The Biscuit Factory Vol. I: Days of Wine and Cheese serialisation. Part 10

Hector Drummond Posted on by

2000-01

Semester 1

Week 4

Wednesday… continue

 

It’s getting hard to talk about anything now, as the two time lords have had a little too much Tardis fuel to drink. They’ve resumed battle, and are getting louder and louder, each denouncing the other’s field, much to everyone else’s embarrassment. George especially is looking red in the face, and looks to be about to faint from shame. The whole restaurant is being forced to listen, and the waiters are nervously hovering, waiting for their moment to rush in and politely ask them to be quiet. Compton, Ren and Walter start chatting again in an attempt to disassociate themselves, and to provide some auditory cover, but their efforts are futile.

Beresford is accusing Hedley of sticking his philosophical oar into areas he doesn’t understand.

‘Leave physics to the physicists,’ Beresford says. ‘You don’t even understand the basics of what’s going on, so your theories have no relevance to anything. You’re embarrassing yourself.’

The audience tenses at this. The argument has left the arena of specifics, and looks like heading into general drunken abuse territory.

Hedley is not fazed. A confident and polished Oxbridge product, he has dealt with plenty of this sort of attitude before from better physicists than Beresford. But he is getting fed up with the man and wishes he would go away. He is also drunker than he realises.

‘What are you playing at, buster?’ he drawls, with effortless contempt. He is winding Sadler up like a master. ‘You come along to another department’s dinner, and insult their profession? Who asked you to come?’

‘It’s not a departmental dinner, it’s the dinner for your talk which was open to all.’

‘The talk was open to all. The dinner wasn’t. It’s a private dinner and you’ve gate-crashed it. I never heard anyone invite you. Do you think a philosopher would dream of inviting himself to a Physics dinner and then spend the dinner insulting the field of Physics?’

‘Wouldn’t worry us,’ shouts Sadler. ‘We could handle him. We’d squash him like a bug!’ Sadler bangs his fist into his palm, perhaps unnecessarily, to illustrate said squashing manoeuvres. ‘I’d tell him to bring it on! Say what you want!’

‘Do you know anything about philosophy of physics? Or even philosophy of science?’ says Hedley. ‘Have you ever read anything in the field, you ignoramus?’

‘Do you know anything about physics?’

‘I have a fucking Physics degree,’ says Hedley.

‘Undergraduate degree. Means nothing. You have a superficial and screwed-up understanding of everything.’

‘I doubt it, I read Physics at Cambridge, not at your department. Whereas you know less about the Philosophy of Physics than my third-year undergraduates. You haven’t even read any David Lewis. But then, my students don’t have the disadvantage you have of being at a second-rate University. I suggest you acquaint yourself with the literature before you go shooting your mouth off.’

‘Please,’ gasps George, who is holding his chest. Ren wonders whether he is going to complain about Hedley’s general insult to Grayvington, an insult which Hedley appears to be unaware he has made. ‘Please could we keep it down and not make it so personal?’

‘You wouldn’t know a fucking Boltzmann equation if I etched into your forehead with a fucking chisel,’ shouts Sadler.

So this is the famous Sadler temper, Ren thinks, that Douglas, via Garrett, has told him about. The two antagonists did not appear to be personally acquainted before today, but Ren wonders whether there is something in Hedley’s past that has made Beresford so hostile. Did he once insult Beresford’s sister? Did Hedley ever stop him getting a grant?

‘Do they let you play with chisels, then?’ says Hedley. ‘Is that what you try to split atoms with here?’

George has his head down on the table; he seems to be having a serious panic attack. The waiters are dumbfounded. They’ve never seen anything like this before. Everyone, the waiters, the cooks, the other customers, even the academics themselves, are now weirdly fascinated by the question that is hovering in front of their mind – what happens when academics lose it with each other? What exactly do they do? Do they just ramp up the academic references? Challenge each other to a fencing duel? Face off on a special edition of University Challenge? Hit each other with theses?

‘What does a philosopher split an atom with?’ yells Beresford, who makes the ominous transition from sitting to standing. ‘A piece of chalk?’

‘Sit down,’ says Hedley, who knows Beresford is close to losing it now.

‘A piece of fucking chalk?’ Beresford bends over to talk more directly to Hedley’s face. ‘You fucking chalky cunt.’

