Arguments

 

Subject: Arguments

How do arguments come about. There are ideological arguments, political and religious arguments, trivial and deeply felt arguments, there are a range of jealousy arguments often based on insecurity, there are pecking order arguments often associated with change. An argument therefore is the opposite to an agreement and in the scheme of things is healthy since it would br a weird world if we all agreed on everything.

And yet the concept of universal agreement is attractive in so far arguments are deemed destructive, but are they. Our minds are the minds of individual human beings not that of a composite society and the arguments are about our individuality. The individuality is precious since sometimes it’s an indicator of those who think for themselves and not those who are simply followers.

Never the less arguments do bruise egos, if and when proven wrong whilst at the same time their loss feeds our insecurity. To admit your wrong on something which you would have pledged as part of a core belief, places the rest of your beliefs on shaky ground and since much of what we think we stand for is based in those core beliefs, what we stand for is then also questionable, after all each of us has our own Pandora’s box full of merits we feel invaluable but in reality are a curse.

There are other arguments, the trivial burst of anger, words which fly across the room inflicting pain when non was intended. This anger, often rooted in something else, lashes out without thought and sets in motion a whole cascade of emotion most of which is destructive. This time bomb we carry inside us is often a mixture of resentment about life in general and is always there waiting to go off and trip us up. As soon as the words are out we wish we hadn’t sent them but the antidote, a simple apology seems so difficult because the anger is based on something else which is still there, unattended still lingering like a foul smell.

Given we do harm if an argument becomes too pointed what should we do to foster the habit of good interrogation, healthy interrogation without slipping into lazy ideological tub thumping. The Buddhists have a way of stressing the meaning of every sentence, dismantling it for contradictions, much as Plato did in his famous arguments. If you ask for a definition and then a further definition of each answer it often destroys lazy fundamentalism.  The problem is good dialogue can simply become a rhetorical masterclass, a way of bamboozling people with fine words. A better way is to drill down on what you mean and why. In many cases you will never find a meeting of minds and other than enjoying the good rough and tumble of concept jousting you have to remind yourself not to concern yourself with winning but only happy to take part. To prove  there are people who have other views and therefore should be accommodated for them. 

Waiting at the sperm bank

 

Subject: Waiting at the sperm bank.

 

What do we mean by identity. Do I identify myself as an English man or indeed as a man, and is it important that I do identify myself as something which others in society can equate to.  But what if A person can’t, what if I categorise myself as a monkey or a horse. I remember a friends daughter thought she was a horse and would play the part of being a horse, neighing and running in a sort of pantomime gallop right into her 6/7th year I’m sure she grew out of it but her parents, (her mother was a psychologist) allowed her the rein (sic) to be what her mind represented to her as being, her identity.
Our bodies are remarkable things and generally nature gets it right in that our mind attune’s itself to what we appear to be but not always. Do we in fact follow the prompting of the mind in these matters or our anatomy. Does the bodies chemistry dictate our sex for instance regardless of being in possession of the organs which normally dictate whether you are a boy or girl. If it’s chemistry and not equipment then how much more does chemistry dictate who we are and if we are a chemical soup, unpredictable, then this unpredictability this lottery of substance is scary to say the least. In societies in which conformity is the essence of the society then characteristic norms will be thrust upon all children to conform and maybe there is some justification in this given the possible range of chemical outcomes. Modern western thought wishes to accommodate these variances as being the new norms, we begin to see new assemblies of chemical, possibly genome divergence establish themselves as a new minority, each with its demand for representation.
If the basic building blocks are changed to erect new forms of structure regardless of ones anatomy, a biological anatomy which developed to establish a purpose, that of producing progeny to ensure the species kept going, this Darwinian pact is made a mockery of if the only meaningful ingredient is lust. If on the other hand we have developed our sense of who we are, outside the Darwinian credo (survival of the fittest). The definition of strongest, traditionally masculine, in a world which has learnt to cosset so much by its insistence on safety loses its familiar importance. If strong means mentally adroit then in many fields women are far far stronger than men and since brute strength is loosing its appeal and in the age of AI it will continue to lose out, then the reliance men placed on being stronger is waining each decade.
Men had better find a new role for themselves considering their decreasing lack of relevance in species preservation, as they continue to  loose out on the fundamentals and substitute their part by waiting in the queue at the sperm bank.

The unnecessary deaths in care homes

 

Subject: The unnecessary deaths in Care Homes

Having listened to a barrage of first hand experience on BBCs 'Any Answers', regarding the forced admittance of old people, patients in hospital, into care homes without any testing or concern about the effect of sending someone who was infected with Covid 19 into a home where many frail old people lived, each extremely susceptible to picking up the virus, that a case of manslaughter should be laid at the door of decision makers both in the government and also those who headed National Health England.

3000 people a day were dying unnecessarily, 3000 a day, that's war time proportions for a combat zone and it was allowed to happen willingly on the assumption that hospital beds would be required for the predicted surge in Covid patients and because an alternative plan hadn't been thought out and the consequences must have been deemed acceptable since frail people are about to die anyway.

It humiliating to think that these leaders who regularly appear on our television screens, people at the apex of power and yet lacking a semblance of common sense or a modicum of crisis management are the very people we are asked to trust in matters of governance and leadership. The sad horrible fact emerges that these old people were collateral damage as the NHS readied itself for the influx of patients from the general population with Covid. Any temporary provision would have been better than sending them into care homes. Hotels, army camps, old unused wards in a general hospital, anywhere but into a care home.

It's when you listen to the men and woman in the street, the retired doctors, the owners of care homes the relatives of the dead, that you discern the truth, not from the panelists on 'Question Time' like David Davis who was and is prepared, then and now to lie about the whole debacle as if lying were an alternate truth. The professional of liar, previously known as members of the political class has reach its zenith with the current government. Hancock and Johnson blithely bat away the accusations as if the facts of so many deaths were nothing to do with them. Who was it to do with then.

There's a strange paralysis at work here, that unless it's down in print with an official stamp of provenance anything will  be denied, conversations will be defined as a balance of opposing opinions and opinions as we know carry no weight. If you have the brass face to deny everything which has, or should have your finger prints on it, being in charge surely must carry some weight, it must allocate some responsibility for the actions taken otherwise we are in the world of Alice in Wonderland but of course we’ve been there before !!!

The reason behind the booing

 

Subject: The reason behind the booing

Is taking the knee an act of symbolism or it’s it a call to arms and does opposition to it mean the person is a racist.

Racism  is a complex subject and has become one of the derisive issues of the decade. The plausibility, or implausibility of categorising someone because of their skin colour on one level is stupid but as with so many things we form judgements based on the input we receive through the press or with our own real life experience. These judgements can be categorised as being based on a mixture of prejudice and first hand knowledge and inevitably  are based on generalisation which usually are a weak link in our sense of right and wrong. An individuals experience usually makes a mockery of the general consensus in that the exception, which lies with the individual, often proves the generalisation wrong

Equality for all is claimed as the basis for taking the knee and yet taking the knee is largely projected as a racial thing, a protest against the inequality towards black people, so much so that politics soon becomes intertwined and discredits the movement.

Black Lives Matter which affiliates 'taking the knee' has cast itself as anti capitalist, anti business, and generally speaking anti the way our democracies are set up with power lying in few hands and the proceeds of that power making a few people horrendously rich. On that basis, if we are not rich we should at least be taking note and have at least some sympathy with what is said.

If I agree to take the knee, as rich football players, do I condemn the system which made me rich, and can I condemn the inequality which arises when I compare to my friend who never quite made the first team and struggles. Do the men and women on the terraces who boo the symbolism of ‘taking the knee’ not also make a point that although all lives matter, the injustice is just as prevalent for a poor undereducated white as it is for a black person and their skin colour seems to work against them.

Of course it’s the system which ‘buries equality’ not the colour of your skin. In some societies being black is an advantage, in others it’s your religion which gives a leg up and of course the greatest balm in life is having money. So when people show their unwillingness to come under the influence of what is seen as a Woke mentality, which only seems biased towards racial injustice and forgets social injustice, then I have some sympathy with those who boo.

This determination to see things through a racial prism and not a social one is causing much harm in our multicultural society. People see decades old structures built on a  tradition of tolerance turned against them by new arrivals and feel thwarted and made  incoherent by the rules and structures which rise, year on year, in an effort to placate the minorities living amongst us.

Is it any wonder that a few raise their voices and boo.

Spelling

 Subject: Spelling

A friend reminded me yesterday that my spelling needed improvement. He is an ex-Grammar School chap who's school life disciplined him into being taught English by having his head being filled with complex rules which define the language. The rules are important in that they set the parameters and people are then corralled in a way to understand the written word which then makes the understanding universal. Without the rules, interpretation would be a riot of conjecture and supposition.

