All posts tagged polemic

Diversity, or how progressive rhetoric about diversity and the greater representation of women, blacks and Asians masks the ongoing influence of traditional networks of private school and Oxbridge

Polemic – a strong verbal or written attack on someone or something

The British cultural élite is very concerned about ‘diversity’, which means pre-eminently more women and more ethnic minorities.

I’m making the simple point that it does not, on the whole, mean more poor and disadvantaged people, God no.

It still tends to means more ‘people like us’, more people who grew up in well-connected, upper-middle-class homes, went to élite private schools – but now more of them are women, black or Asian.

Same élite education, though. And the same confident, patronising, we-know-best, élite attitudes.

This isn’t an evidence-based analysis, it doesn’t take a serious look at the no doubt increasing diversity in broadcasting and the media.

It’s just a list, and what’s more it is cherry-picked and biased to make my point.

But then this is a polemic, knowingly biased and slanted in order to make a polemical point.

The point I’m making is that the higher ranks of Britain’s media talk a great talk about diversity and inclusion, but in reality the commanding heights of British culture continue to be managed and run by the same kind of upper-middle-class, southern, private-school-educated élite as it always has.

I am fleshing out the points made by John Gray in his numerous essays about the shortcomings of Britain’s progressive classes, as summarised in my last blog post.

It’s symptomatic that Channel 4 has for a very long time prided itself on being progressive, diverse and woke, and yet the three main presenters on its flagship news programme, Channel 4 News – Jon Snow, Matt Frei and Cathy Newman – all went to very expensive private schools, and the latter two both went to Oxford.

I’m not making an in-depth sociological analysis. I’m just rather awed that the annual school fees at Matt Frei and Cathy Newman’s private schools (£41,600 and £40,700 respectively) are far more than the average British annual wage (currently just over £30,000 for the full-time employed).

I’m awed that the children of the very well-off still run so much, or feature so prominently, especially in the arts and broadcasting, despite all the distracting rhetoric they put out about ‘diversity’ and ‘feminism’ and ‘inclusion’.

BBC TODAY PROGRAMME
Mishal Husain – Cobham Hall (boarding fees: £31,500), Cambridge
Martha Kearney – George Watson’s Ladies College (day fees: £13,170), Oxford
Nick Robinson – Cheadle Hulme School (day pupil fees: £12,300), Oxford
Sarah Sands – Kent College, Pembury (boarding fees: £11,500) Goldsmiths, University of London
Justin Webb – Sidcot School (boarding fees: £27,540), London School of Economics,

BBC RADIO WORLD AT ONE
Sarah Anne Louise Montague, Lady Brooke – Blanchelande College (annual fees: £10,800), University of Bristol
Mark Mardell – Epsom College private school (boarding fees: £38,568), University of Kent
Ed Stourton – Ampleforth College (boarding fees: £36,486 per year), Cambridge
Faisal Islam – Manchester Grammar School (annual fees: £13,000), Trinity College Cambridge
Claire Marshall – Blundell’s School (annual fees: £13,000 ), Balliol College, Oxford

BBC ANDREW MARR SHOW
Andrew Marr – Loretto School (annual fees: £36,000), Trinity Hall Cambridge

BBC WOMAN’S HOUR
Emma Barnett – Manchester High School for Girls (annual fees: £12,200) University of Nottingham
Jane Garvey – Merchant Taylors’ Girls’ School, Crosby (annual fees: £11,000), University of Birmingham

THE WORLD TONIGHT
Ritula Shah – Haberdashers’ Aske’s School for Girls (annual fees: £19,500), University of Warwick

BBC NEWS PRESENTERS
Samira Ahmed – Wimbledon High School (annual fees: £20,000), St Edmund Hall, Oxford
Anita Anand – Bancroft’s School (annual fees: £19,000), King’s College London
Jo Coburn – Politics Live – North London Collegiate School (annual fees: £21,000), Oxford
Stephanie Flanders – former BBC economics editor – St Paul’s Girls’ School (£26,500), Balliol College, Oxford
Fi Glover – St Swithun’s School (annual fees: £34,500), University of Kent
Will Gompertz, BBC arts editor – Bedford School (annual fees: £33,000). Married to the daughter of the Provost of Eton
Roger Harrabin, BBC Environment Analyst – King Henry VIII School (annual fees: £12,000), St Catharine’s College, Cambridge
James Landale, BBC’s diplomatic correspondent – Eton College (fees: £42,600), University of Bristol.
Paddy O’Connell, presenter of Broadcasting House – Gresham’s School (boarding fees: £36,000), University of Aberdeen
Hugh Pym, Health Editor BBC News – Marlborough College (annual fees: £38,000), Christ Church, Oxford
Sophie Raworth – 6 O’Clock News presenter: Putney High, and St Paul’s Girls’ schools (£26,500), Manchester University
Alice Roberts – presenter of Coast – The Red Maids’ School (annual fees: £15,000), University of Wales
David Shukman, science editor of BBC News – Eton (fees: £42,600), Durham University
Norman Smith, BBC Assistant Political Editor – Oundle School (annual fees: £38,000), St Peter’s College, Oxford
Vicki Young, BBC News Chief Political Correspondent – Truro High School for Girls (annual fees: £14,000), New Hall, Cambridge

JOURNALISTS
Katy Balls, The Spectator magazine – 
Louise Callaghan Sunday Times Journalist of the Year – UWC Atlantic College (annual fees: £33,000), School of Oriental and African Studies
Melanie Phillips, The Times and BBC – Putney High School (annual fees: £20,000), St Anne’s College, Oxford
Helen Lewis – Deputy Editor of the New Statesman & feminist author – St Mary’s School, Worcester (annual fees: £18,000), St Peter’s College, Oxford
Rachel Sylvester – South Hampstead High School (annual fees: £20,000) Somerville College, Oxford. I just listened to Sylvester on Radio 4 saying the laddish culture at Number 10 is really putting off women voters. According to the Office of National Statistics there are about 23,500,000 women voters in this country. This is what a public school and Oxford education does – gives you the confidence that, like Rachel Sylvester a) you know exactly what tens of millions of people are thinking and b) they are all in complete agreement with your own woke feminist thoughts.

