We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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Back when the world was still damp from the Flood and Peter Davison was Dr Who, I was in the University Officers Training Corps. I don’t know if the term is still used by the British Army, but back then a green, typewritten piece of paper headed “Part One Orders” was always on display on the unit noticeboard. Well, I think it was green. It was certainly typewritten, because everything was at that time – that’s how I knew at once that the people saying that the “Rathergate” documents that purported to have been written by an officer of the Texas Air National Guard in 1973 were fake had a very good case. The big thing about Part One Orders was that they were orders. You had to obey them, which meant you had to know what they were. You were under orders to read the Orders, specifically to check whether they had changed since you last read them. Reading a short document once a week was not an onerous requirement for Officer Cadet Solent but I gather that proper soldiers had to check ’em every day and woe betide them if they did not. On the other hand, the existence of Part One Orders meant that if some almighty balls-up happened because someone did not realise that circumstances had changed, the tide of woe could be diverted away from the immediate ballser-upper if he could show that the change had never been announced on the P1s.
Poor lefties. They are under at least as strict a requirement to keep abreast with changes to their orders as that imposed by Section 5.121 of the Queen’s Regulations (1975) but nobody will ever openly tell them that the orders have changed. Not even on Bluesky. Maybe on WhatsApp if they are very high ranking, but the foot soldiers of the progressive movement just have to know by osmosis.
That is why I can find some pity in my heart for the teachers at Bilton School in Warwickshire who sent home a twelve year old girl called Courtney White for wearing a Union Jack dress on Diversity Day, and then found themselves being condemned by a Labour Prime Minister. Not a lot of pity, but some. Nobody told them that the world had changed since 2022. Obviously, they should have been able to work it out from the fact that Reform are leading in the polls but maybe they were too busy putting up posters to notice.
This will bring back memories for some of you:
The radical 1960s schools experiment that created a whole new alphabet – and left thousands of children unable to spell
The Initial Teaching Alphabet was a radical, little-known educational experiment trialled in British schools (and in other English-speaking countries) during the 1960s and 70s. Billed as a way to help children learn to read faster by making spelling more phonetically intuitive, it radically rewrote the rules of literacy for tens of thousands of children seemingly overnight. And then it vanished without explanation. Barely documented, rarely acknowledged, and quietly abandoned – but never quite forgotten by those it touched.
I just missed experiencing the delights of the Initial Teaching Alphabet. I knew of it; a few of the Ladybird ITA books, including, if I recall correctly, “Peepl at Wurk: The Poleesman” as illustrated in the article, lingered in cupboards and crannies at my primary school. I remember asking what those funny letters were and being given a fairly good explanation. I was quite old before I realised that most people didn’t know about it.
Looking at the Guardian article to which I link above and at the Wikipedia article on the ITA, the choice of letter forms seems to have been amateurish. Some of them resemble the letters of the International Phonetic Alphabet, but many of characters and pairs of characters used to represent vowels and diphthongs in the ITA contradict the way those same characters are used in the IPA. And what in the name of Paul Passy’s sainted aunt was the point of borrowing the “long S”, ʃ, from the IPA but then not using this character on its own to replace the digraph “sh”, as the IPA does? The ITA spelling of “ship” appears to be “ʃhip”, which is the worst of both worlds – the children had to learn the difficult concept that two letters can represent one sound, but still had to unlearn the funny S before they could read the word as it was written outside school.
The Guardian article, and even more so the comments to it, make much of the fact that the creator of the ITA, Sir James Pitman (the grandson of the man who invented Pitman’s shorthand) was a Conservative MP. In fact he was the sort of Progressive Conservative that socialist charities like to have on the Board of Trustees to prove they are not irredeemably partisan. “As a member of parliament, he championed many notable causes, notably nationalisation, education, and world security.” He was one of a long line of would-be reformers of English spelling and comes across as motivated only by a well-meaning desire to help the children of the English-speaking world cope with our famously odd orthography.
Pity the ITA was a flop. Well, probably a flop – though it certainly disappeared from schools quickly enough, and most of those who remembered it speak of the difficulty of having to learn to read twice, no systematic survey of its results was ever made, so we cannot be sure. A few brave voices in the comments say that it did them no harm and one or two even say it helped them.
