Cycling campaigners slam “outrageous” council plan to hold road scheme meetings in secret, arguing it will “erode trust”

eburtthebike wrote:

So an incompetent tory administration (is there any other kind?) decides to hold their meetings in private to hide their incompetence.  That's democracy for you!  Not sure how it could erode trust, though, as nobody trusts a tory.

Is it even legal?  Surely the public have a right to know how such fundamentally important decisions are made, not just be told the result of biased councillors, who have already demonstrated their dire incompetence.

If I lived there my councillors would get no peace.

A small lecksher on the meanings of trust and faith might help.

To have trust in something or someone is to have historically acquired evidence enabling a judgement about their likely future behaviours, attitudes and other manifestations concerning various things the somethings or someones habitually do or have a responsibilty for.

For example, I trust Len the Fish and Becky the Fruit to, respectively, sell me fish and fruit that is of good quality and fair price, as they have done so a hundred times before. I also trust that a certain acquintance will exagerate or make stuff up in attempts to get me to do what he wants, as he's done so dozens of times before.

Generally, you can trust that Toryspivs will attempt to make policies and decisions that benefit them and their pals at the expense of citizens at large - those they supposedly represent - as they've done so for decades, with plenty of evidence to demonstrate the fact.

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Faith is an assumption of faux-trust in the absence of any historical evidence, one way or another, that a something or someone will behave as they say they will in the future. If we meet someone unknown, we tend to intially have faith that they'll behave towrds us within the basic tenets of civilised behaviour, which will eventually become a trust they genrally will, if they do so; or a trust that they'll do the opposite if they habitually do so.

Faith should be a strictly temporary means of agreeing to allow a something or someone to proceed, with evidence of their actual behaviours gradually accumulating post-events to form a pukka trust that they'll behave as we come to see them behave over time.

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These Toryspivs on the council are wanting to make decisions in secret; and for the citizens to have faith that they'll do so in good faith (that is, do what they claim they'll do - make policies good for the citizens they represent) ..... probably so that the Toryspivs can make policies not in the interests of the citizens, in a fashion that sees such policies established before the citizens realise it and form a pukka trust that Toryspiv will generally not represent their interests.

The fatal flaw in this Toryspiv tactic is that most of the citizens with any sense have already formed a trust that the Toryspivs will lie, cheat, feather their own nests and generally trash things for profit or reasons of ideological dogma. 

Toryspivs have long ago lost the means to successfully expect anyone to have faith in them when they promise to be good, having acquired a wide-spread reputation of a kind that means sensible citizens will trust only that these pinstriped criminal types will continue to do what they've always done - broken Britain and every part of it to serve themselves and their big business and finance familiars, justifying the trashing with a ridiculous idealogy of long-defunct economics and class prejudices.

Cugel wrote:

A small lecksher on the meanings of trust and faith might help.

We must be using different units if you think that is small.  Being succinct is a useful skill.

eburtthebike wrote:

Cugel wrote:

A small lecksher on the meanings of trust and faith might help.

We must be using different units if you think that is small.  Being succinct is a useful skill.

Being succinct is usually a means to reduce a complex matter to a meaningless, useless, ambiguous or plain stupid soundbite - one of the many curses lying upon post-modern folk reduced to pseudo-communicating with nothing but cheep-cheep-cheeps. But I suppose that in a world of cheepers, cheeping must be "a useful skill" - although the products that such a shallow wordcraft produce seem rather mundane.

The "succinct" posts remind me of those amateur Christmas cards made of pre-produced & glued bits of cliched paper cut-out shapes stuck on a bit of 2-colour thin card, perhaps sprinkled with some plastic glitter that immediately falls off; and inclusive of a hackneyed twee phrase that makes one cringe when read.

Sadly, the succinct writings often represent even more succinct "thinking".

There's really no need to keep proving that prolix isn't good and succinct is.

Yes, it's always more complicated than that, but ... "It's the audience, stupid".  Often these are humans.  If they left or dozed off your pearls were wasted.

As poets, editors and (alas) politicians know - quantity's easy, quality not.

Perhaps it's "right" that verse lingers, and the Gettysburg Address is more quoted than the Gettysburgh Oration?

But of course there is a balance to be struck. Had Lincoln said, for example, "Thanks for coming, now can we get back to the war" it would certainly have been brief, but perhaps not quite so effective or memorable. 

But there again I've never been accused of using one word where three would do, so perhaps I'm not best placed to judge!

Yes.

CyclingInGawler wrote:

But there again I've never been accused of using one word where three would do, so perhaps I'm not best placed to judge!

My own informing principle is: why use a picture when 2000 words will do?

But many do find their eye and brain sliding into a neutral idle as they get to the 12th word of any sentence. Their gaze loses focus; the brain goes clack-clack-clack as it fails to engage one cog with another. They flick the page, to find a more exciting cartoon or perhaps some novel swearing to stimulate their jaded interest.

Perhaps "succinct" now just means, "Use a string of currently fashionable trigger words + a sarky cartoon"? Even soundbites are now too tedious to parse, it seems.

Cugel wrote:

Perhaps "succinct" now just means, "Use a string of currently fashionable trigger words + a sarky cartoon"?

No.  The difference between succinct and prolix is that the former is effective.