Via BoingBoing, a whacky solution (this one Japanese, but is it any whackier than what we Americans come up with?):

Ms. Tsukioka, a 29-year-old experimental fashion designer, lifted a flap on her skirt to reveal a large sheet of cloth printed in bright red with a soft drink logo partly visible. By holding the sheet open and stepping to the side of the road, she showed how a woman walking alone could elude pursuers — by disguising herself as a vending machine.

The wearer hides behind the sheet, printed with an actual-size photo of a vending machine. Ms. Tsukioka’s clothing is still in development, but she already has several versions, including one that unfolds from a kimono and a deluxe model with four sides for more complete camouflaging.

It’s hard to imagine this particular solution being proposed in the United States, but this is one place where I think the narrative of Japanese oddness can do some good. Dressing up as a vending machine seems silly to American eyes, and hopefully it can demonstrate by analogy the silliness of our own expectations of what women can and should do to avoid rape and assault.

At BoingBoing, Doctorow notes that the design of this vending machine plays into a Japanese cultural myth that crime rates are increasing, when in fact “Japanese crime levels are in decline” — another point of similarity between Japanese and American hysteria about rape and assault.

(Hat tip: draegonhawke)

This weekend Carmen and I were interviewed by the New York Times about the recent rash of noose threats. Here is the link to the article and a few quotes from the article.

At least seven times in the past few weeks, nooses have been anonymously tossed over pipes or hung on doorknobs in the New York metropolitan area — four times here on Long Island, twice in New York City, once at a Home Depot store in Passaic, N.J. The settings are disparate. One noose was hung in a police station locker room in Hempstead, where the apparent target was a black police officer recently promoted to deputy chief. Another was draped over the doorknob of the office of a black professor at Columbia University.

The question of why these things were happening — whether linked to events somewhere else, like in Jena, La., or part of some new homegrown vernacular of race hate — seemed to wait in line last week behind the question of where the next noose would be found.

Three noose episodes took place on Long Island in three days. On Wednesday, two were found at a sanitation garage in the Town of Hempstead — one of them looped around the neck of a stuffed animal with its face blackened. On Thursday, a noose was discovered hanging in a Nassau County highway department yard in Baldwin. On Friday, a worker at the Green Acres shopping mall in Valley Stream found one slung over a door at a construction site.

Here they describe the history of Long Island, and we have Carmen’s quote:

Like many other parts of the country, Long Island is not without a history of racial bigotry. Black people were barred from buying homes in Levittown until well into the 1960s. Some Long Island school districts are still among the most segregated in the country. The black population is about 12 percent of the total, but is highly concentrated in a half-dozen communities that are 95 percent minority. In 2004, in Suffolk County, it was still possible for an interracial couple to wake up in the night to find a cross burning on their lawn — it happened in a hamlet called Lake Grove.

Lynching was not part of that history. But to some of those sifting the evidence, the nooses of 2007 represent much the same impulse as lynchings did in the Jim Crow South.

“In the context of today, the noose means, ‘There is still a racial hierarchy in this country, and you better not overstep your bounds,’” said Carmen Van Kerckhove, the founder of a New York consulting firm, New Demographic, that specializes in workplace problems, including racial tension.

Here’s one of the men who was threatened with a noose with my quote at the end:

Willie Warren, an equipment operator at the Nassau County Public Works yard here, was among three workers in the garage on Thursday when an employee ran in to tell them he had found a noose hanging from a fence outside. Mr. Warren, 41, who has been with the department for 20 years, filed a racial discrimination suit in 2004, producing tape recordings of a supervisor referring to him with racial epithets. He won the case, got a promotion, still works for one of the supervisors named in his suit, and considers himself unflappable on the job.

The noose shook him. “It’s hard to explain, but it made me upset the whole day,” Mr. Warren said. One white co-worker was as upset as he was, he said. Another said, “What’s the big deal? It’s only a noose.”

Rachel E. Sullivan, an assistant professor of sociology at Long Island University’s C. W. Post College, said most people do not understand what lynchings were. “They think it was a few guys coming in the night, in their hooded sheets, taking you away,” she said.

