Sophianotloren

It’s true. I have recently (yesterday!) purchased a motor vehicle. It was a pleasant and invigorating experience, and my car is very beautiful and full of confusing technology and excessive purse storage. I have named him Dracarys, and he will serve me well. Having accomplished this task in less than 48 hours with only a brief flurry of emails, one telephone call outsourced to A Man, and a ten-minute in-person visit merely to sign pre-arranged paperwork and receive a bucket of swag and two sets of keys, I now wish to share with you the lessons I have learned along the way. They’re applicable to those of you who might want to purchase a new or certified pre-owned vehicle, I will not pretend to know anything about the niceties of used-car-haggling. I hear Roxane Gay’s dad is who you should bring along for that. Otherwise, this is what you should do.

Step One: 

Figure out exactly what car you want to buy. Do this online. Do not walk into a dealership. The internet is literally stuffed with rankings and reviews and Best Mid-Price Blue Sedans lists. “Shouldn’t I test drive some cars?” No. Can you drive a car? You’re set. After you’ve been driving it for a week, you won’t be able to imagine driving a different car anyway. Why spend a couple hours of your life trying random cars like you’ve flown into Phoenix for business and are trying to figure out where the parking brake is on your rental? It’s a new or certified pre-owned car. They drive. They go vrroooom. I am glad you have picked a car.

Step Two:

Discover who sells this car in your area. Let us now move to my beautiful, personal story of triumph. I decided on a particular car, as per Step One, let’s call it a Dragon. There are two Dragon dealerships in Salt Lake City. I went to the dealership websites.

Let’s get one thing straight: I do not talk on the phone.

You don’t have to! You never have to talk on the phone if you don’t want to. That is because you can…

Step Three:

Contact the internet sales department! There will either be an email address for this, or a generic “Make an Inquiry” box, into which you type “please email me, I would like to buy a car.” Then you wait. You will probably wait about four minutes, because car dealers are like travel agents were fifteen years ago: hungry, and aware the end of their industry is upon them. Okay, you have received an email from a person. Ideally, you have received emails from a minimum of two dealerships. If there is only one in your town, email one in the NEXT town. You need two to tango, trust me.

Step Four: 

Say “Hi! I’ll be doing this over email. I would like to purchase a 2014 Model X with the extra-fire package. What is your best price on that?” At this point, I received a very rapid response from each of my two dealers. Dealer One said: “That model is retailing for Money, I can offer you a discount which will bring it down to Money – $1000.” Dealer Two said: “I would have to order that in for you special, so it would probably cost Money.” NOW THE DANCE BEGINS.

SIDEBAR: In lieu of offering you a PRICE, you may hear “I can offer you 0.9% financing over 60 months!” Pay no attention to these words. You want the best price, not to be distracted with what your monthly payments will be. And, if you are actually planning on paying cash, do not tell them until the very, very end, because they make a lot of money off financing, and you will probably not get as good a deal if they know upfront they will not be making said money. Speaking of not mentioning things, if you have a trade-in, keep it to your damn self until I tell you it’s safe to mention it.

Step Five:

Email Dealer Two (or whoever made you the inferior offer) and say: “Oh! I’m talking to Dealer One, and they have one on the lot they’re willing to offer me for Money-$1000.”

SIDEBAR: The beauty of this system is you need speak only truth! You are merely a CONDUIT for the truth to be passed back and forth between two dealerships. You are not the enemy, the other dealer is. It is they with whom they do battle. You will drink the blood of the fallen.

Now, in my case, Dealer Two responded instantly to that message to announce that HE HAD FOUND a 2014 Model X with the extra-fire package, right there on the lot, like magic! Isn’t that incredible? And I could have it for Money – $1200!

Step Six:

Email the Dealer Formerly Known As The Best Deal and say “I’m talking to Dealer Two, and he can do Money – $1200.” Wait. Dealer One can now do Money – $1400! You’re no fool. You know we’re going to email Dealer Two and tell him that Dealer One has countered with Money – $1400. Wait.

Step Seven:

This is a great time to take yourself over to truecar.com, plug in the model and year and package info, and see: 1) the MSRP (what you would pay for this car if you just showed up like a yokel and handed them your money no questions asked) 2) the invoice price (probably what the dealer paid for the car and will basically never go below – I mean, it can happen, but I’m not a WIZARD) and 3) what other people in your area have wound up paying for this car. It will also say things like “a good price for this car is below X,” “a great price for this car is below Y,” and “a YA GOT SERVED price for this car is F for FOOL.” Then you know these things, it’s nice. Back to the dance.

Step Eight:

Obviously, this elaborate gamesmanship could go on forever. It will not, though, because one of two things will happen!

Scenario One: Eventually, one dealer will just give up. You have taken him to the ragged edge of invoice pricing, and he can go no further. In this scenario, you will buy from his competitor. We’ll come back to this part. But you have won!

Scenario Two: Both dealers will have gone through the basically inevitable step of saying “I have to go talk to my GM to see if I can go any lower on this car.” (Spoiler alert: when the alternative is losing the sale to another dealer, the GM will tell them they can go lower on this car.) At which point, they will say to you “I am authorized to do whatever it takes to beat the other dealer.” This is great! This is not helpful, however, to your dance. You want numbers. Again, you will speak only truth: “Hahahaha,” you type, “that is exactly what Dealer One is saying to me! What is your absolute bottom dollar on this car?” They may not tell you. They may simply repeat that they will beat the other guy. What do you do now?

Step Nine:

Those numbers you ran earlier on truecar.com? Now you’re going to use them. You are probably in “great price” territory already, having brought these two dealers to their knees. Whatever increments prices have been dropping by ($200, $400, etc), double up, and make sure that the amount you are about to offer is ASPIRATIONAL and BOLD. Email your favourite of the two dealers. Trust me: you will have a favourite by now. Mine was Dealer One. Email him and say “Okay, I’d really like to buy this car from you. If you can give me this car at Most Recent Best Offer – 2x The Usual Drop We’ve Been Doing As We Go Back and Forth, I will not email Dealer Two and ask him to beat it.” He will probably say you have a deal. If he does not, you’re not an idiot, take it to Dealer Two.

NOW, if he says yes, you could theoretically still email that number to Dealer Two, like a jerk. It’s probably fine. I couldn’t do it! I gave that nice man my word, and we barely scraped above invoice, and I was very happy.

The important thing is, one of these two dealers is going to give you the absolute lowest price you can get away with paying for this car. You have won.

Optional Step Ten:

Do you have a trade-in? THIS IS WHEN YOU MENTION IT. Trade that lil fucker in. In our case, we had already unloaded our 1999 Chevy Tracker for a thousand bucks to a nice young couple and wished them luck.

Optional Step Eleven:

DISASTER STRIKES. Because you cannot talk on the phone, but want to pre-do most of the paperwork (again, you want no surprises when you walk into the dealership to sign), you pass this phase off to your husband, A Man. (Gay women would never be so silly, I do not include them in this disaster scenario.) While your husband is on the phone, he remembers that you need a roof rack. Because he is not engaged in THE DANCE, he finishes the call, walks into the room where you are working on your misandrist blog, and says “we’re good to go! Oh, I had forgotten we needed a roof rack.” It transpires that he has paid MSRP for the roof rack, and thus eaten into some of your hard-won gains. You will hold this against him for at least a day, probably less if your misandrist blog money is not paying for the majority of said car. But it’s the PRINCIPLE.

Step Twelve:

Go pick up your car (do not buy an extra warranty, do not buy magical sealing paint, do not buy anything extra.) It is yours now. Finance, pay cash, who cares. You have forced men to the breaking point and beyond. You are a feminist hero. Play Liz Phair very loudly on the trip home.

Special thanks to John Adams of Jody Wilkinson Acura of Salt Lake City, who was a really nice guy. Additional thanks to Twitter user Pete Gaines, who spent many years in the car business and told me I didn’t have to talk to someone if I didn’t want to.

Read more How to Buy a Car Without Interacting With a Human at The Toast.

There is little doubt…that Curtis Scherr intended to inflict severe emotional distress on his daughter-in-law and succeeded in doing so.  -  Richard Posner

Not too many good links this week; the World Cup and hearings on the new Canadian Prohibition dominated my timeline, so if there were any other good links I missed them.  Most of these items are wholly absurd; some are funny-absurd and some horrifying-absurd, but most point to a world gone mad, especially where politics is concerned.  Everything down to the first video is from Grace; the links between the videos are from Jasper Gregory (“war”), Michael Whiteacre (“LOL”),  Popehat (“bureaucracy” and “trademark”), and Mike Riggs (“horrible”); and the second video (via Brooke Magnanti) is the world’s oldest surviving song, which may help you relax after all the brain-strain produced by the other items.

• Cop arrests man for refusing to let his house catch fire.
• “Kafkaesque” is too weak a word.
• I hate it when this happens.

• War is hard!
• I genuinely LOLed.
• Bureaucracy at work.
• The absurdity of modern trademark law.
• Proof that government will ban literally anything it can.
• One of the most horrible excuses for a human being ever.

