Fake politician more true than some of the real ones. Not a facet of our culture to be happy about, but funny in its accuracy. Laughed out loud and thought I must share!

From WKUK. Tip of the hat to Pete Darby for the link.

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Lovely article from Havi this week, one of my favourites ever from her:

Some useful guiding principles for the Book of You.

People vary.

That’s why it’s the Book of You and not the Book of Humanity In General That Is Also Known As The Book of All Things For All People At All Time.

All the biggified people on the internet shouting about how you have to write in the morning and you can’t have more than three projects and how you always have to do X to get Y?

They’re not talking about you. They’re talking about themselves. They are sharing some of the information from that big Book of Them.

In fact, lots of things vary.

Just because something is true for you right now doesn’t mean it’s always going to be true for you.

The Book of You isn’t about absolutes. It’s about taking various factors into consideration, and figuring out what you can extrapolate from what you know. And then testing.

I was especially tickled at the “That’s why it’s the Book of You and not the Book of Humanity In General That Is Also Known As The Book of All Things For All People At All Time.” Hahahaha!

Received wisdom that isn’t very wise

This has been a major theme of my explorations for the last ten years or so: disentangling what actually works for me from what I once nicknamed “Received wisdom that isn’t very wise”.

It seems to me that a lot of people don’t realise what Havi so succinctly points out. They talk, and write articles and books, as though everyone is much more similar to them than is actually the case. Sometimes they get so evangelical about their wonderful methods, you could accidentally start to wonder if you’re wrong for not being able to succeed along that route.

So then as a listener/reader, you have to do your own filtering. Does this fit? Does that fit? Does this method help, or am I in fact hindering myself by trying to do things that way when I’m not wired like that person is?

Books

A few books which I’ve found useful on the quest:

All recommended by me :-)

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On the defence of elective home-based education from heavy-handed expensive intrusive bureaucracy, we have…

Not unrelatedly,

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I thought I’d celebrate it by telling you about a favourite book and a favourite blog.

Time to Think

The book is Nancy Kline’s Time to Think. It’s been hugely influential in my life ever since I discovered it in December 1998. (Funnily enough, the copyright year inside it is actually 1999, but it got into at least one bookshop just before the turn of the year, and that’s where I found it. I’d already read and liked a previous book of hers.)

NK’s writing immediately rang true to me. I recognised the Thinking Environment as a description of a listening space that was missing in my life, which I’d been intuitively trying for a long time to elicit from friends without having a clear idea of exactly what to ask for. So the book was doubly useful: one, it clarified for me what I was looking for; and two, in future, all I needed to do to explain the idea was to give people the book!

Then, early in 1999, I started rather experimentally having Thinking Sessions with a friend. I remember in one of the earliest ones where it was my turn (maybe the very first), my theme was about how doing my business accounts could be less of a nightmare every year.

One new idea I had in that session was getting my computer to open an accounts spreadsheet on start-up, so I could input right then whatever had happened that day or the previous day, while it was still fresh in memory. Another was designating a container for receipts near where I took my coat off, so I could empty my pockets into it when I got in, and not have to search the house for bus tickets every year. It took several years after that for the doing-the-accounts nightmare to diminish to a reasonable size, but that Thinking Session was the start.

I’ve kept on with Thinking Sessions ever since - not with the same friend all that time, but with different people over the years. A lot of mine are about how I’m using my time and energy, including a sort of “Review of what’s currently happening”. But sometimes I’ll zoom in on some particular area.

Here’s an article I wrote back in 2000, with a bit more about how the process works. Currently I have three regular Thinking Partners, and we take turns to do an hour every couple of weeks. We call them Thinks - “Your turn to Think” is a familiar phrase in my life :-)

The Fluent Self

The blog I want to celebrate is Havi Brooks’ The Fluent Self. I think it must have been some time in 2008 that I discovered this, and it quickly became a favourite of mine - it’s now at the top of the list in my feed reader.

