Reflexão - O fim de um ciclo (Ruben Amorim)

 

Ruben Amorim foi, sem sombra de dúvida, um treinador que trouxe outra forma de estar à equipa de futebol do Sporting Clube de Portugal (S.C.P.). O seu comportamento em campo, a sua forma de comunicar, a genuinidade do sorriso, a prontidão das respostas nas conferências de imprensa, são indicadores de que se está em presença, para lá de uma pessoa competente na profissão, de um homem bem formado. O que, como se sabe, é raro no panorama nacional. Assim se mantenha.

Independentemente da tentativa de endeusamento em que os media sempre insistiram, ele nunca se deixou enovelar nessa forma simplista, primária, mas tão característica de estarmos - media e populaça -,  na modalidade. 

Porque não acredito em milagres, vou ter saudades deste S.C.P. mas, sobretudo, desta figura. Teremos de esperar, sentados claro, pelo aparecimento de outro fenómeno como este, no clube ou noutro lado. 

Sim, porque é de um fenómeno que se trata. E a "tropa fandanga" nem se apercebeu! Tratou-se simplesmente, para a "massa adepta" e "não adepta" - leia-se carneirismo nacional! -, de mais um treinador. 

Amorim foi - e é! -, muito mais do que isso. E disso - independentemente de não ser o principal atributo para o futebol -, é que me custa mais abdicar, pela raridade da peça nos tempos que vivemos. 

Sorte para ele! Porque o mundo dos homens é mesmo muito mau...

PS - Entretanto os nossos valorosos me(r)dia, que nos consideram a todos burros e que por isso perderam toda a credibilidade junto de quem pensa, vão divulgando "pérolas" cretinas, leia-se, comparações estatísticas como estas: 

"Szabo também é o único que ganhou mais títulos nacionais (7) do que Amorim, que venceu cinco: dois campeonatos (2020/21 e 2023/24), duas Taças da Liga (2020/21 e 2021/22) e uma Supertaça (2021)". Comentário LBC:(No tempo de Szabo havia Taça da Liga?, Supertaça??)

"No último, na época passada, conquistou mesmo a melhor pontuação de sempre dos leões, com 90 pontos"

Comentário (LBC) (Há setenta anos as vitórias valiam 3 pontos?, as ligas tinham 18 equipas?, havia quantas substituições por jogo?, etc., etc! Os campos eram todos relvados? As regras eram iguais???

The Spectator - Drinking With J.D. Vance

(personal underlines)

to understand the future...

 

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/drinking-jd-vance-trump-vice-president?utm_medium=email&utm_source=CampaignMonitor_Editorial&utm_campaign=LNCH%20%2020240717%20%20House%20Ads%20%20AB+CID_ba1fabc3d8d77991fba46838d4031938

Drinking With J.D. Vance

‘Israel is a country and a nation that doesn’t hate its own fucking people’

Do you know the old joke about a rabbi, a priest, and J.D. Vance walking into a bar?

Actually, it’s not a joke. It happened to me.

In 2021, I found myself wandering around the Orlando Hilton trying to find a beer to self-medicate after hourslong harangues around the fallen nature of the West, when I bumped into J.D. Vance.

I was trying to fit in with the Catholics and Orthodox (of both Christian and Jewish varieties) who populate the National Conservativism Conference (NatCon), which I was covering for Tablet. I had my kippah on—though I was more than a year away from my conversion beit din—and I remember wondering whether it was helping or hurting my ability to socialize.

See, the “NatCons” are an odd assortment of traditionalists standing for nationalism, free enterprise, public religion, and other “Western values.” Their conferences sort of feel like a continuation of the Thirty Years’ War, spaces where Catholics and Protestants are somehow still in their battle for supremacy. Unlike in history, however, the Jews here had a leg up. Indeed, for all of its many mentions of Christian nationalism, this event was run by one—namely Israeli author Yoram Hazony.

When I finally found the bar, it was a Dennis Hopper-esque scene of the edgy new right. Chris Rufo, the one-man media army, had just launched his anti-CRT crusade and was doing a victory lap over a recent legislative coup. Walter Kirn, author of Up in the Air, was entertaining a crowd, as was Curtis Yarvin aka Mencius Moldbug, a notorious blogger whose views veer from nihilist to monarchist. Just about every contrarian weird Twitter account was there, and if you managed to tie the profile pic to the actual face, it felt as if your timeline somehow showed up in person. Drink glasses were filled and emptied as political views of questionable viability (or even sanity) were floated and shot down.

And then, several drinks in, James David Vance—as of yesterday the vice presidential candidate of the Republican ticket, but back then a candidate for senator from Ohio—rolled up behind me.

‘We love our country, but we don’t want to live in a shithole.’

Already a star, he was at the conference to speak about universities as the enemy. Vance and I had a messaging history: He’d sent me a note of support when I had a little run-in with the trillion-dollar corporation which makes the laptop I’m typing this on. Since he was one of the few mainstream politicians—as opposed to semi-obscure Catholic integralist philosophers—in attendance, I decided he was the one to talk to.

We settled down at an L-shaped couch nearby, and within minutes the area around us filled up with various conference hangers-on, forming a hooting peanut gallery to our conversation.

I noticed immediately that Vance had to be at least three drinks deep, which could make for a great interview. Unfortunately, I also noticed, as I fumbled to set up the recording app on my phone and LARP at being a real journalist yet again, that I was at least as many drinks deep as he was. As I tried to remember my interview plan, Vance took the reins.

Vance: “Correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe your book came out on June 28, 2016.” 

Me: “That’s incredible recall. That’s right.” 

Vance: “Your book and my book came out at the exact same time. The same day.”

Not only did I not remember when Hillbilly Elegy, my interview subject’s famous memoir of his family’s hardscrabble Appalachian upbringing, was published; I didn’t remember when my own book came out.

Vance: “I remember because your book got to The New York Times bestseller list and mine did not. And I remember thinking to myself, ‘holy shit, this guy wrote this great book about Facebook and he’s going to be the book that’s successful and my shitty book, it’s not going to do anything.’ Anyway, your book is good …”

Me: “Yours stayed on the bestseller list much longer than mine did.”

What little mental planning I’d done here was totally foiled at this sudden confession, five years after the fact, of a writerly competition between us. What I did have, though, was genuine curiosity about how the Big Important Ideas so seriously being fought over by the Twitter avatars here—ideas about religion in society, about populism—might ever translate into actual politics.

“The particularities in my race are very distinct, and so I don’t draw too many lessons for the specifics of my race from the national conservatives,” Vance told me. “But with that caveat, I can’t think of a single other political movement in America right now that has as much energy as this one.”

I asked him to expound a bit. 

“The left is committed to brain-dead Bidenism,” he said (note that this was three years before the president’s disastrously feeble debate performance last month). “Biden’s entire political project is harmonizing various parts of the American left that don’t make any sense. And the American right, at the establishment level, is a series of dogmas that existed 40 years ago and are totally exhausted. And then there’s this thing called national conservatism,” Vance continued, “and it is vibrant and young people are excited about it.”

Hoots and hollers rang out from the peanut gallery. (“This is on the record!” one sharpie darkly warned the others. My iPhone was sitting on the coffee table in plain view.)

And not only young people anymore. In the wake of yesterday’s announcement, much has been made (including in these pages) of the seeming enthrallment of a segment of tech with the ticket that Vance—himself a former tech venture capitalist—is now a part of. My own chats have been lighting up with people fighting about how to understand his views on tech, which some people misunderstand as contradictory. He has, for example, praised Lina Kahn—the head of the Federal Trade Commission who is widely loathed in Silicon Valley. But in fact, Vance points to an emerging split in this space: He is, to use Marc Andreessen’s coinage, pro little tech and anti big tech.

“About three months ago, I gave a speech in Youngstown and the whole speech was me shitting on the power of big technology. After, a guy comes up to me and he says, ‘I really love your speech. The one criticism I had was your point about big tech.’ I thought I was going to hear a classical liberal defense of the private sector again. But what the guy then says is, ‘I agree with what you said about the big tech companies, but y+´ 

ou want to break them up. Why can’t we just throw all their CEOs in prison?’”

(A voice from the crowd piped up, presumably having heard this anecdote before. “I thought he wanted to kill them. Wasn’t it ‘kill them,’” “No,” Vance joked, “that was in southeastern Ohio.”)

To riff on another old joke: OK, but is all this … good for the Jews?

Before I could get my exact question right, Vance launched. “Israel is a country and a nation that doesn’t hate its own fucking people,” he said. “I really admire that.”

It’s worth noting this was pre-Oct. 7, which opened up an ugly rift on the right over Israel, with accusations of Jewish war-mongering bleeding into obscene antisemitism. Still, his comments didn’t feel either superficial or transient. Unlike the neocons, from whom he’s staked a far position, Vance’s admiration for Israel is directly tied to the ideas he has about what’s best for America and our future.

“Israel is the only advanced economy in the entire world that has birth rates above replacement level,” he said. “One of the great lessons of Israel for the United States of America is that when you develop a civilization that’s rooted in self-love and patriotism, you don’t have declining birth rates.”

I asked him how religion factored into these views. 

“My relatives want Israel to be successful so that when the Second Coming of Christ happens in seven years, there’s going to be a country there ready to absorb it. So yeah, there’s some of that,” he said. “But the actual reason that most middle-class Christian Ohioans love Israel is that Israel is a nation that doesn’t hate itself. That’s it. That’s why I like it. My dad does not wake up saying, ‘I really want Israel to be successful over the United States of America.’ He says: ‘Israel, they care about each other. They love their own country. They’re basically aligned more or less with America.’ And that’s it. And I think that’s a great thing.”

The conversation rambled on as th784e crowd chimed in with increasingly intoxicated commentary. I circled back to my original question—namely, whether all of the talk of big ideas would ever translate on the ground, to the lives of actual people?

“Does a normal Ohio voter read Yoram Hazony and Mencius Moldbug? No. They’re old people. They live their lives, they support their family, they want jobs,” Vance told me. “But do they agree with the broad thrust of where we think American public policy should go? Absolutely.”

But who are these people? Are they just old dying white people, headed for minority status anyway, or are they—as Vance has argued—the members of a multiracial and multicultural base of Americans? Listening to the tape now, I hear skepticism in my own voice—a doubt that the coalition these people had in mind would ever come together. Vance didn’t share it.

“Translating the impulse of the multiracial, multicultural middle class turned working class—there’s a lot of work to do,” he said. “But the instincts of the middle-class Black voter, the middle-class white voter, the middle-class Latino voter, are the same.”

“We love our country, but we don’t want to live in a shithole.”

It was time for another drink.

Série - Nuno Garoupa (Os votos americanos falaram)

Uma perspectiva bem diferente e real, do que se passa no mundo. 

