Theresa May’s theatre

Hector Drummond Posted on by

It’s hard to believe that a lot of Brexiteers, and Remainers as well, who have previously been critical of May, have been singing her praises since she made her speech. The speech was pure theatre. May puts on these little shows occasionally where she pretends to be tough and Thatcherite, and then goes out into the real world and is hopeless. She’s not defending Britain. She’s defending her useless Chequers plan, which nobody in the whole Universe except her team like. Not that she’s even really defending that, because she’ll gladly water a lot of that down over the next few months.

Yesterday Donald Tusk said our proposals would undermine the single market. He didn’t explain how in any detail or make any counter-proposal. So we are at an impasse.

She’s known for months that the EU wasn’t interested in Chequers. She knows exactly why they aren’t. And they have offered another proposal, as she says herself in the same speech. A free-trade agreement along the lines of the Canada-EU agreement is on the cards. If she wants a deal than that’s the framework. That would make most Britons happy. Sure there is the Irish border problem associated with that, but that’s what needs to be negotiated. If that can’t be solved then a hard, ie. a clean Brexit must happen, but few people really believe that the EU are that worried about the Irish border.

But I have also been clear that the best outcome is for the UK to leave with a deal.

In other words, “I’m terrified of the prospect of a no deal Brexit”. The EU knows this, so they know she’ll back down eventually. She knows, and they know, that a no-deal Brexit requires her to have exactly the sort of guts and belief that she clearly doesn’t have.

What’s hard to decide at this stage is whether the EU would like May to stay on because they think she’ll give in and bring about a very soft Brexit, giving them control over Britain, or whether they genuinely want rid of Britain, and would prefer to undermine May so that they can get a Brexiteer PM in and sort out a free trade agreement and be done with the whole thing. I was previously leaning towards the former theory, but after the Salzburg fiasco, and they way the EU treated May, I’m starting to lean towards the latter.

Anyway, the Tory party now has the perfect chance to boot May out. Although her little am-dram performance may have saved her neck once again.

Is a country run by a lot of Laurie Pennys going to be a match for anything?

Hector Drummond Posted on by

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard wonders whether, as Kishore Mahbubani, the “prophet of Eastern ascendancy and Singapore’s former UN ambassador” claims, the West’s era of dominance is over:

Brace for a shattering shock. Westerners will discover within a generation that the fleeting 200-year era of Euro-American dominance is over.

 

“The Asians are coming back and the chemistry of the 21st century will be completely different. You will have to make choices,” said Mahbubani … The rules of the world order will be set in the East. International law will mutate. The financial institutions and global trading structure will be run by China and India. Westerners will have to adapt, nolens volens, to the Confucian-Hindu way of doing things.

 

That, at least, is the argument. Doubters say the world has been waiting for the Asian century since Marco Polo. Something always seems to intrude. Usually autocracy.

There is one difference this time, which AEP neglects to mention. The West’s efforts to commit suicide are intensifying. If the East gets it together then a culture obsessed with speech codes, safe spaces and policing the internet for people who deny that women can have penises will be no match for it.

Yes, I know economics isn’t always a zero-sum game. But sometimes it is. And culture, and the law, are different again. Weaker, victim-led cultures die. The West is starting to die. If the West can shrug off the left like it did in the 80s then it can revive, but the left has much more of a strangehold on the culture and the institutions than it did in the 80s. And modern leftists are altogether more stupid, tribal, ahistoric, inward-looking and divorced from reality than even the 80s leftists were, which is saying something.

It really would be something of an irony if it turned out that the Universities, long thought to be the jewel in the West’s crown, turned out to be the cause of its demise.

Avoid it like the plague

Hector Drummond Posted on by

What is Communism and hard-left socialism like? A lot of analogies have been made over the years, but in view of its stupendous death toll it can perhaps be best compared to a genetically-engineered virus which some scientists swear will solve all of life’s problems, yet every time it is unleashed it kills millions of people instead, and leaves millions more in crippling pain, disfigurement, terror and poverty.

Despite this, there are still some people who are desperate to try it again, even though it’s the same virus every time. This time it will work, they say, even though hardly anything has changed. Would you want to try it?

The other funny thing about this anaology is that often the people who want to try it again are the same ones who are terrified of the possible consequences of genetically modified food, consequences which are so unlikely that they almost enter the realms of the abstract. With GM food apparently no risk, no matter how small, is worth it.

Same people.

Update: I should perhaps also note that I had to resort to using a non-real, science-fiction scenario to draw an adequate analogy with Communism, because hardly anything else in reality can equal it in terms of the level of disaster it causes. You’d rather your country was hit by a major earthquake or an atom bomb than Communism.

Sound familiar?

Hector Drummond Posted on by

The killer of Trotsky, Ramon Mercader, refused to admit that he had been hired by Stalin to commit the murder:

Even after his identity had been established fingerprints, he refused to admit who he was or why he had come to commit the murder. The official Stalinist version was that he was a disgruntled Trotskyite, and that the NKVD had nothing to do with it. (Robert Conquest, The Great Terror: A Reassessment, p. 418.)

It’s less well-known these days that the NKVD had made a botched attempt on Trotsky’s life a few months earlier. A Mexican social realist painter called David Alfaro Siqueiros

and two accomplices collected a number of sub-machine guns, police and Army uniforms, and some ladders and incendiary bombs, together with a rotary power saw. He dressed himelf as a major in the Mexican Army and put on a disguise. At about 2:00 A.M., he assembled the twenty men he had chosen, and they drove in four cars to Trotsky’s fortified villa. Some of the police had already been lured away; the others were trussed up at gunpoint. The telephone wires were cut, and the sentry on duty, an American called Harte, was rushed and overwhelmed. The force broke into the patio and swept the bedrooms with tommy guns for several minutes. They then pulled out, leaving several incendiaries and a large dynamite bomb. The latter failed to explode. Trotsky was slightly wounded in the right leg; his ten-year-old grandson was also hit. His wife received some burns from the incendiaries, Otherwise, the attack was a failure. (Robert Conquest, The Great Terror: A Reassessment, p. 416.)

 

A three-legged horse

Hector Drummond Posted on by

There’s no doubt that Tony Blair was always an amoral opportunist, but I think something snapped in him after the left protested so vehemently against the Iraq War. It’s like he said ‘If you won’t venerate me as a great statesman then screw you, I’ll make millions from despots who want to hear what I have to say”. And now Brexit gives him a chance to play the great statesman again, with similar results.

Blair, Major and Clegg. It’s a wonder that any of them can stand to be associated with the other two.

The Biscuit Factory Vol. I: Days of Wine and Cheese serialisation. Part 38

Hector Drummond Posted on by

2000-01

Semester 2

Week 5

Thursday

 

‘Take them all over,’ says Derek.

‘All of them?’ says Simon.

‘The state?’ says Bob. ‘Yes.’

‘All the public schools?’ says Simon.

‘No more private schools,’ says Derek.

Ren, who has just finished talking to a student nearby, has overheard the conversation, and joins the trio.

‘Are you saying that the state should commandeer private schools?’

‘Of course,’ says Derek. ‘Don’t tell me you’re so right-wing that you’re holding a torch for the bloody public schools?’

‘Right-wing? Jesus, you lot are so out of touch with ordinary opinion that you think sending your kid to a private school must be criminalised. No wonder civilians think academics are political cranks.’

‘Didn’t you get sexually abused at yours?’ says Derek.

‘Unlike you I went to state school.’

‘If a state education is good enough for most people, why isn’t it good enough for everyone?’

‘Yeah, why should a few people get a superior education?’ says Bob.

Derek gives Bob a look.

‘Well put, Bob,’ says Ren.

‘They don’t get a superior education.’ says Derek. ‘They get an unbalanced education.’

‘At my state school I just got a mediocre education, with leftist indoctrination,’ says Ren. ‘I had to educate myself to learn anything.’

‘You don’t have to just take them over in one go. Another method is to just gradually bring them under your control by way of increasing regulation,’ says Simon, who usually speaks slowly and with bizarre emphases on certain words. ‘And the teachers they’ll have to choose from in the future will mostly be left-wing, because that’s the way University graduates are heading, so they’ll be taken over by stealth.’

‘Don’t frighten the horses, that’s always your way, isn’t it, Simon?’ says Derek.

‘Unless your aim is to actually frighten the horses, then yes, that’s my way,’ says Simon, in his quiet but slightly hammy way. ‘Choose the effective path, rather than the melodramatic one.’

‘I think you’ll find that Derek’s aim mainly is to frighten the horses,’ says Ren. ‘He doesn’t want to make an omelette without breaking some eggs. That’s half the fun of it.’

‘It’s just that you have to establish early on who’s boss,’ says Derek. ‘Otherwise the old bosses will have too many opportunities to stymie you.’

‘So we all agree that the state should completely take over the Universities as well?’ says Ren.

