Arday: hard not to laugh

There's a light mood in Schloss Drew this weekend.  The Jason Arday affair is possibly even funnier than Keir Starmer 'resigning' when his legacy is as golden as he and his loyal backbenchers loudly proclaimed.  

As the story rumbled inexorably towards the front pages, progressives reflexively dropped everything and rushed headlong towards the sound of gunfire.  On arriving at the battlefield they immediately hurled themselves into digging mighty entrenchments - nay, positive tank-traps - as a prelude to what they fondly imagined would be a swift and decisive counter-attack.  Unfortunately, the deeper and more frenziedly they dug, the more they became buried in the shit from their own shovels.  Far from any prospect of burying a handful of inconvenient little fabrications, they must now confront the uncontainable, volcanic eruption that is their man's stupendous output of truly creative confabulation.  We are plainly dealing with a decade's worth of deceit from (to switch idioms) an ocean-going liar.  I look forward to receiving a letter from Carter-Fuck on the subject.

Some years ago I sat on the jury of a lengthy Old Bailey murder trial.  One of the sadder aspects was that alongside the two murderers in the dock was the mother of one of the perps, who had fabricated an elaborate but laughably transparent alibi for her son that was contradicted by his own defence case.  Inevitably, she was banged up for attempting to pervert the course of justice.  In mitigation, her Counsel could only offer the excuse that nobody had ever believed her in the first place.  In the ranks of the more reflective and self-critical progressives there's a growing suspicion that we are in similar territory with Arday: did any grown adult** who'd been exposed to more than a couple of lines of his fantastically fabricated life story ever believe a word he said?

Which then leads the sadder-and-hopefully-wiser wokists to wonder - what kind of perverse, inverse racism they have themselves been guilty of?  Patronising, or what?

It all adds to the gaiety of the nation.  Enjoy your weekend!

ND

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** That said, it is Cambridge academics we are talking about

Goings-on in the BP boardroom: WTF?

BP is a genuine puzzle.  How can an enormous company of considerable long standing with some seriously impressive attributes, be so maladroit in its senior appointments?  With the summary eviction of Mr Manifold[1], BP will have had 3 chairs and 5 CEOs since 2020, and a heap of embarrassment.  This is a crazy level of volatility at the top.

It's not a company I have definitive views on; but inevitably I have had loads of dealings with them over my decades in the industry.  (They offered me a job once: but I didn't want to move to Japan.)  Here are some observations.

• Although superficially they might all look pretty similar, big multinational oil companies aren't remotely all operating under the same business model.  We can map out a spectrum.  At one end we have Exxon - fundamentally centred on building and managing physical assets; i.e. engineer-driven, and deeply suspicious of finance & trading activity, which it minimises very purposefully.  At the other end,  BP  - plenty of capable engineers and physical assets, but also exceptionally capable and commercially active traders and finance types.  At these two extremes on the spectrum, the respective P&L and balance sheets aren't very similar.[2]  
• BP has shown itself somewhat prone to accommodating the woke agenda.  The 'Beyond Petroleum' rebrand dates as far back as 2000, under the proto-scandalous John Browne[3], so that until recently the eco-'green' stuff was fairly prominent in the business, almost as much as the traditional 'green stuff'.  They have also made several 'questionable' appointments of females at very exalted levels, IMHO for the sole purpose of having wimmin in senior jobs because at least a couple of them are self-evidently not up to the job.
• More generally, they seem to hire outsiders for top jobs far more than is usual in the industry.  Really confident big companies of long standing place far more trust in promotion from the ranks of their long-term employees - rightly or wrongly. [4]
• However, the boardroom nonsense of all kinds clearly hasn't been at the expense of their trading prowess.  And overall, I have a fair degree of respect for the senior working-level management of the company across the board, who mostly seem to get on with business in an intelligent and competent way.

All that doesn't lead me to any firm conclusions about BP's future.  But the company has been such a major part of the UK business scene for so long, I have to believe many C@W readers will have well-informed perspectives on the company.  So - the floor is yours.

ND

UPDATE:  Someone pointed out to me that I couldn't possibly have been referring to Meg O'Neill, and they were right.  I wasn't.  She's good.

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[1]  Cue the obvious jokes about Manifold sins and wickedness ...

[2]  Shell, incidentally, is pretty much bang in the middle

[3]  Scandal notwithstanding, Browne was a serious oil man.  He called the market correctly in 1997, judging $10 to be the bottom (when the Economist was suggesting $6 was coming) and bought Amoco. 

Arco and BurmahCastrol at the absolute bottom of the market, doubling the size of BP.  That's impressively good business judgment - speculative, but based on solid knowledge, experience and instinct, rather than a bought-in price forecast from some 'econometrics' outfit. 

[4]  The pros and cons of this can of course be argued at length: maybe for another post.

Taxing English? - or taxing its beneficiaries!

Revanchism is generally understood in 20th century Leninist or Maoist terms: the capitalist / imperialist classes lashing out against their progressive tormentors.  But it might equally be applied to the thought-processes of those of the woke persuasion who see reparations as the appropriate form of justice against, well, anything they don't like.  This generally means lining up western white folks and seeking to empty their pockets on some spurious pretext or other.

Here's a really hilarious one that shows just how deep this nonsense runs: a writer in the Graun (where else?) who reckons that those brought up speaking English as their mother tongue enjoy unfair advantages in the world, which he is pleased to call "linguistic injustice".  He reports favourably on: 

"compensatory measures [to] help reduce global linguistic injustice. Philippe Van Parijs, of the University of Louvain, has, somewhat provocatively, proposed a linguistic tax on English-speaking countries to compensate for the costs of teaching English in other countries. This would involve establishing a global tax on countries where the majority of the population speaks English as a native language and distributing the revenue to countries where English is taught in schools as a foreign language"

Etc etc with further anti-English measures he likes the sound of.  He doesn't make it clear whether India and any African countries would fall into his net (Nigeria comes to mind, and SA of course) - in fact he doesn't mention India at all.  These omissions are rather cowardly, I feel.

It seems we shall have to put up with this increasingly insolent stuff forever.   It rather overlooks the bountiful innovations issuing forth from these islands and its colonies and former colonies over several centuries, a list too long to insert here - enjoyed today by most of the rest of the world in some degree or other.  The great Lee Kwan Yew used to speak in very much those tones, I recall.  We should therefore respond with a "gratitude tax" on all those billions who benefit from English and its associated cultural boons (e.g. trade under Common Law jurisdiction, to name but one): we could call it the Lee Levy in his honour.

ND

Rolling euphemisms, wokery, & the glories of the English language

Keeping up with whatever is the approved euphemism has always been a great lark.  We read that "obesity" now needs to be replaced - and not with "too fat", either.  The Beeb hasn't caught up with this one yet - you do really need to be on your toes.  Fortunately, the English language is replete with a wide range of colourful alternatives.

It was ever thus: whole histories could be written on the rolling evolution of the approved terms for, e.g. death, various disabilities, and descriptions of ethnicity.  Up to a point, this is to do with kindness: when a particular conventional usage becomes a term of abuse or mockery, it's time to coin something new.  Which is fair enough, albeit we sometimes get empty phrases like "learning difficulties" which covers so broad a spectrum of phenomena as to be rendered meaningless.  I have learning difficulties when I keep being interrupted, but I doubt I qualify for charitable largesse.

There's a nastier dynamic at work, though.  When anything is being politicised by the identitarian left, terminology becomes paramount, the left being beset by over-intellectualisation, theorising - and faddery, one-upmanship and ideological purity.  And nothing is more enjoyable than witch-hunting.  So nothing is neater than to keep changing the rules by making some term in common usage a shibboleth: utter it, or say it wrong - and you're damned.  Hurrah! - another heretic exposed and harried to the point of despair!

And this need to "be on your toes" ensures that only the elite of lefties at radical academic institutions can ever be up to date in these matters.  Everyone else is guaranteed to be behind the curve, beyond the pale, and in need of re-education and groveling self-flagellation, at the very least.  But maybe total cancelation and ruination.  Oh, the horrors of feeling oneself in thrall to such vicious little shits - who increasingly call the shot, not only in colleges, but in HR departments across the English-speaking world, depressing though it is to acknowledge.

If there is hope, it lies with the proles, as Orwell famously wrote.  They'll have some ideas on the subject of obesity, and one or two other things besides.  Who ate all the pies, eh?

ND

How the Woke Thing Cripples the Left

Some enlightening weekend reading.  We non-lefties are most just annoyed by the woke nonsense, but for the 'honest, traditional' egalitarian Left, it's crippling.  Some extracts here from a great essay that deserves to be read in full (my emphasis, towards the end): 

Here’s a fun tip for you all: if you have the power to get someone fired or otherwise ruin their life you are not a powerless, marginalized Other … a bizarre liberal discursive culture where, if you dress up what you’re doing in vague language about oppression, you can operate however you’d like without rebuke and attempt to ruin the life of whoever you please … 

The left-of-center is in a profoundly strange and deeply unhealthy place. In the span of a decade or less a bizarre form of linguistically-radical but substantively-conservative identity neoliberalism descended from decaying humanities departments in elite universities and infected social media ... through which it conquered the media and entertainment industries, the nonprofit industrial complex, and government entities as wide-ranging as the U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights and the brass of the Pentagon. That movement now effectively controls the idea-and-story generating power of our society, outside of explicitly conservative media which exists in a large silo but a silo all the same. On any given day the most powerful institutions in the world go to great lengths to mollify the social justice movement, to demonstrate fealty, to avoid its wrath. It’s common now for liberals to deny the influence and power of social justice politics, for inscrutable reasons, but if the current level of control over how people talk publicly is insufficient, I can’t imagine what would placate them… 

because the social justice movement’s first dictate is to establish a hierarchy of suffering, and to tell those that are purported to suffer less that their problems aren’t problems, no such mass movement is coming. The social justice movement is not just incidentally antagonistic to organizing everyone and recognizing all kinds of people as worthy of our compassion and support. That antagonism is existential. When you ask many people within the movement, “what could we do to convert the white working class to our values?,” they will simply tell you that they don’t want to convert them, that they are not worthy of being a part of their movement. They would rather have targets than converts, to lose as an exclusive moral caste than win as a grubby populist coalition. 

Core to understanding this moment is to realize that the vast majority of people who enforce these politics don’t actually believe in them. They don’t, that is, think that social justice politics as currently composed are healthy or just or likely to result in tangible positive change. There’s a core of true-believers who do, and there’s a group of those who profit directly from the hegemony of social justice politics in elite spaces… There’s conservative critics, who are both the most natural targets of social justice ire and yet those the social justice movement seem least interested in targeting. There’s an island of misfit toys of left and leftish critics of social justice politics like me. 

And then there’s the great big mass of people who are just scared … Why wade in those waters when the potential consequences are so severe, and when the upside is so limited? … no one feels empowered to speak truth to bullshit.

ND

Nietzsche on Woke Identity Politics

We've had cause to mention Nietzsche over the weekend.  He is not to everyone's taste:  content-wise; stylistically; difficulty (or all three).  Nevertherless his insight into humanity is the most consistently penetrating I know, along with other tremendous contributions to philosophy, psychology and even wider still.  

And nothing changes.  This is from his famous Also Sprach Zarathustra (1884) - widely viewed as the most poetic expression of his thought, and extraordinarily influential in 20th century European literature, but (frankly) no easier read than his more conventional expositions.  Nevertheless, some passages need no contextual explanation for their force and astuteness to jump out at us.  His coinage for the woke warriors and 'intersectionalists' of his time is the tarantulas.  He wouldn't have been surprised by Edinburgh University's treatment of David Hume ...

   

"That the world may become full of the storms of our revenge, let precisely that be what we call justice"  -  thus the tarantulas speak to each other.   "We will wreak vengeance and abuse on all those who are not as we are"  -  thus the tarantula-hearts promise themselves.   "And 'will to equality'  -  that shall henceforth be the name of virtue; and we shall raise outcry against everything that currently has power!" 

You preachers of equality  -  from you the tyrannical madness of impotence cries out for "equality":  thus your secret desire to be tyrants disguises itself in words of virtue.

 

Nothing changes.

ND

 

BBC: the Bad and the Very, Very Good

This isn't a wokewatch blog, there isn't time in the day;   though sometimes we can't contain ourselves.  The importance of free speech and truth-telling is central to the type of liberal capitalism we espouse.

