Because they wanted to.
If they had won they would have had to have dealt with Brexit and the EU. They did not and still do not have the calibre of people needed to do that.
There are people who want to be in power rather than pure, and people who would rather be pure than in power.
Labour always was the party of purity. It just looked like it was a bunch of power-grabbers because, for a while, it espoused the cause of the Working Man, and no finer political cause is there. In that cause, Lenin and Marx told them, no deception and no lie is too great. In that cause one may get one’s hands dirty, and justify all the stains it puts on your soul. So that’s what the Labour Party did.
Then it abandoned the Working Man. It lost the moral justification for being impure. Once it was out of power, it was invaded by people who wanted to be pure, because it was safe for them.
The Conservatives have never been, nor ever will be, about purity. They are now the party of the Working Man. And of the Capitalist. Which is only odd until you realise that the common enemy of both is the Bureaucrat, the Diversity Manager, the Equality Advisor, the Global Warming panic-monger. Which is who Labour stands for now.
But that's not why they lost.
They lost because they put an un-electable leader up front. As the Liberal Democrats did. A 110 decibel warning siren.
They wanted to lose.
Monday, 13 January 2020
Thursday, 9 January 2020
Don Henley - The Boys of Summer
The Boys of Summer is a song by Don Henley, who was one of The Eagles.
It is one of the most evocative musical soundscapes not only in rock music, but in all of music. The music was written, apparently, by Mike Campbell. Henley’s guitar, echoed and repeated, with its seagull cries, conjured up long empty beaches at the start of autumn, with a sense of nostalgia for the summer, but also a deeper sense of loss.
The song is about a man who wants to get his woman back. She has left him for the younger, more exciting and temporary lovers she meets in the summer.
It’s the song with one of the more famous lines in rock music:
But the verse isn’t about that. It’s about the way the Dead-Head sticker jogs the singer into realising that he can’t go back to her. Intellectually, he knows he can’t. Emotionally, as the ‘but’ leading to the final chorus suggests, he can’t stop himself from wanting to try.
Blue-Pill Oneitis chump. Yo, bro, bitch be a ho, you don’t want to know her ass no mo’. Or if you want some Blue-Pill spirituality with that: he has to realise that she is on her own path, and has a right to go whichever way she wants, and he has to let her go with love. Same advice: stop stalking, quit whining, get over it, get back into another saddle. (Insofar as the singer blames himself for her loss of interest, there’s an undeniable Blue Pill streak in the lyrics. But at least he’s not simping.)
But the song is not about his attempts to get her back. He hasn’t started yet. He’s still thinking, or dreaming, about it. The song is an acknowledgement of the strength of feelings that he knows would be pointless to act on.
And that explains why the song has a drive and edge that we would not expect from what should be a blues or a romantic lament. The music is not only a soundscape intended to evoke summer’s end in a small beach town, it’s intended to portray the force of his emotional dilemma.
It is one of the most evocative musical soundscapes not only in rock music, but in all of music. The music was written, apparently, by Mike Campbell. Henley’s guitar, echoed and repeated, with its seagull cries, conjured up long empty beaches at the start of autumn, with a sense of nostalgia for the summer, but also a deeper sense of loss.
The song is about a man who wants to get his woman back. She has left him for the younger, more exciting and temporary lovers she meets in the summer.
It’s the song with one of the more famous lines in rock music:
Out on the road todayThat image of a Dead-Head sticker on a Cadillac went straight into the pop-culture and describes a certain way of selling out: comfortable, complacent, and successfully. Sell out like that and there is no going back.
I saw a Dead-Head sticker on a Cadillac
A little voice inside my head said
Don’t look back you can never look back
Thought I knew what love was
What did I know
Those days are gone forever
I should just let them go but..
But the verse isn’t about that. It’s about the way the Dead-Head sticker jogs the singer into realising that he can’t go back to her. Intellectually, he knows he can’t. Emotionally, as the ‘but’ leading to the final chorus suggests, he can’t stop himself from wanting to try.
Blue-Pill Oneitis chump. Yo, bro, bitch be a ho, you don’t want to know her ass no mo’. Or if you want some Blue-Pill spirituality with that: he has to realise that she is on her own path, and has a right to go whichever way she wants, and he has to let her go with love. Same advice: stop stalking, quit whining, get over it, get back into another saddle. (Insofar as the singer blames himself for her loss of interest, there’s an undeniable Blue Pill streak in the lyrics. But at least he’s not simping.)
But the song is not about his attempts to get her back. He hasn’t started yet. He’s still thinking, or dreaming, about it. The song is an acknowledgement of the strength of feelings that he knows would be pointless to act on.
And that explains why the song has a drive and edge that we would not expect from what should be a blues or a romantic lament. The music is not only a soundscape intended to evoke summer’s end in a small beach town, it’s intended to portray the force of his emotional dilemma.
Monday, 6 January 2020
Peter Woit, Dominic Cummings and How To Hire Whizz-Kids
Dominic Cummings has a widely-cited blog post about the people he wants to hire and it has attracted a lot of attention. Even from Peter Woit, who says this...
Here’s why you don’t advertise "high ethical values and some devotion to telling the truth" when what you want are people with off-the-charts technical skills and ideas. Because it signals that attitude is more important than skill, and that demonstrating that attitude is an important part of the job - rather than an important part of one’s character. Which means the job involves some posing and virtue signalling. So the skilled people won’t apply, no more than they would to an advertisement that said something about “must be able to function well in a big-company environment”, which they would read as “a lot of your time is going to be wasted on bureaucratic BS”.
For similar reasons you don’t go on about how you want people "to make the world a better place in some specific way.” Quite apart from all the talent you will turn away because they think that what you want to do will actually make the world a worse place. An appeal to people who want to change the world is code for “we’re not paying the market rate for the skills we say we want” and which will be read as “we don’t really want those skills because we don’t know how to use them”.
British politics is full of the “confident public school bluffers”. It’s full of networkers and people who can sense changes of policy and mood and pick up the latest buzz phrases and ideas, but who can’t actually do anything. When they go outside for advice and insight, they go to people who will listen carefully and then tell them what they want to hear.
This is exactly what Cummings does not want. He wants "people who are much brighter than me who can work in an extreme environment. If you play office politics, you will be discovered and immediately binned."
“People much brighter than me” is code for “I am not intimidated by the fact you can do things I can’t and understand things I never will. I don’t need to prove myself in competition with you.” Which is very attractive to people who have spent a couple of years dialling it down so as not to upset their less competent managers.
Cummings goes on to make a point near to my heart. "People in SW1 talk a lot about ‘diversity’ but they rarely mean ‘true cognitive diversity’. They are usually babbling about ‘gender identity diversity blah blah’. What SW1 needs is not more drivel about ‘identity’ and ‘diversity’ from Oxbridge humanities graduates but more genuine cognitive diversity."
Amen. The last thing anyone needs to solve real problems is a room full of multi-cultural people who all have MBAs from Harvard, London or INSEAD. Or a room full of vibrant Oxbridge humanities graduates. That is not diversity. That’s a mono-culture. Or the editorial staff of The Economist.
There’s another reason why you don’t advertise for people with "high ethical values and some devotion to telling the truth” who also want to make the world a better place in some specific way. It’s really easy to lie about those things and impossible to test for them, since most people can make good contextual guesses at what constitutes the interviewers’ understanding of “high ethical values”.
That’s why Cummings wrote his ad that way.
Peter Woit’s first complaint is that Cummings did not follow the assumed model of how politicians recruit, and the kind of people they should recruit: that politicians should recruit Good People Who Care About Issues And Can Work Within Existing Frameworks To Address Those Issues.
