Monthly Archives: April 2006

Miscellaneous

You know you are getting old when …

April 13, 2006 – 2:02 am

… after spending a whole day pulling together the paperwork for your tax return, you think: “Next year I will organise this better”, then a second later think “who am I kidding? Of course I’ll continue to file the papers in a heap on the floor for months at a time. I always have.”

Still, I rewarded myself by going to see the RSC’s The Crucible (brilliant – report later today) and strolled home through the West End enjoying the emergence of the rituals of the spring mating season (even if the weather still isn’t co-operating). The provincial flocks in their best new denims were pouring out of Les Mis on to the tour buses that had entirely blocked Shaftesbury Avenue, while outside the nightclub near Oxford Circus Tube, a chorus of pavement T-shirt-sellers had set up a melodious version of “Skinny, Hoodie, Skinny, Hoodie” for a band whose name I couldn’t quite read upside down.

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Carnival of Feminists

Call for nominations: Carnival of Feminists …

April 13, 2006 – 1:45 am

The next carnival is sweeping up fast, and with a lot of the world celebrating Easter soon, make sure you don’t miss out!

The second call for nominations is up – the suggested (although not compulsory topic) is “Feminism and Challenges – physical, mental, emotional and spiritual.” Possible topics including: self-determination in health and mental health care, disability issues, transgender issues, issues of aging, integration of religion and feminist beliefs, economic issues, etc.

They can be sent to ISeeInvisiblePeople AT gmail.com, or submitted via the nomination form.

Please help to spread the word!

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Feminism

‘Licence to batter’

April 12, 2006 – 10:40 am

Imagine the case: a bloke is down the pub, has a drink or two too many, loses his temper with a man at the next table who is, he thinks, “looking at me funny” and beats the hell out of him. Duly hauled before a magistrate, he says: “Sorry. Really sorry. Didn’t mean any harm. Won’t do it again.” The magistrate says: “That’s all right then. Here’s a slap on the wrist.”

No, I can’t imagine it either. But that is what is proposed, at least for cases of domestic violence, in new draft guidelines.

MEN and women who attack their partners should have the chance to avoid being sent to jail if they appear genuinely sorry for their violence, according to sentencing proposals published yesterday.
Instead, wife-beaters could receive a suspended prison sentence or community order. The proposals also recommend that perpetrators of domestic violence attend courses to tackle their offending, even though it is too early to know if they are effective in curbing violence.
The head of the leading domestic violence charity attacked the draft guidelines. Sandra Horley, chief executive of Refuge, said: “It would be a travesty if the Sentencing Guidelines Council proposals on domestic violence come into effect. In short they give men a licence to batter women as long as they are able to put on a remorseful act in front of a judge.”

That fits nicely with an excellent interview with Catharine McKinnon, whose latest book, Are Women Human? has just been published.

She writes: “[T]he fact that the law of rape protects rapists and is written from their point of view to guarantee impunity for most rapes is officially regarded as a violation of the law of sex equality, national or international, by virtually nobody.”
Are you suggesting that rape law enshrines rapists’ points of view, I ask MacKinnon? “Yes, in a couple of senses. The most obvious sense is that most rapists are men and most legislators are men and most judges are men and the law of rape was created when women weren’t even allowed to vote. So that means not that all the people who wrote it were rapists, but that they are a member of the group who do [rape] and who do for reasons that they share in common even with those who don’t, namely masculinity and their identification with masculine norms and in particular being the people who initiate sex and being the people who socially experience themselves as being affirmed by aggressive initiation of sexual interaction.”

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Environmental politics

Coverage of the Green Party local election launch

April 12, 2006 – 9:32 am

The BBC goes very straight:

The Green Party hopes to have more than 100 councillors after the local elections in England on 4 May.
The party is calling for good local services within walking distance and protection for local businesses.
The Greens already have 70 council seats including six in Oxford, where they hold the balance of power.
The party’s Caroline Lucas told the BBC they did not expect to win overall control in any council but were hopeful of boosting numbers of councillors….

