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-history-turn-blind-eye-to-china”>Slavery will never be history as long as we turn a blind eye to China:

Forced labour is an essential part of the Chinese state’s programme to humiliate and destroy ethnic minorities. The parallels with the antebellum south reach to the cotton fields. The Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps (XPCC) runs prison factories and its own paramilitary force to keep its captives in line. It helped create the Chinese cotton industry, which now supplies 20% of the world’s cotton market and, maybe, the clothes on your back. XPCC sends forced labour to pick cotton because no one has ever picked cotton unless poverty or slave masters forced them to. It’s hard to know what is worse: the backbreaking work or the exposure to pesticides.

Mechanisation might spare the conscripts the pain. But Amy K Lehr from the Center for Strategic and International Studies reports that, after scouring the websites of Chinese companies and officials for evidence, she was surprised by the amount of cotton still hand-harvested in Xinjiang. Perhaps it is not so surprising. If the Chinese Communist party has a reserve army of forced labour, it has no need to spend on technology. Indeed, forced labour allows it to defray the costs of repression. […]

When I talk to Rahima Mahmut, from the World Uyghur Congress, she’s close to despair at the cowardice of Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Indonesia and all the other Muslim-majority countries that stay silent about the persecution of Muslims for love of Chinese money and fear of Chinese retribution. She is not wholly despondent, though. The mapping of China’s “re-education” camps only began in 2018, she says. Whether with forced labour or the overthrow of the rule of law in Hong Kong, the tyrannical turn in Chinese policy is taking time to sink in.

Last week, MPs in the China Research Group recommended that Britain join with Biden’s America and other democracies, not for a cold war, but to ensure basic protections. Included among them was the requirement that “supply chains are free from slave or child labour from political prisoners and persecuted ethnic minorities in China”. Most may still not want to look, but the world has gone past the point when it can pretend slavery is history.

Admittedly Apple are probably way down the list of guilty parties here. It's the fashion industry where we're likely to find the worst offenders.

And it's not just the Uighurs. North Korean slave labour is widespread now in Chinese sweat shops, even manufacturing PPE [personal protective equipment] for the western market.

s that human activities have disrupted natural systems and that human systems affect responses to crises. For example, in their manifesto for planetary health, Horton and colleagues argued that neoliberal capitalism deepens many of the current crises faced by communities around the world….

The Horton referred to is of course Richard Horton, who happens to be editor of the Lancet.

“font-size: 11pt”>He is not alone. Even as millions have endured increased sanctions, some see external pressure as the only way to break the hold of the powerful ayatollahs….

Ashrafi — whose name has been changed to protect his identity — lives in Shiraz, the ancient southwestern city known as the resting place of the 14th-century poet Hafez, and the repository of some of the finest Persian art. As he watches the election news in America, he has been considering his country’s history and the current regime’s tenuous place in it.

“The Trump administration was the only US administration to distinguish between Iran in terms of its people, history and geography, and the Islamic Republic as its governing body,” he said. “From this viewpoint, the Islamic Republic is no longer an unalterable fact, and it could change.”

Ashrafi compares Trump to Ronald Reagan, who chose to escalate the Cold War arms race and denounce the former Soviet Union as an “evil empire”. He was accused of being a warmonger, but was vindicated when it collapsed. In the same way, Ashrafi argues, Trump’s harsh policies might have helped bring down the Iranian regime in another four years.

Paradoxically, some Iranians feel comfortable with Trump’s belligerence and mendacity, which mirrors the pugnacious rhetoric and dishonesty of the Islamic Republic’s leaders. “Trump is kind of attractive for people like the Iranian middle class because he bullies anyone — and in Iran, the one who bullies, he or she has power,” said Anahita, a journalist in her twenties living in Tehran.

Anahita — whose name has been changed — said that when she recently wrote an online piece about the US elections, she was surprised to see pro-Trump comments pouring in from people across Iran.

That's quite an endorsement, given that Trump's policies against Iran have caused considerable hardship inside the country. It shows how desperate so many Iranians are to see the back of the mullahs. 

ong adolescents in six weeks than in the whole of 2018 and 2019.

Fourth, it means that children whose parents have poor accommodation or precarious jobs are suffering serious distress and disabling psychological problems, when they are at no risk at all, to protect older people who are approaching the end of their lives anyway. The average age of death with Covid-19 is 82.4 years.

The moral is not that we should restrict just the old and vulnerable, which would indeed be impractical. The moral is that coercion is a blunt instrument which we should not be using, except possibly against those known to be infectious. It is simply too crude, too arbitrary, too destructive and too unjust.

The alternative is to give people balanced advice rather than commands. It is to allow them to make their own judgments in the light of their own situation and the situation of those around them: their age, their state of health, where they live, whether they have already had the disease and the sort of occasions on which they mix with others. People have a natural instinct for self-preservation. They are not idiots.

This is not a perfect solution, but there are no perfect solutions. Some people will make bad judgments. There may well be more people in hospital and more deaths. But that has to be set against the crushing of the human spirit and the catastrophic social and economic destruction caused by the government’s counter-measures. Ministers must learn to think about more than one issue at a time. Public health is not the only thing that matters. Public welfare matters more.

And the NHS? The evidence that it is threatened is thin. But there is a point of principle too. The NHS has been underfunded for years. It has one of the lowest intensive care capacities in Europe. It is regularly overwhelmed by respiratory cases in a bad winter, even without Covid-19. Yet it has never previously been suggested that because the state provides us with a service, it is morally entitled to deploy mass coercion to stop us needing it.

Lord Sumption previously, in March, April, May, September, November. Phew.

I'm not sure how much I agree with him any longer, but I'm glad someone's making the argument.

From the Atlantic's In Focus:

A woman walks a dog past the Drax power station at sunset, North Yorkshire. [Lee Smith / Reuters]

Starlings flying over the Altare della Patria monument, Rome. [Tiziana Fabi / AFP / Getty]

rist Domenico Di Ceglie, who proposed that gender dysphoria, rather than a problem, should be seen as a statement by the individual setting out their goal: ‘a process analogous to the development of a vocation, such as an early calling to the priesthood or an enduring and compulsive ambition to pursue particular professional roles’. I wondered why the same reasoning couldn't be applied to anorexia, such that a clinic analogous to the Tavistock might have been set up to help and advise young children, especially young girls, on the best techniques for drastic weight loss, perhaps with medical intervention and special emetic drugs, so they could achieve their early calling to look as thin as possible. Who could deny these desperate young girls the right of agency over their own bodies? Activists would hurl abuse at those anti-anorexia campaigners…."don't you realise these young people will very likely kill themselves if they're not supported in their determination to starve till they look like living skeletons?" 

Still sounds like a reasonable analogy to me. Except of course anorexia is visibly and obviously harmful to the individual.

And transitioning isn't?

ans lobby.

3/ This is why PBs in gender dysphoria are *completely* different to PBs for precocious puberty. A 7 yr old taking PBs to stop an early puberty will be on them for a short time before experiencing full puberty. A GD child on PBs will not & will never complete normal development.

4/ To see advocates of PBs for gender dysphoria insist that children can consent to them; that it’s about “bodily autonomy”; that it brings them “joy” —turns my stomach. Those of us that know what grooming looks like, know what this language is painfully close to.

5/ Those orgs that are blithely ignoring the Bell v Tavistock ruling, from a court that considered evidence from around the world, including from WPATH & the Endocrine Society & are saying that they know better & chanting slogans, are truly disgracing themselves & their orgs.

6/ I didn’t expect these orgs to celebrate the Bell ruling, although they should. But I did expect them to respect it. That none of them have is a crisis in child protection. It reveals something rancid at the heart of their organisations.

7/ That’s why we need a public inquiry that examines what happened at the Tavistock & what is happening with LGBTQ orgs & child safeguarding. We need a moratorium on their funding & influence. The stakes are too high. We are either a country of laws or empty ideologies.
END

hone conversation on February 12, a consulate official suggested that his own activities in Turkey may have contributed to his mother’s detention, accusing him of meeting dissidents in Egypt, which he has never visited.

Other Uighurs, insisting on anonymity, say they have also been asked to provide information on their contacts in Turkey….

Uighurs head to Turkey, of course, because of their close cultural and ethnic ties. It's the obvious place for Uighurs in exile to campaign about the cultural genocide that the Chinese state is overseeing in Xinjiang.

President Erdogan though, that brave scourge of those like France's Macron who would dare to defame Muslims, has made his position quite clear: carry on China. Genocide of the Muslim population? Not a problem.

has been ordered to return to prison from convalescence this week. Last year Sotoudeh was sentenced to 38 years in jail, and 148 lashes, on charges related to threatening national security and “encouraging corruption and prostitution.”

The charges arise from Sotoudeh’s work defending Iranian women arrested for removing their headscarves in public and distributing pins and flowers in women’s rights demonstrations.

This is all hostage diplomacy of various kinds, and in varying degrees. Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor abducted by Beijing, and Ahmadreza Djalali, Kylie Moore-Gilbert and Nasrin Sotoudeh in Iran. In the case of Ahmadreza Djalali, the regime simply appears determined to make an example of him: if you refuse to engage in espionage abroad in service of Supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, we will kill you.

According to the Guardian on Wednesday, Djalali has been granted a temporary reprieve. This may be linked to a possible prisoner exchange:

There have been reports that the threatened execution could yet be linked to the trial in Belgium of an Iranian diplomat. Assadollah Assadi, who was serving at the embassy in Vienna, is accused of providing explosives to two individuals to bomb a rally of the opposition group the National Council of Resistance of Iran near Paris on 30 June 2018. Iran may be seeking to organise a prisoner swap, as it has on previous occasions. Belgian prosecutors are seeking a 20-year prison sentence.

Sophie Wilmès, Belgium’s deputy prime minister and foreign minister, spoke with Zarif to “discuss consular issues” on Wednesday, Iranian news agencies reported. Iran is claiming diplomatic immunity for Assadi and he has refused to appear in court.

Cynical and amoral to the core. 

Here's an oddity: the Jubalaires, a gospel group from the 1940s, in an old soundie:

[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BiGU7mJAaeM&w=550&h=309]

They've revamped an old Louis Armstrong number, Me and Brother Bill, about an unlikely hunting trip to Maine: shooting a grizzly bear which may or may not have been a grizzly bear. Louis later performed the song in a duet with Bing Crosby. It's all a bit weird – the bear turns white and off they run (talking about the KKK maybe?) – but those costumes with the deerstalkers are fabulous, and you can see a line from this straight through to doo-wop and beat-boxing.

Brother Bill seems to have been something of a popular motif, starting with a 1913 film about lonely mountain folk, through Satchmo, and on to the Animals with Brother Bill (The Last Clean Shirt) in 1977.

And now I know where Dylan got Brother Bill from, in Tombstone Blues:

Now I wish I could give Brother Bill his great thrill
I would set him in chains at the top of the hill
Then send out for some pillars and Cecil B. DeMille
He could die happily ever after.

More bear fun from the Jubalaires with The Preacher and the Bear. Or try Noah, about the well-known ark chappie.