Serving the Quantitative Finance Community

  • 1
  • 4
  • 5
  • 6
  • 7
  • 8
  • 38
 
User avatar
bearish
Posts: 5186
Joined: February 3rd, 2011, 2:19 pm

Re: FSU, Toby Young, Eugenics & Wilmott.com

July 25th, 2021, 9:34 pm

Journalists could face up to 14 years in prison for stories embarrassing the Government under proposed changes to the Official Secrets Act that would treat them like foreign SPIES

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/articl ... hange.html

Wormwood Scrubs, Pentonville, Wakefield, Douglas promenade?
Strictly speaking, a treasonable offence, like Lord Haw Haw.

Indeed, you may see Englishmen trying to get political asylum in Hong Kong!
 
User avatar
Cuchulainn
Posts: 20252
Joined: July 16th, 2004, 7:38 am
Location: 20, 000

Re: FSU, Toby Young, Eugenics & Wilmott.com

July 26th, 2021, 9:26 am

Journalists could face up to 14 years in prison for stories embarrassing the Government under proposed changes to the Official Secrets Act that would treat them like foreign SPIES

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/articl ... hange.html

Wormwood Scrubs, Pentonville, Wakefield, Douglas promenade?
Strictly speaking, a treasonable offence, like Lord Haw Haw.

Indeed, you may see Englishmen trying to get political asylum in Hong Kong!
A benign regime.
 