She teaches a course on African-American history, including the killings of thousands by lynching in the United States between the end of the Civil War and the end of the civil rights movement of the 1960s.

“But in reality these were whole, big community events,” she said. “Children and families would come to watch. Hundreds of people attended. They would watch a man being burned and mutilated before he was hung. They would pose for pictures with the body.

“If people had a grasp of what really happened at these things,” Professor Sullivan continued, “they would understand the power of the symbol of a noose.”

You can read the whole article at the link above.

I don’t remember when I first heard the theory that life could have evolved on Mars and traveled to Earth by way of meteorite, a theory which a commenter on my livejournal points out is called panspermia. I’ve always thought panspermia was pretty far-fetched, but apparently it’s close-enough fetched that scientists are testing its viability.

Scientists at the University of Aberdeen are investigating whether life can travel between planets via meteorite, including whether or not it could have traveled from Mars to Earth. Investigating the later claim, they sculpted a slab of rock into a particular shape, and are attached it to an unmanned Russian craft.

Further details of the experiments are to be revealed later, but the scientists already have some theories about what a meteorite that could carry life would have to look like:

Prof Parnell said primitive life could not survive a meteorite of small size because of the heat, but believed it could survive inside the centre of a larger one measuring tens of centimetres.

UPDATE: In comments, Robert and Ron try to correct my ignorance on the issue. Robert writes:

It’s a numbers game. Simplifying assumption: the transport mechanism is viable, widespread, and easy/automatic - impacts on planetary surfaces that carry life-bearing rock out into deep space is pretty good as far as those go.

With that assumption in place, then life can start anywhere in the universe and spread through the transport mechanism. The initial “invention” of life remains very unlikely, but you have trillions of potential places for it, instead of just one. “It happened somewhere else and then drifted here” is much more likely than “it happened here”.

The analogy I like to use is rock music. Is there rock music in your town? Sure. Was it invented there? No, it was invented in (a hundred) other places, and CAME there. It’s a more likely scenario that you live in a place that has bands who were inspired from some outside source, than it is that you have bands who invented it themselves.

A few days ago, Amanda wrote a comment on a thread at Pandagon that I thought was so smart that I wrote her and asked if I could make it a post on Alas.

The context: Amanda and other commenters were involved in an argument with anti-feminist Dana (male), during which Dana trotted out a lot of assumptions about how feminism is opposed to family values. Amanda went through each of Dana’s claims and debunked them — feminism is not breaking up marriages and causing teen pregnancy rates to skyrocket. Instead, as we see feminist values filter into society, we see that real family values are actually boosted.

Amanda:

The divorce rate has actually declined since the 70s, which means that your way—the stifling culture of the 50s—was the way that “broke homes”.

Also, this:

Dana assertion that “our way” has led “kids” to have children at younger and younger ages. Survey says:

In 1970, the average age of a new mother was 21 years old. By 2000, the average age was 28.

Dana claims that “our way” is what leads children to live in poverty. Survey says:

One dire consequence was that one in four Americans in the mid-1950s lived in poverty. By the end of the 1950s, one in three American children lived in poverty…..

Today, the rate of poverty is half what it was in the 1950s. In fact, now if a husband is the sole breadwinner the family is four times more likely to be poor than one in which the wife brings home an income too. Dual income homes earn nearly two-thirds more than that of families in which the husband alone works. Consequently, the percentage of children living in poverty has decreased 50 percent since 1959. Money may not be everything. But it’s something.

Dana says that our way leads to unhappy and broken marriages. Survey says:

Not surprisingly, researchers in the ’50s found that less than one in three married couples reported being happy or very happy with their relationship. Compare that to today, when 61 percent of married Americans report themselves to be “very happy” in their marriage. Part of the sour spouse problem of the ’50s was that many couples didn’t really want to be married to each other. Often, they were trapped into marriage by unintended pregnancy.

Dana claims that feminism and pro-sex philosophies have led to a surge in teenage pregnancy. Survey says:

With no sex-ed, no birth control, no legal abortion — the exact legislative agenda of today’s pro-life movement! — teen birth rates soared, reaching highs that have not been equaled since: there were twice as many teen mothers in the ’50s than today.

Conclusion: Dana is full of shit. And if you want happier, healthier families and situations where girls delay childbirth until they’re ready and the divorce rate to go down, there’s only one solution.

Embrace “our way”.

In our email conversation, Amanda also mentioned feminism’s positive effect on the economy, which in turn leads to positive effects for families:

It’s worth noting that the poverty issue has more to do with feminism than an improved economy—I’ve seen it noted by a lot of social scientists that women joining the workforce in large numbers has been the saving grace of the middle class. Without those women’s incomes, “free market” capitalism would have shrunk the middle class considerably and we’d probably be worse off than we were in the 50s.

Amanda’s facts lead to a couple of conclusions:

1) Feminism would be worthwhile even if it did cause divorce and teen pregnancy because women’s equality is a non-negotiable moral good. However, as we’ve known for a long time, increasing the wealth and happiness of women increases the wealth and happiness of families, so feminism is a win-win situation.

2) When “family values” are a code word for the religious right, they really have nothing to do with increasing the value and health of the family. They have to do with reinforcing the patriarchal model of family. If so-called “family values” proponents were actually concerned with the health of families (which include women as well as children and fathers), the conversation about family would look very different than it does now.

Former “Alas” blogger Bean is interviewed by Amanda Marcotte (of “Pandagon”) in this week’s edition of Amanda’s weekly podcast at RH Reality Check. Bean discusses the myths and realities of domestic violence and barriers facing American abuse survivors abroad.

Check it out!

From Time Magazine’s website:

An uneasy sense of dèjá vu swept over Florida last week after an all-white jury acquitted seven juvenile boot camp guards and a nurse charged with aggravated manslaughter in the death of a black teen last year.

The shocking verdict came down despite a half hour of videotape that showed the guards hitting and kicking the 14-year-old, Martin Lee Anderson, and holding their hands over his mouth for as long as five minutes at a time, while the nurse stood by and watched. The jury seemed persuaded by the first and widely discredited autopsy report that blamed the boy’s death on a sickle-cell condition, even though a second autopsy ordered by the state had ruled Anderson died from suffocation (the Justice Department has since announced it will investigate whether federal civil rights violations charges should be brought in the case). “It’s wrong!” Anderson’s mother, Gina Jones, shouted as she stormed out of the Panama City courtroom after the verdict was read. The Anderson decision was reminiscent of another bewildering verdict five years ago, when three Florida state prison guards charged with stomping 36-year-old inmate Frank Valdes to death in his cell in 1999 were acquitted — even though the guards’ boot prints were found all over his back.

The crime Martin Anderson committed? He stole his grandmother’s car. As The Bias Committee points out, it’s hard to imagine a 14 year old middle-class white kid being sent to juvenile boot camp for that. Middle-class white kids get second chances, not boot camp.

First of all, stealing your grandmother’s car is joyriding, and when a white kid does it, particularly a white kid from one of those rolling green hill communities, the cops take him home and hand him over to the parents with a warning. So we can all agree that the original offense was an example of disproportionate sentencing. And then, and then, a death sentence.

I don’t think I’ve ever read a better post than this one by La Lubu of Feministe on why we need S-CHIP, why we need national healthcare, and why our current system is abso-fucking lutely sadistic and nonsensical.

I cried twice reading it.

Feel free to comment, but unlike a lot of posts, I’m going to be really strict on moderation on this one. If you’re saying things that can reasonably be interpreted as “It’s okay if a bunch of people die horribly because that’s how the free market works,” then your comment will be replaced with animal noises.

Really.

Don’t be a dick.

From Brad Plumer:

For the past 20 years, the World Bank and assorted Western governments have been telling Malawi how to conduct its affairs. Stop subsidizing crop prices. Curtail spending. Float your currency. And so on. More recently, in 2000, donors demanded that Malawi dismantle a fledgling program that subsidized fertilizer for poor farmers–who often can’t afford it on their own–on the grounds that the subsidies would make it impossible for a “solid agricultural market to develop.”

