Tag: prejudice

That me and Kevin we’re just not the same…

~ quantumdreamer ~ Leave a comment

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Although I do have a research paper co-author who is a University Challenge quiz winner and am a regular viewer of past series of University Challenge which  I quite like, I am not the same as Kevin. Since we have been watching YouTube re-runs my average score has risen to the point where I might even be a slightly above average quiz team member. I have been accidentally learning the answers to questions. I can respond Pavlovian to certain questions. I am now slightly programmed.

We try very hard to get people to fit to our preconceived ideas, notions and prejudices about how people should or ought to be. Very few measure well to the perfect Kevin yardstick. We reach for that shoe horn and try real hard to squeeze them into the shoe we have imagined for them. If people are not  sufficiently like Kevin we can be upset and complain. We may discard them outright because of their lack of apparent Kevin-ness. We can throw the poorly made Kevin ersatz out with the tepid and soapy bathwater. Kevin himself never gets the blame it is merely the poor attempt at Kevin-hood. Kevin is a perfected and illusory ideal.

I am pretty sure that in a number of contexts that I am not sufficiently like Kevin to be taken seriously and thereby can be easily discounted. People do not believe me because I am not like Kevin. Kevin is the reason that many things have gone wrong or not even gotten started.

Anway enough about Kevin.

Tonight we have Beef Karai on the menu.  I am going to use the last of my hand ground Karai spice mix to do us a curry. Not sure yet if I am going to add some flaked almonds but probably will add a few dried apricots. To make it a tad more Persian inspired. We will see.

I have made it up to the local supermarket to participate in the shopping. I walked around mostly using only one crutch. Bit knackered now…can be done.

Last night I upped the codeine and managed for the first time to get near six hours sleep. If that continues tonight I will be well happy.

The next hurdle will be driving up to the physiotherapist’s clinic. Possibly early next week. It is already a lot easier getting in and out of the car than before I had the operation. The guidance in the US and UK is more contra than here. Things here can be a bit loose {imagine shoulder movement and hand gestures}.

Unfortunately I am still technically speaking obese. Although I have lost ~4 kg in just under two weeks I am still defined obese, a fat bastard. According to the NHS web site I have to lose another 8 kg to stop being obese. Not sure if I am supposed to aim for that or not…

I will be more like Kevin then…

Time to Recalibrate Your Detectors…

~ quantumdreamer ~ Leave a comment

When people change it can be difficult for others to a) note the change b) accept the change and c) assimilate that change in to new ways of perception, assimilation and interaction. People often interpret others though a largely historical lens and previous shared social context. They struggle to see the changed spots on a leopard, even if that leopard is now a zebra. Dogma suggests that it is impossible. It cannot be so.

A while back I ran into someone whom I knew from one context. I had the feeling that she had not yet noticed I was different. I knew that she was a highly intelligent nuclear physicist who had worked at the nuclear physics facility in Dubna. I suggested that she recalibrate her detectors in respect of how she was perceiving and hence interacting with me. She listened and got the notion. I too started from a more flexible view of her. As a consequence we managed to communicate fairly well with each other. It took a little while to “find” each other.

People can have very fixated views of others, fixated opinions and hard wired biases. The better we think we know someone the more rigid are our views of how they are and might still be.

For a long time I was an evangelical vegan. This lasted for not far off a decade. Eating a beef steak in front of someone you have lectured, evangelised to and otherwise bored shitless is a true game changer and a re-arranger of perception. Often some radical enactments of drama are impossible. I have joked that were I to tip up wearing Buddhist monastic robes unexpected and visit an erstwhile acquaintance it could be a bit of a mind fuck for them. Although I could perhaps buy some garb on line I would not wear them as I have not been ordained in this life.

There are some things that are very hard for people to accept. This is because to do so would require and perhaps initiate a radical change in the narrative which they have held. It could re-arrange the sense they make of the world and the story or legend they have told themselves.

How might a science professor interact with a high lama tulku incarnation? What is the correct protocol? What is the correct ordering of cheese?

Between ~12 and 12:35 this afternoon, French time, I experienced a phenomenon of visual disturbance in which the perceptual field, mostly left eye, started to warp and acquire an unusual brightness. I usually associate changes like this with something big and impactful happening in the web of life. Something of import, somewhere, was going on. I was standing on our small indoors scaffold painting the ceiling. It is best to take great care whilst these phenomena occur, especially if one is up high. I was near my limit of standing, getting close to two hours painting. Tiredness leads to accident and with osteoporosis a fall is unwise. I am not as steady as I once was. I can only stand for around two hours at a time now before the fatigue and pain overwhelm. It saves us money if I paint and we want the room finished before I have my total hip replacement fitted. For me there are maybe one or two more sessions of painting before I stop. The nurse was adamant that I should do no DIY in the week leading up to the operation. A scratch or cut could increase the infection risk on my right leg.

My mobility is not good. People might remember me differently and to see me hobble could change perception a little. How and in what other ways they might recalibrate their detectors might be moot. If you only knew me in one context it might be difficult to accept me as a pikey retired person.

I’ll speculate that very many people are in no way as open minded as they imagine themselves to be. They can be very set in their ways, their perceptions and try to shoe-horn observables to fit prior narratives.  

In general people do not believe that their detectors need recalibration even when experimental evidence suggests that they might. Only something major might prompt the start of the recalibration. Some will need a huge discrepancy to even accept as a hypothesis that their detectors need a tweak, a recalibration. Even though said detectors might be out of warranty.

Psilocybin Zwitterion or Breaking Bad – the T-shirt problem…

~ quantumdreamer ~ Leave a comment

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I was so upset that I cried

All the way to the chip shop

When I came out there was Gordon

Standing at the bus stop

And guess who was with him?

Yeah, Julie

And they were both laughing at me

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Oh, she is cruel and heartless

To pack me for Gordon

Just cos he’s better looking than me

Just cos he’s cool and trendy

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But I know he’s a moron

Gordon is a moron

Gordon is a moron

Gordon is a moron

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Jilted John

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This morning I am wearing a black t-shirt with a rainbow coloured molecular structure of the psilocybin zwitterion. This is what it is mostly like at blood pH. In the past I was partial to a few shrooms. When you go to a pharmacy or hospital it attracts attention. I have had a prostate specific antigen {PSA} test done this morning which will advise as to yet another MRI and/or prostate biopsy. There was a black woman in the queue who looked at the molecule, caught my eye and smiled.

I have a series of t-shirts which can catch eyes in hospitals “trust me I am a doctor” , “Schrödinger’s cat is dead / alive” superposition, psilocybin zwitterion and a Breaking Bad Heisenberg t-shirt. In general I don’t wear the Schrödinger t-shirt to hospitals because people see the “dead” word. There is a bit of a sense of humour failure here in France. In the UK these t-shirts usually spark some kind of comment, a bit of banter.

Since I have been here I have been systematically treated as if I am a bit of an “anglais-moron” according to my interpretation of events. I have yet to find a solution to the problem of forewarning people about my background and what I am capable of. It was rarely a problem in the UK because medics ask your profession there. The Imperial word can have effect.

Problem:

“Is there a way to stop being treated a priori as a moron?”

As I was waiting in the phlebotomy vampire queue I heard the dulcet tones of Jilted John in my mind. It occurred to me that I need to get a white t-shirt  printed in large black {WHAM style} letters. On the front it would say, “My name is not Gordon” on the back it would say “I am not a fucking moron”.

In short I don’t think that there is a way especially since I am now a quasi-crippled semi-obese grey of a certain age.

I did think briefly that I should learn sign language. So that I could start signing instead of talking.

Hey ho…

I am pretty sure that it is unwise to wear a psilocybin zwitterion or Breaking Bad t-shirt when going through customs. Though a part of me wants to do the experiment…the results could be uncertain.

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…

Being Off the Map

~ quantumdreamer ~ Leave a comment

In general people have a fairly fixed idea about how the world is, how people behave and what is expected. Which is a nice way of saying that people are prejudiced. The fact that I resigned my job at a decent university without any other, better job to go to, was for many a non sequitur. They could not get their head around it. It did not compute. Some invented some imaginary scandal to explain it, scandal ever being bread and butter in perfidious Albion.

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People do not associate words on perception and meditation with a smoking skinhead bovver-boy. Nor do they image that a piss artist front row rugby player can chant in deep voice. People are set in their ways and their minds are a tad concrete.

I quite like having more than one working explanation for any given situation. I do not have to settle in any absolute way for which one is “right”. Modern education insists on getting the socially accepted “right” answer to exam questions. Students want to learn how to produce and parrot the “right” answer so as to get “A” levels and degrees. People are trained to think in an absolute binary right-wrong way.

The most logical explanation from a socio-political point of view is that I am simply a burn-out who could not hack it with the big boys, the big cheeses.

Another explanation is that I am off the map. I differ significantly in orientation from most. I just don’t fit. I am a square peg which cannot be hammered into a round hole. No drama. People have long been wary of things which have not been mapped out.

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This means that only the foolhardy might seek to touch me with a barge pole. I could be infectious. Association with me could be career threatening.

I have been told by others that people do not want to be seen associating with me in public.

There is no incentive in a “what-is-in-it-for-me” sense to interact with me in any way, whether meaningful or otherwise.

I will likely remain off the map, uncharted.

People can choose to choose whatever it is they want to choose. Their choice is their choice. I have no wish to influence. If they make poor choices that is not my problem. I never advised them and they never sought my advice. People need to learn in whichever way helps them to learn.

This notion of standing back, non-interference, is neutral. It is nether life enhancing nor life destructive. It is an approach which does not make sense to others who wish to interact, to impinge, to affect and to influence. Some cannot resist trying to guide the lives of others and bend them to their will.

Non-interference is a direct consequence of emptiness, lack of will or ambition, is not on the map of modern ways of living. It is not there in “opportunity” land. After all “opportunities” should and must be seized!!

Why?

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Who Do You Take Seriously?

~ quantumdreamer ~ Leave a comment

I’ll start this off with two omissions.

Of late we have heard a lot of the orange-drone-voice-man and his quest for Swedish Krona. The body language of his interaction with Vlad the Impaler has been dissected, no doubt for a fee, in various outlets. Not one of them has thought to mention that Putin is a dan grade judoka. Probably none of these body-language experts have been on the mat. If like Putin you are a lifelong judoka you cannot but help assessing where the centre of gravity of people is. This includes during handshakes. Instinctively one adjusts position and weight to see how another responds. A player of with-caddy-cart 18 hole golf has a different mentality to a judoka. Always there is an inkling of what throw one might attempt. A golfer might not anticipate this. Putin might one day step in for an Ipponseionage and bam…Putin will always be a judoka to the core.

Unless I am mistaken the history of the tribes of Israel as per the old-testament speaks of the wrath and retribution of God. There is Divine intervention on a biblical scale. Right now Israel is going biblical on Gaza. Maybe they have checked this out with God and he is on board, maybe not. If he is unhappy with this bellicose vengeance he might have to intervene. I have not heard this aspect discussed. But large scale divine intervention is a part of their religious hagiography. Maybe God is no longer as important as Netanyahu.

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As an old fart in rural Brittany there is no reason why anyone might take me seriously, even were my observations apt and applicable. This is because I am not famous nor am I a big cheese. I do not have thousands of followers on this internet thingy. If you are a nobody, nobody takes you seriously. You have to have a gang, a club, a peer group or be properly institutionalised. It is possible that people who have been in the same institution for several decades might imagine me the lunatic!! Life has a few quirks.

I don’t think that golfer boy is noting a shift in the way the world is. He is a bit too stuck in the past. He does not have a wide encompassing view of humanity as a whole.

As a rule of thumb people give the most credence to people who are relatively close to them physically, their colleagues, who think in a similar manner. They like what they hear back so they take it seriously. Anyone outside can be seen as misguided, an enemy even. Their views and opinions are not taken seriously, they are discounted. Even people who know intellectually about this prejudice cannot resist it. It is a fundamental flaw of group-think and group-mind. Peer “pressure” is way more powerful than we care to acknowledge. The desire to not rock the boat and to comply is endemic.

“Which idiot would dare to put their head above the parapet?”

If anyone did, they would only be taken seriously posthumously and in retrospect. Genius is most often ascribed posthumously and with hindsight. Rarely is it proclaimed in vivo. Everyone knows this and yet repeats history by non-acceptance and in some cases derision.

Things must not be too different in order to be taken seriously!

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The obvious question here is why do unicorns always point to the right?

Some people do not like those who have a different perspective from them, they resist hearing it and in any way assimilating. They just can’t or won’t take divergent views seriously.

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Do people have to see the world in a similar way to you in order for you to take them seriously?

Must everyone think just like you?

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Shunning Ostracism & Excommunication – Historical Precedent

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I think it both accurate and fair to say that there is much historical precedent for the “human” practices of shunning ostracism  & excommunication. The practices may be official or unofficial, sanctioned by the hierarchy or simply via the social practices unspoken by “they”. Often the shunned is/are way ahead of their times, avantgarde or simply unwilling to submit and comply with some edict or other. Many who refuse to kowtow are ostracised. At the time the ostracism or excommunication is considered thoroughly justified. Imagined divine right is on the side of those doing the exclusions. The hindsight of years or decades looks back in disbelief. “Really? They did that?”

The shunners do not imagine for one moment that shunning is what they are doing, it does not even occur to them and is rarely overtly discussed. There is no thought or empathy for the shunned or ostracised.

“They are not us. We are right!”

Shunning ostracism & excommunication are cult like practices which continue to this day. The threat of these is used to coerce compliance. In Scientology one can even be declared “fair game”! The person ostracised and shunned is the subject of gossip and hearsay, in absentia. No prodigals are allowed.

Someone might read an article on say Galileo in the Inquisition and tut-tut, then talk of Martin Fleischmann or Ranga Dias. One is a hero the others not. If your reputation is tarnished it is very hard to get a research grant funded, the so called objectivity flies out the window. People are way more fickle than they are prepared to admit. Every church, including science, has some form of shunning practice.

Shunning ostracism & excommunication are tools of coercion and manipulation favoured by the status quo, used to assert power over. The fear of these can stifle any dissent. A church “elder” can claim it can prevent some god-fearing person from entering heaven. That is a manipulative mind-fuck of high order.

The historical precedents are extensive and these practises continue to this day, in churches, organisations, political parties, clubs and societies. They even occur in peer groups.

Humans are prone to repeat rather than learn from history. They keep the same old manipulation playbook, Grimoire, and use it over and over…

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Information and Context

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Because people are lazy, they tend to treat information in a monopolar way, without actually acknowledging that. We have monopolar information. They are very confirmation bias oriented. The red caps might hear gospel from the don, the green caps from The Guardian and the anti-brown-Islam-o-phobes might want to hear Uncle Nigel pontificate. People perceive according to how they want to perceive, they believe what they want to hear. Perception is monopolar and not balanced or heteropolar. Bias is pandemic.

Taking a monopolar information source out of a wider context is rarely wise. Newspapers are sold to their biased audience and articles are targeted at that bias. Tell me what I want to hear and I will buy your newspaper, or clickety-click it on line so that you can get advertisement revenue.

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I could say that I have a fair general knowledge. Out of context that is a lie. I would be shit at normal pub quiz general knowledge, because a) I don’t like soccer, b) I have no idea about current soap operas and c) I know nothing about package holiday destinations nor who is hot on social media. I would be a middling team member on a University Challenge quiz team.

I can say with a fair degree of confidence that I understand how academic science is enacted and reported. I may be rusty on nuance, but I have a good gist. I can read a Nature article and know to what extent I understand and if there are gaps in understanding which I might need to follow up on. If I watch a video on YouTube, I know that it is almost always surface and that people have a click generating agenda. Pass the Saxa salt, please.

I have read widely in the esoteric – occult – new age bookshelves of the library, the one with actual books in not on-line. I have intellectual access to that context something your common or garden scientist will not have. Many so-called scientists are disproportionately fearful of being labelled “whacko”. The gossip around “cold-fusion” is exemplar. Yet I have discussed over a cigarette on the steps of the Chemistry Department at Imperial College with a practising homeopath and staff member. We talked and speculated on quantum effects in water memory. Homeopathy is derided by many a sceptic yet demonstrably erudite scientist.

