arrested for satire

Disturbing reports of a man at a pro-Palestine protest last weekend being arrested, handcuffed, and interviewed by police for 6 hours, apparently for nothing worse than carrying a placard showing a Private Eye cartoon. I know that Private Eye has gone downmarket in recent years, but even so.
   The protest itself wasn't illegal, but the cartoon apparently was. At least, holding up a copy of the cartoon was considered to be, though apparently the original publication in the magazine wasn't.
   I don't blame the police. I blame former Home Secretaries such as Jack Straw and Charles Clarke, under whose watch loosely worded legislation, ostensibly designed to combat terrorism or violence against minorities, was passed. (The New Labour period was also the time when the appalling NCHI regime was brought in.)
   The police will tend to reflect the ideological values of the elites. As the latter move away from believing in individual rights, and towards collectivist values – or, in the case of academics, outright Marxism – both legislation and police discretion will tend to reflect this demotion of the individual. It's happening everywhere, but in Britain it's particularly noticeable, since Britain was once a place which had a relatively high level of respect for individual rights and individual territory.

arbiters of truth and virtue

American universities are having to cope with the wind of hostility from the Trump administration. According to US Vice President J D Vance, universities are the enemy. From the position of a conservative politician, Vance's assessment is quite correct. Academia is opposed to conservatism generally, and completely intolerant of Trump's version – which, bombastics aside, isn't really any more extreme than Reaganism. (During his first term, I highlighted the blatant bias against Trump exhibited by Oxford University Press's politics blog.)
   Steven Pinker, writing in defence of Harvard, asserts that the motivation for the attack on academia is "to cripple civil society institutions that serve as loci of influence outside the executive branch". But it's just as plausible that the motivation is to limit the power of institutions that now serve as unaccountable arbiters of truth and virtue.

US colleges are trying to fight back. The Chronicle of Higher Education has just published a guide to help colleges change public perceptions.

Reputations in higher education are notoriously hard to shift – and today, the headwinds are stronger than ever. Many Americans question whether college is worth it, dismiss the value of the curriculum, or believe campuses push radical agendas.

But referring to colleges 'pushing radical agendas' may be missing the point. The agendas that are being habitually pushed these days aren't any longer 'radical'. They've become the norm, at least among intellectuals.
   The idea that one might choose not to intervene in society, in order to produce more 'just' outcomes, has become inconceivable to the kind of people who teach humanities. Or perhaps it would be more correct to say that if there are any of them who feel differently, they're not permitted to say so.
   It's the divergence of political and moral norms between academics on the one hand, and the public at large on the other, that's the problem – finally being addressed after years of avoidance, however clumsily.
   We are long past the stage of 'tenured radicals'. We're at the stage where narratives have been almost entirely changed to suit the preferences of an intellectual class. A class which (statistically) favours intervention, because it increases its scope for exercising power.

Read more in:
POWER-MAD AND HYPOCRITICAL:
Why professors love Marxism.

"gaslighting on an industrial scale"

Finally, a commentator who doesn't think inequality is morally wrong, or oppressive, or otherwise harmful: Sherelle Jacobs, writing in Thursday's Telegraph.

The thesis that inequality is bad, and only justifiable (if at all) for the sake of incentives, has become so standard in intellectual circles that it's usually taken for granted these days, at least by the kind of people who read the Guardian. Many who've been to college, and got exposed to the politics of humanities professors, have been brainwashed to believe that inequality is immoral. But these days you don't need to go to college to pick up the ideology: it's all around us.
   As so often, the original source of the negative attitude seems to be intellectuals' own preferences, not the general public. Sure, everyone resents, at least a little, others who look like they've got more. But that doesn't necessarily translate into wanting to abolish inequality – at least, not without stirring up and fomenting by intellectuals.
    Anyway, we know what happens when you try to eliminate economic inequality: you get a whole class of government apparatchiks responsible for eliminating it. This leads to social inequality that's worse than the inequality that's supposedly been eliminated.

Ms Jacobs gives the Conservatives a well-deserved telling off. Some of her sentences should be turned into motivational posters, and stuck up in Conservative offices across the country.

• A wealth tax ... is a moral abomination.

• The Right must stop implicitly apologising for ... the benefits of capitalism.

• The notion that private property cannot be justifiably raided by the state ought to be sacrosanct.

• A wealth tax denigrates the kind of values society should be encouraging – prudence, ambition, delayed gratification.

I especially like this one:

• The Left are gaslighting us on an industrial scale.

Britain has come a long way from the Victorian work ethic which produced the Clifton Suspension Bridge and other amazing construction projects, and a level of success and efficiency that Germans of the time could only dream about. By now,

we don't see success as something to aspire to, but rather to be torn down.