Apparently Lewis is the author of a ‘light-hearted’ Helen’s Law which states that the comments in an online magazine or newspaper under an article about feminism, justify feminism. I would suggest a light-hearted Simon’s Law, which states that the posh, white woman lecturing you about your male ‘privilege’ almost certainly went to an expensive private school and Oxford.

That’s what qualifies her to lecture you about your ‘privilege’. Somehow Helen Lewis has managed to turn progressive values on their head so that, although she had a privileged education at an exclusive private school, then three years at the elite University of Oxford, which gifted her top jobs in London’s political and literary world… you are the one who is supposed to apologise to her for your privilege.

See what this ruling class has done? Reinforced its position at the commanding heights of academia, media and the arts, while at the same time making everyone else feel guilty for merely being white or male or working class.

This is not a discourse of equality. It is a discourse of power and control.

CHANNEL FOUR NEWS
Jon Snow – St Edward’s School in Oxford (boarding fees: £39,500), University of Liverpool
Cathy Newman – Charterhouse (boarding fees: £40,695), Oxford
Matt Frei – Westminster School (boarding fees: £41,600), Oxford
Gary Gibbon – The John Lyon School, Harrow (fees: £19,500), Balliol College, Oxford
Head of Channel 4, Alex Mahon – St Margaret’s School, Edinburgh (annual fees: £20,000), Imperial College London

ITV
Sir Peter Lytton Bazalgette, Chairman of ITV – Dulwich College (annual fees: £44,400), Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge
Dame Carolyn Julia McCall, Chief Executive of ITV – Catholic girls’ boarding school in Derbyshire, University of Kent
Jeremy Kyle – Reading Blue Coat School (fees: £17,500), University of Surrey
Mary Nightingale – St Margaret’s School, Exeter (fees: £8,500), University of London
The Honourable Robert Peston (son of Lord Peston) – Highgate Wood Secondary School, Oxford
Susannah Reid – Croydon High School (fees: £17,000 per annum), St Paul’s Girls’ School (£26,500), University of Bristol
Ben Shepherd – Chigwell School (boarding fees: £33,000), University of Birmingham

TV PRESENTERS
David Baddiel – The Haberdashers’ Aske’s Boys’ School in Elstree (annual fees: £21,000), King’s College Cambridge
Clare Balding OBE – Thatcham (annual fees: £39,000), Newnham College, Cambridge
Joan Bakewell – Stockport High School for Girls (fees: £12,000), Newnham College, Cambridge
Brian Cox – Hulme Grammar School (fees: £11,500), University of Manchester
Anne Robinson – Farnborough Hill Convent school (£15,500)
Hardeep Singh Kohli – St Aloysius’ College, Glasgow (annual fees: £13,500), University of Glasgow
Claudia Winkleman – City of London School for Girls (fees: £25,000), New Hall Cambridge
Lucy Worsley OBE history presenter – Abbey School, Reading, New College, Oxford

COMEDIANS
Hugh Dennis – University College School, London (annual fees: £21,000), St John’s College, Cambridge
Dawn French – St Dunstan’s Abbey School (private), Central School of Speech and Drama
Stephen Fry – Uppingham School, Rutland (annual boarding fees: £39,000), Queens’ College, Cambridge
Hugh Laurie – Eton College (annual fees: £42,600), Selwyn College Cambridge
David Mitchell – Abingdon School (fees: £40,000), Peterhouse College Cambridge
Steve Punt – Whitgift School (annual boarding fees: £40,000), St Catharine’s College, Cambridge
Jennifer Saunders – St Paul’s Girls’ School (fees: £26,500), the Central School of Speech and Drama

ACTORS
Phoebe Waller-Bridge – St Augustine’s Priory (fees: £16,400), DLD College London (boarding fees: £18,000), RADA
Benedict Cumberbatch – Harrow School (fees: £42,000), London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art
Judi Dench – the Mount School, a Quaker independent secondary school in York (annual fees: £15,500)
Tom Hiddleston – The Dragon School Oxford, Eton College (annual fees: £42,600), Pembroke College, Cambridge
Damien Lewis – Ashdown House Prep School, Eton College (annual fees: £42,600), Guildhall School of Music & Drama
Rosamund Pike – Badminton School in Bristol (annual fees: £17,000), Wadham College, Oxford
Toby Stephens – Seaford College (annual fees: £34,400), London Academy of Music & Dramatic Art
Stephen Mangan – Haileybury and Imperial Service College (annual fees: £36,200) Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge

CELEBRITY VICARS
The Reverend Richard Coles – Wellingborough School (annual fees £16,500), King’s College London
The Reverend Giles Fraser – Uppingham (annual fees: £39,000), Newcastle University

WRITERS
Will Self – University College School, London (annual fees: £21,000), Exeter College, Oxford

LABOUR PARTY
John McDonnell – St Joseph’s College, Ipswich (boarding fees: £35,000), Brunel University
Seamus Milne – former Labour Party Director of Strategy and Communications – Winchester College (annual fees: £41,000), Balliol College Oxford

LIBERAL PARTY
Ed Davey – Nottingham High School (fees: £16,000) (in the year above Labour Shadow Chancellor, Ed Balls), Jesus College, Oxford

GREEN PARTY
Jonathan Bartley – Dulwich College (annual fees: £44,400), London School of Economics
Caroline Lucas – Malvern Girls’ College (annual fees: £37,000), University of Exeter

