Sunday 25 September 2016

Peace in Jerusalem



Peace in Jerusalem is possible with a few adjustments in ideas.  Perception is everything.

By whatever name, there must be some form of Palestinian autonomy.  The present disputes are between limited, extreme forms of power devolvement, or are ways of denying any such autonomy or making it total and absolute with Israel’s destruction.   Centrist positions based on a peaceful co-existence are rarely considered.   We must not be satisfied with a compromise that binds everyone into an unsatisfactory stale-mate indefinitely.  Political autonomy can belong to a sub-set of a society without needing territorial divisions.  Palestinian autonomy could be developed as Palestinian Statehood within a Greater Israel – a State within a State.  

Remaining un-divided, Jerusalem can also act as the Palestinian Capital, because it will be a shared capital, not a split city.  There are advantages of shared embassies and Israel is in control of security.  But it will take good will. The only way to achieve real Peace in Jerusalem is for the mutual denial of each other’s declaration of Divine Unity to end.  There must be genuine mutual religious acknowledgement.  It is time that Jewish Rabbis accepted that the Prophet of Islam pbuh is a true Prophet to the Gentiles while not a Jewish Prophet.  Islam is equivalent to Judaism, as for example, in the way that Halal and Kosher are one system within another.  

Our two religions should be in harmony with each other.  It could start anywhere.  It would be most excellent if a Yeshiva joined up with a college for the training of Imams, and in doing so the two religions would work together to find the deep similarity between them.  There is no end to the level of co-operation that might be achieved in centuries to come, once the process has begun.  It is possible to imagine Judea as a Theocracy, where everyone complies with Jewish Law or Sharia Law depending on their faith, and the two co-exist like fraternal siblings who love each other.  

Even though Judaism is much older, in a way Islam is more universal, so it is possible to see Judaism as another strand within Islam like Sunni and Shia; while they dispute the lineage of the Caliphate after the Prophet pbuh, Jews deny there was any such lineage at all, which is quite different from denying the Prophet phuh.  

If Jerusalem were to become a Palestinian Capital, it would be logical to extend that to any re-established Caliphate, which is a consideration that might frighten people more than a mere Palestinian State with its own little Capital within a walled ghetto of a split city.  It frightens me, I am stopping thinking of this now.

Thursday 8 September 2016

The Australian Crown

Far too many well-educated, intelligent people do not really think about issues they support or oppose.  The Australian Crown is a good example.  The Republican Movement is driven by the self-assigned ‘intelligentsia’.  These people are often in positions of power and influence and on matters pertaining to their particular fields of expertise they are paragons of rationality and are elevated to a higher Academic Degree for that very reason.  However, on other Social Issues, about which they have no greater expertise than the vast majority of other people who do not have academic excellence, exceptional ability to do well on Intelligence Tests and Exams, their opinions are motivated by Emotions and Sub-Conscious mental activity.  

Dunning-Kruger is the name given to the frequent behaviour of someone who is actually very ignorant about a subject believing themselves to know everything there is to know about it and present themselves as confident experts on the subject, prepared to fight against those who disagree with them, who might actually be people who do know more of the real truth.  There is also a tendency amongst people with expertise in a narrow specialisation to believe that their authority in that case can be extended to an equivalent authority in everything, even though they share a lack of knowledge and a propensity to visceral beliefs with everyone else.

When New Whig FaceBook page started, one of its repeated themes was support for the Australian Crown.  Perhaps it is time to try to find those posts, or rewrite them.   Rebuffing arguments with individuals has no effect on the widespread belief-system within a Social Group, and even if the individual has been convinced by some argument or other, their new thoughts on the subject quickly fade as they readopt the dominant views of their micro-societies.  Even without the deliberate insults it is hard to sustain enthusiasm, and observing so many people wallowing in their own ignorance as though it was proof of their egalitarian nature, by being no more rational than how they see their mental inferiors, and being on the receiving end when people refuse to contemplate ideas that contravene the prejudices they took in with their mothers’ milk, and resort to vulgar insults to distract from the real issues to avoid cognitive dissonance.

By keeping it simple, Republicans can avoid many ramifications of such a fundamental change.  It is perhaps too hard for people to