The left really think that the right live in a Handmaid’s Tale world – for real

Hector Drummond Posted on by

A leftist who’s decided to stop being such an arsehole and get to know some right-wingers confirms that hard leftists have insane, cartoonish views of the right:

When I did finally bite the bullet and appear on a right-wing talk show last month, I didn’t flip over tables or smash things. Instead, I ended up making friends. The show was The Daily Wire with Michael Knowles, which broadcasts on Ben Shapiro’s network.

 

Turns out their offices are in Los Angeles—not in the Idaho hinterlands, surrounded by barbed wire and armed militiamen. And it says a lot about how brainwashed I was by stereotypes that I found myself surprised to see so many women and visible minorities casually strolling the hallways. In my ignorance, I’d once imagined these places to be a white-collar version of Triumph Of The Will.

 

I met Knowles while I was getting makeup done. He was warm and hilarious. In my former life, I’d never have pictured a Republican laughing at anything except the plight of the poor. Then his producer came in. His Latino female producer. I made direct eye contact in case she wanted to blink out some S.O.S kidnap code. But nothing. Just another goddamn nice, and funny, conservative.

If the rest of us had ever realised that our whole worldview was a complete joke in such a humiliating way we’d hang our heads in shame for years and keep our mouths shut. But no, leftists still think they’re right about pretty much everything no matter how often their views get shown to be bilgewater, and they keep on talking with the same assurance about worldwide politics even though they’ve just been revealed to be about as perceptive as a gallstone on something that was right in front of their eyes.

The thought that “Maybe the minds of us leftists don’t connect to reality in a functioning way” never seems to enter their heads. Probably because their minds don’t connect to reality in a functioning way.

Only another 547 episodes and then I will no longer have to risk seeing this sad sack of a face any more whenever I go into the TV room.

Update: Oh, and he also confirms what is obvious to everyone else, but is completely anthema to leftists:

Back in the day when I was (what grandly might be called) a Twitter activist, my life was falling apart. I never thought about the consequences of my Tweets. I never thought that my targets’ families might see what I’d written, or that they may lose their jobs, or that even though we had massive disagreements politically, that these people were still human beings with feelings. All I cared about was getting validation. All I cared about was getting to bask in the negative energy of someone else’s crappy life, so that I didn’t have to confront my own. My marriage is falling apart, but at least I’m not Justine Sacco! I haven’t called my Dad back in weeks, but John McCain’s a dead asshole! Ninety percent of social media is projection.

Again, he doesn’t pause to think “Maybe all my political beliefs have no objective basis and I just adopted them to allow me to cope with my own many and varied failings.”

 

Bullying and streaming

Hector Drummond Posted on by

The Telegraph presents the views of a supposed expert on bullying:

Dr Nassem argues that schools “need to change their entire culture” as the hierarchical way in which they are run, including children being streamed into sets based on their abilities, encourages bullying.

But then, from the same person:

Dr Nassem added that fears of cyber bully are a “distraction” as during her research children have told her that “what bothers them is being face to face, sat in a classroom with the same bully on a daily basis.”

Streaming is often the only way that bright kids can get away from bullies. Yet she wants to stop streaming, which increases the chances of a bright kid having to sit next to a bully.

If you’re asking the bright kids questions, why don’t you ask them whether they would like to spend most of their time in a streamed environment or a non-streamed environment?

The Biscuit Factory Vol. I: Days of Wine and Cheese serialisation. Part 34

Hector Drummond Posted on by

2000-01

Semester 1

Week 7

Saturday (cont.)

 

‘But why do the Universities themselves let the government push them around?’ asks Tanja.

‘The Universities sold their soul to the government,’ says Ren. ‘In return for letting government have some power over them, the government guarantees their existence, and their funding. It’s not like the Universities couldn’t operate as private industries, they could, but then you’d have all the uncertainties you get with running a private business. There’d be no guarantee that you’d have the student numbers you needed next year. Perhaps they’d all migrate to some new place. And there’d be no guarantee that the students you do get can afford to pay you what you needed. But under the current arrangement those risks are greatly reduced. The government pays the student fees. Competition is reduced because the government controls the market, and the quotas, so the status quo changes only very slowly, if at all. Grayvington, for example, knows that, unless it’s incredibly stupid with its money, it will still be in business in thirty, forty, fifty years time, at the very least, and probably a lot longer, because it has the government behind it.’

‘Okay, I can see the attraction of that.’

‘It’s a good deal for them, especially for the Vice-Chancellors, who get paid huge money by academic standards to operate as bosses in a sheltered market. But the problem is that the government wants more control in return for the money and the guarantees it’s giving. It’s gradually been taking away power from the Universities, and that’s going to ramp up over the next few decades. This is not something that gets commented on much, because most academics are left-wing, so government control over industry seems so natural to them that they barely notice that it’s an issue. Of course, they’ll complain about what sort of control the government should have, but they don’t really see the fact of government control as an issue.’

‘But you can’t just let industries do what they want, can you?’ says Tanja.

‘Let’s not have that discussion now,’ says Ren.

‘Well, okay. But if, like, you academics don’t like what the government is doing why don’t you just all stand up against them? Right? Protest. Why don’t you just not cooperate with the QAE and RAA?’

‘QAA and RAE. Like I said, academics are cowards, and no-one wants to be the first one to stand up and be shot down..’

‘Then why doesn’t the Union do anything?’

‘The Union complains a bit, but the Union is useless. It has no credibility. It’s run by hard leftists who are mainly interested in boycotting Israel. Last week it put out another report on why Israel is the most evil country in the world. The only practical thing it’s capable of doing is making placards saying “Evil Tory scum”.’

Tanja looks dubious, but Miles defends Ren. ‘That’s true, unfortunately. Look, I don’t agree with a lot of what Ren says, but the Union isn’t very effective, and the academics who oppose the RAE and the QAA don’t want to rock the boat.’

‘Sounds like you mostly agree with me then,’ says Ren.

‘Well, I would disagree somewhat on the matter of how academics view the RAE and QAA,’ says Miles. ‘While some academics hate them, some think they’re good things.’

‘That’s true, some academics do think that,’ says Ren. ‘So we are in agreement.’

‘The real problem is the Vice-Chancellors and the managers,’ says Jay, like it’s his turn for a rant. ‘If the Union was in charge then things would be better. Although I don’t suppose you agree with that,’ he says, shooting a sardonic glance at Ren.

‘The Union, no, but the academics yes,’ says Ren. ‘I think we’d be better off with the academics back in charge. They might be a bit incompetent sometimes at running things, but the move to professional management has been a disaster for Universities. Would you, as an economist, agree with that, Lily?’

‘Definitely,’ says Lily. ‘So many people said that academics can’t run things, you need professionals, or academics you turn into professionals with high salaries to match, but they’ve made just as many, if not more, bad financial decisions, and other bad sorts of decisions, as the old academics did. The old academics were much more careful with money. Look how many Universities have currently got themselves into serious debt now that they’ve been taken over by supposedly proper professionals, who don’t know very much except how to spend money.’

‘And even worse than that, the modern managers are slowly squeezing the life out of the sector,’ says Ren.

‘Are you sure you’re not left-wing?’ says Jay. ‘I heartily endorse those sentiments.’

‘Well, I’m sure we can find much to fight about later, but let’s celebrate our current agreement.’

Ren and Jay clink glasses.

‘I’m sure we can. They say you’re a mouthy gobshite,’ says Jay, with an extra-loud emphasis to make sure that Ren’s parents hear this opinion of their son, ‘and they’re not wrong, but you’re not all bad.’

‘Anyone’s gob need filling with some more shite?’ asks Lily.

‘Are you buying a round, or offering some speciality services?’ asks Jay.

‘I’m offering to buy you some of the landlord’s speciality services from the tank in the basement that according to Ren he brews the ale in,’ says Lily.

‘Where he also keeps an assortment of gimps, and monkeys that have escaped from the Psychology labs,’ adds Ren.

‘So that’s where all our monkeys have got to,’ says Miles.

‘Then a pint of the landlord’s finest, with extra shiza,’ says Jay.

‘Liquid pork scratchings for you, Ren?’

‘Liquid pork scratchings? Be still my beating heart,’ says Ren, ‘the woman plays you for a fool. If there really was such a thing then I’d already be a limp-limbed shell of a man lying on dirty sheets in a filthy scratching den, barely responding to the overtures of those of my timid friends who dare not indulge themselves, lest they be lost and be never able to eat a square meal again.’

‘That’s not that different from your current life, you know,’ says Miles. ‘Replace the scratching juice with alcohol and that’s pretty much you to a tee.’

‘Except that you’re lying in the even filthier bed next to me. With even gaunter features.’

‘I never said I was timid.’

Lily finally gets an order out of everyone, and acquesting she goes.

‘So given your analysis, Ren,’ says Miles, ‘why don’t you be the one to put your head above the parapet? Are you a coward too?’

‘I’m too junior for it to have any effect,’ says Ren. ‘I’m only a few months into the job. And I’m still on probation. It has to be people who are more senior.’

‘Or maybe you’re just a coward?’ says Douglas.

‘Maybe I am,’ says Ren. ‘All talk and no action. Thinking of the pension again. At twenty-eight.’

‘Well, at least you’re walking the walk on the TITE,’ says Miles. ‘Gotta salute you for that.’

‘Yes, best of luck with your new career in the service sector,’ says Douglas.

Miles starts to add something to that, but Ren interrupts him. ‘No, don’t say it,’ he says.

‘Don’t say what?’ says Miles.

‘I know what you’re going to say. That I have to start practising saying “Do you want fries with that?”. Say something more original.’

‘That’s a bit hard, because garages don’t have petrol pump attendants any more,’ says Miles. ‘There’s always clerking in an insurance office. Or is that all computerised these days?’

‘The young man carbuncular arrives, a small house agent’s clerk, with one bold stare,’ says Douglas.

‘I’m not pimply,’ says Ren.

‘One of the low on whom assurance sits, as a silk hat on a Bradford millionaire.’

‘Bradford? Are you slagging your own off now, northern chemist?’ says Ren.

‘Not my words. One of your philosophers, wasn’t he?’

‘That’s it, I shall take up as a poet. Specifically, dirty limericks. Here’s one of mine that I’ve always been quite fond of:

 

There once was a man with a whim

To make use of his counterfeit limb

He procured a girl

Turned her round with a twirl

And stuck it right up her big…’

 

Ren coughs instead of finishing. Lily has come back with the drinks.

‘Not like you to go shy, Ren,’ says Miles, his eyebrows raised.

‘Don’t be coy on my behalf,’ says Lily. ‘I’m pretty good with limericks myself. Here’s one of mine I made up last year. How does it go again? Der-der-der, yes, that’s it.

 

Said a hugey who called himself Bryce

Self-fellatio would be very nice

With his penis in place

In the hole in his face

Hit the back of his throat in a trice.’

 

The table is in uproar at this, laughing, gasping, spilling drinks, coughing. Ren is doing all of them, and in addition his old fellow has undergone another rapid phase transition. It’s so stiff and tall it could act as the structural support for a skyscraper. Pour some concrete on it and you’ve got an instant addition to the New York City skyline. Even Gay Jay will have a boner over that. And Tanja has even cracked a smile.

