Follow the logic

+For evening exercise a walk round Scarborough’s Marine Drive is nominally attractive. I add the word ‘nominally’ because its popularity brings out a number of people for whom the basics of Covid-19 awareness is a test too far. Maybe it’s the mixed messages from government which licenses ignorant behaviour, but I’m not sure that reasonable explanation goes far enough. Despite the road itself being more traffic free these days, the pavement has become overburdened with cyclists of all ages who weave in an and out between pedestrians. Whilst the pavement is wide, it is not to my knowledge a designated dual use surface. I suggested to one cyclist that he might consider social distancing, since it was clear he had no intention of doing so—the answer was simply ‘no.’ I think he was probably about the same age as me, so the arrogance of ignorance is clearly not the preserve of eternal youth. One reason perhaps why so many choose to ride on the pavement is because the Marine Drive road is a fairly bumpy, cobbled surface. The pavement is smoother. But since most of the law breakers are riding mountain bikes what difference should that make? What exactly should one do in these circumstances? An exchange of effing and blinding might be the only unsatisfactory outcome. Or a sprinkling of drawing pins?
 
+All hope is not lost, but it’s a very complicated story. That’s the impression I have gleaned from reading Terry Eagleton’s Hope Without Optimism, which I bought before all this virus stuff took off. How prescient of me. I like to think that I enjoy reading Eagleton’s books, but I confess to struggling with keeping up and this one’s no exception. He makes a virtue of being well read and understanding what he reads well, whereas my slovenly style of reading allows so much to slip past without understanding, still less helping me develop my personal hermeneutical framework. How easy and perhaps preferable it would be to slide into a fideist cul-de-sac and just await the blinding flash of wisdom, never mind all that heuristic guesswork. I’m not sure what I’m hoping for here, that’s the problem reading a book about hope without optimism. It’s all a bit complicated.
 
+Surely it’s time to bring back the three ’r’s’ which is to say the value of ‘r’ can be our positive key metric when it’s below 1, a bit dodgy when it’s hovering around 1 and of no significance at all when it’s above 1? Wouldn’t it be a good idea if we learnt our three r’s before we tuned into a government briefing? Then we could better understand the significance of why what was important for the government yesterday needn’t be important today. What exactly is it that drives us to believe that consistency matters? Progress? Shouldn’t we just accept that a, b, c, d, e, f, etc., etc., as a sequence is purely arbitrary? These letters after all are combined in new formulations everyday, language evolves. If my thinking is correct, we generally allow whoever is in charge to bastardise definitional meaning whenever it suits. There is logic in language and there is logic in maths, but where is the logic in life? That is the fundamental dialectic and it is what, in its current pathetic form we are witnessing today, as ministers play ‘logical’ mind games on what they assume to be an unsuspecting public incapable of logic (the last bit is as yet to be tested).