I did a bad thing here yesterday. A stupid, emotional thing that was contradictory and lame - not unusual, I'm perpetually full of it, but I want to own up to it this time.
I linked to David Cameron bemoaning the low rates of sex crime convictions, and then I linked a successful terrorism conviction and got sceptical and paranoid about it. This is not only an inconsistent attitude towards criminal justice, towards the principle of innocent until proven guilty - it's also inconsistent regarding individual people.
I've mentioned this in passing before: there's these two guys - Jean Charles de Menezes and Mohammed Abdul Kahar. You've probably heard of at least one of them.
I'm not cherrypicking examples here - they are the only two people to have been shot by Metropolitan Police officers as part of Operation Kratos, in which a shoot-to-kill order was applied to terror suspects who were thought to be capable of causing imminent damage. Menezes died after being shot eight times while catching a train at Stockwell tube station, and Kahar survived being shot once in the chest during a house raid at Forest Gate.
Both were, within days, confirmed to be innocent of terrorism.
Both were, shortly afterwards, charged with sex crimes - Menezes was accused of rape and Kahar was accused of downloading child porn.
Further forensic examination found that both charges were as devoid of substance as the original terrorism suspicions.
So if we're going to ask that our legal system doesn't shoot to kill, assumes innocence until guilt is proven, and requires a case to be solid beyond reasonable doubt, that has to apply to terrorism and to sex crimes because the wrongly accused may well be the exact same people, under suspicion for the exact same reasons. (and it doesn't take much in the way of paranoia to cause speculation as to why these two men were wrongly accused of sex crimes - if it happens the next two times as well, maybe we can talk about a trend).
Tuesday, November 13, 2007
Monday, November 12, 2007
ye linkage
David Cameron wants to fix our broken rape laws. Please, please, let this become the bipartisan effort it should be. Some of it - like the idea that sex ed should be absolutely compulsory and should include lessons on consent (and I'd hope they'd do some on the effects of abuse too) - might even work. Read this too - terrifying stories about women who were let down by the police and/or the courts.
This bothers me in so many ways. It says it's a horrible crime to own a few books and to write a few poems. It says that crime is equivalent to those of Abu Hamza, or other hate preachers. It is all a bit bizarre and scary. I wonder what'll happen if/when she appeals.
I actually find this strangely reassuring - I like knowing I'm not the only one who can't look the bullshit in the eye.
This bothers me in so many ways. It says it's a horrible crime to own a few books and to write a few poems. It says that crime is equivalent to those of Abu Hamza, or other hate preachers. It is all a bit bizarre and scary. I wonder what'll happen if/when she appeals.
I actually find this strangely reassuring - I like knowing I'm not the only one who can't look the bullshit in the eye.
Friday, November 09, 2007
Seven Reasons Why The Campaign Against Climate Change Is Good For A Laugh
[or, Selected Notes from a Mass Meeting, with Panel, held at Friends House on November 8th.]
1. It made consumerism feel like a sort of black magic. At one point in the floor session, John Sauven's reply to a questioner included the words 'We mostly exceed our fair carbon ration even if we don't fly, and I won't embarrass you by asking if you do fly...' Total Heroes moment there, hand gesture and all. Flying, for Christ's sake, what could be more magical than that? We were told, in a variety of different ways, that emissions in the developing world are not increasing and ours are not decreasing, that we're merely outsourcing our own consumption - having the things we use made on the other side of the world, where it will create even more inefficient mess. (The Moonbat helpfully added that we wipe our asses on trees shipped over from Brazil). I own more books and more changes of clothing than any medieval queen, you know? And when Sauven said all advertising is pornography and that industry should be ended...we're dipping back to before economics, back to objects with moral dimensions, back to magic as if we never left.
At the CCC's heart is the belief that this way of living is going to radically change our world, probably destroy vast swathes of it. The government's target is for a 60% cut in emissions by 2030; apparently this target was pegged not by science, but by the CBI - science suggests that to avoid runaway warming we need to cut emissions by 90% as soon as we possibly can.
2. The Moonbat. The Moonbat! He's a lovely voice - even pronounces 'solution' correctly, and vanishingly few people can do that without sounding like an utter twat. I wrote down some of the things he said;
[as with almost all nicknamage, I call him the Moonbat because I love him, really I do.]
3. Everything they were talking about - about shutting down Drax again, about supergluing people to the Shell HQ, about taking to the streets on December 8th, about building a mass movement, about the failure of the million-strong Stop The War campaign - is directly tied to the meaningless of civic life in the UK. These people, driven people who know their science, who know what has to be done, who care so deeply about the preservation of life and of wellbeing and even of our crazy magic economy - cannot do anything to influence the course of events other than by putting a tick in a box once every five years, and by supergluing themselves to Shell and maybe writing a few letters here and there. Meanwhile, government climate targets are set by the CBI.
This is why we need to move towards direct democracy as soon as we possibly can.
[addendum: a recent Moonbat piece on this very subject.]
4. The repeated allusions to 'total war'. If stopping cimate change were the overriding priority of our society, we would, as happened in the USA right after Pearl Harbour, rapidly turn our entire economy towards that priority. (The Moonbat in particular was confident that we haven't lost this one yet, and he firmly believes that Europe, if Europe so wanted, could be generating all its power from renewable sources within a few years.)
Could we? Would we? That was sixty years ago. That was a world ago. That was back when we actually made things here, back before we substituted real economic growth for the City boom, back when such efforts didn't require renationalisation and imported labour, back when dissent was a different beast. It's really weird, from here in the magic carpet world, to listen to people harking back to long-gone efforts as if it could ever be the same again.
5. The confidence in carbon rationing. It's the only fair way of making cuts, sure. It also wouldn't work, wouldn't last, wouldn't be secure, and would be extremely morally iffy.
There were 600 people in Friends House that night, some there because they cared, some there because it was free and interesting. Given carbon rationing, how would we have 'paid' for the lighting and ventilation? Would the organisers bear the burden, or would all the attendees share in it? How about other public events - bonfires, for instance. And who picks up the tab for your copy of the Metro? These are tiny things, but they add up - would rationing only cover large indiscretions like food miles and flight? Or would it cover everything? If the government builds a new hospital, who covers its power use? Patients, taxpayers, who? For individual consumers, out there going places and buying things, rationing would work. Consider it on a social, community level and it shatters.
We're used enough to chip and pin, right? But there's always the odd granny out there who doesn't get it; people who don't use cards, or don't know their PINs, even some who can't use them due to disabilities. My teenage brother has only just got his first one, and still goes to the bank counter because he's shy of ATMs. Carbon rationing would have to be used by everyone; it would have to be simple enough and secure enough for, at the very least, everyone in Europe to be able to use it, no getouts for disability or incomprehension or unwillingness.
And what happens if someone urgently needs something - a meal, an ambulance, a morning after pill, a ride home - and finds they have no carbon ration left?
