Mick Hartley

Politics and Culture

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  • Swinging dicks

    This is a perfect example of how the pieties of the Democrats, and the nice polite America they imagine they inhabit, are so easily skewered by the Trump approach. The case was brought by the Korean-owned Olympic Spa, who were appealing against Washington State’s ruling that they had to allow trans women – men claiming to b women – into their women-only spaces. The case was thrown out – with a dissenting opinion:

    A Donald Trump-appointed federal appellate judge invoked the term “swinging dicks” three times in an unusually crass opinion involving a nude, female-only Korean spa, drawing sharp rebukes from 29 of his colleagues.

    “This is a case about swinging dicks,” began a Thursday dissenting opinion from Judge Lawrence VanDyke of the US Court of Appeals. He said he would have ruled in favor of Washington state’s Olympus Spa, which had sought to bar transgender women from its spa facilities on free speech grounds.

    “You may think that swinging dicks shouldn’t appear in a judicial opinion. You’re not wrong,” he wrote. “But as much as you might understandably be shocked and displeased to merely encounter that phrase in this opinion, I hope we all can agree that it is far more jarring for the unsuspecting and exposed women at Olympus Spa— some as young as thirteen—to be visually assaulted by the real thing.”

    He went on to say that it “feels like the supposed adults in the room have collectively lost their minds” and criticized “woke judges’ willingness” to sacrifice constitutional rights “on the altar of ‘social progress.’”

    Unusually crass, no doubt, but very much to the point. The assembled pompous legal minds had collectively decided that the rights of women and girls to have their own space free of male genitalia were of no consequence compared to the rights of men who claim to be women.

    VanDyke’s dissent prompted a harsh rebuke from more than two dozen of his colleagues, who wrote separately to say that the US legal system “is not a place for vulgar barroom talk” and that VanDyke’s dissent “ignores ordinary principles of dignity and civility and demeans this court.”

    Not half as much as their ridiculous decision demeans the court.

  • UK Garages

    The quirky old individual garages are almost gone now, replaced by charmless corporate self-service sites. Photographer Philip Butler captured some of the survivors, and some old relics, before they disappear for ever. From his book 226 Garages and Service Stations.

    As motoring became popular in the early 1900s, the need for mechanical expertise to service, repair, refuel, and sell vehicles soared – and the ‘garage’ was born. From the Mock-Tudor fad of the 1920s via the Streamline Moderne of the 1930s, to the simple Modernist rationalism of postwar Britain, each era has produced a distinct automotive architecture. With the introduction of the Ministry of Transport (MOT) vehicle test in the 1960s, demand accelerated still further. A diverse array of structures was utilised – churches, cinemas, railway arches, fire stations, shops, factories – all proved versatile enough to find second lives as garages.

    Black Cat Garage, Bampton, Devon

    St John’s Garage 1947, Whithorn, Wigtownshire

    Garage, Southbourne, Dorset

    Former Colyford Filling Station, Devon

    Michelin House, Chelsea, London

    Silver Street Garage, Kedington, Suffolk

    Former C B Attride Motor Engineers, Broadstairs, Kent

    Former Athenaeum Service Station, Islington, London

    Former Condor Services, Costock, Nottinghamshire

    Manor Road Garage, East Preston, West Sussex

    Double-S service station, Ashton, Cornwall

    Four Lanes Garage, Marston, Cheshire

    [Photos © Philip Butler]

  • Wasn’t sure about his gender

    Meanwhile, in Melbourne:

  • The Canadian artist

    More here:

    Bogart enjoys tickling various mosses, can eat a lemon slice including peel without flinching, and if they had to be a bird would love to be a swallow. Ben is a settler of Dutch and French ancestry and lives and works on the unceded traditional territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̍əm (Musqueam), Sk̠wx̠wú7mesh (Squamish), and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) First Peoples, also known as Vancouver.

  • Tackling LGBT+ hate crimes

    https://twitter.com/oliviabaileymp/status/2032154723512430645

    Isn’t that lovely? And there, at the back on the left, is Mridul Wadhwa, the disgraced male former head of the Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre, who has special expertise in telling abused woman to “reframe their trauma” if they don’t like talking to men about the horrors they’ve experienced.

    Once again it looks like the T is wagging the LGB dog.

    Added: also trans activist “Helen” Belcher, back right.

    Update: Olivia Bailey’s X post has now been deleted.

  • The voice of Unison

    As I noted yesterday, unions don’t do critical thinking. It’s all about slogans.

