White versus black in a woke world

In our ridiculous world with its changing fashion and hypes, “Woke” has become the word for a new adverse attitude.

Everything seems to have become woke. We speak about a woke class, a woke capitalism, there is even spoken about a church of woke. You can’t imagine how crazier it gets.

In Dutch for example we may not speak any more of a “blank” person (a Caucasian) but has to say a “white person”, though it is not done anymore to speak about a “black person” when talking of a brown-coloured person.

It has taken me some time before I came to understand what people really meant with Woke, because that adjective derived from African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) meaning “alert to racial prejudice and discrimination“, deemed to be used for so what everything.  Inappropriately, that word woke was used by many people in their conversations, even when they talked about cows and calves. It seemed “cool” to use that word.

A Black Lives Matter die-in over rail tracks, protesting alleged police brutality in Saint Paul, Minnesota (September 20, 2015)

Though the phrase stay woke had already emerged in AAVE by the 1930s, in some contexts referring to an awareness of the social and political issues affecting African Americans it only recently after the international social movement, formed in the United States in 2013, Black Lives Matter movement, following the killings of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Pamela Turner and Rekia Boyd, among others. Very quickly the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter founds its way internationally on social media.

Up to 2020 the support for the Black Lives Matter movement had grown so much it had also created a social awareness, something had to change. Black Lives Matter also voiced support for various movements and causes beyond police brutality, including LGBTQ activism, feminism, immigration reform, and economic justice and by doing so a new movement arose, being a “Woke generation”.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines woke as ‘originally: well-informed, up-to-date. Now chiefly: alert to racial or social discrimination and injustice’.

Surely being alert to racial or social discrimination and injustice isn’t a bad thing? {‘Why’s it so wrong to be called woke?’}

Suddenly it no longer seemed appropriate to talk about men, women, homosexuals, bisexuals, sexless, and transgender people in a certain way. Asexuality being distinct from abstention from sexual activity and from celibacy, after all the pedo sex scandals there had come an “anti-paedophile activism” encompassing opposition to paedophiles, paedophile advocacy groups, child pornography, and child sexual abuse. But several people presenting too openly their sexual acts, like on Pride parades, all other people to have to accept their actions, otherwise to be labelled not only ‘conservative’ but even “anti-” when it was or is not so.

There have been incidents in which vigilantism intended to be against pedophiles has been mistakenly directed against the wrong person, including:

• A mob confusing a pediatrician with a pedophile, due to the similarities between the words.^[8]
• An incident where a man was misidentified as a pedophile because he was wearing a neck brace similar to the one a sex offender was wearing when pictured in a newspaper.^[9][10] {Wikipedia on Anti-pedophile activism}

In the same vein of misunderstanding and misinterpreting, the whole woke movement has arisen and has grown into something very annoying and discussion limiting something.

In the present time not allowed to say one can see a “community of igloos” or temporary winter homes or hunting-ground dwellings of Canadian and Greenland Inuit (Eskimos) (Illustration from Charles Francis Hall’s Arctic Researches and Life Among the Esquimaux, 1865)

In many museums in the world the curator started relabeling the historical objects and artworks, often making it they had to describe the object with several words instead of previously but now not accepted ‘one word’. As such people have become not allowed to use words like “hut” or “cabane” “or “shag” / “Shack”  you even may not say anymore “primitive dwelling” or “shanty” not allowed to say “roughly built, often ramshackle building”, “igloo“, “Eskimo“, etc.. In some museums, the labels by the works have become so full of words most visitors even do not take time any more to read them. (Proof that all that woke thing creates just the opposite and gives people even less insight into the world events and customs of many peoples. )

I do agree we may not speak about “savages” when there are those pictures of Africans who are depicted as “savages” or vicious or merciless, brutal, not domesticated or cultivated, wild people. But I think there is nothing wrong by saying those white people considered the coloured people they found in Africa, to be very wild and uneducated or regarded as primitive.

White people do have to live with the Atlantic slave trade which played an important role in spurring the Industrial Revolution in its early decades and helping to birth a new financial system. We can not ignore the shameful treatment of coloured people from that time regarded as illiterate areas.

Insofar as the trade encouraged the emergence of a new British commercial class that in turn lobbied for modernising reforms through Parliament, it may even have played a paradoxically pivotal role in the birth of modern democracy. We should never deny or downplay the dark side of Western history – nor the strangely double-edged story of Western freedom.

In concealing certain events and in not being allowed to mention them or not being allowed to use certain words, one misses the ball and is more likely not to achieve the intended goal of integration and respect.

Sherelle Jacobs writes

The evil “whiteness” stuff is getting out of hand. Everywhere one looks there are excesses.
Take the decolonised university courses that seek to purge Dead White Men (the intellectual cousin of the Evil White Male) from the curriculum. Or the obsession with toppling statues of figures such as Cecil Rhodes. {The West is doomed if it blames all its problems on Evil White Males}

Where she refers to the constituent college of the University of Oxford in Oxford, England, Oriel College that the majority wanted the statue to be removed and that the King Edward Street plaque should be removed. Previously in 2016, Oriel College had decided to keep the statue following a consultation, despite protests from campaigners.  Some of the university’s geography dons published a statement saying it is a “source of shame” for the city that the imperialist Cecil Rhodes was still “honoured” with a statue.

When Sherelle Jacobs attended a colourism workshop at her old university not long ago, mixed race women, including her, were prohibited from speaking on account of their “proximity to whiteness”. There you see but how that whole woke business has twisted the whole system and made many not think and act soberly anymore. Rightly she reamerks

Even worse is the trend towards barring white people from black spaces altogether. Two Canadian theatres have sparked an outcry by limiting performances to an “all black-identifying audience”. {The West is doomed if it blames all its problems on Evil White Males}

We should know that taking away historic statues, plaques, memorials or monuments is also going to take away the remembrances to those people and events, making the next generations not even thinking any more about what happened in the past.

Wiping out the past will not correct the things that have gone wrong. By hiding what really happened, one is also clearly not taking any blame but prefers to deliberately conceal what really happened. Which I think is a much more shameful attitude.

In Monroeville, a flyspeck of a town in Alabama, Jacobs recently saw an amateur performance of To Kill A Mockingbird in which local white men in the audience were invited on stage to be part of the jury.

It really worked: residents of this Deep South town, where African-Americans can still remember being forced to sit in a separate part of the cinema, pondering their history and how it made them feel without outside judgment or virtue signalling. Sadly, Monroeville is a rare case. {The West is doomed if it blames all its problems on Evil White Males}

she writes and adds

Banner at 2017 Climate March in Washington D.C.

It doesn’t help that some conservatives have reacted to all this with downright denialism. It cannot be right that, in some Deep South schools, pupils are being taught that the American Civil War had nothing to do with slavery. {The West is doomed if it blames all its problems on Evil White Males}

We have to be very careful by taking away statues and remembrance plates. There are enough people who would love to see the terms Holocaust denial and AIDS denialism to disappear so that the denial of the facts and the reality of the subject matters would not matter anymore. In the States of America we have a beautiful example of the dangers of the denialism that is going on in this “woke world”.

In 2020, cultural scientists Akane Kanai and Rosalind Gill described “woke capitalism” as the “dramatically intensifying” trend to include historically marginalized groups (currently primarily in terms of race, gender and religion) as mascots in advertisement with a message of empowerment to signal progressive values.

On the one hand, this creates an individualized and depoliticized idea of social justice, reducing it to an increase in self-confidence.

On the other hand, the omnipresent visibility in advertising can also amplify a backlash against the equality of precisely these minorities. These would become mascots not only of the companies using them, but of the unchallenged neoliberal economic system with its socially unjust order itself. For the economically weak, the equality of these minorities would thus become indispensable to the maintenance of this economic system; the minorities would be seen responsible for the losses of this system. {Kanai, A.; Gill, R. (October 28, 2020). “Woke? Affect, neoliberalism, marginalised identities and consumer culture”. New Formations: A Journal of Culture, Theory & Politics. 102 (102): 10–27. doi:10.3898/NewF:102.01.2020. ISSN 0950-2378. S2CID 234623282.}

We must always make sure that everything is kept in perspective and that the institutions will make sure that everything is neatly laid out and will not conceal anything even if it ‘discriminates’ against a certain group. We will always have to strive to expose an open honesty.

In his new book Colonialism, Nigel Biggar points out that the British Empire did some good, establishing peace in warring societies, alleviating rural poverty and building infrastructure. Some routinely use facts such as these flippantly to claim that the Empire definitively did more good than bad. But, as Biggar himself observes, the positives and negatives are incommensurable: “How much racism is worth immunisation against disease?” {The West is doomed if it blames all its problems on Evil White Males}

According to Jacobs it would be far more constructive if conservatives focused on challenging the toxic Evil White Male reading of history. She writes

For one thing, it distracts us from the truth of our past: namely, that it was driven not so much by a cabal of racist megalomaniacs but by inescapable ideas in which we are all still, to this day, complicit. {The West is doomed if it blames all its problems on Evil White Males}

Forever, certain groups of people will have to face their past. It does no good, on the contrary, to cover up the past by bringing up all kinds of newer concepts and naming things differently. By honestly stating what those ancestors were doing, future generations will be able to get a fair picture of what was done, which cannot be reversed anyway.

