Mick Hartley

Politics and Culture

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  • The knife attacker

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    In the sentencing remarks, the Judge said: "I note however that you are now 59 years old and someone of hitherto exemplary character… You are a loved husband and father. A hard worker and someone who, those who have written on your behalf cannot praise highly enough. You are relied upon as a carer and much respected in your work with charity.”

    The man he slashes a knife at is Hamit Coskun, who was burning a Koran in protest. For this, Hamit was originally charged by the CPS with intent to cause "harassment, alarm or distress" against "the religious institution of Islam". This charge was dropped, and changed to a Public Order Offence: disorderly behaviour within the hearing or sight of a person likely to be caused harassment, alarm or distress.

    Part of the prosecution’s evidence that Hamit had caused someone harassment, alarm or distress was that Moussa Kadri attacked him with a knife.

    Hamit was convicted and ordered to pay a fine of £240. He is also now living in hiding due to credible threats to his life. Moussa Kadri, the man who tries to stab him in this video, is walking free.

    The suggestion that Kadri's attack showed that Hamit "had caused someone harassment, alarm or distress" is like saying that a woman's rape showed that she'd caused someone, her rapist, an uncontrollable sexual urge. It was her fault. Lovely to see how Islamic thinking is penetrating our legal system.

    From the BBC report:

    Lord Young of Acton, general secretary of the Free Speech Union, said after the sentencing that it "sends a green light to any Muslim who wants to enforce an Islamic blasphemy by taking the law into their own hands.

    "The court is effectively saying that if you attack a blasphemer with a knife, he will be convicted of causing you harassment, alarm or distress and you won't have to spend a day behind bars."

  • The Māori women’s rights advocate

    It's worse in New Zealand. Anna Slatz at Reduxx:

    A Māori women’s rights advocate in New Zealand is facing prison time after being reported to police by a trans-identified male for her social media posts. Rex Landy, a member of Mana Wāhine Kōrero, was arrested in December of 2024 after being targeted by a trans activist who took issue with her online commentary.

    The source of the complaints against Landy is a fantasy author named Daniel Johnston, a man who identifies as “female” and refers to himself by the name “Caitlin Spice.” Speaking to Reduxx, Landy explains that she first became aware of Johnston in 2019 after she discovered that he had participated in having Broadsheet, a women’s issues magazine, suspended on Facebook.

    “All they had done was post some quotes of his where he said things like ‘I am a legal female’ and boasted about being able to use the women’s washrooms,” Landy says. “They had to fight to get their account back.”

    Broadsheet had warned their readers about Johnston, noting that he “delights in taunting feminists who are defending women’s rights.”

    Landy says that Johnston’s rhetoric, specifically that about using women’s intimate spaces, was triggering for her as a survivor of sexual abuse.

    “That’s when I realized he could be in any toilet in Wellington, where I go, from time to time. And I got upset.” Landy explains that she later discovered Johnston had been targeting multiple women critical of gender ideology in New Zealand for insult and harassment.

    While it is unclear when Johnston began to “identify” as a woman, he first started attracting attention on social media for making graphic posts about his vaginoplasty and use of women’s restrooms. On his now-deleted X (then Twitter), Johnston would frequently make comments about his post-surgical fluid leakage, dilation, and use of women’s menstrual products.

    Lovely bloke. See the article for a more graphic account of his "vaginal leakage", of which he's inordinately proud.

    It gets worse.

    While in court last week, Landy was told the prosecution was not willing to entertain diversion or discharge without conviction because of her beliefs.

    “They said I was not eligible because I was in the ‘grip of an ideology’ and was ‘unlikely to change my mind,'” Landy explains, rejecting the premise that a belief in biological sex is ideological. “So this is an exercise in them trying to get me to change my mind.”

    She is next expected to appear in court on December 16, and faces three months in jail or a $50,000 fine. Her current bail conditions include a ban on directly or indirectly contacting Johnston.

