Soft targets for scorn : Who gives a stuff about homoeopathy* ?

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13 April

Honestly, I'd really far rather that people such as Simon Singh, who campaign about homoeopathy, would consider the rights and wrongs of electro-convulsive therapy* (ECT), or even psychosurgery : that's keeping it within the so-called sphere of medicine (borderline butchery ?), but one could migrate to hammering many an alternative therapy, whereas homoeopathy seems to have an abiding fascination, which is what this posting concerns itself with.

To keep with ECT : it's odd that human-rights campaigners, journalists and the like want to stress the inhumanity of measures used against, say, Iraqi detainees to break them (whether or not to get information from them), but those - equally detained - under the Mental Health Act 1983 (as amended) seem to be have some different sort of emotional or moral status as victim, compared with military prisoners or officials of deposed regimes. Maybe I'm just weird in finding that curious...

Actually, I don't think so, because it actually seems easier (possibly as a result of documentary : but, then, who makes the documentaries, and why about that ?) for people to contemplate the ethics of the waterboarding or mock execution of a captive in (or brought from) a foreign country than what might happen, say, to an Afghani in a UK psychiatric unit, deemed to be in an unshakeable depression and (irrespective of consent) to need ECT to save his life or for some other reason under the 1983 Act.

RT @mrxeis From an adviser who says #Homeopathy is Mad to one who says it is Nonsense. Just about covers the spectrum of scientific opinion.
— Simon Singh (@SLSingh) April 18, 2013

And where are we with our headline issue, homoeopathy ? Well, isn't much criticism - dressing-up of the criticism aside - just saying either You're gullible pricks to believe in this crap (various royals included, I believe***), or You are exploiting gullible pricks who believe in this crap - and it matters because it is done 'on the NHS' ?

So what irritates me is the arbitrarily focused smugness of those who say that this is all crap and we're not such mugs as to believe in it, or to want it to continue :

Nothing better to get angry about (such as the mental-health or other humanitarian issues already mentioned) ?

Or just making a fuss because it's an easy battle to win, when most people grasp that the practice is one of repeated dilution, and don't need much stoking to concur that it should not happen at public expense.

Frankly, with the waste that is everywhere in this world, from unnecessarily upgrading phones or laptops (or PCs) just because people can, or have to****, is stopping homoeopathic treatment going to save anything sigificant in terms of money or lives ? Is is really such a huge topic that Pratter needs to be full of condemnation of it, whether in ridicule or rhetoric ?

Who cares, @slsingh ? All these Tweets about homoeopathy are plain boring !
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) April 18, 2013

Unless homoeopathy is banned by law (and might go underground ?), it will continue privately, so the people who were involved in the NHS have an incentive - called losing their job - to work for a private institution, or set up on their own. Net result what ? What savings, and what change ?

Maybe worthwhile in itself, but why not highlight the horrible and cruel isolation and poverty in which many with mental-health conditions have to live ? The lack of befriending or other support schemes, the lack of concern that poor diet, lifestyle and even the long-term effects of medication have on, and reciprocally so, physical health, the battles to be awarded and survive on wlefare benefits, etc., etc., ?

Honestly, Splatter, I really can't think that it matters any great amount, when such degraded lives are all around us, that a few people are being prescribed overdiluted extracts - don't mock or barrack this practice of low significance when people are living and dying in obscurity. If you choose to, you prove that your own mental and personal satisfaction in what you do outweighs the demands of your humanity, your integrity, and your intellect.

@theagentapsley i think you want the unfollow button
— Simon Singh (@SLSingh) April 18, 2013

End-notes

* How can something as damaging, as brutal and little understood as to its mechanism of effectiveness (when effective), be called 'a therapy' ?

** Most people who Tweet so much about it can't even spell it - they write homeopathy, when they'd probably pounce on someone not putting homoeothermy...

*** And some might know, far better than I, how there came to be a Bristol Homoeopathic Hospital.

**** Because applications and web-coding becomes ever more (gratuitously ?) complicated, and not (or no longer) supported by the only operating that will run on a computer because of its specification, whose functionality is otherwise perfectly good.


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Bonding ? Schmonding !

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9 March

Time for a rant - a rantlet, for lack of time...

Yes, I am happy to originate a term, but I will not adopt one that makes no connection with - no sense to - me, such as male bonding:

1. 'Bonding' was what superglue was supposed to do, when one bought an expensive, fiddly little tube of stuff that did precious little for one's sanity, when it went everywhere but the target, made one fear for sticking one's fingers together for eternity, and ultimately stuck nothing to nothing.

2. Moreover, there is no such thing - as far as I am aware - as female bonding, so the implication is that men are just useless at opening up to each other on any real or emotional level, and need special sessions.

3. There's the Pratter hashtag (God knows why they are called that !) #EverydaySexism - is referring to 'male bonding' that ? Yes, just like man flu, it is.


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Twitter and Facebook: making language a dying art? (a report from Varsity)

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29 January

This story is carried by Varsity, but, since I do not go near Arsebook, I must post my comment here:

When, more than thirty years ago, there was a Cambridge Collegiate Examination (CCE), the only applicants who did not have to take an 'essay paper' were those studying English : I have no idea when the CCE was abolished, but, before then, colleges could bear writing ability in mind prior to interview.

Are these the days that Dr Abulafia harks back to ?


Actually, what is bizarre is that, first with text-messages, then with the Tweet, we so readily acceded to the reintroduction of the telegram (for the character-limit tends to relate to some sort of cost).