‘Sit down, you great gas giant.’

Beresford picks up a bowl of sweet-and-sour chicken and rice and shoves it across the prone body of George, who appears to be hyperventilating, into Hedley’s face. There are horrified-but-delighted gasps from the whole restaurant. It’s not like a fight in a restaurant never happens, but it’s not supposed to happen between academics. Ren can almost hear the other customers telling their friends tomorrow, ‘No better than animals, they were, those supposed eggheads.’ Which is pretty much what he’ll be telling people too.

Hedley grabs a fistful of prawn crackers and scrunches them on Beresford’s face. Beresford just stands there and takes it, as if to say ‘I’m Hemingway, that all you got?’ Then he quickly and, he hopes, expertly, jabs Hedley in the stomach. He expects this to knock Hedley down and finish the job, but although Hedley is winded, he still manages to walk around the table to pick up a plate of ribs, which he throws at Beresford. He clearly means for the ribs to go all over the larger physicist, but most of them scatter and miss the target. The greasy plate, meanwhile, has slipped out of Hedley’s hand by accident and it cracks Beresford on the forehead, and breaks in two, one half falling onto George, who has deciding that feigning complete unconsciousness is the best policy. Beresford’s head has been sliced, and blood starts seeping out of the wound. Hedley looks annoyed with himself for losing his cool.

‘Well, you brought that on yourself,’ Hedley says. Then, as though realising that a witty retort is what will tip the scales back in his favour, he adds, ‘Physics in action.’ The restaurant is silent. He realises that his line hasn’t quite done the job, so he says, ‘If that’s how you’re going to treat a visiting speaker, I’m off,’ and he stalks out of the restaurant unhindered. The waiters part to let him through.

As he slams the door behind him the restaurant erupts with excitement, anger, and outrage. Ren notices that George is making strange-sounding moans, and it’s him that some of the others are attending to, rather than the gash-headed Beresford, who is in disgrace. Then Ren realises that Hedley has left something important behind.

‘His briefcase,’ he shouts over the tumult. ‘Hedley’s left his briefcase behind.’

Hedley’s train tickets are probably in there, so Ren picks it up and runs out of the restaurant, his unconscious registering some surprise that George has been placed on the floor. He looks around for Hedley, and sees him a long way further off than he expected. Hedley is stalking off determinedly, looking like he is trying to get as far away from the damage as quickly as he can. Ren eventually catches up with him.

‘Hedley,’ he shouts. Hedley ignores him, hoping that he has misheard and that wasn’t his named being called.

‘Hedley. Hedley, you left your briefcase behind,’ Ren says. Once Hedley realises he’s not being chased by the manager, he turns around.

‘Ah, my dear boy, thank you so much. I’d completely forgotten about that in all that commotion with your oaf of a colleague.’

‘I’m sorry about that guy, Hedley. Like you said, he wasn’t one of us, so I wouldn’t call him my colleague. I’m new here, but I’ve already heard stories about him from people I know in Physics. Apparently he does shit like that a lot.’

‘Quite all right, no need to apologise, young man. Are you rushing back to the scene of devastation now at Chase the Dragon? I’m not sure that’s wise, there may be police arriving soon.’

Ren doubts that, but he can’t say he’s very keen to rush back to the restaurant. As organiser, his meal is free, so there’s no need to pay a share of the bill. (Whoever pays for it tonight will be reimbursed by the department.)

‘I need a drink after all that,’ says Hedley. ‘How about we jump in a taxi and go somewhere more salubrious?’

‘Well…’ Ren looks doubtful. Not going back to the restaurant is one thing, but just going off drinking with Hedley seems a bit much. And what was up with George?

‘The drinks will all be on me. As long as you take me somewhere chic.’

‘Well, I can’t really say no to that. C’mon, there’s a taxi rank around the corner from here, I think.’

The Free Speech Union

Hector Drummond Posted on by

I’m going to be part of the Free Speech Union. It’s going to be a proper Union with legal representation for its members. There will also be lots of talks and events. I encourage you all to join up, it’s where the official fightback starts.

Here’s the director, Toby Young, talking about it to Free Market Conservatives. You can e-mail Toby today at jsmillsociety@gmail.com to find out more.

