August 12, 2020 - 7:00am
Silly season isn’t what it used to be. There’s just too much end-of-the-world stuff going on. Even the ‘Phew, what a scorcher!’ headlines of August are a portent of doom these days.
Luckily, blue tick Twitter is always good for a giggle. The humour may be unintentional, but our liberal celebs have outdone themselves this year. For instance, here’s Emma Kennedy opining on the Union:
https://twitter.com/EmmaKennedy/status/1293142444792569861?s=20
Really? Not a single reason? Well, for starters, how about the collective responsibility on which all administrations depend? I’m not sure that the SNP’s Nicola Sturgeon or Labour’s Mark Drakeford would want to be bound by the collective decisions of a Tory government. And as for Northern Ireland — where the First Minister and Deputy First Minister are of equal standing and one of them is a Sinn Fein politician — how’s that going to work?
Kennedy wasn’t alone in shooting from the hip. For instance, Professor Brian Cox might have paused a bit longer before tweeting in response to Priti Patel:
I’m so sick of this ‘The British People’ nonsense. It’s inflammatory and divisive and also errant vacuous nonsense with no meaning in a multi-party democracy. The phrase should be banned from political discourse. https://t.co/zVW56W5qlZ
— Brian Cox (@ProfBrianCox) August 8, 2020
He was, of course, expressing his disdain for a certain style of political rhetoric rather than the British people themselves, but why shouldn’t ministers speak and act in our name? It is their duty, after all — and it would be weird if their language didn’t reflect that fact. The Professor may recall the New Labour years when ministers also invoked ‘the people’ and ‘the British people’. I wonder if he felt equally sick about it back then? Or perhaps he thought that things could only get better?
Jessica Simor QC has also had a lively August online. For instance, here she is tweeting about the CANZUK concept (the idea of a political union of Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom):
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SubscribeWell done Mr Franklin for exposing these pathetic pseuds.
It is a pity you didn’t have the space to expose more of them, and amuse us with the vacuous nonsense they invariably spout.
Hear hear!
When a culture has reached the point where it proclaims men to be women and asserts that 2+2=4 is colonialist racism, there really is no intellectual low to which it cannot sink.
I really don’t understand the 2+2=4 colonial rascist thing. Does anybody else?
I think Chris is referring to how some parts of the woke movement see mathematics as an oppressive western social construct.
Their claim is that for certain types of object, if you aggregate them you will end up with a non-additive quantity.
So for example, if you put a male and female animal together in a pen, soon you will have three animals. Or if you put a fox and a chicken together in a pen, soon you will have one animal.
They wrongly believe that this disproves mathematics.
It is an analogy; and it comes largely from some genuine, published material written by academics fully committed to progressivist thought and action. Mr Martin could have chosen almost any term or combination of terms from the progressivist lexicon of invective.
The allusion is to works such as the following “Moving Towards a Feminist Epistemology in Mathematics” by Leone Burton (Educational Studies in Mathematics, 28: pp. 275″“291) and the article “Political Conocimiento for Teaching Mathematics: Why Teachers Need It and How to Develop It”, by Rochelle Gutiérrez, in Building Support for Scholarly Practices in Mathematics Methods (2017). In these and countless others, a pre-existing doctrine is applied to a well-established scientific or mathematical method, and used to undermine the method. Almost invariably, these pre-existing doctrines are shaped by concepts of identifying and fighting against racism, patriarchy, oppression, colonialism, . . . . . the list goes on.
All of it is, as Mr Martin says, an “intellectual low”. But it is so widely accepted within academia, and is spreading into school curriculums. It is extremely dangerous.
Thank you, Martin.
Signed, Mr Martin.
Yur waa! Kan yu rite tha agin like slowli in big leturs . Ta
For my two penneth on this. I heard a terrific explanation on this a few months ago but can’t quite recall by whom. But essentially it’s not that 2+2 = 4 or doesn’t equal 4. That’s irrelevant apparently. The question is in whose interest is it that 2+2=4. In summary this idelogy has innoculated itself from rational argument by removing any relation to truth or logic. There is no objective truth to be found. There are competing groups of identities with different interests engaged in a zero-sum conflict. Facts, logic, truth, mathematics, biology you name it can all be ignored or denied depending on whether they suit the interests of one identity group or another. If the answer 4 suits their purpose then ok. If the answer 4 doesn’t suit their purpose then the means of calculation is deemed oppressive and can be ignored.
It’s not a game logical, rational people can win. They shouldn’t even try.
Hear, hear! And that’s a good explanation of why, worth rather more than “two penneth”.
Thank you!
https://www.youtube.com/wat…
If I understand her correctly, it depends what you are counting. 2pencils +2pencils=4 pencils is OK; 2slaves +2slaves =4slaves makes maths racist.
She is conflating the subject with the use to which it is put. By the same token nuclear power is racist because you could use it to bomb African countries.
I love the way her first statement is that white people are all racist and the way her smug self-righteous look gives way to panic as she realises he is not buying it.
Try this
https://www.youtube.com/wat…
I love the way she starts off so smug and starts to lose it as she realises he is not buying into her narrative.
She conflates the subject with the use to which it is put. It is not maths which is racist but it can be used in racist situations. Of course, language (or any other discipline) can also be used in a racist way but that does not make language inherently racist.
A blue tick is a verification mark to show that the user is indeed the celebrity or organisation they claim to be. All social media has a problem with users putting fake names to give the impression they are someone they are not.
And some people are unfortunate enough to share their name with a celebrity, so could be mistaken for them. I can’t imagine that that’s very likely, though.
https://www.youtube.com/wat…
Nice one!
Well played!
Thanks for the explanation. For the record, I’m not the former Spurs central defender who also made four appearances for England.
of course it’s racist. How do we know?
It exists.
Yes! This is one of the most telling aspects of current social media rhetoric. Every idiot has an opinion; but if you are some kind of celebrity, social media offers you, idiot or not, the opportunity regularly to declare your status and flaunt your supposed influence, without taking any responsibility for what you might say.
I wouldn’t expect attention-seekers such as Emma Kennedy to understand that discretion and precise thought are far more creditable than spewing opinion of a spuriously moral nature. But I would expect a little more from a famous scientist and from a QC who is supposed to understand the value of intellectual and linguistic discipline. (What on earth does “racist” mean in her lexicon of self-righteousness?)
Social media feeds the worst aspects of human nature. In particular, it diminishes the restraining effect of face-to-face discourse; and in that respect it’s even worse than e-mail because the world it has constructed is a levelling one in which immediate response is encouraged, with little or no heed to the consequences and possible influences of what is said. To pick an extreme opposing example, there are very good reasons why Her Majesty the Queen does not declare her opinions in public, and is (by several accounts I’ve heard) pretty guarded even in private (for whom can she trust?).
The challenge I have put to several people I know who are enthusiastic users of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and other platforms, is to ask them to explain to me their merits. Not one such user has ever persuaded me that the merits were in fact meritorious. Its entire culture is ostensibly individualistic, but is in fact collectivist; it breeds irrational fear; it undermines concepts of truth. I could go on. Suffice it to say that UnHerd and one or two other sites of that kind are the nearest I have ever come to social media, or ever will.
He’s got a doctorate in particle physics, but that grants him precisely zero additional insight into any other branch of science, let alone public policy.
And he’s actually famous not for any scientific achievements, which are zero, but because he was the keyboardist for Dare and D:Ream.
I think David Steele was probably too busy playing forward defensives against Lillee and Thomson. Perhaps you mean David Steel?
As contrasted with the bland but suprisingly effective England opening bat against the Australians.
I’ve vaguely heard of Brian Cox – he was in some pop group, wasn’t he? Who, though, are the others? Twitter seems to be strange place, full of strange people who over-estimate their importance. I believe that Piers Morgan and Alistair Campbell seem to spend a lot of time ranting on twitter and they are two good reasons to avoid it!
IMO Brian Cox has a point. Invoking the ‘British people’ card over the complex small boat/refugee/economic migrant question is, I think, missing the point. It’s complex, it’s technical, it’s an issue, get on and sort it out with as little fuss as possible; to reignite the Brexit conflagration isn’t the smartest move right now. It has echoes of Harriet Harmon’s “court of public opinion” gaffe in the 2000s.