The Off Topic Topic

[Eddie Teach]

That's not a very Jewish name.

Well it is a Hebrew name.

Close, Welsh.

[Sheilbh]

Yeah, but the widespread acceptance of "pub curry" as pub food would prime the population to accept real curry more readily.

The British people don't need to be primed to accept any form of curry  

[Duque de Bragança]

That's not a very Jewish name.

There are secret jews amongst us

While you are the crypto-Moor ? 

[Syt]

[Oexmelin]

Distantly related: I attended a talk on James Baldwin this week-end, in which the speaker quoted his eulogy by Toni Morrison. I know Sheilbh is fond of the genre (?), but I invite you all to give it a look:

https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/98/03/29/specials/baldwin-morrison.html

Here's the first part:

Jimmy, there is too much to think about you, and too much to feel. The difficulty is your life refuses summation - it always did - and invites contemplation instead. Like many of us left here I thought I knew you. Now I discover that in your company it is myself I know. That is the astonishing gift of your art and your friendship: You gave us ourselves to think about, to cherish. We are like Hall Montana* watching ''with new wonder'' his brother saints, knowing the song he sang is us, ''He is us.''

I never heard a single command from you, yet the demands you made on me, the challenges you issued to me, were nevertheless unmistakable, even if unenforced: that I work and think at the top of my form, that I stand on moral ground but know that ground must be shored up by mercy, that ''the world is before [ me ] and [ I ] need not take it or leave it as it was when [ I ] came in.''

Well, the season was always Christmas with you there and, like one aspect of that scenario, you did not neglect to bring at least three gifts. You gave me a language to dwell in, a gift so perfect it seems my own invention. I have been thinking your spoken and written thoughts for so long I believed they were mine. I have been seeing the world through your eyes for so long, I believed that clear clear view was my own. Even now, even here, I need you to tell me what I am feeling and how to articulate it. So I have pored again through the 6,895 pages of your published work to acknowledge the debt and thank you for the credit. No one possessed or inhabited language for me the way you did. You made American English honest - genuinely international. You exposed its secrets and reshaped it until it was truly modern dialogic, representative, humane. You stripped it of ease and false comfort and fake innocence and evasion and hypocrisy. And in place of deviousness was clarity. In place of soft plump lies was a lean, targeted power. In place of intellectual disingenuousness and what you called ''exasperating egocentricity,'' you gave us undecorated truth. You replaced lumbering platitudes with an upright elegance. You went into that forbidden territory and decolonized it, ''robbed it of the jewel of its naivete,'' and un-gated it for black people so that in your wake we could enter it, occupy it, restructure it in order to accommodate our complicated passion - not our vanities but our intricate, difficult, demanding beauty, our tragic, insistent knowledge, our lived reality, our sleek classical imagination - all the while refusing ''to be defined by a language that has never been able to recognize [ us ] .'' In your hands language was handsome again. In your hands we saw how it was meant to be: neither bloodless nor bloody, and yet alive.

[Sheilbh]

Distantly related: I attended a talk on James Baldwin this week-end, in which the speaker quoted his eulogy by Toni Morrison. I know Sheilbh is fond of the genre (?), but I invite you all to give it a look:

Thanks. Yeah. I'm very fond of writing for the dead whether eulogy, elegy or obituary (which I think are consistently the best written pieces in newspapers).

[Valmy]

The Freikorps rolling around Berlin 100 years ago in 1920:



Hans are we the baddies?

[Eddie Teach]

Distantly related: I attended a talk on James Baldwin this week-end, in which the speaker quoted his eulogy by Toni Morrison. I know Sheilbh is fond of the genre (?), but I invite you all to give it a look:

Thanks. Yeah. I'm very fond of writing for the dead whether eulogy, elegy or obituary (which I think are consistently the best written pieces in newspapers).

Have you read The Hive Queen and The Hegemon?

[Sheilbh]

Nope. Any good?

[Eddie Teach]

I can't seem to find a copy. 

[merithyn]

Christ - Britain's most prolific serial rapist convicted:
https://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/greater-manchester-news/reynhard-sinaga-evil-double-life-17518266

Indonesian born, sunday school-teaching, PhD student, who hung out in and around Manchester clubs, posed as a good samaritan and date-raped almost two hundred men (overwhelmingly straight), the police estimate 195 victims. He filmed a lot of the assualts.

Because of the number of complainants and the volume of evidence (and because he pled not guilty) there have had to be four separate trials - the final one closed today. Case has been so bad jurors have been offered counselling and exempted from future jury service.

Statements from the victims, most of whom didn't know, are really heartbreaking.

This is horrendous. Those poor guys. 

[Razgovory]

On the plus side it demonstrates that men are more willing to report such attacks.  That's a big step forward in combating sexual violence.

[crazy canuck]

On the plus side it demonstrates that men are more willing to report such attacks.  That's a big step forward in combating sexual violence.

Except that is not how the police found out.  There is a good Guardian podcast on this case.

According to the podcast the last victim regained consciousness while being sexually assaulted.  He then proceeded to beat his assaulter to the point that he thought he had killed him.  The victim then called the police to report that he thought he had killed a man and that he had been raped.  On arriving on the scene the police arrested the victim.  It was only after reviewing footage from a cell phone that was taken from the scene (the attacker apparently filmed all his sexual assaults on that phone) that the police realized what had happened.  It took many months to identify and interview all the other victims (some of whom had no idea they had actually been assaulted).

[Sheilbh]

Yeah, by the sound of it most of the victims had no idea until the police spoke to them.

[DGuller]

I wonder if the victims would've been better off continuing to have no idea...   I know that's not an option, but I do wonder in cases like these as to how much of the victimization is being done once investigation starts.