Mick Hartley

Meanwhile, in Russia:

A Russian scientist who is close to President Putin has told a forum of schoolteachers in Moscow that the West is planning to exterminate the majority of the Earth’s population, leaving a tiny elite whose needs will be serviced by robots.

The comments by Mikhail Kovalchuk, the head of Russia’s Kurchatov nuclear research institute, highlight the type of extreme conspiracy theories that critics say influence Kremlin policy.

Kovalchuk, 77, alleged that western countries were plotting to unleash a deadly virus to reduce the number of people on Earth. He also claimed the West was using LGBT and child-free ideologies to cut populations because robots would soon be able to work better and more effectively.

“The West … understands that a huge number of people are becoming unnecessary. They have begun to prepare for a population reduction,” he told the Forum of Class Teachers, a Kremlin-backed organisation. “They introduced the LGBT agenda and for those who didn’t go along with it, they offered a second option — the child-free family. It’s working brilliantly. In a generation or two, there’ll be no continuation of their bloodlines. Only a small elite, the ones they actually need, will remain.”

“As for the rest — the people they don’t even see as human — they’ll be eliminated with biological weapons. A virus or something like that with a 90 per cent mortality rate will come along and mow them down,” he said.

These people are insane. They live in a Putin-bubble, where only the crazy survive.

Putin and his allies have shown an alarming tendency over the years to believe in baseless conspiracy theories. The Russian leader has previously referenced a claim that Madeleine Albright, the former US secretary of state, thought it was “unfair” that Russia owned all of Siberia. There is no record of Albright ever making the comment.

The source of the allegation was eventually traced by The Moscow Times to a “mind-reading experiment” that was carried out by the Kremlin’s Federal Guard Service in 1999. Boris Ratnikov, a retired major general, told journalists that Russian psychics had stared at an image of Albright to “glean these things.”

Nazi Germany thrived on absurd theories, especially inside the Hitler bunker – the hollow earth theory, for one, on top of all the racial pseudo-science. Comparisons of Putin’s Russia with the Third Reich become more and more apposite with the descent into paranoid absurdity …

The Greens continue their downward spiral towards irrelevance. The Times:

Women’s rights campaigners have claimed they are victims of discrimination after being banned from the Green Party conference.

The Green Women’s Declaration (GWD), a group advocating for sex-based rights for women, were told two days before the party’s conference that their stall booking was cancelled and they would not be allowed to recruit members.

The group said the move “undermines the rights of women to advocate for single-sex spaces, services, and sports — rights that are protected under UK law”.

It said: “The accusations made against our members, including claims of hostility and confrontation, are wholly unfounded.”

The ban is the latest argument between those in the party who believe in sex-based rights and those who have made transgender rights a priority.

Which is odd for a party supposedly focused on saving the planet, but once gender ideology gets you there’s no turning back – especially in a fringe party that tends to attract, well….weirdos.

Like their new leader.. who in his hypnotherapy days used the power of his mind to help women increase the size of their breasts. As if that wasn’t bad enough, he was endorsed by Owen Jones as Green leader, and, of course, vowed that under his leader ship the party would focus on “calling out the genocide in Gaza”.

Zack Polanski, the new Green Party leader, has repeatedly spoken about his support for transgender people. He said this week that the party’s policy would remain that transgender people should be able to self-identify as whatever gender they wish.…

Polanski said earlier this week that his party was a “broad church” but “even churches have walls”.

He told PinkNews: “So, if you agree on most things, that’s absolutely part of being in the Green Party. But there is no space in the Green Party for racism, homophobia, misogyny, and transphobia and ultimately, if those are the things that you want to espouse then that is not a space [for you].

“Of course people can disagree, but this is about disagreeing respectfully. If someone wants to misgender someone, I don’t think that’s a respectful disagreement.”

Oh ffs…

Worth revisiting this Far Side cartoon, after the death of Jane Goodall.

The Jane Goodall foundation was horrified, saying it was “incredibly offensive” and in poor taste, and threatened legal action.

When Goodall herself saw the cartoon she loved it, licensed it from Gary Larson for her Institute to sell for fundraising, and wrote the foreword to The Far Side Gallery 5.

BREAKING: Four people have been injured in a car and stabbing attack at a synagogue in Manchester, UK.

On the morning of Yom Kippur, the holiest day for Jews, they are coming to our synagogues to murder us. pic.twitter.com/JP8qMdESaQ

— Hen Mazzig (@HenMazzig) October 2, 2025

Globalising the intifada. This is what it means.

Can we start taking antisemitism in the UK seriously? At last?

Update: two dead, two injured. Suspect, who was shot dead, appears to have been carrying explosives – so this could have been much worse.

Police have declared it a “terrorist incident” – code for, a Muslim did it.

Added: the killer was a British citizen of Syrian descent. His name was Jihad Al-Shamie. Police said they are still working to understand the motivation behind the attack. Perhaps there’s a clue in the name.

