Politics and Culture
An Easter message from Pravda:
The World Russian People's Council led by Patriarch Kirill of Moscow has adopted an "order" that refers to the Russian invasion of Ukraine as a "holy war" and states that "the entire territory of present-day Ukraine should be included in the area of Russia's exclusive influence".
Easter greetings from Moscow: Declaration of holy war on the West that “has fallen into Satanism.” https://t.co/KPle0v6BSh
— Serhii Plokhy (@SPlokhy) March 30, 2024
It's almost two weeks now since the neighbourhood made the news, to much excitement, with our very own Banksy mural.
Things, alas, have not gone well. Someone sploshed some white paint over it a couple of days later, and now…
All fenced in, "CCTV in operation", and barely visible behind all the panels.
The tree, meanwhile, which looked so bare and brutalised two weeks back, is now showing spring shoots, and should soon be in blossom.
There's a moral in there somewhere…
The Office for National Statistics made the news last year when they “hugely overestimated” the number of transgender people in the UK. The finding that the numbers were particularly high in London boroughs like Newham and Brent, where large numbers of non-English speakers reside, was suspected to be less because of the number of trans Muslims, more the bafflement caused by the question, “is the gender you identify with the same as your sex registered at birth?”.
Women working for the Office for National Statistics face disciplinary action if they object to male-born colleagues using single-sex lavatories and changing rooms, documents leaked to The Sunday Telegraph reveal.
A cache of HR policies, internal communications and posts from the ONS intranet show that the statistics body has been subject to “institutional capture” by trans activists, gender-critical campaigners have alleged….
A set of ONS resources on “Gender Identity and Transitioning at Work” includes a manager’s checklist for supporting a transitioning employee with a section headed “use of single-sex facilities”.
It says: “Have you agreed when the employee will start to use single-sex facilities, such as toilets and changing rooms, appropriate to their acquired gender? This will usually be on the first day of transition.”
The document says that “if colleagues object to sharing facilities with employees going through transition, the situation should be dealt with through communication, discussion and education.
“If colleagues persist with unreasonable objections you may need to manage the situation via grievance or disciplinary procedures.”…
The policy states that “all trans people should be treated according to the gender in which they identify, irrespective of their legal gender status under the Gender Recognition Act 2004” and that “although not covered by the Gender Recognition Act (2004), ONS accepts that it is good practice to treat a transgender person who does not hold a GRC in the same way as a person who does”.
Sex Matters said both points “go far beyond the law, disregarding the impact on other employees”.
It also said that leaked posts from the ONS intranet showed “an organisation that has put transgender identities and feelings before everything – including accuracy”….
Fiona McAnena, Sex Matters’ director of campaigns, said: “The ONS staff documents that have been leaked are inaccurate, ideologically driven and inflammatory. This is what institutional capture looks like.”
The same old story:
"Zionist scum off our streets" pic.twitter.com/vW8zEczGek
— Harry's Place (@hurryupharry) March 30, 2024
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Right down to the arrest of the Iranian "Hamas is Terrorist" counter-protestor:
INCOMING
Police have arrested Iranian anti Hamas activist Niyak Ghorbani AGAIN!!
His previous arrest while holding an anti Hamas banner caused outrage @metpoliceuk what are you doing?? pic.twitter.com/NtDUKjLOPl
— Harry's Place (@hurryupharry) March 30, 2024
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Also:
The day after an Iranian dissident is stabbed multiple times outside his own home it's shameful that the flag of the regime is still welcome on these anti Zionist demonstrations. pic.twitter.com/4ZukXyQyHd
— Harry's Place (@hurryupharry) March 30, 2024
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Palestine is just the veneer for something far more insidious taking place in British society right now pic.twitter.com/jCdQjUAyGU
— Harry's Place (@hurryupharry) March 30, 2024
Predictable, but still depressing:
Britain’s biggest teaching union is to blame Israel for the war in Gaza and publish “educational resources” about the conflict for teachers.
Leaders of the National Education Union (NEU) are calling on their 300,000 members to actively campaign for Palestine and “increase understanding” of the conflict.
The union’s executive board has backed a motion, to be discussed at the annual conference next week, which declares that “Israel’s hard-right, racist government is the main driver of conflict, violence and war in Palestine and Israel”.
