Back from a weekend in the Derbyshire Dales and, as might have been expected given the 55th anniversary of the release of Carry on up the Khyber was at the end of last month, instead of serious political discussion, it's an afternoon for innuendo and ludicrous knob gags.
Twas ever thus on PB, some might say.
We are into the denouement of this version of Conservative Government - it's not quite the cones hotline but it's reminscent of Stephen Dorrell coming out to bat for Major and the Government in early 1997. The universe he inhabited, where the Government was doing wonderful things, everyone was happy and no one had the wobbles, was so far removed from everyone else's the only conclusion was he had fallen through a portal from an alternative Britain.
We had Opinium which was about as game changing as bi-regeneration in Who and it seems even the mighty Jordan Peterson is warning we will be Venezuela if Starmer wins. Well, we already have oil so I suppose there's a parallel of sorts but we had all this back in the dim and distant when apparently Blair was going to take us halfway down the road to Communism. Remind me how that worked out.
The death throes of the centre right are certainly illuminating - the strange thing is a conservative message of fiscal probity, targeted public spending and protecting communities and environment would probably play well among voters but that's not where thirteen and a half years od Conservative-led Government has got us.
The only reason being advanced by anyone for voting Conservative seems to me "Starmer would be worse" - how would he be "worse"? I can no more conceive of Starmer being worse than the corrupt bunch of incompetents than I can Sir Sidney Ruff-Diamond passing on an afternoon's Tiffin.
This was a man who was content to serve in a shadow cabinet led by Jeremy Corbyn. The space for 'worse' is pretty big.
I find it very easy to conceive of a Government being 'worse' than the current one. The current Government's actions are circumscribed by a fractious and electorate-fearing PCP. That limits the damage they can do considerably. That's probably why we got a relatively mild budget (though it still wasn't a real reduction in the tax-burden). A post-landslide Labour Government, elected on a manifesto of nothing but nice sounding generalities, would attempt to remake the country in its grey, authoritarian image, and would have the party discipline to cause considerable misery.
If there's anyone here who's delighted about the prospect, can you tell us which Labour policy you're most looking forward to?
Raising £3bn by ending the non-Dom scheme and using some of that money to fund free breakfast clubs for schoolchildren sounds like a good step.
Labour are generally keeping quiet about their policies at the moment which is frustrating but probably sound politics from their perspective. We should have this debate once we see the election manifestos.
Worth noting: the Scottish universities take account of poor performing schools by giving their applicants favourable treatment in terms of the grades they will accept.
You might think that this helps bridge the attainment gap. But the dirty little secret is that the kids who actually benefit are those whose parents pay for private tuition.
I know for a fact that pretty well every single child from my local secondary who has got into one of the "ancients" to do a degree that leads to one of the professions has had coaching from private tutors. Kids from poor homes don't stand a chance in proudly devolved egalitarian Scotland.
I have experienced two helicopter journeys. From heliport to offshore platform, and back again. Bloody awful. I spent the week knowing that I had to get back on the helicopter for the return flight.
Anyone who prefers this mode of transport to catching a train is, in my view, totally bonkers.
Helicopters are brilliant. I did a helicopter pub crawl once, in the Northern Territory. Flying from beach bar to riverside beershack to jungle gin-joint - surrounded by salt water crocodiles
Everyone got drunker and drunker as the day went on until the pilots eventually started racing each other. Superb
My one and only experience of helicopter travel was being collected from the top of a mountain in Drumochter and being dropped off at Raigmore Hospital in Inverness. Broken ankle.
Rather hilariously the chopper was met by ambulance at the helipad, and after being complicatedly transferred, it then took about 15 seconds to drive to the A&E dept.
I have to say the blokes in the copter were good value. Amused and sympathetic at the same time.
I've had two helicopter rides for similar reasons. Broken femur while skiing. Slipped and fell on my back on sea defence rocks in Devon.
Both times they had me lying on my back and I didn't see a thing.
Rishi Sunak reminds me (sorta) of another rich guy politico with less-than-stellar political abilities & sensibilities, especially (or even more so) with political & electoral presentation:
George Bush the Elder (and Better, or at least Less Worser).
RS and GHWB were, in the famed words of then Texas Gov. Ann RIchards, each "born with a silver spoon in his mouth". Which frequently serves/served as a substitute/trigger re: foot-in-mouth syndrome.
Imitations by Bush I and Sunak 1/2 of Richie Rich the Poor Rich Kid and Even Worse Politician, are in contrast to other wealthy folk who have risen to become POTUS or (less frequently) PM.
> Theodore Roosevelt was (IMHO anyway) the beginning of this line in the USA. When he entered Republican district (and clubhouse) politics as a young man, this was considered aberrant behavior for a person of wealth and status, by his own social/economic class . . . and just about everybody else. Yet TR soon developed his own uncommon version of the common touch: the four-eyed cowboy, Rough Rider and reformer. Which from 1898 - 1912 saw him elected Governor of New York > Vice President > President then finally defeated as insurgent Progressive "Bull Moose" challenger to his own handpicked successor as POTUS.
> Franklin Roosevelt picked up where his Republican cousin (and his wife's uncle) left off. FDR's rise was less meteoric than TR's, HOWEVER when he contracted polio it very significantly altered his political trajectory. First, by converting him from a rich kid pretty boy in politics, to a serious person overcoming extremely serious personal challenges AND serving the public interest. Second, by putting FDR into close, personal contact with fellow polio victims of every social class - including the kid whose family shipped him to Warm Springs on the train via a shipping crate, the only way they could afford. And the rest, as they say, is history.
Further American examples include JFK and RFK I, Nelson Rockefeller and . . . wait for it . . . Donald Trump. But my time to type this drivel grows short, and do want to mention at least one UKer:
> Joseph Chamberlain who resembled his contemporary T Roosevelt in many ways EXCEPT for the cowboy hat, and also in relative social standing, with TR being old money versus JC the (sorta) self-made man. Both Teddy and Pushful Joe where renowned imperialists, war-mongers AND reformers whose appeal to voters of middle and working classes was a key factor in their political rise. Joe Chamberlain never made it to Prime Minister, but his son Neville did. However, whereas TR only managed to split one major political party (Republican: 1912), JC did it with TWO (Liberal: 1888 over Home Rule; Conservative/Liberal Unionists over Protectionism versus Free Trade 1903).
> Harold Macmillan had the manner born, but was really (and relatively) nouveau riche, but he leveraged his old aristo persona to achieve electoral success thanks to millions of Brits NOT to the manner born.
Back from a weekend in the Derbyshire Dales and, as might have been expected given the 55th anniversary of the release of Carry on up the Khyber was at the end of last month, instead of serious political discussion, it's an afternoon for innuendo and ludicrous knob gags.
Twas ever thus on PB, some might say.
We are into the denouement of this version of Conservative Government - it's not quite the cones hotline but it's reminscent of Stephen Dorrell coming out to bat for Major and the Government in early 1997. The universe he inhabited, where the Government was doing wonderful things, everyone was happy and no one had the wobbles, was so far removed from everyone else's the only conclusion was he had fallen through a portal from an alternative Britain.
We had Opinium which was about as game changing as bi-regeneration in Who and it seems even the mighty Jordan Peterson is warning we will be Venezuela if Starmer wins. Well, we already have oil so I suppose there's a parallel of sorts but we had all this back in the dim and distant when apparently Blair was going to take us halfway down the road to Communism. Remind me how that worked out.
The death throes of the centre right are certainly illuminating - the strange thing is a conservative message of fiscal probity, targeted public spending and protecting communities and environment would probably play well among voters but that's not where thirteen and a half years of Conservative-led Government has got us.
The only reason being advanced by anyone for voting Conservative seems to me "Starmer would be worse" - how would he be "worse"? I can no more conceive of Starmer being worse than the corrupt bunch of incompetents than I can Sir Sidney Ruff-Diamond passing on an afternoon's Tiffin.
The death throes of the centre right? The centre-right is alive and well, and will continue to thrive headquartered in Chancellor Reeves' Treasury.
The fact that Labour is essentially offering the same prospectus as the current Government - hosing down pensioners with cash, tax rises and spending cuts for everyone else - and that its electoral offer therefore boils down to Continuity Conservatism, delivered slightly less incompetently, continues to receive remarkably little attention.
Labour's economic prospectus - essentially, that it will magic growth out of austerity and prayer and this will solve all of our other problems - is as fantastical as the sunlit uplands that "Brexit freedoms" were supposed to bring about. Relieving poverty and doing something meaningful to tackle the tsunami of working age sick cases - largely caused by obesity and mental ill-health, much of which can also be traced back to impoverishment - is a necessary precondition for economic success. How in the name of God are we meant to succeed when a fifth of the working population is part-time or living off benefits because they are knackered, and when we don't have the housing or other infrastructure to solve the problem by importing five or ten million fit immigrants?
Dealing with these problems, along with the tremendous complications resulting from the collapse of health and social care provision, has to come first, and therefore the money to help tackle it can only come from a pretty thoroughgoing program of redistribution, which Labour would have presented as just in the past but now regards as the work of the Devil. The current version of Labour is an essentially conservative party, focusing on the conservation of the wealth of those - principally the minted grey vote - who believe that they shouldn't be asked to pay for anything and whom Starmer and Reeves are too afraid to ask to pay for anything, either. And so on we go, circling the plughole.
You're not wrong, of course.
I approach it from a slightly different angle - if you think we should be running a balanced budget and ideally a surplus to begin to pay back the mountain of debt we have accumulated, how do you get to that?
The other aspect is we aspire to European levels of public services on American levels of taxation. Put another way, we want excellent public services as long as we don't have to pay for them and that's how we have validated the huge levels of borrowing which have characterised recent years. For all his professions of Thatcherism, Sunak has hosed us all with free money - surprisingly (or not), this made him very popular at one time.
Reeves knows she cannot instigate the debate because the slightest hint of tax rises and the Conservatives/Daily Mail go berserk and the slightest hint of spending cuts and the Unions go mad. The alternative now seems to be to demonise those who are economically inactive and the paradox of that is of course in order to fill the gaps left by the economically inactive we import cheap labour and that drives everyone mad.
The only area of house building where we have been successful is the madhouse.
I had a fun night last night. Soho was rammed, the London nightlife economy seems to be in full flow, despite Khan's best attempts; it was also good to learn that even in my advanced years I canstill be turfed out of the Groucho at 3am
However there was one jarring moment. Early in the evening I was talking to an old friend in the pub and we got on to Israel/Gaza and this friend came very close - to my mind - to outright anti-Semitism. eg he was defending the US university presidents who said "students marching around calling for genocide of the Jews" constitutes acceptable free speech
I pointed out to him there is no way he would take that position if the supposed students were marching around calling for "genocide of black people". He mumbled away, unable to refute this, then he pursued some insane counter-argument that calling for genocide does not necessarily equal violence.
GENOCIDE??
My friend is a generally mild mannered chap, a Remainery Lib Dem, with leftish tendencies on Woke. Not even a Corbynite
If someone like him is lapsing towards anti-Semitism then that is really ominous
Not wanting an outright shouting match I steered the conversation away from politics and the rest of the evening was a hoot, for everyone
Worth noting: the Scottish universities take account of poor performing schools by giving their applicants favourable treatment in terms of the grades they will accept.
You might think that this helps bridge the attainment gap. But the dirty little secret is that the kids who actually benefit are those whose parents pay for private tuition.
I know for a fact that pretty well every single child from my local secondary who has got into one of the "ancients" to do a degree that leads to one of the professions has had coaching from private tutors. Kids from poor homes don't stand a chance in proudly devolved egalitarian Scotland.
It's lamentable. Anecdotally, my own children suffered from this. Both the girls got taught to read by phonics and were well on their way by Christmas of the first year. My son, with Curriculum for Excellence, did not have a reading age at 7. He was memorising story tapes and his teacher never noticed. We got him tutoring, old style, and by the time he was 8 his reading age was 15. It just does not work. But so long as you tick enough boxes no one will notice.
Worth noting: the Scottish universities take account of poor performing schools by giving their applicants favourable treatment in terms of the grades they will accept.
You might think that this helps bridge the attainment gap. But the dirty little secret is that the kids who actually benefit are those whose parents pay for private tuition.
I know for a fact that pretty well every single child from my local secondary who has got into one of the "ancients" to do a degree that leads to one of the professions has had coaching from private tutors. Kids from poor homes don't stand a chance in proudly devolved egalitarian Scotland.
It's lamentable. Anecdotally, my own children suffered from this. Both the girls got taught to read by phonics and were well on their way by Christmas of the first year. My son, with Curriculum for Excellence, did not have a reading age at 7. He was memorising story tapes and his teacher never noticed. We got him tutoring, old style, and by the time he was 8 his reading age was 15. It just does not work. But so long as you tick enough boxes no one will notice.
Disturbing. Surely at some point Scottish voters are going to make the SNP pay for this failure?
I had a fun night last night. Soho was rammed, the London nightlife economy seems to be in full flow, despite Khan's best attempts; it was also good to learn that even in my advanced years I canstill be turfed out of the Groucho at 3am
However there was one jarring moment. Early in the evening I was talking to an old friend in the pub and we got on to Israel/Gaza and this friend came very close - to my mind - to outright anti-Semitism. eg he was defending the US university presidents who said "students marching around calling for genocide of the Jews" constitutes acceptable free speech
I pointed out to him there is no way he would take that position if the supposed students were marching around calling for "genocide of black people". He mumbled away, unable to refute this, then he pursued some insane counter-argument that calling for genocide does not necessarily equal violence.
GENOCIDE??
My friend is a generally mild mannered chap, a Remainery Lib Dem, with leftish tendencies on Woke. Not even a Corbynite
If someone like him is lapsing towards anti-Semitism then that is really ominous
Not wanting an outright shouting match I steered the conversation away from politics and the rest of the evening was a hoot, for everyone
But still. Disquieting
He might be writing on another blog in similar terms about your views on Islam and Islamists.
I had a fun night last night. Soho was rammed, the London nightlife economy seems to be in full flow, despite Khan's best attempts; it was also good to learn that even in my advanced years I canstill be turfed out of the Groucho at 3am
However there was one jarring moment. Early in the evening I was talking to an old friend in the pub and we got on to Israel/Gaza and this friend came very close - to my mind - to outright anti-Semitism. eg he was defending the US university presidents who said "students marching around calling for genocide of the Jews" constitutes acceptable free speech
I pointed out to him there is no way he would take that position if the supposed students were marching around calling for "genocide of black people". He mumbled away, unable to refute this, then he pursued some insane counter-argument that calling for genocide does not necessarily equal violence.
GENOCIDE??
My friend is a generally mild mannered chap, a Remainery Lib Dem, with leftish tendencies on Woke. Not even a Corbynite
If someone like him is lapsing towards anti-Semitism then that is really ominous
Not wanting an outright shouting match I steered the conversation away from politics and the rest of the evening was a hoot, for everyone
But still. Disquieting
He might be writing on another blog in similar terms about your views on Islam and Islamists.
Worth noting: the Scottish universities take account of poor performing schools by giving their applicants favourable treatment in terms of the grades they will accept.
You might think that this helps bridge the attainment gap. But the dirty little secret is that the kids who actually benefit are those whose parents pay for private tuition.
I know for a fact that pretty well every single child from my local secondary who has got into one of the "ancients" to do a degree that leads to one of the professions has had coaching from private tutors. Kids from poor homes don't stand a chance in proudly devolved egalitarian Scotland.
It's lamentable. Anecdotally, my own children suffered from this. Both the girls got taught to read by phonics and were well on their way by Christmas of the first year. My son, with Curriculum for Excellence, did not have a reading age at 7. He was memorising story tapes and his teacher never noticed. We got him tutoring, old style, and by the time he was 8 his reading age was 15. It just does not work. But so long as you tick enough boxes no one will notice.
Rolling the same way in London - private school at primary, switch to state for secondary/6th form.
With A levels, that’s just 4 tutors….
The state schools love the soaring results.
The thing I find interesting, is that it is back to the old style of learning for the really rich.
Mind you, a couple of friends have got their children sharing tuition sessions. A class of 2. Others have been asking about similar arrangements. I wonder where this will lead….
I had a fun night last night. Soho was rammed, the London nightlife economy seems to be in full flow, despite Khan's best attempts; it was also good to learn that even in my advanced years I canstill be turfed out of the Groucho at 3am
However there was one jarring moment. Early in the evening I was talking to an old friend in the pub and we got on to Israel/Gaza and this friend came very close - to my mind - to outright anti-Semitism. eg he was defending the US university presidents who said "students marching around calling for genocide of the Jews" constitutes acceptable free speech
I pointed out to him there is no way he would take that position if the supposed students were marching around calling for "genocide of black people". He mumbled away, unable to refute this, then he pursued some insane counter-argument that calling for genocide does not necessarily equal violence.
