Author: Mick Hartley

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[Photos © Café Royal Books/Peter Fryer]

[As ever, click on the photos to enlarge]

From the Daily NK:

A young North Korean woman was publicly executed by firing squad in late January in Sinuiju, North Pyongan province, following her conviction for murder, Daily NK has learned.

The execution was reportedly carried out in public as a deterrent amid rising violent crime linked to economic hardship. According to a source in North Pyongan province, the execution took place on Jan. 20 at an empty lot near Chaeha market, following an immediate public trial by city police and court officials.

The condemned woman, identified only by her surname Lee and in her early 20s, was convicted of murdering an elderly couple in their 70s last October. The case had initially gone unsolved, with Daily NK reporting in November that authorities had failed to identify any suspects after a month of investigation. Three months later, Lee was arrested, swiftly tried, and executed….

The sudden execution immediately following the trial shocked onlookers who had gathered to watch the proceedings. Disturbingly, children under 10 were present in the crowd. “We didn’t know there would be a public execution. A lot of children there were traumatized seeing their first public execution,” the source said.

While public executions in North Korea have decreased in recent years, authorities appear to be returning to harsher measures as economic conditions deteriorate and violent crimes increase. “As people struggle to make a living, more violent crimes are being committed. The authorities are responding with more public trials and firing squad executions, hoping to deter such crimes,” the source explained.

David Patrikarakos at UnHerd rubbishes the Trump Gaza plan, but then equivocates somewhat at the end. His conclusion:

But if this idea is dangerous, impetuous and unlikely to see the light of day, the impulse behind it (even though borne from instinct rather than design) — to think about a seemingly unsolvable problem in a new light, however crazed, is perhaps worthwhile. As policy, Trump’s Gaza plan is a disaster; as a thought experiment, it’s absurd. But such an unthinkable suggestion might actually kickstart the sort of unorthodox, disruptive thinking that has eluded more measured, knowledgeable and sharper minds — and which has helped to keep peace so tortuously at bay for almost 60 years.

Well yes. That is, perhaps, the point.

A comment on the article:

I wonder how many Palestinians wouldn’t rather spend their threescore-and-ten building their lives somewhere other than the rubble that Gaza now is, and wouldn’t jump at the chance to move elsewhere for the chance of a better life.
Maybe they do all desire to return to penury and destitution, living in the ruins of what used to be their houses, ruled by Hamas and seeing their children go off to pointless deaths in a jihadi cul-de-sac. They get bonus payments, apparently, for dead kids. And Heaven awaits, sultanas and all.
So tough choices.
But is it really so absurd that Trump is pushing a plan that would at least give individual Palestinians that choice? Or is it absurd that Western liberals would deny them that choice?
Is it not absurd, in fact, that the UN, and geniuses of similar ilk, has spent decades financing a terrorist government of a quasi-state, seen the consequences, and decided that somehow a return to this situation is in everyone’s best interests.
Trump’s thinking on this is way outside the Overton window, sure. The author claims that as policy the plan is a ‘disaster’. Take a good long look at Gaza, and tell me what current bien pensant policy is then. Trump’s plan has at least the advantage of looking like good sense at the outset.
As a thought experiment, it is absurd only to those incapable of seeing beyond the bounds of an Overton window that will leave their lack of imagination behind as it moves.

cognition than anything done in 2024 by 4 billion actual women.

In JustBeKindism, actual women are beneath contempt. Smith quotes Andrea Long Chu, a trans-identifying man and the Pulitzer prize-winning author of Females: A Concern (the title alone merits an award for mansplaining). “Female,” says Chu, means “any psychic operation in which the self is sacrificed to make room for the desires of another … [The] barest essentials [of femaleness are] an open mouth, an expectant asshole, blank, blank eyes.”

Just Be Kind is of course the mantra churned out by those who support trans women (men) competing in women's sport: refusing to be "inclusive" – so cruel – and hey, there are only a few of them so what's the big problem? Just be kind, can't you? Ditto for trans men (more often than not, it seems, sex offenders) in women's prisons. And men like Spanish trans actor Karla Sofía Gascón up for best actress at the Academy Awards. The list goes on. Never works the other way, somehow.

t falls outside is unusual”.

The Science Museum guide claims that people think “the top of the brick with sticking out pins is male, the bottom of the brick with holes to receive the pins is female, and the process of the two sides being put together is called mating”.

No source is provided for the alleged view that people consider Lego to be gendered, or that sticking bricks together is called “mating”.

Because they just made it up.

Red Cross: Humanitarian bystander of the year

ft. @ShutupLyle pic.twitter.com/kxdBjGgG2t

— ארץ נהדרת (@Eretz_Nehederet) February 6, 2025

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11pt”>According to her website she's currently a Research Fellow at the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies, University of Exeter.

Coming out with unhinged stuff about ridding the world of Israel, and lauding a genocidal antisemitic terrorist group, clearly does wonders for your academic career.

now Dolores. They don't need state-funded rape crisis centres, nor do they ever frequent high street changing rooms. They simper from talk show sofas about those nasty far-right bigots who don't want penises swinging around the girls' showers, secure in the knowledge that their private pool remains the safe place it always was.

Those who've benefited most from gender identity ideology are men, both trans-identified and not. Some have been rewarded for having a cross-dressing kink by access to all spaces previously reserved for women. Others have parlayed their delicious new victim status into an excuse to threaten, assault and harass women. Non-trans-identified leftybros have found a magnificent platform from which to display their own impeccably progressive credentials, by jeering and sneering at the needs of women and girls, all while patting themselves on the back for giving away rights that aren't theirs.

The actual victims in this mess have been women and children, especially the most vulnerable, gay people who've resisted the movement and paid a horrible price, and regular people working in environments where one misplaced pronoun could see you vilified or constructively dismissed. Do not tell me this is about a tiny minority. This movement has impacted society in disastrous ways, and if you had any sense, you'd be quietly deleting every trace of activist mantras, ad hominem attacks, false equivalence and circular arguments from your X feeds, because the day is fast approaching when you'll want to pretend you always saw through the craziness and never believed it for a second.

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Added:

Congratulations to every single person on the left who’s been campaigning to destroy women’s and girls’ rights. Without you, there’d be no images like this. pic.twitter.com/mzR7l5k1OW

— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) February 6, 2025

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a from the beginning, engendered by an act of pure negation. The Arabs could have gone along with the U.N.’s partition plan like the Jews did, and chosen to build whatever version of Switzerland or Belgium on the eastern Med in 1948. Instead, they resoundingly chose war. That’s the storied “Nakba” at the core of the Palestinian legend—the catastrophe that drove the Arabs from their land and hung a key around the neck of a nation waiting to go home. The Arabs chose the catastrophe; they chose war, based on the premise that they would inevitably win and exterminate the Jews.

Yet despite repeated military failures, and the increasing distance between the first-world powerhouse that the Israelis built and their increasingly war-torn, third-world neighborhood, the global conscience was always predisposed to rebuilding what the Palestinians destroyed. Accordingly, the Palestinian Arabs became a tribe of feral children whose identity was carved out of the relentless vow to eliminate Israel and slaughter the Jews en masse—despite repeated failures, each one more crushing than the last.

Trump said, enough, we’re not rebuilding Gaza. Time for a new idea—the Gazans have to to go, they can try to start again somewhere else, in a land where every building still standing isn’t already wired to explode. […]

Here is the stark reality: Gazans, not just the enlisted members of the Hamas brigades, waged an exterminationist campaign against Israel, and they lost. At virtually any other time in history, save the last 75 years, they would be lucky to lose only territory and not have their legend and language permanently deleted from the book of the living.

Trump’s generous offer to the Gazans therefore signals a return to history, but with a twist. Trump has not only spared them, but vowed to provide them with new lives, better lives, work, new homes, a chance to raise their families in peace, an existence not premised on total and permanent war with a more powerful adversary destined to rout them entirely, and would have already done so if not for the objections of other powerful global players.

Interesting times. This is a paradigm shift in thinking about Israel and Gaza – and only the US could make this suggestion. The old pre-Obama US, that is. Could it really happen? Could they make it work? I honestly don't think so, but….we'll see. It certainly has – as Trump loves to do – shaken things up.