Mick Hartley

Author: Mick Hartley

  • Clearing up Sturgeon’s mess

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  • Stonewall freeze

    ounts.

    The slippery slope just got slippier. They jumped on the trans bandwagon after the gay rights battles were won, to keep the money flowing in, and now they're paying the price. The T has no place alongside the LGB.

    Added: see Dennis Noel Kavanagh's thread reader.

  • The Manitou

    Ca. 1905. "Steamer Manitou at dock, Mackinac Island, Michigan."

    image from www.shorpy.com
    [Photo: Shorpy/Detroit Publishing Company]

  • The coke smuggler

    The Jersey Evening Post headline – Woman jailed after trying to bring cocaine into Jersey.

    The article:

    A 39-year-old woman has been jailed for four years and six months after trying to bring £13,000 worth of cocaine into Jersey.

    Emma Louise Llewellyn, from Stoke-on-Trent, arrived on a flight from Liverpool in November last year and initially claimed that she was visiting the Island for the weekend to see a friend.

    But after Customs officers swabbed her baggage, traces of cocaine were found. Llewellyn initially denied drug use but later admitted to having used the Class A drug the previous week.

    The photograph:

    Screenshot 2025-02-23 172607

  • Kentish Town 1975

    3T06Z32Y4DGTV&psc=1″>This Was Then:

    This Was Then is the first career-spanning book by one of the UK’s most significant documentary photographers. Shot across Britain over three decades, in the years before and after Margaret Thatcher’s time in government, This Was Then brilliantly captures seemingly small moments of everyday life that tell a far bigger story of Britain during this time. Abrahams’ photographs demonstrate his unerring ability to capture “ordinary people living extraordinary lives”.

  • The street or the women’s restroom

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  • The BBC news correspondent

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    "The propaganda efforts by both Hamas and Israel over the hostage releases are pretty nauseating".

    Donnison has history. From the JC, October 2023:

    A BBC journalist who wrongly suggested Israel was behind last week’s Gaza hospital blast had previously caused outrage by presenting a picture of an injured Syrian girl as a “heartbreaking” image of a Palestinian child hurt in an Israeli attack.

    The BBC is being urged to take further action against Jon Donnison, who has worked for the corporation for 15 years. In November 2012, he shared a picture of a young girl lying on a hospital bed with bloodied clothes, which had been taken in Syria.

    Still at the Beeb. Fits right in.

    Added: here's the original tweet. Worth it for the replies.

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  • Narcissistic men with borderline personality disorder

    >

    It has long been obvious that a declaration of a sex-mismatched gender identity will make trusting souls act as if a whole new person has suddenly been born — even better for public rehabilitation than being ritually humiliated in a jungle. Under normal circumstances it would be quite unusual for a woman who was also a former Ukip candidate, had admitted to strangling her wife and said publicly that Camden had “too many gays” to get onto Woman’s Hour or Celebrity MasterChef, but exceptions were happily made for the boxing promoter turned LGBT ambassador Kellie Maloney after transition. And if you ever find yourself killing your partner, then trying to rape a shop assistant only days after prison release, you could always draw upon the inspirational example of Karen Jones, who did the same: say you’re a woman now, rebrand your crimes as a “cry for help” and after prison become a motivational speaker. In Jones’s case, the outcome was an invitation to address the House of Lords in 2018.

    We are not as naive as we once were, and the taste for Hollywood-style redemption arcs about finding your inner womanhood somewhere between arrest and the prison cell is dissipating. The public doesn’t seem as misty-eyed as back when a man putting on a dress was generally treated as a kind of secular canonisation. Awareness has been helped by greater statistical clarity about reality: for instance, that, according to recent figures, 70 per cent of trans-identified prisoners are incarcerated for sexual assault or violent crime, compared with about 19 per cent of the male prison population generally.

    Still, there remains a general reluctance in polite society to spell out a point that grows more obvious with every news story about a “woman” arrested for paedophilia, voyeurism or sex attacks. So I’ll say it. We need to responsibly face the fact that certain men are attracted to identifying as women because they are already psychologically unstable; and the stories about how any subsequent predatory behaviour or aggression comes only from “societal transphobia” or “repressing who I really was” is a load of, well, balls.

    There are many different reasons for people to transition, and it serves nobody to treat all cases as alike. “Some men” does not mean “all men”, obviously. But it is not random that certain narcissistic men with borderline personality disorder start announcing they are female, for the two things can be manifestations of the same set of underlying psychological issues. And this fact has obvious consequences, not just for changing room allocation but also for being able to keep track of professionals who work with vulnerable people, however many changes in identity they profess to have. Let’s all stop pretending we have had a collective brain transplant and forgotten very basic safeguarding rules that, deep down, we really know.

    A "narcissistic man with borderline personality disorder" would be a fair description of Trump. Ironic then that he would be the one to call a halt to the gender rampage through American institutions. But then history has never been straightforward – and he could hardly miss the open goal left by the gender-obsessed Democrats.

  • Open University pays out

    to avoid a public airing of the facts”.

    “After long claiming it could not wait for the truth to come out in court, that it would fight this case ‘vigorously’ and ‘robustly’ all the way, the OU [Open University] – while making no admission as to liability – has resolved the matter by way of payment of an undisclosable sum of money.

    “Why, the OU faithful will be asking, has the university decided to pay me an undisclosable amount of money to avoid a public airing of the facts, if what I said was not true?”

    In a statement provided to Times Higher Education in 2023, the Open University said: “Since being dismissed, Almut Gadow has made a series of offensive and spurious allegations online which we reject in the strongest of terms. We welcome the opportunity the tribunal hearing provides to present our evidence about the facts of this case”.

    And what were these "offensive and spurious allegations"?

    Dr Gadow had alleged that the university’s equality, diversion and inclusion (EDI) department announced plans to “incorporate its political ideologies” across the curriculum in the 2021-22 academic year.

    She claimed she voiced concerns that a criminal lawyer’s role “is to present facts” and that “sex is a relevant fact for offences involving perpetrators’ and/or victims’ bodies”.

    The academic also argued that “no offender should be allowed to dictate the language of his case in a way which masks relevant facts”.

    Dr Gadow said she was told that her posts on the online staff forum amounted to “serious insubordination” because she had been told it was not the place for such discussions.

    She was informed by the university that her persistence in posting comments on issues relating to gender identity, paedophilia, and sex offending amounted to “serious bullying and harassment”.

    The content of several of her posts was a breach of the university’s transgender staff policy because they may “create an environment in the forum that isn’t inclusive, trans-friendly, or respectful”, Dr Gadow was also told.

    In a statement following the settlement from the Open University, Dr Gadow claimed her experience illustrated that EDI policies at universities often place undue pressure on staff and teaching.

    “Much needs to be corrected in this area, where EDIdeology dictates the content of OU teaching at the expense of academic freedom. My case has highlighted the extent to which EDI-fied and ‘liberated’ curricula violate not only the university’s obligations to uphold academic freedom but the human rights of its members,” she said.

    It would perhaps be too much to suggest that they realised she was right. More likely, they decided they didn't want their dirty washing aired in public.

  • The Kremlin’s most useful idiot

    mmunist Party ended term limits for the presidency, allowing Xi to rule indefinitely. “He’s now president for life. And look, he was able to do that. I think that’s great. Maybe we’ll have to give it a shot someday.” Watch this space.

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