Skeletons made of light. // “How large would they be in the sky?” // Storm on Saturn. // Ann Althouse has shrunk. // Neutrino observatory under Mount Kamioka, Japan. // Pilots, scripts and pitches – from BSG and Doctor Who to The West Wing. (h/t, MeFi) // A whole heap of John Wayne films. // Zombies, robots, aliens. // Portable death ray. // Grow Cannon. // There are things inside your belly button. // Nostrils. // Wristwatch of note. // Residence of note. // The uterus piñata. // The UK explained for readers overseas. Look, we’re complicated, okay? // The complete McBain. (h/t, MirandaM) // 22 manly uses for an Altoids tin.

By Deutsch Inc.

Over the past few months I have become, and remain, deeply embedded in the student movement in the UK and Europe. Many of the young people who feature in the piece – on whose activities I’ve been keeping meticulous notes, and who are of a similar age and political attitude to myself – have since become as close to personal friends as observational subjects ever can be… This has stretched my objectivity to its limits. I have had to work and rework the article to make sure I was constructing an accurate portrait.

So says Laurie Penny, reporting from “the front line of student activism.”

Readers familiar with Ms Penny’s brand of activist journalism – in the pages of the Guardian, New Statesman and the communist Morning Star – may find her use of the words “accurate” and “objectivity” inadvertently amusing. This is the same Laurie Penny who tells us that, while “not everyone who displays an England flag is a fascist,” football is nonetheless “commodified nationalism” played by “misogynist jocks” indulging in “organised sadism.” The World Cup is apparently not about football at all, but “only and always about men.” It’s a “month of corporate-sponsored quasi-xenophobia,” one that “violently excludes more than half the people.”

Like so much in Laurie’s world, it just does, okay?

Writing for Red Pepper, Ms Penny tells us that, “capitalism is built on the docile bodies of women” and that women are reduced to “reproductive labourers whose physical and sexual autonomy is relentlessly policed.” The same article rails against “US state governments [that] compete to think up ever more cruel and unusual ways to punish women for sexual self-determination.” 

It is, I think, fair to say that Laurie Penny enjoys railing against things, generally things that aren’t entirely obvious but which are framed as both terrible and somehow self-evident. A typical Laurie Penny article is long on assertion, short on facts and coherent argument, and invariably written in the highest possible gear. She rails against the Conservative Party (“hordes of drooling poshos”) and its “brutally intolerant moral agenda.” The details of this brutally intolerant agenda are, alas, somewhat vague. She rails against “the bruised superstructure of patriarchal capitalist control,” the particulars of which also remain unspecified and mysterious. She rails against a “heteronormative patriarchy that oppresses all of us.” (What, you didn’t know?) She rails against “brutal repression” by an impending police state that no-one else can see, and she rails against protestors “not being heard,” as if being heard must entail being agreed with and obeyed. Ours, she says, is a world “on fire.”

When not railing against a heteronormative police state that’s brutal, intolerant and also on fire, Ms Penny likes to share with us an extensive menu of personal miseries, along with other aspects of her fascinating self:  

It’s getting harder to stay in touch with why I write and campaign in the first place. It’s getting harder to stay angry… That terrifies me more than anything… The centre-right have taken back my country… Across the pond, the American right are winning the fight for ideological control of the world’s only superpower.

Very few people surf in the dark. // This product is endorsed by the Guild of Evil. // Matchstick insects. // Tape measure tesseract. // The dog dung vacuum. // Contemporary coffins. // For cat enthusiasts. // 100 years of IBM. // The Adventures of Sexy Batman. // Heroic but avoidable film character deaths. // Shelley Duvall says hello. (h/t, MeFi) // “The membrane is tens of times thinner than a human hair.” And it’s somewhere overhead. // Destination Moon, 1950. // Make your own planet. // “The goal is to show how hard and frustrating it was for an average person to simply do their shopping.” Yes, it’s communist Monopoly.

Kay Hymowitz outlines the tensions between institutional / academic feminism, in which the state is pivotal and must always expand, and the “Mama Grizzly” feminism of Sarah Palin and much of the Tea Party, in which budgets and bureaucracy are major issues too:

The Palinites, then, have introduced an unfamiliar thought into American politics: maybe a trillion-dollar deficit is a woman’s issue. But where does that leave expensive, bureaucracy-heavy initiatives like universal pre-K, child care, and parental leave? Consider a recent feminist initiative, the Paycheck Fairness Act, passed in the House but scuttled in November by a few Republican Senate votes. Feminist supporters, saying that it would close loopholes in previous antidiscrimination legislation, didn’t worry about how redundant or bureaucratically tortured it might be or how many lawsuits it might unleash. But chances are that the Grizzlies, in keeping with their frontiersy individualism and their fears about ballooning deficits, would see in the act government run amok. After all, it would come on top of the 1963 Equal Pay Act; Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which bans employment discrimination; the 2009 Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act; innumerable state and local laws and regulations; and a crowd of watchdogs at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

The ideological tension is perhaps best summarised by this contribution from the bewildered novelist Amy Bloom:

There is no such thing as free market/anti-legislation… feminism. 

Helen Smith notes a study by Daniel John Zizzo and Andrew Oswald on the cost of malice:

Are people willing to pay to burn other people’s money? The short answer to this question is: yes. Our subjects gave up large amounts of their cash to hurt others in the laboratory. The extent of burning surprised us… Even at a price of 0.25 (meaning that to burn another person’s dollar cost me 25 cents), many people wished to destroy other individuals’ cash.

And, via Mr Eugenides, Jonathan Rauch on intellectual pluralism and its opponents:

The modern anti-racist and anti-sexist and anti-homophobic campaigners are totalists, demanding not that misguided ideas and ugly expressions be corrected or criticised but that they be eradicated. They make war not on errors but on error, and like other totalists they act in the name of public safety – the safety, especially, of minorities… For lack of anything else, I will call the new anti-pluralism “purism,” since its major tenet is that society cannot be just until the last traces of invidious prejudice have been scrubbed away.

Feel free to add your own.