User avatar
Paul
Posts: 6604
Joined: July 20th, 2001, 3:28 pm

Re: FSU, Toby Young, Eugenics & Wilmott.com

August 13th, 2021, 4:52 pm

Welcome to the Free Speech Union’s weekly newsletter. This newsletter is a brief round-up of the free speech news of the week.
The publishing purges
Kate Clanchy has been forced to rewrite her Orwell Prize-winning book, Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me, on the grounds that it features “racial tropes”, e.g. describing a child of colour as having “almond eyes”. After a social media storm, she apologised and said she was “grateful” to those who’d attacked her for showing her the error of her ways. The publisher has also apologised for “the hurt we have caused” and thanked the book’s critics. The Orwell Foundation has said it acknowledges the “concerns and hurt expressed” about the book, which it lauded just a year ago. Anthony Brett tells the full story of the “ugliest cancellation in recent history” in the Telegraph – and it seems to be metastasizing. Philip Pullman, author of His Dark Materials, has been condemned by the Society of Authors, of which he is President, after he came to Clanchy’s defence and compared her critics to members of the Taliban. The Society has issued a statement telling its members “to be mindful of their privilege”. Our General Secretary, Toby Young, was interviewed about the controversy for talkRADIO.
Sarah Ditum has written an article for the Times about the battle between ideological purity and literature and concluded that purity is winning. Tom Slater says in the Spectator that what has happened to Clanchy is “faintly Stalinist, with a grovelling apology following the howling denunciation”.
Meanwhile, Mills & Boon has asked its authors to write novels with more socially progressive heroes, says FSU Advisory Council member Allison Pearson in the Telegraph, while Ben Lawrence makes a plea in the Telegraph to keep the cancel culture mob away from musicals.
£1 million of taxpayers’ money for Stonewall
At least £1 million of taxpayers’ money has been given to Stonewall for its “advice” on diversity. Three hundred and twenty-seven public bodies from Homes England to the House of Commons have handed over cash to Stonewall, largely through its Diversity Champions scheme, despite its legal guidance on trans issues being “erroneous” and “incorrect”, according to equalities barrister Akua Reindorf. James Roberts of the TaxPayers’ Alliance describes “firms [falling] over themselves to display their virtue online while hiring expensive consultants to tell their own staff they are bad people” with needless woke training programmes. Why is taxpayers’ money being used in this way, asks trans journalist Debbie Hayton in UnHerd.
The University of Essex has apologised for the apology it issued after no-platforming two feminist academics, Jo Phoenix and Rosa Freedman. Having initially admitted to making a mistake, the Vice Chancellor has now apologised for a second time, saying that because the University apologised for the original incident during Pride month many of its students had been made to feel “unsafe”. Julie Bindel lambasts the flip-flopping Vice Chancellor in a piece for UnHerd, describing Essex University as an “example of what happens when institutions capitulate to extreme transgender ideology”.
Michael Biggs has written a piece for the Critic about the case of an LSE Gender Studies student who gave a presentation, apparently well received, in which they fantasised about holding a knife to the throat of women who oppose transgender ideology.
Culture war
Patrick West has written in the Spectator about how free speech is now the exclusive preserve of the rich and powerful, but he is not making the usual argument that disadvantaged groups don’t have the same access to the public square. Rather, his point is that the old and wealthy are essentially uncancellable, but ordinary people on low or middle incomes are terrified of being targeted by woke outrage mobs.
Peter Hitchens makes the same point in his Mail on Sunday column: “Huge areas of opinion are now closed off from discussion, for fear of cancellation, advertising boycotts, and generally being cast into the outer darkness. With gathering speed and completeness, a total revolution in thought and morals is taking hold of Western societies, just at the moment when they should be girding themselves against pressure to become more like China.” Jamie Bartlett has written about the spread of Chinese censorship in the West in UnHerd and the four distinct versions of the Internet that are starting to emerge: libertarian, corporatist, bureaucratic, and the Beijing authoritarian model. Also in UnHerd, Kat Rosenfield argues that the culture war isn’t a war between the Left and the Right, but, for the most part, a civil war on the Left which both sides will eventually lose – the Left will eat itself.
The Ivy has withdrawn an advert for its new Asian restaurant in London after the video promoting the new brasserie offended social media users. The advert was criticised for featuring stereotypes of Asian peoples and cultures, e.g. men in sumo costumes, not to mention “cultural appropriation”. The word curry is also on borrowed time. According to a Californian food blogger, the term is rooted in colonialism. Our Deputy Research Director Emma Webb said: “If Californian food bloggers want to take on Essex blokes over curry, good luck to them.”
Scottish police will undergo unconscious bias training, under new plans to improve relations between football fans and the police.
Vivek Ramaswamy has spoken to Janice Turner in the Times about woke corporations and their huge power to set the terms of debate and silence dissenters.
Dennis Relojo-Howell has written for the Critic about how being a snowflake is bad for your mental health.
Trans
FSU member Rebekah Wershbale has written in the Glinner Update, Graham Linehan’s blog, about being branded a “transphobe” in official training material used by the Labour Party because she wore a t-shirt which said “woman: adult human female”.
Mridul Wadhwa was born a man and now lives as a trans woman, and has since become the CEO of Edinburgh Rape Crisis. Wadhwa has said that some survivors of sexual violence are “fearful” about a trans-inclusive rape-crisis centre and may arrive with “misinformed” or “bigoted” views if they think transwomen pose a threat to their safety. Speaking on a podcast, Wadhwa argued that women seeking help after sexual assaults should “expect to be challenged on [their] prejudices”. Brendan O’Neill in Spiked is unimpressed: “It ought to go without saying that no woman who arrives at a rape-crisis centre should have her worldview interrogated. It shouldn’t matter if a woman holds cranky religious beliefs or weird conspiratorial political views. She should still absolutely have the right to access assistance following a sexual assault, without fearing that she will be challenged or reprimanded for what she thinks.”
FSU Advisory Council member Zoe Strimpel has written in the Telegraph about the case of a Californian professor reduced to begging for forgiveness from medical students after he used the term “pregnant women” and explores how medics are no longer being taught about the ways some illnesses affect men and women differently. She cites an example from 2019 of a “transgender man” (born a woman) whose baby died after doctors treated abdominal pain as a medical issue, rather than identifying that the patient was pregnant and in labour. Strimpel writes: “Unlike America, we can still pull back from the brink, but we don’t have long.”
Critical Race Theory
Given the spread of Critical Race Theory through the British education system, it is worth reading this article in UnHerd by Joel Kotkin and Edward Heyman on the ideology’s obsession with “whiteness” and rewriting history. The situation in America is so extreme that an Atlanta school has begun segregating pupils by race and is now being sued by angry parents. The US Senate has voted to stop funding the teaching of CRT in American schools.
Street preachers, Batley, and blasphemy
We have written to the newly-elected Batley and Spen MP Kim Leadbeater about the Batley Grammar School case, urging her to support the teacher and his family, who are still in hiding. She replied saying the teacher and family were of “great importance to me both personally and as the MP for the area”. Both letters can be read on our blog.
Ben Sixsmith asks in the Critic why the knife attack on FSU member Hatun Tash at Speakers’ Corner was barely covered in the media. Hatun has given an interview to the Spectator about her ordeal and spoken to Spiked about the “warzone” that is Speakers’ Corner.
Street preacher Hazel Lewis has won a court case after she was accused of threatening and abusive behaviour. Following an 18-month legal battle, the judge concluded there was no case to answer. Lewis is now suing the Metropolitan Police.
An eight-year-old Hindu boy in Pakistan has been charged with blasphemy and is reportedly being held in protective custody. Kunwar Khuldune Shahid has written about the case in the Spectator, pointing out that blasphemy laws are being used to target minorities of all kinds in Pakistan, under all sorts of bizarre pretexts: “Sending texts, sharing poetry, giving homework, producing films, making footballs, removing stickers and drinking water are some of the acts that have been deemed blasphemous in Pakistan. Even reading the Quran, performing Islamic rituals or calling yourself Muslim is sacrilegious if you belong to the Ahmadiyya sect, making Pakistan the only country where one can be imprisoned – or even sentenced to death – for practising Islam.”
Legal updates
Firefighter Paul Embery has achieved a sensational victory for free speech. He was sacked by the firefighters’ trade union he worked for because he spoke in favour of Brexit and won his case for unfair dismissal at the Employment Tribunal. Read his account of the saga in UnHerd.
New disciplinary rules by the Bar Tribunal and Adjudication Service, banning racy jokes, among other things, have been criticised by barristers as virtue signalling.
 
User avatar
katastrofa
Posts: 7440
Joined: August 16th, 2007, 5:36 am
Location: Alpha Centauri

Re: FSU, Toby Young, Eugenics & Wilmott.com

August 14th, 2021, 2:39 pm

TL;DR (the inherent problem of free speech)
 
User avatar
Alan
Posts: 2958
Joined: December 19th, 2001, 4:01 am
Location: California
Contact:

Re: FSU, Toby Young, Eugenics & Wilmott.com

August 14th, 2021, 4:54 pm

Interesting newsletter -- I read it. 

Related. In the US, Virginia's Loudon County Public School District has become ground zero for a lot of pushback to the leftist political indoctrination of students: 

 Advisory Board Calls On Virginia School District To Dismiss Teachers Who Criticize The District’s Equity Training

Virginia teacher resigns at school board meeting, denounces 'highly politicized agendas'
 
User avatar
gatarek
Posts: 213
Joined: July 14th, 2002, 3:00 am

Re: FSU, Toby Young, Eugenics & Wilmott.com

August 15th, 2021, 6:27 am

:D
 
User avatar
Paul
Posts: 6604
Joined: July 20th, 2001, 3:28 pm

Re: FSU, Toby Young, Eugenics & Wilmott.com

September 24th, 2021, 4:52 pm

Welcome to the Free Speech Union’s weekly newsletter, our round-up of the free speech news of the week. Like all of our work this newsletter depends on the support of our members and donors, so if you’re not already a paying member please sign-up today or encourage a friend to join and help us turn the tide against cancel culture.

