“Steve Pinker is wrong”

Epimedium setosum_18-2.jpghttps://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/mar/13/john-gray-steven-pinker-wrong-violence-war-declining

 

“Co-authoring an article with Pinker in the New York Times (“War Really Is Going Out of Style”), the scholar of international relations Joshua L Goldstein presented a similar view in Winning the War on War: the Decline of Armed Conflict Worldwide (2011). Earlier, the political scientist John E Mueller (whose work Pinker and Goldstein reference) argued in Retreat from Doomsday: The Obsolescence of Major War (1989) that the institution of war was disappearing, with the civil wars of recent times being more like conflicts among criminal gangs. Pronounced in the summer of 1989 when liberal democracy seemed to be triumphant, Francis Fukuyama’s declaration of “the end of history” – the disappearance of large-scale violent conflict between rival political systems – was a version of the same message.

Another proponent of the Long Peace is the well-known utilitarian philosopher Peter Singer, who has praised The Better Angels of Our Nature as “a supremely important book … a masterly achievement. Pinker convincingly demonstrates that there has been a dramatic decline in violence, and he is persuasive about the causes of that decline.” In a forthcoming book, The Most Good You Can Do, Singer describes altruism as “an emerging movement” with the potential to fundamentally alter the way humans live.

Among the causes of the outbreak of altruism, Pinker and Singer attach particular importance to the ascendancy of Enlightenment thinking. Reviewing Pinker, Singer writes: “During the Enlightenment, in 17th- and 18th-century Europe and countries under European influence, an important change occurred. People began to look askance at forms of violence that had previously been taken for granted: slavery, torture, despotism, duelling and extreme forms of punishment … Pinker refers to this as ‘the humanitarian revolution’.” Here too Pinker and Singer belong in a contemporary orthodoxy. With other beliefs crumbling, many seek to return to what they piously describe as “Enlightenment values”. But these values were not as unambiguously benign as is nowadays commonly supposed. John Locke denied America’s indigenous peoples any legal claim to the country’s “wild woods and uncultivated wastes”; Voltaire promoted the “pre-Adamite” theory of human development according to which Jews were remnants of an earlier and inferior humanoid species; Kant maintained that Africans were innately inclined to the practice of slavery; the utilitarian Jeremy Benthamdeveloped the project of an ideal penitentiary, the Panopticon, where inmates would be kept in solitary confinement under constant surveillance. None of these views is discussed by Singer or Pinker. More generally, there is no mention of the powerful illiberal current in Enlightenment thinking, expressed in the Jacobins and the Bolsheviks, which advocated and practised methodical violence as a means of improving society.

Talking to Steve Pinker

6390442_d0ac9b8051_s-1

https://mosaicscience.com/story/pinker/

 

“Does any kind of spirituality, however non-religiously defined, play a role in his life?

“I’m afraid of using the word ‘spiritual’,” he says. “I mean, I have a sense of awe and wonder – a sense of intellectual vertigo in pondering certain questions. I hesitate to use the word ‘spiritual’ just because it comes with so much baggage about the supernatural.”

Pinker’s next book, The Sense of Style, will be a style manual for writers incorporating insights from cognitive psychology and linguistics. For example, it will offer advice on how to get around “the curse of knowledge” – the difficulty writers face in being unable to place themselves in the mind of a reader who doesn’t already know as much as the writer knows. Or the question of how to relate to one’s imagined reader: insights from psychology, Pinker will argue, show that the appropriate metaphor to keep in mind is one of vision – that “the stance you take as a writer ought to be to pretend that you’re pointing out something in the world that your reader could see with his own eyes if only he were given an unobstructed view”.!

Simile,synonym, sin for evermore

Poetry just hints while prose can flourish more
[As  in giving speeches, Oh, Lord, they are too long]
To persuade us to give our money for the new Cathedral door

I met the new schoolmaster ,oh,my eye, he is a bore
I wish instead of  yapping on he put his thoughts in song
Lieder may well hint while  prose embroiders more

I heard the women talking, they want to share their lore
I hope they do not gossip ,as we know what is damned wrong:
To persuade us to give our money for the new Cathedral door

I am  not a hinter, yet explaining is a chore
I ‘m a victim  to my scruples,they send me round the bend
Prose’s too  articulate, Poetry  hints ,oh metaphor!

