Daybook 4.

(May/June 2015)

Always look on the dark side of life.

If everyone concentrated only on the positive then nothing would ever get done. Because the positive doesn’t need anything doing about it: it’s just fine as it is. The most motivated people will be the ones who focus on the negative things. Because those are the things that need something doing about them.

Data storage.

On a computer http:// is a bit like c:\. So maybe the internet is just another data storage device. And it could have just been set up as a bigger version of a folder storage system like you get in Windows. And all the ‘webpages’ would have been things you usually get in those folders. Like Word files. Conversely I could organise the content of my hard drive on my computer here as a (offline) website. Where the files would all open in a browser.

Rhetoric in everyday life.

This is the art of the manipulation of the contents of somebody’s mind by what you say to them and how you say it. For example when an official body does something wrong, their statement will say “some mistakes were made” instead of “we made some mistakes”. The former seems like an admission but it is in the passive tense so it isn’t really. It makes the hearer think the official body have admitted fault but they haven’t!

Or someone who has been accused of something will say: “these allegations are groundless”. This sounds like they are saying the allegations are not true but they are not saying that.

Or (somewhat conversely) say Mary wants to criticise something Jack said without seeming to do so. She could say (about what Jack said): “Some people might that’s just pure nonsense”.

Or Jack might want to tell Mary that he thinks she isn’t as helpful towards him as he would like her to be. Instead of saying it outright he could say that he had a dream in which he fell over in the road and Mary walked past but didn’t help him. Whereas really there was no such dream! He just made it up.

Books.

I don’t like owning books. Because either I have read them, in which case I have got from them what they have to give and so I don’t need them anymore. Or I haven’t read them in which case why have I got them? Except perhaps to make me look clever when people see them on my bookshelf. The only books I should have are either ones I am reading at the moment or ones I will start reading very soon. The idea of public borrowing libraries is therefore appealing. The only problem with lending libraries is that they have never been as comprehensive and prompt at getting you the book you want as they should be. And now the internet has overtaken them anyway.

Bullying.

I hated school for a number of reasons. But I never suffered much from bullying. Despite the fact that I was a feeble nerdy misfit type. I think I was so pathetic and insignificant the bullies thought it beneath them to bully me. They have their standards like everybody else. Moral and professional standards. They just ignored me (the same way everybody did and does). In many ways I think I resented their lack of attention.

Do it now.

You should tell the people you love that you love them. And why you do. (Don’t leave it until it’s too late, do it now!) And then also tell the people you hate that you hate them and why you do. And then (last but not least) tell the people that you love why you hate them. Because no matter how much you love somebody there will always be something about them that you hate. And you owe it to them to tell them what that something is.

Power.

Democracy gives power to the people. But power corrupts. (And absolute power corrupts absolutely.) So democracy corrupts the people.

Fence-sitting.

The good thing about “sitting on the fence” is that from there you can see both sides. (“Now”, like Joni Mitchell said.)

Life extension.

Some people are keen to live a lot longer than they are expected to. With medical advancements you could live to be 500 years old, they say, wide-eyed with astonishment. But I think to myself: by the time you get to that age you will have no memories of you as you were aged what you are now. Or even as you were aged 100. But then that is the same as if that 100 year old had ceased to exist and been replaced with the some older person, some person that only has the memories from year 100 onwards. So then who or what has succeeded in living longer? Contrary to what the enthusiasts of life extension think it’s not that clear cut. The life span of someone who lives longer hasn’t really been extended because it is diminishing at the past end as fast as it is being extended at the future end. -- Actually, the way memory works it is more like that at 500 you will still have your memories of the first part of your life but will not be forming many new memories. (Because your memory is full?) So you won’t really be living any more years. It will be like pouring water into an already full cup. (Your cup runneth over!)

Misanthropy.

I like people and I am happy to admit that I do. But I associate with them hardly ever. On hearing which someone might say to me: “But yet you say you like people!” And I would respond “I like tea but I would refuse a plastic cup of vending machine tea, and then you might say to me: but yet you say you like tea!”

Being right.

Imagine I say about Mary: “that Mary! she has to be right about everything all the time!”. According to the usual meaning of this phrase, this means that Mary will stubbornly cling to her current opinions despite overwhelming evidence and arguments to the contrary. All due to an unwillingness to admit she is wrong. But, strictly speaking, the phrase “has to be right about everything all the time” could equally apply to her if she was constantly and rigorously seeking the truth about things. So rigorously that she would change her current opinions and admit she was wrong about them without hesitation as and when the evidence and arguments demanded. So when she says to people: “tell me why you think I’m wrong” she doesn’t say this with the intention of getting into an argument with them. Rather she says it with the genuine desire to learn about something which might show she is wrong. A bit like the way you might sometimes ask: “Am I doing this right?” when you are not sure. So there’s nothing wrong with “wanting to be right about everything all the time”.

In fact isn’t that what everybody wants, to be right about everything all the time. Who wants to be wrong? If we say of Mary: “she thinks she’s right about everything”. Again, according to the usual meaning of this phrase, it means that she doesn’t ever think that she might be wrong. But, strictly speaking, that phrase could equally mean what it means literally that she thinks everything she believe is right. But that’s fair enough. Everyone thinks this! Nobody thinks that they are wrong about something they believe, do they? If they did they would stop believing it.

The present.

Jack: Hey Mary, I got you a present!

Mary: Oh thanks, Jack! (pause) So, where is it?

Jack: Where’s what?

Mary: The present.

Jack: What present?

Soap.

In response to me complaining of itchy skin a doctor once suggested that I stop using soap. And I looked at her like she’d suggested that I stop breathing. Surely the usage of soap isn’t something that you can just casually discontinue! But then, on the other hand people managed for a long time without it so maybe she’s got a point.

Not nice.

Buddhists (and their ilk) can only be nice to you in a negative way by wanting to remove things that are causing you pain. They can’t be nice to you in the positive sense of doing something that gives you pleasure because they think pleasure is bad in the sense that it just attaches you to the world more. Don’t expect them to buy you chocolate any time soon.

This didn’t really happen.

The other day at work E came over to my section of the office and said “can somebody please help me with this report?”. I immediately put my hand up and said: “I’m somebody!”. And she gave me stern look and said: “No you’re not. You’re nobody!”. And I thought: Why does she hate me so much? Maybe it was that time I fell over in the snow and she rushed over to me to help saying: “Hey. are you OK?” and I grinned back at her and said “Yeah, I’m great thanks. How are you?” This is the sort of lame humour which she doesn’t like.

Not well.

It’s important to be clear about what your ends are, what you are trying to achieve. If you don’t know exactly what you are doing you are never going to know if you are doing it well. And doing something well is good regardless of what the thing that you are doing is. But you need to know what this latter is in order to be able to make a judgement about the former.

Film clip.

I remember a movie clip I once saw many years ago. A man falls out of an upstairs window and, when he hits the ground, he smashes into pieces as if he was crockery. A neat bit of trick photography.

Not sorry.

Someone is rude to me and I berate them for being rude and they respond by saying: “I’m sorry that you feel I have been rude.” Which seems like an apology but isn’t.

Business.

We are friendly and easy-going with our friends and acquaintances but in business the customer-business relation is essentially a cold and distant one. One where it’s OK to be rather standoffish and unhelpful and abrupt and short. But there’s no reason for this. So, if you work in a Call Centre, why can’t you just answer a customer’s question the same way you would if a friend asked you about something? Why can’t you adopt the same air of casual familiarity? Imagine a friend of yours called the Call Centre where you work and got put through to you. The script given to you by your employers would force you to talk in the standard cold informal manner. And this would seem irksome to you. But surely you should want to talk to all your callers in the same nice way that you want to talk to your friend. Maybe it’s all just a “power corrupts” thing. If you are at a Call Centre then you are in a position of power. And so you behave accordingly.

Clothes.

There is a lot of variation in the sorts of clothes that people wear. Either between different people now or between (the same) people over time. Shapes, colours, patterns, materials. How do they decide what to wear? On what basis do they choose? The function of clothes does not vary that much so you wouldn’t have thought there would be so much variation. (By the way the same point could be applied to cars.) Maybe the variation is because people also use clothes to say something about themselves. (They express their individuality by slavishly dressing like all the other people they know!) But what makes them think I want to hear what they’ve got to say about themselves? And even if I did want to know something about them I would want to know something other than what they can and want to say with their clothes. I’d like everybody to wear the same clothes and then they would be forced to say what they want to say (to express their individuality) with words and not with their clothes.

Metacritic.

People on the internet use the word ‘metacritic’ to mean (something like) somebody (or some website) that aggregates critical reviews about some particular thing such as a movie. But really the word ‘metacritic’ should refer to somebody who is a critic of critics. This person would write reviews about critics and give them a score of between 1 and 5 stars. They would write reviews about how good other reviewers are at reviewing things. So you could have reviews of how well Roger Ebert or Philip French review films. ... Of course there couldn’t be very many of these metacritics because then we would need somebody to review their work, ie a metametacritic.

