Mick Hartley

Rebranding paedophilia

Back in Scotland:

Police Scotland has used the term “minor-attracted people” (MAP) to describe paedophiles in a major report, despite warnings it normalises child abuse.

Chief constable Iain Livingstone’s annual assessment of the force’s performance made reference to it working in a European project targeted at MAP.

The report said the Horizon Europe Project was aimed at “providing them with the necessary support, treatment and guidance to help prevent criminal activities”.

Police Scotland emphasised it opposed describing paedophiles as MAPs and insisted the term had only been included in the report as it was used by the project’s commissioning documents.

But the report was published amid wider concerns by campaigners over what they see as attempts to rebrand paedophilia as a harmless sexual preference.

The term MAP is contentious because child abusers are trying to escape the stigma attached to paedophilia and maintain they should be regarded as a niche group alongside the LGBT community.

Well yes: LGBTP would not be a good look.

Kenny McAskill, Scotland’s former justice secretary, said using euphemisms for paedophiles simply “masks the reality and their danger”.

“The term in whatever context is baloney,” he added.

Maggie Mellon, an independent social work consultant, said the term MAP risked “the danger of normalising and therefore perhaps decriminalising a serious offence”.

She added: “There should be diagnostic and treatment options for those who present a risk to children but the police are not a therapeutic service - they should be devoting their resources to closing down porn sites that feature children and abuse of women and upping their detection and conviction rates for those promoting child abuse.”

Meanwhile, in Germany:

The German national government and the Berlin Senate are set to support a play about about “minor-attracted people” that casts being a pedophile in a sympathetic light.

Titled “A MAP’s Tale,” the feature will premiere in February of 2023 at Theater unterm Dach in Berlin and will focus on the story of a character named Adam, who is portrayed as a young man grappling with his sexual attraction to children.

In the play’s description, pedophilia is labeled a “sexual preference disorder” and a “sexual orientation.” While the play is described as tackling the issue of preventing child sexual abuse, the synopsis decries what they call the “gross oversimplifications and criminal associations that currently shape our perceptions of all MAPs.” [...]

The Berlin Senate has a disturbing history of providing funding to concerning projects, the most infamous of which is widely known as the Kentler Project.

Beginning in 1969, sexologist Helmut Kentler received support from the Berlin Senate to launch a pilot program which placed foster children in the homes of pedophiles in an attempt to test his theory that pedophiles could make good foster fathers. Kentler had theorized that the pedophile’s attraction to children would result in a strong drive to take care of them.

“These people were able to put up with these [mentally] retarded boys only because they were in love with them, infatuated with them, crazy about them,” Kentler explained in 1970. The program operated for 30 years with full government knowledge, and a number of children experienced horrific sexual abuse at the hands of their pedophile “foster parents.”

Big train

John Collier, September 1942. "Richwood, West Virginia. An engineer on the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad."

[Photo: Shorpy/John Collier for the Farm Security Administration]

Depraved, toxic and perverted desires

More on North Korea's never-ending campaign against cultural decadence:

North Korean authorities recently produced a video that shows the public humiliation of people who were caught enjoying and distributing South Korean TV shows and music.

Daily NK recently obtained the video, which is entitled “Let’s Wage an Even More Intense Struggle to Wipe Out All Anti-socialist and Non-socialist Phenomena in the Capital.”

The video shows individuals who appear to have been arrested for consuming or distributing media from the outside world being publicly berated by a mob.

Echoes of the Cultural Revolution:

North Korea has been handing out stern punishments to people who watch or distribute foreign videos and media since enacting the “anti-reactionary thought law” in late 2020. 

In fact, the video fully demonstrates the North Korean authorities’ attitude toward the viewing and distribution of foreign content. 

It harshly condemns South Korean, Western and US cultures “that usually target depraved, toxic and perverted desires,” calling them “dangerous toxins that instill delusions about the enemy countries and paralyze the revolutionary and class consciousness.” 

The video further accuses the South Korean “puppets” and “enemy forces” of holding fast to their “ideological and cultural invasion schemes,” and claims their “wicked goal” is to “weaken from the inside” North Korean socialism by “infiltrating reactionary culture and spiritually and culturally corrupting the people.”

The video accuses some “ideologically and spiritually distorted and ethically corrupt people and students” of “openly distributing the impure music and videos” sent into North Korea “by the South Korean puppets and enemy forces to spread reactionary and decadent thought and culture.” ...

In fact, the video’s narration said an “intense, great mop-up operation to boldly smash anti-socialist and non-socialist phenomena that weakens our internal power and blocks our drive is now being intensely waged across the entire society.”

This suggests that an intensive mop-up operation is being waged against South Korean pop culture and information from the outside world not only in Pyongyang, but throughout the entire country as well. 

Printer's devil

John Collier, September 1942. Richwood, West Virginia. "Louise Thompson, printer's devil on the Nicholas Republican newspaper, operating Linotype machine."

[Photos: Shorpy/John Collier for the Farm Security Administration]

Not to allow any born man to fight a born woman

Some adults appear to have entered the room:

Boxing is to try to introduce a category solely for transgender fighters next year, to prevent anyone born a man ever fighting a woman in the ring.

The head of the World Boxing Council (WBC) said it would put out a “global call” for trans athletes in 2023, with the aim of setting up their own separate league or tournament.

Boxing is to look to adopt the “at birth” rule, meaning a trans fighter born a man would only be able to compete against a fellow trans fighter born a man.

Under the rule, trans athletes will not be allowed to compete against non-trans fighters.

Mauricio Sulaimán, president of the WBC, said his sport needed to look closely at the transgender issue for “safety and inclusion” reasons.

He told The Times: “We voted unanimously not to allow any born man to fight a born woman. That is the main thing — we will never allow a born man against a born woman inside the ring. But with inclusion, we’re creating a programme so transgender athletes can box if they desire to do so – man against man, woman against woman.

“When it comes to a contact sport, it is absolutely impossible to accept a man punching a woman. It is very dangerous.”

Exactly. Perhaps other sports  - including the Olympic Committee - could take note. And when it's not dangerous, as here, it's patently unfair.

Waterland

At Walthamstow Wetlands this morning:

The lockdown disaster

Matt Ridley, long-time campaigner for taking the lab-leak theory seriously and co-author of Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19, writes in the Telegraph today on the total failure of lockdowns:

We will never know how many people are dying of Covid in China. The regime will probably cook the statistical books. The chief executive of an asset management firm in China shared an image last week of a document at a mortuary describing the note you have to sign to get your dead relative released for cremation: “I guarantee that the deceased XXX did not die of #COVID, and I will be fully responsible for any false claim.”

Nor will we ever know how many people died as a result of lockdowns in the almost three years in which they were imposed in brutal fashion on the Chinese people before Xi Jinping’s abrupt and humiliating about-turn a few weeks ago. But those in the know think both numbers will be in the millions. Relying on draconian lockdowns, while failing to vaccinate the elderly or to buy effective Western jabs, has almost certainly ensured that all age groups will have suffered significant excess mortality from both causes.

Excess mortality is the only true measure of the impact of an epidemic, as the 19th-century epidemiologist William Farr insisted: “The death rate is a fact; all else is inference.” And lockdowns cause excess mortality outside the virus itself: from untreated cancer and heart disease, from suicide and mental illness. If you look at excess mortality over the past three years, on most data sets one of the countries with the lowest overall mortality increases is Sweden, the only country that stood against the herd and refused to implement widespread compulsory lockdowns or close schools.

Over the period from March 2020 to June 2022, Sweden’s cumulative, all-cause excess mortality was 6.7 per cent according to an analysis of data published by the OECD. That is the lowest of all the 31 countries studied. In America, the equivalent excess mortality was 54.1 per cent, in Britain 24.5 per cent and in Denmark 12.9 per cent. Even zero-Covid New Zealand is at 15.5 per cent. Only thinly populated Norway comes close to Sweden’s achievement, with 6.9 per cent.

Those who argued that Sweden was being sensible in relying mostly on voluntary measures were routinely vilified during the pandemic. We know with certainty that the Swedish model has failed, wrote Peter Geoghegan in The Guardian a year ago. Swedes are different, we were told: they live in the forest (no they don’t: the country is more urbanised than the UK); are more socially responsible (cultural stereotypes, anyone?); can be compared only with Danes and Norwegians (yup, done that – see above).

In his fine book The Herd, the Swedish journalist Johan Anderberg has chronicled the development of the Swedish policy and how tough it was for its architect, Anders Tegnell, to stay the course as country after country was stampeded into compulsory and comprehensive lockdowns. “Shutting down society completely won’t work,” said Tegnell on March 12 2020, while watching with admiration Boris Johnson preach the same message. He was devastated when Britain about-turned 10 days later, leaving Sweden alone to be the world’s control experiment.

Britain changed course after the release of unrealistic and oversimplified models produced by Imperial College. The same trick was tried in Sweden by Joacim Rocklov and colleagues at Umea University, using a version of the same Imperial models. Unlike Sir Chris Whitty, Tegnell called it a “horror scenario of no use to anyone”. Honourable British exceptions include the epidemiologist Mark Woolhouse, who wrote a book accurately titled The Year the World Went Mad..

We now know – from Matt Hancock’s diaries – that one of the worst decisions, restrictions on children in schools, was driven not by any evidence that it would save lives but by a fear of being outflanked by Nicola Sturgeon....

Then, in December 2021, came the final proof that the lockdown fanatics were wrong. The science establishment tried to bounce Boris Johnson into a Christmas lockdown to prevent the omicron wave. Ignoring evidence that omicron was mild – and not just because many people had been vaccinated – they produced models showing a range of possible outcomes: very high to massively high death rates if we did not lock down.

Egged on by Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak, Boris called their bluff and refused to cancel Christmas. As Fraser Nelson has chronicled in The Spectator, deaths and hospitalisations never reached a small fraction of even their lowest predicted levels. That emperor had no clothes.

Until 2020, lockdowns were never part of the plan to control pandemics. The reason they happened was twofold. The internet for the first time allowed economies to limp along, at least for the middle class, while locked down. And an inordinately gullible admiration for China had spread within academia and the World Health Organisation.

Richard Horton, the editor of The Lancet, wrote in 2017 that, after Xi Jinping had stated that Marxism is to be the foundation for a healthy China, “medicine has a great deal to learn from Marx”. This was shortly after receiving a Friendship Award from the Chinese government. “China has a socialist, collective system (whatever criticisms people may have),” tweeted Susan Michie, now a senior adviser to the World Health Organisation, “not an individualistic, consumer-oriented, profit-driven society badly damaged by 20 years of failed neoliberal economic policies. #LearntLessons.”

“I am convinced that we have a unique opportunity to entrench a new idea of ​​the Left,” wrote Roberto Speranza, the health minister in Italy, about the decision to implement a national lockdown. “It’s a communist one party state, we said. We couldn’t get away with it in Europe, we thought … And then Italy did it. And we realised we could,” said Professor Lockdown himself, Neil Ferguson of Imperial.

Where are the China worshippers now? Has The Lancet carried an editorial disavowing its admiration for one-party tyranny and castigating the Covid failures of Beijing? I searched its website in vain. Have The Guardian or The New York Times recognised that they were wrong about Sweden? Guess. 

Dressed as a woman

Meanwhile, in Texas:

A registered sex offender is once again in police custody after being caught attempting to take lewd photos of women in a shopping mall restroom.

Douglas Egan, 45, was arrested on Christmas Eve at the Hulen Mall in Fort Worth, Texas, after police were called and told he had threatened a witness with a gun. The confrontation began when the woman was using the mall restroom and noticed a cellphone being held beneath the partition to her stall. Alarmed, the woman exited the stall and confronted Egan, who attempted to flee.

According to Fox 4, Egan was reportedly “dressed as a woman” at the time of the incident....

Prior to this incident, Egan was already a known sex offender, having been issued a lifetime registration for three disturbing incidents, one of which was against a teen girl.

Egan was deposed in 2010 and 2011 for indecent exposure, and in 2015 for indecency with a child by exposure. All three victims were female, and Egan received terms of incarceration for each offense, the shortest being 60 days for his 2011 offense, and the longest being 7 years for his 2015 offense.

The repeat offender is classified as a “high risk” sex offender, indicating he is considered to be a serious threat to the community, and is expected to engage in further criminal sexual conduct.

