The Donald J Trump Presidential Library.
That golden statue. Straight outta Pyongyang.
Mick Hartley
Politics and Culture
-
He’s opposed to Lammy’s culling of jury trials, so….
-
A sad farewell to the great Glen Baxter.
Glen Baxter, who has died aged 82, created a unique artistic universe populated by erudite cowboys, tweed-clad empire-builders and malevolent boy scouts that made him a staple of the jokey end of the greetings-card market in Britain but saw him hailed on the Continent as a modern Surrealist master.
Baxter’s art pastiched the crude illustrations found in the Boys’ Own annuals and Western comics he had devoured in his youth, resulting in an idiosyncratic and instantly recognisable faux naïf style. As with the American cartoonist Gary Larson, each drawing would derive much of its effect from the artfully deadpan accompanying caption, although Baxter ventured farther than Larson into the realm of the purely absurd.
Sometimes the drawings themselves would be offbeat. One featured a man sawing off his own leg in front of two children, with the caption “Uncle Frank would keep us amused for hours”; another featured a colonial type pouring coffee into a cup from a tube in his ear (“‘My career prospects may seem dim, Cynthia, but I will always have my talent,’ blurted Rodney.”)
One of Baxter’s favourite tropes was the use of these absurd alternatives to “said”, as was common in the comics of the day – “expostulated” and the like – but his favourite was “blurted”. “New and selected blurtings” was the subtitle of one of his books.
Baxter was exhibited more frequently in the United States, Australia and Europe than in his native Britain; his work was held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Musée National d’Art Moderne at the Pompidou Centre. In France he was so famous that “un Baxter” became a widespread phrase for an absurd situation, and the French critics compared him variously with the Dadaists, Heidegger and Jonathan Swift.
Heidegger and Glen Baxter?? Only the French.
He had his first exhibition in New York in 1974 – Edward Gorey bought 10 drawings and declared that Baxter ‘‘betrays all the ominous symptoms of genius” – and his first book of drawings was published in Amsterdam in 1979. In the 1980s he finally began to come to the notice of his fellow countrymen and published successful collections of his works, including The Impending Gleam (1981), Jodhpurs in the Quantocks (1986) and Glen Baxter Returns to Normal (1992). The Wonder Book of Sex (1995) was a spoof lovers’ manual, introducing readers to novelties such as “The Dundee Position”, which involved bagpipes.
A puckish, bristling-haired figure, Baxter was amiable and unpretentious, though he admitted to some annoyance at not being taken as seriously in Britain as abroad. Fed up with inane responses when he told people that he was an artist, he preferred to tell strangers that he was “in the paint business”.
He worked at his home in a Georgian terraced house in Camberwell, in a studio lined with Twin Peaks videos, cowboy annuals and church surplice catalogues; daytime television played silently in the background while Australian birdsong was piped into the room.
Baxter was close friends with the mercurial humorist Ivor Cutler, and recalled that they had once improvised a superb radio play together, only for it to transpire that Cutler had forgotten to switch on the tape recorder.
Some featured cartoons. [Artworks? Paintings? Blurtings?]
Glen Baxter here previously: Further Blurtings
-
Kim Jong-un’s consolidation of power, from the Daily NK:
North Korea completed preparations for Kim Jong Un’s fourth term as the country’s supreme leader in late February and March 2026, holding three major political events in rapid succession that replaced more than half of the officials in key ruling bodies and hardened the regime’s stance toward South Korea.
The Ninth Congress of the Workers’ Party of Korea (Feb. 19–25), elections for the 15th Supreme People’s Assembly (March 15), and the assembly’s first session (March 22–23) together secured Kim’s reappointment as general secretary of the party and president of the State Affairs Commission. The events also deepened the personality cult around his predecessors while ousting elder statesmen including Choe Ryong Hae from positions of influence.
The reshuffle marks Kim’s 15th year in power and signals a deliberate departure from the model set by Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il. With North Korea’s nuclear arsenal maturing and thousands of troops deployed to support Russia’s war in Ukraine, Kim appears confident enough to chart his own course. That course rests on five pillars: nuclear weapons, self-reliance, ideological reinforcement, hostility toward South Korea, and diplomacy aligned with bloc membership or national interest….
Kim used the address to assert the legitimacy of North Korea’s nuclear program and self-reliance drive, and to declare his intention to keep advancing what he describes as autonomy, independence and self-defense built on nuclear weapons. His remarks also invoked the “three revolutions — ideological, technological and cultural” of the 1970s and called for “strict administrative and legal measures” to prevent what he termed alien and unsound elements from infecting the socialist way of life. He announced plans to introduce a new police system and expand the role of neighborhood watch units and local government offices.
It’s a ratchet. One way only. Always tighter, harder – more crackdowns, more forced conformity, more hatred.
A Pyongyang man was sentenced to more than 12 years in prison at a public trial held in mid-March in the city’s Songyo district after investigators found he had spent years watching banned South Korean videos and music in violation of North Korea’s laws against “reactionary ideology and culture.”…
The trial was held in the conference room at the Songyo district courthouse with officials from local government offices in attendance. Speaking in somber tones, the judge itemized each of the man’s crimes, including his rejection of the socialist system and his importation and propagation of “reactionary ideology and culture” from abroad.
The judge sentenced the man to 12 years and four months in prison for “deliberate, repeated and aggravated criminal acts” under the Criminal Procedure Act and the Reactionary Ideology and Culture Exclusion Act. The man’s family members were also forcibly relocated from Pyongyang to Changjin county in South Hamgyong province.
The judge stated that the harsh sentence was intended as a warning to others, a remark that reportedly produced an awkward silence in the courtroom.
-
The Times, for instance:
The Israeli authorities have backed down in the face of an international outcry after the Patriarch of Jerusalem was blocked by police from conducting a Palm Sunday service in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.
Police stopped the Latin Patriarch — the head of the Roman Catholic church in Jerusalem — from entering the church in the Old City, supposedly on the site of Christ’s tomb, on Sunday morning.
Only then – after the compulsory “bad Israel” bit – do we get the truth.
There is a temporary ban on large gatherings in the Old City because of safety concerns over missiles fired from Iran.
-
With the latest Girlguiding affair in mind, Victoria Smith lays it out in The Critic – The costs of telling the truth too late:
Imagine you are a child who really, really hates being a boy. You despise your sexed body, feel alienated from it, dread the thought of becoming a man. You don’t yet know the difference between masculinity and maleness, that accepting your sex need not be the same as conforming to rigid norms. To learn this you need love and support from the adults around you. But imagine if, rather than offer it, all of these adults kept saying “yes, you must be a girl – and anyone claiming otherwise must want you dead”.
Imagine if they told you that your interest in “feminine” things proved, not the arbitrariness of gender stereotypes, but that you were born in the wrong body. Imagine if they claimed that with the right medication and surgery, you could avoid puberty and ultimately change sex. Imagine if they said that access to the language, resources and spaces of the opposite sex was not only your birthright, but that anyone who sought to deny you this must hate you. Imagine if they insisted that untold numbers of people — priests, feminists, left-wingers, right-wingers, grannies, famous children’s authors — were plotting your demise every time they suggested your body was not the problem.
If it was your mum doing this — backed up by teachers, medical professionals and other trusted folk — you’d believe her. Not just because she was validating your own anxieties, but because these would be insane claims to make if they weren’t true. No loving parent would tell a child they could literally change sex — or that no one really knew what sex anyone was anyways — unless they were certain of it. No parent would encourage them to see hate that wasn’t there. Because those would be truly horrendous things to do.
And yet, here we are.
Yes indeed. Here we are. The scary part is that, once a parent has committed themselves to having a trans child, it’s very difficult to go back – to admit that they made a terrible mistake and have ruined their child’s life while in thrall to a shallow fashionable ideology that was always absolute nonsense.
How does one untangle it now? How can you tell a trans-identified boy that yes, he should absolutely be allowed to defy gender stereotypes but that one way of doing so would be to respect girls’ boundaries? How can he do that when you’ve spent the past few years insisting that even noticing adult human females exist as a meaningful category puts his life at risk? How do you tell him that no, he can’t change sex? Or that plenty of people who’ve been saying this aren’t hate-filled bigots, but very happy to support him in challenging sexism and homophobia, which are not things you do through acts of lifelong self-harm? There is no way of telling a trans-identified boy he can no longer be a girl guide without destroying his trust in the very adults who’ve spent years telling him that the rest of the world is out to destroy him.…
There are adult males who have used gender self-ID selfishly and deliberately. Children and teenagers are a different matter. They have been used and deceived, and there is no way of undoing the harm without causing them further distress. Of course, it may be less distress than if one were to continue down the same path as before. A tweet from the account @wokeandwoofing put it fairly succinctly:
“I brainwashed my son into thinking he was a girl. Chemically castrated him with puberty blockers. Then persuaded him to have his penis cut off. And now the Girl Guides won’t let him in. How could anyone be so cruel to a child?”…
At some point it has to stop. As a long-time critic of gender identity ideology, I know and hate the fact that this will cause enormous upset to some children. I want what I always wanted — for these children to be loved, supported, encouraged to be different, content in their own bodies, and trusting of others. It’s not people like me who took that away from them. Hopefully some repair is possible. For that, activist adults need to put their self-interest to one side and start telling the truth.
-
Suzanne Moore in the Telegraph:
There are many issues with the Green Party – and for some people, watching its leader, Zack Polanski, dancing with Gorton and Denton MP Hannah Spencer at the weekend like they were both at Glastonbury instead of an anti-fascist demonstration was one of them.
The dancing doesn’t bother me, however, though it should bother the other mainstream parties. This kind of spectacle, as frivolous as it can look, has long been an effective way to recruit people to the cause. Because after a long, slow trudge, which seems to be de rigueur for most demos, people want to celebrate…..
Because we all need to take the Green Party seriously. The Greens have absorbed all the worst aspects of Corbynism and attracted all the anti-Semitic dregs that were thrown out of Labour. A lot of them are quite barmy. Some are plain nasty.
Social media messages shared by one of its “stars”, Tope Olawoyin, claimed that the burning of the Hatzola ambulances in Golders Green was “an inside job” and a “false flag” operation. Polanski’s constant refrain that because he himself is Jewish, it gives him a get-out-of-jail-free card is the foulest use of identity politics. It doesn’t.
Polanski has done a lot of cramming lately, seemingly picking up economic and defence policies from YouTube. But that won’t make much difference to the dancing demonstrators, or in the local elections, where polls have the Greens riding high.
Glastonbury’s “Oh Jeremy Corbyn” moment may be derided now, but in 2017, he still took 262 seats. Left-wing populism is not to be taken lightly.
Politics is fragmenting – everyone is fed up. Reform offers nothing for the young – it looks backwards, not forwards; it is simply a forcefield of negativity and pessimism centred around an increasingly irritable Nigel Farage.
Polanski may be a chancer, and the Greens may be selling a naive but often noxious form of “hope”, but it is working. Polanski can have his Glastonbury moment; I suspect there are more to come.
Polanski’s appeal to the disenfranchised young is indeed scary. The pied piper comes to mind. And especially with Islamist Mothin Ali lurking in the background as deputy leader. The red-green alliance in full view. Tragedy, or farce? We’ll find out soon enough.
-
At Tablet Magazine, from Nicole Lampert and Zoe Strimpel:
“The feminists, the so-called feminists, are no longer concerned with the occupation of women’s bodies worldwide, but rather with the occupation of a country called Palestine, which has never existed. Every single area of feminism in America has been wrecked, ruined and is involved in boiler plate filth against Israel and the Jews.” This is how Phyllis Chesler, 85, the feminist psychotherapist, activist, author and long-time observer of global feminism, describes the current moment.
While Chesler remains warm and cheerful in her demeanor, her disgust with the state of the movement she has dedicated her life to, which is now imploding for the second time because of anti-Zionist antisemitism, is a solid mass. A good 40 years into the fight, and with 20 books under her belt, Chesler is now working on a major tome entitled The Complete and Utter Palestinianization of American Feminism.
Ha! Great title.
These days, the internal battles are almost surreal—especially since Hamas’ attack on October 7. The “Zionist” side “argues” that rape and torture should be taken seriously even if the victims are Israeli women, and even if the attackers and torturers are members of “the resistance.” Taking even this minimal position can be friendship-ending. The dominant bloc insists that “the Israeli genocide” is a feminist issue. The increasingly acrimonious rows have gone back and forth from small activist groups all the way up to Reem Alsalem, the U.N.’s Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women and Girls, who in November wrote on X: “No Palestinian applauded rape in Gaza. No independent investigation found that rape took place on the 7th of October.” This was despite a report by her U.N. colleague Pramilla Patten which found that conflict-related sexual violence including rape and gang rape was committed on October 7, across multiple locations.
Younger feminists may wonder how this has all happened. But older feminists know only too well that no subject has fractured feminist movement more—not trans, not surrogacy, not prostitution, not porn—than that small democracy in the Middle East.…
Worth a read.
Mick Hartley 