That’s how it always is

Vigil to be held for Jason Arday as fundraiser reaches £130,000

Prof Arday resigned from his post as professor of sociology of education at the University of Cambridge last week after allegations of plagiarism were made against him. He was found dead at a home in Battersea on Friday.

A vigil for the professor, organised by the group Stand Up To Racism, will be held on the steps of the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square, central London, at 6pm on Monday.


That’s how it always is with these Schilleresque noble hearts; till the last moment every goose is a swan with them, till the last moment, they hope for the best and will see nothing wrong, and although they have an inkling of the other side of the picture, yet they won’t face the truth till they are forced to; the very thought of it makes them shiver; they thrust the truth away with both hands, until the man they deck out in false colours puts a fool’s cap on them with his own hands.

Fyodor Dostoevsky - Crime and Punishment (1866)

A Net Zero Diet

A old diet which could also be used nationwide for uninvited 'guests'.

 

I sat down on the spot, sir, and began to ponder: will a vagabond like that be very much trouble to me? And on thinking it over it seemed he would not be much trouble. He must be fed, I thought. Well, a bit of bread in the morning, and to make it go down better I’ll buy him an onion. At midday I should have to give him another bit of bread and an onion; and in the evening, onion again with kvass, with some more bread if he wanted it. And if some cabbage soup were to come our way, then we should both have had our fill.

Fyodor Dostoevsky - An Honest Thief (1848)

It's the carnival of mediocrity and ineptitude again

Greens plan to punish male members who correct women

Men who correct women could face disciplinary action under plans being considered by the Green Party.

Party bosses are considering a proposal to broaden the Greens’ definition of misogyny to the point that “any disagreement” between the sexes could lead to the man facing a sanction.

The revelation is included in an internal 53-page report on legal and reputational risk to the party, which has been leaked to the Telegraph.

"I may be guilty in my own eyes...I like being guilty in my own eyes...Kraft, forgive me for talking nonsense. Tell me, surely you don't belong to that circle? That's what I wanted to ask."

"They are no sillier than other people and no wiser; they are mad like every one else..."

"Why, is every one mad?" I asked, turning towards him with involuntary curiosity.

"All the best people are mad nowadays; it's the carnival of mediocrity and ineptitude and nothing else...But it's not worth talking about."

Fyodor Dostoevsky - A Raw Youth (1875)

We sometimes choose absolute nonsense

Starmer insists Labour 'kept to our manifesto' despite record-breaking tax rises

He said it was "not true" his government has misled the public after promising not to raise taxes again after last year's budget.

And he refused multiple times to say he had broken his manifesto promise not to raise income tax, national insurance or VAT "on working people".

"We kept to our manifesto in terms of what we've promised," he said.

"But I accept the challenge that we've asked everybody to contribute. I want to be really clear on why we've done that," Sir Keir continued.

"That is because we need to protect our NHS, to make sure that it's there for people when they need it and their families when they need it.

"Secondly, to make sure we've got the money to put into our schools. So every single child can go as far as their talent will take them," the prime minister added.


He knows it's nonsense, but having painted himself into a corner he is willing to make use of nonsense as a simple enough way to deny that he has any knowledge of corners or painting. 

Yet it leads directly to Starmer coming across as ever more foolish, both for painting himself into a corner and for denying it with ludicrously obvious dollops of nonsense. 

As a political tool, even nonsense has its limits, the point where no advantages are gained from using more of it. 

 

Our choice is usually mistaken from a false view of our advantage. We sometimes choose absolute nonsense because in our foolishness we see in that nonsense the easiest means for attaining a supposed advantage.

Fyodor Dostoevsky - Notes from Underground (1864)

But Foma has control of our media and publishing

James Martin Charlton has a topical Critic piece on Dostoyevsky’s depiction of what has become a pervasive modern pest - the virtue-signalling activist.


