Angry Monday

‘Experts agree’. ‘Top academic reports’. ‘Guru advises’. ‘Government Czar appointed’. ‘Think tank recommends.’ Tip-top, expert, Tsar-Czar guru supremo is pleased to announce the outcomes of a five year study into research of findings in accumulated data gathering originating from diverse sources amalgamated to synergise incentive-laden, issue-based, evidential prophecies appertaining to essential societal demographics, which are essential to the demographics observed in society in the hyper-speed, cyber-enabled future... going forward. Or is that all just bollocks?

And the result of all this expertise and good advice? The west has infantilised its younger generations to the extent that never mind telling good advice from bad advice, they don’t even grasp the difference between good and bad itself. Individual reason and responsibility takes second place to collective, central planning, whether from actual governments or from self- appointed watchdogs, trained to sniff out the mildest offence and turn it into crime. And it matters not whether you understand a single mangled sentence of it.

Sexism, gender-identity politics, the race industry, equality enforcement, the Holy Grail and wholly misinformed deity of diversity... In the war of ‘ideologies for every occasion’ is it any wonder we so frequently witness blue-on blue attacks such as when Germaine Greer is mauled by feminists and otherwise free-marketeers plead the case for the EU? For fear of the nouveau offence of, er, causing offence we can’t police actual physical and sexual assault on the genuinely vulnerable. For fear of judgement for making the idle less well-off we turn to making working people poorer still. The first of the gods – Chaos – must be cackling on high.

And in the midst of all this confusion ordinary people are supposed to make sense of events and carry on with their lives without fearing disastrous change as a direct result of governments they think they had a choice in electing? We old curmudgeons are attacked for saying it was better before, but I’m sure that isn’t just memory playing up. Once, a labourer could earn enough to keep a small family fed and housed. Once, all except the very slowest of children could leave school able to read and write and get a job without having to send out a thousand CVs. Once, the police were a respected and visible part of every neighbourhood and malingerers got short shrift from bosses and doctors alike.

Now, social, health and emergency services workers are insulted and assaulted on a regular basis. The nuclear family is derided and side-lined as any and all combinations of LGBT parenting models are encouraged and facilitated. School-leavers are abandoned in favour of imported low-grade workers and in the name of all that expert intelligentsia shit we continue to import jihadis by the truckload; streaming across the borders and screaming for our annihilation.

This, they tell us, brings us nothing but good...

In what he imagines to be a popular statement, Philip Hammond has said that the UK has been late to recognise extremism. I don’t know what you lot in successive governments thought you were doing but we saw through the bullshit of you and all your advisors many years ago. Fuck you, Phil. Fuck all of your experts and fuck all of your think tanks. After all, it’s what you have been doing to us for decades.

First World Problems

In a continuing theme, I know nothing. Seriously, not a thing. For a start, I don’t know how people can remain employed in jobs they clearly can’t do. Oh, you want examples? Well, let’s see: Every religious leader on the planet, despite centuries, nay millennia, of playing on the patience of their sheep flocks has failed to ever produce a single shred of evidence to suggest their own office is based on verifiable fact and not mere superstition. Their followers are even worse – if you can call being a follower a job – they seem to willingly believe all that shit… and then kill people to prove it. So, that’s religion for you; got that pegged.

Then there’s politics; no politician, it seems, has ever managed to successfully bring about even a small fraction of all the promises he/she made. Worse still, in opposition they hypocritically oppose every single one of their own policies now being enacted by the incumbent administration and they routinely slag off every government minister for displaying all the same weaknesses, predilections and weird foibles they themselves displayed in office. This appears to apply to every politician everywhere, all the time and currently David Cameron doesn't know what our foreign policy is towards... er... anywhere. (He isn't even all that convincing about Scotland, never mind the Middle East.)

Owen Jones and Laurie Penny are wrong, of course, about every single thing they say, every single thing they think and every single thing they do and yet they still attract willing acolytes, some of whom really ought to know, in their heart of hearts, they are being taken in by nursery-level, playground polemic. And I must be doing something very wrong indeed because, try as I might, my own lack of knowledge has thus far failed to secure me a comfortable living, being paid for displaying my own ignorance in open, in full public view and in defiance of all the facts.

Climatologists know nothing about the weather, economists know nothing about commerce, stockbrokers rarely get rich without illegal insider knowledge and in Hollywood, according to William Goldman “Nobody knows anything.” And only this week Formula One has boldly announced a new racing driver who doesn’t even have a sodding driving licence. How do any of these people hold their heads up high? Bollocks to the notion of self-esteem, a bit of self-awareness might not go amiss.

And then there are the even bigger issues; the human problems that all of a sudden western governments dare not acknowledge. When the First World doesn’t even know how, or when, to control its own borders how can we possibly be safe from all the ‘infestations’ that are carried by humans; disease, hunger, ignorance… Ebola? We’re fucked. Feeding the multitudes? We’re fucked. islam? We’re definitely fucked… before or after beheading it makes no difference, islam is a clear threat to everything civilised.

Turd World Problems!

There just isn’t a problem out there that simply can’t be solved. Human ingenuity can fix pretty much anything it sets its mind to. We can put a computer in every pocket with the power to bring about real change, improve real lives. But the biggest problem of all is, do we have the will to solve those that really matter? I don’t think we do. I may be stupid, I may know nothing but I reckon the ‘Third World’ war has already started.

Textually Explicit

On Radio 4’s Today programme the other day was a textbook example of the sort of misleading claptrap promulgated by that eccentric breed of outsiders, The Expert. On a depressingly regular basis, experts tell us that what we have known for years is wrong. Gravity is a push, not a pull, the sun rises at night and sets in the morning and drinking thirty cups of strong sugary coffee every day before breakfast will vastly reduce the incidence of dementia… mostly because it will likely kill you before senility has a chance.

It has become fashionable to produce expensively funded ‘studies’ and ‘research’ which reveal that the counter-intuitive conclusion is now always the correct one. Thus enforced multiculturalism, far from being a recipe for strife, can only ever be a force for good and if it isn’t working in your part of the country that is only because you haven’t yet had enough multiculturalism. And dear old Tony Blair, as we are discovering, is rapidly demonstrating his true expertise as he seeks to put his theories about harmony in the Middle East into practice by assisting in the genocide peace process.

But sod the warring factions of a sunni disposition, we have a far graver ‘expert’ crisis on our own doorstep, nay inside our very homes, for ‘research has shown’ that texting may actually improve children’s spelling and grammar. Yes, you read that crekly: Txtspk, fr frm being a modern scRg is 2 B encRged… also leaving out punctuation and capitals can be shown to contribute to the positive development of childrens spelling and grammar skills according to the study by coventry university and the university of tasmania of course not everybody will be happy with the findings because of how very annoying it is especially when you have to wade through whole swathes of dense unpunctuated type several times like this here in order to discern the meaning i find it exhausting even typing without using punctuation and if i had to read everything in text speak i think I would have to resort to a killing spree…

What utter, unadulterated claptrap. This displays not only a total ignorance of cognitive and linguistic development and the difference between cause and correlation, it also show the naïveté of asking children – or psychologists as they like to call themselves - to comment on childhood phenomena. There may be a dozen things going on here, but proof that lazy spelling and no-existent grammar engenders better performance later in life is simply not one of them.

This is simply self-justifying tosh; the same sort of enquiry into developmental psychology that brought about the disastrous and destructive decades of child-centred learning and the notion that the kiddie-winks would become Nobel Prize winning physicists if only the teachers would become mere facilitators and leave them to get on with it. The kind of thinking that led to the ‘all must have prizes’ school of non-competition that causes many British kids to become unemployable after thirteen years of full-time education.

The Intertext - Answers on a postcard...

But hey, maybe I’m being too judgemental and reactionary here. Maybe I should lighten up, take a progressive view and get with the programme. After all, there may be funding available. Coming up: my research into how sitting on your big fat arse every day will help you live longer more fulfilling lives and how you are statistically more likely to win the lottery if you never buy a ticket. Ground-breaking research? Bollocks, more like.

Sunday Supplement

I almost feel sorry for politicians. Almost. I mean where DO you get your economic advice from? From the hoi-polloi who are mere cogs in the machine, the spare parts that come together to make it all work? Or the highly paid experts employed without restraint, their every pronouncement treated uncritically? Or the lobbyists paid to reward you for a favourable nod? Given that the great majority of the population have to live with the worst outcomes of government policy you might think they’d ask the electorate more often, especially as none of the experts seemed to see the crash coming even though ordinary people had been wondering for a decade how come the non-working family over the road had acquired several mortgages and a 4x4.

Throughout history most parts of the world have experienced what could be termed ‘natural disasters’. Floods, droughts, landslip, earthquakes and even bushfires are all part and parcel of living on earth. And every nation, every community has its memories – often living memories of ‘The Great Flood’ or the ‘The Great Drought’. So, naturally the politicians are going to turn to the record keepers at local and national level before coming – or jumping – to any conclusions. But no, instead of asking the people who live with it, they once again turn to the advice of ‘experts’ who concoct some vast eternal global theory to explain a localised, short-term event.

I would trust those with stewardship of the land every time before I placed trust in a theorist who has never donned a pair of wellies. And so, probably would you. Which is why it is even more unfathomable why these people are always the very last to be consulted, although I think I know why. By the time the politicians ever get to ‘the spot’ the damage has always been done - why would you leave Westminster if there isn’t a problem? And, powerless to actually do anything, these same politicians are only going for selfish reasons; to LOOK as if they care. And when they get to ‘the spot’ they find that everybody there is very angry with them, not only for doing nothing beforehand, but for daring to show their useless faces after the event.

Bewildered, the poor souls are driven to apologise for something they had nothing to do with, accept some crackpot reasoning, pre-briefed by their experts and resolve that ‘something must be done’ hoping that whatever that thing is, that they only just heard about, they at least pronounced it correctly on national television. Job done, they then hop aboard their helicopters and head back to Party HQ to watch themselves on the news. It rarely ends well. While a locally born and bred MP may have already been genuinely helping out, nobody asked for and nobody wants a safe-seat, quota-satisfying airhead getting in the way. So once the sound bite has aired the nasty journalists then cut to bitter locals decrying the arrogance of the gobshite they were prevented from confronting directly.

The expert solution...

“Why did nobody tell me this would happen?” ask the confused politicians, “How could you let me make such a twat of myself?” and “I STILL don’t know what that means!” No sensible person would expose themselves to such ridicule as a Philosophy, Politics and Economics graduate does when out of his depth. But the rule of the expert holds firm and true. Just as climate ‘experts’ can’t predict the weather and economic ‘experts’ can’t predict the future state of the economy, political ‘experts’, it seems, know absolutely fuck-all about politics. Isn’t it about time we just stopped listening to the experts altogether?

(For what it's worth the Met Office agrees with me about the floods. Click here.) 

Messages in bottles...

Now, we all know about ‘experts’; gawd knows I bang on about them enough. You know, the feted economists who never predicted the big crashes; the historians who forget that it’s supposed to be an accurate narrative of events and not a fictional rewrite to match their ideology and of course the climatologists who fidget with their forecasts and spend a disproportionate amount of time telling us that although it FEELS warmer, it is in fact colder… and vice versa… and it’s far too complicated for you little people to understand (wind turbines, goddammit!).

But why should we care what they say at all? Because no matter how earnestly they spew their guff they have absolutely no power to influence anything (except, of course, for the £gazillions that governments shower them with). The subjects they deal with are fluffy, indistinct nebulae whose exact nature simply cannot be clearly defined and can never be held to the frequently changing rules they devise, which means what the experts say would be immaterial, were it not for the crippling costs they impose on us mere plebs.

Then there are the politicians of all colours who we sort of think should have a say in all this, so we ought to vote for them so they can influence things in our favour… but then another election comes and goes and we confirm what we really knew all along – meet the new boss, same as the old boss. Because they too are dealing with an enormous system consisting of so many interconnected variables with such unseen and delicate balancing links that it is almost inconceivable that any changes can be made anywhere without somebody losing out.

In order to look busy they tinker ineffectually at the margins and concentrate on pissing off either the people who can choose to pay up or leave, or those who have so little influence or attract so little sympathy their reactions can be ignored altogether. The evidence of the efficacy of experts in explaining big, complicated subjects should tell us that big, complicated government is way too tricky to be left in the hands of people who themselves are in the thrall of experts. All we can do is watch from the sidelines and shrug.

But woe betide the ‘expert’ who pronounces on stuff that’s closer to our hearts and experiences. Get down to the nitty gritty of life and the intuitively graspable bits of our daily grind and we are the experts. And we get pissed off when some twat in a stovepipe hat tries to tell us what we should think and do.

On immigration, welfare, fecklessness, law and order and many more subjects if it looks like a duck, sounds like a duck and walks like a duck – it is, no matter what you say, hat-man, a fucking duck. Which brings me to the arrogance of a class of experts who purport to tell me what I like, or should like; the wine expert. In an article in the Daily Mail they tell us that our preference for cheaper brands is simply wrong. Here, have a couple of quotes:

“the amateur’s perception of a good wine is based on the notion of ‘smoothness…” whereas, experts  “...look for complex flavours, the balance between them and how long flavours linger.”

But don’t worry, with a bit of training you can be educated and “as [your] understanding and sense of taste grow [you will] tend to gravitate to pricier wines that display more complexity”

So, let me get this straight. As an amateur you can enjoy a drink for a moderate price and go to bed happy and still in pocket, but do as the experts say and you too can become a gullible wine snob, paying through the nose for some meretricious plonk that nobody else enjoyed and look down your nose at your former friends' unsophisticated ignorance. Do me a flavour!

A government advisor... advises

And of course, all of this ignores the REAL reason most wine drinkers drink the bloody stuff. There may be wisdom in that there bottle and possibly a little touch of veritas, but most of all there’s a wee bit of oblivion to get you to the end of the day… those so-called experts are alcoholics just like the rest of us, dressing up their denial by forking out fortunes to feed their habit and give it the air of respectability. Well, bollocks to that, give me the Vino Collapso every time.

Building for the future

I used to be an architect. That is, I used to once want to be an architect. Until I discovered what pretentious tits a lot of architects are. Nobody told me - and I didn't find this out until I walked among them - that architects are not the Vitruviuses and Wrens of old; visionaries steeped in structure and form with a deep love of materials, building and fitness for purpose.

What I encountered were 'artists'. Whilst your day-to-day architect may grapple with the odd bungalow or extension, those who aspire to greatness inhabit an ethereal world where they sketch awe-inspiring doodles like this which are then given to engineers - real, practical hands-on, dirty types - to make them work. That is not to say architects are useless, far from it, but they rarely tackle the practical and sometimes (especially with small domestic projects) their solutions make no sense.

The very term 'architect' is imbued with reverence and appropriated by other fields to indicate a deeper knowledge and expertise than might really be there. Jean Monnet is frequently referred to as the architect of the European Union and William Henry Beveridge as the architect of the welfare state. But never forget that an architect is usually a professional dreamer, relying on others to fashion his dreams from the fabric of the real world.

Thus 'architect designed' while sounding lofty, usually means over time, over budget and of dubious usefulness, yet still revered by those who can see the Emperor's new clothes. The architect of Sydney Opera House, Jørn Utzon, is universally lauded but never forget that the building as drawn was unconstructable with available techniques and when it was finally completed it cost not the original $7million estimate but $102million; almost fifteen times over budget. And it was not opened in 1963 as intended, but 1973; ten years late.

Of course, it's a lovely building and rightly revered for its appearance but it sorts of makes my point about architects  They often work largely independently of the bricks and mortar brigade and have little accountability. If you want an example closer to home consider that the Scottish Parliament building at Holyrood was completed three years late and ten times over budget... and it won the Stirling Prize. Some would say that's like rewarding failure.

I have no doubt that the EU energy policy has an 'architect' at the control of the dream machine. From the heady heights of Tour D'Ivoire I'm sure the gigantic bird choppers, farm land given over to solar traps and the de-de-delayed smart meter intrusion into our personal usage habits all sound like wonderful ways of building for the future, but try telling the people of this estate of 'eco homes' that a doubling of their energy costs is actually saving the planet.

The EU - the house that Jack built

So, next time you hear somebody describing their house as architect-built, don't think "Wow" and green-up with envy. Instead, pity them their over-priced, undersized, expensive folly as you drive back to your cosy traditional home. The EU - built by architects... for sheep to live in.