Tag: clever Trevor

Is Being Negative Clever?

~ quantumdreamer ~ Leave a comment

This topic was raised in a dream last night.

Some imagine that being highly sceptical and picking holes in everything is the hallmark of intellect and perhaps cleverness. Please understand that when I use the word clever I do not do so in a positive sense. Clever for me is a derogatory term implying an arrogant perhaps smug self-satisfaction, a know-it-all misplaced glee. It is very easy to pick holes, much harder to mend them. I’ll suggest that it is a flaw of human sociopolitical mindset to be negative. To always find fault and thereby prove just how bad and terrible things are. It is a prejudice. A crowd, perhaps baying, will get behind a negative sentiment easily.

Back when I used to do personal and team development courses my favourite piece of personal feedback was, “Alan’s ability to constantly find positives in every situation was tiresome and irritating!” This was from young Ph.D. students at a Complexity doctoral training centre in UCL. Young people full of negativity are hard to motivate. Can’t is a self fulfilling prophecy. Eeyore is alive and tolerably well, not too bad, getting by, moping.

One of the things which has surprised me about France is just how negative people collectively are. They are inert, they complain and find fault. They are actually more negative than cynical Brits. They have shit loads of great technology which nobody outside of France buys. This is because they seem too shy and embarrassed, perhaps arrogant and lazy, to meanigfully address non Francophone markets. There is a cloud of negativity and little encouragement. The medical profession here lacks warmth and is process driven. It is very good but mostly soul less. Few understand my post hip operation career at the Bolshoi. Graveyard humour is lacking and as a result things can be dour and sullen.

In the dream last night I was talking with a British GP doctor. She was posh upper class and old school, roughly my age. She was tweedy and clearly had an intimate relationship with gin and tonic. You could imagine her on a pheasant shoot equipped with cognac filled hip flask. She was looking at all my extensive medical tests. On the basis of these she wanted to know why I had come to see her. I explained that I was concerned about getting a post cold chest infection. She said that I should not be such an idiot. All my tests showed that aside from my arthritis I am in a very good state of health for my age and considering my past consumption. She said that we was considering telling me to fuck off out of her office. I do not have COPD and my ticker works just find. I said that the constant pain puts a down lens on things. She said that in a half a year or so things would look more rosy. Cheer up!

It kind of highlights how the medical profession may send one off to be a lab rat and then forget to give you perspective. If you have 70 medical appointments in a year you will assume yourself to be severely ill, when you may not be. It shows how the big grey heavy mental cloud of negativity can drag you down suck out your spirit like a Potteresque dementor.  On Monday I stood in the “happy” queue at the pharmacy in the local village. Shiny happy people it was not.

“Sitting here eating my heart out baby, I need some hot stuff baby…” It was a shame that the radio was not on…

The world right now lacks direction, positive direction. It is a heavy and very negative space. Hope is a very rare thing just now. Division and negativity are the prevalent toxins.

Being overly negative is a very big downer…man…

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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Gang aft agley

~ quantumdreamer ~ Leave a comment

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But Mousie, thou art no thy lane,
In proving foresight may be vain:
The best-laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men
Gang aft agley,
An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain,
For promis’d joy!

Still thou are blest, compared wi’ me!
The present only toucheth thee:
But Och! I backward cast my e’e,
On prospects drear!
An’ forward, tho’ I cannot see,
I guess an’ fear!

Robert Burns

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It would seem that the boring old chestnut of “cunning plan” is once more afoot. Those blessed with conventional intelligence and accustomed to using manipulative practices to leverage that which they may or may not want, have a “play book”. In normal corporate and interpersonal matters many of the pages in said book are well thumbed and some have a fairly repetitive modus operandi. What worked once is often used again.

The wife reminded me of an occurrence this morning when someone was playing silly buggers on my tutoring profile site. As usual the best strategy is to play with an entirely straight bat. If someone is pretending to be a potential tutee ask them the same things you would ask other tutees. I ask INFJ questions and these are not what many expect. Answering them is not an obvious bullet point thing. An INFJ question probes beyond face value. It is about feeling and intuition. I often was accustomed to a familial visit before taking on a new tutee. Only one family twigged that I was vetting them, the others thought they were vetting me. Introversion can be handy.

When university students used to try to gain advantage by pulling a “sickie” for exams I would send them to a particular doctor at the health centre with whom I had a good working relationship. I explained that I needed a professional opinion. Later I would have a chat with the doctor and use that to inform my conversation with the student. Often the students mis-reported their conversation with the doctor in the hope of gaining an advantage. Many withdrew their claims of “sickie”.

 Some people simply cannot help themselves in trying to be clever, Trevor. Well knock me down wiv a feather. Being honest, simple and up front is not in their play book. So they try to play silly buggers and come up with very convoluted things, “plans” which make sense, at least in their weird, distorted worlds.

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People prone to cunning plans do not factor in dreaming symbols nor the esoteric concept of seeing. Some people need a pretext in their minds and this is a rational justification. Pretexts and precedents are “important” for certain types. Some cunning “covers”, some so-called pretexts, are completely transparent in left side awareness. Unaware of this people can make right knobheads of themselves when they try to be cunning. Like the Emperor they may be wholly unaware that they have been seen, naked, in their true technicolour colours.

Oh well there may be some incoming, soon…