Every generation has flaws and in every demographic one can find people who do not want to face the truth of the times at the time when bad things are happening before their eyes. A great example of this are the young people today who all want the hottest phone but don’t want to think about how several children have been exploited for it.

How different are the hypocrisies of our ancestors from our own? {The West is doomed if it blames all its problems on Evil White Males}

asks Jacobs, who does not see people smashing their smartphones in protest at the Congolese children who have died mining the rare cobalt that is crucial to powering their gadgets.

Fixating on a few Evil White Males is a convenient excuse not to face up to such things. {The West is doomed if it blames all its problems on Evil White Males}

she writes.

And the Evil White Male view of history is feeding Western declinism. Some activists have taken to linking certain values or trends with empire and slavery in order to discredit them. People are, in turn, reluctant to challenge these spurious views for fear of being labelled a sympathiser with the Evil White Male of history – or even worse, compared to them.  {The West is doomed if it blames all its problems on Evil White Males}

Jacobs asks us to

Consider also the post-modernist academics who denounce “objective, rational linear thinking” as Western-centric (as if the idea that words and language are fundamental expressions of an external reality can be simply waved away as a “white cultural trope”).

If societies attitudes’ to their past shape their future, then we should be concerned indeed. Unless the West can shake off some of this racialised self-loathing, its decline seems guaranteed.   {The West is doomed if it blames all its problems on Evil White Males}

It is much too easy to blame racism. With the killing of Tyre Nichols, lots of people shouted “racism”, not seeing that it where five “black” cops that went mad at one of their own folks. Those coloured police officers showed the world how American police is not trained enough and have a superior feeling, wanting to show their power over others, be they white or black persons. Too often we can hear the language of such officers, shouting words which should not be allowed to be said by people of the law. We also should recognise in what happened, how education but also social, institutional, and cultural systems play a significant role in shaping people their behaviour and how their formation and culture may contribute to negative outcomes.

Let us be aware

There are also many people who use ‘woke’ as a pejorative in an attempt to silence those who protest against bigotry. It’s often a word that racists, misogynists and others attempt to hide behind. Ed, Portsmouth {‘Why’s it so wrong to be called woke?’}

So using ‘woke’ as name-calling has become the default for the oafish who hate people daring to challenge their rather one-sided mindset. Unfortunately, ‘woke’ has become a blanket term that is used by those who don’t want to have their views challenged. Matthew, Birmingham {‘Why’s it so wrong to be called woke?’}

+

Interesting to read:

1. The actual behaviour of big business continues to confound its stated wishes
2. The Telegraph Frontpage for 2022 November 08
3. The Telegraph for Monday 21 November 2022
4. The Telegraph Frontpage for Friday 2022 November 25
5. Green lending tops fossil fuel for first time
6. Anglo-Saxon era church bringing the church into disrepute
7. New term names at London School of Economics
8. Not to tell people that God loves them
9. Evil “whiteness” stuff is getting out of hand

+++

Related

1. Martyr by cop
2. ‘Why’s it so wrong to be called woke?’
3. A breakfast restaurant called “Woke” opened in Conn
4. Connecticut breakfast restaurant called Woke sparks political debate
5. S3: E4 – Wokeback Mountain
6. ‘You People’ Review: Everything Wrong with the Modern Comedy
7. It Depends on What The Means
8. 85 ”The Funeral of a Great Myth,” or Evolution and Hegelian Optimism
9. European ‘Christian state’ faces criticism for banning woke lessons, immigration laws: ‘Will of the people’
10. Blind logic, arrogant conclusions
11. How Wokeism Works | Theo Von – YouTube
12. The problem with Atiku is he thinks Buhari just woke up to get 12m votes because of ethnicity—Keyamo
13. Freedom is …
14. Woke culture threatens academic freedom in social sciences at the University of Amsterdam
15. “Walt’s Disenchanted Kingdom” – A New Documentary on Gender and Sexual Ideology Politics and Disney Going Woke & Broke
16. Not Woke Up: Breakfast Cafe Name Sparks US Conservative Rage | Connecticut
17. Go Woke, Go Broke: Paperchase Goes Into Administration
18. Technological Innovations – Episode 1
19. De omgekeerde wereld
20. Wakker of Woke! Lezing door Simon van Groningen.
21. ‘Wakker of Woke?’ Lezing voor Stichting Sense
22. Wokeness is een groot probleem aan de Universiteit van Amsterdam, mede omdat ervoor wordt weggekeken
23. De zwarte gemeenschap zou excuses van Rutte voor slavernij niet moeten accepteren
24. Biologische studies naar gender laten minder maakbaarheid zien dan de progressieve pers graag zou willen
25. Hoe links mij tot zondebok maakte als klokkenluider van woke extremisme

Bij aankoop van een woning hou rekening met de Renovatieverplichting

De beste belegging of geldelijke verzekering die men kan doen voor later, is het verwerven van een eigendom – met name best een huis, daar een appartement slechts een ruimte in de lucht is.

Als men een huis wil kopen moet men er wel rekening mee houden dat er een “Renovatieverplichting” op rust indien het aangekochte goed niet nieuw is.

Sinds 1 januari 2023 geldt er een renovatieverplichting voor eengezinswoningen en appartementen. Koop je een huis of appartement met energielabel E of F? Dan moet je het renoveren zodat het energielabel D of beter krijgt.

De renovatie moet binnen vijf jaar na de aankoop gebeuren:

• De termijn van vijf jaar start op de datum waarop de authentieke akte verlijdt. Als de akte bijvoorbeeld op 1 februari 2023 verlijdt, moet de woning voor 1 februari 2028 gerenoveerd zijn.
• Als je het vooropgestelde label niet tijdig behaalt, kun je een administratieve geldboete van 500 tot 200.000 euro krijgen. Er wordt dan een nieuwe termijn opgelegd om het label te behalen.

Meer weten over de renovatieverplichting

Waarom deze verplichting? 

De Europese Unie wil de CO₂-uitstoot drastisch verminderen om tegen 2050 klimaatneutraal te zijn. Zo draagt Europa bij aan het klimaatakkoord van Parijs om de opwarming van de aarde te beperken tot 1,5°C. 21 % van de totale Belgische CO₂-uitstoot wordt veroorzaakt door residentiële gebouwen. Daarom moeten alle woningen in Vlaanderen tegen 2050 een EPC-label A hebben. Die evolutie naar A zal stap voor stap doorgevoerd worden.

Colours, men, women, genders, choices of words and political football

Banning words

In the last five years, it sometimes becomes very difficult to know which words we can or cannot use. The banning of some words sometimes goes to the absurd.

Along one side, we are no longer allowed to talk about a negro or a black person, but we have to say a white person when talking about a white person, while we are not white at all, just as a coloured person does not always have to be an African as well as not always dark brown (although the latter should not be said either).

Nowadays, one has to watch so hard what word one uses or one can be called out as a racist, sexist or misogynist or accused of being against people who have changed their sex or are in favour of people of equal sex.

Superiority of a gender

Already in the 1970s one could easily be accused of being a chauvinist. Though one did not have to have a prejudiced belief in the superiority of one’s own gender, group, or kind, others assumed from your attitude to other people that one did. Yes, there was a time that a man treated women as a whole as being lesser in intelligence, talent, or competence in comparison to men. This still happens today; we can find men who put more value on a woman’s looks or abilities as a home-maker than as an equal member of society. But we can also find men who find other men lower than them because they have other feelings than what the majority expects from a man. Already some years, nobody thought something was wrong when seeing women walking hand in hand, but for men, this was not accepted.

Homo’s

I still remember the times when plain-clothes policemen walked everywhere at the public toilets in London to catch men making sweet nothings to other men. They were harshly arrested and detained.

As a kid going to ballet school and later also as a dancer, I and many of my colleagues had to endure mockery and were regularly called gay, ‘homo’ or ‘sissy’ on the streets in public transport. Many of us are even very fond of pretty girls and having to do ‘strong work’ a ‘sissy’ would not like or be able to do. Nothing pansy about carrying girls around the stage, throwing girls in the air and catching girls or making big jumps or playing big swords and other fights on stage.

Coloured people

Even in the time that I had a coloured girlfriend, we spoke of nigers, negro’s or black people, never looking for something bad behind it. But with the years, the community started calling certain words ‘ugly’ and ‘offensive’. Though we did not use those words as an affront or snub. At the end of the last century, it was decided we could not speak anymore of ‘Eskimo’s’, people living in an ‘igloo’ or in a ‘hut or ‘cabin’.

This century not yet running long, has brought new banned words on the list.

Words related to personality and sex

What is striking here is that people are most bothered by words related to their own personalities and people’s relationship with each other. In fact, it has now reached the point where people have started looking for neutral articles and giving recommendations to raise children using neutral terms. It is not bad that one wants to do away with the division of roles for certain sexes, but doing away of the sex, is in my eyes a step too far.

It is not at all bad to have differences in the way the sexes are treated to be removed. I myself promoted that men and women could equally do the same jobs, if they wanted and should as such also spoken about with a female or male word for that job position, though often there did not yet exist a special word for the female person being a director or doctor.

Issue of gender in childhood

In the last few years the issue of gender in childhood has become increasingly contentious

In 2016 Caroline Jordan, president of the Girls’ Schools Association, said teachers should consider using gender-neutral language, and many schools – such as the heavily criticised Highgate school in north London, which did so in June 2017 – introduced the last few years gender-neutral uniform policies. Though I doubt that nowhere one considered boys to wear skirts and as such thought to transfer girls to boys’ uniforms that this would solve the gender problem. It only indicates, in my eyes, how the focus is still on the male aspect and male superiority.