Well, it’s hard to flout the donors, and Malawi did as told. What happened next? Some 1,500 Malawians starved to death in 2002, and five million more needed emergency rations in 2005. So, last year, the government finally told its “advisors” to shove off and put the subsidies back in place. Two years of record surpluses followed, and Malawi is now shipping excess maize to Zimbabwe. As Toronto’s Globe and Mail tells it, the subsidies have worked wonders; they’re far cheaper than importing food aid; and even the EU has reversed its stance and pledge to underwrite the fertilizer coupons.

And from The New York Times:

Bank policies in the 1980s and 1990s that pushed African governments to cut or eliminate fertilizer subsidies, decontrol prices and privatize may have improved fiscal discipline but did not accomplish much for food production, the evaluation said.

It had been expected that higher prices for crops would give farmers an incentive to grow more, while competition among private traders reduced the costs of seeds and fertilizer. But those market forces often failed to work as hoped.

“The whole thing was based on the idea that if you take away the government for the poorest of the poor that somehow these markets will solve the problems,” Professor Sachs said. “But markets can’t step in and won’t step in when people have nothing. And if you take away help, you leave them to die.”

Professor Easterly said the bank’s managers had made elementary mistakes. “It was a simplistic, Economics 101 lesson, that if you raise prices, farmers produce more, which makes sense if farmers have roads, access to credit, good access to fertilizer markets,” he said. “But most of the time, farmers were lacking those.”

Via The Bias Committee:

In December, the United Nations took up a resolution calling for the abolition of life imprisonment without the possibility of parole for children and young teenagers. The vote was 185 to 1, with the United States the lone dissenter.

From the blog Is That Legal?, via Ornicus:

If you have ever been on, say, an admissions committee or a hiring committee, you will quickly recognize the problem that the JAJB (”Japanese American Joint Board”) faced. It had tens of thousands of loyalty files to review, but it lacked the time and manpower carefully to review each file. So it did what admissions and hiring committees do in these situations: it tried to come up with a template that would allow it to process the files without having to review each one. […]

So, for example, a Japanese American who was a Christian got a plus-2; a Japanese American who was a Buddhist got a minus-1. If he was “an instructor in Japanese hobbies or sports” such as judo, he got a minus-2; if he was “an instructor in [an] American sport or hobby,” he got a plus-2. For each Japanese-American periodical he received, he got a minus-1. If he’d never traveled to Japan, he got a plus-1. One trip to Japan earned him a minus-1. Two trips to Japan got him a minus-3. More than three years in a Japanese-language after-school program in the United States got him a minus-3. And so on.

You get the idea.

For reasons that the archival record does not disclose, the JAJB ditched the point system after a while and shifted instead to a system that looked for particular patterns of factors and then broke the files into three large groups – a “white” group that merited an automatic stamp of loyalty, a “black” group that merited an automatic stamp of disloyalty, and a “brown” or “tan” group that required case-by-case scrutiny of files. (Yes, that’s right: the color between “black” and “white” was not “gray” but “brown.”)

The blogger is the author of a book on the subject: American Inquisition, The Hunt For Japanese American Disloyalty In WWII. Sounds interesting, in a horrifying sort of way. (Curtsy to Ornicus).

I cringed when I read the title of this BBC article: “Diet Choices ‘Written in genes.”

The claim: twin studies suggest that “Identical twins were far more likely to share the same dietary patterns - like a penchant for coffee and garlic.”

The Kings College researchers looked at a total of more than 3,000 female twins aged between 18 and 79, working out their broad preferences using five different dietary “groups”.

These included diets heavy in fruit and vegetables, alcohol, fried meat and potatoes, and low-fat products or low in meat, fish and poultry.

…

Professor Jane Wardle, from University College, said that the findings, and other similar research, pointed to genetics playing a “moderate” part in the development of preferred foods.

She said that it was possible that genes involved with taste, or the “reward” chemicals released by the body in response to certain foods, might play a role.

“People have always made the assumption that food choices are all due to environmental factors during life, but it now seems this isn’t the case.

“It also suggests that what parents do to influence eating habits in childhood are not necessarily as important as we thought - and that a lot of effort may need to be made with young people as they become independent in adolescence to steer them onto the right course.”

This feels, to me, like a lot of spouting based on preferences for garlic and coffee. Garlic and coffee are things that hit certain parts of the palette. They suggest that the way things taste on the tongue is perhaps partially genetic — but didn’t we know that? Some segment of the population (to which I unfortunately belong) is unable to determine the finer distinctions between most of the spices we use in food, all of which are instead only interpreted by the brain as pain. That’s genetic. Why wouldn’t “bitterness tastes good” (like coffee) be one of those things?

Although really, coffee’s a poor example because it has such a heavy social meaning. Personalities can help drive people toward coffee, and we know that twin studies indicate similarities in personality. So, garlic is better. Yes, I will believe that genetics influence how people interpret the flavor of garlic.

But to make a leap from that to a more sophisticated claim about dietary types? Eh… I haven’t read the study, but it seems problematic to do, and I wonder how many of the factors which a social scientist would see as important to such a study were included.

And of course, as usual, the claim (which we are to take as something ruling out social influences) is probably only tested in one or two regions (say: England, or England, America, and France), so it doesn’t necessarily say anything definitive about cultural mediation of taste. (If I’m wrong about that, would be happy to hear it.)

I haven’t read the study itself, and I’m not an expert on these topics, so these are just ruminations. As reported, this study yields some interesting information. However, it seems to me that its findings are likely to be overblown. Anyone catch American television news coverage of it? Was it really annoying?

From a post on Oy Bay (curtsy to Muzzlewatch) entitled “San Francisco Art Gallery Censors Writing and Art Work as Too Zionist”:

Himmelberger Gallery, a well-known art gallery located in San Francisco’s tony Union Square, has decided to cancel plans to publish an art catalogue of one of its represented artists, noted author Alan Kaufman […] The gallery objects to the expressly Zionist focus of several essay contributions to the catalogue by well-known authors and journalists[…]

The catalogue was to present 15 of Kaufman’s paintings which are under contract to the gallery and whose subjects range from the Holocaust to Israel to the New Antisemitism. The gallery’s prices for the works in question have been cited at between $3,275 and $36,000. The works have hung in the gallery and a cross-section of them also appeared on the gallery website.

At a meeting between gallery head David Himmelberger and Kaufman, Himmelberger surprised the artist and author with an eleventh hour decision not to proceed with the catalogue due to the Zionist “agenda” of the essays as well as some of the paintings. Himmelberger said that such a presentation was antithetical to the aims of the gallery, which promotes “international understanding” and forswears all forms of nationalism and religion. But the authors see this as a transparent example of the way in which the word Zionism has been exiled from civil discourse and has been turned by the cultural establishment into a refugee of a word, a pariah of an idea, and a euphemism for Antisemitism.

Oy Bay also quotes a statement released by the “Zionist Five,” who are the five authors who were to be published in the catalogue. From reading the statement, my guess is that it’s not the word “Zionism” that scared the publisher away, so much as the extremism of the views presented. For example:

Let us, then, be perfectly frank about one thing. To vilify, marginalize, suppress or outlaw Zionism politically, socially or culturally, for any reason whatever, is to wish no less then murderous extinction upon every Jewish man, woman and child in the world today.

Note the “for any reason whatsoever.” Next time I hear someone deny that Zionists mix up criticism of Zionism with anti-Semitism, I hope I remember that quote; according to these folks, criticizing Zionism for any reason at all isn’t just anti-Semitic, it’s wishing Genocide upon the Jews.

Some thoughts:

1) It’s not censorship for a private publisher to decide not to publish a book. Kaufman’s belief that he’s been “censored for expression of a Zionist perspective” is over the top.

2) When I first read this story, I thought perhaps Kaufman was suffering from another form of censorship: When a publisher owns the rights to publish a work but refuses to publish it. I think that is censorship, but it doesn’t seem to be the case here; the gallery’s lawyer has said that Kaufman is free to publish the catalogue elsewhere.

3) There’s another form of de facto censorship, which is when objections to a point of view are so overwhelming that that point of view becomes impossible to publish, or is in some other significant way cut out of “the marketplace of ideas.” It’s implausible that’s the situation here, though; one gallery owner declined to print one catalogue, but most of the authors in the catalogue are published elsewhere.

