That freedom/safety quote. Turns out it's more fun pseudonymous. 'Pah!' to being ruled by a pathogen.
England, sending SAGE packing
Joined November 2020
- Tweets22.5K
- Following291
- Followers207
- Likes9.9K
Judas Maccabeus retweeted
This will prove a toxic quote.
Over a million small companies employ 1-9 people. I suspect most of those employers work exceptionally hard.
Emma Reynolds wd be wise to retract asap. Otherwise opposition parties will play the quote on a loop between now & the next election.
'I don't think employers are working people.'
@CamillaTominey grills Chief Secretary to the Treasury, Emma Reynolds MP, over whether Labour has breached its manifesto pledge in the Budget.
📺 Freeview 236, Sky 512, Virgin 604
Good news: Simon Heffer's utterly ungraceful review of @trussliz's new book, Bank Job, alerted me to its existence and I have now ordered a copy. Nice one! #lizwasright
1
52
Judas Maccabeus retweeted
Cliveden House burnt down in 1849. The architect behind Parliament rebuilt it in two years.
Now, Parliament has spent over a decade just planning its own repairs.
What happened to the country that built things? 👇
Cannot use any streaming services without creating an account with @LGUK on new TV. Absolutely outrageous. I contract with streaming providers not with the hardware vendor. That and your "user agreement". Nothing we ticked has any validity - we ticked under duress.
8
Unacceptable to stop taking cash @StarbucksUK. And I was not the only customer affected. Are you doing this in all your locations? Retailers get one shot: I'll pay by card once and then I'm not coming back.
1
113
Judas Maccabeus retweeted
Software engineering is dead... In other news, a software engineer with 18 years of experience (me) just spent 15 hours refining a big new feature, asking questions that the frontier models hadn't even considered. Software engineering isn't going anywhere.
Judas Maccabeus retweeted
Professors of education in England are *furious* that England did relatively well in PISA and that should tell policymakers everything they need to know about education professors.
Judas Maccabeus retweeted
📣🕯📖 Introducing the CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY FREE SPEECH SOCIETY
When we arrived at Cambridge University last year, we expected to find a place built around the pursuit of truth: where ideas could be freely raised, tested, and challenged. Cambridge ought to be a bastion of critical thinking, but in practice, that principle has been eroded.
Speakers are no-platformed or quietly uninvited. Students self-censor in supervisions and exams as well as social settings – not because they lack a view, but because they have learned that the wrong view carries social cost. Too often, ideas are not tested by argument and challenge, but are left to stagnate in closed-minded consensus. We think this is a serious failure of the University’s basic function and mission.
It is against this backdrop that we are founding the Cambridge University Free Speech Society. We firmly hold the belief that the only reliable way to sort good ideas from bad ones is to let them compete in the open: to state them clearly, subject them to scrutiny, defend them under pressure, and revise or abandon them when they fail to hold up.
The society will run across a few main formats:
Speaker events with open Q&A – bringing in speakers with a range of views and perspectives from across the political and academic spectrum, and giving students and the public the chance to question and challenge them directly.
Student debates – opportunities for members to argue positions, including ones they may not personally hold, and to sharpen their own thinking and public speaking skills in the process.
The Symposium – a fortnightly reading group dedicated to understanding the ideas underpinning the present historical moment.
Join us!
If you think a university should be a place where you can think out loud, question received wisdom, argue your case, and disagree openly without being cast out for it, we’d love you to join us. All we ask of you is the willingness to contest ideas in good faith and the humility to be contested in return.
Details of our first event to follow shortly!
In the meantime, follow us here on X at @cufreespeechsoc, on Instagram at @cufreespeechsociety, and feel free to get in touch at committee@cufss.org or through our website cufss.org.
We are deeply grateful to the Ian Mactaggart Programme for its support. Administered by the Free Speech Union, the Ian Mactaggart Programme was established to foster a culture of open debate, independent thinking and free expression among young people in the UK, especially students.
Judas Maccabeus retweeted
Students at one of Cambridge University’s oldest colleges are being required to attend “inclusivity training” delivered by a charity whose published educational materials misstate key provisions of equality law and treat contested ideas such as “micro-inequities” not as proper subjects of academic inquiry but as settled norms for regulating conduct, with potentially chilling consequences for lawful speech.
CAF’s Freddie Attenborough for @TheCriticMag.
thecritic.co.uk/runaway-trai…
Judas Maccabeus retweeted
We have come full circle. Having abolished the requirement for students to be members of the Church of England before they could graduate, Caius College Cambridge now mandates quasi-religious DEI dogma as the new orthodoxy. I hope someone is brave enough to dissent. It will be an interesting test of the new heresy threshold.
At Caius College, Cambridge, attendance of these 1.5 hour-long inclusivity training sessions is mandatory for all undergrads.
