Do What You Love or Love What You Do

You ought to do what you love. You deserve it. Though likely you won't get paid for it for a long time unless you've been at it for a while.

And since you weren't born famous or fabulously wealthy, you will have to do a lot of doing of things that you don't think you love. Do these lovingly anyway. Love what you do.

When you put a lot of care into any task, no matter how small, someone will notice: You. And you will take it as a compliment.

"By golly, this Franco guy, sure does take pride in the way he sweeps up the cubbies where the cats live at the Petco! He must really be a stand-up guy!"

You'll start to form ideas about yourself. They'll be grand. You'll swell with pride thinking about this person. You may even be tempted to live up to such an idea of yourself.

I suggest you try it. It's the best medicine I have ever taken.

Social Media Companies Need Our Outrage and Hate

I saw a lament today that Twitter doesn't work to create a safe space on their community to prevent vitriol and hate. And I find it unsurprising.

Twitter is the wild west of social media. There are nearly no rules and no barriers to creating new accounts. So it's not surprising that some users feel free to heap abuse on others with no fear of penalty.

Twitter (and Facebook) have every incentive to let outrage, hate, and vitriol happen. To be an effective advertising platform (or user impression data mine) you need a system with active users. Outrage drives traffic and keeps people engaged longer and gives the outraged reactor the illusion that they have done something meaningful. (Just consider how much time you spend crafting a response to something you think is wrong compared to something uplifting and or cute. There is a reason Facebook only had a "Like" button and a reply button for ages.)

CNN and Fox News make a business of scaring the crap out of people to sell advertisements. They thrive on tragedy. Now, these are broadcast media so an analogy is going to be limited when comparing with social media. But I think the dynamic is the same if you substitute tragedy with controversy or outrage.

Right or wrong, that's my opinion on a common dynamic with social media companies. They want us to troll one another. They don't care about what kind of world they create. That's our job.

Photo Credit

# Buffalo Bill 10 | Toda a Arte e Graciosidade das Antigas C… | Flickr

Elizabeth Warren Illustrated How Power Corrupts Back in 2004

I watched a video this morning which offers an insight into the nature of politics in the USA. It is from 2004 and it's a video in which Elizabeth Warren relates a story about meeting Hillary Clinton, the First Lady, and being invited to explain her case against a bankruptcy bill. Clinton understood it and worked to oppose it. In the end, President Bill Clinton Vetoed it.

According to Warren's story, this unkillable bill came back into the senate later, introduced by Senator Hillary Clinton. We have heard that power corrupts. We have heard very cynical ideas about how politicians are only motivated by re-election. This story is a bit of evidence that it's true.

Now I'm not here to help out either of the presidential candidates. We know that no one will be "perfect" and someone has to be elected warts-and-all. Its nice to know what some of those warts are.

I do not take Hillary Clinton to be particularly different than any other politician in this regard. She is the same in kind, even if she may be different in degree. Her constituency consists of her largest donors: both in money and PR opportunities. Because that's how you play the game.

That is how Trump will play the game.

We reject ideologues because of their detachment to reality. But there is a name for a person that compromises every principle they claim they had in the name of practicality: Hypocrite. You cannot have integrity without also having some unmovable principles.

Many voters, fearing ideologues, prefer from their politicians a pragmatic consensus-building way. The pragmatist, however, has every reason to obey the incentives that the system provides. The alternative is getting eliminated from the game too soon. And before you know it, many politicians no longer have any unmovable principles except the ones that keep a politician playing the corporate donor game as long as possible.

The age of industrialism has brought mega corporations and mega government into existence as evil partners that care nothing about your Liberty. Some of the strange behavior we are seeing in the world is a rejection of unaccountable government as it is. I think Trump's campaign is an ill-conceived version of this. I think Brexit is a version of this. I think the relative success of the Sanders campaign was a version of this.

I'm likely to vote Libertarian. It's a way of refusing to play the game as presented. The world goes to hell either way unless some of us stop being so damn pragmatic and give some sense of importance to principles.

So I'm playing a longer game. A game where I attempt to elect people who will act to make government smaller no matter how short their political careers will be. We know everyone else just wants it to be larger since that expands their power (and deepens their corruption).

I will also play a longer game of putting less money on credit cards, because screw these companies if they're going to use profits to lobby the hell out of government. One man can't starve them out alone but one man can perhaps start a movement.

I reject the incentives of the credit card companies. You can keep your 2% cash back in exchange for your 3%+ transaction fees. No thanks.

Nothing in this world comes for free. And odds are that people giving things to you are taking more than they are giving. We should be wary of any incentives presented to us and at least try to understand secondary effects of our actions. A secondary effect of charging everything to a credit card is that the price of everything is increased to cover the transaction fees.

I'll have to decide how I feel about this long term but it occurs to me as an afterthought that it wouldn't be a horrible thing if someone were to create a system to allow people to pay one another on the internet completely bypassing the credit card systems. I'm not sure that bitcoin is it. Paypal certainly wasn't it.

References

Maajid Nawaz at Oslo Freedom Forum

Notes and Quotes from Maajid Nawaz at Oslo Freedom Forum:

Islamism

  • #Islamism is the desire to impose any version of Islam over society. (distinct from Islam, the faith.)
  • #Jihadism: The use of force to spread Islamism
  • There is a misdiagnosis about what we are dealing with. Today, we are dealing with it like an organized crime gang: take out the leader and deal with the gang.
  • We cannot kill/shoot/legislate our way out of this problem.
  • You cannot kill an idea. (Killing Osama bin Laden did no more to kill jihadism than killing Malala did to kill her ideas.)

...it's not new and has support within the communities

  • How on earth is it possible that 6000 born-and-raised European citizens go to join the worst terrorist group that history has ever known if not for the fact that there was level of support within the communities for this ideology?
  • This ideology has been propagated for decades in Europe.

...and we have to give ourselves permission to talk about it, even though we fear being labeled bigots

  • The solution is to give people permission to have this conversation. (The danger lies in not wanting to appear as an anti-Muslim bigot, or a racist, or an Islamophobe.)
  • The alternative to talking is violence and conflict as we have seen for the last decade and longer.

...we can challenge intolerable acts whomever we think we are, and we don't need to be Islamic scholars to do so

  • You do not need to be black to challenge racism
  • You don't have to be gay to challenge homophobia
  • So none of you should be told that you cannot condemn stoning a woman to death or throwing gays off of tall buildings or chopping off body parts.
  • You don't need to know anything about the Quran... nor the Hadith to condemn stoning a woman to death

...and now that we are free to talk about this, here are some things we need to come up with:

  • Let's work together to build these 5 things that the civil society needs to push back against this theocratic ideology: Ideas, Narratives, Symbols, Leaders, A Goal. (The violent jihadists have all of these.)

References

Here's how to talk about Islamist extremism without invading countries or pretending it doesn't exist, freestyled in 10 mins at the Oslo Freedom Forum

#Solidarity #Tyranny

A Job Hopping Pattern: Seeing Opportunity in Drudgery and Paying Attention

There are reasons to feel disillusioned with the idea of tech companies and tech startups. Unicorn status is the primary goal these days and some put their valuation ahead of every other consideration: culture, impact, sustainability, responsibility.

If I look back on my career, the companies I have worked for were all tech startups that had grown into more mature companies. They have provided me with a really comfortable living. Since college, I haven't had to wonder how I'd make my bills on any given month.

I started on desktop work in college and when I finished college that's what I was doing. It is work with a lot of drudgery. Dull work.

You might ask why anyone would take on a job that involves drudgery but that's a key feature of most of the jobs available to a person just starting out, and it's a common characteristic of every job you can get at any level.

There is a duality that ensures that any job you get involves drudgery: Without the impetus of pain sufficient to drive an employer to hire in order to offload that pain, the job would not exist at all. On the other hand, if the job were just something that needs doing and is easy, you'd have a lot of competition for the job and it would pay very little. The sweet spot is always drudgery that isn't easy.

Now I'm going to say something profoundly important: In business, the opportunity is found in the drudgery provided that you perform the work with the best attitude you can muster AND you pay attention.

Paying Attention

There are two things which deserve your particular attention in any job:

  1. How can you improve the way things are done? Can you design a system that will make any of your tasks take less labor? Can you reduce errors or improve consistency? Can you template any interactions? This is the application of systems thinking to your job.
  2. As you do your job, what other functions do you interact with at the edge of your work? Are any of them something you have been curious to learn more about? Are any of them a truer fit to your personality and interests? If so, it is possible that these edges present possible next opportunities for you to grow into.

I look at the balance of my work life since 1998 and I've generally been able to niche into the most interesting work at some edge within the space I was working. As I said, I had started out doing desktop support. And I was immediately frustrated with the complete lack transparency on the internals of Microsoft Windows. They don't give you much diagnostic info with which to troubleshoot. It was not supportable. So far as I could tell there are two reliable operations implemented by Windows: format disk and install software. (It is not surprising to me that Linux has a larger market share on the server side of things.)

At the edge of working in Desktop support was software development and network engineering. I made sure to chat up the network engineer when we did the transition to Ethernet at my desktop job. This was likely what I was going to aim for and what I spent spare time studying.

But it was really specialized. And it would take a lot of years to get there. Working at an ISP would do. And... thanks to a college connection, I was hired a Sales Engineer at an Internet Service Provider out of college. UUNET. Back in 1998, this felt like the promised land of unlimited opportunity.

What they never tell you in college is that getting the job is the beginning of the story and the struggle. And boy did I struggle. I struggled with the bureaucratic jargon of telecoms. CFA/LOA. Demarc. Routers. BGP. There was a lot that I didn't understand and couldn't quite visualize. I had the job but I wasn't the strongest performer on my team. Eventually, when the opportunity came up, I transitioned into Sales Eng group for colocation and web hosting.

I didn't start thriving as a Sales Engineer until I was selling technology for which I had a crystal clear model of the system in my head. Web hosting is pretty-much just computers and software systems connected by Ethernet. It made much more sense to me and was a much better fit for my skills and interests.

In spite of the obviously better fit, I put in a lot of effort to develop key skills so that I could be successful at this job. I did this primarily by taking full advantage of the smart people around me who knew much more than I did and were willing to share what they knew. With their coaching, I taught myself the basics of Solaris administration by formatting my SPARC desktop and learned a bunch: How to download GNU packages and compile and install them. I learned grep and awk. These are things most people learned in college but I hadn't. Better late than never.

When I noticed a pattern of repetitive work, I turned my efforts to reducing labor and turnaround times. One example of this as a Web SE was customizing Visio templates to make diagram creation for custom web hosting quicker to produce and more consistent. There were really only a half-dozen variants. Create those and pretty them up once. Thereafter you're pretty much just adding the customer name to it.

I also implemented a crude PERL/CGI application for tracking interest in feature requests to provide feedback to product management. It was good times. But every job has it's downsides. The rub on being a Sales Engineer is that the more aggressive sales people will drop everything to get before some customers and I'd have to get on a plane or train with little notice. After that happened about twice, I decided it was time to get back to fundamentals: less sales, more engineering.

I approached the manager in charge of the network design team for hosting and colo to see if I could work on his team. He knew I didn't have a perfectly filled out background but he gave me the chance anyway.

As it turns out, this is an ideal hiring situation for the manager as well. As a manager, you generally want to hire someone you have already worked with because you have some idea of the kind of work they are capable of delivering. Having a rich connection with direct co-workers means that you can get honest and frank opinions on a person's character and willingness to invest and learn. It's pretty low risk compared to hiring an unknown from outside.

The Opportunity of Drudgery

Nearly all of my job transitions have been new niches at the edge of my previous jobs. In all of my jobs, I did not do well at them until I developed enough new skills that I was able to implement new systems to deal with the dull work.

I am beginning to suspect that there is something universal in this that can applied to developing a business as well. I have seen at least one school that teaches an entrepreneurial pattern that involves talking to business owners, coming to understand their problems, developing a wireframe/prototype, and enrolling the customer to pay for it as you develop it.

Here's what I notice: the methodology I just described takes full advantage of the type of work ethic I described above in the Paying Attention section. Only, instead of systematizing your own work, you start by getting in touch with people and probing them to describe the kinds of dull work or pain points they have so that you can systematize their problems into a software solution.

This is interesting for me to consider. It's something I could visualize for myself (and I imagine this is true for a lot of the people I know). I can imagine what gaps I would need to fill in my skillset to make it happen. Getting in front of potential clients isn't something into which many Engineer/Technician types have invested sufficient time.

I love this aspect of being able to visualize a potential future: Things which seem impossibly far, only have the chance to transition to possibly far when you start to map the way there.

