Fathoming it out

Subject:Fathoming it out.

Given that "DeepFakes" are increasingly becoming part of what we see on YouTube to distort reality and disturb the balance in our minds of what is reality why on earth would we watch it as a source of information.
It's an intriguing sociological question which touches on our need these days to condense everything into an ever shortening time span as our brains are pummelled with unsubstantiated information. Once upon a time only the things we saw with our own eyes would we believe. The world outside our vision and our experience was of no interest and only practical things first hand held any interest. Then the printing press developed mass awareness linking the worlds outside our immediate gaze with a host of worlds which were in the gaze of others. The acceleration of ways to view these other worlds has proceeded at a pace such that today we see, at an instant things happening on the other side of the globe. So what we see has become the yardstick for what we know, no longer is the encyclopaedia lifted from the shelf to find out the academic truth but a heading is typed into YouTube to ferret out a clip which nearest exemplifies what you are looking for. The clip and the family of clips of the subject are linked in convenient boxes tantalisingly made simple to click onto and becomes the total source of your knowledge, "seeing is believing" right !
Sadly this is not true anymore, the manipulation of viewable content has become so good you simply can't recognise what is true or what is false and if that is now the case where do we now go for the truth. Does the truth matter or is life simply entertainment a series of experiences the starker the better. Do we kneed to know the truth since we are often seeing things which are happening far away. On the one hand, our two dimensional input which can never be equal to the reality of what is happening on the ground whilst on the other, because we can't do anything useful to help or hinder, we are simply voyeurs, watching for watchings sake.
If of course what we see effects our actions that's different. If we are led to contribute to a charity because of the sight of malnourished children or if we are convinced by propaganda to vote in a certain way, these are arguments for the good and bad use of information. If on the other hand we treat everything we see with a dose of skepticism and search around for a balance of views and take on board the motivation for why these pieces of information got to you in the first place, then your internal filter, your brain will fathom it out.  
A more dangerous aspect of fake news and fakery in general is that not only does it sow the wrong idea about a subject, it causes intelligent right minded people to doubt each other. Sowing disharmony then is the greatest danger since with disharmony flows a range of ideological wedges between people who would normally be friends. We all search for comfort in finding someone who thinks like we do, it bolsters our sense of camaraderie and makes the world less lonely but if, whilst we live and work in close proximity, we are searching for answers to the world around us from very different news sources, some deliberately misleading then it's difficult to find any sort of cohesion. The term “it's as plain as the nose on your face” when good old common sense would be enough to find conformity is missing in a chaos of fakery, a tactic used by those who wish us harm to destabilise society and make people pliable to any sort of suggestion. 

Sent from my iPad 

Fact or Fiction

 

Subject:Fact or fiction

Facts are not the work of fiction, or are they. How much of our factual life is and how much is embellishment, made necessary, if for no other reason than to come to terms with ones past. How clinical can we be when discussing our failures or our successes and how blind we become to the nitty gritty which forced us to behave or not behave. Do we understand the forces which bend and twist us each day, each minute of the day, the incontinence of fear and disillusionment, the lack of vision to see the effect we have on others and our hopeless ineptitude to do anything to curbed our nature to do so.
The fictional me, the one I put out for others to see, washed, shaved and polished  which makes me more acceptable, slinks around like a doppelgänger to the one which states it doesn't care what others think. Of course he cares, what would we be without others to care, what would a lifetimes existence alone on a desert island, free from the courtesy we exhibit the moment we step outside the front door. This fine balance between the fictional me and the factual one is given some leeway when we engage in writing. The words on the page can represent the real me or the fictional one and no one knows but me. This escape from the reality of being challenged to substantiate ones views, only having to project them onto a page and to see what happens, is cathartic. Are the views unique, well for a moment yes inso far they represent what I thought, I thought, a moment ago. Thoughts built on my own experience, themselves hidden behind platitudes and denial, deceiving to deceive, not intentionally but as a quirk of the mind which is forever refurbishing reality. 
Is life then fiction or fact, are the bits and bites which make up the physical you, the reality you. Where is that other you the emotions the hopes and fears. Does that not also represent you, the ethereal you, 
Perhaps Buddhism has the answers. although somewhat unpalatable from one aspect, its uniformity. In an effort to find a foundation, a rock on which to built the need, you unearth the substance of 'your substance' as a human being, both in relation to others, as well as yourself. This disbursement of the fictional you by laying bare the reality of who I am could be the final straw in the disbursement of the fictional you but are you strong enough to live without your illusionary friend.
Destroying the doppelgänger, who you have come to know and like, much more than the blemished character laying within and to revealing to all and sundry might forever damage relations with those around.  Better the devil they know than the one you do.
And don't worry, I wouldn't disclose if this piece is fiction or fact, whether it was written by me or my doppelgänger since you will never know.

What a rotton country this is

 

Subject:What a rotten country this is.

It's interesting how the temperament of different nationalities provokes a different response to certain subject matter regarding my blogs. The people who are more frontier spirited, who's parents emigrated to new lands within the last 80 or so years have a willingness to retain old fashioned ideas of how society works. They reflect, as I do, that because something is new and mimics the word on the street, that we must be flexible in accepting new things, more understanding when old norms are trashed and that change is always a good thing.
Most people would agree that flexibility and understanding are needed throughout our lives but if we are asked to be flexible about something we have reservation about then our reservations must be equally valid and we must be allowed to voice those reservations without being taken to the social equivalent of the stocks and pilloried with taunts of bigotry or being called a racist.
In this country we have been forced fed a diet of divergence, we have been drip fed ideas of what is right and what is wrong based on a modern concept that if someone claims their need to signal that they are unique in some way or other we must aggregate their claim with all the others flowing from a society which gives it an equal footing to everything that went before it, which in no way resembles my concept of what was the normal I grew up with.  The extent of the change culturally and sociologically has been massive and the indigenous people, such as myself have had to conform to a huge reorganisation of social norms from those in the 1940s / 50s and of course before. Change was slow and grew from a need of the people who lived here to change based on their own needs and perception of what was acceptable or not. 
From the late 40s many of these changes were not organic, not the result of a slow maturation, a maturing natural change but instead were forced upon us by the political class and its need to create a multicultural, multifaceted, multi faced society. The extent to which people were consulted in any way was minimal, rather they were told they had to conform or else and to avoid a witch hunt they kept  their heads down and offered little or no comment on their difficulty in understanding, let alone absorbing the cultures and religious practices which these minorities brought with them into the social mix, pressing their claim for greater recognition and not just recognition, not just parity but a claim for preeminence.
Everyone has rights but it seems minority rights count for more than majority rights, in fact one could go so far as to say the majority relinquished their rights for fear of being labelled prejudiced.  One only has to see the pressure put on dissenting voices if the trend to worship at the alter of some minority cause is questioned and given the power of Twitter and Facebook to trash viable but in the eyes of the new commentariat, misinformed views, and debate withers into populist sloganeering.

I'm uncomfortable for instance with the pressure Louis Hamilton applies to the other racing drivers standing on the grid of a Formula 1 race, to kneel in acknowledgement to 'Black Lives Matter'. Of course they do but it's Hamilton's condemnation of those drivers who don't kneel and refuse to be pressured to do so that annoys me. Slogans have a power of there own. "Your Country Needs You" comes to mind with Lord Kitchener invoking patriotic symbolism to encourage young manly white working class lads to take the Queens shilling and enlist in the army. What he failed to mention was the enormous casualty rate in trench warfare where men were sent over the top to die in their thousands as the likes of Kitchener failed to value the lives of his fellow countrymen. This lack of a value on people who are not privileged by birth is not just a Black thing it covers the whole of humanity. The jobs, the promotion, the health, where you live and how you live is equally defined by the accent you have or your lack of educational attainment due to the poor provision of educational facilities as it is by the colour of your skin. Evidence the success of the Indian community versus their neighbours, Pakistan in this country. 
I'm not saying race doesn't play a part but then so does so many other variables such as parental aspiration which hold back the white child just as much as a black child. There are so many black people who's success challenges the idea that being black is a hurdle too high to climb. If being black in a predominantly white society (am I still allowed to describe it so) is a disadvantage then the prejudice must also be assumed to flow the other way and of course it does. I don't have to fly far to encounter prejudice, the French have a long standing dismissal of the English, not for being black but for being perfidious. The prejudice of being white in Africa depends on the nation your in, the prejudice in Asia likewise. In Japan they won't let you in as a non Japanese person without serious qualifications and even in the old commonwealth countries the hurdles are getting higher to gain admittance and be accepted and all the while this is happening, we in this country still have an open door for the cousins of those who live here and who profess what a rotten country this is.

 

The hybrid child

Subject:The hybrid child.

I have a range of friends who's views differ from my own. Because of our friendship we usually steer clear of contentious subjects since there is little use in trying to change the mind of someone who has made theirs up on the basis of their experience or a deep held sociological need to modify the society they live in.
This need to educate society and get it to understand the ever wider complexity of what we might describe as the 'human condition' leads some people to redefine what, for an older generation was a settled matter. It seems that today there are no settled matters anymore, everything is fluid, things which we accepted as the norm are these days constrained to the trash heap and anyone still holding those old ideas is in danger of being called a bigot.
This morning I was listening to a discussion on the radio in which a woman was describing how she was bringing up her child as gender neutral. A good part of her desire seemed tied up with her idea  that gender difference  is the basis for conflict and the logical thing to do was to raise her child as neither boy or girl. 
It seemed to me that these ideological agendas in which a mother can have and can influence the way a child is raised is quite radical. Playing God as it were, she has decided to remove the biological and chemical impetus which nature has set in motion for a notional idea of what she wants to do with her child. It's this modern idea of 'its her child' and she can treat it as a project, an opportunity to modify according to her inclination rather than the child's natural outcome given the chemistry which plays a part in determining the emotional preference irrespective of the biological circumstance.
With all the options available it makes one wonder if the child isn't in danger of its mothergiven the consequences of insisting the child is gender neutral and trying to conceptualise what that may mean for the child. The argument that we stereotype children according to their having genitals is pure fantasy. We know that some boys who have the genitalia sometimes feel unhappy being in a boys body and would wish to be a girl but this is different from a deliberate intervention to strike a mid neuter stance so that the child doesn't know whether it's a boy or a girl until at some later stage it can decide. Obviously it's physiological make up, and the production of testosterone usually leads the child to know what it is and the neuter argument is that the parents shouldn't  prejudge that choice by assuming, if it looks like a girl, it's a girl, as we used to in the days when we assumed that nature knew best. 
The emotional attachment for toys which were gender based reinforced the simple observation, that's a boy and that's a girl but was clouded by the numbers of young adults who felt that they were in the wrong bodies or that their emotional attachment was towards members of their own sex. This revelation that people cared more for members of the same sex was bewildering when I was growing up and the sexual act between two men was outlawed. Slowly we have become a more permissive society, some would say a more understanding society, in all kinds of ways to the extent that each year a new level of of interpersonal relationship and new ways of describing ourselves has made the era of 'boy meets girl' an unnecessarily complicated process made even more so by the parents who wish to create their own hybrid child.

DeepFlakes

  

Given that "DeepFakes" are increasingly becoming part of what we see on YouTube to distort reality and disturb the balance in our minds of what is reality why on earth would we watch it as a source of information.
It's an intriguing sociological question which touches on our need these days to condense everything into an ever shortening time span as our brains are pummelled with unsubstantiated information. Once upon a time only the things we saw with our own eyes would we believe. The world outside our vision and our experience was of no interest and only practical things first hand held any interest. Then the printing press developed mass awareness linking the worlds outside our immediate gaze with a host of worlds which were in the gaze of others. The acceleration of ways to view these other worlds has proceeded at a pace such that today we see, at an instant things happening on the other side of the globe. So what we see has become the yardstick for what we know, no longer is the encyclopaedia lifted from the shelf to find out the academic truth but a heading is typed into YouTube to ferret out a clip which nearest exemplifies what you are looking for. The clip and the family of clips of the subject are linked in convenient boxes tantalisingly made simple to click onto and becomes the total source of your knowledge, "seeing is believing" right !
Sadly this is not true anymore, the manipulation of viewable content has become so good you simply can't recognise what is true or what is false and if that is now the case where do we now go for the truth. Does the truth matter or is life simply entertainment a series of experiences the starker the better. Do we kneed to know the truth since we are often seeing things which are happening far away. On the one hand, our two dimensional input which can never be equal to the reality of what is happening on the ground whilst on the other, because we can't do anything useful to help or hinder, we are simply voyeurs, watching for watchings sake.
If of course what we see effects our actions that's different. If we are led to contribute to a charity because of the sight of malnourished children or if we are convinced by propaganda to vote in a certain way, these are arguments for the good and bad use of information. If on the other hand we treat everything we see with a dose of skepticism and search around for a balance of views and take on board the motivation for why these pieces of information got to you in the first place, then your internal filter, your brain will fathom it out.  
A more dangerous aspect of fake news and fakery in general is that not only does it sow the wrong idea about a subject, it causes intelligent right minded people to doubt each other. Sowing disharmony then is the greatest danger since with disharmony flows a range of ideological wedges between people who would normally be friends. We all search for comfort in finding someone who thinks like we do, it bolsters our sense of camaraderie and makes the world less lonely but if, whilst we live and work in close proximity, we are searching for answers to the world around us from very different news sources, some deliberately misleading then it's difficult to find any sort of cohesion. The term “it's as plain as the nose on your face” when good old common sense would be enough to find conformity is missing in a chaos of fakery, a tactic used by those who wish us harm to destabilise society and make people pliable to any sort of suggestion. 

Sent from my iPad