E não no nosso cantinho, pequenino, mas que alguns acham ser este sim, o centro do mundo.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CG7Yz-VSZDc

The Spectator - The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books

 (personal underlines)

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/11/the-elite-college-students-who-cant-read-books/679945/

The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books

To read a book in college, it helps to have read a book in high school.

By

October 1, 2024, 7:30 AM ET

Illustration by Masha Krasnova-Shabaeva

Produced by ElevenLabs and News Over Audio (NOA) using AI narration.

This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here.

Updated at 10:57 a.m. ET on October 1, 2024

Nicholas Dames has taught Literature Humanities, Columbia University’s required great-books course, since 1998. He loves the job, but it has changed. Over the past decade, students have become overwhelmed by the reading. College kids have never read everything they’re assigned, of course, but this feels different. Dames’s students now seem bewildered by the thought of finishing multiple books a semester. His colleagues have noticed the same problem. Many students no longer arrive at college—even at highly selective, elite colleges—prepared to read books.

This development puzzled Dames until one day during the fall 2022 semester, when a first-year student came to his office hours to share how challenging she had found the early assignments. Lit Hum often requires students to read a book, sometimes a very long and dense one, in just a week or two. But the student told Dames that, at her public high school, she had never been required to read an entire book. She had been assigned excerpts, poetry, and news articles, but not a single book cover to cover.

Read: Why kids aren’t falling in love with reading

“My jaw dropped,” Dames told me. The anecdote helped explain the change he was seeing in his students: It’s not that they don’t want to do the reading. It’s that they don’t know how. Middle and high schools have stopped asking them to.

In 1979, Martha Maxwell, an influential literacy scholar, wrote, “Every generation, at some point, discovers that students cannot read as well as they would like or as well as professors expect.” Dames, who studies the history of the novel, acknowledged the longevity of the complaint. “Part of me is always tempted to be very skeptical about the idea that this is something new,” he said.

Daniel Shore, the chair of Georgetown’s English department, told me that his students have trouble staying focused on even a sonnet.

And yet, “I think there is a phenomenon that we’re noticing that I’m also hesitant to ignore.” Twenty years ago, Dames’s classes had no problem engaging in sophisticated discussions of Pride and Prejudice one week and Crime and Punishment the next. Now his students tell him up front that the reading load feels impossible. It’s not just the frenetic pace; they struggle to attend to small details while keeping track of the overall plot.

No comprehensive data exist on this trend, but the majority of the 33 professors I spoke with relayed similar experiences. Many had discussed the change at faculty meetings and in conversations with fellow instructors. Anthony Grafton, a Princeton historian, said his students arrive on campus with a narrower vocabulary and less understanding of language than they used to have. There are always students who “read insightfully and easily and write beautifully,” he said, “but they are now more exceptions.” Jack Chen, a Chinese-literature professor at the University of Virginia, finds his students “shutting down” when confronted with ideas they don’t understand; they’re less able to persist through a challenging text than they used to be. Daniel Shore, the chair of Georgetown’s English department, told me that his students have trouble staying focused on even a sonnet.

Failing to complete a 14-line poem without succumbing to distraction suggests one familiar explanation for the decline in reading aptitude: smartphones. Teenagers are constantly tempted by their devices, which inhibits their preparation for the rigors of college coursework—then they get to college, and the distractions keep flowing. “It’s changed expectations about what’s worthy of attention,” Daniel Willingham, a psychologist at UVA, told me. “Being bored has become unnatural.” Reading books, even for pleasure, can’t compete with TikTok, Instagram, YouTube. In 1976, about 40 percent of high-school seniors said they had read at least six books for fun in the previous year, compared with 11.5 percent who hadn’t read any. By 2022, those percentages had flipped.

Read: The terrible costs of a phone-based childhood

But middle- and high-school kids appear to be encountering fewer and fewer books in the classroom as well. For more than two decades, new educational initiatives such as No Child Left Behind and Common Core emphasized informational texts and standardized tests. Teachers at many schools shifted from books to short informational passages, followed by questions about the author’s main idea—mimicking the format of standardized reading-comprehension tests. Antero Garcia, a Stanford education professor, is completing his term as vice president of the National Council of Teachers of English and previously taught at a public school in Los Angeles. He told me that the new guidelines were intended to help students make clear arguments and synthesize texts. But “in doing so, we’ve sacrificed young people’s ability to grapple with long-form texts in general.”

Mike Szkolka, a teacher and an administrator who has spent almost two decades in Boston and New York schools, told me that excerpts have replaced books across grade levels. “There’s no testing skill that can be related to … Can you sit down and read Tolstoy? ” he said. And if a skill is not easily measured, instructors and district leaders have little incentive to teach it. Carol Jago, a literacy expert who crisscrosses the country helping teachers design curricula, says that educators tell her they’ve stopped teaching the novels they’ve long revered, such as My Ántonia and Great Expectations. The pandemic, which scrambled syllabi and moved coursework online, accelerated the shift away from teaching complete works.

In a recent EdWeek Research Center survey of about 300 third-to-eighth-grade educators, only 17 percent said they primarily teach whole texts. An additional 49 percent combine whole texts with anthologies and excerpts. But nearly a quarter of respondents said that books are no longer the center of their curricula. One public-high-school teacher in Illinois told me that she used to structure her classes around books but now focuses on skills, such as how to make good decisions. In a unit about leadership, students read parts of Homer’s Odyssey and supplement it with music, articles, and TED Talks. (She assured me that her students read at least two full texts each semester.) An Advanced Placement English Literature teacher in Atlanta told me that the class used to read 14 books each year. Now they’re down to six or seven.

