Part 4 of the ‘Covid Coda‘
Blog time : it’s mid July 2022 , we are back from a much needed break away from work and home so I am starting over where I left off with my boat project and partner Jax is back to work in her Coronary Care Unit. Right now i’m waiting on the materials I ordered when we got back from our holiday so today I just cleaned the hull out and played around with a bit of painting – it’s break time now so I’m going to make a coffee and go sit by the boat and think for a while…..boat’s and some practical jobs seem to help me with that.
In my first two posts of the Covid Coda series I started to explore the very strange idea of possibly being subject to a multi faceted attack by powers unseen and I followed that idea up in the second post by looking at our sense of happiness – either better or worse ; my feeling about that and what the evidence all points to is that we are less happy now than we were pre-covid but that happiness seems to be reducing because of other causes as well as the pandemic.
In this post I want to return to an older theme of mine – which is primarily about language , and in particular the twisting and turning of words, language and meaning which seems to be coming at us from multiple sources ……even to the extent that we are told that there are words and phrases that we cannot use and subjects we cannot discuss .
I for one am a simple sailor and retired nurse and I say …….who are you – whoever you are, to determine what words I use and how I use them , and equally what subjects I chose to talk about. I said to my partner this morning that writing like this can feel strange because starting with something potentially difficult and then taking a first step – that one step leads to another, one thought to another and that by the end of a post I can be somewhere that I really didn’t expect.
In this post I started out by thinking about the use and misuse of words , equity, inclusion and diversity as examples and then the simple terms male and female – from there I was thinking about recent examples that I saw during the pandemic where words became ‘weasel words’ that sound kind-of good until you think about them so…..
In Norfolk I tried to work on the next post in my thread which covers other sailors and boatbuilders – their boats and their adventures : I should have been writing about my best mate ‘Big Al’ down in New Zealand and his project which I’m very excited about but I keep failing with that post because I keep coming up against the same block that I have for months now so I thought it best to cover it in a post and then we can get back to talking about a great project.
I set out to write about New Zealand because it’s sailing conditions and geography are so different to our own and that those very conditions and geography have created many of my personal hero’s – Ed Hilary who learnt his mountaineering in the Mt Cook range, Peter Blake who became the world’s premier ocean racing sailor , Burt Monroe who built the world’s fastest Indian (Motorcycle) in his backyard shed and then strangely Peter Jackson who brought JR Tolkien to the big screen ….with a little help from a whole load of other Kiwi technicians, model makers and prop builders.
This post is strangely based on just a few lines from JR Tolkien’s ‘Lord of the Rings‘ when the Hobbits meet the character Strider in a pub (Inn) at the borders of the Shire.
In the first relevant scene we kind-of meet Strider who is introduced by the innkeeper as ‘one of those dangerous folk’ and he certainly looks a bit of a dodgy character because we see him sat alone in a dark corner where he can see but not be seen, wearing the middle earth version of a hoodie and smoking a pipe. The hobbits avoid eye contact….a bit like not making eye contact with the dangerous looking bloke in a modern pub in the wrong place in town, anyway, Strider ends up saving the Hobbits and one of them comments that an enemy would feel foul while appearing fair – and that is exactly the opposite of Strider (Aragorn) who looks as rough as but feels ‘fair’.
My New Zealand based reflection on that is that my hero’s often looked ‘foul’ or at least rough and ready but they spoke and acted ‘fair’ and ‘straight’ – the very opposite is that my feeling and observation of the New Zealand prime minister (Jacinda Ardern) looks fair – a ‘pretty communist‘ according to one Kiwi farmer but in every other way feels foul in her speech, body language and actions. Another line from Tolkien comes to mind “your words are poison” – except that in Ardern’s case and others – Trudeau comes to mind – that their words may sound initially fair but when thought about at all quickly sound more like ‘poison’ or ‘weasel words’. Another way of seeing or hearing the same thing is through an Orwellian lens – specifically via his dystopian novel 1984 – not just with terms such as ‘quackspeak‘ and ‘doublethink‘ but with a reduced and censored language too.
If you’re about to say ‘hang on-you can’t say that’ then ‘gotcha‘ , equally if you say that it’s just politics and it’s only my opinion then fine but it’s not actually political in a partisan left/right way although maybe in the way of the state vs the people or authoritarianism and division vs free speech, open discourse and unity. A good thought for a simple blog like mine shouldn’t dabble with politics – but isn’t exactly politics and more like a global wide assault on truth, reason and discourse (Logos).
What I mean by that is that just one thing that Ardern desperately wanted to do was to create a 2 class or 2 tier society where only the vaccine compliant would have access to healthcare, travel and even their own bank accounts ; if anything Trudeau is even worse because what he wanted to do was seize the funds of anyone who dared to disagree with him……who says dictators are dead ?. Both of them , and others, wanted more than anything to suppress dissent and anything that wasn’t exactly in line with what they, and only they, chose to be the ‘facts’ or ‘truth’ of a situation.
