Can of Worms

Why the modern belief that the Bible is 'without error' is plain wrong – and why it's actually a blasphemous insult to God.

2026-10-10T12:15:16.616+01:00

To claim that a collection of texts written, copied, translated, and compiled by human beings is entirely “without error” is one of the greatest ironies of modern Christianity. The doctrine of scriptural inerrancy—the belief that the Bible is completely free from error in all matters of science, history, and theology—is not a sign of deep faith. It is a misguided and fundamentally blasphemous doctrine. By insisting that the Bible is a perfect product, inerrantists inadvertently elevate fallen human beings to the status of the divine, directly contradicting a core tenet of the Christian faith: no one is perfect except God.

The Blasphemy of Human Perfection

Christianity teaches that humanity is inherently flawed, limited, and dependent on divine grace. “For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23). If human beings are imperfect, it is a logical and theological impossibility for human writers to produce a flawless, perfect text. To argue otherwise is to claim that the authors of Scripture were temporarily stripped of their human limitations, becoming infallible conduits.

By declaring the text “perfect,” the doctrine of inerrancy implicitly attributes divine perfection to human instruments. This leads directly to bibliolatry—the worship of a book. It risks replacing the living, perfect God with a paper idol. God alone possesses the attribute of absolute perfection. When we attribute that same absolute perfection to a text penned by human hands, we inadvertently steal glory from the Creator and award it to the creature, which is the very definition of blasphemy.

The Modern Invention of a “Perfect” Book

Proponents of inerrancy often speak as if this doctrine fell directly out of heaven at Pentecost. In reality, the idea of absolute scriptural inerrancy is a relatively modern development born out of anxiety.

For the first millennium of the Church, theologians like Augustine and Origen recognized that Scripture contained allegories, metaphors, and historical difficulties. They were comfortable with the text’s human elements, choosing to focus on its spiritual truth. Even the Protestant Reformers like Martin Luther referred to the Epistle of James as an “epistle of straw,” showing a nuanced understanding of varying scriptural authority rather than a flat, rigid view of perfection.

The rigid, literalist concept of inerrancy only truly solidified during the 19th and 20th centuries, largely as a reactionary movement against the Enlightenment, Darwinism, and modern historical criticism. Terrified that science and history would dismantle the faith, fundamentalist theologians (most notably through the Princeton Theology and later the 1978 Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy) built a fortress around the text. They established a dangerous rule: if the Bible is wrong on one minor historical detail, the entire faith collapses. This development was not a deeper understanding of truth, but a desperate, erroneous retreat into modern rationalism.

Refuting the Arguments for Inerrancy

Defenders of inerrancy rely on a few central arguments, all of which fall apart under close theological scrutiny:

The Argument from Divine Inspiration: Inerrantists argue that because “All Scripture is God-breathed” (2 Timothy 3:16), it must be perfect because God is perfect.

The Refutation: This is a false equation. God regularly breathes life into imperfect things. God breathed life into Adam, yet Adam sinned. God breathes the Holy Spirit into the Church, yet the Church remains deeply flawed and makes historical errors. Divine inspiration does not override human agency or erase human limitation; it works through it.

The “Original Autographs” Loophole: When confronted with obvious contradictions in the Bible, inerrantists claim that only the original manuscripts (which no longer exist) were perfect, and that later scribes introduced errors.

The Refutation: This is an unhelpful and unfalsifiable argument. If God deemed it vital to give humanity a perfectly error-free text, it makes no sense that He would fail to preserve it. Relying on invisible, non-existent “original” texts admits that the Bible we actually have today does contain errors, rendering the practical application of the doctrine completely useless.

The “Domino Theory” of Truth: Inerrantists claim that if the Bible contains even one minor error—such as a misstated historical date or a scientific inaccuracy—then we cannot trust anything it says about salvation or Jesus Christ.

The Refutation: This is a fragile, all-or-nothing fallacy. We do not apply this extreme standard to any other area of life. A history textbook can have a typo or a misdated minor battle without making its entire account of history a lie. True faith does not require a brittle checklist of flawless data; it requires trust in a living Person.

The Reality of an Imperfect Text

The internal evidence against inerrancy is overwhelming. The Bible is not a single book written by a single hand, but a library of 66 books written over thousands of years by dozens of authors. Consequently, it contains undeniable discrepancies that no amount of theological gymnastics can fully iron out.

For example, the Gospels contain distinct discrepancies on the timeline and details of Jesus’ life. Matthew records that Judas hanged himself (Matthew 27:5), while Acts records that he fell headlong and his bowels gushed out (Acts 1:18). In the Old Testament, 2 Samuel 24:1 states that the Lord incited David to count Israel, while 1 Chronicles 21:1 states that Satan incited David.

Furthermore, the Bible reflects the ancient, unscientific worldviews of its authors. It describes a flat earth held up by pillars with a solid dome (the firmament) holding back waters above (Genesis 1:6-7, 1 Samuel 2:8). To force these ancient poetic and historical understandings into a modern cage of scientific accuracy does violence to the text itself. It is not without error because it was written by men who possessed an ancient, limited understanding of the physical universe.

Reclaiming Reverence Without Idolatry

To say the Bible is not perfect is not an invitation to disrespect Scripture, nor does it mean Christ’s message was lost. Far from it. We can fully trust that God, in His infinite wisdom, ensured the Bible contains the exact spiritual message He intended. His guiding hand was undeniably with the writers, moving through their cultural contexts, their poetry, their struggles, and their history to reveal His character.

The main message of Christ’s love, sacrifice, and resurrection shines through the text with absolute clarity. The flaws of the human vessel do not dilute the purity of the living water inside it. We can hold the Bible in the highest esteem as our sacred, authoritative guide for faith and practice without demanding that it act as a flawless 21st-century science textbook.

The Danger of Inerrancy and the Need for Common Sense

The danger of insisting that “all scripture is perfect” is that it forces believers to abandon moral reasoning and common sense. When people believe every word is directly dictated by a flawless God, they feel forced to defend horrific things as divine ideals. They find themselves justifying the graphic commands of total genocide in the Old Testament, the regulation of chattel slavery, and the historical subjugation of women as the “perfect” will of God.

We must interpret the Bible with common sense and critical thinking. The ultimate revelation of God is not a book; it is a person—Jesus Christ. Jesus is the lens through which all Scripture must be read. If a specific verse, law, or historical passage sounds cruel, unloving, or directly violates Christ’s overarching message of grace, mercy, and love, we must have the spiritual courage to reject a literal application of it. We must let Jesus judge the text, rather than letting the text obscure Jesus.

Conclusion: A False Doctrine Laid Bare

Scriptural inerrancy is plain wrong. It is a modern, fear-driven dogma that creates a fragile faith, easily shattered by the first encounter with basic history or science. Worse than being intellectually flawed, it is a theological misstep. It demands that we view a human product as divine, shifting our worship away from the living God and onto the pages of a book.

True Christian maturity requires abandoning this fragile checklist of perfection. We must embrace the Bible for what it actually is: a beautiful, divinely inspired, thoroughly human testament to God’s messy, unfolding relationship with an imperfect world. God is perfect. The Bible does not need to be.

I Became a Viral Influencer With Millions of Views — and the Way People Reacted Was Very Unexpected. (A true story.)

2026-10-02T19:22:10.907+01:00

For years, my trajectory as a writer followed a modest, quiet path. Over a five-year period, I wrote in a Google blog that eventually accumulated 100,000 views, self-published two books, and spent three years writing political articles for my local Labour Party branch. While these early projects brought immense personal satisfaction, they were small-scale endeavors that didn’t exactly make me rich. Paired with my academic background studying law and social science at the Open University, these years gave me a disciplined relationship with the craft. Even on Twitter, regular posting yielded a modest 500 followers, despite a few surreal moments where my replies were scraped and featured in national newspapers like The Sun and the Daily Mail.

But digital platforms are highly unpredictable. When I opened a Threads account and began sharing my usual political commentary, the systemic friction evaporated. My account experienced an explosive viral trajectory: over one million views and 30,000 + likes a month, culminating in a rapid surge to 14,000 followers.

When a writer shares this kind of dramatic shift—not out of arrogance, but as a surprising piece of personal news regarding an unexpected pivot into micro-influence—social norms dictate a response of basic celebration or curiosity. The writer is hardly MrBeast, and the milestones are simply being relayed as factual news. While a small handful of people reacted positively, offering genuine congratulations, the vast majority of responses formed a stark, unsettling wall: total silence from some, and outright hostility from others. Why does sudden success in writing inspire such sharp, competitive vitriol? What psychological mechanisms drive onlookers to react with anger, avoidance, or resentment to a peer’s breakthrough?

The Threat of the Digital Upstart: Social Comparison and Relative Deprivation

To understand why public metrics often elicit anger rather than applause, one must look at Social Comparison Theory (Festinger 1954). Human beings naturally evaluate their own worth and success relative to their immediate peers. When someone in a social circle unexpectedly achieves high digital visibility, it shatters the unwritten group hierarchy. A sudden transition from a peer to a writer reaching millions triggers acute feelings of relative deprivation in onlookers (Walker and Smith 2002).

People rarely compare themselves to global celebrities; the gap is too vast to feel personal. Instead, they compare themselves to peers with similar backgrounds. When a peer achieves sudden virality, it forces onlookers to confront their own latent or frustrated ambitions. The hostility and silence are unconscious defense mechanisms designed to protect the ego from the painful realization that they have not achieved similar visibility. This dynamic is explicitly clear in those who completely ignore the news, choosing instead to reply by listing their own writing aspirations—a psychological phenomenon known as conversational narcissism (Vangelisti et al. 1990), where an individual attempts to reclaim status by shifting the focus entirely back to themselves.

The Unique Crucible of Writing: Why the Written Word Sparks Competition

While success in any field can provoke envy, writing and political commentary inspire a uniquely intense brand of competitive friction. Unlike specialized fields like surgery or engineering, where a lack of formal training acts as a natural barrier to entry, writing is universally accessible. Because almost everyone can write a post, many harbor a latent belief that they could be widely read if given the same platform.

When a text achieves millions of views, it directly challenges the observers’ internal valuation of their own intellect and communicative competence (Salovey and Rodin 1984). Writing is an extension of the self; it is thought made public. Therefore, a peer’s viral writing success is often interpreted as a direct challenge to the observer’s own intellectual standing. The resulting envy is frequently weaponized as hostility or cloaked in the narrative that the writer’s metrics are unearned, an attempt to minimize the achievement and restore the observer’s fragile self-concept (Alicke and Zell 2008).

These destructive dynamics tend to manifest through three distinct behavioral responses. First, overt hostility and anger function as a direct ego defense mechanism, often taking the form of malicious, unprovoked attacks on the validity, tone, or specific content of the political posts. Second, uncharacteristic silence acts as a tool for status minimization and social exclusion; by completely pretending the milestone was never shared, onlookers attempt to avoid validating the creator’s sudden success. Finally, a conversational pivot serves to deflect frustrated personal ambitions, where the individual chooses to ignore the shared metrics altogether in order to talk exclusively about their own writing goals.

Authentic Pride vs. Projected Hubris

A common rationalization for hostile behavior is the claim that the successful person is bragging. However, from a psychological perspective, sharing highly unusual life developments—such as a sudden, massive shift in audience metrics—is completely normative social behavior. There is a distinct psychological boundary between authentic pride, which centers on hard work and unexpected achievements, and hubris, which involves an arrogant sense of innate superiority (Tracy and Robins 2007).

Reflecting on a major transition in digital scale is a natural attempt to process a shift in identity. A hostile reaction to this disclosure relies on a cognitive distortion: the observer projects their own insecurities onto the speaker, mischaracterizing baseline factual reporting as illegitimate pride. This reaction is a classic component of “Tall Poppy Syndrome” (Feather 1989), a documented social phenomenon where individuals of rapid success are deliberately criticized or cut down by their peers to force them back down to the perceived group average.

Parasocial Hostility and the Influencer’s Adaptation

For those operating in the public eye, managing this hostility is a core component of psychological survival. Large-scale influencers and public figures routinely encounter what researchers call parasocial hostility (Giles 2002)—disproportionate anger from individuals who feel they know the creator but are reacting entirely out of their own psychological projections.

Experienced digital figures cope with this by developing cognitive detachment, recognizing that the hostility directed toward them is rarely about the content of their work, but is instead a reflection of the commenter’s internal frustrations. They reframe the negativity not as personal failure, but as an inevitable structural byproduct of digital scale (Marwick and boyd 2011). When views reach into the millions, the probability of intersecting with individuals suffering from acute status anxiety approaches certainty.

Theological Resolution: Breaking the Tyranny of Envy

The psychological pathology of envy, avoidance, and hostility is deeply entrenched in human nature. While psychological frameworks can diagnose these dark responses, they cannot cure them. Only a profound spiritual transformation can break the tyranny of competitive malice. Within Christian theology, envy is recognized not just as a flaw, but as a profound spiritual sickness—a sin that directly distorts the soul’s capacity for community, empathy, and love.

The teachings of Christ directly confront and dismantle the status anxieties that fuel these hostile reactions. In the Gospel of Matthew, the Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard (Matthew 20:1-16) serves as a radical critique of comparative resentment. When the early workers complain that latecomers received the same reward, the master replies, “Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me? Or do you begrudge my generosity?” (Matthew 20:15). This parable illustrates a liberating truth: another person’s favor, sudden abundance, or viral platform does not diminish one’s own intrinsic worth in the eyes of God.

Furthermore, the Pauline exhortation to “rejoice with those who rejoice” (Romans 12:15) is not a passive suggestion, but an intentional, conscious command to reject the ego’s competitive impulses. Human pride demands a zero-sum game where another’s rise implies our own fall. Christ’s model of humility and self-giving love completely subverts this framework.

By grounding one’s identity in an unconditional spiritual security—knowing that ultimate value is secured by the cross rather than the shifting sands of digital metrics or social status—the individual is liberated from the torment of another’s success. Christ offers the ultimate psychological exit ramp: He transforms the success of a peer from a threatening mirror of deficiencies into an opportunity for genuine, uncorrupted celebration. Ultimately, when the soul is anchored in Christ, the achievements of others no longer diminish us; they invite us to marvel at the diverse distribution of gifts in a broken world desperately in need of truth.

References

Alicke, M. D., and Zell, E. (2008). Social comparison and envy. In R. H. Smith (Ed.), Envy: Theory and research (pp. 73-93). Oxford University Press.

Feather, N. T. (1989). Attitudes towards the high achiever: The Fall of the Tall Poppy. Australian Journal of Psychology, 41(3), 239-267.

Festinger, L. (1954). A theory of social comparison processes. Human Relations, 7(2), 117-140.

Giles, D. C. (2002). Parasocial interaction: A review of the literature and a model for future research. Media Psychology, 4(3), 279-305.

Marwick, A. E., and boyd, d. (2011). To see and be seen: Celebrity practice on Twitter. Convergence, 17(2), 139-158.

Salovey, P., and Rodin, J. (1984). Some antecedents and consequences of jealousy and envy. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 47(4), 780-792.

Tracy, J. L., and Robins, R. W. (2007). The psychological structure of pride: A tale of two facets. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 92(3), 506-525.

Vangelisti, A. L., Knapp, M. L., and Daly, J. A. (1990). Conversational narcissism. Communication Monographs, 57(4), 251-274.

Walker, I., and Smith, H. J. (Eds.). (2002). Relative deprivation: Specification, development, and integration. Cambridge University Press.

The Subconscious Sickness: Psychological Pressure, Perceived Failure, and the Manifestation of Maladaptive Coping in Emerging Adults

2026-10-01T23:07:04.596+01:00

For young people aged 20 to 35, the transition into adulthood has become a psychological gauntlet. Modern emerging adults face an unprecedented convergence of societal pressures to achieve instantaneous, multifaceted success the moment they enter their twenties. Society demands they simultaneously secure a high-paying career, acquire real estate, and possess elite academic credentials. When systemic economic realities or personal timelines disrupt this idealized trajectory, it results not in an objective failure, but a deeply internalized perceived failure. To protect a fragile and fractured ego from the intolerable shame of falling short, the human subconscious deploys radical defense mechanisms. One such pathway is the subconscious faking or amplification of mental health symptoms—a functional processing where illness becomes a protective shield. This subconscious manifestation provides a dual utility: it offers a socially blameless excuse to withdraw from a brutal, hyper-competitive job market, and it secures a steady income via sickness benefits.

This paper presents a definitive case for this psychological phenomenon, detailing the mechanics of ego defence, the role of financial reinforcement, observed gender disparities, the necessity of parental intervention, and the ultimate resolution found through radical self-acceptance and Christian theology.

The Pressure Cooker of Emerging Adulthood and Ego Defence

The psychological framework of emerging adulthood—spanning roughly from ages 18 to 29—is inherently unstable (Arnett, 2000). When society superimposes a rigid metric of immediate material success onto this developmental stage, the discrepancy between the “ideal self” and the “actual self” widens dangerously. According to Self-Discrepancy Theory, large gaps between these self-guides induce severe emotional distress, specifically dejection, shame, and anxiety (Higgins, 1987).

For an individual with a fragile ego structure, admitting that they cannot meet these socio-economic demands is psychologically catastrophic. To prevent the complete collapse of self-esteem, the subconscious mind utilizes defence mechanisms to alter perception and deflect blame. When conscious rationalization fails, the ego turns to somatization or functional neurological symptoms, where psychological distress is involuntarily converted into physical or mental illness symptoms (American Psychiatric Association, 2013). By genuinely believing themselves to be incapacitated by an elite, unmanageable mental illness, the individual resolves the cognitive dissonance of their situation. They are no longer a “failure” due to a lack of capability or drive; they are a victim of a medical affliction.

Sickness Benefits and the Subconscious Reinforcement Loop

Once the subconscious establishes illness as a shield, the external environment actively steps in to reinforce and perpetuate this “sick role” (Parsons, 1951). This introduces the powerful dynamic of secondary gain—the external, tangible benefits that an individual receives as a direct result of being diagnosed as ill (Fishbain et al., 1995).

In modern welfare states, the availability of sickness and disability benefits offers a powerful incentive for the subconscious mind to maintain its defensive facade. Obtaining a medical certificate provides two highly reinforcing variables. First, it codifies the individual’s exemption from traditional adult responsibilities, such as full-time employment. Second, it delivers a steady, risk-free stream of income, reducing the immediate survival pressure to enter a hostile labor market. Psychological studies into operant conditioning demonstrate that when a behavior—or a subconsciously generated symptom profile—successfully removes an unpleasant stimulus (the pressure to achieve) and provides a positive reward (financial benefit), the subconscious state is heavily reinforced and prolonged (Skinner, 1953).

Gender Disparities in Functional and Somatoform Manifestations

This phenomenon of converting psychological distress into a functional illness profile shows a distinct demographic skew, with women being significantly more likely than men to present with these conditions. Empirical data consistently shows that women experience higher rates of somatoform disorders, functional neurological disorders, and highly subjective distress profiles (Barsky et al., 2001; Kroenke et al., 1997). For instance, in diagnostic categories involving somatization and functional neurological symptoms, observed gender ratios regularly reach two-to-one or even three-to-one in favor of female prevalence, alongside significantly higher reporting of chronic fatigue and subjective pain outcomes.

Psychological literature attributes this disparity to differences in gender socialization and coping strategies. Women are structurally socialized to internalize distress, which correlates heavily with higher rates of anxiety, depression, and somatization, whereas men are more likely to externalize distress through substance abuse or antisocial behavior (Eaton et al., 2012). Consequently, when a young woman faces the agonizing weight of perceived societal failure, her subconscious apparatus is statistically far more prone to generating a clinical or psychological symptom profile as a somatic shield than her male peers.

De-stigmatising Parental Investigation

Because these symptom profiles manifest so convincingly, families frequently encounter profound denial when a young adult becomes chronically unproductive. Parents often accept clinical labels at face value, terrified that questioning the diagnosis makes them unsupportive, unloving, or cruel.

However, developmental paradigms emphasize that parents should feel absolutely no embarrassment in exploring the possibility of subconscious symptom faking or amplification. Confronting the potential reality of a secondary-gain dynamic is not an act of invalidation; it is an essential diagnostic boundary. Enabling the sick role can freeze an individual in a state of arrested development, ultimately worsening their long-term prognosis and independence (Twenge, 2017). Families must courageously look past the outward medical presentation to assess whether the illness is functioning primarily as an avoidant mechanism against the terrifying demands of adult self-sufficiency.

Resolution: Acceptance and the Teachings of Christ

The secular cure for this subconscious trap lies in Carl Rogers’ concept of Unconditional Positive Self-Regard (Rogers, 1957). The individual must fully decouple their human worth from external socioeconomic milestones. True psychological stability requires an individual to accept themselves entirely at whatever level of success they currently occupy, stripping the subconscious of its need to invent an illness as an excuse.

For complete spiritual and psychological resolution, the foundational teachings of Jesus Christ offer an absolute remedy to the fractured ego. First, Christ explicitly commands his followers to abandon the crushing anxiety of material accumulation and status. In the Sermon on the Mount, he states, “Therefore do not worry, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’... But seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added to you” (Matthew 6:31-33, NKJV). This teaching completely neutralises the societal pressure to achieve instantaneous wealth.

Second, Christ recognizes the exhaustion of trying to meet the impossible standards of the world, offering a spiritual exchange of burdens: “Come to Me, all you who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take My yoke upon you and learn from Me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls” (Matthew 11:28-29, NKJV).

By internalizing these truths, the young adult realizes that their value is divinely ordained and completely independent of houses, degrees, or corporate titles. When the terror of worldly judgment is replaced by divine acceptance, the fragile ego no longer requires the protective illusion of sickness. The subconscious need for a medical excuse evaporates, allowing the individual to step out of the sick role and into authentic, peaceful reality.

References

American Psychiatric Association, 2013. Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (DSM-5). 5th ed. Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Publishing.

Arnett, J.J., 2000. Emerging adulthood: A theory of development from the late teens through the twenties. American Psychologist, 55(5), pp.469-480.

Barsky, A.J., Peekna, H.M. and Borus, J.F., 2001. Somatization and medicalization in women. Journal of General Internal Medicine, 16(2), pp.135-145.

Eaton, N.R., Keyes, K.M., Krueger, R.F., Balsis, S., Skodol, A.E., Markon, K.E., Grant, B.F. and Hasin, D.S., 2012. An invariant dimensional structure of gender differences in mental disorders. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 121(1), pp.282-288.

Fishbain, D.A., Rosomoff, H.L., Cutler, R.B. and Rosomoff, R.S., 1995. Secondary gain concept: A review of the scientific evidence. The Clinical Journal of Pain, 11(1), pp.6-21.

Higgins, E.T., 1987. Self-discrepancy: A theory relating self and affect. Psychological Review, 94(3), pp.319-340.

Kroenke, K., Spitzer, R.L., deGruy, F.V., Hahn, S.R., Linzer, M., Williams, J.B., Brody, D. and Davies, M., 1997. Somatoform disorders in primary care: The PRIME-MD 1000 study. Archives of Family Medicine, 6(3), pp.211-216.

Parsons, T., 1951. The Social System. Glencoe, IL: Free Press.

Rogers, C.R., 1957. The necessary and sufficient conditions of therapeutic personality change. Journal of Consulting Psychology, 21(2), pp.95-103.

Skinner, B.F., 1953. Science and human behavior. New York: Macmillan.

Twenge, J.M., 2017. iGen: Why today’s super-connected kids are growing up less rebellious, more tolerant, less happy—and completely unprepared for adulthood. New York: Atria Books.

The Dark Psychology of Family Estrangement and How to Break Out of It

2026-09-29T19:33:05.620+01:00

Through conversations with people from all walks of life, I noticed just how prolific family estrangement really is, which compelled me to research the dark psychology behind why it happens and think about how it can be fixed.

One of the most isolating illusions of modern life is the belief that a fractured family is a rare, localized anomaly. When a brother stops speaking to his sister, or when a daughter cuts off her mother, the immediate instinct of those involved is often a deep, quiet shame. We are conditioned by idealized cultural archetypes to view the family unit as an unbreakable sanctuary. Consequently, when a rift occurs, individuals assume their family must be unique and uniquely broken.

Yet, empirical data tells a completely different story: family estrangement is incredibly common. In a landmark national study, Cornell University sociologist Dr. Karl Pillemer revealed that a staggering 27% of American adults—roughly 67 million people—are actively estranged from a family member (Pillemer, 2020). Furthermore, a comprehensive German longitudinal study tracking thousands of individuals over a six-year period found that 28% of participants experienced at least one distinct period of complete estrangement from a sibling (Hank and Steinbach, 2023). These statistics prove that family fractures are not bizarre outliers; they are a widespread, structurally normal aspect of human relationship dynamics across all social classes and income groups. If your family contains people who no longer speak to one another, you are not suffering through an isolated tragedy—you are witnessing a common psychological phenomenon.

While some estrangements are entirely justified and necessary for self-preservation—such as escaping overt physical or emotional abuse—a massive percentage of family fractures are driven by entirely manufactured grievances and false rationales. To understand why so many siblings and relatives stop speaking, one must examine how toxic family systems weaponize false narratives to justify cruelty.

The Narcissist’s Theater and Sibling Competition

The root of many sibling estrangements can be traced back to the architecture of the dysfunctional family home, particularly one governed by a narcissistic parent. In a healthy environment, parental love is unconditional, which allows siblings to form secure attachments with one another. In a narcissistic family system, however, affection is a scarce commodity. The narcissistic parent operates as the absolute authority, dispensing validation, praise, and attention conditionally to control the family dynamic.

To maintain control, the parent implicitly forces the children to compete for this limited parental validation. This environment naturally gives rise to "sibling scapegoating." Psychologists note that a narcissistic parent frequently assigns arbitrary roles to their children to regulate their own fragile ego: one child becomes the "golden child," who can do no wrong, while another is cast as the "scapegoat," blamed for the family’s systemic flaws.

To survive this psychological battlefield and secure the parent's favor, siblings often construct false narratives about one another. The golden child or the compliant sibling must pathologize the scapegoat to justify their own elevated status and alignment with the toxic parent. Over time, these false narratives harden. A sibling will convince themselves that their brother or sister is fundamentally flawed, manipulative, or toxic.

The tragic irony of this dynamic is that the resulting estrangement becomes a defensive necessity—not to protect against harm, but to protect the lie. If a sibling decides to break the silence and engage in open, honest communication with the estranged relative, they run a massive risk: the risk of exposing their manufactured narrative as entirely false. Human beings possess a powerful aversion to cognitive dissonance. Confronting the reality that a sibling is actually reasonable, kind, or unjustly maligned would force the other family members to confront their own complicity in a cruel family system. Thus, maintaining absolute silence acts as a psychological shield, preserving the false narrative and keeping reality safely at bay.

The Weaponization of False Rationales and Confirmation Bias

In many cases, the reasons cited for cutting off a family member are completely detached from reality, relying on primitive defense mechanisms and cognitive distortions to justify the cruelty of the silence. Research into the psychology of estrangement shows that estranged individuals frequently rely on rationalization and splitting (all-or-nothing thinking), where they rewrite history to paint themselves as entirely innocent victims and the other party as a cartoonish villain.

Cornell research highlights a phenomenon known as "defensive ignorance," where individuals who cut off their family members frequently cling to false, unverified justifications while completely ignoring objective facts (Pillemer, 2020). Because the human brain struggles with guilt, it utilizes cognitive dissonance reduction. To feel good about treating a blood relative like a ghost, a person must deliberately misinterpret past events, exaggerate minor friction into "abuse," and hallucinate malicious intent behind innocent actions.

This need to protect a fragile self-image explains why false rumors and character assassinations find such fertile ground within extended families. When an envious relative circulates a damaging lie about a family member, the remaining circle rarely acts as objective judges. Instead, they choose to accept the rumor as absolute fact because it conveniently suits their pre-existing personal agendas. In psychology, this is driven by confirmation bias and motivated reasoning. Family members who harbor hidden insecurities, unresolved rivalries, or latent guilt find relief in the alleged downfalls of another. If a cousin or a sibling is universally agreed to be "the problem," then everyone else is absolved of their own interpersonal failures. Validating a false rumor provides an easy social currency within the family network, allowing members to bond over shared condemnation while avoiding the difficult, painful work of self-reflection.

