Universities not magical kingdoms shock

Hector Drummond Posted on by

Strange views about campus novels by someone who’s just written their own campus novel:

I have always been fascinated by campus novels. As a young girl I was swept up in the journey of Charles Ryder in Brideshead Revisted, and the knowing satires of faculty life in Amis’s ‘Lucky Jim’ and Bradbury’s “The History Man”, as well as the coming-of-age arc of E.M. Forster’s ‘The Longest Journey”. Each, in their different ways, seemed to point in the same direction – that university would be a place where your character was formed.

I haven’t read the Forster, but this is a bizarre view to take of Lucky Jim and The History Man. In both novels undergraduates hardly feature; the lecturers are the characters. And the lecturers are all skewered. The undergraduates that do briefly feature are presented as dim, naive and/or annoying.

Even in Brideshead, which does paint a more detailed and romantic view of undergraduate life, the idea is that Charles’ development gets side-tracked and stunted by Sebastian and his family, and it’s only later on, after he’s had some real life experience, that he develops as a person.

I imagined a campus of challenging, glamorous people and charismatic teachers who would fling open the shutters and widen my narrow world view.

 

But six months later and I was walking down an Oxford high street with a female college friend as bewildered and dissappointed [sic] by college as I was. Where I asked her were they – these Sebastian Flytes, who were going to light up our university lives. The people around us seemed either diligent and dull or posturing as thespians or dope-smokers or political agitators

I suppose that to someone who has misread Brideshead so badly (or who is so desperate to escape their own life) that she thinks that Sebastian the snooty drunk would be a great guy to hang out with, is going to be shocked to find that Universities, even Oxbridge, are full of dull nerds and talentless posers. The massive expansion of the Universities apparently passed her by.

(In my experience, though, there are great people at every University. The thing is, though, they’re not the ones who come over when the two shy new girls enter the college bar.)

Blacking up was not racist then, and it isn’t now

Hector Drummond Posted on by

It turns out Justin Trudeau has often done something that would result in career suicide if done by a conservative:

Two more instances of Justin Trudeau in racist makeup have surfaced hours after Time Magazine reported that he wore brown face at an “Arabian Nights” themed fundraiser in January 2001.

But he gets a free pass because of the ‘Bill Clinton rule’, which is that you can do what you want if you’re on the left (at least, until such a time as the left decides they don’t need you anymore, at which point they may throw you under a bus).

A rare picture of Justin Trudeau just before he killed Captain Cook.

But we all knew that. What’s even more interesting is just how many people knew about these incidents, yet Trudeau was PM for a whole four years before they broke in the media:

Some 500 guests showed up

Guest after guest is quoted with their opinions. Many people were photographed with him, looking perfectly happy. And, as we’ve discovered, there were other similar incidents. So half of Canada would have known about Trudeau’s predilection for the boot polish. Yet all these people were happy to keep quiet for years, even when political figures on the right were attacked for the same sort of thing. I bet you half the journalists in Canada knew about these pictures. I bet you all the newspapers were sent them years ago, and they declined to run them, until finally they were forced by the Conservatives getting hold of the pictures and pushing the story.

“How-de-do-dare. I’ll take dese doo whide ladies. Help yarself to da oil.”

Are we really going to judge the world’s political leaders for what outfit they choose at a fancy dress party? Do we really think that anyone who dresses as a Nazi at a party is really endorsing them? What about the people who chose the Viking outfit? Are they endorsing the Viking’s history of rape and pillage? Or are they oppressing the Vikings’ descendants? If a man puts on a schoolgirl outfit, is he… it’s all too ridiculous to continue with. I trust that the leader of Canada’s opposition Conservative party will have a less ridiculous, less PC take on this:

“I was extremely shocked and disappointed when I learned of Justin Trudeau’s actions this evening,” Scheer told reporters in comments broadcast live from an airport in Quebec where he is campaigning for the Oct. 21 national election.

 

“Wearing brown face is an act of open mockery and racism. What Canadians saw this evening is someone with a complete lack of judgment and integrity and someone who’s not fit to govern this country.”

Oh. The world is heading for a dark place. And I’m not talking about Kiwi polish.

Update: Trudeau’s real crime is against the English language and logic:

Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau said Thursday he had a message for racialized Canadians specifically.

“Racialized Canadians”? Imagine if Trump had used this phrase. We’d be hearing about it for years.

