Mick Hartley

Politics and Culture

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  • Trans visibility

    The artistic photographs, posted the day after Trans Day of Visibility, have been given a “sensitive content” warning by Instagram, but have been left up on the social media site, despite showing Cain’s genitalia while she stares into the camera.

    At a time when trans bodies are being policed like never before, and politicians are doing everything in their power to strip transgender people of their rights, it feels refreshingly liberating to show the full breadth of the same kind of trans body the Republican Party is trying to criminalize.

    The photos are not overtly sexual, instead they lean into femininity, with a floral bedspread and draped curtains in the background. Other photos in the carousel show Cain in the same corset, but also wearing tight white shorts.

    See also: “The feminine penis is different than the masculine penis”.

  • “Zionist parasites”

  • Putting her personal ambition first

    The indefatigable Baroness Falkner strikes again. From the Telegraph:

    Bridget Phillipson has been accused of blocking guidance on upholding women’s right to single-sex spaces over fears that it could damage her career.

    Baroness Falkner – who drew up the equality law changes – said Ms Phillipson was putting her “personal ambition” before her role as women and equalities minister over fears that pro-trans backbenchers would scupper any chance of promotion if she published the guidance.

    Thursday will mark the first anniversary of the Supreme Court judgment on the definition of a woman, which ruled that trans women are not legally women for the purposes of the Equality Act.

    In a devastating attack on what she described as the Government’s “cowardice”, Lady Falkner said the delay “betrayed” women who have a right to expect that trans women – biological men – are barred from female toilets and changing rooms.

    The peer also accused Sir Keir Starmer of failing to uphold the law on women’s spaces despite being a lawyer himself.

    Lady Falkner, who led the Equality and Human Rights Commission until November, suggested the Government risked making the same mistake over trans rights that it did with grooming gangs by failing to take action for fear of upsetting a minority group.

    She’s not wrong.

    Interview here.

    “For some months now, we’ve been hearing speculation about whether the Prime Minister will continue to be in place, or whether there’s going to be a major reshuffle,” says Falkner. “[Phillipson] is ever ambitious, and I suspect that she doesn’t want to alienate the activist MPs in her party by showing her hand. She was set back by being defeated in her quest to be deputy leader of the party, and she is putting her personal ambition ahead of her role as the minister for women and equalities. That is a very sad and sorry state of affairs for our country in terms of the message it sends about this Government.”….

    And she believes the rot goes right to the top, to Keir Starmer: “You have a Government led by a lawyer, yet he’s unable to uphold the law in its most visible form, which is statutory guidance produced by a regulator – an independent regulator – of that law.”….

    “Britain is, in many ways, at a crossroads with the fragmentation of politics,” she says. “There has to be a long, deep reflection on whether we’re going to continue as a society to uphold what I call muscular liberalism: in that we balance rights, everybody’s rights, properly, and are not afraid of calling out wrongdoing because we’re intimidated by upsetting one group or another.”

  • Those gender-fluid Victorian boys

    From the Telegraph:

    The Bowes Museum in Barnard Castle, County Durham, tells visitors that “gender fluidity” was a feature of 19th-century childhoods because some boys wore dresses up to the age of eight.

    A leaflet produced by the museum claims the fashion trend – known as breeching – was equivalent to the modern phenomenon of gender nonconformity.

    Oh god. It was the fashion then. Far from being a statement about gender fluidity, it was a practical solution to to the problem of faecal fluidity, as it would have been easier then, before the days of elastic, to pull off the breeches rather than unbutton a pair of trousers every time a nappy needed changing. Can we please stop it with this ahistorical nonsense?

    The LGBTQIA+ leaflet is offered to visitors at the museum and art gallery, which opened in 1892, and contains pictures of two boys’ dresses dating to the 19th century.

    “It’s often assumed that gender binaries (the classification of gender into two opposing categories: male and female) have always been strictly enforced and that gender fluidity is a recent development,” it reads.

    “However, this is not true. Throughout history, gender distinctions in children’s clothing were less rigid, especially in early childhood.

    “Both boys and girls commonly wore dresses during infancy and toddlerhood for practical reasons. The transition from dresses to trousers, known as ‘breeching’, marked an important cultural milestone for boys, typically occurring between ages four and seven, depending on family traditions.”

    And depending on the success or otherwise of toilet training.

    Helen Joyce, director of advocacy at Sex Matters, told The Telegraph: “The idea that Victorian children were ‘gender fluid’ because of practicalities relating to clothing is absolute nonsense.

    “The so-called ‘opposing categories’ of male and female, as the museum puts it, are to do with biology and have nothing to do with little boys wearing dresses instead of trousers because elastic was a brand new invention and not widely used.

    “This is the latest example of the cultural sector desperately rewriting history to pretend that the fantasies of gender ideologues aren’t a modern invention.”

  • “The chosen people”

    Your latest Green Party candidate – from the JC:

    The husband of Loose Women star Nadia Sawalha, who is a Green Party local election candidate in south London, has ranted about “the chosen people” posing the biggest threat to the planet, the JC can reveal. 

    Mark Adderley, who is standing in Crystal Palace and Upper Norwood, also suggested some drones fired at Gulf states could be Israeli “false flag” attacks and blamed Benjamin Netanyahu for the Hatzola ambulance attack.

    In a video titled “true cause of the anti-semitic [sic] ambulance attack,” Adderley attributed responsibility for last month’s attack on Hatzola ambulances in north London to the Israeli prime minister.

    “To what extent has Benjamin Netanyahu made the lives of Jewish people all over the world more dangerous by committing a genocide?” Adderley asked.

    In the caption, he added: “Benjamin Netanyahu is single-handedly responsible for endangering the lives of Jewish People THROUGHOUT the WORLD … and just for the record … if a Muslim community had their own Ambulance service we would have never heard the end of it …”

    Five people have now been arrested in connection with the arson attack, which police are treating as an antisemitic hate crime.

    It comes as another Green Party candidate in London reportedly withdrew from local elections after sharing a conspiracy theory about the same incident.

    Tope Olawoyin, posting on her now-private X account, allegedly wrote: “I can say with almost absolute certainty that the men arrested are white, probably even Jewish, because we all know for a fact that if they weren’t their names and pictures would be EVERYWHERE.”

    There seems to be something of a pattern here.

  • LA noir

    The dark side of Los Angeles. Photos from Daniel Sackheim:

    [All images © Daniel Sackheim]

    From his book The City Unseen.

  • Rote learning sessions

    Parroting the words: never mind comprehension. It’s like the faithful memorising the Koran. From the Daily NK:

    North Korea has tightened ideological controls since the Ninth Workers’ Party of Korea Congress. Now, first-quarter Q&A-style ideological review sessions have swept across nearly all institutions and organizations, Daily NK has learned.

    From late March through early April, officials conducted sessions centered on rote learning and recall of key party documents. These included Kim Jong Un’s work report to the Ninth Party Congress, his policy speech at the first session of the 15th Supreme People’s Assembly, and materials tied to the Three Revolutions Red Flag Movement — a nationwide ideological and productivity campaign promoted by the WPK.

    A Daily NK source in Ryanggang province reported on Friday that the evaluations covered “government agencies, enterprises, farms, and schools — almost every type of organization.” Enterprises competed by workplace, farms by work team, and schools by department.…

    North Korea has promoted “putting ideology first” as a guiding principle since the Ninth Party Congress. The push has intensified efforts to monitor and enforce ideological conformity. But critics say the emphasis on performative rote learning — with little regard for genuine understanding — fuels mental exhaustion and quiet resentment among the North Korean people rather than real ideological commitment.

    Well yes, you would think so.

  • America’s broken promises

    Janice Turner, in the Times, on Trump’s failing in Iran:

    American bombers have returned to base and the US president has swerved from apocalyptic threats to calling right-wing commentators “nut jobs”. Negotiations begin, the news cycle turns, the world tentatively starts to memory-hole this deranged six weeks.

    Unless you’re Iranian. There is no ceasefire here, say the regime’s opponents — the vast majority of its people — just a war-hardened elite ever keener to murder its citizens. Not content with a reported 657 hangings this year, the head of Iran’s judiciary, Gholam-Hossein Mohseni-Eje’i, has issued an order to expedite death penalties for thousands held since the January uprisings.

    Prisoners include doctors who treated the wounded. And are overwhelmingly young. What monstrous death cult hangs a teenage wrestling champion like Saleh Mohammadi? One that gunned down as many as 40,000 peaceful protesters; that targets women’s eyes and genitals and rapes virgin girls before execution so they won’t (say believers) go to heaven; that picked off whole families on rooftops with sniper rifles and stormed hospitals to put bullets in the heads of patients on drips. Stacks of body-bags were full of sons and daughters, the girls’ long, black hair tumbling out.

    To many, Iranians looked naive for believing Donald Trump’s promise that America’s “overwhelming strength and devastating force” could provide their “only chance for generations”. What nation welcomes western warmongering, a foreign power dispatching its leader and cheers the bombings in its capital? One that has been occupied by a theocracy for 47 years, where any act against the regime is punished as moharebeh (waging war against God); one that first tried every other means possible and has no other hope.

    While the left demonstrated against America’s war and condemned the killing of children in bombings without mentioning the many more murdered by the mullahs, while it chanted its comfortable clichés, unchanged since Vietnam, it could not compute that outside Iranian embassies across the world the Iranian diaspora — many of them left-leaning and no lovers of Trump — were dancing because the ayatollah was dead.

    Unfortunately for the Iranians, the US president currently directing the war against the Tehran regime is Donald Trump, who appears to have no comprehension of how Iran could be freed. Anything but the total defeat of the theocrats will be seen as – and will be – a victory for them. They don’t care how many Iranians die as long as they remain in power. There’s no deal to be brokered with them: they’re absolutist in their thinking, and utterly ruthless. The wretched people of Iran, suffering and weakened under the mullahs now for over 40 years, simply don’t have the power or the weaponry to seize control. Only US boots on the ground is going to do that – and that’s the one option Trump isn’t willing to consider.

    Iranians are used to America’s broken promises. After Mahmoud Ahmadinejad stole the 2009 election, the Green Movement protests filled the streets and the Islamic regime teetered. Yet President Obama refused to speak out and, according to The Iran Wars by the Wall Street Journal reporter Jay Solomon, told the CIA to end all links with Green activists and wrote personal letters to the ayatollah promising not to undermine his regime. Obama got his nuclear deal but has since said he regrets turning his back on Iran’s democrats, who were soon savagely suppressed.

    Trump’s explicit injunction to the Iranians, that it was “time to take control of your destiny”, makes his apparent abandonment all the more despicable. It is reminiscent of President Bush in 1991 at the end of the first Gulf War saying “the Iraqi people should put Saddam aside” to solve their internal problems and “facilitate the acceptance of Iraq back into the family of peace-loving nations”. This emboldened the Shia in southern Iraq and the Kurds in the north to rise up. But when Saddam brutally crushed both rebellions, the US sat on its hands.

    Why is the world so uniquely quiet about the Iranian regime? The January massacres were several times bigger than the Srebrenica massacres of 8,000 Bosnian Muslims. In fact, since they were conducted during an internet blackout, we have no idea how many died. Many relatives were never told what happened to their loved ones and suspect they were thrown into mass graves. Thousands of others now dread the call from prison to collect the body of their summarily executed child.

    Yet just this week Spain returned its ambassador to Tehran, while Britain still refuses to proscribe the IRGC, a Labour manifesto pledge, despite MI5 dealing with at least 20 plots against Iranian dissidents and British Jews since 2022.

    Well…it’s not over yet. And there are positives. Iran’s proxies – Hamas, Hezbollah – have been severely weakened. And the Arab states are now clear in their hostility to Iran.

  • Seizing the opportunity: Taiwan

    From Niall Ferguson’s article today in the Times:

    …the biggest risk is that President Xi Jinping seizes the opportunity presented by the Iran crisis and challenges the status quo in Taiwan.

    And here we are:

    Xi told her: “Compatriots on both sides of the strait are all Chinese, one family.” He added: “Taiwan independence is the chief culprit undermining peace.” Cheng called her six-day trip a “journey for peace” and invoked the 1992 Consensus. This did not happen by accident. It happened today. The Iran war pulled American military assets out of the Pacific. Carriers, Marines, THAAD, Patriots, all redeployed to the Middle East since February 28. Brookings explicitly identified this as “strategic space” for Beijing. China then used its leverage over Iran (1.5 million barrels per day, Tehran’s largest customer) to nudge Tehran toward the ceasefire. Trump confirmed: “I heard yes” when asked if China persuaded Iran. The ceasefire was the entrance fee for the May 14-15 Beijing summit. Today’s KMT meeting is the pre-summit positioning play.

    The sequence is architectural. China vetoed the UN Hormuz resolution on April 7 (preserving Iran’s leverage and its own intermediary status). China nudged Iran toward the bilateral ceasefire the same day (building goodwill with Trump). China scheduled the Xi-Cheng meeting for April 10 (the day Islamabad talks begin, when US attention is maximally diverted). And the May summit sits five weeks away, where Taiwan language will be tested in a room where China arrives with three diplomatic receipts: we helped you get the ceasefire, we kept the KMT dialogue alive, and we are the only power that can deliver Iran.

    Meanwhile, the KMT-controlled legislature has stalled Taiwan’s $40 billion special defense budget for asymmetric capabilities. The same party whose chairwoman is shaking Xi’s hand today is the party blocking the weapons purchases Washington needs Taiwan to make to sustain the First Island Chain deterrence strategy that underpins US containment of China. Bloomberg reported that Beijing will “use the sitdown to argue that Taiwanese people are in favor of closer ties, sending a key signal to the US.” The New York Times said Xi is using the meeting “to cast Beijing as a peacemaker and squeeze the island’s president.”

    Taiwan produces over 90 percent of the world’s most advanced semiconductors. TSMC commands 72 percent of the global foundry market. A full conflict over Taiwan would erase $10.6 trillion in global GDP in year one. This is not a sideshow. This is the main event wearing a mask…..

  • The UN Committee for Program and Coordination