 

Exit stage left, pursued by a ManPigBear

Hector Drummond Posted on by

Thinking of becoming a climate scientist and saving the world? Great idea. But where to train? Cambridge? CalTech? MIT? Bit hard to get into them with your school results, right? Well, here’s some useful advice. The world’s most influential climate experts don’t go to Imperial. They don’t even go to East Anglia. They go here:

The good news is that you don’t even have to have passed any science subjects. Hell, you don’t even to know anything about science, as long as you know how to emote.

Alternatively, if America’s too difficult, try here:

And if this place seems a little heavy for you, what with expecting you to read, like, fascists like Shakespeare, then there’s always somewhere like this:

Here you can become a climate expert while also being able to take the time to really expand your own personal horizons. Plus you’ll be able to boss them around with your superior wokeness because they’ll all be hicks. After graduating it won’t be long before you’re in the papers because of your tweets about how the theatrical company you’re currently in is, like, so uncool about climate awareness.

So stop worrying about your lack of scientific credentials. The people who really know about climate are the people who know what ‘Exit stage left’ means. That stuff’s not easy, is it?

Climate expertise is about leg warmers, not calculators.

Some more articles of note

Hector Drummond Posted on by

Great article on the last few years of Brexit. It’s great because it’s one of the few articles that can see that the ERG Spartans were the sensible ones:

The 28 MPs were widely condemned for their actions, but triggered a series of events that led to the first significant Conservative majority in 30 years, with the supposedly impossible-to-reopen Withdrawal Agreement duly reopened along the way. No one but them saw this as being even slightly feasible. Predictably the pundits did not foresee these events. Most markedly, pro-Brexit commentators on the right (Iain Martin, Tim Montgomerie, Fraser Nelson, Henry Newman, James Forsyth, the editorial writers of ConservativeHome and the Spectator) were all for accepting the Withdrawal Agreement by the time of the decisive vote.

A good description of how ‘purity spirals’ can happen in the real world, even in the world of…  knitting:

Lately we’ve been witnessing more and more small worlds fall apart under the weight of their vast moral centre of gravity. In the past year, the middle-class, middle-aged, overwhelmingly female knitters of Instagram have descended into internecine conflict over racism allegations …

 

I decided to call both the phenomenon and the documentary, “The Purity Spiral”. A purity spiral occurs when a community becomes fixated on implementing a single value that has no upper limit, and no single agreed interpretation. The result is a moral feeding frenzy.

A black British actor who appeared in ‘Hamilton’ may face legal action over hate hoax:

Last November, British actor and “Hamilton” musical star, Giles Terera, claimed in a viral tweet that he and a group of eight other black actors were refused entry at a London pub after being “racially profiled.” However, the blues bar immediately refuted the allegations of racism in a Facebook post, saying that some members of Terera’s group did not have IDs. Now, it appears that the “Ain’t Nothin’ But Blues” bar in central London may be taking legal action against Mr. Terera.

Pete Buttigieg has big tech and its money behind him:

Pete Buttigieg is having a fundraiser thrown for him by a who’s-who of wealthy Silicon Valley families.

 

Recode obtained a host list circulated to prospective donors for an exclusive event, slated for Monday morning in Palo Alto. The list is littered with the family members of prominent Silicon Valley execs, including:

 

Nicole Shanahan, wife of Google cofounder Sergey Brin.
Wendy Schmidt, wife of former Google CEO Eric Schmidt.
Michelle Sandberg, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg’s sister.

 

Also hosting the event is Netflix cofounder and CEO Reed Hastings.

 

When you try to make short sentences look long

Hector Drummond Posted on by

Newspaper headlines, especially in the Daily Mail, always try to make it sound like long sentences were given for dramatic crimes:

Dramatic bodycam footage shows officers pinning a man on the floor as police smashed a crime ring involved in raiding cash machines across the South East.

 

The driver was hauled out of his vehicle and restrained while officers discovered an ATM stashed in the back of the specially adapted van.

 

Five men who formed part of an organised criminal network have now been jailed for a combined total of over 22 years, Kent Police said.

22 years! But hang on… that’s for five men. That’s an average of four and a half years each. Probably be out in two.

Video taken of the back of the van shows how the roof had been gouged open to allow for a cash machine to be dropped into it quickly.

 

Officers find a heavily-scarred ATM in the van, still trailing heavy black chains, and recover £100,000 in cash.

A couple of years for a large and destructive bank robbery.

