Observador - Só faltava mesmo uma migração caótica de javalis (Tiago Dores)

 

(sublinhados pessoais)

https://observador.pt/opiniao/so-faltava-mesmo-uma-migracao-caotica-de-javalis/

Só faltava mesmo uma migração caótica de javalis

De Albufeira a Viseu, passando pelas praias de Setúbal, os bácoros estão a aparecer em todo o lado. E ninguém está preocupado em pôr ordem nisto, pelo menos até os suínos irem passear ao Martim Moniz

19 ago. 2026, 00:21

Meus caros, após profunda reflexão, desejo partilhar convosco o seguinte: “não podemos viver uma espécie de censura moderna em que as pessoas só conhecem, sabem e debatem os assuntos mais polémicos, os assuntos de pequenos incidentes, dos pequenos episódios, e deixar aquilo que é mais importante escondido em notas de rodapé ou mesmo omitido dos grandes espaços de veicular e comentar a informação.” Ora, tendo isto em conta, hoje vou falar de javalis.

Sem deixar de assinalar, no entanto, algumas coisas de pormenor, como o investimento “estratégico” de mais de 300 milhões de euros que o Governo de Luís Montenegro decidiu fazer na REN. Se, enquanto contribuinte, me dessem a escolher, teria optado por destinar essa parte dos meus impostos a um novo investimento dinamizado pelo príncipe da Nigéria, que, ao contrário dos governos portugueses, não tem no currículo outros belíssimos investimentos estratégicos, tipo TAP ou EFACEC. Já se a parte “estratégica” for comprar esta posição na REN só para, daqui a pouco, a revender a um investidor mais alinhado com os EUA do que com a China, aí retiro o que disse e volto já aos javalis.

Não sem antes mencionar aquela turista sueca que veio a Lisboa para testemunhar a luz única da cidade e que, por pouco, concluía se essa luz é mais ou menos única do que a luz ao fundo do túnel que testemunham os que passam para o lado de lá. Num instante, uma pessoa está a encher o bandulho com pastéis de nata; no instante seguinte, tem uma forte perceção de pontada no estômago, à qual é totalmente alheio o dito pastel.

E à qual não será tão alheia uma bala perdida. Disparada por um empreendedor do setor agrícola que comercializava louro prensado como droga e que atirou, ao que tudo indica, contra um rival do mesmo ramo de actividade, mas acabou por acertar na turista. O suspeito saiu em liberdade, talvez porque, sendo verdade que vender louro por droga pode consubstanciar o crime de burla, não é menos verdade que, só por mérito deste menino, já se perdeu a conta a quanta gente abandonou o consumo de drogas depois de ficar agarrada a ervas aromáticas ótimas para temperar bifes. Por falar em bifes, lembrem-me de falar nos javalis.

Ainda a propósito de pontadas no estômago, mas desta vez causadas pela fominha, celebrou-se há dias o centenário do nascimento de Fidel Castro, evento em que marcou presença o líder do ainda não extinto PCP. Paulo Raimundo assinalou que Fidel “deixou um rico e atual legado de reflexões, propostas inspiradoras e guias de ação”. Pois deixou. Por exemplo, se alguém quiser refletir sobre as propostas de ação inspiradoras que foram capazes de transformar todo um país numa grande ilha de lata, só pode chegar a uma conclusão: mais valia ser baleado, não fatalmente, a meio de um pastel de nata, do que ter a infelicidade de engolir comunismo durante décadas a fio.

Engolir que, enfim, me leva aos javalis. Que, de repente, de Albufeira a Viseu, passando por Abrantes e pelas praias de Setúbal, andam a aparecer por todo o lado. E ninguém parece minimamente preocupado em pôr ordem nisto. Pelo menos até os suínos pensarem em ir passear ao Martim Moniz. Aí é que vão ver se o regabofe não se acaba depressa, seus bacorinhos.

Mas lá está, os portugueses só sabem ver o lado mau das notícias. Em que outro sítio do mundo seria má notícia ter proteína de primeira, à solta pelas ruas e sem dono? Bastava andar com um grelhador no porta-bagagens e, ao cruzarmo-nos com ela, imobilizá-la — por meios humanos, como é óbvio, e não como o vendedor de louro prensado imobilizou a turista sueca — para depois a pormos a rodar no espeto. E enquanto nos deliciávamos com o petisco, já íamos delineando um plano de contingência para a próxima grande tragédia nacional: uma praga de lagosta a dar à costa.

Observador - Artur Baptista da Silva passeia-se por Cambridge (Jorge Fernandes)

 

(sublinhados pessoais)

https://observador.pt/opiniao/artur-baptista-da-silva-passeia-se-por-cambridge/

Artur Baptista da Silva passeia-se por Cambridge

Questionar a biografia de alguém identificado com uma narrativa de superação e marginalização deixou de ser lido como rigor e passou a ser lido como hostilidade estrutural

Jorge Fernandes 

19 ago. 2026, 00:23

Natal de 2012. O país estava em transe. O Passismo, dizia-se, destruía o tecido social e a economia, condenando Portugal a uma pobreza total da qual jamais se levantaria. Nesse ambiente, as Nações Unidas terão feito um relatório sobre a crise social na Europa do Sul dirigido por Artur Baptista da Silva, doutorado pela Universidade de Milton, Wisconsin, que a Lisboa bem-pensante recebeu de boca aberta durante semanas, até que uma ida ao Expresso da Meia-Noite revelou o óbvio: era um burlão de segunda, com um doutoramento falso e o mais perto que estivera das Nações Unidas terá sido uma visita guiada ao edifício.

