Before I set about some other duties, I pause to browse the blogs and bitch about them (affectionately of course).
On the subject of lazy blogging, if Guido is going to complain about substandard satire on the TV, he needs to get some of his own material or at the very least put me on his blogroll before he shamelessly recycles my finds in his posts.
Chris shouldn’t let his obsession with managers blind him to the truth about democracy. In dismissing the New Conservatives’ child poverty “policy”, he writes:
“That there are trade-offs and choices in policy is a fact the managerialists are desperate to avoid.”
No. It’s a fact that voters are desperate to avoid. Plenty of us can’t even face that there are trade-offs and choices in to be made in our own lives, never mind in government policy—a shortcoming that, for example, Ocean Finance is only to happy to exploit. [You can google them for yourself; I’m certainly not linking to the bastards.]
Grammar Puss has done two profoundly unwise things:
- given her blog a background that will trigger epileptic episodes in many of her readers and
- admitted to using the work of The Wedding Present as a tool of seduction
You seduce someone with Ella Fitzgerald singing Cole Porter. Applying the Wedding Present (who must be in the top ten of Bands Epitomizing Everything That’s Wrong with Indie Rock) to the erogenous parts of someone’s ears is like massaging sump oil into their bits.
Ella Fitzgerald would be my preference also, but unfortunately the Wedding Present were more effective on the man in question. Just one of the many, many reasons why he was not worth the effort.
Glad the background has grown on you since yesterday.
The first WP album was okay, but the rest decidely weren’t. Who are the rest of the top ten?
Ncked it from you? Pretty sure I got the picture link from an anonymous comment on my blog.
Could be wrong. If so apologies. Try to be scrupulous about that kind of thing. Might blogroll you just for the cheek.
A-ha! Receiving stolen goods. That’s alright then 😉
I’m not obsessed with managers. I just think we should scrutinize the ideological ruses that underpin hierarchies and power. I post considerably less about managerialism than many bloggers (pro and anti) do about Iraq: why not call them “Iraq obsessives?” And I’d post even less about it if others did the job for me. But since the left lost all desire to analyze economics sensibly at least 20 years ago, I’m on my own.
Still, you make make a good point.
Notoriously I despise and oppose all ideologies—in the sense of “visionary speculation[s], [political or economic] system[s] of thought”—Chambers. Blair’s regime has persisted in part because of its leader’s adaptability, his admitted lack of interest in ideology.
The persistence of power structures and hierarchies also has almost nothing to do with ideology. In the same way that the human tendency to trade has nothing to do with ideology—despite ideologues of the Left and Right willing it otherwise. After the fighting stops and the harvest is in, building hierarchies and making markets are what people do.
It is true that, as you say, people attempt to underpin hierarchies and power with “ideological ruses”, but these tricks are unnecessary. Human hatred of the other, desire for status, and laziness will do the maintenance work effectively. It’s just that (Labour) governments are full of humanities graduates and management consultants, many of whom need idea fairies to believe in.
Blair’s claim not to be interested in ideology is itself ideological – it’s the ideology of the technocrat, the guy who thinks that “what matters is what works”, as if effectiveness were morally unambiguous and practically straightforward. This should be noted, as should the non-existence of idea fairies.
And is it really true that a desire for hierarchy is natural – I don’t feel such a desire? And if it is, should we accept it or fight against it, as we fight against “natural” facts like disease? And even if hierarchy is inevitable, what determines who’s at the top? Often, it’s ideology – in today’s Britain, the ideology of managerialism. It’s not as if some people are natural slaves, is it?