Jail for bondage sex rape accuser

This story has me incredibly concerned.

The version of events that is now accepted as "true" is descvribed simply by the opening para:

Knowles, 21, was furious that the night of passion - which included bondage - with Alex Warran, 25, had failed to win him back.

So in revenge she told her father, a Ministry of Defence policeman, that Mr Warren had raped her and he called police.

I struggle to accept this as the whole picture.

Although there is this:

After Mr Warren was arrested, Knowles was contacted again by the police and she admitted she had made up the allegation and even signed a statement confirming that said she had agreed to everything, including bondage.

It feels to me incomplete, and I do not feel confident in holding Ms Knowles as guilty here. Because I am very keen on bondage (and indeed, any kind of sex) being based on clear and informed consent, I feel as though that is lacking in this. It is an issue that has been discussed in BDSM forums online that it is hard to say "yes, I consented to x but then they did y as well, which I didn't consent to, and that made it rape." Ms Knowles seems to have admitted freely that she did agree to have sex with Mr Warren. I find it hugely suspect that she signed this declaration - was she given only one declaration ("sign this or else" - and she's got the "or else" anyway, it appears!) or was she given the chance to accept or retract each individual element? Is it possible, in fact, that there was pressure put on Ms Knowles to retract everything? That is my concern, especially when I read the following passage [my emphasis here]:

Jason Coulter, mitigating, told Judge Picton that Knowles, who now lives in Bristol, was genuinely sorry but had believed she had been raped.

He said: "The primary hurt to Mr Warren will be his wrongful arrest and that he spent wrongful time in custody as a result of her false allegation.

"Whatever happened between the parties on that night, the sexual encounter of tying her up was something that she found an unpleasant experience.

"That aspect, which had never taken place before, was a new form of sexual encounter and she didn't expect it to happen to her."

My fear is that she did not consent - or else, she withdrew her consent during the activity - and that, because her initial statement was (in her words) "over-exaggerated a bit", she was left unable to push forward with the specific claim.

I do not believe that the public interest was served in bringing Ms Knowles to trial for her false allegation; had I been on the jury I would have been implacable that she should not be found guilty. Although the prosecution alleged clear malicious intent, I would never have been convinced of it and would not have seen any way to view her actions as anything other than those of a frightened and worried woman.

Enthusiastic, negotiated, informed, consent, should be the benchmark, whether we're dealing with the mildest bondage or the harshest whipping, the most vanilla or the most kinky of sex. When we hear "yes", we want it to be "yes, yes, YES!!!" and not "oh, okay then".

The saddest, and most harmful, thing about this is it plays directly into the MRA gynophobic misogyny that I believe probably underpins a lot of unjust acquittals in rape trials (and there have to be a lot of them, because no one is going to convince me that 95% of rape allegations are false!) The trope that women only have sex with men because they want something leads inexorably to the belief that if they do the sex and then don't get what they want, then women will automatically cry "rape!" to punish the man involved. And that is the story we have been told here. And I just don't buy it.

In defence of the judgemental meat-eater

DaisyDeadhead asks, "Will somebody please explain to me how a bunch of meat-eaters can judge Michael Vick?"

I would not normally rise to the bait if she left it at that rhetorical question, but she continues to lambast the omnivorous/carnivorous among us with the accusation that being a meat-eater is exactly the same as being a fan of bloodsports such as dogfighting.

This I feel is not acceptable, and her arguments must be met head-on.

I want to be absolutely clear on what this is about: it is not a defence of meat-eating in general, and it is not a criticism of vegetarianism. It is directly a refutation of Daisy's assertion that meat-eating is exactly the same as dogfighting. Personally, I find little difficulty with eating meat from a moral perspective, but that is a different debate - and I have no problem with others feeling that they are not happy with their consciences if they eat meat. This is just a question about moral equivalence.

Daisy cites carnivores:

Ohhhh nooooo, the carnivores say, we LIKE TO EAT BIRDS. So, it isn't the same thing as dogfighting. We have said so!

Ohhhhhh nooooo, the carnivores say, WE MUST EAT.

Ohhhhh noooo, the carnivores say, there is sadism and unsavory pleasure taken in dogfighting.

Daisy points out that vegetarians survive perfectly well without eating meat, so "we must eat" is not a particularly potent argument. There is, however, a valid observation that the human digestive tract is designed to be omnivorous (and the counter-observation that it's designed for predominantly vegetable matter).

The first slightly questionable line of reasoning is "at least the dogs have a fighting chance, the birds are raised to die." Ignoring for one moment that it is the nature of living things to die eventually anyway (it's not a very potent or relevant argument to make, it's just cheap sophistry). The birds are raised to die, says Daisy. For the purpose, indeed, of being eaten. Skipping merrily past the chestnut of "nature red in tooth and claw", we come to the question of what, exactly, makes that wrong. Methods do exist both to give chickens (and indeed, other butcher-destined animals) a relatively pleasant life for as long as they have one, and to make the ending of it swift and pretty painless. (NB: IIRC, in the McLibel court case, the court found that McDonalds and their suppliers were guilty of cutting corners, meaning that the humane killing technique was ineffective in its design purpose)

It is not necessarily a cruel existence, although destined to be a short one: indeed, some producers and supermarkets in the UK make a selling point of the ethical way in which they treat their livestock and poultry while they are alive.

Which leads on to Daisy's assertion that in fact, the sadism, cruelty and "unsavoury pleasure" in dogfighting are matched in the consumption of meat as food.

Says Daisy:

There is also unacknowledged SADISM in putting an animal in your mouth and ripping it to pieces, chewing it up (GROSS!) and going MMMMMMM (instead of retching) when this is not necessary to live and is only for the pleasure of your palate. How is your deliberate ripping, slicing and cooking of birds, God's creatures (not yours!), any different from sport? It's all about entertainment of one kind or another. How is the entertainment of your palate supposedly superior to the entertainment provided to Michael Vick and his friends? The only difference is that one form of sadism is culturally acceptable and one is not.

Once the animal gets to the point of going in my mouth, it has usually been dead for several hours. It's been cooked in an oven or a grill or a frying pan - it is without a doubt beyond sensory experience of any kind. Whether I "rip it to pieces" or daintily cut it with a sharp knife into delicate bite-sized chunks makes not one iota of difference to the animal that my dinner used to be. Chewing, of course, is just a part of how we process food, so what Daisy thinks is gross about it (except, of course, that the law of polite eating is to make it as unobvious as possible that you are in fact eating) is beyond me. As already noted, it is irrelevant that it used to be an animal unless you happen to have a particular attachment to the type of animal it used to be (which point Daisy uses to explain why she believes people view Vick differently from meat-eaters). And of course, when something has a nice taste, we frequently do savour the taste rather than retching. Daisy, presumably, thinks we should respond by retching, as if we have just been confronted with a picture of what the food used to be and told "you just ate Snuffles the poodle" - or possibly even "you just ate a portion of Mrs McDougall, who passed away yesterday". And yet, the retching would not be produced by what we just ate, but by social norms. As Daisy points out, some cultures are perfectly okay with eating dogs. I could add that there are even some societies who are okay with eating deceased humans.

A quick point about definitions. Sadism is specifically taking joy in suffering. Strictly speaking, it's about taking sexual pleasure in others' suffering, but common usage often leaves that bit out. We can stick with the generalised "enjoying (causing) suffering" definition for this discussion.

So the question becomes, "Is it really true that by enjoying the flavour a a piece of meat that someone takes pleasure in another creature's suffering?" Indirectly, it may be argued, yes. That certainly seems to be Daisy's point of view. But the pleasure is not derived from the suffering, even though it is perhaps a consequence of that suffering (assuming suffering has taken place, see above). One might as well argue that anyone who wore/wears Nike, Adidas or Puma shoes that were made in Asian sweatshops is also taking sadistic pleasure. After all, the comfort of their feet that they enjoyed was a direct result of underpaid children being worked for obscenely long hours in intolerable conditions! But I am sure that very few of those who wore/wears those shoes ever felt any pleasure at the thought of that suffering taking place. They might have pushed the knowledge to the backs of their minds, hidden from it, tried to avoid feeling guilty about it, and carried on as before, but they didn't take any pleasure in it.

Likewise with meat-eaters. Very few meat-eaters take pleasure in thinking about how the meat ended up from being the chicken or fluffy little lamb to being a part of their meal. (I suppose a few ultra-macho tossers might posture about it, but they are, thankfully, a minority).

Meat-eating does not involve sadism.

Dogfighting, on the other hand, is all about putting dogs into a situation where you know they are going to get hurt; and if you're betting on the fight then you want one of them to get hurt a lot, and the more it gets hurt the better it is for you. It is, without a doubt, sadistic behaviour. The choice to gamble on that, instead of a game of cards or a properly accredited sporting event, tells us that, yes, the suffering of the animals invovled is an integral part of the enjoyment.

Dogfighting is about sadism. Meat-eating is not.