‘What? No,’ says Derek.

‘Of course not,’ says Simon. ‘That would be awful.’

‘A disaster,’ says Bob. ‘The state couldn’t possibly run the Universities. Imagine having a government bureaucrat in charge of Grayvington.’

‘So it’s imperative that the state does not run even a single University,’ says Ren, ‘because the state is full of idiots who don’t know what they’re doing, but they must nevertheless be put in charge of all schools?’

‘It take specialist skills to run academia,’ says Derek. ‘Only academics are in a position to know how to do it properly. Not the government, they’d make a complete mess of it.’

‘Conquest’s first law of politics: everyone’s a conservative about what he knows best. In our field, it’s best to let Universities manage themselves, and the government know-nothings should butt out. But in that pretty similar field over there, which I don’t know so well, I reckon the government know-nothings should run everything.’

‘Oh come on, it’s not the same thing at all,’ blusters Bob.

‘You mean the school’s are even harder to get right?’ says Ren. ‘You may be right there.’

‘We’re the experts on Locke,’ says Simon. ‘We’re the experts on Joyce. We’re the experts on physics. We’re the people who know the students best. We’re the ones who should make the decisions.’

‘Sure, but schools can say the same thing. They know their students the best, they know the parents, they’re the ones in the best position to make the decisions for their students.’

‘You can hire a lot of educational experts who make better decisions than teachers,’ says Simon, ‘and that’s what the state’s done.’

‘You can say the same of lecturers. The state could easily hire a panel of top philosophers who tell us what to teach. But would that be a good idea? Do you want a panel setting your curriculum for you? And the idea that the state does a good job of hiring educational experts is horse feathers. The whole field is full of poor quality, unempirical, politicised dross, and the government education department that sets the national curriculum is full of third-raters, despite the fact that that department takes a significant proportion of the whole education budget. Thank God there are still some schools that can provide some variety in what is taught.’

‘Why should richer students get a better education?’ says Bob.

‘I thought the argument was that the state is better at education? Or is it that you want to cut down private schools because they’re better than state schools?’

‘What it is, is that public schools suck up too many good students,’ says Derek, ‘leaving those at state schools at a disadvantage.’ He is about to elaborate further on this when Verna comes up looking angrily at Ren. Ren assumes she has come to join the battle against him, but it turns out it’s something else.

‘Ren,’ she says. ‘I have a bone to pick with you.’

‘What?’

‘That graduate seminar you came to yesterday. Your behaviour wasn’t acceptable, and you need to be told.’

‘Huh?’ Ren racks his brain. He didn’t misbehave at that graduate seminar yesterday. What on Earth is this misbegotten hag going on about? ‘What are you talking about, Verna?’

‘You asked Lauren a question.’

‘Yes. And…?’

‘You asked her a question after her talk. That’s not acceptable.’

‘I don’t understand. I asked her a question in question time. When the floor had been thrown open to questions.’

‘Yes, but you shouldn’t have asked her a question.’

‘I shouldn’t have asked her a question… in question time?’

‘It was threatening.’

‘I’m not following you. It was a normal question, in fact a fairly softball question, asked in a normal tone of voice. How was it threatening?’

‘It was threatening because you are a staff member asking a graduate student a question.’

Derek and Bob make their excuses and slip away.

‘Still not following you. Isn’t the point of these graduate seminars to give grad students the chance to experience a philosophy talk? Where people ask them questions? Isn’t that what we all want when we give a talk? To discuss our ideas with other philosophers?’

‘It’s intimidating for a graduate student to have to answer a question from a staff member. Especially an analytic staff member.’

‘I asked her an easy question, and she answered it without any trouble. Did she say she was intimidated?’

‘No, but it’s the principle that matters. Graduate students can find it a hostile experience to be asked about their work by staff members.’

Simon decided that he is better off elsewhere too, and he glides away silently.

‘This is stupid. The grad students beg us to come to their seminars. They’re desperate for us to pay them attention, and ask them about their research. And they want the experience of facing questions before they have to do it for real, in front of a real audience, who might ask them much more hostile questions. That’s why I went. You sent out an e-mail practically ordering us to come to this week’s.’

Verna seems to be unmoved by what Ren has said. ‘I didn’t say you could come and ask questions.’

‘You just want us to come and sit there and listen? Like it’s a lecture, not a seminar.’

‘That’s right. Unless you’re someone sympathetic to their viewpoint, you should just listen. In respectful silence. Not harass them.’

‘But you asked a question.’

‘I’m not a hostile questioner.’

‘Neither am I. I asked a straightforward question. Practically a practise question for her. It was hardly Bertie Russell or Freddie Ayer getting vicious and trying to knock someone down and destroy them. And why do you count as non-hostile?’

‘I’m female. I’m not analytic. And I’m her supervisor.’

‘Then you’re the last person who should be asking questions in a seminar. You’ve had many opportunities to talk to her about her research. The point of the seminar is to open it up to others. To let her get used to taking questions from people who might not agree with her. Or people who haven’t understood things, and need more explanation. This is a University. These are graduate students, for Christ’s sake. It’s not a sheltered workshop.’

‘That is offensive talk.’

Ren thinks better of letting her know what real offensive talk looks like.

‘Really, you just don’t want the wrong people asking awkward questions,’ he says, in a slightly harder voice. ‘Or even non-awkward questions. I don’t think she had any issues with answering questions. It did her good. You’re doing her no good trying to hide her. She’s not a shrinking violet first-year grad student. She’s a third-year, and can cope.’

‘You’re being aggressive. This is what we don’t want students being exposed to.’

‘You’re the one being aggressive. You came over to me to berate me over nothing.’

‘You’re still being aggressive. This is the sort of behaviour that needs to be stamped out.’

‘Is your hypocrisy deliberate? Or do you genuinely believe that I’m being the aggressor when I’m just defending myself against your aggression?’

‘I need to speak to the Head of Department about your unacceptable violent male attitude.’

Ren shakes his head. ‘I seem to remember you saying the same sort of thing about him last semester, so I’m not sure how well that’s going to work. Adelaide’s not Head any more, remember.’

‘Then I’ll take it higher up. The Dean is not so keen on your sort of bully-boy tactics.’

‘Can’t have people asking questions at a University after all, can we?’ says a fed-up Ren as he walks away.

No wonder the state of the country is now like the inside of a mad woman’s head

Hector Drummond Posted on by

There was a lot of Twitter admiration last night about how wonderful Ruth Davidson is for admitting to the Sunday Times that she has had depression and mental health issues. How brave she is, apparently, even though every man and his dog is now claiming to have mental health issues, and anyone caught without mental health issues is considered rather passe and working-class.

My thoughts were rather different. They were, why do screwed-up people who can barely cope with their own life so often seek to rule over others? And wouldn’t it be nice to have some normal, or at least some robust, people in charge again? Although after reflection I dropped the ‘again’.

It’s not like she’s the worst politican out there, and I wish her all the best, and I’m glad she’s been sensible enough to rule out ever taking the ‘top job’ (assuming she’s telling the truth). But I’d rather not be dictated to by neurotics and megalomaniacs and various assorted headcases. Someone who struggles to cope with reality isn’t someone I want making the rules.

(Similar points apply to modern journalism.)

The end of the left still seems a very long way away

Hector Drummond Posted on by

Remember when when the Berlin Wall fell, and then the USSR? Many right-wingers, and many non-political people, said this is the end of the left.

Others, however, warned that leftists don’t stop being leftists, and plotting and agitating against freedom, just because they’re not currently in power or vogue, and that we were not rid of them at all.

I think we can safely say that those people were right.

Another good point these wise men made was that without the bogeymen of the USSR, East Germany, etc. hanging over them, leftists might be able to gradually acquire respectability. That’s also happened.

Update: I saw a comment a while back on a blog, possibly Tim Newman’s, that’s been haunting me for a while. It was along the lines of, “I sometimes wonder whether the real reason the Iron Curtain came down is because there was no longer any great difference between one side of it and the other.”

The Biscuit Factory Vol. I: Days of Wine and Cheese serialisation. Part 37

Hector Drummond Posted on by

2000-01

Semester 2

Week 4

Wednesday

 

Ren’s in his office recovering after giving a lecture, which had gone well enough but will require some extra explaining next week, on top of the extra explaining he was already going to have to do because of the previous week’s lecture which he didn’t have time to cover today. But he can’t get on with writing down everything he needs to write down while it’s still fresh in his mind, because now he has to go to meet this week’s visiting speaker, and then host the weekly departmental seminar.

