Mick Hartley

Author: Mick Hartley

  • Tackling the Muslim Brotherhood

    g-left: 40px”>The time has come to tackle the Brotherhood and shut down its financial, media, charitable and political arms in Britain. The government recently banned Hizb ut-Tahrir for advancing the same ideology as the Brotherhood after October 7. Follow this lead and relations will be strengthened with Arab nations in the Gulf. The Brotherhood is banned in Mecca, but thrives in London, including under names such as the Muslim Association of Britain.

    Hamas is the Palestinian arm of the Muslim Brotherhood. They unashamedly killed Jews and have vowed to act again. The Brotherhood in Britain, operating under different “community representative” organisations, has been radicalising young Muslims against Jews. Islamist mosques and publishing houses have been disseminating calls for the destruction of Israel. After October 7, this is not an abstract issue. Sayyid Qutb, the Lenin of the Brotherhood, wrote Our Battle against the Jews in the 1950s, and Ayatollah Khamenei, now supreme leader of Iran, translated that text into Farsi. Their agenda against Jews and Israel couldn’t be more clear.

    Our intelligence services do not take this threat seriously enough, because they do not understand the power of religion and are focused on Russian, Chinese and jihadist plots. Islamists are not democrats. Gaza, Iran, Algeria, Egypt and even Pakistan show us that Islamists when in power are not democrats but use opportunities granted to them by the ballot box to enforce anti-democratic measures.

    This is an urgent and profound challenge. But I am hopeful it is one that can be resolved. There are five big political ideas, pioneered by Britain, that can help us unite as a nation and live in peace with our Muslim citizens.

    The five "big political ideas" are:

    "the rule of law, based on reason and the long English common law tradition, to ensure justice is upheld"
    "liberal individualism, the rejection of oppression by any form of collectivism"
    "gender equality"
    "freedom of speech, thought and assembly"
    "racial parity".

    Free societies can self-destruct unless they are vigilant. For as long as we fly the flag with confidence in our national character, our Muslim and other fellow citizens will join the British mainstream with pride and a sense of belonging. We must not tolerate intolerance and terror. The future of our country depends on it.

    Well I hope he's right, but, as the most recommennded comment puts it:

    No rational person would disagree with any of this, but the religious fanatics and the far left aren’t rational. They believe that they are privy to a higher truth and that they have the right – the obligation – to use force to impose it on the rest of us.

    Trying to reason with them, or bring them into a shared understanding of the rights and obligations of a democratic social order, isn’t going to work any more than it did for Chamberlain.

  • Pathologising those who disagree with her

    iate the supposed power of her arguments. If set out clearly it'd be much easier to see how ridiculous they are.

    She does not differentiate between the authoritarian bigotry of a Viktor Orban and the rights-balancing concerns of a left-wing feminist. All critics of gender ideology, according to Butler, desire “the restoration of a patriarchal dream-order where a father is a father; a sexed identity never changes; women, conceived as ‘born female at birth’, resume their natural and ‘moral’ positions within the household; and white people hold uncontested racial supremacy”.

    That is a very windy way of saying that if you disagree with Butler you must be racist. Butler might be all about troubling the gender binary, but morally hers is a simple world of goodies and baddies.

    There is no effort to persuade the sceptical reader, because Butler’s presumption is that her opponents don’t read. “It is nearly impossible to bridge this epistemic divide with good arguments, because of the fear that reading will introduce confusion into the reader’s mind or bring her into direct contact with the devil.”

    Her critics are racist and stupid.

    In any case she’s true to her word about not bothering to make good arguments. Instead, Butler is out to pathologise those who disagree with her. Either they’re under the influence of a vaguely sketched conspiracy beginning with the Catholic Church (we are treated to two chapters establishing that the Pope is a touch on the socially conservative side) or in the case of feminists who perversely “insist on the biological differences between two sexes”, they are gulled by their own trauma.

    In all the verbosity you could almost miss how insulting Butler is to female victims of male violence. But it’s there. After a section on JK Rowling, Butler writes: “Living in the repetitive temporality of trauma does not always give us an adequate account of social reality.” In other words, women who have been abused (which includes Rowling) cannot be trusted. No wonder Butler doesn’t want to identify as a woman: she doesn’t seem to like them very much.

    There’s another interpretation of the pushback against gender identity. Trans campaigners overreached: they imposed a medical pathway of “affirmation” that has harmed probably thousands of young people. It is not damning of feminists that they are on the same page as Vladimir Putin about there being two sexes. That is just how many sexes there are.

    Butler condemns feminists for being fellow travellers with the politically unspeakable, but never questions who she might be aligned with. In her world there are no homophobic parents turning their effeminate sons into acceptable little girls; there are no men declaring themselves women simply to commit violence. (Or if there are, Butler will only concede to a “few instances”, and what’s a rape or two?)

    It is insulting to have to treat a book like this seriously, when it treats its own subject as a game. Butler flatters herself if she thinks there’s anything to be afraid of in her work. The only terror is that anyone would find it impressive.

  • The Streets of London 2

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  • The Streets of London

    t3GYBFfkh”>pic.twitter.com/Rt3GYBFfkh

    — Harry's Place (@hurryupharry) March 9, 2024

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    Update: he was later "de-arrested".

