Nietzsche, China, and Tory politics

John Holbo has pointed out, in a post on Crooked Timber, that Nietzsche advocated in Morgenröte expatriating 1/4 of the European population, and replacing them with Chinese immigrants, who would

bring with them the type of thinking and living that would suit industrious ants. Indeed, they could generally help the nervous Europe that is jittering itself to bits to attain some measure of asiatic calm and contemplation…

Know we know where the Tories have been cribbing their social policies! Just a few weeks ago Jeremy Hunt, the health secretary, made headlines by declaring that cuts to tax credits for the working poor were needed to inspire them to work as hard as Chinese and Americans:

My wife is Chinese. We want this to be one of the most successful countries in the world in 20, 30, 40 years’ time. There’s a pretty difficult question that we have to answer, which is essentially: are we going to be a country which is prepared to work hard in the way that Asian economies are prepared to work hard, in the way that Americans are prepared to work hard?

Unlike Nietzsche, Hunt believes in transfer of spirit without transfer of people. I’m not sure if this is what the UKIP voters thought they would get by keeping out the foreigners.

His cabinet colleague Michael Gove believes the Chinese have other lessons to teach. He wrote a few years back that

I’d like us to implement a cultural revolution just like the one they’ve had in China.

Confidence game: Growth mindset for the secret police

Powers that give MI5, MI6 and GCHQ a “dizzying” range of electronic surveillance capabilities will be laid out in the investigatory powers bill next month, in a move that will bolster the confidence of the intelligence agencies but pave the way for a row with privacy campaigners.

According to one headline announcing this report in the Times, the security services will get the “legal right” to hack into people’s computers and other electronic devices. Under must circumstances, “legal right” might be seen as redundant, but not here. They already do these things, they have the power to do these things, but what they lack, apparently, is confidence in their abilities.

Cue the Growth Mindset (TM). I suppose it was only a matter of time before education fads started sloshing over into spying: After all, aren’t GCHQ and the others supposed to be “learning things”? What they need is confidence. The standard critiques apply:

Confidence and motivation are crucial, but confidence without competence is simply hot air.

How to do it: Medical testing edition

I was commenting just recently on the cult of big ideas, where people whose life experiences have given them hierarchical power are suckers for “ideas” that are mostly blather, lots of words about the irrelevant bits of the problem, distracting attention from the real difficulties. And now Theranos is in the news. I read about this company, started by the obviously charismatic Elizabeth Holmes, in The New Yorker about a year ago. My immediate reaction was, this must be a joke. It was very much in the spirit of Monty Python’s How to do it.

Theranos, a Silicon Valley company[…], is working to upend the lucrative business of blood testing. Blood analysis is integral to medicine. When your physician wants to check some aspect of your health, such as your cholesterol or glucose levels, or look for indications of kidney or liver problems, a blood test is often required. This typically involves a long needle and several blood-filled vials, which are sent to a lab for analysis… [Theranos] has developed blood tests that can help detect dozens of medical conditions, from high cholesterol to cancer, based on a drop or two of blood drawn with a pinprick from your finger. Holmes told the audience that blood testing can be done more quickly, conveniently, and inexpensively, and that lives can be saved as a consequence.

Sounds wonderful. Quick. Convenient. Inexpensive. Saving lives. How is she going to do all that? Well, she wears “a black suit and a black cotton turtleneck, reminiscent of Steve Jobs”. She dropped out of Stanford. She has a board of directors full of highly influential aged former politicians, but no scientists, so far as I can tell. She “is in advanced discussions with the Cleveland Clinic. It has also opened centers in forty-one Walgreens pharmacies, with plans to open thousands more. If you show the pharmacist your I.D., your insurance card, and a doctor’s note, you can have your blood drawn right there…. A typical lab test for cholesterol can cost fifty dollars or more; the Theranos test at Walgreens costs two dollars and ninety-nine cents.” Continue reading “How to do it: Medical testing edition”

How to rid the world of genocide

One of my favourite Monty Python sketches is “How to do it“. It parodies a children’s show, teaching children how to do interesting and cool new things — in this case, “How to be a gynecologist… how to construct a box-girder bridge, … how to irrigate the Sahara Desert and make vast new areas of land cultivatable, and… how to rid the world of all known diseases.” The method described for the last is

First of all, become a doctor, and discover a marvelous cure for something. And then, when the medical profession starts to take notice of you, you can jolly well tell them what to do and make sure they get everything right, so there will never be any diseases ever again.

I think of this sketch often, when I hear a certain kind of blustering politician, most commonly (but not exclusively) of the US Republican variety. The classic sort of “How to do it” (HTDI) solution is the completely generic “I’d get the both sides into the room and tell them, c’mon guys, let’s roll up our sleeves and just get it done. We’re not leaving here until we’ve come up with a solution.” (That’s for a conflict; if it’s a technical challenge, like cancer, or drought, replace “both sides” with “all the experts”. Depending on the politician’s demeanor and gender this may also include “knocking heads together”.) The point is, they see solving complicated problems the way they might appear in a montage in a Hollywood film: Lots of furrowed brows, sleeves being rolled up, maybe a fist pounds on a table. It’s a manager’s perspective. Not a very intelligent manager. Of course, it sounds ridiculous to anyone who has ever been involved in the details solving real problems, whether political, technical, or scientific, but it sounds good to other people who have only seen the same films that the politician has seen. Continue reading “How to rid the world of genocide”

The Times racebaits

I mentioned before the peculiarly awkward and unfunny humour that bursts out in the Times when establishment interests are challenged (standing out particularly sharply in contrast to the usually professional and intelligent demeanour of that particular rag). Yesterday one of their columnists, Patrick Kidd, commented on Jeremy Corbyn’s first Labour Party conference speech. He noticed that two illustrious authors quoted in the speech were BLACK, and decided, giving him an appropriately racially charged metaphor for mocking the Reds:

It certainly felt as if he had taken us deep into the night with a series of unconnected riffs on a general jazz theme of “let’s be kinder to each other.” This was Jeremy Corbyn playing Miles Davis in the uncut version of Kind of Red, with contributions from Ben Okri on drums and Maya Angelou spanking the double bass.

One other point: I’ve noticed that lazy newspaper columnists have this trick of taking a stupid cliché that anyone would recognise as such — a disjointed speech is like jazz, ho hum, what is this, 1958? I think that’s when the Times was spreading fear of contamination by jazz-inflected, negro-influenced leftists, and youth contaminated by contact with racial inferiors — and inflates it to a shaggy-dog story with all kinds of extra detail and verbiage. Unless you’re SJ Perelman, it doesn’t become original this way, only more embarrassingly hackneyed.

The magic of markets

I find The Times fascinating, as a peek into the id of the British establishment. Thus, it usually seems sort of objective and reasonable — and I find its science coverage excellent, for a daily newspaper — until some event hits the nerve of class interests and establishment ideology, such as on the day after Jeremy Corbyn’s election as Labour Party leader. Then the news and editorials fall into line with a kind of mirthless sarcasm that astonishes in its combination of vituperation and simplemindedness. I find myself then reading it, like the scripture of some weird sect — I’m not naming names here — wondering, does anyone really find this either amusing or insightful. With the extra frisson of remembering that those who find it both amusing and insightful are running the country.

Today there was an editorial bashing the NHS. After one of those it-was-probably-clever-the-first-time-someone-said-it quips about how at current growth rates, the NHS will exceed 100 percent of the British economy by 2100, the writer (Ross Clark) refers to one of today’s news items:

A new threat to NHS financial stability has emerged: thanks to the increasing complexity of drugs it will cost a lot more in future to produce generic versions.

At present, drugs typically fall in price by 95 per cent once their patents expire. But new drugs that rely on biological agents are expected to fall in price by only 25 per cent, drastically cutting the £13.5 billion  the NHS saves every year by using generic drugs.

The NHS should have cottoned on much faster to the fact that generic drugs cannot be relied on indefinitely. It should be using its power in the marketplace much more to push prices down.

I bet there are heaps of overpaid NHS managers slapping their foreheads, thinking “power of the marketplace, why didn’t I think of that?!” The whole point is that these new drugs are expensive to produce, so no pharmaceutical company is going to rush in to sell it for 5% of the original cost, regardless of whether it is protected by patent rights. We’re seeing a change in the relative cost of development and production. (It’s the reverse of the change in the music industry from the early days of CDs when the physical production of the CD cost several dollars to now when the marginal cost of an album is infinitesimal.)

No amount of “cottoning on” by the NHS is going to change this fundamental reality.

Gay-baiting Francis

Am I wrong to see homophobic allusions in right-wing pundit George Will’s attack on Pope Francis? He accuses the pope of “fact-free flamboyance” (which would be a nice alliteration if it made any sense, which I can’t see that it does) and calls his “social diagnoses” “shrill”. Again, is this just an attempt to simulate eloquence on a deadline? The expression is striking, but nonsensical. How can a “diagnosis” be shrill? He also accuses the Bishop of Rome of “rhetorical exhibitionism”.

My earlier comments on the gender connotations of “shrill” are here.

Warnings

Suppose your football coach exhorts the team with all the great coach clichés: “We win or lose together”, “There’s no I in ‘Team'”, maybe “We can still win if we pull together and give 110 percent in the second half”. Would anyone say this was a “warning”? But when Angela Merkel says Europe needs to work together to deal with the current influx of migrants, we get this headline in the Guardian:

 

guardian_merkel

It reminds me of the peculiar set of mandatory texts that were introduced for cigarette packets in the US in 1981: Among the warnings of carbon monoxide and foetal injury was this one:

SURGEON GENERAL’S WARNING: Quitting Smoking Now Greatly Reduces Serious Risks to Your Health.

“Greatly reduces serious risks to your health” doesn’t sound like a warning to me.

Halvesies

According to a report on The Intercept, a US anti-Muslim group has been pushing back against claims that Texas teenager Ahmed Mohammed, who was recently arrested for bringing a homemade clock to school, was the victim of anti-Muslim prejudice, or, indeed, that he was unfairly treated in any way.

Center for Security Policy vice president Jim Hanson argued on his organization’s podcast that the clock “looks exactly like a number of IED triggers that were produced by the Iranians and used to kill U.S. troops in the war in Iraq.” He said the clock “was half a bomb.”

Rightwing organisations spouting nonsense is nothing worth commenting on, but I find the particular logical construction here fascinating. He’s right, after all. It is indeed half a bomb. It just happens to be the half without explosives. And if any Muslim teens think of bringing homemade telescopes to school, I trust they’ll be arrested for bringing “half a sniper rifle” to school. That may look like an innocent block of wood to you, but it’s actually half a combat knife; no more innocuous for being the part without a blade.

All very logical. I admit, it’s slightly odd to hear this obsession with dangerous components coming from the same side of the political spectrum that inclines to dismiss the dangerousness of firearms because they can’t kill people all on their own.

National Union of Students causes division… by criticising government anti-Muslim policies

From The Guardian:

In a pointed letter to the NUS president Megan Dunn, higher education minister Jo Johnson has said he is disturbed by a motion passed at the NUS conference to oppose the Counter-Terrorism and Security Act, the government’s main piece of counter-terrorism legislation.

Although he concedes the NUS is doing some good work, he also asserts contradictory statements made by NUS officials, including those that described the government’s approach as a “racialised, Islamophobic witch-hunt”. Earlier in the year, another officer claimed that strategies such as Prevent “ultimately exist to police Muslim expression”.

He said such views cause division, and points to motions passed by student unions in a series of institutions opposing Prevent, including King’s College London, Durham and Soas, University of London.

We can’t have people espousing “views” that “cause division”. Because uniformity of views is one of those British values that immigrants need to learn about.

You may think it’s all fun and games, passing motions at your conference in opposition to certain government policies. But you have to be aware that these “motions” lead to other people making “contradictory statements”, then you’re on a slippery slope to other student unions also opposing the government policies, and before you can stop it you’ve destroyed the House of Lords:

The Home Office is concerned peers could reject the regulations, which are due to come into force next week, on the grounds they inhibit free speech and thought on campuses.

Stupid kids! Not thinking about the consequences of their actions. Presumably that’s why David Cameron said

Schools, universities and colleges, more than anywhere else, have a duty to protect impressionable young minds.