Daybook 8.

Two quotes.

1. “Withdrawal in disgust is not the same thing as apathy.”

2. “Nothing matters very much and most things don’t matter at all.”

Decisions, decisions.

Some people are good at making decisions quickly. Decisions about whether or not to do something. I like to take my time. I usually wait at least until it is too late.

Work.

I’d like to read the detailed accounts of other people’s work life. But it would need to be in detail. So if they worked at a desk I would want to know what sort of desk. And how they arrange their software on the screen of the computer that is on the desk. Exactly what buttons they press and when. I haven’t yet found a book or website or anything that covers this kind of thing. There is a book called “Working” by Studs Terkel which I thought would be the kind of thing I want. The subtitle of the book is “People talk about what they do all day and how they feel about what they do”. But the content of the book seems to be mostly the latter of these two things. Things like some builder saying: “There’s not a house in this country that I haven’t built that I don’t look at every time I go by.” That sort of thing.

Dictatorship.

This makes it sound like there is one person who, through the exercise of their own force, has absolute power over a population. But surely that’s not possible, is it? How can one person rule everyone by force? Don’t they ever sleep? Without the support of a sizeable minority group they wouldn’t be able to do anything.

(Sometimes I read that a dictator “seized power” as if power was some small object like a magic ring, the possession of which gives the holder power. But that’s not how it works.)

So then there is a very interesting question about this minority which is: exactly how big does a minority group need to be for it to be able to maintain control by force of the whole population?

(All of the preceding applies to monarchy as well as dictatorship.)

Lion.

A few weeks ago I was walking up the main pedestrian shopping street and I thought to myself: wouldn’t it be funny if a lion suddenly jumped out of one of these shops and attacked an unsuspecting shopper. And yes, it would be funny. But only for a very short time.

Illusion.

When I watch a film it seems that the speech is coming from the images of the mouths of the people on the screen but it’s not. It’s coming from some audio speakers which might be on the other side of the room.

Transcript.

If I read a transcript while listening to a recording of someone saying the words in the transcript it’s as if they are reading out the words. But they aren’t.

Passive aggressive.

I’m so glad there’s a term for this. It’s a quite sophisticated phenomena which would be overlooked otherwise. By which I mean that if there’s no word for something we kind of assume it doesn’t exist. And if there is a word then we assume that there is some such thing that that word refers to even though there isn’t. This point applies to the words ‘love’ and ‘socialism’.

Cruel.

There is something called the NSPCC which is the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. And I thought to myself: what if those initials actually meant National Society for the Promotion of Cruelty to Children. What would such an organisation be about? They might be based around an idea rather like the (quite certainly wrong) one that says we should feed children dirt so as to build up their immune system.

Children learn something from the world being cruel to them but indiscriminate and excessive cruelty will not deliver an effective lesson. The NSPCC would prevent this latter sort of cruelty certainly but in its place they would administer a milder form of cruelty and/or cruelty administered in a controlled and managed fashion thus maximising the learning outcome. (Rather like the way people can cure themselves of their phobia of, say, spiders by gradually exposing themselves to spiders in a controlled way. Uncontrolled exposure is much less effective.)

Production 1.

In any modern western city people are busy working. And, at the same time, they have lots of nice stuff: cars, computers, TVs, smartphones, household machines, clothes. But there seems to be no relation between these two things, between the work they do and the things they have. There are no visible production facilities churning out these cars, computers, TVs and so on. The nice stuff they have just appears as if out of nowhere and the production facilities are elsewhere. It seems like the Globalised world has resulted in western countries being where all the clean office type work is done. Finance, design, software. And the dirty hands physical work has been exported elsewhere. It’s like a 19th century factory on a larger scale. The boardroom and office are in some western country. And the factory floor is in China or India. (Apple products say: “designed in California, assembled in China”.)

Production 2.

Another way of looking at it is that modern de-industrialised western cities seem financially unsustainable. For example you will get many western cities that don’t produce things that go outside that city. (Which, in the past, it’s fair to say was something you would expect of a city.) And yet, despite this, the other direction of flow continues regardless. By which I mean that things continue to come into the city, things that the city can not and does not produce for itself.

I’m not saying that it’s not true that all the people in the city are employed doing things but these are all things for the city, not for outside of it. So the people will make and repair buildings, prepare and serve food and all that kind of thing. But there is nothing they are exporting that I can see. And yet stuff streams in from outside. Almost mysteriously it arrives in trucks: food, clothes, electronic equipment.

It’s like the city is “unemployed” and living on some unearned income somehow. Because even unemployed people can be busy. Like cooking and keeping the house and garden clean and tidy.

