Recovery Is A Means To Sobriety, Not Fun

When I first got sober, the task itself was a challenge and a source of excitement and discovery. After a good few years, when I had regular employment and some degree of emotional sobriety, the thrill of physical sobriety was gone. I have to remember that it’s something I do every day, and can lose any day. That’s why I still go to meetings.

The same has happened with the self-development stuff. Early nights needed for the early mornings prevent the parties and even the opera and the theatre; the careful diet discourages blow-outs and gimmick food; sobriety cuts out booze and drugs, and that has serious consequences for anyone’s sex life, let alone mine. Life has turned into a stream of comforting and bland white-food experiences.

At which point, you said all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. Which is one of those things people say without really understanding it.

What is work? One answer is that it’s something we would only do if we were being paid to do it. I like that one, but that misses the essential bit. Work is anything we do that is goal-directed, rather than for the fun of the thing itself. Employment is work, because the aim is to get paid by doing whatever the boss need me to do. Shopping for food is work. The gym is work, and so is making the bed, ironing the sheets, reading a non-fiction book, tidying a room, cleaning the car, making a painting, taking photographs, networking in the pub after work, chasing girls… a lot more things are goal-directed than you might believe. Sleeping is goal-directed activity, and so work, which is why I wake up exhausted every morning.

Being dull is about being poor company, withdrawn, shy, not being funny, amusing, pleasant, not knowing how to take part in the chatter, the teasing, and the all-round bonhomie. It’s about Jack not being fun for other people rather than having fun for himself.

Being a dull boy may not be such a bad thing, if the only company you have to keep is forever getting into fights, debt, unplanned pregnancies, and going in and out of jail, or if the people you know are gossipy, back-biting, empty-headed, and don’t do much more than eat, drink, shop and get high.

What is it about work that makes Jack a dull boy? Trick question: it only makes Jack dull if it’s that kind of work. Drudgery for someone else’s benefit.

A lot of the self-improvement stuff can be habit, but habit does not mean drudgery, and it is all for oneself.

The trick is to remember that there was a time I didn’t do it, and how I felt then. I could consider that I could stop, and what the consequences of doing that would be. And sometimes, instead of saying “this is just this again”, to say “this is what I do”.

Dutch Apple Pie, Zandvoort

 

Lunchtime dessert: apple pie, vanilla ice cream, beach outside the window. Zandvoort.

Let’s Have Lots of Gun Control, But...

I’m a Brit. Brits can own guns: shotguns and light caliber rifles. No .38 snub-noses, .357 magnums, Tec-9’s, Uzi’s, AK-47’s nor any other military weapon. This has been so for a long, long time. A criminal who takes a gun to a crime will do a LOT more time than if he had slipped a knuckle-duster in his pocket. This change in the law reduced offences in which a firearm was involved from 24,094 in 2003/4 to 8,399 in 2015/6.

There has been exactly one school shooting in the UK (Dunblane, 1996), and two mass shootings (Hungerford 1987, and Cumbria 2010).

Britain has all the personal freedom you could want. People come from all over the world to our little island because they will be left alone to live their lives, as long as they leave others alone to live theirs. People may go to the USA to follow a dream of riches and fame, but they come to the UK to live their lives without onerous state interference. Surely there are bureaucrats with far too many powers, but that’s bureaucracy everywhere. But if you pay your bills and stay away from the Family Courts and Social Services, you are as free as a bird. The bureaucrats are busy enough dealing with their regulars and covering up their cock-ups, they don’t need to find trouble.

And yet we have some of the strictest gun control. On. The. Planet.

There are countries in the world where a decent man needs a practical firearm to defend himself. New Zealand is not one of them, but it has an organisation called the New Zealand Shooters’ Association, and until recently ordinary civilians who weren’t criminals or taking psychiatric medication were allowed to have semi-automatic weapons and even assault rifles.

I know guns don’t kill people, people kill people. But if the people who have a yen to kill people can’t get the guns, they will let the urge go un-acted upon. Because killing people without guns is messy, bloody, up close, and more likely to go wrong for the killer.

The gun control nuts use their right to have a loaded semi-automatic AK-47 in the house as the touchstone of individual liberty. Listen to them and it feels like it is the only thing they care about, and the only things that matters. Meanwhile, in the USA, the Police can seize anything they want without a Court Order on suspicion of criminal activity. Focussing on gun control means you miss all the other stuff the bureaucrats are taking away. In the name of not letting a crisis go to waste, the New Zealand censor banned Jordan Peterson’s unreadable best-seller 12 Rules For Life because it might encourage more right-wing nuts. No legal possession of semi-automatics, no crisis to hide heavy-handed ideological censorship.

I say let’s have lots and lots of gun control.

But Governments have to take the guns from the Bad Guys - the criminals, drug cartels, organised terrorist groups and guerrilla forces - first. Then they can disarm the civilians. And then they have to disarm (most of) the Police.

