December 2018

I've been a bit quiet lately, and I think this Sherry Turkle TED talk mirrors my thoughts about FB at the moment. Like many new social media, it's being used to create connection, at the expense of conversation. Where are the conversations happening in our societies? Conversations are the blood in society’s body I think, without them societies collapse, as we’re seeing a bit at the moment, with hysteria and slogans filling the vacuum where conversations have disappeared. Government is a type of conversation, and it’s caught in the same problem. Turkle I think captures very well why we're absolutely addicted to connection, but not conversation. And what we might do about it. (If you don't have the 20 mins to watch, you can always click on 'transcript' to read the talk instead, takes only a few mins to get through.)

Check out the idea of peoples’ ‘second selves’, the self they curate, alongside the self they traditionally live. I think we’ve always had a social self, a second self, it’s just that now it’s much, much bigger than it used to be. People staring at their phones and oversharing on social media are living the struggle between the two selves. An anthropologist studying modern people. And finding that our technologies are us, they’re not tools.

Do you agree with this? I don't, I think it's the disease that has infected Anglo countries in particular, in the last 50 years. The current LNP believes in this crap - listen to how often they talk of tax 'relief' and 'freedom from government interference'. The government IS the people. It amazes me this individual freedom versus government argument has any legs at all. There are countries in the world that have only minimal government, I can guarantee you don't want to live there. People invented governments to give them MORE freedom to do other things.

I just spent a few days in Melbourne. It made me angry, because it reminded me again of the unforgivable vandalism that was done in ripping up Sydney’s tram network. Walking in central Melbourne is pleasant, the trams keep huge numbers of cars off the streets, it’s so much quieter and less aggressive than Sydney. And they kept the trees. Sydney’s Tram Network was amongst the largest in the world. Over 1500 trams (more than 3 times as many as Melbourne) used to operate all over the city, well into the suburbs. (Have attached a map of just the Eastern suburbs tramways, the reach was staggering.) There were over 400 million passenger trips per year at its peak, and the network ran for nearly a century. Overseas transport ‘experts’ advised Sydney to get rid of its trams from the 1930s, which was widely unpopular. The experts won. I think it’s possibly the greatest act of public vandalism in modern Australian history. It’s costing over $2 billion to add just one light rail line back down George Street, which gives you an idea of the magnitude of the vandalism in ripping out the old trams. As George Monbiot once said, the pro-car forces in our societies are some of the greatest anti-social bastards we have.

Marc Martel did the Freddie vocals for the Bohemian Rhapsody movie, and he also fronts the only official Queen cover band, that Queen’s drummer Roger Taylor set up. This is a beautiful performance I think.

Not sure if I posted this before. Trivia question of the day - who is this a photo of?

When we see chaos in politics, I think we’re looking in a mirror. There is no ‘sensible centre’ just waiting for somebody to lead them. Politicians are us, government is us. The more we withdraw from and don’t debate the issues of the day amongst ourselves, the more they build up pressure, which has to be relieved somewhere. In parliament, that’s its job, to argue, not to be nice. I think we’re enormous hypocrites, it’s our own refusal to discuss difficult things we’re seeing in that mirror, when we see chaos in government. The more we want to live lives free of argument and politics, with just leisure and a few drinks and some sport and concerts etc., the more I think we have to offload all of our shit on somebody else to sort out for us. It has to be done somewhere.

Happy birthday Brett :)

Happy birthday twinnie!

One of the things I liked about Nanette was Gadsby's intelligent refusal to be shoehorned into any category, of 'her people'. She saw that as just another way to sideline and harass people, even if well intentioned. She wanted people to be treated for who they are, individually. And yet...I feel she's doing this a bit herself now. Big generic words like 'misogyny', and frequent reference to 'men' as a homogeneous group. Of course misogyny is real, but to just bandy it about as a catch-all phrase isn't progress, I don't think. Those big generic concepts feel good in an activist sort of "yeh!" fists in the air sort of way, but to me they're the same thing she criticises in the treatment she's received from others over the years. It's flipping the same behaviour in the other direction? https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2018/12/06/hannah-gadsby-good-men-monologue-misogyny-hollywood/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.f9d24baf4e08

Welcome, Waleed. “I’ve been thinking about institutions a lot lately. About how if there is anything that characterises our current political moment of disillusionment, anger and a rampant, destructive cynicism, it is that we no longer seem to believe in any institutions at all.”

