Entrepreneurship is like one of those carnival games where you throw darts or something.

Middle class kids can afford one throw. Most miss. A few hit the target and get a small prize. A very few hit the center bullseye and get a bigger prize. Rags to riches! The American Dream lives on.

Rich kids can afford many throws. If they want to, they can try over and over and over again until they hit something and feel good about themselves. Some keep going until they hit the center bullseye, then they give speeches or write blog posts about “meritocracy” and the salutary effects of hard work.

Poor kids aren’t visiting the carnival. They’re the ones working it.

The above is a comment on a Hacker News post. An screenshot of this lives on my computer and I think about it once in a while.

Internet has been down for the past week here and many people were suffering in various ways. Even many email services were hard to access. We use VPNs to connect to different online services and every VPN works on specific ISPs so we have to change VPNs based on what operator or ISP we’re using.

I, for example, have promised people that I do certain work and failed to hold my promise. This of course just one example. I know a lot of people who missed their deadlines and their reputation was hurt, and they have suffered financially and in many other ways.

Now imagine a young person in his twenties trying to start a business providing products. Born in a poor family and living in a country with no free Internet, no free flow of information, and certain limitations on accessibility of resources which are imposed by government.

This person was born into this. He had no saying in the situation he was born into. He didn’t choose his country or family or even the time of his birth. However, the conditions he was born in has serious effects on his life.

He probably has to commit a lifelong effort to just stay alive. He probably will never meet his goals and will never even be able to dream about success the way a Swiss boy or a French girl dreams or thinks.

Success is not purely the result of hard work. It’s based on many things and one very important one of them is the condition people are born in and have to live with. The reality of life is that nothing is guaranteed because of your motivation, hard work, genius, or skills, and your condition and your situation in life is one of the most impacting aspects.

Watching Marvel Cinematic Universe movies, I know all those saviors needed one thing to become a hero and that was being worthy of helping people and selflessness. What made those people recognized as heroes is that they put aside their differences and accepted their weaknesses yet became whole as a team, became strong, and defeated most impossible enemies.

I love Marvel movies because they make me feel hopeful. They teach us something that maybe other movies can’t even mention and that’s how a simplest act can make an impact complex and big enough to save the entire world.

Most of the times I hear people worrying about not being enough to do something or not being worthy of acting in defense of people, I just remember how some normal human beings with just one or two special talents could save the world in our favorite movies.

It’s true that those are just movies but the lesson we learn from those movies are real. I believe millions of people fighting against a common enemy are far more stronger than a team of 10 people with robots or magic.

These fighters for freedom are worthy. Worthy of lifting Thor’s hammer, worthy of becoming an Avenger, and worthy of becoming the leaders of war for freedom.

I remember someone telling me a wonderful story about our true value: a while back someone gave a watch to me. He handed me a wristwatch. I opened the box and it was a beautiful watch. It wasn’t super fancy but it was attractive. I brought it to home and put it in my desk drawer.

Couple of months later I opened the drawer to take something out and I saw the watch sitting there. I looked at it again and I thought it costs a few hundred bucks but for some reason I did a web search for its price and when I did I nearly passed out. The exact watch came out, it was worth over 10 thousand dollars.

It was from a very famous prestigious watchmaker. I’ve seen a lot of other watches that cost several hundred dollars but because of the manufacturer this watch was extremely valuable. You could put it side by side of other watches and you wouldn’t see much difference. Looked average, ordinary, copied. On the surface it looked the same.

But what gave it its value was who made it. Sometimes we don’t realize who we are because we see other people just like us. We may look average, ordinary, like nothing stands out but there’s something about us that makes us extremely valuable.

We’re not a copy, or a knockoff, we are original. We can’t get any more prestigious than what we are now. Nothing is more valuable than what we are.

Never think of yourself as worthless or incapable. You are capable of holding an entire chain together and doing the impossible. Simplest act from you can affect the whole system, the whole universe, and result in doing the absolute impossible.

You are not a single person, you are what the chain needs to remain intact. You, alone, can’t do anything but you are what the chain needs to remain intact. You may be the first part of the chain or the last one, either way, you are doing greatest work you can.

Never think of yourself as worthless or not valued. Never think that you are alone or you can’t do anything because you feel lonely in your situation. Think about how you inspire others or how you can start something amazing enough to change everything.

Everybody is a genius in their own way but it’s the injustices imposed on people that make it look different.

Let’s create an imaginary jungle. We have a lot of different animals in the jungle. We have monkeys, we have tigers, elephants, lions, fishes, penguins, etc.

All those animals have unique abilities and all of them are genius in their own way. The problem is that we want to enforce equality in a wrong way. If we measure the genius of animals but asking for one exam, say climbing a tree, then we’re giving advantage to monkeys and imposing injustice on fishes.