And the Beeb is so very often at fault: so when it lives gloriously up to its Charter the trumpets should be sounded.  But before that, a reminder of its venality.  They are re-running David Olusoga's A House Through Time, and I must have missed the relevant episode of the Liverpool House, or I'd have mentioned it then.  Olusoga is of course a revisionist historian with an impressively "rational" demeanour - oh, he knows so many facts - and needless to say the Bristol House was that of a slave-trader etc etc ad nauseam.  The Liverpool example was near the docks, and in the episode that covers WW2 he delivers the following line.  Thanks to the untiring efforts of the two heroic dock workers he's lauding,

"the Port of Liverpool remained operational throughout the War, ensuring that Britain was fed, equipped and armed"

Except, of course, when it wasn't.  The Liverpool dockers have always been notorious for their propensity for striking, and WW2 was no exception.  As well as a load of small strikes in the period before Hitler invaded Russia (i.e. when Russia was Hitler's ally and the Communist Party opposed the war), there was what even trade unionists accept was a "major" dock strike in Liverpool in 1943; and a big seaman's strike there in 1942.  Londoners of my father's generation would bitterly recall the Liverpool dockers being out at the height of the Blitz.  Time to revise the revisionist account, then.

BUT  (*fanfare*)  the Beeb has redeemed itself, and all is not lost.  For they have seen fit to publish a no-holds-barred account of how the Atlantic slave trade had its origins in a pre-existing, and utterly unrepentent native African slave trade.  We all knew this, but I wasn't expecting to see it aired quite so fully as it is here. 

'My Nigerian great-grandfather sold slaves' - Nigerian journalist and novelist Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani writes that one of her ancestors sold slaves, but argues that he should not be judged by today's standards or values.  

My great-grandfather, Nwaubani Ogogo Oriaku, was what I prefer to call a businessman, from the Igbo ethnic group of south-eastern Nigeria. He dealt in a number of goods, including tobacco and palm produce. He also sold human beings. "He had agents who captured slaves from different places and brought them to him," my father told me...

It further contains some highly relevant cultural commentary by this bravely outspoken lady.

The successful sale of adults was considered an exploit for which a man was hailed by praise singers, akin to exploits in wrestling, war, or in hunting animals like the lion. Slavery was so ingrained in the culture that a number of popular Igbo proverbs make reference to it: [e.g.] Anyone who has no slave is his own slave ... The concept of "all men are created equal" was completely alien to traditional religion and law in his society. It would be unfair to judge a 19th Century man by 21st Century principles.  Assessing the people of Africa's past by today's standards would compel us to cast the majority of our heroes as villains  [my emphasis].

Can this article survive for long in the Beeb's website before being taken down?  I've recommended elsewhere that we all cache it as a gem of accurate, thorough historical reporting and intelligent commentary.  It deserves to go viral - and if it did, the resultant woke-wailing would be wondrous to behold.

ND

Wealth taxes on Agenda in the US

"Young, mega-rich - and demanding to pay more "
This is an interesting article on the BBC. It comes as no surprise that some of the woke community who have inherited a huge amount of money or made themselves fabulously rich have come out to try and push the idea of wealth tax on the US elections.

Of course, this is always the thin end of the wedge. The wealthiest can easily pay such taxes levelled at 1% and indeed their investments return much better than this on average so it has no impact.

But in terms of virtue signaling it pays them really well - they get huge points across the world for showing their moral conscience. What amazing people!

Of course this is the worst way to promote a tax, maybe the second worst. But it does strike me as being at least on the side of truth. As there is no good case in Western democracies to have a wealth tax. Wealth taxes are levied on assets that have already paid their dues, it is double taxation, akin to inheritance tax. Like the equally terrible Land Value Tax, it places the State as the ultimate owner of all goods and all citizens as rentiers. We literally spent hundreds of years getting us to the position we are in now, which also managed to create capitalism and lift more people out of poverty than ever before in human history. The side effect of this is a bunch of rich people, could be worse. 

Practically of course, when recently tried in France they have ended up with a scandal to dwarf our own expenses scandal, with 60 politicians now being prosecuted for tax evasion. After all, a wealth tax is reliant on valuation of assets and these can be gifted, pledged, drawn against - all sorts of things to hide the true position.

The reason I say they make the case well is a wealth tax only works as a moral crusade, a peaen against the unfairness of society and a call to make rich people feel guilty and change their ways. Except of course, they could always give more money to the Government themselves, no one is stopping them.

PS I fixed my browser spellchecker at long last...

PPS Still needed spellchecking, this is slowly creeping up my to do list....