Anthology of Ideas

The United States of America has a long history of inequality, from its treatment of Native Americans to women’s rights, it has tended to favor one group over others, but it has attempted to repair the damage it caused. However, even though America is the “land of opportunity,” its formerly oppressed peoples are not equal, but what does it mean to be equal? Is equality the government saying you must have the same number of employees from each arbitrarily defined “race?” Does equality mean that people should be forced to be equal? In examining this issue, one must define equality itself.

There are three forms of equality: equality of outcome, of opportunity, and of perception. Equality of perception is the most basic: it dictates that for people to be equal, each person should be perceived as being of equal worth.

This video that demonstrates the causes and consequences of the theory of 10 dimensions was released several years ago. However, it is still the best resource on the web for imagining the higher dimensions.

Imagining the Tenth Dimension

David Hume, an 18th century philosopher, stated that morality is based on sentiments rather than reason. He concluded this after he developed his “theory” of knowledge which stated that everything we could know was observable by the senses — he was a naturalistic philosopher. He then looked at situations in which he thought that there was an obvious “wrong” and he tried to identify the “matter of fact” vice in the situation. He immediately found that he could not find the vice within the facts of the situations.

For example, let us examine a boy who steals a toy at a store. A matter of fact about this situation is that a young human male has taken an item from a store. This is what happened. The senses and reason tell us a few other things too: the toy was a plastic squirt gun; the boy used his hands to take the toy; it took only a second for the boy to do this.

Byron, intentionally or unintentionally, weaves himself into his poetry stamping it with his entire persona. His characters are part of himself; the poems are pieces of his mind; the events are based on experience. Byron’s poetry is an amalgamation of all aspects of Byron. This is truer in some poems than others: some are nearly biographical and others skillfully manipulate other’s perceptions of Byron. His poetry reveals the inner workings of his mind . Because of this, the voices in Byron’s poetry are not just the voices of Byron’s characters: they are the intermingling of the poet with the poem. One of the most pervasive and recognizable aspects of Byronic poetry is the Byronic hero who is a manifestation of parts of Byron’s own personality and thoughts. Byron’s “The Corsair” introduces the most Byronic of Byron’s heroes: Conrad. He then proceeds to emasculate him and proposes Gulnare, a former sex slave, as an alternative hero.

Hans Rosling gave a very educational TED talk that uses UN statistics about world health, money and birth rates to destroy the myths about the so-called third world. In the first few minutes, he demonstrates that the developing world has more of the traits that one assigns to the “western” world than previously believed. He then continues to attack other myths through the use of statistics, humor and some really neat graphs.

“Globalism is a most vile institution that rapes weaker cultures of the world and homogenizes them into a single unit devoid of variety.” Agree? Disagree? Agree somewhat? While most would not agree with the statement, many agree with the sentiment. Opponents of globalism often see it as the forcing of a super-power’s culture onto other smaller cultures. Not to be blunt, but it isn’t.

The spread of the most powerful culture to the rest of the word has been occurring for all of history. Those without power mimic those who have it to improve themselves. The Mayans, Egyptians, Babylonians, Greeks, Hindus, Arabs, Romans, French, British etc ad infinitum have all been mimicked at one point in time or another in the past 4,000 Years. At no point did the world’s cultures fuse into a super-organism: coliseums were built and gladiators were trained, but provinces didn’t cast off their traditions and become purely Roman — had they done so the Roman Empire would have lasted beyond 1,500 C.E.