tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33481621899211800892024-02-07T18:33:12.621+00:00mediocracy extraa supplement to the <a href="http://inversions-and-deceptions.com/"><b>mediocracy</b></a> siteFabe Tassanohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03279119414821928574noreply@blogger.comBlogger70125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3348162189921180089.post-18436373579502253692017-02-03T04:00:00.001+00:002017-02-03T04:00:02.514+00:00counter-extremismI have posted a second article on erosion of the rule of law. This one covers existing counter-terrorism legislation and the UK government’s counter-extremism strategy.Fabe Tassanohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03279119414821928574noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3348162189921180089.post-33159065009866134382017-02-01T13:48:00.002+00:002017-02-01T13:49:04.161+00:00new article
I have posted an article on legal certainty, the first in a series dealing with erosion of the rule of law in Britain and elsewhere.Fabe Tassanohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03279119414821928574noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3348162189921180089.post-28185600420191629292016-12-06T11:04:00.000+00:002016-12-06T23:39:39.810+00:00Merkel, Obama, Trump and ‘liberal’ values
“Angela Merkel has said she will seek a fourth term as German chancellor after Donald Trump’s election left her as the west’s pre-eminent defender of liberal values.”
Financial Times, 20 November 2016
In the above extract from a news alert, Angela Merkel is explicitly, and Barack Obama implicitly, identified with “liberal” values; while Donald Trump is presumed to be relatively non-liberal.
Fabe Tassanohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03279119414821928574noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3348162189921180089.post-10426611312994959732016-11-03T11:27:00.001+00:002016-11-03T11:33:46.353+00:00‘free’ debate at ‘universities’
“Many students claim that formally ‘free’ debate sidelines the voices of oppressed people, as prejudice leads more privileged folk to subtly ignore their points of view.” editor of student magazine No Offence
A year ago a few dissident students tried to support free speech by publishing a magazine with articles that flouted the current ideological bias. The result? The magazine was banned by Fabe Tassanohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03279119414821928574noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3348162189921180089.post-48246540210984361872016-10-23T08:22:00.000+01:002016-10-28T16:05:03.265+01:00coming soonPlease add this site’s RSS to your feed reader, or subscribe to Google FeedBurner (via sidebar).
This will notify you of future posts, and of new articles appearing on the main site.
We gratefully acknowledge the recent donation from Mr E P.Fabe Tassanohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03279119414821928574noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3348162189921180089.post-26995348944651738092015-10-21T10:59:00.000+01:002016-10-24T11:54:22.953+01:00the phony economy crowds out reality● Thousands of people regularly read our blogs. Yet 99% of them do absolutely nothing to help us.
It seems likely the welfare state has dulled rather than enhanced any innate willingness to help others. I mean “others” in the sense of people one knows about — rather than the supposedly needy as marketed by governments and NGOs.
Similarly, the existence of a bloated ‘university’ sector &Fabe Tassanohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03279119414821928574noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3348162189921180089.post-31015554144794123772015-09-23T09:49:00.002+01:002015-09-23T13:46:57.731+01:00aetiology of socialism● What causes a person to become a socialist? One possible reason seems to be anger about being excluded – from the elite, from one’s social class, from having one’s abilities recognised, from social approval.
Sometimes the anger is justified, in the sense that the person is inappropriately excluded. Many intellectuals and artists feel they are not sufficiently recognised. Even if they are Fabe Tassanohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03279119414821928574noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3348162189921180089.post-74419077945566309172015-08-12T09:03:00.001+01:002015-08-13T09:54:23.805+01:00mediocrazia e degradazione● A propos recent reports about the degradation of Rome.
Mediocracy is a condition that primarily affects mature civilisations, particularly those which have at one stage emphasised the individual. It represents both an outgrowth of, and a reaction against, individualism.
One doesn’t get much more mature than Greece and Italy, and we were recently reminded about some of the problems that Greece Fabe Tassanohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03279119414821928574noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3348162189921180089.post-87263688420053994652015-07-15T20:35:00.000+01:002015-07-16T09:28:32.878+01:00spying without frontiers● The saga of Olimar and the X-ray specs continues.
Olimar and his friends regularly spied on many ladies while they were undressing, including Angela and Dilma.The office of the Generalbundesanwalt (Germany’s Attorney General), which was contemplating action against the US government for alleged spying on Angela Merkel, recently gave up its investigation, ostensibly for lack of evidence. Fabe Tassanohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03279119414821928574noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3348162189921180089.post-34736505463393067452015-05-20T10:25:00.000+01:002015-05-22T09:04:12.642+01:00those Russians● I have been taking a renewed interest in Russian literature, and wondering which are the best translations. Constance Garnett’s (from the 19th century) are the ones most people are familiar with, but they have their limitations.
My colleague Celia Green can read Russian, and tells me that it often contains implied emotions or statements which are more or less impossible to convert to English Fabe Tassanohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03279119414821928574noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3348162189921180089.post-42609769883348178422015-05-06T09:05:00.003+01:002015-05-22T09:04:46.735+01:00academia’s reputation● The other day I came across someone in the higher education bureaucracy arguing in favour of limits on intellectual freedom, along the lines of: “academics can’t just behave how they like ... they shouldn’t be free to say things that might upset other people ... there ought to be a rule against bringing academia into disrepute ... it should be possible to eject or otherwise penalise Fabe Tassanohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03279119414821928574noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3348162189921180089.post-52142568929461428712015-04-15T09:19:00.000+01:002015-05-22T09:05:00.456+01:00Max and Moritz● Today is the birthday of Wilhelm Busch, influential nineteenth-century German humorist and cartoonist, and creator of Max and Moritz. The book is a classic of German children’s literature but is rather unpleasant, in the vein of Struwwelpeter. Max and Moritz are two naughty boys who perpetrate a number of nasty tricks, before themselves coming to a sticky end.Ja, zur Übeltätigkeit,
ja, dazu istFabe Tassanohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03279119414821928574noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3348162189921180089.post-67412470604367966632015-03-25T17:10:00.000+00:002015-05-22T09:05:08.784+01:00less cruel, more ‘usual’?● Apparently Utah is bringing back death by firing squad as a method of capital punishment. While not approving of the death penalty per se, it seems to me this technique is possibly less awful than the more clinical, scientifically ‘correct’ one of lethal injection.
I’ve recently been re-reading Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot. The passage where Prince Myshkin discusses the guillotine — echoing Fabe Tassanohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03279119414821928574noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3348162189921180089.post-71463361202285499242015-03-11T09:47:00.001+00:002016-11-20T11:03:54.463+00:00Dr T’s alternative ‘pastoral letter’● Most politicians these days seem to be trying to communicate the same tired vision, ditto most clerics. No wonder many people feel disconnected from both modern politics and modern religion. In a world of mediocracy, certain nuggets of traditional wisdom may be helpful.
It’s not advisable to place much faith in popular leaders. They are apt to have reached their positions by arbitrary (or Fabe Tassanohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03279119414821928574noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3348162189921180089.post-4481966171697548982015-02-18T23:59:00.000+00:002015-05-22T09:05:27.027+01:00Church of England: wicked ‘individualism’● From the House of Bishops’ Pastoral Letter on the 2015 General Election:
Consumption, rather than production, has come to define us, and individualism has tended to estrange people from one another. So has an excessive emphasis on competition regarded as a sort of social Darwinism. (This is a perverse consequence of allowing market rhetoric to creep into social policy.) [§45]
The Fabe Tassanohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03279119414821928574noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3348162189921180089.post-13384250621593524472015-02-04T17:54:00.001+00:002015-05-22T09:05:44.744+01:00Will QE cause inflation, or is there a ‘statute of limitations’?● ECB President Mario Draghi in response to being asked whether the recently announced programme of quantitative easing, intended to boost the ailing eurozone, might eventually lead to damaging price inflation for certain asset classes:
I think the best way to answer to this is, have we seen lots of inflation since QE programmes started? Have we seen that? And now it’s been quite a few years Fabe Tassanohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03279119414821928574noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3348162189921180089.post-54985659537006814332015-01-21T23:04:00.000+00:002015-05-22T09:05:52.728+01:00principle of fiction: doctors good, bankers bad● Given that the banking system, which experienced a once-in-a-lifetime breakdown in 2008, is not by any means fully recovered, and will likely generate more problems down the line, hatred of financiers will probably be with us for some time to come. (A misplaced reaction, since the breakdown was a symptom of mediocracy in general, and not specific to banking.)
Recently, coming across an old Fabe Tassanohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03279119414821928574noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3348162189921180089.post-27306483652227638782014-11-12T20:18:00.000+00:002015-05-22T09:06:13.513+01:00True Grit: 1969, 2010● A few months ago I enjoyed seeing the Coen brothers’ True Grit, based on the 1968 novel. Hailee Steinfeld’s acting made it easy to warm to the central character of Mattie, a headstrong 14-year-old girl who demonstrates more “grit” than any of the men she encounters. Last week Film4 showed the 1969 movie with John Wayne and Kim Darby, providing an opportunity to compare and contrast.
At first Fabe Tassanohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03279119414821928574noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3348162189921180089.post-30848971550967517722014-10-29T17:11:00.000+00:002015-05-22T09:06:22.326+01:00covert morality● Writing in the previous post about the supposed virtuousness of wanting an existing social trend to continue – rather than not – reminded me of one of the key deceptions of mediocracy: its claim to be value-neutral.
Even if we restrict the term “value” to areas of disapproval not enshrined in the form of legal prohibitions, I doubt whether any society is capable of being truly value-neutral, Fabe Tassanohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03279119414821928574noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3348162189921180089.post-61365993454784315172014-10-15T11:28:00.000+01:002015-05-22T09:06:31.692+01:00the illogic of progress fetishism● There’s something fundamentally illogical about the contemporary tendency to fetishise speed of ‘progress’ – and to despise those who want things to move more slowly, or not at all, or to go in a direction their critics would describe as ‘backwards’.
Call the state of society 20 years ago S1, and the current state S2. We can calculate an apparent rate of change by looking at the difference in Fabe Tassanohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03279119414821928574noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3348162189921180089.post-43935208111299617372014-10-01T21:59:00.001+01:002015-05-22T09:06:42.027+01:00the end of the experiment● Two years ago, I commented on an FT opinion piece which warned of the possible fallout from the inevitable turn in US interest rates, when they finally came off their zero (or near-zero) bottom.
Never mind banks going bust, what about the possibility of central banks becoming insolvent? According to Scott Minerd, a 1% increase in US interest rates “would cause the market value of the Federal Fabe Tassanohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03279119414821928574noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3348162189921180089.post-21609689127777390602014-09-03T21:10:00.001+01:002015-05-22T09:07:00.459+01:00Doctors rule, OK?● The Independent’s editors are no libertarians. Regarding the Ashya King case, they concede that getting Spanish police to imprison the parents was an act in which “the hand of the law showed itself a little too heavy”. But they have little time for parents wanting to give more weight to their own views than to the opinion of the ‘professionals’.
Doctors are of course not, in most cases, paid Fabe Tassanohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03279119414821928574noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3348162189921180089.post-34241027713301100492014-08-20T21:32:00.002+01:002015-10-26T16:05:50.384+00:00teaching yobs to be ‘confident feminists’● According to Shadow Home Secretary Yvette Cooper, writing recently in the Independent, there is “growing abuse and harassment of young women and girls”. For her, as a socialist, the correct response to something undesirable is (of course) “government action”.
According to the Children’s Commissioner there is clear evidence that violence in young relationships is growing. The British Crime Fabe Tassanohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03279119414821928574noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3348162189921180089.post-49529576409464983682014-08-06T20:57:00.000+01:002015-05-22T09:07:18.112+01:00ten key tenets● The guiding principle of mediocracy is that society is sovereign over the individual, and that it should control both culture and everyday life. The following tenets elaborate this.
1. The world is satisfactorily explained, in all key respects, by an established body of knowledge and theory. Publicly sanctioned cultural representatives are in agreement on all crucial points. Any change to this Fabe Tassanohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03279119414821928574noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3348162189921180089.post-1633125728809754532014-07-23T22:04:00.001+01:002014-07-23T22:07:15.964+01:00state encroachment: irresistible● There may have been several factors that went into the decision to relieve Michael Gove of his post as minister for education. But the overall import seems clear. It has been shown, once again, that trying to take on a profession which operates under an ideology that it staunchly believes to be morally correct is a hopeless cause.
In a conflict between (a) politicians claiming to do what votersFabe Tassanohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03279119414821928574noreply@blogger.com