Mick Hartley

Politics and Culture

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  • Not suitable as an educational resource

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  • “Stricken with grief”

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  • What about the girls?

    Teenage boys are the hot topic now, after the Adolescence storm. It was a girl who was killed, though. Joan Smith at UnHerd:

    A third of teenage girls don’t feel safe at school. That’s the headline finding from new research, showing that the proportion has more than doubled in four years. In 2019, 15% of year 9 girls felt unsafe, compared to 34% in 2023. The fact that girls as young as 13 are scared of going to school should surely shame a civilised country.

    The experience of teenage boys is a hot topic at the moment, thanks to the Netflix drama Adolescence. The Prime Minister has an embarrassing habit of making policy based on what people happen to be talking about at any given time. And while the programme has focused attention on the plight of young boys being infected by the misogynistic ideologies of online influencers like Andrew Tate, the real victim of the show is the young girl who is stabbed to death as a result.

    Adolescence 2, perhaps? The girl's tale. That might make the PM take notice.

    That message is only reinforced by the push for “gender neutral” toilets, removing a single-sex space where girls could take refuge. Schools are clearly failing young women. Do we have to wait for another Netflix series before ministers decide that making schools safe for them is an urgent priority?

  • A sunny day in Hot Springs

    Hot Springs, Arkansas, 1906. "Central Avenue South."

    image from www.shorpy.com
    [Photo: Shorpy/Detroit Publishing Company]

  • “The idea that it taps into some sort of universal experience of white British teenage boys…”

    Further to On Adolescence – from the Telegraph:

    When Antoinette Keane – a teacher and the mother of two teenage boys – overheard her colleagues talking excitedly about playing the smash-hit Netflix drama Adolescence to pupils, she was alarmed.

    Keane teaches English and has spent her career showing children how to sort fact from fiction and understand the concepts of bias and perspective. And yet, amid the breathless reactions to the show from the Prime Minister down, she believes a dangerous narrative is being spun that Adolescence has uncovered some sort of truth about boys.

    The four-part drama follows Jamie Miller, a 13-year-old who is arrested for murdering a schoolmate, Katie, after he has been radicalised online. Over the course of the undeniably compelling series, we watch as police visit the local comprehensive, a psychologist evaluates Jamie in prison, and his parents cope with the devastating aftermath of his actions. Tens of millions of people have watched it worldwide – including Sir Keir Starmer, who has now decreed that it should be shown in schools around the country.

    “As a piece of fiction it is very good,” says Keane, “but as the mother of white British teenage boys, I am very against the idea that it taps into some sort of universal experience of white British teenage boys – I live and work with them and can tell you that is simply not the case. If we show it in schools, we are saying we believe that this is who they are.”

    For Keane, there are a number of further problems. Firstly, we are exclusively engaged in Jamie’s world, rather than Katie’s. “It is his story, his challenges, his family, his voice,” she says. “Her voice is erased – that was a creative choice they made, and in terms of art, it works very well, but it is a disaster as an educational resource.”

    She also believes that a drama with a damning view of education probably shouldn’t be shown in schools. “In the second episode, there is only one competent teacher,” she says. “The others are putting on videos instead of teaching, while the well-meaning but ineffective head teacher doesn’t instil any confidence. Nobody stops or changes or guides pupil behaviour. Not only is this not fair – there are good, nurturing teachers everywhere – but if you show this in a school, you are undermining yourself as you do so. You are saying, ‘We are powerless’.

    We, the teachers, are powerless – and you, young lads, are potential scum. Give you access to social media and you turn into killers.

    ”Ultimately, what we should have learnt by now is that education by television rarely works. “Adolescence is an incredible piece of storytelling that has opened a lot of people’s eyes to the issues of sexism and misogyny amongst young people,” says Sean McGrath, a director who has written a play about trauma and consent that is now performed in schools around the country.

    “But we must remember that [Adolescence] was written to inform and influence an adult audience, and in my opinion, is not age-appropriate for young teenagers. Showing it in schools is a bit like using Schindler’s List to teach Year 7s about antisemitism, or Requiem for a Dream to warn them about drugs – powerful, yes, but not created with the developmental, emotional, or psychological needs of young people in mind.”

  • A defamation masquerading as a statistic

    We heard earlier in the week that Hamas had removed thousands of deaths from its Gaza casualty figures – a good proportion of them children. Brendan O'Neill in the Spectator: 

    Are we being lied to, or at the very least misled, about what’s going on in Gaza? It increasingly seems so. Israel is carrying out a genocide, cries the activist class. Its pummelling of Gaza is one of the most barbarous onslaughts against civilians in history, they say. New research suggests these feverish claims have no basis in truth. What Israel’s voluble haters call ‘mass murder’ is in fact a pretty normal war….

