Mick Hartley

From the Times of Israel:

ROTTERDAM, the Netherlands — An anti-Israel protester approached this reporter while narrowly avoiding the guidelines of the 20-odd tents that dotted Erasmus University campus’s main square. Wearing a keffiyeh over her face, she asked about the purpose of my visit.

About 30 of her comrades watched while eating dinner: a rice and lentil dish served from a large pot atop a portable gas stove.

“It’s a Zionist,” she called out, upon learning the name of this publication, prompting the group to cover their faces with their keffiyehs and surgical masks. They encircled, screaming, “Intifada!” as they placed a Palestinian flag over the camera to prevent any filming of the events taking place at one of Europe’s most prestigious institutions of higher learning.

The protesters had a tray with red paint at the ready, which they use during blockages. Only those students or faculty who agree to dip a palm in the paint to show solidarity with Palestinians are let through to various campus facilities.

A man who sounded like a native Arabic speaker began drumming on a bucket. The other activists started chanting “From the river to the sea,” and the man shouted: “Falastin arabiyeh,” Arabic for “an Arab Palestine.”

“It’s a Zionist” – that is, “It’s a Jew” while trying to dodge the charge of antisemitism. 

Some 75% of the Dutch-Jewish population were murdered in the Holocaust.

This poster appeared on the Darlington nurses' changing room this week. A changing room where nurses have had panic attacks after having to undress in front of a biological male identifying as a woman who openly says he is trying to get his girlfriend pregnant.

When they… pic.twitter.com/5GKTNkpTqN

— Christian Concern (@CConcern) July 2, 2024

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"When they complained, they were told by management they needed 'educating' and had to 'broaden their mindset.'

The poster was also visible to members of the public and patients. Is this acceptable @Keir_Starmer @wesstreeting @RosieDuffield1 ?"

See here for more on the Darlington nurses.

Amy Hamm at Reduxx:

A trans-identified male in the Maine-et-Loire region of France has been awarded €7,000 in compensation after a court determined he was the victim of “gender discrimination” by his former employer.

Syntia Dersoir, 22, had filed a complaint against the McDonald’s franchise where he worked after management referred to him by his legal, male name and asked him to remove the makeup he wore during his shift.

Dersoir began working at a McDonald’s located in Segré-en-Anjou Bleu beginning from September 2022. He was hired under his birth name and was legally registered as a male at the time. In early 2023, he began wearing makeup and prosthetic breasts to work, and, by the spring of 2023, he obtained an alteration of his identification documents.

Dersoir alleged that the discrimination happened over several weeks in 2023 after he began wearing his prosthetic breasts and makeup to work. Management at the McDonald’s branch where Dersoir was employed continued to refer to him by the name he had been hired under, his male name, despite his requests to be called by his feminine preferred name.

I know. Can you begin to imagine how he must have suffered?

According to his legal complaint, Dersoir detailed that during one shift, when he was wearing lipstick, a manager asked him to leave or to go to a nearby store and purchase makeup remover. In March of 2023, Dersoir obtained a note from his doctor allowing him to take sick-leave, citing the stress he was suffering from the discrimination he had been subjected to.

Dersoir complained to the French Labour Inspectorate, and was provided a lawyer by the French Democratic Confederation of Labour (CFDT), a conglomorate of national labour unions. He also filed a criminal complaint against the management at the McDonald’s where he had been working….

French media has run sympathetic stories on Dersoir, profiling him as a victim of discrimination. Some outlets are criticizing the managers at the fast-food chain, which uses the slogan “come as you are” in the country. One outlet suggested that Dersoir’s bosses had “trampled on” the sentiment behind the slogan and are “guilty of moral harassment and discrimination.”

On June 24, the employment tribunal of Angers ruled in Dersoir’s favor, ordering the franchise to pay him €7,000 in compensation. Dersoir’s lawyer was excited about the verdict, noting that it set a precedent and that other “victims” may now be able to come forward.

“As soon as a large brand is convicted … it necessarily provokes a discussion. This is a first to condemn McDonald’s, which presents itself from the angle of tolerance, for precisely the opposite,” the lawyer said.

Charlotte Duval, the Deputy Secretary General of the Maine-et-Loire Services Union, similarly praised the decision, stating: “This ruling is very positive … it is the recognition of [Dersoir’s] victimization. It may also open the door to other people who are experiencing this kind of situation to talk about it.”

So which is it? A young man who, realising he'd been born in the wrong body and was really a woman, at last found the courage to live as his true self – or another chancer who saw how in the current climate he could indulge his sexual fetish for dressing as a woman with loads of make-up and prosthetic breasts…and be the victim, getting sympathy and financial compensation. Hmm. It's a tricky one…

A month in a forced labour camp for a North Korean miner wearing jeans. From the Daily NK:

A coal mining complex in North Hamgyong Province held a lecture and ideological struggle meeting in mid-June to crack down on “anti-socialist” clothing and appearances. One of the miners was punished for wearing blue jeans.

Speaking on condition of anonymity, a source in the province told Daily NK on Friday that the Kyongwon County coal mining complex held a lecture on proper socialist attire followed by an ideological struggle meeting on June 10.

A party secretary, who led the lecture, emphasized North Korean leader Kim Jong Il’s statement that “clothing reflects a person’s mental state” and criticized workers’ attire and hairstyles.

The official mentioned youth wearing South Korean-style haircuts and women wearing tight pants or low-cut tops, warning that “ideological degeneration starts from clothing, and those who don’t follow party-approved styles will be dealt with by the police department.”

In the subsequent meeting, a man in his 40s named Kim (pseudonym) from the mine’s tunneling unit was publicly criticized for wearing jeans in the mine. Kim explained he changed into jeans inside the mine due to their durability, but this explanation was seen by officials as evidence Kim was “unable to accept criticism.”

Interestingly enough, jeans were first sold to American coal miners who appreciated their durability for work in mines.

Kim was ultimately sentenced to a month at a forced labor camp.

Another man in his 50s, Moon (pseudonym), from the coal extraction unit, was also brought on stage for wearing a denim jacket.

“Moon was only criticized, not sent to a forced labor camp, as it was acknowledged he bought the jacket from a used clothing seller without knowing it was American. However, workers were speechless watching him cut up his jacket on stage.”

I’ve heard straight men talk about trans women as though they’re fallen men to whom sympathy ought to be automatically extended, but there’s deeper stuff going on, too.

I asked a lefty straight man I know (this is irl) whether he was aware how many penised ‘lesbians’ are…

— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) July 1, 2024

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I asked a lefty straight man I know (this is irl) whether he was aware how many penised ‘lesbians’ are involved in the push to access female spaces. The subject made him incredibly uncomfortable. He simply didn’t want to hear it. I then asked him whether he knew what his straight male friends wanted from women in the bedroom, kink/sex wise. Horrified look: ‘no, of course I bloody don’t.’

I said to him that if you put 100 straight and bi women of our age and average sexual experience in a room together, they could write an authoritative compendium on straight male kink in an afternoon, from their own direct experience or that of women they know. I said I presumed he knew that a cross-dressing fetish is one of the most common paraphilias in heterosexual men and that this has been in the psychological literature since Freud.

I cannot overstate how little he wanted to talk about this, let alone acknowledge that any of it was real and happening. I don’t know whether it was the idea that women actually talk about what they meet in the bedroom that touched a nerve, or whether he found the whole subject ick, or didn’t like the suggestion that he was naive or poorly informed, but the impression given was that I was depraved to say such things aloud, and that he’d much prefer a seemly silence.

Incredible that NOT A SINGLE ACT has mentioned that on October 7 400 young people went to a music festival and were murdered or kidnapped.
Does this mean that none of them care? Or that they are too afraid that doing anything that humanises Israelis will mean they will… https://t.co/2jDBieAi5A

— Nicole Lampert (@nicolelampert) June 30, 2024

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Kim worship moves up another gear. Richard Lloyd Parry in the Times:

Loyal officials of the North Korean communist party are wearing badges bearing the face of Kim Jong-un for the first time, in an indication of the increasingly intense cult of personality that is developing around the supreme leader.

Photographs on state media taken at the plenary session of the Workers’ Party of Korea (WPK), which reviews the party’s achievements in the first half of the year, show cadres wearing the badges on their left lapels.

All North Koreans are obliged to wear a badge portraying the Kims but, until this week, these were always images of Kim’s late father and grandfather: Kim Jong-il, whom he succeeded in 2011, and Kim Il-sung, the country’s founding president.

For all the energy that state media expends on glorifying the brilliance and achievements of Kim, an important element of the personality cult has always been the pretence of self-deprecation. Like his father before him, the young Kim affects humility in comparison with his even more glorious forebears. Recently there have been signs that he is casting off modesty and establishing a personal iconography.

Most schools, homes and workplaces also display framed portraits of the two dead leaders — and in May, Kim Jong-un’s portrait was seen in media photographs displayed alongside them for the first time.

In the spring, North Korea broadcast a new song in praise of him, accompanied by a video of ecstatic citizens singing his name and praising the “bright future” that he promises. The song, Friendly Father, has gone viral on the social media app TikTok and has been banned in South Korea, where North Korean propaganda is illegal.

Here's a North Korean official proudly wearing the new Kim pin. 

{Image: Reuters]

I featured Friendly Father back in April. 

It's the bottle caps:

TRT Arabic TV (Turkey) aired a report on June 21, 2024 on the Pepsi boycott in Lebanon, which came after the local Pepsi representatives changed the bottle caps to blue and white colors, the colors of the Israeli flag. Activists interviewed in the report claimed that the two lines in the cap resemble the lines in the Israeli flag, with one of them claiming that the two lines symbolize the Nile and Euphrates River, to which supposedly, Israel intends to expand.

Helen Joyce at The Critic on how gender theory is built on euphemisms:

[O]ne of the core tenets of critical theory is that it’s impossible to be truly liberated from what their high priest, Michel Foucault, dubbed “power-knowledge” — a kind of glorified status quo. All you can do is tinker. 

You can wear drag to subvert masculinity, call yourself “queer” to smash heteronormativity or identify as non-binary to “trouble” the categories of male and female. You can’t actually liberate women, only make the category of “women” meaningless by detaching it from any corporeal criteria.

If queer theorists were correct, women would never have won the right to vote, to own property or to study and work on the same terms as men within the rigged “power-knowledge” system known as patriarchy. But there is one group whose failings are nicely explained by queer theory — queer theorists themselves. They avert their critical gaze from culture-war topics because they don’t want to bite the research councils that feed them.

It is difficult to get a professor of gender studies to understand the importance of a clear definition of “woman” to women’s legal rights when her grant to study pregnant men depends on her not understanding it.

This self-interested quietism is why the gender theorists are so attached to euphemism. Their linguistic landscape is blissfully free of confused teenage girls getting their breasts chopped off, and middle-aged men whose cross-dressing fetish has expanded into an all-consuming desire for castration. Instead they celebrate “top surgery” and “gender affirmation”. If you point out what these gruesome operations involve, you are called obscene.

That word is as loaded as “fringe” or “distraction”, but again the queer theorists play deaf and dumb. I think it’s the surgeries that are obscene, not the words. Gender clinicians are promising their patients impossibilities, and concealing that fact with language that cries out for a critical analysis.

That they get away with it reveals where the power really lies — and it’s not with the unenlightened masses being forced to pretend that a castrated man has somehow become a woman, or indeed with the man whose obsession has led to his mutilation at the clinicians’ hands.

October 1907. "New York, N.Y. — Carnegie Hall, West 57th Street and Seventh Avenue."

[Photo: Shorpy/Detroit Publishing Company]

Unchanged, but now surrounded: