Author: Mick Hartley

it would not be a crime to express the opinion that sex is immutable unless it was accompanied by behaviour that was intended to stir up hatred, which could include aggressive campaigning.

The hate crime bill will criminalise threatening and abusive comments intended to stir up hatred against minorities. It has provoked a backlash from actors including Rowan Atkinson and Elaine C Smith, the authors Chris Brookmyre and Val McDermid and the Scottish Newspaper Society, who fear it will have a “chilling effect” on public debate about divisive social issues.

Lucy Hunter Blackburn, founder of the women’s rights activists Murray Blackburn Mckenzie, raised concerns last week that anyone who describes a woman as an “adult human female” would face a police investigation…..

Mr Yousaf confirmed that a campaign promoting the view that sex was immutable would be prosecuted if it was deemed deliberately provocative.

And who gets to decide what's "deliberately provocative"?

Biology teachers will be treading on thin ice, then. Will they be prosecuted for saying that sex is immutable and that men can't just become women, in accordance with, um, biological facts?

Interesting times north of the border…

geBodyParagraph-module__paragraph–block ContentPageBodyParagraph-module__paragraph–size-medium–spacing-normal”>These rebels, unhappy with what they view as a threat to free speech, have now come up with three proposed amendments (one, two, three) to be put in a ballot to all Cambridge academics, which, basically, seek to replace the idea of respect with that of tolerance. The voting starts on Friday.

A push-back, perhaps, against the spread of woke authoritarianism.

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r their own purposes.’ It is thus here – at the intersection of antisemitic antizionism and traditional Judeophobia, where leftists are overrepresented – that the true source of the Labour antisemitism crisis is to be found. It is not an import from the right, or a random statistical quirk, but rather a homegrown problem with roots that are specific to the left. […]

 The alternative to condemning British Jews to the status of fools at best, or liars and propagandists at worst, is for the left to acknowledge that the way it has long understood antisemitism, Israel, and the idea of Jewish nationhood is not only historically and conceptually flawed but is itself tainted with antisemitism. But this would mean challenging not just axiomatic beliefs about Israel but an entire worldview, one built on conspiracy, irrationality and projection. Corbyn’s statement and ongoing refusal to withdraw it is thus as much a defence of this ideological edifice as it is an evasion of his responsibility for the crisis.

But read it all.

Preparing for war:

May 1942. Washington, D.C. "Wartime construction in vicinity of federal government buildings — lower 14th Street improvement project. Construction of a bridge and road near Independence Avenue and 14th and 16th Streets. Steel piles to be driven as supports for bridge structure."

March 1942. Washington, D.C. "Construction of temporary war emergency buildings on the Mall, near 16th and 17th Streets N.W., seen from the top of the Washington Monument."
[Photos: Shorpy/John Ferrell for the Office of War Information]

ren who are often taught to treat them as if they are the toxic ones. Parents tell their trans declared children that they are worried about them, that they don’t think they should make life-altering decisions, that they’re young and they should explore slowly. In return, trans children will recite what they’ve learned to parrot from internet influencers and activists. They will call these parents transphobes. They treat parents like the enemy. They will demand total buy-in or the gig is over.

Worst of all, parents find that some therapists are the ones who are accelerating the tear in the familial fabric. There is much testimony among parents of trans kids who have been told by therapists that lack of support for these children is the same as harming them.

Ultimately, particularly as children enter their late teens or early 20s, they are more emboldened to leave behind their families, to disconnect from parents who’ve wanted nothing more than to make their children happy and whole. There are many exceptions to this, of course; some trans children have suffered abuses at the hands of their families. But trans kids have also co-opted the “I was abused” phrase to describe a home life where their gender choice was not embraced, either in part or at all. Equipped with the fevered feeling to transition, the scripted language they study online, and the sense that there’s a “glitter family” out there waiting to make their world a perfect utopia, teens are more empowered than ever to walk down the lane and shut the garden gate, maintaining the belief their parents don’t love them. In many, many cases, they are very wrong.

As I've noted before, this whole gender dysphoria business parallels the child abuse scandals of the 1980s and 90s – with the way that troubled and unhappy young people are encouraged to blame their wicked parents, and with the role of irresponsible therapists. Now, as an added bonus, we have the powerful and toxic role of social media to help spread the word.

Back then it was just your mind they messed with. Now it's your body as well.

Up in Hampstead this morning:

th-korean-slave-labour”>depressing report:

The British government has sourced PPE [personal protective equipment] from factories in China where hundreds of North Korean women have been secretly working in conditions of modern slavery, according to evidence uncovered by the Guardian.

The Guardian’s findings indicate that hundreds of thousands of protective coveralls ordered for the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) have come from factories using North Korean labour in the Chinese city of Dandong.

The three-month investigation has also found evidence of North Korean labour being used in factories exporting PPE to the US, Italy, Germany, South Africa, Japan, South Korea, the Philippines and Myanmar.

It is claimed that the North Korean workers in Dandong, who are mostly women, work for up to 18 hours a day, with little or no time off. They are under constant surveillance and are unable to freely leave the factories.

Sources indicate that the North Korean workers in PPE factories in Dandong have about 70% of their wages seized by the North Korean state.

“The workers have no days off. They are not allowed to go out. The North Korean [state] controls them. They make money for the country,” said a manager at one factory.

The UN has branded the export of workers to foreign countries by the North Korean regime as state-sponsored forced labour, defined as a form of modern slavery by the International Labour Organization.

The findings suggest that the UK government may have indirectly funnelled taxpayers’ money into the pockets of Kim Jong-un and his brutal regime which the UN has said is guilty of “widespread and gross human rights violations” amounting to crimes against humanity.

The use of North Korean workers in China breaches UN sanctions which were put in place to cut off the income North Korea earned from its overseas workers and other foreign business interests. One of the explicit aims of the sanctions is to halt foreign export earnings being used to support the regime’s prohibited nuclear and ballistic missile programs. US sanctions also prohibit the import of any goods into the US manufactured in whole or in part by North Koreans.

The Chinese – who gave us the virus in the first place, thanks very much – are now making a nice profit providing the world with PPE against the spread of the virus, using slave labour  from North Korea. And breaking UN sanctions in the process. Hmm.

s authority to overlook the students’ anti-socialist acts – as well as the party and security officials who failed to properly provide party guidance process petitions or enforce the law in the case – were expelled from the party, stripped of their positions or discharged, and exiled to the provinces along with their families….

All seven members of the party committee of Pyongyang Medical University who overlooked the students’ anti-socialist crimes were sent with their families to Chagang Province to work at a calcium carbonate mine in Sijung County and a logging station in Rangrim County. Five officials from the Ministry of Public Security in Chung-guyok who squashed the petition and the Ministry of Public Security officials who were responsible for failing to properly unhold the law during the Pyongcheon incident were exiled with their families to a farm in Rinsan, North Hwanghae Province.

The source said about 60 people were exiled from Pyongyang to the provinces over the matter. 

Moreover, North Korean authorities publicly executed the four students at Pyongyang Medical University by firing squad. It seems the authorities opted for a public execution to warn people against anti-socialist acts and to instill caution and fear.

Well, that should sort the problem. No half measures here…

a Shahbaz, who was abducted at gunpoint and gang-raped before her wedding, is in hiding after being accused of apostasy for breaking off the marriage – an offence punishable by death in Islam.

More than 9,000 people have signed a petition asking the Prime Minister to grant the teenager and her family asylum in Britain to save her from ‘certain death’. Her supporters cite parallels with the case of Asia Bibi, a Pakistani Christian who was hounded by Islamic vigilantes on her release from prison after bogus blasphemy charges.

Last night, Maira appealed directly to Mr Johnson. ‘I am very much scared due to threats to my life and my family. Please protect me,’ she said in a statement.

The schoolgirl fled her husband in August, five days after the Lahore high court ruled she had willingly converted to Islam and married Mohamad Nakash Tariq, a 45-year-old barber who lived near her family in the city of Faisalabad.

The ruling sparked protests in Pakistan where, according to human-rights groups, an estimated 1,000 Christian and Hindu girls are kidnapped each year and forced to convert to Islam.

Maira claims she was abducted on April 28 and held prisoner in a basement. She alleges that her captors drugged and raped her before forcing her to convert to Islam to marry Tariq. He denies her claims.

Sajid Christopher, a human-rights activist in Lahore who is supporting the teenager, said: ‘Maira is aware that if her abductor finds out where she is, she will be taken and killed. Dangerous men have been calling at their home and their neighbours’ homes trying to find out where the family are.’

Gang-rape of a 14-year-old not an issue, it seems, but apostasy by breaking off the marriage – death can be the only punishment for such a wicked crime.

Whitehall sources said concerns about the plight of girls in Pakistan had been raised last week by Foreign Office Minister Lord Ahmad during a meeting with Pakistan’s minister for human rights, Dr Shireen Mazari.

However, Home Office officials do not consider asylum claims lodged outside UK territory, instead advising those in need of protection to claim asylum in the first safe country they reach. Last night, a Government spokesman said: ‘Forcing women and girls into marriage is a serious abuse of human rights.’

In other words: oh dear what a shame, but no, we're not going to do anything. Asia Bibi, remember, appealed for asylum in the UK, but the appeal was denied because her presence might "stir civil unrest".

According to the Times (the article doesn't seem to be online), Maira says her captors filmed themselves raping her, using the footage to blackmail her into converting to Islam and marrying.

John Pontifex, head of press for Aid to the Church in Need: "For years more government overseas aid has gone to Pakistan than any other country. A fresh approach is needed." Well yes…