Life

I've started noticing online how people from countries that don't need national defense really do not understand the nature of mandatory military service and wartime duty.

I had happened to scroll my way into a discussion on some american influencer family, who are all about being wealthy Conservative Christians who homeschool their kids so they won't get exposed to any other kind of values. Anyway one of the daughters married a man from Ukraine because there's no sufficiently white, conservative and christian men left in America I guess.

And originally this girl (who was sheltered, homeschooled, didn't speak any other language than english, and had zero experience of living independently) was supposed to move to Ukraine to live with her new husband, but then shit hit the fan. So they shipped their little family back to the US to live cozy on her parents' money.

So I happened to scroll into discussion about the Ukraine husband and the apparent vitrol happening online among the people who keep tabs on this family out of sheer curiosity. And there was someone, an american I guess from their writing style, who was baffled by the community's attitude towards him dodging the draft in his homeland. Like yeah the guy is a smug homophobic jackass, but isn't it fucked up to demand that he should volunteer to go fucking die??

And I kind of paused right there, having a kind of epiphany about how different worlds we come from, and how I really could not begin to explain this to someone who did not grow up this way. I'm not from Ukraine and I've never personally known war, but coming from Finland, I've got an understanding of how countries with a border and history with Russia are raised to think about war.

War isn't something you volunteer for. It's not something you can opt in or opt out of. It's something that comes to you, inevitably and eventually, and you're just lucky if it doesn't happen during your time. But if it does, that's just the cards that were dealt to you.

From the perspective of an invader, it's easy to equate "volunteering to fight" with "volunteering to die". It's easy to think that if you simply refuse to fight in war, there will be no war. That's not what it's like for those being invaded. When the war is brought to you, your choice is between "get shot in combat" and "get shot in your living room". Death is not voluntary, you only get to choose when and where.

Choosing to shake off that sense of duty doesn't make it disappear, it simply drops the weight on someone else's shoulders. Somone who may be more capable than you or less capable than you. If you were in a room with a button, knowing that there's a chance that you might die if you don't push it, but that there's a stranger in the next room, who has an equal chance of dying if you do push it. You don't know what those odds are, but if you decide to save yourself, you've chosen to rather risk the stranger.

Resenting someone from dodging military duty when their country is being invaded isn't a matter of hating someone for wanting to live. It's about knowing that this person decided: "Someone else's son deserves to die more than I do."

original artwork for Agalloch, by Fursy Teyssier of Les Discrets

Henryk Weyssenhoff - Łoś na trzęsawisku ( Marshlands with an elk )

The Appetizer for Fuzzy

"Bart Kosko, the leading proponent of fuzzy thinking, has degrees in philosophy, economics, mathematics and electrical engineering but even in his book there is a clear-cut thesis that ties all this complex thinking together: to explore the paradigm shift from black and white to gray, from bivalence and binary (either/or) thinking to multivalence, a less simplistic but more accurate way of thinking that responds to life in matters of degree, integrating probability and ambiguity in all modes of operation. (Kosko, Bart. Fuzzy Thinking. New York: Hyperion Press, 1993.)

Fuzzy thinking demands that you increase your options. What are all the possible things or events or conditions that could occur as you explore something? You must use your imagination much more actively than usual. Fuzzy thinking comes from fuzzy math sets in which endless possibilites have been explored. So to unite fuzzy thinking with traditional logic, you need to know more, feel more and think more exhaustively.

Perhaps the word "fuzzy" is misleading for undergraduates. Gratuitous ambiguity due to laziness is not the goal, but rather an inclusion of degree, probability and ambiguity in the formulation of structures that respond to phenomena. In other words it is harder and more intellectually demanding to engage in fuzzy thinking. Kosko has a thorough understanding of traditional logic and its fallacies as well as all the specific scientific applications of fuzzy thinking.

Traditional logic, with all its artificiality, is based on language, but the irony is that the flesh of language is our bodily experience, the cries and sighs and gurgles of needs and wants that slowly grow into more complex sounds that usually connote more than they denote. Nature constantly speaks a language that is homospatial and homotemporal, layered and nonlinear in space and time, and this language still resides in our subconscious world of dreams. While expository writing necessitates so-called logical, grammatically correct sentences that grow into coherent, well-developed paragraphs integrated by a thesis, this type of writing should not exclude the multivalent nature of experience, of our bodies, our dreams and our environments. Clarity in expository writing is important so you must redefine words in the context in which you are using them but it's okay to struggle with solutions, to end with answers and to obfuscate a cause-effect relationship with a provocative "what if?" "

- Julia L. Keefer

Fine Art of the Forest

(c) riverwindphotography, August 2024

Mice Studying, Kyosai Kawanabe

Any social entrepreneurs worth their (fair-trade, alder-smoked) sea salt will have an "our story" section on their website, explaining how a college trip to Guatemala or a grandmother's devotion to fresh produce inspired the company's current mission. "It's not just 'my candles are great', it's 'and then I went to Java and discovered this wax and this is a part of my journey, here's a picture,'" says Deresiewicz. "Goods now all have to be experiences.

Elizabeth Nolan Brown aka. "smoothie catharsis will solve your existential crisis"

sky-lines by anthony samaniego on Flickr.