Category: Uncategorised

Widowhoood is one of those facets of historical experience that I can’t really grok. Widows throughout pre-modern history have been subject to such a weird mix of fear and acceptance, left a socially precarious position but also one in which they have more freedom than married women. Biblical examples would be Ruth and Judith; historical ones can be traced through land and tax records. Laurence Fontaine argued in a recent issue of Esprit that widows in France had more access to markets:

Dans la France de l’Ancien Régime, le droit des femmes évoluait selon leur statut social et les phases de leur cycle de vie ; les veuves étant, par exemple, plus libres que les femmes mariées qui restaient soumises à l’autorité des maris. Toutefois, la charge qui leur incombait de s’occuper et de nourrir la famille leur a donné un accès au marché.

What I can’t figure out is how much this peculiarly, perversely privileged position of widows was general, how much just a situation which enabled a few personally strong widows to run with it, while the majority ended up in much more difficult circumstances, practically and socially.

[as is probably obvious, this is mainly a marker for a topic I find interesting, but which has presumably already been the subject of multiple books, and which I don’t anticipate having anything new to say about]

I love that this article questioning the opening-up of Belarus is all about dubious industrial figures, with nothing about

it being a repressive police state

.

Johann Hari on good form:

something stranger still is happening in The Election That Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Every day in this country, two big forces artificially drag the British government way to the right of the British people, making it enact policies that benefit a small, rich elite at the expense of the rest. We are not supposed to notice this, never mind try to change it. Yet suddenly, in this election, those forces have been exposed.

Good: Laurie Penny has been shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for political writing. Better: she’s willing to deliver a well-placed kick to the shins of the organizers, for defending the indefensible, for remaining closed within a tiny bubble of the political elite, and generally for being symptomatic of the fuckwittery of a disconnected and introspective political elite.

Nonetheless, I’m glad of the Orwell Prize, because it has introduced me to Madam Miaow. another excellent shortlisted blog, which I wouldn’t otherwise have discovered. And…she’s hardly less scathing than Laurie, about “

a truly flesh-crawling example of how skewed and corrupt is the mentality of these people who are running and ruining our lives

“.

Comment on post-election PR in the UK:

I’m afraid that this has been predicted in every close-looking election since … well pretty much since Labour rose to power a century ago, without ever coming close to occurring.

Anybody still following news here because of the

Panama corporate database

might like to know about a new site indexing UK company records, including names of their directors. The people behind it explain:

we bought the Companies House appointment snapshot and dropped it into a quick little searchable symfony app so you can browse the data – it’s the directors and secretaries of every UK company, cross-linked. Quite handy for looking up your PPCs, ex-MPs, etc. Also handy (if you’re a childish prat like me) for looking up funny names (see if you can beat Minge Fan, or Arse Plems Kyentu).

Heh. I’m also a little baffled by the love of Betahaus, which in the end is Just An Office. But even stranger is the terror people seem to have at absolutely safe parts of Berlin:

Das Betahaus liegt zudem abseits neben einer Autowerkstatt und ist eine ansonsten unvermietbare (imho) GSW Immobilien. Absolut keine Gegend wo man Abends alleine durchgehen möchte (Kottbuser Tor ist nicht weit).

ACTA text due for release today:

Overall, therefore, there was a general sense from this session that negotiations have now advanced to a point where making a draft text available to the public will help the process of reaching a final agreement. For that reason, and based on the specific momentum coming out of this meeting, participants have reached unanimous agreement that the time is right for making available to the public the consolidated text coming out of these discussions, which will reflect the substantial progress made at this round.

It is intended to release this on Wednesday 21 April.

Ken Macleod:

“Global warming is real, it’s happening and it’s serious, but it’s certainly no reason to believe there’s more than an outlying possibility of the world coming to an end in this century.”

Charles Stross:

I’ve lately been trying to project possible futures that don’t include any kind of singularity, be it a minor one (like the steam engine) or a massive one (strongly superhuman A.I.s that are to us as we are to cats and dogs). Mostly they require either a malthusian collapse, or repressive legislative/political forces. So, to that extent, any SF that doesn’t try to address the issue is either a dystopia or a fantasy.

A worrying example of how brittle and centralized a lot of our culture is:

A recent wave of takedowns affecting many of the Hitler “Downfall” parody videos has resulted in their removal from YouTube.