THE WOMEN’S EQUALITY PARTY
Catherine Mayer co-founder of the WEP – Manchester High School for Girls (fees: £12,000), University of Sussex
Sandi Toksvig co-founder of the WEP – Tormead independent School (fees: £16,000), Girton College, Cambridge

DIGITAL
Martha Lane Fox – Baroness Lane-Fox of Soho, CBE
– co-founder of LastMinute.com
– on the boards of Twitter, Donmar Warehouse and Chanel
– trustee of The Queens Commonwealth Trust
– previously on the board of Channel 4
– youngest female member of House of Lords 2013
– Chancellor of the Open University 2014
– 2019 named the most influential woman in Britain’s digital sector from the past quarter of a century
Martha Fox is a member of an English landed gentry family seated at Bramham Park.
Education: Westminster School (annual fees: £42,000), Magdalen College, Oxford

For feminists, Martha Lane Fox is a pioneer and a symbol of Women in Tech and public life. For me, she is a classic example of The Establishment, and how it supports and helps its own, using its complex nexus of power and influence – regardless of her gender.

Brent Hoberman CBE – British entrepreneur and co-founder with Martha Lane Fox of Lastminute.com in 1998.
Education: Eton College (annual fees: £42,600), New College Oxford

Three conclusions

1. Oxbridge I say ‘Oxbridge’ but of the 84 figures here who all went to public school, only half, 41, went to Oxbridge.

This post is the opposite of a serious statistical survey, but it suggests that the relentless criticism of Oxford and Cambridge about their lack of diversity (often from eminent figures in politics or the media who themselves went to Oxbridge) is missing the point.

The problem starts way before university, it starts in the network of expensive private preparatory and secondary schools which inculcate in their pupils a superior attitude of confidence and capability, which plug their pupils into extensive networks of power and influence, and prepare them for the Oxbridge entrance exams with a thoroughness and insider knowledge which very few state schools can match.

For example, Clare Balding applied to read law at Christ’s College, Cambridge, but failed her interview. Give up and go to another university? No, because Clare then realised she didn’t want to do law after all, and so her family and school supported her to re-apply to Cambridge – this time to Newnham College – where she did successfully gain admission, second time around.

Which was nice for her, but how many families in the UK can afford to send their children to a £40,000-per-year school? And how many schools in the UK are geared up to support their 6th formers through not one but two full-scale applications to Oxbridge?

In her career at the BBC, Balding has become one of the UK’s best-known lesbian personalities, so on one level it’s easy for her and her supporters to paint her as a rebel, a disruptor of the patriarchy, a role model for LGBT+ people blah blah, and no doubt she is.

But she has also benefited from huge advantages of money, class and power that you and I can’t imagine.

So hammering the lack of ‘diversity’ at Oxford and Cambridge is, in my opinion, blaming the symptom, not the underlying cause.

2. Networks It’s not just about the private schools, it’s also about the extensive family networks with which the professional upper-middle-classes support each other, and which the élite schools confirm and extend.

Tristram Hunt is a textbook example of John Gray’s contention that the Labour Party has for decades been haemorrhaging its working class support, especially in the North of England (read any analysis of the 2019 election results) while at the same time it has slowly turned into the preserve of the pontificating, privileged, southern, private-school-educated, professional class.

Tristram Julian William Hunt, Director of the Victoria and Albert Museum
Well-connected family: son of Julian Hunt (,leader of the Labour Party group on Cambridge City Council and awarded a life peerage as Baron Hunt of Chesterton); grandson of Roland Hunt, a British diplomat; cousin of Virginia Bottomley (former Tory cabinet minister, now Baroness Bottomley of Nettlestone)
Private education: University College School, Hampstead (annual fees: £21,000), Trinity College Cambridge
Committed progressive: Labour MP for Stoke-on-Trent Central from 2010 to 2017
Social influence: Hunt is a lecturer in modern British History at Queen Mary University of London, has written several history books, presented history programmes on television, is a regular writer for The Guardian and The Observer

Miranda Hart is a good example of a media star (actor, writer, comedian) who is held up by feminists as a role model for women, despite having benefited from extensive family connections and an extremely expensive private education that you and I could only dream of.

Miranda Hart, actor
Well connected family: Her father was commanding officer of HMS Coventry when it was sunk by the Argentinians in the 1982 Falklands conflict. Hart is from an aristocratic background. Hart’s patrilineal great-great-great-great-grandfather was Sir Percival Hart Dyke, 5th Baronet (1767–1846). Her distant cousin, the 10th and present baronet, Sir David Hart Dyke, lives in Canada. One of her first cousins is plant hunter Tom Hart Dyke, creator of the World of Gardens at Lullingstone Castle. Her maternal grandfather was Sir William Luce (1907–1977), Commander-in-Chief and Governor of Aden (1956–60). Her mother’s only sibling is the Lord Luce, a former Conservative minister, later Commander-in-Chief of Gibraltar (1997–2000). Richard’s son, the journalist and author Edward Luce, is one of Miranda Hart’s first cousins. Her great-uncle, the brother of her maternal grandfather, was Admiral Sir David Luce, who served as First Sea Lord. The father of David and William, Miranda Hart’s great-grandfather, was Rear Admiral John Luce. John’s brother, her great-great-uncle, was Major General Sir Richard Harman Luce, who served as Member of Parliament for Derby (1924–29). Her other maternal great-grandfather (through William’s wife Margaret Napier) was Vice Admiral Sir Trevylyan Napier, who was the Commander-in-Chief, America and West Indies Station (1919–20). His wife, Miranda’s great-grandmother, was Mary Elizabeth Culme-Seymour, daughter of Sir Michael Culme-Seymour, 3rd Baronet, Vice-Admiral of the United Kingdom (1901–20). Hart is a fourth cousin, twice removed, of Diana, Princess of Wales.
Private education: Downe House, near Thatcham (annual fees: £39,000), where she was a friend of the sports presenter Clare Balding, who was head girl. University of the West of England, Bristol
Influence ‘Miranda Hart is one of the UK’s best-loved comedians’

Role model? In the sense that she has benefited throughout her life and career from a well-connected, affluent family, and from attending £39,000-per-year schools, yes, she is a perfect feminist role model.

3. Progressive politics is the modern reincarnation of Victorian class superiority So focusing on ‘diversity’, on the ‘representation’ of women and ethnic minorities, while not intrinsically wrong, allows the larger injustice of the fact that 5% of the population benefit from a fantastic education, dazzling facilities and life-enhancing social connections which the other 95% of the population does not enjoy, to just carry on.

Cathy Newman loses no opportunity to flaunt her ‘feminist beliefs’, has authored books about ‘rebel’ women lol, but her secondary school education alone cost at least £250,000 and plugged her into networks of power and influence that you and I can only dream about.

Yet she feels confident to lecture you and me – who never had a fraction of her advantages – about our male privilege and patriarchy and sexism because… that’s what expensive private schools do. They give their pupils the confidence to lord it over the rest of us, convincing them that their values are impeccably, unquestionably correct.

Private school-educated progressives are the modern reincarnation of the Victorian missionaries and Imperial administrators which the private schools were originally set up to churn out by the thousand.

But instead of being sent to farflung colonies to lord it over the natives, today’s loftily superior woke missionaries go on to run the British media and the arts and our political parties and lord it over us.

The instinct to lecture their fellow countrymen (and it is mostly women lecturing men they lecture) from a lofty position of moral rectitude remains exactly the same as it was with their Victorian forebears.

150 years ago the public school elite looked down on the majority of their fellow Brits for being illiterate, uneducated, unchristian, plebs – so unlike their own superior, spiritual souls.

Now their modern reincarnations look down on the majority of their fellow Brits for being racist, sexist, xenophobic, gammon-faced, Brexit-voting chavs – so unlike their own feminist, diverse, woke and politically enlightened selves.

Different age, different issues and different insults.

But the same basic attitude of superior, snobbish elitism. The same conviction of their own utter rectitude. The same patronising disdain for the majority of the actual population of the country they live in.

Related blog postsRachel Sylvester

 

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by Simon on February 28, 2020  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on February 28, 2020

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2020/02/28/diversity-or-how-progressive-rhetoric-about-diversity-and-greater-representation-of-women-blacks-and-asians-masks-the-ongoing-influence-of-networks-of-power-formed-at-private-school-and-oxbridge/

Fuck America, or why the British cultural elite’s subservience to all things American is a form of cultural and political betrayal

Polemic – a strong verbal or written attack on someone or something

WHY are progressive publications like the Guardian and Independent and New Statesman, all the BBC TV and radio channels, and most other radio and TV stations, and so many British-based culture websites, so in thrall to, so subservient to, so obsessed by the culture and politics of the United States of America – this shameful, ailing, failing, racist, global capitalist, violent, imperialist monster nation?

WHY are we subjected every year to the obsessive coverage of American movies and movie stars and the Golden Globes and the Oscars? WHY are so many progressive liberals slaves to American films and TV? American movies are consumer capitalism in its purest, most exploitative form.

WHY does British TV create endless programmes which send chefs, comedians and pop stars off on road trips to the same old destinations across America, or yet another tired documentary about the art scene or music or street life of New York or California?

WHY the endless American voices on radio and TV, on the news and in the papers?

WHY is it impossible to have any programmes or discussions about the internet or social media or artificial intelligence or the economy or globalisation which are not dominated by American experts and American gurus? Are there no experts on these subjects in Britain?

SURELY the efforts of the progressive Left should be on REJECTING American influence – rejecting its violence and gun culture and political extremism and military imperialism and drug wars and grotesque prison population – rejecting American influence at every level and trying to sustain and extend traditional European values of social democracy?

Fuck America (a poem to be shouted through a megaphone on the model of Howl by Allen Ginsberg)

Fuck America with its screwed-up race relations, its black men shot on a weekly basis by its racist police.

Fuck America, proud possessor of the largest prison population in the world (2.2 million), disproportionately blacks and Hispanics.

Fuck America with its ridiculous war on drugs. President Nixon declared that war in 1971, has it succeeded in wiping out cocaine and heroin use?

Fuck America, world leader in opioid addiction.

Fuck America and its urban decay, entire cities like Detroit, Birmingham and Flint abandoned in smouldering ruins, urban wastelands, blighted generations.

Fuck America with its out-of-control gun culture, its high school massacres and the daily death toll among its feral street gangs.

Fuck America with its shameful healthcare system which condemns tens of millions of citizens to misery, unnecessary pain and early death.

Fuck America with its endless imperialist wars. The war in Afghanistan began in 2003 and is still ongoing. It is estimated to have cost $2 trillion and failed in all its objectives. Kabul welcomes back its Taliban rulers!

Fuck America with its hypertrophic consumer capitalism, its creation of entirely false needs and wants, its marketing of junk food, junk music and junk movies to screw money out of a glamour-dazzled population of moronic drones.

Fuck America and the ever-deeper penetration of our private lives and identities and activities by its creepy social media, phone and internet giants. Fuck Amazon, Facebook, Twitter and Google and their grotesque evasion of tax in their host countries.

Fuck American universities with their promotion of woke culture, their extreme and angry versions of feminism, black and gay rights, which originate in the uniquely exaggerated hypermasculinity of their absurd Hollywood macho stereotypes and the horrors of American slavery – an extreme and polarising culture war which has generated a litany of abusive terms – ‘pale, male and stale’, ‘toxic masculinity’, ‘white male rage’, ‘the male gaze’, ‘mansplaining’, ‘whitesplaining’ – which have not brought about a peaceful happy society but serve solely to fuel the toxic animosities between the embittered minorities of an increasingly fragmented society.

Fuck America with its rotten political culture, the paralysing political polarisation which regularly brings the entire government to the brink of collapse, with its Tea Party and its Moral Majority and its President Trump. Nations get the leaders they deserve and so America has awarded itself a bullshit artist, a dumb-ass, know-nothing, braggart, pussy-grabbing bully-boy. Well, they deserve him but he’s nothing to do with me. I didn’t vote for him. He doesn’t rule me. Like all other Americans, he can fuck off.

Donald Trump is a fitting leader, emblem and symbols of a bloated, decadent, failing state.

So WHY ON EARTH are so many ‘progressive’ media outlets, artists, writers and gallery curators so in thrall to this monstrous, corrupt, violent and immoral rotting empire?

References

The American War on Terror

Joseph Stiglitz, former chief economist of the World Bank and winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, and Linda Bilmes of Harvard University, have stated the total costs of the Iraq War on the US economy will be three trillion dollars and possibly more, in their book The Three Trillion Dollar War published in March 2008. This estimate does not include the cost to the rest of the world, or to Iraq. (Financial cost of the Iraq War)

Between 480,000 and 507,000 people have been killed in the United States’ post-9/11 wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. (Human Cost of the Post-9/11 Wars)

The cost of nearly 18 years of war in Afghanistan will amount to more than $2 trillion. Was the money well spent? There is little to show for it. The Taliban control much of the country. Afghanistan remains one of the world’s largest sources of refugees and migrants. More than 2,400 American soldiers and more than 38,000 Afghan civilians have died. (What Did the U.S. Get for $2 trillion in Afghanistan?)

American Torture

‘After the U.S. dismissed United Nations concerns about torture in 2006, one UK judge observed, “America’s idea of what is torture … does not appear to coincide with that of most civilized nations.”‘ (Torture and the United States)

American Drone Attacks

The Intercept magazine reported, ‘Between January 2012 and February 2013, U.S. special operations airstrikes [in northeastern Afghanistan] killed more than 200 people. Of those, only 35 were the intended targets. During one five-month period of the operation, according to the documents, nearly 90 percent of the people killed in airstrikes were not the intended targets.’

During President Obama’s presidency, the use of drone strikes dramatically increased compared to their use under the Bush administration. This was the unforeseen result of Obama’s election pledges not to risk US servicemen’s lives, to reduce the costs of America’s terror wars, and to be more effective.

Black men shot by police in America

The American Prison Population

The United States represents about 4.4 percent of the world’s population but houses around 22 percent of the world’s prisoners, some 2.2 million prisoners, 60% of them black or Hispanic, giving it the highest incarceration rate, per head, of any country in the world. The Land of the Free is more accurately described as the Land of the Locked-Up. (Comparison of United States incarceration rate with other countries)

American Drug addiction

‘The number of people suffering from addiction in America is astounding.’ (Statistics on Drug Addiction)

The American Opioid epidemic

Every day, more than 130 people in the United States die after overdosing on opioids. (Opioid Overdose Crisis)

American Urban decay

Motor City Industrial Park

An abandoned car company plant known as Motor City Industrial Park, Detroit (2008)

Extreme poverty in America

An estimated 41 million Americans live in poverty. (A journey through a land of extreme poverty: welcome to America)

American Gun culture

‘The gun culture of the United States can be considered unique among developed countries in terms of the large number of firearms owned by civilians, generally permissive regulations, and high levels of gun violence.’ (Gun culture in the United States)

American Mass shootings

Mass shootings in the United States in 2019

Comparing deaths from terrorist attack with deaths from Americans shooting each other (and themselves)

‘For every one American killed by an act of terror in the United States or abroad in 2014, more than 1,049 died because of guns. Using numbers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, we found that from 2001 to 2014, 440,095 people died by firearms on US soil… This data covered all manners of death, including homicide, accident and suicide. According to the US State Department, the number of US citizens killed overseas as a result of incidents of terrorism from 2001 to 2014 was 369. In addition, we compiled all terrorism incidents inside the United States and found that between 2001 and 2014, there were 3,043 people killed in domestic acts of terrorism. This brings the total to 3,412.’

So: from 2001 to 2014 3,412 deaths from terrorism (almost all in 9/11); over the same period, 440,095 gun-related deaths. (CNN: American deaths in terrorism vs. gun violence in one graph) Does America declare a three trillion dollar war on guns? Nope.

American Healthcare

‘About 44 million people in this country have no health insurance, and another 38 million have inadequate health insurance. This means that nearly one-third of Americans face each day without the security of knowing that, if and when they need it, medical care is available to them and their families.’ (Healthcare crisis)

‘Americans spend twice per capita what France spends on health care, but their life expectancy is four years shorter, their rates of maternal and infant death are almost twice as high, and, unlike the French, Americans leave 30 million people uninsured. The amount Americans spend unnecessarily on health care weighs more heavily on their economy, Case and Deaton write, than the Versailles Treaty reparations did on Germany’s in the 1920s.’ (Left Behind by Helen Epstein)

American Junk Food

‘Obesity rates in the United States are the highest in the world.’ (Obesity in the United States)

So

So WHY are British curators so slavishly in thrall to American painters, sculptures, artists, photographers, novelists, playwrights and – above all – film-makers?

Because they’re so much richer, more glamorous, more fun and more successful than the handful of British artists depicting the gloomy, shabby British scene?

In my experience, British film and documentary makers, writers and commentators, artists and curators, are all far more familiar with the geography, look and feel and issues and restaurants of New York and Los Angeles than they are with Nottingham or Luton.

Here’s an anecdote:

In the week commencing Monday 20 February 2017 I was listening to radio 4’s World At One News which was doing yet another item about Brexit. The presenter, Martha Kearney, introduced a piece from Middlesbrough, where a reporter had gone to interview people because it had one of the highest Leave voters in the country. Anyway, Kearney introduced Middlesbrough as being in the North-West of England. Then we listened to the piece. But when we came back to Kearney 3 minutes later, she made a hurried apology. She explained that she should, of course, have said that Middlesbrough is in the North-East of England

Think about it for a moment. The researcher who researched the piece and wrote the link to it must have thought Middlesbrough is in the North-West of England. Any sub-editor who reviewed and checked the piece must have thought Middlesbrough is in the North-West. The editor of the whole programme presumably had sight of the piece and its link before approving it and so also thought that Middlesbrough is in the North-West of England. And then Kearney read the link out live on air and didn’t notice anything wrong, until – during the broadcast of the actual item – someone somewhere finally realised they’d made a mistake. Martha Kearney also thought Middlesbrough is in the North-West of England.

So nobody working on one of Radio 4’s flagship news programmes knows where in England Middlesbrough is.

How do people in Middlesbrough feel about this? Do you think it confirms everything they already believe about Londoners and the people in charge of everything?

But there’s a sweet coda to this story. The following week, on 26 February 2017 the 89th Academy Awards ceremony was held in Los Angeles. There was an embarrassing cock-up over the announcement of the Best Picture Award, with host Warren Beatty initially reading out the wrong result (saying La La Land had won, when it was in fact Moonlight).

The point is that the following Monday, 27 February, Radio 4’s World At One had an item on the story and who did they get to talk about it? Martha Kearney! And why? Because Martha just happened to have been attending the Oscars ceremony and was sitting in the audience when the cock-up happened. Why? Because Martha’s husband works in films (inevitably) and was an executive producer of the Academy Awards nominated short documentary Watani: My Homeland (about Syrian refugees, naturally).

And Martha’s background?

Martha Kearney was brought up in an academic environment; her father, the historian Hugh Kearney, taught first at Sussex and later at Edinburgh universities. She was educated at St Joseph’s Catholic School, Burgess Hill, before attending the independent Brighton and Hove High School and completing her secondary education at George Watson’s Ladies College in Edinburgh (a private school with annual fees of £13,170.) From 1976 to 1980 she read classics at St Anne’s College, Oxford.

So: private school-educated BBC presenter Martha Kearney knows more about the Oscars and Los Angeles and the plight of Syrian refugees than she does about the geography of her own country.

For me this little nexus of events neatly crystalises the idea of a metropolitan, cultural and media élite. It combines an upper-middle-class, university-and-private school milieu – exactly the milieu John Gray and other analysts highlight as providing the core vote for the modern urban bourgeois Labour Party – with an everso earnest concern for fashionable ‘issues’ (Syrian refugees), a slavish adulation of American culture and awards and glamour and dazzle, and a chronic ignorance about the lives and experiences of people in the poorer provincial parts of her own country.

To summarise: in my opinion the British cultural élite’s slavish adulation of American life and values is intimately entwined with its ignorance of, and contempt for, the lives and opinions of the mass of their own countrymen and woman, and is a form of political and cultural betrayal.

Importing woke culture which is not appropriate to Britain

Obviously Britain has its own racism and sexism and homophobia which need to be addressed, but I want to make three points:

1. Britain is not America The two countries have very, very different histories. The history of American slavery, intrinsic to the development of the whole country and not abolished until 1865 and at the cost of one of the bloodiest wars of all time, is not the same as the history of black people in this country, who only began to arrive in significant numbers after the Second World War. The histories of masculinity and femininity in America were influenced after the war by the gross stereotypes promoted by Hollywood and American advertising and TV (John Wayne, Henry Fonda, Marilyn Monroe). These are not the same as the images of masculinity and femininity you find in British movies or popular of the same period (Dirk Bogarde, John Mills, Sylvia Sim).

These are just a handful of ways in which eliding the histories of these two very different countries leads to completely misleading results.

I’m not saying sexism, racism and homophobia don’t exist in Britain, Good God no. I’m trying to emphasise that addressing issues like sexism and racism and homophobia in Britain requires a detailed and accurate study of the specifically British circumstances under which they developed.

Trying to solve British problems with American solutions won’t work. Describing the British situation with American terminology won’t work. Which brings me to my second point:

2. American rhetoric inflames The wholesale importing of the extreme, angry and divisive woke rhetoric which has been invented and perfected on American university campuses inflames the situation in Britain without addressing the specifically British nature and the specifically British history of the problems.

3. Eliding American problems with British problems, and using American terminology and American political tropes to describe British history, British situations and British social problems leads inevitably to simplifying and stereotyping these problems.

For British feminists to say all British men in positions of power are like Harvey Weinstein is like me saying all women drivers are rubbish. It’s just a stupid stereotype. It doesn’t name names, or gather evidence, or begin court proceedings, or gain convictions, or lobby politicians, or draft legislation, or pass Acts of Parliament to address the issue. It’s just generalised abuse, and one more contribution to the sewer of toxic abuse which all public and political discourse is turning into, thanks to American social media.

Importing American social problems and American political rhetoric and American toxic abuse into the specifically British arena is not helping – it is only exacerbating the fragmentation of British society into an ever-growing number of permanently angry and aggrieved constituencies, a situation which is already at a toxic level in America, and getting steadily worse here.

What have all the efforts of a million woke American academics and writers and actors and film-makers and artists and photographers and feminists and black activists and LGBT+ campaigners led up to? A peaceful, liberated and enlightened land? No. To President Donald Trump.

WHY on earth would anyone think this is a culture to be touched with a long barge pole while wearing a hazchem suit, let alone imported wholesale and gleefully celebrated?

In my opinion it’s like importing the plague and saying, ‘Well they have it in America: we ought to have it here.’

Advertising posters on the tube today 27/2/2020

  • TINA: The Tina Turner musical
  • THE LION KING musical
  • 9 TO 5 the musical
  • THE BOOK OF MORMON musical
  • THRILLER the musical
  • WICKED the musical
  • PRETTY WOMAN the musical
  • TATE membership, promoted by an Andy Warhol silkscreen of Marilyn

Which is why, in this context and amid this company, when the curators of the Masculinities exhibition at the Barbican choose to promote it with a photo of a black man they may think they’re being radical and diverse: but all I notice is that their poster is featuring one more American man photographed by an American photographer to promote an exhibition stuffed with American cultural products, which takes its place alongside all the other American cultural imports which saturate our culture.

Think I’m exaggerating?

Recent British exhibitions celebrating American artists and photographers

Related blog posts

4 Comments
by Simon on February 27, 2020  •  Permalink
Posted in America, Politics
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Posted by Simon on February 27, 2020

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2020/02/27/fuck-america-or-why-the-british-cultural-elites-subservience-to-all-things-american-is-a-form-of-cultural-and-political-betrayal/

Richard Dawkins and Christianity

Richard Dawkins’s anti-Christianity

Dawkins obviously has a psychological problem with Christian believers. He won’t stop or let up in his attacks on the ‘foolish’, ‘misguided’ Christians and creationists who persist in their religious faith – despite the theory of evolution having provided a comprehensive answer to how life on earth originated but, above all, on why it has proliferated, become so diverse, and is so intricately interlinked, giving such an appearance of wonderful ‘design’ that the badly-educated or wilfully ignorant persist in claiming there must be an Omnipotent designer of it all.

‘Wrong wrong wrong!’ as Dawkins puts it with typical subtlety puts it in River Out of Eden.

Dawkins has devoted most of his adult life to writing a series of books which effectively repeat the same arguments against this kind of Christian obscurantism over and over again:

  • The Blind Watchmaker
  • River Out of Eden
  • Climbing Mount Improbable
  • Unweaving the Rainbow
  • A Devil’s Chaplain
  • The God Delusion
  • The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution
  • The Magic of Reality: How We Know What’s Really True
  • Science in the Soul: Selected Writings of a Passionate Rationalist

All of which lead up to his latest book, Outgrowing God: A Beginner’s Guide, published just last year as he entered his 78th year.

What motivates Richard Dawkins’s anti-Christianity

What drives this unyielding commitment to attack, criticise, undermine and ridicule Christians and creationists at every available opportunity?

Well, consider this excerpt from Dawkins’s Wikipedia article:

From 1954 to 1959 Dawkins attended Oundle School in Northamptonshire, an English public school with a distinct Church of England flavour, where he was in Laundimer house… Dawkins describes his childhood as ‘a normal Anglican upbringing’. He embraced Christianity until halfway through his teenage years, at which point he concluded that the theory of evolution was a better explanation for life’s complexity, and ceased believing in a god…

‘An English public school with a distinct Church of England flavour’. Aha.

In a nutshell, I think Dawkins argues so fiercely and unrelentingly with Christians, and with all the Christian attempts to adapt the theory of evolution to Christian belief, because he is arguing with his own younger self.

This explains why the arguing is so ubiquitous – why he finds The Enemy everywhere he looks – because the Enemy is in his own mind.

And it explains why the war can never end – because the young Dawkins’s naive and earnest Christian belief will be with him, dogging his every thought, like an unwanted Mr Hyde, until he dies.

It explains why Dawkins never takes on anti-evolutionary believers from other faiths, such as Jews, Muslims, Hindus and so on, and entirely restricts his obsessive attacks to Christian anti-evolutionists.

And it explains why the cast of straw men he sets out to demolish consists almost exclusively of Church of England bishops and American fundamentalists – because these are Protestant Christians, Christians from his own Anglican tribe.

Richard Dawkins’s Christian turn of thought

It also explains something else about The Blind Watchmaker and River Out of Eden, which is unexpected, counter-intuitive and easy to overlook.

This is that, amid the endless analogies, metaphors, comparisons and parallels that Dawkins is constantly drawing in order to make his polemical anti-creationist points, he still automatically invokes Christian examples, stories and texts – and here’s the most telling point – sometimes in a very positive light.

At these moments in the books, you can envision the bright-eyed schoolboy Dawkins, proudly taking part in each Sunday’s Morning Service at his Anglican public school, peeping through the text.

His fundamental attachment to Christian tropes pops up all over the place. Take the title of the book, River Out of Eden – why bring Eden into it at all? Why Christianise the story of DNA?

Same with ‘African Eve’ and ‘Mitochondrial Eve’, terms applied to the hypothetical female ancestor from which all currently living humans are supposedly descended… Why introduce the misleading word ‘Eve’ into it at all? Why piggy-back on Christian myth?

Casually he says a person’s DNA may be compared to their ‘family Bible’ (p.44) and that the mitochondrial DNA within our cells can be compared to the ‘Apocrypha’ of the family Bible (p.55). I wonder how many modern readers know, unprompted, what the Apocrypha are.

Later he casually mentions that the famous Big Bang which brought the universe into being ‘baptised time and the universe’ (p.168). Baptised?

Why reinforce the framework of Christian ideology like this, with a continual drizzle of Christian references – why not create entirely new metaphors and concepts?

Take the passage which purports to explain how the process of sex mixes up the parents’ DNA as it passes into their progeny. Within a sentence of explaining that this is his subject, Dawkins veers off to compare the mixing up of DNA to the textual history of the Song of Songs from the Bible.

Why? Does he really imagine his secular, multi-cultural audience will be sufficiently familiar with the text of The Song of Songs to take his point about changes and mutations in it? For the Song, he tells us:

contains errors – mutations – especially in translation: ‘Take us the foxes, the little foxes, that spoil the vines’ is a mistranslation, even though a lifetime’s repetition has given it a haunting appeal of its own, which is unlikely to be matched by the more correct: ‘Catch for us the fruit bats, the little fruit bats…’ (p.45)

‘A lifetime’s repetition has given it a haunting appeal’? A lifetime’s repetition by who, exactly? Have you spent a lifetime repeating these words from The Song of Songs? I haven’t.

This is pure autobiography and gives us a window into Richard’s mind and – it is my contention – demonstrates that Dawkins is coming from a far more deeply rooted Christian worldview than any of his secular readers.

Take another, longer example – the extraordinary passage in The Blind Watchmaker where Dawkins devotes a chapter of the book to arguing against the newish theory of evolution by punctuated equilibrium which had been proposed by paleontologists Niles Eldridge and Stephen Jay Gould in the early 1970s.

But here’s how he starts the chapter on this subject: he asks the reader to imagine themselves in the scholarly field of ancient history, and to imagine a new scholarly paper which has just been published and which takes a literal interpretation of the story of the 40 years the ancient Israelites spent wandering in the wilderness after their escape from Egypt and before they reached the Promised Land.

Dawkins goes into loads of detail about what this hypothetical paper would contain: He explains that the paper takes the claim that the ancient Israelites took 40 years to travel from the borders of Egypt to what is modern-day Israel at literal face value and then works out that the travelling horde must have covered about 25 yards a day, in other words, one yard an hour.

This is so patently absurd that the hypothetical ancient historian in this hypothetical paper Dawkins has invented, dismisses the entire story of the Exodus as a ridiculous myth, and this is what has rattled the cages of the scholarly world of ancient historians and brought it to the attention of the world’s media – in Dawkins’s made-up analogy.

At the end of two pages devoted to elaborately working out all the details of this extended analogy, Dawkins finally announces that this literalistic ancient historian’s approach is precisely the approach Eldridge and Gould take towards evolution in their theory of punctuated equilibrium – taking the physical facts (of the patchy fossil record) literally, in order to ridicule the larger theory of neo-Darwinism (neo-Darwinism is the twentieth-century synthesis of Darwin’s original theory with the Mendelian genetics which provide the mechanism by which it works, later confirmed by the discovery of the structure of DNA in 1953; it is, strictly speaking, this neo-Darwinism which Dawkins is at such pains to defend).

Anyway:

1. I couldn’t believe Dawkins wasted so much space on such a far-fetched, fantastical, long-winded and, in the end, completely useless analogy (Stephen Jay Gould’s theory of punctuated evolution is like a hypothetical scholar of Bible history coming up with a new interpretation of the Book of Exodus!)

2. But for my purposes in this review, what is really telling about the passage is the way that, when he’s not consciously attacking it, Dawkins’s religious education gave him such a deep familiarity with Christian stories and the prose of the King James Bible and the Book of Prayer – that he cannot escape them, that his mind automatically reaches to them as his first analogy for anything.

And 3. that Dawkins expects his readers to be so equally imbued with a comprehensive knowledge of Christian stories and texts that he just assumes the best analogy for almost anything he wants to explain will be a Christian analogy.

Other examples of Dawkins’s Christian turn of mind

In the last third of River Out of Eden Dawkins introduces the rather abstruse idea of a ‘utility function’ which is, apparently, a concept from engineering which means ‘that which must be maximised’.

When it comes to life and evolution Dawkins says it is often useful to apply this concept to various attributes of living organisms such as the peacock’s tail, the extraordinary life-cycles of queen bees and so on, in order to understand the function they perform.

But then he staggered me by going on to say:

A good way to dramatise our task is to imagine that living creatures were made by a Divine Engineer and try to work out, by reverse engineering, what the engineer was trying to maximise: What was God’s Utility Function? (p.122)

And in fact this entire 44-page-long chapter is titled God’s Utility Function.

This flabbergasted me. The whole point of his long, exhausting book The Blind Watchmaker was to explain again and again, in countless variations, how the complex life forms we see around us were emphatically NOT designed by a creator God, but are the result of countless small mutations and variations naturally produced in each new generation of organism, which are selected out by the environment and other organisms, so that only the ones which help an organism adapt to its environment survive.

So why is he now asking the reader to imagine a God which is a Divine Engineer and Grand Designer?!!!!

Similarly, in Unweaving The Rainbow, which I’ve just read, he starts the rambling chapter about DNA finger-printing with a quote about lawyers from the Gospel of Saint Luke. Why?

And compares the lineage of DNA down the billennia to God making his promise to Abraham that his seed will inhabit the land, going on to give the complete quotation.

When he wants to cite a date from ancient history, it’s none of the acts of the ancient Greeks or Romans which spring to mind but but, of course, the birth of Christ, a handy two thousand years ago.

Continually, throughout all his books, the Christian framework, Christian dates, Christian stories, Christian quotations and Christian turns of phrase recur again and again.

Conclusion

In conclusion, you could argue, a little cheekily, that although Dawkins’s conscious mind and intentions and numerous books and lectures and TV programmes are all directed (with monotonous obsessiveness) at countering and undermining Christian belief – his unconscious mind, his boyhood memories, his love of the rhythms and images of the Christian Bible – mean that the Christian mythos, its legends and stories and even particular phrases from its holy texts, continually recur to him as his first choice for comparisons and analogies, and that as a result – unwittingly – he is reinforcing and re-embedding the very thing he claims to want to overthrow.

You could argue that Richard Dawkins is a fundamentally Christian author.

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1 Comment
by Simon on January 18, 2020  •  Permalink
Posted in Books, Christianity, Philosophy
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Posted by Simon on January 18, 2020

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2020/01/18/richard-dawkins-and-christianity/

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