Saturday 23 August 2008

The Alamo

If you're in America, may I suggest you FUCKING STAY THERE.


This is not meant to be racist, by the way, it's only meant to tell you that the endless drivel, the self-satisfied stream of piss-talk you'll come to know as politics, is waiting for you here. We have tolerant people desperate to exclude people they don't like from public discourse; evidence-based politicos who think people who don't share their worldview are mad (and who think that national psychiatric units are the victims of massive conspiracies for not agreeing with them); liberty loving ID card fanatics; CCTV loving dickwads who think that government spying on you is in fact less awful than your taking pics in a public space; doctors who only ever appear on the radio to discuss their love of death; MPs who think you need to prove yourself to the state, day in day out.

And you know, the worst thing is - there is a majority in favour of all this evil.


We want it, we call for it, it comforts us: evil. It looks so good, so fine, so sexy. It makes us feel happy by the fire of our repeated bullshit.


And people ask me why I have turned away from literature and history towards maths. Literature and history are hopelessly compromised by two generations of academics whose politics take precedence over the results of their researches, and who think their audiences are either essentially their own political side, or completely stupid. I have become a postmodernist at last: these subjects are screwed by their insistence on socialist narrative. The facts have been manipulated, turned, twisted, ignored, by cadres of people of the same politics for forty years now. We no longer know what is true from what is a lie.

How are we to tell? We are not supposed to.


There is no bullshit in maths. I complete the square, calculate a confidence interval, discuss the width of the interval, see how something is binomially distributed, differentiate, integrate.

Integrate. Integrate. I integrate a differential function*




*This is a reference to a long-forgotten song by Karel Fialka, which was called...well I forget what it was called but it was sort of sung by the guy's 10 year old kid and the refrain was "The A Team, The A Team, I see the A Team". It was a sort of satire on violent 80s TV. Needless to say, Doctor Who was not mentioned. The song can be found on "Now That's What I Call Music 10".

6 comments:

Crushed said...

Is this one of those games where we each propvide a word?
Next comentor provides another word and we see what story develops?

Cool!


Ok...

Archeoraptor

Bill Haydon said...

Hey man, you've missed the point! Or have you pissed the moint?

I'm sort of trying to be serious, dude!

Bill Haydon said...
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Bill Haydon said...
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Bill Haydon said...

Bloody hell I can't even post a bloody comment now wi'oot summat ganning bloody wrong.

Crushed said...

I posted the song a while back, its in the archives somewhere.

September 07? October 07?