....and anyone who disagrees with me is a racist

Those who truly abhor racism and prejudice need to stop and examine the theory and mechanism that works against these horrible tendencies in our society.

This means truly defining what prejudice is, understanding what philospophical moral theories have been most successful in reducing racism and prejudice in society and examining our history too see how totalitarian states have been toppled or how equal rights have actually been improved.

The knee jerk reaction of countering prejudice with more predjudice which is seen in the philosophically unsound current ideologies that will brand anyone a racist that disagrees with your knee jerk reaction, is in itself, the fuel that drives predjudice in our society today.

The circle of the extreme right and extreme left in terms of identity politics actually meet in the same place, and it's a place where the wielding of absolute power against the individual is the core of the dogma that drives their collective mission. 

Part of this mission has been a redefining of what racism is. It's a definition that will cast a doubt on my ability to define racism, not based upon checking if my definition is correct, but by casting doubt on me personally because their ideological identity politic would define me as white (even though my mother is half Indian and was born in Calcutta)

These ideologies have their roots in Marxist and post modernist ideas. I am very interested in both these philosophies and can list the merits in both. But as with many philosophies, there are great faults in their structure. These faults are not understood by those who now propound these beliefs and there for me lies the problem.

And these faults are exposed by cognitive science, evolutionary psychology and the English and American philosphical traditions of logic and academic rigour. But individuals from these areas who have raised criticism have been branded by the ideological left as racists and in many ways had their ideas challenged not by countering their arguments, but by the attempted besmirchment of their character or the character of their audience.

This dogmatic, ideological approach is spreading through our society and these ideas are being wired into our institutions as we speak. Anyone who has been asked to tick a box defining their race has come up against this, even though this is obviously a racist act. But we live in the world where calling out this racism could get you branded a racist.

So at this point, I would like to say I agree with the motivations of the ideological left, I am not a racist but I have real problems with their philosophy, to the point where I find this ideology racist and it is within those terms that I disagree with their ideas.

Of course I am using their methods of besmirchment against them, but again, this exposes the problems in that ideological position.

If you study your history one of the things that beat racism was THE TRUTH. ('but what is truth?' I hear the post modernists counter...go away please) 

The races in terms of their abilities, morality, talents and intelligence are equal. Science proves this unequivocably. Inconsequential genetic differences like skin colour do not create any real difference between races. Only through a respect for truth can this fact have any power in a society. And the truth is that the races are a social construct in themselves (the ideological left love social constructs)

Is anyone out there who is asking 'what is truth?' really want to disagree with this? The ideological left have to agree with these points, even though the post modern theory their whole ideology rests on would have to question the veracity of this truth.

So I will state these facts again (post modernists hate facts, as do politicians)

The races do not actually exist. Therefore any attribute given to any race does not exist. There is only one race; human beings and their abilities are equally spread and do not correlate to any imagined racial group.

Yes...the races do not really exist. Races were created by those in power to retain power. Racism has been successfully countered by those groups who identified with a race and then argued they are same as the other races. Think about that and then ask yourself if a statement like Black Lives Matter is rooted in those philosophical terms?

The fact that a power structure has defined a group with an identity will not be beaten by identity politics. But there is something far more sinister at work here and this is the reason for this post.

Much as I would like to try and define racism, show how liberal philosophy came up with the real arguments that in the end demolished the slave trade worldwide and show why the civil rights movements of the sixties worked, and then show how elements of the ideological left identity politics actually run against these because they are essentially racist in their ideology, but I think anyone reading this will begin to see the faults in this dogma anyway by looking at it from another angle. 

But let's for a minute forget all this and turn our focus on a Russian military man, turned theater director, turned political aide to Putin...Vladislav Surkov....

Surkov came up with a political approach called Sovereign Democracy. This is an approach that creates confusion, distraction, obsfucation in your electorate whilst giving them enough of a standard of living to shut up and put up. It is what has given Putin the illusion of a democratic mandate for so many years. And it's a method that seems to be getting more and more popular across the rest of globe.

Surkov's ideas could well be rooted in his time as a theater director, where the world is your stage and you pull the strings of the characters and political movements of your creation. Surkov advocated the financing of neo Nazi groups and Marxist groups in his country. By creating that division within the electorate a perceived, fake vacuum emerges that get's filled by a disguised totalitarian force.

From wikipedia...