LibDems with blue rosettes

Hector Drummond Posted on by

It’s telling, isn’t it, how easily someone can be a Conservative MP one day, and a Lib Dem MP the next? No change of beliefs is needed. No change of mindset. The MP carries on exactly as before, saying the same things. One could also imagine such people joining New Labour, before the Corbynites took over. (And of course, this has happened, Robert Jackson and Quentin Davies, for example, in the 2000s.)

Why do these people choose to join the Conservatives rather than the LibDems in the first place? The reason is that the Conservatives are a successful party. They have more money. They win elections. Their enacted policies (as opposed to what they say) have for years been pretty similar to the LibDems, so the prospective MP thinks, join the winners.

X man thinks X is important

Hector Drummond Posted on by

Robbie Collin talking crap again in the Telegraph:

the myth of the American astronaut was made by the movies.

Nope. I suspect Robbie wasn’t around, or at least wasn’t very old, in the late 60s and early 70s, so he doesn’t remember the incredible aura that surrounded the American astronauts, even before any film about them was ever made. I mean, for God’s sake, human beings walked on another world, live on TV, at a time when TVs were mostly black and white, radios still crackled, computers had hardly started, and half the world was still living in primitive conditions, and Robbie thinks it was the movies that caused us to gasp in wonder at the men who did it?

But most of all this attitude is caused by a man whose life is premised on movies being important thinking that movies are more important than they really are.

Improve yourself, the Tonya Harding way

Hector Drummond Posted on by

How We Can Be A Better Cricket Team, by Trevor Bayliss:

Exclusively revealed: Trevor Bayliss shares his blueprint for English cricket to make the Test team more successful

One of his ideas is:

Banning touring players from playing county cricket before a Test series

That is, stop the opposition players getting some practice in in the 4-day county competition before the series starts. I’m not saying it’s a bad idea, just that it’s not really a way of making your own team better. It’s a way of making the other team worse.

But then, the headline does say how to make the English team ‘more successful’, not ‘better’, so I can’t really argue with that.

 

The brave man bravely comes out in his brave fight against something that requires bravery to even talk about

Hector Drummond Posted on by

The Telegraph reprints another piece of social activism disguised as journalism:

Christopher Eccleston has been praised for raising awareness after speaking out about his long battle with anorexia and how he once contemplated suicide.

Literally half the article consists of praise for Eccleston for doing this:

The actor has been praised by fans, with many thanking him for raising awareness.

 

“Thank you Christopher Eccleston for speaking up about your struggles with anorexia and body image issues,” said one person on Twitter. “Not enough public awareness about body image issues and mental health complexities men experience.”

And so on, ad nauseum, with unnamed Twitter users providing all the ‘so brave’ content. This is not reporting. This is social manipulation, blatantly pushing the position on mental health you want.

And how exactly is it ‘brave’ when every time some celebrity reveals that they’ve sometimes been depressed — as though the rest of us have never been through that, and we’re too dumb to realise that celebrities can get depressed too — they’re hailed as heroes in a media orgy, and the words ‘brave’ and courageous’ come flying fast? Since when has courage been telling people that you’ve always tried to be thin?

It must have been intolerable for Chistopher to have to have a beard for this role, because the beard made his face look millimetres thicker.

The article comes from the shadowy ‘Press Association’, previously a venerable pound-the-streets journalist agency, now a glossy multi-million pound … something. It’s not exactly clear what they are really. Objective journalists at all times, or sometimes paid provider of favourable content for their clients hiding behind the anonymous ‘PA’ byline? Sometime political agenda pushers? This is tellingly vague:

Collaborative

Our deep relationships with key organisations and individuals reinforce our position as a trusted source of content to digital, media and corporate customers.

I note that PA has been heavily involved in efforts to have computers write news stories. A template for this sort of story wouldn’t be too hard, would it? Basically this, with blank spaces for the name of the sleb, and blank spaces for the condition. The Twitter users mentioned are all conveniently anonymous already.

In actuality, though, I suspect that this is simply a press release for Eccleston’s forthcoming autobiography – excerpts of which have been released and which form the basis of this ‘story’ – which has just been reprinted in full by the Telegraph.

Does the text of the Benn-Burt bill prevent Johnson making extra requests?

Hector Drummond Posted on by

The text of the Benn-Burt bill, otherwise known as the European Union (Withdrawal) (No.6) Bill , can be found here. There’s nothing in it that I can see that prevents Boris Johnson making demands as part of the extension request. The relevant subsection is this:

The Prime Minister must seek to obtain from the European Council an extension of the period under Article 50(3) of the Treaty on European Union ending at 11.00pm on 31 October 2019 by sending to the President of the European Council a letter in the form set out in the Schedule to this Act requesting an extension of that period to 11.00pm on 31 January 2020.

