Mick Hartley

Author: Mick Hartley

  • Chatham Square and ‘El’ tracks

    Manhattan ca. 1900. "Chatham Square and 'El' tracks, New York City, N.Y."

    image from www.shorpy.com
    [Photo: Shorpy/Detroit Photographic Company]

  • The new IOC president

    the spirit of the Games”. Yet her embrace of one of the world’s most repulsive dictators, her silence at gross human rights abuses and her abysmal performance as sports minister should disqualify her from leading the Olympic movement. Her appointment would be a win for Zimbabwe’s dictator, not for the future of global sport.

    Hmm.

  • Hamas stole the aid


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    Full text:

    “I saw Hamas terrorists carrying boxes with the UN and UNRWA emblems on them into the tunnels, dozens and dozens of boxes, paid for by your government.”

    Will the world listen now?

    Almost certainly not.

  • The first gender-neutral degree ceremony

    Exciting news from Oxford, where moves are afoot to ensure that non-binary students, finally, may not have to suffer the humiliation and embarrassment of a Latin ceremony which includes gendered words. 

    Oxford is set to make an 800-year-old Latin ceremony gender-neutral for the benefit of non-binary students.

    The university has conferred its degrees in Latin since the 12th century, but the wording used could be changed to make it more inclusive.

    Dons will vote on a proposal to change the Latin ceremonial text to cater to those “who identify as non-binary”.

    In a gazette issued to alert faculties to the planned changes, the introduction of the first gender-neutral degree ceremony in Oxford’s almost 1,000-year history is deemed “necessary”.

    The changes involve stripping a Latin message of congratulations of words that are grammatically gendered masculine or feminine.

    This is what progress looks like. 

    Next stop: removing gender from French (and Italian, and Spanish, and German…). They should've done it ages ago. How on earth do non-binary people cope in these ridiculous languages?

  • The gullibility of publicly-funded organisations

    Joan Smith at UnHerd on the Sullivan Review:

    For decades, right up until the late Nineties, the UK had gold-standard data on sex. Not any more: a startling graph in the review shows that questions about sex are now outnumbered by those relating to “gender” and “gender identity”. The responses are worse than useless, except as an illustration of the gullibility of publicly-funded organisations when pressured by entitled activists.

    The Government’s failure to act promptly could hardly be more shameful. Public records have in effect been falsified, creating avoidable risks and exposing organisations to ridicule. What’s more, who will now trust official Government data on important subjects? Worse still, institutions have forfeited trust in a way that makes society less safe for victims of crime.

    But will the government act on this? Streeting has said they will, but couldn't resist adding that gender identity could still be recorded and respected – as though he hasn't quite understood what the problem is. 

  • At the Portland Interscholastic League meet

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    Ooh, he's very fast, isn't he? Compared to the girls, that is. Of course compared to the boys he's not fast at all, and wouldn't win. Which is, presumably, why he goes for the girls' race. Much easier.

    It's astonishing that people don't see this…

  • Streeting takes note

    Streeting responds to the Sullivan Review on the erasure of biological sex by UK bodies like the NHS and the Civil Service.

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    Which is very good news of course – but where is this gender identity of which you speak, Wes? Do doctors need special training to locate it? How do I get to know my gender identity? Or is it just a feely thing taken up and pushed by gender cultists who purposefully play on the ambiguity of the sex/gender distinction to pretend that any male who doesn't conform to male stereotypes has a female gender identity, and any female who doesn't conform to female stereotypes has a male gender identity. The main beneficiaries of this – the main pushers – would appear to be autogynephilic men who get a sexual thrill out of pretending to be women, and can now present themselves as brave pioneers of the trans revolution. The main victims are women, and especially troubled young girls who are sucked into this social contagion and persuaded to ruin their lives in the nonsensical belief that somehow they were born into the wrong body.

    It's regressive nonsense.

  • The erasure of biological sex

    nged” how it viewed sex in terms of data collection and recommended that the UK Statistics Authority — which oversees the ONS — should consider launching a review of activism and impartiality within the civil service in relation to the production of official statistics….

    Sullivan said: “This should not be seen as a zero-sum game between characteristics. We can and should collect data on both [sex and gender identity]. Acknowledging sex does not erase gender identity or vice versa.”

    *Sigh*. There is no such thing as gender identity. It's nonsense. It's cult-speak. 

    Sex can be recorded differently across the prison service, while many police forces record sex as the gender given in a gender recognition certificate.

    The review said it meant that data across police forces was not reliable, particularly in patterns of female offending and “the classification of a small number of males within the female category may result in artificial significant increase in female offending rates”.

    Yes, we had noticed. See under "not our crimes", ad nauseam. Isla Bryson, Karen White….the list goes on and on. 

    Maya Forstater, chief executive of the charity Sex Matters, said the review was “devastatingly clear about the harms caused by carelessness with sex data and a decade-long failure of the civil service to maintain impartiality and uphold data standards”.

  • Very good relationships

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  • Thriving on debt he can’t repay

    eorist of negotiations.

    The third problem about The Art of the Deal is that so many of the triumphant transactions it celebrates either never completed or collapsed after they did. Television City and the tallest building in the world weren’t built, the US Football League folded, the Trump Golden Series Cadillac never got beyond a prototype and, famously, his Atlantic City casino enterprise turned into a nightmare of debt that almost finished him off altogether.

    It is also notable that many of the professional and personal relationships he boasts of in 1987 have long since ended in acrimony or court or both. The only ones that have remained consistent are the feuds….

    The thing that most characterises Trump’s business career is that he is a huge borrower, occasionally toppling over into hopeless debt. Sometimes he does this on instinct. He took on one disastrous loan of hundreds of millions of dollars without even setting foot in the business he was buying. A borrower is a better way of understanding him than merely thinking of him as a dealmaker.

    As president of the United States, Trump has inherited a vast amount of power, built up through investment in the military and in political diplomacy. His country has achieved leadership of the free world by establishing alliances and offering security to other nations in return for their allegiance and co-operation. He is now borrowing against that, essentially consuming the US stock of power, friendships and credibility. He is trying to turn those long-term relationships into immediate cash, either by reducing defence expenditure or even forcing former allies effectively to lend to the US at favourable rates. Any risk to liberal democracy he prices very cheaply.

    It is not hard to see why this might prove immediately successful. The US has a lot of power and in a single transaction — you do this or I will impose a tariff on you; you do that or I will stop arming Ukraine — its position is hard to resist. But any real theory of the art of the deal would note that most transactions are not isolated events. They are the result of repeated engagements. And for repeated engagements you require trust. Trump is consuming the trust that so many of his predecessors invested in.

    Once, the Trump casino business was a wonder to behold. But Trump Plaza closed in 2014 and was demolished in 2021, the Trump Marina was sold in 2011 and became the Golden Nugget, and the Trump Taj Mahal closed in 2016. Roll up, roll up — and place your bets on the future of the Trump White House.

    He is, in old parlance, a con-man. A huckster. He talks the MAGA talk, but he's selling all the goodwill the US has accrued over the years in the cause of his own ego.

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