Doomsday No Deal scenarios and the WWII spirit

Hector Drummond Posted on by

On Twitter there’s been a lot of disparaging comments about a certain recent strand of Leaver sentiment, the sentiment that says that the spirit that got us through World War II will get us through any problems to do with a No Deal Brexit. Remainers sniff and huff about this. What’s shooting at Nazis in trenches got to do with complex modern trade negotiations and international law treaties, they say. Apples and oranges. Even clever and admirable soft-Leavers like Kristian Niemitz adopt this view.

They’re wrong. They’re missing the point. The World War II-spirit Leavers are right.

Suppose some things do go terribly wrong with a No Deal Brexit. (I should point out here that if anything does go wrong in such a scenario, the cause is the government’s woeful preparations for a No Deal, not the No Deal itself. As I’ve been saying ever since the referendum, the government should have said to the EU straight away that we’re completely out, so let’s now sort out any problems areas in the two years we have.)

Suppose, for example, that some of the very unlikely doomsday scenarios, like planes not able to fly in and out of Britain, really do happen. Not that I think they will, even with a No Deal Brexit, but let’s indulge the doomsayers and suppose that some of them do. Suppose no planes or ships can get in or out of Britain.Or, rather, suppose that flying or boating to Europe isn’t able to happen for a while, because there’s no reason why the UK would stop any planes or ships coming in, and there’s no reason why you couldn’t still fly from the UK to, say, Australia (even if some routes have to be modified).

It may be true that the putting together of a hasty treaty to try to solve such a terrible situation as soon as possible would require more in the way of expertise in the relevant areas of law and international aviation systems, rather than, say, knowledge of how to keep a Lee Enfield in good condition, but the more important question would be, how would we, the British public, cope? Would we go to pieces and all have nervous breakdowns and just hide under our beds for the rest of our lives wailing that the state and the elite must run everything as they see fit from now on? Well, no. We’d be incandescent with rage (the Conservatives and the civil service would probably be screwed forever as a result), and a lot of people would suffer financially (especially people who work in aviation travel and related industries, and anyone who’s booked a European holiday), but we would cope. Just as we did when… let’s see when was it? Oh, that’s right. World War II.

It’s true that the British people are not what they were back then. So I agree that not everyone will cope. All the snowflakes will hide under their beds for the rest of their lives demanding that the state and the elite must run everything as they see fit from now on, although that’s pretty much what they do all the time anyway. All the Guardianiastas and everyone who works at a University will scream and shout that the state and the elite must run everything as they see fit from now on, although that’s also pretty much what they do now anyway. All these types will blame the Leavers, even though it was the Remainers in government and the civil service who were in charge, and who caused this.

But the rest of us will cope. We’ll holiday in Britain for a while. We’ll put up our relatives who worked in the airline industry and who’ve lost their house because of the malice of the Remainers and the EU (who were egged on by the Remainers). We’ll donate to charity. Sacrifices will have to be made. But we’ll make those sacrifices gladly, because of the greater prize that we have our eyes on, which is independence from the EU. The agreements will eventually be struck, even with the incompetents in charge (nervousness about lampposts can concentrate the mind wonderfully), and in the meantime, we’ll seethe and plan our revenge, but most of all we’ll cope.

It will help that an even greater prize that we’ll have our eyes on will be more independence from the mandarins of Whitehall, because they will not recover if they allow any such disastrous scenario to happen. It would also hasten the end of the EU. If the EU banned British flights coming into the EU, while Britain allowed European flights to come into Britain, it would damage the EU’s reputation so badly that I doubt that even that famously hard-to-kill institution would survive for too many years afterwards.

I don’t think any of this will actually happen, though. Personally I think that a stitch-up is nigh. But that’s a topic for another post.

Update: This article by Jake Berry, although it’s a bit of a puff-piece, is on my wavelength.

It’s fine with us that you don’t want kids Grace, because we don’t want you reproducing either

Hector Drummond Posted on by

Guardianistas are basically people who want to tell the rest of us how to organise the future, but can’t be shagged having any kids themselves, because they don’t really like having to deal with people who won’t obey them but they can’t kill:

With the long school summer holidays coming to an end, I would like to offer my annual thanks to the nation’s parents for another six weeks of sterling service. Not merely for raising future generations of doctors, scientists and Love Island contestants, but also for my annual refresher course on fertility choices. It’s still a no from me.

Also contained in this non-article of an article was this:

as one of my more realistic mother friends wrote on Facebook last week, “I am at the fucking Peppa Pig Live Show. Use a Durex, people.”

Peppa Pig is great. I bet the Peppa Pig live show is brilliant. The Fireman Sam live show certainly is. There are many awful things you have to sit through as a parent – PC has made most kids’ shows , especially BBC ones, incredibly boring – but Peppa Pig is not one of them. (And the Sooty live show is literally the best live show in the whole UK.)

You call that a blog comment? This is a blog comment

Hector Drummond Posted on by

Sam Duncan:

“Once they were in control of moderation, they began purging every single non-leftwing non-SJW commenter from their sites.”

 

And they’re doing it elsewhere, too. The actual story there – an open-source project adding a clause to its licence banning “ICE collaborators” from using its code – is of interest, but it’s the background that’s really illustrative.

The guy who unilaterally added the clause had previously introduced an SJW-friendly “Code of Conduct”, then proceeded to “cease making constructive contributions to the Lerna codebase as well as actively and willfully disregard” it. Fotrunately in this case, others on the project have grown sick of this, kicked him out, and reverted their licence.

 

But I think it’s a very neat and tidy illustration of the tactic. Had this chap been more skilled in it, continuing to pull his weight instead of concentrating entirely on his agenda, had his colleagues been more supine, he might have got away with it and another tiny little area of civil society would have become a “social justice” echo-chamber. I believe the Lefties call it “entryism”.

