Mick Hartley

Every once in a while there's a moment that stops you. This is one of them.

Vance not only fails to recognize that Vladimir Putin's Russia — after years of wanton destruction and killing, assiduously documented — is very obviously "the bad guy," but he's willing to mock those… https://t.co/4QlE5B2EZI

— Stephen Hayes (@stephenfhayes) October 25, 2024

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This, from Arty Morty, is well worth a read – There are no trans kids, only kids confused about sex:

Extremists within the trans movement — I call them transgender fundamentalists or just gender fundamentalists — are not only seeking to replace the biological underpinnings of sex with their “gender identity” model, they’re also misappropriating and swapping out the conceptual underpinnings of homosexuality for transgender: they wrongly claim that homosexuality is a mere social construct — supposedly not “invented” until the word came about in the 1800s, despite widespread evidence of homosexuals’ presence and consistent characteristics throughout history. And they simultaneously insist that the opposite is true with respect to trans: they claim that when the term “transgender” came into broad cultural usage via social media, it revealed a natural category of people who have always been present, but who have up until now been inexplicably unaccounted-for throughout history.

If true, this would be a radical, civilization-upending discovery — that since the dawn of humankind none of us has ever known one another’s true sex; we’ve only been interacting with each other’s “gender identities” this whole time — or at least, we should have been, if our oppressive culture hadn’t inhibited them. If it’s not true, then the transgender fundamentalist movement is headed for an iceberg: it will soon go down as one of the biggest cultural disasters in history.

All evidence points to the latter case.  […]

This is arguably the trans activists’ primary bone of contention with the rest of the world: the fact that male and female and homosexual and heterosexual are fundamental, natural categories of people, but trans and “cis” are… well, I wouldn’t say they’re “made up” (that wording’s maybe a bit harsh) but they’re culturally contingent social categories. Which, when you think about it, should have been completely obvious to everyone all along: they’re just identities after all, and identities are social constructs by definition.

The main objective of the gender fundamentalist movement is to flip the facts around — to force society to swallow the lie that male and female (and by extension, gay and straight) are oppressive social constructs — literally, “white supremacist colonialist” fictions — while trans and “cis” are as fundamental as the elementary particles and as universal as the laws of thermodynamics.

But yes, read it all. Powerful and comprehensive. 

“Gender identity” has tainted progressive politics in the eyes of an entire generation. Countless people have abandoned their liberal political affiliations and lost trust in liberal media outlets like the New York Times, the Guardian, and the New Yorker upon realizing that the transgender movement has mutated into a dangerous cult and that liberal politicians and journalists are foisting it on the rest of society, perhaps unwittingly. Wittingly or not, they are complicit in a grave injustice.

In the existential tug-of-war between the material world and the conceptual world, between the hardware of our bodies and the software of ideas that animate us, only our software can be truly reprogrammed. While we can improve our bodies in many ways, we are each stuck for life with the one we were born with. That’s a fact we cannot ever fully transcend. And that’s a good thing. Our imperfect bodies are what make us human, and learning to value and love ourselves for who we are is the great project that gives meaning to each of our lives. The great project of civilization is our collective attempt to help each other in that regard. Transgender fundamentalism has been a detour from civilization’s path to progress, a lurch toward the false promise that we can each opt out of the challenges that society collectively faces — that every man is an island, where we can satisfy our desires and overcome our fears by imagining reality away, lured down a false path of personal enlightenment by medical shamans who sold us lies. But in the end — spoiler alert — you’ll find it was all just a dream. Sorry, Neo and Morpheus, we are not trapped in the Matrix after all. The real world is all there is, and all of us men and women must work together to make it better.

A research study at the University of Leeds, "to establish some agreement amongst clinicians regarding what a gender identity assessment with children, young people and their family should look like in practice".

My name is Joe Coleman (he/him). I am a Trainee Clinical Psychologist at the University of Leeds. This project is being supervised by:

• • Rebecca Yeates (she/her) Lecturer in Clinical Psychology, University of Leeds

  • Claudia Zitz (they/them) Assistant Professor in Clinical Psychology, University of Birmingham

  • James Lea (he/they) Senior Fellow of Higher Education Academy, University of Manchester

  • Gary Latchford (he/him) Professor of Clinical Psychology, University of Leeds 

Lovely. Some more detail.

One of the concerns raised in the Cass Review’s interim report was that gender identity assessments were inconsistent and lacked standardisation. There was a suggestion that the clinician’s own perceptions, experiences and beliefs were impacting upon their approach. Young people and families have also reported some frustration with this inconsistency.