Whatever one's views about "entertainment of the palate" and whether that's ethically acceptable, when meat-eaters go about indulging that form of entertainment, they do so without wishing suffering. Yes, the industrialised process of providing meat for people's plates is an obscene and hideous one - factory farming is an abomination. Most meat-eaters try not to think about them at all. But also many actually seek out providers who do not use factory farming methods but employ free-range principles, proper care of livestock etc, use genuinely humane methods of slaughter, and so on. It is possible to minimise the cruelty and suffering involved in the process of providing meat products. Meat-eaters are not seekers of cruelty. Dogfighters are.

***

I stated this at the top of the discussion, but I'm going to re-state it here for clarity and emphasis: this is not a defence of meat-eating per se; it is rather a clear statement of the distinction in ethical terms between eating meat, and fighting dogs. It is intended to explain why it is possible for people to eat meat and at the same time despise Michael Vick for his part in a cruel bloodsport. I acknowledge that if you feel that eating meat is wrong, and feel that the "entertainment of the palate" is insufficient justification for doing so, then you will still conclude that it is not okay to eat meat. That's fine. I'm not arguing against that position with this post (and although I could argue against that position, I feel I know both sides of the debate so well that it would have no purpose - I remain unconvinced by the vegetarians' arguments, and they will remain unconvinced by mine).

As it happens, I think the world would be a lot better if the amount of meat being consumed by the human race were to be reduced greatly; I want to see factory farming and similarly cruel industrialised practices abolished (with the reduced consumption of meat, it should be possible to answer the world's requirements using humane methods). This would have positive effects in terms of the environment, in terms of the food capacity of the world, and in terms of health. But that, as mentioned earlier, is another debate entirely.

The mash-up to mash your mind: Nirvana vs Rickroll...

Found via Renee @ Womanist Musings:



I have to disagree with Renee's assessment ("share the horror"). To me, this is what makes music so much fun to muck about with. I think it's awesome! Of course, I do have a very sick mind and sense of humour, which may explain my reaction as compared to others'...

OMG That's me...

I swear, I still don't think of myself as an adult. I feel out of my depth with adult things. Except sex. And that's only because I spend so much time reading about it, looking at pictures of it, and hey, I even had it a couple of times, y'know? So, I'm, like, experienced and everything...!

Seriously, I'm convinced if companies knew my real age in my mind they'd crap themselves that they do things like lend me money, sell me knives, lease a flat to me, etc.

Then again, I think of what I was actually like in my teens and thank fuck I'm not quite that bad any more with my politics etc!

Good-girl/Bad-girl sexy

I used to love doing the quizzes in the girlie mags my sister regularly bought (there was a range of them, the ones I recall are "Miz", "19", "Just Seventeen" and of course the UK version of Cosmo) and seeing what sort of girl I would be!

Via Figleaf and Holly @ Pervocracy I was put onto a US Cosmo quiz thing called "Are You Good-girl Hot or Bad-girl Hot?" (follow the links on Holly or Figleaf to try it yourself). I couldn't resist trying it out. Since it's online, I was able to take screenshots to show you what my answers and result were (and hey, dig how their colour scheme matches mine almost exactly - how cool is that!?):



God knows I don't have much in the way of assets that can be worked (at least, not in public, until nudism is an accepted part of social behaviour...) and however smart I may be, I draw the line at "sophisticated. I actually usually go for humour, but failing that, I'm much more likely to be shy, oh so painfully shy... if I can just work on that "sultry" bit now...

Oh yeah, and "effortlessly"? For mere mortal men, the dominant paradigm would have any form of dating as requiring all sorts of effort!


Gosh **blush** the thought of initiating physical contact at all - but equally, no lust-inducing figure (gay man or straight woman) is going to notice me all by myself, and waiting for a chance encounter of a mutual acquaintance just ain't gonna cut it. And the MAJOR dose of self-consciousness that would come from trying a ruse like "need another drink?" would sink me before I got there - picture tripping over my own feet and falling flat on my face in a most classy (NOT!) style - so this was a bit of a doozy for me. In the end, my thing is just to approach and introduce myself. But like I said, attempting physical contact (quite apart from the potential for a man initiating physical contact to be misread in a most unfortunate way) is just impossible for me, at least until some words have been exchanged!


Actually, I could have gone two ways with this. The fact is, I am still friends with my exes, and they like to stay friends with me, so that's answer 3. But I'm a fucking SADIST, for crying out loud. I don't think anyone's described me as "could still bring home to parents" (even though I probably could be). But knife-wielding bi-ness, if that includes a little evil glint in the eye, yes - I have been described in those sorts of terms before, many times.



What can I say? I'm fucking lazy sometimes, and anyway almost all my clothes are t-shirts and jeans/combats/joggers, cos I'm living on a tight budget and those are the cheapest casual clothes money can buy!


Actually, when put into practice, the last answer came closest - but the "new" partner was someone whom I'd spoken with online for months already so it doesn't really count. If we're assuming that this is a person I've met for the first time at that night's social event, and we've spent hours talking to each other, and I've got the hots for her or him (and I know he's gay!)then I think I would be confident enough to offer a goodnight cuddle and peck on the cheek, and would go for it.


Geez, I didn't realise it was possible for "sexy" to come off as "nasty", except that I'm a sadist and my "sexy" often is a bit scary and dark and "evil" (in a fun way!) But that's not to do with degree of "sexy", it's to do with type of "sexy".

Also - I lack the artifice necessary to do "lure". I don't lure anybody because that would imply that a) I knew what I was doing and b) that I wanted them not to be aware of what I was doing. My deal is much simpler: I let them know I'm interested in them in a sexy/dating sense, but if that's not cool then friends is cool too - so let's see which works out for us both? And sometimes it works out as friends, and sometimes it works out as sexy/dating stuff. "Luring", whether it's the arseholish PUA type, or the various feminine equivalents (I had "walletworking" here first, but realised not all women, and probably not even most women, who do the luring stuff are after money and that stereotype is not worthy to be perpetuated here): not really my deal. Not as recipient, not as performer.

Finally, I don't want a potential partner kept guessing about my "sack skills" - I want people to know I can get to the QB and bring him down! Oh, not what they meant? My bad! Yeah, I don't want a potential submissive partner to be guessing about my skills: trust and safety being hugely important with my kind of sex, I want her to be confident of what I've got.

Thank you Favre the memories

It appears that the legendary #4 has made a final decision that he will not, after all, be coming back for season 19 of his illustrious NFL career, and will call a final end to it instead.

Oddly enough, I finally got my hands on Madden 09 today (the one with Favre as the cover guy, which is the whole reason I wanted it instead of the latest version!) and in a way that makes it seem fitting, too. After all, it was last year that he seemed to be brought back into the game where most cover guys get knocked out of it!

Last year around this time, with the prospect of Brett coming back, and the furore over whether or not he would be willing to be potentially the back-up behind Aaron Rodgers, or if he would finally ditch the Packers and go for a trade somewhere else, I felt that Brett was really being a bit childish about things. This time, he seems to have arrived at a more adult decision. As much as I would have loved to see him go round one more time, regardless of what colours he was wearing for it, I think this is the grown up thing for him to do.

Of course, it might have been more grown up for him to make the decision a bit sooner, but a) then we wouldn't have had a summer of Favre Watch to enjoy, and b) perhaps if things had been slightly different, it wouldn't have needed to be the grown up decision and he could have gone on; maybe it took this long for all the pieces to be clear in his mind, and I can respect that.

So, as the grizzled-looking QB heads off into the sunset, I have a few wishes for him and his family. Obviously I wish them all well and long and happy lives together after this. But also, I think it would be great if Favre continued to work out with the local school squad each summer. He could also be a great figure for charity events and I would like to see him do some of that.

But most of all, I just want to thank him for the memories of watching a unique talent at work, digging his team out of trouble so often - and so often, digging them into trouble as well! Good luck, #4, and happy retirement!

Feminist-Ally cookie-guilt

Please note: this post has been tagged "silly nonsense" and should be treated as self-absorbed waffling and not anything, y'know, serious, like

A fellow blogger, female-identified and feminist, sent me by email the comment:

Take care babe, and thanks again for all your brilliant contributions to the blog debate. Allies like you are gold dust...

Which is incredibly lovely and all, and yet -

I'm not supposed to be in it for the cookies! Stop giving me cookies! That's not why I'm here! (Oh, go on then, I will have just one more, got to watch my figure...)

It's not that I see feminist/feminist-ally blogging as a rewardless task, or one that should be without reward. On the contrary, I do it because I get a lot out of it, which just follows from the sort of person I am anyway - to me, it's a worthwhile and enjoyable (at times) activity. But there does kind of get this cognitive dissonance going between knowing I'm not supposed to be doing it to win approval, and yet here I am, winning approval. It's kind of, approval I don't know what to do with, in a way. And the thing is, it's not of the class (and nowhere near the degree) of "I finished my dissertation and got an 'A', yay me" and everyone going "phwoar, you've got great tits!" - the approval is appropriate to the "achievement", it's just somehow completely not what I was looking for. If you can picture a QB who has just led his team to an improbable comeback to win in the 4th Quarter, and him standing at the press conference and everyone gushing over him and congratulating him, the press asks "how does it feel to be rated one of the greatest QBs of your generation" and he just looks embarrassed, "I don't do it for that. I play the game, I do my job as well as I can, that's enough. And sometimes winning is nice too."

