Bleating

Yesterday I waded through an article in the Guardian that was bemoaning the impact of the Trump on ‘our’ broadcast media.

Except Fox News it seems; they have a leave pass. Sour grapes?

Firstly, there was no declaration of a conflict of interest associated with the article. Which ironically was one of the main arguments against the Trump.

Secondly, the shrillness of the argument was almost at pre-Brexit elevens. Emotions trumped reason, and I noticed.

Thirdly, and most damning, their arguments were uber conservative. In short, very short, the broadcast media ‘past’ is better than the one dystopian post-Trump future media scenario that was cherry-picked from the journo’s imagination.

Self-serving conservatism – a how-to:

Step One; paint the worst case future scenario.

Step Two; assume that you have a crystal ball, so you know it’s true, this scenario.

Step Three; use this scenario to argue for the preservation of the status quo, or even a return to the past.

As much as I hate to admit it, so long as he doesn’t start a world war, this Trump is exactly what we need.

The analogy I’d make is to the human immune system. Unless it is regularly challenged with bugs it becomes weak and useless, and completely unprepared for some newly evolved superbug that will completely wipe us out.

P.S. Here are the five articles on Trumpism found in this morning’s Guardian.

My View

Another public company CEO just got busted having an affair with his PA.

This CEO got ‘seriously’ penalised by his board; he received a one-off annual pay cut of 20%.

And the PA, she resigned. Presumably she’s being looked after by the CEO out of the residual $5m or so that he picked up.

The penalty wasn’t for having the affair, but for not declaring it, as per company policy.

On one hand this approach has merit. You can’t legislate against stupidity so you may as well work around it.

But had the CEO declared the affair, one of the participants would have either lost their job or been unhappily redeployed.

And that someone would have been the PA.

So the outcome would have been the same for her, no matter what. 

It still doesn’t work to have your CEO this compromised, or this compromisable.

This character flaw of compromisability must flavour many of his (I’ll stick to this gender for the purposes of this hypothesis) management activities. Not to mention the inherent dishonesty and lack of discipline.

In fact, assuming that most of the CEOs of Australian listed company are this compromisable, dishonest and ill-disciplined, one can assume that this doesn’t matter, solely because they are all as afflicted as each other, but all are also protected from foreign competition.

No competitive disadvantage then!

If I were on your board, mate, you’d have an app on your phone which would ask you to confirm daily that you aren’t having any sort of affair with any employee of our company, or even that of any supplier, customer or partner.

At the threat of full repayment of all renumeration you have ever received as CEO. After all, part of the justification for those big ticket salaries are your honesty, uncompromisability and discipline.

I suspect this would do the trick.

Owl & Feline

The starfish was always innocent.

So was the ovary.

Vaguely Forked Juxtaposition

Simply the happiest I have been since, well, last night…

Who?

This is why trademarks were invented.

Passive Assertion

Affluence just about always leads to boredom, which often gives folks the breathing space they need to ponder the past and the future, and the not-here, which is otherwise known as curating curiosity.

Curiosity can lead to many things and one of them is depression, if the curiosity is accompanied by genuine intelligence and a certain social gullibility. 

Time loves the active verb. The Black Dog is loved by no one.

Today I just have to admit it; I’m happy, content, or whatever you want to call it.

There’s hardly a thing that anyone or anything could do to seriously dint my positive demeanour 

It’s worth noting that I got here with a combination of thinking and experiencing, often not clearly aware of my goals.

Sheer dogged determination, mixed with the amalgamated insights of thousands of wonderful authors that have shared their own.

There are no short cuts. It takes energy and time to rewire yourself, and you can only do so if you set in mind a thermodynamic driving force of good.

Affluence; the root cause of the problem is also the gift that supplies the solution. Don’t waste it and don’t chase it, grasshopper.

Swhat?

Boredom is the mother of curiosity.

Coincidentally boredom is the enemy of Indooroopilly State School.

Or so they believe.

Fortunately they aren’t inclined to question their own beliefs, so it’s all ok.

Curious

A curious mind. That is the stated target for the Indooroopilly State School. They like stating things.

They want their graduates to have curious minds. Curious indeed.

Applying my very curious mind (and not the product of any curriculum) and my well-trained rational skills (something they actually could teach and that is becoming very short in supply), here are some of their built-in assumptions:

(1) curiosity is deemed as a necessity for innovation, 

(2) innovation is the future of labour in our post-tech world, 

(3) curiosity is in short supply,

(4) graduates with curious minds will do very well in this world,

(5) curiosity is very hard to teach,

(6) but we can do it,

(7) so, please admire us,

(8) and don’t you dare use your dodgy home-grown curiosity to question our institutional model of curiosity.

As ever, their delusions don’t matter because everyone else has them. 

So their graduates are at no competitive disadvantage with their cargo-cult curiosity skills, sans rational skills.

This is in fact just a marketing program designed to feed everybody the lies without which they would feel unworthy. 

Bloody curious indeed.

The Chicken or the Egg

Chickens, free range or caged, that is the question.

Or is it?

Have you noticed that many people are very concerned about the welfare of chickens, or at least they claim so.

Mostly I believe them because so many of them fork out extra dough for the eggs from the less constrained hens with frequent flyer points.

But, and this is important, you don’t hear the same debates raging about the chickens that we eat. 

Free range or caged? No one cares.

Odd really. 

My bet is that even the dullest concerned person would be aware of the hypocrisy inherent in worrying about the welfare of the animals that we are about to eat.

Which only serves to highlight the hypocrisy associated with worrying about the ones that we don’t.

Correct!

Right at the moment the mainstream media is full of articles, mostly opinion pieces, that are deploring the ‘false-truth’ phenomenon.

No one is suggesting that Donald invented false truths, but they are blaming him for the first wide-scale & successful political deployment of the concept (outside of China, Russia, South America, Africa, the Middle East and every vaguely non-democratic authoritarian state that has ever existed).

None of these articles carry a disclaimer that says something like this: “The author is paid by the New York Times which is currently at war with Donald Trump due to certain remarks that he has made, which add to the general air of non-viability of our business model.”

Which is to say, while the broadcast media doesn’t make up false truths, they happily ignore real ones.

And when they want to cast aspersions, well then they call in their opinion piece writers and wash their hands of the contents.

When they want a specific result, they beat up unimportant facts.

In the long run, the creation of multiple channels of communications to the unwashed can’t be anything but a good thing.

Given that most folks couldn’t tell a false-truth from an ignored one or an exaggerated one, the best possible situation is competing truths.

Eventually even the slowest of the slow will start assigning probability factors to all information received.

In truth (my truth, this is an opinion of course) most people simply believe what suits them, and, even if their lives depended upon it, they couldn’t explain why some truths are more amenable than others.

Qantas Strip Club

What is that? Nothing comes to mind. No possible explanation makes sense. It’s a she, I’m sure. But, well, how did she track it down, the horizontally striped onesie? And where did the concept arise? Who, who, who thought this was a good idea? And why? Is there an alternative universe, wormholes, the Matrix? I don’t understand and I’m starting to go mad.

Crushed Nuts

Truly odd that our crystallised politicians would pick sides in the middle east. I mean, don’t they have enough issues already without making up new ones that have no potential gain? There’s either hidden flows of brown paper bags, or they are hubris-ridden retards. Probably both.

Jet Supernova, to be precise

This is Fiction

In matters of fictional reading, I get especially annoyed by the presence of a ‘God the narrator’.

In order to highlight my point, here is a random sentence out of Patrick White’s Voss (my favourite go-to book for all literary things disliked) – “Unlike other men, English officers stationed there, or young landowners coming coltish from the country for the practical purpose of finding a wife, he did not consider himself under the obligation to laugh. Or perhaps it was not funny.”

Ignoring the broad and unsubstantiated generalisations about English officers and young landowners, this quote clearly describes the thoughts of a God looking down at Voss and deciding that he pretty much didn’t have a sense of humour (neither did Patrick for that matter).

We know this because Voss, a social retard just off the DSM scale, was far too stupid to even consider analysing himself, or others. Ironically, White’s God wasn’t omniscient; observe that he wasn’t sure why Voss didn’t laugh. Thus further highlighting that Voss wasn’t doing the narrating.

White accidentally invented a defective God, one that could narrate away but wasn’t sure of his facts. I am sure that he, either one – God or Patrick, didn’t even notice.

Back to my narrative. I view the use of the ‘God the narrator’ mechanism as equivalent to the horrible situation where someone keeps responding to your statements with an emphatic ‘correct!’; i.e. an arbiter of the truth, and not an agreeable person.

But in the case of fiction the author is an arbiter of reality, and still not an agreeable person.

You, author, I find it cowardly of you to hide behind unexplained supernatural forces and imaginary friends, in order to conceal the fact that you have nothing to write about except your own deluded daydreams!

Of slightly lesser offence; occasionally an author will fiddle with time and tense as well. Unexplained wormholes in the fabric of their own fantasies.

For example, it (which, you must admit, is better than assigning a gender to the guileless thing) will be happily writing away in the first person-present tense, but will then throw in the odd all-knowing third person aside that draws upon the benefit of unexpected time-travelling hindsight.

You know what I mean; all of sudden you get a third person one-liner at the end of the chapter, such as – “He didn’t know then but he would come to regret this decision.”

And then without a moment’s regret at its self-spoiling, the author will flip back to the first person-present tense. You (the reader) are supposed to live in deep suspense, awaiting the shonky details of this literary bed wetting.

My guess is that most novelists don’t even know that they are playing any of these tricks. They are a cargo cult of readers turned typists, foisting their derivative imaginations upon the swill of less inclined junkies.

Cactus

This one can say about Toyota; their design ethic has the utmost priority upon offending the least number of people. This is the lowest of the lows amongst all design principles.

So why do people buy them?

They are good value, well-engineered, inoffensive, and they, the people, simply don’t care.

For them, it’s all about losing the least amount of money and being mobile without looking like a complete twat.

They just don’t have enough aesthetic intelligence to be offended.

I would call this a life wasted. Cactus, in fact.

Note to Lola

Living in the ‘now’ doesn’t mean just living in the here and now. 

How about living in the now, here and there?

Which is to say, imagine things elsewhere as well as where you are!

Nicole & the Clarified Keys

Lead BnB

On a 1-10 scale, from marshmallow to concrete, this one, the bottom one, was an eleven.

It’s what the Chinese believe is a bed; they being of the mythological delusion that a slab of lead is good for one’s back.

Fortunately there was a spare one in the spare bedroom that quickly became less spare (the top one).

Her”’c9o

“Shapes and shadows danced in distorted cacophony making it difficult to focus”

Firstly, the ‘for Her’ is missing.

This sentence needs a subject because otherwise not a single living thing could have focused, due to the shapes and shadows dancing in a distorted cacophony.

No, it was just Her that had the focus issues.

I can see it now; there she was, trapped in the half light, thinking to herself “fuck, these shapes and shadows dancing in distorted cacophony are making it difficult for me to focus”.

If the focusing in question was mental and not visual, same same, but even more so. It might explain things though.

I’m only joking. We all know what she really thought was “fuck, its hard to see in the dark”.

Maybe it was God, a He, that was thinking in these fancy, fancy words. He’s been at it so long that its all he’s got to keep himself amused.

Or possibly it was just the author thinking that people would be more impressed if (a) God was narrating the text, and (b) He did in flowery and complex prose otherwise unknown to spoken English (not even in the worst poetry), and (c) all of these conniptions were passed off as the real-time thoughts of Her.

And just for the record; shapes and sounds are visual. A cacophony is aural. Just saying.

The only focus issue here is my ability to read such pretentious bullshit.

Correct!

 

Logjam

His future was ashes but he didn’t know that then. 

A cacophony of darts and dashes silenced the choir that serenaded the collective, the community that shrouded and protected. 

[I give up. I can’t do it. It kills me.If I ever write a book I’ll make sure there is no God the narrator, nor a proxy buried in a character. There’ll be plenty of ‘I’s. Opinions will be labelled as such. And you’ll be reading in the Now.]

Nostalgia

I don’t know why but I just remembered a dinner party event, many years ago, where I was perversely seated next to a loudly ticking biological bomb that said to me ‘​It does have a certain je ne sais quoi, doesn’t it?’

This in reference to je ne sais quoi; it was too long ago.

Unanticipated as this pearler was, Yellow Glen bubbly erupted from my nose.

No cigar that night.

This is apropos of nowt other than as a description of the contrast to the good fortunes that adorn my personal space, latterly.

Metamorphosis

Shoot up your plastic Kate and, abracadabra, you get a Margaret Scrotum. I sense the dead hand of Kafka.

Is there is or is there ain’t?

In reference to this deeply philosophical query (exhibit below) I’m thinking that the pundit is pissing up the wrong tree.

Cause and effect, my friend. Why is Canberra?

Walk the Talk

Imagine that your non-homosexual partner is having a relationship with a third party. 

The key questions that you should ponder are:

1. Is your partner’s new friend your sex or the other?

2. If it is yours, is the relationship sexual or otherwise?

Let me explain where I am going with this…

Is it rational to have absolutely no jealousy if your wife has a non-sexual but deep relationship with a girlfriend, but then to get super jealous if she has a similar type of friendship with a male?

Not for me, it isn’t.

Is it reasonable to be not at all jealous if she has deep friendship with a male friend but then to get deeply jealous if they also put body parts into each other?

Makes no sense…

What happens if  you reasonably decide that there is no issue with her and her male friend not only having a deep relationship, but also deciding that it is OK if they fuck? Might you not eventually lose your spouse to the friend?

Possibly, but preventing something that should happen from happening isn’t a formula for happiness me-thinks.

In love and relationships the best approach is to enjoy what you have while you have it. But also, be prepared to lose it, and when you do, you can wallow in the pain of loss which will of course pass, as all feelings do.

Once you’ve been through these hoops a few times you probably won’t fear anything and coincidentally your relationships will be that much better for the lack of fear.

This is an example of using rational thinking, call it philosophy if you will, to breakdown an intuitive response that might otherwise lead you astray.

But even so, you have to keep practicing. We can’t just adopt new positions with a one-off declaration of will, derived with a flourish of logic.

Diction itchin

If you tap into Google something like ‘how to get rid of an addiction’, by Jesus you get some rubbish coming back at you.

For example, ‘7 ways to get rid of an addiction’ starts with ‘1. Self-determination…’.

Others suggest starting with a pen and paper, with which to make lists. Lots of them. Nuh.

Here’s the real path:

1. Indulge in your addiction until you are destitute and/or physically sick. This will give you the much-needed motivation to change.

2. Talk to someone wiser than yourself in order to understand the root cause of your addiction. We are all shit at analysing ourselves, so don’t bother trying.

3. They’re slippery hypotheses, these on the subject of your own psychology. Keeping them in your mind just doesn’t work. Write the thing down and read it every day.

4. Buck up your pride; you have to talk to everyone in your life about it too. All of them, the people that is. Ad nauseum. Bore the fuck out of them.

5. Then, and only then, you start the avoidance habit. If drinking is your problem, drink a little less. Go for the record number of days. And don’t forget, bore everyone with the details.

6. Keep at it. Don’t get too disheartened when you relapse, which you will. Restart, reset, when you need to. All the way back to step 1 if needed.

7. Eventually you will get there. Or not.

8. Oh, and read Mark Twain on the subject. Some bad habits are very useful as they will save you later in life when you need to give something up to get well. And the way to quit is to quench the desire rather than the act. 

Argument v Debate

I have always distinguished between a debate and an argument.

For mine, a debate involves two reasonable and/or rational people that are prepared to consider and even adopt the position of another, even if the chances of this happening are very slight. Nothing is ruled out. Debates can be emotional, but the intent is never lost on either party.

