December 21, 2017

Horse 2357 - Fragments VI: The Journey To And From The West

A9 - Scientific Astrology

We had a client come in the other day who is some sort of psychologist person at a hospital, which I imagine means that she would have to deal with assessing some quite disturbed people (not a job that I would want to do), and while my boss was downstairs, I was given a quiz thing to demonstrate the sort of work that she does. Much to my chagrin, the test looked somewhat suspicious and when I completed it, it turned out to be yet another one of those Myers-Briggs Type Indicator Personality type tests.

I absolutely hate this kind of test. Notwithstanding the fact that it's mostly a load of codswallop, it is misused by practically everyone (as if there was a legitimate use for it in the first place) and in effect becomes a kind of fancy astrology type exam for smart people, or at least people who want to appear to be smart.
Just as pointlessly as sorting the world into 12 zodiac signs based on what time of the year you were born, the Meyer-Briggs Personality type test sorts people into 16 kinds of people based on what time of day that they answered. I have taken variations of this test in the past and have been sorted into different categories; which says to me that the efficacy of the test is pretty close to zero.

For the record, I am a JJJJ type, which means that I like judging and listening to Triple J. If it is any help, I am also born in the Star sign of Vectra, in the year of the Rubber Cat; which means that I was born in 19XX and I have a peculiar liking of machinery, especially machinery which produces things through extrusion.

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AD6 - Adverdetective 

I have watched a lot of detective shows on television and listened to many more which would have originally been on the radio. It strikes me as really weird that within the various universes (universii?) that these detectives are famous but it is never really explained why. Do they take out TV and radio ads? Just how expensive is it to run adverts anyway?
It also immediately strikes me that running adverts for someone like Johnny Dollar or Phillip Marlowe on the radio or television would just look really stupid. The announcer on WHYO would have to read copy like:

Got any corpses lying around? Have any relatives with limbs missing for no apparent reason? Have you been recently robbed by thieves and they've taken your Faberge eggs? Then why not call Rollo Q Private Detective Agency on 7575 1966?
Our famous team of private detectives are perfect for all of your mystery solving needs. Want a guy in a trench coat and fedora to investigate a blackmail racket? We can help. Maybe you'd like a lady in a business suit to infiltrate corporate business fraud? We've got you covered. Maybe you just want six hired goons to show up and scare your scheming step brother into exposing his plans for an inheritance confidence trick? It's all in a day's work for... the Rollo Q Private Detective Agency. 
We eliminate the middle man and that means that the savings are passed on to you. We're in two great locations:  116 West Chester Street, Northwood and 223 Third Avenue, Fort Beckton. That's 7575 1966. Call now. 

There is no way I can imagine a jingle or a set of chimes for a detective agency in an advertisement. It seems to run in direct contradiction to the requirements for discretion and privacy that might ensue as a result of client confidentiality; which really makes me wonder how detectives become famous in the first place.

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BCT - The Death of Bob Cat

The thing I find almost incredible is that after they've dug the hole for a lot of these large buildings, they simply leave the poor old bobcat at the bottom of the hole and build the foundations and indeed the whole building, over the top of it. The wee bobcat having done its job proudly, is discarded and entombed as though it were an offering to the gods of construction. None of the people who live in their brand new apartments, neither know or care about the sacrifice which has been made; nor that they are living directly above the buried bobcat.

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C95 - Cars 0: Disney Does My Head In

Where the heck do these cars come from anyway? I imagine that there must be some kind of factory which churns them out but that's kind of disturbing. What if they are living things? That's also disturbing and I don't think I even want to know how the reproductive systems of anthropomorphised cars work.
Do they have schools and universities? Do they grow up? If you consider that Lightning McQueen is roughly the same size as Doc Hudson, then does that mean that they are already fully grown from the beginning?
If they don't have hands, then how exactly is the infrastructure of the world built? How do they hold hammers, turn screwdrivers, operate machines, write things... how do they do the things which are necessary to produce their own existence?

What about their internal organs? They​ have eyes and mouths. How are they sentient? Is there the remnants of a genetically modified human inside? Is this what becomes of humanity after the

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D3 - Argument Of Every Argument Ever

I am usually quite late at noticing things in the world; partly because I suspect that I am something of an ascetic and a misanthrope and have a fundamental distrust of humanity, and partly because despite this I still want to give people the benefit of the doubt because it is easier to attribute things to stupidity rather than malice, but now that I have come late to the party, I have noticed that the extremisation of ideas in conversations, has more or less reached everywhere.

There is a sketch in an episode of Monty Python called the "Five Minute Argument Sketch". The premise is that someone goes to a firm to have an argument with someone. There is a line in the sketch which says that an argument is a string of statements which are presented to arrive at a proposition; whereas contradiction is the automatic gainsay to disagree with what the other person said.

Somehow I feel that not just in the adversarial discourse of the legal system and​ politics but in so many other areas of life, we have reached the point where just about everything has become the intractable automatic disagreement with what someone else says.

I think that everything has come down to two rather basic arguments:
a) I have the right to do anything that I like, whenever I like, and by any means necessary and I refuse to admit that my actions have any negative consequences for anyone else.
b ) I am inherently virtuous and am offended by your actions. Please do not do them. I have the right to stop anything I like, by any means necessary and I refuse to admit that my actions have any consequences for anyone else.

Confusingly, argument a) is mostly taken up by cultural authoritarians who at some point were given the label of "conservative" despite wanting to tear down public institutions but still regulate cultural virtue signals; while argument b) is taken up by cultural progressives who sometimes use argument a) to expand their own agenda, while stealing ideology from the mostly dead economic left.

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QQQ - Droning Conversation

I know that this is part of your personality and that you probably have some deep seated need for approval from literally everybody but when you've had a conversation at me (and I don't mean "with" me) for sixteen minutes and I've said virtually nothing, then that doesn't mean that I am your friend.
I was on a flight from Sydney to Dubbo when I was still working for the law courts and across the aisle from me was a nine year old boy who was trying to have a conversation with me; and for virtually the whole flight I couldn't hear a thing over the rumble of the engines, so I smiled and nodded and laughed in appropriate points in the conversation, all while having no idea what the heck this kid said. For all I know he could have been on a terror list and was telling me plans in detail about how to blow up a 747 and I'd still have been none the wiser.
That's what sitting through the your tales was like, Mister Lawyer. The droning of your perpetual "I", "I" and "I" in your conversation, was like the rumble of those engines. You could have been describing how you'd blow up a 747 and you probably are on a terror list for all I know.

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R12 - Uniform Of The Damned

It's like this is a novel idea, when as little as 15 years ago the whole workforce was virtually clad in white shirts and black trousers and with the only concession to colour being people's ties. If look at photographs of offices going back more than a hundred and thirty years, you will find that a white shirt and black trousers was almost the de facto uniform of billions of office operatives. From photos of Mission Control for the Mercury Project, to the human computers in Bletchley Park, to the traders frantically yelling on the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange just before the great crash, it was white shirts and black trousers which built, burned, and rebuilt the world.

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