Being in charge of the seminars was one of the admin jobs he was given when he arrived at Grayvington. New, young members of the department are often given this role. One reason for this is that it’s a job that doesn’t require much knowledge of University procedures and rules, or much familiarity with University politics. But it’s also felt that it’s a way that newbies can get to meet more senior members of the profession, and that will help them make a name for themselves – networking is as vital in the Philosophy profession as it is everywhere else – and that in turn helps improve the department’s name. It also means that the visiting speakers get to interact with some new blood, who genuinely want to listen to what the speaker has to say, and who genuinely want to go out to a restaurant with them afterwards, rather than the speaker having to deal with the same tired old farts who are bored of departmental seminars and who just want to go home as soon as the talk is finished.

But there are some downsides to giving the job to a newbie. Some of the more distinguished and older guest speakers, especially overseas ones, aren’t so keen on having to spend time with wet-behind-the-ears kids fresh out of their doctorate, and expect to be entertained by the more eminent and interesting members of the department. Thus it was understood that if a really big name came to speak then someone more senior would be given the job of looking after them. However, this policy hasn’t been a great success in the past, as there is, unfortunately, no-one in the department who is both eminent and interesting. (This is perhaps why none of senior members of the department are taking the job of hosting a very big name in the field, Tyson Kipnis, who is coming to give a talk in a few weeks. Or perhaps it’s because Tyson has a rep for being difficult.)

Another problem is that the seminar organiser has to book the speakers for the next academic year, and newbies don’t have the contacts or the knowledge to do a good job of that, so whoever has the job depends greatly on the rest of the department recommending people they know who might be interested, and who will give a decent talk. This is something the other departmental members can’t always be bothered to do. (It’s not their job this year, okay?) If prompted enough they might recommend an old friend, who will usually turn out to have nothing much to say, or someone whose written work they have admired, who as often as not will turn out to be a terrible speaker and gruesome company.

Ren has already been surprised at how dull salaried philosophers can be. At conferences, as a grad student, you can get a mistaken impression of them, because there are always a few who are fun, who stay up drinking and talking shit with the grad students, and letting their hair down. It’s easy to think that lots of other philosophers are like that. (Maybe a lot were, back in 1972.) But eventually Ren will come to realise that such philosophers are few in number. At those conferences he and the other grad students never noticed that they weren’t socialising with the one-hundred and fifty other philosophers who have gone to bed early, or who are having torpid conversations with each other over dinner somewhere in a stuffy restaurant far away from the conference bar and the postgrads and the minor members of the profession. In the whole country there are really only three philosophers with permanent positions who are any fun, and even they are gradually becoming jaded as various responsibilities, both academic and familial, are piled upon their shoulders.

So most of the philosophers Ren has to wine and dine are not scintillating company. (Thankfully he doesn’t have to do much entertaining of any of the snake-oil merchants that the Continentalists have got in to do talks, because Verna, not trusting Ren to keep things civil, usually looks after them.) Often only a few other colleagues come to the dinner afterwards. Sometimes no-one else comes if the speaker is really dull, or unknown, or it’s essay-marking time. In that situation it can be hard work to keep the guest entertained. Most of them expect you to do the work of entertaining them. That’s partly because they’re often people who are socially awkward to start with, but it’s also because they feel that they’ve done the work of giving your department their talk, so now it’s your job to entertain them, on behalf of your department, and be interested in them. But that’s not easy when you’ve nothing much in common, and they’re less interesting than the curtains, and they have no knowledge of any topic that would engage what Ren likes to call a ‘spirited person’.

Usually what a speaker wants to do most of all after their talk is to discuss the material they have just presented. This is fair enough, as one of the points of going to another department to present your work is to get some feedback on your views (as well as getting the chance to promulgate them). So you really want some discussion of the ideas you’ve just spent the last few months working on, however critical. Usually there’s a few people around who are happy to talk to the speaker about their views, or attack them. But if no-one else is at dinner other than the speaker and the organiser, then that duty falls to the organiser. If the topic is something that you, the organiser, is interested in, then all might be well. But if it’s been some boring old tosh that you paid no attention to, or you just had more important things to think about, like the next Test match, or people you might be able to have sex with, or writing down good band names on your piece of paper so the speaker thinks you’re taking notes, then you’re in a jam. (It’s generally a good idea to pay some attention to the speaker’s talk when you’re the organiser.)

The only way out is to pretend to have some idea of what the speaker had said, but ask him or her to explain things all over again just to be absolutely sure you’ve understood it properly, and then act like everything they say is most fascinating. The speaker may well realise that you hadn’t listened the first time, but even so, they’ll still run through it all again, because (a) they want to talk about it, and also because (b) they know, just as you do, that this will fill in the time until they go to their hotel, or the train station. (But not their car; no-one in British philosophy ever drives to give a talk, except Ren and his departmental colleague Compton Hart, so it is invariably the train station that speakers who aren’t staying overnight will go to.)

