Totally great post on Takimag today about Roger Stone.
Which nicely illustrates the terrible state of the nation.
I recommend it to everyone. Anyone.
Literary Criticism
What’s This Mean?
Nothing can please many, and please long, but just representations of general nature. Particular manners can be known to few, and therefore few only can judge how nearly they are copied. The irregular combinations of fanciful invention may delight awhile, by that novelty of which the common satiety of life sends us all in quest: but the pleasures of sudden wonder are soon exhausted, and the mind can only repose on the stability of truth.
Samuel Johnson. ‘Preface to Shakespeare’.
This is quoted by Christopher De Groot in a recent Takimag post as “..the high point of literary criticism; “
I can’t even understand it. Makes me look pretty dumb then, doesn’t it? If that’s a high point in literary criticism I suppose it’d go without saying that itself it would be pretty literary – and I’d assume ‘literary’ to presuppose intelligible….
Best I can make of it is that general truthful things are the most lasting pleasures.
Well that would seem to go without saying.
But I will admit it perhaps does need some saying. In a culture devoted to excited stimulation perhaps many forget that a pleasant ordinary life is in fact ‘as good as it gets’.
So okay, because many of us have lost our way perhaps it needs saying. But that makes it the high point of literary criticism?
I don’t get it.
Proportionate Representation Fallacy
Today it is just about axiomatic that Boardrooms and Committees, etc, should always have the same proportion of women to the whole in them as exists in the wider population.
Without it they are supposed not to be represented.
This is a fallacy. A lie.
They are not represented ‘by a woman’ is the fact. But that’s as far as it goes.
It is altogether too easy to slip into thinking this means they are not represented at all. I thought this myself. Or, rather, I didn’t think. I just accepted it.
But it is the purest nonsense. Sloppy thinking of the first order.
Wherever you get group representation by one individual you get a sex being represented by someone not of that sex.
It is the norm. Always has been.
Further sloppy thinking assumes that having a female on the board means that women are now represented.
Howso? That particular woman is represented and that may well be as far as it goes. No other woman in the world may be represented.
To be ‘represented’ means to have your own desires, aims, perception of life manifest in that arena.
There’s positively no guarantee whatever that any single woman can or does represent all women.
And it is quite clear that often she doesn’t.
Case in point: Mother Theresa. How about if you had Mother Theresa on the board as a representative of women? As she virtually was in the halls of the church and allied politics.
How many women did she represent?
That she denied any right to contraception and was majorly instrumental in the extended suffering and even death of thousands of women who’d have happily, keenly, taken abortion if they could have got it is undeniable.
Undeniable. She’d to this day claim it was a virtuous stance, a virtuous act.
So having a female body on the board doesn’t necessarily mean you have ‘female representation’.
It is all just simply too silly to be taken seriously and yet that is what our world is doing today: taking this edict, this farcical idea, seriously, to the point of making laws about it. Forcing people to structure their boardrooms this way.
And what’s the final idiocy, the final farce, the final irony?
Well this: this concept, this push, is promoted by the very people who deny you can have any sexes: that outlaw ‘men only’ and ‘women only’ toilets, that have in some insance parts of the USA made it illegal to call males ‘men’ and females ‘women’, and so on…
Those who demand the board be proportionately male and female deny there are any males and females (except, of course, on the whim of the moment when you suddenly decide you feel all ‘feminine’ or ‘masculine’).
Madness.
It is a manifestation of the popularity of a new freedom found. A new game that excites, exhilarates, empowers and can be played without any skills, training, effort, qualifications or repercussions:
It doesn’t have a name that I know of. Whinge, whine and demand maybe it should be called.
For to play it that’s all you have to do . Whinge, whine and demand.
With one little proviso: you always do it in the name of some minority and/or women.
Why does it work?
Ahh. Now that’s the real story. Never looked at. ..
Are Solicitors Fair Dink? $700 For a $50 Job?
How fair dink are solicitors?
They’d have a duty of care wouldn’t they? Of course. It is a legal requirement.
They’d know that. They are solicitors. Yet they don’t seem to give a damn.
How about charging $700 for a job you can do yourself for $50?
And a job that in the end the person did do themselves?
