A new country, and the same old psychopathic war mongers, the same old compliant Christian soldiers, and the same old moronic media cheerleaders.
Tag: politics
Turing the Other Cheek
The Bank of England has announced that Alan Turing will feature on England’s new £50 note. That’s nice. It just about makes up for having hounded him to death.
It’s not the Heat, it’s the Stupidity
Australian is going to the polls today, with that smirking, right wing clown attempting to be elected Prime Minister. And of course we’ll all be cheering for him to beat Scott Morrison.
The fact that the ignorant, science denying, happy clapping, coal-hugging thug pictured above even has a shot at winning indicates the appalling low level of political discourse. We shouldn’t be surprised, of course, but for some reason we are.
Back in 2014, the Maths Masters wrote a column on then Prime Minster Tony Abbott’s climate denialism, entitled How to be Liberal with the Truth. Our editor rejected the column as a “diatribe”, which was fair enough, and we took the rejection in our stride. Nonetheless, our editor passed the diatribe to the Age‘s op-ed desk which published the column as Tony Abbott is a liar: It’s a mathematical truth. Our diatribe was a hit.
The diatribe ended with a prediction:
But what of Tony? Will he be remembered as a liar? Probably, but probably he’ll be remembered for much more. Eventually, and more likely sooner rather than later, global warming will be undeniable. Truly undeniable.Which means Abbott should go down in history as the Australian Prime Minister, the last Australian Prime Minister, to deny physical reality.
We were wrong then. But, maybe now Australia will finally be done with anti-science idiots.
Update
Geez, Australians are dumb. And Queenslanders are dumber.
It’s Time to ATAR and Feather the Labor Party
Tanya Plibersek, Australian Labor’s Shadow Minister for Education, has just been reaching out to the media. Plibersek has objected to the low ATAR sufficient for school leavers to gain entry to a teaching degree, and she has threatened that if universities don’t raise the entry standards then Labor may impose a cap on student numbers:
We [should] choose our teaching students from amongst the top 30 per cent …
This raises the obvious question: why the top 30 per cent of students? Why not the top 10 per cent? Or the top 1 per cent? If you’re going to dream an impossible dream, you may as well make it a really good one.
Plibersek is angry at the universities, claiming they are over-enrolling and dumbing down their teaching degrees, and of course she is correct. Universities don’t give a damn whether their students learn anything or whether the students have any hope of getting a job at the end, because for decades the Australian government has paid universities to not give a damn. The universities would enrol carrots if they could figure out a way for the carrots to fill in the paperwork.
The corruption of university teaching enrolment, however, has almost nothing to do with the poor quality of school teachers and school teaching. The true culprits are the neoliberal thugs and the left wing loons who, over decades, have destroyed the very notion of education and thus have reduced teaching to a meaningless, hateful and hated profession, so that with rare exceptions the only people who become teachers are those with either little choice or little sense or a masochistically high devotion to civic duty.
If Plibersek wants “teaching to be as well-respected as medicine” then perhaps Labor could stick their neck out and fight for a decent increase in teachers’ wages. Labor could fight for the proper academic control of educational disciplines so that there might be a coherent and deep Australian curriculum for teachers to teach. Labor could fight against teachers’ Sisyphean reporting requirements and against the swamping over-administration of public schools. Labor could promise to stop, entirely, the insane funding of poisonously wealthy private schools. Labor could admit that for decades they have been led by soulless beancounters and clueless education hacks, so as much as anyone they have lost sight of what education is and how a government can demand it.
But no. Plibersek and Labor choose an easy battle, and a stupid, pointless battle.
None of this is to imply that Labor’s opponents are better. Nothing could be worse for education, or anything, than the sadistic, truth-killing Liberal-National psychopaths currently in power.
But we expect better from Labor. Well, no we don’t. But once upon a time we did.
Update (27/02/19)
Tanya Plibersek has announced a new Labor policy, to offer $40,000 grants for “the best and the brightest” to do teaching degrees, and to go on to teach in public schools. Of course Plibersek’s suggestion that this will attract school duxes and university medal winners into teaching is pure fantasy, but it’s a nanostep in the right direction.
A Quick Word on Matthew Guy and Safe Injecting Rooms
The Victorian Election is in a few days, and the conservative Liberal leader Matthew Guy has just promised to shut down Richmond’s safe injecting room within a week of being elected. Guy claims that it is “intolerable to have the facility next to a primary school“.
The school in question is Richmond West Primary School. It is my daughter’s school and it is a lovely school. So, I have a deep interest in this issue and a strong opinion on it.
My opinion is that Matthew Guy is an ignorant, sleazy, hypocritical, god-bothering, worthless piece of scum.
There are innumerable reasons to vote against Matthew Guy and his loathsome Liberal and National mates on Saturday, and Guy’s neanderthal stance on Richmond’s safe injecting room should be high on everybody’s list.
The Marriage Equality Theorem
Theorem: Let V be the set of valid arguments against marriage equality. Then V is empty.
Proof: Let P be a valid argument. Then, by now, someone would have argued P. This has not occurred. (Proof: by exhaustion.) By contradiction, it follows that P does not exist, and thus V is empty. QED.
An alternative, direct proof of the theorem was provided by the California Supreme Court; their proof applied the definition of equality.
Consideration of the many straight-forward corollaries of this theorem are left to the reader.