Friday 29 August 2008

It’s a dog’s life



Each and every unemployed Wightman has 2 CVs; the one he writes for himself, and the one written for him by the media led populace. Who would employ a man if his CV had entries such as: “work shy”; “dirty and rude”; “drunken layabout”; “benefits fraud”; “untrustworthy”; “criminal”? And what chance of securing a job interview, when your two referees are Ms Fear and Mr Greed. This self fulfilling prophecy ensures the victims are not only blamed for their bad fortune, but condemned to further persecution by the pejorative label ‘unemployed’: “Give a dog a bad name and hang him.”

A moments thought as to who would willingly choose to be poor, and you might question the validity of blaming job seekers for their predicament. You might ask who benefits from this scurrilous and mendacious chorus of blaming the poor for their poverty? The answer is those shallow and insecure parvenues amongst us, whose need to curry favour from the orthodox mob, helps console them for the betrayal by their own conceit; and the greedy, who are never satisfied until they have secured for themselves every last crumb.

In our free market, ask yourself what an efficient economy means, if not the ever greater gain for the minimum of outlay; and does that not imply down-sizing the work force in both number and wages. If so, then there is the true blame for unemployment and the strife of workers; the greed that got Wightmen sacked yesterday, and then treats them as scapegoats today, to cover the shame of maximum profiteering. Where most of those profits go abroad in the expanding markets of the tiger economies; the rest goes into the public sector as tax, and the civil service grows like a giant incurable cancer, in danger of becoming larger than the ailing patient it feeds upon. The public sector ship is so full of rats, that they are the cause of its sinking. Such a neurotic environment will not be open to Wightmen, as the sisters union has closed the hatches to them; women and minorities first, de jure now, de facto before.

What of the many jobs advertised in the County Press each week? They are but the ephemeral vacancies, likened to ‘musical chairs’ played by the unhappy workforce that jumps from one lowly paid job to another, at the tune of “Things can only get better”, played on a Chinese manufactured jukebox. The unemployed rarely get invited to play in this game, except as a cameo bogeyman, to frighten naughty children to play nice.

And is it beyond your understanding that some of these once proud men, betrayed, and in a fit of despair, should ‘throw the helve after the hatchet’, and become the very pariahs that modern society seeks to hate? Lucky for you that most unemployed Wightmen are civilized individuals; lucky for you they aren’t 4000 angry miners; or shipbuilders; or steelworkers; with a unified belligerence, that might take grievous offence at being blamed.

But help is at hand in the guise of the government’s Department for Works and Pensions, which fund various support agencies that teach the job seekers to better apply themselves. We need to sell ourselves more; an honest CV just wasn’t good enough, you need to be better than honest. Maths isn’t good enough either, it’s far too judgemental; you need to know the new democratic numeracy rules, such as: the DWP employs 85% women, which proves relatively that equality and diversity works, even if you’ve been removed from the equation, so that you can’t. And minimum wages aren’t low enough, you must be willing to earn your giros via community service, thus stealing the punishments meted out to petty criminals, so as to atone for your sin of poverty: “Hungry dogs eat dirty pudding”.

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Monday 25 August 2008

The Smell of CCTV



Within the CCTV culture we risk the feeling of no longer being integral to our own society when we are permanently scrutinized; pre-emptive guilt alienates us from law, order, and each other; we become as strangers in our home towns.

If two dogs meet, they are curious about each other; unfamiliar to themselves and possibly on unfamiliar ground, they go through a routine of scrutiny. One manoeuvre is the taking turns to smell each others private parts; possibly to determine the scent that marks a dog’s territory via urine or faeces. This procedure is fraught with tension, as each dog being scrutinized is temporarily vulnerable to the other should they decide to attack. The act of compliance to such intimate scrutiny maybe a social form of appeasement offered to purchase acceptance. Conversely if the dog being scrutinized feels more dominant, then a contest may ensue as the superior dog bulks at the other dogs approach.

Similarly for men, visiting a new place, especially a closed community, or entering a strange pub, full of regulars; you can be forgiven for the sense of alienation you feel. You will almost certainly be sensitive to any quirks and customs that the locals display, and probably be willing to accommodate to flatter, should any contact be made. Eye contact is very much a contention, as it is the means we scrutinize each other be that amongst familiars or strangers; it is our dog equivalence of smelling private parts.

Pointing is rude, and when on mutually uncontested ground, eye contact is frowned upon, cf. travellers on the tube trains, where the seats face each other across an open aisle; the passengers assume a display of spectacular asocial behaviour, by pointedly avoiding eye contact.

