Mick Hartley

Politics and Culture

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  • Aesop was right

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  • The Biden legacy

    The eulogies for the wonderful presidency of Joe Biden pour in: no mention of the catastrophe of the Afghanistan withdrawal, never mind the continuing of the disastrous Obama Iran-appeasement policies, or his complete capture by gender ideology. OK, he's been generally good on Ukraine, which is no small matter. Meanwhile Kamala Harris, widely acknowledged as one of the most lacklustre and incompetent vice-presidents in American history, is now lauded as the fabulous and dynamic new great hope to slay the monster Trump.

    William Hague in the Times doesn't eulogise Biden, and he does mention Afghanistan:

    Early in his presidency he pulled out the last US forces from Afghanistan, predictably leading to a total collapse and the return of the Taliban. Millions of people, particularly women and girls, have been plunged into social and political darkness and the credibility of the West has suffered a devastating blow. We may never know how much Vladimir Putin was emboldened by the spectacle of the US abandoning its central foreign policy effort of the previous 20 years, but the invasion of Ukraine was soon to follow….

    Ukraine has been steadfastly supported by Biden but always with great caution on how US-supplied weapons can be used. The main request of President Zelensky on recent visits to Britain and America has been to be allowed to use missiles against targets deeper inside Russia. It is time to grant that request.

    The grim outlook for Ukraine, particularly if Trump were to be elected, is that it could be another Afghanistan. Brave people have been supported in fighting for their freedom but that support evaporates when they are no longer fresh in our minds or prominent in our news media. We help them survive a war but not quite long enough or decisively enough to actually win it.

    If that continues to be the pattern, it will not only be Russia but also China, Iran and North Korea that will take heart: the lesson will be that the West can always be outlasted, it will always lose interest, a new president with different priorities will always come along.

    It was always a fallacy on the part of Biden that Afghanistan could be abandoned to focus more on the strategic threat from China. It is an even greater fallacy on the part of JD Vance, Trump’s new running mate, that Ukraine doesn’t matter because, again, the real problem is Beijing. The failure to follow through on supporting allies, giving them the tools to protect themselves, will only make it more likely that Kim Jong-un lashes out, or Xi Jinping makes a move on Taiwan, or a supreme leader in Tehran makes the final dash to possess the bomb.

    Letting Ukraine fire western arms at airfields and other military sites in Russia, not just in the border region near Kharkiv, would make a serious difference to the war and place Ukraine in a stronger position for any peace negotiations to come. Yet the White House is reluctant; Germany — whose Taurus missiles could be especially effective — opposed; and Britain, despite an apparently positive announcement after Keir Starmer met Zelensky, unclear. There is a humanitarian case, as huge Russian bombs are hitting children’s hospitals and power plants; a military case, as one side is fighting with one hand tied behind its back; and a strategic case, as the collapse of Ukraine would be a catastrophe for the free world.

    Biden can make a crucial difference. It’s too late to save Afghanistan but he still has the time and the power to help Ukraine save itself.

    I don't see it happening, unfortunately, but it's definitely a case worth making.

  • Ordinary people

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    What are the chances?

    Here's the latest, today:

    Emma

    Software engineer Emma Harris earns £50,000 a year and said the cost of renting and bills takes up about two-thirds of her salary. "I am not likely to ever own a house and it’s just depressing," she said.

    She lives in Birmingham, and last year the average price of a first-time buyer home in the West Midlands was ÂŁ215,000.

    Ms Harris said: "I feel completely trapped in the situation I am in. The chances of me owning my own house are pretty much non-existent.

    "I want to cry. I want to scream. I want to shout, and do various other things but none of them solve the issue – that I don't have the money to put away each month to scrape together the money for a deposit."

    She said the prospect of raising money for a deposit caused "a few sleepless nights".

    He's managing to put on a brave face though.

  • Women’s pain

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    Here's the article:

    Biological males who identify as female, and their doctors, are being encouraged to take part in a Victorian taxpayer-funded inquiry that was set up to investigate women’s pain, including chronic issues like endometriosis and menopause.

    In a move that women’s advocates labelled “absurd”, the Allan government is calling for submissions from people with experience of women’s pain, including “anyone who identifies as a woman, though they may have a different sex at birth”.

    The move has been panned by Women’s Forum Australia chief executive Rachael Wong, who said it “makes a mockery of women’s pain and women are understandably angry”.

    “It’s absurd to have to state the obvious, but it is physiol­ogically impossible for men to experience female health conditions or the pain that comes with them,” she said.

    “Many of these conditions, like endometriosis, fibroids and PCOS (polycystic ovary syndrome), have a devastating impact on women’s quality of life, yet are under-diagnosed and under-treated.

    “Just when it looks like they may be taking women’s health issues seriously, the government wants men to have their say. It’s insulting.”

  • The moral blackmail of troubled parents

    Libby Purves in the Times on the sick threat of teen suicide as a weapon in the gender wars:

    Don’t wince away, bored from gender wars and Wes Streeting’s restriction on puberty blockers that suppress hormonal changes in physically normal children. Focus on one serious wickedness: the moral blackmail of troubled parents, a reckless and cruel spreading of lies….

    Some propagandists are careful, talking only of “an increased risk” of suicide. But many, like Clive Lewis MP, claim to know young people for whom the drug “probably saved their life”. Wilder adherents shout “stop killing trans kids!” and parents are asked by committed therapists: “Do you want a happy little girl or a dead son?” The charity Mermaids has claimed that 50 per cent of children questioning their gender attempt suicide.

    So it was more than welcome last week that Professor Louis Appleby, a leading authority on mental health and a government adviser, confirmed that there is no evidence whatsoever of this. No surging rise in suicide by gender-questioning children. “The way this issue has been discussed on social media,” he said, “has been insensitive, distressing and dangerous,” and risks imitative self-harm, to which adolescents distressed for any reason are famously prone.

    But ideologues rant on, blind to data and sense, shamefully backed by celebrities and MPs wanting to be cool. Some families who “transed” their own children, especially once they have moved on to irreversible surgery, inevitably double down and speak of it as an act of wisdom and compassion. It would, after all, be horrifying to any parent to think otherwise.

    Again and again, organisations like the “Good Law Project” and Stonewall reiterate such talk, that social acceptance and waiting for adulthood are not enough because without a life-changing assault on their hormonal development hundreds of children will die by their own hand.

    The sick opportunism of it should repel anyone…

    Suicide always carries a special horror because the animal instinct for self-preservation is intense: we cannot help but snatch our hand from the fire or flinch from an attack or abyss. Reverence for life is a powerful morality; medicine cherishes even the frailest. And remember that until 1961 in England and Wales you could still be prosecuted for attempted “self-murder”: the last jailing was 1959.

    The actual moment of taking your life remains deeply personal: the subject’s mind has moved to areas incomprehensible to most of us. Having lost an adult son this way I have probably had more conversations with survivors of this catastrophe than most, and seen the struggle to understand, the acceptance that we can’t, and the determination not to become collateral damage. And not — this is vital — ever to allow our lost one to become some sick, romantic “Young Werther” example.

    Moreover, threatening suicide as a ploy is a particularly low form of blackmail. Spurned lovers sometimes deploy it, but “if you leave me I’ll kill myself” is a despicable (and probably wholly inaccurate) threat. It is useful to talk openly about mental health, and maybe admit to that psychiatric weasel-phrase “suicidal ideation” (not unusual, we all do it sometimes, recognising it as a mental escape-valve with no real intention). But talking about that ideation should always frame it as something to be defeated. Threatening it is deeply wrong.

    So it is infinitely more unforgivable to threaten it by proxy against strangers with young children who get nervous about burgeoning womanhood or manhood, or flinch at silly social expectations to be a fighting superhero or a hot Disney princess. How dare campaigners with a bossy cultural (or pharmaceutical) agenda throw about false statistics threatening the worst of all parental nightmares?

    Have any of those spreading these despicable lies about suicide risk ever apologised? Sadly that's not the way it works with ideologues. Jolyon Maugham is now taking a break to go walking in the mountains for a fortnight. To reconsider? I very much doubt it.

  • Good news and bad news

    The good news:

    President Biden withdrew from November's election on Sunday, having faced increasing calls to step aside since his TV debate against Donald Trump.

    The bad news:

    A growing number of senior Democrat politicians and party backers are supporting Kamala Harris to be the party's presidential candidate, after Joe Biden quit the race

  • Israeli sportspeople “not welcome at the Paris Olympic Games”

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    Full text:

    Far-left French lawmaker, Thomas Portes, announced at a Free Palestine protest today that “the Israeli delegation is not welcome in Paris. Israeli sportspeople are not welcome at the Paris Olympic Games.” He also called for protestors to “mobilize” against it.

    Israeli athletes are facing abuse in every corner — from anonymous death threats to threats from a government official.

    French Jewish groups, as well as other left-wing politicians, have condemned Portes, and say he is putting a target on Israeli athletes’ backs.

    But the damage of a government leader publicly calling to ban Israelis from the Olympics is not so easily reversed. And French Jews, who are already experiencing unprecedented hatred, will be left to deal with the antisemitic fallout.

  • Jewish sport

    From the JC:

    Israel’s football team will face off against Belgium in the Nations League at an undisclosed private venue in Hungary after multiple Belgian cities refuse to host the fixture out of security concerns.

    The Belgian Football Federation (RBFA) has been looking for a new venue to host the match after Brussels said the game would be “impossible” to host due to security fears. Other Belgian cities also reportedly refused to host the match.

    The match will now take place behind closed doors in Debrecen, Hungary on 6 September.

    “Given that in Belgium, no local authority considered it possible to organise the home match of the Red Devils against Israel, the RBFA had to look for a solution abroad,” the federation said.

    Most of the home games for the Belgian national team will take place at the King Baudouin Stadium in Brussels, with only Israel being forced to play in a separate country.

    The news comes as FIFA is currently deliberating a proposal from the Palestinian Football Association to suspend Israel from competing internationally. The football world’s governing body said the issue and its legal considerations would be discussed and shared with its council on August 31, only after the Paris Olympics which runs between July 26 and August 11.

    I can make a fair guess how that will pan out. The last World Cup – with FIFA officials treated, let's say, generously by the hosts – ended up after all in Qatar.

    Meanwhile:

    Israel is sending armed Shin Bet agents to Paris to prepare for the largest-ever security operation for Israeli athletes at the Olympic Games.

    Israeli Olympians taking part in the world’s foremost sports competition have been receiving death threats online over the last few days, according to Israeli media….

    Israeli broadcaster Walla reported over the weekend that Israeli athletes have received threatening online messages written in poor Hebrew. As many as 15 athletes and their teams reportedly received identical death threats via email, warning them they would be killed if they arrived in France.

    The anonymous email threatened to repeat the atrocities of the Munich Massacre during the 1972 Summer Olympics, promising harm to “any Israeli presence at the Olympics.”

    The Munich Massacre saw 11 Israeli athletes and coaches murdered by 8 individuals belonging to the Palestinian militant group Black September.

  • Cass 100 days on

    Hadley Freeman in the Sunday Times – Will the trans activists ever accept they lost?

    Dr Hilary Cass’s recommendations to NHS England were careful and compassionate and they strongly urged against overmedicalising young people, as had been the NHS’s tendency. So presumably it’s been a straight path since then, with those who advocated doling out masculinising and feminising hormones to young people now admitting they got it wrong, and everyone singing “kumbaya”? Well. Let’s look at just the past week for a snapshot of the situation. You may require motion sickness pills for all the ups and downs.

    Last weekend the health secretary, Wes Streeting, confirmed his decision to keep the ban on puberty blockers being prescribed to gender-dysphoric young people and patiently spelt out his reasons. The too-long, didn’t-read version is: “I believe in science and safeguarding and so I’m following Cass’s recommendations.” This got exactly the kind of measured response we’ve all come to expect from gender ideologues. The legal campaign group the Good Law Project, run by the tax barrister Jolyon Maugham, claimed there had been a “surge” of suicides of young people because they could no longer obtain puberty blockers. High-profile journalists and thousands of others repeated that claim. On Friday the government’s suicide adviser, Professor Louis Appleby, published a strikingly punchy review that quashed that claim and condemned those making it. Creepy fantasies about young people killing themselves are par for the course for gender ideologues. But, post Cass, flat-out lies are no longer accepted.

    Just days after Streeting reaffirmed his commitment to Cass’s recommendations, the New Statesman reported that the British Medical Association was voting to disavow them. The BMA denied this but conceded that there had been “discussions” and that “the outcome of the discussions is not being made public”. The lack of transparency from the BMA is worrying, clearly. Yet the hasty denial and obfuscation are, at least, an acknowledgment that disavowing Cass would go very much against the public mood now.

    The day after that it was the King’s Speech, which has nothing to do with Colin Firth, even though my brain keeps saying otherwise. For months there had been suggestions that as well as banning gay conversion therapy — the practice of trying to persuade someone they’re not gay — Labour would ban trans conversion therapy. Dr Cass has warned that this could risk “frightening therapists who are just doing their job and having an appropriate exploratory conversation with a young person”. In other words, an adult — doctor, teacher or parent — could be prosecuted if they asked an unhappy teenage girl why she thought she was a boy, and whether it might have something to do with a past traumatic experience. And what if a gay boy has internalised homophobia and so insists he must be a girl if he fancies other boys — isn’t transgenderism itself then a kind of gay conversion therapy? “No loopholes,” the reliably ill-advised Anneliese Dodds, minister for women and equalities, tweeted. And yet Labour found one, proposing not legislation but merely a draft bill banning trans conversion therapy, and carving out exceptions for “legitimate psychological support”. The draft is a sop to Labour MPs such as Zarah Sultana and Apsana Begum who insist, still, they know better than Dr Cass and young people should be given puberty blockers — the equivalent of sticking their fingers in their ears and shouting, “Nah nah nah nah naaah!” But it’s ultimately a nod to reality, and proof that Cass has made an impact on Keir Starmer.

