Theoretically, we cannot define what is shown to the powerful as respect

Kırmızılar, 15 June 2025

You may recall that the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris suffered a major fire on the evening of April 15, 2019. Caroline Bruzelius, a professor of art history at Duke University, said that such a fire would most likely start in wooden roofs like the one on the Notre Dame cathedral. She explained that “most people don’t see this when they visit the cathedral, but there were about sixty thick planks supporting the roof of the cathedral. So there was a forest of timber between the vaults and the roof. They were old, dry and porous.” France is also very sensitive, old, dry and porous. Charlie Hebdo, the truck attack in Nice, the white caps, the yellow vests… Liberté, égalité, fraternité are things of the past. There is a fear that someone will change the name of Paris... As Lenin who changed the name of Petrograd to Leningrad and Stalin who changed Volgograd to Stalingrad. 

On the thought of Cimrman

Kırmızılar, 11 August 2024

Bertrand Russell describes philosophy as starting with something simple that is not worth saying and ending with something paradoxical that no one will believe. He talks about the need to not be afraid of nonsense. But Cimrmanism is not absurd. It just gets its power from its non-seriousness. It may be possible to define it as surphilosophical with two characteristics. Because it is fictional against philosophy and also because it approaches it with humor.

On extreme respect

Marmaris Sabancı High School choir was singing the Tenth Anniversary March during the Teachers' Day in 2004. Meanwhile, the majority stood up, but the 7th president of Turkiye, Kenan Evren, who was living in Marmaris after his retirement, listened to the march from his seat. He then said that:

"I did not stand up because the Tenth Anniversary March is not the National Anthem."

Thereupon, some of those who had just stood up turned and applauded Mr. Evren. Some people had just stood up because everyone else had.

This is an example of our lack of thinking. We don't really think, we mostly adapt. For this reason, we sit down and stand up, greeting left and greeting right. The main reason is that we do not have a real feeling. Here is a phenomenon that we can identify as emotional shallowness. We don't know what is love, we don't know what is freedom... There is a huge difference between the feeling of freedom when a soldier returns to his village after having fought for three years, and what we think of as freedom. In Turkiye, we have a definiton like "love murder". There cannot be such a conceptualization. We don't know what love is, deep down we don't know what respect is. True love is more about respect than love. This is incomprehensible, so our thinking moves in a wrong direction. Today, a hedonistic, an Aristipposian meaning exists.