When I heard a top acadmic had insulted half the country I was a little surprised, then I thought 'wait...34% voting Tory and 14% UKIP, half sounds about right after all', but no: it turned out that Professor Hunt's crime was to blaspheme the Sacred Femme.
Which is obviously way worse.
The Conservative Woman says what needs to be said, and what's more they get the point about what it reveals about the hollowness of the Tory Party, but there's a flipside to this. Consider what it says about British science.
In so far as not a single member of the 'scientific community' felt that the public lynching of a bona fide expert in his field might be going a little too far - and even now his defenders aren't quibbling with the lynching in principle, just claiming that he didn't exactly say what people think he said - these people should probably stop claiming to support diversity.
Ditto, they should also stop pretending to be mystified why conservatives don't trust them. Not only is there the obvious point of just how warm we in the 48% are supposed to feel about folks operating a de facto 'no conservatives need apply' policy, but there's what it reveals about the reliability of their results. These guys claim to be disinterested seekers after truth, but how does that mesh with recruitment policies that leave half the country on the curb? Are they really claiming that there are conservative pilots, conservative engineers and conservative programmers, but when it comes to the science, there's not a single competent conservative scientist in the whole country? Millions of conservatives in the country but apparently they can't find one who's good enough to join their little club. Right there, before they've even done a stroke of work, they've shown they're prepared to skew their results to fit a political agenda ('no rightists') but we're meant to trust them when they say if we don't surrender to the UN, the Earth will be a ball of fire?
Which is obviously way worse.
The Conservative Woman says what needs to be said, and what's more they get the point about what it reveals about the hollowness of the Tory Party, but there's a flipside to this. Consider what it says about British science.
In so far as not a single member of the 'scientific community' felt that the public lynching of a bona fide expert in his field might be going a little too far - and even now his defenders aren't quibbling with the lynching in principle, just claiming that he didn't exactly say what people think he said - these people should probably stop claiming to support diversity.
Ditto, they should also stop pretending to be mystified why conservatives don't trust them. Not only is there the obvious point of just how warm we in the 48% are supposed to feel about folks operating a de facto 'no conservatives need apply' policy, but there's what it reveals about the reliability of their results. These guys claim to be disinterested seekers after truth, but how does that mesh with recruitment policies that leave half the country on the curb? Are they really claiming that there are conservative pilots, conservative engineers and conservative programmers, but when it comes to the science, there's not a single competent conservative scientist in the whole country? Millions of conservatives in the country but apparently they can't find one who's good enough to join their little club. Right there, before they've even done a stroke of work, they've shown they're prepared to skew their results to fit a political agenda ('no rightists') but we're meant to trust them when they say if we don't surrender to the UN, the Earth will be a ball of fire?
2 comments:
Sorry to be a pedant, but the combined Tory and UKIP share was 49.5%. With the Ulster Unionist parties the nominally conservative share was over 50%.
Good post btw.
Actually quite a few scientists came out in his support - Dawkins among others. To my surprise, BBC Radio's The Now Show (public school lefty comedy) devoted a sketch the other day to attacking the witch-hunters.
(now the elections are over they've dropped the previously compulsory UKIP/Farage attack sketch - maybe they're short of material)
Laban
Post a Comment