Mick Hartley

Politics and Culture

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  • At the Labour Conference

  • Exercising her right to speak out

    I won’t post the whole thing as it’s as it’s a long one, but here’s JK Rowling on Emma Watson. 

    Conclusion:

    Adults can’t expect to cosy up to an activist movement that regularly calls for a friend’s assassination, then assert their right to the former friend’s love, as though the friend was in fact their mother. Emma is rightly free to disagree with me and indeed to discuss her feelings about me in public – but I have the same right, and I’ve finally decided to exercise it.

  • Blind obedience to trans dogma

    Jo Bartosch at Spiked on the state of the Lib Dems:

    Like dog owners who come to resemble their pets, the Liberal Democrats are starting to look uncannily like their leader: a man whose most notable contribution to public life has been pratfalls, from tumbling off paddleboards to shrieking on rollercoasters. Its Bournemouth conference, which began last week, opened with the gagging of a debate on the definition of ‘woman’. It closed with the Patsy Calton Award – created in memory of a female MP who died of breast cancer to honour exceptional women – being handed to a man.

    The winner, Manchester councillor Chris Northwood, first declared himself ‘trans’ in 2021, apparently inspired by actor Ellen / Elliot Page’s transition. Incredibly, a video played at the conference listed one of his achievements as standing up for ‘women’s safety’. After receiving the prize, Northwood posted on X: ‘I see people are upset that I won an award for women because I’m the wrong type of woman.’ Of course, the reason people are angry is not that he is the ‘wrong type of woman’ – it’s that he is not a woman at all.

    The Lib Dems have only doubled down since. The Lib Dems’ official social-media account said awarding the prize to Northwood proved how much they ‘honour and value all of our women members’. Not to be out-gushed, Liberal Democrat Women declared that ‘she is an inspiration to many within the party with her dedication to the party and her constituents’ (sic).

    There is opposition within the party – the gender-critical Liberal Voice for Women (LV4W) – but while it has widespread support among the rank and file, the leaders are having none of it.

    LV4W chair, Zoe Hollowood, urged delegates to back a straightforward motion: that ‘woman’ in quota rules means an adult human female. ‘We must stop telling people it’s unsafe to hear views they disagree with – that excuse opens the door to censorship, violence and tyranny’, she said. Her appeal, according to reports, was met with groans in the audience.

    Among the audience members was Lucas North, the ‘they/them’ treasurer of LGBT+ Liberal Democrats. He proceeded to dismiss the LV4W motion as a ‘sham’ and demanded members ‘reject the idea that trans identities are up for debate’. Unsurprisingly, Lib Dem MPs slunk out of the room before the vote, apparently because they had another meeting to attend. Hollowood’s final plea to ‘vote against this suppression’ was met with jeers when she dared to mention the arrest of comedy writer Graham Linehan.

    We shouldn’t be surprised by the fevered, dogmatic opposition faced by Hollowood and LV4W. After all, blind obedience to trans dogma is one of the Lib Dems’ few consistent policies…

    The Patsy Calton Award should have been a moment to celebrate women’s contribution to politics, and to honour activists like Hollowood. Instead, it became a monument to the party’s contempt for its own female members. When it comes to sex and gender, the party’s pratfalls aren’t clumsy accidents – they’re deliberate. The joke, however, is clearly on women.

  • The “benefits” of first-cousin marriage

    Unbelievable. From the Telegraph:

    The NHS has been urged to apologise for publishing guidance extolling the benefits of first-cousin marriage despite the increased risk of birth defects.

    Guidance published last week by the NHS England’s Genomics Education Programme says first-cousin marriage is linked to “stronger extended family support systems and economic advantages”.

    But the practice has also been linked to oppression of women and also has a proven increased risk of genetic disease in offspring of first-cousin relationships.

    First cousin marriages are, of course, prevalent as a long-standing cultural tradition in Britain’s Pakistani communities. A 2005 report, commissioned by MP Ann Cryer, revealed that the Pakistani community accounted for 30 per cent of all births with recessive disorders, despite representing 3.4 per cent of the birth rate nationwide. From that same period Dr Peter Corry, Consultant Paediatrician at Bradford Royal Infirmary, said his hospital saw so many recessive genetic illnesses that it had became a centre of excellence for the treatment of some of them. They’d identified about 140 different autosomal recessive disorders among local children: he estimated that a typical district would see 20 to 30.

    Dr Patrick Nash, an expert on religious law and director of the Pharos Foundation social science research group in Oxford, called the guidance “truly dismaying”.