Cambridge Vice-Chancellor mired in anti-free speech initiatives resigns early

Stephen Toope has resigned as Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge University. Our Director Douglas Murray celebrates the early resignation of the “undistinguished” Vice-Chancellor, listing the many ways freedom of speech and academic freedom were “trashed” during Toope’s tenure. We threatened legal action over an anonymous “microaggression” reporting system backed by him, which was withdrawn following our intervention back in May. The Times says Toope will be remembered for various controversies over free speech at Cambridge, including the landslide defeat of his plan to mandate that all “identities” and views be “respected”. Dr Arif Ahmed, a Fellow of Gonville and Caius College and member of our Advisory Council, played a critical role in winning that battle. He has written for Spiked about the victorious campaign to defeat the plan.
Professor Paul Harper-Scott has resigned from Royal Holloway in protest against “endemic” cancel culture and the dogmatic purification of the curriculum via “decolonisation” initiatives. The Telegraph and the Times have reported on the story, and Professor Harper-Scott has written a blog post explaining why he left.
Worcester College has apologised for hosting a Christian Concern event after “distressed” students complained, despite the event taking place outside of term time. Writing in the Telegraph, Catherine Pepinster says the episode shows that freedom of speech is “in danger of being lost” at Worcester. We are writing to David Isaac, the Provost of Worcester and former Chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, to complain.
Meanwhile, academics at the University of Exeter have been advised by the University’s library to de-emphasise “white, male and Eurocentric authors” and instead rely more on tweets and blogs for research to ensure that “marginalised, misrepresented or excluded” voices are heard. The guidance has prompted a backlash, with 40 academics expressing anger at this latest “decolonisation” drive, but a planned letter of protest is being delayed until after the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Bill becomes law.
The Government has been accused of double standards after confirming that Oxbridge common rooms will be exempt from the provisions of the Higher Education Bill. Universities Minister Michelle Donelan argued that junior and middle common rooms did not need to be included in the law as colleges fund JCRs and MCRs and can therefore “exert a lot of control over their activities” – and Oxbridge colleges will be subject to the new law.
The 2021 US College Free Speech Rankings have been released by the Foundation for Individuals Rights in Education. The pro-free speech group reports that 66% of students support shouting down speakers and 23% support using violence to stop a speaker.

School holds mock trial of Conservative MP, finding him guilty because of his ancestors’ links to the slave trade

A south Dorset school held a mock trial of Conservative MP Richard Drax, with children as young as 12 deciding whether he should be held responsible for his ancestors’ involvement in the slave trade.
Scottish schools have been urged to carry out an “audit of books”, with children’s classic The Tiger That Came To Tea again in the firing line at a three-day conference. A campaign group called Zero Tolerance previously said the book reinforced gender stereotypes because the greedy tiger is male and is waited on by the female characters. Teachers attending the conference were also urged not to use “gendered names” such as “buddy” for children.
Candidates to be blocked from seeking office if they’ve sent “grossly offensive” tweets
Andrew Tettenborn of our Legal Advisory Council has sounded the alarm about provisions in the Election Bill which would prevent people from standing for election if they’ve been convicted under the Communications Act 2003 of sending a “grossly offensive” message. “An over-enthusiastic hustings heckler – or an excessively outspoken rival candidate – could face becoming legally unelectable to any office for five years,” he writes. “The same would apply to anyone who, like a campaigner imprisoned a couple of years ago, followed an MP or councillor around to make a point he or she didn’t want to hear. And, of course, it could apply to anyone who tweets unpleasant things about a political rival.”
Meanwhile, police told a pro-life activist that giving offence is the equivalent of punching someone in the face, reports Dave Brennan in the Critic.

Too dangerous for Labour MP to attend her party conference after she criticised trans ideology

