Power Threads

Women deeply want men who are competent and powerful. And I don’t mean power in that they can exert tyrannical control over others. That’s not power. That’s just corruption. [Jordan Peterson on Threads]

Like many liberal herbivores I’ve moved over to Threads from Twitter (now rebranded as X). I’ve done this for the same reason as others I suppose: I’m hoping there will be fewer annoying people there. I’d like to think that doesn’t mean fewer people I disagree with – rather it means fewer people who post in a tribal way and just to annoy – people who buy into a conspiratorial ideology that they’ve swallowed whole. I’m thinking of right-wingers for the most part, but the left do it too.

Most people don’t examine their beliefs and then choose a party or side that best fits those beliefs. Rather they choose sides first with their gut and then take on board all the beliefs of the side they have chosen. Abortion. Capitalism. Climate change. China. Masks. Vaccines. Immigration. Crime and punishment. You could have a separate position on each since there’s no connection between them, but people aren’t like that. If they are climate change deniers they must also be anti-immigration. If they are pro-abortion they have to favour self-ID for trans people.

Returning to the quote at the top, I noticed a few comments to the effect of What are you doing here Mr Peterson? You’re not meant to be here. Jordan Peterson is a bête noire of the left and the sort of person they don’t want to have ruining their day on Threads. But why would they expect people like him not to have a Threads account? Threads has no way of stopping such people. People talk about the moderation on Threads compared to the free-for-all on X. But unless a person says something extreme I don’t see how that moderation will thwart them. No, all the right-wingers will migrate from X to Threads in due course. They will get no pleasure from sharing right-wingery only with like-minded people. They will want to own the libs.

Moving to the content of what Peterson wrote, what struck me first was his use of the following formula …

A is good, so this unappealing aspect of A is not really A – it is B. (In this case A = power and B = corruption.)

I discussed this at greater length here. It is a common and knee-jerk way of talking about things and it strikes me as wrong-headed every time I see it. Rather than admit that A has good and bad aspects people use this tired formula. Peterson compounds this error by his use of the word corruption for term B. Corruption generally refers to a system where public servants take bribes. That hardly fits tyrants. Is he using corruption in its other sense of general rottenness? That would fit better but it doesn’t seem like he’s doing that.

I’m interested in semantics but others may be more interested in sexual politics. A woman further down the thread clearly was. She gave an honest response, which I will paraphrase.

I don’t like you Mr Peterson. What you say sounds like stereotyping though I admit it happens to be true in my case. A stopped clock is right twice a day.

Now there are evolutionary reasons why Peterson’s post may ring true for that woman. Females need resources to nurture their young and look for mates that can provide them.

But I’m going to speculate on another reason …

When we are young we all (male and female) hope that there are competent people who will take charge if necessary. We know our own limitations but feel secure because we assume the adults know what’s what. That security breaks down a bit when we become adults ourselves and still haven’t much of a clue. Inadequate though we are, we are as good as it gets. Only in specific circumstances – with airline pilots, doctors etc – can we revert to childhood security.

Do some women feel that Mr Right will give them a more durable version of that pilot-induced security? The Mr Right option isn’t open to straight men, so they turn to philosophy, hobbies, work etc for security. Dreams and tales and hopes of perfect relationships tend not to interest them. It’s a theory anyway.

People call this kind of talk stereotyping. But stereotyping is merely a cussword for generalising with some guesswork thrown in, and this is fine as long as you acknowledge its limitations – that you may be wrong and it may not apply in every case or to everybody.

Caitlin Moran got a lot of flak recently over her book What About Men? In it she writes about what she thinks is wrong with the emotional lives of men. In brief, they ought to be more like women in the way they share their feelings. Imagine a man trying to write the same book about women! the critics said (even in the liberal press). No respectable publisher would take the book on. The man would have to vent on YouTube or somewhere like that. In any case what good has the female way of handling emotions done for women? They have worse mental health even than men, though it’s true they don’t commit suicide as much.

At least with generalisation you have something to go on. After all, some men do have mates that they banter with down the pub and so on (using the culture-specific language of the Moran’s native UK). Many don’t, but the generalisation is at least based on some observable facts. But speculation on the emotions of the opposite sex can have no such foundation. The inner life of a person is invisible and unknowable. One can only extrapolate from one’s own inner life.

