Post No. 1,488 - Some reading

Some recent reading links that may be of interest:

• Building Paganism in a Culture that Trivializes the Sacred;
• The Benefits of Outer Courts and Training Circles; 
• A Practical Guide to Pagan Priesthood: A Book Review; 
• The Balancing Path: Nonbinary Perspective on Gendered Divinity; 
• Never Annoy a Writer – The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina Part 3.

Post No. 1,487 - an update on virtue signalling: moral purity

Late last year I wrote about the unspiritual, concerning and, frankly, disturbing behaviour described as "virtue signalling" (see here): I've now come across another term used for much the same problem - "moral purity", as in "the quest for", in the sense of being able to demonstrate that more than genuinely having it. Apart from being a trap spiritually, one that sends one sliding backwards, in terms of accomplishing change, it is also a backwards slide - a bit like the old "snakes and ladders" children's board game.

From this article on the groups of attitudes towards the climate crisis:

"We need to find a way to convince the Cautious that urgent action is necessary.
This, very difficultly, often requires language that isn't fraught with tones of crisis. More on this in a moment.
 . . . I've also spent a lot of time wondering about the efficacy of the language around climate change, around emergency, crisis and urgency.
The facts of climate change and the need for rapid response absolutely merit these terms.
 . . . But the language of crisis and emergency can actually turn off those who are Disengaged and Cautious, and make them more critical of attempts to address climate change."

I've written similar warnings about such matters when considering the issue of backlashes - and will be the first to admit how difficult that is, as it leaves those showing the forbearance in greater need of healing.

Post No. 1,486 - No PWR, and this week.

For personal reasons I have not been able to do another PWR for this week. It is late, but in the meantime I am going to suggest doing the same as last week - see below. (I am actually wondering if I should be doing fortnightly forecasts . . . )

There are a couple of other things I want to do for this week, beginning with a magnificent "sigil for the dissolution of hate" by the also magnificent Laura  Tempest  Zakroff. Normally I would just provide the link, but as Laura Tempest Zakroff has provided for non-commercial use under a creative commons licence, I'm going to be bolder than usual, and provide a copy here:

On top of that, I've been re-reading some of the very controversial Lobsang Rampa's books, and these quotes, read by me back in the 70s, were an early step on the path to doing this meditation work, and still have a largely useful message:

From Lesson Twelve of Lobsang Rampa’s “You - Forever” (republished as part of “Wisdom Of The Masters”, ed. William Kern, Tim Swartz)

“It is possible for a small group of people, thinking constructively, to alter the whole course of the world’s events. . . . Unfortunately it is too difficult to get a small group of people who are so unselfish, so un-self-centred, that they can switch off their own selfish thoughts and concentrate only on the good of the world.”

“If each of you in your group keep your feet and your hands together, each of you will conserve body energy. . . . Your group should sit in a circle, all more or less gazing at space in the centre of the circle, preferably at a space on the floor because then heads will be slightly tilted down, and that is more restful and more natural. Do not talk, just sit-be SURE you do not talk. You have already decided on the theme of your thoughts so no further talk is necessary. . . . Sit like that for some minutes. Gradually each one of you will feel a great peace stealing in upon you, each one of you will feel as if you are being flooded with an inner light. You will have truly spiritual enlightenment, and will feel that you are “One with the Universe.”

“We talk too much, all of us, we let our brains clatter away like machines which have no thought. If we relax, if we remain alone more and talk less when we are in the company of others, then thoughts of a greater purity than we can now imagine come flooding in upon us to uplift our souls. Some of the old country people who were alone all day had far greater Purity of thoughts than any person in the cities of the world. Shepherds, while by no means educated people, had a degree of spiritual purity which many of the priests of high degree would envy. That is because they had time to be alone, time to ponder, and when they were tired of pondering their minds would go blank and the greater thoughts from “beyond” would enter.” . . . “. . . practice for half an hour every day. Practice sitting or reclining, and remember you must be quite fully at ease. Let your mind become still. . . . “Be still and know the I within.”