Treze anos depois de Baptista da Silva, uma fraude inocente que pôs o país a rir naquele Natal de 2012, as fraudes estão por todo o lado. A mais recente e mais famosa foi a de Jason Arday. Vale a pena passar as credenciais de Arday a pente fino porque, sem dúvida, é um burlão de um calibre superior ao de Baptista da Silva. Nascido em 1985, Arday dizia ter sido não verbal até aos onze anos e que só aprendera a ler aos dezoito, o que não augurava propriamente um futuro académico brilhante. Para além disso, afirmara ter feito voluntariado para a WaterAid a instalar pontos de água na África do Sul e na América Latina, e que correra 30 maratonas em 35 dias, tendo sofrido, inclusive, um ataque epiléptico a meio da vigésima primeira maratona, que, ainda assim, concluiu. Com estas corridas, conseguira angariar mais de 5 milhões de libras para obras de caridade. Academicamente, Arday mostrou também ser um óptimo burlão. Depois de uma tese com inúmeras passagens plagiadas, dizia ainda ter sido, tal como o nosso Feliciano Duarte Barreiras, professor visitante na Ohio State University e na Universidade de Glasgow, além de afirmar ter uma cátedra honorífica em Durham, no norte de Inglaterra. Todas estas mentiras foram premiadas, para espanto de muitos, com uma Cátedra em Sociologia da Educação em Cambridge. Ao longo dos últimos anos, vários académicos e jornalistas começaram a alertar para a situação de Arday, que negava veementemente qualquer problema e, mais, ameaçava processar quem se atrevesse a falar sobre o assunto. Na semana passada, as mentiras foram demasiadas, e Arday acabou por demitir-se de Cambridge e, mais tarde, suicidar-se em Londres. Uma tragédia.

Como foi possível que tudo isto acontecesse? Convém dizê-lo com clareza: isto não é uma história sobre a maldade da imprensa de direita, por mais que alguns tentem agora vendê-la como tal, e o New York Times, jornal que dificilmente se pode suspeitar de enviesamento à direita, fez aliás um retrato minucioso das falhas de Cambridge neste processo. É antes a história de instituições intelectuais outrora eminentes a falharem a sua missão, sintoma claro de um declínio mais vasto e mais antigo.

Ao longo dos últimos anos, a academia, especialmente nas ciências sociais, mudou muito. Em primeiro lugar, a lógica que alguns denominam “métrica” na avaliação dos currículos académicos passou a ser vista com o mesmo desconforto moral que se reserva a um pecado confessável: coisa de editoras, de mercado, de um mundo em que ainda se contavam coisas para se avaliar alguém. Em seu lugar, prega-se hoje a avaliação “holística” dos currículos, palavra que, note-se, tanto pode significar rigor renovado como ausência total de critério, consoante o dia e o currículo em causa. É precisamente essa lógica que explica o caso Arday: não precisou de provar excelência académica, bastou-lhe contar uma história de adversidade (não-verbal até aos onze anos, analfabeto até aos dezoito, deficiência, pobreza) que a academia hoje trata como validação moral do mérito. A história substituiu, em larga medida, o escrutínio do trabalho, e o desaparecimento do chamado “Weird Nerd”, o excêntrico brilhante que outrora povoava os departamentos universitários, deu lugar a um tipo de indivíduo que tropeça na academia não tanto por amor à Verdade, mas por incapacidade de vingar em contextos corporativos. Em Portugal, este ataque frontal às métricas está bem vivo nas ciências sociais, e degrada-as até ao limite, naturalmente, com o bom e velho clientelismo que rege a vasta maioria nos concursos universitários em terras lusas.

Em segundo lugar, há uma inversão do ónus da prova: questionar a biografia de alguém identificado com uma narrativa de superação e marginalização deixou de ser lido como rigor e passou a ser lido como hostilidade estrutural. Não surpreende, por isso, que académicos e jornalistas tenham alertado durante anos sem que Cambridge agisse, e que a ameaça de processos judiciais tenha funcionado, com sucesso, como forma de silenciamento. Pior, mesmo depois da morte de Arday, há quem insista em explicar tudo pelo racismo estrutural, como se o escrutínio a que foi sujeito um burlão profissional só tivesse acontecido porque Arday era negro. A fraude confirmada transforma-se, por magia retórica, em mais uma prova da opressão do burlão. O caso Arday e esta desnaturação conformista mais vasta da academia são, creio, epifenómenos do mesmo problema de fundo: ambos a jusante da politização da vida académica ao longo das últimas décadas, que substituiu normas antigas, organizadas, ainda que imperfeitamente, em torno da excentricidade intelectual e da busca da verdade, por normas organizadas em torno da conformidade ideológica, do processo institucional e da vigilância das atitudes sociais e políticas aceitáveis.

Nada disto é acidental. Houve, na academia, uma tentativa sincera, mas mal dirigida, de corrigir, através de políticas de diversidade, equidade e inclusão, universidades estrutural e historicamente ocupadas pelas classes dominantes. Sou absolutamente contra o método, não contra o objectivo. A universidade é o ponto de chegada, o topo da pirâmide; gastar energia e dinheiro a torná-la mais diversa por decreto, ali em cima, é gastá-los tarde demais. Não seria mais justo, e mais eficaz, investir em apoiar crianças de classes mais baixas desde a infância, ao longo da escolaridade, para que cheguem à disputa por uma cátedra em condições de competir de forma limpa? É uma solução menos vistosa, rende poucos posts nas redes sociais, mas tem a vantagem incómoda de ser verdadeira. No final de contas, a classe continua a ser o grande determinante. Marx tinha razão.

Vejamos Claudine Gay, antiga presidente de Harvard, que se demitiu há dois anos no meio de um escândalo de anti-semitismo em que muitos preferiram ver racismo e sexismo puro. Será que Claudine Gay, filha de um dos homens mais ricos do Haiti, próximo do facínora “Papa Doc” que governou a ilha durante décadas, educada nas escolas privadas mais caras dos Estados Unidos, vem de um contexto de falta de privilégio? Terá sofrido mais do que um homem branco de classe média baixa, filho de operários, que nunca pôs os pés numa escola privada? Tenho dúvidas.

Baptista da Silva enganou Portugal durante semanas. Arday enganou Cambridge durante anos. A diferença não está no talento dos burlões: está no tamanho do escudo que a academia construiu à volta deles. Sendo Arday, no fundo, apenas um burlão, o seu caso deveria antes fazer-nos reflectir sobre as estruturas centrais da sociedade actual, e sobre como certos grupos conseguiram capturar o discurso progressista para, sob a pretensa bandeira da justiça social, guardarem, na verdade, o seu próprio privilégio.

Reflexão - Victor Davis Hanson (sobre o racismo nas Universidades)

Victor Davis Hanson: 'I Was Told I Wouldn't Be Hired Because I Was a White Male'

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

The Spectator - The unspoken etiquette of plane seats

 

(personal underlines)

https://spectator.com/article/the-unspoken-etiquette-of-plane-seats/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=CampaignMonitor_Editorial&utm_campaign=LIFE%20%2020260802%20SUN%20%20SG+CID_283c63a25c7576096988705d4d795e17

The unspoken etiquette of plane seats

Everyone has a position

31 July 2026, 5:01am

(iStock)

Are you a ‘recliner’ or a ‘refrainer’? Do you ease your seat back on an aeroplane as soon as you can, or remain bolt upright and swallow your fury as the headrest in front is lowered a few inches from your nose? Or are you to be found in the slender oval on the Venn diagram; the waiting room between recliner and refrainer, hanging on until the food service has finished before caressing the recline button? Whose armrest is it? Nobody cares anymore. All anyone wants to know is will the person in front of them recline their seat? 

According to a survey published this year by travel website The Vacationer, more than 77 per cent of respondents think it rude to recline your seat fully, thereby transforming a seemingly innocuous act into one charged with social tension. Sprinkle in a heady dose of ‘airport disorientation’, and all bets are off. Steve Taylor, Psychology Lecturer at Leeds Beckett University, highlights the liminality of airports, calling them ‘zones of absence’. In other words: on an aeroplane, anything goes. What might cause you to blush on terra firma is barely an afterthought in the sky. There’s a reason they have a club a mile up there. 

The internet is chock-full of footage and reports of in-flight bust-ups about reclined seats. In 2024, Cathay Pacific banned a Hong Kong couple from its flights following the Hongkongers’ hostility towards a Chinese woman in front of them who reclined her seat.  In protest, the woman from Hong Kong reportedly stretched her legs out along the armrests of the reclining woman while her husband shook and pummelled the headrest. Uneasy relations between Hong Kong and China undoubtedly fed into the fracas but I did wonder momentarily whether stretching one’s legs out on armrests wouldn’t solve everything. It strikes me as a fair exchange: you recline, I stretch out, and together we form a sort of human jigsaw that wouldn’t look out of place in an El Salvador Mega Prison.  

As a nervous flyer, I have always been an accidental refrainer. I envy the soul that can relax and recline but I am forever monitoring the movements of the air stewardesses and analysing the overhead lights and in-flight sounds; my husband will no longer sit next to me on flights and I have come to accept that I will die alone – and upright. I have made my peace with this but also recognise that I am not a true Refrainer. A Refrainer is one who could easily paint obtuse angles with his headrest and yet chooses not to.  

A rare breed one might think? Well, not according to the same Vacationer survey on the rudeness of a reclined seat. Apparently, almost 46 per cent of those surveyed said they don’t recline their seat because they think it rude to do so. Really? I was staggered by this statistic, seeing virtually no evidence of refraining on recent short-haul flights where at least three-quarters of seats were reclined. I suspect one might start out prepared to take a stand (or seat) on reclining and then relent once the seat in front has been reclined and the back ache begins.  

As the pitch (technical term for the space between rows) decreases with every newly-designed aircraft, Joshua Rothman in the New Yorker points to the cynicism – and barefaced greed – of the airlines: ‘in economic terms, the airlines have sold the same inches of space twice – once to you, and once to the person behind you. It’s hard to get out of that bind.’  

But get out of it you can. In 1998, Ira Goldman, all six foot three inches of him, invented the ‘Knee Defender ™’. This ingenious device – two small plastic clips on which is printed in tiny script the rejoinder ‘Be courteous, do not hog space!’ – works by clipping on to the seat tray mechanism of the seat in front thereby (don’t ask me how) jamming its recline function. The device is so controversial that it has its own Wiki page and has been banned by most major airlines following an incident in 2014 when its deployment on a United Airlines flight resulted in a fight between passengers who were subsequently ‘deplaned’ off route. Goldman recorded a boom in sales of the Knee Defender ™ after the United Airlines affair. 

Interestingly, easyJet and Ryanair seats are not reclinable and as ‘fixed reclines’ are increasingly built into new fleets of aircraft, a major social division might cease to exist. While I will miss the opportunity to judge people on the tilt of their seats, I will be most sore if I never witness a Knee Defender ™ being fitted surreptitiously and the subsequent fireworks (or perfect, bloodless deception). I’m also still looking for a True Refrainer; the kind of person who endures the infraction of a seat being lowered into his face without blinking, without feeling the need to engage in the ‘chain reaction of seat reclination’ – a sort of Übermensch of aeroplane passengers. Find me that person and I’ll sit next to him on our last, doomed, flight together. 

