Wednesday 3 January 2018

Toby Young, Sacred Cow

Watch the hysteria directed at those who dare to point out the utter unsuitability for public life of this idol of what little remains of the Conservative core vote.

Toby Young’s persistence in office, and indeed the fact that he was ever considered for it, demonstrates the base that this country’s presently governing party has to please: people who think that the drug laws do not apply to them but only to the common herd, men who think that it is hilarious to dress up as a woman in order to assault a lesbian, and people who favour embryonic screening for IQ in order to abort those who failed the test.

Young was of course appointed by Jo Johnson, who, like his brother, owes his own otherwise inexplicable political advancement to membership of a club that exists, complete with a membership list and a uniform, for the purpose of becoming drunk and disorderly in order to commit criminal damage and assault. A group of boys the same age who did that on a council estate would go to prison.

Buy the way, there is no such thing as IQ, and if you believe that there is, then you are probably, heaven help you, Toby Young. I have never taken an IQ test in my life. I question whether anyone who sets any store by them is sufficiently intelligent to be allowed out alone, if at all. For example, Toby Young.  The whole thing depends on “mental age”, whatever that may be.

The IQ of children in numerous countries has “improved” dramatically over the years when IQ tests have been set, and therefore taught to, in schools. Indeed, that never fails to happen. The publications of Mensa are a particularly rich seam of amusement. “More people than you might think are above average”? I’m guessing about half of them. “One person in 20 is in the top five per cent”? You don’t say! And so on. But never try and tell the “I have a high IQ” lot any of this.

You wouldn’t have to, and indeed you never could, do anything to get a high IQ, even if such a thing really existed. Having it would be no cause for congratulation, still less for self-congratulation or for the creation of an international society for mutual congratulation. Never mind for the creation and maintenance, at public expense, of an entire network of highly prestigious schools for those who had been deemed to have been born with this imaginary attribute.

Or for the abortion of those who had been deemed to have been conceived without it. Yet such is apparently at least the implicit policy of this Government.

No comments:

Post a Comment