Mick Hartley

Dennis Kavanagh from Gay Men’s Network at Spiked – The Pride movement has nothing to be proud of:

This year’s Pride Month has rarely seemed so pointless. After all, only the truly shameless in the LGBT activist set could feel any pride in 2024 – a year in which the rainbow-flag fliers’ betrayal of gay youngsters in the name of gender ideology was laid bare.

The publication of the Cass Review in April exposed the scandal of the NHS’s treatment of ‘gender confused’ kids. It showed how the NHS’s Gender Identity Development Services (GIDS) subjected troubled, often gay youngsters to life-altering hormones, drugs and treatments. Yet when these same-sex-attracted young people needed a gay movement, it failed them. Stonewall, its principal representative, actively cheered on those encouraging gay youngsters to believe they were born in the wrong body. Former Stonewall CEO Ruth Hunt even warned parents that half their gender-distressed children would commit suicide without puberty blockers. At the same time, leading sections of the gay movement turned on anyone questioning the trans agenda.

You won’t see any reflection on this betrayal of gays and lesbians during Pride Month. There will be no recognition that by embracing gender ideology, the gay-rights movement of today has undermined the gay rights of tomorrow. Instead, an unholy alliance of corporates, trade unions and parading gendercrats will spend weeks celebrating their supposed virtue, while remaining oblivious to the absurdity and growing unpopularity of the movement they represent….

Pride was once our answer to shame. The riposte to being kicked out of your home for coming out. The retort to everyday incidents of homophobia, which are now thankfully a thing of the past in the UK and the West….

Pride, the holy month of the rainbow, is now a thoroughly rudderless affair. Its foolish embrace of the specious cause of trans rights has cost it dear. This increasingly silly party now takes place against the backdrop of a generation-defining medical scandal that Pride and its backers endorsed. Even Stonewall seems cowed. It certainly seems less keen to pronounce that transing a two-year-old is a good idea than it was just a few years ago.

Pride should parade its way into irrelevance. The gay-rights activism of the future will need to look very different.

Woman kills man. Er, no. Man kills woman. It's so confusing:

A trans-identified male is being investigated by Norwegian authorities for the brutal murder of his partner, a trans-identified female. Initial media reports which had previously identified the suspected killer as a man were altered soon afterwards to describe him as a “woman” despite him being biologically male, with the victim, a biological female, being described as a “man.”

On the evening of November 27, 2023, a 22 year-old female who went by the name Oliver Ravn Rønning was beaten to death with a baseball bat at her apartment in Porsgrunn, which she had just moved into days before with her partner. Rønning is a female who identifies as a man, while her partner is a male who identifies as a woman….

While the murder itself has shaken Norway, the way in which national media has approached the case has left readers confused.

Many news reports have altered language used to refer to both the victim and suspect, or have described the case as one in which a man was allegedly murdered by his girlfriend, obfuscating the sexes of those involved completely.

Østlandsposten referred to the female victim as a “young man” who was said to have been “afraid of his girlfriend, a teenage boy, 18, who wants to be referred to as a woman.” Meanwhile, police prosecutor Odd Skei Kostveit told news outlet Telemarksavisa that law enforcement intends to “refer to the two involved as they themselves wanted.”

In official records, the deceased 22-year-old victim is registered as a woman, while the 18-year-old accused of murder is registered as a man.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali draws some interesting parallels between Islam and gender ideology, with their shared view of women as a “cluster of sexualized stereotypes”. Islam, Autogynephilia, and Ideological Capture:

When a nation’s laws subsist on an ideology like Islam, it subjugates about half of its population. I have written for years about the ways in which Islam deprives women of autonomy, choice, and personhood – today I want to bring this into comparison with a new ideology which threatens to deprive half of the population of basic and crucial rights.

“Which societies view womanhood as a cluster of feminine stereotypes (an ultimately male-supremacist worldview)? A certain organized religion comes to mind.”

