Since 1994, a Pakistani activist who founded the Progressive Women’s Association “has documented 7,800 cases of women who were deliberately burned, scalded or subjected to acid attacks, just in the Islamabad area. In only 2 percent of those cases was anyone convicted.”

When terrorism is personal.

A word of caution. The images are graphic and possibly distressing. Note how often the captions read “familial dispute” or “rejected him for marriage.”

Via Brain Terminal.

Today’s Guardian editorial sings the praises of that “radical literary magazine,” The London Review of Books: 

So essential to Britain’s intellectual life… The editorial care taken is a cause for wonder and cheer.

The LRB is also praised for,

The standard it keeps up.

Those who diverge from the Guardian’s definition of standards may feel less enthusiastic. Let’s not forget the LRB’s default anti-Israel bias, perhaps best summarised by the magazine’s editor, Mary-Kay Wilmers, who told the Sunday Times: “I’m unambiguously hostile to Israel because it’s a mendacious state.” There’s also the LRB’s history of excusing Islamic terrorism with wild inversions of reality. As, for instance, when Charles Glass fawned over the  “uncompromising programme” of Hizballah and its “intelligent” use of “car bombs, ambushes, small rockets and suicide bombers.” It’s always heartening to see literary intellectuals being titillated by random savagery and casually disregarding the openly genocidal statements of Hizballah’s Hassan Nasrallah. I suspect readers of the LRB will be studiously unaware that in 2003 Hizballah’s TV channel broadcast a 30-part “history” series based on The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. But then this is the kind of “intellectual life” that sees fit to publish a breezy hagiography of – wait for it – Robert Mugabe. 

We’ve seen such things before, not least in the Guardian itself, and in such elevated organs as the New Left Review. As when the Marxist art critic Julian Stallabrass pondered the “spectacle” of terrorism and seemed more than a little aroused by the “vanguard politics” of “Islamic revolutionaries” who “harden themselves against mundane sentiment.” According to Mr Stallabrass, “the 9/11 attacks did no more than return to the US a taste of the force it has wielded across the globe.” A view shared by the Cambridge historian and LRB regular Mary Beard, who described the events of that morning as a “predictable outcome of US actions,” while putting the words terrorist and terrorism in ironic quotation marks. Ms Beard also pondered the feeling that “America had it coming” and likened jihadist terrorism to “extraordinary acts of bravery.” The Guardian’s then comment editor Seumas Milne also framed terrorism in quotation marks and said with eerie confidence, “Americans simply don’t get it.” This, on September 13, while human dust was still, quite literally, settling on Manhattan.

The London Review of Books is of course Arts Council funded.

You’ll be pleased to hear that Misty Keasler, quoted above, has published a book of her photographs, Love Hotels: The Hidden Fantasy Rooms of Japan. Among her subjects is the Hotel Adonis, Osaka, which offers patrons a Naughty Nurse Play Area and a Hello Kitty S&M Room.

Ms Keasler is interviewed here. Via Coudal.

In the Telegraph, Peter Whittle bemoans the failure to challenge anti-social behaviour:

Indeed. The suspicion of not being able to count on backup from others no less inconvenienced will tend to inhibit efforts to assert basic civility. I recall one particularly miserable train journey during which a group of four teenagers amused themselves by throwing trainers to each other, narrowly missing the heads of other passengers. When, inevitably, one of the shoes hit a woman in the face, no-one intervened. One of the teenagers laughed and mumbled “sorry,” and the trainer-throwing continued for another minute or so, albeit half-heartedly.

Nearby passengers made sure to direct their attention either downwards to their own shoes or to the woman who’d been struck, with sounds of muted and impotent sympathy, thus excusing themselves from a more direct confrontation. The four teenagers got off the train a minute or two later, by which time an air of self-loathing had spread among the two dozen remaining passengers like an embarrassing smell. It occurred to me that the number of people who could have intervened but didn’t actually worked against any single urge to do so. If two dozen people do nothing, conspicuously, there’s an awareness of a collective decision not to intervene, and a kind of moral inertia.

