rage at the system – Page 18 – Another angry woman

Evolutionary psychology and anarchy

I hold a particular, burning hatred of The Blank Slate, a seminal popular evolutionary psychology book. It seems to me that many people read it and, without applying any critical thinking, believe themselves to now be experts in human nature and that we’re all hardwired to be bellends so acting like a bellend is completely fine. I’ve basically stopped approving comments that cite The Blank Slate, because they’re always completely wrong.

In short, the author of The Blank Slate, Steven Pinker, is a psychologist. Not an evolutionary psychologist: he did some very good work in child language acquisition and visual cognition. It is disappointing to see someone with scientific training write a book so unscientific. Rather than presenting a scientific account, The Blank Slate uses anecdotal evidence and pure speculation to make its point, and the point is that everything is how it is because it’s just human nature and so that’s how it is. The back of the book is full of breathless praise from right-wing newspapers, as it confirms their world view. However, The Blank Slate is not good science. Far from it. I will not critique the whole thing here: for those interested, here is a very comprehensive overview. For a shorter read, I wrote something about evolutionary psychology’s attitude towards gender here, and The Blank Slate is riddled with such problems.

Instead, I am going to focus on one short part of The Blank Slate which is completely wrong: Pinker’s views on anarchism.

In the media this weekend, there has been a lot of conflation of anarchy with lawlessness in commentary on the London riots. Anarchy is distinct from lawlessness: it refers to the absence of imposed political authority, while lawlessness has an implication of disorder. Pinker believes these two concepts to be one and the same:

The generalization that anarchy in the sence of a lack of government leads to anarchy in the sense of violent chaos may be banal, but it is often overlooked in today’s still-romantic climate. (The Blank Slate, p331)

Pinker argues that violence is “a near-inevitable outcome of the dynamics of self-interested social organisms” (The Blank Slate, p329), and that police are the adaptation to this aspect of human nature. Like the rest of Pinker’s book, the evidence is purely anecdotal. What is provided is a series of anecdotes which paint a picture of how we are but one line of riot cops away from a Mad Max dystopia.

At one point, Pinker explains that he used to be an anarchist, and that this changed following the Montreal police strike, where riots broke out. Of this incident, Pinker says:

This decisive empirical test left my politics in tatters (The Blank Slate, p331)

Empirical test? Pinker is supposed to be a fucking scientist! An anecdote is hardly an empirical test!

The evidence seems cherry-picked. At no point does Pinker discuss anywhere autonomous communities which operate perfectly well without police–take, for example, Greenham Common or any number of communes. The former example, Greenham Common may not sway Pinker, given his rather dated gender politics, but there are plenty of examples of places which have done just fine without any governance from the state.

However, fighting anecdotal evidence with more anecdotal evidence is the wrong approach–it is no better than Pinker’s own method.

Essentially, two hypotheses are proposed by Pinker in his treatment of anarchism:

1. That violence is an integral part of human nature

2. That the only way to stop it is to have a police force

The first hypothesis is not possible to test: this is a shortcoming of evolutionary psychology as a whole: one cannot empirically test whether something is “human nature” or not. We can look at proxies–for example, if violence is genetic, we can study identical twins who were raised apart, though even this methodology is flawed.

The second hypothesis would require controlling for all confounding variables, to test whether a police force is truly necessary and the only thing standing in the way of our horrifying nature. Essentially, one would need people raised in a complete vacuum with no mitigating factors such as economic deprivation or racism. This is, of course, impossible to test.

So what we are left with is a fairy story: we’re all violent, grappling thugs, and it’s only the presence of a policeman that stops us chucking a brick through the nearest window and running off with a spangly new telly.

The other side to the story is equally untestable: the very same two impossible experiments would need to be conducted to test whether we could do a lot better without state-controlled law enforcement.

Basically, there’s no science anywhere. We cannot discuss whether human nature inevitably tends towards looting any more than it inevitably tends towards cooperation. The difference is, anarchism does not tend to pretend it has science on its side: it is a political movement, an analysis of the system we have an a conclusion that we would probably do better without it.

I would feel a lot more comfortable, I think, if people stopped couching their political beliefs in pseudo-science. Rioting is a complex issue with a solution far beyond a little bit of anecdotal storytelling which concludes it’s in our genes. It must, therefore, be treated as such.

Likewise, anarchism is a complex political ideology. It cannot be handwaved away with nonsense and misconceptions.

Maturity and making peace with the establishment

I recently took the Political Compass test. I rather predictably ended up in the bottom left (the anarchist corner), though I do not think it is a brilliant measure of where a person lies politically–some of the questions were worded poorly, and I think more than two dimensions are required to measure political leanings and… That is essentially beside the point. This post is about one of the questions on the test:

“Making peace with the establishment is an important aspect of maturity.”

I have heard this line before. I have heard it from trolls. I have heard it from friends. It is nigh-on memetic. Grow the fuck up and accept the system.

I vehemently disagree. To unpick this statement, let us turn to the work of Jean Piaget, a hugely influential developmental psychologist. Piaget’s research focused on how children learned, and how they mature cognitively. Through observation and experimenting with teaching, he identified key cognitive milestones which children pass as they mature.

According to Piaget, children are natural, curious “mini-scientists”. As they grow older, they develop and refine the ability to develop and test hypotheses, building an understanding of how the world works. Maturity is dynamic, as conceptualised here: a constant quest of questioning everything. Making peace with the establishment is the opposite of this: making peace with the establishment is to take a step back from logical experimentation and exploration.

Acceptance of the establishment also requires the belief that everyone thinks the same way: that the established set of default options is what is generally accepted as correct and that anyone who believes otherwise is somehow strange. The belief that everyone thinks in the same way as you is known as egocentrism. According to Piaget, one should grow out of this belief by the age of seven.

Unswerving acquiescence has an ancient tradition. In is apparent in the Bible: 1 Corinthians 3 is basically St Paul bollocking the Corinthians for being immature and telling them to grow the fuck up and do what God tells them. A little later in the same book, the famous quote comes up:

When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me (1 Corinthians 13:11)

Here, Paul is talking about settling down into a monogamous relationship and starting the traditional family favoured by the system.

For two thousand years, submission to the established order has been incentivised by dangling the carrot of maturity. When boiled down, it sounds like a schoolyard taunt. “If you don’t do as we say, you’re a baby“. It is the clique setting the rules, enforcing their law in any way they can. The law of the playground plays out on a large scale, and many of us buy it wholesale.

In a way, I was lucky to be so thoroughly unpopular at school that nothing I could do would gain social approval. I grew immune to such disdain and therefore had the means to allow myself to flourish. I read, I tried on identities. I experimented with views and beliefs. I learned all I could. And I came to the conclusion that something was not right in the world, and I fight what I, through Piaget’s top level of reasoning, concluded was correct. I accept I may be wrong, and presented with good evidence can be swayed.

I arrived where I am through thought. Surely this is more mature than blind acceptance?

Lysistrata’s direct action

An interesting piece of news today: women in Columbia have been engaging in a “crossed legs” protest, refusing to have sex until a road into their town is repaired.

The method of protest itself is not new at all: sex strikes have happened in many places, including Naples, Kenya and Belgium. The reasons vary: sometimes it is to end a war. Others, it is to stop men letting off illegal fireworks. It is an established form of protest: Lysistratic strikes are included on the seminal list “198 Methods Of Nonviolent Action“.

The term “Lysistratic strike” comes from the Greek comedy Lysistrata, in which the women on all sides of the Peloponnesian war decide to stop having sex with their husbands until peace has been negotiated. Although the play was written by a man, there are several woman-positive themes in the play. It is, essentially, a story about female solidarity. In order for the strike to work, all women must be involved–scabbing is simply not acceptable. When the women unite, they are incredibly powerful: their actions end a long and fruitless war. The message is empowering; it says, stand together, sisters, and you will prevail.

A second incredibly likeable aspect of Lysistrata is that it accepts that women enjoy sex. For a play that is two and a half millennia old, this is fairly advanced thinking. The women in Lysistrata are portrayed as having just as much difficulty with not having sex as the men. They are devastated to have to do without the lioness on a cheesegrater position.* They miss sex, because they really like it. Unfortunately, this kind of admission that women enjoy sex is sadly lacking from a lot of drama, even today.

Lysistratic strikes themselves have two huge positive points going for them. They are entirely peaceful, and they require a lot of solidarity with fellow women, as demonstrated in Lysistrata.