The only people who should ever be able to get their hands on anything more than a shotgun or a light-gauge rifle are trained, uniformed soldiers. They have to had it back in at the end of the day. I don’t even want to see British policeman with those Heckler and Koch semi-automatic rifles.

Want to be Normal? Never Do The Math, Never Make Decisions

The MGTOW / Bachelor / Self-Improvement lifestyle, especially when combined with intermittent fasting and an 05:30 wake-up time, can rapidly lead to a fairly austere lifestyle. No drugs, no drinking, no Rolexes, no fancy weekends away with expensive girlfriends, no bespoke suits and shoes, no using the latest phone, nor other bling. Some people might even forego the Apple gear and decent Northampton-made shoes for a mid-range Dell and shoes from China, but for me that’s going too far.

Maybe it’s a consequence of being on the AA program, or it’s a consequence of the austerity bit, but I find I have lost sympathy for the chaos, emotional squalor, health problems, financial difficulties, and hangovers of regular people, let alone for their material wants, desires and fantasies.

To me those are choices they have made, but to them, I have realised, none of it is a choice. They call it life and it just happens to them. Choice for them is about what to consume, not how to live. Because they don’t think of themselves as deciding, they don’t experience anything as a consequence, just as more stuff that happens from outside. They hear people saying things like ‘actions have consequences’ and they nod along because they know it’s an Approved Thought, but they don’t think it applies to them. Decisions are something other people make.

AA has a koan: nobody held you down and forced whisky down your throat. Which they didn’t. I picked up the drink and poured it down my throat. My actions. My choices. The day I heard that AA koan, or more accurately, the day I understood it, I felt a sense of relief and of revelation.

I made choices that got me drunk. Now I could make choices that kept me sober. Getting drunk didn’t happen to me, it was something I could stop doing to me.

(Some things do happen to us - losing a job when the company downsizes, drowsiness from hay fever, getting a cold - but even then we can try to do something about the situation we get tipped into. That’s a choice.)

Even if regular people accept that they make choices, they don’t do the math around those choices. Someone told me that they had been putting off having children because it wasn’t the right time. Then one day someone said to them: it’s never the right time to have children. The math on children, for Western people with good jobs and a pleasant lifestyle, is all negative, as the declining birth rates all over Europe attest. It’s poor people who have children because, it doesn’t make their lives any worse.

If you’re a Westener with a shot at a decent job, defined as one that lets you live in your own place and still save some money, the math says you live pretty much as I do, though with more partying. If you don’t make that much, there’s some bad math that says two of you can maybe afford a place of your own. It’s bad math because it doesn’t factor in the expected cost (cost x probability) of the break-up, and the probability of break-up is 40% plus.

Regular people don’t do the math. This matters because if you hire them to manage parts of your company, they are not going to do the math there either. How many business plans for marginal but career-enhancing projects, with utterly fake numbers, do you see? Right. All of them. Regular people do stuff because they think it will enhance their lives, and they don’t look at the downside that will hit them like the tide in the Bristol Channel.

What do they gain, in their private lives, by ignoring the math and even not thinking about consequences? I have no idea. It may be the sense that they don’t want to be me and mine. They don’t want to be That Guy who thinks about tomorrow’s hangover when contemplating another round tonight. Why they would want to be the guy who has the hangover, I have no idea.

And I still see it as a decision that they make. Because it is.

Vittorio Swiss Chocolate

The chocolate is pretty good, the ice cream is delicious, especially after training (*cough*).

Everyone Gets The Brexit They Want

Here’s the Brexit situation. The EU - May agreement is unacceptable because of the backstop. Speaker Bercow won’t let it come before Parliament again until there’s a significant change to it. Which there won’t be, because the EU have said they won’t change it. An extension that’s conditional on the agreement being voted in isn’t going to happen, unless Bercow accepts that as a significant change. However, there’s still no guarantee that enough MP’s will change their minds.

No MP is going to propose cancelling A50. The Whips wouldn’t stand for it: it’s one of those things where everybody has to trust everybody else, and there’s too much political capital to be gained by welching on that trust to seem like the Party that’s faithful to the British People.

I give outside odds against Angel Merkel telling the EU to drop the backstop - this would be about Wednesday - so the MPs can vote for the rest of the agreement before the 29th. She gets to be the saviour of Europe, after being its Prime Traitor. Nice legacy.

I’m not changing my position that the EU wants the UK out because we will impede their lunatic Federalism. And the UK wants out because we don’t want to spend our lives fighting lunatic Federalism.

If the EU was staffed by proper grown-ups, it would have talked about trade first and payments afterwards. Instead it is staffed by corrupt and second-rate bureaucrats, all of whom failed in their national political scene. They claim to love Europe, but they hate the people of Europe, and they hate the parliaments of Europe, in which they failed so badly. They have to punish all wrong-doers, and so must make all the other countries think twice. So the UK always was going to get an unacceptable deal.

No-one must be seen to making the decision to leave without a deal. Nobody must be to blame. Everybody must have plausible deniability. That’s why nobody will bring a motion to abandon A50. That’s why the EU stuck in a condition that they knew was unacceptable.

Theresa May has been accused of being a closet Remainer who wants Brexit to fail. Au contraire. She hates the EU in its post-Lisbon guise, and she hates the ECJ and ECHR. Given a choice between destruction and staying under the jurisdiction of the European Courts, she will burn the world. Resigning, by the way, would be tantamount to burning the world.

I suspect that Theresa May was deeply affected by the story of A Fistful of Dollars, where Clint Eastwood’s Stranger plays two factions off against each other, walking away with a lot of money and leaving ruins behind him. He gets beaten up before he can win.

The quisling media portrays Theresa May as a weakened, powerless incompetent. That’s George Osborne projecting his own personality and life on her. That wasn’t the Prime Minister I saw making a statement from Downing Street, skewering the MPs and appealing over their heads to their constituents.

Edward Said, Orientalism and Failure-Conspiracies

Recently there was an Edward Said-related anniversary. I thought it for forty years of the publication of his book Orientalism in the UK, but I could have been wrong. Said’s career-defining book argued that the Western view of Oriental, and especially Arabic and Muslim, cultures served an imperialist agenda, creating inaccurate images of the mysterious East that justified the Western treatment of those cultures: Here’s a quote from Said:

Very little of the detail, the human density, the passion of Arab–Moslem life has entered the awareness of even those people whose profession it is to report the Arab world. What we have, instead, is a series of crude, essentialized caricatures of the Islamic world, presented in such a way as to make that world vulnerable to military aggression.

(Said was talking about Palestine, not Iraq.)

To the contrary. While the artists, writers and historians may have created the myth that Said describes, the politicians had an altogether more practical view. Western foreign policy up to the disastrous First Iraqi War showed a shrewd understanding that Arab countries, with their simmering religious feuds, corruption and gangsterism, were best left to dictators or despots maintaining order with varying and regrettable levels of brutality. The events since then have only confirmed this. It has nothing to do with culture, religion or the detail, the human density, the passion of Arab–Moslem life (Said’s phrase), and everything to do with the underlying gangsterism, and, of course, who gets the kickbacks from the oil supply.

In the previous decades, Europeans were forced into this situation time and time again. People complained and protested about Imperial rule, the Europeans walked away, and after the first independent government, the country promptly fell apart. Quick, name any country that has done better since their Imperial rulers walked away(*). What happened to farming in Zimbabwe and is happening in South Africa should make anyone who "cares about the planet" weep. For that matter, name any country that lost its dictator and didn’t sink into gangsterism (**).

The process is something like this:

1) Group A complains that they are not getting as much of the good stuff they could if they weren’t oppressed, discriminated against; or otherwise disadvantaged by Group B

2) Group B stops doing whatever it is or at least passes a law to make it illegal...

3) … and it all goes well until there’s a change of leadership, or the torch passes to another generation, when...

4) ...the whole show falls into the chaos of internecine strife, or someone notices that only a small proportion of Group A’s are getting the ‘good stuff’...

5) …when academics and activists create conspiracy theories to explain the failure, e.g. the patriarchy, white privilege, Group A’s specific culture and values, years of oppression, cultural hegemony, toxic culture, and on and on.

The purpose of the conspiracy theory is not to help redress whatever wrong continues to be done to Group A. It is to provide the leaders of the failed movement with an excuse, and to help their useful-idiot western sympathisers deal with the horrendous cognitive dissonance created by their adoption of, and continued support for, a spectacularly failed policy(***).

Said’s book was one of the first that blamed Western cultural theories for the behaviour of a non-Western government (the Palestinian Authority). Behind a smoke-screen that Said contributed to, Yassir Araft diverted hundreds of millions of external aid into what was euphemistically called the Chairman’s Fund and away from improving the lives of Palestinians. Did Said realise he was being played?

So, contra Said, the Orient is not the victim of some nefarious myth-making by obscure academics - they aren’t that important or influential. The Orient is how it is because it is hot, has poor agriculture, and is ruled by corrupt theocratic governments which insist that the population learns nothing except one book, and that by rote. Some of it is geography, and a lot of it is a political decision. A decision Said's own book helped disguise.

(*) Vietnam. But not until the North Vietnamese lost their Imperial backers as well.

(**) Estonia, Lithuania and Poland don’t count, since they never had dictators like Albania and Romania did. The Czechs and Slovaks sorted themselves out eventually. What the Serbs and Bosnians did to each other was appalling. If you think Russia isn’t a gangster state, you aren’t paying attention.

(***) Any time it occurs to you that feminism fits this pattern...