“It’s not like I can say, ‘Okay, over the next three weeks, I expect you to read The Iliad,’ because they’re not going to do it.”

Private schools, which produce a disproportionate share of elite college students, seem to have been slower to shift away from reading complete volumes—leading to what Dames describes as a disconcerting reading-skills gap among incoming freshmen. But private schools are not immune to the trend. At the prep school that I graduated from five years ago, I took a Jane Austen course my senior year. I read only a single Austen novel.

The issue that Dames and other professors have observed is distinct from the problem at community colleges and nonselective universities, where some students arrive with literacy and comprehension deficits that can leave them unable to complete collegiate courses. High-achieving students at exclusive schools like Columbia can decode words and sentences. But they struggle to muster the attention or ambition required to immerse themselves in a substantial text.

Faced with this predicament, many college professors feel they have no choice but to assign less reading and lower their expectations. Victoria Kahn, who has taught literature at UC Berkeley since 1997, used to assign 200 pages each week. Now she assigns less than half of that. “I don’t do the whole Iliad. I assign books of The Iliad. I hope that some of them will read the whole thing,” Kahn told me. “It’s not like I can say, ‘Okay, over the next three weeks, I expect you to read The Iliad,’ because they’re not going to do it.”

Xochitl Gonzalez: The schools that are no longer teaching kids to read books

Andrew Delbanco, a longtime American-studies professor at Columbia, now teaches a seminar on short works of American prose instead of a survey course on literature. The Melville segment used to include Moby-Dick; now his students make do with Billy Budd, Benito Cereno, and “Bartleby, the Scrivener.” There are some benefits—short works allow more time to focus on “the intricacies and subtleties of language,” Delbanco told me—and he has made peace with the change. “One has to adjust to the times,” he said.

The Columbia instructors who determine the Lit Hum curriculum decided to trim the reading list for the current school year. (It had been growing in recent years, even while students struggled with the reading, as new books by nonwhite authors were added.) Like Delbanco, some see advantages to teaching fewer books. Even the best-prepared students have probably been skimming some of their Lit Hum assignments for years. Joseph Howley, the program’s chair, said he’d rather students miss out on some of the classics—Crime and Punishment is now off the list—but read the remaining texts in greater depth. And, crucially, the change will give professors more time to teach students how they expect them to read.

But it’s not clear that instructors can foster a love of reading by thinning out the syllabus. Some experts I spoke with attributed the decline of book reading to a shift in values rather than in skill sets. Students can still read books, they argue—they’re just choosing not to. Students today are far more concerned about their job prospects than they were in the past. Every year, they tell Howley that, despite enjoying what they learned in Lit Hum, they plan to instead get a degree in something more useful for their career.

The same factors that have contributed to declining enrollment in the humanities might lead students to spend less time reading in the courses they do take. A 2023 survey of Harvard seniors found that they spend almost as much time on jobs and extracurriculars as they do on academics. And thanks to years of grade inflation (in a recent report, 79 percent of Harvard grades were in the A range), college kids can get by without doing all of their assigned work.

Whether through atrophy or apathy, a generation of students is reading fewer books. They might read more as they age—older adults are the most voracious readers—but the data are not encouraging. The American Time Use Survey shows that the overall pool of people who read books for pleasure has shrunk over the past two decades. A couple of professors told me that their students see reading books as akin to listening to vinyl records—something that a small subculture may still enjoy, but that’s mostly a relic of an earlier time.

The economic survival of the publishing industry requires an audience willing and able to spend time with an extended piece of writing. But as readers of a literary magazine will surely appreciate, more than a venerable industry is at stake. Books can cultivate a sophisticated form of empathy, transporting a reader into the mind of someone who lived hundreds of years ago, or a person who lives in a radically different context from the reader’s own. “A lot of contemporary ideas of empathy are built on identification, identity politics,” Kahn, the Berkeley professor, said. “Reading is more complicated than that, so it enlarges your sympathies.”

Yet such benefits require staying with a character through their journey; they cannot be approximated by reading a five- or even 30-page excerpt. According to the neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf, so-called deep reading—sustained immersion in a text—stimulates a number of valuable mental habits, including critical thinking and self-reflection, in ways that skimming or reading in short bursts does not.

Over and over, the professors I spoke with painted a grim picture of young people’s reading habits. (The historian Adrian Johns was one dissenter, but allowed, “My experience is a bit unusual because the University of Chicago is, like, the last bastion of people who do read things.”) For years, Dames has asked his first-years about their favorite book. In the past, they cited books such as Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre. Now, he says, almost half of them cite young-adult books. Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson series seems to be a particular favorite.

I can imagine worse preparations for the trials, and thrills, of Lit Hum. Riordan’s series, although full of frothy action and sometimes sophomoric humor, also cleverly engages in a literary exercise as old as the Western canon: spinning new adventures for the petulant gods and compromised heroes of Greek mythology. But of course there is a reason that, despite millennia of reinterpretations, we’ve never forgotten the originals. To understand the human condition, and to appreciate humankind’s greatest achievements, you still need to read The Iliad—all of it.

---

Due to an editing error, this article initially misstated the year Nicholas Dames started teaching Literature Humanities. This article appears in the November 2024 print edition with the headline “The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

Séries - The Brigade

 Boa impressão desta série

The Spectator - Will this end the ridiculous charade of males in women’s sports?

