Mick Hartley

Politics and Culture

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  • Told to apologise for her online posts or face an investigation

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    Deborah Anderson, a mother of two, was visited at her home in June by an officer from Thames Valley Police. He told her someone had lodged a complaint about her social media posts. She told him she was an American citizen and a member of the Free Speech Union and he should be investigating burglaries and rapes, not hurty words on social media.

    Chillingly, he told her he was there to get her to apologise to the person who was offended by her posts. If she refused, she’d be questioned down at the station.

    What was Deborah’s supposed crime? The policeman didn’t tell her. Was it her passionate support of President Trump and the MAGA movement on her Facebook and X pages?

    To make it worse, Deborah is in the midst of cancer treatment, including chemotherapy. She ought to be have been convalescing. Instead, she was harassed for her tweets.

    The FSU took on her case and, as a result, the police have now dropped their investigation. But they still haven’t told Deborah which of her posts got her into trouble, claiming they’ve accidentally deleted the record of the complaint.

    Thames Valley Police are responsible for guarding President Trump this week. What would he make of the fact that those same officers are visiting the homes of his supporters – including US citizens – and threatening them with arrest.

  • Double marching standards

    Daniel Sugarman at Jewish News on the reaction to last Saturday's Tommy Robinson march, compared to the previous two years of Free Palestine violence and intimidation:

    Politicians queued up to condemn Saturday’s march – such condemnation is entirely understandable. The Prime Minister released a statement, telling the nation, among other things, that, “People have a right to peaceful protest. It is core to our country’s values. But we will not stand for assaults on police officers doing their job or for people feeling intimidated on our streets because of their background or the colour of their skin. Britain is a nation proudly built on tolerance, diversity and respect.”

    I had to laugh a little at that. It may have escaped notice from some, but the last 23 months have seen plenty of marches through London which have seen both assaults on police officers and people feeling intimidated because of their background.

    On these marches, people have routinely engaged in Holocaust inversion, echoed age-old antisemitic conspiracy theories by accusing the world’s only Jewish state of exercising unnatural control over politicians, media and financial systems, and called for globalising the intifada (I suggest you look at pictures of the aftermath of the many terror attacks which took place during the last intifada to truly understand what that means to most Jews).

    Many members of the UK Jewish community have made clear that they have found these marches acutely intimidatory….

    In the last few days, I have seen a number of MPs and local councillors, many based in the capital, whose silence over the last 23 months, in the face of dozens of marches, was deafening. But when marchers are holding Union Jacks or the cross of St George, rather than a Palestinian flag? Apparently then, and only then, is it time for platitudes about how minorities should not feel threatened.

    Fortunately for those politicians in question, in just a few short weeks yet another of those ostensibly pro-Palestinian demonstrations will take place in central London. These MPs and councillors will have the opportunity to demonstrate that their outrage about minority groups feeling threatened by a major march through London is not selective.

    British Jews will watch to see whether such politicians can show a shred of consistency.

    I think we can safely predict exactly how much consistency – or how little – we'll see.

    Jews still don't count.

  • So it has ever been for Israel

    Jerry Coyne on the UN genocide charge:

    I’m wondering what these critics would have Israel do. Withdraw and allow Hamas to keep running Gaza? It’s curious that we don’t hear them saying what is clearly true: Hamas and other terrorist groups are bent on genocide of the Jews, as they have written and repeatedly stated. As everyone knows, if Israel was really intent on wiping out Palestinians, it would withdraw its soldiers and simply bomb the territory to smithereens. They are not doing that, but sending in IDF soldiers, many of whom have been killed. And they warn civilians of strikes in advance as well as telling them where to go for safety, though things are chaotic in Gaza with this assault.  The critics don’t know from genocide. But it’s true that Israel is losing the public relations war, as another article in the WSJ asserts: it’s “winning the war but losing the world.” And so it has ever been for Israel.

    Yep.

  • Preventing immorality

    I wonder why they'd do this:

    The Taliban leader banned fibre optic internet in an Afghan province to “prevent immorality,” a spokesman for the administration said Tuesday.

    It’s the first time a ban of this kind has been imposed since the Taliban seized power in August 2021, and leaves government offices, the private sector, public institutions, and homes in northern Balkh province without Wi-Fi internet.

    Oh yes. Women. Can't have them learning.