That’s what modern Western cities seem like. They are like retired gents pottering about the garden. They’re not doing any real work. But in that sense their position seems precarious and unsustainable.

United Kingdom.

What a strange name for a country. Like someone was deciding what to call this country and they thought: well, it’s a kingdom and it’s united so let’s call it “United Kingdom”. But that name could apply to, for example, Spain which is also a united kingdom (it has a monarchy). You might as well just call the UK “The Country” because it is one. I suppose the name “United Kingdom” will persist even if the monarchy got abolished. Then some wit would make a remark rather like the one that Voltaire made about the Holy Roman Empire: “it’s not holy, it’s not Roman and it’s not an empire”.

The Nasty Party.

I’m always surprised that the government is not as nasty as the people who elect it. The government is not as right wing as the Daily Mail (which in turn, I suspect, is not as right wing as the people who read it). But the Daily Mail is certainly more representative of the views of the general population than the party in power no matter how right wing this party is. Another fact related to this is that all the Trades Unions that most people are members of are a lot more left wing than the political parties those same members regularly vote for.

Conversation.

It is a natural part of normal conversation to state your opinion about something, typically politics. But this is inevitably an invitation to either agree or disagree and then an argument can ensue without the other person having consented to such. For example suppose Jack meets Mary and, after they have got the pleasantries out of the way, he says to her: “I think that Theresa May is making a real mess of the Brexit negotiations.” At this point Mary must either agree or disagree. She can’t just nod her head and make some remark like: “how very interesting your opinion is Jack!” or “yes, so what?”. (Which she might want to do if she was wanting to avoid getting into an argument.) But the question “so what?” could (and maybe should) be asked about anything that anybody says at the start of a conversation. Jack might have started telling Mary about his holiday in Florence and she could have said: “so what? why are you telling me this? What makes you think I give a stuff about you and your stupid holiday?”.

Prison.

There’s a line from a poem: “stone walls do not a prison make”. Which means that even though you are in a physical prison yet it is not really one if you do not see it as one. But that phrase may also be taken to mean that, even though you are not in a physical prison, yet you are really in one because of other circumstances.

The main reason people don’t like prison is that you don’t have any social life and can’t go places and can’t develop yourself the way you’d like. But what if your life outside prison is like that anyway? If you have no friends, not enough money to go anywhere and everyone shuns you and is uncooperative towards you then this has the consequence that you can’t develop yourself much in the same way that someone in prison can’t. (If other people are taking these attitudes towards you deliberately then it might be called ostracism.) Deliberate or not it’s probably worse than being in prison. Because you still have to do things to live but you will have to do them all yourself. People will stand by and let you do things the hard way when they could easily step in and help.

Translation.

I am familiar with the work of Beethoven, but I have no idea of what his status was in his own time. Was he like Neil Young, well known but liked by serious people and not the majority? Or was he like Stockhausen, his music only known by a tiny minority? Or was he as popular as the Beatles were in their day? My question makes no sense though because you can’t compare instances. In the same way that saying: “Tom Hanks is the new Jimmy Stewart” doesn’t really work. It’s rather like how sometimes you find a foreign word for which there is no equivalent in English.

Ice cream.

What if there were some place where there was free ice cream. So people spent all their spare time in the enjoyment of that delicious stuff. But at the same time they’d be thinking: this isn’t quite right, there’s something missing. Sure this ice cream is really nice but there’s other things we could and should be doing.

Elite.

Suppose Mary supports right-wing outfits like the UKIP or the Donald Trump because she, as she says, despises the “left wing liberal elite”. But surely she despises those left wing elites because they are elites, not because they’re left wing. So, switching her support to a right wing party makes no sense. Instead she should support some left wing group which isn’t so elitist.

Fond.

Absence makes the heart grow fonder. So make that absence permanent and your fondness will be boundless.

Computer.

Most people don’t use a computer to ‘compute’. They use it to type up text documents, send and receive messages, browse the internet and display videos and suchlike. But the word ‘compute’ suggests they are doing something more active. Like calculating the trajectory of a spaceship or analysing lots of data data. That sort of thing.

WhatsApp.

A mobile cellphone smartphone is actually a computer. The mobile phone number that is associated with it is something left over from when it used to be a phone. So if I send a message using WhatsApp then that’s done on the internet. It’s more like sending an email than it is like sending an SMS text. So a phone number is not needed. Apps like WhatsApp use your phone number as a matter of convenience only.

Bad.

