Monday 9th June 2025
Blog Page 882

Week in Science: 30/04/17

Cherwell Science and Tech Editors
-
0
Week in Science: 30/04/17

It’s not easy keeping up with all the events going around the University. With Week in Science, the Cherwell Science and Tech editors bring to your attention interesting talks around the city, all of which they attend religiously.

—

The concept of time in biology, and the unity of life 

Source: Oxford Martin School

Presented by Oxford Martin School and the Oxford Centre for Tropical Forests 

Date and Time: 8th May, 17:30 to 18:30pm

Location: Oxford Martin School, 34 Broad Street, OX1 3BD

Speaker: Professor Brian J. Enquist

Description: One of our biggest technological innovations is that of time keeping. From the atomic to the astronomical scales, our technology has enabled us to precisely measure time. Our timekeeping uses clocks that all tick along the same time scale – a time scale that is also relative to how we perceive the passage of time.

For biology, the passage of time, however, is not only different but reveals deep truths about life. Across the diversity of life, the passage of time from bacteria to humans to giant Redwood trees is perceived differently. Instead of a constant ticking of a clock – the pace of life is reflected in scaling laws that characterise the variation in the cycles of heartbeats, metabolism, growth and reproduction.

In this lecture Professor Brian J. Enquist, Oxford Martin Visiting Fellow, will introduce a second concept of time – physiological time. Physiological time enables us to better understand why we age, the emergence of disease and cancer, the functioning of ecosystems, and the diversity of life. Physiological time is one of the most significant characteristics of life and helps unite the study of biology. A deeper question is what ultimately sets the pace of life.

As will be discussed, the search for a universal biological clock that unites life’s cycles is the most intriguing Holy Grail of biology.

Entry: Free, register early to avoid disappointment.

—

Puzzle Competition

Presented by The Oxford Invariants Society

Date and Time: 2nd May, 20:00pm.

Location: Maths Institute Café, Mathematical Institute, Woodstock Road, OX2 6GG.

Description: This week we’re having a puzzle competition!

It starts at 8pm on Tuesday (2nd May) in the Maths Institute Café. Bring your friends or form a team of up to 4 people on the spot and solve some fun maths puzzles! Of course, there will also be snacks and drinks for everyone and some great prizes for the winners.

Entry: The event is free for members and £3 for non-members. Memberships is also available for £15, for life.

—

Lorna Casselton Memorial Lecture: The International Search for Life Beyond Earth – From Mars to Extrasolar Planets

Presented by St Cross College

Date and Time: 3rd May, 17:00 to 18:00pm.

Location: Main Lecture Theatre L1, Mathematical Institute, Woodstock Road, OX2 6GG.

Speaker: Dr Ellen Stofan, NASA Chief Scientist.

Description: The 3rd Lorna Casselton Memorial Lecture, given by Dr Ellen Stofan, former NASA Chief Scientist, and entitled “The International Search for Life Beyond Earth – From Mars to Extrasolar Planets” will be at 5 pm on Wednesday 3rd May 2017 in the main lecture theatre, L1, at the Mathematical Institute, Woodstock Road, Oxford.

Entry: Free, register early to avoid disappointment.

—

 

 

 

Life Divided: Croquet

Akshay Bilolikar and Esme Ash
-
0
Life Divided: Croquet

For: Akshay Bilolikar

It’s the first swing, but also the final. It’s that almost intractable angle hiding in plain sight on an Oxford college lawn. It’s the croquet bug: an insatiable seasonal desire to pick up the mallet, set up the court, and hit wooden balls through hoops. Between shots, there’s conferral with your partner. Grand and arcane schemes are orchestrated. Your vision must compete with your opponent’s if you’re to master the court. Little, if anything, ever goes to plan. Perhaps the sun is in your eye, but in any case you can’t quite master the angle on that last shot.

The game isn’t lost yet. There’s still possibility, even if it’s only in reach with a healthy dose of Lady Luck. One hoop behind, it’s not yet over. Two, a triumph becomes distant, yet almost within reach. On the third, there’s no way to win except to take—ruthlessly—all the opportunities your opponent gives you. Half the time, the game ends there—the leader’s advantage is not easily waived. Just often enough, however, the golden window presents itself. Jumping through the window of opportunity to snatch success from the jaws of defeat. Strategic thought, almost like chess on grass, to match your opponent on the court.

And yet, the croquet bug is not solely an infection of the mind: it’s an infection of the soul, one rooted in the summer air and the scent of the good months ahead. The game always takes longer than you allocated it time. You inevitably have to deputise to hold your place. Frustration mounts, pitilessly, but it never overwhelms because the balance of possibilities will, one day, swing in your favour. Day after day, you find yourself returning to the court. Some of your friends—the immune ones, who don’t see the possibility at play between the hoops—will balk at the hours you spend in the summer sun doing little more than hitting balls through hoops. And yet, you’ve got the bug, and you’re doing so much more

Against: Esmé Ash

Croquet? Seriously? You’d be forgiven for mistaking this pointless game as a tasty snack (see croquettes), but for some unfathomable reason, the tradition of whacking balls with sticks à la Alice in Wonderland—minus the flamingos—hasn’t died out when it really should have by now, along with boater hats and braces.

There are lots of wonderful eccentricities that are part of the fabric of college life, but croquet does not earn its place in the hall of fame for three reasons. Firstly, the “sport” (if you could call it that) is inherently unfair. No matter how flat the quad, it’s never a level playing field when cuppers rolls around because prime time for practising is invariably Trinity term, when anyone who has exams, or studies a real degree, is too busy for such frivolity.

Meanwhile, hordes of E&M students spend hours honing their skills, Pimm’s in hand, ready to crush the opposition within minutes of setting up those little hoops on the grass. No, I don’t know what they’re called—and any self-respecting student won’t know, either. But, sore losing aside, the institution of croquet and its association with Oxford is just another stereotype we have to fight, to break the misconception that we all wear red trousers and pinstripe blazers. “What’s so special that means they can play on the grass?”, prospective students wonder as they skirt the quads.

The format of the game leaves little room for mistakes, too, dissuading even the bravest of timid freshers from stepping up and having a go in case they ruin a team’s winning streak. Finally, Oxford in the summer is a beautiful thing to behold—and there are so many other things you can do which lie beyond the well-groomed lawns of your particular college.

Try rowing, punting, touring colleges, and venturing out to Cowley, Jericho or another quirky corner of the city. Croquet is a spectator sport, best served with strawberries and cream.

Fashion in Paris is moving in the right direction

Chloe Dootson-Graube
-
0
Fashion in Paris is moving in the right direction

One would be hard pressed to find anything in fashion journalism as sacrosanct as the concept of ‘The Parisian’. The recent elapse of fashion weeks across the globe saw fashion publications taking to the streets in an attempt to document the street-style turn out and I defy you to find a look more widely aspired to or applauded than the ‘Parisian’.

But what is meant by the term in its sartorial use? To channel Bardot and Birkin, or to don a starched shirt, neat trousers and sensible shoes, has become the ubiquitous ‘Parisian’ trend. But many would argue that it is more a state of mind than a particular type of attire. Vogue identi es it as an “overall air of gamine insouciance”, and one of the movement’s foremost IT girls, Caroline de Maigret, attributes it to the personality of the wearer, and the “effortless” air they possess.

Others suggest that the de ning feature of Parisian style is largely the cultivation of a personal image. Ines de la Fressange and Carine Roitield’s nurture of this plays a big role in their esteemed fashion credits and Vogue supports this notion: “No deliberate statement-making, no peacocking of designer freebies […] it’s not about fitting the clothes, see: it’s about the clothes fitting you.” The integrity of the cut, the strength of the silhouette and the shape of the fabric seem to be what is valued.

