Submission

 Palestine? I genuinely could not give a fuck for the ham-arse supporting, sky-pixie-worshipping, stone-age barbarians. Nor for any muslim anywhere on this planet. Good luck to the Chinese and Japanese with their ethnic cleansing of this scourge of humanity. I'm saying this while I still can because despite the stirrings of clarity emerging from the Humsa Yuseless affair and the Cass report, the 'next generation' appear to be in thrall to a dozen different kinds of gullibility.

It is easier, they say, for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. Well, they would say that, wouldn't they? It's medieval for 'give the church all your wealth and we'll pray for you'. Well, in allah-world all they have to do to enter that fictional kingdom is to murder a kafir or two... or preferably, blow up a whole stadium full of them. At least the Christian lie didn't involve gruesome killing.

King Charles, the current spaniel-in-chief, sees himself as defender of the faiths, plural, but no religion should be respected when it refuses to countenance the existence of another. Just as predicted by millions of ordinary people (people not gifted with 'expert' wisdom) predicted, the muslim population is nearing critical mass. And they are testing our resolve daily with these shows of both force and coercion. And they are winning the battles.

The time is long past for appeasement, which has never resulted in relief from persecution, the time is nigh for some good Old Testament, pre-Christian smiting. Turn the other cheek? Bollocks to that. Rather, unto him that dealt the first blow shall be delivered the last. islam must be resisted with every fibre of our being because islam will not bring peace but subjugation. Convert or die, or be enslaved. Is that really where we are heading?

A bunch of the same kind of unemployable Marxist useful idiot that islam exploits to march against Israel has today been blocking the progress of a coach loaded with illegal immig-rats who are  being removed from their taxpayer funded London hotel to a taxpayer funded barge, the Bibby Stockholm, where conditions are still much better than what they were afforded in the last few entirely safe countries they travelled through.

The religion of peas.

And what are the police doing? Trying to reason with them, trying to persuade them to allow the bus to proceed. Trying their very hardest not to upset their muslim handlers lest they unleash even greater civil unrest. Contrast this with the recent police treatment of a few patriotic St George's Day revellers donning the flag of England. It is very clear who the police are afraid of and that, by my reckoning, is as sure a test of who rules over us than any other... and it really isn't the idiot King Charles.

University Challenge

I’m seriously considering taking an Open University MSc in engineering, specialising in electrical. If I go for it, it will take eight years, minimum, add nothing to my earning potential and, should I stay the course, I would be graduating some time after my 70^th birthday. This is fine and I still intend to be working to at least that age because I’m in the knowledge business and I strive to improve year on year; no idling down to retirement for me. Preparatory to making that decision I am working through some of the many free courses the OU offers while I’m in my last fortnight of lockdown.

I was struck by a massive disparity in the length of time I have been taking to complete certain courses compared to the recommended times. For instance, I have just completed a 40-hour unit in about four hours. Naturally, being a bit of a bighead, I was tempted to scoff and speculate about the quality of undergrads that so much content seemed to be targeted at such low levels of cognition and former education.

But then I stopped and, as I have been trying to educate myself to do for some years now, began to think of reasons, rather than just naysay education generally. See, it can’t be true that kids of today are less intelligent than kids of my vintage, given that brainpower has a massive evolutionary element to it and a baby whisked here from, say, 1000 A.D could almost certainly be raised and completely assimilated into today’s society without any measurable difference from the current native population.

Attitudes, learning, physical prowess, socialisation and general behaviour are mostly, we now know, the products of nurture. The appearance of heredity is given by the unfortunate cycle that condemns kids raised in dysfunctional households to go on to head up more dysfunctional households. Instead of tackling the appalling black hole of aspiration successive societies (government, community leaders, pressure groups and individuals) have ‘progressively’ relaxed the social pressures that our more puritan forebears applied.

It is no longer considered humane to suggest that people should better themselves, that they should pull themselves up by their bootstraps; what Victorian nonsense is this? But it isn’t Victorian, it is – or rather, it was – one of the guiding principles of the working class. Parents did not want for their kids what they had endured themselves, but they didn’t expect anything to be handed to them. Work hard, get ahead.

Back to the university business. My generation of working-class kids was really the first to have a genuine chance to attend university in any number; certainly we were the first to see it as a real possibility, rather than a rare entitlement. And although we went up far better tutored in the basics, the real point of university – and one which, I freely admit, was lost on me – was to broaden one’s horizons. The degree, while a stepping-stone to better careers, was in some cases almost secondary, certainly in the burgeoning ‘new’ disciplines.

