Author: Mick Hartley

28 March. This affirmed that Russia is fighting a ‘holy war.’ This is presented as an imperialist project, to create an expanded homeland for all Russian people, including the sub-groups of Belarussians and Ukrainians, where their culture and spirituality will be honoured, and also as a defensive struggle against the ‘globalism’ and ‘satanism’ that has gripped the West.

An imperialist project to create an expanded homeland. I think we've been here before.

If ever an argument was needed against unchecked autocracy Putin’s Russia provides it. Continuing failure to achieve his objectives has only aggravated his fanaticism. The problem is not that he is irrational but the way that he has framed his Ukraine problem obliges him to act in ever more unreasonable ways, because to do otherwise would require giving in to forces that challenge his idea of the Russian nation and what is stands for. Over a decade he has managed to turn an inconvenient aspect of Ukraine’s foreign policy into an existential threat. He will stick with a war without end because he dare not admit that it was folly to launch it in the first place. So the war machine must be fed with all available people and resources, independent and critical thought must be suppressed, and Ukrainians must be punished for their insubordination with ever more devastation and cruelty.

2, 2024

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From the LGB Alliance response to the Scottish government's consultation on ending conversion practices in Scotland:

We are particularly concerned about “conversion practices” described in relation to talking therapy. It is essential to understand that many of the teenagers, especially girls, who are being referred to gender clinics, mistake their homosexuality for a gender identity issue. We know that an exceptionally high percentage of teens referred to gender clinics have same-sex sexual orientation – so much so that clinicians at the Tavistock GIDS clinic in London joked: “Soon there will be no gay kids left”. Data reported by GIDS reveal that teenage patients expressing a sexual orientation were overwhelmingly homosexual or bisexual. 67.7% of adolescent female patients were recorded as being attracted to other females only, 21.1% were bisexual, and only 8.5% were listed as heterosexual. Among adolescent male patients, 42.3% were attracted only to other males, 38% were bisexual, and only 19.2% said they were attracted only to females….

One whistleblower explicitly referred to the institutional homophobia at the GIDS in his exit interview. Furthermore, the BBC Newsnight reporters Hannah Barnes and Deborah Cohen reported that homophobia was a factor in all the families they spoke to. In our view, the medicalisation of largely LGB, “gender non-conforming” teenagers is the greatest medical scandal of our age. The Scottish Government presents its Bill as progressive and caring. We say it is the opposite. The Bill is homophobic at its heart and strikes a mortal blow at the interests of lesbian, gay and bisexual people, eroding rights that have been painstakingly advanced over the past half-century.

But read the whole thing: it's a comprehensive demolition. 

An interesting note from Scottish MP Ash Regan, who originally backed the Hate Crime Bill but has now changed her mind:

I was asked for my view on whether we should include sex as a characteristic, to protect women from misogyny, and I said yes. I was told that in feedback from women’s rights organisations, they sought a separate offence in misogyny legislation that could assist in dealing with the specific considerations in domestic abuse law.

After the act was passed, the follow-up meeting to discuss the guidance was a singular event that shaped my future political career. At that meeting ministers decided that they would not add clarifying real-world scenarios involving gender-critical feminists as there was nothing to gain, and it would upset the transgender lobby.

The last lot of us defeated right wing homophobia, this generation will defeat left wing homophobia.

Both of them call us Queers and neither cares very much if we are insulted. Both practice conversion therapy, one by prayer, the other by gender. Both do homophobic violence,…

— Dennis Noel Kavanagh (@Jebadoo2) April 1, 2024

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Full text:

The last lot of us defeated right wing homophobia, this generation will defeat left wing homophobia.

Both of them call us Queers and neither cares very much if we are insulted. Both practice conversion therapy, one by prayer, the other by gender. Both do homophobic violence, one on the street, one in surgery. Both are disgusted by variously by our “sinful behaviour” or the modern equivalents “sexual racism”/ “genital fetishism”. Both have control of the levers of power and both face grassroots opposition that will destroy them.

Neither listens to us very much and both regard us principally as a medical issue.

But success is our destiny and failure theirs. There is nothing very much new in history and this chapter is nearly over. Gender falls in 2024 and perhaps we close a book on the spasms of left and right and their struggle to adapt to kids that are just different, boys who just want to kiss each other and heaven forbid, two women who can get on just fine without a bloke.

to use the SNP’s new hate crime laws to arrest her for her views on transgender issues.

The Harry Potter author had said she was looking forward to being arrested after describing a series of transgender women as men on the day the new law came into force.

An SNP minister had earlier admitted that Rowling could be investigated under the Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act – which creates a new offence of “stirring up of hatred” for “misgendering” trans people.

However, the Prime Minister gave his support to Rowling saying that the Conservatives would always protect free speech.

He said: “People should not be criminalised for stating simple facts on biology. We believe in free speech in this country, and Conservatives will always protect it.”

He knows he's on to a winner here.

Will this now prompt a comment from Starmer? Perhaps not…

Update: Education Secretary Gillian Keegan joins the pile-on:

JK Rowling should not be arrested for her views on transgender issues because the new Scottish hate crime law is a “terrible piece of legislation”, the Education Secretary has said.

Gillian Keegan defended the Harry Potter author after Humza Yousaf’s SNP Government introduced a new offence of “stirring up hatred” by “misgendering” trans people….

Asked whether Rowling should be arrested, Ms Keegan told Times Radio: “Well, no. As we have said, people shouldn’t be criminalised for just stating biological facts and it does seem odd that I think one of the ministers in Scotland said that you could be arrested for misgendering.

“And I am pretty sure that the police in Scotland, as are the police in England, should be much more focused on fighting crime than policing people’s thoughts.

“So this is, I think, a terrible bit of legislation. It is not something we will be introducing in this country.”

It's an open goal. You can hardly blame the Tories for taking advantage.

“What's the wound to lesbianism, if the category of women is expanded to include transwomen? What’s the wound?”

😡 🤯

Judith Butler needs help w/a question@my_real_name @akabeth10 @Alisonellis27 @KnotsReeta @Docstockk @Aja02537920@LesbianOwl33 @formerleftwingr @HeidiBrionesq pic.twitter.com/2WwkOQgfaS

— WomenAreReal (@WomenAreReals) April 1, 2024

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The "wound", as everyone knows but she pretends not to, is that men can't be lesbians: that men claiming to be lesbians, complaining that women who aren't interested in them as sexual partners are "transphobic", is pure gas-lighting. And it's the same gas-lighting that Butler is doing here: there's no rational reason that she can see – or that she claims she can see – that these lesbians don't accept trans women. It can only be a hatred, a phobia.

For Stonewall's Nancy Kelley, lesbians not wanting to sleep with trans women is sexual racism; for Butler it's hatred, a phobia. At least Nancy Kelley makes no claims to be one of the world's leading philosophical thinkers.

new legislation is wide open to abuse by activists who wish to silence those of us speaking out about the dangers of eliminating women's and girls’ single-sex spaces, the nonsense made of crime data if violent and sexual assaults committed by men are recorded as female crimes, the grotesque unfairness of allowing males to compete in female sports, the injustice of women’s jobs, honours and opportunities being taken by trans-identified men, and the reality and immutability of biological sex.

For several years now, Scottish women have been pressured by their government and members of the police force to deny the evidence of their eyes and ears, repudiate biological facts and embrace a neo-religious concept of gender that is unprovable and untestable. The re-definition of 'woman' to include every man who declares himself one has already had serious consequences for women's and girls’ rights and safety in Scotland, with the strongest impact felt, as ever, by the most vulnerable, including female prisoners and rape survivors.

It is impossible to accurately describe or tackle the reality of violence and sexual violence committed against women and girls, or address the current assault on women’s and girls’ rights, unless we are allowed to call a man a man. Freedom of speech and belief are at an end in Scotland if the accurate description of biological sex is deemed criminal.

I'm currently out of the country, but if what I've written here qualifies as an offence under the terms of the new act, I look forward to being arrested when I return to the birthplace of the Scottish Enlightenment.

If you agree with the views set out in this tweet, please retweet it.

do know that this new offence can be committed in the privacy of your own home since the old “dwelling defence” has been abandoned. Your own son or daughter could, in theory, report you for stirring up transphobic hate at the breakfast table.

We’re assured that, for prosecution to succeed, there must be convincing evidence of “threatening and abusive behaviour”. But these things are already illegal and have been for decades. The stirring-up part is another of those “progressive“ quasi-crimes designed to “send a message” to people to watch what they say or write. Whether or not the sentiment in question is actionable is very much in the eye of the beholder. Uniquely, in our supposedly “blind” justice system, the accuser will decide what is and is not “stirring up hatred”. Police Scotland define a hate crime as “any crime which is perceived by the victim or any other person to be motivated (wholly or partly) by malice or ill will”. You’ve been warned….

Just because an act is badly drafted, insufferably vague and contradictory in law doesn’t make it ineffectual. Indeed, the very vagueness is what makes the Hate Crime Act so insidious.

It is no accident that this law was born at about the same time as the Gender Recognition Reform (Scotland) Bill and by the same first minister, Nicola Sturgeon. The intention was, at least in part, to give trans people, newly transitioned by self-identification, the same legal protections as people of colour. It has morphed into a legal Frankenstein. This clype’s charter [clype: Scots slang for informer – MH] will cause grief to many innocent people, inhibit free speech, waste police time and occupy the courts with trivial and mendacious offences until it is finally consigned, along with this government’s other daft and illiberal laws, to the legislative rubbish bin.

John Collier, November 1942. "Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (vicinity). Westland coal mine. 'Mantrip' going into a drift mine."

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