So is it only okay to speculate about the emotions of people of the same sex as oneself? The variation within the sexes is likely greater than between the sexes so that doesn’t stack up. I’d say the important thing is not to be dogmatic. Speculation yes. Pontification no. I suspect this is where Moran fell down. She got careless and cocky and thought the Zeitgeist gave her a free pass to pontificate.

AI Pilot Error

You have to have a goal. Mine is to fly to all the islands and capitals of the world where the scenery is good enough. I could fly anywhere. I could go straight to the Grand Canyon but I dont. I may never go there, or if I do I will dawdle my way there. Below is a holiday island and I can see it all at one glance. There’s no mystery and I dont like that. Flying has taught me that most places look good from a few hundred feet and tedious from a few thousand. You need to lose yourself in the scenery. You must penetrate the valleys with their towering wooded sides. I look down into my cockpit. I have a simple aeroplane with a throttle and a speedometer and an altimeter. There are a few other things too that I dont know much about. It has a yoke for steering and a brake which I assume is for when I’m on the ground. You can hardly brake in the air now can you? It’s funny to think that when I started flying I used to point the yoke down if I wanted to descend. You can steer right and left in a car so you ought to be able to steer up and down in an aeroplane. Right? It’s a steering wheel in three dimensions isnt it? Well what was I thinking of. I now realise that you need to increase the throttle to go up and decrease it to go down. You have to work with the air rather than fight it by yanking the yoke. This island isnt part of the United Kingdom. Rather it was a part of the Duchy of Normandy that remained loyal to the English Crown. Its trees are odd. There are too many of them and they’re too big, making it look tropical. Somebody has rooted up all the hedgerows and replaced them with lines of trees, somebody who knows nothing of how things work hereabouts. And they’ve built too many single-storey houses. Millionaires come here because of the low taxes but I cant see anywhere I’d like to live. Currently I have a friend doing the flying for me. Air Traffic Control (ATC) has told him to fly straight in to runway 26. The ATC person has an American accent. He pauses his sentences in the wrong places and with the wrong stress. He says Charlie Tango Sierra … Lima fly straight in runway twenty … six. But my friend doesnt fly straight in. He makes silly corkscrew turns and circles and instead of losing altitude he gains it. He speeds up and heads out over the sea at 4000 feet and I know from experience that he will never land. He will soar into the blue yonder and plunge us into the Bay of Biscay when our fuel runs out. I’m lazy about flying myself so I often delegate it. But I have to stir myself on this occasion so I push him to one side and take the controls. Immediately the plane lurches in my amateur hands and it takes me a while to steady it. I cut the throttle. We lose height and I make a big loop back to the island and the airfield. As I approach the runway the ATC man tells me to go around. No way am I going to go around! He wants me to abort the landing and make another pointless big circle. It’s like asking somebody to stop in mid-pee. I ignore him and touch down. The ATC man has a special angry voice that he reserves for situations like this. You were not cleared to land, he says. Exit the runway immediately. I want to say it was an emergency and I needed to go to the loo, but I have no right of reply.

Lodgesale Wood

This scene could be in any temperate forest in the northern hemisphere. It could even be in the southern one if you don’t look too close. Yet I need something specific for this blog post, and the best I can come up with is the wood’s name on the Ordnance Survey (OS) map: Lodgesale Wood.

Someone from the OS must have asked the locals what they called it at some point during the last 200 years. I like to imagine said locals having fun with the map men – feeding them silly names which then got immortalised on the charts. But if some yokel was having fun in this case they were being rather subtle about it.

I could research the name, I know – and I do. Google doesn’t turn up anything much. If I was serious I could no doubt find answers, but nothing comes out of the effort I’m prepared to put in.

So what about my new friend ChatGPT? He claims he’s never heard of it but suggests that Lodgesale might imply a place where they sold lodges – or an area known for its affordable lodgings. The first sounds improbable. How many local lodges could there be that needed selling? It makes me wonder whether he even knows what a lodge is. The second sounds plain daft unless tree-houses used to be a thing hereabouts.

