Love thyself?

We've all heard this late 20th century cliche - you have to love yourself, possibly before you love anybody else, in order to be happy.

Now how do you do that exactly? I don't want to start on one of my lectures on the meaning of words like "love" and "hate" (TL;DR: they don't have a single coherent meaning). Basically, with many words, you look at the various way the words are being used and figure out what they're referring to in each case. If we look at a  few uses of "love":

- "I love my wife" means  I have  a unique bond that comes from having been in love, years of shared experience & goals, knowing each other better than anyone else does, and lots of sex...and a few other things...this is a different bond from:

 - "I love my friend". Meaning that I enjoy their company, have fun with them, may have known them for years etc, but the feelings involved are significantly different from those for the person I've shared a bed with for 20 years

- "I love Salt and Pepper fish from my favourite Chinese restaurant" - I get intense pleasure from putting that food in my mouth, I get an explosion of endorphins from so doing that.. almost.. rivals the pleasure the person in the first example has given me in many of our nights together. Obviously the dead fish doesn't give me support in the other ways she does. I hope that's obvious

So which of these ways can one be said to "love oneself"? Well you can't give yourself the support, fun & affection that wife and friends do, or you wouldn't need them. And one can't enjoy oneself in the way one enjoys a curry/pasta dish etc - not really. Or at least I don't think that's what the pretty young things on Instagram mean when they repeat this hashtag...

In actual fact I don't think I love myself at all, especially when I'm happy. In those times - fortunately they are frequent - I would rather say that I love my life. Matt Walsh jokingly says* on his show that he hates himself, but he seems happy enough, after a fashion.

So what do people mean by the phrase? I'd hazard a guess that they really mean "look after yourself", maybe? Or "stop internalising other people's criticisms of you, real and imagined". Instead one should internalise the uniformly positive things some people might say about you. Does that sound right? It is at least a little bit more specific & therefore meaningful.

I'd further assert that this is something only women would say - it means very little, emotionally, for a very masculine person (am I allowed to say this any more?). So I can only guess at what they're going on about. It's another indicator of the emotional & intellectual differences between men and women

Though I wonder if actually loving others & loving one's life would indeed be more satisfying to these folks than thinking about themselves at all. Letting go of one's ego & cravings being a good rule of thumb...which I've nicked from the Buddhists. But what do I know?

* if you can find it, among the 2000+ videos he's made

That old "posh" British accent - why did we laugh at it?

When I was at university, I used to laugh with my friends at the Monty Python sketches ridiculing posh English accents and the army officers that used them. This was in the very early 90s. The Monty Python sketches were getting really old themselves, and the accents we were laughing at were fast dying out. 

One of my reasons for joining in this humour was less honourable. Being young I hankered after friendship. When I got to university I found a lot of my fellow students going in a political direction I knew I couldn't follow. Today we'd call it the "progressive" Left. But I found that when I played Graham Chapman's sergeant major character, some of those friends laughed very loud*. I didn't share the political bent that made them laugh at some things rather than others - but social pressure encouraged me to laugh at that parody

How we laughed at the posh-speaking army officers. Except that those officers were the ones that were actually in charge of one of the best militaries in the world, widely respected.

I've been thinking about this again when I watched a documentary about Britain's campaign in the Falklands. It is their sort who ran half the world. They were not much like today's breed of Englishmen: who all seem to hate each other, who are negative about themselves, everyone around them, the future, our past...negative about everything, really, which they seem to think is a badge of honour

* my student friends even seemed political at what they'd laugh at. Maybe that's true of some of the things those of us on the centre-right laugh at. But I do think that "progressives" took the phrase "the personal is the political" excessively seriously. A huge number of them were obsessive about their politics. It was hard to talk to them about any subject without them relating it to the struggle against the Tories. This cultist frame of mind is incredibly inimical to the imaginative life

Why the Left argues that black is white

I expect my progressive opponents (what a dishonourable lot they are) will think that title means I'm talking about race, but that's not what this is about. I'm concerned with the way so many modern Leftist ideas seem designed to disorient everyone by attacking everything we believe. Progressives and postmodernists seem to have always hated science and logic, so they created this trend of undermining every certainty. 

