I was at a presentation this morning given by a woman who was employed by the Scottish Government to talk about various educational initiatives. I’m not going to comment on those initiatives, because I post here under my real name and I’d quite like to keep my job.

Her opening remarks though, are worth passing on. She talked about the various educational links that have been set up between Scotland and Lithuania, because of ‘the similarities between their struggle for independence and our struggle for independence’.

In the last century, Lithuania was occupied by the Soviet Union, then the German National Socialists, then the Soviets again from 1944. It is estimated that around 80% of Lithuanian Jews were killed under German occupation. When the Soviet Union occupied Lithuania it did all the things that it did in other occupied countries: it closed down political and religious organisations, arrested so-called ‘dissidents’, sent folk to certain death in Siberian camps and so on. The country did not break away from Soviet rule until 1990.

Educational links have been set up between Scotland and Lithuania, because of ‘the similarities between their struggle for independence and our struggle for independence’.

As » Continue Reading.

Libby Purves has performed an important public service. She has given a name to something that needed to be given a name.

“The most savage, bilious, self-righteous rants are from people living affluent self-pleasing lives in comfortable homes, doing lucky and rewarding jobs with like-minded friends. What they are doing (I risk losing a friend or two) is “virtue-signalling”: competing to seem compassionate. Few are notably open-handed: St Matthew would need a rewrite of Chapter 19. “Jesus said unto him, If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that thou hast and give to the poor. But when the young man heard that saying, he went away sorrowful, for he had great possessions. So he went on Twitter instead and called Michael Gove a ‘vile reptilian evil tory scumbag’, and linked to a cartoon of Iain Duncan Smith stealing a paralysed woman’s wheelchair. And lo, he felt better and went for a £3.50 caramel macchiato with some mates from the BBC”

Her article is behind a paywall, but it’s quoted here:

http://mickhartley.typepad.com/blog/2015/05/virtue-signalling.html

Perhaps I’m not best placed to judge because I’m not a Labour supporter, but this article looks to me like it makes some sense:

http://www.adamsmith.org/research/think-pieces/7-policies-the-labour-party-should-adopt-in-opposition/

A couple of days ago I was going through some emails at work, replying to important stuff and kicking some less important stuff into the long grass. It’s a shared workspace and the computer is used by a number of colleagues. I noticed, after a couple of minutes, that it had been left on an ‘auto-correct’ setting and was changing some words as I typed. I’m not keen on that sort of thing; I don’t even use predictive text on my phone, because I don’t like the idea of a piece of software interpreting my intentions, guessing what I’m about to do next (I’m not paranoid, but everyone else thinks I am).

Responding to one particular message, I had to use the phrase ‘his specific requirements’. I typed it, added a sentence or two and was just about to hit the ‘send’ button when I froze in horror. There, on the screen, was an electronic grenade with the pin pulled. The software had corrected my intended ‘specific’ to the (in this case) deadly ‘pacific’. I’m guessing that I had somehow missed out the ‘s’ as I hurriedly composed the message. Accordingly, my email now featured the phrase: ‘his pacific » Continue Reading.