Theresa May, Gaslighting: we gotta talk about manipulative behaviours.

Name the behaviour.

Theresa May responding to Jeremy Corbyn, in Parliament, on our taxes...

She rejects his point, she lies about the situation, then she gaslights Corbyn (and the opposition, and indeed the entire country) which is to say she switches from the direct question, disguises it with lies, and then blames the other for the problem...

And nobody comments, nobody stops her, nobody points out the lies,no says you are avoiding the question, no one points out the gas-lighting, the tactic of not only not answering the question directly, but of also implying the questioner is in the wrong!

This tactic is anti-democratic because it is abusive in intent. It is bullying, no less.

It is disruptive to good governance.

Parliament and the media alike must be challenged about these tactics...

We need to talk more about this kind of dynamic in public affairs....

Kindest regards

Corneilius

"Do what you love, it's Your Gift to Universe"

Thank you for reading this blog. All we need to do is be really honest, responsive to the evidence we find,and ready to reassess when new evidence emerges. The rest is easy.

Alan Alda, Mai Lai and Robert Sapolsky...

This lovely video of a walking chat between Alan Alda and Robert Zapolsky presents some very interesting insights, based on current proven research, that raise serious questions about behaviour, power, punishment and justice.. The Brain on Trial.

It's also about observing patterns across a population, and understanding that the patterns can never describe an individual with any degree of accuracy - that protocol must be capable of responding to each case, as it presents, and as the evidence provides.

One cannot say "all Americans...." or "all Russians'... or "all Muslims" .. or "all women".. or "all men" or "all psychopaths" etc etc with any degree of accuracy.

Such phrases always precede a caricature, which is a manipulative device...

I have read Robert Sapolksy's book "Behave : the biology of humans at our best and worst" which is a holistic review of all available evidence regarding the biological processes associated with behaviour, and in particular, with those where healthy self regulation is undeveloped, where sociality has few experiential neural networks to fire with, and instead the focus is on regulating others to meet one's perceived needs.
His assessment is that structure is largely genetic, and behaviour is lagely learned, and both are also affected by past generations experience, not least in epigenetic terms - our genetics are responsive to environment and experience.

Eskimos do not learn to carry fat, they learn to hunt and live, and heal and thrive...

That kind of core behavioural dynamic of hierarchies, using power over others, is learned.

As a behaviour, dominance over others is far from innate.

There are many bio-chemical and physiological dispositions that can underpin vulnerability to becoming more controlling, dispositions that start in pre birth conditions, or later on in any area where healthy development is undermined,  but invisible because it's a social norm, and that may well be partly a matter of how the inherited epigenetic changes  affected that particular child...  that and the  environment and the lives of long dead ancestors..

There is nothing innate about it. We are evolved to be social, connected, co-operative, creative... to thrive by living and working together..

We are not that well evolvoed for violence, because it undermines our health, even for the 'victors'.

The argument that  the Alpha Male is biologically mandated is a cultural construct, rather than a biological fact.

That kind of competitive predatory behaviour is learned largely through the sensory and the environmental experiential afforded the child, and as we know, that varys from family to family , as much as culture to culture...

If control and punishment are habitual, the child's body and mind can become automatic, unconscious, with a layer of justification and rationalisation crafted in the external world, as part of the controlling behavioiur set.

When a few people with these habituations gather and organise, and gain more power they will build an institution, a family, a hierarchy...  and seek to protect it, for the power, t
Experientially loving becomes automatic,  defenciveness and insecurity becomes automatic for the child exposed to love or insecurity.... that child will act out, and if that is misinterpreted, and the child is 'regulated' that deepens the child's alienation, anger and frustration.... if that child does not receive support to heal, then more regulation will deepen the wounds... add to that additional trauma potentials created by the systems of hierarchical violence and authority..

On a societal scale, this has huge implications, and it is by neccessity an exercise of compassion, informed by science, evidence, good health and common sense to deconstruct these processes, and disentangle our institutions from replicating or propogasting those patterns... as adults gifting the next generation of children, I see no finer work.

If the child does not learn loving self regulation, his or her brain will not create a neurology of loving self regulation - if then that child as an adult behaves in ways that cause harm we have to look at the past, to look at all the evidence, to then be able to decide how best to proceed, in terms of society and health and safety...

These are generalised outlines, and I would urge readers to go to Sapolksy's book, and his videos...

We dearly need some calm, evidence based assessments of behavioural issues, not least because the political ruling class are presenting that they are a behavioural problem, on all sides.... that fact that trolling is a standard politcial tactic in mainstream public discourse rather proves the point, elegantly. 
Understand this : Politics is the struggle for power, Healthy Civil Governance is the careful and diligent administration of a community's shared resource(s) for the equity of the entire community.....

