Groundhog Day: Six more weeks of Winter or is Spring on the way?
A very popular and very funny and brilliantly created film is the comedy film: Groundhog Day starring Bill Murray and Andie MacDowell. The premise of the film is that Bill Murray for reasons unknown must live the same day over and over again, which is Groundhog Day:-
"Groundhog Day (Canadian French: Jour de la Marmotte; Pennsylvania German: Grundsaudaag, Murmeltiertag) is a traditional holiday celebrated on February 2. According to folklore, if it is cloudy when a groundhog emerges from its burrow on this day, then the spring season will come early; if it is sunny, the groundhog will supposedly see its shadow and retreat back into its den, and winter weather will persist for six more weeks."
It would have been "perfect timing" to have written this yesterday to coincide with February 2nd, but I was busy with The Market Solution: A Growing Solution and the newspapers and interviews and commentary have mostly all landed today on the question of: "EU Reform" and "EU Renegotiation" so that David Cameron can hold the "EU Referendum" and "get it out of the way". That last phrase is I think very telling:-
Holding a Referendum on Cameron's "spin" not on >40yrs x7 Major Treaties is somehow going to resolve the question from now until June 23rd? Looking at below, the failure to serve people more democratically is as much a part of the reason to leave the EU and to not trust the politicians latest promises and their dismissal of the final delivery of a referendum, now that it has been officially offered:-
A Growing Political Debt: Stuffing >40yrs and x7 Major Treaties into Cameron's reform renegotiation for the referendum to "refer to the people"...
Apparently it's "bad for the economy" so needs to be gotten rid of; but very little argument about the ability for a Referendum to capture the minds and imaginations of the electorate and turn out in large numbers to participate in Real (direct) Democracy on a singular and most important political subject.
If people are bored of this referendum in the news, why is that? Is that the fault of the politicians and legacy news-media? The trivialization of a problem to be "gotten out of the way" given it is such a large subject.
We know that a subject becomes boring when:-
Main Priority for "Referral To The People": Education & Time To Think to make good informed and well-reasoned decisions on large subjects.
It's interesting to compare, but if the EURO had had more debate and more open discussion, then a better decision may have been made? So to consider the Referendum as "something to get out of the way" I think is very short-sighted.
Some summaries of this Groundhog Day EU Politics:-
The Boiling Frog provides the most penetrating consideration of the present situation in my opinion: Namely what are the implications for the visible denouement being played out. That is to say: Or is it? And that further is to arrive at a very concrete conclusion: If David Cameron must resort to shadows and spin on the subject of the EU Referendum via EU Reform via EU Renegotiation, then the subject itself is casting too long a shadow over the functional purpose of politics in our political institutions, I would conclude.
Is the sun rising or setting on Political Union underneath EU Treaties for the UK?
Does the EU cast too large a shadow over UK Politics, it's very presence casting too much into shadow and doubt and uncertainty?
What are we to make of David Cameron's slippery and shoddy reform promises?
Pete North has the right of it: Their very behaviour, conduct and dysfunctional politics (their shadow) of our politicians is answer already and answer more than enough, itself.
I suspect The Boiling Frog above is correct. We'll get a relatively poor deal in February, then I think the EU will work it's magic on Migration (Dublin IV?) and with that final flourish Cameron may go for a Summer Referendum to "get it out of the way"; if he and the EU have concluded that a Treaty Political I.O.U Promise for Association Membership in late 2017 is not on the current agenda, for whatever reasons; and that without that his chances diminish irreversibly with time (and the spread of information and public understanding of the subject).
Only such dysfunctional politics could produce a June 23rd Referendum date given all the above and against:-
EC Recommendations
Regional Elections in the UK
Summer holiday season and major sports events
The lack of "fundamental change" once again promised by David Cameron and once again demonstrating he's a serial liar when it comes to the EU.
Again our politicians and media commentators fail to point out how and why this is dysfunctional to even talk up the prospects of an "early referendum". Alternatively it may simply be an exercise to "park" the EU Referendum jitters with complex papers and details until 2017? Either way all we're really doing is chasing after political shadows and making predictions based off such lack of substance!
