[lesbians] what's in a name

Ersatz or real?

The unimpeachable Jams O'Donnell draws our attention to:

“We are Lesbians and we are proud” said Mr Lambrou “All we want to do is to look anyone in the eye and say we are lesbians without them sniggering.”

Of course this is referring to the dispute on the island of Lesvos where locals wish to reclaim the hijacked name for the island itself, just as the worldwide movement to reclaim the terms "gay' and "rainbow" are moving into gear. On Sappho:

An Oxyrhynchus papyrus from around 200 AD and the Suda agree that Sappho had a mother called Cleïs and a daughter by the same name. Two preserved fragments of Sappho's poetry refer to a Cleïs. In fragment 98, Sappho addresses Cleïs, saying that she has no way of obtaining a decorated headband for her. Fragment 132 reads in full: "I have a beautiful child [pais] who looks like golden flowers, my darling Cleis, from whom I would not (take) all Lydia or lovely..."

[Incidentally, good to see the usage of the "AD" in that paragraph.]

The daughter is disputed, some saying that "daughter" could have referred to any of her circle of admirers. Interesting that seeming lesbians actually turn out often to be quite partial to the company of men.

Think I'll run a poll here to see what you think on the intellectual property rights issue:

Who has the right to the Lesbian name?
	The island of Lesbos
	Homosexual women
pollcode.com free polls

[caption time] grrrrr

[heraldry] make your own coat of arms

The purists will no doubt have me on the short list for euthanasia but:

Dymphna, one of the partners in Gates of Vienna, posed the question some time ago: "What would appear on your coat of arms?"

I did have one but lost it. Now if you are entitled to one already, well and good and the World is not Enough. But for the rest of us – time to get working on our heraldry. Mine appears below:

Symbolism of the Higham coat-of-arms

The anchor means hope, religious steadfastness and symbolizes sailing.

The four quadrants separated by the dancette line:

1] Paschal lamb with cross is evident;
2] Stag means one who will not fight unless provoked;
3] Dolphin represents grace and style;
4] Catherine wheel means one who is prepared to undergo trials for his faith
5] Spilt blood means just that.

The dancette line crossing the shields means water.
The wombat represents obstinate determination and directness.
The badger represents hidden talent, integrity and determination.

Amo ut invenio means ‘I love as I find’.


Good sites to help you with your tasteful design

Fleur de lis
Painting about

My notated list of expressions in traditional heraldry

Bordure - polite way of saying "Cr-p"
Couchant - avec moi
Counter-passant - nothing you wish to buy there
Dormant - intimate organs
Fesse - con
Gardant - anti-perspirant
Mullet - Tony Blair
Passant regardant - check out the chicks
Pile - ordure [b]
Rampant regardant - on hind legs, tongue hanging out
Trippant - on substances

[thought for the day] sunday evening

Time for that old Chesterton snippet:

An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered; an adventure is an inconvenience rightly considered.

[rationalism] perpetuating blinkered half truths

No fool like an old fool

Definition of political correctness:

No matter what guise the particular variety takes, the end result is always the same: repression, followed by carnage and tragedy, born out of good intentions towards the common good.

It's a quick step from here to Statism, compulsion and denial of free will:

If men hadn't free will, how can we possibly come to any moral decisions? This lays the basis for the idea, that the only natural environment for man, is liberty. This being the reason why mentally and emotionally mature people prefer freedom over Statism and Collectivism.

Cassandra explains the lie:

The central philosophical con trick of all Collectivist thought ... is perpetrated in order to accommodate the lie, so that the ideology may survive yet another generation: it is the denial of Reality and with it, the rejection of right and wrong, good and bad.

This rejection or denial creates amorality, a sort of childlike unawareness that some things are just plain wrong, such as indiscriminate sex:

This amorality has become a problem of Biblical proportions as adherents because of it, do not recognize Evil, even if it bit them in the behind.

Plus:

Another, moral consequence of the rejection of reality is, that good and bad, right and wrong, truth and lie, are denied in the same way; or to put it in another way: everybody is 'right' from his or her own particular point of view, and anything 'bad' is called 'bad', only because it doesn't fit into our present, defective idea of society.

Thus we come to moral relativism and into this fuzzy logic steps genuine evil, albeit surreptitiously in its early stages, masquerading under the do-gooder tag of "tolerance":

The denial of evil as a reality leads to wishful thinking, further blindness, and the denial of the self; it decreases rather than increases awareness. A false picture of reality is created -- the reality of the present state of humankind.