I get like that when people say nice things to me about my involvement in feminist blogging. I should let it go by just as easily as all the other stuff, have no reaction one way or the other, but no - I still get the cookie-guilt.

I suppose this blog post in itself is displaying a huge "it's all about MEEEEEE!" privilege thing, so now I get to have privilege-guilt as well.

Ho hum, it's hardeasy being a white het male...

Beautiful Rain

It is morning here, and I have been awake most of the night, except for a short sleep of about 3 hours.

Sat in front of my computer, facing the window to one side of the screen, I can see the mauve-grey skies and see the shadowy green of the trees opposite.

Rain, smooth and soft and steady, slithers down the velvet heavens, drenching the soil.

The wind rustles leaf and branch, not violently but restively; the raindrops pitter on the ground, and water gushes down drainpipes. A sopping, flowing symphony of soft water from above, dark in colour, light in tone.

Morning rains.

I am not a fish (or, "please don't kettle me!")

As promised, my experiences of 'kettling'.

This is essentially the statement I gave in evidence to the law firm who represented the Mayday 2001 Oxford Circus protesters. It describes my experience as a victim of the first use of the "kettling" tactic by UK police officers and why I believe a lot of the claims about the reasons for the tactic were bogus.

On May 1st 2001 I made my way to the railway station in [hometown] from where I caught the train to London arriving at approximately 12.30pm.

I travelled on my own hoping to meet and join the Mayday Protesters. I then used the Underground to travel to Embankment from where I walked to Piccadilly Circus in time for a meeting at 1pm.

On my way I passed a small demonstration outside New Zealand House and I recall that this demonstration was peaceful even though the demonstrators were chanting and being loud. The demonstrators were being contained from spilling into the road by large numbers of police officers. I also recall that as I travelled from Embankment to Piccadilly I noticed that there seem to be up to 10 police officers on every street corner.

I recall that the protest at Piccadilly was designated by its organisers as a Pagan celebration of Beltane (it is the origins of the May 1st holiday and centred around the Eros Statue). I recall that when I met up with the demonstrators it was very musical meeting with drum playing, taking important role and I joined in with a small clay drum that I had brought with me.

I had also bought with me my guitar but did not play at the Beltane meeting as it was raining and I did not want the guitar to get wet. I also recall that people were singing. Later on I recall that there were loud whistles and cheering as a bike ride went past.

I felt the whole event was relatively peaceful and everyone was in high spirits and the police presence seemed to be relatively low compared to the presence I had seen on my way to Piccadilly.

At approximately 2pm, the Piccadilly demonstration started to dissipate and around the same time, a large marching group came past and most of the Piccadilly demonstrators joined in with this marching group, including myself. This group proceeded to march North up Regent Street, towards Oxford Circus.

When we arrived at Oxford Circus, the march began to slow down, for reasons that at first were unclear to me. The only bit of violence I had seen during our march up to Oxford Circus was, a scuffle between one protester and another protester which was soon brought under control by the other protesters.

When the march first stopped at around Oxford Circus, my first assumption was that this was where the major event of the afternoon intended to take place. I believe there were approximately been 1,000 – 3,000 people there at this time. It quickly became apparent that the protesters were hemmed in on all sides by police barricades.

I realised within the first two hours of our immobility, these barricades were reinforced by the arrival of police vans so as to block the entire highway.

I would say that I first noticed that I was being detained at approximately 3pm and my realisation came when I saw the police vans blocking the highway.

When the march first stopped various leaders within the demonstration led the group in chanting slogans and singing short protest songs directed at the general causes for which we had marched. However, after what seemed like an hour in which the protest was not allowed to move on, people began to lose interest in chanting and boredom increased.

I noted some members of the demonstration began to consume large quantities of alcohol and the mood turned restless and a few scuffles broke out in the crowd. It was the immediate concern of those surrounding the people involved in the scuffle to control the aggressors and persuade them to calm down.

I believe that it was the same person involved in more than one scuffle. I also recall that when scuffles did break out, the police did not intervene or help innocent protesters who may have been injured by the aggressor.

In order for the police to have intervened, they would have had to penetrate into the crowd and they did not do this.

At approximately 4pm I began to make friends with the protesters nearest me in the crowd. After talking to them for a while I learned that people were very hungry and thirsty as several people had been expected to return home, myself included.

I had bought a pack lunch of chicken and cheese sandwiches since I had left home before lunchtime, and would be sometime travelling on the return journey. I therefore shared this food including a bottle of Cola drink and a chocolate bar with the people nearest to me. To my knowledge this was the last food and drink available to the crowd.

At this point, people were also complaining of needing to go to the toilet. I heard rumours that these problems had been mentioned to the police officers at the barricades and, the police officers had been very unsympathetic and ignored the protesters.

I do know that one member of the protest rang Directory Enquiries to obtain the number for Scotland Yard. This protester telephoned Scotland Yard to alert them to our predicament regarding toilet facilities.

At approximately 5 or 6pm I heard the first announcement. The police informed the crowd via loud speaker that, “we were being detained to prevent a breach of the peace or damage to property”. I also recall two other announcements, the first being “you are being detained for your own safety” and “move closer into the middle”.

I also recall that these announcements were repeated at regular intervals approximately every one hour.

At approximately 6pm I began gathering names of people who believed that they were being detained illegally. I spent the next 1 – 1-and-half hours gathering names and I believe that I gathered something like 200 names. Whilst I was doing this I recall the first damage to property occurred. I was positioned more towards the Marble Arch end of Oxford Street, quite near the Benetton shop.

I recall someone at the far side of the crowd where I was situated, hurling an object through a window. I was told by a friend that the time was 6.05pm when this incident occurred. Later on I noticed that one of the sets of traffic lights had been broken and I recall that these two incidents constituted the entire damage to property by the demonstrators throughout our total period of detention.

By this time people were naturally beginning to lose the patience asked for by the police.

At approximately 6.30pm I went and spoke to a police officer on the barricade, on the western entrance to Oxford Circus. I explained that I had to catch a train in order to return home and that if I did not return home soon, people would be worried about me. The policeman I spoke to was White, Male, Dark Hair and was wearing a helmet. He was very unhelpful and replied, “You and everyone else on the protest”.

I then asked the same police officer if I could have access to a telephone in order to contact my family and inform them that I was being detained. I recall that this request was denied and I was not given any reason for the denial of this request.

I also recall speaking to some elderly people who informed me that they had also approached the police and asked to be released and the police had declined.

I also recall people saying that the police had charged the crowd and seemed to be forcing the demonstrators into the middle. People felt afraid of being crushed and I was afraid of being knocked over since the crowd was very tightly packed and it was difficult keeping my balance.

I also had my guitar, which was very heavy, on my back since I was being detained, I had to carry my guitar on my back for the whole day. I recall that I suffered from backache for one further day after the detention.

I believe it was around 9.30pm when the police finally started to release people from Oxford Circus. The process took a further hour to complete and people left via the Northern exit. The police formed a wall of officers with riot shields and helmets who advanced in a northerly direction. This put pressure on the crowd to stay relatively dense.

I soon found myself facing this wall and struck up a brief conversation with a police officer who asked me to play a song on my guitar. After which I joined the general movement towards the exist. I was finally freed at around 10.30pm and as I was released I had to walk through a channel lined on either side with police officers. This was very intimidating.

I was not stopped and searched or (to my knowledge) photographed however, I did see people being stopped and searched and I believe that this was a psychological tactic the police were using to intimidate protestors.

The last train to [hometown] left from Victoria Station at 10.34 and therefore I had no chance of catching it. I therefore had to catch a train from London Bridge Railway Station to Tunbridge Wells and this train departed at 11.37pm. With no buses running that late at night between Tunbridge Wells and [hometown] I had to ask someone to collect me from Tunbridge Wells Railway Station at 12.30am on 2nd May 2001. This obviously greatly inconvenience the other person and by the time I arrived home it was 12.45am.

I was effectively kept a prisoner in Oxford Circus for well over 8 hours without any provision for food, drink or toilet facilities save the little food and drink I had brought with me prior to being detained. Many other protestors had not brought any food or drink with them.

The weather was wet and raining for most of the time we were detained in I believe inhuman conditions for this 8 hour period.

I have been on many demonstrations during my lifetime however, I have never been held and I believe that the tactics the police used on this Mayday demonstration will affect future protests.

My Radical History part 3 - 2000 onwards

On Mayday 2000, there was a mass anti-globalisation demonstration in the centre of London. Several outlets of McDonalds, as the most visible emblem of US Capitalist "imperialism" were vandalised, and pranks including sowing grass seed as a Mohican hairdo on the head of a famous statue took place. The pranks were very much in a sense of humour about the movement, while also showing the contempt that the protesters felt about the figures and the current regime.

