stupid-heads » bella gerens

Homeschooling or state schooling?

Mar 142009

I’m not entirely sure what to make of this, nor do I know whether it’s any sort of legitimate news article. But let’s assume for the moment that it is:

A North Carolina judge has ordered three children to attend public schools this fall because the homeschooling their mother has provided over the last four years needs to be “challenged.” The children, however, have tested above their grade levels – by as much as two years. The decision is raising eyebrows among homeschooling families, and one friend of the mother has launched a website to publicize the issue. The ruling was made by Judge Ned Mangum of Wake County, who was handling a divorce proceeding for Thomas and Venessa Mills.

…

Mangum said he made the determination on his guiding principle, “What’s in the best interest of the minor children,” and conceded it was putting his judgment in place of the mother’s.

…

On her website, family friend Robyn Williams said Mangum stated his decision was not ideologically or religiously motivated but that ordering the children into public schools would “challenge the ideas you’ve taught them.”

…

According to Williams’ website, the judge also ordered a mental health evaluation for the mother – but not the father – as part of the divorce proceedings, in what Williams described as an attack on the “mother’s conservative Christian beliefs.”

Here’s how I read this tale: mother takes children out of state education because state school is crap. Mother and father get divorced. Father wants children put back into state education. Judge handling divorce proceedings orders children to be put back into state education because ideas learned from mother (amongst them possibly conservative Christianity) need to be ‘challenged’.

This bothers me on multiple levels. On the one hand, I see the dangers inherent in filling children with dogma they’re discouraged from questioning. On the other hand, I see the dangers inherent in filling children with dogma they’re discouraged from questioning. The only difference between homeschooling and state schooling appears to be which dogma the poor creatures are forced to consume.

Not to mention that I thought North Carolina, a place very dear to my heart, was above this sort of stuff. Its judges, among whom I number one of my own family members, are not generally given to illiberal, heavy-handed pronouncements about how parents can and cannot educate their offspring. And this decision is a bit rich coming from this particular judge, whose daughter I used to teach – in a religious private school.

As the Devil would say, fucking hellski…

Jump in feet-first, you fool

stupid-heads 2 Responses »

Mar 092009

Over the weekend, someone called Don Paskini decided to dip his big toe into the libertarian pool and see what all the fuss was about.

After a rather perfunctory foray into some libertarian blogs on Sunday afternoon, he discovered:

So I didn’t manage to bond with the Libertarians over the police database of dissident protesters. But I did learn about the merits of Tsarist Russia; that the government shouldn’t help women who are losing their jobs; that it’s wrong to pay people £7/hour or more if they live in Glasgow and work for the council; about how privatisation can create a market in whether our children get indoctrinated by the gays and about the Nazi ownership of our children by the state.

Not to mention that next time someone asks me for my opinion on a really, really stupid idea, I now know that a polite way to reply is to say that it sounds ‘impeccably liberal’.

But something still puzzled me. Why would a group of people who want another way forward for the country, who are extremely ANGRY and who fantasise about stringing up our elected leaders from lamp posts not be worried about the existence of a database which the state can use to monitor dissenters?

And then I thought about it from another perspective, and all became clear. Pity the poor Police Surveillance Officer, monitoring this drivel and having to decide what kind of security risk they might be. I suspect they would conclude two things:

1. Their policy aims seem to revolve exclusively around giving more to those who already have a lot of money and power, so probably not one to worry about too much.

2. And anyway, as credible and organised threats to the existing order go, they make the Socialist Workers Party look like the Bolsheviks.

I was going to take the piss, but one of the commenters appears to have got in his apologia first:

You have misrepresented the arguments on each of these sites in turn.

…

As for opposing the ‘dissident database’, when the time comes, you will find these chaps on the barricades. They don’t have to prove their credentials to you.

Thank you, Jonathan Miller, whoever you are.

In conclusion, I wish to point out that Don decided to test the waters because:

I took it and discovered that I was 40% liberal and 60% illiberal. It said: “Thank you for taking our test. But we think you may be more interested in an illiberal, statist party like the Labour Party or Conservative Party. If you wish to advertise your illiberal values, please find your blog badge below.”

It’s a brave political strategy for a fledgling party – “thank you for expressing an interest in our party, however you might be more interested in these other political parties.”

But I was not deterred and decided that I was going to build on the 40% that I had in common with the Libertarian Party. So I thought I’d pick an issue where I knew we would agree, and find out what leading Libertarians had written about it.

That issue, as it happens, was state surveillance and databases, based on an article from the Guardian about police records of protesters and campaigners. Don oh-so-astutely assumed that because the issue wasn’t the top post on the libertarian blogs during his arbitrary five-minute reccie, neither Samizdata nor the Devil’s Kitchen nor Old Holborn nor Bishop Hill nor the Libertarian Alliance are concerned about surveillance and databases.

Don, allow me to correct your misapprehension.

[H/T DaveA.]

A collection of thoughts

argh, indolence, political blunders, sexism: alive and well, stupid-heads 4 Responses »

Mar 082009

Dennis, whilst ducking for metaphorical cover, accuses me in the comments of poor showing lately, and I must admit this is true. A backlog of tedious marking sapped most of my energy this week (although I did make a move into the GTD realm, which was oddly satisfying), the last of which was expended at a school charity event in which I competed for the three-legged race title with Mr Smug Git. (Yes, we won.)

As for the weekend, most of things that would have gotten my goat have been rather more ably ranted about by others, whose rage acts as a sort of catharsis, after the reading of which I feel like a boat that has passed through the rapids and now drifts lazily through shallow eddies: calm and purged of the evil humours, the recipient of successful emotional phlebotomy.

David Davis (no, not that one) at the Libertarian Alliance has flagged up a trio of AQA science GCSE papers, the questions on which make even me, with my liberal-arts mind, feel like a scientific genius. With my superior knowledge of the ins and outs of the public exam system in this day and age, I can reveal that after 12 March, the January 2009 papers will be available on the interwebs. I was fortunate enough to invigilate one of the biology papers, and thus I can provide a sneak preview of one or two of the questions therein:

Paper 1, Question 5 – Explain how agricultural activities are contributing to global warming.

Paper 2, Question 4 – Importing tomatoes may be more damaging to the environment than consuming tomatoes grown in Britain. Explain why.

I have it on good authority that even science teachers think this stuff is bollocks.

Next, Vindico has written an excellent post about Jade Goody as a bulwark against Marxism. She is indeed someone who has improved her circumstances in life, and without hypocrisy or the wibble that comes with following the state-prescribed Route Out of Poverty. Jade Goody is unapologetic and unashamed, and when people call her trashy, ugly, or unpleasant, a red haze of anger descends over my eyes. She is a human being – and no worse than most – and my regard for her includes empathetic horror, eye-watering pity, and the heart-wrenching fellow-feeling for a woman exactly my own age who is facing imminent non-existence. I cannot imagine anything worse, and I wouldn’t wish such an end on my worst enemy, let alone on a woman who has cleverly capitalised on the innate voyeurism of the British public to lift herself out of squalor and build herself and her children an enviable fortune.

Finally, the Devil levels blistering attacks upon, amongst others, Margot Wallstrom and Gordon Brown, essentially for their seeming inability to recognise that the realities inside their heads and outside them do not correspond. For all the fact that she is a woman herself, Margot has some damned funny ideas about women, and I object vociferously to her presumption to speak for us all. If I take what she says about women’s concerns at face value, I discover to my amazement that I am actually a man, caring nothing, as I do, for things like shared wealth and the preservation of the environment. She stands for all that I hate about the feminist movement: namely, this idea that women deserve some sort of special treatment to make up for the fact that they are women. Fuck that. If feminism has any legitimate goal, it should be that women are treated as human beings, with all of the attendant rights and liberties that any human being deserves. Continuing to differentiate us as a group and using that differentiation as an excuse to deprive other people of their rights and liberties is not only counter-productive, but insidiously evil.

Upon Gordon Brown’s delusions I shall not comment; the Devil has already done so, and with better invective than I could hope to produce.

On a different note, there is this theory tiptoeing around the blogosphere that the government wants us to riot this summer so that they can invoke the Civil Contingencies Act. There is some proof that the inflammatory baiting of our dear leaders is having an effect; I report a conversation witnessed on Facebook, of all places:

Status: John proposes a medieval-style riot in which we lynch the bankers (this must not, repeat not, turn into a pogrom).

Commenter: Hmph. That’s exactly what the government wants you to do.

