Mick Hartley

Politics and Culture

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  • Pregnant people

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    I love that slight exasperated eye roll. [That's Martine Croxhall]

  • The (far) right side of history

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  • Cymru Pride clash

    The Pride Cymru march finds its match in the Cymru Queers for Palestine.

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  • Trashing an old friend

    Stephen Daisley joins the Stephen Fry pile-on:

    Fry suggests Rowling has been ‘radicalised’, a word familiar to followers of the gender controversy for its customary application to women who insist on their rights. Although the terminology echoes that used to describe recruitment of Islamist terrorists, you need not be a feminist semantician to suspect that ‘radical’ is being used as a synonym for ‘hysterical’, as though women who believe in chromosomal sex are like the mad heroine of a Charlotte Perkins Gilman story and would benefit from a lie down.

    Radicalisation is a deceptive and manipulative framing because recognising the existence of physiological differences between men and women isn’t radicalism, it’s biology. Fry has repeatedly professed his distaste for the gender wars and refused to engage on the substance. For all his donnish affectations, he’s a ‘be kind’ merchant whose contribution to the debate is every bit as vacuous as those Insta mums who pose with a Pride Progress flag in front of their ‘Live, Laugh, Love’ wall canvas every 1 June.

    Yet were Fry to take heed of what the gender ideology vanguard say, he might grasp that their use of ‘radicalisation’ is projection. For if you’ve convinced yourself that men become women by declaring themselves to be so, that women corseting themselves in chest binders or having healthy breasts amputated is sound therapeutic care, that children should be offered medical and even surgical interventions to mutilate their bodies – and, yes, this is what the vanguard believes – then you should stop and ask who exactly has been radicalised here.

    I get the impression Fry is someone who likes to be liked. That perhaps prompted his outburst in the first place: the desire to be seen as having the right sort of views by the "luvvie" dinner party crowd. To be "clubbable". I wonder if he's regretting it now. As well as reeking of misogyny – it does feel as though he really wanted to say "hysterical" but restrained himself just in time – his remarks come at a time when the climate of opinion is changing and the excesses of gender ideology are finally being rolled back.

    It's like the Simone Biles case. There could hardly be two people more different than Fry and Biles, but both have come out recently with sudden out-of-the-blue ad hominem attacks against prominent gender critics. In Biles' case it was Riley Gaines, the US campaigner against men in women's sport. 

    Oliver Brown in the Telegraph – How Simone Biles turned trans activist – and trashed her reputation:

    The message was blunt, blistering and wildly off-brand. Simone Biles, the transcendent gymnast whose gravity-defying routines have been appointment viewing at the past three Olympics, needed just one social media post to shred her wholesome image in the most jarring fashion.

    Railing against Riley Gaines, the former swimmer who has campaigned vigorously to keep biological males out of women’s sport, she wrote on X: “Bully someone your own size, which would ironically be a male.” With that crass drive-by shot, she definitively affirmed the old Warren Buffett maxim of it taking 20 years to build a reputation and just five minutes to ruin it.

    At least Biles, unlike Fry, wasn't trashing an old friend.

  • Political Tippex

    If good people ignore unpleasant facts that threaten their world view, then bad people will step in. Janice Turner in the Times this morning:

    Eyes blazing, a clearly furious Baroness Casey, sitting on the Newsnight sofa beside two grooming gang victims, reflected on what she’d learnt in the decade since her Rotherham report. “If good people don’t grip difficult issues,” she said, “in my experience bad people do.”

    She recalled reading a file on a child who had been raped to find in the perpetrator’s description someone had Tippexed out the word “Pakistani”. As she picked this off with a paperclip, Casey wondered what had driven this person to literally whitewash the facts. Fear for their organisation’s reputation or their own? Worry for “community tensions”? Meanwhile the English Defence League had parked up, intimidating every Muslim in town.

    Definitions of “good” and “bad” may vary. But it is inarguable that the reason Baroness Casey will now head up a second, even more sweeping, inquiry into grooming gangs is agitation by Elon Musk, JD Vance, Tommy Robinson and his far- right associates. Their prime motive is not concern for thousands of abused, betrayed girls, but cynical opportunism. They want to leverage the gangs (and a perceived establishment cover-up) against all Muslims for wider political ends.

    As Casey says, it’s because the “good” people — or rather those who identify as such — refused to engage with the truth. Even after Casey reviewed the data and found British Pakistani men over-represented in grooming cases and even after numerous convictions, many “good” people still dispute this distinct abuse model even exists. “It’s a racist fantasy…” you still hear, or “most abusers are white men…” Political Tippex.

    Not just the grooming gangs, of course. See also, gender:

    In the US, on Joe Biden’s very first day as president he issued an executive order that redefined “sex” in Title IX women’s rights protections to incorporate gender identity. In doing so, entirely without debate, he permitted biological males to compete in (and inevitably dominate) female sports, and for any male-bodied prisoner, including rapists and murderers, unrestricted transfer into women’s jails. Moreover Biden appointed the trans activist Rachel Levine, who opposed any lower age limit on cross-sex hormones or gender surgery for children, as an adviser.

    This week the US Supreme Court upheld the right of Tennessee to ban such treatments for minors, which will strengthen existing bans in 25 other states. In Britain, thanks to the courage of whistleblowing medics and gender critical feminists, this was accomplished some years back via the Cass review. But in America, as the New York Times puts it, “the LGBTQ movement drove itself towards a cliff — and took the Democratic Party with it”. Since US liberals doubled down, championing mastectomies for 14-year-old girls and cheering on boys stealing female track medals, it was left to the Maga movement to grab the easy popular, political win. But, of course, Trump didn’t stop at reversing extreme gender policies — he has also ripped up basic rights, such as cruelly banning trans people from serving in the military.

    Biden left an open goal. Of course Trump took advantage. 

    “Good” people need to grip harder, be braver, embrace complexity over slogans, stop Tippexing out the truth. Thoughtful Muslims, such as Baroness Warsi, should investigate the cultural and religious reasons towns such as Dewsbury, where she grew up, have produced rings of Pakistani men who pimp out poor white girls. Democrats could defend women’s sports and oppose the baseless mutilation of minors. Because when they don’t, as Baroness Casey says, the “bad” people can’t wait to do it for them.

    I'm not sure, from what I've seen of her, that I'd call Baroness Warsi "thoughtful". Still, yes…

    From a comment:

    When difficult issues – grooming gangs, uncontrolled migration – are handled with denial or euphemism a political vacuum opens up. And into that vacuum step those less concerned with nuance. Historian Tom Holland has noted that the most sensitive issue is not ethnicity, but religion: the fact that ISIS justified sexual slavery by citing early Islamic texts is deeply uncomfortable – yet undeniably part of the context. When mainstream parties sidestep such realities, they hand ready ammunition to populists. What begins as moral squeamishness ends in political forfeiture. Reform isn’t polling well because its ideas are better – it’s because too many others stopped talking.

    The story of the grooming gangs is the story of predominantly Muslim men in northern towns. Labour's answer to this? A law against "Islamophobia":

    Angela Rayner is accused of wanting to secretly drive through a definition of Islamophobia that could make it harder to discuss grooming gangs.

    The Deputy Prime Minister has appointed a working group to come up with a definition to be used across government.

    It is chaired by Dominic Grieve, the former Tory Cabinet minister, who has praised a 2019 study that called the discussion of “grooming gangs” an example of “anti-Muslim racism”.

  • Puberty is not a medical condition

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  • The US and Iran

    Niall Ferguson and Yoav Gallant – former Israeli minister of defense – at the Free Press. Should America join in against Iran? – especially given that the US is the only country with bombs powerful enough to destroy the nuclear facilities deep underground.

    Opponents of U.S. military action tell a simplified story of past interventions—in Vietnam, most obviously, but some also cite Iraq and Afghanistan—that led to “forever wars.” But isolationists have trouble arguing that the United States should never intervene abroad. Would the Cold War have gone better if Harry Truman had abandoned South Korea to Stalin’s proxies in 1950? Would the Middle East have benefited if Kuwait had been left in Saddam Hussein’s hands in 1991? Would the Balkans be stabler today if Bill Clinton had not belatedly acted to save Bosnia and then Kosovo from Slobodan Milošević’s aggression?

    There are, of course, those cases where the US declined to intervene – most notably Syria. How did that work out? It allowed Assad to stay in power for years, destroying the country, killing hundreds of thousands, and – not least – giving Russia the opportunity to reassert itself as a global power, practicing the aerial destruction since unleashed on Ukraine.

    None of these analogies is really applicable anyway, because the United States today is not being asked to send soldiers to invade or occupy Iran. The action President Trump must decide upon is clearly defined and limited in its duration and scale, since much of the work of defeating Iran has already been done by Israel.

    But one task remains.

    Much of Iran’s nuclear weapons program now lies in ruins, and many of the scientists who ran it are dead. But one key site remains at Fordow. Deep underground and heavily fortified, it holds the core of Iran’s remaining enrichment capability: eight cascades with over 3,000 centrifuges. The facility’s scale allows Iran to rapidly enrich weapons-grade uranium. It could do so in just three weeks, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Leaving it intact risks allowing the Islamic Republic to rebuild and resume its quest for the ultimate weapon of mass destruction.

    Fordow is built into the mountains near Qom, encased under at least 300 feet of limestone, and protected by additional layers of reinforced concrete shielding and other structural defense measures that increase the facility’s ability to survive a heavy air attack. There is no credible way that Israel alone can destroy it.

    Only one air force has the power to finish off Fordow. The United States designed and built the GBU 57A/B Massive Ordnance Penetrator (MOP) precisely for such a task…..

    Israel has moved and continues to move with determination and dispatch. The support of allies, first and foremost the United States, has been crucial. Now, with a single exertion of its unmatched military strength, the United States can shorten the war, prevent wider escalation, and end the principal threat to Middle Eastern stability. It can also send a signal to those other authoritarian powers who have been Iran’s enablers that American deterrence is back.

  • An ever-evolving virus

    Izabella Tabarovsky is a writer with a special interest in Soviet antizionism and contemporary left antisemitism. Back in January she was canceled from delivering a scheduled lecture by two Finnish universities. She's now delivered the same lecture to members of the Finnish parliament.

    From her Facebook post:

    I grew up in the USSR, where, in my own time, Jews were barred from certain universities and academic departments.

    Certain professions and career paths were closed to us. I experienced it personally.

    I left the USSR in 1989 at the age of 19. I went to the United States. And I thought that I had left all of it behind.

    But here I am today, witnessing the same antisemitic ideology being reborn in the democratic West.

    And once again Jews are being pushed out of universities, professions, political and cultural organizations….

    Antisemitism is an ever-evolving virus.

    Today’s antisemitism takes the form of demonizing Zionism and Israel.

    It draws on tropes developed by Soviet propaganda, which itself was woven from threads that include some of the darkest ideological constructs humanity ever produced: the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and Nazi ideology.

    It is toxic and dangerous.

    Millions of Jews historically suffered as a result of this propaganda.

    What gives this history urgency is that we are at a point where Jews are being killed under the guise of anti-Zionism.

    Nazi Germany dehumanized Jews to the point where they could be exterminated by the millions.

    Today, in polite societies in the democratic West, Jews are once again being dehumanized—as Zionists.

    “Zionists don’t deserve to live,” said a student at Columbia University.

    And Jews are already being killed on that basis…..

  • The state of Pride

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  • The true cost of North Korea’s pandemic deception

    The North Korean Covid catastrophe. From the Daily NK:

    A damning new report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies reveals the true cost of North Korea’s pandemic deception—a systematic cover-up that likely condemned thousands of its own citizens to preventable deaths.

    Based on interviews with 100 North Koreans, the study paints a devastating picture of a government that chose propaganda over public health. While Pyongyang didn’t officially acknowledge a single COVID case until May 2022, the virus had been ravaging the isolated nation since 2020, spreading unchecked through a population left defenseless by their own leadership.

    The testimonies are haunting in their simplicity. One interviewee described hospitals so overwhelmed they classified anyone with fever and cold symptoms as a COVID suspect—not because of sophisticated testing, but because they had no testing capabilities at all. An education worker recounted nursing homes running out of coffins as death tolls mounted. Of the 100 people interviewed, 92 reported that they or someone they knew had contracted the virus.

    This wasn’t mere bureaucratic incompetence; it was willful negligence. The report concludes that if North Korea had told the truth early and accepted international assistance, countless lives could have been saved. Instead, the regime chose to maintain its facade of pandemic-free perfection while its people suffered without vaccines, protective equipment, or even basic medical acknowledgment of their illness.

    The findings illuminate a cruel irony: a government that claims to put its people first abandoned them when they needed protection most. Citizens were left to fend for themselves against a virus their government pretended didn’t exist, turning what should have been a public health response into a test of individual survival.