BF2S Forums Investment

is this group of pompous know-it-alls in the building with us know? they seem to be ghosts with a penchant for haunting you. not many other people see them. i'm not sure where these patrician humanities snobs are at? it's certainly not in the chamber of the house of commons.

well done for finding a meaningless meme picture? every bit as cringe as elon musk. 50-year-old men ffs.

Last edited by uziq (2025-04-07 03:32:39)

michael gove a humanities patrician, lmao hahahah. he's the exact same sociological type as thatcher: a petit-bourgeoisie from the margins of power. he found his place in the tory party being a student politician scot with a thick accent who soon learned to speak RP and adopt the nastiest elements of toryism to fit in. ah, yes, gove, the posh 'born to rule' type nonpareil! the orphan from aberdeen!

do you have the foggiest fucking clue what you're talking about?

Last edited by uziq (2025-04-07 03:43:04)

as i have told you countless times, 99% of graduates of humanities bear little to no resemblance to these types.

the PPE or oxford union climbers are clearly their own side-show, the university reading they do is really immaterial. they go there because they want to get into the game of politics, not because they're earnest scholars of the humanities. you can't tell the difference between boris's 'roman statesman' act and him being supposedly a paragon of the classics, which is just all sorts of funny. nobody with an ounce of sense would be confused about that.

you're trying to portray the disaster of british government as being due to an hereditary caste of posh nobs who read literatoor and act like they're born to rule. then you cite boris johnson, our version of trump and whose government was typified by dom cummings administering 'shock therapy' to whitehall in a play-for-play parallel to musk/DOGE, and ... michael gove? an orphan from scotland who started life as a student labour politician with a thick scottish brogue? yeah, you may have to revise this 'england has been destroyed by patrician toffs' thing. because gove is not it.

half the people who have passed through the oxford 'national politics' mill aren't 'born to rule' though, it's totally non-fucking-sensical.

thatcher was a chemist who grew up above a shop. gove was an orphan who spent his youth as a socialist, for christ's sake. what about these types communicates 'born to rule' in any sense of the phrase? it's like arguing with a person who is senile and confused. this is not a cogent take, dilbert. it is incoherent.

i've always said to diagnose the problem for what it is, which is elite re/production at the top, and thesedays of a peculiarly centrist and neoliberal bent. your average 'born to rule' toff is probably more likely to be a much older strain of Conservative than the 'nice party' types that cameron-osborne ushered in with their rebranding; and is definitely something else from the populist tv celebrity that boris represented, being much more like the trump show than anything else in british political history. you're simply mischaracterising the hereditary elite in britain, and it confuses the issue for no good reason.

the oxford union isn't even part of the university of oxford ffs. clearly the political strivers who are attracted to that game of politics are ones to watch. clearly a lot of very identifiable psychological 'types' and future sociopaths waiting for their time in front of an applauding crowd. worrying, yes. every society has these sites of elite production. what does it have to do with 'oxford humanities', for fuck's sake?

Last edited by uziq (2025-04-07 04:23:41)

because PPE at oxford is 'the' anointed course that gives access to power. it's an insider gig.

PPE is not representative of the humanities. it's not taken seriously by any humanities scholars. it is a side show, a nursery for the political elite.

i don't think the course should exist, don't get me wrong.

but why can't you say the problem is 'old etonians', or 'public school boys', who are undoubtedly overrepresented at the top and with a disastrous track record? why can't you say 'PPE', which produces this toxic brand of politics and 'business as usual' technocracy? that's very relevant. why do you have to say 'oxford humanities'? 99% of scholars in the field didn't go to public school or aspire to run a quango on tufton street.

instead you're invoking this very vague stereotype about 'posh university men' from the 19th century or something, as if it has any bearing on the complexion of the political elite today. it doesn't! there are just as many upstarts as there are landed gentry who studied classics because that's what their grandfather the 17th earl of arrogance studied in 1903.

rishi sunak? priti patel? the current leader of the tory party, kemi? the hell do they have to do with this caricature you're making of posh effete dandies who go around with a boutonnière reading evelyn waugh?

Last edited by uziq (2025-04-07 04:31:37)

i really wish you wouldn't always invoke 'historically' with such a shaky grasp of history as a subject. pretty fucking richly ironic, when you think about it.

what does it even mean, besides? you do realise hardly anyone got BScs and MScs prior to the modern research university, right? no shit MAs from oxon are going to be over-represented in the sample prior to the 1950s. the modern sciences as fields of study and research didn't exist. isaac fucking newton got a BA and MA.

no disagreements that the UK in general is a class-bound place and the same people, over and over again, have run the show. we are not putting forward our best for the top jobs. i don't disagree with that at all. but saying 'the humanities' are to blame is so fucking retarded that it's funny. hereditary privilege is to blame, networks of power are to blame, not what someone dilly-dallied around reading (or not reading) for 3 years when a young man. that's just so asinine.

it always comes down to this autistic fixation you have with undergraduate education, when it has no bearing at all on someone's political career or leadership qualities. reading plant biology doesn't make for a better premiere than reading the history of the crimean war. i don't know how else to spell this out for you. an entitled and indolent elite bred out of centuries of class-based privilege is going to make for bad leaders no matter what 3-letter degree appellation you grant them.

Last edited by uziq (2025-04-07 04:43:22)

your suggested fix is to thrust scientists and engineers into the top jobs, as if they'd de facto do a better job because of their undergraduate qualifications. there are countless examples on the historical record of nations who tried to run government 'scientifically' and failed miserably. the 20th century is a graveyard of such experiments.

my recommended remedy would be to promote better access to politics for people regardless of background. i'm all for wider citizen participation and getting more experience in the room, or via consultative processes. widen democracy with citizen's assemblies. bring in small business and leaders of industry. sounds good! anything to dethrone the insane problems we face with inequality and with a self-perpetuating elite.

i couldn't care any less what degree a politician read for. there is no 'master key' degree that will teach someone how to run a society. most political questions aren't really one of raw intellectual competency. and they certainly don't have some 'solution' that can be figured out if you get enough eggheads together in a room. dominic cummings tried to harness 'big data' and nerd wonks with 'no ideological baggage' to run society and it managed to deliver us the most incoherent and worst-performing covid response in all of europe.

Last edited by uziq (2025-04-07 04:49:08)

https://nypost.com/2025/04/08/opinion/7 … orce-them/

NY Post article about the missing 7 million men who are NEETs.

...

I am embarrassed to have ever been one of those people who are like "everyone needs to work."  >:[

As a worker I think it is great that a lot of men aren't working. That means there are more opportunities for the people who want to remain in the workforce. Not just employment opportunities but also relationship and political opportunities.

I am trying to think of an offensive term for workers who want everyone to work. I can't quite figure this one out.

Huh?

SuperJail Warden wrote:

https://nypost.com/2025/04/08/opinion/7-million-young-men-dont-want-to-work-we-must-force-them/

NY Post article about the missing 7 million men who are NEETs.

...

I am embarrassed to have ever been one of those people who are like "everyone needs to work."  >:[

As a worker I think it is great that a lot of men aren't working. That means there are more opportunities for the people who want to remain in the workforce. Not just employment opportunities but also relationship and political opportunities.

I am trying to think of an offensive term for workers who want everyone to work. I can't quite figure this one out.

there are whole political economies based around the 'ideal' number of people to keep unemployed or underemployed. a reserve army of labour does wonderful things for the labour market. and full employment isn't good news for the boss class generally. workers start to band together and ask for things.

Last edited by uziq (2025-04-10 12:49:31)