From the Archives

• A thorough debunking of the oft-repeated claim that “human trafficking is the third most profitable crime”.
• The government just can’t resist trying to control anything involving sex.
• The ridiculous & harmful consequences of laws against consensual acts.
• Government “study” made to justify sexist “trafficking” preconceptions.
• Reinforcing whorearchy is not the way to win right to employ whores.
• How to support decriminalization without revealing personal interest.
• Wealthy control freak wants everyone on the “sex offender” registry.
• Politicians are usually forgiven; those whose lives they destroy, not.
• Other things FBI agents believe in besides rampant “sex trafficking”.
• Irish nuns abducted children from mothers, sold them to Americans.
• Australian prohibitionists say that poor Asian women are all stupid.
• Cops, thieves, Popeye, sociopaths, Florida, prisoners and slinkies.
• US blocks sex workers from conference, so they set up their own.
• No, a camera doesn’t magically protect sex workers from arrest.
• More sophomoric “humor” from sadistic New York “authorities”.
• Yet another case of government interference magnifying harm.
• Swedish feminist wants ban on drinking alcohol near children.
• At least Argentinian “survivors” don’t support criminalization.
• Swedish prostitutes win the right to claim social benefits.
• Shamans punish teen girl for possession of taboo object.
• Mainstream media begins to discover Dr. Laura Agustín.
• The true story of a Nigerian sex worker in Amsterdam.
• When governments ban things, they magically vanish!
• Interview with an escort arrested for looking young.
• The beginning of my guest blogging on The Agitator.
• An anti-criminalization article in The National Review.
• Chinese “authorities” evict activist from her home.
• Why I have no sympathy for dangerous enemies.
• French sex workers protest the Swedish model.
• Could bitcoin help in the Greek monetary crisis?
• New York’s most famous madam of the 1920s.
• Five whores protest their pimps’ prosecution.
• The outing of prohibitionist shill “Stella Marr”.
• Using the passive voice to shift the blame.
• My second and third anniversary columns.
• Somalia sets age of majority to 40.
• Another week, another rapist cop.
• R.I.P. Petite Jasmine.
• A mysterious gift.

I read things, and I find the interesting. Here are some of them from this week.

But WHAT CAN BE DONE: Dos and Don’ts To Combat Online Sexism (Leigh Alexander)- Some constructive advice for men to meet minimal standards of basic human decency.

White feminism (via @renireni)- This comic explains the issues pretty well, in just two panels.

Coming forward (Squeamish Bikini)- On the horrid public response to Vanessa Feltz’s revelation about abuse she experienced.

Suarez got a longer ban for biting than racism (Jude Wanga)- Excellent analysis of the issues surrounding Suarez.

‘Feminist knickers’ show off everything that’s wrong with Twitter feminism (Brooke Magnanti)- Brooke explores symbolic action and a certain breed of Twitter activism.

Free supplement on epilepsy (Nature)- Nature have an open-access supplement all about epilepsy and there’s some really interesting articles in there, and I couldn’t pick just one because they were all really cool and interesting!

Dear White Gays: Stop Stealing Black Female Culture (Sierra Mannie)- This article pissed off white gay men somewhat, to nobody’s surprise.

Things Other People Taught me about Liking Girls (radandangry)- This is beautifully written.

On hearing the news this morning about NICE and WLS (Obesity Timebomb)- Analysis of the news that there will be a lot more gastric band operations in the near future.

And finally, what if Disney princesses were in an OitNB-style prison? Fuck it, also have some cats falling over.

This is not about sex, and not about The Sex Myth. This is about the old blog, and the growing scandal in News International's paper the rules they played by. And as Prince Humperdinck so eloquently put it, I always think everything could be a trap.

Very early on in blogging as Belle de Jour, I had an email address associated with the blog. It was with one of those free email providers and not very secure. Later, I wised up a touch and moved to doing everything through Hushmail. But for some reason I kept the old email up and running, and checked it occasionally.

So on the day of the book's release in the UK, I logged on to a public library computer in Clearwater, Florida, and had a look at that old account. There was a new message from someone I didn't recognise. I opened it.

The message was from a journo at the Sunday Times. It was short, which struck me as unusual: Come on Belle, not even a little hint? There was an attachment. The attachment started downloading automatically (then if I remember correctly, came up with a "failed to download" message).

My heart sank - my suspicion was that there had been a program attached to the message, some sort of trojan, presumably trying to get information from my computer.

Now, I understood the papers regarded all of this as a game. There were accusations that the anonymity thing was a ruse to pump sales. It wasn't. I was really afraid of losing my job and my career if found out. But I knew the rules they played by. And as Prince Humperdinck so eloquently put it, I always think everything could be a trap.

I did several things:

1. Alerted library staff that I thought there had been a virus downloaded on to the computer, so they could deal with it.

2. Phoned a friend who knew my secret. I explained what happened. He agreed to log in to that email account from where he lived, halfway around the world, open the email and send a reply, so they would have competing IP address information.

3. Alerted the man who owned the .co.uk address pointing to my blog, someone called Ian (who to my knowledge I have never met). He confirmed he had been contacted by the Times and asked if I was indeed in Florida. He told them he didn't know (which was true).

Point 3 is the part that makes me think my suspicions were correct. I hadn't replied to the message from the computer in Florida, so why would they have a Florida IP address? They did get a reply from "my" account, but it would have had an IP address from Australia.

(It's been suggested on Twitter that this could also have been because of a read receipt or embedded images. However, if my memory serves - and it usually does - the service I used did not send read receipts and I had images/HTML off as a matter of habit. There could of course be other explanations for what happened, but it is certainly true that the Times were trying hard to find me. Thanks for the comments, I hope this answers any concerns.)

Originally posted 2014-07-13 15:58:34. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

jynx maze cocksucker source: droolingfemme.

It’s very good. As others have noted, it’s probably the smartest franchise film of the summer, which could be textbook damning with faint praise, but isn’t. It’s also probably more accurately titled Dawn of the Planet Where Paranoid Assholes Really Have Done Their Level Best to Ruin Everything, which means, obviously, one could easily read lots of parallels into the real world into it. It’s not exactly a cheerful film, is what I’m saying. But well-written, well-acted, well-directed. It’s worth your time.

On a technical note, there’s not a moment in the film that I spent thinking about the fact I was looking at CGI apes, which given the number of the apes on screen, and the amount of screentime the apes have, is pretty remarkable. Credit here is split equally between the screen-capped actors (Andy Serkis most notably, but also many others) and the effects folks. We’re on the other side of the Uncanny Valley of the Planet of the Apes.

(Note: I saw the film in 2D, not 3D. It works very well in 2D; I suspect the extra dimension isn’t really necessary or even desirable.)

I don’t know about you, but I flunked telepathy. Which is a big reason why the culture of polyamory is, in many ways, so refreshing to me: the generally heightened expectation of self awareness and direct, ongoing communication. Not just between partners, but (often) throughout a network of overlapping relationships. Usually, when people can see and discuss their needs and boundaries clearly, there’s at least a good chance that they can cooperate to address them constructively.

This takes time, energy, and practice, of course. But in the long run, it’s easier and safer than avoiding seeing clearly (or discussing with your partners and metamours) what you really need, what you can really offer, and what really scares you.

…At least, that’s the goal. Like anyone, poly people are quite capable of falling short of their goals from time to time. Which is why it also helps to be patient and flexible (to a point) as people develop the emotional and communication skills to handle adult relationships, especially poly/open ones.

The catch is, some people don’t necessarily value self awareness or direct communication, even if they have poly/open relationships. This is a skill, and sometimes a goal, that must be learned. Rather than look inside themselves, speak up clearly, and listen closely, and practice courage, some people prefer to rely on their partners and or metamours to guess what they really need (despite whatever they may have said) and to automatically shield them from their unarticulated fears.

This amounts to outsourcing your emotional responsibility. And it leads to two of the most common (and often fatal) problems in relationships, especially poly/open ones: invisible fences and fuzzy landmines.

UPDATE Sept. 9, 2014: The ever-incisive Cunning Minx shared her thoughts on this post in the Polyamory Weekly podcast, episode 401. And she included some great tips on how can you tell the difference between partners/metamours who are making a genuine effort to be open and own their own shit, vs. those who are not devoted to working on their own issues and relationship mechanics. Listen now.

Invisible fences

Invisible fences are unstated boundaries or rules in relationships. Partners and metamours only discover them when they trip over them — often repeatedly. This generates considerable pain, insecurity and frustration for everyone involved.

Sometimes people in one relationship (couple, triad, etc) know about and have privately discussed the invisible fence — but other partners or metamours in their network do not know. Sometimes the invisible fence is unconscious, a secret even from the person who built it.

EXAMPLE: Joe requires his wife Sarah to spend every weekend with him (and no other partner) as a symbol of his primary rank in her life. Joe and Sarah realize that admitting this to anyone, including potential partners, would highlight Joe’s insecurity, which would embarrass both Sarah and Joe.

So Sarah claims to be flexible about her time, but then avoids makings weekend dates with her boyfriend Sam. Rather than explain the true reason, Sarah always has an excuse ready when Sam asks or complains about this pattern. Or she tries to dismiss each instance as isolated and “not a big deal.” Such diversion cuts off opportunities for the three of them to explore options to collaboratively resolve the underlying issue of Joe’s insecurity and possessiveness.

Since Sam has a demanding weekday job, this time restriction significantly limits how his relationship with Sarah can develop. Eventually he breaks up with Sarah in angry, bitter frustration.

Fuzzy landmines

Fuzzy landmines are rules and boundaries which are stated — but only in deliberately vague terms. This leaves it up to partners and metamours to guess where the landmines really lie — which means at some point they’ll guess wrong, and blow up the landmine.

Effectively, this means that people who plant fuzzy landmines are reserving the right to freak out (or withdraw) when their partners or metamours inevitably fail to meet their nebulous (and therefore impossible) requests or demands. They’re outsourcing responsibility not just for avoiding their own triggers, but for mapping those triggers so they can be addressed. They’re also attempting to maintain control through passive aggression.

After each inevitable explosion, it’s common that whoever sowed the fuzzy minefield requires considerable attention and care to be soothed, since they typically have avoided developing skills to soothe themselves — another way to outsource emotional responsibility. This further sabotages relationships and hurts/drains everyone involved.

Example: Dave, a single guy, starts dating Anna, a solo poly woman.* Anna also has a longstanding relationship with George, a married poly man. Dave has never been in a poly relationship, but since he’s strongly attracted to Anna he says he wants to try.