One of the things that fascinates me about singing is how great singers (and it can take enormous practice) are those who don’t sing with their voice. They sing with their whole body. Singing just with your voice will normally ruin your voice, your ‘voice’ is a sound made by your entire body, not just your throat. Using the whole body frees a singer up for creative expression. Think I’ve suggested before that all of our activities in daily life can be like that. Many of us stop allowing our bodies to learn how to do everyday things better. Our walking and sitting and running and use of our hands are stuck at an immature level of development. We’re tight and effortful, everything is held, including our breath and thoughts. You can tell when that’s happened when ‘parts’ of you start to seem to go bad. You get a ‘bad back’ or ‘sore knee’. Your shoulders ache, your hip hurts. There’s likely nothing wrong with your back or knee or shoulders or hip, they’re the victims of a not properly integrated activity. As good singing teachers sometimes say, your speaking voice (the voice you use in everyday, integrated activity) is the root of your singing voice, if you lose that foundation in your singing, your singing (and throat) will suffer. You lose full body integration. (And much as I loved Freddie Mercury, he butchered his throat. It’s terrible to suggest a few lessons could have helped him sing for longer and without damage, but I think it’s true. On those last tours the voice was often shot.)

Happy Birthday Pen!

What if ‘big pictures’ don’t actually exist? Of real interest to me, because of the assumptions in play, that there are specific things in our lives, and separate ‘big picture’ things. I could take a photo of my front yard, and put it next to a map of the whole town. Is the second one a ‘big’ picture? Nope, it’s just another picture. It highlights different details, that’s all. It actually has LESS detail than the photo of my front yard. I think this applies to any topic. Each person isn’t some tiny view of the ‘whole’. Each person has a view of everything - life, the universe - that shapes everything they think, feel and do. Once we understand that I think many of societies’ problems take on an entirely different meaning.

Happy Birthday Inez, and a lovely day for it :)

I haven’t seen many organisations that don’t struggle to understand the best way to run and lead their work. Millions or even tens of millions of people worldwide are cynically mocking their companies‘ ‘visions’ and ‘missions’ and ‘strategic plans’. I’m convinced this is because we understand organisations in ‘big picture’ ways, we think the organisation is a separate, ‘big’ thing to the people working in it. Paul O’Neill was the CEO of Alcoa, a major multinational. He realised that you only need to focus on specific problems, no matter how small they seem. No generalities, no big pictures. The problems link everything to everything else, automatically. Alcoa’s profits increased five-fold.

Happy Birthday Mother Megan! Hope you got some sleep ;)

Hmm, Bohemian Rhapsody the movie has made about $700 million profit worldwide. I’m sure FOX will want a sequel. Tricky, that.

A government shuts down parliament because it thinks it might lose a vote. Both here and now in the UK. Hardly anybody cares or even notices. The Honeybadger not choosing one of the Bachelorettes creates outrage. A reality TV star is president of the world’s biggest superpower. I’m seeing connections.

So that's a wrap. The Summer Flames got through a season. The Winter Flames may have more skill, but the Summer Flames have more...um...age. Or something. I think we're looking dangerous, the fellas have figured out how to play now. Bring on another comp. And we don't have a single photo of the team, so this was the closest I could find in terms of talent and skill.

If anybody can find a video of Joslyn Rechter singing Habenara on the Panel back in 2002, I'll shower them with thanks and appreciation. I can find just about every other musical guest they had, but not her, and she was something special.

Not a great fan of Michael Jensen, but this today about Hannah Gadsby - thoughts? "But what Gadsby does not go on to offer is a story we also need: a story in which there is forgiveness, mercy, and reconciliation – the counterpart to the truth about our badness. Realising that I am bad is like a kind of moral vertigo. It’s a really uncomfortable feeling. Without resolution, it produces not change, but just shame."

Cool image. I was taught about the balance of nature at school. It was only years later that I learned that this picture is a lie. There is no nature, and no balance. And that’s why climate change is so scary, no Mother Nature and no comforting balance looks after us.