Last we heard from Barbie Kardashian – born Gabriel Alejandro Gentile – he was serving time in Limerick Women’s Prison after threatening to torture, rape and kill his mother. Now he’s been released:

From Reduxx:

Kardashian, who has been described as a risk to public safety, served two years and six months of a five and a half year sentence, of which the final twelve months were suspended. He has reportedly been released with “strict” conditions, and will be provided housing in Dublin.

After being released, Kardashian, accompanied by a small white dog and wearing a pink shirt and breast forms, spoke to Gript columnist Paddy O’Gorman and expressed a desire to track down his mother and father to murder them. Speaking casually, he expressed no remorse and suggested that if he cannot find his parents, he will go on to murder someone else instead.

“I enjoy the impact that my actions have caused. I enjoy hurting people. I would describe myself as someone who enjoys making people suffer,” Kardashian told media. He also provided his opinions on gender ideology, noting that he would use women’s public bathrooms while free and that “I have a need for people to view me as a woman, and not as a man.”

What could possibly go wrong?

The acquiescence of so many academics on the subject of women-only spaces, and of keeping men out of women’s sports, has been something of an embarrassment – and especially in the field of philosophy. Of course a very vocal minority of trans activists and gender champions populate the field, but the majority of philosophers – being, one assumes, intelligent people – must be quite aware of the absurdities and plain unfairness that allows men who claim to be women to compete against real women. But till recently this majority has kept silent, intimidated by the consequences of coming out as gender-critical and sex-realist.

That, according to Daniel Kodsi at Tablet, may be changing. In support of forthcoming legal battles in the US Supreme Court on the subject of keeping women’s sport for women, he’s written a brief which argues, in a philosophical kind of way, that men and women are natural categories, while women-plus-men-who-claim-they’re-women is an unnatural or gerrymandered category.

And, as it turns out, many philosophers are now prepared to put their names to this brief.

In the first instance, I wrote the brief in an attempt to do a bit of good with philosophy, by using philosophical ideas like those just sketched to strengthen the case for protecting women’s sports. But I had a second motivation as well: namely, to do some good for philosophy, by illustrating that philosophical ideas can be brought to bear in a rigorous way on current public concerns. In the past decade’s culture war, academia has not exactly covered itself in glory. In particular, tenured university professors—grown men and women, with some of the best job security in the world—have not. With a few honorable exceptions, they have acquiesced nearly to a person in fashionable taboos and dogmas, not least the taboo against recognizing the right of girls and women to their own spaces, services, and provisions. My long-standing impression has been that my colleagues in philosophy are more accurate on this question than their public track record may suggest. Their failure to speak out publicly is more for want of nerve and opportunity than sense.

The roster of names that the brief ended up attracting—on, it should be mentioned, quite short notice—provides some evidence for that conjecture. Indeed, though—like all but the most famous mathematicians and natural scientists—few of the signatories will be known to nonphilosophers, some of the philosophers who joined the brief are extremely well-known within the profession.…

In fact, to my knowledge, the brief represents the first time that so many senior academics in any discipline have put their name to an argument on what may be termed the sex-realist side of recent culture wars, according to which it is appropriate for at least some social practices to be organized around the biological line of sex. That is, although many academics have joined open letters supporting the right of their colleagues to express sex-realist views, very few have committed to the truth of such views, even as regards issues like sports, where the sex-based approach under challenge in the court cases enjoys supermajority support among the broader public. Against that background, the fact that leading figures in one profession have now joined an amicus brief advocating for a key sex-based right is a small but significant step in the right direction.

It would, of course, be naive to expect the ideological bias rife in many parts of academic life to be brought under control anytime soon. Such bias has rightly led to a rising tide of distrust in academia. Still, locked away in the ivory tower remain many intelligent and intellectually curious men and women, working hard on important and interesting questions. They must be incentivized to fight back against what many no doubt privately recognize to be a stifling and pernicious culture of complacence.

Through north east London, from Tottenham below the North Circular down to Hackney’s Springfield Park, running along side the reservoirs.

No, it’s not quite Little Venice.

The state of academic publishing: part 87 in a continuing series. Susan Pickard at UnHerd on the trans co-option of Simone de Beauvoir, and the rejection of her book:

In 2022, I signed a contract with an academic press for a book on Simone de Beauvoir, titled Beauvoirian Feminism. Two years later, I finished the book, which foregrounded the feminist thinker’s claim that biology is key to women’s experience. I’m a full professor of sociology at the University of Liverpool, and publication of finished academic works at my level is usually a matter of course. 

On this topic, however, things did not go smoothly. After the book was completed, due to the controversial nature of the material, the press sent it out to 26 readers for peer review. Most accepted the invitation — then backed out once they saw the manuscript. Only one delivered a report, criticizing my work for being “unfair” to gender theorist Judith Butler and “gratuitously unkind to trans people.” My insistence on embodiment — Beauvoir’s insistence — was treated as an embarrassing throwback. In 2025, the contract was terminated. 

