High School Social Science Projects Part I

Hector Drummond Posted on by

In my early days as a University lecturer — which wasn’t that long ago — I sometimes found myself reluctantly involved in ‘multidisciplinary’ work. In the case of most other discplines this was fine. But there were a few disciplines, namely the ones that had a rep for being havens of bullshit, that turned out to be full of — surprise suprise — bullshit.

Probably the worst was Sociology. (You’re shocked, I know. You never saw that coming.) There was one practice that was popular at the time amongst Sociology PhD students, at least judging by some of the presentations I was forced to attend. This I called the High School Social Science Project. The student would hold up an exercise book, into which they had pasted sections they had cut out of magazines and newspapers. Headlines, pictures, stories, snippets. The sort of thing you’d sometimes have to do in high school, in Social Science class. (Actually, I’m not sure I ever did anything like this in high school. But some kids definitely did.)

Then the student would provide us with their left-wing opinion on whatever the topic was, these opinions being a simplified — although only slightly simplified — version of the sort of theory that was popular amongst the Sociology lecturers. The material in the exercise book was sort of supposed to be evidence for this interpretation, although of course it was nothing of the sort. Or perhaps it was just supposed to be an illustration of the theory in action. Or perhaps just window-dressing. You never knew, because concepts like evidence were never mentioned.

The Sociology lecturers all acted as though this was perfectly normal, while we multi-displinary academics from non-Sociology departments (young ‘uns the lot of us) sat there with our jaws hanging open, unable to believe what they were seeing. Of course, the slightest attempt at criticism of what was being said, or the method, would cause the sociologists to circle the wagon and get aggressive, and basically try to make you feel like a bad person and a fascist for talking about evidence and logical analysis and the testing of theories. And they certainly didn’t like even the suggestion that perhaps pasting stuff you’d cut out of magazines into an exercise book wasn’t serious scholarship. This was Intertextual Media Analysis, or some such grand shit.

Whenever I would tell people about this, they always seemed like they were reluctant to believe me. I think they thought I was exaggerating for comic effect. I wish to God I was.

(To be continued…)

The Nunes memo, Google results, and the media’s ‘Soubry strategy’

Hector Drummond Posted on by

Heard much about the Nunes memo and the claims by the Republicans that the FBI colluded with the Democrats to ‘wiretap’ the Trump campaign from the UK media? Nope, not me either. Just a few small, hidden away nothing to see here stories, and some scoffing.

Now, maybe, as the Democrats claim, it’s all overblown. But this is the same media that has been hyping every little possibility that Trump is a Russian puppet for over a year, putting every dubious beat-up they can onto their front pages. But anything that goes the other way is just given the move-along-sonny treatment.

It’s also noticeable that when you type ‘Nunes memo’ into Google, you get page after page after page of left-wing sources. CNN, Vanity Fair, Time, Rolling Stone, Slate, The Independent, FactCheck, Vox, MSNBC, The Nation, Polifact, The Nation, LA Times, NBC News, ThinkProgress, Vice, Mother Jones, The Economist, Newsweek, NY Times, Vice, Huffington Post, etc., with only the occasional ‘acceptable’ right-wing, anti-Trump place there, like National Review. Is that Google manipulating the search results, or is it just a reflection of the left-wing bias of the MSM?

It’s also noticeable that many of these media outlets are playing the old game of ‘heavily promote the lone Republican/Conservative who disagrees’ angle, just like the UK media does witrh Anna Soubry over Brexit. Although it’s an old tactic, I nevertheless propose we call it the ‘Soubry strategy’.

The EU is like a private club we’ve outsourced government to

Hector Drummond Posted on by

The EU is, in many ways, no different to a private organisation. A club. And it’s this club that Britain and all the other EU countries have handed the keys to. Being in the EU is like having signed a really, really bad PFI contract, the worst one ever.

Imagine if G4 came up to your family and said, ‘We want you to hand over most of your important family decisions to us. We’ll make whatever decisions we think are best for you. Although basically we’ll just do whatever we like. And you have to fund our operation, which is expensive.’ You’d tell them to bugger off, right? Even if they said that your dodgy Uncle Ted is a part of it, and he’ll help them make the right decisions, and you can tell Ted what you think, and he’ll pass it on.

But this is in essence what the UK did over the decades. But dodgy Uncle Ted was clever; he didn’t put it like that. He sold it well. The truth about what was really going on was hidden. The Europeans were presented with a fait accompli. The Brits were told they were joining a free trade area. Gradually the powers of the private club were ramped up, and votes were avoided, and the club grew more and more powerful, and more and more arrogant.