One of the many benefits of this is that by embracing the individuality of the wearer, many of the stigmas that plague the fashion industry have been ostensibly removed. For example, many of the movement’s IT girls are significantly older than is typical in the fashion industry: well respected figures like Caroline de Maigret, 42, de la Fressange, 59, and Roitfeld, 62, are all far older than the teens and twenties of the Kendall Jenners and Gigi Hadids of New York.

There do however remain certain gaping holes in the movement’s liberal inclusivity. After all, “the overall air of gamine insouciance” comes part and parcel with a certain waifish slender-ness. One would encounter some difficulty in attempting to identify any plus-size figures at the forefront, or indeed, even in the background of the movement.

Moreover, it ought to be noted that the scene remains disproportionately white for a city with a population that is 10-15 % Muslim and 18 % black. With a city with such a substantial non-white population, is it not somewhat suspect that this diversity finds no representation? Why is it the neat black garb of impressionists that finds itself highlighted, rather than the hijab?

Furthermore, this notion of an individual personal style only seems to go so far. It is perhaps somewhat melodramatic to describe Parisian fashion as a policy of ‘uniformization’, but De Maigret herself concedes in a Refinery 29 interview that she believes “sometimes French women are so scared of the faux pas that they’re not adventurous. I think sometimes maybe it’s a bit dull”. The Gucci Gang, a Parisian style collective who have turned the heads of fashion publications such as I-D and Vogue, make the claim that in France, “everything is taboo”.

Yet it must be said that minimalism and uniform dressing are not universal facets of the day-to-day Parisian dress. My grandmother is a born and bred Parisian and her approach to fashion is buying clothing with a price below double digits. While I’m certainly not naming my own ageing relatives as the epicentre of innovative fashion, this sort of the out-the-box thinking is beginning to proliferate. Take the Gucci Gang, for example, who have been making waves with their Parisian fashion is ‘mort’ attitude. Thaïs, one of their members, said in an interview that “there is a great energy in the new generation of Parisian designers”.

Moreover, Rihanna’s Fenty Puma line —which debuted at Paris Fashion Week last year—makes the case for both decadence and ‘trashy-dressing’, combining the indulgent ruffles and baby pinks of the classic ‘Marie Antoinette style’, with standard sportswear staples. There is still a long way to go, but Parisian fashion is proving itself to be a diverse medium, not limited to the stark standards set by its forebears.

A day in the life of… an assistant director

Rebekah King
-
0
A day in the life of… an assistant director

Adjusting the bosom of another woman, as you pull closed the clasps on her corset, is an intimacy best reserved for the more advanced months of a friendship. Unless, of course, you are Assistant Director for a period-costume play, in which case you may find yourself fondling others and making introductions at once:

“Hello, I’m Rebekah; I’ll be helping Sarah out.”

“Hi, I’m playing Charlotte Brontë. Should I take my bra off first?”

To be an Assistant Director is to multitask. One has, therefore, a truly unique perspective: a hands-on closeness to all aspects of production.

As first mate, I have watched the captain of our ship bring Brontë safely into port. Sarah Pyper (a development officer at St Peter’s) is one of those directors whom actors and production folk alike adore. She is intelligent, practical, and calm, and has done wonders with a difficult but rewarding script.

Here’s the problem: Polly Teale (our author) wants to write for television. Many’s the time when Sarah has cursed her for a stage direction such as ‘Lights change: it is 1835’ (“Ah!” thinks the lighting designer, “I’ll fetch my 1835 bulbs”) or ‘Emily releases the hawk’ (“How expensive is it to hire a bird of prey for a fortnight?”). But once the tidying up was done, Brontë started to look like a touching and, at times, truly poetic script: a fitting cousin for the BBC’s recent To Walk Invisible.

If you know and love the Brontës, this is a play for you. If you can’t quite remember who wrote Wuthering Heights, and had forgotten that the third sister was called Anne, the play will invite you to discover a world of purple moors and wild imaginations.