GENOCIDE??
My friend is a generally mild mannered chap, a Remainery Lib Dem, with leftish tendencies on Woke. Not even a Corbynite
If someone like him is lapsing towards anti-Semitism then that is really ominous
Not wanting an outright shouting match I steered the conversation away from politics and the rest of the evening was a hoot, for everyone
But still. Disquieting
He might be writing on another blog in similar terms about your views on Islam and Islamists.
I believe this is called Whataboutery?
'O, wad some Power the giftie gie us To see oursels as others see us!
Worth noting: the Scottish universities take account of poor performing schools by giving their applicants favourable treatment in terms of the grades they will accept.
You might think that this helps bridge the attainment gap. But the dirty little secret is that the kids who actually benefit are those whose parents pay for private tuition.
I know for a fact that pretty well every single child from my local secondary who has got into one of the "ancients" to do a degree that leads to one of the professions has had coaching from private tutors. Kids from poor homes don't stand a chance in proudly devolved egalitarian Scotland.
It's lamentable. Anecdotally, my own children suffered from this. Both the girls got taught to read by phonics and were well on their way by Christmas of the first year. My son, with Curriculum for Excellence, did not have a reading age at 7. He was memorising story tapes and his teacher never noticed. We got him tutoring, old style, and by the time he was 8 his reading age was 15. It just does not work. But so long as you tick enough boxes no one will notice.
Disturbing. Surely at some point Scottish voters are going to make the SNP pay for this failure?
Scottish politics is a sterile desert of constitutional wrangling and has been for 15 years now, possibly longer. It drowns out everything else. There is no meaningful debate on education, health, the economy, the desperate state of our roads with the A1 and the A9 still not duelled, the Ferries, the bottle scheme, nothing. You are either for independence so you vote for this bunch of twats or you are not in which case you vote for a variety of different twats.
Northern Ireland has more political guidance than Scotland, even without an Assembly. Its dispiriting.
On topic of politicos and helicopters, perhaps worth noting that in American politics, one of the first (if not THE first) to use whirly birds as an electoral ASSET was Lyndon B. Johnson.
In 1948 while campaigning for US Senate in Texas Democratic primary, and subsequent runoff, LBJ used helicopter(s) to travel hither and yon across the Lone Star State.
> Chopper enabled Johnson to meet, greet and speak in many separated/isolated communities large and (mostly) small in very time-effective manner.
> PLUS in those more innocent (or at least less high tech) times, the helicopter itself drew crowds and generated publicity for LBJ.
At least part of then-Congressman Johnson's razor-thin victory of sitting sitting popular governor, may be attributed to his helicopter strategy.
OF COURSE times & politics HAVE changed a bit since 1948 . . .
Worth noting: the Scottish universities take account of poor performing schools by giving their applicants favourable treatment in terms of the grades they will accept.
You might think that this helps bridge the attainment gap. But the dirty little secret is that the kids who actually benefit are those whose parents pay for private tuition.
I know for a fact that pretty well every single child from my local secondary who has got into one of the "ancients" to do a degree that leads to one of the professions has had coaching from private tutors. Kids from poor homes don't stand a chance in proudly devolved egalitarian Scotland.
It's lamentable. Anecdotally, my own children suffered from this. Both the girls got taught to read by phonics and were well on their way by Christmas of the first year. My son, with Curriculum for Excellence, did not have a reading age at 7. He was memorising story tapes and his teacher never noticed. We got him tutoring, old style, and by the time he was 8 his reading age was 15. It just does not work. But so long as you tick enough boxes no one will notice.
Disturbing. Surely at some point Scottish voters are going to make the SNP pay for this failure?
Scottish politics is a sterile desert of constitutional wrangling and has been for 15 years now, possibly longer. It drowns out everything else. There is no meaningful debate on education, health, the economy, the desperate state of our roads with the A1 and the A9 still not duelled, the Ferries, the bottle scheme, nothing. You are either for independence so you vote for this bunch of twats or you are not in which case you vote for a variety of different twats.
Northern Ireland has more political guidance than Scotland, even without an Assembly. Its dispiriting.
Dispiriting indeed
At least there is a chance the Nats could lose Holyrood in 2026, which would be a potential route out of this stagnation?
Mrs Stodge and I travelled on a couple of occasions to the Scillies using the helicoptyer from Penzance which BA used to operate.
Superb service - got to St Mary's in time for breakfast at The Bishop and Wolf and caught the morning ferries to St Martin's and Tresco while the poor old Scillonian passengers fetched up at lunchtime and could only wander round the town.
Thoroughly enjoyed it. Sad when it closed a good few years back but I gather a new company, Penzance Helicopters, has re-started the service.
Has anyone else encountered unexpected anti-Semitism?
That poll cited by @williamglenn suggests that I am observing something real
Yes, I have heard colleagues disgusted and repulsed by what is happening in Gaza. Nothing, in their view, justifies that, not even October 7th. They are not focused in their criticism, it is Jews as a people that are being held responsible.
Mrs Stodge and I travelled on a couple of occasions to the Scillies using the helicoptyer from Penzance which BA used to operate.
Superb service - got to St Mary's in time for breakfast at The Bishop and Wolf and caught the morning ferries to St Martin's and Tresco while the poor old Scillonian passengers fetched up at lunchtime and could only wander round the town.
Thoroughly enjoyed it. Sad when it closed a good few years back but I gather a new company, Penzance Helicopters, has re-started the service.
Yes I've done that flight, it is quite magical, taking off from Penzance then whirring across the seas of Lyonesse and landing on that fairytale archipelago. Brilliant
Has anyone else encountered unexpected anti-Semitism?
That poll cited by @williamglenn suggests that I am observing something real
Yes, I have heard colleagues disgusted and repulsed by what is happening in Gaza. Nothing, in their view, justifies that, not even October 7th. They are not focused in their criticism, it is Jews as a people that are being held responsible.
It's ever likely, when criticism of Israel is continually met with the response "if you criticise Israel, you are criticising all Jews." In the end, the response is going to be "OK - if you say so".
Has anyone else encountered unexpected anti-Semitism?
That poll cited by @williamglenn suggests that I am observing something real
It’s fairly common to encounter racism. Many people have no idea that you don’t have to shave your head, get badly spelt tattoos, drink 15 cans of cheap beer and join the EDL to be a racist.
If I had a pound for those occasions when the wine and cocaine was in at a posh event. And someone went “don’t get me wrong, but…”
When I asked my Ghanaian ex why she preferred talking to some unreconstructed South Africans at a do we went to - she kinda sighed and said “they are honest about their racism - half the other people in the room are like that, but just lie about it”
Worth noting: the Scottish universities take account of poor performing schools by giving their applicants favourable treatment in terms of the grades they will accept.
You might think that this helps bridge the attainment gap. But the dirty little secret is that the kids who actually benefit are those whose parents pay for private tuition.
I know for a fact that pretty well every single child from my local secondary who has got into one of the "ancients" to do a degree that leads to one of the professions has had coaching from private tutors. Kids from poor homes don't stand a chance in proudly devolved egalitarian Scotland.
It's lamentable. Anecdotally, my own children suffered from this. Both the girls got taught to read by phonics and were well on their way by Christmas of the first year. My son, with Curriculum for Excellence, did not have a reading age at 7. He was memorising story tapes and his teacher never noticed. We got him tutoring, old style, and by the time he was 8 his reading age was 15. It just does not work. But so long as you tick enough boxes no one will notice.
Rolling the same way in London - private school at primary, switch to state for secondary/6th form.
With A levels, that’s just 4 tutors….
The state schools love the soaring results.
The thing I find interesting, is that it is back to the old style of learning for the really rich.
Mind you, a couple of friends have got their children sharing tuition sessions. A class of 2. Others have been asking about similar arrangements. I wonder where this will lead….
Where it is leading, inevitably, is that the gap in performance between the affluent and the poor widens. It never was a level playing field but the slope for those from poor backgrounds in underperforming schools without tutors, let alone private education, gets steeper and steeper. The consequences for our society really cannot be overstated.
Has anyone else encountered unexpected anti-Semitism?
That poll cited by @williamglenn suggests that I am observing something real
Yes, I have heard colleagues disgusted and repulsed by what is happening in Gaza. Nothing, in their view, justifies that, not even October 7th. They are not focused in their criticism, it is Jews as a people that are being held responsible.
Interesting
But let me make sure I am getting you right -
It is perfectly arguable that October 7 does niot justify what Israel has done since in Gaza - I'm not sure I agree, but I could easily be persuaded of this, it is morally complex
However you are saying - if I understand you correctly - that people you know are going from that opinion (justifiable) to holding every Jewish person accountable for the behaviour of Israel in Gaza (unjustifiable)?
Mrs Stodge and I travelled on a couple of occasions to the Scillies using the helicoptyer from Penzance which BA used to operate.
Superb service - got to St Mary's in time for breakfast at The Bishop and Wolf and caught the morning ferries to St Martin's and Tresco while the poor old Scillonian passengers fetched up at lunchtime and could only wander round the town.
Thoroughly enjoyed it. Sad when it closed a good few years back but I gather a new company, Penzance Helicopters, has re-started the service.
Yes I've done that flight, it is quite magical, taking off from Penzance then whirring across the seas of Lyonesse and landing on that fairytale archipelago. Brilliant
If you get good weather the Scillies are Edenic
We were hugely fortunate on both occasions with cloudless skies and warm sunshine in May. I have to say the breakfast at the Bishop and Wolf was first class but should have left more room for lunch on St Martin's.
Mrs Stodge loved Tresco and its gardens but we've yet to visit either Bryher or St Agnes.
Mrs Stodge and I travelled on a couple of occasions to the Scillies using the helicoptyer from Penzance which BA used to operate.
Superb service - got to St Mary's in time for breakfast at The Bishop and Wolf and caught the morning ferries to St Martin's and Tresco while the poor old Scillonian passengers fetched up at lunchtime and could only wander round the town.
Thoroughly enjoyed it. Sad when it closed a good few years back but I gather a new company, Penzance Helicopters, has re-started the service.
Yes I've done that flight, it is quite magical, taking off from Penzance then whirring across the seas of Lyonesse and landing on that fairytale archipelago. Brilliant
If you get good weather the Scillies are Edenic
We were hugely fortunate on both occasions with cloudless skies and warm sunshine in May. I have to say the breakfast at the Bishop and Wolf was first class but should have left more room for lunch on St Martin's.
Mrs Stodge loved Tresco and its gardens but we've yet to visit either Bryher or St Agnes.
Ah, you must do St Agnes! If you get a fine day, you can have drink and lunch in the gardens of the Turks Head, or down on the beach beneath the pub
And it's worth noting there's some very weird shit in there, with Haley losing to Biden (while everyone else has her well ahead).
On the antisemitism one, the questions themselves are a bit of a mess.
And they certainly don't have young people calling for Israel to exist. 69% of young people think Israel has a right to exist as the homeland of Jews,
Simultaneously, 67% of those same young people also think Jews are oppressors. (Albeit, the question about Jews and oppression - on page 57 - frames it very weirdly - "false ideology" anyone. Go read it yourself.)
Just had a week of (relatively distant) funerals - end of year, end of life type things and have therefore sat through several church services including no fewer than two instances of 1 Corinthians 13.
Plenty of The Christ Childs and Will Live Forevers and Eternal Loves Died for You so on and so forth.
I find myself at these services staring intently at the vicar and the congregants in absolute wonder at such a set of beliefs. Each to their own, however, and good luck to them. As long as they don't do any harm all's well although a casual look through the past 5,000 years shows that this sadly has not been the case but one can hope.
I'm not sure which set of beliefs you are wondering at, but the set of aspirations expressed in I Corinthians 13 seem to me to be more or less the pinnacle of humanist and humanitarian theism no worse for the fact that lots of people (no doubt including thee and me) don't try hard enough to achieve it.
What is this harm the vicar and congregation (of which you were one, as sometimes am I) could do as a result of encountering this text?
None. The sentiment is great. As I said the main reaction is wonder at the belief. And also there has been not a little religious-inspired strife and oppression.
Has anyone else encountered unexpected anti-Semitism?
That poll cited by @williamglenn suggests that I am observing something real
It’s fairly common to encounter racism. Many people have no idea that you don’t have to shave your head, get badly spelt tattoos, drink 15 cans of cheap beer and join the EDL to be a racist.
If I had a pound for those occasions when the wine and cocaine was in at a posh event. And someone went “don’t get me wrong, but…”
When I asked my Ghanaian ex why she preferred talking to some unreconstructed South Africans at a do we went to - she kinda sighed and said “they are honest about their racism - half the other people in the room are like that, but just lie about it”
This is interesting, but again it is whataboutery
Of course racism is always with us, like poverty, hopefully one day we can abolish both
However I am specifically talking about anti-Semitism, and its sudden and overt re-appearance in society, often unabashed, and often from educated people - this to me is new and deeply perturbing
Has anyone else encountered unexpected anti-Semitism?
That poll cited by @williamglenn suggests that I am observing something real
Yes, I have heard colleagues disgusted and repulsed by what is happening in Gaza. Nothing, in their view, justifies that, not even October 7th. They are not focused in their criticism, it is Jews as a people that are being held responsible.
Interesting
But let me make sure I am getting you right -
It is perfectly arguable that October 7 does niot justify what Israel has done since in Gaza - I'm not sure I agree, but I could easily be persuaded of this, it is morally complex
However you are saying - if I understand you correctly - that people you know are going from that opinion (justifiable) to holding every Jewish person accountable for the behaviour of Israel in Gaza (unjustifiable)?
Yes, and that is where I differ from them. Criticism of Netanyahu's government and its policies I have no problem with. They bear a huge part of the responsibility for the current mess.
Holding Jews in this country responsible for this, just because they are Jewish, is wrong. Very wrong. Yesterday there were Palestinians and their supporters campaigning in Princes Street in Edinburgh. They had no doubt who their enemy was. it was Jews. All Jews. They wanted them dead.
Has anyone else encountered unexpected anti-Semitism?
That poll cited by @williamglenn suggests that I am observing something real
Yes, I have heard colleagues disgusted and repulsed by what is happening in Gaza. Nothing, in their view, justifies that, not even October 7th. They are not focused in their criticism, it is Jews as a people that are being held responsible.
Interesting
But let me make sure I am getting you right -
It is perfectly arguable that October 7 does niot justify what Israel has done since in Gaza - I'm not sure I agree, but I could easily be persuaded of this, it is morally complex
However you are saying - if I understand you correctly - that people you know are going from that opinion (justifiable) to holding every Jewish person accountable for the behaviour of Israel in Gaza (unjustifiable)?
Yes, and that is where I differ from them. Criticism of Netanyahu's government and its policies I have no problem with. They bear a huge part of the responsibility for the current mess.
Holding Jews in this country responsible for this, just because they are Jewish, is wrong. Very wrong. Yesterday there were Palestinians and their supporters campaigning in Princes Street in Edinburgh. They had no doubt who their enemy was. it was Jews. All Jews. They wanted them dead.
You are 100% correct.
And we're in this incredibly dangerous cycle, where Jews feel themselves under attack and Muslims see their co-religionists being attacked.
Worth noting: the Scottish universities take account of poor performing schools by giving their applicants favourable treatment in terms of the grades they will accept.
You might think that this helps bridge the attainment gap. But the dirty little secret is that the kids who actually benefit are those whose parents pay for private tuition.
I know for a fact that pretty well every single child from my local secondary who has got into one of the "ancients" to do a degree that leads to one of the professions has had coaching from private tutors. Kids from poor homes don't stand a chance in proudly devolved egalitarian Scotland.
It's lamentable. Anecdotally, my own children suffered from this. Both the girls got taught to read by phonics and were well on their way by Christmas of the first year. My son, with Curriculum for Excellence, did not have a reading age at 7. He was memorising story tapes and his teacher never noticed. We got him tutoring, old style, and by the time he was 8 his reading age was 15. It just does not work. But so long as you tick enough boxes no one will notice.
Rolling the same way in London - private school at primary, switch to state for secondary/6th form.
With A levels, that’s just 4 tutors….
The state schools love the soaring results.
The thing I find interesting, is that it is back to the old style of learning for the really rich.
