Misguided by the stars

I recently read the novel, “Drive Your Plough Over the Bones of the Dead” (and then saw the 2017 film adaptation, “Spoor”). This is the first I’ve read by the Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk. The novel kept my attention, though I did not feel any great endearment towards the story or its themes. The novel could be said to revolve around a couple of main motifs: the question of freewill vs. determinism, and the question of how much importance to give to non-human lives. Because I had already made up my mind with regard to these themes, it was not so meaningful for me to revisit them.

With regard to determinism, this has been thrashed out extensively by eastern thinkers. The “law of karma” is informed by greater intelligence than anything in astrology, because it assigns a significant role to free will; so it neatly wraps both determinism and free will into it. But even so, sages advise to put it aside. The “I Ching” too is a bit more than an “oracle” because in casting the yarrow sticks, the idea is to allow the universe to intervene at the time of consultation; and the interpretation itself is a dialogue that takes place with the subconscious. It is less about interpreting a pattern that has been hard coded at the time of birth, than about learning and interpreting signs, understanding natural cycles and our relation to them – there’s a whole practical philosophy behind the book, so working with the I Ching is more about getting into the spirit of correct and timely action than about being told what to expect by an oracle. The I Ching is perhaps just a tool for acquiring intimacy with the book’s philosophical underpinnings.

With regard to the novel’s other major theme – the relative importance of nature – it is increasingly clear that we place ourselves above nature only to our peril. We exist with all of nature in a state of interbeing. There is no way to separate or disentangle ourselves from nature or the universe. But interbeing is based on something deeper and more integral than the character’s emotional bondage. Placing oneself in the position of guardian angel or ambassador for the natural world is just as misguided as believing one is either its master or steward. To place oneself in any of these roles is to adopt just another form of separation. In doing so, the character additionally separates herself from her community.

Interoperability

I am not so worried about a few big tech companies embracing fediverse, because if a couple of them do, it may draw the even bigger fish in too, meaning that for the first time we will have interoperability between major social media companies.

If we like the unique feel of Tumblr, the rapidity of Twitter, the artistic community of deviantart or the targeted boosts offered by Facebook, etc. we could choose one of those services knowing that we can still them to stay in touch with our friends on other networks.

That will still not be enough to persuade many of us to join those commercial networks, but we will finally be able to read posts sent by our friends, and they will be able to read ours. If that happens, it will be great, because it will no longer matter what service people decide to join.

Even the big companies may eventually see that interoperability is to their advantage – they will simply need to shift their attention away from all kinds of devious behaviour that aims to lock in users by force, and towards offering the best experience possible. When people are no longer held captive, they will be able to demand more.

If I already enjoy being on Facebook, but can also see there all the posts of my friends on Twitter, I will end up spending more of my time on Facebook, which is eventually better for Facebook.

The only real danger, as far as I understand it, is that as with email, it could become a playing field mainly of a few big operators. Because in order for it to work properly, there is quite a high bar to reach. It has to be done with a slew of protocols and security standards. But new email companies and services, even non-profits run by a few volunteers, do manage to break in, and even manage to be innovative in what they offer.

I think this will be the same with the fediverse. What will eventually persuade the big companies to open up and be interoperable will be government regulations or other necessities, rather than “competition” from Mastodon. But the availability of common free opensource protocols like ActivityPub is showing the way forward.

Diary

Shifting as I do between Markdown, BBCode, Orgmode, SPIP PHP tags and plain HTML there’s a tendency to get a bit mixed up sometimes. Bill Gates would say that the wonderful thing about standards is that there are so many of them.

Lately I haven’t found the inspiration to write in my blog, but, on the other hand, I’ve written lots of little things in various other places, so I’ll collect a couple of them here.

In sickness and in health

A person who has to be laid up for several months due to a couple of unexpected spinal operations wrote that:

“I’m feeling ok now – a little mentally traumatised still from the urgency and unexpectedness of the surgery. The randomness of life really hit me.”

I wrote back that I wasn’t sure that “life is random” because I’ve been conditioned to think of it as prarabhda karma – which Jiddu Krishnamurti would have laughed at, because we create theories to explain away life’s mysteries. I also wrote that I try to relate to the “random” things that happen to us as gifts from the universe, as a bhakti would do. Baruch ha shem be tov ve ba ra as they say in Judaism.

But then she asked me to explain all these words, so follows my explanation:

‘Prarabhda karma’ is one of three types of karma according to brahmanist texts: it’s the kind that you have already been landed with, as against the karma you are now creating, or the karma that you have already perpetrated, but which has not yet resulted in anything. Actually, there’s nothing mystical about the word karma itself – it simply means action – the Indo-European root is cognate with our word “create”, but there’s a whole philosophy built around it (in both Hinduism and Buddhism): the result of “bad” actions, good “actions”, and doing action without seeking reward, etc. – the Bhagavad Gita, a poem of 700 verses, spends a lot of time on it.

‘bhakti’ means someone of a devotional bent, who might find himself in opposition to, say, a “raja yogi” or a dhyani. The analogy they usually give in India is that a bhakti is like a kitten, who his mother picks up by the scruff of his neck, and allows himself to be carried along, surrendering personal will to divine providence, whereas other kinds of yogis are more like the monkey baby, tenaciously clinging to their stated objective.