Detective Inspector James Derham of the Kent and Essex Serious Crime Directorate said: ‘These men had absolutely no regard for the damage their crimes had on the communities they targeted.

 

‘They put the public in danger with their reckless actions, crippled businesses, caused hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of damage and stole plant machinery which prevented businesses from moving forward with building works.

 

‘In short, their selfish actions had severe consequences for many people including the local communities who relied upon these facilities.

What a good thing, then, that they’ll be in jail for … less than a thousand days each. Do you think, judging by their mug shots, that they may try again? Or will they become reformed citizens in jail?

‘The officers involved in the case worked with sheer tenacity to painstakingly piece together the movements of those involved and other key evidence, leaving these men with no other option but to admit their part in the conspiracy.’

All that hard work kind of seems pointless now.

You’ll just make it angry

Hector Drummond Posted on by

In response to this morning’s post about the BBC, Tim the Coder says in the comments:

It would still be a win, because I wouldn't be forced to pay for it under threat of violence.
I have no objection to political parties, industry lobbies and religions funding their own propaganda channels.
I just oppose the coercion.

I don’t think it would be a win, because the BBC is extremely powerful after decades of enormous public funding. It owns its own massive studios, it has vast amounts of gear, and it has all the infrastructure it needs already set up. (A lot of its content now comes from independent production companies, but it still has all those things.)

And as I said in the post, it still has the reputation, and the prime slots on TVs and digital boxes. How the hell can any new channel compete against that? Letting the BBC loose from the licence fee and all the restrictions attendant upon the fee would be could setting a monster loose.

If the BBC leftists want to have a TV channel let them start from scratch. Why should they be gifted with the BBC?

Peckerhead

Hector Drummond Posted on by

Here’s an article extraordinary for its lack of self-knowledge. The first half contains a degree of sneering against ordinary Leavers that even the Guardian might consider a bit over the top:

Parliament Square was a knuckle-dragging carnival of irredeemable stupidity

 

What makes Britain’s independence day different from those that have gone before it that its prize is a freedom nobody else wants

 

There they were, all gathered in one place. Not quite midnight’s children but 11 o’clock’s toddlers. Here, at the long-awaited end of dry January, was a once-proud nation coming together to wet its little trousers.

A few commentators have already critiqued this, including Dellers. But what really grabbed me was that after sticking the boot into Britain’s own ‘basket of deplorables’ in the first half of the article, in the second half the author complains about the divide in Britain:

Brexit’s ultimate tragedy is that it has broken the very thing it imagines itself to have restored: national identity, national cohesion. There is none at all. There are just two huge tribes set against each other, and the mutual loathing is as fierce as ever.

 

There simply isn’t any middle ground. The gulf is as wide as it has ever been: one side revels in regaining its imagined independence, while the other mourns the terrible loss of having been part of something big, something ambitious, with its eyes fixed on the future and not drunk on the imagined glories of the past.

So let me summarise this article:

(1) One half of the country is extremely stupid and vile and those people should not be allowed to have any say in things because they are foolish and ignorant and really they should all be in jail.

(2) How awful it is that we have such a terrible divide in this country.

Okay.

But even (1) and (2) don’t quite capture it, because the author is blaming the Brexiteers for the divide:

The prime minister urges healing – but he is the disease, not the cure.

So we must add:

(3) The divide is all the fault of the thick Leavers who were allowed to meddle in things beyond their comprehension. Not us virtuous and brilliant Remainers.

But you virtuous and brilliant Remainers still want to heal the divide, right?

There is simply no way anyone of good conscience can make peace with being so very clearly on the wrong side of history.

 

Come together? Sorry, but no thanks.

It appears not. Instead we have

(4) The divide will remain until the Remainers crush the Leavers and reverse Brexit.

Got it, thanks.

As it’s the Independent, which is so hopeless that it regularly publishes fake articles concocted by Andrew Doyle, I wondered whether this was also a fake. But it’s written by the Indy’s own political sketch writer, Tom Peck, who is, you would surmise from the way he carries on, an Olympian god.

 

Let’s kill the BBC like we killed Ch 4. Er, wait…

Hector Drummond Posted on by

A lot of people on social media are speculating that the end of the BBC is night, declaring that the Conservatives are going to decriminalise the licence fee. But these things are entirely separate. Decriminalising the licence fee will not end the BBC. It will make things financially difficult for the BBC for a while, sure. It will have to cut down. But it won’t end. And it won’t mean an end to BBC bias either, quite the opposite, in fact.