An argument on the other hand involves at least one party that has no intention of ever adopting the position of the other. This of course infuriates the other party and emotions can spiral out of control. Arguments usually end in stalemate or false declarations of conformity, when one party becomes too exhausted to continue.

The Five Types of Jealousy

According to someone or other, there are three types of jealousy. I make it five.

(1) Symptomatic Jealousy is a consequence of a major mental illness such as paranoid disorder, schizophrenia, substance abuse, or organic brain disorders.

I call this Mad Jealousy. ‘Nuff said.

(2) Because of personality disorder or strong sensitizing experiences, some people who aren’t on the wrong side of the DSM are especially sensitive to self-esteem or relationship threat. They experience Pathological Jealousy.

I call this Addictive Jealousy because it’s actually driven by a desire to avoid psychological pain. Ironic that, because it’s counter-productive in many instances.

But, and this is key, the psychological pain caused by the fallout of Addictive Jealousy is, for the sufferers, preferable to the threat of experiencing whatever the primary psychological pain is that they are avoiding, no matter how unlikely this is.

(3) So-called Normal Jealousy occurs in people who are neither sensitized nor suffering from a major mental illness. I’ve broken this into three categories.

(3A) Compulsive Jealousy is driven by an anxiety that the future will be different to the present, when it comes to personal relationships.

On one hand, this is completely defensible. And yet the habit can be quite compulsive because it requires a crystal ball.

Unfortunately we humans are randomly useless at forecasting on emotional matters; we usually don’t know this and tend to either be over-optimistic or under-optimistic. Compulsive Jealousy is of course an example of the latter.

(3B) Compulsive Jealousy can morph into what I call Prophylactic Jealousy. You can think of this as akin to some real world version of the movie, Minority Report. The sufferer imagines a future crime by, for example, a spouse, and then explains to the future criminal what their punishment will be if the crime does occur. This is an attempt to circumvent the future crime altogether. Proposed punishment can range from ‘I will be upset’ to ‘I will be angry’ or ‘I will leave you and take the kids with me’.

I believe that sufferers of Prophylactic Jealousy need serious counseling. They are suffering from a compulsive habit that crosses over into something from the DSM, and also causes a lot of pain for others and for themselves by placing much unnecessary strain on relationships.

(3C) Having said all that, I’d say that there is a fifth type of jealousy, Defensive Jealousy.

This one kicks in only after the damning facts are known and real, and doesn’t require the imagining of a crime of the heart.

This type of jealousy is a mechanism to protect the self against future harm, on the principle that leopards will almost always have spots.Of course, on rare occasions leopards get dipped into chlorine bleach. Getting it wrong on these occasions is a statistically acceptable risk to those acting upon the principle of Defensive Jealousy.

The definition of “future harm” here is critical. Each of us could weigh up the pros and cons of a situation quite differently. Some would go with their gut, and yet others would let to rational mind have a bat as well. Some might reason themselves into realizing that they have nothing to fear except fear itself. We are all different and we are all coming from different places, with different intents. There is no ‘right’ way to live, just better ways for you and me, as compared to what we are doing now.

Disclaimer: this blog is simply an attempt to describe what I have observed around me on the subject of jealousy. Nothing written here should be taken as evidence that I condone jealousy in any of its five forms. However it would be delusional to pretend that jealousy doesn’t exist; and hence, noting that it does, there is much merit in cataloging the types of jealousy so that one can more efficiently deal with it when it arises, in yourself or in others.

Multiple Choices

If you started a fling my gut feeling is that you wouldn’t be able to share it with me for fear of:

(a) hurting me and causing pain, or

(b) me leaving our relationship.

Obsession

What do you call something that is addictively desirable until it is obtained, thereafter becoming less and less valuable until it is essentially worthless?

Well it’s not a thing at all. It’s a psychological condition. Let me explain in the context of a cheating husband.

If a husband cheats again and again, then it is likely that he’s got a deep addiction for something, and it is certainly not the thing that is addictively desirable until it is obtained.

On this, the holy side of the DSM, most people that have a sexual addiction also have substantive negative beliefs running around in their skulls.

They may feel unworthy or they may feel that no one can genuinely love them.

These feelings have causes. And effects. And they are the bullseye of the target, if change is desired.

A deep sense of insecurity drives addicts to compartmentalize their sexual and intimate lives, thereby avoiding intimacy altogether in some instances

After all, being intimate with a spouse requires that one feels worthy of such love.

In some cases, cheating can serve to temporarily make the addict feel more powerful and less insecure.

But more importantly, the addict feels that he has nothing to offer other than his sexual attractiveness.

He will be addicted to flirting and inappropriate behavior. He will be irresistibly drawn to people that find him attractive.

These addicts will continually seek to sexualize all relationships, even business relationships.

Each new affair will quickly become an unwanted intimacy. The addict will move on, and then on, and on again.

Procurement

It’s just not the year for Leicesters.

Not the Matrix

It would appear that 13 year olds are now of the mind to pair up in a virtual fashion.

And when I say fashion, I do mean fashion; it is quite fashionable to have a boyfriend or girlfriend.

But the current interpretation of the conjoined ‘friend’ is rather virtual in nature.

A couple will communicate by text or through a messaging app, but actual face to face meetings are minimised or altogether avoided because they are yucky, messy, or something else altogether; I know not what.

This phenomenon has also assisted in the rise of vibisexuality in the matrix. Driven by images of female pop stars kissing other female pop stars, some young girls have decided to have their virtual affairs with other girls. There’s no feedback loop to hoop.

My prediction is that these 13 year olds will continue to have their virtual relationships even as they get to that age where something else could be desired.

You can see them now; 30 years old with virtual husbands and wives.

They will live apart but communicate continually through apps.

They may even each have virtual presence with the other through holograms that move and speak.

When it comes to sex, procreation and child raising, well, technology will allow this to be outsourced.

And the kids can be then be virtual, computer generated, thereby solving the world’s population problem.

So it’s not quite the Matrix that we are looking at it here. After the next generation everyone will be virtual with no messy bodies to look after.

Taxi

It gives me great comfort, on the odd occasion that I find myself in a taxi, to know that the meter has been secured with copper wire and a lump of lead.

Genius

Heath Robinson at his best – “The One Piece Chromium Steel Dining Room Suite”. This one makes me laugh every time.

Dog’s Breakfast – example

This is a true account of what just happened…

[Scene] in the gym. 

I’d just finished using the lat pull machine and got up to to use the bicep curl machine to my left. The woman on the cable rowing machine on my right said:

“I was going to use that machine next”

“?” I just looked at her in confusion.

“I won’t be long” she continued. Meaning that it wouldn’t be long before she finished with the rowing and started doing her planned bicep curls.

“Are you running late for a meeting?” Me, trying to be helpful.

“No, I just don’t like waiting”

At which point, without a word, I inserted my headphones, cranked the volume, and started on my bicep curls. Aka option (1).

Dog’s Breakfast

I really do believe that some people are genuinely all worked up about the inhumane injustices wreaked upon some animals – chickens and dogs mainly, but also to the odd pig and cat, and even the occasional more exotic critter.

But whence comes such emotions? (assumption alert) Asymmetrical Anthropomorphism; that’s the problem here.

That is, people with psychological issues that are sublimating away their imbalances by assigning human characteristics to (thereby) unfairly treated animals; hence creating a facile diversion away from dealing with their own shit.

The only evidence that I have for this assertion is (a) the mad look in their eyes, and (b) their complete inability to rationally discuss such matters – see explanation below.

You can always tell when someone is mad. First, you pick a subject that they are passionate about and then start a discussion whereby the goal is to list the assumptions that they have made to arrive at their position, assuming that they did so rationally (which they did not).

Half-way through the process they usually lose their shit and storm out of the room. Or scream at you and hit you. Quod erat demonstrandum.

Now you can’t remove with logic what was not put there with logic in the first place. So if you find yourself dealing with someone that is suffering from Asymmetrical Anthropomorphism (or similar) there are only two options:

(1) You completely ignore them, or

(2) If that is not possible, then you have to consider violence. It’s a case of hurt or be hurt.