Archive for the ‘Thoughts’ Category

Is there anything worse than when you just can’t remember a word no matter how hard you try?

Yes. Yes there is. Cancer. Smallpox. TB. Disease in general. War. Crime. Guns. X Factor. Poverty. Death, taxes, earthquakes, hard to open packaging, etc, etc.. Ok, so there are many things worse than not being able to remember a specific word, but it’s still quite annoying.

So I thought I would share my experiences, to see if others (ie, you, the reader) had similar processes or maybe even some better suggestions.

The biggest problem I find is that I will get a specific sound stuck in my head. I have the sound “an” stuck in my head, but the word I’m trying to think of begins with a “sh” sound – and no matter how hard I try, all the word I can think of keep beginning with an “an” sound, and even when I deliberately think of another word, I just find myself drifting back to the same sound, even though I’ve tried all the possibilities and it clearly doesn’t start with that (I’m 95% sure…).

The problem (I imagine) is that my brain is stuck in a particular pattern, and I need to get out of that pattern.

The way I get round that it to just start thinking of other random sounds, and indeed making that sound in my head. Not actual words, just the sounds. “be…”, “du…”, “re…”, over and over. That is all I usually need my conscious mind to do, and the rest of my mind will then suddenly make the connection, and I think of the word when I hit the right sound.

Anyway, the moral of the story is, the brain is pretty cool.

This month at the Humanist Society of West Yorkshire, Simon Duncan presented a talk on social media – what it is and whether it is a good thing or not. Of course, the answer is yes.

Social media brings us huge benefits, at relatively little cost – and indeed almost no monetary cost, as sites like Facebook are all free. Unfortunately, it tends to take a bad wrap because of people not really thinking their arguments through. You can blame the media a little for this, but I don’t think they shoulder that much responsibility.

Take cyber bullying for example. It’s ace. Kids are going to bully other kids anyway, that is just part of society, at least at the moment. But with cyber bullying – you have a full paper trail of everything that has gone on! If social media has made the bullying situation worse for anyone, it’s the bullies! You can now just take your text messages straight to the school, or even the police. None of this complicated business of having to prove what they said with witnesses.

According to Simon, studies have also shown that using social media actually increases real world interaction. That’s certainly true of me – the main reason I use Facebook is to organise real world events with my friends. As well as plenty of other uses of course, such as keeping in touch with friends I otherwise couldn’t keep in touch with affectively because they’re in a different timezone in a different part of the world.

Other fears include issues like privacy and targetted advertising. Perhaps this has been a problem in the past, but with increased awareness of the situation, companies are now putting in place the tools to effectively manage your privacy and you can quickly and instantly lock down your profile, most of which is restricted to approved friends only anyway. This is arguably far more secure than the records the government has for example, which will probably end up on a USB stick left on a public train.

Targeting advertising is actually a massive benefit to us – because more effective advertising means less advertising. If companies can reach their target audience more effectively, they need to reach less people, so they spend less on blanket advertising. This is evident from the reduction of advertising – remember all the big flashing banners and pop-ups that plagued the internet – most of those have now given way to these small text links on Google and Facebook, and the web is much the better for it.

I remember being in an assembly at primary school, which I believe was being delivered by our then headmaster, Peter Boyle.

He was talking about how we should all be polite to each other. Near the end of the talk he proposed the idea that it should be a school rule that we should all be polite to each other and suggested that we vote on it. “All those in favour”, and all the hands in the hall went up, except for one. “All those against”, and one single handle was put into the air – mine.

As a special privilege for daring to decent from the prevailing opinion, I was invited to the front of the hall, to explain to the whole school why I didn’t think being polite to each other was a good rule to have.

I obliged.

My answer what that I thought it was unfair that we should impose such a rule as to me, a rule is a rule that should be followed, and if you break the rule there should be consequences – a punishment of some kind. Yet smiling, or holding a door open isn’t something I feel fits that category. Everyone can have a bad day; sometimes I don’r want to smile, or say good morning, or hold a door for someone.

