Not so much pain...
The human body is a strange thing. Yesterday, my back was killing me. Today, no problem. Today I had a little trouble because I overdid it with my wrist in bujapidasana and bakasana yesterday, so I stopped at navasana (the asana before bujapidasana) today. Sorry for the no doubt boring Yoga descriptions, but after all my whining yesterday I felt I needed to post an update.
The whole thing with Michael Jackson is weird. I've read at least one blog in which the author said he was acquitted only because he was rich and had good lawyers. Superficially, this is probably true. However, the implication seemed to be "he was guilty, but he was acquitted because of his unfair monetary advantage."
I don't want to be an apologist for hoarding wealth here. If you have a lot of money you might as well do good works with it rather than hoarding it. But the fact is that people are neurotic, and sometimes don't think of this, and that doesn't mean they're evil. Michael Jackson is a strange fellow, so I think people are predisposed to assume that he's a bad fellow, but different doesn't mean bad - people can seem very normal and be very evil, and people can be very weird and yet very, very kind - indeed, being too kind is, at least in our culture, one way in which you can be weird. Say, spending your riches helping others. What are you, some kind of chump?
Anyway, the point is that when you have a lot of money, people tend to see you as a bag of money, not as a person. So someone who wants to have more money might well target you. And if you have a tendency to be nice to people like that, they might take advantage of you. Not that you shouldn't be nice to them. So I confess to a certain degree of ignorance, which I think I share with most of the population of people who have heard about the Michael Jackson case. That is, I know very little about Michael Jackson. I certainly don't know enough to say for sure that he's guilty of the crime of which he's been acquitted. I don't know enough to say he's an angel either, but the point is that I don't know enough to know that he's not.
The outcome of the media circus that has been his life in the past six months seems likely to be that a lot of people will assume he is not an angel. I'd just like to encourage people not to make assumptions without data. Heresay isn't data. So you probably don't know enough to judge. We would do well to turn our eyes away from spectacles like these and find something good to do with the time we save, or maybe just read a book if we're too burnt to do something good.
The whole thing with Michael Jackson is weird. I've read at least one blog in which the author said he was acquitted only because he was rich and had good lawyers. Superficially, this is probably true. However, the implication seemed to be "he was guilty, but he was acquitted because of his unfair monetary advantage."
I don't want to be an apologist for hoarding wealth here. If you have a lot of money you might as well do good works with it rather than hoarding it. But the fact is that people are neurotic, and sometimes don't think of this, and that doesn't mean they're evil. Michael Jackson is a strange fellow, so I think people are predisposed to assume that he's a bad fellow, but different doesn't mean bad - people can seem very normal and be very evil, and people can be very weird and yet very, very kind - indeed, being too kind is, at least in our culture, one way in which you can be weird. Say, spending your riches helping others. What are you, some kind of chump?
Anyway, the point is that when you have a lot of money, people tend to see you as a bag of money, not as a person. So someone who wants to have more money might well target you. And if you have a tendency to be nice to people like that, they might take advantage of you. Not that you shouldn't be nice to them. So I confess to a certain degree of ignorance, which I think I share with most of the population of people who have heard about the Michael Jackson case. That is, I know very little about Michael Jackson. I certainly don't know enough to say for sure that he's guilty of the crime of which he's been acquitted. I don't know enough to say he's an angel either, but the point is that I don't know enough to know that he's not.
The outcome of the media circus that has been his life in the past six months seems likely to be that a lot of people will assume he is not an angel. I'd just like to encourage people not to make assumptions without data. Heresay isn't data. So you probably don't know enough to judge. We would do well to turn our eyes away from spectacles like these and find something good to do with the time we save, or maybe just read a book if we're too burnt to do something good.
posted by Ted Lemon at 11:35 PM
1 Comments:
Don't know if I'll have the chance to address this at proper length later, but, in haste, wanted to say that my point really was about society and green people, not about the verifiable guilt of Michael Jackson. Unfortunately, one of the ways that you recognize a green person is by seeing how they're treated differently than other people. I don't know if anyone's done it with the Jackson case, but for the OJ case, someone found a parallel situation involving a poor white man who was convicted quite quickly. OJ, like Michael Jackson and Robert Blake, is green.
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