What person has the right to "own" land, and by what authority, in any case?

In our world the land is owned, the sky is owned, the seas are owned, fresh water is owned. There are patents on species of life. String together a few words from the English language, and this very likely is owned too [go on, "Just Do It"(TM)(c)]*. For pete's sake, even the design of the wheel is patented and owned! What next, will the right to breath air or have children be claimed by someone?

Point is that these things are not ours to own. The lands of the middle east are just as much mine as they are Hezbollah's or the Jews' or anyone else's for that matter. The sea and the air and the sky belongs to me as well as you.

I'm saying that the middle east will continue with their wars until one thing happens: humanity progresses beyond private ownership of public commons.

Part of letting go of our obsession with "owning" everything is letting go the idea that certain people or certain groups of people "own" G0d**, because that's essentially what organised religion is- it's the idea that a single group of people have the monopoly on G0d; that they alone hold the right to tell others what G0d wants; and that they alone have access to all the wonders that G0d has to offer in life and after life. Organised religion is about the privatisation of G0d.

In the middle east both sides claim a right to the land by virtue of their group's sole, exclusive access to G0d, who has apparantly given them the authority to occupy such land. To say that one side is "right" and the other is "wrong" is, on a universal level, to bow to and accept the idea that G0d and G0d's will can be privatised and "owned" by a certain group of people.

If you accept my argument that organised religion is about the privatisation of G0d, then sometime it should occur to you that it's ridiculous to even think that the lowly human species could "own" G0d. And in the same way that we can never really own G0d, we can never really own land.

It is useless to argue about who is right or wrong in this specific conflict in the middle east, because ultimately it becomes an argument about who "owns" things that cannot be owned. Both sides claim that they "own" the land because they claim to "own" sole access to G0d, and their ownership of the land is 'what g0d wants'. The real fault here lies with humanity's way of thinking that such things can be solely "owned" by one group to the exclusion of other groups.

To fix the problem we don't need a political solution, we need a paradigm shift. This is happening, no doubt about that, though the real question to ask is will this paradigm shift happen in time to save us from ourselves?

**G0d/All That Is/The Thing That's 'Bigger Than Us' - call it what you want
* "Just Do It" is a copyrighted, registered trade mark belonging to Nike, i.e. you may not use these words without paying Nike money.

Thanks to Debs for this

This has a little to do with the previous barking dog article I made in my last post. On the South African MYADSL forums, a forumite with the alias "Maronite Pride" He makes a post about a blog he or someone else (personally I think its him who runs the website, but I could be wrong) has posted on. He has decided to call this website : http://deathofjohannesburg.blogspot.com/ Death of Johannesburg.

What he attempts to do here is drive through all the slum areas of the city of Johannesburg, and take pictures of the worst areas he cant find, and fictitiously portray this as an image of what Johannesburg really is. He totally excludes the majority of the developed parts of the city.

In is conversations online, he is also trying to portray people with liberal perspectives as denialists. We all know who the biggest denialists of them all are. I made a comment about how the analogy between "liberal" and "denialist" is completely unfair and unwarranted, and this is basically the response I got back from him.

"Propaganda? You want to talk about propaganda? Is this the same international liberal propaganda that brought apartheid down with cosmic lies? The conservative side is far from any denalists, they realize what is going on were all the liberals are clueless. If you compare to what is going on today and what happened under apartheid, hell no apartheid wasn’t bad at all. There was no such thing as all this crime, unemployment, decaying of the infrastructure and so on (and this is for everybody not just Whites). People never lived behind high walls, electric fences and armed bars, hell it was unimaginable. Of all the riots we had (which was heavily backed by the Marxists), what was the death toll (yeah around ~700 or so throughout all of apartheid, how many die a year in this lovely rainbow nation today)? I’m so sick of you liberals and your fake-ass fantasy world. I’ve even talked to Blacks who said they would rather live under apartheid than what we have now, this chaos never existed at all and all of you liberals buy into this “oh it’s because of apartheid” guilt bomb. Oh I guess we should be concerned now about “global warming” now when people are being killed left and right. Wake up."

Now do you see the type of mentality we often have to deal with in South Africa? For him its still a black white thing. Not a rich poor thing. Oh you bad liberal international press!!! according to him, you were all wrong, and the racist regime in control was right! I'm sorry if you don't like my fantasy world Mr "Pride" ideas, however, I am smart enough to know the way the older generation tried to run the world is WRONG, and as a human being I am willing to accept that and move on. You apparently can not see this simple point in life. It really makes me sad (About the same amount of sadness as what I feel when watching a lemming jump to its senseless death.)

Things in South Africa were NEVER better under apartheid, unless you were a racist. Simple en klaar. The majority of South Africans were treated worse than an animals, and by the sounds of things, you come across as one of those people wanting to use the whip on them.

You have no idea what crime really was about during apartheid, you also seem to have no concept on any time of reality, and I call you Mr "Maronite Pride" a racist, and would greatly appreciate it if you could leave this country you so hate. South Africa deserves real people wanting to make a real difference for the whole of the country. It no longer has to abide by your Nazi beliefs, and thank the good lord for that.

Humanity has moved forward...why don't you?

Its been well over 10 years since our South African government left its racist past, and in most ways, we are over it. However, a couple of recent websites trying to piggy back on the soccer world cup 2010 media exposure are really pissing me off.

They look like they have been put together with some or other craft publisher like Front Page or MS word or something, and really badly designed. However, I can look past badly designed websites if the content is sufficient enough, however, this is sadly lacking in this case.

My definition of a barking dog website, is a website that is meant to be for the "common good", but does nothing but whine. These webmasters really thing they're doing something productive, but all they're doing is whining and moaning with incomplete facts, and distorted versions of reality. They`ll happily moan because crime is bad, and "things" are bad.. and its "not like the good old days", but wont actually do anything about it.

They re just barking dogs with no bite, simply concentrating on the negative without actually attempting to do anything at all positive. They wont join their local policing community, they wont actually sit down with people in the mix to resolve differences. They`ll just sit on their asses, and moan about poor whites, this, and poor whites that.. Paaaaaleeeeeease.

The first barking dog website I would like to talk about is a site called http://www.crimeexposure.co.za . It has used rotten.com style tactics to be stun its readers into believing what it says actually has some credibility. The first version of the site was extremely child like. It looked like the guy who designed the website was about 17 years old. A couple of forum posts later in myadsl and I saw that some of the childishness has got edited out. Now it just looks like a "I'm trying to make make advertising money off other peoples misfortunes while not actually doing anything about it" site. I wonder how many community policing forums Mark is involved in. My money is on none.

The next barking dog website I came across is http://www.southafricaiscrap.blogspot.com/ . This one looks like it was written by a serious right winger (with a basic caveman like grasp of the Internet). sitting on his farm, with tanks all around him, still scared that every person who is not like him is out to get him.

This silly idiot who writes this blog keeps referring to the problem as a "black" or "white" issue. Sorry to tell you boet. Its a "poor" / "rich" thing. Got nothing to do with color of the skin, however, I think the author of that blog may be to simple to grasp this. He looks like his a product of extremely heavy apartheid brainwashing, and there's no arguing with people like that. The ignorance was not argued into them, so therefore it can not be argued out of them.

Crime is a very serious in South Africa, and needs to be addressed seriously. Instead of just standing on your soap box and crying about the crime. Get out there and actually DO something about it. Until you do, you are just a hypocrite, and I will judge you accordingly.

I just thought I would get you to have a closer look at the word Ubuntu. If you really understand the meaning of this word, then you really do know what its all about

Ubuntu, pronounced: /ùbúntú/ (oo-BOON-too), is a sub-Saharan African ethic or ideology focusing on people's allegiances and relations with each other. The word has its origin in the Bantu languages of Southern Africa. Ubuntu is seen as a traditional African concept.

A rough translation in English could be "humanity towards others," or "I am because we are," . Another translation could be: "The belief in a universal bond of sharing that connects all humanity." [1].

An attempt at a longer definition has been made by Archbishop Desmond Tutu:

"A person with ubuntu is open and available to others, affirming of others, does not feel threatened that others are able and good, for he or she has a proper self-assurance that comes from knowing that he or she belongs in a greater whole and is diminished when others are humiliated or diminished, when others are tortured or oppressed."

Ubuntu is seen as one of the founding principles of the new republic of South Africa, and is connected to the idea of an African Renaissance. In the political sphere, the concept of ubuntu is used to emphasise the need for unity or consensus in decision-making, as well as the need for a suitably humanitarian ethic to inform those decisions.