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When I did education blogging I wrote a lot about something I called sovietisation. This referred to the baleful impact upon education of our present government’s mania for setting targets (often involving exam results) and then rewarding institutions according to how well they could fake reaching these targets. In this connection, see this posting by David Hepworth. It is based on a story that has already seen the light of day in Times Higher Education, although I couldn’t get further with the link in Hepworth’s posting than that.
This comment on Hepworth’s piece by a certain Rob Spence deserves, I think, slightly wider circulation:
I work in a university that’s in what is coyly termed the same “sector” as London Met – i.e. the widening access, non- “traditional” student sector. There’s a real tension between the government’s agenda to have 50% of people taking a degree, and the absolute imperative, driven by the funding model, to retain students. So on the one hand we are accepting students with at best a mediocre academic record, whose motivation is not study but lifestyle, and on the other we are being penalised financially if we fail to retain them. No-one can be surprised if these utterly apathetic students drift away, but the system insists that every student who decides, for probably very good reasons, that they don’t want to carry on, represents a failure on the part of the university, which then gets its funding reduced.
You are right, it looks as if they are cooking the books, but it’s actually quite difficult to keep track of non-appearing students, because whereas in the past we could just withdraw them, now we are expected to keep them on the books.
There are quite a few “ghost” students who register, but never turn up – we had one last year who registered, collected her student loan, and disappeared to Ibiza.
Quantifying success, eh? It can really get you into trouble. Especially if you are the government. You define success, but you end up trampling all over it.
You define educational success as, say, vast numbers of people going on to university who don’t really want to go on to university. But by the time the policy has worked its evil way, the thing being measured has done a cartwheel. In this case, the thing that the government pays for, people turning up at a university, is measured. But people vanishing soon afterwards is something that it is in nobody’s interests to notice. The university wants to hang on to the government’s money. The government wants to be able to boast about how swimmingly everything is going and how much it is helping. Only a few malcontents grumble, in things like blog comment threads, but if they get serious and loud about their grumbling, they too will find their interests seriously suffering, as they well know.
With enterprises that are responsible to themselves and to a gang of people in their immediate vicinity, people who are basically taking their own chances at their own expense, a mess like the one described so well by Rob Spence eventually gets corrected, because it costs too many people too much to persist with it. They change the definition of success to one that works better. Or they replace the boss, or even all the bosses. If all that fails, they shut the enterprise down and everyone goes their separate ways. Which is often acrimonious, because quite a few people may still be getting what they want for a price they can live with, but at least the badness for those who are not so happy with things stops. But when the government’s success measurements cause havoc, everyone is all too liable still to conspire to say that all is well.
What makes sovietisation so uniquely itself is the way that everyone knows the story – what is going wrong and why it is going wrong – but nobody has any interest in telling the story like it really is, up to and including the Minister for whatever it is being deranged, for he/she too depends on all those statistically encoded lies to tell the world that he/she is doing a great job instead of merely a very average or worse job. The Prime Minister likewise, come to that.
The answer is to denationalise everything. Not easy, I know. But necessary if you want this kind of nonsense to be kept within bounds.
At the bottom of this, you can read this:
This is a parody and in no way expresses any political ideology, nor does it intend to defame the BBC.
But don’t let that put you off. My thanks to this guy.
As here, for instance. Via Liberty Alone, I learn of a remarkable new recruit to the ranks of those who are panicking about the pandemic. Yes, it is none other than the US Libertarian Party. They have just issued a press release reprimanding the US state for not being statist enough about this medically trivial event, which is in any case only being plugged up in order to divert attention away from other governmental blunders and to excuse further governmental usurpations, despite all the blunders. Why can’t they see that? Or don’t they care about such things any more? One can imagine a true “pandemic” that really did need measures like draconian border controls to defend against it (sickness is the health of the state), but if this trivial flu variant is it, then, to put it mildly, an explanation to that effect should have been added.
The UK Libertarian Party should treat this pandemic pandering as an awful warning of what happens to small parties – parties “of principle” – who become gripped by the desire to pile up lots of mere votes, and who forget what they were started to accomplish. First they pick a regular politician to lead them, and he then picks more regular politicians to help him, and before you know it, they are behaving like regular politicians.
But it is more fundamental than that, I fear. Start a political party, and before you know it, it is behaving like a political party. LPUK beware.
