Behaviour: Nice? Kind? Good? or Appropriate?

You see ‘be nice’, ‘be kind’ ‘just do good’ posts on social media all the time.
What is happening there?
Is it a soundbite which sounds and feels good to the poster (and they think will make others like them more), or are they superficial  enough to actually believe it?
The motivations behind our behaviours are nuanced (whether some realise it or not).
Just saying ‘be nice’, ‘be kind’, ‘do good’, doesn’t cut it as a serious outlook on life.

‘Oh, but you know what is meant’, will be the complaint.
Well, no I don’t, certainly not always, and my concern is that the people saying it don’t really know what they mean, other than superficially, either.
Who gets to decide what counts as nice, kind or good behaviour in any situation?
If you, why? If them, why?
Surface level thinking without the nuance either of degree or accounting for exceptions, leaves you open to awkward questioning that can cause you to contradict yourself or even appear hypocritical.

So this type of warm & fuzzy yet pointless exhortation is a real curse of social media and time-handicapped TV slots; they make the complex sound easy which can lead to doing or saying what’s expedient (cowardice), not what’s right (courage/truth/honesty), which is a very dangerous and therefore foolish thing.

Surely a more accurate exhortation would be for us all to act appropriately in every situation, which of course, requires wisdom, which I define as good judgement.
Good judgement in turn requires the ability to see and then weigh-up both the immediate and future effects of your behaviour, both on the individual/group on the receiving end and, importantly, upon yourself.
[Tip: sometimes you have to make a choice between two less than ideal outcomes.]

We can all see that appropriate behaviour is much more socially mature than any exhortation of the ‘be nice’, ‘be kind’, ‘be good’ type, because it allows much more freedom of choice over how you judge it best to behave in any given circumstance.

Who decides what is appropriate behaviour? You or them?
It has to be YOU.
Otherwise, you can be forced into doing or saying things that you believe to be false or at least, unwise purely to gain the other’s approval.
Knowingly doing or saying things you don’t believe or don’t believe are the best course of action is the sort of cowardice that eats away at your soul, piece by piece.
It's shaming; and if we get used to acting shamefully, we will eventually find that, in tricky situations, we can’t act any other way.
We become very good at justifying our shameful behaviour because it’s easier than looking ourselves in the mirror and deciding to find the courage necessary to change from expedient behaviour to appropriate (honest) behaviour.

I accept of course that in most situations, we will all agree on what is the appropriate behaviour and often, even very often, this will coincide with what most would class as nice, kind, good.
Equally, we should all be socially well-adjusted enough to know how to put a differing or unpopular view across so as not to cause immediate antagonism. But here’s the rub:

It's not in the vast majority of ordinary daily life scenarios that properly understanding what is appropriate or wise behaviour matters.
It’s in the minority of difficult, awkward, potentially embarrassing or dangerous situations that appropriateness or wise judgement, as opposed to expediency, is so important.

If your priority at all times is not to upset anyone; not to contradict them; to say or give them what they want, whatever they want, you’re not exercising wise judgement, merely following a somewhat cowardly formula of obsequiousness, harmlessness and servility.
Is it really so important that, regardless of circumstance, regardless of truth and honesty, our main driver should be simply not to risk someone thinking or saying that we’re not a nice person? Really?
It shouldn’t be.
That’s weakness, both of intellect and character.

Now the other person may well fully accept that weak behaviour; may even praise and thank you; shower you with gratitude; tell you how wise you are; tell you what a nice, kind and good person you are.
But that doesn’t mean you’ve behaved in the most appropriate way; the wisest way; the way that’s in their or your best interests.

By the way, I am by no means claiming never to fall into the same trap. But I’m hoping that awareness and attention to it at least allows me the hope of improvement; an improvement which the shallow over-simplicity and cowardice of complicity and expediency never can.

We are all alone - accept and embrace it constructively

We are all alone, born alone, die alone, and—in spite of True Romance stories—we shall all someday look back on our lives and see that, in spite of our company, we were alone the whole way.
I do not say lonely—at least, not all the time—but essentially, and finally, alone.
This is what makes your self-respect so important, and I don't see how you can respect yourself if you must look in the hearts and minds of others for your happiness.

Hunter S. Thompson

_________________________________________________

My initial reaction is that, while superficially it may seem a bleak and anti-social message, ultimately, he's right.

Only I am ME.

And, while relationships with others are both necessary and enriching in many ways, the relationship with yourself is the one that truly decides the level of your inner contentedness*.

Requiring the approval of others before you can approve of yourself is emotional and psychological outsourcing.
Psychological cowardice even; and cowardice is shaming; and shame devours a little of our soul each time, unless we put it right.

Speak with others, work with others, play with others, discuss with others, learn from others.
But you must come to terms with yourself for yourself, and within yourself, in order to gain the true benefits of these external interactions.

This doesn’t mean that you don’t listen, learn and evaluate while interacting with others.
Rather, that allowing the actions, words and opinions of others to be the main arbiter of how you view yourself, is ultimately unhealthy.

Only I am ME is an ultimate truth.

Embrace it to the full.

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* I try to shy away from using the word ‘happiness’.
It can mean different things to different people in differing situations, and not all are good. Some people are ‘happy’, when something bad happens to someone else, for example.
So I prefer the concept of contentment, as it speaks to me of a calm inner peace not endangered by overly emotional bias.

Parents must be the key moral authority for their children, not those who work for the State

Since Marx, there has been no successful dictatorship based upon a political ideology that hasn’t removed the role of the parent as the arbiter and teacher of morality to their children and replaced it with the ideology of the State or Leader.

Just remember that when you hear people say that parents should not be told of certain things their children say to, for example, teachers and doctors.
The exclusion of the parents; the telling of children that their parents are NOT the key authority in their lives is exactly what Stalin, Mao, Hitler, Pol-Pot, Kim Il-Sung, Castro etc did.

Only in clear cases of parental abuse should the State authorities override the wishes and views of the parents.
And simply having different socio-political opinions to the currently prevailing Authority, is NOT abuse.

The true (original) meanings of Faith, Sin & Prophecy

Researching the earliest Christian thinking, which is highly neo-Platonic, I’ve been reading and listening to a variety of sources.

I recently came across a discussion about the way in which certain words, usually used in a religious context, have been altered in meaning in relatively recent times.
These alterations in meaning may account for some of the misunderstandings and mis-readings both within Christianity, between Christians and atheists, and between Christians and other religious thinking generally.

So I wanted to share Dr John Vervaeke’s brief description of three words used in our language that didn’t originally mean what we use them to mean now.

Faith didn’t used to mean ‘believing in things for which there is no scientific evidence’. That’s a historically recent idea.
Faith was your sense of Da’ath, the sense that you’re on course, on the right path, the right Way, involved and evolving with things as life progresses.
Knowing what to do at life’s turning points (kairos); how and when you need to change something in your life; who you need to change into.
We think this way still — how it’s going, is this relationship on course, am I progressing, is this the kind of person I want to be, is it going well, etc. That’s Da’ath.

Sin in the original meaning is the sense that you’re off course, off the path not the modern sense of simply doing something immoral.
If I become self-deluded or closed-minded, I can become off-course, step off the path and so lose or damage my faith, lose that sense of Da’ath without realizing it; become sinful.

Prophecy isn’t about telling you what’s going to happen, but rather a call to awakening. The job of the prophet is to wake you up right now to how you are off course (sinful). A prophet is not a fortune teller; a closer analogy might be a mentor or trusted friend who wakes you up to something you needed to see and be made aware of. So you can move away from sin; to get back on the path; to return to faith in your life.

Make of that what you will!

Official authority: not fit for purpose

We have reached a point where ‘authority’, in the guise of carefully chosen ’experts’, politicians and media, have been found to be saying untrue things and/or getting things badly wrong so often, and on vitally important matters, that we no longer know who or what to believe.

Or rather, we can justify believing what ‘authority’ tells us when it suits us, and not believing what ’authority’ tells us when it suits us, because, let’s face it, we’ll be right half the time whether by luck or judgement.

Which means we are in a VERY bad place societally.

And it’s entirely the fault of the stupid games played by politicians, large corporations, unelected global organisations, academia and the media, who collectively make up the ‘authority’ I speak of.

Money, ambition and political ideology are put ahead of honesty, truth & decency.
Wisdom is a known but abstract concept; foolishness and hubris the norm.

But not all the academic experts/media/politicians etc can be like this, surely?

No, but their worlds are very opaque and cliquey; full of poor behavioural incentives.

In academia, certainly in science, money rules, so the provider of the finance influences the research to be undertaken and also, tacitly, what the expected answer is.
You can get blackballed very easily, even if you have tenure; made persona non-grata, making your life unpleasant, and even moving away and getting a job in a different University, very difficult; not for anything you do academically, but for having the wrong political opinions or questioning the prevailing cultural narrative.
This all incentivises not rocking the boat and capitulation to the bully, not honesty & integrity.

The media owners recruit people who think as they do, and it’s made clear what the editorial line is they are to take.

Large corporations are, almost literally, a law unto themselves. Vast amounts of money at stake will have that effect, especially when they and governments are closely linked.

Global organisations are run by ‘appointed’ former (and often failed) politicians, accountable to…who, exactly? It’s jobs for the boys, or rather, jobs for those with the correct ideological opinions, that can be trusted to say what they’re told to, in return for huge salaries.

Politicians? Well, if you wholly trust anyone who volunteers themselves to have power over others, you really are naïve. Some are well-meaning but the system is tribal, hence divisive and corrupting, making independence of thought and constant integrity very difficult to maintain.

None of the people who make up our elite institutions, either locally or globally, want, or have the courage, to take responsibility for errors and failures.
Protecting their personal positions, agendas and the institutions in which they sit, are far more important to them than honest civic duty, professional integrity or truth.

The ends justify the means.

And since they’ve convinced themselves that their view of societal utopia is not just right but righteous (like a religion), they have no compunction in using disgraceful methods (e.g. propaganda) to achieve those ends.

Ask yourself why it’s always those at the bottom of society, never those proposing and making the massive societal changes, who always come off worse from these panics and crises that elicit the grandiose, even extreme, plans and schemes to save us all from supposed catastrophe?

And the answer to all our problems that we are being gradually driven toward is, supposedly, global government.
Global government will prevent the next pandemic; prevent climate change; stop wars; give stable economies; remove famine etc, etc.

No it won’t!
And the level of naivety required to think it will, is akin to a brainwashed cult member.
Wishful thinking doesn’t make things so.

Of course, to achieve this cloud cuckoo land utopian vision (which is essentially global communism), it’s obvious that democracy has to be moved as far away as possible from the positions of power.
The Brexit vote and Trump election demonstrated that very clearly,apparently

How much do you think your personal vote matters now, when you are one of several tens of thousands in your local parliamentary constituency?
How much less would it count if you were just one vote out of billions?
On that scale, how would any individual be able to weigh-up the merits of candidates and Parties from all around the world?
How would the honesty of and fair play in any global vote be capable of being determined and verified?

The further from the levers of power the individual voter is, the easier they are to manipulate and/or simply ignore.
No, if you think nation-state politics is corrupt, you ain’t seen global politics!

So, meaningful democracy must be removed if our global betters are to be allowed to get on with making the world the perfect place, without interference from the ignorant plebs and deplorables.

Why is this obvious issue (to anyone awake) not a massive societal debate?
Because the people causing the problems and promoting the anti-democratic solutions are happy for us to be asleep; they are precisely those who control what is and isn’t discussed on a societal level and who are of course, the last ones who want these matters publicly discussed!

Look at the difficulties Sadiq Khan is having with his car tax pretending to be for environmental reasons, when it’s obvious that it’s a combination of a money grab (via tax or fines) and globalist environmental crisis ideology gone mad.
The philosopher Sebastian Morello, speaking of the woes in the Roman Catholic Church at the moment, recently wrote this of the Pope - but it applies equally to what Khan does in London:

"This, of course, is exactly what belongs to the psychology of an abusive man: he oscillates from begging to be loved and listened to [my cause is righteous, honest!], to throwing his fists around. A central reason why abusive people behave in this way is because they have lost authority. They can no longer be believed or trusted, and so they resort to begging, sentimental gestures, and then violence."

