Religion and Politics Blog

Card-carrying Liberal Democrat. My views are my own, and do not necessarily reflect party policy.

Simon Jenkins’ understanding doesn’t add up

Posted on March 10, 2016 by Tim Hall

It appears that C P Snow’s Two Cultures is alive and well if this monumentally ignorant piece by The Guardian’s Simon Jenkins is anything to go by.

We accept the need for maths in advanced physics and in computing algorithms, much as we accept Greek for archaeology and Anglo-Saxon for early literature. The “mathematics of finance” school at Columbia University is lavishly sponsored by Wall Street firms, for good reason. But that does not mean every primary pupil must spend hours, indeed years, trying to learn equations and πr2, which they soon forget through disuse. Maths is for specialists, so why instil arithmophobia in the rest?

Charge the maths lobby with the uselessness of its subject and the answer is a mix of chauvinism and vacuity. Maths must be taught if we are to beat the Chinese (at maths). Or it falls back on primitivism, that maths “trains the mind”. So does learning the Qur’an and reciting Latin verbs.

Meanwhile, the curriculum systematically denies pupils what might be of real use to them and society. There is no “need” for more mathematicians. The nation needs, and therefore pays most for, more executives, accountants, salesmen, designers and creative thinkers.

That attitude betrays quite heroic levels of igorance and prejudice, and it’s not much of a stretch to blame attitudes like his for Britain’s industrial decline. Does he really believe the nation’s economy needs anything like as many archeologists or experts on early literature as it does computer programmers or engineers?

Of course, it’s the programmers and engineers who built the internet infrastructure that enables his ridiculous drivel to reach an audience.

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Why I’m voting Remain

Posted on March 8, 2016 by Tim Hall

EU Logo The European Union in deeply flawed, and structured in a way that makes it difficult to reform. It has a very bad democratic deficit. It’s handling the Syrian refugee crisis very, very badly. And the implementation of the Euro was an ill-conceived mess that we were right to have kept out of.

But for all its flaws, I’m voting Remain in the referendum in June. Because remaining in Europe is still far better than the alternative. What the EU does will continue to effect the UK whether we’re still in it or not, and we cannot influence or reform something if we’re we’re no longer a member. Love it or loathe it, the EU matters.

At best, voting to leave the European Union is a reckless gamble.

At worst, it’s a decisive move towards a meaner, nastier vision of Britain that will be a worse place to live in for everyone other than the wealthy elites. Look at some of Tory Brexiter Priti Patel’s comments about British workers being the laziest in the world and her demands that the life of the young must be all work and no play so that Britain can compete with the sweatshops of the far east. That’s the vision of the people who want us to leave.

Looking at the faces of the “Out” campaign; it’s like a rogues gallery of the worst people in British politics. Almost all of them are those who believe that the Social Democratic values at the heart of the European project are an anathema. There are a few leftist troglodytes who still believe in a Soviet-style command economy, but the majority are ideologues who have read far too much Ayn Rand, or the out-of-touch nostalgic for the days of Empire.

We’ve got Nigel Farage, about whom more than enough has been said. We’ve got the loathsome and repellent George Galloway. We’ve got new-age conspiracy moonbat David Icke. We’ve got the utterly cynical opportunist Boris Johnson. The bulk of them are the worst half of the Tory party, typified by Iain Duncan-Smith, one of the few people I’m willing to use the word “Evil” to describe. There is a Labour Out campaign, but it’s a motley assortment of has-beens and B-listers; all the big hitters of the party are on the “In” side.

And what about the rest of the world? Paddy Ashdown stated today that all of Britain’s NATO allies want us to remain. Who wants us to leave? French neo-fascist leader Marine Le Pen for one. And Vladimir Putin.

If you vote to leave the EU, those are the people you are siding with.

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Peer Reviewed

Posted on March 5, 2016 by Tim Hall

Following Peer Reviewed on Twitter is making me wonder if academic postmodernism is the modern-day secular equivalent of the Gnostic heresies of centuries past.

This Twitter account is the work of someone who possibly has too much time on their hands, who trawls academic journals in search of the most ridiculous-looking papers, and posts screengrabs of the abstracts.

This is a typical example.

Gnostic Heresy Screencap

It really does read like something out of Private Eye’s Pseud’s Corner. Indeed, one ot two people have implied that the combination of tortured logic and awful academic prose worthy of H. P. Lovecraft is actually triggering.

I have no idea of the compiler’s personal politics, but the selected nonsense skews very heavily leftwards, with a lot of references to Critical Race Theory and intersectional feminism. This might just be down to the author’s biases, but it might equally be that the prevalence of  pseudo-intellectual codswallop skews heavily towards the left.

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The Trump

Posted on March 5, 2016 by Tim Hall

TrumpThe American election has to be the most frightening one during my lifetime. The rise of Donald Trump on the right and Bernie Sanders on the left both demonstrate a populist revolt against a ruling elite that’s lost the support of large sections of the population. In the case of Trump it’s the closest a serious presidential candidate has come to full-blown Fascism. He certainly makes similar accusations against George W Bush look like risible hyperbole.

The Republican party has always been the party of the rich. In the past they’ve managed to win elections by playing bait-and-switch with a proportion of the electorate, encouraging them to vote against their economic interests by stoking the fires of xenophobia.

The coming of The Trump has bought that to an end. If your political strategy is essentially a confidence trick, sooner or later a bigger and better conman is going to beat you at your own game. Nobody really knows what Trump would do if elected President, but very few have so little to lose they’re prepared to risk finding out.

The 1% have reached a crossroads. Either they accept the party’s over and recognise that their gross inequalities are unsustainable. Or they just conclude their interests are no longer compatible with democracy, and it’s democracy that has to go. One wonders how they might react should Bernie Sanders become President.

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Nuclear Trains

Posted on March 3, 2016 by Tim Hall

Scottish CND and one or two SNP MPs have been getting themselves in a lather on Twitter over a short video clip of nuclear flask train passing through Paisley on route between Hunterston and Sellafield. The heavily-constructed steel flasks carry spent reactor fuel rods for reprocessing.

Never mind that these trains have been running for decades, or that they run in connection with the civilian nuclear power industry and have nothing to do with nuclear weapons.

Lines like “I marched against nuclear weapons in 1963” and “What if Faslane was hit by a meteorite” show their level of argument. They come over as thinking “nuclear” is such a big scary word that there’s no point discussing rational assessments of risks with these people.

The above video isn’t actually Paisley, but from Bridgewater in Somerset, with flask traffic from Hinkley Point. The veteran class 37 locomotives are 50 years old,  two of a handful of the type still earning their keep more than a decade after most of their classmates were retired.

Interestingly the rail operator, Direct Rail Services, is the only publically-owned train company in Britain. Although it’s run as a commercial business and has diversified its rail operations to include Anglo-Scottish intermodal traffic and even some passenger work, it’s still part of the state-owned nuclear industry.

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Sandy Beaches and the Clickbait Media

Posted on March 1, 2016 by Tim Hall

It turns out that a couple of “XYZ is problematic” clickbait pieces on a popular feminist culture website by the pseudonymous “Sandy Beaches” were actually the work of a troll, in an affair that sounds like a cross between The Sokal Hoax and Naked Came The Stranger.

Quite simply, I wanted to see how ridiculous and flagrantly wrong/untruthful I could be and get away with it. I’d had the FFVII/sexism article written well over a year ago, yet I didn’t pull the trigger. I thought, at the time, that it would be far too stupid and misinformed for any publication to run. However, as the articles regarding feminist complaints on…well everything…began to pile up, each one getting progressively less logical and more poorly argued, I decided it was time.

It is the most successful article I’ve ever written. More comments, more views, more shares, more threads, more responses, than anything I’ve ever done before. As of now, the FFVII/sexism article sits at around 1000 FB shares and 700+ comments, not including the multiple threads and video and article responses I’ve seen.

When you take into consideration I wrote this piece in about 30 minutes (35–40 including some editing I’ll get into later), the energy to reward ratio is unbelievable.

As I’ve said before, if your rhetoric is so predictable and formulaic that an outsider who is opposed to everything you stand for can fake it without being caught, you need to raise your game.

The usual suspects are predictably declaring the whole thing as a judgement on the current state of feminism. But I think the real villain here is the dubious outrage-for-clicks business model of so much of the online media. It’s become a race to the bottom to see who can push people’s buttons for profit, and damn the longer term cultural consquences. Even Guardian Music has started to publish pieces like “Is Opera the most misogynistic of all artforms?, which I refused to read on principle. And no, this is not just a “Social Justice Warrior” thing; the right has its own outrage-sheets which are every bit as rancid.

It’s poisoning our cultural conversations, polarising our online communities into petty warring tribes, and sucking up energy thar could be better spent in enthusing about things.

