Elsewhere
More of me
October 9, 2007 37 comments
Much as I consider blogging here about various ways to kill large and small animals to be my main internet gig, I have also been posting at other places. Here is my CiF post today about a new law banning the incitement of hatred against gay people:
It’s a strange concept, this idea of banning the incitement of hatred. What offends us is the hatred itself, but what we seek to police is its expression, as though hatred is a virus against which innocent ears are defenceless and so must be protected. Perhaps it is so. In which case there is no reason to stop at banning hate speech on the grounds of parentage or religion or sexuality. Straw must proceed logically and ban hate speech against the old, and the fat, those who do not conform to current industrial criteria of beauty, writers of bad books, the bald, fast-food magnates, and the plain indolent.
Meanwhile, I have also been committing more emergent literature from the wonderfully varied referral logs at stevenpoole.net:
How to stop a hippo charging:
verbal slogans.Become a full time martial arts apprentice:
joy in repetition.
Follow the links to read and comment on the full things, if you like.
Update: published in the New Statesman today is my long review on Douglas Coupland and his school of “Sentimental Hipsterism”:
It is perhaps no coincidence that in Douglas Coupland novels, the sense of feeling like a refugee from a Douglas Coupland novel is elevated to a universal existential condition.
The idea that someone’s looking online for how to stop a hippo charging is delightful: either they’re in a really big hurry to get the information, or they’re planning some crazy heist caper.
Or, less excitingly, they’re compiling a further volume of the worst case survival guide.
Indeed – although as far as I remember from my brief sojourn in hippo country the only way to stop one charging would be to shoot it dead with a rifle. I suppose sw might try attaching little lead weights to its feet, but that would present its own challenges.
Should we not comment here? Didn’t Mill cover this territory in On Liberty?
I like your article & I withdraw my comment on Mill, to the extent that while he did cover this territory, it is hardly resolved. This is a great opportunity to a) discuss gay issues and rap, and b) call a type of bigotry “swivel-eyed”, which has made my day.
sw, you may comment where you wish. Of course the topic of “free speech” did exercise Mill, as it did Milton and Fish and many others. As you may know, I’m more of a Fishian.
Perhaps we could attach lead weights to the legs of swivel-eyed bigots?
As far as I know, it is only the U.S. that has got freedom of speech right: incitement to violence is illegal; incitement to hatred is not. I believe incitement to hatred is now protected by a legal judgement by the Supreme Court.
Very few people enjoy hearing the BNP, KKK, theocratic chauvinists of all complexions go on about ethnic minorities, the “ZOG Machine”, “unbelievers” and some such guff, but the U.S. rightly protects such depraved mutterings. Unfortunately we do not.
Strange that not one political party has the courage to repeal the laws on incitement to hatred. But then not one of our parties takes freedom of speech seriously. Discrepancy resolved!
That is a delightful ‘meanwhile’; would I be alone in construing the hippo couplet as ironising the column whose extract precedes it?
The ‘verbal slogans’ which promise to stop the charging hippo of homophobic hatred in its tracks might, I suppose, denote the reappropriated speech to which you refer. Nonetheless, I prefer to hope that they designate these particular minutiae of the Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill. This reading is probably overoptimistic; however, perhaps said minutiae will at least perform the function of little lead weights, and slow the hippo down.
[…] There has been quite a bit in the news about this (BBC | The Guardian | International Herald Tribune | The Daily Telegraph | Sky | The Times | Yahoo! news | politicis.co.uk). Predictably, Stonewall has welcomed this (Ben Summerskill, Stonewall Chief Executive, said: ‘We’re delighted. …’), as has the gay blogosphere (Adriano | Gay Republic | Gay News Blog | Pink News | Phlamer | Swinging Both Ways | Towleroad) and others (eg Coventry Green Party | Real Labour Blogger | ), and it has provoked the predictable range of responses (Anglican Mainstream | BNP | Catholic Action UK | Muslims Today | Smug Board). My favourite comments are Unspeak and Comment is Free, (thoughtful discussion by Steven Poole) and Harry’s Place (very balanced analysis). […]
Yes, I suppose I meant that Mill went into a lot of detail in discussing how to deal with “opinions” and “acts” and most discussions I’ve seen pretty much reiterate his positions and accept his problems (which, for all I know, were just a reiteration of Milton before him, or sumfink) – anyway, no matter how hard you beat those horses, they just don’t seem to die.
BTW, I look forward to a new era in unspeak that does not involve Raskolnikovian images of violence against animals.
sw,
Flog the hippocampus, not the horse?
(Light the lamp, not the rat…)
sw, one of the problems with Mill’s discussion is that “opinion” (or “proposition”) as he uses it seems to cover a variety of speech-acts, possibly including incitement to violence, which we might want to distinguish from one another. But if you like I shall refrain henceforth from flogging any horses that have already been abused by famous philosophers, leaving us nothing to talk about at all.
You started it!
Not intentional, but perfectly true!
Um…
Did not! I was only responding to a thread about BBC documentarians tossing lemmings from clifftops and your musings about frogs in hot water.
I think that if you look back over my comments, you’ll find that I actually do not suggest that you
not because I’m worried it would “leav[e] us nothing to talk about at all” – there’s a whole world of topics that philosophers like Hegel and Jesus haven’t covered – but because those problems are unresolved. So, please, stuff that cat back in the bag where you found it.
Ah, I see you don’t really want to talk about Mill at all but were just using him as a signal of your impatience with “most discussions” on the subject. Anyway, it was your idea to attach lead weights to the frogs’ feet, which tipped the discussion over into pure sadism!
the vast and impressive legal protections given to free speech of the most controversial kind in the USA render the horrible conventional dullness and conformity of the actual speech there even more surprising.
Does the new law mean that Kevin Myers will be locked up next time he visits the UK? If so I think I’m for it.
Umm…
You’re not entirely wrong, but you are warping my words and my intent. I just wanted to point out that Mill had covered a lot of this territory and, as I hastily added in comment #4, that doesn’t mean we can’t keep talking about the topic. Your responses seem designed to attack me personally and deflect from yourself from any further responsibility for comparing your work with Mill’s: in short you are killing two sweet little songbirds with one stone. ;-)
The Simpsons? South Park? Arrested Development? Kurt Vonnegut? Philip Roth? Public Enemy? Bruce Springsteen? Sufjan Stevens? Jon Stewart? Stephen Colbert? Antony and the Johnsons? May I just repeat: The Simpsons? South Park? Arrested Development? Would you like to remove head from ass or is it more comfy up there?
Is the speech of Rick Santorum really more conventional, dull and conformist than that of “Melanie Phillips”? Tough call.
Eh? I am merely attacking your sadistic obsession with attaching small lead weights to the feet of tiny defenceless animals. Meanwhile, I said something about what I find unsatisfactory with Mill’s discussion as applied to the present topic at #11. Since you declined to address that, I naturally assumed that, after all, you had no interest in talking specifically about Mill and so your invocation of his name was merely a sort of vague shorthand for your lack of interest in discussing the subject further. Which is fine! Heaven help us if Jack Straw passes a law demanding mandatory discussions of “free speech”.
Actually, the “;-)” was meant to indicate that my entire last argument was constructed so that I could invoke the murder of sweet songbirds, having already thrashed horses, stuffed cats into bags, attached lead weights to butterflies, etc. Obviously, you and your other readers will have enjoyed these grotesque speech acts as separate from the actual acts of violence against animals. Right?
BTW, your point in #11 about Mill was simply consistent with my point in #4, so I hardly felt it necessary to agree with you out loud. In the future, I will make sure to say, “Yes, Mr. Poole, thank you, Mr. Poole” whenever I agree with you, just so you won’t think that I’m ignoring you or, with my silence, secretly doubting you.
That’s an excellent idea: it is bound to make our conversations so much more civilized from now on.
Yes, Mr. Poole. Thank you, Mr. Poole.
BTW, speaking of “various ways to kill large and small animals”, I came across a quasi-biological example of unspeak today, one that I don’t think you’ve dealth with: Facts of Life.
I give you the floor on “Facts of Life”.
In a book I am reading, the mass being lost every second by the Sun is said to be the equivalent of “a million elephants”. I find that an extremely poignant animal metaphor.
It is beautiful, and raises two questions: what is the sun’s overall mass in elephant equivalents, and how much of that decomposing mass of a million elephants per second reaches the earth?
