Mick Hartley

Politics and Culture

recent posts

email me

  • “People should not be criminalised for stating simple facts on biology”

    Well then:

    Rishi Sunak has backed JK Rowling after she challenged Scottish police to use the SNP’s new hate crime laws to arrest her for her views on transgender issues.

    The Harry Potter author had said she was looking forward to being arrested after describing a series of transgender women as men on the day the new law came into force.

    An SNP minister had earlier admitted that Rowling could be investigated under the Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act – which creates a new offence of “stirring up of hatred” for “misgendering” trans people.

    However, the Prime Minister gave his support to Rowling saying that the Conservatives would always protect free speech.

    He said: “People should not be criminalised for stating simple facts on biology. We believe in free speech in this country, and Conservatives will always protect it.”

    He knows he's on to a winner here.

    Will this now prompt a comment from Starmer? Perhaps not…

    Update: Education Secretary Gillian Keegan joins the pile-on:

    JK Rowling should not be arrested for her views on transgender issues because the new Scottish hate crime law is a “terrible piece of legislation”, the Education Secretary has said.

    Gillian Keegan defended the Harry Potter author after Humza Yousaf’s SNP Government introduced a new offence of “stirring up hatred” by “misgendering” trans people….

    Asked whether Rowling should be arrested, Ms Keegan told Times Radio: “Well, no. As we have said, people shouldn’t be criminalised for just stating biological facts and it does seem odd that I think one of the ministers in Scotland said that you could be arrested for misgendering.

    “And I am pretty sure that the police in Scotland, as are the police in England, should be much more focused on fighting crime than policing people’s thoughts.

    “So this is, I think, a terrible bit of legislation. It is not something we will be introducing in this country.”

    It's an open goal. You can hardly blame the Tories for taking advantage.

  • What’s the wound?

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

    The "wound", as everyone knows but she pretends not to, is that men can't be lesbians: that men claiming to be lesbians, complaining that women who aren't interested in them as sexual partners are "transphobic", is pure gas-lighting. And it's the same gas-lighting that Butler is doing here: there's no rational reason that she can see – or that she claims she can see – that these lesbians don't accept trans women. It can only be a hatred, a phobia.

    For Stonewall's Nancy Kelley, lesbians not wanting to sleep with trans women is sexual racism; for Butler it's hatred, a phobia. At least Nancy Kelley makes no claims to be one of the world's leading philosophical thinkers.

  • Rowling rides in

    As noted in the Telegraph, JK Rowling has been busy tweeting (Xing?):

    JK Rowling has challenged Scotland’s police to arrest her under the SNP’s new hate crime laws after stating that a series of high-profile trans women are men.

    The Harry Potter author, who lives in Edinburgh, tweeted: “Freedom of speech and belief are at an end in Scotland if the accurate description of biological sex is deemed criminal.

    “I’m currently out of the country, but if what I’ve written here qualifies as an offence under the terms of the new act, I look forward to being arrested when I return to the birthplace of the Scottish Enlightenment.”

    Rowling posted pictures of 10 high-profile trans people on Twitter and mocked their claims to be women.

    For example:

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

    Finally:

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

    Full text:

    In passing the Scottish Hate Crime Act, Scottish lawmakers seem to have placed higher value on the feelings of men performing their idea of femaleness, however misogynistically or opportunistically, than on the rights and freedoms of actual women and girls. The new legislation is wide open to abuse by activists who wish to silence those of us speaking out about the dangers of eliminating women's and girls’ single-sex spaces, the nonsense made of crime data if violent and sexual assaults committed by men are recorded as female crimes, the grotesque unfairness of allowing males to compete in female sports, the injustice of women’s jobs, honours and opportunities being taken by trans-identified men, and the reality and immutability of biological sex.

    For several years now, Scottish women have been pressured by their government and members of the police force to deny the evidence of their eyes and ears, repudiate biological facts and embrace a neo-religious concept of gender that is unprovable and untestable. The re-definition of 'woman' to include every man who declares himself one has already had serious consequences for women's and girls’ rights and safety in Scotland, with the strongest impact felt, as ever, by the most vulnerable, including female prisoners and rape survivors.

    It is impossible to accurately describe or tackle the reality of violence and sexual violence committed against women and girls, or address the current assault on women’s and girls’ rights, unless we are allowed to call a man a man. Freedom of speech and belief are at an end in Scotland if the accurate description of biological sex is deemed criminal.

    I'm currently out of the country, but if what I've written here qualifies as an offence under the terms of the new act, I look forward to being arrested when I return to the birthplace of the Scottish Enlightenment.

    If you agree with the views set out in this tweet, please retweet it.

  • A Legal Frankenstein

    Iain Macwhirter in the Times on Scotland's new Hate Crime Act:

    [M]ake no mistake, the Hate Crime Act is a new law. It creates for the first time a standalone crime of “stirring up hatred” against people with the protected characteristics of, among other things “transgender identity”. What constitutes “stirring up” is never made clear. However, we do know that this new offence can be committed in the privacy of your own home since the old “dwelling defence” has been abandoned. Your own son or daughter could, in theory, report you for stirring up transphobic hate at the breakfast table.

    We’re assured that, for prosecution to succeed, there must be convincing evidence of “threatening and abusive behaviour”. But these things are already illegal and have been for decades. The stirring-up part is another of those “progressive“ quasi-crimes designed to “send a message” to people to watch what they say or write. Whether or not the sentiment in question is actionable is very much in the eye of the beholder. Uniquely, in our supposedly “blind” justice system, the accuser will decide what is and is not “stirring up hatred”. Police Scotland define a hate crime as “any crime which is perceived by the victim or any other person to be motivated (wholly or partly) by malice or ill will”. You’ve been warned….

