The Sunday Ishmael: 4/02/24

 I've stayed in Orkney for more than two decades, and during that time my home has never been burgled, nothing has been stolen from my person, I have never been physically attacked, let alone murdered by children. This is not because Orkney is a particularly safe place - it has its share of crimes of violence and acquisition. It is more the result of my anonymity, the middle class safety of my home's location, and because I don't go where the wild things are. It is so much hot air and sweet Fanny Adams to say the streets should be safe for women to walk at any time of day or night wearing whatever they choose to express their personality and sexuality. The truth is that they are not, probably never will be, given the nature of the human race, and it's best not to put yourself in harm's way. 

Human nature is not noble, but its worst excesses can be encouraged or discouraged. Society can be structured to reduce both motivation to prey on one's fellow humans and the opportunity to do so. A century or so ago the measures to enforce desirable behaviour weren't kind or pretty: religion threatened eternal torment, female sexual transgression was punished by stigma and banishment, their children designated bastards, murderers  executed. Even these harsh measures were ineffective, as  Dr. Lucy Lisp gloatingly tells us  about Victorian female killers. 

Dr Lucy Lisp, Keeper of the Royal Knocking Shops and media tart, is happiest 

posing for the nation in a bath or laced-up in a Georgian corset, pouting and lisping her crass arty histories at us, a pseudo-scholarly telly trollop, ghastly little stoat.

Hi, big boy,
I'm Doctor Lucy, buy me.  No business like showbusiness.  (mr ishmael 6/05/2015)

But to abandon any attempt to socialise our young by internalising  morality just because we have fallen out with religion, "traditional values" and believe it is okay for women to enjoy sex, has not been the best idea we've ever had. Instead, we have created a bear-pit for ourselves, a competitive, envious, avaricious, self-indulgent hell of gratified impulse, pandered by the Dark Lords of the Internet, who will service any grotesque desire, as long as there's money to be made. Most of us can deal with it, fairly unscathed - okay, I buy too much, my garage is piled high with Amazon cardboard and I haven't got enough life left to read all the books on my Kindle, but I haven't murdered anyone. However, the young, the vulnerable, the insecure, the neuro-divergent - well, it's a different matter there. Takes us into the fevered atmosphere of the 1960 trial of  D. H. Lawrence’s novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover for being obscene under British law,  citing the informal precedent of “variable obscenity,” which held that obscene books should be kept out of the hands of children, women, and the working classes, who were all susceptible to works likely to “deprave or corrupt” - unlike upper-middle-class male readers. The prosecutor, Mervyn Griffith-Jones, who had represented the British at the Nuremberg war crimes trials, asked the jury, “Is it a book that you would even wish your wife or servants to read?” In response, members of the jury broke out in laughter. Three of the jurors were women. The jury pool also included a cross-section of workers, including teachers, dockworkers, drivers, and salesmen. It was unlikely that any of them employed live-in domestic servants. 

Sixty-four years later, anyone in possession of a mobile phone can read anything, look at anything, incite suicide, violence or murder, order their drugs or court notoriety by posting videos of themselves on TikTok miming and dancing to popular songs. Brianna Ghey was a 16-year-old, born male and living as a girl, who had a strong internet presence and promoted a transgender life, assisting younger children to access hormone replacement therapy.  She had many more followers than this blog attracts - variously reported as 11,000, 31,000  or  63,000. Lots, anyway. In February last year she was killed by her two 15 year old chums, Scarlett Jenkinson  

and Eddie Ratcliffe in a planned knife attack. Eddie is autistic and a selective mute. 

Despite his facial hair, he looks very young and vulnerable. Each has blamed the other for the knife work on Brianna. Both have been found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment, with a minimum tariff of 22 years for Scarlett and 20 years for Eddie. That's three kids with their lives lost or ruined. Brianna's mum is firm in her belief that it was the internet and its dark delights that turned Scarlett and Eddie into conspirators and caused Brianna to lose her life at their hands and she is now campaigning for a change in the law to prevent youngsters from having legal access to phones with full internet capability. It would have to be a global change in the law, of course. Can't see it happening, myself, however desirable it might be. Pandora's box has been opened and that's that.