The answer, authority thinks, is to bring about a system in which people are told their views count but in which, in reality, they don’t [look at the, effectively, zero action on illegal immigration for example].
Constant distraction via manufactured and exaggerated crises, combined with divisive faux moral causes, justifying worsening people’s standards of living and watering-down personal freedoms is the way it’s being done.

‘We’re your saviours in this chaotic world, and your wise moral guides; aren’t you lucky we're here? Do what you’re told’.

I would recommend reading Toby Ord’s book, The Precipice, on existential risk. We are very near the precipice now, I suggest.

Also, watch this discussion between Eric Weinstein and Chris Williamson which covers a lot of the topics (and many more) in this blog. Eric Weinstein - Why Can No One Agree On The Truth Anymore? (4K) | Modern Wisdom 676 - YouTube

I’ll leave you with a poem by Charles Bukowski from The Last Night of the Earth Poems

people are worn away with
striving,
they hide in common habits.

their concerns are herd 
concerns.

few have the ability to stare
at an old shoe for
ten minutes
or to think of odd things
like who invented the
doorknob?

they become unalive
because they are unable to

pause

undo themselves

unkink

unsee

unlearn

roll clear.

listen to their untrue
laughter, then
walk away. 

 

Men directly competing against women in strength sports is unfair

This post is partly my own but also uses research by biologist, Zach Elliott. 

There are still some sports organisations who don’t, or pretend not to, understand the inherent physical advantages post-puberty males have over post-puberty females.

I just don’t understand how that can be.

Now this may be because I am thinking about this from a simple basis of facts and the logical conclusions that follow, as opposed to emotionally or politically.

Do they genuinely not understand the science of the male performance advantage?
The strength difference between male and female bodies is vast.
[I’ve foot-noted the relevant research.]

On average, males have:

- 57% more grip strength [1]

- 65% more leg strength [2]

- 90% more total upper body strength [3]

- 162% more punch power [4]

To put these numbers in perspective, on average, males are only 7% taller than females, yet on the population level we easily see the considerable height differences between them.[5]

The percentage strength differences are immense not marginal.
How else would very mediocre male athletes who never won anything against the best men be able to compete on equal terms or even beat the best biological women in the world? 

Even at the elite athlete level, the difference in world records make it clear.
Whether short distances, 100m; medium, 400m; or really long, 10000m, the difference is around 10%.

In the 100m at the recent World Championships, not only would the winner of the Women's race not made the final in the Men's, she wouldn't even have made the semi-finals!

The musculoskeletal differences between equally trained males and females are so large that there is no way males can compete fairly with females.

And no, taking drugs to lower testosterone does NOT in any meaningful way negate the puberty-given strength advantage of males over females [6]

The answer to me is that, since we seem to have decided to affirm rather than treat this mental illness, we do away with the MEN category and replace it with an OPEN category. This way, anyone who is or identifies as whatever they like, can enter the OPEN category but only biological adult human females can enter the Women or Female category.

Guess how many women or trans women will be winnig in the OPEN category?
And of course we know why if we take the identity politics out of it.
Why some institutions can't, won't or are afraid do this is the real question.

For more detail see:

[1] Bohannon, R., et al. (2019). Handgrip Strength: A Comparison of Values Obtained from the NHANES and NIH Toolbox Studies. American Journal of Occupational Therapy, 73(2).

[2] Lassek, W. D. and Gaulin, S. J. (2009). Costs and benefits of fat-free muscle mass in men: relationship to mating success, dietary requirements, and native immunity. Evolution of Human Behavior, 30, 322-328.

[3] Morris, J., et al. (2020). Sexual dimorphism in human arm power and force: implications for sexual selection on fighting ability. Journal of Experimental Biology, 223(2).

[4] Ibid.

[5] Roser, M., et al. (2019). Human height. Our World in Data.

[6] Emma N Hilton and Tommy R Lundberg (2021) Transgender Women in the Female Category of Sport: Perspectives on Testosterone Suppression and Performance Advantage