What Comes After Climate Change?

 I am very happy to accept that when scientists generally all agree on a topic – climate change, pandemics, renewables, and all that – they are almost certain to be right. Just because many previous predictions did not pan out exactly as described, doesn’t mean that many more were not actually vindicated. But we live in an age where mere facts take second place to feelings, and faith is still a stronger motivator than the plain truth.

Everybody has a different level of investment in the current climate narrative; the elderly just want to hang on to the world they knew without having to make too many changes. The young have been terrified into believing that the human race will actually become extinct in a few decades. And the political classes are panicking about being blamed for it. Those of us in the middle, the boomers who will end up paying for it all are rolling our eyes and waiting for the next hyperbolic announcement to come along.

The truth is nobody really knows what to do. Nobody. Oh, there are plenty of talking heads willing to promote their vision for the world. And there are lots of yummy technological innovations lining up to be recognised and funded. But, just like last week’s local elections, even when all the evidence is in – the votes have been counted – the interpretation of the results varies from sombre acknowledgment to wild speculation. We know our politics is broken; we just don’t know how to fix it.

Same with the climate and the demonstrations and disruption caused by the Extinction Rebellion crowd and their hangers-on have not helped. What they demand is, literally, impossible. All human economic activity would have to cease immediately. The resulting hand-to-mouth existence would be so horrifically inefficient that, if anything, emissions would increase and the competition for scarce resources would result in wholesale chaos. Do as this peculiar mix of children and old hippies insist, and everything would turn to shit very quickly indeed.

Already there are forecasts that the metals and minerals needed to build the green revolutionary machine are becoming harder to extract. More and more energy will be expended in trying to winkle out dwindling supplies of copper and cobalt and the like, and more and more energy will be expended in waging the wars to possess the land in which those supplies are located. The pursuit of the green dream will, it seems, be the direct cause of increased CO₂ emissions for decades to come. Irony, thou art come in human form.

Education might once have been a large part of the answer, but I see a dumbed-down population, in thrall to the whims of Tik-Tok and other social media, unable to concentrate for even ten minutes at a time. I see people who are incapable of critically assessing even small chunks of the mountain of information they receive every day. And I see people helpless to do anything other than parrot the lines they are given by their current cult leaders.

Next - the transport of the future!

Maybe they prefer it this way. Maybe they prefer living in a Netflix Special version of life in which everything is a drama, every episode ends on a cliff edge and every denouement is simply a springboard to the next surprising plot development. The way it looks to me right now is how Heroes and Lost looked during the Hollywood writers’ strike, and I am expecting to see many more rambling, incoherent episodes as The Climate Crisis lumbers drunkenly on to its final, disappointing cancellation.

Great Apes?

Year on year I find that candidates for the technical building services qualifications I deliver are less and less able to learn without chopping up the subject matter into bite-sized chunks. And of course, once you start cutting up their meat for them, they want it guided on demand into their reluctantly waiting mouths. How soon before we also have to chew it for them?

Yesterday, however, I had the rare experience of assessing two candidates for their inspection and testing practical task who were entirely competent. They did the work efficiently, sensibly and without fuss and demonstrated a thorough grasp of the reason behind every part of the process. Proceeding to fault finding they both also showed an excellent understanding and were able to explain their processes clearly and propose good, practical rectification procedures.

It is a shame, therefore, that they end up with only the same recorded attainment as those who rely entirely on rote-learned procedures and regurgitated stock phrases which, while providing a workaday route to completing the qualification, hardly inspire confidence. Some fully-qualified electricians are more equal than other fully-qualified electricians.

And just as in the broader world of education the poorly educated become the educators, looking for ways to make their lives easier. Every time assessments are reviewed and revised the apparent aim is to make attainment easier; the tail always wags the dogs as with any bureaucracy. Rigour disappeared a long time ago under a tidal wave of requirements to de-colonise curricula, increase whatever diversity is actually supposed to mean, and of course, to ‘leave nobody behind’.

