Clodbergs

They showed some little acumen, but their fundamental error is this — they pride themselves on their intelligence. No man of any real depth ever does such a thing as this. He knows very well that whatever he is, there are half a million more so; that the age of exceptional intellects expired, at least in this country, with Mr. Edmund Burke, and is not likely to rise from the dead. Now we are all pretty much good useful clods on a level: education, like all good husbandry, tends to pulverisation; and if the collective produce is greater, let us be at once thankful and humble.

R. D. Blackmore - Clara Vaughan (1864)


It’s an interesting quote, this one. It suggests that education has a tendency to create a standardised product and does not foster individual intelligence.

Well we knew that but don't do much about it. Even as a casual idea with the inevitable exceptions, it does explain the vast number of educated clods we churn out. They mostly seem to end up in the media or politics which has the advantage of keeping them visible.

Or does it keep them visible? Maybe there is an iceberg effect too. Many more educated clods do seem to lurk beneath the more visible clods of public life. Maybe a clod of them was responsible for the dramatic sinking of the previously unsinkable HS2. 

Clodbergs we could call them.

Well short

Government falls 'well short' of electric car charger target

A Government target for electric car chargers near motorways has been missed, new analysis has revealed.

The Department for Transport (DfT) had set an ambition for there to be at least six rapid or ultra-rapid chargers offering speeds over 50kWh at every motorway service area in England by the end of 2023.


Fine, sack senior people at the Department for Transport.

But that's not how it works. 

Officials are well short of shouldering that kind of responsibility.

Night Words

Yawns, checks the clock… oh, 3:30am so it’s not time to make a cup of tea and why am I trying to remember the name of that guy who is supposed to have said –

Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.

What was his first name… A, B, C, D, E… E - it was Eric something. Yes that’s it - Eric… A, B, C… it was Eric Hoffer. That’s a good effort at this time of night, but where did it come from?

What’s a good analogy of dredging up memories which stay hidden until some kind of input comes along? Something like the first letter of a name? Memory as a kaleidoscope? No that’s just random, it’s nothing like that.

What is it? 

Dunno... 

...but remembering Eric Hoffer was something…

...at this time of night...

Weak Words

Why do people in responsible positions say things which are plainly misleading, biased or untrue? Why is this not at all uncommon? Suppose we take just one aspect of it - the language of public discourse which has become progressively shrill yet weaker in it the way it fails to map the real world. Language which is supposedly progressive but no longer pragmatic.

In the not so distant past, weakness and ambiguity in social discourse were opposed by educational rigour applied to meaning, grammar and worthwhile subjects for discussion. Today this pragmatic robustness within public debate has been weakened by political fashions.

From some mysterious point, perhaps towards the end of the nineteenth century, robust cultural conventions came to seem too oppressive and discriminatory to be quite the thing in fashionably progressive society. Holes appeared in the language of right and wrong, good and evil, upright and corrupt. The value of pragmatic discrimination quietly slipped away into what was subsequently presented as a grim and prejudiced past. ‘Dickensian’ became a pejorative adjective.

The slowly meandering result is cultural drift towards indulgently weak public discourse. Under the relentless nudge of fashions and ideologies, names are changed, meanings shift, pragmatic moral boundaries weaken, culture softens to a level of incoherence no sane person would have planned.

The softening is powerfully seductive and correction not a trivial matter. The language of pragmatic discrimination has weakened, faded into a history which is no longer understood by those whose job it is to understand. Priggish denunciation of the past undermines any possibility of learning from it. There has been a fundamental cultural erosion which is probably well beyond remedy because we don’t have enough people who still speak the required remedial language.

A stronger, more pragmatic and less political culture would have to be built on the culture we have now. It would have to be built using language more powerfully rational than the language now settled within public discourse.

It is beyond remedy.

Couldn't resist it

Hundreds of neglected buildings should be put to new uses to help meet net zero targets, campaigners say

Leaky Secrets

N. Korean government review finds that many violators of state secrets law were state security officials

The results of the recent year-end review suggest that internal discipline in the Ministry of State Security is not particularly robust

Members of the Ministry of State Security (MSS) are tasked with protecting state secrets, but a review of violators of the 2023 State Secrets Protection Law revealed that many violators were these very same MSS officials and their families. Over 100 violations of the law were uncovered in South Hwanghae Province alone.

Presumably this problem was supposed to be secret too.

Quotes for 2024

She had feelings that she believed to be thoughts; she had likes and dislikes that she believed to be thoughts; she had impulses she believed to be thoughts; her mind was full of shifting and flying pictures that she believed to be thoughts; it was also full of echoes of what she had heard and read, and these she usually believed to be thoughts original with her. Words were fluent upon her lips without her knowing or wondering how they got there; yet she was sure they expressed truths and she easily became angry, or grieved, if they were challenged.

Booth Tarkington - Claire Ambler (1928)


Among the items of the suite was a three-legged milking-stool in deal covered with white enamel paint heightened by salmon-tinted bows of imitation silk. Society had recently been thunderstruck by the originality of putting a milking-stool in a drawing-room; its quaintness appealed with tremendous force to nearly all hearts; nearly every house-mistress on seeing a milking-stool in a friend’s drawing-room, decided that she must have a milking-stool in her drawing-room, and took measures to get one.

Arnold Bennett - These Twain (1915)


But there can be little doubt, I think, that if some form of Collectivism is imposed upon England it will be imposed, as everything else has been, by an instructed political class upon a people partly apathetic and partly hypnotized. The aristocracy will be as ready to “administer” Collectivism as they were to administer Puritanism or Manchesterism; in some ways such a centralized political power is necessarily attractive to them.

G. K. Chesterton – What’s Wrong With The World (1910)