Philobiblon

For the first time a giant squid, inhabitant of the ocean depth, has been filmed, the BBC reports. And it looks like the horror movie people might have been right about its hunting methods, and the scientists wrong.

And reality is also getting a little closer to the SF writers – particularly Kim Stanley Robinson of the Mars trilogy fame (although I don’t know if he invented the idea) – wiith a successful experiment on the quest to build a space elevator – which if it ever came off, would get rid of all those messy, dangerous rocket engines. (Via Instapundit.)

Tony Blair’s speech to the Labour conference:

For eight years I have battered the criminal justice system to get it to change. And it was only when we started to introduce special ASB laws, we really made a difference. And I now understand why: the system itself is the problem. We are trying to fight 21st-century crime – ASB, drug-dealing, binge-drinking, organised crime – with 19th-century methods, as if we still lived in the time of Dickens.

The whole of our system starts from the proposition that its duty is to protect the innocent from being wrongly convicted. Don’t misunderstand me: that must be the duty of any criminal justice system. But surely our primary duty should be to allow law-abiding people to live in safety.It means a complete change of thinking. It doesn’t mean abandoning human rights; it means deciding whose come first.

“Batter”, such a nice choice of verb, don’t you think? And he wants a “complete change of thinking from innocent until proven guilty”.

Mr Blair wants “victim’s rights” to come first – so if she or he gets up in court and puts on a really strong performance, the crim gets an extra couple of years in jail. (Heading fast towards Hammurabi’s “eye for an eye” – back to the 1700s, that’s BC, of course.)

So today, the mother of the innocent Brazilian electrician shot dead by police on the London Tube says Sir Ian Blair, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, must resign.

Mr Blair?

Like most people who’ve studied philosophy, I went through a period of wrestling with the issue of cultural relativism: how can I say my cultural norms are good, and your cultural norms are repugnant?

A brief study of the issue of female genital mutilation resolved that problem for me comfortably – there are cultural practices that are simply indefensible and should be stamped out by all means possible, just like a species’ general right to exist can be waived in a case such as smallpox.

And for all their faults – and Third World criticisms about their lack of attention to rights such as food and housing are legitimate – the United Nations human rights framework is a pretty good place to start in making value judgments.

But cultural relativism has taken hold in surprising quarters, including it would seem, the Northern Territory in Australia, where a 55-year-old tribal elder who anally raped and bashed a 14-year-old girl, who had been “promised” to him when she was just four years old, was given a jail term of one month. (Although the fact that the Territory’s white culture is extremely masculo-centric might also, I can’t but feel, have something to do with this.)

This was on the grounds that he apparently didn’t know he was doing anything wrong under Australian law, and was merely following cultural norms.

Some of the background to this, as I understand it. A number of the tribal groups in the Territory have a tradition of very young girls being promised as wives to senior men in the tribe, and given to them at a very young age. I’ve seen explanations for this along the lines that this was a harsh, arid, unforgiving environment, and only experienced hunters were likely to be able to support a family. Maybe that was true, maybe it wasn’t. It is not, of course, true now.

The only good news is that someone has stepped in as the poor girl’s advocate and is trying to have the sentence increased, the Sydney Morning Herald reports.

One of the things I try to do with this blog is celebrate the lives of forgotten or under-appreciated women. I’m still wrestling with the question as to why it is that women seem to disappear so easily from historical memory, when far less significant men survive.

I wanted to share information about a Yahoo group that is on much the same quest, sending out a daily email biography of a prominent woman on her birthday. New subscriptions are welcome.

Yesterday’s subject was the English painter and illustrator Helen Allingham. You’ll almost certainly have seen her work on a box of chocolates somewhere. What struck me about her life is how like its pattern was to that of so many modern women. Entirely by her own efforts, she established a career as an illustrator, but this ended when she married and had children. After a decade-long hiatus,, however, she started a second career as a watercolourist, and continued that until her death.

Today’s character is Minnie Vautrin. I was writing yesterday of a would-be military hero, well in Nanking in 1937 she was a real hero.

“In Nanking, Vautrin is still remembered as Guanyin Pusa, “the living goddess of mercy,” a heroine in the city’s worst hour. When American Iris Chang discovered Vautrin’s diary in Yale University Library in 1995, she was moved to write a book about the atrocities her own grandparents survived, saying “I felt that if anyone deserved her place in history, that person was Minnie Vautrin. … Chang and Vautrin are the main characters portrayed in a recent Chinese national dance drama company production,_Nanking 1937_.” (From today’s email.)

Chang of course has her own tragic story.

History
Women

Picked up some antibiotics this morning from Boots the Chemist. The doctor tells me I have consolidation in my left lung (which makes me sound like a building site). The message of this is don’t ignore nasty grating noises in the lungs for weeks, in the hope they’ll get better!

But the printed label on the drugs says: “Keep out of childrens reach”.

It seems Mr Boots has never heard of apostrophes.