Mick Hartley

Politics and Culture

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  • Another weak lady brain destroyed by “radicalisation”

    After Stephen Fry's pompous diatribe against JK Rowling, Victoria Smith at UnHerd wonders just who's been radicalised:

    My youngest son has audio versions of all of the Harry Potter books. Given the public pronouncements of a certain artist, I’ve started to find this problematic. True, one can separate the art from the creator, but sometimes the latter’s hateful beliefs infect the former. This is the case when actor Stephen Fry reads the works of brilliant, principled writer J.K. Rowling.

    There’s something in the way he voices each female character, from Hermoine Grainger to Dolores Umbridge, which reeks of misogyny. The way to sound like a woman, in Fry’s view, is to make yourself high-pitched, whiny and annoying, no matter what you have to say. I haven’t banned my son from listening because the books are still wonderful. Nonetheless, every time I hear Fry holding forth, I’m reminded of Liz Lochhead’s poem “Men Talk”: “Women prattle / Women waffle and wiffle / Men talk.”

    And if women are going to keep talking, it seems that the least they can do is shut up about serious issues such as their own existence in law. Fry has become the latest self-appointed man of reason to express dismay at Rowling’s involvement in current debates around sex and gender. Speaking to The Show People podcast, Fry, a man who once told sexual abuse victims to “grow up” and stop being so “self-pitying”, believes that Rowling, a woman who uses her own money to help such victims, has become “cruel” and “mocking”. Then again, he suggests, perhaps she can’t help it.

    “She has been radicalised, I fear,” he told the podcast. “Perhaps by Terfs, but also by the vitriol that is thrown at her.” He added: “I’m afraid she seems to be a lost cause for us.”

    Oh no! Not another weak lady brain destroyed by “radicalisation”!

    Strong echoes of the familiar old vitriol thrown at the suffragettes. And who's this "us" for whom Rowling seems a lost cause? Presumably he's talking about virtually the entire entertainment industry, who've been united in their support of the gender cult, and who throw the most delightful dinner parties.

    The ultimate irony of the “radicalisation” slur is that no one needs to be radicalised into believing the same things everyone on the planet believed 10 years ago. It is darkly hilarious to think that feminists popping champagne corks are held up as examples of damaged, brainwashed bigots, while men who take to the streets calling for their deaths are merely considered to have taken things a bit far in the name of a just cause.

    I doubt that the Stephen Fry who recorded the Harry Potter books could have predicted that one day, he’d be on the side of those men. Still, that Fry’s low-level misogyny always made him vulnerable to radicalisation. Perhaps there’s a way back, but my feeling is he’s too far gone.

  • Breaking into a military site

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  • “Against this murderous sociopathic Zio-American global empire”

    We thought David Miller was bad – but at least Bristol University got rid of him. This guy is a professor of history at California State University, San Bernardino.

  • Men still barging into women’s toilets

    Trans-identified men aren't used to being thwarted in their fantasy lives as "dolls". For the past few years they've been indulged in virtually every way, from using female toilets to competing in women's sport. Well, times are changing – and the men don't like it.

    Jo Bartosch at Spiked:

    Robin Moira White has two rock-solid reasons to steer clear of the ladies’ loos. One, he’s male. Two, he’s a barrister, which means he should know better than to treat women’s toilets like a legal grey area (that happens to have nice hand soap). And yet, last week, the trans-activist lawyer breezed right past the unisex loos in Westminster’s Portcullis House and straight into a female-only space.

    We should have seen this coming. Last month, White told the BBC’s Woman’s Hour that he would keep using women’s spaces, in defiance of the UK Supreme Court’s ruling in April that men should not be able to access female-only facilities. This applies even if those men have a gender-recognition certificate saying they’re a woman. It is outrageous for anyone, let alone a high-profile barrister, to flagrantly contradict the law like this.

    Kate Harris, co-founder of LGB Alliance, and Heather Binning, executive director of the Women’s Rights Network, were at a Women and Equalities Select Committee meeting last week, discussing that very Supreme Court judgment. That was when White, also in attendance, followed them to the ladies’.

    ‘We suspect he knew exactly what he was doing – and that we, of all women, would challenge him’, Binning told me. ‘Kate and I felt we had no choice but to speak up and tell him – a large man who is about a foot taller than either of us – that he should not be there.’

    She found the encounter intimidating, as it was in a small space without cameras or security guards. ‘Silence from other women should not be interpreted by these men as consent [to enter women’s spaces]’, she told me. ‘It is beholden on the rest of the public, the police and employers, to uphold the law and to put practices and policies in place to defend women in society and not to leave it to individual women to take on this role.’

    White is far from alone in flouting the rules, of course. As Harris told me:

    ‘Many male trans activists have expressed their commitment to break the law by continuing to use women’s facilities. This is a form of abuse towards women. The NHS, many MPs, trades unions, universities, schools and a range of public and private organisations have all expressed their willingness to undermine the rule of law by ignoring the Supreme Court ruling. This is unprecedented and should concern all of us who care about liberal democracy. ’

    They do it – many of them – because it's an illicit thrill. They enjoy noting the women's discomfort.

