Chris Grey in his latest blog post on the attitude of Brexiteers now after Brexit is done:

The country, as represented by Frost, seems increasingly like a stroppy, entitled teenager who has stormed out of the family home in a tantrum and now endlessly complains that his awful parents are disrespecting him. ‘Not only are they no longer housing me,’ he whines, ‘but they are insisting I clear my stuff out just because I promised to when I left. And I’m stuck with paying the rent on my new place because they won’t help me out any more. Don’t they realise I’m an adult now?’

https://chrisgreybrexitblog.blogspot.com/2021/03/fisking-frost.html

Actually correlates well with population density. No surprise there. More people, more GDP per capita.

Now this one is a bit misleading, apparently the scale matters. Here’s an alternative.

And I am reading “Our plugin erection”. Something’s wrong with me today…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S7yBVgkSnWg

First you’ve got to get on board
You’ve got to spread your wings
You’ve got to take a chance
If you want romance
And fancy things
– The Weepies/Fancy Things

#music

Fascinating. Is there such a thing in Europe? I am not aware…

Chris Grey’s upcoming book Brexit Unfolded. How no one got what they wanted (and why they were never going to)

Prof. Chris Grey of the blog “Brexit & Beyond” fame will publish a book on Brexit.

• announced at the end of the post: https://chrisgreybrexitblog.blogspot.com/2021/03/brexit-unhinged.html
• can be pre-ordered in the UK.

Now I am curious whether and how his publisher will make it available in the EU.

Isolated ecosystem of Movile Cave, Romania

http://www.bbc.co.uk/earth/story/20150904-the-bizarre-beasts-living-in-romanias-poison-cave

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Movile_Cave

Movile Cave has been cut off for millions of years. Its air is thick with harmful gases, yet it is home to an array of strange animals

An older article on BBC web about a cave in Romania, with an isolated ecosystem of animals living off of sulphuric chemosynthesis, methane and carbon dioxide. The bacteria in the case are “trapped” there since 5+ millions of years, various animals for several millions (2+) years.

I did not know there are isolated ecosystems on Earth. Very interesting.

Movement in Bitcoin-land re energy consumption

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/03/02/china-bitcoin-mining-hub-to-shut-down-cryptocurrency-projects.html

I read here that a Chinese province with significant presence of miners is about to ban Bitcoin mining because of missing targets on energy consumption.

If more governments wake up to this (as we hear recently more and more about Bitcoin energy consumption and carbon footprint), this might get interesting for the bubble folk. 🍿

Der Club der schoenen Muetter

Kriminalhörspiel, 55 min, Deutschlandfunk Kultur (in German)

https://www.deutschlandfunkkultur.de/krimi-hoerspiel-drei-frauen-ermitteln-in-der-neubausiedlung.3686.de.html?dram:article_id=490000

Absolutely hilarious radio play about 3 typical suburban “smart-ass” mothers and their thoughts about a solo father (a porn-star-type macho techno-fan guy with a violet Pontiac Firebird car) taking care of his little daughter (a small princess “Lillifee”-kind). They are attracted to him, repulsed by him, he does not care about them and then he suddenly dies. Great fun.

Lessons from a year of Covid

by Yuval Noah Harari

https://www.ft.com/content/f1b30f2c-84aa-4595-84f2-7816796d6841

A very good article by Harrari about what we can learn from dealing with COVID-19 pandemic. It takes a very cold and independent look at what happened and is happening. He identifies mostly positive lessons we can learn from the events of the last year. I think that is an extremely useful view, as newspapers are only full of negative news. These are not just “sunny” observations, he actually goes very deep in identifying what’s important and at the same time positive. Similarly, he identifies negative things which are going on, but are highly non-obvious.

As is usual for him, Harrari takes a long-term view on what’s happening and impacts of those things. I think this is important reading.

Lessons

1. scientists of the world were able to come up with bio-tech solutions to this crisis in an unprecedentedly short timeframe. The first time in history, humankind is not helpless against biopathogens.
2. due to vast technological advances since industial revolution, we were able to largely minimise impact of the pandemic: trade is going on well, food supply was effectively not disrupted at all, many sectors of business were able to adapt relatively quickly. 100, or 500 years ago, this pandemic would be devastating, while now it’s just “bad”.
3. Internet infrastructure is way more resilient than we thought.
4. Internet and cyberspace is becoming the single point of failure for humanity. This will need solving in the future.
5. Science cannot solve everything. The most important decisions finaly need to be taken by politicians. These are failing us. Mostly because, unlike scientists, they do not cooperate on global scale, but rather hold nationalistic turf wars. In a worse case, they fail us by negligence and not taking the right actions, even though scientists tell us.
6. we learned that protection of life is not all. Sometimes, secondary impacts of the pandemic need to be weighed against the loss of life due to illness. These are challenges which we’ll need to solve and come to terms with in the future.
7. centralisation and concentration of private information about citizens is becoming a strategic asset of governments. Publics will need to resolve the conundrum of transparency not only top-down, but bottom-up too.
8. globalisation in the face of pathogens is inevitable and global cooperation must be resolved.
9. it’s clear we need a global coordination institutions to help with the next pandemic. WHO is there, but needs more money and needs to be improved.

