Charivari from a Corner of Europe

Spreading the message

“The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct” is the title of a paper on Gender Studies, which was submitted for “peer review”, then accepted for publication in an academic journal called Cogent Social Sciences. Its two authors, themselves academics, composed it in the style of “post-structuralist discursive gender theory”. Their 3000-word study was carefully framed to ensure that it was complete nonsense, but, they said, “we assumed that if we were clear … that maleness is intrinsically bad and that the penis is somehow at the root of it, we could get the paper published in a respectable journal”. It includes some pioneering insights, such as the concept of “manspreading” or “men sitting with their legs spread wide”, which is “akin to raping the empty space around them”.

The peer reviewers did not notice that all the citations were invented (though one reviewer asked for more of them). Perhaps they were seduced by the revelation that the conceptual penis “disenfranchised communities based upon gender identity and is the conceptual driver behind climate change”. This is probably why President Trump is against the Paris accords.

Davos Man

“For Muslims it’s the Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca and for European Christians it may be Santiago de Compostela,” writes Quentin Letts, but for “patronising corporate swanks” there is only one shrine to visit in the third week of January, namely Davos. The plight of the world’s impoverished masses may be on the official program, “but the unspoken agenda is career advancement”. Hollywood stars advertise their saintliness, toppled statesmen have their egos stroked—and of course no such gathering would be complete without Bono burnishing his halo.

There are lectures on poverty given by billionaires. Rock stars discuss democracy with dictators. Cocktail parties are held to mark world hunger: “Another caviar-topped quail’s egg, ambassador? It’s a long time till the black-tie fondue.” The foyer of the Hilton Hotel features an exhibition that shows how the poor live (not very well—fancy that!) And don’t miss the up-and-coming “Young Global Leaders”, who are “pushing boundaries and rethinking the world around them”. This year they include a “psychologist of altruism”, a Swedish spin doctor, a women’s underwear designer from Canada, and Rio Ferdinand, the former footballer.

In Davos, where a plate of spaghetti can set you back the weekly wage of a Bangladeshi textile-worker, you must be seen at a seminar on “The Future of Consumption”. It is chaired by Baohong Sun, Dean’s Distinguished Chair Professor of Marketing at the Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business (sic) in the People’s Republic of China.

Liberal Demoprats

After the Brexit referendum, the prats’ geriatric leader Vince Cable said the EU issue had been decided by a democratic vote which we must respect. But that was then; he has subsequently decided that the voters were misguided to vote the way not approved by the Demoprats and should be ignored. In the run-up to the referendum, the party’s former leader Paddy Ashdown (sometimes known as Paddy Pantsdown after some rumpy-pumpy with his well-upholstered secretary) proclaimed:

I will forgive no one who does not respect the sovereign voice of the British people once it has spoken, whether it is a majority of 1 per cent or 20 per cent. When the British people have spoken you do what they command. Either you believe in democracy or you don’t.

Fighting words from the ex-member of the Special Boat Squadron! But this ringing endorsement of democracy was made when it seemed that Remain would win. Since Leave won, it appears that Pantsdown thinks 4 per cent, let alone 1 per cent, is after all not the sovereign voice of the people and … should be ignored. In the meantime, most Demoprat voters seem to have drifted off to the embrace of Comrade Corbyn. If you are going to betray your democracy, you may as well do it properly.

Fraudits

An enterprising US advocate called Thomas has been denting the Teflon coating on some of the least appealing chisellers of contemporary capitalism, namely the “big four” auditors. His team, run from a Californian beach house, consists of three partners, an office manager and her dog Daphne. The root of the problem is that the auditor oligopoly makes more money from selling its clients “services” (such as borderline tax evasion) than it does from the auditing. So they can’t afford to lose an audit, even if, as is not infrequently the case, this means whitewashing the accounts.

In a virtuoso performance in a Miami court, Thomas courteously asked a Price-WaterhouseCoopers partner to explain what he understood by the term “red flag” in audit briefings. The partner said he was “not familiar” with the term; he thought a red flag was something on a beach to warn away swimmers. The phrase is “not in our literature”, he added gratuitously, “it’s not something we use to describe any issue”. Thomas then produced a PriceWaterhouseCoopers e-mail that used the term familiarly and an official PriceWaterhouseCoopers work paper which featured a small icon in the margin, a red flag as it happened. The auditor called it a “tick mark”.