This project therefore aims to address these concerns. It recognises that conducting these assessments is a specialist task, and values the knowledge, experience, and expertise of gender clinicians. Therefore, the project aims to draw upon this expertise to develop a consensus amongst clinicians on the core components and processes of an assessment, with the aim of increasing consistency across assessments and overall, improving the experience of those who are accessing the support.

So, who can take part?

Whilst the research wishes to hear from participants with a wide range of views and beliefs, it is important that participants subscribe to some basic beliefs regarding the validity of gender diversity and an individual’s right to access assessment support regarding their identity. Therefore, participants must also meet the below criteria in regard to their beliefs:

• • Gender diversity is normal, and not inherently pathological, in child development.

  • Children, young people, and families have a right to support when exploring their gender identity and/or any distress that relates to this.

  • One possible outcome of an assessment is that a child or young person continues to identify with a gender identity that differs to their sex assigned at birth.

Individuals who hold different beliefs are not invited to take part in this research because the focus of the research is gaining consensus on the components and processes of a children and young people’s gender assessments.

Individuals who hold different beliefs – for instance that the phrase "a child or young person continues to identify with a gender identity that differs to their sex assigned at birth" makes no sense – are not invited to participate, as they may skew the results in a way contrary to the results aimed for. "The focus of the research is gaining consensus", and he can hardly do that if he includes people who disagree. So, only gender-affirming clinicians need apply.

As I said wrt the suppressed NIH study in the US: this isn't science, it's ideology.

James Esses: "our universities have been taken over by a trans agenda".

Added: the research is described as a Delphi study:

The Delphi method or Delphi technique is a structured communication technique or method, originally developed as a systematic, interactive forecasting method that relies on a panel of experts…

Delphi is based on the principle that forecasts (or decisions) from a structured group of individuals are more accurate than those from unstructured groups. The experts answer questionnaires in two or more rounds. After each round, a facilitator or change agent provides an anonymised summary of the experts' forecasts from the previous round as well as the reasons they provided for their judgments. Thus, experts are encouraged to revise their earlier answers in light of the replies of other members of their panel. It is believed that during this process the range of the answers will decrease and the group will converge towards the "correct" answer.

I think we can see the problem – especially if the "experts" are chosen to exclude those with whom the study coordinator disagrees. If, that is, the only experts included in the study are those who believe in the reality of "gender identity", and the prevalence of gender dysphoric teens who've been cruelly let down by Cass.

Special attention has to be paid to the formulation of the Delphi theses and the definition and selection of the experts in order to avoid methodological weaknesses that severely threaten the validity and reliability of the results.

Hmm.

The UN Secretary General *bowing* to Putin at the BRICS conference. For shame! pic.twitter.com/Vg5pBEBMRf

— Alan Johnson (@Fathom_Editor) October 24, 2024

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A story that sheds some light on the life of North Korean workers in China, and what the Chinese think of them. From the Daily NK:

Some 120 North Korean workers from a garment factory in Dandong, China, were repatriated to North Korea on Sept. 30. The unexpected deportation by Chinese authorities has strained relations between Beijing and Pyongyang.

Those repatriated included about 100 female workers who made garments and another dozen or so officials who managed them.

The North Korean workers received their deportation orders from authorities in China on Sept. 29 and all returned to North Korea the next day, sources said.

The incident was triggered by a female worker who disappeared from her workplace.

The woman wandered around Dandong after leaving her workplace in mid-September. Prior to the incident, she reportedly had difficulty communicating with co-workers and exhibited cognitive difficulties.

It remains unclear whether these problems were present when the woman was assigned to work in China, or whether they manifested themselves over the course of months spent largely in confined spaces.

After leaving her factory and dormitory, the woman spent a day wandering the streets of Dandong. She walked as far as the railway bridge over the Yalu River, about 15 kilometers from the factory, and the next day entered a North Korean restaurant called Songdowon in downtown Dandong.

North Korean restaurant workers informed state security agents about the woman, who was speaking incoherently, and the agents replied that they had been looking for her.

The problem was that the garment factory where the woman had worked had already reported her disappearance to the Chinese police, who had been tracking her through video feeds from security cameras installed throughout the downtown area.

As a result, the Chinese police detained the woman and investigated the incident. A week later, the police ordered not only the woman but all the North Korean workers and managers at her factory to return to North Korea immediately.

