Professional Disrepute

I received the following email from a longstanding friend. As I'm not a subscriber at present to any of the mainstream UK Newspapers I would have missed the letter he has sent me in full and which I reproduce here.

Pat,

This was a letter in the Daily Mail today, from a Mr. Paul Laxton of Huddersfield.  His letter chimes very well with your Dilbert post, so please indulge me whilst I reproduce it in full:

As a working class grammar school boy, my parents and teachers expected me to enter the professional classes.  I’ve been a member of two professions, a teacher in comprehensive schools from 1979 to 1984 and a member of the Prison Service, rising to deputy governor.

Why did my parents aspire for me to enter a profession?  Professionals were respected and respectability was the prime working class virtue.  They had earned the deference they received.  One of the most striking features of my adult life is the way that respect has eroded – and thrown away by the professionals themselves.

After the ordeal of professional photographer Cinnamon Heathcote-Drury – who was accused of pushing a pregnant Muslim woman to the floor – was swiftly concluded by the common sense of a jury, I can’t stay silent.  I was shocked that he arresting officers didn’t conduct even the most rudimentary investigation to establish the facts.  This case is only one of a long line in which police credibility has been eroded by incompetence, partiality and political correctness.  The legal profession, too, now attracts the greatest opprobrium of all, apart from banking.

Meanwhile, judges bring the whole notion of justice into disrepute by elevating the rights of foreign criminals, desperate to stay in this country and enjoy the benefits of our generous welfare state, at the expense of citizens whose children have been mown down by speeding, unlicensed vehicles driven by uninsured drivers.  The ‘no-win-no-fee’ provisions brought in by Jack Straw have encouraged the rapacity of lawyers, the culture of entitlement and the frequently absurd claims of human rights abuse.

The Church of England tears itself apart over gay clergy and female bishops at the expense of the moral and religious messages its declining adherents are straining to hear.  The Catholic Church has also forfeited respect by its ostrich position over paedophile priests.  Teaching was already falling victim to progressive nostrums when I became a student in 1974.  Since then discipline has been banished, achievement cheapened and standards abolished.

I have witnessed the diminution of prison service senior management and was, for a time, ashamed to be associated with the profession of prison governor.  How did we get here?  The educated elite of my generation came to power in 1997.  New Labour abandoned both Methodism, and conventional Marxism, and embraced the ideas of Antonio Gramsci, who taught that revolution came through the infiltration and subversion of the political and civic institutions of the State, and the ideas of Herbert Marcuse, who advocated the control of language and the consequent intolerance of free speech.

Tony Blair was the perfect front man for the revolution that has all but destroyed the reputation of our professions.

I think he has hit the nail fairly and squarely on the head.  The enemy is indeed within.  Feel free to use this on your blog.

Jim

I have several thoughts on what Mr Laxton says. Chief among them is that he is right on almost every level, though I would say that the slide into 'disrepute' of the professions, especially teaching and the law, began even earlier than 1997. Blair simply accelerated it and extended, or perhaps simply made it all obvious.

The judiciary has long been a target of infiltration by Fabianists, so has teaching and the University faculties. The Civil Service was targeted early, since that is the real 'government' of any state and the clergy of almost all churches are largely the product of 'liberationist' and 'liberalist' theological training centres. Those that aren't are, sadly, the product of fundamentalist schools and an even bigger threat to real faith.

Most people don't know that all the Labour ideals are founded in the Methodist teachings of the Welsh and English "Methodist Societies" (Methodism isn't a "Church" in the UK where it is still, constitutionally, a "Society" of the Church of England as founded by the Wesley brothers). The entire ethos of shared wealth, shared effort and support for the aged, infirm and the destitute comes from Methodist Christian teaching and not from Marx. What Labour have done, is remove the Christian principle and replace it with a mishmash of atheist, humanist and secularist ideologies. Even Marx has suffered the rewriting of his ideas to suit a new class of Oligarchs.

A brief study of Plato's analysis of 'government' shows this. An Oligarchy arises when personal wealth becomes more improtant than the well-being of the state or community. The hallmarks are -

• People break the law for money, virtue is abandoned in pursuit of wealth (and before anyone points at Mrs Thatcher, I would point to the fact this has been evident in British society for a lot longer than her brief period in office),
• The rich and famous are honoured and cultivates, virtue is neglected or denigrated, and
• People prefer trade, materialism and money to virtue.

The flaws of such a society include -

• Rulers are elected because of material successes, but who picks the richest sailor on a ship to command, when he can't navigate?
• Two classes arise; the rich and the poor, but they are united in being afraid to defend their society against external enemies, developing a symbiotic dependence,
• The love of money leads to evasion of taxes, giving rise to rising demands on those who do. Infrastructures suffer and fall into disrepair, and
• Homeless people wander the streets, impoverished, angry, but powerless to change the system, so they resort to crime, that provokes ever more restrictions on freedoms for everyone ...

Anyone recognise the pattern here? Plato postulates that this situation eventually gives rise to democracy, but I'm not sure of that, after all, it is our democracy that has descended into this form of Oligarchy.

Blair completed the process of bringing the "professions" into disrepute, but he went further, he reduced the rising technical professions to "tradesmen" and promoted incompetence. My, and Jim's profession has suffered badly from this promotion of unqualified 'managers' selected on purely politically correct and ideological grounds. Since 1997 every white Briton has been labelled 'Institutionally Racist' and every white British male as 'potential abuser of woman and children, over represented in the workplace and sexist.' That is Blair's real legacy which, taken with the ludicrous approach to policing and justice is a large part of the problem the UK now faces.

Not only have our 'professions' fallen into disrepute, but our entire society has been subsumed into an Oligarchy. The New Oligarchs are the Political Classes and Bureaucrats and their benefactors in Banking, Law, Commerce and the Arts. As Mr Laxton says, the language and the organs of state have all been perverted to this cause - and we let it happen.

The Subtle Takeover

I'm a subscriber to a "Daily Dilbert" and have been for a long time. Today's strip (July 17, 2012) is a gem. The pointy haired 'Boss' is addressed by his 'secretary' along the lines of, 'he only does what she tells him to do, and the economic devaluation of property puts her relative earnings on a par with his.' He asks, "And your point is?"

Her response is telling. "It's as if you work for me now."

For some years I watched the slow replacement of technocrats in management positions by people waving "management" diplomas and degrees. None of these former filing clerks and secretaries actually had a clue what the people they "managed" did, or how they did it, but, hey! we were constantly told they didn't need to know, they were there to "make our jobs easier" and "facilitate our being able to 'focus' on our work." The strange thing was that our workloads increased as this happened, and not in our specialist fields. If anything, our 'focus' on our specialisms suffered, because now we were constantly filling in forms, or writing reports or 'business cases' for our "managers" in order to allow them to "measure" what we were achieving. Or not.

I know I am not alone in finding that where, in the past, I'd gone to my technocrat boss, made a case for buying some equipment or doing something in a different manner, now I spent several days writing a request just to discuss it. In the past, if I made my case effectively, the boss looked up the budget and, if we had the necessary funds, agreed an allocation, and approved it. Now, I had to draw up a specification, then a business case and finally a report for consideration by a board. Usually after many 'amendments, clarifications and further explanations, might get approval to do it. Or, as often as not, got told I couldn't have the money this year, and would I take this up again next year.

Several times I discovered that money I could have used from the budget had been 'earmarked' for some more 'clerical' support. That invariably made my blood boil, especially as it was money originally budgeted for more teaching or technical support. Again, I'm not alone in discovering this, and it isn't confined to the UK either, it is right through the Western democracies.

There was another change as the "management" became more "manager" and less "technocrat." This occured at the secretarial level. Suddenly they became "Personal Assistants" and very clearly a barrier to any nasty hands on techy types who might want to approach the "manager." Where, before, the management had always wanted to talk to the techies, in fact found it useful and productive to do so, now management didn't want to talk to us because, in all likelihood, we would tell them things they didn't want to hear, or, worse, talk about things they had no knowledge of or which would expose their ignorance.

I have said this before, and I have never been popular for saying it, even when I taught management and leadership. Management is NOT a profession. It is a function of a profession, any profession.

It is a skill which must be learned, but the "manager" of a cleaning operation cannot transfer to "manage" a chemical factory and vice versa. That is where the sort of 'accident' that was the Chernobyl failure begins and lays. Not everyone who is a "techy" has the skills to be a top manager or even a middle manager, but to place someone who is without any knowledge of the functions and operations to be managed in a position of authority over those who do is not just stupid, it is utterly self-defeating.

Today's comic strip sums up exactly what has happened in commerce and industry across the west in the last 30 - 40 years, managers are now accountants, secretaries and filing clerks attempting to manage and direct professionals in all the technical fields - and they haven't a clue what they are doing. Worse, in order to "manage" they fall back on bureaucratic practices, bullying and barriers. It will destroy far more of our economies than it will save and, in the end, it will require their ejection from the offices they have usurped.

Hopefully that will happen before it has reached the point of collapse.

Shakespeare? I think not.

One often hears the assertion that if you left a million monkeys bashing away at a million typewriters, you would, eventually, get some randomised versions of Shakespeare's plays, sonnets or poems. About ten years ago, someone at a university, obviously with a 'research' grant and a sense of humour, decided to test this hypothesis.

They proved, that a hundred monkeys bashing away on a hundred keyboards for a year does not produce any of Shakespeare's work, or anyone else's for that matter. What it did produce was a lot of frustrated monkeys (Press keys to get reward), a lot of wasted effort and hundreds of broken keyboards.

So next time someone says, "if you put a million monkeys in front of a million keyboards ..." you can now say with absolute confidence - "No, it doesn't. All it produces is a lot of monkey p**h and a million broken keyboards.

Wading into controversy

A judge in a Landes court in Köln has made some big waves recently in religious and national circles here in Germany. The lady judge has handed down a ruling which bans the practice of circumcision, describing it as 'mutilation' under legislation which actually deals with 'causing bodily harm.' This has huge ramifications for the Jewish community, who, by religious laws going back at least 4,000 years, circumcise all male children eight days after birth. It impacts on the Muslim community as well, because they circumcise all boys at the age of 6 years. I have no doubt whatsoever that it impacts a wide range of other people with cultural, religious or health reasons for this practice.

The Judge has made her stand, primarily she sees all forms of circumcision as 'bodily harm,' and I would certainly agree with her when it comes to the African Muslim practice of mutilating girls, which is not at all the same thing as circumcising a boy. She has certainly provoked a religious backlash and I must admit there is a certain irony to seeing the Jewish and Muslim Leaders arguing jointly that this is an unwarranted interference in their religious rights.

As you would expect, the Secularists want it rigidly enforced as a way of imposing restrictions on religious practice in all forms and beliefs, and there is a great deal of noise about the whole thing in the media, and political circles. Even the legal community seems divided on it.

Circumcision is practiced in many societies, not just the Jewish and Muslim ones. Most African tribes have a 'rite of passage' in which circumcision of boys plays a large part. It is no accident that it is so widely practiced in areas where the climate is hot, personal hygiene often difficult and transmission of infection made far more likely by the presence of this small piece of the anatomy. Like the vermiform appendix it is a hang-over from our very early ancestors.

Medical studies have identified in recent years that circumcised males are far less likely to transfer certain infective agents to their partners than uncircumcised males. Woman with a circumcised partner are less likely to suffer from cervical cancer or risk sterility through infection. Men are less likely to suffer from fungal infections, simply because there is no convenient place for an infection to develop. No, circumcision won't prevent AIDS/HIV, but it does reduce the risk of a whole range of other infections.

Many of these 'religious' practices have their origins in perfectly sound medical reasoning. Somewhere down the line someone in the distant past realised that circumcision made hygiene in a hot climate a lot easier. Possibly later it found its way into religious observance as a way of making sure it was done. In other societies it became a cultural thing. Certainly all the Bantu tribes Josephus mentioned yesterday practice it, and that is nothing to do with 'religion.'

No, I do believe the lady Judge has allowed her personal opinion to lead her into an area she should have stayed away from. Now she's created a legal minefield, and the politicians are going to have to walk into it to try and find a solution. It's going to be very interesting and I suspect more than a few political careers could be wrecked on it.

Saving Africa ...

I have to say that I read Uzodinma Iweala's article in The Washington Post with great interest. I agree with everything he says in it as well. Please will Western Politicians, Liberals, Pop Stars and other forms of celebrity stop 'Saving Africa!' Very early in the article he makes this point - 


"It seems that these days, wracked by guilt at the humanitarian crisis it has created in the Middle East, the West has turned to Africa for redemption. Idealistic college students, celebrities such as Bob Geldof and politicians such as Tony Blair have all made bringing light to the dark continent their mission. They fly in for internships and fact-finding missions or to pick out children to adopt in much the same way my friends and I in New York take the subway to the pound to adopt stray dogs."


I can't help feeling he's got this absolutely right. Especially the younger university generation at present seem to think they have to feel guilty about living in a country where they have the privilege of clean water, wealth, comfortable homes and education. This drives them to join any and every "crusade" from "save the planet" through to "stop the genocide in XYZ," zealously embracing the perceived 'cause' of whoever is behind it. Most have no idea what they are supporting except in the vaguest sense, most have no more knowledge than what they've read in posters or articles put out by the publicists who write these things with an eye on getting people to part with loads of money for the latest "aid" project.


Mr. Iweala touches on some of this in his article, but one thing I note he hasn't mentioned. This is that many of these "Aid" organisations are now multinational corporations operating under the banner of 'charities.' They enjoy the status of 'Non-Governmental Organisations' in receipt of large amounts of taxpayer money handed over by Governments to 'trusted' agencies supposedly not dealing with perceived 'corruption' in the target state. He does point to the fact that many Pop Stars and Celebrities derive huge publicity from their fronting campaigns, but he then goes on to say that they cannot and will not 'Save Africa.' In fact they are hindering its own efforts to do so.


As he rightly asks - 


Why do Angelina Jolie and Bono receive overwhelming attention for their work in Africa while Nwankwo Kanu or Dikembe Mutombo, Africans both, are hardly ever mentioned? How is it that a former mid-level U.S. diplomat receives more attention for his cowboy antics in Sudan than do the numerous African Union countries that have sent food and troops and spent countless hours trying to negotiate a settlement among all parties in that crisis? 


He is absolutely right to ask these questions. Africans are grateful for the help they receive, but let's give them some credit as well. Many of the problems they face today are the result of well intentioned efforts to impose governments and systems on Africans that are not native to them and have no roots there. Many of the economic problems arise from a lack of understanding of the way things operate in their cultures (Note the plural!). 


I can only endorse his closing statement - 


Last month the Group of Eight industrialized nations and a host of celebrities met in Germany to discuss, among other things, how to save Africa. Before the next such summit, I hope people will realize Africa doesn't want to be saved. Africa wants the world to acknowledge that through fair partnerships with other members of the global community, we ourselves are capable of unprecedented growth.  


We have to stop trying to 'save' Africa. We need to work with Africans, to provide them with the tools and the expertise - and then let them work out their own solutions. 

Particles, Godly or otherwise ...

All the excitement about the CERN Project's having 'discovered' the elusive 'God Particle' - what scientists call the Higgs Boson - certainly got the headline writers and many in the Anti-religion camps going. I discovered that Professor Higgs is not responsible for the name either, in fact it is a news hounds mis-quote of another scientist referring to the Higgs Boson as "the most elusive goddam particle" in the universe. Some smart newshound, probably with only the haziest idea of what the scientist was talking about reported it with the screaming headline "Scientists Seek the God Particle."

As I understand it - and I'm certainly no Particle Physicist - the Higgs Boson is important because it is the fragment of an atom that provides mass to an atom. It is the fragment around which an atom is built. It is smaller than an atom, yet makes up almost all the mass (weight in non-science speak) of the atom. It is the particle that emerged from the "Big Bang" and caused the formation of all other matter. So, the Higgs Boson evidently cannot exist on its own for more than a few nano-seconds, but seems to be the key to almost everything else.

What I find interesting in all the hype, is that many of the scientists involved feel a sense of awe and wonder as they seek to understand how all this works. Some even dare to admit that pure randomised chance doesn't seem a likely solution to the billions of possible combinations necessary to produce even simple life forms, never mind complex ones. And yes, we do have to acknowledge that each and every one of us is a unique set of atoms (and Higgs Bosons) and that we are all made up of atomic dust from exploding stars. Now we really are talking Godly particles.

For myself, I follow these discoveries with a great deal of interest. Each new leap in the dark on this and so much more in science simply tells me that life, in all its forms and shapes, shouldn't exist at all. The fact that it does, suggests to me that there are mysteries we are probably not meant to understand - at least, not yet.

What is 'Democracy'?

In this day and age a term everyone seems to know and define, the trouble is that nearly every dictatorship also claims to be 'democratic' and almost all 'democracies' at some stage elect an authoritarian government. So what is democracy?

According to Sir Winston Churchill, it is the worst form of government - except for all the others. In every 'western' country you can find a variation on the 'democratic system,' by which most people understand there is a 'one man; one vote' system of electing the government and any other local governing bodies or regional legislatures. But there are almost as many variations within that as there are countries which consider themselves 'democratic.' Some even elect the officers of justice, the heads of Police and Fire Services and other 'public services.' But then one encounters the system for electing the head of state which awards certain numbers of votes to the constutuent member states. Thus, while the overall number of votes caste for one candidate may exceed the number of votes going to the opponent, the opponent may still 'win' the election because he/she has the support of more 'state votes' than the other.

Then there are the 'Democratic' states where the one man; one vote system is in place, but there is a single party and ideology to vote for, or there are other 'Parties' but a Central committee decides who is 'suitable' to stand for election and who may not. Is that also 'democratic?' Those who impose that system certainly claim it is, and also claim that everyone else has it wrong.

In other systems, the 'one man' enjoys a 'transferable' vote, so that if choice number 1 does not garner enough support, the vote is transfered to 2nd choice and even 3rd choice. The much defended UK system works, in my opinion, only in the eyes of the beneficiaries - the three main Parties. For one thing, for a large slice of the electorate who live in the so-called 'safe' seats for one or other of the Parties, it doesn't matter whether I vote or not if I don't support the Party who 'owns' the majority of support in that seat. How can the 'elected' Member then claim to represent me? He or she doesn't. I don't agree with their ideology or their policies, which is why I won't vote for them. They cannot therefore claim to be 'my elected representative.'

Worse, the system of 'Whips' in Westminster means that no matter the desires of his or her constituents, the 'elected' Member will vote as they are told to by the Whip for the Party. Then there is the whole question of voter 'turnout.' In recent years the numbers actually exercising their right to vote in any given election is falling to the point of it being of dubious value. The last several in the UK have had turnouts dangerously close to the 50% mark - which means the 'elected' government often represents the views of 30%or less of the whole electorate. (Tony Blair's 'landslide' victories were actually only 28% of the total electorate.)

How democratic is a state were there is almost not chance of changing the government because of what is best described as 'tribal' voting. This happens in most countries to some extent, when voters cannot bring themselves to vote for anyone not of 'The Party' they or their parents have always supported - even when they know that party has not delivered, and cannot deliver on promises, or will continue in government only to destroy jobs, promote corruption or destroy communities. In part this is because most people live in 'democracies' dominated by some form of 'party' system where the 'representative' has almost no connection with the constituency they purport to represent. Probably the worst example of that is the system where the voting is exclusively for the 'Party' and the 'Party' then decides who will take the seat.

In my travels around the world I have seen many examples of supposedly 'democratic' states where one 'Party' is so entrenched it cannot be removed from power. Often this is because the 'constituencies' are so arranged that there is a built in majority for one particular group or Party. In other places the Party controls the Civil Service Bureaucracy (Indonesia is a good example - only Party Members of the ruling 'nationalist' Party are appointed to position in the civil service). In almost all nations, democratic or otherwise, you find the same thing. An entrenched ruling 'elite' supported by embedded advocacy and lobbying groups and a media geared to feeding the electorate only the ideological line the respective regime wants promoted. Can an electorate make an informed decision when it comes to voting? Or will the natural biases we all have be so strongly reinforced by the 'information media' that we cannot make a rational decision?

Even where there is a clearly defined electoral system, where the electorate do have a greater say in who gets elected and who not, the trend recently has been for minority groups and Parties to challenge every decision made by the elected government. Such groups often seek recourse to a court, dragging the elected government/governor through courts such as the "European Court of Human Rights" or any other court they can use to mount a challenge. I get the feeling this is part of a wider movement to try to drag government back to a village council concept, but all it does is lead to frustration and fragmentation. Worse, it means that minority interests can now trump the whole underpinning concept of 'democracy' which is that it is 'rule by the majority.'

I'm sure I can't be the only person who finds it strange that the very same groups and people who campaigned against all forms of 'minority' rule, now want to impose a different form of minority rule on all democratic majorities ...

What is democracy? Well, the inventors of the system, the Ancient Athenians certainly wouldn't recognise the system we call 'democracy.' Perhaps that is the problem.