John: By God, I’ve been programmed. I knew I should have worn the tin-foil hat. KILL THE BANKERS. KILL THE BANKERS. SPARE THE BUREAUCRATS (who do a difficult job in trying circumstances). I’m just a drone controlled by The Man. Tragic.

Yup – there’s the problem with all of us, right there: not enough love for the bureaucrats, who do a difficult job in trying circumstances. Send the love, y’all! They work their asses off, 10-4, four days a week, to fix the mess we’ve made. While you’re at it, why not pick your own bureaucrat to sponsor and send him (or, more likely, her) a nice fruit basket?

Jesus.

Crazy youngster wants economic crash

indolence, stupid-heads 2 Responses »

Mar 032009

Staggering.

A sample:

And in these terms, a moderate, U-shaped recession is, frankly, boring. As a Slate colleague said to me, there’s no glory in just having a couple of banks fail. We want history. We want to go where no generation has gone before. We want to bounce grandkids on our lap and tell them folksy anecdotes about 70-percent-off sales, the Dow being 50+ percent off its all-time high, and the day print media died.

In the abstract, the prospect of a Greater Depression is intriguing. Over the past 80 years, we have successfully mythologized the 1920s and ’30s. Now it seems as if it would be an exciting time to live through, if only to be a witness to history.

He’ll be all right, jack:

Disclaimers are, of course, in order. I’m an urban, middle-class young person with a full-time job. I don’t have a mortgage or any investments to speak of; the Dow’s drop doesn’t kill my retirement fund, nor does the real estate panic chip away at my home equity. This is a symptom of youth, just like the aforementioned desire to be part of a new Great Depression. I am an outlier, existing on an atypical fringe of American society. That I’m a journalist doesn’t help—the more dramatic the narrative, the more exciting my job. Eventually, I will be just as much of a cheerleader for the Dow’s historic rebound rise as I was for its awesome fall.

I’ll admit, I’ve always been a bit thrilled by the idea of being part of a revolution (though not, ideally, a bloody and violent one), but I’m realistic enough to know that a revolution would be a dreadful, messy upheaval that’d squash that excitement sharpish – which is why I’m not out fanning the flames of discontent.

Poor Chad, on the other hand, is too young to understand that, even if the downturn gets no worse, it’s already history. If he wants stories with which to regale his grandchildren, better that he should recount that telephones used to have cords, and once upon a time there was no Google.

David Blunkett: 'Opacity is the new clarity'

political blunders, stupid-heads 5 Responses »

Feb 242009

A tip of the millinery to Old Holborn, who flagged up a lovely example of how not to write that appeared in today’s Guardian. On a normal day, I would have seen this myself, my mild masochistic instincts kicking in with the morning coffee at work, but it’s been a shitty day, and I found that I just couldn’t face the Grauniad until I was home and on the outside of a generous glass of wine.

I’d like to open up a prodigious can of whoop-ass on Blunkett’s piece, but unfortunately, I can’t seem to figure out what the hell he’s saying, and the title of the piece (‘Protecting liberty’) doesn’t appear to reflect the content. Perhaps the Grauniad subs put the title of a David Davis op-ed on by mistake.

Take, for example, the following paragraphs:

If, in the name of liberty, we allow individuals to act in a way that damages the wellbeing of the whole, it will inevitably mean the breakdown of mutuality, thereby changing the very nature of our society.

We need principles upon which we can base actions that, in the name of protecting freedom and decency, may otherwise become oppressive, intolerant of difference and self-destructive.

Slicing out the subordinate clauses and adverbial phrases, I find that he has said, ‘If we allow individuals to act, it will mean breakdown. We need principles.’

I also note the peculiar word choice of the opening clause: ‘If, in the name of liberty, we allow…’ Oh, the irony!

Moving on:

Three areas in particular strike me as urgent. Firstly, the use of powers outside those originally intended. It has almost been forgotten that the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 brought in proper restrictions and oversight over what had previously been a free-for-all. Years later, we have the absurdity of local officials trying to use the powers to tackle dog fouling, or waste management misuse.

Not quite – we have the absurdity of local officials succeeding in using the powers to tackle excretion management. But why does he mention RIPA anyway? This is all he says about it; why does it concern you, D? Where’s the ‘urgency?’ Should RIPA be amended? Do you still possess the capacity to make a definitive statement you can hold to for longer than five minutes? Do you?

Secondly, data sharing. This is an area of major public concern even where the data held is simple – for example, what has previously been taken for granted on driving licences, or passports. Greater clarity on why, when and with whom data can be shared is urgently needed. Clause 152 of the coroners and justice bill needs to be examined thoroughly. It’s not simply whether intentions are benign – undoubtedly they are – but whether powers are likely to be misused.

Come on, D! What data is on driving licences and passports? Do you even know? The data held on passports has changed since you were home secretary, hasn’t it? Who, in fact, ‘takes for granted’ what information is held where? A bit of specificity would have worked well here, methinks. Note, also, his failure to articulate whose intentions are benign, and whose powers might be misused. Perhaps he is under the impression that if he omits the words ‘the government’s,’ that piece of reality will cease to exist.

There is a misconception that the database for biometric passports and ID cards might be misused. That’s why I’m coming to the conclusion that we may have to consider simply making passports universal. If people wanted an easy-to-carry card, as with EU travel documents, they would be able to buy one voluntarily (with ID cards remaining compulsory for foreign nationals).

Translation via excise: ‘The database for biometric passports and ID cards might be misused. This will be compulsory for foreigners.’ Our data, apparently, merits no particular consideration.

I remain to be convinced that a centralised solution is either practical or desirable.

He remains to be convinced – not: ‘I am not convinced.’ This is what we language-type people call periphrasis, lit. talking around the point. Prevarication is a kind of periphrasis – are you prevaricating here, D? I wonder.

Last week’s meanderings by Stella Rimington and the report by the self-styled International Commission of Jurists are so dismissive of the genuine threat that new forms of terrorism pose as to be counter-productive to a meaningful debate. We are not a “surveillance state” – only those who have lived in a police state can appreciate just what that term means.

So what you’re saying is, we won’t be considered a surveillance state until someone who’s lived in a police state confirms the similarities? But who determined that place to be a police state? And the one before it?

A mere ten seconds having a look at Wikipedia could have alerted him to the unfortunate stupidity of his remark; that authoritative worthy says of a police state (emphasis mine):

The classification of a country or regime as a police state is usually contested and debated. Because of the pejorative connotation of the term, it is rare that a country will identify itself as a police state. The classification is often established by an internal whistleblower or an external critic or activist group. The use of the term is motivated as a response to the laws, policies and actions of that regime, and is often used pejoratively to describe the regime’s concept of the social contract, human rights, and similar matters.

Er…whoops. Bad strategy there, D, to mention both the internal whistleblower and the external critic right before you assert that they’re unqualified to classify Britain as a police state.

And Blunkett rounds off the opus with this incomprehensible gibberish:

The strength of our democracy is that we are able to challenge those who presuppose their knowledge of the threats faced, as sufficient justification for protecting mutual interest at the expense of individual freedom. That is when we should assert ourselves, lest the mistakes of the past allow those in power to abuse their position.

Juxtapose that with this earlier paragraph, which I repeat for your convenience:

If, in the name of liberty, we allow individuals to act in a way that damages the wellbeing of the whole, it will inevitably mean the breakdown of mutuality, thereby changing the very nature of our society.

After justifying the protection of mutual interest at the expense of individual liberty by claiming it will prevent the breakdown of mutuality, Blunkett asserts himself to challenge…himself. Well done, D. Masterful. Masterly.

Poor word choice, internal contradiction, weak research, deliberate obfuscation, and the total absence of a thesis: at the end of it all, I can’t figure out whether Blunkett has written (a) a shitty and ill-expressed defence of civil liberties, or (b) a shitty and ill-expressed apologia for those who would violate them.

Life in the Middle Ages

stupid-heads 26 Responses »

Feb 192009

As I sit here and listen to an enterprising builder outside whistle an excellent rendition of Grieg’s ‘In the Hall of the Mountain King,’ my thoughts turn to halls, and kings, and naturally thence, to the Middle Ages.

With my intellectual cap on, as opposed to my professional one, I am a medieval historian and have collected degrees in the subject in the same way that others might collect da Vinci sketches (i.e. expensively). In the hallowed drinking establishments of the world’s foremost institution of learning, I have pondered with fellow medievalists what it might have been like to live during the Middle Ages.

And, despite speculations about the scholarly aestheticism of monastic existence, or the bellicose excitement inherent in noble birth, we decided that it would have been utter shit.

So why – and I have seen this flagged up on Tim and the Landed Underclass already today – are there people, bred in luxurious modernity, who want us to go back to it?

Monty Don, the former BBC Gardener’s World presenter, said the UK could run out of food “within weeks” because the country is so dependent on imports and it was essential for the country to grow more of our own food.

He urged businesses around the country to follow the lead of the National Trust: “If every household, business, office or factory dug up a patch of land there would literally be millions of allotments made available. This is just the start of something really big.”

I will tell you when we really will run out of food, and that is when we stop depending on imports. In the Middle Ages, when importing food was impractical due to the obvious problem of it rotting in transit, local growing conditions meant the difference between a full belly and death by starvation. With the succession of overly-dry and overly-wet summer growing seasons Britain has experienced in the past four years, had we relied entirely on local produce, we all would have starved.

The other problem with eating only local produce is, of course, that delightful as these shores may be, we’d all be eating nothing but turnips and parsnips from November to March. A four-month diet of root vegetables might solve the nation’s obesity problem, but the incidence of malnutrition (particularly things like scurvy) would soar to fifteenth-century levels.

Dame Fiona Reynolds, Director General of the National Trust, said it was not just the recession driving demand for land to grow food but the desire to “reconnect” with the soil.

“More and more people want to grow their own fruit and vegetables,” she said. “This isn’t just about saving money – it’s really satisfying to sow seeds and harvest the fruit and veg of your labour.”

Oh, indeed – it’s very satisfying to till the soil and eat the fruits of one’s labour, as long as one doesn’t have to do it from sun-up to sun-down eight months out of the year, and as long as the fruits of one’s labour are sufficient to keep body and soul together. As the Landed Underclass points out, subsistence farming is hard on the body and, unless one has the luxury of farm-labourers and a horse-drawn plough, unlikely to generate enough produce for actual, y’know, subsistence.

But perhaps in addition to sharing allotments, we will all have the privilege of access to the village horse. It might even be better to have a system wherein the municipality’s food is grown entirely on common land, the care for a strip of which is allocated to every resident. Then we can all reconnect with the soil, and our roots, and our ancient heritage. While we’re at it, we can reconnect with bathing in the freezing rivers and defecating in buckets!

Christ, haven’t these people learned anything? If living off our own fucking local food was so great, our ancestors wouldn’t have escaped in relief from doing it as soon as conditions made it possible. Pardon me while I descend into teleological historicity, but isn’t one of the purposes of chronicling human development to avoid past mistakes, rather than to do the same stupid shit all over again?

Hotmail recommends…

indolence, stupid-heads 2 Responses »

Feb 172009

…more stupid shit.

Jerky guys seem to have some kind of sixth sense. They know how to disappear and re-appear at just the right time. They know when a girl is just about to give up on them, so they send an email or a text. They know how to be vague, give false hope, and keep a girl’s interest perfectly. Unlike the kid in The Sixth Sense, they don’t see dead people. They would say instead, “I see vulnerable people.”

People actually get paid to compose this drivel.

Relationship-wibble tends to interest me because most of it is inflicted by people who haven’t yet learned that they’re not the centre of the universe. (Okay, technically they are, because everywhere is the centre of the universe, but never mind that.) Nobody thinks about them, critiques them, or obsesses over them as much as they suspect.

I discovered my own insignificance at the age of 19, and what a liberating experience it was! Pass the word and share the freedom: the most comforting thing in the world to hear are the words, ‘Nobody cares, dear.’

Teen pregnancy and la Toynbee

stupid-heads 4 Responses »

Feb 172009

It’s Tuesday again, and so I wander over to the Guardian to read Polly’s latest, this time a piece about teen pregnancy (can’t fault her for the relevance factor, what with this tiny-tot father all over the news) and the failure of New Labour.

The failure of New Labour, you may ask? Indeed, she has said this very thing, although as is her wont, not in the same way most of us might say it.