There are, though, problems with Lysistratic actions from a feminist perspective: there is a vast degree of submission to the patriarchy. When women go on a sex strike, two admissions are made:

That men have all of the power
That a woman’s only tool for negotiation is her body

The sex strikes that have occurred throughout history never address either of these issues–they focus, instead, on the issue of protest, be it war, or government formation, or fireworks. Once the fight has been won, the women return to relative powerlessness, their bodies returned to their husbands. It is this that differentiates Lysistratic strikes from more familiar labour strikes. In a labour strike, the workers withhold their labour until certain, labour-related conditions have been met. In a Lysistratic strike, women withhold sex until certain, non-sexual conditions have been met.

The word “withhold” is a loaded term itself: to use the term “withhold sex” implies that this is something that the women should usually be distributing: it is their role to fuck, and to refuse is an act of strike. It is seen as remarkable, that women are not fulfilling the traditional duties of marriage, their jobs. I am therefore relieved to see that Lysistratic strikes are not treated in the same way as labour strikes, where the full force of the establishment conspires to push workers back to work. I have seen no reports of systematic rapes following Lysistratic strikes.

It is not surprising, then, that Lysistratic strikes tend to happen in more patriarchal spaces, as they require patriarchy to be effective at all. It is also worth noting that heteronormativity plays a part in such actions: in a more queer community, wives refusing to fuck husbands would be far less noteworthy.

While it is pleasing for me to see women standing in solidarity in an attempt to make the world a better place, this is tinged with the foul taste of patriarchy which detracts heavily from the beautiful female empowerment it could mean. Lysistratic strikes are not about a woman’s control of her own body. It is a temporary withdrawal from a heteronormative, patriarchal role to make a point, and then a return to those conditions.

Lysistratic strikes cannot, by their very nature, overthrow patriarchy. So I will eschew this method of direct action, and instead continue my quest to understand the lioness on a cheesegrater position.

*If anyone works out what the lioness on a cheesegrater position is, please let me know. It’s been bothering me since I saw the bloody play.

The socialist feminist dystopia, and why I’d like to live there

According to some, we ought to lay down our tools. The fight for social justice has been won, and the world is now ruled by feminists and socialists according to politically correct principles. It says so in a book:

‘Buchanan’s Dictionary of Quotations for Right-minded People’ has been edited by a writer in the USFR, the Union of Socialist Feminist Republics (1997), formerly the United Kingdom. The book is for people who are tired of living in a country run in accordance with socialist, feminist, and politically correct principles.

Don’t just take the word of a (possibly vanity-published) book. Richard Littlejohn also thinks so, as does pretty much every other right-wing columnist. Even the Norwegian murderer seems to believe that social justice is on top.

I am entirely unsure as to why this rag-tag band seem to think that this could possibly be a bad thing. Imagine a world in which there was gender equality. Imagine a world where there was racial equality. Imagine a world where every single person had the same opportunities in life. In this world, the word “equality” would be unnecessary, as individual differences would be meaningless and irrelevant. In this world, any person who got sick, or was born with special needs would have the same access to the same care and nobody would begrudge this. Every person would be seen as a person. There would be no genocide as there would be no hate. There would be no class war, as class would be a historical curiosity. There would be no rape, no sexual coercion, as all would understand principles of respect and consent.

Demonstrably, we do not live in this world, and that’s a real bummer as it would be absolutely fucking brilliant. It would be about as dystopian as being trapped in a room made out of chocolate and having to eat your way out, being greeted on the other side by a fluffy pile of hypoallergenic kittens that shat rainbows.

There are two questions here, then, and the answers to both are related. Why do some believe we live in a world run by feminists and socialists? And why do they think it is a bad thing?

The answer, I think, is because these people construct life as a zero-sum game. These people believe that they were born special and that nobody can take that away from them. To point out that they are wealthy and powerful by an accident of birth rather than anything else is inherently threatening to them. They look down on others–people born the wrong gender or race or sexual orientation, and are frightened that they are only a few genes away from oppression.

Equality is scary, and any moves to equality are terrifying to those who believe in the socialist-feminist dystopia as that would take away their special status, stripping them of the wealth and privilege that allow them to look down on their fellow human beings in disgust.

Letting go of the hate and fear, embracing a world where they were just like everyone else would be beneficial to them. Equality benefits all–that is why it is called equality.

We are nowhere near that point. And I am trapped with the curious feeling that it might be quite nice to live in Richard Littlejohn’s brain.

