A voice crying in the wilderness

Trust is a reciprocal relationship. We believe things said by people we trust – but we trust people who say things we already agree with. So it becomes self-reinforcing. Given that, how can we manipulate trust? Should we be manipulating trust? What are the grounds, the basis on which we evaluate truth? We take things on board to the extent that they correspond with the way we think things are already. But if what is said does not correspond to our pre-existing beliefs or experience, we are more inclined to reject it.
That I guess is it in a nutshell, and put like that it all seems a bit self-evident – well, to me it does. But is that actually the way people see the world more generally? Ah, but who are these ‘people’?
The point, I think, is that no individual’s responses are predictable in that way. Or maybe they are to some extent. This is always the way, isn’t it, you can go by what the probabilities tell you is most likely to happen, but it doesn’t mean that that is what actually will happen.
In any particular case, circumstances lead to a particular resolution. Which does not disprove the rule for all other cases, just says that this is what happened in this case, because of this.
Yet if we look at the classical scientific method, one instance of disproof should lead to the rejection of the general rule. Except that, it doesn’t. Within normal science, we look for the reason which caused the rule to be broken in this instance, and are quite likely to assume that something went wrong in that particular instance, that the sample was contaminated, or there are some circumstances that we are not aware of, and that that extreme example should be rejected and omitted from the findings. That is how science works. Or a new explanation is found for that particular case. We still work on probabilities – most cases indicate this, so we can ignore the one which indicates that.
Where is all this leading me? I don’t know. To the profound, or the banal? Or maybe a bit of both.

How ‘free’ are our choices?

Even if we have freedom of choice, we do not have freedom from the consequences.

Jenray tagged me with this ages and ages ago - so long I can't find it now

Here are my 7 quirks - hope they're quirky enough:
1. I’d rather eat cheese and crackers or French bread (especially with red wine) than any ‘proper’ meal I can think of.
2. I failed the finals for my first degree (too interested in chasing boys rather than studying), but 20 years later I got a PhD (even though I still hadn’t grown out of chasing boys).
3. I wear toe socks, because I find them much more comfortable than having my toes all squashed together.
4. I can bend forward far enough to lay the backs of my hands on the floor and stand on my palms, and still straighten my legs.
5. I live in a listed Georgian vicarage, but I’m an atheist.
6. My secret vice is eating salty, buttery popcorn (yum!) but I hate the sweet stuff (yuk!)
7. My favourite songs are ‘While you see a chance’ by Steve Winwood, and the choral movement of Beethoven’s 9th symphony (‘O Freude’)

Yesterday I shook the hand of a Tory MP. Not something I could ever have imagined myself doing, not an experience I’m in a hurry to repeat. And I agreed with almost everything he said, though most of his party would not.
My talk went well, only a couple of times when I was completely struck dumb, one being when I was introduced to Ken Clarke and had to try and explain to him what I was going to talk about. Well, I should have been prepared, but I wasn’t.
The technology let me down, of course. I took my daughter’s laptop, and one of the organisers brought a projector and laptop which she knew would work together. We couldn’t get the projector to recognise my laptop, so we thought, that’s OK, use the other one. But I’d taken the DVD of the project, thinking I could show them that, then do my 20 minutes PowerPoint. But when we put the DVD in, nothing happened. There was no software on the laptop to play the DVD – there was Windows media player, but when we opened it, it was a version which would only play audio CDs, it didn’t recognise DVDs.
So, after several attempts to get my laptop to talk to the projector, I gave up and went with just the powerpoint, But it was OK. I wasn’t checking the time, but I obviously stretched it out quite a lot because there wasn’t much time for questions at the end (though obviously we were late starting because of the technology troubles). I was just my usual self-deprecating self. It was OK, when I get started I’m nearly always OK, it’s just the apprehension beforehand which gives me problems. I got some good feedback, people were very kind. One lady I know was there when I gave a previous version of the talk in Cambridge last year, and she said to me beforehand, ‘I’m looking forward to hearing your talk again’, which was nice of her.
The last speaker was much more appealing than Ken Clarke, and also very good – a prospective lib dem MEP candidate. I really warmed to him and we had a good chat afterwards. I’d vote for him, if he was standing in this constituency, which he isn’t. He made some nice references to my talk during his, though I mentioned this to Hubby and he said ‘Oh that’s always a good ploy, to refer to the previous speaker, just shows you’ve been listening’ which deflated me a bit.
One of the things he said linked up with something which came from my Crosby Stills and Nash-fest which I’ve been indulging in. On Friday night and in the car on the way to Nottingham I was playing ‘Teach your children’ and thinking about the lines: ‘You of tender years/Can’t know the fears/That your elders grew by’. And I was thinking about the fears which my generation grew by, which I would say was mainly that of nuclear war, and how everything changed with the ending of the cold war (not that the risk has completely gone away, of course, but it has changed).
Anyway, this guy was talking about the expansion of the EU, and was talking about the bringing down of the Berlin wall in 1989, and saying that a few years ago, teaching political science students, that was the most significant political event of their lifetimes, but when he speaks to first year undergraduates now, that means nothing to them because they weren’t even born then, or only just.
It was a good day. People said to me that they enjoyed my bit because the two politicians were talking about how the EU operates at a very high level, but that I was talking about practical things being done on the ground, and real citizens getting involved and engaged, which made it more real. But it was all good. Even Ken Clarke.
And on the way home, I drove down the country roads, as the crow flies, through lovely little Leicestershire villages, not a way I would normally have cause to go, and very pretty it was too. It was 80 miles there up the motorway, and 65 miles coming back, though it took longer coming back because I got snarled up in Kettering and ended up driving round for half an hour, naively I thought it would be easy because all I needed to do was find the A6, but for some reason all the signposts were for the A43 or the A14.

Apparently, Princess Diana and Dodi Al Fayed were unlawfully killed due to extreme negligence on the part of their drunken chauffeur.
I'm amazed.

Taken yesterday afternoon

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Hard to believe it was all covered with snow a few hours earlier, isn't it
(bit chilly to sit out there with my campari and soda, though!)

We Brits (or more specifically, we English), like to see ourselves as special and distinct from those pesky 'Europeans', and pride ourselves on our historical independence.
But don't forget:
The current British Royal Family are of German descent.
The ones prior to them were Dutch.
Before that, Scottish,
Before that, Welsh. (The Spanish tried to move in around this time, but were sent back).
Before that, French (for 400 years).
Before that, Danish.
Before that, German (again).
Before that, Italian.
That gets us back 2000 years.

History doesn’t repeat itself, only in the patterns we impose on it. Nothing is fixed, but everything is predictable to some extent. We look at the world using patterns we have observed before, some things stay the same, maybe human nature stays the same, but different humans apply it in different ways. So no two sets of circumstances are ever exactly the same, and the template we have derived from observing the past may have some application to the future, but there is always the possibility of difference, of something which comes out of left field, which leaves us puzzled and scratching our heads and thinking, ‘well, I didn’t see THAT coming!’

Where I go for my writing classes on Mondays, there is one set of toilets which everybody shares. Sometimes when you go into the cubicle you find that the seat has been left up, and guess what? I put it down and get on with it.
But yesterday I went in and the seat was down but it had been sprayed on. Now, THAT I do find objectionable.