When the UK had finally had enough, and decided to leave, and stop paying large sums to the club every week, it was like a family wanting to leave a protection racket. Threats were made, constantly. Insults flew. ‘You’ll never work in this town again’, the UK was told. The boys came around, cracked their knuckles, made some lightly-veiled threats, and knocked a few vases over.

The funny thing is that the sort of people who like the EU are generally the sort of people who don’t like power being given to private companies, and especially not to private clubs. But the EU is just the mother of all private clubs, an elite fraternity which colludes with the ruling classes so that Europe moves in the direction they all want. Private clubs are all right, it seems, as long as they present themselves in the right way, and have the right aims.

(It may be objected that the EU backroom is no different in principle than the UK civil service, so if we’re all right with the latter, why not the former? To this it could be replied that civil service has grown up organically with the democratically-elected government, and it is objective, two qualities which the EU does not have. It has to be said, however, that the civil service has become alarmingly club-like in recent years itself.)

The Wisdom of Professors 1

Hector Drummond Posted on by

This ‘ecosexual’ film was made by a University Professor of Art at UC Santa Cruz called Elizabeth Stephens. It stars herself and a friend molesting trees and rocks.

More details about ecosex, should you require them, here.

(Via — where else? — David Thompson).

P.S. Elizabeth — Beth — Stephens’ partner is Annie Sprinkle, whose name may vaguely ring a bell. She was a porn actress-turned-performance artist in the 70s and 80s, who became a darling of the gender studies world. One of her most famous performance pieces was called ‘Public Cervix Announcement’, where she got the audience to look at her cervix with a speculum and flashlight.

Spiked’s free speech University rankings

Hector Drummond Posted on by

Spiked’s annual University rankings for free speech are out now. The results don’t surprise me at all, and they illustrate well the diminishing of what was a great British institution. Speech is now much less free at a UK University than it is in the rest of the society, especially in the Humanities and Social Sciences.

As far as the left is concerned, this is just the beginning. If the likes of Josh Connor (left) get control, then you can look forward to the banning of Conservative groups, round-the-clock surveillance of all speech for any signs of sexism and racism, political rewriting of lectures, and kangaroo courts.

(Or perhaps I should say you can look forward to more of that sort of thing.)

Part of the problem here is the strangehold the state has on the University sector; while that isn’t perhaps the root cause, it makes things a lot worse. But it won’t be long before the public starts to wonder why they should be forced to fund the Social Sciences. Or even why they should fund the Universities at all. We need doctors, sure, but even they can fund themselves, the thinking will go.

The socialists have long treated Universities as test beds. After some retreats in the 80s, they’re well in control now. What is happening there now will spread to the rest of society in five to ten, or fifteen years. Universities aren’t just silly places full of foolish undergrads and irrelevant lecturers. They are where most of our young people are now being trained how to think. As the ads say, Universities are where the future is being made.

 

Pretending to muddle through isn’t going to work

Hector Drummond Posted on by

Theresa May’s strategy recently seems to be to sit as still as possible so no-one notices she’s there. That way she hopes to stay in the job as long as possible, until she can eventually say, ‘Well, we had some difficulties, but we somehow managed to muddle through’.

But that’s not going to work, because while she’s just sitting there not uttering a peek the Remainers and the EU are scuttling about, busily preparing ways to screw us over. And the Brexiteers can see this. So, while it’s risky to dump her given the tiny, fragile majority the Tories have, which is vulnerable to just a handful of Remainers voting the wrong way, she has to go, because otherwise the Remainers will win anyway.

If she dumped Hammond she could possibly survive, but as she’s clearly unable to do that, she’s toast.

Modern journalists

Hector Drummond Posted on by

When I was younger I used to spend some time with journalists. In those days the mantra was ‘work hard, play hard’. Now it seems to be ‘work hard, complain hard.’ And the former mainly consists of the latter. Complaining hard is about all they seem to do. Trawling Twitter for controversial statements.

In fact, journalists don’t even do that any more. That would take far too long. No, they just follow a few prime SJW outrage Twatter accounts, and pick up on what some Twats have already laid the groundwork for. That’s it. A few wannabees may go and do some actual field work, by which I just mean, for example, visiting a place where alleged harrassment took place, but they’ll abandon that as soon as they get a proper journalist job. Looking at your favourite Twatter accounts and sending off an e-mail asking for a response is much easier, and means the newspaper can hire intern-level journalists and pay them less (unless you’re Laurie Penny or Owen Jones, who do the same thing but with what passes on the left for panache, so they get paid vastly more).

Even The Daily Mail and The Telegraph have become like this, it’s not just the political operatives posing as journalists at The Guardian and Indy.

And now a commentator at Samizdata claims that a lot of journalism is being written by automated software, or partly-written by automated software:

Narrative Science, in case you haven’t heard of it, is a company that makes computer-generated journalism software. A few algorithms can pull together sabermetrics (baseball analysis), website data, and photo/graphics and compose a sports story: or election information, financial reports, market research, and local news.

I don’t know if this is true (most of my old journalist friends I haven’t seen in years, and I’ve heard that most have left the trade), but it’s almost worse if it isn’t, because then what excuse do the humans who write the daily piffle have?

It also explains Cathy Newman’s performance interviewing Jordan Peterson: Cathy Newman is a hologram programmed with stock Channel 4/Telegraph Women’s section responses.

‘So you’re saying I’m a computer program?’

Yes Cathy, I am. Finally you got one right.

‘In our hearts the needle of the seismograph has already stirred’

Hector Drummond Posted on by

Let’s hope that the UK never gets this bad, even though the commies in the UK are pushing it that way:

From Richard Pipes, The Russian Revolution 1899-1919, London: Harvill, 1990. p. 194:

To the historian of this period, the most striking — and most ominous — impression is the prevalence and intensity of hatred: ideological, ethnic, social. The monarchists despised the liberals and socialists. The radicals hated the ‘bourgeoisie.’  The peasants loathed those who had left the commune to set up private farms. Ukrainians hated Jews, Muslims hated Armenians and the Kazakh nomads hated and wanted to expel the Russians who had settled in their midst… Latvians were ready to pounce on their German landlords… Since political institutions capable of resolving these conflicts had failed to emerge, the chances were that sooner or later resort would again be had to violence…

It was common in those days to speak of Russia living on a “volcano.” In 1908, the poet Alexander Blok used another metaphor when he spoke of a “bomb” ticking in the heart of Russia. Some tried to ignore it, some tried to run away from it, other yet to disarm it. To no avail: “whether we remember or forget, in all of us sit sensations of malaise, fear catastrophe, explosion… We do not know precisely what events await us, but in our hearts the needle of the seismograph has already stirred”.

Theresa May’s image problem

Hector Drummond Posted on by

 

There’s a problem Theresa May has, which may be fatal (politically fatal, that is.) The problem is this.

She comes across as a Thatcherite to people who don’t like Thatcher. So they will never vote for her, even though she’s much closer to them politically than they realise.

 

 

 

 

 

But she doesn’t come across as a Thatcherite to people who do like Thatcher. She comes across as a pathetic Euro-elite wet. So they’re reluctant to support her. A lot of them voted for her grudgingly in the last election, but only because the Conservatives were supporting Brexit. They’re even less keen on her now.

 

 

 

 

Contrast this with Jeremy Corbyn. His base think he’s a Commie, which he is, and they love him for it. But he’s also managed to convince a lot of less radical types that he’s a Remainer of some sort, so they’re supporting a man whose policies they  wouldn’t like at all if they really had more of a clue of what he has in mind.

 

 

 

 

So who looks like they can get their base out, plus some others? Who’s winning the image war? Well, it ain’t Theresa May, is it?

Failing to put your stamp on Brexit

Hector Drummond Posted on by

Boris Johnson told The Sun: “Leaving the European Union will be a monumental moment in British history, so let’s deliver a commemorative stamp that shows the world we’ve got Brexit licked.”

But last night Business Minister Margot James– who is responsible for postal services – branded the issue “divisive” in a clear Government split.

Asked why the Royal Mail would not produce Brexit stamps when they did after we joined the European Economic Community she said: “I don’t think it was such a divisive issue then.

Of course it was a divisive issue then, you sleazy Remainiac. Half the country was dismayed at us joining the EEC, but they were ignored as the Establishment had got the result it wanted, so it was Stamps Ahoy in 1975.

You and the Postal Service mandarins only consider it divisive now because you lost.

Margot James — another name to be added to the ‘Sack ASAP’ list.

Commies always end up with mass slaughter

Hector Drummond Posted on by

At least 10,000 people died in Tiananmen Square massacre, secret British cable from the time alleged
Secret document suggested death toll was much higher than later reported, while claiming wounded students were bayoneted as they begged for their lives and the burnt remains of victims were ‘hosed down the drains’

Tell your friends that it’s not all right to be a communist.

from https://twitter.com/SallyMayweather, via https://twitter.com/cthulhupotamus.