you are so fucking stupid. i literally linked a tweet from one of her classmates at oxford saying ‘nobody gave any time for trickle down, it was thoroughly discredited’.
she was part of a private group called the hayek society. as i outlined in detail before, her wing of the conservative party are totally mixed up with lobby groups and think tanks - with opaque funding, by the way. it’s basically a rerun of the tea party and dark billionaire donors. THAT’s the relevant element here.
you ranting about oxford like an idiot. shut up for once ffs.
kwasi kwarteng was literally at a private drinks party at the house of a leading hedge-fund manager the day of his mini-budget. drinking champagne. they were urging him to 'double down' and 'see it through' ... whilst all making absolute fortunes by shorting the £. i mean, you can't make this stuff up. it's pantomime supervillain stuff.
the chancellor of the exchequer pushes through a 'mini' budget that actually represents the biggest volte face in fiscal policy in generations for the conservatives. shortly before, he fires the senior civil servant that mediates between no 11 and the bank of england. he then refuses to let the budget responsibility oversight body – an organisation set up by his precedessor, george osborne, in a bit of cynical PR twist to hold government spending, aka labour, to prudent standards – do their job. he then goes ahead and pushes through a budget that very nearly caused a full-scale financial crisis and the decimation of most of the UK's pension funds.
and dilbert says oxford PPE professors are the problem.
truss/kwarteng are totally caught-up in a nebulous world of some of the least-accountable monied interests possible. the IEA, a thinktank that ranks absolute bottom for funding and organisational transparency, and which still peddles neoliberal hayekian doctrine a full 40 years after it failed to deliver. hedge fund managers like crispin odey are literally the ex-employers of the chancellor, and are currently raking it in.
but it's tweedy dons prescribing cicero and teaching philosophy who are the problem!
these are the sort of ideologues poisoning the well of UK politics, and who have the ear of liz truss's inner circle. truss was infamous in her cabinet roles for being light on detail and lazy with briefings: she wanted it kept short and simple. and people like matthew lesh (of the institute of economics affairs and the adam smith institute, two highly opaque thinktanks) keep it very short and so sweetly simple for her (worth noting that dominic cummings said of liz truss that she was without doubt the most unhinged person he ever encountered in westminster). matthew lesh's talking points are, variously:
trickle down is good, akcshually
the pension age should be raised
the NHS isn't special and should be privatised
actually, everything should be privatised and the market really does work best, honest
union activity should be restricted and striking made illegal
green politics is too negative: the free market has the answers and climate scientists just enjoy being woke and angry
don't listen to those scientists, by the way: fracking is totally worth it in the UK
london does not need rent controls as they are anti-free market. they definitely have never worked in other cities
i could go on.
but oksferd!!!! reading lists and 4,000 word essays produced by 19 year old undergraduates!!! ironically, matthew lesh is a product of the australian university system (melbourne -> LSE).
i think they're probably aware that massive inequality is untenable, deep down, but it hardly matters whilst they've got their hands on the levers of power for all of ~2 years, does it? here's another phrase from french history: après moi, le déluge.
If any of these Oksferd morons had just learned critical thinking none of them would be beholden to 'thinktanks' would they?
yeah because that's how the real world works, isn't it? it's not like power, ambition, greed and, most of all, MONEY don't talk.
humanities departments are uniquely failing because they aren't producing pure and untemptable idealists who go through life untainted by ambition or the lures of wealth and power?
all of these people, like kwasi kwarteng, are products of an elite system that reproduces elite power structures. his 'oxford critical thinking skills' are only part of the man: a much bigger part is the fact that he has been institutionalised and made part of an establishment. he went to harvard as a kennedy scholar. he got a PhD in economics from cambridge. do you not think he would have internalised a few orthodoxies and presumptions of that ruling elite whilst on his way through eton->oxford->harvard->cambridge?
it's not like STEM godbrains have ever been led astray by the adult world of power and greed, is it?
you exist in a fucking marvel movie, mate. it's dumb.
Look at it this way, lets say Bristol University had a reputation for turning out god-brain Aeronautical engineers, but their planes routinely didn't fly or killed all their passengers, pretty quickly people would stop giving them jobs and no doubt the engineering institutions would hold an enquiry and either shake the department up or remove their right to confer degrees.
"Yeah, the last plane designed by a Bristol graduate didn't take off because the wings were designed upside down, the one before flew off the runway backwards because the engines were back to front, the one before that turned out to be made of cardboard because the engineer pocketed the money and put it in the Caymans - you know who we need to fix this mess? A Bristol Aeronautics graduate - they're god-brain clever and the Dean played rugger with my pater at Eton!"
But in humanities world there's no rigour, no external oversight and depts can hand out degrees based on hot air and nothing else - and everyone expected to unquestioningly bow down before their supposed mega-intellects.
politics in the US and UK are badly tainted by money. sometimes actively so as programmes of sabotage and dissimulation by foreign actors, i.e. russian money. the entire political class are mired in it. that’s the anglo-american model for you, which has always put capitalism at the forefront. you can find people with science degrees, business school MBAs, law school qualifications, etc, all equally implicated in it. i’m not sure the problem is a lack of ‘critical thinking skills’ because oxford is a rubbish school or whatever claptrap you keep ranting about.
lets say Bristol University had a reputation for turning out
but humanities degrees are not aeronautics degrees. they don't produce professionals of any specific cast or mould.
i have told you, time and time again, that the institutions which produce this sort of political ideology and which hold sway over current party structures and politics are thinktanks and private societies. they are the environments that cauldronise these ideas and try to get them put into actual policy. it's not bloody history courses at ancient universities who are producing cookie-cutter graduates who all think Hayek was right and that neo-thatcherism is the future. you are totally unhinged.
is cambridge economics not credible because it viva voce'd a few free-market fundamentalists like kwasi kwarteng? is that not part of academic freedom and the goals of supporting research? cambridge economics should be shut down because it produces the economics equivalent of 'planes that don't fly'? really? like chicago too, i presume? the department that also produced, you know, Keynesianism?
But the whole of UK govt is riddled with these self-serving egotistical nuts who seem to barely have a kindergarten education and have not progressed past the infantile "I want"
it's US and UK politics. it's something about the sociology of the political elite itself in western democracies. you could probably even say that it says something about the psychology of the people who are drawn to politics and power in the first place. of course there's a lot of low-grade (and often not so low-grade) sociopathy. you have to be a certain sort of person to even thrive in that world.
history departments aren't all producing sociopathic wannabe politicians. your broadsides are really not very accurate. construct your own analogies about 'if a gun company manufactured a scope that only achieved 5% accuracy, they'd quickly go out of business'.
But in humanities world there's no rigour, no external oversight and depts can hand out degrees based on hot air and nothing else - and everyone expected to unquestioningly bow down before their supposed mega-intellects.
what are you talking about? no rigour? it's an academic discipline and scholarly vocation with centuries of history. of course it has rigour and internal standards. 'no external oversight'? erm, that's news to me. all of my essays and my eventual degrees were double or triple marked by external examiners from other institutions – which is the normal practice.
you honestly argue like a child. you're at the dawkins level of comment on these matters. ironically you're nothing but polemical hot air yourself.
Dilbert suddenly interested in allusions to the French Revolution, meanwhile there are other impactful, more recent histories that don't pique his interest at all.
for dilbert the full extent of historical knowledge is being able to make a vague allusion in the pub to 'the french revolution', or to compare everything to hitler and the nazis. after that, any deeper knowledge or scholarship, or research skills, is 'unverifiable hot air'. history is just a long beaded ribbon of one-liners and trivia quiz content.
erm academics are literally the 'professionals' of their discipline. i did research and had my work marked and examined by career researchers and world-leading experts in their field. what do you think a professor is? they have a doctorate and are trained in research and teaching. the university IS their profession.
why are degrees which focus on direct translation to real-world jobs or industries, e.g. aeronautics or engineering, more 'worthy' than degrees which focus on training and creating academics? aren't the academic degrees, you know, historically and traditionally the 'purer' ones? your notion of a degree that creates 'professionals' employed in an 'industry' is properly the business of polytechnics. universities produce knowledge, not planes. an academic is literally a professional of such knowledge.
