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.

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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

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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

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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

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Preceding

1. Do you still look out for your morning or evening paper
2. Lots of news demanding attention
3. Mountains of information, disinformation and breaking away
4. The Age of Disinformation
5. Mass Media’s Deception Causing Division
6. Do Governments and Nations Lie?
7. Seasonal Writing
8. Holiday season and BBC being questioned
9. Holiday time reading time
10. Consequences of our digital environment
11. Facts: Why they matter and how to check them
12. Readers, likes and comments
13. What 2022 brought to us and looking forward to 2023
14. Invitation to the news platform that brings a view of the world

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Additional reading

1. Study Guide: Definition of Journalism
2. Why social media presence matters in journalism
3. The Ever-Evolving Industry of Journalism: its Quest to Survive in a Digital World
4. Traditional News Turns into The Journalism We Know Now
5. The news that travels the fastest and the farthest
6. What do we know about the future of journalism?
7. Mississippi journalists discuss the evolution of daily newspapers
8. Joseph Pulitzer’s Retirement Speech & The Traits of Journalism
9. Newspapers: Dying or Changing
10. Journal for and from bothered citizens
11. Eyes on pages and messages on social media
12. Presenting views from different sources
13. 2022 towards its end
14. Entering the last month of the year 2022
15. Thoughts tinged with triviality
16. To protect our democratic system #1 Danger of fake and malicious social media accounts
17. Gossip and fake news, opposite fact checking and facts presenting
18. Texts, writers, accesibility and willingness
19. Changing screens

+++

Related

1. Four reasons game dynamics are vital for networked journalism
2. Toward A Free and Accurate Media
3. The economics of news – a critique
4. Google for Media Day: Using the internet for news gathering and storytelling
5. University Newsgathering
6. Networking and newsgathering: Breaking stories via social media.
7. BBC News Moves to Broadcasting House After Dramatic Over Spend
8. Why Twitter is essential for Journalists
9. “Why Journalism?”
10. Newsgathering: The Inside Story
11. Print Publishing: Yesterday’s News?
12. Finding myself with Immersion Journalism
13. Making the News: Behind the Scenes
14. Network News Anchors: Please quit commenting on stories…
15. Press Coverage of DOJ Lacks in Analysis and Objectivity
16. Online newsgathering, Illuminati, Media and Truth
17. Why (basically) unlimited Twitter lists are amazing
18. Free press? The problem with the DOJ’s ‘new’ rules
19. LUTV Reporter Log VI
20. News Gathering.
21. Why amateur corporate newsletters generally fail
22. Mobile Newsgathering and News Consumption
23. Journalism and Politics
24. The Journalist as a Hunter-Gatherer
25. Patch me in
26. 10 News Outlets to Test Drones for Journalism – Bloomberg
27. Journo tips: Newsgathering
28. Winning the Internet
29. The three most effective things to tweet
30. Where News Comes From
31. Supporting Writers & Readers on Giving Tuesday
32. Use your Eyes!
33. When spurious ‘hacking’ claims chill journalism
34. Story Sources
35. The Case for DailyMe
36. Twitter is a taxi (and newspapers are Metro Transit)
37. All About the Buzz
38. New Newsrooms
39. There have been some very interesting initiatives to bring news events in the picture and to inform the public in a serious way > Hash Internship > Back in 2014, two driving factors led to us creating Hash – firstly, Twitter’s lack of a logged-out experience left a vast amount of awesome content inaccessible to a large audience. Secondly, the online news industry had long been an overwhelming and frustrating place – we wanted to create something that would let people catch up on important events quickly. Hash was our answer: aggregating tweets about the day’s most topical stories in a simple, visual way.
40. Follow The Leaders: Mozilla, New York Times And Washington Post Collaborate

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

To Blog or Not to Blog?

Many people have lots of desires to belong to a community and to share ideas, whilst they are feeling part of a group where they are accepted, and their thoughts are appreciated.

On the net we can find a girl with the name Lola, who looks at what a blog is and questions to blog or not to blog.

She considers the word “blog” to be the short form for the word weblog, referring to an informal website or an informal discussion on discrete topics and written in a conversational way. But the latter is certainly not true of most blogs, which over the years have evolved to present a wider range of topics with extensive descriptions or detailed discussions.

She requests:

Let’s compare a blog to a diary. The blog site is the book and the entries in the diary are the posts. In the diary we write our personal encounters – family, social activities and travel experiences. We also write our thoughts and opinions on certain situations and events in this book. {What is a Blog?}

One may love to write, but that does not one want to write on the net. The old-fashioned diary was always for private writing and reading, but now the internet has offered a place for many to write their own thoughts, readable by millions of people.

Some like the writer of the reblogged article look at a blog being it like a diary.

But while a diary is kept private, a blog is shared either with a small group of readers or published in the World Wide Web. {What is a Blog?}

She also thinks Blogs are displayed in reverse chronological order, but that should not always be so. The owner of the blog may decide to place the oldest blog on top or have them ordered by category.  But we agree that the majority chooses for the most practical and easiest way for being updated with the writings, meaning the most recent entry showing on the top of the blog page in one or more columns vertically downwards or with pictures horizontally per three or more. Furthermore

Aside from pictures, a blog’s content may also contains videos and scanned copies of offline documents. {What is a Blog?}

Some may find immense gratification in writing down something, which they know shall be read by several people. They do not mind if they do not know all those readers, though they do hope several of their friends will be some of their readers. It is for those friends, and acquaintances that many go behind the keyboard to let words roll over the screen.

For some, at first, there is that obstacle that wants to limit them and keep them on the “unknown” side of town. Some keep their blog private, while others (the majority) publish them on the World Wide Web, where we are overloaded with millions of texts luring for our attention.

Zillions of reiterations of topics could make people not want to blog at all. At first, there were the many message and fora platforms that caught the pen of many, but where not so many ‘full articles’ could be found. With the greater accessibility and dissemination of internet possibilities, more people could also find their way to that internet and felt stimulated to interpret their say there too.

In the last few years, we also can find more journalistic webblogs where journalists, historians and several blog writers have joined hands to bring truthful journalism or bringing the news of events of the day from a particular angle. Our blog Some View on the World wants to bring such an up-date of what happened in our world, providing the newsfacts as well as extra commentaries.

With the vast abundance of material to borrow on the internet, it is so what that one can no longer see the forest for the trees, and that one drowns in the swirling water mass of copious text material seeking our attention on all sides.

There are loads of articles out there, which may bring up that question:

 Why should I blog about it? Why would readers want to read mine?

Because is it not that when we write something on the net, we also want someone to read what we have written?

In any case, to start blogging, it is best to plan in advance which direction you want to go. Will it be a personal blog, or will it rather be a blog where you want to sell something or put forward a clear opinion?

It is nice that everyone can find a type of blog to his or her liking. There are political, religious, travel, historical, archaeological, cultural and so many other blogs, allowing us to tap from an infinitely full wine barrel.

To remember further

• blogging industry = millions of bloggers
• wanting to share ideas, opinions + experiences with other people
• wanting to maintain communication with others => we blog.
• writing blogs requires a lot of communication skills = to be good in grammar & punctuations, word usage & spelling, formats + a lot of creativity.
• Receiving comments from readers = rewarding experience.
• to blog or not to blog > depends on your desire + determination to learn + excel in this endeavour

 

+

Preceding

Blogging into the New Year

“Our World” Moving from Blogspot to WordPress

Asking for a Re-Blog

When you think you have nothing to say or to show

Readers, likes and comments

++

Additional reading

1. Wagner the NAR and new wineskins
2. Traditional News Turns into The Journalism We Know Now
3. Presenting views from different sources
4. What do we know about the future of journalism?
5. Hello world!
6. A convinced voice to debunk false allegations
7. A busy 2017 #3 Fake, gossip and real news
8. WordPress appears to have fallen off its best horse
9. A Classic Editor versus Block Editor
10. From old times and sites to new linkings
11. Five years on WordPress
12. From MSN Groups and MSN Spaces via Multiply to Blogspot now transferring to WordPress
13. In case Blogger goes further with her new interface
14. Blogger seems too slow to be practical
15. Our World on Blogger coming to its end
16. “Our World” Moving from Blogspot to WordPress
17. Notification and news feed for Facebook users
18. Walking alone? (Our World) = Walking alone? (Some View on the World)
19. What loneliness is more lonely than distrust?
20. Companionship
21. Presenting views from different sources
22. Newspapers: Dying or Changing
23. Pleased to find Christadelphian World on the net
24. 2010 – 2014 in review
25. First blog post
26. My World…
27. Blogging in the world for Jesus and his Father
28. Immanuel’s first two years of blogging on WordPress
29. If no one died because of War – how different would worlds appear to be
30. 💬 Misquotation Pandemic and Disinformation Polemic: 🧠 Mind Pollution by Viral Falsity 🦠

+++

Related

1. WordPress on Linux Servers
2. Why I will be writing a blog, and why you should too.
3. To blog or not to blog? (Asha Seth)
4. To blog or not to blog (Miss A.J. My thoughts exactly)
5. 5 fun facts to celebrate 100 years of broadcasting
6. Glasgow community newsroom shows how local news can return to the UK high street
7. Journalism and Mass Communication Syllabus
8. Journalism On The Front Lines In Ukraine
9. Causality Journalism: Can Academics Help?
10. Beyond The Labels
11. For Whom Do You Write?
12. Overwrought Reflection about Blogging “Anonymously” & a PSA
13. If You Don’t Post a Bloated Reflection on Writing, Are You Even a Blogger?
14. A Goal on the Horizon
15. My 2022 Year in Books
16. What kind of blog reader are you?
17. This Little Light o’ Mine
18. Devising a social media strategy – a step by step guide
19. The Potpourri of Blogging Comments
20. Draft Queen
21. No Way Home
22. 4 things that helped me make affirmations work for me
23. Carol Anne asks
24. An Ode to Courage
25. 2022 Wrap Up | 2022 Favourites and 2023 Goals
26. A Fresh Start
27. The Mystery of January
28. The Column: Read all about it!
29. A Brave New Year
30. Happy New Years
31. My New Year’s Resolutions 2023
32. How strong are your resolutions as we face a Brave New Year?
33. Daily Blog #412: It’s been weeks (Part Two) Weird Dreams, Manifestations/Goals, New Years Blog
34. As Horrific As Lord Of The Flies
35. guest posting is super OK
36. December wrap-up!
37. The Morning After
38. 3 Reminders for the New Year
39. About Those New Year’s Resolutions …
40. A random memory
41. Happy New Year!
42. Share Your World 2nd January: my response
43. Share Your Blog 2023
44. Author Journey (January 2, 2023)
45. Confusion Rant- Not my best Post, a break from PVX
46. My first collaborative project !

The Lola Talks

Photo by LinkedIn Sales Solutions on Unsplash

To blog or not to blog? That is the question.

Every now and then we find ourselves wanting to share ideas, opinions and experiences with other people. Furthermore, we also want to maintain communication with our clients and customers online. For this reason, we blog.

Receiving comments from readers on our blogs is a rewarding experience. More so when the number of readers and loyal site visitors increase. It’s like being compensated for the hard work we have put into writing our posts.

But writing blogs requires a lot of communication skills. We need to be good in grammar and punctuations, word usage and spelling, formats and a lot of creativity.

We have to remember that in the blogging industry, there are not only a few but millions of bloggers. Thus, we really need to write our materials exceptionally well to stand…

View original post 65 more words

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.

Finding taste in reading books

Those who find taste in reading good books,
is in a position to bear solitude,
anywhere and with great ease.

~ Mahatma Gandhi

A somber song uplifted

”“Hark! The Herald Angels Sing” used to be a somber song,
but that changed in 1855 when it was given its current uplifting melody,
originally written to celebrate Johannes Gutenburg, pioneer of the printing press.”

 

Right wing thinking – Christian Nationalism – Extremism – Fascism – Nazism

There are people who want us to believe there is nothing wrong with Christian Nationalism. Particularly in the U.S.A. and in East Europe (Poland and Hungary) there are many who call themselves Christian, though they do not really follow the teachings of Christ and even have another god than Christ (because they do take Jesus to be God himself and worship him even before pictures and statues, which is an abomination in God’s eyes).

