Sky TV, Oxford and Prisons

I was left flabbergasted and discombobulated when I read that, apparently, the inmates of HM Prisons have access to Sky TV. Not only is the government cutting down on defence, increasing foreign aid spending and destroying the party over something so irrelevant to voters, as gay marriage. They also have time to court society's wrongdoers with Sky TV.

Let me put this in perspective for you.

Here, in Oxford, where I am studying. We do not have Sky TV at my college. Some colleges do not. It is a choice, perhaps a financial choice, one that my abode chose not to indulge its students with. A sensible choice one might argue, we are all here after all to complete our doctoral thesis', not to watch TV. Perhaps the distraction of Sky TV would be so large, that no research was done at all? Regardless, the odious contrast now spitting in out face is this:

Sky TV is paid for and available to inmates of HM Prisons, but not to most students at the University of Oxford.

What does that tell you about the government's priorities.

BBC rapes science reporting again, again and again...

H/T EU Referendum

I hope you will excuse me for being so late in jumping on the posting-bandwagon on this one. Now I think I am fairly well placed to comment on sciency issues, that is after all what I am studying. There will be a lot of professors popping up in the above video and there are a few things to note about the term and title of 'professor'.

You do not have to agree with them because of their position but you sure as hell will respect them. I told our economics lecturer that his entire discipline was pure bullshit in my opinion in my first year of university - but that was only my opinion. If people want to be stupid enough to study something so profoundly boring as economics then you must respect them for that (see; another opinion). Now professors will also have opinions, lo and behold, and they are not paragons of impartial reporting. They like every other human being have built-in bias that they cannot avoid for one reason or another.

With these professors above you are allowed to disagree, equally for those who propagate AGW as a leading truth you are also allowed to disagree and question. This is key; you must question. Do not ever take anything the MSM says as a given truth. It is not. There is far more to anything than one article, and even if you get a thousand, even a hundred thousand articles saying that the glaciers are going to melt in 10 years time that does not make it true. They are only writing what someone else with an intent has told them. Millions upon millions of pieces were written on the supposed Y2K crash of year 2000, that was supposedly going to wipe out the entire global computer network. That did not happen. Of course there was a small band of informed people who said it would not happen but no one listened to them. When they euro was introduced there was a small band of people who said that you cannot have fiscal union without political union for that would lead to a market crash. And look what happened to that; they were ignored as per usual by the media.

Whatever someone says have an autonomous mind. Professors do not know everything and they have opinions like anyone else, and they are highly conscious of getting their work published. Some by any means necessary. Academia is not some abstract castle of infinite good will, the truth is far far more depressing.

Why are young people left-wing?

I am what would be considered a young person and I am a right-wing conservative (not a Tory though). Without getting into a soul searching debate of what actually defines 'wings', lets just say that I am one of the few, if my position in society at large were to be examined. My fellow peers at university are mostly ultra-liberal and even more so left-wing bordering on socialist. Political affiliation is a difficult subject mostly because the people subject to evaluation simply do not know what they are, because few know what they believe in. They have a few hunches as to what an appropriate knee-jerk response would be to some random statement, intended to produce such a reaction but that is about it. When pressed they get annoyed and want to end the discussion. I do not want to end the discussion, I want to know why most people start of their lives as left-wing liberals but later on change to something else and not necessarily conservatism or similar 'isms'.

I have a lot of friends in Sweden, and Sweden is about to have an election. Regular readers will know that I wrote a long prodding essay about Facebook here, sadly Facebook will feature again in this little attempt to come to closure. Facebook is where the action is, so too with politics. I am very saddened to see that so many of my friends, of similar age to myself, are so fantastically left-wing. They post little messages on their personal "comment" about their thoughts on the election and they join various groups who advocate socialism. Much to my dismay for they are comprehensively and collectively, wholly ignorant of the dangers of what they are advocating. I can say this not because I am a righteous plonk who thinks he knows what is best for everyone else, no, because I am a political nerd, and I would like to think that my thoughts and comments are a bit more informed than those of the average Joe.

