Archive for July, 2018

NHS mental services have admitted they are “overwhelmed” after millions of people sought voluntary admission to psychiatric hospitals, claiming they vividly experienced England winning a penalty shootout.

“It was so real,” explained Michelle Herbert. “I felt like I was actually happening. Obviously, it didn’t happen, because it’s England, so it seems like I am no longer able to tell the difference between imagination and reality.”

“Our services are already stretched beyond capacity,” an official for NHS primary care mental health. “Thankfully, we’ve received expert assistance from the Swedish medical authorities, who assured us that the episode would pass by the end of Saturday.”

Health secretary, Jeremy Cunt, released a statement confirming that the lack of capacity to deal with the current crisis had everything to do with the unpredictable nature of healthcare and nothing to do with him having cut 15,000 in-patient beds across England & Wales since 2012.

I’m trying to improve my flossing technique. The dental hygiene kind. Apparently, it is a dance, too, which makes it more difficult to find the content I want. I had a similar problem when searching for “oral”.

My first stop was YouTube. Here is a helpful video on what to do.

The problem? My teeth are in my mouth. That spot where her hand is: that’s where my head is in real life.

Here is another video demonstrating the technique.

Look how far that fake mouth is open. No wonder dentists are constantly telling us to open our mouths wider if they think that people could open it to 90 degrees like a cartoon character.

Jordan Peterson appears regularly in my Facebook and Twitter feeds. Some of it is good, most of it is bad. A lot of it is people making disparaging comments about him without any further explanation or details.

I don’t know what to make of him. Given there is such divided opinion, I tried to form one. But his YouTube video lectures were so long and boring that I soon gave up. So, the jury is still out. But my thoughts aren’t important. What is important is how those who don’t like him express their opinions.

If you’re going to attack him, make sure you do it with valid evidence-based arguments, and not simply name calling. Those who would choose the latter, clearly have a short memory.

It’s no surprise that people opt for this. It’s the predominant strategy of the left. We don’t attack the right best on the weaknesses of their arguments. Most of us seem too scared to do that but instead shout “you’re a racist! Shut up! You’re oppressing me!” And why not? It has been very effective in silencing a lot of people.

Occasionally, though, someone comes along he doesn’t care what we think of him and won’t shut up.

People like Nigel Farage. Farage doesn’t listen when you call him a racist and doesn’t shut up when you say his views are offensive. He just keeps making arguments. They’re not good arguments. But he makes them, and because we’re not making the counter-arguments, he beat us in the EU referendum.

And even more notably, Donald Trump. Nobody could believe that someone who hates Muslims and grabs women’s vaginas could possibly be elected US President. But when we told him “shut up you sexist racist arsehole” he just kept going because he understood that well-off white people vote way more than oppressed minorities and therefore, if you want to win an election, it’s okay to go on saying you’re going to oppress minorities in the interests of white people.

And he won. He’s now the president of the United States. The actual president. Not some comedy figure-head president as Stewart Lee would say. The actual, real president.

Jordan Peterson doesn’t give a shit what you think, either. His campaign is called “Professors Against Political Correctness”. He has said openly that he doesn’t respect trans people because he thinks it is a mental illness. It’s like he went out to go find the least PC thing he could possibly say just to annoy the left. He isn’t going to be silenced by us calling him out on it.

But what he is doing, like Trump did, is to speak to a very powerful group (white men) and telling them what they want to hear: that they don’t need to feel guilty for all the privilege they have and that they don’t deserve to be attacked. We white men are not under attack, of course, but to anyone who has enjoyed a lot of privilege and is now having that em>slightly eroded, it feels that way.

Worse, not only has he found this audience, but he is able to galvanise them by saying “look at how the left attack us: the attack is real and there is the evidence. They call us names and try to shut us up, but we keep speaking out!”

It worked for Farage. It worked for Trump. And if you call Jordan Peterson names, rather than dealing with the issues, it will work for him, too. How much support do you want to give him?

Shoe Dog is a 2016 memoir by Phil Knight, founder of Nike.

Most of the story focuses on the early days, from just before he founded Blue Ribbon Sports in 1964 to when he took Nike public in 1980. It feels like a true entrepreneurs story, grinding it out from selling trainers out of the back of his car, through the almost-bankruptcies and endless crises and eventual triumph.

It paints Nike in a good picture. They innovated, brought new shoes to the market, changed the industry. But then, any memoir is likely to do that. If you read Grinding It Out, Ray Kroc comes over as lovely guy. But I guess I want to believe because I genuinely love the stuff Nike makes. I’ve tried running in other people’s shoes and they’re not as comfortable.

When I bought my Nike holdall, it came with a label saying “we’ve been there since the beginning. For as long as we’ve been making shoes, we’ve been making bags.” I’m sure this is 100% true and not just a strategy to ward off buyer’s remorse. But it is weird that Knight didn’t mention bags anywhere in his book, even though he did talk about the launch of their apparel launch long after he had started selling shoes.

If you’re interested in the story of Nike, or you like tales of entrepreneurship, this is a good read. Otherwise, you’re probably not going to get much out of it.