New scandal girl once posed for photos… in public

Hector Drummond Posted on by

The Daily Mail are splashing with ‘shocking’ pictures of Tory girl Carrie Symonds: which they stole took from social media. And they really are shocking. In one she’s sitting at the beach. Shocking enough, I agree, but even worse was that she was eating a watermelon. Despite this, she wasn’t thrown out of the Conservative Party.

In another picture she was ‘photographed at the helm of a yacht while enjoying a sunshine holiday’. Scandalous, eh? Also – and I can hardly bring myself to report this – she was pictured ‘drinking a glass of rose while on a balcony wearing a bikini’. Brazen.

But worst of all in the minds of the Daily Mail journalists is the fact she once appeared in a student play that had some swear words in it. And I’m sure all decent people will be appalled to her this: ‘For the play, Ms Symonds is wearing a black dress and torn black tights with heavy black make-up smeared around her eyes’. A man who shags a woman like this can hardly be trusted to run the country, can he?

Actually, there was one genuinely shocking thing in the piece:

A passionate environmental campaigner, she founded a company for making an alternative to plastic straws, it has emerged.

This really was something that had me shaking my head in despair. But of course it’s the one thing the Daily Mail approves of about her, because it’s a topic – a totally pointless one – that they campaign on.

You don’t get to pretend you’re funny any more, Guardian fun-killers

Hector Drummond Posted on by

The Guardian has an article about Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure:

I got the Bill & Ted script in the late 80s, after I made Critters. It was apparently Hollywood’s most widely read at the time. Writers Ed Solomon and Chris Matheson had based it …

No. Stop. You don’t get to write about funny films any more, you Guardianista creeps. Unfunny political arseholes like you lot are killing comedy. Don’t pretend you’re still funny by leaching the humour off people who are the exact opposite to you. Go and write some more miserable, joy-killing articles that attempt to further reduce the range of artistic things we can enjoy .. oh, look, they have one like that in the paper today as well:

15 songs we’d rather never hear again

 

The Beatles – I Saw Her Standing There
“She was just 17/ If you know what I mean.” We do. Not Fab.

Apparently teenagers aren’t allowed to fancy each other any more.

Sinitta – So Macho
1986 smash filled with political incorrectness (“I don’t want no seven stone weakling/ Or a boy who thinks he’s a girl”) and still widely played in gyms.

A woman likes men. But not the sort of finger-wagging soymen who write Guardian clickbait articles. How dare she.

Lily Allen – Not Big

In 2018, is it big or clever for Allen to ridicule her ex’s penis?

Well, no, it wasn’t big or clever, not just in 2018, but also when the song came out. (Notice how the Guardian has the ‘leftist timetable’ view of things that I mentioned the other day.) But is it big or clever of the Guardian to scold Lily Allen? She releases a load of garbage, sure, but we can make our own decisions on that without the Granuid’s preaching.

Mungo Jerry – In the Summertime
“Have a drink, have a drive …”.

With all the rubbish that’s been released in the last few decades a mild reference to drink-driving arouses the ire of this buzz-killing twat.

The Vapors – Turning Japanese
A fine 70s power-pop hit about masturbation. Great! Apart from Asian stereotyping.

I don’t think even my grandmother was this pompous.

 

 

 

The Biscuit Factory Vol. I: Days of Wine and Cheese serialisation. Part 36

Hector Drummond Posted on by

2000-01

Semester 2

Week 3

Tuesday

 

Ren knocks on Compton’s door.

‘Compton, what’s all this cuggermugger I hear about Verna winning a grant?’

‘It’s true.’

‘But how?’

‘The postmodern sisterhood. They look after their own.’

‘But even by their standards she’s dumb. Wouldn’t they give it to someone a little brighter?’

‘You overestimate the intelligence of the ranks. There’s not much there. And it’s partly about loyalty, and politics. Verna might have fencepost levels of intelligence, but she can be trusted to write what she’s supposed to, and remain an acolyte, without straying off the reservation, as they say.’

‘So what’s it about?’

‘You haven’t seen? I’ve got the description bookmarked. Here, let me print it out for you. You’d better sit down while I do this, it’s going to be a bit of a shock.’

After the printing has finished Compton passes Ren a piece of paper for perusal.