Being self conscious when overtly scrutinized, such as omnipresent CCTV coverage, will cause uncertainty. In a social setting, eye contact is part of the game to negotiate towards familiarity, and to help gauge each others moods and intentions. But how does one negotiate with a perpetual, unyielding, and impersonal observer?

Remember the self conscious sense of guilt when the headmaster at your school’s assembly barked out a report of the latest misdemeanour discovered by the caretaker? If you were like me, then you would have had your fair share of wrongful accusation, and can not help but to anticipate further injustice from pre-emptive guilt. Does the sense of safety professed by those that advocate CCTV compensate for the ill ease felt by those groups which are judged to be the usual suspects: youths, blacks, the unemployed, drinkers, combinations thereof? Could this all pervasive guilt inducing scrutiny result in a convulsion of antisocial crime: “Give a dog a bad name and hang him.”?

I have a relative whose partner operates the local CCTV system, and feels that when ever she is walking through town, her partner is watching her every step. What will happen if they have a falling out? Will she avoid the town? In George Orwell’s “1984”, Big Brother is a contrived face to evince strength and trust; but what is the face we have, that sits behind our CCTV system? Is it a convivial local bobby; a leather clad member of the Gestapo; or maybe a disgruntled council worker?

The people that gloss over these issues with the excuse that “those with nothing to hide have nothing to fear” are simply overlooking how we interact as a social species. And I would guess that this is very much a gender issue, as men and women interact differently, with women being more comfortable than men at making eye contact; possibly due to sexual competition prevalent between men, lending itself to aggressive feelings; therefore civilised men will generally keep eye contact down to a minimum to avoid confrontations. In a CCTV environment, the system becomes an uncivilised and all pervasive opponent; putting men under high aggressive stress: “Are YOU looking at me!?”

 

 

Sunday 24 August 2008

Hate



We have instincts, both social and individualistic; therefore we have grounds for internal conflict between these motivations. Is hate the natural emotion utilised to arbitrate between them?

Just as the Valkyrie Brunhilde was torn between Wotan’s law, which condemned Sigmund for breaking an oath, and Wotan’s wish to preserve Sigmund, his son; Brunhilde was tasked to fulfil the law of the oath, and see that Sigmund fell in battle as a hero. But love won through, and Brunhilde saved Sigmund from his ordained fate, thus sealing her own downfall, and subsequently that of the gods.

Nature has a less elaborate means of resolving personal conflict between our selfish desires, and those that conflict with our social duties; and that is hatred. With hatred we can more easily separate the mingling of otherwise contradictory standpoints.

Individuals together

Our beliefs are what hold our minds together; confutation with others, and personal cognitive dissonances are prone to strong defensive reactions, with correspondingly strong, adrenaline charged emotions. We are also social animals with a strong sense of worth and placement within society; which can lead to the urge of domination through evangelical persuasion; again adrenaline charged.

In order for a society to work there is a natural and dynamic tendency for hierarchies to form, there are motives to preserve the individual’s beliefs whilst simultaneously negotiating within the beliefs of the group. Domination and compliance are two obverse sides of the same coin; the more we try to dominate, the greater the risk of alienating the others by not complying with their efforts of domination. We are not content with our own beliefs but vie to persuade others as a by product of sexual evolutionary competition; it takes two to tango; therefore we try our hand at domination only so far as we dare, lest we lose the prize.

Faking honesty

The stronger our ego and social proclivities, the greater the hatred required in resolving any dissonance; feckless asocial people, rarely have cause to raise their voices. To swear and rant convincingly, you require earnest conviction; not many frauds or charlatans, if any at all, resort to expletives; it’s as though true hate is almost beyond faking; even the best actors resort to method.

Importance of being earnest

Some academics and politicians, which are prone to rationalizing their world views in somewhat cool and measured ways, are susceptible to being sidelined owing to their apparent lack of passion in discourse, giving the impression they lack earnest integrity. Emotional intensity therefore is affiliated with the credibility of our beliefs, especially when challenged.

More successful speakers may learn the art of mannerisms and expressions to boost their appeal through impassioned rhetoric; but they are shrewd to the effects of excess, lest they intimidate the audience that may have their own distinct views. Hence such a speaker may deploy tests to gauge the audience’s compliance to their words, by gradually increasing the tone, and waiting for audience’s reaction during the performance. When the speaker is confident that his audience is in tune with his message, he may save the most important points for the fulminating climax.