 

Once again: it’s the ‘placemen’ that have given the social media mobs so much power

Hector Drummond Posted on by

Six months ago I published a piece at Comment Central called ‘Social media and the place (wo)men’ about social media threats to free speech. Since then this topic has become even more pressing, and even more talked about – see, for example, this piece from Alistair Heath in the Telegraph today:

The strategy, for tens of thousands of activists working in digital packs, is to bully, shame and destroy anybody who doesn’t agree with them, who dares to express a different opinion or who fails to signal their virtue appropriately. Ad hominem attacks were once seen as bad form: today they are rationalised using bogus theories.

But commentators still aren’t quite getting what’s going on, so I think what I wrote in that piece is more timely than ever. It isn’t just the online mobs that have brought about the current situation. What we’re seeing is a pincer movement, which has two arms. The Twitter mobs are one arm, but the other is the placemen. Or the placewomen. The place(wo)men, if we’re writing like a pretentious academic.

The left has put a lot of their people into strategic positions in institutions, Universities, charities, companies, government departments, and so on. By ‘strategic’, I don’t necessarily mean the top positions. Big bosses in business these days are often left-leaning, but usually they’re not that left-wing enough to really be bothered with this stuff. They’ve got companies to run. Bosses of charities and government departments, on the other hand, are more in to this stuff themselves. And almost everyone under 50 at a modern University is a Believer. But mostly we’re talking about positions where a talentless leftist can bring influence to bear, such as in the HR department. They’re the ones stifling dissent and setting things up.

Once the setup is ready things can swing into action, with the pretext of a Twitter mob. A Twitter mob gets going — I say ‘mob’, but often it’s just a few people — and the place(wo)men can go into action putting the last piece of the scheme into action. You will have seen this a lot recently, when you see a news story that says “The complaint from a twelve-year-old girl that sparked a massive change in how company X does its business’, or ‘The tweet from an innocent student that led to the downfall of Hollywood star/politician/company director Y’.

The lone tweet mentioned is never the real cause. After all, leftists complain about normal stuff millions of times a day every day on Twitter. No, all the pieces have been put into place beforehand, and then the place(wo)men will look for a suitable tweet to light the blue touchpaper with, to make it look as though this was a completely spontaneous, grassroots thing.

So yes, Twitter mobs have some power. But not as much as you think. It’s the use they’re put to by the place(wo)men that’s the real problem. The pincer movement is where the crushing power lies.

Update: A good, related post at Ace of Spades:

He notes that in the old days, people communicated about these interests [ie. comic books] on message boards. But leftwingers began seeking out moderator positions on these boards, and then would only permit their leftwing friends to become moderators.

 

Once they were in control of moderation, they began purging every single non-leftwing non-SJW commenter from their sites. Or at least the ones who didn’t learn to be Silent …

 

Now, why does such a minor thing as comic book message board moderation matters? Well, because at the same time, Social Justice Warriors within the company — hired to appease Social Justice Warrior agitators at Buzzfeed, Jezebel, the Mary Sue, etc. — began agitating to take the company full SJW.

 

When Marvel started experiencing poor sales, the Social Justice Warriors claimed that turning white characters black, male characters female, and straight characters gay, while filling every story with loads of clumsy, blunt leftwing political messaging, would attract a New, Better, Woker audience and bring sales to new heights.

 

Now, back to that purge-of-non-SJWs-from-fan-message-boards: When Marvel Comics now looks for evidence about this theory, they naturally look to fan message boards for either support or refutation of the theory.

 

And what do they find there?

 

Well, now that the only people permitted to comment there at all are all SJWs, they find that the theory seems to have a lot of support behind it. Why look — on all these comic book message boards, everyone’s just ga-ga for more leftwing politics in superhero comic books!

 

The higher-ups at Marvel Comics don’t know the secret about why these message boards are all Full-On SJW, and the SJWs within the company don’t share that information with them.

 

So– Marvel Comics decides, hey, we looked at “the data,” and this SJW Plan sure seems viable!

 

The Biscuit Factory Vol. I: Days of Wine and Cheese serialisation. Part 33

Hector Drummond Posted on by

2000-01

Semester 1

Week 7

Saturday (cont.)

 

‘So is this like the RAE that Miles was telling me about the other day?’ asks Tanja, who is fascinated now, despite herself.

‘Sort of,’ says Miles. ‘The RAE is another government inspection, but it concerns research rather than teaching. It’s called the Research Assessment Exercise. It’s bad, but it’s not in the same league of badness as the QAA. Every seven years a department has to submit up to four papers, that is, articles, or books, from each academic.’

‘Who assesses the work?’ asks Tanja.

‘A couple of people from that discipline will read all the stuff every department in that discipline submits, and then they give each piece of work a score,’ says Ren.

‘How can so few people make such big decisions like that? Is that your objection?’ asks Tanja.

‘That’s one of the objections,’ says Ren. ‘There’s no way that a few people can accurately assess the quality of so much work published in so many sub-areas. That’s just a joke. Nobody really thinks they can. So really, in practise, the assessors base their scores on where the books and articles are published. Better publisher, better score. Better journal, better score. They pretend they don’t do that, because officially they don’t, officially they definitely don’t, but everybody knows they do.’

‘Not that that’s a bad thing, it’s better than trying to do it themselves,’ says Douglas. ‘But it’s not like you can really say that because Paper A is in a supposedly better journal, it’s better than Paper B.’

