The insidious rise of Pornography

There has not been a sex murder in the history of our department in which the killer was not an avid reader of pornographic magazines.” (Detroit police inspector Herbert Case)

PORNOGRAPHY is the portrayal of behaviour designed to cause sexual excitement. The word comes from the Greek pornográphos, which literally means ‘harlot writing’ or ‘the writing of prostitutes.’ Books, magazines, advertising or films that appeal to a base sexual appetite are considered pornographic.

Some argue that pornography should be outlawed, since it is associated with immorality. Others consider any restrictions an infringement of personal freedom.

In the United States, as elsewhere, there has been much confusion over the matter. Earl Warren, former Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, once said: “In all my years of service on the Supreme Court, the subject of obscenity and how to deal with it has given me the most difficulty.”

How widespread has the tide of pornography become? In the United States, Cincinnati lawyer Charles Keating, Jr., stated: “The spread of pornography has reached epidemic proportions in our country.”

Writing in McCall’s magazine, Myra Mannes declared: “We have, in short, now reached a state in our society when anything goes, where all is permitted, and where no limits are placed on the appetites of the individual, on the gratification of their desires and fantasies.”

There has also been a huge increase in pornographic films, plays and sex shows. These feature nudity, suggested or actual fornication, lesbianism, homosexuality and violence or masochism..

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The Last Sailors

The Last Sailors: The Final Days of Working Sail (Book) The Last Sailors [DVD]

Rating: ★★★★★

Neil Hollander and Harald Mertes searched around the sea ports of the world for nearly two years, from 1981 to 1983, for a vanishing breed of sailors and their craft. Despite the predominance of steel hull and diesel engine, traditional wooden hulled sailing craft remain. The men who sail them represent more than the physical accomplishments of fishing, trading and transporting goods and passengers in some remote and inhospitable locations.

These men, who harness the wind and the sea to make their living, are ever dwindling in number, and yet, in some far corners of the globe, vestiges of this traditional way of life remain. The project captured on film and page, as a record and reminder of a bygone era. Eight surviving craft, representative of a distinct culture or location were included; the Windward Islands schooner, the Brazilian jangada, Chilean lancha chilota, Egyptian aiyassa, Sri Lankan oruwa, Bangladeshi shampan, Chinese junk, and Indonesian pinisi..

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The Gentle Tasaday

The Gentle Tasaday: A Stone Age people in the Philippine rain forest (1975) by John Nance

Rating: ★★★★☆

In the mid-1970’s, worldwide attention focused on a twenty-five-member tribe living in the dense jungle of Mindanao in the southern Philippines, said to have been living indefinitely in isolation. Their discovery led to the forming of several expeditions composed of Filipino and American anthropologists, news correspondents, television crews of the National Geographic Society, a cabinet minister of the Philippine government, and an American conservationist, the late Charles A. Lindbergh.

Discovery of the Tasaday was unremarkable. Sometime in 1962, a hunter from a town at the forest’s edge stumbled upon them while laying his wild-pig traps deep in the mountains of South Cotabato. As related, following a trail of strange footprints, he came upon three small men wearing only loin coverings made of leaves. With sharp sticks they were digging up a large root.

Although the tongue spoken by the hunter was related to that of the Tasaday, he resorted to sign language because of difficulty in communicating. The hunter’s tribe practically lives back-to-back with the Tasaday, but the difference in their languages was compared to that between early German and today’s English. Scientists deduced that this suggests an isolation of about a thousand years. Why, the very name ‘Tasaday’ (pronounced Taw-sawdai) was said to combine the Malay word sadai (“abandoned”) and the Malayo-Polynesian word tawo (“man”)! Tasaday is also the name of the forested peak rising above their hidden valley. So complete has been their isolation that, when first contacted, they knew nothing about a nation called the Philippines.

The existence of this tribe became known to outsiders through the efforts of PANAMIN, an agency working for the interests of cultural minorities in the Philippines. As in the Amazon and elsewhere, there is a desperate need for the right help. During early meetings between the hunter and the tribesmen at the forest’s edge, it was not known that they lived in caves, and there were no immediate attempts to go deep into the rain forest. The latter decision to visit the caves was made to protect the Tasaday from loggers, farmers, ranchers and miners who were nibbling away at their shrinking realm. They were to prove a very real threat. The Gentle Tasaday (1975) gives a comprehensive picture of the threat to the tribespeoples..

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Human Follies and Fallacies

Follies and Fallacies in Medicine (1989) by Petr Skrabanek and James McCormick

Books do not arise of themselves; they do not emerge from the primeval slime, but are grafted on to some bizarre selection of everything that has gone before, a selection which is determined by the past experience of their authors”.

The Interdisciplinary approach to science and human reasoning generally, has much to recommend it.* By this we mean new insights, or evidence weighing against established theories in one field, that may profitably be used to re-examine areas in another field of knowledge .There are books published that confine their criticisms to the field their writers are familiar with, or feel best placed to give examples, but which can often be applied in ways the authors themselves may not at first have reckoned with, or conversely, deliberately scattered seeds for others to cultivate elsewhere. One such book is Follies and Fallacies in Medicine. It is not easy to obtain.

The authors aim as stated, ‘is to reach inquisitive minds, particularly those who are still young and uncorrupted by dogma. We offer no solutions to the problems we raise because we do not pretend to know of any. Both of us have been thought to suffer from ‘scepticaemia’ (an uncommon generalised disorder of low infectivity. Medical school education is likely to confer life-long immunity) but are happy to regard this affliction, paradoxically, as a health-promoting state..’

Many examples of erroneous reasoning, obfuscation, faulty logic and accidental misinformation are given; they are not concerned with deliberate falsification, deception or fraud, which can at times pollute the scientific literature. It appears that there is a need to spell out cautions necessary to establish truth, for even the best intentioned author will have a personal bias, a tendency to form a conclusion or a belief before the evidence necessarily justifies it’..

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Heavens Fall- 2006 DVD

Heavens Fall [DVD] (2006) Starring Timothy Hutton, David Strathairn and Leelee Sobieski

Rating: ★★★★★

“Years from now, people will hear the word Scottsboro and it will mean something.”

This is the courtroom drama that depicts the same events that inspired the Robinson trial in Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird. I post the following review for these reasons. Firstly,the interesting character of Samuel Leibowitz, who had a long career as a criminal defense attorney, secondly, the depiction of prejudice and its wider implications, and thirdly, the damage done to the lives of falsely accused individuals. It is all the more harrowing for being a true story, and a relatively recent one.

On March 25th 1931, nine young black men were pulled off a freight train by an angry Alabama lynch mob. Eight of the nine (the ninth was only twelve) were accused of raping two women and subsequently sentenced to death in the electric chair. The United States Supreme Court eventually granted a re-trial for all the defendants. Skilled New York defence attorney Samuel Liebowitz went to Alabama to defend the Scottsboro boys at the behest of the International Labor Defense. His journey into the Deep South symbolized the deep racial divide of the times and set in motion a legal battle that ultimately changed the course of American jurisprudence. The Scottsboro case was a tragic chapter in American history and a story of epic injustice. From their arrest in 1931 to the release of the last Scottsboro defendant in 1950, the rights of nine young black men were violated. During the re-trials, one of the alleged victims, Ruby Bates, admitted going along with the rape story and asserted that none of the Scottsboro Boys ever touched either of the white women. Certain that the strength of the evidence would win the case, Leibowitz  wasn’t prepared for the deep racial prejudice he found. Heavens Fall is the tragic true story of jurisprudence undone by racial prejudice. The case is now widely considered a miscarriage of justice and also led to the end of all-white juries in the South..

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The World of Yesterday

The World of Yesterday (1942) by Stefan Zweig and Anthea Bell (translator)

Guest Review by Mr Ralph Blumenau

Rating: ★★★★★

In the Introduction to his book Stefan Zweig rightly says that no generation in recent times had undergone such a series of cataclysms, each breaking bridges with an earlier period, as had his own.

He had lived not only in one world of yesterday, but in several, and it is these worlds he sets out to describe. A truthful and passionate account of the advent of the horror that tore apart European culture, “The World of Yesterday” gives us insight into the history of a world brutally destroyed, written by a master at the height of his literary talent.

He was born, a Jew, in 1881 into a cosmopolitan and tolerant Vienna and into a world of utter political and economic security, confident in steady progress in society and in science. It knew the douceur de vivre (except that unmarried young men and especially young women led a sexual life which could find an outlet only in prostitution), and where culture – no longer under the patronage of the Court, but under that of the Jewish bourgeoisie – was more honoured throughout society than was wealth. The culture of the older generation was challenged by the avant-garde, with which Zweig and his fellow-students, even while still schoolboys in a stultifying educational system, were knowledgeably, passionately and actively engaged. Hugo von Hoffmansthal and Rilke were their lodestars. The universities were little better: Zweig was only a nominal student at the universities of Vienna and Berlin: his real intellectual life lay elsewhere. Already at the age of 19 he had the first of several articles accepted for the feuilleton section of the prestigious Neue Freie Presse in Vienna (of whose editor, Theodore Herzl, he gives a wonderful account). In Berlin he was looking for (and found) a wider circle – socially and intellectually – than in the somewhat inbred bourgeois and mainly Jewish milieu in which he had moved in Vienna. He drank in influences of every kind, from the sophisticated to the louche, exposing himself to `real life’ as opposed to the purely literal and to some extent derivative life he had led so far..