  • Starmer’s future

    ised as "hate".
    2. They have no conception of, let alone support for, intellectual pluralism. If you disagree with them, you will be dismissed as a dinosaur or a bigot. They have the sensibility of a New Clerisy.
    3. The 2023 noises by Starmer were tactical, designed to appease majority opinion by hinting that he understood their opposition to the erasure of the sex based rights, protections and intimate spaces of women and girls. They will prove to be just an exercise in cynical pre-election impression management.
    4. Post election – with the base angry at the absence of social democratic economic reforms – there will be a drive to pass 1. what will be in effect a Blasphemy Law, and 2. laws that in practice will endorse conversion therapy under the guise of being against it, enshrine near instant "self id", erase the rights of the same-sex attracted, and perhaps even cancel-to-criminalise gender critical views as "hate".

    Hope I am wrong. Don't think I will be.

  • Stonewall still collecting

    have raised concerns among government ministers including Kemi Badenoch, the business secretary and women and equalities minister, over the influence Stonewall is having on policy and its stance on transgender issues.

    The charity’s annual accounts show that Stonewall received £572,868 in grants from government sources in 2022-23, up from £426,390 the year before. In total the charity brought in £7 million in 2022-23.

    The majority of its income — £3.9 million — came from its Diversity Champions Programme, a scheme in which public bodies and private companies pay subscription fees to the charity in return for support and advice on diversity, as well as from its work with schools, local authorities, and providing speakers for events.

    Badenoch previously told government departments to withdraw from the scheme and said last year: “Stonewall do not decide the law of this country.”…

    Freedom of information requests submitted by The Times showed that last year Arts Council England, the Pensions Regulator, the Care Quality Commission, Historic England, Sport England and the Tate paid £3,000 each for membership of the scheme….

    A government source said: “No body funded by taxpayers should be paying external organisations to do their diversity and inclusion work. It is a gross waste of money and Stonewall push several ideologies that are not recognised by the government. However it’s not in the least bit surprising that Labour-run Wales and SNP-run Scotland continue to funnel cash to this discredited organisation.”

    The Welsh government gave the charity £100,000 in 2022-23. A Welsh government spokesman said: “We work with a range of partners to challenge discrimination and to create a society where LGBTQ+ people feel safe to live openly and freely as themselves.”…

    The Scottish government gave Stonewall £101,613, and NHS Scotland gave £38,878.

  • Commercial interests

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    From the Telegraph:

    A leading UK university has banned an academic from teaching a “provocative” course involving China to protect its commercial interests, The Telegraph can disclose.

    Michelle Shipworth, an associate professor at University College London (UCL), told The Telegraph she had “no choice” but to blow the whistle in order to “expose” how British universities were “conceding to the censorship demands of some Chinese students”.

    Ms Shipworth, 58, was also accused of being anti-Chinese after she caught out two students from China who were cheating and they were subsequently expelled. One had used a body double in an attempt to hoodwink her during a supervision.

    Her head of department at UCL told her he was taking action because “in order to be commercially viable”, the university’s courses “need to retain a good reputation amongst future Chinese applicants”.

    UCL has the highest number of Chinese students in the UK, making up almost a quarter of its total student population. More than 10,000 Chinese students are at the university, typically paying two to three times the fees of home-grown students – up to £40,000 a year.

    Ms Shipworth, who teaches at UCL’s Bartlett School of Environment, Energy and Resources, found herself under investigation after a seminar last October examining data from the Global Slavery Index 2014. The data claimed China had the second-highest prevalence of modern slavery in the world….

    She recalled that, at the end of the seminar, one of the Chinese students “stood up and said in a fairly cross tone – I wouldn’t even describe it as angry – something along the lines of: ‘Why are you using such a horrible provocation?’”

    Prof Neil Strachan, Ms Shipworth’s boss, was alerted, culminating in her being told that another academic had been asked to “take over” the research module she had taught for the past 10 years.

  • Heidegger and groupthink

    responsibility for your actions. It means you are not oneself but part of the ‘they-self’.

    Heidegger said that it is life’s arduous challenge to be, or regain, our authenticity and autonomy. Once that state is attained, our lives can be joyous and liberated, not burdened with the imperative of having to conform or bury oneself in a passive public persona.

    This is the task that faces us today: to struggle to be oneself. To not be ‘They’.

    It's certainly a bold idea, citing a Nazi and a supporter of Hitler in the 1930s for his opposition to groupthink and collective herd mentality.

    The joy of Heidegger is that he mixes obscurity of terminology with schoolboy philosophy. The reader, then, struggles through the Eigentlichkeits and the Daseins and eventually may come to appreciate that what the great thinker is getting at is this idea that life is a struggle in which we have to make individual choices and take responsibility for our actions. This spectactularly banal conclusion is then somehow gilded with an aura of profundity, simply because it's been such a struggle to get there. I mean, it's hard going, so he must be a deep thinker – right?

    As philosopher Jonathan Glover put it:

    The moral case against Heidegger the man is obvious. The central moral case against Heidegger the philosopher is easier to get wrong. It is not about a link between his theories and Nazism. It is about undermining philosophy's role in developing a climate of critical thought. His books are an embodiment of the idea that philosophy is an impenetrable fog, in which ideas not clearly understood have to be taken on trust. Karl Jaspers was right in seeing this "incommunicative" mode of thought as linked to being dictatorial.

    Deference is encouraged by having to take it on trust that the obscure means something important. And since things not understood cannot be argued about, the critical faculties atrophy. Philosophy could not have served the Nazis better than by encouraging deference and by this softening of the mind.

    As relevant now as ever.

  • On International Woman Day

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  • The WPATH story

    itself as a religion. Gender ideology, of course, has many of the same cult-like characteristics. The astonishing thing though is how successful it's been, managing to position itself as the progressive follow-on to gay liberation. Countless confused children have paid the price….

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