More festive larks

Johann Hari is a persistently lovely man:

"There is a cost to this chilling of protest. Every British citizen is the beneficiary of a long line of protesters stretching back through the centuries. Every woman reading this can vote and open her own bank account and choose her own husband and have a career because protesters demanded it. Every worker gets at least £5.93 an hour, and paid holidays, and paid sick leave, because protesters demanded it. Every pensioner gets enough to survive because protesters demand it. What what your life would be like if all those protesters through all those years had been frightened into inactivity? If you block the right to protest, you block the path to progress. You are left instead at the whim of an elite, whose priority is tax cuts for themselves, paid for with spending cuts for the poor.

"Your right to protest is under threat."

& tomorrow is UK Uncut Day everybody!

XL

No, Science!

Rather good post from Posie Rider yesterday about this article, and more generally a whole genre of lazy, "adaptationist fallacy" journalism that seems depressingly prevalent these days.

I don't have time to rant about the science -- I'd probably be very witty if I did, I can't help it! -- but very quickly: (1) if the male Autumnal years were infertile, you can bet your barren ballsack there'd be research claiming that strong, wise, grandfathers guarding our little H. erectus litters from antique wolves, falling into tar pits etc. were a vital evolutionary adaptation, the "Butch Sage Hypothesis"; (2) sleaziness sensus strictus is a phenomenon of modernity; and (3) if we accept the normative tone of this hearsay at face value, some of the other things that are "good" for the species would be no age of consent for women, a hoary-whorey age of consent for men, no laws against rape, and totalitarian eugenics! Mmm!

P.S. Posie has a very funny picture of a eugenics tree.

Atta Grrl!

Important opinion piece by Posie Rider out today, along with an illustration by Catherine Redfern!

I haven't been able to think of any other dappy ideas for democracy, BTW! All my ideas have been really good and adopted by various visionary states this week. Cf. Finland's new constitution. Oh, but I did come across five post-democratic ideas from science fiction. "The Proper Study of Hivemind is Hivemind."

Blood-Soaked Tampon

Bard cud!

Melody Wittgenstein & I have been instrumental in the realisation of Posie Rider's latest artistic vision, the short "Blood Soaked Tampon et. al." [sic]. Will Hirstory thank us, Melody? Ze certainly won't forget us!

In PDF.

When like Melody I am old I shall warp purple, and I shall say things like this: "No I zhan't give you my autograph, because zat would be a forgery!"

(Aren't you . . . ?)

"Zat is beside the point: a zignature without a document, by law, is a forgery." (I don't know if this is true or if it will be then, but I will have got it into my head that it is). "For all I know my pet you're MI5, wanting to entrap and blackmail me for my assistance in dealing with a Caliph who has fallen in love with me, or thinks he has. I hold anyhow that tact in introductions, and honest purchases, are the better foundations of an autograph collection, and approaches of the illuztriouz in the ztreetz, odiouz."

Also I will be continually found lifting things far too big and heavy and have them taken off me amid the most soothing of protestations. Ooh I can't wait. I'll get busy. Apparently crack helps the process along.