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Durkheim and Social Change

A basic truth about humanity is that effort deserves reward. Is our society one where reward is accurately related to effort? Reward in its various forms is not absent, but neither is it well correlated to effort. An honest man who works hard may remain poor and unrecognized, another may become rich overnight by some chance event, as an extreme example, perhaps winning the lottery.

A man may spend much time and money building himself a home to retire to, and then the government of his land compulsorily purchase it. The money was not the issue. There are so many factors that affect this equation between effort and reward, that it may at times seem hopeless or overwhelming to make sense of it. In these circumstances, it is unremarkable that people suffer stress, tension and insecurity, and may feel like giving up, become apathetic or depressed, dissolve their marriage, leave a job or college course, emigrate, or worse, commit suicide.

The French sociologist Emile Durkheim, with On Suicide  (1897), was the first to systematically explore this idea of social frustration. In studying the division of labour in society, he was aware the increasing pressures upon people had consequences; people have a ‘breaking point’. He became interested in the  ‘worst case scenario’, suicide, seemingly the most individual of acts, but also having a social basis..

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The Marked Year 1914

The 5th Lancers Re-enter Mons, November 1918 by Richard Caton Woodville (1856-1927).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The four years between 1914 and 1918 were, as Graham Wallas observed, “four years of the most intense and heroic effort the human race has ever made” (Human Nature in Politics – Third Edition , 1921). When that effort was spent, illusions and enthusiasms possible up to 1914 turned to massive disillusionment, an image not unlike the luxurious, class-conscious RMS Titanic, which sank just two years before. The only gain, if any, for humanity was a painful reminder of its own limitations.

“The Great War of 1914-18 lies like a band of scorched earth dividing that time from ours, in wiping out so many lives which would have been operative on the years that followed, in destroying beliefs, changing ideas, and leaving incurable wounds of disillusion, it created a physical as well as psychological gulf between two epochs.”   ( The Guns of August)

“The nineteenth century, the great age of European civilisation, was an edifice of grandeur and passion, of riches and beauty, but with dark cellars below. Its inhabitants lived, as compared to a later time, with more self-reliance, more confidence, more hope, more careless ease, but also hypocrisy, injustice and false sentiment” ( Barbara Tuchman, The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World before the War, 1890-1914)..

Looking back on that world, Emile Verhaeren, the Belgian poet, dedicated his work “With emotion, to the man I used to be”. Ninety-six years later, it is increasingly difficult to remember the pre-1914 world that used to be. Here is a reminder… Continue reading The Marked Year 1914

The Used Book Trade

Having bought and sold books on a casual basis for a couple of decades or so, I thought I would deviate from my usual subjects to give my personal insights into the business, what constitutes ‘success’ and where the future may lead.

The reality is, used book selling is not what it was. I suppose the current economic climate has a part to play, but across the country, the small, independent specialist bookshops are disappearing in like fashion to the corner-shops’ demise under the competition of the supermarkets. My first conclusion is ‘use them or lose them’. The other factor must be the number of charity shops with a couple of shelves crammed with a mixed range of books, and www.oxfam.org.uk for one, now opening used bookshops of their own.

In itself, this is no bad thing, at least they represent a source of books. However, they naturally expect donations of books, as opposed to the independent book sellers who were usually pleased enough to give a few pounds for what you brought in. Far more importantly though, was the knowledge they had of the business. Many shops I have traded with in the past were happy to track down a book for you. This brings us to the brave new era of the Internet, and especially www.amazon.co.uk. Now of course, anyone can quickly locate a copy of a book, even ones that in the past would have taken a lot of time and effort to track down. Accepting the advantages this has brought in sourcing, purchasing, and selling books, it is appropriate here to mention a few disadvantages.

These may not be the observations of everyone in the book business, but it seems to me that Internet selling has created a broader base of what is available, but in so doing, has driven down the price percentage available to the seller, taking into account postage fees, and site selling fees. It is pretty obvious that on Amazon as an example, it is simply not worth competing against the rest on what may once have been viewed as ‘bread and butter’ products. Some of the fun has gone too, twenty years ago, I used to travel once or twice a year between Wales and Scotland. I used to buy Scottish books in Wales and sell in Scotland, and vice versa. There’s just no point anymore..

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Evolution, Creationism, and Other Modern Myths

`When asked by an anthropologist what the Indians called America before the white man came, an Indian said simply, “Ours”

Evolution, Creationism, and Other Modern Myths: A Critical Inquiry

Starting with the knee-jerk reaction of evolutionists to the decision of the Kansas State Board of Education to relax opposition to alternatives to evolution being discussed in schools, Evolution, Creationism, and Other Modern Myths (2002), is a unique, revelatory critique of much that is wrong with science today. Vine Deloria Jr. quotes from an impressive range of scientists, philosophers and other writers, with familiarity and an ability to summarize their arguments simply and concisely, often exposing the flimsy logic employed by respected authorities.. Continue reading Evolution, Creationism, and Other Modern Myths