The correct spelling of a word is just one of many rules which sometimes terrorise people'.Less thought is given to a controversial view or an  attempt at poetic symbolism, never mind the emotion or the search for truth, the important thing is the spelling.

Ok I make mistakes regarding spelling. Some of it induced by the spell checker’s interpretation of the word it thinks I want t use but  its also my lifelong struggle with dyslexia, that jumble of letters with no form or formula. Reading a book is where you normally pick up vocabulary but unfortunately I read a bit like the spell checker, casting my eye over a sentence to define meaning, the sentence, much like an individual word is stored away to use later.   The meaning of the sentence gives me the comprehension of an individual word in a sort of fact checking way but unfortunately putting the cart before the horse this relegates individual spelling a mystery since I never learnt the symmetry of of a word how it is spelts or the rules guiding the way it is spelt. Similarly with grammar, any understanding of the language comes from hours of difficult reading in which the form (the sentence) rather than the particular (the word) is digested.

The components of a sentence, its grammar and syntax it's context plus it's spelling are all technicalities which I never grasped, or for that matter, was ever taught and whilst I would argue that subject matter is much more important than syntax  there are many who would disagree and who am I to object.

The real me.

 

Subject: The real me.

it seems to be accepted that Ideas change with generations but should ideas be jettisoned because of generational change or should ideas be based on key beliefs and therefore have the same substance for all generations. God's commandments, although attributed to a mythological figure have that substance and the social decay we see in society today is perhaps due to a lack of piety, of some sort of philosophical relevance, if not religious reverence. The free for all of a self congratulatory culture without reference to others, the hedonism we see all around, means that values become individual and not part of a collective society. The much decried tribe with its traditions and celebrations, its self-respect and discipline which upheld the unwritten  rules and gave the tribe its surety and a sense of belonging, is today missing.

Is it perhaps the problem, that we know too much about each other, for ever proclaiming, on the internet those ideas and experiences which in he past would have been personal but once released for public consumption the individual is exposed to criticism, or applause from where least expected and it’s this shattering of the self assumptions about our belief system which we thought was shared by those close to us which destroys our instinct that we are right. Without this sense of being right and not wrong plays an important role in the way our character is formed and developed but if we are continually enveloped with people proclaiming we are wrong people, who don't even know us or our back story, then our character has little chance to grow and flourish and we become more and more unsure of what is right and what is wrong.

The internet with its constant chatter of truths and falsehoods, scattered like confetti, is it any wonder that people become mentally misshapen and pathologically misguided.

Switch it off is the cry but switching off this newsreel of events by which we measure our own good fortune isn't easy. To become a news recluse is as bad as being a news junky probably worse since ignorance is seldom best. Defining your own stance on any subject needs subjectivity and patience. An avoidance of popularity is also useful since popularity is often won on pleasing people for the sake of winning them over and not having the honesty to say what needs to be said.

Everybody's truth lies in their own perspective of events and being critiqued for saying something is perfectly normal. Things have a special relevance but it's the sowing of false truths which does the harm since it destabilises ones sensibilities. When the State indulges in this black art then you know we are in trouble. It was always the Wests accusation towards the Russians and the Chinese that they brain-washed their people through propaganda but we saw it recently in the combined effort of the government, mainstream press and special interest parties like the Board of Deputies of British Jews which, day I and day out lambasted Jeremy Corbyn with false stories until the electorate believed he was the devil incarnate and not a man with the best interests of the British common man in his very being.

Of course once again this is my own perspective for which I received a lot of criticism but I was unperturbed because I had done my homework and had not relied solely on the headline or the scurrilous journalism of feature writers like Boris Johnson when writing in the Daily Telegraph.

Just look at the paragon of virtue he turned out to be.

Not fit for the job

Subject: Not fit for the job.

Not fit for the job, well we knew that from his time at the Foreign Office but in the archaic way we produce a Prime Minister is it any wonder we have from time to time had visited such incompetence.

In our parliamentary system we don't get a chance to grill a prospective candidate for PM, we don't get a chance to debate who should occupy the most powerful office in the land rather it's a gift  handed to the winner by the party who won the election, choosing from within their own ranks the man or women who ticks the parties boxes not necessarily the national box. The internecine struggle within the Tory party as Johnson emerged from the ranks resulted in well seasoned politicians, ex-ministers who individually might have expected to be considered for a job being cut out and laid to rest on the back benchers whilst new, barely blooded faces rose through the ranks to become ministers occupying huge responsibility, Spads one day Right Honorables the next.

Respected ex-ministers such as Jeremy Hunt  and Philip Hammond, we’re jettisoned along with Savid Javid for a much more lightweight cabinet which soon showed as poor decision and many U turns followed, especially in the pandemic debacle  

Dominic Cummings laid bare to the the Parliamentary Committee yesterday his view of the performance of Boris Johnson and his team in a scathing attack on not only the ability of cabinet members to do their job but exposed a  lack of integrity, especially of Mat Hancock in his role of Minister of Health and the purported scandals of placing government procurement for PPE  into the hands of family and friends.

In a mammoth 7 hour session before the Committee, Cummings who clearly has an axe to grind with the PM and his girlfriend Carrie Symonds with whom he had gone head to head opposing the appointment by Ms Symonds of her friends to important jobs in the Downing Street office. A wife or girlfriend, in Downing St rightly plays a behind the scenes role since the pressure on the PM, or any man for that matter, is significant if a partner is involved. It cuts across his loyalties, to the job and his colleagues on the one hand  or to the person he shares his life with. It’s one of the basic reasons that in an office environment it’s frowned upon for employees who share the same house to have managerial positions in which a conflict of interest might arise.. Carrie Symonds, having landed a job in Downing Street is in just that position and by applying pressure on the cabinet office regarding the hiring of people she was friendly with (inevitably firing the incumbent) and having a well publicised strop because issues regarding her dog were not being dealt, with all spanks of nepotism.

Cummings laid bare the dysfunctionality of government at the top level, its inability to have plans for different scenarios and schemes worked out if plan A goes wrong.

As laymen we screamed from the sidelines when we heard old people were being discharged from hospital, an potential incubator for Covid, straight into care homes with no provision made to segregate them from the other residents.  We cried out at the news that protective equipment had been so run down and not replenished and that firms in the business of making protective clothing were not being asked to even submit a quote but instead that firms who had no track record in this business were awarded the contract. We only learnt later of the links to family and friends  which seems to have been the vital clincher. We rolled our eyes at the obvious lies about production and missed targets, and wondered how, in any other situation the man in charge should have been fired. Cummings sites 15 occasions when he felt Hancock should have been axed but was protected by the boss Boris.

The problem is that politics is a dirty game and no amount of fact, figures or exposure makes one iota of difference, the good ship Johnson will sail on until the next election and we are once again wooed by promises of a better tomorrow.

 

Compensation

 

Subject: Compensation

Where did the word compensation come from. We know what it means but why in all but exceptional cases is it assumed to be part of the deal we undertake when purchasing a service or goods. Where is 'our' responsibility in all this, where are the checks and balances which we should perform before parting with our cash.

In a 'rights' culture we expect to be allowed to proceed with what we wish to do but proclaim our right to compensation when something goes wrong. We determine our own actions and then shrink from them when events spoil it all, we never consider taking our own responsibility if we decide to push out our comfort envelope a go trekking in the jungles of Borneo, or risk money purchasing things "sight unseen" when, not many years ago, the more sensible amongst us would have questioned why. 

The name on the packet, the name of the area or the exercise we wished to take part in gives clues as to risk and whilst I fully support risk takers,  risk takers, by implication accept risk and would brush aside thoughts of compensation as a guarantee against that that very risk.

I'm amazed at the ease of the process of returned goods when for some inexplicable reason you are encouraged to return the goods. People take advantage of the opportunity and order maybe clothing for a night out and having worn it send it back the next day. It seems that ethics plays little part in our deliberations these days and the system of buying online only encourages it.

There was a time when we took complete responsibility for our actions. If we tripped up on an uneven pavement our response was "I should have looked where I was walking". Today in our blame culture, everyone else is to blame and we expect protection even if we have been stupid. This to my mind is an unhealthy state of affairs since except where the authorities, or others are woefully negligent we should have recompense but one should always consider our own actions first to see if in actual fact we weren't the negligent ones. Our willingness to judge ourselves as less than perfect and assume responsibility was in the 1950s the mark of a person, it gave us a measure of the persons character, not to see the world around as tailor made for them but rather a rough and ready landscape over which we had to be careful. 

It's all part of the of the esteem we used to hold ourselves a sort of quid pro quo with the rest of society. We judged ourselves in small human things like politeness and punctuality, thrift and kindness, not the size of the car, (we probably didn't have one) or the post-code we live at, (we didn't have post codes either in those days). Our world was close by, amongst people like ourself and we were't constantly reminded that all cultures are equal. We were't put through a psychological hoop to constantly remit things we internally felt are wrong or at least to belong to others and not ourselves using some sort of collective holism In which the variables are far too wide to bridge.

