Veggi tables turned

Someone is wrong on the internet! ;) In this case
Twitter / Search - #analogy: "Vegeterians are to vegans what agnostics are to atheists"
Sounds plausible at first, doesn't it? But that plausibility os built on sand: it presupposes that vegetarians are in it for animal rights and if that's the aim then one should go the full monte. However, quite a lot of us are in it because we believe the ecological footprint of meat production is too high and certainly can't allow 7 billion people to consume meat at the current western rate -we're, as a society over consuming and using our economic muscle and unfair economic structures to sustain it. However, that reason for vegetarianism wouldn't rule out some meat-eating in other conditions and some locavores who do eat meat, might use the same or similar reasoning.

Churches that embrace Santorum, Gingrich drive youth away

 I think I see something of this in GB too. I keep bumping into young people who seem to think that the USAmerican so-called Christian right own Christianity. It's one of the reasons I and others consider dsavowing the label 'Christian' -it too easily connotes in some circles "reactionary, heartless, gun-toting, aggressive, insensitive".

 “In effect, Americans (especially young Americans) who might otherwise attend religious services are saying, ‘Well, if religion is just about conservative politics, then I’m outta here"

We really need to be showing alternative models big-time if this isn't true. Otherwise the church in the West deserves to die for it has apostasized. You see, it's not the problem that the Church is seen to be be involved in politics, it is that it so manifestly does not embody the character of Christ if it is closely associated with the shrill, unloving, violent agenda that all but the rightest see in this conservative politics.
Super Tuesday: Churches that embrace Santorum, Gingrich drive youth away - CSMonitor.com:

Remember this when banks threaten to charge for ATM use 'and be outraged

Remember that they are lending your money out several times over and making profit on the interest. By having your money in their bank, you are giving them the means to makes huge amounts of further money -that alone should be sufficient fee for you to have elementary access to your money. Anything more is egregious profiteering.

Check it out; it/s so basic that you'll find this kind of info all over the internet.

Fractional reserve banking - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: The nature of modern banking is such that the cash reserves at the bank available to repay demand deposits need only be a fraction of the demand deposits owed to depositors. In most legal systems, a demand deposit at a bank (e.g., a checking or savings account) is considered a loan to the bank (instead of a bailment) repayable on demand, that the bank can use to finance its investments in loans and interest bearing securities. Banks make a profit based on the difference between the interest they charge on the loans they make, and the interest they pay to their depositors

If they can't turn a decent profit without resorting to this kind of penny-pinching, they really shouldn't be looking after anyone's finances ...

Was Patrick a slave-trading tax collector?

I caught this on the news this morning but didn't hear the whole of the story. So I thought I'd try to fond out more; after all, I've been teaching students of various kinds pretty much the standard story which -to be fair- is actually based on Patrick's own Confessions. Reading them you'd get the impression that Patrick was the victim of a slaving raid and eventually escaped. But ....

... a new study from Cambridge University based on his writings suggests Saint Patrick was not brought to Ireland as a slave, as the legend has it, but that in fact he may actually have sold slaves his family owned to pay his way to Ireland -- in order to avoid a job as a tax collector for the Roman empire

 In actual fact the study seems, from the report, merely to offer a possible reinterpretation based on noting a factor about the culture at the time:

According to his writings, Patrick's family owned several slaves -- a high value and easily transportable commodity -- and Flechner says in the historical context it makes sense that Patrick would convert his family wealth into slaves he could sell in order to pay his way..

The problem is, of course, that Patrick says he was taken as a slave: "... a small villa nearby where I was taken captive. I was at that time about sixteen years of age. I did not, indeed, know the true God; and I was taken into captivity in Ireland with many thousands of people ..."(see here): seems pretty clear to me. And basically Flechner's case at this point is to say that Patrick was being creative with the truth. I am finding it hard to think why Patrick should lie or 'spin' it in that way and on the admittedly brief report here, it is hard to think that the contextual clues Flechner adduces really add up to a case to doubt Patrick's fundamental veracity on this point; after all Patrick does not whitewash other aspects of his past, and slave holding and (presumably trading) wsa not, I understand, necessarily considered a big bad.

Flechner makes a point about the only way out of slavery was to be redeemed, but I'm skeptical that mainland Romano British would have felt that onse of their number stolen away and enslaved should be returned to their captors should they escape: a previously free Roman citizen escaping such a situation would likely be regarded as a returning free citzen not an escaped slave. Nor do I imagine that on returning to Ireland Patrick or any of his companions would feel that he should teturn to slavery in Ulster, and I imagine that no-one left alive in Ulster would actually remember him as a slave -he'd have been given up years before and hardly anyone would have really known him -he woud appear to have spent most of his time in Ireland out in the hills, alone, with livestock. So the redemtion issue seems to be a bit of a blind.

.Was Saint Patrick a slave-trading tax collector? - CNN.com:
The Confession of St Patrick.

