A Response to ‘A Response to A Response’

I have no idea what conservative future has got to do with this, but lo and behold, representation at NUS conference has got shite all to do with genuine feeling of students on campus. This a sad function of the general political apathy of students, and the polarisation of the political landscape by uninformed half-wits.

Every serious candidate wanted to win. every serious candidate needed every vote they could get. every candidate knows that saying “im anti war” is not exactly a vote looser, is it? It’s like a politician saying “I’m anti tax”.

If student respect so “clearly” works on a wide range of issues, why does it not campaigning on such success, rather than reaching for the easy-to-say hollow statements used? My suspicion is that they don’t actually care about anything else but have jsut enough neurons to bang together to keep their left-of-left wing coalition together by being anti-top up fees, anti-racism, anti-Islamophobia. But ask yourself, how hard is it to be anti- anything? I’m anti-death! I’m anti-rain! I’m anti-crime!
See how easy it is! It’s like a toddler playing grown-ups. What is much much hard is defining yourself in something other than anti-… , it takes balls, conviction, and intellect to set out a bold vision of the ideal world and the steps necessary to get there. There is a total lack of any of this in anything i have seen splutter out of ‘RESPECT’.

For someone calling someone else “stupid” i think you need to grow up a little bit and attack ideas not the person. And i think you’re reading into what I’m saying your own misconceptions and beliefs. To assume i see no link to any international event and any domestic event is as good as saying I’m a brain dead vegetable on life support, and quite frankly makes me embarrassed for you. Re-read what i said, take away you pre-decisions on what i think and feel, and realise i am responding to points brought up in the Propaganda video. That i don’t think there is anything NUS could do in such a situation as the Lebanon Conflict. The NUS has taken leads on real, substantive issue where there has been genuine debate and thought. Anti-Apartheid for example, was a campaign with objectives, methods, and a real drive among the student body. I don’t think you’d find a single person in the UK who could knowingly describe what Israel did as “ok”, so is there really a need to campaign for something which is pretty much accepted? on an issue where there is a already a massive choir of voices with real gravitas, importance and experience? Is it not more worthwhile to spend our political capital, limited resources and limited activism on things which are not yet widely accepted, but which we all firmly believe need to be? on things were work over years simply by ourselves and really bring success?

I’d quickly like to call you up on your misconception of what the NUS is. It is a National Union of Students, a membership organisation that seeks to deliver real benefits for it’s students, to represent student views and to ensure every student has the best possible experience they can. Campaigning is secondary to ensuring it has active and engaged members. If everyone left, we couldn’t do a lot of campaigning. It has been the over focus on wasting money on leaflets and posters that has driven many many students away from the NUS and into the arms of apathy and whining. If we deliver benefits and engage students, then we can campaign, we are not, one first principle there to campaign on any and every issue. we think about students first, and ensure their welfare, and then we move onto the wider issues where we can help.

In regard to NUS extra, you miss the point of choice. If you’d rather have the discounts, get the card, if you can live without them, don’t. If you are a poorer student, a 15% discount at topshop is probably of no benefit so don’t bother. but in some cases, if you are ‘poorer’ surely the investment of £10 will work out saving you money in the long term, if you are want to shop at the involved companies. If people are to thick to work out the upfront cost minus future savings, they don’t deserve their place at uni. Your idea that you can gauge every student’s financial situation and judge for all of them is absurd, and you seem incapable of thinking about the decisions involved.