No wonder Britain is falling down the league tables.
Ms Jacobs rightly argues that Britain needs

politicians who are unafraid to declare that the rich benefit us all and wealth inequality is an inevitable outcome of a well functioning economy.

If Ms Jacobs ever decides to stand for Parliament, or to lead the Tory Party, I'd certainly vote for her.

Why don't the Tories get it? The electorate loved Boris Johnson. David Cameron and Rishi Sunak, not so much. Read the runes: if you want to win, be more like Boris, less like 'Dave' or Rishi. But perhaps the Conservatives don't really want to win.
("Don’t support us, we are not worthy" – Mediocracy p.58.)

women on top (in publishing)

What if you own/edit a magazine, and you happen to believe that women are inappropriately under-represented in culture, and that this is because of negative attitudes towards them? You might feel that you should never give space to any opinions or data that might reinforce those negative attitudes.
   For example, someone might want to draw attention to possible statistical differences between women and men, in their respective attitudes towards (say) the choice between liberty vs state intervention. You choose to reject any and all articles containing speculations of this kind. Fair enough, it’s your magazine.
   But what if everyone who owns/controls/edits magazines takes the same approach, and deviation from this approach is demonised, in a sort of intellectual-mob effect? The position of some women, in some respects, would perhaps go on being improved. But not of all women. There are likely to be at least a few women who want to say things that deviate from this orthodoxy.
   One thing that would almost certainly deteriorate is the quality of culture. Suppression and repression are the enemies of cultural progress. Culture is likely to stagnate into something prosaic and predictable.

Women have become dominant in some sectors, and this has caused changes within those sectors. You can choose to like those changes, or to dislike them. But to suppress discussion of them – in order to block the suggestion that the changes might not be 100% positive from all points of view – is bound to reduce the quality of cultural content, academic debate, free speech, and so on.
   Culture is nowadays readily sacrificed on the altar of ideological correctness. This is an approach that has received a big boost from Marxist ideology, and from the fact that it's now the preferred narrative among humanities professors.

---

Power-mad and Hypocritical
is now available in hardback.

---

from Quora.com:

Why is contemporary American literature so boring?
Answer: Political correctness. The social pressure on major American publishing houses in the late 20th century required them to replace good male editors with mediocre female editors (in many cases).
   Very quickly female editors comprised over 80% of all editors. This meant, naturally, that most books accepted for publication were by, for and about women.
   This was good for profits, too, as 80% of all books in America are purchased by – and now written by – women.
   Virtually no one will admit that women and men have different virtues and viewpoints about some things. So, books can no longer write about bull fighting, war, individual courage, cowardice under fire, existential crises, intellectual/moral dilemmas, or other male subjects.
   Women’s literature is basically about relationships. This has effectively emasculated American literature, which was once the bravest, most literary, most insightful, boldest, most true, most subtle, and most masculine in the world.

---

Tax the 'poor'!

Why are conservatives suspicious of the man-made global-warming hypothesis? Because they suspect that, mixed up with the science, there's a leftist political agenda. Why do leftists like the hypothesis? Partly because they care about the planet, but no doubt also because there's a leftist political agenda.
   The Guardian's report on today's mass lobby in Westminster links to a 2023 article which argues that the culprits are 'the rich'. What the accompanying graph actually reflects is that richer nations produce vastly more CO₂ per capita than poorer ones. How do you turn this into support for leftism? Rephrase it as: it's primarily the fault of the 'rich' – which for most Western readers means 'people who are much richer than me' – and then start talking about taxing billionaires. In other words, more redistribution – though in practice that tends to mean from the rich to the State rather than to the poor.

   The Guardian has redrawn a graph taken from an Oxfam publication, but kinda botched it: their version (above) looks like the huge difference is between medium and poor, with relatively little difference between medium and rich. Oxfam's original shows more clearly how the top 10% (in red) produce 50% of emissions.
   But the data could easily be used to make the opposite argument: reduce redistribution. Given that the West's population is only about 15% of the global, the 'richest 10%' might well include half the people in the West. It hardly follows that taxing a few billionaires is going to help much.
   Compared to Victorian times, European countries are far more equalised within their populations. Nearly every household has at least one car, at least one TV, at least one computer. Most take foreign holidays, consume fuel to get to work, spend liberally on Chinese gadgets, and so on.
   If intra-national redistribution from rich to poor were reduced, meaning that a few rich got richer, while a lot of middlingly well-off people got a bit poorer, that might actually have a beneficial effect on CO₂ emissions.
   I'm not advocating doing this. But I wish the Left would stop trying to exploit climate change to advance their preferred politics. (The same applies to 'research' in general.) If they did stop, the Right might develop a less negative attitude to the topic.

misandry (mis=hate, andro=men)

Watched a Netflix fairy-story movie at the weekend (Damsel) which was fun except that, as so often nowadays, it was misandristic.
   All the good characters were female, even the dragon. The men were all useless or worse: a greedy king; a father who sold his daughter for gold. Prince Charming? Treacherous little bustard.
   You see the same thing in current fiction, including most of what’s on offer via Kindle Unlimited. It's as if all books were now required to be based on the mantra "the source of all evil is men."
   I bet that if you looked at all the PhDs exploring culture and gender, over the last ten years, less than 1% (in fact, probably none) have even mentioned the concept of misandry, in other than dismissive terms.
   No wonder men are increasingly disidentified with the male role – some to the point of wanting to switch sex altogether.
   I have a theory, but you may not like it, as it has overtones of conspiracy. Promoting resentment is a key ingredient to bringing about GMR.* The proletariat's been done, so male-female relations are now a more potent area for destabilisation activism. Keep telling everyone that men are oppressive, toxic, etc. Eventually the sexes will hate each other sufficiently to generate societal breakdown and revolution (probably followed by authoritarian collectivism).

Why did the cultural Marxist Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979) and his disciples encourage people to have as much sex as possible, as a route to 'liberation'? (Feminists could argue – but mostly don't – that promoting casual sex was in men's interests more than women's.) It's possible that the now-normal serial dumping, including of pregnant women, has made men more hated than loved, and that this is what's behind the current disturbing level of misandry, in novels and movies. It's also possible that this end result was, in some sense, intentional.
   Perhaps Marcuse foresaw that the resulting breakdown in the 'pact' between the sexes would destabilise Western society, in a way that would suit Marxist interests.

* GMR = the glorious Marxist revolution

Death to ... er, Glastonbury?!

Glastonbury and the BBC are basically like academia. Unashamedly biased, and having little time but much contempt for non-leftists.
   Every now and then something egregious hits the headlines. (The latest: pop group calls for "death to IDF", and BBC@Glastonbury broadcasts it without censoring.) The Right's response these days? Fight fire with fire. If the Left already suppresses what it dislikes by use of aggressive policing, we should do it too. Invade academia with neutrality commissars! Fire the head of the BBC! Ban Glastonbury!
   In spite of such occasional eruptions of outrage against the BBC, or universities, the whole 'liberal' regime rumbles on. Water off a duck's butt.
   Trying to impose neutrality on leftist middle-class institutions seems pointless. A better approach would be to let them become gradually marginalised, by withdrawing state support.
   Pop acts trying to make it are always going to be tempted to use a bit of controversy as a way of getting attention. I remember the fuss about the Sex Pistols' number one hit God Save the Queen, which the BBC banned, making the song seem even more exciting.
   It's a shame the choice of controversy is biased: calling for death to the IDF is apparently controversial in the 'right' way, while the same call for the PLO isn't. A bit of balance slash pluralism slash neutrality would be nice, when it comes to hate speech that passes the censors.
   And how did poor Keir Starmer get to be on a par with "Reform, transphobia, selling arms, gammons, justifying genocide, JK Rowling, and Nigel f***ing Farage", in liberals' current list of approved hate objects?

fiddling while the country burns

Pointless rebranding of the dot in 'gov.uk', costing half a million quid. In my view it's a manifestation of a theme of mediocracy (a.k.a. cultural Marxism) which I highlighted in the Mediocracy book: giving primacy to appearance rather than substance. It's part of the whole denial-of-objectivity, denial-of-reality thing.

In a mediocracy ... social consensus is the only criterion of reality. Since society sees what is presented rather than what is behind the image, appearance becomes more important than substance. (p.32)

They're dropping the crown from the logo. This fits with the prevailing anti-class ideology. It seems a shame, however, to lose the tiny nod to monarchy, part of Britain's identity. My guess would be that most voters, if given any say in the matter, would choose to keep it. But as usual, it isn't about what people want but about what's considered ideologically correct.

According to Stanford's online Encyclopedia of Philosophy, post-structuralist (i.e. cultural-Marxist) philosopher Jean Baudrillard

suggests that truth and reality are illusions, and that people should respect appearance, and give up the quest for truth and reality.

Truth doesn't matter, or it isn't real, or there's no such thing as objectivity, etc. So forget about the economy, or immigration, or the rise of censorship. Those things may not even be real. Just fiddle with logos and corporate IDs.
   The pointless-rebranding phenomenon got going under John Major, and hit a peak under Tony Blair. Perhaps it isn't quite as intense as it was back then, but it has never really gone away.
   The elites may be dimly aware that there is a serious problem looming re the relationship between the governors and the governed. It seems they haven't the ghost of an idea what to do about it — except they're certain it must not involve any 'lurch to the right' or 'populism'. Meanwhile, best just go on fiddling with presentation and style!

---

Power-mad and Hypocritical is now available in paperback.

---