THE BUREAUCRATIC SOFT SHOE SHUFFLE BOONDOGGLE

 Have you ever noticed what happens when you lob a stone into the centre of a mass of insects feeding on a dead carcass? There is an instant explosion of movement away from the point of impact. The vermin flee as rapidly as possible from that spot where the most immanent damage is liable to be experienced.

 And so it is with bureaucrats when there is bl...ame to be apportioned for an error, mistake or system failure. Alas, we are experiencing such a moment in regards to Bryany, another hiccup in her short but already slightly checkered history.

 It all began when she wanted to study a ‘grown-up’ subject for her SACE, that is; she chose the way of VET (vocational education training) as one of her subjects for year 12. Great, we thought, having a TAFE qualification should prove advantageous in her still to come (then) employment prospects. Little did we know the extent to which the increasingly bureaucratised (see: blame adverse) Australian education system would play its part in upping the discomfiture levels of those ‘unusual’ students and in particular the parents of such children?

 As it turned out Bryany’s powerful personality, natural charms and abilities procured for her a dream job without the need for the nod of approval from said academic overseers however, the ongoing farrago does appear to have the potential to put a spanner-in-the works regarding her longer term university plans, that is in our current understanding of how things pan out (though she has this uncanny ability to circumvent such mundane barriers).

Thus we are embroiled in the battle for culpability. This is a significant struggle I can assure you because at the very mention of the word responsibility, collars are turned up, faces averted and tremulous tones assert in true Shultzerian terms: “we know nothing!” , it’s not our fault”, we were not told” and so forth. When evidence is produced to disprove such disclaimers the lines change to: “WE cannot be blamed, it is the students fault, they knew this was an adult course and therefore we adults cannot be blamed for the student’s error”. And would you not know it but all of the relevant documents that attest to failure, apportion blame etcetera, have been ‘lost’.

 We are currently maintaining the path of proportional benevolence and giving the relevant educational authorities room to recant but soon I fear we are going to have to pass the details onto authorities with an axe to grind and see if political election sloganeering translates into actual action.

 Watch this space.

Duh!

Well articulated Shaun O'Doyle:

There is also the ‘reading Genesis scientifically’ (p. 66) canard. Young-age creationists do not read Genesis as science but as history. Pattemore, like many theistic evolutionists, doesn’t seem to understand the difference. It seems that a ‘scientific’ account of history for Pattemore (and others like him) seems roughly to mean an account of what really happened in the physical world. If so, then that is how we understand Genesis 1–11, but why call that ‘scientific’? That just causes concept confusion—science is not history. Science is about repeatable present process; history is about unrepeatable past events. Science can be used in the study of history, but it cannot be the final authority on determining historicity in a universe governed by the God of Scripture since at the very least science cannot constrain how God might act. Science can’t ‘tell’ us how God acted, only people can—and only God is sure to produce a reliable account.
 

A dilemma some well intentioned but obviously non-reflective folk fall foul of. And I include even those who appear reflective; i.e. with a vast string of letters behind their names, because smart does not preclude fallibility.

Pattemore’s tone towards his opponents is also problematic: “Although the proponents [of young-age creationism] claim the authority of Scripture for these beliefs, their activity is also driven by certain fears or perceived dangers” (p. 35). He then proceeds to list more than half a dozen fears that supposedly drive the beliefs of biblical creationists. Pattemore doesn’t claim this only for biblical creationists: “Does Intelligent Design harbour undercurrents of fear too? I suspect it does” (p. 36). He then lists the supposed ‘fears’ of ID proponents. Apparently anyone who believes in some form of Special Creation is motivated by fear. Pattemore must be nigh omniscient to know just what motivates his ideological opponents! C.S. Lewis called this ‘Bulverism’¹³—the fallacy of pontificating on the motives one’s opponents have for their ‘obviously irrational’ belief before actually disproving their belief.

Victims of victimology

More profound insight from one of America's most perspicacious sons, Thomas Sowell:

What do low-income whites in England and ghetto blacks in the United States have in common? It cannot be simply low incomes, because children from other groups in the same low-income brackets outperform whites in England and outperform blacks in America.

What low-income whites in England and ghetto blacks in the United States have in common is a generations-long indoctrination in victimhood. The political left in both countries has, for more than half a century, maintained a steady and loud drumbeat of claims that the deck is stacked against those at the bottom.

The American left uses race and the British left uses class, but the British left has been at it longer. In both countries, immigrants who have not been in the country as long have not been so distracted by such ideology into a blind resentment and lashing out at other people.

In both countries, immigrants enter a supposedly closed society that refuses to let anyone rise -- and they nevertheless rise, while the native-born at the bottom remain at the bottom.

Those who promote an ideology of victimhood may imagine that they are helping those at the bottom, when in fact they are harming them, more so than the society that the left is denouncing.

We in America have gotten used to vast gaps between blacks and whites on test scores. But this was not always the case, in places where there was anything like comparable education.

Back in the 1940s, before the vast expansion of the welfare state and the ideology of victimhood used to justify it, there was no such gap on test scores between black schools in Harlem and white, working class schools on New York's lower east side.

You can find the data on pages 40-41 of an article of mine in the Fall 1981 issue of "Teachers College Record," a journal published by Columbia University -- that is, if you think facts matter more than rhetoric or social visions.

Imaginary enemies

A short excerpt from a brief article on the inanity of identity politics and the damage it is causing:

An identity defined in terms of victimhood needs fresh injections of oppression to sustain its existence. Those African-Americans who define “blackness” not in terms of positive values but in terms of negative values, need white racism, the real thing or the fake one, to remind them of who they are. And the same holds true for other minorities who define themselves not by their culture or values, but by their resentments…

The left’s need for victimisation means that increasing levels of tolerance actually lead to escalating confrontations with these manufacturers of intolerance. The assertion that all white people are innately racist because of their privilege is one such response to increasing tolerance. By claiming that whiteness itself is racist, the left gets back to political identity, rather than actual discrimination, as the source of conflict, and redefines even the most tolerant university multicultural spaces as racist.

The manufacturers of intolerance, whether they’re tenured academics like Ward Churchill, professional politicians like Barack Obama or angry waitresses like Dayna Morales, respond to tolerance with provocations. Their goal is to elicit evidence of intolerance to sustain their political identity. The more tolerance they encounter, the more they escalate their provocations. Their goal is not a tolerant society. It’s not a multiracial society or a post-racial society. It is a society perpetually at war over identity politics. That conflict is what gives them power.

 

 

The whole article is worth reading and to be found @

http://davidthompson.typepad.com/davidthompson/2013/12/because-lying-and-resenting-is-what-angels-do.html#more

The not-so-hidden agenda behind the ABC!

When you come across an article that effectively articulates your own particular viewpoint and does it in a seemingly effortless and erudite way, then it behoves one to publish it without alteration.
This is a small excerpt:

The ruse of open-mindedness, over the past half-century, has enabled bohemia-styled socialists to capture the commanding heights of our erstwhile Judeo-Christian nation, from the education system and academia to many of our mainstream Christian denominations. The march of the left through our social institutions has been that much more effective for the marchers themselves believing they march to their own drum. They are all – cough, cough – individuals. We have to accept the probability, as astonishing as it might sound, that Mark Scott genuinely thinks the ghosts of Media Watch past and present have been without “ideological bias”. Conservatives must also face the likelihood that ABC management really believes publishing Edward Snowden’s leaked documents best serves Australia’s national interest – the national interest being best served by the humiliation of a Coalition government and undermining its “stop the boats” agenda.

...this gem is hidden within the article:  'The ABC’s undeclared mission statement is to reconfigure Australian society;(italics & bold mine) the takedown of Tony Abbott’s character, paradoxically, is nothing personal.

The complete article can be found @: http://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2013/12/taxes-abc/

To be PC or not to be PC, that is.....

A very instructive excerpt, particularly for an artist:

....the late Doris Lessing on language, academia and political correctness:

A very common way of thinking in literary criticism is not seen as a consequence of communism, but it is. Every writer has the experience of being told that a novel, a story, is “about” something or other. I wrote a story, The Fifth Child, which was at once pigeonholed as being about the Palestinian problem, genetic research, feminism, anti-Semitism and so on. A journalist from France walked into my living room and before she had even sat down said, “Of course The Fifth Child is about AIDS.” An effective conversation stopper, I assure you. But what is interesting is the habit of mind that has to analyse a literary work like this. If you say, “Had I wanted to write about AIDS or the Palestinian problem I would have written a pamphlet,” you tend to get baffled stares. That a work of the imagination has to be “really” about some problem is, again, an heir of Socialist Realism. To write a story for the sake of storytelling is frivolous, not to say reactionary.

We can only hope this is so!

Richard Lindzen, Professor of Atmospheric Sciences emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology:

Global climate alarmism has been costly to society, and it has the potential to be vastly more costly. It also has been damaging to science, as scientists adjust both data and even theory to accommodate politically correct positions…

There are past examples. In the U.S. in the early 20th century, the eugenics movement had coopted the science of human genetics and was driving a political agenda. The movement achieved the Immigration Restriction Act of 1923, as well as forced sterilization laws in several states. The movement became discredited by Nazi atrocities, but the American consequences survived well into the 1960s. In the Soviet Union, Trofim Denisovich Lysenko (1898-1976) promoted the Lamarckian view of the inheritance of acquired characteristics. It fit with Stalin’s megalomaniacal insistence on the ability of society to remold nature….

Global warming differs from the previous two affairs. Global warming has become a religion. A surprisingly large number of people seem to have concluded that all that gives meaning to their lives is the belief that they are saving the planet by paying attention to their carbon footprint…

In contrast to Lysenkoism, Global Warming has a global constituency, and has successfully coopted almost all of institutional science. However, the cracks in the scientific claims for catastrophic warming are, I think, becoming much harder for the supporters to defend.

The warming religion will collapse from its sheer cost

Andrew Bolt –, Tuesday, December, 03, 2013, (6:46am)

How many billions of dollars have been squandered on pretending to do something about the weather? On placating the great Climate God?
Richard Lindzen, Professor of Atmospheric Sciences emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology:

Global climate alarmism has been costly to society, and it has the potential to be vastly more costly. It also has been damaging to science, as scientists adjust both data and even theory to accommodate politically correct positions…
There are past examples. In the U.S. in the early 20th century, the eugenics movement had coopted the science of human genetics and was driving a political agenda. The movement achieved the Immigration Restriction Act of 1923, as well as forced sterilization laws in several states. The movement became discredited by Nazi atrocities, but the American consequences survived well into the 1960s.
In the Soviet Union, Trofim Denisovich Lysenko (1898-1976) promoted the Lamarckian view of the inheritance of acquired characteristics. It fit with Stalin’s megalomaniacal insistence on the ability of society to remold nature….
Global warming differs from the previous two affairs. Global warming has become a religion. A surprisingly large number of people seem to have concluded that all that gives meaning to their lives is the belief that they are saving the planet by paying attention to their carbon footprint…
In contrast to Lysenkoism, Global Warming has a global constituency, and has successfully coopted almost all of institutional science. However, the cracks in the scientific claims for catastrophic warming are, I think, becoming much harder for the supporters to defend.

For example:

In fact:

“‘Real Risk of a Maunder Minimum ‘Little Ice Age’ announced the BBC this week, in reporting startling findings by Professor Mike Lockwood of Reading University. ‘Professor Lockwood believes solar activity is now falling more rapidly than at any time in the last 10,000 years [raising the risk of a new Little Ice Age]…, explained Paul Hudson, the BBC’s climate correspondent. If Earth is spared a new Little Ice Age, a severe cooling as ‘occurred in the early 1800s, which also had its fair share of cold winters and cold summers is, according to him, ‘more likely than not to happen.”