“We say, on the contrary, that in providing silence we should be providing one of the most precious things upon this Earth, for in the modern world there is no longer silence, . . . You, by providing an oasis of quiet and peace and tranquillity, can do much for yourself and for your fellow {humans]. . . . Will you try for a day, and see how quiet you can be? See how little you can talk. Say only that which is necessary and avoid all that which is irrelevant, avoid all that which is merely senseless gossip and chatter. If you do this consciously and deliberately you will be quite shocked at the day’s end at how much you normally say which really does not matter in the least. . . . Many of the Religious Orders have Orders of silence, many of the monks and nuns are commanded to keep silence, and the authorities do not do this as a punishment, they do it because they know that only in silence can one hear the voices of the Great Beyond.”

Last week's PWR:

• Sunday: the purpose of this day’s work is, mainly, to build a reserve of BPM energy to call upon during the coming week. In addition to the meditation / clearing work described below, I will also be working on making sure I, my crystals and my other tools / devices are as fully charged with BPM energy as I can make them (which is something I have posted about elsewhere, but may post more about in the near future):
   - clear nonBPM units from, and send BPM energy to Europe, the South Atlantic, Southern and Indian Oceans, Australia, archipelagic South East Asia, the West Pacific Ocean, Siberian Russia, and East and Central Asia, and to all actual and potential BPM Leaders, for all humans to recognise the essential shared humanness of other people, all BPM Interrupters of violence / hate / fear / anger, and for all humans to choose to live modestly;
• Monday:
   - clear nonBPM units from, and send BPM energy to Antarctica and the East Pacific Ocean, the North Atlantic Ocean, Europe (again), and the Arctic;
• Tuesday:
   - clear nonBPM units from, and send BPM energy to all America;
• Wednesday:
   - clear nonBPM units from, and send BPM energy to European Russia, West Asia and northern, central and southern Africa;
• Thursday:
   - clear nonBPM units from, and send BPM energy to South and mainland South East Asia, and southern Africa;
• Friday:
   - clear nonBPM units from, and send BPM energy to South and mainland South East Asia;
• Saturday: this day will now be reserved for rest, recuperation and healing – of all those who are trying in a BPM way to make this planet a better place, not only of myself and those who are sharing this work. I ask that any and all healers who wish to contribute to this, take a few minutes to contribute to this on this day.

Invasion Day

Today is Invasion Day.

• http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jan/26/australia-day-is-a-time-for-mourning-not-celebration; and

• http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/may/27/does-it-matter-that-citizens-arent-always-proud-of-their-country for Invasion Day.

May Australia become a nation:

• truly founded on fairness by proper, BPLF recognition of our indigenous people, proper addressing of discrimination INCLUDING educating people all those who don't understand why dispossession causes problems; 
• which genuinely understands and honours multiculturalism, rather than thinking imported Anglo-Saxon neo-christian culture is somehow "the norm", or somehow more desirable than multiculturalism.

In the spirit of the car sticker from the USA which said "Welcome to America. Now speak Cherokee", may we consider "Welcome to Australia. Now speak Kulin (or whatever language was spoken in your area)."

Post No. 1,485 - Cross posting: Psychopaths in the workplace

This originally appeared on my political blog at https://politicalmusingsofkayleen.blogspot.com/2020/01/psychopaths-in-workplace.html.

I'm fortunate that it's been years since I've had to put up with a psychopath - plenty of normal humans with flaws such as misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, and "that's the way it is done by everyone" thinking, but I actually have the best direct manager I've ever had at the moment (he's now drawn ahead of the other outstanding manager, who gave me a 30% pay rise).

Nevertheless, there are plenty of other workplaces where people are doubtlessly undergoing what I went through many years ago, and that's what I want to cover - for the sake of the victims, the businesses or organisations, and the psychopaths themselves.

I think the most common sign of a psychopath is the "non-apology" - for instance, claiming to be sorry for the upset feelings of the victim, but not actually taking responsibility for, or even admitting, wrongdoing.

The best way of handling that, especially if the wrongdoer just says "sorry", is an approach my partner uses: ask them what exactly are they sorry for? If they can talk genuinely and contritely about the issues, they may well be genuine - although actions speak louder than words.

As an example of the latter, I've worked with a few people who've made an obvious point of using the correct (female) pronouns with me, but it has been so obvious and forced that I've actually wound up doubting their action on the basis that (a) they seemed forced, and (b) what situation led to them think that such behaviour was necessary - is there misgendering behind my back, or do they have problems accepting TGD people?

And they probably thought they were being good at people-based management.

There are other examples around at the moment - our neoliberal Prime Minister, Morrison, is one.

His ineptness with people led me, at one stage, to wonder if he was in some way autistic, but all the autistic people I know (including some nephews and a niece) are far better at interactions than he is. I am reminded of the assessments of the defendants at various World War Two related trials of genocidaires as lacking in empathy. Morrison hasn't committed direct mass murders as those others had, but his focus on numbers and political power has caused harm to our physical world and Australian society that I fear is irreparable.

He has yet to issue any credible apology that I've come across - he's issued a non-apology (sorry others were offended, but not sorry for having done the wrong thing) for being out of the nation while the 2019/20 climate bushfires were underway, but that obviously doesn't count. (In my state, the Wrongs Act specifically removes legal fallout from an apology, so anyone who claims that they can't apologise for legal reasons is either uninformed, stupid, or a psychopath.) 

So, going back to the workplace, the non-apology is a strong indication you might be working for a psychopath.

There are other indicators, but those are behaviours indicated by managers who are NOT psychopaths but are simply inept - behaviours such as unreasonable requests for overtime, lack of empathy when family members are ill, failing to see the problems with misogyny or other bigotry, etc (and to be clear, my manager does NOT have any of those problems - it's a shame he's unlikely to ever read this :) ).

(I have a few articles planned on stupid assumptions - and bigotry - experienced in our medical system and elsewhere: those are about dangerous and deeply harmful flaws, including arrogance and self-serving denials, but not psychopaths.)


The responses to such unacceptable behaviour are, largely, the same for psychopaths and normal flawed human beings:

• learn how to be assertive, and be assertive; 
• practice beforehand explaining the reasons (including human rights and legal - research as needed) and needs that more flexibility or reasonable adaptations for your genuine needs will help the company (e.g., if I'm worried about family member's health, I cannot be fully focused on work [if they say "I don't see why", I would probably respond along the lines "I don't see how you could be lacking in such a basic understanding of people - how is that?" - you're probably dealing with a psychopath, and their pride is more likely to be the way to get to them than normal appeals to human empathy]); 
• try to appear calm. One of the biggest flaws in our patriarchal world is discomfort with emotions - I've even had one misogynist abuse me for being upset the first time my partner was diagnosed with cancer. Our court systems are also deeply flawed by the presumption that those who are upset or put off balance in a court are likely to be guilty - no acknowledgment there of the intimidatory nature of the legal process, power dynamics, or bullying - or even the simple human cost of having to disclose what one has been through (there bigots and power addicts in some pockets of our system who make this particularly worse). The point is, this patriarchally biased world will WRONGLY dismiss or downplay you if you dare show your humanity by being emotional.
  Furthermore, if you're dealing with a psychopath, they will not understand, let alone be moved by, any emotions.
  Psychopaths have to be fought, in the same way that the evils of naziism had to be fought, but when you're face-to-face with them, emotions are meaningless because they don't understand them - it's not that they don't have emotions, they crucially lack the important human ones like empathy. They are, however, likely to have pride, and that is their weakness - you just have to know what it is that they're proud about;
• gain an understanding of your rights - get advice from your union if you need (although I'm found them particularly flawed on some topics - mainly LGBTIQ matters, but also the effects of being groped [aka "searched'] on women); and
• keep written records in a safe place - as accurate and precise as you can: time, date, specific words, etc.