With the fall of the Conservative Party, and the New Labour project rapidly turning into "Thatcherism 2: Maggie's Student", my generation felt increasingly unrepresented and unheard. It seemed almost to be a step back to the lyric from Queen's Hammer to Fall: "For we who grew up tall and proud/ In the shadow of the mushroom cloud/ Convinced out voices can't be heard/ Just wanna scream it louder and louder and louder..." The Mayday 2000 "riot" was organised by anarchist, socialist and environmentalist groups but was taken over by activist individualists who wanted to make a point.

Although the protest was demonised in the national media, the accounts struck a chord with me. The organisers were already saying that there would be a protest on Mayday 2001, and I made up my mind that I would be there.

The reasons for choosing Mayday were twofold: firstly because it is traditionally the Pagan/Celtic festival of Beltane (although in fact the English Mayday is more associated with Anglo-Saxon paganism than Celtic), and through the new-age/anti-establishment (which for many of my peers automatically meant anti-Christianity) roots of the anti-globalisation movement, pagan festivals came to mean a lot to many of the protesters. But equally, on the socialist and anarchist side (who tended to be more atheist) it is also known as Labour Day or International Workers Day. Since all these causes found a common enemy in modern global capitalism, they had decided to unite on a day "sacred" to all their movements and say so.

Between May 2000 and May 2001, as noted in Part 2, for me the 1990s ended with the election of coup by GW Bush to become President of the USA. This was seen as a huge step back for the campaign, and when Tony Blair became so chummy with Bush, it was an added kick in the teeth.

This, of course, fuelled the anger and hatred of all things USAian (especially rightwing, capitalist, imperialist USA - of which Dubya was seen to be the epitome) and Mayday 2001 looked like being a major event.

It turned out to be an important day in British political protest, but for all the wrong reasons. The police, afer the softly-softly approach to the 2000 protest, had come up with a new tactic (now known as 'kettling') to deal with us protesters. I arrived in London with my guitar and a packed lunch, at around 12:30, expecting to stay until 5 or 6pm and catch the train home again. As it turned out, I was held prisoner until 10:30pm. I would say it was this event that really started me down the road towards feeling that peaceful protest is insufficient in modern Britain: if we are treated as criminals when we are minding our own business peacefully protesting, then what good does it do to refrain from violent protest?

2001, of course, brought us the world-changing event of September 11th. I remember writing just a day or two afterwards a very angry, bitter song (I no longer have the lyrics or music available) about what I perceived would be the aftermath. I foresaw in the footage of Palestinians cheering a blow against the American oppressor a world in which there would be war after war, in which many many deaths on both sides would ensue, and peace would be a distant memory. I also recall that the initial assumptions in the media were that it had been a Palestinian terrorist group that was responsible - those cheering protesters in the Occupied Territories obviously lending weight to that assumption. It was only later that Al Qaida, Osama Bin Laden and the Taliban were fingered for it. Essentially, I also recall that the claims were never backed up. Bush and his cohorts just repeated the claims until they became the "truth". Later, of course, it appeared that there were, indeed, Al Qaida members responsible, but they were all Saudi Arabian citizens, not Afghans. The footage of OBL claiming responsibility also seemed suspicious, and there is some justice in saying that I was becoming a conspiracy theorist about the whole thing (like, Bush's regime were faking them, and maybe there was no OBL just a hate-figure created by the neocons, like an inverse of Big Brother in 1984).

Public opposition to the war in Afghanistan was muted, and really limited to the usual suspects: anarchists, socialist groups, peace campaigners. The Taliban were, by any rational measure, a seriously evil regime and getting rid of them would be a good thing. But we on the Left made several predictions:

• It will be bad for the Afghan people, who will suffer due to the prosecution of this war
• It will not be possible to win this war quickly, and it will result in troops being there for years to come
• Democratic elections may not have the beneficial results you expect them to

The Taliban were, of course, ousted from power rather quickly, at which point the rightwingers and supporters of the war turned around and laughed at the naysayers, saying effectively "HAH! Proved you wrong there!"

That was 2001. It's now 2009. Has democracy greatly enhanced women's rights in Afghanistan? Only slightly. Have the Afghan people benefited much from the war being fought in their country? Not a great deal (and their major cash crop is now being destroyed regularly by the occupiers). And, of course, we are talking about sending more and more troops into the region. The anti-war campaigners have been proved right.

2002 saw me at another Mayday protest in London.After the police oppression of the 2001 protest, the organisers decided we were not going to have a big centralised protest but scatter loads of small demonstrations, events and so on throughout the day at many different locations. The whole thing seemed to me to e much lower-key than any previous demo I'd been to, and it was hard to avoid the feeling that the protest movement had (at least temporarily) had the stuffing knocked out of us by the outcome of 2001. Nevertheless, with my growing confidence in my own sexuality and with it a growing interest in the politics of sex and gender, I was finding new causes, and one event in particular that caught my eye was a carnival by the Sex Workers Union. I had not realised such an organisation existed until that day, and I wished I could have stayed longer to see more about them. but my fierce willingness to stand up for sex workers' rights probably comes from realising that sex workers are self-advocating. It was a realisation that whores aren't all victims.

This was also the era of the paedophile witch hunts in Britain, which were so effortlessly lampooned by Chris Morris' Brass Eye Special in 2001. The hatred expressed by much of the British media at the Brass Eye special was more because they knew that the media themselves were the target of Chris Morris' satire; the moral outrage was a screen to protect themselves from the just criticism. I have always been a firm advocate of rehabilitation and reintegration as the best way to deal with sex offenders, and it was due to seeing the way witch hunts work in terms of national hysteria that forced me to this view, as much as my firm belief that even the worst criminal is still a human being and should be regarded as such. The Methodist Church is one of a few organisations that take a similar view. Of course, as I'm a sadist, many people view me as a pervert as well, and there is still a strong element in British society that would see little difference between me and a paedophile (the implications that has for women's autonomy are clear, I hope: these people think women are as powerless and incapable of making their own decisions as little children).

With even the supposed party of the left now espousing rightwing philosophy and policy, it was no surprise that racist anti-immigration policies were drafted, that civil liberties were gleefully eroded under the guise of protecting us from paedophiles, foreigners and the like. Steve Bell's fuel price protester cartoon captures the spirit of the reactionary grassroots movement so perfectly (the difficult-to-read caption on the right says "No DERV for paediatricia pervs"). Some paediatricians (doctors who specialise in childhood maladies) were, indeed, targeted by lynch mobs who couldn't tell the difference between "paediatrician" and "paedophile".

2003, of course, saw the culmination of Dubya's plan to commit another illegal war. Tony Blair earned himself the epithet "Dubya's Lapdog" by willingly following Dubya's lead (although, strangely, it was the lapdog who carried the pooperscooper and cleaned up after his master's public droppings, it seemed). This was in direct opposition to the will of the British people.

I was not there on February 15th 2003, because I was laid low by a cold virus (manflu! I had manflu!) - the only member of my family not to go. I watched on television, though, as somewhere between 1 and 2 million UK citizens marched through London, right past the Houses of Parliament. In any other age, they would have stormed the Palace of Westminster and wrested power from the government then and there. They didn't, because it was an entirely peaceful protest. No kettling involved here! But equally, it was utterly ineffectual. Tony Blair ignored the protest, somehow managing to convince himself that it was an "unrepresentative minority" who were opposed to war.

If I started down the road to believing violent protest was necessary on Mayday 2001, then 15th Feb 2003 was the culmination of that journey. If that many people could protest peacefully, and still be ignored by the people in power, then ultimately peaceful protest could not be the whole of the movement for change. It has an important place, of course, as being the easiest way for people to say something, but it seems that it is not the way for anyone to be heard. After being a pacifist or non-violence supporter all my life, I finally decided that I needed to arm myself if I wanted there to be change.

When people talk about "radicalising" young people (they usually use the word "Muslims") and turning them to violence, they are usually talking about some bad guy leading them astray. But the real radicalising force is oppression: the more you try to oppress a people (for instance, in response to radicalism!) the more injustice and anger you generate, and the more likely young people especially are to see that they have to do something about it. And that, ultimately, is my story of how I became the fierce person I am today.

By the time war in Iraq began, I had recovered from my sniffles (manflu! it was manflu!) I knew that an anti-war protest was planned for "the day war breaks out" in Brighton, which is near enough that I could get there on public transport easily enough. Therefore, I went and participated in the protest.

Anger and high spirits make a curious mixture, but typify the demo experiences that I have seen: while the point of the protest is to express and vent anger at the faceless powers that govern our lives (capitalism, corporations, our own government), yet the ways we choose to do it are full of fun and party spirit. We sang, people played drums, I had conversations with nice people - these are what typify many of the protests I went on.

