Mick Hartley

Politics and Culture

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  • Chatham Square and ‘El’ tracks

    Manhattan ca. 1900. "Chatham Square and 'El' tracks, New York City, N.Y."

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

  • The new IOC president

    So Seb Coe didn't make it.

    Zimbabwe's sports minister Kirsty Coventry has been elected as the new president of the International Olympic Committee. The 41-year-old former swimmer, who won two Olympic gold medals, replaces German Thomas Bach – who had held the role since 2013 – and becomes the first woman, the first African and the youngest person to hold the role.

    World Athletics boss Lord Coe was among the favourites to win Thursday's election in Greece, but Coventry secured an absolute majority of 49 of the 97 votes available in the first round of voting.

    Runner-up Juan Antonio Samaranch Jr won 28 votes while Coe secured eight.

    Coventry, who already sits on the IOC executive board and was said to be Bach's preferred candidate, is the 10th person to hold the highest office in sport and be in post for at least the next eight years.

    "Bach's preferred candidate" does not augur well – especially after the farce of the male boxers winning women's gold at the last Olympics with Bach's approval. Coe has been outspoken about his support for fairness in women's sport – which doesn't seem to have won him many friends in the right places.

    On the one hand there's this, from last month:

    The IOC presidential candidate has ignited discussion with her viewpoint on transgender athletes. She advocates a total ban on competitors in categories that match their gender identity, arguing for restrictions based on biological sex.

    As reported by The Telegraph, Kirsty Coventry is calling for strict rules on transgender participation in the Olympics. "Ensuring fairness in women's sport and maintaining the integrity of women's categories is essential," Coventry said. "It is vital that all stakeholders work together on this issue."

    She also pointed to scientific evidence, adding, "This debate is not focused on men's competitions, which underlines the need to protect women's sport. Her comments place her at the centre of the ongoing debate about the participation of transgender people in elite sport. Although she does not agree with the most intransigent views, her support for the ban underlines her commitment to ensuring competitive equality in women's categories.

    Coventry went on to claim that "transgender women have an inherent physical advantage in women's categories, potentially reducing fair opportunities for biological women".

    Which is all very encouraging.

    On the other hand there's this, from Mohamed Keita of the Human Rights Foundation, in today's Times:

    Coventry’s positive international image contrasts with the highly controversial figure and poor-performing minister she has become since crossing into politics in her native Zimbabwe in 2018. It also obscures her role as the soft-power ambassador of one of the world’s longest-ruling and most brutal dictatorships, which has been under UK sanctions for years.

    Coventry belongs to Zimbabwe’s first post-independence generation and no Zimbabwean athlete has come close to her achievements as she swam in five Olympics from 2000 to 2016. She became a national sensation, a symbol of hope for Zimbabweans amid repression and economic collapse. Robert Mugabe exploited her popularity and amid his strident rhetoric against western imperialism and the violent expropriation of farms, he called her Zimbabwe’s “golden girl” and fêted her. Coventry trod carefully, expressing support for positive change, donating some of Mugabe’s prize money to charity, or calling for peace and unity.

    But the 2017 coup that ousted Mugabe and brought to power his deputy Emmerson Mnangagwa marked a significant turn for Coventry. She joined his already repressive government as minister of youth, sport, arts, and recreation. She rejected calls on her to resign in protest at gross human rights violations; she attended ruling Zanu-PF party functions. She was embroiled in a scandal and lawsuit involving farmland seized by Mugabe during the height of his catastrophic land grab.

    The public viewed her as incompetent. Football and boxing were in a dismal state, as were the national stadiums. Fifa banned Zimbabwe for 18 months after the government tried to take control of the country’s football association. Zimbabwean Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) athlete Themba Gorimbo described Coventry as “the worst sports minister ever”.

    Coventry is running for the IOC presidency insisting that “stakeholders must adhere to the highest ethical standards to safeguard the spirit of the Games”. Yet her embrace of one of the world’s most repulsive dictators, her silence at gross human rights abuses and her abysmal performance as sports minister should disqualify her from leading the Olympic movement. Her appointment would be a win for Zimbabwe’s dictator, not for the future of global sport.

    Hmm.

  • Hamas stole the aid


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    Full text:

    “I saw Hamas terrorists carrying boxes with the UN and UNRWA emblems on them into the tunnels, dozens and dozens of boxes, paid for by your government.”

    Will the world listen now?

    Almost certainly not.

  • The first gender-neutral degree ceremony

    Exciting news from Oxford, where moves are afoot to ensure that non-binary students, finally, may not have to suffer the humiliation and embarrassment of a Latin ceremony which includes gendered words. 

    Oxford is set to make an 800-year-old Latin ceremony gender-neutral for the benefit of non-binary students.

    The university has conferred its degrees in Latin since the 12th century, but the wording used could be changed to make it more inclusive.

    Dons will vote on a proposal to change the Latin ceremonial text to cater to those “who identify as non-binary”.

    In a gazette issued to alert faculties to the planned changes, the introduction of the first gender-neutral degree ceremony in Oxford’s almost 1,000-year history is deemed “necessary”.

    The changes involve stripping a Latin message of congratulations of words that are grammatically gendered masculine or feminine.

    This is what progress looks like. 

    Next stop: removing gender from French (and Italian, and Spanish, and German…). They should've done it ages ago. How on earth do non-binary people cope in these ridiculous languages?

  • The gullibility of publicly-funded organisations

    Joan Smith at UnHerd on the Sullivan Review:

    For decades, right up until the late Nineties, the UK had gold-standard data on sex. Not any more: a startling graph in the review shows that questions about sex are now outnumbered by those relating to “gender” and “gender identity”. The responses are worse than useless, except as an illustration of the gullibility of publicly-funded organisations when pressured by entitled activists.

    The Government’s failure to act promptly could hardly be more shameful. Public records have in effect been falsified, creating avoidable risks and exposing organisations to ridicule. What’s more, who will now trust official Government data on important subjects? Worse still, institutions have forfeited trust in a way that makes society less safe for victims of crime.

    But will the government act on this? Streeting has said they will, but couldn't resist adding that gender identity could still be recorded and respected – as though he hasn't quite understood what the problem is. 

  • At the Portland Interscholastic League meet

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    Ooh, he's very fast, isn't he? Compared to the girls, that is. Of course compared to the boys he's not fast at all, and wouldn't win. Which is, presumably, why he goes for the girls' race. Much easier.

    It's astonishing that people don't see this…

  • Streeting takes note

    Streeting responds to the Sullivan Review on the erasure of biological sex by UK bodies like the NHS and the Civil Service.

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    Which is very good news of course – but where is this gender identity of which you speak, Wes? Do doctors need special training to locate it? How do I get to know my gender identity? Or is it just a feely thing taken up and pushed by gender cultists who purposefully play on the ambiguity of the sex/gender distinction to pretend that any male who doesn't conform to male stereotypes has a female gender identity, and any female who doesn't conform to female stereotypes has a male gender identity. The main beneficiaries of this – the main pushers – would appear to be autogynephilic men who get a sexual thrill out of pretending to be women, and can now present themselves as brave pioneers of the trans revolution. The main victims are women, and especially troubled young girls who are sucked into this social contagion and persuaded to ruin their lives in the nonsensical belief that somehow they were born into the wrong body.

    It's regressive nonsense.

  • The erasure of biological sex

    The rot goes deep. From the Times:

    Cancer referrals have been missed and previous convictions overlooked because biological sex has been erased from official data on health, crime and education, a review has found.

    The review, commissioned by the last Conservative government and released on Wednesday, found that the word “gender” started to replace “sex” in the collection of data in the 1990s and that for the past ten years “robust and accurate data on biological sex” has been lost.

    The study, led by Professor Alice Sullivan from University College London, investigated all public bodies and found “the meaning of sex is no longer stable in administrative or major survey data”.

    Sullivan’s review found inconsistencies in the way sex and gender were recorded and conflated. Some official surveys were found to remove sex altogether and only collected information on gender identity.

    This included a Royal Navy sexual harassment survey, which asked how respondents identified rather than asking for their sex “despite its obvious relevance to the subject matter”.

    In another case, a children’s camping programme raised safeguarding concerns through collecting data on gender identity, with male, female and “other” response options.

    Jesus. 

    Some of those interviewed for the study said there was a “hostile environment” in raising the issues within their organisations and Sullivan said that ministers should “consider the vulnerability of government and public bodies to internal activism that seeks to influence outward-facing policy”.

    Sullivan said the Office for National Statistics had “radically changed” how it viewed sex in terms of data collection and recommended that the UK Statistics Authority — which oversees the ONS — should consider launching a review of activism and impartiality within the civil service in relation to the production of official statistics….

    Sullivan said: “This should not be seen as a zero-sum game between characteristics. We can and should collect data on both [sex and gender identity]. Acknowledging sex does not erase gender identity or vice versa.”

    *Sigh*. There is no such thing as gender identity. It's nonsense. It's cult-speak. 

    Sex can be recorded differently across the prison service, while many police forces record sex as the gender given in a gender recognition certificate.

    The review said it meant that data across police forces was not reliable, particularly in patterns of female offending and “the classification of a small number of males within the female category may result in artificial significant increase in female offending rates”.

    Yes, we had noticed. See under "not our crimes", ad nauseam. Isla Bryson, Karen White….the list goes on and on. 

    Maya Forstater, chief executive of the charity Sex Matters, said the review was “devastatingly clear about the harms caused by carelessness with sex data and a decade-long failure of the civil service to maintain impartiality and uphold data standards”.

  • Very good relationships

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  • Thriving on debt he can’t repay

    A smart analysis by Daniel Finkelstein in the Times – Trump’s deals thrive on debt he can’t repay:

    “I don’t do it for the money. I’ve got enough, much more than I’ll ever need. I do it to do it. Deals are my art form. Other people paint beautifully on canvas or write wonderful poetry. I like making deals, preferably big deals. That’s how I get my kicks.”

    With these words Donald Trump opened his bestselling 1987 book The Art of the Deal. And years later, in 2015, launching his bid for the presidency in the lobby of Trump Tower, he referred back to his love affair with negotiation: “We need a leader that wrote The Art of the Deal.”…

    There are three problems with citing his authorship of The Art of the Deal as establishing Trump’s credentials as a president. The first is that he didn’t write it. The book was written by his co-author Tony Schwartz, who suggested the title and the basic idea as a way of writing the memoir Trump had accepted a commission to produce. Trump wasn’t able to write a book; he didn’t even read them.

    Schwartz found Trump to have an almost impossibly short attention span and little interest in explaining himself. The ghostwriter ended up listening in to his subject’s phone calls, which Trump enjoyed because it allowed him to show off. Schwartz was mainly struck by how much lying Trump did.

    Which leads to the second problem: there is very little in The Art of the Deal about the art of deals. What there is Schwartz had to confect. Including the stuff about not being interested in money (an assertion Schwartz laughs at) and all the guff about poetry (“He was incapable of saying something like that. It wouldn’t even be in his vocabulary.”) So Trump did big deals but was not some theorist of negotiations.

    The third problem about The Art of the Deal is that so many of the triumphant transactions it celebrates either never completed or collapsed after they did. Television City and the tallest building in the world weren’t built, the US Football League folded, the Trump Golden Series Cadillac never got beyond a prototype and, famously, his Atlantic City casino enterprise turned into a nightmare of debt that almost finished him off altogether.

    It is also notable that many of the professional and personal relationships he boasts of in 1987 have long since ended in acrimony or court or both. The only ones that have remained consistent are the feuds….

    The thing that most characterises Trump’s business career is that he is a huge borrower, occasionally toppling over into hopeless debt. Sometimes he does this on instinct. He took on one disastrous loan of hundreds of millions of dollars without even setting foot in the business he was buying. A borrower is a better way of understanding him than merely thinking of him as a dealmaker.

    As president of the United States, Trump has inherited a vast amount of power, built up through investment in the military and in political diplomacy. His country has achieved leadership of the free world by establishing alliances and offering security to other nations in return for their allegiance and co-operation. He is now borrowing against that, essentially consuming the US stock of power, friendships and credibility. He is trying to turn those long-term relationships into immediate cash, either by reducing defence expenditure or even forcing former allies effectively to lend to the US at favourable rates. Any risk to liberal democracy he prices very cheaply.

    It is not hard to see why this might prove immediately successful. The US has a lot of power and in a single transaction — you do this or I will impose a tariff on you; you do that or I will stop arming Ukraine — its position is hard to resist. But any real theory of the art of the deal would note that most transactions are not isolated events. They are the result of repeated engagements. And for repeated engagements you require trust. Trump is consuming the trust that so many of his predecessors invested in.

    Once, the Trump casino business was a wonder to behold. But Trump Plaza closed in 2014 and was demolished in 2021, the Trump Marina was sold in 2011 and became the Golden Nugget, and the Trump Taj Mahal closed in 2016. Roll up, roll up — and place your bets on the future of the Trump White House.

    He is, in old parlance, a con-man. A huckster. He talks the MAGA talk, but he's selling all the goodwill the US has accrued over the years in the cause of his own ego.