Simile,synonym, sin for evermore
Though Jesus is our saviour,absolution will depend
On how much gold we offer for the new Cathedral door

Never  give up hope  yet look at Jesus’ end
See continued horrors in the so called “Holy” Land
Poetry  will hint while prose will labour sure
To persuade the  golden calf to  come ram the new church door

 

Literary devices:Accumulation or ” The More the Merrier” [ not used by poets!]

Since I posted an article which said prose accumulates I thought I should explain it.This article is goodWhiteStarling.jpg

 

Accumulation

ACCUMULATION

Definition of Accumulation

Accumulation is a figure of speech in rhetoric that creates a list or gathers scattered ideas in a way that builds up, emphasizes, or summarizes the main point. Accumulation is an example of addition in rhetoric, using a “more the merrier” approach to illustrating the theme of a passage. Addition in rhetoric is also known as adiectio, while the definition of accumulation is the same as that of congeries and accumulatio. Accumulation is part of a group of figures of speech in rhetoric called enumeratio. Note that accumulation often has some repetition included, especially anaphora in which a word is repeated at the beginning of successive clauses or sentences. However, to qualify as accumulation the repetition must have a sense of adding on to a list and not simply repeating the same thing over and over.

To read more use the link above

The word accumulation comes from the Latin word for “to amass.”

Common Examples of Accumulation

There are many famous examples of accumulation in speeches, songs, interviews, advertisements, and so on. Here are some examples of accumulation, both famous and more obscure:

I’ve been to:
Boston, Charleston, Dayton, Louisiana,
Washington, Houston, Kingston, Texarkana,
Monterey, Faraday, Santa Fe, Tallapoosa,
Glen Rock, Black Rock, Little Rock, Oskaloosa,
Tennessee to Tennesse Chicopee, Spirit Lake,
Grand Lake, Devils Lake, Crater Lake, for Pete’s sake.

—“I’ve Been Everywhere” by Johnny Cash

St. Augustine founded it. Becket died for it. Chaucer wrote about it. Cromwell shot at it. Hitler bombed it. Time is destroying it. Will you save it?

—Slogan for Canterbury Cathedral in England

The dentist is clever

 

After the dentist took out my wisdom tooth she told me to sit still for a while.As I was doing that the nurse dangled something in front of me.I was wondering is if she wanted to give it to me. so put out my hand.
She said,It’s your tooth.Well it was covered in blood and had roots like  mature carrot.They were over the moon because they knew [ I did not]’ that it was going to be difficult.
My roots are twice as long as the average so some folk must have short roots.The roots contain a nerve  so my nerves are huge.Does that make me more sensitive than average?I’ve never heard it mentioned.But it may explain why  human beings vary so much.I can’t watch violent films or films about hospitals especially late at night.My friend can watch anything.Well, maybe  not ANYTHING
I am intrigued by these physical aspects.Some folk have very narrow arteries.I never thought much about this

The difference between poetry and prose

19029692_934673353339210_3990976413130029783_nhttps://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2012/04/the-difference-between-poetry-and-prose

 

 

The Difference Between Poetry and Prose

Prose is all about accumulation (a morality of work), while poetry as it is practiced today is about the isolation of feelings (an aesthetics of omission). Among other things, prose is principally an ethical project, while poetry is amoral, a tampering with truths which the world of prose (and its naturalistic approach to mimesis) takes for granted. Poetry creates its own truth, which at times is the same truth as the world’s, and sometimes not. Whatever the case, its mimesis is always a rearrangement, at a molecular level, of that axis between the “seen” and the “felt” (that coal chute which connects the childish eye to the Socratic heart), which, were it not for poetry, with its misguided elenchus, would remain obscured. In both classical and modern languages it is poetry that evolves first and is only much later followed by prose, as though in a language’s childhood, as in our own, poetry were the more efficient communicator of ideas. Whether this has to do with the nature of ideation or some characteristic intrinsic to the material evolution of tongues has never been adequately decided. Probably this evolution, from poetry to prose, depends on synergy—between the passion for thought and enthusiasm for new means. Technology also played a roll. With the spread of the printing press after 1440, texts no longer had to be memorized. Poetry’s inbuilt mnemonics (rhyme, meter, refrain, line breaks) were no longer essential for processing and holding on to knowledge. Little hard drives were suddenly everywhere available. But even a century later, in Elizabethan England, English prose had not yet come close to achieving the flexibility of poetry. One need only compare Shakespeare’s blank verse soliloquies to the abashed prose of one of the Elizabethans’ greatest disputants, Richard Hooker, or to the Martin Marprelate tracts. These are differences not only in talent but ones inherent to the medium. Even the King James Bible, “the noblest monument of English prose,” cannot compare to the blank verse of Shakespeare.