    “Cousin marriage is incest, plain and simple, and needs to be banned with the utmost urgency – there is no ‘balance’ to be struck between this cultural lifestyle choice and the severe public health implications it incurs.

    “This official article is deeply misleading and should be retracted with an apology so that the public is not misled by omission and half-truths.”

    Last year Sweden, Denmark and Norway announced their intention to ban cousin marriages. And it’s not the genetic aspect they were mainly concerned about – it’s the link to cultural separation and the oppression of women. As Matthew Syed argued back in 2023, it’s a tribal institution, reinforcing separatism and cultural isolation – a problem familiar to us from northern towns where Muslim communities can tend to live in isolation from mainstream British society.

    Cousin marriage, you see, is perhaps the ultimate mechanism of cultural separation. This is a point well understood by anthropologists who have studied kinship institutions around the world, from tribes to clans and lineages to biraderi. When a Tutsi marries a Tutsi, they ensure that they remain sequestered from outsiders (such as Hutus) and that their children will sustain the family tradition. The same is true in Afghanistan, which has one of the highest rates of consanguineous marriage in the world and clans that have persisted for thousands of years.

    The problem, though, is that while kin marriage binds people more closely within ethnic groups, it simultaneously strengthens divides between groups — a truth noted by the British anthropologist Sir Jack Goody. This, in turn, permits the emergence of parallel values, animosities and rivalries. Joseph Henrich of Harvard has found that the higher the rate of cousin marriage in a nation, the higher the level of corruption, nepotism and poverty — and the lower the level of trust. This, of course, is the daily reality of sectarian societies from the Middle East to sub-Saharan Africa.

    But we have to be honest enough to admit that we are seeing pockets of the same problem here in the UK and, indeed, across Europe. Again, it’s simplistic to say that this is a Pakistani problem or an Islamic one. All religions have fundamentalist and illiberal interpretations, but it is striking that they seem to mutate and spread faster in insular communities held together by “inward” marriage, perhaps because these have a tendency to become ever more detached from the moral trajectory of wider civilisation. Just look at walled-off Christian sects and millenarian cults.

    And the role this all plays in keeping women hidden and sequestered in their traditional subservient roles should surely be clear enough. 

    This is also worth a read:

    For British Pakistanis, moving away from their hometown and leaving behind family is not easy. Many start a fresh life in the UK but eventually become fearful that they will lose their cultural values and, as a way to stay connected, they encourage or even force their children to marry back home within the family. This is an attempt to keep family ties strong and maintain family relationships.

    Others will frown upon the British culture i.e. clubbing, dating, pre-marital sexual relationships and as a way to prevent their children from engaging, consanguineous marriages will take place.

  • Flames of the revolution

    Winning hearts and minds. From the Daily NK:

    North Korea has ordered mandatory weekly indoctrination sessions for young people nationwide, deploying revolutionary slogans and historical lessons to counter growing youth dissatisfaction with economic hardships and military deployments to Russia.

    The Socialist Patriotic Youth League’s Central Committee ordered chapters nationwide in mid-September to study North Korean youth movement history at least once weekly. Youth league organizations across the country now hold ten-minute mandatory sessions before their regular weekly criticism meetings, according to a source in North Pyongan province recently.

    The youth league has declared that the country’s youth movement is entering a golden age and that all young people must focus on understanding Kim Jong Un’s greatness. The campaign centers on a slogan that became a key mobilization tool during the 10th Youth League Conference in April 2021, calling on youth to energetically carry out party decisions and volunteer for the most demanding aspects of building the socialist economy.

    Boy that’s a great slogan. That’ll win them over.

    Study session leaders are instructing youth to carry forward the revolutionary traditions of Kim Il Sung’s anti-Japanese armed resistance, the youth shock troops of the Chollima movement, and youth heroes during the Arduous March period.

    Sources suggest the campaign responds to growing youth dissatisfaction over economic hardships and troop deployments to Russia. The state is pressuring young people to become the “flames of the revolution” through increased organizational and ideological control, with these history sessions designed to stamp out any signs of disloyalty before they can develop.

  • What starts as “being kind” ends up right here

    I posted on this Australian case last week – here at Reduxx – where a trans-identified man convicted of sexually assaulting his own 5-year-old daughter is currently being held in a women’s prison. Sall Grover lays it out:

    More:

    A male sex offender of this magnitude being in a women’s prison because he claims to be a woman is the culmination of everything gender ideology is about. It’s one of the many worst case scenarios. What starts as “being kind” ends up right here.

    But it’s not just that he is in a woman’s prison, as bad as that is. It’s that his claim of being a woman was used as a defense to get him a lighter sentence – and it worked. What do legislators think that says to all the worst men in society? The easiest loophole imaginable has been created for them and, evidently, they’re using it. They will continue to use it until someone in power puts a stop to it.

    Currently, any man – ANY MAN – can claim to be a woman, go into a female only space full of women & girls, and then, in the event he does something horrific, claim to be a woman to get a lesser sentence & be put into a woman’s prison. Of course, no good man would even think to do this. Literally, only the bad men would. And that’s a massive part of the problem…

  • Schools as “therapeutic institutions”

    This. From the Sunday Times.

    Schools have become “therapeutic institutions” for children, and should return to their pre-pandemic focus on academic and extracurricular activities, according to the former head of Ofsted.

    Baroness Spielman said schools are encouraging children as young as three to identify negative emotions, which are a normal part of childhood, when many would be better off simply being “fully engaged” in school life.

    Spielman, who ran the schools watchdog from 2017 to 2023, said: “If schools have reconceived themselves as therapeutic institutions and are looking for things to be wrong with the child, they’ll probably find some. And we’ll stay in this sort of negative spiral of unintentionally encouraging children to find things to be unhappy about.

    “Wellbeing is an outcome of getting various pieces of a child’s life right, including their learning. It’s not an activity. Adolescence is a period of massive psychological adjustment with lumps and bumps, but you have to experience the lumps and bumps to be a resilient adult.”

    Exactly. Tell that to the puberty blocker fools – the ultimate example of trying to “cure” children from imagined social-contagion maladies instead of allowing them to grow and develop naturally.

    She added: “The danger is you get into a downward spiral where the more of that kind of [mental health] support you give to a child, the more you reinforce the idea that they can’t cope without it.”

  • All necessary means

    The ironies of protesting Israel:

    The warship sent by Spain to protect the “Global Sumud Flotilla” heading to Gaza is kitted out with Israeli weapons.

    The Furor is said to be "equipped with all necessary means", has a 76mm Oto Melara cannon and two MK-38 25mm automatic machine guns, all developed by Israel's Rafael defence group.

  • Violating human dignity

    Even in sensible Switzerland. From Reduxx:

    A man in Switzerland is facing 10 days in prison after refusing to pay a fine for an “offensive” social media post. Emanuel Brünisholz, a wind instrument repairman from Burgdorf, was convicted under anti-discrimination laws for making statement emphasizing skeletal evidence of binary sex.

    A wind instrument repair man. There's a joke in their somewhere…

    Brünisholz’s ordeal began in December of 2022 when he responded to a Facebook post by Swiss National Council member Andreas Glarner. In his comment, Brünisholz wrote: “If you dig up LGBTQI people after 200 years, you’ll only find men and women based on their skeletons. Everything else is a mental illness promoted through the curriculum.”

    The reply, which highlighted the immutable nature of biological sex and played on a popular meme, quickly drew complaints from activists who filed reports with local police, alleging it constituted public incitement to hatred under Article 261bis of the Swiss Criminal Code. This provision, originally enacted in 1995 to prohibit the dissemination of ideas based on race, ethnicity, or religion that degrade human dignity, was expanded in 2020 to include a broad interpretation of “sexual identities.”

    Burgdorf Police interrogated Brünisholz on August 15, 2023, launching a formal investigation into charges of discrimination and hate speech. During the questioning, conducted by the Regional Police Command Mittelland – Emmental – Oberaargau and documented in an official transcript, Brünisholz was interrogated about the “intent” behind his Facebook reply.

    To the question, “What did you mean by this comment?” he replied: “Well, that those who think there’s not just man and woman, I want to tell them that there’s only man and woman.”

    Seems fair enough. And of course absolutely true. But apparently it's belittling to LGBT(Q)I people. Well, belittling to the T portion of LGBT(Q)I people – the people who believe you can change sex.

    The Bernese judiciary determined that “through his comment published on Facebook, [Brünisholz] has publicly belittled the group of LGBT(Q)I people based on their sexual orientation and in a way that violates human dignity.” He was issued a penal order fining him 500 Swiss francs (approximately $580 USD), convertible to 10 days of imprisonment if unpaid.

  • Trans culture is not Maori culture

    Yesterday a Maori demonstration -"jihadists not welcome here". Today:

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