The Speaker of the House of Commons has intervened over the threats made to Labour MP Rosie Duffield after she was labelled “transphobic” for liking a tweet saying “only women have a cervix”. Sir Lindsay Hoyle said that MPs should be able to appear publicly “without fear of harm” after Duffield said she would not be able to attend the Labour Party conference because of the threats. She has sought a meeting with Sir Keir Starmer, but so far the Labour leader hasn’t responded. Brendan O’Neill criticised Starmer’s “shameful silence” over the abuse targeting Duffield and Trevor Phillips has written about the case in the Times.
Sir Ed Davey was questioned by Andrew Marr over the case of FSU member Natalie Bird, barred for standing as a candidate for the Liberal Democrats because she wore a t-shirt saying “woman: adult human female”. Natalie is now crowdfunding to fight a legal battle against the Party. Jo Bartosch says that Lib Dems are being purged of feminists as the Party embraces trans ideology with increasing zeal. Debbie Hayton reports on how the Lib Dems silenced a debate on conversion therapy after a speaker tried to warn about the unintended consequences of an overly-broad ban that might prohibit reasonable therapeutic techniques.
Joanna Williams says the Crown Estate is engaging in “woke washing” by signing up to Stonewall’s embattled Diversity Champions programme – a scheme many other organisations are ditching. She explores how Stonewall became synonymous with the Establishment.
A feminist discussion and debating society at Bristol University has been sanctioned for being a women-only space. It is raising funds to challenge the decision.
Ellen Pasternack says the success of recent books by gender critical feminists shows that “no debate” is no longer an option where trans issues are concerned.
Scottish children should be taught to use “inclusive pronouns” under a new guide book aimed at 9-11 year-olds. What Does LGBT+ Mean? advises primary age children to use “they” instead of “he” or “she” to avoid misgendering their 10-year-old classmates.

Music, arts and culture

Gillian Philip lost her job as a young adult author after she expressed support for JK Rowling on Twitter. She’s a member of the Free Speech Union and we’ve been supporting her ever since. This week, she wrote an article for the Express about her experience of retraining as a HGV driver and how tolerant the haulage industry is compared to the publishing world. She will be speaking about her experience on our panel at the Battle of Ideas: How To Fight Cancel Culture And Win.
Zoe Strimpel of our Advisory Council says the sacking of 14 white members of the English Touring Opera shows how the “quagmire of identity politics” will destroy the arts. Rod Liddle calls it a war “against intelligence, complexity and the acquisition of knowledge”.
Craig Revel-Horwood has spoken of his fear of being cancelled. He said he felt he had to tone down his criticism of couples on Strictly Come Dancing and told the Sun: “There is not as much freedom of speech as we used to have, with the fear of offending certain groups.”
Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Thomas Spence says Banned Books Week is not actually interested in banned books, especially if they are written by conservative authors.

“Snowflake” deemed an offensive term by Ofcom

Ofcom has added a raft of new terms to a list of “potentially offensive” words. The terms are not banned, but the words will be taken into account by the regulator when considering a complaint against a broadcaster. They include “snowflake”, “Remoaner”, “gammon”, and “Karen”.
Andrew Doyle of our Advisory Council hosted Free Speech Nation on GB News with a live studio audience this week. You can watch his opening monologue here. Andrew Neil has said he will not appear on the new channel following a war of words between the presenter and the station’s management.
Will woke rule?
Tim Stanley says in his Telegraph column that the age of woke is coming to an end, as the Government fights back to restore free speech on campus. But Sherelle Jacobs argues that Boris Johnson “baulked at putting a culture war at the centre of his governing mission” and that as a consequence the government has been “half-hearted” in responding to things like statue-toppling. Tyler Cowen writes in Bloomberg that the woke movement is America’s next great global export, but Ed West disagrees, arguing in UnHerd that wokery is unlikely to thrive outside the post-Christian West.

NHS and government departments offer critical race training

The NHS is offering courses to staff on Black Lives Matter, white privilege, unconscious bias, authentic allyship and intersectionality, reports Ewan Somerville in the Telegraph.
Civil servants at the Ministry of Justice have been told by a colleague to brush up on their Critical Race Theory, and directed towards an article that criticises Equalities Minister Kemi Badenoch for being the wrong sort of black person, reports Guido Fawkes.

Tech

The Online Safety Bill – which poses serious threats to free expression – has likely been delayed by the recent reshuffle.
The Guardian shared the findings of a study by Freedom House which concluded that online freedom is declining globally.

FSU at Battle of Ideas Festival

The FSU will be out in force at this year’s Battle of Ideas Festival at Church House in Westminster on the weekend of the 9th and 10th of October. We’re hosting a session, chaired by our founder Toby Young, called “The FSU Files: How to Fight ‘Cancel Culture’ and Win” in which we’ll hear from individuals who’ve experienced first-hand what it’s like to be cancelled. But these particular individuals also have something else in common: with our help, they’ve all fought back. We will hear from them about what the most effective ways are of surviving an online assassination attempt, as well as more general advice on how to persuade people that free speech is a cause worth defending.
Across the weekend there are numerous other sessions on free speech issues that should be of interest to FSU supporters, including “Hate, Heresy and the Fight for Free Speech”, “From GB News to Ben & Jerry’s: Boycotts or Censorship?”, “Publish and Be Damned?”, “The History Wars”, “The Social Justice March through the Institutions”, “Has Coronavirus Changed Us?” and “Can Culture Survive the Culture Wars?”
Most of our staff will be there encouraging others to join the FSU, so come and find us at our stall and say hello. You can buy tickets here. Members were sent a discount code in the last monthly newsletter.
Incidentally, Toby will be debating the pros and cons of the lockdown policy alongside Carl Heneghan, Luke Johnson and Oliver Kamm at the London Hotel on Monday. You can purchase tickets to that event here.

Graham Linehan on cancel culture

Our Education and Events Director Jan Macvarish interviewed Graham Linehan in our latest members-only speakeasy. The award-winning comedy writer had a lot to say about some of the sitcoms he’s created, including Father TedBlack Books and The IT Crowd, as well as fighting off attempts to cancel him from trans activists. You can watch the interview on our YouTube channel here. Please do subscribe to the channel as when we hit 30,000 subscribers we can start monetising it.
 
 
User avatar
Paul
Posts: 6604
Joined: July 20th, 2001, 3:28 pm

Re: FSU, Toby Young, Eugenics & Wilmott.com

October 1st, 2021, 8:00 pm

Welcome to the Free Speech Union’s weekly newsletter, our round-up of the free speech news of the week. Like all of our work this newsletter depends on the support of our members and donors, so if you’re not already a paying member please sign-up today or encourage a friend to join and help us turn the tide against cancel culture.

Keir Starmer: It “shouldn’t be said” that only women have a cervix

Questioned about Labour MP Rosie Duffield’s view that only women have a cervix, Sir Keir Starmer said it is “something that shouldn’t be said. It is not right.” In response, Health Secretary Sajid Javid accused the Labour leader of being in “total denial of scientific fact”. Laura Dodsworth says in the Critic that “Labour needs politicians with the balls – or ovaries – to speak the truth”. Brendan O’Neill writes in Spiked: “Punishing expressions of biological fact is as ridiculous and tyrannical as it would be to punish people who say the Earth is spherical.” The row continued throughout the Labour conference. Matthew d’Ancona blamed the Twittersphere’s hold on political discourse for the inability of Labour politicians to deal with the issue of whether this was “transphobia”. David Lammy MP said critics of gender self-identification were “dinosaurs” who wanted to “hoard rights”, prompting Melanie McDonagh to write in the Telegraph that “women are frightened of saying what they actually think and can’t articulate their unremarkable, mainstream views without being abused”. The Conservative Party was criticised by activists just for agreeing to host a stand for gender critical group LGB Alliance at its forthcoming conference.

Meanwhile, delegates at the Labour conference were told that too many white men were putting their hands up to speak. Writing in Spiked, Nick Tyrone said the incident showed how toxic identity politics is to Labour. London mayor Sadiq Khan told delegates that he needs constant 24-hour security provided by a team of 15 police officers and that his staff had been offered counselling after dealing with “vitriol” directed at him.

The word woman erased as Lancet and ACLU opt for “bodies with vaginas” and “[people]”

Medical journal the Lancet has been pilloried for referring to women as “bodies with vaginas”. Debbie Hayton compares the modern debate over sex and gender to the heresies of early Christianity. Mary Harrington writes in UnHerd that women are being erased, and a pushback against trans ideology is becoming more difficult as it spreads across the Establishment. Helen Joyce told the New Statesman that gender critical feminists should not be vilified and that her generation of women “are in a bigger fight than the suffragettes”. Her book, Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality, is being hidden in some bookshops, writes Graham Linehan. Apparently, staff are anxious that the public might be upset by books that challenge the current trans orthodoxy.