 

(personal underlines)

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/will-this-end-the-ridiculous-charade-of-males-in-women-sports/?status=Non-subs&utm_medium=email&utm_source=CampaignMonitor_Editorial&utm_campaign=BLND%20%2020241025%20%20HOUSE%20ADS%20%20IH+CID_e6cfbd383bce356d7c549f7f2a467643

Will this end the ridiculous charade of males in women’s sports?

25 October 2024, 5:16pm

Trans cyclist Canadian cyclist Rachel McKinnon (Credit: Getty images)

I’ve long liked to think that if I was a really big girl I would transition to compete in the men’s boxing heavyweight championship. Why not, ladies? Tyson Fury earns about £100 million every time he laces up his gloves. Why not get a slice of that pie?

After all, for an extremely weird decade or so we’ve been enjoined to believe there are no physical advantages, at least not in terms of strength, speed or stamina, to being born male over female. It’s the foundational myth upon which all sorts of madness – hulking great former blokes taking on women at sports including rugby, swimming, cycling and football – has been predicated. 

Why has it taken until now for someone to suggest this?

If biological men can dominate women’s sport, then why not the other way around? Why don’t biological women ever switch codes, so to speak, to beat the fellas on the their own turf? 

It looks like we might now never know. The UN has just issued a report on violence against women and girls in sport that appears to want to put a stop to the bending of gender rules in sport for good. Reading it is like waking up from a particularly wild dream in which everyone seemed to have gone insane. Finally, someone – the UN Special Rapporteur Reem Alsalem, in this case – is talking perfect sense. 

Alsalem doesn’t hold back. She points out that since trans women – she calls them by the old fashioned term ‘males’ – have been allowed to compete with biological women in sport, ‘over 600 female athletes in more than 400 competitions have lost more than 890 medals in 29 different sports’. She makes clear, too, that everything we’ve been told about medications to suppress testosterone in trans women, thereby ensuring they have no athletic advantages over biological women, is a load of rubbish. 

She says: ‘Male athletes have specific attributes considered advantageous in certain sports, such as strength and testosterone levels that are higher than those of the average range for females, even before puberty… Pharmaceutical testosterone suppression for genetically male athletes – irrespective of how they identify – will not eliminate the set of comparative performance advantages they have already acquired.’ Quite. 

It goes without saying the ridiculous debate about whether men should be allowed to compete against women in any sport, let alone contact sports, has had serious repercussions for actual women. Alsalem says: ‘When female-only sports spaces are opened to males, as documented in disciplines such as in volleyball, basketballand soccer… injuries have included knocked-out teeth, concussions resulting in neural impairment, broken legs and skull fractures.’

She cites, too, a study published in Sports Medicine that found: 

Even in non-elite sport, ‘the least powerful man produced more power than the most powerful woman’ and states that, where men and women have roughly the same levels of fitness, males’ average punching power has been measured as 162 per cent greater than females. 

None of this can possibly come as news to anyone who has walked about in the world with their eyes open.

The way the entire trans issue has been weaponised in recent years by those on the front lines of the culture wars strikes most people, I think, as extremely bizarre. ‘What is a woman?’ has become a staple question of any media interview with a politician, and all of us increasingly – particularly during Pride month, when even captured corporations get in on the fun – are stridently impelled to agree that trans women are indeed women. 

Personally, I’ve come suspect the point of it all is just a diabolically clever and deliberate means of making the West question itself constantly, eventually causing it to suffer a nervous breakdown. Looking around, you’d have to say as a plan it’s working quite well. 

Anyway, I digress. Alsalem’s report makes one particularly exciting proposal, one that surely would be a ratings smash: ‘the creation of open [sports] categories for those persons who do not wish to compete in the category of their biological sex.’ A trans-only category. Why has it taken until now for someone to suggest this? Who doesn’t want to know who is the fastest transgender person in the world, or the strongest, or the most capable of jumping very high? 

One hopes after this report, the allowing of men to compete with women in physical contests, let alone to share changing rooms, will be a strange thought experiment we will tell future generations about, while shaking our heads in bewilderment. ‘Males must not compete in the female categories of sport,’ the report says. 

And let that be an end to it.

Livro - Abril pelas direitas

 Perspectiva diferente, mas original, do 25 de Abril.

Reflexão (LBC) - Jogos Olímpicos (2024 Paris)

Reflections on Paris Olympic Games

I followed, once again, and intermittently, some of the events of these Olympic Games in Paris. Interest has been declining. And this, for multiple reasons. But the past leaves a mark.

I regularly watched handball (channel 408), volleyball (channel 409), and judo (canal 407). I made forays into table tennis and athletics. And not much else. 

Although I admire the queen discipline of aquatic sports (I realized this when I accompanied Diogo and Filipe during their many years of federated swimming), I don't have the patience to follow it. It is of an unspeakable monotony. Hours spent admiring the tilework in the surroundings... 

On the one hand, it is impressive to see the evolution of the numbers in athletics and swimming, but on the other hand, it is curious to note the trend that these same results show towards an asymptote, resulting from the limitations of human capabilities. Antidote? Alternative pathetic modalities are being invented (in both senses!)...

Watching athletes like those in the decathlon (or triathlon) perform such disparate sub-specialties, but with such specific technicality, can only be understood by someone who has practiced, at a certain level, some sport. 

The spectacular nature and evolution of indoor volleyball, as well as handball, are evident. The overwhelming supremacy of the attack over the defense in the first, and the role of the goalkeepers or aerial play in the second, are proof of this.