Mind you, a couple of friends have got their children sharing tuition sessions. A class of 2. Others have been asking about similar arrangements. I wonder where this will lead….
Where it is leading, inevitably, is that the gap in performance between the affluent and the poor widens. It never was a level playing field but the slope for those from poor backgrounds in underperforming schools without tutors, let alone private education, gets steeper and steeper. The consequences for our society really cannot be overstated.
It will take about a decade for the political works to notice the tuition thing. The back slapping about successful state schools will drown it out.
It reduces the burden of private school on the middle class, and provides an example of success to the other kids. So it might not be all bad.
According to the admin at the local Free School, you get quite a few parents offering to pay for all kinds of things - even extra teachers. Which is not allowed, as I understand it
Has anyone else encountered unexpected anti-Semitism?
That poll cited by @williamglenn suggests that I am observing something real
Yes, I have heard colleagues disgusted and repulsed by what is happening in Gaza. Nothing, in their view, justifies that, not even October 7th. They are not focused in their criticism, it is Jews as a people that are being held responsible.
Interesting
But let me make sure I am getting you right -
It is perfectly arguable that October 7 does niot justify what Israel has done since in Gaza - I'm not sure I agree, but I could easily be persuaded of this, it is morally complex
However you are saying - if I understand you correctly - that people you know are going from that opinion (justifiable) to holding every Jewish person accountable for the behaviour of Israel in Gaza (unjustifiable)?
Yes, and that is where I differ from them. Criticism of Netanyahu's government and its policies I have no problem with. They bear a huge part of the responsibility for the current mess.
Holding Jews in this country responsible for this, just because they are Jewish, is wrong. Very wrong. Yesterday there were Palestinians and their supporters campaigning in Princes Street in Edinburgh. They had no doubt who their enemy was. it was Jews. All Jews. They wanted them dead.
I witnessed the same on the big Palestinian march in London. Naked and overt Jew-hatred. Horrendous
I don't know how we are going to root it out, but we need to root it out. It really doesn't help that educated clever people like my Lib Dem friend are happily parroting the same hateful nonsense albeit in more eloquent tones, it provides cover for even more extreme views
I have experienced two helicopter journeys. From heliport to offshore platform, and back again. Bloody awful. I spent the week knowing that I had to get back on the helicopter for the return flight.
Anyone who prefers this mode of transport to catching a train is, in my view, totally bonkers.
Helicopters are brilliant. I did a helicopter pub crawl once, in the Northern Territory. Flying from beach bar to riverside beershack to jungle gin-joint - surrounded by salt water crocodiles
Everyone got drunker and drunker as the day went on until the pilots eventually started racing each other. Superb
My one and only experience of helicopter travel was being collected from the top of a mountain in Drumochter and being dropped off at Raigmore Hospital in Inverness. Broken ankle.
Rather hilariously the chopper was met by ambulance at the helipad, and after being complicatedly transferred, it then took about 15 seconds to drive to the A&E dept.
I have to say the blokes in the copter were good value. Amused and sympathetic at the same time.
I have done a couple, La Guadia to JFK which was brilliant and one in Florida keys , at a crab shack and owner was an ex vietnam pilot and had a very small helicopter in the back , took us over the keys very low etc , was incredible if scary.
Hot off the press: Eddie Izzard has lost in her bid to fight Caroline Lucas's Brighton seat for Labour (as I predicted she would).
I wonder what other seat Izzard will try. The patronising and condescending nature of the social media from Izzard account can’t have helped. Vote for me, I’m trans and vote for me and I pledge to make my main home here.
What a clown.
Well, yes. That's how Izzard makes a living.
Izzard is actually quite an accomplished actor these days.
I was listening again to his 1994 show. Gut-bustingly funny and, like I believe I have discussed with @Leon who had the same reaction, I remember seeing him live many times around that time (the first time was during Gulf 1) and being in physical pain with laughter. There was simply no one funnier and most comics stood on his shoulders for observational/absurd routines.
As a politician? Relentlessly optimistic, generous, idealistic, and therefore ultimately probably likely to be a failure.
Yes, he was the funniest comedian I have ever seen (live or otherwise) - indeed the funniest person - in those early gigs
I have laughed more than that only a few times, usually on magic mushrooms or the like
Indeed, I think it was the 1994 show I saw live and for some reason he still make me laugh with his spiel about “le singe est dans l’arbre”. How just talking in French about a monkey in a tree could be so funny I will never know but he was very funny, a little surreal and delivered so well.
OMG yes the monkey in the tree riff. Incredible
Written down in cold black and white it isn't remotely funny, but his timing, his phrasing, his persona, the diffident shrugging, somehow made it the funniest thing I'd ever heard. I still don't know how. And it had to be seen live to get the full effect
It's all, or much of it is, on Amazon Prime ffs and/but well worth listening to, as I did this morning.
I saw him first in Soho can't remember which club and then followed him to the bigger venues.
And I will stop there or it will degenerate into a tiresome and banal rehearsal of his work a la Monty Python bores, suffice to say the Shaftesbury Theatre and royal fanfare opening riffs floored everyone from the outset.
Yet another rich-guy American politico of top rank was Nelson Rockefeller, long-term Governor of New York, Republican POTUS hopeful and (unelected) Vice President (under Gerald Ford).
One of the richest men in the US, from one of it's wealthiest clans of corporate mega-capitalists, he nevertheless achieve considerable electoral rapport with more-average citizens.
First, by getting the press then the public to call him "Rocky" something his family, friends, retainers, etc. never did (similar to how nobody who actually knew Theodore Roosevelt called HIM "Teddy").
Next, by developing the habit of calling just about any male he met on the campaign trail "Fella".
Then he was filmed and photographed, also on campaign trail, eating succession of blntzes, calzones, baklava and just about anything else from ethnic bakeries, restaurants, street vendors in New York City; and also piles of pies, corn-dogs, cotton-candy, etc., etc. during tours of Upstate county fairs.
Note that Rocky achieved his common touch with the aid of LARGE number of aides, strategists, support staff, you name it, he had it.
AND after he was elected (and re-elected) Governor, rather than charge the taxpayers for his transport and many other expenses, Rockefeller picked up the tab . . . something his granddaddy was notoriously reluctant to do.
Indeed, Rocky paid for entire blocks of Manhattan office space, for variety of state governmental programs and projects.
ADDENDUM - further note that Nelson Rockefeller was aided in his first campaign for governor of NY, by running against ANOTHER guy who was filthy rich, namely incumbent Democratic Gov. Averill Harriman.
Who incidentally while US Ambassador to UK during WW2 had affair with Pamela aka Mrs. Randolph Churchill; and after leaving politics and divorcing his first wife, he ended up reconnecting with her. AND after his death, Pamela Harriman herself ended up (figuratively and litterally) and American Ambassador to France.
Worth noting: the Scottish universities take account of poor performing schools by giving their applicants favourable treatment in terms of the grades they will accept.
You might think that this helps bridge the attainment gap. But the dirty little secret is that the kids who actually benefit are those whose parents pay for private tuition.
I know for a fact that pretty well every single child from my local secondary who has got into one of the "ancients" to do a degree that leads to one of the professions has had coaching from private tutors. Kids from poor homes don't stand a chance in proudly devolved egalitarian Scotland.
No hope of anything being fair under the crooked SNP.
Has anyone else encountered unexpected anti-Semitism?
That poll cited by @williamglenn suggests that I am observing something real
Yes, I have heard colleagues disgusted and repulsed by what is happening in Gaza. Nothing, in their view, justifies that, not even October 7th. They are not focused in their criticism, it is Jews as a people that are being held responsible.
It's ever likely, when criticism of Israel is continually met with the response "if you criticise Israel, you are criticising all Jews." In the end, the response is going to be "OK - if you say so".
No, no, no. The answer to that is not ok. The answer is don't talk rubbish.
I have experienced two helicopter journeys. From heliport to offshore platform, and back again. Bloody awful. I spent the week knowing that I had to get back on the helicopter for the return flight.
Anyone who prefers this mode of transport to catching a train is, in my view, totally bonkers.
Helicopters are brilliant. I did a helicopter pub crawl once, in the Northern Territory. Flying from beach bar to riverside beershack to jungle gin-joint - surrounded by salt water crocodiles
Everyone got drunker and drunker as the day went on until the pilots eventually started racing each other. Superb
My one and only experience of helicopter travel was being collected from the top of a mountain in Drumochter and being dropped off at Raigmore Hospital in Inverness. Broken ankle.
Rather hilariously the chopper was met by ambulance at the helipad, and after being complicatedly transferred, it then took about 15 seconds to drive to the A&E dept.
I have to say the blokes in the copter were good value. Amused and sympathetic at the same time.
I have done a couple, La Guadia to JFK which was brilliant and one in Florida keys , at a crab shack and owner was an ex vietnam pilot and had a very small helicopter in the back , took us over the keys very low etc , was incredible if scary.
The best chopper flight is Nice airport to Monte Carlo. Impossibly glamorous (and also means you avoid endless Riviera traffic)
Has anyone else encountered unexpected anti-Semitism?
That poll cited by @williamglenn suggests that I am observing something real
Yes, I have heard colleagues disgusted and repulsed by what is happening in Gaza. Nothing, in their view, justifies that, not even October 7th. They are not focused in their criticism, it is Jews as a people that are being held responsible.
Interesting
But let me make sure I am getting you right -
It is perfectly arguable that October 7 does niot justify what Israel has done since in Gaza - I'm not sure I agree, but I could easily be persuaded of this, it is morally complex
However you are saying - if I understand you correctly - that people you know are going from that opinion (justifiable) to holding every Jewish person accountable for the behaviour of Israel in Gaza (unjustifiable)?
Yes, and that is where I differ from them. Criticism of Netanyahu's government and its policies I have no problem with. They bear a huge part of the responsibility for the current mess.
Holding Jews in this country responsible for this, just because they are Jewish, is wrong. Very wrong. Yesterday there were Palestinians and their supporters campaigning in Princes Street in Edinburgh. They had no doubt who their enemy was. it was Jews. All Jews. They wanted them dead.
That is incredibly disturbing. To be frank it's not helped by Yousaf banging on about the situation in Gaza and criticising the UK Govts balanced approach. We all appreciate the terrible situation he was in with his in-laws, and he gained some sympathy for this, but in his position he needs to step back a bit and consider the impact on Scotland's Jewish community. He has a duty of care to minorities.
Worth noting: the Scottish universities take account of poor performing schools by giving their applicants favourable treatment in terms of the grades they will accept.
You might think that this helps bridge the attainment gap. But the dirty little secret is that the kids who actually benefit are those whose parents pay for private tuition.
I know for a fact that pretty well every single child from my local secondary who has got into one of the "ancients" to do a degree that leads to one of the professions has had coaching from private tutors. Kids from poor homes don't stand a chance in proudly devolved egalitarian Scotland.
It's lamentable. Anecdotally, my own children suffered from this. Both the girls got taught to read by phonics and were well on their way by Christmas of the first year. My son, with Curriculum for Excellence, did not have a reading age at 7. He was memorising story tapes and his teacher never noticed. We got him tutoring, old style, and by the time he was 8 his reading age was 15. It just does not work. But so long as you tick enough boxes no one will notice.
Disturbing. Surely at some point Scottish voters are going to make the SNP pay for this failure?
Scottish politics is a sterile desert of constitutional wrangling and has been for 15 years now, possibly longer. It drowns out everything else. There is no meaningful debate on education, health, the economy, the desperate state of our roads with the A1 and the A9 still not duelled, the Ferries, the bottle scheme, nothing. You are either for independence so you vote for this bunch of twats or you are not in which case you vote for a variety of different twats.
Northern Ireland has more political guidance than Scotland, even without an Assembly. Its dispiriting.
Dispiriting indeed
At least there is a chance the Nats could lose Holyrood in 2026, which would be a potential route out of this stagnation?
The ferries thing is mind-boggling
At least they have hulls which may be ferries in the end even if expensive , if I remember correctly in the English version there were not even rowing boats that were purchased just a paper contract. That is mind boggling
As an example of a highly educated man treading on dangerous thin ice, re the Jews, the historian William Dalrymple edges dangerously close to anti-Semitism in some of his social media discourse. To my mind
Has anyone else encountered unexpected anti-Semitism?
That poll cited by @williamglenn suggests that I am observing something real
Yes, I have heard colleagues disgusted and repulsed by what is happening in Gaza. Nothing, in their view, justifies that, not even October 7th. They are not focused in their criticism, it is Jews as a people that are being held responsible.
Interesting
But let me make sure I am getting you right -
It is perfectly arguable that October 7 does niot justify what Israel has done since in Gaza - I'm not sure I agree, but I could easily be persuaded of this, it is morally complex
However you are saying - if I understand you correctly - that people you know are going from that opinion (justifiable) to holding every Jewish person accountable for the behaviour of Israel in Gaza (unjustifiable)?
Yes, and that is where I differ from them. Criticism of Netanyahu's government and its policies I have no problem with. They bear a huge part of the responsibility for the current mess.
Holding Jews in this country responsible for this, just because they are Jewish, is wrong. Very wrong. Yesterday there were Palestinians and their supporters campaigning in Princes Street in Edinburgh. They had no doubt who their enemy was. it was Jews. All Jews. They wanted them dead.
I witnessed the same on the big Palestinian march in London. Naked and overt Jew-hatred. Horrendous
I don't know how we are going to root it out, but we need to root it out. It really doesn't help that educated clever people like my Lib Dem friend are happily parroting the same hateful nonsense albeit in more eloquent tones, it provides cover for even more extreme views
Let's hope no one is suggesting all UK Jews should be rounded up and interned.
Worth noting: the Scottish universities take account of poor performing schools by giving their applicants favourable treatment in terms of the grades they will accept.
You might think that this helps bridge the attainment gap. But the dirty little secret is that the kids who actually benefit are those whose parents pay for private tuition.
I know for a fact that pretty well every single child from my local secondary who has got into one of the "ancients" to do a degree that leads to one of the professions has had coaching from private tutors. Kids from poor homes don't stand a chance in proudly devolved egalitarian Scotland.
It's lamentable. Anecdotally, my own children suffered from this. Both the girls got taught to read by phonics and were well on their way by Christmas of the first year. My son, with Curriculum for Excellence, did not have a reading age at 7. He was memorising story tapes and his teacher never noticed. We got him tutoring, old style, and by the time he was 8 his reading age was 15. It just does not work. But so long as you tick enough boxes no one will notice.
Disturbing. Surely at some point Scottish voters are going to make the SNP pay for this failure?
Scottish politics is a sterile desert of constitutional wrangling and has been for 15 years now, possibly longer. It drowns out everything else. There is no meaningful debate on education, health, the economy, the desperate state of our roads with the A1 and the A9 still not duelled, the Ferries, the bottle scheme, nothing. You are either for independence so you vote for this bunch of twats or you are not in which case you vote for a variety of different twats.
Northern Ireland has more political guidance than Scotland, even without an Assembly. Its dispiriting.
Dispiriting indeed
At least there is a chance the Nats could lose Holyrood in 2026, which would be a potential route out of this stagnation?
The ferries thing is mind-boggling
Whereas the Houses of Parliament repairs saga is just business as usual.
Worth noting: the Scottish universities take account of poor performing schools by giving their applicants favourable treatment in terms of the grades they will accept.
You might think that this helps bridge the attainment gap. But the dirty little secret is that the kids who actually benefit are those whose parents pay for private tuition.
I know for a fact that pretty well every single child from my local secondary who has got into one of the "ancients" to do a degree that leads to one of the professions has had coaching from private tutors. Kids from poor homes don't stand a chance in proudly devolved egalitarian Scotland.
It's lamentable. Anecdotally, my own children suffered from this. Both the girls got taught to read by phonics and were well on their way by Christmas of the first year. My son, with Curriculum for Excellence, did not have a reading age at 7. He was memorising story tapes and his teacher never noticed. We got him tutoring, old style, and by the time he was 8 his reading age was 15. It just does not work. But so long as you tick enough boxes no one will notice.
Disturbing. Surely at some point Scottish voters are going to make the SNP pay for this failure?
They are the best of a bad bunch , voting for any of the English regional donkeys would be a bit like voting Tory in England at next election.
Worth noting: the Scottish universities take account of poor performing schools by giving their applicants favourable treatment in terms of the grades they will accept.
You might think that this helps bridge the attainment gap. But the dirty little secret is that the kids who actually benefit are those whose parents pay for private tuition.
I know for a fact that pretty well every single child from my local secondary who has got into one of the "ancients" to do a degree that leads to one of the professions has had coaching from private tutors. Kids from poor homes don't stand a chance in proudly devolved egalitarian Scotland.