Série - Le Prophète

 

The Spectator - It’s madness to sit exams on screens

 

(personal underlines)

https://spectator.com/article/the-madness-of-sitting-exams-on-screens/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=CampaignMonitor_Editorial&utm_campaign=LIFE%20%2020260805%20WED%20%20SG%20%20ExpressVPN+CID_5b0054fc8494211fab2bbdb3ec2c1b7c

It’s madness to sit exams on screens

Remember the simplicity of the pen and paper?

Philip Womack4 August 2026, 4:59am

(iStock)

There is, says Colin Hughes, who is the head of the exam board AQA, no downside to switching pupils from written exams into a gleaming modern utopia of computerised tests. Students, he says, are baffled by the fact that exams don’t take place on screens. He also seems to think the poor dears won’t be able to type if they don’t take exams on computers, as if they weren’t competent enough to learn how to use a keyboard without them. What’s more, boring old exam papers, it seems, have been causing delays in providing results for schools: doing them on a screen would solve that problem instantly, and, shazaam, Johnny and Jemima can get their C minuses in Raffia Work almost instantly.

Sometimes I do wonder why certain people are so bedazzled by technology. We spend so much of our time trying to keep children away from computers: why force it on them in other situations? Well, I know the reason why in this particular case: it would obviously be oodles cheaper to feed pupils’ examinations into a computer, which can then be marked by AI, rather than hiring a lot of depressed teachers to wearily wade through one million essays on ‘The role of women in Of Mice and Men.’ 

But do these people not understand? Have they not, in recent years, been near a computer? Are they unable to contemplate the horrors that will unfold? There is something almost sanctified about an exam hall. Though I would imagine that few people look back with any kind of positive emotion at those long summers interrupted by frantic revision, I must admit that I did rather enjoy the challenges (and the stationery that accompanied it). Two uninterrupted hours in which to write an essay, or translate something, or solve a problem, in a situation which is entirely geared to keep you in monastic silence. There has been nothing like it since. 

The gentle rustle of papers as students turned over pages, mentally squaring up for the battle ahead; the occasional yawn or stretch; the careful tread of the examiners pacing up and down the ranks of desks in the sports hall; the ticking of the giant clock. Not a sound else; although I do remember my Greek A-level being punctuated by the excited bleats of the school farm’s flock of sheep.

A pen and paper exam is entirely straightforward. It requires nothing other than said paper and pen; little can go wrong in the time between paper being delivered to the school and handed in to the examiners. With only a pen in your hand and a piece of paper in front of you, the mind connects to the hand in a way which is uninterrupted and free flowing. This, surely, is what everyone is looking for when they talk about achieving a ‘flow state’. You can even settle into a state of inspiration as the ideas and sentences pour out. What’s more, it’s good for you. Countless scientific papers have shown that writing with a pen is quite simply the best way of retaining and processing information, partly because it’s one of the most complex tasks our brains can perform. 

Now picture the delightful scene which AQA wants to foist on students: a large, hot sports hall, packed with endless terminals (paid for by whom, I wonder, and no doubt already filled up with expensive AQA-approved software); wires trailing everywhere, ready to trip up the unwary; students trying to log on. ‘Sir, I’ve forgotten my password!’ goes up the cry. Once log on has been achieved, the flash of screens and the incessant clickety clack of the keyboards will dominate. And how far away from somebody would you have to sit in order not to spy on their answers? Would some kind of cubicle system have to be set up? Perhaps the PE teachers will have to be roped in to act as human shields. 

And that’s only if things are working. All it takes is one fuse, one computer crashing or not loading correctly, or one mischievous teen to switch off the plugs, and there are immediate problems. It also has an effect on the way that pupils process answering. Computer creep has already infected the 11+, with its horrible multiple-choice answers. How long before it is decreed that students will no longer have to do anything so difficult as write an actual essay, instead simply answering an endless, mindless series of questions with 4 possible answers: ‘What is the role of women in Of Mice and Men?’ A) Passive B) Active C) Essential D) Marginal. 
 
Exams set by machines, requiring machine-like answers, and marked by a machine: what a wonderful prospect. Any school with any sense should release itself from the bonds of the exam boards at once and return to the soothing scratching of pens.  

Livros comprados (Bidding)

 

Cartoon - Hermann (Jim Unger)

 

Livro - Le Crépuscule des lumières

 Pena não haver no espectro nacional, meia dúzia, sei lá, dois, pronto!, um livro que aborde estes temas...

The Spectator - Class clowns: the triumph of inanity over academia

 

(personal underlines, silent mockeries...and regrets!)

https://spectator.com/article/class-clowns-the-triumph-of-inanity-over-academia/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=CampaignMonitor_Editorial&utm_campaign=WEEK%20%2020260813%20%20AL+CID_0a2de7bbdcb39ff491025dc400f54e8d

Class clowns: the triumph of inanity over academia

Lara Brown

Daniel Defoe observed that plague victims ‘never perceiv’d that they were infected’ until they discovered the ‘tokens’ on their skin. By that point, ‘nothing could follow but certain Death’.

Something similar might be said of Britain’s universities. In recent days, the Jason Arday affair has captured the world’s attention because of its absurdity. But the humiliation of Cambridge is not an early sign of infection. It is just a particularly visible bubo.

At one level, Arday’s fall reveals how, even in our most elite universities, DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) dogma has warped intellectual standards to the point of madness. Yet a deeper examination reveals poor Jason to be merely a poster boy for the increasingly fetid system that is British higher education.

Take the London School of Economics (LSE), which has produced 21 Nobel Prize winners, was ranked number one in the UK by the Times Good University Guide last year and is internationally acclaimed for its teaching on economics, finance and politics. However, all first-year students must now take LSE100, the university’s ‘flagship interdisciplinary course’. Students may choose to study one of three modest questions: ‘How can we transform our climate futures?’; ‘How can we control AI?’; or ‘How can we create a fair society?’. One student described the course as ‘famous for being a massive waste of time’. What is lost in academic discipline is made up for in ideological indoctrination.