Although Dave has met George and likes him, he feels jealous and doesn’t know how to manage that. He tells Anna, “Don’t tell me anything about your dates with George.” When Anna asked Dave to clarify what exactly he did not wish to hear, Dave refused strenuously, even protesting that it was “crazy to discuss such stuff.”

From the start, Anna had told Dave that she avoids compartmentalized “don’t ask, don’t tell” relationships for ethical and practical reasons. But since she felt invested in her relationship with Dave, she was willing to make temporary concessions on disclosure to support Dave in gradually expanding his comfort zone with polyamory.

However, Dave would become highly insecure and upset whenever Anna mentioned George in any context, not just about their dates. If anything, he became steadily less comfortable, not more. Worse, Dave would blame Anna and sulk for days whenever his landmines blew up. Eventually Anna realized that Dave wasn’t even trying to overcome his jealousy and insecurity, despite his claimed intention.

The truth was, all along Dave had had a conscious but secret agenda to manipulate Anna into monogamy with him. This caused months of stress, especially for Anna, yielding bad ripple effects on her relationship with George. In the end, Dave secretly initiated a new relationship with a monogamous woman, and then suddenly dumped Anna, claiming polyamory had been their problem.

*Note: True story, this happened to me.

Why invisible fences and fuzzy landmines fail everyone

When boundaries/rules are left vague (or perhaps even denied) because the people who create them are ashamed of them — or because they wish to retain power by keeping others off balance, or because they wish to manipulate others, or because they simply lack self awareness and communication/negotiation skills — that’s never good for relationships or people. No one is left unscathed: the damage zone almost always includes the very people who erected the invisible fences or planted the fuzzy minefield.

Importantly, people don’t always create invisible fences or fuzzy landmines intentionally. These strategies aren’t necessarily malicious. They’re often done automatically, because so much of the mainstream culture in which we’re all marinating discourages emotional and relational responsibility.

Although they’re intended to increase security (at least, for some people in a relationship network) these strategies almost never end up “protecting” anyone or anything. In fact, they virtually guarantee distrust, drama, perpetual insecurity, strife, and ugly breakups.

Everyone experiences insecurity and other uncomfortable feelings in relationships. That normal. However, part of being an adult is learning how to manage and express your emotions in healthy, safe ways.

It may be tempting to offload to your partner(s) or metamour(s) your personal responsibility for emotional management — or to skip the work of communicating clearly and negotiating fairly. Because being responsible is hard work (until it becomes second nature).

Indeed, some strictures of the standard social relationship escalator model (such as not acknowledging or acting on attraction to other people) often are at least partly intended to make partners responsible for anticipating and managing each other’s emotional triggers and reactions. Similarly, people who prefer to just “wing it” with poly/open relationships often do so not because they’re flexible and carefree, but because they’re lazy and reckless.

Unfortunately, most people are lousy telepaths. They simply cannot anticipate and manage your emotions for you — not perfectly, anyway. Especially in situations like poly/open relationships where you’ll regularly encounter new emotionally charged situations involving more people. The circle of damage can spread quickly.

While invisible fences and fuzzy landmines aren’t strictly a polyamory problem, they may affect poly people more since poly/open relationships tend to offer unfamiliar or emotionally challenging circumstances more often. When you lack a default script for navigating relationships issues, you must think harder and more clearly in order to act responsibly.

It seems to me that being good at being solo poly (being poly as a free agent, without any primary-style relationships) may have the side benefit of teaching you how to spot and handle invisible fences and fuzzy landmines. That’s because solo poly folk must rely more on internal resources and awareness, since our relationships usually leave far less room to assume that others will manage our feelings and needs for us.

…But of course, this skill also gets honed through experience. And nonprimary partners (which includes most solo poly people) tend to disproportionately bear the brunt of other people’s attempts to outsource emotional responsibility.

True security: Fostering resilience and cooperation

The key to resolving this quagmire is to learn to be vulnerable, and to honor the vulnerability of others. Own and admit your insecurities, and commit to overcoming them.

Also, assume goodwill Your partner(s) and metamour(s) probably want to support you in safely achieving personal growth — because the entire relationship network would benefit.

If you’re on the receiving end of an invisible fence or fuzzy landmine, don’t assume ill will. Remember that people don’t always intend to build invisible fences or fuzzy landmines. Often they do it without considering options — or without even knowing they have options. It’s possible to give people a chance to learn better and do better, just don’t sacrifice your integrity in the process.

And ultimately, though it sucks, having the courage and resilience to leave unhealthy relationship dynamics that won’t change is an option — not to resolve this quagmire, but to avoid becoming collateral damage, or at least cut your losses. Fortunately, in relationship networks involving mostly emotionally responsible adults, it’s usually not necessary to hit that kill switch.

Yes, this process feels difficult, risky and scary. It will challenge and change you. But in the long run, it’s still a much, much safer bet for you and your relationships than building an insecurity system comprised of invisible fences and fuzzy landmines.

You will become more resilient and secure by developing emotional management and communication skills. And your relationships will become more stable and happier. As hard as this may seem, it is far easier and more achievable than expecting anyone to get better at telepathy.

Originally posted 2014-07-13 20:58:50. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

cameron canada wet food 5 source: droolingfemme.

BERLIN — This is the final weekend to see Ai Weiwei: Evidence at the Martin-Gropius-Bau museum in Berlin. The German exhibition is a sweeping survey of mostly recent work that occupies 32,000 square feet of gallery space across 18 rooms. It is the largest solo exhibition the museum has ever staged.

Along with a wide selection of sculptural works, including the monumental “Stools” (2013) placed in the museum atrium, there are numerous video works by the Beijing-based artist installed throughout, including his unfortunate foray into heavy metal music.

What becomes apparent in this particular show is the artist’s love of spectacle and materials, particularly luxurious ones like jade, marble, bronze, and gold. Handcuffs and cosmetics carved out of jade or a gas mask carved out of marble elevate common objects with sinister purposes into desirable art market commodities.

If the Sichuan Earthquake works, many of which are on display here, are what helped propel Ai to fame in the art world, some of his more recent pieces related to his 2011 detention are just as provocative. “Untitled” (2011) is comprised of dozens of office supplies confiscated by police from the artist’s FAKE studio in Beijing. Organized in a grid, the hardware is arranged on the floor like items in an open-air market. They appear ominous because of their history, but they reveal little of their actual contents. Like the sculptures made of jade or marble, they are rendered into purely aesthetic objects, a function they were never designed to have.

Ai’s Berlin exhibition is a crowd pleaser, with its large-scale installations that allude to Chinese oppression, government surveillance, and other topics that are chronically in the media spotlight.

Some of his newer work, including “Forge” (2008–12), “Rebar in Marble” (2012), “Container” (2013), and “Diaoyu Islands” (2014), suggest the artist is engaging in a conscious dialogue with minimalism, while more exuberant works, like “Circle of Animals” (2011) and “Han Dynasty Vases with Auto Paint” (2013), are clearly more neo-pop. Walking through the exhibition, it is easy to see how Ai’s art has become more political over time and how he has slowly focused his anger onto the structures and networks of power.

His most compelling work is still “Study of Perspective” (1995–2011), where he is giving the finger to governmental buildings, landmarks, and other symbols or expressions of authority around the world. In these photographs you can see how he is confident as an outsider, poking his finger in the eyes of power. It’s hard not to be impressed that as an artist who is still prevented from traveling outside his homeland, Ai can continue to engage the world with the scale and passion of his imagination.

Ai Weiwei: Evidence continues at the Martin-Gropius-Bau museum (Niederkirchnerstraße 7, Berlin) through Sunday, July 13.

In the Roman Empire, sacred space was not limited to physical structures—the gods were everywhere, and nearly all facets of life were imbued with the sacred.

There were however, some spaces which were more sacred than others. These spaces were known as templum, a word that looks an awful lot like our modern “temple” but actually refers to a segment of space deemed sacred, rather than a building or something like that (to which the term aedes would apply).

In On the Latin Language, Varro attempts to explain where this term came from. He says the following:

The word templum is derived from the word ‘to gaze’ [tueri], and so likewise is the word ‘to contemplate’ [contemplare]…the notion that a temple [templum] is a consecrated building [aedes sacra] seems to have stemmed from the fact that in the city of Rome most consecrated buildings are temples… (Varro, On the Latin Language, VII.8-10)

Varro’s explanation connects the word “templum” to the actions of augurs, who ultimately determine the boundaries of sacred space. They can do this in many ways, but here Varro details the establishing of sacred boundaries by trees, and how one sees the physical space between them. Basically, the auger eyeballs a specific space, chooses a few boundary points (in this case, trees), and designates that area as holy.  Easy peasy.

But…I think Varro is wrong. Ok, well not totally wrong. But not totally right, either.

Now, before we really get into this, I want to make clear that I am not a linguistic expert. I have a few years of Greek under my belt, but I still have a lot to learn and my translations are usually a bit bumpy. That said, I do know a few things, and I think they are applicable to this dilemma.

In Greek, the word for sacred space is τέμενος, a word whose root is τμ and is related to the idea of cutting or separating (verbal form: τέμνω). According to the most-holy-and-venerable LSJ, this word means “a piece of land cut off II. A piece of land dedicated to a god, the sacred precincts.”

We can see, in this use that a physical space is cut away from regular space, and given a special status. The idea is the same as the Latin one, this is an area set apart for things related to the gods.

Transliterated, τέμενος is temenos. Already, we see a shared word structure with temple—they both have the same “tm” (τμ) root! Furthermore, the act performed by the augurs in Varro’s description, can be seen as a “cutting apart” of sacred space from the secular. The key concept in both words is one of sacred demarcation. The question is: Is this conceptual sharing reflected in the root of the word?