A more recent experience involved a much smaller number of onlookers, a much larger number of aggressors, and had very different results. I was standing at a bus stop during a mass exodus of secondary school kids late one afternoon. Two elderly women were huddled anxiously at the front of the queue, with me behind – the three of us surrounded by a disordered mass of teenagers that had spread in all directions. As the bus approached, the mass of teenagers surged forward, indifferent to the three people supposedly at the front of the queue. The intimidation was utterly casual. This, presumably, was how they behaved every day of the week.

In a rare moment of alpha male theatre, I blocked their path, faced down the nearest youth and bellowed a demand for order. A moment of total stillness followed. Caught unprepared, the mass of teenagers quickly backed off, silent and non-plussed. Evidently this was something for which no clever riposte had been rehearsed. The unexpected interlude allowed the elderly ladies to make appreciative noises and climb onboard without further harassment.

This is not the easiest thing to do successfully. The stare, body language and bellowing have to be calibrated just so. Too little force and mockery may ensue – from which there’s no recovery. This is, after all, a game of humiliation. You have to look as though you mean it absolutely. Those being bellowed at have to at least entertain the possibility that you may do them serious harm if they fail to comply. The risk of embarrassment has to be theirs and theirs alone. This requires a certain willingness to look like an escaped mental patient, at least temporarily. But looking utterly bonkers and socially incongruous is much easier to do if you’re not inhibited by a large group of other people conspicuously doing nothing.

Thanks to TDK, I finally got to see Mike Judge’s new animated series, The Goode Family, which follows an environmentally obsessive PC household and their ostentatious concerns. Here are the first three episodes.

Given Judge’s previous creation, King of the Hill, there are inevitably some good moments. There’s an amusing scene involving carrier bag anxiety, and the local overpriced whole food store has an electronic display informing customers of the latest ethical shopping practices, which change in real time. And there are odd flashes of demented ingenuity, as when a visiting Freegan uses his own tears as seasoning. Unfortunately, these moments are spaced much too far apart. What we get instead are misfires like this scene, in which the Goodes fret about the correct way to refer to their black neighbour. There’s a joke lurking in there somewhere, but nobody managed to find it. And that’s pretty much the default setting for the first few episodes.

King of the Hill quickly grew beyond Texan small town caricature and, however grotesque its protagonists could be, they felt both plausible and deserving of some empathy. Comedy emerged from character and didn’t depend entirely on stereotypes, knowing references or the weekly plot contrivance. Viewers soon came to share the producers’ obvious affection for the Hills, despite – or because of – Hank’s unwavering squareness and preoccupation with propane. And while Hank was often stuffy, unadventurous and emotionally repressed, he remained above all an honourable man – something of an oddity in modern animation. The rooting of comedy in character and culture – as opposed to politics – also made possible a collision of surrealism and genuine poignancy. Peggy’s need for oversized shoes and her subsequent, unwitting friendship with a transvestite springs to mind or Khan’s off-meds mania and all too brief grill-building genius. Likewise, Bill’s near-constant teetering on the brink of despair – a gag that could only be sustained over 13 years because his innumerable failures were offset with moments of real pathos and humanity.  

In contrast, The Goode Family is laboured and affected, as if built by committee from the outside in, with unlikeable characters and a premise that’s somehow both obvious and thin. There’s no evidence yet that Judge or his writers have any sympathy for the Goodes and their self-inflicted predicament, and it’s not clear whether we’re supposed to see them as victims of their own politics or just unrelenting grotesques. The daughter, Bliss, is presented supposedly as a foil for her dysfunctionally PC mother, but the tension on offer is between preening political concern and preening teenage ennui. Perhaps these are teething troubles and The Goode Family will find its footing and become much funnier and less self-conscious. But if so, it needs to improve a hell of a lot, very quickly. Right now, the protagonists seem more suited as secondary characters in a show about someone else, and the air of contrivance leaves the series feeling almost as fake and unappealing as the pretensions it mocks.