“The decision was made to repatriate the entire contingent at the factory, including the managers, because of their negligent management of the workers. The rationale was that allowing North Koreans to roam around Chinese cities could have a negative impact on public safety,” a source said.

The North Korean consulate in China was blindsided by the incident. In response, the consulate organized an emergency five-day conference for managers of North Koreans working in the country.

“Our relations with China are not so good right now. Since we’re here in China, we have to make sure we abide by Chinese law,” consulate officials said during the conference.

“Everyone was surprised when the Chinese authorities suddenly deported this group of North Korean workers. Some say this incident seems to confirm that relations between Beijing and Pyongyang are rocky at the moment,” another source in China told Daily NK.

A surveillance state – with, it would seem, a real contempt for North Koreans.

Eliza Mondegreen at UnHerd on the suppression of the puberty blocker study exposed in the NYT (yesterday):

At the outset of the National Institutes of Health study, principal investigator Johanna Olson-Kennedy, one of the most vocal advocates of “gender-affirming care” in the United States, expected that young patients put on puberty blockers would experience “decreased symptoms of depression, anxiety, trauma symptoms, self-injury, and suicidality” and “increased body esteem and quality of life over time”. But that’s apparently not what the evidence showed. Rather than revise her hypotheses and share her findings with the scientific community, Olson-Kennedy and her team decided to sit on the results. Olson-Kennedy told Ghorayshi that she worried the study’s disappointing findings would be “weaponised” by critics.

Unfortunately, Olson-Kennedy and her team are not alone in taking an “affirmation-only” approach to publishing research findings. Suppressing inconvenient data is a pattern in the field of gender medicine, which has long subordinated scientific research to political expediency. Researchers and clinicians in the field tend to work backwards from their desired conclusions (“gender-affirming care is safe and effective,” “the science is settled”), then tell patients, parents, policymakers, and the public what they think these audiences need to hear in order to fall in line. Forget the ideal of impartial scientific research. What we have here are clinicians and researchers acting as “agents of lawfare,” with one eye on the courts and one eye on their reputations. In the process, they lose sight of their patients.

It's possible of course that simple self-interest plays a large part here: Olson-Kennedy has built her career on the success of "gender-affirming care". But what this surely demonstrates more than anything else is that gender medicine is not science and is not medcine: it's an ideology. Negative results are dismissed because they may harm the cause.

In recent years, the field of gender medicine has sustained itself in an increasingly polarised political climate through a systematic campaign of suppressing, obfuscating, and misrepresenting research. This strategy operates behind the scenes, quietly distorting public understanding of the issue at hand. But such an approach cannot survive scrutiny from mainstream media outlets and exposure in court cases. 

Which, thanks largely to the Cass Report, is what we're now starting to see.

Postscript: JK Rowling sums it up:

“We must not publish a study that says we’re harming children because people who say we’re harming children will use the study as evidence that we’re harming children, which might make it difficult for us to continue harming children.”

 

In response to a news item about Mohammad Abu Itiwi, a Nukhba commander in the Al Bureij Battalion of Hamas' Central Camps Brigade who'd been employed by UNRWA:

The involvement of numerous UNRWA employees in terror activities, especially on October 7th, is more than just a scandal—it’s a symptom of a deeper, festering disease. A disease that has torn through the lives of families like mine.

In 1948, when war came, my family fled Jaffa… https://t.co/YUezirvtkT

— George Deek (@GeorgeDeek) October 24, 2024

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Full text:

In 1948, when war came, my family fled Jaffa to Lebanon, trusting Arab leaders who promised a swift victory over the Jews. But when Israel won, the promises shattered, and my family was stranded—trapped in a UN-run refugee camp. The fallout from that moment is something my family still carries.

My family’s fate splintered into three paths. One group escaped to the West—Canada, the U.S., and beyond. They’ve long since assimilated, now as Canadian and American as anyone else.

My grandparents, however, risked everything to smuggle themselves back into Jaffa with their newborn child. They endured incredible hardship, but they rebuilt their lives, became equal citizens, and now their grandson—me—serves as an ambassador for Israel.

But the third path, the one my relatives who stayed in the Arab world were forced to walk, is the one that breaks my heart the most.

For nearly 80 years, my family in Lebanon and Syria have been denied the dignity of citizenship. Stateless, they’ve been forced into an existence of waiting—waiting for a return that will never come. Some found jobs in the Gulf, but even they are stuck in limbo, branded as “forever refugees.” They hold on to keys that will never fit in any door, clinging to the false hope that one day they’ll reclaim the homes of their ancestors, built on the ashes of the Jewish state.

Thanks to UNRWA, this illusion persists. My relatives, their children, their grandchildren, and now even their great-grandchildren are trapped in a cycle of victimhood. How is it that my cousins in Canada have full rights as citizens, while those born and raised in Syria, Lebanon, and the Gulf are still labeled refugees?

This isn’t just a failure of policy. It’s a human tragedy.

Every decent person must demand the dismantling of UNRWA. My cousins—and millions of others—deserve more than endless waiting. They deserve a future.

George Deek is Israel’s ambassador to Azerbaijan.

Today at Winkworth Arboretum in deepest Surrey:

I acquired a folding bike some while back for just this sort of trip – tube down to Waterloo, train to Godalming. Perfect. A car journey down from north London would be grim. Hadn't realised that the three or so miles from Godalming to Winkworth is all uphill…

Oliver Brown in the Telegraph:

Lord Triesman, the former chairman of the Football Association, has said he is “deeply concerned” that the governing body he used to lead is “not providing women and girls with fair, safe sport” because of its policy of allowing biological males to compete in the female category.

In a sharply critical letter to Debbie Hewitt and Mark Bullingham, the FA’s chair and chief executive respectively, Lord Triesman, who served as the organisation’s first independent chairman from 2008 to 2010, argues that his successors’ approach is not only compromising the integrity of women’s football but creating an atmosphere where many people feel frightened even to speak up about their concerns.

“I am deeply concerned that the FA is not providing all women and girls with fair, safe football because of its policy allowing male players – those with XY chromosomes, but a transgender identity – to play in the women’s game,” Lord Triesman writes.

“This has led to significant problems of concern to people in football and, I estimate, a majority of parliamentarians. There is compelling evidence showing how even an individual trans-identifying male player can adversely impact a significant number of female players. It is especially problematic to see that even raising questions about this can lead to disciplinary action. This means that women and girls cannot expect fairness and cannot even raise a question if they see a male player who may or may not claim a transgender identity.

“Many other sports including athletics, swimming and cycling have, with some difficulty, amended their eligibility rules to protect the female category and its sporting integrity. This leaves football as by far the biggest sport not to have done so. As a contact sport, I would suggest the risks are self-evident.”…

The FA has been under significant pressure to change its stance since last December, when it received a letter from more than 70 MPs and members of the House of Lords – including Lord Triesman – demanding urgent action to protect women from the injury risks of playing against biological males. After Telegraph Sport’s revelation that at least four women’s teams in the Sheffield and Hallamshire League were refusing to play against Francesca Needham, a trans-identifying male accused of causing a season-ending injury to an opponent, MPs ordered the FA to “show leadership” and to abandon its position of allowing those born male to register to play in their “affirmed gender”….

The FA said that it was happy to discuss its policy with Lord Triesman. It has consistently defended its position, saying in a statement earlier this year: “Our current transgender policy has been in place for 10 years, and it has helped to enable a very small population of transgender women to enjoy playing football safely in the grass-roots game. This is a complex and constantly evolving area, and our review remains ongoing as we monitor and support the practical application of our policy.

Ooh, so smug, these people – and so self-righteous. A "very small population of transgender women" – who can still adversely affect a very large number of real women – "enjoy playing football safely" – while the women can't enjoy playing football safely because they're playing against men. In women's football, this is – which was specifically set up so they wouldn't have to play against bigger, stronger, faster, men.

And of course it's not a complex area at all. It couldn't be simpler. No men in women's football.

France has just announced that it has successfully raised $800 million from the international community following a conference aimed at addressing the crisis in Lebanon.

The funds are primarily intended to assist displaced Lebanese civilians.

While the Élysée emphasized the… pic.twitter.com/8EPZw8l5Ho

— Hen Mazzig (@HenMazzig) October 24, 2024

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Full text:

While the Élysée emphasized the need for Hezbollah to disarm, halt its attacks on Israel, and comply with UN Resolution 1701, there are concerns about whether the aid will actually reach Lebanese civilians, given Hezbollah’s control of the region.

The aid will be distributed through the UN, but recent months have unfortunately shown the UN’s leniency towards groups like Hamas and Hezbollah.

I hope I’m wrong, but the international community may end up handing $800 million to Hezbollah — enough for them to rearm and escalate attacks on Israel.

For "the UN’s leniency towards groups like Hamas and Hezbollah", better "the UN’s cooperation with groups like Hamas and Hezbollah".