How Dostoyevsky dissected activistic hypocrites

Dostoyevsky’s outrageous grotesque now runs riot in our institutions

Over the past decade or so, a very particular type of character has made its presence known in many of our offices and institutions, veritably tyrannising our lives. Countless numbers of us have suffered this type in silence or experienced humiliations — or worse — at their hands. Only now are they being acknowledged, as articles appear on activist capture, notably at the BBC. Yet readers of one of Dostoyevsky’s lesser-known novels will recognise the type, epitomised by the compellingly awful Foma Fomich Opiskin in the early novel The Village of Stepanchikovo...

We recognise Foma immediately as the pattern of the office and institutional activist. For Foma advertises his virtuous capacity for seeing past stale conventions to create a more egalitarian society. It is this self-proclamation as an avatar of a better world which has impressed his host’s mother and others, and even seems to have drawn in the colonel. For Foma turns the colonel’s instinct towards fairness against him, guilt-tripping his host for perceived slights.


The whole piece is well worth reading, even for those who haven't read the book. Worth reading not only as a reminder that virtue-signalling activists aren't a new problem, but also a reminder that we probably have even more of the pernicious pests. The BBC is full of them.


Foma is a character on a par with Shakespeare’s portraits of overweening rogues; he has something of Malvolio’s Puritan scornfulness, Iago’s manipulative genius and Parolles’ bravado and cowardice. He also bears a strong resemblance to Molière’s Tartuffe. Contemporary stages, sitcoms and novels should be full of Foma’s likenesses, mirroring and mocking our encounters with them in reality. But Foma has control of our media and publishing just as he did the colonel’s household. We must on no account allow him to become the fixture Dostoyevsky pictures him becoming in the Stepanchikovo estate. For if we cannot resist this mere popinjay, how will we resist the Demons that Dostoyevsky shows us to be following him?

It isn't new

The emotional toll of climate change is broad-ranging, especially for young people

Many worry about what the future holds, and a daily grind of climate anxiety and distress can lead to sleeplessness, an inability to focus and worse. Some young people wonder whether it’s moral to bring children into the world. Many people grieve for the natural world.

Activists, climate psychologists and others in the fight against climate change have a range of ways to build resilience and help manage emotions.


Onlookers may give a weary shrug, but crude emotionalism is part of the narrative. Without this essential ingredient, even the easily persuaded may drift away towards other emotional outlets. 

Believers are supposed to feel or at least feign anxiety, grief, anger, fear and helplessness - the fascination lies in their own emotions, not the real world.

It isn't new.


And you know it all comes from that same half-bakedness, that sentimentality. They are fascinated, not by realism, but by the emotional ideal side of socialism, by the religious note in it, so to say, by the poetry of it… second-hand, of course.

Fyodor Dostoevsky - Demons (1871-72)

Fantastic things

Green MSP Gillian Mackay launches leadership bid to 'deliver fantastic things for Scotland'

An MSP who successfully led a campaign to create anti-protest buffer zones around abortion clinics is bidding to become a co-leader of the Scottish Greens.

Gillian Mackay said she wanted to "deliver fantastic things for Scotland" and claimed she could "take the party further and deliver great election results".


Your fantastic world will grow pale, your dreams will fade and die and will fall like the yellow leaves from the trees....

Fyodor Dostoevsky - White Nights (1848)

One of those people

By natural temperament, brother, and by social position I’m one of those people who can do nothing sensible themselves, but can read sermons to other people.

Fyodor Dostoevsky - The Insulted and Injured (1861)

Green co-leader opens party conference with scathing attack on Labour U-turns

Green co-leader Adrian Ramsay has opened the party’s conference with an attack on the “lacklustre offers and U-turns” of Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour Party.

Kicking off the left-wing party’s campaign against Labour for next year’s local elections, Mr Ramsay painted the Greens as “an inspiring alternative to business as usual”.

A glorious mediocrity of the most bourgeois kind

Just Stop Oil eco-zealots have gone from 'harmless hippies to committing reckless acts of criminal damage' Tory policing minister Chris Philip rages after Anglican priest, 82, and retired teacher, 85, attacked the Magna Carta

A pair of elderly protestors who brazenly hammered the glass protecting the Magna Carta, before gluing themselves to the display as part of a Just Stop Oil protest, have been denounced for their 'reckless' stunt.


The enemies of all true life, out-of-date Liberals who are afraid of their own independence, the flunkeys of thought, the enemies of individuality and freedom, the decrepit advocates of deadness and rottenness! All they have to offer is senility, a glorious mediocrity of the most bourgeois kind, contemptible shallowness, a jealous equality, equality without individual dignity, equality as it’s understood by flunkeys or by the French in ‘93. And the worst of it is there are swarms of scoundrels among them, swarms of scoundrels!

Fyodor Dostoevsky – Demons (1871-72)

A sort of loathing for real life

We are so divorced from it that we feel at once a sort of loathing for real life, and so cannot bear to be reminded of it. Why, we have come almost to looking upon real life as an effort, almost as hard work, and we are all privately agreed that it is better in books. And why do we fuss and fume sometimes? Why are we perverse and ask for something else? We don’t know what ourselves. It would be the worse for us if our petulant prayers were answered.

Fyodor Dostoevsky - Notes from Underground (1864)


Here in the UK with a general election looming, we see the loathing Dostoevsky saw over a century and a half ago. Our political classes have built it into the necessary art of political life, pandering to petulant prayers which must never, ever be resolved by consultation with real life. Below the pandering, the projects nobody voted for may continue. 

Real life would destroy everything, all of our political games, fantasies and the political screen behind which we are not supposed to look. Keir Starmer and his Labour colleagues have no interest whatever in providing answers to anything real. No interest in correcting anything from the vast pile of failures the Tories have left, no interest in anything which could possibly be measured against real life.

The result is a mendacious swamp where nothing can be interpreted against a reliable yardstick because that would open the door to real life. There is no point trying to make sense of the swamp on its own terms because tomorrow those terms will have shifted. Real life is loathed and those who insist on referring to it may find themselves loathed too.

The fate of the loyal voter

You see what I am like; they take something from you, and you give them something else as well and say, ‘Take that, too.’ They strike you on the cheek and in your joy you offer them your whole back. Then they try to lure you like a dog with a bun, and you embrace them with your foolish paws and fall to kissing them with all your heart and soul.

Fyodor Dostoevsky - Polzunkov (1848)

The evolution of failure

What’s the most offensive is not their lying — one can always forgive lying — lying is a delightful thing, for it leads to truth — what is offensive is that they lie and worship their own lying....

Fyodor Dostoevsky - Crime and Punishment (1866)


We all know a great deal about lying and liars. Unfortunately they are an important part of life yet we do not weave that knowledge into a coherent, democratic standpoint on political reality. Any worthwhile debate on political lying is almost certain to be undermined by political interests because the lies create and nurture those same interests.

What is an ambitious dullard to do in order to climb the greasy pole? Even for an onlooker it is obvious enough that the ambitious climber must adopt greasy pole dishonesty. The pole climber must lie because this is where the advantage is to be found. Lies are a route to power plus social and political superiority, while truth is not.

Truth is too democratic, there is no political advantage to be gained by the pursuit of truth. Anyone can be truthful. Anyone can become a liar too, but not everyone can own lies in the sense that important lies become part of their public identity. Not everyone can stand up and take personal rhetorical ownership of politically significant lies.

It is a subtle thing, this aptitude for taking ownership of lies and reaping the political benefits. It is akin to competent acting, learning a script and repeating the lines as if they were not written by someone else. The lines become personal, they come from the heart, from visceral, caring, feeling humanity. But they are lies.

It’s a problem which cannot be resolved without taking away the advantage of lying from powerful people and institutions. Any attempt to undermine political lies is met with more lies which always have the inbuilt advantage of being mainstream.

Yet lies ultimately fail simply because they are lies, because in one way or another they are not aligned with the inflexible nature of reality. The only power which seems able to deal with political lies is reality itself, the slow yet inexorable evolution of failure.