The American Civil Liberties Union has apologised after publishing a quote from the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg with the word “woman” scrubbed out and replaced with “people”. The ACLU published the quote as: “The decision whether or not to bear a child is central to a [person’s] life, to [their] well-being and dignity… When the Government controls that decision for [people], [they are] being treated as less than a fully adult human responsible for [their] own choices.” After a backlash, the campaign group’s executive director said: “My colleagues do a fantastic job of trying to understand a reality that people who seek abortions are not only women. That reality exists.” He also claimed that Ginsburg would have wanted her words edited: “In today’s America language sometimes needs to be rethought.”

A feminist group at Bristol University plans to sue its student union, after it was fined for denying a transgender individual entry to a women-only event. In response, union officials have ordered the society’s president to resign and barred her from holding any other leadership positions.

Kent students made to say wearing second-hand clothes is “white privilege” in compulsory “Expect Respect” module

Students at Kent University have been compelled to complete a four-hour “Expect Respect” module which makes them tick 13 options which are supposed examples of “white privilege”. These include the ability to have “neutral or pleasant” neighbours and, bizarrely, wearing second-hand clothes. Staff at Kent have been told to consider adding trigger warnings to exam papers and carry out “pronoun checks” when meeting new students. Frank Furedi, who is a professor at Kent, said the course amounted to “thought policing”. Mark Piggott in the Times agrees: “Kent is just the latest university apparently more concerned about telling students what to think about racism than teaching them other stuff, like, perhaps, medicine, law or computer science. We may not have quite matched the peak woke extremes of our US counterparts – where correctly answering a maths question is construed as ‘racist’ – but we aren’t far behind.” Kent Professor Ellie Lee told Julia Hartley-Brewer of our Media Advisory Council: “It’s wrong for a university to project on to students one way of thinking.”

Cambridge academics have welcomed the early departure of outgoing Vice-Chancellor Professor Stephen Toope, whose tenure had been mired in free speech controversies. Sir Partha Dasgupta, a fellow of St John’s College, said the crises afflicting Cambridge had been of the institution’s own making, and described cancel culture as an attempt “by a vocal minority of students and faculty – all hugely privileged in comparison to the average citizen – anxious to close freedom of expression that the average citizen has always exercised in her day-to-day life.” Jordan Peterson has announced that he will visit Cambridge in November at the invitation of Dr James Orr, a member of our Advisory Council. Dr Arif Ahmed, also a member, has written in the Telegraph that the invitation will be a litmus test of the university’s commitment to free speech and will decided “whether Cambridge is on the side of the Enlightenment or the mob”. Peterson said that Toope had turned Cambridge into a “preposterous place”.

The University of the West of Scotland has adopted guidance on “microaggressions”, which warns staff and students not to ask questions like “Do people eat insects in your country?” Glasgow University has renamed the Gregory Building, on the grounds that its namesake, Professor John Walter Gregory, was racist.

Senior Conservatives have called on the Government to set up a register tracking Chinese influence on British universities.

Books, theatre and Star Wars

Carry On veteran Jim Davidson has criticised theatre proprietors for imposing their own values on the public and blocking popular, non-PC comedians from performing.

Books clubs have been invaded by cancel culture, writes Helen Kirwan-Taylor in the Telegraph.

Neil Davenport has written for Spiked about the public sector “woke gravy train”, and the vast sums of taxpayers’ money being spent on equality, diversity and inclusion.

Star Wars has been deemed to have a “problematic cultural legacy” with the saga’s Jedi Knights blamed for “connecting justice initiatives to corporate capital”.

YouTube to block Covid misinformation

YouTube has announced a ban on vaccine misinformation as part of a crackdown on all “harmful content”.

New research papers find “authoritarian” personality traits on left and right, and debunk “trigger warnings”

A major study has identified authoritarian personality traits on the left. Researchers found a shared trait among respondents who agreed with statements like “I should have the right not to be exposed to offensive views” and “Getting rid of inequality is more important than protecting the so-called ‘right’ to free speech”.

