Protected: Chalmers and Kafka III: Textual Tyranny

This post is password protected. To view it please enter your password below:

Password:

Underestimate BLIAR at your peril

You thought BLIAR had fallen to rock bottom? Don’t underestimate him!

Several years ago Tony Blair attempted to deport an Egyptian human rights lawyer who had been the victim of truly terrible torture in his own country: Blair argued that an assurance from Egypt of the man’s safety would suffice. Unusually, during a court challenge to the legality of his detention, private memoranda between Blair and the Home Office were made public. Across a note from the Home Office expressing concern that even hard assurances given by Egypt were unlikely to provide real protection against torture and execution, Blair had scribbled: ‘Get them back.’ Beside the passage about the assurances he wrote: ‘This is a bit much. Why do we need all these things?’ The man succeeded in his court challenge, but today, on the basis of secret information provided by Egypt, he is the subject of a UN Assets Freezing Order managed by the Treasury. He has no assets, no income and no work, and can be given neither money nor ‘benefit’ without a licence. ‘Benefit’ includes eating the meals his wife cooks. She requires a licence to cook them, and is obliged to account for every penny spent by the household. She speaks little English and is disabled, so is compelled to pass the obligation onto their children, who have to submit monthly accounts to the Treasury of every apple bought from the market, every bus fare to school. Failure to do so constitutes a criminal and imprisonable offence. A few weeks ago in the House of Lords, Lord Hoffman expressed horror at ‘the meanness and squalor’ of a regime ‘that monitored who had what for breakfast’.

British Muslims

War Criminals’ Rewards (cont’d)

A columnist in the Guardian asks: They led us into a disastrous war, yet still they prosper, why? The best answer is given by one of the readers

Because they are the owners, manager and operators of the industrial-military-political-banking-security-organized religion-dynamic of war/disaster profit, petrochemical- and do gooder lobbyist complex. Blair and his cronies during his PM ship, collected one too many IOUs and the good old boy network is now paying back. It is not any different then the Industrialists, many of them British and Americans, who collaborated with their Nazi counter parts to make huge profits from the war. To that end, organized religion like the Catholic Church and Swiss bankers also made out like bandits.

As to the revelation by Christopher Meyer, the former British ambassador to the US, that BLIAR’s minion once instructed him to ‘get up the arse of the White House and stay there’.

Cannot be true, path was already blocked, Tony Blair being there all the time

Chalmers: A Modern University or a Kafka Nightmare?

Chalmers changed its policies regarding appointments and promotions recently. The changes made are shrouded in a fog of documents whose impact only becomes clear to people when they are hit by decisions made by the Appointments Committee.

For instance, one of the changes made is to enforce requirements of “pedagogic competence”, which sounds fine, until one sees how the Appointment Committee interprets this.

Consider the case of “D”, an Associate Professor at Chalmers for 7 years, recommended by his Department for promotion to Professor (or rather a “bitter” version of this, but let’s skip that). “D” was instrumental in developing arrange of new courses at the Department ranging from introductory programming courses that serve the University as a whole, to specialized courses targeted towards his primary area of expertise, in each of which he has had a consistent record of good student evaluations. He is a coordinator of a popular new International Masters programme at Chalmers. He has been invited as a lecturer at prestigious Ph.D. school, the latest of which is de Giorgi School ). He is the author of a Ph.D. level textbook soon to be published by Cambridge University Press. Blah, blah, blah …

So would”D” be considered “pedagogically competent” by the Appointments Committee? No! Why??

Because he doesn’t have a certificate for 10 points of “pedagogic courses”!

In other words, the Appointment Committee makes its decisions based on

• ZERO credit for documented, quantifiable, real improvement of teaching quality demonstrated over 7 years in the same University
• FULL credit for a certificate whose results are never tested in the classroom in the future i.e. whether the certificate actually results in significant detectable improvement in teaching quality.

One thought this was what the bureaucratic red-tape institutions in far away places did …

And it gets worse! When asked, some members of the Appointments Committee declared that they too felt the Chalmers rule was stupid and should not be implemented in this way. So why do they do it?

“Because it is a directive from the university leadership.”

“But have you informed the leadership of this view?”

“Yes.”

“What is the leadership’s reply?”

“Well, they have to do it because the Government has a requirement for all universities in Sweden to do it.” …

And so the buck keeps getting passed one level up until it disappears somewhere …

The final hilarious finale is that when one traces the Government rule in question after some effort, it transpires that the rule is supposed to be applied to new appointments, not to someone who has been teaching successfully for over 7 years – a surprisingly rational condition, especially coming from a Government directive. The Chalmers Appointment Committee, on the other hand, applies the rule exactly in reverse, because they don’t enforce this requirement of new candidates!

A modern university or a Kafka nightmare?

A War Criminal’s Reward

How does supreme war criminal BLIAR get rewarded as JP Morgan’s strategic advisor for $1 million a year? A reader on Geoff Whaethcroft ’s column answers:

JP Morgan did not, we can be sure, take on Mr. Blair without consulting some of the clients who will pay for ex-prime ministerial wisdom. I wonder if those clients include some of the (many) US Fortune 500 companies who benefitted from major UK government contracts under Blair’s leadership? They have much to thank him for.

