Go Figure!

Rishi Sunak is back on his maths obsession, but like so many others he is entirely missing the point, The reason we are so far behind other ‘advanced’ nations is that the political will to point at the whole herds of elephants in the room is absent. And this is by design. Education is still the path to future prosperity, but not for the nation. The way we are going we will soon be world leaders in mediocrity and identity politics.

The HR tails has been firmly wagging the dog for decades now and nobody with the power to hire, to shape the demography of the workforce, believes in merit any more. What matters most is a virtuous blend of the diverse. As long as a corporation can field a team of multicoloured, multicultural, neuro-diverse, gender-fluid incompetents it will be hailed as the pinnacle of human achievement even as it achieves the square root of fuck-all.

For years I have declared that while 20% of UK adults are said to be functionally illiterate, the other third are bad at maths. This used to get a chuckle; now it is met with silence and blank incomprehension… probably because fully half of UK adults have the numeracy of a six-year old, so can’t put two and two together. Rishi Rich wants to address all of this by making maths compulsory in some form until eighteen.

Too late, mate. Back in the bad old days of bricks in the wall at least each school-leaver entered the workforce with a role to play. Now, they don’t want to be bricks but identify instead as decorative planters, as corporate performance art, as influencers, copycatting other influencers in their turn. Children are no different from seventy years ago, they have just had the wrong thoughts put into their heads throughout their lives. Nothing wrong with being a brick – at least those bricks could read a bus timetable and add up their overtime.

Without bricks you just can’t build any walls at all. Only a very few have the talent to lead, to innovate, to design, to plan; the rest of us would be far happier just getting on with our own tasks and leaving the hard stuff to those who can do it. But no, the modern ethos is that you can somehow earn a living by not fitting in at all, and then altering society to look like you. Again, however, a tiny few will do the influencing and the lumpen masses will just follow them… over an economic cliff.

We need doers. We need plumbers and wiremen, builders and road-repairers. We need drivers and waiters and cleaners and shelf-stackers. We need doctors and engineers and scientists and entrepreneurs, too, but we will always need bricklayers if we ever want to build a wall. If you think about it the old bricks ended up being wonderfully diverse, simply by pursuing what they could. The irony is that by pursuing diversity above all we end up with herds of useless, bland, self-declaring morons without a talent between them.

I am Womxn hear me Roxr

There has been some hilarity this week over the Wellcome Collection’s backing down over the use of the alternative, unpronounceable and numeratively unclear spelling of a formerly inoffensive collective noun. “‘Womxn’ is apparently a relatively common term on US university campuses, as it ‘allows space for individuals who identify as genderfluid, genderqueer, gender non-conforming, or non-binary,’ according to the Daily Dot website. The ‘x’, we are told, ‘opens up the free-human-woman concept to include trans women’, since, of course, ‘woman’ excludes such people.”

Lucky people, eh? Lucky? Well, if the most important thing to you is whether you are politically correct enough, inclusive enough, diverse enough, accepting enough and you have the time to thoroughly steep yourself in gender studies and other confected fripperies, you probably have it pretty good. I guess when all your material needs are met you just need to complete the tick-list of fulfilled spiritual wants and you’re good to go. Please go.

Then there is the BBC’s intention to challenge ‘heteronormative’ culture at the corporation. Whaaaat? You want us to wear badges now?  You need special shorthand so that you can identify fellow sufferers, sympathisers, friendly non-combatants and what, the enemy? Should all the straights perhaps wear yellow stars, would that make it any easier? I have no problem with people expressing their desires, their differences, their hopes and even their crusades, and badges are as good a way as any other, but the problem with minorities these days is they will not rest until theirs is the majority view.

If a minority who perceives it has been persecuted can so arrange things that the majority are punished for their ordinariness how the hell does society ever manage to come up with a set of rules that are fundamentally fair to all? This whole business of identity politics is a symptom of the madness of atomised thinking, fractured societies and the breakdown of traditional structures in the quest for inclusivity, diversity and equality – all of which are singularly incompatible with each other.

You patently cannot have diversity AND equality and the wearing of badges strikes me as more exclusive than otherwise – or should we wear multiple badges. How about we wear no badge and perhaps judge people – for judge we must – on whether they’re a dick or not, rather than whether they have a dick or not? Why does everybody have to come out and declare an allegiance or worse, be forced into adopting an apparent allegiance they simply don’t feel? Can’t people who work at the BBC or go to university just be allowed to be who they are without having to constantly bear colours?

Karen White - because 'she' says so.

I blame Freud, with his crackpot mummy/daddy issues and somehow legitimising the hocus-pocus of cold reading as settled science. And once again it began with the chattering classes – the devil makes work for idle hands and all that. We used to have unwritten codes of behaviour in Britain which meant difference was largely tolerated. Now we have actual written criminal offences which demand they be obeyed. Can anybody spot the differxnce?

The Age of Wonder

What do you mean, you’re not gay? How on earth do you ever expect to get a decent job? The old advice to work hard, keep your nose clean and make yourself indispensable would seem, in this new, identitarian world, to be positively antediluvian. Today it is not even about who you are, but what you are. Forget your dewy-eyed longing for a meritocracy, the mediocracy is where it’s at; a few years ago companies were being advised to hire for diversity before talent on the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy that as successful companies were often diverse, therefore their success must be because of their diversity.

This is as ridiculous a stance as Tony Blair’s let’s-send-everybody-to-university policy, founded on the notion that as graduates, in general, up to the New Labour era, earned more, thus an automatic increase in prosperity could be magicked-up simply by removing the barriers to entry. Grade inflation, already worryingly accelerated, became rampant. And what happened? The market responded by creating worthless degrees from pop-up, ersatz universities and threw a generation of eager young people on the employability scrapheap.

You would think we would learn. Teach everybody the same rigorous basics, select for specialisation, emphasise important STEM subjects, but simultaneously encourage the less academic to learn lifelong, vitally important, non-academic skills. But most importantly, build an educated, informed, realistically aspirational new workforce. Any country which relies on attracting foreign workers to do work well within the compass of its own citizens is pursuing a folly which may well be about to be realised when they make a similarly monumental fuck-up over a botched Brexit.

But back to the identity bullshit. Disney has been in bother for casting a non-disabled actor in the role of a disabled character and BBC is currently taking flak for not managing to cast an actual elephant man in the role of the Elephant man. A caller to Nick Ferrari this morning even sort of managed to suggest that only Joseph [John] Merrick himself could have given a faithful rendering of his life’s experiences. She seemed unhinged enough to be capable of being indignant that Merrick, who died in 1890 wasn’t offered the lead role in the 1980 movie. See what happens when your audience is innumerate?

And as if the idiocy of identity politics isn’t apparent enough a BBC executive is once again publicly calling, in the name of diversity, for the replacement of white men on the telly-box who present with no gender confusion, disablement or other victim status,. How long before they are demanding Daniel Day-Lewis gives back his Oscar and other awards for My Left Foot on account of him having full control of both feet?

Yeah, I think we've got all the bases covered here.

When civilisation falls, when transport and technology vanish, when the human rights industry eventually has us all eating each other and all that is left of the western world is a metaphorical giant left foot bearing the legend of Ozymandias, once king of kings, will future historians wonder what led to the ending of the reformation, the age of enlightenment, the industrial revolution, the space age, the information superhighway and all the wonders created by millions of brilliant minds... or will they just be too stupid?

Beyond Brexit

I take a day off and what happens? I come back to find the opposite sides of Brexit still calling each other stupid. Or, to be more specific, the less eloquent Brexiteers are slinging mud and insults in a reactionary fashion at Remainers, while the intellectual big guns of Remain are aiming what they think are finely-honed arguments at anybody who voted to leave. And yet that ignorant lumpen proletariat refuses to back down. How dare they ignore democracy! But they each had a vote and Leave won, say the pragmatists. Then how dare they ignore ‘parliamentary’ democracy! They’re not happy.

Day after day the pro-EU lobby demands that its voice is the only one that should be heard. If only there weren’t so many babbling voices as  the entire country goes stark, staring, full-on, fruit bat bonkers. Feminists tear into women, the left tie themselves in knots over denying, yet shoring up their institutional anti-Semitism and over the pond the US election has become so bizarre that, whatever the outcome, you fear for the sanity of the entire country. The western world is one almighty fuck-up right now and this is not lost on dear old Uncle Vlad.

Decades of pandering to a self-destructive narrative about multifarious, yet nebulous inherent human rights has put the rights of individuals ahead of the rights of society, so that freedom and security and plain common sense have been sacrificed on the many altars of fractured idealism. Instead of the imagined rainbow of multicultural mores we have a straightforward divide of the old-fashioned kind. Not so much a haves against have-nots struggle, although that will never go away, but more of a righteous-versus-the-ungodly kind of affair.

Today we are split into the factions of want-to-be-led against do-as-I-say and it isn’t getting us very far. The would-be leaders, among which there is no clear consensus, squabble between themselves over the minutiae of their enormously disparate aims, while the rest of us (the thick ones, remember) do our best to keep the country going. If you had a clue, we would happily follow, but you don't. Where once we had the blitz spirit of keeping calm and carrying on, one nation against a common enemy, we now have the splits spirit which mitigates against any form of unity.

Seriously, who cares about your very specific struggle for recognition? The more you seek to define yourself as a rights-holder on the grounds that your particular needs are a unique subset of the modern holy grails of identity; gender, sexuality, race, religion, disability, etc, the more your majority tends towards one – zero if your problem is low self-esteem. In a way you should be grateful for the referendum; at least it’s given you a bigger family to belong to. But that sense of membership is illusory.

The big brains are all for remain?

We Brexiteers, we happy band of fruitcakes, loonies and racists, voted out for reasons the Bremoaners, despite their 'superior' intellect, don’t really grasp. We actually do want to keep calm and carry on. All we need from government is basic law and order and a state that works, which we can afford. When it comes to ‘empowerment’, give us the tools and we’ll finish the job. Despite all protestations to the contrary, the will of the 52% is actually pretty coherent. If it helps at all, the squabbling leave factions can continue with our blessing to think of us as thick, but at least we know what Brexit looks like.

Beyond Brexit

I take a day off and what happens? I come back to find the opposite sides of Brexit still calling each other stupid. Or, to be more specific, the less eloquent Brexiteers are slinging mud and insults in a reactionary fashion at Remainers, while the intellectual big guns of Remain are aiming what they think are finely-honed arguments at anybody who voted to leave. And yet that ignorant lumpen proletariat refuses to back down. How dare they ignore democracy! But they each had a vote and Leave won, say the pragmatists. Then how dare they ignore ‘parliamentary’ democracy! They’re not happy.

Day after day the pro-EU lobby demands that its voice is the only one that should be heard. If only there weren’t so many babbling voices as  the entire country goes stark, staring, full-on, fruit bat bonkers. Feminists tear into women, the left tie themselves in knots over denying, yet shoring up, their institutional anti-Semitism and over the pond the US election has become so bizarre that, whatever the outcome, you fear for the sanity of the entire country. The western world is one almighty fuck-up right now and this is not lost on dear old Uncle Vlad.

Decades of pandering to a self-destructive narrative about multifarious, yet nebulous inherent human rights has put the rights of individuals ahead of the rights of society, so that freedom and security and plain common sense have been sacrificed on the many altars of fractured idealism. Instead of the imagined rainbow of multicultural mores we have a straightforward divide of the old-fashioned kind. Not so much a haves against have-nots struggle, although that will never go away, but more of a righteous-versus-the-ungodly kind of affair.