Kaufman might argue that San Francisco’s “marketplace of ideas” effectively disallows pro-Zionist discussion. If that’s true, then that’s a reasonable complaint on his part. On the other hand, the fact that his paintings were displayed in a major San Francisco gallery, apparently without being protested, suggests that the San Francisco experience may not be as bleak as all that.

4) Kaufman sees an equivalence between his situation and that of Black men (what about Black women?) in “the old South”:

“My standing up and declaring Zionist art in San Francisco is really like a black man standing up in the old South and declaring himself a free man.”

The comparison trivializes slavery and Jim Crow, in much the same way that stupid concentration camp comparisons trivialize the Holocaust. (I do think that comparisons can be worthwhile when they’re intelligently made, as The Sideshow argues.)

Here’s my stab at creating a different kind of feminist BDSM discussion.

Anyone want to post their happy BDSM stories? Actually, can we broaden that to happy kink stories? Happy stories of the joys of non-mainstream sexuality — asexuals so pleased they’re purring, enduring polyamorous relationships full of steamy sex and fantastic folks, glorious golden showers. No criticism! No sociological analysis! No worries or tragedies! Just happy, kinky romance and fucking.

Ridiculously silly stories okay, too. Feel free to relate any gaffs you can laugh about.

UPDATE: Feel free to sock puppet, if it would make you more comfortable.

Notice a pattern?

Femnisting: “Bush has appointed a birth control opponent Susan Orr to head our nation’s family planning office.” From the Washington Post:

Susan Orr, most recently an associate commissioner in the Administration for Children and Families, was appointed Monday to be acting deputy assistant secretary for population affairs. She will oversee $283 million in annual grants to provide low-income families and others with contraceptive services, counseling and preventive screenings.

In a 2001 article in The Washington Post, Orr applauded a Bush proposal to stop requiring all health insurance plans for federal employees to cover a broad range of birth control. “We’re quite pleased, because fertility is not a disease,” said Orr, then an official with the Family Research Council.

Barak Obama: Bush nominates anti-voting-right activist to Federal Election Committee.

President George W. Bush has recently nominated Hans von Spakovsky to serve on the Federal Election Commission (FEC). It’s the job of the FEC to regulate elections and disclose campaign finance contributions. […] From 2001 to 2005, von Spakovsky served as an official at the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division where he amassed a record of undermining voting rights¹, creating restrictions that would make it harder for poor and minority communities to vote, and putting partisan politics above upholding our civil rights.

It seems likely that Obama will be successful in blocking von Spakovsky’s nomination, thankfully.

Brad Blog: Bush’s Chief of Voting Rights Supports Unconstitutional I.D. Requirements at Polling Places

The remarks by Tanner, video-taped and first reported by The BRAD BLOG, were meant in support of his decision to allow a Photo ID restriction at polling places in Georgia, over the recommendation of four out of five of the career attorneys in the Civil Rights unit. The law would later be found unconstitutional by two federal judges, one of whom declared the practice to be a “Jim Crow-era poll tax”.

1. More on von Spakovsky’s record here. (back)

Now that I’ve knocked Pharyngula a few times, I guess I’ll do a post favoring some good ol’ enlightenment rationalism, based on this study from the BBC.

An oft-touted example of mind over matter is the efficacy of optimism in aiding cancer cures. A good outlook is supposed to equal a cure. “How brave and corageous she was,” we hear of those who pull through. “She struggled and she overcame.”

Sometimes nastier stories drift in of assumptions that people who died from cancer somehow sinned in succumbing. They gave up. They were weak. They failed to fight. They didn’t want to live. They weren’t strong enough.

My mom had such an anecdote a few years ago, to describe the way that her hairdresser’s husband had died. “[My hairdresser] says he gave up, and died a week after that. What a shame. It’s too bad he gave up.”

The appeal of such a narrative is obvious — it gives us a sense that we control our own fates. It gives us a tool — optomism — to hold against insurmountable odds. If we can be positive and uplifting enough, we have a chance against illness. It’s only those who give up that die.

Optomism as medical cure is a secular replacement for prayer as medical cure. For some religious people, it’s a way to talk about the power of prayer in language that’s acceptable to the ears of people who don’t believe in the efficacy of appealing to god for intervention. For areligious people — like my mother — it can be a replacement for prayer, a way of capturing the sense of control that we gain from something like prayer, and applying it to a (mostly) materialist view of the universe.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t actually work.

