Author: Mick Hartley

ine, too, that your legally protected right to express such an opinion counted for nothing because all that mattered was whether the person who heard you perceived it to be offensive.

If you live in Scotland, this is the world you will be living in as of Monday. And no, it’s not an April Fool’s prank by the Scottish Government, despite the date when it comes into force.

The Hate and Public Order (Scotland) Act will, according to its critics, be a state-sponsored assault on free speech with sinister parallels to the Stasi in East Germany.

Billed as a necessary legislative update to a hotch-potch of anti-hate laws (it finally abolishes the offence of blasphemy, last prosecuted in 1843) it extends the offence of stirring up hatred to cover not only race and religion but also age, disability, sexual orientation, transgender identity and “variations in sex characteristics”.

Politicians have warned that the new law will be “weaponised” by the radical trans lobby to criminalise anyone who states their belief in the immutability of someone’s birth sex.

Meanwhile, The Telegraph has been told that Police Scotland – which has just announced it will no longer investigate certain low-level crimes – is diverting resources so it can investigate the expected influx of accusatory phone calls it will receive from those offended by other people’s opinions.

The force has promised to investigate every hate crime complaint it receives, and if the complainant (or victim, as they are officially referred to) insists they were upset by something they perceived to be a hate crime, it will be logged as a non-crime hate incident (NCHI) even if there is not a shred of evidence of any crime being committed.

Little wonder that women’s rights campaigners fear that the new law will be used by trans radicals to settle scores and silence anyone who dares to challenge their world view.

If George Orwell was still around, he could perhaps write a book about it and call it Twenty Twenty-Four.

Ooh, clever.

Calum Steele, former general secretary of the Scottish Police Federation, which represents rank and file officers, is among those who fear that the police will be swamped.

He says: “I know from colleagues that they are reallocating resources from elsewhere to be able to deal with the influx of reported hate speech.”

Part of the problem, he says, is that there is nothing to deter malicious complaints made by people wanting to settle scores with each other, because: “It’s difficult to imagine how you could prove someone was wasting police time when the whole thing is based entirely on their perception rather than evidence.”

In other words, it's a charter for vexatious claims – for people with an ideological axe to grind to silence and punish their critics. In that respect it's basically a blasphemy law – as seen for instance in Pakistan, where anyone with a score to settle just accuses their enemy of insulting Islam and it's game over. Nothing to do with crime as we understand it; everything to do with blasphemy against a particular religious/ideological belief. And I think we all know which particular adherents of a religious/ideological belief are going to be making maximum use of this. Gender-critical women, beware.

ll now be designated “third-party reporting centres” for accusations of hateful crime, including one in a Glasgow sex shop. Snitch on someone you dislike and pick up a dildo at the same time — isn’t modern life wonderful? …

Many commentators are concerned that the whole Act will chill legitimate free speech, either via actual criminal sanctions or via misinterpretations of the law by police and others; and there are particular worries about speech that is critical of religion, either of the traditional or transactivist kinds. But the smooth-tongued rainbow mandarins paid to dictate equality policy to a mostly vacant-eyed political class have told everyone to take a deep breath and relax. As the chief executive of Equality Network in Scotland Rebecca Crowther soothingly told Sky News: “This legislation is not going to catch people online saying things that I might disagree with, that you might disagree with, things that might upset me, things that might upset others in the community… What it does legislate against is when that freedom of speech strays into something that is abusive, that could cause fear and alarm, and that also incites hatred or incites people to act on that hatred.” Meanwhile Yousaf himself has said that he has “full confidence” that the police will look beyond “vexatious” complaints.

But what this trite sort of response obviously ignores is that, as social norms change, it is increasingly difficult for people to distinguish between that which is merely disagreeable and upsetting, and that which is genuinely hateful and abusive. It is an irony of the present situation that so many seem to think that biology is socially constructed but that the meaning of hatred is natural and fixed. In fact, what counts as an adequate expression of a particular emotion is at least partly culturally determined, and these days the category of hatred seems to be a lot more expansive than it used to be. Previously, its presence was indicated by otherwise random-looking outbursts of violence towards outgroups, and the use of aggressive slurs. In present day Scotland, however, it seems detectable from saying things like “choosing to identify as ‘non-binary’ is as valid as choosing to identify as a cat” — a recent statement by the Conservative MSP Murdo Fraser, subsequently recorded by police as a non-crime hate incident, a verdict he now intends to contest in court….

A reasonable person wouldn’t have gone along with any of this, and yet in Scotland crazily myopic and illiberal measures continue to be waved through, with stunning condescension on the part of their smug originators. In other words, there’s no use appealing to what some hypothetical reasonable person would think, when there appear to be no such people in the vicinity. They’ve probably all gone down the sex shop to report J.K. Rowling for saying homosexuality is a thing. It’s almost as if these people hate us.

It's going to be interesting, to say the least, to see how this astonishingly bad piece of legislation will work out, but given Police Scotland's training on gender-critical activists called Jo, who think trans people should be sent to the gas chambers, I think we can get a fairly good idea. If nothing else, it's a trans activists' charter for silencing their critics.

Update: Taggart's on the case.

'Thur's been a misgenderin.' pic.twitter.com/67R29Aipf2

— Ian Acheson 🇬🇧🇮🇪 (@NotThatBigIan) March 29, 2024

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stfeeding a baby can be a reality.

‘She reported unforeseen benefits, including female gender affirmation and full breast maturation.

‘The patient did not experience any side effects from her treatment regimen.’

Isn't that nice? Not a word about the baby, of course – merely a prop in this grotesque exercise in "gender-affirmation".

Maya Forstater, executive director of campaign group Sex Matter, said: ‘Babies cannot consent to being participants in a study which sets aside biological reality to define treatment protocols relating to so-called “gender medicine”.

‘Men should not be permitted, still less supported, to get between babies and their mothers, or to use babies as props to validate their beliefs that they are women.’

e=”padding-left: 40px”>“Football NSW continues to align with Football Australia’s adoption of the Australian Human Rights Commission’s Guidelines for the inclusion of transgender and gender diverse people in sport, under which, community players are permitted to participate in football on the basis of the gender with which they identify.”

It's broken, folks. It's cult-speak. It's laughable. Though I doubt the girl who had her leg broken found it very funny.

k/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/mt_imported_image_1758240694.jpg” style=”width: 550px” title=”Derien-1″ />

[All images © Thibaut Derien]

e AP's victory, alongside Mahmoud's photo of Louk on Instagram, where they came under immense criticism from users. Louk's name is not mentioned anywhere in the program's Instagram post.

"There is a dead body of a partially unclothed human being, a young woman who was brutally murdered and probably raped. This cannot be real. Please remove this photo," one user wrote, while another said "She has a name. Shani Louk. Her family specifically requested that we remember her laughing and living. Take this down and show some respect. If you want to post our Shani, find a photo she consented to."

Mahmud, who took the photo of Louk, had his name mentioned in an earlier report when parents of Louk and other Nova massacre victims sued AP and Reuters last month for their employment of photojournalists who accompanied the terrorists on their pogrom and contended that AP ignored close connections the photographers had to terrorist organizations, to which they said: "we have not seen any evidence – including in the lawsuit – that the freelance journalists who contributed to our coverage did."

Awards for photos of people celebrating murdered Jews. These are dark times.

Update:

This is how Shani Louk's family asked for her to be remembered. Smiling and alive.

The biggest photojournalism competition in the world decided to trample on the family's wishes in favor of giving a photo of Shani's mutilated body a prestigious award. She wasn't even named in… pic.twitter.com/y4L4R35bdA

— Hen Mazzig (@HenMazzig) March 28, 2024

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is entirely possible from Russia, in the end this is unlikely: "History tends to favour cock-up over conspiracy, and we know the FSB can be as staggeringly incompetent as any sweeping bureaucracy, especially one predicated on fear".

k, I discover that Victoria Nuland, that harbinger of death, that angel of death, who, if she comes anywhere near you, be sure a civil war is coming in your country. I saw her with my own eyes promise the Russians some nasty surprises in the next few weeks and months. I’m working further back and I discover that the White House spokesman John Kirby announced that American citizens had been warned to stay away from crowded places, including shopping malls and theatres, in the great city of Moscow, the greatest city in Europe, the capital of the largest country on the earth. And I was never that great at mathematics. But I know that one and one makes two. I know that one and two makes three. I know that one and three makes four. And so I have four pieces of evidence in my mind that leads me to believe that the United States, that the Nato allies, and their proxy servant, the state of Ukraine, the remaining state of Ukraine were in fact responsible for this mass murder.

There are no depths to which the man won't sink to get his voice heard.

John Collier, November 1942. "Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (vicinity). Champion No. 1 coal cleaning plant of Pittsburgh Coal Company."

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

The United Nations does it again:

Saudi Arabia has been chosen as the chair of the UN commission that is supposed to promote gender equality and empower women around the world, after an unopposed bid for leadership condemned by human rights groups because of the kingdom’s “abysmal” record on women’s rights.

The Saudi ambassador to the UN, Abdulaziz Alwasil, was elected as chair of the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW), by “acclamation” on Wednesday, as there were no rival candidates and no dissent at the CSW’s annual meeting in New York.

Alwasil was endorsed by the group of Asia-Pacific states on the commission. When the outgoing chair, the Filipino envoy to the UN, Antonio Manuel Lagdameo, asked the 45 members if they had any objections there was silence in the chamber.

“I hear no objection. It is so decided,” Lagdameo said.

Now if it'd been Israel…