Higher Ground

On Twitter last week, following the death of the Queen, Jeremy Clarkson wrote “One of the things I’ve noticed in these last few hours is that so very many people on Twitter are truly awful human beings.” Shortly afterwards he followed this with “Twitter is a handy and constant reminder that socialists are disgusting people.” As most of you will be aware I have been permanently suspended from that platform for expressing opinions and airing quips which did not go down well with the righteous minds of the brave new world.

It has long been known that left-wingers, who get to set the agenda, tend to be more highly educated than right-wingers, who merely win the spoils. In a typically lazy, left-wing manner, education is equated to intelligence, whilst success, often earned by sheer hard work, is seen as somehow linked to being less well intellectually equipped. And it is true that many wealthy winners in life practically gloat about their lack of education not holding them back.

Clarkson himself reminds school leavers annually that he was not a high achiever. This year it took the form of a tweet from a luxury yacht: “Don’t worry if your A level results are disappointing. I got a C and 2 Us and I’m currently holidaying on this boat.” And in this example pithily puts down the notion that education is the pinnacle of human achievement; you can’t feed your family with degrees and diplomas.

Educational success, in many ways, is just a measure of how readily one is able to absorb a particular narrative and follow it to a conclusion, regardless of its value outside the classroom. Whereas your normal, everyday entrepreneur tends to get easily bored and forever seek new ideas to exploit. A lesson not quickly grasped may benefit from greater application and more diligent studying, but may also be not worth learning in the end.

Perhaps this is why academics, in the pursuit of knowledge for the sake of knowledge can also be susceptible to inhaling the heady vapours of ideology; in the past religious, in the present political. And while the duffers, the also-rans in the A* stakes, are busy taking any job that pays the rent, their learned contemporaries pursue avenues which lead to long decades in disciplines of little real value to the world.

Once, universities thrived on offering valuable sciences and engineering, medicine and management, but in recent decades the humanities have become the academic vehicles of choice for those who probably ought never to have gone on to higher education. This recent Spectator article suggests it might be time to turn the tide. 

For my part I have seen the declaration time and time again that those on the left are more intelligent than those on the right. But this claim, it seems to me, relies on a particular definition of intelligence and one characterised by an occasional inability to be mentally agile, to think outside the box, to adapt and thrive. Instead it relies on the dogmatic clinging to tired old tropes, reinforcing groupthink and trotting out long-established arguments.

Much like religion, if you need an origin story and enforcers, with scholars forever justifying the improbable; if you need to keep on developing your themes and reminding people of why they joined your movement; if you need threats of excommunication – or as we now call it ‘de-platforming’ – maybe this is less a sign of intelligence than indoctrination.

Meanwhile those you despise, those lower orders of the right, own the houses you rent, the businesses you work for, and run the country you so regularly disparage. They get up in the morning and go to productive work to create the world you live in. The left may think they occupy the intellectual high ground. The right are happy to let them believe that. Does ‘educated’ really mean ‘intelligent’ in this universe?

In Praise of Populism

I get the impression that Joe Biden and his minions are shitting themselves. In launching his extraordinary attack on the MAGA movement and in naming Donald Trump himself, did he think they were heading off a re-election attempt by 'Orange Man Bad', or did he seek to deliberately provoke such an attempt? Because, if one thing is guaranteed to get the devout to double down it is to attack their faith.

Labelling populism as an attack on democracy, when the espousal of populist causes is virtually the definition of a practical democracy in action seems to me a schoolboy error. Because, in doing so you have to explain what is so very wrong about promising to do what those who vote for you want you to do. Is he saying that what you hope and believe is just plain wrong? Is he telling all patriotic American citizens that they must hand the power to an executive that has no intention of listening to its voters?

He's actually gone much further and said, out loud, that the very people who genuinely believe themselves to be the embodiment of ’The American Way’ are not only destroying the soul they truly think they represent, but that they are actual fascists. Biden has effectively said that Trump is Hitler and his voters are Nazis… which has to be just about the most fucked-up thinking around right now. And this in a climate where many Democrats literally believe that women can possess a penis and men can give birth.

The world is mad. Stark, staring crazy. And the lunatics are woven right through the cloth of society even up to its highest echelons. Something has to give. And when the shooting starts which side would you want to be on; the side with all the guns and the determination to fight, or the side which wants your five-year old to choose gender reassignment?

