Mick Hartley

Politics and Culture

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  • Using “she/her” pronouns

    Talking of moral wastelands….from Reduxx – Transgender “Youth Advocate” Charged With Rape of Infant Girl In Washington.

    A six-month-old baby.

    On Facebook, Flournoy claims to be a “youth advocate,” and he operated multiple social media accounts under the name Isabelle. On X, Flournoy followed multiple transgender pornography accounts, as well as engaged with racialized pornography that fetishized themes of white inferiority and the “black new world order.”

    Local media reports covering Flournoy’s arrest referred to him using “she/her” pronouns.

  • A moral wasteland of conformity and fear

    Samiksha Bhattacharjee in the Telegraph – Pro-trans mob made me the most hated student at my university:

    Since I re-started the Libertarian Society at University College London, I seem to have become the most hated person on campus. I have lost friends, my group’s treasurer has resigned, and my own students’ union has released a public statement implying they are “devastated” that we hosted a speaker who believes in the reality of biological sex.

    This, it appears, is what it is like to be a classical liberal at university. 

    Life at the modern university.

    The proof that students are starving for that choice was found at the pub after Connie Shaw’s event. Away from the glare of free speech “compliance officers” and activists reading from AI-generated scripts, dozens of students joined us for a pint.

    They whispered their support, terrified that a graduate recruiter or a union official might see them. They see the union funding a Gender Expression Fund for beauty products and clothing for transgender people, and they wonder why that same union cannot spare a single word to condemn the sexual harassment of a female speaker.

    My university has taught me a painful lesson: that the price of freedom is the loss of belonging and popularity. As long as the alternative is a moral wasteland of conformity and fear, that’s a price I’m willing to pay.

  • Iran destroying Lebanon

    Good man. Hell of a beard, too.

  • Woman’s Hour

  • Saltley, Birmingham 1978–1979

    Photographer Brian Homer, at Cafe Royal Books:

    [Photos © Cafe Royal Books/Brian Homer]

  • The Hampstead Ponds case

  • A paradigm shift

    Titania McGrath at The Critic:

    A recent book has revealed that William Shakespeare was actually a black woman. Predictably, historians and literary critics have been demanding “proof”, but do they have any proof that Shakespeare was white and male? These evidence-fetishists are such hypocrites.

    The book is called The Real Shakespeare by feminist scholar Irene Coslet and contains a genuine picture of the great bard which shows clearly that she was black. True, the author drew the picture herself, but photography wasn’t invented back then. Drawing her own evidence strikes me as the most sensible solution to that problem.

    The smoking gun comes in an exciting new discovery. Through painstaking research, Coslet has discovered that “Shakespeare” is an anagram of “A She Speaker”. That cannot be a coincidence. The same rigorous analytical method can be used to determine that Eric Clapton suffers from a sleeping disorder because his name is an anagram of “narcoleptic”.

    As Coslet insightfully argues in her book: “Shakespeare was well aware of sounds, and how sounds can be used to convey meaning.” This radical re-reading explodes every misconception we have ever had. Up until now, we had assumed that Shakespeare was unfamiliar with the concept of the spoken word or communication.

    The insistence that Shakespeare must have been white and male is an example of how our understanding of history has been distorted by fascistic revisionism. For instance, very few people know that Aristotle was a Punjabi transwoman. Or that William of Orange was a Taiwanese sex worker with a missing foot.

    Even if these facts are not true, that does not make them false. Reality is a social construct. The designation of an individual as “white” and “male” has no authentic material basis but is rather an interpretative imposition to reinforce racist patriarchal power structures….

    Yes, the book is real enough – “The reader will leave this book with a sense of wonder, transformation, and will experience a paradigm shift.” Can’t ask for more than that.

  • The Cheider school in Amsterdam

    A sign of the times. Pini Dunner at Tablet Magazine – The School My Grandfather Built Was Bombed in Amsterdam:

    An explosive device was detonated on Friday night outside the Cheider school in Amsterdam. It struck the outer wall of a building on Zeelandstraat in Buitenveldert. For most readers, it is just another attack against a Jewish institution in a sequence of attacks on Jewish institutions around the world. For me, it is something else entirely.

    The Cheider was founded by my late grandfather, Uri Yehuda “Adje” Cohen, a hero who spent the Holocaust years leading a resistance group in Rotterdam against the occupying Nazis while living in hiding in a secret room behind a closet in the home of a gentile friend.

    By any standard, he was an extraordinary individual. Far from resting on his laurels after the war, my grandfather devoted the postwar years to rebuilding the decimated Dutch Jewish community.…

    An explosive device placed against the wall of a Jewish school carries an obvious message. It is meant to intimidate a community by targeting its children and its institutions.

    The attack in Amsterdam did not occur in isolation. The Western world is experiencing the worst surge of antisemitism in decades. Just last week, a man drove a truck into Temple Israel in West Bloomfield, Michigan—one of the largest synagogues in the United States—and opened fire before dying at the scene. Security guards stopped him before the 140 children on the premises were harmed. Similar attacks or attempted attacks on Jewish institutions have occurred across several countries in recent months.

    These incidents come at a moment of heightened international tension amid the war involving the United States, Israel, and Iran. The details differ from place to place, but the pattern is unmistakable. Jewish schools and synagogues in Europe and America are increasingly treated as targets, and Jews everywhere are reminded of how fragile security can be.

    My grandfather believed that the only answer to hatred was to double down on Jewish life—to strengthen it, expand it, and refuse to allow intimidation to succeed.

    The history of the Cheider proves that he was right. The school began at a moment when many believed traditional Jewish life in the Netherlands might never recover from the devastation of the 20th century. One man disagreed. He cleared a table in his apartment and gathered five children around it. That was how the Cheider began.

    Today the school still stands on Zeelandstraat in Amsterdam. Children still study there. And the work that began around that table continues.

    A bomb may damage a wall. But it cannot destroy what my grandfather built.

  • Labour women

    More on that Olivia Bailey meeting, here from Sonia Sodha – How is the government so useless on women’s rights?

    After the Supreme Court clarified that sex means biological sex in the Equality Act 2010 – meaning men cannot identify into women-only spaces, services and sports – the sighs of relief were conditional. No one was sure how the government would respond. But within days the prime minister said he welcomed the “real clarity” of the judgment, calling it a “step forwards”. Phew.

    Or so we thought. To call the government’s approach to implementing the Supreme Court judgment lackadaisical would be too kind. Phillipson has for months sat on the draft Code of Practice from the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) that would provide businesses and service providers with accurate legal guidance on how they should implement the law as set out by the Supreme Court. Before it gets circulated, she has to lay the draft code before Parliament. Six months later, she has inexplicably failed to do so, producing varied excuses as to why not, the latest being that the EHRC should be publishing a business impact assessment of existing law that they must follow, despite the fact that’s not their job. Even worse, she has left the old 2011 Code in circulation, which gets the law wrong and puts service providers who follow it at risk of being sued for unlawful discrimination.

    Second, when the Good Law Project judicially reviewed the interim guidance produced by the EHRC in the wake of the Supreme Court judgment last November, lawyers acting for Bridget Phillipson argued against the Supreme Court that female-only services could admit men who identify as women without ceasing to be single-sex in law. The High Court remarked that her submission was “not easy to follow”. Why on earth would government lawyers be attempting to undermine the Supreme Court judgment on Phillipson’s instructions, when Starmer had earlier welcomed it as a model of clarity?

    .This is the context in which Wadhwa was invited in alongside other organisations to discuss hate crime with the equalities minister. You would expect the government to at least be even-handed in its decisions about which groups to meet with. At this meeting, there were no gender-critical gay and lesbian groups like LGB Alliance represented. Even the labelling of the meeting as “LGBT+” suggests that ministers have picked a side, favouring those campaigners who think men can identify as lesbians, and that same-sex attraction really means being attracted to people of the same “gender identity” regardless of their sex, a concept gender-critical gay people regard as homophobic. Incredibly, the grassroots feminist campaign For Women Scotland which took the case on the meaning of sex right up to the Supreme Court says Phillipson has never met with them.

    The point, surely, it that these Labour women – Olivia Bailey, Bridget Phillipson, and the rest – are trans believers. They think trans women are women. They’ve bought the whole Stonewall line – which, when they were clawing their way to the top, was pretty much required – and don’t have the stomach or the intellectual integrity to backtrack now that the whole house of cards is falling apart.

    God knows what Starmer actually thinks. I don’t suppose he knows himself.

  • The master faith

    Spencer Case in The Philosophers’ Magazine – Jihadism: At Least as Bad as Nazism. Worth reading in full, but here’s a taster:

    Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu said, “The Nazis believed in a master race, the militant Islamists believe in a master faith. They just disagree who among them will be the master of the master faith”. I think there are at least three reasons that the master faith is even more sinister than the ideology of the master race.

    First, the master faith can more easily attract converts. Non-whites, most of the world’s population, are unlikely to find white supremacism  appealing. No form of racism seems likely to unify people across races since not everyone can be part of the master race—but a master faith can do that. Moreover, Hitlerian pseudo-science is a less compelling ideology than Islamism, which claims the authority of a 1,400-year religion rich with stories and rituals. Authoritarian secular ideologies such as Nazism may be quasi-religious in their fervor, but in the end lack the psychological power that religions have.

    A more easily transmissible disease is, all else equal, a worse disease. A very transmissible disease might be vastly more destructive than one that is more lethal but less transmissible. COVID-19 killed many more people than Ebola despite the latter’s being more lethal, precisely because COVID-19 is much more transmissible. The same holds for ideologies. Nazism is an Ebola-like ideology: jihadism is a bit more like COVID-19.

    Second, the existence of millions of non-violent Muslims perversely makes the jihadist threat worse in certain respects.  Imagine an alternate world where millions of Germans sincerely believed Mein Kampf was an elaborate metaphor for peaceful spiritual struggle, while the most thoroughly indoctrinated are genocidal extremists. In that world, Nazism probably wouldn’t have produced such extreme violence so quickly, but it would have been much harder to exclude from polite circles. Nazis could conceal themselves more easily, using the penumbra of “moderates” as a protective membrane. They could also recruit more effectively, gradually radicalizing new converts who are at first drawn in by the humane interpretations of core texts.  This is the advantage jihadists have in our world.

    Anti-racist activists often stress that racism can be subtle and insidious enough to go unnoticed. This can get taken too far to the point that everything starts to look racist, but there’s a legitimate point here. When racial terrorism earned Birmingham, Alabama, the nickname “Bombingham”, the problem clearly wasn’t confined to those manufacturing and planting bombs. Something similar is true of jihadist terrorists. Muslims who are peaceful, in the sense that they would never commit violent acts themselves, may nonetheless participate in a culture of violence to a variety of degrees, some of which make them complicit. They may openly sympathize with those who carry out attacks, offer excuses on their behalf, or simply decline to condemn them.  

    Finally, jihadism’s emphasis on martyrdom makes it especially difficult to counter. Lawrence Wright’s The Looming Tower describes mujahedeen in Afghanistan weeping because they survived Russian attacks—a reaction that would have been incomprehensible to the Nazi rank-and-file. Things were different with the Imperial Japanese, with their kamikaze pilots, and the Tamil Tigers, who used suicide bomb attacks in Sri Lanka. But these groups killed themselves to advance group interests. Jihadists, with their eschatological worldview, are happy to bring their countrymen with them to the hereafter. That’s why an Islamist regime such as Iran possessing nuclear weapons is such a terrifying prospect: it is impossible to deter someone willing, even eager, to be destroyed.

    The danger is enormous. Fifty-seven governments belong to the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, controlling over two billion people, and they are not shy in throwing their economic and political weight around Islamist goals…

    Comparing Nazism and Islamism, see also: