Mick Hartley

Politics and Culture

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  • Protected philosophical beliefs

    Now it's Paul Weller. From the Times:

    Paul Weller has threatened to sue his former accountants because they refused to work for him after his statements accusing Israel of committing genocide in Gaza.

    The former Jam frontman, 67, threatened a discrimination claim against Harris & Trotter, which had worked with him for more than 30 years.

    In a pre-action letter, his legal representatives said Weller was told in March that accountants and tax advisers at Harris & Trotter would no longer work with him or for his companies.

    The refusal came almost a year after the firm was said to have reassured Weller that its client funds were not being used to support Israel after he had expressed concerns.

    According to the letter, a partner at the firm said in a text to Weller: “It’s well known what your political views are in relation to Israel, the Palestinians and Gaza, but we as a firm are offended at the assertions that Israel is committing any type of genocide.

    “Everyone is entitled to their own views, but you are alleging such anti-Israel views that we as a firm with Jewish roots and many Jewish partners are not prepared to work with someone who holds these views.”

    He added: “Genocide is what happened in Germany being their desire to rid Europe of its Jews. This is not the intention of Israel in Gaza, in fact it is the other way round. Hamas have been clear they want the extinction of Israel. There is never any mention of the slaughter that took place on October 7th or the taking of hostages.”

    According to the letter, Weller responded 15 minutes later, telling the partner, “I’m not prepared to work with people that support genocide so suits me fine”, to which the partner said that he did not support genocide and the only party committing genocidal acts were Hamas.

    The singer then said: “No, you’re either complicit or stupid to what’s going on there. Let’s leave it at that.”

    Lawyers for Weller claim that by withdrawing their services, the firm unlawfully discriminated against the singer’s protected philosophical beliefs, including that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza and that Palestine should be recognised as a state.

    Protected philosophical beliefs??

    The letter states that Weller’s “deeply held and non-negotiable belief that the State of Israel was committing genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza” was a “central part” of his moral and philosophical worldview.

    What a conceited idiot. Why can't he just accept the parting of the ways and find other accountants?

    And good for Harris & Trotter for speaking out.

  • The most pretentious Boyle

    Further to that Rowling and Boyle post yesterday, see Victoria Smith's Critic piece – The most pretentious edgelord:

    Not being offended by Frankie Boyle is an in-group signifier. It shows you’re one of those special people who knows all the hidden meanings, not just why Boyle’s back catalogue of transphobic gags isn’t offensive, but also why Ricky Gervais’s jokes about Caitlyn Jenner are, in Boyle’s own words, “lazy”.

    “I would like [Gervais] to have the same respect for trans people he seems to have for animals,” opines Boyle. Thank goodness for that. I’d hate it to be the same respect Frankie Boyle has for rape victims and disabled children.

    Approving of Frankie Boyle and not Ricky Gervais shows you get it. What it is you get, you’re not really sure, but anyhow, you’re better than all the people who don’t.

    But yes, read it all.

    Boyle wants to be seen as fearless, speaking the truths others shy clear of, but he's never going to cross the trans taliban who seem to rule "progressive" comedy now. So this is what we get – and it all sits very nicely with his misogyny.

  • The trauma psychiatrist

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    Renowned psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk, who has revolutionized the field of trauma, shocked an audience at a psychiatry seminar when he compared Israel's war on Hamas to the Nazi genocide of Jews.

    The center where the lecture was delivered has now banned van der Kolk from speaking there again.

    Van der Kolk later apologized: "I want to express my deep regret for talking about what is happening in Gaza being equivalent to what the Nazis did in the 1940s,” he wrote. “It was a gratuitous, offensive, inaccurate and completely unnecessary comment, rooted in my own identification with children in bombed out cities during, and shortly after, World War II.”

    I'm glad that van der Kolk took accountability over his harmful words, and that proper consequences will take place.

    But the incident is yet another troubling sign of the times.

    More and more Jewish therapists and patients have reported staggering levels of antisemitism taking over the field.

    Hopefully, the fact that he has apologized can be a wake up call. It's not appropriate for anyone to weaponize a people's trauma for politics, least of all those who treat trauma for a living.

     

  • Lisa Nandy “protecting the dolls”

    Lisa Nandy, secretary of state for culture media and sport, has been photographed looking very pleased with herself wearing a "Protect the Dolls" t-shirt – as worn by luminaries such as Pedro Pascal, Tilda Swinton, Alan Cumming and Madonna. The "dolls" here are trans women – that is, men – who are deemed to be in need of protection from – well, they're always in need of protection of course, but just now it's from the exigencies of the Supreme Court ruling on single sex spaces:

    It is not surprising that Nandy is keen to protect the dolls. Ever on the ‘right-thinking’ side of history, she has consistently denied biological reality. ‘I think transwomen are women… so I think they should be accommodated in a prison of their choosing’, she once said of a man jailed for five counts of child rape, who later claimed to be a woman. She has also been happy for men to compete in women’s sport, claiming last year that it should be up to each individual sporting body whether to allow male-bodied athletes to compete in the female category.

    LGB Labour have now written her a letter:

    Nandy1

    Nandy2

    It would be bad enough for an MP to so publicly show her disagreement with the law, but for a cabinet minister…

    Starmer should be having a strong word – but of course he won't.

  • Maybe not Budapest

    Donald Trump and Viktor Orbán discussed Ukraine’s potential EU membership and possible talks between Volodymyr Zelenskiy and Vladimir Putin, with Budapest under consideration, a senior White House official told Reuters.

    Hmm.

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  • Gender-affirming care

    In which the doctor who coined the phrase "evidence based medicine" makes it clear that of course this doesn't apply to "gender-affirming care".