In regards to islamohpobia, your views are from a very insulated and reactionary background. People are afraid of lots of things, and generally what feeds that fear is ignorance. People aren’t scared of a religion, but of the actions some people have done in the name of religion! People weren’t scared of the KKK because they were Christian, but because they were murdering racist ???s.
I also feel you are being quite racist and to be honest, rude, by trying to rubbish my ideas simply because you think i am some kind of 1 dimensional stereotype. As someone who lives in an over whelmingly Bangladeshi community, not 10m from a rather large mosque, i am quite aware of what people are and aren’t scared of. I’m not scared of the old men with the white beards. im scar of the young ones with shaved heads who fight every week and beat people with their belts. Jack straws comments on the veil are much malginaned but very very few people have actualy read what he said, preferring instead to rely on hearsay and overblown reactionaries with political agendas. Tell me you have read exactly what he said and why you think what he said was in any way wrong and we can have a conversation. the ‘racist cartoons’ must mean the 11 cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed printed in 20 continental magazines. If this is indeed true, the word is certainly not “racist”. And on that, any slightly educated follower of the events is well aware of the cartoons themselves, those that were published, and those there were added later and included in the group that were taken to the middle east and spread to deliberately inflame the populace.
As you will know from your considered opinion the original 11 cartoons were not altogether that bad, but the 3 added post hoc were indeed highly bigoted and quite frankly shit. the original 11 were far more mild than was ever made out, but that never fits into the story peddled.

You can’t go a day without reading anything in the tabloids that isn’t ???y journalism of the lowest common denominator type designed to sell copy rather than inform. There are daily articles about binge drinking, house prices, immigration, the EU, so your point is somewhat weak.

you seem angry but uninformed, passionate but not thoughtful, its not wonder you are a prime candidate to be taken in by RESPECTS agenda. But if you are prepared to think before you speak, to gain some understanding on topics rather than merely gaining an opinion, i quite happily engage in discourse with you

Good day sir

A response to ‘A Response’

From hanifleylabi on www.educationet.org

‘A fringe? We were the 4th biggest faction at conference last year and the 2nd largest party political ones. When talking student politics it’s conservative future who are thankfully the crazy fringe. If students didn’t care about the war then at last year’s conference every candidate serious about winning pledged support to the stop the war coalition. At my uni we filled more coaches to the recent demo than we have for 3 years. We have a bigger stop the war society than we have had for 3 years and the RESPECT sabb who stood on a fund education not war platform won by the largest number of votes apart from those running against RON.

Student RESPECT clearly does work on a wide range of issues I’m sure Gemma could vouch for that herself having worked with us in the Admission Impossible campaign, anti racism campaigns and anti islamophobia campaigns amongst some.

One of the main planks of NUS is Internationalism. We are a campaigning student led body which has historically (along with similar roganisations all over the world) taken political stances on a variety of domestic and international issues and there’s no reason to stop now. Simply because you are so stupid you cannot see the link between the struggles at home and the struggles abroad doesn’t mean the rest of us are.

In regard to NUS Extra there is no choice if you want the extra discounts. You must buy the card. If you can’t afford the card then you don’t get the benefits and this is wrong as it affects poorer students. It’s also a crap way of trying to save NUS financially and I don’t believe it’s doing too well.

In regard to Islamophobia your views come from a very white middle class background. People ARE scared of muslims and Islam. When we are told that they are seperating themselves off from society when we are told that they want to bring stoning and flogging to Britain, Jack Straw’s comments on the veil, the racist cartoons etc etc etc. You can’t go a day without reading something negative in the tabloids about Muslims. Muslims in this country and under attack and it is our duty to stand with the oppressed’

A Response to ‘RESPECT’ NUS Election video

‘Respect’ Propaganda

originally posted on educationnet messageboard
I think its the perfect piece of low brow tabloidesque warporn that makes respect the laughing stock of the educated people of this country.

Firstly, and this point has been made before, like it or not the student populace, as a whole, don’t really give a fuck about the ‘anti-war’ thing anymore. There is NO SINGLE issue which unites students anymore, not even top-up fees, so to campaign essentially on a single issue shows what the tracing-paper thickness of ‘RESPECT’s’ intellectual credibility. I think i really can speak for a huge majority of students when i point out that we want to be represented by adults who can comprehend the wide range of issues that ACTUALY face ACTUAL students. Gemma, for all her faults, at least as independent mind, and can listen to real students’ problems with empathy and represent them to the wider world. I am terrified at the prospect of the intellectually-blinded, close minded respect people claiming to speak on the student bodies behalf in any situation, let alone on the national scale.

