Quatloos!

My daily rummaging through BAILII turned up London Borough of Tower Hamlets v H & Anor [2017] EWFC B65. As with much of the Family Court's business it is a sad case of children being taken from their parents. But this snippet made an eyebrow raise:

13. I am mindful that the parents are in person. They are highly suspicious of anything that the court does, not trusting the process. During the course of this hearing they have indicated on more than one occasion that they do not recognise the authority of the court and have no intention of engaging with the process. I have been told that I have no rights over them and in fact this court is not my court room but rather theirs. What follows is a simplified explanation of the law in the hope that they are listening and will understand my concerns and be encouraged to take legal advice.

...and then at the end of the judgment:

Finally, I should like to add this comment. During the course of this hearing, as I have mentioned above, the parents have tried very hard to indicate that they have no respect for the court or process. For example:

a. They have insisted that they will not answer to their proper names;

b. Father has purported to "serve" me with a "contract" telling me that he has sent it on to my private email address – and that he has addressed it to me in both my work name and my married name;

c. Father has indicated that he has no intention of seeking legal advice "even if we wanted to be part of this system".

It may be that there is nothing that can be done to stop the adoption order for their child (their many other children are already the subject of care orders). But either they have been a bit too quick with their Googling, or (I suspect) someone is giving them some catastrophically bad advice.

And in the final paragraph of a very fair and balanced judgement:

I realise that these parents are finding this whole situation stressful and upsetting. I do not hold against them that they hold these views and their behaviour today has been frankly irrelevant to my decision making. However, I do want to make it clear that at the next hearing I will not countenance a situation in which the parents have taken no action and seek more time in an effort to simply frustrate the adoption process. I would remind them that the placement remains lawful until determined otherwise. Any lawyer will advise them that there are strict time limits which apply to applications to review decisions, and rightly so. I have told them what they should do. If they chose not to do it then there may come a point where we need to proceed to make final decisions.

This strikes me as a case where the parents have been handed a lifeline by the judge to seek a JR to decide whether or not there's been maladministration by the local authority. But knowing what we know about sovcits, it's more than likely they'll follow a path that's likely to result in them self-sabotaging any possibility of a successful legal challenge to the local authority's actions.

First class judicial understatement.

Note also that the parents alleged that the children were being abused in foster care, which takes us close to Hoaxtead territory. There's a thesis for someone in the links between FMOTL and 'ritual abuse' delusions.

Comrade Sharik wrote:There's a thesis for someone in the links between FMOTL and 'ritual abuse' delusions.

I think I can do that thesis in one line...

FMOTL ideas are simply a conspiracy theory and people who believe one conspiracy theory tend to believe them all including ritual abuse.

I don't think a whole thesis, possibly a monograph.

I have noticed that the tendency to believe ten impossible things before breakfast seems to be a part of the way that a certain type of person reinforces their starting diversion into strangeness. My somewhat informal studies have shown that buying the whole package seems to be the destination for many, and I do not find this surprising.
In order to even consider that something seems unlikely, you have to have some standards of reasonableness to compare things with. I consider I am a fairly reasonable person. I know a bit about quite a large number of things, and to me, all that knowledge is like a jigsaw puzzle almost completed on a table, all the pieces interlock neatly with other pieces to make a coherent picture. It is a picture with some holes in it but thay are holes that could be filled with just the right shaped pieces, pieces that would interlock with the stuff already there.
With that image it is not all that difficult to see that some pieces in the box, or in a handful of pieces someone gives me, are not pieces from the overall jigsaw, sometimes because they just do not fit anywhere in what is already there, and sometimes because they are totally the wrong thickness or overall shape to fit anywhere.
I suspect pretty well everybody has a similar jigsaw puzzle or other simile in their head about what they know and do not know, and what is likely to fit and what simply won't.

Those who espouse the wilder fields of woo, are I think, like people whose jigsaw is there, but still a random pile of pieces in the box, because somehow, they have never developed a method of fitting it all together. If you present someone with a mass of unrelated data, what can they do with it? The Bering Strait is between Alsaka and Russia, the currency of Burma is the Kyat and the cortex is part of the brain. And a huge number of other random noise, as it appears to those who cannot , or have not been taught to make the connections that turn this stuff into a coherent whole.
How appealing, then, a simple explanation for things that just seem a confusing muddle? And no questions to be asked, all the answers have been provided by the simple formula of the magic bean soup.

Why am I not rich? It's the corrupt system. Why do others seem to have more fun? It's because they have secret power. How can I get out of this mess? Just follow this yellow brick road to success, and unveil the Wizard. Say this, it works. It does not but that's not the point, it is something to hang on to for now.

They can even get their information from people they are inclined to trust, people of their own background and class. It may be crap but it's our crap.

Is there a remedy? Probably not with mature specimens, but I do think education has a lot to answer for with the young. You have to get the kids to see how stuff fits together from an early age if they are going to be able to see connections later. SATs, OFSTED, league tables and an inpenetrable wall of official policy that changes with the seasons have not done education much good.
When I was at school, rather a long time ago, we had a syllabus and exams, but when we thought we were being so clever by getting the teacher to go off topic and talk about the battle of Tobruk instead of algebra, or pig farming instead of the Tudors, we were really being educated then, not when we parsed a sentence.

So, my conclusion, the devotion to the irrational is a lifebelt in a sea of confusion. The remedy may be to remove the confusion, but that is tricky, it would involve a re-education project so long and so expensive it is impractical, not to mention how hard it would be resisted by the subjects.

We could teach less but do it better in today's schools, for the future. I don't think there is any way to prevent more of today's adults falling for whatever nonsense some guru, however inept or nonsenseical serves up.

Siegfried Shrink wrote: How appealing, then, a simple explanation for things that just seem a confusing muddle? And no questions to be asked, all the answers have been provided by the simple formula of the magic bean soup.

One thing that strikes me is that conspiracy theory “explanations”, many of which contradict each other, are so often vastly more complex, involved and almost if not absolutely impossible to assemble into any kind of coherent whole than let’s say “more rationally” based and generally accepted explanations of the same thing.

So complex that accepting them as true requires a level of cognotive dissonance the mere thought of which makes my head spin.

If this child does become the result of an adoption order, it saddens me to say that he/she may have had a lucky escape.

Siegfried Shrink wrote:I have noticed that the tendency to believe ten impossible things before breakfast seems to be a part of the way that a certain type of person reinforces their starting diversion into strangeness. My somewhat informal studies have shown that buying the whole package seems to be the destination for many, and I do not find this surprising.

Certainly this is true, but I think there's another constituency of "desperate gullibles" who come into sov-citting because it appears to offer some fragment of hope in dire circumstances. These parents may be simply grasping at any straw to prevent their child being removed and adopted, just as Mark Quaile (see Random Freemanesque Babblings topic) is resorting to any silly tactic rather than facing up to the loss of his family's home.

I think these people are the saddest FMOTL recruits. They don't enter with any positive ambition of political reform, they just see the bombastic twaddle about seizing courts, putting officials on notice and serving liens etc, and they imagine that they can obtain some powerful words and documents which will somehow stop their domestic catastrophe. Of course it just makes things worse, but I find it hard to condemn someone who makes a 'crisis conversion' in such circumstances. Instead I condemn the egomaniacal liars who take advantage of their desparation - David Robinson, Graham Moore and many others before them.

Hercule Parrot wrote:
Instead I condemn the egomaniacal liars who take advantage of their desparation - David Robinson, Graham Moore and many others before them.

I certainly agree with that. I have a respect for teaching that is deeply offended by the teaching of lies, it is a betrayal of the faith of the pupils, and it is not as if they are teaching some subject where there is controversy about the subject matter. Their assertions are just flat out wrong.

People like Jordam Maxwell earn my special ire, they are willing to teach rubbish about practically anything that there is rubbish to be taught about.

Controversy creates cash.

Look at the abundance of charlatans out there, the David Ickes, the Celyons and the David wolfe, all making hefty profits from preaching pseudoscience or freeman crap.

It is a post-factual era we are living in, were Woo is sacred and facts are ignored.

In the words of the telegraph "Its the metropolitan liberal elites fault", and that's how the less socially mobile think at the moment; in my opinion.

JimUk1 wrote:Woo is sacred and facts are ignored.

I'd say rather that the Woo is simple and the facts are harder.

Comparing a proper legal lecture on 'joinder' with the sov-cit version illustrates this, even if your only source of information is You Tube videos.

It really does not matter if you do not understand the magic, it is supposed to work if you say the words and make the hand gestures right. Use our letters, read our script, obey the guru.
With real stuff you have to understand the concept, and apply it in the correct manner where it is relevant, and chose another approach if appropriate.

Nothing new about woo.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_shirt