If somebody does something horrible then we hate them. But then we have the saying: “people aren’t as bad as the worst thing they’ve done”. Which is true. But the converse is also true: people aren’t as good as the best thing they’ve done. If Jack saved Mary from drowning one day we shouldn’t treat him like a hero. He was just in the right place at the right time.

Do-gooders.

On the face of it this term should have a positive meaning. But it doesn’t, it means “a well-meaning but unrealistic or interfering philanthropist or reformer”. (There are many characters like this in the novels of Charles Dickens.) And the connotations are even more negative I’d say. They suggest that do-gooders are not nice people. One thing is the suspicion that do-gooders are somehow rather vain and that the motive behind their good doing is their own sense of what a fabulous person they are. And then there is also the thought that do-gooders are foolishly letting their feelings for people determine their behaviour. That they are the left wing “bleeding heart liberals” who make policy based on their feelings of empathy with the suffering peoples. A basis which does not depend on (often fickle) feelings would be better. For example how about treating people justly. If I treat people justly I’m not “doing good” in the sense of being nice to them. And behaving justly towards people can often include doing things which are, on the face of it, not nice. Tough love and a well deserved good smack round the head can often do wonders for people.

Wealth.

Everybody wants to succeed when they are “setting out in life”. But what if I said to some 18 year old: look, here’s your next 50 years and it doesn’t include any sort of fabulous extravagance at all. It’s an average comfortable life (as it exists in the West early 21st century) though: a nice house warm in winter and cool in the summer, good food, internet, clean environment. Suppose I said this to Jack who is aged 18 and he is disappointed, asserting his right to pursue a lifestyle yet more opulent it being one with a villa in some foreign country and a yacht and gold jewellery and shiny cars that go really fast or whatever the hell else he has set his heart on. But to want more than what he is being offered might seem unreasonable even crazy if taken to the extremes that very wealthy people take things. Wanting to live in giant palace and that kind of thing. Maybe the government should give up trying to heavily tax the very wealthy as a means of restricting their acquiring of things. Because this just makes the wealthy squeal like an infant. They should rather treat their aspirations like a mental illness which is what they might well be. There’s plenty of other extreme behaviours which are classified as such, why not this one? And certainly there is something wrong with wanting to be rich. (I don’t mean wanting to be not poor which is different.) It’s a kind of obsessive behaviour. Being very rich doesn’t improve your quality of life and even if it does this isn’t something which couldn’t be done in other ways. So wealthy people and the associated desire to be wealthy should be treated almost as a public health matter. It should be contained but we shouldn’t expect to deal with it fully in the sense in which Socialists think we can. Think of it rather as: “the rich you will have with you always”.

Trust.

Suppose Jack is careful and rational about his opinions. He sits down and goes through and applies the process of ‘reason’ - logical arguments to get to his conclusions and he trusts that this process won’t get him to anything objectionable. After all: how could that possibly happen? But what if it did, then what? For example what if his reasonings led him to the conclusion that he ought to enslave and torture a certain section of the population. Would he reject reason? Or would he just think he had applied reason incorrectly?

Talent.

Do people like doing things because they’re good at them? Is it possible to enjoy doing something even though you can’t do it very well. I like maths but I’m not very good at it. It takes me forever to understand the simplest things. I mostly don’t bother.

Free market.

This rewards scarcity not effort. So proponents of hard work should be against the free market! For example driving is not a well paid job because, while it is a quite difficult thing to learn and to do, the majority of people can do it. Is the converse also true I wonder: do you get things which are easy to learn but very rare and so they are paid well?

Blankets.

Why do we sleep under blankets (and duvets and suchlike). To keep us warm. But why not just wear extra clothes when we go to bed to sleep? (And you WOULD need extra clothes because lying down you lose more heat than standing up because heat rises and lying down there is more horizontal surface from which heat can escape.) Wear extra clothes, or, at the very least, keep on as much as we already have on. But instead we take off our clothes and then put on blankets instead. If we kept our clothes on we wouldn’t need the blankets. The only thing I can think is that a blanket is the only form of keeping warm which can be shared with another. You can both get under the same blanket. So single people using blankets are just doing what everybody else is doing and thus making a terrible fool of themselves because in their situation a blanket isn’t necessary at all.

Audio illusion.

In the duck rabbit illusion what we see changes. It’s as if we are looking at different pictures. But the picture itself has not changed and neither has whatever physical process is happening in our eyes when we see something. We can look at the duck-rabbit picture and flit between seeing two different things. In other similar illusions the change in what we see is determined by context. For example in “the cat” context effect (search “the cat word illusion”) the ‘H’ and the ‘A’ look different according to the context but they are the same. The same thing can happen with word sounds. If I hear “well you should” and “will you take it”. The vowel in the words ‘well’ and ‘will’ might be identical (in terms of air vibrations).