And, just as with Dubya's Afghan war before it, his Iraq war saw early crowing by the neocons (anyone remember "Mission Accomplished"?) followed by the realisation that the anti-war campaigners had been right all along: it did collapse into a long, drawn-out engagement; democratic elections did not work very well, thousands of civilians were killed, the US occupying forces were not welcome (the Iraqis celebrated the fall of Saddam Hussain, but that was it), the US forces completely mismanaged the whole situation. And, of course, there were no WMD.

In 2004 my attentions were on the domestic scene, and on civil liberties. Particularly, the 2004 Licensing Act. The Musicians Union and several other organisations of live performers were campaigning against the "2 in a bar rule" that meant that unless a venue had a public entertainment licence, if any 2 people performing were joined by a third, then it was an illegal performance. This technically meant that a pub full of people singing "Happy Birthday" could result in the landlord being closed down. the MU wanted this outdated and oppressive law scrapped, and set out its case to the New Labour government.

New Labour, being as it is ultimately inclined towards authoritarianism/totalitarianism, chose to abolish the 2 in a bar rule and replace it with a "none in a bar" rule instead. Instead of being illegal to have three performers, it was now going to be illegal to have even 1 performer unless a venue was licensed for music performance. I took the time to download and read through the relevant pages of the Licensing Bill (it has since been passed into law and become the Licensing Act 2004). I organised my arguments, wrote to my MP, encouraged as many people as I could to write to theirs. The Licensing Act changed a lot of other things as well (for instance, it made the legal age to drink alcohol a flat 18, instead of having the various loopholes that actually encouraged a way of learning to drink responsibly by starting younger - this also abolished some great old traditions of English grassroots sport such as the "Jug" for a 5-wicket haul at cricket, which would often fall to some young fast bowler). The main problem was that instead of having separate licences for performance and serving alcohol and so on, there would now be a single licence to cover all these things, but you had to decide in advance when applying for your licence which things you wanted to be able to do. If you wanted to add things later, then the letter of the law would mean that you had to apply for a whole new licence. It also carried an assumption that all those who wanted to host events also wanted to serve alcohol. This instinct to take more control, and impose rigid restrictions on live music horrified the campaigners, but again, despite our objections the bill passed into law without substantial change.

Since then, my involvement in radical protest has been limited. I have written to my MP on sexual politics (decriminalising prstitution, and SM, as well as being a very vocal opponent of the extreme porn laws) and to oppose the Abolition of Parliament Bill (so called because it would have removed Parliamentary oversight from a lot of the executive branch's decisions). My only real activism has been the organising of a protest concert as part of the campaign against the extreme porn law that was passed in 2008.

As depression has kept my laid low for a couple of years, but I have now shaken it off again, it is possible that I will be at more protests, and do more practical radicalism again, but this blog has in part been about keeping it ticking over in the meantime. It has also, of course, revitalised my sexual politics and my personal radical feminism, and the Lord knows there's plenty of activism to be done in that area. But this has been my radical history.

My Radical History part 2 - 1990s

The early 1990s were a curious time to be a young person in Britain, or so it seemed to me. As I explained in Part 1, the defining structures of my youth were crumbling away: the USSR collapsed, Soviet socialism was dead, swept aside; there was a reunited Germany, whose future was uncertain as the former GDR tried to catch up with the rest of the Federal Republic with which it was now united; Apartheid in South Africa was coming to an end, in what seemed at the time to be chaotic fashion, but Nelson Mandela was free again after decades of captivity; Thatcher was deposed as her attempt to introduce the poll tax in Britain was crushed by popular revolt, with genuine riots in London that were only partially suppressed by police action. Reagan had left office in 1989, after 2 terms as US President, replaced by George Bush the First...

Bush and Thatcher's replacement, the rather inept John Major, a man more interested in trying to revive a mythical version of England than in genuine government, it seemed at the time - led a military adventure against Iraq, which could fairly be called the "100 hours war" in terms of how long the ground campaign lasted. I still remember Bush saying on television "This is not just about oil", and my mother commenting, "Ah, so he's admitting it IS about oil - because if it's not just about oil, then it is at least partly about oil." I have had some good teachers when it comes to viewing politicians with cynical eyes.

It was, perhaps, the first post-Cold War military engagement and to my young eyes it was very scary indeed. Iraq was widely believed to be some way along the process of developing a nuclear weapon (and we had far more evidence, as I recall, then we ever did for George Bush the Second's war), and the potential for apocalypse from the burning of the oil fields was easy to see as the environment was just beginning to be a real issue in politics at that time.

But the real political events I remember came a couple of years later. As I said, the poll tax riots overthrew Thatcher, and John Major seemed to be inept and incapable as Prime Minister. 1992 was supposed to be the year in which a Labour government would take power and undo some of the damage of the Thatcher years. Before the General Election, however, there was the creation of the European Union by the signing of the Maastricht Treaty. I remember the buld-up to this for a number of reasons. One was the concern about "federalism" and a desire by the Right in Britain particularly to avoid a "slippery slope" leading to a "United States of Europe" with the individual nations being ruled by a central federal body. The other concern was a passage in the Maastricht Treaty called the "Social Chapter". The Social Chapter would have guaranteed certain rights to workers, such as equality of the genders, a limit on how long workers could be required to work, and other fairly basic rights of that nature. I recall, after the treaty was signed and the UK had been granted an opt-out on this part of the treaty, going to the library to find out what all the fuss was about. I looked up the Social Chapter and found the full text available to read. I read it. It wasn't a very long document, but it struck me that any nation wanting to retain the right not to honour these rights must surely be a harsh and unpleasant place to be a low-waged worker. I recall feeling very angry indeed that my government didn't want me to have these rights when I grew up.

The schism in the Conservative Party over whether or not to be a part of the European Unionwas a part of what gave the impression that they were on the way out. The poll tax catastrophe hadn't been forgotten, the Tories were unpopular, the first stirrings of the sleaze that would finally destroy Major's government were already being heard - surely, felt the Left, this was our moment.

It wasn't.

John Major clung to power by a narrow margin. There are still conspiracy theories that suggest that the election was stolen through fraud, noting that several of the key marginal constituencies that Major needed to win and did, showed a much higher than normal number of postal ballots returned. It was crushing. The parliamentary Left was put into retreat, and has still not recovered as far as I can see.

I said in Part 1 that I was finding my own causes. This was as I discovered popular music. The late 1980s and early 1990s were characterised by the rise of dance music: house, trance, hiphop and, especially, rave. I never really liked that sort of music, but the political response to it was something to which I could respond with passion - and hatred. Although the laws weren't to go before Parliament until 1995, there was a long and vicious campaign by the rightwing media in this country to demonise the young people who went to raves, who took drugs (such as ecstacy) and generally were Not Being Good Little Adults. Never mind that those stories had run regularly every decade for at least a century beforehand, of course this time was Worse Than Ever Before (just like every other time...) I may have hated the rave-goers music, but (with apologies to Voltaire) I was ready to defend to the last their right to rave to it.

I was young, angry and cynical at the way that people in power seemed to treat those without power - especially us young folks. I remember questioning whether anyone really cared about human rights, and whether it was really just everyone for themselves when it came down to it. I was fierce about wanting to support the environment, civil liberties, human rights, end violence, but felt powerless. This probably represents the nadir of my activist self. it also, of course, coincides with puberty, and the many issues I had with my burgeoning sexuality, as a sadist, that seemed so conflicted with the principles I wanted to uphold.

However, a new politics was beginning to form among the young people I knew at the time. I was involved with a number of folk groups and was outspoken at school. I follwed the news and stayed in touch, This was before the internet was all that widely available (although it was becoming more so - the school had just got its first inernet-access computer) but there were print media available, and vague echoes even turned up in the evening news sometimes. We were commonly called "Thatcher's Children" - we'd spent our entire formative years with Maggie Thatcher as PM. But we rebelled as best we could against the Conservative philosophy she'd left us with. And there was music for us - sometimes, even by us. The Levellers especially, seemed to capture with their sound and lyrics the spirit of anti-establishment individualism that ran through this movement - politically outspoken with green, "new age" and leftwing ideals, they struck a chord with many who had grown up hating Thatcher, and finding Major not much of an improvement. The song "One Way" (lyric: "There's only one way of life, and that's your own") was very popular and could be heard strummed on many a young rebel's guitar.

The individualism of this movement seemed unsatisfactory to me. That lyric always bugged me because, as I in fact once said to someone who sang it, "What happens if my way of life involves murdering you? And, there's 5 billion people in the world, so is that 5 billion ways of life, or do I get to enforce mine on everyone?" I was becoming much more interested in political and ethical philosophy (and in Autumn 1994 was writing a coursework essay for my 'A' Level Theology course on whether every right has a corresponding duty) and I could see that simple individualism was not sustainable; I wanted a philosophy that made better sense of collectivism. I found it in part in Christ Jesus, and in part in Karl Marx.

It felt like a radical act back then to start writing and talking about what my life felt like. I know that some reading this will say, "What's so radical about that? You were white, male, cis, het: your experience was not radical but the default!" But I was also young, and I did not see my experiences mirrored very much in the media; not in media representations of white, male, het, cis youngsters, and certainly not in political terms!