This is terribly troubling. And what is that Mrs Justice Yip doing, releasing their names? Either they should be treated as children, or not. She said members of the public would want to know the identities of Brianna's killers 'as they seek to understand how children could do something so dreadful'. Bollocks. The public interest is not the same thing as the public being interested in something. There's a great deal of murder by young people under the age of 18 these days. It is not rare. This case has received the publicity it has because of the transgender element, which is terrifically fashionable. 

I also take issue with the description of these three as children. The word conjures up for me images of pre-pubertal kiddies. We need another term in law for people who are post pubertal, but not yet legally adult. Youth would do.

mr ishmael would have had no difficulty in recognising this situation as a predictable development: 

Living in the Shitegeist: August 2009

Twitter is a mystery to me. Seems like some form of digitised narcissism. Twittering is what Arts correspondents do, Kirsty Wark and Paul Morley and Germaine Greer, twitter-twitter, any old frothy, pretentious bollocks, just as long as they get paid. Who would want to be a twitterer ? No, really, have you seen Paul Morley ?

Facebook, too, don't know what it is, don't want to; i-things, don't know, blackberry, that, too. Not a thing to admit to in decent company but I don't have a mobile phone. There is no special virtue in this abstinence but neither is it being Luddite - although the Luddites had some socio-economic validity to their opposition, an early manifestation of It's not the economy, Stupid - I have some IT stuff, enough. This non-engagement with the latest IT wheeze is, though, a sort of discernment, a resistance. I would jump in my car tomorrow, even with its world-famous sticky automatic transmission, and drive to Moscow or Kathmandu, having managed all these years without satnav. Genghis Kahn did it and he was on horseback. It is in our nature to cultivate a sense of direction, or we could look at the Sun, or we could ask someone for directions, do some of that communicating shit that we're so good at. Satnav is an infantilisation too far, like Fatboy Jerry Clarkson and his simile-generating engine - this car is soooo fast that your hair'll catch fire, this car is soooo extraordinary that you'll want to own one, only you can't afford one, but I can, it's for big boys, see. My ancestors - and yours - sailed the world in paper boats, what the fuck do I want with satnav?

His Holy Grumpiness, my Highlands neighbour, Mr Bob Dylan, in one if his interviews of epic grievance, remarked that Aaah-Wontsa-Pohna-Time, if people wanted the sound of a handclap on a pop record they'd run up to the 'mic and clap their fucking hands, like decent Christian or in his case, artistically pantheistic people should, fucking self-indulgent idiot, one minute at the Wailing Wall, the next at the Vatican; nowadays, there's a button on the keyboard marked "handclap." What is the point of that ? Bob's rock'n'roll credentials may be as counterfeit as much - but by no means all - of his output, indeed, given his endlessly tedious Western Swing Rockabilly it is difficult and painful to recall that he authored Highway 61 Revisited (and should in all decency, therefore, shut the fuck up with his cheesy gnomic whining, vain, silly old fart) but he was right enough in being dismayed by the digitisation of everything, even spontaneity, by GlobaMusic; it's the human handclap for me, too. But not the Stetson.

It is as though we do this shit without even thinking Do we want to ? but just because some nerd lacking a proper job has dreamed it up. - A sitemeter, for instance, counts the visits to this cyberplace, it logs the duration of and the geographical location of visitors. I don't know how it works, some instrument of Satan. I looked at it for a couple of weeks and found that it influenced what I wrote, as though I was the CEO of a global dissent corporation; Hmmm. things are a bit quiet in Malaysia this week, maybe do a piece about pineapples, or rubber. I now take a quick peek every couple of weeks, just to get an idea of how many people read this stuff, there is no analysis beyond that and actually I should disable it altogether, lest I be tempted. It wouldn't ever occur to me, though, that I should make it public, have it running down the side of the page, somebody has just come on and is from such-and-such a place and the last site he was looking at was so-and-so; what on Earth is that about? If someone signs their name and address in a comment, that's one thing, although no-one ever does but to have a piece of software identifying the reader's location and last-visited site is an impertinence worthy of government, isn't it, creepy, entirely contrary to the supposed anonymous nature of cyberworld, a staggering impudence, an overwhelming conceit. Not only is Big Brother watching you on behalf of the government, he is watching you on behalf of me, the Mighty Libertarian Blogger, look, that's you, City of London, or Frome, Somerset, down the side there; you can post but you can't hide, cheeky fucking bastard.

