Mick Hartley

Politics and Culture

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  • A clearing of the files

    Who’d have thought lovely super-moral Noam Chomsky, scourge of US imperialism and defender of the down-trodden masses, would be an Epstein pal:

    Jeffrey Epstein sought advice from linguist Noam Chomsky over what he called “putrid” media coverage of sex trafficking allegations against him, new files show..…

    In 2023, Noam Chomsky, 97, told the Wall Street Journal of his relationship with Epstein: “First response is that it is none of your business. Or anyone’s. Second is that I knew him and we met occasionally.”

    Epstein’s email to Chomsky came as the Miami Herald published a series of investigative reports into Epstein and a plea deal he reached to avoid trial on federal sex trafficking charges in 2008.

    “Noam. I d love your advice on how I handle my putrid press,” Epstein wrote, adding that media coverage was “spiralling out of control”.

    “Do I have someone write an op ed?” Epstein asked. “defend myself? or try to ignore. realizing that mobs are dangerous.”

    A reply from an account labelled in the documents as Noam Chomsky reads: “What the vultures dearly want is public response, which then provides a public opening for an onslaught of venomous attacks, many from just publicity seekers or cranks of all sorts.”

    “That’s particularly true now with the hysteria that has developed about abuse of women, which has reached the point that even questioning a charge is a crime worse than murder,” the email added.

    “The hysteria that has developed about abuse of women”. What a hero for the progressive left.

    For some, a clearing of the files has been necessary…

  • The polar bear renaissance

    It turns out they’re doing fine. Matt Ridley in the Spectator:

    The BBC reported terrible news last week about polar bears: they are thriving. This is very annoying of them as it goes against the interests of environmental activists, polar bears being the very emblem, mascot and clickbait of climate change cataclysm. But the bears’ stubborn refusal to get the memo and starve has become too obvious to ignore.

    The latest evidence comes from the Barents Sea, and the Norwegian-administered archipelago of Svalbard in particular, where bear numbers have been steadily increasing. Surprisingly, they are also getting fatter, according to measurements taken when bears are caught and weighed. This is despite a decline in sea-ice cover in the area, especially in autumn. Even more unexpectedly, the bears are fattest in or after years when the sea ice retreats farthest.

    The reason for this is largely down to the increasing life to be found in the Arctic seas, as sunlight gets in: plankton booms, so more fish, so more seals, so more bears.

    One study found that in 22 years to 2025, the productivity of phytoplankton shot up by 80 per cent in the Eurasian Arctic, 34 per cent in the Barents Sea, thanks to less ice and therefore more sunlight. 

    Lots of evidence now suggests that the Arctic Ocean was nearly or completely ice-free in late summer and early autumn in the early millennia of the current interglacial period, around 9,000-6,000 years ago. It was probably very rich in marine life as a result, with lots of seals on the ice for polar bears to eat in spring, even if the bears had to take refuge on land and fast during the ice-free autumn months – just as they do today in Hudson Bay and much of Svalbard.

    Most polar bear scientists have continued to insist the species is in imminent danger of extinction, because that way lies funding. They ostracised those who dissented, such as Mitchell Taylor and Susan Crockford, Canadian zoologists who argued that polar bears would probably survive even in a warming Arctic. ‘For the sake of polar bear conservation, views that run counter to human-induced climate change are extremely unhelpful,’ said Andrew Derocher, as he expelled Taylor from the Polar Bear Specialist Group in 2009.

    When a Netflix documentary in 2017, narrated by Sir David Attenborough, filmed walrus which had fallen off a cliff in Siberia, Crockford argued that they had probably been stampeded by polar bears. The film’s producers dismissed the suggestion, but it later turned out she was right. Despite being hounded out of the University of Victoria in British Columbia in 2019 for her views on polar bears, Crockford has continued to argue that more seasonal melting of sea ice means more and fatter bears. Turns out she was right about that too.

    Plus the melting of the Arctic ice has no influence on sea level, as it’s on top of water – so all good news: more animal life, plus clearing the north-west passage. Unfortunately the same can’t be said for the melting of the Greenland or the Antarctic ice-caps, which do affect sea levels…

  • The silence matters

    Masih Alinejad, in Tablet, with an open letter to NYC mayor Zohran Mamdani:

    While mass killings are unfolding in Iran, you have chosen silence.

    While women are being beaten, imprisoned, and killed for refusing compulsory hijab and the entire Islamic regime in Iran, you have offered no sympathy, no solidarity, not even a basic condemnation.

    This silence matters….

    In Iran, the Islamic Republic has carried out one of the largest massacres of civilians in its history. Protesters are shot in the streets. Detainees are raped and killed. Hospitals are raided.

    That is why your celebration of World Hijab Day, lacking your sympathy for women being oppressed in Iran, is not a neutral cultural gesture. For millions of Iranian women, the hijab is not a choice. It is the uniform of their oppressors. Celebrating it while women are being slaughtered for rejecting it is, at best, deeply insensitive. At worst, it normalizes and sanitizes the violence of a terrorist regime.

    Of course this silence isn’t confined to Mamdani: it’s right across the western media. The BBC regularly features the latest reports from Gaza as lead stories – today it’s Inside Gaza hospital struggling to provide care to newborn babies – but nothing when it comes to the tens of thousands being slaughtered in Iran. Nothing.

  • “Negotiations”

    Why did Putin not allow himself such brutal strikes on civilian infrastructure under Biden, whom Trump calls “weak,” but totally destroys peaceful cities and disregards the “strong Trump”?

  • A popularity contest dressed in robes

    The usual suspects – step forward Corbynite MP John McDonnell – are praising the Palestine Action acquittal. But Amnesty UK?

    It does nothing of the sort. These activists weren’t on trial for being members of a proscribed organisation: they were on trial for breaking and entering, criminal damage, and grievous bodily harm. On all of which counts they were demonstrably guilty.

    A comment:

    The Palestine Action trial does not raise questions about counter-terror laws. It raises a far more serious question. How do we protect British democracy from being subverted by activist/prejudiced juries?

    Let’s not pretend about what happened here.

    The defendants were not acquitted because what they did was legal. Burglary. Damage to private property. Grievous bodily harm. These are bog-standard offences. Nothing exotic. Nothing ambiguous. Given the evidence, in any politically neutral case, these people would have been found guilty and sent to prison.

    But this case was not politically neutral.

    The entire defence strategy rested on one gambit. Compel the jury to acquit despite the fact that every defendant admitted to the acts they were charged with. The argument was simple. Their intent mattered. They believed, wholeheartedly, that smashing property and injuring a police officer was somehow saving lives in Gaza.

    That is not a legal defence. That is an appeal to sympathy.

    And it worked.

    Twelve random strangers who shared the political beliefs of the defendants decided those beliefs were enough to override the law. That is what happened. That is what we should be alarmed about.

    The concern here is not sentencing guidelines or prosecutorial overreach. The concern is the source of our laws – the British Parliament – being subverted by activism at the level of the jury box.

    If political sympathy can nullify clear-cut criminal liability, then we do not have a legal system. We have a popularity contest dressed in robes.

    I doubt that all twelve jurors were sympathetic. Given that they were deliberating for over 36 hours, I get the sense that there were a few there who were absolutely refusing to endorse a guilty charge because of their personal sympathy for the Palestinian cause, and others who saw clearly that their duty was to put aside ideologies and concentrate on the evidence. And they couldn’t agree.

    It’d be interesting if we got one of those anonymous juror revelations about what really went on.

  • Not guilty

    Palestine Action activists cleared over weapons factory attack:

    At Woolwich Crown Court, in south-east London, Charlotte Head, Samuel Corner, Leona Kamio, Fatema Rajwani, Zoe Rogers and Jordan Devlin were found not guilty over allegations that they had used or threatened unlawful violence.

    Activists used an old prison van to ram-raid an Elbit Systems factory in Bristol in the early hours of Aug 6 2024, and attacked police officers with sledgehammers, according to Avon and Somerset Police.

    I expect that policewoman who had her spine fractured fell over and landed on one of the sledgehammers. How very silly of her.

    Footage played to the jury showed six protesters wearing red jumpsuits at the site.

    All six on trial were acquitted of aggravated burglary, and jurors also found Ms Rajwani, Ms Rogers and Mr Devlin not guilty of violent disorder.

    The jury deliberated for 36 hours and 34 minutes, but could not reach verdicts on charges of criminal damage against all six defendants. No verdict was reached in the allegation that Mr Corner, 23, inflicted grievous bodily harm on Sgt Kate Evans or on the charges of violent disorder against Ms Head, Mr Corner and Ms Kamio.…

    The sledgehammers were solely for destroying property and were not “in any circumstances intended to injure security staff”, the court heard. The defendants had also not planned to use violence during the protest, they said.

    Rajiv Menon KC, defending, said the group had not expected security guards to enter the factory during their action, adding that the defendants were “completely out of their depth”.

    They “genuinely believed” their demonstration at the factory would help the Palestinian cause in Gaza, the court heard.

    Well that’s alright then.

    Elbit Systems UK said nothing it manufactured was sent to the Israeli Defense Forces, and that its UK arm provided equipment to the British military.

    A spokesman for Avon and Somerset Police Federation said they noted the verdict in the case, particularly in relation to the alleged assault of a colleague.

    “Like people across the country, we have viewed very distressing scenes during this trial, including footage of a police officer trying to maintain law and order only to be severely injured,” he said.

    “We remind the public that a brave police officer’s spine was fractured during this incident.

    “Avon and Somerset Police Federation continues to support our injured colleague and all officers involved on that day.”

    Tom Gent, chairman of the federation added: “When an officer is assaulted while simply doing their job, the impact is felt across the policing family. We expect – and rely upon – the full support of the criminal justice system when our officers are harmed in the line of duty.”

    Were there Free Palestine supporters in the jury? It seems a reasonable conclusion.

    I don’t support the government’s proposed restriction on trial by jury, but my word, sometimes they seriously mess it up.

    Added:

  • Guardiola’s rant

  • Child abuse

    Maya Forstater at The Critic on the puberty blocker trial:

    The government has licensed the “pathways” puberty blockers experiment to go ahead. Drugs used for chemical castration will be given to children with the hope of improving their mental wellbeing moderately for a few years. The Health Secretary, Wes Streeting, is the man responsible. Clinicians and parliamentarians have written to him, asking him to think again. He has said he feels “uncomfortable”. So he should. It is obscene to ask an overwrought child to make the unconscionable decision to take this drug for this purpose, and unethical for the state to offer it to them.

    Children who are too young to vote, get a tattoo or even decide what subjects to study at school cannot understand what they are being asked to put at risk in order to pursue their desire to “transition”. This includes the chance to go through normal physical and mental development, to understand their sexual orientation, to have a fulfilling adult sex life, to have children and to enjoy decades of life in a healthy body rather than as a lifelong medical patient.

    They are also too young to understand, or perhaps too strongly committed to accept, that the promise on the other side is a mis-sold dream. There is no combination of pills, surgeries and laws that can enable a boy to grow up to be a woman or a girl to become a man. The Supreme Court made this clear last year. This should have led to a re-evaluation of this proposed experiment on children. Instead, NHS bureaucrats and the medical researchers carried on regardless, and the Health Secretary allowed them.

    Streeting claims that his approach “has been led by the evidence, not ideology”, but the justification for the trial is drenched in gender ideology.

    Children will be asked questions such as whether they “prefer to behave like my affirmed gender” and whether they agree that “every time someone treats me like my assigned sex I feel hurt”.

    The committee did not ask even basic questions, such as what is meant by “gender” and “sex” or what it would mean to “live and be accepted as a person of the affirmed gender” (desire to do this is amongst the diagnostic criteria).

    Without qualms or concerns it signed off survey tools that ask children whether they are “definitely a boy”, “mainly a boy”, “definitely a girl”, “mainly a girl” or “neither a boy or girl”; and whether they describe themselves as “cisgender”, “transgender”, “non-binary”, “agender”, “genderfluid”, “genderqueer”, “two spirit” or “other”.

    These terms and questions are based on the promise that a person can leave behind their sex (“assigned sex”, in the terminology of the trial protocol) and become a person of the opposite sex (“affirmed gender”). It uses “boy” and “girl” for both concepts. The committee did not ask if the children could understand this bait-and-switch in language. They didn’t even ask themselves if they understood it.

    And they’ve dodged the most fundamental questions.

    Every decision-maker involved in this story has somehow overlooked two crucial facts that have been available in plain sight all along, and which were the basis for the Supreme Court judgment last year. Human beings cannot change sex. And other people have rights. It shouldn’t take courage — or indeed any particular insight — to say either of these things.

    Stunting a child’s mental, physical, sexual and reproductive development based on an impossible dream isn’t kindness, it’s child abuse. Passing the responsibility to children to make the decision is deeply unethical.

  • Just pay the fine

    Talking of Kathleen Stock (below)….

    Fun fact: Sally Hines was her Doctoral student.

  • Never forget

    This will go down in history as one of the worst medical scandals of all time. Adults inside and outside the medical profession sold troubled young people like Varian the idea that all of their complex trauma would be resolved by removing healthy body parts.

    As more and more detransitioners arrive in court, the public will learn the full extent of the harm done to kids in the name of an ideology. Clinicians performing these ‘treatments’ will go down in history as barbarous activists who betrayed a sacred oath: to do no harm. But we should never forget how many people outside the medical profession urged these young people on, gleefully assuring them that anyone advising caution was an evil bigot. There are people in elitist professions like publishing and academia, not to mention politicians and celebrities with young fan bases, who did all they could to champion the idea of gender identity, and kept pushing it even as the evidence of harm mounted. They’re just as culpable as the clinicians. Too lazy to think more deeply than the fashionable mantras that got them social media likes, too arrogant to look at evidence from anyone outside their political bubble, they’ve slurred whistleblowers and attacked anyone with valid questions. In doing so, they’ve created a cultural climate without which this appalling tragedy could not have taken place.

    Never forget, because only by learning the lesson can we stop this happening again.

    Added:

    ……the bloviator of Ghent, and that thick nonbinary one at Yale whose name I have forgotten) – all self-styled Good People – not only loved the idea of teenagers losing crucial body parts for psychological reasons, but tried to destroy my career in order to stop me saying I hated it. Such a bunch of ludicrous fools.