As the 1990s progressed, we moved from the era of Generation X with Nirvana as their soundtrack - the disillusionment that I described above - and hit the Britpop 90s. Politically, Britpop was too diverse to have any particular meaning, but I mention it for one band in particular - Pulp. Their songs did carry political messages (although not in the parliamentary/party sense). Common People, a song about how privilege works, and why the oppressed class might not appreciate the would-be saviours was one of these. The other was Sorted for E's and Whizz, which almost came full circle on the debate around raves, as Jarvis Cocker sang about the reality versus the mythologised version of what it was like to attend a rave: "I seem to have left an important part of my brain, somewhere, in a field in Hampshire."

This resonated with me because it seemed like it actually addressed (without offering any answers, though) the doubts that I had about the individualism of my peers.

In Autumn 1996 I went to university. I became involved quite closely with the Socialist Worker Student Society (the student wing of the SWP) but my radicalism having its roots in Christianity didn't fit too well with them. At the Christian Union, my Christianity having its roots in communism didn't go down too well either. I spent years trying to get the two groups to talk to one another about radical politics, but nobody wanted to. I also got told off by the SWSS for bringing a Bible quotation into a political discussion to support the SWSS position. After that, i was never a full member. But it was a good route to get involved in the leftwing activism that I wanted to be a part of.

May 1st 1997 probably marks the real revival in my activist spirits. As I've just said, I was involved with the SWSS at that time and a regular at their meetings. The euphoria of the Labour Party's landslide victory in the General Election was tempered by the knowledge that it was the New Labour 'Lite' version that had taken power, a party that was suspiciously cozy with the Captains of Industry. It is easy to forget now that without the first New Labour government, we would not have in the UK a Human Rights act, or a minimum wage, or the abolition of Section 28 (the name for the law that outlawed schools teaching homosexuality as natural), or the Freedom of Information Act (which was made laughably full of holes, like a colander, but has still been a useful tool for activists since). They gave us all that, but ultimately they did betray us nonetheless - the authoritarian and totalitarian tendencies that have been criticised so often sicne then were apparent very early on. In the end, though, it can be argued that that betrayal galvanised me into action.

I am guessing because of my memory of how quickly the light faded that it must have been mid-Autumn (which means we'd had plenty of activism before then on the subject) when the SWSS organised a coachload of protesters including me to go down to London for a massive gathering in Hyde Park to protest the introduction of tuition fees. My class was to be the last who would enjoy degree-level education paid for by the State. With anarchic disregard for scansion, we sang to the tune of "London Bridge is Falling Down": "Education is a Right, Not a Priv'lege". This was my first real protest as an adult, without being carried along by my parents.

My enduring memory is of the then chairperson of the Students Union giving a speech (one of many speakers that day) and, in true rabble-rousing spirit she yelled, "Downing Street's just over there - we should go and tell them how we feel!" The crowd all roared "YEAH!" and immediately started to head in the direction of Downing Street. The chairperson suddenly realised her mistake. She said, "No! Wait! Come back! We've got loads of excellent speakers still to come! Stay around for them!" But it was too late. We were off. I was a little bit worried that we would miss the coach back to our university, but fuck it - this was PROTEST!

The police were left with a bit of a dilemma. There were many thousands of students all suddenly deciding at once to set off with rebellious intent. We were supposed to be staying in Hyde Park - this was what the police would have arranged with the organisers. They clearly had not come expecting a great deal of trouble, and had to choose quickly whether to allow this new march to take place, or to try to contain it, possibly thereby exacerbating the situation and leading to greater violence. Whoever was in charge on the day made the right decision and allowed us to march. the police units cordoned us off and escorted us along our new route until we arrived at the back of Downing Street, where we chanted our slogans and verbally abused the wankers that the British public had put in charge. Then we went home.

It is worth noting that there were elements in the march who WANTED a confrontation and deliberately set out to orchestrate a clash between protesters and police. By calling out instructions to the marchers as we approached Hyde Park, that would have led the marchers to press against the police by weight of numbers (that is, telling us to turn right instead of left, and thus persuading those who couldn't see clearly what was going on to press the frontmost marchers against the police cordon) they were trying to cause a violent altercation between protesters and marchers. Fortunately, the march stewards appointed by the Students Union were better organised than the anarchists were and managed to forestall this attempt to cause trouble. I mention this because it revealed to me how it is impossible to gauge the character of a crowd in general. The purpose and intent of "the crowd" was peaceful protest - although we were obviously young and antagonistic towards the police in general, we didn't want a fight. Except that some people did. And it isn't always easy to tell who's influencing what or how.

I was also a regular attendee at the monthly University Students Union general meetings. These meetings were a farce because they were never quorate according to the constitution of the union, and because they weren't quorate we couldn't change the rules for quoracy to make the next ones quorate... It was a relatively politically active campus, so there were some good discussions and debates to be had there, which is why I continued to attend. My biggest contribution was to move to have steel cans recycled as well as aluminium ones, because steel cans end up in landfill sites, bad for the environment, etc. The debate was fairly mundane and uninspiring, but it was a taste of political activism of sorts.

I was working through some privilege/Nice Guy(tm) issues while at uni, and questioned why there should be a veto on men using the safety bus by any women passengers (apparently for a long time, it was specifically the women's bus) - to me, men are also victims of violence (and as recounted elsewhere in this blog, I was subjected to a sexual assault while at university. The rule was that a man could use the bus, but if any female passenger objected to him getting on board, then he couldn't. The reasoning I was told, was that if there was even one man there, then a woman who had been raped, or who seriously feared rape, might feel unable to use the bus because of fear of that one man.

I also got upset with posters that said "domestic violence against women is a crime" - because of the apparent implication that domestic violence against males is completely legal. I saw myself as "feminist" back then, and was quite vocal about many women's rights issues, but there seemed to be a lot around to remind me that it was okay for me to be judged on the basis of my gender. I have never really lost that concern, although nowadays I tend to be a little more careful in how I explore what the concerns mean and what the background is.

I left university in 1999 and returned to live with my parents. The machinations of the New Labour project were still in their infancy but protest continued. Around me I could see the continued development of those political movements in my generation, focussing on environmental issues, human rights and civil liberties, and on a growing anger at the ways in which global trade was impoverishing populations in Africa and Asia. A new banner heading for this was "anti-globalisation".

In other news, George W Bush (Dubya) was gearing up to run for the Presidency of the USA. Bill Clinton, the "Third Way" exponent who was the USA's parallel to the New Labour project, had served two terms and was due to stand down, his VP Al Gore set to take his place.

Thinking in terms of politics and activism, it was the 2000 US Presidential Election (undoubtedly stolen by GWB) that marked the boundary between one decade and the next. Although the world was not due to change until 2001, it was the blatant way in which the election in Florida had been rigged that marked for me, a shift in my consciousness of the world.

Coming in Part 3: Mayday; a new era of war; and a new era of racism

Radical Soundtrack part 2 - the 90s

Following on from Part 1



The Shamen - Ebeneezer Goode

Probably THE anthem of the rave generation in protest against government crackdowns, the lyrics are not about a person called "Ebeneezer", but rather, the chorus should be heard as "E's are good, E's are good" - the drug ecstasy being perhaps the biggest symbol of the rave culture, especially to those who wanted to see that culture eradicated.



Nirvana - Smells Like Teen Spirit

The anthem of "Generation X", which seems to me to have been the generation maybe just 5 years older than mine. The anger and frustration of Nirvana's songs also followed naturally on from the nihilism of the late 1980s (see 'Hammer to Fall' in the previous instalment). It seemed to me that there was a distrust of the powers that be, but no real hope for something better - only a desire to tear at the world.



Levellers - One Way

Emblematic of the individualist anti-captialism of the early 90s youth movements that I was a part of.



Pulp - Sorted for Es and Whizz

To me, this song reflected the sense of lost direction that I felt about my generation during the mid-1990s.



Chumbawamba - Tubthumping

Chumbawamba were a local band while I was at university, and were regulars performing at socialist/anarchist events while I was there. This song became a hit after I'd already seen them live a couple of times, and was probably their biggest hit in the UK. I definitely associate them strongly with the anti-globalisation movement.

1984 in 2009

One of the key things that struck me about the world that George Orwell created in the novel 1984 was how the ruling powers constantly rewrote history to suit their needs. As the past became not a matter of fact but of politics, I found myself being more disturbed by that, than by a lot of the other oppressive techniques used by the proponents of "EngSoc".

Hot on the heels of yesterday's news story about Texan rightwing Christians rewriting US history books, comes news that Israel's education ministry is erasing Arab experience of the 1948 war for what amount to political reasons alone:

Netanyahu's Likud takes a different view. "There is no reason to present the creation of the Israeli state as a catastrophe in an official teaching programme," said the education minister, Gideon Saar. "The objective of the education system is not to deny the legitimacy of our state, nor promote extremism among Arab-Israelis."