And then it has to be secure, and those who calculate the carbon costs must be accurate. I'm not even going to go there.
6. Crowd demographics. I'll tell you a secret; I'm tired of gender. I'm fed up of it, it's exhausting me, I'd like to see it abolished, and I wish I could put it down, but I can't, because it has no intention of putting me or anyone else down, and that's the fault of people like the CCC, and just about everything else I walk into.
There were, we were told, 600 people at the meeting; all but perhaps a dozen were white. I'd hazard that the gender split was dead even. Where that got interesting was when the floor was opened at the end (nb: not like that, though the reference is appropriate) - of those, we'll call it 20 people, who raised their hand to put forward a question, I counted only three women, and only two not-white men.
Even on the far left, political discussion is still all about Mr Special White Guy.
Why? Why the crap do vast numbers of women enter that political space as listeners, and then not even attempt to contribute? And why - even after being challenged about this last year at Conway Hall, by a fantastic black lady from the floor - do the CCC organisers seem oblivious to the whole race/gender thing? They were speaking of building mass movements, of the pressure from the street that had brought social changes in the past - how the heck are they going to get that if they've come up with a way of having meetings that gives access [almost] only to Mr Special White Guy?
No, it's not their fault - it seemed to be like any other white boys' club, with questions taken from men they knew, men with clipboards, men from thinktanks, men of science, men with opinions, men who knew other men. It's interesting how the gender split among the organisers (all white, except the West London rep lady) worked out; there were three male panellists - two campaigners (the CCC head and the Greenpeace head) and a writer - while the compère, the Climate Camp (ie. direct action) head, at least half of the local London organisers, and (as far as I could see) all the people carrying microphones around were women. As if the boys are meant to talk about the big ideas while the girls do all the work. I've heard this one before. It's not the CCC's fault, but it's their problem and they haven't a hope in hell of building any kind of popular movement without fixing things so they have a room that at least looks like London and sounds like London.
(The unbearable whiteness is echoed on the other side of the same coin, in the UK's new religious movements - not the same thing as the green movement, but there's a hefty overlap. I touched on that a little bit here, not that that post is recommended reading, being as long and rambly as it is, but hey.)
7. John Sauven. He's a really special white guy. He even started a sentence with 'The cost purely from an American perspective -' (No, of course he's not American, and I doubt he's ever lived or worked there, he's just making shit up). He also said 'Money isn't a problem - the world is awash with money.' No, really, who the fuck are you and what planet are you from?
A lot of suggested emissions cuts are based on European metropolitan privilege; the Moonbat cheerfully announces that the Sahara gets 15 hours of sunlight a day so we could just go run a 4500-mile DC power line to it and - Maybe he's forgotten that it's not his desert? (I actually doubt it has escaped his mind - more likely he thinks it would enrich the region, because the oil markets have totally proven how that works - but it wasn't something he touched on). Individual cuts also work for us but not them; while we develop ever more fuel-efficient cars, our secondhand gas guzzlers, like so much of our secondhand clothing, get shipped to Africa and sold on to people who've never had cars before, people who really benefit from having cars.
People like John Sauven need reminding that not everyone can be Mr Special White Guy like he is.
I've every intention of continuing to support the CCC, and I'll likely be outside the US Embassy with a placard on December 8th, but they remain in blissful single-issue obliviousness to their place in the world.
1. It made consumerism feel like a sort of black magic. At one point in the floor session, John Sauven's reply to a questioner included the words 'We mostly exceed our fair carbon ration even if we don't fly, and I won't embarrass you by asking if you do fly...' Total Heroes moment there, hand gesture and all. Flying, for Christ's sake, what could be more magical than that? We were told, in a variety of different ways, that emissions in the developing world are not increasing and ours are not decreasing, that we're merely outsourcing our own consumption - having the things we use made on the other side of the world, where it will create even more inefficient mess. (The Moonbat helpfully added that we wipe our asses on trees shipped over from Brazil). I own more books and more changes of clothing than any medieval queen, you know? And when Sauven said all advertising is pornography and that industry should be ended...we're dipping back to before economics, back to objects with moral dimensions, back to magic as if we never left.
At the CCC's heart is the belief that this way of living is going to radically change our world, probably destroy vast swathes of it. The government's target is for a 60% cut in emissions by 2030; apparently this target was pegged not by science, but by the CBI - science suggests that to avoid runaway warming we need to cut emissions by 90% as soon as we possibly can.
2. The Moonbat. The Moonbat! He's a lovely voice - even pronounces 'solution' correctly, and vanishingly few people can do that without sounding like an utter twat. I wrote down some of the things he said;
"As an environmentalist I quite like pain. We all thrash ourselves with nettle leaves in the morning before breakfast."
"I don't care very much about trawlermen."
"I was a great supporter of the Stern Report, until I read it."
"Microgeneration requires ambient energy, and people avoid living in places with high ambient energy - the tops of mountains, the middle of the Sahara desert, or several hundred miles offshore..."
"There are only three questions [about stopping climate change] left; if not now, then when? If not here, then where? If not us, then who?"
[as with almost all nicknamage, I call him the Moonbat because I love him, really I do.]
3. Everything they were talking about - about shutting down Drax again, about supergluing people to the Shell HQ, about taking to the streets on December 8th, about building a mass movement, about the failure of the million-strong Stop The War campaign - is directly tied to the meaningless of civic life in the UK. These people, driven people who know their science, who know what has to be done, who care so deeply about the preservation of life and of wellbeing and even of our crazy magic economy - cannot do anything to influence the course of events other than by putting a tick in a box once every five years, and by supergluing themselves to Shell and maybe writing a few letters here and there. Meanwhile, government climate targets are set by the CBI.
This is why we need to move towards direct democracy as soon as we possibly can.
[addendum: a recent Moonbat piece on this very subject.]
4. The repeated allusions to 'total war'. If stopping cimate change were the overriding priority of our society, we would, as happened in the USA right after Pearl Harbour, rapidly turn our entire economy towards that priority. (The Moonbat in particular was confident that we haven't lost this one yet, and he firmly believes that Europe, if Europe so wanted, could be generating all its power from renewable sources within a few years.)
Could we? Would we? That was sixty years ago. That was a world ago. That was back when we actually made things here, back before we substituted real economic growth for the City boom, back when such efforts didn't require renationalisation and imported labour, back when dissent was a different beast. It's really weird, from here in the magic carpet world, to listen to people harking back to long-gone efforts as if it could ever be the same again.
5. The confidence in carbon rationing. It's the only fair way of making cuts, sure. It also wouldn't work, wouldn't last, wouldn't be secure, and would be extremely morally iffy.
There were 600 people in Friends House that night, some there because they cared, some there because it was free and interesting. Given carbon rationing, how would we have 'paid' for the lighting and ventilation? Would the organisers bear the burden, or would all the attendees share in it? How about other public events - bonfires, for instance. And who picks up the tab for your copy of the Metro? These are tiny things, but they add up - would rationing only cover large indiscretions like food miles and flight? Or would it cover everything? If the government builds a new hospital, who covers its power use? Patients, taxpayers, who? For individual consumers, out there going places and buying things, rationing would work. Consider it on a social, community level and it shatters.