In 2013, Surkov was characterized by The Economist as the engineer of "a system of make-believe", "a land of imitation political parties, stage-managed media and fake social movements".
In Western media outside Russia, a vocal and eloquent critic of Surkov and of the administration of Vladamir Putin in general has been Peter Pomerantsev. Pomerantsev has written op-eds in The Atlantic, The New York Times and the The London review accusing Surkov, "Putin's chief ideologue" with "unsurpassed influence over Russian politics", of turning Russia into a "managed democracy", and of reducing Russion politics to nothing but "post modernist theatre". In a talk before the Legatum Institute Pomerantsev, along with Pavel Khodorkovsky, termed Russia a "postmodern dictatorship".

Look at Trump in the US and Prime Minister Boris Cummings in the UK and ask yourself if we are now moving towards a 'managed democracy' within a 'post modern dictatorship'?

The 'stage managed media and fake social movements' could well be driving the current movements in the US and UK. 

It's obvious that the BLM protestors trying to tear down the structure and the teenage gunslingers trying to take out the protestors could just be a very lucky occurence for Trump and his supporters. Or it could all be very well stage managed. 

We just don't know do we?

Through out the eighties and nineties the West blamed Colonel Gaddafi for various terrorist attrocities when they knew all along Syria was to blame. When the Arab spring happened the west supported those protestors who went onto the streets to argue against the dictatorships they were living under. Here we had a truly democratic movement that was without ideology or a leader, organised through Twitter and Facebook that managed to topple these totalitarian states. But the vacuum created by this movement was filled by even more dictatorial and ideoligical power elites and ended up with the West and Russia supporting Assad as he bombed the people of Syria out of existence.

Now with this in mind, think about Trump, BLM and the woke movement....is all of this a clever retelling of events to try and maintain a far right elite in the US? Is Trump really being hurt by the protests of the ideological left? Seriously...is this movement really doing what it says it's doing?

Our political world is changing. The billionaire elites are growing stronger and stronger. The unquestioned countenance of the ideological left in our culture is matched only by the unassailable right wing in our political domain. Are these two things linked?

So going to the start of my post, you will not beat predjudice with more predjudice. Questioning the ideas behind identity politics does not make you a racist. especially if the divisions created by identity politics are serving a hidden political agenda that I have hinted at above.

So let me reiterate. The bounds required to identify a group are not only arbitary but also fake. Everyone has the right to identify with a group but applying any attribute to that group is essentially prejudiced. defining another individual as part of another group and defining that group with attributes is also prejudiced. 

This is how racism started in the first place. Arguing that it is redistribution of power is a move backwards towards tribalism. And again, racism is rooted in tribalism.

The power dynamics that defined these racial groups and the feeling that people have to identify with those groups is very real and is again a product of racism. Nobody is born believing they are black or white, this is put on us all. Yes we do end up identifying as racial groups (and even then, how many individuals feel stuck between two arbitary divisions all of their life) but the way to beat this is by promoting how we are the same not different. 

These divisions are fake. Do not let anyone use your justified abhorrence of prejudice and division to back you into a defensive corner. Remember Martin Luther King and Gandhi. They were right.

And this means promoting equality of opportunity, not equality of outcomes. 

'I don't want nobody

To give me nothing
Open up the door
I'll get it myself…' James Brown

And if you find some of the ideas inherent in the ideological left a bit...well...prejudiced, uniformed and dogmatic, this does not make you a racist. Anyone who says you are is simply a twat.

A lot of the ideas in this post came from the documentary HYPE- NORMALISATION

What everyone has forgotten about education

 

If animals could sing they would sing 'We don't need no education' but they can't sing so they never do. 

(I did see a parrot singing a Beyonce song the other day but I hope that this is the exception that proves the rule)

Animals do have skills and abilities but they don't need to be educated, those skills come naturally. Those skills are wired into every animal's very being, and the wiring is contained in their genes so those skills can be passed down through the generations. Those skills also evolve as their enviroment and situation changes.

Even the bird that can sing like Beyonce can do so because it has a heritable ability, wired into the animal at birth.

So anyone who says that we are a blank slate, a tabula rasa, is wrong.

We, like animals, are born with certain skills wired in. This does not mean we are born with those skills. What we are born with is an innate drive and ability to learn those skills ourselves. And we will learn those skills ourselves using the natural enviroment around us.

When a baby is born it has a huge motivation and drive to learn to move, grasp, look, flinch, crawl, stand, walk and run. These are all incredibly difficult skills. Anyone who has tried to design a robot will tell you it is easier to program them to work out chess moves than it is to make them pick up the chess pieces and move them. Baby's are like space probes. They arrive on this planet but instead of being programmed to collect dirt and take photographs they are wired to do what babies do. (grasp, look, flinch, crawl etc)

But babies are programmed to learn stuff that other animals aren't. Babies are programmed to learn to talk. Now this does not mean they are born talking. But you don't need to teach a baby to talk. They are born with the ability to teach themselves to talk. They just need to hear other humans talk. This is a very important fact about humans. 

A child will teach themselves to talk but they will not teach themselves to read or write. Reading and writing is not something that we are born with an ability to learn ourselves. It is a skill that will develop through some sort of inflicted outside agency. (ie. a teacher has to force us to do repetitive stuff to develop that skill)

And reading and writing is such an important skill that we have as a species developed a huge system across the globe that teaches this skill. At a very young age we force children to spend all their days in a building where adults will force them to repeat over and over the actions required to learn to read. We also will force them to repeat over and over the actions required to learn their times tables, the order of the days of the week, the months of the year, what date the Norman's invaded England etc. Repetition is at the heart of so many skills that we were all taught at school.

So here are the things that I think get forgotten about education.

1) People intuitively learn some things but not other things. Education is about teaching what is counter intuitive.

2) Most knowledge and skills a based in part but fundamentally on some sort of repetive 'learning by rote' method.

3) People will intuitively repeat certain actions to learn certain skills but will not repeat other actions. Education forces them to do these fundamental but counter intuitive repetitions.

4) Knowledge as well as skill is based upon rote learning. You cannot 'know' history without memorising certain historical facts and you cannot 'learn' music without memorising certain scales and chords.

So to put it simply, in every subject there are intuitive aspects. ie. aspects the that the student will work out or develop themselves, and there are counter intuitive aspects that will need to be taught.

Education is the transmission of counter intuitive skills and knowledge.

'Talent' or 'ability' or ''aptitude' may be the student's individual motivation and inclination to partake in the repetitive actions required to develop the knowledge or skills associated with excellence in that subject. Why would a certain student possess more motivation than another? This is because we all like different stuff. People liking different stuff is possibly the key to humankind's success. Education is about developing these different likes. This is fundamentally why education has to be student focused.

In today's education we try and teach the student too much. 

This does not allow for the repetition required to really develop the fundamental skill or knowledge needed to truly understand that subject. It is better to go deeply into a narrow but fundamental aspect of any given subject than try and cover everything. Inside maths is physics, chemistry, music. Inside music is art, history, maths. All the subjects are contained within each other. We should not value certain subjects over others (as in the preference for teaching the three 'Rs' or today's preference for STEM subjects)

We need to identify and develop a students likes and teach the fundamental,counter intuitive aspects of their likes in a way that opens them up to an understanding of all the subjects. We need to teach, to quote William Blake, the ability 'To see a World in a Grain of Sand'

A good teacher will always be looking for skill and knowledge development. It logically follows that they will know when those skills have been developed.  In 2020 in the UK the government, unable to test this skill development in an examination setting because of COVID 19, decided to create an algorhythm that would assign grades to students based upon how close they were to the ideal, privleged, well off, middle class, rule follower that would make the perfect citizen in their view of a perfect society where everyone should be aspiring to be a privleged, well off, middle class, rule follower.

Of course it was a disaster

And so they had no choice but to ask the teachers what grade they thought the student would have achieved. This of course was much more accurate because teachers inherently will know this. On the whole they have no motivation to cheat in this regard, in fact most teachers only cheat when they are faced with another ridiculous algorythm than dictates to them how many students in their class should pass. (have I let that secret out the bag? No worries, no one is reading this...)

Let's scrap examinations and let the teachers tell us how good the student is in the same way we let doctors tell us what is wrong with us and driving instructors whether someone is fit to drive. 

So there we have it. Find out what the student likes and focus on those areas, they will intuitively learn certain things, the teacher is there to teach the counter intuitive. Teach the fundamentals in a way that let's all the other subjects in and allow for repetition so that the student will develop a real understanding of the subject rather that memorising facts that they can trot out in an examination. In fact, scrap exams and trust the teachers to tell you how good they are and in doing this put the focus back on teaching and not assessment.

Is this what everyone has forgotten about education?

Well...perhaps forgotten is the wrong word. 

You see school and college is not really about education is it? Really they are about contrition and conformity. This is why education, like the NHS and defence, becomes a political football. And this is because we also see education as a method of creating ideal citizens for whatever ideological political system you adher to. 

Education is really there to create little politically correct drones that will only excel in the STEM subjects you will force them to excel in so they can contibute to your economy without asking too many questions. And this is why we don't really educate our children, because if we were to do that they might start thinking for themselves. The right want conformity, the left want contrition. It's all the same thing really. And that is really not to question anything or be truly creative but to adher to a set of values that have their root fundamentally in the unquestioned application of power, and this comes from both sides of the political spectrum. 

This is truly a dangerous situation.......