From another angle, and despite understanding why and how they have been introduced into the "spectacle society" circuit, I cannot understand some events, more worthy of a circus than the Olympic Games.

Yes, definitely "the circus is in town"! What is the interest in having half a dozen girls underwater, all painted (?), identical in physique, with predictable and visible difficulties in breathing, to perform synchronized movements? And having the kids skateboarding or performing acrobatic movements to the sound of a pamphlet song, always analogous? I have no doubt that one of the next events will be a fashion show of drag queens in swimsuits with one or another mandatory move...

(The people are really basic for accepting this hammering of absurd things down their throats. They didn't go to the schoolyard when they should have, nor did they get beaten up when they should have, and then this is what happens).

When there was a circus at the fairs - now it's becoming extinct, with only the circus of those very tiny and rich companies of clowns remaining - there were also trapeze artists, aerial and ground acrobatics, jumps into strange places, weightlifters, etc., etc.

There seems to be a kind of reinvention of disciplines that have nothing to do with spectacle. It makes me laugh. Whoever played indoor volleyball more seriously understands the futility, the inconsistency of beach volleyball. What is the objective? Put the ball in the empty space? Simple! But no! The flock rejoices at that, as if it were Organic Chemistry or Quantum Physics. As if it had a titanic level of difficulty. Passing the redundancy, wait twenty years and you will see what awaits you physically...

Nowadays, a lot of things confuse me. From the previous controversy with "handicapped" athletes, now with lgbtaeiou, transgender or trigender, tetragender or whatever, passing through the introduction of new modalities like climbing, skateboarding, synchronized swimming or breakdancing (??).

By the way, couldn't an opening ceremony be held without controversy? Without those so-called minorities that only complicate things?

Finally, three other reflections: in the first, it greatly impresses me, in team sports, the need to constantly greet each other with "pats and taps," as if they were needy children or people with dementia. It's when they are introduced to the public, it's when they go to the bench, it's when they leave the bench, it's when they start the game, it's when they finish a part of the game, it's in the timeouts, it's when they do something well, it's when they mess up (??), everything is a moment for them to self-satisfy with the pseudo support of others. 

Secondly, the way it is agreed upon and is complicit with the customs and practices of certain countries. Why is the participation of athletes with headscarves accepted? Or with the whole body covered? The day this leniency conflicts with the rules due to any accident, all hell will break loose.

Third: how is it acceptable for athletes to participate with necklaces, earrings, and other adornments? Of course, this will only end when there is an accident and then everyone will reflect...

It is, after all, the trivialization of a moment that should be unique by doing something WELL done. Or how modern and inconsistent habits are acquired, to the detriment of ancient rituals that have their reasons for being.

Let's have hope. Yes, because I don't have any!

Reflexões de uns Jogos Olímpicos

Acompanhei, uma vez mais, e intermitentemente, algumas das disciplinas destes JO em Paris. O interesse tem vindo a diminuir. E isto por múltiplas razões. Mas o passado deixa rasto.

Vi, com regularidade, o andebol (canal 408), o voleibol (canal 409) e o judo (canal 407). Fiz incursões no ténis de mesa e no atletismo. E pouco mais. 

Apesar de admirar a disciplina raínha das modalidades aquáticas (apercebi-me quando acompanhei o Diogo e o Filipe nos seus muitos anos de natação federada), não tenho paciência para a acompanhar. É de uma monotonia inenarrável. Horas a apreciar a azulejaria das redondezas... 

Se por um lado impressiona ver a evolução dos números do atletismo e da natação, por outro é curiosa a tendência que esses mesmos resultados evidenciam para uma assímptota, decorrente da limitação das capacidades do ser humano. Antídoto? Inventam-se modalidades alternativas (em ambos os sentidos!) patetas...

Assistir a atletas como os do decatlo (ou triatlo) a fazerem sub-especialidades tão díspares, mas com uma tecnicidade tão específica, só pode ser entendido por quem praticou, num certo nível, alguma modalidade. 

É evidente a espectacularidade e a evolução do voleibol de pavilhão, bem como do andebol. A supremacia avassaladora do ataque sobre a defesa no primeiro, e o papel dos guarda redes ou o jogo aéreo no segundo, são disso prova.

Já noutro ângulo, e apesar de perceber porque e como têm vindo a ser introduzidas no circuito da "sociedade espectáculo", não posso entender algumas modalidades, mais dignas de um circo do que de uns Jogos Olímpicos.

Sim, definitivamente "the circus in in town"! Qual o interesse em ter meia dúzia de garotas debaixo de água, todas pintadas (?), iguais no físico, com dificuldades previsíveis e visíveis em respirar, para fazer movimentos sincronizados? E de ter os putos a fazer skate ou a efectuar movimentos acrobáticos ao som de uma música panfletária, sempre análogos? Não duvido que uma das próximas modalidades será uma passagem de modelos de dragqueens em fato de banho com um ou outro movimento obrigatório...

(A malta é mesmo básica ao aceitar esta martelagem pela goela abaixo de coisas absurdas. Não foram para o recreio quando deviam ter ido, nem levaram porrada quando deviam ter levado e depois dá nisto)

Quando havia o circo, nas feiras - hoje está em extinção, havendo apenas o circo daquelas companhias finérrimas dos ricalhaços -, também havia trapezistas, acrobacia aérea e de solo, saltos para sítios esquisitos, levantadores de halteres, etc., etc.

Há como que uma espécie de reinvenção de modalidades que de espectáculo nada têm. Faz-me rir. Quem jogou voleibol de pavilhão mais a sério, percebe a inutilidade, a inconsequência do voleibol de praia. Qual o objectivo? Colocar a bola no vazio? Simples! Mas não! O rebanho rejubila com aquilo, como se de Química Orgânica ou Física Quântica se tratasse. Como se tivesse um grau de dificuldade mastodôntico. Passe a redundância, esperem vinte anos e vão ver os que os espera no físico...

Hoje em dia muita coisa me faz confusão. Desde a anterior polémica com os atletas "handicaped", agora com os lgbtaeiou, os transgéneros ou trigéneros, tetragéneros  ou quejandos, passando pela introdução de novas modalidades como a escalada, o skate, a natação sincronizada ou o breakdance (??).

Já agora, não se poderia fazer uma cerimónia de abertura sem polémica? Sem as ditas minorias que só complicam?

Finalmente, três outras reflexões: na primeira, mete-me muita impressão, nas modalidades colectivas, a necessidade de se cumprimentarem constantemente com "tapinhas e palmadinhas", como se se tratasse de crianças carenciadas, ou de portadores de demência. É quando são apresentadas ao público, é quando vão para o banco, é quando saem do banco, é quando começam o jogo, é quando acabam uma parte do jogo, é quando fazem qualquer coisa bem, é quando fazem asneira (??), tudo é o momento para se auto-satisfazerem com o pseudo apoio dos outros. 

Na segunda, a forma como se pactua e é conivente com os usos e costumes de certos países. Porque se aceita a participação de atletas com o lenço na cabeça? Ou com o corpo todo coberto? No dia em que este facilitismo entrar em conflito com as regras por um acidente qualquer, cai o Carmo e a Trindade.

Terceira: como se aceita que atletas participem com fios ao pescoço, brincos e outros adornos? Claro que isto só acaba quando houver um acidente e, aí, tudo vai reflectir...

É, enfim, a banalização do momento que deveria ser único por se fazer algo BEM feito. Ou como se ganham vícios modernos e sem consistência, em detrimento de rituais antigos mas com razão de ser.

Tenhamos esperança. Sim, porque eu não tenho!

The Spectator - Broken Britain: what went wrong?

 

(personal underline)

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/broken-britain-what-went-wrong/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=CampaignMonitor_Editorial&utm_campaign=ECON%20%2020230908%20%20AL+CID_88e1d1f624cfa95bac4b34b6229691ab

Broken Britain: what went wrong?

Did Gillian Keegan need to apologise? The Education Secretary thought her ITV interview had ended and she could speak frankly. She insisted the schools’ concrete crisis was down to ‘everyone else’ who had ‘sat on their arse’.

It was a fair point, inelegantly expressed. It’s been almost 25 years since the order first went out from Whitehall to inspect schools and hospitals for crumbling reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete (Raac). When a roof eventually collapsed at the Singlewell Primary school in Kent in 2018, the government sent out surveys to inquire about building material – but that was largely it. Like lazy homeowners, or dodgy landlords, successive administrations assumed the problem would be dealt with by somebody else at a later date.

Then, days before the new term started this week, parents of pupils at more than 150 schools were told it wasn’t safe for their kids to return. Memories of ‘stay at home’ messaging came back in a flash.

The blame can be spread. The SNP in Scotland and the Labour party in Wales have only just started the Raac discovery process. But Rishi Sunak’s government is going to take the brunt of the anger. After 13 years in power, the Tories must accept that voters aren’t interested in root causes. Every primary school student sent home this week was born under a Conservative-led government.

The school-roofs issue could be regarded as urgent yet manageable. But to a lot of the public, it seems as if the country is falling apart. The NHS is shambolic: its waiting list now includes 13 per cent of England’s adult population. The sewage system is inadequate, with rivers and coastlines full of effluents. Trains are expensive and overcrowded. Airports descend into chaos at the slightest glitch in air traffic control software.

A recent poll by Lord Ashcroft found that 58 per cent of 2019 Tory voters agreed with the statement ‘Britain is broken – people are getting poorer, nothing seems to work properly’. In the lead-up to the next election, even the party’s supporters are going to be asking the Tories why the country appears to be in ruins. So far, there’s little evidence of a coherent response.

This has allowed Labour to argue that Tory cuts mean public sector failure, which is resonating. But this hardly tallies with the numbers overall. State spending is 60 per cent higher in real terms than it was, on average, in the Tony Blair years. Tax receipts account for 36.9 per cent of GDP: a share on course to reach a post-war high by the end of this parliament. The Tories didn’t starve the beast. They fed it generously and will go into the election taxing and spending more than the governments of Blair and Gordon Brown – or when Denis Healey was chancellor.

But where has all the money gone if not into projects such as public-building maintenance, generally considered a core function of the state? The problem is one of short-termism, where investment is repeatedly delayed for the instant gratification of government giveaways and positive headlines.

In the final days of Brown’s premiership, even the heavy-spending prime minister seemed to realise he’d gone too far. He managed to keep billions in capital investment off the books by signing up to Private Finance Initiatives (PFI) projects: outrageously expensive contracts with private companies to build and maintain hospitals and schools, paid back in hefty fees for 25 or 30 years. On top of that, he racked up a £150 billion deficit in his mishandling of the financial crash. To persuade markets that he had a credible plan, he offered up long-term spending as a sacrifice, factoring in big cuts to capital spending from 2011 onwards.