Like an alcoholic failing to concede the true nature of what faces him, deniers of the existence of evil leave themselves wide open. Elias Staub, The roots of evil: the origins of genocide and other group violence. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989.) offers another characterization:

“Evil is not a scientific concept with an agreed meaning, but the idea of evil is part of a broadly shared human cultural heritage. The essence of evil is the destruction of human beings…

That's the bottom line, both in observed experience and in metaphysics. It has always been and still is about enslavement, the denial of "humanness" and the reduction of humans to primal instincts. This is the basis of Associative Disorder and mind control. It's why Jack Nicholson had a lobotomy in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. People are simply blinded to it, hamstrung by a denial of the metaphysical:

Prefiguring Peck, Rollo May long held that here in America--with its youthful optimism and naivete--we comprehend little of evil's true nature, and are thus naively ill-prepared to contend with it.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn showed how it inevitably leads to violence:

"Violence cannot exist in and of itself. It is invariably interlinked with the Lie."

The primary battleground is indeed the destruction of liberty via the unsustainable constructs of society peddled as the Lie but where the Libertarians now jump ship is that they ascribe this to the non-metaphysical entirely. However, even philosophy recognizes the place of the epistemological and epistemology seeks to explain:

"The daimonic," wrote May, "is any natural function which has the power to take over the whole person. Sex and eros, anger and rage, and the craving for power are examples. The daimonic can be either creative or destructive and is normally both. When this power goes awry, and one element usurps control over the total personality, we have "daimon possession," the traditional name through history for psychosis.

Problem is though that it strays into the realm of the metaphysical:

Nowadays however, the epistemological problem, by a fatal mistake of method, is assigned to metaphysics, and the result is a confusion between the two branches of philosophy, viz. metaphysics and epistemology.

Metaphysics joins the dots:

The metaphysical sciences reach the highest point of abstraction. They prescind, or abstract, not only from those qualities physics and mathematics abstract from, but also leave out of consideration the determination of quantity. They consider only Being and its highest determinations, such as substance, cause, quality, action etc.

It leads the scientist to a dilemma:

When therefore, the scientist rejects metaphysics, he suppresses a natural and ineradicable tendency of the individual mind towards unification and, at the same time, he tries to put up in every highway and byway of his own science a barrier against further progress in the direction of rational explanation.

Besides, the cultivation of the metaphysical habit of mind is productive of excellent results in the sphere of general culture. The faculty of appreciating principles as well as facts is a quality which cannot be absent from the mind without detriment to that symmetry of development wherein true culture consists.

Similarly, to try to reason as a philosophe, whilst excluding or rationalizing the metaphysical has always been quite erroneously fashionable; to ascribe verbose esoteric labels as the post-modernists are wont to do creates an aura of academic competence but is, in fact, incompetent by definition.

It's a stubborn mindset more concerned with perpetuating a loosely strung together set of half-truths and rejecting as beyond the pale the notion of concepts of good and evil.

Meanwhile, one side in this eternal struggle sits back and chuckles.

[baby photo parade] for your delectation

Photo 1

Hmmm, here's how it works, people - the clues are written in the post but they do not correspond to the photo in the vicinity.

Photo 2

The trick, of course, is to mix and match the photos [no more than two of any baby] to the blurbs.

Photo 3

Then some nice words in the comments section about someone else's baby photo here would be much appreciated.

Photo 4

Answers themselves are in white, as usual, below and can be seen by highlighting the line.

Photo 5

I'd take it as a personal favour if you clicked on the name in red, if you haven't already visited today and drop in on these folk to say hello and maybe have a snoop around.

Photo 6

Right, so away we go.

Photo 7

Cherie

One of me aged about 6 months old. I don’t think I have changed all that much ;-) Well maybe I have a bit more to say for myself these days!

Photo 8

Kate

These pictures are of my two youngest in the buggy, and how they are now holding my baby niece Freya who is only 10 weeks old. All very cute and very hard work......but very much loved.

Photo 9

Ginro

Some pics my Dad took when I must have been about three years old. They're black and white unfortunately so for the record I had blue eyes and dark brown hair.

The first photo I seem to look a bit dazed so was probably contemplating Einsteins Theory of Relativity, or had just done a surprise in my trousers, lol.

The second photo someone had probably put something on their head to try and make me laugh. Hmmm, now I know where my daughters serious look comes from.

Photo 10

JMB

Attached is the not so great but earliest photo I have of me. I'm lucky to have any since I have moved country twice.

Here you have the chubby legs and the chubby freckled face of JMB at the ripe old age of six. I was in 1A, it was 1942 (yes we had air raid drills regularly) and the school was Mortdale, a suburb of Sydney, Australia.

Only dresses allowed but you could bring your doll to school in those days as you can see behind me and there were quite a few in the original photo of 33 students. Imagine teaching 33 children to read at one time!

Photo 11

Sean

Sean01_a1: Where's my Teddy?

Sean02_a2: Ah ...

Photo 12

Juliet

Here I am aged three - my (paternal) gran had this photo taken during one of my visits with her.

Photo 13

Bob G

Not everyone can be a hero; somebody has to sit on the curb and clap as they go by.

Photo 14

Welshcakes

I expect it's too late but here I am at 3 [I think] at my auntie's house in Devon. To think that one was ever so carefree!!

Nunyaa did not submit a blurb so her two photos in the post are the wildcards. Thanks so much for submitting those - it was a bit of yourself you were sending so I tried to do you justice.



Answers


1 Sean...2 Welshcakes...3 Bob G...4 Kate...5 Ginro...

6 Cherie...7 Julie...8 Nunyaa...9 JMB...10 Kate...

11 JMB...12 Ginro...13 Nunyaa...14 Sean.

[national stereotypes] n2 - the glaswegian

Glasgow, European City of Culture, 1990

The city itself is a mishmash, described in this article on its reign as European Capital of Culture:

The City fathers still bend over backwards to accommodate commercial interests; new buildings--commercial and residential--of abysmal quality are allowed, and the old are still allowed to decay and tumble. Glasgow has always had a strong American character, reflected in particular in its early-twentieth-century architecture, but today much of the city looks like parts of Detroit.

hingie

A traditional activity in tenement buildings, to have a hingie is to lean out of an open window in a flat and pass the time of day by watching the comings and goings in the street, occasionally conversing with passers-by or occupants of other open windows.

The stone-built tenement is a major feature of Glasgow's urban landscape, [b]uilt in large numbers from the mid-1800s to the early years of the twentieth century to accommodate the city's growing population.

The local humour's a good guide to a city's reputation:

Glaswegians consider Edinburgh to be in the east - the Far East. Edinburghers consider Glasgow to be in the west - the Wild West. How do you know when you're staying in Glasgow? When you call the hotel desk and say "I've gotta leak in my sink" and the response is "go ahead".

Glasgow teachers are known to use the following translations for the remarks they make on pupils' report cards:

"A born leader" - Runs a protection racket
"Easy-going" - Bone idle
"Helpful" - A creep
"Reliable" - Informs on his friends
"A rather solitary child" - He smells
"Popular in the playground" - Sells pornography

Rab C. Nesbitt [pictured] gives an insight into Glasgow and in particular, Govan:

Ian Pattison's scripts mercilessly poke fun at the more sanctimonious tendencies of nationalism, such as tartan wearing exiles, folk songs from the Hebrides, and the worst aspects of the 'remember Culloden' victim mentality. However the failings of the proletariat are satirised too - working-class culture and its limitations are hardly romanticised through Rab and his drinking pals, who often proudly refer to themselves as 'scum'.

Rab: "Mary, we huv knain each other tae long to let a pound ae dead meat tae come between us".

Mary: "Let's leave oor sex life oota this."





If you'd like to see the whole episode, Part 2 is here and Part 3 here. The language - a bit of background:

Northeast English, spoken throughout the traditional counties of Northumberland and County Durham , shares other features with Scots which have not been described above.As well as the main dialects, Edinburgh, Dundee and Glasgow (see Glasgow patter) have local variations on an anglicised form of Central Scots.

Glaswegian is a bit more specific, described thus:

Glasgow patter has evolved over the centuries amongst the working classes, Irish immigrants and passing seamen in the dockyards. The dialect is anglicised west central lowland Scots or Scottish English depending on viewpoint, and features a varied mix of typical Scots expressions and vocabulary, as well as some examples of rhyming slang, local cultural references and street slang.

Some examples:

Buckie/Bucky — Buckfast Tonic Wine - cheap, strong, fortified wine popular with many teenagers.

Cleek — To refer to picking up a partner of the opposite sex, cleek being the Scots word for a hook or crook referring to the linking of arms. A more colourful theory is that it originates from late night kissing couples on tenement doorsteps and knocking milk bottles to make a clinking sound.

Dreepie - hanging from the edge of a roof so that your feet are as close as possible to the ground.

Electric soup — see buckie, also a Scottish comic book. Anything more alcoholic than tasty. To 'be on the electric soup' has an implication of loss of faculty.

Hauners — A helping hand in a playground fight.

Jeg — Any carbonated soft drink.

Mad wi it — Drunk or intoxicated.

Mintit - Cool/amazing.

Particks — A term for breasts which came about through a number of slang words, an area of the city and a pub (The Partick Smiddy).

So that's the Glaswegian and his life and as Rab explains to his wain:

"You'll be skint, battered, exploited, lied to, cheated and despised. But at least you'll no' be bored."

[the enlightenment] time honoured tradition of missing the point

I've never much bothered to raise the intellectual tone of this blog, preferring that type of poor man's intellectualism which obscures itself behind a sea of diverse comments of all shapes and sizes.

But this post by Deogolwulf, in which I largely agree with his thrust and yet feel he is missing the main underpinning, demanded reply. Deogolwulf wrote, in his comments section:

There is no necessity from liberty of thought to pluralism, for pluralism is an idea about the desirability of plurality, and if there really is liberty of thought, then I am free to come up with other ideas, even ones that might seek to reduce the liberty of thought in my rivals, ideas that are explicitly anti-pluralistic, Indeed, given the urge to dominate that we find amongst humans, that wouldn't be a surprise to find -- indeed as we do find.

As I put in footnote [5]: "As a mere matter of consequences, let us also acknowledge that from the fact of a plurality of views, derived from the call for the equal right of every man to express his own, it does not follow that any one of those views itself will have as its object, let alone its effect, a plurality of views, that is to say, that any view will itself be in favour of pluralism."

But this is rather by-the-by as far as the post is concerned; for, as said therein, right from the beginning of the radical current of the Enlightenment, liberty was conceived, in a very odd way, as being based on equality and tied to the general will.

Pluralism wasn't on their minds - nor on the minds of all those universal systemisers which you seem to have overlooked. My argument isn't that the Enlightenment had no good ideas conducive to liberty of thought; only that it had some very bad ones -- which is just as one would expect when you have liberality of thought.

That's as maybe, Deogolwulf and yet it misses the main purpose of the Enlightenment, as espoused by an as yet non-existent school of ersatz philosophical thought for which it might well be time to find a coffee house therein to promote it. I humbly reply:

"It is therefore neither an exaggeration nor a weary old canard to say that some projects of the Enlightenment were themselves totalitarian in character or that they were an inspiration to subsequent regimes."

In temporal terms, a truism indeed but the ultimate black joke is the metaphysical underpinning of the essential purpose of the wonderfully misnamed Enlightenment [I refer to it as the Darkening] which led man down hopeful country lanes only to be caught in the quagmire beyond.

This is the sum total of philosophic thinking which takes not into account the metaphysical aspects of life. In short, it was a superb con, appealing to the Babel-like egotistical presumption of the capacity of man to out-G-d G-d but without the perceptive capacity to achieve this end.

Like a dog chasing its tail.

So paying its dues to its powerful antecedents in such movements as the French Revolution and long before e'en to 1688 and earlier, which in turn paid its dues to the inevitably inept godless morality and subsequently spawning delusion in the form of otherwise sentient thinkers such as François-Marie Arouet, who under the guise of "freedom of religion" actually set up the mechanism for its suppression, religion being merely the moniker applied by those who would have spiritual connection of humans deflected, then the Darkening was on a hiding to nothing.

And even today with the Grayling delusion couched in professional philosopher approved intellectual tones, the myth is perpetuated that the explanation for humankind can exclude consideration of the spiritual aspects which make possible the eventual understanding, given the initial spirit of enquiry and intellectual equipment to be able to discern and differentiate the wheat from the chaff and posturing from imposture.

In short, it's the most natural and logical thing in the world that totalitarianism should sprout from the fertile bed of Enlightenment manure, itself patiently laid by the most perniciously cynical demagogue of all.

Callest ye this claptrap? So be it.

[thought for the day] baby photo evening

There's a Russian term which is as well known here as the Spanish "mañana" is in Spain.

This word is "бывает" [biva'yet] and it means, roughly, "it happens" but can be broadened into "it just is" or even "it's just logical". So when something doesn't go as planned, this expression keeps one's head clear and one's feet on the ground.

The baby photo parade will now be tomorrow morning for two reasons:

1. I have 5 entries but shall wait for 8;
2. The eyes are now closing and I'd like to do that post some justice.

So, with apologies, dear reader - бывает!

[troubles] question of relativity

I don't know if there's something in the air but every which way I turn this evening, bad luck and dire situations appear before my eyes.

1. The sudden quadriplegic

A promising career as a policeman, a vigorous life spent in karate classes and fishing the lakes of his beloved North Carolina, future plans conjured when things were perfect -- plans that seemed irrelevant and impossible now.

It had been eight months since John shattered his C-5 vertebra diving over a wave during a family vacation. Eight months spent in either a hospital bed or that detestable chair.Eight months, also, for Marci to hunt for the miracle that just might bring him and their family back from despair.

And now, staring at her laptop, she prayed she had found it.

2. The heartless medical jobsworths

"OK, well this is the situation. I have these recurrent eye problems that I have been told to report to the hospital every time they occur as it needs immediate attention."

"No you don't. No one can see one of the doctors here without a referral."

"You don't understand. The doctors themselves have told me to ring and book an appointment every time it happens, and I have been going in to the hospital a number of times now over the past eighteen months."

"No, you haven't. No one can see a doctor without a referral."

"Check the records."

"No one can see a doctor here without a referral."

"Look I...Oh for God's sake, forget it!" And I slammed the phone down.

3. The voice in the wilderness

I am very grateful for the support of fellow bloggers. I have spoken on many occasions to her GP and various consultants; I have written to her GP and consultants; our MSP wrote to NHS Lothian all without a glimmer of success.

I have spoken to experts outwith the NHS and one from within: all have said that Mrs Carr is the type of patient they should be seeing but yet access is denied.

Mrs Carr needs help NOW!

Others need help now!!

You can help.

Let's spread this story across the web until it so big that it cannot be ignored. If you can please post about Mrs Carr's plight; please link to my posts and ask your readers to do likewise. Even if you are not in the UK please help.

As I wrote at Ginro's:

I feel this situation of yours is far worse than mine. Mine is so laughably dire that it is going to mean a total life change. That can be handled. But to endure the sort of run around you were getting, particularly with your condition, this was beyond the pale.

Allow me to explain.

There are problems which are ongoing, soul-sapping, day after day when it seems no one cares, no one will help. These are the ones described above and they're ultimately debilitating.

Then there is mine where, through one stroke of a pen in another city, the whole bottom has dropped out and I'm now living on borrowed time but even more. I must leave country X but I technically can't because country Y will not accept entry without a return entry to country X. My problem, says country X. So I can't actually move and get incarcerated for it.

Strangely, this sort of thing is not as stressful as the other type. All representations which can be made will be - it's out of my hands and is pointless now dwelling on it until there is some result. All is in the pipeline. It will be resolved. Or else it will not - no halfway house.

My health is good, the brain is operating, the only sad part is to see friends starting to shy away - people always do if they know you have an ongoing problem. They fear you're actually going to rain on their parade and so they start to schedule a dutiful time when they feel strong enough to face you.

People are human and this is natural. Cityunslicker had something vaguely close to this in this post:

Equally quite a senior manager was effectively made redundant the other day too; true to form, everyone kept their own counsel and proceeded to ignore the poor chap and carry on as normal whilst he sat there contemplating what to do. No one must mention the unmentionable, even to someone they have worked with for years and years.

This reaction, assuming the chap was reasonably well liked, is worrying. Each of the other people in that office has his own family, mortgage, commitments and his household budget is already stretched. This reaction is not exactly dog eat dog but it is sitting back and watching colleagues picked off at random and praying it will not be him. Heads down and carry on, quite understandably, of course.

That chap has now moved, in the space of ten minutes, from trusted and respected senior colleague to an embarrassing blip on the radar whom we'd like to shift out of sight as soon as poss, thank you very much, if it's all the same to you.

JMB sounds a timely cautionary note, at this point, about this negative drift in thinking and I think she's right. Plus it's always well to sign off on an optimistic note:

Try not to judge your friends too harshly, they probably feel helpless and don't know what to say so it's easier to avoid than deal with it.

In the light of that comment, my penultimate sentence: "I'll amuse myself this third last Saturday evening by packing some boxes, bumbling around and ignoring the deafening and embarrassed silence," appears less than gracious.

For me, there are better prospects than for some of the other poor blighters I could mention.