Mick Hartley

Politics and Culture

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  • Scotch Sunday

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  • Crocus ring

    Tavistock Square Gardens.

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  • Violence on the rise in North Korea

    In the wake of those unprecedented riots by unpaid North Korean workers in China, Ko Young-hwan, a North Korean diplomat who defected to South Korea, is interviewed at the Chosun Ilbo – “North Korean workers in China are angry, and things are no better back home”.

    Are you saying North Korea isn’t what it used to be?

    “Violence has been on the rise in North Korea lately. The most frequently assaulted are security and safety agents. It has become commonplace for attackers to wait for the agents to return home or leave, then assault them in alleys and flee. It’s not like the old days when citizens couldn’t make a peep.”

    Can control over the residents be maintained like that?

    “Day and night are completely different. These days, security agents stop anyone on the street, snatch their cell phones, and if a South Korean song plays, they drag them away. They also ask for IDs if they hear young men and women calling each other ‘oppa,’ [a South Korean word for older brother], or ‘Honey.’ If their surnames differ, they say, ‘He’s not your oppa. You’ve been watching puppet regime dramas, haven’t you?’ and take them away. The control is so tight that people become anxious about using expressions they’ve used without a second thought, worrying if they might sound like they’re speaking in the South Korean style. They can’t even say ‘Nice to meet you’ because it’s considered a South Korean phrase. Life is hard enough, but with such oppression, people vent their frustrations under the cover of night.”

    North Korea, starting with the Reactionary Ideology and Culture Rejection Act in 2020, which included clauses for extreme punishment, successively enacted laws such as the Youth Education Guarantee Act and the Pyongyang Cultural Language Protection Act, collectively known as the ‘anti-South Korea three acts,’ all during the administration of former President Moon Jae-in. Ko analyzed that Kim Jong-un’s actions, including the directive to demolish facilities at Mount Kumgang in October 2019, blowing up the inter-Korean liaison office in Kaesong in June 2020, and even going as far as to enact extreme laws, were due to the judgment that the side effects of South Korean cultural infiltration, such as ideological and systemic relaxation, far outweigh the benefits gained from inter-Korean exchanges.

    What’s the economic situation in North Korea?

    “Kim Jong-un recently lamented that ‘we can’t even provide necessities to the local people.’ Simply put, in the provinces these days, people have to dip food in salt since there’s no soy sauce or bean paste. In the past, they used to light lamps with petroleum or pine resin at night, but even that isn’t easy now. After 7 p.m., only a few people walk around, and people sleep right after the early evening. It’s like a zombie city, a ghost town. The only place that’s lit is the statues of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il.”

    It wouldn’t be a recent development that the situation has become difficult.

    “When I was in the North, there was already a huge gap between Pyongyang and the provinces. Food distribution in the provinces was cut off during the North Korean famine, also known as the March of Suffering, and things got even harder in the mid-2010s as UN sanctions intensified. Still, people managed to get by with items found in the markets, but with the pandemic, the market hours have been shortened, and the items available for trade have been restricted.”

    Is it any better in Pyongyang?

    “Pyongyang has electricity only four hours a day, two hours each during rush hour. In high-rise apartments, 300 to 400 people line up to use the elevators at rush hour. Apartments in the Hwasong district, which Kim Jong-un boasts about, are 70 to 80 stories high. The residents are frustrated. They go out in search of firewood because houses are not heated. Many homeowners move to the outskirts because they can’t get wood.”

    But N. Korea builds 10,000 apartments a year.

    “The Pyongyang sewer system was built in 1958-1959 before the People’s Army of China withdrew. They’re building skyscrapers on top of it. When you flush the toilet, it clogs and backs up on the first floor. A North Korean defector from Pyongyang called it “an apartment without a butthole.” They’re just building apartments in a rush without maintaining sewer pipes or expanding sewage disposal facilities.”

    Disposal of feces must be troublesome.

    “Luckily, excrements have to be collected in the winter months. People fight over compost in cities and rural areas alike. Pyongyang is no exception. While the higher-ups pay the People’s leader to take care of it, the majority of the population composts their collected wastes by mixing them with briquette ashes. The collecting process is in full swing at this time of year.

    Kim Jong-un has acknowledged the poor conditions in Pyongyang on several occasions. At a Politburo meeting Kim chaired in June 2020 amid the rampant spread of COVID-19, he openly addressed the urgent issue of sustaining the livelihood of Pyongyang’s residents. During his speech at the National Mothers’ Congress last December, he said, “We will first solve the problems of insufficient water and firewood, public transportation, elevators, and heating system for the capital’s citizens.” This means nothing has improved in three and a half years.”

