rational = poof

From a post on FB by a guy with schooldays in Fife

"When I was at school, everyone was scared to give the right answer to the teacher in case they were called a "poof".
(In Fife schools all boys were classed as poofs at a moment's notice, for doing anything that suggested they were intelligent or sensitive humans. That was forbidden." ...

"Nowadays, people running about trying to use big words they don't really understand to seem clever.
Ironic, because if they hadn't pretended to be stupid in the first place they would have learned what the big words mean and realise there's no need to use them."

Such a destructive system does any good???
Authoritarian Schooling, a catalogue of damage, by David Gribble

MINORITY RECOGNITION PAIN SET OFF IN THE MOST CASUAL DAILY LIFE

Today, in the later half of November, is blue sky sunny, but from a frosty start, nippy enough air to have some folks in woolly hats, and some of the seasonal German market's security staff wearing scarves over their mouths. Temperature up to 9 then falling to 6 at sunset.

In this, in the crowd exploring the German market there were as many as 6 other folks in shorts. Both adults and kids, and from both visually apparent sides of the gender spectrum. (Well worded?) I, as an aspie with a shorts sensory issue and a metabolically active body heat, have a lot of pain baggage around a minority identity struggle that I did not get a good life start in. So to see actually what I want, the social liberty I care about doing well and advancing, carries pain. The pain of needing simple equal recognition, needing to be identified as one of the shorts favouring folks comfortable in this type of air and further.

I did not see this in my childhood/youth. Is it climate change, that more folks find days at this time of year sunnier now, hence also milder? Yet there were some folks visibly wrapped up feeling cold, and all of us shorts folks were also wearing coats. Is it this region's climate, helpful to folks finding their cold boundaries: for I have always thought that shorts are seen more and colder here in East-Central Scotland than they were in the unhappy exiled location of my childhood, South Wales. Is it the existence of the web, allowing now for anyone who doubts it to confirm that colder shorts are doable and won't give them colds. Is it a good era shift, away from the evil conformity caused by hard macho attitudes in the punk and alternative comedy eras? I grew up before the web, but after the mid-century tradition of knee-length breeches for boys had died out; and in a region affected by saturated damp air causing cold-like symptoms that prevented me until my 20s from discovering my shortist identity as a real life option; and I was never a cub because my tastes were not outdoor enough and did not at the time know they wore them; and I went to a school whose uniform was rigidly only long trousers right from above the first primary year; and the unfairly difficult older boyhood when there is an irrational age prejudice against shorts I was at exactly in the punk era when shorts were most out of fashion. Amid all that unfair hammering of circumstances, never did I see what I saw today, nor before my 20s get the opportunity to be one of the folks seen in them on this type of day at this time of year. But my soul identity has always been that I should have been.

So even if it's good right social change and to be celebrated, also it's a deep stinging oppression pain concerning life fairness. For all shortists who have been oppressed and in struggle, I have to push society and posterity to consider analysis of the causes.

Maurice Frank
18 Nov 2018

Is there gentle caring society without religious places in it?

Here's proud of a Youtube comment I just made, on how sneery tough antagonistic character types - the human majority - can't get along well in a thinking way and create local social scenes around their ideas. Anyone who wants that to happen needs to be favourable to making social behaviour softer and more including and welcoming than it usually is.

It's an atheist cartoonist, called "DarkMatter2525", - hey I happen to be sceptical of dark matter. In this cartoon www.youtube.com/watch?v=wguAQHWVcZY he complains that urban America is very densely full of churches, and atheists feel hassled by it. This was one of his emotionally serious offerings, probably his most self-troubled one.

He is a prolific maker of comedy cartoons on theology, though like all the Youtube atheists he never looks at the thesis of a God not having any magic omnipotence. The cartoons directly about conservative and morally harsh religious ideas, and how they would really work out for society if practised literally, are addictively incisive and what any conservative theocracy needs to hear. They are really good and deliciously libertarian. Others are turkeys leaving you furious at wasting time on them: those are the ones where he digresses onto lots of unnecessary sex and nudity themes to make himself look cool. Comics with macho characters always do that. Particularly offensive in some of his cartoons are some too harshly head-on uninhibited depictions of violent or medically tragic deaths, within a comedy context, made shockingly coldly unfeelingly by someone who believes in no existence after death, and wishes to attract his viewers to that harsh macho belief too - all those of his cartoons are just as bad as the harsh scriptures he argues for being offended by.

His sense of humour is emotionally gloating and psychologically sneering in the misery ehancing horrible way that has remained popular ever since the barbaric "alternative" comedy of the 80s started it. There was a clue in there to his complaint, to the social imbalance favouring Christians over atheists in having any neighbourhood social life with likeminded folks towards religion and its issues. And it's not only Christians, it's everyone who feels compatible with a church, you might not be a Christian but still feel likdminded enough with a liberal church to belong to it socially. I wrote -
"
" Plenty of nice folks are atheists. But the milder forms of organised religion, regardless of their content's rightness or wrongness, have a social virtue that practically nothing else achieves [besides the aspie scene, hopefully!] - they bring together softer gentler characters and give them a social space to be themselves and accepted, a refuge. From what? From human uncivilisation, from persecution by all the derisive-hearted macho thug chararcters who are a tyranny of conformity to a futile harsh cycle of sneer and violence which destroys everything nice. And because being macho includes deriding every nice idea in religions, not for being wrong but for being nice, macho sneer characters are always atheists.

This makes it far harder for atheists than for the religious, to like each other and get along well socially. Consequently, they can't form so many local associations equivalent to churches. The religious outcompete you not on ideas, their ideas can be dumb without limit, but on escape from cruel human nature. If humans were socially nicer than we are, there would be an equal spread of atheist churches. If you want to fight back from being surrounded by churches, encourage atheists to be saintly instead of tough personalities, ignore every macho sod who drops atheism in disgust at it, and look forward to the quality life of basking in warm-hearted tolerant soppy company.

That prospect is not shaking your self-esteem, is it? because that wouldn't be the rational response to its reasoned merits.
"

Maurice Frank