The Fragility of the Hyper-Sensitive Mind

Not all estrangements require a master manipulator; many are born out of sheer psychological unsophistication. In any family tree, there are individuals who lack emotional literacy and psychological insight. These unlearned or emotionally fragile individuals often harbor deep, decades-long grudges over the slightest, most trivial comments.

An innocent observation, a joke misheard, or a constructive piece of advice is instantly filtered through their deep-seated insecurity and perceived as a malicious assault on their character. Because they lack the emotional maturity to engage in meta-communication—the ability to talk objectively about how they communicate—they cannot express hurt feelings constructively. They do not say, "When you said that, it hurt my feelings; what did you mean by it?" Instead, they internalize the perceived slight, mutate it into an unpardonable error, and weaponize silence as a passive-aggressive tool of retaliation. Families lacking conflict-resolution skills frequently use complete relational cutoffs as a primitive, unlearned coping mechanism to avoid the discomfort of mature adult dialogue (Scharp, 2016).

Geography and the Absence of Self-Interest

The likelihood of permanent alienation increases exponentially when family members live far apart. In past generations, geographical proximity forced a certain level of basic tolerance; families lived in the same towns, attended the same churches, and relied on one another for mutual survival. Today, global mobility means relatives are often separated by vast distances.

When relatives live far apart, the transactional incentive to repair a broken relationship completely evaporates. In the cold calculus of daily life, maintaining a relationship requires effort, time, and emotional energy. If an estranged sibling lives thousands of miles away, their absence does not disrupt the day-to-day routine of the other. There is no shared social circle, no accidental run-ins at the local grocery store, and no immediate mutual dependence. Without a practical, self-interested incentive to bridge the gap, the inertia of silence takes over. The estrangement simply becomes the path of least resistance, allowing emotional distance to be permanently solidified by physical distance.

The Divine Way Out of the Psychological Rut

When left strictly to human psychology, the cycle of estrangement is almost impossible to break. The human mind is highly proficient at justifying its own coldness, nursing its wounds, and demanding that the other party blink first. Left to our own devices, we remain trapped in a psychological rut of pride, score-keeping, and emotional gridlock.

To truly break free from this matrix of false narratives and generational grudges, one requires a framework that transcends human ego entirely. It is here that the teachings of God and Christ offer a radical, transformative way out.

Christ’s teachings do not merely suggest kindness; they fundamentally subvert the logic of human psychology. Where the ego demands vindication, Christ demands humility. Where the family system rewards holding a grudge, the Gospel commands radical forgiveness. This is not a superficial "forgetting" of wrongs, but a profound spiritual choice to relinquish the right to retaliation.

When Christ instructs his followers to forgive "seventy times seven" and to love their enemies, He is providing a direct antidote to the toxic score-keeping that destroys families. By recognizing that all human beings are flawed, fallen, and in need of grace, an individual can look at an envious sibling or an emotionally immature relative not with burning resentment, but with deep compassion. The divine model teaches that the first person to extend grace is not the weakest link in the family, but the strongest. It offers a path to lay down the exhausting burden of maintaining false narratives, exposing the futility of pride, and providing a quiet, courageous road back to healing, warmth, and reconciliation.

References

Hank, K. and Steinbach, A. (2023) 'Sibling estrangement in adulthood', Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 40(4), pp. 1127–1138.

Pillemer, K. (2020) Fault Lines: Fractured Families and How to Mend Them. New York: Avery.

Scharp, K. M. (2016) 'Family Estrangement', in The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Family Studies, pp. 1–4.

Why the idea of hell being an eternal torment is very likely mistaken and not really supported by the Bible.

2026-09-25T09:57:09.015+01:00

The popular Christian image of hell as a place where immortal souls are kept alive forever and subjected to conscious fiery torment developed over centuries and became particularly influential during the Middle Ages.

Rather than being a simple teaching that can be read directly from the Bible, the medieval conception of hell was shaped by developing theological traditions, imagery and literature. Dante's *Inferno* (14th century) was especially influential in embedding a vivid picture of different levels of eternal punishment in the Western imagination, with its elaborate descriptions of sinners suffering eternally in hell.

The problem with this tradition is that it can lead us to read later ideas back into the Bible, rather than allowing the Bible's own language to determine what happens to the wicked.

The biblical case for conditional immortality is that human beings are not naturally immortal. Immortality is God's gift to those who are saved, while those who ultimately reject God finally die, perish and are destroyed.

** The biblical case for conditional immortality **

1. Matthew 10:28 — God can destroy both body and soul.

 “Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather, be afraid of the One who can **destroy both soul and body in hell**.”

Jesus explicitly says that God can destroy **both soul and body**. This sits awkwardly with the idea that the soul is inherently indestructible and must therefore remain conscious forever.

**2. Romans 6:23 — Sin leads to death; eternal life is a gift**

“For the wages of sin is **death**, but the gift of God is **eternal life** in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

The contrast is striking: the consequence of sin is **death**, while eternal life is God's **gift**. If everyone is naturally immortal, eternal life would not really be a distinctive gift given to those who are saved.

**3. John 3:16 — The alternative to eternal life is perishing**

“Whoever believes in him shall not **perish** but have eternal life.”

Jesus contrasts two outcomes: **perishing** and **eternal life**. The natural reading is that eternal life is the destiny of the saved, while those who reject Christ ultimately perish.

**4. 1 Timothy 6:16 — God alone possesses immortality**

“He who is the blessed and only Sovereign, the King of kings and Lord of lords, who alone is **immortal**...”

This is particularly significant for conditional immortality. Paul describes God as the one who **alone is immortal**, rather than describing every human soul as inherently immortal.

**5. 2 Timothy 1:10 — Immortality is brought through Christ**

“...our Saviour, Christ Jesus... has destroyed death and has brought **life and immortality to light through the gospel**.”

Again, immortality is presented as something revealed and brought through Christ, rather than something automatically possessed by every human being.

**6. Matthew 7:13 — The broad road leads to destruction**

“Wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to **destruction**, and many enter through it.”

Jesus describes the ultimate destination of those on the broad road as **destruction**, not eternal life in misery.

**7. 2 Thessalonians 1:9 — Everlasting destruction**

“They will suffer the punishment of **eternal destruction**, shut out from the presence of the Lord...”

The punishment is described as **destruction**. “Eternal” can naturally describe the permanence of the result: destruction that is everlasting and irreversible.

**8. 2 Peter 2:6 — Sodom and Gomorrah as an example**

“He condemned the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah by burning them to ashes, and made them an example of what is going to happen to the ungodly.”

Peter uses the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah as an example of God's judgment on the ungodly. The cities were not preserved forever in conscious suffering; they were **burned to ashes**.

**9. Malachi 4:1 — The wicked become completely consumed**

“Every evildoer will be **stubble**, and the day that is coming will set them on fire... Not a root or a branch will be left to them.”

The imagery is of something being **consumed**, leaving neither root nor branch.

**10. Psalm 37:20 — The wicked vanish like smoke**

“But the wicked will perish... they will vanish—**like smoke they will vanish away**.”

The repeated biblical imagery is not of immortal sinners suffering endlessly, but of the wicked **perishing, being destroyed and ultimately disappearing**.

The overall biblical pattern

Taken together, these passages repeatedly use words such as **death, perish, destroy, destruction, consume and vanish** when describing the ultimate fate of the wicked.

Conversely, **immortality and eternal life are presented as gifts associated with salvation**.

That creates a straightforward biblical distinction:

**The saved receive eternal life.
The unsaved ultimately die and are destroyed.**

The traditional doctrine of eternal conscious torment therefore requires an additional assumption: that the wicked remain inherently immortal and consciously exist forever despite the Bible repeatedly describing their final fate as **death and destruction**.

The issue, then, is not whether the Bible teaches judgment. It clearly does. The question is **what that judgment ultimately does to the wicked**. The biblical language consistently points towards **death and destruction**, while the familiar image of eternally conscious souls suffering in a fiery hell owes much to centuries of later theological development and medieval imagination. 

Nothingness Is Stranger Than God

2026-09-18T23:32:02.425+01:00

We live in a universe that began. That much is clear from the evidence around us—expanding space, cooling radiation, the finite age of stars and galaxies. From this, many of us draw a quiet, almost automatic conclusion: everything that exists must have been caused by something else. Something prior. Something that made it. And so the question arises, almost inevitably: if God exists, who made God?

The question feels profound. It is, in truth, a symptom of limited thinking.

Consider the alternatives for a moment without the usual prejudices. What is more basic, more “default,” as the first setting of reality? Absolute nothingness—no space, no time, no laws, no potential, no possibility—or an uncreated, unlimited power that simply is? We treat nothingness as the natural baseline and then act surprised when anything exists at all. Yet pure nothing has no properties with which to generate something. It cannot “decide” to become a universe. It cannot fluctuate, because fluctuation already presupposes rules and a stage on which to fluctuate. Absolute nothing is not a stable starting point; it is an intellectual convenience we invent after the fact.

An uncreated source of unlimited power, by contrast, requires no prior cause. It is not an object inside a larger system that needs explaining. It is the system’s ground. Unlimited power is not a property bolted onto an otherwise ordinary being; it is the capacity to be the origin of all properties. Why should that be strange? Why should it be any less likely than the mysterious appearance of something from pure nothing? The demand that everything must have been created is not a law of logic. It is a habit of minds that only ever experience contingent, time-bound things. We extrapolate that habit onto the foundation of reality itself and then declare the foundation illegitimate because it does not fit the habit.

This is the foolishness that becomes a barrier. We insist the first cause must obey the same rules as the things it causes. We treat causality as an infinite regress that somehow never bottoms out, or we prefer the elegant silence of nothingness because it asks nothing of us. Both moves spare us the discomfort of confronting something greater than our categories. Both keep us safely inside the small circle of what we already understand.

To get our heads around the idea of God, we have to reverse the direction of our thinking. Stop beginning with the finite and working backward. Begin with the infinite and notice that the finite is the surprising part. Our myopia is understandable—we are small, brief creatures embedded in a causal chain that stretches behind us for billions of years—but it is not obligatory. The same minds that mapped the quantum vacuum and the curvature of spacetime are capable of recognizing that those maps describe effects, not the ultimate ground. We can choose to look past the effects.

What might make such a ground physically possible? We do not yet know the full architecture of reality, and that is precisely the point. Physics has repeatedly uncovered layers that once seemed supernatural: fields that permeate empty space, information that appears more fundamental than matter, consciousness that stubbornly resists reduction to pure mechanism. Suppose consciousness is not an emergent accident of neurons but a primary feature of existence, the way certain mathematical structures are primary. Suppose the deepest “physics” is not particles and forces but an unbounded intentionality that can instantiate laws, space, and time the way a mind can instantiate a dream—except without the limitations of a brain. In such a framework, unlimited power is not a violation of nature; it is the nature that generates every subsequent law. The “supernatural” would simply be the physics we have not yet formalized: a physics in which being itself is active, personal, and free of external constraint. Nothing in our current equations rules this out. They simply stop short of it.

None of this is abstract philosophy for its own sake. If an uncreated, unlimited God is the default setting of the universe, then the appearance of a world capable of hosting self-aware creatures is not an accident of chemistry. It looks more like intention. Earth, with its fragile balance of conditions and its peculiar species that can ask questions about origins, begins to look like a deliberate project. We are not cosmic afterthoughts. We are the part of the project that can look back at the Creator and recognize the gift.

That recognition is what He appears to want. The same power that did not need to create anything chose to create beings who can know Him—not as a distant force, but as the living source who remains present. The invitation is open. We do not have to solve every metaphysical puzzle before accepting it. We only have to stop demanding that the foundation of reality fit inside the small box of our prior assumptions. Once we reverse the thinking, the default becomes clear, the barrier falls away, and the relationship becomes possible.

'I've always wanted to write a book'.

2026-05-22T08:45:49.205+01:00

Many people dream of writing a book. Far fewer experience what comes afterwards: trying to persuade other people to care about it. The romantic image of authorship — the idea that once you have completed a book, readers will naturally appear — collides brutally with reality. In the modern world, saying “I’ve written a book” often produces indifference, awkwardness, suspicion, or even hostility. The problem is not simply that books are difficult to sell commercially. The deeper issue is psychological. Books place the author in a strange social position, and many people react negatively to that position for reasons that are rarely admitted openly.

The first problem is sheer overload. Modern audiences are drowning in information. In previous centuries, books occupied a central place in culture because information was scarce. Today, people wake up to hundreds of messages, endless news feeds, podcasts, streaming platforms, YouTube channels, TikTok videos, and social media updates. Attention has become the most valuable commodity in the world. According to the psychologist and economist Herbert Simon, “a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.” Herbert Simon In other words, the more content available, the harder it becomes for any individual work to gain attention. A new book is not competing with other books alone; it is competing with the entire internet.

The second problem is the extraordinary level of competition. Millions of books now exist online through self-publishing, Amazon Kindle, traditional publishing houses, audiobooks, blogs, and newsletters. The barriers to publication have collapsed. This is democratically positive in one sense, but commercially devastating in another. Every author is now shouting into a stadium full of other authors. Even genuinely excellent books disappear unnoticed because there are simply too many alternatives.

At the same time, culture itself has shifted away from reading. Video increasingly dominates public attention because it demands less effort from the audience. Reading requires concentration, imagination, silence, and time. Video offers instant stimulation. The neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf has argued that digital culture is changing the way people process information, weakening “deep reading” habits that books depend upon. Many people still claim to admire books intellectually, but in practice their leisure time is spent scrolling short-form content.

Yet these practical problems are not the most interesting obstacle. The strongest resistance often comes from psychology and social status. Mentioning “my book” can trigger defensive reactions in other people because authorship carries symbolic meaning. A book is not viewed merely as an object. It is often interpreted as a statement about intelligence, authority, and importance. When someone says they have written a book, listeners may subconsciously hear: “I believe my thoughts are important enough for others to read.”

This creates status anxiety. Social comparison theory, first developed by the psychologist Leon Festinger, argues that people constantly evaluate themselves against others. If somebody nearby has achieved something intellectually ambitious, it can create feelings of inadequacy in those who have not. That is why one of the most common responses to hearing about a book is: “I’ve always wanted to write a book.” The statement sounds supportive, but often contains an undertone of self-comparison or self-defence. The conversation subtly becomes about the other person’s unrealised ambitions rather than the book itself.