Being Assistant Director is a much more important role when things go wrong. It’s a bit like being the younger brother of king: if he’s loved you’ll never get to feel the inner contours of the throne. But open rebellion on a play-set is an excitement I have witnessed before and will happily do without.

Thistledown Theatre is not a student company, and everything feels rather more relaxed. Sarah and the rest don’t need my guidance, and for once I can enjoy the ‘assistant’ half of my job-description.

Rewind: “Our greatest work may be found in our escape”

Carmen Martinez
-
0
Rewind: “Our greatest work may be found in our escape”

In 1925, Theodor Seuss Geisel—more commonly known by his pen name, Dr. Seuss—started a postgraduate degree in English literature at Lincoln College, but he never completed it. His lecture notes on Shakespeare quickly became scribblings of strange beasts, as he found life at Oxford stifling. Seuss himself later imagined his tutor thinking he was “the only man he’d ever seen who never ever should have come to Oxford”. This tutor advised him to leave Oxford, to broaden what he knew about the world, to travel Europe with schoolboy guides to meet the world in real life.

The scenes in the colourful pages of his storybooks can seem an escape from real life, and indeed it was cartoons that offered Seuss an escape from the course at Oxford which he felt he was gaining nothing from. His time at our university is summed up well on Lincoln’s website: “While finding a course in the punctuation of Shakespeare dull, he began to draw pictures and doodles during his lectures.”

When Seuss took a couple of example cartoons he had drawn to illustrate ‘Paradise Lost’ to a certain famous Broad Street bookshop, cheekily hoping he might be commissioned to do many more, he was turned away, having been told: “This isn’t quite the Blackwell type of humour.” Forty years later his books were the main event in the shopfront window.

In looking back over Dr. Seuss’s works, I see what these doodles eventually amounted to. I am drawn into the mundane quibbles of furry, odd but also strangely majestic creatures with names like ‘Sneetches’ and ‘Zax’. The characters find themselves in trouble against a backdrop of improbably colourful trees and hills, but tend to work out their differences, in dialogue with the rhythm and rhyme that made their author so important to helping children learn to read.

However, the tales of Dr. Seuss’s wacky beasts don’t lack a didactic angle, and criticism of the sources of hate in our world. In ‘The Zax’, a North-Going Zax and a South-Going Zax meet in the middle of a desert and in refusing to budge come to resemble a political deadlock:

“Never budge. That’s my rule. Never budge in the least! Not an inch to the west! Not an inch to the east! / I’ll stay here not budging! I can and I will / If it makes you and me and the whole world stand still!”

While the books’ settings are a zany escape from real life, there is value to be gained from mocking this kind of behaviour. Dr. Seuss artfully fused his skill for creating doodles with stances on morality. He helped children around the world to love reading and it started with drawings which seemed a product of distraction and not the ‘right thing’ to be doing in his time at Oxford.

Perhaps our greatest ‘work’, like that of Dr. Seuss, can be found in the marginal scribbles of our essay notes. Our greatest work or product, found in our ‘escape’.

College Insider – Worcester

Cherwell Life
-
0
College Insider – Worcester

Everywhere you turn in Worcester, you see Chanel. And no, I’m not talking about thousand pound skirt suits, but the Provost’s West Highland Terrier.

It’s a strange Sunday morning when I don’t run into Coco Chanel, out for her morning stroll round the lake, on my way to brunch. There’s nothing like a tiny white bundle of enthusiastic yelping and friendly tail wagging for a hangover cure. And the anticipation of the meal ahead isn’t bad either. Sunday brunch at Worcester comes to about £1.40 for a plate heaped with a fry-up and pastries and, if you’re suave and subtle like me, you can usually nick a couple of bowls of cereal as a bonus. If the bursar is reading this, may I amicably suggest that you consider installing CCTV at the self-service bar?

Worcester isn’t generally considered one of the superlative colleges—it isn’t the richest, or the smallest, or even the sportiest. Occasionally it gets called the prettiest, and I wouldn’t disagree. But the label I really think Worcester deserves is the keenest. I cannot imagine another college where a girl’s Cupper’s football match, at 10am on a freezing cold Sunday morning in January, would gather a crowd of ten to fifteen people, from across year groups. Sure, we may have pitches on-site, but last term’s building works meant that getting to them involved a bit of a trek—it wasn’t just a matter of rolling out of bed. We take it pretty seriously, and it’s something I would sacrifice a lot to remain part of.

But let’s be clear, Worcester isn’t some kind of pastry-filled paradise, peopled only by fluffy dogs and supportive friends. It’s a college like any other, and of course, it has its problems. For example, my first year room inhabits a concrete block about half a mile away from main quad. A tactical befriending of someone living on main quad is the answer: many a night I have crashed on a certain friend’s beanbag for a box of Brannos’ finest and a quick power nap, before heading back to my room.

With Trinity beginning, the inevitable approach of the post-prelim lake swim is beginning to cost me sleep. The prospect of emerging from a grueling set of essays, only to be doused in whipped cream and bubbles, and then forcibly dunked in ice-cold, swan shit strewn waters is not exactly the stuff of daydreams. But, a Worcester challenge is a Worcester challenge, and who I am to fight tradition?

Tolkien and ‘the problems of another place’

Sandy Elliot
-
0
Tolkien and ‘the problems of another place’

I do not know precisely, or even approximately, how many hours of my life have been passed watching The Lord of the Rings. Just watching each of the three films once in their theatrical cut amounts to about twelve hours of screen time. In the extended editions (arguably the only correct way to watch them) it’s even more. Time spent watching those well-loved DVDs stacks up effortlessly, in part because very few films have been made that are so profoundly watchable.

But watching The Lord of the Rings, while a source of great happiness to me and whoever my viewing companions may be, is not, for lack of a better word, very productive. For all the immense effort and expense that went into making the films (Sir Ian McKellen once told me personally that about one third of the entire process for the actors consisted of hiking around New Zealand) watching them seems to be an innocuous, but not a useful pastime.

Who says art should be useful? What does ‘useful’ even mean? Thinking about it for long enough (as with most things) our consumption of media is just another surreal aspect of a surreal existence: we like to stare at the marks on a page or the pixels on a screen, and one way or another this brings us great delight. No need to drag in Jean-Paul Sartre or Oscar Wilde to realise that The Lord of the Rings is not deep social critique. It does not have, nor does it pretend to have, a function as an instrument for political or social change.

If anything, it plays into and even invents the archetype of a fantasy film with an all-white cast, with only three prominent female characters, all of whom are in completely different parts of Middle Earth being ruled over by different men. This is despite the fact that the role of Arwen Evenstar was considerably expanded in the process of book-to-film adaptation.

Indeed, in Tolkien’s world, the Elves, “wisest and fairest of all beings”, are also emblematic of absolute sexual orthodoxy. In defence of the novel (and to some extent, the films) there are very worthy environmental messages to be found in the plight of the Ents. But The Lord of the Rings nevertheless does not seem a particularly useful instrument for getting out of the current mess. Indeed, some would argue that such escapist works are part of the human instinct to run away from our problems rather than addressing them. Our attraction to them based on the ‘escape’ that they offer is, in this view, almost irresponsible.

I believe that this is a preposterous argument, for the simple reason that paradoxically, escapism is an inalienable part of who we are as humans. The true reason for this is that even at its most privileged, life itself is so very limiting. We feel confined to this insignificant rock named Earth like Prometheus in his chains, and on a deeper level, we can even feel lonely in our own bodies, entrapped by the cast-iron borders of our souls—the ones we erected to keep barbarians out.

That is why on the night of Trump’s election, Obama said that the sun would rise in the morning whatever the outcome, and also why that statement could be of no comfort whatsoever, for it was a reminder that we are so alone here.