 

 

A bit tired!

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I had my wisdom tooth out and even saw an X ray on the screen.Modern methods are much better but it is tiring loosing blood etc.I hope I will feel much better than I have been now.I feel so tired I could do what old people do and fall asleep in the chair
What a sunny day.Really beautiful

 

Life is like

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Life is when you can’t afford a picture and you decide to paint your own and then become a famous artist without really trying

Life is like when you lose your comb and have to decide whether to brush your hair with a toothbrush or a clothes brush.Or to just pour a jug of water over your head
Life is like you’re just starting a painting in the Art Class copying from a picture.The someone stands behind you and says.My,you’re ambitious.

Life is like you pay £100 for a filling in your wisdom tooth  which then aches so much you  have to have it out costing ,who knows?

Life is like you hate the dark winter but you can no longer tolerate heat

Life is like you are admiring your husband’s refusal to rush then you find he’s dying of a heart condition and can barely move at all

Life is like , your  sick husband falls on the floor in the night and when you ring 999 you find they are very busy as it is a Bank Holiday so after 3 hours you have to get the police.

Life is like   you order tea and it comes as a nug of hot water and a tea bag

Life is like you are having a wisdom tooth out and your neighbour tells you how terrible it will be and how someone nearly died from that

How we can improve our memories

IMG_0018.jpg

https://www.fastcompany.com/40524058/use-these-five-tricks-to-never-forget-something-important-again

 

“GET READY FOR INFORMATION

A lot of memory is about paying attention. “It sounds obvious, but we live in a day when our attention span is very fickle, because there’s so much coming at us all the time,” says Dellis. “Force yourself to be laser-focused on one thing at a time.”

For example, when Dellis meets people and wants to learn their names, the first thing he does before asking their name is to mentally ask himself, “What is this person’s name?” over and over.”

We both chose

18813669_928664443940101_6781399779103626144_n 18740472_928664223940123_5809860896380774728_n

 

I cannot mend the lamp that we both chose

The top and bottom split when  he fell down
But I can make it look as if it glows

The candle burns, has fragrance of a rose
That takes away my sadness and my frown
I cannot mend the lamp that we both chose

I find it hard to  bear the pain of loss
The concept is  more verbal than it’s noun
But in my home  the candle  brightly glows

In Blythburgh church, a lighted candle  bless
See the painted angels and their crowns!
I  will bear this breakage and its cost

I will get the strength to bear my cross
Oh,haul me, holy one, if I fall down.
Beyond  these lights we sense  the Light of God

Bless the hand that points us past the known
Where each of us must travel, perhaps alone
I cannot mend our lamp that we both chose
I  wander in my grief amongst the low

Royaume Uni: a hostile environment for “foreigners” England sins again against its own ex- Empire peoples.Some have died of strain and anxiety. Heil Mary

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/apr/19/theresa-may-immigration-policy-seen-as-almost-reminiscent-of-nazi-germany

 

May’s immigration policy seen as ‘almost reminiscent of Nazi Germany’

“Comments from ex-civil service chief Sir Bob Kerslake increase pressure on PM as row over Windrush-era citizens continues”

 

“Mackenzie claims that May’s mission was to make it systematically difficult to get by without papers, even though the Home Office had no firm evidence of the scale of the alleged abuse.

Work checks, school registration, hospital and GP appointments, bank accounts and credit were all among the everyday activities where proof of status could be required.

“I saw endless papers claiming the system was ‘unsustainable in the current economic climate’ but no evidence to back it up,” she tweeted.