We're used enough to chip and pin, right? But there's always the odd granny out there who doesn't get it; people who don't use cards, or don't know their PINs, even some who can't use them due to disabilities. My teenage brother has only just got his first one, and still goes to the bank counter because he's shy of ATMs. Carbon rationing would have to be used by everyone; it would have to be simple enough and secure enough for, at the very least, everyone in Europe to be able to use it, no getouts for disability or incomprehension or unwillingness.
And what happens if someone urgently needs something - a meal, an ambulance, a morning after pill, a ride home - and finds they have no carbon ration left?
And then it has to be secure, and those who calculate the carbon costs must be accurate. I'm not even going to go there.
6. Crowd demographics. I'll tell you a secret; I'm tired of gender. I'm fed up of it, it's exhausting me, I'd like to see it abolished, and I wish I could put it down, but I can't, because it has no intention of putting me or anyone else down, and that's the fault of people like the CCC, and just about everything else I walk into.
There were, we were told, 600 people at the meeting; all but perhaps a dozen were white. I'd hazard that the gender split was dead even. Where that got interesting was when the floor was opened at the end (nb: not like that, though the reference is appropriate) - of those, we'll call it 20 people, who raised their hand to put forward a question, I counted only three women, and only two not-white men.
Even on the far left, political discussion is still all about Mr Special White Guy.
Why? Why the crap do vast numbers of women enter that political space as listeners, and then not even attempt to contribute? And why - even after being challenged about this last year at Conway Hall, by a fantastic black lady from the floor - do the CCC organisers seem oblivious to the whole race/gender thing? They were speaking of building mass movements, of the pressure from the street that had brought social changes in the past - how the heck are they going to get that if they've come up with a way of having meetings that gives access [almost] only to Mr Special White Guy?
No, it's not their fault - it seemed to be like any other white boys' club, with questions taken from men they knew, men with clipboards, men from thinktanks, men of science, men with opinions, men who knew other men. It's interesting how the gender split among the organisers (all white, except the West London rep lady) worked out; there were three male panellists - two campaigners (the CCC head and the Greenpeace head) and a writer - while the compère, the Climate Camp (ie. direct action) head, at least half of the local London organisers, and (as far as I could see) all the people carrying microphones around were women. As if the boys are meant to talk about the big ideas while the girls do all the work. I've heard this one before. It's not the CCC's fault, but it's their problem and they haven't a hope in hell of building any kind of popular movement without fixing things so they have a room that at least looks like London and sounds like London.
(The unbearable whiteness is echoed on the other side of the same coin, in the UK's new religious movements - not the same thing as the green movement, but there's a hefty overlap. I touched on that a little bit here, not that that post is recommended reading, being as long and rambly as it is, but hey.)
7. John Sauven. He's a really special white guy. He even started a sentence with 'The cost purely from an American perspective -' (No, of course he's not American, and I doubt he's ever lived or worked there, he's just making shit up). He also said 'Money isn't a problem - the world is awash with money.' No, really, who the fuck are you and what planet are you from?
A lot of suggested emissions cuts are based on European metropolitan privilege; the Moonbat cheerfully announces that the Sahara gets 15 hours of sunlight a day so we could just go run a 4500-mile DC power line to it and - Maybe he's forgotten that it's not his desert? (I actually doubt it has escaped his mind - more likely he thinks it would enrich the region, because the oil markets have totally proven how that works - but it wasn't something he touched on). Individual cuts also work for us but not them; while we develop ever more fuel-efficient cars, our secondhand gas guzzlers, like so much of our secondhand clothing, get shipped to Africa and sold on to people who've never had cars before, people who really benefit from having cars.
People like John Sauven need reminding that not everyone can be Mr Special White Guy like he is.
I've every intention of continuing to support the CCC, and I'll likely be outside the US Embassy with a placard on December 8th, but they remain in blissful single-issue obliviousness to their place in the world.
Tuesday, November 06, 2007
Feminist Art Criticism: When Not To Even Bother/links + an invite
Ow, my brain.
Also:
Alis Dee has more about Frank Miller, with added BATMAN.
V, who has begun a blog about art, mental health and race, yey!!1, is telling us why to hate The Poisonwood Bible (which I've never read) and Lost In Translation (which I never liked and was just gagging for a good reason to hate).
And an invite to be a greenie leftie:
Campaign against Climate Change - "How can we win the race against climate catastrophe?"
A Public Meeting on Thursday November 8th, at 7.00pm
at the Friends Meeting House, Euston Road, London.
With George Monbiot, Author, Journalist and Campaigner
John Sauven, Director of Greenpeace UK
Claire Fauset, from the Camp for Climate Action
and Phil Thornhill, National Coordinator Campaign against Climate Change
This year the arctic ice cap shrunk to just 60% of its normal size (the average summer size for 1979-2000). We are seeing the first macro-impact of global warming. Some have speculated that only a small temperature increase (of a kind quite possible in the next ten years or so) could see the ice disappear completely and very rapidly. That would leave open sea which absorbs heat from the sun rather than reflect it back into the atmosphere as ice does. The warmed waters would then transmit heat to the land causing massive melting of permafrost, releasing huge quantities of CO2 and methane., triggering a massive warming event that would render much of the globe uninhabitable. This is just one of the terrifying “positive feedback” scenarios that have been suggested as a possible result of continuing to belch out greenhouse gases into the atmosphere the way we do now.
So what are we doing about it?
Changing the light bulbs. Buying cars that use slightly less petrol. At most, reducing emissions by a few percentage points a year. Do we have a plan even remotely radical enough to stand any real chance of heading off disaster ? Where are the politicians conveying the true urgency of the situation ? Where is the solemn prime ministerial broadcast explaining that the nation and the world is in grave peril and we need to take extreme action? What can we do in this situation to turn the politics around and get the scale and speed of action that we really need?
George Monbiot in his recent book “Heat” has offered a radical blueprint for survival. But recently he has said that even that does not go far enough.
Come to this Public Meeting to find out what he is saying now –what the Director of Britain’s best known environmental pressure group has to say about it, too, - and also the view from the activists who hit the headlines with their 'Climate Camp' at Heathrow, earlier this year.
The Moonbat is a decent speaker, so should be alright, for a laugh if nothing else. Friends House is right opposite Euston Station. I'll be there.
Sunday, October 21, 2007
The Rules
Alas and Feminist SF (I got a minor Heroes spoiler on that thread, oh noez) are doing an excellent job of saying 'Nice, but not good enough' in JK Rowling's general direction. This comment had me running to the Indy archives, because I recalled that I've heard this conversation before.
I first read this wonderful Hari piece in a newspaper I picked up on the Tube nearly two years ago, and it's sharp enough to have stuck in my head. It's about the laws of depicting gay men in Hollywood, and boils down to this:
"There are two types of Acceptable Gay Man: you can be a sexless sissy who is fairly happy with his female friends and waspish one-liners, or you can be masculine and actually have a sex drive - in which case you will die."
[an aside: Hari missed one of the rare exceptions, The Wedding Banquet, which was Ang Lee's first gay film. It's a comedy, but a serious one with a lot of cultural smarts to share and a lot of real troubles to talk about, and the sexuality is masculine and the ending is cosy. Back when I was at university, I once had half a gender seminar dissolve into an argument about whether we liked Simon or not.]
That's Hollywood, and Hari explores the particulars in splendid detail. The underlying rule - that men having sex with men and enjoying it and enjoying life cannot be shown to the world - also seems to drive Rowling, who has gone with celibate, tragic and dead, and added silence atop of that. Gay relationships in SF/F have a distinct leaning towards tragedy; Iron Council we spoke of yesterday, China Mountain Zhang can be shelved beside it, and the LHM goes without saying (um, that's when it is shelved, rather than in the guilty sop pile next to my bed). Meanwhile in ILLUMINATUS! (and I feel in The Year Of Our War too), teh gay is a sort of comedic, pornic horror. Interview With The Vampire skirts both, looking for shock, tears and erotic frisson. (One sometimes-glorious counterexample is the Authority, though most of what I know about that I learned from reading Alis Dee).
Lesbians, from Sandman to Discworld, are better at getting away with it, but I can't help but wonder if that's because everyone knows that if there's no cock, it's not real sex. Then there's distractions like Inara - and most of the queer in the Vagina Monologues, come to that - who are just doing it for the men, because the men are so mean, and the men never let us 'be ourselves', oh wah wah, because gay has to be a 'choice', a justification, a negative rather than a positive. Sex has to have a cock. One cock. Even if you're just hiding from it. And more than one cock just can't be good.
Addendum, which I can't believe I forgot earlier: Daurizre (see #8 specifically) once wrote on the same topic, but took it in the opposite direction. She calls it 300 Syndrome, and says it thusly:
"There is, among conservatives and Republicans, what I might dub 300 Syndrome. It's been pointed out before that many Nazi leaders were homosexual, and people have pondered why it is that gays would run to a group of people that would try to kill them--the obvious answer being summed up in the phrase 'self-defense'. But there's a flip side to it, when people who otherwise loathe gays embrace certain gay men, or bisexuals, as the epitome of Manliness, all without acknowledging that they were, in fact, gay or bi. For example, the movie "300" stars three hundred Spartans, and the Spartans, like most in Greek society at the time, subtly encouraged gay relations so long as they strengthened the bonds between fellow soldiers. However, the righties who want to hold the movie up as an example of all that is white manliness ignore this--not because they're stupid, but because being gay is forgivable if you kill a whole lot of people. Alexander the Great loved Hephaestion, and slept with Bagoas, but this is okay--he killed a whole mess of folks, too, which balances the gayness out. That sort of thing. This is Don't Ask Don't Tell in action, where men and women are allowed to fight and die so long as they don't admit their sexuality."
300 was, of course, based on a book by Frank Miller. Ho hum.
I first read this wonderful Hari piece in a newspaper I picked up on the Tube nearly two years ago, and it's sharp enough to have stuck in my head. It's about the laws of depicting gay men in Hollywood, and boils down to this:
"There are two types of Acceptable Gay Man: you can be a sexless sissy who is fairly happy with his female friends and waspish one-liners, or you can be masculine and actually have a sex drive - in which case you will die."
[an aside: Hari missed one of the rare exceptions, The Wedding Banquet, which was Ang Lee's first gay film. It's a comedy, but a serious one with a lot of cultural smarts to share and a lot of real troubles to talk about, and the sexuality is masculine and the ending is cosy. Back when I was at university, I once had half a gender seminar dissolve into an argument about whether we liked Simon or not.]
That's Hollywood, and Hari explores the particulars in splendid detail. The underlying rule - that men having sex with men and enjoying it and enjoying life cannot be shown to the world - also seems to drive Rowling, who has gone with celibate, tragic and dead, and added silence atop of that. Gay relationships in SF/F have a distinct leaning towards tragedy; Iron Council we spoke of yesterday, China Mountain Zhang can be shelved beside it, and the LHM goes without saying (um, that's when it is shelved, rather than in the guilty sop pile next to my bed). Meanwhile in ILLUMINATUS! (and I feel in The Year Of Our War too), teh gay is a sort of comedic, pornic horror. Interview With The Vampire skirts both, looking for shock, tears and erotic frisson. (One sometimes-glorious counterexample is the Authority, though most of what I know about that I learned from reading Alis Dee).
Lesbians, from Sandman to Discworld, are better at getting away with it, but I can't help but wonder if that's because everyone knows that if there's no cock, it's not real sex. Then there's distractions like Inara - and most of the queer in the Vagina Monologues, come to that - who are just doing it for the men, because the men are so mean, and the men never let us 'be ourselves', oh wah wah, because gay has to be a 'choice', a justification, a negative rather than a positive. Sex has to have a cock. One cock. Even if you're just hiding from it. And more than one cock just can't be good.
Addendum, which I can't believe I forgot earlier: Daurizre (see #8 specifically) once wrote on the same topic, but took it in the opposite direction. She calls it 300 Syndrome, and says it thusly:
"There is, among conservatives and Republicans, what I might dub 300 Syndrome. It's been pointed out before that many Nazi leaders were homosexual, and people have pondered why it is that gays would run to a group of people that would try to kill them--the obvious answer being summed up in the phrase 'self-defense'. But there's a flip side to it, when people who otherwise loathe gays embrace certain gay men, or bisexuals, as the epitome of Manliness, all without acknowledging that they were, in fact, gay or bi. For example, the movie "300" stars three hundred Spartans, and the Spartans, like most in Greek society at the time, subtly encouraged gay relations so long as they strengthened the bonds between fellow soldiers. However, the righties who want to hold the movie up as an example of all that is white manliness ignore this--not because they're stupid, but because being gay is forgivable if you kill a whole lot of people. Alexander the Great loved Hephaestion, and slept with Bagoas, but this is okay--he killed a whole mess of folks, too, which balances the gayness out. That sort of thing. This is Don't Ask Don't Tell in action, where men and women are allowed to fight and die so long as they don't admit their sexuality."
300 was, of course, based on a book by Frank Miller. Ho hum.
Saturday, October 20, 2007
1958
[NB: I originally wrote this to let of steam, but both this post and the FMT are now very slightly Internets Famous, and have thus been Criticised by Smart People. I'd therefore like to add C A Monteath-Carr's suggestion for an alternate FMT equation:
If (# of Female Prostitutes) > (# of All Other Women), then [WTF?]
I would like to propose a measure called The Frank Miller Test. It will test how much male sci-fi writers are obsessed with whores; if the proportion of female sex workers to neutrally presented female people in his story is above 1:1, he fails.
