Provocative Questions

Fandango’s Provocative Question #44

Fandango25 Comments

FPQWelcome once again to Fandango’s Provocative Question. Each week I will pose what I think is a provocative question for your consideration. By provocative, I don’t mean a question that will cause annoyance or anger. Nor do I mean a question intended to arouse sexual desire or interest.

What I do mean is a question that is likely to get you to think, to be creative, and to provoke a response. Hopefully a positive response.

You’re probably familiar with this quote from philosopher, essayist, poet, and novelist, George Santayana, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.“ In a 1948 speech to the House of Commons, Winston Churchill changed the quote slightly when he said, “Those who fail to learn from history are condemned to repeat it.“

So, speaking about what you remember about the past or have learned from history, how would you answer this question:

What do you think was (or is) the most significant event in the history of the human race? Please explain.

If you choose to participate, write a post with your response to the question. Once you are done, tag your post with #FPQ and create a pingback to this post if you are on WordPress. Or you can simply include a link to your post in the comments.

The issue with pingbacks not showing up seems to have been resolved, but you might check to confirm that your pingback is there. If not, please manually add your link in the comments.

Fandango’s Provocative Question #43

Fandango35 Comments

FPQWelcome once again to Fandango’s Provocative Question. Each week I will pose what I think is a provocative question for your consideration. By provocative, I don’t mean a question that will cause annoyance or anger. Nor do I mean a question intended to arouse sexual desire or interest.

What I do mean is a question that is likely to get you to think, to be creative, and to provoke a response. Hopefully a positive response.

I have two children (now fully grown adults). Their DNA comes from their mother and me. They were raised in the same household by their mother and me. And yet their personalities couldn’t be more different.

A while back, we got two dogs, Labrador retrievers, from the same litter when they were seven weeks old. And yet their personalities (or doggy natures) couldn’t have been more different.

So I often wonder about the “nature versus nurture” conundrum. The debate involves whether human (or canine?) behavior is determined by the environment, either prenatal or during a person’s life, or by a person’s genes.

“Nature” refers to all of the genes and hereditary factors that influence who we are — from our physical appearance to our personality characteristics.

”Nurture” refers to all the environmental variables that affect who we are, including our early childhood experiences, how we were raised, our social relationships, and our surrounding culture.

Now I’m interested in what you think. So my question is this:

What do you believe, when it comes to people’s traits and personalities? Are they primarily formed and shaped by nature or by nurture, as defined above? What about your personality? Nature or nurture? Please elaborate.

If you choose to participate, write a post with your response to the question. Once you are done, tag your post with #FPQ and create a pingback to this post if you are on WordPress. Or you can simply include a link to your post in the comments.

The issue with pingbacks not showing up seems to have been resolved, but you might check to confirm that your pingback is there. If not, please manually add your link in the comments.

Fandango’s Provocative Question #42

Fandango22 Comments

FPQWelcome once again to Fandango’s Provocative Question. Each week I will pose what I think is a provocative question for your consideration. By provocative, I don’t mean a question that will cause annoyance or anger. Nor do I mean a question intended to arouse sexual desire or interest.

What I do mean is a question that is likely to get you to think, to be creative, and to provoke a response. Hopefully a positive response.

This week I am actually going to borrow from fellow blogger, Melanie, at Sparks from a Combustible Mind. In her Share Your World post from earlier this week, one of the questions she asked was, “When is censorship warranted? Ever?”

There we’re some fascinating responses to that question and, since some of you who read this post may not have read Melanie’s post, I thought I’d ask it again, but not from the prospect of censorship per se, but on the whole notion of freedom of speech.

Freedom of speech is a principle that supports the freedom of an individual or a community to articulate and express their opinions and ideas without fear of retaliation, censorship, or legal sanction. This is especially important to us bloggers.

One example of where freedom of speech or expression is under attack is that American border patrol agents, who have the authority to search belongings for contraband, or to determine who is admissible into the U.S., have recently been claiming the right to search travelers’ devices for “general law enforcement purposes.” They claim that they can seize and search your phone, and even make a copy of it so that forensic experts can analyze its contents off-site.

The good news is that, based upon rulings in some recent lawsuits, border agents can’t search travelers’ cellphones without having some reason to believe a particular traveler has committed a crime.

The fact that they thought they had the right to seize and search the electronic devices, including social media postings, of people legally entering the country is, to me, very disconcerting.

So my question is this:

Do you feel that in today’s world — and perhaps in the part of the world in which you live — the freedom to articulate and express opinions and ideas without fear of retaliation, censorship, or legal sanction is being threatened?

If you choose to participate, write a post with your response to the question. Once you are done, tag your post with #FPQ and create a pingback to this post if you are on WordPress. Or you can simply include a link to your post in the comments.

The issue with pingbacks not showing up seems to have been resolved, but you might check to confirm that your pingback is there. If not, please manually add your link in the comments.

Fandango’s Provocative Question #41

Fandango29 Comments

FPQWelcome once again to Fandango’s Provocative Question. Each week I will pose what I think is a provocative question for your consideration. By provocative, I don’t mean a question that will cause annoyance or anger. Nor do I mean a question intended to arouse sexual desire or interest.

What I do mean is a question that is likely to get you to think, to be creative, and to provoke a response. Hopefully a positive response.

This week I came upon a quote from Zadie Smith, an English novelist, essayist, and short-story writer.48F9BB42-DD80-4A1C-BEED-1D12CC1DB85EI was originally going to use her quote for my response to Linda G. Hill’s One-Liner Wednesday prompt today, but the more I thought about the quote, I decided that it would be better suited for this week’s provocative question. Here’s her quote:

“The past is always tense, the future perfect.”

I love this quote. It’s a play on words with respect to verb tenses (past tense and future perfect tense). But it’s also more than that, isn’t it?

Our pasts are filled with many moments and memories, both good ones and bad ones. Yet when many of us think about our pasts, we often tend to focus on the negative moments, those times and events that we may regret or where we wish we’d done or said something different.

But our pasts are what made us who we are today and because of what we have learned — hopefully — from our pasts, we have a chance to make our futures better and brighter. And maybe even perfect.

So this week’s question is for you to discuss what you think about Zadie Smith’s quote. Do you believe that the past is always tense, the future perfect?

If you choose to participate, write a post with your response to the question. Once you are done, tag your post with #FPQ and create a pingback to this post if you are on WordPress. Or you can simply include a link to your post in the comments.

The issue with pingbacks not showing up seems to have been resolved, but you might check to confirm that your pingback is there. If not, please manually add your link in the comments.

Fandango’s Provocative Question #40

Fandango15 Comments

FPQWelcome once again to Fandango’s Provocative Question. Each week I will pose what I think is a provocative question for your consideration. By provocative, I don’t mean a question that will cause annoyance or anger. Nor do I mean a question intended to arouse sexual desire or interest.

What I do mean is a question that is likely to get you to think, to be creative, and to provoke a response. Hopefully a positive response.

This week’s provocative question is about control and how much control each of us has in our lives. I’d like to think I’m calling the shots in my own life, but I know that the reality is that there are all kinds of external factors and events that have influenced the trajectory my life has taken.

So I ask you this:

How much control do you believe you have over your own life?

If you choose to participate, write a post with your response to the question. Once you are done, tag your post with #FPQ and create a pingback to this post if you are on WordPress. Or you can simply include a link to your post in the comments.

The issue with pingbacks not showing up seems to have been resolved, but you might check to confirm that your pingback is there. If not, please manually add your link in the comments.