The view to which this is different, is that of, "a new generation of revisionist Israeli historians has rejected the old official narrative that the Palestinians, supported by the neighbouring Arab states, were responsible for their own misfortune."

The rhetoric - that describing the war as a disaster must also be describing the creation of the State of Israel as a disaster - seems to me to be deliberately misleading and confrontational. The State of Israel was created first, by the British and by the United Nations. The borders of Israel after the 1948 war were considerably greater than those established by the UN, and consequently it is fair to say that it was not purely a war in defence of Israel's right to exist. Just like the 1967 war, it was also a land grab, and there is plenty of evidence that this resulted in many Palestinians being driven by force from their ancestral homes.

It is fair to say that the creation of Israel, and the establishment of its ability to sustain itself against attack, are not catastrophes. But the war as it actually unfolded I think can fairly be seen to be a catastrophe for the Palestinian people. These are the scars of the past that will have to be healed before peace can truly reign in the Middle East. There are plenty of scars felt by bth sides, I do not deny this. But hiding them and trying to write them out of official history (which is what the history taught in schools is) is never going to heal them. Instead, children will be taught the folk history of their people instead, and that will be far more radicalising than having the experiences acknowledged in school. Because attempts to deny the history of a people generally lead to rebellion because the young folks want to know WHY the ruling powers tell a different story from their parents. If you hide things like the nakba from people instead of acknowledging it, then those explanations can only come from those who feel anger already at the ruling power (in this case, Israel). It is like covering a wound but not tending it, which only leads to that wwound festering and becoming worse, instead of seeing it heal.

Krazee Kristchuns: In ur skoolz, religionizing ur history

Christian right in Texas recommends that children be taught that there would be no United States if it had not been for God.

(To realise the full horror of what's going on in Texas, you need to read the whole article - it's long but worth it)

I remember seeing on a Channel 4 series called "Exploitica", which took the piss chronically out of the incredibly un-PC media output of 1950s and 60s USA, a piece of footage, apparently genuine and apparently undoctored, of anti-Communist propaganda that claimed that in the USSR everyone was taught that every great innovation of the last 100 years or so had been invented by communists - that the Commies were all-out for rewriting history and brainwashing people with their version. Heck, it's a common enough trope from all kinds of dystopian science fiction.

But the fact that it was, essentially, the same Christian Right who were behind that sort of propaganda, who are now pushing to rewrite USAian history to put their own movement at the centre of it, is just irony overload!

Correct me if I am wrong here, but my understanding was that the US Declaration of Independence, and the US Constitution, were inspired most particularly by the Enlightenment philosophy of people like Locke, Thomas Paine (who, after all, was instrumental in writing the Declaration - and was an avowed atheist!) and so on. It was the Age of Reason, when religion was being pushed aside, not used as the foundation of government. The French Revolution, probably the closest ideological counterpart of the US revolution in Europe (obviously, rather different in execution because of the much greater proximity of the most hated rulers) was determinedly secular (French secularism has a long history). While it is fair to say that the founders of the USA were brought up in religious faith, and I am sure I have seen historical evidence that shows most of them to have been at least nominally Christian, the foundations of the modern USA were founded on secular democratic and republican ideals, not on theological reasoning.

Reading the linked article, which also carries this nugget:

Another of the experts is Reverend Peter Marshall, who heads his own Christian ministry and preaches that Hurricane Katrina and defeat in the Vietnam war were God's punishment for sexual promiscuity and tolerance of homosexuals.

one almost feels that these people would teach the Salem Witch Trials (how's that for "the role of Christianity in American history,!?) not as a warning against bigotry and hysteria, but as an example of the right and proper way of dealing with the Other and Different.

Marshall later told the Wall Street Journal that the struggle over the history curriculum is part of a wider battle. "We're in an all-out moral and spiritual civil war for the soul of America, and the record of American history is right at the heart of it," he said.

That, of course, goes right back to my original observation of rewriting history.

It also seems to me that it carries some slight echoes (SLIGHT, I hasten to emphasise, lest anyone accuse me of a Godwin fail here) of the justifications for the Inquisitions, which were also about "moral and spiritual" war for people's souls. Not that the people whose souls were being fought for appreciated the weapons and methods used...

These people are why it is so hard to be a Christian these days. I can't honestly say I'd prefer the lions or what-have-you, but honestly - having people assume that I'm like these nutters? **shudder**

Abuse of police powers - what else is new?

Can anyone else see what might be wrong about this?

Seconds later, an undercover officer wearing jeans and a black jacket enters the shot, and asks Atkinson: "Do you realise it is an offence under the Terrorism Act to film police officers?" He then adds: "Can you show me what you you just filmed?"

Atkinson stopped filming and placed her phone in her pocket. According to her account of the incident, which was submitted to the Independent Police Complaints Commission that night, the officer tried several times to forcefully grab the phone from her pocket.

Failing to get the phone, he called over two female undercover officers from nearby. Atkinson said he told the women: "This young lady had been filming me and the other officers and it's against the law. Her phone is in her right jacket pocket and I'm trying to get it."

An argument ensued, Atkinson said, and five police officers – four of them undercover – backed her into an alcove, insisting they had the right to view her phone.

She said she was detained there for about 25 minutes, during which her wrist was handcuffed and a female officer told her: "We'll put you under arrest, take to you to the station and look at your phone there."

A second female officer approached her and said, incorrectly: "Look, your boyfriend's just been arrested for drugs, so I suggest you do as we say."

As the article says, the law specifically refers to footage "likely to be useful to" terrorists. It's quite hard to see how a video of a standard (if unjustified) stop and search would fall into that category.

But that's nothing compared to the abuse of power that the officers used in trying to enforce their made-up version of the law.

"I felt totally helpless," she said. "I was being restrained and I felt that no one was listening to me."

There was quite clearly use of overwhelming force and fear (backing a young woman into an alcove to force her to do something against her will, for fuck's sake!) and (as predicted by human rights campaigners ) the police are using this law not to prevent terrorism but to cover up their own brutality, abuse of powers and corrupt behaviour (lying about having arrested Ms Atkinson's boyfriend was a relatively minor act of corruption, but it was corrupt policing tactics nonetheless).

This is what Great Britain is becoming. A police state. How anyone can doubt that when such laws as these are enacted in the first place (never mind how the police abuse the laws once they're in place!) surely proves it. That we can still, at least, challenge these laws to some extent (as Gemma Atkinson is doing) proves we aren't all the way there yet, but each new law created in this vein shuts down our options for protest, for legal recourse, for justice.

Of course, at this point we get the usual "if you've got nothing to hide, you've nothing to fear" about these new laws - but, evidently, the police feel they have something to hide, and they have something to fear, and that's why the rest of us - the people who have nothing to hide - DO have something to fear. We have to fear the police, because they WILL come for us. Ms Atkinson and her boyfriend had nothing to hide, they had done nothing wrong. And yet, her bf is stopped and searched; when Ms Atkinson decides to hold the police to account for their actions (by making a video on her mobile phone) then she is subjected to what amounts to emotional and physical abuse by the police (not actually brutal, but also not acceptable behaviour). So it's just not true that we, the general public, have nothing to fear. What's more, the more laws like this are made, the more things even decent, normally law-abiding folks will find they have to hide, even though they are doing nothing wrong.

This is the state that Britain has reached.

Makeover-under-round-and-round... ooh, dizzy!

I've tweaked a couple of things on my blog setup here. Nothing much, mind, because oevrall I still like the same old colour scheme I had. I tweaked the colour for the links in the sidebar (they seemed to me to be a bit invisible at times, now they have a bit more contrast so you can see which bits are important). I also made the headings in the sidebar a bit more noticeable.

I've pruned away a lot of the gadgets and stuff that were cluttering up the sidebar, because I ecided they weren't doing anything useful really, and they weren't giving me much fun. This also prompted me to get around to updating my blogroll so that it actually reflects who I genuinely do read fairly often. If you were on the old blogroll and are not on the new one but want to be, for sure you can send me a message and I'll gladly reinstate you (though you may have to remind me what your blog URL is).

I've also added a little "reactions" rating thingy to the bottom of all my posts, so at last you can tell me how I'm doing without the hassle of actually responding to a post. Am I groovy, sexy, scary or stoopid? You decide!

Finally, I've added a more up-to-date photo of me.

Have fun, peeps!

Taking the Epistle: 2 Corinthians and Galatians

Continuing the series looking at the Letters section of the New Testament, with Romans and 1 Corinthians already in the bag, it's time to catch up with the second of Paul's letters to the Corinthians (or rather, the second one that they preserved).

I'm including Galatians in this post for two reasons. Firstly, because I don't have a lot to say about 2Co, and secondly because in a way they have similar themes, at least as far as Paul's attitude goes.

