Thoughts

My time (and energy) are a bit limited of late, so I thought I'd just do a brief little post of . . . (random) thoughts.

Firstly, I've been working on a book to be titled "The Scarred of Modern Life". However, I finally weakened and read a sample from the e-book version of Mary L Trump's excellent book "Too Much and Never Enough" (Simon and Schuster UK (2020), ISBN-10 1471190137, ISBN13: 9781982141462; Amazon), on her uncle, the notorious despot, POTUS45.

This well written and well conceptualised book, which is now on my wish list, has beaten me to the punch on some of what I want to cover.  It is powerful, insightful, and, in my opinion, essential reading for all who are voting in next US Presidential election (obviously not me - but I get to comment because the incompetence of #45 is harming my world).

A few points which came to mind for me upon reading this are:

• how make sure there are no others like this in the future? The lessons that seems pretty clear from the book is that a major contributing factor would be better parenting - at the very least, avoiding abuse. Better parenting is also aided by allowing choice - by not taking the "mini me" approach, where one's children are expected to be copies of oneself, rather than whoever their truest self is; 
• how much of this applies to our neoliberal Prime Minister Morrison and his cohort, who were so pathetic as human beings that they needed lessons on how to be empathic?

I was going to add in a list of the faults of this appalling coterie, but I think the empathy lessons mostly nails the problem (there are also ideological flaws, but I'll come to those shortly).

I also want to reiterate one of the reasons I will not be naming people in my forthcoming autobiography: normal human beings are capable of change. I may well have interacted with people during a bad part of their life, or they may simple have grown as human beings - just as Nelson Mandela and Gandhi did, for instance.

Others don't grow. #45 is one example, but I've also known several in my life, and one such person who I found out recently seems to be in the no growth category is someone who will be appearing in my autobiography when I write about living on a boat in the 90s because of his utterly disgusting habit of - without prior permission, or any concept that he needed to ask for permission - throwing his used handkerchiefs in with my clothes when I was washing them at the marina laundry. Now, if I had the right cycle, extra disinfectant, correct washing powder, etc, that would be OK, but I didn't, and, above all else, it was a gross invasion of my personal boundaries, including my right to safely do clean washing.

The bastard ignored my polite requests, and my removals of his filthy garments, until one day when I removed his bloody stuff I threw them in some dirt and told him, when he asked about it, that I would call the police if he ever did that again.

THAT finally seemed to get through to the bastard, and he stopped thereafter, but he was a patronising, paternalistic and, I suspect, misogynistic character.

I'm still not naming him, because he might have changed, and he might change in the future, and that change may well be made more easily if I don't name him.

But if such behaviour happened to me again, from anyone, I won't stuff around, I'll go straight to a lawyer, and then get the police involved.

That sort of haughty, arrogant, conceited, self-important, entitled presumption should never be allowed to go unremarked or unchallenged anywhere (as I've written about here) - and especially when it occurs in a child (the vast majority of such cases in children being, in my experience, caused by similarly flawed adults).

That sort of mindset is also responsible for the appalling character flaws of some police, some military, and Goddess knows how many intelligence service people - flaws which make those people unsuited and unfit for those positions on the grounds of incompetence. (incidentally, I put their mindset in the same category as rapists.)

On that latter category, intelligence agencies, I'd like to provide a few quotes from "The Pentagon Papers: The Secret History of the Vietnam War" by Neil Sheehan, Smith Hedrick, E. W. Kenworthy, Butterfield Fox, James L. Greenfield (Amazon):

“The guarding of military and diplomatic secrets at the expense of informed representative government provides no real security for our Republic.”

“Secrecy in government is fundamentally anti-democratic, perpetuating bureaucratic errors. Open debate and discussion of public issues are vital to our national health. On public questions there should be “open and robust debate.” New York Times, Inc. V. Sullivan, 376 U. S. 254, 269-270.”

“The dominant purpose of the First Amendment was to prohibit the widespread practice of governmental suppression of embarrassing information. It is common knowledge that the First Amendment was adopted against the widespread use of the common law of seditious libel to punish the dissemination of material that is embar[r]assing to the powers-that-be. See Emerson, The System of Free Expressions, c. V (1970); Chafee, Free Speech in the United States, c. XIII (1941).”

Obviously, some of that is limited here as a consequence of being a separate sovereign nation with our own laws, but the principles still apply, as we also aspire to being a democracy.

Given that, how do we get them out of those positions, and how do we make sure such people are not created in the first place?

and in the meantime, how do we limit the damage done by them - and by those who are sloppy, careless, or flawed in their thinking?

As an example of the latter, why do people hand over their e-signatures without a thought in the world as to the consequences? Do they know that companies they're giving their signatures to have safe and secure procedures generally, let alone in how they manage copies of e-signatures?

As an example, I go to Australia Post rather than establish an account with an online money transfer company because my personal details are at considerable risk as:

(a) such companies are typically only as strong as their weakest link - as one social media platform has demonstrated;
(b) many companies are so stupid when it comes to online security they get people to change their passwords every 3 months, or think having back up questions is a good thing;
(c) I have had secretaries tell me - quite pompously, I must say - they would "only" use an e-signature of mine if a manage authorised it (FFS! As a professional engineer, my signature has professional implications - and only gets used with MY permission, no matter how inconvenient that is for managers. I've also had other engineers literally forge my physical signature to comply with a timeline - i.e., for convenience, rather than legality. When I quietly commented over the phone that such would result in me calling the police, they whited out the forgery, and presented it to me the next day. Again, FFS. I have only once had to start taking a company to the Institute Of Engineers Australia [now "trading as" [just change your bloody name] "Engineers Australia" Ethics Committee, but I would again if I needed to - and the bloody registration scheme we have misses all of that); and
(d) only one system I've come across (see here) has ever come close to adequate security over the use of e-signatures.

The pompous and stupid think trust in a company should be automatic: no, it shouldn't - and the stupidity of our neoliberal national government on online security has also shown that.

(I'd trust the companies if someone I knew could be trusted, like Bruce  Schneier, had sufficient access to say that company could be trusted.)

Unfortunately, I also know that Australia Post also fail abysmally on inclusivity matters, from when I have provided a witness signature for a friend and the bastard I was served by was quite transphobic (but their online security seems reasonable - see here).

Actually, thirty years ago I realised that trying to pass makes no difference - despite the claims of the shallow and superficial and quite unthinking transphobes who claim they want that, and then act differently when people do pass - and that is from personal experience of such transphobes in the 90s, particularly in the workplace.

The clincher for me was when I had a cisgender woman with a deep voice express her relief at not being alone (this was part of the inspiration for this short story).

The bigots can go to hell (or could if it existed). They are the ones with the problems - and it doesn't matter that they may not have thought about it: they should have, in this day and age. (CN  Lester has some great comments on this also - see here and here.)

The truth is that things like their requests - and this applies just as much when the "requests" are made by people in other minorities, or even by trans people -  to be told formally first of people's pronouns is just an excuse to be passive aggressive.

I met people in the 80s who didn't need such requests, or prior explanations, before behaving like decent human beings. Every bigot since then has shown that they are flawed as human beings.

I would also like to commend Victor Zammit's updated book "A Lawyer Presents the Case for the Afterlife" (Amazon; see also here), which has some brilliant analysis of the types of thinking problems that results in, in the context he is writing about, illogical resistance to evidence of personal survival of consciousness after death, but also explains the illogical persistence of transphobia, slavery, neoliberalism, and paternalism of the type I encountered at the marina in the 90s and the world is experiencing from the voters and the jackbooted thugs who support #45 - those problems are ALL linked.

Earlier online versions of the key chapters of Mr Zammit's book that I am referring to can be found at:

• http://www.victorzammit.com/book/4thedition/chapter27.html; 
• http://www.victorzammit.com/book/4thedition/chapter28.html; and 
• http://www.victorzammit.com/book/4thedition/chapter29.html. 

The long term solutions to all these problems are:

• teach critical thinking in schools, which helps kids be resistant to commercial and business propaganda (aka advertising), fake news, and, if done properly, bad parenting; 
• start taking pride in doing things well, not cheaply - cheaply is the path of neoliberal ideology, slavery, and misogyny (including all forms of violence against women), misandry and transphobia and non-consensual surgery on intersex children (including all forms of violence against these people), and all other forms of discrimination and bigotry and exclusion; and 
• accept that trying to do things properly will take and refinement.

 This wound up being longer than I planned.