Imagine my dismay, then, on finding that examination boards in the UK are looking at ways of examining GCSE and A-Level qualifications online. Worse, they are considering adaptive testing, whereby a less able student is given an assessment more suited to their level. Where does this end up, with everybody being awarded an A* for every subject? As we say here, we can explain it to you, but we can’t understand it for you.

For many, the thirst for knowledge just isn’t there. The school experience has prepared them for a life of having everything explained by others and carrying out work tasks in a perfunctory manner, much as in the old Soviet system – “we pretend to work, you pretend to pay us”. Few, in my experience, even see the value in reading. And we let these people vote, drive vehicles and procreate (not necessarily at the same time).

Worker's play time

I scan the horizon, but I can’t see any signs of hope, I really can’t. Each iteration of Homo sapiens appears to tend further towards Homo incognitans. Maybe it’s a good thing. At some future point when humans have lost the ability to reason, to communicate, to even use basic tools, maybe we will be less of a risk to the planet and we can revert back to being packs of hunter-gathering primates and learn to amble along on our knuckles again. I suspect we will be happier for it.

The Beginnings

As usual, the newspapers got it wrong; the historians likewise. When the politician was assassinated, all the commentators – the professors of economics, sociology and politics, the daily chat-show dial-a-quests – declared that this was the start of a dangerous new era of social unrest. All so wrong as to be laughable, were it not so serious. This wasn’t the start at all; it was the end.

But there was still an appetite among the commentariat for there to be a racial motive behind the killing of the UK’s first fully practicing muslim Prime Minister. Xenophobia, the hallmark of the ugly, angry white British savages, must be to blame. Somewhere, decades earlier, the unspeakable act of Brexit had thrust the very worst of humanity to the forefront of politics and this was undeniably the inevitable result. It had been foreseen, and here it was in the flesh.

Populism, they said, was to blame, populism being the pejorative term recruited to replace the difficult concept of popular democracy whereby it was possible to elect ‘the wrong sort of people’. But ‘the right sort of people’ had managed to elevate the son of a bus driver to the highest position in the land. And the wrong sort had killed him. Except they hadn’t. Tariq Hussein had been killed by another muslim. And the reason this had happened was nothing to do with the influence of white populists. Rather, it was their absence which lay at the cause.

Because, long ago, the white people of Europe had been educated by their very own leaders to hate themselves. They had more or less given up on reproducing as they had seen their culture derided, belittled and sidelined. White boys became the worst performers in school and as a result their life chances were limited. White girls became mere vessels for the production of half-caste muslim babies. The old warriors died and nobody took their place. And the only whites in positions of notional authority were dhimmis to the submissive demands of islam.

The first islamic Prime Minister was merely an inevitability of having 90% of the seats in Westminster held by muslims and the rest by an assortment of other ethnicities, none of which had origins in Europe. The few small pockets of white resistance lived on their reservations in the poorer rural areas; old and shabby seaside towns, decaying hamlets in the north, on the impoverished outskirts of once industrial cities. Even had there been the thirst for revenge, the means were simply not available.

A white person travelling in public transport would stand out like a boil, a white, suppurating sore on an otherwise acceptably tanned face. And white people didn’t drive any more, they could barely afford to. So to suggest that this murder was somehow the start of a revolution was so wrong as to be risible. The time for revolution was long past and the urge of the British to bring order and civilisation had been reduced to a simple obsession with keeping neat lawns and orderly herbaceous borders.

The killer, named in the papers as Aziz Beydoun and pictured with a very full beard and wearing a croqueted taqiyah was nevertheless described as a white supremacist and a member of one of the many banned organisations with roots in simple Christian values. This was accepted by all, despite the evidence of their own eyes, as further confirmation that the extinction of the Anglo-Saxon was both progressive and desirable. Kiplings poem The Beginnings described a lost race; there were now no English left to hate. The new breed would now begin to fight amongst themselves.