I have been fortunate enough to have known some of these people since I could barely walk. They are truly wonderful people, but sitting where I am, they are also complete fucking nut-jobs who are indulging in the most disgusting form of cultural relativism. What is more they seem to have no recollection of history, which is made even worse since I know they have had history classes; I took the same classes. When they say socialism, they dream up some eutopia-like scenario and post a nice little red star to accompany their political creed, leaving me dumbstruck again. They know nothing of the gulags, perestroika or glasnost or of serfs and Molotov. What is 1905 and 17 to them more than some random years? Do they know that Soviet socialism (which is nice way of saying 'communism') killed in excess of 20 million people. Who is Solyetzin, what did he do, 'sounds lika soya to me'. Do they know that socialism/communism has failed everywhere it was tried? Sweden was not built upon socialism, but it just so happens to be one of the frontrunners of the modern welfare state. Welfare per se, is not socialism - I think. That might just be my deluded way of putting together a cognitive argument. Put it like this instead: I believe that if you are fortunate enough to have had the possibilities to advance to such a point that you are self-reliant, then a small small percentage of your income should be given to your fellow man so that he too, hopefully, can do the same. Our birth place is, to the best of our knowledge, random and for all I know I could have been sitting in Katmandu right now, mending carpets, not having a thought in the world for the modern welfare state. Based on that alone, it suffices to say that we should all be compassionate but not excessively so [I think]. However...

The dangers of the welfare state are 1) it often is unjust in taking lawful property from individuals through excessive taxation, 2) it substitutes the collective judgment of the government for the freedom and judgment of the individual 3) it discourages initiative and entrepreneurship by individuals, and 4) it leads to excessive government power and hence corruption. The danger of these tendencies of the welfare state were well summarized by Lionel Trilling, a respected man of the contemporary liberal left as quoted by Gertrude Himmelfarb in her book 'Poverty and Compassion' “Some paradox of our natures leads us, when once we have made our fellow men the objects of our enlightened interest, to go on to make them the object of our pity, then of our wisdom, ultimately of our coercion. It is to prevent this corruption, the most ironic and tragic that man knows, that we stand in need of the moral realism which is the product of the moral imagination”. As political economist F. A. Hayek has stated; “The guiding principle that a policy of freedom for the individual is the only truly progressive policy remains as true today as it was in the nineteenth century”.

So why are young people left-wing? I think (a lot of 'I think' tonight simply because there is very little written on this subject, at least very little that is available to me) a lot of it is derived from some spurious belief that because you are young you want to break from the past, you want the new world, automatically assuming that the old world is a bad world. Since you yourself are 'new' your ideals have not been tainted by reality and pragmatism (you remember, I am sure, all the bollocks you got at school "anyone can do anything" and we all thought 'great, fantastic, I can be a rocket scientist' even though we knew deep down that there was probably only one or two kids in the room who had those kind of brains) and you express yourself in the way of a revolutionary who has the most commendable of values, not to mention altruistic of values, but has little in the way of prospects. Because you are new (simple terminology but lets not get bogged down in semantics) you reject all opposing views as being irrelevant and erroneous, because they are made on the premise of an old society. Yours is the right belief, the righteous belief, yours must be correct because others are wrong, since their ideals and morals have been debased and contaminated by the old world. Hence by proxy, and proxy alone, your altruistic and utopian idea must be morally superior to those of the elders. And since you have the moral imperative only you, and you alone, have the right to change the world.

Socialism is meretricious.

Academic Dumbing Down

In the wake of yet another year of A-level improvement where magically this year's cohort of students was even better than the last, let me tell you how my department does things.

When we started our first year on my course there were 82 of us. The majority of us had been subject to interviews, real interviews, with academic questions not "so how do you like our building?". After our exam results were released it was clear that a significant proportion would not advance to the second year of the course. In fact 25% of the year failed and had to either do retakes the subsequent year or redo the entire year. This is in the light of what our department also decided to do:

• The pass rate was raised from 30% to 40% on all exams,
• The majority of all tests were put into a new format where you had to do the questions provided. I.e. you could not choose which questions to do based on what particular part of the syllabus you knew, you had to do the entire thing.
• The following year all exams had entered into this new format.

The total fail rate on the course is between 25-30% which means that in the end fourth year there are only roughly 55-60 people left. The rest had been weeded out. This is the point I am trying to put forth. You see, instead of making the examinations easier, like the government would have done, afraid of offending someone's intelligence, the department made it harder because the industry had told them that some of the department's graduates were not up to scratch on some parts of the course. That would not do, if it did not improve industry would stop favouring my universities' graduates. Even if you magically manage to make it onto a tough university course with having barely lifted a finger, it is not going to fly, not at the university and not in real life. You are immediately categorised as being stupid, average or clever. Me, I am probably hovering around the 'stupid-average' border but at least I know that.

Even though the government and their bloody quangos massage the statistics in favour of their policies, British students are still tumbling down the international league tables in maths, science and literacy. They are not becoming dumber but the system sure as hell is. What is more, you enter students under the false premise that they are actually able enough to pursue a proper university education in a real subject like English or Physics, when really they are not. I am not saying this because I am an arrogant git who thinks he is better than the rest no; I too failed one subject and had to do a resist. This I am not proud of but it just goes to show that real courses and real universities are hard, some of them, very hard. They are certainly not places for people who are complacent about their work ethic.

You need to be able to tell individuals that they are not good enough, that they need to work harder in order to comprehend the material, otherwise you risk not only failing the individual but the collective as well. It is abundantly clear which side the government has chosen. Socialism UK hard at work again, what was once an absolute measure of academic achievement has been all but destroyed in pursuit of an educational egalitarianism that was neither obtainable nor desirable. It is hardly surprising that more top schools are opting for alternatives such as the International Baccalaureate and the Pre-U.

And who is to blame for keeping the poor out of university? The middle-class of course. I thought, as did the Telegraph, that with a new government, this sort of self-destroying (not 'defeating') rhetoric would end with what appears to be seen as a "sensible" government. No. It would appear that only underdogs are able to be honourable in the face of certain failure. A man must be big enough to admit his mistakes, smart enough to profit from them, and strong enough to correct them. Though I suspect that it was not men who destroyed the educational system of this country. Call them anything but men for that they were not. Men, in the most serene sense of the word, apply their actions for the benefit of others, admit their mistakes and are quiet about their successes. Those are the virtues of a true statesman and we have not had one in years.

Hibernation with propellers

Dear readers and kinsfolk, Mr. Spitfire has entered the unholy period of revision and will as such, as the circumstances present themselves, inhabit the vast realms of the blogosphere somewhat less in the coming weeks. Fret not, for he shall return, stronger than before and all the more vigilant in telling our rulers precisely what they do not want to hear. Long I do for the day when I have the honour of being such a thorn in the political side that I am being censored. Somehow I reckon, my relative unimportance will most likely render such a fantastic hope moot. But who knows.

Now wipe that tear out of your eye and rejoice at the picture below, which is the first of a set of four propellers being built for the Queen Elizabeth Class aircraft carriers.

Anyschmoot, revision calls, mañana ye dwellers of the past.

Update:

It has come to my attention that this is going to be a very dirty election and that all sorts of foul treatments are thrown around. For your benefit, here are what some the 'insults' actually mean:

RACISM: a belief or doctrine that inherent differences among the various human races determine cultural or individual achievement, usually involving the idea that one's own race is superior and has the right to rule others.

XENOPHOBIC: an unreasonable fear or hatred of foreigners or strangers or of that which is foreign or strange.