"With
that, what people are also learning is that politics can be fun. For a
day's outing, the 35-plus that attended found it an entertaining,
challenging day, from which we all learnt and all benefitted."
About a year later, the next September, at Leaming Spa this time I also attended a second meeting which again I found conducive, as per When To Attend/Hold Meetings, EU Referendum: not just another meeting. One person I met and was very grateful to listen to, told me an interesting thing at lunch. "If they asked a politician whether or not they would vote yes or no (in/out; remain/leave) in a Referendum on our membership and that politician did not give a direct (no/out/leave) answer then this was a hugely economical test of that particular politician's credibility", as per MIND THE (Credibility) GAP! I would like to thank that person with this blog with the idea of suggesting a name for such a test:-
The Fluorescent Scorpion Test
When you shine an Ultraviolet (UV) light in the dark, the scorpion's body lights up with a fluorescent glow, making it particularly easy to spot and stand out against it's surroundings. The same concept applies to the above "Test Question"
A lot of hard work has been put into reading huge amounts of material and from time to time a new concept is coined or used which makes learning politics fun from time to time! So here's a list to add to our newly coined scorpion!
"The Wrong Turn": Excusing the inexcusable by the unspeakable?
As mentioned in When To Attend/Hold Meetings and in Learning & Playing The Rules Of The Game break-throughs in understanding often hinge on Definitions, decomposing the guiding Rules which are conducive to "Concept Shifts". We've just looked at how David Cameron is attempting to master the language of the debate before it's even started with his "Middle Way Fallacy" from the previous blog Using A Macroscope on Cameron's Reform and how this is an attempt to distort The Brexit Number & The EU Onion real picture of Brexit in relation to the EU itself, using another concept of the EU as an Onion of concentric layers towards the core.
When we achieve these concept shifts, often it can be experienced as an exercise of focus where are skills of understanding are matched by an appropriate challenge and we fall into the timeless FLOW + CHANNEL as per Power To The People:-
Even at low skill and low challenge level we can tap FLOW: The psychology of optimal experience; which often accompanies forming a "good fit" from using a newly created or encountered "model of understanding" of a new concept: Learning becomes it's own reward and is fun, as perhaps you can see above.
As per Pete North in A word about "showing unity" . Other politicians will suggest that "eurosceptics" should be clever and resort to a Middle Way to win and we can describe them as Judas Goats as this goes contrary to developing Power To The People. Others yet again will try to dodge the question of how they will vote for various reasons who are politicians who obviously have given up on the people as per You know, we're just not reaching that guy. and for them we can apply The Fluorescent Scorpion Test. In all cases, however there's a distinction: Where people are really trying to learn and develop the democracy and quality of our politics, there is likely a correlation with the attempt to inject some "flow" into the experience for others: Away from apathy and anxiety towards real control (not the lip-service the politicians peddle) and arousal to the challenges our political system is supposed to be designed to help resolve successfully.
That's as good a "Rule Of Thumb" over who to trust in the upcoming Referendum as any:-
Hansel & Gretel: The following morning, the family treks into the woods. Hansel takes a slice of bread and leaves a trail of bread crumbs
to follow home. However, after they are once again abandoned, the
children find that birds have eaten the crumbs and they are lost in the
woods.
Computer Usage: "The graphical control element Breadcrumbs or breadcrumb trail is a navigation aid used in user interfaces. It allows users to keep track of their locations within programs or documents. The term comes from the trail of breadcrumbs left by Hansel and Gretel in the eponymous fairytale."
Urban Dictionary: "The act of sending out flirtatious, but non-committal text messages (ie
"breadcrumbs") to members of the opposite sex in order to lure a sexual
partner without expending much effort."
Association Agreement foreshadowing by the BBC?