If 30% of board members were women, we’d still be fucked

This article from Laurie Penny talks about the currently fashionable trend for trying to put more women in the boardroom as it is good for business. In particular, it references the “30 Per Cent Club”, a campaign group who aim for representation of 30% women on boards. Laurie discusses the political perspective very eloquently, and if you have not yet read the article, I strongly recommend you do so. Here, I provide some supplemental notes on the shaky science behind the 30 Per Cent Club.

The 30% figure is claimed to be evidence based, drawn from a 2007 report which found that businesses with more than 30% women on the board tended to do better, using a measure of success which is not in the public domain and ignoring any other possible explanations for the pattern, for example, that businesses with a better equality record might perform better due to being nicer places to work. The study was not well-conducted, and explanations for why this effect emerges are similarly problematic.

The notion that having more women in charge is good for a business rests on the assumption that men’s brains and women’s brains are fundamentally, innately different. Men are believed to be more likely to take risks, and these risks do not always pay off. This risk-taking behaviour has been put forward as an explanation for the financial crash. The evidence supporting this claim comes from a naturalistic study of City traders: those with higher levels of male sex hormone testosterone were more likely to take risks in investment. The sample size of the study was small; testosterone was only measured at the beginning and end of the day, not during trading; and, crucially, consisted entirely of men. From these results, a conclusion has been drawn by some that women must make better investors and therefore we need more women on the boards because women will not be distracted by all those manly endogenous steroids floating around.

Curiously, the explanation that men’s brains and women’s brains are fundamentally, innately different has also been used as an explanation for why there are fewer women in business in the first place. By this line of reason, men’s brains are set up for analysing, while women’s brains are set up for empathising. In work, the analytical person is better suited. At home, the empathic person is better suited. Men and women are just different, and have different roles. It’s not discrimination at all!

That innate, hardwired, cognitive differences between men and women can explain two opposing phenomena is not surprising, as the innate, hardwired, cognitive differences between men and women may not be as innate and hardwired as generally believed. Differences in performance on empathising or analytical tasks disappears when people are told that men and women perform the same on those tests, while the neuroimaging and hormonal tests are often as problematic as the testosterone study which “proves” that women make better investors. Building on this shaky foundation of research, the 30% Club campaigns for an arbitrary figure of gender representation in the hope of fixing a broken system with the power of women’s intuition. It is benevolent sexism: the belief that women are just better at this sort of thing than men, because they are different, and putting more women at the top will be beneficial as it will maximise profit.

In an ideal world, perhaps, women would already be represented in positions of power in numbers proportionate to their existence: 50%.

Why should we give a shit what the press thinks of us?

I am sitting among feminists. I am sitting among radical lefties. I am sitting among activists. We discuss ideas for action. Every time, no matter what the action, the whisper will come around, and it will piss all over the nascent plans we had developed. “But that will look bad in the papers. They’ll use that against us.”

Every time, the same. Ideas are aborted purely because of the fear of what the media might think.

The same thing happens in the aftermath of a protest. After March 26th, for example, the left descended into an orgy of backbiting: black bloc made us look bad, UK Uncut made us look bad, UK Uncut need to say they had nothing to do with black bloc so our media overlords will be sated. It was the worst orgy ever.

At the moment, this obsession with how the media views activism is apparent in the squabbling over Jonnie Marbles and a pie. There is still squabbling over that bloody pie. In the initial half an hour post-splat, much of the hand-wringing was over how a parliamentary process may have been disrupted. When it became apparent that the show went on completely as advertised, it shifted. This will look bad in the media, they chattered, Murdoch will come across sympathetically. We must call for a purge of the left, starting with Comrade Marbles.

I have seem more people worrying about sympathy from Murdoch in the media than actual sympathy for Murdoch in the media.

At any rate, why should what the media think about us matter at all?

Our newspapers and television channels are owned by a small bunch of rich white men, and represent pet projects for disseminating their rich white male views. They have a vested interest in maintaining their own power, and anyone who challenges their position is ultimately viewed as a threat. To the media, feminists, socialists, anarchists, environmentalists, those who suggest that the rich white men who rule the world, are dangerous.

They do all they can to defame us: feminists become paranoid man haters; environmentalists, smelly tree-huggers; anarchists violent mindless thugs. This will happen whatever activists do. If Cthulu rose and was defeated by me, the Daily Mail would probably run a story about how I only vanquished the monster-god because he was male, and anyway I’m a massive slut, and isn’t that terrible?