    Just because an act is badly drafted, insufferably vague and contradictory in law doesn’t make it ineffectual. Indeed, the very vagueness is what makes the Hate Crime Act so insidious.

    It is no accident that this law was born at about the same time as the Gender Recognition Reform (Scotland) Bill and by the same first minister, Nicola Sturgeon. The intention was, at least in part, to give trans people, newly transitioned by self-identification, the same legal protections as people of colour. It has morphed into a legal Frankenstein. This clype’s charter [clype: Scots slang for informer – MH] will cause grief to many innocent people, inhibit free speech, waste police time and occupy the courts with trivial and mendacious offences until it is finally consigned, along with this government’s other daft and illiberal laws, to the legislative rubbish bin.

  • Moving miners

    John Collier, November 1942. "Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (vicinity). Westland coal mine. 'Mantrip' going into a drift mine."

    image from www.shorpy.com
    [Photo: Shorpy/John Collier for the Office of War Information]

  • White supremacist patriarchy at work

    From the National Organisation for Women – "the largest organization of feminist grassroots activists in the United States". 

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

    An April fool? Nope (dated 31st March). 

    They've lost the plot.

    Responses are not kind:

    "You are such a complete and utter embarrassment."

    "Repeat after ME: Weaponizing “trans” against women is the ultimate gaslighting at work. Making women believe we need to make space for men in OUR sports is patriarchy at work. Fold up your tent & go home. You have no business thinking you represent women. You. Are. Putrid.…"

    "Lol you realize just squeezing as many "oppression buzzwords" into a sentence doesn't make your argument more persuasive, right? In fact, it makes it less so."

    "Simply amazing that the organization that fought for WOMENS rights now fights to allow men to subjugate them again. Just incredible."

  • Burnley 1970s

    More from the extensive Café Royal Books catalogue. This time we're in Lancashire, with Dragan Novaković:

    Burnley1

    Burnley2

    Burnley3

    Burnley4

    Burnley5

    Burnley6

    Burnley7

    Burnley8
    [Photos © Cafe Royal Books/Dragan Novaković]

  • This crappy sequel

    Arty Morty – The Hole Where Gay Rights Used to Be:

    Comparing yesterday’s gay rights movement to today’s trans rights movement is like comparing Jaws to Jaws 2: the first was an unprecedented phenomenon, a masterpiece, and a blockbuster. The second is a cheap knockoff greedily churned out to exploit the market the first one created. […]

    Progressives have walked into a trap: they got so addicted to feeling morally superior to conservatives over gay rights, they became easy marks for the cheapest scam in the books: opportunists posing as persecuted victims. Now the progressives are discovering that they were duped, and they’ve been made to look like moral cowards, so they’re panicking and doubling down, and they will keep on doing so, becoming more and more deluded and unhinged, until the entire system collapses.

    This crappy sequel is a flop, and the reckoning is going to bite, hard.

    Worth a read.

  • A philosophical and moral approach

    An interesting article in today's Sunday Times from Dominic Lawson, who comes to his late father Nigel's defence after the man's record as chancellor was trashed by Labour shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves in her recent Mais lecture (here).

    Reeves, though, extolled one figure above all, who was associated with that period: the Cambridge economist Joan Robinson (1903-83). This undoubtedly brilliant woman was praised by Reeves for understanding — allegedly in contrast to Nigel Lawson — that economics “is about values, rooted in political, philosophical and moral questions, about human nature and the good society”.

    My father was of a generation that knew something of where Robinson’s “philosophical and moral” outlook had led, and perhaps it is because of that age difference that no one commenting on the shadow chancellor’s lecture has made the points he almost certainly would have done. So I will.

    Ms Reeves’s idol was this country’s most influential advocate of the economic policies and practice of Mao Zedong, not just the Great Leap Forward — the forced collectivisation of agriculture, which caused a famine that killed an estimated 50 million Chinese people — but also the Cultural Revolution. Robinson declared of the former period that “the rationing system worked”. She was — as Evan Osborne sets out in his essay “Captive of One’s Own Theory: Joan Robinson and Maoist China” — even dismissive of official toleration of desperate individual efforts to grow food during the Great Leap Forward. Robinson had written of the “many concessions [that] had to be made to individualistic sentiment among the peasants; some communes actually disintegrated into private household cultivation”. Tut-tut.

    As for the barbarous Cultural Revolution, Robinson praised it at the time as “the first example of a new kind of class war” and condoned the violence by the Red Guards against the “rightists”, observing: “Perhaps they are still wondering what hit them.” She even enthused about the North Korean model, describing it as a “nation without poverty … all the economic miracles of the postwar world are put in the shade by these achievements”.

    Leave aside that Robinson had fallen abjectly for the propaganda of her hosts (she went to North Korea and was a frequent guest of Mao’s regime): it was her very “philosophical and moral approach”, eulogised by Reeves, that led her into such blindness.

    From Robinson's Wiki entry:

    In October 1964, Robinson also visited North Korea, which was effectively a single-party Communist state, and wrote in her report "Korean Miracle" that the country's success was due to "the intense concentration of the Koreans on national pride" under Kim Il Sung, "a messiah rather than a dictator." She also stated in reference to the division of Korea that "[o]bviously, sooner or later the country must be reunited by absorbing the South into socialism."

    Hmm.

  • Clean coal

    John Collier, November 1942. "Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (vicinity). Champion No. 1 coal cleaning plant. Loading cars with clean coal."

    image from www.shorpy.com
    [Photo: Shorpy/John Collier, Office of War Information]