Those very conservative Christians often also believe Jesus Christ was a white person, though as a Palestinian he had a light brown skin. For them, Jesus had to belong to the White Race, because only the Caucasian or Europoid, as descendants of Adam, are the ones directly created and foreseen by God. The Mongoloid, and Negroid where considered the lower sort of human beings because they arrived from the sinners and as such had to bear the consequences of their sin and thus had to come to terms with the fact that, as people of colour, they were inferior human beings.

For many Americans God has given them America. According to them, it belongs to them. They forget that the Red Indians were and still are the original and rightful residents of what is now called North America or the United States of America and Canada. They also seem to forget that God has put all things under Christ’s feet and has made him the head over all things for the church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all (Ephesians 1:15-23) and that all people should become united in Christ. Those who call themselves Christian should as members of that body (Christ = the Church) should be as brothers and sisters, as siblings forming one body and one spirit, just as they were called to the one hope of their calling, not telling lies but speaking the truth in love, being prepared to let everybody grow and themselves also growing up in every way into Jesus Christ, him who is the head, from whom the whole body, joined and knit together by every ligament with which it is equipped, as each part is working properly, promoting the body’s growth in building itself up in love. (Ephesians 4:4, 15-16)

That community sphere and love of Christ is far to look for in many of those American churches, and certainly in those nationalist churches. Strangely enough, several Americans in such nationalist churches or conservative evangelical churches have forgotten their own family background, or simply do not want to acknowledge it, but others want to convince others that the land they live in, has always belonged to them and is a gift from God that they should protect against all strangers trying to come to nest in ‘their nation’.

Those nationalist Christians believe they have a heavenly calling to become immortal, coming to live in heaven. This heavenly goal is for them something which is received by grace and can only be received by the chosen people (they – and strangely not the Biblical Chosen People of Israel). According to them, the white man was created by God (they seem to forget that Adam means the ‘red man’ or ‘man from the red earth‘) to form families, clans, tribes and nations under different earthly governments. Nations and governments are, therefore, according to them, an absolute good and not merely a post-fall necessity of political systems. And that can only be accomplished by their society of white evangelicals making sure that their race and community shall not be polluted by mixing varieties, or coloured people and people thinking differently.

Stephen Wolfe defines Christian Nationalism as follows:

“Christian nationalism is nationalism modified by Christianity.

My definition of Christian nationalism is a Christianized form of nationalism or, put differently, a species of nationalism. Thus, I treat nationalism as a genus, meaning that all that is essential to generic nationalism is true of Christian nationalism.” {The Case for Christian Nationalism (p. 10). Canon Press. Kindle Edition by Stephen Wolfe}

One can wonder what he means by nationalism that would be Christianised. He explains:

My definition of nationalism is similar to that of Christian nationalism, though with less content: Nationalism refers to a totality of national action, consisting of civil laws and social customs, conducted by a nation as a nation, in order to procure for itself both earthly and heavenly good.” {The Case for Christian Nationalism (p. 10-11). Canon Press. Kindle Edition by Stephen Wolfe}

This for me gives the impression that man would be capable to produce heavenly good. Clearly he, like more Christian Americans does not know the Bible enough to work from those Scriptures. But that does not seem to him to be a shortcoming or problem at all, as he assumes that we may think further from the human mind and put everything in the light of the human relationship to the ecclesiastical relationship in order to be able to come to our place in the entirety of God’s work.

About his methodology Wolfe explains:

I assume the Reformed theological tradition ^{might he mean Calvinism}, and so I make little effort to exegete biblical text. Some readers will complain that I rarely appeal to Scripture to argue for my positions. I understand the frustration, but allow me to explain: I am neither a theologian nor a biblical scholar. I have no training in moving from scriptural interpretation to theological articulation.” {The Case for Christian Nationalism (p. 16). Canon Press. Kindle Edition by Stephen Wolfe}

He has a very strange idea about the unity of the church, but that is a general misconception of most American conservative evangelists. He writes:

Spiritual unity is inadequate for formal ecclesial unity. {The Case for Christian Nationalism (p. 200). Canon Press. Kindle Edition, by Stephen Wolfe.}

Though, ecclesial unity can only be formed by all those in the ecclesia willing to go for the same values and same beliefs. Without spiritual unity, based on Biblical Truth, no real good spiritual raster or framework can be built, nor shall the congregation be able to form one strong unity in Christ.

Not to fall far the trap of Christian Nationalism he is right to say

People do not suddenly speak some Gospel language and then assume a Gospel culture. The people’s way of life permeates the visible church, and it serves as an ancillary feature that makes possible the administration of sacred things (e.g., preaching in the vernacular). The administration of the Word and Sacraments require, at a bare minimum, a common language; and church fellowship requires at least a core culture serving as the cultural norm for social relations. Culturally distinct groups of Christians could, of course, start their own churches, and this would solve one problem. {The Case for Christian Nationalism (p. 200). Canon Press. Kindle Edition, by Stephen Wolfe.}

It is important to get a “Way of life” in line with the “Way of life of Christ”. And that is the main point where those Christian Nationalists go wrong. In Eastern Europe as well as in North America, those Nationalist Christians do not follow the teaching of Christ at all, which speaks of tolerance and unselfish love for all people, which is very wrong with those nationalists who exclude others, especially if they have a different colour or race, and do not think they belong to ‘their’ nation.

Many Christian Nationalists believe that it is impossible for people from other backgrounds and cultures to achieve a spiritual presence, especially if they do not speak the same language and / or use the same Bible. They actually exclude the power of God’s Work, and apparently do not believe that God can protect his own Word if it were not printed in their language. All too often we find King James Bible only by such conservatives, but also groups that give preference to the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR)  Apostles Bible. That last movement allows Pentecostal denominations and Charismatic movements to be considered as one spiritual unit or church unity. For them is the world under Satan, and it is the white people who have become Christians who have the authority as well as the duty to reclaim the world for God.