The sessions will be delivered by Stop Hate UK, who erroneously state that "gender identity" is a protected characteristic and that "Islamophobia is a crime." One would hope these are honest mistakes and they will be correcting them @stophateuk
It will be interesting to hear what they have to say about the hate myself and others experienced at Cambridge for having the temerity to join a society for women that excludes men. Their website talks a lot about The Law and they seem to be very much in favour of the crime of Hate as a category: the word itself is menacingly capitalised throughout their material with the ominous implication that the violence or harassment ordinarily necessary for hatred to constitute a Hate Crime is somehow superfluous, and that simply Hating silently in your head should be sufficient.
I wonder if they like the law so much when it comes to the protected characteristic of belief in the binary nature of sex and the Supreme Court judgment clarifying that sex in law means biological sex. We shall soon find out.
In any case, by bringing them in and mandating attendance, Caius College is at best tacitly endorsing this ideological pressuring of students into being firmly on the woke side of a culture war they are determined not to wade out of, even given recent events. Training will of course include American rubbish about unconscious bias, microaggressions and how to be an Upstander against heteronormative hypermasculinity.
No doubt some administrator has looked over this charity and their session descriptions and decided there's nothing at all controversial here, nothing political, just kindness.
Judas Maccabeus retweeted
CAF has been looking closely at the mandatory 90-minute “inclusivity training” that all Caius undergraduates are due to receive from Stop Hate UK from next week.
Some of the publicly available material raises serious questions for us — both about the accuracy with which aspects of equality law are presented, and about the line between introducing students to contested concepts and requiring them to express assent to particular ways of understanding speech and social interaction.
We will be writing to Cambridge to address some of those concerns later this week, once our draft has undergone legal review.
But what we don’t yet know, and what may matter considerably from a legal and regulatory perspective, is what actually happens during the training.
So if you’re a Caius student attending one of these sessions, or know someone who is, CAF would be very interested to hear from you afterwards.
Are there quizzes, scenarios, exercises or tick-box questions? Are some answers treated as “correct”? Can students complete the training while openly disagreeing with propositions advanced during it? Are they ever required to repeat an exercise or answer until they select the approved response? Are students given materials they can retain? How are key terms like “harassment” and “discrimination” defined, if at all?
And perhaps most importantly: did the training affect how willing you felt to contribute to discussions of difficult or contentious subjects afterwards?
You can DM us via X, use the ‘get in touch’ function on our website, or email us directly at manager@afcomm.org.uk.
Screenshots or contemporaneous notes would also be very useful. We’re happy to treat approaches in confidence.
@theasewell05 @MaeveHalligan @lottietredgett @Fox_Claire @ProfAliceS @drianpace @astor_charlie
At Caius College, Cambridge, attendance of these 1.5 hour-long inclusivity training sessions is mandatory for all undergrads.
The sessions will be delivered by Stop Hate UK, who erroneously state that "gender identity" is a protected characteristic and that "Islamophobia is a crime." One would hope these are honest mistakes and they will be correcting them @stophateuk
It will be interesting to hear what they have to say about the hate myself and others experienced at Cambridge for having the temerity to join a society for women that excludes men. Their website talks a lot about The Law and they seem to be very much in favour of the crime of Hate as a category: the word itself is menacingly capitalised throughout their material with the ominous implication that the violence or harassment ordinarily necessary for hatred to constitute a Hate Crime is somehow superfluous, and that simply Hating silently in your head should be sufficient.
I wonder if they like the law so much when it comes to the protected characteristic of belief in the binary nature of sex and the Supreme Court judgment clarifying that sex in law means biological sex. We shall soon find out.
In any case, by bringing them in and mandating attendance, Caius College is at best tacitly endorsing this ideological pressuring of students into being firmly on the woke side of a culture war they are determined not to wade out of, even given recent events. Training will of course include American rubbish about unconscious bias, microaggressions and how to be an Upstander against heteronormative hypermasculinity.
No doubt some administrator has looked over this charity and their session descriptions and decided there's nothing at all controversial here, nothing political, just kindness.
Judas Maccabeus retweeted
Tories are poling within 3 points of Reform nationally but Reformers still desperately push the party is dead based on PCC and mayoral votes in areas the Tories have never done well in with turnout of 17-25%.
Judas Maccabeus retweeted
Proposed English reservoirs blocked or delayed by nimbys since 1989:
Abingdon
Broad Oak (Kent)
Cheddar 2
Fens Reservoir
South Lincolnshire Reservoir
North Suffolk Reservoir
West Midlands Reservoir
Severn Trent
River Adur Offline Reservoir
Mendips Quarry Reservoir
Havant Thicket
Judas Maccabeus retweeted
I wonder if there are signs that ex Tory MPs didn’t pass their candidate assessment….
If anyone can see or find any please let me know!
Personally I’m finding it difficult…
Leaving a party after 50 years, was not an easy decision. Tackling the challenges Britain faces requires a strong leader and committed party; we must drive out this terrible Labour government. I believe that Nigel Farage offers that leadership. I am proud to join @reformparty_uk
Judas Maccabeus retweeted
Gen Z craves full-fat religion while the Church acts like a secular NGO telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/07…
Judas Maccabeus retweeted
Wrote about what ministry is not.
thecritic.co.uk/missionaries…