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  • At the National Centre for Social Research

    In 2021 the Office for National Statistics hugely overestimated the trans population. They asked “Is the gender you identify with the same as your sex registered at birth?”, and found that places with high immigrant communities whose first language was not English, like the London boroughs of Newham and Brent, had surprisingly high levels of trans identification – a result much celebrated by trans activists. It took Michael Biggs, sociology professor at Oxford, to point out the problem: they didn't understand the question.

    The statistical confusion continues:

    Trans women have been allowed to self-identify as women in a survey about social attitudes.

    Polling published by the National Centre for Social Research (NatCen) included biological men who were allowed to give their answers as women.

    Gender-critical academics claimed that the report, which is part of the British Social Attitudes series, could be “misleading” because it “conflates sex and gender”.

    NatCen insisted that the sample size of men identifying as women, non-binary, or vice versa was too small to affect the results significantly.

    If they know it's a problem, why do it?

    The NatCen report concluded that “gender identity matters most to women”. It cited polling showing that 66 per cent of women say that being a woman is extremely or very important to how they think of themselves, compared with 52 per cent of men who feel the same about male identity.

    That makes no sense. These women are saying that being women – their sex – is very important to them. It has nothing to do with "gender identity" as the term's now used by activists. These NatCen people are hopelessly confused.

    Prof Alice Sullivan, of UCL, an expert on gender identity, told The Telegraph: “They are overriding the sex where that doesn’t agree. Thirteen of the men identified as women. That’s muddling sex and gender identity.

    “And they are using gender identity when it doesn’t agree with sex and the way they report that does not make it obvious.

    “It’s unfortunate given that they have data on sex, so they can look at sex separately, but they have chosen to effectively muddle the two and that could be quite misleading.”…

    Prof Selina Todd, a modern history academic at the University of Oxford, claimed: “This report seems very confused, because the authors conflate sex and gender.

    “They also misunderstand sex as ‘assigned at birth’ – it isn’t, it’s a biological fact, determined at conception.

    “Gender is not an innate identity, as they claim, but a set of roles and behaviours that people are expected to conform to, depending on which sex they are.”

    Back to the drawing board.

  • “Uncomfortable” but “ultimately right”

    Wes Streeting sticks to his guns. From the Telegraph:

    Wes Streeting has said banning puberty blockers has been “uncomfortable” but was “ultimately right”.

    The Health Secretary made the comments at an NHS LGBT conference where he faced questions from trans activists about the impact of the ban, which he made indefinite last year.

    He told attendees that it had been “truly uncomfortable” and that hearing from young people who had been affected had “not sat easily with me at all” as he defended the decision.

    It is now illegal to supply puberty blockers to gender-questioning children in the UK outside of an NHS trial that is yet to start, following recommendations made by the Cass Review which found the use of such drugs in children was based on “weak evidence”…

    “It has not sat easily with me at all, that there are young people who describe to me how they feel about not being able to access puberty blockers,” he said. “But I have to make sure that I defend the clinical evidence base and that I do the thing that I think is ultimately right, even if it’s truly uncomfortable for me in the meantime”.

    He'd like to be nice to all these deluded young people who believe they've been born in the wrong body, but the clinical evidence points the other way. Puberty blockers are damaging, not reversible, and almost inevitably lead to cross-sex hormones and then to surgical mutilation of a healthy young person's body. So no…

    He also said he was “frustrated” that the upcoming clinical trial into puberty blockers had “taken longer than I would have hoped” because of the ethical governance required.

    A clinical trial that should never happen.

    But yes, he stood firm in front of a hostile audience. That's no small matter.

  • Propaganda dressed in legal language

    A rebuttal of the UN's new report accusing Israel of genocide, from UN Watch – Legal Analysis of Pillay Commission’s September 2025 Report to Human Rights Council:

    Accusations of genocide are among the most serious charges that can be made against a state. They evoke the darkest episodes of modern history, such as the Holocaust, Rwanda, and Srebrenica, and they carry immense legal consequences as well as profound moral weight. For this reason, the Genocide Convention of 1948 sets a deliberately high bar: genocide requires specific intent (dolus specialis) to destroy, in whole or in part, a protected group “as such.” Genocidal intent is established only when there is no other reasonable inference. Evidence of widespread civilian casualties, extensive destruction, or inflammatory rhetoric does not suffice; what is required is proof that deaths and suffering were the result of a deliberate policy to exterminate a people. Establishing such intent is among the most difficult elements in international law, and the genocide allegation against Israel fails at this threshold even before considering the Report’s distortions of its conduct in Gaza.

    The UN Human Rights Council Commission of Inquiry’s report is fatally deficient: its reasoning is deeply flawed, its evidentiary base unreliable, and its methodology unsound. It selectively misinterprets statements by Israeli leaders, accepts unverified Hamas casualty figures, disregards Hamas’s systematic use of human shields, relies on unverified media reports (such as by Al-Jazeera), and assumes that civilian deaths in Gaza are only the result of deliberate targeting by Israel. Its omissions are equally striking. The report erases Hamas as an active belligerent; across its 72 pages, it never acknowledges that the IDF is engaged with a 30,000-strong fighting force that constructed a battlefield fortified with 500 kilometers of tunnels. Such deficiencies strip the document of legal credibility and render it indistinguishable from propaganda dressed in legal language….

  • Non-gendered breastfeeding

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  • The greying out of South Korea

    From the Daily NK:

    North Korea has issued an order to replace maps of the Korean Peninsula displayed in state agency offices nationwide with maps showing only the northern half of the peninsula, coinciding with the nation’s Foundation Day on Sept. 9. The state appears to be accelerating efforts to erase concepts of reunification and a single Korean nation in line with the leadership’s doctrine of “two hostile states.”

    The newly issued maps feature “Map of Choson” written in bold letters at the top, using North Korea’s term for Korea. A box on the left side displays a red slogan: “The powerful civilized nation we are building is a socialist cultural state where the socialist culture blossoms and flourishes in all its brilliance, a land where the people, endowed with lofty creative ability and a high level of cultural refinement, create and enjoy the most advanced civilization at the highest level — Kim Jong Un.”

    At the lower right is a legend explaining symbols for monuments idolizing the Kim family, including “statues of the great leaders Comrade Kim Il Sung and Comrade Kim Jong Il,” “major revolutionary battle sites,” and “major revolutionary history sites.”

    The maps also display national capitals; provincial, city, and county seats; national borders and provincial boundaries; major roads; mountains and valleys; salt farms; ports and seaways; and other points of interest.

    Most significantly, the new maps label South Korea as “Hanguk”—the South Korean term for Korea. South Korea appears filled in gray with no administrative districts or place names specified. The maps use South Korea’s formal name rather than “South Choson,” as the North has long called it, labeling it simply by name in the same font and text size used for China and Russia.

    This treatment suggests North Korea now views South Korea as a separate, foreign entity rather than part of a single nation, reflecting the leadership’s “two hostile states” doctrine. North Korea has been working to erase concepts of shared national identity and reunification with the South since declaring that North and South were “two hostile states in a state of war” during a ruling party plenary session in late December 2023….

    As authorities distribute the maps, they have ordered agencies to indoctrinate members to refer to South Korea as “Hanguk” rather than “South Choson” and to view South Korea as a foreign country, not the southern half of a single Korean nation.

  • The feminists who argued themselves out of being women

    After the Piers Morgan debacle, when Laurie Penny proudly declared herself to be trans and non-binary but couldn't quite manage to explain what she was talking about, Victoria Smith takes a deeper look at what's really going on:

    Non-binary is the gender identity you end up claiming if you’re a feminist who’s made the category “woman” uninhabitable for any female human with an ounce of self-respect.

    Judith Butler now lays claim to they/them pronouns, and advocates for what she calls “gender freedom”, suggesting that if anyone doesn’t like the “woman” box, they’re welcome to jump right out of it. That doing so might impose intolerable costs — for instance, in terms of the resources, legacies, research, spaces, boundaries to which one may lay claim — is ignored, presumably because they’re not the kind of cost which have much impact on someone of Butler’s status.

    A point many gender critical feminists have made over the years is that if we agreed with the regressive, stereotype-laden definitions of gender ideologues — if we, too, saw gender as a spectrum between Barbie and GI Joe — then we’d be non-binary as well.

    Women like Laurie Penny and Judith Butler have accepted the male/trans stereotype of a woman as passive, blank, a receptacle for male desires, etc. etc.. So they decide, unsurprisingly, that they themselves are actually not silly women like that, but something much better – non-binary! You'd think it would make more sense, from a feminist perspective, to challenge this gender stereotype of a woman rather than decide that you're not one, but this whole trans/queer theory world view depends on gender stereotypes, and they really really don't want to see that. Plus, it makes them special – which is always nice.