In Great Britain the Christian Nationalists may think like their American believers, but on the continent, they mostly are convinced that only the Roman Catholic Faith is the right faith, and all protestants should come back to the Papal Church, whilst all the unitarian or non-trinitarian believers should be done away with because they would be the hand of Satan.

Europe and the U.S.A may try to be a gathering of bigger places or states, also known as nations, which try to have common bonds in their legal system, their general culture of freedom of speech, even their religious attitudes and holidays, their sports, their food, their music, their movies, simply said to have a common culture. The main aim is to have a general line of common things that should bring different people in that ‘unit’ together. There is an understanding that the common bonds though there is a diversity of these cultural experiences would tear the connection apart or subtract from the strength of the “commonness” or “unity”. Variety should not mean that it would not go together and would mean division. But the nationalist Christians do not want to find a variety of ideas in their ranks. For them, equality in thinking is one of the main things to belong to the covenant.

Religion may traditionally been something that binds a people or nation together, but no group of people can force others to have their religion, and that its in a way what those Christian Nationalists want. They want everybody to think like them and to believe like them.

At no time was it ever Jesus idea that White Americans or any other group of people would be of more importance than the real original People of God, the Bnei Yisroel (people of Israel). God made it clear that Israel was His Chosen People. And it is not up to man to decide who is to be God’s Chosen People. Those nationalists should better delve into the Scriptures to see what it teaches us about our place in the world and how we have to relate to other human beings.

It looks like a lot of Christian Nationalists are afraid of what is further from their bed, instead of opening their horizons, they want to close their world in a time of globalisation.

Those who think God’s Word is only for a few are wrong. The Word of God is revealed to all mankind and calls all people, be them white or bronw, to self-denial and transformation and to unite with eachother, coming closer to God in unity and full of love. From the gospels we learn that strangers were to be loved, the same as the followers of Christ would love themselves. The law effectively speaks against the actions of the nations in preferring their own.

We should know that any form of extreme behaviour or way of thinking is contrary to the open mind Jesus wanted his followers to have. From the previous centuries we also can see how such extremism derailed and gave birth to movements we as lovers of God should avoid, because they are totally against the rules of love for the other.

Giving exaggerated attention to the country or belonging to one country has created currents in the world that excluded others, such as what Nazism did to Jews, gipsies and true God-loving persons who did not wish to believe in the Trinity. Such a cursing attitude that goes against the commandments of God should be avoided by every Christian.

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Preceding

Evangelicals: For The Love Of Trump

Evangelicals & Seduction

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Additional reading

1. People of God
2. The Many Faces of Extremism
3. A diluted reformation point
4. Capitalism and economic policy and Christian survey
5. About Three-in-Ten U.S. Adults Are Now Religiously Unaffiliated
6. Living with some type of physical disability in the U.S.A.
7. Less Americans interested in praying
8. The American clouds of Anti-Semitism
9. Gradual decline by American Christians
10. The Media and Democracy
11. Right-wing fundamentalist Christians to dictate the U.S.A.
12. American churches closing their doors for good
13. American secularism is growing — and growing more complicated
14. American fundamentalists win
15. Our selection of The Week’s 2nd week of August 2022
16. Reasons why Christianity is declining rapidly in America
17. How willing are people to stand up for their values and beliefs
18. What Does it Really Mean to Be a Radical Follower of Jesus?
19. Gradual decline by American Christians
20. What is happening in America to religion and to the language of faith
21. How to Save the American Church
22. Have corrupt kleptocrats and international criminals to make America great
23. A president daring to use the Bible for underlining his hate speech
24. How the term Evangelical has grown to blur theology and ideology
25. Presbyterians and Reformed Christians, membership and active involvement is part of a congregation’s DNA
26. War against deconstruction Christian movement
27. Hope For, But Not In, Evangelicalism
28. Dan Foster on what he finds the Stupidest solution to school shootings presented by a Christian Pastor
29. Christian nationalism is shaping a Pennsylvania primary — and a GOP shift
30. Does one have to be afraid of Christian nationalism
31. Our stance against certain religions and immigrating people
32. Those willing to tarnish
33. Who are the anti-Jehovah people
34. Facing Extremism
35. The Moral Character of Public Officials: Remembering January 6
36. Martin Luther King’s Dream Today
37. Joshua, a Particular Baptist his view on Nationalism

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Related

1. the church is the center in Christ
2. Lesson 2: The History of Church and State
3. Lesson 3: Christian Nationalism
4. Race and Nation in Latin America: Whitening, Browning, and the Failures of Mestizaje
5. Christian Nationalism, Thomas Achord and the disturbing tale of an anonymous twitter account
6. Interview with Jennifer Butler
7. The Rise of Right-Wing Wokeism
8. Thesis? – Is Neo-Calvinism a legitimate replacement theory for the more radical Christian Nationalism?
9. Book: Taking America Back for God
10. Challenge or Persuade?
11. Chris Has A [Christian Nationalist] Dream. How Does It Turn Out?
12. Racial Segregation has no place whatsoever in Christ’s Church
13. What is a Nation? Preliminary Thoughts Before Reading “The Case for Christian Nationalism.”
14. Interview with Mikey Weinstein
15. Book Review: The Founding Myth by Andrew L. Seidel
16. Teleology and a Biblical Perspective on the State
17. Christian Nationalism Debates Expose Clashing Views of Power
18. Christian Nationalism Is Cosplay
19. Show: Is Christian nationalism on the rise in the United States?
20. Christian Nationalism Might Be Cosplay: The Babylon Bee Interview
21. The Heresy of Christian Nationalism Part 1: Identity, a Historic Survey
22. The Heresy of Christian Nationalism Part 2: Rationalism and Natural Theology
23. The evil heresy of “Christian nationalism”
24. Christian Nationalism & Postmillenialism
25. God Bless America
26. The Black Man’s Mental Health
27. What would a world without “woke” culture be like?
28. What queer fans really want from Killing Eve’s final season
29. Supporting Trans People of Colour, Sabah Choudrey
30. Numair Masud: People of Colour
31. Research: Artificial intelligence can fuel racial bias in healthcare, but can mitigate it, too
32. ‘Nothing was done’: Labour members call out Starmer’s inaction on racism
33. Students are building their own support groups as universities fail to act on racism
34. The Next Needful Steps
35. The Kidnapping of Satan
36. Why the Hatred Towards LGBTQ
37. Civil Religion in Pennsylvania’s Capitol
38. Freedom – mine or ours?
39. Sermon: Die to Live to – The Problem with Nationalism
40. Sermon: Taking America Back for God?

Lose Our Fear

justabitfurther

Are you creative? Do you live a creative life?

Not exactly convinced we get this question asked of us very often, but “are you creative?”

Personally, I believe that we are all creative. That each one of us has the ability to create “works of art(you can define that however, you like)” that the world and universe desperately want and needs to be part of existence – to be seen and savoured.

Many of you will argue that point.

I’ve often heard people say of themselves, “well…I don’t have a creative bone in my body.” Rubbish – I don’t believe that for even a nanosecond.

Perhaps we’re stuck on the phrases “are you creative?” and “do you live a creative life?” There are more articles and papers on the definition of those two phrases than one might care to look at. But, consider this.

Although we perceive creativity as being…

View original post 207 more words

To Colour Or Not To Colour?

When children first start to draw, we teach them to colour in between the lines. We reward accuracy rather than interpretation. Neatness, not expression. This says a lot about our own predispositions.

The problem with kids’ colouring is also that often their elders guide them not to use certain colours for certain objects and come to teach them that they have to colour skies in blue and not in green or red for example.

Last few years the publishers sought it also right to print colouring books for adults where they now also have to feel the restriction to colour between the lines.

Perhaps fine motor skills may be trained by colouring between the lines, but it does not give so much freedom to self-expression, and that is much more important to stimulate.

We even interfere with ” to hold a crayon correctly” as if we do know the best way to hold a pencil or pen. (This reminds me how we as children got a tick on our hands when we dared to write or draw with our left hand.)
How many of us did not get directives on how to fill in a blank piece of paper. Some of us got to learn we always had to keep a white border and should not have the drawing pass the paper.

We should give all children the liberty to express themselves freely. Why not present the sky to be green, mauve and not blue, the grass being red and not green, clouds being blue or orange?

Many people are so ingrained in calibrated settings and dare not allow ideas other than those as we perceive things in real life.

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Related

• Stop Conforming – Day 302 of 365 Days to a Better You

 

justabitfurther

The past few days at the start of 2022 has reminded me, that “putting away the crayon box and/or colouring between the lines” may actually be the most devastating move I could make at the moment. A strange opening, but hang in there with me.

Generally, most of us would agree that rules are necessary in a wide expanse of situations. You know – “stop at a red light”; “wear a life jacket when canoeing”; and the oldie but goodie “don’t eat yellow snow.” You get the idea.

Rules(real and imagined) can be a good thing, but they can also be the most restricting and strangling when it comes to who we are and should be as an individual.

Often family, society and/or our upbringing force; slot or “passive-agressively suggest” this is how we “should be or act or live our OWN lives.”

Conformity has it’s place. But, it…

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a stack of books

about these things

There’s no finer gift on a cold, blustery day, than a stack of books and the whole day off to read them!

Quote and photo by Jean Pike

View original post

If I had grown up

Random Specific Thoughts

“Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.”
―C.S. Lewis

Tortured hollows, twisted, coloured and soaked –
Of fragrant laughing reveries, they speak,
Watching as ancestors’ advice is mocked,
And radiant long paths ahead seem bleak.

If I had grown up, certainly of this
Pure, barefaced joy – I would have no inkling
Wandering in societal norms’ abyss
Predestined to watch hopeful souls wrinkling.

Remorseless time must I hold in hard ice
To linger behind captive in this world
Where hearts’ choices – deep and true have no price
And remain young in memories unfurled.

Truly, if I had grown up, and age gained
My young heart of feathers must I have chained.

“When we are children we seldom think of the future. This innocence leaves us free to enjoy ourselves as few adults can. The day we fret about the future is the…

View original post 417 more words

The Power of Women in 2022

Coming to the end of 2022

Facing another year nearly going to be part of the past, we still might say we had a year where lots of attention was given to certain men, but where women had to prove more than men, that they “could stand their man”.

At this site and also on our other sites, we do hope we could find a balance and give the necessary women some attention. Also for the matter of reblogging, we came across some women’s writings which deserved our attention and found you should get to know them too.

Just look at our previous postings where we mentioned and took some texts from the Jewish Young Professional (JYP), one of those female bloggers who regularly know to bring a smile to our face, with her playful take on the world and finely crafted poetry laced with some Jewish humour.

Besides JYP, a lot of women in 2022 passed the review. You could find in our reblogs, writings from the following women: Shambhavi Yadav, Barbara Leonhard, Cindy Georgakas, Saania Sparkle, Leona Cicone, Shalini Garg, Hola Luna, Maya Angelou, Urvashi The Little Mermaid, Sohair, Jane Park, Nethmie Dehigama, Deanna, Melissa from Working Zillennial, Susan Reimer, Brenda Davis Harsham, Noor Putteneers, Sofie Terryn, Ines Udelnow, Beverley Doreen Wright, an Ukrainian refugee, Kyrian Lyndon, Christa Noteboom, Joyce O’Day, Christine McNeill-Matteso, and D from Introverted Thoughts. So there are a whole bunch of them that we were allowed to introduce alongside the male writers.

Regarding “following authors”, we have to say that we do not always get updates on the publications of people we follow. For instance, Cindy Barton Knoke has been out of the picture this year, so we have missed her very nice prints. It seems there has gone something wrong in the WordPress system that they did not yet manage to solve after one year. In any case, she is still one of our favoured bloggers, whose site Cindy Knoke we still recommend as one not to miss next year.

Furthermore, we could not ignore Angela Merkel as a remarkable woman of the 2020-2022s. But for 2022, there were some women whose positions and/or statements more than deserved our attention.

The Power of Women

The American magazine Forbes announced its picks for the world’s most powerful women of 2022. Meet the three trailblazers who topped the list.

Image: John MacDougall—EPA/Alamy

1. Ursula von der Leyen

The first female president of the European Commission, she earned the top spot largely for her unwavering support of Ukraine following the Russian invasion in February. Learn what other gender barriers von der Leyen has broken.

2. Christine Lagarde

This year Lagarde, the first woman to head the European Central Bank, drew praise for her handling of various economic challenges, especially rising inflation and concerns about a worldwide recession. What other crises has she faced in her pioneering career? (To be honest: we would not place her in our top listing of most important people for 2022.)

3. Kamala Harris

U.S. Vice President Harris made news in 2022 with her advocacy of voting rights and reproductive freedom. Both were major issues of the midterms, which saw her Democratic colleagues perform better than expected.

The growth of Wikipedia

Words and data to look for

For some years now, voluntary writers make the effort to provide enough serious information for all people to find for free on the net.

We have hardback copies and a subscription to Encyclopedia Britannica and provide links to it on our articles so that people also can find more information on subjects. Some of our writers also contribute to articles on the multilingual free online encyclopedia (or encyclopaedia) Wikipedia, started in 2001, to which our readers also can find additional links. It is a fantastic enterprise, that operates under an open-source management style and allows everyone to find sufficient background information on multiple topics.

Nupedia, the beginning of a free online English-language encyclopaedia

Screenshot from the Wayback Machine Nupedia 2003

Homepage of Wikipedia, which runs on MediaWiki, one of the most popular wiki software packages

Perhaps inspired by objectivist “openness,” Jimmy Wales, a successful bond trader, founded a free online English-language encyclopaedia called Nupedia, which sought free contributions from scholars and other experts and subjected them to an intensive peer-review process. Frustrated by the slow progress of this project, Wales and Nupedia’s editor in chief, Larry Sanger, in 2001 turned to a new technology, a type of software called wiki, created by American computer programmer Ward Cunningham, to create Wikipedia, a companion encyclopaedia site that anyone could contribute to and edit.

Wiki software and Wikipedia

As a feature of Nupedia.com Wikipedia entered the world of the internet on January 15, 2001, but, following objections from the advisory board, got relaunched as an independent Web site a few days later. The Wiki engines allowed content to be written using a simplified markup language, sometimes edited with the help of a rich-text editor. Ward Cunningham, the developer of the first wiki software, WikiWikiWeb, originally described wiki as

“the simplest online database that could possibly work”

It was incredible to see how many enthusiastic writers from all over the world could bring some 20,000 articles in 18 languages, including French, German, Polish, Dutch, Hebrew, Chinese, and Esperanto its first year. In 2003 Nupedia was terminated and its articles moved into the non-profit effort Wikipedia.

By 2006 the English-language version of Wikipedia had more than one million articles, and by the time of its 10th anniversary in 2011 it had surpassed 3.5 million.

The only regret we have to note is that too many readers insist that Wikipedia tells THE truth and that everything it says would really be so. They don’t realise that over the years certain writers have repeatedly taken advantage of it, to sell disinformation or totally untrue matters as well-founded. Luckily, several writer-readers are willing to invest their time to control the added articles so that individuals who will maliciously attempt to thwart the open-source website Wikipedia by introducing false or misleading content, shall be unmasked and excluded from the system. Rather than worrying about every user’s actions and intentions, proponents of wiki software rely on their community of users to edit and correct what are perceived to be errors or biases. The good thing about having continuous writers make additions and corrections is that the encyclopaedia can be kept very up-to-date. Very quickly, necessary background information can thus be delivered to the inquisitive public. Although such a system is certainly far from foolproof, wikis stand as an example of the origin of an Internet counterculture that has a basic assumption of the goodness of people.

The website’s coverage of the events of the day and controversial topics such as American politics and major events like the COVID-19 pandemic and the Russian invasion of Ukraine has received substantial media attention and has exposed weaknesses as the system’s strengths.

Wikipedia pages on female and minority scientists and engineers

It is incredible how many people use Wikipedia and trust it for its information. But one must realise that it is not an all-explanatory work that also does not reflect all information correctly balanced all the time.

Jessica Wade in 2017

Jess Wade a British physicist in the Blackett Laboratory at Imperial College London, specialising in Raman spectroscopy. noticed she could not find any information on Wikipedia about some very important people.

In 2017 after meeting American climatologist and professor Kim Cobb she wanted to know more about her and went on Wikipedia to be astonished not to find an entry on that very young but also a good professor and publisher with over 100 peer-reviewed publications in major journals.

Having the idea that Wikipedia is “used by pretty much everyone,” Wade realised that

“despite it being this incredibly important resource, it was suffering from a lack of content, particularly about women, but also about people of color.”

Since then, Wade has completed more than 1,750 pages for female and minority scientists and engineers, she often spends her evenings reading journals, scientific papers, archived documents, and social media to find potential subjects. It takes Wade a few hours to write each Wikipedia entry, but she’s not doing it all alone — she also teaches others how to research and put together pages during training workshops. Wade describes herself as a

“tiny fish in a massive sea,”

but she’ll

“keep doing everything I can to make science a more accessible and inclusive place to be.”

It is with people like her that Wikipedia is in a position to grow further into a place where people can easily go and look something up to find further more information about someone or about something.

Holiday season and BBC being questioned

Since we came back from our Summer trip, we noticed at BBC Breakfast and in other news broadcastings on BBC 1 we are not able any more to watch the local or London News. We only come to see a red page with the notice we are not allowed to see that broadcasting in our area (Belgium).

Normally, my day starts with the Breakfast show, me wanting to know what might or should get our attention that day. It is strange the notice let us know it is a matter of copyrights, that we are not able to see that part of the news, whilst at BBC World, luckily we still can see the whole newsbroadcasting.

Furthermore, in recent years, we cannot rid ourselves of the opinion that the BBC seems to be repeating more and more. Since BBC First was all about repeats, we had given up on that channel, provided we felt the extra payment for that channel was then unnecessary. For BBC 1, BBC 2 and BBC World, we still pay extra in our television subscription (which includes Science and Discovery Science in that package)

ITV we cannot receive here in the middle of Belgium, but we are lucky the VRT (or Flemish television) buys a lot of its series so that we can enjoy them even without annoying advertisements in between.