‘Yeah, take World Science,’ shouts Jay, as though he wants the editorial board of World Science to hear his pointed comments all the way from Grayvington. ‘It’s one of the biggest journals in the science world, but it has areas it likes to publish, and areas it doesn’t like to publish. And lots of stuff they publish isn’t that good, but it’s trendy.’

‘And World Science has cliques that run things, and they get each other into print,’ says Lily in a quiet voice, like she’d also prefer Jay to keep it down. ‘Buggins’ turn. Like a lot of journals. Each revolves around its own clique, and the interests of its usual referees, which are often drawn from that clique.’

Tanja is looking disillusioned, but she also looks like she’s appreciating having the scales fall away from her eyes. Universities are fucked-up places just like everywhere else. (At least, they are when the government gets involved, although that is not a thought that occurs to her. The thought, the mistaken thought, that occurs to her at this moment is that it’s no wonder that academic philosophers like Ren are so small-minded, having to deal with all this bureaucracy.)

‘And who’s to say what’s a better journal anyway?’ says Ren.

‘Yes,’ says Lily. ‘Determining that is very difficult if there’s no agreement, which there usually isn’t.’

‘There is this move in some fields, especially in the sciences, to try to make journal rankings more objective,’ says Miles. ‘One way they’re trying is by citation count. The journals that get the most citations, that is, mentions in articles and books, are the best. But that’s like trying to say that the best music is the stuff at the top of the pop charts.’

‘Also, a lot of material gets a lot of mentions only because it’s being held up as an example of what is wrong,’ says Lily.

‘Yeah,’ says Ren, ‘in fact the Arts and Humanities Citation Index did a study of the years, seventy-six to eighty-three, I think it was, and found that the most cited twentieth century author in the major humanities journals, by a long way, was Lenin. Also in the top ten were such idiots as Heidegger, Sartre, Derrida and Foucault. And most of the others weren’t much better, Barthes, Levi-Strauss, etc.

‘Das Kapital is always in the top ten or twenty of those lists of the most cited works every year,’ says Miles.

‘What’s bad about that?’ says Jay.

‘You’re fucking joking, right?’ says Ren. ‘Marx at number twelve, Robert Conquest at, who knows where? Seven thousand? And usually at or near the top is Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which is still trendy despite Kuhn’s obvious inability to distinguish between the logic of science and the history of science.’

‘In science the citation counts aren’t much better,’ says Jay. ‘It’s rewarding those who make the most noise, not those who do the best science.’

‘At least the RAE is attempting, however imperfectly, to directly measure what it’s supposed to measure,’ says Ren. ‘Research quality, that is. Unlike the QAA, which uses highly indirect measures of teaching quality.’

‘In my view there’s only one good thing about the RAE, and that is that it hasn’t been overcomplicated like the QAA,’ says Lily. ‘It’s straightforward. Here’s some work, let’s see how good it is. Even though they’re mistaken in thinking that they can so easily assess that work, at least that’s all there is.’

‘For now, ‘says Ren. ‘But that won’t last. It’s government. And there are vested interests. Government doesn’t like things being simple. It thrives on things being unwieldy and over-complicated, all of which enables it to expand. If you think it’s going to stay simple you’re fooling yourself.’

‘I agree,’ says Jay. ‘Because the RAE is causing all sorts of problems for Oxford and Cambridge. They don’t do as well in the RAE as they expected they would, because they’re full of old grandees who don’t publish so much these days. So they’re pressuring the RAE to change the criteria, to include things like “marks of esteem”, like getting keynotes.’

‘What are keynotes?’ says Tanja.

‘Getting a keynote means being invited to present a keynote lecture at a conference, that is, one of the prestigious longer speeches that everyone is expected to turn up to. Oxbridge wants this to count in the RAE. They have so much clout that I expect it’ll be included in future RAEs. Which will defeat the point of the RAE, which is that it’s not supposed to be about reputation, but about the actual research that is done in that RAE period, not basking in the glory of research done in earlier periods.’

‘You just wait, eventually they’ll start including things like being an editor of a journal, and all sorts of other shit,’ says Miles.

‘But does any of this really matter?’ asks Tanja.

‘Yes,’ says Miles, ‘because how much research money the government gives your department depends on your RAE score. And departments with a lower RAE score sometimes get given the axe.’

‘The other problem with the RAE,’ says Lily, ‘is that it encourages publishing for the sake of the RAE. It’s not like there’s any shortage of academic papers in the world. People are publishing material that no-one is going to read, or needs to read, just because the RAE says they have too.

‘Gore Vidal once said that the world doesn’t need any more novelists,’ says Ren. ‘What it needs is more readers. That applies to the academic world in spades. Tens of thousands of papers coming out, that no-one, except the author and a referee or two, ever reads. Journals are overwhelmed. Referees are overwhelmed. Refereeing is getting worse, academics hand over their referring duties to their grad students because they don’t have time to do it. Because of the demand to publish, more and more journals will start up, and put out more and more papers that no-one will read. We have an epidemic of over-publishing, which is made worse by the government.’

‘Why do you all put up with it?’ says Tanja.

‘Good question. We shouldn’t,’ says Ren. ‘But, like I said earlier, academics are cowards. They’re all wedded to their salaries and their pensions. They’ve assumed they have a job for a life and as a result they’ve got themselves nice houses with big mortgages. Funny how the middle-class left always ends up in the nice positions. So most academics would be in financial trouble if they lost their jobs, so they don’t take any risks.’

The lesson is, don’t be bad at maths

Hector Drummond Posted on by

An update to my last post about Judith Woods’ article about the GCSE system. She says it’s unfair that her daughter had to get a decent mark in maths to get into her preferred sixth-form college, when all she wanted to do was study fine art.

To explain: although my daughter got a fantastic grade in art, which she wants to study, her grade in maths, which she does not want to study, isn’t deemed high enough to gain entry into the sixth form of her choice – to do fine art.