It's lamentable. Anecdotally, my own children suffered from this. Both the girls got taught to read by phonics and were well on their way by Christmas of the first year. My son, with Curriculum for Excellence, did not have a reading age at 7. He was memorising story tapes and his teacher never noticed. We got him tutoring, old style, and by the time he was 8 his reading age was 15. It just does not work. But so long as you tick enough boxes no one will notice.
Disturbing. Surely at some point Scottish voters are going to make the SNP pay for this failure?
They are the best of a bad bunch , voting for any of the English regional donkeys would be a bit like voting Tory in England at next election.
And thus the stagnation will continue. Must be so very wearying for sensible Scots like @DavidL
Has anyone else encountered unexpected anti-Semitism?
That poll cited by @williamglenn suggests that I am observing something real
Yes, I have heard colleagues disgusted and repulsed by what is happening in Gaza. Nothing, in their view, justifies that, not even October 7th. They are not focused in their criticism, it is Jews as a people that are being held responsible.
Interesting
But let me make sure I am getting you right -
It is perfectly arguable that October 7 does niot justify what Israel has done since in Gaza - I'm not sure I agree, but I could easily be persuaded of this, it is morally complex
However you are saying - if I understand you correctly - that people you know are going from that opinion (justifiable) to holding every Jewish person accountable for the behaviour of Israel in Gaza (unjustifiable)?
Yes, and that is where I differ from them. Criticism of Netanyahu's government and its policies I have no problem with. They bear a huge part of the responsibility for the current mess.
Holding Jews in this country responsible for this, just because they are Jewish, is wrong. Very wrong. Yesterday there were Palestinians and their supporters campaigning in Princes Street in Edinburgh. They had no doubt who their enemy was. it was Jews. All Jews. They wanted them dead.
That is incredibly disturbing. To be frank it's not helped by Yousaf banging on about the situation in Gaza and criticising the UK Govts balanced approach. We all appreciate the terrible situation he was in with his in-laws, and he gained some sympathy for this, but in his position he needs to step back a bit and consider the impact on Scotland's Jewish community. He has a duty of care to minorities.
Yes same with him dolling out dosh all over teh place when people in Scotland are homeless and starving, the guy is just totally useless and a nasty piece of work. He lives up to his several monikers.
Has anyone else encountered unexpected anti-Semitism?
That poll cited by @williamglenn suggests that I am observing something real
Yes, I have heard colleagues disgusted and repulsed by what is happening in Gaza. Nothing, in their view, justifies that, not even October 7th. They are not focused in their criticism, it is Jews as a people that are being held responsible.
Interesting
But let me make sure I am getting you right -
It is perfectly arguable that October 7 does niot justify what Israel has done since in Gaza - I'm not sure I agree, but I could easily be persuaded of this, it is morally complex
However you are saying - if I understand you correctly - that people you know are going from that opinion (justifiable) to holding every Jewish person accountable for the behaviour of Israel in Gaza (unjustifiable)?
Yes, and that is where I differ from them. Criticism of Netanyahu's government and its policies I have no problem with. They bear a huge part of the responsibility for the current mess.
Holding Jews in this country responsible for this, just because they are Jewish, is wrong. Very wrong. Yesterday there were Palestinians and their supporters campaigning in Princes Street in Edinburgh. They had no doubt who their enemy was. it was Jews. All Jews. They wanted them dead.
I witnessed the same on the big Palestinian march in London. Naked and overt Jew-hatred. Horrendous
I don't know how we are going to root it out, but we need to root it out. It really doesn't help that educated clever people like my Lib Dem friend are happily parroting the same hateful nonsense albeit in more eloquent tones, it provides cover for even more extreme views
Let's hope no one is suggesting all UK Jews should be rounded up and interned.
Wasn’t there a poster on PB arguing that all of certain group should be detained without trial? Name escapes me….
Has anyone else encountered unexpected anti-Semitism?
That poll cited by @williamglenn suggests that I am observing something real
Yes, I have heard colleagues disgusted and repulsed by what is happening in Gaza. Nothing, in their view, justifies that, not even October 7th. They are not focused in their criticism, it is Jews as a people that are being held responsible.
It's ever likely, when criticism of Israel is continually met with the response "if you criticise Israel, you are criticising all Jews." In the end, the response is going to be "OK - if you say so".
It's not continually met with that response. That response is only invented, as you have here, to try to bring some faux credibility to your own views on the Jews.
Has anyone else encountered unexpected anti-Semitism?
That poll cited by @williamglenn suggests that I am observing something real
Yes, I have heard colleagues disgusted and repulsed by what is happening in Gaza. Nothing, in their view, justifies that, not even October 7th. They are not focused in their criticism, it is Jews as a people that are being held responsible.
Interesting
But let me make sure I am getting you right -
It is perfectly arguable that October 7 does niot justify what Israel has done since in Gaza - I'm not sure I agree, but I could easily be persuaded of this, it is morally complex
However you are saying - if I understand you correctly - that people you know are going from that opinion (justifiable) to holding every Jewish person accountable for the behaviour of Israel in Gaza (unjustifiable)?
Yes, and that is where I differ from them. Criticism of Netanyahu's government and its policies I have no problem with. They bear a huge part of the responsibility for the current mess.
Holding Jews in this country responsible for this, just because they are Jewish, is wrong. Very wrong. Yesterday there were Palestinians and their supporters campaigning in Princes Street in Edinburgh. They had no doubt who their enemy was. it was Jews. All Jews. They wanted them dead.
These people must be sick in the head. Have to say the FM encourages it daily.
Worth noting: the Scottish universities take account of poor performing schools by giving their applicants favourable treatment in terms of the grades they will accept.
You might think that this helps bridge the attainment gap. But the dirty little secret is that the kids who actually benefit are those whose parents pay for private tuition.
I know for a fact that pretty well every single child from my local secondary who has got into one of the "ancients" to do a degree that leads to one of the professions has had coaching from private tutors. Kids from poor homes don't stand a chance in proudly devolved egalitarian Scotland.
It's lamentable. Anecdotally, my own children suffered from this. Both the girls got taught to read by phonics and were well on their way by Christmas of the first year. My son, with Curriculum for Excellence, did not have a reading age at 7. He was memorising story tapes and his teacher never noticed. We got him tutoring, old style, and by the time he was 8 his reading age was 15. It just does not work. But so long as you tick enough boxes no one will notice.
Disturbing. Surely at some point Scottish voters are going to make the SNP pay for this failure?
Scottish politics is a sterile desert of constitutional wrangling and has been for 15 years now, possibly longer. It drowns out everything else. There is no meaningful debate on education, health, the economy, the desperate state of our roads with the A1 and the A9 still not duelled, the Ferries, the bottle scheme, nothing. You are either for independence so you vote for this bunch of twats or you are not in which case you vote for a variety of different twats.
Northern Ireland has more political guidance than Scotland, even without an Assembly. Its dispiriting.
As a matter of fact I think these multiple failures may catch up with the SNP. They are, at last, being reported.
And, let's face it, the Yousaf/Robison combo is not in the same league as Sturgeon/Swinney in motivating their natural supporters. ot talking down their opponents. No-one is scared or initimidated anymore.
Worth noting: the Scottish universities take account of poor performing schools by giving their applicants favourable treatment in terms of the grades they will accept.
You might think that this helps bridge the attainment gap. But the dirty little secret is that the kids who actually benefit are those whose parents pay for private tuition.
I know for a fact that pretty well every single child from my local secondary who has got into one of the "ancients" to do a degree that leads to one of the professions has had coaching from private tutors. Kids from poor homes don't stand a chance in proudly devolved egalitarian Scotland.
It's lamentable. Anecdotally, my own children suffered from this. Both the girls got taught to read by phonics and were well on their way by Christmas of the first year. My son, with Curriculum for Excellence, did not have a reading age at 7. He was memorising story tapes and his teacher never noticed. We got him tutoring, old style, and by the time he was 8 his reading age was 15. It just does not work. But so long as you tick enough boxes no one will notice.
Disturbing. Surely at some point Scottish voters are going to make the SNP pay for this failure?
They are the best of a bad bunch , voting for any of the English regional donkeys would be a bit like voting Tory in England at next election.
And thus the stagnation will continue. Must be so very wearying for sensible Scots like @DavidL
England is no better, in fact likely is worse. Our only hope is to get out and dump the SNP, at least then we would get some other real Scottish parties that would eb interested in teh country rather than having grifters at home and down south robbing us blind.
Back from a weekend in the Derbyshire Dales and, as might have been expected given the 55th anniversary of the release of Carry on up the Khyber was at the end of last month, instead of serious political discussion, it's an afternoon for innuendo and ludicrous knob gags.
Twas ever thus on PB, some might say.
We are into the denouement of this version of Conservative Government - it's not quite the cones hotline but it's reminscent of Stephen Dorrell coming out to bat for Major and the Government in early 1997. The universe he inhabited, where the Government was doing wonderful things, everyone was happy and no one had the wobbles, was so far removed from everyone else's the only conclusion was he had fallen through a portal from an alternative Britain.
We had Opinium which was about as game changing as bi-regeneration in Who and it seems even the mighty Jordan Peterson is warning we will be Venezuela if Starmer wins. Well, we already have oil so I suppose there's a parallel of sorts but we had all this back in the dim and distant when apparently Blair was going to take us halfway down the road to Communism. Remind me how that worked out.
The death throes of the centre right are certainly illuminating - the strange thing is a conservative message of fiscal probity, targeted public spending and protecting communities and environment would probably play well among voters but that's not where thirteen and a half years od Conservative-led Government has got us.
The only reason being advanced by anyone for voting Conservative seems to me "Starmer would be worse" - how would he be "worse"? I can no more conceive of Starmer being worse than the corrupt bunch of incompetents than I can Sir Sidney Ruff-Diamond passing on an afternoon's Tiffin.
This was a man who was content to serve in a shadow cabinet led by Jeremy Corbyn. The space for 'worse' is pretty big.
Are you forgetting Sunak served as CoE in a Johnson Government? You seem to ignore that Johnson was as equally unsuitable for high office as was Corbyn. In all fairness to Corbyn, by dint of being a serial loser he has done less damage to our nation than has Johnson, and thus Sunak.
They are not equivalent
Johnson was a bad PM who was unsuited for the role
Corbyn, by virtue of his antisemitism, would have shamed Britain if he had been elected
Has anyone else encountered unexpected anti-Semitism?
That poll cited by @williamglenn suggests that I am observing something real
Yes, I have heard colleagues disgusted and repulsed by what is happening in Gaza. Nothing, in their view, justifies that, not even October 7th. They are not focused in their criticism, it is Jews as a people that are being held responsible.
Interesting
But let me make sure I am getting you right -
It is perfectly arguable that October 7 does niot justify what Israel has done since in Gaza - I'm not sure I agree, but I could easily be persuaded of this, it is morally complex
However you are saying - if I understand you correctly - that people you know are going from that opinion (justifiable) to holding every Jewish person accountable for the behaviour of Israel in Gaza (unjustifiable)?
Yes, and that is where I differ from them. Criticism of Netanyahu's government and its policies I have no problem with. They bear a huge part of the responsibility for the current mess.
Holding Jews in this country responsible for this, just because they are Jewish, is wrong. Very wrong. Yesterday there were Palestinians and their supporters campaigning in Princes Street in Edinburgh. They had no doubt who their enemy was. it was Jews. All Jews. They wanted them dead.
These people must be sick in the head. Have to say the FM encourages it daily.
They are very, very angry. And a little desperate. As @rcs1000 points out people are being driven to extremes.
Speaking of Eddie (Marsan now, not Izzard) I was listening to an old episode of Must Watch to hear their views on Squid Game (the original series not the reality show) and they were reviewing Ridley Road which is about Colin Jordan and his fascists in the 1960s. Plus ca change as they might say. In France.
Fuck. There was I talking about vintage Eddie Izzard and I hadn't realised we'd moved onto the resurgence of anti-Semitism.
Even amongst the most intelligent people on PB.
The pal of mine who I quoted earlier - beginning this evening's debate - is one of the smartest people I know, yet he was making - to my mind - blatantly anti-Semitic remarks (which I have never heard from him ever before, it's worth noting)
As I say he got himself in such a tangle trying to justify the infamous answers of the US university presidents at Congress, that he ended up claiming it was OK to call for the "genocide of Jews" on a US campus because "genocide does not necessarily mean violence"
How can a man with an IQ over 140 end up trotting out arrant nonsense like that? The answer, I fear, is anti Semitism clouding his judgement and forcing him into absurd intellectual contortions
Back from a weekend in the Derbyshire Dales and, as might have been expected given the 55th anniversary of the release of Carry on up the Khyber was at the end of last month, instead of serious political discussion, it's an afternoon for innuendo and ludicrous knob gags.
Twas ever thus on PB, some might say.
We are into the denouement of this version of Conservative Government - it's not quite the cones hotline but it's reminscent of Stephen Dorrell coming out to bat for Major and the Government in early 1997. The universe he inhabited, where the Government was doing wonderful things, everyone was happy and no one had the wobbles, was so far removed from everyone else's the only conclusion was he had fallen through a portal from an alternative Britain.
We had Opinium which was about as game changing as bi-regeneration in Who and it seems even the mighty Jordan Peterson is warning we will be Venezuela if Starmer wins. Well, we already have oil so I suppose there's a parallel of sorts but we had all this back in the dim and distant when apparently Blair was going to take us halfway down the road to Communism. Remind me how that worked out.
The death throes of the centre right are certainly illuminating - the strange thing is a conservative message of fiscal probity, targeted public spending and protecting communities and environment would probably play well among voters but that's not where thirteen and a half years od Conservative-led Government has got us.
The only reason being advanced by anyone for voting Conservative seems to me "Starmer would be worse" - how would he be "worse"? I can no more conceive of Starmer being worse than the corrupt bunch of incompetents than I can Sir Sidney Ruff-Diamond passing on an afternoon's Tiffin.
This was a man who was content to serve in a shadow cabinet led by Jeremy Corbyn. The space for 'worse' is pretty big.
Are you forgetting Sunak served as CoE in a Johnson Government? You seem to ignore that Johnson was as equally unsuitable for high office as was Corbyn. In all fairness to Corbyn, by dint of being a serial loser he has done less damage to our nation than has Johnson, and thus Sunak.
They are not equivalent
Johnson was a bad PM who was unsuited for the role
Corbyn, by virtue of his antisemitism, would have shamed Britain if he had been elected
Boris Johnson said Muslim women looked like letterboxes and referred to piccaninies but obviously that's totally fine.
And it's worth noting there's some very weird shit in there, with Haley losing to Biden (while everyone else has her well ahead).
On the antisemitism one, the questions themselves are a bit of a mess.
And they certainly don't have young people calling for Israel to exist. 69% of young people think Israel has a right to exist as the homeland of Jews,
Simultaneously, 67% of those same young people also think Jews are oppressors. (Albeit, the question about Jews and oppression - on page 57 - frames it very weirdly - "false ideology" anyone. Go read it yourself.)
DeSantis second choice for GOP nomination after Trump, Haley third
Biden leads DeSantis 44% to 41% and Haley 42% to 40% but Trump leads Biden 47% to 42% albeit with 12% DK
Has anyone else encountered unexpected anti-Semitism?
That poll cited by @williamglenn suggests that I am observing something real
Yes, I have heard colleagues disgusted and repulsed by what is happening in Gaza. Nothing, in their view, justifies that, not even October 7th. They are not focused in their criticism, it is Jews as a people that are being held responsible.
It's ever likely, when criticism of Israel is continually met with the response "if you criticise Israel, you are criticising all Jews." In the end, the response is going to be "OK - if you say so".
It's not though - there are plenty of people, not least many Israelis themselves, who are scathing about Netanyahu, his allies, and their actions before and after 7 October. They manage it.
But some people - actually a frightening amount of people - are just very, very bad at criticising Israel without lapsing into antisemitic conspiracism and tropes. They then act like the fact they're saying these things about Israel or 'Zionists' rather than Jews is some kind of get out of jail free card that makes their views OK because to them hating Israel is the moral position so the anger that produces it is justified.
First blessing for a same sex couple in the Church of England took place today at St John the Baptist Church in Felixstowe, Suffolk after approval from the House of Bishops and Synod https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-suffolk-67743298
Fuck. There was I talking about vintage Eddie Izzard and I hadn't realised we'd moved onto the resurgence of anti-Semitism.