I’ve written about this recently, so I won’t go into detail again, but ask yourself this. Was Channel 4 ‘ended’ when it stopped receiving government money? No. Did Channel 4 stop being politically biased when that happened? No. So why would the BBC be different?

You may say, ‘Ah, but Channel 4 was allowed to run ads to bring in money, and the BBC won’t be allowed to’. Maybe, but the BBC will still have a ton of money coming in from people who will continue to be good citizens and pay the BBC. There’s an enormous amount of non-essential things in the BBC that could be cut, allowing them to continue on a smaller budget. They’ll still have the prime slots on TVs and digital boxes, and millions of people will continue to watch the BBC channels, and listen to the BBC radio stations, because it’s the BBC. The BBC has a reputation that the alternative, gimmicky, more obviously left-wing Channel 4 never had. That rep is now undeserved, sure, and it’s fading, but it’s still there for an awful lot of people.

And before too long the Beeb will demand to be able to run ads, or have a subscription service, or both, to make up for lost revenue, and this is likely to be granted, unless the government can show some extraordinary backbone.

Ask yourself this. If the Conservatives try to hobble the BBC, which is the more likely outcome?

(1) The BBC turns over a new leaf, renounces its leftism, and becomes scrupulously neutral, and starts to treat conservativism with respect. The likes of Nish Kumar are sacked, and shows like Doctor Who become good old-fashioned entertainment again, instead of being Doctor Woke.

Or (2) The BBC double down on the leftism and hatred of conservatism, feeling like it no longer has to even pretend to be even-handed.

Leftists never learn, part one million

Hector Drummond Posted on by

San Francisco has become a giant toilet:

Each day, up to 30 people stroll in and openly steal goods, costing him hundreds of dollars.

 

A street cleaner showed me a box filled with used syringes that he had collected, then I met two charity workers picking up needles from the pavement. How many do you find a day, I ask? ‘Between 300 and 600, depending on the weather,’ one replies.

 

He has been bitten twice recently by people in his shop and he also found a woman turning blue in the toilet after a drugs overdose, a hypodermic needle still stuck in her leg.

 

He showed me a metal door that is corroding due to people urinating in his doorway, then spoke of finding a man relieving himself in full view of infants playing in a child centre next door.

What’s the answer of the ruling leftists who have presided over this disaster? Double down, of course. That’s always their answer.

Yet true to form, San Francisco has just elected as district attorney a radical called Chesa Boudin, whose parents were infamous militants from a far-Left, anti-war group. They were jailed for triple murder when Chesa was a toddler, leaving him to be adopted by the founders of the organisation.

 

The 39-year-old, who studied at Oxford University as a Rhodes scholar and later worked as a translator for Venezuela’s former leader Hugo Chavez, a Fidel Castro acolyte, campaigned on moving away from prosecuting ‘quality of life’ offences to focus on serious and corporate offences.

 

 

Inventor of cancel culture gets cancelled

Hector Drummond Posted on by

More leftism-easting-itself on display in the Alastair Stewart case:

We were both members of the National Union of Students executive and marched shoulder to shoulder on demonstration after demonstration.

 

We even ventured behind the Iron Curtain to meet communist student leaders, where I discovered that, even if he wasn’t the full Red Menace, Al was far more radical than I was.

 

Indeed, he abandoned his degree studies at Bristol University to take up activism full-time.

It turns out, in one of those grisly ironies that are forever afflicting the left, that Stewart was the very man responsible for getting the National Union of Students to adopt a No Platform policy:

And it was Al who played a crucial role in persuading the NUS to adopt its first ‘no-platform’ policy.

 

The idea was that student unions should prohibit explicitly racist parties, such as the violently anti-immigrant National Front, from organising on campuses.

We need to ask the question. Is everyone in the establishment a former radical leftist? Or just most of them?

Update: Another cancel culture progenitor gets cancelled:

Sonmez is one of the architects of the cancel culture that currently plagues us. She was one of the first accusers of former LA Times foreign correspondent Jonathan Kaiman, sending a letter to the LA Times in which she described him as exhibiting “problematic behaviour.”