I also love that you can do a lot of good by focusing on dull work. It's easy to want a job that is comfortable. And it's easy (or at least, common) to do that job without trying to improve the way that it's done. What's less easy and more rewarding is to develop new ways to get the job done that reduce labor, that improve delivery time, or consistency, or with fewer errors.

Once again: In business, the opportunity is found in the drudgery provided that you perform the work with the best attitude you can muster AND you pay attention.

Inspiration

I think I could love the idea of a small software company that wasn't trying to become a Unicorn. It would solve a specific kind problem for a number of clients and would be able to function even if we didn't all work all the time.

This post was inspired when I read "Million Dollar Products" by Kyle Neath. It gives me a tiny bit of hope and bit of being able to imagine a future tech company that I start with friends so that we can do something meaningful.

Bicycle Maintenance and Loss of Sleep to Smoke Detectors

This weekend I lost a bit of sleep to some false alarms from the smoke detectors in the house. They went off a 0400 two nights ago.

I decided I'd head to the Home Depot to replace them today. And I decided I would bicycle. Get some exercise.

My bicycle has been locked to the front patio for about 2 years and has a lot of rust and pollen on it. The tires were both flat. Every surface was covered in grime.

I set to cleaning it. Water and paper towels for most of the work. I used the only pump I have: a powered compressor that runs off of my car's 12V system. I used an old can of chain wax that Liz had from motorcycling to lubricate the chain and sprockets.

My bicycle now looks clean and is definitely still servicable. (I wish I had taken before/after pictures. Something I will have to remember for next time.)

I am proud of getting my bicycle in working order once again. It's a tiny bit of practice of living up to my renaissance ideal of becoming skilled in as many areas as I can.

At the Home Depot, I selected a replacement Smoke detector similar to the i2040 model that I had just removed. The Kidde FireX p12040 looks substantially similar but uses photoelectric sensing rather than ionization. To my delight, I was able to use the existing mounts and harnesses.

Hopefully this will reduce the number of false alarms, for a while at least.

I'm also proud that I did not just order something from Amazon this time. I suspect I will be doing this less and less as I try to re-orient my life from being a worker and consumer toward the life of a polymath craftsman.

Beware of Deals: Altucher Newsletter Silent Auto Renewal

Found today while looking at my credit card bill: a $79 charge to jamesaltucher.com.

It apparently came from what I thought was a $20 deal I purchased on AppSumo. And thanks to this deal, I am have decided that I can no longer trust AppSumo or Altucher.

I have searched my inbox and I see no e-mail from Altucher indicating pending renewal, nor that a renewal charge has occurred. This is strange, because they have my e-mail address.

This is a huge breach of trust and transparency by Altucher. This is a moral equivalent of 1-900 number. It is an underhanded tactic of getting monthly-recurring charges from a lot of people.

Question to James: Do you know this is going on? Do you care what happens in your name? Do you know that you're a crook if you're doing this on purpose hoping that people just forget they're paying you yearly?

I have written Altucher's customer service requesting a refund and cancellation of my account. On Monday, I intend to dispute the charges with my credit card if I haven't heard back from their customer service. I'll update with status here on the outcome.

Status

6/27/2016 - I have received a prompt response and I can confirm they have a very liberal refund policy, which I appreciate.

Thank you for contacting Choose Yourself Media customer support.

In line with our no-questions asked guarantee, your subscription to The Altucher Report has been cancelled and we have processed your $79 refund. Please allow 5-7 business days for the payment to show in your account.

Complex and Simple: Immigration and Economy

As we consider the referendum in the UK on whether to leave the European Union, let's consider a couple of definitions:

Definitions

Complex, adjective

  1. composed of many interconnected parts; compound; composite: a complex highway system.
  2. characterized by a very complicated or involved arrangement of parts, units, etc.: complex machinery

1: adjective 1. composed of many interconnected parts; compound; composite: a complex highway system. 2. characterized by a very complicated or involved arrangement of parts, units, etc.: complex machinery.

Simple, adjective

  1. easy to understand, deal with, use, etc.: a simple matter; simple tools
  2. not elaborate or artificial; plain: a simple style
  3. not ornate or luxurious; unadorned: a simple gown
  4. unaffected; unassuming; modest: a simple manner
  5. not complicated: a simple design
  6. not complex or compound; single.

As an Engineer, looking at things as systems, my mind hones in on interconnectedness. Simple means independent and not interconnected. And Complex denotes interconnected and intertwined.

Immigration and Economy: Intertwined

Some people assert that the Brexit referendum is about immigration and xenophobia, not economics:

Others make strong arguments that it's about the economy and sovereignty.

I observe that I couldn't find any pure articles containing only economic arguments for leaving. Thus, I suspect that the voices talking about economic reasons tend to be the more rational side of this debate.

Also found on the side of the discussion in favor of leaving, are charicatures of xenophobic white people written by their detractors. I have no opinion on whether this is true, who is right, and who is wrong.

I tend to notice the complexity of the discussion. Economics and immigration will always be complex/intertwined so long as you have a Welfare State. With a welfare state in place, there isn't a way to talk about immigration that doesn't include consideration for people who intend to immigrate and to contribute nothing to the society.

Even if used your imagination to remove the welfare state from the picture completely, for example by denying welfare benefits to new immigrants, the governemnt would still have a lot to figure out. For consideration: what happens to an immigrant fails to thrive? Homeless people, whether citizens or not, tend to become something the government has to deal with.

Do we expect that immigrants that left everything behind are able to stand up and trive immediately in a country where they may not speak the language? It's not likely. I can tell you for certain that my family benefitted from foodstamp programs for some part of the time my parents were trying to figure out their new life in America after fleeing a Vietnam that had recently fallen to the communists.

My little thought experiment suggests to me that immigration is untetherable from economics no matter how we slice it. Because being in a country and trying to live means being an actor in the economy. But that doesn't mean that a Welfare State has no role in xenophobia. I still maintain that it makes the situation worse.

Selection for Desirable Traits

The first chapters of Ender in Exile, by Orson Scott Card include an e-mail epigraph discussing trait selection in space colonization efforts:

"...as history shows us, when colonization is voluntary, people will self-select better than any system.

It's like those foolish attempts to control immigration to America based on the traits that were deemed desirable, when in fact the only trait that defines Americans historically us 'descended from somebody willing to give up everything to live there'...

Willingness is the single most important test..."