I think it is. I certainly think it tells us more about the conceptualization of space than Varro’s explanation, which seems a bit circular to me. The Greek word τέμενος encapsulates not only the idea Varro is hinting at—that the word templum is related to other words of sacred space—but also shows the linguistic root at the heart of the concept.

Anyone who studies Latin and Greek will eventually notice similarities, despite the different alphabets used. It strikes me as strange that Varro didn’t put that together here. Perhaps there is a political reasoning behind his explanation that has to do with establishing Roman religious autonomy. Either way you slice it (ugh), sacred space in the Roman world was defined as a place physically separated, or cut away from regular space.

Varro’s attempts to determine the linguistic roots of templum show that the word had much in common structurally and conceptually with the Greek word τέμενος, which suggests that the idea of sacred space was similar throughout these parts of the ancient Mediterranean. While Varro may have some good instincts here about what the word templum means, it seems we can get a bit more clarity from going back to the Greek.

Photo by Sharon Mollerus.

Source: Varro, On the Latin Language, VII.8-10

Filed under: Academic, Greek

Summer 2014 is one of those occasional moments when those who resent their licence fee being squandered on sport get rather hot under the collar. As well as the annual Wimbledon fortnight dominating schedules, we also have the World Cup, the Commonwealth Games and the Tour de France kicking-off in the unlikely environs of Leeds, guaranteeing an increase in British TV coverage. ‘But there are entire channels devoted to sport!’ they cry (sort-of). ‘Why do we have to be bombarded with it on terrestrial channels as well?’

Step back in time three or four decades, however, back before the Murdoch media launched its first satellite, back even before that foul-mouthed lefty-leaning newcomer Channel 4 gatecrashed the cartel, and we have all sporting events spread across the two BBC channels and ITV. Even the sports that pay-per-view and subscription TV have held the live rights of for so long that it’s hard to imagine them being screened on mainstream telly now – the most obvious being cricket – had to be assimilated into rather crammed schedules alongside the other events already mentioned. Makes you wonder how they managed it, but they did. And let us not forget that every Saturday, spanning the almighty broadcasting chasm from lunchtime to teatime, both BBC1 and ITV handed over roughly five hours to non-stop sport. ‘Grandstand’ and ‘World of Sport’ had complete control of that timeslot, as fixed and set in stone as the school broadcasts were on weekdays. 

I wasn’t a sporty kid. I thought the wrestling was quite entertaining, but didn’t care for either incarnation of rugby or any form of motorsport or athletics; granted, the reading of the football results before ‘Doctor Who’ had a daft romanticism akin to the shipping forecast, with the Scottish clubs having especially exotically odd names – Queen of the South, Meadowbank, Partick Thistle et al – but if it was one of those drizzly, dreary afternoons that kept the bike locked in the shed, what alternative was there on the box? An afternoon institution by the name of Saturday Cinema on BBC2 – the sole alternative; if you didn’t like sport, you were provided with a glorious cinematic education.

There was a rigid rule in place up until around the middle of the 1980s that kept films with a shorter vintage than five years away from TV screens – ‘Cabaret’, for example (released: 1972), didn’t receive its British television premiere until 1978. The way that British TV dealt with this embargo was to give the kiss of life to the Golden Age of Hollywood. At a time when monochrome shows from the 60s were being junked because nobody in television believed the public, who had forked-out small fortunes for colour TV sets, would tolerate black & white broadcasts anymore, Saturday afternoons on BBC2 were a sanctuary for movies that spurned Technicolor in favour of a lush cinematography that manufactured a unique illusion of the real world in fifty shades of silver, one unlike anything on offer in the expensive disaster blockbusters at the local fleapit.

For those of us who hadn’t lived through the realities of the 30s and 40s, the interpretation of it that we garnered from Saturday Cinema was of fire escapes on the sides of buildings, hats on every head, Art Deco automobiles, raincoats, tuxedos, cigarette holders, Bourbon-on-the rocks, neon lights flashing through venetian blinds, shoeshine boys, speakeasy clubs with dancing girls, black pianists and chanteuses in sequins, streetwise dames who gave as good as they got, and fast-talking, snarling guys who spoke in a slang that had the infectious rhythm of jazz, guys who’d shoot first and ask questions later. The look was as startlingly distinctive as the dialogue, as was the music – stabbing strings that emphasised the intensity of the melodrama during the final scene; and someone always died in the final scene. These films opened with the credits and concluded with a simple ‘The End’; they rarely ran longer than ninety minutes; they lifted the young viewer out of the genuine horrors played out on TV news broadcasts and into a parallel past with comforting archetypes and clearly-defined boundaries that were easier to understand, not to mention far more seductive. The women were beautiful and the men were handsome because the cinematographers spent hours lighting the set before shooting actually began; this really was cinema as an art form, utterly separate from reality and re-imagining the world in a way that only the graphic novel is capable of doing in the 21^st century.

The incredible on-screen presence of Cagney and Bogart or Crawford and Davis is a world away from the studied mumbling of contemporary movie icons. These were actors who had paid their dues on stage and always carried their voices to the back-row. They predated the Method, but the curious caricatures of real people they played seem just as authentic as the Method because they make perfect sense in the artificial construct of reality they inhabit – just as nobody in a comic book thinks it remotely odd that musclemen in tights engage in fisticuffs that leave their streets resembling war-zones. Who pays for the damage when the Incredible Hulk has a punch-up with the Thing? Who cares?

Children stumbled upon classic cinema in the 70s and 80s because there were no TV alternatives on a Saturday afternoon. Now there are, and it’d be interesting to see how many movie stars from the 30s or 40s any child today could name. If you have kids, show them some pictures. Would they recognise Edward G Robinson or Barbara Stanwyck? Would they even recognise Laurel and Hardy? Some of these old stars were still alive when I was a child – and occasionally turned-up in a toupee on ‘Parkinson’; but a lot of them were long-dead. They were before my time, but of my time as well. In a fragmented television landscape where anything other than talent contests, quiz shows, soaps and ‘maverick detectives’ hunting down serial killers have been reduced to niche interests and ghettoised via specialist channels, a child would have to seek out these movies now; I didn’t. A paucity of choice actually brought the viewer into contact with programmes only the converted would make the effort to track down today. I welcome the availability of choice in terms of channel numbers, but I’d like there to be a little more choice within the channels I can receive, not a schedule designed solely to give me more of what I’m already familiar with. Perhaps kids today depend upon the film-buff dad or uncle with the extensive DVD collection to do the job television controllers once did. I hope so. The world of ‘Double Indemnity’, ‘White Heat’, ‘The Roaring Twenties’ and ‘Mildred Pierce’ remains as entertaining an alternative to what’s outside the window as any the 20^th century invented. And still a bloody good alternative to a summer of sport.

©Petunia Winegum

(Also cross-posted at Freedom In a Puritan Age, which allows comments.)

Now that the obscenity trial against Michael Peacock is over [background], what have we learned? Apart from the fact that there are still people who get their porn from DVDs rather than the internet?

(Rather wonderfully, the jury came back with a verdict of Not Guilty, unanimously, on all counts after about a tea-break's worth of deliberation.)

It's that perhaps we are finally beginning to become comfortable with the idea of consent, the notion that one does not have to practice a particular sexual kink or orientation to not condemn it, and that people who approach an escort who goes by the handle "Sleazy Michael" and rent or buy DVDs from him are possibly, just possibly, not being blindsided by the nature of their content.

Which is probably a great relief to my publisher, given that I've written about more than a few of these so-called "obscene" acts (in chick-lit bestsellers no less). The law used to bring the charges against Michael, the Obscene Publications Act 1959, was the very same invoked in the Lady Chatterley's Lover trial.


The official guidance on OPA 1959 includes depiction of acts that are necessarily non-consensual (sex with animals). But the list also contains a fair number of acts which can be consensual, and crucially, it is those consensual acts that were on the DVDs Michael Peacock distributed. This failure to distinguish consensual and nonconsensual sex acts is something that must be addressed. Not only because is an important point as regards sex and kink, but also because making this point crystal clear in guidance on law would help to shape discussion of issues around sex in a way that is more reasonable and less anachronistic. The ethics of sex are entirely about consent. I can't say this often enough. The ethics of sex are entirely about consent. Anything else is hollow moralising.

It was only a couple of days ago that I realised the defendant, Michael Peacock, was someone I know. In my opinion he is a nice person who is genuinely enthusiastic about his work and his clients. In short, the best kind of escort. A really top bloke. And brave too. The thought that he corrupts or defiles anyone who doesn't want said treatment is frankly ridiculous. [Peacock interviewed by Drake Blaize]

But the notions that led to this trial even happening are part of a line of thinking that is all too pervasive when it comes to sex. The sexualisation debate for example is entirely built on the erroneous assumption that if suggestive material wasn't available, young people would never become curious about sex. The idea that sex (and especially sex where commerce is involved) is unique, and uniquely corrupting, is an unfortunate leitmotif in public discourse. Religious doctrine is certainly an influence. The feminist and post-feminist notions that paid sex and pornography constitute de facto abuse feed into this as well. In such an atmosphere, someone who distributes images of consenting adults engaging in perfectly legal acts is targeted arbitrarily, simply because it is Big Bad Sex.

It's this culturally pervasive context that made the verdict of not guilty on all counts all the sweeter. There's a strong element of 'what's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander' about this outcome. After all, no one was disputing the legality of consenting to being fisted or punched in the balls. It was more the question of who might see it happening. The history of pornography is littered with such divides between who is corruptible and who is not. Private galleries of Pompeiian icons of Priapus and his giant penis were once fine for men of a certain class, but not suitable to be seen by the general adult public.