I said, alonglongtimeago, that I'd get back to the whole general mess of how sex work gets portrayed in sci-fi & fantasy. It's a happy coincidence for me that Yonmei recently wrote about this vile story CS Lewis penned in 1958 because if she hadn't, I would've had to search it out and reread it, ewwww. It's a short exploration concerning sex on an exploratory mission to Mars. 'Sex' meaning to Lewis exactly what it often means in sci-fi and in videogames - sex between the male adventurer and the female prostitute. Go read Yonmei's post, because I can't bear to rehash this vile example. Gist is, women can only come to Mars if they're going to be prostitutes. (The really cringlingly awful part is that when I first read it - I think I was 14 or 13 - I swallowed this shit whole.)
There's a lot of supposedly 'speculative' fictions where it's still 1958.
I am going to start with the ones I love the most, because they're the ones that hurt; China Mieville remains my writer of ultimate worship (and not just because of what he called Charles Clarke that one time on Lenin's Tomb), but there's this moment in The Scar where one of the minor characters, Carrianne, tells a story near-identical to that of Lewis's 'ministering angels'. Even on a first, frantic readthrough of a book I was badly in love with, this stood out as the weakest thing he'd ever put on paper.
Yeah. Great journeys are for penises, but vaginas can tag along and put out for us and that makes them winners! This isn't normative, I know, it's descriptive, he has an anthropology background, I shouldn't be so quick to smell a rat. And yet.
Carrianne is only one woman, but in male-authored sci-fi, the whole stupid prostitutes-only thing more often follows that 1958 pattern of the organised group. Iron Council is such a self-aware commentary on socialism, on industrial organisation, on the politics of objects (both technologies and bodies), on revolution, that I'm hesitant to rip at any one moment. It's a journey, a circle. The bit that involves prostitution is that wild present-tense 150-page book-within-book that some people hate and I hopelessly adore: Anamnesis ~ The Perpetual Train.
Mostly, it's about technological determinism with sociological determinisms piled atop that. (Beautifully. It's probably the best book in the entire world). A company sponsored by a wealthy coastal city-state is building a railway line across a continent, out from their city toward places they have never been. The Perpetual Train follows Judah, one of the Transcontinental Railway Trust's surveyors: he watches as the construction of the railway changes the land and the communities that it passes through.
It's 1958 again. The men have a quest, and the women are the questers' prostitutes. (Anonymous homosexual intercourse is suggested as the cash-free alternative). There's also, of course, this narrative about how 'vices' of all kinds are brought by the evil capitalist enterprise to the virgin wilderness -
- but not quite, I fucking adore this one:
Part of me adores that bolded line, and the energy of the passage in general. The other part is saying waitacottonpickingminute, you're appropriating vaginas to demonstrate your philosophy of technology? You're using the gender-neutral word 'worker' to mean 'man who pays for sex'? You're drawing lines between 'untamed' rural amazons and prostitutes who are Slaves Of The Patriarchal-Capital-Whatsit? Prostitutes who (as the story goes) 'corrupt' those women through violence, enforce their taboos and turn them, vampire-like, into prostitutes themselves? The shit?
There are only four sorts of women in The Perpetual Train: these village sluts, these whores, monsters and a few passing gamblers. The only ones that organise are, naturally, the whores.
Mieville is a materialist revolutionary - the (male) workers unionise, and the (female) sex workers unionise, not for ideology but because the TRT's wage money dries up; the two unions then unite and eventually do things their own way, a way in which no one is being paid for anything. So women get to stop being prostitutes AFTER THE REVOLUTION! and not before. That's all the women he's writing about, by the end of The Perpetual Train, excepting a few nameless Remade (class-critical monsters). It's not like this in The Scar: there, where a small group of women gather together, they're usually librarians.
[Addendum: I spoke to him about this after the Weird symposium - see here for his response to some of the points raised.]
I've done Firefly. The circumstances are murky, but the only reason Inara was able to be part of the quest while retaining her class privilege was because she was a sex worker.
I said I wouldn't do Frank Miller himself. It's the writers I love that I want to unpick. We're going to Discworld. We're going to the fandom-splitting nadir/zenith of Discworld, Night Watch. It has two things in common with The Perpetual Train; firstly it is a fold in time, set about thirty years before the rest of the series around it; secondly, all the women in that time-fold are prostitutes, excepting only two, who are both addressed as potential prostitutes. In the past, all women were bought and sold, geddit?
There are the prostitutes. There's the cat-owning figure at the back, Madame, and at one point a man asks if that's her title or her profession. There's the real seamstress, for Discworld regulars. I can't recall another woman in the entire thick of the book: Sybil and Angua creep in only at the temporally flat edges. I can't excerpt *listens to collective sighs of relief* because I can't find a copy anywhere (fact: he once posted my copy of Night Watch to Australia, but then gave me one of the other zillion we had sat about just-in-case), but I swear to god it's true. And again, as in The Perpetual Train, the unionising of the prostitutes is their key issue. It's an entirely realistic concern. And yet.
It's not like this is how he usually 'does' gender; Pratchett adores toying with female stereotypes, and has made us see eye to eye with the bitter one; fall in love with the fat, forty-year-old virgin; awaken the inner babysitter. He's franchised the Tooth Fairy. He's done an entire book about the orphaned servant-girl not getting married to the handsome prince. He's followed the queen from beehive to chessboard to mountaintop kingdom. Do not ask us about Mrs Cake.
Thing is, outside of the agency-worker Tooth Fairies, the only organised group of women...is that union, a guild no less, of prostitutes. There is this whole thing about how the witches do not have a hierarchy, or a leader, because Esme Weatherwax would never allow it; there is this other whole thing about how only three city guilds will even accept female members; the whores, the beggars, and the detested Night Watch (but only long after the revolution, even then). In other words, women do not form organised groups, but prostitutes do. And in Night Watch, the revolution demands 'reasonably priced love', because the only women the author has welcomed on board are whores.
[Here there could've been a word or two about how prostitution is brought into videogames, but it's just more of that cock-coddling I mentioned here, with the occasional added touch of slut-shaming or poor-little-victiming. I do think it makes me feel less comfortable presenting as a female PC in a gameworld, just because it makes it overtly clear that this invented society, otherwise little resembling our own, is programmed to cater specifically to the cock. Bioware has been known to proffer an occasional rentboy. It doesn't work, because I am not really a potential consumer of sex. It just looks like mapping male sexuality on to that afterthought that is the female PC, which is what it is.]
I'll say it again; when male sci-fi authors write about trade unions for sex workers, they do not do so out of the goodness of their bleeding liberal hearts. One fascinating thing about sex work that I would never have known without reading the words of sex workers themselves: the johns are sometimes organised. (The immensely readable PeridotAsh has written about this here and here). The sex industry impinges more on the average man's life than the average woman's - few women are potential customers or potential employees, while a sizeable minority of men are consumers of sex and all will find it marketed to them at some point. Is this why male sci-fi writers circle the topic like vultures, appropriate it and sometimes use it as their only discourse on women at all? By fantasising about organised sex workers, are they becoming an organised community of sex consumers? Are they already that, and just acting it out on paper?
