Mick Hartley

Politics and Culture

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  • Israel’s “shift to the right”

    Ah yes, it's always the fault of the Jews.

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    It's not like these people had some random "rightward shift"…they were the target of Hamas massacre and genocide. If articles were more clear then they would note that it is Hamas that sought since the 1990s to prevent two states and Hamas singled out the kibbutzim for massacre because Hamas wanted to murder people who believe in peace. Hamas has always sought to murder peace. It did it in the 1990s with bombings, and then the Second Intifada and then after Disengagement.

    It is Hamas that has always been responsible for Israel's "shift" to the right.

  • The thirst for affirmation overwhelms the desire for truth

    Jerry Coyne is vexed that yet another US science journal, Natural History, has jumped on the sex-isn't-binary bandwagon – first by publishing a contentious article by Agustin Fuentes, but then, more worryingly, by arguing that they were right to do so, and Fuentes is correct:

    Note as well that the editors have been taken in by the claim that the variability of “sexual behavior” and of “sexual activity” within and among species show that there is variability in the number of sexes beyond two.  This is a false argument, as anybody who knows biology and isn’t warped by ideology should know.

    What bothers me most about this editorial is the editors’ sanctimonious claim that they are acting “in the public interest” by recognizing the “science” in this debate, but the bogus-ness of that science is all on Fuentes’s side. Shame on you, editors of Natural History. Have you actually followed this debate? How can it be that the Supreme Court of the UK has apprehended and resolved this debate better than do editors of a science magazine.

    A good comment:

    What’s going on here is people presenting positions that they know will be approved by those whose opinions they value. It’s the same as intelligent Christians who use their ingenuity in defending silly doctrines, in order to be in good standing with their community.

    For a short while – a couple of centuries, maybe – there was a dominant ideology among intellectuals that you should follow logic and evidence wherever they led, and if you were howled down for your heterodox views, then fine. That ideology is ebbing away, to my great regret. Young people are far less likely to hold it. Perhaps it’s the result of social media? Anyway, I know from personal experience that whenever I go to a philosophy conference, the younger people there will advance what they deem to be the most progressive positions, and if they consider objections, it will be in a cursory manner, with the aim of dismissing them.

    It’s more important for Fuentes, and the editors of Natural History, to be in the right camp – the camp that disagrees with traditionalists and Trump – than to follow the evidence. The thirst for affirmation overwhelms the desire for truth, I’m afraid.

    It's the same as the proud "right side of history" boast. Never mind the argument and the science, it's all about being seen as progressive and virtuous.

    Also, what she said.

  • Pretending to believe these things has become an elitist badge of virtue

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    In light of recent open letters from academia and the arts criticising the UK's Supreme Court ruling on sex-based rights, it's possibly worth remembering that nobody sane believes, or has ever believed, that humans can change sex, or that binary sex isn't a material fact. These letters do nothing but remind us of what we know only too well: that pretending to believe these things has become an elitist badge of virtue.

    I often wonder whether the signatories of such letters have to quieten their consciences before publicly boosting a movement intent on removing women's and girls' rights, which bullies gay people who admit openly they don't want opposite sex partners, and campaigns for the continued sterilisation of vulnerable and troubled kids. Do they feel any qualms at all while chanting the foundational lie of their religion: Trans Women are Women, Trans Men are Men?

    I have no idea. All I know for sure is that it's a complete waste of time telling a gender activist that their favourite slogan is self-contradictory nonsense, because the lie is the whole point. They're not repeating it because it's true – they know full well it's not true – but because they believe they can make it true, sort of, if they force everyone else to agree. The foundational lie functions as both catechism and crucifix: the set form of words that obviates the tedious necessity of coming up with your own explanation of why you're one of the Godly, and an exorcist's weapon which will defeat demonic facts and reason, and promote the advance of righteous pseudoscience and sophistry.

    Some argue that signatories of these sorts of letters are motivated by fear: fear for their careers, of course, but also fear of their co-religionists, who include angry, narcissistic men who threaten and sometimes enact violence on non-believers; back-stabbing colleagues ever ready to report wrongthink; the online shamers and doxxers and rape threateners, and, of course, the influential zealots in the upper echelons of liberal professions (though we can quibble whether they're actually liberal at all, given the draconian authoritarianism that seems to have engulfed so many). Gender ideology could give medieval Catholicism a run for its money when it comes to punishing heretics, so isn't it common sense to keep your head down and recite your Hail Mulvaneys?

    But before we start feeling too sorry for any cowed and fearful TWAWites who're TERFy on the sly, let's not forget what a high proportion of them have willingly snatched up pitchforks and torches to join the inquisitional purges. Call me lacking in proper womanly sympathy, but I find the harm they've enabled and in some cases directly championed or funded – the hounding and shaming of vulnerable women, the forced loss of livelihoods, the unregulated medical experiment on minors – tends to dry up my tears at source.

    History is littered with the debris of irrational and harmful belief systems that once seemed unassailable. As Orwell said, 'Some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals believe them.' Gender ideology may have embedded itself deeply into our institutions, where it's been imposed, top-down, on the supposedly unenlightened, but it is not invulnerable.

    Court losses are starting to stack up. The condescension, overreach, entitlement and aggression of gender activists is eroding public support daily. Women are fighting back and winning significant victories. Sporting bodies have miraculously awoken from their slumber and remembered that males tend to be larger, stronger and faster than females. Parts of the medical establishment are questioning cutting healthy breasts off teenaged girls is really the best way to fix their mental health problems.

    One seemingly harmless little white lie – Trans Women are Women, Trans Men are Men – uttered in most cases without any real thought at all, and a few short years later, people who think of themselves as supremely virtuous are typing 'yes, rapists' pronouns are absolutely the hill I'll die on,' rubbing shoulders with those who call for women to be hanged and decapitated for wanting all-female rape crisis centres, and furiously denying clear and mounting evidence of the greatest medical scandal in a century.

    I wonder if they ever ask themselves how they got here, and I wonder whether any of them will ever feel shame.

  • The photographer’s train

    Ca. 1901. "Near Franklin, New Jersey." The Detroit Photographic Special – William Henry Jackson's traveling photographic studio-salon – being pulled by a Delaware, Lackawanna & Western locomotive.

    image from www.shorpy.com
    [Photo: Shorpy/William Henry Jackson]

  • “Impossible to implement”

    More union opposition to the Supreme Court ruling:

    Civil servants have defied official trans guidance from the equalities watchdog.

    The Public and Commercial Services (PCS) union said interim advice issued by the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) was “not fit for purpose”.

    …the PCS said the guidance was “damaging” and “impossible to implement” in a statement from Fran Heathcote, its general secretary, and Martin Cavanagh, its president.

    “The current interim guidance published by the EHRC is clearly not fit for purpose and is damaging in its advice, and will be impossible to implement,” the union said.

    “PCS is committed to a thorough response to the announced consultation and campaign that any guidance issued puts support and dignity for all at its heart.”

    The union said it was “carefully considering” its own policies in light of the ruling to make sure they were “fully inclusive”.

    “As an equalities-focused union, PCS remains steadfast in promoting and championing the workplace rights of women, trans, and LGBT+ workers,” it said.

    Maya Forstater, chief executive of Sex Matters, said civil servants who believed the ruling was “impossible to implement” should resign.

    “PCS’s furious reaction to the EHRC’s interim guidance on the implications of the Supreme Court judgment for single-sex services and spaces reads more like a statement from a men’s rights group than one from a Civil Service union concerned to uphold the rights of all its members, including women,” she said.

    “The judgment painstakingly considered how the Equality Act protects everybody’s human rights and the EHRC’s advice accurately reflects this.

    “Civil servants who find a law that was passed by Parliament in 2010 ‘impossible to implement’ because of their own fringe belief system should resign and stop collecting a public salary.”

    Well quite. It's the law. Even civil servants – especially civil servants – can't defy the law.

  • The riddle of “TERF Island”

    Mind you, those "not in our name" feminists have nothing on the righteous fury about the Supreme Court ruling over at The Nation:

    Try as they might to wrap themselves in the antifascist flag, though, these activists are hailing a decision that represents a ghoulish culmination of fascistic “family values” agitation in women’s name—something it achieves by stomping on a tiny, ultra-vulnerable minority.

    This is nothing new, either; for over two decades, at the highest levels of Britain’s state and cultural establishment, the articulation of cissexist policy has flowed not only from antifeminist politicians’ lips but also from trans-exclusionary radical feminists (TERFs), who have used every conceivable queerphobic and fascist trope against trans women—pervert, groomer, pedophile, fetishist, rapist, barbarian, deceiver, interloper, parasite—to achieve their end….