Improve your German

The Financial Times’s Simon Kuper produced his own version of Scotus’s Devil’s Dictionary before the German election, featuring the following definitions of prospective voters:

Gutmensch (good person): supposedly naive leftie self-hating Muslim-hugging German. Bahnhofsklatscher (station clappers) are the Gutmenschen who stood in train stations in September 2015 applauding arriving refugees. The rival tribe to the Gutmenschen are the Wutbürger (furious citizens). Older Wutbürger are often known as Hassenrentner (hate pensioners), though they regard themselves as besorgte Bürger (concerned citizens) who accuse the Gutmenschen of Hypermoral and Genderwahn (moral overkill and gender madness).

The newly current Lügenpresse (lying press), says Kuper, is a revival of a Nazi expression (as we all know, the liberal press never lies); likewise Volksverräter was a Nazi term (Left-liberals batting for the opposition are never traitors, but simply misunderstood idealists). Putinversteher are those who understand Putin, establishment figures who go around explaining that Putin is much misunderstood. The leading Putinversteher is Socialist ex-Chancellor Schröder who sits on the board of the Russian oil company Rosneft.

Since Kuper wrote this, there has been an election in Germany, from which it appears that, in the privacy of the polling booth, quite a lot of the Gutmenschen decided that they were actually Wutbürger—with the result that Alternative für Deutschland won ninety-four seats in the Bundestag.

Spratt in Vienna

Richard Gordon, who trained as a doctor and entertained us in the 1950s with his irreverent novels about hospital life, died in 2017. The books were made into films featuring Dirk Bogarde as the smoothly cynical young doctor, buxom nurses who “were no better than they ought to be” (one played by Brigitte Bardot) and James Robertson Justice as the tyrannical and choleric consultant Sir Lancelot Spratt.

A few such can still be found—when Scotus had his hip done in Vienna he was woken the morning afterwards by the arrival of the Primarius with his Schleppe of nurses and junior doctors. Seizing the non-operated leg he rotated it violently to demonstrate its decreasing mobility, ignoring the terrified patient. As the leg did not actually fall off, there was a general display of admiration and the junior doctors made an enthusiastic note on their clipboards. Having established that the other hip had been operated on in Hungary, he said, “Well, now you have the Austrian version. It’s like the Austro-Hungarian empire—the Austrian bit is better” (cautious titters from the Schleppe).

Gordon was once asked if he was satisfied with his life. “Yes,” he said. “I made as much money from writing as a consultant earns, probably more. And I didn’t kill anybody.”

Guffopedia

One Financial Times column that is agreeably obnoxious is that by Lucy Kellaway, who sadly is leaving the paper to become a teacher. As the inventor of the “Guffopedia” she has been spearing for a decade the disingenuous and often emetic messages that semi-literate executives send to their unfortunate staff.

Her final annual award for egregious examples featured the CEO of Tesla claiming to be “laser-focused on achieving full self-driving capability on one integrated platform with an order of magnitude greater safety [sic] than the average manually driven car” (that is, Tesla cars must stop crashing). Kellaway it was who discovered that swimming caps were “hair management systems” according to Speedo and socks from Falke were “life performance solutions”. She has winkled out a consultant who talks of a “global touch-base” and another who is overheard saying, “Can we cold towel that?”

The global managing director of a design company asks a question to which she hopes never to hear the answer: “How to activate insights around latent mobility or multimodal needs?” As a model to be emulated she recommends, instead of the noxious wind of impossibly self-important executives, the Chinese meat magnate who offers an admirably clear job description for himself: “What I do is kill pigs and sell meat.”

During the year CEO Angela Ahrendts wandered into Kellaway’s line of fire when she wrote an excruciating open letter to her daughters on LinkedIn. One particularly toe-curling passage runs: “You know I am on 24/7 for advice, love, or just to share a funny filtered photo, bitmoji or laugh.” Kellaway comments:

By contrast, I have always made it clear to my children I am on 16/7 max—they can wake me at night only for emergencies and never for a laugh or a bitmoji. I am not sure what the latter is, but now I think of it, I doubt if I am on for that during the day either.

Oxytocin

Rod Liddle, the bad boy of the Spectator who claims to vote socialist though the Labour Party keeps trying to revoke his membership, has discovered a hormone that makes you a moronic liberal. (Does one actually need a hormone for that?) “People who feel unkindly disposed towards illegal migrants are chemically imbalanced, according to a study from the University of Bonn,” he writes.

Apparently they are deficient in oxytocin, a neuro-peptide hormone known as the “cuddle drug” because of its ability to turn normal human beings into simpering halfwits. Psychologists ran a series of studies in which Germans were asked how much money they would like to give to, say, Tariq and Mohammed, just arrived from the Middle East. “Nothing at all, unless they intend to spend it on a ticket home” is of course the correct response, and indeed many Germans initially concurred with this. But after doses of oxytocin, they became wildly generous … Perhaps [he adds ungallantly] German women should be dosed with it to make them more amenable when sexually assaulted by the migrants.

But are not those who already have excess oxytocin “chemically unbalanced”? Scotus himself was born with an oxytocin deficiency and was offered treatment in a liberal thought clinic, but fears the side-effects, which Liddle describes as “mania, memory impairment, hypersensitivity, intense confusion, shakiness, stupidity and convulsions”.

Virtue-signalling merit awards

The field of contenders was impressive last year. There was the Mayor of Kassel, who told his fellow German citizens concerned about the number of migrants about to be dumped on their city that probably they should move somewhere else; then there was the Austrian President, a former Maoist of lugubrious mien and permanent unshave, who opined that Austrian schoolgirls should be compelled to wear headscarves “in solidarity” with their Muslim fellow pupils.

However the judges (Scotus, Mrs Scotus and a man they met in the pub) were unanimous that the first prize should go to the not infrequently intoxicated former leader of the German Green Party, who said: “There is no such thing as Germans, there are only non-migrants.” Curiously, the migrants themselves seemed to think that there certainly was such a thing as Germans, who lived in a place called Germany and financed its generous welfare system; that was where they wanted to go—and certainly not to join the “non-migrants” of Hungary or Bulgaria.

Runner-up was Harvard University: “Chelsea”, formerly “Bradley”, Manning, was no sooner pardoned by the former windbag in the White House for betraying his/her country while serving in army intelligence in Iraq, than he/she was offered a visiting fellowship at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. The acting director of the Harvard Institute of Politics said:

Broadening the range and depth of opportunity for students to hear from and engage with experts, leaders and policy-shapers is a cornerstone of the Institute of Politics. We welcome the breadth of thought-provoking viewpoints on race, gender, politics and the media …

In particular Chelsea, presumably in her role as “expert”, “leader” or “policy-shaper”, would “engage students in discourse on ‘issues of LGBTQ identity in the military’”. So nowadays all you need is a sex change to catapult from traitor to celebrity. Sadly this courageous  appointment proved a bridge too far even for Harvard’s cowardly PC academics, so after protests Chelsea was hastily redesignated “guest speaker”. Not likely to be “no platformed” either, since she is now an LGBTQXYZ heroine and untouchable.

And finally the consolation prize goes to the World Health Organisation which appointed nonagenarian tyrant Robert Mugabe its “Goodwill Ambassador” in Southern Africa. True, Zimbabwe’s health system has collapsed: according to Physicians for Human Rights, under Mugabe there has been “a dramatic reversal of its population’s access to food, clean water, basic sanitation and health care”, leading to “the shuttering of hospitals and clinics, the closing of its medical school and the beatings of health workers”. This is probably why the Ethiopian head of the WHO described Zimbabwe as “a country that places universal health coverage and health promotion at the centre of its policies to provide health care to all”—though not quite all, as Mugabe himself had long received expensive treatment abroad. Zimbabwe’s Herald newspaper reported the appointment as a “new feather in the President’s cap”.