This is much the same as the situation in the UK where the forces are the old order of family, right and wrong, against the social engineers and academics who think they know better. To band together as a country or to open the borders to all and sundry and pretend this does no harm? To reward hard work and enterprise, or instead fund the ever-increasing search for ways to be offended?

The left will always eat itself.

It’s not going to happen, it’s clearly not. But wouldn’t it be interesting if, by poking the bear Trump is persuaded to stand, then wins and resumes his crusade against the woke. And wouldn’t it be a spectacle if a resurgent Boris Johnson made it back into the big chair and did the same. Because being popular and even populist is not divisive at all. No, what is – literally – divisive is forever slicing and dicing society into as many atomic particle as you can conjure up via the ridiculous notion of conferring credibility on outlandish theories of race and gender and neuro-diversity and all the various fictions dreamed up by those who ultimately contribute not one damned useful thing to life on Planet Earth.

Take it Back

I can’t be alone in being appalled at the behaviour of our governments over the last thirty years. And yes, I am going to say it; Margaret Thatcher was the last leader with a clear and profound belief in the British people and a desire to fight the forces lined up to attack our way of life. Her successor seemed to want nothing more than to subjugate our will to that of the EU politburo and Tony Blair and his crazy gang set about dismantling forever a Britannia that had taken a thousand years to build.

After Blair came a series of caretaker administrations intent on nothing so much as appeasing the international judicial junta and as a result we have tumbled into more rabbit holes than Watership Down. The trans debacle, the ever-inflating exam grades, the dash for devalued qualifications as proxy for actual, meaningful skills, and the appallingly disjointed Net-Zero policy are all obstacles we have allowed the government to put in its own way. Policy after failed policy, while the public is shouting from the sidelines that they won’t work, will incentive the wrong behaviours and will cost a fortune.

Who would have thought that it would take a mere 40 years for a country which once ruled the world to become a feeble ward of court, reliant for its every need on one surrogate parent or another? When did we become, both individually and nationally, incapable of fending for ourselves? If it’s not the EU it’s the UN, or NATO, or, heaven forfend, the WEF. One after another supranational entity has fingers in all of our pies; it has to stop.

I’m not saying we become isolationist, although I don’t see how that would be any more disastrous than the mess we’re in now. But what the country – any country – needs is strong governance that actually works. Leaders need to be actually, not nominally, accountable for their actions. And those leaders need to actually lead, not just follow the latest on-trend opinions of the chattering classes, although they really do have to listen to those who will be affected by legislation, which they don’t appear to have done for a long time.

If we don’t want to allow illegal entry into the country then we should prevent such passage. If we want people to be able to afford their own homes then we shouldn’t allow foreign money to flood into the housing market, inflating prices out of reach. And if we want people to be able to afford to drive to work, heat their homes and power their lives, we need to have an energy supply both under our control and within our budget. Likewise, education, health, law and order and the entire constitution and behaviour of society as a whole.

And none of this is impossible, yet with every nervous, eggshell-treading, politically correct, U-turn invoking announcement, minister after minister has only made the situation worse. Boris Johnson may be all the things his haters say he is (although, blimey, how could one human hold so many flaws?) but he was, and remains for many, a popular choice. His eventual ousting by the very people rejected in his electoral victory speaks volumes about the distance which now stands between the establishment and the population at large.

Unless this changes, soon, I can envisage a time when people simply take matters into their own hands. Some already are; vigilante patrols, paedophile-hunting groups,a nervous few challenging aggressive islamification. But when youths can simply walk into MacDonalds, high street electrical stores, sportswear outlets and the like and take whatever they wish with impunity, it becomes clearer than ever that our police ‘service’ has lost control.

Naturally, such talk of muscular, law-applying regimes will provoke the flaccid left to protest and wail and moan, but when I said flaccid, I meant it. Those who the left once courted as their own, the working class, are on our side now and what is left is a wishy-washy collective comprising the limp and ineffectual malcontents of the identitarians, the soft, liberal middle class and a few posturing academics whose theses bear no merit.

Time to get our bite back

We should simply stop listening. You want safe spaces, you think it’s all because you’re black, you are offended by differing opinions? Who cares? The sooner we adopt a national ‘fuck you’ attitude to all this crap, the better. Get in line, pull your socks up, give your kids a clip round the ear from time to time and reclaim your natural British right to tut loudly in queues. All is not yet lost, but there is little time left to save the best nation on Earth.