Back to holes, because they may be the secret to everything. What would ‘nothing’ look like? How would you describe or represent nothing? I think ‘nothing’ is an impossibility, there is no way to have no-thing. Even if you imagine nothing as a big black space you still have black, and space - things. This actually matters in profound ways. For example both scientific and religious warriors use the idea of nothing as the foundation of their arguments.

Are you an Andre? Senior managers appoint more senior managers to offload the shit parts of their own jobs they don't want to deal with. (Wave to Lithgow Council.) Job ads are a good guide here, most senior jobs will tell you what the shit work is in an organisation somebody more senior doesn't want to do any more. Similarly, I'm yet to see an organisational restructure that wasn't just about senior people shifting work they don't want onto other people.

*wince* maybe a worse dancer than me. Isn’t it funny that conservatives the world over campaign on slogans like ‘opportunity’, and when you see them here in the crowd you see people who would have an anxiety attack if the Penfolds Grange they inherited from daddy was served a little too warm?

Start the day with a minute-and-a-half of gentle wisdom. https://youtu.be/tJMa9ywmxnc

‘Relax’ is another contrast word I think, often used incorrectly. You can be more relaxed than you were a moment ago - the contrast - but I don’t think you can just be ‘relaxed’. Being relaxed generally means taking things just as they are, which is really just being present, not a separate state. This matters I think because a lot of people try really hard to relax, when in fact the real problem isn’t that - it’s that they’re not dealing with and understanding a situation well. And a lot of our lives are also organised around work non-relaxed time and holiday/break relaxed time. Which makes work a crap place to be and holiday like a hedonistic orgy of nothingness. Our misunderstanding about relaxing causes us to structure our lives in that binary way.

Stupid, venal people win in our world all the time. But to me it’s important to not blame just the stupid, venal people for this, as we often do. Stupid, venal people succeed when others say and do nothing. It’s the mass of bystanders who are really responsible.

This is a true conservative. Bearing no resemblance whatsoever to the culture warriors who use that name today.

Saying men can't know what it's like to be a woman, or women can't know what it's like to be a man, is like saying you can't understand frogs, because you're not a frog.

The idea of ‘mental illness’ came from having to deal with conditions that were beyond the limited understanding of medicine. For example the horrendous injuries many men suffered in World War 1, which couldn’t be healed by fixing the parts of the body that had been broken. So ‘mental’ is literally just a ‘I give up’ category, ‘it must be psychological’ (as if that explains a single thing). We even call organisations dealing with these illnesses things like ‘headspace’. To me it’s important because it also creates a far too narrow focus on the causes of these illnesses, which are not in peoples’ heads at all. They’re just conditions that are too complex for very narrow medical categories. And often there are quite simple treatments for these conditions, that involve understanding how a person is related to the world around them, not to what is going on in their head. Nothing is going on inside anybody’s head, except some flashes of electricity. (I also think images of injured soldiers like this would be much better ‘Lest We Forget’ photos than the syrupy, sentimental horseshit we usually get that makes us forget exactly what it is we’re not supposed to forget.)

Where I live, the surest way to end a drought is to have some great astronomical event that you want to see in the night sky.

Great short animation about being and also eating fat. Contrasts again, for me, only in rich, well-nourished societies is fat (being or eating it) seen as bad. https://aeon.co/videos/abundance-has-made-fat-an-enemy-but-its-been-a-friend-to-humans-for-millennia

Happy birthday Louie :)

Happy birthday Phil!

Translation is usually thought of as something you do between different languages. But actually all meaning is translated, even within the same language. What we think we’re communicating to others is always translated by them into a meaning that is not the same. Teachers know this, politicians know this, marketing people know this. And why is this important? I think because it forces us to see communication as not about messages, but as about encounters between people. The shift from communication to conversation, having to to relate to another person from within their framework, not yours.

Is the problem really size? I don’t think so, size brings great advantages. Governance maybe, who owns organisations as they get larger, and whether they should become public at that size.

I still recommend people replace assumptions about society with Google Trends. Which shows what people really are thinking. For example, the political attempt to link terrorism to Islam has clearly been a tremendous success in Australia.

Data shows couples who have at least some non-mutual friends tend to have longer relationships. My guess? Love is difference, and having independent as well as shared lives keeps people healthily different from one another.

Research consistently shows that people lie. All the time. Not just because we’re all evil gits, but for a whole range of reasons. The most fundamental being the translation thing again, what we think we mean is never what others think we mean. But also because we curate our selves, people who do surveys for example will lie about themselves, and sometimes they even believe the lies themselves. This is where I think Google has changed the world. People lie much less in their actual behaviour, when they’re acting anonymously. And Google has truckloads of data on us acting in those ways. It’s not sinister, anybody can look at the data, and it’s not linked to individuals, just group trends. Here’s an example. Assumptions generally say marriages fail because because people are unhappy, and their marriage is ‘loveless’. That’s what people say in surveys. But what does their behaviour and searching tell us? That overwhelmingly people are struggling with sex in their marriage. It beats love and happiness hands down.

Many of the problems we face today make complete sense if you see them as us living through post-imperial times. The end of empires. This fantastic story has all sorts of messages for us, not least that immigration is largely the result of the break down of old colonies, colonies we stripped for our own benefit. We still do it today in all sorts of ways. The least understood I think is what we call ‘travel’.

Happy Birthday Boudi :)

Teenagers get bad press on most things. But to me they've always been the age-group that keeps society honest. "Researchers originally found a correlation between a teenager's being adopted and a variety of negative behaviours, such as using drugs, drinking alcohol, and skipping school. In subsequent research, they found this correlation was entirely explained by the 19 percent of self-reported adopted teenagers who weren't actually adopted. Follow-up research has found that a meaningful percent of teenagers tell surveys they are more than seven feet tall, weigh more than four hundred pounds, or have three children. One survey found 99-percent of students who reported having an artificial limb to researchers were kidding."

More men Google how to pleasure themselves orally, than Google how to pleasure a woman. Seriously. I look on all men now with alarmed suspicion.

What is wrong with you people.

Notice how a treasurer always points to graphs when talking about ‘the economy’? That’s because those graphs are the only place it exists. The economy is a statistical construction. I wish that was better understood, it’s the biggest grown up fairytale of all. Or maybe it’s a tie for first with ‘gravity pulls/pushes me down.’

People lie. Governments lie. But they can’t hide the traces of what they do. A fun example here, GDP is a measure that doesn’t tell you a lot about how well a country is really doing, and it can also be gamed. North Korea for example will tell you it’s doing brilliantly. However people realised that the wealth of a country has a strong link to how much light it uses at night. So scanning satellite images will give you an idea in real-time just how well a country is doing. In this image South Korea is blazing with light, and North Korea is in the dark.

Ever noticed that people can only live 'off the grid', in 'self-sufficient' ways, in societies that have a grid in the first place? They're not self-sufficient at all, they're absolutely reliant upon a strong, stable society to enable that lifestyle. (Check out the solar panel on this little hut, good luck making that yourself.) Try being self-sufficient in the middle of an unstable society, and you'll probably be murdered for your gear and food in a week. I think it's a wank. A rich and privileged person's wank. It's also another way to show the stupidity of the idea that society and government is some sort of restriction on individuals. People who hate government, funnily enough, tend to live in countries with strong governments. They'd be dead in no time living anywhere else.

Google insight of the day. Women are twice as likely to search for pornography featuring violence against women.

The warning label that should come with all social media (or life in general), which I saw yesterday... Don’t compare your inside with everybody else’s outside. Everybody’s outside is mostly a lie. Or selective editing at best.

I don’t usually succeed in convincing people that our desires, and the feelings they produce, are the root of our whole lives. But I think it’s the most fundamental fact. Some say reason is the root, but even reason is a type of desire. So is God, truth - you name it. It’s all desires.

Greg Hunt, Health Minister: "We support private health". Greg, government 'supporting' private health makes it public health, not private health. Admit it, you're a socialist. Nothing else works.

A senior teacher I worked with said one day, “we need to do more for the gifted kids”. I said, “how do you know which kids are gifted? Are you gifted? Would you recognise a gifted child?” It was a serious question. There are so many stories of gifted adults who went totally unrecognised at school. A truly gifted person will often be a total pain in the arse at school. What makes them gifted is that they won’t think the same way as most people. Most teachers aren’t gifted, and nor should they be, but that should be taken into account when assessing real ability. I was reflecting on this after the annual school awards round. When I was at school and when I was teaching, these were rarely anything but teacher’s pet awards. Kids who didn’t create waves, who jumped through school hoops well. Dux awards at primary level were nearly always ‘crawling mum awards’. They’re social awards, not academic awards, they too often reward social and socioeconomic status. Look at how often they match exactly the cliques in adult society in a given town.