A repeat sex offender dressing up as a woman to gain access to women-only spaces? But surely this sort of thing - as we've been repeatedly told by Nicola Sturgeon and her supporters - never happens. A move to Scotland and our friend here could just get the certificate and there'd be no stopping him.

And a Merry Christmas to you too

From the Telegraph:

Hundreds of patients received a diagnosis of lung cancer from their GP instead of a message wishing them a “Merry Christmas” because of texts sent “in error”.

Patients registered with the Askern Medical Practice, near Doncaster, received messages informing them that they had “aggressive lung cancer with metastases”, followed by another message offering “sincere apologies” for the misdiagnosis and wishing them a “very merry Christmas and a Happy New Year”.

Patients in receipt of the messages included one father waiting for lung cancer test results.

Property developer Chris Reed, 57, said that his partner burst into tears upon hearing the news and that he tried to call the surgery but could not get through as the lines were jammed. 

He went to the surgery instead and demanded to see a doctor, where he was told that the message was a mistake and that his results were negative. 

Mr Reed said: “They went from, ‘You’ve got lung cancer’ to ‘Merry Christmas’ in about an hour. Unbelievable.”

The Jews expelled from the Arab world

Lyn Julius on Making sense of the great Mizrahi exodus:

Sixty years ago, Algeria declared its independence from France after a bloody war that is thought to have claimed over a million lives. In the course of throwing off the French colonial yoke, Algeria divested itself of 800,000 “white settlers” or pieds noirs. But along with the settlers went 130,000 native Algerian Jews.

There was a reason for this: Within a year of independence, it was clear that there would be no place for non-Muslims in the new Algeria. Indeed, the country’s constitution stipulated that only those with a Muslim father or grandfather could acquire Algerian citizenship.

The Jewish refugees, who held French citizenship, were “repatriated” to France, where they had never lived. One of them was Shmuel Trigano, then 14-years-old. Within two days and with two suitcases in hand, his life changed forever. Uprooted from the only home he had ever known, he was left permanently scarred.

Trigano, now a Professor of Sociology at Paris Nanterre University, has edited a book, La fin du Judaïsme en terres d’Islam, on the expulsion of the Jews across the Muslim world.

For centuries, Jews were, along with Armenians and Greeks, a subject, second-class dhimmi people living under Muslim domination, principally in the Ottoman Empire. But after the Arab defeat in Israel’s 1948 War of Independence, that oppression descended into outright ethnic cleansing.

This ethnic cleansing took two forms: Exclusion, a “softer” form of oppression, in places such as Morocco, Tunisia and Lebanon; and expulsion from places like Egypt, Iraq and Libya.

Trigano identifies several factors that afflicted all of these Jewish communities at various times: Denationalization (denial or withdrawal of citizenship), isolation (denial of passports and travel bans), sequestration, legal discrimination (Arabization, the state takeover of Jewish communal bodies), socioeconomic discrimination (forced business partnerships with Muslims and boycotts), dispossession (extortion, freezing of bank accounts, ransoms and seizures) and violence (riots and arrests on spurious grounds). All these measures recalled the statut des juifs, the set of discriminatory laws imposed by the pro-Nazi Vichy regime in North Africa during World War II.

The antisemitic nature of the measures taken by Arab states is clear for all to see: Whatever their political opinions, all Jews were punished for the “crime” of Zionism. According to Trigano, this collective punishment was derived from the antisemitic myth of the individual Jew as someone who hides behind his own emancipation in order to exercise secret power and control.

Although the Jews of then-Palestine suffered pogroms instigated by the Palestinian mufti, Haj Amin al-Husseini, and were targeted for extermination in the 1948 war, the facts have been turned on their head to suggest that the losing Arab side was targeted for ethnic cleansing.

According to Professor Trigano, the problem is that Israel has failed to speak the truth, allowing free rein to historical distortion and propaganda, to the extent that a perverse resolution condemning Israel as an “apartheid” state has been proposed in the French parliament.

Zionism is blamed for the plight of the Jews, and too many people believe in the myth of peaceful coexistence between Jews and Arabs before the establishment of Israel. Unfortunately, there has also been a tendency among Jews to gloss over inconvenient facts or sugarcoat the history of relations between the two groups.