Secondly, your point in the video about the NUS ‘failing to call for a ceasefire’ only serves to reinforce how pointlessly hopeless a RESPECT leadership would be. To think the NUS has some kind of geo-political clout, and that a letter from Gemma on behalf of the NUS would in anyway affect national defence & foreign is straight up fucking retarded. The NUS would devalue itself by doing such a thing. Yes it was an error on the part of the UK to not get involved sooner, but what the fuck has that got to do with a National Union of students who role is to deliver real benefits to it’s members? Speaking out on things like that are the reason so many of our members just totally switch off at the mention of the NUS.

Thirdly, you claim to fight for ‘rights’ but only the rights you choose. NUS extra is OPTIONAL. see there is how you reinforce rights, give people a choice. I personally don’t think its all that, but I’m not forced to take it up (unlike an upping in affiliation fees). By deciding that NO-ONE can have NUS Extra, you are deciding for everyone, despite the evidence that quite a few students have taken them up. If you really do believe in rights, the first thing you should do is allow people the right to choose how to spend their money, not deciding for them.

Fourthly, “No To Islamophobia” is an easy to say mob rousing phrase that has very little behind it. Very few people are afraid of Islam. People get scared by all kinds of things, but a religion is not one of them. People CAN be scared by PEOPLE. I get scared chav in tracksuits when it’s 3am and i’m walking home alone wearing a pink shirt, pink scarf, and longish hair. I don’t think the chavs are going to turn around and say that i am WHITE-MALE-APHOBIC. When i was growing up, people were scared of the Irish, simply because all the terrorist activity on British soil from 1970-1998 was pretty much exclusively the work of the IRA, ergo all Irish must be terrorists. More recently, people esposing Islam are the ones who are doing (or trying) to get their terrorising on, it is somewhat natural of the thoughtless feckless masses to make a similar set of associations. The key response, and the one made by the majority of Irish communities during the troubles, was outright outcry as only retards use violence for political gain. The key to battling these perceptions is not to demonise and accuse back, but to educate. It is simply to point out the following point over and over again:

Terrorism is to Islam

 

what

 

KKK is to Christianity

Fifthly, and much more briefly, the photo displayed at 2:18 looks pretty photoshopped.

In conclusion, RESPECT and the like are thankfully the crazy fringe. Students, as a whole, don’t share your goals, ideas, or ideology. You are a stain on our credibility by associating yourselves with the rather shady fellows who fund respect and espouse such crazy ideas. I hope that conference sees through the crazy to the insecure retards with megaphones that you are.

RON for ULU President!

When the student union movement was talking it’s first stumbling steps out into the world it was lauded as a fine example of the power of democracy. It was hoped that future leaders would vie with each other to take up the mantle of student representation and leadership. The students themselves would have a plethora of very fine, articulate candidates from which to choose, since the brightest and the best would fight for their chance to test their mettle, and cut their teeth, in the world of politics. This cream of the crop would represent the very best we as students had to offer.

If this is still true today, then we have become a very strange bunch, as today’s cream is distinctly manky and many of us suspect it is more like some foul and rotting cheese. For the brightest and the best of the 100,000+ students of the venerable University of London appear to have been dredged up from the deepes darkest pits of the slop bucket from the equally venerable HMP Wormwood Scrubs.

It is at this point that the law students inform me of the defense of “fair comment” and how it is important not to defame anyone too much.

That said, the two candidates for ULU President represent everything wrong with student politics and it is my opinion that they will be utter unabashed disasters.

Ishmail Malik, President (ish) of Birbeck. I say ‘ish’ because his SU council is doing it’s best to remove him from office due to his sheer lack of aptitude for the role. He does not seem to possess the honor to amicably suspend himself from his role until he is assured of either a mandate from his students, or lack thereof. He has also been caught in the act of fraud, in that he forged the signature of a KCLSU sabbatical officer on his nomination paper. He was caught serendipitously as the officer he impersonated happened to be particularly involved with ULU. This is combined with his rather extreme personal politics, which will instantly divide the student body between those unbalanced acolytes of the ‘RESPECT’ bunch, and the rest of us healthy intelligent students who enjoy freedom of thought. This is a candidate who explicitly does not seek to represent all of us, but simply panders to mob.

Jennifer Hausman, President of Goldsmiths. Should you ever have the opportunity to hear Jennifer at a hustings, here is a handy cut-and-keep checklist as to exactly what her first sentence will contain, without fail:

I am:
1) An international student
2) a mature student
3) a post-graduate
4) a female
5) a disabled student
6) a student of mixed ethnic background

I challenge you to test this out as for the past 4 speeches she has made at NUS have all started the exact same way. And it just plain and simply pisses me off. First thing she is being disingenuous as she is simply a whining American with a few too many session’s with her therapist under her belt, who seems to think the way to the ballot box is to ensure you tick as many minority/diversity boxes as possible. I think she genuinely believes students are as stupid as to think “Oh I’m a woman/of mixed ethnic background, I will surely vote for this person regardless of any other factor”. Thankfully the only place her tactic has worked so far appears to have been Goldsmiths. I would also point out that despite NUS policy on self-defining as an ethnic minority, she appears to be the most un-ethnicly diverse white American ever (but i am open to hearing about these diverse origins).

All this aside, I am simply upset that ULU has failed so badly at attracting the kind of candidates it desperately needs if it is to survive. This year is the first year in 5 that the ULU budget shows a surplus, not a £500,000 deficit, and that is down to the under-congratulated work of Jim Hunkin, VP finance, who has been so successful in rescuing ULU from financial catastrophe, that some on the ULU council felt it necessary to try and use a ‘no-confidence’ vote to get him out of office. If that is how leadership, vision, and success are rewarded at ULU, it is no wonder that the cream has gone distinctly cheesy.

I urge you to Vote RON in the upcoming ULU Presidential Elections

Polytechnics

Come on people, lets stop this nonsense, and admit what everyone knows but doesn’t want to say. Manchester Metropolitan does not deserve to be called a University.
Thanks to ‘New’ Labour’s efforts to get 50% of the population into Higher Education, we seem to be swimming in piss-poor universities with the provenance of last night’s kebab. This idea that you need a degree more than anything is polluting the system with absolute crap. To be fair, an SAT level 7 in English is worth more than most of the degrees peddled today, because at least that proves that you can write a bit, and probably know the difference between a semi-colon and a colon. And the idea that a First Class Honours Degree in History from Manchester Metropolitan University equate even one iota to even a Third Class Honors Degree from Oxbridge is more that laughable.
Now, to be fair, im not saying that Man Met is the worst, let alone the only, former trumped-up polytechnic displaying its shoddy wares like some stereotypical used watch salesmen. But I feel that the continuation of the word “University” instead of “Polytechnic” degrades all the other institutions deserving of such a suffix. Manchester Metropolitan just happens to be the most convenient and local of such a place.
Seriously, such places should have kept to being polytechnics, and been proud for being good at what they did. Not sullying the name university, and heaping mountains of debt on to unsuspecting students. They should have concentrated on providing well respected vocational courses that most employers really want. Trained plumbers, electricians and carpenters; and then really encourage aprentiships as an excellent way to get both a job and an education.
It may be a bit anecdotal, but famously a group of city bankers gave up their jobs and became plumbers, and earnt far more in their new careers. In London a plumber can quite happily charge a £50 call-out fee on top of £75p/h. In emergencies, they can pretty much charge what they like as the insurance company will pay it. They can work when they want, and hike up their rates on weekends and bank holidays.
Contrast this with the shrinking graduate employment pool, where these days a graduate will come out of university with, on average, in excess of £12,000 of debt. With poor job prospects and skills employers don’t really care about, how long will it be before the average Tescos checkout position will have applications from10 English graduates per vacancy.
No-one wins in this era of target driven, government fixation on “educashun educashun educatshun”. The students feel so pressured into having to go to university that they will end up doing a worthless degree at a non-entity university, only because they believe that that’s what they need to get a job. Employers end up with huge gaps in the employment market and no-one to fill it. Those they do employ end up needing classes in basic literacy and innumeracy because their degree in popular music has left them barely able to articulate a coherent sentence, let alone to stand up and do a presentation to the board. The Government ends up with a big bill for funding all this extra “universities”, so much so it is prepared to give two universities £60million cash just to merge so they no longer have to fund one of them.  And middle-ground universities have to fight tooth and nail to distinguish themselves from the old polytechnics.