What Dr Abulafia, to be an historian of such matters, would really need to show is that use of telegrams by the classes that could afford them made them as dull as he makes out the so-called social - nearly said 'facial' ! - media have made recent undergraduates*...


End-notes

* I like the alleged exchange between Cary Grant and a reporter (in which you will have to imagine the question-mark, because I do not recall how it was styled in a telegram) :


HOW OLD CARY GRANT

OLD CARY GRANT VERY WELL STOP HOW YOU



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What is Pritter's Achilles' heel?

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25 June

Serious or not, I do not believe that it is any more possible to have a debate by Splatter/Twatter than by MSN Messenger: with the latter, because of the immediacy of seeing the other person's reponse, it's all too easy to feel the need to reply quickly (perhaps, more and more quickly) and, sooner or later, say something (or in such a way) that, if interpreted differently, gives rise to offence, defence and even reprisal.

In theory, if the visuals on Skype weren't such rubbish and not in synch, it would be better than a telephone-call. Still, with a conversation by telephone, there is potential for noticing and acting on such cues as inflexion, intonation, breathiness of the voice, involuntary ways of evincing surprise, shock, etc. - you know, all those things that go to make up the 92% in that standard iceberg cod-psychology diagram*, which purports to show how little of the meaning in a face-to-face conversation is in the words. (Oh yes, generalizing diagram? Just try saying 'You're fired!'(or 'Your mother is dead') to someone in a serious voice, and ask how little he or she took from your words!)

As to Pratter, with a character-limit similar to text-messaging's regrettable re-invention of the telegram's pressure on words to save charges, it should be no worse than text-messaging, except that there is an arena, a sort of Big Top: by which I mean that, if I send a text-message to Dr Paul, some time (which may be longer than one expects) it gets to his phone and, one hopes, he reads it and, in his own time, replies (if it needs a reply).


So much holds true for both: I can choose to expend money or time on an extended text-message, just as I can send a follow-up Tweet straight after. What remains (or results) is the fragmentary nature, not just of the correspondence, but also of the means of conducting it (especially on a handheld device), which has the potential, not least when other debates / conversations are going on at the same, for participants not stopping to check what the other person did say before letting go a broadside.

However, telecomms errors and hacking apart, a text-message doesn't go to anyone else's phone, for which read 'is publicly available on Witter - until I choose to delete it - for anyone who decides to do what is weirdly called following me' (sounds like licensed stalking ['Someone's following me' never sounded like a good thing before], but there we go. Here, though, with my debate with Dr Paul, which may involve misunderstandings, misrememberings, misconceptions, all this is (circus again!) being played out before an audience, even if it probably is an audience that couldn't care less, and glances - or scrolls - past**.

I believe that that element of 'dirty washing in public' changes things, both as to the things said, and the desire (albeit resistible) to say things back. Combine that with doing whatever it is in 140 characters, or multiples thereof, and what a mess results!

And who softened the blow / profile of all this under the cunning aegis of calling it all 'social media'? Pratter is a tool that has the potential to be a divisive medium, if not just a repository for endlessly spread links to Internet items or products whose actual worth or interest one cannot judge from the Tweet itself. This sheer advertisement and self-promotion might be better placed on t.v.

End-notes

* Which, as Tomkinson's Schooldays would possibly say, was seen by Potter Minor on a training-course, reproduced afterwards with slightly variant percentages and passed on to Venables, who couldn't read the scribbled figures, but had a guess, and delivered them in a lecture heard by Barnstoneworth, who told Eric Olthwaite...

** Unlike the rubbernecking that gives rise to those dangerous slow-downs on Motorways, as if either the pulled-over police-car with the flashing lights gives a screw about the other drivers' speeds just at that moment, or the sight of a vehicle on its side is inescapably edifying.


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The Tower of Pritter

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May Day

Once upon a time, on his album Up (2002), Peter Gabriel included a track in which he had taken the phrase signal to noise (from the world of hi-fi) and created a song - which, of course, one can interpret as one will (just as one can, say, the song 'Wallflower' from a much earlier album: whose theme is used in Birdy (1984), a film on whose music I commented in The Future or How do you choose a satisfying film? (Part 2))


On my interpretation of what some might find a limited (because repetitive) lyric, Gabriel is clearly distinguishing between what is valuable (the signal) and what might impede it (the noise). Therefore its own message (something like, from memory, turn up the signal, keep out the noise) is just as applicable to finding the occasional real news-story amongst what else appears in a number of our alleged newspapers as it is to that convenient triangle of factors - perhaps unthinkingly beloved by those who run training courses on assertiveness or communication skills - that purports to establish as empirical fact that some very low percentage* of what we (think that we) say is in our (choice of) words**

I have given counter-examples elsewhere, but, on what level of perversity as to the power of actual words does one have to be on to think that contextual data supply all 93% of what is meant to be lacking in simply saying?:

* You're fired!

* I want you to sleep with me

* You're standing on my foot!

* You've won first prize

* This duck is delicious

* Do you mind if I sit here / take this chair?


Bombard yourself, as Splatter can (I mean Twatter), with messages from an unlimited number of people, though, and you might - amongst 'the noise' - miss someone asking you to tea / to bed / for a drink.

Or following Bassfuck in a crowded bar on your preferred mobile device, highly meaningful though I'm really sure that all of its content is, might make you unaware that you are some banknotes and a credit-card or two lighter than when you started the evening.

Remember: the value of the Internet can go up as well as down


End-notes

* Usually between 7 and 11%.

** As Cher successfully suggested in her cover-version of 'The Shoop Shoop Song' in Mermaids (1990), it's in his kiss.


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