People are scared of the occult. It actually means “difficult to see” as in “an occult fracture of the T3 vertebra”. It does not mean that I am going to bite the head off a bat, spit blood to anoint the bone of goat and point that at you whilst chanting incantations for your demise.

People can and do get the wrong end of the stick.

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It is possibly not illegal to file a patent application on “Quantum Telepathy” using the name Whacko McNutjob at the Intellectual Property Office in Newport, less eye catching perhaps at the European Patent Office unless the examiner was a Brit. One could ascertain if there was prejudice against Nut-jobs. We could define a new term, nutjobphobic.

I am confident that I can write an application of sufficient plausibility. I have three granted patents already.

People can over and misinterpret just about anything which they read on the internet. Rarely do they check understanding nor can they be arsed to read around or do further research. The gospel according to SEO optimized Google search returns is a highly skewed and paid for version. People forget and rely.

The informational fodder is not always the best fully nutritional meal for an avid clicker.

How We Are Perceived…

~ quantumdreamer ~ Leave a comment

…never look a gift horse in the mouth

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I’ll speculate that there is a good chance that I might be perceived as a quasi-Jurassic old fart.

The estate agent recently said that we had a lot of DVDs just like his parents. I do not know most of the protagonists in Wimbledon, I have no idea what music “stars” are popular with the exception of Taylor Swift, on celeb Goggle Box I have no idea who some of them are and I could not name more than a few of the Labour party cabinet. I recognise a few players in the England cricket team and am perhaps the most up to date with northern hemisphere rugby. I do not use a smart ‘phone and have never done “face time”.

Science fiction can predict with sometimes uncanny accuracy future trends. The detailed match is not exact but the scoping predictive. We have Orwell’s 1984 and now webcams and microphones driven by fibre broadband in most homes. The Trumpian “ministry of truth” publishes edicts to millions over the internet. The propaganda wars are on. We have the “new-speak” of wokeism and offence at pronoun use.

In the film “Logan’s Run” the young and the beautiful have an expiry date before they go to “Dignitas” for recycling. When the time comes, they are expunged. Everyone must be young and sexy and beautiful. Fat crippled old men are not allowed. Books are an antique artefact of the past.

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Now you can get Turkey teeth, a Brazilian bum lift, liposuction, a bionic penis and a designer vagina. You can get lip filler so that you look like a pollock who has bitten a stinging jellyfish and get plastic bags full of chemicals sewn into your tits. You can take weight loss drugs instead of heroin to lose weight. And of course you can buy Sino-Mexican fentanyl at bargain basement prices for a few pesos.

Not all “progress” is uplifting or good.

There is a tendency to throw the baby out with the bath water.

The summer of 2003 was pivotal for me. I had just gotten divorced and went on a PADI advanced open water diving course, on my own, at Sharm El-Sheikh. I was partnered with a young woman who was intelligent and a cardio-fit dentist. She was also a fairly high level rower, only a little younger than me. She was on holiday with others of the rowing “Henley” set and there was some talk about some of them preparing for Olympics. She represented two things I did not understand, the choice of dentistry as a profession and competing in rowing. I could not and still cannot understand dentistry as a profession. Yes, it relieves pain and is financially viable but isn’t it a tad repetitive and boring.

We got on fairly well and worked OK as a team. We were both a bit anxious. It turned out that she was single and looking to change that. I understood that she was attractive according to how these things are perceived. I saw her mostly as my diving partner. She talked a lot. Then one day on the bus she looked at my recent root canal work, which was not up to scratch according to her professional opinion. I knew at that moment her orientation towards me had changed from mild interest to “no, this geezer has bad teeth”. There was a slight cooling on her part. I had been scratched off a mental list.

When we finished the course, I climbed Mount Sinai on the night before my birthday and saw dawn of my birthday atop said hill. It was for me a truly transcendent experience. Something very powerful started that day and I was “off my trolly” for most of the journey back to London.

In this inane example she looked in my mouth and did not like what she saw. A perception was based on a single variable. It was a show stopper for her.

Nowadays where everybody has to be plastic-fantastic with their own PR and propaganda anti-social media platforms it is difficult to find a non-embellished reality. The drive to subscribe and adhere to a faux-perfection is said to be a driver for poor mental health. It is difficult to know who or what we really are or may be.