Don't you just hate that?

 There I was, on Friday night, responding to a Twitter follower who had announced his intention to procure a tasty takeaway. Next thing I know, my account is suspended. For what, you may ask, which I did.

My appeal to the Twitter gods - presumably perpetually offended American infants - elicted the following response:

"Your account has been suspended and will not be restored because it was found to be violating Twitter's Terms of Service, specifically the Twitter Rules against hateful conduct.

It is against our rules to promote violence against or directly attack or threaten other people on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability, or disease.

Additionally, if we determine that the primary purpose of an account is to incite harm towards others on the basis of these categories, that account may be suspended without prior warning."

Wow, I did all that? The next question has to be, how? By using vernacular, and a bit of nostalgia. The tweet which released so much venom is below.

Quite the monster, am I not? So, here I am again, locked out in the cold... with my 'rubbery' chicken.

See you on the other side some time.

Green Around The Gills

 Saint Greta of Thunberg has been in the news again and she is still happily berating the grown-ups for all the evils of the world. It was a quiet morning at work, so I walked the half-mile to the Co-op Local shop and thought about what I had done. I was appalled at the sheer amount of litter at the roadside. Packaging, takeaway wrappers, indeed quite a lot of once-edible food, and plastic bottles as far as the eye could see.

Quite apart from the obvious eyesore, this speaks to a separation of self from society as people discard things with no consideration for those who will see it, those who will, eventually, pick it up and the very planet everybody now pretends to care so very much for.

We throw away perfectly usable stuff and we carelessly hoard things of little value to us. For example, there is more gold in a tonne of mobile phones than in a tonne of gold-bearing rock, and it is easier to extract, but we cling onto our old phones as the value of recycling is relatively small to us individually. And then, minerals, metals, finished products and other valuable resources are daily committed to the grave of landfill with impunity. We have grown up spoilt, but the fluffy rug of abundant cheap energy has been brusquely whipped from beneath our feet and we have no idea how to keep our balance.

I think about this sort of thing, a lot. I am concerned at the general level of ignorance and incuriosity about our world. What is energy, where does it come from and why does it cost what it costs? Looking out at vast cities, how is it possible that their denizens are fed and watered and cleaned and kept free from disease? What is this thing made from, and how do we know about gravity, time, electromagnetic radiation, the elements, the stars, the universe? And why does humanity keep on coming back to the fictions of deity?

So, when I mischievously tweeted about how one might find the shiny new electric vehicle they have just purchased has become a financial millstone around one’s neck, I was expecting both agreement and disagreement, and this is how it transpired. On the one side, many Tweeters agreed, retweeted or liked my original thread in all its hyperbolic glory. On the other, a relatively small number (mirroring, I expect the relatively small proportion of RV owners out there) bristled at my ignorance and launched full-on rebuttals of all my assertions.

Par for the course, naturally; you are either right or wrong on social media, and sometimes both at the same time. Schrödinger’s opinion. But, for what it’s worth, here is my stance on all things net-zero related:

·       One size, one solution. does not fit all.

·       Is it accessible?

·       Is it affordable?

·       Is it reliable?

·       Does it cost more than it saves?

·       Does it do less environmental harm than what it replaces?

·       Is it wise to replace now, or should I let my current technology run its course?

And what of the future? How will my new life paradigm evolve over the next year, next 10 years, next 50 years? At the moment there are dozens of apparent solutions to the one big problem. In time there will be fewer mainstream technologies and the rest will be in the hands of the eccentric few who can afford to indulge their passions and invest their time and money in novel ways. But it is a fact that the majority of us will have to toe the line; I just want it to be the right line. And right now I don’t think anybody knows where that line will be drawn.

Compromise is the key!

As it stands, going green may well be good, but it is a long way from being cheap and what sways most people is cheap, rather than good. The EV discourse attracted thousands of likes and a good many replies, most of which I tried to address in a placatory tone – I’m not anti-Electric Vehicles, I’m just sceptical about everything – but some respondents showed up with fists clenched. Let’s not make it a fight, eh? But, when it comes to the whole net-zero strategy, let’s all ask the hard questions before we part with our hard-earned.