LSE students who opt to study ‘How can we create a fair society?’ discover a course description asserting: ‘As the expanding billionaire class increasingly dominates political systems, while gender and ethnicity gaps widen, the question of how to reach a fairer world is both urgent and contentious.’ Even stranger than the courses are the people who teach them. Among them is Dr Alex Frankovitch, whose PhD thesis was entitled ‘Fucking and Being Fucked: Towards a Sexual Ethics of Sex on Drugs’. One student recalls asking Frankovitch about Warren Buffett, only to discover that they (to use Dr Frankovitch’s preferred pronoun) had never heard of him.

Dr Carolina Are is, according to LSE’s website, a ‘digital criminologist… researcher-activist and content creator’ who won a Sexual Freedom Award in 2019. She gives lectures on reducing ‘online harms’ and ‘how we can control AI’. When not contemplating man’s struggle against machine, she is a pole-dancer and instructor. The website linked to her university profile contains her showreel and invites visitors to ‘learn a pole dance choreography, pole tricks, floorwork or twerk with me via Zoom!’ Sadly, Friedrich Hayek, the father of modern free-market economics, did not offer similar services when he taught at LSE.

Are is entitled to do what she wants in her free time. But what sets alarm bells ringing about her academic standing is that pole-dancing seems to be not just an outlet for relaxation, but the focal point of her research.

One of her most recent papers is called ‘“Sexy jail” and performative transparency: Evaluating shadowbanning notifications and appeals in Instagram’s Account Status amongst pole dancing content creators’. It examines the treatment of pole dancers, ‘a demographic greatly affected by algorithmic precarity in the creator economy’, and concludes that Instagram’s system has been ‘ineffective and discriminatory’. An important finding, no doubt, but is such material what LSE students signed up for? One student complains of having to be careful not to use any technical language in submitted work due to Dr Are’s lack of expertise.

When asked how students should put together a presentation for the course, to be assessed for their final grade, Dr Are allegedly answered: ‘I really hate when a white man gives the presentation… It’s just so boring.’ An LSE spokesperson said Dr Are ‘has a relevant PhD and is qualified to teach on the course’ and that she denies making the ‘boring’ comment.

It would be comforting to dismiss all this as an eccentricity peculiar to the LSE. But so many universities across the country are wasting student time in much the same way. At Exeter, you can study for an MA and PhD in magic and occult science. At Liverpool, you can pay £6,850 a year to do an MA in ‘The Beatles, heritage and culture’. At Falmouth, students can undertake a BA in ‘Esports & Livestreaming’ at the university’s ‘renowned Games Academy’.

Students of global sustainable development have previously had the chance to enrol in a ‘surviving the apocalypse’ module at Warwick. Given the growing instability of the world, that may sound potentially useful. Yet the syllabus suggests projects on ‘mushrooms and zombies’ and insists the course has a ‘subtle (?) but unmasked convenor neurodiversity (ADHD) guiding its set-up and delivery’. I’m not sure I’m sufficiently neurodiverse to understand what that means.

Students on all these courses are eligible for undergraduate or postgraduate loans. It’s impossible to know what percentage of that financial support will ever be repaid to the taxpayer.

And it’s not as if prudent students can escape the madness by pursuing more conventional subjects. Those studying English and comparative literary studies at Warwick, for instance, can pick up 15 credits by studying a module on ‘Queering the Literary Landscape: LGBTQ+ Literature and Culture in the Contemporary World’. Even a maths degree offers no refuge. Students at Edinburgh might be surprised to learn that the school of mathematics is committed to ‘decolonising’. The faculty claims that ‘the history of mathematics typically centres cisgendered, straight, white European men’ and recommends that students should take implicit bias tests.

Madness in the lecture theatre is just the more visible by-product of a much longer production line. Before students can study zombies, pole dancing and astrology, academics must first turn these subjects into recognised fields of research.

Earlier this year, a team of five researchers published a paper on ‘Decolonising the sciences: Enhancing the experience of staff and students from racially minoritised ethnic groups using LEGO® Serious Play®’. This work was the culmination of a study across three northern English universities in which 50 adult students, researchers, academics and professional staff were asked to build Lego models representing their experiences of racial inequality, institutional barriers and decolonisation. Participants constructed walls, ladders and bridges out of Lego as metaphors for racism. Somehow this childish activity now constitutes academic research.

There’s more. A researcher at Rose Bruford College, in south-east London, is investigating ‘the lack of career development support for established drag performers’. The project is intended to contribute ‘to drag studies as a growing academic field, addressing a current lack of attention about how to sustain this historically working class and popular performance form’.

Meanwhile, at Bath Spa, a senior lecturer in organisational behaviour and leadership has received a grant to investigate ‘cognitive and emotional costs of identity regulation among ethnically diverse early career professionals’. The project bemoans that ‘professions in the UK often promote values like competence, meritocracy and individual achievement, reflecting white and western norms’.

At least that’s privately funded. The government’s Department for Science, Innovation and Technology has just shelled out for a project at the University of Essex entitled ‘Towards a queer communism: Past, present and future horizons of liberation’.

None of this is new, of course. Frivolous and absurd studies have been pouring out of higher education institutions since at least the 1970s. In 2012, Robert J. Wallis of Richmond University published a paper analysing people’s experiences jumping on a life-size inflatable Stonehenge, concluding that ‘bouncing on the artwork-cum-plaything provided an immediate sensory and visceral experience which was meaningful in relation to the real Stonehenge’. This somehow gazumped Spinal Tap for Stonehenge silliness.