You.

When someone says to you: “do you know that you …” and then describes some odd habit you’ve got. (For example “do you know that you touch your nose every time someone mentions books”.) Is your immediate reaction to say: “do I really?” or is to say “no I don’t!”?

Tilt.

When you tilt your head 45 degrees things don’t look oblique. Like they would if I showed you a picture of things taken at an angle of 45 degrees.

Train tickets.

I once got a day return ticket for 23.90. Where the price for a single ticket was 23.80. This is a common pricing arrangement but I’ve never managed to find out why. The other anomalous thing is that you ca not get a return ticket that spans over midnight. So if I want to go somewhere at 11pm and come back at 7am I would have to get two single tickets which would (to use the previously given example) cost 47.60 which is a lot more than a return ticket. If I wanted to make my eight hour visit 11am to 7pm then it would just cost 23.90.

Antibiotics.

The advice about antibiotics is always complete the course because if you don’t then this might lead to the prevalence of antibiotic resistance bacteria. But do I understand why not finishing the course leads to resistance? The explanation would seem to be that if you stop too early you will have killed only the weakest of the bacteria leaving the strongest. So, if the course is 10 days and you stop after 7 then the strong bacteria that need 10 days of antibiotics will still be there. But I don’t see how this can be the explanation. If the strongest bacteria are still there then how is the patient feeling better?

Another thing is: suppose that the 10 day bacteria are left, that’s not going to be a problem is it? I mean as long as other people take the full 10 days then they will be OK?

And then there is the other thing that gets said which is that it is overuse of antibiotics that is the problem. But overuse is kind of like the opposite of stopping too early. So then I need to figure out in my head what the reasoning behind this is.

This happens to me a lot. Some, on the face of it, simple statement about something. But when I think about it for a while I get hopelessly confused. And then I start to suspect myself: am I finding confusion because I am persistently looking for it? Also am I being slack at resolving the confusion through research? In this case I do an internet search on things like: “how does overuse of antibiotics lead to antibiotic resistance” but I don’t get anywhere. Maybe I am expecting results too quickly.

Receipts.

Suppose Jack buys bread at a store for £1.00. The store gives him a receipt which is a document that says the store has received £1 from Jack. So really Jack ought to give them a corresponding receipt document to say that he has received from them a loaf of bread. Why do the store give him a receipt anyway? Is it in case later they say to him “you never gave us £1.00!” and insist that he pay them again? The receipt prevents this from happening as it is evidence that he did pay them £1.00. But equally might not Jack say to the store: “you never gave me a loaf of bread”?

The futility of criticism.

In a review HERE of a piece of music I really like, the reviewer says: “quite frankly, it’s pretty tedious to listen to”. But I really like this music. And I think that the thing that I like about this music is whatever aspect of it is the one that the critic is referring to by the word “tedious”. This shows all art criticism to be pointless.

Employer vs employee.

An employee can just leave a job if they want. Maybe they fancy a change. An employer can’t do likewise, there are rules and laws controlling the circumstances in which an employer can stop employing someone. Similarly an employee can freely be discriminative but an employer can not. An employee can say: “X offered me a job but I turned it down because X is black (or a woman or gay)”.

Filenames.

I can create a .txt file which is zero bytes. But it still has a name. Where is that name stored? Not in the file because that file’s size is zero.

Two solutions.

There is a problem that power corrupts. There are two solutions.

First, nobody has any power over anybody. Which includes there being no organisations of any sort because organisation involves giving some people power over others.

The second solution is to let people have power but don’t let them know they have it. Like the ruler of the galaxy in that book by Douglas Adams.

Writing.

When I write I try really hard to seamlessly tie up all the ideas. To show how all the points I am making relate to each other. But then I think: this can only happen in the reader’s mind. It can’t happen on the page. I should write down my points separately and let the reader’s mind do the rest.

History.

I tend to imagine the course of historical events as some kind of a path we have followed. A path which was there already rather than one we created. Where this path is a good one on the whole (excluding temporary diversions like wars). Good because it has got us to the better way of life we have now. But all this might be wrong. Saying that there was a path that we followed is like saying that when a sculptor makes a statue they aren’t making something but they are just uncovering what was concealed in the slab they started out with. And when we say the path we followed is a good one we only assume this because we haven’t got anything to compare it with. Although some writers have given us imagined alternatives to think about. See William Morris ‘News from Nowhere’ for example.

[21 May 2017]