Too nice

In the absence of hate, we risk appearing shallow; we would also reduce our emotional and intellectual boundaries to some extent, aiding compliance with the domination by others; but this is countered by appearing less of a stalwart ally, and so less attractive to earnest people. Do these ‘nice’ people, who lack strong hate emotions, open themselves up to fads and a nebulous array of superstitions? Since the social urge within these people may overwhelm their weak selfish defence mechanisms, so they may fall prey to the dominating evangelical religions and fads; nice people maybe the dupes of society.

Imbalances between the selfish and social urges, which are not accompanied by hate emotions, may account for symptoms encountered in conditions such as autism and Williams-Beuren syndrome respectively. It is noted however that sufferers of these conditions may have sporadic attacks of anger, possibly as a neuro-chemical catharsis for otherwise un-utilized hate emotions in their everyday behaviour.

Too hot

Conversely, a greater tendency to hate, increasing the selfish urge, may lead to staunch bigotry; shutting out most alternate views to the point of obstreperous cussedness. Such an imbalance toward the selfish side may lead to extreme forms of politics and religion, especially when accompanied by a need to belong, but without the compromise of social negotiation.

The school bully, excessive police or military force, feminist misanthropy; these are all examples of how excessive hate can be used in place of rational persuasion, to achieve a social conformity: “You are either with us or against us.” The Eichmanns of this world, from callous bureaucrats, to over zealous guards or priests, all perform under the illusion of moral superiority bequeathed from the sense of the greater good; so the greater the hate, the greater the prize of social belonging by defaulting those outside the cult.

And what if the sophistication of politics and religion become less important; can the extreme social urge be fulfilled by blind hate alone? Consider the public executions in the Colosseum of ancient Rome, or the gathering of a lynch mob, which melds, however briefly, in a social self affirming maelstrom, at the expense of some hapless victim. If so, then we should not be surprised that primitive religions and politics require sacrifice and pariah as a matter of form, with the vast number of players oblivious as to the reasons for their prejudices they have imbued from each other.

Demarcation: “Out damned spot”

Internally we may have conflicts with our own beliefs, the so called cognitive dissonances. Many ideas we acquire from different sources simply clash with our sense of right and wrong. Take for example sexual deviance; because sex is a fundamental motivation, there is no meaningful rationalization to negotiate between acceptance and non-acceptance; hence we resort to a primitive demarcation via love and hate. This is because we risk contaminating our emotions regarding fundamental urges; we could provoke similar disturbance by incongruent choices of food or entertainment, as our minds are made up of those pleasurable notions we call ‘decency’. Hate serves to segregate in our own minds those unpleasant thoughts that could otherwise interfere with our primitive motivations by inadvertently crossing over and contaminating those pleasurable thoughts. Hate filled phobias are therefore perfectly natural; they induce strong hormonal emotions that serve to hard-wire neuronal pathways by thickening relevant synapses, and fixing our minds on the ‘ointment’, whilst avoiding the flies. It would take a lot of time and love, to persuade a monkey to like a snake, as some of our phobias are ready formed by evolutionary benefit; and it would be a disaster for our sex lives, and evolution, if every time we looked at our lovers, we saw our parents or siblings instead.

In the absence of external scapegoats to offload our revulsions, this system can be a self harming pitfall, rather than a saviour of decency; as hate is strong enough an emotion to modify a content state of mind, to an unhappy one; for example, a neurotic tendency of over cleanliness; or phobias that serve no apparent rational purpose of survival, such as fear of blemishes on a painted surface; or the fear suffered by the obsessive compulsive when not completing a ritual.

Might it also account for sexual deviances by the revulsion of sexual maturity suffered by some unfortunate youths during puberty? Imagine a lad who was precocious enough to have sexual desire for girls his own age, but suffered under some aberration, induced or inherent, to become disgusted by the adult form, that this left an indelible proclivity towards the prepubescent by default. As he grows, he exorcises out of his mind those feelings towards the mature female that other boys develop; thence he is doomed by his modified sexual urge to desire the immature female form. A similar argument may be used to account for homosexuality, whereby the sexual urge is not lost, but rerouted by the hate and disgust of the heterosexual form. Let us hope that the increase of feminist teachers, and other religious influences in our schools, doesn’t pervert too many boys from natural healthy maturity.