This dovetails nicely with the attempts of Cultural Marxists to overturn everything that holds Western societies together and keeps them strong: liberties, democracy, capitalism, patriotism, Christianity. It is uncanny how academics have taught people to be tired of every one of those things. But pomo people hate logic and science themselves: things often created by white men and that frequently provide inconvenient obstacles for Leftwing claims. I'm also forced to observe that a big part of this trend is just to confuse everyone, to the point where minds are more malleable. 

The big example (for me) is the danger of saying "men and women are different" or "men can't be women". If you do so (I'm afraid of even saying it in print here, such are the speech fascists and their hold on social media platforms) the army of angry people accusing you of "hatred" - for expressing and opinion - beggars belief. 

Some idiot will accuse you of hate speech, there'll be a mob on twitter, none of whom will check what you say - crowds never think for themselves and, unfortunately, this happens online as well. 

It was too much already when these lunatics were trying to get people cancelled and socially ostracised for having the wrong opinion. Now they want us thrown in jail for it.

And there's a sort of inevitability about how governments just roll over every time and introduce bills for yet more censorship of speech that almost nobody asked for (except for a small bunch of psychopaths).

I confess to being puzzled and demoralised by how governments so quickly give in to this insanity, but I expect it's because of the "intersectional" nature of this kind of politics. The feminists and anti-racists are pushing these measures, so the trans lobby are included, even though feminists actually hate them, and soon it will be illegal hate-speech to say "men can't be women".

And all our principles of free speech are going, just like that, because a bunch of kids who understand nothing (they're not exactly philosophers, are they?) repeat brainless slogans like "free speech doesn't mean the freedom to utter hate-speech"

The argument is that if you disagree with someone on these matters, it's inevitably because of "hatred" - they're pulling the same trick the Left use on immigration every single time - and no one anywhere questions the logic of it even once, all the way up to the House of Commons.

Of course logic is a white man's creation to oppress everyone else, I forgot.. Well here we are, we'll past the stage where the quotes from Orwell's 1984 are getting old: Freedom is Slavery, War is Peace etc.. But young, ignorant people haven't read or understood Orwell - our teachers saw to that

Progressives, feminists, books and culture

It amused me to find a thread on mumsnet agonising about how someone's DS (dear son) was reading the BeastQuest books by the tonne (or having them read to him). She was upset that the main character was male & that the main female character didn't do as much. It was therefore, of course, "sexist"!

This is the feminist/progressive mindset: having got him reading at all, she then wanted to control what he read. It's not that there aren't books (Nancy Drew, but really thousands of them) with female lead characters, but that either a) he wasn't reading them, or b) they aren't always as popular; people's choices of reading are what are upsetting her. It must be upsetting for her that the Harry Potter is the main character in the bestsellers. It's the same mindset that had Dr Who disastrously turned into a woman, and will soon do the same for James Bond (which has already contained a rant or 2 against sexism from the new "M" who was at this stage, inevitably, a women). Firstly, they can't produce a franchise with a popular lead character themselves (Lara Croft, Mrs Marple etc are either not successful enough or "problematic in their representation of women") Secondly, they want to control all that we see, hear, say or think. They are, quite simply, mad...and they control the publishers & bookshops, schools, universities and the broadcast media. That's why you should be worried - your liberties are under attack

The idea that dishonest arguments weaken your position

So I don't consider myself rightwing - but I certainly read & watch a lot of content by those who oppose the extremes of modern progressive politics. There is a argument with which we console ourselves, and I'm not sure it holds water. 

The argument takes this form: feminists complaining about mansplaining weaken feminism because they imply that women are so weak that they need to be protected from male arguments. A similar assertion is that positive discrimination and "offence politics" are themselves racist because they imply that ethnic minorities are too stupid to get jobs for themselves and, again, need protection from offence (by authoritarian, anti-free-speech laws)

The appalling logic of progressives might weaken the logical framework they are putting forward - but political power, as we know, is not won by presenting the most logical argument, but by either persuading people with arguments (however specious) and traducing or threatening anyone who disagrees. In this, feminists and the "everything is racist" mob are preeminent: their approach to politics is entirely based on accusations of hatred and arguments that are just plausible enough that the more articulate people* in their camp can persuade themselves that they are right.

In my first example above, the more bonkers feminists may continue to argue that women need to be protected from interruptions, that men aren't allowed to express a view on the abortion issue, and that womens' prisons should be closed, and at the same time they will claim that they "only want equality".  Some of us will laugh at what nonsense this is, and then we will watch and wonder why those who rule us do exactly what the activists want 

So the progressive cult may still be successful politically as what they say gets less and less internally consistent. It may take a long time - and a lot of work for the rest of us - for their intellectual dishonesty to be widely recognised. As much as anything else, it's a matter of removing a self-selecting group from power, and seeing as they are very rich, this could be difficult

 * note that I did not say "the more intelligent people in their camp"

Everything wrong with the science of IQ tests

As succinct as I can make it

1) "Intelligence" is a word that has been used in all sorts of ways, but never defined or restricted to one of them. In other words, it has no agreed definition
2) it therefore cannot be measured.
3) so what is being measured with IQ tests? Performance on one short test of a set of tasks. Interesting, but not that interesting
4) neither do the tests address innate ability vs practice or preparation at those tasks - surely precisely what they are trying to measure?
5) the predictive power of IQ tests wrt later life success is their main selling point. But predictive power is just a kind of correlation (school success also correlates to later success, but we wouldn't say it measures intellectual talent well) It does not mean that IQ tests measure intelligence, whatever that may be.
6) tests only measure limited problem-solving abilities. Several other abilities based on memory, directionless creativity or emotional thinking are profoundly important.

On this last point I'd say that there are many different styles of thinking with different strengths and a better study of "intelligence" would evaluate these.

Happy belated Christmas and Samuel Johnson

I see that I put up a post complaining about self-righteous progressives on Christmas day, so I had better try and add some seasonal light-heartedness to my blog.

In fact I've spent much of the last month focusing on the more spiritual and nurturing side of things (though for all the  bloody good it's done my temper, I wonder if I ought to have bothered..). But I wanted to share some wonderful, if slightly acerbic, Samuel Johnson-related quotes.

Firstly, a segment of Horace Walpole's systematic character assassination of Johnson. Wikipedia tells us that

"Horatio Walpole, 4th Earl of Orford (24 September 1717 – 2 March 1797), also known as Horace Walpole, was an English art historian, man of letters, antiquarian and Whig politician"

He was also the son of the first Prime Minister of Britain - it's always difficult to be the son of a famous & respected father - and a writer. His fiction seems to have been of limited interest, but his letters are fascinating for anyone interested in those times. Here he is on the celebrated Dr Johnson and the 'zanies' who admire him:

"The Signora talks of her Doctor's expanded mind, and has contributed her mite to show that never mind was narrower. In fact the poor man is to be pitied: he was mad, and his disciples did not find it out, but have unveiled all his defects: nay, have exhibited all his brutalities as wit, and his lowest conundrums as humour"

and this is my favourite bit (I am going to use this one myself):

"What will posterity think of us when it reads what an idol we adored"

Perhaps a Whig politician of those times would find many things about a Tory disagreeable (I'm astonished by people whose judgements of others depend entirely on their politics, rather than objective examination of their qualities). Johnson was indeed something of a Tory who embellished his reports of Parliamentary debates so that "the Whig dogs should not have the best of it"

I should say that I actually rather like Samuel Johnson, but when I read that last quote, I'm uncomfortably reminded of how I feel when I find there is enough public demand for Russel Brand to appear on TV again, and for him to have a "Booky wook" published. I'd anyway like to let Dr Johnson have the last word(s) here with a couple of his remarks:

"I have found you an argument, sir. I am not obliged to find you an understanding"

(I'm definitely using that one, as well... I get the same feeling very often on Twitter). A bit of wisdom:

"Sir, I look upon every day to be lost, in which I do not make a new acquaintance"

and finally, for Christmas, a note of mystery

"This world, where much is to be done and little to be known"