Author: Mick Hartley

https://t.co/57hXiJu1jx

— John Spencer (@SpencerGuard) August 24, 2025

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

From the article – Stop Leaving Egypt Out of the Conversation on Gaza’s Humanitarian Crisis:

Last week the UN-backed Integrated Food Security Phase Classification system declared famine conditions in parts of northern Gaza. The declaration altered normal IPC standards by relying on projections rather than verified evidence such as daily death counts from malnutrition or updated reporting on hunger mortality. No data was presented on the number of people dying per day from starvation, nor was there acknowledgment that aid deliveries into Gaza have increased significantly over the past two weeks. The announcement generated headlines worldwide but departed from the empirical baseline normally required to label a famine.

Amid this humanitarian debate, Egypt remains absent from serious discussion of solutions. Egypt is a signatory to the 1951 Refugee Convention, the 1967 Protocol which expanded asylum protections worldwide by removing the original convention’s geographic and time limitations, and the 1969 OAU Convention Governing the Specific Aspects of Refugee Problems in Africa. Despite these commitments, Cairo has repeatedly refused to open its border to displaced Gazans. After the October 7 attacks and the outbreak of war, Egypt reinforced its position by deploying an armored brigade and tens of thousands of troops to northern Sinai, erecting new border fortifications, and constructing a massive wall near Rafah to ensure no civilians could escape from the war zone inside Gaza. These measures show that Egypt’s current explanations came after its decision to physically seal the border.

As ever, Egypt is more concerned with using Palestinians as pawns in its cold war against Israel than in actually doing anything to help them.

Egypt’s decision to militarize its border, construct new barriers, and block every avenue of escape reflects its national calculations. Yet those calculations should not be accepted uncritically. The lessons of Ukraine, Syria, and Yemen are clear: mass displacement must be managed through regional and international cooperation, not sealed borders. Egypt may claim to be protecting the Palestinian cause, but in practice it has trapped civilians inside a war zone. The world should stop excusing this ahistorical position and begin demanding concrete humanitarian solutions that save lives without undermining eventual Palestinian return. With the United Nations General Assembly convening in September, Egypt can no longer be allowed to remain absent from this conversation and certainly not continue to block humanitarian options. The UN should make it a priority to debate and act on the creation of an internationally monitored humanitarian zone in the Sinai desert so that civilians have a genuine avenue for safety until the war ends.

What's really going on in Ukraine. From MEMRI TV:

Lebanese Russian affairs expert Iskandar Kfoury said on Pravda TV on YouTube on August 19, 2025 that the problems in Ukraine were instigated by the Jews. He claimed that former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko was actually Jewish, as were the majority of holders of key political positions. He added that President Volodymyr Zelensky is Jewish and said that this was part of what he described as a Jewish “agenda” to disintegrate Ukraine. Kfoury further claimed that Jews in Russia have also been working to disintegrate the country. The interviewer alleged that Jews put hallucinogens and drugs in sacks of flour in Gaza, and Kfoury responded that they threw contaminated breadcrumbs at the Gazans. He added that Jews call for an end to the war in Ukraine, but argued that there is nothing destructive about this war and asserted that humanitarian centers have not been targeted in Ukraine.

Some expert. 

Amid the general lunacy, perhaps the notion that there's "nothing destructive" about the invasion of Ukraine is worth singling out. But yes – it's insanity all the way down.

Susie Green is back.

British children are accessing outlawed puberty blockers through an EU loophole, The Telegraph can reveal.

Evidence seen by The Telegraph suggests children are having online consultations with EU doctors and then flying to the Continent with their parents to get injections of the maximum six-month dose of the drugs, which were indefinitely banned across the UK by Wes Streeting.

The method and logistics of circumventing the law are being promoted by Anne Health, a private trans clinic run by Susie Green, the former chief executive of Mermaids, the trans charity.

After Susie Green's husband made clear his dislike of the supposed femininity of their young son, they put the poor lad on all manner of puberty blockers and the like before she whisked him off to Thailand on his sixteenth birthday to have his genitals removed. Better a mutilated simulacrum of a woman than a gay man.

And she clearly hasn't changed. 

Dr Louise Irvine, the co-chairman of the Clinical Advisory Network on Sex and Gender, said the prescribing of “puberty blockers for the purpose of preventing normal puberty in gender-questioning children is banned in the UK for good reason – they risk serious harm and have no evidence of benefit”.

She called on the Government to “act promptly to protect children from this abuse, including strong measures to prevent importation and criminal sanctions”.

Ms Green has been accused of “exploiting” vulnerable children, with desperate parents spending thousands of pounds on accessing the drugs through Anne Health….

Dr Alice Hodkinson, co-founder of Biology in Medicine, a doctors’ campaign group, said: “Parents believe they are doing the right thing, but they are being tragically misled. If you block the natural process of puberty, you miss a window of opportunity to enter adulthood.

“Preventing puberty will limit brain development and will lower IQ. Children will lose their future sexual function and never know what they have lost.”

From Shalom Lappin's Quillette article The Neo-Romantic Revolt, on the strange alliance between Islamism and the postmodern Left:

An important catalyst for this evolution was the rise of critical theory. Initially designed as a critique of bourgeois capitalist-class influence on social and cultural institutions (Gramsci, Adorno, Marcuse), it was later combined with French deconstructionist approaches to textual interpretation (Foucault, Derrida). This generated a breakdown of constraints on approved moral commitments and the disappearance of the notion of scientific objectivity. Categories of race, ethnicity, and gender now became the primary reference points in the identification of oppressive agents of control, and Western culture—denigrated as male, white, and colonialist—became the main target of opposition. In this way, the postmodern Left emptied the traditional Left of any remaining class-based politics and a commitment to Western Enlightenment values. The Left became a shell into which the neo-Romantic elixir of cultural/moral relativism and anti-colonial primitivism were poured. This toxic mix facilitated the bizarre situation in which jihadi movements have been able to colonise what now passes for the radical Left as a vehicle for its own reactionary agenda.

The postmodern Left doesn’t appear to realise that the Islamist agenda is profoundly incompatible with their own ostensibly “inclusive” libertarian cultural and gender aspirations. Nor do they seem to know what happens when leftwing revolutionary groups try to hitch their cause to reactionary movements—following the 1979 revolution in Iran, the Islamists immediately turned on the communist Tudeh Party and imprisoned or liquidated its membership and support base. This has not dampened the enthusiasm with which the postmodern Left still embraces the Iranian regime and its Islamist clients in Gaza and Lebanon. Apparently, the Left’s neo-Romantic primitivist commitments place the Islamists in the sacred class of noble savage, which exempts them from responsibility for their actions. It will be interesting to see how the Left responds when they discover that Islamists do not return the favour of granting diplomatic immunity to heterodox practices, particularly in matters of gender and lifestyle.

Worth a read.

The German Jew who was attacked with paint while posting photos of the hostages is now considering leaving Germany: “There is a tsunami of antisemitism.”

How many more must leave Europe, Canada, or the US before the world takes a stand against antisemitism? pic.twitter.com/x5U5Q4ntsG

— Hen Mazzig (@HenMazzig) August 24, 2025

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

ted in female competition.

It was far from the only absurdity in this row. Edwards became a symbol of sporting bravery, overcoming the terror of the high seas and the chauvinism of male opponents convinced that her boat would sink before it even rounded The Needles off the Isle of Wight, but some of those honouring her feats on stage were frightened simply to be in the same room as her, for fear of being exposed to views they deemed transphobic.

Two members of the production team, she reveals, resigned over Edwards’ gender-critical beliefs before the opening night. Certain crew members, she was told, were worried about being introduced to her at the after-party. “Truly,” she says, “there aren’t enough eye-rolls in the world. It was just the vindictiveness of it, the nastiness. They didn’t protest the night before, or the night after, only the night I was there.

“They don’t understand the rights they are giving away, or how hard we had to fight for those rights. What I wish they would realise is that they stand on the shoulders of giants. It is not just me, but the Maiden crew, the people who got us there, my mother’s generation, my grandmother’s generation. They have all given something to the movement for the 100-plus years since the suffragettes. All have done one or two things that have pushed us that little bit further.”

And now the sad little cast members, who understand nothing of this, demonstrate about the importance of being nice to the men who want to take all this away.

“I always thought that sport would be the jimmy that forced the whole thing open,” Edwards says. “The problem is expressed so visually in sport, by the sight of a huge man towering over a tiny woman on a cycling podium.

“I know from sailing with men, when I’ve been the only woman on the boat, that the physical, immediate, explosive power of men can be shockingly extraordinary, and they can summon it at a moment’s notice. As women, we know this power dynamic to our cost – that you can be fit and strong, but that the bloke can still pulverise you.”

She is implacable, in the face of constant abuse and belittling by trans activists. “There’s no point arguing with them,” she shrugs. “It’s like explaining the theory of relativity to my dog.”

Trans-identifying Man wins Edinburgh comedy award…of course he did…😒
Did he win it because he dislikes JK Rowling ?… pic.twitter.com/B6COB4QlS8

— Jonny Bell (@Jonnywsbell) August 23, 2025

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

From the Beeb:

Nicoresti, from Birmingham, took the award and a prize of £10,000 in a shortlist described as the "stars of tomorrow".

The Guardian awarded the show Baby Doomer four stars, calling it "an ebullient hour with a sky-high joke count".

Nicoresti said: "Winning the award sure is swell, I'm super excited and stoked and jazzed. I did this for the queers making weird art, and it's a privilege to share this moment with the first all female line-up of award winners."

Added – Dominic Maxwell in the Times:

The ending is touching, but the hour as a whole is a caustic celebration of the absurdity and necessity of trying to be true to who you are.

He's a man pretending to be a woman, ffs.

s he was the "female" of his team?🤷‍♀️ pic.twitter.com/iDt9jhRH9X

— 🚲 (@i_heart__bikes) August 23, 2025

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

adult males who claim to be women. When her work was presented in scholarly forums, other academics objected to being “non-consensually co-platformed” with her: an impressively obtuse complaint from the folks who insist that women have no business worrying about the presence of men in their spaces.

If you want one simple root cause for where we are – and this is me rather than Kodsi and Maier – you could well cite the baleful influence of postmodern scholarship.

Any teenager off to university to start a humanities degree next month will encounter the result of a scholarly environment that treats inadequate, moralistic theorising with an unearned respect. An analysis of cross-disciplinary US college syllabuses, shared by the psychologist Steven Pinker on X, revealed a pervasive bias towards woke scholarship. With the US figures probably propped up by its “great books” tradition, the UK’s figures were even direr: the gender studies specialist Judith Butler listed thousands of times more often than Plato; the cultural critic Edward Said more often than Shakespeare and the radical French philosopher Michel Foucault more than virtually anyone.

Their conclusion:

There are many lessons to draw from academia’s sustained indulgence of woke ideology. Any serious government should curb the funding of EDI bureaucracies. Subsidies that have been used to inflate the demand for college degrees, depressing standards, should be wound down. Tenure, a form of job security often justified on the grounds that it liberates academics to speak their minds, has proven doubtfully effective in that respect. Its unfortunate effect now may be to allow some of the worst proponents of a bankrupt ideology to continue to haunt their institutions long after the excesses of woke are banished from the rest of public life. The past decade has shown that wokeness disables academia from promoting knowledge and furthering the good in myriad ways. Perversely, but unsurprisingly, one of the things that bias precludes, for those in the grip of it, is its own discovery and correction. Steering universities towards this realisation should be the aim of academia’s real progressives.

No, I don't understand why Latin America has fallen so hard for the trans con. For instance, there's the Brazilian woman who's been officially granted full refugee protections in a European country after facing 25 years in prison for misgendering a transgender politician. 

And now:

This is Charlotte Schneider Callejas, a male transvestite, appointed as Colombia’s new Minister of Women by president Gustavo Petro.

Who do you think he will prioritize – women, or men with a fetish for pretending to be women? 🤔 pic.twitter.com/3DhNW5ScAm

— Genevieve Gluck (@WomenReadWomen) August 22, 2025

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

A deeply ingrained "macho" culture of misogyny would probably be a good place to start.

"2024 was the worst year in eight years for femicides in Colombia. The Colombian Observatory of Femicides recorded 886 femicides – when women are killed specifically on the basis of their sex."