    There are people who will never accept Cass’s recommendations. For some it’s because they genuinely believe children can and should change sex, just as wine can change into Jesus’s blood. I suspect Dr Helen Webberley falls into this category, given she has made a career out of prescribing puberty blockers to children. On Friday the General Medical Council finally revoked her licence.

    Others will simply be too embarrassed to admit they got this so wrong, and the publisher Hachette may well soon feel the sting of that. It is facing a claim of discrimination from a former editor, Ursula Doyle, who says she was pushed out of her job after publishing feminist books including Kathleen Stock’s bestselling Material Girls, which is critical of gender theory. Last weekend Doyle launched a crowdfunder for her case and reached her goal — £30,000 — in less than a day, proving that the time when women who refused to say two plus two equals unicorns could be quietly shoved out of their jobs is over.

    Then there are parents who, for whatever reason, helped their child to transition. Some of them will never accept Cass, because to acknowledge that you facilitated your child’s self-destructive behaviour is too painful to accept. That is very sad for them, and their children. But the past hundred days suggests that in the very near future fewer children and parents will have to suffer similarly. The road will not be straight, but it’s finally in the right direction. Two plus two equals four once more.

    That's surely the key to a great deal of gender activist opposition. As I think Helen Joyce was the first to point out, those parents who transed their children need to believe they did the right thing for their own sanity. Imagine, given the sacred task of bringing up children, subjecting them to medical mutilation and ruining their lives all for the sake of a cult-like fantasy that is now being exposed as dangerous nonsense from top to bottom. It's a nightmare they can only alleviate by sticking fingers in their ears and keeping on, obsessively, with the delusion.

  • The Rape Crisis Centre that helps men who sexually assault women

    The latest on the troubled Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre, from the Times:

    The chief executive of a rape crisis support centre has been put on leave pending an investigation into its “Kafkaesque” treatment of staff.

    Mridul Wadhwa, a man who identifies as a woman, was sent home in May by the board of Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre (ERCC) after being identified as the “invisible hand” behind a “heresy hunt” designed to force out Roz Adams, a counsellor with gender-critical views.

    The outcry over Wadhwa’s behaviour intensified following the sentencing this week of Cameron Downing, a coercive and manipulative male sex offender, who identified as non-binary and claimed to have received extensive support from ERCC.

    After Downing, an SNP equalities officer, was convicted of multiple sexual offences, the author JK Rowling said: “That a male sexual predator was able to access the services of the Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre should beggar belief, but, of course, it doesn’t. ERCC is still run by the trans-identified male who believes women who want single-sex services are bigots.”

    Downing, 24, was sentenced to six years in prison after he was convicted of ten charges including assault, sexual assault and domestic abuse.

    He falsely accused a male partner of rape and then blackmailed him into carrying out sexual acts. He was also convicted of sexual assault against three women and another man.

    [Downing, remember, is the SNP activist who tweeted how he wanted to “beat the f**k” out of feminists.]

    Before his arrest, Downing said ERCC was the reason he was “able to keep going” and he “cannot put into words how much they’ve helped me”.

    Helping men who sexually assault women? Fine. Women who've been raped? Not so much. What a farce. The Rape Enabling Centre.

    The feminist campaign organisation For Women Scotland said Downing was able to use “the supposedly women-only service [at ERCC] because he claimed to be non-binary”. It added: “The much-vaunted claim that they were expert in detecting predators looking to exploit self-ID seems to be hollow.”

    In a statement on Twitter/X, the group described ERCC as “a delinquent organisation”. It said Rape Crisis Scotland, the umbrella organisation for 17 similar centres across the country, and Sandy Brindley, its chief executive, along with “all those who facilitated Wadhwa” must be held accountable.

    For Women Scotland added: “A proper independent investigation must now happen, and those who were complicit must resign NOW — including Brindley herself and Mridul Wadhwa. In no other org [organisation] would they be permitted to cling on in the face of such damning evidence.”

    It's a text-book case of what happens when gender ideology takes over.