    It is the demographics of the death count from Gaza that are most telling. Studies – unbiased ones, that is – suggest that up to 72 per cent of the fatalities aged 13 to 55 are men. This backs up Israel’s claim that it is targeting fighting-age males (Hamas deploys even very young males to carry out its terror). The West’s noisy Israelophobes frequently say that as many as two-thirds of the dead in Gaza are women and children. There’s no evidence for this. It’s a defamation masquerading as a statistic.

    No sane person denies that the war in Gaza has caused enormous suffering, including for civilians. It is a moral outrage that Hamas brought this tragedy onto the Palestinian people with its fascistic assault on Israel on 7 October 2023. Yet the story we so often hear about Israel’s war – that it is uniquely murderous, a genocide, a bloodlusting assault on women and children – is just not true. It is heavy on hysteria and light indeed on facts.

    We’ve now had a year-and-a-half of the most unhinged animus for Israel. On our streets, on our campuses and most unforgivably in our press, the cry has gone out: Israel is one of the most murderous nations in history. One can’t help but hear the echo of old, dark bigotries in this curious loathing for Israel. The idea that the Jewish nation is inherently genocidal, that it targets children for ‘bloodletting’, resuscitates the medieval calumny that treated the Jews as a child-sacrificing race.

    When the fog of war clears, we’ll need a reckoning with how the activist class and the media talked about this conflict. Why they so rarely mentioned the deaths of Hamas militants. Why they depicted a war on an army of anti-Semites as a slaughter of civilians. Why they engaged in the shameful moral inversion of calling Israel’s fightback against genocidal terrorists a ‘genocide’. Too many have made themselves the Lord Haw-Haws of Hamas, foolishly spreading its lies about the war and its libels against the Jewish state.

    The BBC still reports every communication on casualties from Hamas as front page news. 

  • The misogynistic finger of the trans movement

    More women are now casting off the old "heroin chic" look of the Kate Moss era, and use gyms as men do – to get fit and to put on some muscle. Jean Hatchet at the Critic applauds the change but notes onr big problem:

    Unfortunately, as in every other area of women’s public lives, where there is such progress for women, the misogynistic finger of the trans movement has poked its way into a tiny crack in policy, so that men pretending to be women can demand that women accommodate their incessant need for validation.

    Most commercial gyms have separate changing rooms for men and women but when anything has the label “woman” placed upon it, it becomes an object of intense desire for the men who pretend to be women.

    A female changing room in a gym is irresistible for these men, and most of the major UK gyms have come under pressure to implement policy which allows men into women’s changing rooms. Much of this pressure appears to have come from one specific company.

    The group “UK ACTIVE” have produced trans inclusive guidelines which encourage front line staff in gyms and leisure centres to “assist trans people to access leisure centres”, but which actually deny women’s right to single-sex changing space and “assist” men in getting naked in front of women and children.

    Fearful of censure, or complicit with the group’s aims, gyms and leisure centres have complied almost universally with these guidelines. Now if women want to change and shower at the gym, their safety, privacy and dignity are compromised. The cruel advice from UK Active is, “a trans person should be permitted to use whichever single-sex area they choose”.

    Objections will not be tolerated:

    The Orwellian direction to gyms from UK Active is that:

    You should adopt a zero-tolerance policy on any transphobic behaviour from staff or facility users … be prepared to challenge transphobic language, attitudes and behaviours. Explain your and their requirements within the law to the person objecting and affirm that you will be supporting your trans facility users. In terms of education other facility users direct them to literature online, link them with a local LGBT association or perhaps even consider running workshops.

    The idea that women will be policed, bullied and silenced if they don’t comply with accepting men in their changing rooms is nothing short of horrifying.

    It's reminiscent of the Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre farrago, when former (male) boss Mridul Wadhwa gave his opinion that rape victims unwilling to be seen by men (trans women) should be challenged on their prejudices, and made to "reframe" their trauma. So many people – well, men – so keen to tell women what they're doing wrong. And, usually, it's about not letting men get what they want. 

  • Islamist jails

    This is very depressing. From the Times:

    Prisoners who refuse to join radical Islamist gangs are having to be placed in segregation units for their own safety, The Times can reveal.

    Officers at HMP Frankland in Co Durham, one of the highest-security jails in Britain, are keeping vulnerable prisoners apart from Islamic extremists in an effort to maintain order and discipline.

    The jail has become so overrun with Islamic gangs that its “terrorist separation centres”, built to stop terrorists from radicalising other prisoners, have become obsolete.