    The by-now familiar story of a bullying trans activist who malevolently accuses gender-critical women of harassment – with the full backing of the authorities.

    There's some irony here. New Zealand is obsessed with its Maori heritage, to the extent that Matauranga, the Maori way of knowledge, has been elevated to the extent that it's now taught as of equal value to science – an issue that Jerry Coyne has taken up, here for instance, or here. There could hardly be a better (worse) example of western ideology gone wrong than gender woo, yet in this case the Maori wisdom (ie common sense), as shown by this woman Rex Landy, is overruled by the authorities.

    A belief in biological sex, as affirmed both by science and by a Maori woman and her traditional knowledge, must bow before the greater power of gender ideology.

  • Protected groups and the police

    Helen Joyce at The Critic recounts her experience of being secretly logged as a criminal by the police at the behest of trans activists, who are seen as members of a "protected group". It's the same mechanism, and reputedly the same trans activist (Lynsay Watson), which resulted in the ludicrous arrest of Graham Linehan at Heathrow.

    Her conclusion:

    Trans lobby groups such as Stonewall have partnered with almost every force in the country and despite not being the law, gender self-identification is firmly embedded in police practice. Officers have been trained that calling a man a man, if he says he’s a woman, is “anti-transgender hate”. When the culprit is someone like me who believes that to the contrary, it’s essential in order to protect women’s rights, claims of “significant harm” are believed and repeat offences are not guaranteed.

    The reason Watson was taken seriously and I wasn’t is because he insists men who say they’re women are women and I say the truth, which is that they’re not. The disparity is by design: a feature of the law, not a bug.

    This can’t be fixed by abolishing non-crime hate incidents and applying “common sense”. It requires radical change in the culture of policing. No more partnerships with lobby groups, no more flags and badges, no more marking Pride Month, Transgender Day of Remembrance and the rest of the identitarian calendar. On trans issues it will take a deradicalisation programme, with officers retrained to understand that self-ID is not the law and factual statements about the two sexes aren’t hateful.

    More fundamentally, “protected groups” have got to go. They’re unnecessary, and there’s no evidence they’re effective. There’s no need for them, either: offences against women and children are policed not by giving them special group status but by creating dedicated strategies and specialist teams.

    Above all, creating special categories of people who can instruct the police to credulously record their claims about others offends against two fundamental principles: that we are all innocent until proven guilty, and equal before the law.

  • “We will have peace only when we recognize, respect, and guarantee the security of Israel ”

    Well then. President Prabowo Subianto at the UN General Assembly.

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  • Statehood through the Tinkerbell Effect

    The idea that something exists if enough people believe in it. Dave Rich on Palestinian statehood:

    The recognition of Palestinian statehood by the UK and other western governments is less an acknowledgement of reality, and more an expression of faith. The official statements announcing recognition do not even try to pretend that Palestine meets the criteria for statehood as set out in international law, because it obviously doesn’t (this is a separate question from whether Palestinians as a people have the right to statehood). Not for Palestine, the need to fulfil the laborious challenge that every other state that has come into being in the modern era has had to meet.

    Instead, it is as if these governments hope that they can imagine Palestine into being simply by saying it is so. It is statehood through the Tinkerbell Effect – the idea that something exists if enough people believe in it.

    The problem is that the two state solution has been on offer for years – and has been rejected for years, by the Palestinians. Has anything changed? The problem if anything has got worse, as the international community has implicitly – and often explicitly – supported the Palestinians in their fantasy of being refugees whose destiny it is to eventually return to their stolen land. In the meantime the Palestinian claim has been subsumed into an Islamist holy war, driven by Iran, where the sacred land of the Al-Aqsa mosque can never be home to the evil Zionists.

    Those are the barriers.

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  • People with ovaries

    Meanwhile, in Bristol:

    A council has become embroiled in a transgender row after insisting that women should be called “people with ovaries”.

    Bristol city council has been accused of offending women with “virtue-signalling madness” after claiming that legally defining sex as biological “misgenders trans people” and could lead to discrimination.

    Officials also argued that the term “maternity” should be scrapped and replaced with “paternity” to avoid offending trans people, despite the latter meaning “the fact of being a father”.

    They also demanded support for biological men who wanted to “chest-feed” babies, despite questions about whether the practice is harmful.

    Oh ffs. Of course it's harmful. A tiny baby forced to drink some chemically-induced gunge to satisfy a man's fetish…

    And if women are “people with ovaries”, why aren't men “people with testicles”? Somehow it never works that way.

    Bristol city council, whose Green Party leader Tony Dyer has criticised the Supreme Court ruling, raised a number of objections, including urging the EHRC to drop gendered language when referring to pregnancy, maternity and breastfeeding.

    It wrote that “not all pregnant individuals would use the pronouns ‘she/her’” so it could lead to “emotional and psychological distress” for “trans men, non-binary, gender diverse or intersex individuals”.

    “We strongly advise the use of more inclusive language such as using ‘they/them’ to refer to all individuals, or include other identities to reflect the diversity of individuals who access maternity or paternity services,” officials said.

    “This could include ‘people with ovaries’ or the term ‘people who use paternity services’. We also recognise that individuals may not identify with the word maternity and prefer paternity as it is gender neutral.

    Eh? Does he even know what paternity means? The man's an idiot.

    The consultation response, signed off by Mr Dyer and his deputy, also took issue with a new definition of sexual orientation, which states that a lesbian woman or a gay man is someone attracted to someone of the same sex.

    The council complained that this means that two biological men in a relationship would be “wrongly” categorised as gay.

    “The revised wording of this section introduces confusion by defining sexual orientation only in relation to biological sex, rather than the affirmed gender of a partner,” Bristol council wrote.

    “For instance, under this framing, a heterosexual man in a relationship with a trans woman could be wrongly categorised as gay, solely because of his partner’s sex assigned at birth.

    “This erases the affirmed gender of trans people and mischaracterises the orientation of their partners. Sexual orientation is about patterns of attraction, including attraction to people of a particular gender – not just anatomy or birth sex.”

    They've really drunk the KoolAid, this lot.

  • Offended by opinions

    Barrister Sarah Phillimore in the Telegraph:

    Baroness Harman’s independent review of bullying, harassment and sexual harassment at the Bar, published earlier this month, sent ripples across the barrister community for its potential to lead to censorship and the repression of free speech.

    Sadly, these likely encroachments do not surprise me.

    Speech should only be a criminal or regulatory matter if a very high bar of offence is crossed. Certainly I don’t think I’ve ever crossed it. Yet, in our culture now, mere disagreement is seen as violence, and not having a prevailing view about issues such as sexuality or transgenderism is seen inherently to be bigoted.

    I know this from personal experience. In 2020 I was investigated for 18 months by the Bar Standards Board (BSB) after an unknown person reported a collection of my past social media tweets that they deemed to be offensive, to the police.

    Twelve pages were recorded by Wiltshire Police as transphobic and religiously aggravated “non-crime hate incidents”.

    While ultimately the police and the BSB’s investigation came to nothing, it was distressing, irritating, time-consuming and utterly absurd.

    See here for more details. She's also a particular target of Jolyon Maugham's risible Good Law Project, accused of misgendering and deadnaming a trans woman (here). The horror.

    The thing that really worries me from Lady Harman’s new report is recommendation number 24, which reads: “Regulatory enforcement action must be taken against online bullying and harassment,” particularly if it’s motivated by misogyny or racism.

    But who is deciding an unknown individual’s motivations for a tweet? Somebody who is upset enough to get the whole apparatus of either the criminal law or a regulatory offence moving? It’s very dangerous.

    I’m confident I understand the law around freedom of expression inside out. I understand the requirements for a registered professional and about proportionality, but that, I think, is what we are losing. The fetters some people wish to put on speech, simply because said speech makes them feel unhappy, is grossly disproportionate….