However the majority view (which I share) is that it was one of many foolish experiments carried out on schoolchildren by bright-eyed educationalists throughout the 1960s and 70s because parents in those days were far too trusting of authority. Some of the Guardian commenters take a harsher view. Someone calling themselves “karapipiris” thunders,
The elephant in the room is this:
It was precisely this inconsistency that Conservative MP Sir James Pitman – grandson of Sir Isaac Pitman, the inventor of shorthand
In any society when power and influence is hereditary what one will get is damage done by trying out ideas of incompetents in the real world. I can imagine that dozens of people dedicated to educating children at the time actually had good ideas on how to do better, but they were not aristocrats.
In vain do other commenters point out that Pitman’s knighthood was not hereditary and that the ITA was actually a cross-party initiative originally proposed by a Labour MP, Montefiore Follick; the upvotes still flow in a mighty river to Mr, Ms, or Mx Karapipiris for saying that the reason that this ill-conceived scheme was so casually inflicted on so many children was that its leading spirit had a knighthood.
Karapipiris is wrong about the aristocracy part, but right about it being remarkable how little discussion or testing there was before an experiment which obviously had the potential to harm the children it was meant to help was launched in thousands of schools.
Someone called “BFEMBis” thinks they have seen through the conspiracy:
Apparently it was never introduced at Eton.
Ditto: Harrow
Ditto: St Paul’s
Ditto: Charterhouse, Winchester, Merchant Taylor’s, Gordenstoun, Benenden,…
Strange, that.
‘Makes yer fink,’ in’nit ?
Like Karapipiris, BFEMBis got plenty of upvotes for this asinine comment, although in fairness to the Guardian commentariat, the person who pointed out that all the posh schools listed start taking pupils at the age of thirteen got more. Once again, however, I must admit that BFEMBis does have the shadow of a point. I don’t know what the use of pseudo-Cockney eye dialect in “Makes yer fink,’ in’nit” was meant to convey, but the relatively low uptake of the ITA by private schools does indeed make yer fink. Despite being infested with at least as high a proportion of kaftan-wearers as the state sector, the private sector does seem to escape the worst of these fads. It introduces mad schemes just as enthusiastically as the state sector does but is quicker to dump them when they don’t work out.*
Why is that then? Why do private schools on average have stronger immunity to fads than state schools do? If BFEMBis and his/her/their upvoters finked a little more deeply about that question they might realise why so many people remain willing to pay double for their child’s education despite all that the current government throws at them.
A private school – or a “public” school in the British meaning of the term – cannot afford consistently bad results. “Bad” is a relative term: a surprising number of the UK’s fee-paying schools are aimed at children with special educational needs who have been failed by the state system. But whether success is measured in Oxbridge admissions or some kid who had been written off unexpectedly scraping a couple of GCSEs, a fee-paying school must be able to convince parents and prospective parents that the service they offer is worth the cost. If it cannot, those fees will dry up faster than you can say nief.
*Very occasionally, they do work out.
is all the terrorism carried out by Muslims. The London bombings of twenty years ago are but one entry in a long, long list. Muslims are much more prone to commit acts of terrorism than any other group in the world. This has been true for forty years.
No, this does not mean that all or most Muslims are terrorists. As I have often said, some of the bravest people in the world are Muslims who know that the terrorists can find them and their families and fight them anyway.
No, this does not mean it is decent behaviour to buttonhole your Muslim work colleague and harangue him or her for the crimes of their co-religionists.
It does mean that unless and until the Muslim world confronts the fact that most terrorism is Islamic terrorism, the non-Muslim world is rational to view Muslims with extra suspicion and to discriminate against them in matters of security. The idealistic refusal of the Western part of the non-Islamic world (or rather its political class) to do this is folly, a folly that will eventually backfire on Muslims living in the West.
Remember that photo of Sir Keir Starmer and Angela Rayner taking the knee in support of the Black Lives Matter movement? Leaving aside the question of whether George Floyd’s death was murder – the late Niall Kilmartin thought it was not – it was inevitable that people would eventually ask why, if the then Leader of the Opposition and now Prime Minister of the United Kingdom was obliged to get down on his knees and beg forgiveness because the police in a foreign country had killed one man, should not Muslim leaders and opinion-formers make some similar acknowledgement that all these thousands upon thousands of murders preceded by a shout of “Allahu Akbar!” had something to do with Islam? Why can’t there be – why is there not – a “Kafir Lives Matter” movement?
“The Covid ‘lab leak’ theory isn’t just a rightwing conspiracy – pretending that’s the case is bad for science”, writes Jane Qiu in the Guardian.
That’s right. In the Guardian. My surprise at the location of the article was equalled by my surprise at the location of its writer: “Jane Qiu is an award-winning independent science writer in Beijing.” I didn’t know there were independent science writers in Beijing, but I guess there must be for an article on this particular topic written by someone describing themselves as such to appear. Anyway, she writes:
Some scientists assert evidence supporting natural-origins hypotheses with excessive confidence and show little tolerance for dissenting views. They have appeared eager to shut down the debate, repeatedly and since early 2020. For instance, when their work was published in the journal Science in 2022, they proclaimed the case closed and lab-leak theories dead. Even researchers leaning towards natural origins theories, such as the virus ecologist Vincent Munster of Rocky Mountains Laboratories in Hamilton, Montana, told me they lamented that some of their colleagues defend their theories “like a religion”.
No one embodies the crisis of trust in science more than Peter Daszak, the former president of EcoHealth Alliance. A series of missteps on his part has helped to fuel public distrust. In early 2020, for instance, he organised a statement by dozens of prominent scientists in the Lancet, which strongly condemned “conspiracy theories suggesting that Covid-19 does not have a natural origin”, without disclosing his nearly two-decade collaboration with the Wuhan Institute of Virology as a conflict of interest.
Similarly, he denies that his own collaboration with the Wuhan lab involved gain-of-function research, even though Shi Zhengli – the Chinese scientist who led the bat-borne coronavirus studies – has openly acknowledged that the lab’s work produced at least one genetically modified virus more virulent than its parental strain. (That work is not directly relevant to the origins of Covid-19.)
The documentary [Christian Frei’s Blame: Bats, Politics and a Planet Out of Balance, short title Blame] claims that attacks on EcoHealth Alliance and the spread of lab-leak conspiracy theories have fuelled distrust in science. In reality, it’s the other way round: public distrust in science, fuelled by the unresolved H5N1 gain-of-function controversy and by lack of transparency and humility from scientists such as Daszak, has driven scepticism and increased support for lab-leak theories.
This is not news to anyone who has read Matt Ridley and Alina Chan’s book Viral. Or to anyone who does not entirely get their news from the Guardian, the BBC and the New York Times, come to think of it. Still, better five years late than never. Why now, I wonder? Did someone at the Scott Trust take Katharine Viner to one side and gently suggest that it would be nice if the customary Guardian delay between “this is an absurd far right conspiracy theory” and “it’s the fault of the far right for talking about it before we did and using up all the available words” was not too far out of line with the nearly four years it took to admit Hunter Biden’s laptop was real and Joe Biden was senile? Or is something big about to break?
“This will be in textbooks”, writes Maria Avdeeva.
Ukraine secretly delivered FPV drones and wooden mobile cabins into Russia. The drones were hidden under the roofs of the cabins, which were later mounted on trucks.
At the signal, the roofs opened remotely. Dozens of drones launched directly from the trucks, striking strategic bomber aircraft.
And — Russia can’t produce these bombers anymore. The loss is massive.
Nothing like this has ever been done before.
In one sense, of course, it has been done before. The military history of the twentieth century contains many examples of large numbers of planes being destroyed on their airfields – by the Japanese at Pearl Harbour, by the Germans at the beginning of Operation Barbarossa, and by the Israelis in the first hours of the Six Day War, to name but three.
But such damage being done by itty bitty little drones that were considered little more than toys a few years ago is new.
We live in an age when politics trumps science, and the choice of verb is deliberate. Remember “Scientists Debunk Lab Accident Theory Of Pandemic Emergence”? How about “Social justice matters more than social distance”? During the Covid-19 pandemic, the frequency of scientists and doctors issuing passionate debunkings of any vaguely scientific idea that Donald Trump happened to mention that day, only to issue equally passionate rebunkings the minute the wind changed, became so great that even the New York Times winced.
Science has always been politicised, but it was not always this bad. Cast your mind back to the turn of the century – 1998 to be precise. Antivax sentiment was not completely unknown but in general vaccines were seen by almost everyone as the means by which smallpox, diptheria and polio had been banished to the history books. I still see them this way. Here is a graph taken from the website of the Office for National Statistics of life expectancy at birth in the UK from 1841 to 2011. As the accompanying article says, the fairly steep rise in the second half of the time period was probably due to health improvements in the older population, but the ASTOUNDINGLY steep rise between 1890 and 1950 was probably due to health improvements in the younger population. Take a bow, childhood immunisation. We have forgotten how lucky we are to have been born in the age of the vaccine.
In 1998 something happened that caused trust in vaccines to slip. The following is an extract from the Wikipedia page for Dr Richard Horton, who was then and is now the editor of The Lancet, probably the world’s pre-eminent medical journal:
“On 28 February 1998 Horton published a controversial paper by Andrew Wakefield and 12 co-authors with the title “Ileal-lymphoid-nodular hyperplasia, non-specific colitis, and pervasive developmental disorder in children” suggesting that vaccines could cause autism. The publication of the paper set off a sharp decline in vaccinations in Europe and America and in subsequent years globally.”
I want to make clear that there was nothing wrong in the Lancet publishing Wakefield’s paper. How else is science meant to advance, other than by putting forward hypotheses and inviting all comers to replicate them or refute them? The wrong lay in sticking to this particular hypothesis long after it had been disproved. Horton only retracted Wakefield’s paper in February 2010, after Wakefield had been struck off the register of the General Medical Council for financial and medical misconduct.
There have been at least two switches in the political coding of Wakefield’s theory since it came out. Stereotyping madly, in the first few years after 1998 antivax sentiment was seen as a belief held by low-status Christian hicks in the American South. From about 2005 onwards antivax views also became popular among West and East Coast hippies, practitioners of alternative medicine and the like, most of whom were left wing, and a good deal more media savvy than the former group. Dr Richard Horton, the editor of the Lancet who published and defended Wakefield, is, without exaggeration, a Marxist. Back in 2006, I posted about his view that, “As this axis of Anglo-American imperialism extends its influence through war and conflict, gathering power and wealth as it goes, so millions of people are left to die in poverty and disease.”
One of the many evils of the scientific and medical censorship practised during the Covid-19 pandemic is that people whose attitudes ranged from belief in David Icke’s shape-shifting lizards to having doubts about specific Covid-19 vaccines that might be right, wrong, or a bit of both, but which are certainly reasonable, were all lumped together under the heading of “vaccine denialists” and condemned en masse. That meant that people who might have been open to argument were never argued with. Persuasion in either direction cannot happen if people cannot discuss a subject. Science cannot happen if people cannot discuss a subject. I remember commenting to this effect to the Times in late 2021. My comment lasted about five minutes before being deleted.
It is 27 years since 1998, 15 years since 2010, and five years since the start of the pandemic. Time for another burst of news stories about autism and vaccines. The script is much the same but many of the actors have swapped roles.
“RFK’s statements prove autistic people and their families everywhere should fear Trump and his allies”, writes John Harris in the Guardian’s Sunday sister, the Observer. The initials “RFK” refer to Robert F. Kennedy Junior, the US Secretary of Health and Human Services. There is a video of the speech made by Kennedy on April 16th to which Mr Harris is objecting here and I found a transcript of it here.
→ Continue reading: Two different types of irrationality over autism
‘Rayner calls in Army to tackle Birmingham bin crisis’, the Telegraph reports:
Angela Rayner has called in the Army to tackle the Birmingham bin crisis.
The Local Government Secretary has used formal powers known as Military Aid to the Civil Authorities (Maca) to summon Army experts after a strike by bin workers, which has lasted over a month, left more than 17,000 tons of waste rotting in the streets.
It is understood a small number of military personnel with operational planning expertise are offering logistical support to tackle the crisis. Sources said there were contingency plans in place to scale up the number of soldiers involved if necessary.
If such a scaling-up does prove necessary, Ms Rayner can cite the example of one of the most revered of Labour leaders:
The London dock strike of July 1949, led by Communists, was suppressed when the Attlee Government sent in 13,000 Army troops and passed special legislation to promptly end the strike. His response reveals Attlee’s growing concern that Soviet expansionism, supported by the British Communist Party, was a genuine threat to national security, and that the docks were highly vulnerable to sabotage ordered by Moscow. He noted that the strike was caused not by local grievances, but to help communist unions who were on strike in Canada. Attlee agreed with MI5 that he faced “a very present menace”.
OK, the parallel between Attlee’s summoning of the Army and Rayner’s is not close, and I made it mostly to poke fun at present day lefties, whose hymns of praise to Attlee usually leave out the verse about him using the army to break a strike, and always omit the one about him being the father of the UK’s independent nuclear deterrent.
A better historical parallel to explain Ms Rayner’s distinct lack of solidarity with the striking binmen would be the 1978-9 “Winter of Discontent”.
I will get to the subject of Hertfordshire Police in 2025 in due course. First, answer me this: “Why didn’t anyone speak out during the Salem witch trials, given how incredibly fake they were?”
I came across this question in a tweet from someone calling themselves “Science Banana”. Mr or Ms Banana goes on to describe how the Salem accusers started off by denouncing easy targets – two women of questionable repute and a slave. But they did not stop there.
Their next choice was very shrewd. The fourth person the “afflicted girls” accused was a highly religious and respectable woman who had publicly expressed skepticism of their ridiculous bullshit. She was immediately arrested and imprisoned.
Genuine belief would do for most; preference falsification would keep the rest quiet.
After the skeptic, the next “witch” accused and imprisoned was an elderly church lady of spotless reputation. And the same day, a four-year-old girl. She went to prison too. At that point, the accusers knew they could get away with anything.
The Salem Witch trials are usually cited “as a vivid cautionary tale about the dangers of isolation, religious extremism, false accusations, and lapses in due process.” The evil consequences of all these things were indeed made clear in the witch hunt, which cost at least twenty-five innocent people their lives. But the affair was also a tale of boiling the frog.
Now I’ll talk about what Hertfordshire Police were up to last week. Frederick Attenborough of the Free Speech Union tells the increasingly odd story of Hertfordshire Police vs two primary school parents:
A story that seemed troubling enough when it emerged over the weekend is turning out to be even worse than it first appeared, with the strange willingness of Hertfordshire Police to intervene in a debate at a primary school proving ever stranger.
On Saturday, the Times reported that in late January six uniformed officers in three marked cars and a van had been sent to arrest Maxie Allen and Rosalind Levine after their child’s school, Cowley Hill Primary, objected to a series of emails and “disparaging” comments in a parents’ WhatsApp group. As the police carried out a search of the house, the couple were detained in front of their three year-old daughter, before being held in cells for eight hours. And all this for querying the recruitment process for a new headteacher.
Accused of “casting aspersions” on the chair of governors in an “upsetting” way, they were then questioned on suspicion of harassment, malicious communications and causing a nuisance on school property.
Following a five-week investigation the police concluded there was insufficient evidence and took no further action – although the knock at the door, the squad vehicles and the highly public arrest by half a dozen officers must have felt like quite a punishment already.
No wonder that Mr Allen, a producer at Times Radio, said the couple’s treatment represented “massive overreach” by Hertfordshire Police. He told the Times: “It was absolutely nightmarish. I couldn’t believe this was happening, that a public authority could use the police to close down a legitimate inquiry. Yet we have never even been told what these communications were that were supposedly criminal, which is completely Kafkaesque.”
But it now transpires that the force’s intervention wasn’t restricted to Mr Allen and Ms Levine. Hertfordshire Police also warned Michelle Vince, a local county councillor, to stop helping the family by sending emails to the school on their behalf – or risk being investigated herself.
On this occasion, the police attempt at intimidation backfired because Mr Allen is a producer at Times Radio and therefore had instant access to the national press. You can listen to him talk about what happened here. The fact that the police felt confident to proceed as they did strongly suggests that they have done this before to less well-connected people and it worked.
As the article says, it gets worse.
And still there’s more. The email to Ms Vince asked her to forward the warning to anyone she’d cc’ed when contacting the school. This included the local Conservative MP, and former Deputy Prime Minister, Sir Oliver Dowden.
Ms Vince said she felt “uncomfortable” passing on the warning to Sir Oliver. For his part, he was “astonished that a situation could have arisen where any police officer could think it would be remotely acceptable to suggest that an MP should be curtailed in carrying out their democratic duties”.
First a local councillor, then an MP. Note that when the police tried to intimidate a bunch of stroppy parents they did not know that one of them had a job with a national newspaper, but when they tried to frighten Councillor Michelle Vince and Sir Oliver Dowden MP (not just a Knight of the Realm and an MP, but a former Deputy Prime Minister – think about that) into ceasing to represent their constituents, the police knew exactly what these people’s roles were. To stop Councillor Vince and Sir Oliver performing the duties of their elected positions was the point. I rather think that the eminence of Sir Oliver was part of the point, too. They thought they could get away with anything.
The police probably thought of themselves as fearlessly taking on the powerful, a motive which has also been ascribed to those young girls in seventeenth century Salem. But if they really wanted to fearlessly show that no one is above the law, they could have directed the six uniformed officers in three marked cars and a van to arrest someone who might fight back.
Ernest Benn was the uncle of Tony Benn and great-uncle of Hilary Benn. Luckily for us he was the black sheep of the family and pursued a career in business before becoming one of the “great and the good”. And then he decided he didn’t want to be great or good any more, founding the Society for Individual Freedom. As I understand it the Libertarian Alliance – who most here will be familiar with – emerged from that association.
A hundred years ago Benn was compiling a list of good economics books which – seemingly unbelievably – The Times published. It includes – as you might expect – Smith, Bastiat and Mill and – as you might not expect – Spencer and Smiles. It also includes Henry Ford – presumably before he started blaming the Jews for everything. But there is one book that’s missing. Luckily a young Austrian is on the case.
 The Times, Tuesday, 14 April 1925 [I hope this is legible. It’s a bit blurred on my computer but the original is fine. The list is totally blurred if I try to include it inline with the post. All very odd.]
“Dark Laboratory: groundbreaking book argues climate crisis was sparked by colonisation” was the headline of the review of Tao Leigh Goffe’s magnum opus in the Guardian, but the headline is wrong. I have read the whole article, even the captions to the pictures (“The reggae artist Chronixx, whose lyrics form part of the implements Goffe uses to dismantle the superstructure of western science”) so I know all about it. Colonisation was only a symptom. The real villain was Carl Linnaeus. Now you probably thought of Linnaeus as the “biologist and physician who formalised binomial nomenclature” and as something of a hero to ecologists. Not any more!
Central to Goffe’s critique is the notion that European colonialism turned the islands of the Caribbean into a “dark laboratory of colonial desires and experiments … the epicentre of the modern globalised world”.
It was there that enslaving farmers first formulated the structures of modern capitalism, alongside a scientific method rooted in eugenics and racism that privileged the status of white men while denigrating Black and Indigenous forms of science.
Such experiments included the creation of monocrop agriculture, the clearing of terrestrial and marine ecosystems making territories vulnerable to extreme weather, the categorisation of wildlife along lines of superficial characteristics
Told ya Linnaeus was the real baddie. How much better off we would all be if his father had followed his first instincts and apprenticed him to a cobbler. Then we would have respected Black and Indigenous forms of science.
and the now equally discredited categorisation of different races along similar lines.
Um, how discredited is that? Richard Dawkins put an entertaining account of the vicious feud between the geneticists and the cladists in The Blind Watchmaker (a feud in which an announcement that some colleague had “gone over to the Cladists” was received with scarcely less horror than an announcement that said colleague had taken Holy Orders), but I thought the whole point was that it all washes up on the same shore in the end. And is it not one of the main conclusions of Linnaean classification that the test of whether Organism X and Organism Y are of the same species is whether they can interbreed? All humans can interbreed, making us one species, QE-categorically-D.
“In opposition to the land, the colonial approach has been one of razing and dynamite, eroding Indigenous relationships to the soil,” writes Goffe. We must, she argues, “connect the dots between the brutal system of chattel slavery and the degradation of the natural environment … The worlds Europeans built depended on making the lives of some disposable.”
The worlds everyone else built are so much nicer.
Related posts:
Not just physics, Indigenous Australian physics
Decolonise your mind!
and, just for the nostalgia value, here is one from back when when Greens liked science:
Climate change action: “The Science” gives way to “The Physics”
One last thought… having one’s superstructure dismantled by the use of reggae lyrics sounds a distinctly unsettling process. But that is what has been done to western science, we now learn. Therefore The Science no longer is Settled.
UPDATE: OK, so it wasn’t one last thought. More thoughts came overnight, and I want to get them down before I forget. I might expand what follows into another post later.
1) Tao Leigh Goffe is “dismantling the superstructure” of the branch upon which she sits. She says that racist western science caused capitalism, which caused the climate crisis. But the justification we are given for believing that there is a climate crisis comes from that same western science. And if some of us are less convinced than she thinks we ought to be about the scale and imminence of peril, that is not because we have lost faith in science but because we have lost faith in many of the people with “scientist” in their job title.
2) Science does not make men good. It does make them powerful. The article speaks of “a scientific method rooted in eugenics and racism that privileged the status of white men while denigrating Black and Indigenous forms of science”, but one reason that the white men were in a position to enslave and oppress others was that their science was the one that worked.