Capital spending is the easiest target for the chopping block. Necessary upgrades to public buildings, the rail network, airports and roads can be covered up for quite some time. It’s not so easy to brush aside demands for higher salaries, more GPs, a bigger safety net and free childcare. Capital spending did indeed drop by 15 per cent in real terms in 2010-11 – as Brown intended, but David Cameron implemented.

This was the trick of Cameron and George Osborne’s government: ring-fence the daily spending of politically sensitive areas while cutting deeper into council funding and capital projects that would take longer to show signs of wear.

The cross-party conspiracy of neglect put school upgrades in the firing line too. The decision under Michael Gove to scrap Labour’s Building Schools for the Future investment programme – designed to see every secondary state school upgraded at a total cost of £55 billion – was justified by digging into the scheme’s problems. Ministers thought the pot of money was being raided by architects, pushing up the costs of building and repairs to unnecessarily high levels. That may have been true, but the government failed to replace the scheme with anything like the same level of investment. The result: on current trajectories, the average state school in England will get an upgrade every 400 years. The average lifespan of Raac roofing is about 30.

In hospitals as well, the strategy was to grab money from the capital budget to beef up day-to-day spending. At the height of austerity, more than £4 billion was diverted in this way, according to the King’s Fund think tank. Shortly before the pandemic, it reported on a ‘high-risk backlog’ – where repairs are needed to ‘prevent catastrophic failure’ or ‘deficiencies in safety liable to cause serious injury’. It may not be long before one of these failures takes the spotlight, leading to the kind of soul-searching triggered by the concrete crisis.

The irony of the austerity era is how much fiscal pain was inflicted in some areas, while the size of the state was barely reduced. Between 2010 and 2015, the government cut public spending by an average of just 0.15 per cent a year. The money saved by the brutal cuts to long-term infrastructure investment was not returned to the taxpayer or used to reduce public sector net debt, which has doubled to £2 trillion since the Tories came to power. Instead, it’s been used to make ever-loftier spending commitments, which is what MPs think the public want to hear.

Those promises fall under two spending areas, mainly within the Department of Health and the Department for Work and Pensions. These costs now take up over 40 per cent of government spending, with £215 billion spent on health and £254 billion on welfare (of which £134 billion is in pensioner benefits). The Tories have come to express their loyalty to the NHS by how much cash they throw at day-to-day running costs, not by whether patients are better treated. Bribing the elderly with a ‘triple lock’ inflation-matching pension pledge has seen the welfare bill skyrocket, as has the cost of keeping 12 per cent of the working-age population on out-of-work benefits.

Even at the height of reform during the Cameron years, pension benefits and NHS spending were off-limits. They have remained so. It has always been the path of least resistance – until, that is, public buildings start caving in.

The government has long preferred grandiose yet half-baked investment projects, which become their successors’ problem when it all goes wrong. Osborne’s ‘hard hat tour’, which promoted HS2, proved the perfect photo opportunity for a project which would reveal its true costs once he was out of office. (The project is billions of pounds over budget.) Theresa May used her final days in office to push through a legal commitment to net-zero carbon emission by 2050 – the most expensive pledge any UK prime minister has ever taken. In her recent memoir, May writes that this commitment is one of her proudest achievements: a binding target with massive costs, ushered in with minimal consultation, and without the slightest clue as to where future governments might find the money.

Perhaps Cameron and May never expected the Tories to stay in power as long as they have. With hindsight, Osborne might have used a tenth of the HS2 budget to upgrade local transport, which would be up and running by now and could be something for his party to claim as a success. May – or Boris Johnson with his 80-seat majority – might have built some more homes too.

Instead, Rishi Sunak now must explain why, 13 years on, schools are unsafe, nothing gets built, and the country’s major institutions all seem to teeter on the brink of collapse. Because that’s what happens when short-term political decisions pile up: lots of money is spent, nothing much happens.

Sunak can’t quite say there’s no cash to spend on improvements, given the record levels of revenue funnelling into the Treasury. But he will struggle to reallocate resources – and to raise more. As Liz Truss discovered when she tried to usher in what was estimated to be the single largest handout in British history (the energy price guarantee), the markets no longer lend billions to big-spending agendas.

Normally, it’s left-leaning political leaders who want to splurge. Just this week, the SNP’s Humza Yousaf has been talking about free childcare for Scotland’s toddlers, while London Mayor Sadiq Khan has offered free school meals to all of London’s children, no matter the family’s financial circumstances.

But Keir Starmer appears to be at least vaguely cognisant that cash has to come from somewhere, which is why he and his shadow chancellor made the politically painful decision earlier this year to roll back their pledge of £28 billion for ‘green investment’. They, too, will be hesitant to divert cash from today’s giveaways to investments that will pay off long after they leave Westminster.

Here, Sunak may have an advantage. The theme of his unsuccessful leadership campaign was that ‘fairytale’ spending pledges end badly. His emphasis on candour – attaching price tags to what’s being spent – eventually landed him the job in No. 10, but has also led to an even higher tax burden than the one imposed on us by Boris Johnson. But Sunak has long been wanting to turn the conversation on to the need to think longer-term. He’s expected to start emphasising that in coming months. At next month’s Tory conference, he’ll argue that it’s time to think about investments and reform that will boost prosperity in ten or 20 years’ time.

His point will be that only the Tories can clean up the mess left by the Tories. But he must also accept that the mess was not caused by spending restraint. The Conservatives fell for the politics of bribery, a trap from which they have not yet managed to escape.