In the age-old war between humans and pathogens, the frontline passes through the body of each and every human being. If this line is breached anywhere on the planet, it puts all of us in danger. Even the richest people in the most developed countries have a personal interest to protect the poorest people in the least developed countries. If a new virus jumps from a bat to a human in a poor village in some remote jungle, within a few days that virus can take a walk down Wall Street.

I find it interesting what happens when somebody blocks you on fediverse.

1. I send something
2. Somebody calls it bs
3. I point out it’s actually reality and try to engage in a conversation
4. The person send a flurry of toots, calls me names and blocks me as I am still reading them.

And then fun starts.

1. I see the person’s replies disappear, but my client still shows some of them in a chaotic order
2. I try to reply, but my toots are orphans
3. The person follows me, so I think they still engage
4. I try to speak to him/her, to no avail
5. My client shows I cannot follow them, while they follow me
6. On their local timeline, the whole conversation is still intact, toots which seem deleted to me are still there
7. After a while I realise the person probably blocked me without me understanding why that happened and I am speaking into a black hole.

I very well understand why blocking is there and why the sender had no way to know what’s going on. I would still prefer the person at least telling me they block me so that I know what’s going on.

Either way I think it’s very impolite do block people in as civilised conversation, just because they disagree without finishing it. That we are in a digital world does not mean we shall behave like jerks. Nobody is forcing that person to read my stuff and I certainly am not asking anybody to respond to whatever I have in mind. I learn something every day. Just today I learned something about strange behaviours of others.

Some observations on public discourse about gender roles

Recently I came in more contact with people speaking a lot about feminism and traditional roles in families and household organisation, etc. I noticed, in this domain, there’s a lot of attitudes which go approximately like this: “Everything is fine with me, it’s their fault anyway, so they should give me (our gender) what we want, or need, and it should go without me saying anything. And if they don’t deliver, we’ll be angry and call it oppression.”

Now, I am not saying that there are not significant problems with for instance division of work in households between men and women, or gender pay gaps. These phenomena absolutely exist and we need to solve them for the good of our societies. But I doubt that calling that a problem exists and then silently expecting others to solve it for us will work. What might work instead, is an open dialogue. But I am digressing, so let’s get back on track.

Thinking about this (relatively loud) group of feminists who complain, but are not ready to enter a dialogue reminded me of something I learned in couples therapy literature: meta-emotion and specifically ability to ask for what you need and resolving conflicts related to that.

Meta-emotion and assertiveness to get what you need

In relationships psychology, Gottman therapy and Attachment theory they generally identify 2 types of attitudes to emotions (meta-emotion) in individuals:

1. emotion coaching/secure attachment
2. “screwed-up attachment”/anxious/avoidant meta-emotion

Emotion coaching people are free in their expression of emotions and generally speaking have no problem to ask what they want and resolve situations (often conflicts) when they don’t get it. People with other types of meta-emotion would typically have problems doing so. This is not to say, something is wrong with the second group. Personally, I just think they have a somewhat harder time interacting with others, especially when they need something from them. But that is not a character problem as such, just a logistical difficulty - although many try to resolve such problems by (conscious, or unconscious) use of psychological manipulation. And that is of course problematic.

Hypothesis

Could it be that this loud and (perhaps even ineffective) group of activists on feminist issues is statistically more on the side anxious/avoidant meta-emotion?

The intuition is that if they were on the emotion coaching/secure attachment spectrum, they would probably (in aggregate) be able to resolve their individual household troubles with their partner easier and thus would be very open to a dialogue.

On the positive side, though, these people are loud and point a finger to a real issue, while those who resolve it silently at home maybe would not be - and the problem would persist unresolved. And if it so, I am curious how large would this silent group be?

Observing these discussions about roles and issue in shifts away from traditional roles division, I realised there are plenty of people there who have a very healthy understanding of what actually goes on. Typically they are able to see that the problems feminism speak about are not women-only, but are shared problems which can only be resolved together with participation of men and women alike in an open dialogue. Very often, these people would express something like this: “I recognise this as a problem in our society, but I am lucky to have a partner/friends around me who are working/ready to work on this too.” Maybe it’s not luck what they speak about, but their secure meta-emotion attitude and their own strength and ability to speak about these topics freely without negative emotions and resolving them with their partners and friends.

And continuing on this, if at least something is correct in the above hypothesis, I would be curious about relationship dynamics there. The prevalence of secure attachment is reported at about 50-60% of population. Assuming random coupling (which is not exactly true, but let’s keep it simple), we get that about 25-40% of couples are secure-secure attachment pair. So it’s fair to say that about 30% of each gender are happy with their relationship and are able to resolve their gender roles at home.

If this little hypothesis above is correct, these would form the mostly silent (at least not loud) group and the radicals would be recruited from the remaining 70% of population.

Now if the statistical division of meta-emotion is stable and does not change over time (which I sincerely hope is not the case!), then it means the amount of people who are unhappy with the division of household chores and roles in their relationships will remain stable somewhat stable (or at least unsatisfactory) too and the issues of feminists won’t get ever resolved. That would be a sad future indeed.

Just to wrap it up, in a consequence, this whole speculation I wrote here would lead to a proposal how to resolve many issues feminists point their fingers to: we need to move as many people to emotional coaching/secure attachment mode of meta-emotion in the first place, and then many of these gender roles problems canbe easier to solve.

I am curious to hear from all sides how wrong I am. Let;s how much emotion coaching we get in the discussion - if there will be any…

#feminism #meta-emotion #relationships

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