Facts of life: used in a few scenarios. First, and most importantly, it is used as a term for sex education, unspeaking the numerous fictions that will be incorporated into that pedagogy and smuggling in the notion that sex is primarily about “life”. Second, “facts of life” when more generally used in biology is often unspeaking the theoretical and cultural construction of that particular understanding of life. Third, when some hoodlum is telling you that “Them’s the apples – those are the facts of life, my friend”, that hoodlum has just selectively chosen a few nuggets of questionable truth and generalised them into all existence, somehow supporting their own point of view.
Ugh – forgive the transition from “that hoodlum” to “their own point of view”.
A million elephants apparently represent about a 10-million-million-millionth of one per cent of the Sun’s mass. It has lost about 0.1% of mass through conversion into energy, or elephants, since its birth.
The book to hand gives no exact figure but the answer is roughly “not much”; as of course the elephants are lumbering off in all directions.
I like what you have to say about “facts of life”. I didn’t know it was used more generally in biology: can you give an example?
Is it instead primarily about death?
Pleasure, sir, pleasure. Communion and satisfaction, lust and loving, the desire for company and warmth – these are all things that might be considered primary in sexual congress. If this sounds unfamiliar to you, perhaps you might e-mail me in person, and I can direct you to some good books on the topic.
Hmm, maybe not. The best I can do is go to “Born and Made: An Ethnography of Preimplantation Genetic Diagnosis”, by Franklin and Roberts, who say:
The authors use scare quotes quite promiscuously – one might even say, incontinently. One can never be sure whether they are quoting somebody, using colloquial short-cuts, or conceding their own ironic distance from a term. It can be confusing – are they putting “itself” in quotation marks because biomedicine cannot have a self, or because the self that it has did not really want to allow the subsequent doubt to become “more visibly contingent and uncertain”. In this case, I’m not sure whether this is a pair of ethnographers making their own connection to biological “facts of life” – especially potent given the object of their study – of if they are quoting biologists, or if they are quoting what they think biologists would be saying.
In order to answer your question better, I googled “facts of life” to see what I could come up, but apparently there was a television show of that name, and I really didn’t want to get caught up in that material.
BTW, Franklin and Roberts are really good on the public “debate” around preimplantation genetic diagnosis, reminiscent of how you dealt with things like “neutrality” and media claims about being fair and balanced:
You’re very clever, young man, very clever,” said the old lady. “But it’s turtles all the way down!”
For anyone that didn’t catch the update, here is a long review I wrote for today’s New Statesman of the latest Douglas Coupland novel.
Now, onto Preimplantation Genetic Diagnosis.
sw, I would read that weird “itself” rather in your second proposed way – it seems that the authors mean something like “despite itself”.
Their use of “facts of life” evidently relies on that phrase’s folk meaning of the facts about how reproduction is accomplished, so I guess they are playing on the the idea that the facts are no longer actually indisputable facts. Indeed I think this allows us to recast your earlier discussion.
To be specific, I don’t think that, as you suggested, the phrase “facts of life” implies that sex is all about life, but rather the inverse: it implies that life is all about, or boils down to, or has as its essential precondition in humans, sex. And of course modern advances in reproductive medicine mean that sex is no longer an essential precondition for making humans. Presumably it’s in this way that your authors mean the “facts of life” are once again up for grabs.
I’m not really interested in arguing here, especially because some people have written whole books about how terms like this can have several, sometimes competing, meanings; I will say that I very much like your last reading and do agree that this is what the authors were saying.
Splendid! But if you’re “not really interested” in arguing with people who have written whole books etc, why on earth are you commenting on this blog at all?
PS you forgot to say “Yes, Mr. Poole” etc as we had agreed.
I originally did write “Yes, Mr. Poole” etc. but then felt it was too hostile and might be taken sarcastically – not that you, Mr. Poole, would misinterpret something like that. I’m just not in a hostile mood today. I’m feeling cheerful and light and gay – in which case, you are quite right to be asking, “why on earth are you commenting on this blog at all?”
Ah, if you’re not feeling hostile I’m afraid this is quite the wrong place. Have a gay day!
Are you two married or something?
Sadly, no. At least then I would have the recourse of withholding sex.
“Sadly, no. At least then I would have the recourse of withholding sex.”
As a reward for what?