- Most pernicious
- Be careful what you wish for...
- New Page
- New Page
- Homeric hymn to Pan
- New Page
- Home
- What the hell. I have nothing to lose
- My Adventures
- My Story
-
Essentials
- The earth is not flat
- The abolition of mind
- Things that only need saying once-one e tel
- Manners makyth man
- Coal in the bath and the victim culture
- The withdrawal of love and forcing oneself on others
- So some guys had the really freaky idea that we should love one another
- Jesus!
- 'Judge not that ye be not judged'
- Goo
- The way we were: Anglican England
- 'Avatars of living grace'
- Ditching the theology of love
- Reality >
- PANTHER: the argument
- Moi
- The new Marxism
- Dill's World (blog)
- New Page
- The collapse of education
- The Anile Heir
- For Katie: Harry Secombe: 'The Lord is my Shepherd'
- For Katie: He who would valiant be
-
'And now Amanda is seriously ill.'
- Otting
- THAT AM I >
- Medicine: the joke
- It's like this, Doc >
- Medicine: the continuing joke
- 'By Tummel and Loch Rannoch'
- The laughing-stock of the civilized world
- And be damned to you
- In the garden with Mummy
- Transforming the Na-Mhoram's Grim
- Blair: the icing on the cake
- Expecto patronam
- Scarlet battalions
- My family: any colour so long as it's red
- Back to the freaking juniper-tree (1)
- Back to the freaking juniper-tree (2)
- Our grandfather who art in heaven (though I doubt it), Howard be thy name
- So you have a problem with my family, fucker?
- 'Jew-Communists'
- Margaret, my great-grandmother, an Irish tart
- The FUQs
- Dear Wannabe Nemesis
- Shall we try again, Bobbles my sweet?
- Evil
- Dixi (that's Latin, you know, Father)
- The cultural use of the lamp-post
- A home from home
- All times are now (1)
- All times are now (2)
- For Katie: All times are now (3)
- For Katie: All times are now (4)
- For Katie; All times are now (5)
- For Katie: All times are now (6)
- Non serviam
- This colour doesn't run
- The balance
- Civilization - the balance
-
Gallery
- And be damned to you
- Catholic Encyclopaedia 1912: Obedience
- Voltaire and Jesus
- Tertullian, Women in Canon Law (1912) and Mulieris Dignitatem (1988)
- Padding through the Vatican archives
- The Vatican State
- Extra ecclesiam nulla salus: go to hell, go directly to hell, do not pass 'Go'
- A short history lesson
- A phrase-book for monkey-nuts
- Summary: the abode of the loon
-
Translations from Voltaire (mine): Concerning the Church of England
>
- Bukharin and Preobrazhensky: Communism and Religion
- Translations from Voltaire (mine): Freedom of Thought
- Translations from Voltaire (mine): Transubstantiation
- Thomas Paine: The Age of Reason
- Lenin: Socialism and Religion
- Marx: 'So much for the social principles of Christianity'
- The Horcruxes and the illusion of power
- 'And death shall have no dominion'
- Led Zep: Kashmir
- Buddhist meditation music: Zen Garden
- Karula
- Summary: the love way or the power way
- Flashtest
- The worst university in the country
- Just finishing off, Dolores
- Miss Smila's feeling for snow
- Death of an expert witness
- Interesting, those trips to Moscow
- 'His single hand portrayed it'
- Of course no-one pays any attention to poets
- The desire of the moth for the flame
- The Hospital
- The ghost in the machine was riled
- I am the very model of a medical practitioner
- I am the very model of a modern faith apologist: reprise
- I am of course reminded of a little list (of a little list)
- In the garden with Mummy when the Nine turned up
- Grow the fuck up, comrades
- Thin red line
- 'The Party', 'The Regiment'
- Once upon a time there was a big red giant
- Britain's not very secret weapon
- The headlines
- The waning of the age of aquarium
- Letter to MI5: Playing The Patriot Game
- Those in peril on the sea
- The Patriot Game (song)
- Country matters: 'Elf and Safety
- The Matter of Britain
- Marianne
- Riders on the storm with soundtrack
- The rat-catchers
- 'And gentleman in England, now a-bed, shall think themselves accurs'd...'
- The evidence no-one asks for
- England
- My father when young 2
- A few of my books
- The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism and Capitalism
- Barry's book-plate (evil grin)
- Barry: 'demob' if only from the MOI and redeployment at JWT
- Barry: publishing contracts with Curtis Brown
- Barry's funeral service
- Family album
- Barbara's 100th birthday
- And Nigel's funeral: read by Saul on the whale-backed Downs
- Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
- Class mum lives in a field with Dinge: the intellectual Left
- Within you, without you
- Because the world is round, it turns me on
- More Lattic and other incredibly cool stuff
- Hass and Venga
- The Lover of Jalaluddin Rumi and some things you never wanted to know about translation
- Love IS the law
- Shahriar's sites for sore eyes
- Islamic art and civilization
- Abu Nuwas
- Fisking Warsi
- Harry's Place v. Scumbag College
- Henrietta wondered if HP was too soft on Sparte-Smythe
- Koorosh Modarresi of the Worker-Communist Party of Iran
- Rumy Hasan of the Birmingham Socialist Alliance
- Sharia socialists
- ComSymp, ShariaSymp: plus ca change....
- Illustrations of the Rubaiyat
- Hell, objectively speaking: St Catherine of Genoa
- Joe Stote
- Katy Kianush
- 'Brothers, if you hear...'
- L'Internationale
- A Lioness's Quest
- The Battle of Evermore
- Rosa Luxemburg
- Love in a time of cholera
- TEKEL: Religious, guys? Doesn't that mean shit?
- Please do not feed the god. He really doesn't appreciate it.
- Instead of God eating people, people eat God. Seems a good swap
- Herstory
- Ultramontanism
- Multiverse defined by the sexual equipment of the human male
- Civis romana sum?
- Sunday School, 1913: 'THE GATES WILL BE OPEN TO ALL MANKIND'
- Huxley
- Consciousness 101
- Jesus Christ the apple-tree
- WE DO NOT KNOW
- Trial before Pilate
- 'For the sake of the nation, this Jesus must die!'
- Much how I feel about doctors and other forms of intellectual pollution in the University, really
- Jesus, a human being
- By all means get us wrong, Father
- 'They turned to Rome to sentence Nazareth'
- Buddhism: frightful threat to the Church, you know
- Dharma the Cat and the Barefoot Doctor
- Non-duality
- Exo, eso, balance, Balrogs et le Parti Communiste Francais 1939-1945
- ComSymp, ShariaSymp: Fit the Second
- Printing and the Reformation
- Glossary
- Early chess: more, er, gentlemen (and ladies)
- The Crusades: it's good to look at dates
- Richard and Saladin: perspectives
- Richard and Saladin: perspectives
- Nathan the Wise
- Portly and the Piper at the Gates of Dawn
- Otters return to Thames (maybe)
- The Ottery, TW9
- Spring: rain and shine
- Problems with numeracy: cardinals, generals and rock 'n' roll
- Franny and Zooey
- The tail does not wag the dog
- Try again? I think not: finale
- How many deaths does it take till they know that too many British Muslim women have died
- Who killed Banaz
- Sexism, racism, Islamophobia, Marxophobia and a rather interesting school
- Aaargh! The Terrible Tonge-Monster!
- Just hammering the stake a little further in
- A second English Civil War: women against women
- The vorpal sword goes snicker-snack
- You were saying...
- Of course I've slain the bloody Jabberwock
- Chapter One - Stalinism is just so yesterday
- The rightful heir, the usurper and the usurper's bloody wife
- Wiping excrement off the sole of one's boo
- Fascism victorious, gloating and spurious - for the moment, certainly
- Six counties (sob, the horror of it) lie under John Bull's tyranny
- Calling Lord Haw-Haw
- Cool Britannia
- 'Hell is just as properly proper as Greenwich or as Bath or Joppa'
- 'Any old iron, any old iron, any, any old iron...'
- The Front Line
- Taking it from the top...
- Happy birthday to m
- Extract from The Anile Heir including Lattic
- My body my self
- Culluket, Kastanessen and of course Coulter
- The Girl Who Talked to Otters
- Notes, some of which are Caroline's
- Our revels now are ended
- Pallas Athene
- More notes
- Pan pipes - conclusions - allegory
- Shit, man, they won't even state their problem in the Agora
- Those whom the gods wish to destroy they first make mad
- Poetry in motion
- Ain't no use in looking down!/Ain't no discharge on the ground!
- Queen - We will rock you!
- Queen - Killer Queen
- The wrong shaped body, inferior product
- What a friend they have in evil, all their sins and griefs to bear
- In sum
- 'Building a remedy for Kruschev and Kennedy'
- Classic Islamoballs (and of course pure Stalinism)
- Deja vu
- Really, there are more important things to think about....
- Sleeping Pan by InertiaK
- Hymn to Pan by Faun
- Pan pipes
- Dirty old men
- For Katie: 'And death shall have no dominion'
- The Stone Table cracked
- 10 intellectual frauds of the orthodox religious and their slaves
- A Miracle of Exmoor: a Christmas masque
- WE DO NOT KNOW
- Intelligent women
- 'Tales of brave Ulysses'
- Coursera
- Free
- Milburn
- A fifth column
- Ain't there nuffink wrong with my back, apes?
- Gunfight at OK Corral
- Gunfight at OK Corral: the movie
- Harmonica and Frank
- Captain's Log: Star-Date Whatever
- Women, the US election, the President of the United States and other cool stuf
- The fury of a woman who has been raped
- "Are all American officers so ill-mannered?"
- The grand-daughter of not-quite-the-founder of the Labour Party
- Meanwhile...the lamp-post
- 'Sarat's little joke': the Economic Liaison Officer to the Anile Throne
- Where have all the SovSymps gone, long time passing...
- Roots and reductionism
- 'At anchor here I ride...'
- 'Against all things ending'
- New Page
- Verstehen Sie?
- Memoirs of London medicine
- 28th August 2010
- Irreducible evil
- Irreducible evil
- Just for you: Anthea Turner - and the python
- Goose-stepping morons should try reading books not burning them
- Just call me Serafina Pekkala, or possibly Lady Godiva
- A few reminders
- More? You want more?
- Grand finale
- It even has a pretty cover
- Bambi
- C'est nous qu'on ose mediter/De rendre a l'antique esclavage!
- A reminder of who is Marianne
- Voici Noel!
- Vicar of Bray
- Spanish Ladies
- Meanwhile back in Scilly....Song of the Western Men
- Twenty years behind enemy lines
- Family tree
- Pavarotti: Little Drummer Boy
- Walking in the air
- 'So you think you can love me and spit in my eye/So you think you can love me and leave me to die'
- Aw, come on, Doc, you're such an academic
- Je suis allee voir dans sa tete
- 16 chants de Noel
- 16 chants de Noel
- Talking of sheep...
- The distancing of Jesus from the churches
- So this is how it is to be
- And....And Stafford....And
- A limp prick and no balls
- Excuse me while I dress my hair with vine leaves
- Excuse me while I dress my hair with vine leaves
- Other notes
- Other notes
- Blair
- No?
- 'Are you still laughing, Sarat?' Pt One
- 'Are you still laughing, Sarat?' Pt Two
- If you're going to Acton Vale, be sure to wear some flowers in your hair
- The truth about medicine
- Getting nowhere fast
- Bird in the bloody wilderness
- As I have so tiresomely repetitively said
- Untitled
- That which sustains
- Therefore, Vice-Chancellor
- The lies they tell and the drivel they spout
- Rising above the evil reptilian kitten-eaters
- We too do not do cowering
- What the papers say
- The closed (sealed/wounded/stunted/practically non-existent) mind
- Dust and sparkles: child of Dust and Light and Lenin
- Just screaming
- More ridiculous womanish screaming
- Look, children, do look, it's a Five-Year Plan
- Fictionally speaking...The House that Keir built
- The heavy mob moves in: "We're Ancient Greeks. We do reason. And of course democracy."
- What did New Labour achieve?
- Apollo speaks
- Physician, heal thyself - or not
- Wholly unnecessary footnote
- Ah, the dirty underbelly of medicine
- Artemis' arrows
- Dear Apollo, I think the mind-itch needs to be stronger
- A few hymns
- Rhinoceros!
- Begging them to sue me for 15 years
- 'Now that I lie here/My body all holes/I think of the traitors/Who bargained and sold'
- Of course, if anyone has a spare atom bomb
- Whatever it takes
- Shit on the sole of my boot
- Shit on the sole of my boot
- You will see me dead rather than support me
- Vultures waiting for the flesh that dies
- Would you like to see the state of my mattress?
- 'When you've shouted "Rule, Britannia!"...
- 'I vow to thee, my country...' Aw, come on, you know it makes your skin crawl
- The Fixers
- The prince, the cardinal, the duke, the politician and the professor
- The Enforcers
- Me charm. You just strange
- So what exactly am I saying here?
- Pussy Riot: Yet another day in the destruction of Ivana Denisovich
- Untitled
- Pussy Riot (2): no pasaran
- Just smile for the camera, fuckers
- PANTHER: the animations, though not yet the videos
- Theme music
- So-o-o
- Just a stupid woman screaming
- Just a reminder of the Miracle of Exmoor
- Mess with the best. Die like the rest
- The essential paradigm
- No-one wants me to survive. No-one wants me to succeed
- "Are you still laughing, Sarat?"
- You have heard of the University, Doctor?
- PANTHER: The Manual, out now on Scribd
- Going back to work tomorrow
- The gift of speech
- Point counterpoint
- To cut a long story short, therefore
- To cut a long story even shorter
- A few things you need to note
- Death rather than dishonour
- In brief, therefore
- Start of first draft - what do you think of it so far?
- Let me tell you a story, Jackanory, Jackanory...
- Phase II
- Thus we see the great esteem in which London medicine holds the University
- Washed down the drain
- Raped, butchered, destroyed means what?
- "I invoke Artemis"
- I invoke Artemis (II)
- The closing-down sale. Everything must go
- Murder by remote control
- Insufferable
- Befehl ist Befehl
- Order of play
- The Broadmoor annexe
- I say, don't they shoot collaborators?
- You pay them
- Dear British Public
- Graphically speaking.....
- I have taken a lead
- Endsum
- The good news and the bad news
- The education suitable to the masses prescribed by the C19th industrialist, therefore
- 'Are you still laughing, Sarat?/Medicine: the joke
- I shit on you daily
- It is fact
- A new continuum...Watch this space not
- Lady Sybil's swamp-dragons (footnote to the above)
- The Age of Aquarius
- But of course your usual Christmas present, little sick-bags
- 'Sing as you raise your bow, shoot straighter than before'
- There's just one huge and enormous difference, isn't there
- Shall we just highlight that bit?
- Untitled
- Untitled
- Off to see the Wizard, the wonderful Wizard of Oz
- Untitled
- 'Don despicable, don of death' Could I leave it out?
- Finish with a summary of the facts
- Roll bloody up for the greatest show on earth
- Just thought to start to make a couple of videos
- Killer Queen
- It is concluded
- A short note
- I need help
- Get out of my university, animals
- Bluestockings
- Oh, when is this going to end?
- Go for it, fuckers, go for it
- Fnords, Jesus and the gerund
- Corsin and coradium
- TAH: Chapter One
- The cancer that is medicine
- The Petri dish
- Hanging them is good. Exposing them is better
- Lattic....
- Female = non-person
- That which sustains reprise
- Faun: Unda. To that which sustains, we can add...
- Non, c'est pas ca
- Quod erat demonstrandum
- To move on, therefore
- So there you have it
- The script
- Ars longa vita brevis
- PANTHER: the movie
- Animal Farm: the midden
- The word is psychopath
- If you prefer, a septic tank
- And the rest
- Twin cores
- Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit
- Here the matter rests at present
- So just what is this bloody nonsense?
- My knowledge of Photoshop has increased by leaps and bounds
- Question One
- Words and pictures
- Etched in acid
- Dear fucking world
- More
- Caniba and Hokabi
- I think - class (Lancashire A, puh-lease, rhymes with gas)
- What is the point of what you are saying? What is it intended to achieve?
- PANTHER was created in 2008
- Happy Samhain
- Profound concern
- The Road to the Isles
- And of course Andy Stewart
- 'Banks on every finger'
- Don't tread on me
- A Miracle of Exmoor: a Christmas masque
- Untitled
- Pretty much a classic, wouldn't you say
- Goose-stepping morons should try reading books not burning them (2)
- There is no reasoning with them
- A little give and take
- Extraordinary irresistible find
- Music
- So there it is, part solution, mostly not
- Reprise: 'Are you still laughing, Sarat?'/Medicine: the joke
- Mireille
- Espèce de pute!
- Etched in stone
- Hate Fal the most?
- Or Shav?
- Or is it Dill?
- Or is it Dill?
- Reminder: Ars longa vita brevis
- Reminder: PANTHER: the movie
- 'If you cannot make up rhymes/There are always the columns of The Times'
- Jarring blast: letter to my father 19th February 2012
- Vermin made simple
- You were saying
- And so, dear MI5, dear Labour Party, dear University...
- I who might as well be fucking dead
- Death rather than dishonour
- Strands
- Dolls on music-boxes wound up by a key
- Beyond death
- You can fit a lot into a five-minute video
- Je suis Charlie
- Marble Arch? The Brandenburg Gate? The Colosseum?
- Sort of cross between Athena and Artemis, really
- OK, lemme be rational
- Meanwhile...
- Meanwhile...
- As if: cui bono?
- Dark satanic mills
- Work in progress
- Welcome to sewer NHS
- Over my dead body
- Beam them up to the Great Prick in the Sky
- So there it is, part solution, mostly not
- That which sustains finale
- Messing about on the River: Lattic, Sarat and Shavli too
- Christ, it's a mad monkey
- Lots of nuffink
- Led Zep: Kashmir (2)
- The pillars of the West/By all means get us wrong, Father
- Evil reptilian kitten-eater
- Cockroach Protection League
- Happy Easter
- The very models of a medical practitioner
- The Act of Desecration
- No is the answer. What is the question? Loony alert, therefore
- The Grand Plan
- Go for it
- Waste of oxygen
- Prologue
- Intermezzo
- Just the time for a brief reminder
- Mess with the best - die like the rest
- Wailings of sick Trots not
- Heavy metal
- 'Allow me to introduce myself...'
- Freddie and Peter
- How to depict one of the most powerful men in the world
- Moog
- Anyone for tennis?
- Hair
- Hairier?
- Hairiest?
- Untitled
- Python and Allen
- Prepared for any eventuality
- Bad moon rising with soundtrack
- Riders on the storm with soundtrack
- 'Sing as you raise your bow, shoot straighter than before' encore une fois
- Not one foul animal among them will uphold freedom and democracy
- Flower power
- Meanwhile there's really only one song for Ardeshna (and Blair)
- Thin red line - the third of the set
- PANTHER: the movie - nealy there
- Do you like my channel art?
- Couple more soundbites to choke on
- Home movie
- Damaged goods
- How is Virginia these days?
- The Hunger Games
- Now on YouTube
- Second vid
- The Mutts
- The Mutt Pit
- The video I shall make
- Kindly therefore display all the wit, creaivity, intellect, education and intelligence you don't have
- The last picture show
- Faun: Unda. To that which sustains, we can add...
- Faun: Unda. To that which sustains, we can add...
- Faun: Unda. To that which sustains, we can add...
- The Last Picture Show 2: female eunuchs
- In tg
- New Page
- New Page
- New Page
- In
- In the heat of the night
- In the heat of the night
- Not a complicated image
- Vermin
- 'It is a slave's lot thou describest, to refrain from uttering what one thinks'
- Won't that be fun, Fitter?
- New Page
- Nous sommes tous P:aris
- Meanwhile back at the ranch
- You may remember the Squelch?
- DIXI
- I laugh at you daily
- The end
- Fuck your lies, your cowardice, your hypocrisy, vermin
- Got it all sewn up
- I am Dill
- PANTHER: the movie - a reminder
- And of course the manual
- They deploy
- New Page
- Traitors and would be murderers
- And the other video
- Yes, there are, aren't there.
- Zopiclone
- Hell
- No answer is a very clear answer
- For Katie: All times are now (1)
- For Katie: The Lord of the Dance
- For Katie and m: The heart will go on
- If it's the last thing I ever do, whcih I suppose it might well be
- My fine body twisted, all battered and lame
- Reflections
- For Katie: The trumpet shall sound
- For Katie: Hallelujah Chorus
- For Katie
- The service
- Reading from 'Burnt Norton'
- Going Back
- or in other words
- I need help
- Time past and time future
- Tomorrow
- How many other lives have you destroyed?
- Arundel
- After such knowledge, what forgiveness
- Let it be said - it will be said
- Information governance
- So----
- Sitting in their tin cans far above the world...
- Another shit-filled weekend
- The Cull
- Society has the right to require of avery public agent an account of his administration
- The laughing stock
- 'Sing while you raise your bow...'
- Simple questions
- For fuck's sake they're all vermin
- Functionally illiterate
- Of no significance to me whatever
- The best story
- Mess with the best. Die like the rest
- The visible difference
- Drop the dead donkey: UCH imploding
- It remains the case
- Oh, and it remains the case
- What matters
- Salvat regina!
- Nancy Wake
- Nancy Wake 2
- 2016: your annual treat - A Miracle of Exmoor
- Dunscreaming (shortly, anyhow)
- Any normal person
- Malice
- Keep your loving brother happy
- Surprised by joy
- University Challenge
- Meanwhile back at the lamp-post
- Except to speak of the absolute horror
- And in particular
- Because I screamed I needed help
- QED
- Sredni Vashtar
- The wild and wacky world of the Waffen SS
- Think I'm a bloody servant, do you
- Irrationality
- Literate, literary, educated, intellectual England
- Refinements
- Doesn't the University see the joke?
- The Piper at the Gates of Dawn
- On the whole, I think....
- Ain't taking it from a woman
- A great and mighty wonder I'm still standing
- The zenith of human possibility
- ' pilot of the storm who leaves no trace'
- 'Sing while you raise your bow. Shoot straighter than before'
- In the face of the evidence
- Watch this space
- Brennt Paris?
- 'I vow to thee, my country...' Aw, come on, you know it makes your skin crawl
- Within you, without you - especially without you
- Ain't I got no respet
- Goose-stepping morons should try reading books not burning them
- The Matter of Kadun: physics and metaphysics
- Cartoons
- Over-arching significance not
- They just wouldn't list
- 'And now that I lie here/My body all holes'
- Photoshoot
- I saved about half the books
- I just don't understand
- Fnords
- Pigs in clover
- See you in hell, fuckers
- Attempted murder
- Bog-rats
- Person or persons unknown but very guessable
- All you need is love
- One more time
- More
- Depict them in bondage
- In sum, Mr Benn's questions
- 'Arnold Lane/Had a strange/Hobby...'
- '...Doors bang/Chain-gang...'
- Etx
- Shoot straighter than before
- My moon and my wand
- My college, my university
- Inevitable and not
- painfully slow on the uptake
- This too you may stuff up your arse
- And of course this
- Pout
- TTFN
- Wiping excrement off the sole of my boot
- A West End comedy, perhaps
- Fascism
- I really don't think so, no
- For Katie: He who would valiant be
- For Katie: He who would valiant be
- For Barry: Danny Boy
- Epitaph: it's your funeral
- Yea, though I work in the Land of the Valley of the Shadow of Death
- Do learn to read, Doctor
- The crooked road the English drunkard made
- By Oak and Ash and Thorn
- Can't un read plain words of English
- I get the gist, I surely do
- The world of perversion
- The Ottery has moved to the banks of the Arun
- Snapping my claws at the foeman''s chants
- Yes, the crash of the waves on the foreshore
- The even longer march of Everywoman
- You tried so desperately hard to destroy me
- Evil reptilian kitten-eaters
- The five most evil men in England
- Love does not drown in corruption)
- Like something out of Hieronymus Bosch
- Harry Secombe: The Old Rugged Cross
- The Drivellers
- Insolence is so very vexing, is it not
- Protected by the faith of my fore-fathers
- Lost causes
- Solid Soviet steel
- 1
- Murderous vermin who jeer at disability
- Clarity
- De profundis clamavi
- Reprise: Nancy Wake 2
- Generals gather in their masses...
- Cry foul and bloody murder
- Tumour
- New Page
- Ludicrous
- I think I said get me out of there
- This is not life
- All bets off, fuckers
- New Page
- Dearest darling Katie and Barry
- You think you impress me?
- Manners, ladies and gentlemen, puh-lease
- I suppose the exact charge would be
- No-o-o I don't thik you should forget about Lattic
- Boys having a bit of a larf
- I thnk, you know, dear Artemis...
- Sttill drooling, are you
- 'Thou shallt not suffer a witch to live.;
- My YouTube channel
- Education is what is left
- New Page
- To su
- To sum up
- The endless road traversed (nearly)
- It's a mandala, stupid
- Happy New Year
- Keep your loving brother happy
- Not with a bang but a whimper
- I, however, have outstanding questions
- Feline groovy
- Suitable cases for treatment
- I have spoken
- Nothing taxing to the sane
- I have of course the utmost...
- Doctors and nurses cannot cope with quantum physics
- Addended: Etched in acid and have been for years
- The psychology of medicine
- No outcry
- A very simple question
- To which task I shall now..
- RIP the Labour Party
- First things first
- I a woman
- The Howard lion
- Lest we forget: I don't
- New Page
- Pat me on the head and tell mee not to be a silly little girl
- I a woman of over 60
- A hanging matter
- The gross falsification of history
- 'The writers by their presence...'
- One more time just for the hell of it
- Lastly...
- The answer is no
- So that was the Universiity that was
- Hey you, get off of my cloud...
- Off. off, off of my cloud...
- A right waste of make-up
- So what?
- Footnotes to the above
- So where - ?
- What is the name of - and can't they - ?
- The glorious first of June
- Why has the door not been smashed down/?
- Your professors, Vice-Chancellor
- Anti-dialogue
- Shall we finish with a quick...
- They don't want the Jabberwock slain
- ABOVE THE LAW?
- So - I think -
- "Sentence first = verdict afterwards."
- DA and TM
- Post mortem
- Everywhere I go people are collecting bloody food
- how many people are on PAYE?
- I am naturallly reminded...
- Where was I?
- Where was I (2)?
- Welcome to the NHS
- Let's play doctors and nurses
- 'Senior members of the University'
- These are {{DOCTORS}}} and {{{NURSES}}}
- The girl who talked to otters
- How you hate intelligence
- And you always get away with it, don't you
- And you always get away with it, don't you
- The Hundred Flowers Movement
- New Page
- In one line
- Belloc, Apollo and May
- While readiing The Four Men
- Golgotha, place of a skull
- Troll toes
- So go for it
- PUT-DOWN
- New Page
- The required result
- Sex and mind
- Their mommas told them...
- Greece or Rome
- The new normal
- Isn't this interesting?
- New Page
- Ruthless vicious evil old men
- The charge is atteempted murder
- The C-List
- Q&A
- Ludicrous propositions
- Chained to the oars
- Footnotes
- 1095 and all that
- The Anglican garden
- Or of course a Kabbalist
- I have some time ago...
- Cult, Death-Eaters
- Not forgetting Nathan the Wise
- Cultural exchange
- And of course not forgetting...
- In short, in my young day...
- Contemplating this Matter of Kadun
- Nearly there
- I detect, therefore
- 'That government by the people, for the people, shall not perish from this earth.'
- Tingle
- Follow-up
- Cave-meen
- Not ancient history
- I have indeed graphically
- 'By their deeds'
- So maybe you'll also like this bit
- Just to be exact
- Which?
- Oh, all right, just for you
- Left something out, didn't I
- Didn't quite finish that off
- Ciletij
- Ritawa
- Shav and Zik
- The party
- Spetzi
- senoki
- Punching the pixels
- Reality
- More tails from the riverbank
- The Sarat and Maya Show
- Perverts
- If we may now...
- In short
- progress
- A national joke
- The Spetzi Effect
- Quanta
- Who owns me if I do not own myself? Reprise
- Who owns me if I do not own myself? Reprise
- Boys having a bit of a larf
- You really have....
- And they all just sit there
- So exactly what - ?
- Hostile fascist foreign powers
- Personal, very
- Rubber dolly
- Essentially
- Fana
- LLLLOLLLL
- Unnatural, innit
- It's over, monkeys, over
- You might learn something but probably not
- So now Blair will tell us all
- Spetzi and Qine
- RL
- Qine and Spetzi
- Fucktards united
- Capital
- Well, didn't I just hand myself the short straw
- Do they actually understand?
- Quotable quotes
- 3D printing
- Ah, but can you print fluffy cushions?
- Taking an intelligent interest
- Vaudos 1
- Vaudos 2
- Vaudos 2.75
- New Page
- Anniversary Waltz
- Automation: ostrich land
- The Kirit and Micaela Show
- New Page
- Cookery time
- What are they like!
- Until we meet on camera...
- And just because I know you love Homeric hymns
- New Page
- Dear Artemis, Athena, Apollo and Pan
- Baz and Paw on the loose in Van-Senok
- Back to the fermions
- Buffy the Vampire Slayer
- A crude, vulgar, ugly, insolent, mad and evil little man
- RIP English Christianity
- And the outstanding question is...
- Foxes, fruit, fermions and fuck you where you breathe
- Varna's Wall
- Particularly working on
- From the Shrine to the Viledeen
- Spring
- Fisking Welby
- New Page
- And how is the great penis in the sky tonight?
- After-thoughts: don't forget Isis and her pal Sobek
- The cat I don't yet have
- The Greater and Lesser Lunacies
- To whom it may concern....
- New Page
- Frank
- Cock-suckers
- Should you not be a movie buff...
- Marked as property
- Questions, questions....
- You will publicly answer those questions
- And this was Margaret
- Reprise: Our grandfather who art in heaven (though I doubt it), Howard be thy name
- To remind you...
- England the poem
- Back to the Viledeen
- Come on, I just want you to...
- So this is the story
- New Page
- Theme from The Water Margin
- Turn off the bloody Horst Wessel Lied
- Is it -10 yet?
- Chesterton - and Belloc
- New Page
- So what have I proved?
- Mock you incessantly
- No problem, no problem at all
- They have only one interest
- Misa and ban-Razit
- Rowley and Saunders
- HARD WIRING
- Bad science
- Dereliction of duty here, comrades
- Taking it from the top..
- New Page
- Dot the i. Cross the t
- More Fal
- Maya's assassination
- So-o-o
- Well, hi there, Sar-fenan
- And the third reason
- Ysabel Belinda Felicity Jehan Howard
- 'And now that I lie here...'
- Ain't they really
- And so
- 'Of course she has to do this on her own.'
- Who the fuck are Bonnie and Clyde
- How the cards fall
- And don't forget Dill
- And Shav and Dill
- Squishy, Archchancellor: not a healthy diet
- Back to you, Sar-Fenan
- This is not a physics textbook
- e=mc2
- A NON-EVENT
- woo hoo
- Her story
- Oi, you, Sar-fenan!
- Bloody kitten-eaters
- HHGG 1
- HHGG 4
- HHGG 2
- Reprise: It reallly is...
- Dave Allen
- Some psycho schizoid freak
- So absolutely insolently irreducibly evil
- This site
- Under the block
- Do you not understand?
- Gee, it's so wonderful to know
- Parameters
- I might go so far as to say
- I might''ve finished losing my temper
- Archaeopteryx flew like a pheasant
- I am not a child. Children are under 16
- New Page
- Blair, Corbyn, WCPI
- Smile for the camera
- 'Labour'
- Nothing you won't surrender
- HTF do I hitch a lift to Betelgeuse?
- "We are the Daleks."
- Back as ever to the Viledeen
- Scream quietly or the neighbours will hear
- The products rejected out of hand
- ComSymp ShariaSymp Fit the Third
- How to defend England
- If you cannot get rid of the people who govern you...
- National Museum Wales
- Why is this continuing?
- My mission I seem to have been landed with
- Dixi
- Go it alone, suffer alone, what's new
- Deep breaths
- New Page
- Gratis
- Justt to complete the set
- About that grave
- Damn!
- About that clock
- Oh pilot of the storm that leaves no trace
- Last but by no means least
- After which
- Or in short
- Notification...
- I think perhaps tomorrow...
- C17th England
- Je suis comme je suis
- Whatever you do, take pride...
- Selfies
- There remains of course my mind
- If you failed to get the gist
- Alice's Left Hip Esquire
- Limp pricks and no balls
- New Page
- Never ask them to strip
- You, off my planet
- If they absolutely won't...
- Achilles' heel
- Oh just do begone
- No-one on Planet Normal
- Welcome to Labour's England
- Democracy...
- New Page
- Bringing back the dark
- The best story
- Is there one single point?
- To come up to date
- Evil
- The destruction of the intellectual basis of the free world
- The mad relations in the rafters
- Let this be my contentment
- Results
- None of which of course
- A purely indigenous evil
- Here the matter rests at present
- New Page
- New Page
- A toss-up
- Blair
- New Page
- Reality 105
- The wearing of the green
- Recently come to light
- Growly snarly wolf
- New Page
- Five years later...
- Bobbles
- OK, assume.
- A flight of fancy
- So long as we understand each other
- Footnote
- Fisking Warsi reprise
- Why was nothing done?
- Job well done, filth
- Being a galactic mail from me to Zaphod
- Beyond evil
- In the 61st minute of the final hour
- Doo-be, doo-be, do
- English Christianity until....
- New Page
- 'I AM KING AND GOD AND LAW#
- So I get this
- Bad mood
- Another book for you, Blair
- One should always write things down - in some form or another
- All cleared up in five minutes
- Of course I have worn such a hat
- Thus, bloody thus
- No pasaran
- I continued...
- You prefer Misa and Ban-razit
- The 3D printer in the town centre
- Labour's apotheosis
- Selling women by the pound
- Why, my own mother and father wouldn't recognize me
- And the punchline is
- Do just go and fuck yourselves
- Fruit Loop
- Only one interest
- The price of a woman's body
- Eris
- Just can't hear you
- VR
- Not as exciting as Hokabi
- 'Unfortunate'
- Oh look what they're saying about me
- Should one really not...
- I am intelligent.
- From the archives: fisking Warsi
- Do MPs entirely grasp what they're there for?
- Our servants not our masters
- New Page
- Or you could say the reverse
- The problem is that there is no problem
- Irrelevant
- From the archives: who killed Banaz
- From the archives: ooh, we are so sensitive
- From the archives: wondrous multiculturalism
- From the archives: Banaz' sister spoke out
- Neither right nor honourable nor gentlemen
- The carrion chorus
- And so
- New Page
- Can hear you from here, animal
- Forgot it at Christmas
- 'Blinder motions bounded in a shallower brain'
- So golly gosh
- And I laugh (2)
- What else can we talk about
- Thus
- Spare ribs
- Mene mene tekel upharsin
- And of course...
- Matthew 7: 3
- Blair
- This exchange
- Because it's a horrible way to die
- Peter
- Those convictions
- A purely pernicious twist
- The open mind
- They took away the post-its
- First part of Fal 2
- Sarat at the Shrine 1
- Sarat at the Shrine 2
- To continue...
- Contemplating this Matter of Kadun 1
- 2. Contemplating this Matter of Kadun 2
- Shav, Petrush and this Matter of Kadun
- Shav, Petrush and this Matter of Kadun
- Dill and this Matter of Kadun
- Of course
- Ridiculous and viie
- From the archives: obedience (1912)
- I should imagine...
- From the archives: And who kept this bubbling?
- From the archives: Voltaire on the CofE
- From the archives: Extra ecclesiam nulla salus
- From the archives: The Vatican archives 1
- From the archives: the Vatian archives 2
- From the archives: The Vatican archives 3
- 2000 years making most of it up
- Proud Archbishop of York conducts his own daughter's wedding ceremony
- New Page
- Nothing may be said. Nothing may be done.
- It seemed a good idea at th e time
- Sarat, Maya, Cioulis, Spetzi,Ritawa reprise
- Aren't they gorgeous?
- A precedent has been set
- Something else for the animals to gloat over
- Let's play doctors and nurses
- Women beware women
- How best may we accommodate you, o master
- The Agora
- New Page
- Violence power coercion desecration
- BOURGEOIS MORALITY
- New Page
- Once more from the top
- So what do I think?
- First part of Fal
- Fal 2 2021
- Fal and Tet
- To conclude: to whom it may concern
- Sarat and Hass
- THis is what I look like, Vice-Chancellor
- Sonderkommando
- The balance of probability
- Can I keep this up for ever?
- How you hate intelligence 2
- Et freaking cetera
- Honestly, darling, that mantilla
- The prince, the duke, the cardinal, the politician and the professor
- The Fixers
- The Enforcers
- By the balls of Apollo!
- Cernunnos
- Burunda
- Solidarity
- About that new sofa I printed...
- A position it is entirely easy to understand
- Yes. Yes, you are ridiculous
- Yes. Yes, everything I have said about you is an understatement
- Meanwhile back at the ottery
- The flawed concept of Islamophobia
- Oh rats!
- The revolving door
- Ah yes, my future
- Explicit liber
- So now....
- Deep breaths
- Thanks awfully for the suggestion, old boy
- A list, therefore
- Previous reflections
- Ah, culture
- Ah, here you have the nub
- New Page
- Tropes
- Letter to my dead parents
- New Page
- These they left me
- Don't forget Lattic
- Is it a bird? Is it a plane?
- Song of the Western Men
- The new national anthem
- Wanna see the Deeds
- New Page
- Another very fine song
- Shamima Begum
- The perfect citizens of a fascist state
- Grease
- Love, Serafina Pekkala
- To whom it may concern
- First part of Fal
- Fal 2
- Also to whom it may concern
- So what happened then?
- New Page
- New Page
- Who has no authority in England
- I shall now potter off
- La trahison des clercs
- 'Those who cannot remember the past...'
- A little intellectual exercise...
- The view of the Labour leadership
- Take it from the top, Karl
- Is Abbott a feminist? We shall see
- Ooh, we are so sensitive
- Death before dishonour
- Listen very carefully. I shall say this only once
- Of course certain lines here
- Hide the Secret. Hide the Weakness
- The very model of a modern faith apologist
- Models of modern health practitioners
- Meanderings
- Negation
- Bloody certifiable
- Convert, comrades, convert!
- Found the articles
- Dangerous animals
- I name you the Duke of Plaza-Toro
- New Page
- New Page
- Christchurch 1
- New Page
- New Page
- To May, whom it concerns
- Shouts and whispers
- Hic jacet
- Hyde Park, London, England
- Condition of the Working-Class in England 1845
- Thus ComSymp ShariaSymp
- Ooh, you guessed
- You are so obvious
- In detail
- Hard wiring
- If mind does not exist., democracy is unnecessary
- Th Age of Reason, 1794
- Fisking Cantuar
- Danger: profoundly esoteric image
- The seer and that which he sees are one.
- Meanwhile hats off to the Guardian
- Letter to MI5 in case you missed it.
- Fucking Pollyanna
- The Greta Garbo Home for Wayward Boys and Girls
- Perhaps in five year old English
- Non serviam
- The 7 principles of public life. Pix too
- Tor and Tonge
- Barking moonbats
- Herr Hitler, I presume
- A rich joke, Blair
- Eire in the 1950s?
- Cold shower
- By definition 'God' has to know what a lepton is
- Ah, the Yorkshire Ripper
- Parallel government
- New Page
- You will not look at them
- The magic migraine
- From about a year ago
- La nausee
- Yes, it's Operation Mindfuck
- Book review
- Happy bloody Easter
- A little quiet attempted murder
- Fal 2
- The curse of the killer zombies
- So the next logical step would be...
- Don't my silly little arts degree mean nuffink?
- Oh dear I have upset someone(s)
- New Page
- A few questions
- There are no great ones
- Gets so horribly in the way
- Violence against women, it's what you pay your taxes for
- 'Bring me the head of Alfreddo Garcia'
- Just don't forget Lattic
- The House of the Rising Sun
- The initiation of force
- Yes, that's right, I said Bentley
- Turning now to this Matter of Kadun I
- Shav, Petrush and this Matter of Kadun
- Shav, Petrush and the Matter of Kadun 2
- Do admire your handiwork
- Marche funebre
- Misogyny
- On this 75th anniversary...
- The Enchanted Forest
- If you should confront these filth
- Encore une fois
- Impertinent evil filth
- A successful outcome
- Therefore...
- Which end is up
- I shall create it
- PANTHER: The Manual, out now on Scribd
- Sarat, Maya, Cioulis, Spetzi,Ritawa
- First part of Fal
- Fal 2
- Indeed there are many interesting people to talk to in my mind
- Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof
- To dig a little deeper
- Of food-banks and reprographics
- No dark
- Just remembered another spectacular waste of money
- More about Tories
- And more...
- This and that and some of the other
- Or in short
- Don't forget The House That Keir Built
- Memo to the Senate of the University of London
- Turning now to this Matter of Kadun I
- Shav, Petrush and this Matter of Kadun
- The fur does settle...
- Models of medical practitioners
- HARD WIRING 2
- Strange things happen in the quantum universe
- Strange things happen in the quantum world
- "Are you still laughing, Sarat?"
- Falsity
- Je ne regrette rien
- Of course you could always check the facts
- 'Do you recall what was the deal/The day the music died.'
- The family handbook
- Goose-stepping morons
- Riidiculous
- Welcome to the diverse and plural real world
- Does it not sound sweet?
- This half-wit waving her degree...
- O tempora! O mores! O mayhem!
- Sexism is a crime
- ''I can't be treated like this.'
- And here the matter rests at present
- J'ai vecu
- Extreme unction
- The free movement of peoples
- The rules
- The witch must burn in hell, he trumpeted,
- You can always ask Google
- Monsters
- Just think, then you can add murder to your CVs
- New Page
- No dark
- In sum
- Give them everything they ask for
- Good for a laugh
- The end. Full stop.
- Just grow a pair
- Bad moon rose
- To whom it may concern
- And?
- And don't forget Lattic
- The Hall of Mirrors
- Because of course
- How to murder a woman
- Bwahaha
- They gave them time
- My big brown eyes
- A n all-party statement from the House of Commons
- Fat pig
- Always remember...
- Always remember...
- The whole lot of them
- Clear and present danger
- Note to Jackson, Hughes and Ardeshna
- So...
- Oy, you
- They did not like the New Marxism at all
- Irritable Owl Syndrome
- The drivel show
- Oh, you know, Woodstock
- Aqiuarius
- One more time and once again...
- Anglican England
- Since I feel bloody annoying
- At cock crow
- Civilized behaviour
- New Page
- 'Thirty pieces of silver'
- 'I look for truth and find that I get damned'
- Found the quote
- Carrion
- Books
- Singer to my clan in that dim red dawn of man
- Five Prime Ministers
- The victory of the Tuatha de Danaan
- A briefer response
- Bonfire Night
- Conjecture
- Or as I said more lucidly...
- They really didn't like my poems at all
- Denis Diderot
- The Age of Reason
- Some years later...
- We the people
- Side-dishes
- So do tell
- Facts
- Reality
- Because I know you hate it even more
- So perhaps
- Termites
- So you go right on..
- I even told them about the SOE
- Transforming the Na-Mhoram's Grim
- Oh and this
- I think Hafiz would have liked Bunyan's hymn
- Fisking Warsi
- Welcome to Brighton, a plural and diverse community
- An 'All Party Parliamentary Group'
- Oh, when will this end?
- QEbloodyD
- To return to civilization.
- Fal continued
- Fal and Tet
- Dill and this Matter of Kadun
- Shav, Petrush and this Matter of Kadun
- Maya's assassination
- They stripped
- For monkey-nuts: dixi
- Fisking Malik: Preamble
- Melodrama
- Fisking Malik: Part One
- The end is Nye
- Aberfan
- New York Mining Disaster 1941
- Resonances
- Don't talk to me about the law
- And so...
- And the other thing...
- you so love lies, don't you
- Writing things down
- I am the very model of a medical practitioner
- PAINLESS BUT PERMANENT
- Love from Serafina Pekkala
- A difference of opinion
- Just a theory
- What the hell do you think I am, you ridiculous little pieces of shit
- This will do for the time being
- This colour doesn't run
- The desired result
- No balls, 'Frank', just no balls
- Just call me Harmonica
- Hokabi
- In his tin can, far above the world
- Bloody psychopaths, in short
- Berchtesgaden, 1935
- You are so obvious, Blair
- So what happens next?
- So what is the matter with you
- End of the road
- Happy New Year
- Meaningless
- Kinky boys
- A sick joke
- So:
- Bottom-feeders
- New Page
- So why are you here?
- There, isn't that just so cute
- The Lizard of Oz
- And stuff this...
- And they have never heard of...
- Of course I'm a fucking witch
- Just getting out my tunic of skins
- Erudite, that's me
- In short...
- First part of Fal
- Fal 2
- So, as ever
- It is a slave's lot thou describest
- Shav, Petrush and this Matter of Kadun
- Medicine: the joke
- Are you five-year-olds?
- The Directorate
- Murderers and traitors
- Books....
- Books, filth, books
- Since I have no intention...
- Oh, how they stripped.
- Indeed, it is like this, Doc
- Thus...
- And the fuss is about what?
- This and that
- And don't forget Lattic
- Lemme set the scene
- Diversity
- This matter of Kadun: (inner and eso) 1
- The matter of Kadun (inner and eso) 2
- They are the Daleks. They are Masters of the Universe
- I however do not remotely think that
- 'See how I die. Just watch me die.'
- A simple case of attempted murder
- The final act
- Our story
- So why did they not support PANTHER?
- Love drowned in Corruption
- All times are now (1)
- Transforming the Na-Mhoram's Grim
- 'The Father took from him the Keys and the Sword'
- 'That government by the people....'
- Ir's a fucking doddle
- The smoking gun
- Read all abaht it
- Woo-hoo, it's a full moon.
- Carrion
- 'All you need is love'
- Just not macho
- So what precisely - ?
- so when England's answer to Indiana Jones...
- And you filth at UCH
- 'When Julius Fabricius, Sub-Prefect of the Weald...'
- More history (after a bit)
- Exodus 32 (well, loosely)
- A 99% confidence rating
- Something of the kind..
- Come to my funeral, Blair?
- Do anything for them, anything to feed them
- Forgot to repeat the Bobbles letters
- England in the C21st and the C12th
- In the event of.
- My head held firmly under water
- The most basic standards
- Miscellany
- The primate pecking order
- Cancer Ward
- Locke, Hume, Kant, Mill, is there anyone they didn't ban
- Farce
- The Tories' own quest for ideological purity
- 'opium of the people'
- Blair's New Model England
- In English not Latin or Arabic
- Because no-one stops them
- The thin end of the wedge
- Intellectually sickening
- And don't forget Lattic
- Sickboy
- From the Shrine to the Viledeen
- The company of civilized people
- The care of the penis
- So you're happy now
- Unlikely
- I hope...
- So very much more interesting
- Astronomy for Kids of all ages
- Dill and this Matter of Kadun
- In sum....
- Shit
- And I laugh
- Feeesh
- And be damned to you.
- Avatars of perfection
- New Page
- Marked for extermination from the start
- i'm helpless and desperate and alone so just fuck you
- So just go and
- Wouldn't it be lovely to be in hospital
- Alice's adventure in hospital
- The NHS does not live by bread alone
- Just say cheese
- Clear and present danger to women
- There are those who despise being able to spell....
- I remain, yours sincerely
- Do you think I don't know what you are
- Thus troll toes
- Achilles
- Complete barbarians
- Bloody rings of power
- Lady Sybil's exploding dragons
- Mesdames, messieurs, faites vos jeux
- A societal archetype....
- Sascha doing his renowned impression of a baby zebra
- Pog ma thoin!
- The continuum
- Good to see the young people out in the fresh air enjoying themselves
- Look once again at spite-ridden lower-middle-class women
- So the hell with you
- Mr Morgan, Mr Paxman
- Ah, you're going to sue me?
- Or perhaps
- So which particular set of ludicrous and obscene lies?
- The opium of the people
- Throw them my body, throw them my life. Can't do enough for them
- The hell with all of you
- First part of Fal
- Fal 2
- Fal and Tet
- All any of them want, my destruction, the destruction of democracy, destruction of the University
- Maya's assassination
- Sarat, Maya, Cioulis, Spetzi,Ritawa
- Vultures
- They had one chance
- Monsters
- So the fuss is about what?
- Unrectifiable harm done with malice aforethought
- There was, you will recall, a bad moon rising
- Cool stuff
- Just what is your fucking problem?
- So now Emglishwomen are destroyed at the command of sadists
- Aggravating factors: adding insult to injury
- Selfies
- Evidence
- Bonnie and Clyde
- Chinese whispers
- Beyond evil
- Evidence
- They jumped from 40,000 feet without a parachute
- Kindle and things
- Bloody Operation Mindfuck
- What to do when they push Chinese writing under the door
- The word you seek is brainwashed
- The bloody cosmic laughter.
- I thought you might like to see...
- Women's bodies break easily
- They were told and they were told and they were told
- Not on the whole given to Schadenfreude
- Do they actually have IQs or do they flatline?
- Wouldn;'t it be funny if Bobbles were Francis
- All times are now, yet again
- Shame
- What you need to do...
- So all of it a right bloody waste of make-up
- 'There is nothing you can't buy'
- And of course I told them what would happen
- The sub-species woman
- Le quatorze juillet
- Oh and this bit, comrades
- 'Tell all the boys I'm back in the city...'
- Time for a wash and brush-up
- And, and, and
- Verse 5 of the Red Flag and don't forget Lattic
- New Page
- But of course
- Fill in a few gaps
- Merit
- Homo sapiens sapiens stands erect
- Bunch of boobs
- The required result
- Lower than vermin, much lower
- And another one
- The Wizard of Oz
- And the only outstanding question
- Cooking the books
- so come on....
- Hell and tarnation
- You did go to school, Blair?
- New Page
- New Page
- Sick-boys
- Pscyho-sexual cripples
- Understanding
- Oh and because I know you're thick...
- Another scalp for the sick-boys
- So, pig-bitch
- Pig-bitch 2
- Pig-bitch 3
- Functionally illiterate
- How you hate human
- The ghost in the machine was riled
- Dear MI5 person
- Or perhaps Linch and Goldstone prefer...
- Yes
- First part of Fal
- Fal 2
- Fal and Tet
- You, Blair
- This site will self-destruct...
- Left out repeating the juicy bit
- Hi to the University of Witwatersrand or wherever
- You are really very funny
- You are really very funny
- How very funny
- As if
- If...
- Can it be more obvious>
- Conclusion
- The initiation of force
- A busted flush
- Shall we have that again?
- The sum of the ravings
- This meanwhile
- But of course
- Point-blank rejection of the governing system of the country
- What part of fuck off does the Vatican not understand?
- Please save the crackling
- Happy Hallowe'en
- This bit's fun too
- Time it was
- Oh you know, like this
- Screw you....
- As if
- NHS bureaucracy strikes again
- More asses
- Show's over
- My body, my self
- New Page
- Hate intelligence, hate better
- The Library at Alexandria (and things)
- HARD WIRING A
- Hard wiring B
- Hard wiring C
- And of course they ain't fucking illitrit
- Index Librorum Prohibitorum and things
- New Page
- Jesus, look at them!
- So take a walk on the wild side
- But your Achilles' heel remains
- Addressing an empty crisp packet
- Empty crisp packets
- So here's to you, criminal vermin
- Only 4000 variants
- So they sat there jerking themselves off
- And on no account forget Lattic
- So, Mr Benn's questions
- The contents of the septic tank
- Lizard men
- Playing with my dolls
- Ah, yes, the funny farm
- Hic jacet 2
- New Page
- This was Anglican England
- I really understand
- First part of Fal 2021
- Fal 2 2021
- Fal and Tet 2021
- Trash
- The horoor
- The Reformation
- Uncle Joe and the Na-Mhoram's Grim
- Dixi@ I have spokwn
- And govenment is for what?
- And here is picture of Jesus with his beloved pet ferret
- Your Christmas favourite
- Peter
- And this is what happened
- Les Eleutheromanes
- I repeat, just for the hell of it.
- So I'll just go on thinking my own thoughts
- All times are now (1)
- All times are now (3)
- 'Be careful with that axe, Eugene'
- La Ballade des Pendus
- We do not know
- Banal
- The wrong kind of snow
- Oy, monkey-nuts
- Lizard-men
- And of course they all know too
- Fiver in the Death Warren
- And lo it came to pass
- One way to deal with sexual fuxk-ups
- Dill and this Matter of Kadun 2021
- Frauds
- Complications
- Yes, but I know who I am
- Today satirized as
- Dill, the bit in the middle
- Question
- Ah, but
- What can be wrong with that?
- So what have I done
- And this is the state of my body
- Absolutely insolent, absolutely evil, absolutely degenerate
- Dangerous wild beasts
- Cowardly, contemptible cock=suckers
- Farce
- Thus, m'lud, it is clearly demonstrated
- An offence against law, fact, reason, sanity
- So we go through it all again
- The empty swimming-pool
- So I have questions
- One more bloody time
- It remains the best way
- Get real
- Two to the power of 75000 to one against and falling
- Along with Oolon Colluphid
- Head honcho
- So why - ?
- Civilized behaviour
- 'Be careful with that axe,Eugene' (2)
- Deep Thought
- England in the C21st
- So what's next?
- I do understand
- Right bloody waste of make-up
- An aggressive cancer
- A question of degree (not the academic kind)
- McDonnell's little friends in Iran
- Ah, yes, McDonnell
- Everything was perfectly normal
- Blog
- So when did you hear - ?
- Time for a wash and brush-up
- Time for a wash and brush-up (2)
- So calming
- The Piper at the Gates of Dawn
- Google Images search
- Am enthusiastic amateur classicist
- It only remains therefore
- Aum mani padme hum
- New Page
- WHen everything fails
- Jackson
- Thus
- Tsk, tsk, tsk
- If I may translate...
- Perhaps you prefer - ?
- Roast aurochs
- Totally synbolic, totally not
- Just doesn't matter, does it
- Base details
- History, should there be any
- Libro de los juegos
- Yuck! Kitten-eaters!
- Sea-changes: writing the 60s out of history
- So do just tell
- The end of the world is nigh
- New Page
- The party of law and order
- Thank you, Prime Minister, that will be all
- Fit for human habitation
- Aw, Dimitri!
- Yes? And?
- Ah, bon, les putes
- Indicting Tories
- Poor Mr Sunak
- Falsity
- RL
- Untitled
- The D-word
- Nye, wouldst that thou wert living at this hour!
- Sp gp fpr ot
- Fortunately there are more elevated things to do than contemplate infected shit
- The parable of the respirator
- Arbeit macht frei
- Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness
- It's the grapes that come from Chile
- Untitled
- The actual social principles of Christianity
- The social principles of Christianity as observed by Marx
- Bananas and eggs with your polio
- The hallmarks of the age
- Gilead
- Spinal tap
- Purr
- An atypical population
- New Page
- Leche-culs
- The Woman with the Book and the Woman with the Bow
- RTFM
- The ceding of democratic control
- I shit on you daily
- The ceding of democratic control pt 2
- Fortunately there are civilized people to talk to
- This is how to deal with pervert monkeys
- Pink stars and burquas
- Ditching the theology of love: reprise
- A happy communist life
- Or you prefer Nigel?
- Our papa
- My turf, bubba
- Guarding the pigs
- Just a little obvious
- New Page
- BDSM
- The deeds, Naylor, the deeds
- So Sarat, Maya, Cioulis, Spetzi,Ritawa
- And the hunt continues
- Jesus!
- Question for those with daughters
- So what has happened to Jesus?
- New Page
- All on prime-time television
- Lest we forget: I don't
- You know, like at Hokabi and Caniba and so on
- Until they learn
- Vaudos 1: so it's a walking fence
- Vaudos 2
- Vaudos 2.75
- First part of Fal
- Fal 2 2021
- Fal and Tet
- New Page
- Don't forget they ain't fucking illitrit
- There when it gets shitty
- Luke 23:46
- Of course he argued with himself about it.
- Democracy: a system devised to cage and contain power
- If there are any future historians
- What to, the Higgs boson?
- Maya's assassination
- Dill and this Matter of Kadun 2021
- 1. Shav, Petrush and this Matter of Kadun
- Astronomy for Kids of all ages
- 1. Contemplating this Matter of Kadun 1
- 2. Contemplating this Matter of Kadun 2
- 2. Shav, Petrush and the Matter of Kadun 2
- Who are pensioners?
- Party political broadcast...
- Look at all the little lungfish
- Unfit to govern
- Protozoa capering in the primeval soup
- Have you managed to be human?
- Life in a fact-free world
- And of course our dear friends the anti-vaxxers
- The wrong kind of Muggle
- Just put this on Twitter too
- Precisely how - ?
- Aroint thee, Muse!
- Death by government
- Cruel and unusual punishment
- It is, I think, the creation of Vernon and Marge
- Gee, isn't it just the market?
- There would not therefore seem to be an real difference
- The goose that laid the golden eggs
- The gifts that kept on giving
- Only 37.9 million tourists a year
- The Big Squeeze
- All the same gig
- Lolling insolent evil
- So now I walk with a rollator
- So, I deem
- Terror-tactics against a medically vulnerable woman
- New Page
- There is no dark
- Me
- The issues facing my grand-parents
- Don't forget the house that Keir built
- The desire of the moth for the flame
- The way through the woods
- Bit late for me and my steed...
- Art is individualism
- Magdalene laundries
- I told you not to put all the stars out
- Indeed the animals have a big problem with my family
- In the garden with Mummy
- ComSymp
- Chanctonbury Ring
- Doubtless too busy
- Light reading
- Reality 102: reprise
- Reality 103: reprise
- Reality 103a: reprise
- Reality 104: reprise
- Religious census of 1851
- Mortal sin
- If Twitter is anything to go by...
- The 1945 Labour landslide
- So just look at them all, Vice-Chancellor
- And of course an offence to UCL
- Time for a wash and brush-up
- The new Marxism
- Coal in the bath and the victim culture (2)
- Nice bit of bedtime reading
- Christ, you are so boring!
- First part of Fal
- Fal 2 2021
- And of course this
- Just don't forget Lattic
- Thus Bobbles
- Fal and Tet
- Mr Benn's questions.
- Mr Benn's questions. A good clear message. The IRA
- Just so - so - so
- None of this of course is subject to discussion
- Therefore, ain't I got no respect
- Nor do I tug my forelock
- Book of Common Prayer
- 'I know that my Redeemer liveth'
- Meanwhile an offal-fest on Twitter'
- Spine
- This is what they expected me to push
- What? Oh, the picture Jesus mentioned
- Our servants not our masters (2)
- His Majesty's the model of a modern major-general
- The withdrawal of love and forcing oneself on others (2)
- Sarat, Maya, Cioulis, Spetzi,Ritawa reprise
- Journey to the edge of the universe
- Oh they do get so antsy
- I am the very model of a medical practitioner: reprise
- I am the very model of a modern faith apologist: reprise
- Quid agas
- Balrogs
- C10th architects
- Truss and Braverman
- Imbeciles
- As for the rest of it...
- So:
- Totally ordinary Brits
- The corruption of history
- 'Imagination has seized power!'
- So, you, Blair
- Without fear or favour
- So a special round of applause for
- The Anglican garden: reprise
- It is remarkably tedious
- All times are now (1) reprise
- All times are now (2) reprise
- All times are now (3): reprise
- All times are now (4): reprise
- All times are now (5): reprise
- All times are now (6)
- Maya's assassination: reprise
- Lizard-men: reprise
- Doth it not say in the Book of Pious Crap
- That government by the corrupt and inane for the corrupt and inane shall not perish from this earth
- And answer Mr Benn's questions
- Thus the dirty shit-filled hierarchical fascist brains
- PANTHER...
- 'And now Amanda is seriously ill.'
- You might also enjoy Sredni Vashtar
- Girls. You were saying? About girls?
- 'And gentlemen in England, now a-bed, shall think themselves accurs'd...'
- This happened in RL
- Ooh
- HMQ
- How to lose operations other than war
- There, isn't that just so cute:reprise
- Ah, the sub-species woman
- How do you dare?
- Oh look what they're saying about me: reprise
- 'Blinder motions bounded in a shallower brain': reprise
- A lemur speaks!
- Welcome to London, Mr President
- HMQ (2)
- Gee, guys, what might have happened
- Neither benefiting from nor obsesssed by
- In sum, then
- The succession that matters
- In sum, therefore
- It has therefore been established
- And be damned to you: reprise
- Who did impose on a subject of Her Britannic Majesty
- How the cards fell
- Prefer high crimes and misdeameanours
- Time for something else
- Couldn't finish without your favourite song
- The Abbey
- The end of the world is nigh: reprise
- Men don't get it
- 'In order to rightly judge these efforts known as the "woman movement"'
- I'm sure Mr Kwarteng believes in equality
- Get real fast
- Roast aurochs: reprise
- It didn't work last time, peeps
- Doctors
- Ants
- Bellatrix
- Vaudos 1: so it's a walking fence
- Vaudos 2
- Vaudos 2.75
- It's like this, Nurses
- Letter to MI5: reprise
- And you do not make me into a porter
- I do so understand
- How you hate intelligence
- How you hate intelligence; reprise
- So how many people has Medicine destroyed?
- Don't you like my DNA?
- So you're going to sue me?
- I understand
- Hmm, so I guess...
- Yes I understand
- This is how it should be? Reallyy?
- Special mentions
- The wayside
- My country. Took seizin
- To whom it may concern
- Do tell
- A blank wall
- Democracy is so yesterday
- Nothing is too low
- https://www.coursera.org/learn/our-earth?
- No interest to me, old boy. No interest whatever
- Burn the witch at the stake! How much money we shall make!
- One quick question
- And something for Bobbles
- If...
- 'MI5's mission is to keep the country safe.'
- Reality reprise
- Reality reprise 2
- Your life in their hands, Episode 923452
- New Page
- New Page
- Never trust, never assume sanity will prevail
- New Page
- So in short
- The University in its death throes
- Narrow focus
- The absolute insolence, therefore
- In shorter
- Same old
- Same old (2)
- So there it is
- So they just couldn't possibly
- Ringleaders
- Encore une fois the manual
- Butchers and would-be murderers
- Nor of course response to my vid
- Or the second one
- The closed (sealed/wounded/stunted/practically non-existent) mind (20
- Please don't forget The House That Keir Built
- Sarat, Maya, Cioulis, Spetzi,Ritawa
- First part of Fal
- Fal 2 2021
- Fal and Tet
- So who knows
- As if I were capable of caring
- Above the law
- Depict them therefore in bondage
- Money talking
- Pure BDSM
- Please don't forget Lattic
- Meeee
- 'There is no dark'
- Hellenismos, tau-neutrinos, hanging
- Vita brevis ars longa
- True targets
- I a woman
- Boring
- Therefore, Vice-Chancellor
- Thus I refer you to...
- Break the stupid cunt's back
- So there it is
- irreducible evil
- Oversight
- Mock, yes, crawl, no
- All the things you haven't changed
- Cute family picture
- You can check it out on the DTIC site
- Eagles are rare in WC1
- High crimes and midemeanour
The Great University Education Scam
By the time there's no need to be literate, no need to be able to ratiocinate, no need to know anything at all outside narrow subject boundaries, no requirement to want to think, no need to be able to select and order data, no requirement to be able to construct arguments or analyse existing arguments, no need to be able to step outside a given frame of reference and question its foundations, no need for any intellectual skills at all, of course anyone can get a 'degree'. Honestly, I just want everyone to know I understand.
These etchings of mine have not come about due to the discovery of doctors and biologists who cannot write cogently about reality, rationality or Racine but by the discovery of doctors and biologists who cannot write cogently about medicine and biology. The biological sciences are really going to benefit from a generation of ’researchers’ so fur-brained they can’t describe their first researches. How can you identify unanswered questions if you cannot think? Welcome to the world of those from whom clarity of thought is absent.
What the educational establishment is going to explain is this: No more than half a dozen pages are required – what you did, why you did it, how you did it, what the results were and what those results might mean: Blendit’s syndrome is a rare disease of the connective tissue, causing severe debilitation, especially in women of child-bearing age (1). Laggie et al (2) have shown that some 80% of sufferers in this group have a defect in the ability to produce the growth factor chronine. Chronine reacts with the hormone condosit in the production of healthy tissue (3, 4). Condosit is produced by the ovaries during the luteal peak (5). Silofome Z has been shown to stimulate the production of chronine in vitro... It is really isn’t very difficult, especially if you’ve been doing the work for the last two years. Of course you do have to have something resembling a mind. She approached the keyboard cautiously. Intraduction (was that how you spelled it?) My name is Susan and I am a doctor. No, that wasn’t what she’d seen in the journals.
We are talking (repetitively) of the inability to select and order data, of the inability to question and analyse given propositions, to stand outside a given frame of reference and question its foundations. It does not matter here whether we are talking of oncology or Origen. We are talking specifically of how it does not take everyone six months to produce half a dozen pages. Some of us, indeed, in our spare time, can put together in a couple of years the material for some 20 or 30 reasonably original contributions to thought. We are talking about the marked absence of any intellect whatever. Cannot write simple descriptive essays. The short word for this is stupid. Any undergraduate in the Faculty of Arts of a real university could knock off such a paper in his or her sleep, but then of course arts undergraduates do deal with original material, are expected to be able to sift Kant or Chaucer, are not spoon-fed from potted versions and summaries, are expected to digest vast amounts of reading and select from their reading. Note also that this inability is not an inability to write the original research grant, of which some junior doctors and scientists are equally incapable. It is an inability to describe what they fuck they have been doing with the grant money for the last two or three years.
A real degree entails reading, synthesizing and questioning millions of words on and around one’s subject. After that some sadistic academic asks you questions you hadn’t thought of and expects reasoned written and oral answers. In order to give such answers, a high level of literacy is required. By this means the mind is put through hoops, given the work-out from hell and in short trained.
The subject of a degree is essentially secondary. It’s very entertaining to think of Morris chundering to herself about what Wordsworth’s words are worth compared to the ability to read the instructions on an assay-kit, but she and her ghastly kind do (as ever) miss the point. The subject is just something to practise with, the choice of equipment in the gym. Take mind away from the study of French language and literature from the year 0 to the present day and what you are left with is what the mechanics think an arts degree is, a little heap of couplets and verb-forms. It will, however, be obvious even to the thickest materialist that his face is not being ripped open by lines of sixteenth-century French poetry, he is not being disembowelled by the vowel sounds of Vulgar Latin, his throat is not being cut by the imperfect subjunctive and the bienséances are by no means opening up in a mushroom cloud above his head.
These etchings have come about because a Marxist rabble despises those of us who do write cogently about reality, rationality or Racine. Imagination is that without which nothing man-made: no towns, no drains, no books, no plays, no planes, no trains, no rhymes, no electric light, only lots and lots and lots of grass and trees and a few guys and girls called Urg and Urga who are just about to develop the capacity to imagine how things could be different around here.
Imagination is that which takes a cold hard look at how things are, takes them apart and puts the pieces together in a different order, adds new pieces, jettisons superfluous pieces, makes things different. Imagination does not practise given ‘skills to benefit the economy’. Imagination looks at how things are done and finds a completely different way of doing them.
Of course once you have defined all history as the history of the class struggle you don’t really have anything else to say about it. You have also reduced the entire human experience to a struggle for power. You are therefore incredibly boring. Uggh with his club is not what is interesting and delightful about human beings.
Mind sits anterior to data. Mind sits anterior to data, questioning, synthesizing, comparing, creating and of course checking on the reality quotient.. The upper level of mentation, the capacity to select, order, analyse, question and synthesize information and that faculty called imagination which breaks down what is into its constituent parts and remakes it as something new in the world, has been denied. Call it the upper storey. They do not visit the top floor. This is what I mean by the abolition of intellect (have to spell these things out for the brain-washed). They can function, so far as they can be said to function intellectually at all, only within a given frame of reference. They are incapable of handling questioning of the frame of reference. Indeed they are the brightest stars in the University's firmament. Mind is evident in the world. Religious freaks call it the work of the devil and commie freaks call it insanity.
The Leftist approach to education is based on what has been described here as the absence of any CPU and which may also be described as the belief the outside equals the inside. It has also been stated here that self-realization comes when internal reality equals external reality, when the outside equals the inside. The difference is of course that in the latter the inside changes to become capable of perceiving the realities of the outside and in the former there is not supposed to be any inside only a blank sheet on which is imprinted what is going on outside.
You should not learn is the top and bottom of it. Certainly you should not learn anything that affects the inside but all learning is despised as 'conditioning'. You bet: some of us find life functions slightly more swiftly and smoothly when one has been 'conditioned' with the multiplication tables or the reflex response that 6+4 = 10. I got sixpence for knowing my tables once. Of course I'm scarred for life. You should not be exposed to anything that may change you. The problem is education is exposure to that which may change you, broaden your horizons, cause you to change your mind. This terror of 'indoctrination' lies behind child-centred education,. They have difficulty distinguishing between fact and opinion. Fact: Napoleon defeated at Battle of Waterloo. Opinion: good thing/bad thing. Give reasons for your answer. Actually what they have difficulty with is the notion there might be perspectives on Waterloo other than imperialist powers in conflict. Lorenz on imprinting is a fascinating parallel here. (What's the damned thing called, not King Solomon's Mines, King Solomon's Ring - yeah, yeah, and I've read Ardrey too and the glorious Elaine Morgan's The Descent of Woman). To the Left we're all ducklings. This is the essential primate-brain terror of words as threatening, words as power, the primitive belief in magick and words of power that can change you.
When something is as despised and disparaged as the traditional arts degree, whom does it threaten? What is the problem with 5-10% of the population being unusually adept at reading, writing and thinking? Surely we add zest to the community, keep it on its toes, innovate? Don't people like new ideas? What are people so terribly afraid we might read, write and think about?. We don't like change, do we, or argument or verbal dexterity.
The supposed abolition of mind supposedly rendered the universities without purpose, and simulacra had to be created, within the original buildings and in new ones, supposed institutions of higher education from which the training of mind was absent, since you cannot train something that does not exist. Similarly, since mind does not exist (what processes any information at all is unclear), the amount of and complexity of information people could be expected to absorb became acutely truncated; clearly it is taxing to an entirely mechanical body to expect it to be able to spell, punctuate or know anything outside an extremely limited field (that and the amount of and complexity of information the stupid can absorb is acutely truncated and they must not learn what they are not). This represents of course the ever-present fundamental denial of reality, in this case of generations of human beings, many of whom, unfortunately for the programmers, are still alive and kicking. The intellectual rigour, high level of literacy and clarity of thought and expression associated with the traditional arts degree mysteriously became irrelevant to the modern age for reasons not clearly (not surprisingly) stated and were systematically denigrated and abolished, superficially because they are outside either the intellectual reach or the interest or both of the majority of people or because the subject-matter is held irrelevant (indeed we do not wish people to learn about being human), but actually because a) they too, being qualities of mind, could not exist and b) because they alone pose any danger to the sub-Marxist intellectual hegemony, the piffling deluded irrational tripe that passes for thought on the Left and is evident particularly in the chipmunk droppings of Dead Man’s Gulch, as the DES is affectionately known. Particularly of course they dislike the ability to use language born of the study of language and literature. The formal essay is out-dated? Anything that separates the sheep from the goats is out-dated.
Labour myth – Labour evil – dismisses visible intelligence as the result of well-off parents. Ministers deny – affect to deny – any differences in individual ability. Sundry definitions and pseudo-definitions of intelligence abound. Here is a simple one: no sweat, man. . One of the problems in the education non-debate is that anyone who went to the sort of school where people cake-walked 8 or more academic O Levels and still had time for uh, sexual experiment, rock ‘n’ roll and reading omnivorously and vociferously, seized with ‘satiable curtiosity’ knows what I mean and the rest have never been exposed to the very bright, have never found out what they are not.
What the modern phenomenon of, it sometimes seems, universal exam stress and near-breakdown indicates to the bright is that the sufferers are not so bright and being idiotically pushed in the wrong direction because idiots think everyone should have a pseudo-academic education.
Intelligence can be cultivated. If with application and perseverance you dig away at a vexing question until you solve it, you have added to your ways of thinking, found new ways of looking at the world. If you work out how to solve an unfamiliar algebra problem, the next time you are faced with an unfamiliar algebra problem you will have new approaches in your armoury. If you work out what in the world Hegel was on about, where he was coming from, as they say, see how he thought, you have a new weapon with which to tackle Hume. Intelligence remains unfair and unequal. IQ tests measure mental speed and there is nothing classist or racist in figuring out what deductions can be made from the statements that Ann is taller than Rasheed, Sean is shorter than Grace and Grace is not as tall as Rasheed or what is the next number in the sequence 144, 121, 100, 81. Probably intelligence is primarily relational, the number of neurons that spark between the ears as you read, the connections you make, the putting together. The more connections you make the more you can make. If you think a lot you get better at it.
Intelligence is also being able to distinguish between real and false connections. That Jane’s coat is orange and marigolds are also orange does not mean that everything that can sensibly be said about marigolds applies equally to Jane’s coat.
You don’t really know what stupidity is until you have worked in the public sector. ‘There’s a hole in my bucket, dear Liza, there’s a hole in my bucket, dear Liza, a hole.‘ This site contends that leaden ox-like thickness is not fixed, that those in whom nothing appears to move between the ears are not necessarily those in whom nothing can move between the ears but that it is rather that no teacher, no employer, has suggested to them that they switch on that which is between their ears, connect it to the mains
‘What are you complaining about, only in our country is poetry truly respected; people are even killed because of it. That happens nowhere else.’
(Osip Mandelstam, 1891-1938; arrested in 1931 and sent into internal exile; released in 1937; arrested again 1938 and sentenced to five years’ hard labour in Siberia; died later that year in a transit camp.)
98% of my DNA shared with the chimp! And I brachiate! It really obsesses them. Clearly the goal of biological evolution is strap-hanging on the Victoria Line.
We do see the roots of the contempt for literacy, I trust, the hysteria evoked by the word illiterate, the contempt for the humanities. Chimps do not need an advanced grasp of language; the chimp world does not have history or philosophy or literature or require the capacity for independent thought. Sustained writing has no place in the world of the chimpanzee. Since everything in the chimp-world is fixed, books that change things are an impossibility.
Just think! A Britain in which no-one writes books! Especially critical ones. In which everyone is ignorant of history, philosophy, literature. Of course it’s not quite like that – ever heard of bookshops, ever heard of the Internet (indeed there are a lot of people on-line who know a great deal about liberty and democracy) - but mentally they inhabit a monkey-world in which it is like that, which is one thing, and spreading this slime over the entire nation is apparently the goal of the Government, which is another.
We do see, I hope, that we are having a little Cultural Revolution whereby people do not need to know about history, philosophy, politics, literature, theology or any other aspect of being human, whereby it is mysteriously irrelevant to know there was a Reformation, an English Bill of Rights, a United States Constitution, an Enlightenment or a French Revolution, not to mention a Magna Carta, a Peasants‘ Revolt or indeed a place called Woodstock, where four thousand years of insights into being human of poets, philosophers and other writers are irrelevant.
How are the illiterate and brain-dead to benefit the economy and society in general? Have they thought this through, you hear me cry. Of course they bloody have: better the stagnation so reminiscent of the late unlamented USSR than troublesome people who know they live in a free country.
These etchings of mine have come about through coming across a rabble of stupid, corrupt, ignorant, illiterate, irrational criminals pretending to run the NHS. But of course they have degrees so they must be brilliant! They do not have degrees and they are not brilliant.
You do not set limits on how bright I am allowed to be, how literate I am allowed to be, how questioning I am allowed to be, how democratic I am allowed to be, in order that I do not show up the enemies of democracy. You do not try to mutilate me mentally or physically with your social engineering, demand I be illiterate, servile, criminal and thick in order not to upset those who are actually illiterate, servile, criminal and thick.
I contend, it will astound you to learn, that education policy is not merely wrong-headed, but malign, intent on the production of an illiterate, irrational and painfully ignorant so-called professional class, who are therefore easily manipulated and not only will not but cannot argue against whatever drivelling directives they are given by those hostile to freedom and democracy.
Homo sum; humani nil a me alienum puto
[I am a man. I count nothing human foreign to me.]
Terence: Heauton Timorumenon, 77
Quot homines tot sententiae; suo’ quoique mos.
[There are as many opinions as there are people: each has his correct way.]
Terence: Phormio, 203
The humanities teach about being human, about love, death, fear, pain, sex and the whole damn thing. Books, all books, down to Mills and Boon or The Story of ‘O’ express a perspective on being human, one person’s take on this life business. If you read a lot of different books, you get a lot of people’s take. If you read a lot of similar books and consider them the be-all and end-all, you will become dangerously deluded. This applies equally to the reader of Mills and Boon and the reader of Mein Kampf and its cousins, though the usually female who believes life is as depicted by Barbara Cartland is of course likely only to get herself hurt, not to hurt others.
If you read a lot of books you learn both everything you ever wanted to know about the species and everything you never wanted to know, both how wonderful people can be and how inutterably vile, and you learn people have divergent opinions, important when you come from a mono-minded community. Then you decide what you think.
From books you learn more about other people than you could possibly do by talking to them. From the Net you learn more than you ever could by reading books because anyone with a telephone line and a computer who is capable of stringing a paragraph together and learning FTP can have a Website for free without benefit of publisher and anyone with a telephone line and a computer can read on-line most of the great books of the world.
There has been and indeed is in the ‘education debate’ some very deliberate confusion which has mostly amounted to all post-school education is degree-level without anyone asking why or if you do ask why you’re a fascist. This is coupled with a refusal to accept that when free education has long been available to all failure is not the result of imperialist capitalist hyenas.
If children do not want to learn the business of schools is to encourage them to learn. If they still refuse to learn when not 5 but 15 that is their responsibility – and to say 16-year-olds are old enough to vote and old enough to have sex, both adult decisions requiring a degree of maturity and sense of responsibility, but are not old enough to make choices concerning the rest of their lives is of course claptrap.
It is the responsibility of schools to teach. It is the responsibility of schools to stretch children and encourage them to go as far as they are willing and able. It is the responsibility of schools to examine to see if learning has occurred. It is the responsibility of schools to provide everyone with a good general education and primarily ensure that everyone can read, write and do sums, without which the whole business of school will be a nightmare, primarily to the child concerned, and with which children are empowered to pursue, perhaps later in life, as far as they are willing and able, what interests them. It is also the business of schools to be honest, which means to tell children when they are failing.
It is fundamental to most current social woes that people cannot change or should not be expected to. Limitless patience and tolerance must be applied to crooks and idiots. Clearly this is deadly to education. From it has stemmed the blight of relevance when actually education is about broadening horizons, discovering things you have never dreamed existed. It is about improving on the raw material, transforming some ghastly little twat speaking in grunts and hitting people into an interested and civilized person – that is indeed ‘interested’ not ‘interesting‘, though he or she may also become interesting: someone who has become enthusiastic about something outside himself or herself, whether it be plumbing and main drainage or C11th century oral literature, and takes an interest in the world around him or her, including the people in it, who matter equally and should not be hit.
The old order, those forces of conservatism, for all their language about promoting the individual, and freedom and liberty, they held people back. They kept people down. They stunted people's potential. Year after year. Decade after decade.
Blair’s address to Conference in 1999.
Failure may not be, therefore, the result, as the appalling twat who is temporarily Prime Minister has put it, the result of a Right-wing Establishment plot but the result of a corrupt Leftist educational establishment:
[I’m still of course waiting to learn how at the end of the C19th and in the early C20th a strong Lancashire accent, artisan origins and a hammer and sickle embroidered on his sleeve kept my grandfather down, dahn Sarf, by the way: they moved to London shortly after the end of WWI. I should also love to know how my father's cousin, Professor Rodney Howard Hilton, a lad from Middleton who gorriself scholarship to Balliol in the 30s (his mum feared he would become foreign) was kept down. Labour really cannot stand people being intelligent. In Labour-speak the unintelligent have been kept down by the evil failure of Oxford to award them scholarships.]
If you are not bright and not industrious, you are not going to become a brain surgeon any more than you’re going to become a lecturer in mediaeval Persian. The human capacity for self-delusion is such that you may be entirely capable of believing that the barrier is them evil elites and establishments. Blair’s and Mandelson’s contributions to this are not useful or in other words they foster delusion and resentment and are calculated to.
If you lack the manual dexterity of a mill-girl you are not suited to being a brain surgeon. I at least do not wish any part of me under the knife wielded by someone all thumbs.
If you possess the manual dexterity of a mill-girl but no brain, you are also not going to be a brain surgeon.
The marvellous advances in technology mean that work that is purely cerebral is within the grasp of anyone who has the necessary brain-power, regardless of physical disability, viz Stephen Hawkings. I suppose one has to mention David Blunkett. The man’s a pig but that doesn’t undermine his remarkable achievement in overcoming blindness. [The blog Big Blunkett is more charitable and says he might be a nice man in private life.]
We can’t all be everything is a commonplace within the grasp of most people except the Cabinet. So is that intelligence is not an index of moral worth. The most internationally renowned of professors may be a complete shit. Education standards must be collapsed in order to pretend that as many people as possible are highly intelligent because to say they’re not is mysteriously some reflection on their value as people. What the hell does it matter if you’re a dustman so long as you’re a happy dustman. If you don’t want to be a dustman and are therefore an unhappy dustman, go for exploring what you do want to do.
Education is something a large number of people are at all the time, especially now in the Internet age, only they don’t necessarily call it that. Education is what happens when a group of users of a particular software program form a group, on the Web or in RL, swap tips, where the more advanced users help the newbies. They might as easily be rose-growers or enthusiasts for archaeology. Education is what happens when people look things up, whether in a library or on the Net.
Such education is utterly dependent on literacy and sufficient functioning brain cells to be able to figure out the Net. It is also dependent on basic research skills, not on what you know but on whether you know how to find out more.
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The millions of people who have taught themselves to use computers is a very obvious example of people’s ability to learn on their own if they want to. If the mind is engaged, if there is enthusiasm, if there is not learning by rote, people follow up leads and teach themselves or ask questions of friends
While the principle of life-long education and the opportunity to return full-time to the classroom or lecture-theatre is fine, the financial commitments that come with adulthood may preclude it. Full-time education is not just for the formative years but it is useful to take advantage of it then rather than later.
My own degree subject, modern languages, is successfully taught at both the vocational and the academic level and no-one seems to get at all flustered or confused by this. If I sign up for an evening-course ‘French for Computer Nerds’, I do not think of it as postgraduate study. Vocational training imparts knowledge necessary to the performance of a particular job or functioning in a particular situation. It does not challenge what you think about the world or change how you think. A subject may be approached at a variety of levels. Notwithstanding the emanations from Ms Morris, the vocational level is not the one requiring most brain activity. Today we find the quaint reversal that those who do are vastly superior to those who can think. Those who do a particular task are indeed often those best placed to say what is wrong with how it is being done, what causes problems, what does not achieve the desired result, and workers at every level should be both listened to and heeded, but that still doesn’t necessarily make them capable of meshing their views with those of countless other colleagues performing other roles. Software is another example. Vocational training teaches the use of a program. Academic study analyses the program, teaches the programming language, is the province of those capable of rectifying the glitches in the program and writing a better one. If you have a profound knowledge of and possibly a degree in aeronautics or computer science and pursue your knowledge of a modern language such that you become a top-level translator, the complexity of the material with which you deal is equivalent to degree-level work and your Institute of Linguists Diploma is not a vocational qualification but a professional one, a professional one being defined as a practical qualification at an advanced intellectual level.
People can and do and should pursue subjects as far as they are willing and able. What we are primarily talking about here is not brain-power but attitude. After 100 years of free schooling there is still a section of society who proves resistant, appears not to wish to learn anything whatever and leaves school pig-ignorant and whining loudly. They are not the poor lickle victims of the elites, and the problem is not only that they might have resisted learning even to read and write with any fluency but that they have resisted any burgeoning emotional maturity such that they are not going to settle to be decent citizens doing a fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay and bringing up happy, well-adjusted children as well as anything else they might be interested in, but are intellectually and emotionally about two years old, practically as empty-headed and certainly as ready to throw tantrums. This is a problem when young men are six feet two.
Labour ravings about education, opportunity and transforming society can probably be reduced to: there are some people who are very incurious, a sort of lumpenproletariat uninterested in any kind of self-development (the actual lumpenproletariat were uninterested in revolutionary advancement), who now have the opportunity to spend their leisure on activities educational only to the sociologist, who are couch potatoes, who have not been made to learn even the basics at school, whose children are resistant to anything except short-term thrills, and the Labour Party can’t bear it, people are good and wise , they cry, and so will do anything to schooling to avoid facing it, chiefly of course avoid teaching or the notion there is a core body of knowledge that should be taught to enable all people to function at all.
Some people have got to be dustmen. Ain’t life a bitch. Until making all the liberal bourgeois intellectuals do all the heavy and dirty work is legalized, it’s going to be the people least successful at school That doesn’t mean they’re the least important members of society; in fact they’re critical. Nor does it mean they are unsuccessful as people. There are people who are content with family life, who reckon they know what they need to know to live the lives they want to live, who may indeed possess a considerable body of knowledge of things that fall outside conventional definitions of education, whether rose-growing or furniture restoration. They might be into any one of a hundred things that don’t quite make it as a job, whether it’s politics or reading or making kites or being fathers. Being a good father and clearing up the garbage are vastly more important than many a drivel-job where you get to wear a suit and keep your hands clean. Fashion and PR spring to mind. So does being a grossly incompetent manager. That workers by hand rather than brain are essential and important is Basic Labour. It is not Basic New Labour, which seems to want to push everyone into pseudo-worker-by-brain jobs.
The Labour Party seems unable to bear everyone does not have certificates. It seems now that Fred who makes furniture in his spare time has to have a degree. [One of my great-grandfathers was a cabinet-maker and thus extremely good at making furniture. Me, I make other kinds of Cabinet. That’s social mobility for you.] It is important to a human being to have a good general education and something to show an employer to demonstrate that this has been achieved. It is not important to have a load of phoney certificates otherwise known as GCSEs proclaiming you talented in languages or science when you are not and it is not important to have a so-called degree claiming you are among the brightest in the country when you are not.
Although the ultimate aim of the Soviet government is to achieve full communism and equal remuneration for all kinds of work, it cannot, however, introduce this equality straightaway, at the present time, when only the first steps of the transition from capitalism to communism are being taken. For a certain period of time, therefore, we must retain the present higher remuneration for specialists in order to give them an incentive to work no worse, and even better, than they have worked before; and with the same object in view, we must not reject the system of paying bonuses for the most successful work, particularly organisational work.
It is equally necessary to surround the bourgeois specialist with a comradely atmosphere created by working hand in hand with the masses of rank-and-file workers led by politically-conscious Communists in order to promote mutual understanding and friendship between workers by hand and brain whom capitalism kept apart
Lenin: Rough Draft of the Programme of the RCP [Russian Communist Party]
In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has vanished; after labor has become not only a means of life but life's prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly -- only then then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!
Marx: Critique of the Gotha Programme
It is not intrinsic even to Marxist-Leninism and certainly not to the British Labour Party that, brain surgeon and mill-girl, dustman and lecturer, we are not all workers each contributing something to society, that we have different abilities and aptitudes.
Labour is resolved to change as speedily as possible by constructive measures the social and economic system which confers unfair privileges on the few, and undeserved hardship on the many. The working of this system has brought unemployment and reduced wages to the workers, suffering and starvation to their families, loss of opportunities for full mental and physical development to their children, anxiety and worry to the salaried and professional workers and small traders. Labour means to bring about a more equitable distribution of the wealth produced by the common effort of the workers by hand and brain.
1922 Labour Party Manifesto
Remember (shall I allow you to forget?) that it was a Labour Government that established grammar schools. We can’t all be brain surgeons. We can establish a society where, no matter how deprived your background, if you’re willing and able to be a brain surgeon you can be. The hatred of excellence, the screams of ‘elitism’, the insistent hysterical levelling-down are not an intrinsic part of the Left (though as I argue elsewhere they do follow from certain other basic propositions). The new egalitarianism is part of the politics of envy – if I can’t do it, you can’t either – and the new egalitarians are the fundamentally pathetic, intellectually and emotionally, the gormless, the cowards, the bullies, the cheats, the liars, the lazy, the weak and vicious, hating anyone who’s made a better job of being a human than they have.
The upshot of this assault on reality will surely be not only private schools but private universities. The arts have one tremendous advantage over the sciences: they are cheap to run, requiring no massively expensive laboratories. The arts need only books, pen, paper and now a PC.
Policy, you want policy? Ah well….
1. Children shall be exposed to possibilities from the earliest age in the hope that they shall find something they are good at and which interests them, these possibilities including elementary science and geography – why the sun makes it hot, why it rains, the nitrogen cycle, how a pushbike works, how a motorbike works, how you move, why too many chips make you fat etc – all of which can be made intensely child-friendly by computer animations – general knowledge of the location of towns, rivers, counties, countries and oceans, the main events in British history and world history and the main milestones in the establishment of liberty and democracy.
2. All children shall learn to read, write simple grammatically correct and properly spelled sentences and do arithmetic, including mental arithmetic because shop-assistants who look at you as though you’re a Martian and reach for their calculators when you tell them that 78p and 22p = £1 are a pain in the backside.
3. All children shall be encouraged in creative thinking, in the exercise of imagination, by understanding of what creativity is, not by being encouraged to write drivel or left to make meaningless daubs, creativity being the deconstruction of what is into its constituent parts and the putting of some or all of those constituent parts together differently, plus or not the addition of other elements to make something new in the world, understanding all human advances have depended not on an obsession with what is, trapping people and standing in the way like a four-metre thick wall, but on the mental jump to conceiving what is not but can be brought into existence, whether that thing be a clean bright factory instead of a dark satanic mill or the wheel. If you have a green square and a dark red rectangle it may be a brick wall in front of a patch of grass, but if you move the dark red rectangle, put it above the green square and make it blue, then you have the beginnings of grass and sky. This may be applied equally to the most formal of classical representations, a Rembrandt for instance, and to abstractions and may start from the age of 0 + not a lot. Essentially, children shall learn how to distinguish between what is and what is not, what is being an accurate measurement of the dimensions of a brick and what is not being supposing you changed the proportions, why aren’t bricks square?
4. Children shall be expected to write formal essays showing that they have understood what they have learned, starting with two or three sentences and moving on to a couple of paragraphs from the time they can write.
5 Illiteracy shall mean failure in examinations, no matter what the subject.
6. The minimum standard for university entrance shall include Mathematics at the old O Level standard, even if the candidate intends to read an arts subject.
7. Those who make no effort shall fail and shall be told they are failing because they do not make effort of which they are capable, the failure reflecting a state of mind that is alterable, not an innate fact of their being which is not. Until the age of about 14, they shall nonetheless be cajoled and encouraged to succeed, but may then be told they are choosing to be illiterate, ignorant and idle and unemployable and the hell with them.
From the Website of the London Mathematical Society
? Are current standards in mathematics at GCSE (Grades A--C) in any way comparable to those associated with GCE O-level and CSE (Grade 1)?
The percentages of students obtaining Grades A to C have risen sharply in the last decade, and there would seem to be clear evidence of grade dilution. This and other structural changes have had a marked effect on the `gap' between GCSE and A-level. Since 1994 students can routinely obtain a Grade B taking only the intermediate tier GCSE papers, which assess students on a reduced syllabus (requiring, for example, very little algebra). Moreover, the mathematical knowledge now required to obtain an A* on GCSE papers in no way corresponds to that needed to obtain a good grade on the GCE additional mathematics formerly taken by many mathematically high-attaining students….
However, few would dispute the observations that:
(a) in recent years less emphasis has been placed on the acquisition of skills involving arithmetic, fractions, ratios, algebraic technique, and the basic geometry of triangles, lines and circles;
(b) all of these neglected topics are vital for further study in mathematics, science and engineering.
These etchings of mine have not come about due to the discovery of doctors and biologists who cannot write cogently about reality, rationality or Racine but by the discovery of doctors and biologists who cannot write cogently about medicine and biology. The biological sciences are really going to benefit from a generation of ’researchers’ so fur-brained they can’t describe their first researches. How can you identify unanswered questions if you cannot think? Welcome to the world of those from whom clarity of thought is absent.
What the educational establishment is going to explain is this: No more than half a dozen pages are required – what you did, why you did it, how you did it, what the results were and what those results might mean: Blendit’s syndrome is a rare disease of the connective tissue, causing severe debilitation, especially in women of child-bearing age (1). Laggie et al (2) have shown that some 80% of sufferers in this group have a defect in the ability to produce the growth factor chronine. Chronine reacts with the hormone condosit in the production of healthy tissue (3, 4). Condosit is produced by the ovaries during the luteal peak (5). Silofome Z has been shown to stimulate the production of chronine in vitro... It is really isn’t very difficult, especially if you’ve been doing the work for the last two years. Of course you do have to have something resembling a mind. She approached the keyboard cautiously. Intraduction (was that how you spelled it?) My name is Susan and I am a doctor. No, that wasn’t what she’d seen in the journals.
We are talking (repetitively) of the inability to select and order data, of the inability to question and analyse given propositions, to stand outside a given frame of reference and question its foundations. It does not matter here whether we are talking of oncology or Origen. We are talking specifically of how it does not take everyone six months to produce half a dozen pages. Some of us, indeed, in our spare time, can put together in a couple of years the material for some 20 or 30 reasonably original contributions to thought. We are talking about the marked absence of any intellect whatever. Cannot write simple descriptive essays. The short word for this is stupid. Any undergraduate in the Faculty of Arts of a real university could knock off such a paper in his or her sleep, but then of course arts undergraduates do deal with original material, are expected to be able to sift Kant or Chaucer, are not spoon-fed from potted versions and summaries, are expected to digest vast amounts of reading and select from their reading. Note also that this inability is not an inability to write the original research grant, of which some junior doctors and scientists are equally incapable. It is an inability to describe what they fuck they have been doing with the grant money for the last two or three years.
A real degree entails reading, synthesizing and questioning millions of words on and around one’s subject. After that some sadistic academic asks you questions you hadn’t thought of and expects reasoned written and oral answers. In order to give such answers, a high level of literacy is required. By this means the mind is put through hoops, given the work-out from hell and in short trained.
The subject of a degree is essentially secondary. It’s very entertaining to think of Morris chundering to herself about what Wordsworth’s words are worth compared to the ability to read the instructions on an assay-kit, but she and her ghastly kind do (as ever) miss the point. The subject is just something to practise with, the choice of equipment in the gym. Take mind away from the study of French language and literature from the year 0 to the present day and what you are left with is what the mechanics think an arts degree is, a little heap of couplets and verb-forms. It will, however, be obvious even to the thickest materialist that his face is not being ripped open by lines of sixteenth-century French poetry, he is not being disembowelled by the vowel sounds of Vulgar Latin, his throat is not being cut by the imperfect subjunctive and the bienséances are by no means opening up in a mushroom cloud above his head.
These etchings have come about because a Marxist rabble despises those of us who do write cogently about reality, rationality or Racine. Imagination is that without which nothing man-made: no towns, no drains, no books, no plays, no planes, no trains, no rhymes, no electric light, only lots and lots and lots of grass and trees and a few guys and girls called Urg and Urga who are just about to develop the capacity to imagine how things could be different around here.
Imagination is that which takes a cold hard look at how things are, takes them apart and puts the pieces together in a different order, adds new pieces, jettisons superfluous pieces, makes things different. Imagination does not practise given ‘skills to benefit the economy’. Imagination looks at how things are done and finds a completely different way of doing them.
Of course once you have defined all history as the history of the class struggle you don’t really have anything else to say about it. You have also reduced the entire human experience to a struggle for power. You are therefore incredibly boring. Uggh with his club is not what is interesting and delightful about human beings.
Mind sits anterior to data. Mind sits anterior to data, questioning, synthesizing, comparing, creating and of course checking on the reality quotient.. The upper level of mentation, the capacity to select, order, analyse, question and synthesize information and that faculty called imagination which breaks down what is into its constituent parts and remakes it as something new in the world, has been denied. Call it the upper storey. They do not visit the top floor. This is what I mean by the abolition of intellect (have to spell these things out for the brain-washed). They can function, so far as they can be said to function intellectually at all, only within a given frame of reference. They are incapable of handling questioning of the frame of reference. Indeed they are the brightest stars in the University's firmament. Mind is evident in the world. Religious freaks call it the work of the devil and commie freaks call it insanity.
The Leftist approach to education is based on what has been described here as the absence of any CPU and which may also be described as the belief the outside equals the inside. It has also been stated here that self-realization comes when internal reality equals external reality, when the outside equals the inside. The difference is of course that in the latter the inside changes to become capable of perceiving the realities of the outside and in the former there is not supposed to be any inside only a blank sheet on which is imprinted what is going on outside.
You should not learn is the top and bottom of it. Certainly you should not learn anything that affects the inside but all learning is despised as 'conditioning'. You bet: some of us find life functions slightly more swiftly and smoothly when one has been 'conditioned' with the multiplication tables or the reflex response that 6+4 = 10. I got sixpence for knowing my tables once. Of course I'm scarred for life. You should not be exposed to anything that may change you. The problem is education is exposure to that which may change you, broaden your horizons, cause you to change your mind. This terror of 'indoctrination' lies behind child-centred education,. They have difficulty distinguishing between fact and opinion. Fact: Napoleon defeated at Battle of Waterloo. Opinion: good thing/bad thing. Give reasons for your answer. Actually what they have difficulty with is the notion there might be perspectives on Waterloo other than imperialist powers in conflict. Lorenz on imprinting is a fascinating parallel here. (What's the damned thing called, not King Solomon's Mines, King Solomon's Ring - yeah, yeah, and I've read Ardrey too and the glorious Elaine Morgan's The Descent of Woman). To the Left we're all ducklings. This is the essential primate-brain terror of words as threatening, words as power, the primitive belief in magick and words of power that can change you.
When something is as despised and disparaged as the traditional arts degree, whom does it threaten? What is the problem with 5-10% of the population being unusually adept at reading, writing and thinking? Surely we add zest to the community, keep it on its toes, innovate? Don't people like new ideas? What are people so terribly afraid we might read, write and think about?. We don't like change, do we, or argument or verbal dexterity.
The supposed abolition of mind supposedly rendered the universities without purpose, and simulacra had to be created, within the original buildings and in new ones, supposed institutions of higher education from which the training of mind was absent, since you cannot train something that does not exist. Similarly, since mind does not exist (what processes any information at all is unclear), the amount of and complexity of information people could be expected to absorb became acutely truncated; clearly it is taxing to an entirely mechanical body to expect it to be able to spell, punctuate or know anything outside an extremely limited field (that and the amount of and complexity of information the stupid can absorb is acutely truncated and they must not learn what they are not). This represents of course the ever-present fundamental denial of reality, in this case of generations of human beings, many of whom, unfortunately for the programmers, are still alive and kicking. The intellectual rigour, high level of literacy and clarity of thought and expression associated with the traditional arts degree mysteriously became irrelevant to the modern age for reasons not clearly (not surprisingly) stated and were systematically denigrated and abolished, superficially because they are outside either the intellectual reach or the interest or both of the majority of people or because the subject-matter is held irrelevant (indeed we do not wish people to learn about being human), but actually because a) they too, being qualities of mind, could not exist and b) because they alone pose any danger to the sub-Marxist intellectual hegemony, the piffling deluded irrational tripe that passes for thought on the Left and is evident particularly in the chipmunk droppings of Dead Man’s Gulch, as the DES is affectionately known. Particularly of course they dislike the ability to use language born of the study of language and literature. The formal essay is out-dated? Anything that separates the sheep from the goats is out-dated.
Labour myth – Labour evil – dismisses visible intelligence as the result of well-off parents. Ministers deny – affect to deny – any differences in individual ability. Sundry definitions and pseudo-definitions of intelligence abound. Here is a simple one: no sweat, man. . One of the problems in the education non-debate is that anyone who went to the sort of school where people cake-walked 8 or more academic O Levels and still had time for uh, sexual experiment, rock ‘n’ roll and reading omnivorously and vociferously, seized with ‘satiable curtiosity’ knows what I mean and the rest have never been exposed to the very bright, have never found out what they are not.
What the modern phenomenon of, it sometimes seems, universal exam stress and near-breakdown indicates to the bright is that the sufferers are not so bright and being idiotically pushed in the wrong direction because idiots think everyone should have a pseudo-academic education.
Intelligence can be cultivated. If with application and perseverance you dig away at a vexing question until you solve it, you have added to your ways of thinking, found new ways of looking at the world. If you work out how to solve an unfamiliar algebra problem, the next time you are faced with an unfamiliar algebra problem you will have new approaches in your armoury. If you work out what in the world Hegel was on about, where he was coming from, as they say, see how he thought, you have a new weapon with which to tackle Hume. Intelligence remains unfair and unequal. IQ tests measure mental speed and there is nothing classist or racist in figuring out what deductions can be made from the statements that Ann is taller than Rasheed, Sean is shorter than Grace and Grace is not as tall as Rasheed or what is the next number in the sequence 144, 121, 100, 81. Probably intelligence is primarily relational, the number of neurons that spark between the ears as you read, the connections you make, the putting together. The more connections you make the more you can make. If you think a lot you get better at it.
Intelligence is also being able to distinguish between real and false connections. That Jane’s coat is orange and marigolds are also orange does not mean that everything that can sensibly be said about marigolds applies equally to Jane’s coat.
You don’t really know what stupidity is until you have worked in the public sector. ‘There’s a hole in my bucket, dear Liza, there’s a hole in my bucket, dear Liza, a hole.‘ This site contends that leaden ox-like thickness is not fixed, that those in whom nothing appears to move between the ears are not necessarily those in whom nothing can move between the ears but that it is rather that no teacher, no employer, has suggested to them that they switch on that which is between their ears, connect it to the mains
‘What are you complaining about, only in our country is poetry truly respected; people are even killed because of it. That happens nowhere else.’
(Osip Mandelstam, 1891-1938; arrested in 1931 and sent into internal exile; released in 1937; arrested again 1938 and sentenced to five years’ hard labour in Siberia; died later that year in a transit camp.)
98% of my DNA shared with the chimp! And I brachiate! It really obsesses them. Clearly the goal of biological evolution is strap-hanging on the Victoria Line.
We do see the roots of the contempt for literacy, I trust, the hysteria evoked by the word illiterate, the contempt for the humanities. Chimps do not need an advanced grasp of language; the chimp world does not have history or philosophy or literature or require the capacity for independent thought. Sustained writing has no place in the world of the chimpanzee. Since everything in the chimp-world is fixed, books that change things are an impossibility.
Just think! A Britain in which no-one writes books! Especially critical ones. In which everyone is ignorant of history, philosophy, literature. Of course it’s not quite like that – ever heard of bookshops, ever heard of the Internet (indeed there are a lot of people on-line who know a great deal about liberty and democracy) - but mentally they inhabit a monkey-world in which it is like that, which is one thing, and spreading this slime over the entire nation is apparently the goal of the Government, which is another.
We do see, I hope, that we are having a little Cultural Revolution whereby people do not need to know about history, philosophy, politics, literature, theology or any other aspect of being human, whereby it is mysteriously irrelevant to know there was a Reformation, an English Bill of Rights, a United States Constitution, an Enlightenment or a French Revolution, not to mention a Magna Carta, a Peasants‘ Revolt or indeed a place called Woodstock, where four thousand years of insights into being human of poets, philosophers and other writers are irrelevant.
How are the illiterate and brain-dead to benefit the economy and society in general? Have they thought this through, you hear me cry. Of course they bloody have: better the stagnation so reminiscent of the late unlamented USSR than troublesome people who know they live in a free country.
These etchings of mine have come about through coming across a rabble of stupid, corrupt, ignorant, illiterate, irrational criminals pretending to run the NHS. But of course they have degrees so they must be brilliant! They do not have degrees and they are not brilliant.
You do not set limits on how bright I am allowed to be, how literate I am allowed to be, how questioning I am allowed to be, how democratic I am allowed to be, in order that I do not show up the enemies of democracy. You do not try to mutilate me mentally or physically with your social engineering, demand I be illiterate, servile, criminal and thick in order not to upset those who are actually illiterate, servile, criminal and thick.
I contend, it will astound you to learn, that education policy is not merely wrong-headed, but malign, intent on the production of an illiterate, irrational and painfully ignorant so-called professional class, who are therefore easily manipulated and not only will not but cannot argue against whatever drivelling directives they are given by those hostile to freedom and democracy.
Homo sum; humani nil a me alienum puto
[I am a man. I count nothing human foreign to me.]
Terence: Heauton Timorumenon, 77
Quot homines tot sententiae; suo’ quoique mos.
[There are as many opinions as there are people: each has his correct way.]
Terence: Phormio, 203
The humanities teach about being human, about love, death, fear, pain, sex and the whole damn thing. Books, all books, down to Mills and Boon or The Story of ‘O’ express a perspective on being human, one person’s take on this life business. If you read a lot of different books, you get a lot of people’s take. If you read a lot of similar books and consider them the be-all and end-all, you will become dangerously deluded. This applies equally to the reader of Mills and Boon and the reader of Mein Kampf and its cousins, though the usually female who believes life is as depicted by Barbara Cartland is of course likely only to get herself hurt, not to hurt others.
If you read a lot of books you learn both everything you ever wanted to know about the species and everything you never wanted to know, both how wonderful people can be and how inutterably vile, and you learn people have divergent opinions, important when you come from a mono-minded community. Then you decide what you think.
From books you learn more about other people than you could possibly do by talking to them. From the Net you learn more than you ever could by reading books because anyone with a telephone line and a computer who is capable of stringing a paragraph together and learning FTP can have a Website for free without benefit of publisher and anyone with a telephone line and a computer can read on-line most of the great books of the world.
There has been and indeed is in the ‘education debate’ some very deliberate confusion which has mostly amounted to all post-school education is degree-level without anyone asking why or if you do ask why you’re a fascist. This is coupled with a refusal to accept that when free education has long been available to all failure is not the result of imperialist capitalist hyenas.
If children do not want to learn the business of schools is to encourage them to learn. If they still refuse to learn when not 5 but 15 that is their responsibility – and to say 16-year-olds are old enough to vote and old enough to have sex, both adult decisions requiring a degree of maturity and sense of responsibility, but are not old enough to make choices concerning the rest of their lives is of course claptrap.
It is the responsibility of schools to teach. It is the responsibility of schools to stretch children and encourage them to go as far as they are willing and able. It is the responsibility of schools to examine to see if learning has occurred. It is the responsibility of schools to provide everyone with a good general education and primarily ensure that everyone can read, write and do sums, without which the whole business of school will be a nightmare, primarily to the child concerned, and with which children are empowered to pursue, perhaps later in life, as far as they are willing and able, what interests them. It is also the business of schools to be honest, which means to tell children when they are failing.
It is fundamental to most current social woes that people cannot change or should not be expected to. Limitless patience and tolerance must be applied to crooks and idiots. Clearly this is deadly to education. From it has stemmed the blight of relevance when actually education is about broadening horizons, discovering things you have never dreamed existed. It is about improving on the raw material, transforming some ghastly little twat speaking in grunts and hitting people into an interested and civilized person – that is indeed ‘interested’ not ‘interesting‘, though he or she may also become interesting: someone who has become enthusiastic about something outside himself or herself, whether it be plumbing and main drainage or C11th century oral literature, and takes an interest in the world around him or her, including the people in it, who matter equally and should not be hit.
The old order, those forces of conservatism, for all their language about promoting the individual, and freedom and liberty, they held people back. They kept people down. They stunted people's potential. Year after year. Decade after decade.
Blair’s address to Conference in 1999.
Failure may not be, therefore, the result, as the appalling twat who is temporarily Prime Minister has put it, the result of a Right-wing Establishment plot but the result of a corrupt Leftist educational establishment:
[I’m still of course waiting to learn how at the end of the C19th and in the early C20th a strong Lancashire accent, artisan origins and a hammer and sickle embroidered on his sleeve kept my grandfather down, dahn Sarf, by the way: they moved to London shortly after the end of WWI. I should also love to know how my father's cousin, Professor Rodney Howard Hilton, a lad from Middleton who gorriself scholarship to Balliol in the 30s (his mum feared he would become foreign) was kept down. Labour really cannot stand people being intelligent. In Labour-speak the unintelligent have been kept down by the evil failure of Oxford to award them scholarships.]
If you are not bright and not industrious, you are not going to become a brain surgeon any more than you’re going to become a lecturer in mediaeval Persian. The human capacity for self-delusion is such that you may be entirely capable of believing that the barrier is them evil elites and establishments. Blair’s and Mandelson’s contributions to this are not useful or in other words they foster delusion and resentment and are calculated to.
If you lack the manual dexterity of a mill-girl you are not suited to being a brain surgeon. I at least do not wish any part of me under the knife wielded by someone all thumbs.
If you possess the manual dexterity of a mill-girl but no brain, you are also not going to be a brain surgeon.
The marvellous advances in technology mean that work that is purely cerebral is within the grasp of anyone who has the necessary brain-power, regardless of physical disability, viz Stephen Hawkings. I suppose one has to mention David Blunkett. The man’s a pig but that doesn’t undermine his remarkable achievement in overcoming blindness. [The blog Big Blunkett is more charitable and says he might be a nice man in private life.]
We can’t all be everything is a commonplace within the grasp of most people except the Cabinet. So is that intelligence is not an index of moral worth. The most internationally renowned of professors may be a complete shit. Education standards must be collapsed in order to pretend that as many people as possible are highly intelligent because to say they’re not is mysteriously some reflection on their value as people. What the hell does it matter if you’re a dustman so long as you’re a happy dustman. If you don’t want to be a dustman and are therefore an unhappy dustman, go for exploring what you do want to do.
Education is something a large number of people are at all the time, especially now in the Internet age, only they don’t necessarily call it that. Education is what happens when a group of users of a particular software program form a group, on the Web or in RL, swap tips, where the more advanced users help the newbies. They might as easily be rose-growers or enthusiasts for archaeology. Education is what happens when people look things up, whether in a library or on the Net.
Such education is utterly dependent on literacy and sufficient functioning brain cells to be able to figure out the Net. It is also dependent on basic research skills, not on what you know but on whether you know how to find out more.
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The millions of people who have taught themselves to use computers is a very obvious example of people’s ability to learn on their own if they want to. If the mind is engaged, if there is enthusiasm, if there is not learning by rote, people follow up leads and teach themselves or ask questions of friends
While the principle of life-long education and the opportunity to return full-time to the classroom or lecture-theatre is fine, the financial commitments that come with adulthood may preclude it. Full-time education is not just for the formative years but it is useful to take advantage of it then rather than later.
My own degree subject, modern languages, is successfully taught at both the vocational and the academic level and no-one seems to get at all flustered or confused by this. If I sign up for an evening-course ‘French for Computer Nerds’, I do not think of it as postgraduate study. Vocational training imparts knowledge necessary to the performance of a particular job or functioning in a particular situation. It does not challenge what you think about the world or change how you think. A subject may be approached at a variety of levels. Notwithstanding the emanations from Ms Morris, the vocational level is not the one requiring most brain activity. Today we find the quaint reversal that those who do are vastly superior to those who can think. Those who do a particular task are indeed often those best placed to say what is wrong with how it is being done, what causes problems, what does not achieve the desired result, and workers at every level should be both listened to and heeded, but that still doesn’t necessarily make them capable of meshing their views with those of countless other colleagues performing other roles. Software is another example. Vocational training teaches the use of a program. Academic study analyses the program, teaches the programming language, is the province of those capable of rectifying the glitches in the program and writing a better one. If you have a profound knowledge of and possibly a degree in aeronautics or computer science and pursue your knowledge of a modern language such that you become a top-level translator, the complexity of the material with which you deal is equivalent to degree-level work and your Institute of Linguists Diploma is not a vocational qualification but a professional one, a professional one being defined as a practical qualification at an advanced intellectual level.
People can and do and should pursue subjects as far as they are willing and able. What we are primarily talking about here is not brain-power but attitude. After 100 years of free schooling there is still a section of society who proves resistant, appears not to wish to learn anything whatever and leaves school pig-ignorant and whining loudly. They are not the poor lickle victims of the elites, and the problem is not only that they might have resisted learning even to read and write with any fluency but that they have resisted any burgeoning emotional maturity such that they are not going to settle to be decent citizens doing a fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay and bringing up happy, well-adjusted children as well as anything else they might be interested in, but are intellectually and emotionally about two years old, practically as empty-headed and certainly as ready to throw tantrums. This is a problem when young men are six feet two.
Labour ravings about education, opportunity and transforming society can probably be reduced to: there are some people who are very incurious, a sort of lumpenproletariat uninterested in any kind of self-development (the actual lumpenproletariat were uninterested in revolutionary advancement), who now have the opportunity to spend their leisure on activities educational only to the sociologist, who are couch potatoes, who have not been made to learn even the basics at school, whose children are resistant to anything except short-term thrills, and the Labour Party can’t bear it, people are good and wise , they cry, and so will do anything to schooling to avoid facing it, chiefly of course avoid teaching or the notion there is a core body of knowledge that should be taught to enable all people to function at all.
Some people have got to be dustmen. Ain’t life a bitch. Until making all the liberal bourgeois intellectuals do all the heavy and dirty work is legalized, it’s going to be the people least successful at school That doesn’t mean they’re the least important members of society; in fact they’re critical. Nor does it mean they are unsuccessful as people. There are people who are content with family life, who reckon they know what they need to know to live the lives they want to live, who may indeed possess a considerable body of knowledge of things that fall outside conventional definitions of education, whether rose-growing or furniture restoration. They might be into any one of a hundred things that don’t quite make it as a job, whether it’s politics or reading or making kites or being fathers. Being a good father and clearing up the garbage are vastly more important than many a drivel-job where you get to wear a suit and keep your hands clean. Fashion and PR spring to mind. So does being a grossly incompetent manager. That workers by hand rather than brain are essential and important is Basic Labour. It is not Basic New Labour, which seems to want to push everyone into pseudo-worker-by-brain jobs.
The Labour Party seems unable to bear everyone does not have certificates. It seems now that Fred who makes furniture in his spare time has to have a degree. [One of my great-grandfathers was a cabinet-maker and thus extremely good at making furniture. Me, I make other kinds of Cabinet. That’s social mobility for you.] It is important to a human being to have a good general education and something to show an employer to demonstrate that this has been achieved. It is not important to have a load of phoney certificates otherwise known as GCSEs proclaiming you talented in languages or science when you are not and it is not important to have a so-called degree claiming you are among the brightest in the country when you are not.
Although the ultimate aim of the Soviet government is to achieve full communism and equal remuneration for all kinds of work, it cannot, however, introduce this equality straightaway, at the present time, when only the first steps of the transition from capitalism to communism are being taken. For a certain period of time, therefore, we must retain the present higher remuneration for specialists in order to give them an incentive to work no worse, and even better, than they have worked before; and with the same object in view, we must not reject the system of paying bonuses for the most successful work, particularly organisational work.
It is equally necessary to surround the bourgeois specialist with a comradely atmosphere created by working hand in hand with the masses of rank-and-file workers led by politically-conscious Communists in order to promote mutual understanding and friendship between workers by hand and brain whom capitalism kept apart
Lenin: Rough Draft of the Programme of the RCP [Russian Communist Party]
In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has vanished; after labor has become not only a means of life but life's prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly -- only then then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!
Marx: Critique of the Gotha Programme
It is not intrinsic even to Marxist-Leninism and certainly not to the British Labour Party that, brain surgeon and mill-girl, dustman and lecturer, we are not all workers each contributing something to society, that we have different abilities and aptitudes.
Labour is resolved to change as speedily as possible by constructive measures the social and economic system which confers unfair privileges on the few, and undeserved hardship on the many. The working of this system has brought unemployment and reduced wages to the workers, suffering and starvation to their families, loss of opportunities for full mental and physical development to their children, anxiety and worry to the salaried and professional workers and small traders. Labour means to bring about a more equitable distribution of the wealth produced by the common effort of the workers by hand and brain.
1922 Labour Party Manifesto
Remember (shall I allow you to forget?) that it was a Labour Government that established grammar schools. We can’t all be brain surgeons. We can establish a society where, no matter how deprived your background, if you’re willing and able to be a brain surgeon you can be. The hatred of excellence, the screams of ‘elitism’, the insistent hysterical levelling-down are not an intrinsic part of the Left (though as I argue elsewhere they do follow from certain other basic propositions). The new egalitarianism is part of the politics of envy – if I can’t do it, you can’t either – and the new egalitarians are the fundamentally pathetic, intellectually and emotionally, the gormless, the cowards, the bullies, the cheats, the liars, the lazy, the weak and vicious, hating anyone who’s made a better job of being a human than they have.
The upshot of this assault on reality will surely be not only private schools but private universities. The arts have one tremendous advantage over the sciences: they are cheap to run, requiring no massively expensive laboratories. The arts need only books, pen, paper and now a PC.
Policy, you want policy? Ah well….
1. Children shall be exposed to possibilities from the earliest age in the hope that they shall find something they are good at and which interests them, these possibilities including elementary science and geography – why the sun makes it hot, why it rains, the nitrogen cycle, how a pushbike works, how a motorbike works, how you move, why too many chips make you fat etc – all of which can be made intensely child-friendly by computer animations – general knowledge of the location of towns, rivers, counties, countries and oceans, the main events in British history and world history and the main milestones in the establishment of liberty and democracy.
2. All children shall learn to read, write simple grammatically correct and properly spelled sentences and do arithmetic, including mental arithmetic because shop-assistants who look at you as though you’re a Martian and reach for their calculators when you tell them that 78p and 22p = £1 are a pain in the backside.
3. All children shall be encouraged in creative thinking, in the exercise of imagination, by understanding of what creativity is, not by being encouraged to write drivel or left to make meaningless daubs, creativity being the deconstruction of what is into its constituent parts and the putting of some or all of those constituent parts together differently, plus or not the addition of other elements to make something new in the world, understanding all human advances have depended not on an obsession with what is, trapping people and standing in the way like a four-metre thick wall, but on the mental jump to conceiving what is not but can be brought into existence, whether that thing be a clean bright factory instead of a dark satanic mill or the wheel. If you have a green square and a dark red rectangle it may be a brick wall in front of a patch of grass, but if you move the dark red rectangle, put it above the green square and make it blue, then you have the beginnings of grass and sky. This may be applied equally to the most formal of classical representations, a Rembrandt for instance, and to abstractions and may start from the age of 0 + not a lot. Essentially, children shall learn how to distinguish between what is and what is not, what is being an accurate measurement of the dimensions of a brick and what is not being supposing you changed the proportions, why aren’t bricks square?
4. Children shall be expected to write formal essays showing that they have understood what they have learned, starting with two or three sentences and moving on to a couple of paragraphs from the time they can write.
5 Illiteracy shall mean failure in examinations, no matter what the subject.
6. The minimum standard for university entrance shall include Mathematics at the old O Level standard, even if the candidate intends to read an arts subject.
7. Those who make no effort shall fail and shall be told they are failing because they do not make effort of which they are capable, the failure reflecting a state of mind that is alterable, not an innate fact of their being which is not. Until the age of about 14, they shall nonetheless be cajoled and encouraged to succeed, but may then be told they are choosing to be illiterate, ignorant and idle and unemployable and the hell with them.
From the Website of the London Mathematical Society
? Are current standards in mathematics at GCSE (Grades A--C) in any way comparable to those associated with GCE O-level and CSE (Grade 1)?
The percentages of students obtaining Grades A to C have risen sharply in the last decade, and there would seem to be clear evidence of grade dilution. This and other structural changes have had a marked effect on the `gap' between GCSE and A-level. Since 1994 students can routinely obtain a Grade B taking only the intermediate tier GCSE papers, which assess students on a reduced syllabus (requiring, for example, very little algebra). Moreover, the mathematical knowledge now required to obtain an A* on GCSE papers in no way corresponds to that needed to obtain a good grade on the GCE additional mathematics formerly taken by many mathematically high-attaining students….
However, few would dispute the observations that:
(a) in recent years less emphasis has been placed on the acquisition of skills involving arithmetic, fractions, ratios, algebraic technique, and the basic geometry of triangles, lines and circles;
(b) all of these neglected topics are vital for further study in mathematics, science and engineering.