Havi writes with a lovely mix of compassion, humour and creativity. The blog subtitle is “When you need some destuckification.”

Some of the running jokes I can sort of “take or leave”, but the central core of what she writes is right up my street: metaphors, internal conversations, working “with yourself” rather than trying to turn yourself into someone you’re not.

Havi identifies as an introvert, and she has an interesting perspective on balancing (a) a strong need for time alone with (b) a purpose which involves being “out in the world”. I don’t think I’ve seen that written about anywhere else, and I find it really useful.

By way of further intro, some ideas/posts I liked:

Happy reading!

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At the start of 2009, I never guessed how much of it I’d spend on home ed activism. It’s not something I wanted or went looking for; it feels more like something that the universe decided to put in front of me, like it or not, and a case of “choose what you’ve got”.

It was 1995 when I recognised/reclassified myself as bi and jumped into queer politics, and I’ve always lived as approximately female (even though I rarely feel gendered in & of myself). But for whatever reasons (which is probably an article in itself, and certainly including significant amounts of racial/ability/financial/educational privilege), I haven’t generally had an acute visceral feeling of those oppressions like I’ve had this year with the home ed stuff. I’ve been present at times to other people’s fears and hatreds of gay people and other people’s misogyny, but until this year I’d very rarely had the sense of being a tiny inconsequential ant under the big oblivious looming boot of the State.

Section 28

Jill wrote an essay recently about the parallels between Section 28 and the current anti-home-ed legislation plans, and the similarity had occurred to me too. Lying lies, taking advantage of the general public’s ignorance of gayness to misrepresent our real lives and make prejudice look reasonable (to some people). And, in the guise of “protecting children”, in fact betraying them.

(In my opinion, schools still haven’t recovered from how wary teachers were in those years of doing anything to challenge homophobic bullying. My heart goes out to the young lesbian/bi/gay/trans people who survived school in those times - and the ones still in school now.)

But at the time of Section 28, everyone I knew agreed that it was completely wrong! (Or at least, that’s how it seemed.) And even when homophobia and biphobia were very obvious in the world, it mostly felt like “This will get better; the work is being done; prejudice is slowly slowly being overcome”. The Labour Government were less homophobic than Mrs Thatcher’s lot too, so that felt like an improvement. (In fact I often had a sense that they’d be doing even more to help if they didn’t have to take into account the power of the Daily Mail.) So I was always cushioned from despair by a sense that the climate was changing in our favour - as well as by having a strong community around me.

whereas now in 2009 when the Government or the media tell lies about non-school education, I don’t have the same sense that most people “get it” or realise how much misrepresentation is going on. (or indeed how close to their own families the Govt are skating, with their plans for us; the phrase “First they came for the home educators…” has gone through my mind many times in recent months.)

And although it’s true that home ed is widely misrepresented and often thought to be a bit weird, still I don’t get any sense that the Govt is being pushed by public opinion into its present agenda of top-down control and interference; on the contrary, they’ve been doing a pretty effective job of manipulating public opinion by publishing lies.

A new dawn

I still remember how elated I felt when Tony Blair’s government got elected. After Section 28 and the Poll Tax, it seemed like a new dawn. I’d stayed up all night at a friend’s house nearby at a watch-the-election party, and walked home along a nearly-deserted street in the early daylight. And this bloke was coming the other way, no-one I knew, and as we got near each other we both just grinned in sheer delight. Hurrah!

To give them credit, they did bring in the Civil Partnerships legislation; it’s not equality, but it’s enabled some good friends of mine to transform an international relationship into a happy domestic one. Can’t knock that.

But oh Labour. Little did we know. Little did we guess of your titanic databases and micromanagement and ingenious dossiers of misleadingness. On that day of joy and optimism in 1997, this is not what I thought we were getting.

Buddhism

I was reading some books about Buddhism this week. I’d written down a title of Pema Chödrön’s (maybe a recommendation from a friend, can’t remember now) and so ended up looking on that shelf at the library, and found some other interesting things while I was there.