            We need to stop the “student ambassador” programs in schools which encourage ‘challenged’ students to go to university by sending cash-strapped student in to sing university’s praises; these are precisely the people who would benefit from bricklaying classes in a secondary modern comprehensive school as it would show them real and acheiveable career goals. Pushing for the poor and stupid to go and waste three years and thousands of pounds is plain sadistic. Actually intelligent children from such schools will always make it to the university place they deserve, but taking the bathwater with the baby tarnishes the true universities with the ex-polytechnic brush.

Smokers

How would you like it if every time I urinated I held back a little just to run over to you to finish off? This is exactly how disgusting it is for non-smokers to be in the presence of smokers in any enclosed place.
All these militant smokers who believe that they have some sort of right to inflict their bad habits, and weak wills, upon those of us with enough individuality to not succumb to ‘peer pressure’ need to be taught a lesson in basic respect of human life. I don’t have too much of a problem with you killing yourself, simply because if it’s a human right to live, it’s a human right to die, but as soon as I can smell your cancer sticks, you’ve come close enough thank you.
Now im not trying to say that we should outlaw tobacco completely, cigars (not cheap ones, but a nice Monte Cristo or any other with a pleasing aroma) and pipes aren’t such a plague on our health, quite simply because if we did there would be a £3.5billion defict in the already stodgy looking budget. This much toted argument that alough smokers have a direct cost to the NHS of £500m, this is vastly outweighed by the £4+ billion in tax revenues tries to make out that people who smoke are making some kind of conscious decision to help the encomy and stop the local library from closing. True if we lost, or greatly reduced, the level of smoking we would loose tax revenue, but along with that we would need to spend less in propping up the NHS to treat the long list of affliction that affect any long term smoker.
A smoking ban in all public places would have many many benefits. The foremost would stop the annoying frequency of having to dry clean one’s coats and jackets after a night out to fumigate all the ash, arsenic and aroma that permeates every part of me after going to any establishment that allows smoking. And girls often notice how quickly their hair seems to absorb the putrid smells, tarnishing both the fragrance and shine of healthy hair.
Also by pushing smokers to get off out of their seats and go outside to smoke, they may gradually begin to smoke less and less as the stress put on their (now diseased and clogged) hearts is balanced by an increasingly small amount. This gradual withdrawal from daytime and non-social smoking could hopefully be the first step towards them giving up. And after a year or so having given up, when you’ve finally finished cough up the last of the dead parts of your own lungs, you might once again be in possession of all 5 senses!
Being able to actually smell stuff with intensity and diversity, not overtones of grey, be able to taste food with delicate nuances in flavour, not sticking to the extremes where you no that at least some taste will make it through the scorched taste buds. Maybe 5 years down the line, and with a little chemical help, you could even begin to scrub away the layers of soiled enamel that coats all your tea colour teeth.
To think that it is our choice to ‘opt-out’ of smoking, failing to accept that you must have made a positive decision to smoke, its more that just ignorant, it is disrespectful to all those who have that small amount of willpower to never take an easy way out to relieve stress. I understand that a strong nicotine addiction is more powerful that heroin, and that once hooked, a person may never regain their freedom from its grip, but to all those new to university, I implore you to either never start or quit now while your youthful lungs can still just about manage to repair the damage done.

Quam Bonum Est?

It is strange to think that the major, and as yet unreconciled, difference between the Catholic and Eastern Orthodox is one little word, ‘Filosque’; I am of course ignoring all the more cosmetic differences such as the choice between pleated or A-line skirts worn by the differing priests.