So if you need a job done properly, do it yourself – as the saying goes. I remember there’s a big posh hotel only a couple of miles away from here, called South Lodge. It turns out that a rich man from a brewing family had it built as a house in 1883. The family sold it in 1985 and it became a hotel. So it may be that they sold off part of their estate before 1985 and that part became known as Lodgesale Wood. It’s a theory anyway. If true, the name likely doesn’t appear on older Ordnance Survey maps. I need to check that.

Flower World

Although these flowers looked good I wasn’t expecting them to make a pleasing photo. The composition was too messy. But by chance the final balance of light and shade has worked out well and I’m happy with the result. This image makes me imagine myself an insect – a bee or a hoverfly, let’s say. I picture myself lost in this world of leaves and petals. A green thought in a green shade, and a pink thought in a pink one. As children we can lose ourselves in these vegetative universes, given the opportunity – but I guess that means growing up in a temperate climate with nature at hand. We used to make tunnels through the grass in the field near our house. Looking back, I don’t see how they could have been tunnels as such, but they felt like tunnels to us. We could make adventures out of the most unpromising props. My brother and I would dive to the bottom of our shared bed and imagine we were Jacques Cousteau. We watched TV programmes about underwater sea diving. Men fought off sharks, fought each other, cut air-tubes with knives. We knew about aqua-lungs, mouthpieces, the bends and flippers. And they had those torpedo-like swimming aids with two handles and a little propellor. Whatever happened to those? I digress as always. I usually try to name wildflowers but don’t bother with garden ones – yet I can place a garden plant in a family or genus if it resembles a wild one. Before apps like PlantNet came along it was often tricky to name an unfamiliar flower. You could look at pictures, use dichotomous keys, or ask somebody who already knew. But once you’d cracked it you could spot it on a roadside verge while driving past at 40 mph. Once named, it had a look that was unmistakable. Before identification you agonised between similar illustrations in a book. I’m not so good with birds but I imagine the same applies. The bird has a certain general look and a quick impression is enough to nail it. Bird watchers call that sketchy impression the bird’s jizz. Stop sniggering at the back.

Monochrome Cows

We had to walk around these cows because they were lying across the footpath. I like to give animals a wide berth so they don’t feel obliged to get up and move, especially in this hot weather.

I’ve tried before to get a good photo of Friesian cows, and I’ve converted this one to monochrome. Was that necessary given they’re black and white? Well, they had pink noses and yellow ear tags. That’s my excuse.

I wrote quite a bit about my grandfather in my last post. Now he’s getting yet more attention because cows make me think of him as well. In his youth he was a cowman on various dairy farms in Cheshire. I can’t say he talked a lot about it but I do recall him mentioning a certain dairy that was fussy about cleanliness. The cows’ udders and teats had to be squeaky clean when their people came to inspect the cowshed. This surprised me. I had an image of rough and ready 1910 farm life with little concern for hygiene. Not so, it seems.

Cows also make me think of the corresponding adjective beginning with b. When I was a teacher a colleague and I were once struggling to come up with an epithet to describe a student. Bovine? I suggested. We both agreed this was the mot juste though we had no intention of sharing it with the student. We weren’t that kind of teacher! So bovine is not considered a compliment, and yet one could be worse than bovine. These photographed cows are pretty laid back and that’s admirable in some ways. Of course they don’t have to study or pass exams. Lucky them.

And what about the other animal-based adjectives? I sometimes see feline used to describe humans, but canine gets used about. well, dogs for the most part. They used to say that women were either cats or horses. (I’m not sure who they were, but it’s possible they would get more flak for saying that today). Still I can see some truth in it. The important thing is that the cats and the horses can both be attractive, but in different ways. Still, a wise man would be on safer ground using feline rather than equine.

You don’t often hear anybody described as porcine, but simian is a thing. Don’t worry. I’m not going to go through every possible animal. That would be tedious.

So. Dairy farming. It’s not perfect, is it, from an ethical point of view? Cows belch and fart a lot of methane which is a greenhouse gas, and what about the cruelty aspect? My friend ChatGPT tells me that the constant cycle of pregnancy and milking can be taxing for cows. Not to mention the separation of calves from their mothers too soon after birth. Then there are the cramped living conditions on some farms …

So am I a vegan? No. Though, like many people, I do care about animal welfare and support shops that care about it. The UK has many faults but this is an area where it does do well in comparison with other countries. Still, I’m not sure how far one can go down this road. By existing I’m taking up space and resources that another animal or plant could use. Should I be here at all? Where do you draw the line?