More importantly though, these are added niceties that we use to show people respect and curtsey. It’s friendly to smile and say good morning. If this was a rule, that therefore had to be followed, how would you know if someone was genuinely being friendly, or simply following a rule? Making it an optional extra gives you the chance to go that extra mile, even if it is a very, very small one, to be nice to someone else. As soon as you make that a rule you must follow, you take that away.

So, I remain steadfast in the views I expressed all those many years ago. We remain a friendly and polite society because manners aren’t a rule, not because they are.

We’re now ten years on from Portugal legalising drugs and all the evidence says it works. Drug use levels have plunged.

This has interesting implications for drug legislation in the United Kingdom because it shows that a more progressive attitude to drugs is clearly the way forward.

It’s not that Portugal have removed all drug laws – it is still illegal to be a drug dealer. But what they have done is switched from an attitude of punishing drug users, to an attitude of helping them overcome their addiction and giving them the support they need.

We should do the same.

Now of course, the first thing most people will say is “that’s a crazy idea, you can’t legalise doing drugs because doing drugs is wrong.” These people often drink alcohol and coffee as well as often smoking cigarettes as well. But those don’t count, even though it has been shown that alcohol is more dangerous than ecstasy.

But, you don’t even have to agree that it is the right thing to do to legalise drugs. The bar is far lower than that. All you have to agree is that the current method of dealing with drugs has failed. And it has. Drug use is ubiquitous with modern society. Everyone who has gone through the university system in the past few decades has at least tried drugs, don’t kid yourself that that isn’t the case.

What is the result of such widespread drug use? Massive amounts of crime! As DrugScore point out, an addict needs £15,000-30,000 a year to feed their habit and as a result estimate the value of goods stolen each year could be over £2,000,000,000. That is more zeros than there are people in the UK. Do the maths – that is £30 a year each of us are paying. The story is the same in the US – 17% of prisoners are in there because of of drug related crime^[1].

Much of this could be solved by relaxing drug laws. Best of all, it’s been proven to work in Portugal. Of course, chances are that anyone reading my blog already knows this.

That’s right, I said it. I’m an atheist, and I used the word Christmas. I know, I know, I’m crazy, I’m on the edge, etc, etc. A lot of non-believers don’t like using the word because they think it has too many Christian connotations. But I really don’t have a problem with it.

Why? I guess for the same reason that Reclaim the Night started. I don’t think we should give up the word so easy. Because it’s nonsense that the origins of the holiday season lie in Christianity, we all know it’s nonsense and it really doesn’t bother me that people are occasionally misguided about this, but even if they were, it would only inspire me to explain to them the truth.

Of course, Christians genuinely are celebrating the birth of Jesus, but the rest of us aren’t. Any suggestion we were could equally be rebuked by the argument that actually, Christians are celebrating Paganism just as much. So I don’t even get drawn into the debate these days. For me, as a Humanist, the holiday season is another arbitrary point to celebrate life. family and friendships. But as all holidays are essentially arbitrary these days, it doesn’t make it any less special.

Recently, I wrote about a theory that had been put to me, suggesting that we should align the age of sexual consent and the age of voting. I founded it difficult to come up with arguments to refute it.

But there is a problem. If you just put the age of sexual consent up to 18, kids will probably just have sex anyway. It’s not like people really pay that much attention to the law as it is. Indeed, some people make the argument that the age of sexual consent should be lowered.

Of course, that isn’t necessarily an issue. Maybe you just lower the age of voting to 14 as well, but then we would probably all agree that that would be pretty crazy. Still, once you agree that people can do more harm with sexual activity than they can with voting, how can you argue that the age of consent should be lower than the age of voting?

So, what are we do to then? Do we just live with the contradiction that it doesn’t make sense to have a higher age of voting than sexual consent, except it doesn’t make sense and settle with a logically inconsistent but ultimately pragmatic approach? Maybe that in itself is logical justification? I’ll throw it open to the floor…

One question I often get asked when discussing religion with Christians is “you do accept Jesus as a historical figure, right?”

The argument goes along the lines of this:

1. There is evidence that there was a character called Jesus in historical records
2. Therefore, you have to accept that some of the Bible is true
3. If you accept the historial parts as true, why not accept the rest of it as well?