Our world is endlessly spinning, and when our fellow humans commit such a senseless act as elevating a mindlessly destructive and bigoted creature to the purple, we cannot filter à l’anglaise—take the French leave—and close the door quietly behind us. We cannot hand in a letter of resignation from humanity when we see children gunned down in the school playground. Perhaps we, like the astronauts in 2001: A Space Odyssey hope at each stage in the history of our evolution for some new level of transcendence, to find new and even more ‘final’ frontiers.

Or perhaps, like Job, we feel that the meanderings of our lives are a joke played by the Almighty—that we cannot even hope to understand why it is that we live in such a senseless, cruel world, that we wouldn’t even be capable of understanding. It seems that all we can do is find new and ever more creative ways to escape. If, say, the Bible and Mad Men have one thing in common, it is that they are both works of escapist art. Even works which deal in grit and realism have the escapist quality of being something else: a problem other than our very own, no matter how familiar it may be.

As I place my DVD of The Return of the King in the disc drive for the umpteenth time, I am enjoying a truly majestic, life-affirming work of art, but fundamentally I am escaping to a world that is not my own and problems that are none of ours.

Watching The Lord of the Rings on a rainy day may not do the world too much good, but it does wonders for the soul.

Can the Liberal Democrats capture Oxford East from Labour?

Alex Yeandle
-
0
Can the Liberal Democrats capture Oxford East from Labour?

With the announcement that Andrew Smith, Oxford East’s MP since 1987, is not standing for re-election to the next parliament, all eyes have turned to what could be a thrillingly close race between Labour and the Lib Dems for one of the most pro-remain seats in the country.

On the face of it, it would not appear that Labour should be too concerned. In 2015 Oxford East was won with a whopping majority of 30 per cent, just over 15,000 votes. The seat has been won by Labour for the past section successive general elections, spanning the eras of Thatcherism and Blairism right through to Milifandom. Young people, of which Oxford has many, are well known to be disproportionately left of centre as a demographic. It is arguably young people who Jeremy Corbyn is most well supported by, young people who voted so heavily for Britain to remain in the EU, and young people who wish to replace the current Conservative government. Upon closer analysis, however, Oxford East has a turbulent electoral history and is far from being a safe Labour seat.

The Oxford East constituency was created in the 1983 general election, as Margaret Thatcher defeated Michael Foot. The seat was won by Conservative Steven Norris. Norris lost the seat to current MP Andrew Smith in 1987. The interesting thing to notice here is the comparatively small size of the Labour majority in Oxford East. In 1987 the seat was won by just 1,288, before considerably increasing in the 1992 and 1997 elections.

Sitting on a huge majority in Blair’s two landslide election wins, the 2005 election gave a spectacularly diff erent result. A 12.5 per cent swing away from Labour and 11 per cent swing to the Lib Dems transformed a Labour majority of 10,334 to just 963. The context of this election is incredibly important, given the backdrop of the Iraq War. Once more in 2010, in light of Clegg-mania, the Lib Dems were only 4,500 votes behind Labour.

It appears, therefore, that only on three unique occasions has Oxford East been a landslide win for the Labour Party. The first two elections under Tony Blair, arguably Labour’s peak popularity for generations, and the 2015 election which delivered a historic meltdown in the Lib Dem vote. Looking at 2017, it is quite obvious that none of these conditions really hold that strongly. The days of Blairite third-way politics are long gone in the UK, and the Lib Dems, whilst not at pre-coalition levels, are gaining support rapidly amongst europhillic voters. The importance of Europe has never been such a splitting line in UK elections before, but the referendum results show clearly where Oxford stands on this divide.

If the opinion polling is vaguely correct, we can expect the Labour party vote share to fall and both Lib Dem and Conservative support rise, even if not under uniform swing. It is entirely plausible that the internationalist, liberal population of Oxford votes against Jeremy Corbyn’s Brexit plans, and crosses the box for Tim Farron’s clear eurocentric message.

The data show that Oxford East is far from a safe seat. With John McDonnell immediately coming to door-knock here last week it is clear that Labour are not taking anything for granted. However winning this seat still remains, in my view, a long shot for the Lib Dems. Not only did they come in fourth place last time out, behind the Conservatives and Greens, they face the classic problem of first past the post voting—that left of centre parties split each other’s votes. With Labour, Lib Dems and Greens all popular in Oxford, coupled with a massive 22 per cent vote share to recover from 2010, winning Oxford East would require big changes in support for parties. A strong Conservative showing and a large swing against Labour could nick the seat for Tim Farron, but this seems unlikely on uniform swing. The Lib Dems would be better off campaigning heavily in Oxford West and Abingdon, a Conservative-Liberal Democrat marginal, which is probably much easier pickings for them.

Le Pen won’t win, but the Front National will not disappear

Jorge Lopez Llorente
-
0
Le Pen won’t win, but the Front National will not disappear

Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen have entered the second round of the 2017 French elections: it is the expected clash, the final decision that must be made after months of uncertainty. The first round results were tight: Macron won this round but only gathered slightly more support than Le Pen—securing 2 per cent more than her at the final tally.

Everything now seems to indicate however that the second round will not be such a close call, instead delivering a clear victory for Macron. This seems logical and I trust the polls, which so far have been fairly accurate. Macron’s additional two per cent of first round voters plus the so-called ‘optimistic’ approach and reform suggestions of his En Marche! platform will not be enough by themselves to tilt the election to his side.

Ironically, Macron will rely on Marine Le Pen to win. Rather than gaining more support because of his own ideas, Macron will surely gain a majority, thanks to voters of other parties now eliminated in the first round who loathe the Front National and will be prepared make a sacrifice to stop Le Pen. Macron will simply absorb other voters in this way, and he knows Le Pen will do all the fighting and scaremongering, hoping he can take advantage with a calm face, as he has been doing. Fillon? Mélenchon? Hamon? They have all been swiped away. Most of their supporters in the first round will now turn to Macron.

This trend has been marked early by the eliminated candidates themselves. Fillon has encouraged his voters to vote for Macron explicitly as a vote against Le Pen. The socialist Benoît Hamon has also endorsed Macron, but reluctantly so, again for the sake of lashing against the Front National’s extremist threat. Le Pen will find it hard to match, limited to her own direct supporters and perhaps small bunches of angry radicals from both extremes of the spectrum who initially backed Fillon or Mélenchon. Whose election is it then?

Macron himself has acted cleverly, using the system’s rules to his advantage by positioning himself in the centre, claiming to neither the left nor the right, despite coming from the Socialist Party, and acting as an all-embracing negotiator. Some passion must drive people to vote for Le Pen: radical right-wing beliefs, fear, frustration with mainstream politicians. But you could vote for Macron, reluctantly opting for the lesser evil with resignation. Maybe in a one-round election Le Pen could have snatched a direct victory, but the French system has clearly got too many obstacles for her at the moment.

We tend to compare the Brexit vote and the 2017 Dutch elections to these French elections, tracing the rise of alt (read: far) right candidates. Nevertheless, we should start realising that fear works both ways. In the Dutch elections Mark Rutte won, not Le Pen’s extremist peer Geert Wilders, because Dutch voters feared Wilders more than Islam. So if extremist right-wingers are on the rise, so are those who despise them, probably even more so.

The fear that populist politicians like Le Pen manipulate so well in their favour can, in fact, turn against them. Still, it troubles me that fear, division, and a basis of hate against rivals rather than a defence of one’s own ideas have become this election’s modus operandi. These are all Le Pen’s own terms. We can’t ignore that this election has always been Le Pen’s election, whichever way it turns out, because her Front National has set the undeclared deeper rules of the game.

Yes, in the end Macron will surely win this time. The relief will not last though. He will have to face a divided France in which most of the French will be less than delighted with him from day one, to say the least. Le Pen will not just disappear—she will be a burden for the next few years. I am already worried about what might happen in the next election. The Front National will undoubtedly bark and snarl at President Macron at every opportunity, spitting out that he has been propped up by a rotten establishment and perhaps even turning to violence. Macron’s additional support may even backfire in the future. Le Pen’s latest maneuver of pretending to scale down her leading role shows how devious she can be, camouflaging herself in plain sight. It is too soon, but the ammunition is there, and Le Pen must be drooling over it already, ready to pounce.