Cows like the above wouldn’t exist without farming. They’re not part of the scheme of nature. I’m not using that as an argument in favour of dairy farming, and I imagine many vegans would say so be it. It’s better for an animal not to exist if the alternative is cruelty.

Now, having written the above paragraph, I immediately see two problems with it.

First, I said that dairy cows are not part of the scheme of nature. Actually they are in a sense because humans are part of the scheme of nature, and we created dairy cows. So anything we do, no matter how objectionable, is part of the scheme of nature. It may be that we are an unsuccessful experiment of nature, and nature may have to get rid of us for the greater good. But, make no mistake, we are as natural as anything else in this world. Nature sometimes gets things wrong and creates evolutionary dead ends.

Another thing in the paragraph isn’t wrong but needs refining. I wrote that cows like these wouldn’t exist. Yet there is a place in UK nature for some kind of cow-like animal. The ancestors of modern cows, the aurochs, once roamed Europe, Asia, and North Africa. Heck cattle, used still in some rewilding projects, were an attempt (c1930) to breed back to the aurochs.

Nettle Leafscape

It occurred to me the other day that I often say I like this photo when writing about my own photographs. So is it immodest to do this?

I’m going to say no it isn’t, because photography for me is a process of selection. That process has three stages. First (when I’m out and about) is the selection of the subject. Second (at home) is the selection of the image. Third (likewise at home) is the cropping, which is also a kind of selection. Selection involves liking and its opposite, so liking is intrinsic and implicit. For this reason I’m allowed to talk about it, I reckon.

But even if a photo were a thing you created from scratch like a painting, you must have liked it if you’re displaying it. So the argument wouldn’t be that different. Albeit in this case it might be cooler to leave the explicit liking to others.

But does any such rule of modesty actually exist?

Anyway enough of the self-flagellation and back to the above image, which is a close-up of a nettle leaf. At the third selection stage I cropped it to look like an aerial view of a rainforest. It has valleys, rivers and tributaries and you can imagine it taken from an altitude of about 10 km. Since this is a nettle I also look for the stinging hairs, and fancy I can see them when I enlarge the photograph.

When I was a child everybody said that dock leaves were a cure for nettle stings. We would rub our stung legs with them, but never felt any benefit. So I decided in my childish way that what you needed for it to work, was to extract the essence of the dock. I mashed up some leaves, added methylated spirit, and left them to marinate in a little bottle. I guess I chose spirit rather than water because of its medical associations. The glass of the bottle was a therapeutic brown.

My grandfather, who lived with us then, viewed this concoction with deep suspicion. You shouldn’t be meddling in things like that. You don’t know what it’s going to do to your skin.

This kind of caution was a common theme with him. I used to spend a lot of time playing with batteries, making circuits, and lighting bulbs. Electricity is dangerous, he would say. It doesn’t give you a second chance. You can’t get electrocuted with a nine-volt battery, I thought, so what are you on about? Looking back now, he may have feared I’d graduate to sticking wires in the mains sockets. He often said that hazards (like electricity) had very narrow shoulders. They could insinuate themselves where grosser things couldn’t penetrate. They could take you by surprise and floor you before you knew what had hit you.

Returning to nettles, I do know you can eat them. If you boil them they no longer sting your mouth I guess. I imagine they taste a bit like spinach.

Speaking of which, Popeye used to eat spinach in the cartoons we watched in c1960. It gave him superhuman strength when he needed it. We never ate it in our family and I’d never seen it, so I wasn’t familiar with it. Who ate it in the UK at that time? Nobody I knew. From the way Popeye used to pour it into his mouth from a tin, it looked like some kind of powder. To a child it had a similar status to haggis. You weren’t sure what it was and I don’t recall anybody giving me a straight answer.

Let’s return to nettles. I once watched a documentary in which a man was eating raw nettles. He was folding them to avoid the stinging hairs and his lips and gums were black afterwards. I’m not sure why he was doing it. It may have been a macho thing like having a vindaloo. At primary school we boys would try to impress the girls by putting holly leaves in our mouths, but not nettles. I guess our hormone levels were not yet high enough for that. Rutting season was still to come.