It was probably nearly 40 years ago -- another life, in lots of ways -- that I first read about 'the elephant in the room' concept and wondered what this was. I think I found the reference in a book by Idries Shah, long since dead but a thoughtful writer of the times who helped tell me about sufism.
Sufism in case you didn't know has been subsumed by a certain religion, claiming that as they noticed it was already in existence it was therefore theirs to do with as they wish. Numerous islamists will shriek, as they are won't to do, that everything is the creation of their mindset and who am I to argue? After all, nothing existed before about the sixth century AD, as we are slowly being educated to accept.
Anyway sufism was brought to my attention by Idries Shah and I enjoyed reading the aphorisms and stories of the sufis, especially those of Nasruddin who as a 'wise fool' always saw what was going on behind the mask and the truth of life. He was also funny, which helps enormously. But the one thing I couldn't get my head round was the idea of this elephant stood in the middle of the room and no one could grasp what it was. Instead, experts fussed around the edges and into the corners either ignoring the obvious or making great pronouncements if they discovered say, the tail of the creature, or the foot.
They argued skilfully and ingeniously, but no had a conclusive idea what this was. One way or another, they couldn't stand back and see it.
Being a naive young person I thought this was a flight of fancy too far. It couldn't be true in modern Britain, I said. We had come through change and wars, the building up and subsequent loss of power, the ability to create and make things that would help people, offered the world the basis of a fair legal system and along the way provided some of its best literature. Britain had through all sorts of events gained experience and wisdom.
Our great and good leaders now entrusted with safeguarding this glorious tradition, and specially chosen by this wonderful thing called democracy which naturally brought the very best to the top and allowed those exalted ones to gently and wisely rule our lives -- apart from the places where a donkey painted red would get elected to parliament -- would see all. They would not fail to see any elephants in the room. How, I argued to myself, could those educated and superior people not ever see what was in front of them?
If there was a fat elephant filling the room, they would notice. I could trust them.
So I read more books on sufism and some of it made sense, some of it didn't, but as always Nasruddin's clownish-actions-but-accurate-observations made me smile. Wisdom had a sense of humour, I was relieved to discover. However, there was still the elephant in the room.
Here's the rub: either we started to elect the wrong people to the job of guiding us or the elephant came with stunning camouflage. Or perhaps our great and good leaders stopped feeling and searching. Maybe the corners were far more fascinating. Perhaps, as Paul Simon sang about seeing "angels in the architecture" that turned out to be a lot more rewarding. I mean, you could stand, mouth agape, looking up at the wonder of it all and save yourself turning round and shrieking with horror at this big thing threatening to crush you.
So, without naming elephants, it's time to admit we have some big ones packing into our limited room. These islands, some might say, do not a lot of room right now to offer. Whatever; these all-too-obvious massive forms are there but are being ignored. Issues are being skirted round and no one in power is in a position to say "Dear God, what is this thing blocking the light?" Even if one of these creatures treads on someone's foot there are a multitude of excuses either that the elephant didn't mean it, or it isn't all the elephant's feet doing it or it was an accident and treading happens. Get over it and move on round the edges. Look at the architecture and see angels instead. Hey peasants, we do it and look at us: we rule!
Yes, they rule, and don't we know it. And with all that power comes the ability to avoid looking down or turning around because then they will have to do something about all these elephants. The ones we the ordinary people might see but they refuse to notice at all.
Friday 29 November 2013
Thursday 28 November 2013
Allowing bums on cushions
There is a dilemma for modern society and one that I can't seeing being resolved anytime soon. It's the one about allowing people to do things.
How much allowance do we make for people, how much are they allowed to do before it becomes offensive or counter-productive or even, in a few cases, downright dangerous to the welfare of the society so generous in the first place?
Tough questions, and we don't know the answer. We could of course pick a position somewhere between the tyrannical "Everything not proscribed is forbidden" or "Damn the torpedoes. Full speed ahead!" The problem is no position within the limits of everything and nothing will suit us all, all the time. It certainly doesn't suit governments, who take various and changing views on a wide range of allowances, adjusting them either by weight of popular opinion, what they think will win the next election or simply what they have been told or choose to believe.
It is easy to think that our great and good leaders and the elite who scurries along behind them begging for more scraps from the table of public finance have their fingers on the pulse of society. Easy to think they look and listen and understand it all when in fact most of them live in very restricted environments. If they don't know, and can't know, they need information and input; they need someone to tell them. I am here reminded of the old saying about a prominent British politician of many years ago, who was so influenced by others he "bore the impression of the last person who sat upon him." The quote may not be 100 per cent accurate, but the principle is there.
Sadly, it's a principle enshrined in our leaders these days.
Stepping away from the ridiculous posturings and pronouncements of those paid generously by the public purse, many people have a similar dilemma in their life over all sorts of issues, allowing one thing for themselves while demanding another limit for others. The old "do as I say, not as I do" springs to mind here. We may be hypocritical, perhaps because we inevitably see no harm in a little of what we enjoy but a lot of harm in what other people desire, but we allow ourselves that luxury.
The difference between, say, a bottle of wine over a meal for sociable reasons at a weekend seen against the practice of all out binge drinking where someone lies vomiting in the gutter having smashed shop windows in their drunken state. We did it because we were in control and they are not may be easy to determine from your point of view but maybe not someone else's. So, if you allow one event how far do you go to stop the other event?
All or nothing? All or nothing for some but not for all?
Of course balance and common sense, it will be argued, play a vital role in everything. Except as we know balances can be tipped and arranged or even fixed, and common sense is often shown to be not very common at all.
But here's the broader problem: the one where groups of people emerge who want either freedom (or restriction, or both in some convoluted way) but who may within their ranks have different and varied views. It is a pretty obvious statement that the problem with any group is that gradually one position or another rises to the top, that control and direction of the group devolves to those aggressive, insistent people who have definite views about what should be and how it should be. In other words, the ones who say "Oh, I don't care, it's nothing to do with me," are gradually eased aside by those who shout "This is terrible and must be stopped at once!" or equally "Let us have more of this now, or else!"
This then becomes the problem for society: if you allow people to do something is there a danger they will go to one extreme or the other and want more of what they want, and with it less of what you want? Their demands may seem supposedly reasonable at first but having achieved them, why should the group stop there?
Let's says a religious group wants a limit of alcohol consumption. While a few of their number may individually drink secretly themselves the collective idea emerges that globally drinking booze ought to be limited to one beer can per person in certain places. Later the group, having secured an agreement to the basic idea from those cushions in government (because the weight of their collective bums has grown considerable) begins to say that actually the ban should be everywhere in public. More cushion-sitting follows. Then the group demands no alcohol anywhere, private or public.
The cushions at the top may have been plumped back up but the heavy sitting resumes, the ban enforced.
The extreme end of the group, the ones who have come to set the agenda, have got what they wanted. The rest of their gathering goes along with it all, having already established they really don't mind because they didn't drink and anyway the government has shown it can be sat upon effectively. Our leaders are receptive to threats of voting, or withdrawal of support and the ban is enshrined in law, which now has to be maintained. No point in having a law if no one takes any notice.
Let's say there are enormous repercussions with the closure of breweries, public houses, off-licences and even farms growing hops and vineyards are duly closed. There are benefits too with more shelves in supermarkets available for other products, far fewer binge-drinking and alcohol-related problems (remember some goes on in secret, still) but the public turns to something else which is potentially more harmful to their health and welfare. Perhaps a soft drug, or home brewing with dodgy ingredients. Criminal interest will grow (think the story of prohibition here and the gangland violence) and there is a whole bunch more problems with enforcement, allied with extensive covering up of the fact the original ban was a wretched thing.
But, all this was because allowances were made. A group, or certain individuals within that group were allowed to have a say -- perhaps outwardly a logical, sensible and well-researched say by their standards, but a say nonetheless -- in the shape of society. The result is you are not allowed to do something. The group, emboldened by their success, goes on the demand more things not even related now to booze. They have shown they are organised, powerful and single-minded in their insistence of what they want. Votes can be withdrawn, though there is some evidence by now they never really wanted votes anyway and the establishment of their authority figures is so much better than choice or democracy.
It emerges (or was known all along but no one liked to say anything) that this particular group haven't sought a ban on alcohol because of health issues; they are religious and they have it on good authority that their god doesn't like people drinking. Quite why their god, who is omnipotent, allowed alcohol to be created and the skills to produce it in handy cans and bottles in the first place remains a mystery but not one people likes to examine. Omnipotence, apparently, doesn't like questions being asked.
It is now obvious to the population at large that allowances, having been made in the first place, have resulted in far fewer freedoms being allowed. "We allowed these people to have their say and look what's happened! Now they want us to more of what they want and less of what we wanted."
Oh well, that's allowances for you. Unfortunately you can't have it both ways. Not unless you go down the road of a tyrannical authority in the first place who makes it clear they allow no one to sit on them. They aren't cushions then but concrete slabs.
However that, we can say, is the great question for society: are no cushions allowed or do you allow bums to descend with a self-satisfied grunt and then not get off the cushions?
How much allowance do we make for people, how much are they allowed to do before it becomes offensive or counter-productive or even, in a few cases, downright dangerous to the welfare of the society so generous in the first place?
Tough questions, and we don't know the answer. We could of course pick a position somewhere between the tyrannical "Everything not proscribed is forbidden" or "Damn the torpedoes. Full speed ahead!" The problem is no position within the limits of everything and nothing will suit us all, all the time. It certainly doesn't suit governments, who take various and changing views on a wide range of allowances, adjusting them either by weight of popular opinion, what they think will win the next election or simply what they have been told or choose to believe.
It is easy to think that our great and good leaders and the elite who scurries along behind them begging for more scraps from the table of public finance have their fingers on the pulse of society. Easy to think they look and listen and understand it all when in fact most of them live in very restricted environments. If they don't know, and can't know, they need information and input; they need someone to tell them. I am here reminded of the old saying about a prominent British politician of many years ago, who was so influenced by others he "bore the impression of the last person who sat upon him." The quote may not be 100 per cent accurate, but the principle is there.
Sadly, it's a principle enshrined in our leaders these days.
Stepping away from the ridiculous posturings and pronouncements of those paid generously by the public purse, many people have a similar dilemma in their life over all sorts of issues, allowing one thing for themselves while demanding another limit for others. The old "do as I say, not as I do" springs to mind here. We may be hypocritical, perhaps because we inevitably see no harm in a little of what we enjoy but a lot of harm in what other people desire, but we allow ourselves that luxury.
The difference between, say, a bottle of wine over a meal for sociable reasons at a weekend seen against the practice of all out binge drinking where someone lies vomiting in the gutter having smashed shop windows in their drunken state. We did it because we were in control and they are not may be easy to determine from your point of view but maybe not someone else's. So, if you allow one event how far do you go to stop the other event?
All or nothing? All or nothing for some but not for all?
Of course balance and common sense, it will be argued, play a vital role in everything. Except as we know balances can be tipped and arranged or even fixed, and common sense is often shown to be not very common at all.
