The democratic civilities around religious liberty and all having lots of different views on what happens when we die, is among the widest appreciated and valued items of personal liberty. We remember the Middle Ages history of inquisitions and religious wars, and every time religion comes up we experience the value of our liberty to think something else than the person or group we are talking to. Some follow a politeness tip to avoid it in conversation because of the different views, but folks interested in the subject enjoy exploring the ideas range.
Part of the civil coexistence is to know that we will each apply our own beliefs to each other's deaths. That's common sense. The only exception to the civility is the insultingness and evil fear play involved in threats of hell, and those are obviously a personal hostility and bigotry so they breach civility. All the range of beliefs that are not control threats or hostile like that, but that are civil to imagine, the civility of coexistence applies to. Whatever you believe about death is what you believe has happened.
An author of a well regarded autism book interpreting our community as a civil rights movement, Neurotribes, Steve Silberman, has died suddenly. There is some mourning around on Facebook. But also, there is a post going round, that he posted only a year before, telling everyone how to react to his death. It orders, dictates, not to react to it saying anything that expressed any afterlife beliefs. He calls those "comforting fables", which comes from the hardline atheist astronomer Carl Sagan. He was entitled to his view like anyone, and to have any memorials follow it. But he was not entitled to dictate to everyone else not to react to the event of his death through their beliefs.
He dictates to all to take an anti-afterlife lesson of our impermanence,from his death. Dictates to arrive at his view. That's overbearing dictatorial arrogance. He tried to use instruction on how to handle his death, to trap folks into his belief position, as an outcome of following the instruction. To censor folks' own perceptions in how they react to a death. That was controlling arrogance and a misuse if the civility code around death.
For it he forfeits the civility code. Your beliefs are your human right. It makes it fair to only remember him as an arrogant jerk. To realise from this that he was that, and for it not ceased to merit positive remembering.
Maurice Frank
4 Sep 2024
Wednesday, September 4, 2024
Thursday, June 27, 2024
muck that is child abuse to claim to even have any choice to think.
Utterly disgusting idea presented as one of those fluffy-positive thoughts, shared on the fb page of "Autism To Maxx" -
" Don't regret anything. Good times become good memories. Bad times become good lessons."
My reply:
" Rape is not a lesson and it would be misogyny to conceive for a second that it is. Murder of a loved one is not a lesson and it would be fascism to conceive for a second that it is. Being in either side of the Israel-Gaza war or in Ukraine is not a lesson and it would be utterly evil to conceive for a second that it is. Having your child die is not a lesson and it forfeits membership of an intelligent species to conceive for a second that it is. Therefore likewise the monster, in an autism forum 20 years ago, who dared for one second to suggest treating as a learning experience a life defining child abuse that I survived and did not choose or consent to and that did not happen to several less nice people who got the thing the abuse took from me ".
Referring to the evil that my speaking out on has been well known in the autistic scene and helped others, particularly its permanent record go posterity in the book Bittersweet on the Autism Spectrum. The destruction of my child authorship by homework.
IT WAS REMOVED WITHIN HOURS. Original post morning. Because of its disappearance, posted the same evening this reply to Cindy Vien:
" which is exactly why, this morning I posted a response I can no longer see: that listed several types of unconsented serious life wrongs that it would be utterly evil to conceive of telling the victim to treat as a lesson. Concluding with:
Therefore likewise the monster, in an autism forum 20 years ago, who dared for one second to suggest treating as a learning experience a life defining child abuse that I survived and did not choose or consent to, and that did not happen to several less nice ppl who got the thing the abuse took from me. "
" Don't regret anything. Good times become good memories. Bad times become good lessons."
My reply:
" Rape is not a lesson and it would be misogyny to conceive for a second that it is. Murder of a loved one is not a lesson and it would be fascism to conceive for a second that it is. Being in either side of the Israel-Gaza war or in Ukraine is not a lesson and it would be utterly evil to conceive for a second that it is. Having your child die is not a lesson and it forfeits membership of an intelligent species to conceive for a second that it is. Therefore likewise the monster, in an autism forum 20 years ago, who dared for one second to suggest treating as a learning experience a life defining child abuse that I survived and did not choose or consent to and that did not happen to several less nice people who got the thing the abuse took from me ".
Referring to the evil that my speaking out on has been well known in the autistic scene and helped others, particularly its permanent record go posterity in the book Bittersweet on the Autism Spectrum. The destruction of my child authorship by homework.
IT WAS REMOVED WITHIN HOURS. Original post morning. Because of its disappearance, posted the same evening this reply to Cindy Vien:
" which is exactly why, this morning I posted a response I can no longer see: that listed several types of unconsented serious life wrongs that it would be utterly evil to conceive of telling the victim to treat as a lesson. Concluding with:
Therefore likewise the monster, in an autism forum 20 years ago, who dared for one second to suggest treating as a learning experience a life defining child abuse that I survived and did not choose or consent to, and that did not happen to several less nice ppl who got the thing the abuse took from me. "
Friday, February 2, 2024
Inconsistency trauma around the child abuse of year round shorts school uniforms worldwide
Reddit contains many recurring topic posts on stupid school rules and is a vast library on them, in face of which the authoritarian model of school is completely indefensible. Year round shorts uniforms are regularly mentioned in them, confirming how persistently, while randomly, they have occurred and been a trope. This post, just within the length limit, makes an article itself -
More attention is needed on trauma from the inconsistency of uniforms, the cruelty that what is ideal for you can happen at some other schools and chance not to happen at yours. I'm desperate for some engaging and empathy on this around all year round shorts uniforms for boys. Many folks don't even realise they exist, including me in my boyhood ! but to those who do, by the majority experience of it it's the most astoundingly cruel thing not to get stopped by modern child protection standards even in the paedo paranoia era. But nobody realises this - the opposite cruelty exists too, where by your own metabolic nature you actually like year round shorts, for you those uniforms would suit and not be cruel, but you chance not to get them ! and you get the opposite, a school very against shorts !
For a start, the incredible mix of perceptions shows that at media elite level the system does not care if a thing done quite a lot in some places is not even known of in others. "I've never heard of a school not allowing trousers before." "Didn't think they still existed." "I am horrified to discover this cruel and poncy tradition still exists." "It's not that usual nowadays". But recently on Mumsnet: "it is fairly general for boys to wear short trousers with long socks, as part of their school uniform, up to a certain age. They certainly do, and always have, around my way" They were never much a thing in South Wales, and throughout my 70s-80s schooldays, before the web, I had no idea they existed. Nor my mother that they still existed, even though she had lived in the mid-century era of boys' knee breeches, she believed any question of shorts in winter had ended with that era. Also she had sanitised it in memory. She told me the breeches and socks were both knee length and practically met and the socks could be turned up, so that it was not shorts in the modern sense of significant bareness. In fact, memories are mixed on that, some posts say the same so was partly right, but other posts express knee cruelty and signifant bareness, So clearly that had come in too, by some time 30s-50s range, and there were dfferent personal bubbles of perception then as now.
I'm autistic with a sensory issue need for shorts, and actually have recognition of this as a need as an adult worker, ever since 2009 starting in the employment support system as it was then under Labour. I have it publicly announced in Bittersweet on the Autism Spectrum, Jessica Kingsley 2017, as a human rights precedent against uniforms. Especially against all uniforms that ban shorts. It's entirely down to media elite that it has not been reported as that. I have worn year round as an adult for over 30 years and am deeply bonded with it as my identity. It's physically real that it and all clothes minorities should be another category in identity politics.
But I will never understand how I have been so lucky in adulthood since my awakening to this identity in my 20s, but was so cruelly unlucky with it in every way in childhood.I narrowly missed the breeches era, and I grew up in South Wales, which has a respiratorily irritating damp air climate, which causes catarrh symptoms like a persistent cold. Family had local knowledge of this, mum called it "Cardiff catarrh". It was even the exiled wrong place for me, as I'm Scottish, knee loving stock, not locally adapted to South Wales's air. TV doctor Miriam Stoppard wrote of a Thames Valley catarrh similarly, and air problems in Russia's Volga Basin cities may be a case, problem seems to come from long waterways. Living before the web with no info source on year round shorts, it literally happened to me that I could never discover by myself that they are not harmful and don't make you catch cold, as this unfair nasal climate filled winters with a catching cold feeling !! It is a lifelong wound and heartbreak, that this robbed my childhood of my identity.
Clearly a shorts school uniform would have woken me up to my identity. So think how it feels now to see a consensus online that in the 70s they were still very widespread and even usual, and universal in private schools. No they were not. My autistic early reading lead to a mislabelling as gifted and private school, and I started at Cardiff's Monkton House in 1973, yes 1973, with juniors free to choose our trousers length in an otherwise traditional uniform. Then all needed to wake me up was the proverbial "that one kid at school who always stays in shorts". I never had him. WHY NOT? when posts now tell us there are such great numbers everywhere that every school has hm ! These nasal climates could still rob kids now. Though better access to info on it now the web exists, a child's web access may be oversupervised or prevented by poverty.
