TED Community » Allan Macdougall

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• TEDCred score: +47.40 TEDCred reflects your contribution to the TED community.

• +2

  A comment on Conversation: What makes you care?

  23 hours ago: The nature of my work means that I have the very genuine honour and privilege of hearing personal stories that sometimes have been 'locked up' inside - often for years, or even lifetimes. Those hitherto locked-up stories that have shaped the person sitting in front of me, are often so powerful as to induce a profound empathic reaction in me - such that I feel I have almost lived that story myself.
  
  What makes me care, is an understanding of their experience via my own lived experience. If there is any similarity or match in emotional reaction to such experiences, the more powerful the story seems to me. That power is increased a thousandfold if the person has never related the story to anyone else before, because of its raw, visceral nature. Seldom has such a story been modified by the intellect to be told as a story 'by rote'.
  
  That's not to say relating stories by rote are 'flat' by comparison. They can also be powerful if the listener can perceive that the emotion attached to it is still genuinely felt.

• A comment on Conversation: What makes a good judge?

  1 day ago: An injustice in one culture might be regarded as just in another. Therefore a good judge in one country might be a poor one in another, where even 'Natural Justice' seems to us to contradict ethical norms.
  
  It is a mistake in my opinion, for one set of laws to try and distort and modify another set of laws that have evolved over hundreds of years, and exist for good reason. For instance, Western laws imposed on a country where Sharia law endemically exists, would probably be extremely uncomfortable for that host country - and vice versa.
  
  A one-world law, and any judge who is regarded as representative of it, would be up against countries who would vigorously defend their own cultures from being eroded. Legislation, as some sort of nebulous Western blanket smothering every country would rid the world of its rich diversity and vitality.
  
  This is a somewhat long-winded way of saying that a good judge is one who is capable of being empathically disposed towards regional and cultural diversity.
• +1

  A reply on Conversation: What do you think about Islam?

  3 days ago: Fair enough.
  
  I would add: "Please don't go to war, and claim that God is on your side".

• A reply on Conversation: What do you think about Islam?

  4 days ago: As your first reaction to Vahid's question, I feel it it was implied.
  
  So if the question was: "What do you think about Christianity?", you still would have said: "Please don't blow things up"...?

• A reply on Conversation: What do you think about Islam?

  4 days ago: I admire those principles.
  
  What I'm trying to do is to get you to discuss the notion that blowing things up cannot be confined exclusively to Islam.
  
  I put to you that Christianity, and economic ideologies in the name of Christianity, are just as much to blame for world atrocities - if not more so.
  
  The roots of Christianity and Islam, and their proponents, are much more peaceful than their modern, media portrayed equivalents. Those modern equivalents seem to me to be too steeped in politics and economics for them to be regarded any more as legitimate religions. Both are as bad as each other in that respect.
  
  The upshot is that oil is not a God-given right for Western consumption, if it is at all costs. Neither are fundamentalist reactions towards such greed. Which came first, do you think?
  
  I ask you somewhat bluntly, do you think Islam would be a peace-loving religion if it wasn't for oil?
• +1

  A reply on Conversation: What do you think about Islam?

  4 days ago: You may well be consistent in the safety of this hypothetical situation, but let's really try hard to grasp this kind of reality for a moment: Are you saying that your response would not be even remotely visceral when you find out that the city you love, your family and friends are in danger of being destroyed by foreign invaders?
  
  In the face of such invasion, and in the heat of the moment, is it enough to stand there saying: "please don't blow up things"? Do you think the invaders would actually listen to you, if what they are after has unimaginable economic value to their culture?

• A reply on Conversation: What do you think about Islam?

  4 days ago: Not you personally.
  
  You seem to be responding to the media view of Islam.
  
  If Budapest was sitting on a huge oil field and a country vastly richer than Hungary laid claim to all of it by invading and "blowing stuff up", how would you respond?
• +1

  A reply on Conversation: What do you think about Islam?

  4 days ago: "please don't blow up things"
  
  "please don't beat up anyone"
  
  The pot calling the kettle black again.

• A reply on Conversation: Why are YOU killing the planet?

  5 days ago: Thanks LaMar. I can only do my best!
  
  I wish you well too.

• A reply on Conversation: Why are YOU killing the planet?

  5 days ago: In answer to your second para: The $400 you paid for your plot of land would cost anywhere between £200,000 - £300,000 here in overcrowded UK. That's $304,500 - $457,000 to save you working it out. Then there's planning permission on top of that.
  
  The existing housing stock in UK is either very old or built to a very poor EPC spec. And with paltry government incentives to go green, it is beholden on ordinary people like me to fund the bulk of a new build with an EPC that is anywhere near carbon neutral.
  
  I'm not punching holes in your methods. It's the other way round if anything. I actually think what you are doing is admirable.
  
  If you want to be an ambassador for any movement, green or otherwise, you DO NOT do it by biting the hands that support you, Neither do you hurl accusations of guilt towards sympathetic others when you've been through the very same process yourself - and know what it feels like!