Other largess:

Within months of leaving No 10 he has picked up several million for his memoirs, £250,000 a time for speaking engagements, and now an annual £500,000 for providing “strategic advice and insight” to Morgan, the US investment bank, which will take him a few days a month. As the 19th-century Earl of Glasgow might have said, a fellow can jog along on that.

Or for his help in this BAE-Saudi deal …

Socialism for the Rich and How to Create Wealth

According to the Economist , “the very rich are not that different from you and me”, we can both have the same life style! How? It’s the debt stupid! Just borrow as much as you want! The irony of the timing of this claim, in the unfolding financial carnage, seems to have escaped the Economist altogether …

The present mess was forecast about a year ago by RGR , Nouriel Roubini’s excellent economics blog. He was right because his analysis is based on solid empirical data and faultless logic, in contrast to the hilarious pro-”Free Market” spinning of the Economist.

As Roubini says in Privatizing Profits and Socializing Losses , surveying the shameless rescuing of the Atlases ,

For all of us who do truly believe in free market economies where a variety of public goods are provided by governments and the financial sector is properly supervised and regulated this is not a capitalist system but rather socialism for the rich.

That Socialism for the Rich is an essential part of the EE is further illustrated in Tony Judt’s review of Robert Reich’s book.

An entertaining account of how to “create wealth” is given by John Lanchester . The real scary thing is that the system really seems to have created a Frankenstein’s monster in financial derivatives, that nobody has a clue about, certainly not the banks. The quotes by Warren Buffet are sobering.

Interestingly, the chairman of Northern Rock who led it into a improbable modern day real life bank run, was Matt Ridley, author of several entertaining popular biology books that espouse the “miracle of the market”, see for example, Origins of Virtue . But, as Northern Rock’s slouching towards nationalisation shows, Libertarians are the True Social Parasites .

Why I won’t join the Humanisterna

If you go to the web page of the Humanisterna , you’ll find an appeal to forgo a Christmas gift in favour of a donation to support Ayaan Hirsi Ali. I support the right of free speech for Hirsi Ali although I find her style annoying and find much of her writing shoddy and unscholarly. (For the record, I find much more repugnant the islamic fundamentalists who threaten to kill her and were responsible for the Murder in Amsterdam . But, for a much more nuanced view of islam and women, see for instance, Laila Lalami’s columns in the Nation.)

I was curious to see why the Hirsi Ali appeal figures so prominently on the Humanisterna page. I looked further and found a link that takes you to Sam Harris’ website which hosts a “security trust” for Hirsi Ali. Here, under “Frequently Asked Questions”, Harris considers this one: “Aren’t there more important causes to support than the protection of Ayaan Hirsi Ali?” And as part of his answer, says:

it is difficult to imagine how the world might look after a single incident of [islamic] nuclear terrorism. I think it is safe to say, however, that if we do suffer even one such attack, global warming will seem the least of our concerns.

Apart from being exhibit A for a display of losing all sense of proportion, it’s also totally illogical – how does my support for Hirsi Ali diminish the alleged threat of nuclear terror?

This symptom of losing all sense of proportion seems also to afflict the Humanisterna in its activities in Sweden, with its repeated attacks in newspapers and other public forums on religion, specifically Christian in this case. In a country where the influence of the church is hardly evident in society or daily life, except in very benign forms, this obsession is hard to understand.

In particular, one wonders why this issue consumes all the energies of a society dedicated to the principles of Humanism. What is Humanism? To quote from the Humanisterna’s own website:

Humanism unites compassion and reason in an effort to create a better society, where we ourselves are responsible for what happens. Democracy and human rights are universal values and must exist for all people, regardless of where you live.

For example, perhaps the Humanisterna could take up the issue of demonisation of muslims as a whole illustrated in Pomland by Seamus Milne. Liberal stalwart author Martin Amis suggests “strip-searching people who look like they’re from the Middle East or from Pakistan”, preventing Muslims from travelling, and further down the road, deportation. I don’t follow the Swedish media closely, but there are sure signs that this exists here too (I found this: Islamophobia in Sweden). In neighbouring Denmark, a political party wins almost 25% of the vote based on it. So why don’t the Humanisterna bring reason and compassion to bear on this issue? Don’t they and Harris realise that by intemperate attacks on religion, they are actually strengthening the support base for terrorism?

I am all with the Humanisterna in looking forward to the day when enlightenment principles of reason would triumph over religious superstition, but I wonder if their methods are not counter-productive. Here is what one of the heroes of enlightenment principles had to say:

though I am a strong advocate for free thought on all subjects, yet it appears to me (whether rightly or wrongly) that direct arguments against Christianity & theism produce hardly any effect on the public; & freedom of thought is best promoted by the gradual illumination of men’s minds which follows from the advance of science.

(Charles Darwin, declining a request from Edward Aveling to dedicate his book to Darwin.)