Showing posts with label references. Show all posts
Showing posts with label references. Show all posts

Saturday, 26 October 2013

Post No. 482 - This week, and reading

Well, this week has been brought to me care of the queue jumper. It began when I was purchasing my wholemeal rolls on the way to work (so I could make my lunch during my lunch break), and what appeared to be a father and daughter walked in to the shop just ahead of me, ignored the queue there, and were served ahead of another school child who was waiting patiently and politely in line. In fact, if I hadn't pointed out that she was ahead of me, the inattentive staff would have served me ahead of her as well.

That's happened a couple of times this week, and, perhaps as a result of that, I've noticed how many people do the same while driving - queue jumping, in the form of cutting in in front of other cars in particular. Thinking more broadly, I know many people - women in particular - who get very offended if they are given special treatment, including being served or attended to ahead of others.

It's not very becoming to see, and every one of those people can count themselves as a - drum roll here - "Warrior for the Forces of Expediency" in what I am - humorously - referring to as the Battle of Armageddon between the Forces of Indolence and Expediency against the Forces of Perspicacity and Honour.

Looking at such behaviour superficially, these people look inconsiderate. Look a little deeper, though, and it is quite possible that they are trying to deal with the soul-crushing pressures of modern life in 'the West', particularly in cities ... or trying to heal from a major assault or injury ... or simply exhausted from the strains of family and work - and the soul-crushing pressures of modern life in 'the West', particularly in cities.

So ... what to do?

Well, in the short term, such behaviour is wrong, and needs to be shown up, NOT accepted, and possibly even challenged. The thing is, however, if you do so angrily, you will simply add to the barriers the wrongdoer has set up. If you do so gently, they may not show any signs of acknowledging their errors, and may even react angrily now, but there is more likely to be a response when the message sinks through to their Soul.

Wow. That's hard - quite a challenge to find a way to do that, which is why I so rarely will challenge such behaviour. I'd rather not make the situation worse.

Oh, and by the way, if you act in anger, remembering my proposition that anger is not an emotion, you could simply be reacting to the same things in you that caused in others the behaviour you are reacting to ...

So ... I've been doing some Internet-surfing, and here's a fairly big batch of links for you to enjoy :) I'll begin with my usual greetings ... 
G'day, Hello, Howdy, Hi, Zdravstvujtye (some of my work colleagues are Russian, including an absolutely invaluable administrator who has recently taken maternity leave - may she and young one and family be blest), guten Tag (where I have connection owing to a recent past life), sveiki, Czesc (I have friends, not just colleagues, at work who are Polish), bonjour (colleagues at a former workplace were French, and we practised my woeful and limited range of this language), selamat pagi (one of the best junior engineers I ever worked with was Malaysian, and she taught me a few words), annyeonghaseyo, pryvit, bitaem, como vai (a friend of mine a few years ago, although not Brazilian, had Portuguese ancestry), ¡Hola (a former work colleague and friend, a VERY talented artist - with a Mexican sensibility to her artwork, particularly around the Day of the Dead - used to teach me Mexican Spanish), Selamat pagi, ni hao (ah, my work trips to Asia, and the many wonderful, wonderful people I have met there - and some excellent work colleagues and friends here, as well), bongiorno (my current home city of Melbourne has lots of Greeks and Italians, who have made our culture far richer - and made us coffee snobs :) ), hoschakal, hejsan, ciao. 
and now on with the links. 























As a final link, I came some time ago across "Gnosis "The Lost Gospels" by Anglican priest Pete Owen Jones. This presentation , which ends with an admission that if Christianity hadn't gone down the particular paths it did - despite evidence that other gospels exist and women were not marginalised originally - it would not have become a widespread religion. I'm working on developing a more comprehensive critique, but for the moment I'll just give the link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DQHz8GzeYNg (see also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Owen-Jones and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Testament_apocrypha#Gospels).


[1] BPF = Balanced Positive (spiritual) Forces. See here and here for more on this.

[2] Please see here and my post "The Death of Wikipedia" for the reasons I now recommend caution when using Wikipedia. I'm also exploring use of h2g2, although that doesn't appear to be as extensive (h2g2 is intended - rather engagingly - to be the Earth edition of "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"). 

Love, light, hugs and blessings




Gnwmythr 
(pronounced "new-MYTH-ear"; ... aka Bellatrix Lux?)

My "blogiography" (list of all posts - currently not up to date) is here.  

I started this blog to cover karmic regression-rescue (see here and here), and it grew ...  See here for my group mind project, here and here for my "pagans for peace" project (and join me at 9 PM on Sunday, wherever you are, to meditate for peace), and here for my bindrune kit-bag.
  • One size does NOT fit all. 
  • May the world of commerce and business be recognised to be a servant, not a master, of the lives of people.
  • Ban the dream interpretation industry! 
  • A home is for living in, not feeling, becoming or being rich or a “better” class than others.
  • Like fire to the physical, emotions to the soul make a good servant, and a bad master. 
  • "Following the crowd" is not "going with the flow".
  • Armageddon is alive and well and happening right now: it is a battle between the indolence of "I only ..." and/or "I just ..." and/or "Everyone knows ... " and/or "they can ..." and what Bruce Schneier [2] calls "security theatre" on one side, and perspicacity and the understanding that the means shape the end on the other. Indolence vs. perspicacity, and expediency vs. honour.
  • The means shape the end.  
  • Sometimes you just can't argue with a biped that is armed with a sharp stick, a thick head and not too much in the way of grunts.
  • As words can kill, the right to freedom of speech comes with a DUTY to be as well-informed, objective and balanced as you can be.
  • My favourite action movie of all time is "Gandhi". However, I loathe the stereotypical action movie - and, for similar reasons, I loathe many dramas, which are often emotionally violent, more so in some cases than many war films.
Do not pray for easy lives. Pray to be stronger [people]. JOHN F. KENNEDY (quoting 19th century Episcopal Bishop Phillips Brooks)
Jesus loves you.  Odin wants you to grow up. (Facebook meme, according to John Beckett)

Females, get over 'cute'. Get competent. Get trained. Get capable. Get over 'cute'. And those of you who are called Patty and Debby and Suzy, get over that. Because we use those names to infantalise females – we keep females in their 'little girl' state by the names we use for them. Get over it. If you want to be taken seriously, get serious. JANE ELLIOTT 

The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good [people] to do nothing. (based on writing by) EDMUND BURKE

"The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them." EINSTEIN

We didn't inherit the Earth from our ancestors, we only borrowed it from our children ANTOINE DE SAINT-EXUPÉRY

Like an unchecked cancer, hate corrodes the personality and eats away its vital unity. MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.

True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.

Those whom we cannot stand are usually those who we cannot understand P.K.SHAW

Few men are willing to brave the disapproval of their fellows, the censure of their colleagues, and the wrath of their society. Moral courage is a rarer commodity than bravery in battle or great intelligence. Yet it is the one essential, vital quality for those who seek to change a world which yields most painfully to change." SENATOR ROBERT F. KENNEDY (US Attorney General 1966 Speech) 
Too much and too long, we seem to have surrendered community excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Our gross national product ... if we should judge America by that -- counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. ... Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages; the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage; neither our wisdom nor our learning; neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country; it measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile." ROBERT F. KENNEDY 1968
Tags: anger, attitudes, emotions, empathy, impatience, myths, nonviolence, reading, references, society, stereotypes, 

First published: Laugardagr, 26th October, 2013

Last edited: Saturday, 26th October, 2013
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Saturday, 11 August 2012

Post No. 397 - The Death of Wikipedia [Content Warning: mention of violent crime]

Well, over the years I've come to respect and use Wikipedia as a reasonable and more up-to-date information source. I particularly liked the fact that, in the "old days", it was possible to find out when there were disputes in views on a topic - for instance, on horse steeplechase/jumps/racing. At that time, a check (sorry, cannot lay my hands on the reference now) found that a typical page on the Wikipedia website would have around five errors - but typical encyclopaedia pages had around six.

So the situation was pretty reasonable. Since then, however, people have started trying to make Wikipedia more "authoritative" - defined from academic point of view. End result? Decent articles on paganism are getting squeezed out because of a lack of "authoritative" writings ...

Wikipedia can no longer claim in any way, shape or form, in my opinion, to be a people's encyclopaedia (actually, I don't know that it ever did ... ).

However, what has been the death knell of Wikipedia for me personally was some absolute rubbish I found recently on the entry for Laser sailing dinghies (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_%28dinghy%29). The passage concerned claims that a few Laser sailors recently revolutionised downwind sailing by introducing ... * ta-da * techniques that I have been using for four decades!

The passage concerned is this:

"Since 1998 Laser sailing has increased to not only be physical upwind and reaching but also to also include far more demanding sailing and potential speed increases when sailing downwind. Traditionally sailing downwind has been considered processional in dinghy racing, simply being pushed downwind. But Laser sailors, including Ben Ainslie and Robert Scheidt significantly changed the techniques used to race a Laser downwind. The techniques these sailors introduced uses a much more dynamic sailing method, concentrating on surfing the waves going downwind. The sailors will weave their way downwind, constantly look either side for the next large wave they can "hop" onto and surf downwind. In order to maximise their speed boats will often be sailed by the lee, where the boom and sail will be allowed to travel significantly forward of the mast.

This change in technique for downwind racing has changed most dinghy racing to be much more competitive on the downwind legs and resulted in a change of the international course shape from a traditional triangle to a trapezoid giving greater opportunity for increased upwind and straight downwind legs."

In refutation of this ill-considered, unresearched tripe, I state that:
  1. I used surfing as a standard in my Heron in the 70s;
  2. sailing by the lee was standard technique in the OK dinghies when I was learning back in the early 70s!!!!!
  3. the American John Bertrand, who won the 1976 and 1977 Laser World titles (as opposed to the Australian John Bertrand, who skippered the first winning challenger in the America's Cup), was an early source of the idea of keeping your dinghy's bow pointing downwards to maximise the surfing which everyone was using;
  4. luffing and blanketing were standard parts of racing that I was taught back in the early 70s - and used regularly.
I could go and dig up some books I have in storage from that time to provide quotes, but it isn't worth that.

Still, as I once pointed out to a friend, Wikipedia does at least give information sources and references and external links, so it is useful starting point, but I now have to say, treat everything there with considerable caution, and I will caution all Wikipedia links I post with the following:
"Please see my post "The Death of Wikipedia" for the reasons I now recommend caution when using Wikipedia."

Oh, the reason I haven't got on line and fixed the wrong article?

I have too many blasted accounts and passwords to manage as it is, and no desire to get into any online arguments - I had enough of those a long, long, long time ago ...
PS - there is a newspaper article here about the possible deletion of an article on a murder in my home city which also illustrates this problem - both the complexity of coming up with rules that enable a useful creation that reflects reality, and the unacknowledged "if it ain't in the US, it ain't important" bias that taints too many things. The use of social media, and the public response to that terrible murder is what makes it notable. If the editing committee is too stupid to understand or grasp that, then maybe they should get out of the way, and let Wikipedia stay a people's encyclopaedia, 'cos it is rapidly losing any claim to being that, and when that change has finished, I'll stop using it.

PPS - more on the problems on Wikipedia here, from the “Skeptical about Skeptics” website (which has quite a few posts worth reading and thinking about – don’t just automatically agree or disagree, think objectively, and critically – not “pseudo-sceptically”; also see here), which has links to here, a very informed and credibly presented defence of homeopathy, and here, the latest post at a website on concerns about Wikipedia’s current approach,


Love, light, hugs and blessings

Gnwmythr
(pronounced "new-MYTH-ear")
My "blogiography" is here.
 May the world of commerce and business be recognised to be a servant, not a master, of the lives of people.
 A home is for living in, not feeling, becoming or being rich or a “better” class than others.
The International Labour Organisation's definition of "full employment" is wrong, useless and misleading.
Armageddon is alive and well and happening right now: it is a battle between the indolence of "I only ..." and/or "I just ..." on one side, and perspicacity on the other.
 Like fire to the physical, emotions to the soul make a good servant, and a bad master.

The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good [people] to do nothing. EDMUND BURKE
Your children are not your children. ... They come through you but ... they belong not to you ... for their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow KAHLIL GIBRAN
We didn't inherit the Earth from our ancestors, we only borrowed it from our children ANTOINE DE SAINT-EXUPÉRY
 Like an unchecked cancer, hate corrodes the personality and eats away its vital unity. MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.
Those whom we cannot stand are usually those who we cannot understand P.K.SHAW
Tags: about me, academia, discrimination, references, society,

 First published: Laugardagr, 11th August, 2012

 Last edited: Tuesday, 12th July, 2016 = added the PPS 


 


 

 

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