But those Existing Frameworks are not policy-neutral. Over two years of non-stop opposition by the British Civil Service to Brexit, culminating in the shenanigans of the House of Commons through the summer and autumn of 2019, the use of the legal system, and especially the Supreme Court, to pursue politics by other means… all this has shown that the Establishment is not a fiction but a bunch of real people with deep contempt for the very public whose taxes pay their wages. Some of those people will have been bought and paid for by the EU, but a lot simply have contempt for the voter. Cummings understands, as do many British people, that the bureaucrats, judges and others Establishment types who allowed their personal beliefs and feelings to get in the way of their job... those people have to step aside or be pushed aside.
That’s what I think is Peter Woit’s second complaint. He wants to believe in the Integrity and Rightness of "the institutions", and Cummings clearly does not. Peter Woit wants to believe that “the institutions" can somehow neutralise the personal interests of those working in them.
The latest generation of populist politicians are saying that if that ever was true, it is not now, and that "the institutions" are simply force multipliers for Establishment cronies to impose their ideas on, and express their contempt for, the people.
That’s a hard thing for a lot of people to take. If you don’t believe in "the institutions", what do you believe in? (Answer: that the job of a politician is not to make the people over in some image of a Good Person, but to manage the provision of Common Goods and to regulate and oversee the private sector and the provision of whatever are the key services and products in the current mode of really-existing Capitalism at the time. It’s not exactly inspiring, but I don’t want people who need to be inspired to run the State, I want people who will do it when they have a hangover.)
Disclaimer: Peter Woit is much better at his job than I am at mine. He probably has a longer track record of being a decent person as well, which since I’m a recovering alcoholic is pretty much a gimme. His book Not Even Wrong is a must-read even after all these years, and I continue to learn much from his blog. Everyone can’t be a good judge of everything, and the fact that a smart guy like him misses the point of a recruitment advertisement tells us how hard this stuff is to understand.
The remarkable things to me about this long document are what it doesn’t contain. In particular I see nothing at all about any specific policy goals. Usually a new government would recruit people by appealing to their desire to make the world a better place in some specific way, but there’s nothing about that here. The goal is to control the government and what the British population believes, but to what end?This is one of those times I’m glad I never stayed in Academia, but went into the private sector. Because I know exactly what Cummings is trying to do with this blog post / advertisement. He is trying to attract people who would never otherwise in a million years go anywhere near politics and the public sector.
In addition, a more conventional hiring process would be asking for candidates of high ethical values, with some devotion to telling the truth. Cummings seems to be asking for exactly the opposite: best if your background is “from a crime family hired by the KGB.”
Here’s why you don’t advertise "high ethical values and some devotion to telling the truth" when what you want are people with off-the-charts technical skills and ideas. Because it signals that attitude is more important than skill, and that demonstrating that attitude is an important part of the job - rather than an important part of one’s character. Which means the job involves some posing and virtue signalling. So the skilled people won’t apply, no more than they would to an advertisement that said something about “must be able to function well in a big-company environment”, which they would read as “a lot of your time is going to be wasted on bureaucratic BS”.
For similar reasons you don’t go on about how you want people "to make the world a better place in some specific way.” Quite apart from all the talent you will turn away because they think that what you want to do will actually make the world a worse place. An appeal to people who want to change the world is code for “we’re not paying the market rate for the skills we say we want” and which will be read as “we don’t really want those skills because we don’t know how to use them”.
British politics is full of the “confident public school bluffers”. It’s full of networkers and people who can sense changes of policy and mood and pick up the latest buzz phrases and ideas, but who can’t actually do anything. When they go outside for advice and insight, they go to people who will listen carefully and then tell them what they want to hear.
This is exactly what Cummings does not want. He wants "people who are much brighter than me who can work in an extreme environment. If you play office politics, you will be discovered and immediately binned."
“People much brighter than me” is code for “I am not intimidated by the fact you can do things I can’t and understand things I never will. I don’t need to prove myself in competition with you.” Which is very attractive to people who have spent a couple of years dialling it down so as not to upset their less competent managers.
Cummings goes on to make a point near to my heart. "People in SW1 talk a lot about ‘diversity’ but they rarely mean ‘true cognitive diversity’. They are usually babbling about ‘gender identity diversity blah blah’. What SW1 needs is not more drivel about ‘identity’ and ‘diversity’ from Oxbridge humanities graduates but more genuine cognitive diversity."
Amen. The last thing anyone needs to solve real problems is a room full of multi-cultural people who all have MBAs from Harvard, London or INSEAD. Or a room full of vibrant Oxbridge humanities graduates. That is not diversity. That’s a mono-culture. Or the editorial staff of The Economist.
There’s another reason why you don’t advertise for people with "high ethical values and some devotion to telling the truth” who also want to make the world a better place in some specific way. It’s really easy to lie about those things and impossible to test for them, since most people can make good contextual guesses at what constitutes the interviewers’ understanding of “high ethical values”.
That’s why Cummings wrote his ad that way.
Peter Woit’s first complaint is that Cummings did not follow the assumed model of how politicians recruit, and the kind of people they should recruit: that politicians should recruit Good People Who Care About Issues And Can Work Within Existing Frameworks To Address Those Issues.
But those Existing Frameworks are not policy-neutral. Over two years of non-stop opposition by the British Civil Service to Brexit, culminating in the shenanigans of the House of Commons through the summer and autumn of 2019, the use of the legal system, and especially the Supreme Court, to pursue politics by other means… all this has shown that the Establishment is not a fiction but a bunch of real people with deep contempt for the very public whose taxes pay their wages. Some of those people will have been bought and paid for by the EU, but a lot simply have contempt for the voter. Cummings understands, as do many British people, that the bureaucrats, judges and others Establishment types who allowed their personal beliefs and feelings to get in the way of their job... those people have to step aside or be pushed aside.
That’s what I think is Peter Woit’s second complaint. He wants to believe in the Integrity and Rightness of "the institutions", and Cummings clearly does not. Peter Woit wants to believe that “the institutions" can somehow neutralise the personal interests of those working in them.
The latest generation of populist politicians are saying that if that ever was true, it is not now, and that "the institutions" are simply force multipliers for Establishment cronies to impose their ideas on, and express their contempt for, the people.
That’s a hard thing for a lot of people to take. If you don’t believe in "the institutions", what do you believe in? (Answer: that the job of a politician is not to make the people over in some image of a Good Person, but to manage the provision of Common Goods and to regulate and oversee the private sector and the provision of whatever are the key services and products in the current mode of really-existing Capitalism at the time. It’s not exactly inspiring, but I don’t want people who need to be inspired to run the State, I want people who will do it when they have a hangover.)
Disclaimer: Peter Woit is much better at his job than I am at mine. He probably has a longer track record of being a decent person as well, which since I’m a recovering alcoholic is pretty much a gimme. His book Not Even Wrong is a must-read even after all these years, and I continue to learn much from his blog. Everyone can’t be a good judge of everything, and the fact that a smart guy like him misses the point of a recruitment advertisement tells us how hard this stuff is to understand.
Thursday, 2 January 2020
Things I Replaced in 2019
LAN Cable. For about a year I had a few metres of Cat 6 LAN cable wrapped round a paint bowl - don’t ask - because I used to use it to connect my work laptop when I worked from home. Stopped doing that sometime this year, or even earlier when I went over to the Netgear D6400 router.
Copper broadband. I don’t need a DS3 into my house and 5 E1’s out, but that’s what I get. For days on end between re-connects by the local DLE.
My 2004 Fiat Punto. Retired for me. Replaced by a 2011 Fiat Punto.
My Bose QC20s at work. Gave up the ghost after years of use. Replaced with QC35’s
Tidal. Yes I know Spotify is not integrated with Roon, but I don’t have Roon, and Spotify seems to have almost all the music I could ever want.
My old crockery. With some nice simple stuff on sale at John Lewis.
Long hot-water based drinks after breakfast. I drink cold water, or espresso. I feel better for it.
Bench press. Yep, I know. That means I am no longer any kind of Bro. It was taking too much out of me, especially the worry that I might drop the damn bar on myself. After you faint in the gym for the first time, you never entirely trust your body again.
Grimy and mossy stonework around the house. Thanks to the Karcher water-jet cleaner.
Leaking roof and gutters. It took a couple of passes, but the roofer finally got it all sorted out and cleaned up.
The Roberts bedside radio. Replaced with a Bose Colour 2 speaker and an iPod.
The grey houndstooth overcoat. I wore that thing every day for five winters straight. It was getting ragged.
Copper broadband. I don’t need a DS3 into my house and 5 E1’s out, but that’s what I get. For days on end between re-connects by the local DLE.
My 2004 Fiat Punto. Retired for me. Replaced by a 2011 Fiat Punto.
My Bose QC20s at work. Gave up the ghost after years of use. Replaced with QC35’s
Tidal. Yes I know Spotify is not integrated with Roon, but I don’t have Roon, and Spotify seems to have almost all the music I could ever want.
My old crockery. With some nice simple stuff on sale at John Lewis.
Long hot-water based drinks after breakfast. I drink cold water, or espresso. I feel better for it.
Bench press. Yep, I know. That means I am no longer any kind of Bro. It was taking too much out of me, especially the worry that I might drop the damn bar on myself. After you faint in the gym for the first time, you never entirely trust your body again.
Grimy and mossy stonework around the house. Thanks to the Karcher water-jet cleaner.
Leaking roof and gutters. It took a couple of passes, but the roofer finally got it all sorted out and cleaned up.
The Roberts bedside radio. Replaced with a Bose Colour 2 speaker and an iPod.
The grey houndstooth overcoat. I wore that thing every day for five winters straight. It was getting ragged.
Thursday, 19 December 2019
St Lawrence Jewry With The Lights On
It was the Lord Mayor's Carol Service Thursday evening, and they turned the lights on in St Lawrence Jewry, so they could move stuff around and have a dust before the City Gentry turned up. I'm not really a City person, but this did make me realise that, while the Bank of England at one end of Throgmorton Street might be the centre of the financial universe, the centre of the traditional City is St Pauls and the Guildhall. Which is where St Lawrence Jewry is.
Monday, 16 December 2019
Simply Be - A Road Sign
This is a bus-stop and sign on a journey I make around once-a-week, and have been for years. Suddenly it became a photograph. The subject isn't the girls, or the silly ad, but the road sign.
Covered in pollen and tree dust, only really visible in winter, and offering a choice of destinations ranging from the downright insalubrious (Hanworth) to the supposedly posh (Twickenham), with Hounslow somewhere in the middle.
The advert gets cleaned and renewed because capitalism. The road sign stays dirty because why should Hounslow council spend my local taxes cleaning their road signs?
Week three of the Great SW Trains Guards strike. Nearly Xmas.
Thursday, 12 December 2019
The Load We Have To Move
I read James Wallman’s book on how we can improve the way we use our spare time, and in putting some remarks together, kept going off at a tangent. Wallman’s book is full of life-hacks, some reasonable and some utterly silly, and I don’t like hacks because I’d rather identify and solve the underlying problem. The underlying reasons for why people waste their spare time on junk activities are about the structure of their lives, and that takes us away from simple hacks to some serious reviews and actions that lack best-seller friendliness.
Then I remembered Jordan Peterson’s remark about young men and purpose, from one of his classic videos...
and the line “well, at least I moved that load from here to there”. He meant it as a metaphor, and then I realised what the load really is.
Very few people even come close. I’m bad at finding tradesmen and couldn’t find a new friend if my life depended on it. My Game is weak, and my job-hunting is bad. My diet is skewed towards sugar, and lacks variety. This may be because I’m getting old and my taste buds are going. I was in my mid-forties before I worked for a manager who thought I was good at my job and appreciated it. Only a couple of years before that I did my Step Eight and started to feel some actual self-respect. I spent a lot of the first half of my being pretty much a junk person myself. When I was at my alcoholic worst, I worked for some dodgy but not actually criminal people, and I have worked for a company director who wound up in jail, so maybe I have worked for criminals.
Getting honest work is not difficult, but it’s not easy either. Here’s the (*): nurses, policemen, firemen and teachers are paid from taxes. They are paid not to do what the people they deal with want, but what the Government and the organisation wants to do with the people they deal with. It’s a subtle but crucial difference. Provided that the staff are in tune with the public, that’s not so bad, but when the organisation is looks down on the public, that’s not so acceptable.
That’s the load. Do those things and you won’t be asking about the purpose of your life.
Because that’s what living is.
Then I remembered Jordan Peterson’s remark about young men and purpose, from one of his classic videos...
and the line “well, at least I moved that load from here to there”. He meant it as a metaphor, and then I realised what the load really is.
You are someone who respects themselves, and is lucky enough to have friends and co-workers who are considerate enough to express their thanks for what you do for them. Earn a living working in a company that produces something legal that people want and are not forced by law to pay for (*). Pay your taxes and not whine about it. Work hard, exercise, eat right, not drink too much, and not buy things you don’t need with money you don’t have to impress people you don’t care about. Stay away from junk culture, junk food, junk activities and junk people. Try all sorts of things until you find food, drink, music, literature, movies, dance, theatre, sports, athletic and outdoor activities, that you like. Learn to cook, buy food, and keep your lodgings clean. Learn how to recognise users, losers and abusers, and keep them out of your life. Learn how to recognise scientific, political, economic, commercial and personal fraud. (It isn’t as hard as you might think.) Learn to follow the money: ask, about anyone who is getting press coverage and telling you how you should behave, where they are getting their money from, who is financing them? Learn how to find tradesmen to do what you can’t, and don’t begrudge paying them a fair price. Learn how to find and make friends - keeping them depends as much on them as on you. Learn how to find jobs and interview well for them, and also to leave politely when it’s obvious the job is a crock.That’s the load.
You are not going to get married or enter into a domestic relationship unless your parents and her parents are still happily married. You are not going to have children until you are married, and unless you can think, right now, of three ways of keeping a four year-old, a ten year-old and a seventeen-year-old from being bored in whatever the weather is right now. (You should remember those from your own childhood.) Learn Game so you are not tongue-tied and awkward when you meet a woman you want to have an affair with, and especially the one you want to have children with, because you're going to need to Game her for the rest of your life.
Very few people even come close. I’m bad at finding tradesmen and couldn’t find a new friend if my life depended on it. My Game is weak, and my job-hunting is bad. My diet is skewed towards sugar, and lacks variety. This may be because I’m getting old and my taste buds are going. I was in my mid-forties before I worked for a manager who thought I was good at my job and appreciated it. Only a couple of years before that I did my Step Eight and started to feel some actual self-respect. I spent a lot of the first half of my being pretty much a junk person myself. When I was at my alcoholic worst, I worked for some dodgy but not actually criminal people, and I have worked for a company director who wound up in jail, so maybe I have worked for criminals.
Getting honest work is not difficult, but it’s not easy either. Here’s the (*): nurses, policemen, firemen and teachers are paid from taxes. They are paid not to do what the people they deal with want, but what the Government and the organisation wants to do with the people they deal with. It’s a subtle but crucial difference. Provided that the staff are in tune with the public, that’s not so bad, but when the organisation is looks down on the public, that’s not so acceptable.
That’s the load. Do those things and you won’t be asking about the purpose of your life.
Because that’s what living is.
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