Um, I think Mieville doesn't even like vagina, and I know Frank Miller has never spoken to a woman in his entire life. But hey.
[addendum: the angry black woman assures me that Mieville does like vagina. I am more than cool with that, because oh god would I ever hit it.]
Does this matter out in the real world? Only in that it makes it harder to hear real sex workers because of all the male-invented versions getting in the way, and putting fanrats like me off the topic entirely because I've seen how these guys use it.
If (# of Female Prostitutes) > (# of All Other Women), then [WTF?]
I would like to propose a measure called The Frank Miller Test. It will test how much male sci-fi writers are obsessed with whores; if the proportion of female sex workers to neutrally presented female people in his story is above 1:1, he fails.
I said, alonglongtimeago, that I'd get back to the whole general mess of how sex work gets portrayed in sci-fi & fantasy. It's a happy coincidence for me that Yonmei recently wrote about this vile story CS Lewis penned in 1958 because if she hadn't, I would've had to search it out and reread it, ewwww. It's a short exploration concerning sex on an exploratory mission to Mars. 'Sex' meaning to Lewis exactly what it often means in sci-fi and in videogames - sex between the male adventurer and the female prostitute. Go read Yonmei's post, because I can't bear to rehash this vile example. Gist is, women can only come to Mars if they're going to be prostitutes. (The really cringlingly awful part is that when I first read it - I think I was 14 or 13 - I swallowed this shit whole.)
There's a lot of supposedly 'speculative' fictions where it's still 1958.
I am going to start with the ones I love the most, because they're the ones that hurt; China Mieville remains my writer of ultimate worship (and not just because of what he called Charles Clarke that one time on Lenin's Tomb), but there's this moment in The Scar where one of the minor characters, Carrianne, tells a story near-identical to that of Lewis's 'ministering angels'. Even on a first, frantic readthrough of a book I was badly in love with, this stood out as the weakest thing he'd ever put on paper.
We were sailing our whim-trawler for Kohnid in Gnurr Kett. That's a long, hard journey. I was seventeen. I won the lottery to be figurehead and concubine. I spent the daylight strapped to the bowsprit, scattering orchid petals in front of the ship, spent the night reading the men's cards and in their beds. That was dull, but I enjoyed the days. Dangling there, singing, sleeping, watching the sea.
Yeah. Great journeys are for penises, but vaginas can tag along and put out for us and that makes them winners! This isn't normative, I know, it's descriptive, he has an anthropology background, I shouldn't be so quick to smell a rat. And yet.
Carrianne is only one woman, but in male-authored sci-fi, the whole stupid prostitutes-only thing more often follows that 1958 pattern of the organised group. Iron Council is such a self-aware commentary on socialism, on industrial organisation, on the politics of objects (both technologies and bodies), on revolution, that I'm hesitant to rip at any one moment. It's a journey, a circle. The bit that involves prostitution is that wild present-tense 150-page book-within-book that some people hate and I hopelessly adore: Anamnesis ~ The Perpetual Train.
Mostly, it's about technological determinism with sociological determinisms piled atop that. (Beautifully. It's probably the best book in the entire world). A company sponsored by a wealthy coastal city-state is building a railway line across a continent, out from their city toward places they have never been. The Perpetual Train follows Judah, one of the Transcontinental Railway Trust's surveyors: he watches as the construction of the railway changes the land and the communities that it passes through.
The villages they pass become rich and murderously violent - decadent, liquor-swilling, whore-filled and lawless - for the few days or weeks of the railroad, and then die. The towns live mayfly lives. Sex is as much part of the iron-road industry as spiking, grading, herding and paperwork. A tent city of prostitute refugees from New Crobuzon's red-light districts follows the rails and the men that set them down. The men call it Fucktown.
It's 1958 again. The men have a quest, and the women are the questers' prostitutes. (Anonymous homosexual intercourse is suggested as the cash-free alternative). There's also, of course, this narrative about how 'vices' of all kinds are brought by the evil capitalist enterprise to the virgin wilderness -
- but not quite, I fucking adore this one:
There are several like her, some boys but mostly young women, utterly charged by the arrival of these tough roustabouts and the breathing pistons of the trains. Their families lament while they let their flocks run, or sell them for meat to railroaders for scrimshawed trinkets from the tool-rooms. The goatkeep young men join the grading teams and fill the rivers. The young women find other outlets. [...] There is bad blood among the camp followers. The whores who have dutifully followed these men, splitting from the perpetual train to work with these mountain diggers, are affronted by their new rural rivals, these farmgirls who expect no pay. Some of the workers themselves are threatened by these newly voracious young women who do not sell sex or even give sex but take it. They know no rules. They have yet to learn taboos...
Part of me adores that bolded line, and the energy of the passage in general. The other part is saying waitacottonpickingminute, you're appropriating vaginas to demonstrate your philosophy of technology? You're using the gender-neutral word 'worker' to mean 'man who pays for sex'? You're drawing lines between 'untamed' rural amazons and prostitutes who are Slaves Of The Patriarchal-Capital-Whatsit? Prostitutes who (as the story goes) 'corrupt' those women through violence, enforce their taboos and turn them, vampire-like, into prostitutes themselves? The shit?
There are only four sorts of women in The Perpetual Train: these village sluts, these whores, monsters and a few passing gamblers. The only ones that organise are, naturally, the whores.
Mieville is a materialist revolutionary - the (male) workers unionise, and the (female) sex workers unionise, not for ideology but because the TRT's wage money dries up; the two unions then unite and eventually do things their own way, a way in which no one is being paid for anything. So women get to stop being prostitutes AFTER THE REVOLUTION! and not before. That's all the women he's writing about, by the end of The Perpetual Train, excepting a few nameless Remade (class-critical monsters). It's not like this in The Scar: there, where a small group of women gather together, they're usually librarians.
[Addendum: I spoke to him about this after the Weird symposium - see here for his response to some of the points raised.]
I've done Firefly. The circumstances are murky, but the only reason Inara was able to be part of the quest while retaining her class privilege was because she was a sex worker.
I said I wouldn't do Frank Miller himself. It's the writers I love that I want to unpick. We're going to Discworld. We're going to the fandom-splitting nadir/zenith of Discworld, Night Watch. It has two things in common with The Perpetual Train; firstly it is a fold in time, set about thirty years before the rest of the series around it; secondly, all the women in that time-fold are prostitutes, excepting only two, who are both addressed as potential prostitutes. In the past, all women were bought and sold, geddit?