But here's the broader problem: the one where groups of people emerge who want either freedom (or restriction, or both in some convoluted way) but who may within their ranks have different and varied views. It is a pretty obvious statement that the problem with any group is that gradually one position or another rises to the top, that control and direction of the group devolves to those aggressive, insistent people who have definite views about what should be and how it should be. In other words, the ones who say "Oh, I don't care, it's nothing to do with me," are gradually eased aside by those who shout "This is terrible and must be stopped at once!" or equally "Let us have more of this now, or else!"
This then becomes the problem for society: if you allow people to do something is there a danger they will go to one extreme or the other and want more of what they want, and with it less of what you want? Their demands may seem supposedly reasonable at first but having achieved them, why should the group stop there?
Let's says a religious group wants a limit of alcohol consumption. While a few of their number may individually drink secretly themselves the collective idea emerges that globally drinking booze ought to be limited to one beer can per person in certain places. Later the group, having secured an agreement to the basic idea from those cushions in government (because the weight of their collective bums has grown considerable) begins to say that actually the ban should be everywhere in public. More cushion-sitting follows. Then the group demands no alcohol anywhere, private or public.
The cushions at the top may have been plumped back up but the heavy sitting resumes, the ban enforced.
The extreme end of the group, the ones who have come to set the agenda, have got what they wanted. The rest of their gathering goes along with it all, having already established they really don't mind because they didn't drink and anyway the government has shown it can be sat upon effectively. Our leaders are receptive to threats of voting, or withdrawal of support and the ban is enshrined in law, which now has to be maintained. No point in having a law if no one takes any notice.
Let's say there are enormous repercussions with the closure of breweries, public houses, off-licences and even farms growing hops and vineyards are duly closed. There are benefits too with more shelves in supermarkets available for other products, far fewer binge-drinking and alcohol-related problems (remember some goes on in secret, still) but the public turns to something else which is potentially more harmful to their health and welfare. Perhaps a soft drug, or home brewing with dodgy ingredients. Criminal interest will grow (think the story of prohibition here and the gangland violence) and there is a whole bunch more problems with enforcement, allied with extensive covering up of the fact the original ban was a wretched thing.
But, all this was because allowances were made. A group, or certain individuals within that group were allowed to have a say -- perhaps outwardly a logical, sensible and well-researched say by their standards, but a say nonetheless -- in the shape of society. The result is you are not allowed to do something. The group, emboldened by their success, goes on the demand more things not even related now to booze. They have shown they are organised, powerful and single-minded in their insistence of what they want. Votes can be withdrawn, though there is some evidence by now they never really wanted votes anyway and the establishment of their authority figures is so much better than choice or democracy.
It emerges (or was known all along but no one liked to say anything) that this particular group haven't sought a ban on alcohol because of health issues; they are religious and they have it on good authority that their god doesn't like people drinking. Quite why their god, who is omnipotent, allowed alcohol to be created and the skills to produce it in handy cans and bottles in the first place remains a mystery but not one people likes to examine. Omnipotence, apparently, doesn't like questions being asked.
It is now obvious to the population at large that allowances, having been made in the first place, have resulted in far fewer freedoms being allowed. "We allowed these people to have their say and look what's happened! Now they want us to more of what they want and less of what we wanted."
Oh well, that's allowances for you. Unfortunately you can't have it both ways. Not unless you go down the road of a tyrannical authority in the first place who makes it clear they allow no one to sit on them. They aren't cushions then but concrete slabs.
However that, we can say, is the great question for society: are no cushions allowed or do you allow bums to descend with a self-satisfied grunt and then not get off the cushions?
Wednesday 27 November 2013
The inconsequential and the no consequence
We live, some would say, in the age of the inconsequential. We do though live in an age with seemingly no consequence.
That we are surrounded by the inconsequential is hardly worth mentioning. In fact, we accept it to such a level is only astonishing if one stops to think, because carefully mixed in with the spin and the propaganda and the PR exercises and the impassioned statements about this sad old world in need of more laws and regulations, are matters of absolutely no consequence.
Today I saw in a mainstream news source a report about the outrage that the removal of a character in an animated TV series was causing. There was we were told a real storm brewing because something that was unreal on all sorts of levels (a cartoon of a talking dog, no less) was about to leave our television screens. An act so terrible to comprehend that it was about to make people's lives unbearable.
Apparently the additional news that a new speaking cartoon dog was about to replace the old speaking cartoon dog of 14 years was not deemed likely to stop this reported impending explosion of anger. The afficianados of this televised fantasy, and who no doubt could repeat whole shows line for line, were I was reliably informed going to be upset. Very upset. Very, very upset. Petitions would be raised, urgent emails sent. Sharp comments made to friends.
People would say, with their voices cracking with emotion, that they could not possibly watch the show any more. "It's over," they would say, biting their bottom lip bravely. "They have ripped the heart out of this pointless animated fantasy that is sporadically amusing but not very well drawn and has gone on far too long."
No, sorry, I made that last bit up. None of the faithful who stare slack-jawed at this TV show would ever say that.
So I have been given inconsequential information and I suppose it had an effect: it prompted me to write this.
But there is (though hard to believe) something more important related to the inconsequential. This is the fact there is little or no consequence of any action these days. At one time there was a degree of honour, a sort of public admittance that wrong had been done. People in power resigned if found doing something wrong or immoral. A sort of falling on their sword.
Now though, those who comprise our lords and masters, the elite who dictate what we must do and think (even if they don't do it themselves) shrug so-called 'errors of judgement' off. Possibly they may admit, loosely, that they made a mistake or an error of judgement but no one would step down from a very personally rewarding office for screwing the nation or telling lies. No point in throwing in the towel when it's so well-paid and such an easy job too with all the perks and expenses and luxury living.
A small fuss may be made, but it will blow over in time. before too long people will have forgotten, and anyway you can always say sorry and carry on not being sorry. You see, one thing our elite has learned is that there is always the death of a TV cartoon character to deflect the public's attention from being dissatisfied for long.
This, in turn, moves down the food-chain. As above, so below.
We know that there are people 'out there' with no position and no authority but they have learned they have nothing to fear from any action they take. I understand that most petty crime goes unsolved and in fact, most petty crime is no longer reported because it just wastes your time. It would be just another statistic, lost in the maze of official documents to be filed away and forgotten. Nothing will be done and even if the system caught the little shit who did something to you and yours, chances are he or she will be told not to do it again. Possibly told in a strict voice, too, but really he or she can live with that.
Let me tell you a little tale. It is not significant in that it is probably happening all over the country these days to a greater or lesser degree, but it helps illustrate my point about no consequence.
Someone I know teaches in a comprehensive school. Tough job, but someone's got to do it. He does it with as much humour and good grace as he can manage; he knows the kids appreciate a light touch on the wheel of education if only to stop the uninterested falling asleep out of boredom. If you can tell them you like dubstep or whatever they listen to the lesson and thus one can begin to claim some of the little darlings' usually fragile attention.
One day Mr X (not his real name) was walking down school corridor and a child, big enough and tall enough to pass as a fully grown male, was beating the living poo out a little kid four years his junior. Right there in the school corridor, where teachers walk. Mr X dragged the wild child-man off the helpless little mite, hearing the bigger one saying -- the way teens do -- that he was fuckin' gonna kill the little twat, or words to that effect. The little twat was spared injury by fist and boot by timely intervention but as Mr X hauled the big lad away the thug was trying to still get punches and kicks in around the teacher in a last bid to hurt the smaller one.
Hauled off to the head's office the grinding wheels of scholarly justice ground into action and... nothing was done. The school it seemed did not want to expel the potentially homicidal yoof for fear of gaining a 'bad reputation.' The school's answer was to give Master Thuglet a three day suspension to reflect on his thuggery (and probably reflect well by playing violent video games and listening to rap or whatever) and then he could return to his local bastion of education to learn more. Or not.
The point is that this lout knew in today's society there would be no consequence. What are you going to do? Who are you going to call? There's nothing you can do to stop me. Say what you want but it has no bearing on me. Three days off school? Wow, that hurts! Can't you make it four and really make me suffer?
So the little kid, who may or may not have done something so terrible that he deserved to be punched and kicked by someone at least a third bigger, older and stronger, probably now lives in fear of his life. After all, who will defend him? The little one may hope that Mr X or Miss Y or another teacher is always around and the head of this school may hope that not only does it not happen again but also that the news doesn't get out and local parents remove their kids (though as you could only remove them to a school where another muscular lout can do the same, there's not much point.)
The big lout may one day end up committing a crime so terrible that he goes to jail, though you wouldn't bet on it. Whatever happens to him now though you can rest assured he got one good thing out of school: he has been taught there are no real consequences for any action.
He may however get very angry about the death of an animated talking dog on TV and really take it out on someone, no matter what the small consequences are.
That we are surrounded by the inconsequential is hardly worth mentioning. In fact, we accept it to such a level is only astonishing if one stops to think, because carefully mixed in with the spin and the propaganda and the PR exercises and the impassioned statements about this sad old world in need of more laws and regulations, are matters of absolutely no consequence.
Today I saw in a mainstream news source a report about the outrage that the removal of a character in an animated TV series was causing. There was we were told a real storm brewing because something that was unreal on all sorts of levels (a cartoon of a talking dog, no less) was about to leave our television screens. An act so terrible to comprehend that it was about to make people's lives unbearable.
Apparently the additional news that a new speaking cartoon dog was about to replace the old speaking cartoon dog of 14 years was not deemed likely to stop this reported impending explosion of anger. The afficianados of this televised fantasy, and who no doubt could repeat whole shows line for line, were I was reliably informed going to be upset. Very upset. Very, very upset. Petitions would be raised, urgent emails sent. Sharp comments made to friends.
People would say, with their voices cracking with emotion, that they could not possibly watch the show any more. "It's over," they would say, biting their bottom lip bravely. "They have ripped the heart out of this pointless animated fantasy that is sporadically amusing but not very well drawn and has gone on far too long."
No, sorry, I made that last bit up. None of the faithful who stare slack-jawed at this TV show would ever say that.
So I have been given inconsequential information and I suppose it had an effect: it prompted me to write this.
But there is (though hard to believe) something more important related to the inconsequential. This is the fact there is little or no consequence of any action these days. At one time there was a degree of honour, a sort of public admittance that wrong had been done. People in power resigned if found doing something wrong or immoral. A sort of falling on their sword.
Now though, those who comprise our lords and masters, the elite who dictate what we must do and think (even if they don't do it themselves) shrug so-called 'errors of judgement' off. Possibly they may admit, loosely, that they made a mistake or an error of judgement but no one would step down from a very personally rewarding office for screwing the nation or telling lies. No point in throwing in the towel when it's so well-paid and such an easy job too with all the perks and expenses and luxury living.
A small fuss may be made, but it will blow over in time. before too long people will have forgotten, and anyway you can always say sorry and carry on not being sorry. You see, one thing our elite has learned is that there is always the death of a TV cartoon character to deflect the public's attention from being dissatisfied for long.
This, in turn, moves down the food-chain. As above, so below.