The Buddhists say suffering is part of life - although I didn’t realise till I read these books that the word used for “suffering” could equally be translated as “pervasive unsatisfactoriness”. For some reason that amuses me! and makes more sense as well.

Anyway, so a big theme of Buddhism is how you relate to suffering (or “pervasive unsatisfactoriness”) in all its forms. And one of the things mentioned a few times was how, if you have grief or pain or any other feeling that’s hard for you to be with, one of the ways you can transform it is by thinking of all the other people around the world who are having the same feeling, and sending them loving-kindness. It’s not that that’ll necessarily make you feel better - although it might - it’s that your suffering becomes a channel towards more compassion for, and connection with, other humans.

I like that idea. I like the idea that when I feel despair about the whole situation, I can send love to everyone having the same feelings. There are so many people round the world struggling to make themselves heard in the face of unlistening power over their lives, some in much more terrible circumstances than this.

Learning

Actually I had already been doing something a bit similar to that with the home ed stuff. When I’ve awoken at night thinking “This is heading in a bad direction, and the Government isn’t listening to us” or being angry/upset about the lies, every now and again I’ve been remembering to think “This is what it’s like to be oppressed; remember this situation, remember this feeling.” Like a sort of “This will not be wasted if I can learn from it.” And thinking of other oppressed people, and telling myself “You’ve never really known this feeling before, and that’s how privileged you are; well, now you know, and don’t forget.”

A silver lining

An unexpected silver lining for me is that in the last few weeks I seem to have really “got on a roll” with writing for this blog. That’s something else that I hadn’t foreseen at the start of 2009; I’d settled into a rhythm of maybe one post a month or so.

I was reasonably content with that, but it wasn’t quite how I’d originally envisaged the blog. Part of the original point of it was so that not so much of my daily online writing would happen in ephemeral contexts where neither I nor anyone else would be likely ever to re-read it (such as in comments on someone else’s friends-locked post).

But what I noticed was that even when I had the blog, I was still doing most of my writing in other places. What I hadn’t taken into account was the degree to which my writing is in response to other people’s. Often what I was writing was an answer to someone else. And then its natural home was in the thread with the other person’s writing, and not here. And if I posted here, I thought “people reading here won’t have the context, so it won’t be as good”. So in fact not a lot had changed.

Somehow in the last few months, and especially the last few weeks, I’ve stopped worrying about that. I’ve had things to say, I’ve wanted to use the blog to publish them, and I’ve switched my default position to “I will write, and people will get it, or they won’t”. I mean, I’m never oblivious of my audience’s various points of view - that’s partly why it takes me so long to write things - but I’m trusting that the people reading here will either have enough background context already to make sense of things, or be able to make a reasonable guess, or learn it as they go along.

So I feel like some kind of change has been catalysed there in my relationship to the blog, and I’m thinking there’s a good chance that I’ll continue to publish more even after the wave of urgency/intensity passes which is associated with the current Bill. If my writing takes another channel, that’s fine too, but I like the idea of cranking out more of it, one way or another.

Sustainable activism

Something else I found a while back (and have already shared with a few people) is this extract from a speech by Linda Bacon. She’s an advocate of “Health at every size“, and wrote a book of that name. You can find the whole speech at her web site.

I forget how I happened upon this speech exactly, but it might have been via Charlotte Cooper’s blog Obesity Timebomb (which I recommend b.t.w.). But anyway, it has some wise things in it about sustainable activism.

It may just be that we don’t eradicate fat oppression. I’d like to have faith in the inevitability of justice being done, of good triumphing evil, but I need to be honest here and acknowledge that I’m just not confident that’s going to happen. The civil rights movement based on race began long ago, and while some of the more explicit forms of racism are less tolerated, racism still permeates our psyches.

…

But before you get down on me for pessimism, I challenge you to look at it in a different way, because it can be very liberating to reframe it. Maybe the point isn’t victory, as much as we would like to see that done. Maybe the real issue is that through the effort to achieve freedom and equality we get our humanity.

