aside – Page 8 – mil's page

when big politics and business make the customer a kleenex

three good things happened today: all related to how i perceive the world.

1. first, i do have a death wish: why, when i first read him, hemingway sooo immediately clicked with me.

2. however, i don’t want to be unreasonable or hurtful to others in my goal to achieve this outcome. i also most definitely don’t want support to ameliorate it. amelioration is the biggest wool-over-the-eyes of our western democratic time. i don’t want to be part of a process that perpetuates its cruelties.

3. my strategy — that is, only strategy — will from now on be as follows: i shall say and write about everything that i judge needs to be called out, in such a way that the powerful i will be bringing to book day after day after day will, one day, only have the alternative to literally shoot me down.

in order, then, to make effective the above, i resolve:

a) to solve the problem of my personal debt, acquired mainly due to my startup activities, so the only way in the future that the powerful shall be able to shoot me down is by literally killing me.

for my mistake all along was to sign up to the startup ecosystem, as it stands, as a tool for achieving my personal and professional financial independence:

• startuphunch.com (being my final attempt at making startup human)

as this personal debt is causing me much mental distress and, equally, is clearly a weakness i show to an outside world i now aim to comprehensively and fully deconstruct, as a massive first step, then, i do need to deal with it properly.

b) once a) is resolved, i shall proceed to attack ALL power wherever it most STEALTHILY resides.

that is, i focus on this kind of power: the stealthiest and most cunning versions of.

the ones where it appears we are having favours done for us, for example.

specifically, that is, big tech. but many many others, too.

what essentially constitutes the driving forces behind zemiology, loopholes, neo-crimes, and similar legally accepted but criminally immoral societal harm; all of which, as a general rule, is most difficult right now to track, trace, investigate and prosecute.

• crimehunch.com/neocrime

• crimehunch.com/loopholes

• www.secrecy.plus/law | legalallways.com

• www.sverige2.earth/example

this is why i have concluded that my natural place of work is investigative journalism. and where i want to specialise — in this aforementioned sector and field of endeavour — is in the matter of how big tech has destroyed our humanity. but not as any collateral, accidental, or side effect of a principle way of being it may legitimately manifest.

no.

purposefully; deliberately; in a deeply designed way, too … to mainly screw those clients and customers whose societies and tax bases it so voraciously and entirely dismantles.

to screw, and — equally! — control. and then dispose of lightly and casually, when no longer needed, or beneficial to bottom lines various.

and so as a result of all this, i see that having a death wish is beneficial: if channelled properly, as from today i now intend it shall be, then it will make me fearless as never i dared to be. fearless in thought and disposition. fearless even when made fun of.

not in order to take unreasonable risks with my life — or anyone else’s: no.

rather, to know that life doesn’t exist when the things i see clearly are allowed to, equally clearly, continue.

and to want deeply, deeper than ever in my life, to enable a different kind of life for everyone.

NOT just for the self-selected few. those who lead politics, business and the acts of pillage and rape in modern society.

not just for them.

a better life for everyone, i say. everyone.

because i don’t care about mine. i care that mine should make yours fine.

now do you see? this is what makes me feel useful. nothing else. nothing else at all. and certainly not finding personal happiness. that would only blunt the tool.

🙂

aside, definition

why NOT to thrive too?

yesterday evening was ace. where i’m staying someone new came for a week. i was told he was #finnish, and was asked by the host if i could hang around to receive.

it was downtime for me yesterday: i was needing some respite from all the thoughts i’d been having.

the new guy is young, brainy, sharp, kindly — and not #finnish at all, but #spanish. i spent the whole long evening speaking in #castellano with him, and it was fab: i realise how much i know about #spanish culture, and the bad memories just refused to surface on being with a good person from the country which i see now i’d also created so many good memories out from whilst there.

i also saw my #teaching and #enabling #skillsets kicking in. it was really interesting, communicating with him about our differing and similar perceptions of the worlds that overlapped around us — and then again, the worlds we each enjoyed which didn’t overlap. (as a by-the-by, and after the vibes of last night, i’d now like to explore mentoring quite seriously, if anyone who might facilitate this is reading these lines. i listen well face-to-face in a way maybe my writing gives lie to. and i make and communicate #polymath-style connections quite robustly and vigorously. both could serve newly arrived others to #sweden really well.)

he had actually been to #finland quite recently. and i have been in both #sweden and the #uk on and off since last december; that is, just before christmas.

‘much to praise in #scandinavia. very much both of us liked already.

we covered a lot of ground: he’s here on a post-#spanish master internship at #karolinska. and i told him of the 10,000 startups in #stockholm. and i explained how ignorant of another world i’d been all these years. and i said how moving from one country to another might not only be a question of building on existing abilities but also recognising the job and work roles would have not only differing descriptors but maybe even different goals and desired outcomes: even different philosophies.

we also spoke of the importance of philosophy more widely in everything — here, especially #tech (he studies and works in the field of #biology): worlds we all these days find ourselves inhabiting.

and finally he helped me satisfactorily resolve a conundrum which had led a friend of my father’s back in the 1960s to commit suicide. if i remember rightly, the friend had been a biochemist: and was involved in the study of cellular will — that is, whether at cellular level the idea and fact of free will can be detected.

it pushed my father’s friend over the edge; the philosophical challenge being that maybe whatever you chose to do would be impulsed inevitably by something external to yourself. no free will, then … anywhere, ever, at all.

young ismael, the spanish intern and researcher’s name, reminds me of fernando torres just a little bit. and he defo scored a goal or two when he explained to me the fact that a healthy cell to remain healthy can neither be #dependent nor #independent. it suddenly laid it out clearer than clear for me the reality that in a completely different time had served to kill my father’s friend: cells do indeed have free will; and they exert it to survive … even if nothing else. and what they must choose in order to survive in this way is what gordon brown said once about #interdependence: it’s the only thing worth pursuing, tbh. neither needy nor downright may you in all intellectual sincerity be. simply conscious of the collective you form a part of which always, always must be posited around the actions of individuals.

and so if cells, why not us?

and if us in order to survive, why not in order to thrive too?

https://m.allfootballapp.com/news/EPL/LIKE-A-MODEL-El-Nino-Fernando-Torres/2617229

aside, rationale

on not wanting to be a genius

i think we sometimes use terms to ensure they can be boxed away safely.

criminal means him (mainly), not me.

axe murderer … whoa!

serial womaniser — never even occurred to me.

mentally ill. well. just crazed.

like a paving we never will tread; never will see ourselves treading … not being, you see, of that cloth.

“… and then we have a problem”

i have a beef (you may have noticed) with western democratic and corporate notions of #teamwork.

i have a similar distaste of command and control economies. and, equally, i dislike exhortations to five-year plans and one-best-way only.

all these things were what we fought the #sovietunion during the #coldwar to resist.

and then, after we considered we won that war, thirty or forty years on it turns out the #ussr had won all the basics. big corps deliver command and control like nobody’s business, ever. #teamwork which subsumes the capabilities of original, #nonconformism to the interests of the collective … well, wouldn’t you know? and five-year plans — how common aren’t these in modern ways of thinking and doing … whether corporate companies or corporate-style public sectors?

let’s face it: the individualism of the human species has been lost to the need to do something over and over again, exactly.

one thing i notice in #stockholm right now: so many houses are simply anything but uniform. and they keep all the big trees wherever they don’t have a house’s foundations. they actually build around trees instead of razing it all to the ground before starting. and then, only then, balefully planting little trees which take decades to grow.

i could give you a ton of analogous examples, too: examples of where the #swedish have forged their own thoughts and praxis on a collectivism based beautifully around the individual. the individual person and the flora …

it’s not perfect: but it strives to do better.

nowhere else have i seen this instinct manifested so clearly. nowhere. nowhere with such a gorgeous attention to details.