 

Meanwhile her friend did not get as high a grade in art, which she too wants to study but she got a lot higher in maths, which she does not want to study, and as a result she will be attending that very self same sixth form – to do fine art.

 

It’s a sort of twisted logic worthy of Lewis Carroll.

Well, no, it may be somewhat unfair, but it isn’t Lewis Carroll, not when you think about things from the college’s point of view. It may be disappointing to this girl, and I do feel for her, and it’s a very imperfect system, but we’re not in Alice in Wonderland territory.

The main point is that she’s not trying to get into art school, where requiring a good grade in maths really wouldn’t make much sense. She’s trying to get into a sixth form college, which will teach fine art as one of many other subjects. The students there, including this girl, if she went, will be doing three to five different subjects a year. So she couldn’t just do fine art, she’s have to some other subjects as well.

Now, a top sixth-form college can afford to be picky about who it lets in. It will want to admit the best students it can, for various reasons. One of these reasons will be that the better students are probably going to be easier to teach. I say ‘probably’ because I found that at University this was generally true, although not always — sometimes a year where the required marks were lower were better to teach than a year where the students had got higher marks. And sometimes the students with the higher marks can be more of a pain in the arse as they expect everything to be done for them, instead of them doing the work. But as a general rule of thumb it’s more likely that the students with the higher marks are the better students to have.

So that means you want students with higher marks, and higher marks across the board, not just a high mark in one thing, Someone who is good at only fine art may be great to teach in fine art, but drags things down in every other class they do. This may not, of course, apply to this particular girl, who may be a joy to teach in her other classes, but we’re talking probabilities here — you go with what’s more likely.

I note that many University courses require a good or decent mark in GCSE Maths, in addition to whatever other requirements they have. Places that add this requirement do it because they think that it helps keep out students who get the required marks in easier A level subjects. This is hardly perfect, and some courses that used to do this no longer do so, and it would certainly be good if some better system could be devised where students who are clever and talented at everything except Maths could still get in, but then things become very messy and complicated, and there’s no guarantee that you’d really achieve the aim of letting in just those students who are clever and talented at everything except Maths and not a lot of other students who won’t be up to it (and exactly who those C&T students are is hard to decide to start with).

This is not to say that I always agree with having these sorts of Maths requirements. I’m not sure they’re always a good idea. But they’re hardly Lewis Carroll. As I said, the top sixth-firm colleges want top students, and requiring a good mark in Maths is a crude and sometimes unfair but generally pretty effective way of ruling out an awful lot of students who aren’t at the level they require.

I do, however, expect that Woods is right in saying that the GCSE system is generally a shambles. It’s the government organising it, so its bound to be.

And I have been somewhat unfair on the parents because at the bottom level it’s really the state that’s to blame for all this tremendous pressure that is being placed on students by their parents. The main reason why middle-class parents, and aspirational working-class parents, are desperate to get their kids into good schools is because the average state school is so badly run, and hamstrung by political correcteness, with little ability to discipline badly-behaved kids. That’s why you have to get your kids into a good school where the kids behave well because they all come from backgrounds where that’s expected. If they end up at an average state school, however, then they’ll face all sorts of disruptions from unruly classmates.

The bright kids may be protected to some degree in subjects that are streamed, but someone like Judith Woods’ daughter, who is only average in some subjects, will have to sit through endless classes that are ruined by bad behaviour, and where the expectations from the teachers are low. I can’t really blame parents for wanting their kids to be spared that.

Don’t send your daughter to a crammer and then complain that education isn’t fun any more

Hector Drummond Posted on by

Judith Woods complains about GCSEs in the Telegraph:

And so, instead of carefully calibrating, then resetting the pendulum, he [Gove] swung it too far in the opposite direction and sucked the joy out of learning.

But she also says:

I paid for tutors and crammer courses. And it was worth it because she passed with a little legroom to spare …

 

My daughter’s lovely, dedicated maths teacher went beyond the call of duty; early morning classes, late afternoon interventions,  …

 

But as parents we have watched our shining children reduced to tearful wrecks and depressed insomniacs over the past two years by the sheer grinding pressure and volume of work.

While I expect a lot of what she says about the GCSE shambles in the article is true, and she maybe has a point about the maths requirements for the top sixth-firm coleges, you have to think that part of the problem lies with the parents. The reason for making the exams harder is to separate out the brilliant students from the good ones, which hasn’t been happening enough in the past. But an awful lot of parents of good students are refusing to let this stop their children from getting into the brilliant category, so they push and push them to work like dogs so that they still get into the top category.

Well, it’s your family. But you can hardly then turn around and complain that Gove is the one taking the fun out of learning. If you’re the one hiring a tutor for your children then it’s you as well, isn’t it?

I’m all for the pursuit of excellence, and hard work, and pushing your boundaries, and all that malarky, and setting high expectations for your kids, but there comes a point where the pursuit of excellence becomes the degradation of life for no good reason. And it’s worse when it’s not you you’re doing it to, but your children.

The good grammar and private schools all give this advice out, because they know what happens when kids who don’t really have a natural aptitude for learning get in: “Don’t try to push your kids into an environment where they don’t belong by hiring tutors for a year or so beforehand to pass the entrance tests”, as so many parents do. That’s good advice for anyone. Push yourself by all means, but don’t ruin your life to get somewhere you then find you don’t want to be.

The Biscuit Factory Vol. I: Days of Wine and Cheese serialisation. Part 32

Hector Drummond Posted on by

2000-01

Semester 1

Week 7

Saturday (cont.)