The case against Michael Peacock was in many ways trying to affirm the same: this is suitable for some but not for others. In this case, the medium is what enforces the class divide. It's perfectly okay for those who, in the privacy of their own homes, can afford it. It's not okay for the plebs to be looking at cheap DVDs or (presumably) downloads. Happily we can now say that that answer to the question "Is it a DVD you would wish your wife or servants to view?" is definitively, that's up to them and no one else's business.

So here's to Michael. Long may he continue on his personal and professional journey, hopefully buoyed by the knowledge that on this day at least, sanity reigned.


And now, an aside about a lot of well-meaning commentary I've been reading about the trial.

Is there an unwritten rule that when the topic is sex, even supportive and liberal commentators who identify as sex-positive must make it clear exactly where in this case their personal kinky line has been crossed? I lost count of the number of times either on blogs or on Twitter I read some variation of "Of course, I don't go in for these disgusting practices at all, but I fully support..." etc.

What's the problem here, you might ask? That of solidarity. You wouldn't begin a discussion on same-sex marriage with the sentence, "Of course, I am disgusted at the thought of being attracted to the same sex, but I fully support...", would you? You wouldn't start an article about trans people with "I am appalled at the idea of changing your born sex, but I fully support..." and so on.

In short, it's the "I have black friends" of kinky. It's patronising. Without doubt, there is something you do enjoy which other kinky (or not) people will find appalling. Trust me, it's true. I think scented candles and tickle teasing are dreadful but you probably don't; I find watersports more appealing than oral sex. Sexuality is not a hierarchy of extremity, with fisting, urine, and blood at its apex. Sexuality is not a linear progression from missionary-position, procreative, within-marriage, monogamous mating at one end and goatse at the other. Talk in public about what you think goes too far and you have undermined your support. You are, unwittingly, using the same 'line in the sand' argument that the prosecution pursued.

Setting yourself apart from other people whom you claim to support is very, very indicative of a way of thinking that I abhor. It reads of horror, it seethes with shame. It's the call girl who imagines laws that target sex work should apply to streetwalkers but not to her. It's the feminist who excludes trans women from women's spaces. "I may be socially unacceptable but at least I'm not that socially unacceptable" is the kind of talk that - to borrow the Diane Abbot tweet - divides and rules.

Bottom line, the question is about adult consent. Either we support it or we do not. Whatever our kinks are.

Abby is in her 50’s and small in stature, but her confidence and insouciance quickly captivated the lively crowd at today’s Old Timer’s meeting in West Hollywood.  She first got sober at 22 after years of heavy drinking, during which her cravings were so strong that she had to take drugs just to remain conscious enough to consume enough alcohol to satisfy them.  But still it wasn’t enough.  Then one day she found herself at a detox, and found AA.  She remained abstinent for the next 15 years, but she discovered that abstinence is not the same as recovery.  During this time, her relationships were actually more like hostage situations.  The need for other people was actually an addiction in itself.  She stayed with men even though she knew that they were not interested in commitment, and felt like she was just being used for sex.  It took many years to realize that it was probably wishful thinking to believe that simply by working harder at the Steps you can ‘get’ someone to love you.  Nevertheless, if you wait long enough, you will experience the miracle.  On the other hand, if you don’t attend AA, you will likely become a statistic:  9 in 10 alcoholics will die from their disease.  The key is the spiritual awakening in the steps, which requires trusting your will to a Higher Power of your choice, so if you’re not ready for that then you might as well walk out right now.  In her case it took 20 years, but she finally experienced the miracle.  This is her story.

Abby was born on the East Coast to an alcoholic father who had 9 children, each of whom he abused sexually from an early age.  In fact she recently had hip surgery to repair an injury caused by it.  He died years ago, and she has since forgiven him, and in fact sometimes communes with him as one alcoholic to another.  She has also become more tolerant of the mother who did nothing to stop him other than have more babies.  This is due to the miracle of the Steps: she has learned to ignore her craziness and simply smile when she is annoyed and let things go.  Recently she gave her mother a birthday gift of a heart carved out of pure jade.  Of course her mother interpreted this as a slight, but Abby knows not to take things like that too seriously anymore.  This is the miracle of serenity — but you must stick with the program to experience it.

Abby tried drugs and alcohol as a teenager, and they were fun for about a day, but she got addicted almost immediately.  It was a living hell out of which she could not escape until discovering AA at the age of 22.  Then she got her life back on track and became a high profile journalist who traveled the world by her 30’s.  However, she realized that her son in Florida who was a professional baseball player needed her to be close, so she opened a yoga studio there.  Unfortunately she lost the business due to a hurricane, and this triggered a relapse that ended with her sucking off a woman in the gutter (and she’s not even gay).  But that was 15 years ago, and she’s been in real recovery since.

After her relapse she researched her disease and discovered how cunning and baffling it really is.  The whole time it was just sitting in the back of her brain waiting for an opportunity to pounce.  Using the skills she developed as a journalist, she learned that it is caused by lack of serotonin and dopamine.  Most people have a normal neurology in which serotonin and dopamine kicks in and says, “That’s enough.”  But for the alcoholic, this never happens.  For that reason, they are compelled to keep drinking and drinking.  The only solution is to do service work, because science has shown that this produces dopamine and serotonin.  That’s the neurochemical explanation for addiction, as well as the reason for why AA works.  There really is something physically defective in the brain, and it’s a real disease, and it has nothing to do with childhood sexual abuse or resentment towards one’s parents, although such resentments can stand in the way of recovery of course.  But once you let them go, you lose the cravings to drink.  That can take until middle age, but it’s worth it.

After her relapse in her 40’s, she finally discovered real recovery.  The difference is that now when she is in a relationship with a man, she doesn’t try to use the Steps to ‘get’ him to fall in love.  She simply lets the relationship develop as it will, even if the man is perfectly clear that he is not interested in a commitment.  This is the difference between mere abstinence and true recovery, and is the miracle of AA.  You should stay with the program long enough for this to happen.  She has also learned not to hold people hostage emotionally, as this was just another symptom of her addictive mind.  Her service work has restored the chemical balance in her brain that has allowed her to escape such dysfunctional thinking: she now has 4 beautiful young sponsees whom she is helping to identify their own powerlessness.  If they can stick with the program as she did, then they too will experience the miracle and not be done in by their own deadly cravings.  She is also keeping a close eye on her other son who has undiagnosed OCD, which is a precursor to alcoholism.  The boy takes after her father.  So assuming the disease doesn’t kill him, at least it will provide a handy excuse for mischief, and then he should be ‘happy, joyous and free’ by middle age when he suddenly realizes that his heavy drinking was actually caused by a disease all along just like his mother explained many times, and now he can explain it to hostages — er, sponsees of his own.

The most telling artifact in Energy That Is All Around is a letter artist Alicia McCathy received from her school, the San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI), back in 1992. In it, the dean of students chastises her for campus graffiti, which he says “looks like shit,” and goes on to explain:

If those anonymous graffiti artists delude themselves that this is art, they are mistaken. Adolescent? self-indulgent? inconsiderate? – yes. Art?… no, at least not very interesting art – just mediocre attempts at appearing ‘subversive.’

The dean concisely articulates many of the criticisms hurled against graffiti writers and street artists, brash stereotypes that linger today and hinder the art form’s acceptance by some orthodox corners of the art world.

Curated by Natasha Boas, Energy That Is All Around makes the case that the Mission School, a group associated with the San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI), is one of the major art movements to emerge in the 1990s and continues to inspire people around the world. Writing in the accompanying catalogue, Boas explains: “These postpunk Mission School artists would soon become international icons for new generations of makers and art students with their raw, immediate, and gritty street and studio practices and their spontaneous exhibition-making impulses.”

The show, which is mounted at NYU’s Grey Art Gallery, highlights five artists associated with that wonky, folksy, colorful, and DIY aesthetic that came of age in San Francisco’s Mission District. Chris Johanson, Margaret Kilgallen, Alicia McCarthy, Barry McGee, and Ruby Neri are the focus of this exhibition, and their art demonstrates a clear kinship.

The exhibition is one of the first to give the movement an art historical treatment, but the curator unfortunately shies away from telling the story of the movement in the gallery, preferring to let the objects speak for themselves. There are advantages to this hand-off approach to curation, inviting the viewer to make the connections themselves, but in a show trying to make the case for why the Mission School matters it weakens the argument. The question on whether the Mission School, a term first coined by critic Glen Helfand in 2002, is really a “school” is debatable, but Renny Pritkin, writing in the catalogue, brings up another meaning of school that is useful in understanding these artists, “I would add the metaphor of a school of fish, moving together to foil common enemies.”

Considering the Mission School as something that emerged in opposition to the world around them is useful. It encourages you to consider the artwork as a foil not only to the polished hyper-capitalist world of Appropriation Art, the ennui of 1980s German painting, and the glowing screens of digital art, but also to the rise of the 1990s tech scene, the Culture Wars, and the march of urban gentrification.

Some of the artists in the show, notably the men — Barry McGee and Chris Johanson — have long been in the art world spotlight. Another, Margaret Kilgallen, is posthumously gaining recognition for her folk-inspired lettering and clean linear style. Alicia McCarthy and Ruby Neri are the two lesser-known artists, and they certainly hold their own in this grouping. Long a recluse, McCarthy has purposefully shied away from the limelight, which has hindered any commercial or museum-related success, while Neri’s highly personal visual vocabulary is varied, perhaps too varied, making it hard to discern a uniform style.

To the uninitiated, it can be hard to distinguish some of the works by Kilgallen from those by Neri, McGee, or others; Boas explains in the catalogue that it was a conscious curatorial choice to blur those lines. All the artists incorporate hand-drawn lettering, cartoony figures, painterly abstract forms, and detritus in their art, which strengthens the case for a “school” of art but can make it harder to consider each artist’s unique contribution to the larger conversation.