I love comparing social media and Google search. The former is often curated fantasy, the latter tells you want people are really thinking. An example, how people describe their husbands. Firstly, on social media, the top phrases are: The best My best friend Amazing The greatest So cute In Google search, the top search terms relating to husbands are: Gay A jerk Amazing Annoying Mean

Gulp. Mammatus (bubble) clouds I think.

Long-term political success depends I think on being elected at the right time ‘economically’. When things are doing well and people have money in their pockets, they tend to assume the government in power is responsible and keep electing them. The danger for Labor right now is that economic conditions around the world look dire. If they come to power next year and Australia goes into recession, you can already hear the conservatives crowing about ‘Labor is no good with the economy’. John Howard and Peter Costello were absolutely hopeless managers of money, but have a reputation of being economic miracle workers. They rode a boom not of their own making, and pissed the lot of it away. I have my ‘told you so’ on ice, ready.

I think this is so much truer than people will admit. It’s like a ritual, we affect being interested in other peoples’ personal lives, in their ‘gorgeous’ children and ‘amazing’ holidays. But I would bet a lot of it is just the polite ritual that allows us to dump our own next lot of personal trivia onto others. Some people probably remember slide nights. Where you were trapped at somebody’s house, watching hundreds of slides of their recent trip or family adventures. Excruciating torture. And yet...this is the bread and butter of social media, like FB? But worse, it’s like being at 200 slide nights at once. More curated selves I think. It’s not just the sharing of information, it’s social positioning, status-building.

Laticia Caceres is a theatre director with what I think is a sensible take on #metoo. A take that highlights one of the things that has left both workers and women exposed to abuse, and not just sexual abuse. And has led to these cases being prosecuted in public, in the media, which is a terrible precedent. Outside the home these are usually industrial matters much more than they’re battles of the sexes, or patriarchy etc. “This is why our unions have to be our first port of call in instances of bullying or harassment. If an industrial matter of any nature arises, artists need to know there is someone on their side who is going to advocate for them. Unions can take theatre companies to task, ensuring that work-safe policies are being enforced. They can set up mediations when there are disputes, and they can even facilitate legal action if an unsafe workplace situation continues or escalates.”

“They cheer - even when it is good!” Heh. Artur Schnabel, using wit to argue for greater discrimination. Not everything is soooo amazing.

Male commentator on Women’s BBL, after one of his female co-commentators thanked him for the invitation to be there. “You have good shape. In all the right areas.”

To the driver of the Council street sweeping truck who’s been driving and beep-reversing up and down the street for the past 20 minutes, before 7am, Merry Christmas to you too.

Watching a panel discussion about the meaning of Christmas, and how ‘materialism’ has apparently taken over the real meaning of Christmas, which is about family and love and blah blah. The usual tired binary argument. Just saying: the 3 wise men - the Magi - all brought gifts. The Christian meaning of Christmas is God made flesh - Jesus’ birth. Incarnation. Materialism every way you look.

Once a year Christmas, for a tiny moment, forces its way through the fog of our one true religion. Porn.

Be safe over Christmas. Look after yourself emotionally, as well as physically.

“We tend to see more through our thoughts and opinions than through our eyes. Our thoughts act as a kind of veil preventing us from seeing things with fresh eyes.” John Kabat-Zinn

More patterns. This bit of the Oz outback looks like mould when seen from the air. What’s interesting to me is that the patterns we see here aren’t visible at ground level. We tend to divide things up into order and chaos. Order and disorder. But that’s just a perspective on things, not how things are themselves. This ‘order’ in the outback was always there, but wasn’t visible from the ground, that’s all. It needed a different perspective. I think the same can be said for all things.