The other key issue here is to remember that you're not alone. Workplaces these days are founded on keeping workers divided, because they're more easily subjugated that way.

Stupidly, some people - wrongly - think they have the capacity to negotiate for more money for themself that way - and screw anyone else who loses out as a result.

However, if you can find others who share your concerns, it is worth providing a little mutual support. Unfortunately, in a workplace run by a psychopath, that's likely to be a bit like being a secret agent behind enemy lines. That means it is your friends outside of the workplace who will be crucial in maintaining your sanity and balance - and to do so, those friends MUST be non-judgemental. If they come out with crap about "why aren't you leaving" (particularly given our current under and unemployment problems), move on to others who are genuinely supportive - who are genuine friends.

Psychopaths can be outlasted - I know from personal experience. The thing is, their impacts on workplaces are inevitably harmful, and companies will - generally, not always - eventually get rid of the psychopaths and try people who are more likely to be stweards of the people who are the company's best resource.

But for you to be able to get the benefit of that, you have to get to end of the reign of abuse in reasonable mental and emotional health and wellbeing.

Psychopaths can be overcome, or, if not that, often outlasted.

In any case, their evil needs to be purged from the world, but that is task for outside the workplace.

Post No. 1,484 - Cross posting: Shirking and stuffing up legislative - and other - responsibility

This originally appeared on my political blog at https://politicalmusingsofkayleen.blogspot.com/2020/01/shirking-and-stuffing-up-legislative.html.

This is a post in my Ethics, Lazy Management, and Flawed Thinking series - see https://politicalmusingsofkayleen.blogspot.com/2019/11/ethics-lazy-management-and-flawed.html.

I have, from time to time, wondered about those in bureaucracies and politics, and the strangeness of their thinking.

Actually, that applies elsewhere as well - for instance, I asked my state's blood donations service recently a simple, straightforward question: do your staff misgender trans and gender diverse (TGD) people, which is a yes/no question. Instead, I got evasive and irrelevant answers and, after multiple rounds of - to pinch an America phrase - "rope a dope", I finally got a "no, we don't misgender". (They also clearly showed that they have no idea of the differences between various TGD people, and referred to overseas research which I will now have to find and examine for transphobic bias - possibly in the language used.)

It actually took literally years, if I count the first time I asked the question, and the time taken, combined with the irrelevant answer, leaves me with an impression that those people are either:

(a) incompetent, in that they do not understand a key issue for an accepted group in society, or
(b) trying to hide their bigotry.

Those are my impressions: I may be wrong, but I'm certainly not going to endorse, use or recommend them as a result of their appallingly bad performance on that.

I've got a similar impression of a major cancer hospital in my home city, where a doctor was so stupid - completely missing all contextual clues - that he asked me what pronouns I use.

I'm aware some people in the TGD world advocate for this, but it marks TGD people as "other", and sets up an excuse that gives bigots a way to abuse TGD people.

I have similar thoughts about gender-free toilets - I suspect advocates have never been stuck in a job with misogynists.

Going back to politics, the obvious concern is about the competence (and maybe the sanity?) of those who twist genuine concern about security into a excuse to commit human rights abuses against refugees.

There's been plenty written about the issues elsewhere, including by me, but what I am questioning here is the motivation and ability to think clearly and properly of both the political leaders and the public service implementers of that abusive policy.

This is partly being triggered by reading Telford Taylor's "The Anatomy of the Nuremberg Trials: A Personal Memoir", which goes into the motivations of some of the most evil people of last century, but also by my personal experience - such as the time a very junior staff member in a politician's office wilfully misinterpreted a question about tiny homes into an excuse about housing policy. My anger at his irrelevant response led to me talking to the MP concerned, and he was dismissive. He was a conservative politician (this was many years ago), and I think I have only ever received one reasonable response to a letter or email I've sent to conservative politician.