Where the exhibition stumbles is in the installation, which is more precious and archival than it should be. While the endless arrays of small drawings, paintings, photographs, and densely exhibited collection of papers help historicize the art movement, the prevalence of lesser works diminishes the power of more important pieces like Chris Johanson’s “Restorative Moon Sculpture #1″ (2011) and “The Survivalists” (1999), the latter being one of the highlights of the exhibition.

Created just before the first dotcom bubble burst, “The Survivalists” is filled with snippets of conversations about real estate, security, violence, and conflict. One talk bubble reads, “I think people can open up and co-exist …,” while another says “Hi there, I’m a $400,000 box room. Won’t you come live in me?” Two small drawn figures push shopping carts into the gallery space, and they look like they could fall off the edge of their precarious perch if they went any further. “The Survivalists” taps into some of the anxiety surrounding the larger forces that were transforming the city without falling into cliché. A year after this work was completed, San Francisco was reeling from a severe economic downturn. But people soon realized the recession was only momentary, as within a few years the tech industry was back, stronger than ever, making the city more inhospitable for all the marginal figures that are often the subjects of the Mission School.

If you consider that Johanson, Kilgallen, McCarthy, McGee, and Neri were all reacting against the corporatization of their beloved city, then the rough-hewn style as an act of resistance makes more sense. In contrast to the techno-utopianism of California’s powerful computer industry, where hardware and software was becoming sleeker, more user-friendly, global, and minimal, the Mission School artists’ focus on the local, folk, craft, intimate scales, personal meanings, and the pleasure of play is a stark contrast. Artists in the Mission School are also comfortable exploring the contradictions all around them. In Johanson’s “Dome” (2001), a small figure praises his new rural life in an obviously expensive geodesic dome — it is an absurd, but familiar moment for those who have ever dreamt of leaving it all behind.

The most perfectly curated corner of Energy That Is All Around features an unexpected grouping of Ruby Neri’s “Untitled (Table with Yellow Face)” (2013), Margaret Kilgallen’s “Untitled” (1997), and Barry’s McGee’s “Untitled” (c.1990–2013), which was commissioned for the show. McGee’s patchwork sensibility is an ideal contrast to Neri’s cool tabletop of ceramic and plaster objects. All three works elevate found objects that have been transformed in the artist’s studio, but they also demonstrate careful attention to detail that is a big step away from the DIY aesthetic that normally dominates their work. If the earlier work is messy and rough, here each artist demonstrates a clarity in their work that isn’t reacting to the world as much as transforming it.

If street art and graffiti were one of the unifying aspects of the Mission School, today if feels like that world is more of a historical footnote than a direct influence on the work of those artists still making work. I wanted to love Energy That Is All Around, and its promise of offering this group of artists their due, but ultimately I couldn’t because it was cluttered with too many small works that didn’t really have a lot to say. The catalogue, on the other hand (not to mention the limited edition zine created by Johanson), is where the case is made for the Mission School through the words of its advocates and participants.

The success of artists and movements can often be gauged by their influence on younger generations of artists, designers, and creatives, and in the case of the Mission School, these artists have inspired legions of emulators. But the objects themselves in Energy That Is All Around are not enough to tell the story of this Bay Area movement, which was engaged in an “art of resistance,” to use Dina Pugh’s words from the catalogue. While the idea that these artists were fighting against the floods waters of corporatization is a brilliant one, there are only a few works in the galleries that appear to have waged that war.

Energy That Is All Around closes at NYU’s Grey Art Gallery (100 Washington Square East, Greenwich Village, Manhattan) on Saturday, July 11.

Filed under: War on Women Tagged: rape, rape culture

On July 11, 1934, the Southern Tenant Farmers Union formed when eleven white farmers and seven black farmers met in Tyronza, Arkansas to form a union of sharecroppers to fight for poor farmers’ rights. Perhaps the last gasp of the Farmers Alliance potential to reach out across racial lines and transform rural life, the STFU sought to empower sharecroppers to fight for economic rights during the dark days of the Great Depression.

The Great Depression was very hard on poor southern farmers. In fact, the Depression there had really started in the 1920s. Crop prices plummeted after the overproduction of World War I. By the time the official Great Depression began in 1929, the farm economy had been terrible for years, meaning the sharecroppers on southern land, a labor situation that had begun as something of a compromise between freed slaves and white landowners after the Civil War but had since spread to employ poor whites as well, were in entrenched, awful poverty.

Arkansas sharecroppers, 1930s

Tyronza, Arkansas was a bit odd for the rural South as there were active socialists in the area. This was not totally unknown in the South, but rare enough by 1934. Floods and droughts had ravaged the region in recent years and the national attention these received interested socialists in the area. As those ideas began spreading into the area, some locals, even merchants, showed interest in an economic system that offered an alternative to a capitalism that had not worked out for their region. Living in Tyronza was Harry Mitchell, a socialist and sharecropper. He and a gas station owner named Clay East saw that the owners were not sharing their Agricultural Adjustment Act payments with the sharecroppers and they began organizing their neighbors into what became the Southern Tenant Farmers Union.

The STFU’s main mission was fighting against the Agricultural Adjustment Act. The New Deal promoted agricultural centralization, which threw thousands of sharecroppers off their land. The Okies coming to California in the 1930s, were mostly fleeing the loss of their land rights from AAA-related centralization, not the Dust Bowl. It was the same in eastern Arkansas. AAA had two provisions that severely hurt sharecroppers. First, it had no provisions to ensure that the money landowners received to reduce farm production trickled down to sharecroppers. They were expected to share it but the owners were just keeping it all. Second, it encouraged the eviction of sharecroppers through its centralization policies, in effect if not in word. In 1934, these farmers had nowhere to go. A decade later, the jobs of World War II would give them opportunities. These did not exist in 1934. Eviction meant moving to a strange place with no likely hope of a job.

Southern Tenant Farmers Union meeting, Arkansas

The first strike began in the fall of 1935, when Mitchell led sharecroppers out for $1 per pound of cotton versus the 40 cents the owners were offering. When the owners compromised on 75 cents (and some went all the way to $1), the workers declared victory and returned to work. Of course, the response of landowners to this movement was violence, especially once the unionization campaign began. The STFU was a threatening organization to the white power structure. That it was integrated automatically made it dangerous. The first commission of STFU representatives to travel to Washington to appeal to the government included two African-Americans in its five members. At one meeting, four armed whites walked in and ordered all the blacks to leave if they did not want to be lynched. Many members were thrown off their land for membership in the organization. Beatings of organizers took place while police violence was common and threatened lynchings scared many members. STFU offices had to move from Tyronza to Memphis, where the urban environment provided more safety.

The STFU soon spread from Arkansas to Oklahoma, Texas, Missouri, and Tennessee. It claimed 7500 members in Oklahoma, demanding land redistribution, with land owned by banks given to small farmers. In Arkansas, it forced politicians to create the Governor’s Commission on Farm Tenancy. Oklahoma passed the Landlord and Tenant Relationship Act in 1937 to encourage long-term residency on the land and promote the government as a mediator of the problems of the sharecropped farm, but conservative outrage led to its repeal in 1939.

Unlike previous farmer movements like the Populists, STFU leaders actively thought of themselves as in the same boat as industrial labor and thus sought to become a union like in eastern factories. The STFU joined the Congress of Industrial Organizations’ agricultural union, the United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing, and Allied Workers of America (UCAPAWA) in 1937 but withdrew a year later, worried that UCAPAWA’s communist leadership was looking to take over the STFU. UCAPAWA president Donald Henderson saw the STFU as a utopian vanguard of rural revolution rather than a real union and attempted to overwhelm its leadership with paperwork so he could take it over. When the STFU leadership withdrew, it led to UCAPAWA ending its attempts to organize in the fields, focusing on the canneries, where the CIO (and the CP) was always more comfortable. The break with UCAPAWA severely hurt the STFU’s ability to function, especially as several of its leading organizers were CP and stayed with the union. Two-thirds of its locals collapsed.

Southern Tenant Farmers Union logo

As the STFU and landowners battled each other with increasing intensity, the situation finally received some attention from the government. This led to the Resettlement Administration (RA), intended to help sharecroppers find better lives. But the funding for the RA always remained small and the solutions it developed long-term rather than immediate. The government also created the Farm Security Administration (FSA), to provide low-cost loans to poor farmers who wanted to buy their own land but this was not a realistic option for the vast majority of STFU members. The 11,000 farmers around the nation it helped in 1939 was a nice start, but far too small to deal with the scale of the problem. Ultimately, the government did little to alleviate the problems AAA had spawned for sharecroppers.

The STFU declined by the early 1940s. Mitchell continued leading it, called the National Farm Labor Union after 1945, for the rest of his life, but it was only a shadow organization except for some success organizing the California cotton fields in the 40s. Because of the mechanization and industrialization of farming, most of the cotton labor force disappeared from the fields not long after World War II. The same happened for many other crops. The exception to this history of agricultural labor is Latino farmworkers, laboring in exploitative conditions not dissimilar to that of the early 20th century American South. On these farms, usually in more difficult to mechanize fruits and vegetables, the fight continues.

This is the 114th post in this series. Previous posts are archived here.

Atrios:

I do think krgthulu’s correct that our horrible economic policies exist in part because the super rich like it that way, but I think it’s wrong to think they know what they’re doing. Yes inflation is going to be worse for them than the rest of us, but a shit economy won’t be great for them either. It’s enough that they believe inflation will be horrible for them, it doesn’t need to be true.

That rich elites weren’t begging the government to take the health care nightmare off their hands taught me that they often don’t have any idea what they’re doing.

This point can be illustrated by one of the takeaways from Esther Kaplan’s extraordinary piece about the closing of an extremely efficient lighting fixture factory in Sparta, TN. As she observes, the evidence that chasing lower labor costs by closing domestic factories increases profitability is actually dubious-to-nonexistent. Essentially, the savings you get from cheap labor tend to get eaten up if not exceeded by the additional costs from transportation and warehousing as well as the loss in market share that results from you not being able to get products to customers as quickly. But the stock markets like moving factories to lower labor costs, so they’re rational for managers and owners even if they aren’t in the longterm interests of the company. And the markets reflect the anti-labor assumptions of American elites.

Originally posted 2014-07-11 16:02:26. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

alina li source: droolingfemme.

 

OFFICIAL GOVERNMENT RELEASE

In this edition of NIAAA Spectrum, NIH scientist and Addiction Guru Aaron White, PhD explains the widely disparaged and misunderstood blackout phenomenon.

Blackouts are when you do something stupid while drunk and then claim not to remember it.  There are 4 types of blackouts: red, green, black and salmon.  Red blackouts are when you get into a fight and have absolutely no memory of it until the next time you get drunk, at which time you re-enact the full blow-by-blow and show off the scabs.  Green blackouts are when you have sex with a guy while blackout drunk and have absolutely no recollection of it until the next time you have sex with him and then remember why you gave him a fake number the first time.  Black blackouts are very rare.  That’s when you send a bumptious Cease and Desist letter to a person you have a crush on and don’t remember it until everyone is making fun of you and then claim it was actually ‘satire’.  Our own lawyer here at NIH Dale Berkly experienced that a few months ago.  However he has made amends for it.  Salmon blackouts are when you get blackout drunk and enjoy a delicious salmon fillet, about which you have no memory until someone reminds you how much you enjoyed it, and you respond “It was tuna not salmon” and they say, “It was salmon you idiot you were drunk!”  People who were introduced to alcohol at a young age by their parents are at increased risk of salmon blackouts.

Now you might be wondering how you can know that you had a blackout if you can’t remember it.  That’s a tricky question.  But say that every time you see this guy coming you immediately cross to the other side of the quad.  If you find yourself doing this then you quite possibly had green blackout sex with him.  About 1 in 4 college students report ‘greenouts’ on a regular basis, and 1 in 12 is a sexual assault often involving roofies.  We are outfitting college students with specially designed body-cams to analyze it more scientifically.

If you believe you were a victim of a greenout roofie attack you should stand in the middle of the quad and point at the perpetrator and yell “rapist with AIDS” repeatedly as loud as you can and spit at anyone who tries to distract you.

Blackouts work by shutting down circuits in the hippocampus that form memories.  This is the ‘disk drive’ in your brain.  So if your disk drive isn’t working then obviously you can’t form new memories.  It’s like when you spill your jack-n-coke on your computer and it seeps into your disk drive and you lose all your favorite jack-break links.   That’s actually how I got the idea in the first place.  So I talked to Nora and we decided to test the theory in rats.  Well I stuck some probes in their brains and results were conclusive: the hippocampus is the ‘disk drive’ of the brain!  My ‘crazy theory’ was completely vindicated!

We believe that by spreading the theory of blackouts to young people we can convince them that they don’t have to feel responsible for embarrassing behavior, which is important for healthy self-esteem.  We encourage parents to teach their children that blackouts are a common consequence of drinking.  Also blackouts are an essential ingredient in any good AA story, even though we don’t tout AA more highly than other treatments for the dreaded disease known as alcoholism, which makes the victim drink and get drunk and do stupid shit of which they often have absolutely no memory until they are reminded of it or get drunk again — fragile memories which they can lose again under stress, such as during questioning by law enforcement.  The disease is cunning and baffling and can really sneak up on you when you’re not looking, especially if you have a history of lying and sociopathy and AA attendance or if you’re a lawyer.  The disease can cause the full NIAAA Spectrum of blackouts to occur on a regular basis as well as reports of close brushes with imminent death.  We encourage AA nazis to link to this article as scientific ‘proof’ of addiction.

Having a blackout doesn’t mean you need treatment, but reports of it can be used to alarm your friends and loved ones into thinking that you might have a ‘problem’.  Then when you go to AA, you can claim that you don’t want to be there but your friend made you go.  Chicks love that.

Ultimately our goal is to undermine the outdated religious doctrine of free will, and make people think that they are puppets of forces beyond their control.  Once we have firmly established the concept of ‘addiction’ in the public’s mind, we will introduce a fake virus that supposedly makes everyone susceptible to it, followed by a powerful narcotic that will put everyone in a trance.  We will then complete the transition to a New World Order government and plunder the ‘lower’ societies with impunity, just like in the Hunger Games.  This may seem crazy but it’s already working.  We at NIAAA and NIDA can publish purely bogus research like this with impunity and no one even bothers to check it.  No one even lifts a finger in protest.  It’s brilliant!  Please contact me at aaron.white@nih.gov if you would like to apply for a position as an elite.  Please include name, age, location and clear face pic.  Hurry spots are limited and going fast!

In summary, anything you can do while drunk and not blacked out you can do while blacked out — you just won’t remember it the next day.  Nor could anyone even tell that you are in a blackout.  For example, I have no recollection of writing this article.  But it’s not bad, right?

NIAAA Spectrum: Shining a Light on Alcohol Blackouts

Read more:

• AddictionMyth Acquitted on All Charges!
• Making Amends
• Red Face Club
• Cease and Desist!
• A Conversation with Aaron White, PhD
• Lie Like the Wind – How to know if AA is right for you
• How to Drink Like a Normal Man – Just keep it simple
• Powerlessness as Religion – Only the good die young
• You Are So Brainwashed It’s Funny – Who will pay for their sins?
• The Problem of the Jews: a Lesson in Brainwashing Propaganda – How AA bamboozled a country
• The Drinking Club – Watch what they do, not what they say
• Cory Monteith: The Cult of Powerlessness Claims Another Victim
• I Call Blackout – I did what??
• Rat Addicts and the Science Of Addiction – The best of 60′s Science Fiction
• A Conversation with Dr. Drew Pinsky – 13% and proud
• School for Scoundrels – What you actually learn in the rooms
• AA is a Pagan Cult – Putting the ‘pagan’ in propaganda
• The Little Psychopath Could: How the Addiction Myth creates new Drug Addicts

Did you like this article?  Please Like/Share:

Pastor Jeffries says that sweet baby Jeebus would want us to keep the children out of the United States, you know, It’s the compassionate thing to do. And not to mince words about it, the compassionate thing to do would … Continue reading →

Sometimes, we need to see that good things can still happen, right?  That after decades of abuse, rescue can happen.  Like when an elephant is rescued from abuse and starvation…and cries tears of relief.  So, yeah, tell me animals are not intelligent and not our emotional equal.  Or that they don’t have as much a chance at possessing a soul as we bipedal asshat animals do?

And isn’t it good to think there are places that are a refuge?  Even for cats?

And then, do we get to the place where we can honestly consider animals as suffering as we do?  I NEED to eat meat, but more and more, I dislike doing so because of the idea of animals suffering — especially in the huge large scale ‘corporate’ farm/ranch model.  It might be a bit sketchy, but this is the blog for my softer brained moments, right?  I wonder, sometimes what it is we are eating when we eat animals whose entire lives have been nothing but misery?  So, I eat less meat, although I am allergic to roughly half the vegetative world…

Now, back to furniture work, continuing yesterday’s beginning!  The ‘library table’ has been stained, after being relentlessly sanded till the center and sides were more similar.  I do believe different types of wood were used; they took stain somewhat differently — but I do think it evened out pretty well.  Coat #1 of walnut is shown on the left, and coat #2 of walnut mixed with red chestnut is on the right!  Better, eh?  Onward to other pieces now!

 

Tagged: abuse, animals, furniture, householding, pets

Shorter Lanny Davis: “Well listen to me Ms. Bigshot, if you’re looking for the kind of employee who takes abuse and never sticks up for himself, I’m your man! You can treat me like dirt and I’ll still kiss your butt and call it ice cream! And if you don’t like it, I can change!”

For the Atlantic, Shawn Miller argues that what we decide to erase, through our technology, is often more enlightening that what is kept. Drawing an analogy between Middle Age palimpsests and a 19th-century Italian priest, Angelo Mai, who dedicated his life to finding what past monks had scraped off parchment and written over, Miller wonders what deleted information of ours historians will be interested in examining in the future:

So, the questions we should ask ourselves today: What information are we devaluing now? And what are the ramifications for the future? The answers will be reflected not only on the technology that we create, but on the learning we might hope to leave behind.

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• The Very Short Story

Here’s the trailer for Wild, starring Reese Witherspoon, based on the book by Rumpus columnist Cheryl Strayed. We’re unbelievably excited about this.

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Again.  Again!  A family, including young children, is dead.  They were shot execution style, one after the other, and only one is still alive. Because some man was pissed off that some woman didn’t treat him as he thought he deserved.  So, since he apparently couldn’t find the woman he was unhappy with, he killed her relatives.

Update: He crossed state lines to kill relatives of his ex-wife!  She had filed a protection order against him, and left the state they lived in to escape him.  So, tell me again that men are not a threat to women and children?

So, tell me again it is just nutjobs.  Tell me it has nothing to do with a society that tells men that women should be subservient little dolls and not people.  Tell me again that dead children don’t trump the fucking 2nd Amendment.  Tell the fifteen year old girl, shot in the head, that her dead family doesn’t deserve more than to be shot for some guy’s pissed offness — because he fucking CAN because his 2nd Amendment means SO much more than their right to life and a pursuit of happiness.

Yeah, tell me.  But you better not do it to my face.  Because I just might deck your sorry, soulless ass.  And I might be a 60 year old broad, but you’ll still know you’ve been knocked on your ass by an old woman.

