ninme

The Times - Deeds, not dentistry, are what we want at No 10, by David Aaronovitch

I read in The Times yesterday that scientists can induce dyscalculia — number blindness — by subjecting a section of the parietal lobe to repeated transcranial magnetic stimulation. It doesn’t hurt, but over time you become innumerate, and I thought, yes, that’s what we journalists are doing right now. Whenever the voter shows any signs of getting interested in policies, we hit them with a whole load of stuff about the personalities of politicians, and gradually the ability to work out anything complicated dwindles. …

It is hard to focus. Lost in the current orgy of self-indulgent catastrophism and victimhood by proxy (as in “this country is becoming a fascist state — why only last week a parking warden . . .”), is any sense of how Britain has actually changed in the past ten to twenty years. There is little media or popular memory of mass unemployment, flu crises or of what Gerry Adams might have tried to do to Ian Paisley if he’d met him face to face in 1987.

Hehehe. Wonderful.