A former head of the UK border force said on Thursday that something had gone “badly wrong” at the Home Office with the loss of experience and knowledge of immigration as a result of departmental reorganisations.

“Corporate memory and expertise has been lost with the abolition of the immigration service and subsequently the abolition of the UK Border Agency now as well,” said Tony Smith, a veteran official in immigration enforcement who was the interim director general of the UK Border Force between 2012 and 2013.

“A lot of people were let go who had that experience “

When I was born my mother said,what’s that?

I wash my hair in Fairy green shampoo
[I do the dishes and the saucepans  hot]
I find the texture better than with glue

If my hair is dirty, I feel blue
My face goes red,my eyes look like pink dots
I wash my hair in Fairy green shampoo

I don’t do what other women do
My perspiration  draws great love from cats
I find hair spray is better than  UHU

I ‘m  trisexual ,I’m harassed  by you
Why  do other folk not find me hot?
I wash my hair in Fairy green shampoo

On holiday ,I hired a  green canoe
It had no engine, no computer mat
I find hair mousse is better than  UHU

When I was born my mother said,what’s that?
My grandma said I looked quite like the cat
I wash my hair in   any new shampoo
It shines so much  a Bobby cried,Love you!

The Start: Writing Your Own Poem

IMG_0026.jpg

Resisting the urge to interpret contemporary poems and “wrong” dreams. BY JUDY ROWE MICHAELS

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/69588/the-start-writing-your-own-poem

 

Practice of an art is more salutary than talk about it.
There is nothing more composing than composition.
—Robert Frost, from his notebooks[Poetry and Prose,
edited by Edward Connery Lathem and Lawrance Thompson
(Holt, 1972)]

The Love

We knew not of the future or the loss
We blithely live unknowing of the price.
The severed heart, the depth of pain,the Love

To make a narrative at any cost
To be by love and loneliness enticed
Better we dismiss a future loss

Into a union holy and its lusts
Joyful when we feel dear love arrive
The full,great heart, the depth, its piteous Cross

Don’t live apart, split off,in psychic frost
Cut off from passion and creative drive
Better we accept the future loss

Our inner world is filled with these grey ghosts
We rid ourselves of hate and do not thrive
With frozen heart and hand and eye morose

Reality itself, we can’t describe
But in our sensual skin we feel alive
We accept the future and its loss
The severed heart, the depth of pain,the Love.

Loss and grief for both Israelis and Palestinians by David Grossman

Photo0751.jpg

https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/full-text-speech-by-david-grossman-at-alternative-memorial-day-event-1.6011820

The death of a loved one is actually also the death of a private, whole, personal and unique culture, with its own special language and its own secret, and it will never be again, nor will there be another like it.

David Grossman’s speech at an alternative Memorial Day ceremony

An old man in the sun beside a tree

A man of peaceful face and pale blue eye
An old man in the sun beside  a tree
A pilot in the RAF  at war

He could have been a  Nazi, German spy
His Aryan appearance I could see
A man of peaceful face and pale blue eye

Men like him  flew from the other side
Mad blitz on London, blazes,poetry.
A pilot in the Luftwaffe for years

And who brought God in here,must Love be tried?
Was he the God of  Copper, broiling free?
The man had gentle face and kind blue eye

Was that life the one for which man’s born?
Was Jesus silent on his bended knee?
Is he  our pilot  in the inner war?

Up and down, the bells ring by the sea
Open up your arms,Lord, embrace me
Oh ,man of peaceful face and pale blue eye
A pilot in the RAF, dark Victory

 

 

I met a man who flew Spitfires in WW2

spits_aligned

http://www.world-war-2-planes.com/spitfire.html

 

 

I sat down in the town as it was so hot.A man near me who must be about 94 said he was in the RAF.He survived 2.5 years flying to protect Britain from German warplanes.
He said on his first flight he found himself face to face with a German plane.He had to pull a trigger and fire the machine guns on the wings.For a moment he did not want to but he did and all  the bombs on the German plane exploded in front of him and the crew were blown to bits.
Another time, again he was alone in the plane, he was hit by a German   and the tail fell off his plane.He managed to get out with his parachute,hoping the enemy would not  kill him by gunfire,They did sometimes
He seemed a peaceful person but he told  me he never sleeps well and has nightmares every night.But he married and had two children and has grandchildren.He was once in a pub in the East End when the Kray brothers shot a man and killed him.He worked for a company who supplied the marble for Euston Station.
So  we agreed that we never know the stories of the people we pass in the street.And he  might write his down

 

Until my invitation to the feast.

The bell rang on the ancient church at noon.

A sparrow flitted to  the Tudor wall.

Was this the knell  which brings us  damned gloom?

 

Perhaps there is no meaning here at all.

I read my unknown thoughts projected out,

And  in my rage, desire the walls to fall.

 

Like you, I am too  often stuck in doubt.

Betrayed by old ideal and vanished wish.

So what is in confuses that without.

 

Oh,pain, oh ,mind, oh agony, oh flesh.

I shall not cling to life and wait for grace.

I am, myself, a fish in net of mesh.

 

Was this my  destiny, my rightful place;

Alone besieged by sorrows on all sides?

I  err for  being sad is no disgrace.

 

So ,to my hopes, I’ll cling like drowning beast.

Until my invitation to the feast.

I don’t even know if it is Russian

IMG_0021.jpgThanks for calling to tell me I am owed insurance  money after that bus ran over me in Uxbridge Road.However,I   have died since.

Thanks for asking me what I think of your  telephone service.I prefer Westminster Cathedral.

Thanks for  saying I have a beautiful voice.However you may not realise I am 87 and  no longer date strange men  or indeed any men or other human beings.

Thanks for the offer of  three pairs  of shoes for the price of two.I have 50 pairs of shoes now so I must turn down your offer or buy a new home.

Thanks for sending me the Sun.If the Guardian is not there I’d prefer nothing at all to come or if  you are desperate  for money send The Telegraph

Thanks but the LRB is too much for me already.It gives me a certain je ne sais  pas or qua or da da  as I walk into the Turkish Cafe for my coffee.It keeps men at bay.And women,I hope.I love Jesus best.

Please stop writing to me.I don’t speak Russian.I don’t even know if it is Russian.And I do not want to  be  your wife.Or a spy.

Trump in Israel

graffiti-berlin-wall-wall-trabi.jpghttps://www.timesofisrael.com/late-night-shows-poke-fun-at-trumps-israel-visit/

 

“American late-night television hosts delivered a number of jokes at the expense of US President Donald Trump and his visit to Israel on Monday, highlighting some of the US leader’s less delicate moments and off-the-cuff remarks.

On “Late Night,” host Seth Meyers made fun of Trump’s historic visit to the Western Wall, tying it to the president’s pledge to build a wall long the border with Mexico and make Mexico pay for it.

“President Trump visited the Jewish holy site the Western Wall in East Jerusalem today. He also said the wall was the reason Israel doesn’t have any Mexicans,” Meyers said.”

On Sundays he takes in the Bread Divine

The way that we can split ourselves within
Is , in truth, the cause of grievous sin
The kindly doctor with his much loved wife
Experiments in  Death Camps with his  knife

On Sundays he takes in the Bread Divine
Washed down   with  God’s  own Blood ,now  changed to wine.
We would choose again to kill the Good
As madness rolls in overwhelming flood

Our  forced conversions   did not go down deep
Where dwells  barbarian soul ,awake,asleep.
At times of strain the force of evil grows
To entertain us humans with its blows

What shall guide us in the time to come,
Since we murdered God and then his Son?

I might have a nervous breakdown next

I might have a nervous  breakdown next
We have to fill the day with will and care
My mental health  is worsening as I text

I feel so angry, I am deeply vexed
If this was cricket someone would declare
That they might have a nervous  breakdown next

I guess a doctor might give me a test
Would it be  my cue to  show a flair?
My mental health  is worse than I can text

In the past man  used to value rest
Now it is our pysches we prefer
So I might have a psychic  break through next

I feel so limp,I’ve lost my love and  zest
But to the lords of warfare, won’t defer
My mental health   forecast in ancient texts

I see a crowd of medics who confer
I see a  syringe of the drugs so drear
I might have had mental  breakdown next
I escaped  but  they still  run  the West