Desmond Tutu offered this advice as rationale for the work of a freedom fighter: “You don’t do the things you do because others will necessarily join you in doing them, nor because they will ultimately prove successful. You do the things you do because the things you do are right.”

I don’t know the future of fat rights. I don’t know whether anything I do, or write, or teach, will make a difference. But I do it, write it, teach it anyway, because it’s the right thing to do. And as uncertain as the outcome may be, the outcome of silence is clear. Change doesn’t happen if you don’t try. And given the choice between the uncertainty of taking action and the certainty of non-action, I opt for trying. It allows me to sleep at night and it gives me hope.

Letting go of the preoccupation with outcome, even while we fight for it, makes us more effective. If you require payoff, you’ll burn out quickly. But if you are committed to the struggle, you can keep on keeping on. Even when you don’t “win,” there is fulfillment in your involvement in something worthwhile.

So here’s the final advice I’d like to leave you with. Your primary source of power lies within you. Strive for integrity. Your value system has to come from you, not just something you’ve absorbed from your culture. Exorcise the oppressor’s values lodged in your psyche.

This is not an easy task I am recommending. It is tough sifting out what’s legitimately right and good and in the best interest of you and our community, and ridding yourself of the ugliness of fatism, racism, sexism, homophobia, and all the other toxins in our environment. Have compassion for yourself throughout your journey. Recognize that it may be a destination you never get to, but it is the journey that is important.

Remember that those that have power currently are really quite vulnerable. Their power depends on the obedience of others. The military cannot be sustained if the soldiers refuse to fight. And each soldier that opts out weakens the troop. Your individual journey is important. When you take pride in your beautiful body, you opt out of the war. It will have its impact. Clichéd as it may be, Ghandi was right: we need to be the change we wish to see in the world.

Here, have an index…
Top of page
Section 28
A new dawn
Buddhism
Learning
A silver lining
Sustainable activism

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BrainPop, Sixty Symbols, The Happy Scientist, Planet SciCast, Junior Rangers, The BBC, The Periodic Table of Videos. Also, a note on Age ranges; And one more…

BrainPop

Short animations on loads of different subjects. BrainPop (ordinary) features Tim and Moby. BrainPop Junior features Annie and Moby. Moby is a robot. In each case, the young human explains the subject, and Moby asks questions by going “Beep”.

There’s an English site, brainpop.co.uk, and an American one which on the whole I prefer. (I don’t like the tone of voice of the English “Tim”. He often sounds like he’s telling Moby off for being stupid.) The American site includes BrainPop Junior.

BrainPop seems pretty good to me for its factual content - though not infallible - and as for the subtexts and politics, it could be a lot worse. On the Columbus Day video they do point out that people were already living in the Americas before Columbus got there. We see women in non-stereotypical roles, and numerous people of colour. I don’t recall any allusion to queer people anywhere yet.

The main downside: a full subscription costs money. But there’s a pretty good selection of free videos too.

BrainPop Free Stuff page. If you go poking around under the category headings, you’ll find a few more individual movies tagged “Free” as well.

BrainPop Junior home page. This includes a free “Movie of the Week”, which changes every week. The new one seems to appear on a Saturday.

At the time of writing, there are also ten free movies on a winter theme.

BrainPop UK doesn’t seem to have a page with free stuff, but again, you can find some tagged “free” by poking around.

In each case, you can also get a free time-limited trial, enabling you to view all the movies: currently 30 days for the UK site and 7 days for the US one.

There’s even BrainPop Español, in Spanish, and a completely separate set of “English as a second language” movies. (I think the ESL ones are free.)

The “ordinary” BrainPop movies are maybe 2 to 3 minutes long, the “Junior” ones more like 10. This might seem odd, but I think perhaps the premise is that younger children would need an adult to set the movies going, whereas older children would be doing it themselves. So the movies for the younger ones are long enough for an adult to nip off and do something else for a few minutes.