Speaking personally, I can’t help wondering why the Left are so ready to believe that everyone who gets a tax bill for £50,000 will just grit their teeth and pay it, but putting 20p on a pint of beer will force average Joes like us to quit drinking. Either incentives matter, or they don’t.
– a throwaway thought in brackets in a long Britblog roundup from Mr Eugenides
Hazel Blears (not one of our favourite people here) has just, in among a lot of ignominious verbiage about what a fine job the government is doing, done something unignominious, by contriving the following deadly soundbite, in today’s Observer:
YouTube if you want to. …
Which echoes Margaret Thatcher. This lady’s not for tubing, it would seem. (LATER: Except that … she is.) This collapsing government has been, like all collapsing governments as described by their members, failing to get its message across. No, the message has well and truly got across, but people don’t like it.
And the YouTuber himself has contributed another memorable one-liner, in the form of this outburst to a journalist last week:
“You are impugning my integrity.”
Well, yes.
Many have declared themselves baffled by Brown’s protestations concerning his own extreme moral excellence, which they often take as true merely because Brown himself appears to believe them, and his actual moral depravity, as if the two things together make no sense. Well, if you agree with him that he really is morally excellent, then indeed you will be baffled, because clearly he is morally repulsive. Actually it all makes perfect sense. He is, in his own hopelessly non-functioning eyes, a morally excellent person, doing an excellent job. Therefore all means, however depraved – intimidating colleagues shamelessly, robbing the rest of us blind – are excusable, obligatory even, to keep him in that job, and to prevent anybody else, obviously truly depraved, from trying to take the job away from him. Gordon Brown’s moral excellence in his own eyes and his moral depravity in all other eyes are logically intermeshed, his delusion of moral excellence being just one more item on the long list of all his actual depravities.
Taxi drivers have a place in British political life not unlike the Oracle of Delphi in the affairs of Classical Greece. And they are now, based on my admitted rather small sample, speaking with one voice. Following my mother’s death earlier this year, I was yesterday lugging possessions from home to home, so to speak, and had need of two such oracles. Both, without any encouragement from me, even as they were steering me from and to Egham station, also steered the conversation towards the expenses being run up by Labour MPs. Specifically Labour MPs, please note. “My grandad who was in the miner’s union – Labour all his life – know what I’m saying? – must be turning in his grave …” “If any of us did that kind of thing, we’d be up before the Old Bill.” Shouldn’t that be arrested (“nabbed”) by the Old Bill and up before the “Beaks?” No matter, he was in full flood and in no mood to be interrupted about side-issues.
I recall being a bit scornful here about how this issue seems now to dominate the thinking of so many voters. But, as commenters pointed out, there is a direct connection between the grand larcenies being committed by our government in its panic reactions to the banking crisis and the petty thievings of our MPs. MPs should have their minds on All That. Instead they have been contriving second homes for themselves, and fourth giant flat screen televisions, and are now most concerned not about the state of the nation’s finances, but about being caught out in their own little thievings. Recently I read somewhere – link anybody? – about a Labour MP saying something like: “I don’t care if Gordon Brown ruins the world economy; but he should keep his hands off my expenses.” The failure of MPs to exercise oversight over the big stuff was directly related to their over-concentration on their own little living arrangements, and I apologise for not seeing that more quickly. It’s a variant of that Parkinson’s Law (so many of these are now relevant) about how people who are fussing about their new headquarters building are going to do that actual job rather badly for the duration of the move.
Can it be an accident that (a) one of the most splendid new pieces of sports architecture in London in recent years has been the resplendent new curved stand at the Oval cricket ground, the home of Surrey CCC, but that (b) the mere Surrey cricket team has gone from heroes to zeroes during the period of this new stand’s construction and opening? I digress, although not that much, because another even more striking (if far less handsome) recent addition to the London architectural scene has been the brand spanking new office block that has recently been constructed across the road from Parliament, for … correct: Britain’s MPs.
Maybe unfairly, those oracular taxi drivers, as I say, and contrary to what I talked about in my earlier piece (where I suggested that it is now MPs of all parties who are in the firing line), homed in on Labour MPs. Labour MPs, they said, are supposed to be better than that. What’s happened to them? Conservatives look after themselves better, but at least they do this, at least partly, most of them, with their own money, which they have obtained either by inheriting it, or by doing more elevated versions of driving taxis.
