Cartoons

I loved this cartoon. It sums up the ludicrously over-optimistic view that people have about life. It seems that being optimistic is an evolutionary advantage, even if that optimism is unfounded. We're descended from all those cave-men* who didn't lie in the cave moaning that there was no point in getting up to hunt mammoths because we'd all be dead by 25.

I like cartoons which have a particular warped sensibility about them. It's hard for me to define that further, but here is a another (sadly defunct) cartoon strip that floats my boat. Enjoy!

* There weren't really any cave-men. Living in caves is draughty and unpleasant. Even for hominids.

Happy New Year Saddam

So, the US and UK governments have another murder on their hands, to go along with all the others. I'm not saying that Saddam Hussein was a nice man. I wouldn't have invited him to my new-years eve party, or anything. However, I believe that you can judge a country by how it treats it's prisoners, and ex-dictators are no exception.

State sponsored execution is the worst kind of murder, because it is carried out in cold blood, on a totally helpless enemy. Anyone who approves of it should watch Krzysztof Kieslowski's film A Short Film About Killing, which puts the point better than I can.

Some people will say that it was the Iraqi's who executed him, not Bush or Blair but as Riverbend says:

"...make no mistake about it, this trial and verdict and execution are 100% American. Some of the actors were Iraqi enough, but the production, direction and montage was pure Hollywood..."

Here in the UK, we don't have the death penalty, but that hasn't stopped bloggers, christians, and the media over here metaphorically rubbing their hands with glee at the fact that once again we've managed to outsource our executions to somewhere that does. I haven't provided a link to the christian, because it was my mum.

Unforeseen Consequences

Unless you've been living on Mars, or at least outside the UK, for the last couple of weeks, it will not have escaped your notice that someone has been murdering prostitutes in the the Ipswich area. With a blog titled "Sex and Death", I could hardly fail to comment on this, albeit a bit late.

Matthew Parris has written an excellent article about it here, in which he lays the blame fairly and squarely at the current laws on prostitution.

The important point to take from this is that whenever governments make a law prohibiting something, there will be unforeseen, and often undesirable, side-effects. By making brothels and advertising illegal, they force women to work on the streets, and by making drugs illegal they push up the price and force addicts to commit crimes to feed their artificially expensive habits. That's what the International Collective of Prostitutes think, and they should know.

In this case, the murdered women would not have had to hang around on street corners, making themselves easy targets for a maniac, if the law had been different. It's a pity the lawmakers aren't able to see this.

Extreme Pornography

Here's a cause that is close to my heart, and incorporates both sex and death nicely. The death was that of Jane Longhurst, a schoolteacher in Brighton, England. Ms Longhurst was strangled with a pair of tights by a man named Graham Coutts, a sales rep and neck fetishist.

Coutts claimed that her death was accidental, and had been caused during a bout of breath play while they were having sex, a practice that he had performed with previous sexual partners. He hid the body for 5 weeks and then burned it, which didn't help his case much.

Another thing which seems not to have helped his case much was his predeliction for web sites showing images of asphyxial sex and strangulation which was brought up during the trial.

He was duly sentenced to life imprisonment for murder, with a recommendation that he serve a minimum of 30 years. You can read the local paper's version here.

However, when referred to the House of Lords, the conviction was judged unsafe, as the option of finding him guilty of negligent manslaughter hadn't been offered to the jury in the first trial. The trial has therefore restarted. You can read the pop version of it here or the official version, here. The wheels of justice grind slow, but they grind exceeding fine.

Enter Mrs Liz Longhurst, mother of the deceased. Mrs Longhurst firmly believes that it was the violent internet porn that Coutts was interested in that caused him to murder her daughter. Mrs Longhurst duly set about lobbying the government to prevent people in Britain from looking at these sort of images on the web. She even presented the government with a petition with 50,000 signatures on it, agreeing with her.

So far so good.

The British government responded with a consultation on a new law which would outlaw images of sexual violence, necrophilia and beastiality (a.k.a Extreme Pornography) on the web. In essence it proposes a prison sentence of up to 3 years for even looking at an image of this type, with worryingly vague definitions of what 'this type' of image might be. Even if it's legal to actually do. Even if its been faked up, or the participants are acting. Even if it's you and your wife.

So what's wrong with this?

Firstly the consultation document is deeply flawed. It asserts that there is no causal link between viewing images of Extreme Pornography and actually performing illegal acts. It then proposes to make them illegal anyway.

It consistently and deliberately proposes an equivalence between Child Pornography and Extreme Pornography, when none exists, as a justification for the new law.

Lastly, even though the majority of responses to the consultation were against the proposal, the government claims that most people were in favour of it. Mind you, the government won't actually post the responses on the web. My full response to the consultation can be found here.

Now you may not be the sort of person who is interested in necrophilia, beastiality or sexual violence. To be honest I don't suppose anyone is interested in all of these. But a lot of people are interested in BDSM. A 1981 study from Indiana University states that 4.5% of the straight population are into BDSM, 26% if you're gay. In Britain, that's around 2 million adults.

A lot of them will have pictures of their activities. If this law goes through, all these people, who have harmed no-one, and merely engaged in lawful, consensual sex will be threatened with having their homes raided, their computers seized, their liberty removed, and their names permanently on the sex offenders register. This matters, even if you're not personally interested in Extreme Pornography.

Mind you, If you're John Beyer of Mediawatch, you think this doesn't go far enough. That's a whole other story.

Lots of discussion about this on the web. A group of concerned citizens have started up Backlash to give the government a spanking. Other good starting points are the activism board on informed consent, and I like melonfarmers.

Update: Today is Blogging for Backlash day, and this post is linked on their site. Check out all the other blogs and discussions.

Why Sex and Death?

Because it's the basis of all good literature, and of all human life. Some of the main topics of this blog will be evolutionary psychology, terror management theory, and how they relate to the religious impulse. And that's all about sex and death too.

I don't promise to stick to these topics, but they'll probably be recurring themes.