Cosmetically my appearance to the young is not appealing. I have yellowing teeth with several gaps. I am portly and hirsute. My below belt grandpa-garden is untended. I have not had a crack back and sack, ever. My teeth, which remain, are my own. There is no dental mortgage. I do not dress fashionably and I waddle when I walk, like a duck. I have never had an umbilical cord to my iPhone or Galaxy. If I were to attempt to type a text it would be snail pace and error strewn. I am a bumpkin, a yokel even pikey. I have zero power or kudos by association

I am in a package which would be unappealing, no doubt some might seek to educate me and bring me up to date. Were I to have things to share and impart, many would not be able to see past the gift wrap.

“What can that crippled old man with gappy yellow teeth possibly have to offer me? He is such a success, he has done so very well for himself, not.”

How we are perceived may differ substantially from how we actually are. People can squander opportunity based on prejudice about how things ought to be…

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…beware of Greeks bearing gifts.

Social Discomfort – Social Anxiety Disorder

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I think it fair to suggest that social discomfort is a pillar of comedy. We all find it funny if sometimes uncomfortable.

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The more uptight, pompous and status oriented one is the more likely one is to experience social discomfort. Heaven forbid that someone do something inconsistent with their social position, something gauche, something off trend. A pleb should kneel and kotow. They must know and accept their place.

At the Babraham Institute once, one Ph.D. student wrote in the feedback for a course that I gave, that it was unprofessional for me to say that my former employers, Imperial College, were a cold efficiency employer. They were not a hugs kisses and birthday cake bunch. He felt perhaps that I was slagging them off. Though many would have been happy to be called cool {cold} and efficient, competitive and perhaps ruthless. As a young man he had a lot to learn about reality and maybe his idealism would soon be tarnished.

Psychologists have a fundamental assumption, that people like to socialise and that they SHOULD do so. It underpins much psychological diagnoses according to my non-erudite and hence inexpert eye. It is clear to me that my unwillingness to play the social game has impacted on my career advancement. One could say that socialisation is a societal pre-requisite for promotion, a needed social skill.

On the DSM-5 social anxiety scale one is asked if one avoids social contacts, extensively prepares for them and self-medicates in order to face them, the so-called Dutch courage. It suggests that one is fearful of social situations. Maybe one simply does not like them and therefore avoids them {like the plague}. It is not uncommon for people to get pissed, smoke weed and snort Charlie in social situations.

Does that make them psychologically ill and diagnosable?

I’ll postulate.

Modern psychological wisdom is prejudiced against introverts and introversion. Such behaviours are seen as faulty and in need of fixing.

As usual it is the extroverts who dominate the “air time” or soap box.

In terms of the anxiety disorder, I meet the avoidance criteria but not the fear.

Is it bad not to want to surround yourself with gobshites arseholes and knobheads? To not share a finger buffet and talk endless shit with them?

Why not avoid something that you do not enjoy?

This kind of avoiding seem pretty darned sane to me.


In general I dial back on the boffinaciousness because it causes social discomfort and nobody likes a know-it-all. Which means that you often have to wait for people to catch up. I used to self-handicap with a lot of weed, which also enhances patience in all areas apart from munchies.

In France some are seemingly embarrassed to speak poor English, where no English are embarrassed with their appalling French. It is weird. Is it about control? There is social discomfort. They do not slow down {in French} and talk to you like a moron as is common {in English} in the UK. I sense a discomfort.

I went to see the zebra at the zoo.

I’ll postulate further.

Social discomfort and the fear thereof is very limiting and causes many problems. Things that need to be broached and discussed are avoided in case of social awkwardness occurring.

Fear of loss of face {FOLOF} is almost as big as fear of missing out {FOMO}.

Even though I am very introverted I have good interpersonal skills as a part of my chameleon toolkit. Strangely the most important social skill of all is being able to listen. It puts people at ease.

Is being uncomfortable with BS a clinically diagnostic malady? This is a social discomfort but not one of awkwardness of embarrassment, simply preference

Is there a DSM-5 criteria list for the Avoidance of Bull Shit Personality Disorder?

Do we need to train people to better accept tolerate and otherwise believe bull shit?

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