The difference today is that the rot appears to have spread throughout academia, from top to bottom. Even respected journals aren’t safe. I was surprised to find an article in Shakespeare Quarterly ‘refusing to celebrate’ the quatercentenary of the publication of the 1623 Shakespeare First Folio. The author reasoned that we should not be ‘dedicating our energies, at a time of international emergency, to the production of ever more scholarship on a 400-year-old book’. If this is really his view, we have to wonder what he is doing in the English department of Gonville and Caius, Cambridge.

The author goes on to blame the Folio for climate change, arguing that Henry and Emily’s Folger Shakespeare Library collection ‘was built from the money he made working for the Standard Oil Company and its later derivatives, which became the progenitors of ExxonMobil’. He then asks us to reflect ‘on the extent to which modern cultural dispensations float on an often unacknowledged reservoir of fossil fuels’. Drill, baby, drill.

Professor Jason Scott-Warren, who wrote the article, is the director of the Cambridge Centre for Material Texts. He supervises graduates on English and European Renaissance literature and has been arrested several times for his environmental protest actions.

Sane students complain that, even in more prestigious universities, it is nigh-on impossible to find a normal supervisor for a dissertation, so preoccupied is everyone with queering, decolonising or sticking themselves to motorway bridges. It’s a lot easier to condemn Shakespeare for causing climate change than it is to properly analyse his work.

We will never really know what is going on in lecture theatres and supervisions. The University and College Union has long objected to unannounced lesson observation to assess an academic’s competence and most students don’t complain. But in the pointless courses, the insane modules and the absurd journal articles, we can see the symptoms of a morbid university disease in this country.

Faculties and academics have all broadly been left to their own devices for decades. The Office for Students doesn’t regularly inspect what is happening inside university classes. Even after the introduction of the revised Teaching Excellence Framework, starting next year, no one will ask if academia is providing any valuable insight or skills.

Student finance has guaranteed cash flow for many institutions which, judging by the quality of their offering, should have gone under. But the sickness is terminal for some. This month, after years of difficulty, the University of Kent completed its merger with Greenwich. Greenwich’s vice-chancellor is CEO of the new ‘super university’ – a triumph for the former polytechnic.

It would be easy to rue the decline of a formerly prestigious institution. But a brief glance at how academics at Kent have spent their time and resources tells a different story. Why did they fund a study into ‘what drives sex toy popularity’ in 2023? Why is one of the senior lecturers in 18th century studies currently supervising a project on queer readings of fan fiction and the ‘omegaverse’?

It’s not all decay. Many universities still have healthy organs, uncorrupted by ideological inanity. Researchers at Kent, for instance, were responsible for developing the retinal-imaging technology now used in many hospitals, as well as genome sequencing parrots to understand beak and feather disease. Yet while scientists slave away, their peers in Kent’s Durrell Institute of Conservation and Ecology are busy publishing research about ‘racial and economic disparities in coastal access and engagement’.

Academia lacks a proper incentive structure. There is no higher authority to differentiate the value of curing cancer compared with producing yet another autoethnography. Trusts like Wellcome, and our own government, are happy to hand out grants for the latter without pausing to ask what it’s all for.

If your life’s great passion is the study of bouncy castles, pole dancing or writing essays on autoethnography, there ought to be nothing to stop you from working at Toys R Us, a gentleman’s club or the Guardian. But these people have all chosen to pursue academia. They are attracted to the status it confers. This was the world in which Jason Arday thrived. His colleagues at Cambridge were carrying out research on how fairy tales can break the gender binary in playgrounds or writing ‘a self-portrait of an artist who teaches’. Is it really surprising that his error-ridden thesis didn’t stand out against this backdrop?

Série - Rivages

 

The Spectator - The mawkish madness of Dobby’s ‘grave’

 

(personal underlines, silent mockeries)

https://spectator.com/article/the-mawkish-madness-of-dobbys-grave/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=CampaignMonitor_Editorial&utm_campaign=WEEK%20%2020260813%20%20AL+CID_0a2de7bbdcb39ff491025dc400f54e8d

The mawkish madness of Dobby’s ‘grave’

Douglas Murray

I don’t know how many readers have visited the grave of Dobby the house-elf, but any who have should immediately be sectioned and have their subscriptions to The Spectator cancelled.

This strong course of action occurs to me after reading one of those stories that can make you laugh, cry and smack your head into your hands all at once. It relates to a ‘memorial’ which apparently sits on Freshwater West beach in Pembrokeshire, Wales. The area is run by the National Trust – a charity which used to look after our nation’s heritage sites.

The beach in question was where filming took place for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Since then, fans of the film – which spawned a new generation of mewling, ungrateful actors – have been laying stones and pebbles at the spot at which Dobby died, many of them with messages on (‘Here lies Dobby, a free elf’). The National Trust has already asked fans not to leave socks on the pile (don’t ask), but stones to form a kind of cairn appear perfectly acceptable.

At this stage it might be worth noting that ‘Dobby’ is a fictional character. No such house-elf ever existed. Therefore you might think this rather whimsy-infused ‘memorial’ should not detain us much longer.

Except that this is one of those increasingly typical moments in modern Britain when a fantasy world and the real world come into conflict – and the real world loses the encounter. A £430 million undersea cable linking the UK and Ireland had been due to pass through the area but – thanks to Harry Potter fans complaining in their hundreds – was rerouted. Indeed, the cable now passes nearer to some Bronze Age human burial remains in order not to disrupt the non-existent grave of the never-existent Dobby.

The project manager of this farrago told the media that the hundreds of complaints the company had received had ensured that it took the issue very, very seriously. Simon Ludlam said that, in the end, the cable ‘went quite close to some real Bronze Age remains, but we avoided Dobby’s grave’. This solution made ‘a lot of people very happy’, he added, ‘and Dobby’s happy’.

At this point I would be happy to pull my head out of my own hands and smack Mr Ludlam around the face with a sock, a stone or anything else that came to hand.

Firstly, due to matters of taste. Of all the sentimental attitudes which are most painful, surely the worst is this sort of modern British ‘whimsy’. It is as one with the sort of people who, after the death of Elizabeth II, chose to leave Paddington Bear toys among the flowers, or pass around memes online of Paddington leading the late Queen towards the gates of St Peter.

The Queen Mother’s favourite poem – ‘The Gate of the Year’ – includes the line that on treading into the unknown you should ‘put your hand into the Hand of God’. It seemed telling that by the time her sovereign daughter died the country had ditched the hand of God as hard to put faith in and replaced it with a theology in which the departed should instead place their hand into the hand of Paddington Bear before being received into glory.

Until the past few years, I would have dismissed such sentimental claptrap as being distinctly un-British. Further, I would have said that while such mawkish sentimentality might still thrive among the Irish, the British would surely keep it at bay. I mention the Irish with justification. Some years ago, a motorway bypass in County Clare had to be altered in order to protect a ‘sacred’ fairy bush. Local ‘experts’ had claimed that if the fairy bush was destroyed to make room for the £100 million bypass then the new roadway might suffer a ‘curse’. More recently a new housing scheme in County Wicklow found itself at the centre of a similar row after a ‘fairy tree’ was put at risk. Fortunately the fairy tree survived as the builders built around it.

In relating these stories I do not intend to plant in the minds of readers any idea that the Irish are a superstitious and backwards people. I do not say that at all. But it does seem slightly regrettable that protecting the sacred fairy bush of County Clare, or the fairy tree of County Wicklow, seems like perfectly sensible propositions beside diverting an undersea cable in order to avoid disturbing the site of a fantasy character’s burial place.

Which brings me to the second problem in all this: that such a story seems awfully telling about a country and its priorities. Over recent years Britain has found it impossible to complete almost any major infrastructure projects. Most of the time this is due to the discovery of a rare earthworm or – as anyone who has tried to restore a property in the countryside will know – that there is evidence of bats. You do not have to have seen a bat, merely have evidence that bats may once have eyed up your property, and you’ll discover that your house is no longer your own but has fallen into the joint custodianship of Dave from the local council and any passing bat.

Even this is merely a good-ish intention taken to a typically bureaucratic extreme. No such excuse can be made for the Dobby’s grave phenomenon. It is simply indicative of a country where the adults have all taken leave of their senses and handed over the decision-making to children who were never told ‘no’.

I suppose that if these are the new rules of the game there is an argument for playing along. I would be happy to start by claiming there is a horcrux to be found somewhere in the oil reserves in the North Sea and that unless we start extracting all that oil we risk not finding it and therefore failing to defeat the Dark Lord. Which is not the maddest energy policy I’ve heard lately.

The Spectator - Cambridge has fallen

 

(personal underlines)

https://spectator.com/article/cambridge-has-fallen/

Cambridge has fallen

The Spectator

‘What distinguishes Cambridge from Oxford,’ A.A. Milne said in 1939, ‘is that nobody who has been to Cambridge feels impelled to write about it.’ Four decades later, Tom Sharpe would prove him wrong about Cantabrigian reticence with Porterhouse Blue – his riotous satire of the conflict between an idealistic new master and the stuffed shirts of the senior common room. It’s a shame that Sharpe isn’t around to enjoy the Jason Arday scandal – a farce so absurd that even he may have dismissed it as being too silly.

When Arday was announced as Cambridge’s professor of sociology of education, he was lauded as the university’s youngest-ever black professor. His biography had a whiff of Hollywood. Arday had been diagnosed with a developmental disorder at the age of three. He was said to be mute until he was 11 and illiterate until he was 18. But he rose from two GCSEs in P.E. and textiles to complete a PhD, raise £5.5 million by running 30 marathons in 35 days – an achievement so stirring it inspired Andy Murray – and become, in the Guardian’s words, ‘a highly respected scholar of race, inequality and education’.

As Lara Brown writes in her article, Arday’s claims have now been ‘comprehensively debunked’. His published works were discovered to contain dozens of passages lifted wholesale from – or bearing an uncanny resemblance to – other academic papers; his biographical assertions were exposed as hollow and ludicrous, including a suggestion that he had starred in the TV show Seven Up, which began 21 years before he was born. The Guardian has since investigated Arday’s claims, such as an assault by a masked man and an assertion that a pig’s head was posted to his parents after his appointment to Cambridge. When the paper found no evidence to support these claims, they asked him for comment. ‘To be honest, I thought you’d just believe me,’ was Arday’s reply.

Cambridge is sticking by its man. Arday, the university claims, has been the victim of ‘a vile smear campaign to undermine his credibility’ – or, as it is also known, journalism. As Lara points out: ‘Arday’s ascent is a stunning indictment not just of the incuriosity of Cambridge but its corruption.’ Seemingly, ‘no one ever checked Arday’s academic CV, the papers he’d put out for publication or the data he used’. The best explanation is that, amid the Black Lives Matter hysteria, Cambridge hired Arday so he could be sent on ‘an endless, self-flagellating media round’, berating the institution for its past racism and then praising it for improving. In this role, being a fantasist was no hindrance.

Two years ago, the classicist David Butterfield wrote in these pages that Cambridge was in decline due to ‘politicised teaching, grade inflation, authoritarian campus policies and lurid, even laughable, research grants’. Progressive posturing and social engineering had been put before academic standards; an expensive bureaucracy was strangling the freedom on which worthy scholarship was based; an explosion in mental health claims had stifled intellectual development. Those who dissented from Cambridge’s progressive orthodoxy meanwhile had been hounded out.

Some might find the focus on one institution myopic and elitist. But Butterfield argued that the ‘ambitions of our whole education system are ultimately pegged to the achievements at the very pinnacle’.

A fish rots from the head. Cambridge exemplifies flaws across British universities: grade inflation, campus wokery, academic corruption, vice-chancellor greed and a loss of purpose; Arday is part of a much wider problem.

The greatest victims of this decay are the students, paying ever more for ever less. A third of graduates are not in graduate jobs; some 45 per cent of English higher education institutions are running a deficit, with rising costs becoming harder to meet amid restrictions on student visas.

What is needed is a more ambitious university system demanding higher standards with more sustainable finances. But, while ministers can push for reform, the impetus must come from within the universities, which have become lost in their avarice and dogmatism. If they cannot find their way back, what worth is their teaching?

There were few finer critics of closed-minded, work-shy students or priggish, over-remunerated academics than the late Rod Liddle. Since this issue is a tribute to Rod, he should have the final word. In 2021, a group of Durham students walked out of a speech he gave at the institution. He wrote afterwards that British universities make ‘proud proclamations of their commitment to freedom of speech followed by the immediate disavowal of that commitment, and the persecution of anyone who has taken that proclamation at face value. The kids, meanwhile, will continue hearing only one view, because who now would invite a social conservative to speak at a British university?’

Cartoon - Jim Unger (Herman)

Ou...o que é a "Arte"? 

Observador - Seguro quer fronteiras inseguras (Miguel Morgado)

 

(sublinhados pessoais)

https://observador.pt/opiniao/seguro-quer-fronteiras-inseguras/

Seguro quer fronteiras inseguras

É assim que os nossos governantes, juizes e “activistas” de vária estirpe nos têm imposto os seus sobressaltos éticos que tornaram a Europa num caso único de desregramento e descontrolo.

Miguel Morgado 

16 ago. 2026, 00:25

Não há outra maneira de dizê-lo: o Presidente da República Seguro sempre conviveu bem com o caos fronteiriço e migratório do governo Costa; e, agora, hostiliza a orientação do actual governo para repor alguma racionalidade e sobriedade à integridade do Estado e da sociedade portuguesa. O requerimento que tornou público há uma semana de fiscalização preventiva da constitucionalidade da chamada “lei do retorno” (o normativo que regula a entrada, permanência, expulsão de estrangeiros, além dos procedimentos para os requerentes de asilo) torna tudo cristalino. Mas podia poupar-nos à farsa das suas profissões de lealdade com os acordos europeus ou com o direito soberano de qualquer Estado, incluindo o nosso, de regrar as suas fronteiras.

De facto, quem lesse apenas as primeiras linhas do requerimento de Seguro ao Tribunal Constitucional não poderia adivinhar que a substância da sua solicitação fosse tão hostil para com as intenções do governo. Nessas primeiras linhas o Presidente é todo juras de lealdade ao que os líderes europeus em 2024 acordaram em matéria de admissões, expulsões e asilo. Todo ele é amor à autonomia do Estado português para regular as entradas de estrangeiros em território nacional. Mas rapidamente se percebe que é tudo conversa fiada.

Seguro nem sequer quer clarificar juridicamente uma questão que, mais tarde, podia ser objecto de litigância e, assim, de imprevisibilidade e incerteza. Não, Seguro quer destruir a lei do governo porque prefere o estado actual de permissibilidade, mesmo que vá ao arrepio do grande consenso europeu corporizado no chamado Pacto das Migrações.

Não se trata apenas de algumas das normas postas em causa pelo Presidente serem transcrições de directivas que exigem transposição para o ordenamento jurídico nacional. Seguro quer recriar um suposto conflito entre os consensos políticos europeus e o seu produto legal, por um lado, e a Constituição da República, por outro. Vale a pena notar que Seguro faz certamente coro com os que a toda a hora reivindicam “soluções europeias”. Agora que existe uma “solução europeia” procuramos novos patamares de “consciência ética humanitária” na nossa própria Constituição para repudiar a dita solução consensual. No fundo, o Presidente quer exibir uns quantos preconceitos que a sua família política socialista insiste em converter em mandamentos universais sem aceitar o custo de os fazer corresponder explicitamente à sua consequência política directa: a imigração ilimitada e desregulada.

Todos os obstáculos que Seguro agora enuncia, quer seja sobre sobre os procedimentos a aplicar aos requerentes de asilo, quer seja ao tratamento a dar aos menores, colidem com a necessidade imperiosa de conciliar a possibilidade de tornar os fluxos migratórios geríveis com as condições práticas proporcionadas pela situação concreta do Estado português, dos seus serviços administrativos, policiais e judiciais, e dos incentivos dados aos migrantes. Seguro não quer saber dessas minudências para nada. Ele paira nas nuvens da superioridade ética cosmopolita que bate no peito para as câmaras das televisões ao mesmo tempo que escapa à responsabilização pelos efeitos reais da sua inconsciência. Resta agora a impossível esperança de que os juizes conselheiros no palácio Ratton mostrem a sensatez que manifestamente escapa ao Presidente da República.

É assim que os nossos governantes, juizes e “activistas” de vária estirpe nos têm imposto os seus sobressaltos éticos que tornaram a Europa num caso único de desregramento e descontrolo. Termo-nos tornado ridículos aos olhos do mundo, como recentemente o governo marroquino deixou dolorosamente óbvio, já seria mau. Mas a vulnerabilidade e a fragilidade autoinfligidas por governantes que elegemos, e por juizes que acatamos, é a cereja no bolo da ironia.