Mick Hartley

The street photography of Tony Van Le:

Le is fueled by serendipity and strangeness. Having originally explored these grounds through music production, the artist has since moved toward manifesting a similar ethos through photography. Impassioned by the transient work of Vivian Maier, Le has spent years cultivating this calling, becoming more confident with focusing his lens on strangers over time. 

“The Magic Number”

“Into the Unknown”

“Man and Iguana”

“Metacognition”

“Woman with Mannequin on Motorbike”

“Diverse Pathways”

“Bicyclist and Steam”

“Among Us”

“Police Officer, Red-Tailed Hawk, and Rodent”

“Nature’s Crown”
[All images © Tony Van Le]

More at his website.

According to Kathleen Stock in the Times, cool rich kids in liberal US colleges are beginning to reject all that pronoun stuff – it's "so over" – while the East Coast broadsheets are beginning to talk about stuff like unfair male advantage in women’s sport and the experimental status of medicalised child transition, having avoided or spiked such stories for years. But this isn't yet the end of it:

So can the rest of us — the ones who knew all along that wokeness was a pseudo-progressive hobby for guilty rich people, role-playing as meaningful political action — relax? Unfortunately not yet. For I’m afraid the demise of woke won’t be like the end of toothbrush moustaches, indie folk music or any other temporary behaviour supercharged by the whims of the young and the hip, then dropped without consequence. Wokeness, in contrast, is a bit like a hulking great boulder launched into the middle of a calm lake: waves will be crashing on the shoreline long after the epicentre bears no trace.

The most obvious difference between wokeness and other passing fashions is that nobody working in HR ever decreed that moustache-wearers or indie folk-listeners be considered uniquely oppressed minority groups. In contrast, thanks to wild and unevidenced claims made at the height of wokemania by lobbying groups, thousands of organisations have been left with unfair, illiberal and sometimes even illegal policies that blatantly cater to the special interests of a few: rules about how social spaces can be accessed and by whom; what data can and cannot be collected; what conversations are allowed and which are not. Policies tend to dictate organisational behaviour long after those who first championed them move on ideologically; and especially when propped up by a raft of specially created career positions, whose occupants have a financial interest in maintaining the momentum….

In effect, the storm-surge of wokeness throughout British institutions from 2020 onwards was what the political scientist Cass Sunstein has called a “reputational cascade”: a relatively small number of people started acting in a certain way, each for roughly independent reasons; then at a certain point, a wider group of people started observing the behaviour of the smaller group and copying them, each privately assuming their reputations would be damaged if they did not. Before long, this pattern expanded exponentially, helped by the odd bit of public witch-burning.

Ha! Said with feeling. Stock herself was one of the nore notable "witches" to be burnt in the Great Trans Crusade.

Here again is a difference with more benign aesthetic crazes: if you don’t keep up with the moral version, you risk losing your social circle or even your job. But the reputational cascade that was wokeness didn’t just deter dissent from those frightened to swim against the perceived tide. It also incentivised opportunists, who actively used the surging tide to swim further ahead than their competitors. Many organisations latched on to it as a positive marketing strategy, thereby creating workplace structures and habits that, from the inside, now seem very difficult to unpick.

Perhaps, though, we shouldn’t be too gloomy. For of course, the existence of a reputational cascade doesn’t require sincere belief in the rectitude or wisdom of whatever behaviours you are copying, only the sincere belief that nearly everybody else thinks such behaviours are good ones. And, while no doubt depressing as a fact about human nature, this also has an upside: it only takes widespread realisation that other people don’t actually believe what you thought they believed for a reputational cascade to collapse. As organisations start to cotton on properly to the fact the tides of fashion are turning, it will be interesting to see what happens next.

On wokeness, this is good from Andrew Sullivan, on the subject of Katherine Maher (via Jerry Coyne):

The point I have been trying to make for years now is that wokeness is not some racier version of liberalism, merely seeking to be kinder and more inclusive. It is, in fact, directly hostile to liberal values; it subordinates truth to ideology; it judges people not by their ability but by their identity; and it regards ideological diversity as a mere dog-whistle for bigotry. Maher has publicly and repeatedly avowed support for this very illiberalism. If people with these views run liberal institutions, the institutions will not — cannot — remain liberal for very long. And they haven’t. Elite universities are turning into madrassas, and media is turning into propaganda.