    White has previously claimed he’s not been challenged when entering women’s spaces because people assume he’s female. I’d suggest the real reason is actually that he looks, and sounds, like an entitled bloke. What has hitherto allowed him to go unchallenged isn’t kindness, it isn’t really even courtesy – it’s fear.

    Who wants to be the sales assistant who tells a hulking man in lipstick he’s in the wrong changing room? Or the receptionist who calls a man in a baby doll dress and with a 5 o’clock shadow ‘Sir’? The cost might not only be a job, but one’s front teeth, too….

    This is why institutions – from the House of Commons to high-street banks – are pretending biological sex is complicated. It’s precisely because it isn’t complicated – and they don’t want to offend entitled, bullying men.

    For all my strident views, if I found myself alone with a man like White in the ladies’, I would be hesitant to speak up. Not out of kindness – and not because I’m a coward. But because it’s a risk I simply can’t afford to take.

    The threat of violence is always there – as women know only too well.

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  • ‘Radicalised by TERFs’

    Oh dear. 

    Harry Potter narrator Sir Stephen Fry has turned on JK Rowling, branding her a 'lost cause' and accusing her of being 'radicalised by TERFs'.

    It's the ridiculous Sir Stephen who's showing himself to be the lost cause here, alas.

    The comedian and television presenter, who previously hosted QI, told how he used to have dinner regularly with the author and described her views towards the trans community as 'strange'.

    Recording podcast The Show People last week, Sir Stephen, who is himself gay, said: 'She has been radicalised I fear and it may be she has been radicalised by TERFs, but also by the vitriol that is thrown at her….

    He said: 'She started to make these peculiar statements and had very strong difficult views. She seemed to wake up or kick a hornet's nest of transphobia which has been entirely destructive.

    'I disagree profoundly with her on this subject. I am angry she does not disavow some of the more revolting and truly horrible, destructive violently destructive things that people say. She does not attack those at all.

    'She says things that are inflammatory and contemptuous, mocking and add to a terribly distressing time for trans people.

    'She has crowed at the success of legislation in Scotland and elsewhere declaring things about gender.

    'So I am very happy to go on the record to say that I am really angry about that. My view about all things of sharp and difficult nature is that is is much more important to be effective than to be right.'

    Oh I don't know. It's quite important to be right.

    It's a strange time to come out with this nonsense, with the gender cult clearly on the retreat.

  • De-escalation

    Keir Starmer does his robotic impression of a serious statesman by wittering on about "de-escalation" vis-a-vis Israel and Iran. Eliot Wilson in the Spectator:

    The Prime Minister has clung doggedly to this line since the first reports came through early last Friday morning of massive and coordinated Israeli air strikes on Iran. That afternoon, Downing Street announced that Starmer had spoken to his counterpart in Jerusalem, Benjamin Netanyahu. The read-out was almost a caricature of Starmer’s mugwumpish, hand-wringing approach to public affairs:

    The Prime Minister was clear that Israel has a right to self-defence and set out the UK’s grave concerns about Iran’s nuclear programme. He reiterated the need for de-escalation and a diplomatic resolution, in the interests of stability in the region.

    In other words, the UK fully appreciated and understood Israel’s anxieties and the threats it faced, but would rather, on balance, it did not act to alleviate them because that would only lead to unpleasantness.

    Unfortunately it's not clear how you negotiate with a theocracy led by people who believe in the imminent arrival of the hidden imam, leading to an apocalyptic war of the righteous against the wicked. And who see the destruction of Israel as a religious imperative, while the US and the UK are firmly in the camp of the wicked.

    Israel, the only recognisable liberal democracy in the Middle East, is a long-standing ally of the United Kingdom. It has faced existential threats since its declaration of independence in May 1948. Iran, by contrast, since the Islamic Revolution of 1979, has been definitionally an enemy of the West and of Western interests. The Islamic Republic of Iran does not recognise Israel’s right to exist: Israel’s destruction has been central to Tehran’s foreign policy for nearly 50 years.

    This is not merely an existential threat to Israel. On 5 November 1979, the supreme leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, declared that ‘the Great Satan is America that gathers around other devils blatantly’. Meanwhile, the United Kingdom is ‘the old fox’, a malign agent of intervention which remains an implacable enemy.

    Iran has sponsored Islamic terrorism across the Middle East and around the world: through the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), it has trained, supplied and assisted Hamas, Hezbollah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the Taliban, al-Qa’eda, the Houthi movement, the Mahdi Army, the Badr Organisation, Saraya al-Mukhtar and the al-Ashtar Brigades in Bahrain. It is now also closely tied into the ‘Axis of Upheaval’, or ‘CRINK’: China, Russia, Iran and North Korea.

    The Islamic Republic of Iran is not a state with which the West can have sustainable long-term relations. It funds and foments violence against us and our allies, and it seeks to develop nuclear weapons. It also exercises a potentially devastating control over one of the four or five most important global maritime chokepoints in the Strait of Hormuz, through which a quarter of the world’s oil and a third of its liquefied natural gas must transit.

