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> I don't know how I feel about the British comedy candidate outclassing half of the American elected leadership–and a good fraction of its industrial leadershi
by dofm 4mo ago
> I don't know how I feel about the British comedy candidate outclassing half of the American elected leadership–and a good fraction of its industrial leadership–on IQ.)
Your entire political system has flirted with anti-intellectualism for over a century; it used to pretend to be uneducated simpletons to appeal to the electorate (witness, e.g. the folksy “ahhm just a simple mayynn” gurning schtick of Senator John Kennedy, who literally fakes his accent and demeanour despite having a sharp legal mind and Oxford degree, and who could likely conjugate latin; he is following a path trodden by Bill Clinton) and now it has refined the concept such that politicians can actually be simpletons for real: Tommy Tuberville isn’t faking being thick and neither is Markwayne Mullin.
I don’t know about conjugating latin specifically (I used to be able to do this but the memory has faded) but the standard of literacy in the UK was excellent.
We do now have a fairly similar literacy skills profile in the young as the USA and Canada, but unlike in the USA, older adults outperform them, partly because more of us were exposed to the (now essentially eliminated) selective education (grammar school) system that favoured advanced literacy.
We are thus as I understand it unique in having (ETA: or having had) declining literacy; it is declining to the US/Canada level rather than below it but it is rather sad.
Binface went to good schools and has an Oxford classics degree, I think. Much of our political class did. More recently they will have done the PPE degree (which is more or less training to be a politician). He is in that sense as “establishment” as Farage, but more importantly he is a product of that fading system. So it is this you are observing; writers, politicians, actors often come from that declining tradition.
Side note: even many politicians from a non-traditional background have gone through this path at some level; the famously working-class deputy prime minister John Prescott studied at Ruskin College, which was a college associated with the trade union movement based in and sort of orbiting Oxford University that specialised in providing PPE-type education to aspiring politicians from working class backgrounds (originally founded, incidentally, by two Americans)
- madaxe_again 4mo agoIsn’t it the democratic ideal though? Of the people, for the people. If a representative democracy is to truly be representative then the elected representatives should be… representative? Tuberville and Mullin I wouldn’t say were thick so much as they’re pretty average.
- flir 4mo agoNah, you elect the person who best represents your interests, not the person who best represents you. Look on it as a hiring process. Don't you want to select someone competent?
- altairprime 4mo agoThat’s a very interesting game theory question: the answer is not always “yes”, especially when it comes to people’s secret motivations!
- flir 4mo agoWell the analogy isn't perfect. I realised I should have said "wishes". Not everyone votes based on self-interest. (And in a FPTP system you are, IMO, better off voting against the person who least represents your wishes).
- Cthulhu_ 4mo agoThe challenge is that politics is its own profession, just like management. Even though there are people that have the theoretical knowledge on how a country should be run / what policies would work best, working it out into something legalese or balancing the books is where politicians come in. In theory.
- dofm 4mo agoGoodness, if Tuberville is average then the USA is in much worse shape than it realises. Mullin, like MTG, has some political instincts and some facility with the parliamentary process, as it turns out, and I almost feel bad about putting him in the same category as Tuberville, but he is not a smart guy. Don’t get me wrong, we have many mediocre politicians in the UK, but few like these guys at the parliamentary level. The difference is this whole flirting with anti-intellectualism thing. Pretending to be less educated or intellectual than you are has just not been a big part of our wider culture.
- Twey 4mo ago
- teamonkey 4mo agoI went looking for stats saying the UK has declining literacy rates but could only find ones that said that literacy was improving. https://www.ons.gov.uk/explore-local-statistics/indicators/early-years-literacy https://www.ons.gov.uk/explore-local-statistics/indicators/e...
- dofm 4mo agoThere has apparently been a little bounce in the last few years, a sort of long term consequence of changes made to education policy by New Labour and the consequent movement of teachers from selective education into comprehensive education, but for example here is an article from twelve years ago: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2013/oct/08/england-young-people-league-table-basic-skills-oecd https://www.theguardian.com/education/2013/oct/08/england-yo... We were, for decades, a country in considerable literacy decline, and the only one of its kind. Some of this might have been a consequence of scrapping the grammar school system without giving the comprehensive system access to the same resources. I tend to think that when Americans observe that British politicians and actors speak with a larger vocabulary or more eloquently, the people they are observing are products of the tail end of the grammar school system and the growth of a bias towards private education that emerged in its wake; the school system that turned out men and women of letters used to be available to all and now is available only to those with money.
- teamonkey 4mo ago> considerable decline Again, I think, citation needed, since conservative media does like to bang on about this a lot, but I’ve not seen actual proof that education standards are falling, or worse than they were when I was at school. What I think has happened since the close of grammar schools is that the gap between most educated and least educated has closed significantly. This government report from 2023 shows that gap closing, while also showing an improvement from previous years. https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/675330e020bcf083762a6d48/Survey_of_Adult_Skills_2023__PIAAC__National_Report_for_England.pdf https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/675330e020bcf...
- 4mo ago
- tim333 4mo ago>declining tradition Rishi Sunak, Liz Truss, Boris Johnson, Theresa May, and David Cameron went to Oxford and Starmer did a postgrad there. So the current PM and previous five. Maybe Binface can make PM after all?