The accepted norm, the fundamental concept of international relations as materially the struggle for primacy among militarised states, who utilise war fare in pursuit of policy objectives absolutely afflicts a nations domestic governance, with bills, costs and losses that are all wholly avoidable.

That is psychopathy. 

Institutionalised. Given a lick of paint, some gold plate and a few fancy bits of cloth and bling.
The obvious lies and caricatures of material reality that abound in various Governments justifications for wars, the talk of punishment, sanctions, 'humanitarian intervention' all speak to people whose ability to self regulate thjeir urge for power is undermined, aand whose goal is ever more power over a majority of people, at whatever cost, borne usually by the ordinary folk ..

It's nuts.

It must be diagnosed before there is any possibility of dealing with it... and the best way to deal with it is tio de-legitimise it wholly, and defund it within each social cultural institutional organisation unit at home - we in the UK deal with ours, those in Russia and anywhere else deal with theirs.

We have to stop allowing the justifications and accepted norms of international war fare be taken at face value, and let the victimised, the survivors lead our concerns and let prevention be our concern, as citizens and humane patriots/matriots/fraternities/sisterhoods... it is our money they are using to fund these wars.

It is a behavioural issue.
And that means that it is ultimately a resolveable situation.

---

Mai Lai - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Lai_Massacre
Mai Lai's happen in all wars. It's what happens when a military in theatre moves across a landscape.

People's homes become battle grounds.... Mai Lai's happen when artillery and missiles are launched at built up areas, no matter who is launching them.

For the majority of people, these wars are none of their business, they have no say, no power, no claim within these wars, they are wholly innocent.

The one's who make war must be made accountable by the innocent.

There is no other way.

.



Kindest regards

Corneilius

"Do what you love, it's Your Gift to Universe"

Thank you for reading this blog. All we need to do is be really honest, responsive to the evidence we find,and ready to reassess when new evidence emerges. The rest is easy.

Patterns, details, humanity. Toby Young.

Gangs... power structures.... hooligans.... Boris Johnson, Toby Young, Jeremy Hunt. Pinochet. Saddam. Nixon.

portrait of a neoliberal gangster.

- youth gangs and associated knife crime issue requires some social honesty

Persistent, institutionalised social inequity is directly correlated with widespread chronic distress, despair, powerlessness. The evidence for this is clear. Giving banks close to half a trillion dollars, whiist reducing support to poor and vulnerable people was not the choice of the people. So it goes.

Persistent, instutionalised social inequity is also correlated with emergent and increasing street crime, petty public violence and other signs of breakdown. The Community fragments. Resources are diverted away. The greater the sense of inequity, the greater the refusal to co-operate, the more intense the breakdown. This is just common sense. Visible Social Inequity is the driving pressure. Pressure. International relations between States, with dominant power blocks seeking hegemony, in an adversarial environment that is fully militarised. This robs peoples of resources, youth, respect and dignity and it absolutely influences local politics, to the very core.

Lateral Violence is a term that describes a statistical dynamic, where abuse within a hierarchy trickles down, and emerges as sideways violence and aggression, where individuals or groups pick on others at their own level or below, to vent their anger upon. Gay bashing, racism, religious sectarianism and much else falls into this dynamic, or emerges more often within the dynamics of a hierarchically violent power culture That is a pattern. Not an excuse.

Not every case is the pattern; they are more than that, and to understand what is creating the pattern, we need to be honest about the evidence, the dataset, and that has to include the journey of that individual, and of every individual we learn about, it has to take in the situation of his or her lived experience and social setting as see all the elements that come into play, as influencers on those lives. All of them, in both qualitative and quantitative research terms. Empathy, compassion,respectful distance: scientific.

First Minimum requirement to solve a problem is the full understanding of the problem.

The second is access to all available pertinent information. A news story will provide only a caricature of any situation it reports, A news story is not enough to base a diagnosis on. Yet we are all expected to do this, from reading newspapers,. etc to voting in that booth, we are told we have enough information make a diagnosis, and we vote with very little data.. Beyond each caricature of a criminal or murderer, a terrorist or a soldier there lies an invisible child, now an adult human being, a history. Do not let the bullies write that history. Or co-opt it to their ends. There will be some cases that are a mixture of all of this: that are to do with social care systems and punishment, with socio-economic status, with broken familial relationships, some might have disabilities, or emotional trauma, and all will have differently altered brains, trauma altered endocrine alterations.

Peer pressure, poverty, marginalisation, bigotry can all interplay and adversely impact any child, any developing brain.

These harmful elements running through a society do not proclaim the health of that society, do they?

The Media hypes stories, for an agenda, not for honesty, or justice.

Justice would remove the economic incentive for gang membership and operations. As a first step.

By dismantling any institutionalised socio-economic inhibitors on equitable economic engagement and arrangements, where being a low skill worker does not mean low paid, economically challenged .... every hour of our lives is precious. All equally so.