3) Modern science arose in Western Europe. There was a period of a few centuries where the resulting superiority of European technology – ships and guns at the sharp end, with the power of the ironworks and the printing press behind them – meant that scruffy bands of white “adventurers” could conquer whole continents. That period is over. The scientific method is now available to anyone who wants it. Which mostly seems to be the Chinese at the moment.
“I know that the conquest of English America is an impossibility. You cannot, I venture to say it, you CANNOT conquer America…As to conquest, therefore, my Lords, I repeat, it is impossible. You may swell every expense, and every effort, still more extravagantly; pile and accumulate every assistance you can buy or borrow; traffic and barter with every little pitiful German Prince, that sells and sends his subjects to the shambles of a foreign country; your efforts are for ever vain and impotent—doubly so from this mercenary aid on which you rely; for it irritates, to an incurable resentment, the minds of your enemies—to overrun them with the sordid sons of rapine and plunder; devoting them and their possessions to the rapacity of hireling cruelty! If I were an American, as I am an Englishman, while a foreign troop was landed in my country, I never would lay down my arms, never! never! never!”
– William Pitt the Elder, speaking in the House of Lords on 18th November 1777 in opposition to the war against the rebellious American colonists.
There are some things about the views of supporters of President Trump, and of Americans in general, about the situation in Ukraine that I understand very well. Consider this Bloomberg clip from the President’s speech to the United Nations General Assembly on 25th September 2018. The caption to the video says gleefully, “Watch the German delegation’s response at UNGA when Trump says “Germany will become totally dependent on Russian energy if it does not immediately change course.” The German delegation had a good laugh at the American rube and his silly ideas about not being dependent on Vladimir Putin, and all the sophisticated people on both sides of the Atlantic laughed with them.
They are not laughing now. They are still asking for money, though. In the face of such arrogance, it is no surprise that President Trump and a great many of his countrymen are saying, “We tried to warn you about Russia but you laughed. It’s nice that you ‘stand with Ukraine’ now, but you can do it with your own money. Bye.”
That, I get. I don’t agree with the view that the conquest of a country in Europe by Russia can safely be ignored by the US, but I can understand it.
What I do not get is how many Americans whose views I normally admire have moved from saying, “This war is sad, but it’s none of our business” to speaking as if Ukraine were morally in the wrong for continuing to fight. To take one example, here is a recent tweet from Elon Musk:
What I am sickened by is years of slaughter in a stalemate that Ukraine will inevitably lose.
Anyone who really cares, really thinks and really understands wants the meat grinder to stop.
PEACE NOW!!
Similar impassioned pleas for “peace” are being made by many accounts that I follow on X that belong to Americans who are proud supporters of the right to bear arms, people who would until recently have considered themselves spiritual descendants of those unconquerable Americans praised by Pitt. It seems to me that the position of the Ukrainians now is very like that of the Americans then, right down to the invaders of their country being reinforced by wretched hirelings from far away who have been sold by their leaders and sent to die in a the shambles of a foreign war of which they know nothing.
Were the Americans of December 1776 culpable for not laying down their arms when all seemed lost? Should the famous painting of Washington crossing the Delaware be covered up in shame?
Washington not caring about the meat-grinder
My first piggy bank was in the shape of a globe. After I’d found out what a globe was my first question was “Where is Britain?” and I got the rather disappointing reply familiar to all Britons. My second question – to which there was an similarly disappointing answer – was “Where is Vietnam?” I asked because I had heard the word over and over again on the radio.
In 1975, South Vietnam was defeated by the communist North. I remember the TV pictures. I was particularly saddened by the sight of a helicopter being thrown off the deck of an American aircraft carrier. I knew then that this was a catastrophe although it took me a lot longer to find out just how much of a catastrophe.
People often talk about how bloody the Vietnam War was. Perhaps 500,000 deaths. What they rarely talk about is how bloody the Vietnam Peace was. Two million dead by some estimates. Once the South Vietnamese Army had collapsed the South Vietnamese had nothing to protect them from communist tyranny, red in tooth and claw.
It didn’t have to be this way. The big secret about Vietnam – apart from the peace being bloodier than the war – was that South Vietnam would have been just fine had the US public not got bored of the thing and the US Congress not voted to end combat air patrols over the country.
I can’t imagine what brought that to mind.
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