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    "After criticism of his reviews showing that gender interventions are based on no good evidence, the man who coined the phrase "evidence based medicine" now says that when there's no good evidence supporting an intervention, you should go with what the patient says they want. 2/3"

    "If that wasn't bad enough, there is of course good evidence of harm in gender medicine – namely, that the interventions irreparably damage people's fertility and overall health. You would need strong evidence of large benefits to outweigh the known harms, and there is none. 3/3"

    From the paper:

    Authors of scientific articles have a responsibility to attend to how their contributions will be used and to modify their presentation in the articles, or other communications, accordingly. We, five authors of recent systematic reviews related to gender-affirming care, are concerned that the conclusions of our work–that only low certainty evidence exists (as determined by the GRADE [Grading of Recommendations Assessment, Development, and Evaluation] approach) regarding the benefits of the gender-affirming care interventions addressed in our systematic reviews–will be misused. Specifically, we are concerned that the assessments of the certainty of evidence using established and standard methodology are interpreted as evidence supporting denial of care to trans, nonbinary, and gender-diverse (TGD) individuals, including youth. We are concerned our findings will be used to justify denying care such as puberty blockers and hormone replacement therapy to TGD individuals. Indeed, our prior work has been used in exactly this highly problematic way.

    We therefore feel compelled to make explicit our view regarding how our findings should and should not be used. Following fundamental principles of humane medical practice, clinicians have an obligation to care for those in need, often in the context of shared decision making. It is unconscionable to forbid clinicians from delivering gender-affirming care. 

     Moreover, following the principles of evidence-based decision-making, clinicians should always have a high respect for the autonomy of patients and their advocates. The high respect for autonomy becomes particularly important when the certainty of the evidence is low or very low. In such circumstances, clinicians should work with patients to ensure that care reflects the experience, goals, and priorities of those needing care – that is, their values and preferences.

    It is profoundly misguided to cast health care based on low-certainty evidence as bad care or as care driven by ideology, and low-certainty evidence as bad science.

    Gosh. Talk about profoundly misguided. But yes, this is Canada.

  • Don’t mention the war

    From the Times:

    Two decades after the end of the war, diplomats and civil servants were horrified by what they saw as a flood of “anti-German” films and television series that slandered the Wehrmacht soldiers as villains.

    “You see them plundering, committing arson and murdering women and children,” the West German outpost in Caracas wrote in a cable to the foreign ministry, adding that it was quietly lobbying to have Combat! taken off the airwaves.

    This was part of a clandestine international campaign to try to suppress unflattering depictions of the Third Reich’s war machine, which is detailed in a landmark historical study of the postwar West German government.

    It was an era in which Germans still widely believed in the myth of the “clean Wehrmacht”, which maintained that the Nazi military and its generals were mere soldiers doing their jobs and innocent of war crimes. Where atrocities had been committed, the theory held, the Nazi dictatorship and its “party soldiers” in the SS were to blame.

    Later scholarship demonstrated conclusively that this was not the case: the Wehrmacht had in fact committed numerous war crimes on its own initiative, including the massacres of thousands of prisoners of war, the killing of tens of thousands of civilians and the rape of as many as ten million women….

    This belief was so entrenched that West German officials were outraged by postwar films that shed light on the Third Reich’s crimes against humanity.

    Some of these incidents are already notorious: in 1956, for example, the West German interior ministry and embassy in Paris tried to have Night and Fog, the French director Alain Resnais’ award-winning documentary about the Auschwitz and Majdanek death camps, withdrawn from the programme at the Cannes film festival.

    Jutta Braun, a senior researcher at the Leibniz Centre for Contemporary History in Potsdam, has uncovered evidence that these efforts were much more extensive than previously known, and lasted until well into the 1970s.

    Sifting through the archives of the German Federal Press Office (BPA), Braun found officials had not only maintained a list of “anti-German propaganda” in war films but also used underhand means to try to get them pulled from cinemas and television schedules.

    Its targets were numerous: not only Combat! and Night and Fog but also other popular American series such as The Rat Patrol, which told the story of American and British soldiers trying to sabotage Rommel’s Afrika Korps, and Jericho, which followed British, American and French spies behind enemy lines.

    In 1965 the West German embassy in Washington, led by an ambassador who had previously headed the anti-American propaganda section in the Nazi German foreign ministry, went so far as to blame “the type of Jewish liberal who has great influence in the modern communications industry” for the tide of “hate-films” that had added murderous German soldiers to the pantheon of “bad guys”.

    Amazing. And for decades everyone would have unquestioningly shared their horror that such a sentiment could be voiced. Not any more, though..

  • At Auschwitz

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    It began with the attacker asking her: “Aren’t you ashamed?”

    She then shouted: “You are killing children.”

    When Korchak calmly stood her ground, she replied:

    “I will never be ashamed to wear this flag, and I will never be ashamed to be a Jew.”

    This entire exchange took place on the railway tracks leading to the crematorium.

    This is where things stand now: Jews are being called murderers at the very site where we were murdered by the millions.

    Antisemitism has reached the point where the literal sites of the Holocaust don’t even register to the antisemites obsessed with blaming random Jews for a foreign conflict.

    But, the high schoolers were undaunted: they started signing “Am Yisrael Chai” until the woman left them alone.

    Jewish kids shouldn’t have to fend off haters while learning about the tragedies of our history.

    But, they’re right: Am Yisrael Chai 🇮🇱

  • Rowling and Boyle

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  • Polari Prize capitulation

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    Here we are:

    Polari1

    Polari2

    Polari3

    Always against transphobia, but not too keen on gays. Like everything else in the bright shiny new LGBT world, it's now all about the T.

    Background.