    The decades-long coordinated attack on trans rights paves the way for the unraveling of the Equality Act as a whole, and the dismantling of every (limited but important) legislative gain for social justice achieved since 1998’s explosive “Lawrence Inquiry” into institutional and police racism in the UK. The playbook is now all set to merge with the American one “defending women against gender ideology extremism” (per the White House’s executive order of January, which seeks to make human sexuation, as it were, great again).

    Hitherto, to suggest as much has typically incurred incandescent indignation on the part of feminism’s Brexiteers—the self-styled anti-woke left-liberal single-issue cissexists whose reactionary brand has long been hegemonic in the UK. This camp has long promoted itself as profoundly un-American. But, increasingly, its hatred of the Black, abolitionist, gender-abundant, utopian international left supersedes its patriotism, leading it to align itself with MAGA (unlikely inheritor of the “true” feminism the left abandoned) without shame….

    Preferring the term “gender-critical,” 21st-century TERFs have protested for years that TERF is a misogynistic slur; still, the more of British society they’ve captured, the more they’ve grown content with the moniker. “Welcome to Team TERF,” gloats UnHerd every time an A-lister turns transphobe. “2023 is the year of the TERF,” declares the far-right rally Let Women Speak. “We will fight,” jokes Rowling in another revealing effort to claim Churchillian glory for her cause, “on the beaches of TERF Island.” The copious “strong borders” imagery readily reveals TERFism to be a female cultural nationalism or sexual nationalism, premised—Brexit-style—on the securitization of the tacitly white and innocent body politic against dysgenic gender “refugees.”

    The pogrom-inciting tenor of what has been called “the trans debate” was normalized from the get-go by feminism’s moral alibi and the nepotism of Britain’s commentariat class. The hyper-respectability of many of its ringleaders surely didn’t hurt, either. Helen Joyce, one of the most influential trans-annihilationists currently heralding the Supreme Court decision as a personal win, is a former editor at The Economist. Her buddy the celebrity anti-trans philosopher Kathleen Stock is a royally honored academic. Rowling, of course, is a national treasure. Meanwhile, the publishing industry has glutted itself on trans-“skeptic” books just asking questions—not just by Joyce and Stock—and these all receive rave reviews in the UK Guardian. (Back in 2018, the US office of that newspaper was even moved to denounce its British counterpart over its participation in the self-styled “feminist” moral panic.)

    The riddle of “TERF Island” continues to intrigue those international onlookers who intuit feminism and transphobia to be opposites. Unlike the supposedly very different—crassly “polarized” and “partisan”—makeup of the American fight for trans rights, in Britain it’s a point of pride that genteelly genocidal anti-gender-ism cuts across Conservative, Labour, and feminist milieus.

    Phew. "A ghoulish culmination of fascistic “family values” agitation"; "trans-annihilationists"; "pogrom-inducing"; "genteelly genocidal". I think we get the point.

  • Unequivocally rejecting

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    Here's the letter: Not In Our Name – Feminist Academics and Educators Speak Out.

    We unequivocally reject the idea that women can be defined by their biology, a claim which is neither feminist nor scientific. For centuries, women have fought for the right to do, wear and be what they want to be. It is essentialist and patriarchal to assert that body, genes, chromosomes and reproductive capacity make women (or men).

    Feminism teaches us that our body does not determine our destiny, and nor should legislation, policies, or society's expectations.

    Trans people are being used as scapegoats and a distraction from the problems that we actually face in society. This is an attack on trans people and will further inflame transphobia. When the Supreme Court ‘clarifies’ (cf. Supreme Court, 2025, pg. 76) what a woman ‘is’ they enforce the idea that all women need to conform to a singular, racialised and ableist model of femininity.

    They can't quite get their heads around the idea that woman can be – are – defined by their biology, but that this in no way defines how women present themselves, or dress, or behave, or think. Years of Gender Studies, Queer Theory, and reading Judith Butler can do that to you.

  • The bonkers Greens

    The Greens have done well in the local elections. Nothing new there: a lot of people tend to vote Green when uninspired by the main parties, believing themselves to be voting "for the planet". If only. Julie Bindel in the Spectator:

    In recent years, the party has gone bonkers: it has become obsessed with supporting policies likely to appeal to idealistic, upper-middle-class sixth formers before they grow up.

    Green party candidates have said they want to decriminalise the entire sex trade. The party also wants guidance issued by the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) in the wake of the Supreme Court’s ruling to be withdrawn. Denyer told the BBC this week that the guidance puts trans people at risk of discrimination. But what about women?

    They don't care.

    The Green’s record on women’s rights is disgraceful. In 2019, its Regional Council (GPRC) announced the appointment of two co-chairs, describing them as ‘Self identifying Non-Male Co-Chair: (female)’ and ‘Self identifying Non-Female Co-Chair: (male)’.

    The party explained that ‘to specify that the chairs must be a “man” and a “woman” would exclude people who have non-binary or other identities, and we want the roles to be open to everyone.’ I asked if they would also advertise for ‘non-male non-heterosexuals’, to ensure that lesbians were not excluded. I’m still waiting to hear back.

    The Green party leadership has long capitulated to the trans Taliban. But, in the process of doing so, it has forgotten its original purpose: to protect the environment.

    ‘The planet is burning,’ a senior Green party member told me, ‘but you would think they would pay more attention to that than bloody pronouns.’ Unfortunately, that hasn’t been the case – as the Green’s new supporters are about to learn the hard way.

    They've also shown themselves more concerned with promoting a hatred of Jews and of Israel than with saving whales, with the election last year of Green Party councillor Mothin Ali in Leeds, amongst others…

    The Green Party faces a showdown with Lord Mann, the government’s independent adviser on antisemitism, over the conduct of councillors newly elected under its banner.

    One who shouted Allahu akbar (God is greatest) and described getting a seat on Leeds city council as a “win for the people of Gaza” had previously been involved in the harassment of a Jewish university chaplain driven from his home.

    Two who won seats in Bristol had been involved in social media posts which led the city’s Labour Party to fear that the Greens were becoming a haven for antisemitism.

    A Peterborough Green councillor has also been shown by the Jewish press to have made insulting anti-Israel comments….

    The new face of the Green Party, which has traditionally been involved in campaigning to save hedgerows and improve air quality, came as a surprise to observers of last week’s local elections.

    Three of the four councillors whose activities have raised cause for concern were previously Labour supporters or activists, raising the likelihood that Jeremy Corbyn fans have been migrating to the Greens and changing their culture.

    Mothin Ali, wearing a keffiyeh, the scarf symbolic of Palestinian resistance, celebrated his victory in Leeds by raising his arm in the air and saying: “We will not be silenced. We will raise the voice of Gaza. We will raise the voice of Palestine. Allahu akbar!”

    The Greens have, sadly, become a haven for nutters.

  • Promoting an “our things are best” sentiment

    Laundry soap that doesn’t clean, toothpaste lacking flavor, toothbrushes too stiff. It's a losing battle. 

    North Korean authorities are restricting the distribution of foreign products in markets while encouraging the sale of domestically produced items. However, people are responding coldly to these locally made goods.

    A source in South Pyongan province recently informed Daily NK that Pyongsong’s commerce department issues monthly directives requiring vendors to prioritize domestic products. The source explained that earlier this month, local market management offices were instructed to restrict the promotion and widespread distribution of foreign goods, while requiring domestic products to be prominently displayed for customers.

    This move appears to be an attempt to counter the widespread preference for foreign goods among North Koreans by promoting a “our things are best” sentiment….

    Despite these efforts, consumers remain unimpressed with domestic products. Local residents generally recognize that many so-called domestic items primarily consist of imported components repackaged as North Korean goods. Many dismiss the government’s “our things are best” campaign as unrealistic propaganda that ignores quality issues.

    Citizens also complain about the few decent domestic products being prohibitively expensive and limited in quantity. North Korean instant noodles, for example, are priced similarly to Chinese versions but are less popular due to inferior taste and texture. Recently produced necessities like soap, toothpaste, toothbrushes, shampoo, and conditioner from local factories are also widely rejected for their poor quality.

    The source reported that laundry soap doesn’t clean effectively, toothpaste lacks flavor, and toothbrushes are too stiff—all contributing to the negative reputation of domestic goods.

    Furthermore, people criticize the corruption surrounding these directives, as merchants routinely bribe market supervisors to avoid compliance. Vendors often display domestic products for show while secretly selling foreign goods behind the counter.

  • Grassroots

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    In full:

    This legal victory was won by small grassroots organisations taking on the Scottish government, the Equalities watchdog and a huge NGO from their living rooms – one while running a farm!

    Reminds me of this quote:

    "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed, citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has" – Margaret Mead