Mick Hartley

From the Daily NK:

North Korean officials in Nampo are forcing unmarried women over 28 into arranged marriages, declaring that remaining single is a “non-socialist act” that shirks patriotic duty.

A source in South Pyongan province told Daily NK recently that the party committee of Nampo “recently began arranging forced marriages of women over the age of 28, regarding the act of remaining unmarried despite reaching marriageable age a non-socialist phenomenon.”…

The city’s party committee stated that “marriage and childbirth are not private decisions but a question of patriotism, and refusing to marry appears to be a refusal to perform the role a woman should play for the fatherland.” They threatened to “make an organizational issue of people who don’t get married.”

This means young people who intentionally remain single, particularly young women, face political and social disadvantages.

Specifically, the city’s party committee reportedly pressured those refusing marriage by threatening to add their names to labor mobilization lists and classify them as volunteers for work in rural communities, mines, or long-term construction projects.

In response to the Nampo party committee’s policy, the district of Waudo has been arranging forced marriages of unmarried women over 28 since March 19.

Neighborhood watch unit heads and Socialist Patriotic Youth League officials in the district are arranging marriages after compiling lists of unmarried women over 28. Women who refuse are classified as eligible for labor mobilizations as “shirkers of their socialist duty.”

For the benefit of those questioning why fencing has sex categories, have any of you ever watched fencing?

Lunge strength and speed passed you by, did it? pic.twitter.com/yCB7O5iszT

— Emma Hilton (@FondOfBeetles) April 2, 2025

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The case of the Adult Human Female film-makers against the UCU, as reported in the Guardian:

Two academics behind a gender-critical film have taken legal action against their union, accusing it of discrimination and harassment after it campaigned on social media to stop the documentary being screened.

Deirdre O’Neill, a senior lecturer in film studies at the University of Hertfordshire, and Michael Wayne, a professor of media and film studies at Brunel University, describe Adult Human Female as the first UK documentary to look at the “clash between women’s rights and gender ideology/trans rights”.

When a screening was arranged at the University of Edinburgh in 2022, documents before the tribunal said the local branch of the University and College Union (UCU) wrote to the university calling on it to cancel the event, describing it as a “clear attack on trans people’s identities” and denouncing it as “transphobic” on Twitter….

O’Neill and Wayne, who describe themselves as gender critical, believe sex is a matter of biology, that it is impossible for a human to change sex, and that sex is important in a range of different political and social contexts.

They also do not subscribe to gender identity theory, “namely the belief that people are born with an internal sense of gender which may or may not correspond to their biological sex”, the documents state.

Can you believe it? Guardian readers must have been spluttering over their cornflakes reading this. But yes, there are people out there who believe that sex is a matter of biology, that it's important, and that gender identity is not a thing. There are also people out there who believe that 2 plus 2 equals 4, despite the repeated testimony of leading academics and Queer Mathematics theorists that this is a gross simplification based on outdated neocolonialist thinking, and that with a deeper understanding we can see that 2 plus 2 may often, in fact, equal 5.

The real story is that there’s not a newsroom on the planet who hasn’t known this since day one. pic.twitter.com/IuWhQ9d7b4

— Galut Greg🎗️ גלות 流亡 (@ExiledIsraelite) April 2, 2025

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Eastern Blocks II is the latest photobook from Zupagrafika -  a follow-up to the original 2019 Eastern Blocks, expanding their survey of the brutalist aesthetic in the concrete suburbs of the former Eastern Bloc.  

Tbilisi

Prague

Tbilisi

Vilnius

Tallinn

Tbilisi

Lviv

Chișinău

Prague
[Photos © Zupagrafika]

Judith Butler explains why water is not H20: we can tell that the glass contains water without checking it contains hydrogen or oxygen. https://t.co/JXuzSw3Nrh

— Alex Byrne (@byrne_a) April 1, 2025

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From that LRB article:

There are two significant problems with using gametes to define sex. First, no one checks gametes at the moment of sex assignment, let alone at conception (when they don’t yet exist). They are not observable. To base sex assignment on gametes is therefore to rely on an imperceptible dimension of sex when observation remains the principal way sex is assigned. Second, most biologists agree that neither biological determinism nor biological reductionism provides an adequate account of sex determination and development. As the Society for the Study of Evolution explains in a letter published on 5 February, the ‘scientific consensus’ defines sex in humans as a ‘biological construct that relies on a combination of chromosomes, hormonal balances, and the resulting expression of gonads, external genitalia and secondary sex characteristics. There is variation in all these biological attributes that make up sex.’ They remind us that ‘sex and gender result from the interplay of genetics and environment. Such diversity is a hallmark of biological species, including humans.’

This is, in short, nonsense. Jerry Coyne has debunked this stuff ad nauseam – here, for instance, or here.

And here's his take on the Butler LRB article.

Added:

I don't know if Butler was ever smart – but the LRB used to be. Now it runs garbage like this. It is genuinely incredible how gender ideology has turned so many into desperate clowns https://t.co/wVWWtnQawa

— Hadley Freeman (@HadleyFreeman) April 2, 2025

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A man has been inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame. pic.twitter.com/8bRfGWvWru

— Sall Grover (@salltweets) April 2, 2025

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From the article:

Stone, credited with starting the academic field of transgender studies, is also a recording engineer, an artist, and the first known trans woman in the National Women’s Hall of Fame. Around the end of this year, her story will be told in a documentary film.

Stone was inducted into the hall last year along with several other prominent women, such as civil rights icon Ruby Bridges, tennis champion Serena Williams, and scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw.

Earlier inductees, among more than 300 in the hall, include Susan B. Anthony, Jane Addams, Maya Angelou, Hillary Clinton, Angela Davis, Emily Dickinson, Amelia Earhart, Jane Fonda, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Billie Jean King, Wilma Mankiller, Michelle Obama, Rosa Parks, Nancy Pelosi, Sally Ride, and Eleanor Roosevelt. The hall, founded in 1973, is located in Seneca Falls, New York, noted as the birthplace of the American women’s rights movement, having hosted the nation’s first Women’s Rights Convention in 1848.

And now, finally, a man! Well isn't that just wonderful.

“It’s a great honor and a great responsibility,” Stone says of her induction. “Somebody has to go first.”

“Obviously this was an incredibly historic induction,” says Jennifer Gabriel, CEO of the hall. “We were delighted to be able to celebrate her. She does a good job of highlighting the trans community and experiences we all share as women.”

Except – you know – he's not a woman. From his Wiki page we learn that he "underwent gender reassignment" in 1974, in his late thirties. So no, his experience is not one "we all share as women".

This last week from historian Benny Morris in the Telegraph – The West has blinded itself to the suffering of Middle Eastern Christians:

During the second half of 1915, in a giant outpouring of empathy and generosity, many thousands of Americans, organised by the American Committee for Armenian and Syrian Relief, donated millions of dollars to aid the survivors of the Muslim Turkish genocide against Asia Minor’s Armenian communities.

By the mid-1920s, more than £1.5 billion in today’s values had been raised to help the surviving Armenians and those still alive after the Turks went on to destroy the other Christian communities of Asia Minor, the Greeks and the Assyrians. Hundreds of American volunteers travelled to the Middle East and the Balkans to distribute food and set up orphanages, vocational schools and hospitals for the remnants of the once thriving Christian communities.

How times change. The slaughter, between 1955 and 2005, of up to two million black African Christians and animists in southern Sudan by Sudan’s Muslim Arab government – bent on Islamising and Arabising the territory’s non-Muslims – generated little interest or coverage in the Western world….

The steep decline in Christian numbers in the Middle East began with the Ottoman imperial and republican Turkish anti-Christian genocide, though what was to come was already augured in the large-scale massacres of Christians in Lebanon and Damascus in 1860 by their Muslim and Druze neighbours and Ottoman troops.

Before 1894, the year the Ottoman government-ordered anti-Armenian massacres began, Christians represented 20-25 per cent of Turkey’s population. Today they represent less than 2 per cent.

The depletion in Christian numbers and the steady ejection of Christians from the Middle East was driven by the emergence of the anti-Western Arab nationalist movements and their conjunction with Islamic revivalism….

So Western Christians keep their peace in the face of oppression or even genocide in the Middle East – unless, of course, the victims happen to be Arabs, in which case the Western Christian conscience is quickly stirred to righteous protest and rhetoric, and even action.

Unless the victims happen to be Arabs, and the perpetrators are Jews.

As I've said before….

Whoever's doing the PR for Arabs is doing one hell of a job. One of the darkest imperial expansions – across northern Africa as Islam was spread by the sword: ignored or downplayed, as only Western imperialism counts. Look at all those lovely mosques they built! The brutal history of centuries of slavery – black Africans dragged, chained, in camel trains across the deserts to Arabia, and the Barbary Coast raids on northern Europe: only the Atlantic slave trade counts.

And now, largely Arab groups slaughter black Africans and have "slave hunts", with women and girls being rounded up…it doesn't make the news apart from the odd largely ignored report on the back pages. In Gaza, though, the Arabs are the biggest victims ever as the Israelis take strong action to counter the Hamas Islamic jihad against Jews, and the world explodes in protest. It's genocide, they cry.

Nice work if you can get it.

From the Telegraph:

New research shows that Hamas has quietly dropped thousands of deaths from its Gaza war casualty figures.

Salo Aizenberg, from the US-based non-profit organisation Honest Reporting, said that Hamas’s March 2025 casualty update had removed thousands of people it previously listed as having been killed last year.

“Hamas’s new March 2025 fatality list quietly drops 3,400 fully “identified” deaths listed in its August and October 2024 reports – including 1,080 children. These “deaths” never happened. The numbers were falsified – again,” Mr Aizenberg wrote. The casualty lists are released as PDFs by the Hamas-run Gaza ministry of health, which has been cited by international media as a source for fatality figures in the enclave since the start of the war.

Including, notably, the BBC.

A report by the Henry Jackson Society in December said that the number of civilians killed in the Gaza conflict had probably been inflated by Hamas in order to portray Israel as deliberately targeting innocent people.

Andrew Fox, the author of the report, said the latest deletions are likely to have been an attempt by Hamas to retain credibility….

Mr Fox noted that data within Hamas’ lists undermines its claim that most casualties have been civilians.

“The demographics are the most important thing in all this. We’ve heard the claims that about 70 per cent of the deaths are women and children, and these lists, especially the most recent, show that’s complete nonsense,” he said.

About 72 per cent of fatalities aged 13-55 are men, which is the rough age range of Hamas combatants, Mr Fox said. “We know that Hamas uses child soldiers, and these statistics show clearly that Israel is targeting fighting-aged men.”

Magnolias at Golders Hill Park this morning: