The splendid Bob and Jenna Torres have written a book! It’s guaranteed to be funny, erudite, and enlightening. And, judging by the title, it’s guaranteed to involve veganism in some way. Check out Vegan Freak: Being Vegan In Non-Vegan World, and send in your vegan-related problems (there’s a section in the book on sex-toys) to the cucumber-equipped team Torres here.

The New York Times reports that March of the Penguins is getting lots of favourable coverage from the Christian Right in the US because Keep Reading »

This week saw the International Association for Suicide Prevention World Congress in Durban entitled, in a mix of the sombre and the uplifting, “Scaling the Summit: Suicidal Behaviour in Diverse Cultures“. One look at the programme, and I knew it wasn’t worth going. It’s not that suicide isn’t a serious issue. It is. But the mind boggles at the banality of what passes for suicide prevention strategy. The core of the symposium was dedicated to various kinds of low level governmental intervention, and different ways of persuading individuals that they probably oughtn’t to kill themselves. Rarely was it suggested, even in the title of a talk, that there may be other forces at work, beyond individual pathology. The logic of this approach is to suggest that large parts of the world are fucked up, and it’s all their own fault. China, for example, has an estimated 2 million suicide attempts per year. That’s a lot of fucked up people. But it couldn’t possibly have anything to do with the fact that the Chinese government, along with pretty much every other government, has abandoned its commitment to people living in rural areas. When I was in India two weeks ago, in the hot zone of farmer suicides, the pattern was clear. Farmers who had embarked on a neoliberal route, shifting towards cash crops dictated by the world market, were the ones who ended up giving themselves. When they died, they were invariably in debt, and saw no other way out. If this is pathology, it is pathology on a mass scale. We have a word for this. It’s “politics”. Meanwhile, the suicidologists, do what they can. Avenues of inquiry such as “Conceptualising a strain theory of suicide ” or “Psychosocial characteristics of suicide victims in central Slovenia ” give the measure of thinking in the world of suicide prevention. In short, it was a congress of people doing everything they could about suicide, except confront the reasons why people do it. Because, if you want to keep the epidemological cash flowing, suggesting that there are political forces at work is suicidal.

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Once again, the good folk at Kennedy Road, together with a widening group of supporters, took to the streets to tell their corpulent councillor quite what they thought of him. They did this by mourning his death. Among the wails, his passing was grieved with cries of “No one abused us like he did” and “No one gave us biryani at election time like Baig”. Baig, unrepentently alive, didn’t see the funny side, and hid inside an armoured personnel carrier for the duration, emerging only to accept a memorandum. The little shit.

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Right, I’m on my way back to Durban after marathon tour. I’ll be writing up this book, videoblogging, and otherwise finding excuses not to apply for jobs that I won’t get. So expect plenty of posts. And links. Including this, from the Onion…
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