In other words, as I’ve noted before, it’s all about Islam.
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From Facebook: Derrida’s contribution to postmodern philosophy.
Not just Derrida: it was the house style of French post-structuralism – Lacan, Althusser, the whole crowd. Which was then copied to America and became the house style for a whole generation of postmodern academics – most notably, perhaps, Judith Butler.
John Searle died a couple of weeks ago, aged 93.
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Like those Labour women (previous post) this man doesn’t seem to understand what the law says now about single-sex spaces. But as he’s asking for feedback, the chance to provide it should not be missed. Here..
As there are three ponds – men, women, mixed – there’s absolutely no reason to be “inclusive” and allow trans women into the women’s pond.
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They can’t be trusted to protect women. They still see trans as that poor minority in need of protection – the latest in the civil rights battle after race, women, and gays. If they still don’t get it now, after the Supreme Court ruling and all, they probably never will. They’re not, like so many on the left, people who like to change their minds. Once they’ve decided on something, despite what new evidence emerges, they stick to it. They think it means being true to their principles, when it usually signals stupidity.
First Lucy Powell:
The new trans rules are “not right” and should be reviewed by MPs, one of Labour’s deputy leadership candidates has said.
Lucy Powell appeared to criticise the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) guidance on transgender issues, which has advised that workplaces provide protected single-sex spaces.
The Manchester MP is odds-on favourite to replace Angela Rayner as Labour’s deputy leader next month, and has pledged to offer a critical voice on the Government from outside the Cabinet.
But she doesn’t understand the law.
And now Lisa Nandy:
Trans women should be able to compete in some women’s sports despite the Supreme Court ruling on the definition of gender, Lisa Nandy has suggested.
The Culture Secretary said there were some sports in which it was “perfectly possible to include everybody” and still keep competition both safe and fair.
Women’s sports have been warned that they will face legal action if they fail to ban trans players after the Supreme Court ruled in April that a woman was defined as a “biological female”….
But Ms Nandy said the issue of trans athletes competing alongside biological women was still not clear cut, despite the April ruling.
Oh yes it is. Trans women are men, and men have no business in women’s sport. It’s as clear cut as it’s possible to get in this complicated world. Nice-but-dim Nandy, alas, can’t see it.
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Photographer Bryan Sansivero, from his book ‘America the Abandoned’, capturing a few of the estimated 15 million abandoned houses around the country:
[Photos © Bryan Sansivaro]
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Einat Wilf at Quillette talks about “Schrödinger’s Palestine”. The one state – the state people like to kid themselves that the Palestinians want – is a responsible partner to Israel which accepts that the talk of permanent refugees into the fifth generation is nonsense, and accepts responsibility for the violence against the Jews culminating in the 7th October massacre. That cat’s dead. The other state – the one Palestinians actually want – is the one where Israel can continue to be harassed and attacked until it no longer exits. That cat’s alive.
The metaphor seems a bit laboured to me, but yes, we know what she means.
This is to the point though.
I always bring the quote by Ernest Bevin…the British Labour foreign minister after World War II. He explained why Britain failed to fulfill the mandate unanimously given by the League of Nations to help the Jewish people achieve sovereignty on one sliver of the Ottoman Empire. They didn’t betray the Arabs—the Arabs got plenty of states on the lands of the Ottoman Empire—but the Jews, who are a people of the Empire, should have received their fair share proportionally. Israel would have been multiple times the size of what was proposed.
To explain the British failure—Britain: only the Jews didn’t get a state, and this is Britain’s failure to fulfil the terms it received from the League of Nations—he said: “The conflict in the land between Jews and Arabs is irreconcilable.” He called it irreconcilable in February 1947—before any excuses: no occupation, no settlements, no Netanyahu, no displacement.
He continued: “For the Jews in the land, their top priority is to establish a sovereign Jewish state.” Self-determination for the people of Israel in the land of Israel. “For the Arabs, their top priority”—the point of principle—“is to resist to the last the establishment of Jewish sovereignty in any part of the land.”
He’s saying this is a conflict between the Jews wanting a state and the Arabs wanting the Jews not to have a state. Back to the present: this has always been the Palestinian vision long before Hamas. Hamas is merely the most recent executor. If there’s no Hamas tomorrow, this remains the Palestinian vision—what I call Palestinianism. They will always produce organisations to realise it. Nothing in the recognition or in UN declarations put a stop to Palestinianism. No one said, “Enough. You can live next to a Jewish state, but not on its ruins.” They continued to fuel the vision that the Jewish state can one day be gone.