Annoyance.

When I arrive at the train station platform I look up at the electronic display board which states what train is at that platform at the moment. But the display alternates (every 10 seconds) between that information and some other ‘special notice’ such as “Closing of train doors: please note that doors may be closed up to one minute before departure”. If I arrive when that notice is displayed I have to wait up to 10 seconds until the more relevant information about the train appears. This is an annoyance of limited significance. But an annoyance nevertheless.

For free.

There’s no such thing as ‘free’ when we are talking about stuff you normally have to pay for. If somebody is handing out free bread then it’s not really free. The word ‘free’ actually means ‘paid for by somebody else’. The bread maker was paid by someone. Or if they weren’t then they paid for it themselves, ie they paid whatever they might have got if they sold it. - The other relevant thing here is: free goods and services aren’t valued by the recipients. By which I mean the recipients don’t insist on quality from the providers. And those goods and service are generally of a lower quality than ones that are paid for by the recipients. For example healthcare and education in a nationalised system. I don’t know why exactly these two things are the case but they are.

Self-awareness.

Many media (films, TV shows, novels) are satirically funny about the stupidity of the general population. And this media is popular with the people who make up that same population. Do they not see that the satire is about them? Do they not recognise themselves?

When there is an unpleasant character in a work of fiction, do people who are like that recognise themselves? If a horrible person sees a horrible person in a movie, where they are depicted negatively, does the horrible person say: “wait, that’s me!”.

This question is therefore about that thing where we put a white spot on the forehead of a monkey and put it in front of a mirror to see if it will recognise itself and try to remove the spot.

Another way of putting it is: I watch a film with a bad guy and I think, this film isn’t made to be watched by bad guys like that. Because the viewer of the movie is invited to side against them.

Novels etc about weird people. This is for an audience of normal people. If you are a weird person yourself, then it’s not for you. If you are a lonely person then the song ‘Eleanor Rigby’ is not for you. If you are a serial killer then ‘Silence Of The Lambs’ is not for you.

When I meet people I often put them into a category. Like I might think “this guy’s a bit loud”. And then I think: “is he aware of this? Does he know what he’s like?”. But then I think: “do I know what I’m like? If I met me what category would I put me into?”. Of course I can never meet me so “what am I like?” is a question only other people can answer. Other people understand me better than I do because they have more perspective on me than I do.

Reading for pleasure.

I like this quote by Lawrence Rust Hills about ‘page-turner’ popular novels. He says: “Before one knows it, he’s nearly through with the book and then must continue so as to ‘find out what happens at the end’. These are the sort of book of which publishers say ‘Once you pick it up, you can’t put it down,’ and one of the major reasons you don’t want to put it down is that you don’t ever want to pick it up again.”

In other words you just want to find out what happens, you don’t want to read it not really! If somebody just told you what happened then that would be fine.

A somewhat different observation from the one by Rust Hills is as follows.

These novels are ‘page-turners’. But I want to read novels where I NEVER want to turn the page. I want to read the pages not turn them. It’s such a delight reading each page slowly and carefully and I linger over every sentence as if it were poetry.

And also about such a novel it will NOT be true that you “can’t put it down”. On the contrary you will have to put it down after say about an hour at the most of reading it. Because the pleasure of reading is so intense. Or because the pleasure requires effort from you, and the best pleasures are effortful.

Maybe it’s bit like the way that if you are eating something very delicious (like chocolate) you will have to stop after a certain amount because it is just too much. Whereas with bland food you can eat as much as you like.

Stupid arguments.

I get annoyed when I talk to people who don’t know how to conduct a sensible argument. For example I say to X that I think, morally, everybody in an economy should be paid the same standard salary regardless of their occupation. (A controversial opinion I admit.) The subsequent exchange goes as follows.

X: So do you give away all of the current salary that you earn more than what that standard salary would be?

Me: No, of course I don’t.

X: So you’re contradicting yourself!

Me: No I’m not. Because my initial assertion was a hypothetical and general one.

X: No! If you really believed that everyone should get paid the same you’d give up your excess salary now. You’re not doing that which shows that you don’t really believe what you’re saying. What you’re saying is wrong.

And they have a smug look on their face when they say this. They have turned a sensible statement of opinion into an argument. And then they have treated that argument as a fight where the aim is just to prove the other person wrong, by any means necessary. And then when they have (or think they have) won the fight they are gleefully jumping up and down gloating with excitement. Imbeciles!

