Tag: argue the toss

Discuss or Claim – Shoot Down in Flames

~ quantumdreamer ~ Leave a comment

I’ll start into this with some statements, see if you agree with them.

  • It is easier to discount than to prove.
  • There is a section of humanity that has a very negative mindset and is personally insecure. It is sceptical and seeks approval by negating everything and disproving it, thereby showing just how very clever it is while claiming kudos from other negative peers for its I-told-you-so cleverness. There is an element of look-at-me to these behaviours. Strangely people seek to be both smug and clever, which at first pass seems contradictory.
  • It is easier to disprove than it is to prove.
  • People derive a great deal of seeming pleasure from shooting others down in flames and arguing the toss so as to apparently “win”.
  • They are stuck in their ways, primitive, possibly bigoted and old-fashioned.

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In writing this blog I have chosen a largely discursive approach and have been fairly careful to not make any claims, profess said claims or adamantly proclaim accuracy. I have been careful in my use of language to avoid dogmatic assertion.

This dogmatic assertion habit is perhaps a bane of our times.

Were I to make claims there is a danger that people would prime their Gatling guns and take aim. Many like an assertion to aim at, particularly ones with numbers in so that the petty can nit-pick.

“You said you would limit immigration to 200,000 in fact we had 215,000 last year, you did not do what you said you were going to do. You lying bastard!!”

This pseudo-journalistic mentality is pervasive and makes arguments out of petty trivial stuff. Comparison mind never strays too far from the adolescent urinal pissing contest.

In approaching this blog I had one question, “What is the best way to approach closed concretised mind insistent on proof where none may exist?”

The answer I came up with was to adopt a discursive approach in the vain hope that these might at least stimulate some thinking. I am aware that the human mind is bullet-point and sound-byte, click-bait oriented these days. It is easy to gain wide publicity by making outrageous claims.

“Tariffs are already bringing trillions of dollars into the US treasury!!”

{US GDP ~ 30 trillion dollars, Federal tax revenue ~ 5 trillion }

Tariffs then {according to Trump} must already account  for more than 20% of the annual Federal income by use of the plural “trillions”. This statement cannot yet be factual.

It is the easiest thing in the world to make wild assertions, to gob-off and to make outrageous claims. Even were these factual it would be straightforward to find some way of discounting, casting doubt upon and otherwise undermining any claim. People love to find fault and pick holes in things.

Most people are already finding fault before they have reached the end of a sentence or heard what someone is trying to communicate. They can place so much stock in arguing the toss and dissing others. It can make them feel big.

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Do you like to shoot people down in flames?

Does it give you a boner or make you go damp?

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What is Safe to Ignore?

~ quantumdreamer ~ Leave a comment

The ongoing foray into medical things has thrown up a few things which may or may not be safe to ignore. As a part of the ongoing saga I am going to have a full cardiovascular MOT or road worthiness test. The presence of excess iron has many knock on implications and I have already been prescribed one medication which is no longer recommended.

You can call me rusty.

It is a long old haul and the garden is suffering a bit from lack of attention.

It seems so far that the Jury has decided that I don’t have five of the genetic mutations which I have tested for. I am going to discuss these further, a little. My status as a mutant has not yet been confirmed.

Traditional western medicine is based upon symptoms. By the time symptoms are apparent disease has arrived. More recently tests are done with a mind to early prophylaxis where possible. What may be, is clear in some case and less so in others. The UK mass newspapers are full of misdiagnosis horror stories.

“I went to see multiple GPs. They sent me home with a box of Rennie’s. Later in A&E after I tripped up on the way home from the pub, they found a basketball size alien tumour of extraplanetary origin growing in my kidney. I have two and half weeks to live!”

These cases are rare and anomalous. The tendency is to discount and not pay sufficient attention to things which do not fit your story, your view of how things might be.

“It is impossible to have extra planetary tumours growing in the kidneys. They are usually found in the spleen!! Everyone knows this! DOH.”

People can be very dismissive about things which later turn out to be highly important. They ignore things which are not safe to ignore.

I like to offer people options. The easiest option is that I am an eccentric borderline nut-job burn out. I suspect that as an explanation this would find purchase in the minds of many. It is a pigeonhole into which I can be fitted easily. I can then be ignored. I may be briefly entertained but never taken seriously. To develop this a little further. If one is enamoured with intrigue, one could say that whacko-nut-job-eccentric is my cover.

With a high degree of certainty one can predict answers to certain questions. This is because denial is a Pavlovian response in some. I have asked a number of people if they feel they have unresolved karma with me. To date no-body has answered that question. Nobody has tried. They have ignored it and let it drop. It is easy to discard and discount. On my part it has been a genuine and well-intended question very largely for their benefit. But of course people know best and are unwilling to do the work needed to answer a question of moderate depth and wide implication. People want to preserve face above all else. FOLOF, fear of loss of face.

Is such a question safe to ignore?

In the “normal” world and within its confines and rules, yes. But this is a world and philosophy bridging question and the limited “normal” context loses its imagined wide applicability. Ignoring such a question ignores and devalues a way of being held by hundreds of millions of people.

A lot of people think small details can be ignored. A prime minister preaching about lock down may deem it his God-given right to party. Ignoring, conveniently, the detail which he said that we didn’t ought. A small detail ignored can come back to bite you on the bum with rabid and perhaps gangrenous teeth.

“The law was not broken in its strictest and most convenient {for us} interpretation.”

Obsessing about detail can be very tiring. So knowing what is and is not important makes life easier. We all make choices and assign priorities whether consciously or by default.

People may argue the toss when it is very unwise so to do. The toss once argued for cannot be u-turned always. You may have won the toss but you can be up shit creek in a barbed wire canoe without a paddle. The toss will not keep you warm in a nuclear winter.

My own opinion is that it is not safe to ignore your dreams. Experimental evidence has suggested this to me. This morning’s dream had someone I once knew trying to manipulate a situation, to find some kind of pretext. It was suggested that some kind of trap is in preparation. It revolves around the number of conspiracy three, three people. In every conspiracy there has to be at least three. Without being paranoid I am opening myself up to the dream both at night and during the day to see what, if anything, the dreaming has to add to this morning’s dream.

It is very easy to imagine important and significant the wrong things entirely.

We can ignore the things we did not ought to. We may need to pay strict attention and focus to things which we might otherwise flippantly ignore.

What is safe to ignore?

Messaging Assumption and Miscommunication

~ quantumdreamer ~ Leave a comment

Postulate.

The human ability to get entirely the wrong of the stick is close to infinite.

Herein lies the mystery of perception, bias and multiple failures in communication both as a purveyor and acceptor. People may not be aware that they are, whether consciously or not, sending messages which others are receiving and perceiving and assimilating.

I suspect that because I am largely silent and can be not expressive, people tend to imagine that I am judging and being critical. They may expect some verbal response / discussion / mutual bullshitting when talking and when none is forthcoming, they can get unnerved. The feedback mechanism is missing. They expect chit-chat. In the absence they can confer multiple meanings which simply are not there.

People can read all sorts of shit into things. They may imagine I am sending a message when I am not. People might read this blog and imagine that I am messaging them directly.

The likelihood of miscommunication in the context of different cultures and frames of refence is enhanced. People may imagine that their customs are transferable. The French attitude of laissez-faire can be interpreted as complete indifference, fence sitting and not giving a shit, disinterest. It can be read, “that person can’t be arsed, sod ’em, they are not serious. Let’s move on to someone who has a point of view or opinion.”

In trying not to impinge a different message can be received. “Waste of time.”

I’ll assume with a high confidence integral that many people have made hugely erroneous assumptions over the years as to my motivations, what I am thinking and where I am coming from. This {my} assumption is based upon my interpretations of their behaviours and could be invalid. There may be transference of their ways of thinking and prejudices onto me.

There are certain types of people who like to argue the toss and “win” arguments / debates. They like to “score” points.

If someone like this expresses a point of view and one does not counter it, remaining silent even. They can assume agreement and/or victory. The lucky recipient of opinion may disagree totally but cannot be arsed to verbalise. Agreement can be assumed and the illusion of being right /accurate taken from the non-intervention.

Many introverts cannot be bothered to do the thinking for gobby extroverts. It is not important to them nor is share of air time or limelight kudos. The introverts can be disinterested in interaction.

I am reasonably confident that I have by accident, thrown a spanner into the works, with my interactions with the French medical profession. I have not behaved in the manner to which they are accustomed and they have not had the skill or experience to handle it. There has a result been extensive miscommunication and they have made assumptions about what might transpire, what I understand and how I perceive them. It can be very hierarchical. Most medics have not interacted as I have. My need to chat and discuss is vanishingly small when viewed from the angle of French customs. If I want to find out my first port of call is research which I will do thoroughly.

Once miscommunication has gone beyond a certain point the situation becomes very difficult if not impossible to salvage. This is because face and pride have now come into play and dominate, often unilaterally, subsequent interpersonal dynamics.

Postulate

The human notion of face and implicit loss of face is one of the most expensive bits of human folly in terms of relationships and loss of human life.

Face in this context is illusion, a socio-political construct which sells gossip magazines, tabloid newspapers and underpins the scripts of television soap operas.

“Face” lies aback assumption and miscommunication. People get offended, an emotional overaction, if things do not comply with assumption and social expectation. People can assume that the {their} worldview is common and that everyone holds similar prejudices to them.

Once people have gotten hold of the wrong end of the stick the tendency is to grasp this ever more tightly. Mis-perceptions and mis-assimilations of reality are more concrete and fixed than one might imagine.

There is no better demonstration of miscommunication than the game of “Chinese whispers”. Yet surprisingly, given this knowledge, the faceless and ubiquitous “they” are somehow the font of all truth and knowledge….

There is not a lot you can do or say which is contrary to the omniscience of “they”. No matter how well you communicate it, it cannot be perceived accurately because “they” dogmatically forbid it.

The wrong end of the stick beckons with the gravitational pull of a supermassive black hole…

The Not Being Believed Theme

~ quantumdreamer ~ Leave a comment

“It was just a dream!”

Many do not pay attention to their dreams and discount them. Many others pay a little more attention. It is easy to write them off with the perhaps adamant assertion above. I have heard many anecdotes where people have been very unsettled by dreams. I’ll speculate that the more hard-core scientist you think you are the more likely it is that you will discount the import of dreams. They are fluffy febrile stuff for tree huggers, hippies, conspiracy theorists, whackos and new agers. Only space cadets are into dreams.

You can work out for yourself if I am a hippie space-cadet or not. Perhaps I am in a superposition state.

I am doing a little experiment here in the blog in which I group dreams in a time ordered sequence according to theme. It seems to me one dream is easily ignored but a time ordered sequence appears to have a tad more substance. It is a feeling. I challenge you to read one of these themed collections, see what you reckon. It might twist your melon man.

I am not all that interested in “winning” arguments, nor do I like to argue the toss incessantly. I do not need to convince or win people over. I will not try to cajole or coerce belief. In fact, when I have noted that somebody badly wants to “win” an argument I have let them do so on occasion, because it seems so important to them. I capitulate and say that they are “right”. Nobody has ever asked me what I mean by that. People tend to take the short-cut easy way out.

In quite a few of my dreams I am “told” that I will not be believed and that I will not be listened to.

Viewed from one angle not believing me and not listening to me, has karmic implications. One could argue that it is my karma to be treated like this. One could make a counter case that by acting thus “they” are making a massive karmic error.

I have a rule of thumb, “99% of people only think about themselves 99% of the time”. Obvs it is the 99% rule. This is a concise re-wording of the self-diagnosed omniscient / auto proctology rule.

If my dreams tell me I will not be believed there are two options, try to be heard or not bother. I have given up on banging my head against a brick wall.

The other big recurring theme in the dreams is someone else’s mess, often ginormous.

There is a catch 22. Because of the karmic mess created by others, if I try to tell them about said karmic mess, I will not be believed, and the karmic mess will get deeper. If I try to help, I will make it worse. It is an SEP, someone else’s problem.

Let me be specific if anyone claims to know my mind and to be speaking on my behalf, they are a liar and a charlatan. I have never appointed a spokesperson, a port-parole or any kind of PR agent to speak on my behalf. If you believe anyone claiming to know me and where I am coming from / what I am up to, then you are gullible and buying snake oil.

I have just made a statement and according to my dreams it will not be believed or listened to either.

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