No matter what we do, it will ultimately be used against us in the media. Why should we march to the beat of their drum? It makes us no better than the politicians. Look at Ed Miliband. He provides no real opposition to government because he is so hell-bent on satisfying the media. Look at the discourse surrounding the deficit. Politicians are not supposed to point out that we do not really need to bother with getting rid of the deficit, because the media has jumped upon the idea that if we do not reduce it, Hitler will ride out of hell on velociraptor. Look at discourse surrounding immigration. No politician will say “Actually, why don’t we talk about how immigration is not A Bad Thing at all?” This is because they must all play into the media narrative, that forrins and darkies are taking over the country and OH MY GOD THIS IS TERRIBLE WHY CAN’T CHURCHILL COME AND KILL THEM WITH A SPITFIRE?

Instead of attempting to appease those who we should actively be trying to challenge, we need to disseminate our own narratives. Trust in the mainstream media is low. Talking, pamphlets, direction to good readings, and more talking to people. That is how we spread our message. We cannot get it across through the mainstream media. They will not let us.

It is time to stop caring what the media thinks of us, and time to start telling the world what it is that we stand for.

I think Julian Assange is a rapist. I still like Wikileaks.

Trigger warning for rape

If what his own defence lawyers say is true, Julian Assange is a rapist.

He described Assange as penetrating one woman while she slept without a condom, in defiance of her previously expressed wishes, before arguing that because she subsequently “consented to … continuation” of the act of intercourse, the incident as a whole must be taken as consensual.

In the other incident, in which Assange is alleged to have held a woman down against her will during a sexual encounter, Emmerson offered this summary: “[The complainant] was lying on her back and Assange was on top of her … [she] felt that Assange wanted to insert his penis into her vagina directly, which she did not want since he was not wearing a condom … she therefore tried to turn her hips and squeeze her legs together in order to avoid a penetration … [she] tried several times to reach for a condom, which Assange had stopped her from doing by holding her arms and bending her legs open and trying to penetrate her with his penis without using a condom. [She] says that she felt about to cry since she was held down and could not reach a condom and felt this could end badly.”

In the first instance, he penetrated a woman without her consent. The penetration was not consensual. This is rape. Legally and morally.

In the second instance, he held down a woman and attempted to penetrate her while she was distressed and fighting him off. If penetration occurred, this is rape. If penetration did not occur, it is attempted rape and rather serious sexual assault. Legally and morally.

Even his own defence is saying that Julian Assange is a rapist.

Despite this, there are still those who leap to Assange’s defence. A top tweet referred to what Assange did as “being a bad lover“, and many others similar in tone buzzed around hashtags pertaining to Assange’s extradition hearing. Some of these voices even come from the left.

It is a far cry from the outrage surrounding Ken Clarke’s distinction between “serious rape” and “date rape”. Suddenly, the very same people who objected to a Tory engaging in rape apologism are doing the very same thing themselves: springing to the defence of a rapist, declaring there must have been some sort of misunderstanding, or perhaps the women are lying, or perhaps holding a woman down and forcibly attempting penetration isn’t anything like rape, or squirming around, groping for legal loopholes.

What Assange did was wrong. Thoroughly wrong. I had hoped we had reached a stage where penetrating a woman who is unable to consent or using force to penetrate a woman is known by all to be something that is thoroughly reprehensible and worthy of punishment. I am disappointed and furious that this is not the case.

It is perfectly possible to decry Assange while supporting Wikileaks. As a project, I think Wikileaks is a good thing. Some information needs to be made available in the public domain, and Wikileaks is brilliant for facilitating this. I also believe in free speech, something championed by Wikileaks. Free speech allows me to express my opinion that Julian Assange is a rapist.

Assange is not Wikileaks. For starters, Wikileaks is a large project which is staffed by many people other than Assange. Another difference is that Julian Assange is most likely a rapist, and Wikileaks is not. It is therefore perfectly simple to support Wikileaks while acknowledging what Assange did is completely and utterly wrong.

It is rather like Rebekah Brooks and the News of the World. Rebekah Brooks should have resigned or been sacked, setting up a distance between Brooks and the newspaper. Instead, Brooks was kept, while the newspaper was taken down.