There are other things you could do, Gary

Gary Lineker latest: BBC accused of 'assault on free speech' as former boss Greg Dyke says it 'undermined its own credibility'


In my humble opinion he ought long ago to have been derogated to the office of frightening sparrows in the kitchen garden. There, and only there, would he have been in his proper sphere, and doing some good to his fellow countrymen.

Fyodor Dostoevsky - Uncle's Dream (1859)

The fool's cap

Biden's State of the Union: Agony and ecstasy of writing the president's biggest speech

As US President Joe Biden puts the finishing touches to his State of the Union address, spare a thought for the behind-the-scenes toil of the White House speechwriters, the hardest-working team in Washington this time of year.

That’s how it always is with these Schilleresque noble hearts; till the last moment every goose is a swan with them, till the last moment, they hope for the best and will see nothing wrong, and although they have an inkling of the other side of the picture, yet they won’t face the truth till they are forced to; the very thought of it makes them shiver; they thrust the truth away with both hands, until the man they deck out in false colours puts a fool’s cap on them with his own hands.

Fyodor Dostoevsky - Crime and Punishment (1866)

The numerous and varied legion of dullards

Climate change rally in Nottingham to coincide with COP27

A rally calling for stronger action on climate change has been held in Nottingham.

About 100 people gathered in Trinity Square for the rally, which was organised by the Nottingham Coalition for Climate Justice.

Over 40 demonstrations were planned throughout the UK on Saturday, during the UN summit COP27 in Egypt.


He was one of the numerous and varied legion of dullards, of half-animate abortions, conceited, half-educated coxcombs, who attach themselves to the idea most in fashion only to vulgarise it and who caricature every cause they serve, however sincerely.

Fyodor Dostoevsky - Crime and Punishment (1867)


There are things we could say about the environment, how to understand, improve, enjoy and integrate ourselves into it. How to tackle degradation. The tragedy of the climate narrative is the hordes of conceited, half-educated coxcombs who attach themselves to the idea, who do indeed vulgarise and caricature it.

It isn’t only the lies, distortions, crooked dealing and monumental stupidity, but the years and years of lost opportunities. The environment is something to be treasured, but these absurd clowns are not its guardians.

That same half-bakedness, that sentimentality

And you know it all comes from that same half-bakedness, that sentimentality. They are fascinated, not by realism, but by the emotional ideal side of socialism, by the religious note in it, so to say, by the poetry of it… second-hand, of course.

Fyodor Dostoevsky - Demons (1871-72)

COP27: 'Climate chaos' as UN climate summit begins

The UN's annual climate change summit has opened with hosts Egypt calling on countries to move from "pledges to an era of implementation".

More than 120 world leaders are due to make speeches at the conference, known as COP27, in Sharm el-Sheikh.

About 40,000 people will attend but some activists are staying away over concerns about Egypt's rights record.

As COP27 opened the UN released a new report it described as a "chronicle of climate chaos".

The hardest thing in life

“My friend, I’ve been telling lies all my life. Even when I told the truth I never spoke for the sake of the truth, but always for my own sake. I knew it before, but I only see it now.... Oh, where are those friends whom I have insulted with my friendship all my life? And all, all! Savez-vous... perhaps I am telling lies now; no doubt I am telling lies now. The worst of it is that I believe myself when I am lying. The hardest thing in life is to live without telling lies... and without believing in one’s lies.

Fyodor Dostoevsky - Demons (1871-72)

The political classes have solved this problem – lying is not the hardest thing in their lives. They don’t try to live their political lives without telling lies and they manage to tell those lies without believing them.

Yet Dostoevsky was mostly right. Few of us have the ability to lie as the political classes lie and we never fully understand how they do it.

A Lazy Jubilee

Oh, if I had done nothing simply from laziness! Heavens, how I should have respected myself, then. I should have respected myself because I should at least have been capable of being lazy; there would at least have been one quality, as it were, positive in me, in which I could have believed myself.

Fyodor Dostoevsky - Notes from the Underground (1864)

We didn’t do much to celebrate the Jubilee thingy yesterday. For the most part it was a lazy day reading in the garden. I did prepare a potato salad at some point, chucked in a few herbs from the garden and so on.

We also strolled into town to buy some more clothes pegs because the crappy plastic things keep breaking. Almost as if they are designed to break, although at £1 a dozen it isn’t worth becoming a clothes peg activist demanding more quality in basic products.

Apart from that it was an unusually lazy day and for us that is unusual. We like a few jobs to do and aren’t at all keen on staying around the house and garden all day, even if all we do is go out somewhere for a coffee. I did water the garden later on, but yes, on the whole it was a lazy jubilee day.

When nonsense is an advantage

Our choice is usually mistaken from a false view of our advantage. We sometimes choose absolute nonsense because in our foolishness we see in that nonsense the easiest means for attaining a supposed advantage.

Fyodor Dostoevsky - Notes from Underground (1864)

Approval, assent, agreement, acceptance, acquiescence all seem to revolve around the way we go along with something. Yet given the right circumstances and backing we can easily be persuaded to go along with the most abject nonsense. 

Dostoevsky was right of course, nonsense can be the easiest means for attaining a supposed advantage, which is why we see so much of it and why it can't be eradicated. Some make use of the advantage and some don’t. Making use of it successfully almost always requires the nonsense to be called something else and imposed on others.

Yet it is surprising how often nonsense offers some kind of advantage even when quite startlingly blatant. It can be built on the distortion, corruption and endlessly subtle misuse of language, yet still be absurdly obvious. Not to everyone of course.

As we grow up we learn our native language and make ourselves understood. We learn to mimic whatever language forms are appropriate to the situations we encounter. But from an early age we also learn nonsense language appropriate to other situations such as fairy stories which evolve over time into political convictions.

We also learn from an early age that it can be socially beneficial to repeat nonsense. Often it becomes an apparently innocuous activity such as watching Monty Python with friends. It doesn’t seem to matter if nonsense enters the language as amusement but perhaps it does.

As children we receive subtle and not so subtle approval cues when we use language appropriate to a situation. Approval almost becomes a thing, almost an entity, an essential aspect of language. Without approval there is no way to learn a language, no way to get it right. But many of us must have signalled our approval of Monty Python nonsense and a vast amount of other nonsense in a similar vein.

Approval is an aspect of what we are as social beings and is necessarily manipulated because we are social beings. The Monty Python team aimed at one type of approval, political movements aim at another. We approve or we don’t, but as individuals we cannot cause even the most obvious nonsense to expire through terminal disapproval. We may approve or reject political nonsense, pass it on or ignore it, but cannot stand in the way of it.

Nonsense can have value and in our value-conscious world that value can be pumped up by pumping up the nonsense market. Almost inevitably it has become common for experts to offer dubiously simple opinions to a wider audience than their fellow experts. These wider audiences may be incompetent, but their approval is guaranteed because the experts are pumping up an approved narrative.

All of which is familiar, but it leaves us with an insoluble problem. Many people clearly give their approval to anything authoritative and pass it on rather than carry out their own analysis. Others are far more inclined to withhold approval, recognise nonsense for what it is and reject it whatever the social consequences.

For some people, the search for truth often goes no further than conformist approval of anything authoritative which is dutifully passed on socially. The distinction is blurred of course, but not that blurred. Conformist blockheads who can't even detect nonsense are a problem. Possibly the problem.

The millionth echo

Two quotes for the political party conference season here in the UK.

 

Side by side they walked in quick step, as to the beating of a drum; eyes direct, as looking along a barrel, ears pricked for the millionth echo of an offensive remark.

George Gissing - Isabel Clarendon (1885)


You see what I am like; they take something from you, and you give them something else as well and say, ‘Take that, too.’ They strike you on the cheek and in your joy you offer them your whole back. Then they try to lure you like a dog with a bun, and you embrace them with your foolish paws and fall to kissing them with all your heart and soul.

Fyodor Dostoevsky - Polzunkov (1848)


It has always been obvious enough that core aspects of the human condition are old and intractable. We do not have the ability to eliminate them. The best we may do is ameliorate them, but we elect leaders who tell us otherwise. And too many of us listen to them.