Most students weren’t and aren’t activists. Most are getting on, using what they have to the best of their abilities – which includes attention span, competing demands and all the rest – to try and better themselves. (Or is that a pejorative phrase nowadays?) But I believe there is a significant and growing proportion of students, at establishments which actively facilitate it, whose entire raison d’être is to challenge the structure of society itself. They attend pre-radicalised and use universities and many tutors as a base for inevitably left-wing activist causes.

This is a gross misuse of education facilities and resources and dilutes the objectivity and purpose of higher education. When I last attended a university full time (1999-2000 MSc) this was already apparent, but I fear it has slipped further. Maybe it is time to stop pretending that every school-leaver is university material? Maybe it is time to recognise that the various degrees whose title ends in ‘studies’ (Black Studies, Women’s Studies and so on) are vanity courses with little positive to add to the national experience?

Time, once again, to have that conversation; what is the purpose of higher education and to what extent should it be publicly funded? How about this: state assistance and grants for universities which specialise in science, engineering, medicine and other essential and necessarily elite disciplines. Funded polytechnics for business studies, technical diplomas and the like. Specialist art and music colleges with funding for the genuinely talented. Tech colleges for all the skills, again funded.

Given that very few student loans are repaid at all, we fund higher education anyway, but why should we fund those whose sole purpose is to cause trouble, to demand special treatment, to set black against white, gay against straight, gender against… everything else? How about zero funding for Universities of ‘Studies’? Let them fund themselves and let’s have that funding right out in the open. If you want to wage war on the state, then do it on your own dime.

These foolish things

Now I’m as devout an atheist as any, but the bible – for all that it is based on an unprovable and basically childish premise - contains some wise words. For example, verse eleven of the thirteenth chapter of the First Epistle to the Corinthians states: “When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things.” To those of us who have long worked for a living and long now for a return to more childish pleasures in our dotage this is a passage which invokes a truth we have experienced personally.

You can still have fun, still enjoy a youthful interest in novelty and wonder but our wilder excesses are tempered by that steady counsel – empathy. I may not sympathise with your cause but I can pretty well empathise with how you will feel if, for instance, I invade your personal space with my rancid and unappealing opinions about you and what you stand for. And while I might have a go on Twitter, or blog about you in distasteful terms I would draw the line at throwing eggs in your face, painting a swastika on your door or turning up mob-handed and scaring your kids.

I well remember the Rag Weeks at university – oh what witty wags we all were back then when we were so sure we were the only generation to ever have discovered drink, sex and spectacular swearing. But the idiocy of our cocksure strutting was quickly brought into sharp focus when the world of work opened its doors and we discovered, quick-sharp, that the time for play was over. But some people can’t seem to relinquish their grip on these foolish things and one such thing is the belief that maintaining the soothing fictions of your cosseted world of academia will sustain you into adulthood.

University is a privilege not afforded to all and often unappreciated by those who benefit. It is a time for experimentation with ideas, lifestyles and allegiances which will ultimately shape your world view and your future self. But it is supposed to be a period of transition from the child you were to the adult you will one day become; it is not meant to be a blueprint, Peter Pan-like for your forever-land. Barrie called it Neverland for a reason and only the lost boys remain trapped there, in infancy. This week, one little lost boy – the still-a-student-after-more-than-a-decade – Dan Glass - tossed his rattle out of the pram.

This former Sussex University union president is now in his early thirties but prefers to cling to the naïve affiliations of his student days, hitching his horse to any old bandwagon so long as it has the right new-age, lefty, any-cause-will-do credentials, furthering his bent for petty headline-grabbing with a succession of high jinks and pranks posing as political activism. From what I can glean, no tiresome juvenile crusade-du-jour goes un-banged-on about. Climate, gender, page 3, breastfeeding, HIV ‘rights’, etc and any activity, it seems, that wage-earners engage in, is fair game for disruption.

Free the aberrant apostrophe!

We have a right to protest in this country and even the likes of Dan Glass are allowed – quite rightly - to express their opinions. But others have rights also, which is a counterpoint often unacknowledged by those whose opinions are formed in the lukewarm crucible of the school of soft landings. Those of us who have experienced Big School, the one with the hard knocks, have no time for these annoying, squabbling, half-formed ‘kidults’ and just one piece of important advice for the likes of Mr Glass. Grow up.