I watched this, this morning and it reminded me of the "mock-up" Association Agreement symbol in MIND THE (Credibility) GAP. Mr. Brexit also notices some potential foreshadowing of Association Membership, too:-
This "drip-drip" or "bread-crumbing" towards the intended result, it seems has been Cameron's consistent dress-rehearsal for some time as per the above previous blog.
You can read and listen to most if not all the Legacy News-Media and it won't make any difference to your understanding, it will only yet again and again remind you of Bremner, Bird & Fortune's satirical double-acts; doubly so if you are vaguely aware of the EU and of Brexit beyond these sources as per Understanding The Mountains Of Madness. One of the fundamental problems with the EU is that it is a question as much as "WHO?" as it is as "WHAT?". There's a really decent article by Tony Parsons in GQ Magazine that seems to make this point in a very straightforward and common sense way (without recourse to "Group Cohesion" theories!): Why We Should Leave The EU ~ Tony Parsons:-
"Forty years have passed since our last referendum on Europe, but with the ailing continent in economic free fall in the face of global competition, the time has come to quit this failed experiment. Goodbye EU, hello world...
The liberal establishment, from Downing Street to Broadcasting House, will argue for Britain to remain in the EU, that the loss of our national sovereignty, the degrading of our democracy, is a price worth paying because it is good for business.
But can you really put a price tag on freedom?
Don't let them tell you the British are not a proud, independent nation. Don't buy into their stinking culture of fear. Throw your arms around the big beautiful world. Don't be a Little European. Just say no."
Here is encapsulated in simple language some of the major themes:-
Time
Deceptive Political machinery
Results and Performance feedback
Globalization
Don't make choices based on Fear: You'll regret it!
Our future is engaging with the bigger picture, brighter picture
Our relationship with the EU as per Set Theory representation:-
This is what Supranationalism means politically and legally!
What David Cameron is attempting to breadcrumb and gather pace now towards is this little trick:-
It does not matter how he phrases it, to quote an old Chinese proverb: "The more he writes the darker it gets (more ink and more confusion!)." The rebrand of "equals" is seen in the BBC footage above, but politically and legally under Supranationalism it looks like the above: We are a political SUB-SET along with the rest of the EU members, with the EZ an even smaller sub-set politically merging. Dr. RAE North has been arguing that the esssential result that we wish to achieve in our EU Referendum (likely in 2017) is to recognize the EQUAL SETS status politically and legally of EFTA Nations such as Norway as per The Norway Option (or model!):-
The Norway Option ~ Dr. Richard North: One Step & One Component At A Time
It was already noted in My Kingdom for a Macroscope! that people often failed to understand the place and the order of The Norway Option in the greater context of Brexit = Present Simple Event (x1 day vs 16,425 days) compared to the full FLEXCIT Present Continuous towards Future Perfect Continuous Process. The full picture of which leads to the necessary condition of a Brexit vote is:-
UNECE becomes the "Regional Super-Set of equals" removing supranational subordination for international cooperation
In the above, what is made clear is the EQUAL SETS political and legal nature. It also massively helps as per The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up and creates the "Positive Vision" that is based of developing "Real Wings Of Knowledge" with which to experience a flight of freedom as per Strange Trails. A lot of "eurosceptics" fail to understand this, because become hung-up upon the EEA Treaty agreement that is effectively the Present Simple and Present Continuous GLUE towards the full development of the Future Perfect Continuous FLEXCIT process.
Abstracting the full Campaign Process itself as per Argument Abstraction, the primary aim is to reach Power To The People in this EU Popular Referendum (likely in 2017) and David Cameron just like every other voter has x1 vote himself: No more and no less:-
Increasing "People Power" (= Democracy) via Correct Process
One of the best books I've ever come across and gladly though carefully share, here, is Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi 's "Flow: The psychology of optimal experience". Effectively or colloquially, the graph above represents the balance between a person's skill at an activity or task and the challenge level of applied skill to this task. Invariably the conditions for "being in the zone" or as per sport "on fire" or "in a hot streak" etc etc require conditions such as clear problem and goal definitions and balance between the two variables. The conditions to reach FLOW itself are a balance between the two where: Challenge = Skill, but tend to emerge where skill is higher and challenge is higher to match that skill. Variations around this eg Skill >> Challange and you have Relaxation, where Challenge >> Skill you have Anxiety and where both are very low you have Apathy. We've already discussed how negative and deleterious too much Anxiety is to experience and how it reduces our decision-making capacity as per Our Government: "Ifs, Buts, Maybes" and again in Argumentum Ad Infinitum and hence perpetuated on a national scale in the Legacy News-Media in Understanding The Mountains of Madness.