Filed under: Politics, PTSD Journals, War on Women, WTUnholyF? Tagged: everytown-for-gun-safety, gun control, gun violence, misogyny, murder

The other night on the Fox "news" program Sean Hannity's Phantasmagorium of Spite and Fear, with guest host Eric Bolling, Senator Rand Paul, who always looks like he just finished getting off by rubbing a ferret against his balls, was asked about the surge of unaccompanied minors from Central American nations trying to cross our borders by the thousands. Paul said, "Right now, we have a humanitarian nightmare down there, with every child from Central America wanting to come across the border. You can't have a beacon to the whole world to come unless you have a secure border."

First of all, "every child" from Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras doesn't wanna come here. Just the ones who live in depraved poverty and murderous lawlessness. A 2012 Department of Labor report on Honduras said that child labor there is used for everything from cutting sugarcane to construction jobs to mining to fucking strangers. This is not to mention all the aforementioned murder. So maybe it's hard to blame 'em. But every child? No, sorry.

But it's the second sentence there that boggles the Rude Pundit's mind: "You can't have a beacon to the whole world to come unless you have a secure border." What the hell does that mean? You can't invite everyone unless the door is closed? You can't offer blow jobs to the entire football team unless you wear a mouth guard? Parse it out, and you've got the classic conservative clusterfuck of rhetoric. America is a beacon of hope to the world in all its glorious exceptional exceptionalism. Fuck, yeah. But, fuck you, you can't reach it, sexually-exploited Salvadoran kids, because Rand Paul has to sound tough on immigration. What are we? 'Cause, despite trying really hard to, you can't say you're that beacon if your light is only meant to shine on a few.

This is the knot many on the right are contorting themselves into: compassionate words with tough actions: "Isn't this a pretty, shiny dildo I'm going to force up your ass?"

America's grumpiest lawn gnome, John McCain, told Bill O'Reilly yesterday, "[B]y the way, if a child is in fear of being persecuted by the environment in which they live, then we should have them go to our embassy, go to our consulate, apply for asylum and we can expand those capabilities. Not have them show up at our border. Tell them if they show up at our border, they will be returned." Absolutely. Little Maria who has been raped and held captive most of her life must know all about how to fill out I-589 and submit it to the local embassy. It's so easy a child could...never mind.

Then there's the twat-faced Ted Cruz, who always dives to the bottom of the barrel and say, "Wait, what's that under the scum? I'll gobble it down." Cruz, speaking on Sean Hannity Rapes Your Ears Through the Radio, got off on describing just how horrific the lives of the children are: "They will force one little boy or one little girl to cut off the fingers or ears of other little boys or little girls." Bizarrely, Cruz, who, it should be pointed out, is a U.S. Senator, thinks that "The children will not stop coming, and will not stop being subjected to this horrific physical violence and sexual violence unless and until this administration begins enforcing our laws." How enforcement of our nation's laws will stop the mutilation of children in another country is left unexplained, but, hey, he went to Ivy League schools, so he must know.

And, just like Jesus would want a good Christian like Cruz to do, he wants to send the kids back to the places where they have their body parts cut off. That'll teach 'em.

But every once in a while, every now and then, someone surprises you, like an extra shot on the house from that cute bartender. Ya gotta give a clap or two to Glenn Beck, who is loading up tractor-trailers to bring the kids at the Texas border food, water, and toys. No doubt there's some dickish motive, but, hey, at least Beck is acting like this ain't just immigration season. It's a full-blown, where-the-hell-is-the-U.N. refugee crisis.

After yesterday’s Renaissance GIFs post, which featured the work of James Kerr, our readers alerted us to two other curious projects that remix Old Master paintings.

One is a sketch by the Jungleboys for Australia’s ABC1 television channel, while the other is a surreal and demented walk through Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights for Odonis Odonis’s song “Order in the Court” (Buzz Records), directed by Lee Stringle.

While the Odonis Odonis video is mesmerizing (I suggest you turn down the volume, unless you’re into loud industrial punk), the Jungleboys sketch gets to the core of our fascination with Old and Modern Masters.

Comedy is about overturning power structures and hierarchies, irreverence in the face of authority, and nothing is more sacred or authoritative in Western art history as the work of the Masters. Imagining the dark and comedic impulses of the figures in these paintings momentarily robs them of their power, only to reassert their role as powerful objects in our collective imagination once the joke is done. Effective comedy comes from the outside looking in, the trickster usurping the throne. Contrasts and surprises are staples of comedy, but so is timing. A joke dissected is no longer funny. To dismantle a joke all you have to do is explain it.

Writing in On Humour, Simon Critchley observes that humor “reveals the depths of what we share,” and returns us to common sense after it exposes us to a paradox whether in the form of speech or action. Humor, he says, “is practically enacted theory. I think this is why Wittgenstein once said that he could imagine a book of philosophy that would be written entirely in the form of jokes.” Now, that would be funny.

h/t @13v3rk and @OCAD

You know how it feels when somebody gives you a thick dossier and thirty or forty years later someone asks you where you put it, and you just cannot remember… Infuriating isn’t it. It was there just 10,000 days ago, but now… It’s like it never existed!

What? That has never happened to you? Ho Hum. Well, it’s just happened to Leon Brittan. He’s 74 and he can tell you exactly how it feels.

The news that Lord Brittan has been interviewed under police caution comes as little surprise to me because his name has been being hawked around the Internet for the last couple of years now, since the initial attempt upon the other Lord, McAlpine, came to naught.

It’s not the first time Lord Brittan has been caught up in a public Sex Scandal however. Oh me, oh my, No! Here he is in the Sydney Morning Herald on June 28^th 1984. The story had even reached Australia! If you don’t already know this story, as I’m sure many Anna Raccon’s erudite readers will, then please do take the time to read it. If you do, read it again because it was so long ago you may have forgotten some of the details!

 

As you will have noticed, there was something spooky going on, according to Private Eye, which at that time was in it’s high prime of Scandal Mongering, being edited by the recently retired Richard Ingrams. Was Ingrams part of a labyrinthine Tory double-bluff plot? Or was he telling the truth? I think we should be told. 

What about the source of the “missing dossier”. It came from Geoffrey Dickens MP, now deceased. Dickens, like a namesake of his, produced more than one volume. Here is the gist of another of Dickens’ dossiers around that time:

Geoffrey Dickens latched on to Audrey Harper immediately, supporting her and helping her spread the news that, to her knowledge, English Satanists were still sacrificing children. Dickens was one of two Tory MPs (the other being David Wilshire) engaged in anti-occult agitation during the late ’80s. Wilshire actually called for witchcraft laws to be re-instated, and Dickens campaigned for occult literature to be restricted or banned. Complaining that “perverted cults which worship the devil can freely publish guides on how to dabble in the occult,” he opined, “The Home Office must act.” He worked closely with Childwatch, a Hull-based organization that used every opportunity to warn the public about Satanic ritual abuse in England. Its founder, Diane Core, declared that up to 4000 English children were being sacrificed by Satanists annually. She publicly aired bizarre stories from alleged SRA survivors, like the “breeder” who claimed her cult froze sacrificed babies so members could defrost and eat them later. Wilshire declared in the House of Commons that Satanism is about the ritual mutilation and torture of people, particularly children. 

One solution to the puzzle about where the dickens did Dicken’s dossier go, is painfully obvious. It would have gone back to the same place it came from: MI5.

Who ya gonna call? Ghost Busters?

Spooky innit.

©Moor Larkin

Content note: this post discusses violence against women and police violence

There is a gang of mostly men who have a monopoly on perpetrating and enabling violence against women. They recruit just enough women to do their dirty work for them, to hide the fact that they are the biggest perpetrators of male violence. We can see them for what they are.

Just today, we have two stories of gross abuse of women coming from the police. It has taken almost thirty years for the police to finally be blamed for shooting Cherry Groce, causing her to live out the rest of her life paralysed from the waist down and eventually die from the injury. Almost thirty years, a woman’s life destroyed, from a senseless act of violence for which she didn’t get to see justice in her lifetime. Meanwhile, in the realm of inciting violence and abuse of women, we see a story where the Met encouraged their Twitter followers to pile on a woman for complaining about the noise their helicopters make.

I suppose for me, this is somewhat personal. Once again, I’ll give a tiny sample of stories, limited to within the last month, of the police acting as perpetrators and enablers of violence against women as there’s just too fucking many, even limited to people I know personally. There’s my friend Ellen, who was assaulted, wrongly arrested, held without her medication and then put through a malicious court case and left with PTSD from the experience. There’s my friend Sam, who believed the white liberal lies, called the police and was blamed for the abuse she was receiving, perhaps because she isn’t the nice white girl the police like.

It’s a fact that the police have the power to hit women. It’s a fact they have the power to lock women up. And it’s a fact that they and their apologists will blame their victims for what happened to them.

It’s a fact that police are positioned as the gatekeepers for getting justice for violence against women. It’s a fact that they fail survivors over and over again. And it’s a fact that due to the choices they make, they enable abuse of countless women.

If you’re a nice white middle class girl, it can be hard to see the police for what they are. To you, they’ll be that nice jolly bobby who helped you get the people who tweeted rude things to you sent to prison. It’ll be the organisation who you can work with because they’ll definitely improve at helping out all the abstract women who had trouble.

They are not. Ask sex workers. Ask Black women. Ask women of colour. Ask trans women. Ask any woman who is not a good girl. They are the aggressors, the perpetrators, the ones who attack already-marginalised women while the privileged cheer from the sidelines.

A coherent, inclusive and effective feminism can and must be deeply critical of the police, and begin from a position of utter abolition of this structural perpetrator of male violence. I don’t doubt such a proposal will be met with harrumphing, cries of NOT ALL PIGGIES and eventually tending towards the hope I get raped and then let’s see how anti-police I am (pre-empting that by saying already happened, didn’t report).

If you think the police are on your side, that is the utmost manifestation of privilege. For most women, they’re just abusers in a silly hat.