The members of the public service who have written back at the behest of their conservative masters and served up political talking points have also tarred themselves and the public service with the taint of incompetence.

One area of personal experience that I find galling is the response to my attempts to depoliticise approaches to crime. I consider that we need an independent Chief Criminologist, much as we have a Solicitor-General, a Chief Health Officer, a Chief Veterinarian, and a Chief Scientist. People forms views on the basis of inaccurate perceptions, and, much as we need medical decisions based on evidence and not anti-vaxxer nut jobs and science based on evidence and not flat earth nut jobs, we need decisions about the management of crime based on real causes and real solutions, not racist fear, social media tropes (of the sort that lead to physical murders in India and elsewhere), or people's fallacious opinions that they are inherently different to criminals and circumstances have no influence.

In my home state we have an office which takes a consumer affairs type approach to reporting on crime and policing, but manages to also address to a small extent some of the criminologist aspects of preventing and "fighting" crime, but that isn't enough.

I've also read recently that an investigation is underway into "perceptions-based approaches to crime". WTF???

We don't need to indulge and enhance false perceptions, we need to replace false perceptions with evidence presented in a way that builds trust in the evidence (where it is merited - and I consider independent experts the arbiter of that, not members of the public, and DEFINITELY NOT police [although, to give them due credit, some due understand the broader picture - more than advocate for better thinking]).

If someone developed that out of any of the emails I've written on this, I have to wonder what is WRONG with their thinking processes.

And there are plenty of thinking errors around.

As examples, I'm come across people who think homophobic and transphobic responses to LGBTIQ kids are different and can't be addressed at the same time, others who don't see that bigotry is a universal underlying problem, or who think duck-shoving responsibility for refugees to another nation is inherently different to duck-shoving responsibility for renting to a real estate agent. The degree and expression is different, but the underlying problem is the same.

We've seen that more recently in infrastructure construction with the trend away from allocating risk to whoever can best manage it to coercive tendering processes that places costs, consequences and personal health and social disruption for tendering processes solely to Contractors. I saw that with a local Council job replacing stormwater drains: people in local Government stupidly and wrongly think that saving money by not having superintendents, or not engaging in such projects (if they lack the technical skills to do so, they are unfit for their jobs - incompetent, in other words) is better for the community.

It isn't: it creates much larger costs that are borne by the community elsewhere, and creates risks of projects going wrong, or going wrong and not being discovered until the consequences are devastating.

There have been problems with costs increasing in projects in the past: that was a combination of stupidity in the engineering professions ("if the cost is too high early on they may not do the work" - which IS THEIR RIGHT [I had a lot of arguments on that one in the 80s and 90s]) and clients - particularly some of the absolute shits I've known who arbitrarily decided that they'd spent "enough" money on investigations, even though we would tell them they needed to do more if they wanted certainty on costs. (The two worst for that who I've ever had the misfortune to encounter are, fortunately, long dead.)

The one last example of this problem that I wish to mention is evading the consequences of laws by passing implementation down to others, possibly people with no direct expertise. This is particularly important in the case of all legislation which introduces ID requirements - such as the ill-conceived engineers registration bill. Such bills can potential introduce "othering" mechanisms that can be used for discrimination or even genocide, in some nations. And it is a responsibility of good nations not to set an example that can be misused by others.

Where ID requirements are introduced, it is up to good governments to ensure the laws mentioned or acknowledge the importance of anti-discrimination principles.

My state has a mechanism for reviewing the "consistency" of laws with such principles, but, based on the rubber stamping of the engineers registration bill, I have to wonder how well informed those reviewers are.

Anyhow, I'll leave this at that for now. If I had the time and energy, I would edit it, but I don't - personal circumstances are getting in the way again.