~alone

Somewher in Jesmond is this message. Is it a promise or a threat?

Mooring rusted

Which is better? This photo or the one on the previous post?

Mooring

 This is on Cuthbert's Isle, Lindisfarne.

Why the monastic hours were less punitive than I imagined

WhenI first discovered that the seven monsatic hours of prayer included a prayer time that interrupted sleep, I used to feel that this was surely part of a punishing ascetic schedule. Now I'm not so sure. Evidence has been accumulating that we humans may, in fact not only be wired to have two roughly 4-hour sleep periods separated by an hour or so but that reading historical evidences shows that until the industrial revolution, most people seemed to do just that.
 "For most of evolution we slept a certain way," says sleep psychologist Gregg Jacobs. "Waking up during the night is part of normal human physiology."
One of the things that some texts mention is that some people used this time for spiritual practice. So it seems to me likely that the monastic offices were merely a monkly or nunly version of this.
BBC News - The myth of the eight-hour sleep:

Christianity is 'broad shouldered'

Yeah, we thought so.

BBC director-general Mark Thompson has claimed Christianity is treated with far less sensitivity than other religions because it is ‘pretty broad shouldered’.

Actually it's a compliment. And it's as it should be in the sense that it's a more Christlike image. That doesn't mean we shouldn't point out the inconsistencies and call people to account: but we should do so assertively not aggressively. My fear is that many Christains when it comes to the public arena become shrill and aggressive and don't knlow how to be appropriately assertive -which involves respecting the other parties.

It's interesting to consider this:  

“I complain in the strongest possible terms”, is different from, “I complain in the strongest possible terms and I am loading my AK47 as I write”. This definitely raises the stakes.’

The question is whther we should be giving that kind of privilege to that kind of implied threat. I think not. Geese and ganders probably ought to be served with the same media sauce...
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2106953/Christianity-gets-sensitive-treatment-religions-admits-BBC-chief.html#ixzz1o4Qt9u7P
And a later article in the Guardian is worth a look too, picking up as it does on the implied point I make in the previous paragraph.

Christianity gets less sensitive treatment than other religions admits BBC chief | Mail Online:

Sorry, there's no such thing as 'correct grammar'

At last -a voice in a national 'paper that's articulating a point of view that is linguistically coherant:

There is just "the grammar" and one of the great failings of education today is that neither teachers or pupils know it. In fact, we would neither be able to speak nor understand if we didn't know it. A three-year-old who says "I bringed it" is expressing the grammar through the structure she has learned which indicates past happenings. It just so happens that the "ed" ending isn't the customary way of doing it with that verb. So she knows "grammar" but not the grammar of that particular word in that particular context

Quite so: if you and I can understand it or at least come up with a couple of possible interpretations, then grammar has likely been used (and the real arguments about 'correctness should really be about how best to elegantly express thoughts with the minimum of ambiguity). "Correct" is usually an attmept to assert one dialect over another; normally a so-called standard English over a regional or socio-cultural variety. And let's make no bones about it: the English being asserted is actually the dialect that happens to be the one traditionally favoured by those in government and historically derives from that used by landed plutocrats. They assumed  others would speak like them if they were important. -You would know the ruled by their lack of mastery of the King's English ie, as used at court, and the by those without access to the money to educate their children in elite institutions. It's time for the rest of us to stop playing that game with them.

The truth is that the rest of us have as much right as the elite to put our cultural artefacts 'out there' and that includes our speech forms.

language is owned and controlled by everybody and what we do with it seems to be governed by various kinds of consent, operating through the social groups of our lives. Social groups in society don't swim about in some kind of harmonious melting pot. We rub against each other from very different and opposing positions, so why we should agree about language use and the means of describing it is beyond me.

It's time to stop talking about 'correctness' and name the beast for what it is: cultural prejudice and power games. Comprehension not spurious correctness should be the sole or at least main test. The arguments about 'correctness' should really be about how best to elegantly express thoughts with the minimum of ambiguity and the most appropriately to the audience. And incidentally this criterion would show that elite-speakers are often less than able communicators if their socio-linguistic privilege is removed -they often rely on the fact that others are expected to speak like them to avoid having to understand and speak in other forms. It's the intra-English equivalent of English speakers tending not to learn other languages because 'everyone' speaks English.

Sorry, there's no such thing as 'correct grammar' | Michael Rosen | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk

Alcohol as excuse -and on not accepting it

People who've been in personal conversation with me in the last handful of years will know that I have been infomally proposing the 'our' problem with alcohol use in the UK is cultural more than anything else. So you can imagine that I am feeking somewhat vindicated reading this article: Seriously, why do we drink alcohol? : RSA blogs. Here's a quote to show you why I think it's interesting and helpful to me, based on research and insights from anthropology:

“When people think they are drinking alcohol, they behave according to their cultural beliefs about the behavioural effects of alcohol.” The problems of drinking-related anti-social behaviour in Britain are therefore about cultural conceptions of what drunkenness means, not what alcohol does.

