A review of Return to Growth: How to Fix the Economy by Jon Moynihan.
Our politicians – and that means all of us (we are all politicians now) – should read a fascinating article: Michaela C. Schippers, John P.A. Ioannidis and Matthias W.J. Luijks, ‘Is Society caught up in a Death Spiral? Modelling Societal Demise and Its Reversal’, Frontiers in Sociology 9 (2024). These authors suggest that our current disastrous situation is not to be explained by ‘mass formation’ or ‘groupthink’: of course, some of us have entered an altered psychological state and many of us exhibit a tendency to follow the consensus. But Ioannidis – you have heard of him – and his colleagues suggest that these do not do full justice to what is going on.
What is going on is that we are caught in a death spiral: the phenomenon by which ants, acting in ways that are usually good, continue to act in that way through disaster and destruction to death.
Our politicians should also read an important book. This is Jon Moynihan’s, Return to Growth. It came out in September, and a copy of this book should be on the desk of every politician, every civil servant, and every journalist. If Schippers, Ioannidis and Luijks have come with the bad news, Moynihan comes with both bad and good news. The bad news is that the United Kingdom has been in an economic death spiral for 20 years. The good news is that it can be reversed.
I should say that Schippers, Ioannidis and Luijks think that the death spiral can be reversed: by open society, resilience, compassion, willingness to change, avoidance of blame, “civil and intelligent disobedience” and “constructive deviance”, but most importantly by decreasing inequalities. This is alright as far as it goes, but, unfortunately, it plays into the language of the death spiral. For who is it, if not the death spiral politicians, who have themselves used the language of resilience, compassion, etc. and especially the language of “decreasing inequalities”? This is the sort of language that used by death spiral politicians and death spiral civil servants to justify more intervention, and distracts even sensible commentators into thinking that we have to tax the corporations, adopt a digital currency, enforce a universal basic something or other, maybe income, maybe shares. The answer to this is “No”. Not robust enough.
Moynihan offers something robust, and thinkable. He is not advocating some ivory tower remedy, or gesturing at utopia, like Varoufakis or Graeber. On the contrary, he is in the tradition of the most sensible and balanced thinkers who ever put pen to paper, the enlightened Scots David Hume, Adam Smith, John Millar and my own favourite Adam Ferguson: and, like them, he suggests that we look at our system of politics, finance and commerce in the most rational way possible. Not rationalist, but rational. We should be cool, calm, collected and concentrate on what is actually going on: call spades spades.
I shall try to summarise the argument. The next paragraph is the most important one.
His observation is that the British economy experienced growth in GDP per capita for two centuries, but for the last two decades has not. He calls this ‘bust’ but what it actually is is declining growth: the economy is increasing a bit, but not much, not as much as it did, and not as much as other economies do. We are in a situation in which there is too much government, too much tax, and too much regulation. His suggestions are, obviously enough – and memorable since there are three of them – that we should cut government, cut tax and cut regulation. He supports these suggestions with not only extremely close consideration of the facts, but also close examination of the economic theories that support his claim. His book is long, but can be read in a few hours if one reads it with the right attitude. And even a politician or civil servant should be able to make sense of the summaries of the argument which Moynihan conveniently places at the beginning and the end of the book.
I have said before that I am no economist. And so I have to take a certain amount on trust. Keynesian quantitative easing is a bewildering subject (Moynihan scoffs on p.160): and since our majority economic consensus since the Second World War has been that this is the way to deal with all problems, that requires some counter-argument which it does not receive here. On p.89 Moynihan observes that some economists (on the Left) think that economic downturn causes increased government spending, while some other economists (on the Right) think that increased government spending causes economic downturn. Oh, causality! Let the economists argue. But I think the causality is irrelevant: the argument stands on moral and political grounds: because increased government spending is intrinsically demoralising: it creates a cult in which we strip out of ourselves not only common sense but also civilisation. And it is also depoliticising: everyone knows the politicians can hardly breathe in Westminster. I found very persuasive the view of Moynihan that “austerity” was simply a form of language designed politically to make it impossible to enable us to reverse the death spiral. He has a chart that shows that Osborne’s “austerity” only managed briefly to reverse the second half of Brown’s spending increases. So much for “austerity”. Blair was more austere than Osborne. In fact, “austerity” is death spiral language, a term of abuse to stop us saving the state. For what we need is austerity, austerity of mind: and Moynihan shows it in exemplary form here. His tone throughout is reasonable: he lacks any inclination to indulge in scorn or contempt, though scorn and contempt are deserved by many of his subjects.
I learnt much from the book. Let me quote it for a bit:
- Western European economies… adopted the ‘social democratic’ model (high government expenditure, high taxes, high regulation) [and] are barely growing at all.
- Since the year 2000, government spending has… expanded. It is now at some 45% of the economy, up from 35% in 2000.
- The Office for Budget Responsibility uses a model that predicts that the more immigration we have, the more GDP will rise. But the rise in GDP per capita will not be commensurate… The OBR has… overstated the benefits of mass immigration.
- The U.K. is inexorably being swallowed up bit by bit by its Debt.
- The UK’s level of expenditure is now 15% higher than it was pre-Covid.
- In a social democracy, big government, high taxes, and a big welfare state are fundamentally democratic but are, in practice, controlled by disparate extractive groups such as political elites, bankers, senior (retiree) voters, large corporations, semi-monopolistic state enterprises and civil servants.
- The larger the government, the greater the opportunity for rent-seeking.
Basta! as D.H. Lawrence liked to say. That’s enough. Except, perhaps, for the point that our ruling order exhibits “ignorance”, “naivety” and “overexuberant spending”.
The book is a collection of good judgements. He argues that future economic growth is likely to be less than 1% per annum, which is not enough to cover the cost of the immigrants coming in, since we need growth of 1% just to cover that cost. He shows that ‘core’ government expenditure is only 12% of GDP, or 20%, if we include health. But current government expenditure is 46% of GDP. Core = police, judicial, prisons, defence, diplomacy, education, highways, sewage, sanitation, environment. That 12% is close to the tithe that is advocated by Dominic Frisby. This core state is the old law-and-order state of the Victorians. The ‘core’, even if we include the grotesque NHS, is only 44% of current government expenditure: that is, 44% of 46 per cent of GDP: i.e., 20% of GDP. The rest we could do without. Together with health (and in relation to health he shows that we spend £25 billion more than comparable countries), social welfare accounts for half of government expenditure. The third largest expenditure is servicing the debt, which is 12% of government expenditure (£128 billion last year).
The welfare state is the state which exists as a surplus to the core-expenditure-state or what we might call the law-and-order-and-education state. This welfare state is responsible for much of the death spiral: and its toxicity can be seen when we see that 54% of people in the U.K. receive more in benefits than they pay in taxes. How about that for rent-seeking? We have a rent-seeking population living like Morlocks beneath the rent-seeking Eloi of the civil service and far below the rent-seeking Icaruses and Daedeluses of the cloudcapitalist corporations.
Moynihan shows that the greater part of “social welfare” is taken up by pensions. Now, I have never tried to understand the “triple lock”. But it turns out that the “triple lock” is a conspiracy against all sense: it has locked us into a situation where pensions always increase in the most magnificent way possible, leaving inflation way behind. No one is telling the truth about pensions: Moynihan speculates that much is hidden, as the bodies have been buried in the future (under the ground where our children will toil). As the old increase in number and in age this pension expansion has spectacular consequences: sufficiently absurd for us surely to call in question the capacity for making sense in all governments of the past 20 years. “There has never been any discussion of this,” says Moynihan. Well, it should be discussed. The U.K. is indebted to the future to the cost of £2.6 trillion. No funds have been set aside for this. It is unfunded.
For those who want to read the book, it is fairly dry, though devastating, until around p.130. Until that point it is full of charts and numbers. And facts, which I hope I have not got wrong in the repeating of them. (For those who want equations, they have to wait until the appendices.) But from p.130 onwards Moynihan writes with suppressed derision of the ‘mental health’ cult and other follies: though his tone remains forensic rather than polemical. He observes that extra health spending in the last 20 years has gone into funding NHS “apparatchiks”: the dreaded administrators that have afflicted every branch of activity, including, disastrously, the universities. The universities have a grievance since they are relatively under-funded, he says, compared to universities in other similar countries. (Not good, to have an educated class with a grievance, an entitled grievance: they are educating our youth into this grievance.) Moynihan suggests that we take the top 30% of earners out of the NHS, and refuse the service to immigrants for the first six years. Sounds sensible to me. Moynihan is sensible about universities too: that they are a national institution, and so the majority of places should be reserved for the British: otherwise we educate the world, which is pleasant, but, again, demoralising for the death spiralists who remain on the island. He laments the arrival of ‘woke’ in the Ministry of Defence. He suggests that we should spend more on defence, but not on diversity-in-defence.
Then there is the state, the public servant state. Hegel called civil servants “the universal class”: he saw them as a sort of Coleridgean clerisy that put the interests of the state above their own interests. This only worked because the Hegelian state was objective: for everyone. But our modern state is not a Hegelian state: it has become a Marxist state: a state which extracts rents, taxes, etc. from the people. The way it works in modern conditions is that it pays what used to be a quarter of the workforce in 1997 but what is now a third of the workforce. ’Sblood! A third, one out of three, of the workforce is on the state shilling. Who is going to be able to vote for a change in this system of extractive politics when a third of the workforce will always vote to continue seeking its rents?
Moynihan has read the books of these civil servants. Not civil. Not servants. His verdict: “Self-regard, complacency, and little self-awareness.” His account is devastating. The entire civil service took more than two thousand years off “sick” in 2022. (See p.229 if you doubt.) We are being governed by what Julie Burchill calls mental elfs: working four-day weeks, working at home on furniture bought by the state, constantly pulling ‘sickies’, etc. His verdict is that the civil service is an “extractive institution”. Paint that on the walls in Whitehall, Banksy, you coward.
Moynihan makes much of “Wagner’s Law, first formulated in the 1860s: public expenditure [in a democracy] increases as national income increases”. He shows that expenditure has not only increased, but is paid for in Byzantine manner. Brown and Osborne both contributed to the elaboration of the tax code, which, I did not know, is – the longest in the world. The state cannot even take its cut very sharply: the United Kingdom has the bluntest scissors in the world. Needless to say, the European Union helped blunt them, but we did most of the blunting ourselves.
Shall I summarise the argument again? His book is full of detailed practical suggestions. But the argument is three-barrelled. Cut government. Cut tax. Cut regulation. These are necessary for economic growth. If we do the opposite we demoralise ourselves by concerning ourselves with redistribution, by trying to tax the rich, by stunting genuine activity, by importing false imperatives into an entirely rent-seeking system: a system defended by a vastly expanded civil “service” which serves itself and does so by exploiting a language of “crisis” and “exclusion” and “deprivation” to support its salaries and pensions. He doesn’t say, though he could, that the system encourages mediocrity. When there is a scare (which they call a “crisis”), everyone says “Something must be done, money must be spent, laws must be passed”. They should not say this. If they are allowed to say this we suffer the consequences: which, he says, are “extremist, absolutist and nonsensical”. And we suffer from mediocre moralising in the form of Net Zero, DEI, ESG, Stonewall, etc. McKinsey is wrong: diversity does not increase profits. Increasing tax rates does not necessarily increase tax revenues.
Moynihan believes, he says, in the rule of law, low corruption, suppression of extractive institutions, free markets, free trade, sound money. But at root the message is simple: minimise government, lower taxes, cut regulation. I found nothing to disagree with in the entire book.
If I were to criticise the book, it would be along Burkean lines. The late historian J.G.A. Pocock showed that though Edmund Burke agreed with Hume, Smith et al in many regards he came to suppose that their belief that commerce civilised us was in fact the opposite of the truth: that, in fact, commerce depended on a prior civilisation. Hence the need to talk about religion and history, as Burke did: our history. Moynihan takes the Smith line, not the Burke line. And it is possible to ask whether our common culture in the 21st Century has enough in it to enable us to reverse the Fabian habit of thinking that only a maximised state can be trusted to solve all political problems. I think we need a bit more Bible and Shakespeare in our schools.
But let me end with Adam Smith. In The Wealth of Nations, that universally admired book of 1776, he wrote the following small poem:
A progressive state is happy.
A stationary state is dull.
A declining state is melancholy.
Smith’s example of a stationary state was China. The irony! Moynihan’s basic claim is Smith’s: that a progressive state – a state experiencing growth – is happy. But for the moment it is China that is the progressive state, and the United Kingdom may well be that dread thing, a stationary state. If so, at least it’s only dull, and not yet melancholy.
Dr. James Alexander is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at Bilkent University in Turkey.
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Absolutely mind blowing.
Just one example:
Along with a caretaker there are also a Premises Manager and a Premises Assistant. How many properties have they got?
Each teacher requires a subject manager and the manager requires an assistant. No wonder schools are complaining of being short of money.
There is even a Head of Resources, better known as Personnel. Why can’t the Headmaster do this job, or delegate this to his deputy and if the deputy is too “busy” surely the deputy assistant could mark the teachers register.
Total jokesville.
When I was at primary school, there were nine teachers, a headmaster and a caretaker, plus kitchen staff and dinner ladies. I think it’s this managerial culture that’s led to this institutional capture.
It’s a multi-academy trust so you have several linked schools who will share staff.
The Aquinas Trust is the multi-academy organisation and Rye College is a single-location component I believe. The school’s web site implies that these are all full time members of the college team. If they are part-timing in their roles then the web site is, at the very least, being disingenuous.
If the school is in a multi-academy trust those people will be responsible for multiple schools that make up the trust. Not saying it’s definitely not wasteful, but we could be talking about 4 or 5 schools averaging 800+ pupils each who share staff, particularly in the admin positions.
What is a Director of Literacy and More Able?
What is a Director of Literacy and More Able?
Librarian?
Then presumably a Director of Literacy and Less Able would be a video librarian.
I would be concerned as to the abilities of such a person,the use of the “and more able” just hanging there would suggest a level of illiteracy.
More able in what I onder?
More able in what I wonder?
Have we got a hate crime here?
Implied intelligence shaming of the ‘less able.’
The fake Tory Party can’t blame Labour for this woke indoctrination in our state schools. The buck for all of this evil agenda stops at the door of this wretched, corrupted party.
Correct and beyond dispute.
That sounds like a terribly white teaching line-up. If it is, I don’t know how they can live with themselves.
Have you seen the number of employees? and look at the titles, there are more employed that are not teachers than are. Why for example is there a need for a marketing and communications person? its a school, like wise the woman who looks after “inclusion”, she has an assistant.
All undoubtedly enjoying gold plated pensions etc from us mugs who fork out the highest taxes since WW2 to keep them in place.
They’ve got two Science Teachers. They may as well be sacked since the school isn’t teaching scientific FACTS, it’s teaching Cultural Marxism propaganda.
“There are girls in her class who are trans…”
A class of 13 year olds, presumably 30 or less in number, has more than one transsexual and one transcat. Does that strike anyone as an example of a functioning society?
It does, actually. It’s an excellent demonstration that – given enough time and criminal energy – adults can talk children without experiences with the real world into pretty much anything, no matter how idiotic. Eg, I’m pretty convinced that the girl claiming to identify as cat doesn’t spend much time hunting mice or birds on all fours in order to eat them raw and that she probably also doesn’t go periodically all-but-mad for desire to have sex with a tom cat.
The solution is to get all these perverts, morons and perverted morons out of child education. This should be an honoured task for people of the highest moral and idealistc standing, not an also-career for useless people who cheated their way to an academic degree.
Excellent RW.
I once sat behind two girls of about 13 or 14 on a train. Being young they did not have the common sense to discuss private and intimate matters in quieter voices and what they were saying was easily overheard. I have never heard such absurdity and muddled thinking about sex and gender coming from children who clearly had learned the nonsense in school. This is a diabolical disgrace. But it is not about individual teachers, as some might pursue it with more zeal than others. This is coming from above from politicians who make education policy, just as they make energy policy or foreign policy. They are brainwashing children and whether it is climate, race, equality, diversity or gender, it has a purpose and that purpose is to put government in charge of everything and take away all personal freedom. When you can control people to the extent that they can be told they MUST NOT disagree that a person can really be a cat then wokery seems to have won. ———-But the battle is only beginning and evil like this cannot possibly prevail
If she’s a cat, I hope she’s only being fed Whiskas twice a day (other brands are available).
We have to defend the right of these young girls to have chest binders, puberty blockers, testosterone treatment, and multiple disfiguring operations. That will be a few more who will not be able to have kids, although one may have kittens.
