PC476 Diversity Blindness Dec 2009
The Idea of Cultural Norms - Diversity Blindness
- Read something in the paper, which started me thinking that's another idea of a cultural norm, but forgot what it was ...maybe the Christmas idea. Yes it was someone on the radio saying they didn't like the false bonhomie of New Year and Christmas.

- The original idea was the nuclear family norm. The idea that since the majority of people get married have a house and 2 kids that that is something everyone does. When in truth over the last 1000 years there always have been a sizeable minority of people who have done other things .. like being gay, or being a monk, being a traveller etc etc.

- This Diversity Blindness is important by for society.. that evryone is not doing the same thing.
- concentrating on this majority seems obvious to advertisers, but they miss out onthe non-mainsteam market

People will believe the irrational
- Ray Hammond Futurogist nutter he was one of those people cos the way they speak seems so convincing, but then you realise they don't know what they are talking about. He started off very well , saying that if anyone doubts my credibility they can check his books over the last 10+ years. Then he goes on about how geo-engineering will inevitabley go out of control ..unaware about the routine cloud seeding by Russia and China. he then goes on a bender about climate change saying that for sure by the end of the century it won't be 2C hotter, but surely 4C hotter.
- This is the giveaway he's a fervent catastophe believer, but for sure he didn't predict that the last ten years were stable no believer got close to the actual they all drew graphs pontingsteeply upwards. His other stuff showed theat he lacked the important ability to say "I don't know" when he doesn't know. He used the term futurist for people who looked optimistically at the future.

Stollocks a codeword for a timeout in an argument
- I listened to the play Private Lives - The couple in it keep getting into dreadful rows so they come up with a code word "stollocks". So when someone says it then instead of escalating the talking has to stop for 2 minutes; so it’s like calling a timeout rest period in an argument. It's strange that writer Noel Coward was famous for being so gay but wrote so3 much about heterosexual relationships.

Australian Identity
- in the BBC WS Forum prog they were talking about how the Australian military has built up the Anzac Day story of disastrous defeat and death of 10s of thousands of Australian soldiers at Gallipoli beach in WW1 as a focal point of Australian identity. The Aborigine expert pointed out that to white Australians it allows them to think of themselves as descendants of honorable liberators, when in truth they were the opposite : Australia doesn't have an independence day cos the white people who invaded the Aborigines country still occupy it.

Darwin nearly didn't get Island differences idea
- Darwin noticed how different birds from different Galapagos islands had different characteristics, he only realised that afterwards when looking at birds classified by his assistant cos he himself had never actually recorded down which particular island the the things he collected were from.

The Original Feminist Criticised Women Not Men
- BBC IOT covered Mary Wollstonecraft the 18th century writer of "Vindications of the rights of woman" etc

- not a feminist in the modern sense - rather that aiming at men, it doesn't criticise men for oppressing women rather it tells women to get their act together : stop sitting around doing things like reading silly novels, indulging in excessive sensibility (romanticsm) and accepting the myth made by society that women are inferior to men.
- She calls women "spaniels" and "toys", but argues that this is not because of an innate deficiency of mind but rather because men have denied them access to education
- called herself a "rational dissenter" the original name of the Unitarian Church people

The Nature of the Beast
Why most systems distort away from the optimum.
- Imagine the devil operating the strings of puppets : capitalism, book industry, mass media.

- I am noticing that many systems don't work in the ideal way we would like them to

- 1. Capitalism causes over supply and mass wastage

- 2. In the book industry trash New stuff like Dan Brown and Harry Potter are pushed while truly inspiring old books

- 3. Modern mass media should give us a more precise picture of the world, but it is the The Nature of the Beast that it gives us a hugely distorted picture.

- It's somehow the nature of the media beast - On some issues instead of maintaining a wide diversity of opinion all published opinions seem to converge to as strong influential opinion which later turns out to be wrong e.g. How the British Media handled the MMR vaccine research by a rogue scientist negative disaster stories are the nature of the media beast.

- Bad News is best - Murdoch knows that there is much more scope with negative stories rather than positive. Positive stories have only one option "good news such and such will happen", but with bad news have a multitude of options and the story can run and run "Oh my God this might happen, or this might happen etc. etc. "

- Mass - media by it's very nature becomes a tool of the Devil in action as it spins every story into a hyperbolical headline.

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