    Ko compared North Korea’s current aggressive stance to when it threatened “a sea of fire” upon Seoul in 2013. “In early 2013, North Korea threatened to turn Seoul into a ‘sea of fire’ daily, and Kim went to Jangjae Island and Mudo Island on the West Sea frontline and urged to ‘mow down the enemy lines,’ raising the risks of a possible war,” Ko said. “Jang Sung-taek’s power was great at the time, and Kim bluffed his way out because his power was vulnerable.”

    He said North Korea is most likely ratcheting up hostile demonstrations against South Korea to cover up domestic turmoil. “A country that wants to go to war does not sell 5,000 containers of shells,” he added. “Kim’s biggest concern is passing on power to the fourth generation and continuing the ‘Kim Dynasty.’ How could he possibly go to war?”

  • Overground cringe

    Oh god, those new names for the Overground lines.

    Overground

    The Suffragette Line for Gospel Oak to Barking? What's wrong with the Barking Line? Suffragette Line is such an awkward mouthful, nevermind that the line has nothing at all to do with the suffragettes. "There are delays on the Suffragette Line" What? Which one's that again? It's just performative feel-good nonsense. If you want quirky – and why not? – try the Goblin Line. (Geddit? Gospel Oak to Barking LINe.) It's already used informally, on social media. No doubt similar strange but interesting names could be conjured up for the others – even, if nothing else, a felicitous combination of station names as they did for the Bakerloo line. But Sadiq Khan et al. don't do quirky – just tone-deaf smug.

    Janice Turner – I’m done with mayor’s performative politics. "Sadiq Khan’s naming of London’s rail lines typifies a style that prefers virtue-signalling to tackling real problems".

    My response to Sadiq Khan, the London mayor, announcing the new lines was a weary groan. Had someone ingested a diversity, equity and inclusion manual and burped them up? You could hear the brainstorm session, the whiteboard guy saying “we need a woman one, a black one, an LGBTQ+ one”. Jews? “Better not.” But there’s the East End, Cable Street … “The Weaver line!” But weren’t the Jews tailors? “Close enough, and if the Free Palestine lot kick off, just say we meant Huguenots.”

    Such puerile, lazy, half-cocked thinking….

    Khan treats voters like distractible children. A shiny anti-hate crime poster on every platform is supposed to make us forget violence on the Tube has shot up, with 10,836 reported crimes in April to September last year compared with 6,924 in 2022. Or that knife crime is rising at its fastest rate in five years, with 40 incidents reported a day. Or that shop workers face unprecedented threats. I often find flowers and ribbons tied to a lamppost, a shrine to yet another slain young man.

    London mayors do not have vast powers but at least they’re supposed to speak to and for the whole messy, nine-million-strong capital. Lacking charisma, touch or wit, Khan resorts to tick-box diversity which only accentuates difference.

    Sam Bidwell at The Critic:

    Much ink has already been spilled by the usual suspects about the silliness of Khan’s cringeworthy left-wing mythmaking. By now, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the mayor of our national capital has a habit of spending taxpayer money on virtue signalling. Nor should it surprise us that the left continues to trot out the same tired narratives about the Suffragettes and the Windrush Generation, both of which are little more than clumsy attempts to prove Britain’s liberal bona fides on women’s rights and immigration respectively. 

    However, the Overground’s new names should worry us not merely because they are rooted in a wholly fabricated left-wing national mythology, but because they speak to a deeper rot at the heart of British culture. 

    Even more unsettling than Khan’s astroturfed progressivism is the realisation that Britain has become a twee, unserious country which feels the need to tell people what it stands for. Particularly in London, we now bombard the unsuspecting public with constant reminders of what Britain is all about, as determined by a litany of faceless stakeholder committees. This is the same childish instinct that prompted Birmingham City Council to come up with street names like “Equality Road” and “Diversity Grove”, shortly before it declared bankruptcy….

    It’s also remarkable how little thought has been put towards ensuring that these new monikers bear any relation to the areas that these lines serve. It is profoundly silly, for example, that the Mildmay line doesn’t run particularly close to Mildmay hospital — and what on earth do Barking and Tottenham have to do with the Suffragettes, who were famously most active in Holborn?