Back on the track with Jack Delano, March 1943. "Chicago, Illinois. Switchmen riding one of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe diesel switch engines."

[Photo: Shorpy/Jack Delano for the Office of War Information]

To reinforce that Columbia jibe in the last post, here's John Aziz in the JC:

“A message to the scum of nations and pigs of the Earth. Paradise lies in the shadow of swords. Glory to he who makes the occupier taste bitterness”, the tattered brown cardboard sign read in peculiarly pretentious and melodramatic language, attached with a wedge of black duct tape to a nondescript tent.

“Let it be known”, the woman in the brown keffiyeh spoke into the microphone with a coiled passion, her voice inflected with an American accent. “It was the Al-Aqsa flood (of October 7) that put the global intifada back on the table again. And it is the sacrificial spirit of the Palestinian freedom fighters that will guide every struggle on every corner of the Earth to victory. How far are we willing to go in losing all of the trappings of a respectable life, the material spoils that we have been taught to value as individuals?”

This is the kind of message that as a Palestinian, I have heard a lot over the years from a range of voices on my own side of the conflict. A message of unrestrained militancy, a threat to the world, a warning, an omen of violence. The language of Hamas, the language of al-muqawama (the resistance), the language of war.

But this is not Gaza, nor Yemen, nor Tehran. These are not the militant words of some radical imam amid the dust clouds of Arabia, or the war-torn Mediterranean landscape of Gaza. These are signs posted and words spoken at Columbia University’s Gaza solidarity encampment, in New York, the city with the largest Jewish population in the world – a city populated by 1.6 million Jews as compared to second-place Jerusalem’s 546,000 Jews. If these students wished to emulate their heroes of the Al-Aqsa Flood and attack or kidnap Jews, they would have plenty to choose from.

“Jews, Jews”, the hordes of American students chanted, “go back to Poland”. Many of these students might identify as left-wing and anti-racist, but the only recent historical parallel to this uncloaked antisemitism were the naked chants of “Jews will not replace us” spewed by the so-called alt-right, the incels, groypers, and neo-Nazis in Charlottesville in 2017.

Do these idiots really think Jews came from Poland? Don't they know any history beyond a fairy-tale fantasy of lovely innocent brown people and horrible Jew colonisers? – that Israel is the Jewish ancestral homeland? – that they were there thousands of years before the Arabs showed up with the Islamic Arab conquests of the 7th century? – that nearly a half of Israeli Jews are Mizrahi, mostly expelled from Middle Eastern countries and with no connection to Europe?

And do they know that Auschwitz is in Poland? Or is that the point?

Update: Brendan O'Neill:

We need to be honest about what is happening at Columbia. This is solidarity with a pogrom. It is sympathy for fascism. It is privileged leftists getting a cheap moral kick from a mass act of racist violence against Jews that they catastrophically mistake for a blow against imperialism. It is the Socialism of Fools.

Dearborn Friday Sermon by Dr. Baqir Berry:

Dr. Baqir Berry discussed the “dangers” of dealing with the Jews in his April 12, 2024 Friday sermon streamed live on the Facebook page of the Islamic Institute of Knowledge in Dearborn, Michigan. He said that Zionism is the “ISIS of today” and that it is “million times worse than the ISIS of the Muslims.” Berry added that ISIS didn’t commit the kind of crimes perpetrated by the Zionists. He continued to say that the Zionists, in America too, are barbaric criminal savages, and he asked: “What kind of peace can you have with them?” Berry said that Zionism and Israel pose the “greatest imminent danger” that threatens all of humanity, just like Nazism. He added that Israel must be removed in order to remove this great imminent danger and that the Jews and Zionists must be reeducated in order for a “real democracy” and a culture of peace to be established.

There was a time when this kind of crude antisemitic diatribe could only be made inside a mosque, where the supposed privilege of religion would render the preacher immune from prosecution – or even censure. In the present climate, though, he could do this routine at Columbia University say, and get cheered by all the excited young Free Palestine progressives.

