Hang on Meddle, I know Stu and he is none of those things.

Intellectual dishonesty (at best) is a bit of a theme with our Mr G. Goes off on an academic jolly and then is contemptuous of further education. I could go on.

It’s real and unpleasant. But asking folks not to stir up further hatred and resentment in an already precarious situation is not being an ostrich.

There are parallels with the 1930’s, but also glaring differences. Churchill did not propose the demonisation of a British minority in response to the rise of Fascism.

I’ve no arguments with the facts, Stu 🙂

JB, a nation and an individual are two different things. The thing is, they do not necessarily have mutual interests. When it comes to self-determination they are often at odds – have you not noticed that the nations that go around being as self-determining as they can and determined to remain outsiders can have the least individually free, most repressed peoples? Or that true entrepreneurial self-starting (etc etc) pulled together types exist in abundance in countries that happily work with other countries? In other words there is at least no correlation, and possibly even a slight negative one. I am sure both R’s were smart enough to notice that, and I certainly wouldn’t think individual self-reliance would influence international political thought.. it would take an almost psychopathic level of egoistic self-obsession to transpose the personal to the national in this way. Churchill did not, after all,

The trouble is, those that stomp about bollocking on about the right to bear arms and smaller government rarely make this connection, and think their country must be as stubbornly backwards and antisocial as they are to be ‘free’, as I guess they presume they must be.

I agree. Religion and the law are separate, and must remain so, otherwise you get some bloke deciding that some obscure text of dubious origin, when interpreted by his own superior intellect and aided by his direct line to Jesus/Mohammed/Obi Wan Kenobi, actually means that all pants must be worn inside out and the wife is wrong about the best way to Tescos, and I deserve a bigger house and death to the infidel who doubts it. When these priests / imams / Jedi become the ‘law givers’ any society is in trouble, surely?

Related to this – the reliance on a holy book and the ‘word of… (insert deity here)’ to make decisions rather than applying ones own morality, ethics and rational thought is surely the very abrogation of responsibility for actions that has been decried often on this forum. It’s just that ‘Society made me do it’ has replaced ‘God made me do it’ in our secular society. Others are still at the ‘God made me do it’ stage.

As for the Luton story itself.. yup, nothing to say. It certainly didn’t make me think ‘Oh no, equal rights are a BAD thing, John was right all along’. When you think about it, why would it?

John G – are you saying that the evidence is a child has to be raised masculine to become an academic genius? Or indeed that there is no evidence to the contrary?

Is it not more likely that plenty of natural geniuses have ended up in ‘gender roles’ – (Google ‘Goldie Hawn IQ’) – while a few have managed to steer their way through to academic recognition (Rosalind Franklin, though she missed out on the Nobel Prize). Not that Goldie Hawn hasn’t been quite smart in her career anyway! I would argue it is less to do with their own interests and more to do with perception of their abilities and expected roles. My girls might be into ‘My Little Pony’ and Disney’s Frozen now, but I don’t think this precludes them from being academically successful, in itself.

In fact, girls are outperforming boys at UK schools. Which makes the ‘Sexist Einstein shirt gaffe’ kind of ironic.