Contrast that with this visual:

"Make America White Again," says the billboard of a restaurant-owner in Tenessee which lays bare the entitled attitudes of some people who don't seem to understand this: just because you were lucky enough to be born on the right bit of soil doesn't make you any more deserving to be here than a person that left everything they owned behind for a chance to live in freedom. You may have a right to be here, but whether you morally deserve it or not is up to you (and we are not impressed).

The essence of the United States of America ought to be the spirit that created it: Liberty. We couldn't have it where we were born so we came here to bring it into existence.

The people who fight tooth-and-nail to get here deserve a chance to try to make their lives work here. What if we let in anyone who wanted to come from anywhere so long as they didn't come here to be a drain? I think this would be easier if we didn't try to make the government into this entity that is supposed to take care of us all.

The government cannot simultaneously be the protector of liberty and the coercive tax-collector for handouts. Giving euphemistic names such as "social contract" and "social safety net" doesn't change the coercive nature of it. You don't pay taxes, you go to jail. You don't like the recent tax hikes? Pay for a lobbyist.

This isn't the essence of America. It is a perversion of it.

So what would be more consistent? Essentialize the government to the protection of rights and minimal administration. Move ALL of the welfare programs into private not-for-profit concerns that are voluntarily funded.

Then maybe, we would have a shot at being able to say to the world with a straight face:

“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me:
I lift my lamp beside the golden door.”

Try reading that aloud, by the way. They are some powerful words.

Tyranny: "cruel and oppressive government or rule."

Tyranny:

"cruel and oppressive government or rule."

The opposite of a "Live and Let Live" philosophy is one of tyranny. Tyrants rarely include "tyrant" in their self-conception. They think they are doing good by changing the world according to some ideal. But neither "the greater good" nor some idea of "the will of God" transforms tyranny into liberty. Oppression can never be individual freedom.

When we consider the maxim that "the road to hell is paved with good intentions", we should remember that both of the justifications itemized above are often used to force others to behave in certain ways. Entire countries have become enslaved by regimes expounding these exact justifications.

Organized religion tends toward tyranny unless specific effort is made to banish it. (Incidentally, this is true of organized government). You can see the difference between the ones that make the effort and the ones that do not. Consider the stark difference of modern day Buddhism as compared to the Roman Catholic Church of the middle ages.

Political Islam, also known as Islamism, makes no effort to banish tyranny. Neither does certain variants of American Christianity. They are the forward deployments of the forces of tyranny.

They deserve our rebuke and our material opposition. These are the enemies of liberty until they work to banish every vestige of Tyranny from their ethos.

s/Islam Is (No){0,1} Religion of Peace/Stop Arguing About What Islam Is/

If you've read my thoughts on the meaninglessness of labels such as ‪#‎Islam‬, you can see through the fog of war: Islam isn't one big monolithic thing and to say "Islam means Peace" is a meaningless subterfuge about nothing in particular.

Because of my unusual ideas about labels, I find a title such as Gay Muslim: Islam Is No Religion of Peace to be guilty of inviting the wrong kind of conversation. The article is a good read, by the way. More reinforcement that Islam is a manifold of subcultures trying to find their way in the world. But the gay subculture stands in stark contrast to outsider notions of how conservative the religion looks on average.

The article also reinforces this: Ideas Kill. Not directly, but by the people who act because they are emboldened by them. Self-loathing and mortal sin, combined with a few carefully placed notions of what it takes to achieve redemption seems to be particularly deadly in consequence.

It still comes down to this for me. If I view adoption of some dangerous ideas as a problem inherent with Islam, I feel like there's some panel I have to take it to for approval. I have no standing to challenge Islam nor any standing to ask Muslims to reject things they consider their identity. No way in. Access denied.

But I don't view it like that. My view is that there are bad ideas in the Muslim zeitgeist and some that have demonstrably bad outcomes. And we don't have to ask people to reject their identities to challenge some of their notions. Identities can be revised and refined and essentialized. If enough people who call themselves Muslims reject an idea, value, or custom, then the definition of muslim changes. End of story.

Now... If we as non-Muslims are moved to try to take down the bad ideas, "Us. Vs. Them" isn't going to work.

How do we influence the other whom we hold in judgment?

Answer: We don't even try. Judgment is final.

But, say instead... I view my brother as mistaken: overtaken by a bad idea that he is acting to perpetuate and spread... do I then see an opportunity to share a different way of seeing things? Possibilities abound.

References

Sects and Violence — Francis Luong

Gay Muslim: Islam Is No Religion of Peace - The Daily Beast

Sects and Violence

I want to talk today about what "Islam" means. I am not a muslim and I am a complete outsider. I see danger in some ideas associated with Islam and beauty in some of the ideas. I see people saying Islam is peace. And I see mobs and violence associated with it. And so I think it's long overdue to ask whether we are all referring to the same thing when we refer to "Islam".

From what I can see, Islam means peace to most Muslims I know. And to some Muslims, it means violence visited upon other people for various different reasons: some political, some moral, always opportunistic, and always justified by some grandiose vision (a story). And the latter part is a bit sticky since the spectacle and tragedy creates a more vivid impression in the mind than the many Muslim neighbors we know and work with.

Let's Talk About Sects, Baby

Let me tell you about a trick of the human mind. It is a tendency for non-Muslims to think about Islam as one enormous monolith with complete homogeneity of belief and action. But Muslims are 1.6 Billion+ in number. And the idea of one great Islam doesn't withstand scrutiny.

Every religious or philosophical movement has within it a manifold of sects. People just can't seem to agree on things. Take any belief system and you can break it down to subgroups based on the disagreements.

To provide specific examples, I have collected here an accounting of the major religions I could think of and their sub-sects scraped from Wikipedia:

  • Chrisitanity: Catholic, Orthodox, Protestant, Evangelical,...
  • Judaism: Rabinnic, Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, Humanistic,...
  • Hinduism: Vaishnavism, Shaivism, Shaktism, Smartism,...
  • Buddhism: Therevada, Mahayana, Vajrayana, Zen,...

And as for Islam? Sunni, Shia, Sufi, Salafi, Wahhabi,...

There are no incidents of complete uniform belief within any belief system. Humans are messy, sloppy creatures subject to entropy. Our brains are meat-machines driven by huge variations in chemistry. Fuzzy logic? check. Non-logical leaps? check. Context-dropping? check. Mistakes of thinking? check. Hormone-driven teenagers? check.

You know why clear thinking is beautiful when you hear it? Because it is rare. Reason is slow and requires discipline and it is always impressive to hear an idea that is simple and clear and true.

Aside: Beware of Mob Think

There is a sort of situation worth mentioning where uniformity does arise... where an idea can become so loud that it drowns out other ideas. When human beings are in a mob driven by fear and anger whipped into a frenzy, we have shown ourselves to be capable of frighteningly uniform non-thinking. The Rwandan genocide comes to mind. Nazi Germany comes to mind.

People are capable of their ugliest actions when they blindly react rather than stepping back and thinking about things rationally, and acting accordingly. And, in the case of Rwanda and Nazi Germany, both resulted in the creation of cultures that slaughtered unimaginable numbers.

Labels Fail Us

Back to the main point. The labels: Islam. Muslim.

There is a visual that Sam Harris mentioned in his chat with Neil Tyson about what a Christian imagines when they find out that a person can be painted with the term "Atheist":

they think they know a lot about you based on your admission that you are an atheist... It's almost like you're in a debate with someone and they draw the police crime scene outline of a dead body on the sidewalk and you just walk up and lie down in it... that you just conform perfectly to their expectations of how clueless you must be of their context.

Don't we do this with "Islam"... just a little? We imagine Islam as one thing. We imagine Muslims as one people who conform perfectly to some expectation.

The labels fail Muslims and the labels fail non-Muslims alike. The labels expose non-Muslims to the mistake of thinking in "Us vs. Them" terms with Muslims as the other. And the labels expose Muslims to taking a defensive posture where "We are under attack" by an unjust world who will not accept them. The labels expose Muslims to having their fear and frustrations manipulated.

But these are just stories and they are divisive ones. These are the ones that deliver us into the hands of Neo-fascists. And we don't want those hands anywhere near us so it's time to abandon these stories, which divide us.

image.jpg

Beyond Us Vs. Them

We need some new narratives to give us hope and something to strive for.

Instead of Us vs. Them... What if we just thought of this whole mess as a bunch of people with a bunch of mixed-up ideas and some of them are poison?

Rather than considering Islam as one set of ideas interpretable only one way, we can remember that ideas are subject to fashion trends. They are subject to trending upward or downward at any given point in time.

Here are ideas I would love to see trend upward:

  • Non-Muslims reflect and realize that Muslims are our neighbors and friends and co-workers. Most of them want to live their lives and raise their families. We act accordingly. We love our neighbors.
  • The world notices that Muslims have their versions of Goebbels and Hitler. And the world will need to put these tyrants down in exactly the same way: total war ending in unconditional surrender. This is the only way to defeat evil that has decided to wage war: Force met with overwhelming force.
  • Muslims embrace freedom of speech and dissent by all, especially other Muslims, and Non-Muslims unilaterally choose to stop disrespecting Muhammad because it's nearly always a gimmicky cheap shot that is not doing anybody any good.
  • Muslims come out in support of liberal values. We will support and encourage these people because they have right on their side. Further, we work to encourage the conservatives among Muslims to respect the rights of all human beings alike (male, female, gay, straight), just as we do with non-Muslim conservatives. Live and let live becomes the universal norm.
  • "Islam means peace" becomes a statement of intention... a movement and a mantra owned by Muslims: they are defiant, vocal, and visible movement of the majority.
  • Secularism: All people of all religions work to keep their religions separate from the state. There are no state religions. Just respect and protection of rights for all beliefs and creeds.

The only way we can do this is to see the bigger "Us". We, as humans, need to see Universal principles describing fundamental rights. In other words: the conditions under which we are able to live with one another.

We don't need to be innovators who must define fundamental rights for the first time. We have the shoulders of giants to stand on. But as I said, ideas are subject to fashion and we do have to keep these ideas trending upward. It's constant upkeep... yes. There is no magic bullet to make humans respect rights for all time.

But it's good work if you can get it. And as always... Discipline Equals Freedom.

Speaking Softly About Rape

A woman has been raped. Everyone knows the name of the assailant: Brock Turner. And the discussion following has been touching and shocking all at the same time.

What follows are my thoughts about what I have seen online.

In case anything I write below creates a doubt, and I wouldn't write that unless I have seen some serious grandstanding and moralizing (and un-friendings) going on, lets establish some of my positions:

  • Brock Turner is a rapist and he should be going to prison for as long as the law permits.
  • The fact that the victim got so drunk that she became unconscious doesn't justify any part of his despicable action, no matter how many minutes were involved.
  • The Victim deserves no shame at all for what happened.

Okay... let's talk about this.

A Measured Voice

One voice that is measured is the voice of the victim, who has elected not to have her name splattered all over the media. I respect that decision. I'll humanize her by calling her "Victoria".

I have read the full text of Victoria's statement to the court and to her assailant. I was moved by its graphic visuals of the scene in the hospital following her shocking awakening to discover that her head was strapped to a gurney and she had no idea where she was or why she had pine needles in her hair. What followed was the alienating indignity of having her body further probed for documentation.

And as if all of that isn't enough, she has to deal with the aftermath of all of this in her head. And she has to figure out how to continue living her life without breaking down and without flying into a rage. And she and her boyfriend have to deal with an alien new reality.

When it comes down to it, there is no price that can be paid to settle this debt by the rapist, Brock Turner. There's no way to get square again. And frankly, he owes her a serious apology and one that is not diluted by the long filibuster that is in his full statement.

What You Are Not Permitted to Mention

I read the Victoria's statement and I think I "get it". I think she used every bit of her will to summon love in her heart to have written so patiently. I am moved and inspired to the full possibilities of the best version of myself.

But then I open the BookFace and I find I am assaulted repeatedly by reposts and words from people I know which seek to impose constraints upon what we are allowed to say aloud and what certain words mean. It's feels like I am being shouted down when I haven't even said anything.

And the conclusion I am left with is that I am someone who doesn't "get it".

We are apparently not allowed to talk about how it is inadvisable to get drunk. Don't even think about it, the assailant named it as the primary contributing factor for him. The fact of a woman being drunk, even to the point of passing out, is not justification for rape, says practically everyone knowing fully that they have the truth on their side.

I don't disagree but that doesn't mean we aren't talking past one another here. If we consider the many factors that are ingredients in this terrible, horrible, unspeakable incident there are two that things that specific people could have done differently that would have changed the situation:

  • Brock Turner could have acted like a gentleman
  • Victoria could have consumed less (or no) inebriating substance

One might be tempted to make the case that I am a heartless and cruel human being who is giving moral shelter to the assailant and re-victimizing the victim if I mention the second point.

But if there are multiple factors that could have been changed to nudge the situation, why not permit ourselves to reconsider them all? After all, any incident is a function of its contributing factors.

This is an idea that is hammered in motorcycle safety class. They present to you multiple scenarios where a crash occurs, and in each one you are required to identify the reasons a crash occurred. The object lesson is that most crashes happen because of a complex of reasons and rarely because of one single cause.

I think we are doing a disservice to Victoria and to this entire discussion if we choose to ignore that "opportunity" is a contributing factor to crime. And the rapist Brock Turner would have had much less opportunity when faced with a sober woman with her full wits about her, resisting with everything she had.

I wish so much for her that she could have resisted. And for this reason, I wish that people didn't drink when they party.

I don't think it justifies Brock Turner's act of rape to say that. I don't think it has to mean that we hold him with any less blame.

AN EDUCATION CAMPAIGN!!!!!

But as you can see, I have to speak very carefully in order to say that.

There is something going on in the broader culture around rape. I would call it a campaign to educate except for the sensation of being SHOUTED DOWN BY PEOPLE YELLING AT THE TOP OF THEIR LUNGS!!!

From what I can gather, the shouting is way of reacting meaningfully in the aftermath of a senseless tragedy that we do not wish to compound by minimizing the victim's choices as well. The shouting is a ham-fisted attempt at unequivocal expression of solidarity with Victoria and vocal opposition to the tendency to blame the victim and to show them less support than they deserve.

I think the motivation is noble but the methods are off-putting.

It feels to me like we are trying so hard to control the thoughts of the people around us. We are telling the others around us what to think, and in what exact words. And more importantly, we are making decisions about what must NEVER be thought or said following a rape incident and that we will bring shame down upon anyone who dares to use the forbidden words.

Well, I have to be honest: I shut down when I read words that come on too strong with the thought policing and shaming. And I don't feel good about these interactions. I think that online discussion has the capacity to make us better when we are able to put our ideas together. But it's not the case when faced with this ugly feeling of being shouted down. It isn't the online experience I want to have and it's probably not what you're after either.

Well... Part of the beauty of our age is that we each have our own space to write what we notice. We all have the chance to write the Internet we would like to read. And, hopefully I have written this without shouting and without giving moral cover to Turner.

Speaking Softly

Please take this to heart: When we say things softly and with a heart full of love, we can trust that we will be heard.

We have a term for the experience of reading or hearing something that makes sense: it "resonates". I like to visualize the words echoing softly in the heart and mind of the reader/listener.

We can choose unilateral disarmament. We can choose to speak softly and trust the echoes to make sensible new ideas a part of the way we think and live. And maybe if we do this consistently, we will finally get to have the online experience we desire: sharing ideas, connecting people, and changing things for the better.

Think Bigger

To Victoria

I hear you. I am so sorry for what has happened to you. And, I hope you know that you have touched me with your strength and your compassion.

You are connecting people and changing things for the better. Thank you.

You CAN Choose Your Family

In a recent conversation with friends I heard that you can't choose your family. Strange thing is... I have chosen them.

In my typical know-it-all manner, I shared this thought. My own peculiar history has allowed me the privilege of choosing them: I am the prodigal son in my family. I un-chose them and barely showed up for years and years. I pretty much missed out on the infant years for my niece, Chloe.

I regret missing that time but I am pretty sure it was something that had to happen. In my post-college days, I had a lot of blame for my dad, and I didn't like pressure from my family. I had bad boundaries until I took responsibility for my life and shed any notion that anyone was to blame for anything from here on out.

Taking responsibility for yourself means caring more about what you have chosen than what others think of it. It means acting based on your choice rather than pressure from others. It means recognizing that when others speak up to share their opinions out of concern, that you can listen without having to do anything about it.

You never need to decide or do anything right away. Urgency is often an illusion. So is authority.

There is freedom in knowing that you do not have to do anything and that you don't have to be concerned with what others think of you. Ironically, one of the freedoms is that you can choose to care what they think of you and to enjoy it. Also, you can choose to care about them and put the focus on all of the things that you admire of them and forgive the areas where they might need to grow. This is what I mean when I say I have chosen my family.

Most people don't make an active choice in regards to their family. They act out of resentment that they didn't have a choice in the matter of which people they grew up with and, if the disagreement is acrimonious, they opt-out. In America, it's your right to do so.

What we may not realize is that we can also opt-in any time we want to whatever extent we want. Contrary to conventional wisdom, We are not our brother's keeper, but we have the option to be if we choose. Or we can choose merely to be our brother's fellow traveler. If we're lucky, we will get to be our brother's friend.

I recognize now that we don't have to go through all of the estrangement of becoming a prodigal son to choose our families. I did so because I had some growing to do and it was easier to take responsibility when I thought no one would be there to catch me if I fell. I had to learn to stand on my own by doing it.

I am grateful that my brothers and sisters didn't hold it against me that I was a stranger for so long. Being persistent but not pushy, they welcomed me back whenever I saw them and I eventually I started showing up consistently and I am so much the richer for it.

They are part of nearly every week of my life now. I get to visit with them every Sunday. I get to sing with my nieces and chase the nephews around. We eat great food, usually cooked by one of my brothers. We tell stories and laugh.

We have all chosen one another, even though we grew up together and it was someone else's choice to unite us.

We have chosen to unite ourselves.

Neil Tyson on Not Fighting in the Trenches on Sam Harris Podcast

Theme

I try to take the high road. I'm not interested in fighting in the trenches.

My notes from a fascinating chat between Neil DeGrasse Tyson and Sam Harris. I was struck with Tyson's extreme discipline for focusing on his fundamentals of education and finding playful ways to talk about science in the context of things people already care about (pop culture).

He's a man who has decided what he wants his contribution to be and seems really skilled at avoiding the rest of the BS. Following are notes that I took from a second listen to the podcast.

Notes

  • Tyson: People care about science when it is playfully folded into things they already care about
  • Harris: The boundary between communicating science to the public and doing science in the act of thinking out loud about data is very thin, if it exists at all

Tyson

  • Scientific discoveries become public interest. Examples: "Big Bang", "Black Hole" - official terms that are strings of single syllable words to describe complex phenomena that become part of the lexicon. Fun for the public to follow. The idea is graspable because the words don't get in the way.
  • I was struck with how Tyson cuts through the bull and avoids controversy. "Call a climate expert. Don't call me.". I don't occupy any platform.
  • Skeptic vs. Denier defined: Skeptic: doubts claim and convinced by evidence. Denier: doubts claim and doubts evidence.
  • You don't see me debating people. I'd rather just educate them in the first place so that the debate isn't even necessary.

Tyson: Platforms and Training the Electorate

  • Tyson's fundamental position: There are objective truths out there that you ought to know about and I as an educator have a duty to alert you to those objective truths. What you do politically in the face of those truths is your business.
  • Defines someone with a "platform" as: trying to get people to see the world that they do. Including politically.
  • I never say anything against a politician. Why? Because they have electorates that support them.
  • My target is the population that are following statements that are objectively false. I see it as my duty to train the electorate how think about this information and once they are trained they can do what they want.
  • As an educator, it is a task to educate people so that they can judge what is true and what is not.
  • Harris: You're preserving your effectiveness as a communicator and educator. (Tyson: yes, that's an accurate statement)

Tyson on Religion/Politics

  • Your religion is a belief system and does not cue off of objective truths. Otherwise we would call it science. It's your right to hold religious beliefs.
  • However... Governmental Decision... Laws need to be secular in a country that preserves religious freedom.

Harris: Problem with Atheism

  • Atheism defines itself in opposition: We don't call ourselves "non-astrologers". And if it became ascendant, we would talk about reason, evidence, common sense, and science to neutralize those claims without ever defining ourselves in opposition to astrology
  • Atheism as a term has no philosophical content

Tyson on Label Atheist

  • I don't do anything to dodge the term
  • if you require that I give myself a label... closest is "agnostic".
  • would rather have no label at all
  • label is an intellectually lazy way to assert you know more about someone than you actually know and therefore don't have to engage them in conversation.
  • Oh you're an atheist? And bam, in comes a whole portfolio of expectations on what you will say, what your behaviors and attitudes are...
  • dictionary definition is irrelevant... dictionary does not define words, but rather describes them as they have come into meaning
  • there is conduct that [outspoken atheists] exhibit that I do not... this captures the sense of what atheist is defined by those most visible
  • interesting: "Goodbye" an historical abbreviation of "God be with you.".
  • Uses AD/BC vs. CE/BCE.

  • Until he no longer hears, "I thought you were an atheist"... no labels.

  • Harris interjects with this insightful and humorous assessment: Atheist given meaning mostly in circles of religious dogmatists... they think they know a lot about you based on your admission that you are an atheist... It's almost like you're in a debate with someone and they draw the police crime scene outline of a dead body on the sidewalk and you just walk up and lie down in it... that you just conform perfectly to their expectations of how clueless you must be of their context.

References

Neil deGrasse Tyson (@neiltyson) | Twitter

The Impossibility of Saying Goodbye To The Dying (and Shrine Focus, and Soul Searching)

On Friday evening, I got home from a short road trip to New York and Liz needed to talk about Canobeans, her 20-year old cat. Canobeans had pretty much stopped eating, was getting dehydrated, and was having trouble with using the litter box. We made the decision to schedule with Lap of Love to have her euthanized because her health was accelerating downhill.

Saturday wasn't a blur for me but it still went much too quickly. The Vet from Lap of Love was scheduled for 1pm. I doted on Canobeans with nearly every free moment before 1pm taking breaks here and there. I brushed her. I talked to her. I fed her water. I told her how much we loved her and what a gift she was to us.

I didn't say goodbye. It's just too hard and too sad. I'd fall to pieces. Maybe that would have been appropriate.

What Do You Do In the Final Moments?

Rest well, Canobeans.

What the heck can you do you make final moments in life feel like they are enough? I'm not sure that it can be achieved.

In the final moments, when you are trying your best to say and show the depth of your love and loss, nearly everything you do is symbolic. Everything you do feels totally futile. Your gestures can never make up for the fact that there will never again on this earth be what we had together. It's like trying to pay a sort of life-debt that can never be repaid.

But you do it anyway. You stop assessing and stay in the moment. You laugh when you can. You remember to breathe when your body forgets to do it for you.

While Canobeans was still alive, I focused on doing things she enjoyed so that she could know that we loved her.

Now that she is gone, it helps for me to do small gestures to express my gratitude for how much richer my life was because I had this other being to care for and to enjoy.

A Shrine as A Focus

A Shrine

Liz and I setup this shrine. It started with just flowers... an impulse buy at the store. And we put them in a vase in the bedroom, where Canobeans spent the last year. I added candles, and a cat toy. Liz put her paw print mold next to everything. And then we picked some photos to print and stuck them in frames. And we arranged it all on a very small table.

We light candles when they go out. They are wonderful to look at, day or night. A small fire that requires some care to keep it burning from time to time. This is good catharsis for us. Candle light is a wonderful focus for just sitting and being. For just accepting that what is, is.

A struggle that is particular to me in grieving is that the feeling of the person/cat I just lost slips away from me. It's not that I want to hold on and never let go. But I don't want to just "get on with my life" either. I want to keep a space for pondering and remembering. This is a good time for soul-searching and thinking about life. I am not looking to rush it along.

The ritual of keeping the candles going and pausing at this little shrine helps me to remember. It gives me a bit of space in my very-busy head. I think it's because I would have to do all of this remembering in my head if we didn't have the shrine but now that we have set it up it makes it easier for us because we don't have to keep it all in our heads and hearts. We can look upon our love and loss from the outside rather than only gazing inward.

In The Aftermath, Soul Searching Questions Abound

Getting space in my head is crucial right now also because another struggle I face are the manifold questions that arise in the aftermath of putting a pet to rest. Soul-searching questions are inevitable. Try as I might to trust our decisions, I find that I revisit the questions again and again and I have to justify that what I did was the right choice. All of the reasons are there, but getting to an alignment between feeling and reason isn't something I can force. It takes time. I have to trust that too.

I find myself thinking about everything that matters just before death and the things that matter in the aftermath. All that matters is that there was love. And all love is unique and beautiful and fleeting. Sometimes love is just brushing hair or fur. Sometimes love is cleaning poop off of something that shouldn't have poop on it. For certain, love is missing something/someone you are used to interacting with daily.

I find myself pondering eternity. The great unponderable. A sensation of being human is that our existence feels continuous and eternal: All I know is that I have always been and it feels like I shall always be. It is alien to imagine that I will not exist some day. I don't believe in an afterlife but sometimes it's a "pretty little lie". Either way there is good news: Either I am wrong and will continue on, or I am right that I will no longer exist and I probably won't know it anyway.

If I'm wrong I hope I get to see Canobeans and all of my loved ones again some day.

Unplugging All The Things Is Just The First Step

The things we used to be able to get away from by unplugging them now all have batteries so we will need to plan to run those down as well to get away from the din and the distractions.

Playing the Long Game: Attacking Liberty's Antagonists

One of the key takeaways from reading The Aristotle Adventure is that people tend to suppress ideas that they find threatening. And the forms that the threats take vary in subtlety and violence.

  • Direct physical threats to books are rare.
  • Physical threats to people by mobs, assassins, and inquisitors was much more common
  • Other forms of threats included: ostracism, ex-communication, denial of access to books (this is back before public libraries) and other scholars, loss of income, banishment, and intereference with careers.

In the 1800 years that the works of Aristotle had to survive, they had to be copied by hand again and again in order to do so. The printing press was not invented by Johannes Gutenberg until 1450. Before this, copying was a tedius, error-prone, and expensive process. As a result, the subtle challenges listed above present severe existential threats to a body of work.

Many of the tactics listed above are archaic. The Catholic church of current day doesn't have the pervasive influence on government that in the days of monarchy based on the "divine right of kings," following fall of the Roman empire through the Renaissance and the Scientific revolution.

Of the subtler tactics listed in the final bullet, many of these can still be employed in our current day and age in university settings, and government research institutions, and the think tanks funded by the government. (I'd say they could also be employed in corporations, but most corporations are pragmatic rather than ideological). Ostracism, loss of income, and intereference with career are all real threats that can be used against a person that a bully wants to silence. This helps to silence one speaker but The Internet has made it harder than ever to silence someone completely. Although I suspect that most of us feel pretty frustrated with how to make oneself heard in all of the noise.

In spite of how hard it is to be silenced completely, the work to maintain the current state of liberty is still crucial. We must fight to keep what we have attained by aggressively exposing and denouncing those who would hack at the support pillars of free speech.

We can also fight by choosing better stewards for the machinery which protects our liberty. The source of many attacks on freedom of speech come directly from government.

The administrators of government have unique privileges to arrest people, tax them, and drag them down with legal or regulatory procedures. They have many levers of intimidation. They can do so for seemingly arbitrary reasons. This is why we want the most long-sighted stewards that are willing to take the job making leadership decisions in our governments.

Government shouldn't just be a job with prestige. It should be a sacred trust.

This is also why we do not want anyone with a tactical ideological agenda in power. A tactical ideological agenda can come from religious sources but can also originate from any kind of pseudo-scientific notion that attempts to survive challenge by any means other than reason. For the latter, imagine a new economic order or social justice agenda.

(side note: I'm all for efforts to connect people and foster acts of kindness, but I prefer these to be organized independent of the government and without government funding)

What I'm saying in short is that to vote "on the issues", for a candidate whom will do whatever it takes to get some thing done is to play a dangerous game with a system of safeguards which is responsible for protecting us all from the ugliest and most opportunistic power mongers.

We should be voting on fundamentals. This will do the most to protect the foundation of our liberty: the freedom to hold an idea, to express it, and to act upon it so long as you do not violate the rights of another.

Here is the guidance from the founding fathers as I understand it in simple fundamentals: Limit the exercise of government power to ensure the maxiumum liberty of choice and action to each person.

Although NONE of the top 3 Presidential candidates are exponents of this kind of restraint, this is what we need to look for and support even if they belong to a third party. It's time to fire the two largest political parties in the USA. They do not care about liberty.

References

Many of these notes are from The Aristotle Adventure, by Burgess Laughlin.

News is Not Information And Liberty Needs Church/State Separation

It's easy to view #muslims as a monolithic other. But 1-billion plus others is a lot of people.

Agreement is Rare

I want to take us into a thought experiment in the lives we know best... our own. Consider any ism that you have ever been a part of. Libertarianism, Vegetarianism, Christianity-ism.

Now take a random sample set of yourself and any 1 or 2 other people whom you can think of that have self-identified under that label.

Then ask yourself the question: "did we agree on everything that fell under the principles of that ism? Did we agree on how those principles translate into action?"

No matter what ism, you will not find 100% agreement on principles and implications. The more people you add, the lower the overlapping level of agreement in the massive venn-diagram.

One Billion Ideological Carbon Copies?

How then does this apply to a billion such people? It becomes impossible to believe that they see exactly the same things as true and important and worthy of action. Except for the sorts of things that most human beings have in common:

  • we want to live our lives
  • we look out for the well-being of those we care about

We, as non-muslims, can take a moment to fully take in the heterogenity of the full body of muslims. Not all of them will be conservative or bigotted or sexist. Some of them may not even care about politics: live and let live.

Ideas come and go in perpetual motion and there is constant change on which ones are fashionable.

Our mainstream media do a bad job of representing reality in a statistically correct way. Anything that gets reported on seems to be statistically prevalent to our easily-fooled psyches. People who want to just live their lives are not news. People getting along with one another is not news.

We have this conception that "news" is information. And while this is true, as far as statistical impressions go, it is total misinformation.

Regardless, I'd like to take heart in the news story listed below under References (1), "Tunisian Islamists Ennahda move to separate politics, religion".

The separation of church and state is a fundamental principle with huge implications to liberty. Every innovation, including the ones made in the realm of liberty, begins as heresy against the mainstream fashion that came before. Heresy is attacked with prejudice by any state that is involved in policing your ideas.

We must support the freedom to express ideas and therefore we must support any effort no matter how small toward states and political movements that compose themselves as independent of religion. We must support secular politics and we must denounce and resist any effort to marry state with religion as an attack upon our lives and liberty.

So what can we do?

People in the mainstream media can certainly do something: stop putting forward the loud obnoxious conservative bigot muslims as their "authentic" voices. You are not an authority on one billion plus people.

People who are not media can stop watching CNN and Fox News. They are not in the business of informing you. You are not "learning" when you hear their interpretations. Remember: They are in the business of selling your eyes to advertisers.

References

1: Tunisian Islamists Ennahda move to separate politics, religion | Reuters
2: Maajid Nawaz