 

A good Christian soldier

Hector Drummond Posted on by

This is one of the saddest obits I’ve ever read:

She was born on April 3 1932 and liked to describe herself as “the love child of itinerant communist market traders”. Her father, an atheist from the Midlands, was a member of the Marxist-sympathising Plebs League and a founder of the Communist Party of Great Britain who earned his living travelling around the country in a wooden caravan selling home-made herbal remedies

Not even that bit. This bit:

Hylda Sims was one: a lifelong advocate of Left-wing values and progressive thinking, she was still performing topical songs in a City Ramblers Revival band with Simon Prager and Doc Stenson weeks before her death.

Even in her 80s she was still treading the boards to push the one true faith.

 

The Biscuit Factory Vol. I: Days of Wine and Cheese serialisation. Part 9

Hector Drummond Posted on by

2000-01

Semester 1

Week 4

Wednesday… continued

 

‘He will attempt to re-program you, you know,’ says Compton. ‘Soon you’ll be pressured to write a grant with him. He will induct you into the dark arts of grant-writing. He’ll be doing it for himself, and the department’s sake, but he’ll also think he’s doing you a favour. Which he is, if you want grants.’

‘And as a young person, you should do,’ says Walter. ‘That’s the way the Humanities are going to go, grants and funding will matter more and more over the next few decades. Glad I’ll be retiring before all that comes. So if you can stand it, let him teach you.’

‘I get the impression Ren isn’t the type,’ says Compton. ‘You’re lucky you had that postdoc position so you could get those papers published, I think if you hadn’t the department would have hired someone with a more modern attitude.’

‘More modern?’

‘More compliant. More timid. A team worker, i.e. do what the Head tells you. Your sarcastic attitude has been noticed. They don’t like academics having their own personalities any more. I’ve found this out myself. Why do you think Derek’s never been promoted?’

Compton lowers his voice so he can’t be heard, not that there is much danger of this, as Beresford and Hedley are starting to argue more loudly again.

‘He may be a left-wing arsehole,’ says Compton, looking carefully at Derek, ‘but that’s not why. It’s because he’s too fond of his status as an iconoclast.’

‘I thought it was because he never publishes?’

‘Well, that too. But he’d still have trouble getting promoted, because he says, shall we say, unhelpful things, especially to the higher-ups.’

‘Like what?’

Compton glances at Derek again. ‘Let’s just say he considers them sell-outs. Traitors to the cause.’

‘He’s got a point.’

‘Indeed. Robot wanted him to apply for a grant recently, but he just said no. Didn’t go down too well.’

‘You never just say an outright “No” when the Head asks you something like that,’ says Walter. ‘If you don’t want to do it you’ve got to be more subtle than that.’

‘What would you say?’

‘You’d say something like, I’ve love to, but I have X, Y and Z on my plate at the moment. Or you suggest a future project instead when you have more time. You’ve got to find something that makes it reasonable of you to say no. Or gives the appearance of being reasonable.’

‘Robot is pushing things back again to the old style of department where there was a big Professor who rules the roost and he just tells everyone what to do, based on whatever he thinks is right,’ says Compton.

‘Or in his case, whatever the higher-ups approve of,’ says Walter. ‘All he cares about is looking good on the metrics so he can get promoted to senior management.’

‘Why would anyone want to go into senior management?’ says Ren, who’s still young and naive enough to be enjoying his research.

‘As you get older some people lose interest in their research, and money becomes more important,’ says Compton. ‘Senior management is where the really big salaries are. And the bigger your final salary, the bigger your pension. You no longer have to slave away at your research, or waste your time taking seminars full of undergraduate dimwits. You get to make the decisions, and you’re pretty insulated from their consequences. You swan about with the great and the good at fancy restaurants. And you get a secretary who does a lot of the drudge work for you.’

‘It won’t ever happen for Grant, though,’ says Walter. ‘He’s uncomfortable to be around. Being a bastard is no impediment, not that he’s really that much of a bastard compared to some of that lot, but you’ve got to have a bit of charm, which he doesn’t.’

‘Yes, he’s about as much fun as flat lemonade,’ agrees Ren. ‘The permanent frown, the weary impatience with human frailty… I can see why the higher-ups might want him running a department, but you wouldn’t want to have to deal with him all the time yourself.’

‘He’s valuable to them where he is, doing what he’s good at,’ says Compton. ‘So although he doesn’t realise it, he’s never going to get to that level.’