She begins from the unstated premise that teen pregnancy is not a good thing, although her reasoning is a bit skewed:

Britain’s teenage pregnancy rates are appalling, with only the US worse in the west. Why? Because teen pregnancy tracks inequality. That does not absolve Alfie, Chantelle and their parents of their personal responsibilities. But the most unequal nations have the greatest number of dysfunctional families, unless the cycle is broken by determined and expensive intervention in generation after generation.

Teenage parenthood is linked to higher crime rates, poverty, and disadvantage in the children of teen mothers, as well as a greater likelihood for those children to become teenaged parents themselves. However, contrary to what Polly implies, teenage parenthood is generally correlated as the cause of those things, not a result of them. Teen pregnancy doesn’t track inequality; it precedes it.

Never mind that, though. We all agree, though perhaps for different reasons, that there should be less teenage pregnancy. Why has New Labour failed to achieve this?

First, and most disastrous, David Blunkett, at education, point-blank refused to introduce compulsory top-quality sex education. (No, don’t even stop to think about that one.) Only now is Labour at last introducing it in an autumn bill – amid fears it might get fatally delayed or succumb to the Mail’s mad anti-sex education campaign.

Translation: the government was pressured, not by the electorate, but by the Daily Mail, into not imposing a forced centrally-planned educational decree on schools.

Why else did they fail?

…money was found to provide good contraceptive clinics, but it was given to local health services with neither ringfencing nor monitoring to see that it was actually spent on teenage clinics. Why not? Because the government has been politically intimidated into ordering “less top-down” and more “local”, with disastrous results for many key programmes.

Translation: the government gave local authorities tax moneys extorted from the nation at large, but failed to impose a forced centrally-planned spending decree on those authorities.

The teen pregnancy story is a good microcosm of the Labour years. To halve the rate was a colossal ambition. It was a far harder target than halving child poverty – no simple putting of money into tax credits can change the deep culture of sexual behaviour. Of all the things the state can and can’t do, making people have sex only with the right people at the right time is the least amenable to Whitehall action.

‘Least amenable,’ take note. Not, as the rest of sane humanity might say, ‘least possible or desirable.’

And so, Polly finishes up, the problem has not been Labour’s disastrous policies of rewarding teen parents with social housing and child benefit, thus creating an incentive for teenagers to procreate, nor the complete failure of a patriarchal society to get over its Puritanical hang-ups about sex. No, no! The problem is that Labour have not done enough to force top-down social planning, paid for by punitive taxation, on a society that does not match its ideal of equality and conformity for all:

Labour has tried, but most of Europe, under more decades of social democratic governments, has worked harder for longer. Too often Labour thought it could move mountains with teaspoons, making Swedish promises with neither Swedish taxes, nor the will to force social democratic policies on to local services. There will be plenty more Alfie, Shannon and Baby P stories – testaments not to a worsening “broken Britain” but to a low tax, weak social policy century that Labour has only started to improve.

Fucking hell, Polly: even when you get it right, you get it wrong.

The new meaning of 'voluntary'

political blunders, stupid-heads, US-bashing 3 Responses »

Feb 122009

Evidently, in the opinion of Harry Reid (D), Senate Majority Leader, paying taxes in the US is voluntary, whereby ‘voluntary’ means ‘your employer doesn’t withhold the full amount owed.’ Because you can cheat on your taxes, says he, the American taxation system must be described as voluntary. He contrasts this with ‘many European countries’ where the full amount owed is withheld by employers. Because in ‘many European countries’ people do not file their own income tax returns, those systems must be described as forced taxation.

The interviewer really sticks it to him at 2.20. And what, may I ask, is this word ‘phrase-ology?’

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7mRSI8yWwg&hl=en&fs=1]

Supply and demand

argh, stupid-heads 4 Responses »

Feb 092009

Via Tim Worstall (yes, again), I find this piece in the Telegraph, in which the General Teaching Council for England indicates that it would very much appreciate it if all private school-teachers acquired an official teaching qualification as teachers in the state sector are required to do.

Such a qualification can be obtained on a one-year post-graduate teaching course, a one-year qualification-cum-experience course, or a degree in education.

Tim rightly takes issue with the box-ticking, hoop-jumping nature of this sort of requirement, labelling it ‘part of the spread of the hateful credentialism of our times.’

My own criticism is related to something else entirely, and not in any way influenced by the fact that I myself am an unqualified private-school teacher. According to the UK immigration website, teaching is a shortage occupation. Which means – I think I’m right in saying this – that there aren’t enough teachers.

So the solution to the teaching-shortage problem is to make it even more difficult for people to become or remain teachers. Riiiiiiiiight.

Melanie Phillips loses the plot

argh, stupid-heads No Responses »

Feb 092009

Melanie Phillips, author of such calmly objective columns in the Daily Mail as ‘To place children with two gay men when an adoptive mother and father are available is a sickening assault on family life‘, is seemingly incapable of catching a point even when lobbed at her underhand at 20mph with a wiffle ball. Witness today’s column, entitled ‘Drugs no worse than horse-riding? The folly of these ‘experts’ simply beggars belief,’ in which she attacks everything about the recent statements by Prof. David Nutt, head of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs except (a) what he actually said, and (b) his funny name.

Let’s take a quick look at the Outrage-O-Meter. Sarcastic questions with tone of faux incredulity? Check.

Has April Fools’ Day come early this year?

Hyperbolic language? Check. [Emphasis mine.]

Yet the Advisory Council will this week propose the downgrading of ecstasy from category A to category B — having apparently learned nothing from the debacle over cannabis, the downgrading of which contributed to an explosion of all drug use.

More astonishingly still, Professor Nutt has said that ecstasy is less dangerous than horse-riding.

In an academic paper, he ridiculed concern about the effects of ecstasy by comparing it to ‘equasy’ or ‘Equine Addiction Syndrome’.

And:

You really do have to scrape your jaw off the floor. Not only will such trivialisation of ecstasy cause grave distress to parents whose children have died from taking the drug, but it knocks the ground from under the feet of parents terrified that their children will start taking it.

Cherry-picking or misrepresentation of facts and/or statistics? Check.

The only reason there are not many more deaths from ecstasy is that unlike horseriding, it is illegal.

And the ill-effects of ecstasy are not limited to death. Professor Nutt says horseriding can lead to brain damage — but fails to say that ecstasy almost inevitably harms the brain.

Pardon me while I laugh myself silly at the linguistic inexactitude of the phrase ‘almost inevitably.’

Faulty syllogisms? Check.

His co-director, Amanda Neidpath, who advocates the bizarre practice of ‘trepanation’ (boring a hole in the skull) as a protective measure against dementia, told a meeting of the World Psychedelic Forum that the Beckley Foundation’s projects included investigating the ‘possible beneficial use of micro-doses of LSD to improve cerebral circulation’.

Goodness me, micro-doses of LSD! Give ‘em an inch, and soon we’ll all be trippin’. Because something is an illegal recreational drug does not mean it hasn’t got its legitimate uses, just as because something is a legal pharmacological treatment for illness does not mean it isn’t dangerous.

Unsubstantiated claims? Check.

The Advisory Council is riddled with ‘harm reduction’ advocates who, believing it impossible to prevent young people from using illegal drugs at all, are therefore reluctant to admit the full extent of the harm they actually do.

For substantiated claims, and a very thorough analysis of UK drug policy and the role of the Advisory Council, see Unity’s excellent piece at the Ministry of Truth.

Hysterical blaming? Check.

The single most important reason why Britain’s drug problem is now out of control is that a critical mass of defeatist police officers, spineless politicians, global legalisation lobbyists with bottomless pockets and the ‘great and the good’, determined to prevent their drug-taking offspring from acquiring criminal records, all talk down the risks of drug use and talk up legalisation.

And finally, graceless and inapropos classical allusion? Check.

Horse-riding it isn’t; but there’s an Augean stables here which cries out to be cleaned.

In her ill-informed, righteous indignation, Ms Phillips echoes Home Secretary and total whore Jacqui Smith, who also missed the boat entirely.

The boat, point, and plot being that Prof Nutt was not making a claim about the empirical dangers of ecstasy. He was making an observation about contemporary British views regarding risk: namely, that some extremely risky behaviours are not only legal but even encouraged, whilst others that are statistically no more life-threatening are stigmatised and criminalised (an argument elegantly proffered, with emphasis on Home Secretary and total whore Jacqui Smith’s hypocrisy vis a vis compliance with law, by the pithy Mr Eugenides).

Is it really so much to ask that the journalists who are meant to protect and promote our traditional liberties not be blithering, propagandising, disingenuous morons?

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