2 Corinthians sees Paul at his most whiny, in my opinion. The context appears to be that rival religious teachers (pagan, and in some cases Christian as well) have been criticising Paul's actions and behaviour, both while teaching in Corinth and also in ways that he has presented himself to the Corinthian church in his travel plans and letters. The whole letter seems to stand by way of Paul arguing (as I said, in a rather whiny way) in his own defence. What it shows is a man (as discussed in my look at Romans and 1 Corinthians) who is a bit of a control freak, and a lover of authority, who finds his control and authority is being challenged. There does not appear to be much in the way of Christian doctrine recorded in this letter, and it is hard to see why the founders of the modern Church considered this letter to be worth preserving as important for future Christians to read and understand. Its value seems only to be in revealing something about Paul the man.

In Galatians, there is some serious consideration of theology, but once again it comes as Paul is defending himself and his teachings against accusations and challenges against his authority. The churches of the region then know as Galatia (which, it seems from the introductory study notes in my NIV Study Bible, may not be contiguous with the region covered by the modern-day term) were being infiltrated by a group called the Judaisers, who were insisting that the Old Testament rituals and practices still had to be observed. This was directly in contradiction to the teaching of Paul, to whit, that it is through Christ alone that we are saved, not through ritual or "good works". While Paul consistently argued (for example, he makes the same case in Romans) that there was no need to abandon the old rituals if they gave people a sense of security about their spiritual wellbeing, he was equally adamant that there was no need for Christians to observe them either.

Paul starts by describing his being called by God, after he had originally persecuted Christians, to become an apostle and to preach the gospel of Christ's saving power; he challenges people, "Or am I trying to please men? If I were still trying to please men, I would not be a servant of Christ." He describes some of his travellings and relations with the other apostles, establishing again that he spoke with authority, and that "they saw that I had been entrusted with the task of preaching the gospel to the Gentiles, just as Peter had been to the Jews."

However, the controversy that forms the centre of Galatians, it seems, was also present amongst the early apostles. Paul writes, "When Peter came to Antioch, I oppsed him to his face, because he was clearly in the wrong." He then describes how Peter had been advocating the adherence to OT law, and writes [Galatians 2:14-19]:

I said to Peter in front of them all, "You are a Jew, yet you live like a Gentile, and not like a Jew. How is it, then, that you force Gentiles to follow Jewish customs? We who are Jews by birth and not 'Gentile sinners' know that a man is not justified by observing the law, but by faith in jesus Christ. So we, too, have put our faith in Christ Jesus that we may be justified by faith in Christ and not by observing the law, because by observing the law no-one will be justified.

If, while we seek to be justified in Christ, it becomes evident that we ourselves are sinners, does that mean that Christ promotes sin? Absolutely not! If I rebild what I destroyed, I prove that I am a law-breaker. For through the law I died to the law so that I might live for God."

He concludes his speech with the words [2:21] "I do not set aside the grace of God, for if righteousness could be gained through the law, Christ died for nothing!"

It strikes me as being an impassioned defence of the doctrine that Paul preached, and which still forms a central part of Christian orthodoxy today - that we are made good only by faith, not by good deeds. What that faith means for our lives is expressed by Paul in his description of "love" in 1 Corinthians 13. This is made clear later in Galatians (5:6) when Paul writes, "For in Christ Jesus beither circumcision nor uncircumcsion has any value. the only thing that counts is faith expressing itself through love."

After describing his public criticism of Peter, Paul then moves on to the full business of his letter to the Galatians, which is to criticise them for making the same errors as Peter did. In 3:2 Paul asks them scornfully, "I would like to learn just one thing from you: did you receive the Spirit by observing the law, or by believing what you heard?"

Paul reinterprets elements of OT scripture, including the promises made to Abraham, as including all who have faith in the Lord, and says that these are the spiritual children of Abraham regardless of the genetic lineage; he claims that through this God has made good his promise to Abraham "All nations will be blessed through you."

He continues his theme of the transient nature of the Law [3:23-25]:

Before this faith came, we were held prisoners by the law, locked up until faith should be revealed. So the law was put in charge to lead us to Christ that we may be justified by faith. Now that faith has come, we are no longer under the supervision of the law.

I have sometimes myself made a similar argument concerning the Old testament and its relationship to the New. It is somewhat gratifying to find that Paul seems to agree with me on this point. I used to frame it that "The OT is a law for the obedience of fools; the NT is a law for the guidance of wise men." Paul's arguments seem to match this, for example, when he writes "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 childish ways behind me." When he likens the Corinthians to being children in the Spirit. and with this argument that the OT law has been a guide, to lead us to Christ, it is the same idea that we (both as individual people, and humans beings as a race) come to Christ by graduating from the Law to the Spirit, from obedience to understanding.

Paul in fact revisits the child to adult metaphor in Galatians [4:1-7]:

What I am saying is that as long as the heir is a child, he is no different from a slave, although he owns the whole estate. He is subject to guardians and trustees until the time set by his father. So also, when we were children, we were in slavery under the basic principles of the world. But when the time had fully come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under law, to redeem those under law, that we might receive the full rights of sons. Because you are sons, God sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, the spirit who calls out, "Abba, Father." So you are no longer a slave, but a son; and since you are a son, God has made you also an heir.

(NB 'Abba' is the Aramaic for 'Father')

This idea of a right time, a time "set by [the] father", I sometimes justify by my faith that God does not ask the world to accept what we are not yet ready to accept. He(She/It/They) knows that we humans are imperfect, finite creatures, and must develop our understanding of our relationship to Him(Her/It/Them). For that reason, God did not ask us to believe at 600BC a story about the big bang, quantum theory and general relativity. Similarly, not every advance in justice and human rights could come all at once (and it is my belief that this has caused God severe pain from humans' inhumanity to humans). But I'm getting sidetracked into my own personal theology, instead of looking at what Paul himself wrote.

Paul's next tactic is to use the tale of Abraham's sons, Ishmael and Isaac, as a metaphor for the Old Testament covenant and the New Testament covenant. The child born of Hagar (by human means) is Ishmael, and represents a testament leading into slavery (i.e. the Old Testament, which is written as a law of men) but Isaac, born through God's promise to Sarah (who by that time was menopausal, according to Genesis), represents the New Testament, also born of God's promise to Creation. Personally, I don't really like this analogy and I don't see what it adds to Paul's arguments from before. He introduces it as a way of using scripture again to put his point across to a (partly) Jewish Christian church, but I think it is a weak analogy and equally, I seems to misuse the story as it appears in Genesis. Setting myself up against Paul as a student of OT scripture seems unwise, but this is how I feel. I also feel uncomfortable because he dehumanises the women in the Genesis account, turning them into mere symbols for the point he is making (I believe I have already mentioned Paul was a bit of a misogynist!)

Paul then states that the sinful nature and the Spirit are antagonistic, and that living by the Spirit leads away from the sinful nature. What, we may ask, is "the sinful nature"? Paul tells us:

• sexual immorality, impurity and debauchery;
• idolatry and witchcraft;
• hatred, discord, jealousy, fits of rage, selfish ambition, dissensions, factions and envy;
• drunkenness, orgies and the like.

Now, I believe I've ummed and ahhed before over Paul's definition of "sexual immorality", and I'll come back to that later (possibly in summing up this series, possibly in a later Letter). Idolatry is pretty clear, but in Biblical terms, witchcraft really is not. I am inclined to read it as magic for selfish ends only, because things like Joseph's ability to interpret dreams seem like a form of witchcraft to me, but that talent is used not to selfish ends but through the will of God; so it is that I have little trouble accepting "white witchcraft" that is performed as a spiritual offering as being in accordance with the Spirit; that's why I gladly read tarot for others. I believe that God gives me this talent to bring His(Her/Its/Their) light into others' lives.

It is the third list of qualities that strikes me as being most important. One is tempted to cast Paul for a moment with the voice and mannerisms of Jedi Master Yoda, warning the young Skywalker against the Dark Side of the Force! Although the obvious comparison for the Jedi religion is Buddhism, here we see clearly that a similar balanced approach to life is called for by the Christian spirit. We can also suggest that a number of modern day (*ahem*especially US rightwing*ahem*) Christians seem to be entangled in the sinful nature.....

Enjoyment of alcohol is clearly not against Christ's way (I mean, his first miracle was turning water into wine at a wedding feast!) but the prohibition of great excess and loss of self-control clearly is a further extension of that "Jedi" mindset.

Paul then tells us the "fruit of the Spirit":

"love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. Against such things there is no law."

Paul finishes with one more exhortation to his readers to support one another, and not to be proud of their good deeds but to be satisfied with the good in itself - that is, not to seek to please men, but only to serve God.

Looking back over this post, I find I have been less critical of Paul (at least, in his letter to the Galatians) than I feel I was in Romans and 1 Corinthians. This is probably to do with the fact that here I have seen much of my own theology echoed, and it is harder for me to stand back from that! But it is also in this theology (as well as in such references as Ruth's vow to Naomi) that I find the justification of same-sex couples and sexual relationships; as I said already, I'll come back to Paul's homophobia another time, but here I can leave you with no better example than Combat Queer's response to a 'Christian' troll.