Mick Hartley

Author: Mick Hartley

  • Essentially a mini North Korea

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  • Very sympathetic to Vladimir Putin

    If you can get through the bluster and the lies and the ramblings, Trump is probably stronger on Israel and Iran than Biden/Harris – or at least he was when he was president. No telling now, since his palpable mental decline. On the other hand:

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  • Baltimore truck

    John Vachon, March 1943. "Truck transportation from Baltimore to New Orleans. A truck and trailer in Baltimore."

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    [Photo: Shorpy/John Vachon for the Office of War Information]

  • Ideologically filthy opportunists

    ficials have arrested four officers at a military film studio for possessing South Korean e-books, considered “reactionary media” by the regime.

    A source in Pyongyang revealed recently that the incident occurred at the Military Science Film Studio in late September. “The military’s state security department conducted an unannounced search, took four officers into custody, and held a major ideological struggle session at the studio,” he said.

    The officers were caught secretly reading dozens of South Korean e-books stored on external hard drives and USB flash drives during night shifts. They had been smuggling the memory cards into work in their backpacks or uniform pockets, waiting for quiet moments to access the content.

    The arrests came after an informant at the film studio tipped off the state security department. Agents monitored the officers to confirm the behavior before conducting a surprise search, finding the incriminating memory cards on their persons.

    “The incident sent shockwaves through the film studio,” the source said. In response, the studio’s party committee and the state security department organized an ideological struggle session and intensive training for all staff and managers.

    During the late September session, the arrested officers were denounced as “ideologically filthy opportunists” who had “infiltrated the film studio” and “undermined its ideological atmosphere by collecting reactionary media.” Organizers called for increased vigilance against such behavior.

  • At the European Parliament

    Belgian MEP Assita Kanko, yesterday:

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  • Appeasing Iran

    rn history. That Iran is an implacable foe to everything America stands for should surely be obvious to even the dimmest bulbs in Washington, but a determination to be the "nice" president with the lovely smile after a bellicose Bush – plus an inability to make those tough decsions on, say, Syria – means that billions of dollars have been released to help the Iranian regime survive, and the ridiculous JCPOA limps on as testament to a misplaced trust in Iran's reliability. Tehran is tottering, millions of its people – and especially its women – are desperate for change. But Biden will continue the prevarication, aiming his criticism not at the mullahs but at an Israel fighting for its survival.

    However, what the Bidenites and the rest of the West fail to understand is that when Israel said after October 7 “never again”, it meant it. The Israelis want the genocidal Iranian regime — responsible for so much Israeli and Jewish slaughter — to be neutralised and will stand for nothing less. They don’t want war. They simply have no choice.

  • On the run to Clovis

    Jack Delano, March 1943. "Vaughn, New Mexico. One of the 5000 Class Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad freight locomotives about to leave on the run to Clovis, New Mexico."

    image from www.shorpy.com
    [Photo: Shorpy/Jack Delano for the Office of War Information]

  • Leading people who think of themselves as idealists into morally disastrous territory

    ne has come to see during this last year, Israel could indeed be defeated in a military war, and the Jews could indeed be “decolonized,” which is to say, massacred. And if that were to happen, the proponents of the decolonization ideology in the American universities—not just the students, but the professors, enough of them to be noticeable—would respond, as they have already shown us, by cheering.

    Also, of course, Israel is the ancestral home of the Jews – a point which could hardly have been advanced by those British colonisers staking their claims in North America and Australia.

    Their cheers would be deep and vigorous, too. That is because, in the decolonization ideology, as Kirsch explains, “Palestine is the reference point for every type of social wrong,” and the destruction of Israel would be the triumph for the ideology itself and for every well-intentioned person and political movement around the world. And so, the new and exotic academic ideology that inveighs against “settler colonialism” has turned out to be a recognizable thing. It is one more variation on a phenomenon well known to the twentieth century—the noble doctrine that turns into its opposite. Kirsch makes the point: “I see it leading people who think of themselves as idealists into morally disastrous territory, in ways that are all too familiar in modern history."

    We pass through Frantz Fanon and Gary Snyder (the hippie/Buddhist San Francisco poet? Yes indeed)….