That is:
It’s a divorce application. The person is very distraught. As some tend to be when in such a scene. Divorces are very stressful aren’t they?
So because of the stresses and strains they give up trying to talk to their partner where they’re ostensibly going to file a joint application and have a peaceful, amicable arrangement, and in distress and turmoil go to a solicitor for help with filing this divorce application.
Now we are not talking the government fee here in this ‘$50’ cost estimate. No. That’s $900 and has to be paid whichever way you go. Tax. You know how it is.
No. But electronic filing of an application, via their website (the govt), from your desktop, at home, costs you maybe $50 all up. For printing out things, for going to get signatures witnessed and whatever.. coffee, croissants…
$50.
So this solicitor quotes this lady $800 (plus the govt $900) and she accepts.
And then she gives the solicitor two affidavits. Completed. Signed. Witnessed.
Being virtually all that is needed for the application actually. The total thing requires an affidavit each from the joint applicants and then signed, witnessed actual application.
Three pieces of paper.
Two of them – the most labour intensive, the most difficult to obtain, this lady gives to the solicitor as a done thing.
Accepts to use the solicitor’s services, gives the documents, forks out money as a retainer and leaves.
And then at home a couple of days later has a reconciliation to some extent with the partner and they decide to continue doing the thing themselves at home.
In the interim the solicitor has rung the partner and asked them to come into the office to sign something. And he declines. So that stops everything there as far as the solicitor is concerned.
So after the ‘reconciliation’ the lady goes back to the solicitor and says she’ll no longer need their services how about returning the documents and most of the money.
Okay says the solicitor. That’ll be $700.
Quoted $800 for the whole job. Did none of it. Demanded $700.
Which shocked and distressed this lady a great deal.
The parties concerned did the job at home in a few minutes at a cost of less than $50.
The demand – in fact it was more than a demand as the solicitor already had the money and wouldn’t return it so it was an appropriation. I’d call it a theft.
Now where is the ‘duty of care’ ? Where has the care gone? There’s evident distress in the first place. There’s the evident exorbitant cost of solicitors. There’s the obvious availability of the govt. DIY online app. There’s the obvious minor drama just blown up that can be reasonably expected to die down and allow further joint work towards the end as in fact happened.
Due care would call for the solicitor to consider all of this and carefully inform the lady. In effect to warn the lady she was walking unnecessarily into a place of potential harm – as it turned out real harm.
Was the lady, for instance, aware that her initial ‘consultation’ with the solicitor had cost her in the solicitor’s estimate nearly $300 ? Just to talk and explain.
I will wager the lady would expect this initial visit to be virtually non-accountable, but just the very beginning of everything.. ‘start now’ when she left the place so to speak.
What can we add to this? How about t his: the lady was Asian with a poor command of technical, legal, bureaucratic English.
Distressed with her home life, distressed to be alone in a foreign country, distressed to be swimming in a technical sea she couldn’t understand.
It is very true that the lady could have proceeded with an application online by herself easily enough. But such was her naivety in such matters, her phobia of them, that she turned away from that and sought help from a solicitor.
A professional person with a duty of care.
Whose obvious first course should have been to direct to counselling we’d think, obviously. A ‘cooling off’ period at the very least. A handing over of a piece of paper spelling it all out at the very, very least.
But no. She was immediately, there and then, fleeced of $300.
And a job quoted at $800 that comprised mainly of three pieces of paper had none of those pieces of paper processed by the solicitor yet she charged $700 !
How proud is the Legal Profession of this?
The Legal Profession often gets away with no mention of it; to such an extent that it probably even slips the public mind, they give it no thought, they actually forget it, but the fact is the Legal Profession is there to help people.
It has supposedly got the interests of the public, the nation, the individuals with which it deals at heart.
There’s a convenient canard emanating from the USA recent decades where they love to denigrate all law breakers as ‘scum’ and ‘lowlifes’ etc. that the Legal Profession is there merely to ‘uphold the law’.
No. It is there to help people. If it doesn’t help people we don’t need it or want it.
In fact there is no contradiction. There should be no contradictions. All our Laws are meant to Help People.
And there’s a Law that applies in this case and it is the Law of Duty of Care.
Where was their Care?
And where was their avarice and lack of care?