‘ blessed is God who brings goodness and ba ra’ I suppose “praise G-d whether he brings us good things or bad things” is the spirit of it. Bhakta, or devotion, is pretty much the same in all religions, I think. In one of Paul Bowles books, set in Morocco, there’s a scene where the narrator accidentally slams the taxi door on the hand of an elderly fellow passenger. Wordlessly, the old guy wraps his bloodied fingers in his shawl, mutters “alhamdulillah” (praise be to Allah!) and goes on his way.

I find I don’t have a problem reconciling between the attitudes of these different religions, while not believing in a conceptualization of God as some of them do. “God” is just a shorthand term used for convenience; a personalisation similar to the way some people assign personal names to inanimate objects. If they find it helpful, let them do so. Just don’t try to persuade me that divinity is the way that you imagine it, based on what has been drummed into you in churches and temples. Or that the god you yourself have set up on a pedestal needs to be pulled down, because either way, it is of no consequence to me. Agnosticism and atheism are nonsense terms and only imply that we haven’t understood, while “belief” will always be extremely fragile.

Progressive web applications

On my phone, using Epicyon, I noticed that there are interesting differences between Firefox (and Mull) and Chrome, in the way they handle progressive web apps. The launcher I use does not directly support pwas. But I found that if I create a Chrome pwa in Samsung’s default launcher, I can then go back and use it in my launcher. But the same is not true for Firefox pwas. They can be added to Samsung’s home screen, but do not show up among the applications, as do Chrome pwas. I don’t normally use Chrome and when it began to pester me about syncing between devices, I decided not to use it for Epicyon either. So, since I can’t use Firefox web apps under my launcher, I simply open Epicyon from a Mull tab. I might eventually put Vivaldi back on my phone, so then I’ll see what happens with the web apps that it creates, but for Epicyon I can manage like that. My launcher, by the way, is Baldphone – it’s supposed to be a simple launcher for old people. Maybe I’m getting old, because although I’ve experimented with every launcher in F-Droid, I like it best.

Unfediverse

Someone said the other day that it isn’t entirely true to say that “the Fediverse is bigger than Mastodon” because, as it stands, Mastodon by itself has many more people on it than any of the other non-Mastodon instances. (And what happens if all of Tumblr joins the Fediverse?) Anyway, for now, the effect of Mastodon’s “market dominance” is that all the other instances need to conform to Mastodon first, and then worry about being interoperable with each other only later. As a result, although almost everything I do in Epicyon and Hubzilla will work in Mastodon, and everything I receive from Mastodon is likely to come through fine, this is not true if I try to follow someone on Hubzilla from Epicyon, and, as I just discovered, posting an image in Hubzilla will come through blank to Akkoma (a Pleroma fork). Even with Mastodon, Epicyon and maybe Hubzilla have compatibility problems. From Epicyon, I discovered that I cannot respond to surveys, for example. Images can be given alt tags in Hubzilla (through a non-intuitive and undocumented syntax), but these do not seem to work in exactly the same way as in Mastodon. It’s all a bit wild. So, for interoperability it’s best to keep posts as simple as possible.

Palestine

When political realities change for the worse, we tend to adapt to them by hardening our positions. When Russia invades Ukraine, this has an inhibiting factor on all discourse that tries to be even-handed. Suddenly we are all against Russia, siding with the warmongers of NATO. That’s too bad, because the necessary nuances are lost – with the darkness of night comes our inabilities to perceive differences in colors.

It’s the same now with what’s happening in Israel/Palestine. Israel’s new regime is so harsh, anti-Arab and Fascist, the world cannot do other than to side with Palestinians and to unite against Israel. This usually results in sending Israeli Jews into defensive mode. A people so traumatized by historical antisemitism have a strong defensive reflex. This too is dangerous.

But what can one do? What can one do when a conflict seems to require that we take sides? To sign up anyway but just not to be happy about it?

Lao Tsu has the following to say about war:

Tao Te Ching – Lao Tzu – chapter 31

Good weapons are instruments of fear; all creatures hate them.
Therefore followers of the Tao never used them.
The wise man prefers the left.
The man of war prefers the right.

Weapons are instruments of fear; they are not a wise man’s tools.
He uses them only when he has no choice.
Peace and quiet are dear to his heart.
And victory no cause for rejoicing.
If you rejoice in victory, then you delight in killing;
If you delight in killing, you cannot fulfill yourself.

On happy occasions precedence is given to the left,
On sad occasions to the right.
In the army the general stands on the left,
The commander-in-chief on the right.
This means that war is conducted like a funeral.
When many people are being killed,
They should be mourned in heartfelt sorrow.
That is why a victory must be observed like a funeral.

I’m told that there’s a parallel Talmudic passage.

War and peace may be governed by firm principles, or be in the domain of realpolitik. But they are also matters of the heart. When it comes down to it, I am not going to listen to Lao Tsu, Marx, Jesus, my elders, the Prime Minister or the laws of the nation. I’m going to do what my heart tells me to do.

Links

Palestine: Unite or die | Israel-Palestine conflict | Al Jazeera This article by an al-Jazeera senior journalist suggests that it’s imperative for Palestinians to put aside their differences if they want to struggle against the new political realities in the region.

2022’s Best Investigative Stories in India – GIJN

There are amazing stories here.