Nothing to do with the October 7th pogrom, then? With Hamas using all the resources in Gaza to build up a terror network of tunnels, with weapons hidden in hospitals and schools, in pursuit of their explicit aim of killing Jews and destroying the state of Israel? No – as ever, it's the fault of the Jews.
The motion, which also calls for the NEU to support the Palestine Solidarity Campaign and Stop the War Coalition, will be debated despite laws that forbid teachers from pushing their political views in classrooms.
Gillian Keegan, the Education Secretary, said the motion was “wholly inappropriate” and “completely ignore[s] the horrific terrorist attacks committed by Hamas on October 7”.
She added: “Teachers have a duty to remain politically impartial and to ensure all sides of contested views are presented fairly and without bias or prejudice.
“These proposals will cause significant hurt to members of the Jewish community and the thousands of Jewish children and parents in British schools.”
I'm not a Keegan fan, but she's absolutely right here.
The motion comes after Daniel Kebede, a militant trade unionist and pro-Palestine campaigner took over as general secretary of the union last year.
Mr Kebede, a former teacher in the North East of England, was embroiled in an anti-Semitism row last year when a clip emerged of him speaking at a rally in Newcastle, where participants were heard calling to “globalise the intifada”.
The Telegraph sums it up – Scotland’s Hate Crime Act will make opinions dangerous – and play into the trans lobby’s hands:
Imagine living in a world where sitting in your own living room and saying “men can’t be women” could result in the police logging a “hate incident” against your name.
Imagine, too, that your legally protected right to express such an opinion counted for nothing because all that mattered was whether the person who heard you perceived it to be offensive.
If you live in Scotland, this is the world you will be living in as of Monday. And no, it’s not an April Fool’s prank by the Scottish Government, despite the date when it comes into force.
The Hate and Public Order (Scotland) Act will, according to its critics, be a state-sponsored assault on free speech with sinister parallels to the Stasi in East Germany.
Billed as a necessary legislative update to a hotch-potch of anti-hate laws (it finally abolishes the offence of blasphemy, last prosecuted in 1843) it extends the offence of stirring up hatred to cover not only race and religion but also age, disability, sexual orientation, transgender identity and “variations in sex characteristics”.
Politicians have warned that the new law will be “weaponised” by the radical trans lobby to criminalise anyone who states their belief in the immutability of someone’s birth sex.
Meanwhile, The Telegraph has been told that Police Scotland – which has just announced it will no longer investigate certain low-level crimes – is diverting resources so it can investigate the expected influx of accusatory phone calls it will receive from those offended by other people’s opinions.
The force has promised to investigate every hate crime complaint it receives, and if the complainant (or victim, as they are officially referred to) insists they were upset by something they perceived to be a hate crime, it will be logged as a non-crime hate incident (NCHI) even if there is not a shred of evidence of any crime being committed.
Little wonder that women’s rights campaigners fear that the new law will be used by trans radicals to settle scores and silence anyone who dares to challenge their world view.
If George Orwell was still around, he could perhaps write a book about it and call it Twenty Twenty-Four.
Ooh, clever.
Calum Steele, former general secretary of the Scottish Police Federation, which represents rank and file officers, is among those who fear that the police will be swamped.
He says: “I know from colleagues that they are reallocating resources from elsewhere to be able to deal with the influx of reported hate speech.”
Part of the problem, he says, is that there is nothing to deter malicious complaints made by people wanting to settle scores with each other, because: “It’s difficult to imagine how you could prove someone was wasting police time when the whole thing is based entirely on their perception rather than evidence.”
In other words, it's a charter for vexatious claims – for people with an ideological axe to grind to silence and punish their critics. In that respect it's basically a blasphemy law – as seen for instance in Pakistan, where anyone with a score to settle just accuses their enemy of insulting Islam and it's game over. Nothing to do with crime as we understand it; everything to do with blasphemy against a particular religious/ideological belief. And I think we all know which particular adherents of a religious/ideological belief are going to be making maximum use of this. Gender-critical women, beware.
A new dystopian vision comes to Scotland next week with the introduction of the extraordinary hate crime law. If you haven't been following the debate, Kathleen Stock at UnHerd is probably as good a place to start as any.
If the Scottish establishment is to be believed, ordinary Scots are positively frothing with hatred at the moment. Already Police Scotland record “non-crime hate incidents”, based solely on an onlooker’s perception of hatred, as a matter of course. But this hasn’t been enough to stem the tide of venom north of the border. So on Monday, the Hate Crime and Public Order Act will come into force, intended among other things to criminalise the “stirring up” of hatred towards several protected characteristics, including race, age, disability, religion, and transgender identity.
And there’s more. Ostensibly introduced for those victims of hate crimes too intimidated to speak to the police directly, there will now be designated “third-party reporting centres” for accusations of hateful crime, including one in a Glasgow sex shop. Snitch on someone you dislike and pick up a dildo at the same time — isn’t modern life wonderful? …
Many commentators are concerned that the whole Act will chill legitimate free speech, either via actual criminal sanctions or via misinterpretations of the law by police and others; and there are particular worries about speech that is critical of religion, either of the traditional or transactivist kinds. But the smooth-tongued rainbow mandarins paid to dictate equality policy to a mostly vacant-eyed political class have told everyone to take a deep breath and relax. As the chief executive of Equality Network in Scotland Rebecca Crowther soothingly told Sky News: “This legislation is not going to catch people online saying things that I might disagree with, that you might disagree with, things that might upset me, things that might upset others in the community… What it does legislate against is when that freedom of speech strays into something that is abusive, that could cause fear and alarm, and that also incites hatred or incites people to act on that hatred.” Meanwhile Yousaf himself has said that he has “full confidence” that the police will look beyond “vexatious” complaints.
But what this trite sort of response obviously ignores is that, as social norms change, it is increasingly difficult for people to distinguish between that which is merely disagreeable and upsetting, and that which is genuinely hateful and abusive. It is an irony of the present situation that so many seem to think that biology is socially constructed but that the meaning of hatred is natural and fixed. In fact, what counts as an adequate expression of a particular emotion is at least partly culturally determined, and these days the category of hatred seems to be a lot more expansive than it used to be. Previously, its presence was indicated by otherwise random-looking outbursts of violence towards outgroups, and the use of aggressive slurs. In present day Scotland, however, it seems detectable from saying things like “choosing to identify as ‘non-binary’ is as valid as choosing to identify as a cat” — a recent statement by the Conservative MSP Murdo Fraser, subsequently recorded by police as a non-crime hate incident, a verdict he now intends to contest in court….
A reasonable person wouldn’t have gone along with any of this, and yet in Scotland crazily myopic and illiberal measures continue to be waved through, with stunning condescension on the part of their smug originators. In other words, there’s no use appealing to what some hypothetical reasonable person would think, when there appear to be no such people in the vicinity. They’ve probably all gone down the sex shop to report J.K. Rowling for saying homosexuality is a thing. It’s almost as if these people hate us.
It's going to be interesting, to say the least, to see how this astonishingly bad piece of legislation will work out, but given Police Scotland's training on gender-critical activists called Jo, who think trans people should be sent to the gas chambers, I think we can get a fairly good idea. If nothing else, it's a trans activists' charter for silencing their critics.
Update: Taggart's on the case.
'Thur's been a misgenderin.' pic.twitter.com/67R29Aipf2
— Ian Acheson 🇬🇧🇮🇪 (@NotThatBigIan) March 29, 2024
From the Mail:
A trans woman has been helped to breastfeed her grandchild, in what is thought to be a world first.
And, let's hope, a world last.
The unidentified 50-year-old was helped to express up to 30ml of milk at a time, after a four week course of hormone treatment.
Researchers from Duke University reported the woman ‘lactated for a total of two weeks’ and was able to feed the four-month-old baby.
The motivation for inducing lactation was to create a ‘bond from breastfeeding that she had not been able to experience with her own five children’.
The motivation certainly wasn't the health of the baby – god knows what repulsive chemical stew the poor child was ingesting. That comes way down the list of priorities, though: most important was for the man to get his little thrill.
And what was the mother thinking??
‘The patient tearfully reported this was a significant and emotional experience for her that felt very different from formula feeding her other children.
‘She states she has a special bond with this baby for which she is grateful.
‘She regrets that she had not known about the possibility sooner and wished that other transgender women could know that breastfeeding a baby can be a reality.
‘She reported unforeseen benefits, including female gender affirmation and full breast maturation.
‘The patient did not experience any side effects from her treatment regimen.’
