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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.

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. ..

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?

Mind Is a Blank…

A couple of minutes ago I had something in mind that made me think I should immediately post it on the web, it was so important…

Now I can’t remember what it was.

And now I come here I see I haven’t been here since April. 2019. At least it was 2019 and not 2018 or earlier.

And I see the typeface, at least on this old monitor of mine, is awful.

Ah well, you get that.

And I came h ere via ‘abrogard’s blog’ – googled. My old blog. It is still there. But viewable only. It doesn’t ‘work’.

Instead there’s a new place as a ‘continuance’ maybe. At ‘blogger.com’ . But it only has two posts on it.

So, in short, my blogging history is screwed.

Well that ‘s to be expected when you’re getting it all for free. At the beginning of new technology.

Isn’t it?

And the thing is what’s happening, has happened, to me is equally likely to happen to our whole nation.

That’s how vulnerable we are.

And growing more vulnerable day by day.

It seems. From where I’m standing. But I know little. Let’s hope it’s better than that.

So

Or just terribly bad reporting?

Here is an excerpt from David Cole’s post on Takimag April 2, 2019:

Muslim terrorists murdered twenty Filipino Christians as they attended services in their church two months ago, and do you recall the response from local Muslim leaders? Was it “We must address the anti-Christian bigotry in our community?” Or “We must stand in solidarity with our Christian countrymen?” Nope. It was “Well, to stop us from killing more Christians, let us carve a Muslim-only autonomous region in the country.” That’s literally like whites responding to the New Zealand massacre by saying, “Well, the solution is to keep New Zealand white and Christian. If we don’t have to mix, we won’t have any more race- or religion-based mass shootings.”

How do you think the media would have responded to that? Or the U.N.? Or most Western politicians? But in fact, the world response (and the response from media organs like CNN and the BBC) to the Muzz demand was essentially “Yes! Yes! Give them an autonomous region, so that they needn’t mix with those damn Christians.”

This is a point that bears repeating: A white Christian kills a bunch of Muslims in New Zealand, and the response is “More diversity! More mixing! Force them damn intolerant whiteys to get along, or jail their asses as racists.” Muslims in the Philippines massacre a bunch of Christians, and the response is “Let the Muslims be autonomous! Let them live free of mixing, free of diversity! Let them never have to see another Christian again!”

That was it.

What can I add? Nothing. It leaves one speechless.

This new law of Morrison’s strikes me as all wrong. The problem is the action, not the photographing of it.

Morrison’s law: if we can’t see horrible things photographed by the perpetrator then why can we see imitations of them, lifelike depictions of them, movies of them, which certainly will be made, all the more certainly after this law?

This muting of the press, of freedom of information, this censoring of free speech in the name of delicate sensibilities (that is the rationale, is it?) means that if some copper accidentally films his brutality then we can’t see it? It protects him? Or the state troopers in some brutal regime? They are protected from publicity?

This would mean all Daesh videos are banned? So that we don’t know what they’re doing?

And if our own governments start doing these things (as we’ve seen in recent years they actually do.. ) then we’ll be denied the sight of it?

These things can only be seen if someone else sees/films it or it is a movie depiction? i.e. the real truth, the facts, must be avoided, are legally not permitted?

There’s another rationale: to remove the supposed incentive for imitators to do these same horrible things in order to get a viral movie.

A long bow to think this law would stop that. A long bow. I safely predict it will have no such effect.

And I predict it will have the effect of deepening the mistrust and cynicism of the people against their governments.

Even mooting the idea is enough to deepen cynicism, for isn’t it obviously a cheap, band wagon riding, poorly thought out and overtly destructive of basic rights measure?

That totally avoids the real problem, a typical masterpiece of misdirection: the problem is the madness of the attack, the killing.

And the root of that madness is the madness of fundamentalist Muslims.

And the root of that madness is the madness of their doctrine, the terrible situations in their homelands, the madness brought about by the interference of the west in their homelands and the terrible examples put before them by the insane shooters in the USA – themselves made insane by the insane govt of the USA. which does things like this morrison thing and even worse.

Who can respect government? Or the craven, sheepish, media?

The radio – Radio National, Australia – is full of hysterical talk about ‘Islamophobia’ in the wake of the killings in New Zealand where some nutter blew up a Mosque, I think.

So they seek the origins of ‘Islamophobia’. They look for someone, something to blame.

Madness. Has all reason been declared out of bounds? The western world has gone completely nuts. According to what I read in the columns of Takimag, the online magazine, for instance. And numerous other places you get the same total irrationality reported.

The origins of Islamophobia are in thousands of Islamists cutting the heads off innocent people in public. The origins of Islamophobia are in the deaths of thousands of innocent people by terrorist attacks by Islamic groups.

Pointless to labour the point. One does. One tries to lay out point after point after point, proof after proof after proof, example after example….

But it is pointless. Those with rationality and eyes to see, ears to hear, see and hear quickly. The rest never will. Never. They’re coming from some other angle, some other logic, some other headspace, some other world.

The origins of Islamophobia are in Islam.

In the actions of those who profess the religion.

In what the writings of the religion turn out to be on investigation.

