Mick Hartley

What to look forward to under Starmer's Labour – Laurie Wastell in the Spectator:

With Sir Keir Starmer creeping closer to No. 10 every day, attention is rightly being paid to the radicalism of Labour’s agenda. Many have pointed to the awful prospect of its Race Equality Act, which would entail vast social engineering by state bureaucrats in pursuit of racial ‘equity’. Labour backs a definition of ‘Islamophobia’ that arguably equates criticism of Islam with racism – amounting to something like a blasphemy law. Meanwhile, its chilling plans for a ‘trans-inclusive’ ban on conversion therapy could criminalise clinicians not taking an ‘affirmative’ approach to patients who present with gender dysphoria. In other words, Labour could make it illegal not to set vulnerable young patients on a path towards experimental drugs and irreversible surgery.

Alan Johnson:

After spending a couple of hours in a room with Labour Party people of some importance and sway recently, and reading what they write, I concluded the following:
1. They have contempt for majority opinion on women's sex based rights. Eg. They think Maya Forstater's views are appalling and the law should be changed so her appalling views can be criminalised as "hate".
2. They have no conception of, let alone support for, intellectual pluralism. If you disagree with them, you will be dismissed as a dinosaur or a bigot. They have the sensibility of a New Clerisy.
3. The 2023 noises by Starmer were tactical, designed to appease majority opinion by hinting that he understood their opposition to the erasure of the sex based rights, protections and intimate spaces of women and girls. They will prove to be just an exercise in cynical pre-election impression management.
4. Post election – with the base angry at the absence of social democratic economic reforms – there will be a drive to pass 1. what will be in effect a Blasphemy Law, and 2. laws that in practice will endorse conversion therapy under the guise of being against it, enshrine near instant "self id", erase the rights of the same-sex attracted, and perhaps even cancel-to-criminalise gender critical views as "hate".

Hope I am wrong. Don't think I will be.

Despite the collapse of its image and the debunking of its ideology, the money keeps coming in.

Quangos kept their memberships for a Stonewall diversity scheme despite a government diktat to cut ties with the charity, it has been revealed.

At least eight arms-length bodies — which have the oversight of government departments — paid thousands of pounds to the charity last financial year, as Stonewall reported that its income from government-backed grants had been boosted above half a million pounds.

The memberships have raised concerns among government ministers including Kemi Badenoch, the business secretary and women and equalities minister, over the influence Stonewall is having on policy and its stance on transgender issues.

The charity’s annual accounts show that Stonewall received £572,868 in grants from government sources in 2022-23, up from £426,390 the year before. In total the charity brought in £7 million in 2022-23.

The majority of its income — £3.9 million — came from its Diversity Champions Programme, a scheme in which public bodies and private companies pay subscription fees to the charity in return for support and advice on diversity, as well as from its work with schools, local authorities, and providing speakers for events.

Badenoch previously told government departments to withdraw from the scheme and said last year: “Stonewall do not decide the law of this country.”…

Freedom of information requests submitted by The Times showed that last year Arts Council England, the Pensions Regulator, the Care Quality Commission, Historic England, Sport England and the Tate paid £3,000 each for membership of the scheme….

A government source said: “No body funded by taxpayers should be paying external organisations to do their diversity and inclusion work. It is a gross waste of money and Stonewall push several ideologies that are not recognised by the government. However it’s not in the least bit surprising that Labour-run Wales and SNP-run Scotland continue to funnel cash to this discredited organisation.”

The Welsh government gave the charity £100,000 in 2022-23. A Welsh government spokesman said: “We work with a range of partners to challenge discrimination and to create a society where LGBTQ+ people feel safe to live openly and freely as themselves.”…

The Scottish government gave Stonewall £101,613, and NHS Scotland gave £38,878.

FSU member and University College London academic Michelle Shipworth has been BANNED from teaching her own course, after a Chinese student complained that discussing modern slavery in China was too "provocative". We've now taken this up directly with UCL.https://t.co/B6cL3Ah4mU

— The Free Speech Union (@SpeechUnion) March 9, 2024

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From the Telegraph:

A leading UK university has banned an academic from teaching a “provocative” course involving China to protect its commercial interests, The Telegraph can disclose.

Michelle Shipworth, an associate professor at University College London (UCL), told The Telegraph she had “no choice” but to blow the whistle in order to “expose” how British universities were “conceding to the censorship demands of some Chinese students”.

Ms Shipworth, 58, was also accused of being anti-Chinese after she caught out two students from China who were cheating and they were subsequently expelled. One had used a body double in an attempt to hoodwink her during a supervision.

Her head of department at UCL told her he was taking action because “in order to be commercially viable”, the university’s courses “need to retain a good reputation amongst future Chinese applicants”.

UCL has the highest number of Chinese students in the UK, making up almost a quarter of its total student population. More than 10,000 Chinese students are at the university, typically paying two to three times the fees of home-grown students – up to £40,000 a year.

Ms Shipworth, who teaches at UCL’s Bartlett School of Environment, Energy and Resources, found herself under investigation after a seminar last October examining data from the Global Slavery Index 2014. The data claimed China had the second-highest prevalence of modern slavery in the world….

She recalled that, at the end of the seminar, one of the Chinese students “stood up and said in a fairly cross tone – I wouldn’t even describe it as angry – something along the lines of: ‘Why are you using such a horrible provocation?’”

Prof Neil Strachan, Ms Shipworth’s boss, was alerted, culminating in her being told that another academic had been asked to “take over” the research module she had taught for the past 10 years.

Patrick West of Spiked has been reading Heidegger, and thinks he could be the answer to the problem of collective herd mentality and cancel culture – "The notoriously difficult philosopher was a vociferous enemy of groupthink".

Ever since I started to read him a couple of years ago, it has increasingly struck me that the best antidote to today’s woes are the thoughts of German philosopher Martin Heidegger. He could even be seen as a counterbalance to Michel Foucault, the French philosopher who inspired much woke thinking.

Utilising Heidegger would be no mean feat. His magnum opus, Being and Time (1927), is notoriously difficult to read in translation. Worse still, he was a member of the Nazi Party from May 1933 until the end of the war, and his posthumously published ‘black notebooks’ have exposed his deep-seated anti-Semitism. He was a ‘small man’ as the critic George Steiner once put it. But he was also a great thinker. And ironically, despite what we now know about the rise of the Nazis, Heidegger was actually very sound on the pernicious power of the crowd.

Intrinsic to Heidegger’s philosophy was a belief in authenticity, which, in his own idiosyncratic German, he called Eigentlichkeit. We are ‘thrown’ into the world at a time not of our choosing and our time here is finite. This is the primary source of our angst, says Heideigger. In this finite life, we are necessarily faced with having to make individual choices, which, by implication, are moral choices. It is a terrible but inevitable predicament to be authentic, to be oneself, to decide one’s destiny.

For Heidegger, the opposite of Eigentlichkeit is being beholden to das Man. In English this is translated variously as ‘They’, ‘People’ or ‘The Public’. This is the tempting, easy, inauthentic option. To conform to what ‘They’ expect means not having to make up your own mind or take responsibility for your actions. It means you are not oneself but part of the ‘they-self’.

Heidegger said that it is life’s arduous challenge to be, or regain, our authenticity and autonomy. Once that state is attained, our lives can be joyous and liberated, not burdened with the imperative of having to conform or bury oneself in a passive public persona.

This is the task that faces us today: to struggle to be oneself. To not be ‘They’.

It's certainly a bold idea, citing a Nazi and a supporter of Hitler in the 1930s for his opposition to groupthink and collective herd mentality.

The joy of Heidegger is that he mixes obscurity of terminology with schoolboy philosophy. The reader, then, struggles through the Eigentlichkeits and the Daseins and eventually may come to appreciate that what the great thinker is getting at is this idea that life is a struggle in which we have to make individual choices and take responsibility for our actions. This spectactularly banal conclusion is then somehow gilded with an aura of profundity, simply because it's been such a struggle to get there. I mean, it's hard going, so he must be a deep thinker – right?

As philosopher Jonathan Glover put it:

The moral case against Heidegger the man is obvious. The central moral case against Heidegger the philosopher is easier to get wrong. It is not about a link between his theories and Nazism. It is about undermining philosophy's role in developing a climate of critical thought. His books are an embodiment of the idea that philosophy is an impenetrable fog, in which ideas not clearly understood have to be taken on trust. Karl Jaspers was right in seeing this "incommunicative" mode of thought as linked to being dictatorial.

Deference is encouraged by having to take it on trust that the obscure means something important. And since things not understood cannot be argued about, the critical faculties atrophy. Philosophy could not have served the Nazis better than by encouraging deference and by this softening of the mind.

As relevant now as ever.

I’m a woman from inside Iran. It’s a punishable crime for me to walk unveiled & make this video but on International Woman Day, I have a message for all of you:
Please be my voice and help us to be #UnitedAgainstGenderApartheid. #EndGenderApartheid

pic.twitter.com/s1XFHXiLvL

— Masih Alinejad 🏳️ (@AlinejadMasih) March 8, 2024

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More on WPATH, and its dodgy history, from Malcolm Clark at The Critic:

Its founder Harry Benjamin began his career in the late 1930s in New York promoting quack hormone cures based on the work of the now discredited German medic Eugen Steinach who, among other things, claimed he could cure homosexuality by implanting tiny grafts of a heterosexual men’s testicles into gay men’s bodies. Ironically, this attempt to turn confused, self-loathing gays straight may be the only consistent thread in WPATH’s shameful history.

Harry Benjamin became obsessed with transsexuality in the late 1950s and in 1963 treated a fabulously wealthy lesbian heiress called (Rita/) Reed Erickson who believed she was a man. She was so pleased with the results of her mastectomy and testosterone injections she helped Benjamin set up the predecessor of WPATH, the US-based Harry Benjamin Foundation and its later global equivalent the Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association. She then poured vast sums of money into both. Without her largesse it is inconceivable that today’s gender affirmation colossus would have taken root. She funded support groups, international conferences, films and lectures. She also worked with Benjamin on his first Standards of Care. It was through Benjamin and his good friend the distinctly creepy scientist John Money that Erickson paid for the first gender identity clinic in the States at John Hopkins University.

If this sounds like an uplifting story of private wealth enabling medical innovation it requires important context. Erickson saw her gender identity funding as just a small part of her commitment to all sorts of New Age ideas that she hoped would “expand our understanding of human consciousness”.

Among the recipients of barrow-loads of her moolah were all sorts of cranks from the parapsychologist Stanley Krippner, who claimed to be able to communicate telepathically, to the marine laboratory of neuroscientist John Lilly who claimed he was on the brink of being able to communicate with dolphins. His research programme was shut down after local papers revealed a female scientist had been regularly masturbating a male dolphin. As you do. Lilly was also by then a ketamine addict as was Erickson herself. Did I mention she poured yet more of her money into ketamine research? If only she’d realised it’s never a good idea to get high on your own supply.

The point is that none of these projects was considered less important to Erickson than that of Harry Benjamin’s. The bank transfers continued for all of them even as Erickson had to take refuge from drug charges in a huge estancia in Mexico. It was there in 1976 that the “writer” Helen Schuman was flown by private jet to meet Erickson and her pet leopard. Schuman convinced her to pay for the publication of A Course in Miracles, a book Schuman insisted had been dictated to her by Jesus himself. You may scoff at Schuman, and I do, but on the upside she hasn’t been responsible for the castration of thousands of boys or the mutilation of thousands of girls.

A Course in Miracles still sells. Krippner, who is in his dotage now, is still researching. Lilly, long dead, still has his fans. But only the gender pseudoscience that Erickson helped establish and funded for three decades has managed to sink its tentacles into public life and medicine. The reason it alone was able to do this was because it tapped into the language of social justice and identity politics. There was no community of angry dolphin-communicators to cancel those who denied their delusion. No bands of telepathic activists who claimed they would commit suicide if we didn’t use their newly invented pronouns. We would never accept Ketamine devotees picketing medical meetings to try to enforce prescribing the drug to children.

The leaks from WPATH should mark the start of a long overdue re-assessment of this dodgy lobby group by medical regulators. But that’s not enough. It’s time they explained why they fell for the rebranding of an organisation set up by a pill-pushing fraudster and funded by a drug-addled crank. The harm caused by serious institutions embracing its pseudo-science and magical thinking has been incalculable.

Yep, it's cranks all the way down in the golden age of American crankery, from Scientology to Carlos Castaneda to orgone boxes to multiple personalities. Scientology, cleverly, formalised itself as a religion. Gender ideology, of course, has many of the same cult-like characteristics. The astonishing thing though is how successful it's been, managing to position itself as the progressive follow-on to gay liberation. Countless confused children have paid the price….

Another side of the WPATH files, as mentioned by Janice Turner in today's Times:

If you thought eunuchs died out with the Ottoman Empire and have become merely Machiavellian characters in Game of Thrones, you’ve lost track of modern sexual mores. A release this week of leaked documents and internal videos from WPATH (World Professional Association for Transgender Health) was appallingly familiar to anyone acquainted with the grotesque “treatments” that rapacious doctors, especially in the US, perform on vulnerable adults and children.

One issue, however, highlighted by the feminist online magazine Reduxx, was somewhat eye-popping. WPATH is a symposium of global “experts” who draw up “best practice” guidance for treating trans people. Yet in 2021 it updated its standards of care to define eunuch as a gender identity and suggested it might be one that required surgeons to perform “reduction or elimination of masculine physical features”.

WPATH was effectively saying that a medic might be correct to castrate a physiologically disturbed man. (One would-be patient was a 19-year-old autistic youth who lived in his parents’ basement and saw surgery as a route back to childhood.)

Reduxx discovered that an academic who contributed to WPATH’s eunuch guidance was, under a pseudonym, an administrator on a website called The Eunuch Archive, a sadomasochistic forum brimming with paedophilic torture fantasies in which little boys are grateful to the men who castrate them. WPATH is no marginal institution: its protocols were adopted by Tavistock’s Gids clinic, and its name is still invoked across the NHS.

One of the very few – the only? – mention of the WPATH files scandal in the mainsteam press.

A longish interview with Israeli academic Dan Schueftan at Quillette. A couple of extracts:

The Palestinian perspective is, and this did not change in the last 100 years, that the very collective existence of the Jews here in the Middle East is illegitimate, except as individuals of the Jewish religion. They deny the existence of a Jewish people. Even today, the so-called president of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, gave a speech. It's so ridiculous, it's unbelievable. I mean, he tells stories about there's never been a Jewish people and so on, and the Khazars and the Caucasus, and it's ridiculous. They even deny the existence of a Jewish people, and of course they believe that Israel is a product of a colonial British act and the very existence of Israel is illegitimate and they make the option of national coexistence of a historic compromise impossible. Therefore, they don't have a state.

Now the way they behaved in terms of violence, persuaded the Jews, and after October 7th more than any time in the past, that since whatever they have they weaponise, what they want in the final analysis, and they say it openly, is to obliterate the state of Israel. Hamas even speak about obliterating all the Jews. Their charter relies on the protocols of the elders of Zion. So this is an attempt by the Palestinians to terminate the existence, not only of the state of Israel, but also of the Jews as a national collective, as a sovereign entity in this region.

This is a problem that, at least in the foreseeable future, doesn't have a solution. […]

I mean, Americans come to Israel now and say, tell us what your end game is, and I tell them, oh, we really need to learn from you. You had an end game bringing democracy to Iraq. Then you had an end game bringing women's rights to Afghanistan. Let's learn from you. Tell us how after bringing democracy to Iraq and women's rights to Afghanistan will you bring peace to the Palestinians.

Ouch.

Well worth a read.

Abraham Wyner, a professor of statistics and data science, suggests – quelle surprise – that the Hamas-supplied casualty figures for Gaza may not be entirely accurate:

The number of civilian casualties in Gaza has been at the center of international attention since the start of the war. The main source for the data has been the Hamas-controlled Gaza Health Ministry, which now claims more than 30,000 dead, the majority of which it says are children and women. Recently, the Biden administration lent legitimacy to Hamas’ figure. When asked at a House Armed Services Committee hearing last week how many Palestinian women and children have been killed since Oct. 7, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said the number was “over 25,000.” The Pentagon quickly clarified that the secretary “was citing an estimate from the Hamas-controlled Health Ministry.” President Biden himself had earlier cited this figure, asserting that “too many, too many of the over 27,000 Palestinians killed in this conflict have been innocent civilians and children, including thousands of children.” The White House also explained that the president “was referring to publicly available data about the total number of casualties.”

Here’s the problem with this data: The numbers are not real. That much is obvious to anyone who understands how naturally occurring numbers work. The casualties are not overwhelmingly women and children, and the majority may be Hamas fighters.

If Hamas’ numbers are faked or fraudulent in some way, there may be evidence in the numbers themselves that can demonstrate it. While there is not much data available, there is a little, and it is enough: From Oct. 26 until Nov. 10, 2023, the Gaza Health Ministry released daily casualty figures that include both a total number and a specific number of women and children.

Basically, the reported daily numbers are remarkably consistent from day to day: in the real world you'd expect considerable variation. Also, you'd expect the women and the children casualties to correlate, depending on the amount of destruction of residential buildings on a particular day – but they don't. And there's an inexplicable negative correlation between the number of men killed and the number of women killed.

While the evidence is not dispositive, it is highly suggestive that a process unconnected or loosely connected to reality was used to report the numbers. Most likely, the Hamas ministry settled on a daily total arbitrarily. We know this because the daily totals increase too consistently to be real. Then they assigned about 70% of the total to be women and children, splitting that amount randomly from day to day. Then they in-filled the number of men as set by the predetermined total. This explains all the data observed….

The truth can’t yet be known and probably never will be. The total civilian casualty count is likely to be extremely overstated. Israel estimates that at least 12,000 fighters have been killed. If that number proves to be even reasonably accurate, then the ratio of noncombatant casualties to combatants is remarkably low: at most 1.4 to 1 and perhaps as low as 1 to 1. By historical standards of urban warfare, where combatants are embedded above and below into civilian population centers, this is a remarkable and successful effort to prevent unnecessary loss of life while fighting an implacable enemy that protects itself with civilians.

More at MEMRI TV, this time from Mufti Muhammad Ibn Muneer, the Imam of the Masjid on the Van Wyck, in Queens, New York:

"Every single opportunity they get to kill someone, they kill someone. Every single opportunity. And they have the nerve to have a supposed Star of David, and supposedly attribute themselves to David. David has nothing to do with you. Solomon has nothing to do with you. You have nothing to with David. You have nothing to do with Solomon. You have blood lust. You lust for slaughtering and murdering of people, and the manipulation of people. You are evil. Everything about your existence is evil. You deny, you lie, you twist. Of course you always have the ace of spades, which is the victim card."

Gosh. Who could he be talking about?