The fish can’t breathe in the air. The tiger may be able to climb a tree but not as good as the monkey. The elephants are dumbest in this measure because they can breathe in the air but can’t even jump.

This injustice makes them unequal.

I believe the only way we can have equality is to treat everybody with justice. All animals are equal in the way we treat them and that is with justice. If we measure how genius is a fish by its ability to swim, and measure how genius is a monkey by its ability to climb a tree, and measure tigers by their ability to run, then we can have a jungle of genius animals with everyone in their designated role and responsibility.

Our societies are very much like jungles. We measure everybody with the same test and we get the same results for it every time. People have their differences and these differences doesn’t make them dumb or incapable, but makes them unique and special in various matters. The situation people grow in has a lot of impact on them and the way they behave is very much affected from it.

When we constantly do a wrong test on wrong people, they will live a life believing they’re stupid. We know people have different set of skills and we know they behave differently in a same situation. Yet, instead of taking advantage of their skills to get the best complex of results, we try to force them behave and react as we desire. This will fail.

A lot of genius people have been wasted. Many artists are victim of not having a chance to glow and dying without ever finding out their true potential. Many athletes were placed in wrong positions and were eventually ruined. Many engineers failed to do what they truly capable of because of wrong tests and measurements imposed on them in schools or colleges.

Diversity is beautiful. It’s empowering. It gives societies ability to benefit from different and unique set of skills different people have. However, you can’t benefit from these skills and abilities if you try to make everyone and everything look the same. It ruins everything and turns into a disaster.

Iran is a beautiful example of diversity working well. We have Fars people, Turks, Lurs, Kurds, and Arabs living together with no problem. Every one of those people have unique culture, unique physique, unique set of moral values, and unique environment which makes them capable of accomplishing unique tasks. The result of integrating those people had made an amazing society of which everyone is benefited and satisfied.

People benefit from what they can’t have themselves on their own and are satisfied by tasks accomplished by ones who have capabilities. It’s because we expected and understood what those unique cultures and people have and integrated them into a working society. We don’t change them, we don’t colonize them, we don’t divide them, we integrate them into our diverse and capable society. It has been working for more than 3,000 years and it’s still working.

Today, there are protests in the country started by death of a Kurd girl, Mahsa Amini, who was reportedly killed by morality police. Fars people, Lurs, Turks, Arabs, Baluchs, and everybody else are protesting among their Kurd brothers and sisters in solidarity. They see themselves as one nation, one people, and one society not with differences, but with unique characteristics.

Debates are often viewed as two opposing sides finding some common ground in the middle.

However, this framework presumes that both viewpoints are valid and equal when in reality not all viewpoints are, or should be, considered as such.

And sometimes when you concede ground to meet in the middle, you still end up losing. And losing is the correct word. In political debates when you don’t achieve what you’re fighting for, which should be people’s benefits and rights, you’ve lost your fight.

The middle between civil rights and genocide, which means both sides have given up some grounds, is murder. No matter what you achieve, you’re responsible for the murder.

People may have some in common with their political opponent but it’s exactly the differences that matter. Common ground of believing in women rights’ to vote means nothing if one side of the debate is Hitler.

I’m sure we have all some stuff in common with Hitler. Charlie Chaplin had a mustache in common. Animal lovers and pet owners have something in common with him. Hitler even did some good stuff when he was in power.

Hitler instituted anti-animal cruelty laws. He was a well known animal lover, and was accompanied frequently by his pet dog, Blondi, which he killed near the end of the war to test a cyanide capsul to see if it would work if he ever needed to commit suicide.

Hitler instituted laws to prevent smoking in public. He abhorred smoking, and as Führer made laws that made smoking in public illegal in many places.

Hitler helped to start the automotive company Volkswagen. He was a primary endorser of the Volkswagen Beetle, a “people’s car” intended to be affordable for all Germans.

Hitler started the first major construction of the Autobahn, plans for which were divised and badly started by the Weimar Republic. The Autobahn is a prominent highway in Germany today.

Hell he even started the tradition of Olympic runners carrying the torch to the Olympic stadium and lighting the Olympic torch. While people forget the origins of this tradition, Hitler started it as a marketing tool for Germany.

But the fact that he killed millions of people, did war crimes, and committed genocide prevents us from making him an ideal in out political positions. Hitler will always be remembered as a monster he was, no matter how many animals he saved or how many poor people he rescued.

When we talk about political debates, it’s not the wins we care about, because the wins were our basic rights, but it’s the losses that matter, because those are rights we lost.

You either have your abortion rights or you don’t, there’s no middle. Part of your rights is not enough. You either have all of or you have nothing. You either have your freedom or you don’t, there’s nothing in the middle.

Don’t get tricked by those who urge you to sacrifice your rights to accomplish something. It’s a trap to lessen your freedom, trick you to accept less, and finally abolish your freedom completely.

You remember the campaign Jon Stewart promoted years ago? It was “The Rally to Restore Sanity” which was all about people being more moderate. The message of the rally was that if the media stopped giving voices to crazy people on both sides, maybe we could restore sanity.

It was an urged non-partisan cooperation between moderates on both sides. What they forgot was that Obama tried that and found out there are no moderates on the other side.

Jon Stewart believed that the national convention is dominated by right-wingers who believe Obama is a socialist and people on the supposed left (Democrats) who believe that 9/11 was an inside job.

But there weren’t any Democratic leaders who said 9/11 was an inside job but Republicans who think Obama was a socialist? All of them.

It was official Republican policy to claim Obama is a dangerous socialist. Like tax cuts pay for themselves and gay men just haven’t met the right women.

As another example of both sides using overheating rhetoric Stewart cited the right acquainting Obama with Hitler and the left calling Bush a war criminal. Except for thinking Obama is like Hitler is utterly unfounded but calling Bush a war criminal is the opinion of General Antonio Taguba who headed the Army’s investigation to Abu Gharib.

Republicans keep staking out a position that is further and further right and demand the Democrats meet them in the middle, which is now not the middle anymore.

That is why healthcare reform is so watered down. It’s Bob Dole’s plan from 1994. Same thing for cap and trade, it was the first President Bush’s plan to deal with carbon emissions. Now the Republican plan for climate change is to claim it’s a hoax.

Two opposing sides doesn’t necessarily have two compelling arguments. Martin Luther King spoke at that mall in the capital and he didn’t say those southern sheriffs with the fire hoses and the German Shepherds have a point too. He said “I have a dream”, they have a nightmare.

This isn’t Team Edward and Team Jacob. Liberals and Progressives must stand up and be counted and not pretend that we’re greedy or mean or shortsighted as they are and if that’s too polarizing for you and you still want to reach across the aisle and hold hands with someone on the right, try staying there, because they suit you more.

In Persian, sometimes curse words are different than other languages. For example, people sometimes refer to another person as an animal. In English you may insult someone by calling them a pig or a donkey, in Persian you can insult people calling them a calf or cow, in addition to pig or donkey.

A principal in a middle school tells this story. He says one day, just few minutes to break time, a gentleman with a nice suit and a very calming tune and behavior walked into my office. He asked to speak with a teacher. He wanted to ask about his child’s behavior and education. I asked him to introduce himself and he replied “I’m the cow, the father of the calf!”

He said the teacher knows him. Tell her I’m the cow, she’ll know!

I was surprised. I told the teacher about this and she was surprised as well. She said maybe he has some kind of psychological disorder. What does he mean? I don’t understand. I asked the teacher to meet the parent and she accepted.

The man greeted the teacher very politely and introduced himself: “I’m the cow.” The teacher greeted him back and replied with a wondering voice: “but…”

The man continued “you know me well, I’m the cow, father of the calf! I’m the father of that girl you called calf yesterday.” The teacher stuttered and said “but, you know…”

The man then started to talk. “You know, maybe my daughter has a problem, and I fully understand that you may get frustrated but wouldn’t it be better to share her problems with me before insulting her? I could help you, even if it’s little, with this problems.” The man and the teacher talked a little more after that.

After their conversation ended, the man handed a business card to the teacher. On it, it was written “Dr. [name]. Professor and Board Member of the Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences at University of [name]”

Few days later I asked him to speak for us and the teachers and he accepted. He delivered an amazing touching speech.

Violence, unlike what we think, is not just physical. Usually we consider hard physical interaction and sexual assault as violence but the reality is that the domain of violence is too wide and it includes verbal violence as well as many others.

When we insult someone, ridicule a race, mock the believers of some belief, when we accuse someone of something that one is not, when we threaten a person, all of these are acts of violence; the only difference is that verbal violence is without bleeding.

Verbal violence kills people from inside. Have you ever seen someone visit emergency room or go to police because he was bullied or insulted?

Victims of verbal violence don’t have scars on their bodies or a sign or mark that shows they were violated. Violence is first shaped in mind, then transformed into verbals and they eventually form physical violence. It affects mental health as well as physical health.

When a political leader calls its opposition dumb and corrupt, we as their followers are getting ready to walk on them or hit them with our cars. Why? Because we no longer consider them worthy of living. We blame them for everything that is fault and we form violence towards them.

When in a stadium, hundred thousand people shout insults and derogatory phrases at the opponents team, we set the stage for the post-game showdown. We’re forming violence against those people.

When we call the opposition movement the traitors and enemies’ puppets, then the physical removal and physical elimination of the other side will be justified for us, because we formed the violence in our minds before that.

When we call women chicks, the next lane driver an idiot donkey, the customer a fat cow, the student retarded, and regular people dumb, all of these will form violence in our minds which will prepare us for physical violence, from fist fights to sexual assault.

What should we do? I believe the first thing we should do is learn and practice conversational skills. The lack of conversational skill will result in lack of proper communication, because people won’t be able to word what they mean properly, and then they’ll try to communicate aggressively and violently, because the violence is formed in our minds and the blame is on others.

Practicing communication and conversation and practicing to empty our minds and hearts will help us to act more properly and less violently.

Second thing we should do is to repeat with ourselves that killing people is not just stabbing them in heart or firing a bullet at their head. A man or woman whose personality and individuality is broken inside, whose integrity is violated constantly, whose self-consciousness and respect is destroyed won’t have a normal life anymore.

We should remind ourselves that the opposite movement, the opponent team, the believers in something we don’t believe are just human beings like us. They are affected by their environment and they are formed by what they have been in. We should repeat that forming violence against them is not OK.

We should learn to use the word cow for cows only.

A common argument conservatives often throw is that the Founding Fathers would approve of a behavior or political/societal practice. For example, they say the Founding Fathers would not approve of separation of religion and state, which I previously wrote about on a different post.

Aside from how dumb is such argument in any sense, the idea of justifying anything morally by saying someone 300 years ago would approve of it is pathetic.

Using the Founding Fathers argument, they should also believe in slavery or at least segregation. George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Patrick Henry were all slave-owners.

Among American presidents, twelve of them owned slaves. Eight of them owned slaves while in office. George Washington is believed to own more than 1,500 slaves while in office. George Washington’s slaves were not freed even when he was passing Northwest Ordinance, which banned slave ownership in north of the Ohio river.

Jefferson fathered multiple slave children with the enslaved woman Sally Hemings, the likely half-sister of his late wife Martha Wayles Skelton.

Despite being a lifelong slave owner, Jefferson routinely condemned the institution of slavery, attempted to restrict its expansion, and advocated gradual emancipation. As President, he oversaw the abolition of the international slave trade.

Founding Fathers were not hypocrites, were they? I’m not sure what to call it but owning slaves while trying to free them seems a lot like hypocrisy to me.

Did Founding Fathers approve hypocrisy? Should we be hypocrites and justify it using the Founding Fathers argument? How is a moral practice justified because someone in 1801 was doing it?

James Polk became the Democratic nominee for president in 1844 partially because of his tolerance of slavery, in contrast to Van Buren. As president, he generally supported the rights of slave owners. His will provided for the freeing of his slaves after the death of his wife, though the Emancipation Proclamation and the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution ended up freeing them long before her death in 1891.

The majority of the signers of the Declaration of Independence owned enslaved people. Many southerners who could be considered Founders were pro-slavery. Their children fought against northerners in the

James Madison is known as the Father of the Constitution because of his pivotal role in the document’s drafting as well as its ratification. He is also a slave owner, believed to own more than 100 enslaved people.

Madison occasionally condemned the institution of slavery and opposed the international slave trade, but he also vehemently opposed any attempts to restrict its domestic expansion. Madison did not free his slaves during his lifetime or in his will.

When Madison was writing the Constitution, the Fathers did not give women right to vote. They didn’t consider all human beings equal. They did not believe a woman is suitable to work in politics.

I don’t blame them though. I think they should’ve done much much better but ethics were much different back then. It’s not ethical to restrict a woman or control here today, because we believe in a different ethical system from then, which is a good thing. We don’t get our ethics from 1800’s.

Slavery is just one example of many wrong things Founding Fathers or American presidents did, of course.

Let’s not even mention that those people were colonizers and they stole land and killed indigenous people of those lands brutally. Let’s not mention their behaviors toward each other, even white people, and other countries. We can even forget about the massacres and anything else.

If you get stuck in an island of cannibals, will eating a human be justified? If all your neighbors beat their wives or daughters, will you do it too? If all of your family members smoke crack, would you do drugs?

I don’t believe a sane person would do anything wrong or immoral just because others do it. Trying to justify a wrongdoing with “but he did it too” seems just stupid, doesn’t it? It’s childish.

Aside from that, why just get wrong things from the Founding Fathers? I previously have explained how Founding Fathers resisted the idea of involving religion in laws.

Thomas Jefferson was a deist. George Washington belonged to a church, but may or may not have been a believer, he was silent about it. Thomas Paine was a deist and an opponent of organized religion in general and Christianity in particular. Ben Franklin was a deist, but sympathetic towards Christians.

Will conservatives shut up about religion, Christianity, and the separation of Church and State because Founding Fathers did as well? I guess not. Maybe they got the hypocrisy from the slave-owning Fathers.