Conclusion

Hate is then the primitive and natural emotion that guides our performance within a social setting; it clarifies the demarcation between what we feel is right and wrong. In rude health, we try to inseminate others with our beliefs, whilst preserving our own individuality by cussed rejection of the views of others, especially if they contradict our own. By implication, hate also preserves our sense of decency, in that we use it to exorcise those internal dissonances of thought, lest our primordial urges be contaminated with incongruence.

An excess of hate, results in bigotry and brutality regarding others not in our chosen group; and may lead to neuroses or deviances, especially if focussed on ourselves in the absence of pariahs and scapegoats.


Monday 11 August 2008

Educating Rita[lin]



There is a distinction between teaching the student and teaching the subject; the latter is what used to be called education. The present system is about training the student to achieve ‘outcomes’ for certification of compliance, and monitoring the ‘progress’ of teachers and schools; causing the revulsion by cussed youths that would otherwise engage and aspire to knowledge. It maybe the explanation of why girls are doing better than boys these days, owing to this change of emphasis, that aids the box ticking bureaucracies, whilst fobbing off the conceit of faddish herds, with empty inflated grades.

Girls tend to be more amenable, more willing to integrate, comply and collaborate, so as to be flattered by acceptance. Boys on the other hand, seek challenges and independence; they thrive on cussedness, and are flattered by hard won victories.

The present emphasis on inclusivity, “no child left behind”, has inevitably led to the reduction of standards, since skill and talent have a normal distribution in the population, therefore inclusivity and high standards work against each other. Standards have dropped both by reducing the erudition required in examination, and by dumbing down the syllabuses. The girls thrive on lowered standards and reduced contention, because the easier the tests the greater the compliance; however the boys correspondingly fail to rise to the diminished challenges, as the reduced difficulty robs them of any sense of kudos from winning their spurs; “An empty hand is no lure for a hawk”.

In frustration, the teachers resort to ‘training’ the boys; which simply results in their cussed rejection of the whole schooling regime; this in turn leads to the pejorative term ‘laddishness’, a wholesale condemnation of the Y chromosome. It now becomes a war of both sex and generation; the headmistress selected for this conflict is ‘Rita’, Ritalin, the chemical cosh for cussed kids.

Ritalin works by allowing the dopamine levels to accumulate at the synapse during neurone activity. Dopamine functions at the synapses during the anticipation of pleasure, such as the sex drive, and is believed to be integral with the process of learning. Correspondingly, adverse stimuli such as bad food or unpleasant situations will result in a decrease of dopamine.

In our formative years we learn more than just academic lessons, we learn social distinctions alongside emotions. Our reactions to right and wrong, or good and bad, are what make us the functional individuals we are within a social group. Part of the learning process involves the resolution of social and cognitive dissonances; Ritalin may well alter this natural process to the point of perversion. The presence or absence of dopamine at the synapses is nature’s way of making a demarcation between the learning of pleasant as opposed to unpleasant stimulation. Or put another way, a kid sparked up on Ritalin may learn a bad lesson just as well as a good one. And does the Ritalin wear off when little Johnny is hanging around bad company, or suffering the unnatural propaganda from ‘social engineers’?

Furthermore, with an ever increasing number of feminist teachers, who have a low regard for males in general, what possible disincentive is there to prescribe the drug wholesale? Considering the potential boon afforded to quota-filling teachers presented with a classroom full of ‘compliant’ students, my guess is that boys will be targeted for this abuse, especially as the media is busy frightening the public with stories of ‘feral kids’.

Imagine if Winston Churchill was a present day child... “I made very little progress in my lessons, and none at all at games. I counted the days and the hours to the end of every term, when I should return home from this hateful servitude and range my soldiers in line of battle on the nursery floor.” Would he be a candidate for ADHD, and after a course of Ritalin, would he then still be the man of the hour?

You can guess the outrage from feminists if husbands suggested the use of Ritalin on their obstreperous wives; or better still, if Ritalin is effective at focusing the mind for the learner, why not make the teachers take it so as to improve their lessons? It’s perfectly safe, after all, it’s been tested on children!

The idea of synthetically altering a child’s state of mind during his formative years, based upon the dubious politics of feminist teachers and the amoral school bureaucracy, smacks of brain washing; and is tantamount to the betrayal of the child’s future, to cover up the incompetence, and in some respects, the misandry of the teaching profession as a whole.

Below are the graphs for Teacher Gender ratios (Data set ST30308), and the corresponding A-level results by Gender for students with 2 or more A-level passes (Data set ST30317), for the years 1985 to 1998, according to the Department for Education and Employment for England and Wales. The data suggests the hypothesis that boys do not prosper in a feminist realm.

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