Why do we have so many conspiracies today? (New Coke was just one of hundreds.) Some even call it a ‘conspiracy culture’. A real Christmas question for me. I think it’s actually pretty simple. Society’s institutions are collapsing, from religion to science, to government, to education etc. A lot of that collapse is due to sustained attack, particularly from the boomer generation, who have for decades been furiously promoting a ‘lifestyle’ philosophy, where what defines meaning for our existence is the quality of each individual person’s life and lifestyle. In the process traditions, accumulated wisdom, trust, expertise, habits, have all been trashed. What that leaves is individual people, naked in front of the entire world and a vast present without a past, and trying to make sense of it for themselves. Paranoid and anxious people, seeing dark forces acting everywhere. In that situation, conspiracies create big bombastic narratives that help to make sense of what seems like a confusing mess. Like fairy tales do for kids. Conspiracies always have a similar structure, some great guiding power or person or group steering everything. Total anxious overload, because without tradition everything has to be processed by every person, all the time. We lost God and institutions as what holds it all together, conspiracies and their associated paranoia have taken their place.

Ever noticed that when we drink, the ‘last drink’ is what shapes how we drink, right from the first drink? Is this idea of the ‘last’ also what drives our individual behaviour in everything else too? How much money we spend? How much and how hard we argue with others? How intensely we flirt? I think it applies cross the board. The ‘last’ is the action that would take us over a threshold into a new type of person, that we don’t want to be. We don’t wait to reach those limits, the limit shapes how we act right from the start. Those limits *are* our ‘morals’. Morality is about limits, not rules.

If you believe tax cuts lead to more jobs and higher wages for people, have a look in real-time how Trump’s tax cuts are playing out. The same sort that were proposed here in Oz. Big companies and rich individuals promote tax cuts for the same reason - it makes them richer. The only thing that lifts wages is unions. Industrial power. Which is why these same rich people campaign so ferociously against unions.

The idea of a holiday is only a couple of centuries old. It’s never sat well with some people, including me, the idea that you flog yourself for nearly 50 weeks a year and somehow having a few weeks off will then recharge you. Good, meaningful work is something people are actually reluctant to stop doing. And it doesn’t stress you. So holidays are mostly just a symptom of shit work. Which is a symptom of working people having not enough say in the world.

There’s a real elitism in a lot of singing, opera singing is often taken as the gold standard against which singers should be judged. And a lot of the theory of singing derives from there, all the stuff about chest voices and head voices etc. But opera singing evolved to basically allow a human being to bellow across a large hall and still be heard, meaning it leaves much less room for nuance and phrasing. Listen to an opera singer sing a popular song and it so often sounds completely wooden, French and Saunders did an hilarious take on that. The microphone enabled an entirely different type of singing, one where singers could introduce sophisticated and nuanced phrasing to the way words were sung. None of that could have been heard in an opera theatre or even in a stage musical. To this day some elitists scoff at singers who ‘need’ microphones. It misses the point I think, microphones aren’t just about volume.

We are the problem. We are our governments.

This whole article is a wonderful read. It’s about the trends in trust, worldwide. I think you can explain an awful lot of the problems we see by looking at how our trust in each other, and in institutions, is changing. (And some amazing insights, such as in Europe, people trust the police more than they trust each other. In the US, nobody is trusting anybody. That explains the guns better than anything.) Some countries are holding the line, usually those with strong public sectors. Others are dragging us towards a cowboy model, the Wild West, where each person sits at home with their armoury of weapons. It’s not a chicken and egg question, it’s the deliberate attack on trust that is causing our other problems. The free market ideas of the past decades.

Every single item on this list is some version of ‘look at me’?

I’ve been using ASMR for years, not for mental health issues but for the sheer goosebumpy enjoyment of the sounds. Highly recommended.

This is one of Ancient Rome’s sewers. Still surviving, great engineering. I don’t think it’s well recognised that technology is what actually binds us together. For example, bridges in the US currently need more than $140 billion in maintenance, to stop them collapsing. You could look on that as a technical problem, but that amount of money shows the degree of social inter-connectedness technologies require, to function. Building things binds people to those same things, otherwise they collapse and the societies they enable collapse. Engineers build societies, not structures.

Did you have a New Year resolution? Mine, hmm. Maybe that we don’t make public thinking about life and enjoying life mutually exclusive things. Australia can be frustrating like that, it often opposes thought and living, as if they were two different things. Sometimes the leisure culture of Oz seems like those people who desperately try to be busy, to avoid having to face how they’re really feeling. Do we ‘have a good time’ as a sort of national religion because stopping and doing nothing for a moment would expose those sorts of feelings?