Today we are split into the factions of want-to-be-led against do-as-I-say and it isn’t getting us very far. The would-be leaders, among which there is no clear consensus, squabble between themselves over the minutiae of their enormously disparate aims, while the rest of us (the thick ones, remember) do our best to keep the country going. If you had a clue, we would happily follow, but you don't. Where once we had the blitz spirit of keeping calm and carrying on, one nation against a common enemy, we now have the splits spirit which mitigates against any form of unity.

Seriously, who cares about your very specific struggle for recognition? The more you seek to define yourself as a rights-holder on the grounds that your particular needs are a unique subset of the modern holy grails of identity; gender, sexuality, race, religion, disability, etc, the more your majority tends towards one – zero if your problem is low self-esteem. In a way you should be grateful for the referendum; at least it’s given you a bigger family to belong to. But that sense of membership is illusory.

The big brains are all for remain?

We Brexiteers, we happy band of fruitcakes, loonies and racists, voted out for reasons the Bremoaners, despite their 'superior' intellect, don’t really grasp. We actually do want to keep calm and carry on. All we need from government is basic law and order and a state that works, which we can afford. When it comes to ‘empowerment’, give us the tools and we’ll finish the job. Despite all protestations to the contrary, the will of the 52% is actually pretty coherent. If it helps at all, the squabbling leave factions can continue with our blessing to think of us as thick, but at least we know what Brexit looks like.

Despicable Me

Well, I learned a thing or two yesterday. Having got used to seeing the abbreviation LGBT used liberally – or illiberally – by the media and having got used to the idea that Gay Pride has become LGBT Pride I stumbled upon LGBTQ. “Q?” I asked, “Queer” ‘they’ replied (personal pronouns get trickier every day). Then, just as I was absorbing this new piece of concatenation and wondering what the crucial difference between L, G and Q was, I was introduced to LGBTQI, to which I wittily asked “QI means like Stephen Fry?” The rolling of the tumbleweed could be heard across the world.

Twitter is marvellous. It lets you have conversations that in real life could get you beaten up, barred, sacked or excommunicated. You can stop any time you like and you don’t have to lose friends over it – not real friends, anyway. But some just take it too far. Words on a screen are worse than weapons to some and to misuse forms of address for those who don’t conform to what is undeniably the binary norm is considered almost as bad as physical abuse. One day we may all end up with our own individual identification and wear tattooed bar codes on our foreheads so that people know how to greet us and what subjects to steer away from, or be uncharacteristically sensitive to.

But if you can choose something as fundamental as your gender/sexual identity and then march and campaign for recognition, surely you can be big enough to choose how you react towards those who don’t understand your concerns. It’s not their battle to fight for your rights and some of them are bewildered and yes, offended by your insistence that they accept you, no matter how much it costs them. It might be in your interests if you are a militant gender warrior to cut them some slack; after all, many of them are from the generation who fought – actually fought and died - for the rights you so casually demand.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. My reaction to intolerance is indifference. You don’t like my plain vanilla identity, I don’t care. That doesn’t mean I ‘hate’ you; far from it. And while I find the screeching and appropriation amusing, your multi-coloured, bifurcated, binary-denying, straight-hating, all-inclusive-unless-you’re-a-Tory, confused, identity-meandering crusade is just a sideshow to the important things in life. It may be important to you, but it really isn’t important to anybody else, other than some right-on politicians looking for a sectarian vote bloc.

The important things in life? Well, that’s up to you. But in my book that means navigating the stormy waters of this veil of tears with, well, with as few actual tears as possible. Not starting fights you can’t finish, not getting upset over things you can’t change and not craving things you will never have. Try it, a quiet pragmatism goes a long way in the search for contentment. I really don’t care whether you are L or G or B or T or Q or I or even 'plus'; it's not me you have to convince... it sounds like it's you. You’re welcome.