Graphology, Bill Gates and Tony Blair 

The recent Davos World Economic Forum has brought this little strange story to light. The media find some scraps of paper with 'doodles' on which they think were made by Tony Blair. They hired graphologists to have a gander at them, and they found Blair to be "struggling to concentrate" and "not a natural leader". Unfortunately, they weren't Mr Blair's writing but one Bill Gates of Microsoft. From the BBC article, with the reaction from a Downing Street spokesman:

"We look forward with amusement to explanations by a variety of psychologists and graphologists of how various characteristics ascribed to the prime minister on the basis of the doodles, such as 'struggling to concentrate', 'not a natural leader', 'struggling to keep control of a confusing world' and 'an unstable man who is feeling under enormous pressure', equally apply to Mr Gates."

"We are astonished that no-one who ran the story thought to ask No 10 if the doodles were in fact Mr Blair's, particularly as it was obvious to anyone the handwriting was totally different."

And it shows, again, how the media are duped by these idiots. ZDNet describe how the Times and the Mirror were taken in by these graphologist idiots. And Slashdot have been weighing in.

Oh, and the Downing Street response would be funny, but it's somewhat hypocritical for those representing the Prime Minister to condemn graphologists, when Mr and Mrs Blair are enjoying Mexican mud-bath rebirthing ceremonies, consulting Carole Caplin (who, according to this report sounds somewhat like a psychopath with a 'detox' addiction) and Lilias Curtin, has interests in various altmed things including ayurvedic, crystals and acupuncture. Those crazy graphologists, eh? Misdiagnosing Blair's instability for Gates'. Good old Tone and Cherie. They don't get taken in by these crazy things like the press do, see?

Thanks to my Tripod visitors! 

I've just had an email from Tripod about an account on there that sits virtually untouched from back in 2003:

Wow, sixty two page impressions in a month, and my site is one of the "most popular"! Fantastic!

Government adverts are enough to put anyone off teaching 

I saw those horrifying adverts the other day to try to recruit people to the teaching 'profession', and it kind of confirmed my belief that teaching was really not a very smart career move (even if you are one of these strange people who thinks that the government aren't a bunch of criminals and that working for them is immoral in the same way as living off the profits of a Mafia protection racket is immoral). The advert showed children to be consistently happy, smart, cheerful and intelligent. Dolan Cummings sums up my feelings brilliantly with this paragraph:

What's really depressing is that anyone attracted to teaching by these adverts, anyone persuaded that working with kids really is 'better than any anti-ageing cream' is likely to have very little to offer schoolkids. It's bad enough that TV should be dominated by a cult of youth and the celebration of banality. Is it too much to ask that schools should encourage pupils to aspire to something more?

Yes, frankly it is. Aspiration is a dangerous thing. When you are a body that wants to micro-manage every aspect of citizens lives, and use their money to fund this purpose, you don't want anybody aspiring to anything good like the pursuit of intellectual goals. Of course, this is the problem. The type of teachers that schools need are exactly the types which aren't going in to the profession because they think (rightly) that it sucks buttcrust. Of course, some of us have things like impatience and short tempers, so we kind of avoid teaching altogether (I'm not sure I could stand a day working with brats - whether the real life ones or the cartoonish depictions in the Teacher Training adverts).

Which brings me to what I am currently doing. I'm trying to write an article called "What is inclusion?" which I hope will be a beginner's guide to a lot of the problems with education and society (and, of course, the relation between the two). In this little ditty, I'm going to cover all sorts of things. I've been reading a fair bit about these crazy initiation classes they have in American universities to encourage a kind of faux-tolerance. The strangest bit actually was the part about how they had these lectures on diversity training, trying to get new students to embrace and include students of all races (whatever a race is - nobody has given a true description of any biological difference bar some fairly naive anatomical differences such as skin colour or some quite arbitrary defintions such as nationality), by getting them to go to separate classes based on race. What better way to inculcate tolerance and colour-blindness than get all the people of different classes to go to different classes?

The thing I don't get is how American universities, and let's be fair, it is mostly American universities who have these ridiculous initiation things, need them. I don't think there are any real equivalents on campuses here in Britain - sure there are some silly initiation ceremonies (when I started, we had to play a silly memory game to try and learn each others names and some interesting facts about one another, and we had some morsels of advice like "don't piss your loan away!" and "Hi! We're the chaplains, and if you need spiritual advice, we are here!"). We don't have these discrimination lectures, and yet, we seem to get on just grandly. We can get together with people of all the different nationalities, "races", genders, creeds (political, religious or otherwise) and go and have a few drinks or have a heated philosophical argument in the pub. We don't need to be diversity-trained. We can quite easily get on with one another without squabbling or resorts to our base instincts of "Ooh, they be different, let's pick on them!". That is because we are, to all extents and purposes, adults. (Okay, I may just be a rambling fool with a weblog, but I like to think that my colleagues - most of which are younger than me - are mature adults).

Most thinking people will have disagreements. If we all have different and complicated ideas on fiscal policy or the workings of the human mind or the current world political situation or the free will/determinsim problem, and we can still get along - and academic life has shown how it is possible for people with so many different intellectual committments to get along productively - then why on earth are we going to pick on arbitary things like gender or nationality or 'race'? I don't care if you are black or white, or you come from England or France or Zimbabwe. Those things aren't important. But if you want to have a nice debate about philosophy, be my guest.

The point is that I can't really think of how this has been inculcated. Of course, I'm probably wrong - it probably was inculcated somewhere. But it seems so damn natural. The idea that you'd have to teach that is so ridiculous. The only possible reason I could think that something like this would take off is if someone had a desire to micromanage, Big Brother-style, people's thoughts.