We know that there are people 'out there' with no position and no authority but they have learned they have nothing to fear from any action they take. I understand that most petty crime goes unsolved and in fact, most petty crime is no longer reported because it just wastes your time. It would be just another statistic, lost in the maze of official documents to be filed away and forgotten. Nothing will be done and even if the system caught the little shit who did something to you and yours, chances are he or she will be told not to do it again. Possibly told in a strict voice, too, but really he or she can live with that.
Let me tell you a little tale. It is not significant in that it is probably happening all over the country these days to a greater or lesser degree, but it helps illustrate my point about no consequence.
Someone I know teaches in a comprehensive school. Tough job, but someone's got to do it. He does it with as much humour and good grace as he can manage; he knows the kids appreciate a light touch on the wheel of education if only to stop the uninterested falling asleep out of boredom. If you can tell them you like dubstep or whatever they listen to the lesson and thus one can begin to claim some of the little darlings' usually fragile attention.
One day Mr X (not his real name) was walking down school corridor and a child, big enough and tall enough to pass as a fully grown male, was beating the living poo out a little kid four years his junior. Right there in the school corridor, where teachers walk. Mr X dragged the wild child-man off the helpless little mite, hearing the bigger one saying -- the way teens do -- that he was fuckin' gonna kill the little twat, or words to that effect. The little twat was spared injury by fist and boot by timely intervention but as Mr X hauled the big lad away the thug was trying to still get punches and kicks in around the teacher in a last bid to hurt the smaller one.
Hauled off to the head's office the grinding wheels of scholarly justice ground into action and... nothing was done. The school it seemed did not want to expel the potentially homicidal yoof for fear of gaining a 'bad reputation.' The school's answer was to give Master Thuglet a three day suspension to reflect on his thuggery (and probably reflect well by playing violent video games and listening to rap or whatever) and then he could return to his local bastion of education to learn more. Or not.
The point is that this lout knew in today's society there would be no consequence. What are you going to do? Who are you going to call? There's nothing you can do to stop me. Say what you want but it has no bearing on me. Three days off school? Wow, that hurts! Can't you make it four and really make me suffer?
So the little kid, who may or may not have done something so terrible that he deserved to be punched and kicked by someone at least a third bigger, older and stronger, probably now lives in fear of his life. After all, who will defend him? The little one may hope that Mr X or Miss Y or another teacher is always around and the head of this school may hope that not only does it not happen again but also that the news doesn't get out and local parents remove their kids (though as you could only remove them to a school where another muscular lout can do the same, there's not much point.)
The big lout may one day end up committing a crime so terrible that he goes to jail, though you wouldn't bet on it. Whatever happens to him now though you can rest assured he got one good thing out of school: he has been taught there are no real consequences for any action.
He may however get very angry about the death of an animated talking dog on TV and really take it out on someone, no matter what the small consequences are.
Tuesday 26 November 2013
Welcome to my Time Machine
The other day I invented a Time Machine. It's not a big deal, and it's not particularly complicated. You need a lot of springs, a few cogs, a jar of pickled onions and most essentially of all, a sprig of Thyme. Geddit? Yes, I thought you would.
Anyhow, this thing sits on a shelf in my study, or what passes for a study in a small bedroom where I removed a single bed and put in a desk with a 'puter on top of it. Easy. But here's the hard part: I don't know whether to go forward or back with the Time Machine.
There is part of me that fears both directions. If I go back I might find it isn't as rosy-tinted as my spectacles promised. The people there, in the way people always are, will be a mixture of kindness and stupidity. The same with the future, I expect. Okay, we take that as a given, but the nature of humans apart there are numerous practical issues in a time-related way that have to be confronted.
For example: If I go back to a time when I wasn't alive then would I be there to see it? This is a time-travel equivalent of trees falling in woods and no one hearing. If I went back a long way and could see it all, could I speak the language? Language evolves continually and what with regional dialects I might not do well in this. Equally the same in the future; everyone could say little more than "lol" and I wouldn't know what we were all lolling at.
The practicalities of arriving in another place are legion. No, not jumping into the middle of a Roman Legion, tough though that would be, but if I went forward would I be jumping into a brick wall destined to be built right on that spot? Okay, the wise might say, go to a park. After all, no tree would grow where you are arriving right? No one would think of using the park to store, er, non-park things like bricks there in the future or in say, build a prison with them.
In a way the same with the past: I could inadvertently go back to when the land was different shape and find myself falling down a ravine. Where my house is built used to be allotments, but in a short hop back, relatively speaking, I might end up in someone's greenhouse. I bet broken glass would slice through a time-traveller just as effectively as a non time-traveller of the period.
Okay, I hear the advice, go back a short way to where you know things are pretty much as now. Go back to a time when the currency in your pocket is legal tender and you can understand what's being said. You know, like yesterday. Or the day before. But then I might see myself and that could scare me; in a mirror I don't see the back of my balding head. Observing me from behind might make me think how ridiculous I look, how badly I walk.
Worse would be the short term future: I might not see me there at all -- balding or not -- and maybe notice my family standing around weeping as if it was the day of a funeral. Oops, didn't want to see that.
I could jump a few dozen years into the future in a place I was pretty sure would be unchanged, but find that some bizarre cult had taken hold of everyone and life had become living hell. Great, so rapidly return home and change the future. Go out and locate the architect of this terrible time to come and expose them. No wait, that might hasten the apocalypse because there's always someone who thinks the ideas on offer won't be how they turn out.
You know, like those people who loved communism because it made them free and then ended up being free to wander round a gulag in Siberia. Remember we have intelligent, sensitive folk these days who are quick to say when some death-cult loudly predicts it will wipe you and yours out that the speaker didn't mean it; they were just expressing a cultural thing and we all love cultural differences so they must too. What? Even the ones who say you will in future only have their culture? Oh well, they really don't mean it, because our nice people keep saying they are too nice to do that, so that should do the trick.
There's also the problem of changing a future via getting rid of one person when there are so many working together towards that future. One of the problems of going back in time and, say, killing Hitler would be it neither stopped the march of that political ideology at a time when there were a lot of people in Germany not at all happy about the Treaty of Versailles post WW1 but no Hitler probably would not have prevented the likes of Stalin doing what he was going to do to his fellow Russians.
You'd get pretty exhausted running round eliminating all sorts of bad guys and then seeing off the ones who take over because, hey, there's a vacuum in power or room at the top. There's a real danger too the time-traveller goes back to a time to do something to make the future better and find that in making the future "better" it simply didn't include that time-traveller ever appearing. It's the thing about treading on butterflies and changing the future in ways one can't imagine.
Have I even thought that I know what really happened in a far off time? Just because the history books say something was like that or occurred this way does not necessarily mean it was quite like they said it was. After all, history is written by the winners and all sorts of 'facts' may be adjusted to suit a current narrative or even some political ideal.
The more I think about this the more I think I will stay where I am. Safer that way if not outwardly as exciting.
So, I will take my Time Machine apart, use the Thyme in a meal and put the rest back in the cupboard in the hope that the market one day will pay eagerly for an unopened jar of pickled onions.
Anyhow, this thing sits on a shelf in my study, or what passes for a study in a small bedroom where I removed a single bed and put in a desk with a 'puter on top of it. Easy. But here's the hard part: I don't know whether to go forward or back with the Time Machine.
There is part of me that fears both directions. If I go back I might find it isn't as rosy-tinted as my spectacles promised. The people there, in the way people always are, will be a mixture of kindness and stupidity. The same with the future, I expect. Okay, we take that as a given, but the nature of humans apart there are numerous practical issues in a time-related way that have to be confronted.
For example: If I go back to a time when I wasn't alive then would I be there to see it? This is a time-travel equivalent of trees falling in woods and no one hearing. If I went back a long way and could see it all, could I speak the language? Language evolves continually and what with regional dialects I might not do well in this. Equally the same in the future; everyone could say little more than "lol" and I wouldn't know what we were all lolling at.
The practicalities of arriving in another place are legion. No, not jumping into the middle of a Roman Legion, tough though that would be, but if I went forward would I be jumping into a brick wall destined to be built right on that spot? Okay, the wise might say, go to a park. After all, no tree would grow where you are arriving right? No one would think of using the park to store, er, non-park things like bricks there in the future or in say, build a prison with them.
In a way the same with the past: I could inadvertently go back to when the land was different shape and find myself falling down a ravine. Where my house is built used to be allotments, but in a short hop back, relatively speaking, I might end up in someone's greenhouse. I bet broken glass would slice through a time-traveller just as effectively as a non time-traveller of the period.
Okay, I hear the advice, go back a short way to where you know things are pretty much as now. Go back to a time when the currency in your pocket is legal tender and you can understand what's being said. You know, like yesterday. Or the day before. But then I might see myself and that could scare me; in a mirror I don't see the back of my balding head. Observing me from behind might make me think how ridiculous I look, how badly I walk.
Worse would be the short term future: I might not see me there at all -- balding or not -- and maybe notice my family standing around weeping as if it was the day of a funeral. Oops, didn't want to see that.
I could jump a few dozen years into the future in a place I was pretty sure would be unchanged, but find that some bizarre cult had taken hold of everyone and life had become living hell. Great, so rapidly return home and change the future. Go out and locate the architect of this terrible time to come and expose them. No wait, that might hasten the apocalypse because there's always someone who thinks the ideas on offer won't be how they turn out.
You know, like those people who loved communism because it made them free and then ended up being free to wander round a gulag in Siberia. Remember we have intelligent, sensitive folk these days who are quick to say when some death-cult loudly predicts it will wipe you and yours out that the speaker didn't mean it; they were just expressing a cultural thing and we all love cultural differences so they must too. What? Even the ones who say you will in future only have their culture? Oh well, they really don't mean it, because our nice people keep saying they are too nice to do that, so that should do the trick.
There's also the problem of changing a future via getting rid of one person when there are so many working together towards that future. One of the problems of going back in time and, say, killing Hitler would be it neither stopped the march of that political ideology at a time when there were a lot of people in Germany not at all happy about the Treaty of Versailles post WW1 but no Hitler probably would not have prevented the likes of Stalin doing what he was going to do to his fellow Russians.
You'd get pretty exhausted running round eliminating all sorts of bad guys and then seeing off the ones who take over because, hey, there's a vacuum in power or room at the top. There's a real danger too the time-traveller goes back to a time to do something to make the future better and find that in making the future "better" it simply didn't include that time-traveller ever appearing. It's the thing about treading on butterflies and changing the future in ways one can't imagine.
Have I even thought that I know what really happened in a far off time? Just because the history books say something was like that or occurred this way does not necessarily mean it was quite like they said it was. After all, history is written by the winners and all sorts of 'facts' may be adjusted to suit a current narrative or even some political ideal.
The more I think about this the more I think I will stay where I am. Safer that way if not outwardly as exciting.
So, I will take my Time Machine apart, use the Thyme in a meal and put the rest back in the cupboard in the hope that the market one day will pay eagerly for an unopened jar of pickled onions.