Working on it...

A propos my last post - here - I attempted to set up a VPN in order to circumvent the Twitter Stazi, but all that achieved was that my laptop became invisible to the internet... and the internet invisible to it. Not an optimal start, I admit, and not a solution I am eager to try again in a hurry. Before I go anywhere near those sorts of shenanigans I'll need a good boffing up of what in the world I am trying to do.

Maybe, I just wait for Saint Elon to lift all permanent suspensions and I can get my original account back, along with the 9000 or so followers I lost back in 2018. But I suspect that won't happen. The most likely thing coming from the Musk initiative, should it come to fruition, is that I will have to register with my real name and thus invite the possibility of some real whackos finding out where I live and work.

No thanks. The only reason Twitter works for the non-fame-obsessed is because of its anonymity. Have you seen how insipid are the accounts of those who think Twitter is the same as Facebook, or Family Whatsapp? I try to be measured in what I tweet, but sod treading on eggshells the whole time; no matter what you write, the second you express an opinion somebody will be offended and try and have your account exterminated.

What of the other 'free speech' platforms? Gab, Parler, Gettr... John Bulls' Gammon Club (yes, that exists, or existed, at least). They all have one major failing in common and that is that they are not Twitter. In this they are exactly like all those new failed political parties that come along. We have had dozens in the UK over the last half-century, all trying to wrest back power from the government to the people. And all failing for similar reasons.

People take comfort in the familiar, the devil they know, and they tend to believe the propaganda from those self-same devils. Ukip is racist, Gettr is white supremacist, For Britain is a platform for xenophobia, Parler is a platform for holocaust deniers... etc, etc. And so it goes on. And the worst of it is that, given enough time and throwing enough journalism at it, sooner or later there is evidence of misdoings.

Well, of course, but who among us is squeaky clean? And who would really want the squeakiest of clean candidates to run things? You would have to be as pious as a saint, with opinions of such neutrality as to be no opinion at all, and you'd have to have the social life of a hermit. When it comes to it we always end up having to make do with the same government, regardless of the colour of their flag, or the tenor of their song. And as much as we moan about it we know the rules and largely abide by them.

I think what I'm saying is that I don't believe Twitter can change, at least not while recognisably remaining Twitter. And as eggshellish as your presence there may be, it is the price you pay for membership. Maybe after all these years of being a rule follower, my expulsion from the only social media platform I ever got on with means I am a bad boy after all.

Canned

 Well, I got canned again. By Twitter, that is. The offending post was innocuous enough - I am not the first and will not be the last to suggest that our Parliament is thoroughly broken and, being unfixable, a better remedy would be to blow the whole lot up and start over. This was the post, which Twitter insisted I delete, and then went on to suspend my account:

I very much doubt that anybody could be offended by that, especially the usual leftist complainants who spend most of their sentient lives, such as they are, screeching for the most horrific of punishments to be inflicted on the Tories. No matter the colour of the rosettes, British politics is moribund; a deadly sludge of mire and sleaze, of corruption, venality and self aggrandisement. It is not fit for purpose and sometimes, you have to move on.

Which kind of gets me back to Twitter. For a decade now, Twitter has been my family, my friends and, if I'm honest, my entire social life. Why should stating what would be absolutely normal among friends be a hanging offence? Some get away with far, far worse, harbouring as they do great hatred for all who do not share their thinking. I hate nobody - hate is such an immature response to anything - yet I get labeled a hate criminal for saying out loud what so many whisper among themselves.

Will Elon Musk change anything? I doubt it. Will I find a way back onto the platform? I'm not sure. Will Twitter even survive the decade, given that the young are uninterested, it seems, in anything which allows two-way conversation (to a point)?

Who knows. So, until (if) we meet again, stay safe, be happy and don't upset the algorithms.