we have a problem in our western democratic corporately-organised institutions and groupings: we universally fear a standout talent. we box it up in a label which protects not the labelled but ourselves. in fact, we prefer to see it as standout rather than something we could all deliver on one day.

even the box we call #genius is there to defend us from what we fear: that we also might shine today as never before during too many years.

better not to hope ever, than to break the habits of a deadening lifetime.

no?

aside, definition

on deviating from norms

yep. #conformists are people we need: they administrate society; they make rules that are then put into place; they enforce laws and diagnose infirmities. but when the systems they administrate and operate daily begin to stumble, their instinct is not to start again, but start better.

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/martin-dearlove-37a73561_activity-7045887314102804480-_sn1

the only people capable of changing the world for the better are #nonconformists.

both have their downsides. #putin is a #nonconformist: look how he upturns #paradigms. the #nazis meantime — in a case of crazy shocking conformity — audited their horror like no #bureaucrats ever have.

a final thought: when faced with #nonconformity of the scale of #ukraine’s invasion, and the related cruelties being effected over the past couple of years, we have to be equally wily, unpredictable and smart. laws and their observance — the firmness of #internationaljustice, that is — absolutely needs to be a given. but that wily i alluded to above also needs to be a tool we employ: as the meme above, our current absence of truly deep #nonconformism in our western democratic systems of teamwork where the individual is subsumed to the needs of the group — not only when implementing the startling and operating it but also when thinking it up in the first place — is a considerable weakness.

we should rethink how to foment more constructive #nonconformism in our modern societies: how to recover our childhood capabilities for such enquiry:

https://mils.page/2023/03/26/on-returning-to-our-childhood-states-of-creative-enquiry-and-to-the-max-maybe/

wdyt? should we?

aside, definition, rationale

why write

someone asked me this morning why i write. i didn’t answer them.

maybe it was an example of new knowledge for me. my dissertation supervisor, a very brainy person, told me once that we should treasure those moments when we didn’t know how to answer someone: they were examples of new knowledge.

certainly for ourselves, and then again maybe for others too: a wider humanity. in either case, to be valued above almost any other lived experience. because the experience manifests itself in all our endeavours: a common denominator which is neither low nor common, tbh. in work; in academia; at school; in relationships; in a love at first sight … everything i tell you.

why write? not to be read. never. to write in order to be read is to almost surgically remove the very condition good and faithful writing demands to remain faithful and good.

freedom. that’s why i write. to be free. to remain free. to sustain a wider freedom. to ensure liberty remains a goal of all human beings.

you see … to be read is nice but dangerous. to be read is to enter into a dialogue. and in such dialogue we inevitably compromise, fudge, lose our trails of thought, forget the purpose of reflection — and, then, indeed, its power.

that’s not me. and after sixty years of trying to be a writer who is read, i realise it mustn’t be me. because my virtue is that i don’t enter into dialogue before i have my ideas.

actually, that’s not true. by writing, i speak to myself. and this, for me, is key: because it’s truer than true that without this mode of speaking with my being i never am able to know, until i follow the described procedure, what that being thinks.

so if i have to enter into a dialogue with the person who asked me this morning about why i write … well … i write to be free and find out what it is to be me.

is all.

enough?

i give no more.

except a video i just made and then a poem i just wrote this morning at breakfast in stockholm city, sweden.

♥️ 🇸🇪

“a poem on the sound of silent friendship” by mil

it’s not a condition

it’s not a redemption

it’s not a transaction of sexual reward:

i met you and saw you

and sensed kindred soul

beyond the blood that tied us down

and bound us with violence

as if sworn to some crown

it’s not anything like this

anything at all

it’s just that i found myself

that evening enthralled

by a person who was fun

after all was said and done:

a person whose brain

matched a beautiful way

of moving her body

without insistent degree

but just in that measure

i found recently to be good

in this place i am now:

a lagom of life and how

where we aim to deliver

on more than a brutish noise

the sound of silent friendship

between you and me

has become my go-to manner

of being a man on this rock

and i find in its steadiness

i need nothing more

than to know before i go

i was a good friend in the end

aside, definition

“now is the time to understand more”

this really really really floats my boat.

