Author: Mick Hartley

24

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evidently the "transgender" issue meant a good deal to some voters. can't imagine why anyone feels threatened by such a small number of individuals who might otherwise be regarded sympathetically; & can only conclude that many voters were made to hate & fear by rightwing media caricaturing & demonizing them.

it's called "scapegoating"– we can see it happening to innocent persons but it is difficult if not impossible to combat when the media is so pervasive & determined.

Some pertinent comments:

I realised you were a stupid person during your disgusting reaction to the Charlie Hebdo massacre. Nothing you've said since about women's rights contradicts my assessment. Incurious, obtuse, ignorant. [Graham Linehan]

If you genuinely can’t imagine why so many people had a problem with the transgender issue, you are the reason Dems lost.

Have you tried listening to women?

’ freedoms both at home and abroad.

An investigation into Chinese seafood factories has revealed that North Korean workers are completely cut off from outside information. According to a source who spoke to Daily NK on Oct. 31, “(North Korean workers) are strictly prohibited from reading South Korean books or viewing South Korean videos or photographs in their dormitories. American and Japanese media are also prohibited, as is Chinese media that is considered risqué or non-socialist or anti-socialist in content.”

Workers who violate these rules face serious consequences under North Korean overseas labor regulations. “Workers can not only be sent back to North Korea but may also face a tougher review back home, and their managers can lose their jobs, too,” the source explained. This amounts to collective punishment, with managers being held responsible for their subordinates’ violations. The heightened scrutiny for returnees could result in life imprisonment or execution, as stipulated in the Reactionary Ideology and Culture Rejection Law.

Since mid-October, the regime has intensified ideological education about these laws among overseas workers. This push coincides with North Korea’s recent constitutional amendment declaring South Korea a hostile state.

“Lectures held in the middle of this month for North Korean workers at a seafood factory in Donggang, Liaoning province, focused on clearly defining the state’s permanent territory and correcting social and historical attitudes about the two hostile states,” the source said. “The lectures are designed to police workers’ ideology while stressing the rupture with South Korea.”

The Pyongyang Cultural Language Protection Act has created additional restrictions. In early October, a worker at a Dalian seafood factory received punishment for humming a South Korean song – a month of extended work hours and mandatory self-criticism. The law specifically prohibits South Korean terms of address like “oppa” (older brother) and the honorific “-nim.” Workers must instead use official titles or “comrade.”

In July, four workers at a Donggang factory faced financial penalties for using the term “oppa” while discussing a South Korean movie. The relatively mild punishment suggests these infractions are too common to warrant the law’s full penalties, which can include at least six years of hard labor or even death. (Article 58 of the Pyongyang Cultural Language Protection Act states that violations of the ban on the “puppet state” dialect are to be punished by at least six years of hard labor, with the possibility of a life sentence or capital punishment.)

"Received punishment for humming a South Korean song". It's life, Jim, but not as we know it.

Ooh, let me guess. Emotive longform pieces from Owen Jones complaining that American taxi drivers aren't reading enough Judith Butler? pic.twitter.com/F8zzzNlLGQ

— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) November 7, 2024

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I’m going back to my hotel in New York.

With a Muslim Pakistani American cab driver… who voted for Donald Trump because “the prices were too high” under Biden

— Owen Jones (@owenjonesjourno) November 6, 2024

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Historians will be analyzing the Dem stupidity of centering these clowns for many decades to come. https://t.co/wLGnwZT7xn

— Fred Sargeant (@FredSargeant) November 6, 2024

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she’s been told and effectively sanctioned by the FA for doing so. She asked, ‘Are you a man?’, and she admitted to that. The FA is essentially saying that no woman, when faced with what appears to be a male on the pitch, is entitled to ask a question.”…

Fiona McAnena, director of campaigns at Sex Matters, told Telegraph Sport: “The FA has declared open season on women and girls in football with its disastrous policy, which means that no one can question a male player participating in a women’s game.she admitted to that. The FA is essentially saying that no woman, when faced with what appears to be a male on the pitch, is entitled to ask a question.”…

“Anyone who does could find themselves suspended just for asking. Disciplining women and girls for saying what they see plainly in front of them makes a mockery of the game. The FA’s new strategy for women’s and girls’ football is worthless as long as this transgender inclusion policy is in place. How can the FA talk about a commitment to true equality in community football while undermining the rights and safety of the very players it claims to be supporting?”

Back to Orwell: "The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command."

eft: 40px”>Adams suffered harassment after she stood up for a female victim who wanted assurances she would receive counselling from a woman, with Wadhwa identified as the “invisible hand” behind the counsellor’s persecution.

For 16 months under Wadhwa, who identifies as a trans woman but has no gender recognition certificate, the ERCC had no women-only spaces. Referrals to the centre have been paused while its safeguarding procedures are revamped.

In his remedy ruling, Ian McFatridge, the judge, ordered the centre to publish a statement and to refer survivors of sexual assault to Beira’s Place, the women’s refuge established by the author JK Rowling as an alternative source of support for female victims of sexual violence.

Ha! Game set and match to Rowling and all the gender critical women who've been fighting this case.

So then – where does this leave Rape Crisis Scotland and its CEO Sandy Brindley, who's been in full support of Mridul Wadhwa throughout…

nces that from the very narrow and selfish perspective of an Israeli, and putting aside everything that was going on in the US, the Trump Administration policies in the Middle East were nothing short of perfect.

They included two key pillars: Basing the American exit from the Middle East on support for Israel and Gulf allies rather than Iran, and, more to my expertise, sending a clear message to Palestinians and other Arab nations that enough is enough – they need to start coming to terms with Israel's past victories in 1948 and 1967.

This second message was conveyed through a series of important policies from defunding UNRWA, closing down the PLO office in DC, removing some PA funding, recognizing Jerusalem as Israel's capital and recognizing the Golan Heights as sovereign Israeli territory.

This second message was also augmented through a Peace Plan that let the Palestinians know that they can have a state, sovereignty and economic prosperity if they actually pursue it (to which, true to form, they responded with "no, no and a thousand times no").

It is no coincidence then that the Trump Administration ended its first four term with four peace agreements between Israel and Arab/Islamic countries and momentum for more.

The Biden Administration, in an act that I repeatedly described in real time as juvenile, undid almost all of the Trump Administration policies. They refunded UNRWA and other Palestinian causes, with no strings attached (Congress made it a bit more difficult), turned a cold shoulder to the Abraham Accords (for a year, refusing to even call them that), and went back to a long and failed policy of indulging Palestinians and saving them from any reckoning with their past defeats, and the absolute destruction that is their total ideology of no Jewish state in any borders. It is therefore also no coincidence that the Biden/Harris administration ends its term on the cusp of a regional war.

Unfortunately, even after the October 7th massacre and invasion, with all the love that President Biden personally and truly has for Israel, the policies undertaken by the administration extended the war and the suffering, by refusing to state that the war must end with a clear Israeli victory, Hamas/Gaza surrender, full release of hostages, and that Israel is under no obligation to supply its enemies before they surrender and release the hostages.

So as a new Trump administration is being formed, my hope for a change in the situation, even for peace, rest on the expectation that this administration will again emphasize support for Israel and Gulf countries over Iran, defund UNRWA completely and hopefully this time will mobilize more countries to do the same, make it clear that Israel has US backing to win the war, and that Hamas/Gaza is expected to surrender and release the hostages, that Israel is under no obligation to supply an enemy before it surrenders and as it holds hostages, that Lebanon needs to make full peace with Israel rather than another worse than useless UN resolution, and that Palestinians and other Arab countries can enjoy sovereignty, peace and prosperity when they finally finally finally understand not only that Israel is here to stay, but that the Jewish people, in building their sovereign state in the Land of Israel, are home.

Well…who knows? We'll see.

On the other hand a Trump presidency surely spells disaster for Ukraine. But again – who knows? What Trump says and what Trump does often don't have much in common. But Israel can to a large extent, as we're seeing, take care of itself. Ukraine can't. Ukraine needs western – and in practice that means largely American – support. That really matters. I don't think anything, at the moment, matters more.

t help, either. And within the Republican Party, the economic libertarian approach of Ronald Reagan began to lose support of less well-off social conservatives and nationalists.

Yet this still can’t fully explain how, in an American political system that ate up and spat out candidates with fairly minor foibles, Trump was able to persist to arrive at today, let alone tomorrow.

Here are the three things I think this tells us, none of them very encouraging and all of them relevant to Britain. They are, as I say, things Trump has made us see that we cannot unsee.

First, people simply don’t care about political scandals anywhere near as much as journalists and other politicians do. Minor scandals are hardly noticed at all, with the protagonists completely unknown. Major scandals may entertain but they often don’t outrage because people (wrongly) think that all politicians are pretty much the same.

In 2016, Trump did not seem to many potential voters in any way a less suitable president than Hillary Clinton. And this was not because they thought him a saint. It was that they thought her at least as much a sinner. They also thought her a hypocrite because Trump, at least, didn’t pretend. Hypocrisy is why partygate mattered, while Boris Johnson’s sex life did not.

That seems right. Because Trump says so many outrageous things, people assume he's not a hypocrite. He "tells it like it is". Nonsense, of course – the man's a compulsive liar. But it is a key part of his appeal.

Second, Trump shows how we reason. We start with what we want to think — what it suits our interests to think — and we fit our explanation of events round it. So people who support Trump saw his criminal convictions as evidence that he and they were right and that the liberal establishment had rigged the system against them. Social media intensifies this tendency to motivated reasoning.

But it is the third lesson of Trump’s rise, and persistence, that is the most worrying. Far from his contempt for democracy — his active subversion of it in January 2021, his open flirtation with dictatorship before and since — being politically ruinous, it actually attracts many voters.

An alarming number of people don’t care at all about liberal democratic norms as long as things are all right for them. And they rather think “strongman” rule might be a better idea than rule by a load of squabbling politicians. They like that Trump is (as he is thought to be) a successful and ruthless businessman. They like that he belittles others. They think he is doing that on their behalf.

He isn't, of course.

A comment from a Times reader:

I have just watched a programme beamed from the Middle East (not from Israel, by the way). Many of those interviewed hoped that Trump would win, especially the women who were interviewed. One of the main reasons they gave was that "he doesn't lie". So, okay, he doesn't lie… deliberately. Instead he opens his mouth and blurts out the first and usually the most sensationally insulting thing that comes into his head. Whether it is true or not is immaterial, and usually it isn't true. So he does lie, but does so with such force that his listeners admire him for speaking in "plain" terms. The truth is unimportant. It is "his" truth, and that's what counts to them. He frightens me, and so do his supporters.

One hundred years ago, a Republican victory for Calvin Coolidge. "November 4, 1924. "Election night crowd at Washington Star."

[Photo: Shorpy/National Photo Company]

ay continue to see women leave the party as long as the political left shows women they see them as nothing more than an idea in a man’s head.’ …

Many of Biden’s actions that have been heralded as great steps for ‘trans rights’ have been downright chilling. His appointment of trans activist Rachel Levine first as assistant secretary for health, and then as an admiral and head of the US Public Health Service Commissioned Corps, has allowed the dangerous fiction of the ‘transgender child’ to be embedded into medical protocols across the US. Levine has repeatedly made the false claim that there is ‘no argument among medical professionals’ surrounding the care of children who identify as transgender and that ‘gender-affirming care for transgender youth is essential and can be life-saving’. In the years since Levine’s appointment, detransitioners have begun to file lawsuits against the medical professionals who removed their breasts, sex organs and prescribed them hormones. The damage to these young people will be felt long after Levine and Biden have left office.

In essence, the Democratic Party has sacrificed women’s rights and children’s safety at the altar of gender ideology, providing Republicans with an open goal.

Exactly. As has been said often enough, the whole issue of “gender identity” has tainted progressive politics in the eyes of an entire generation, with countless people abandoning their liberal political affiliations and losing trust in liberal media outlets because of it. People can change sex, they're told; troubled young girls should have their breasts cut off and be given powerful drugs to wreck their puberty as part of "gender-affirming care" if social media persuades them that they've been "born in the wrong body"; men can be imprisoned with women if they wear a wig and a dress, and can compete in women's sport if they just say that they've transitioned. Yes, you're being lied to. Of course the Republicans are going to use that. Who knows how different the election might be looking now if the Dems had ditched the trans activists.

Ooh look – here's Biden meeting Dylan Mulvaney, that simpering parody of a girly girl:

[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B9258AnO_Bk&w=550&h=309]

Added:

“We’re abandoning YOU because you’ve abandoned US” pic.twitter.com/ED3WfWBSwQ

— mello_revfoxx 🪷 (@mellow_vello) November 5, 2024

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