 

Tanja’s raised voice has attracted the attention of Lily again, and Miles, who is starting to look uneasily at Tanja. While Tanja is busy berating Ren (who is trying to send a telepathic message to Miles to replace Tanja with a round of drinks), Lily gets Miles’ attention, and points to his crotch, and then at Tanja’s mouth, to indicate that Miles should stuff his cock into her mouth to shut her up, and, like, why hasn’t he being doing more of that so they don’t have to hear Tanja bore the hell out of them again?

Tanja doesn’t see this, but Ren does, and he immediately breaks the world record for the fastest erection ever attained by a human adult male. It won’t go down as the fastest recorded erection, of course, because no such records are kept outside of certain public school circles, but nevertheless, it is the fastest erection ever achieved, which God, if God exists, would be glad to attest to. Well, perhaps not glad, Ren thinks, but he would reveal the truth if asked. (Actually, thinking about it, he wouldn’t. He’d clam up. But he’d know, in his heart, what the truth is.)

Tanja breaks off, perhaps unsure of where this shit is going, or perhaps she was subliminally aware of Lily doing something in her peripheral vision.

‘You know,’ says Ren, getting back into the conversation straight away in the hope that it will make his erection go away before he has an accident in his trousers, ‘you’d be better off talking to someone like Tony Shaver about this sort of thing.’

‘Who’s Tony Shaver?’

‘He’s Tony Shaver. Or, to give him his full name, Tony Fucking Shaver. A guy in my department. He’s much more simpatico with this sort of stuff than I am.’

This is not really true. Although Tony Shaver is a massive bullshit artist, even he would find this sort of talk painful. He’s more into sociology of science than hippy-dippy kaleidoscope talk. But Ren would be glad to make Tony suffer. Also, talking about Tony Shaver is proving to be an effective rod size-reducer.

‘Miles, have you told Tanja about the QAA?’ asks Lily.

Ren, glad of a chance to escape from Tanja’s preoccupations, starts banging his forehead against the table. ‘The QAA. The QAA. The fucking QAA,’ he drones.

Tanja looks annoyed, knowing that the previous conversation is over, and this one is about to take off whatever she does. ‘All right then, I’ll bite,’ she says. ‘What’s the QAA?’

‘You don’t want to know,’ says Lily. ‘Seriously, don’t ask.’

Tanja frowns at Lily, because she doesn’t want to ask. They’re the ones making her.

‘Too late,’ says Ren.

‘The QAA is a review process that the government does every few years,’ says Miles, who is not very attentive to his girlfriend’s moods, ‘supposedly to ensure teaching quality in UK Universities. Sounds all right in theory, right?’

Tanja nods, because she is supposed to.

Ren demurs: ‘It doesn’t sound all right in theory to me. The government running anything is a bad idea, especially when it’s a Labour government. And the more complex the industry, more absurd the whole idea is. Hygiene in restaurants they can just about cope with. Anything else is a disaster. We don’t have government inspection of the quality of washing machines, for a good reason.’

‘Well, anyway,’ says Miles, whatever you think of government inspections in theory, in practise the QAA is a total disaster. Have a guess how many times the QAA people have observed our teaching in Psychology.’

‘I’ve no idea,’ says Tanja. ‘One hundred?’

‘Nope.’

‘Two hundred? Fifty? Five hundred? I’ve really no idea.’

‘The answer is… zero.’

‘Zero? What? What do you mean?’

‘Zero. They don’t watch any teaching. There’s a fortune spent on QAA, and enormous amounts of time goes into it, but none of it involves watching anyone doing any lectures or any teaching of any sort.’

‘What do they… investigate then?’

‘It’s all just a massive box-ticking exercise,’ says Lily. ‘Do you do this? Do you do that? All the things they think teaching should involve. But no actual investigation of what the actual teaching is like.

‘Not that there’s much point them doing that either,’ say Ren. ‘Why think that two or three people appointed by the government going to listen to the lecturers in a department can give you any sort of definitive verdict? Won’t they have their own subjective reactions to a lecturer? And how good are they at teaching themselves?’

‘So why is it such a big process if it’s just answering some questions on teaching?’ asks Tanja.

‘That’s what government bureaucracy is like,’ says Ren. ‘You won’t believe how enormous it has all got, just, as you say, to ask some questions about teaching. In my department they’ve had to put a whole room aside just to store all the documents required. And we’re spending about eighteen months’ worth of manpower on it, worth about sixty thousand pounds. Just for the endless filling in of the endless forms. For a smaller department. Across the University sector, with hundreds of Unis, each with dozens of departments, we’re talking an enormous number of millions per round spent on useless form-filling. All that is money that could have been spent on much better things.’

Tanja is looking goggle-eyed at Ren.

‘It doesn’t even measure anything worthwhile,’ says Lily. ‘It’s not even really claiming to be measuring teaching quality. It’s just assessing how well a department measures up to what the department itself claims its teaching goals are. Not that it even does that. Most of the time it has to assume that the department is telling the truth, and it doesn’t really have any way of knowing that. So it’s not really even measuring how well a department measures up to its own goals. But that is the intention. To assess how well a department measures up to its own teaching goals, rather than measuring how well the department teaches.’

‘Yes,’ says Jay, ‘which also means that if one department makes bolder claims than another department, then the first department could get a lower QAA score than the second even if it’s the better teaching department.’

‘And what they are measuring changes every time,’ says Douglas. ‘I discovered that what they’re asking us this time is different to what they asked us last time. So the QAA scores, even assuming they really did tell you about the quality of a department’s teaching, don’t tell you anything about that department’s teaching quality over time. Any change in scores is just as likely to reflect a change in the questions asked this time, rather than any change in teaching quality.’