    Perhaps, then, the Prime Minister should think again. Do we really benefit from the ‘de-escalation’ of a conflict between Israel and Iran in which the early signs are that Israel has delivered catastrophic blows to the Tehran régime’s capabilities and infrastructure? Iran has lost the head of its armed forces, the head of the IRGC and half a dozen other senior military leaders; Major-General Ali Shadmani was appointed to lead the armed forces’ combatant HQ, Khatam al-Anbiya Central Headquarters, after its previous commander, Gholam Ali Rashid, was killed, then was himself killed by an air strike after four days in post. The Islamic Republic is in a critical condition.

    Negotiations to accommodate or constrain Iran have never yielded a long-term solution because such a co-existence is impossible. There is no need for UK armed forces to wade into this fight – we lack any meaningful capacity to do so anyway – but it is hard to see how our interests are not served by an Iranian defeat and, potentially, regime change in Iran. Israel is fighting because it feels it must.

    Explain, Sir Keir, to those of us struggling to understand, how ‘de-escalation’, giving Iran breathing space and halting Israel’s devastatingly effective military campaign, is in Britain’s strategic interests. Iran is on the ropes, and it would be an act of criminal folly to force our way in and offer to mop its brow now.

    Starmer is, on this as on so much else, out of his depth.

    Meanwhile the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, in many ways the driving force of the Iranian regime, is still not proscribed here in the UK despite its well-documented activity here against those opposing the Tehran regime. The excuse is that we need to keep the channels of communication open – advice that could come straight from the  Starmer schoolboy book of international relations.

  • A power gay in Tel Aviv

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  • An era of manifold blessings

    From the Daily NK:

    North Korea is forcing citizens to repeatedly watch a propaganda video called “The Policy of the Workers’ Party Is Good” that catalogues Kim Jong Un’s supposed achievements.

    “Party organizations are scrambling to prepare for the midyear business review and the Central Committee plenary session in late June. They’re putting extra emphasis on studying this propaganda video right now,” a source in South Pyongan province told Daily NK recently.

    The regime created the propaganda video as a follow-up to a song with the same title. Local party branches and neighborhood watch units are being forced to watch it over and over again.

    Workers at a coal mine in Kaechon have been sitting through repeated political study sessions where they watch the video and then write personal essays about it, according to the source.

    Just what you feel like after a long shift down the pit.

    The video promotes Kim’s regional development policy by highlighting projects like the Kangdong county hospital and cultural complex, as well as a coastal fish farm in Ragwon county, as examples of his “loving attention and dedication.”

    “The video calls Kim Jong Un’s leadership an ‘era of manifold blessings’ and claims ‘the dreams of the people are the dreams of our great leader,'” the source explained. “It heaps praise on the party’s regional development policy with phrases like ‘the people’s happiness is endless when policies are filled with love and kindness’ and ‘the people’s destiny is determined by policy.'”

    People are not impressed.

    But North Koreans who’ve watched the video are fed up with both its message and having to view it repeatedly at work and in their neighborhoods….

    What particularly grates on North Koreans is that beyond watching these videos, they’re also expected to write essays demonstrating their loyalty and thanking Kim for his endless work and sacrifices for the people’s happiness.

    “The videos call ordinary people patriots and heroes, but the real goal is getting people to endure their hardships. People have to fake enthusiasm and praise the party’s policies even though their lives stay exactly the same, which just leaves them more exhausted and frustrated,” the source said.

    Well yes.

    The picture accompanying the article – Kim Jong Un posing for a commemorative photo with participants of the Third National Meeting of Active Neighborhood Unit Leaders in March this year – shows another unacknowledged problem…

    Jung-pong

    …the leader's unfortunate body odour. No one dares to mention it.

  • All change at the Ministry of Justice

    From the Telegraph:

    The Ministry of Justice (MoJ) has scrubbed all mention of LGBT, gender and race from its diversity policy.

    The ministry on Tuesday removed all references to “diversity staff networks” based on characteristics and cut reference to the charity Stonewall on a page outlining department-wide equality and diversity policies on its website.

    It instead promised to take an “evidence-based approach” to equality.

    Prior to being updated, the page advertised an array of diversity networks for civil servants based on characteristics including “race, disability, gender, LGBTQI, faith, carers, job sharers, menopause, EU nationals, and parents”…..

    The old policy also said the ministry would take an active approach to “increasing diversity representation at all levels”, promising to “develop interventions” to block any “disproportionate outcomes”.

    The MoJ has now changed the language to remove references to minority groups and scrap claims that it will actively intervene to promote diversity among its workforce.

    The new policy says the department now aims to hire the “widest possible range of geographical, social and career backgrounds”. It also states that officials are focused on “having the best people working in MoJ”, rather than increasing diversity.

    All references to external benchmarks that the department has participated in, including the Stonewall 100 list of the most inclusive workplaces for LGBT employees, have also been removed.

    Sounds good. Though they're not allowing themselves to get too excited about it.

    A Ministry of Justice spokesman said: “These routine changes are being made in line with Civil Service-wide guidelines.”

    Sir Humphrey couldn't have put it better.

  • Martina interview

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    Plus, you know – they're men, for god's sake.

    Full interview here.