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item0075A 1050, 1051 1050 16 December 2004
Roger, Happy birthday! The curious thing is - it works. The difficulty for Western medicine is to answer the question: Why does it work? I think it works because it is an art practised for well over a thousand years by trial and error. The system is pragmatic. Practitioners have retained a cause and effect link if perceived to have an affect on the subject. The explanation for all this is very metaphoric/figurative, in contrast to the discourse of Western medicine. However, a considerable amount of what passes as “scientific” medical explanation has its own metaphors and rhetorical tropes (more on that another time).
As you
know, acupuncturists adopt a holistic approach to their art — beware for
some unusual questions! - It knocks spots off psychoanalysis. One of the
techniques I do remember is the massaging of the area between thumb and
index finger to relief headaches. If somebody now says it doesn't, that
will make for an interesting philosophical discussion as to what's
happening. I'll have to put it down to distraction therapy. Can you throw any further light on acupuncture, and its practical effects? If you can Drop me a line
1051 13 December 2004 Blunkett's End
Let’s tell it like it is. David Blunkett garnered the most enormous goodwill, for having overcome his blindness. Nothing will ever deprive him of that astonishing accolade. But his is a barren, bleak personality, powered by the bruising ego which enabled him to overcome his disability. He lacks ordinary sensitivities, to the point of believing his crudeness to be a virtue in itself. He is a thug, a bully, tough and uncompromising. He claimed to embody the values of the “working-class” from which he came, but he represented only their lowest common denominator. He failed to reflect the higher sense of justice and fair play, the innate sense of equality, which also characterise and ennoble such communities. He made the awesome mistake of believing that any liberal belief in human rights was muddle-headed, a middle-class conceit, not for the likes of him and his ilk.
But Blunkett’s relentless pursuit of his love-child, against the wishes of the mother, was not an act of selfless commitment: it was sheer, obsessive selfishness, a breath-taking disregard for the privacy of both mother and child, which blinded him and clouded his judgment. He was brought low precisely by the lack of generosity and liberal insight which he displayed in his exercise of power. He did not have the breadth of character, or the human understanding, to realise where his own faults lay.
Finally, I do not trust a man who considers himself to be driven by “honesty”. That that is the ultimate hubris, self-deceit. Like George Dubya Bush, his failings made him a dangerous man to exercise political power. I am glad that he has gone.
What do you think? Drop me a line
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His roughness and toughness bolstered his standing with the insubstantial
Tony Blair, who had had no close personal contact with “working-class”
communities and their “values”. Blunkett lent to Blair and to the
Government a distinctive class legitimacy.