If labour voters can’t breed, where’s the harm?
It must really kill them that it’s only their own kids they are destroying, with most conservatives kids untouched, despite their greatest efforts.
Liblabcon voters. I still live in hope of a backlash against the uniparty.
There used to be some decent people in the Labour party, and probably still are a few (though I seem to remember Frank Field was forced out). That’s the task now, to back those groups opposing an alternative society, whether independents, new parties, or just organisations or groups of concerned people who propose a better way.
“although one may have kittens.”
After the appropriate lessons in ‘how cats shag.’
(Apologies but probably nothing the children are not already familiar with).
Having seen the performance of a queen barn cat you probably wouldn’t want this going on in a classroom, most distracting.
Well I think savvy pupils should revolt, get together and decide that from hence forth they all identify as any creature, real or fictitious, and then see what the idiotic teachers do with them. Make their lives as difficult and miserable as possible and put complaints in about the teachers if they don’t refer to them as their chosen creature. Parents can get on board with this as well. Just milk the absurdity of the situation for what it is. I’m loving the kid who identifies as a dinosaur though! LOL Which one I wonder…?
Regarding this trans ideology BS though, thank god for this psychiatrist in the U.S who is calling out the dangers posed to kids, speaking from an entirely rational, evidence-based and factual standpoint. Her 5min testimonial;
https://twitter.com/DrLoupis/status/1671048443119169537?cxt=HHwWgsCz6ZLt4LAuAAAA
In contrast, here is Dr McNamara, who is all about ”gender affirming care” for minors. You can draw your own conclusions on who is the doctor that has children’s welfare as a priority and has not forgotten her Hippocratic oath. ( 2min clip )
https://twitter.com/DrLoupis/status/1671051129625427970?cxt=HHwWhIC27cKJ4rAuAAAA
I’m looking forward to the Department of Education putting out its first advert for a:
Student Focussed School Vet.
I don’t know, I’m also pretty impressed with the creativity of the kids and the one who identifies as the moon. Maybe all the kids should get together and arrange to be different planets and celestial bodies. They’d be genderless, so no pronouns to worry about, and they can orbit around the perimeter of the classroom the whole day and not do any work! Just stay in character and ignore the teacher for the duration. There’s many ways kids can choose to fight the system if they really think about it.
Indeed Mogs.
The two girls who stood their ground against that appalling creature currently labelled as a teacher are truly worthy of our utmost respect. Quite honestly I could not have mounted such a defence against a teacher at age 18, let alone 13 although I was clearly blessed in never having such a dangerous person ‘teaching’ me.
I do hope this recording reaches as many children as possible because this is where hope lies and by God are their generation going to need it.
Those girls were absolute stars. Salute.
I must admit I did have a hint of admiration for anyone who has the ingenuity to identify as “the moon”.
One who identifies as a cat really is shooting themselves in the foot. Do they need reminding that a cat gets blamed for everything that goes wrong in a household (“it was the cat, honest!”). If anyone has any allergies then this cat must be expelled. It can be quite useful for dodging accountability, however. If Matt Hancock had only self-identified as a weasel he would have got away with everything!
“One who identifies as a cat really is shooting themselves in the foot.”
You mean, “shooting themselves in the paw.”
The pupils are revolting. So are the peasants. t least we know what happened to Humpty Dumpty now…
Somebody must surely know the name of the teacher.
And why no mention of this teacher in question being taken down? Man, I’d be all over her and that school like a bad case of Monkeybollox if that were my daughter she spoke to like that.
The Mail has the name apparently – rest assured that were it a right-wing teacher, their name and picture would be all over the mass meeja.
I’ve watched this only partially because this person self-identifying as teacher was too annoying but if someone ever managed disqualify itself thoroughly for its supposed profession, that would be this indescribable entity. The prime example would be shouting at a child whether she identified with her private bits and that there are three sexes because children are born as functioning hermaphrodites in very rare cases.
Being stupid and aggressive are not supposed to be prime personality traits of teachers.
Come on RW it’s only three minutes. Stop being so finicky.
Three minutes of a complete moron shouting nonsense is decidedly more than I’m willing to endure. I would read a transcript as this wouldn’t make annoying noises and I could read it in under 30s.
The inflections in the speech are an essential part of understanding what has gone on.
Back in the day I can recall teachers who were stupid and sadistic, especially those who’d been incarcerated in Japanese POW camps
I’m sure she will be given maximum security to save her from the “right-wing extremists.”
Unlike the teacher in Batley who was thrown to the Muslim-extremist wolves.
Her name and photo were posted on Twitter
The story’s not just in this country: the USA has picked it up and it’s being reported widely there…
Oh that’s brilliant
I do not wish to be cruel and perhaps this is indicative of the condition of the nation when I state that this story, for me at least, counts as light relief.
Nothing says “We are the good guys” like doing everything possible to block all attempts to find out what you are up to.
Or to supposedly protect children from being bullied by bullying children. It’s hard to tell in this scenario who is the adult and who is the child.
I’ve seen various amusing comments along the lines of; feed her only cat food & see how long her resolution lasts!
Cats are obligate carnivores – it’s probably also a vegan.
One thing that gets to me about this, is the self-righteousness of people like this teacher and its ilk, patting themselves on the back about how they are being inclusive and providing safe spaces – yet being completely incapable of seeing their own cruelty and bullying to people who are ‘different’ (i.e. not aligning with the teacher’s personal views). The hypocrisy is bad enough, but an adult speaking in that manner to a child? Saying that it is okay to speak in such a manner to one child in order to protect another child? How about being the adult in the room and not speaking to anyone like that?
Just like corona and the climate nonsense, the gender ideology nonsense is just an excuse for vile people to let out their inner nazi while claiming some type of moral high ground.
The mother is rightly angry, but to some extent is playing along when she says there are girls who are trans in her daugther’s class. No, there are girls who have been indoctrinated and persuaded through social media and educational grooming that they should claim to be trans. The mother need not be rude like the teacher, but language use is important and by saying the girls are trans rather than that they claim to be trans for the moment, lends credence to the gender nonsense.
As for the court case – secret copyright material? WTH does that mean? Copyrighted material is not some secret inventive process, it is merely material that has copyright protection from being reproduced without acknowledgement or payment. The whole point of copyright is for material to be published, but with protection of commercial interests, not to maintain secrecy. If it’s so secret, it would not be shown to either teachers or children, who I would bet did not sign any type of non-disclosure clause. The intellectual ability of the judiciary seems to be sinking on a part with that of the general population.
Exactly so. Classified material rated as secret – begs the question as to whether that means commercially secret, or national interest secret? Surely it doesn’t have some sort of government classification … or does it?
If there are no paper copies available, that raises a number of red flags as it means no adult outside the education system can ever review it. Who has written the material and who is profiting from it? Or is it yet another set of rainbow grifters monetising child sex education / grooming.
Or is it only secret because “they” know full well that if any normal parents read it they will be so appalled at the content that staff and authors are likely to be sundered from nave to chaps by a gaggle of incensed parents?
Brilliant.
The whole point of copyright is for material to be published
Thank you for pointing this out. I had the feeling that there’s something wrong with this statement but couldn’t quite point a finger to it. The copyright claim is a red herring. What is really meant is that the school has acquired copies of the material under NDA (non-disclosure agreement). This should be prohibited for teaching material as that’s supposed to meet certain objective quality standards and that’s impossible when it’s not accessible for inspection by third parties. The company providing this is hiding it because they damn well know that they have something to hide.
If the teacher is referencing published material it is imperative that the publisher is identified and then we can let the whole country know about them. They don’t need to be shy.
Actually, shouldn’t such curricula information be available on request?
This is something which comes from the software industry where you can have something that’s copyrighted (meaning only the copyright owner may make copies of it) but unpublished (meaning people who obtained a legitimate copy are bound to keep the information secret due to the terms of their license). The academy trust obtained unspecified teaching material from some provider and that came with a license attached which demanded that the content must not be disclosed to people not involved in the process of using it for teaching. This doesn’t even mean something nefarious is going on. It could just be a legal department trying to maximise the value of so-called intellectual property by keeping it secret from potential competitors.
As I already wrote: Such licenses ought to be outlawed for teaching material because third parties have a legitimate interest in getting access to it. The really simple case would be a parent (or some tutoring organization) trying to help a pupil with his homework.
Just as with the indemnity granted to the quaccine manufacturers
The managerial, political and bureaucratic elite has gone all-in on not just normalising but promoting ever more extreme perversion, absurdities and mental illness.
The ZMan describes what’s currently going on and this episode fits in to a T: “Integral to the managerial polyarchy is the narrative. This is the semi-official story for how the managerial elite believes events ought to unfold. The narrative promotes some cause or issue popular with the elite or it can simply work to promote solidarity in the managerial class by underscoring the difference between the members of the managerial class and the masses. The narrative not only frames reality, but often it is expected to shape reality by altering behavior.
It is an interesting inversion of cult behavior. To members of a cult, the rules of the cult are perfectly rational. The appeal of the cult is it provides clarity to the members who struggle with a disorganized mind. The member find herself surrounded by people who see things through the same lens. On the other hand, to those outside the cult, what happens inside the cult is strange and counter to objective reality. It is why cults have a negative connotation. They appear irrational.
The managerial class looks at the masses as a cult. The people who vote for the wrong candidate in elections are not acting from rational self-interest. They are not even acting from subjective preference. They are irrationally lashing out out of fear and anger for no reason at all! The role of the managerial class in the great narrative of life is to impose their rules on these people. Those wreckers and deviationists are cast into a role that supports the narrative.”
..I agree with you, but you miss out the bit where the managerial class always think that they are superior in every way to the rest of us..remember the headlines about anti-vaxxers being uneducated and lower class?
Believing they are superior and in a ‘different’ (educationaly and morally rarified group)….is a huge part of their ‘belonging’.
When people feel so superior it’s easy to pretend your actions are for the ‘other people’s own good’….just my thoughts….
..
Rudy’s take on it:
“Full marks to those kids. That miserable excuse for a ‘teacher’ has no business whatsoever being in a school.
Look how, instead of a discussion with questions and a genuine search for the ‘truth’ of a matter, the kids are not even being allowed to question, or to express their opinion.
I’m impressed with those kids – they’ve already found their inner pot of gold and are rejecting the crock of shit their teacher is trying to force on them.”
https://rudolphrigger.substack.com/p/whats-at-the-end-of-the-rainbow
A decent summary in the substack.
Question 1…
…am I the only person who thinks schools have forgotten what they are there for?
Someone in authority..i.e our useless Government should be the one reminding them…!! Parents everywhere should demand, and councils should have to sign a charter about what they want their kids taught…i.e maths, English, geography..you know, normal educational lessons…
Question 2.…..as we have now gone down the rabbit hole in regard to gender nonsense…for example, a man who rapes or kills women can now identify as a woman and legally go to a women’s only prison..ditto a female ward in a hospital..if the young girl who identifies as a cat is particularly young and bendy, is it ok for her to remove her underwear, lift up her leg, and lick her butt-hole…? Something all my cats have done…I mean it must be OK in this freak show if the rest is allowable??
Precisely Mrs Gums. Could not the authorities define the perversion limits? Just so we know, after all we wouldn’t want to go too far and offend anyone.
Would we?
‘Parents have lost power over what their children are taught’.
No.
Learn from the American Pitmbull moms.
Fight these evil teachers who want to pervert your kids.
I wonder if the school provides a litter tray in the corner of the class-room, for the use of pupils. I would be intrigued to know f it gets used.
So if we are to treat anyone identifying as a man as we would normally treat a man,
And if we are to treat anyone identifying as a woman as we would normally treat a woman,
then,
Anyone identifying as a cat……
Tins of cat food for school lunches, no access to the human facilities, just a cat litter in the corner of the class. Oh, and how about doing away with all those HUMAN rights, not generally associated with cats, like for instance right to an education. Meow.
Snap. Your post popped up simultaneously!
Great minds think alike. I have a cat and he is perfectly happy without ever having expressed aspirations to general literacy and numeracy. These people need to go to the vets for a check-up!
The kid will go far in life.
The cat girl is either an arch piss taker or a seriously troubled attention seeker. Either way she has done us all a favour and done what kids do which is sniff out the bullshit in adults’ positions on things. From an absurd position they have been pushed into a more obviously absurd one.
I’d love it to be the former, but the girls arguing with their teacher seem to believe she’s serious.
Seriously troubled, for sure. I doubt she really thinks she’s a cat. I’m no expert on mental illness but I have some experience of people who have lost their grip and they have not been close to this kind of delusion- and they have been so dysfunctional that they have been sectioned.
If there are those who would choose to take on a persona other than that of a human then they need to be allowed to have the full immersive experience. After all how many people who own cats, or who work with horses send them to school each day in clothing.
So come on teachers and schools if you want to be taken seriously then do the job properly and provide the appropriate surroundings and food for the little darlings.
Seconded
Been commenting on this since heard about it yesterday.
you should be soooo proud of yourselves for defending what you believe in. I utterly happen to agree with you, but instead of having a reasonable debate with you gals, this hideous hectoring bully, threatening and name calling, was a total abuse of power and position; frankly what an old bag.We in this house are with you and seems like most of the country are with you
Well done girls
As in all things you need to trace back to where all of this emanates from. In the past the school was there to educate, to teach children “how to think”, but for some time schools have been politicised, and now teach children “what to think” They now impart values to their pupils. But not all parents and their children will share those. When schools become a vehicle for the social engineers there will therefore be a clash. In the curriculum we see increasing amounts of stuff included on the environment, on race, on gender etc which are political issues, not academic ones. Many parents will not want their children taught about “gender fluidity” or “white privilege”. Controlling language and therefore ta argument is a vital tool in schools and getting rid of words like “boy” and “girl” ———“Head Boy” is sometimes replaced with a more gender neutral term like “Head of School”. The idea that a person’s gender is determined by their feelings alone is crucial to this gender ideology running rampant across the western world’s education system. The mother in the article above is asking why they are teaching this stuff to 13 year olds, and she is right to be angry. Her child is being socially engineered for political purposes.
” Yet all of Page’s attempts to see the lesson plan and materials have been blocked, including by the courts, on grounds of the commercial interests of the provider.”
Ah, is this why the Times muppets failed to shine a light on the pharmaceutical industry with regards to certain experimental meications that have been heavily promoted in recent times? Muppets.
And didn’t a 1930s central European empire use similar tactics to promote their ideology?
Julia Hartley Brewer has a good piece on this.
Also features on Sky News Australia.
97% of the sane population are proud too. The 3% who were previously in an asylum can whistle.
Parents just need to find out when their child’s timetable has the PHSE lessons scheduled and keep their child off school on those days.
I would have been very proud of my child too.
Standing up for what you believe and speaking out in a respectful way is an absolutely vital life skill. We should be teaching all our children to question and reason.
We do not all identify as sheep who mindlessly follow the flock regardless of the consequences!
I hope this brave young girl’s example leads to a massive fight back against views being imposed on us all regardless of the evidence and the consequences.
Where are the Board of Governors? The Trustees? Why is this nonsense allowed to proliferate? There used to be Parent Teacher Associations so that they could work together to provide proper all round education for children.
Billboard Chris in Canada (where things are even worse) has single-handedly been doing so much to go against this stupidity which is ultimately going to ruin the lives of so many children.
Good to know that proper parenting still exists!
Unreal – the teacher should be sacked and the school investigated. The Church of England has really lost the plot when it is allowing its schools to use indoctrination like this. I feel sorry for the poor kid that’s being indulged in its belief that it’s a cat.
That’s a harmless albeit somewhat weird costume show kids are bound to enjoy which will ultimatively end with puberty and the discovery of offer interests. At least until an industry offering animalism-affirming plastic surgery has sprung up. The evil bit is cross-sex self-identification because a ‘cure’ is available for that, starting with nowadays useless drugs originally invented for chemical castration of gays (rebranded as puberty blockers) and ending with gross mutilation of so far healthy bodies to turn them into a grotesque parody of the other sex. By the time people realize that they have been lied to all the time and that their quest is ultimatively futile, they’ll ideally be beyond any hope of recovery and will have to live out the remainder of their lives in whatever dysfunctional hulks they’re left with and they will have been forever cut off from the possibilty of leading a biologically normal live.
I still believe that a good deal of sadism must be involved with putting someone onto this trajectory and affirming that everything will ultimatively work out fine whenever doubts spring up until it’s too late because everybody (who’s intelligent enough, ie, not people like this person self-identfying as teacher) except the victims knows that it cannot and won’t.