 

———————————————————-

‘Recon(cept)ualizing the Vacuum Cleaner:

God, Slave, Function, Liberation’

Verna Leach

Vacuum. Cleaner. Clean. Vacuum. The diffraction of the void. The nothingness of space at the heart of the assemblange. A womb? To give: birth: to: [multiple possibilities]. A parallax view of a revolutionary machine with an atomic energy-driven core. Liberator, or captor? Is it our tool, or we it’s?

In the political ecology of things the humble/mighty vacuum cleaner has been ignored, but nothing played a bigger part in womens’ lives in the twentieth century. This project explores the metaphysicks, the politicks, the in(tra)fusion of this mash-chine from a postmodernist perspective, sucking in Foucault, Irigaray, Derrida, Baudrillard, Kristeva and Lyotard. A multiple-meaning/multiple-conclusion approach has been derived from the recent breakthroughs of Hoskaveda, allowing the fullest/weakest focus/pan on the Booth/Kenney invention, which created a Russian revolution/holocaust in the suburbs of the privileged/enslaved. Calibrations are reset, and a machine is created anew, only this time in the form of word’s and idea’s, which create their own powerful force and irresistible attraction.

———————————————————-

 

‘This is utter bilge. How much money was she awarded for this?’

‘One hundred and fifty thousand pounds.’

‘One hundred and fifty thousand pounds? This cannot be real.’

‘It’s real.’

‘How is she going to spend that much money on this baloney? The result will be a few papers that you could write up in the pub one afternoon once you’ve knocked a few back.’

‘Three years of teaching and admin buyout for her.’

‘Three years? THREE FUCKING YEARS? No way is this real. This is a prank. You’re shitting me, aren’t you?’

‘Plus she gets a PhD student funded to do this with her.’

‘A PhD? On some fake bullshit on vacuum cleaners?’

‘Could have been worse. She could easily have got two or three PhD students out of it.’

‘This doesn’t even read like something Verna could have written. It may be idiotic, but it shows a bit more invention than she’s capable of.’

‘Well spotted. The word is that Adalia helped her write it. Reads much more like something Adalia would write, rather than Verna the Learner.’

‘So is Adalia on the grant as well?’

‘No, she was just lending a hand, as a favour. So she is of course mightily pissed off that Verna has landed such a big grant with it. Big by Philosophy standards, anyway. They’re not speaking. Not that Verna will care.’

Ren screws the piece of paper up and throws it at the wall. ‘The whole grant system has gone insane.’

‘Conquest’s third law of politics,’ says Compton. ‘The simplest way to explain the behaviour of any bureaucratic organisation is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies. Or parasites, I would add. In this case that is, to some extent, literally true. The Continentalists, for instance, who are both enemies of scholarship, and parasites, have infiltrated the system. It’s Kimball’s “long march through the institutions” in action. Once they get in to the system, they’re very difficult to get out, and they work hard at getting more of each other in. In a way, that’s also what the Robotikin has done. Got himself into the system, so he and the people like him can give each other grants. Did you know about his grant from a few years ago?’

‘I knew he had one, but I don’t know the details.’

‘Philosophy of architecture. Not as loopy as Verna’s of course, but still total dejecture. A complete waste of taxpayer’s money. I can’t even tell you what it’s about because I can’t remember, it’s like trying to grab hold of fog. Something about structural integrity, I think.

‘Isn’t philosophy of architecture a bit like philosophy of sport? A kind of artificial field invented, or expanded, by people desperate for a field that isn’t too hard to make a name in for yourself?’

‘You might say that. I couldn’t possibly comment. Robot has this little group of philosophy of architecture people who all refer to each other’s work, and referee it. Outside of that group there isn’t a person on Earth who would have the slightest interest in anything that lot say. No other philosophers care. No architects care. It’s of no relevance to anyone handing out money for architecture projects, public or private. Even the members of the group wouldn’t be interested if they weren’t making a career out of it. Yet Warhol was awarded two-hundred and twenty-five thousand pounds for it, all paid for by Uncle Sucker.’

Ren just sits and shakes his head, completely donnered.

‘Didn’t you know?’ says Compton.

‘I didn’t know he got that much money.’

‘That’s why he has so many PhD students. Most of them are funded through his grants.’

‘Is that why his students are all so dull? Because they have to work on his boring ideas?’

‘I expect that’s the reason.’

