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Finsbury Park this morning:

=”font-size: 11pt”>It concludes: "There is prolific credible evidence of Uighur women being subject to measures that prevent them from reproducing, either temporarily or permanently (such as by having IUDs non-consensually implanted or through forced removal of their wombs), as well as forced abortions. Such acts would, in our view, clearly constitute a form of genocidal conduct under [international law]."

Genocide can also include the forcible transfer of children from one group to another.

The opinion says: "There is evidence of Uighur children being forcibly removed from their parents. This includes their non-consensual placement in orphanages when one or both parents are in detention, and their mandatory placement in boarding schools.

It continues: "The fact that children are deprived of the opportunity to practise their Uighur culture…, that they are sometimes given Han names, and that they are sometimes subject to adoption by Han ethnic families, all bolsters the evidence that their forced removal is carried out with the intention of destroying the Uighur population as an ethnic group as such."

Article 2 of the UN Convention on genocide:

In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with
intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as
such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its
physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

I previously noted that four out of the five conditions were being met in Xinjiang, but said I wasn't sure about that last one, forcibly transferring children. Well I take that back. It's five out of five.

Life in North Korea, no. 94 of a never-ending series, from the Daily NK:

A source has told Daily NK that North Korean authorities are conducting public lectures on “squashing anti-socialist and non-socialist acts” as a follow-up measure to the Eighth Party Congress.

According to a Daily NK source in South Pyongan Province on Monday, cadres from the provincial and city parties are visiting workplaces to give the lectures.

In a lecture described by the source, the lecturer first called on audiences to remember that “non-socialist acts are frightening crimes that render cracks in our single-minded unity firmly bound to the party and disintegrate the socialist system,” encouraging them to “keep up the fight” to “squash these phenomena.” 

The lecturer called on people to “get their heads together” and conduct a mass struggle to break the spirit of “those who brazenly carry out non-socialist acts that violate the interests of the nation and its people” so that they “cannot lift their heads again.”

This suggests the lecturers intend to generate fear as they warn of harsher crackdowns and punishments for state-designated non-socialist acts. They also revealed the authorities’ intention to put a complete stop to transgressions by stressing people’s obligation to watch one another.

In particular, the lecturer said enemies are “wickedly plotting” even today to damage the authority of “our highly august party” and “endanger the socialist system” by sowing “internal political instability and chaos,” as they “have also done in the past.”

In a reflection of North Korea’s typical propaganda technique of promoting internal unity by stressing efforts against enemies, the lecture basically claims that the war against non-socialist phenomena such as South Korean pop culture is “sacred activity” to protect the regime. 

At the Glinner Update, a link to four separate threads on Mumsnet’s Am I Being Unreasonable (AIBU) board, each putting forward a gender critical position "and all four show overwhelming popular support for those positions".

This one on AIBU….to think Stonewall should not be involved with schools? has 100 comments (now closed). For instance:

• I don’t want Stonewall anywhere near my child’s education. I will teach them about the evils of prejudice myself. Science denying zealots can piss all the way off.
• Stonewall have found that current fashionable gender issues are the Flying Scotsman of gravy trains. I find it all a cynical drive for power, relevance, and above all, money.
• They tried to lobby government to remove single sex spaces
  They have tried to redefine what it means to be gay
  They have no place in schools
  They have no place in politics
  They no longer represent the groups they were set up to lobby on behalf of.
• They’ve become a misogynistic, homophobic, intolerant, science-denying bunch of zealots and should have absolutely no place in our education system. Their ideology is extremely damaging, especially to girls. Stonewall are a shitshow of their former selves
• Stonewall definitely shouldn't be in schools. I do not want my children taught ideology over facts, I do not want my children taught anti-women, anti-gay propaganda, and I do not want my children to be taught to override their own needs, wishes and concerns in order to validate others. Actually, I also don't want them to be taught that the world will bend to their will, or that people who disagree with them have no right to be heard. None of that, thanks very much.

And so on…

Simon Tisdall in the Guardian – The world’s bad guys are winning. Is anyone going to stand up to them?

Blame Joe Biden for not stepping in more quickly, or Donald Trump for encouraging authoritarian rulers. Blame Barack Obama for lifting sanctions. Easier still, blame China for propping up a military junta and putting profit before people.

The International Court of Justice warned of ongoing genocide, but nobody was saved. UN security council members argued endlessly about what to do. The finger of blame also points at Aung San Suu Kyi, Nobel heroine turned sellout.

Yet while recriminations over last week’s coup in Myanmar may be inevitable, they are beside the point. The issue now is what is the international community going to do about it? The quick answer, based on recent precedents, is not a lot.

This dilemma not only applies to Myanmar. Across the world, to put it crudely, the bad guys are winning. The coup is another landmark in what David Miliband, a former UK foreign secretary, calls the “age of impunity”.

A Tisdall joke, perhaps? Every time the west intervenes somewhere, the Guardian is at the forefront of those bemoaning the neo-colonialism, the neo-imperialism, and the just downright neo-nastiness of the interference. It seems a bit rich now to start complaining because no one wants to intervene any more.

Impunity is spreading, non-accountability goes viral. Authoritarianism is the new normal. According to the latest Economist survey, only 8.4% of the world’s population live in a fully functioning democracy, while more than a third live under authoritarian rule – and it’s getting worse.

Even when western politicians try hard to induce dictators and coup-leaders to mend their ways, they usually end up fighting a losing battle. Today’s question is not “who lost Myanmar?” It’s “has the west lost?”

If we in the west have lost – if we do live now in the "age of impunity" – the Guardian and its writers like Simon Tisdall should take at least some of the credit. It's what they've always wanted, after all.

individual to avoid being attacked erase the lived experiences of so many of us. We want to reiterate that no matter the circumstances, victim-survivors are not responsible for crimes or violence committed against them. Our hope and commitment for the future is that you never are made to feel like violence was your fault, and instead that you feel cared for and supported by the institution you’ve entrusted with your safety and education.

This kind of overwrought response to initiatives designed to spur people to be more proactive about personal safety has become not only culturally entrenched but impolitic to rebut.

The reaction of course stems from the traditional offensive response to women's rape claims, along the lines of "you were asking for it, wearing that dress", or "what did you expect, with a skirt that short?". It's a fine line, but while respecting the victims' suffering, and placing all the blame on the perpetrators, it should still be possible to offer sensible advice to make life safer without provoking such a backlash. Acknowledging a victim’s responsibility for their own safety doesn't mean absolving the attacker.

Of course, the point of these safety memos is not to apportion blame for crimes that have already occurred so much as to publicize best practices for preventing new crimes. It is absurd to propose that furnishing a general audience with actionable advice on safety somehow stigmatizes people who—quite possibly despite their own best efforts—have been victimized. Yes, your car might be stolen even if you lock it and take the keys, but does that mean that no one should remind us to lock our cars and take our keys? Or to use a more timely example, advising people to mask and maintain social distance does not victim-shame those who have already contracted COVID, some of whom no doubt caught the disease despite masking and maintaining distance. Still, the activists suppress.

It’s a kind of punitive narcissism: the condition whereby your desire not to be reminded of your misfortune outweighs my right to be equipped to avoid the same misfortune. But even taken at face value, the activists’ notion that we can never correlate outcomes with predisposing behaviors is an argument that we apply nowhere else in life. Such reasoning negates the eminent behavioristic goal of learning from one’s mistakes. Logically speaking, it also negates entire major fields of inquiry—say, epidemiology, which is wholly dependent on the strategy of cataloging possible causative factors over time and drawing logical inferences about common denominators and outcomes. In most walks of life, it is assumed that growth is an ongoing process of self-reflection: What worked? What didn’t?

It's also a denying of personal agency, in a world where victimhood comes to be seen almost as a state of grace.

of repeating itself, however, and we would be wise not to forget it. Simon Fanshawe – one of the original Stonewall co-founders recently remarked: