I’ve just come back from having dinner down at the local restaurant to celebrate mum’s birthday – mum picked me up and we had a wonderful meal along with a desert (my sister, her partner and two kids also joined). While we’re down there I was able to do some grocery shopping after the meal because I needed to pick up some odd bits and pieces. Woolworths had a special on a 3 pack of caned baked beans for $5 so I grabbed a few of those along with some Pepsi Max and other food for the week.
I watching tonight’s episode of ‘The Bradbury Group’ where Tau Henare addressed the issue of anti-Maori racism that rears its ugly head every election. The reason why anti-Maori racism keeps appearing every election year is because it can be summarised best by President Lyndon B. Johnson:
“If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best coloured man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.”
It gives person or a group of people who have no power or influence someone to look down on so that it allows them to feel better about themselves. The capitalist class telling the middle class to scapegoat the working class then the working class being told to blame the beneficiary for their problems then they tell the beneficiary that the problems in their life are due to immigrants. It is a giant pyramid of the capitalist class directing the classes below them are the reason for their hardship is the close below them.
As for the CRL (as mentioned in the episode of ‘The Bradbury Group’) regarding the cost overruns, this goes back to the larger problem which is the lack of a Ministry of Works in terms of long term planning, training up and retaining those with the expertise and experience to be able to lead nation building projects on a large scale. The other component are the continuous legal challenges by professional oxygen thieves hell bent on challenging the CRL every step of the way – a group of idiots claiming the they own the land 30 metres under their house and threaten to bring the whole CRL project to a grinding halt. Then there were legal challenges about building a station in Drury – again, more money wasted dealing with legal challenges and every day the project is stalled is money being wasted.
Regarding my previous post regarding Chrome, I’ve decided to stick with Safari because it really integrates better into the Apple ecosystem. Although there are those couple of bugs I’ve talked about I don’t think it warrants making life more difficult by straddling two ecosystems. I’ve just run the Jetstream benchmark and it is considerably higher than what Safari 26.6 was hitting along with Chrome as well so I’m going to stick with it – maybe in around a month and a half we’ll see 27.1 released and we’ll see the improvements present in Safari Technology Preview 252 make their way into Safari 27.1.
Depending on where they are in their life the advice would be different. If they’re at high school I would remind them that they may think that high school is the centre of their universe but 5-10 years after you leave high school to go to university or polytechnic no one is going to care what happened during those years. There is a reason why the saying “high school hero, real world zero” holds true because apart from those who seem to be perpetually stuck in their high school phase, everyone else moves on to bigger and better things after high school.
There is no set path and don’t look for a preset way to give your life meaning – you have to go through that process yourself to find what brings you meaning. When you just ‘phone in’ or to use an existentialist term ‘living in bad faith’, the process of finding meaning in itself brings meaning to your life in much the same way that Albert Camus noted in his essay on ‘The Myth of Sisyphus.’: “One must imagine Sisyphus happy because his conscious acceptance of an endless, meaningless struggle turns his punishment into an act of ultimate rebellion.”
Lastly, don’t compare yourself to others – comparing yourself to others and where other people are at in their life is the ruiner of joy that may have in your life. Rather than celebrating the small achievements you have made in your life you’re constantly comparing yourself to others so you never get to enjoy the feeling of having achieved something. It is something that activists are reminded – celebrate the small victories allows you to recharge your batteries which will enable you to continue fighting for the bigger long term goals.
Just to round it up – stop caring whether something is cringe. If you want true freedom then embrace the cringe, become the cringe, because I can assure you that 99% of people are living their lives completely oblivious to what you’re doing in your own life. There is a tendency of assuming that people are making judgments about you but the reality is that most people are too occupied in their own lives dealing with their own drama with little concern with what other people are doing in their own lives.
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