Opinions (professional or not) are a confession of ignorance. We have opinions only when we do not know, cannot approximate or prove.

Forgiveness without repentance and atonement is like forgiving a herd of cows for blocking traffic, ‘for they do not know what they do’. It holds the offender to a lower moral standard than the forgiver. In some cases this may be the right attitude, but it is not Love. When unwarranted, it is contempt; denying the capacity of the offender to redeem himself, it denies his honour. Alternatively, it is a euphemism for “henceforth, I do not hate you”, which in turn implies that “hitherto, I did hate you”.

I regard as proven that if such entities exist they must be biologically related to humans, they must be part of our common evolution of meaning, therefore always in some kind of ‘social’ and reciprocal relationship with the ‘common’ humanity. In short, they are human, conscious rational beings related to all of us, but more developed in their degree of consciousness than an average punter (“angels” etc). The demonic forces, on the other hand, are not conscious beings but forces of nature, even if they manifest thought human-like bodies.

News media is now basically a continuous process of outrage/provocation and sedation/release. Keeps you busy and dictates your emotional life.

The obviously irrational and unjust actions of the government are done not because the government believes they are rational and just, but to be seen as irrational and unjust, to make you angry, frustrated and to motivate you to argue about it, to protest, to resist and then be also frustrated by your failure to persuade them about something that obvious.

This does not let the government off the hook for mandating a vaccine that was expected to kill a percentage of people. Intentionally killing a minority for the alleged benefit of the majority is still just plain murder. The claim that the vaccine overall saved lives is a lie, since its net impact on longevity was not proven. Presenting unproven claims as proven facts is a lie.

The principle of Proportionality may apply to resolving conflicts between different rights. It cannot justify taking away the same right from one person in order to secure it for another; this is not proportionality, not discrimination between different rights, but discrimination between different people.

“The view that constitutional rights are nothing but private interests whose protection depends, on each occasion, on being balanced with competing public interests, in fact, renders the Constitution futile. Indeed, if constitutional rights protect the same kind of interests as those of the government, and if the protection depends on considerations of some kind of relative “ weight ” given to the confl icting interests, it follows that the protection accorded by the Constitution can never be stable but is always conditional on various circumstances and depends on the outcome of balancing. On this view, not only is it doubtful whether the Constitution is the kind of law that includes stable and knowable propositions, but it also renders the very idea of such a constitution futile.” https://academic.oup.com/icon/article/7/3/468/703178

The right to life cannot even hypothetically be “proportionally” restricted, unlike the freedom of movement or expression. A person is either alive or dead; you can’t be slightly dead but mostly alive in a “balanced” way.

The argument from proportionality is typically used to justify actions or policies that ‘limit’ human rights (where ‘limitation’ has the sense of depriving a person of something that persons normally have the right not to be deprived of) for the sake of a politically contingent, ungrounded, vague, unstable and logically inconsistent idea of Greater Good. The alleged rationale of this approach is to ‘balance’ the rights of one person against those of others in the right way, without engaging in moral discourse about the normative premises. Proponents of the ‘principle’ of proportionality may argue that when the conventional moral premises expressed in the form of human rights come into conflict, any deeper moral evaluation would be too analytically demanding to be comprehensible and persuasive to the general public, whereas the pretence to ‘balancing of interests’ allows all three sides to the conflict (including the judiciary) to save face, even if one party is objectively wronged in the process. On this view, the injustice of proportionality is in continuity with the prejudice of culture: it is more likely to be seen as justice because real justice is incomprehensible to prejudiced minds.

When words are used to covey a meaning that is the opposite of what the same words in the same context can be interpreted to mean, then the sense of those words is lost. For example, if “she/her” is taken to mean either a male or a female, then it signifies neither but implies both, hence (ironically) the genderless and plural token “they/them” is often assumed.

The idea that the will of the ruling power can be defeated by ‘protests’ is at best naive. Protests are anticipated, can be intentionally provoked, and are easily guided to serve the will of the ruling power. Moreover, protesting (insofar as it demands compliance with its own will and moral judgement or else) is a feeble attempt at tyranny, an endorsement of tyranny. It is therefore not surprising that every ‘successful’ revolution became the new face of the official tyranny. The ruling power cannot be defeated by force or coercion (which is implicit in the premise that it is the ruling power). The ruling power can be occasionally persuaded by competence, but never by weakness, never by emotions, never by pity.

The ‘education system’ is to kids what puppy farms and animal shelters are to pets: commodification and degradation of that which people purport to value. It is thousandfold more difficult to correct the harm of bad foundations than to avoid them in the first place.

Perhaps a suitable (albeit non-exclusively so) starting point to engaging with the ruling power is to consider it as a natural predator and yourself as its natural food. The task is then to transcend the non-rational but deterministic predator/prey dynamic by cultivating both yourself and the predator at a higher metaphysical level, because neither is JUST a predator or JUST food. Failing that, it may be worthwhile paying attention to the multiplicity of the predator, who is not a univocal/integrated being but prone to internal conflict insofar as it is not metaphysically developed. Predators cull one another, keep one another in check and can themselves become food. Neither being food nor being predator is a sophisticated, conscious state, and both are defeated by death.

“Defending your Country” is the oldest and most reliable means of population control and pacification (by directing the human propensity for violence against itself).

I would neither support nor oppose any specific model of government. This is a choice I am happy to relinquish to others, and let them fight over it. I do not think it matters much what model of government is in place, because there is always a ruling power that sanctions the model, and presents the model as its public face.

In political systems that are functionally deficient (communism/socialism), political corruption is the means of supplementing the system and making it work on the existential level. It is the inescapable shadow of the system. In political systems that are functionally sufficient (capitalism/democracy), human corruption is integrated into the system itself, normalised, legitimised.

A potentially harmful medical intervention is justifiable when someone is sick (only insofar as it remedies the harm of the illness), but not when someone is healthy.

There are two ways of interpreting an arrow in the bullseye of a target: 1) someone accomplished a perfect shot into the target, 2) someone painted the target around the arrow. The fact that the universe is improbably ‘just right’ for the emergence of consciousness assumes (1), but we can alternatively interpret the outcome as (2), as the evidence that the universe was intentionally ‘fitted’ to consciousness, which implies that the universe emerged from or with consciousness, not independently of it. Only this second interpretation avoids the circular logic of positing ‘the world as we know it’ (meaningful only in the mind, a concept) as something that exists independently of the mind, but still as that concept.