‘You know what really pisses me off?’ Jay almost shouts. His scientific researches have enabled him to hit the exact frequencies that makes his voice resonate throughout nearby galaxies. ‘In most other fields the inspectors, who come from that field, think that they should look after their own field to some extent, so they give all the departments good scores, or pretty good scores, unless you really are a bad teaching department.’

Ren can feel the wooden walls on the other side of the place shaking as Jay speaks. Is he an amateur opera singer? A trained histrion? He looks the part, with his shaggy black hair, and his theatrical moustache, goatee and jowls, which the goatee fails to disguise (the goatee fails to disguise the jowls, that is. The goatee isn’t meant to disguise itself, or the moustache).

‘But in my field,’ Jay continues, ‘they take it all really seriously, they’re true believers, the stupid bastards, so they give out some undeservedly low scores to show how pure they are. Stupid, stupid, bastards.’

Jay’s enunciation, you have to admit, is excellent, but it’s not really a conversation that Ren wants advertised to everyone else in the place. Some of the other patrons are throwing annoyed looks their way, but as is the way with loudies, Jay is oblivious to this.

‘So,’ Jay goes on, ‘one good department in one field might get a much lower score than a poor department in another field. It’s so unscientific that all just becomes a worthless exercise.’

Ren shrugs. ‘You lefties only have yourself to blame,’ he says in a low voice, in the hope that this will make Jay speak more quietly. ‘You always think the government can fix things, but usually it makes things worse. No situation is so bad that the government can’t make it a disaster.’

‘But has it improved teaching?’ asks Tanja.

At that the academics all burst out laughing. Jay laughs like he’s in a theatrical version of a spoof of a Hammer Horror film. In fact he looks like he’s currently performing five nights a week in a theatrical version of a spoof of a Hammer Horror film.

‘Christ no,’ says Miles, wiping his eyes. ‘It hasn’t made teaching any better at all.’

‘All it’s done is removed all the old internal incentives we had as academics to teach well, and replaced them with external incentives,’ says Lily the economist. ‘External incentives don’t work as well as internal ones.’

‘Especially when the monitoring systems for those external incentives are so poor,’ says Ren.

Is Spiked starting to realise it’s the one who’s been blind to Corbyn?

Hector Drummond Posted on by

According to Spiked Online Corbyn is starting to look like a dangerous leftist with his latest media proposals:

No sooner had excerpts from the Labour leader’s proposals been released in advance than Corbyn’s online fan club were cheering them to the digital rafters, with #ChangeTheMedia trending on Twitter long before he even stood up to speak. That sounded more like a threat than a proposal. What Labour’s plans would really mean is a British form of government-approved journalism produced by a state-sponsored media. No wonder they went down so well with the instinctive Stalinist wing of the Corbynista movement.

It’s not that I disagree. Of course I agree. It’s just that Spiked have been telling us for at least a year that Corbyn is a harmless Swedish-style social democrat, and anyone who takes his hard-left claims seriously is a foaming-at-the-mouth anti-Communist, who’s almost as stupid as Corbyn himself.

Perhaps they’ll eventually put two and two together and realise that the man and his cronies are dangerous virtual Communists. Hopefully before they find their own website banned.

Sainsburys’ offers, so good that I’m virtually hypnotised into obeying

Hector Drummond Posted on by

Sainsburys are not doing as well as their supermarket rivals:

Sainsbury’s lagged rivals as the worst performer of the UK’s Big Four supermarkets …

In the 12 weeks to August 12, Sainsbury’s sales grew just 1.2pc, compared with a 3.5pc average across all the grocers.

Why are Sainsburys underperforming? Well, this doesn’t help:

A WHOLE 10P OFF RYVITA RYE CRISPBREAD! TO USE WITHIN TWO WEEKS. Forget the other supermarkets, I’m going to drive five miles out of my way next time to use Sainsburys just so I can get 10p off Ryvita rye crispbread. I might even leave work early to make sure I get there before the rush.

Admittedly it’s not a product I ever buy, it’s not a product I even like much, but who can argue with 10p? Not to mention the offer of 20p off unsalted butter. Sure I don’t use unsalted butter, but that’s twice as much off as the crispbread offer.

For me the moment when Sainsburys went downhill was when they stopped stocking classier products and started doing more of their own mediocre home brand stuff. (I can’t remember when this was, though. Five years ago? Eight?) At that point a lot of middle-class people switched to Waitrose because they had more snob appeal, but Sainsburys couldn’t compete with Tesco or Asda on the cheap front either.

(I used to like Sainsburys’ petrol offers, 4p a litre off, they were good value, but with the markup on petrol so slim to start with there was no way they could ever sustain that.)

Update: I may go back just to see what other ludicrous offers they can come up with. 5p off gluten-free spinach-flavoured haggis? 8p off fat-free porridge? 50p off lichen-and-masala shampoo?

Jamie Oliver’s restaurants have a pipe from his bank to the kitchen

Hector Drummond Posted on by

A bit of good news to cheer us all up:

Oliver’s bid to extend his publishing phenomenon into a global restaurant empire has so far failed and instead cost him millions in cash and reams of bad headlines around the world, especially in his native Britain as well as in Australia.

Last time I said anything negative about Jamie Oliver (on Twitter) hundreds of restaurant people went berserk at myself and Christopher Snowdon (who had also made fun of him). So let me say here that I don’t wish to see anyone lose their jobs, but I would like to see all these people employed by a better restauranter than Oliver.

I’ve never had a good meal in a Jamie Oliver restaurant. And I’ve never met anyone else who has. And the fact is that there are too many middle-of-the-road restaurants chains like his for the market. They can’t all survive. But I like the fact that Jamie Oliver is paying for a lot of people out of his own pocket. It’s part-payback for Turkey Twizzlers.