And the text of the letter is this:

“Dear Mr President,

 

The UK Parliament has passed the European Union (Withdrawal) (No. 2) Act 2019. Its provisions now require Her Majesty’s Government to seek an extension of the period provided under Article 50(3) of the Treaty on European Union, including as applied by Article 106a of the Euratom Treaty, currently due to expire at 11.00pm GMT on 31 October 2019, until 11.00pm GMT on 31 January 2020.

 

I am writing therefore to inform the European Council that the United Kingdom is seeking a further extension to the period provided under Article 50(3) of the Treaty on European Union, including as applied by Article 106a of the Euratom Treaty. The United Kingdom proposes that this period should end at 11.00pm GMT on 31 January 2020. If the parties are able to ratify before this date, the Government proposes that the period should be terminated early.

 

Yours sincerely,

Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland”

What here prevents Johnson from also demanding that Portugal becomes a British territory, with all the Portugese people required to leave by Christmas, as part of the extension request?

 

There’s no end to this Parliament’s powers if this counts as law

Hector Drummond Posted on by

How is this ‘the law’?

Mr Johnson’s Government has been told to publish communications connected to prorogation and no-deal Brexit planning after MPs supported an emergency Commons motion.

 

Former attorney general Dominic Grieve’s demand for all written and electronic contact about the temporary suspension of Parliament and Operation Yellowhammer documents since July 23 to be released was approved by 311 votes to 302, majority nine.

 

He used the parliamentary device of a humble address to the Queen to ask for the documents to be put before the Commons by ministers by no later than 11pm on Wednesday.

Is this an Act of Parliament? No. Did it go through the Lords? No. Has it received Royal Assent? No. Is it compatible with Grieve’s beloved ECHR? No. So how is it ‘the law’?

Remember when May’s government never published the legal advice it had received on Brexit even though Parliament ordered it to, and nothing happened, except that on p. 17 of the newspapers it was noted that it was in contempt of Parliament? Will the media treat any refusal of Johnson’s the same way?

We can’t have this Parliament of ghouls just voting on whatever it feels like on any particular night and have that be ‘the law’. That’s no basis for a functioning society. Johnson’s executive needs to put them back in their place. But it doesn’t help when the establishment and media is made up of fellow travellers who will ignore the government being in contempt of Parliament when it suits them, and make a fuss of it when it doesn’t.

Hence the repugnant spectacle of the likes of Clive Lewis and Caroline Lucas holding up protest signs saying ‘Silenced’ at the close of Parliament. If there is one group of people in our society who get a disproportionate say over the rest of us, it is these Remainer clowns who can rely on favourable media coverage 24/7.

(As Paul Horgan says here, the Marxists love anything that upsets and discredits the traditional order, because the resulting chaos provides an opportunity for them to grab power, as has been demonstrated many times in the past.)

Update: The ‘path back’ – do the Tories really want the poisonous autocrat Damien Grieve back in the party after this?

The biggest threat to Brexit is not from the Remainers…

Hector Drummond Posted on by

… it’s from the government. The Remainers can do nothing against a determined government. The Benn-Burt bill can easily be sidestepped, for example, by sending an additional letter to the EU making  an extension impossible. Other Remainer last-minute tactics can also be stopped by a government that is determined enough. I expect Parliament could be prorogued until the start of November if necessary.

No, the biggest problem is Johnson, Cummings and their team. As I’ve been saying all along, they’re not No Dealers. They want a deal. They want a deal pretty desperately, in fact. The EU knows that as well, because Johnson and co… keep saying so. Yes, this amazingly crack team of supposedly ruthless negotiators keep talking about how much they really don’t want No Deal. Way to convince the other side, dudes. Sure May and her team were history’s worst ever negotiators, but this lot aren’t far behind.

Take this, for example:

[Johnson said] that no-deal would be a “failure of statecraft for which we would all be responsible”.

This is, at first glance, an utterly stupid thing to say, not only because it signals to the EU how desperate he is for a deal, but it also makes it difficult for himself to accept No Deal, because then No Deal becomes condemned as a failure by his own words. But I think the real point of him saying it was to both signal to the EU that he wants a deal – please give me something – and to soften Brexiteers up for No Deal not happening.

Johnson is convinced that the EU will crack and he’ll get a good deal. He’s been saying for years that the real negotiation happens in the last few weeks, or even days. Maybe the EU will crack, I don’t know. But why would they, when they know Johnson will? They’re psychopaths and ideologues, and he isn’t. They know he’s boxed himself into a corner almost as badly as May has.

The EU’s tactic has remained the same for years. Offer the same piece of shit over and over again, knowing that as time runs out Parliament may become desperate enough to pass it. In indicating that he’d really, really, prefer not to walk away with no deal, Johnson has proved little more adept than Theresa May at coping with a real-life negotiation.

 

This blog is one step ahead

Hector Drummond Posted on by

Following my suggestion on Saturday about how to get around the Benn-Burt bill, we get this in the Telegraph:

One plan under serious consideration would see the Prime Minister send an accompanying letter alongside the request to extend Article 50 setting out that the Government does not want any delay after Oct 31.

 

On Sunday night, a Cabinet source told The Telegraph: “There is a prescribed letter that has to be sent… Does that stop the Prime Minister sending other documents to the EU? I don’t think it does.

It’s pretty much my suggestion but without the flair. I still say that the government should send an extra letter demanding that the price of an extension agreement is that every EU citizen, now and in the future, becomes eligible to serve as an unpaid servant to every British family. That’s how you put the EU off with style.

Quote of the Day

Hector Drummond Posted on by

Formertory in the comments:

The continuing clearout of the Conservative Party puts me in mind (without wishing to be indelicate on a Sunday morning) of an episode many years ago when I had a colonoscopy.  For 24 hours beforehand I had to drink a disgusting liquid intended to, ah, clear me out.  The unpleasantness of the medicine and the strange relief as it did its work in a most uncompromising fashion is something I remember well, the memory evoked anew as the Conservative Party's body politic evacuates some more shit.  Nurse!  Another dose, please!

Is it my birthday?

Hector Drummond Posted on by

Amber Rudd resigns from the Conservative Party! It’s almost like what everyone on this side of the blogosphere has been saying for years: show some balls and the wets who are dragging us down will soon run away crying. Big girl’s blouses running off in a spaz tantrum gulping great buckets of air while radish-sized saliva gobules wrap around their heads is sweet to me. Very sweet.

Amber Rudd’s Remainer brother in the days when Boris planned to debag the bounder. Yes, really.

 

Oh, and Claire Perry is standing down at the next election. It’s almost too much for my taste buds to bear. Like I’ve accidentally fallen through the roof of a sugar factory. It’s incredibly sweet but I suspect I’m just having an amazing hallucination before I die.

When Michael Gove ends up as the wettest member of the party I’ll be voting for the Conservatives again.

Another way to sabotage the Benn-Burt bill

Hector Drummond Posted on by

Why couldn’t Boris just demand all sorts of things that the EU must do as part of the agreement to get an Article 50 extension, things which the EU would never agree to? Such as that all the leaders must wear clown suits every day for the duration of the extension period? Or that Macron must chop his own testicles off?

Or, to take some less silly examples, that the EU must agree that Britain has no remaining financial obligations towards the EU at all, and that the EU owes the UK 100 billion pounds for their share of the existing EU assets that the UK has helped pay for over the decades? That’s actually one that there are some grounds for thinking is true, and it would be reasonable – well, relatively reasonable – to demand. And, say, that Spain gives up all claims on Gibraltar for the rest of eternity, and will forfeit the Costa Brava to Britain if they ever utter a peep about it again. And that France agrees never to compete in the football World Cup again.

Okay, I’m starting to get silly again, but as far as I can gather there’s nothing in the bill which prevents this sort of approach. That means that the bill is not a water-tight way to guarantee an agreed extension.

No doubt if Boris did this and no agreement happened then we’d definitely see a no confidence vote in the government pass before the end of October. And if you thought things are a chaotic disaster now, wait until that happens.

Update: I’d have also thought that any agreement would involve the EU demanding that before Oct 31 the UK Parliament must be dissolved and a new election called for later in the year.

Update 2: The text of the Benn-Burt bill, otherwise known as the European Union (Withdrawal) (No.6) Bill , can be found here. There’s nothing in it that I can see that prevents Johnson making demands as part of the extension request. The relevant subsection is this:

The Prime Minister must seek to obtain from the European Council an extension of the period under Article 50(3) of the Treaty on European Union ending at 11.00pm on 31 October 2019 by sending to the President of the European Council a letter in the form set out in the Schedule to this Act requesting an extension of that period to 11.00pm on 31 January 2020.

And the text of the letter is this:

“Dear Mr President,

 

The UK Parliament has passed the European Union (Withdrawal) (No. 2) Act 2019. Its provisions now require Her Majesty’s Government to seek an extension of the period provided under Article 50(3) of the Treaty on European Union, including as applied by Article 106a of the Euratom Treaty, currently due to expire at 11.00pm GMT on 31 October 2019, until 11.00pm GMT on 31 January 2020.

 

I am writing therefore to inform the European Council that the United Kingdom is seeking a further extension to the period provided under Article 50(3) of the Treaty on European Union, including as applied by Article 106a of the Euratom Treaty. The United Kingdom proposes that this period should end at 11.00pmGMT on 31 January 2020. If the parties are able to ratify before this date, the Government proposes that the period should be terminated early.

 

Yours sincerely,

Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland”

What here prevents Johnson from asking for Portugal to become a British territory, with all the Portugese people to leave by Christmas, as part of the extension request?

 

Don’t you know who my grandad is?

Hector Drummond Posted on by

It’s funny how the left is suddenly full of respect for Winston Churchill. And full of respect for someone because of who their grandfather was. Nicholas Soames, who lost the Tory whip the other day, is the grandson of Winston Churchill. And the left think that Boris Johnson has done a terrible thing here, because he’s the grandson of Winston Churchill. It’s good to know that family lineage suddenly matters to the left. But when did Churchill become a goodie? I thought the left now regarded Churchill as a terrible man, a colonialist, a warmonger, a racist, a man who gassed Arabs, and so on?

Only this year John McDonnell denounced Churchill as a baddie:

Labour’s shadow chancellor John McDonnell has attracted a storm of criticism after describing Sir Winston Churchill as a “villain”.

 

Responding to a question posed by Politico, Mr McDonnell cited Sir Winston’s decision to send in the Lancashire Fusiliers to help police quell a Welsh miners’ strike in Tonypandy in November 1910 while serving as home secretary as the reason for his judgement.

Surely Johnson should be congratulated for seeing off the grandson of an enemy of the people?

And as for fatty Soames himself, for years the left has regarded him as the worst sort of sexist, racist, bloated, upper-class Tory arsehole. Which he is. Yet now it’s a tragedy that this fine fellow has been booted out of the party? Another reminder that the left only loves a Tory when it suits them.

Prorogue until Nov 1 to stop an interim PM getting another extension

Hector Drummond Posted on by

The one thing that does worry me about Boris providing any signal that he has given up on his idea of getting a deal, and is preparing some way around the legislation that’s supposed to stop No Deal, is that it may galvanise the Remainers to vote against the government in a confidence vote and then install their own interim leader who can go to the EU and request an extension. That’s why it’s a bad idea to let Parliament come back before Oct 31. The closer we get to Oct 31 and the more it looks like No Deal will triumph, the more desperate the Remainers will get, and they’ll stop at nothing in that scenario, and I expect they will vote the government down at that point.

It may be that Johnson and Cummings figure that if that happens the new Remainer alliance won’t last long beyond Oct 31, so there’ll be an early election before too long, and as the populace will have been alienated badly by these antics, the Tories will romp in. Maybe. But it’s not guaranteed. And what if the EU and the new PM agree an extension of a year? Or two years? We need to get out of the EU ASAP. (I’ve been saying that since June 24, 2016: get out ASAP before the anti-Brexit forces can work out ways to stop it).

The best way to get out now is to prorogue Parliament until Nov 1. The only reason Johnson didn’t is because he wanted to come back to Parliament with a crappy deal in mid-October. But that move has failed, as it was always going to. The EU will never agree anything new in such a short space of time with Parliament in such chaos. Only bad things can happen in those last few weeks if this Parliament – a Parliament full of liars and cheats – is allowed to sit. (And Johnson’s already had the full blast of ‘coup’ claims thrown at him, and they didn’t work, so more of that won’t do much damage).

The only alternative is that Johnson tells Labour that unless it supports an early election right now then he will prorogue until Nov 1, but even that may not be enough to force an election.

(Hopefully Cummings will realise that it’s no point being half-ruthless. You’ve got to do what’s required to win, and not chicken out before the finishing line. For example, you’ve got to keep the expelled Tories out of the party — let them back in and you’re finished.)

Update: But I’m being too optimistic, really. Boris won’t prorogue any further. He won’t get a better deal from the EU, but that just means he’ll bring back the WA again, slightly modified, for a mid-October vote. I shouldn’t forget my own points that (a) the Tories always betray us; (b) Boris may not be as squishy as, say, Oliver Letwin, but he’s still a squish; and (c) there is no evidence that Cummings is on the side of the clean Brexiteers. Being a hard man doesn’t make him a hard Brexit man.