At age 7, I had a new classmate heading to be an unwilling year rounder, but yes he was cold, and my puzzled questions may have helped him to assert to his dad to get longs after all by start of winter. Helped him, unknowingly hurt myself. The news media never discussed shorts uniforms, even when discussed whether to have uniforms at all. So it never showed me they existed, and it never showed the families suffering them that opposite cases existed. There was only one moment when I was puzzled and racked with envy to see 2 schoolboys my age singing carols on Nationwide in shorts. I supposed TV studio warmth must have enabled it. They left us all in our bubbles. Relatives in Edinburgh never had cause to mention that shorts uniforms are prominent there, and we never visited in winter. We were in close touch with a mum's schoolmate's family in Weymouth, and never heard anything of shorts uniforms from their region.
Most terribly anguishing is that I lost my best chance to wake up just because hated football ! That is why I was not a scout. I expressed interest in cubs when a classmate joined, we got as far as trying to contact an organiser, but then my grandma warned, sourced from local talk not cubs themselves, that cubs did football a lot, and persuaded me it made cubs unsuitable. She was my supporter against school football, and some coverage I have seen and online failed experiences of cubs do suggest she was right. But it was a tragedy of losing other good stuff to 1 stupid barrier. Including, family did not know, and the classmate never mentioned because uncool, the cubs had a year round shorts uniform then. I would have loved it and been awakened by it to ask searching questions on year round life's health safety. That I only discovered it years later was devastating. It exactly appealed to sensitive soft boys like me, not to rough footballing boys !
This could be all the difference between waking up at 8 or in my 20s !And it still gets worse, as terrible a wrong turn as in the Doctor Who story Turn Left. It would have averted, that 8 was exactly when I was placed in a greedy overambitious advance streaming school, with fee helpers until I became a scholarship boy, that would end disastrously in a pressure horror and breakdown at 14. Balfour House, whose discredited closure I was a key cause of. If I was awake to shorts I would have known from start Balfour was bad, never have believed in it or agreed to go there. For its businesslike gloom included it did not allow shorts at all above the first primary year after infants class. Boys' uniform was a black suit. It did not allow us to go home in PE kits even on hot afternoons. It's a mercy it did not allow mini-skirts and allowed the girls woolly tights: anti-leg across genders. Think how it feels to read of others getting shorts uniforms to 12 or 13, while I got that. And in a 70s right wing private school.
At age 10, I tested the feel of staying in shorts at home all through Oct, it was beautiful, and I longed to continue the untroubledness into Nov. The nasal climate did its work, grim clarity that year round shorts was an impossible dream that could not exist. This could happen even to a kid in the city the Prime Minister was an MP for, James Callaghan.
At age 14 in adolescent unit, there was a girl there who experimented with bare legs for a few days of early winter, spotted my reaction, and guessed right I might like to be in shorts and suggested it, and mentioned having a cousin inclined thus. But she did not say he did it year round, nor arrange for me to learn from him. The unit was a medical institution and part of the health service, and its team included Welsh writer Harri Pritchard-Jones, dad of Boris Johnson associate Guto Harri. The unit did not inform us that year round shorts was a safe okay choice that would not harm health. So that moment was lost too, and for that girl too, whose own testing it ended after that and she just went into jeans, as if she had been trying to find it out for herself too and let down by the unit too.
Now think of a horrific catch 22 vicious circle, my nose may have played up more because longs discomfort. For after I found my identity and started year round shorts in my 20s, my respiratory health actually felt improved and less catarrhal ! even when still living in Cardiff.
More attention is needed on trauma from the inconsistency of uniforms, the cruelty that what is ideal for you can happen at some other schools and chance not to happen at yours. I'm desperate for some engaging and empathy on this around all year round shorts uniforms for boys. Many folks don't even realise they exist, including me in my boyhood ! but to those who do, by the majority experience of it it's the most astoundingly cruel thing not to get stopped by modern child protection standards even in the paedo paranoia era. But nobody realises this - the opposite cruelty exists too, where by your own metabolic nature you actually like year round shorts, for you those uniforms would suit and not be cruel, but you chance not to get them ! and you get the opposite, a school very against shorts !
For a start, the incredible mix of perceptions shows that at media elite level the system does not care if a thing done quite a lot in some places is not even known of in others. "I've never heard of a school not allowing trousers before." "Didn't think they still existed." "I am horrified to discover this cruel and poncy tradition still exists." "It's not that usual nowadays". But recently on Mumsnet: "it is fairly general for boys to wear short trousers with long socks, as part of their school uniform, up to a certain age. They certainly do, and always have, around my way" They were never much a thing in South Wales, and throughout my 70s-80s schooldays, before the web, I had no idea they existed. Nor my mother that they still existed, even though she had lived in the mid-century era of boys' knee breeches, she believed any question of shorts in winter had ended with that era. Also she had sanitised it in memory. She told me the breeches and socks were both knee length and practically met and the socks could be turned up, so that it was not shorts in the modern sense of significant bareness. In fact, memories are mixed on that, some posts say the same so was partly right, but other posts express knee cruelty and signifant bareness, So clearly that had come in too, by some time 30s-50s range, and there were dfferent personal bubbles of perception then as now.
I'm autistic with a sensory issue need for shorts, and actually have recognition of this as a need as an adult worker, ever since 2009 starting in the employment support system as it was then under Labour. I have it publicly announced in Bittersweet on the Autism Spectrum, Jessica Kingsley 2017, as a human rights precedent against uniforms. Especially against all uniforms that ban shorts. It's entirely down to media elite that it has not been reported as that. I have worn year round as an adult for over 30 years and am deeply bonded with it as my identity. It's physically real that it and all clothes minorities should be another category in identity politics.
But I will never understand how I have been so lucky in adulthood since my awakening to this identity in my 20s, but was so cruelly unlucky with it in every way in childhood.I narrowly missed the breeches era, and I grew up in South Wales, which has a respiratorily irritating damp air climate, which causes catarrh symptoms like a persistent cold. Family had local knowledge of this, mum called it "Cardiff catarrh". It was even the exiled wrong place for me, as I'm Scottish, knee loving stock, not locally adapted to South Wales's air. TV doctor Miriam Stoppard wrote of a Thames Valley catarrh similarly, and air problems in Russia's Volga Basin cities may be a case, problem seems to come from long waterways. Living before the web with no info source on year round shorts, it literally happened to me that I could never discover by myself that they are not harmful and don't make you catch cold, as this unfair nasal climate filled winters with a catching cold feeling !! It is a lifelong wound and heartbreak, that this robbed my childhood of my identity.
Clearly a shorts school uniform would have woken me up to my identity. So think how it feels now to see a consensus online that in the 70s they were still very widespread and even usual, and universal in private schools. No they were not. My autistic early reading lead to a mislabelling as gifted and private school, and I started at Cardiff's Monkton House in 1973, yes 1973, with juniors free to choose our trousers length in an otherwise traditional uniform. Then all needed to wake me up was the proverbial "that one kid at school who always stays in shorts". I never had him. WHY NOT? when posts now tell us there are such great numbers everywhere that every school has hm ! These nasal climates could still rob kids now. Though better access to info on it now the web exists, a child's web access may be oversupervised or prevented by poverty.
At age 7, I had a new classmate heading to be an unwilling year rounder, but yes he was cold, and my puzzled questions may have helped him to assert to his dad to get longs after all by start of winter. Helped him, unknowingly hurt myself. The news media never discussed shorts uniforms, even when discussed whether to have uniforms at all. So it never showed me they existed, and it never showed the families suffering them that opposite cases existed. There was only one moment when I was puzzled and racked with envy to see 2 schoolboys my age singing carols on Nationwide in shorts. I supposed TV studio warmth must have enabled it. They left us all in our bubbles. Relatives in Edinburgh never had cause to mention that shorts uniforms are prominent there, and we never visited in winter. We were in close touch with a mum's schoolmate's family in Weymouth, and never heard anything of shorts uniforms from their region.
Most terribly anguishing is that I lost my best chance to wake up just because hated football ! That is why I was not a scout. I expressed interest in cubs when a classmate joined, we got as far as trying to contact an organiser, but then my grandma warned, sourced from local talk not cubs themselves, that cubs did football a lot, and persuaded me it made cubs unsuitable. She was my supporter against school football, and some coverage I have seen and online failed experiences of cubs do suggest she was right. But it was a tragedy of losing other good stuff to 1 stupid barrier. Including, family did not know, and the classmate never mentioned because uncool, the cubs had a year round shorts uniform then. I would have loved it and been awakened by it to ask searching questions on year round life's health safety. That I only discovered it years later was devastating. It exactly appealed to sensitive soft boys like me, not to rough footballing boys !
This could be all the difference between waking up at 8 or in my 20s !And it still gets worse, as terrible a wrong turn as in the Doctor Who story Turn Left. It would have averted, that 8 was exactly when I was placed in a greedy overambitious advance streaming school, with fee helpers until I became a scholarship boy, that would end disastrously in a pressure horror and breakdown at 14. Balfour House, whose discredited closure I was a key cause of. If I was awake to shorts I would have known from start Balfour was bad, never have believed in it or agreed to go there. For its businesslike gloom included it did not allow shorts at all above the first primary year after infants class. Boys' uniform was a black suit. It did not allow us to go home in PE kits even on hot afternoons. It's a mercy it did not allow mini-skirts and allowed the girls woolly tights: anti-leg across genders. Think how it feels to read of others getting shorts uniforms to 12 or 13, while I got that. And in a 70s right wing private school.
At age 10, I tested the feel of staying in shorts at home all through Oct, it was beautiful, and I longed to continue the untroubledness into Nov. The nasal climate did its work, grim clarity that year round shorts was an impossible dream that could not exist. This could happen even to a kid in the city the Prime Minister was an MP for, James Callaghan.
At age 14 in adolescent unit, there was a girl there who experimented with bare legs for a few days of early winter, spotted my reaction, and guessed right I might like to be in shorts and suggested it, and mentioned having a cousin inclined thus. But she did not say he did it year round, nor arrange for me to learn from him. The unit was a medical institution and part of the health service, and its team included Welsh writer Harri Pritchard-Jones, dad of Boris Johnson associate Guto Harri. The unit did not inform us that year round shorts was a safe okay choice that would not harm health. So that moment was lost too, and for that girl too, whose own testing it ended after that and she just went into jeans, as if she had been trying to find it out for herself too and let down by the unit too.
Now think of a horrific catch 22 vicious circle, my nose may have played up more because longs discomfort. For after I found my identity and started year round shorts in my 20s, my respiratory health actually felt improved and less catarrhal ! even when still living in Cardiff.
Maurice Frank
2 Feb 2024
Saturday, December 30, 2023
consultation on new autism bill: govt circular
Govt announcement on a new "Learning Disabilities, Autism and Neurodivergence (LDAN) Bill". Sounds really broad, historically it has always been a problem to handle learning disability + autism together. There is a lot to read in the link, on a range of social topics the bill may affect, I have not had time yet, before you can form a view on whether it achieves any new real accountability.
The consultation can be found online at: consult.gov.scot/mental-health-unit/learning-disabilities-autism-neurodivergence-bill/ There is an explanation of how to respond and the consultation paper is provided in alternative formats, including: Easy Read, audio, British Sign Language, child-friendly version with an accompanying adult’s guide, and a summary version. You can also request paper copies.
We will also be providing information on upcoming consultation events at this link in the New Year.
We would be grateful if you could share this through your networks and groups. We would like this consultation to reach as many people as possible to gather their views and have their say.
You can also submit a response in writing, audio, video, or BSL video by sending via email to LDAN.Bill@gov.scot
The News Release can be found here: Building a fairer Scotland - gov.scot (a href="https://www.gov.scot/news/building-a-fairer-scotland-1/">www.gov.scot/news/building-a-fairer-scotland-1/)
The consultation can be found online at: consult.gov.scot/mental-health-unit/learning-disabilities-autism-neurodivergence-bill/ There is an explanation of how to respond and the consultation paper is provided in alternative formats, including: Easy Read, audio, British Sign Language, child-friendly version with an accompanying adult’s guide, and a summary version. You can also request paper copies.
We will also be providing information on upcoming consultation events at this link in the New Year.
We would be grateful if you could share this through your networks and groups. We would like this consultation to reach as many people as possible to gather their views and have their say.
You can also submit a response in writing, audio, video, or BSL video by sending via email to LDAN.Bill@gov.scot
The News Release can be found here: Building a fairer Scotland - gov.scot (a href="https://www.gov.scot/news/building-a-fairer-scotland-1/">www.gov.scot/news/building-a-fairer-scotland-1/)
Tuesday, December 12, 2023
cruises and springlike days wonderfully normalising shorts in winter
All over Britain there are now many mild days in Nov-Mar and many when temperatures surge up into double figures. We never used to experience that as possible in 1970s-80s winters, whatever your casual view is on climate change. I say that remembering those winters in South Wales, and now being based in and preferring the climate further north that's supposed to be relatively cooler!
In the present early winter, Britain actually has already had one snowy cold snap, but on either side of it a lot of milder time, and I saw really strikingly what that was like at south coast latitude. I was in Southampton on Nov 24-5 and 9 Dec 2023, both dates when the weather was bright and more springlike than used to be possible at those dates in childhood memory, but Dec 9 had a nippy windiness too. There were loads of folks wearing shorts. Not just one in a day. Not a few one-off sensory issue outriders like when folks see me on colder days. No. There were many. Still a minority, but steady stream of them everywhere and all through the day. Like just as casually ordinary to do then as in summer. Both adults and kids alike, as is good for social freedom. So that for Dec 9 it could be predicted from the earlier memory, and that prediction was right!
Social progress carries a painful mix of emotions, as all good feeling about it, in place of the anger there would be at not having it, is always mixed with anger at past memory of not having it. It would be less possible to have an undiscovered shorts sensory issue in your childhood if this had used to happen at winter dates then. This experience in Southampton is a much further, deeper scale, conditions shift and culture shift with it, to see, than already the striking but handful number of shorts I saw being happily worn on a frostier day in Manchester Feb 2019. Go back another 2 days to Dec 7, I was on the return leg (how freudian) to Southampton aboard a P+O cruise ship, hugging the Bay of Biscay on a prospectively stormy Atlantic day just as it crossed from balmy Iberian back to colder British air. Aboard there too it was wonderful to see that most of the folks who had taken on the comfort of shorts in Iberia, of all ages, found comfort in them and chose to remain in it, securely among each other in this holiday setting. That too felt as an enlightenment for many and cultural advance, though seen only inside its own bubble where the media and rest of the country are oblivious to it.
Money of course affects who gets to take cruises and how frequently, even at a time when it's worth knowing there are some cheap bargain ones around as they try to recover from covid. It was still not something I could afford to do at all in my Thatcher generation and pre-diagnosis youth. Coping ability with the bureaucratic preparations for them is a concern that some may feel overwhelmed by, print a boarding pass and proof of insurance, fill in a medical needs questionnaire and an emergency contact form and your passport number. But the practical reason to take cruises is that they are a much easier more safely organised for you way to travel than a self-organised holday. Their slow reemergence from covid has sifted the arrogant from the careful, as only within this year has there ended a requirement to take a covid test just before the cruise and not be allowed to come if it resulted positive. Last winter the company Fred Olsen was taking an outrageous line of no refunds if that happened and leaving it to claim from your travel insurance with all that can be bad in that! P+O at present is providing its own inhouse insurance deal that is part of its trading with you, so makes the refund so too, and as said, you no longer have to test before coming: which is why this was my first cruise post-covid.
I'm writing about it in furtherance of dress freedom and social ease of wearing shorts: yet that is exactly something that cruises traditionally have not been associated with and have been oppressors against. Anyone with my absolute and identity defining opposition to all dress codes will only take a cruise that is possible to go through the whole of without at any time submitting to a dress code, to keep away from all the places where they have them. But when you can do that, it is actively a good feeling to take part in rolling back the boundaries and being part of the solidarity of so doing, thus helping to reduce the dress coded culture and keep it constrained enough to be optable out of. Thus on this cruise it just meant I needed to opt out of all the onboard events and bars in the evenings and spend them mostly in my cabin. Enquiry before booking established that it was not dress coded to go to the buffet for supper, or to return aboard from a port we were still at into the evening. It was even a pleasure to find myself joining other shorts wearers, adult and kid, in successfully establishing something not found out in advance, that sightseeing on the open air decks did not become dress coded in the evening either.
So it was actively a nice action against dress codes to take the cruise. It gave this wonderfully revelatory nice experience that needs sharing, where many Brits on the day of sailing back into our climate in December shared among themselves, in the confidence of numbers, the comfort choice to stay in the shorts they had started wearing while in a neighbouring warmer climate.
Maurice Frank
12 Dec 2023
In the present early winter, Britain actually has already had one snowy cold snap, but on either side of it a lot of milder time, and I saw really strikingly what that was like at south coast latitude. I was in Southampton on Nov 24-5 and 9 Dec 2023, both dates when the weather was bright and more springlike than used to be possible at those dates in childhood memory, but Dec 9 had a nippy windiness too. There were loads of folks wearing shorts. Not just one in a day. Not a few one-off sensory issue outriders like when folks see me on colder days. No. There were many. Still a minority, but steady stream of them everywhere and all through the day. Like just as casually ordinary to do then as in summer. Both adults and kids alike, as is good for social freedom. So that for Dec 9 it could be predicted from the earlier memory, and that prediction was right!
Social progress carries a painful mix of emotions, as all good feeling about it, in place of the anger there would be at not having it, is always mixed with anger at past memory of not having it. It would be less possible to have an undiscovered shorts sensory issue in your childhood if this had used to happen at winter dates then. This experience in Southampton is a much further, deeper scale, conditions shift and culture shift with it, to see, than already the striking but handful number of shorts I saw being happily worn on a frostier day in Manchester Feb 2019. Go back another 2 days to Dec 7, I was on the return leg (how freudian) to Southampton aboard a P+O cruise ship, hugging the Bay of Biscay on a prospectively stormy Atlantic day just as it crossed from balmy Iberian back to colder British air. Aboard there too it was wonderful to see that most of the folks who had taken on the comfort of shorts in Iberia, of all ages, found comfort in them and chose to remain in it, securely among each other in this holiday setting. That too felt as an enlightenment for many and cultural advance, though seen only inside its own bubble where the media and rest of the country are oblivious to it.
Money of course affects who gets to take cruises and how frequently, even at a time when it's worth knowing there are some cheap bargain ones around as they try to recover from covid. It was still not something I could afford to do at all in my Thatcher generation and pre-diagnosis youth. Coping ability with the bureaucratic preparations for them is a concern that some may feel overwhelmed by, print a boarding pass and proof of insurance, fill in a medical needs questionnaire and an emergency contact form and your passport number. But the practical reason to take cruises is that they are a much easier more safely organised for you way to travel than a self-organised holday. Their slow reemergence from covid has sifted the arrogant from the careful, as only within this year has there ended a requirement to take a covid test just before the cruise and not be allowed to come if it resulted positive. Last winter the company Fred Olsen was taking an outrageous line of no refunds if that happened and leaving it to claim from your travel insurance with all that can be bad in that! P+O at present is providing its own inhouse insurance deal that is part of its trading with you, so makes the refund so too, and as said, you no longer have to test before coming: which is why this was my first cruise post-covid.
I'm writing about it in furtherance of dress freedom and social ease of wearing shorts: yet that is exactly something that cruises traditionally have not been associated with and have been oppressors against. Anyone with my absolute and identity defining opposition to all dress codes will only take a cruise that is possible to go through the whole of without at any time submitting to a dress code, to keep away from all the places where they have them. But when you can do that, it is actively a good feeling to take part in rolling back the boundaries and being part of the solidarity of so doing, thus helping to reduce the dress coded culture and keep it constrained enough to be optable out of. Thus on this cruise it just meant I needed to opt out of all the onboard events and bars in the evenings and spend them mostly in my cabin. Enquiry before booking established that it was not dress coded to go to the buffet for supper, or to return aboard from a port we were still at into the evening. It was even a pleasure to find myself joining other shorts wearers, adult and kid, in successfully establishing something not found out in advance, that sightseeing on the open air decks did not become dress coded in the evening either.
So it was actively a nice action against dress codes to take the cruise. It gave this wonderfully revelatory nice experience that needs sharing, where many Brits on the day of sailing back into our climate in December shared among themselves, in the confidence of numbers, the comfort choice to stay in the shorts they had started wearing while in a neighbouring warmer climate.
Maurice Frank
12 Dec 2023
Saturday, September 9, 2023
trading: is Cineworld one world ?
I got a "goodwill gesture" voucher for a film, for misadvertising, from the Picturehouse cinema chain that owns Cameo. Having got it, I do need to go to trading standards for personal solution, but I still want trading standards to record it as a precedent for everyone.
It's because Picturehouse gives out a promotional magazine for forthcoming films, Picturehouse Recommends, which reasonably to anyone is advertising info to decide from the films featured that it's worth buying a membership. But it does not then necessarily show every film featured in it, in all its cinemas or even whole regions. The film concerned, Haunted Mansion, is not being shown at Cameo or at any other Picturehouses than just 3 in southeast England.
Worse, the Picturehouse brand is owned by Cineworld, they are both the same company, as news stories on its troubles show, that also show it needs public goodwill to keep it going. We certainly want to give that goodwill to our present Sat meeting place. But it operates the 2 brands as different companies, and completely against public goodwill, memberships of each are not usable at the other. Haunted Mansion was on right across the Cineworld chain.
Being the same company, the 2 brands have an obvious trading standards duty to cover each other's trading errors interchangeably. Instead of taking on that, the goodwill gesture deals with Picturehouse's advertising fault wholly within Picturehouse.
Maurice Frank
9 Sep 2023
It's because Picturehouse gives out a promotional magazine for forthcoming films, Picturehouse Recommends, which reasonably to anyone is advertising info to decide from the films featured that it's worth buying a membership. But it does not then necessarily show every film featured in it, in all its cinemas or even whole regions. The film concerned, Haunted Mansion, is not being shown at Cameo or at any other Picturehouses than just 3 in southeast England.
Worse, the Picturehouse brand is owned by Cineworld, they are both the same company, as news stories on its troubles show, that also show it needs public goodwill to keep it going. We certainly want to give that goodwill to our present Sat meeting place. But it operates the 2 brands as different companies, and completely against public goodwill, memberships of each are not usable at the other. Haunted Mansion was on right across the Cineworld chain.
Being the same company, the 2 brands have an obvious trading standards duty to cover each other's trading errors interchangeably. Instead of taking on that, the goodwill gesture deals with Picturehouse's advertising fault wholly within Picturehouse.
Maurice Frank
9 Sep 2023
Thursday, January 5, 2023
take care not to look where you are going
Just picked up off radio 4: there is a new film, TILL, an angry true life film confronting serious moral pain and need to remember. on a lynching of a black 14 year old boy in Mississippi 1955, Emmett Till.
