Friday 7 September 2007

Animals are Panicking

I can't readily explain what it was that brought me back to blogging, unless it were boredom: it certainly was not a desire to explain or expand upon my political obsessions, though I intend to do that too. My assumptions are of a simple class, obtained through Freudian simplicities and back pedalled reasoning.

Did I ever discuss my favourite types of pornography?


Well, time and place my friends, time and place.

My political views are easy and reactionary: I don't see why government deigns to give me rights and why I should be grateful. I _do_ see why there is no other source of rights, though we've transmuted a post-holocaust set of aspirations via Ernest Bevin into a Platonic reality of some faintly sinister kind.

Nathelees, blogging is no reason for expounding on these ignorances, nor are ignorances reasons for blogging. No. The bloghaters, whisper if you dare, are right. We blog because we are frustrated and because we want to hear what we want to hear. Yes, alright, sometimes I read the Intelligent Person's Guardian (Matt, Stumbling &c) but mostly I read the nearest equivalents to the Mail, the Torygraph and the Times (though it's dispiritingly socially liberal these days, even unto its tv reviews helpfully pointing out which tv shows show homophobia and which don't, as if anyone reads a tv review to be told what to think about human sexuality).

By the way can I just take this opportunity to tell ALL tv reviewers the following:

I don't give a fuck for your views on abortion, Mrs Thatcher, Eisenhower, President Reagan, gay rights, religion, atheism, stem cell research, the internet, blogging, corruption, sex or murder.

You are hired to discuss whether x programme is good or not. Kindly stick to this remit or fuck off. We are not so utterly ignorant that we need political point scoring in the middle of so-called professional media criticism. So fuck off. Or give me your job.


Then again, if they did, you'd get stuff like this:

Castrovalva is a pointed satire on Thatcher's Britain (c all newspapers): the characters (who, interestingly, barely seem to know who they are in this nightmarescape) stumble over invented traditions, which appear to give a conservative gloss to reality but which in fact expose the hollow and false nature of conservative fantasies....


Er...no, actually, hang on. More like this:

Logopolis suggests that technology and "progress" (c Greenpeace) is but a fig leaf for universe threatening desires. It is wholly ironic that Logopolis, the mental maths paradise, resorts to flawed and, if you observe closely, cobwebbed technology to save the universe. The implication is clear. Only the natural mind is acceptable. Technology (ie carbon footprinted wasteage) is harmful.

Erm..no that's still not right. Wait a minute...er....


Um. Anyway.

By the way, academic twats, research does not "show" anything. It might "suggest" conclusions, but it does not "show" them. I learned that in GCSE History. Shame that graduate teachers are bedazzled by self interested twats waving bits of paper and telling them that x study of 4 children in Luton "shows" that y obtains when it might well do, but we just don't, actually, know for certain.

Huh. So much for blogging as a way of expanding the mind.

5 comments:

Gracchi said...

Research can show things TD- it can show for example as my PHD does what the structure of an argument that the New Model Army conducted in 1647 was- it can show what happened when in my field or in other fields say wiht people I have worked along side it can demonstrate the role of plasmids inside a cell during cell splits, it can show how particles fired at incredibly high speed relate to each other etc etc. Yes no study or piece of research demonstrates anything beyond what it is designed to demonstrate- but without research its hard to demonstrate anything whatsoever.

Bill Haydon said...

Fair enough. I was thinking more of the research that gets trotted out in my line of work every day, where I find it hard to believe that the academics concerned didn't already know their conclusions before they started, and where a small study somehow "shows" a universal truth.

Crushed said...

Like the sort of studies that show if you treat employees well, they work better?

Hey, I think Blogging is about being our our own media.
It's about the democratisation of received thinking.

We're all having our say and getting a chance to free our minds from being told what to think.

Matt M said...

Off-topic - but BBC radio 7 are repeating the first series of the 8th Doctor audio adventures at 6pm weekdays.

Bill Haydon said...

Well, CBI, if that's determined by a study of say 150 people and then they say "the research shows that..."then no, I don't agree. A body of research might do, maybe.

In my business, dodgy assumptions about the politics of education are routinely given authority by the phrase "the research shows" and often this turns out to be small scale studies or highly questionable ones.