But one bit of that earlier posting about the smallness of MP thieving compared to the bail-out thieving at least stands up very well, namely the bit that said that it is electorally very portentous when the voters decide who the biggest thieves are, and if it is true that the voters (as represented by their spokesmen the taxi drivers) have decided that it is actually Labour MPs, then that spells electoral doom for Labour. Sacking Gordon Brown won’t save any of the doomed, which is perhaps why they may not now bother to sack Gordon Brown, despite all my recent imprecations. No wonder they’re feeling suicidal. This government is not just topped by a spectacularly rotten Prime Minister; it is backed by a rotten party.
I realise that I owe Samizdata a separate piece about why I take the particular rottenness of Gordon Brown so much more seriously than, according to strictly libertarian notions, I am supposed to. Surely they are all just as bad. Briefly, my argument will be: no they aren’t. There are degrees of rottenness among politicians, and it is foolish to deny this. As for the other argument I hear here, that we need a spell of absolute darkness in order to educate The Masses and build a Movement truly capable of ushering in a genuine New Dawn, well, that kind of talk scares me. Briefly (this is a huge subject I know) what if we get the absolute darkness, but not the dawn? I say that the sooner this country switches from the deepening gloom of Labour to the relative if flickering and fitful illumination that might (although I agree: might not) be the Conservatives under David Cameron, the better. If that means (which actually I don’t think it does mean – see my future posting if it ever materialises) that it takes rather longer to find our way to the Promised Land, well so be it.
Some of us do think that designer labels will save our souls. That’s bad. But it’s a whole lot better than thinking that, say, the Führer will save your soul, or a crusade against the infidels, or nationalism, or a host of other collective salvations. When the inevitable disappointment from consumerism comes, it’s a private tragedy. When the inevitable disappointment from a collective salvation comes, it’s a national crisis inviting some new, possibly worse, collective salvation. Until humans learn the wisdom of angels, I will remain a great supporter of crass consumerism and conspicuous consumption.
– Roger Koppl. I encountered this by randomly exploring the IEA blog‘s blogroll. I will now go shopping.
I put this up as a Samizdata quote of the day, before realising that there already was one. Sorry. But, it’s good and deserves plentiful copying and pasting, so here is that posting rehashed, with the quote in question as its starting point:
So, yet again, the courts are faced with a sample of the deeply confusing provisions of the Criminal Justice Act 2003, and the satellite Statutory Instruments to which it is giving stuttering birth. The most inviting course for this Court to follow, would be for its members, having shaken their heads in despair to hold up their hands and say: “the Holy Grail of rational interpretation is impossible to find”. But it is not for us to desert our judicial duty, however lamentably others have legislated. But, we find little comfort or assistance in the historic canons of construction for determining the will of Parliament which were fashioned in a more leisurely age and at a time when elegance and clarity of thought and language were to be found in legislation as a matter of course rather than exception.
That is the Court of Appeal struggling to make sense of the Criminal Justice Act 2003. Found here by him (who has recently resolved to blog approximately every day and whom I recommend) via a comment on this, which is about, among other foolishnesses, the recent fashion among Them for stopping us taking photos of Them.
My dad was a Big Cheese lawyer, and I can remember him telling me stuff like this several decades ago. I vaguely recall him saying that until about nineteen sixty something or thenabouts, there was this bloke who lived in a den in Whitehall and who spent his time rewriting laws so that (a) they didn’t contradict themselves, and (b) they didn’t contradict each other, but (c) so far as he could contrive it, they managed to maintain the original will of the legislators, insofar as he could divine it. If he could not divine it, he made it up, as intelligently as he could. But then, catastrophe. He retired. Ever since then, the laws have got more and more incoherent and incomprehensible. And of course now, you would need about a hundred of such non-existent paragons of legal non-incontinence just to keep up.
As Rob, the above mentioned blogger quotes another commenter saying:
We are told that ‘ignorance of the law is no excuse’ but how can it not be an excuse when even the courts are unsure of what the law is?
In practice, I think I notice that, recently (i.e. during the time since that old bloke my dad talked about retired), They have evolved a relatively sensible way of enforcing Their laws (senseless though the laws themselves frequently are), which is based on distinguishing between real laws and arbitrary laws. The real ones, against things like murder, assault, robbery and so on, still get you arrested at once, provided They catch you at it. But the vast mountain range of arbitrary laws and rules and regulations, often in the form of policy directives from On High about what various Acts of Parliament actually mean (given that as originally written they are quite often gibberish) according to On High, are enforced by you first being given a warning. You may not park on that purple line. You must have a permit to hand out leaflets here. You can’t wear that hat or that suntan lotion or eat that sticky bun or drink that drink in that sized glass or call that an artichoke. You are obliged to fill in this form. You must send it to us (i.e. Them) within one month. Etcetera, etcetera, et something angry cetera. Which means that, in practice, ignorance of the law has become the obviously reasonable defence that it obviously now is, with regard to almost all recently concocted laws. If They were to insist otherwise, They would get repeatedly involved in huge fights with people who don’t want to break the law, but who don’t know what it is. I.e. with everybody.
I now live my life certain that I am constantly breaking laws of this or that recently invented sort, and as far as I am concerned it is up to Them to tell me about which laws actually matter to Them. I will then, if I think that Their particular commands or demands make some sense, or if They are sufficiently menacing about them, obey them. Or, I will carry on breaking whatever idiot law it is or that They have just made up without troubling Parliament with the petty details, but a bit more carefully. I still take photos of policemen, for instance. I am just a bit more careful about letting them know I’m doing it, and am careful while doing it not to Look At Them In A Funny Way.
Decade after decade, to mention another example, I have failed to register to vote. Occasionally I read somewhere or see something telling me that this is illegal. Is it? I don’t know and I don’t care. Nobody menacing actually tells me that I must register and threatens me with actual trouble if I don’t. So from where I stand, the mere law of the matter can go jump into the Serpentine.
If They want me to be more respectful of “the law” (which is how They typically now describe Their laws), They should reduce the number of – and reduce the incoherence and arbitrariness of – Their laws, to the point where the laws that remain mostly make sense.
You are now signed up to this petition. Thank you.
For news about the Prime Minister’s work and agenda, and other features including films, interviews, a virtual tour and history of No.10, visit the main Downing Street homepage.
If you’d like to tell your friends about this petition, its permanent web address is: http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/please-go/
– This is what you get as soon as you click on the second of the above links, fill in your details, and then confirm it all by clicking on the link in the email they immediately send you. I was impressed by the ease and speed of it all.
As I have already confessed, I have incurred the sympathetic derision of commenters here with my various and variously expressed hopes-stroke-predictions that Gordon Brown will, within a matter of days, or weeks, or just soon, no longer be our Prime Minister. But just when I had resigned myself to Mr Brown’s non-resignation, that is to say to him not being ejected from Downing Street with whatever would be the necessary degree of force by a delegation of Labour Party heavies appalled by the damage that Mr Brown is doing to the Labour Party (even as they remain stubbornly indifferent to the damage he might also be doing to the mere country), and thus resigned also to the consequent hell of Mr Brown remaining our Prime Minister for another fourteen months, this happens. This being a petition to the Prime Minister, begging him to resign.
Even if it fails in its ultimate purpose, this petition may surely do some good. It may, for instance, show the Labour Party rank-and-file something of the odd mixture of fear and contempt now felt towards Mr Brown and his hangers-on (hanging on being all that they now seem able to think about) by almost all British non-tax-guzzlers, and many others besides. This in its turn may cause Labour supporters to join in by adding their own names to the electronic heep, if only to earn a few shreds of national gratitude for their now apparently supine and utterly corrupted Party.
Better yet, this petition, if it takes off as I think it might, may put a rocket up David Cameron’s rear end, to tell him to stop merely waiting for the country to fall into his lap like a rotten apple (while carefully refraining from telling us what he would then do with it other than allow the rot to continue), and get him instead to start saying that the rot should stop, and saying how. (Basically: which government activities should be closed down, now.) In due course, and I realise that it goes against the grain around here to be saying such a thing, Mr Cameron might even become the kind of Prime Minister who might actually stop some of that rot.
Guido Fawkes and Iain Dale have already linked to and given their support to this petition. Both have insisted that they don’t usually ‘do’ government petitions, but both of them sense that this one could be something else again. No doubt other bloggers have already added their voices to what I trust is now a chorus, saying similar things, and if they have, I think that all of them – Guido, Dale and all – are right. This could get very big, very fast.
I think this is great, from regular commenter here NickM of Counting Cats:
The tale science tells about how we got here (and got to the point where we could ask such questions) is not just truer than the bronze-age claptrap of The Bible (or Qu’ran or stories about Marduk or whatever …) but more compelling. We are DNA on the right-handed scroll and it has taken four billion years to make us. We are that amazing. Isn’t that more compelling than some old shit about talking snakes and a job done in six days? Is it not a truly grand narrative? The truth is so much more beautiful than the lie. It is also the truth and that also goes a long way on it’s own.
Ah, c’mon folks … I have heard enough from creationists about how if we’re merely risen slime we’re still slime and that in some unspecified way we are therefore still tainted by the slime. But what slime! This piece of slime can be moved to tears by the music of Palestrina, this piece of slime can be amused by the plays of William Shakespeare, this piece of slime can parse HTML and FORTRAN. This piece of slime can factorize quadratics, do integration by parts and hold an opinion on the Copenhagen Interpretation. This is one hell of a piece of slime and so, dear reader, are you.
I am proud to be slime with post-graduate qualifications. I am stardust (so are you) created in the forge of supernovae (is that not cool?). I am atoms in motion (so are you). I am victory (so are you). I am almost everything you are and you are almost everything I am. We share half of our DNA with cabbages after all.
I entirely agree with all this, but I do not stick it up here to insist that all of you do. I know that all of you do not, which is fine by me. Especially if, from what you do believe instead, you draw political conclusions with which I strongly do agree. I stick it up here because it puts a particular point (call it the “glory of slime” argument) in answer to a common objection to Darwinian atheism (the “sliminess of slime” argument) with exuberant eloquence. Even many of those who think it tosh will at least agree that it is very well written.
The Cat Counter acknowledges the sliminess of slime, but then trumps it with the grandeur. But I bet, when he wrote his bit, that he had, rattling about somewhere in his head, this, which acknowledges the grandeur but then trumps it with slime, or in this case with dust:
What piece of work is a man! How noble in reason! How infinite in faculty! In form and moving how
express and admirable! In action how like an angel! In apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the world! The paragon of animals! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?
While Hamlet emphasises also what fine and beautiful athletes we are, NickM concentrates only our mental glories. An interesting omission, maybe? There are all kinds of memes floating about now to the effect that although many of us dirt-bags are clever, we are not that beautiful, a blot on the world even, compared to many other more exotic looking animals, who now seem to us much more express and admirable in form and moving. Maybe this is something to do with how we have evolved to admire how we look only when young, yet are clever enough now to have contrived for millions upon millions of us to be shuffling on unattractively into old age instead of reverting to actual dirt at forty and being replaced by younger and prettier dirt-bags.
This, by Clay Shirky, is a truly fascinating blog posting. And the bit of it that I am about to quote (which is as far as I have so far got in it) is (to use a word I usually resist) awesome, at any rate in its long-term potential impact:
Just to pick one example, one I’m in love with, but it’s tiny. A couple of weeks one of my students at ITP forwarded me a project started by a professor in Brazil, in Fortaleza, named Vasco Furtado. It’s a Wiki Map for crime in Brazil. If there’s an assault, if there’s a burglary, if there’s a mugging, a robbery, a rape, a murder, you can go and put a push-pin on a Google Map, and you can characterize the assault, and you start to see a map of where these crimes are occurring.
That does not sound ‘tiny’ to me. It sounds huge. Finally, here might be a system worth reporting crimes to.
What this says is that those maps you see in TV cop shows will stop being a cop monopoly and become something everyone can consult, and contribute to. A golden age of private sector law enforcement beckons. In the words of the title of the blog (now alas not alive any more) where this particular posting appears: “Here comes everybody”. And against everybody, the criminals will be put back on the defensive where they belong, in other words where they were before TV took almost all law-abiding citizens off the streets (by showing them such things as TV cop shows), leaving behind only actually existing (as opposed to TV fantasy) government policemen, idiotically droning their mantra: leave it to us. Which has worked really well, hasn’t it?
Apologies to all those to whom this is stale news, what with this blog posting being based on a speech that was delivered exactly one year ago tomorrow. But if only a small fraction of the Samizdata readership has not seen this posting before, then from where I sit this is a very good mission accomplished. My thanks to Lynn Sislo, for mentioning it here.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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