Even amongst the most intelligent people on PB.
The pal of mine who I quoted earlier - beginning this evening's debate - is one of the smartest people I know, yet he was making - to my mind - blatantly anti-Semitic remarks (which I have never heard from him ever before, it's worth noting)
As I say he got himself in such a tangle trying to justify the infamous answers of the US university presidents at Congress, that he ended up claiming it was OK to call for the "genocide of Jews" on a US campus because "genocide does not necessarily mean violence"
How can a man with an IQ over 140 end up trotting out arrant nonsense like that? The answer, I fear, is anti Semitism clouding his judgement and forcing him into absurd intellectual contortions
Of course the big error was to discuss the thing in the first place. But I have no doubt anti-semitism exists all over the place. One reason I believe is because traditionally Jews have been weak so it has suited bullies to discriminate against them. That weakness as I have several times noted has also been a reason why The Left embraced them immediately post WWII and has rejected them now.
Worth noting: the Scottish universities take account of poor performing schools by giving their applicants favourable treatment in terms of the grades they will accept.
You might think that this helps bridge the attainment gap. But the dirty little secret is that the kids who actually benefit are those whose parents pay for private tuition.
I know for a fact that pretty well every single child from my local secondary who has got into one of the "ancients" to do a degree that leads to one of the professions has had coaching from private tutors. Kids from poor homes don't stand a chance in proudly devolved egalitarian Scotland.
It's lamentable. Anecdotally, my own children suffered from this. Both the girls got taught to read by phonics and were well on their way by Christmas of the first year. My son, with Curriculum for Excellence, did not have a reading age at 7. He was memorising story tapes and his teacher never noticed. We got him tutoring, old style, and by the time he was 8 his reading age was 15. It just does not work. But so long as you tick enough boxes no one will notice.
Disturbing. Surely at some point Scottish voters are going to make the SNP pay for this failure?
Scottish politics is a sterile desert of constitutional wrangling and has been for 15 years now, possibly longer. It drowns out everything else. There is no meaningful debate on education, health, the economy, the desperate state of our roads with the A1 and the A9 still not duelled, the Ferries, the bottle scheme, nothing. You are either for independence so you vote for this bunch of twats or you are not in which case you vote for a variety of different twats.
Northern Ireland has more political guidance than Scotland, even without an Assembly. Its dispiriting.
As a matter of fact I think these multiple failures may catch up with the SNP. They are, at last, being reported.
And, let's face it, the Yousaf/Robison combo is not in the same league as Sturgeon/Swinney in motivating their natural supporters. ot talking down their opponents. No-one is scared or initimidated anymore.
Yousaf does not have the same teflon plating that Nicola had but it is still remarkable how few of the current issues are actually being reported in the mainstream media.
There is the Minister who was allegedly having an affair, Hancock style, with an MP during Covid, there is the deep disquiet that nothing seems to be happening in relation to Operation Branchform after nearly 2.5 years now, there was the recent humiliation of the Scottish government taking their own Information Commissioner to court to try and stop the production of material that was the basis of his report but was so redacted that the Commissioner himself said it was highly distorted and he could not support it, there is the complete lack of contemporaneous records or minutes of meetings given to the Covid Inquiry, amongst others, so few of these stories and many more get any attention at all from our media.
Worth noting: the Scottish universities take account of poor performing schools by giving their applicants favourable treatment in terms of the grades they will accept.
You might think that this helps bridge the attainment gap. But the dirty little secret is that the kids who actually benefit are those whose parents pay for private tuition.
I know for a fact that pretty well every single child from my local secondary who has got into one of the "ancients" to do a degree that leads to one of the professions has had coaching from private tutors. Kids from poor homes don't stand a chance in proudly devolved egalitarian Scotland.
It's lamentable. Anecdotally, my own children suffered from this. Both the girls got taught to read by phonics and were well on their way by Christmas of the first year. My son, with Curriculum for Excellence, did not have a reading age at 7. He was memorising story tapes and his teacher never noticed. We got him tutoring, old style, and by the time he was 8 his reading age was 15. It just does not work. But so long as you tick enough boxes no one will notice.
Disturbing. Surely at some point Scottish voters are going to make the SNP pay for this failure?
Scottish politics is a sterile desert of constitutional wrangling and has been for 15 years now, possibly longer. It drowns out everything else. There is no meaningful debate on education, health, the economy, the desperate state of our roads with the A1 and the A9 still not duelled, the Ferries, the bottle scheme, nothing. You are either for independence so you vote for this bunch of twats or you are not in which case you vote for a variety of different twats.
Northern Ireland has more political guidance than Scotland, even without an Assembly. Its dispiriting.
As a matter of fact I think these multiple failures may catch up with the SNP. They are, at last, being reported.
And, let's face it, the Yousaf/Robison combo is not in the same league as Sturgeon/Swinney in motivating their natural supporters. ot talking down their opponents. No-one is scared or initimidated anymore.
It was the Sturgeon/Swinney partnership that signed off the revised Fiscal Agreement that will result in next week’s brutal Holyrood budget. Raising 900 million in tax increases to give a net 170 million increase in the total budget is the work of bumbling amateurs, and we’re now saddled with worse replacements.
In the new Harvard/Harris poll, 67% of respondents aged 18-24 agree that "Jews as a class are oppressors and should be treated as oppressors."
Consistent with other polls that have found relatively high anti-Jewish sentiment among young American adults.
I think that’s a selective reading of the poll. 66% of that age group think Hamas’s attacks on Israel were genocidal in nature. Asked whether they support Israel or Hamas, that age group split 50%/50%.
66% of that age group think antisemitism is growing in the US; 69% think discrimination against Muslims is growing. 63% say antisemitism is prevalent on campuses. 68% say Jewish students are facing harassment. 70%, still the same age group, think that calling for the genocide of Jewish people is hate speech (compared to 79% across all ages).
69%, same age group, think Israel has a right to exist.
Back from a weekend in the Derbyshire Dales and, as might have been expected given the 55th anniversary of the release of Carry on up the Khyber was at the end of last month, instead of serious political discussion, it's an afternoon for innuendo and ludicrous knob gags.
Twas ever thus on PB, some might say.
We are into the denouement of this version of Conservative Government - it's not quite the cones hotline but it's reminscent of Stephen Dorrell coming out to bat for Major and the Government in early 1997. The universe he inhabited, where the Government was doing wonderful things, everyone was happy and no one had the wobbles, was so far removed from everyone else's the only conclusion was he had fallen through a portal from an alternative Britain.
We had Opinium which was about as game changing as bi-regeneration in Who and it seems even the mighty Jordan Peterson is warning we will be Venezuela if Starmer wins. Well, we already have oil so I suppose there's a parallel of sorts but we had all this back in the dim and distant when apparently Blair was going to take us halfway down the road to Communism. Remind me how that worked out.
The death throes of the centre right are certainly illuminating - the strange thing is a conservative message of fiscal probity, targeted public spending and protecting communities and environment would probably play well among voters but that's not where thirteen and a half years od Conservative-led Government has got us.
The only reason being advanced by anyone for voting Conservative seems to me "Starmer would be worse" - how would he be "worse"? I can no more conceive of Starmer being worse than the corrupt bunch of incompetents than I can Sir Sidney Ruff-Diamond passing on an afternoon's Tiffin.
This was a man who was content to serve in a shadow cabinet led by Jeremy Corbyn. The space for 'worse' is pretty big.
Are you forgetting Sunak served as CoE in a Johnson Government? You seem to ignore that Johnson was as equally unsuitable for high office as was Corbyn. In all fairness to Corbyn, by dint of being a serial loser he has done less damage to our nation than has Johnson, and thus Sunak.
They are not equivalent
Johnson was a bad PM who was unsuited for the role
Corbyn, by virtue of his antisemitism, would have shamed Britain if he had been elected
Boris Johnson said Muslim women looked like letterboxes and referred to piccaninies but obviously that's totally fine.
His point was that he believed it was/is oppressive for Muslim women to (have to wear) the burka. Is your belief in cultural relativism such that you applaud the seeming (because I have no idea beyond a well educated guess) subjugation of women from a particular culture.
Fuck. There was I talking about vintage Eddie Izzard and I hadn't realised we'd moved onto the resurgence of anti-Semitism.
Even amongst the most intelligent people on PB.
The pal of mine who I quoted earlier - beginning this evening's debate - is one of the smartest people I know, yet he was making - to my mind - blatantly anti-Semitic remarks (which I have never heard from him ever before, it's worth noting)
As I say he got himself in such a tangle trying to justify the infamous answers of the US university presidents at Congress, that he ended up claiming it was OK to call for the "genocide of Jews" on a US campus because "genocide does not necessarily mean violence"
How can a man with an IQ over 140 end up trotting out arrant nonsense like that? The answer, I fear, is anti Semitism clouding his judgement and forcing him into absurd intellectual contortions
Of course the big error was to discuss the thing in the first place. But I have no doubt anti-semitism exists all over the place. One reason I believe is because traditionally Jews have been weak so it has suited bullies to discriminate against them. That weakness as I have several times noted has also been a reason why The Left embraced them immediately post WWII and has rejected them now.
IIRC (we were all boozing) he started the debate on Gaza, and he was the one who got REALLY heated, and I was the one who calmed it down and steered it into safer waters (I know: quite out of character)
I have seldom seen him so animated about any subject, apart from maybe Brexit, which he absolutely loathed, as a europhile Lib Dem
And, as I said, he has never displayed a hint of anti-Semitism in the past, so it came out of nowhere, and he was properly angry
Worth noting: the Scottish universities take account of poor performing schools by giving their applicants favourable treatment in terms of the grades they will accept.
You might think that this helps bridge the attainment gap. But the dirty little secret is that the kids who actually benefit are those whose parents pay for private tuition.
I know for a fact that pretty well every single child from my local secondary who has got into one of the "ancients" to do a degree that leads to one of the professions has had coaching from private tutors. Kids from poor homes don't stand a chance in proudly devolved egalitarian Scotland.
It's lamentable. Anecdotally, my own children suffered from this. Both the girls got taught to read by phonics and were well on their way by Christmas of the first year. My son, with Curriculum for Excellence, did not have a reading age at 7. He was memorising story tapes and his teacher never noticed. We got him tutoring, old style, and by the time he was 8 his reading age was 15. It just does not work. But so long as you tick enough boxes no one will notice.
Disturbing. Surely at some point Scottish voters are going to make the SNP pay for this failure?
Scottish politics is a sterile desert of constitutional wrangling and has been for 15 years now, possibly longer. It drowns out everything else. There is no meaningful debate on education, health, the economy, the desperate state of our roads with the A1 and the A9 still not duelled, the Ferries, the bottle scheme, nothing. You are either for independence so you vote for this bunch of twats or you are not in which case you vote for a variety of different twats.
Northern Ireland has more political guidance than Scotland, even without an Assembly. Its dispiriting.
As a matter of fact I think these multiple failures may catch up with the SNP. They are, at last, being reported.
And, let's face it, the Yousaf/Robison combo is not in the same league as Sturgeon/Swinney in motivating their natural supporters. ot talking down their opponents. No-one is scared or initimidated anymore.
Yousaf does not have the same teflon plating that Nicola had but it is still remarkable how few of the current issues are actually being reported in the mainstream media.
There is the Minister who was allegedly having an affair, Hancock style, with an MP during Covid, there is the deep disquiet that nothing seems to be happening in relation to Operation Branchform after nearly 2.5 years now, there was the recent humiliation of the Scottish government taking their own Information Commissioner to court to try and stop the production of material that was the basis of his report but was so redacted that the Commissioner himself said it was highly distorted and he could not support it, there is the complete lack of contemporaneous records or minutes of meetings given to the Covid Inquiry, amongst others, so few of these stories and many more get any attention at all from our media.
You have a point, to be fair. In fact, several points.
It is quite extraordinary that Matheson remains in post. He wouldn't have survived at Westminster. There's a real problem of governance at Holyrood.
Back from a weekend in the Derbyshire Dales and, as might have been expected given the 55th anniversary of the release of Carry on up the Khyber was at the end of last month, instead of serious political discussion, it's an afternoon for innuendo and ludicrous knob gags.
Twas ever thus on PB, some might say.
We are into the denouement of this version of Conservative Government - it's not quite the cones hotline but it's reminscent of Stephen Dorrell coming out to bat for Major and the Government in early 1997. The universe he inhabited, where the Government was doing wonderful things, everyone was happy and no one had the wobbles, was so far removed from everyone else's the only conclusion was he had fallen through a portal from an alternative Britain.
We had Opinium which was about as game changing as bi-regeneration in Who and it seems even the mighty Jordan Peterson is warning we will be Venezuela if Starmer wins. Well, we already have oil so I suppose there's a parallel of sorts but we had all this back in the dim and distant when apparently Blair was going to take us halfway down the road to Communism. Remind me how that worked out.
The death throes of the centre right are certainly illuminating - the strange thing is a conservative message of fiscal probity, targeted public spending and protecting communities and environment would probably play well among voters but that's not where thirteen and a half years od Conservative-led Government has got us.
The only reason being advanced by anyone for voting Conservative seems to me "Starmer would be worse" - how would he be "worse"? I can no more conceive of Starmer being worse than the corrupt bunch of incompetents than I can Sir Sidney Ruff-Diamond passing on an afternoon's Tiffin.
This was a man who was content to serve in a shadow cabinet led by Jeremy Corbyn. The space for 'worse' is pretty big.
Are you forgetting Sunak served as CoE in a Johnson Government? You seem to ignore that Johnson was as equally unsuitable for high office as was Corbyn. In all fairness to Corbyn, by dint of being a serial loser he has done less damage to our nation than has Johnson, and thus Sunak.
They are not equivalent
Johnson was a bad PM who was unsuited for the role
Corbyn, by virtue of his antisemitism, would have shamed Britain if he had been elected
No, an absolute equivalence, despite you correctly citing at the very least an acquiescence to anti-Semitism in the Corbyn column.
Fuck. There was I talking about vintage Eddie Izzard and I hadn't realised we'd moved onto the resurgence of anti-Semitism.
Even amongst the most intelligent people on PB.
The pal of mine who I quoted earlier - beginning this evening's debate - is one of the smartest people I know, yet he was making - to my mind - blatantly anti-Semitic remarks (which I have never heard from him ever before, it's worth noting)
As I say he got himself in such a tangle trying to justify the infamous answers of the US university presidents at Congress, that he ended up claiming it was OK to call for the "genocide of Jews" on a US campus because "genocide does not necessarily mean violence"
How can a man with an IQ over 140 end up trotting out arrant nonsense like that? The answer, I fear, is anti Semitism clouding his judgement and forcing him into absurd intellectual contortions
Of course the big error was to discuss the thing in the first place. But I have no doubt anti-semitism exists all over the place. One reason I believe is because traditionally Jews have been weak so it has suited bullies to discriminate against them. That weakness as I have several times noted has also been a reason why The Left embraced them immediately post WWII and has rejected them now.
IIRC (we were all boozing) he started the debate on Gaza, and he was the one who got REALLY heated, and I was the one who calmed it down and steered it into safer waters (I know: quite out of character)
I have seldom seen him so animated about any subject, apart from maybe Brexit, which he absolutely loathed, as a europhile Lib Dem
And, as I said, he has never displayed a hint of anti-Semitism in the past, so it came out of nowhere, and he was properly angry
BOOZING? Well really.
Anti-semitism is a millennia-old phenomenon. I'd be amazed if it didn't manifest itself in The Groucho. Or White's, for that matter.
Back from a weekend in the Derbyshire Dales and, as might have been expected given the 55th anniversary of the release of Carry on up the Khyber was at the end of last month, instead of serious political discussion, it's an afternoon for innuendo and ludicrous knob gags.
Twas ever thus on PB, some might say.
We are into the denouement of this version of Conservative Government - it's not quite the cones hotline but it's reminscent of Stephen Dorrell coming out to bat for Major and the Government in early 1997. The universe he inhabited, where the Government was doing wonderful things, everyone was happy and no one had the wobbles, was so far removed from everyone else's the only conclusion was he had fallen through a portal from an alternative Britain.
We had Opinium which was about as game changing as bi-regeneration in Who and it seems even the mighty Jordan Peterson is warning we will be Venezuela if Starmer wins. Well, we already have oil so I suppose there's a parallel of sorts but we had all this back in the dim and distant when apparently Blair was going to take us halfway down the road to Communism. Remind me how that worked out.
The death throes of the centre right are certainly illuminating - the strange thing is a conservative message of fiscal probity, targeted public spending and protecting communities and environment would probably play well among voters but that's not where thirteen and a half years od Conservative-led Government has got us.