  • Islam and race

    We’ve seen those photos of homosexuals hanging from cranes in Iran and those videos of gays being thrown off the tops of buildings by Hamas. Yet we have Gays for Palestine – and, as Douglas Murray notes, a silence from gay publications here and in the US on Iran now.

    The unwritten rule has been there for decades: the fight for gay equality – as for women’s rights – halts at the borders of Islam.

    Why is that, I wonder?

    Somehow Islam has managed to pass itself off as a race, so the social prohibitions which apply to racism have transferred to Muslims – that is, people who hold a set of beliefs, not people of a particular ethnicity. Which is of course the purpose behind the concept of “Islamophobia” as a way of forestalling any criticism of Islam.

    This works partly because it’s simply true in the UK that the majority of Muslims are ethnically from East Asia: Pakistan or Bangladesh. There’s a deeper reason though, which is that, for Muslims, Islam is not merely a belief that they happen to hold, but an essential – the essential – part of their being. As such it’s unchangeable – as race is unchangeable.

    A fundamental principle of Western thought is the separation between a person and their beliefs. This is not a fundamental principle of Islamic thought. Quite the contrary: born a Muslim, you die a Muslim. The notion that you might change your mind is so alien that the punishment for apostasy – in theory, if not necessarily in practice – is death.

    And we seem to have swallowed it.

    Many figures in public life here say they’re Muslim. Off the top of my head I think of Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood, and former ECHR chairman Kishwer Falkner. Are they practicing Muslims? I have no idea, but I’ve seen both, recently, refer to themselves as Muslim. It’s part of their identity – fixed, whether they believe in it or not. Somehow they would never say, no, I’m not Muslim any more – as Christians, by contrast, are so happy to concede about their own loss of faith.

    It seems like the comparison, deliberate or not, is with Jews rather than Christians. Something you’re born as, rather than something you acquire culturally. Can there, then, be such a thing as a secular Muslim, then – as some non-religious Jews call themselves secular? I wonder…

  • Empty slogans

    Was deputy leader Mothin Ali there? I’m guessing not.

  • Compost theft

    Only in North Korea.

    A near-theft of compost painstakingly produced by a side-business work team under the logistics bureau of North Korea’s Ninth Corps headquarters has prompted workers to organize nightly guard rotations at the storage site, Daily NK has learned.

    According to a Daily NK source in North Hamgyong province yesterday, someone arrived at the compost storage site near the Ninth Corps headquarters late on the night of Feb. 21, during the party conference, pulling a cart in an apparent attempt to load and carry away compost undetected. The individual or individuals were caught in the act.

    A single cart can carry more than one ton of compost, so the potential loss could have been significant. Fortunately, those attempting the theft fled the scene as soon as they were spotted, leaving the compost untouched.

    In the wake of the incident, workers from the logistics bureau’s side-business team have been taking turns standing guard at the compost storage site from 9 p.m. to 6 a.m.

    The headquarters logistics bureau runs side-business farming operations using its own workers to secure food supplies for the unit. To meet the fertilizer needs of that farming, the bureau assigns a dedicated team of around five to seven people to compost production.

    The compost that nearly went missing was produced intensively by the side-business team from June through November of last year, with the total quantity amounting to several dozen tons.

    We’re talking here of human compost: that is, human excrement. So the idea of a dedicated team tasked with producing compost does conjure up some unwelcome images.

    They don’t do it all themselves, though….

    “The side-business workers dedicated to compost production spent even the hottest days of last summer going from outhouse to outhouse with buckets strapped to their backs to collect human waste, and scraping ash from waste pits to make the compost,” the source said. “The compost they produce is of such high quality that even when mixed with other ash it passes inspection with ease.”

    What a job.

    The problem, the source explained, is that word has spread that the Ninth Corps headquarters logistics bureau side-business team has been stockpiling high-quality compost, and that has made it a prime target for theft among the broader population, particularly given the annual “compost battle” that kicks off each year at this time.

    As I’ve noted before, the use of human excrement as compost is considered a likely factor in the prevalence of intestinal parasitic worms in the North Korean population.

    The case of the soldier who escaped in November 2017 by running across the demilitarised zone is instructive here. Badly wounded, he was rushed to hospital, where his intestines were found to be full of parasitic worms. The surgeon responsible said that he’d never seen anything like it before outside of textbooks. Other doctors have also described removing various types of worms and parasites from North Korean defectors.

  • In the dustbin of history

    ….every regime that has aligned itself with what she calls “Palestinianism” has ultimately met the same fate.

    Full video.