'High Skill : Challenge' ratio => experience of FLOW
This is all incredibly destructive behaviour to peoples' experience of politics: It accounts in my opinion for the "Apathy", "Boredom" and on ocassion the over-dose by design or ineptness of "Anxiety" the politicians inject into the national discourse in order that they may be on hand to relieve the pain later; having prolonged it, in the first place. These destroy our positive feedback-loops as per Pattern Recognition which is depend on Memory input as compared in Eurosceptic "Amnesia" vs Brexiteer "Total Memory Recall" .
What has to be done is to come back to the behaviour of our politicians, the ones who are supposed to represent the people, the "professionals"; the 650 MP's in our Houses of Parliament at Westminster and our 73 MEP's in the European Parliament in Brussels and Strasbourg. Quoting Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in FLOW, p.190-191:
Britain's present Representative Democracy: Predictable & Poor Scaling of Democracy
"A person is part of a family or a friendship to the extent he invests psychic energy in goals shared with other people. In the same way, one can belong to larger interpersonal systems by subscribing to the aspirations of a community, an ethnic group, a political party, or a nation. In ancient Greek usage, "politics" referred to whatever involved people in affairs that went beyond personal and family welfare. In this broad sense, politics can be one of the most enjoyable and most complex activities available to the individual, for the larger the social arena one moves in, the greater the challenge it presents. A person can deal with very intricate problems in solitude, and family and friends can take up a lot of attention. But trying to optimize the goals of unrelated individuals involves a lot of complexities an order of magnitude higher. If we consider only material consequences, we might regard selfish politicians as canny because they try to achieve wealth and power for themselves. But if we accept the fact that optimal experience is what gives real value to life, then we must conclude that politicians who strive to realize the common good are actually smarter, because they are taking on the higher challenges, and thus have a better chance to experience real enjoyment. The concept of flow is useful not only in helping individuals improve the quality of their lives, but also in pointing out how public action should be directed. Perhaps the most powerful effect flow theory could ahve in the public sector is in providing a blueprint for how institutions may be reformed so as to make them more conducive to optimal experience. A community should be judged good not because it is technologically advanced, or swimming in material riches; it is good if it offers people a chance to enjoy as many aspects of their lives as possible, while allowing them to develop their potential in the pursuit of ever greater challenges. But no social change can come about until the consciousness of individuals is changed first... those who try to make life better for for everyone without having learned to control their own lives first usually end up making things worse all around."
Rueda de Casino: A Cuban Communal Dance - conducive to social Flow
In Of Democracy and Time Dilation the "measurement" of time on the quality of our politics and hence our decision-making was considered and very briefly described or "looked at". The ratio of years of participation, the increase in population from about 32 million to 65 million from around 1901-2015 and hence the dilution of representation, along with the representation of more of our powers in the EU Parliament and even lower representation (both turn-out and ratio) eg 1:1 million constituents more or less and the general decline in voter engagement ie General Elections turn-out. We also looked at some of the arithmetic of the Referendum itself in via The Boiling Frog: Frog Fractions: EU Referendum: 51% and further in Understanding The Mountains of Madness that describes the adoption of the politicians' approach to "guiding the public" towards the middle Green colour in the spectrum via the Legacy News-Media blanket coverage: Based on the above Apathy-Worry-Anxiety dynamic above.
What we can learn from the Flow Theory is that Time, Definition of Challenge, Skill, Internal Motivation are all conducive to improving the quality of experience; and when applied to our politics this is very much what is required via a change to encourage these parameters, for example via greater Real Democracy with increased connections to representation such as The Harrogate Agenda provides the conditions for:-
Reducing the layers of abstraction in our politics and reconnecting people
Before I became personally involved and interested in politics, I remember one great holiday I spent with my brother who was living in France. We were in the French South Western region of the Pays Basque in the town of Biarritz (excellent waves) and decided to cycle across the border into Spain, The Basque Country (Euskadi). It was an amazing sense of freedom cycling across the border into a new foreign land (where suddenly my brother's decent-enough French was no-longer understood and I could leap "into my own element" and use my "very-beginner's Spanish" (just!)). On our way towards San Sebastián we decided to veer off course and take some refreshments in a small town and stumbled upon a scene such as (although smaller) this:-
"Some kinda, god-damn town meeting going on..."
Anyway, it was a lot smaller than the above, but there were speeches, brass bands and plenty of people congregated and there was "controlled energy". We had a fine tapas for our "pit-stop" but the impression of that small town square meeting for the Basque "independence and autonomy" always stayed with me, seeing with my own eyes an example of "active real democracy". And I still admire that commitment, particularly when it reminded me of a geography documentary I saw a long time ago:-
The Mondragon Experiment (BBC Documentary, Horizon, 1980)
An experiment in "Worker participation" in Mondragon, a small-town in North-East Spain in The Basque Country. One of the things this idea of attempting to "re-engage people with meaningful work" reminds of:-
"Lack of experience diminishes our power of taking a comprehensive view of the admitted facts. Hence those who dwell in intimate association with nature and its phenomena are more able to lay down principles such as to admit of a wide and coherent development; while those whom devotion to abstract discussions has rendered unobservant of facts are too ready to dogmatize on the basis of a few observations" ~ Aristotle
Recently the EU Referendum has been looked at and the communication has been simplified at the same time as referencing the source material FLEXCIT, The Great Deception and a myriad of other sources of information. We can think of the EU Referendum as a useful and popular exercise in The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up and in Strange Trails we looked at the sadness and sorrow of people who expend their valuable "psychic energy" (catch-all) only to be let down by the politicians on both sides of the Referendum Question; because the intellectual foundations were not soundly laid as they should have been by our wretched politicians (The knight 'N Knave) (as per Dr. RAE North) were not laid (ie educating and "skilling-up" the people in understanding the politics):-
The product of the politicians neglect of educating people: Anxiety + Apathy => Sadness from a lack of understanding the challenge.
In Pub Signs the attempt was made to provide a visual indication of communication of the Central Point Argument of the EU Referendum as explained in Argument Abstraction.
We'll be offered rich pickings of "Turkish Delight! Turkish Delight!" but it is a promise of false riches based off the above dynamic without resolving this intrinsic self-made political malaise which are politicians are not in the business of reforming the public anxiety-apathy and nor is the legacy media with their worry default of "Bad News". It ties into given the EU Referendum is the first popular referendum in >40 years: The Harrogate Agenda:-
The premise on which our movement is based is that democracy means "people power". The word democracy stems from the Greek word, dēmokratía, comprising two parts: dêmos "people" and kratos "power". Without a demos, there is no democracy. But people without power is not democracy either.
Our current system of government is known as "representative democracy". That phrase is a misuse of the word democracy. People do not hold power: that system cannot by definition be a democracy. We seek to return power to the people. We are concerned with power – who holds it and under what circumstances and controls, and how to get more of it. Above all else, we hold to the core principle that in a true democracy the people must hold the power.
Our objective is to recover power. Our focus is on the acquisition of power. And once we ourselves, the people, hold the power, we can then attend to the many problems and injustices that plague modern society. But without power, there is only protest – and we achieve nothing of any lasting value.
FLEXCIT, the latest version is available from EUReferendum.com. The challenge is high, but if you choose to download it and increase "your skill and understanding" you might find politics is a much more rewarding use of your time and energy... and... as importantly... of your friends and family's too.
I'm off to finally get a printed version from the local print shop and hope to show plenty of people this great work for the people.