Concerning the BBC we are not the only ones who get the impression the national public broadcaster is taking fewer risks in the last few months. The number of new shows on the BBC has fallen by almost half. In its annual report, Ofcom, the government-approved regulatory and competition authority for the broadcasting, telecommunications and postal industries of the United Kingdom, said that the BBC is increasingly reliant on returning series, many of which have been going for decades.

I am sad to note that this also happens on Flemish television, where on VRT 1 they have been broadcasting repeats of “FC De Kampioenen” (F.C. The Champions) a long-running Flemish sitcom chronicling the (mis)adventures of a fictional local football team, for “ages”, for which there are remarkably still many viewers. But last year, the television season seemed to end as early as March/April, on which then almost no new productions were shown.

The private channels seem to be in the same bed ill, but there one may wonder why they have created so many channels, when these then fill up their programming anyway with repeats of each other’s programmes. Sure, it’s all about sending as many adverts into the world as possible. But they would do better to charge more for these commercials and send fewer of them to the viewer. In any case, we at home only watch VTM News and ignore everything else. We don’t feel like being orendulously annoyed by the adverts that constantly interrupt films and series.

Stalwarts of the BBC schedules include Have I Got News For You, now on its 64th series, and Bargain Hunt, which returned this year for its 62nd series. Since 1963 the British science fiction television show broadcast by the BBC, Doctor Who, seems still going strong, approaching its 60th anniversary. The BBC began producing new episodes in 2005, which quickly proved popular. Lots of people wanting to follow those adventures of the extraterrestrial being that with various companions combats foes, works to save civilisations, and helps people in need, it surprises me that still so many are eager to see the new episodes.

Other shows which have been around for years include Mastermind (series 48), Top Gear (series 33) and Silent Witness (series 25).

In its report, Ofcom said that

“the balance of new and returning series sheds light on the BBC’s level of risk-taking”.

But when one looks at new productions one can see there are less new shows or series since 2021, showing a high reliance on returning series.

The lack of new shows is illustrated by this year’s BBC Christmas schedule. Continuing the trend set in recent years, it predominantly comprises festive specials of familiar shows including once again the period drama series about a group of nurse midwives working in the East End of London in the late 1950s and 1960s, “Call the Midwife”. Originally, we also watched every episode, but in the long run it seemed like it was always the same, and we had had enough.

For those who love the British–French crime comedy drama television series created by Robert Thorogood, starring Ben Miller, “Death in Paradise”, there shall again be an offering this Christmas season. (Oh boy, oh boy.) Though that series has enjoyed high viewing figures and a generally positive critical reception since its debut, leading to repeated renewals, I hate it, and find the jokes not classy enough and the plot so predictable. (Not worth spending your time on it.)

The Irish television sitcom Mrs Brown’s Boys, with moments, can get me smiling, but for me this would be better left to be played in the 1970s though it was only developed from O’Carroll’s works going back to the early 1990s.  The Christmas special broadcast on 25 December 2011 could have been good fun, but the last two years, it all seemed too noisy, exaggerated overcasting. Already in December 2020, O’Carroll announced that additional Christmas specials had been commissioned up to 2026, stating

“This new deal we signed last week goes all the way to 2026, which means I will be able to grow into the part, and we’ve a clause in which guarantees Mrs Brown is aired at 10pm on Christmas night, or else we don’t have to make it.”

But I would not interrupt a family gathering to go sit in front of the television, nor record that Christmas show to see it later. On 19 February 2022, it was announced that Mrs. Brown’s Boys would be returning for a fourth series set to air in 2022, in which I wonder how long people will “milk this”, and how long shall the public accept, or come to terms with, to watch those ever-recurring running gags?.

A lot of games are brought to many television stations, and the end-of-year days are not spared. The British comedy game show which started in 1979 and is still running today, albeit with some sizeable gaps, Blankety Blank, shall also be on the viewing calendar for some people. That show, with Mrs Brown’s Boys, may then provide distraction and relaxation for lonely people, where they can put that loneliness aside for a while and still experience a pleasant fun night in these dark days.

Provided there are so many sports fans then anyway, several state-run channels such as VRT and BBC will also bring enough of this on the board. The “world’s longest running TV sports quiz” shall also be present during this coming end-of-year period.

Unfortunately, such a world-renowned organisation lacks the guts to come up with refreshing and new ideas during these days, where family time is after all important, without having to present films that are too chamois-sweet and certainly not to present “The Sound of music” or “Home Alone” for the 100,000th time (which, for example, the commercial channel VTM would dare to do).

Ofcom’s research found that audiences rate the BBC low for risk-taking.

“Taking risks and innovating in how and what it commissions is key to how the BBC can set itself apart from competitors,”

the regulator said.

If television stations don’t pay attention and keep broadcasting so many repeats with an abundance of commercials being sent into the living room, more and more people will drop out of simply watching a TV channel or paying for cable TV. We can already see that the younger generation prefers not to take out a cable subscription anymore, but to order what they really want to see on the Internet when they want to make time for appropriate entertainment on their TV.
In the coming years, one can therefore expect the popularity of streaming services and companies like Netflix, Disney, a.o. to increase, while many people also bring larger screens into their homes with Dolby stereo sound.

Like me, the regulator also finds that

“Risk-taking can also help the BBC evolve its offering to stay relevant and appeal to a wide range of audiences, including those currently under-served.”

It is now, that one will have to be more mindful of those who are so often overlooked or forgotten.

Viewers and listeners from the lowest socio-economic groups – accounting for a quarter of the UK population – are less engaged and less satisfied with the BBC than their wealthier counterparts, the report found, concluding that they were “persistently under-served” by the broadcaster.

Fortunately, we can still be charmed by the many wonderful nature documentaries and excellent police and detective series, but the BBC has to make choices with its different channels to reach certain viewer groups during certain hours on certain channels.