Online journalism and cultural criticism needs a better business model, one that supports well-written and informed cultural analysis rather than cheap and nasty clickbait that preaches to partisan choirs. At the moment I don’t believe the ad-supported model can do this.

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Let Justice Be Done Though The Liberal Heavens Fall

Posted on February 26, 2016 by Tim Hall

Nick Cohen is on form again in Standpoint over the events in Rotherham and Cologne, and the apparent divide-by-zero error sufffered by some parts of the left.

My colleague David Paxton looked at these and other examples of fear of the far-Right and aptly described them as a “noble lies, told to prevent us idiot yokels from becoming a mob. People are stepping out from their job descriptions and moonlighting as censors.” He might have gone further. The refusal of the police and public authorities to follow the law they are meant to uphold demeans the societies they are meant to serve.

They see Britain as a 21st-century Weimar Republic where the smallest incitement could lead to pogroms and tyranny. The white men and women around them are not fellow citizens but closet fascists, who must be kept in ignorance for fear that they will dress up in black leather and attend torchlight parades. In these circumstances, abused girls aren’t victims, but inconveniences who must be suppressed for the greater good.

He again stresses how the current incarnation of identity politics which puts communities and their sometimes self-appointed leaders ahead of individuals is not fir for purpose for today’s highly diverse society.

We should stop playing shabby games of ethnic favouritism with the victims of crime, which should never have been played in the first place. Whether a child is abused by a white celebrity or Pakistani thug, or a migrant taking advantage of unknown freedoms, says nothing about whites or Pakistanis or asylum seekers, and everything about them. We should do what we should always have done and insist that equality before the law is the best way of integrating newcomers as well as being a blessing in itself.

Nick Cohen is sounding more and more like a stuck record on this subject. But that doesn’t mean he’s wrong.

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It appears that the latest people to join the Out Campaign clown car are Doctor Death and vile former NME hack Tony Parsons. They join such luminaries as Iain Duncan-Smith, George Galloway and David Icke. With friends like those…

Posted on February 25, 2016 by Tim Hall | Comments Off

Academic Drivel Report

Posted on February 24, 2016 by Tim Hall

Great post by sociology professor Peter Dreier on his Sokal-style hoax in which he managed to troll a conference in Tokyo with a conference paper extract that was in fact complete gibberish.

This panel addresses absences—the gaps, silences, and remains within the construction of knowledge and ignorance—in order to contribute to an ongoing STS dialogue; one that has roots in Bloor’s “sociology of error” to more recent work in agnotology (Proctor and Scheibinger) and in residues (Bowker and Star). From feminist and postcolonial theory, we have learned to be continually vigilant about the dynamics and non-dynamics in knowledge construction and application. This panel addresses these negations, unseen crevices, deletions, and leftovers from multiple perspectives. Its aims to identify and theorize some of those areas that demand our vigilance in order to broaden and provide systematic ways to understand how absences and gaps are a continual part of social interactions and our STS studies. Interested Presenters: Please send us a brief abstract and title of your talk with your name, email and affiliation. We would like contributions no later than 15 January to compile and submit the session.

And that’s not gibberish itself; it’s the call for submissions to which he responded.

The whole thing is well worth a read as a polemic on the opaque and pretentious nature of so much academic writing, especially in the social sciences.

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Twitter Flailing on Freedom of Speech

Posted on February 24, 2016 by Tim Hall

If Twitter had got its act together on harassment five years ago they wouldn’t now be in a position where suspending the accounts of a handful of right-wing loudmouths seemed like a good idea.

Freedom of speech means you can speak truth to power without government or corporate interests acting as a gatekeeper over what speech is acceptable.

But freedom of speech also means you can voice controversial opinions without being shouted down. The “heckler’s veto” of the mob is as much a censor as any bureaucrat with a red pen.

Unless you refuse to accept the existence of the heckler’s veto, freedom of speech isn’t as simple as absolutists would make out; there is some speech which can only exist at the expense of other speech. If you operate any space on the web, from a community site to a large social network, sooner or later you’ve going to have to decide who’s speech has the most value, the heckler or the heckled.

This is not a defence of Twtter’s recent actions; the arbitrary nature and the complete lack of transparency ring all sorts of alarm bells, and paints a picture of a clueless management flailing around with desperate short-term fixes. It comes over as little more than simplistic virtue signalling, which very few people are impressed by. It’s got to the point where nobody trusts them any more.

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