Monday 25 November 2013
Your child's right to be labelled
There are times you think the world finally has gone so mad it can't keep on spinning, but then you look at the mainstream news and see all the spinning there so you know this is where it comes from. But yes, the world does get more and more mad. The 1963 film "It's A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World" was about fifty years too early; I'd settle for their version of madness any time.
Be that as it may, madness grows daily. Many of us lately have seen on tinterwebz the letter from a school to parents about a religious visit. In short, the original letter said a child must go on the trip unless certifiably ill. No, it wasn't as the letter assured anxious parents any cause for worry as there would be no requirement for the little ones to participate in a religious service (which one supposes may clash with parental choice) but would involve handling of religious artefacts.
These were not spelled out but I can imagine religious books, prayer wheels, beads, small statues of deities, remnants of some saint and so on. Or maybe it was just one item, which may be a book beginning with the letter Q, or K in some translations.
The letter said: "Refusal to allow your child to attend this trip will result in a Racial Discrimination note being attached to your child's education record, which will remain on this file throughout their school career."
Now please stop and pause here. This is a no doubt a caring 'n' sharing school handed the enormous power to label a child for years. They cannot beat your child, they cannot make them undertake harmful practices or endure uncomfortable lessons. Yet they can label the kid for being racist by doing nothing except not going on a trip to look at something.
The school has been granted a power and they are damn well ready to use it. That alone should scare us.
You may ask, reasonably, what religion is a racial matter? As far as I know people pale and blonde can join a religion mostly made up of dark and swarthy, or people with ginger genes can be in a religion originally founded for people with yellow pigmentation. At no point is a religion exclusively racial, no matter what its origins.
Yet here was a school, dedicated to the welfare and the future of its pupils, jumping up and down and screaming potential racist to a child whose parents had to give permission for a trip. Get this clear, please: the parents may or may not be racist (allowing for the fact that religion isn't) but the child is blamed.
The. Child. Is. Blamed. For a long time too, in fact for all his or her school life.
Remember those softy mushy-headed liberals with such finely tuned sympathies for all humans, those who love us all no matter what because they say they do? Well, they may well like this approach a lot because one of their persuasion believes that religion is race and little children should be condemned for what the parent says.
I suppose it is the sins of the father's visited on the children. Probably a religious idea, once.
So once more we see the left's wailing that religion is race, though many people know it isn't. However this majority are apparently callous reactionaries who know nothing. We also suspect we aren't talking Quakers or Buddhism here. Nor are these elite-crazies in charge acknowledging atheism or even that some folk quietly nod to the gods of chance and the weather. But your child, dear parent, is deemed racist –– and we have the label ready to pin on them.
Privately I think a shit storm should descend on this school's high ups and any teacher who backed this abominable idea, and none be allowed to escape with an apology as if it was a typing error. I do not normally call for the removal of people in office, though I think some are dangerous if allowed to stay. However I think it is time the real world said to these lunatics it is time to stop, and if you oh-so-highly-paid-person has now not got a job being in charge of children, then fine. We will get someone sensible instead to oversee our children's development in school.
Better, let's not stop there. The council who approved this idea in the first place and handed this power to a school needs to go as well. Sure, that's lot of useless lefty wets out of work but I am sure they can find a job stacking shelves in time.
Just tell them that separating white milk from black puddings isn't racial stacking by the supermarket; it's because milk goes under dairy and black puddings go with the meats. And they can pray to the gods of consumerism that they still have a job next week.
Be that as it may, madness grows daily. Many of us lately have seen on tinterwebz the letter from a school to parents about a religious visit. In short, the original letter said a child must go on the trip unless certifiably ill. No, it wasn't as the letter assured anxious parents any cause for worry as there would be no requirement for the little ones to participate in a religious service (which one supposes may clash with parental choice) but would involve handling of religious artefacts.
These were not spelled out but I can imagine religious books, prayer wheels, beads, small statues of deities, remnants of some saint and so on. Or maybe it was just one item, which may be a book beginning with the letter Q, or K in some translations.
The letter said: "Refusal to allow your child to attend this trip will result in a Racial Discrimination note being attached to your child's education record, which will remain on this file throughout their school career."
Now please stop and pause here. This is a no doubt a caring 'n' sharing school handed the enormous power to label a child for years. They cannot beat your child, they cannot make them undertake harmful practices or endure uncomfortable lessons. Yet they can label the kid for being racist by doing nothing except not going on a trip to look at something.
The school has been granted a power and they are damn well ready to use it. That alone should scare us.
You may ask, reasonably, what religion is a racial matter? As far as I know people pale and blonde can join a religion mostly made up of dark and swarthy, or people with ginger genes can be in a religion originally founded for people with yellow pigmentation. At no point is a religion exclusively racial, no matter what its origins.
Yet here was a school, dedicated to the welfare and the future of its pupils, jumping up and down and screaming potential racist to a child whose parents had to give permission for a trip. Get this clear, please: the parents may or may not be racist (allowing for the fact that religion isn't) but the child is blamed.
The. Child. Is. Blamed. For a long time too, in fact for all his or her school life.
Remember those softy mushy-headed liberals with such finely tuned sympathies for all humans, those who love us all no matter what because they say they do? Well, they may well like this approach a lot because one of their persuasion believes that religion is race and little children should be condemned for what the parent says.
I suppose it is the sins of the father's visited on the children. Probably a religious idea, once.
So once more we see the left's wailing that religion is race, though many people know it isn't. However this majority are apparently callous reactionaries who know nothing. We also suspect we aren't talking Quakers or Buddhism here. Nor are these elite-crazies in charge acknowledging atheism or even that some folk quietly nod to the gods of chance and the weather. But your child, dear parent, is deemed racist –– and we have the label ready to pin on them.
Privately I think a shit storm should descend on this school's high ups and any teacher who backed this abominable idea, and none be allowed to escape with an apology as if it was a typing error. I do not normally call for the removal of people in office, though I think some are dangerous if allowed to stay. However I think it is time the real world said to these lunatics it is time to stop, and if you oh-so-highly-paid-person has now not got a job being in charge of children, then fine. We will get someone sensible instead to oversee our children's development in school.
Better, let's not stop there. The council who approved this idea in the first place and handed this power to a school needs to go as well. Sure, that's lot of useless lefty wets out of work but I am sure they can find a job stacking shelves in time.
Just tell them that separating white milk from black puddings isn't racial stacking by the supermarket; it's because milk goes under dairy and black puddings go with the meats. And they can pray to the gods of consumerism that they still have a job next week.
Sunday 24 November 2013
...but you still think it
It's hard to be correct all the time these days. There's evidence coming at you from all ends and sides that the New World our elite have created for us to enjoy (though not them; they prefer to stand apart from it) isn't really much fun.
No, I'm not using the word fun here as in laughter and jollity, but fun as in something you are made to do and told you have to get pleasure from. Like having some of the world's most unpleasant beings coming to live in your town and pretending their culture and ways are enhancing your life even if your life now prevents you from going out at night alone, or having to say that this practice is perfectly normal and acceptable when it doesn't seem that way at all and never did for most of your life, or acknowledging you said a 'man' word when you really meant 'person' because someone will be offended you didn't think a manhole cover in the street was capable of being accessed by a fully-trained, health-and-safety aware and equally regarded person-without-gender-issues.
But even though you see this, even though some of it makes you worry about how we ended up like this, you keep your mouth shut. You have been encouraged or trained or ordered not to show any emotion here. You won't be liked and can have unpleasant labels attached to you, even if the people doing the labelling (as discussed in these blogs before) stoutly maintain they don't label people.
It isn't easy being alive today and walking on eggshells all the time. Every so often, despite your lightness of foot and deft shuffling to a new position, some precious eggshells will get broken. Offence, as they say, cannot be given but it can and will be taken. More so should you make the error of forgetting your place in the 'Great Scheme Of Equality.'
But despite all the honeyed-words (parsnip-buttering fine words possibly, as earlier stated in this blog) you are subjected to and indeed are required to echo, you aren't always thinking what you are supposed to be saying. Wearing the appropriate faint, satisfied smile too will help here, even if your patience is being strained a little.
For instance, let's say some low-life imported into this country or arriving under the fluttering flag of European unity, spits on the street in front of you. No reason, it's just how it is with him. Yep, before you ask, that happened to me once while walking back from the paper shop one Sunday morning. The poor man who –– despite all the positive reinforcing of his attitudes and our multi-cultural bending over to make him feel loved –– may have thought all English people were turds (while I may be, I cannot speak for all the others) and he clearly thought I deserved to be spat towards if not actually at.
He may not of course have liked how I had my hair combed that morning, or disliked the shade of my trousers. He may, in some culturally-rich way, have been expressing in actions what many words would take to explain to me, though by the look of him I don't think he spoke much English so he went for the best option of a picture is worth a thousand words. No make that a lot of saliva is worth a thousand words. Oh well, I am confident there will be a free evening course available to help him in his English debating skills.
I have no doubt the spitter felt better and perhaps ran home to tell his mates how he had put this strange, paper-reading man in his place with a simple but heartfelt gesture. I however merely stepped over his small puddle of spit and carried on, smiling gently and keeping my mouth shut.
Note I did not say anything that would fracture the delicate balance of social harmony insisted on by our betters. I admit I was carrying (I think) The Sunday Times and this man may well have been an Observer reader and naturally wanted to express his distaste for my reading choice. Well, that would be freedom of speech, or freedom of spit, as we all love these days (even if we can't say anything freely, we can say we have freedom of speech.)
We are, we must remind ourselves, free to say what we want except when it causes strife, division, hatred and a general non-love for others. Thus I kept my mouth shut and while I may have wished this man had kept his beard-surrounded mouth shut too please note I did not say it.
I breezed on my way, leaving him from what I could see to try and wipe the spit from his beard where alas he had dribbled. I know I should have rushed to him with my hankie and offered to wipe his chin for him, but for some reason I was eager to get home and read the latest heart-felt pleas from our leaders to be nice to all.
But then, I have much to learn though I am sure our elite will teach me how, or instruct others to teach me at great taxpayer expense as they sit in their taxpayer-funded ivory towers.
I will say though that a certain thought crossed my mind as I lightly stepped over the expression of this man's multi-cultural affection for me. Yes, very bad on my part. While we are championing the use of Thought Police to make sure we think correctly and we all not saying anything, they currently have a small problem with reading all thoughts. I am sure they are working on how to overcome this and once successful, I will have to watch my thoughts too. Happily watch them, and not harbour any negative views as I do so.
For now, I am free to reflect on my one uncharitable thought towards this decent, upright human being and berate myself for even having the audacity to allow those naughty impulses to briefly flicker across my brain.
It will all get better, I am sure, because I have been told to think it will.
No, I'm not using the word fun here as in laughter and jollity, but fun as in something you are made to do and told you have to get pleasure from. Like having some of the world's most unpleasant beings coming to live in your town and pretending their culture and ways are enhancing your life even if your life now prevents you from going out at night alone, or having to say that this practice is perfectly normal and acceptable when it doesn't seem that way at all and never did for most of your life, or acknowledging you said a 'man' word when you really meant 'person' because someone will be offended you didn't think a manhole cover in the street was capable of being accessed by a fully-trained, health-and-safety aware and equally regarded person-without-gender-issues.
But even though you see this, even though some of it makes you worry about how we ended up like this, you keep your mouth shut. You have been encouraged or trained or ordered not to show any emotion here. You won't be liked and can have unpleasant labels attached to you, even if the people doing the labelling (as discussed in these blogs before) stoutly maintain they don't label people.
It isn't easy being alive today and walking on eggshells all the time. Every so often, despite your lightness of foot and deft shuffling to a new position, some precious eggshells will get broken. Offence, as they say, cannot be given but it can and will be taken. More so should you make the error of forgetting your place in the 'Great Scheme Of Equality.'
But despite all the honeyed-words (parsnip-buttering fine words possibly, as earlier stated in this blog) you are subjected to and indeed are required to echo, you aren't always thinking what you are supposed to be saying. Wearing the appropriate faint, satisfied smile too will help here, even if your patience is being strained a little.
For instance, let's say some low-life imported into this country or arriving under the fluttering flag of European unity, spits on the street in front of you. No reason, it's just how it is with him. Yep, before you ask, that happened to me once while walking back from the paper shop one Sunday morning. The poor man who –– despite all the positive reinforcing of his attitudes and our multi-cultural bending over to make him feel loved –– may have thought all English people were turds (while I may be, I cannot speak for all the others) and he clearly thought I deserved to be spat towards if not actually at.
He may not of course have liked how I had my hair combed that morning, or disliked the shade of my trousers. He may, in some culturally-rich way, have been expressing in actions what many words would take to explain to me, though by the look of him I don't think he spoke much English so he went for the best option of a picture is worth a thousand words. No make that a lot of saliva is worth a thousand words. Oh well, I am confident there will be a free evening course available to help him in his English debating skills.
I have no doubt the spitter felt better and perhaps ran home to tell his mates how he had put this strange, paper-reading man in his place with a simple but heartfelt gesture. I however merely stepped over his small puddle of spit and carried on, smiling gently and keeping my mouth shut.
Note I did not say anything that would fracture the delicate balance of social harmony insisted on by our betters. I admit I was carrying (I think) The Sunday Times and this man may well have been an Observer reader and naturally wanted to express his distaste for my reading choice. Well, that would be freedom of speech, or freedom of spit, as we all love these days (even if we can't say anything freely, we can say we have freedom of speech.)
We are, we must remind ourselves, free to say what we want except when it causes strife, division, hatred and a general non-love for others. Thus I kept my mouth shut and while I may have wished this man had kept his beard-surrounded mouth shut too please note I did not say it.
I breezed on my way, leaving him from what I could see to try and wipe the spit from his beard where alas he had dribbled. I know I should have rushed to him with my hankie and offered to wipe his chin for him, but for some reason I was eager to get home and read the latest heart-felt pleas from our leaders to be nice to all.
But then, I have much to learn though I am sure our elite will teach me how, or instruct others to teach me at great taxpayer expense as they sit in their taxpayer-funded ivory towers.
I will say though that a certain thought crossed my mind as I lightly stepped over the expression of this man's multi-cultural affection for me. Yes, very bad on my part. While we are championing the use of Thought Police to make sure we think correctly and we all not saying anything, they currently have a small problem with reading all thoughts. I am sure they are working on how to overcome this and once successful, I will have to watch my thoughts too. Happily watch them, and not harbour any negative views as I do so.
For now, I am free to reflect on my one uncharitable thought towards this decent, upright human being and berate myself for even having the audacity to allow those naughty impulses to briefly flicker across my brain.
It will all get better, I am sure, because I have been told to think it will.
Friday 22 November 2013
I didn't notice I wasn't noticing
Not Noticing Things is the exciting new concept that drives our modern, caring 'n' sharing society forward, but I suspect you never noticed.
It's a shame in one sense that you weren't aware of the new trend that consumes so much of our political and cultural energy, but perhaps in another way it's more acceptable Not Noticing Things. It saves you Asking Awkward Questions and then listening to the long silence as no one can come up with answers. Better you don't know would be the best solution here.
So you see, this exciting new trend known as Not Noticing Things, or NNT as we like to say because having noticed that the people in general weren't noticing we can start using acronyms, is everywhere. NNT infuses our political corridors of power. It shapes our national media. It makes tens of thousands of people 'up at the top' feel that they are justified in having wildly inaccurate thoughts and make utterly ineffective policies. Laws too, because people under the soothing, cosy NNT would never notice that they were having their freedom of action and thought removed bit by bit.
Now we have governments and 'leaders' who are happy with NNT there is absolutely no danger of the terrible condition known as AAQ emerging. This is our favourite acronym for the dreaded Asking Awkward Questions.
Like people asking the very uncomfortable questions such as: "If unfettered immigration is so good why are there so many problems with it?"
More, they could be indulging in seriously AAQ with something along the lines of: "Why is our education system so unable to prepare our children for standing on their own feet and thinking for themselves?"
Then really powerful AAQ kicks in with the utterly wretched: "How come the people we vote for along with all the media we pay for, manage to have a complete and total ability to NNT?"
Fortunately, AAQ doesn't kick in often because those in power and with the ability to persuade are successfully pursuing a policy and practice of NNT. Thus you can imagine the relief in the cloistered circles of the elite sections of our society. I mean, if people were to stop NNT then those who skim very fat livings off our ignorance would face people AAQ and promptly Have To Do Something.
Dear God, please, not the HTDS! Spare us! What do you think we are? Capable? Knowing? Intelligent? Puh-lease... You voted for a system and support a media that has no idea what's going on. Oh, I admit they are well versed in NNT but they more than anything want you to NNT too.
They have enough knowledge of NNT to work hard to ensure that you are NNT at all.
Mind you, I have to say there are definite benefits from NNT. You can enjoy various fantasies about how children are learning useful things when they aren't. You can pretend that lots of people coming here to live on benefits while developing a ghetto mentality is excellent news but above all you can be expected to keep on voting for NNT and watching and reading drivel from the media who find it so much easier to NNT.
So, on balance, you can see why NNT is the way to go. At the next election they are relying on you to NNT and vote while the media will fail to report that NNT is actually a bad idea. I mean, imagine the chaos that would ensue if we started to, heaven forfend, actually Notice Things.
NNT beats NT hands down in our brave new world, no question about it.
The fact you came across this post and may now have some independent thoughts on the subject can, our superiors and betters know, be treated by a swift and unthinking return to the warm, welcoming arms of NNT.
Thanks, they will say, we are sure you will enjoy the NNT fantasies so much more.
It's a shame in one sense that you weren't aware of the new trend that consumes so much of our political and cultural energy, but perhaps in another way it's more acceptable Not Noticing Things. It saves you Asking Awkward Questions and then listening to the long silence as no one can come up with answers. Better you don't know would be the best solution here.
So you see, this exciting new trend known as Not Noticing Things, or NNT as we like to say because having noticed that the people in general weren't noticing we can start using acronyms, is everywhere. NNT infuses our political corridors of power. It shapes our national media. It makes tens of thousands of people 'up at the top' feel that they are justified in having wildly inaccurate thoughts and make utterly ineffective policies. Laws too, because people under the soothing, cosy NNT would never notice that they were having their freedom of action and thought removed bit by bit.
Now we have governments and 'leaders' who are happy with NNT there is absolutely no danger of the terrible condition known as AAQ emerging. This is our favourite acronym for the dreaded Asking Awkward Questions.
Like people asking the very uncomfortable questions such as: "If unfettered immigration is so good why are there so many problems with it?"
More, they could be indulging in seriously AAQ with something along the lines of: "Why is our education system so unable to prepare our children for standing on their own feet and thinking for themselves?"
Then really powerful AAQ kicks in with the utterly wretched: "How come the people we vote for along with all the media we pay for, manage to have a complete and total ability to NNT?"
Fortunately, AAQ doesn't kick in often because those in power and with the ability to persuade are successfully pursuing a policy and practice of NNT. Thus you can imagine the relief in the cloistered circles of the elite sections of our society. I mean, if people were to stop NNT then those who skim very fat livings off our ignorance would face people AAQ and promptly Have To Do Something.
Dear God, please, not the HTDS! Spare us! What do you think we are? Capable? Knowing? Intelligent? Puh-lease... You voted for a system and support a media that has no idea what's going on. Oh, I admit they are well versed in NNT but they more than anything want you to NNT too.
They have enough knowledge of NNT to work hard to ensure that you are NNT at all.
Mind you, I have to say there are definite benefits from NNT. You can enjoy various fantasies about how children are learning useful things when they aren't. You can pretend that lots of people coming here to live on benefits while developing a ghetto mentality is excellent news but above all you can be expected to keep on voting for NNT and watching and reading drivel from the media who find it so much easier to NNT.
So, on balance, you can see why NNT is the way to go. At the next election they are relying on you to NNT and vote while the media will fail to report that NNT is actually a bad idea. I mean, imagine the chaos that would ensue if we started to, heaven forfend, actually Notice Things.
NNT beats NT hands down in our brave new world, no question about it.
The fact you came across this post and may now have some independent thoughts on the subject can, our superiors and betters know, be treated by a swift and unthinking return to the warm, welcoming arms of NNT.
Thanks, they will say, we are sure you will enjoy the NNT fantasies so much more.
Thursday 21 November 2013
Star Trekkin' and we can't find reverse
When you have children, at some point they do what all children do and get obsessed (in a nice, non-stalking way) with things you might not think worthy of obsession.
With mine years ago it was the pop song "Star Trekkin'." It was not only played endlessly on the car tape deck but demanded over and over again. "Again! Put it on again, dad" came the chorus from the back seat.
I am not, I should point out here, particularly interested in pop music. I am of a generation that believed good pop music ended on December 31st, 1989. Oh sure, there have been the odd decent songs since then, but nothing as consistently poppy as we were fed in the 'eighties. One of those songs was the essentially trivial but ever so catchy "Star Trekkin'" from 1987. It not only made it to number one slot but turned out to be the ninth best-selling single of 1987 in the UK says Wikipedia (at a time when record sales meant something.)
So what else did this trivial song have apart from relevance to popular culture and a catchy, kicked-in-the-knee-so-can't ignore-it tune?
Well, it had a degree of truth. Apart from familiar catch-phrases (real or incorrectly attrubuted) from impressions of the show's participants the song has the line "Boldly going forward 'cause we can't find reverse." It also has a Kirk-like voice saying: "We come in peace, shoot to kill."
Funny, maybe, but true. You see if you look at the whole Star Trek thing you soon realised you are being are shoved, at warp factor 9, into a socialist utopia. This wonderful era to come has everyone wearing uniforms, a world government that allows only good things to happen, huge spaceships that probably cost billions of global currency to make but then that's no surprise as no one's counting. The workers aren't paid anything either. Rank and authority are accepted lower down the chain, decisions never really questioned outside of the bridge. Everything is free to these hardy souls but, because they are a thoroughly conditioned people, no one in Star Trek -- unless they are deranged -- asks for more than they are given.
I know, I know... it was a TV show and not real life though it's obvious you can't really see portrayals of the future as real even if apparently some people do. But the underlying message is that to be good you have to follow the diktat of authority. One gets sent out on various missions and face great danger though one must apply the Prime Directive which is tantamount to letting the peasants be themselves. The actual phrasing is: 'The Prime Directive dictates that there can be no interference with the internal development of alien civilisations.'
Bold stuff, except interference is what the show is about. People on far flung planets get interfered with, but strictly for their own good even if they don't know it. They get interfered with because in the Star Trek universe the Big Brother ideal knows better than the people on some backward little planet. Like Big Brother these worthless creatures can be watched and analysed and their fate decided. Justice is done at the end of a phaser though with stirring words attached, spoken gravely. Strangers can and do magically appear in people's lives to assist the cause of freedom, justice and the noble truths of socialist interference.
One of the central tenets of socialism is that people can't be left to make their own way in life. A peasant -- sorry, I meant valued human worker -- must be always guided, advised and corrected in their thoughts. Ideally they should be so encouraged to follow the norm that they never ask "why?" Under socialism, an elite can live very well but they only enjoy luxuries so they can have more time to spend on committees and compiling reports and establishing consultation procedures for your welfare. Your job is to do what you are told and not seek more, because better people than you have set your path out for you. They will negotiate on your behalf (with a generous cut for themselves, naturally) and make sure you stay where you are.
Star Trek, either inadvertently or otherwise, had that mind-set. No one on the great warship in the sky could say: "Let them be, let them sort their own shit out." No one could set a course for second star on the right and straight on 'til morning because the third star on the left needed help. Star Trek approved help.
This would, as the Kirk line in the song has it, involve coming in peace and shooting to kill. The Enterprise was armed with some powerful weapons and its personnel carried weapons, too. Beaming in to people's homes if necessary meant there could be no privacy, no way out for the poor people about to be forcibly helped. Technology allied with superior thinking patterns enabled the righteous to spy and interfere and then kill if needed.
But the line in the song that is perfect for the progressives of socialism is ""Boldly going forward 'cause we can't find reverse." There is no feature in socialism for anything but going forward, no matter what. In Star Trek the past may be visited through easy-to-access time-travel portals, but you wouldn't want to live there. In fact, there is nothing in the past worthy of regard under the progressive ideal.
Quite possibly, Star Trek could progress right past a wonderfully balanced world where people live their own lives and achieve their own levels of happiness. The Enterprise would never know, because no one would ever find reverse on the ship to go back there, in which case they could never sing "Let It Be."
With mine years ago it was the pop song "Star Trekkin'." It was not only played endlessly on the car tape deck but demanded over and over again. "Again! Put it on again, dad" came the chorus from the back seat.
I am not, I should point out here, particularly interested in pop music. I am of a generation that believed good pop music ended on December 31st, 1989. Oh sure, there have been the odd decent songs since then, but nothing as consistently poppy as we were fed in the 'eighties. One of those songs was the essentially trivial but ever so catchy "Star Trekkin'" from 1987. It not only made it to number one slot but turned out to be the ninth best-selling single of 1987 in the UK says Wikipedia (at a time when record sales meant something.)
So what else did this trivial song have apart from relevance to popular culture and a catchy, kicked-in-the-knee-so-can't ignore-it tune?
Well, it had a degree of truth. Apart from familiar catch-phrases (real or incorrectly attrubuted) from impressions of the show's participants the song has the line "Boldly going forward 'cause we can't find reverse." It also has a Kirk-like voice saying: "We come in peace, shoot to kill."
Funny, maybe, but true. You see if you look at the whole Star Trek thing you soon realised you are being are shoved, at warp factor 9, into a socialist utopia. This wonderful era to come has everyone wearing uniforms, a world government that allows only good things to happen, huge spaceships that probably cost billions of global currency to make but then that's no surprise as no one's counting. The workers aren't paid anything either. Rank and authority are accepted lower down the chain, decisions never really questioned outside of the bridge. Everything is free to these hardy souls but, because they are a thoroughly conditioned people, no one in Star Trek -- unless they are deranged -- asks for more than they are given.
I know, I know... it was a TV show and not real life though it's obvious you can't really see portrayals of the future as real even if apparently some people do. But the underlying message is that to be good you have to follow the diktat of authority. One gets sent out on various missions and face great danger though one must apply the Prime Directive which is tantamount to letting the peasants be themselves. The actual phrasing is: 'The Prime Directive dictates that there can be no interference with the internal development of alien civilisations.'
Bold stuff, except interference is what the show is about. People on far flung planets get interfered with, but strictly for their own good even if they don't know it. They get interfered with because in the Star Trek universe the Big Brother ideal knows better than the people on some backward little planet. Like Big Brother these worthless creatures can be watched and analysed and their fate decided. Justice is done at the end of a phaser though with stirring words attached, spoken gravely. Strangers can and do magically appear in people's lives to assist the cause of freedom, justice and the noble truths of socialist interference.
One of the central tenets of socialism is that people can't be left to make their own way in life. A peasant -- sorry, I meant valued human worker -- must be always guided, advised and corrected in their thoughts. Ideally they should be so encouraged to follow the norm that they never ask "why?" Under socialism, an elite can live very well but they only enjoy luxuries so they can have more time to spend on committees and compiling reports and establishing consultation procedures for your welfare. Your job is to do what you are told and not seek more, because better people than you have set your path out for you. They will negotiate on your behalf (with a generous cut for themselves, naturally) and make sure you stay where you are.
Star Trek, either inadvertently or otherwise, had that mind-set. No one on the great warship in the sky could say: "Let them be, let them sort their own shit out." No one could set a course for second star on the right and straight on 'til morning because the third star on the left needed help. Star Trek approved help.
This would, as the Kirk line in the song has it, involve coming in peace and shooting to kill. The Enterprise was armed with some powerful weapons and its personnel carried weapons, too. Beaming in to people's homes if necessary meant there could be no privacy, no way out for the poor people about to be forcibly helped. Technology allied with superior thinking patterns enabled the righteous to spy and interfere and then kill if needed.
But the line in the song that is perfect for the progressives of socialism is ""Boldly going forward 'cause we can't find reverse." There is no feature in socialism for anything but going forward, no matter what. In Star Trek the past may be visited through easy-to-access time-travel portals, but you wouldn't want to live there. In fact, there is nothing in the past worthy of regard under the progressive ideal.
Quite possibly, Star Trek could progress right past a wonderfully balanced world where people live their own lives and achieve their own levels of happiness. The Enterprise would never know, because no one would ever find reverse on the ship to go back there, in which case they could never sing "Let It Be."
Wednesday 20 November 2013
The merry-go-whirlwind of social media
Back in the early 1990s when I was working at a newspaper, I happened to be walking down the street towards the building one lunchtime when I caught up with the Managing Director. Now this man was a decent enough person and I had worked with him in various ways over the years so I knew him well. I asked him if there were any new projects on the horizon and he, detecting that I had some sort of idea, asked me what sort of thing was I thinking of.
You have to understand that at the time newspapers still had some chance of selling themselves to the area they served and all sorts of innovations -- not least was the introduction of 'new technology' that was intended to create a better product -- had changed the way we were. The market was shifting but it hadn't shifted entirely; I was appalled a year or two ago when I met up with one of the circulation people to hear my old paper was selling a third of what it was fifteen years earlier. Yes, we always knew the readership was dying off but they were deserting it in droves by then long before they got to the dying part.
Anyway, I said to the MD on that sunny lunch-hour that I wanted to put the paper on the internet. He smiled and said the internet was never going to take off but if I wanted to make a pitch, then go ahead and try. I made the pitch, he accepted and we assembled a small team of interested parties (all of who including me had other duties that needed our attention) in order to get the thing moving. It was rudimentary but as internet take up then was relatively small it represented a start.
By the time I left the newspaper the internet clearly was taking off despite all predictions of its early demise, and the department expanded. As always with big companies there were some politics involved, the hiring of excitable young Turks to run the web presence who it turned out knew very little about communication but liked redecorating offices and as my services were no longer required I moved on. My plan had been, naively it will seem now I suppose, to make people think better of the paper and make parts of it more accessible so they would want to buy the full thing. Times and views change however, and this new souped-up department of plush offices was to spawn its own monster, and good luck to them and all who sail in the floundering ship of traditional media today.
Over the next few years not only did the internet expand despite theories it wouldn't last (remember, they said that about television and the car, too) but the web became everything to all men and women. It also brought into being a new phenomenon, known as 'social media.' In one fell swoop it became the hottest thing around, because everyone has an opinion and this was the perfect way to express it to, well, everyone.
I admit that while when starting my company's website I did wonder about a sort of online auction but I hadn't the skill to do it alone. Nor could I even begin to imagine anything as big as eBay, nor for that matter did I want to think of anything that might distract from our own classified ad columns.
I also had no idea, not at that stage, that people wanted to express opinions in droves. I am not sure when we posted a news story I could see a sort of 'Letters to the Editor' on it being an essential part of the package. But hey, I was a mere designer, not a Zuckerberg. In other words, back then I had no idea social media would become so important to the world.
It did, and then some.
I make no bones about it: I do the social media thing too and you are looking at my own opinion here on this blog. I am not so silly as to think this is in anyway groundbreaking. It's one of zillions, that's all. They say opinions are like arseholes, because everyone has one. So, here's my arsehole (in the nicest possible way)
So we have people, via Facebook and Twitter, dashing off instant opinions (or exposing arseholes, if you prefer) and I use Twitter as I find Facebook irritating beyond belief. But, each to their own. Times, as I say change, and I am aware what is 'big' today may be a lot smaller tomorrow, and so on.
Now I tend to use Twitter as a sort of news aggregator; imperfect and probably lightweight but quick and it arrives on my desk or iPad and will alert me to some things I didn't know were happening. I am slightly wary of it however and I can see it can be a trap for the foolish. I also don't follow 'celebs' as I can't think of many who excite me to look into their life. I ask actors to act, comedians to make me laugh, musicians to entertain me but when they leave the set or stage they are free to take their life with them. I really don't need to know what they had for lunch yesterday.
Apparently many people do need to know and they follow entertainers in droves. More than that they share the menu and even comment on it. I imagine it makes a jester feel so much better that people eagerly pass on the news of what a joke teller had with his or hear steak and chips, and better still when people respond with: "Mmmm, wonderful! I love your taste!"
None of this is for me (I admit I did follow one female comedian who didn't make me smile much but when she promoted the death of Margaret Thatcher as a cause for joy though not having the same view about the demise of some rancid left-wing tyrant, I happily stopped following her) but then I did meet the full force of social media one day.
I am now wiser by far about what a waste of space it is. It was of course my fault: I commented on someone's post about a very popular comedian. It was along the lines (only two lines, as it is a limited number of characters on Twitter) that this joker -- and he is quite funny at times -- was in my view happy to express a strong and generally negative view on all religions bar one.
No, I didn't mention which one gets the free pass and I won't mention it here. But what did happen was I became engulfed in a small whirlwind of hate and abuse from some of this man's many followers. Having commented to another person, the original poster found it necessary to pass on my comment (though frankly it wasn't either amazing information or even a great insight) and inevitably one or two of his followers also followed the aforementioned jester. For reasons beyond my understanding my relatively bland comment (it contained no form of hatred and not even any criticism of his joke telling) was tweeted to this comedian's timeline and thus to tens of thousands of his itchy, twitchy adorers.
Cue the shit storm.
My timeline was swiftly filled with some astonishing stuff. I was accused of many things and given many classifications (don't you love by the way we live in the age of non-judgemental non-labelling but somehow we are still judged and labelled by the non-judgers?) and lots of things assumed about me that this comedian's followers imagined constituted my whole outlook. I had to smile how I was both one thing and another in the same breath, how they knew me and didn't want to know me. I was dismissed and reviled and even told that the comedian had a lot more followers than me so that proved I was a twat, or something like it.
More, I was involved (though not at my request) in fierce discussions between others over spin-off topics and I was not clear whether I was the subject of this, was being labelled or merely included so that I might appreciate their stunning insight into life. I was sort of dragged into Twitter-short arguments between two or more people as if I cared.
I didn't, but no one asked me.
I can see this jester's fans felt the need to rally to the man's defence. I can see that fawning over someone needs an expression of how willingly they fawn. I can even see that if you think someone is great you need to shore up that greatness and even the tiniest chip in the edifice is not acceptable.
But this was social media here. An hour or two later the storm subsided. By the next day I was history. I'd had my fifteen minutes of fame and was irrelevant now. Many people were happy they understood just where I was 'coming from.' People I had never met now knew me and either hated me because of it or maybe bore a grudging admiration I was this, that or the other.
Was I a christian, or an atheist? Was I a human being or some pond-based low-life? Did I hate this jester or hate his followers more? I may not know myself, but the social media clearly did.
The lesson of all this is obvious. Don't make comments on anything related to a celebrity unless you want to be judged, chewed up and spat out. In the end, it really isn't worth finding out the type of person who is being 'social' on things like Twitter.
You have to understand that at the time newspapers still had some chance of selling themselves to the area they served and all sorts of innovations -- not least was the introduction of 'new technology' that was intended to create a better product -- had changed the way we were. The market was shifting but it hadn't shifted entirely; I was appalled a year or two ago when I met up with one of the circulation people to hear my old paper was selling a third of what it was fifteen years earlier. Yes, we always knew the readership was dying off but they were deserting it in droves by then long before they got to the dying part.
Anyway, I said to the MD on that sunny lunch-hour that I wanted to put the paper on the internet. He smiled and said the internet was never going to take off but if I wanted to make a pitch, then go ahead and try. I made the pitch, he accepted and we assembled a small team of interested parties (all of who including me had other duties that needed our attention) in order to get the thing moving. It was rudimentary but as internet take up then was relatively small it represented a start.
By the time I left the newspaper the internet clearly was taking off despite all predictions of its early demise, and the department expanded. As always with big companies there were some politics involved, the hiring of excitable young Turks to run the web presence who it turned out knew very little about communication but liked redecorating offices and as my services were no longer required I moved on. My plan had been, naively it will seem now I suppose, to make people think better of the paper and make parts of it more accessible so they would want to buy the full thing. Times and views change however, and this new souped-up department of plush offices was to spawn its own monster, and good luck to them and all who sail in the floundering ship of traditional media today.
Over the next few years not only did the internet expand despite theories it wouldn't last (remember, they said that about television and the car, too) but the web became everything to all men and women. It also brought into being a new phenomenon, known as 'social media.' In one fell swoop it became the hottest thing around, because everyone has an opinion and this was the perfect way to express it to, well, everyone.
I admit that while when starting my company's website I did wonder about a sort of online auction but I hadn't the skill to do it alone. Nor could I even begin to imagine anything as big as eBay, nor for that matter did I want to think of anything that might distract from our own classified ad columns.
I also had no idea, not at that stage, that people wanted to express opinions in droves. I am not sure when we posted a news story I could see a sort of 'Letters to the Editor' on it being an essential part of the package. But hey, I was a mere designer, not a Zuckerberg. In other words, back then I had no idea social media would become so important to the world.
It did, and then some.
I make no bones about it: I do the social media thing too and you are looking at my own opinion here on this blog. I am not so silly as to think this is in anyway groundbreaking. It's one of zillions, that's all. They say opinions are like arseholes, because everyone has one. So, here's my arsehole (in the nicest possible way)
So we have people, via Facebook and Twitter, dashing off instant opinions (or exposing arseholes, if you prefer) and I use Twitter as I find Facebook irritating beyond belief. But, each to their own. Times, as I say change, and I am aware what is 'big' today may be a lot smaller tomorrow, and so on.
Now I tend to use Twitter as a sort of news aggregator; imperfect and probably lightweight but quick and it arrives on my desk or iPad and will alert me to some things I didn't know were happening. I am slightly wary of it however and I can see it can be a trap for the foolish. I also don't follow 'celebs' as I can't think of many who excite me to look into their life. I ask actors to act, comedians to make me laugh, musicians to entertain me but when they leave the set or stage they are free to take their life with them. I really don't need to know what they had for lunch yesterday.
Apparently many people do need to know and they follow entertainers in droves. More than that they share the menu and even comment on it. I imagine it makes a jester feel so much better that people eagerly pass on the news of what a joke teller had with his or hear steak and chips, and better still when people respond with: "Mmmm, wonderful! I love your taste!"
None of this is for me (I admit I did follow one female comedian who didn't make me smile much but when she promoted the death of Margaret Thatcher as a cause for joy though not having the same view about the demise of some rancid left-wing tyrant, I happily stopped following her) but then I did meet the full force of social media one day.
I am now wiser by far about what a waste of space it is. It was of course my fault: I commented on someone's post about a very popular comedian. It was along the lines (only two lines, as it is a limited number of characters on Twitter) that this joker -- and he is quite funny at times -- was in my view happy to express a strong and generally negative view on all religions bar one.
No, I didn't mention which one gets the free pass and I won't mention it here. But what did happen was I became engulfed in a small whirlwind of hate and abuse from some of this man's many followers. Having commented to another person, the original poster found it necessary to pass on my comment (though frankly it wasn't either amazing information or even a great insight) and inevitably one or two of his followers also followed the aforementioned jester. For reasons beyond my understanding my relatively bland comment (it contained no form of hatred and not even any criticism of his joke telling) was tweeted to this comedian's timeline and thus to tens of thousands of his itchy, twitchy adorers.
Cue the shit storm.
My timeline was swiftly filled with some astonishing stuff. I was accused of many things and given many classifications (don't you love by the way we live in the age of non-judgemental non-labelling but somehow we are still judged and labelled by the non-judgers?) and lots of things assumed about me that this comedian's followers imagined constituted my whole outlook. I had to smile how I was both one thing and another in the same breath, how they knew me and didn't want to know me. I was dismissed and reviled and even told that the comedian had a lot more followers than me so that proved I was a twat, or something like it.
More, I was involved (though not at my request) in fierce discussions between others over spin-off topics and I was not clear whether I was the subject of this, was being labelled or merely included so that I might appreciate their stunning insight into life. I was sort of dragged into Twitter-short arguments between two or more people as if I cared.
I didn't, but no one asked me.
I can see this jester's fans felt the need to rally to the man's defence. I can see that fawning over someone needs an expression of how willingly they fawn. I can even see that if you think someone is great you need to shore up that greatness and even the tiniest chip in the edifice is not acceptable.
But this was social media here. An hour or two later the storm subsided. By the next day I was history. I'd had my fifteen minutes of fame and was irrelevant now. Many people were happy they understood just where I was 'coming from.' People I had never met now knew me and either hated me because of it or maybe bore a grudging admiration I was this, that or the other.
Was I a christian, or an atheist? Was I a human being or some pond-based low-life? Did I hate this jester or hate his followers more? I may not know myself, but the social media clearly did.
The lesson of all this is obvious. Don't make comments on anything related to a celebrity unless you want to be judged, chewed up and spat out. In the end, it really isn't worth finding out the type of person who is being 'social' on things like Twitter.
Thursday 7 November 2013
Not a parsnip was buttered
I have heard, from somewhere, a strange saying: "Fine words butter no parsnips." First of all, I have no idea from which origin it springs (it is much easier to spot the nautical-reference sayings such as 'cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey') and secondly I have never used it because I don't know what it means to butter parsnips. It must be my working class upbringing: as a kid we never had parsnips, either buttered or unbuttered.
The clue to the use of this saying though is in the the first two words. Indeed, the first two fine words.
We may not know buttered parsnips but we do know fine words. We know them aplenty, because we have whole tranches of people who use fine words. They are taught, as much as anyone is taught anything these fine days, to come up with a memorable 'sound bite' or resonant phrase that will catch people's attention. I admit this is a tough job: in these fine days people's attention wanders all too easily. Bravely though, people try.
These memorable sayings that pithily capture what the nation is feeling (or more to the point, ought to be feeling) are wrapped in longer, stirring and approved speeches. better still there are some glowing words and phrases around those great little aphorisms. take some our present leaders. They read these stirring words from teleprompters and deliver them so well you love the speaker even more than what they are saying.
On this matter, I do recall an episode in the West Wing, that wet-fest of liberal thinking politics and moralising government, where a member of the 'opposition' (not the enemy as president Jed Bartlett once admonished his otherwise brilliant staff) was seen in a brief news clip agreeing that while the 'president' had indeed made a fine speech that was all he did. This carping Republican's screen time was over as soon as he said those words, but we the audience knew in our heart of hearts that was what the sainted Jed did so well. The man gave not just wonderful speeches, not just great speeches but truly uplifting speeches that inspired society to change.
Now I am not stupid most of the time and I do know this was television, and like a lot of US television you had to concertina greatness into 44 minutes running time. We tended therefore to only get bits of his great speeches, but as model for our up and coming politicians it was enough. Forget that it was fantasy TV, the future leaders and we the ones to be led could all use good speechwriters like, er Aaron Sorkin to tell the truths that would gently rock society to a better world.
The odd thing by the way was that the West Wing didn't need long speeches to inspire its workers to correct the world. The talented cast of this show was deeply into promoting a government where everyone in it was so good they knew from a casual comment what they must do to make the world better. Essentially, someone said there was a problem and the team was told to fix it, so they all -- with one mind set so finely tuned they knew what everyone else in the White House was thinking -- beetled off to sort whatever problem it was that week.
In the meantime, in the real world, the speechmakers began to churn out memorable stuff for their puppy dog bosses. And if it wasn't memorable, there would lots of other things in the speech in the hope that maybe something else was memorable. MacMillan's 'Wind of Change' and Powell's 'Rivers of Blood' speeches might not have earned the plaudits quite like Churchill's 'Fight them on the beaches' speech did but they were closer to greatness than Clinton's 'I did not have sex with that woman' or Cameron's puzzling 'Big society' outpouring.
It is sobering that some people are remembered for what they didn't say more than what they did say, and a lot of people are remembered for not saying much at all. But it doesn't stop our leaders trying to come up with the defining, life-enhancing, world-changing fine words that will inspire us to... um... To....Oh I know, vote for them next time round if not quite butter any parsnips.
The clue to the use of this saying though is in the the first two words. Indeed, the first two fine words.
We may not know buttered parsnips but we do know fine words. We know them aplenty, because we have whole tranches of people who use fine words. They are taught, as much as anyone is taught anything these fine days, to come up with a memorable 'sound bite' or resonant phrase that will catch people's attention. I admit this is a tough job: in these fine days people's attention wanders all too easily. Bravely though, people try.
These memorable sayings that pithily capture what the nation is feeling (or more to the point, ought to be feeling) are wrapped in longer, stirring and approved speeches. better still there are some glowing words and phrases around those great little aphorisms. take some our present leaders. They read these stirring words from teleprompters and deliver them so well you love the speaker even more than what they are saying.
On this matter, I do recall an episode in the West Wing, that wet-fest of liberal thinking politics and moralising government, where a member of the 'opposition' (not the enemy as president Jed Bartlett once admonished his otherwise brilliant staff) was seen in a brief news clip agreeing that while the 'president' had indeed made a fine speech that was all he did. This carping Republican's screen time was over as soon as he said those words, but we the audience knew in our heart of hearts that was what the sainted Jed did so well. The man gave not just wonderful speeches, not just great speeches but truly uplifting speeches that inspired society to change.
Now I am not stupid most of the time and I do know this was television, and like a lot of US television you had to concertina greatness into 44 minutes running time. We tended therefore to only get bits of his great speeches, but as model for our up and coming politicians it was enough. Forget that it was fantasy TV, the future leaders and we the ones to be led could all use good speechwriters like, er Aaron Sorkin to tell the truths that would gently rock society to a better world.
The odd thing by the way was that the West Wing didn't need long speeches to inspire its workers to correct the world. The talented cast of this show was deeply into promoting a government where everyone in it was so good they knew from a casual comment what they must do to make the world better. Essentially, someone said there was a problem and the team was told to fix it, so they all -- with one mind set so finely tuned they knew what everyone else in the White House was thinking -- beetled off to sort whatever problem it was that week.
In the meantime, in the real world, the speechmakers began to churn out memorable stuff for their puppy dog bosses. And if it wasn't memorable, there would lots of other things in the speech in the hope that maybe something else was memorable. MacMillan's 'Wind of Change' and Powell's 'Rivers of Blood' speeches might not have earned the plaudits quite like Churchill's 'Fight them on the beaches' speech did but they were closer to greatness than Clinton's 'I did not have sex with that woman' or Cameron's puzzling 'Big society' outpouring.
It is sobering that some people are remembered for what they didn't say more than what they did say, and a lot of people are remembered for not saying much at all. But it doesn't stop our leaders trying to come up with the defining, life-enhancing, world-changing fine words that will inspire us to... um... To....Oh I know, vote for them next time round if not quite butter any parsnips.
Wednesday 6 November 2013
You never knew you were wrong
The other day someone posted (http://condor.depaul.edu/mfiddler/hyphen/humunivers.htm) what was according to Donald E Brown a comprehensive list of Human Universals. In other words, it is what we are and what we can't get away from.
Reading through the list you will see, if you care to look, such things as in no particular order (and freely acknowledging some of them are obviously opposites) measuring, jokes, baby talk, fire, classification, play to perfect skills, feasting, self-control, grammar, sweets preferred, weapons, daily routines, prestige inequalities and even, just to confound us all, magic. I won't attempt to give the whole list but you can see it encompasses many things.
But what you may not know is that while these things have been true for us in one way or another since time immemorial (which by the way is legally identified as 1189 AD according to some people) they are often considered wrong now.
If you look through the list at random you will begin to see that our modern way, or if you prefer our chattering-class left-wing dominated approved thoughts and rigid political correctness, would demand a lot of them to be wrong. Take the idea of 'sweets preferred.' No, they are bad for you say the medical people. How about 'prestige inequalities?' It might be what we do and have always done but we must stop it now. Or 'self-control?' No way, just be free to do whatever you want! After all, there are no consequences now. Classification? Puh-lease, we are talking labels here and many lefties correctly reject labels, other than swiftly naming people as racist, homophobic and so on.
You see, this is what we have now. There are things we are and always have been but we were wrong. Many things in the Human Universals list are amended today or they are turned upside down in the name of fairness and correctness and so as not to give offence.
There's even ethnocentrism in there and of course that must be eliminated at once if we are to be 'progressive.' When it comes to etiquette, what nonsense we now say. Do as you will including spitting and slobbering away as much as you want. We approve of the wild and uncontrolled now and applaud people for being so base.
How about 'sanctions include removal from the social unit?' True, our forebears and ancestors all did it by putting people in a jail the offenders probably wouldn't want to return to, but we ought not to do so now because everyone deserves a second or third or fourth chance and ought to be free to reflect on their past errors.
Then there's this juicy one: 'Sex differences in spatial cognition and behaviour.' I can recall being blown out of the water by a female because I dared mention the suggestion women don't read maps the way men do. I was, apparently, calling them inferior when they aren't.
I could go on but let me add one more to add fuel to the fires of angry leftism: resistance to abuse of power, to dominance.
At this point various left-leaners will jump up and say, yes, we do that. We resist the abuse of power of the market place and fight against the dominance of capitalism. Then they quietly surrender it all to big government and dictators who abuses power on a scale undreamed of by private organisations. No questions asked so the luxury-loving tyrants and champagne-drinking socialists who look down on the ordinary person can do what they want.
Got a database of people? Then be reckless and careless with personal information. Got the database by checking up on people's private phone calls and their associations? Great, we're the government you elected so let's make the most of it and control what people say and think as well as limiting their free time.
Big government often doesn't like criticism, so it works tirelessly to eliminate criticism of its actions. As such it has the power to use armed force and impose punitive sentences, even liberally applying blame to humiliate those it dislikes. It controls the arms and the means of restraining people, and it will use them if they feel threatened. You have none of those dominant powers, but lefties will tell you not having them and giving them to faceless bodies is for your own good.
So how does this differ from the much-hated free market? Well, McDonalds make burgers and so do Burger King and you can choose to eat at either of their places, or you can choose neither of them and eat something else. The market place for all its faults give you the right to make up your own mind, even if one of these companies -- who by the way employ people and pay them -- should 'dominate' the burger market.
In my view, the only Human Universals that the left likes are the ones they can interpret their own way. They also make their own up by saying, for example, it is an inalienable human right to demand more money from the benefits paid by your caring government. Or insist it is the right of people in jails, who are there because they broke the social compact and made their fellow citizens' lives harder, to vote for policies that might benefit them in jail.
Human Universals is a long list and there is a number of them to disagree with in some ways. The point is they have been with us a long time because it is what they are. Turning them upside down doesn't make us seem more clever or make society better. We do what we do because we are what we are.
We perhaps ought to learn how to do some things better, but that process is lengthy and can never be an instant 'let's make a law' knee jerk reaction or vague thought at a dinner party. We got where we have through untold centuries of being us and we will, like it or not, tend to go back to what's on the list before anything else.
Reading through the list you will see, if you care to look, such things as in no particular order (and freely acknowledging some of them are obviously opposites) measuring, jokes, baby talk, fire, classification, play to perfect skills, feasting, self-control, grammar, sweets preferred, weapons, daily routines, prestige inequalities and even, just to confound us all, magic. I won't attempt to give the whole list but you can see it encompasses many things.
But what you may not know is that while these things have been true for us in one way or another since time immemorial (which by the way is legally identified as 1189 AD according to some people) they are often considered wrong now.
If you look through the list at random you will begin to see that our modern way, or if you prefer our chattering-class left-wing dominated approved thoughts and rigid political correctness, would demand a lot of them to be wrong. Take the idea of 'sweets preferred.' No, they are bad for you say the medical people. How about 'prestige inequalities?' It might be what we do and have always done but we must stop it now. Or 'self-control?' No way, just be free to do whatever you want! After all, there are no consequences now. Classification? Puh-lease, we are talking labels here and many lefties correctly reject labels, other than swiftly naming people as racist, homophobic and so on.
You see, this is what we have now. There are things we are and always have been but we were wrong. Many things in the Human Universals list are amended today or they are turned upside down in the name of fairness and correctness and so as not to give offence.
There's even ethnocentrism in there and of course that must be eliminated at once if we are to be 'progressive.' When it comes to etiquette, what nonsense we now say. Do as you will including spitting and slobbering away as much as you want. We approve of the wild and uncontrolled now and applaud people for being so base.
How about 'sanctions include removal from the social unit?' True, our forebears and ancestors all did it by putting people in a jail the offenders probably wouldn't want to return to, but we ought not to do so now because everyone deserves a second or third or fourth chance and ought to be free to reflect on their past errors.
Then there's this juicy one: 'Sex differences in spatial cognition and behaviour.' I can recall being blown out of the water by a female because I dared mention the suggestion women don't read maps the way men do. I was, apparently, calling them inferior when they aren't.
I could go on but let me add one more to add fuel to the fires of angry leftism: resistance to abuse of power, to dominance.
At this point various left-leaners will jump up and say, yes, we do that. We resist the abuse of power of the market place and fight against the dominance of capitalism. Then they quietly surrender it all to big government and dictators who abuses power on a scale undreamed of by private organisations. No questions asked so the luxury-loving tyrants and champagne-drinking socialists who look down on the ordinary person can do what they want.
Got a database of people? Then be reckless and careless with personal information. Got the database by checking up on people's private phone calls and their associations? Great, we're the government you elected so let's make the most of it and control what people say and think as well as limiting their free time.
Big government often doesn't like criticism, so it works tirelessly to eliminate criticism of its actions. As such it has the power to use armed force and impose punitive sentences, even liberally applying blame to humiliate those it dislikes. It controls the arms and the means of restraining people, and it will use them if they feel threatened. You have none of those dominant powers, but lefties will tell you not having them and giving them to faceless bodies is for your own good.
So how does this differ from the much-hated free market? Well, McDonalds make burgers and so do Burger King and you can choose to eat at either of their places, or you can choose neither of them and eat something else. The market place for all its faults give you the right to make up your own mind, even if one of these companies -- who by the way employ people and pay them -- should 'dominate' the burger market.
In my view, the only Human Universals that the left likes are the ones they can interpret their own way. They also make their own up by saying, for example, it is an inalienable human right to demand more money from the benefits paid by your caring government. Or insist it is the right of people in jails, who are there because they broke the social compact and made their fellow citizens' lives harder, to vote for policies that might benefit them in jail.
Human Universals is a long list and there is a number of them to disagree with in some ways. The point is they have been with us a long time because it is what they are. Turning them upside down doesn't make us seem more clever or make society better. We do what we do because we are what we are.
We perhaps ought to learn how to do some things better, but that process is lengthy and can never be an instant 'let's make a law' knee jerk reaction or vague thought at a dinner party. We got where we have through untold centuries of being us and we will, like it or not, tend to go back to what's on the list before anything else.
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