Loosely Speaking

By Ciel - About Me - E-mail this page - Add to My Favorites - Add to Blog List - See other blogs in Everything Else

Saturday, July 22, 2023

Better than court: Mediation

Some years ago, Thomas Crum, an aikido expert, reframed the very idea of 'conflict' from a negative to a positive, pointing out the beauty inherent in the conflict of ocean and land, for instance, on a rugged, sea-battered coastline. His work suggests that acknowledgement of conflict is the key to resolving conflict: acknowledge it, accept its existence, work with the reality that is, rather than frantically trying to replace it, unconsidered, with what you want to be the reality. What you want... Sign in to see full entry.

Monday, July 17, 2023

Socialism...

Democratic Socialism IS NOT the 'socialism' that gets the knee-jerk fear reaction from the ignorant. Democratic Socialism supports the people of a democracy. What they fear with better reason is Authoritarian Socialism. Anyone who is knowingly fighting against the kind of socialism we've had in the US for over a century is actually opposed to the well-being of Americans that might cost they themselves some privilege, power, comfort, and money. The word "Socialism" by itself isn't a useful term.... Sign in to see full entry.

Saturday, July 8, 2023

Change ain't easy...

It's culture shock, like indigenous people experienced with the arrival of Western colonizers: The discovery that the world is bigger and more complicated than we were raised to believe. Our society is riding the shock wave of discovering there are and have always been more than just two genders, that there always have been people 'on the spectrum,' that time and space are not as simple and straightforward as we thought before we had quantum physics to figure out. Some of us are better at... Sign in to see full entry.

Monday, July 3, 2023

The importance of being educated

For a while I have wondered, how do we as parents and teachers teach insight? I've recently been thinking, a mind with nothing to think about atrophies. The world is a great multi-dimensional jigsaw puzzle, and without a wide array of its bits and pieces, it cannot ever be assembled in any meaningful way. This is why everyone, including children, need to gather as many puzzle pieces as we can: read as much, learn as much, get educated as widely as possible. We need as much diversity of... Sign in to see full entry.

Saturday, July 1, 2023

My Son on Being a Patriot

Charles Redding J u n e 3 0, 2 0 2 2 · Just a reminder, that fireworks are unnecessary, harmful in a variety of horrible ways, downright obnoxious, but most significantly a terrible way to show "patriotism" given the veteran I met a few 4ths ago. He was standing in a minefield in the middle of a 7-11 parking lot, and had been breaking car windows to steal a ride to get home to his family. He was flipping in and out between lucid awareness that he was having an episode, and being in a minefield... Sign in to see full entry.

Wednesday, June 21, 2023

another Trump dump

Trump is not a normal human being. He shows all the signs of being a profoundly damaged child, incapable of adult thinking, feeling, reasoning, or communicating... Why does anyone still expect him to behave rationally? He has held this whole nation hostage to his moods and whims, and victimized us all, and from resentment and anger, we want to punish him. But he needs to be disabled from continuing to hurt everyone around him, while his enablers should be held legally accountable for making war... Sign in to see full entry.

Wednesday, May 17, 2023

Politics is sometimes not all bad.

As of yesterday, after all the votes came in and were counted, Yemi Mobolade has won the run-off mayoral election by something like 15 percentage points. He is Nigerian by birth, American by naturalization, and a successful businessman locally with a talent for bringing people together. Full Bio — Yemi Mobolade He is not my most ideal candidate or mayor, but he does represent the possibility of real change, even progress away from Same Old Games and Players in the local political scene. He is an... Sign in to see full entry.

Tuesday, April 11, 2023

Dreaming shaping reality

This morning I woke up from one of those magical one sometimes has, loses the details or coherency of, and yet will always remember it. It was about being in a psychiatric therapy place, both a house and a process. Sometimes I was the therapist, sometimes the client. The dream wasn't about the therapy or topics raised in it, so much as the relationship between the two people. It went through the well-known stages of dependency and projection, when the subject relates to the therapist as to the... Sign in to see full entry.

Thursday, March 30, 2023

Review: HENRY V

Started today with the second half of HENRY V, the version starring and directed by Kenneth Branagh. I went to bed last night after the first half. It's one of my most favorite of Shakespeare's plays, and such a fine production! Highly, highly recommended to anyone who loves English history, Shakespeare, and/or excellence in theater. The first time I saw this most powerful of Shakespearean histories, I was moved to research The Bard's historical accuracy. It's no secret or surprise that he wrote... Sign in to see full entry.

Saturday, March 4, 2023

Mediation

No one comes to mediation as long as they believe they can win. Another thing that is true on the international scale, and also on the personal, individual scale: When someone realizes they can lose everything, they become much more willing to sit down with their conflict's other side and seek a solution in which they don't. They have to accept that the other also will not lose everything. You can't enter into mediation with a vengeful agenda. It works when the conflicting parties sit down in... Sign in to see full entry.

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