The FN will not die anytime soon. Le Pen will lose this battle, but she is set to be the victor in the political war that will shake France in the next few years, because this is all a war of her own creation, on her own terms. Despite percentages or predictions, in conceding her the chance to set up this scenario, all Europeans and the French in particular have already lost, but Le Pen has just begun winning.

‘Despot’s Got Talent’: Semi-final round-up

Stephen Hawes
-
0
‘Despot’s Got Talent’: Semi-final round-up

It was a tough week for the Despots through to the semi-final of this year’s DGT, with judges fighting over which acts should make it to the final showdown at the beginning of May.

Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump’s early-season alliance has been marred by controversial act Bashar al-Assad, whose throwback chemical weapons attack on his own people to the tune of ‘Singing in the Rain’ was described as “unprecedented” by the Trump team, but only given a three out of ten rating by the longstanding Russian judge. “I hoped to see something better after all the work I did with him during the judges’ houses stage of the competition,” Putin said, prompting boos from a notably hostile UN crowd. “He may be in trouble this week. Hopefully the television audience will vote him through, but we’ll be expecting something much better in the final. Perhaps a burlesque-dancer dog eating an Isreali flag whilst juggling fireworks?”

Meanwhile, Kim Jong-un has stepped forward as a potential winner with an expanded performance of his first audition act, missile testing that threatens South Korea and Japan with a rendition that almost brought newest judge Donald Trump to tears. “I love Jong-un’s work. The man has big, big, talent. A really bad dude.” Xi Jinping, normally the most reticent of the three judges, has also come out in favour of the North Korean tenor. “If there’s one thing we’re looking for on this show, it’s the threat of nuclear war. Today, you delivered. After years of encouragement, I am so proud of what you have done. Whatever happens in the competition, your future is sure to be glowing.”

The show’s creator, Simon Cowell, was asked in an interview with The Guardian about whether he thought that the show was encouraging false aspirations amongst its teenage viewers and threatening to throw the world into apocalyptic darkness.

“Frankly,” he said, “I think that anyone who doesn’t realise that it’s all entertainment needs a reality check. And speaking of cheques, as long as the show makes enough for me to be frozen in a vat of champagne and hookers until the whole thing blows over, why would I really care?”

Omar al-Bashir, the Sudanese break-dancer, has revealed that he believes that age has affected his ability to perform. His disappointing semi-final act was not well received by the judges and it is unlikely that he will progress to the next stage of the competition. Trump, who is appearing as a judge for the first time, has been an instant hit with viewers.

“His experience in other talent shows has been crucial,” said Elizabeth Smugridge, a TV critic for The Daily Telegraph, “As soon as the producers persuaded him to stop saying ‘You’re fired’ to the dictators, he was good to go. The man has all the charisma of a TV critic for The Daily Telegraph. A triumph!” His onscreen banter with established judge Vladimir Putin has become the stuff of legend.

Putin, a winner from the twelfth season of the show, famously used Crimean democracy to beat a live bear to death on stage as his final performance. Meanwhile, British prime minister Theresa May has announced that she is working on an appearing in next year’s series. “All the application form says I need to do is develop an isolationist, apathetic, cynical one-party state that doesn’t care about the lives of its ordinary citizens. Frankly, I would have expected getting on to the show to be a bit more difficult.”

1...881882883...2,508Page 882 of 2,508

Support Student Journalism

Cherwell is Oxford’s oldest independent newspaper, established in 1920. We are entirely student-run. By supporting us, you will contribute to keeping our paper in print and online. Every donation makes a difference.

Donate

Explore

Follow us

More

Oxford Student Publications Limited © 2025 - All Rights Reserved | Privacy Policy

Website by James Ashley