beliefs, ramblings, sexuality

Pornography vs Obscenity

I’ve just finished reading Brooke Magnanti’s The Sex Myth: Why Everything We’re Told is Wrong (review later) and she makes a useful point about pornography and obscenity.

The word ‘pornography’ comes from Greek roots: porno-, related to prostitution; graphos, to write. Stories about hookers, in other words … People in the nineteenth century became more worried about drawing a line between what was art and what was obscene. Those worries helped shape the view of what today is labelled ‘pornography’ versus what is labelled ‘erotica’ – even though few people, if any, can give a clear idea of the difference.
‘Obscenity’, meanwhile, comes from the Latin obscenus, meaning repulsive or detestable. Something obscene is something that is offensive to the morality of the time, something taboo. The definition of obscenity is different in different cultures, and even people in the same culture can disagree about what is obscene. Many laws have tried to define obscenity. While erotic imagery can be defined as obscene, it isn’t always considered so, and some laws recognise this

To which I would like to add the word ‘prostitute’: one who engages in sexual activity in exchange for money (payment).
Put that lot together and it means my world view goes something like this …
Technically pornography is stories about those who engage in sex for money. To me this means that any video (or other medium) which portrays a sexual act, where one can reasonably expect that (some of) the participants have been paid is pornography and (depending on one’s predilections) may also be erotic. Mere photographs of vulvas or penises may also be erotic, but are not a sexual act so are not (at least in my world view) pornographic; they aren’t ipso facto a sex act.
Whether one defines the pornographic, or the erotic, as obscene depends very much on one’s personal morality. We each have our own moral code, which may or may not align with that of society at large, and an act (image, description) doesn’t become obscene until it offends our morals and transgresses the line into being taboo. And that act doesn’t have to be sexual.
To use my own views as an example, I have no problem with the depiction of sexual acts, let alone the depiction of breasts, vulvas or penises. Pornography (as defined above) for me only becomes obscene when it crosses the boundary into being violent, non-consensual or involving minors or animals. There are sexual acts I greatly dislike (eg. male homosexuality), but that doesn’t per se make them obscene. But I do find many other things in this world obscene, amongst them the gratuitous killing of people and animals, blatant disregard for human rights, FGM, rape (of people and the environment), corporate greed and bankers mega-bonuses. YMMV.
So pornography is essentially, technically, amenable to definition. Obscenity is not readily definable so easily in anything other that one’s personal world view. Pornography is (should be) a largely objective measure. Obscenity can only ever be subjective. Which, of course, doesn’t mean that legislation cannot prohibit certain acts because the moral view of the majority of the legislature is that they are obscene for them – that’s how our collective, social, morality works and it is only by iconoclasts like me pushing the boundaries that such collective views are shifted.

beliefs, books

Book Review: The Path

Michael Puett & Christine Gross-Loh
The Path: A New Way to Think about Everything
(Penguin, 2017)
This purports to be a self-help book of a new kind: one which encourages us to change our philosophy, and hence our actions, by doing small, simple things. As the cover blurb says:

The first book of its kind, The Path offers a profound guide to living well. It reveals for the first time how the timeless wisdom of ancient Chinese philosophers can transform the way we think about ourselves. Covering subjects from decision-making to relationships, it shows how making small changes in our everyday routines – as simple as showing weaknesses in meetings or greeting people differently – can make us happier and more productive.

The idea is good and the book should have been interesting, but I found it facile and superficial: like cheap brawn, lots of aspic with very little meat. I had to give up on it half way through.
As Ambrose Bierce once commented in a review “The covers of this book are too far apart”. It is a book of 200 pages, which frankly should have been no more than a third of that.
First off it suffers from the current publishing malaise of an over-large typeface, excessive leading, and wider than needed margins; ie. much too much white space. It is also, typically of Penguin, printed on appallingly cheap and nasty paper which is not going to withstand the ravages of time.
But for me, worse than all that, it is written is a very simplistic, almost dumbed-down, laborious style which I found it hard to read – it is so wishy-washy I had trouble picking out the key concepts. Consequently it gave me nothing to think about and take away. It needed a robust editor.
In a way I don’t blame the authors: the concepts are sound and the content would be a good subject of a single philosophy seminar. But it isn’t a book, and for that the publishers have to shoulder the blame.
Overall Rating: ★☆☆☆☆

amusements, science

The Conceptual Penis

Anyone who needs cheering up on a Sunday afternoon, could do worse than read Jerry Coyne’s blog post A new academic hoax: a bogus paper on “the conceptual penis” gets published in a “high quality peer-reviewed” social science journal – and the papers to which it refers.
If you don’t understand a word of it, that’s fine, because the paper being described, The conceptual penis as a social construct in Cogent Social Sciences, is a total and elaborate hoax which even the authors admit they don’t understand! Just as a small example:

Nowhere are the consequences of hypermasculine machismo braggadocio isomorphic identification with the conceptual penis more problematic than concerning the issue of climate change. Climate change is driven by nothing more than it is by certain damaging themes in hypermasculinity that can be best understood via the dominant rapacious approach to climate ecology identifiable with the conceptual penis.

The paper was designed to expose the trendy opaque nonsense of much of the social sciences. And it succeeded as it was published in a peer-reviewed journal.
The paper’s text sort of makes superficial sense – and I could see it becoming a radical feminist meme – but it is actually complete bollox. Enjoy it!

environment, science, thoughts

Radiation

There was a useful, if short, review by David Ropeik of Harvard in Aeon a couple of weeks ago under the title “Fear of radiation is more dangerous than radiation itself“.
This is something which has been said for a long time, but it is useful to have the threads pulled together in a referenced article.
As usual I’ll give your the tl;dr version.

The fear of ionising (nuclear) radiation is deeply ingrained in the public psyche … we simply assume that any exposure to ionising radiation is dangerous. The dose doesn’t matter. The nature of the radioactive material doesn’t matter. The route of exposure – dermal, inhalation, ingestion – doesn’t matter. Radiation = Danger = Fear. Period.
The truth, however, is that the health risk posed by ionising radiation is nowhere near as great as commonly assumed. Instead, our excessive fear of radiation … does more harm to public health than ionising radiation itself. And we know all this from some of the most frightening events in modern world history: the atomic bombings of Japan, and the nuclear accidents at Chernobyl and Fukushima.
Much of what we understand about the actual biological danger of ionising radiation is based on the joint Japan-US research programme called the Life Span Study … of survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki [see also here]… Within 10 kilometres of the explosions, there were 86,600 survivors … and they have been followed and compared with 20,000 non-exposed Japanese. Only 563 of these atomic-bomb survivors have died prematurely of cancer caused by radiation, an increased mortality of less than 1 per cent.


Based on these findings … the lifetime cancer death toll from the Chernobyl nuclear accident might be as high as 4,000, two-thirds of 1 per cent of the 600,000 Chernobyl victims … For Fukushima, which released much less radioactive material … UNSCEAR predicts that ‘No discernible increased incidence of radiation-related health effects are expected among exposed members of the public or their descendants.’
Both nuclear accidents have demonstrated that fear of radiation causes more harm to health than radiation itself … 154,000 people in the area around the Fukushima Daiichi … were hastily evacuated. The Japan Times reported that the evacuation was so rushed that it killed 1,656 people … The earthquake and tsunami killed only 1,607 in that area.
… … …
In 2006, UNSCEAR reported: ‘The mental health impact of Chernobyl is the largest public health problem caused by the accident to date’.
… … …
Fear of radiation led Japan and Germany to close their nuclear power plants. In both nations, the use of natural gas and coal increased, raising levels of particulate pollution and greenhouse gas emissions. Neither country will meet its 2020 greenhouse gas emissions-reduction targets.
… … …
Fear of radiation has deep roots. It goes back to the use of atomic weapons, and our Cold War worry that they might be used again … Psychologically, research has found that we worry excessively about risks that we can’t detect with our own senses, risks associated with catastrophic harm or cancer, risks that are human-made rather than natural … Our fear of radiation is deep, but we should really be afraid of fear instead.

Or in the immortal words of Rear-Admiral Sir Morgan Morgan-Giles: Pro bono publico, nil bloody panico.

environment, ramblings

How to be Green

Noreen and I have always maintained that we’ve done two of the most important things one ever can in terms of being green and preventing global warming. We don’t have children and we don’t run a car.
It turns out that we’re right, as this article outlines.

Any of [the top] lifestyle changes drastically reduces carbon emissions compared to more common practices like recycling, using energy-efficient light bulbs and line-drying clothes.

  • having one fewer child (an average for developed countries of 58.6 metric ton CO2-equivalent (tCO2e) emission reductions per year;
  • living car-free (2.4 tCO2e saved per year);
  • avoiding airplane travel (1.6 tCO2e saved per round trip trans-Atlantic flight);
  • eating a plant-based diet (0.8 tCO2e saved per year).

In fact, according to this list, we should also count the third item.
As always though there is a “but” …
Yes we’ve chosen not to have children. So far, really good. However we are not totally car-free. It’s true that neither of us drives and we’ve never owned a car, but we do use taxis a fair amount. I calculated many years ago that, when one looks at the total (money) cost of ownership, using taxis was much cheaper than running a car. Nevertheless, using taxis can’t count as totally car-free, although I’d maintain it is pretty damn good: on the 2-3 times a week we need car transport, by using a taxi for maybe 20 minutes, we share that car with tens of other people that day. And having to get a cab, makes us think about what we’re doing and where we’re going, as we can’t just jump in the car at any slight provocation, several times a day.
In addition we avoid air travel wherever possible. We’ve only ever done one long-haul trip (Washington DC) and even then we made a special effort to offset the carbon emissions. I don’t see us doing long-haul again; but one never knows. Although over the years I did a couple of dozen internal or European flights for work, we’ve only ever done a handful of short-haul flights for leisure purposes – and again I don’t see that changing significantly. Yes, of course we would love to go and see all these fancy places – but we don’t need to, it’s expensive (in so many ways) and we can live without it.
So while we may not be able to count a full 3 out of the 4, I reckon we’re entitled to 2½. Which is probably 2 more than the average person. No reason to gloat, but a reason to be sad that others are perhaps less compassionate, and a reason for some small contentment.
Ultimately it is all down to one’s ethical compass, how one views the world, and making lifestyle choices.
How well do you do?

quotes

Quotes

Our regular monthly round-up of quotes interesting and amusing …
The deeper we go down the internet-porn wormhole, the more it seems narrow-minded to understand porn exclusively in terms of what kind of sex it “teaches” us to have. Because in the streaming era, the amount and diversity of porn we watch exponentially outpaces that of the sex we have … Pornography is more than a mere causal agent in the way we screw. It has also become a laboratory of the sexual imagination – and as such, it offers insight into a collective sexual consciousness that is in a state of high-speed evolution.
[Maureen O’Connor; “Pornhub Is the Kinsey Report of Our Time” at https://www.thecut.com/2017/06/pornhub-and-the-american-sexual-imagination.html]
The globalists are using cats to depopulate whites. Because cats act as surrogate babies they cause white women to not want to have kids. Cats are like a parasite that sucks the maternal instinct from white women.
[Unknown]
We’re not going to introduce ID cards. We’re going to introduce cards of identification.
[David Davis, Brexit Minister]
Religion is the practice of training minds to ignore evidence, reason and logic and increasing the ability of believing in fairytales of Bronze Age and of being proud of them.
[Raghu K Kanam]
It’s an important problem. It’s important because it justifies the many attempts to solve it.
[Dr Sabine Hossenfelder]
We seem okay with violence, but nudity we race to criticise and censor.
[Eva Mendes]
Devon Rex: a delightfully alien-looking cat described by the The Cat Fancier’s Association as a madcap mix of a “cat, a dog, a monkey, and Dennis the Menace”
Civilised disagreement is the hallmark of intelligent people in a humane and rational society
[Robert Neuschul on Facebook]
What is the meaning of life? That was all – a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years, the great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead, there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark.
[Virginia Woolf]
Only you can fill in what’s missing. It’s not something another person can do for you.
[Haruki Murakami]
A number of prostitutes in Nevada, where brothels are legal, have organized as “Hookers for Healthcare” to oppose the healthcare legislation now pending in the US Senate. This poses a real quandary. I don’t know which side to believe. I mean, on one side, there’s this small group of amoral people who every day debase themselves by doing anything, no matter how disgusting and depraved, to please the men who give them money. And on the other side, we’ve got hookers.
[Phil Kloer]
Another round next month.

amusements

More Auction Amusements

We’ve not had any amusements and oddities from our local auction house for a while, largely because the last few sales haven’t thrown up anything really spectacular. Anyway here are the few highlights(?) of the recent sales. Any childish and inappropriate amusement is, of course, entirely in your brain!
Interesting old ivory including binoculars, a circular box, a bone card case with metal inlay, a desk clock, a glass paperweight, a Wills cigarette tin with a picture of the Queen, etc., and a tin containing miniature Nazi paper flags, etc.
A box of curiosities including a German cut-out 3D ‘theatre’ with actors, in original box, a pair of miniature shoes, an old purse, a chain-mail miser’s purse, two wartime handkerchiefs, a pin doll, an old notebook, military badges, an old lock, cigarette holder, etc., all in a fabric-covered box
Two miniature tortoiseshell guitars, a mandolin and a banjo
A 19th century portrait miniature of a child in a papier mache frame …
I wanted to know what the child was in a papier maché frame!
A vintage hand held fire extinguisher, a small box of vintage medicines in bottles and boxes and a Christmas fairy
Three modern large glass ornaments modelled as horns on metal stands
A replica ancient Greek helmet in steel and brass with black bristle cresting, on stand
A novelty metal garden seat in the form of a nodding dog
A large quantity of assorted fabrics, some on rolls, scraps, throws, cushion covers, needlework items, patterns, buttons, buckles, etc., also a small quantity of ladies accessories including a skin handbag, gloves, etc., two vintage costume dolls and a modern doll, a stuffed cat doorstop, etc.
A child’s rocking chair with stirrups …
An early 20th century instrument, possibly medical, an early photograph of a seated gentleman the frame marked, 58 Strand, a Victorian mahogany box of draughts and two large watermarks one of Darenth Mills Dartford and a portrait of Haile Selassie, etc.
Carved woodpecker inkwell …
A good shelf of African wooden tribal wares including bowls, spears, drums and benches
Which was followed by …
A good lot of wooden African tribal art including carved busts, figurines, bowls, jugs, paddles etc.
A Chinese late Qing Dynasty wood carving of three Buddhistic lions finished in red lacquer, with painted verso, in modern gilt frame, and a pair of native African throwing spears
A Timor horse skull mask incised with geometric decoration
An Eco 4 mobility scooter and battery which can be folded up into a car and transported
Ah yes, the patent folding battery.
Over 600 used golf balls
A decorative modern oil on board, of a Bible clutching a nun
A wooden boxed travelling chess set and board, a New Home sewing machine and two heated servers
A modern gilt framed flower fairies plaque marked spurious Minton on the back
A vintage oak wine barrel, a pair of vintage dog nut crackers and a decorative brass fish
Is cracking a dog’s nuts not classed as cruelty?
Seventeen vintage milk bottles including D Wilson & Sons and Lyndley Dairy, two vintage fire buckets and fire extinguisher, a Gordon wrench set in red metal case and other vintage tools …
Six boxes of terracotta plant pots in various graduating sizes
Yes, they really were used clay flowerpots.
A Celmac new ceramic toilet and seat
A charming Edwardian silver toasting fork with turned wood handle, with silver suspension loop, Sheffield 1908, together with a pair of late Victorian silver-plated and oak salad servers fashioned as gardening implements
More anon …

books, history

Book Review: The Watchers

Stephen Alford
The Watchers: A secret History of the Reign of Elizabeth I
(Penguin; 2012)
I mentioned this book some while ago, and promised a review of it when I finished it. At that time I was about four chapters from the end, but have only just got round to reading them – life has intervened in too many ways! Anyway, here at last is a review.
The book is a tour de force of forensic historical document research. There is little remaining evidence to go on, as Alford himself explains in his “Introduction”:

It would be wonderful to have the papers of [Elizabeth’s] secretary and his staff just as they were left at the end of Elizabeth’s reign. Instead we have to make do with tantalizing fragments, scattered pieces of a great documentary puzzle that keep historians on their toes. A stunning exception is the surviving archive of manuscripts belonging to Robert Beale, a clerk of Elizabeth’s Privy Council. Beale was a powerful character, a plainly spoken man of … high intelligence, an experienced bureaucrat and a master of government business. Over his long career, Beale collected the kinds of papers he and his colleagues needed to use every day, organized by themes and topics … Beale’s volumes in the British Library … allow us to understand an Elizabethan archive, to touch it and feel it: the stiff pale animal hide spines and covers, the leather ties to keep the books closed, the indexes for speedy reference, and Beale’s explanatory notes in what, after the frenetic scrawl of Sir Francis Walsingham [Elizabeth’s principal secretary] or the impossibly compressed minute writing of Walsingham’s most secret servant, Thomas Phelippes, is one of the vilest hands of sixteenth-century England … Unfortunately Beale’s papers are exceptional. Time, damp and hungry rodents quickly set to work on the piles of old government papers that lay in heaps in the Tower of London for centuries. Most of what survives today was preserved for us by the enterprising Victorians who … went through the chaos of papers they found in government and family archives and gave them order.

What emerges is a “who nearly done it” from the misty and murky world of Elizabethan espionage. Espionage that, in those dangerously unsettled times, was essential for the survival of Protestant England and Elizabeth. Espionage, which was perhaps the first really consolidated use by the state, and whose methods very much laid the foundations even for today’s shadowy world of subterfuge.
Alford uses the available papers to tell the story of the machinations underneath many of the plots against Elizabeth, and of the subtle, cunning and, yes, dishonest way in which Sir Francis Walsingham, Lord Burleigh, Robert Cecil (Burleigh’s son), and to a lesser extent the Earl of Essex, used spies, couriers and shadowy men to capture Catholic plotters, entrap Mary Queen of Scots and send many to the rack and the gallows.
We all knew that Mary Queen of Scots had been caught out colluding with the Catholic enemy. What we probably didn’t realise was just how many people were involved; many were just couriers of letters who knew not what was happening; but equally many knew parts of the plan and were paid handsome sums of money not to ask questions. We probably also didn’t know that the crucial evidence against Mary was in fact a forgery.
It is a fascinating story with web upon web upon web of interplay between agents, double agents and even triple agents. A web which ranges across much of mainland Europe as well as England. But this tangle of webs does make the book somewhat challenging, as you need a clear head to keep in mind who everyone is, and who is playing who off against who.
It is an engrossing read which is well written and keeps you turning the page – I had to restrict myself to a chapter or two a night just so as not to stay up round the clock to finish the book. This is a book which tells history in the raw, and in the way it happened on the ground at the time, rather than as the sanitised version we are all taught at school. It gives us an insight into what (at least for some elements of society) was a really frightening, unsafe and unstable age.
If you enjoy history, are interested in the Elizabethans, or just like some good intrigue and skulduggery, then this is a book you will want to read. It is perhaps the most fascinating book I’ve read in a long time.
Overall Rating: ★★★★★