To those unschooled in theology the difference is, on the surface at least, a very minor one; certainly not enough to schism over, I mean it’s not like they’re Coptic or Cathars!! The offending word appears at a crucial part of the Profession of Faith (or ‘Christian Mission Statement’ as some of those annoying “forward thinking” evangelists who think by using managerial-techno-babble they will somehow eschew people’s disgust at the over doctrination of the major denominations). It is a statement on the Holy Trinity, essentially explaining who gets the extra pork chop at dinner time, Catholics say they believe that the Holy spirit came from ‘Pater filosque’, Eastern Orthodox however believe that the Holy Sprit comes from Pater alone. Every other word is identical, and the churches are, on the scale of things, indistinguishable in terms of core beliefs.
Now if you are bemused as to what I am on about (and its not because either you are not a Christian or just have never care that much about your faith to investigate it a little), then you my friend are missing a vital part of your education; not R.E. (or R.S. in state schools), but Latin.

The ignorant who dismiss the study of Latin because “its dead”, obviously never went to a good school. To dismiss the unknown because you weren’t smart enough to do it yourself is the stock-in-trade of school bullies everywhere who mock their betters to compensate for their own failings. Latin is alive and well all around us and to ignore the immense gift that studying such an important language provides is a grievous error. I know the obvious argument that is wheeled out again and again is that it helps one study the romantic languages, and yes, Latin is a major help in such things; allowing one to infer meaning quite easily from modern Italian and Spanish (and less so French). But Latin is everywhere, from medicine to law to the words we make up from new technology. I even find that with newly encountered words of some length a workable definition can be extracted by simple applying a bit of the old ‘amo-amas-amat’ to it.
I am ashamed that today my on-the-tounge latin vocab is pretty much restricted to reciting the Pater Noster, singing my old school song, and reeling of the conjugations of Amo and Capio! But I find so frequently that a word here, a legal term there, and it all comes back. Especially when one is used to the Latin mass (which sounds so beautiful compared to the vulgar vernacular) one prefers the sound of Latin hymns and prayers, especially –come Christmas time- Adeste Fideilis which is aurally more pleasing and emotive than plain old “Come all ye faithful.”.
So why can’t we bring back the good old 11+ system where bright individuals get the chance to get a good education, regardless of class, social background or family income. Yes of course the rich will still be able to send their kids to Public School, so what!? Unfortunately of course there will always be those busy-body parents who think their child is the second coming and how on earth didn’t he get that grammar school place he deserved!? Embittered parents of only average children spoil everyone’s day when they protest about the local grammar not taking local (thick) students, instead preferring to take people (hard working, intelligent people) from miles around who don’t even pay their taxes to the same local borough. It’s a travesty, in the eyes of the unfortunate average income, average intelligence populous, that some school should strive to recruit only the best staff and students to give those bright enough the encouragement they need to realize their full potential.
If ‘New’ Labour would stop worrying so desperately about equality and instead recognize the individuality and personality of every one of its electorate it would see that the best seeds for a fruitful economy are a well educated and trained elite to command and control the unthinking masses. Giving the rough diamonds some polish, and putting the trash where they belong (inner-city comprehensive anyone?), they would stop all this traditional underachievement by those from a poorer background by leveling the field and letting individuals stand out by their personal merit alone.

I apologize if you are poor and or thick ,(so most likely not at Manchester hehe) but if you have neither blessings you should just hurry up and get pregnant with that guy in the Burberry cap and gold sovereign ring. Settle down to a life of pot noodle, ITV, hoped earrings and wearing sporting clothing for all occasions. Why waste what precious few neurons you have on worrying about what will never affect you.

[Post Scriptum: for anyone interested ‘Pater’ means ‘father’, ‘Filos’ means ‘son’, ‘que’ means ‘and’, and ‘Noster’ means ‘Our’. Apologies to Classics Scholars for any poor conjugation, declination, or spelling!]