Good.

You can’t decide to be a good person if you aren’t already good. Only a good person would choose to be a good person. (Similarly the acquisition of the mental quality of perseverance requires perseverance.)

Lateral / sequential.

(1.) When people write books they do this laterally not sequentially. They start with the outline of what they want to say and then the rough detail and then the fine detail. In that order. They don’t just sit down and write it out from the start as if it was being dictated to them. First page 1 and then page 2 and then page 3 and so on. Of course I know that Charles Dickens wrote his novels through serialisation, which suggests that he was just writing it pretty much sequentially. As if he was “making it up as he went along”. But surely he must have had an outline of the whole story. And even if the whole story was ‘improvised’ sequentially each individual episode or section must have been written laterally.

(2.) With visual art it’s certainly true. What if an artist produced a painting sequentially. So they prepared a grid on their canvas. Squares 12 by 12 so 144 altogether. And then started at top left. And then painted each square in order. One square a day.

(3.) When I am trying to understand a difficult thing I think the problem is that I think about its parts sequentially but I need to think about them laterally, ie all at once. In other words, I need to read the way writers write: laterally not sequentially.

Hands.

When I am walking along where do I put my hands? Swinging at my sides seems too sloppy. In pockets looks rather louche. (And doesn’t work when it’s warm weather.) Arms crossed over my chest looks too serious. Held behind my back makes me look old and jolly. So I have started clasping my hands together (fingers interwoven) and held in front of me just below my stomach. Or I use my hands to grasp the lapels of my coat. Walking around like a professor delivering a lecture. 

Over.

So that war’s been over 70 years now. It is like, so over! There are some allies who might have been better off on the losing side. Germany and Japan, haven’t they done well! Actually for a while everybody was doing super great. How is that possible by the way? They all spent five years beating the crap out of each other. Completely devastating whole cities. And then straight after you get at least 20 years of prosperity. So, is that the path to prosperity then? Destruction on a massive scale? ... But then I think maybe when they say ‘prosperity’ they mean growth rather than prosperity. And obviously you’re going to have growth after everything’s been bombed. Because there’s plenty of space to grow into. The space left by all the stuff that got destroyed. But then I’m confused. You hear very naive things like: the war was good for the economy, rebuilding to do created jobs so there was full employment. But not all employment creates prosperity surely. If it did then at the end of every day we could just destroy everything we did that day. Then there will be plenty employment for the next day!

Users.

How do people become users of illegal drugs? Imagine I wanted to start taking heroin right now. What would I do? I’ve got no idea. I mean it’s not as if it’s advertised anywhere. I’m surprised that anybody manages to get a hold of it. In general if you are trying to sell something you need to make the knowledge of where to buy what you are selling very easy to find out. But if you’re selling something illegal then you can’t do that. Because the people whose job it is to stop illegal things being sold will be round immediately (if not sooner) to sort you out. And there seems to be no middle ground here because any knowledge that is available enough to buyers will be available enough to the law enforcers. So the only way you could become a drug user would be if you were already associating with people who were users.

For sale.

Can you sell your mind to the devil like you might sell your soul?

People.

Sometimes I want to ask: “what are people like?”. In exactly the same sense that I might ask: “what are French people like?”.

Movie language.

Do movies have a language that I learnt at some point? For example we see a character who looks up. And then the next scene is of a bird in the sky. And I know this means the character is looking at that bird in the sky. But that doesn’t necessarily follow from the conjunction of those two scenes.

The moon landing hoax hoax.

This (meta) hoax is where some people pretended that they really believed that NASA faked the moon landings. But these people didn’t really think that at all! And so they fooled lots of other people into believing that the moon landing was a hoax. - So the moon-landing conspiracy isn’t that some secret powers have manipulated people into believing humans went to the moon when they didn’t. But rather it’s that the secret powers have manipulated some (gullible) people into believing that humans didn’t go to the moon when they did.

No worries.

Some people say: wasn’t it good when you were a kid with none of the worries that adult people have due to responsibilities. But I think, no. I prefer to have responsibilities and to fulfil them than to have no responsibilities. Also it would be good to have responsibilities and not worry about not fulfilling them.

Losing it.

Mary was trying to explain something complicated to Jack. He understood up to a point but then her argument became quite complicated and he said “no, sorry you’ve lost me!” At which Mary got cross and said: “Oh, that’s right, it’s my fault! I’VE lost YOU. Not: you’ve stopped paying attention or you’re not trying hard enough.”