Language, dress, humour, taste, food and music were all a shared diet and without the need to review ones pallet, we looked like one another and talked like one another. If we wanted to see the exotic east we went there on holiday. 

Today exotic is all around and the only thing missing is a traditional pie and chips !!!

Portrait Painting

Subject: Portrait Painting

I did a critique of David Hockney the other day and a friend of mine who attended the Bradford College of Art at the same time as Hockney disagreed with my appeal for more reality in painting and less representational, ((draw your own conclusions), art as to what it is which seems current today.

I have just been watching a competition of unknown artists painting portraits of 4 well known sitters. It’s amazing to see how the likeness evolves, a brush stroke here, a dab of paint there and slowly the canvas comes alight. Each artist has their own technique, some a detailed pencil sketch to gain the right proportion, for others it’s question of washing the canvas with colour to gain a background on which to develop the portrait, others use a pallet knife to build up the layers of paint giving a sort of three demential construct. Some artists seemed to come to a resolution quickly with the rest of the time taken filling out the already recognisable figure with light and shade  whilst others dally around on everything else but the portraiture. For them, like magicians it’s the with holding that counts. My leaning is always to the recognisable, particularly in portraiture, nearly always my choice is rejected by the experts and tonight’s winners were not the contestants I would have chosen.

Why is this, are it my sensibilities too blunt, my rational too stereotyped or is that me and the judges are looking for different things. Do the various techniques get in the way, does the more avant-garde style collect ‘knowhow bonus points’ like a judge at Crufts and my plebeian tastes are just that, plebeian.

I always feel sorry for the artist who has made a good fist at reproducing what’s in front of them but are cast aside for it.  The obtuse, wishy washy unhealthy looking representation seems to fill the judges boots and once again we are left to address the fake account of what’s in front of their eyes and being rewarded for not being able to reproduce it. This distortion of real life and substituting it for something which is more in their mind than what we all can see gets bonus points for originality when, for people such as myself, all I need is the truth as it appears since I have no way of knowing what the distortion means. Perhaps this world of conflicted images distills our own confusion.

Who are we,

 

Subject: Who are we.

What do we mean by identity. Do I identify myself as an English man or indeed, as a man, and is it important I do identify myself as something which others in society can equate to.  What if I can’t, what if I categorise myself as a monkey or a horse. I remember a  friends daughter right into her 6th or 7th year thought she was a horse and would play the part of being a horse, neighing and trying to reconcile her imaginary role by running in a sort of pantomime gallop. I’m sure she grew out of it but her parents (her mother was a psychologist) allowed her the rein (sic) to be what her mind represented to her, as her identity.

Our bodies are remarkable things and generally nature gets it right in that our mind and body appear in sink by attuning to what we appear to be but not always. Do we in fact follow the prompting of the mind in these matters or our anatomy. Does the bodies chemistry dictate our sex for instance regardless of being in possession of organs which normally dictate whether you are a boy or girl. If it’s chemistry and not equipment then how much more does chemistry dictate who we are and if we simply are a chemical soup, unpredictable, then this unpredictability, this lottery of substance is scary to say the least.

In societies in which conformity is the essence of the society then characteristic norms will be thrust upon all children to conform and maybe there is some justification in this given the range of chemical outcomes. Modern western thought try's to accommodate these variances in its slavish assumptions as to individual rights and the need to accommodate any new norm as being natural. We see new assemblies of chemical divergence begin to establish themselves as a minority pushing aside generations of social constraint in favour of a new hybrid. Do social constraints matter or should we welcome any type manifestation so long as it has the rough proportions of a human being.

The tragedy of locking away in Victorian institutions the misshapen wreak  of some biological mishap were horrible, as was the attitude to mental illness and the poor souls inflicted who were simply locked away out of sight.

Today we keep an open mind and try to put our faith in experts who will guide us through the dangers of a psychopath being released onto the streets but I well remember a warning from a mental institution nurse, when I was working in one of these institutions having asked how they coped being surrounded with so many certifiable and potentially dangerous people, his response was that inside the controlled environment of a mental institution he knew what he was dealing with but on the streets outside he had no way of knowing who was psychotic and who wasn't.

So it's all a lottery, a masquerade of good intentions with little surety of outcome.