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I don’t know

What public figure do you disagree with the most?

The first question is who is a public figure? A politician, a ~pastor~ charlatan, educator or musician? Is one a public figure if they are known only within a small hamlet or is there a geographical minimum to be a public figure? Should they be alive or dead? Do I have to disagree with them on everything or just a specific issue.

I am surprised I can’t answer this question definitively. There’s no one individual or groups of individuals that I care so much about what they say to disagree with them. Don’t get me wrong. I am not indifferent. I am not invested in what most public figures say. Take for example Putin or Trump, I interact very rarely with what they say unless as a soundbite and that’s not enough to form a proper opinion.

Where I should ideally pay much attention is with the governance of this country but the president is a fraud. His ministers frauds. It takes a great amount of patience to listen to any of them speak or articulate their policies.

What about public intellectuals? Another blank.

Maybe I should get involved with what’s being said.

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a problem with utilitarian ethics

if you don’t leave under a rock and can red, you could have come across the trolley problem. this is a thought experiment in ethics about a fictional scenario in which an onlooker has the choice to save 5 people in danger of being hit by a trolley, by diverting the trolley to kill just 1 person. Many people would say they would save the many people and imperil the one person. But there’s a problem with this view which I came across recently and I am not sure why it hasn’t been raised previously to challenge utilitarian ethics. the problem, for example, with the trolley problem is that the onlooker has no relationship with either those in the train or the one person being sacrificed. what would be the outcome, say, if the one person is this onlooker’s only child and the trolley is occupied by none of his relatives? Or one of the passengers in the trolley is a boss who recently fired the onlooker making him destitute and the one person is his squeeze? Will he be concerned with the outcome that creates the greatest good for the greatest number? Or will he save his one squeeze?

The challenge here, to restate it, is that our relationships affect or impact on our ethical choices and without considering its implications, some of our ethical theories may tell only half a truth and they need to be reconsidered.

What do you guys think?

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No or none

Do you have a quote you live your life by or think of often?

But there are many that come to mind given the occasion or context.

Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamazov is a goldmine of quotes or passages that always come to mind especially the conversations that occur between Ivan and Alyosha.

Camus’ the rebel is another book that I can think of to recommend.

And Ecclesiastes! If there’s any book that redeems the bible, it is this book.

I didn’t say I am a Nietzsche fan. There’s a lot to learn from this man.

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Dictators

Do we really ever know them?

I have been binge listening to a Noiser podcast, the real dictators and the stories about these men- has there been a woman dictator?- are the personification of cruelty.

It is interesting that some of these people were not really nationals, in the real sense of the word, of the countries they ruled with an iron fist. Take for example the Georgian Stalin, or the Austrian Hitler.

Of the dictators I have listened to their histories, papa Doc was an outlier. A medic who made death his trademark.

Or that these fellows rose from poor or humble backgrounds to come to wield so much power. Mao, Stalin, Gaddafi, and a host of others- all humble folk.

But what this has done is got me thinking about Kenya. It is not in doubt that Moi and Kenyatta was tin pot dictators. It is our present regime and the two previous ones that come to focus and I ask myself how far from a dictatorship we really are. We have a parliament that for all intents and purposes is a big rubber-stamp. The judiciary is a laundromat. And with bodies appearing in rivers, forests and all, I am not sure we are not living in a dictatorship, albeit a subtle one

Where others like Stalin started a personality cult where they became the gods, our benign dictator and his family are part of the church choir and the poor people are hooked. You hear people say oh the president is a good person because of church and I face palm.

Who knew that the Spaniards went through a dictatorship that the whole community seems to have voted to forget?

And it is hard work to topple a dictator. The secret police. The death squads. The cultural revolution. And all their plots are difficult to fight. You put yourself out there to challenge them, you meet a cruel end.

You don’t want to live under a dictatorship no matter how good it looks from the window.

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This morning

When is the last time you took a risk? How did it work out?

I got off bed, went for a short run then got into the car to drive to the office. If you don’t live in a cave like I do, you would have come across news of Nairobi rains and subsequent floods. This went well.

I think cycling in Nairobi is an extreme sport,if not a risk and should be feature somewhere in the 1001 ways to die. And many cyclists have died on our roads, sadly, and there’s no cultural change. But for my love of cycling, I once woke up to try a city to coast adventure. I had no phone just money a bike pump, a patch kit, a torch and water. This went well until it didn’t. I ended up with a puncture in the middle of the Tsavo national park, fixed it and continued. I ended up completing my longest ride to date.

I would go on but I will stop here.

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Sparingly

How do you use social media?

If at all. And mostly to read what others are saying, and learn if that’s possible.

Let’s start from the beginning. The only social media platform that I use or spend time on is LinkedIn after quitting nosebook and twitter before it became x.

And on LinkedIn, it is interesting to see people call themselves experts on a subject because they have written a few blog posts on it, wrote a book that ain’t peer reviewed and have a podcast where the acolytes gather to listen to their king.

Is wordpress social media? Well, I spend a lot of time here. These days agreeing with people, avoiding conflict and getting entertained while at it. In this place, I talk about myself occasionally but use it mostly to clarify my thinking, and this happens sometimes when we disagree. It is the one place where a lot of learning has taken place.

So I use social media sparingly to learn, to communicate and to share pictures of my adventures.

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I don’t know what to think about this: war in the middle East

Two weeks or so ago, Israel bombed the Iranian embassy in Syria killing a number of her people and it promised to respond. But when you read this Post you would think Iran is the aggressor for responding to provocation. Why start a conflict with your neighbour when you don’t want them to fight back?

I like echo chambers. They allow us to be all the rage about those we don’t like without sitting back to ask if we could be culpable. I hope I am wrong on this and we have no major conflict and that lives are not lost needlessly.

It looks like this is the year the world says to hell with peaceful coexistence and goes to a world war again. There’s been weapons build up with nowhere to use them or buyers of the same. A wider conflict in the middle east provides such a market for weapons while people continue to die.

I don’t think there is any hope for lasting peace in the Middle East in this generation and maybe the next.

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Many things

Describe something you learned in high school.

But one of the things that have stayed with me is to not say anything in anger that I would want to withdraw after emotions have cooled.

I learnt also to respond differently to insults. For example, if someone called you a cow, there are two options: you behaved like a cow and should change your ways or the person doesn’t know a cow in which case it is not important.

I don’t want to mention the physics or geography or maths I learnt in high school but I think those two things are life changing. I may not do them well, but I try.