not really sure what point you're trying to make here, but, as usual, you sound very, very silly. sad!
so any subject that doesn't have mathematical proofs deals in 'circle-jerks' and 'invalid' knowledge? because that rules out, you know, about half of all areas of human knowledge and endeavour. not everything can be reduced to a QED, dilbert. are you fucking autistic?
and the fucking irony of calling oxford philosophy 'weak' for this reason: when it was the seat of the enlightnment and the birthplace of empiricism itself via locke!
it's pretty amazing to me that this is seriously your line of analysis. and you're supposed to be intelligent. 'a tiny cabal of far-right populist nutjobs and capitalist free-marketing pirates have hijacked anglo-american politics. the fault for this lies with the entire academic discipline of history'. as my tutor would say: citations needed.
I didn't realise that the current clique of morons in the UK government actually published a retarded book together. The working class is lazy and falling behind their asian counterparts! We should reintroduce the 12hr working day.
the book was a laughing stock for years. not taken seriously even in their own party. fast forward through brexit and the collapse of reason and moderation in the conservative party, and it’s literally the ‘european research group’ and the polemical halfwits who wrote ‘britannia unchained’ who are at the controls.
the parallels to the republican party collapsing into a reality-denying void powered on its own lies and media information bubbles is stark and simply unfunny.
Liz Truss having a harder start to this than T. May, right? I am starting to think being compared to Thatcher is a curse.
erm understatement of the century. i can't think of a bigger unforced error in national politics in my lifetime.
she just burned a huge amount of her political capital in her first 10 days. she had the death of a queen and a national rallying of emotion on her side. a moment of near-unique levels of solidarity and patriotism. she could have risen to the occasion and projected states(wo)manlike calm, leadership. instead she gave a few shaky 'high-school book report' readings, released a bombshell 'mini' budget, and hid away for a week and avoided the media.
the annual party conference is meant to be an occasion for rallying momentum. for a new party leader/prime minister, it's a victory lap. announce all your pie-in-the-sky plans and enjoy the honeymoon without yet dealing with real scrutiny or party-political manoeuvring and the stuff of realpolitik. everyone applauds you. the theme tune plays. you command all the headlines. it's a grace period.
instead her conference is thinly attended, half of her bankbench MPs are attending satellite events nearby and undermining her, and the main hall is full of the distinct sound of one-handed clapping. she's u-turned on one of the major parts of her political ideology in her first major political decision as leader. all that projection about being a new thatcher, 'the lady's not for turning', trying to appear steadfast and resolute in her radical programme. instead she's flopped, literally in the space of a night.
when she did eventually come out to speak to the media, after days of the economy tanking, the currency crashing, and the bank of england having to step in to save the UK's pension funds from collapsing by buying back £60bn's worth of old bonds ... her and the chancellor gave, shall we say, less than inspiring performances. even to a home audience (laura K., the former BBC political correspondent, was notorious during the BoJo-Cummings era as basically being a part of the party apparatus), she was stilted and robotic and clearly out of her depth. the day before, some brainiac from her comms team decided to send her on a national tour of local radio stations – presumably to fly-under-the radar and try and avoid national-level exposure. that backfired: almost all the 'small fry' local radio DJs unanimously roasted her. total bloodbath.
i just cannot explain how bad this is on a political level for her. she never commanded a majority of the votes even in her own party's leadership contest. in the first round she was a mid-table also-ran'er. she ended up in the seat in the eventual run-off of her vs. sunak, for reasons that i suspect are partly racially coded (let's be honest); and even with that golden goose egg laid and ready to hatch, she's managed to fuck it up. she went about things in the first week almost as if she enjoyed bombing her ratings and angering half of her party, as if she wouldn't have to deal with the fallout in a potentially hung parliament in the very near future, after the recess. really mystifyingly stupid stuff.
the conservatives have blown their credibility for a generation, imo. the party who should embody the virtues of prudence, slow reform over radical rupture, fiscal responsibility, stewardship of the economy and environment, etc. in the first week they've announced tax cuts for the richest during an unprecedented cost-of-living crisis; they've announced the abandonment of all regulations on businesses under 500 staff; they've announced the resumption of fracking even though it's an environmentally ruinous dud that doesn't even perform economically or as a viable energy source.
the tories are down something like -33 points against labour in some polls now. you just don't see those numbers in the UK's two-party system. if that were to be translated to a general election this week, it would result in an almost total rout of the conservatives. they'd keep something like 7 seats. lmao.
in other news, I didn't get scroll-locked clicking this link from another source, but I do if I click it from here. strange.
how is anyone not honest-to-god sick of elon musk inserting himself into every. single. fucking. world. event?
enough with the iron man shit already. it's tedious seeing these obligatory 'takes' on his vapid back-of-bar-napkin ideas.
musk is literally the sort of guy who wakes up, sees a major breaking news story that for whatever incomprehensible reason doesn't mention him, and then sets to work thinking about how he can get his name associated with it.
Don't even have to follow the man, everywhere else in news and social media shoves that stuff in your face.
Remember when Andrew Yang called Musk a great fit for the new "Forward" party? Way to hamstring it; I've talked to people who had been interested, but now want nothing to do with it.
it's unfathomable to me that we're in the most escalatory situation in europe since ww2, weekly mentions of nukes, mass mobilisations ... ukraine applying to join NATO ... and yet the top-read article on the guardian today is 'zelensky replies to elon musk'. FFS. he was never elected to any position of public leadership, why are we seriously entertaining letting world conflicts be solved or mediated by billionaires?
Stuff I saw recently about Putin's "nuclear train" was buried by all the counters and interceptions against Musk, including that.
He's more like Weyland-Yutani in terms of corporate ethics than post-Ironman Tony Stark.
Language flying around like "The US would destroy the Russian army if nukes were deployed," extremely high tension, chills. Headlines: "Musk smacked down."
erm academics are literally the 'professionals' of their discipline. i did research and had my work marked and examined by career researchers and world-leading experts in their field. what do you think a professor is? they have a doctorate and are trained in research and teaching. the university IS their profession.
Dilbert_X wrote:
So its a massive circle-jerk
why are degrees which focus on direct translation to real-world jobs or industries, e.g. aeronautics or engineering, more 'worthy' than degrees which focus on training and creating academics?.
Why would anyone care about subjects which are closed and circular?
"Yes, yes, but I'm a world-leading expert in being an expert at being an expert in the things I'm an expert in. My fellow expertise experts all agree and I agree with them"
erm, who certifies and approves the qualifications of engineers? if not other, more senior engineers? what are you even claiming, here, honestly? because a third-party without the academic profession doesn't ratify history PhD's, they're worthless?
why would anyone care about certified HVAC engineers or certified electrical engineers, when they're only examined and appointed by other engineers? what an insular closed little shop!
genuinely one of the most bizarre arguments you have ever deployed. your hatred of humanities is genuinely making you boggle-eyed.
a historian who is guilty of poor scholarship, shoddy research, unethical practices, etc, sinks like a stone. that's because reputations are established and nurtured amongst a peer group of professionals. research is peer-reviewed. books are thoroughly reviewed and vetted, first by peers and then by publishers.
you don't become a 'world-leading' expert without decades of recognition and reputation-making.
in whose interests would it be to promote mediocrities or to circle-jerk this stuff? you do realise how competitive academia is, even within departments, right? it's in no one's interest to inflate the work of a colleague, dumbass. historians regularly call one another out or call each other's work into question. that's part of healthy academic discourse, and the back-and-forth of debate. even small-time journals have letters pages where they can quibble and take to task one another's scholarship to their hearts' content.
this is just such a stupid fucking argument. how is this related to the current crises of the conservative party? you don't understand anything about academic research or the activities of scholars, that's clear enough: but what does it have to do with the misdeeds and ineptitudes of a bunch of politicians? none of them are working academics. the only one with a higher postgraduate degree is kwarteng, who got an ... economics PhD. not a humanities degree.