My own reasons for having come to the conclusion that it is a cultural issue primarily were, firstly, being told by a psychologist friend a number of years back of some research done on alcohol consumption in a social setting where a control group were given zero alcohol but believed they were drinking alcohol. They behaved pretty much they way the actully drunken group did. The onvious explanation is that drinking together rather than ingesting alcohol was the trigger for a raft of behaviours we think of a drunkenness. The second thing was, looking at 'the night out' as a cultural artefact (an unfinished project of mine) suggests that part of the point of it is the story-telling afterwards: there's a heroic quality to the tales told afterwards about the night out (and I make a hypothesis that this may actually trace back to dark ages male warrior subcultures). I suspect that a big part of the point of the night out is to fuel the tale telling and thus to seal the bonding.

Interestingly there seems to be a pride in claiming not to remember (note the implied skepticism about the full veracity of that) events and embarrassing incidents. It seems to me plausible that drunkenness may be an alibi for disinhibited bahaviour: a way to avoid responsibility and yet to enjoy the 'transcendance' or 'taboo breaking' (this latter fuels my skepticism about amnesia).

So my proposal for dealing with binge drinking is to suggest that alcohol pricing and similar interventions are doomed to have only peripheral effects since the real crime and behavioural issues are probably not to do with the absolute quantities of alcohol (though these do have significant health effects and are concerning for that reason). If we're concerned by the criminal and behavioural issues, then we need cultural interventions to erode and challenge the myths of the night out. For example we need to find ways of not colluding with the meme that drunks are not responsible for their behaviour. If alcohol is a depressant, then it really, in actual fact, reveals 'the secrets of the heart' and so is acutely more embarrassing that anyone publically acknowledges -perhaps it's time to start saying that? And we perhaps need to begin to tell the truth about the events narrated in the day-after story-telling in order to reveal the sordid truth and highlight the antisocial effects and not to collude with making out that it's just a 'bit of harmless fun'.

How to make this cultural intervention is the big issue, because, of course, we know that such things are dialogical and clever responses can derail and subvert messages from the powerful or 'moral' maj/min/orities. Hoever, I thinlk that if a number of us start to insist on the truth telling I've just mentioned and do so in a humble and compassionate way, perhaps that could begin to change hearts and minds. It may be then that we can also begin to address the spiritual issue the article begins to address so helpfully towards the end:

The tragedy James alludes to is that when we get this periodic glimpse of being present, at ease with the world, and available for other people, we wrongly think that drinking more will heighten the sensation. Instead, we should ask ourselves more fundamental questions about how we might live our lives, in order to experience such bliss all the time.

Anyone with me?

Stress-related conitive bias leads to optimistic decisions

A very intriguing piece of research which has important ramifications for governance at all levels and in all sectors if it is considered robust. See here for the fuller report: Stress changes how people make decisions:

"Stress seems to help people learn from positive feedback and impairs their learning from negative feedback," ... This means when people under stress are making a difficult decision, they may pay more attention to the upsides of the alternatives they're considering and less to the downsides.

Just transfer that dynamic to Tony Blair (or whover) deciding whether to send troops to uncover WMDs or to remove a nasty dictator...
How should this affect the way we do governance? I think we needdecision-makers who are less stressed or checks and balances to offset their stress-related conitive bias.

Coffeeshopification of HE?

This is a fascinating article.
The Speculist � Blog Archive � In the Future Everything Will Be A Coffee Shop The following quote may give you a flavour of why:

...cheaper ultimately wins. Repeat that story a million times over the next few years and you begin to see how the local colleges – which already are overcharging for their product – begin to suffer in favor of free programs like MITx.

Eventually you could have local campuses becoming places where MITx students seek tutoring, network, and socialize – reclaiming some of the college experience they’d otherwise have lost.

Phil thought this sounded like college as a giant coffee shop. I agree. Every education would be ad hoc. It would be student-directed toward the job market she’s aiming for.

This trend toward… coffeeshopification… is changing more than just colleges

This seems to me to be very interesting. Not least because it throws into relief what it is that HEI's might be offering. Tuition? Accreditation? The student experience?
I think that probably, at the end of the day accreditation is probably the front runner and in some cases tuition. The question in my mind is whether the coffeeshopification might lead to a disagregating of tuition from accreditation.

Of course, as a HEI chaplain I've got to start to wonder what this would mean for such as myself and indeed the whold and currently growing army of student support workers. The revenue for them (us) comes from degree fees. A disaggregation between accreditation (that is the award) and tuition also disaggregates support and welfare which are then, presumably, remerged into the societal background.
But what of communities of researchers and scholarship? What happens to those in a cooffeshopified HE system? Follow the money: where will the funding come from? How will scholars be supported? I'm afraid the most likely answer looks to me like corporations, NGOs and GOs but in a more ad hoc way.

Hmmm still thinking, but this has certainly got me intrigued.