Tories – Page 2 – Wis[s]e Words

Poke in a pig

Published on September 21, 2015Leave a comment

David Cameron with pig

This really is the most hilarious news: David Cameron allegedly fucked a pig’s snout during a ruggers initiation. Cue a veritable barrage of pig jokes and puns on Twitter. But as Rob Fahey explains, it’s more than just silly fun: such hazing rituals are a means for the ruling classes to control themselves:

The ritualised, sexually grotesque nature of Cameron’s initiation sets it apart somewhat, of course; but what’s also different about this kind of ritual in elite circles is the calculation behind it, the power and control it affords, and the self-perpetuating network of influence it creates. Consider this scenario; at elite institutions, those earmarked – by wealth, by title, by connections – for future leadership roles are forced, as impressionable young people, to carry out humiliating acts in order to gain acceptance by an in-group. That same in-group will, over the course of their lives, help advance their career massively in ways both overt and covert; membership of that group essentially secures their success in life. The cost of entry, paid by all members of the group, is participation in humiliating acts; acts which will forever wed them to the group, because should they later act in a way contrary to the group’s interests or desires, their “indiscretions” can be brought back to destroy their careers or personal lives.

Ding-dong

Published on April 8, 2013Leave a comment

Oh fabulous day! Finally, Chumbawamba can bring out their Thatcher EP.

Waging war on the disabled

Published on August 17, 20122 Comments

The independent looks at what the relentless focus on stopping disability benefits cheats means for those actually disabled:

So who are the targets for this abuse? Is it the benefits cheats featured in the various stories about “sick note Britain”? Is it the man who claimed to be too ill to cut his own food caught on camera playing golf or the man who claimed to need a wheelchair filmed Jiving? Of course not. Their friends, far less passersby, will have no idea what income or benefits they receive and certainly won’t know what they said on an application form and pretended in an interview. Who would believe they would have such a brass neck? No it is not the real fraudsters, estimated to be less than 1% of benefit claimants, who are the target for the abuse, it is those with an obvious physical or learning disability. That’s why some of the irresponsible reporting has been so dangerous. It is the person who clearly has a disability, who may actually be in work, who is having to suffer the taunts, the name calling and being spat on.

Meanwhile the Guardian looks how Atos, the for profit company judging people on disability, actually operates:

The film also demonstrates the unease about the radically heightened eligibility criteria felt by some trainers employed by Atos to teach new recruits how to carry out the tests. It is now harder for some very severely disabled claimants to qualify for support. No matter how serious claimants problems are with their arms, for example, “as long as you’ve got one finger, and you can press a button,” they would be found fit for work, a trainer explains.

Which reminds me of when the Dutch government first started to tighten guidelines for disability benefits in the early nineties, with the focus on “finding suitable work for people yaddayaddayadda”, with suitable work defined as, “well, you can always fold eggroll cases”.

I forgot who said it or where, perhaps it was Sandra, but one of the most sensible pieces of advice I’ve ever heard was that you shouldn’t look at what the intent was behind a piece of legislation or policy, but at what it actually does in reality. The purpose of any machine is what it actually does and with law and policy it’s no different. The current disability polices have the effect of killing disabled people, through suicide, through just not having enough money to live on, of isolating them in poverty, of destroying solidarity with the disabled as they’re being portrayed as scroungers and cheats. It’s a war on the disabled.

“published on a slow day to a gentle chorus of mooing”

Published on June 22, 2012Leave a comment

As Alex called Gove’s latest brainwave, to bring back o-levels for thickos, as discussed at Jamie’s. Also from there, The Financial Times (!) comes down hard on it, arguing it would reduce social mobility and condemn the poorest and the northern to inferior qualifications:

The most significant issues around this idea are related to social mobility: the CSE will tend to be an exam for poorer children. Consider who would take the CSE if schools could select the quarter of pupils with the lowest average grades with perfect foresight.

[…]

There will be a geographical effect, too, with some areas switching heavily to it. I have marked this map showing what proportion of children in each neighbourhood will finish in the bottom quarter on the same measure. The CSE will be a northern qualification, too.

Go look: there’s graphs and everything.

It all does once again beg the question why a certain breed of tory, both in the UK as in the States, is so obsessed with bringing back obsolete forms of teaching to the point of fetishism. The phonics fights in the US, the eleven plus in the UK, the alleged degradation of a-levels, undsoweiter, all operating on prejudice rather than fact. Granted, that’s the conservative m.o. in a nutshell, but education does tend to bring the kooks out even more so than other subjects.