‘I don’t even really get how you can work on someone else’s ideas as a grad student in Philosophy,’ says Ren. ‘In science, sure. You run some experiments as directed by the PI. But how do you write on a philosophical topic as directed by the PI? It’s got to be your own work or it’s not a PhD, so the PI can’t just tell you what to write. But your ideas are unlikely to be that close to the PIs. What if you end up thinking up ideas that are very different?’

‘In theory you go with your own ideas if they end up differing from the PI,’ says Compton. ‘But often in practise the PI will guide you closely. Especially if it’s someone like Robot. It’s not really your PhD. You take his skeleton, and add a bit of flesh to it. With writing joint papers it’s even more fraught. If you want to appear on a joint paper you’d better be mighty fictile and agree with the PI. And the PI will expect you to subordinate your views to his or hers. You’re right that this sort of funded collaboration doesn’t really work in Philosophy. Two or three philosophers who find that they have similar ideas on something can collaborate, but hiring in collaborators? Do you hire the best candidates, or the ones who agree with you? It’s just more examples of philosophers pretending to be scientists.’

‘And Verna is pretending to be God knows what.’

‘Pretending to be an intellectual, I think.’

How to be a Guardian tennis writer: 1) Check Billie Jean’s Twitter page. 2) That’s it.

Hector Drummond Posted on by

The Guardian gets the tennis world’s reaction to Serena Williams’ antics at the US Open 180 degrees arse-backwards, as usual:

Tennis players past and present have rallied behind Serena Williams after she claimed the sport was riddled by sexism following an extraordinary on-court tirade at an umpire during the US Open women’s final.

But the only past tennis player they quote is… Billie Jean King. Whose view is, shall we say, a tad biased.

If the Guardian held a tennis tournament, only Billie Jean King and Martina Navratlova would be allowed to enter, and they’d call it ‘The People’s Tournament’.

 

The non-shed of the year

Hector Drummond Posted on by

From the Telegraph:

Shed of the Year, a competition that has been running annually since 2007, ­attracted 2,971 entries this year, and from these the organisers selected 24 entrants, across eight categories, for the public vote. The categories were eco sheds, cabin and summerhouse sheds, workshop and studio sheds, budget sheds, historic sheds, pub and entertainment sheds, not-actually-shed-sheds – which comprise a boat, a retired taxi and a cabinful of Lego – and unique sheds that didn’t fit any of those categories. The unique sheds are a very chic wooden hut made from the upturned prow of a boat; an elfin two-storey job with a roundhouse below and a yurt above; and a sleek, cube-shaped summerhouse whose walls can be re­arranged depending on the weather.

They’re all great; the problem is, rather, linguistic. And cultural. None of them are sheds. Is this a shed?

No. Is this a shed?

Nope. Is this a shed?

Hell no.

Are they good? Yes. Do I wish I had one? Yes. Except maybe that last one. But really, a shed a place where tools and lawnmowers and stuff like that is kept. What’s amusing about men and their sheds is that so many of them are happy spending time their despite the fact that they’re cramped, cold, unglamorous little spaces. But there’s nothing quirky or amusing about anyone spending time in a glamorous, large back-garden luxury room, especially one with with booze on tap. Of course you’d spend time there. And so the link with the great British male shed tradition has been lost.

Don’t give her ideas

Hector Drummond Posted on by

Everyone keeps telling Theresa May not to make the same mistake with Brexit as with the last general election. They’re saying, don’t try to do everything your way with just you and a small cabal of advisors doing what you think fit, ignoring everyone else. Look how badly that turned out last time you did it. You threw away an enormous poll lead and almost lost the election. You did it your way and you barely scraped through.

Thing is, if you want to stop her this is the wrong thing to say. Because she won the last election. She won. Sure she threw away an enormous lead, and sure she humiliated herself and her party in winning, and sure she had to abase herself before the DUP to scrape over the line into power. But the point is, she won. She became PM.

She clearly didn’t care that much about the damage to the party that was caused. Remember this is the woman who said the Conservatives were the nasty party. She doesn’t like the grassroots any more than David Cameron. What matters is that she wears the crown, and she ain’t giving it up.

Unfancied old mare wins it by a nose.

She has exactly the same plans for Brexit. She thinks she can scrape over the line again with her Chequers plan. She thinks she can scratch and fight and bodge and fudge and bully to get it over the line. If the party dies as a result, she won’t care. She doesn’t care who gets damaged, as long as the photo finish shows her winning it by a nose. She’d happily shove her husband off a roof to get her hands on the trophy.

That’s why we can’t rely on the fact that everyone hates Chequers to see it off. It will only die when she dies. That’s why she has to go.