In the overt manifestations of the religion: shrouding women in black, making them slaves.

In the representation of Islam presented by Islamic states such as Saudi Arabia.

There’s the origins of Islamophobia.

It should be used as a sanity check. An intelligence test or something.

Those who cannot see it are mad, deficient in some way.

I wonder why they have to desperately search for the black box when a plane goes down shortly after leaving an airport?

Because I’m thinking that all take offs could have/should have their black box information automatically recorded at the airport.

It could be broadcast from the airplane for the first ten or fifteen minutes of the flight.

Along with a video of the thing while in view – i don’t know how long that is but video as well as possible until well clear of the airport.

I just posted this on Radio National Facebook Page. I’d like the whole world to read it and get back to me. How many millions of us feel the same? Many, I think. There’s blogs everywhere with people trying to give us the benefit of their best deliberations. Too many. Far too many. A hubbub a clamour a deafening chaotic tumult of noises.

Well here’s my contribution, nevertheless:

I think it would be nice if we got some real coverage of the brexit thing.

Like what ‘deals’ are actually in question?

All I’ve heard about is the Ireland thing.

By now I”d expect to be au fait with all the major ‘deals’ ( or existing arrangements) that will suddenly terminate at the end of March and what the significance of those terminations will be.

Most I’ve heard is of shipments on the way to England not knowing what forms they are going to have to fill in when they get there.

Come on. Isn’t it all largely about tariffs and free trade? I don’t know but isn’t that it? Well then what are the major tariff agreements that will suddenly disappear at the end of March if there is no agreement?

And so on. A run down on what products will be effected and how.

And work – the freedom to work and live in Europe for the poms. Well what happens at the end of March? Suddenly thousands of them lose their jobs? Have to suddenly go back to U.K. ? What?

All that sort of stuff. Elementary. Rudimentary you’d think. Stuff fit to serve up to simpletons such as I, but I get nothing, we get nothing.

Then let’s get a little more sophisticated. The UK and Europe are really merely theatres of action for the money manipulators, the banks, the super rich, etc… We all know that, don’t we? By now?

Well what deals are worrying them? I believe a major part of the U.K.’s GDP nowadays comes from the financial sector and that’s because it is a major world financial centre.

i.e. Money is big deal. Money is probably what it is all about at bottom.

So how about some investigative reporting and tell us how the City sees the whole thing. They’re too smart to be caught with their pants down.

There’s nothing at all happens, even world wars, that they don’t make a dollard or a trillion from. So what are they doing while the clowns in parliament and our clown journalists are occupying themselves with these shallow discussions?

What are they up to? There’s the real interesting story.

There’s the real life blood and centre and backbone of England. In the City.

I don’t even know what factors of a Brexit might effect them. Maybe none. In which case the whole Brexit thing is a storm in a teacup.

But if there are some factors then what are they and what are they doing about them?

We all should know – but don’t – that the EU is mainly a de facto state of thousands of unelected bureaucrats waxing fat and powerful whilst leeching off the populace.

That’s just a simple fact. Entertaining to start quantifying and identifying all of them and contemplating their discomfiture when their sinecures suddenly disappear, wouldn’t it be?

We don’t want to hurt the children do we? No.

Unlike Daesh which couldn’t give a damn or even enjoyed hurting them.

So here’s an idea: Send the women and their children to any Muslim country that will take them.

Any.

And if none will take them then ploy number two:

They are ‘paraded’ conspicuously (the women, not the kids) on t.v., facebook, newsreel movies, whatever, wherever and they publicly describe the situation

‘No Muslim nation will take us in, despite the holy words of the prophet, etc. etc.’

And they publicly describe the atrocities of Daesh that they and/or their partners witnessed and/or participated in.

And they pubicly describe the atrocities of Daesh that they didn’t participate in but which Daesh revelled in.

And they describe the overthrow of Daesh.

And they tell renounce wholeheartedly the Muslim faith. They denounce the nonsense of the Koran etc. using the above mentioned facts as support and reasons for their change of heart.

And they make public avowal of wholehearted commitment to the Christian way of life that Australia supports and to Australia and its people (note, I did not say to ‘christianity’ as a religion – I said the ‘christian way of life’ which essentially simply means the ‘christian values’ respect for fellow man, etc… ).

And they talk for five non stop minutes telling us how sorry they are for everything that has been done to indivuals and nations by those sick dogs the Daesh.

And failing that, if they won’t agree to that then

Ploy 3:

Send them to Manus Island. NOT Manus Island as practiced by our government to this day but Manus Island with an Australian Forces Hospital Ship moored offshore to attend continually to medical needs.

IF they won’t accept that then:

Ploy 4:

We take the children from them, sorry, but unavoidable it seems so get it in perspective, kids are being taken from their parents all over the place all the time with far less justification – and put the parents, or ‘parent’ these are just women? -on a boat (fairly big boat, trawler size say ) and take it to within the territorial waters of Indonesia, say, and leave them there. Or outside the Territorial waters of anyone.

Anyway, point is, make them into ‘boat people’.

Any of the above options would put them in a better place than they’re in now.

I commend them to you.