There are the prostitutes. There's the cat-owning figure at the back, Madame, and at one point a man asks if that's her title or her profession. There's the real seamstress, for Discworld regulars. I can't recall another woman in the entire thick of the book: Sybil and Angua creep in only at the temporally flat edges. I can't excerpt *listens to collective sighs of relief* because I can't find a copy anywhere (fact: he once posted my copy of Night Watch to Australia, but then gave me one of the other zillion we had sat about just-in-case), but I swear to god it's true. And again, as in The Perpetual Train, the unionising of the prostitutes is their key issue. It's an entirely realistic concern. And yet.
It's not like this is how he usually 'does' gender; Pratchett adores toying with female stereotypes, and has made us see eye to eye with the bitter one; fall in love with the fat, forty-year-old virgin; awaken the inner babysitter. He's franchised the Tooth Fairy. He's done an entire book about the orphaned servant-girl not getting married to the handsome prince. He's followed the queen from beehive to chessboard to mountaintop kingdom. Do not ask us about Mrs Cake.
Thing is, outside of the agency-worker Tooth Fairies, the only organised group of women...is that union, a guild no less, of prostitutes. There is this whole thing about how the witches do not have a hierarchy, or a leader, because Esme Weatherwax would never allow it; there is this other whole thing about how only three city guilds will even accept female members; the whores, the beggars, and the detested Night Watch (but only long after the revolution, even then). In other words, women do not form organised groups, but prostitutes do. And in Night Watch, the revolution demands 'reasonably priced love', because the only women the author has welcomed on board are whores.
[Here there could've been a word or two about how prostitution is brought into videogames, but it's just more of that cock-coddling I mentioned here, with the occasional added touch of slut-shaming or poor-little-victiming. I do think it makes me feel less comfortable presenting as a female PC in a gameworld, just because it makes it overtly clear that this invented society, otherwise little resembling our own, is programmed to cater specifically to the cock. Bioware has been known to proffer an occasional rentboy. It doesn't work, because I am not really a potential consumer of sex. It just looks like mapping male sexuality on to that afterthought that is the female PC, which is what it is.]
I'll say it again; when male sci-fi authors write about trade unions for sex workers, they do not do so out of the goodness of their bleeding liberal hearts. One fascinating thing about sex work that I would never have known without reading the words of sex workers themselves: the johns are sometimes organised. (The immensely readable PeridotAsh has written about this here and here). The sex industry impinges more on the average man's life than the average woman's - few women are potential customers or potential employees, while a sizeable minority of men are consumers of sex and all will find it marketed to them at some point. Is this why male sci-fi writers circle the topic like vultures, appropriate it and sometimes use it as their only discourse on women at all? By fantasising about organised sex workers, are they becoming an organised community of sex consumers? Are they already that, and just acting it out on paper?
Um, I think Mieville doesn't even like vagina, and I know Frank Miller has never spoken to a woman in his entire life. But hey.
[addendum: the angry black woman assures me that Mieville does like vagina. I am more than cool with that, because oh god would I ever hit it.]
Does this matter out in the real world? Only in that it makes it harder to hear real sex workers because of all the male-invented versions getting in the way, and putting fanrats like me off the topic entirely because I've seen how these guys use it.
Thursday, October 18, 2007
always christmas and:
[in my next post, I will take the piss out of CS Lewis more directly, I promise.]
Alis Dee: breaking my heart and winning the internets.
A related aside; when replaying RPGs, it's really interesting to gen a character of the opposite gender to the one you took in your first trip. Firstly, I find it subtly changes the way you see social tone of the gameworld. (This is particularly so in BGII: Throne of Bhaal - standing there between Sarevok and Imoen, whether you're representing yourself as male or female does make a slight difference, if only in my head.) Secondly, it makes you aware of how the gameworld doles out [relentlessly heteronormative] sexual comfort to each gender. I usually, but not always, go with female characters on first playthroughs, and regularly wind up shocked when situations that were rendered neutrally in that first playthrough are directly, deliberately sexual when I'm playing a man.
I've just got done replaying Neverwinter Nights and it's pretty stunning how much cock-soothing there is thrown in there - everyone from both the two female henchmen to many minor NPCs to one of the major villains is at it. I'm fond enough of Aarin Gend, but after trying it in gamer drag, he feels like famine. Solanas was right; a female PC is asexual, desireless, but a female NPC is an object, a fucktoy. [We will forgive NWN, but only because of Valen. Valen!]
You can always reinterpret a book, but in videogames misogyny is hardwired, right there in the 1s and 0s. It's made invisible to female gamers except in the ultralight of drag. Weirder still is the experience of playing one of those games that were written before gender; I played a little of Final Fantasy I last year, and was confused at the excess of random lesbianism until I realised that the game was assuming that all my self-genned, neutrally presented characters were male.
Alis Dee: breaking my heart and winning the internets.
A related aside; when replaying RPGs, it's really interesting to gen a character of the opposite gender to the one you took in your first trip. Firstly, I find it subtly changes the way you see social tone of the gameworld. (This is particularly so in BGII: Throne of Bhaal - standing there between Sarevok and Imoen, whether you're representing yourself as male or female does make a slight difference, if only in my head.) Secondly, it makes you aware of how the gameworld doles out [relentlessly heteronormative] sexual comfort to each gender. I usually, but not always, go with female characters on first playthroughs, and regularly wind up shocked when situations that were rendered neutrally in that first playthrough are directly, deliberately sexual when I'm playing a man.
I've just got done replaying Neverwinter Nights and it's pretty stunning how much cock-soothing there is thrown in there - everyone from both the two female henchmen to many minor NPCs to one of the major villains is at it. I'm fond enough of Aarin Gend, but after trying it in gamer drag, he feels like famine. Solanas was right; a female PC is asexual, desireless, but a female NPC is an object, a fucktoy. [We will forgive NWN, but only because of Valen. Valen!]
You can always reinterpret a book, but in videogames misogyny is hardwired, right there in the 1s and 0s. It's made invisible to female gamers except in the ultralight of drag. Weirder still is the experience of playing one of those games that were written before gender; I played a little of Final Fantasy I last year, and was confused at the excess of random lesbianism until I realised that the game was assuming that all my self-genned, neutrally presented characters were male.
Tuesday, October 16, 2007
Human life isn't sacred.
Somebody had to say it.
I'm not speaking of religious tenets about the status of human life; what I'm talking about is policy. There are no leaders anywhere (well, except just maybe Bhutan) who put human life first when making the rules. Life wasn't sacred when we invaded Iraq. It wasn't sacred when we decided that it's worthwhile to have all these death machines on our streets, either - cars kill 67 people each week in the UK, and 825 each week in the USA. Life isn't sacred when we talk about climate change - zillions of reports on the human cost of the crisis resulted in mere hand-wringing, while the Stern report on the economic cost of inaction was what made climate change a political priority. When the hell do we ever talk about the importance of human life when we're deciding on policy?
Oh. Yeah. Here. (a link I totally stole from here). Why is that, I wonder?
Honestly, there's no need to invoke conspiracy theories there - it just looks like a vicious cycle of silence. Because human life is sacred, celebrating the economic and social boon of free, legal abortion is a supposedly icky thing to do. (All the while, we're meant to cheer on those lovely liberated Iraqi statue-squishers while a million of their compatriots lie dead at their feet. I'm just saying.) Maybe this silence stops people from seeing it in the same way they do road deaths. Or maybe it's because the benefits are bound to the 'ending' of life in a way that's more obvious than - no, no, wait, it's pretty bloody obvious in the case of that stupid war. Or maybe these losses are seen as preventable by other means - which often isn't true. (More to the point, why were you even driving that car? Why didn't you take the goddamn train?)
So as a political position, it's very hard to consistently defend the right-to-life. As a religious view, that's your call, but it's not mine - I don't think life is simply created and destroyed, I don't see human life as being intrinsically above other forms, and I think personhood is of far greater importance than life. (By 'personhood' I really mean presence in the world, physically, socially, intellectually and spiritually; being part of a great structure of things that touch you and relate to you. Everyone engages at their own level, but that of a 24-week fetus is negligible - certainly when compared to that of a newborn baby, in my totally uninformed and liberally-biased view.) Were I to become troubled about the needless killing of persons, abortion would be a long way down the agenda.
I'm not speaking of religious tenets about the status of human life; what I'm talking about is policy. There are no leaders anywhere (well, except just maybe Bhutan) who put human life first when making the rules. Life wasn't sacred when we invaded Iraq. It wasn't sacred when we decided that it's worthwhile to have all these death machines on our streets, either - cars kill 67 people each week in the UK, and 825 each week in the USA. Life isn't sacred when we talk about climate change - zillions of reports on the human cost of the crisis resulted in mere hand-wringing, while the Stern report on the economic cost of inaction was what made climate change a political priority. When the hell do we ever talk about the importance of human life when we're deciding on policy?
Oh. Yeah. Here. (a link I totally stole from here). Why is that, I wonder?
Honestly, there's no need to invoke conspiracy theories there - it just looks like a vicious cycle of silence. Because human life is sacred, celebrating the economic and social boon of free, legal abortion is a supposedly icky thing to do. (All the while, we're meant to cheer on those lovely liberated Iraqi statue-squishers while a million of their compatriots lie dead at their feet. I'm just saying.) Maybe this silence stops people from seeing it in the same way they do road deaths. Or maybe it's because the benefits are bound to the 'ending' of life in a way that's more obvious than - no, no, wait, it's pretty bloody obvious in the case of that stupid war. Or maybe these losses are seen as preventable by other means - which often isn't true. (More to the point, why were you even driving that car? Why didn't you take the goddamn train?)
So as a political position, it's very hard to consistently defend the right-to-life. As a religious view, that's your call, but it's not mine - I don't think life is simply created and destroyed, I don't see human life as being intrinsically above other forms, and I think personhood is of far greater importance than life. (By 'personhood' I really mean presence in the world, physically, socially, intellectually and spiritually; being part of a great structure of things that touch you and relate to you. Everyone engages at their own level, but that of a 24-week fetus is negligible - certainly when compared to that of a newborn baby, in my totally uninformed and liberally-biased view.) Were I to become troubled about the needless killing of persons, abortion would be a long way down the agenda.
Sunday, October 14, 2007
Paydirt.
Who said this?
"The Armenians were subjected to a genocidal campaign that defies comprehension and commands all decent people to remember and acknowledge the facts and lessons of an awful crime in a century of bloody crimes against humanity. If elected President, I would ensure that our nation properly recognizes the tragic suffering of the Armenian people."
I think you know who said that. In a letter written during his election campaign seven and a half years ago. Hats off to Irving Washington for the heads-up.
A later addendum for further paydirt:
What happens when a mass-market magazine prints a topless photo of an unconsenting 14-year-old? They get a slap on the wrist. Because they can't possibly check that the material they make oodles of money from is consensual, let alone legal! They're far too busy making money for that. So they get a slap on the wrist. Meanwhile, of age women who consent to appear in porn get three years inside, if the Home Office doesn't like their porn, but they can't know if it's okay or not until the Home Office has watched their porn. The law makes so much sense. But it is good to know that I agree with APRFs sometimes.
"The Armenians were subjected to a genocidal campaign that defies comprehension and commands all decent people to remember and acknowledge the facts and lessons of an awful crime in a century of bloody crimes against humanity. If elected President, I would ensure that our nation properly recognizes the tragic suffering of the Armenian people."
I think you know who said that. In a letter written during his election campaign seven and a half years ago. Hats off to Irving Washington for the heads-up.
A later addendum for further paydirt:
What happens when a mass-market magazine prints a topless photo of an unconsenting 14-year-old? They get a slap on the wrist. Because they can't possibly check that the material they make oodles of money from is consensual, let alone legal! They're far too busy making money for that. So they get a slap on the wrist. Meanwhile, of age women who consent to appear in porn get three years inside, if the Home Office doesn't like their porn, but they can't know if it's okay or not until the Home Office has watched their porn. The law makes so much sense. But it is good to know that I agree with APRFs sometimes.
Saturday, October 13, 2007
Kissin' trolls
Just when you're thinking the world is a decent place, up pops an idiot CiFer reminiscing about the good old days when it was cool to rape your spouse. *le sigh* I've got a lot of cynical enjoyment out of leaving youthful, uninformed comments on that thread. I'm not quite there yet myself, so I'm free to see it as a bundle of things (religious/cultural rite + legal arrangement + domestic situation) that do no need to be related, all of which have immensely dodgy histories, and which it is wrong to reward people for bundling together because on the whole those who do it are already winners.
Something everyone should know about: Warner Bros have decided to never again make a film with a female lead. Fine. Fine. That's their prerogative. I'll just never pay money to see one of their films again.
These may be the coolest people in the whole wide world. There's this beautiful idea in ILLUMINATUS! that one can only ever be the caretaker of a space, not its owner, because you are fleshy and temporary while the space, the land, is eternal. By that measure, these 'artists' are probably better caretakers than those who claim to be 'violated' by their squatting in spite of never finding a sign of their presence in four years of occupation.
But wait, no, these are the coolest people in the world. (the sparkly person showed me that.)
and !! Extraordinary place-games indeed. Shame I missed it, but hey.
Something everyone should know about: Warner Bros have decided to never again make a film with a female lead. Fine. Fine. That's their prerogative. I'll just never pay money to see one of their films again.
These may be the coolest people in the whole wide world. There's this beautiful idea in ILLUMINATUS! that one can only ever be the caretaker of a space, not its owner, because you are fleshy and temporary while the space, the land, is eternal. By that measure, these 'artists' are probably better caretakers than those who claim to be 'violated' by their squatting in spite of never finding a sign of their presence in four years of occupation.
But wait, no, these are the coolest people in the world. (the sparkly person showed me that.)
and !! Extraordinary place-games indeed. Shame I missed it, but hey.
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