Examples then……
There is a small group of words, terms and expressions that those who consider themselves to be the intellectual and progressive elite seemingly have to reference every sentence with and which are now the ‘holy’ words which cannot be challenged without risking the immediate threat of being excommunicated – cancelled then.
They start with words that initially sound fair – who would not want a diverse , fair and inclusive society where everyone gets a fair chance – the problem though is that those same words actually seem to mean exclusion , especially if you are white and doubly so (doubleplusbad perhaps) if you are a straight white male. Even the sitting US president mixes up equality and equity – the first refers to equality of opportunity by which we might mean a fair start and equal access to education and suchlike – I wholeheartedly agree with racial and sexual equality – but equity means ‘same outcome’ thus your own skill, merit or effort wouldn’t matter as long as everything came out the same.
Moving on just a little and the same progressive elite would have us accept that any sign of disagreement or even question would instantly mean that we are racist, sexist or something-phobic. Moving on again , and this gets extremely bizarre , but the same intelligentsia that has radically denied god and religion now uses the same language and/or the same concepts as the established religions once did ; Freddy the thinker (Nietzsche) once told us that ‘god is dead’ and that we killed him, well maybe we did but once again we have a quasi religious language plus we have sin back with a vengeance and this time around it’s sin that has no redemption and no forgiveness.
Words, and a simple sailor.
Right from the start with this series of posts I said that i’m just a retired nurse and a simple sailor who is trying to work a few things out by thinking about them and then writing about them, my initial thought problem being how to deal practically with the arbitrarily bullshit ‘rules’ of the pandemic.
My first thoughts as a former specialist nurse was that reason, discourse and ‘truth’ had gone out of the window, that anxiety and fear ‘ruled’ and were being used to control an increasingly compliant and unquestioning populace. Any dissent and even any decent question seemed to be insta-labelled as conspiracy theory and thus instantly dismissed and in most cases either censored or banned from most social media platforms…..there are still things that a person cannot say without risk of having their account closed.
In this post I want to get into just one subject, not covid related, but which to me typifies this ideologue driven tendency to obfuscate, to throw up smoke and mirrors, to avoid discourse and truth and yes…..to make 2 and 2 equal whatever they want it to be that day.
So…….here is a question that many politicians, the entire ‘rainbow’ community and the so called elites can’t answer and yet this simple sailor and retired nurse can do…….”what is a woman” ?
Now, i’m not going to throw in a purely personal opinion – we have a saying in medicine and nursing that ‘opinions are like arseholes’……it doesn’t need another one right ?. Rather I would suggest going one step back, and then another, and asking not our opinion but how we got there ; mine incidentally would have been based , say 40 years ago when I started nursing, on the simple secondary sexual characteristics that stood us in good stead for lets say the last few thousand years. Now of course we can be a bit more sophisticated and say lets just take a buccal smear and look at the chromosomes and we could also say that we make a simple decision to define the people with xx chromosomes as female and simply leave it there.
I find no need at all to start arguing about the secondary stuff such as which dangly/non dangly bits go with which or even why and how each biological sex dress, work or express themselves….it simply doesn’t matter to me……my main point here isn’t about opinion it’s about finding the place where we could have a discussion in which we were talking about the same things….start from a place that we both agree, use words that mean the same to both of us and kind-of ‘do what they say on the tin’.
I trust that most of my sailor readers and visitors would start to see the connection between that argument and what I started out this post with…..words that sound ok when you first hear them but as soon as you think about them and the person using them you realize that the words don’t mean what you think they do and also that the person using them is using a devious and sleight of hand trick to control your thinking through their speech…….ok, so I’m at the slightly weird end of thinking and writing but I maintain that what Arden, Trudeau et al is doing is nothing less than evil.
Some might now say ‘hang on’ and isn’t that a bit strong maybe and also ‘justify or defend that statement’ and so as with giving my basis for an argument about sex and gender I do something similar about words, language and speech……..thus……where and what is my starting point…..my rock if you like in the shifting tides of now-speech ?.
Well, I have 2 ‘rocks’ if you like but one just one word (Logos) to cover both and that’s because the meaning of Logos, or how it is used and understood, can be both rational discourse and reason on the one hand – we could call that the central idea of the entire enlightenment movement – and on the other hand we have logos as something both truly original and divine as in ‘in the beginning was the word’……and so on.
Expressed in my own simple way it is that I seem to have a foot in two separate camps – firstly where reason, rationalism and then discourse give us scientific progress just as one example and that Logos also gives us something akin to ‘divine’ understanding – I think you can tell that i’m at my limits with that one at this stage in these posts. Whatever, it seems to me that reason, rationalism and discourse have gone way out of the window with the pandemic but also something has crept in via the back door such that where there was once meaning now there is not……where words did ‘what it says on the tin’ and that now……they don’t.
I’m starting to flail around a bit with words here so it’s as good a time as any to finish this post and I would like to do that with some ‘source’ material that both goes back a very long way and yet seems to have stood the test of time.
1.” In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” (St James bible)
2.”Jesus answered, “Have you not read that from the beginning the Creator ‘made them male and female,'”
Dirty Wet Dog, the great adventure. 