Sixty Symbols

This is the latest project from Brady Haran, the same film-maker who did the Periodic Table videos (see below). Here, he interviews a load of Physics people from Nottingham University, occasionally intercut with related footage or photos from history. Most of the films are around 8 to 10 minutes long. Quite a few are about astronomy, but by no means all.

Back in the day when I used to watch TV more than once in a blue moon, I remember seeing coverage of some special astronomical event - I think it was an experimental space probe flying past a planet - and finding it incredibly frustrating, because the interviewers would insist on leaving out all the real explanations in case they got too difficult for the average viewer.

Out of that frustration was born in my mind the plan for a whole imaginary TV programme where it wouldn’t be like that, and each episode would revolve around an enthusiastic scientist explaining their interests and their research. If anyone had offered me the chance to make a TV series, this would have been it! though as it happened, no-one did :-)

Well, these films rather remind me of my idea from back then: just various interesting stuff from physics, explained by people who are very good at explaining it, including demos and memorable analogies and the state of current knowledge and so on.

In my opinion they are some of the best films about science I’ve ever seen. Very very watchable! and all absolutely free!

Sixty Symbols home page.

The Happy Scientist

The Happy Scientist is Robert Krampf. He does all kinds of science stuff that you can try at home, explaining as he goes. It’s proper science, and his enthusiasm shines through - it’s a pleasure to hang out with him.

For example, one of the free videos is about water boiling in a pan, and he explains all the stages and what’s really happening as the bubbles form. And in another one, he turns cream into butter, and at the end he spreads it on some bread and says something like “I love experiments that finish up with something you can eat!”

As with Brainpop, some of the videos are free, and to get access to the full set you have to pay money. But in this case it’s only 20 dollars. Highly recommended.

The Happy Scientist home page.

Planet SciCast

Unlike the above sites, Planet SciCast is a compilation - loads of videos made by people in general - including a lot of teams from schools.

SciCast is trying to build the world’s most entertaining science resource, by collecting contributions that are exciting, dynamic, repeatable, and plain fun.

It’s a mixed bag, as some of the contributors are only beginner video-makers, so e.g. the audio can be a bit dodgy at times. But there are some gems.

Top favourite in this household is The Geiger-Müller Groove.

Alpha beta gamma
Tappa tappa tappa
We’re counting on our Geiger-Müller tube
Alpha beta gamma
Tappa tappa tappa
When we shake it all together we get the Geiger-Müller groove

Genius!

We also like

We haven’t watched them all yet, so there might be some more good ones.

Junior Rangers

Annie and Joe, the two young presenters, roam around learning about animals, history and the practical running of Longleat (stately home, zoo etc).

For example, they investigate the reputation of wolves, chat to Lord Bath about painting, feed some lions and discover “Spiders aren’t scary, they’re just a bit wriggly tiggly!”

From an adult’s eye, it’s clear that this series must have been made to promote Longleat as a visitors’ destination. I think it’s smart marketing and well carried out - in part because it doesn’t cram the commercial motive down your throat; these are genuinely entertaining programmes in their own right. There’s just the odd “When you visit Longleat, you too can see the [whatever]“. (There’s a BBC TV programme called Animal Park which is also about Longleat, and must also have done the place a world of commercial good.)

Junior Rangers home page.

The BBC

What’s on the BBC website in terms of videos is always changing. Things stay up there for maybe a week or a month after they’ve been broadcast.

Among favourites in this household have been Life and The Natural World. In lieu of possibly-soon-to-expire links to those, here’s David Attenborough’s favourite moments.

Another fave from the BBC is Tronji, a mix of animation and film. (Link may or may not lead to current programmes, depending on how recently any have been broadcast.) On what I’ve seen so far, I’m rather a fan of Tronjiworld and its subtexts. The premise is that the Tronjis need help from Peopleworld and call on children to help them. (”Welcome, children of Peopleworld. Wobbly-i-o!”) The children get to use their “special skills” to help the Tronjis, and I love the way that even the most seemingly ordinary skills (”telling the time”, “playing the euphonium”) turn out to be exactly what’s required to save the day! Other assets include a mixed-race cast and a great vocabulary of made-up terminology. (”Approaching optimal happiness potential!”)

The Periodic Table of Videos

Earlier project similar to Sixty Symbols, reviewed above. It’s one film per element in the Periodic Table.

I find it not as consistently entertaining as Sixty Symbols, and I’m not sure why. It might be in part because of the inherent limitations of the periodic table as an organising concept for film: some of the heavier elements pretty much don’t exist on Earth, and a lot of the gases are invisible. It might be in part a function of the film-maker’s learning curve - getting gradually better at eliciting interesting comments or demos from the interviewees.

But bear in mind that’s a hard standard to meet, as I think Sixty Symbols is ace! So this is nevertheless good stuff if you like that kind of thing - and the films are still being updated and improved from time to time.

The Periodic Table of Videos.

Age ranges

I’ve not talked about age ranges here, and that’s basically because most of these things aren’t age-specific; they’re potentially enjoyable for anyone, from probably about 3 upwards, or maybe 2 upwards in the case of BrainPop Junior. BrainPop, Tronji and Junior Rangers are explicitly aimed at children, but even then, I’ve learnt things from BrainPop movies and got some mild enjoyment from watching them. So I’d recommend any age child or adult to try out any of the above resources and find out for yourself what you like.

And one more…

Must just mention that old classic, the pinball number count animation from Sesame Street.

Happy watching!

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Philip Pullman on the virtues that sustain a living and waking nation
Transcript of Pullman speech

David Davis, inc “Tell me, Jack, when does it become a police state?“
Transcript of Davis speech

Shami Chakrabarti, inc the difference between rights for citizens and human rights
I felt this speech wasn’t quite as “in tune with the audience” as the ones from the two older blokes, so it’s not as compelling as a piece of video, but still full of good points.
Partial transcript of Chakrabarti speech

Of interest especially to bloggers, here’s a panel featuring Ben Goldacre of Bad Science, and others:
Bloggers’ panel

I also liked this panel: How do we secure modern liberty? (longer video than the others) - especially the contributions from Afua Hirsch and Brian Eno, and the point near the end from Evan Harris.
Partial transcript of that panel - at time of writing still pretty full of errors and omissions, and has a warning up to that effect.

Here’s the home page of the whole site.

I haven’t watched everything from there yet, but I must say I found it relieving and moving to see people talking about this very important stuff of which the Government seems so careless. I’m very glad this convention happened.

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I don’t feel I have much to add to other people’s analysis of the events, except “Yes, that is terrible, and my heart goes out to the people who were affected”.

What I did want to add is: I think one of the best counters to hate speech is to listen directly to some of the people who are being misrepresented and maligned. So in line with that, I’d like to recommend a blog I’ve been enjoying this year - Writeous Sister Speaks, by Aaminah Hernández.

As Aaminah says: “If you want to know what a Muslim woman thinks or feels about something, ask a Muslim woman. And even then, realize that we as individuals cannot speak for all others.”

Aaminah’s often writing mainly for her fellow Muslims, and I know I’m not necessarily always fully understanding the context of what she’s saying. But as well as feeling I’m learning a little, I just enjoy and appreciate her integrity and thoughtfulness and the quality of her writing.

Here’s one of the earliest articles I read of hers, about not identifying as feminist - the comments thread is interesting too.

Here are a few recent posts I liked, giving more of a flavour of the day-to-day blog.

And for extra bonus value, here’s a post where Aaminah links to some of her own favourite bloggers. Enjoy!

Update: Aaminah’s now made her blog friends-locked, so you won’t be able to view those posts any more unless she gives you a password. But it’s still worth looking out for her comments on other people’s blogs. And my point still stands about listening to people first-hand.

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