I accept her point. Something deeper is wrong if this many children are having behavioural problems in our society.
We’re then told the answer is neoliberalism – because of course it is. Rather than, say, locking every child into a house for a couple of years during their formative period.
But then Spud was in favour of more, harder and deeper, wasn’t he?
The problem is that there’s a low barrier to being spazzy now. It used to be Joey Deacon or Rain Man and now it’s just anyone that wants to spend all Saturday watching all the Star Wars movies
The first thing to say is that the children are not at fault. Nor, I suspect, is it their parents in many cases. The problem is systemic, not individual. The problem comes down to neoliberalism, the alienation it has created within society, and the consequent sense of despair, part of which is transmitted to children and impacts their behaviour.
Not fascism or the Far Right? Or is that on Thursdays?
Let me be a little more specific. The problem that we are facing is that neoliberalism is denying everyone in our society their agency, and younger people, most especially, feel this. They also happen to be parents. They are told they must conform, be consumers, productive agents and compliant. They are repeatedly told what to think, what to do and what to buy.
Rather a ‘live and let live’ attitude from someone who wants to mandate the investment destination of all private capital and who suggests that no further development of cameras is required because everything that can be accomplished has been completed
Then the government is surprised that they cannot show initiative at work or competence as parents, when our economic environment and the education system that it depends upon have tried to remove from them all their capacity to think, to accept responsibility, or to identify appropriate courses of action. That is what the removal of agency, on which neoliberalism relies to fulfil its meaningless goal of ever greater consumption, is dependent upon. At the same time, it produces mind-numbing products to fulfil this goal.
I don’t see any evidence that someone who has barred 25,000 people on Twitter and nearly 4 times that on his blog and who calls any criticism ‘trolling’ is someone who values ‘the capacity to think freely’
What are those mind-numbing products? Start with ultra-processed food, which is intended to, and does, change our physical behaviour, wants and desires in ways that are deeply detrimental to our mental and physical health.
My real worry, as the great BiS says is that this is Murphy’s world – we only live in it. Already they are looking at a ban on social media. This is the worst government in global history. And indeed they are already looking to mess about with school meals.
https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/insight/labour-launches-consultation-on-biggest-school-meal-reforms-in-decade/gm-GM476000B8?gemSnapshotKey=GM476000B8-snapshot-23&ocid=msedgdhp
How long until that is extended to the private home?
Move on from there to endless electronic entertainment. It started with multiple television channels, all filled with utter drivel most of the time, and went on to social media, most of which is designed to promote false representations of life as it is really lived, a sense of despair with a person’s own situation, and a sense of alienation from the world around us.
Ditto for this government. The Online Safety Act is an unmitigated disaster and they seem to be looking to shut down vast swathes of the internet under spurious safety grounds.
Then move to our physical environment. We are meant to live and be outside. That is what we were adapted to, and we have not lived long enough as a race to remove this requirement for our physical well-being. And yet work, entertainment, travel and almost every other aspect of life force us to be inside, to live under artificial light, to be immobile, and to be alienated from the world outside. When we do go outside, we are terrified of the sun and the cold, and yet we need natural light and both heat and cold to regulate our bodies. We are denied both. The cocoon that has been created is a recipe for physical and mental disaster, and we are seeing the consequences.
Apparently housing is ‘neoliberal’? When is he moving into a tent then? This ‘cod philosophy’ appears to have been drawn up by Chat GPT in about 5 minutes.
Overall it’s the usual drivel about a ‘Politcs of Care’ – I think it might have been Bongo who said that at his Cambridge event he revealed he earns £2 to £3 an hour – I think he’s overpaid.
neoliberalism is focussed on providing everyone with agency.
It is the Socialists (especially the Greens) who want everyone to conform and tells them what to think.
Private sector education does not try to remove the ability to think – in fact it encourages it.
I was waiting for him to tell us “we have always been at war with EastAsia” but instead I learned that Murphy is terrified of sunlight (and his words suggest that he thinks we are covered with fur like chimpanzees).
I’ve probably said this before but a mate of mine sends his son to a grammar school near us – state but by its nature very selective.
The kid is currently in his final year of A levels and 75% of the boys in his class are on some sort of disability.
In his case it’s for ADHD or something similar, diagnosed by a test.
He and many of his friends gamed the system because, being bright, they know how to answer the questions in such a way as to fake the relevant ‘disability’.
As a result some of the brightest boys in the county are getting (something like) an extra hour per exam paper.
My mate and his wife both agree that it’s mad but took the view that if they didn’t apply they were putting their son at a disadvantage.
It’s all extremely pernicious, and full of twisted incentives in every direction.
But beyond that, yes, all the things the left love led us here – broken families, parents on the dole, drugs dished out like sweeties, the worship and elevation of disability and other weaknesses, the lockdowns (and perhaps the jabs kids get routinely), the inability on pain of law for parents to properly discipline their children, the forty or fifty year campaign by fucking teachers themselves not to be allowed to discipline them etc etc
At which point it becomes a useless test. The test is do X in 3 hours. We don’t let Stevie Wonder onto the roads with a driver’s test for blind people.
So employers will just create a new test.
Unfortunately, employers don’t have the time to sift through every single kid who takes A levels – the A level grades save them quite a lot of time.
I’m currently filtering job applicants. About a third of them are Indian, so I reject them out of hand. That whittles the numbers down quite a bit, and saves me a lot of time.
As Enocĥ sàid…
…
“the A level grades save them quite a lot of time”
How, when 90% of them have A** ?
Which is cheaper? Doing a test or hiring someone defective?
We test people with degrees in computer science because we just don’t entirely trust them.
The kids who were “maturing” during lockdown learnt that people didn’t need to work and the state would provide. Since then they have learnt that Work From Home is the gift that keeps giving.
MMT and other equally loony philosophies tell them that there is no need to to work and produce to get ahead. The state can just print the money for them to have everything, right now. The fact that it’s not doing must be down to the neoliberal conspiracy that means that the rich 1% get everything.
Do they believe it? Unfortunately looking at comments in some other places too many do.
“The fact that it’s not doing must be down to the neoliberal conspiracy that means that the rich 1% get everything.”
That’s the key.
The Left, as well as realising that ending ‘relative poverty’ was a never ending excuse for any bat-shit crazy socialist policy they cared to introduce also realised that the ready made excuse for the inevitable failure of all these bat-shit crazy socialist policies was that capitalism was to blame.
Lol, taking the kids out of state schools may have been the best thing that could have happened to them. Hey, teacher, leave them kids alone.
They still went to school online. So if you’re against indoctrination or whatever then that was continuing anyway. Though kids on average do seem to have learned less online. The problem Tim is pointing out is that even though they were off school it wasn’t like a holiday where they could socialise with friends, at least in the flesh rather than virtually. They were just cooped up at home. Not good for development.
“Spare the rod, spoil the child”….
Better to learn that Life™ has its limits in what it tolerates when they’re young, while simultaneously using the Carrot, than letting Real Life™ do it.
Real Life™ is…. a tad less forgiving…
Murray Rothbard predicted this over 50 years ago, with the example of the Interstate Trade Commission.
Regulatory capture by the regulated.
Now it’s big pharma that has captured the regulator and so are permitted to supply all sorts of junk meds.
Where once one might be a bit grumpy because one’s favourite team lost a match now it’s a diagnosis of clinical depression.
And once on the happy pills it’s impossible to get off. Ask Steve.
It’s not impossible if you start soon enough – it may be once you’re really hooked.
While I was at school someone advised to take codeine to cope with a much-worse-than-usual cold, so (not yet knowing what it was) I did. I found myself continuing to want to take codeine after the cold disappeared and, a bit later, looked it up and found it was related to morphine: so I stopped. Took a bit of willpower …
Next time I had a cold I chose not to take codeine.
codeine is pernicious and many in the first half of the last century were addicted to it. My dad was prescribed it as a teenager for tummy upset and was addicted all of his life. My friend has ankylosing spondylitis (inhered from his father) and they both take for granted that you get a little “happy” with the co-codamols (the co is codeine). They have to take the painkillers all the time so there’s never an occasion to be without, but they are both undoubtedly addicted. It soothes pain and make you happy and is indeed addictive.
For myself, I have tried on occasions to abuse that stuff recreationally (it was always available at home) but it only seems to make me uptight and have a headache and be constipated, so neither a ‘happy’ nor a painkiller but damn effective at suppressing peristalsis, I never even managed to get a good ‘nod’ from it , it’s said to give you an opium-like reverie which is known a ‘a nod’ or ‘nodding’ – its known to some as ‘the medicine’ and afficionados as ‘medicine heads’ – oh well, never mind.
…or telling them that the world will end in a few years.
They’re constantly going on about how miserable their lives are and that they’ve no future, so you’d think being told the world was going to end would cheer them up.
But Tim, shirley you believe what you were told by the great and the good during covid; that lock downs, social distancing, masks, tiers, ‘vaccines’, the rules of 2,4,6,8 who do we appreciate, were the most efficient answer to the problem of covid? It appears not.
Now if only you applied that level of critical thinking to global warming and binned Stern and Nordhaus you might be on to something…………
Something deeper is wrong if this many children are having behavioural problems in our society.
“Therefore, we need communism.”
Adults produce diagnosis of behavioral problems. The change is not in children.
Exactly what I’ve been saying. Locking kids up for 2 years and scaring them half to death won’t cause any issues will it. Also at the same time start teaching them a pile of nonsense about gender. My niece was a fine little girl, went through all that, hit her teens and all of a sudden was self-harming, self-piercing, trying suicide a coupe of times, writing all sorts in her journal, thinking she’s a homosexual or a boy (she was 11 when all this stated FFS! and what a coincidence it all started when they started teaching this crap to her), then gets ‘diagnosed’ as autistic…oh of COURSE she is!!! Her bloody mother was a highly trained teaching assistant in a school for autistic kids and yet she didn’t know her own daughter wasn’t?…Because she ISN’T, she’s just been scared out of her mind and been programmed with poison by the state. Absolutely make my piss boil.