The politics wonks’ site, ePolitix.com, is into the numbers:

Launching its poll push on Tuesday, the party said it was fielding a total of 1,294 candidates.
There will be a particular focus on London, where 567 of the candidates are standing.
Camden, Hackney, Islington, Lambeth, Lewisham and Merton are among the London boroughs where the party is hoping to make gains…

The Guardian, meanwhile, takes the anti-Conservative, national politics line:

The Greens are grateful to David Cameron for pushing environmental issues up the political agenda, the MEP Caroline Lucas said yesterday as the party began its local election campaign.
But Ms Lucas, who represents south-east England in the European parliament, added that the Tories had no policies to back up their claims to care for the environment. She believed their leader’s promise to lead a green revolution was a case of “the emperor’s new clothes”, which was bound to backfire.
At the Greens’ press conference in London, Ms Lucas said every time Mr Cameron was asked “to deliver on a specific policy proposal, you see him ducking and diving, slipping and sliding”.
She added: “When people see the lack of substance behind his rhetoric, that can only do us good.”…

I went out for a short canvassing session on the council estate on which I live last night (when the rain stopped). And I was surprised anew at the highly positive response I got. The Labour Party really is in the stink with its traditional supporters.
***
I was also pleased to see this morning that Jean Lambert, the other English Green MEP, has taken up the case of the murdered Thai human rights lawyer Somchai Neelaphaijit.

MEPs Jean Lambert, from Britain, and Frithjof Schmidt, from Germany, also asked the Council if it had communicated to the Thai government its concern over security threats to Somchai’s wife, Angkhana.
Angkhana has been threatened on several occasions and warned not to pursue her husband’s disappearance, most recently last month.
The issue of allegations of torture by members of the Thai security forces and its effect on Thai-EU relations was also raised by the MEPs.

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Early modern history Women's history

Aphra Behn’s tomb…

April 11, 2006 – 3:54 pm

An interesting query from Holly, who’s been contributing to the “really dead women authors meme” about the location of Aphra Behn’s tomb in Westminister Abbey, and why she isn’t in “Poets’ Corner”.

I happen to have sitting beside my bed in my “to read” pile Maureen Duffy’s biography. It says:

“Thrysis [Thomas Sprat, “Birmingham’s old chaplain, who was Dean of Westminster], I believe, was responsible for her burial in Westminster Abbey on April 20th, no doubt backed by Burnet and by those of sufficient wit and position not to mind the odium or satire that accure to them from such an act. She lies in the cloister and not among the ‘trading poets’ in poets’ corner, but with the Bettertons and Anne Bracegirdle.” (p. 294)

So it sounds like she was classed as “theatre” rather than “literature”.

There’s an image of the tomb here.

Can anyone add to this?

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Politics Science

Little reassurance in rape “cautions”

April 11, 2006 – 11:30 am

More emerges on yesterday’s story about offenders being cautioned for rape, none of it reassuring:

RAPISTS who are cautioned are being put on the sex offenders register for a maximum of two years after the Government relaxed registration rules three years ago.
Young rapists go on the register for only a year from the date on which they are cautioned after admitting the sex attack, The Times has learnt. Yet a rapist convicted in the courts and given a jail term of 2½ years is on the register for the rest of his life.

***
The NHS might be bad at managing dying, but, perhaps unsurprisingly, the private sector nursing homes are even worse. This is something as a society we really, really have to get better at.
***
And I won’t give away the ending, but if you want to hear a detailed tale of the death of a mammoth in England about 700,000 years ago, Fascinating Deaths from Radio Four is well worth a listen. (Not a podcast – you can only do it through the computer, and it doesn’t say how long the link will work for, but usually it is at least a week.)
***
Australia has new draconian employment laws. One of the effects:

Unions will take legal action after workers were docked four hours’ pay for stopping work for 15 minutes to collect money for the family of an employee killed on a construction site.
The workers were docked for taking unprotected industrial action under the Government’s new workplace legislation.
CFMEU organiser Martin Kingham said about 25 workers stopped for up to 15 minutes last Friday to take up a collection for the family of building worker Christos Binos, 58, who was fatally crushed by a concrete slab in Melbourne last month.

The company says the law gives it no choice, and if it did not dock the pay, it could lose government contracts and be fined itself.

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