Collateral Damage in Stockholm

Collateral Damage is the name of the poster that

Collateral Damage in a high control group

I've just presented at the  International Cultic Study Association 2015 in Stockholm. This year the title of the Conference was "Children in High Control Groups", and that's what is depicted in the poster, regarding an anonymised, but global education movement.

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No stigma. World Mental Health Day 2014

I though I'd drop in and write something here, as I haven't for a long time.

That's because what I wrote up until then has been quite enough to be going on with, in terms of having results in the real world.

Unfortunately I am not at liberty to say what those results are at the moment, and am quite curtailed, for legal reasons, just for now, from being very open about what's been happening to me at all, or  about the reality behind the well-evidenced accounts I've published in posts here, and on ANM.

Fixing it for Jim

I know we all loathe and despise this man, but I have been driven to write about him today, because of the almost unbearable tension I experience between the image and the reality, both in the dreadful revelations of how devastating that tension was and is physically for so many people, and also because as a child I felt that tension also emanating uncomfortably from the TV as I watched the gold medallion resting and swinging on his hairy chest.

Of course I watched Jimmy Savile as a kid.  I used to sit green-eyed with envy as some lucky kid, unfortunate because of some terrible vulnerability, got their wildest dreams met by this man who seemed able to do absolutely anything, anything at all at the drop of a hat.  The smiles of those children spoke to me... that's what it would be like to really get what you dream of.

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Breaking the habit of a lifetime.

Ok so it's nearly Christmas, and that's maybe not the best time to be having an operation, especially on my left foot when the other one isn't all that pain free, but when I was offered two dates one before Christmas and one in January, and after nonchalantly trying to take the "after all the festivities" approach for five minutes I just realised there was no point waiting.  I just couldn't use that foot anymore, because it just wouldn't work.  So I've finally (I hope) been and got it done.  Under the plaster, the middle three bones have been sawn through in two places, shortened by about 4mm and now have titanium plates on.

Humanism Is As Humanists Do.

Many of the people I interact

with on Twitter rightly address issues of accountability and lack of it within institutions and especially within the NHS.

On World Mental Health Day

Last year on World Mental Health Day, nearly a year after my mother's death, I wrote a letter of protest to the Deans at Plymouth University which was also a request for help.

Why Whistleblowing Sucks

A chat on Twitter this morning prompted me to jot down a few of my thoughts and experiences in case it's helpful to others trying to define whistleblowing.  There seems to be a lot of back and forth on Twitter about, "oh everyone is a whistleblower now", etc., this is often said in such a way as to disparage someone for looking as if they are seeking to portray themselves as whistleblowing when they are "just" raising concerns, as if whistleblowing is an entertaining new craze.

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A Good Fit

The phrase "not a good fit" actually means
 "we expect collateral damage".

A reader of the Stroud News and Journal has asked for my opinion of the building of a new Steiner School for 600 pupils under the free-school scheme.  I wasn't sure my detailed answer would fit into a comment sized chunk I've written my response here.

Comment Massagement

Me, Pat and Steve on 25/09/11
Mum died on 21/10/11.

It's a long while since I've had any time for blogging.  Moving across the world gets you like that but I'm here to post a comment that was left on a blog that claims to be about humanism, although it's hard, given the vitriol and closed-mindedness in evidence there, so see what that might be that is of any use to anyone. I'm posting the comment here simply because three quarters of it was deleted, with the express intention of reputation destruction. (My comment policy is at the end of this post).

Schoolyard Critics

This post is a footnote to my review of Eugene Schwartz' short movie "Recessitation: Bullying in the Waldorf School", which inverts both joke mechanisms and definitions of play and bullying to ridicule the notion of both.

I've reviewed the movie on ANM, because it provides a lot of useful (if inverted) information about Steiner education, and this addendum examines how, in their own critiques of this movie the Steiner critics have continued and extended the inversions used by Schwartz, by which actions they reveal not only a singular lack of ability to self-scrutinise, but also a dangerous lack of awareness of the similarity of their position to the one that they are criticising.

Free Speech vs Hate Speech

Alicia's hateful speech with no right of reply

I've been re-examining my attitude to free-speech in the light of recent court rulings regarding very offensive statements in the public eye.

Whilst fighting a battle to get the recognition of discrimination in the expulsion of my kids from a dratted Steiner School, the opposite critics have turned on us and mauled us savagely on several occasions.  This arose simply from one person, Melanie Byng proposing initiatives that she was unable to take responsibility for and she has then allowed those personal things to bleed into the area of "Steiner criticism", using the social confirmation bias of her friends, to our detriment and also noticably to the detriment of the British campaign to halt State-funding.

Handy Template for Identifying a Cult

Of use to cult-busters might be this handy template, helpfully supplied by Alicia Hamberg. It originally concerned the treatment of Gregoire Perra, whose whistleblowing activities the 'critiques' talk about increasingly, by the Fédération des Ecoles Steiner en France, who are suing him.


But what I found when I looked at it (once I stopped laughing), was that it can apply to any group that mounts an aggressive attack on people with different opinions or ways of approaching matters, and which, in doing so, begins to approximate cultish behaviour.