Claud

An avid collector of your hopes and worries, a romantic at heart.

She thanks her fairies, for blessing her with people who know compassion down to an art.

For accepting her for who she is, who never fails to turn up,

in times of need as well as happiness, or just there for a loving hug.

I am thinking about having another blog to write about my thoughts about geography. Hmm…will be posting some stuff about it soon.

On an entirely random note, I think it's hard to separate the self from the social sciences. It's hard when your life is so intertwined with your studies, when people start to do things that bites against logical/factual arguments and then provide the most essentialist, racist, sexist, misogynist, stupid-st justification for saying/doing what they do.

It irks me, that people pass on information as if they were fact and truth. I guess for starters, reading 'smartly' (any kind of reading/interpreting) can be done in 3 stages. What is being said, who is saying it and the most importantly, to whose interest does it serve. Just because we cannot see those interests, doesn't mean that it doesn't exist. It just means we have to dig deeper.

It's often safer to say "I don't know" rather than to fight vehemently for a cause that you know very little about. The more you are compelled to do something for an organisation, the more you should be wary of that compulsion. Are you being manipulated to serve a certain interest that unknowingly bring harm? Are you simply a mule to carry certain ideas to further certain oppressive ideologies. I find that by the time I interrogate every aspect of that organisation, I have lost my compulsion to further their cause because there are often too many loopholes in their arguments, if they are not ludicrous altogether.

Do you believe that learning is good? Do you accept that learning means making mistakes? If you accept these two ideas, then you must also be ready to accept for others to point out those mistakes. Therefore, in short, to learn is to be criticised and despite its bitter tang, it is also an acquired taste. Critique is the highest form of flattery and if someone doesn't even intend to engage, it shows that he/she has no interest in your ideas (because they are too ludicrious?).

I guess education is about having an open mind. If you are not ready to accept alternatives or even open to play the devils' advocate, then you have had learned very little, and will learn continue to learn very little. In the age of social media and easy access to information, paradoxically, we know even less about our world. We find ourselves lost and confused, we latch onto anything that seems familiar and 'good'. However, we must be careful not to become information mules just because something seems good on the surface, without understanding the full extent of report or history that led up to events.

The world is fucking complicated. A person who proclaims to know it all, or presents a very simple 'us' vs 'them' scenario is a person we should be wary of. Why do I say so? Because firstly, causation is one of the hardest apeshit to prove. Even statisticians or researchers cannot find a perfect model to depict causation and to say A causes B is truly, something only god will know. Secondly, a story often have multiple actors, some voices are heard, others silenced. How sure can you be, that the story you're hearing now, has every actor in it? Thirdly, simplifying a world into simple categories does not make reality simply, it retards understanding. Every situation has too many variables for it to be reduced to just a few. While it is true that some matter more than others, but the case in point is that sometimes, the details really do change how we see things (for instance, Raffles did not land at the Singapore River, but actually somewhere nearer at Whampoa).

This post has been spurred by the recent KONY viral video….facts are framed to portray certain interests that are veiled as truths. That's why I say, the social sciences and personal life are so intertwined, simple because it changes how you see and engage with reality. A little humility, goes a long way, in making the world a better place to live in.