Trolley 564

Trolley 564 was actually three middle sized trolleys from the M&S food hall, cut out from the herd which had accumulated in the Kokoro passage. One of them had a seriously bent basket, as if someone had rammed the left hand front corner into a wall. Must have taken some doing, however it was done. But it still nested and I ruled it fit for return to the stack.

There was also a Waitrose trolley, not so common just presently, and if it is still there, I shall deal with it later this morning.

And while I am on, a couple of phrases have caught my eye in the past few hours: dog whistle politics and double predestination.

The first is a phrase which one comes across quite often in the Guardian, although I read at reference 2 that it has been around in the US for a while, for more than thirty years. The dog whistles in question are audible to dogs but not to humans and I think the idea in politics is to run advertisements which the attract the attention and votes of this or that unsavoury group without stirring up the respectables. So perhaps an image which plays to racism while not saying or doing anything overtly racist. Wikipedia offers a long list of words in the same general area, for example double-speak, euphemism and sub-liminal, but which do not quite capture the dog whistles. The sense of which I had previously guessed at and got rather wrong.

The case presently in the news is an advertisement run by the Labour Party in which 'Labour was accused of dragging down political standards in Britain after claiming that Rishi Sunak was personally to blame for not sending child sex abusers and other criminals to prison'. To my mind, not a good advertisement for Labour: dealing with sex abuse is far too complicated a matter to be sensibly tackled in tweets and one-liners. And I am reminded that Labour continue to promise how much better than the Tories they will be without coming clean about the need to raise more money, that is to say raise taxes, so to do. Also not good.

The second is a phrase which crops up in reference 4, which I am presently looking at again, as noticed at reference 5. All very theological, not to say nonsensical, but I think the general idea, once popular in Geneva, was that God is all knowing and timeless and so knows who is headed for heaven and who is headed for hell, more or less from the time of their birth. Not to say conception. We are all predestined for one place or the other and it does not make much difference what we get up to in the meantime. I seem to recall that there was a sect in Germany which took this idea to its logical extreme, but I think that they were thoroughly dealt with by the secular authorities. 

The 'double' is not like the twice cooked of (French & foreign) biscuits, rather the fact that both the good and the bad are so predestined.

Which all goes to show the trouble that a bad dose of logic can cause. Much better to muddle through without inquiring too closely into such matters - which was more or less the position of the Roman church and the English church. The Scottish church was, however, badly tainted by the Genevans. 

Woolrych also makes the classist suggestion that, in the 16th and 17th centuries at least, skilled manual workers in towns were also apt to be so tainted. They could often read and their occupations left them plenty of time and energy to mull over deep matters, which would have been better left to their betters. They should have stuck with growing prize vegetables and that sort of thing. From where I associate to Hardy's 'Jude the Obscure'.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2023/04/trolley-563.html.

Reference 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog_whistle_(politics).

Reference 3: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2023/04/the-marmens.html.

Reference 4: Britain in Revolution: 1625-1660 - Austin Woolrych - 2002.

Reference 5: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predestination_in_Calvinism.

Group search key: trolleysk.