Day: December 5, 2016
Today something wonderful happened
I won’t say what it is except it involves an old friend who is in an agonising situation, 2 mobile phones and some fingers.And some courage.The situation cannot be changed but all else has.Happiness outweighs the grief
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You reached out your hand
You reached out your hand
Like a shipwrecked sailor on the sands
And all I did was to take hold of you.
I saw your brown fists
And the cut on your lips
I wanted to warm all that cold out of you
I sang the old song
Forget who was wrong
I’ll tell all the ones not told by you
You reached out again
Forgetting your own pain
Every word is a piece of gold, just for you
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To make my soul ring like a bell
I want a coat of cherry red
To help me now the summer’s dead
I want a coat of teal as well
To make my soul ring like a bell
Our colours are by nature taught
And in a mix,by artist’s caught
Some wear blue to match their eyes
And some like black to match their sighs.
Women have a privilege
For bright as flowers we can dress
To cheer the men as they pass by,
Or in a poppy meadow lie.
While men must look like office clerks
Or nasty dogs that bite and bark
But for your lady why not buy
A raincoat blue like Lenny cried?
We are part of the whole world
So like flowers we unfurl
Let us enjoy loving all
Until we hear the final knell
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There is an urgent need for deep attention to the experience and ideas of others
In recent years a number of studies have linked reading fiction, in particular, to an increased capacity for empathy, and I can think of no quality more necessary at the present moment than empathy. There is an urgent need for deep attention to the experience and ideas of others.
Eliot Twigman at Poets and Writers
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On the right-wing track
Oh,sun and moon, what do you think?
No clouds and now the sky ‘s dark pink
The stems of leafless shrubs are red
The sun is peering through a chink
No husband by me now to wink
Nor kiss me when we go to bed
No clouds and now the sky ‘s dark pink
No man to soothe me with a drink
No comfort for the heart that’s bled.
The sun’s still peering through a chink
The trash collectors lorries clank
No man will recall aught I’ve said
No clouds ,no sun, the sky ‘s dark pink
I drove up to the bottle bank
But have few beer cans since he’s dead
The sun’s still watching through that chink
Time to go where dreams are shed.
Oh, gambol nightly round my bed!
Oh , and now the sky ‘s dark pink
The sun and moon speak through the chink
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Beginning to understand my friend
What I can see from what I wrote earlier is that this lady holds women’s beauty in high esteem.And she is relating to me as I was 40 years ago when I was quite attractive.She fondled my hair when she came to pick me up in her car.She admired my curls [ where are tbey?] I think getting male attaention is her highest priority and she thinks I am so beautiful that I need to be very wary as she said
“Men will be running after you now you are single again.”
So far I have not noticed any such men.And, since I limp, they would not need to run.I think myse;f men can see when one is sad and they stay away unless they are already friends.
As for my writing, she has a degree in English and French so she knows more than I do.But since I love to write and don’t plan to try to make mo ney,does it matter if I write mediocre poetry?
If she now thinks my poetry is better than it was 5 years dgo ,she may be envious.I know that is a very painful state of mind.
We don’t know most of our readers so who knows what their motives are? But for sure they would not come here for sexual thrills !
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Help
“What we would ideally need is a guardian angel who can pause the present and carry our partners back to another time and place, to the moment when the neurotic defence that we are projecting originated. They’d be able to see the unreliable parents, the chaotic house, the loving but neglectful father, the fashion-obsessed mother etc. – and might be appropriately moved by what we had to cope with before we knew how to.”
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Are we hard to live with?
https://thephilosophersmail.com/relationships/how-projection-makes-you-hard-to-live-with/
“The unconscious mind is slow to realise that things have changed in the outer world but sadly quick to mistake one person for another, seeming to judge only by crude correspondences; ‘someone we love’ or ‘a person coming to our party’ appears to be enough to confuse us.
Because projection happens without us knowing it, we generally can’t explain why we are behaving as we are. We carry years behind us that have no discernible shape, which we have forgotten about and which we aren’t in a position to talk others through in a manner that would win us sympathy and understanding. We just come across as mean or mad. What we would ideally need is a guardian angel who can pause the present and carry our partners back to another time and place, to the moment when the neurotic defence that we are projecting originated. They’d be able to see the unreliable parents, the chaotic house, the loving but neglectful father, the fashion-obsessed mother etc. – and might be appropriately moved by what we had to cope with before we knew how to.”
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Friends who are enemies?
Before adding to my previous thoughts about a friend saying a rather unpleasant thing about my blog,I feel I should tell people to trust their instincts.After the event I described I realised I had always felt uncomfortable when alone with her but I had ignored this feeling.So maybe we should listen to our hearts when considering becoming a friend to a new person.See whether they respect us;see if they ask intrusive questions or listen to how they discuss other people.If they always describe other friends in a perjorative way that might be a warning
After I wrote about whether I could continue to be a friend to someone who had said disgusting ,hurtful things to me and also despised my poetry ,I realised that the decision would be different if it were a member of my own family or a close friend I saw regularly.
In that case I would probably know the person more thoroughly and perhaps be able to guess why they wanted to warn me or hurt me.I might just dismiss it.
Someone might say,You need to know what men are really like.However authors who write books often have their photo on the dust jacket somewhere.And is it true anyway that men would visit my blog just to be thrilled by my face? It seems unlikely.
And if it were someone I saw every week I might guess they had a problem on their mind.I might know what it was and hence be able to understand.I used to lived near this lady ; for many years we have lived at a distance and only spoken on the phone.I thought I knew her problems in life which are quite serious.But if she were overwhelmed all of a sudden and came out with this it would seem more obvious to me.She had advised me 5 years ago to stop writing which I ignored.It is very sad but I feel I am more threatened by her tham anyone else.
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What is Fascism?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fascism
“Fascists believe that liberal democracy is obsolete, and they regard the complete mobilization of society under a totalitarian one-party state as necessary to prepare a nation for armed conflict and to respond effectively to economic difficulties.[7] Such a state is led by a strong leader—such as a dictator and a martial government composed of the members of the governing fascist party—to forge national unity and maintain a stable and orderly society.[7] Fascism rejects assertions that violence is automatically negative in nature, and views political violence, war, and imperialism as means that can achieve national rejuvenation.[8][9][10][11] Fascists advocate a mixed economy, with the principal goal of achieving autarky through protectionist and interventionist economic policies.[12]“
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Unskilled and unaware of it: how difficulties in recognizing one’s own incompetence lead to inflated self-assessments.
J Pers Soc Psychol. 1999
Abstract
People tend to hold overly favourable views of their abilities in many social and intellectual domains. The authors suggest that this overestimation occurs, in part, because people who are unskilled in these domains suffer a dual burden: Not only do these people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it. Across 4 studies, the authors found that participants scoring in the bottom quartile on tests of humor, grammar, and logic grossly overestimated their test performance and ability. Although their test scores put them in the 12th percentile, they estimated themselves to be in the 62nd. Several analyses linked this miscalibration to deficits in metacognitive skill, or the capacity to distinguish accuracy from error. Paradoxically, improving the skills of participants, and thus increasing their metacognitive competence, helped them recognize the limitations of their abilities.
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Do we know how ignorant we are?
Quote:
Anyone with more than a passing interest in psychology has surely heard, by now, of the Dunning-Kruger effect – the cognitive bias whereby incompetent people are so incompetent they don’t realise how incompetent they are. (The classic case involved a bank robber who was stunned to be caught; he’d assumed that smearing his face with lemon juice would render him invisible to security cameras.) This is overconfidence of an especially scary kind, because it’s not just a case of talented people exaggerating their talents, but of the untalented feeling disproportionately talented – because they’re untalented. The phenomenon is presumably as old as humanity, but recently, watching and reading the news on both sides of the Atlantic, it’s hard to shake the sense that we’re crossing some kind of threshold. Historians of the future may refer to ours as the Dunning-Kruger era.
The most obvious case, it goes without saying, is that of the proto-fascist misogynist who’s running (at the time of writing, anyway) for president of the United States. It’s not simply that he wouldn’t know how to govern, but that he doesn’t know he wouldn’t know. The British politicians so breezily confident they could handle the results of a Brexit referendum – from Cameron to Gove and Johnson to May – would also seem to fit the bill. But the greatest hazard, with Dunning-Kruger, is imagining it can’t apply to you. (That’s kind of the point of it, after all.) So all of us who thought Brexit or Donald Trump’s nomination impossible must likewise ask ourselves: were we so ill-informed about the world outside our bubbles that this actually boosted our confidence in our judgments
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Can we know ourselves well enough to know why we do bad things?
I was thinking briefly about the time after my spouse died.A so called friend took me out for lunch[ She had not met us for several years] and then while eating she said that men would only come to my blog to wank themselves off onto my photo/avatar.They did not come to read my poetry.She told me it was no good, anyway!!
I almost asked her if they would print off the photo first!As otherwise what they did might damage their laptop… a serious consideration.
[Can you clean my laptop,please? ]The mind boggles.
Actually, it is very insulting to men to say things ike that.
I am no longer interested in that topic which is so ludicrous it is funny/laughable.What does INTEREST me is this
Freud and others developed the notion of the UNCONSCIOUS.This seems to indicate that we cannot know ourselves very well.We tend to block out anything which would disturb our self image.Either by dreams,reflections and observing our actions, talking to close friends we may get to know the bad side of our nature somewhat better.It may not even be so bad.
For example despite teaching maths in Universities I have no confidence in my own ability.That is,I irrationally believe something untrue.So when my husband wanted me to buy a computer I refused as I believed I would not be able to learn how to use it.
Why I am like this I don’t know.I have to force myself to do things and as you see I did get a computer.So if people meet me and know my past they probably believe I am brilliantly clever and maybe rather proud so they may be put off.Once they meet me they see I am not like that.After all however bright a maths teacher is there are hundreds of people who do research that few other humans can understand.[That may have bad consequences.Without algebra we would have no atomic weapons.]
What I really want to learn is whether we can forgive someone who wounds us deeply.This lady who hurt me rang me later to ask how I was.She then said ot was cruel and she DID NOT KNOW why she had said it.She didn’t apologise.Surely she must have some idea!It was a shock at such a time
If she had known herself enough to say she was jealous ,felt sick,.. she envied my long marriage, my brain,she was feeling unwell, she was irritated by me in some way then I would have accepted our friendship should continue even without any apology.
But if she can be so hurtful to an old friend without knowing why then she is dangerous.I don’t condemn her but her aggression is out of her control.
As I said,it was almost funny.Men or women can find many porn sites so I am told.Or they can look at women’s lingerie on line.And as I still then had an obvious large scar on my face it indicated to me she was not really looking at me as I am now .
I wonder though, is it right to reject somebody because they don’t know why they do nasty things? Children do bad things a lot but we expect them to change as they mature.They learn to share toys for example.We don’t condemn them but we try to help them learn top get on with others.Of course some children are badly parented.
Could my friend’s utterance indicate poor parenting? Could it indicate a mental health issue? I was unable to offer her anything unless she could reveal why she said it.Maybe I should be able to guess…..?
How my heart sings 