    Instead, other prisoners are forced into the isolation units to protect them because they are at risk of being attacked and face death threats if they refuse to join the gangs.

    The prison has been accused of appeasing fundamentalists amid a power struggle between radical Islamists and other inmates that is mirrored in many British jails.

    The most dangerously influential Islamist prisoners, deemed at a high risk of radicalising others, were supposed to be isolated within these terrorist separation centres. Now though it seems that the Islamists outnumber the rest, so they control the prison while those brave few unwilling to proclaim their allegiance to jihad populate the separation centres. How on earth could it have come to this?

    A report in 2022 by Jonathan Hall KC, the independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, found that terrorists had been able to seize control of wings and set up sharia courts in some prisons in England and Wales without resistance from prison staff, who were afraid of being accused of Islamophobia if they intervened.

    Ah yes. That's how.

    He found that Islamic extremists had sought to dictate the diets and washing habits of non-Muslim prisoners and had set up sharia courts to deliver punishments such as flogging.

    They escaped punishment by arguing that their prison cells did not come under the jurisdiction of terrorism laws.

  • On Adolescence

    Simon Evans at Spiked on the extraordinary establishment fixation with Adolescence:

    Alongside the ubiquitous demands for more social-media censorship, moves are now afoot to make Adolescence not merely free to view in British schools, as Netflix has just agreed to do, but also compulsory. It’s only a matter of time, surely, before it replaces the footy in pubs, barber shops (ones that actually cut hair anyway) and cab offices up and down the country. Anyone attempting to buy anything sharper than a spatula from Amazon might soon have to watch a few edited highlights of the show and answer a short questionnaire.

    Meanwhile, LBC found a new angle on Adolescence to pursue this week. When Tory leader Kemi Badenoch pointed out to presenter Nick Ferrari that it is a work of fiction, and that there are more pressing issues to worry about, Ferrari suggested that for a politician not to have watched it might be regarded as a ‘dereliction of duty’. His LBC colleague, James O’Brien, went even further. ‘The idea that you would have swerved this programme is unthinkable’, he said. ‘It’s not just the ignorance and the blithe arrogance that’s offensive, it’s the revelling in it’, he despaired, his face like a bag of bewildered offal. O’Brien looked as if he suspected her of not having seen Paddington 2, either, but on this he bit his lip.

    Badenoch does seem to have grasped something important that has eluded many others – namely, that ‘the story on which it is based on has been fundamentally changed’, as she put it. Co-creator Stephen Graham has said that one of the real-life incidents that inspired Adolescence was a ‘young girl in south London who was stabbed to death at a bus stop’ – a reference to the 2023 murder of Elianne Andam by Hassan Sentamu in Croydon. Everyone knows that this had nothing to do with the manosphere, and that the backgrounds of the perpetrator and victim were very different from the characters in Adolescence.

    The establishment left is increasingly dependent on fiction – whether novels, films or TV dramas – to tell the story it wants to, to obscure inconvenient facts and to drive the discourse it wants to hear.

    The undoubted excellence of the acting, and the technical triumph of those episode-length single shots, seem to have seduced everyone into thinking that this must then be showing a powerful truth. As Kemi said though: it's not real, and it's not even an accurate portrayal of what's happening with these stabbings.

    It's fiction.

  • The New York Dyke March

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    Full text:

    Organizers of the New York Dyke March, one of the largest LGBTQ Pride events for women worldwide, have announced that anyone identified as a “Zionist” will not be allowed to participate in this year’s march, scheduled for June 28.

    Once again, “Zionists”—and let’s be clear, that means Jews—are being ostracized and excluded.

    It’s alarming that the LGBTQ community isn’t pushing back against this. A community founded on inclusion and acceptance now has factions that want to exclude an entire group of people.

    The march didn’t ban Russians after the war in Ukraine. They didn’t ban Americans after the Iraq War. They didn’t ban Syrians during the civil war. They didn’t ban Iranians for their oppression of women or for hanging thousands of young people.

    And they didn’t ban Palestinians for executing gay men in Gaza and the West Bank, like Ahmad Abu Marhia, 25, who was beheaded for his sexuality.

    But they have no problem banning Jews.

    Well, I’m a liberal gay Zionist Mizrahi Jewish Israeli man. And I’m proud of every one of these identities.

    I won’t hide any of them to fit into a march that claims to be inclusive.

    Yes, it's inclusive alright:

    Any person who identifies as a dyke is welcome to march regardless of gender expression or identity, sex assigned at birth, sexual orientation, race, age, political affiliation, religious identity, ability, class, or immigration status.

    Just not Jews.