‘But how does he manage to make any friends? How does he get on with people in his field, and on grant panels?’

‘You haven’t met those people. A lot of them are like him,’ says Walter.

‘They’re not exactly his friends,’ says Compton. ‘More like fellow droids with the same batch number, who have mutual interests.’

‘He’s not really that bad when you get to know him,’ says Walter, who sees the good in everyone.

Robot’s colleagues have noticed that recently he’s started showing an interest in human emotion. At least, an interest in simulating it. One of the most frightening things anyone’s ever seen is Robot’s attempt to replicate the human smile. It’s an awful thing to witness, which leaves anyone unfortunate enough to be in the firing line feeling like they’ve seen things humans aren’t supposed to see. A glimpse through a crack in the tent into the workings of the human mind, enough to give them the sense of how deflatingly gimcrack the whole thing is.

You can see it happening in slow motion. First there’s the opportunity for a smile which Grant fails to immediately register. Seconds pass. Then the realisation dawns on him that this is when he should be smiling. Maybe the worst part is that you can almost see the old-style Soviet-era tape decks in his head shifting around as a new spool is loaded, and cranes are brought into position ready for cranking up the mouth corners.

Then it comes. The ersatz, non-Duchenne smile. For most observers this is the worst part. The corners of the mouth go up, but it’s like a corpse having its features adjusted by the undertaker, an impression which is highlighted by the red lines Robot has coming down on both sides of his mouth to the bottom of his face, which stand out conspicuously against the almost albino whiteness of the rest of his skin, making it look like he has the hinged mouth of a venquilitrist’s dummy.

As the corners of his mouth are hauled upwards, the rest of his face stays exactly the same. Robot doesn’t understand that you smile with your orbicularis oculi – the eyelid – muscle as much as with your zygomatic major muscle. Some swear that his eyes become even angrier as his mouth is tormented into position, as though the eyes are registering his real feelings at the imposture he is being forced to adopt in order to deal with these erratic and untrustworthy flesh-based creatures. Robot is perhaps guided by knowing that meat-machine detection systems are often jury-rigged and are thus manipulable – the robin red breast, for instance, can be fooled into attacking a piece of red cloth if it’s on its territory. But Robot leaves his red cloth in place for the wrong amount of time, and then the cranes let go too quickly.

‘Can we kindly not talk about Robot’s smile when we’re eating, please?’ says Bill.

Some more items of note

Hector Drummond Posted on by

The Lancet continues it rapid downhill slide by publishing a piece by an XR activist writing about his arrest for protesting:

Parliament Square on Oct 31, 2018, was unexpectedly crowded. Together with Charlie Parselle, a lawyer I met on the first day at our secondary school in 1955, I had been pushing for action on global heating for 30 years. Despite the efforts of numerous agencies and individuals, we have seen science ignored and ecological devastation proceed apace. Politicians, in thrall to vested interest, seemed incapable of implementing the requisite transformational action, instead persuading their electorates that growth blah blah blah

Speaking of downhill slides, Roger Kimball writes about the latest sad developments at Yale:

Yale announced last week that it will stop teaching its famous survey course, “Introduction to Art History: Renaissance to the Present.” Taught for decades by Vincent Scully, one of Yale’s most celebrated professors, the course was a riveting introduction to pulse of humanism.

 

It is being cashiered for all the usual reasons. Its focus is too white, too European, too male, too “problematic,” as Tim Barringer, chairman of the art history department, puts it.

A humorous new academic dictionary  by Lee Jussim was put up by Psychology Today, but taken down within 24 hours. You can guess why. Quillette have now published it.

Occam’s shoehorn: What you use to fit the data to your narrative, no matter how difficult.

The BBC has been forced into making a major admission on global warming:

The worst-case scenario for emissions of CO2 this century is no longer plausible, say researchers.

 

Referred to as “business as usual”, the scenario assumes a 500% increase in the use of coal, which is now considered unlikely.

Sceptics like Matt Ridley have of course been pointing these very points out for years. But as the piece is by our old friend Matt McGrath, it fills the second half of the story with various apocalyptic scenarios that STILL COULD BE TRUE.

 

Clueless

Hector Drummond Posted on by

Here we have a silly piece on Erasmus by a student. First of all she complains about how much slacker her British University was than the Danish one she went to.