I then sent the manuscript to several other presses, who also declined to take it forward. One respected university imprint rejected the book as “too controversial.” Another told me it did not publish books on “individual thinkers” — then six months later issued a book casting Beauvoir as a pro-trans icon. A third prestigious press told me my book “did not fit its list” — and went on to publish a title called Sex Is a Spectrum, inspired by Beauvoir.

The attempt to repurpose Beauvoir to shore up gender-identity orthodoxy represents an all-out attack on her thinking, and erases the actual contents of The Second Sex, a foundational work of feminist theory, first published in 1949. 

Beauvoir is controversial today because she was the ultimate sex realist; she refused to separate body from identity, and believed that it was only through understanding women’s embodied reality that we could combat patriarchal cultural norms. Her essential position can be summed up simply: sex is the material ground of women’s lives, gender the cultural elaboration of that ground, and liberation comes not from denying the body, but by transforming the meaning imposed upon it.

But that’s not what Judith Butler says, so it must be wrong.

The problem centres round Beauvoir’s most quoted phrase, “One is not born, but becomes, a woman”. It’s not hard to see why that might be taken as trans avant la lettre. According to Pickard, though, this  this doesn’t mean that gender floats free of sex:

For Beauvoir, sex is the foundation; gender its cultural elaboration. A female body is defined by the norms of femininity of its time and place. These norms can change — and Beauvoir’s work aimed to push them toward liberation. Meanwhile, both biology and culture shape the body’s meaning, power, and visibility, qualities that change over a woman’s lifetime as she shifts through the various forms of girl or mother, or menopausal or old woman.

Today, however, Beauvoir is mostly taught through the lens of foundational gender theorist Butler, who claimed to extend her work. But as I argue in my book, Butler actually ignored Bouvoir’s book, collapsing the notion of “becoming a woman” into performance, where repeated gestures conjure the illusion of sex. In Butler’s version, gender is the creator of sex. She makes no mention of puberty, childbirth, or aging.

Butler’s understanding of what a woman is has shaped two generations, and has had noxious consequences for women. If “sex” is only an idea, then puberty itself can be rejected; the category “girl” is something to exit, hormonally or surgically. This is framed as liberation, but in practice, it erases female experience: it turns puberty into a pathology, encourages girls to disidentify from their own bodies, and makes womanhood optional or disposable. What drops out of view is feminism’s starting point — that sex is the basis of women’s oppression. And crucially, the rejection of women’s bodies and of femininity today does not generate demands to transform those constraining norms, but instead points girls toward escape by “becoming boys” — as if freedom lay only on the other side of sex.

Beauvoir’s difference from Butler matters because without sex, feminism loses its compass. If we cannot name sex, how do we name sex-based oppression? 

What’s so scandalous, though, is that Pickard’s views aren’t even allowed. Clearly there’s strong disagreement about what Beauvoir was really saying, and in a sane world these differing takes should be discussed out in the open, but in the world of institutional gender-capture there can be no debate. Anyone who opposes the official line is not wrong, but evil. They can’t be debated; only silenced. It’s ideological capture – Stalinist-style ideological capture. And the bold “progressives” can’t even see it.

Oliver Brown in the Telegraph on the lamentable Lisa Nandy and her latest trans plea:

Lisa Nandy should surely have taken the hint when, having worn a “protect the dolls” T-shirt on a transgender rights march in August, she found herself roundly eviscerated.

Dolls, a slang term from the 1980s for men trying to pass themselves off as women, had long been viewed as misogynistic, a description that succeeded only in objectifying femininity. Except now the Culture Secretary has gone a step further, making the fatuous suggestion at this week’s Labour Party conference that biological men should still be allowed to compete in certain women’s sports.

“There are three things that we’re trying to achieve,” she said on Wednesday. “The first is inclusion, the second is fairness, and the third is safety. And there are some sports where it’s perfectly possible to include everybody and still meet those principles around fairness and safety.”

The instinctive reaction to these remarks is to despair that somebody so oblivious to the reality of sex, and to why immutable male advantage means that the integrity of the women’s category in sport must always be protected, could have been elevated to an office of state. It is as if this year’s Supreme Court verdict never happened.…

Nandy similarly seems beholden to an ideology that people compete in sport with their feelings rather than their bodies. Why else would she say that “we need to make sure that we put as much energy and ambition into competitions that the trans community can participate in fully as we do into all the others”? The message is that a minority of men craving affirmation as women matter to her more than half the population. That is a betrayal of her own sex, a point made to her by eminent former sportswomen in no uncertain terms.

“Inexcusable,” said Sharron Davies of Nandy’s latest statement. “Women’s sport is not a consolation prize for non-conforming males. Women’s sport belongs solely to females.” Tracy Edwards, the round-the-world yachtswoman, said: “It is beyond depressing that we finally have so many women in government and most of them don’t know what a woman is.”

Or, as shadow equalities minister Claire Coutinho put it:

“Time and again, Labour has sided with radical trans activists instead of the women fighting to protect their changing rooms and toilets from biological men. Labour cannot be trusted to protect the privacy, dignity, and safety of women and girls.”

Hampstead yesterday;

View, The Hill.

Under the chestnut tree.

Kenwood bench.