Some, of course, measure their hits as though they were their cock and the publication of site spymeters information just a form of exhibitionism, the IT-flasher, so to speak, but even that is wholly perverse, unsavoury, bragadaccio compounding an ever-indignant scattergun demagoguery, almost, actually, like a party political broadcast, innit, by some crypto-fascist grouping, it's all the wogs' fault, if there weren't any wogs we'd have decent politicians, seem to be the fatuous Chimes of Freedom, tolling through much of bloggery, the bedrock of much of this sort of stuff, wogs out, that's the thing, just watch how that ushers-in a new dawn of respectable and representative politics. Or maybe not.

In his problematic 2017 essay Say Cheese!, in which mr ishmael argues that it is impossible for the State to suppress home-made revenge pornography, and furthermore, it should not attempt to do so, that everyone should just accept the consequences of their own foolish actions, even if those actions were undertaken as teenagers, he writes: If anyone had ever asked me what pubescent teenagers - boys and girls - would do with 'phone cameras this is exactly what I would have predicted.  Because that's exactly what I would've done.

Born too late, me.

Honest Not Invent, Vent Stack, Ishmael’s Blues, and the latest, Flush Test (with a nice picture of the late, much lamented, Mr Harris of Lanarkshire taking a piss on a totem pole) are available from Lulu and Amazon. If you buy from Amazon, it would be nice if you could give a review on their website.

Ishmaelites wishing to buy a copy from lulu should follow these steps :

please register an account first, at lulu.com. This is advisable because otherwise paypal seems to think it's ok to charge in dollars, and they then apply their own conversion rate, which might put the price up slightly for a UK buyer. Once the new account is set up, follow one of the links below (to either paperback or hardback) or type "Ishmael’s Blues" into the Lulu Bookstore search box. Click on the “show explicit content” tab, give the age verification box a date of birth such as 1 January 1960, and proceed.

Link for Hardcover : https://tinyurl.com/je7nddfr

Link for Paperback : https://tinyurl.com/3jurrzux

https://www.lulu.com/shop/ishmael-smith/flush-test/paperback/product-9yjvn7.html?q=Flush+Test&page=1&pageSize=4

At checkout, try WELCOME15 in the coupon box, which (for the moment) takes 15% off the price before postage. If this code has expired by the time you reach this point, try a google search for "Lulu.com voucher code" and see what comes up.

With the 15% voucher, PB (including delivery to a UK address) should be £16.84; HB £27.04.

Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse - Revelation 6

War, Famine, Pestilence and Death

Then I saw when the Lamb broke one of the seven seals, and I heard one of the four living creatures saying as with a voice of thunder, "Come." I looked, and behold, a white horse, and he who sat on it had a bow; and a crown was given to him, and he went out conquering and to conquer.
When He broke the second seal, I heard the second living creature saying, "Come." And another, a red horse, went out; and to him who sat on it, it was granted to take peace from Earth, and that men would slay one another; and a great sword was given to him.
When the Lamb broke the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth living creature saying, "Come." I looked, and behold, an ashen horse; and he who sat on it had the name Death; and Hades was following with him. Authority was given to them over a fourth of the Earth, to kill with sword and with famine and with pestilence and by the wild beasts of the Earth.When He broke the third seal, I heard the third living creature saying, "Come." I looked, and behold, a black horse; and he who sat on it had a pair of scales in his hand. And I heard something like a voice in the center of the four living creatures saying, "A quart of wheat for a denarius, and three quarts of barley for a denarius; but do not damage the oil and the wine."