of the rooster he sketched when he adopted the expressionist style.

While expressionist painters mainly want to provoke a response within the spectator, Baroque and Rococo painters try to depict reality more beautifully than it is with their lavish, frivolous decorations. This can be endearing, like Fragonard’s pastel-coloured damsel on a swing. However, the story behind this painting is naughtier than the tenderness it evokes: the girl on the swing is the mistress of the married courtier, lying on the ground beneath her and peeking into her skirts. The hand gesture of the chubby putto on the left indicates the secrecy of their affair. The swing is pushed by a man who, according to the client’s wishes, should have represented a bishop – but the irony of that request was a bridge too far for the artist, so he painted a layman.

Paintings I can stare at for a long time are the mysterious jungles of the post-impressionist Rousseau. Between the blades of grass and exotic leaves that, one by one, flowed out of his brush with great meticulousness, I keep discovering details of preying predator’s eyes, fruits, and flowers. The artist’s amazement at nature amazes me.

Coloured brush strokes on canvasses make you travel. To the past or the unknown, through memory or fantasy. Which paintings have touched you, and which emotions did they evoke?

Categories
Ethics

Meat Eaters Are Not Cruel.

Chicken wings, lamb chops, a big juicy steak – I used to salivate at the mere thought of my next meaty meal. I proudly identified as a carnivore, and told my friends I didn’t understand how some people could enjoy life without meat. But one day, a visual on the internet became my catalyst for change and brought to the surface what I already knew but had buried into the catacombs of my subconsciousness: the direct link between my chili con carne and the immeasurable suffering of an innocent being that would give me nothing but kindness if it were near me. And since that moment, my body has been incapable of digesting suffering. I no longer saw pork on my plate – I saw a frightened pig. Where I used to see vitello tonnato, I now saw a crying calf and a suffocating tuna.

With time, I learned that refusing to slaughter someone for dinner contributes to many ethical causes: not eating animals saves other humans from being exploited (like the 70 million children who sometimes lose fingers or limbs when cutting carcasses in meat-packing plants), and dramatically diminishes the pollution of our planet. Our body becomes less susceptible to a whole array of diseases when we ditch animal protein. But my major motivation to stop eating animals has always been their well-being. The faulty anthropocentric view that animals live for us, to serve us, needs to be replaced with the ecocentric view that animals live with us, and exist for their own reasons that have nothing to do with servitude. We have no right to use, exploit, or harm them for our benefit, and this basic tenet of the vegan philosophy is simply not applicable in the setting of animal agriculture.

Wherever animals are bred and slaughtered massively, cruelty is involved. It is impossible to cut 30 chicken throats per minute or hang conscious cows on one leg without the occurrence of panic, struggle, agony, and horror. It is also impossible to check if every animal is properly sedated. Humane slaughter is an excuse that meat-eaters, including my former self, use to soothe their mind – but it is a myth. There is nothing humane about anally electrocuting a being that desires to live. Or taking away a newborn calf from its stressed mother to tap off the milk he needs to grow. Or ripping off the testicles of piglets without sedation. Or shredding baby chickens alive with macerators. And there is also nothing necessary about it. We might love the taste of animal flesh, but we don’t need it.

The human species is superior to other animals in many ways – animals can’t compose operas, paint impressionist masterpieces, build cathedrals, write essays, calculate the distance to the moon, or split atoms. But what truly distinguishes us from them, is not our intellect or our skills, but the capacity to acting morally and transcending the need for instant gratification through instinctive behaviour. Although humans assign wildly different definitions to the concepts of right and wrong – we are very much aware there is a difference. Depending on our degree of detachment from our impulses, our actions are the result of a certain level of free will. We don’t eat them because we have to, but because we want to. And it’s not because we can kill them, that we should.

Instinctively, we don’t even want to. Give 10 children an apple and a rabbit, and notify me if one of them wants to kill the rabbit and play with the apple. Adults would likely prefer not to kill it, either, but after decades of being desensitised to violence by their parents, teachers, and society, and the subsequent disconnection of the sausage on their plate from the animal it belonged to, they don’t mind paying someone else to kill that animal for them. Behind the thick brick walls of a slaughterhouse far away from the city, and far away from their sight.