I wrote these words last week to hint towards the regressive implications of redefining “woman” to mean “cluster of sexualized stereotypes” unmoored from the unglamorous reality of embodiment. When men decide in adulthood that they want to be women, they don’t refer to womanhood itself, but to a hyper-feminine, hyper-sexual fantasy. Under this model, womanhood can be adopted and discarded by men as they wish: “Anything you can do, I can do better.” See this sign at a recent Trans Rights protest, whose message has become quite normal in the movement: “Admit it, you want a girlfriend with a cock.”  […]

It must be difficult to have a paraphilia consume one’s everyday thoughts. But the demand that we call people with these fetishes women in order to satisfy their sexual compulsions is an assault on the very nature of womanhood and a failure to help those individuals to accept reality: That they are men with fetishes. 

Perhaps the most crucial difference between homosexuality and transgender identification is that the former is not a self-given “identity” which others must affirm as real. The latter is just that: A denial that women are a sex class, not a feeling or a fantasy. Women do not have to identify as women – we don’t “opt in” to womanhood – we just are. Simply bending to the demands of AGPs (demands which will surely increase in extremity, as fetishes become more extreme when they are indulged) and their legions of activists is not an option. 

Before I conclude, I want to return to the way Islam has paradoxically captured the Left. Footage of high-up British Labour Party politician, Angela Rayner, shows her appealing for Muslim votes in a room devoid of women. Needless to say, Rayner identifies as a feminist but will never criticize the Islamic culture of female silence, absence, and subordination. Similarly, the uncomfortable truth is that gender ideology is naively driven by women in the West as well as the relatively small, but incredibly empowered, numbers of men with perverse incentives. Women who support gender ideology often haven’t experienced the violations which women in hospitals, salons, or sports face when men invade their space. Women, too, make up a vocal portion of the far left who lend their support to radical Islam as part of their anti-White activism. This can be explained by what I call “right side of historyism.” The obscurantism of gender ideology, which reshapes language away from clarity, dupes well-meaning liberals into defending old-fashioned misogyny. 

There's also a congruence between Islam (in Iran at least) and radical trans ideology, in their shared belief that homosexuals are really women born into the wrong body. In Iran, if they avoid the noose, transition via bodily mutilation is the only acceptable "cure" for gays. It's not quite that bad with gender cultists – yet – but it's the same old homophobia.

No of course not – but let's raise the level of stupidity in health care by putting out absurd and confusing messages, while signaling our progressive virtue:

Did you know that anyone with ovaries, regardless of gender identity, can be at risk for ovarian cancer?

Let's raise awareness by asking: can men get ovarian cancer? 🏳️‍🌈#PrideMonth #OvarianCancerAwareness pic.twitter.com/RsoXcjhAAw

— Ovarian Cancer Action (@OvarianCancerUK) June 4, 2024

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Back to Cuba, ca. 1904. "Havana, Cuba — Calle Galleano."

[Photo: Shorpy/Detroit Photographic Company]

An opinion piece in the NYT, Why the Pandemic Probably Started in a Lab, in 5 Key Points, (archived here) from Alina Chan, co-author with Matt Ridley of Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19. 

In short (each point elaborated on).

• The SARS-like virus that caused the pandemic emerged in Wuhan, the city where the world’s foremost research lab for SARS-like viruses is located.
• The year before the outbreak, the Wuhan institute, working with U.S. partners, had proposed creating viruses with SARS‑CoV‑2’s defining feature.
• The Wuhan lab pursued this type of work under low biosafety conditions that could not have contained an airborne virus as infectious as SARS‑CoV‑2.
• The hypothesis that Covid-19 came from an animal at the Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan is not supported by strong evidence.
• Key evidence that would be expected if the virus had emerged from the wildlife trade is still missing.

The pandemic could have been caused by any of hundreds of virus species, at any of tens of thousands of wildlife markets, in any of thousands of cities, and in any year. But it was a SARS-like coronavirus with a unique furin cleavage site that emerged in Wuhan, less than two years after scientists, sometimes working under inadequate biosafety conditions, proposed collecting and creating viruses of that same design.

While several natural spillover scenarios remain plausible, and we still don’t know enough about the full extent of virus research conducted at the Wuhan institute by Dr. Shi’s team and other researchers, a laboratory accident is the most parsimonious explanation of how the pandemic began. Given what we now know, investigators should follow their strongest leads and subpoena all exchanges between the Wuhan scientists and their international partners, including unpublished research proposals, manuscripts, data and commercial orders. In particular, exchanges from 2018 and 2019 — the critical two years before the emergence of Covid-19 — are very likely to be illuminating (and require no cooperation from the Chinese government to acquire), yet they remain beyond the public’s view more than four years after the pandemic began.

Whether the pandemic started on a lab bench or in a market stall, it is undeniable that U.S. federal funding helped to build an unprecedented collection of SARS-like viruses at the Wuhan institute, as well as contributing to research that enhanced them. Advocates and funders of the institute’s research, including Dr. Fauci, should cooperate with the investigation to help identify and close the loopholes that allowed such dangerous work to occur. The world must not continue to bear the intolerable risks of research with the potential to cause pandemics.

Those North Korean trash bags sent over by balloon to the South….an effective counter has been proposed:

In response to North Korea’s mass launch of “trash balloons,” the South Korean government began preparations on June 2 to resume loudspeaker broadcasts toward North Korea, which had been halted since 2018. Additionally, the government is seeking to invalidate the April 27 Panmunjom Declaration and the Sept. 19 Inter-Korean Military Agreement, which were the basis for dismantling the loudspeakers. Five hours after South Korea’s announcement, North Korea announced a temporary suspension of the launches….

Director of the National Security Office Chang Ho-jin, in a briefing, said, “We have decided to take measures that North Korea will find hard to endure,” in response to the provocations. He described the trash balloon launches and GPS jamming as “low-grade provocations unimaginable from a normal country.”

Julie Burchill in the Spectator:

In a decade’s time, what we widely recognise as feminists – people who put women’s rights at the centre of their concerns – may no longer exist in the Labour party, so widespread is the adoption of trans ideology. Labour is now the only major political party in the UK never to have had a woman leader and the way things are going, it’s entirely likely that the first one will have a penis.

The grim reality of rural life in North Korea, from the Daily NK:

People living in farming communities in South Pyongan Province are suffering extreme hardship, Daily NK has learned.

Speaking on condition of anonymity, a Daily NK source in the province said Wednesday that life is “indescribably hard” in rural parts of the province, including Kangdong and Songchon counties. “Local residents are doing everything they can to escape their hardships, but they are desperate as the situation is not improving at all,” he said.

People living in rural South Pyongan Province have struggled to maintain their livelihoods since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Today, more and more families are barely surviving on water, without even gruel to eat. They are doing everything they can to overcome this crisis, focusing on small-scale farming to feed their hungry stomachs. But the source said they are frustrated by the reality they face of mounting debt with no improvement in their lives.

“In farming villages today, most people survive on gruel made from grass from the hillside and a handful of corn powder, but many families can’t even afford that,” the source said. “When you see how people live in the farming communities, it’s hard to believe that people actually live like that.

“People live tenaciously by cultivating their small private fields just for a spoonful of rice, but it’s like pouring water into a sieve,” he continued, adding: “This is because they borrow everything they need to farm, from seeds to fertilizer, at high interest rates, so when fall comes, they have almost nothing left after paying off their debts.”

According to the source, a 40-year-old Kangdong County resident said he currently survives on “grass collected from the hillsides” while farming.” “Living without food or even a penny to my name is a living death. And I have no choice but to live on money borrowed at high interest rates. I’ve tasted bitterness and cried tears of blood because of the high interest, but people like me who have nothing are still grateful. Since we’re struggling, there’s not much else we can do.”

A resident of Songchon County in his 50s said that his entire family “would have starved to death if it weren’t for the grass in the mountains.” He said that all grasses are edible now “because grass isn’t poisonous before Dano. But he added, “Even that’s a struggle. Everyone’s busy preparing to gather grass.”

The man went on to say that some people “pick grass all day, from morning to evening” and that people who do not know this “would think that the animals have eaten all the grass.” He added: “People work hard on their farms, hoping there will be light at the end of the tunnel, holding on tenaciously, but the future looks bleak.”

Havana, Cuba, ca. 1904. "Courtyard of Hotel Florida, Calle Obispo."

[Photo: Shorpy/Detroit Photographic Company]

Still there: