HebrideanUltraTerfHecate

Scotland’s streets bear ideology that led to Bondi beach atrocity

As Paltire flags fly across Glasgow, Jews in Scotland feel the only differences between the horrific events in Australia and us are timing and geog...

I have written on these pages before about the increase in antisemitism in Scotland. But why should an event that occurred more than 10,000 miles away have such an impact? Like the attack in Manchester on Yom Kippur, it was a shock. But was it a surprise? Absolutely not. On the day I arrived in Sydney in September, a crowd estimated by some reports to number 300,000 had descended on the iconic Harbour Bridge. According to news reports, they carried jihadist flags and portraits of the Iranian dictator Ayatollah Ali Khamenei holding a rifle. They chanted: “Death, death to the IDF.” What happened in Bondi stems directly from the normalisation of antisemitic rhetoric and actions. Let me be clear: criticising Israel or any other country is entirely legitimate. But there’s a fundamental difference between criticising a government’s policies and inciting hatred against an entire people. When criticism of Israel crosses into demonising Jews as a group, denying Jewish self-determination while affirming it for others or holding Jews collectively responsible for Israeli government actions, that’s no longer political discourse. That’s antisemitism. And when such hatred becomes legitimised in public conversation, when it goes unchallenged or categorised as mere “criticism”, the conditions for violence are created. https://archive.ph/1FqkU

Humza Yousaf’s foreign trips bankrolled by Qatar and Turkey

The former first minister is accused of neglecting his Holyrood duties to attend the Doha Forum and an event in Istanbul paid for by Turkey’s sta...

Humza Yousaf has been funded by Qatar’s authoritarian government and a broadcaster accused of being a propaganda outlet for President Erdogan of Turkey to travel the world. The former first minister has disclosed that he accepted funding from the Qatari regime, accused of widespread human rights abuses, to attend the Doha Forum in the Gulf state this month. Yousaf also attended an event in Istanbul, at the expense of Turkish state broadcaster TRT, between October 30 and November 2. TRT is now widely seen as a mouthpiece for the Erdogan government, which is accused of targeting political opponents, restricting press freedom and eroding democracy. The Scottish Tories and Reform UK contrasted the former SNP leader’s extensive interventions overseas with his lack of contributions at Holyrood, where he remains an MSP. https://archive.ph/U6Rdw

Having to fake your PhD? That’s so Seventies

The sheer quantity and declining quality of postgraduate degrees makes them easier to obtain but increasingly worthless

The lure of getting prestige on the cheap has always been a problem in higher education, but the threat is evolving. These days, to pretend to have an MA would be fairly pointless as it wouldn’t confer any meaningful edge. Last year, taught postgraduate degrees awarded by UK universities outnumbered undergraduate ones for the first time, unleashing 467,765 master’s-holders on to the career ladder. The sector has risen a staggering 67 per cent in five years. Though most of these degrees went to international students, 29 per cent went to domestic ones. That’s a lot of competition. And it’s not sheer quantity that has lowered the status of many courses; it’s also the quality. As domestic fees have stayed capped, the lucrative taught postgraduate degree business has become indispensable to the survival of universities. In practice this means that for some courses you would have to write your application in green crayon not to get in; and even then, rejection is not guaranteed. The few exceptional students who apply, believing the experience will be more intellectually satisfying than undergraduate days, often arrive to find a set of dissolute, mediocre classmates trying to spin out student life for as long as possible — not so much gaming the jobs market as hiding from it completely. Teaching, meanwhile, is typically done as cheaply as possible. This can mean students on different MA courses converging for shared modules or just recycling undergrad teaching but with longer assessments. Partly for such reasons, doing a master’s in fields such as politics, history and English significantly reduces your earning power in the medium term, compared with doing undergraduate study only. https://archive.ph/2mYfV

seems to be working again.

Peers urge Streeting to scrap puberty blocker trial for children

Young people joining the NHS Pathways trial will be advised on fertility preservation before treatment begins

A group of peers have urged Wes Streeting to halt an NHS-backed puberty blocker trial, saying that it will put children on a pathway of “lifelong medical support”. About 250 girls and boys aged between 10 and 16 will be recruited to a trial of hormone-suppressing drugs from the new year, run by King’s College London. But 11 cross-party members of the Lords have written a letter to The Times urging the health secretary to intervene and get the trial halted. They said: “Most children with concerns about gender grow out of it. But once placed on puberty blockers, the majority proceed to cross sex hormones — and then to the Wild West of our adult gender clinics. We know the resultant harms: reduced bone density, possible impact on brain development, loss of fertility, sexual dysfunction, a requirement for lifelong medical support, often serious pain and medical complications. “How can anyone justify placing a further cohort of vulnerable children on a pathway to this future?” The letter was signed by 11 members of the House of Lords, including the Conservative peer Baroness Jenkin of Kennington and the Labour peer Lord Glasman. https://archive.ph/FfQVU

The Critic Magazine

Enduring delights | John MacLeod | The Critic Magazine

It was first broadcast over forty years ago and has only twice, ever, been repeated. Yet The Box of Delights has proved so definitive — a scr...

It is, of course, inconceivable that the achingly woke BBC would make such a drama today. Indeed, after a repeat in 1986, it took thirty-eight years before it was rebroadcast and, to the fury of fans, it has just been pulled from BBC iPlayer. But thirteen-something young Kay Harker, after all, is a plummy-voiced lad bouncing around Worcestershire in a Norfolk suit. Orphaned — though we are not told how — but unmistakably of gentlefolk, with a pleasant country house and sometimes just a little lordly with the servants. They deferentially address him as “Master Kay.” His guardian, the glamorous Caroline Louisa, is draped in fox-fur; the young Jones siblings, joining Kay for the hols, likewise attend frightfully good schools. There isn’t a person of colour in sight, no one is bi-curious or out to decolonise anyone’s curriculum, and central to The Box of Delights is foiling a dastardly plan to prevent the 1000th annual Christmas service at Tatchester Cathedral. One can readily imagine Adjoa Andoh’s curled lip. But no less important is Kay’s custody of a small magic box — entrusted to him by a mysterious old. The box must, at all costs, never fall into the hands of Abner Brown — a villain in charge of a cabal of pretend-clergy who can shapeshift into wolves, and who desperately wants that box – when he isn’t kidnapping (“scrobbling”) choirboys, conjuring up demons, or plotting badness with Kay’s old governess, Sylvia Daisy Pouncer. The dialogue is remarkably faithful to Masefield’s original, complete with the boarding-school slang of his day — the enjoyable is “splendiferous”, anything unpleasant or vexatious damned as the “purple pim” — and the stunning snowscapes our heroes must wade through in the second episode were filmed on location in Scotland.