Everyone claims they love animals, but no one wants to stop eating them. We all want to halt climate change, but only a few are willing to change what’s on their plate. People want to ditch plastic straws to save the fish, but who wants to ditch eating fish to save the fish? Only vegans do – that tiny percentage of often ridiculed idealists others get upset with for bringing out the cognitive dissonance, rather than getting upset with themselves for causing it with their own words and deeds.

No matter from which perspective you look at it, killing animals is screwed up, and no longer justifiable. The human Dark Ages ended five centuries ago, and it is time we turn the page of the animal Dark Ages. Entrepreneurs, among which some of the most powerful people in the world, now believe the transition to plant-based nutrition is an absolute necessity, and massively invest in plant proteins and lab-grown meats.

The supermarket racks are bursting with lactose-free, sugar-free, oil-free, pesticide-free, hormone-free, E-number-free foods, and hopefully one day in the not-too-distant future, the label ‘100% cruelty-free’ can be added to all of them. Because cruelty doesn’t belong in the western world, where people have already established human rights, women’s rights, child rights, gay rights, and every other imaginable right except animal rights. The most important right animals have, is the right to their own pursuit of happiness, and the prerequisite for that is existence without cruelty.

I don’t believe meat-eaters are cruel – I surely wasn’t. I do believe they are indirectly, often unknowingly, and more than often unwillingly participating in the cruelty inflicted upon animals, and that they are slower to realise the major consequences of their food choices on every aspect of their lives.

And, if you still eat animals, I truly hope this essay has inspired you to be less slow.

Categories
Philosophy

Millennial Absurdism.

When the French thinker Jean-Paul Sartre spoke of absurdism, he was referring to the absurdity of man’s pursuit of meaning in an irrational, meaningless universe. He, Michel Foucault, Albert Camus and other contemporaries wrote entire libraries about this conflict.

Today this school of thought no longer exists – philosophising about existential matters is exhausting, and since the invention of the brain debilitating phenomenon that are social media, our species’ attention span has dropped to 1.3 seconds per post.

We have evolved from thinking about the absurd to being absurd. Just when I thought it couldn’t get any worse, the absurdity of the American left has reached a new low: it has now become wildly inappropriate for a cook of a certain culture to borrow recipes from people of other cultures.

Gordon Ramsey preparing burritos now risks being accused of ‘cultural theft’ of Mexican gastronomic culture, and eating it in his restaurant would be regarded as racist. Stick to fish and chips Gordon, tacos are taboo for crackers like you.

In that line of thinking, Americans should ban croissants from all Starbucks branches. Last time I checked, no French boulangers were involved in the production of their croissants. And what about their African-American employees crushing Brazilian coffee beans to make Italian latte macchiatos? As Douglas Murray would remark: one has to be educated into that level of stupidity.

While humanity is faced with so many pressing issues, such as climate change, religious fanaticism, water scarcity, and the rising threat of nuclear warfare, the woke left engages in the usual nonsense concocted by their narrow-minded little cerebrums, thereby only contributing to the further antagonisation of people.

Absurdity has now become a juxtaposition of the pointlessness of creating problems where there aren’t any and the bagatellisation of what truly destroys us.

It’s sad and amusing at the same time. Like so many aspects of man’s existence. Maybe millennials are philosophers after all.

Categories
Identity Politics

The Royal Racist.

Racists do exist, but the late Queen Elisabeth II, who reigned over the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth realms for more than seven decades, certainly wasn’t one of them. After all, she gave her blessing to the union of her grandson and a woman who, in another era, wouldn’t have been welcomed in Buckingham Palace: a divorcee with brown skin, red blood and a far from unblemished reputation.

Not exactly a dreamed acquisition for one of the oldest and most powerful dynasties in the world, one could say. Yet Her Majesty condoned her social status, her past and her ethnicity – not that the latter should be condoned, but in the light of Harry’s woke accusations, emphasizing this fact wouldn’t hurt. Did she hope to prove to the public that the monarchy has modernized, and keeps up with the times? Or did she grant Harry true happiness with the woman of his dreams, something she didn’t do for her son, the heir of her throne?

Whatever her motivation may have been, she welcomed Meghan Markle into her family with a stiff upper lip and open arms. Under the euphoric cries of subjects, a fairytale wedding took place. The press wrote nothing but words of praise.

But the sweet scone had a bitter aftertaste. Meghan found the protocols, which she was urged to analyse and follow meticulously, annoying. Marrying into a royal family means spending the rest of your privileged life bathing in unbridled luxury – the least you can do is not slamming the car door behind you, sitting with your legs crossed or wearing black nail polish, if these are the unwritten rules. In addition, the tabloids portrayed her and her fiancé as hypocrites. A portrayal that was not entirely erroneous, considering the fact they flew in private jets while lamenting about the disastrous effects of climate change, and accepted blood diamonds from a Saudi oil sheik while ranting about the exploitation of the poor.

Since their ‘Megxit’ from the monarchy, their hypocrisy has inflating substantially. They no longer wanted to be part of what they despisingly call ‘the Firm’, but wished to keep their noble titles. They wanted to stand on their own two feet, but hoped American taxpayers would finance their security bill. They craved privacy, but signed a million-dollar deal with Netflix for a reality TV show, allowing cameramen to record every intimate detail of their everyday life, for the entire world to see. They claimed to respect the Queen’s wishes, but violated their political neutrality in the US elections by showing their support for criminal organizations such as the Democrat Party and BLM. And as the icing on the high tea cake, they suggested someone of the royal family was… racist! On Oprah, without mentioning names! By accusing nobody specifically, they accused everybody. Who had dared asking Harry about the skin colour of his unborn baby? Was it King Philip, then gagging in the hospital? Or jealous Kate, who allegedly made poor Meghan cry? The public could only guess.

Could it be that our Duchess of Hollywood was frustrated at not becoming the new Lady Di, as she might have hoped? That she was the one who decided to leave the stage, dragging along naïve Harry with her? That she pulled the racist card, the most beloved weapon of the politically correct, to take revenge? Giving the question of the family member a malevolent twist is very easy. And it gives angry social justice warriors another reason to hate privileged white people even more…
Maybe the only racist in Buckinhgham Palace was Meghan Markle.

I suspect that the tolerant Prozac princess might one day no longer tolerate her ginger prince, and the latter will, swiftly and with drooping ears, return to Daddy’s palace. But whether he would be delighted with his son’s coming, remains a royal mystery just yet.

Categories
Ethics

Cancel Censorship.

As much as I would sometimes enjoy silencing certain individuals for the things they say, I am against the very act of silencing, or ‘cancelling’, as it is called nowadays, anyone. I deem it better to criticise them, albeit without mincing my words. A truly democratic society should provide a platform for all opinions – not just opinions that are substantiated or making sense. The free expression of all views should be allowed at all times, however idiotic they may be. As an illustration of Voltaire’s beliefs, Evelyn Beatrice Hall wrote:

“I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it”.

Instead of respectfully disapproving each other’s views and engaging in civilised debate or simply ignoring the views we dislike, woke people cancel people they disagree with. Cancelling means annulling individuals from public exposure for an opinion or action deemed politically incorrect, bigotted, or offensive.

For example, J.K. Rowling, the author of the iconic Harry Potter books, was cancelled because she tweeted that women should be called ‘women’ and not ‘people with wombs’, heroically claiming that biological rather than psychological factors are the only valid criterium for determining a person’s gender.

Contrary to women, men do not have wombs, she thinks. For the acknowledgement of this objective fact, which has also been acknowledged by all scientists who have walked the globe since the discovery of the womb, she received severe backlash and a flood of death threats from disgruntled SJW’s who are so tolerant they threaten to murder you. Thousands of outraged, disappointed fans worldwide have stored away Rowling’s books in a dusty corner of their attic after hearing her transphobic hate speech.

Rowling is now the enemy of the LGBTQIA – community and activists worldwide. Afting labelling the former President of the United States a misogynist, much to the delight of her current critics, she is now getting a taste of her own bitter medicine – or should I say, magic potion? The fact the murderous protagonist of her latest book is a transgender, didn’t help.

There are barely any non-white characters in the Harry Potter stories, and the main characters themselves are white and heterosexual. Could it be that Rowling is not only mysogynistic and transphobic, but also racist and sexist? The woke brigade, often pronoucing these four adjectives in one single breath, would certainly agree.

What’s the point of engaging in debates you might lose if you can just destroy the person’s career and reputation by pulling the appropriate -ist card? Silencing people is so much easier than letting their inconvenient truths confront you with the demons you’re desperately trying to avoid.

It is time to stop sacrificing the truth on the totalitarian altar of political correctness.

Categories
The Coronavirus

The Jab.

To vax or not to vax? That is the burning question currently dividing the world into three camps. These camps existed long before the creation of SARS-CoV-2, but the distinction between them was sharpened by the current syndemic.

I use the term ‘syndemic’ because it is more accurate than the word ‘pandemic’. A syndemic is a synergistic epidemic, or in other words: an epidemic with henchmen. These henchmen are underlying diseases, each of which is an epidemic in its own right, like obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, cancer, and compromised immune systems. They are the reason why some are badly affected by the virus, while others don’t even notice they are infected. If the medical community and governments worldwide were to focus on preventing these diseases rather than soothing their symptoms with (scandalously lucrative) therapies and surgeries, most medications and vaccines would become obsolete in postmodern society. The silence of virologists about the power of healthy nutrition and techniques to reduce stress is deafening. The scientific knowledge about that power is already there – it is the motivation to apply it that is lacking.

First, there’s the camp of those who blindly accept the alleged efficiency of the covid vaccine (which technically isn’t a traditional vaccine consisting of a low dose of a real pathogen in order to prepare the immune system for a higher load, but rather, an experimental injection of synthetical messenger RNA of which the consequences have not been tested and verified), and they do so because they proudly claim to ‘trust science’. What does it mean, however, to ‘trust science’? The phrase insinuates ‘science’ is one unanimous block, a worldwide network of like-minded people. It isn’t! Science is comprised of many scientists, individuals with opinions that often complement each other, but also criticise and contradict each other. And even if with the word ‘science’ they mean ‘scientific consensus’, why would that consensus be trusted a priori? Majorities can be dead wrong.

In the scientific sphere too, as in artistic and other spheres, there are archaists and rebels, conservatives and progressives. There are those who are satisfied with the academic status quo and those who find research results unsatisfactory and want to dig further, dare to dig further. There are those who want a pat on the back from their sponsors – because scientific research is a very expensive affair and often relies on sponsors – and those who want to conduct research selflessly. And it is the latter who make science evolve the most. Those who aren’t afraid to challenge widely accepted academic beliefs, nor to be the academic scapegoats. Like Galileo Galilei, who was bold enough to express the then-preposterous claim the Earth was perhaps not the centre of the universe. And that is was round! Today, a statue of this blasphemous madman is standing at the entrance of the Vatican Observatory, and we are well on our way to travel to Mars.

Just like Ludwig Van Beethoven broke with classicism and his musical boldness marked the transition to a new musical era, some scientists want to break with convention and enter unknown grounds. Beethoven’s innovations didn’t make him wildly popular among his contemporaries, but they changed the course of musical history. Without his politically incorrect compositions and rebellious melodic and harmonic innovations, the oeuvre of Liszt, Rachmaninov, Brahms, or Ravel would have sounded quite differently.

And without the impressive scientific record of the world’s most published scientist, the French doctor Didier Raoult, immunological medicine would have looked quite different today. Yet this man is today taunted and demonised by the media and politicians for daring to question the need for a covid vaccine and daring to successfully cure covid-19 patients with hydroxychloroquine. Both the drug and the physician are now blacklisted by the intelligentsia and labeled fraudulent by journalists who know absolutely nothing about science. They want to cancel him like the Protestants wanted to eliminate Galilei. Raoult is the medical Galilei of our times.

Back to the three camps. The reasoning of the first camp is based on their emotions. They believe first it is our moral duty to get vaccinated, and that refusal to do so is a sign of utter selfishness. They believe that the unvaccinated among us are the reason epidemics continue to exist. Some of them have shown to be mini-dictators who dream of injected the entire world population, even forcibly if necessary. A vaccinated obese person, in their eyes, is of lesser risk to his environment than an unvaccinated, fit person, even though it has been proven that the vaccinated can be carriers of the targeted pathogen and still transmit it to others! The actual causes of the syndemic are downplayed or completely ignored by this camp.

The second camp is the antagonistic counterpart of the first: here are the people who think that the chemical conductors and genetically engineered or unethically derived ingredients of vaccines are sufficient reasons to ban all vaccines. They are against the very concept of vaccination and believe that our immune system shouldn’t be messed with. This group includes all people who have undergone the negative effects of traditional vaccines, like the hundreds of Irish girls who experienced serious reactions of Guardasil, the Human Papilloma Virus vaccine, resulting in extreme trauma. Because the pharmaceutical company Merck refuses to acknowledge the causal link between the vaccine and the otherwise unexplained illnesses, these girls do not receive effective medical treatment. Some of the girls have become infertile, some now have the Guillain-Barré syndrome and are partly paralysed, and others have Acute Disseminated Encephalomyelitis, widespread infection of the brain and spinal cord. Many are now unable to attend school due to their debilitating health conditions. Denmark has no less than five centers for girls injured by the same vaccine. The HSE (Ireland’s Health Service) insists that the vaccine is 100% safe and refers to the parents of the girls as ’emotional terrorists’ spreading ‘misinformation’.

Those girls, and other victims of severe vaccine side effects worldwide, receive no compensation from the medical world for having to live with a new pathology, handicap, paralysis, or other consequences the first camp does not like to talk about. Vaccine inserts mention multiple side effects you would rather not experience: aluminum, for example, can lead to permanent brain damage, and the polio vaccine distributed by a software company owner paralysed hundreds of Indian children. The philanthropic billionaire is no longer allowed to enter India – a minor setback compared to a lifetime in a wheelchair. People of the first camp and so-called fact-checkers on the internet like to believe that the advantages of vaccines highly outweigh the risks. But who checks the fact-checkers, and why are thousands of medical doctors who openly doubt vaccines silenced by the Orders of Medicine whose members all belong to the first camp? And if it was your daughter endingup in a wheelchair after being vaccinated, wouldn’t there be a chance your skepticism you about vaccines would rise, and that you would switch camps?

And finally, we have the third camp. Here are the people who do not deny the benefits of certain vaccines, but are critical and do not defend the concept of vaccination at all costs, in the name of science. They believe that science is an evolving phenomenon and can bge conducted by biased individuals who may have conflictng interests, or flawed individuals who are capable of making mistakes.

I assign myself to the latter group and have decided not to be vaccinated against SARS-CoV-2, and nor will I against any other variant of it. How did I come to this decision? My intuition, which was confirmed by the advise and opinions of several medical doctors from my social circle and abroad: one endocrinologist, one gerontologist, two dermatologists, and one allergist advised against it. I made a synthesis of their arguments, and came to a well-considered conclusion that I don’t want the vaccine. There are effective treatments available if I happen to catch the disease, and I’m happy to rely on those.

My decision of not wanting the vaccine confuses first campers, and sometimes even upsets them. I’ve been accused of being an ‘anti-vaxxer’ (which I’m not) spreading ‘conspiracy theories’ (which often turn out to actually have happened – history is filled with conspiracy theories), unwilling to protect the people I love, of ignorance, or even of being the reason pandemics will continue to exist. Bizarrely, the accusers are often the same people who regularly consume meat, dairy, and eggs, and feed it to their children, thereby playing a part in the largest pandemics on earth, and the very creation of viruses they vaccinate themselves against. Let’s not overlook the fact that the majority of all viruses that harm humans, originate in animal agriculture.

Not wanting the coronavirus vaccine is my personal choice and my right – a right that, apparently, not everyone is keen to grant to others. But I believe that right is a fundamental human right, the undeniable, necessary liberty to decide what happens to one’s body, and I will exercise it while I can.