    Finally:

    But I think that chiefly it is worth recalling that, in our own moment, the ideological condemnation of Israel, Judaism, and the Jews that carries the most weight in the world is the one that comes from the Islamist movement—the religious-and-political movement, that is, whose goal is to resurrect the ancient Islamic utopia that can be found in the Qur’an. This movement commands the support right now of many millions of people across the denominations in Islam, and it enjoys the backing of the Islamic Republic of Iran, and is confident of its beliefs and its ultimate triumph someday in the future. And naturally it exerts a pressure on everyone else, and especially on the people in the university quads right now who are protesting against settler colonialism. The pressure is to come up with ideological explanations of every sort—scientific-sounding explanations in the anthropological mode, or political explanations in the national-liberation style of the 1960s, or human-rights explanations in the modern humanitarian fashion, or countercultural displays of universal spirituality—to show that Islamism’s wrath cannot be entirely misplaced, even if the Islamist rhetoric, half medieval-theological, and half pseudo-scientific in the Nazi style (“malignant cancerous tumor,” to quote Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, just now), grates disagreeably on the modern ear.

    Which is how we come to the baffling sight of supposedly progressive anti-Israel protestors on our streets chanting in praise of Hamas, and Hezbollah, and the Houthis, and all the Islamist Jew-hating outfits that are backed and financed by the theocratic regime in Tehran.

  • Rowling on gender identity

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    Full text:

    Unlike sex, gender identity is neither scientifically observable nor testable. In spite of the million word salads attempting one, there's no stable definition of gender identity. The term is variously but not exclusively applied to an innate certainty that one is not the sex one was born, to a constantly shifting sense of self that may be male, female, neither or both, to the extent to which one identifies with often regressive sex stereotypes, or to something akin to a gendered soul, which may be trapped in the 'wrong' body.

    Gender identity is an unfalsifiable idea, a socio-political construct, a quasi-religious belief. At bottom, it is defined by little more than a person's subjective feelings, or (more accurately) their claim to feel those feelings. We are told we must believe in the existence of those feelings and that those feelings constitute a new form of fact, even though in literally no other sphere of human life is it held that a person's self-perception must be accepted unquestioningly as true or real.

    Gender identity ideology is doing measurable, serious harm to some very vulnerable young people and to women. We're watching a medical scandal of terrifying proportions unfold in front of us, along with an assault on the rights of women and girls in the developed world that is unparalleled in my lifetime. I've read treatises on astrology that make more sense than the spiel written on gender identity and I believe that those who continue to push gender identity as 'real' or scientifically observable are guilty of causing widespread damage. The effects are being felt not only by vulnerable individuals, but in once-impartial and rational disciplines and institutions, which, like you, have embraced a form of faith-based fundamentalism masquerading as intellectual sophistication.

  • The pyramid-selling of Jew-hatred

    who say they are appalled, as often as not aren’t. The Jews got what was coming, that was all. History was having its way. Politics – the politics of Jew-aversion with its new academic-kindergarten name of anti-colonialism – stepped in where, for a brief hour at least, pity alone should have spoken.

    A professor of some subject that was no subject at some university that was no university mocked our sorrow for the young mown down at a music festival. “Don’t have music festivals on someone else’s land in that case,” he jeered before a tear could dry. We can say, at least, that his subject had never been history, geography or humanity.

    The inhumanity of each new responder gathered strength and even glee from what had been said before. This was the pyramid-selling of Jew-hatred. “Where’s the Jews?” someone shouted from the steps of the Sydney Opera House. I recall wondering if the wrong news had got out. Did people think it was the Jews who had gone on a murder spree? If not, how to understand the carnival of Jew-revulsion that was unloosed in hours? The blood of Jews had been lavishly spilt, which only made the most educated in our society bay for more? By what logic of morality or compassion could this be? When we find a victim of a road accident lying in the road, we don’t rush over and kick him.

    It was as though permission had finally been given to say whatever one liked about Jews. And that included abandoning the pretence that anti-Zionism wasn’t anti-Jewish. Israeli, Zionist, Jew; in the rush to condemn, the terms became openly interchangeable. The barricades of truth and decency had come down and those who felt they’d been confined for too long behind them could now pour through and abuse to their hearts’ contents. I remember the first time I swore. Once one filthy word came out there was no stopping the rest of them. Of such exhilaration are all mob acts of racism made, but this was different in that the mob had PhDs….

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