Yes, as the Cass Report shows, "gender-affirming care" in the form of puberty blockers is based on shoddy to non-existent medical foundations. But the question that now needs to be asked is, as Helen Saxby writes in The Critic, Where is so much gender confusion coming from?

A few days after the publication of the Cass Review, another important document was made public: a legal advice report by KC Karen Monaghan, regarding the lawfulness of the Brighton Council/Allsorts Trans Inclusion Schools Toolkit. This was commissioned by a couple of Brighton parents who had experienced first-hand the devastating impact of trans ideology being promoted in their child’s school. The evidence, much like the evidence in the Cass report, must be seen as damning of all professionals who accept unevidenced ideological beliefs to the detriment of normal safeguarding duties and legal compliance. Again, many of us were not surprised. For over six years, residents of Brighton have been challenging the council over the Allsorts toolkit and its neglect of the rights of girls in particular. We have spelled out time and again the incompatibility of the toolkit with the Equality Act and Human Rights legislation, only for it to fall on deaf ears.

The mother at the centre of the case against Brighton Council, who must remain anonymous to protect her child, told me this:

Teachers at our daughter’s school transitioned her, supported binding of her breasts and knew about her being prescribed testosterone but never told us. They say the Brighton Toolkit allows them to do this. The same Toolkit has proliferated around the U.K. We were labelled irrational transphobes for questioning this practice. The Cass Report confirms we were right to be concerned. The Monaghan Advice shows the school and council were unlawful in their actions. We want every parent or teacher branded transphobic for challenging these policies to be empowered by Cass and have access to Monaghan so they can hold schools and councils to account, and vulnerable children can be supported with holistic, efficacious, evidence based and lawful care….

Trans Inclusion Schools Toolkits, such as the Allsorts/Brighton Council one, alongside an increasingly large library of trans picture books for young children, are taking away the security of fixed sex identity for children and replacing it with a confusing smorgasbord of “gender” choice which many children cannot cope with. We are creating children who are “gender-confused” or “gender-questioning” (which are both used as synonyms for “trans”) and then, as the queues grow, asking where the services are for “trans kids”. We have a schools-to-clinic pipeline.  

If you want to reduce the waiting lists for unhappy children, then part of the solution is to look more critically at the source of their unhappiness. When that source consists of outside agencies with an ideological agenda having a disproportionate influence on schools and education, that needs to be stopped. Bring on the public enquiry.  

Back in February we had Kemi Badenoch robustly calling out Labour's Anneliese Dodds, who'd been bemoaning the failure of senior conservatives to tackle "the scourge of Islamophobia":

We use the term “Anti-Muslim hatred”. It makes clear the law protects Muslims. In this country, we have a proud tradition of religious freedom AND the freedom to criticise religion. The definition of “Islamophobia” she uses creates a blasphemy law via the back door if adopted.

My comment at the time, "I thought the battle against the ridiculous term "Islamophobia" had been pretty much lost. Encouraging to see this, then…"

And the fightback continues:

Extremists are exploiting the tag of Islamophobia to stifle free speech, says a report backed by Sajid Javid.

The report, published on Monday by the think tank Policy Exchange, details how the term “Islamophobia” is being misused to silence debate about issues such as moves to ban terrorist sympathisers of Hamas….

In a foreword to the report, Mr Javid, a former home secretary, said a new definition of Islamophobia, put forward by a parliamentary group and backed by Labour, would undermine efforts to tackle hatred of Muslims, would be a serious threat to free speech and could worsen existing divisions.

The definition, drawn up by an all-party group chaired by Wes Streeting, now shadow health secretary, described Islamophobia as “rooted in racism and is a type of racism that targets expressions of Muslimness or perceived Muslimness”.

However, Mr Javid said it would risk creating a blasphemy law via the back door by targeting legitimate speech. “Many who propose this new definition have good intentions. But the nakedly political motivations from organisations like Cage and Mend are all too clear,” he said.

“Too often, Islamophobia has been weaponised as a political football, to the detriment of a meaningful conversation that can enable positive change.”

Describing the misuse of the label Islamophobia as a “creeping malaise”, the report highlighted more than a dozen examples, including criticism of Rishi Sunak by the Labour Muslim Network (LMN) after he urged Labour MPs to “call on Hamas and the Houthis to de-escalate the situation” in the Middle East….

Dr Paul Stott, head of security and extremism at Policy Exchange, said: “As the examples illustrate, in the period of emotion and tension since Hamas’s terrorist attack on Israel on 7th October, the use of the term Islamophobia has become wider, less coherent and at times inflated to a remarkable degree. The threat to freedom of speech could not be more clearly signposted.”

As I said some years back:

The charge of Islamophobia deliberately obscures that separation between a person and their beliefs. It accepts the Islamic vision of an immutable union of person and religion. We should refuse to accept those terms. A person's ethnic origins may be Pakistani, Arab, Kurd, European, whatever, and to criticise or abuse them for that is racist and unacceptable. Their beliefs, whether in Islam, Scientology, UFOs, or any other ideology, creed or cult, is an entirely different matter, and should be open to criticism, debate, scepticism, up to and including ridicule. That's the way we do it, and that's what we should be defending. Worship who or what you want, wear what you want, think what you want, but don't expect to be spared from being offended by the opinions and beliefs of others. The charge of Islamophobia is, precisely, an attempt to make criticism of Islam illegitimate – and that attempt should be resisted. We should be free to criticise Islam just as we criticise Christianity, socialism, capitalism, or any other system of beliefs.

The fact that the most well-known Islamic apostate, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, is under constant police protection, that Ibn Warraq, author of "Why I am Not a Muslim", has to write under a pseudonym, and that cartoons of Mohammed still attract death threats and Facebook bans, suggests how far we still have to go. The aim should be, at least for those Muslims resident in the West, that they feel as free to abandon the faith of their parents (or not to, of course) as Christians, atheists, and all the rest of us are free now to make our own choices. As long as Islamophobia is accepted as a legitimate term of criticism, we won't start making any progress.

From the Telegraph:

An NSPCC whistleblower has quit the charity after claiming it risked “grooming” children with aggressive trans ideology.

Julia Marshall, who had volunteered with the organisation for more than 30 years, warned that it had been “completely captured” by the hardline Stonewall campaign group.

The 62-year-old claimed that she and other school volunteers were told to ask primary school-age children their pronouns when they delivered assemblies and workshops.

She says that they were also put under pressure to affirm children’s choices of gender, even where it had nothing to do with protecting them against physical and sexual abuse, which is the NSPCC’s founding purpose.

This isn't new: we heard about the NSPCC captured by Stonewall last year. Nothing seems to have changed…yet.

Interesting. A letter from sixteen senior clinical psychologists in the Observer:

We write as clinical psychologists with longstanding concerns about the scandal unfolding at Gender Identity Development Service clinics. Some of us are former Gids clinicians. While welcoming your editorial stance, we would like to point out that it is not just the medical profession that has “much to reflect on” (“The Observer view on the Cass review: children were catastrophically failed by the medical profession”).

These were psychology-led services. Whether intentionally or not, and many were doing their best in an impossible situation, it was clinical psychologists who promoted an ideology that was almost impossible to challenge; who, as the Cass report found, largely failed to carry out proper assessments of troubled young people, and thus put many on an “irreversible medical pathway” that in most cases was inappropriate; and who failed in their most basic duty to keep proper records.

It is also our professional body, the British Psychological Society, that has failed (despite years of pressure) to produce guidelines for clinicians working with young people in this complex area; and that, forced into making an official response for the first time, now minimises its own role in events and calls for “more psychology” as the answer. We are ashamed of the role psychology has played.

What happened at Gids was a multi-factorial systemic failure, but when the Observer rightly calls for “accountability for the managers and clinicians who pursued such unethical practice and caused avoidable harm to young people”, we believe the role of our own profession should be fully examined.

The British Psychological Society has long been captured by gender ideology.

“Pierce one ear. Now you can teach physics.”#ICYMI read more #TGIF by @NellieBowles here: https://t.co/5BImklU9Ye pic.twitter.com/Ep639mUe40

— The Free Press (@TheFP) April 20, 2024

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