Gender-neutral or gender-free language

In 2018 the European Parliament released guidelines for a gender-neutral language and specific strategies for each of the European languages. For certain languages, like the Germanic languages, this might be trickier than others, them having the personal pronoun’s gender usually matching with the reference noun. The European Parliament recommends alternative approaches, such as feminisation and the replacement of the generic masculine with double forms for specific referents. Since most occupations are traditionally declined to the masculine, apart from typically female jobs, feminisation decreases discrimination by also using feminine correspondents of masculine terms.

In Great Britain, the chief executive of the Educate & Celebrate charity, Dr Elly Barnes told teachers that they should be moving toward a “gender-free model” in a 90-minute lecture organised by the National Education Union (NEU).

Coloured man in a non-traditional gendered occupation, as midwife with child in Oslo, Norway

She advised them to dispense with terms such as “boys”, “girls”, “son”, “father“, and “mother”, replacing them with the gender-neutral words “pupils”, “students”, “child” and “parent”. In Belgium they went a step further also to exclude the words stepmother and stepfather, them becoming a ‘plus parent’. [I wonder if they also would have a min-parent or a minus parent? 😉 ]

According to me, it becomes also very complicated when we may not speak anymore of “your mom”, “your dad”. Politicians may have decided that it’s no longer appropriate (in their mind) to call your parents “mother” or “father” because that would classify them as male or female. The same for the “brother” or “sister”, which now have to be called “sibling”. But are those mothers and fathers not male or female? Though I do agree that there are some children who have two fathers or two mothers.

Stereotyping

People may find it obvious for women to stand for their rights, but in which way are they willing to give men also equal rights?

For centuries stereotyping has been going on. It is not by just going one way, bringing the female site to the men’s place that it will be solved. Generally, one should come to terms to stop stereotyping any gender, be it male or female or even neutral, a group which is still far too much overlooked.
Stereotyping not only limits a human with a particular set of traits he or she can acquire but it also deteriorates the mental health of the person making it difficult to express one’s feelings and thoughts. Far too many people still encounter resistance when they want to go for a particular profession. They are then usually told that these are vocational skills for the opposite sex, but are not appropriate for their gender. It is not only career choices that are under threat. Much more difficult, in fact, is when people are uncomfortable with themselves and want to change their gender. On that front, one notices that we still fall a lot short of allowing own choices, even if they go against the general trend. Lots of people should think about what they want to understand under “Freedom of Expression” and what it really means.

Gender issues and Equalities Act

Gender symbols intertwined. The red (left) is the female Venus symbol. The blue (right) represents the male Mars symbol.

Back to Dr Barnes, who also told the webinar, called Getting the Language Right for 2022, that instead of gendered terms, staff should be referred to as “teacher” or “headteacher” followed by their surname. Ofsted has warned that Schools are using “overtly political materials” to teach children about gender issues.

It was said in 2021 that when it comes to teaching children about sex, sexual orientation and gender reassignment, some school staff are “confusing” their legal obligations under the Equality Act with the moral and the political, according to the school watchdog.

When the Equalities Act was introduced in 2010, it was “contentious from the outset”, according to Chris Jones, Ofsted’s director of corporate strategy, particularly in relation to characteristics relating to sex, sexual orientation and gender reassignment.

Far-right against equality

What we see in Europe is that there is an increasing political sensitivity in these areas that have made it harder for schools to handle equality well. Politicians also try to find a way out for the upcoming far-right groups which try to push the genders again in a straight jacket with specific roles for men and women. Another problem is that those far-right groups are obsessively against people with other sexual feelings than the one they find should be the normal case. From those (political) groups there are also people who are against first names which are too masculine for girls or too feminine for boys. In 2021 reports emerged of schools sanctioning the use of male names for girls as young as 13 without the consent of their parents.

Campaigners have accused teachers of misinterpreting equality regulations by allowing female pupils (who say they identify as boys) or the other way round, to use a different name. In many places, certainly in the East of Europe,  such “new” names used in the classroom, and on pupil registers and official communications from the school would be against the norms or values of the Christian nation.

Wishes of the individual and LGBT issues

One popular trans school kit, published by Brighton and Hove Council with the LGBT youth charity Allsorts, says:

“Care should be taken to ensure the wishes of the individual pupil or student are taken into account with a view to supporting them during potential transition.

Stonewall has advised schools that teachers should drop the terms boys and girls in favour of “learners” and mix up the sexes in PE classes.

The LGBT charity is urging teachers to ditch all gendered language and gendered uniforms and suggests that children should compete against the opposite sex in sport.

Members of the department’s Homeland Security Group, which leads work on Britain’s counter-terrorism response, attended a talk last week focused on “the right language” around LGBT issues.

On Monday, the Home Office moved to distance itself from its contents, which it said did not represent “departmental or government guidance”.

Across 12 slides on gender issues, first reported by Guido Fawkes, Whitehall staff were told:

“Be aware a person’s sex, gender identity, and gender expression may not correspond.

“Genderqueer is a blanket term for those who don’t define their gender in binary terms … It is not a modern invention. Each identity is valid and deserves respect.”

Sexual orientation

It is not because the majority of the population identifies itself as heterosexual that we do not have to take others into account. In Britain roughly 1.5 million people or 3.2 per cent, identified with an LGB+ orientation – “gay or lesbian”, “bisexual” or “other sexual orientation”.

Across England and Wales, more than one in 100 people identified as trans or other gender identities in just 21 local authorities.

A slide on language to avoid using included the terms homosexual and homosexuality, which it said is

“generally considered a medical term now. People tend to use gay instead. Can reduce the person to purely sexual terms”.

It also warned against the use of the word transsexual. But why is one so afraid to allow things or matters called by what it is? People whose gender identity varies from that traditionally associated with their apparent biological sex at birth, themselves are not afraid to call themselves transsexuals or transgenders.

In its original and narrower sense, transgender referred to males and females who respectively gender-identify as females and males.

In a later and broader sense, it has come to designate persons whose gender identities incorporate behaviours and traits traditionally associated with the opposite sex. Transgender persons may thus include transsexuals, transgenderists (in one usage of the term, persons who gender-identify with the opposite sex but who choose not to undergo sex-reassignment surgery or hormone treatments), and androgynes (biologically or psychologically androgynous persons), among other groups. {Encyc. Britannica on Transgender}

Sex-change or medical transition

There are lots of debates going on in Great Britain about allowing children to decide to change sex.

Dr Susan Matthews, an honorary senior research fellow in creative writing at Roehampton University, analysed a series of books that are being circulated in British schools. She concluded that children were being put at risk by transgender books in primary schools that “misrepresent” medical knowledge on puberty blockers.

Her critique of children’s literature was published in the 2019 book Inventing Transgender Children and Young People.

Books and lesson plans that were designed to educate pupils about transgender issues

“fail child safeguarding and conflict with the law”,

she said.

Dr Matthews found that much of the information given about medical transition was “inaccurate”, adding that “potential harms are ignored, glossed over or falsified”.

Helen Joyce, an author and former Economist journalist, believes that men and women are being redefined by trans activists, with laws and policies

“reshaped to privilege self-identified gender identity over biological sex”.

Legal gender change

Most Dutch think an expert opinion is crucial when someone desires legal gender change, but quite a lot of people can understand that certain people would prefer to change sex. At the end of last year, there were some debates after some documentaries were shown where American kids younger than 10 years old got transformations. Two-thirds of the Dutch population say there must be a minimum age for legal gender reassignment on birth certificates. The study, carried out by the Dutch Christian patient association NPV, shows no support for the proposal among the general population. (That is reported by the NPV in a press release.)

Questioning own identity

In West Europe, we clearly see a move in the way how young girls and young boys question their own identities.

According to a study commissioned by NHS England, 10 years ago there were just under 250 referrals, most of them boys, to the Gender Identity Development Service (Gids), run by the Tavistock and Portman NHS foundation trust in London. But in 2021/22 there were already over 5,000 referrals into the Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS).

There has been a dramatic change in the case-mix of referrals from predominantly birth-registered males to predominantly birth-registered females presenting with gender incongruence in their early teen years. Additionally, a significant number of children are also presenting with neurodiversity and other mental health needs and risky behaviours which requires careful consideration and needs to be better understood.

This has led to a lack of clinical consensus and polarised opinion on what the best model of care for children and young people experiencing gender incongruence and dysphoria should be; and a lack of evidence to support families in making informed decisions about interventions that may have life-long consequences.

While some parents said they had embraced their child’s decision and welcomed the societal changes that had made this step possible, others felt confused by their child’s desire to change their body. The big question for many was how they could halt their child or how they could help their child choice to change sex. Several parents said they had been relaxed when their daughters initially began identifying as non-binary, but became uneasy when they said they wanted to take puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones and began binding their breasts. Some spoke of their anxiety and uncertainty about how to respond, particularly when their child was unhappy.

Often bigger problems arise when the parents get lesser control over the child. The uncertainty parents felt was compounded by the highly polarised debate – within the NHS, politics and the media – about how parents and professionals should respond to children who express distress about their gender.

“In the past few years it has become an explosion. Many of us feel confused by what has happened, and it’s often hard to talk about it to colleagues,”

said a London-based psychiatrist working in a child and adolescent mental health unit, who has been a consultant for the past 17 years.

Huge surge in young women wanting to become boys

Perhaps our society should question more how it comes that in the last five to 10 years we’ve seen a huge surge in young women who, at the age of around 12 or 13, want to become boys. We should wonder more about what brings those girls to change their name and press to have hormones or puberty blockers. How does it come that one group does feel inferior to an other and wants to be part of the other group?

Equality Act – Historic day for equality

On December 22 the Scottish government hailed what it called “a historic day for equality” after a vote on that Thursday afternoon in which MSPs overwhelmingly backed plans to make it easier and less intrusive for individuals to legally change their gender, and to extend the streamlined system for obtaining a gender recognition certificate (GRC) to 16- and 17-year-olds.

But immediately after the 86-39 vote, which followed three days of intense and at times emotional debate at Holyrood, the Scottish secretary, Alister Jack, said:

“We share the concerns that many people have regarding certain aspects of this bill, and in particular the safety issues for women and children.

“We will look closely at that, and also the ramifications for the 2010 Equality Act and other UK-wide legislation, in the coming weeks – up to and including a section 35 order stopping the bill going for royal assent if necessary.”

The women and equalities minister, Kemi Badenoch, who met her Scottish government counterpart, Shona Robison, to discuss the bill, said following the vote that the Scottish government had

“not addressed the full implications of their bill – especially on the lives of women and girls”.

She added:

“The UK government is now looking at provisions that can prompt reconsideration and allow MSPs to address these issues.”

A Scottish government spokesperson said:

“The bill as passed is within legislative competence, and was backed by an overwhelming majority, with support from all parties. Any attempt by the UK government to undermine the democratic will of the Scottish parliament will be vigorously contested by the Scottish government.”

Scottish versus English parliament

But the English Government is not willing to accept it. Immediately after the vote, a spokesperson for the Equality and Human Rights Commission called on the UK government to provide clarity on whether Scottish GRCs would be recognised in the rest of the UK.

The Scottish Conservatives’ equalities spokesperson, Rachael Hamilton, told Robison that her government had not brought the people of Scotland with them, and that

“in the rush to make the process a little easier for trans people, the government is making it easier for criminal men to attack women”.

I do believe trans people across Scotland today will be feeling pleased and relieved that this bill has passed, after many years of difficult public debate. Though it is not finished yet. On January the 16th, Rishi Sunak’s government has blocked legislation passed by the Scottish parliament that would make Scotland the first part of the UK to introduce a self-identification system for people who want to change gender, them being concerned the bill will have an “adverse impact” on UK-wide equalities law.

UK government blocking the legislation

Scotland’s first minister Nicola Sturgeon said there were “no grounds” for the UK government to block the legislation, claiming that it did not affect the operation of the Equality Act. For her

“This is a full-frontal attack on our democratically elected Scottish parliament and it’s ability to make its own decisions on devolved matters. @scotgov will defend the legislation and stand up for Scotland’s parliament. If this Westminster veto succeeds, it will be first of many.”

Transgenders deserving respect

Conservatives and certain Christian groups should come to terms that people their wishes should be respected and that governments can not play the boss over their bodies. The Scottish secretary said

“Transgender people who are going through the process to change their legal sex deserve our respect, support and understanding. My decision today is about the legislation’s consequences for the operation of GB-wide equalities protections and other reserved matters.

The law, first proposed by Sturgeon six years ago, was passed by the Scottish parliament by 86 votes to 39, with the overwhelming support of the SNP, Labour, the Greens and the Lib Dems in December, after years of consultation and debate.

The legislation would make it easier for transgender people to obtain official gender recognition certificates, including by reducing waiting times, removing the need for a medical diagnosis and bringing the minimum age down from 18 to 16.

The Labour leader, Keir Starmer, said on Monday that 16-year-olds should not legally be able to change gender, putting him at odds with his party in Scotland.

The shadow Scottish secretary, Ian Murray, said the issue were

“too important to be reduced to the usual constitutional fight”,

and questioned why ministers at Westminster and Holyrood did not work together on an amended bill

“to avoid this unnecessary stand-off”.

Not fiting in the general box

The whole circus in Great Britain shows how politicians are using people who do not fit in the general box are used to be a hot potato in political debates. Nancy Kelley, chief executive of Stonewall, said:

“It is a matter of grave and profound regret that the prime minister has allowed trans people’s lives to be used as a political football. This is not governing with compassion.”

Beth, a queer activist, was watching the proceedings from the public gallery in Holyrood and described it as

“an amazing day for the queer rights movement in Scotland”.

Nevertheless, she also suggested that the toxicity around the reforms had

“allowed intolerance to grow”.

Gender recognition a frontline issue

Dylan Hamilton, a climate activist, like many trans-Scots also noted the extensive delays in the bill’s progress and said

“Gender recognition has become a frontline issue because of this bill but it’s not the most important thing for most trans people. It’s just an administrative issue to make life more dignified, but much more important are the horrifically long waiting lists, hate crime and the coming conversion ‘therapy’ bill [Scotland will include transgender people in its ban on the practice, while the UK government U-turned to exclude them earlier this year].”

The present bill still lets a lot of loopholes, leaving non-binary people excluded and unrecognised.

Boris Johnson had dropped plans to ban any conversion practice last year, only for his government to perform a partial U-turn hours later after a huge backlash.

In a written statement on Tuesday, January the 17th,  the culture secretary, Michelle Donelan, said:

“We recognise the strength of feeling on the issue of harmful conversion practices and remain committed to protecting people from these practices and making sure they can live their lives free from the threat of harm or abuse.”

She said it was right that the issue was tackled

“through a dedicated and tailored legislative approach”,

adding:

“The bill will protect everyone, including those targeted on the basis of their sexuality, or being transgender.”

Donelan said the draft bill, which will only ban conversion practices for over-18s

“who do not consent and who are coerced or forced to undergo”

the practice, would be scrutinised by MPs and peers to help ensure the legislation did not have “unintended consequences”.

Language to cope with Non-binary

A tthe moment it might well be that an increasing number of teenagers are identifying as non-binary, and education needs to respond to this – but the NEU does not believe that schools can or should adopt gender-neutral language across the board. We also should not try to exclude certain words because they would be too much connected by a woman or a man, or for some could sound offensive or would be a medical term. As such, there is no use to exclude homo, transgender, transsexual or other “right language” around LGBT issues, from our vocabulary use.

+

Preceding

Do the concepts of male and female need to have a formal official definition

Trans extremism, trans ideology, genderless a.o. categories and TERFs

What is Racism??

Looking at an American nightmare

Mass Media’s Deception Causing Division

Every shade but white

From the old box: The case for Black English

3 Things Black People Wish White People Understood

Gender, genderless, androgyny, bisexuality, cisgender and transgender

Study says highlighting gender leads to stereotypes

Added commentary to the posting A Progressive Call to Arms

She!

Parenting in changing times

Enough with the Clothes Shaming of Muslim Women

Anti-Semitic pressure driving Jews out of Europe

The Catholic synod on the family and abortion

++

Additional reading

1. 19th and 20th Century Shifts in bourgeoisie
2. Apartheid or Apartness #2 Up to 2nd part 20th Century
3. Migrants to the West #8 Welbeing
4. Happiness mapping and getting over gender mapping
5. Human relations 2013
6. 2014 Culture
7. 2014 Human Rights
8. 2014 Personalities and Obituary
9. Gender equality and women’s rights in the post-2015 agenda
10. 2015 Human rights
11. Growing rift between observant parents and their children
12. Massacre of Black people by a white supremacist is not an anomaly nor new phenomena in the United States
13. Does one have to be afraid of Christian nationalism
14. Apartheid South Africa and Israel’s Treatment of the Palestinians – Modern Parallels
15. A new decade, To open the eyes to get a right view
16. 2020 in view #1 The 45th president of the U.S.A.
17. For this week at the beginning of December 2021
18. Stories the Week brought to you from 2022 June 02 – June 08
19. The Week 2022 July 11- July 17
20. The Telegraph looking at the second week of August 2022
21. New York Times view for 2022 August 29 – September 04
22. Oppressive language of anti-Jehovah people does more than represent violence
23. Need to Embrace People Where They Are
24. To Heal the World? | Book Review
25. Overprotection and making youngsters drifting away
26. Intermarriage and Protecting the state of the Jewish and/or Jeshuaist family
27. Belonging to or being judged by
28. Time for the church to wake up and smell the coffee
29. Three pillars of sustainable development, young people and their rights
30. In Eastern Europe the Foundations of the European Union in danger
31. Prayer on this International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women
32. Old and newer King James Versions and other translations #6 Revisions of revisions

+++

Related

1. A History of African American Policemen in Omaha
2. The Problem With Black People Part 1
3. Can Black People Be Racists?
4. Apology to the Black Race
5. Black People, We’ve Been Duped!
6. Reconciliation: A Black Love Song (?)
7. A Wish Sandwich
8. It’s a Man’s World
9. The World of ‘Men’?
10. Transphobia: a debate that is perhaps wisest to sit out.
11. ”Gender dysphoria and being trans” – A scientific explanation
12. Why is trans an issue?
13. Nothing is Binary
14. Gender-Flex
15. Input: Google AI no longer uses gender binary tags on images of people
16. Popsugar: Apple’s New Gender-Neutral Emoji Are Here to Make Your Keyboard More Inclusive
17. “Awoman”?
18. She/Her – They/Them – Person
19. Sexists are Not Always Misogynists
20. There is no gender neutral
21. The dilemma of gender neutrality
22. Ladies, Gentlemen and Others
23. The Concept of Gender Neutrality and You
24. Gender Neutrality in Rape.
25. Clothes, colours and makeup are gender-neutral – a personal opinion
26. Men: Masculinity or Masculinism. Do we get it right?
27. Does gender neutrality have a plausible future in the Italian language?
28. Guidelines for gender-sensitive language. Are the EU Parliament’s efforts enough?
29. More Thoughts on Gender Neutral Language: Pete’s Husband
30. We Need To Change How We’re Raising Boys
31. Are School Curriculums Promoting Gender Stereotypes?
32. Role of parents in teaching gender-neutrality
33. The importance of inclusive language
34. Parents, do your homework
35. Need for Gender-Neutral Rape Laws: Unheard Voice of the Male Victims
36. N.B. vintage clothing shop embraces gender neutrality and body positivity
37. Need of Gender Neutral Domestic Violence Laws
38. Practicing What You Preach
39. Horse by Chase Twichell
40. Classic kids toy Mr. Potato Head gets new, gender-neutral name
41. How To Decorate The Perfect Gender Neutral Nursery
42. Up In Space
43. Life on this gender neutral planet
44. Full of It
45. How can one discover ideas of gender through Zenne Dance?
46. Women are being Encouraged to Challenge Sexism in the West Mercia Police Force
47. Feminism in India is dying
48. On bisexuality
49. Street harassment, and silence
50. Boys and dolls
51. Have real respect

Begroetende dageraad

°
De dageraad is de tijd dat de zon opkomt of opkomt
maar ook de tijd om vooruit te stappen
met nieuwe heldere plannen
de dag te veroveren met positieve gedachten.
~Marcus Ampe
°

 

When dawn greets us

°
Dawn is the time when the sun rises or comes up
but also the time to step forwards
with new bright plans
conquering the day with positive thoughts.
~Marcus Ampe
°

When dusk greets us

°
When dusk greets us
leave the bad things of the day behind.
~ Marcus Ampe
°

 

Begroetende schemering

°
Wanneer de schemering ons begroet
laten we de slechte dingen van de dag achter ons.
~ Marcus Ampe
°

 

A culture of “democratic cleansing” – Elders and youngsters versus respect

The generation born between 1930 and 1960 had no choice but to listen to father‘s law and do as we were told.

Father’s will is Law!

When we asked

Why?

We got a very short but very well to understand answer.

Therefore!

Now those generations from before the 1960s have become the “oldies”.

We live with the thought that we taught some good and interesting things to our kids, but sometimes seem to wonder what they did with what we taught them and what went wrong with the present generation.

What did we do wrong?

For sure, though we did not always agree with our parents, and dared to go on the streets in 1968 to question our way of living and our society, we always still showed respect for our parents and grandparents. In many cases, there were no great-grandparents. Our grandparents, to us, looked already

so old

at an age that we now already survived a few years.

Unlike our parents, we taught our children to dare to question everything and not just accept or consider everything.

John Humphrys in the Daily Telegraph of 26 December 2022 wonders if he perhaps had a ridiculous dream.

Well yes, and a bit of a nightmare too. I can’t think of anything much worse than my kids sitting in respectful silence while I bang on.

At home and at school we learned courtesy rules. But what is left of it? Some of the things we learned, such as keeping the door open for ladies, are not always anymore appreciated but are viewed as a sexist attitude.

Humphrys writes

If I’ve taught them anything at all – pretty unlikely I know – it’s that healthy scepticism beats the pants off reverence. Always has. Always will.

And yet… maybe just the teeniest smattering of respect might not come amiss? Possibly not boys doffing their caps to ladies in the street as my school ordered us do. After all, who wears caps nowadays? (And is ‘ladies’ sexist? What if they’re trans?)

But perhaps an acknowledgement that we oldies just might have picked up some useful stuff during our decades of experience on this planet that could come in useful? That’s tricky in today’s climate. Just that word “experience” is fraught. It has to be a “lived” experience now and I’m not sure I know what that is.

We have also been brought up to check the past and present and to seek the truth each time.

Our parents taught us that if we did not know something, we should go and look it up in the encyclopaedias provided. Those writers were expected to have undergone sufficient schooling and presented well-founded articles under editorial authority to inform the reader and provide further knowledge. We found it great to find such reference works that contained information on all branches of knowledge or that treated a particular branch of knowledge in a comprehensive manner.

For more than 2,000 years encyclopaedias have existed as summaries of extant scholarship in forms comprehensible to their readers. But in the last two decades, we saw several well-known encyclopaedias disappearing from the market.

At our house, the 1968 Encyclopaedia Britannica, as the oldest English-language general encyclopaedia, was just one of the many other encyclopaedias we could use daily.

The researchers and authors and publishers of encyclopaedias had to face technological changes, beginning in the 1980s with the development and spread of personal computers. It really became a world that opened up, making it possible to look up documents from all over the world. The computer business evolved so fast, quickening in the 1990s and 2000s through the Internet and widespread diffusion of broadband access, it radically altered the publishing world generally and the encyclopaedia business in particular.

The 15th edition of Encyclopædia Britannica (1974), was designed in large part to enhance the role of an encyclopaedia in education and understanding without detracting from its role as a reference book. It represented very much the way we were brought up, finding it necessary to educate and to spread knowledge. Its three parts (Propædia, or Outline of Knowledge; Micropædia, or Ready Reference and Index; and Macropædia, or Knowledge in Depth) represented an effort to design an entire set on the understanding that there is a circle of learning and that an encyclopaedia’s short informational articles on the details of matter within that circle as well as its long articles on general topics must all be planned and prepared in such a way as to reflect their relation to one another and to the whole of knowledge.
For those who wanted to learn more or wished to delve deeper into a particular fact or topic, the Propædia became a great help for self-study. The propaedia was a reader’s version of the circle of learning on which the set had been based and was organised in such a way that a reader might reassemble in meaningful ways material that the accident of alphabetisation had dispersed.

In 1981, under an agreement with Mead Data Central, the first digital version of the Encyclopædia Britannica was created for the LexisNexis service. In the early 1990s Britannica was made available for electronic delivery on a number of CD-ROM-based products, including the Britannica Electronic Index and the Britannica CD (providing text and a dictionary, along with proprietary retrieval software, on a single disc). A two-disc CD was released in 1995, featuring illustrations and photos; multimedia, including videos, animations, and audio, was added in 1997.

John Humphrys seems to find it a waste of money that his parents scrimped to pay a weekly shilling to the Encyclopaedia Britannica door-to-door salesman so that they as kids would always have the world’s knowledge at their fingertips.

He gives the impression that those modern machines and the evolution of artificial intelligence is one of the many reasons why respect between the generations matters.

We do admit that many young people do not understand how the elderly can or cannot handle today’s modern gadgets.

Millennials (born 1981-1996) tend to put the boomers (born post-war) into a category. Specifically, men. Usually “old white men”.

How come that usage is tolerated? Substitute “women” for men and it wouldn’t be. It would be sexist. Substitute “black” for white and it would be racist.

He observes

Those who once wore the badge of old age with a certain pride must now carefully guard their tongues less they cause offence, even when it’s patently obvious that none was intended. Was it necessary to humiliate Lady Susan Hussey when she was seemingly too curious about the origins of a black woman who was wearing a vivid tribal dress? Her offence, it turned out, was being old.

Getting old happens to all of us. How we deal with it is very different. But it is also very different from how outsiders deal with elders.
Especially in recent years, there has been an unpleasant skew there, with many viewing elders as a burden.
Similarly, few can empathise with the world of understanding of those elders who have been brought up with certain ways of thinking, some of which are also sometimes difficult to distance themselves from or continue to think stereotypically.

We all pursue dreams and shall one day be confronted with that older body, becoming aware that there is not only a tendency to forget people’s names, but having more than once looking for the right words, having forgotten (for a moment) certain things. And then in confrontation with the youngsters, they not always understand or want to give some time to get the memory back.

For some elderly it is also not evident to have to rely on others. And the children are not so pleased anymore to be a safety net for their parents, as we looked after our parents when they were already starting to reach a reasonable age. Some may be annoyued that those above 65 do not want to retire. It might be those in their 60s whose mind is fooling them in which case they will rely on others around them to let them know that it is time to retire.

How many times do those who passed the 50s have to hear from the youngsters that their ideas are old fashioned or that they are not anymore from these times? Many younger people find it not appropriate that the elderly are still pursuing ideas and aspirations. Is it a form of respect to accepting that they express their feelings as well as their dreams and aspirations?

Most young people don’t sense time as being a high-speed train, because for them it often looks ages, before there is another hour, another day. That makes them also to express their impatience so often. But then again, the fact that some elders become a bit too slow bothers those younger ones, in that it seems that that time is taken up by that elder, who then keeps them from renewing moments. Some younger ones do not mind letting the older ones know that it is time to retreat, or to get silent.

At a certain age, it can be that we feel that there has come a time we need to withdraw from the hurly-burly of the life we once knew. But it does not always feel so nice, when those younger people say it in our face. (We never would have dared to say such a thing to our elderly.)

In his book, The War On The Old, English literature professor John Sutherland wrote about what he called a culture of “democratic cleansing… a state-condoned campaign against the nation’s old”.

He describes an overwhelming sense of blame that younger generations attribute to “the wrinklies” who voted for Brexit, comfortable in the mansions they bought for a pittance. The once-dignified badge of seniority is becoming synonymous with “narrow-minded”, “outdated” and “incipiently senile”.
The elderly are bed-blockers, job-blockers, pension-drainers. {We used to respect our elders – whatever happened to that? by John Humphrys}

Normally, one went from one generation to the next with improvements, but today that no longer holds true. Today’s 30-year-olds have it much harder than their parents did. The age-old argument over which generation has had more advantages has been settled – at least where finances are concerned.

Adult life is harder to afford now than it was 30 years ago and it has forced today’s young to delay big life events, which tend to happen around this milestone age. Today’s generation are buying their first home two years later, having ­children three years later and getting married six to seven years later than they were in 1992. {Six reasons why boomers have it better than millennials by Jessica Beard}

Due to the pressures of the outside world, those in their twenties and thirties may have become a bit “shorter” in their statements, and it is not always easy for them to be patient with those older people who are, as it were, still watching them or ready with criticism.

Dependence on two earners can make taking time off to care for children ­trickier, and to care for older people, even more, trickier or not so wanted. So it should not always be viewed so negatively by the elderly when those young people now show a little less time than their parents who could make more time for their parents and grandparents.

Many today are so engrossed in their work and the expectations of fellow peers that they have little time left outside their work sphere for their own spiritual formation, religious pursuits and many family activities outside their own families.

It can well be that certain actions and reactions of youngsters are sometimes unjustly interpreted as respectless, or not showing enough respect. It must not be disrespectful, but just because of these other times with much more pressure on the youngsters, that the gap between young and old has widened somewhat today compared to previous decades.

+

Preceding

A more recent discrimination: Old Age

A Cranky Old Man

Readers, likes and comments

Thought on the birthday of an encyclopaedia

Available information for the youngsters and readers of my websites

Redeeming Our World

The Way You Live Your Life

Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan back with a bang

Mishmash of a legal code but importance of mitzvah or commandments

++

Additional reading

1. Ageing and Solidarity between generations
2. Who is considered Old
3. Man in picture, seen from the other planets
4. Subcutaneous power for humanity 1 1940-1960 Influenced by horrors of the century
5. Justififiable anger or just anarchism
6. A trillion words
7. Looking at an era of international “youth culture”
8. Did the picture change for Working dads
9. Living in this world and viewing it
10. Hippies, a president, a damaged ozone layer and knights
11. This Week Twenty-Five Years Ago: The Velvet Revolution Succeeds, December 1989
12. Our brothers in Kyiv’s northwest suburb Irpin
13. Russia not wanting it neighbours countries to cooperate with the West
14. Left behind for economical emigration
15. 2014 Social contacts
16. 2014 Human Rights
17. Time to consider how to care for our common home
18. Welfare state and Poverty in Flanders #7 Education
19. Martin Luther King’s Dream Today
20. This fighting world, Zionism and Israel #5
21. Another Jewish Voice on Trump’s plan: No peace without equality and mutual respect
22. The truest greatness lies in being kind
23. Agape, a love to share with others from the Fruit of the Spirit
24. Approachers of ideas around gods, philosophers and theologians
25. Cleanliness and worrying or not about purity
26. Today’s thought “Teachers will be judged with greater strictness than others” (December 09)
27. Perspectives
28. Hungarian undermining of European freedoms

+++

Related

1. A reflective Morning
2. Time Hobbles On
3. Beautiful, she said
4. I am old.
5. Learning to be Old–5
6. The effects of just being you… Age.
7. When You Grow Old
8. The Age Old Question…
9. Ageism in the workplace
10. Life is Short
11. Pursuing dreams to stay young in mind
12. What We Need, in Order to, Age Gracefully
13. I Can’t Breath Through It All
14. Thirty Five Years and Old.
15. How to be Old
16. 75 And Counting
17. Age 90+
18. Stillness
19. Dealing with Age Discrimination: Workers’ rights and strategies
20. “The best gift you can give your children, is the love and respect you demonstrate for their mother.”
21. Respect for life…
22. … the taste of respect
23. life will teach you to honor and respect balance.
24. I do respect people’s faith
25. High recognitions . . . Honor and respect them, though you no longer worship them
26. Paris attacks darkning the world
27. Holidays break – Day 7

Als je niet plant, plan je om te falen

***

Een nieuw jaar heeft zich weer aangeboden.
Van het voorgaande onthouden wij best enkel het goede.
Maar voor dit jaar mogen wij niet vergeten te plannen,
het is namelijk zo dat als je faalt te plannen
zal je zeker niet slagen in wat je zou willen bereiken.

*

Van harte een gelukkig 2023 toegewenst!

 

If you fail to plan, you plan to fail

***

A new year has once again presented itself.
From what has gone before, it is best to remember only the good.
But for this year, we must not forget to plan,
for if you fail to plan
you will certainly not succeed in what you would like to achieve.

*

Heartily wishing you a happy 2023!

 

31 December 2022 enkel goede dingen te onthouden

***

Ook al zou 2022 niet onder de allerbeste jaren kunnen rekenen,
en mag er misschien heel wat mis gegaan zijn,
Moet men er enkel de goede dingen van onthouden
en het jaar in alle schoonheid afsluiten.

Geniet van deze oudejaarsavond

***

What 2022 brought to us and looking forward to 2023

Liberation

Lots of people thought 2022 would be the year of liberating us from that terrible virus which got the world in its grip. Though not a liberation became several people on their part, an even more senseless killing ‘disease’ came unto Europe.

The leader of the Russian Federation, Vladimir Putin, who would love to find a renewed Soviet Union, said at the beginning of the year he would bring liberation to the Ukrainians. Instead, his “bloodstained” tyranny plunged Europe into the war on a scale not seen since 1945 as Russian troops advanced on Kyiv on Thursday night, February 24th.

The invasion of Ukraine by Russia is shocking and disgraceful. It is the latest terrible aggression by the Putin regime and the latest damaging conflict in our world, with so many people being killed or injured, losing loved ones and seeing their homes destroyed.

2022 has been a tough year to navigate, with a series of political and economic crises that continue to shape our world.

One powerful man

Who could have ever imagined that one man, from up north, would single-handedly turn the world upside down? However, he has succeeded very well in not only bringing black snow over several people, and literally turning the landscape blood-red, he has severely disrupted economic life in several countries.

Following two long pandemic years – with many still experiencing the effects – we’ve witnessed the outbreak of war in Ukraine and could feel in our purse how it affects us also in our region. We cannot ignore this war that has affected many citizens. At our new WordPress Site “Some View on the World” we have given a voice to those suffering in the conflict as well as reporting the situation on the ground and providing the expertise needed to understand geopolitics.

Picturing what is happening in the world

As best we can, we try to give a picture of what is happening in the world on the continuation of “Our World“. 2022 was another year of figuring out how we would be able to keep up with bringing political and religious news alongside our other spiritual websites. We hope to find that balance further in 2023.

By nature, I am not an easy person and have dared to clash several times by speaking my mind outright. Even in the articles, I publish here and on my other websites, my thinking is based on my personal opinion. One can agree or disagree with that view. I, therefore, appreciate that people also dare to express their opinions. But in general, there is a little reaction in that area. Still, I hope the articles brought, can make people think. For instance, I was happy to find that my op-eds on Christmas in the Daily Telegraph were able to bring a debate after all.

Hoping to expose wrongdoings

With the news we place at Some View on the World we do hope we also could be able to expose the mistreatment and deaths of migrant workers in Qatar for almost a decade as well as other wrong attitudes towards people as well as animals and plants. At my personal site and this site as well, in particular on “Some View on the World” we continue to bear witness to the climate crisis as it destroys lives, uproots whole communities and changes the course of our shared future. We hope for 2023 to be able to bring regular news about our environment.

The fallout from the January 6 hearings and Donald Trump’s presidency could get our attention, and we hold our hearts for the intentions of Mr Trump, wanting to come back as president of the U.S.A..

Independence of my websites

For all the reporting we do here, and on my other websites, I would like to remind you, readers, that there is no financial support from companies anywhere and that all reporting is based on personal and independent reporting, where I keep searching for this site among texts that appear on the net what could possibly be fascinating for you to read as well, and thus to reblog them here.

2022 could bring lots of blogs on the net of which we presented some selections over here too. At Firefox several could find their way into ‘Pocket’, like: Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid, How to Want Less, A Neurologist’s Tips to Protect Your Memory, Why You Should Really Stop Charging Your Phone Overnight, A Guide to Getting Rid of Almost Everything, a.o. most read.

Uncovering and unravelling

Whether on social, political or religious issues, we are eager to seek the truth and expose false reports. Exposing wariness is not always appreciated, but is very important in our view. To do that, we can count on several investigative journalists and some newspapers to join in the pursuit of that muddle, so that together we can make certain things known to the world while others would rather see them covered up.

At Some View on the World we have maintained round-the-clock coverage from several places, not always bringing nice news, like mass graves of Bucha, Izium and many war crimes.

The war accelerated a global economic slump, sending costs soaring, throttling energy supplies and raising the spectre of blackouts, malnutrition and a winter of discontent across dozens of countries. As global food supplies fluctuated, we reported on the hunger gripping the Horn of Africa and Afghanistan. In 2022, it became impossible to ignore those victims in poorer countries. But sadly, we had to observe how little the public cared about those people living far from their homes. And closer, many did not wish to have refugees, so we could speak of a refugee crisis again this year.

Here in Belgium, the influx of refugees seems completely uncontrollable and many, even with small children, shamefully had to sleep outside several nights through rain and wind. This while in Great Britain, the reception was also not going smoothly and people started looking for a housing solution in Rwanda, and proceeded to deportations.

Condition of mother earth

A lot of people do not want to realise that things are very bad for Mother Earth. To this, in 2022, several scientists again tried to make it clear to the world that we need to think seriously about this and take action. We were confronted with UK’s hottest summer, a very early and long great Summer in Belgium, drought in Europe, and the accompanying fires.

Heating the houses became for many difficult to keep in the household budget. It looked like mother nature felt the pressure on the energy market, as well. Everywhere in Europe, we had extremely high temperatures for the time of year. In Belgium 2022 became the warmest year since measurements.

The climate emergency ran as a constant thread through much of our Some View on the World journalism in 2022.

While many European countries were suffering from a shortage of water, they had it in other countries, like Pakistan, too much. Devastating floods in Pakistan, encountering one of its worst natural catastrophes, Sydney’s wettest year on record, ferocious heatwaves in the US southwest and the costliest Atlantic hurricane for years, could catch our attention.

At Cop27 in Egypt, the Guardian asked the tough questions. Though, we did not give so much attention to the changing tactics of activists, now more likely to throw soup at a painting as they are to glue themselves to a public highway.

Uprising

In my view, many other protests could get our attention earlier, as they were carried out in a more correct way. Coming from a not expected corner, sparked by the death in custody of a young woman, Mahsa Amini.

Once again, we were able to conclude in Afghanistan and Iran that there is no improvement in human rights yet. The Iranian authorities tightly control reporting inside the country, so we counted on the teams of the Guardian to redouble efforts to reach protagonists to tell their stories. Social media remained also important for this, so it was satisfying to see the Guardian Instagram video on why Iranians are risking everything for change reach more than 2 million viewers.

It is impossible for me to have news sources everywhere, which is why we must also call on professional companies, for which we must also pay. Financial aid is therefore very welcome to cover these expenses. Nevertheless, we try to be as aware as possible of the general events, for which we also make further use of the known news channels and reliable TV channels and newspapers.

United States debacle

In terms of exposure, it was imperative to look at the Trumpists who still claim high and low that the US elections were forged.

The country which was formed on the idea that it could be a free world where everybody could express himself freely and would not be bounded by limitations through a government, in 2022 came to see deep political divisions, caused by a man who as 45th president of the U.S.A. did mutiny on that state and brought democracy in danger. His party made the ongoing climate crisis and racial, economic and health inequalities worsened. It was impossible to ignore the fallout from the January 6 hearings and Donald Trump’s presidency, as well as his willingness to come back as president.

The repeal of Roe v Wade provided a divisive backdrop to the November midterm elections. The conservative, or better said, the extremist Christians in the U.S., made it possible that women lost even the right to their own bodies. They also did not want to give an eye for mother nature nor for all those poor Americans who have no house or anywhere to live except on the streets, where many in the last weeks of the year found their dead by Winter storm Elliott. Buffalo got the worst hit by that bomb cyclone.

Political storms

In 2022 there were more significant elections in America which caught our attention. In Brazil, there were an anxious few weeks as Jair Bolsonaro wanted to do like his friend Trump, saying the votes were falsified. Finally, he suffered a chastening defeat by Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who completed a comeback from prison to the presidential palace.

To our annoyance, we in northern Europe had to observe an inverse movement towards South America. The far right in Sweden, Italy and Israel, could get most seats in parliament. Despite her political prowess, the 45-year-old from Rome, whose strong will and determination has drawn comparisons to Margaret Thatcher, Giorgia Meloni has spent three decades fighting her way to the top of Italian politics. She is clear evidence that go-getters win. In October last year, after Brothers of Italy managed to draw votes away from the Northern League in its northern strongholds in local elections, a secret recording revealed Matteo Salvini hitting out at Meloni, calling her a “pain in the ass”.

In Belgium, too, the newspapers disguised several polls, clearly showing that the right is making a strong rise and where voices can already be heard that NVA will have to make the choice to form a majority coalition with Vlaams Belang.

As for British politics, prime ministers came and went with alarming regularity and the nation buried the pound, Queen Elizabeth and its global standing in quick succession. For 10 days in September, the future of the monarchy dominated the newsroom. The crazy game of the English conservatives who wanted their leader to put his capsones under the benches and to ask the people to stay at home because of Corona and not to have parties seemed to think it normal that their leader could do that and lie about it too. The whole world could laugh at the blunders of Boris Johnson and Liz Truss, while the British citizen seemed not to mind. In any case, they did not demand new elections and left it to the Tory members to elect the new prime minister.

In Australia Labour could note a historic federal election victory.

Economical storms

The struggle between Russia and Ukraine is also a struggle between the Putin regime and Western Europe.

The war accelerated a global economic slump, sending costs soaring, throttling energy supplies and raising the spectre of blackouts, malnutrition and a winter of discontent across dozens of countries. But we also noticed that certain companies were abusing the war in Ukraine to raise their prices.

Cereals and gas were not released enough by blockades from the Russians, which caused major food problems, especially in Africa. In Western Europe we felt our energy prices skyrocket due to the pressure on the export and import markets. In Belgium, it took forever for the government to take measures to mitigate the costs of its citizens. After several months of calls by the Labour Party PvdA/PtB to reduce VAT to 6% and by their appeals to the public to put pressure on the government, things finally came to a head.

Health matters

2022 received big leaps forward for Alzheimer’s treatments, bowel cancer prevention and understanding depression.

In several countries there was joy that people could come together again to party and that the elderly should no longer be separated from their children and grandchildren. The lockdown had made it very clear how important personal contact is. It was striking how in 2022 teenagers and twens still had many psychological difficulties, which were not resolved. Bad enough, many could not be admitted in time, causing unnecessarily too many young people to die, while this could have been avoided.

Post-pandemic in Europe in danger

For months Europe tried to combat Covid-19. We started the annual overview with the relaxation of the Corona measures. But at the end of December, they now appear to be endangered because Europe does not want to take strict measures for the Chinese who are now allowed by their government to travel outside China again, which will allow them to spread the increased disease further outside China. With the coming Chinese New Year, they could start a new pandemic as in Belgium, it started in Antwerp.

For much of the world, a sort of post-pandemic normality has resumed – with one striking exception: the country where it all began. Chinese leaders faced a rapid spread of public anger caused by their draconian Covid lockdown policy. Only after some activists could ignite a revolt against the lockdown and more people joined them on the streets, even coming to shout to get rid of the Chinese leader and communist party, the government got seriously afraid and eased the lockdown measures. After they had done that another hell broke down, the virus rapidly spreading and killing so many people the mortuaries could not handle it anymore.

While the Chinese seem to be in the first Corona wave, as it were, the rest of the world has gotten out over time and everyone is now looking forward to a shock-free 2023.

We too look forward to an ending of the war in Ukraine and to a peaceful solution between Kosovo and Serbia.

At Some View of the World and at my other personal Space, we shall try to bring you up-to-date news of the happenings in the world, and here on this website, we hope we shall still be able to offer you and share with you, some worthwhile articles to read in this coming New Year.

 

*

A sincere thank you to our readers and supporters – wherever you are in the world,
we wish you a wonderful end to 2022 and an optimistic 2023.

°°°

In case you like our work,
do not forget that we always can use your support.

To help us defray the costs
any gift is welcome at
Bankaccount: Giro: BE37 9730 6618 2528
BIC: ARSPBE22
With mention: support websites

For which we thank you wholeheartedly

++

Additional reading

1. G7 agreed to ban or phase out Russian oil and gas imports
2. 2022 the year of fearing some wars

Available information for the youngsters and readers of my websites

John Humphrys does feel a sense of guilt that his parents scrimped to pay a weekly shilling to the Encyclopaedia Britannica door-to-door salesman so that they as kids would always have the world’s knowledge at our fingertips. He says:

What a noble intent. What a waste of money it seems today.

Though I also twice got the full encyclopedia version and for a long tim bought the additional yearbooks. Now I still do pay my yearly subscription, so did and still do support the Encyclopeadia Britannica, so that I can search for truthful information. Once the kids were on their own legs they did not seem interested to search in the books, or on the internet version, because they found other sources on the internet in which most of the youngsters put their faith. For some of them, they do forget that it is people, like me, who are offering our knowledge for free on that internet, but are also not all masters in different subjects.

The volumes of the Encyclopædia Britannica. The Macropædia is the set of volumes 13 to 29, with single colour spines.

What bothers me most about those searches on the internet is that not all search machines bring the ‘searchers’ to the right answers. The Britannica is there also at fault, Not bringing people to their full articles on a certain subject. I must say, often my searches in the Micropaedia and Macropaedia deliver much better answers than the ones on the net.

The 17-volume Macropædia is the third part of the Encyclopædia Britannica; the other two parts are the 12-volume Micropædia and the 1-volume Propædia, intended as a compendium and topical organisation which is an interesting guide to self-study.

The last edition of the print Britannica was published in 2010, and today it provides only the electronic version. I am happy that I have still the printed versions next to the two main electronic versions I can do my research with. I find it important that people should be able to find out more about certain subjects, and for that reason, I still try to include further links in the articles presented on my various websites. I do hope people would use them to find out more about certain subjects. I am happy to see that until now certain links are clicked.

Slower pace and restfulness of this week between Christmas and New Year

Looking from the window from the flat of one of the children in Frankfurt, I notice the quite opposite street with the university building, not many people passing by. At home in Belgium, even living in the countryside, we always have a lot of noise, much more than here in this big German financial city and much more than when I lived in London.

The 24th until the 26th we had one family gathering after the other. Having very good food, having eaten more than we should have done, there was also the business of all chatting and laughing.

Today there were actually not that many people in the streets and shops of Frankfurt city, where the sales were trying to entice people to spend some money anyway.

After the busy, noisy celebration of Christmas, the slower pace and restfulness of this week, between Christmas and New Year’s is for many somehow refreshing.

These days, perhaps many of us shall not follow so much the news events and shall let the world pass the family places. The calmness may come over us. Now we also can think of the man who came to earth so many centuries ago. He preached about the way we better should live. But not so many people wanted or want to listen to him. There were even several people who wanted him dead, and managed to have him killed as a murderer, hanged at the wooden stake.

Several Christians remembered, a few days ago, the birth of that Nazarene man, who shall bring peace to us all. For many, this holiday season is the special occasion that they think of the one who can give peace in our hearts and who can bring peace to the world. Would it be not nice if we could enjoy true peace? Also, being at peace would already be nice. Finding a serene, relaxing, time with no worries. How many of us would not love to get away from the trials and tribulations of everyday life. We should know, we do have to find first peace and love in our own hearts, before we can find peace outside ourselves.

The world is still waiting for that moment of ‘eternal peace’, but for sure it shall come one day.

Finding peace is what most of us would like to do. There is a peace and rest available to us that is deep enough to remain even in the most hectic times, and secure enough to withstand the most severe troubles.

The state we are living in, is man’s own fault. We also have our past, that we should dare to put away and forget about it all. That Nazarene master teacher, some 2 000 years ago, gave us a good example of how to live, but not many want to follow his teachings. In case already all those who call themselves Christian would keep to those teachings of Christ, we would already have a much better world.

Here on the European continent, we have seen many wars, where both fighting parties prayed that God would be at their side and help them to conquer the enemy. Instead of wondering if God would not disagree with them fighting. Some thought after World War II the fighting is now done over, but they are mistaken. The Yugoslavian wars and the recent invasion of Ukraine have proven how fragile peace in our region is.

Even in a part of the world that has been free from open war for a couple of generations, we have increased the security measures and still are not sure, there will be no invasions by foreign troops. We would love to see the space around us free of any danger of intrusion, terrorism, or fear for something bad to happen.

Oh, so often, people point their fingers at another. So many times we do hear that the trouble or fight is there, because of the other. But on the other hand, there are also many who do not believe enough in themselves and are afraid of the other. Such a negative attitude for themselves means that they cannot find peace in themselves. Finding inner peace is very important and necessary to be able to spread peace to others. In these dark days at the end of the year, let’s consider how we may or may not even have disrupted the peace of others, and how we can correct mistakes we have made.

We personally will not be able to do much about the war raging in Ukraine. But we can avoid any small ‘war’ around us and if we see resentment somewhere and find iniquity, we can make an attempt and take a measure to put an end to it.

For many Jews, Jeshuaists and Christians the last few days have been a “time of light”. By more than one miracle God has provided light in the world, and that light we should also show to others around us. Be it Chanukah or Christmas, when we put on the many candles or electric lights, it should be a sign we want to let others know about that light that can shine, because it is the Elohim Who provides the possibility. Both festivals are no holidays for seriousness, but for joy and glory.
And that means spreading light and joy.

These days we best meditate on whatever is honourable, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is good, and whatever is virtuous and praiseworthy.  We all have a Book of books offered to us in which we can find the way to the truth and the way to inner but also outer peace. That book should be our guide and give our hope for that peace that shall come, because all promises made in that book have or shall come true.

 

+

Preceding

What Are You Seeking?

We all have to have dreams

Christians at War? Christians using violence?

How to Find the Meaning of Life and Reach a State of Peace

High time to show the way to peace

As always God has a Plan

Window 190 – The door to our truth, can only be opened from within

True happiness, love and perfection

Being a Light in the World Award

++

Additional reading

1. Just an Ordinary Day
2. Identity Crisis By millennials
3. Honest-hearted people are losing faith in humanity and humanity losing faith in God
4. Spark Understanding, Stitch Connections
5. Facilitations of science and loss of peace of mindA new decade, To open the eyes to get a right view
6. Man’s own fault and the choice to flee from fear
7. How much does man wants to be dependent on a Divine Creator?
8. All I want is peace!!!
9. Running away from the past
10. Looking forward to the return of Jesus
11. Give your tears to God
12. Cry out to Yahweh
13. In the night His song shall be with me
14. Fullness of summer and abundance of harvest found in the satisfying plenitude of life in Christ
15. Will There Ever be Peace on Earth?
16. Look It Squarely In The Eye, And Say….
17. Israel, Fitting the Plan when people allow it
18. Memorizing wonderfully 48 John 16:33 That you may have peace
19. Looking for True Spirituality 8 Measuring Up
20. Not daring to show a connection
21. The quest for peace and order
22. Peace not the absence of disturbance
23. Poetry of Peace
24. Today’s thought “The breastplate of faith” (November 18)
25. Today’s thought “What sorrow awaits rebellious people” (December 17)
26. When examining ourselves
27. Guard well within yourself that treasure, kindness
28. Come ye yourselves apart … and rest awhile (Mark 6:31)
29. Ambassadors showing hope and a world of peace
30. Being comforted by the Most High and His familyThe World framed by the Word of God
31. Memorizing wonderfully 48 John 16:33 That you may have peace
32. Sings of the times – Difficult moments at the borders of Europe
33. Scripture words written for our learning, given by inspiration of God for edification
34. Not studying an abstract and arcane text of the ancient world
35. Only once and with consequences
36. Christian in Christendom or in Christianity
37. Back from gone #3 Giving worries to God and believing in His promises
38. Humbleness
39. Hope is faith holding out its hand in the dark
40. Faith is knowing there is an ocean because you have seen a brook.

+++

Related

1. Christmas at grandma’s
2. Safe Space
3. Peace
4. Peace Prevails
5. Peace and Purpose in A Psalm
6. Finding Peace
7. Darkness
8. Happiness
9. The Peace of the Lord – Sermon for December 29, 2013
10. Strive to Enter God’s Rest – Sermon on Hebrews 4:9-13 (Feb 23/24, 2014)
11. Forgive Us As We Forgive Others – Midweek Sermon (April 9, 2014)
12. Peace Be With You – Sermon for Quasimodo Geniti (April 27th/28, 2014)
13. Keep Away From Mutual Enmity
14. Useful Ways of Leading a Happy Life – Imam As-Sa’dee
15. Guidelines with regard to Criticizing Individuals and Groups – Shaikh Rabee’
16. Christmas Tidings
17. Safe Space
18. Embrace doing nothing.
19. Live Lightly and Peacefully
20. EGW Inspirational Quotes
21. Daily Scripture Series – Dec. 28th
22. Living in the Faith
23. Ukraine latest: Kremlin rules out peace plan that does not recognize annexed regions
24. Give Yourself Permission to Change
25. Wednesday Blessings

Tweede kerstdag 2022

***
Na al het feesten komt soms weleens de kater.
Men voelt dan wel dat men zijn boekje te buiten is gegaan
met lekker eten en drinken.
°°°
Laat deze tweede kerstdag dan maar een dag van rust zijn
en lekker nagenieten
van de fijne momenten die u samen met uw gezin hebt mogen beleven.
***

 

Boxing Day 2022

***

After all the partying, sometimes the hangover comes.
One does feel then that one has gone beyond one’s means
with good food and drink.
°°°
So let this Boxing Day be a day of rest
and reminisce
of the good times, you had with your family.
***

 

Laat 25 december 2022 een dag van menselijke warmte zijn

***
Laat 25 december 2022 een dag van menselijke warmte zijn,
waarbij zij die het moeilijk hebben niet vergeten worden.
***

++
Vindt ook te lezen: Wij wensen u Fijne Kerstdagen

Naar de overvloed van Kerstfeest gaande

*
Voor velen gaat vanavond een periode in van gezellig samen zijn
en Kerst te vieren.
Laten wij op deze dagen van overvloed in onze streken
de tekorten voor velen in ver van ons gelegen gebieden
niet vergeten.

 

Koude – Cadeautjes en Warmte

*
Het zijn niet al die cadeautjes die voor warmte moeten zorgen.
De warmte komt uit het hart van hen die het samenzijn het belangrijkst vinden.
~ Marcus Ampe

 

Seeking human warmth

*

In these cold days
it is important to seek human warmth

~ Marcus Ampe