    Update; from the Telegraph:

    TELEMMGLPICT000366796770_17081076202570_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqqVzuuqpFlyLIwiB6NTmJwfSVWeZ_vEN7c6bHu2jJnT8

  • Pushed off the women’s podium

    Those women's swimming records keep getting broken…

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  • The proposed conversion therapy ban

    From Transgender Trend, a letter to Labour MP Lloyd Russell-Moyle about his proposed Conversion Therapy Bill:

    No legislation banning conversion practices will be safe for children and young people. In fact, a bill which includes transgender puts them at risk of homophobic conversion therapy. The overwhelming evidence for this was summarised brilliantly in Kemi Badenoch’s letter of February 7th to the Women and Equalities Committee. Her letter references all the reputable and irrefutable research pointing to the fact that most children with a transsexual identity will grow up to be non-trans gay and lesbian adults. She shows how identity confusion, based on sex stereotypes can become embedded in a young child’s thinking before they experience sexual attraction.

    You have said that you believe your Bill has safeguards for this cohort of same-sex attracted young people. We think this is naïve in the current social climate in which every organisation that purports to look after the interests of LGB people also have a foundational belief in the existence of ‘trans kids.’ Stonewall for instance says “Research suggests that children as young as 2 recognise their trans identity.” This flies in the face of all our knowledge of child development and their cognitive understanding. To put it bluntly it is an ignorant lie.

    But this lie is repeated ad nauseam by all the major LGBT+ organisations, it is to be found in all the trans toolkits for schools, it is repeated by LGBT+ educational groups. The result is that a belief that has no basis in fact is now embedded in our schools and colleges. This is the idea that a child can have a gender or transgender identity in opposition to their actual biological sex. The major teaching unions also promote their support for this idea. All these groups and organisations advise that ‘trans kids’ must be supported in their belief that they are trans however young they are. This is the social context into which a ban on conversion therapy would land; one highly skewed towards an affirmative approach.

    The Cass Review is clear that a narrow affirmative approach led to the problems of diagnostic overshadowing at GIDS, meaning that other co-morbidities were ignored in favour of a transgender explanation for a child’s distress. Not one of the organisations listed above has engaged in good faith with the Cass Review, nor used its finding to inform their thinking.  None of them have incorporated the shocking facts of what went on at the Tavistock’s GIDS into their training, statements, or curriculum ideas….

    The most pernicious part of the narrative that’s been created is that those practising ‘conversion therapy’ may appear to be compassionate and reasonable. This will stoke a child’s suspicion towards genuinely loving and caring parents, which is a frightening state of insecurity to create for a child. Trust is important in any relationship, but in the parent-child relationship at a time when a child is navigating the storms of adolescence, it is key.

    Imagine the teenage boy who is fully supported and accepted by his parents as gay, but has been relentlessly bullied at school for his effeminacy. If he suddenly announces he identifies as a girl and is trans, his parents may justifiably be concerned. He has already been told that if his parents don’t immediately affirm him they are, at best, unsupportive, and at worst, transphobic bigots. A legislative ban on trans conversion therapy would teach him that they are also potentially criminals.

    A recent New York Times article included an interview with a detransitioner who said this: “I transitioned because I didn’t want to be gay. I believed homosexuality was a sin.” How will your Bill protect young gay and lesbian people who are effectively practicing a form of self-conversion therapy? …

    Worth reading in full, but I very much doubt that Russell-Moyle will take any notice: the man's a straight-up trans ideologue.

  • Promoting Kimilsungism

    It's Day of the Shining Star in North Korea – anniversary of the birth of Dear Leader Kim Jong-il.

    Kim

    And it's coming up to the 50th anniverasry of the Dear Leader's declaration of the doctrine of “society-wide adoption of Kimilsungism" on Feb 19th 1974. So they're holding a special conference to mark the occasion, which everyone will have to watch. From the Daily NK:

    Speaking on condition of anonymity, a source in North Hamgyong Province told Daily NK on Thursday that the Central Committee of the Workers’ Party of Korea (WPK) has announced that it will commemorate the 50th anniversary of Kim Jong Il’s declaration by holding a central conference on Feb. 19…

    “The Central Committee had the propaganda departments of party committees at all levels issue instructions about the event before the Lunar New Year, and they repeated those instructions after the Lunar New Year. This shows how important they consider this event to be,” the source said.

    As part of their instructions for the entire population to watch the conference, the North Korean authorities have ordered the power transmission and distribution departments in each province to make thorough preparations to provide electricity to people with limited mobility so that they can watch the conference at home.

    Typically, people gather in their neighborhood office or workplace auditorium to watch the broadcast of the conferences. However, the government has ordered that measures be taken to enable people with limited mobility to watch the broadcast without leaving their homes.

    However, each person with limited mobility will be paired with a party member or other trusted person to ensure that they watch the broadcast of the conference when the electricity is turned on, instead of watching a foreign movie or doing something else “inappropriate.”

    No escape, then. No excuses. No watching anything "inappropriate".

    The Central Committee also ordered the Socialist Patriotic Youth League to step up its ideological and indoctrination programs.

    “The Central Committee has given orders to create an atmosphere of ideological struggle and to strengthen self-criticism and mutual criticism because many non-socialist and anti-socialist behaviors have recently been observed among members of the Youth League,” the source said. “Such behaviors run counter to the party’s ideology and its intention to train young people to be core elements loyal to the party.”

    The source reported that the Central Committee stressed the need to launch a strong ideological campaign to counter young people’s recent tendency toward individualism, their attempts to escape state control, and their blatant interest in foreign movies, music, and news.

    Moreover, the committee ordered the youth league to create the atmosphere for a collective discussion aimed at transforming the organization into a party-loyal one based on the doctrine of the society-wide adoption of Kimilsungism and to adopt a report and a written decision to that effect, the source added.

  • The trans ACLU

    What was I saying yesterday about the ACLU? – "now, it seems, almost entirely concerned with trans activism".

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    Top surgery for "cisgender" patients – women – will most likely be against life-threatening issues like breast cancer, not some "gender-affirming" butchery.

    What a disgrace.

  • The “inclusive” National MS Society

    From the Mail:

    The National MS Society has defended firing a 90-year-old volunteer for breaching its diversity and inclusion policy after she asked what pronouns were.

    Fran Itkoff had served the non-profit for multiple sclerosis patients for 60 years, with her late husband running the Long Beach Lakewood chapter prior to his death.

    She was left stunned when her bosses forced her to step down on January 19 following an exchange with a colleague who asked her to use her pronouns in an email signatures.

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    That National Multiple Sclerosis Society statement:

    For more than 75 years, the National Multiple Sclerosis Society has advanced one bold vision—a world free of MS. Through thousands of volunteers, dedicated staff, and generous donors, we live that vision every day. We welcome anyone to join us to advance that mission. As an organization, we firmly believe that we best serve and support those living with MS by creating a space that welcomes all. This is especially true for self-help group leaders, who are responsible for leading meetings for people affected by MS to confide in and support one another. Recently, a volunteer, Fran Itkoff, was asked to step away from her role because of statements that were viewed as not aligning with our policy of inclusion. Fran has been a valued member of our volunteer team for more than 60 years. We believe that our staff acted with the best of intentions and did their best to navigate a challenging issue. As an organization, we are in a continued conversation about assuring that our diversity, equity and inclusion policies evolve in service of our mission, and will reach out to Fran in service of this goal.

    Yep, they even name and shame. The tyranny of "inclusivity".

  • Chest-binders and raising trans children

    Et tu, John Lewis?

    An internal John Lewis Partnership magazine promoted both chest binders for transgender children and an organisation currently under investigation by the Charity Commission.

    A LGBT network at the British retail company, which operates John Lewis department stores and Waitrose supermarkets, created Identity, which was published this month.

    Identity featured testimony from the mother of a transgender boy in a story titled “Raising Trans and Non-Binary Children” and contained recommendations for “parents looking to educate themselves”. The mother had joined Mermaids’ forum, the article said, adding that it offered YouTube videos and tips “for both parents and trans children” on its website.

    Mermaids became the subject of an continuing statutory inquiry by the Charity Commission in 2022 after concerns about its management were raised.

    The article contains a quote from the mother of a trans man who said that “a binder is always safer than the alternatives”. She added: “When my trans son was younger, he wore multiple sports bras and crop tops before he came out. We spoke about the harm he could be doing.”

    Dr Jacob Breslow, a Mermaids trustee, resigned from the charity in 2022 after The Times revealed he spoke at a conference hosted by a group that promoted services to paedophiles.

    A Daily Telegraph investigation also claimed that Mermaids had offered to send breast binders to children against their parents’ wishes.

    The John Lewis Partnership said that Mermaids was recommended as one resource, alongside other charities.

    The article in question also discussed social media influencers who shared tips on how to “safely use clothing and equipment to achieve a person’s desired gender identity, for example, chest binders”….

    Identity magazine also featured a piece for “cisgender” people — or those whose gender match their sex — which listed how to be a good “ally” to the LGBT community. It included a section on trans terms and highlighted “neopronouns”, which it said included “ze/zir”, which are preferred by some non-binary individuals. A wordsearch in the magazine featured “cisgender”, “transitioning” and “deadnaming” — a term used to describe calling a trans person by their former name — as answers."

    Never knowingly undertransed.

    Here's the original scoop, from James Esses – The Trans Takeover of John Lewis.