    Last year’s proposal to make it a duty for barristers to promote equality, diversity and inclusion was a clear example of what I’m afraid of. Ultimately, it did not succeed, and I am glad of that, because these proposals don’t really mean diversity. They mean one political view. Transgress against that view and you will be punished.

    For the last decade, the message across public sector organisations is that there is only one thing we’re allowed to believe – and that we must always promote love and inclusion. While that may be a noble aim, it has had disastrous effects on the cohesion of society and alienates vast groups of people. For example, you’re not allowed to discuss immigration because then you’re a racist, and you’re not allowed to discuss gender identity because then you’re a transphobe.

    There’s only a handful of us at the Bar who’ve been willing to speak out. I know many colleagues who keep their heads down because they’ve got young children and big mortgages….

    Frankly, I have no compassion for people who are offended by opinions. If they’re upset by what I say, unless it is genuinely insulting, I do not care. I think they are contemptible.

    And as for the Bar Standards Board, I don’t think my opinions or those of any other barrister should be any concern of theirs.

  • The former Operations Lead and Volunteers Coordinator for Newbury Pride

    From Genevieve Gluck at Reduxx:

    A trans-identified male residing in England has appeared in court accused of sexually abusing a child. Kizzy Lavender Lee, birth name Samuel Wimbridge, who is the former Operations Lead and Volunteers Coordinator for Newbury Pride, has been charged with attempting to coerce a young girl into sexual abuse and making indecent photographs of a child….

    Reduxx has also learned that Wimbridge was active in the trans rights community in the Newbury area. He was featured as a speaker for the Trans Day of Remembrance by Reading Pride in 2022, and held positions with Newbury Pride that same year, where he was photographed posing with a police officer.

    Maybe someday there'll be an exhibition of all those photos of police happily posing with trans activists who were later revealed to be sexual predators. Stephen Ireland of Pride in Surrey for a start, then this bloke…

    Wimbridge began claiming to identify as transgender in March, 2022. At the time, he published a statement to his Facebook profile announcing his new chosen name and threatening to block or report any individual who questioned his claim to being a woman.

    Reduxx has discovered a disturbing digital footprint belonging to Wimbridge, including a social media profile within an online fetish community where he claimed to be a “trans lesbian” with a sexual interest in “age play.”

    Wimbridge maintained a profile on the internet’s leading fetish community, FetLife, where he expressed a sexual interest in humiliation, BDSM, schoolgirl fetishes, redheads, polyamory, age play, and public sexual acts.

    Lovely. "Age play".

    As JK Rowling comments: "I wonder what it is about a movement campaigning to allow men into protected spaces for women and girls that might attract sexual predators. A mystery for the ages."

    No wonder LGB want a split from the Ts.

  • “Lacking in enthusiasm and sincerity”

    Kim Jong-un is displeased. The North Korean media didn't do justice to his supreme magnificence during his trip to Beijing. Heads must roll.

    North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has launched a sweeping purge of party and government officials following his recent visit to China, with punishments extending from the workers’ party to the foreign ministry, according to sources familiar with the situation….

    The party’s propaganda and agitation department suffered the most dismissals during this round of purges, sources said.

    Officials who edited documentary footage of Kim’s China visit faced criticism for producing content deemed “lacking in enthusiasm and sincerity.” The edited scenes showing Kim’s arrival at Beijing station and his reception by senior Chinese officials, including Cai Qi, secretary of the communist party of China central secretariat, and Wang Yi, director of the party’s central foreign affairs commission, appeared “meager and shabby” compared to Chinese media coverage.

    Documentary editors also drew fire for including footage of Kim waiting in line with other world leaders during China’s 80th anniversary victory day celebrations. While Kim received second-to-last reception from Chinese President Xi Jinping and his wife Peng Liyuan — directly before Russian President Vladimir Putin — indicating China’s highest-level treatment, showing Kim waiting in line was deemed damaging to the supreme leader’s image.

    The supreme leader does not wait.

  • Banning women’s books

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