Isn't that nice? Not a word about the baby, of course – merely a prop in this grotesque exercise in "gender-affirmation".
Maya Forstater, executive director of campaign group Sex Matter, said: ‘Babies cannot consent to being participants in a study which sets aside biological reality to define treatment protocols relating to so-called “gender medicine”.
‘Men should not be permitted, still less supported, to get between babies and their mothers, or to use babies as props to validate their beliefs that they are women.’
Meanwhile, in Sydney:
A women’s football competition has been branded “misogynist” after it was won by a team featuring five transgender players amid accusations one had broken an opponents’ leg in two places.
Flying Bats FC won every match they played during the four-week Beryl Ackroyd Cup, including a 10-0 victory in which one of their trans players scored a double hat-trick.
Since winning Sunday’s final in Sydney, Australia, 4-0, it has emerged organisers had earlier held a crisis meeting, during which rival teams were warned forfeiting games against the Bats would result in disciplinary action and could even be viewed as “an act of discrimination”.
The same meeting included accusations a 6ft 2in, 14st Bats player had once broken the leg of 5ft 6in, nine-and-a-half stone opponent in two places and claims 24 of the injured player’s team-mates had quit because they did not want to face the LGBTQ+ side.
Flying Bats went on to win the $1,000 (£514) first prize on Sunday.
One senior club official was quoted by Australia’s Daily Telegraph newspaper saying: “Our girls are here to play for fun and expect to play in the female competition. They did not sign up for a mixed competition.
“Some of the parents were so concerned they would not let their daughters play.
“It was so disheartening for them to see the huge difference in ability – they’re killing it.”
Behold the level of obfuscatory jargon from the club, to avoid acknowledging what's blindingly obvious to anyone with eyes to see:
The president of the Flying Bats, which boasts of being “the biggest LGBTQIA+ women’s and non-binary football club in the world”, told Daily Mail Australia trans women had been playing for them for at least two decades.
Jennifer Peden said: “As a club, the Flying Bats FC stand strongly for inclusion, and pride ourselves on safe, respectful and fair play, the promotion of a supportive community for LGBTQIA+ players, officials and supporters, and the significant physical, social and mental health benefits that participation in sport brings, especially to marginalised members of the LGBTQIA+ community. We are a club that values our cisgender and transgender players equally.
“We strongly support the Australian Human Rights Commission’s guidelines for the inclusion of transgender and gender diverse people in sport.
“These guidelines, along with the Sex Discrimination Act, inform the gender inclusion policies of Football Australia, Football NSW, and the North West Sydney Football Association at the community, grassroots level at which we play.
“Trans women belong in the women’s competition because that is the gender with which they identify. Trans women have played with the club for at least 20 years, at levels ranging from beginner to skilled, just like our cis women players.
“Our players are graded on ability and placed in the team that is most appropriate for their skill and experience level.”
A Football NSW spokesperson said the organisation took “pride in being at the forefront of developing inclusive policies for the sport in Australia and operates within the existing legal framework, including anti-discrimination legislation.
“Football NSW continues to align with Football Australia’s adoption of the Australian Human Rights Commission’s Guidelines for the inclusion of transgender and gender diverse people in sport, under which, community players are permitted to participate in football on the basis of the gender with which they identify.”
It's broken, folks. It's cult-speak. It's laughable. Though I doubt the girl who had her leg broken found it very funny.
From French photographer Thibaut Derien's project J’habite une ville fantôm – "I live in a ghost town": photos of old abandoned shops and cafes in small towns across France – relics of a disappearing world.
Derien, who is also a musician, has traveled all over France, visiting countless small towns and villages along the way. He often avoids major highways, preferring country roads and local streets where development is slower. “I continue this series because I’m still touched each time I discover an old shop,” he tells Colossal, “always standing despite abandonment as a resistance to the modern world. I always think about people who spent their life behind those walls.”
A closed shop represents more than simply a bygone era or an empty facade for the artist, who is interested in capturing the individuality of each location in light of the homogeneity of today’s commercial developments. Derien looks closer: “First, it’s just a facade; you can think it’s sad, but if you look a little bit more you see old paintings, old mosaics, some ‘know-how’… Many commercial centers—all the same—have replaced the small shops, each one different.”
[All images © Thibaut Derien]
Mick Hartley 