In this sense, books can provoke ego threat. Psychologists use this term to describe situations where people feel their self-image is challenged. Research into self-esteem and defensive behaviour repeatedly shows that people often react negatively when confronted with someone who appears more accomplished in a valued area. A published book can therefore unintentionally function as a status signal. Even if the author is modest, some people interpret the act of authorship itself as arrogance.

There is also resentment toward perceived self-promotion. Modern culture encourages individuals to “build a brand” and market themselves constantly online. As a result, audiences have become cynical. When authors promote books, many people instinctively assume they are chasing attention, money, or prestige. The irony is that most books make very little money at all. Yet audiences still associate authorship with ego because books historically carried cultural authority.

Another factor is that many people privately believe they could write a book themselves. Unlike becoming a surgeon or airline pilot, writing appears accessible because everyone uses language daily. This creates a paradoxical lack of respect for the achievement. The logic becomes: “If I could do it too, why should I admire it?” In psychology this resembles the “better-than-average effect,” where individuals overestimate their own abilities relative to others.

Social media intensifies all of this. Online platforms reward short emotional reactions, humour, outrage, tribal politics, and visual stimulation. Books are slow, reflective, and long-form. They do not naturally fit the algorithms. I recently saw a celebrity with nearly a million followers attempt to promote his book online. Despite his enormous audience, posts about the book received only three or four likes. The contrast was striking. A person can attract huge engagement with casual entertainment content, yet struggle completely when asking people to invest attention in something intellectually serious or time-consuming. It revealed how weak the cultural position of books has become, even among audiences who claim to value ideas.

There is also a subtle social discomfort around ambition itself. In Britain especially, overt intellectual ambition is often treated cautiously. People are generally more comfortable with self-deprecation than with declarations of achievement. Saying “I’ve written a book” can therefore violate unspoken cultural expectations of modesty. The author may intend only to share news, but listeners can perceive it as self-importance.

None of this means books are worthless. In fact, the difficulty of gaining attention may increase their value. Books still offer something rare: sustained thought. They allow complexity, depth, and reflection in a culture increasingly dominated by speed and distraction. But commercially and socially, authors now face enormous resistance. They are not only fighting market competition and digital overload. They are also confronting deep psychological reactions linked to status, insecurity, ego, and social comparison.

Writing a book may therefore be easier than selling one. Completing the manuscript is only the beginning. The real challenge comes afterwards: persuading people not merely to buy the book, but to emotionally accept the existence of the person who wrote it.

I have written two books. Yet my most significant reach has come not from long-form work, but from short-form writing on social media, some of which has achieved viral engagement. That contrast only reinforces the central point: in the modern attention economy, brevity travels, but depth must still struggle to be seen at all.

2 Million Views.

2025-03-27T08:21:00.003+00:00

News Update: I don't post on this Blog anymore. But I've been writing political and psychology posts on Threads. My account on there, @greenday_761 has hit 2 Million views and 94 000 likes in the last 90 days. So you're welcome to come over and join the debate!

IMMIGRATION 2024 ELECTION SPECIAL!

2024-06-28T16:12:00.009+01:00

I haven't posted on this blog for several years. I've been busy on other projects, earning a living for one. Also, I have written a full-length novel, called The Adventures of James and Misty (by James Bickle), which is available to buy online. I also spent 3 year writing political articles for my local Labour Party.

I was looking back at earlier posts from this blog, where I politely but dogmatically predicted that the Conservatives being in power would end in tears. And yes, here we are in 2024, 6 days before a General election, with the country's infrastructure on its knees. And, Labour massively ahead in the polls. But how did we get into this mess, and what part has immigration got to play in it?

For any country to thrive economically, you need a mixed economy. An economy that has a healthy balance of rules and freedoms. History clearly tells us that other economic models don't work, a free-market economy has too much freedom, and too few rules, and the bad side of human nature will take advantage, your economy will become corrupt and begin to collapse, as in currently in the United Kingdom. Just the same with a centrally planned economy, your economy has too many rules, the people in power will take unfair financial advantage, the currency will be devalued and your economy will start to collapse, as in left wing dictatorships where you need a wheelbarrow full of banknotes to buy a loaf of bread.

Voters who have training in other areas, and no training in economics, instinctively - and partially correctly - blame high immigration as the cause of the collapse of the UK economy. But these voters mistakenly think that high immigration is the root cause of all the UK's economic problems. They have not studied economics to reach this conclusion, yet they angrily believe it to be true, and find themselves in the arms of far-right parties like Reform UK.

High immigration is part of the economic problem for Britain, but it's only one piece of the puzzle. And yes, Covid, Brexit and the Ukraine war haven't helped either, but they aren't the main cause of our troubles.

The main reason why the UK economy has gone wrong, is the Conservative Party 2010-2024 have a heartfelt, ideological belief that the correct place to be economically is very few rules, and many freedoms, an extreme free market economy. Yet we know from earlier, and history, that a free market economy like that is never going to work in the long term.

So the result of this 2010 to 2024 UK, overly free market economy, is over this time period, the country's wealth, slowly but surely shifted away from keeping public services going, and into the hands of private business and individuals. So of course, the result of the available money supply, moving away from things like keeping the NHS going, and maintaining the nation's roads, is these things start to collapse, as in right now. And this Conservative led, ideological move of our tax money, away from what it should be spent on, i.e the country's infrastructure, and into the hands of private individuals, is the main cause of the economic mess the UK is now in.

But then, the Conservatives, who are now responsible for collapsing public services, desperately need some new money to make the nations finances add up, to prop up the ailing public services, so they turn to allowing high immigration. Bearing in mind, immigrants are usually, young, strong and healthy, and pay much more in taxes to the government, than they take out in welfare.

So, the Conservatives are in the awkward position, of desperately needing the money high immigration creates for them. But they have to deal with the voters, who are generally against high immigration, as obviously, so many new people in the country at once puts an unbearable strain on public services. So the Conservatives have been using smoke and mirrors (the Rwanda policy) to feign that they want to bring immigration numbers right down, whilst simultaneously the Conservatives have allowed very high immigration, 700 000 legal immigrants last year for example.

So actually the cost of living crisis/partial economic collapse in Britain is primarily caused by the Conservatives foolish and mistaken ideological belief that the free market will create a successful economy. And made worse, by them using high immigration as a financial sticking plaster.

We should of course have some immigration as a country, but only the amount of new people, our small country can reasonably cope with.

Tough as life under the Conservatives has been for most of us, a lurch even further right to the Reform Party is not the answer, it could be even worse. Bearing in mind, once the far right get into power, they can soon legislate to remove democratic elections. If you think that sounds alarmist, you only have to look at what Putin has done in Russia.

Only Keir Starmer's Centrist, Labour Party, with its mixed economy policies and rescue plan for public services, will restore the normal, healthy balance of rules and freedoms required to begin to return Britain to a normally functioning country again.

That's why Labour has my vote on July 4th 2024.

James Bickle

Genuinely affordable homes.

2020-07-04T15:34:00.000+01:00

The UK is estimated to be short of 1.2 Million houses, at current building rates, it would take 15 years to deliver these new houses.

There are over 1 Million people on waiting lists for council or housing association accommodation. We need to build 340 000 homes a year to meet demand, 100 000 of which would need to be social rented homes. However the rate of social housing being built has slowed, houses that are being sold off under the ‘right to buy’ scheme are not being replaced.

Things are particularly difficult for young people, with housing costing 7.8 times average annual income, and even more in the Meon Valley area. In 1980 a starter home was £18 000 in my home town of Bishops Waltham, the median average wage in 1980 was £6000 per year. In 2020 the same starter homes go for around £300 000 each, the median average income in 2020 is £30 000 per year, that means a starter home in the area is now 10 times 1 years wages, yet the same homes were only 3 times 1 years wages in 1980.

A Conservative Party change in the rules and language that’s used to describe rent charges has had the effect of creating higher rents and less housing benefit for claimants. Prior to 2010, social rents were set at a level that took account of average local earnings, people could typically afford to pay their rent without housing benefit. But after 2010, new Council and housing association ‘affordable rents’ were set at 80% of private market rents which sounds reasonable at first hearing, but this is no good if the private housing market is not fit for purpose.

In a globalised and hyper-commercialised world, some think it is fine that everything has its price. but just because something – in this case housing - is sold at the 'market price' that doesn't mean it's fair if that market is dysfunctional. The free market has to lead an economy yes, but we know from history that leaving the free market completely unregulated can create economic catastrophe. Instead, deft regulation when and where appropriate will create a sustainable and prosperous economy.

There are 4 Million privately rented homes in the UK, whilst some of these homes are good, others have high rents and Crisis report that 1/3rd of Britain’s privately rented homes fail to meet government standards. Some private landlords are excellent, but in other cases if you complain or report repairs, you can become the victim of a revenge eviction. The housing charity Crisis are calling for 3 to 5 year minimum tenancies and rent increase limits for private renters.

On the 30^th June this year, Boris Johnson made a speech where be pledged to ‘build, build, build’ with 12Bn to build 180 000 new homes to own and rent over the next 5 years. The pledged 12Bn is not new money: Keir Starmer pointed out these pledges are "the re-announcement of many manifesto pledges and commitments, so it's not enough." and the BBC’s economics editor Faisal Islam said that there is ‘nothing really new” in the pledges.

You have to question the Conservative party’s sincerity on housing pledges, in 2014 the Tory government pledged to build 200 000 new affordable starter homes. But not one of these promised 200 000 homes was ever completed and the legislation to enact them was not even passed.

The Labour Party plan to build 1 Million genuinely affordable homes over the next 10 years. Labour also plan to ‘define new ‘affordable housing’ as linked to local income, and scrap the Conservatives’ so-called ‘affordable rent’ homes priced at up to 80% of market rates’. As well Labour plan to ‘Stop the sell-off of 50,000 social rented homes a year by suspending the right to buy, ending all conversions to ‘affordable rent’ and scrapping the Government’s plans to force councils to sell the best of their homes’ You can read more of Labour’s excellent policy proposals to end the housing crisis here.

Everyone needs a stable and affordable place to live, it’s of paramount importance for our well being and survival. What we need to do as a society is sustainably increase housing supply until it meets housing demand, which would have the effect of lowering prices so that houses are once again genuinely affordable. Once UK citizens are no longer spending an unrealistically high percentage of their income on housing costs, be that a mortgage or rent. Disposable income that could be saved or spent in the economy would then be freed up, this would stimulate economic growth and help us emerge out of the Covid-19 recession. When we all work together and with good housing policy, things can get better.

James Bickle

Do you believe in economic fairytales?

2020-01-01T16:41:00.001+00:00

Out campaigning in the Meon Valley, I noticed much frustration and not a little anger amongst voters. Most of my attempts to articulate Labour’s policy were quickly cut short with a cross ‘And crash the economy? I don’t think so’ and the voter marching off!

We live in peculiar times: experts in their fields are discredited by some politicians, whilst simple narratives are touted as the solution to complex problems.

Billionaires with dubious motives employ genius writers, who successfully convince us in popular newspapers that a square is really a circle.

But what’s the truth here? What do the facts say? Is the Labour Party really economically dangerous?

To quickly clarify key economic terms, Public Sector Net Debt (PSND) is the total amount of debt we owe in the UK. Public Sector Net Borrowing (PSNB) or the Current Budget Deficit is the total amount the government has borrowed in a year. Comparing these debt measures to a percentage of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is also useful, as it shows how much debt we owe compared to the size of the UK economy. Annual Tax Receipts is the total government income in one year.

In the chart above, we can see in the first four years of the Tony Blair government 97-01, Labour ran a PSNB/Current Budget surplus and in the next six years, Labour ran a small Current Budget deficit, which was mainly used for infrastructure investment. The Current Budget deficit was high for a long time after the Conservatives gained power in 2010, but did eventually reduce as the national and global economy recovered.

Labour were doing great with the economy until the global financial crisis or Great Recession of 2008 hit. This worldwide financial crisis originated in the United States – financiers were collecting up bad mortgage debts and repackaging the bad debt into ‘new and innovative financial products’ – in other words, mis-selling bad debt as good debt. Once stock markets realised what had been going on, they crashed worldwide as they readjusted to compensate for the bad data.

The Great Recession of 2008 wasn’t created by The Labour Party as the Conservatives falsely claim: in fact most economists agree Deficit spending (as Gordon Brown did during 2008/9) stimulates the economy and overall costs the economy less. In a recession, you have to borrow money (deficit spending) to artificially prop up the economy until it is strong enough to stand on its own two feet again.

History has proven that this fiscal stimulus strategy in a recession overall saves money and prevents a recession turning into a 1930’s US style depression – the Great Depression being an example of when no such strategy was initially used. Eventually, deficit spending was used in the US great depression and this was what finally led the US out of it. Gordon Brown was the first to adopt this deficit spending strategy upon the outbreak of the 2008 global financial crisis, leading others to say that Gordon Brown had 'saved the world'.

So, what is our total PSND and how has it risen in recent times? The UK National Debt is currently 1.8 Trillion Pounds and has more than doubled since 2010 when the Conservatives took power; it doesn’t seem fair to blame Labour for this huge increase in our national debt, when it is ten years since Labour were in government.

Labour’s 2019 election manifesto spending plans would have only meant spending a similar amount of money per year as Germany and France, both of which have very successful economies. These spending plans were hardly an existential Marxist threat to us – that idea is absurd!

The current Conservative government is captured by the idea of heavy deregulation, with its mistaken belief that the wealth created will trickle down to all of us and provide for all. Yet in any economic system, too little regulation is equally as reckless as too much – the same rules apply with government spending.

Our ever enlarging national debt may be caused by the UK productivity gap – we are less productive per person in the UK when compared with similar countries. Britain needs a new economic vision, wage rises need to be supported by genuine sustainable economic growth, not asset bubbles that will eventually burst.

James Bickle

Sticks of Dynamite

2019-04-04T12:54:00.002+01:00

Regards the current Brexit impasse, I don't believe a second referendum is the way through it.

People calling for a second referendum say the will of the people has changed, which is actually a valid point. Also you could defuse criticism should remain win by saying, hang on, it's the will of the people because they have now voted remain. As well, you can reasonably argue that it would not be a second referendum - as in the same as the first - it would be a confirmatory referendum, in other words a different referendum with the choices being the agreed Brexit deal or Remain. One more strong point to justify a second referendum would be that democracy is a constantly evolving thing, in a democracy it's normal to have votes and re votes, what's the problem?

These are all good reasons to make a case for a second referendum, however they are outweighed by the case not to. I'm a remainer, but the leave camp do have the moral high ground here. They won the vote to leave two and half years ago and they want politicians to see that through. If there was a confirmatory referendum and Remain won, which seems likely looking at the polls. The Leave camp would be utterly furious for years, they would use the 24/7 news media and social media to endlessly stir up political dissent and potentially civil disobedience. I'm not saying we should be afraid of the Leavers, but bear in mind they are usually rather hard edged uncompromising people. Control and power for it's own sake are repetitious themes clearly apparent in the subtext of the leavers mind.

So in the scenario where we have had a second referendum and Remain wins by say 8%, the Leavers will be utterly incensed with anger, they will never stop agitating for what they want, the anger and hatred the leavers will feel because of the perceived betrayal will metastasize like a particularly nasty and virulent cancer and will be very damaging for democracy and the social cohesion of the United Kingdom. Imagine how hard right geniuses, Farage and Rees-Mogg will easily exploit the frustration and anger of the Leavers. A second referendum will be playing into the hands of the Hard Right in the UK. Also, there is a chance Remain could lose a second referendum and what will that achieve.

Instead, the way out of this Brexit mess is a soft Brexit, this would be a useful compromise which makes concessions to all sides, even the hard liners. With a soft Brexit we would leave the single market, so 'unlimited' immigration from the EU, to the UK would immediately stop. With a soft Brexit, the EU courts would have no longer have jurisdiction over us in the UK. With a soft Brexit we would only be in a Customs Union, which is only a free trade agreement between the UK and the EU. The case, made by the Brexit hard liners such as the ERG that a Customs Union is an awful thing doesn't compute. If we remain in a Customs Union with the EU all the trade deals we need in the UK are already helpfully negotiated with good deals. Don't forget, the EU Customs Unions trade deals were negotiated using all the soft power the EU has from being a trading bloc which makes up nearly 20% of world GDP and 28 countries; that's a hell of lot of negotiating leverage that if we become completely independent, with the resulting huge loss of 'soft power', we are unlikely to be able to match, we are highly unlikely to be able to better negotiate better trade deals outside of the Customs Union, than we have already, from being inside the EU. This is not being pessimistic, it's just being honest and pragmatic with the facts at hand. A long Brexit extension is suggested, but the current Brexit uncertainty is causing us in the UK to lose millions of pounds per day, a long extension would just make this worse. Rather it's time for us to all gather round a soft Brexit.

There is a time when we could have a second referendum on going back into the European Union: after a ten year gap since the original referendum, this feels like an appropriate length of time. After ten years the case could be justifiably made 'well a decade has passed since the first referendum. But 2.5 years is just handing metaphoric sticks of dynamite to the Leavers...

James Bickle

Mission creep & the new evangelicals.

2018-09-18T20:07:00.002+01:00

Part 1

In the early 1990s in the United Kingdom - and other countries - an evangelical branch of the charismatic Christian Church became increasingly popular (their official title is 'The British New Church Movement (BNCM) but let's call them 'new evangelicals'). The dedicated new members of this new wave of the church would club together financially, old cinemas and bingo halls in high streets were purchased and turned into large churches. The new evangelical movement was exciting, people were attracted to this same newness, soon, the new charismatic churches had more members than the traditional local Catholic and Church of England churches they were kind of competing against.

Why was this new church movement so popular is an important question. Well first is the 'newness' I've already mentioned, we all love something that's new, I mean maybe it's better than what's before right? We can think if we don't get involved in the new thing we will be missing out on something great.

But there was an even greater selling point that attracted new churchgoers in the hundreds of thousands to the new churches - the promise of much greater freedom than the Church of England, and the Catholic Church . We can fairly describe the Church Of England and the Catholic Church as the theological centre ground of the 'Church', but the new evangelicals were to the left of these two denominations.

In the early 1990s I was a member of the new evangelical movement, it was a pretty left wing business. People talked about new evangelicals in Africa who had 'raised the dead' in the same way as described in the Bible, there was much talk about 'spiritual gifts' and using them. A spiritual gift could be say a prophetic seer who might speak out loudly a supernatural 'word of knowledge' in the church meeting. There was prayer for healing in services, the tone of the church services was kind of 'open' - people were allowed to interrupt with say an urgent prayer request or spoke in 'tongues'.

By the way for the avoidance of doubt, I do believe in the spiritual gifts I cite, except perhaps possibly the 'tongues' thing which I suspect is a misinterpretation of the Bible. But in general, of course the Holy Spirit can heal people through Christians prayers, or inspire someone to say a word of knowledge.

However, the point is, the new evangelicals were 'left wing', official meetings ran on into unofficial meetings in people's houses. A rich local member would say open his house for a fun weekend, with bbq provided etc. So there were good reasons why people were attracted to join the new evangelicals, they were fun and open minded.

The new evangelicals hard sold their credentials of being more open than the Church of England. There was also, almost always, the idea circulated either directly or indirectly that the Catholics and Church of England were theologically gravely mistaken - in the sense that the new evangelicals claimed the other two large church groups ignored the spiritual gifts in their theology; (actually they didn't ignore them, it's just the new evangelicals had more emphasis on the spiritual gifts). It was almost as if the new evangelicals claimed to have a kind of monopoly on God and his supernatural power (really it was as much as I describe!)

So I've set the scene, a dynamic, exciting and spiritually edgy new church movement attracting hundreds of thousands of new followers. What could go wrong you say? Well I will tell you in...

Part 2

Since the 1990s the new evangelicals have gradually crept from the theological left, past the theological centre and well into the the theological right wing. How and why has this happened you ask? Well despite all that was good about the new evangelicals in the early 1990s, there was a major design flaw in their church model which was an absence of 'checks and balances'. Every organisation that is long term successful in our world has checks and balances, a Church of England vicar who becomes off the rails can be overruled by his Bishop, or perhaps suspended or dismissed by the regional leaders. In non Christian circles, a CEO of a large business who does foolish things can be voted out by the check and balance mechanism of the shareholders.

People will naturally do lots of good things and works of course. But the reason we need the check and balance mechanisms is because of the biblical 'sinful nature' - in the sense that all people, even Christian converts will have a natural propensity for wrongdoing, Non Christians might just say well 'people can be bad' but even the non Christians still acknowledge that you need some kind of systemic bulwarks to protect against people 'being bad', the courts and a legal system are some obvious bulwarks. The Christian is meant to be aware of the outworking of the 'sinful nature' however and at least do his or her best to stop it in it's tracks.

Some of the manifestations of the 'sinful nature' that have become a problem in the new evangelical church are problem power and control issues. Here's an example, let's say a Church Member disagrees with a leaders teaching or judgement on an issue, genuine disagreement is legitimate right? It's awkward yes, but the different view should be at least listened to and acknowledged. However there are reports coming in from some new evangelical churches that anyone who disagrees with a leaders judgement is ostracized, stripped of their 'serving duties' which means for example the voluntary official positions they have in their church. And then that the member who disagreed with the leaders judgement is shall we say 'encouraged' to leave by subtle methods.

The bad behaviour that the leaders are demonstrating when people do as little as disagree with them is rooted in the sinful nature. The bad side of pride says 'I AM' and no one disagrees with my utterances and direction. The leaders have been allowed to do this bad behaviour as there is no official check and balance mechanisms in the new evangelical movement. Higher up leadership teams that oversee a whole region don't exist, or if new evangelical churches are affiliated with a bigger church group, it's a bigger church group that doesn't have any real power to discipline the smaller group.

I have heard that now in the 2010's the words of knowledge in the church meetings are in places no longer allowed to be freely spoken out loud in the church meetings. All requests to speak out loud in the church must be cleared through the church leadership pre meeting, many requests may be refused if they don't totally align themselves with the leaders views. Obviously you can't have someone who's saying disturbing things just shouting out in the church meetings, but assuming the majority of time the things the members want to say outloud are in the realm of normality, they are still blocked and refused to talk if the words are not 'on message'. The openness in the church meetings of the early 1990s has now gone, in fact the church meetings are now controlling in an unhealthy sense.

I have also heard that the 2010s new evangelicals can be very controlling about romantic relationships. Kind of like certain couplings are discouraged unless the Pastor or leaders approve, and often the Pastor may disapprove of a new relationship, because the Pastor may prefer the woman in question to look to himself for strength and guidance, I'm not saying the Pastor is actually sleeping with the woman. But the Pastor is getting a kick out of the women looking to him and not another man. Actually like a kind of unofficial harem if you will! It goes without saying that blocking the normal flow of developing relationships and controlling and coveting women, or indeed men to look only to you, even in a platonic sense is an outworking of the sinful nature.

Of course, the problems I describe aren't going on in all churches, but I've heard enough anecdotal reports to realise that a pattern of problem behaviour has emerged. Ironically, the new evangelical church is now much more to the right theologically than the theological Centrists they originally decried as theologically uptight and closed minded. The new evangelical church has lost the freedom that originally was its best selling point.

The Wikipedia article about the 'British New Church Movement' (the official name for what I call 'new evangelicals') verifies what I have already seen myself with this quote "Due to the emphasis of the movement on relational church structures, and an emphasis on local autonomy, the movement does not have an overarching authority or figurehead. The various networks retain differing levels of association with one another."

But to be positive, how can this mission creep of the new evangelicals be stopped and fixed? It's in fact very simple, the new evangelical churches must all join together into one large theologically Centrist church organisation, they must vote in Bishops, have an appeal process for members which is independent and above of any one local church. They must get themselves checks and balances to survive. But without these check and balance mechanisms the new evangelical movement will eventually fail.

Who am I with these days personally? The Church Of England...

James Bickle

Interesting Developments

2017-03-20T12:01:00.000+00:00

There is a lot of speculation about Theresa May calling a general election. But a general election now could in the long term help Labour: Theresa May gets returned with about 80 seats say; Corbyn goes and Labour regroup under a different leader and position themselves ready to take 2022. Versus Labour losing by about 25 seats if the next election were not until 2020 and then Labour not being able to take power until 2025.

Also Nicola Sturgeon is again banging the drum of independance for Scotland. But Scotland have just the same fair say about UK matters as England and Wales. Scotland have a valuable batch of SNP MP's in Westminster, helping shape legislation in London that affects their lives in Scotland. They also have extra devolved powers that we don't in England via their Scottish parliament + they have their own Scottish councils + the Scots have extra central government financing (the dividend) that the rest of the UK don't.

So in short, Scotland already get their fair say so what is their motive for let's be honest obsessing about independance (at least in the SNP) - well I think there are 2 possible motives.

1) Power: Let's be honest human beings can crave power for both natural and unnatural reasons to use Star Wars terminology. If Scotland gain independance we have King Salmond of Edinburgh and Queen Sturgeon of Glasgow - and which one of us would not want to be a King or Queen? I don't mean literally King and Queen by the way, I'm just illustrating they will be at the very top of the power ladder if they gain independance.

2) Frustration with Westminster: Quite understandably Nicola Sturgeon and co are deeply frustrated that Westminster is not managing things better. For example, a shocking housing crisis, unfair reductions in employment rights, a NHS creaking under the strain where you often have to become a makeshift Doctor yourself, joining the dots to ensure you get the right treatment. Sturgeon perhaps quite correctly thinks she could run Scotland better herself.

BUT......

We need the Scots help, they are clever and determined: look at those SNP MP's justifiably putting a great deal of pressure on Theresa May and co. Mhairi Black for example, an excellent speaker who is helping keep us in the healthy centre ground with her articulate speeches in parliament. If we lose Scotland, we lose a valuable check and balance mechanism in their Scottish MP's who are helping keep parliament on a moderate course.

Also, safety in numbers - we are a small country who already punches above it's weight on the world stage. If we lose Scotland we are just psychologically going to appear weaker and smaller to the rest of the world. Looking and being weaker as a country won't help us negotiate the things we need on the world stage.

We do still have a democracy in the UK - so if Scotland are concerned that it's not going right, why not stay in the democratic club and try and work towards fixing it. If Scotland gain independence, things might go the left wing way the SNP want for a time. But then the Scottish right will gain power or the centre etc - as the political system always goes in cycles. An independent Scotland will still have to have the same political battles, independance is no guarantee of a better time for Scotland.

So, I reason we are better together - we need the Scottish on board with this UK of ours and maybe they need us as well.

James Bickle

Jack Monroe versus Katie Hopkins

2017-03-10T22:24:00.001+00:00

I was so pleased to see Jack Monroe win her libel case against Katie Hopkins today: I understand people should be able to talk about difficult issues without fear of reprisal but Katie Hopkins has repeatedly said outrageous things and seemed to just keep getting away with it.

I thought Monroe's win was significant in a wider societal context because both women are powerful and prominent in our society at the moment, Monroe represents good and you guessed it Hopkins represents bad.

Under the Cameron government, Katie Hopkins often supported Camerons crueller policies, indeed Hopkins wanted Cameron to go much further than he did.

Under the Cameron government, Jack Monroe often criticised Camerons crueller policies and wanted Cameron to repeal them.

So this may have been a libel case about some awful tweets on one level, but in a wider context it was a Star Wars like power struggle of good versus bad in our society - and it was nice to see good triumph.

I would like to end this post on the word 'triumph', but as ever I have to avoid doubt. I am not saying Katie Hopkins is all bad, Katie Hopkins has lots of good in her I'm sure, I'm just saying that some of the things Katie Hopkins has said are bad.

James Bickle

Send Form Data PHP (Mysql) Using Http Post

2017-02-10T14:44:00.002+00:00

Often on this blog, I tend to write a little post about politics in my spare time; but my day job is Computer Technician and/or Web Developer. I recently had to write a program to send form data into a SQL database using the HTTP post function. The information to write this program was all out there, but it was all scattered around in bits and pieces and not always very clear. So in the interests of the open source/share information mind set, I'm going to post the information and program I made below with comments:

Before you start.

You will need a server (your own computer can be the server running XAMMP) running XAMMP (enable/start Apache and Mysql in XAMMP once installed) if you're going to develop this locally on your computer; or if you want to develop it live on the web, you will need a web host which has PHP and MySql installed and activated. Once you have Mysql running, you will need to create a database called form and within that database a table called form; the form table needs to have rows created ready to collect firstName, lastName and email data. To run this program you need to type
http://localhost/form.php (that address assumes you have the files saved in xammp htdocs folder) into the web browser with apache and mysql running if you are using the program locally, if you are running it on a web server you will need to type in the address for your files on the server.

Part 1 The Html Code form.php

The code below is simple Html to create a form with 3 fields, firstName, lastName and email. When you have filled in the data and click 'submit' you trigger the <form action="send.php"> function. This triggers the send.php program which I will talk about below. It's important to understand the method="post" piece of code too, all that means is that the form data is being sent to the send.php program via the HTTP POST method, in other words the web browser is handling moving the form data you have typed in, over to the send.php program. If you wanted to, you could style the form so it's more attractive using CSS. Save the html as form.php.

<html>
<body>

<form action="send.php" method="post">
First name: <input type="text" name="firstName"><br><br>
Last name: <input type="text" name="lastName"><br><br>
E-mail: <input type="text" name="email"><br><br>
<input type="submit">
</form>

</body>
</html>

Part 2 send.php Code.

<?php
//Put login info into variables for security reasons
$host = "localhost";
$username = "root";
$password = "";
$dbname = "form";

// Create connection
$conn = new mysqli($host, $username, $password, $dbname);

// Check connection
if ($conn->connect_error) {
die("Connection failed: " . $conn->connect_error);
}

// escape variables for security
$firstName = mysqli_real_escape_string($conn, $_POST['firstName']);
$lastName = mysqli_real_escape_string($conn, $_POST['lastName']);
$email = mysqli_real_escape_string($conn, $_POST['email']);

// Insert data in SQL Table
$sql = "INSERT INTO form (firstName, lastName, email)
VALUES ('$firstName', '$lastName', '$email')";

// Report if data transfer successful or error
if ($conn->query($sql) === TRUE) {
echo "New record created successfully";
} else {
echo "Error: " . $sql . "<br>" . $conn->error;
}

// Close connection to database
$conn->close();

?>

send.php above collects the form data from http post, escapes any escape characters for security such as ' or / or null and then inserts the data into your sql table. The login info in send.php is configured to work with a local installation of XAMMP on the default settings. So you may need to put in different settings for your own XAMMP install or web server. send.php is commented so I won't explain any further, except to say if you want to test if your mysqli_real_escape function is working or not, try removing the mysqli_real_escape code from send.php and then run the program and try submitting escape characters such as ' - the program should fail and give an error message.

Now put the mysqli_real_escape code back into send.php, fill in the form data again with escape characters, eg put Jame's in first name and then click submit. The program will report back "New record created successfully" if your program is correctly escaping data. You should now have a working function to collect and save form data to a mysql database...

James Bickle

Grandad Trump

2017-02-04T13:39:00.001+00:00

I've been watching President Trump's first couple of weeks and I have to say things are going along the lines I predicted could happen in previous articles, namely that the rest of the US establishment will revoke anything unwise that Trump attempts to get into law, either by his Executive power or by Statute.

Of course the big story overnight is that Federal Judge Robart put a halt on Trump's 'immigration ban' Executive order. Judge Robart's ruling could eventually be overturned by the US Supreme court, where I think the weighting is 3 Republican Supreme Court Judges versus 2 Democrat Judges. Even if it is overturned, the very fact that a Federal Judge even temporarily overturned Trump's original executive order, devalues President Trumps Executive power, his reputation and the Office of the President. Not good things when you consider the US President is usually viewed as the leader of the free world; it's important for us in the UK to have a good US President, not a bad one...

I don't automatically oppose everything President Trump does, for instance I am anti-abortion so the fact the President has a strong line against that is good; the fact that the President recognises the danger of too much Globalisation is detrimental to a nation states economy is worthwhile.

But to me the 'self interest only' based line Mr Trump takes in all policy is tantamount to making decisions, without really considering all the variables involved. I mean, traditionally those who want to work in politics study the academic disciplines of Politics, Economics AND PHILOSOPHY - just like my Grandad did at Oxford University by the way. For those who may not be totally in the know, the philosophy component part is about the moral rights and wrongs of any proposed policy.

If you don't consider the philosophy or jurisprudence of your proposed law (or Executive order in this case) very carefully someone will most likely eventually overturn it. A wise politician considers the philosophy of his legislation very carefully, making sure to balance the interests of all actors as fairly as possible; something which didn't happen with Trumps immigration ban order. For example when under Trumps new immigration ban executive order US residents who already had 'green cards' which mean they have US citizenship already in place were stopped from re-entering the US, their legal home. The fact that someone is suddenly banned from living in their own country when they already have a legal right to stay permanently is clearly ridiculous and outrageously unfair, you can er bet your bottom dollar that a Judge will overturn it; or at least that it will cause a public outcry that will heap diplomatic pressure on the President and society in general to do something about it.

The Trump Presidency, at least so far, feels like somehow the top banana, the cool guy down your local pub, who likes to set the world to rights after a few pints has managed to blag his way into the Presidency. This top banana always thought 'he or she could do better than those dumb politicians' if only THEY were President. But when the reality of the sheer complexity and difficulty of being President hits home, our top banana really struggles and it becomes apparent they are 'punching above their weight'. Which I think is the case so far with Donald Trump, however Mr Trump is by no means stupid innately, he should do some fast track study on modern politics asap so to avoid future errors.

There's a reason why politicians have to measure their words, it's because EVERYTHING they say has an impact, the good politician is careful what he or she says, to minimise any negativity from each act. I think Trump's politically incorrect, say whatever comes into your head style may be much more suited to campaigning rather than being in office where unfortunately it ends up looking rather ridiculous.

In the photo, here is an example of what Donald Trump said at a recent prayer breakfast as compared to what Barack Obama said one year earlier at the same prayer breakfast. It's things like below and ill thought out Executive orders that devalue the office of the Presidency.

We are all human and I understand why Trump may think about 'ratings'; I mean hell anytime when my Blog has a number surge I screen capture the stats and post them on my twitter account. But rambling about TV ratings when your President just isn't appropriate.

Obviously I don't support the more unpleasant things that Donald Trump says or does; but I do think there's another side to Trump that campaigned for President because he genuinely wants to help for good, for altruistic reasons. A big reason Trump gets so angry at the press is because they often just suggest he is a deranged narcissist in it for self-aggrandisement, without recognising the part of Trump's personality that genuinely wants to give something back to society and help the poor 'rust belt' people of America. Believe it or not, I think there is a 'kindly Grandad' side to Donald Trump's personality that wants to give something back and er share his wisdom.

Well Grandad Trump, you blagged your way into this, but now this is 'important business', just like you said on election night. This is not reality TV anymore. It's time Mr President to step up to the challenge, this is not buying and selling hotels any longer, this is way way more of a bigger deal. Each new law has to be carefully thought out, then left for a day or two and revisited and double and treble checked before being published.

We all know that ratings are very important to Donald Trump, at the moment Trump's Presidential ratings are not looking great, but I think Trump has the potential to turn this around, so come on Mr President.

Raise your game.

James Bickle.

Power *** !

2017-01-16T21:08:00.003+00:00

I was watching BBC News this morning and I witnessed Michael Gove being nothing but completely positive about Donald Trump. I speculated in my mind that Gove's behaviour was about power; I don't know what his motives are of course in reality, I can only guess. Gove lost power when he was forced to withdraw from the Prime Ministerial race and yet more power when Theresa May promptly sacked him when she became Prime Minister, so it seems plausable to suggest the Trump cheerleading could be about Gove trying to gain power from Trump.

So then this got me thinking about the concept of power itself, power usually has negative connotations doesn't it. 'He or she is power mad' etc - but in actual fact, wanting power is a positive and healthy thing; as long as you don't break rules of honesty and decency to get there.

Of course, some people break the rules to become big and powerful, in that case the power the person gained is not impressive, as any power gained via a nefarious route doesn't count, in fact the power gained in this scenario is worse than being a poor and powerless person who has no power at all.

I think every human being is always trying to gain power, it's normal, you notice it every day in your interaction with your fellow human. It's good to be competitive, to try to gain power if it's pursued for the right reasons with good moral's; but if someone finds themselves lying or cheating to gain power, then it's time to take a step back. As the fact the human being has an advanced personality that can over rule and regulate our primal instinct for power is what distinguishes us from animals.

As I thought about power today, I was reminded of a place I worked as a young man, a timber mill. I worked on the wood machining section, a skilled job which was valued by the mill owners. There was one man, ('John' we will call him ) who was the top wood machinist, he was experienced and the Mill ownership valued him, I think he got an extra pound an hour than the other machinists kind of thing.

But interestingly, John would spend literally every tea break defaming the Timber Mill bosses. One director, he alleged, had bought the company 'to it's knees' and was demoted to be Director in charge of transport kind of thing. The main company director, according to John was apparently a foolish and greedy workaholic, cutting corners etc in pursuit of ever more money. Even though John's criticism of the bosses was unfair and inaccurate, I have to say it was entertaining and John was clever. In the tea room we all listened in; myself being a naive young man at the time, kind of half believed John's criticism was correct too.

When I look back, the same Timber Mill bosses were kindly Christians + fair bossses, investing in new machinery etc and sending the finance director round every year to tell you about your pay rise, in other words they were very good bosses and I noticed that this Timber Mill is a much bigger business than it's early days when I worked there.

But from a psychology point of view, the interesting question is, what drove John to invest so much time and energy into defaming his bosses? I can again only speculate of course, but I think it was about power, jealousy of the bosses having power that John didn't to be exact. John was top dog on the shop floor, the best paid practical worker, but of course the senior management in the office were better paid and had more status than John, In the natural human desire to gain power, a senior management role was John's only logical next step to gain more power, after all he was 'King' of the shop floor already.

An older person can learn new things of course, but John was getting near to retirement age and seemed set in his ways and I would think the jump to senior management would have been hard for him, computers and a lot new to learn etc. I think John thought he couldn't manage, or at least didn't want to take on the senior managers job even if he was offered it, John couldn't get the power he craved from a promotion. So instead of self-regulating and accepting his predicament; which was the right thing to do of course, John went workplace terrorist so to speak and spent every single break time defaming the bosses. John would also call them 'pen pushers' in an attempt to undermine and devalue their work. If you think about all this running down of the bosses - to us the captive tea break audience, John was convincing us and himself that in fact he was more powerful and better than senior management, even if that wasn't true. It's not for me to diagnose as I have no qualifications in this area, but perhaps a psychiatrist would confirm John had become a neurotic in this area of his life. John was subconsciously upset and frustrated that he couldn't get up to the next power level, and in defaming the bosses John was papering over the cracks of the problem, without really getting to the bottom of it all.

I didn't understand why John did this defaming at the time, it was only later on after I had studied psychoanalysis that I started to gain some insight. This John defaming shtick was a bit of a storm in a teacup really, I think another side of John quite liked the bosses and I think the bosses quite liked John, maybe the older managers understood and over looked John's neurotic behaviour for the greater good.

Anyway, I just thought that was an interesting example to discuss power and the healthy and unhealthy side of it. Let's end on a positive note, power is a good thing, it's normal and right to pursue it, as long as you don't break the 'rules'!

James Bickle

Changing News

2017-01-11T19:32:00.002+00:00

I was reading a newspaper article (online!) and was surprised to read that Twitter is losing serious money, YouTube is just about breaking even and the only site that makes any money out of the three is Facebook.

I already knew the Guardian newspaper website is losing big money also so this got me wondering: can newspapers survive in an internet age? and if so how...

The thing is, obviously before the internet, paper print newspapers were always going to get bought. People want to know what the news is and didn't always want to listen to radio or television so they brought print newspapers, to read on the train to work etc.

Once the internet came on, people could freely exchange newspaper articles at no cost over the www or via email. The big names newspapers quickly jumped on the internet bandwagon and lots published their newspapers free hoping adverts would fund their online sites. But it's now become clear that although adverts will provide some significant revenue for online newspapers, it's not enough to pay the bills.

So then some newspapers sites introduced paywalls or subscriptions or you can't get access to their sites. This seems to have worked in part, but not enough and for example the dreaded Sun newspaper introduced a paywall and then removed it as it wasn't working out financially.

The bottom line as far as I can work out is, and yes this sounds bleak but also I think it's true. Online newspapers are never going to make a profit with just news alone as internet users can easily share news stories at no financial cost on their Facebook etc and other news organisations will subsidise their news and deliver it free for various reasons.

So having very few news sources in the near future is a concern clearly, as we need a vibrant and free press etc in society for lot's of good reasons.

However, I thought of one way online newspapers can survive (others have bound to have thought of this too I know) and that is to make their news websites not just news, but if you sign up for say a newspaper subscription you get other services also, like say holiday insurance, car insurance and say vehicle breakdown cover. So the other services like the insurance run at a profit, the same profit that pays and subsidises the loss making news side of the same business. The 'free' news that the customer gets when they buy say The Guardian breakdown recovery is the value addedness (I made that word up by the way 'addedness' but let's leave it in!) that the customer gets from buying Guardian breakdown recovery as opposed to AA recovery. Also the Google type adverts on the Guardian site will pay for some of the journalism to be produced, just not all as mentioned earlier.

The above is just one idea, that might work; but the bottom line is here, online news providers have to accept free advert supported news is virtually never going to make a profit, so they need to brainstorm with ideas very quickly or their businesses are going to fail just as quickly.

I hear that the Guardian, well aware it is losing money fast, is currently trialing a range of ideas, such as the one I suggested and other ideas too, then I guess they are planning to drop the ones that don't work and run with the ideas that do work. As this new market is fairly unknown territory, the Guardian's plan seems very smart, pioneering even and I have my fingers crossed for the Guardians survival in the future.

James Bickle

The Primrose Path

2016-11-15T17:28:00.000+00:00

The world is changing fast and the chief causes are Globalisation and Neoliberalism which are two words to describe the same issue of overly unregulated markets.

Voters in America, made poor by Globalisation have opted to vote for Donald Trump, a man with no experience for the job of being President.

Voters in the United Kingdom, made poor by Globalisation have opted to vote to leave the European Union.

Both these events will cause brutal economic results in the short to medium term, we have already seen the pound lose 15% of it's value since the referendum result; this is just since the referendum, let alone what might happen after Brexit actually comes into being. Remember the pound is the main way other countries value us as a nation state on international markets. Post referendum food prices are higher, banks are pulling out of London, which is the biggest financial centre in the world.

I don't want to cause alarm, my view is the UK economy will eventually recover and be stable after Brexit. But I voted remain, as I felt a better strategy was to put pressure on the EU to reform, yet stay in. My remain in a reformed EU plan was all too long winded for the Brexit voters; understandably they had had enough, not enough jobs, not enough affordable housing. I'm pro immigration, but we had too much immigration too fast; these Brexit voters just pulled the plug; with scant regard for the economic fall out, they just didn't care anymore. And for similar reasons voters have just pulled the plug in the US, voting in Trump.

Voters, frustrated by the lowering in their living standards created by hyper-globalisation are turning to the other extreme, a perspective Skeptical of Globalisation. But the Skeptical perspective, with it's closing of borders, high tariffs on incoming goods from other countries won't work either. The only way you could make a Skeptical approach work is to completely shut all borders and make your country an 100% independent self sufficient nation state; this is clearly impossible in an interconnected world, with the internet and cheap freight of goods etc.

People naturally opt to buy the good or service they want at the cheapest price point. If you try and build a wall to stop this happening, people can sail around the wall, dig a tunnel, or fly over it. One wall won't stop humans getting to the best deal they can.

As ever, we need to strike a middle ground here; the Transformationalist perspective acknowledges the unstoppable phenomenon of an interconnected globalised world. But Transformationalism seeks to mitigate Globalisms worst excesses. For example if China is currently flooding world markets with cheap steel, whereby the steel's cheap price is putting UK steel factories out of business; we temporarily put a tariff on China's steel imports to us, I mean just the steel, not introduce a tariff on all products from China as President-elect Trump suggests. The tariff could be lifted when Chinese steel returns to a more normal price on the market. Transformationalists cunningly interfere with and regulate the free market here and there, when it's appropriate.

My view is America and the UK need to give up their false hope that the Skeptical of Globalisation approach, i.e Ukip/Trump type stuff will provide answers, because it won't. Even if you managed to feed and clothe and house everyone in a completely closed border nation state, that same nation state would be pretty weird and isolated from the rest of the world.

We need to engage with the rest of the world, but also we need to drop the false belief that entirely free markets with little or no regulation will somehow provide good for everyone. The growing economic problems since 1979, which was when Reagan and Thatcher started this Neoliberalism project that we are still suffering from, has proved that they won't.

Let's become Transformationalists and lobby our mainstream/centre leaders to adopt this approach too. Let's engage with politics today and tomorrow so that people, who haven't the time to do a big study on politics are no longer taken in by and pushed into the arms of demagogues like Mr Trump and Mr Farage. The Skeptical alt-right won't save us; they are too far along the other way.

Prime Minister Theresa May, who since becoming PM has shown signs of being somewhat better than David Cameron, gave an interesting speech where interestingly she talked about some similar issues that I describe here. Mrs May warned that government's must heed people's concerns about the impact of globalisation on jobs and communities' and talked about a fast changing world. I only just first got to read Mrs May's speech after already completing 95% of this post, so I was interested to find out we have some similar ideas. Although if Mrs May truly wants to get to the centre political ground, she still has some left travelling to do.

Let's not be tempted by escapism, the allure of drifting through life on the primrose path; the allure of the Trump's and Farage's who make us temporarily feel good with their entertaining speeches; but who don't have any real answers; in fact these men have ideas that could make our lives worse.

We need our politicians to give up their blind faith in Neoliberalism; and become converts to the idea that if we are to thrive well in this fast changing world, we all need to become Transformationalists.

James Bickle

Everything In Moderation

2016-11-10T09:00:00.003+00:00

I'm just going to make a few brief comments about the US election result; as I watched the 6 o clock BBC News last night and I saw the BBC economics editor Kamal Ahmed doing a great job of keeping a straight face as he talked about Trump's policy pledges of a 12 Metre wall and 45% tariffs on the Chinese, I think the most important point occurred to me, which is:

Will Trump carry through his more bizarre election policy pledges or will he moderate?

Any right minded person who listened to Trump's more extreme pledges during his campaign was rightly horrified, however were the extreme pledges a strategy of empty promises to target a certain voter demographic, which apparently was middle aged to older men; or did he really mean them?

Later in the same news bulletin, Wall Street stock traders came on and this was the primary question they were interested in too.

Ok so scenario A is that Trump moderates and reneges on a lot of his more extreme pledges; this would be good of course for the US. The obvious disadvantage for Trump in moderating is that the people who voted him in would be furious and never vote him in again. If Trump's Presidency bid was more about a personal victory lap before retirement as opposed to driven by a genuine desire to see massive political change, I think we will see Trump moderate. My hope is that this is indeed about a victory lap as the alternative is more difficult.

Er OK, so scenario B is Trump carries through, or more accurately attempts to carry though everything he pledged in the run up to winning the Presidency.

If Trump succeeded in putting in place all his more extreme pledges, this would cause massive economic and social upheaval for the United States, it would be bad, things might eventually resettle with a Trump economic plan, but in the mean time you would get huge recession if not a 1930's style Great Depression.

However, fortunately there's no need to panic about this notion of Trump carrying through his worst ideas. The US moderate people have an Ace card up their sleeves which is this; a US President is in no way all powerful, any proposed legislation has to be approved by the Senate and Congress or else it won't get through. Even Presidential Executive powers, are subject to judicial review and interpretation. What I'm getting at is if Trump tries to introduce any crazy ideas, his own party, the Republicans who are in control of the Senate and Congress will block him getting the stuff through, if Trump attempts to use his Executive powers to railroad through any daft legislation, the Supreme Court judiciary will block him.

Remember, the largest majority of Republican Senators and Congressmen are left of Trump, and these same Senators and Congressman want to get re-elected next time, they won't rubber stamp through anything that will cause their electorate great harm. The American establishment is powerful and has a history of blocking anything they don't like.

If you need any more convincing, think about how the rest of the UK establishment, blocked a good many of David Cameron's and George Osborne's more extreme ideas; and how cleverly and subtly the UK establishment blocked too...

I'm not saying a Trump Presidency won't be difficult, for example, repealing the affordable health care act, that will go through. There are some tough things that Trump will want to do that the Republican Senators and Congressmen will agree to pass through into law. I'm just saying I think it's unlikely Republicans will allow anything extreme through into law, even if Trump wants to.

James Bickle

Uncomfortably Rich.

2016-10-15T17:32:00.005+01:00

I've been thinking about what Donald Trump's policies would mean for the US economy if enacted. I've been researching from different sources to make sure I gained a well rounded view of his business activities and it was eye opening to say the least. The reason I was so curious about his business dealings is that the main case Trump makes to US voters is 'look I made lots of money in business, I'm great, I'm clever; and here's the key point:

Trump main point to voters is, 'I will take the same techniques that I've used to get rich in business and apply them to running the country, and then America will be great again'.

But what are these Trump techniques, have Trump's business activities helped make America great and if the same techniques are applied to running the country, would they make America great again or not?

It took me a while to find out the basics of Trump's finances, as information sources don't always neatly summarise the main points, but luckily for you I'm going to!

Donald Trump Financial Summary:

* Trump's main business is property.

* Net worth: Circa 3.7 Billion.

* Annual Income: Circa 400 Million.

* Debts of Trump companies: Circa 650 Million.

Obviously the above are the most important statistics and you can quickly get an idea of his finances from them. There's a few other points of interest to note by the way, the 650 Million debt is Trump's companies debt, not his own personal debt, also Trump comes out with a much higher 10 Billion figure to describe his net worth; there's a simple explanation for this, Trump bases that valuation on including the intangible asset of the Trump brand, which is apparently worth about 6 Billion according to Trump, that's 6 Billion of braggadociousness then!

Various news sources make the point that if Trump had never gone into business and just invested his initial start up capital that his Father gave him in the 1980's into stocks and shares, he would be much richer. Whilst I think this point is correct, it's unfair to Trump as how did anyone know the stock index would have grown so much since the 1980's, a fairer comparison would be if he had invested the start up capital into savings accounts, something which would have shown a vastly smaller return.

A general point that people seem to make who have dealt with Trump in a business capacity is that he is an excellent salesman and showman, often persuading people to overvalue his companies with his rhetoric, but that Trumps actual business decisions are often poorly researched and leave a lot to be desired. To anyone who's been watching his election campaign chess moves, this all sounds rather familiar doesn't it.

I'll be fair and report that Trump's property ventures have often been successful, albeit with failures too. Trump seems to have a tendency to take big loans against the asset and also has a propensity to very complicated business structures, but I guess that's life in America. Trump's involvement in The Apprentice TV show has been a big success also.

Some of Trump's business failures are, the luxurious Trump airline which was launched in a market where people were looking for budget flights. A Trump University was launched, which apparently wasn't a real University, more like a Trump education certificate establishment, it failed, apparently the lawsuits there are still ongoing...

Trump's (now closed) Casino side to his business has largely been a failure, it occurred to me, that the massive collection of complaints related to Trump's failed Casinos, could give an indication of how Trump might behave as President if things started going wrong in certain policy areas, how Trump acts under pressure kind of thing. It appears Trump does not take failing in life well, and responds to it badly.

Trump has been involved in 3500 law suits in the last three decades, many of them were people suing Trump for not paying them for their work. On one project alone, Trump's Taj Mahal Casino in Atlantic City, records show that 253 sub-contractors weren't paid in full or on time. According to Colette Nelson who is chief advocacy officer for the American Subcontractors Association developers with a history of not paying contractors are a very small minority.
This instance worked out well for Mr Trump financially, he had more money for himself by withholding part of workers wages, but it worked out very badly for the workers. Trump's business practices here, didn't help anyone except himself. Is Trump for the worker?

Retired piano dealer Michael Diel won a contract to supply $100 000 worth of grand pianos to a Trump casino in 1989. Despite Mr Diel supplying the pianos on time and in good order, Mr Trump said that his casino had run into financial difficulties and could only pay for 70% of the value of the pianos. Mr Diel, a small business owner lost $30 000 with Trump, and his little business had a hard few years, before eventually recovering.

According to a USA today investigation, Donald Trump has a track record of falsely picking holes in contractors work, to use as leverage to negotiate to pay them less than the full amount owed. Apparently if the underpaid or non paid workers commence legal proceedings, Trump uses his deep financial pockets to drag the court case out, so that his opponents run out of money and he wins the case by default, even though he was in the wrong. These practices are morally dubious.

Despite, Mr Trump showing off about being a Billionaire 'ten times over', he has likely not paid any taxes since 1996. When questioned about his non payment of tax in the first tv debate with Hillary Clinton, Trump said it was 'smart'. But we are talking about 20 years of missing tax money, which could have helped the poor in America. I wonder if the 30 000 homeless people living in the Detroit area think it's 'smart' too?

Trump brags about being a business success, but no other major US company has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy as many times as Trump's casino companies did. An investigation by the New York Times details that during his four Casino bankruptcies, Trump wiped clean millions of dollars of debt that he owed creditors, whilst simultaneously paying Millions from the Casinos to himself. The New York Times investigation says that Trump's casinos consistently underperformed financially as compared to other Casinos in the same City.

So we can see from the examples above that, in the least, some people dealing with Trump are being treated badly. Obviously if the problematic business practices detailed above were applied into running the US, trading partners would quickly get very fed up with the US, the country would quickly gain a bad reputation. Countries or businesses might not want to trade with a Trump style US economy that could renege on deals, or refuse to pay; and obviously that would damage the US economy. Would Donald Trump bankrupt the US economy, just like he did his Casino companies?

The idea that Trump can apply the techniques discussed into running a country, and then it will make that country great is simply false.

James Bickle

Donald Trump

2016-10-09T17:47:00.002+01:00

Politically things appear to be stabilised in the UK, for the time being at least. But let's think about the United States. The UK and US are part of the same international market and have similar financial systems, what happens in the US has a direct affect on us in the UK. If the US have a bad President, it causes us problems.

I've followed Donald Trumps campaign and have generally been appalled at the things he has said, not to mention the terrible things Donald Trump said about women in the recently published video. I don't see how Donald Trump can recover after that video and I think he should withdraw from the Presidential race immediately.

I could be disingenuous and make excuses for Americans who are Trump supporters, but let's be real, they are just being taken in, but why?

Well my theory is this:

Remember the Great Recession of 2008? well of course it started in the US sub prime mortgage market; clever but corrupt financiers introduced 'new and innovative financial products' - ie basically they repackaged bad mortgage debt as good mortgage debt and resold it on. When it dawned on the markets that the so called good debt, was really in fact bad debt, prices crashed, first in the US and then in the rest of the world as markets panicked, it caused a domino effect.

The 2008 Great Recession has reshaped the world ever since, and in one way or another has had a detrimental effect on almost all of us. Many American citizens lost their homes in the crash, and of course that is a very upsetting thing for them.

Now, I need to be careful here! People like to throw the 'patronizing' card at you, it's an easy and convenient technique to exploit if they disagree, but I will say it - the reason Donald Trump has become popular is because of a lack of political understanding from US voters. I'm not suggesting these Trump voters are stupid, as I think they are just as smart as you or me, but the lack of understanding stems from voters never having studied politics and economics properly; quite reasonably, these voters may not have had the time to take courses, or widely read.

OK, so the problem can be described like this, the Trump voters have arrived on a building site and are trying to build a house, but they haven't learned the skills required. So what do you get? Obviously a house that is going to fall down.

So these US voters who lost their homes are panicking, angry, and kind of in the dark understanding wise. They want their house back, of course they do and quite rightly.

The next step is Trump comes along and kind of taps into their anger and offers simple solutions: Trump says 'It's the political elite, they betrayed you, I'm different!!!' or Trump says, 'the reason you're poor is immigrants, I will send them back to their own countries, and then build a ten metre high wall to stop any new ones!!!' - what happens next?

The US voters who lost their homes absolutely love every word Trump says because firstly, Trump offers easy to learn (but false) explanations why they are struggling, and offers to put things right for them. Also Donald Trump is rich and I have to say very 'cool' sounding, the guys got showbiz presence no doubt about that. So Trump voters are also impressed by his wealth and enjoy his cool, edgy speeches. Trump is a 'fantastic' salesman, but doesn't have the substance to back it up.

However, if only life were that simple, if only Trumps simple explanations would really fix the problems in practice, but of course they won't. Real life is much more complicated and harder, as President Obama has found out, incidentally I think President Obama has done an excellent job in the face of adversity from the Republicans.

Donald Trump has no experience in politics, he hasn't even been a Senator. Trump is rude, quick tempered, anti-foreigner, apparently a misogynist; Trump has not paid any taxes since 1995, using legal but morally distasteful loopholes. Reports allege Trump has deliberately cheated contractors. Trump says unnecessarily inflammatory remarks to foreign leaders that could have wide ranging political and economic fall out. I could go on and on, you only have to Google to find another 100 justifiable complaints against Trump. A Trump Presidency would be a disaster, bad for America and bad for us.

So please, US citizens, don't be bewitched by Trump's cool, dazzled by his riches and taken in by his simple, unrealistic 'solutions'. Trump won't help you, Trump is politically further right wing, than the people who initially caused the crash of 2008, further right means he believes even more in less state help for the poor, but wants the rich getting richer.

Trump is a man who, despite being a Billionaire thinks paying no taxes is 'smart' - Trumps tax money could have helped the poor these past 20 years, but no, he kept it for himself.

On a more positive note, Hillary Clinton has lots of real life political experience, has a considered approach, is smart, well educated, Hillary would be a safe pair of hands for the US Presidency this November :)

James Bickle

The Benefit Of Psychoanalysis

2016-08-28T11:58:00.000+01:00

Ever since I was quite a young man, I've always been fascinated by psychoanalysis; the idea that people's emotional problems could be fixed by raking over their subconscious thoughts and feelings. The fact the subconscious mind often denies or obstructs the access required to fix the problems is also an interesting component part to psychoanalysis.

I should make very clear, I am not a qualified Psychoanalysist so therefore I will definitely not be attempting to psychoanalyse anyone. If people feel that analysis could help them, they should seek a fully qualified doctor.

However, I have done some private study on the subject of psychoanalysis, so at least I can introduce the topic and encourage people to think about it being something that could benefit them.

Of course, Psychoanalysis was originally 'created' by Sigmund Freud, who by my judgement got some of it right, but Freud's more weird and wonderful ideas should be quietly dropped. In the years since it has been refined and has long since been a legitimate and accepted part of psychiatry.

Anyway, I'm now going to talk about some of my own amateur psychoanalytic observations and what I think they might mean. My observations could be wrong so please don't take them too seriously, but that said I think it's worthwhile to throw them out there.

It seems to me that much neurotic illness is caused by the unhealthy side of pride. It's not just me saying this, psychoanalysis talks often, for example in the work of Karen Horney or Dr Terry D Cooper about the concept of neurotic pride - the Bible describes a similar phenomenon as 'original sin'. As of course Satan fell from grace as he wanted to be 'greater than' God for no good reasons. It goes without saying there are other negative emotions that analysists have to deal with, like say jealousy or unforgiveness.

I've noticed that Christians can be very dismissive of psychoanalysis, but I think their scepticism is in error as the two schools of thought are much more closely linked than they think. Psychoanalysis describes men and women in a way that is surprisingly similar to the Biblical explanation of human's personalities, it's just that Psychoanalysis does not mention the God word.

I should spell out, for the avoidance of doubt, there is certainly a very desirable and normal side to pride which should be encouraged, i.e what people call healthy pride. Olympic athletes pride driving them on to win Gold medals, people working hard to get that promotion at work, which has more money. Taking a healthy pride in one's appearance, or property; or being involved in a healthy competitive rivalry for something. The admirable pride associated with taking part and having a go, even if you come last. This healthy side of pride is good news and helps us achieve good things.

But let's think of an imaginary example of a neurotic person and speculate how psychoanalysis could help them. Again, for the avoidance of doubt, I should make clear that the fictitious example of 'Patient A' in the text below is not based on any real person.

Patient A:

As a young person, patient A had felt like he was very successful in his local community, he had drawn his self esteem from his unofficial ranking in the pecking order of his social group, young people in their late teens and twenties. Capable and charming, patient A had managed to get a relatively good job kind of early. Patient A had thrown his spare money into designer clothes and fast cars, things were good, he refined his comedy so he was even more liked and the ladies were attracted to him. At this point, patient A was at the top of his social group, emotionally he felt content and relaxed.

It's right to pursue success of course, but despite Patient A's early success, later it emerges he had made a strategic mistake in his long term plan. Ideally he should have strived for goals that would have caused him to be successful for a larger part of his life. Of course, there's nothing wrong with the way Patient A enjoyed the fast cars and designer clothes, that's his choice, but ideally if he had wanted to be successful for longer, he should have invested in a house, or maybe started a family.

Time passes for Patient A, and he sees that many of his friends from his original social group, who maybe originally were lower down than him in the early ranking, are now overtaking him in the unofficial pecking order. These friends now have houses, families, better qualifications, perhaps more income. His early social group, which he used as his measure of his success, has matured, this group now put less value on the fast cars and clothes as a measure of success, but more value on the houses, family, income etc.

Patient A now can't keep up and feels himself fall down the ranking of his early group fast and emotionally he starts to panic. By the way, why does he panic? Because it's so very important to humans to be successful, the mixture of healthy and unhealthy pride that drives us all. Patient A's subconscious is now in turmoil, for both good and bad reasons Patient A wants to return to the top of his social group, he might be able to do this eventually, but in the short to medium term he is destined to remain lower down. His subconscious cannot cope with having to be lower down however, so working in secret unison with his consciousness, his subconscious constructs an elaborate system of falsities to paper over the cracks of his failure in the social group. His subconscious is attempting to hide from himself and more importantly from the rest of the community that he is lower down these days.

So what neurotic symptoms does Patient A develop? and how can they be rectified?

When in the company of the same social group of friends, Patient A has become argumentative, if another group friend says plan B is a good way forward, Patient A deploys all his intelligence and sophistry to argue bossily that in fact NO, Plan C is in fact the right way.

However if the same friend had said that Plan C is the correct way forward, Patient A would have automatically and of course neurotically supported plan B with all his might. To Patient A's neurosis, it's not important which plan, B or C is factually correct, what's important to Patient A is winning the argument for it's own sake publically and therefore, in his mind, starting to inch back up the pecking order.

Patient A, may win the public debate on the surface, but quietly other group members note to themselves that in order to do win, he used false evidence, or became red faced and verbally intimidating. Patient A may have temporarily won the argument about plan B or C, but because of the cheap tricks the neurotic mind used to 'win', ironically Patient A slips further down the unofficial rankings in his social groups mind.

Patient A's neurotic illness may have other symptoms of course, as his subconscious is in turmoil, his blood pressure is higher, so he uses alcohol or drugs to 'self medicate'. He may develop clever and entertaining explanations about why the things that the social group now value success on, are in fact not worthwhile measures after all.

When Patient A hears about another person who is successful, or that group members admire for say their intelligence, he quickly reacts by strongly criticising the successful person. Also when hearing about successful people, Patient A may look away/change the subject etc. These things happen because it's painful for Patient A to hear of other's success, due to having such troubled feelings about his own perceived or real lack of success; so Patient A seeks to block out/reject the reports about the other successful person to protect from hurt.

Patient A's conscious mind starts to realise, he is having some symptoms of neurotic illness, but his subconscious, neurotic mind has a cunning plan to explain the symptoms away - 'it's just a problem with 'brain chemistry' a physical thing he was born with, unavoidable and not his fault'

In terms of the subconscious perpetuating the cover up that is the neurotic illness, this false idea of brain chemistry being the cause of the illness is very clever. After all, the ego of the patient is striving to be a great success, so the ego finds it hard to accept it may have psychiatric problems, something that the ego perceives as failure, so the ego says 'hey I'm fine, it's just brain chemistry and you can't help how you were made'.

Also, this 'brain chemistry/not me' explanation of the neurotic symptoms causes further trouble as it blocks the patient getting treatment and therefore getting better, i.e if it's brain chemistry, as opposed to psychological, psychoanalysis type 'psychobabble' won't be able to help thank you very much. It's like the brain chemistry argument is in fact the neurosis protecting itself from being exposed, as it would hurt the patient's ego badly to have the feelings of failure that the neurosis is based on revealed to the conscious mind. So hence this elaborate ruse of brain chemistry - (I accept some psychiatric illness could be caused by brain chemistry, but not in the case of our example) - Psychoanalysis calls this issue 'the patient's resistances' by the way.

But enough of the symptoms, how could Patient A be cured?

From what I've read Psychoanalysis can take a long time, because of the patients resistances, which of course are part of the neurotic illness itself. Apparently the analyst often very quickly works out what is troubling the patient, in the case of our Patient A, anxiety about a perceived drop in success; but the analysis mostly takes much longer because if you are not extremely careful, you can wreck the analysis by offending the patient, or more accurately by offending/threatening the existence of the neurosis. This is understandable, as after all the human being has created the elaborate + clever neurosis to protect himself or herself from pain.

So the psychoanalyst's job is to skillfully, slowly and carefully, guide the patient to realise he has the neurosis and what it's based on. This is tough as the neurosis can fly in the face of logic and reason. The analyst could encourage Patient A to more consciously come to terms with his reduction in ranking in his social group, 'is it really such a bad thing to be lower down in the social group?' the analyst could suggest. The analyst could talk about how the unhealthy side of pride can be a destructive force in people's lives and get the patient to think all this over.

From a Christian perspective (if appropriate), the analyst could remind the patient that God does not measure men and women on material success or failure. But that God values all people highly, regardless of how large or small their earthly achievements. You can see how knowing this could further help defuse the neurosis.

Over a period of time, Patient A may start to accept - in his heart and mind so to speak - 'no actually my reduction in the social group isn't such a bad thing', or at least come to terms with it more. In truth, Patient A might genuinely not have wanted a family, it's just that he felt he should have and the analyst could help the patient realise this. Once the patient comes to terms in a more healthy way emotionally with his drop in success, the neurotic symptoms quickly start to vanish, the neurosis disappears as there is now no purpose for it, his blood pressure reduces again so therefore the self medication of drugs and alcohol is no longer required.

He stops picking neurotically fueled rows with his friends, as he has comes to terms with things more, relationships with the group improve, his complexion improves as he's now healthier and happier and things just start going better for Patient A, his analysis has been a successful one.

People often find the idea of psychoanalysis confrontational and annoying, for some of the reasons explained; but paradoxically and in truth, psychoanalysis often really helps people and sets them free.

James Bickle

Don't Panic Labour

2016-07-13T00:01:00.000+01:00

I've been watching the Labour Party infighting over Jeremy Corbyn for several weeks now. I was undecided if it was the right thing for Corbyn to go or to stay, but I think, belatedly, I've managed to do the maths on this!

Currently and if re-elected, the Labour Party should unite behind Corbyn 100%, and here is my reasoning:

Corbyn is much stronger as a leader than people give him credit for, he is an excellent public speaker, who seems to sort of come alive Yoda like when the force comes upon him. I remember watching Cameron versus Corbyn at Pm's questions, trust me Corbyn was better.

The next point is Labour fighting over Corbyn is making the Party very unstable and in turn weaker. Even if Labour use tricks to force in a new leader, the anger from the Labour members will have destabilising repercussions for years. Human beings have long memories, e.g some members will subconsciously harbour feelings about taking some kind of revenge over the 'Corbyn Whitewash' almost forever more, should it happen.

So far, the other Labour potential leaders who have come forward, are no better than Corbyn. In fact, I would say Corbyn is a stronger candidate than Angela Eagle and also Tom Watson. Why are Labour freaking out about Corbyn, when they don't have someone better to replace him?

The next reason is: Austerity issues in the UK (and the EU as a whole) have pushed voters away from the centre ground to either the hard left, or hard right, so therefore Corbyn stands perfectly positioned to make electoral capital out of this.

Another point is, non students of economics may believe that Corbyn represents a dangerous lefty on managing the economy. Having put in my time studying economics, I can guarantee you that Corbyn is less left wing, than David Cameron was right wing. Corbyn has some excellent people on his economics team, there is nothing crazy about his economic ideas, they are commonly what's described as 'centre left'.

Next point, Corbyn has handled the personal pressure over his leadership crisis, very well, he almost seems to enjoy it, Corbyn's, Andrew Marr show performance last Sunday was very strong.

Furthermore, if Labour do split into two parties over Corbyn, we then have two smaller parties, obviously the reduced numbers make it harder to win an election if the Labour vote is split between Right Labour Party and the Left Labour Party. United we stand, divided we fall right?

To avoid attacking the Labour Party unnecessarily with a wrecking ball, the anti Corbyn brigade should be much more patient, let the Corbyn thing work out naturally either way. The Parliamentary Labour Party (the Labour MP's) are panicking unnecessarily, mistakenly believing Corbyn is unelectable, really? What about the election of Syriza in Greece, or the way the UK just defied the status quo and voted in Brexit.

This analysis is all conditional on Jeremy Corbyn winning the leadership contest with Angela Eagle, if Angela wins, great for her and obviously the way forward reconfigures differently to this post. Or a different candidate may comes forward who is better than Jeremy Corbyn and win, obviously then they have the leaders job and all's good.

Incidentally, bearing in mind the current tensions, it was the right thing for the Labour NEC to allow Corbyn on the ballot paper as an incumbent, especially considering the exact rules were unclear. However, now the rules should be changed, so in future they say that any person in a Labour leadership election, including the incumbent, should have to gain 20% (or whatever %) of the PLP vote share to be allowed to stand. Clearly the PLP do need to be behind any Labour Party Leader.

If Jeremey wins the current leader contest, the Labour Party should immediately unite 100% behind him, you never know he may win 2020, the opposition isn't as strong as it once was + Corbyn is much better than people give him credit for.

James Bickle