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South Korea presidents seem to alternate between hard and soft in their attitude towards the North. Currently, with Lee Jae-myung, we’re very much on the soft side. Here’s Kang Dong Wan at the Daily NK on the latest idiocy:
After 52 years of broadcasting hope into the darkness of North Korea, the silence is deafening. South Korea’s National Intelligence Service (NIS) has pulled the plug on these vital transmissions—a decision that left me stunned and dismayed. What makes this even more shocking is the timing: NIS Director Lee Jong-seok made this choice less than a month into his tenure. This isn’t just a policy shift; it’s an abandonment of the state’s most fundamental duty and a clear violation of law.
North Koreans live in almost complete isolation, cut off from the outside world. These broadcasts represent their only window to see beyond their borders. No previous administration has ever had the NIS suspend radio broadcasts to North Korea, making this truly unprecedented. The flow of information into North Korea remains our most effective and strategic weapon for bringing about change within North Korean society. Civilian organizations have long wrestled with this same challenge: how to effectively deliver information to North Koreans.
The Lee Jae-myung administration declared upon taking office that peace means winning without fighting. Given North Korea’s advanced nuclear capabilities, the real path to victory without fighting lies in psychological and information warfare. North Korean authorities teach through political indoctrination that “South Korea is a rotten, diseased capitalist society full of homeless beggars.” But when North Koreans secretly encounter Korean movies or dramas, they discover a different reality. They express shock at South Korea’s economic prosperity and, above all, its guarantee of freedom and human rights. External information opens their eyes to another world entirely. Such information ultimately becomes a Trojan horse that can crack the foundations of dictatorship.
Yet since taking office, the Lee Jae-myung administration has banned leaflets to North Korea, stopped loudspeaker broadcasts, and now suspended NIS broadcasts. When you consider who benefits most from these measures, the answer becomes clear….
North Korean young people now think differently from their parents. They aren’t the “human bullets and bombs” generation willing to sacrifice their lives for Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il. Instead, they question: “Why should I sacrifice my life for Kim Jong Un?” This ideological shift stems directly from exposure to external information.
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Me yesterday on cousin marriage, after the latest NHS provocation. Now here’s Joan Smith at UnHerd:
Children whose parents are first cousins are at higher risk of birth defects and genetic conditions such as sickle cell disease and cystic fibrosis. According to guidance published last week, however, cousin marriage is linked to “stronger extended family support systems and economic advantages”. NHS England’s Genomics Education Programme appears unaware that so-called “extended family support systems” can be deeply damaging for women and children in the British Pakistani community, where the practice is more common than among other demographics. These networks often enforce honour codes, making it almost impossible to seek help from outsiders.
That’s reflected in official figures, which suggest that Asian women experience lower levels of domestic abuse than other sections of the population. It’s contradicted both by anecdotal evidence and a charity that says that a “hidden crisis” among south Asian women was exposed during the Covid pandemic. The Freedom Charity says it saw a surge in cases of forced marriage and honour crimes, yet “stigma, societal pressure, and fear of dishonour often prevent victims from seeking help”.
Cousin marriage exacerbates the situation. If your father-in-law is also your mother’s brother, the pressure to keep quiet and avoid bringing shame on the family is stronger. It’s a big factor in the isolation of women and girls, raising questions about whether they can refuse when their families insist on cousin marriage.
Forced marriage is a term we hear a lot of in relation to these communities. With good reason.
One of its purposes is to keep wealth within the family. The independent MP Iqbal Mohamed acknowledged as much when he said in the House of Commons that cousin marriage “helps put families on a more secure financial foothold”. These are presumably the “economic advantages” referred to in the new NHS guidance, exposing the naïveté of taking such statements at face value.
Cousin marriage is practised in patriarchal cultures where men hold the power. It’s a way of maintaining the status quo and that may mean persuading teenage girls to marry instead of finishing their education, for example. It perpetuates existing inequalities, and it’s mothers who shoulder most of the responsibility of caring for disabled children.
There was a time when institutions like the NHS would have prioritised health over everything else. Now, though, it seems to be run on a principle of not causing offence to anyone, even if that means abandoning evidence. Anyone except women, that is, given that they are the big losers in this shift to ideology-based medicine.
[Indenting is a problem here for the moment – don’t ask – so I’ve italicised the paragraphs from the article, with my comments not italicised.]
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Full text:
On this day in 1941, 33,771 Jews were murdered over two days in Nazi occupied Ukraine. The Babyn Yar massacre was the largest killing of Jews outside of concentration camps and destroyed most of Kyiv’s Jewish population.
Using newly uncovered data, researchers pieced together the identities of 1,761 previously unknown victims.
The last time these victims’ names were spoken was likely moments before their deaths. Today, their names were read aloud and honored at a memorial marking the massacre’s anniversary.
Aka Babi Yar.
Mick Hartley 