It is a pity to hear that young audiences for the children’s channels, CBeebies and CBBC, are in decline, with increased viewing to iPlayer failing to make up the shortfall. Another problem with iPlayer screening is that people living outside the UK are not able to see those productions. Because of that, many children are missing an interesting boat. Though good to hear that as of 2022, CBeebies-branded channels exist in the United Kingdom and Ireland (their original flagship service) India, Poland, Asia, South Africa, Australia, MENA and Turkey, while branded blocks currently air on KBS in South Korea, and as well as Kids Station in Japan.

A BBC spokesperson said:

“The BBC invests more in original UK content than any other broadcaster and provides an unrivalled range of programming which includes new and exciting shows such as SAS: Rogue Heroes, The Traitors, The English, Am I Being Unreasonable? and The Elon Musk Show alongside favourite returning series, which our audiences love.”

It is true that we should see that the BBC does its best, and does not perform badly with the amount of money which is available for them. This year they also once more have proven to be cracks in presenting life television.  2022 with the death of the Queen showed the world how BBC is a master in such historical times and how they can bring audiences together for major national moments. We also should admit that on the part of bringing news there is the significance of their trusted, impartial news, which means they’re delivering on their remit and delivering value for audiences. I only can hope they shall find a solution for HD viewers so that they soon shall be able to see the news sections of local news again so that in Breakfast and the Nine o’clock news we shall not have those interruptions for 8 à 10 minutes (with just an image of an announcement board that in our region that news cannot be viewed).

Furthermore, we can only hope that the government will continue to recognise the extent to which the BBC is an international signboard that also still has an important job to perform of informing and infotainment, and therefore shall provide enough funds to do that job properly.

 

Impossible not to dream

Poetry from John Looker

From time to time, I have been posting a poem from my book The Human Hive. This one is taken from Part 5, ‘States of Mind’:

DANCER

She turns and takes a final look at the room:
the mirrors across the wall, the well-sprung floor.
If you ignore the lights, it’s like a womb
where music finds embodiment in dance.
Re-living the last half-hour, she shuts the door. 

What did they think of that?

This was the feared audition, the longed-for chance.
Those weeks, let’s say the years, of preparation
had worked their alchemy: as though entranced
her mind and the music fused, her body became
line and shape, gesture, and lightness of motion. 

Surely they will recognise, at last,
my true potential?           

She feels so alive! She wants, she needs, this same
exhilaration daily in her life,
to burst out from the chrysalis…

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Penmanship in danger

Cursive (also known as script, among other names is any style of penmanship in which characters are written joined in a flowing manner, generally for the purpose of making writing faster, in contrast to block letters.

Lots of youngsters, but also older people have no capability anymore for bringing flowing letters often with the strokes of successive characters joined and the angles rounded. It looks like having the successive letters joined together is going to be an art not practised any more. Worse is that not only the writing creates problems. For many youngsters, it seems to be very difficult to read cursive.

Cursive no longer holds a place in most K-12 school curricula, and all of us will suffer the effects, writes Drew Gilpin Faust in The Atlantic. The inability to read cursive means his students can’t read manuscripts, and can only take on research projects that they rely on published sources, rather than handwritten letters or manuscripts. They also struggle to decipher notes from their professors or letters from grandparents. If this trend continues, the thrill of interacting

“with the physical embodiment of thoughts and ideas voiced by a person long since silenced by death,”

will become a privilege of trained translators, writes Gilpin Faust.

“The inability to read handwriting deprives society of direct access to its own past.”

The missing mystery writer

In 1926, the mystery writer Agatha Christie went missing. The story of her 11-day disappearance — as strange a plot as any of her novels — is part of a new biography by Lucy Worsley.

After her husband, Archie, began an affair with a younger woman, Christie fell into a depression. While out for a drive, she crashed her car down a hill and into a hedge. The car was found, but she was not; she had fled to a spa hotel, staying there under a false identity that shared a surname with her husband’s paramour. Finally, after more than a week, two musicians recognized her as the famous missing author.

“Whatever the true circumstances of Christie’s severance with reality, the media had a field day,” Molly Young writes in a review of the biography. “Her book sales shot up.”

Invitation to the news platform that brings a view of the world

Dear Reader,

There is so much news — and too many voices — competing for your attention today.

Do you know that we provide a site where we present news from all over the world and do not mind going deeper into certain facets of facts everyone should know or should receive attention (according to us) .

“Some view on the World”  does just that what the title of the website is called. It wishes to bring a view of world affairs. It wants to be a Journal for you and provides unbiased news and perspective to keep you well-informed and entertained.

In addition to general press reviews, you will be able to find articles that deal with environmental issues and take a closer look at how we, as human beings, must take responsibility, not only ethically and politically, but how we must behave towards other living beings and respect nature. Towards respecting other beings, racial discrimination comes to the fore, but also how we in the West sometimes look strangely at other cultures. We believe that getting to know other cultures and religions better can help to better understand and accept “that otherness of those people”. In today’s society, people do not like to talk about religion, but on “Some View on the World” we certainly do not shy away from that subject, and we even think it is important to talk about God and commandments.

As on this overview site, we believe it is important to let diverse voices have their say. Therefore, at that view of the world, you can find reports from several newspapers and writers from all kinds of directions or different political movements.

Today, we would like to invite you to feast your eyes on that website too, pay it a visit and (who knows) also subscribe to it to receive free daily news in your mailbox.

A warm welcome!

Is it time to BeReal?

Everyday at a different time, everyone is notified simultaneously to capture and share a Photo in 2 Minutes. A new and unique way to discover who your friends really are in their daily life.

It’s neither possible nor necessarily desirable to be authentic on social media. But a new app, BeReal, is trying. It invites users to share something intimate, mundane, maybe even boring.

Once a day, users are prompted to post a pair of simultaneous pictures: One from the front camera, and one from the back. Instead of curating vacation pictures or perfectly posed outfit shots, they’re at home, at work, commuting. It’s an unglamorous scroll, and it’s gotten popular: By mid-August, BeReal had become the No. 1 free iPhone app.

The normalcy, Sophie Haigney writes in The Times, is the point. “This is a version of social media that circles back toward its origins: oversharing, maybe, but the oversharing of minutia that will disappear the next day, instead of building a permanent record of some alternate self.”

Read more about one app’s push for a nostalgic internet.