The power of the mind has been overestimated when it comes to fighting cancer, US scientists say.
They said they found that a patient’s positive or negative emotional state had no direct bearing on cancer survival or disease progression.

They do suggest that cancer patients continue with therapy and working toward a positive attitude — but they suggest it so that cancer patients can be happier, not as a life-saving measure. From the article, “Lead author Dr James Coyne said: “If cancer patients want psychotherapy or to be in a support group, they should be given the opportunity. There can be lots of emotional and social benefits. But they should not seek such experiences solely on the expectation that they are extending their lives.”

Of course, on one hand, it’s depressing to discover that we can’t cure ourselves through sheer cheerful bloodymindedness. It’s hard to acknowledge that we don’t have control over these things, that our outcomes are determined by factors we can’t affect.

I am reminded of the debates about rape, in which people will go to great lengths to blame the victim. We understand why many men do it, but I’ve always found it insightful when feminists observe that one reason many women will do it, too, is because women want to convince themselves that they have the power not to be raped. That if they are not sluts, that if they don’t drink at the wrong time, or trust the wrong person, or go out at night, or wear a short skirt, they can eliminate the possibility of being attacked.

We know it’s not true with rape, and now we know it’s not true with cancer either: you can’t force yourself to be safe, or be cured. But the silver lining in both situations is the same. If we accept that optimism and ineffective safety measures are not the protection that we want to claim, then we can stop blaming the victim. We can stop suggesting that women invite their own rapes, and we can stop suggesting that people invite their deaths because they don’t try hard enough to maintain a sunny disposition.

Julia Frater, of Cancer Research UK, said: “People with cancer can feel under pressure to cope well with their disease and treatment and to stay on top of things. They are often urged to feel positive.

“These results should reassure them that if they don’t feel like this, it’s okay. Many people do feel worried or low following a diagnosis and this isn’t likely to affect the outcome of their treatment.”

A week ago today the New Zealand police invaded homes all over the country. They arrested 17 (or 18) people with breaches of the Firearms Act. But the search warrants were issued under the Terrorism Suppression Act. Those arrested were called terrorists.

The police invaded Ruatoki, a Tuhoe community. They set up a checkpoint along the confiscation line. Those who wanted to go in or out of this community had to stand by their cars and have their picture taken. Armed police officers boarded the bus that takes kids to Kohanga Reo.

That paragraph may not make much sense to non-NZers. Maori are the tangata whenua, or indigenous people of New Zealand. Kohanga Reo is immersion kindergarten. Tuhoe are an iwi, or tribe, from the North Island of New Zealand. This is an attack on the indigenous people of New Zealand. On the indigenous people who are fighting colonisation. This has dominated the news in New Zealand for a week. It is the first time the Terrorism Suppression Act (the New Zealand version of the Patriot Act) has been used and it is being used against indigenous people who have been terrorised by the New Zealand state.

If that was all that had happened I would have written sooner. But the police also invaded a house I’ve spent many, many hours in. They took three of my friends.

There is an element of ridicule to all this. The police took a backpack that people had taken to the farmers market - with avocados and potatoes, later they brought it back because they decided it didn’t contain any evidence of terrorism. The paper claimed that groups from all over the country working on many different issues were going to launch co-ordinated attacks. They clearly don’t know us very well (anyone who has ever worked on the left will understand why).

But when I laugh it is only to relieve the stress, because my friends still aren’t free. In New Zealand almost everyone gets bail. The day that our friends were arrested the other news included a man who had serially raped prostitutes who was out on bail. That they are still there, that we are still going out to the prison everyday, would have seemed unreal a week ago.

I have closed this post to comments. I’m sorry, but I cannot handle abstract discussion about people I love, when I don’t know when we’ll get them back. I will be writing more about this, I will be writing about some of the issues involved. Right now I just wanted to let people know why I hadn’t been posting, and explain some of the background for when I have the energy to write about what is involved.

* There is no situation, no matter how serious and stressful, for which I don’t have the perfect Buffy quote.