The boy lived in the more enlightened northern US states and was visiting the apartheid South. In a clip, his mother is giving him a concerned talk before he goes. She tells him, as point of safety and survival, "It's important not to look at white people in the wrong way."
Now. Any ordinary modern audience now recognises this instantly as serious injustice and is angered by it. Part of the era's black oppression, and of the same culture as murdered this boy, murdered kids for their colour. You instantly course with anger at this, and as part of it, at the idea of being unfree even to look around you, to meet gaze with another part of the population. Your moral sense against racism powers with the unreasonability of that state of existence. Now HOLD THAT THOUGHT !
To be under a witch hunt not even to look at people around you in what some of them are empowered to take as a wrong way, to be under instant hostile judgment for doing that, - IS EXACTLY THE PRESENT SOCIAL CONDITION OF MEN. RIGHT NOW, THE WITCH HUNTING OF MEN, THE CULTURE THAT WE ARE ALL A VILLAINOUS THREAT AND DANGER TO WOMEN, THE PERPETUAL POISE AGAINST US TO CRIMINALISE US AT A GESTURE, AND THE RADICAL FEMINISTS WHO WANT MEN TO BE CONVICTABLE OF RAPE ON ONLY AN ACCUSER'S WORD. This week too, the dangerous in-fashion dogma that accusers are always truthful and there is no lying about rape has been utterly forever disproved by the case of Eleanor Williams, convicted of making serial false rape accusations clearly evidenced to be so. THIS CULTURE INCLUDES THAT SOME WOMEN WILL INSTANTLY CONDEMN ANY MEETING OF EYES AS "LOOKING AT THEM," AND IT INCLUDES THE EMERGENCE LAST YEAR ON THE RAILWAYS, OF A DANGEROUS RULE AGAINST STARING, THAT CAN CATCH ALL SORTS OF INNOCENT WALKING-AROUND SITUATIONS FOR BOTH PASSENGERS AND STAFF, making it unsafe to look where you are going as you walk around.
Witch hunt against looking and deemed staring was part of the old US South's racism and lynch mob hate culture upon black people, now well damned: AND is part of the witch hunt terror against men in our society right now ! That tells you whether this present attitude to men is just or compatible with civil liberties. It tells you it is exactly the same evil as the past racism was.
Maurice Frank
5 Jan 2023
The boy lived in the more enlightened northern US states and was visiting the apartheid South. In a clip, his mother is giving him a concerned talk before he goes. She tells him, as point of safety and survival, "It's important not to look at white people in the wrong way."
Now. Any ordinary modern audience now recognises this instantly as serious injustice and is angered by it. Part of the era's black oppression, and of the same culture as murdered this boy, murdered kids for their colour. You instantly course with anger at this, and as part of it, at the idea of being unfree even to look around you, to meet gaze with another part of the population. Your moral sense against racism powers with the unreasonability of that state of existence. Now HOLD THAT THOUGHT !
To be under a witch hunt not even to look at people around you in what some of them are empowered to take as a wrong way, to be under instant hostile judgment for doing that, - IS EXACTLY THE PRESENT SOCIAL CONDITION OF MEN. RIGHT NOW, THE WITCH HUNTING OF MEN, THE CULTURE THAT WE ARE ALL A VILLAINOUS THREAT AND DANGER TO WOMEN, THE PERPETUAL POISE AGAINST US TO CRIMINALISE US AT A GESTURE, AND THE RADICAL FEMINISTS WHO WANT MEN TO BE CONVICTABLE OF RAPE ON ONLY AN ACCUSER'S WORD. This week too, the dangerous in-fashion dogma that accusers are always truthful and there is no lying about rape has been utterly forever disproved by the case of Eleanor Williams, convicted of making serial false rape accusations clearly evidenced to be so. THIS CULTURE INCLUDES THAT SOME WOMEN WILL INSTANTLY CONDEMN ANY MEETING OF EYES AS "LOOKING AT THEM," AND IT INCLUDES THE EMERGENCE LAST YEAR ON THE RAILWAYS, OF A DANGEROUS RULE AGAINST STARING, THAT CAN CATCH ALL SORTS OF INNOCENT WALKING-AROUND SITUATIONS FOR BOTH PASSENGERS AND STAFF, making it unsafe to look where you are going as you walk around.
Witch hunt against looking and deemed staring was part of the old US South's racism and lynch mob hate culture upon black people, now well damned: AND is part of the witch hunt terror against men in our society right now ! That tells you whether this present attitude to men is just or compatible with civil liberties. It tells you it is exactly the same evil as the past racism was.
Maurice Frank
5 Jan 2023
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