The pattern.

Take a public service. cut it. to save money.

Cut it again. then bash it, to save money..

Slice it, and cut it. Then twist it, to be more efficient.

Keep doing this, until it begins to fail.

Then suggest that a private contractor could step in and save the day.

A large corporate private contractor with a track record of fraud, bad practice, graft and inefficiency.

How can any adult  alive and literate, walking about today in 2018 Britain be unaware of this pattern?

Another fine example is this: The DWP plans to streamline benefits using sanctions as a mechanism in administrating efficiencies have cost more than they have saved.

of November 2016, they had blown £50,000,000 on administering sanctions, £200 million monitoring claimants, £35,000,000 hardship payments, running to a total of £285 million... and they had saved £132 million.

For that total net spend of £153,000,00 they have demonstrably increased chronic stress on 11,000 people who have died soon after assessments that applied reductions on their support. At least 11,000 people, who it can be said, did not need nor deserve any extra pressure and stress upon their lives.

How much of that £132 million was sequestered as corporate profits?

In other words, how much tax payers cash became shareholders profits?

Many others persisted, in spite of the system failures,  and pushed back. Which is why the UN took steps to document the tragedy unfolding.

Have they spent £153 million on bullying vulnerable people just because they can?

Is Toby Young  a natural ally of Donald 'PG' Trump, is his opportunist Toryism emblematic of the brown nosing revolving door of the neoLiberal Ruling Classes?

Kindest regards

Corneilius

"Do what you love, it's Your Gift to Universe"

Thank you for reading this blog. All we need to do is be really honest, responsive to the evidence we find,and ready to reassess when new evidence emerges. The rest is easy.

Benefits and Assistance

On benefits.

There's a difference between assistance or help and benefits.

When people are in need they deserve assistance and help.

When people are doing extremely well financially because they have lobbied government, they are deriving a benefit.

"You do not need a BENEFIT, you deserve assistance."

A shareholders derives a benefit.

Someone who buys a house cheap, decorates it, and and sells it a year later at a profit, not related to the decorating work done, but to 'market prices' derives a benefit.

That is the difference.

If the State called 'benefits' 'assistance' instead, then the bullying of 'people on benefits' would become much clearer because it would be 'the bullying of people deserving assistance'..... so we must call 'benefits' 'assistance' and insist on the clarity of  meaning, intention and outcome.

The system uses words to beat our minds into compliance. We have to counter that.

Tax breaks are benefits.

Subsidies to large scale commercial activities that are immensely profitable are benefits.

Corrupt weapons deals yield benefits.

Cui Bono?

Income support is assistance.

Housing Benefit is Assistance.

Rent controls and social housing are forms of assistance.

Personal Independence Payments and the Independent Living Fund and other ways to support disabled people etc were and are all assistance. Not benefits.

"We are going to reduce the benefits bill" and compare it to "we are going to reduce assistance to those who need it."

"We will support industry with tax breaks" and compare it to "We will ensure shareholders and executives get a financial benefit from our policies".

Critical analysis is a beautiful tool.

Opinion is the subversion of evidence by prejudice.

Kindest regards

Corneilius

"Do what you love, it's Your Gift to Universe"

*If you like this post, if you found the themes resonant, if you agree in part, would you be kind enough to let others know about it? I would really appreciate that. You could drop a comment too, if you felt the urge. Or not. I will moderate contributions, and block any that are abusive. For obvious reasons. Thank you for reading.

Evidence, David Smail and the facts before us.

I have just completed my first reading of 'The Origins of Unhappiness : A New Understanding of Personal Unhappiness' written by David Smail.  It is an astounding work, and I must say, I now believe that it is essential reading for anyone interested in psychological distress, justice and economic equity.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/27133657-the-origins-of-unhappiness

"It is the main argument of this book that emotional and psychological distress is often brought about through the operation of social-environmental powers which have their origin at a considerable distance from those ultimately subjected to them. 

On the whole, psychology has concerned itself very little with the field of power which stretches beyond our immediate relations with each other, and this has led to serious limitations on the explanatory power of the theories it has produced. 

To illustrate this, typical cases of patient distress in the 1980s are examined. The decade when the right-wing of politics proclaimed there was no such thing as society gave rise to psychological distress across social classes, as long-standing societal institutions were dismantled. 

This is as much a work of sociology, politics, and philosophy, as it is of psychology. Fundamentals of an environmental understanding of distress are outlined. A person is the interaction of a body with the environment."

What I got from this book : realism and honesty.

I live in England where poverty is deliberately maintained and the poor are dehumanised in media representations, where the symptoms of that distress are used as signs of a flawed nature in order to blame the impoverished for their impoverished state, which protects the Wealth Extraction systems, externalising the cost of low wages and inadequate social care provision. 

"We need to realise that, rather than the patient being a problem for the world, the world is a problem for the patient. We are embodied products of environment space-time. To make a difference in our lives we need to be able to exert what little influence we have on the environment, to make it, from our perspective, a little more benign. It is not we who need to change, but the world around us.Or, to put it another way, the extent to which we are able to change will always depend upon some material change in the environmental structures of power which envelope us (and insofar as these cannot be changed, for example because they are in the past, neither can we be wiped clean of their effects).

The difficulty with this is immediately apparent: how do we, relatively powerless creatures, bring effective influence to bear on the environment?"

David Smail (goes to wiki page on David Smail) wrote this :

"Hardly any of the 'symptoms' of psychological distress may correctly be seen as medical matters. The so-called psychiatric 'disorders' are nothing to do with faulty biology, nor indeed are they the outcome of individual moral weakness or other personal failing. They are the creation of the social world in which we live, and that world is structured by power.
    
Social power may be defined as the means of obtaining security or advantage, and it will be exercised within any given society in a variety of forms: coercive (force), economic (money power) and ideological (the control of meaning). Power is the dynamic which keeps the social world in motion. It may be used for good or for ill.
    
One cannot hope to understand the phenomena of psychological distress, nor begin to think what can be done about them, without an analysis of how power is distributed and exercised within society.

Such an understanding is the focus of this web-site. "


You can go to David Smail's Website here via wayback web archive.

I respectfully suggest this as a genuinely useful resource base, to find tools and insights that relate to how power operates and behaves in this culture.

The psychology of power hierarchies. The psychology of people adjusting to this unhealthy social institutional structure and culture. Some home truths. Radicalisation. Grooming. Social meaning. Our lives in all of this.

Evidence based.





Kindest regards

Corneilius

"Do what you love, it's Your Gift to Universe"

*If you like this post, if you found the themes resonant, if you agree in part, would you be kind enough to let others know about it? I would really appreciate that. You could drop a comment too, if you felt the urge. Or not. I will moderate contributions, and block any that are abusive. For obvious reasons. Thank you for reading.

Theresa May, Angela Eagle, Jeremy Corbyn and War Crimes.

1. The Laws prohibiting war were then as they are now. Nothing has changed.

2. The senior Lawyer at the Foreign Office, Elizabeth Wilmshurst quit her role just before the war.

She had been at the Foreign Office since 1974.

She stood down from a career that spanned 30 years.

She was 100% clear that the invasion was a War of Aggression, the supreme war crime, in that it contains all other war crimes.

Her letter of resignation made this clear.

"I cannot in conscience go along with advice - within the Office or to the public or Parliament - which asserts the legitimacy of military action without such a resolution, particularly since an unlawful use of force on such a scale amounts to the crime of aggression; nor can I agree with such action in circumstances which are so detrimental to the international order and the rule of law. "

ALL Cabinet level politicians had access to that advice.

http://www.news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/4377605.stm

Claire Short, Robin Cook also resigned. Why?

3. ALL MP's had then, as they have now, a duty of care and of due diligence that is inherent in their roles as MP's, as representatives of their constituencies.

Each and everyone of them had a duty to examine the Laws prohibiting war, and to understand them as they applied at the time.

Failure to do so, along with voting for the War, on such a matter where peoples lives (the troops they were sending, their families) were being put into harms way, and where the outcomes for Iraqi civilians were likely to be horrific, at the expense of the tax payer, was corporate negligence of the highest order, at the very minimum.

They all had plenty of time to exercise due diligence and honour their duty of care.

They chose not to.

Angela Eagle chose not to.

David Cameron chose not to.

Theresa May chose not to.

They are all culpable under the Law, for their inactions as much as their actions.

It is a matter of parliamentary and public record.

They were and are not alone; there are many people in positions of influence in the BBC, Media, Civil Service, Military and Police Command who participated in the rush to war, all of whom had the same duty of care, the same due diligence, given their positions in the system.

4. Jeremy Corbyn is 100% committed to upholding the Law, as is John McDonnell, and as are the vast majority of grass roots electorate.

This is not about personalities, it is about policies, outcomes, accountability and prevention.

We at the grass roots owe it to the dead and living of Iraq, Libya, Yemen and Syria to hold our Government to account for their many crimes, committed using our taxes, using monies borrowed with our future taxes as collateral......

That is the threat the Establishment want to neutralise.

And they will fail. They are failing.

5. Hold steady.

Stay strong.

Stand for justice, truth, honesty and a fair Society.


Kindest regards

Corneilius

"Do what you love, it's Your Gift to Universe"

*If you like this post, if you found the themes resonant, if you agree in part, would you be kind enough to let others know about it? I would really appreciate that. You could drop a comment too, if you felt the urge. Or not. I will moderate contributions, and block any that are abusive. For obvious reasons. Thank you for reading.