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the potential scale of forced labour in the picking of a crop that accounts for a fifth of the world’s cotton supply and is used widely throughout the global fashion industry.

Alongside a large network of detention camps, in which more than a million are thought to have been detained, allegations that minority groups are being coerced into working in textile factories have already been well documented.

The Chinese government denies the claims, insisting that the camps are “vocational training schools” and the factories are part of a massive, and voluntary, “poverty alleviation” scheme.

But the new evidence suggests that upwards of half a million minority workers a year are also being marshalled into seasonal cotton picking under conditions that again appear to raise a high risk of coercion.

In other words, slave labour.

“In my view the implications are truly on a historical scale,” Dr Adrian Zenz, a senior fellow at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation in Washington who uncovered the documents, told the BBC.

“For the first time we not only have evidence of Uighur forced labour in manufacturing, in garment making, it’s directly about the picking of cotton, and I think that is such a game-changer.

“Anyone who cares about ethical sourcing has to look at Xinjiang, which is 85% of China’s cotton and 20% of the world’s cotton, and say, ‘We can’t do this anymore.’”

Adrian Zenz's report here:

New evidence from Chinese government documents and media reports shows that hundreds of thousands of ethnic minority laborers in Xinjiang are being forced to pick cotton by hand through a coercive state-mandated labor transfer and “poverty alleviation” scheme, with potentially drastic consequences for global supply chains. Xinjiang produces 85 percent of China’s and 20 percent of the world’s cotton. Chinese cotton products, in turn, constitute an important basis for garment production in numerous other Asian countries. Previously, evidence for forced labor in Xinjiang pertained only to low-skilled manufacturing, including the production of textiles and apparel. This report provides new evidence for coercion specifically related to cotton picking. These findings have much wider implications, affecting all supply chains that involve Xinjiang cotton as a raw material. On Dec. 2, 2020, the United States placed a Withhold Release Order on cotton produced by the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps. However, this entity only produces 33 percent of Xinjiang’s cotton and only 0.4 percent of its highest-quality long-staple cotton. This report provides evidence for coercive labor related to all cotton produced in Xinjiang….

Hugo Rifkind in the Times – Le Carré never forgot which side he was on: "The bestselling author loved to skewer craven establishment figures but always remembered who the good guys were."

Like when he refused to back Salman Rushdie over the Satanic Verses affair, perhaps, saying that "nobody has a God-given right to insult a great religion and be published with impunity"? Was Ayatollah Khomeini, then, one of the good guys?

I'd have thought the Rushdie affair provided a very clear test of where people stood on the issue of free speech and who the good guys were….a test which Le Carré notably failed at the time.

Here's the exchange of letters in the Guardian between Rushdie, Le Carré, and Christopher Hitchens.

They all made up later.

And again:

Scotland’s gender clinic for children has apologised for a six-month delay in publishing revised guidance on the potential harm of puberty blockers.

The Sandyford clinic in Glasgow removed an online leaflet in June after a parent complained that it failed to recognise that powerful drugs halting development of breasts or facial hair could have long-term health effects.

It followed an admission by NHS England that the impact of such drugs on the development of the teenage brain or children’s bones is unknown.

NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde promised that the guidance, which stated that puberty blockers were fully reversible, would be revised. It issued an apology on Friday after fresh concerns were raised by the parent that an updated version had not been published. “A leaflet previously published on the Sandyford website about hormone blockers has since been removed, and we apologise for any confusion,” said a spokeswoman.

After being reassured that puberty blockers were quite harmless and reversible – just giving those poor children a breathing space – it now turns out that not only are they damaging, but that all these clinics were well aware of the problems, but didn't want to admit what they knew.

ound that suppressing puberty "reduced growth that was dependent on puberty hormones", and height growth continued, "but more slowly than for their peers".

This is serious stuff. Adolescence – puberty – is when young people really need to build up their bone density for that growth spurt into adulthood, along with all the hormonally-driven changes to develop secondary sexual characteristics. You can't stop the latter without stopping the former.

Which is not a good idea at all. See this Twitter thread:

2020 preprint of Tavistock study on puberty blockers confirms massive decrease in bone density of patients relative to their peers. The graph shows the baseline spine bone density and then the decrease over time. /1 pic.twitter.com/L6UFuVOVpW

— Michael K. Laidlaw, MD (@MLaidlawMD) December 13, 2020

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

confirming children.

In particular, Falcón O’Neill has been critical of proposals to allow hormone blockers to be given to prepubescent children (9-10 years old), to use hate-crime laws to criminalise parents who refuse to affirm their child’s self-declared gender identity and compel school teachers to categorise children based upon stereotyped behaviour.

This is an attack on Lidia Falcón O’Neill’s constitutionally protected freedom of speech, expression and political belief.

We stand with Lidia Falcón O’Neill and call on the Hate Crimes Prosecutors Office to respect her right to freedom of speech and political opinion, and dismiss these complaints.

William Henry Jackson, ca. 1897. "Cane fields in Louisiana." 

[Photo: Shorpy/William Henry Jackson]

Spanish lawyer, author, and feminist politician Lidia Falcón is being investigated by the Prosecutor’s Office for Hate Crimes and Discrimination in response to a complaint from Federación Plataforma Trans (the Trans Platform Federation of Spain), because of her gender-critical views. Woman's Place UK features a translation of an interview she gave to a Dominican newspaper:

We are opposed to the idea that everyone has a “gender identity” that ought to be legislated. To begin with, we are opposed to the term “gender” full-stop. The term gender is a linguistic construct that has displaced Marxist categories, and that has displaced anthropological categories. That is to say, it alleges that neither men nor women exist.

The bill proposed to abolish the words “man” and “woman” and to replace the terms “father” and “mother” with “pregnant parent” and “non-pregnant parent.” These are the linguistic monsters fomented through postmodernism. Apart from the fact that the bill intended to legally recognise within the civil registry, any person who declares themselves to be the opposite sex, simply on the basis of their wishes. We are mostly talking about men claiming to be women. This has consequences for sports, prisons, shelters for victims of violence, scientific research, and feminist quotas where being a woman is a determining factor.

We find ourselves at a point in history when women are being erased from the law and public policy.

In my long career fighting for women’s rights, I have to confess my deep concern. I would never have thought that I would find myself at this stage of my life, having to defend the fact that I am a woman and that women exist as human beings, independent from men. Engels said much the same in the Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State 150 years ago.

I don’t think there is anyone sensible, educated or not, who does not know what a woman is and what a man is. These are the two sexes of the human species, corresponding to the two sexes of all mammalian species.

It's a interesting take from someone brought up as a communist, fighting fascism under Franco, who's now seeing the old Marxist thinking of the left being displaced by what she views as postmodernist nonsense. I have no great affection for those old Marxist dogmas, but she does have a point.

Sad to see the Country legend with the golden voice died yesterday:

Charley Pride, the first African-American to enter the Country Music Hall of Fame, has died aged 86, his website has announced.

Pride, who rose to fame in the 1960s, passed away on Saturday from complications of Covid-19.

While Pride was not the first black singer in country music, he became one of its biggest stars during a period of division in the US.

He won three Grammy Awards, followed by a lifetime achievement award in 2017….

"We're not colour-blind yet, but we've advanced a few paces along the path and I like to think I've contributed something to that process," he wrote in his memoir.

"Kiss an Angel Good Morning":

[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKmMovZ52MY&w=550&h=309]

I featured "Is Anybody Going To San Antone?" a couple of years back. 

Obits at the Guardian, NYT, Rolling Stone.

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[Photos: Evgenia Arbugaeva]

o guarantee women a voice in politics, but recent years have seen a rise in men taking seats once set aside for women. Mr Wadhwa secured the position of manager at Forth Valley and Stirling Rape Crisis Centre by concealing his biological sex. 

Gary Dunion, a political advisor to several Green Party leaders, claimed the amendment to allow rape victims to choose the sex of those providing their intimate exams “exists purely to terrorise trans people.” 

Gregor Murray, a Local Councillor for the North East, Dundee City Council, who requests people “don’t use male pronouns” due to his penchant for lipstick, said the law “threw trans people under the bus,” and asked, “What’s next? I don’t feel safe in this country.” 

“How is this about safety? How is this about feminism? […] Just come to my house and kill me – it’s quicker and you can get off,” a trans activist melodramatized after claiming to be “in tears, shaking over the new law.”

Urban farmer and trans activist Jo Edwards said of the amendment: “Hard to be anything but utterly disgusted and depressed by the sheer hate people have inside them. They have truly given up any good part of who they were with it.”

Something of an over-reaction, perhaps. But you have to remember that the suffering of rape victims is as nothing compared to the suffering of trans women denied validation.

Resisters United expressed bewilderment at transgender advocates’ reaction: “I kid you not – they are kicking off about not being able to examine rape victims. Twitter is full of screaming angry tweets about ‘their rights.’ Some are declaring not being able to examine a rape victim makes them ‘feel unsafe.’ How entitled can they get? Isn’t this the most clear woman hate?!”