Trigger warnings can cause greater distress than the material they warn about, according to a new study by Harvard law professor Jeannie Suk Gersen.

Other free speech news

Scottish charities have complained of “gagging orders”, whereby they can only receive funding from the Scottish Government if they agree not to criticise the SNP.

The right-of-centre Koch network has criticised moves to ban critical race theory in America. Evan Feinberg, executive director of the Stand Together Foundation, said: “Using government to ban ideas, even those we disagree with, is also counter to core American principles – the principles that help drive social progress.”

The Atlantic has run a piece on Counterweight, a partner organisation of the FSU which offers help to people who run afoul of social justice ideology in the workplace.

Park MacDougald has written in UnHerd on the rise of cancel culture and sees it as an attempt to “erect taboos and restrictions and impose a new moral order”.

FSU at Battle of Ideas Festival

The FSU will be out in force at this year’s Battle of Ideas Festival at Church House in Westminster on the weekend of the 9th and 10th of October. We’re hosting a session, chaired by our founder Toby Young, called “The FSU Files: How to Fight ‘Cancel Culture’ and Win” in which we’ll hear from individuals who’ve experienced first-hand what it’s like to be cancelled. But these particular individuals also have something else in common: with our help, they’ve all fought back. We will hear from them about the most effective way to survive an online assassination attempt, as well as more general advice on how to persuade people that free speech is a cause worth defending.

Across the weekend there are numerous other sessions on free speech issues that should be of interest to FSU members, including “Hate, Heresy and the Fight for Free Speech”, “From GB News to Ben & Jerry’s: Boycotts or Censorship?”, “Publish and Be Damned?”, “The History Wars”, “The Social Justice March through the Institutions”, “Has Coronavirus Changed Us?” and “Can Culture Survive the Culture Wars?”

Most of our staff will be there encouraging others to join the FSU, so come and find us at our stall and say hello. You can buy tickets here. Members were sent a discount code in the last monthly newsletter.
 
User avatar
Paul
Posts: 6604
Joined: July 20th, 2001, 3:28 pm

Re: FSU, Toby Young, Eugenics & Wilmott.com

October 26th, 2021, 6:03 am

Dave Chappelle! Anyone seen The Closer? Thoughts?
 
User avatar
gatarek
Posts: 213
Joined: July 14th, 2002, 3:00 am

Re: FSU, Toby Young, Eugenics & Wilmott.com

October 26th, 2021, 7:15 am

Who the hell is Alice?
 
User avatar
bearish
Posts: 5186
Joined: February 3rd, 2011, 2:19 pm

Re: FSU, Toby Young, Eugenics & Wilmott.com

October 26th, 2021, 12:08 pm

Who the hell is Alice?
The line is “Who the fuck is Alice?”
 
User avatar
gatarek
Posts: 213
Joined: July 14th, 2002, 3:00 am

Re: FSU, Toby Young, Eugenics & Wilmott.com

October 27th, 2021, 9:37 am

The hell, the f*ck... Irrelevant. Who is this gentleman and why should I bother? Not enough funny for a comedian, not enough smart for a lecturer. A prophet maybe? The audience seemed to be quite excited. Times are worth their religion.
 
User avatar
bearish
Posts: 5186
Joined: February 3rd, 2011, 2:19 pm

Re: FSU, Toby Young, Eugenics & Wilmott.com

October 28th, 2021, 3:29 am

You mean Chris Norman?
 
User avatar
bearish
Posts: 5186
Joined: February 3rd, 2011, 2:19 pm

Re: FSU, Toby Young, Eugenics & Wilmott.com

October 28th, 2021, 3:29 am

Surely you don’t mean me…
 
User avatar
Alan
Posts: 2958
Joined: December 19th, 2001, 4:01 am
Location: California
Contact:

Re: FSU, Toby Young, Eugenics & Wilmott.com

October 30th, 2021, 2:41 am