But do I accept Jesus as a historical figure? No, I don’t. Actually, more accurately, I don’t accept that the question really makes sense. I mean, what exactly are you asking me?

For example, I do accept that there was someone called Jesus. But that is misleading. I believe there were lots of people called Jesus. It’s a nonsense question. It’s like saying “do you believe in John?” in this day and age. Well, of course I believe there was someone called John, I know lots of Johns, it’s a very common name.

What you need to ask for the question to make sense is, “do you believe in this specific John?” And when it comes to Jesus, if you’re asking me “do you believe in Jesus, the son of God”, the answer is of course, no, I’m an atheist, so I don’t believe in a god and therefore I didn’t believe he had a son.

RIP Christopher. Your mastery of the English language was truly an inspiration to me.

Most of us reading this will live in 2011, in the Western World. We’re used to living in a civilised society, summer riots aside. But thanks to globalisation, we’re increasingly finding a clash of cultures on many issues.

A good example of this is the World Cup hosting duties being awarded to Qatar.

The problem with this is that being an Islamic nation, homosexuality (well, homosexual acts, but it amounts to the same thing) is actually illegal there. These are enforced, including against people just on holiday there^[1].

Yet, in 2022, thousands of footballers, and several hundred thousand fans will travel to the country. And many of them will be gay. Even if you take a conservative estimate that 1% of people are gay, that puts at least 1,000 gay people in a country where just being themselves – is illegal.

That’s mental. I really don’t think we should be OK with this situation.

Luckily, everyone’s favourite football character Sepp Blatter stepped in to offer some advice. He explained “I’d say they [gay fans] should refrain from any sexual activities.”^[2]. Problem solved, I guess. Of course, this is from the same man who doesn’t seem to have a problem with racism^[3] and is constantly dogged by allegations of corruption^[4].

So what do we do about it? Well, we could get all the major countries to boycott it. Or at least Western countries, who knows how much control His Holiness commands over South America’s attitudes, and the answer is probably quite a lot. We could certainly give it a try though, and it would be a worthy cause. As Bryan Goldberg points out, Qatar also has a terrible human rights record, and that’s just the start of it.

Of course, we probably won’t do that, not because missing the World Cup would be mega rubbish (which it would be, that would be the biggest drawback of not taking part), but because it would be politically insensitive for us to call a nation out on the fact that their state religion is the most intolerant faiths currently practiced in the modern world (then again, maybe I’m just being over critical – it’s easy to take 534 verses out of context⁵).

Instead, our fearless leader David Cameron hopes that bringing the World Cup to Qatar will show them that homosexuality is actually fine^[6]. Apparently, “football can be a great engine for social change and a change of attitudes” and, when it comes down to it, at least there is such a thing as an Islamic soup kitchen.

So, eleven years from now, in an attempt to change social attitudes, we will send hundreds of our citizens into a country where making love to their spouse is a crime punishable by execution. Wonderful.

[6]: http://www.insideworldfootball.biz/worldcup/bids/qatar/8894-cameron-believes-qatar-world-cup-can-change-attitudes-towards-homosexuality – this resource is no longer available

Recently, I’ve been watching Nothing to Declare (aka Border Security: Australia’s Front Line). It’s about customs officers working at Australia’s airports and seaports. It’s pretty similar to UK Border Security, except that I actually find it interesting.

I use the term I because ultimately it’s trash TV. There is no real intellectual merit to either TV show but for some reason I find Nothing to Declare entertaining, while I find UK Border Security quite dull.

Indeed, we’ve been getting into it so much that last week I set a reminder in our calendars about it. Why is it so addictive?

The story gets stranger though. I randomly got an email from Gijsbert entitled “Nothing to Declare” with a message saying I’ve been watching loads of Nothing to Declare recently. Why do intelligent people, including myself, watch this rubbish?

It’s a fascinating question. It’s so predictable – it’s just people getting caught with cocaine on them and people trying to sneak into the country with the intention of working on their tourist visa, episode after episode. But we’re all addicted to it. Why?

It’s also interesting that both we, and Weili picked up on the fact that the show opens with the title caption “thousands of people dedicate their lives to protecting Australia’s border.” Not just work there – dedicate their lives.