In Denmark, my classmates called out, engaged in debates and challenged the course content. They even challenged our professors for not including scholars from developing countries on the reading lists. The diversity of the student body, and motivation of the students provided an educational style I would never have experienced within the quiet comfort of Lancaster.

And Britain?

My memories of the British study environment are different: poorly attended lectures; classmates who never said a word; professors who prerecorded their talks. The education style was uninspiring.

Okay. But then it turns out that she was comparing a masters in Denmark with an undergraduate degree in Britain:

Admittedly, I was an undergraduate in the UK and studying for a masters in Denmark

I can tell you now that master’s degrees in Britain are completely different to undergraduate degrees. They’re much more like the first description. So she’s comparing apples and oranges.

I agree, though, that British Universities are very slack about monitoring attendance, and requiring any intellectual input from their undergrads. (I expect this is particularly true of Lancaster, which has a reputation as a very social constructivist place.) But this has absolutely bugger-all to do with Erasmus, which is a scheme that allows a small proportion of students to go overseas for a semester, usually to be a tourist and have a good time. Erasmus has no influence at all on a University’s teaching, and it’s just bizarre that the Telegraph has published an article which suggests that there’s a link.

Then the piece gets truly ridiculous:

Only a few weeks after I arrived at the University of California, Berkeley, the liberal heartland of the US just east of the San Francisco Bay, I watched anti-fascists throw Molotov cocktails to protest against a visit from the far-Right British provocateur Milo Yiannapoulos. Not a class went by without discussion of Trump, homelessness or immigration, and an endless stream of guest speakers to our journalism classes, from places like The New York Times or Facebook, would discuss our career prospects.
Everything was bespoke at Berkeley, with an aim to curate proactive, socially engaged individuals.

She thinks paying money to be brainwashed by leftists is a good thing. And the Telegraph published this moron because they thought she had something to say about Erasmus?

American universities are altogether different. They don’t focus on the officialdom of education. Instead, they are hotbeds for political debate and activism, which prioritise individualism, free thought, and helping students to shape their adult identities.

If there’s anything that hasn’t existed in Berkeley since 1968 it’s free thought and individualism. Shaping identities sure exists, though, it’s what Berkeley is all about. Fit into the Berkeley identity mould, or find yourself attacked by a baying mob.

it costs nearly £15,000 per term to study at Berkeley as an out-of-state resident

15k per term? Does she wonder why Berkeley was more bespoke?

Is there another country where this clueless airhead can demonstrate her political correctness? Why, yes there is — the Netherlands:

On one occasion, while trying to engage my classmates on the topic of Zwarte Piet — a tradition where they wear blackface to celebrate Christmas — I was bluntly told “it’s not racism, it’s just tradition”.

And, of course, there is no mention of the fact that Erasmus does not require membership of the EU, and countries from outside the EU participate, nor that Boris Johnson has stated in Parliament that he intends for the UK to stay in the scheme:

Mr Johnson added: “There is no threat to the Erasmus scheme. We will continue to participate. UK students will continue to be able to enjoy the benefits of exchanges with our European friends and partners, just as they will continue to be able to come to this country.”

 

 

She won’t be dating Laurence Fox then

Hector Drummond Posted on by

Crop-haired Guardianista has bad blind date with a man who – gasp – may be a Tory.

Describe Josh in three words
Potential secret Tory

As he has agreed to take part in a blind date set up by the Guardian you’d have to say that’s unlikely.

I wasn’t previously aware of the Guardian’s Blind Date series. It’s worth a browse, as there’s some crashingly awful stuff in there:

What did you talk about?
The sexiest member of the Tory front bench (Philip Hammond, apparently), her thesis: the media’s depiction of female torturers at Abu Ghraib.

And:

Any awkward moments?
He responded well to my rant about how we don’t learn about vaginas.

And:

What did you talk about?
Sylvia Plath, existentialism, performance art, my unusual degree in the recorder.

And:

What did you talk about?
I can’t really remember much after four negronis and wine but: books, scumbag Tories, coming out.

In general, though, it’s not full of people who are stridently political, as I don’t suppose they’d be seen dead appearing in that sort of thing. In fact, it’s nice to see some Guardianistas who can smile and show some normal human emotions, even if most of them look like someone only a Mum could be proud of.