There should be a distance between Assange and Wikileaks. Wikileaks is not Assange. Assange is not Wikileaks. It needs to be clearer: given that Assange is probably a rapist, he is poison to the project. There is a line of reasoning which suggests that the case against Assange was pursued to destroy Wikileaks. I believe that this notion has some traction, and it makes me sad that this case was only brought forward to further the interests of those Wikileaks damaged.

To dissociate Assange from Wikileaks is the solution to the problem. He is hardly essential; there are many competent people who could head up the project. The new head of Wikileaks would not be a rapist and therefore would not be toxic.

Yet many of the same people who called for Brooks to go are defending Assange with rape apologism, instead of divorcing him from the project.

This is unnecessary. We should be focusing on what is right and what is wrong.

Rape is always wrong.

Update: It is entirely possible the defence is referring to if Assange did it, rather than an admission that he had. This does not mean there are not charges to answer. There are. This does not mean he is innocent, nor does it mean the survivors are liars. The allegations must be taken very seriously indeed and not dismissed or brushed away from the discussion.

Update 2: Just want to point out that I am retracting my “still liking Wikileaks” assertion. While I support the notion of a service like Wikileaks which would allow people to anonymously leak information, which would hold the powerful to account, Wikileaks isn’t it. It’s become Assange’s personal propaganda machine, not leaking anything of value and merely waffling on about their leader. It’s beyond help, which is a huge shame as we really need something that would serve the function Wikileaks once did.

Small victories: battling the Hydra

Heracles had the misfortune of being born the bastard son of a god with a terrible marriage. The scorned wife, Hera, hated the boy, and hated the man he became, and strived to make his life a special kind of suffering. Life was a losing battle for Heracles, plagued by a series of unbeatable foes.

He found himself, one day, striving to kill the unkillable. The Hydra. Many-headed, it dwelt in a foul swamp and bled poison. Heracles went for the obvious solution: he took a sickle and chopped one head off the beast. Its head landed with a satisfying thump. This will be easy, Heracles thought. One of my twelve labours over before tea-time. He kicked the head aside.

When he looked up again, he realised the magnitude of his task. Two heads had grown back where moments before there had been nothing but a bleeding, fizzing stump.

Fuck, thought Heracles.

Heracles was nothing if not persistent, though. He happened, with a little help from his nephew and wise Athene, upon a solution: kill it with fire.

Each head was hacked off, and the neck cauterised with flame.

The unkillable was slain. Heracles prevailed.

Today, we have beheaded the Hydra: the News of the World, the vile, filthy rag, has closed down. It was, as I had hoped only hours ago, slain by its own rhetoric.

It is only one head of the beast, though, and this head will grow back twofold. As the News of the World dies, another member of Murdoch’s empire will ascend. Murdoch now owns less of the UK media than before, so it becomes more likely that he will be able to finalise his purchase of BSkyB, filling our televisions with yet more of his tawdry, spiteful pap. Another Murdoch Sunday paper will spring up: the Sunday Sun, perhaps, or the Sun on Sunday, or even, given the tabloid’s love for terrible puns, simply the SUNday. It will rise up unless we cauterise the stump.

Even then, it is still a many-headed beast. There is the rest of Murdoch’s empire to take on. And beside those heads, there is that of the Daily Mail, hissing poison and hate. Next to the tabloids sit the broadsheets, chattering vitriol, appearing composed.

And it is more than just the media, this beast. What of the police, with whom money exchanged hands in the News of the World scandal? What of the government, who enjoy a symbiotic relationship with the gutter press?

Most importantly, what of the system, of which these scandals are merely symptoms? Rags like the News of the World would never exist in a world without grasping, greedy capitalism, or misogyny, or racism, or rampant, intrusive voyeurism. These heads need chopping off and purging with fire.

Today we have witnessed something a tiny victory. It may not even be a victory without more of a fight.

Like Heracles, we must keep burning and hacking. He persisted. He had a happy ending. If we keep fighting, so might we.

Happy birthday, NHS

Without the NHS, I would probably be dead of broken, murderous brain. Today, I wish the NHS a happy 63rd year, and think with pride and gratitude about all of the lives it has saved, all of the people it has mended and all of the highly-trained professionals it has taught to save lives and mend people. It is a beautiful, special thing, the one thing that makes this country great.

To quote Aneurin Bevan, a great person from the days when politicians cared about the people:

The NHS will last as long as there are folk left with the faith left to fight for it.

I think it is apparent that there are. I certainly am.

Our precious NHS is under attack from the Tories. Nye saw this coming over sixty years ago:

That is why no amount of cajolery, and no attempts at ethical or social seduction, can eradicate from my heart a deep burning hatred for the Tory Party that inflicted those bitter experiences on me. So far as I am concerned they are lower than vermin. They condemned millions of first-class people to semi-starvation. Now the Tories are pouring out money in propaganda of all sorts and are hoping by this organised sustained mass suggestion to eradicate from our minds all memory of what we went through. But, I warn you young men and women, do not listen to what they are saying now. Do not listen to the seductions of Lord Woolton. He is a very good salesman. If you are selling shoddy stuff you have to be a good salesman. But I warn you they have not changed, or if they have they are slightly worse than they were.

As a present to the NHS, talk about it to everyone. Express your pride and vow to protect it. It needs our help.

Kallistei: the curse of Eris

Eris, the goddess of discord and strife, was pissed off. The other gods were having a party and nobody had thought to invite her. Perhaps they had snubbed her; she had a habit of ruining parties by disagreeing with everyone and trying to start a fight. Nobody liked to sit next to the goddess of discord when all she did was whisper gossip into their ears. “Hera finds your hunchback repulsive, Hephaestos”; “Demeter thinks you smell a bit fishy, Poseidon”; “You are literally the only Olympian Zeus wouldn’t fuck”.

It pissed Eris off, being left out like that: a perfectly enjoyable night of low-level discord at a wedding, which doubled the fun. She had been planning on seeing just how much she could ruin the happy couple’s union before the marriage were even consumated. If they had only invited her to the party, perhaps she would have played nice and spent just one evening without deciding that the world needed more wars and it was her job to make that happen.

Eris thought hard about how to spoil the party for those bastards who excluded her. Something simple, something divisive, something that would fuck shit up entirely. Turning an apple over in her hands, a plan formed.

Catfight, Eris thought. A catfight so epic it will be remembered for thousands of years to come.

Taking a knife, she carved a message into the apple. One word, a few letters with the potential to bring down cities.

ΚΑΛΛΙΣΤΗΙ.

The wedding feast was in full swing. Gods and heroes danced together, wine flowed. They did not see her there. Eris could have joined the party, but she was pissed off.

Eris lobbed the apple, high into the air. It tumbled, glinting gold. Heads turned skyward.

The apple landed with a bounce between three goddesses. Eris stood back to watch; a smile playing at her lips. They read the message.

Kallistei. For the fairest.

Aphrodite, goddess of love, declared that it must be hers. She was beautiful, she embodied passion and love. Surely it must be hers?

Cow-eyed Hera, the goddess of marriage, claimed the apple for her own. Her own marriage was a shambles: her husband Zeus fucked his way around the pantheon. They had never had the conversation about boundaries and limits. If they had, Zeus would not have heeded it, so Hera responded to his transgressions with vengeful wrath. Her insecurities led her believe that someone must see her as the fairest.

Even smart Athene, clever Athene, goddess of wisdom and warfare, fell prey to the apple’s message. Athene wished fervently that she were the fairest. She declared it hers.

To settle the dispute of who was most beautiful, the goddesses took what they believed to be the only democratic approach: they would ask a man to validate their beauty. They petitioned Zeus, king of the gods with a roving eye for beauty.

He refused. His relationship with his wife was fraught enough. Any answer he gave, he thought, would be wrong.

And so they chose a mortal man, Paris of Troy, who had a decent track record in settling disputes. The three goddesses agreed that he could judge their beauty and tell them, once and for all, who was the fairest, and who owned the apple.

Eris smiled.

Paris chose Aphrodite in the end. She had the power of enchantment and love, and promised Paris the love of the most beautiful mortal woman alive. The other goddesses bickered, knowing Aphrodite had played dirty. They were gratified as a war began. Athene returned to her rightful place, strategising over the Trojan war. Troy fell after a war of ten years.

Eris smiled.

The golden apples of the days of gods with human failings shift forms. They were, after all, only symbols of scarcity.

Yet the curse of Eris remains as potent as ever. Kallistei, emblazoned across this season’s must-have Louboutins. Kallistei, tattooed on the arm of the rock star boyfriend. Kallistei, vajazzled across a bald cunt. Divisive symbols, belonging only to the fairest.

We squabble, we beg men to validate our beauty, and Eris smiles.