The only reason being advanced by anyone for voting Conservative seems to me "Starmer would be worse" - how would he be "worse"? I can no more conceive of Starmer being worse than the corrupt bunch of incompetents than I can Sir Sidney Ruff-Diamond passing on an afternoon's Tiffin.
This was a man who was content to serve in a shadow cabinet led by Jeremy Corbyn. The space for 'worse' is pretty big.
Are you forgetting Sunak served as CoE in a Johnson Government? You seem to ignore that Johnson was as equally unsuitable for high office as was Corbyn. In all fairness to Corbyn, by dint of being a serial loser he has done less damage to our nation than has Johnson, and thus Sunak.
They are not equivalent
Johnson was a bad PM who was unsuited for the role
Corbyn, by virtue of his antisemitism, would have shamed Britain if he had been elected
Boris Johnson said Muslim women looked like letterboxes and referred to piccaninies but obviously that's totally fine.
His point was that he believed it was/is oppressive for Muslim women to (have to wear) the burka. Is your belief in cultural relativism such that you applaud the seeming (because I have no idea beyond a well educated guess) subjugation of women from a particular culture.
He doesn't give a shit about anyone getting oppressed, he just fancied a cheap shot at an easy target. And attacks on Muslim women increased in its wake. He's a racist bully, pure and simple.
Worth noting: the Scottish universities take account of poor performing schools by giving their applicants favourable treatment in terms of the grades they will accept.
You might think that this helps bridge the attainment gap. But the dirty little secret is that the kids who actually benefit are those whose parents pay for private tuition.
I know for a fact that pretty well every single child from my local secondary who has got into one of the "ancients" to do a degree that leads to one of the professions has had coaching from private tutors. Kids from poor homes don't stand a chance in proudly devolved egalitarian Scotland.
It's lamentable. Anecdotally, my own children suffered from this. Both the girls got taught to read by phonics and were well on their way by Christmas of the first year. My son, with Curriculum for Excellence, did not have a reading age at 7. He was memorising story tapes and his teacher never noticed. We got him tutoring, old style, and by the time he was 8 his reading age was 15. It just does not work. But so long as you tick enough boxes no one will notice.
Disturbing. Surely at some point Scottish voters are going to make the SNP pay for this failure?
Scottish politics is a sterile desert of constitutional wrangling and has been for 15 years now, possibly longer. It drowns out everything else. There is no meaningful debate on education, health, the economy, the desperate state of our roads with the A1 and the A9 still not duelled, the Ferries, the bottle scheme, nothing. You are either for independence so you vote for this bunch of twats or you are not in which case you vote for a variety of different twats.
Northern Ireland has more political guidance than Scotland, even without an Assembly. Its dispiriting.
As a matter of fact I think these multiple failures may catch up with the SNP. They are, at last, being reported.
And, let's face it, the Yousaf/Robison combo is not in the same league as Sturgeon/Swinney in motivating their natural supporters. ot talking down their opponents. No-one is scared or initimidated anymore.
Yousaf does not have the same teflon plating that Nicola had but it is still remarkable how few of the current issues are actually being reported in the mainstream media.
There is the Minister who was allegedly having an affair, Hancock style, with an MP during Covid, there is the deep disquiet that nothing seems to be happening in relation to Operation Branchform after nearly 2.5 years now, there was the recent humiliation of the Scottish government taking their own Information Commissioner to court to try and stop the production of material that was the basis of his report but was so redacted that the Commissioner himself said it was highly distorted and he could not support it, there is the complete lack of contemporaneous records or minutes of meetings given to the Covid Inquiry, amongst others, so few of these stories and many more get any attention at all from our media.
You have a point, to be fair. In fact, several points.
It is quite extraordinary that Matheson remains in post. He wouldn't have survived at Westminster. There's a real problem of governance at Holyrood.
Fuck. There was I talking about vintage Eddie Izzard and I hadn't realised we'd moved onto the resurgence of anti-Semitism.
Even amongst the most intelligent people on PB.
The pal of mine who I quoted earlier - beginning this evening's debate - is one of the smartest people I know, yet he was making - to my mind - blatantly anti-Semitic remarks (which I have never heard from him ever before, it's worth noting)
As I say he got himself in such a tangle trying to justify the infamous answers of the US university presidents at Congress, that he ended up claiming it was OK to call for the "genocide of Jews" on a US campus because "genocide does not necessarily mean violence"
How can a man with an IQ over 140 end up trotting out arrant nonsense like that? The answer, I fear, is anti Semitism clouding his judgement and forcing him into absurd intellectual contortions
I think it's also 'fandom' - the fact that in politics these days you're expected to pick your 'side' and support them unwaveringly - even when they're behaving stupidly or offensively. Antisemitism on the left is something the right have made hay out of because it's an open wound that exposes a degree of hypocrisy and flaws in certain beliefs that are cast as inherently righteous.
Thus, when someone sees three University Presidents being primarily criticised by Republican politicians some instinctively try to intellectualise how the former, their kind of people, are right and the latter, who are odiously wrong on so much else, are wrong.
It's a method of reasoning that's now all too common and can lead you to horrific places.
Fuck. There was I talking about vintage Eddie Izzard and I hadn't realised we'd moved onto the resurgence of anti-Semitism.
Even amongst the most intelligent people on PB.
The pal of mine who I quoted earlier - beginning this evening's debate - is one of the smartest people I know, yet he was making - to my mind - blatantly anti-Semitic remarks (which I have never heard from him ever before, it's worth noting)
As I say he got himself in such a tangle trying to justify the infamous answers of the US university presidents at Congress, that he ended up claiming it was OK to call for the "genocide of Jews" on a US campus because "genocide does not necessarily mean violence"
How can a man with an IQ over 140 end up trotting out arrant nonsense like that? The answer, I fear, is anti Semitism clouding his judgement and forcing him into absurd intellectual contortions
Of course the big error was to discuss the thing in the first place. But I have no doubt anti-semitism exists all over the place. One reason I believe is because traditionally Jews have been weak so it has suited bullies to discriminate against them. That weakness as I have several times noted has also been a reason why The Left embraced them immediately post WWII and has rejected them now.
IIRC (we were all boozing) he started the debate on Gaza, and he was the one who got REALLY heated, and I was the one who calmed it down and steered it into safer waters (I know: quite out of character)
I have seldom seen him so animated about any subject, apart from maybe Brexit, which he absolutely loathed, as a europhile Lib Dem
And, as I said, he has never displayed a hint of anti-Semitism in the past, so it came out of nowhere, and he was properly angry
BOOZING? Well really.
Anti-semitism is a millennia-old phenomenon. I'd be amazed if it didn't manifest itself in The Groucho. Or White's, for that matter.
Much more likely in White's than the Grouch, I suspect
Back from a weekend in the Derbyshire Dales and, as might have been expected given the 55th anniversary of the release of Carry on up the Khyber was at the end of last month, instead of serious political discussion, it's an afternoon for innuendo and ludicrous knob gags.
Twas ever thus on PB, some might say.
We are into the denouement of this version of Conservative Government - it's not quite the cones hotline but it's reminscent of Stephen Dorrell coming out to bat for Major and the Government in early 1997. The universe he inhabited, where the Government was doing wonderful things, everyone was happy and no one had the wobbles, was so far removed from everyone else's the only conclusion was he had fallen through a portal from an alternative Britain.
We had Opinium which was about as game changing as bi-regeneration in Who and it seems even the mighty Jordan Peterson is warning we will be Venezuela if Starmer wins. Well, we already have oil so I suppose there's a parallel of sorts but we had all this back in the dim and distant when apparently Blair was going to take us halfway down the road to Communism. Remind me how that worked out.
The death throes of the centre right are certainly illuminating - the strange thing is a conservative message of fiscal probity, targeted public spending and protecting communities and environment would probably play well among voters but that's not where thirteen and a half years od Conservative-led Government has got us.
The only reason being advanced by anyone for voting Conservative seems to me "Starmer would be worse" - how would he be "worse"? I can no more conceive of Starmer being worse than the corrupt bunch of incompetents than I can Sir Sidney Ruff-Diamond passing on an afternoon's Tiffin.
This was a man who was content to serve in a shadow cabinet led by Jeremy Corbyn. The space for 'worse' is pretty big.
Are you forgetting Sunak served as CoE in a Johnson Government? You seem to ignore that Johnson was as equally unsuitable for high office as was Corbyn. In all fairness to Corbyn, by dint of being a serial loser he has done less damage to our nation than has Johnson, and thus Sunak.
They are not equivalent
Johnson was a bad PM who was unsuited for the role
Corbyn, by virtue of his antisemitism, would have shamed Britain if he had been elected
Boris Johnson said Muslim women looked like letterboxes and referred to piccaninies but obviously that's totally fine.
No.Those references are taken out of context. Boris should never have been PM and had multiple failings which should have disbarred him. But racism ireally isn't one of them. He's a complex proposition. Corbyn is only too easy to understand.
Fuck. There was I talking about vintage Eddie Izzard and I hadn't realised we'd moved onto the resurgence of anti-Semitism.
Even amongst the most intelligent people on PB.
The pal of mine who I quoted earlier - beginning this evening's debate - is one of the smartest people I know, yet he was making - to my mind - blatantly anti-Semitic remarks (which I have never heard from him ever before, it's worth noting)
As I say he got himself in such a tangle trying to justify the infamous answers of the US university presidents at Congress, that he ended up claiming it was OK to call for the "genocide of Jews" on a US campus because "genocide does not necessarily mean violence"
How can a man with an IQ over 140 end up trotting out arrant nonsense like that? The answer, I fear, is anti Semitism clouding his judgement and forcing him into absurd intellectual contortions
I think it's also 'fandom' - the fact that in politics these days you're expected to pick your 'side' and support them unwaveringly - even when they're behaving stupidly or offensively. Antisemitism on the left is something the right have made hay out of because it's an open wound that exposes a degree of hypocrisy and flaws in certain beliefs that are cast as inherently righteous.
Thus, when someone sees three University Presidents being primarily criticised by Republican politicians some instinctively try to intellectualise how the former, their kind of people, are right and the latter, who are odiously wrong on so much else, are wrong.
It's a method of reasoning that's now all too common and can lead you to horrific places.
That's a perceptive comment; there was certainly an element of that in my friend's thinking
Has anyone else encountered unexpected anti-Semitism?
That poll cited by @williamglenn suggests that I am observing something real
It’s fairly common to encounter racism. Many people have no idea that you don’t have to shave your head, get badly spelt tattoos, drink 15 cans of cheap beer and join the EDL to be a racist.
If I had a pound for those occasions when the wine and cocaine was in at a posh event. And someone went “don’t get me wrong, but…”
When I asked my Ghanaian ex why she preferred talking to some unreconstructed South Africans at a do we went to - she kinda sighed and said “they are honest about their racism - half the other people in the room are like that, but just lie about it”
This is interesting, but again it is whataboutery
Of course racism is always with us, like poverty, hopefully one day we can abolish both
However I am specifically talking about anti-Semitism, and its sudden and overt re-appearance in society, often unabashed, and often from educated people - this to me is new and deeply perturbing
I don’t think it has just reappeared, suddenly, overly or otherwise.
It was there throughout Trump’s presidency.
It has been a problem for the Labour Party for some time.
It appears more salient to you right now because of your political views, particularly your Islamophobia as many but not all of those currently expressing antisemitic views are Muslims. It is also a bit more salient in reality simply because the situation in Gaza is so prominent in the news.
That’s not to diminish the problem, which is significant. But it’s naive of you to claim it has suddenly reappeared.
First blessing for a same sex couple in the Church of England took place today at St John the Baptist Church in Felixstowe, Suffolk after approval from the House of Bishops and Synod https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-suffolk-67743298
From the pictures that looks like insider trading HY.
Worth noting: the Scottish universities take account of poor performing schools by giving their applicants favourable treatment in terms of the grades they will accept.
You might think that this helps bridge the attainment gap. But the dirty little secret is that the kids who actually benefit are those whose parents pay for private tuition.
I know for a fact that pretty well every single child from my local secondary who has got into one of the "ancients" to do a degree that leads to one of the professions has had coaching from private tutors. Kids from poor homes don't stand a chance in proudly devolved egalitarian Scotland.
It's lamentable. Anecdotally, my own children suffered from this. Both the girls got taught to read by phonics and were well on their way by Christmas of the first year. My son, with Curriculum for Excellence, did not have a reading age at 7. He was memorising story tapes and his teacher never noticed. We got him tutoring, old style, and by the time he was 8 his reading age was 15. It just does not work. But so long as you tick enough boxes no one will notice.
Disturbing. Surely at some point Scottish voters are going to make the SNP pay for this failure?
Scottish politics is a sterile desert of constitutional wrangling and has been for 15 years now, possibly longer. It drowns out everything else. There is no meaningful debate on education, health, the economy, the desperate state of our roads with the A1 and the A9 still not duelled, the Ferries, the bottle scheme, nothing. You are either for independence so you vote for this bunch of twats or you are not in which case you vote for a variety of different twats.
Northern Ireland has more political guidance than Scotland, even without an Assembly. Its dispiriting.
As a matter of fact I think these multiple failures may catch up with the SNP. They are, at last, being reported.
And, let's face it, the Yousaf/Robison combo is not in the same league as Sturgeon/Swinney in motivating their natural supporters. ot talking down their opponents. No-one is scared or initimidated anymore.
Yousaf does not have the same teflon plating that Nicola had but it is still remarkable how few of the current issues are actually being reported in the mainstream media.
There is the Minister who was allegedly having an affair, Hancock style, with an MP during Covid, there is the deep disquiet that nothing seems to be happening in relation to Operation Branchform after nearly 2.5 years now, there was the recent humiliation of the Scottish government taking their own Information Commissioner to court to try and stop the production of material that was the basis of his report but was so redacted that the Commissioner himself said it was highly distorted and he could not support it, there is the complete lack of contemporaneous records or minutes of meetings given to the Covid Inquiry, amongst others, so few of these stories and many more get any attention at all from our media.
The PBers who suggest that the SNP are getting a free pass from the media and despite their regular jeremiads about the Nats that the ishoos are never covered are some of my faves.
Who do you think is delaying any outcome from Branchform, the tent deployers of Police Scotland or is it some nefarious Nat plot?
Back from a weekend in the Derbyshire Dales and, as might have been expected given the 55th anniversary of the release of Carry on up the Khyber was at the end of last month, instead of serious political discussion, it's an afternoon for innuendo and ludicrous knob gags.
Twas ever thus on PB, some might say.
We are into the denouement of this version of Conservative Government - it's not quite the cones hotline but it's reminscent of Stephen Dorrell coming out to bat for Major and the Government in early 1997. The universe he inhabited, where the Government was doing wonderful things, everyone was happy and no one had the wobbles, was so far removed from everyone else's the only conclusion was he had fallen through a portal from an alternative Britain.
We had Opinium which was about as game changing as bi-regeneration in Who and it seems even the mighty Jordan Peterson is warning we will be Venezuela if Starmer wins. Well, we already have oil so I suppose there's a parallel of sorts but we had all this back in the dim and distant when apparently Blair was going to take us halfway down the road to Communism. Remind me how that worked out.
The death throes of the centre right are certainly illuminating - the strange thing is a conservative message of fiscal probity, targeted public spending and protecting communities and environment would probably play well among voters but that's not where thirteen and a half years od Conservative-led Government has got us.
The only reason being advanced by anyone for voting Conservative seems to me "Starmer would be worse" - how would he be "worse"? I can no more conceive of Starmer being worse than the corrupt bunch of incompetents than I can Sir Sidney Ruff-Diamond passing on an afternoon's Tiffin.
This was a man who was content to serve in a shadow cabinet led by Jeremy Corbyn. The space for 'worse' is pretty big.
Are you forgetting Sunak served as CoE in a Johnson Government? You seem to ignore that Johnson was as equally unsuitable for high office as was Corbyn. In all fairness to Corbyn, by dint of being a serial loser he has done less damage to our nation than has Johnson, and thus Sunak.
They are not equivalent
Johnson was a bad PM who was unsuited for the role
Corbyn, by virtue of his antisemitism, would have shamed Britain if he had been elected
Boris Johnson said Muslim women looked like letterboxes and referred to piccaninies but obviously that's totally fine.
His point was that he believed it was/is oppressive for Muslim women to (have to wear) the burka. Is your belief in cultural relativism such that you applaud the seeming (because I have no idea beyond a well educated guess) subjugation of women from a particular culture.
He doesn't give a shit about anyone getting oppressed, he just fancied a cheap shot at an easy target. And attacks on Muslim women increased in its wake. He's a racist bully, pure and simple.
If you say so. I take it you are a big fan of the burka.
Has anyone else encountered unexpected anti-Semitism?
That poll cited by @williamglenn suggests that I am observing something real
It’s fairly common to encounter racism. Many people have no idea that you don’t have to shave your head, get badly spelt tattoos, drink 15 cans of cheap beer and join the EDL to be a racist.
If I had a pound for those occasions when the wine and cocaine was in at a posh event. And someone went “don’t get me wrong, but…”
When I asked my Ghanaian ex why she preferred talking to some unreconstructed South Africans at a do we went to - she kinda sighed and said “they are honest about their racism - half the other people in the room are like that, but just lie about it”
This is interesting, but again it is whataboutery
Of course racism is always with us, like poverty, hopefully one day we can abolish both
However I am specifically talking about anti-Semitism, and its sudden and overt re-appearance in society, often unabashed, and often from educated people - this to me is new and deeply perturbing
I don’t think it has just reappeared, suddenly, overly or otherwise.
It was there throughout Trump’s presidency.
It has been a problem for the Labour Party for some time.
It appears more salient to you right now because of your political views, particularly your Islamophobia as many but not all of those currently expressing antisemitic views are Muslims. It is also a bit more salient in reality simply because the situation in Gaza is so prominent in the news.
That’s not to diminish the problem, which is significant. But it’s naive of you to claim it has suddenly reappeared.
I shall pass over your tawdry ad hominens, out of politeness, and address the major point
You're simply wrong in this case. As I have now said several times, this friend of mine has NEVER displayed a hint of anti-Semitism before, yet suddenly there it was, last night, out of nowhere. So in this insance yes it "suddenly appeared"
And the polling of young people lends credence to the idea that it is resurgent
Fuck. There was I talking about vintage Eddie Izzard and I hadn't realised we'd moved onto the resurgence of anti-Semitism.
Even amongst the most intelligent people on PB.
The pal of mine who I quoted earlier - beginning this evening's debate - is one of the smartest people I know, yet he was making - to my mind - blatantly anti-Semitic remarks (which I have never heard from him ever before, it's worth noting)
As I say he got himself in such a tangle trying to justify the infamous answers of the US university presidents at Congress, that he ended up claiming it was OK to call for the "genocide of Jews" on a US campus because "genocide does not necessarily mean violence"
How can a man with an IQ over 140 end up trotting out arrant nonsense like that? The answer, I fear, is anti Semitism clouding his judgement and forcing him into absurd intellectual contortions
Of course the big error was to discuss the thing in the first place. But I have no doubt anti-semitism exists all over the place. One reason I believe is because traditionally Jews have been weak so it has suited bullies to discriminate against them. That weakness as I have several times noted has also been a reason why The Left embraced them immediately post WWII and has rejected them now.
IIRC (we were all boozing) he started the debate on Gaza, and he was the one who got REALLY heated, and I was the one who calmed it down and steered it into safer waters (I know: quite out of character)
I have seldom seen him so animated about any subject, apart from maybe Brexit, which he absolutely loathed, as a europhile Lib Dem
And, as I said, he has never displayed a hint of anti-Semitism in the past, so it came out of nowhere, and he was properly angry
BOOZING? Well really.
Anti-semitism is a millennia-old phenomenon. I'd be amazed if it didn't manifest itself in The Groucho. Or White's, for that matter.
Much more likely in White's than the Grouch, I suspect
First blessing for a same sex couple in the Church of England took place today at St John the Baptist Church in Felixstowe, Suffolk after approval from the House of Bishops and Synod https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-suffolk-67743298
From the pictures that looks like insider trading HY.
A nice story and good luck to them.
Weird that gay couples would want the blessing of an institution that so obviously despises them.
I don't think despise sufficiently captures the attitude of the CofE towards gay people.
Just had a week of (relatively distant) funerals - end of year, end of life type things and have therefore sat through several church services including no fewer than two instances of 1 Corinthians 13.
Plenty of The Christ Childs and Will Live Forevers and Eternal Loves Died for You so on and so forth.
I find myself at these services staring intently at the vicar and the congregants in absolute wonder at such a set of beliefs. Each to their own, however, and good luck to them. As long as they don't do any harm all's well although a casual look through the past 5,000 years shows that this sadly has not been the case but one can hope.
I'm not sure which set of beliefs you are wondering at, but the set of aspirations expressed in I Corinthians 13 seem to me to be more or less the pinnacle of humanist and humanitarian theism no worse for the fact that lots of people (no doubt including thee and me) don't try hard enough to achieve it.
What is this harm the vicar and congregation (of which you were one, as sometimes am I) could do as a result of encountering this text?
None. The sentiment is great. As I said the main reaction is wonder at the belief. And also there has been not a little religious-inspired strife and oppression.
Thanks. As a theist I entirely share your sense of wonder. FWIW I should think wonder is the source of religion generally, in its unsubverted forms.
As to strife and oppression. All true, though there is much more to be said. Not least that if (which I do not think) there is no divinity then there is little point in isolating a thing called 'religion' to blame for stuff, since in that case all religion is an entirely human responsibility, and it is pure reification to blame an abstract noun for stuff which is 100% a human matter.
First blessing for a same sex couple in the Church of England took place today at St John the Baptist Church in Felixstowe, Suffolk after approval from the House of Bishops and Synod https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-suffolk-67743298
Has anyone else encountered unexpected anti-Semitism?
That poll cited by @williamglenn suggests that I am observing something real
It’s fairly common to encounter racism. Many people have no idea that you don’t have to shave your head, get badly spelt tattoos, drink 15 cans of cheap beer and join the EDL to be a racist.
If I had a pound for those occasions when the wine and cocaine was in at a posh event. And someone went “don’t get me wrong, but…”
When I asked my Ghanaian ex why she preferred talking to some unreconstructed South Africans at a do we went to - she kinda sighed and said “they are honest about their racism - half the other people in the room are like that, but just lie about it”
This is interesting, but again it is whataboutery
Of course racism is always with us, like poverty, hopefully one day we can abolish both
However I am specifically talking about anti-Semitism, and its sudden and overt re-appearance in society, often unabashed, and often from educated people - this to me is new and deeply perturbing
I don’t think it has just reappeared, suddenly, overly or otherwise.
It was there throughout Trump’s presidency.
It has been a problem for the Labour Party for some time.
It appears more salient to you right now because of your political views, particularly your Islamophobia as many but not all of those currently expressing antisemitic views are Muslims. It is also a bit more salient in reality simply because the situation in Gaza is so prominent in the news.
That’s not to diminish the problem, which is significant. But it’s naive of you to claim it has suddenly reappeared.
The phenomenon of non-involved people not seeing a particular form of racism, until it forces itself upon them has been noted and described in many situations.
All the white people in the Southern US who haven’t seen anti-black racism, for example. Not ignored it exactly - but it hasn’t registered. When asked in detail, they often recall “isolated incidents”.
Back from a weekend in the Derbyshire Dales and, as might have been expected given the 55th anniversary of the release of Carry on up the Khyber was at the end of last month, instead of serious political discussion, it's an afternoon for innuendo and ludicrous knob gags.
Twas ever thus on PB, some might say.
We are into the denouement of this version of Conservative Government - it's not quite the cones hotline but it's reminscent of Stephen Dorrell coming out to bat for Major and the Government in early 1997. The universe he inhabited, where the Government was doing wonderful things, everyone was happy and no one had the wobbles, was so far removed from everyone else's the only conclusion was he had fallen through a portal from an alternative Britain.
We had Opinium which was about as game changing as bi-regeneration in Who and it seems even the mighty Jordan Peterson is warning we will be Venezuela if Starmer wins. Well, we already have oil so I suppose there's a parallel of sorts but we had all this back in the dim and distant when apparently Blair was going to take us halfway down the road to Communism. Remind me how that worked out.
The death throes of the centre right are certainly illuminating - the strange thing is a conservative message of fiscal probity, targeted public spending and protecting communities and environment would probably play well among voters but that's not where thirteen and a half years od Conservative-led Government has got us.
The only reason being advanced by anyone for voting Conservative seems to me "Starmer would be worse" - how would he be "worse"? I can no more conceive of Starmer being worse than the corrupt bunch of incompetents than I can Sir Sidney Ruff-Diamond passing on an afternoon's Tiffin.
This was a man who was content to serve in a shadow cabinet led by Jeremy Corbyn. The space for 'worse' is pretty big.
Are you forgetting Sunak served as CoE in a Johnson Government? You seem to ignore that Johnson was as equally unsuitable for high office as was Corbyn. In all fairness to Corbyn, by dint of being a serial loser he has done less damage to our nation than has Johnson, and thus Sunak.
They are not equivalent
Johnson was a bad PM who was unsuited for the role
Corbyn, by virtue of his antisemitism, would have shamed Britain if he had been elected
Boris Johnson said Muslim women looked like letterboxes and referred to piccaninies but obviously that's totally fine.
His point was that he believed it was/is oppressive for Muslim women to (have to wear) the burka. Is your belief in cultural relativism such that you applaud the seeming (because I have no idea beyond a well educated guess) subjugation of women from a particular culture.
That was simply a mealy mouthed Johnson justification.
First blessing for a same sex couple in the Church of England took place today at St John the Baptist Church in Felixstowe, Suffolk after approval from the House of Bishops and Synod https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-suffolk-67743298
From the pictures that looks like insider trading HY.
A nice story and good luck to them.
Weird that gay couples would want the blessing of an institution that so obviously despises them.
I don't think despise sufficiently captures the attitude of the CofE towards gay people.
Worth noting: the Scottish universities take account of poor performing schools by giving their applicants favourable treatment in terms of the grades they will accept.
You might think that this helps bridge the attainment gap. But the dirty little secret is that the kids who actually benefit are those whose parents pay for private tuition.
I know for a fact that pretty well every single child from my local secondary who has got into one of the "ancients" to do a degree that leads to one of the professions has had coaching from private tutors. Kids from poor homes don't stand a chance in proudly devolved egalitarian Scotland.
It's lamentable. Anecdotally, my own children suffered from this. Both the girls got taught to read by phonics and were well on their way by Christmas of the first year. My son, with Curriculum for Excellence, did not have a reading age at 7. He was memorising story tapes and his teacher never noticed. We got him tutoring, old style, and by the time he was 8 his reading age was 15. It just does not work. But so long as you tick enough boxes no one will notice.
Disturbing. Surely at some point Scottish voters are going to make the SNP pay for this failure?
Scottish politics is a sterile desert of constitutional wrangling and has been for 15 years now, possibly longer. It drowns out everything else. There is no meaningful debate on education, health, the economy, the desperate state of our roads with the A1 and the A9 still not duelled, the Ferries, the bottle scheme, nothing. You are either for independence so you vote for this bunch of twats or you are not in which case you vote for a variety of different twats.
Northern Ireland has more political guidance than Scotland, even without an Assembly. Its dispiriting.
As a matter of fact I think these multiple failures may catch up with the SNP. They are, at last, being reported.
And, let's face it, the Yousaf/Robison combo is not in the same league as Sturgeon/Swinney in motivating their natural supporters. ot talking down their opponents. No-one is scared or initimidated anymore.
Yousaf does not have the same teflon plating that Nicola had but it is still remarkable how few of the current issues are actually being reported in the mainstream media.
There is the Minister who was allegedly having an affair, Hancock style, with an MP during Covid, there is the deep disquiet that nothing seems to be happening in relation to Operation Branchform after nearly 2.5 years now, there was the recent humiliation of the Scottish government taking their own Information Commissioner to court to try and stop the production of material that was the basis of his report but was so redacted that the Commissioner himself said it was highly distorted and he could not support it, there is the complete lack of contemporaneous records or minutes of meetings given to the Covid Inquiry, amongst others, so few of these stories and many more get any attention at all from our media.
The PBers who suggest that the SNP are getting a free pass from the media and despite their regular jeremiads about the Nats that the ishoos are never covered are some of my faves.
Who do you think is delaying any outcome from Branchform, the tent deployers of Police Scotland or is it some nefarious Nat plot?
I honestly don't know who or what is delaying it. So far, according to a recent FOI request, the investigation has cost over £1m. It's shocking. There is a real risk that if anyone is ever charged they are going to claim that their article 6 rights have been breached because this has been hanging over them for so long.
And I do not excuse the tent nonsense, that was truly bizarre in a financial investigation.
Back from a weekend in the Derbyshire Dales and, as might have been expected given the 55th anniversary of the release of Carry on up the Khyber was at the end of last month, instead of serious political discussion, it's an afternoon for innuendo and ludicrous knob gags.
Twas ever thus on PB, some might say.
We are into the denouement of this version of Conservative Government - it's not quite the cones hotline but it's reminscent of Stephen Dorrell coming out to bat for Major and the Government in early 1997. The universe he inhabited, where the Government was doing wonderful things, everyone was happy and no one had the wobbles, was so far removed from everyone else's the only conclusion was he had fallen through a portal from an alternative Britain.
We had Opinium which was about as game changing as bi-regeneration in Who and it seems even the mighty Jordan Peterson is warning we will be Venezuela if Starmer wins. Well, we already have oil so I suppose there's a parallel of sorts but we had all this back in the dim and distant when apparently Blair was going to take us halfway down the road to Communism. Remind me how that worked out.
The death throes of the centre right are certainly illuminating - the strange thing is a conservative message of fiscal probity, targeted public spending and protecting communities and environment would probably play well among voters but that's not where thirteen and a half years od Conservative-led Government has got us.
The only reason being advanced by anyone for voting Conservative seems to me "Starmer would be worse" - how would he be "worse"? I can no more conceive of Starmer being worse than the corrupt bunch of incompetents than I can Sir Sidney Ruff-Diamond passing on an afternoon's Tiffin.
This was a man who was content to serve in a shadow cabinet led by Jeremy Corbyn. The space for 'worse' is pretty big.
Are you forgetting Sunak served as CoE in a Johnson Government? You seem to ignore that Johnson was as equally unsuitable for high office as was Corbyn. In all fairness to Corbyn, by dint of being a serial loser he has done less damage to our nation than has Johnson, and thus Sunak.
They are not equivalent
Johnson was a bad PM who was unsuited for the role
Corbyn, by virtue of his antisemitism, would have shamed Britain if he had been elected
Boris Johnson said Muslim women looked like letterboxes and referred to piccaninies but obviously that's totally fine.
His point was that he believed it was/is oppressive for Muslim women to (have to wear) the burka. Is your belief in cultural relativism such that you applaud the seeming (because I have no idea beyond a well educated guess) subjugation of women from a particular culture.
That was simply a mealy mouthed Johnson justification.
First blessing for a same sex couple in the Church of England took place today at St John the Baptist Church in Felixstowe, Suffolk after approval from the House of Bishops and Synod https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-suffolk-67743298
From the pictures that looks like insider trading HY.
A nice story and good luck to them.
Weird that gay couples would want the blessing of an institution that so obviously despises them.
I don't think despise sufficiently captures the attitude of the CofE towards gay people.
First blessing for a same sex couple in the Church of England took place today at St John the Baptist Church in Felixstowe, Suffolk after approval from the House of Bishops and Synod https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-suffolk-67743298
A church mentioned by John Betjeman in 'Felixstowe or the last of her Order' a very touching piece:
Across the grass the poplar shades grow longer And louder clang the waves along the coast. The band packs up. The evening breeze stronger And all the world goes home to tea and toast. I hurry past a cakeshop's tempting scones Bound for the red brick twilight of St John's.
Just had a week of (relatively distant) funerals - end of year, end of life type things and have therefore sat through several church services including no fewer than two instances of 1 Corinthians 13.
Plenty of The Christ Childs and Will Live Forevers and Eternal Loves Died for You so on and so forth.
I find myself at these services staring intently at the vicar and the congregants in absolute wonder at such a set of beliefs. Each to their own, however, and good luck to them. As long as they don't do any harm all's well although a casual look through the past 5,000 years shows that this sadly has not been the case but one can hope.
I'm not sure which set of beliefs you are wondering at, but the set of aspirations expressed in I Corinthians 13 seem to me to be more or less the pinnacle of humanist and humanitarian theism no worse for the fact that lots of people (no doubt including thee and me) don't try hard enough to achieve it.
What is this harm the vicar and congregation (of which you were one, as sometimes am I) could do as a result of encountering this text?
None. The sentiment is great. As I said the main reaction is wonder at the belief. And also there has been not a little religious-inspired strife and oppression.
Thanks. As a theist I entirely share your sense of wonder. FWIW I should think wonder is the source of religion generally, in its unsubverted forms.
As to strife and oppression. All true, though there is much more to be said. Not least that if (which I do not think) there is no divinity then there is little point in isolating a thing called 'religion' to blame for stuff, since in that case all religion is an entirely human responsibility, and it is pure reification to blame an abstract noun for stuff which is 100% a human matter.
Yes that is fair. If it hadn't been religion it would have been football team. But it has been religion these past few thousand years.
Comments
Labour are generally keeping quiet about their policies at the moment which is frustrating but probably sound politics from their perspective. We should have this debate once we see the election manifestos.
If not, or you've missed it, this report in The Grauniad is worth a scan.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/dec/10/scottish-schools-have-tumbled-from-top-of-the-class-this-is-what-went-wrong
Worth noting: the Scottish universities take account of poor performing schools by giving their applicants favourable treatment in terms of the grades they will accept.
You might think that this helps bridge the attainment gap. But the dirty little secret is that the kids who actually benefit are those whose parents pay for private tuition.
I know for a fact that pretty well every single child from my local secondary who has got into one of the "ancients" to do a degree that leads to one of the professions has had coaching from private tutors. Kids from poor homes don't stand a chance in proudly devolved egalitarian Scotland.
https://x.com/saletan/status/1736058033497587901
In the new Harvard/Harris poll, 67% of respondents aged 18-24 agree that "Jews as a class are oppressors and should be treated as oppressors."
Consistent with other polls that have found relatively high anti-Jewish sentiment among young American adults.
Both times they had me lying on my back and I didn't see a thing.
George Bush the Elder (and Better, or at least Less Worser).
RS and GHWB were, in the famed words of then Texas Gov. Ann RIchards, each "born with a silver spoon in his mouth". Which frequently serves/served as a substitute/trigger re: foot-in-mouth syndrome.
Imitations by Bush I and Sunak 1/2 of Richie Rich the Poor Rich Kid and Even Worse Politician, are in contrast to other wealthy folk who have risen to become POTUS or (less frequently) PM.
> Theodore Roosevelt was (IMHO anyway) the beginning of this line in the USA. When he entered Republican district (and clubhouse) politics as a young man, this was considered aberrant behavior for a person of wealth and status, by his own social/economic class . . . and just about everybody else. Yet TR soon developed his own uncommon version of the common touch: the four-eyed cowboy, Rough Rider and reformer. Which from 1898 - 1912 saw him elected Governor of New York > Vice President > President then finally defeated as insurgent Progressive "Bull Moose" challenger to his own handpicked successor as POTUS.
> Franklin Roosevelt picked up where his Republican cousin (and his wife's uncle) left off. FDR's rise was less meteoric than TR's, HOWEVER when he contracted polio it very significantly altered his political trajectory. First, by converting him from a rich kid pretty boy in politics, to a serious person overcoming extremely serious personal challenges AND serving the public interest. Second, by putting FDR into close, personal contact with fellow polio victims of every social class - including the kid whose family shipped him to Warm Springs on the train via a shipping crate, the only way they could afford. And the rest, as they say, is history.
Further American examples include JFK and RFK I, Nelson Rockefeller and . . . wait for it . . . Donald Trump. But my time to type this drivel grows short, and do want to mention at least one UKer:
> Joseph Chamberlain who resembled his contemporary T Roosevelt in many ways EXCEPT for the cowboy hat, and also in relative social standing, with TR being old money versus JC the (sorta) self-made man. Both Teddy and Pushful Joe where renowned imperialists, war-mongers AND reformers whose appeal to voters of middle and working classes was a key factor in their political rise. Joe Chamberlain never made it to Prime Minister, but his son Neville did. However, whereas TR only managed to split one major political party (Republican: 1912), JC did it with TWO (Liberal: 1888 over Home Rule; Conservative/Liberal Unionists over Protectionism versus Free Trade 1903).
> Harold Macmillan had the manner born, but was really (and relatively) nouveau riche, but he leveraged his old aristo persona to achieve electoral success thanks to millions of Brits NOT to the manner born.
What a star!
https://open.spotify.com/episode/130vgtH95U2BGYtHCpFtWq
I approach it from a slightly different angle - if you think we should be running a balanced budget and ideally a surplus to begin to pay back the mountain of debt we have accumulated, how do you get to that?
The other aspect is we aspire to European levels of public services on American levels of taxation. Put another way, we want excellent public services as long as we don't have to pay for them and that's how we have validated the huge levels of borrowing which have characterised recent years. For all his professions of Thatcherism, Sunak has hosed us all with free money - surprisingly (or not), this made him very popular at one time.
Reeves knows she cannot instigate the debate because the slightest hint of tax rises and the Conservatives/Daily Mail go berserk and the slightest hint of spending cuts and the Unions go mad. The alternative now seems to be to demonise those who are economically inactive and the paradox of that is of course in order to fill the gaps left by the economically inactive we import cheap labour and that drives everyone mad.
The only area of house building where we have been successful is the madhouse.
I had a fun night last night. Soho was rammed, the London nightlife economy seems to be in full flow, despite Khan's best attempts; it was also good to learn that even in my advanced years I canstill be turfed out of the Groucho at 3am
However there was one jarring moment. Early in the evening I was talking to an old friend in the pub and we got on to Israel/Gaza and this friend came very close - to my mind - to outright anti-Semitism. eg he was defending the US university presidents who said "students marching around calling for genocide of the Jews" constitutes acceptable free speech
I pointed out to him there is no way he would take that position if the supposed students were marching around calling for "genocide of black people". He mumbled away, unable to refute this, then he pursued some insane counter-argument that calling for genocide does not necessarily equal violence.
GENOCIDE??
My friend is a generally mild mannered chap, a Remainery Lib Dem, with leftish tendencies on Woke. Not even a Corbynite
If someone like him is lapsing towards anti-Semitism then that is really ominous
Not wanting an outright shouting match I steered the conversation away from politics and the rest of the evening was a hoot, for everyone
But still. Disquieting
We got him tutoring, old style, and by the time he was 8 his reading age was 15. It just does not work. But so long as you tick enough boxes no one will notice.
With A levels, that’s just 4 tutors….
The state schools love the soaring results.
The thing I find interesting, is that it is back to the old style of learning for the really rich.
Mind you, a couple of friends have got their children sharing tuition sessions. A class of 2. Others have been asking about similar arrangements. I wonder where this will lead….
To see oursels as others see us!
Northern Ireland has more political guidance than Scotland, even without an Assembly. Its dispiriting.
That poll cited by @williamglenn suggests that I am observing something real
In 1948 while campaigning for US Senate in Texas Democratic primary, and subsequent runoff, LBJ used helicopter(s) to travel hither and yon across the Lone Star State.
> Chopper enabled Johnson to meet, greet and speak in many separated/isolated communities large and (mostly) small in very time-effective manner.
> PLUS in those more innocent (or at least less high tech) times, the helicopter itself drew crowds and generated publicity for LBJ.
At least part of then-Congressman Johnson's razor-thin victory of sitting sitting popular governor, may be attributed to his helicopter strategy.
OF COURSE times & politics HAVE changed a bit since 1948 . . .
At least there is a chance the Nats could lose Holyrood in 2026, which would be a potential route out of this stagnation?
The ferries thing is mind-boggling
Superb service - got to St Mary's in time for breakfast at The Bishop and Wolf and caught the morning ferries to St Martin's and Tresco while the poor old Scillonian passengers fetched up at lunchtime and could only wander round the town.
Thoroughly enjoyed it. Sad when it closed a good few years back but I gather a new company, Penzance Helicopters, has re-started the service.
If you get good weather the Scillies are Edenic
If I had a pound for those occasions when the wine and cocaine was in at a posh event. And someone went “don’t get me wrong, but…”
When I asked my Ghanaian ex why she preferred talking to some unreconstructed South Africans at a do we went to - she kinda sighed and said “they are honest about their racism - half the other people in the room are like that, but just lie about it”
But let me make sure I am getting you right -
It is perfectly arguable that October 7 does niot justify what Israel has done since in Gaza - I'm not sure I agree, but I could easily be persuaded of this, it is morally complex
However you are saying - if I understand you correctly - that people you know are going from that opinion (justifiable) to holding every Jewish person accountable for the behaviour of Israel in Gaza (unjustifiable)?
Mrs Stodge loved Tresco and its gardens but we've yet to visit either Bryher or St Agnes.
Absolutely stunning
https://www.turksheadscilly.co.uk/
And it's worth noting there's some very weird shit in there, with Haley losing to Biden (while everyone else has her well ahead).
On the antisemitism one, the questions themselves are a bit of a mess.
And they certainly don't have young people calling for Israel to exist. 69% of young people think Israel has a right to exist as the homeland of Jews,
Simultaneously, 67% of those same young people also think Jews are oppressors. (Albeit, the question about Jews and oppression - on page 57 - frames it very weirdly - "false ideology" anyone. Go read it yourself.)
Of course racism is always with us, like poverty, hopefully one day we can abolish both
However I am specifically talking about anti-Semitism, and its sudden and overt re-appearance in society, often unabashed, and often from educated people - this to me is new and deeply perturbing
Holding Jews in this country responsible for this, just because they are Jewish, is wrong. Very wrong. Yesterday there were Palestinians and their supporters campaigning in Princes Street in Edinburgh. They had no doubt who their enemy was. it was Jews. All Jews. They wanted them dead.
And we're in this incredibly dangerous cycle, where Jews feel themselves under attack and Muslims see their co-religionists being attacked.
And it pushes people to the extremes.
It reduces the burden of private school on the middle class, and provides an example of success to the other kids. So it might not be all bad.
According to the admin at the local Free School, you get quite a few parents offering to pay for all kinds of things - even extra teachers. Which is not allowed, as I understand it
I don't know how we are going to root it out, but we need to root it out. It really doesn't help that educated clever people like my Lib Dem friend are happily parroting the same hateful nonsense albeit in more eloquent tones, it provides cover for even more extreme views
I saw him first in Soho can't remember which club and then followed him to the bigger venues.
And I will stop there or it will degenerate into a tiresome and banal rehearsal of his work a la Monty Python bores, suffice to say the Shaftesbury Theatre and royal fanfare opening riffs floored everyone from the outset.
One of the richest men in the US, from one of it's wealthiest clans of corporate mega-capitalists, he nevertheless achieve considerable electoral rapport with more-average citizens.
First, by getting the press then the public to call him "Rocky" something his family, friends, retainers, etc. never did (similar to how nobody who actually knew Theodore Roosevelt called HIM "Teddy").
Next, by developing the habit of calling just about any male he met on the campaign trail "Fella".
Then he was filmed and photographed, also on campaign trail, eating succession of blntzes, calzones, baklava and just about anything else from ethnic bakeries, restaurants, street vendors in New York City; and also piles of pies, corn-dogs, cotton-candy, etc., etc. during tours of Upstate county fairs.
Note that Rocky achieved his common touch with the aid of LARGE number of aides, strategists, support staff, you name it, he had it.
AND after he was elected (and re-elected) Governor, rather than charge the taxpayers for his transport and many other expenses, Rockefeller picked up the tab . . . something his granddaddy was notoriously reluctant to do.
Indeed, Rocky paid for entire blocks of Manhattan office space, for variety of state governmental programs and projects.
ADDENDUM - further note that Nelson Rockefeller was aided in his first campaign for governor of NY, by running against ANOTHER guy who was filthy rich, namely incumbent Democratic Gov. Averill Harriman.
Who incidentally while US Ambassador to UK during WW2 had affair with Pamela aka Mrs. Randolph Churchill; and after leaving politics and divorcing his first wife, he ended up reconnecting with her. AND after his death, Pamela Harriman herself ended up (figuratively and litterally) and American Ambassador to France.
That is mind boggling
And he has a history of it
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/a-failure-of-the-critical-faculties-msrsrpgjzrs
He lives up to his several monikers.
Even amongst the most intelligent people on PB.
And, let's face it, the Yousaf/Robison combo is not in the same league as Sturgeon/Swinney in motivating their natural supporters. ot talking down their opponents. No-one is scared or initimidated anymore.
Johnson was a bad PM who was unsuited for the role
Corbyn, by virtue of his antisemitism, would have shamed Britain if he had been elected
As I say he got himself in such a tangle trying to justify the infamous answers of the US university presidents at Congress, that he ended up claiming it was OK to call for the "genocide of Jews" on a US campus because "genocide does not necessarily mean violence"
How can a man with an IQ over 140 end up trotting out arrant nonsense like that? The answer, I fear, is anti Semitism clouding his judgement and forcing him into absurd intellectual contortions
Biden leads DeSantis 44% to 41% and Haley 42% to 40% but Trump leads Biden 47% to 42% albeit with 12% DK
https://harvardharrispoll.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/HHP_Dec23_KeyResults.pdf
But some people - actually a frightening amount of people - are just very, very bad at criticising Israel without lapsing into antisemitic conspiracism and tropes. They then act like the fact they're saying these things about Israel or 'Zionists' rather than Jews is some kind of get out of jail free card that makes their views OK because to them hating Israel is the moral position so the anger that produces it is justified.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-suffolk-67743298
There is the Minister who was allegedly having an affair, Hancock style, with an MP during Covid, there is the deep disquiet that nothing seems to be happening in relation to Operation Branchform after nearly 2.5 years now, there was the recent humiliation of the Scottish government taking their own Information Commissioner to court to try and stop the production of material that was the basis of his report but was so redacted that the Commissioner himself said it was highly distorted and he could not support it, there is the complete lack of contemporaneous records or minutes of meetings given to the Covid Inquiry, amongst others, so few of these stories and many more get any attention at all from our media.
66% of that age group think antisemitism is growing in the US; 69% think discrimination against Muslims is growing. 63% say antisemitism is prevalent on campuses. 68% say Jewish students are facing harassment. 70%, still the same age group, think that calling for the genocide of Jewish people is hate speech (compared to 79% across all ages).
69%, same age group, think Israel has a right to exist.
I have seldom seen him so animated about any subject, apart from maybe Brexit, which he absolutely loathed, as a europhile Lib Dem
And, as I said, he has never displayed a hint of anti-Semitism in the past, so it came out of nowhere, and he was properly angry
It is quite extraordinary that Matheson remains in post. He wouldn't have survived at Westminster. There's a real problem of governance at Holyrood.
Anti-semitism is a millennia-old phenomenon. I'd be amazed if it didn't manifest itself in The Groucho. Or White's, for that matter.
Thus, when someone sees three University Presidents being primarily criticised by Republican politicians some instinctively try to intellectualise how the former, their kind of people, are right and the latter, who are odiously wrong on so much else, are wrong.
It's a method of reasoning that's now all too common and can lead you to horrific places.
It was there throughout Trump’s presidency.
It has been a problem for the Labour Party for some time.
It appears more salient to you right now because of your political views, particularly your Islamophobia as many but not all of those currently expressing antisemitic views are Muslims. It is also a bit more salient in reality simply because the situation in Gaza is so prominent in the news.
That’s not to diminish the problem, which is significant. But it’s naive of you to claim it has suddenly reappeared.
A nice story and good luck to them.
Who do you think is delaying any outcome from Branchform, the tent deployers of Police Scotland or is it some nefarious Nat plot?
You're simply wrong in this case. As I have now said several times, this friend of mine has NEVER displayed a hint of anti-Semitism before, yet suddenly there it was, last night, out of nowhere. So in this insance yes it "suddenly appeared"
And the polling of young people lends credence to the idea that it is resurgent
I don't think despise sufficiently captures the attitude of the CofE towards gay people.
As to strife and oppression. All true, though there is much more to be said. Not least that if (which I do not think) there is no divinity then there is little point in isolating a thing called 'religion' to blame for stuff, since in that case all religion is an entirely human responsibility, and it is pure reification to blame an abstract noun for stuff which is 100% a human matter.
Looks a good move.
This is going to be a battle royale.
All the white people in the Southern US who haven’t seen anti-black racism, for example. Not ignored it exactly - but it hasn’t registered. When asked in detail, they often recall “isolated incidents”.
And I do not excuse the tent nonsense, that was truly bizarre in a financial investigation.
Across the grass the poplar shades grow longer
And louder clang the waves along the coast.
The band packs up. The evening breeze stronger
And all the world goes home to tea and toast.
I hurry past a cakeshop's tempting scones
Bound for the red brick twilight of St John's.