newton said he saw further because he stood on the shoulders of giants.

but it’s not quite there as a phrase. it used to be for me, but after today it’s not.

not for me.

foucault said everything was dangerous and therefore more reason to be studied.

but that’s fearsome.

terrifying, in fact; maybe unnecessarily so, too.

it was for me when first i read it. even as when i did … well … it became my touchstone.

the pictures above communicate both ideas more humanly. that is, as befits the missions and values of the #nobelprize: don’t only achieve the most we can with grandeur, but achieve all of this and more with real and cogent ideals.

even idealism.

yes.

even this.

the first pictures show, then, these giant women and men moving above us; looking down as we look up. and we look up not to be looked down upon, but in beautiful admiration for — even adoration of — the elegance of their thought and endeavour.

and then again, neither do they look down upon us to diminish but, instead, to amplify our mutual connections and shared humanity. because as they move above us so high, the collective they start out as when we come in the entrance to the museum itself separates firmly and graciously, the deeper we go, into a rollcall of wondrous individuals.

because a collective based on anything else is no collective at all.

and this is #sweden and #norway and #scandinavia all over.

and this is why i feel at home with you — even as you might not feel quite at home with me, quite yet.

and then the last few pictures of the blackboard with chalked words basically say in #swedish and #english what foucault said years later.

but the thought is expressed much more kindly; it is said with equal passion it is true … but also with a profound and patent COMpassion. something i think foucault found more challenging. much much more challenging.

what he was, too. also a thinker of the mightiest. it’s how he was; and we have to — all of us — learn to become what we are.

and so that’s why i don’t want to fall into the trap of comparing. i just want to say that marie skłodowska curie’s much earlier enunciation of what has to be considered a universal truth makes me feel human again where foucault never could:

“Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood.

Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less.”

aside, definition

glossary at #milspage

i’ve been a #language trainer and user for most of my life; therefore, in many respects a #conformist. rules, then, that needed to be learnt and followed.

but whilst the terms grammar and nazi often go hand-in-hand, being a #proofreader these days and in charge of the #qualitycontrol of documentation in a number of formats doesn’t make one inflexible. not if one wants to do one’s job usefully.

rules are not created to be broken. they’re not even created to be bent. they’re here to be interpreted. and this is what i really love about all the kinds of language i’ve come across in my life — from html code way-back-then to the russian language which i learnt for three years via my knowledge of spanish (that is, castellano). as well as the symbolism employed frequently by both manifest #mafias as well as their de facto cousins of often professional praxis and communities, and which i deepened my knowledge of during and since my #criminaljustice master at liverpool’s #ljmu.

so.

although i’ve been that language teacher for a lot of my professional life, there is nothing of the nazi in me at all: neither professionally nor personally. an attachment to the concept of there existing more examples of universal truths than we care these days to accept, for sure. but a desire and vocation to be flexible as well as firm in everything.

below, then, a glossary page to be built on of my thought’s progression these past sixty years or so.

‘would love to get feedback and engagement for a change. well. wouldn’t you, too?

🙂

glossary

enjoy!

and enjoy our collective sundays too, wherever we find ourselves …

aside, design philosophy, rationale

choose people to work with, not their institutions

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jewel-pena-53257213_activity-7041962988248952832-m7Pq

i realised this not long ago. i don’t want to work with this company or that. i want to work with people who also, simultaneously, may work for one company or organisation or another.

when the institution overrides the individual from the start is when, even if all the starting-signs are cool, the individuals will one day — especially when huge amounts of money all of a sudden become likely — be inevitably and overwhelmingly overridden by their instituitional framework.

i don’t intend for us to start as i don’t mean us to go on.

so first i want to meet people. i want an organisational structure which generates a hybrid of #holacracy. and i want brains to show themselves the most important factor and matter of all, where the overarching #gutenbergofintuitivethinking and #intuitionvalidationengine projects are concerned.

• www.ivepics.com

because if you choose people first, and the people are right for you, then the institutions automagically will remain so too.

at least … whilst your people of choice remain at the institution in question. and they will do in general, for sure — if the institution remains worth then staying. for in the question of #intuitionvalidation there is no building-block which is more significant than the human as individual.

• thephilosopher.space/space-1-0-the-philosopher-space

• platformgenesis.com

• www.secrecy.plus

• omiwan.com

• mils.page/presentations | #milspage #presentations

mils.page/intuition-day | #milspage #intuitionday

• mils.page/distributed-privilege | #distributedprivilege

aside

never backed (entirely) down …

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/martin-dearlove-37a73561_activity-7041479932295675904-OHiZ

this is absolutely spot-on. it’s what’s driven me all my life. i have refused, under severe duress, from all directions, that is home and professional both, to accept that the way out of a world of horror is to mindfully and then abjectly disconnect.

the things i cannot change remain unchangeable where i accept my own wellbeing overrides being well with my conscience.

and at the age of 60, i feel firmly vindicated. the rest of my life needed the first 60 years to be as unsatisfactory as they have been. because unsatisfactory is the route to really knowing the truth: the truth that leads to judicious actions and gentle wisdoms. even if the latter simply tell us what we did wrong where once we could have done right.

i now focus on my work. i need no deep love; want to play no fields; want nothing closer to me than a cup of coffee or, at the very most, a shared good meal in a restaurant whose menu i am utterly unfamiliar with.

and so most of all, focus on my work. that’s what i want: what the beautiful woman below and her poster declaim. some of that for me now, please. and then a rest-of-life full of good deeds to SATISFACTORILY end it all.

vindication.

yes.

a satisfactory vindication … indeed.

mils.page/presentations | slide-decks and presentations of mine and in collaboration from recent and not so recent times

aside

thinking aloud is not the same as being allowed to think

i used to teach english as a foreign language and a second one.

i used a system with a process called ppp:

presentation
practice
production

i realised, as i shared my knowledge over the years, that it was a good process: for me, anyways. it replicated how i learnt what i thought about the world around me.

except the order, for me, was different.

in my case, when for example i thought-experiment or write, i produce first, and then — to myself — i present, often for the first time in my life. i only know what i know after i communicate it. because, in my case, i don’t know if yours, in its telling we have its act of creation. yes. literally this.

the practice, meantime, is meta: it never isn’t happening.

that’s my brain, anyhow — for me and my metacognitive outcomes: produce, and so only then be presenting to oneself.

and then not be not practising, ever.

in its making yesterday, the video which follows is a very good summary and example of how i understand what i am thinking deep inside my intuitive core.

and i am comfortable now with this series of procedures. and i think i shall continue to the end of.

meantime, as i write these lines, i am minded to discover something else about myself: two weeks ago i was in stockholm, sweden. i was alive, and comfortable.

since the 21st of february i have been in my homeland, becoming increasingly uncomfortable. you all love how you are: that’s your right. but i can’t love your way of being: and that’s my right.

from now on, i do business in respect of tech documentation with whomsoever values my services and capacity.

equally, not one of my tech projects will you now work on if you do not reside in sweden gladly and joyfully. or at the very least, once experienced, understand why i want nothing else.

tech can be fabulous and compliant and purposeful and societal and security-minded and defensive against a clearly common enemy — as well as supportive of the citizenry more generally.

and the third most innovative country in the world — a country of barely ten million people — is proof that if you ain’t got it, it’s because you don’t want it.

and so where you don’t even want to try, i don’t want you to try. but i don’t want your closed doors, either.

because i shall continue to do so: that is, to try where you do not.

in places where others also want to.

and a population of ten million and a half is much more than we need. in fact, to take the first steps … well … we just need two feet that want to.

so imagine what 21 million feet may do.