Slappers By Laura A. Munteanu

I attended a march, organised by Sisters Uncut this weekend, which aimed to raise awareness for victims of domestic violence. It was held in central London, on Valentine’s Day, deliberately to juxtapose its message alongside the festival of patriarchy that V-Day has become. Refuge notes that, "2 women are killed every week in England and Wales by a current or former partner" (Homicide Statistics, 1998) – 1 woman killed every 3 days, and that despite the fact only about a third of the incidents that take place are reported to the police, in 2001/02 British Crime Survey (BCS) found that there were an estimated 635,000 incidents of domestic violence in England and Wales. 81% of the victims were women and 19% were men. Domestic violence incidents also made up nearly 22% of all violent incidents reported by participants in the BCS (Home Office, July 2002). 

I read with some despair also today that Sam Taylor Wood, (the photographer turned erotic film director) and Erica James (the author of the book Taylor Wood has turned into high grossing $81.5 million, first weekend, 50 Shades of Grey film) have fallen out over the representation of BDSM sex in the film. James is angry there is not more, and Wood is angry that her cinematic vision is being interfered with. Wood has delivered a product which is big on submissive, female nudity, but James was concerned about more sexual representation, particularly the masculine and the BDSM representation. This is unfortunate, given the attendant psycho drama about the actress being concerned about her mother and father watching the piece and suffering some sort of permanent moral indignation, and the other psychodrama about the BDSM lovers on screen, not getting on with each other in real life. Add the continual reminder that the director has married a man younger than her, who used to be her actor on a previous film project. Add that to the fact that the fictional work of Erica James was magnified by titilation into a global bestselling trilogy, and that two more ambiguous, fashion conscious, product placement opportunities are waiting to be filmed. I had a bit of an internet browse to see if I could find any reactions to the film from the local BDSM scene, which revealed some irritation at the film and book’s representation. They complained that real BDSM is about exploring one’s limits within an atmosphere of consent, that the domination and submissive aspects of human sexuality exist in everyone, and that these boundaries are worth exploring if you are suitably adventurous. 

Personally, I don’t believe that chafing from rubber wear, being blindfolded and spanked or kicking a man in the balls is ever going to do anything for my libido. What would really turn me on, would be the evolution of a society where a woman being beaten by her husband feels safe in reporting the crime the first time it happens. Not waiting to be beaten on average thirty five times and reporting it because she can’t take any more. Maybe she is put off because the police receptionist is reading 50 Shades of Grey. Maybe her husband feels he is just exploring their intimate boundaries in an adventurous way. Maybe it’s because battered women fall into the ‘other’ category. You know, the category we reserve for accident victims, colleagues who have been sacked from their jobs, heart attack victims, murder victims, victims of state terrorism, the homeless, HIV sufferers. All those everyday tragedies we turn away from, like in looking at them, or interacting with them would somehow contaminate us, render us susceptible to the contagion of bad luck that afflicted them. 

Speaking as an atheist, it is rare I quote Jesus, but when he talked about turning the other cheek, I don’t think that this was what he had in mind. Put away your dildos, your handcuffs and your PVC wear. I promise you, there is nothing in the world more erotic than finding people who are brave enough to share their life’s experience. My sexual response is not defined by a man’s gaze, but rather by what we can achieve together. That’s the point, get it?

Non Linear War By Laura A. Munteanu

In the 21st century, the rules of engagement in respect of war have changed. Gone are the days of armies in their combat uniforms, lying in wait for each other on the plains of battle, pushing each other around by dint of whose hardware is superior on the day. War is no longer fought by supply and by marching at the speed of its slowest soldier. The superpowers are now having the benefits of war, without the massive costs incurred by globally destructive conflicts. The benefits of war being:

1) An atmosphere of dread and fear which facilitates a continuation of armament research, sales and production, for domestic consumption and international commerce. This employs the brightest members of society who would be otherwise employed in consumer product development, medical research or possibly education.

2) The construction of an oppositional narrative without a clearly defined enemy. This is primarily to justify the disproportionate spending on armaments, but also to chill and suppress any political pretension towards global cooperative government. In international mass capitalism conflict is good, cooperation is dangerous.

3) The expense of continual conflict has a chilling effect on all aspects of domestic culture, partially fuelled by the crippling cost of total war on the domestic economies, partially funded through austerities where the nation is indebted to the war industry, and as a result becomes dependant on it for its very survival.

4) Non-linear war has the advantage of generating weak oppositional figures, who generate fear to support the above, but whose atrocities are either far away and concern vulnerable, but distant groups, or occasionally outrage the first world with acts of suicidal terrorism. In these instances, the terrorist is always killed instead of captured, lest the terrorist is able to share their world view in opposition to the dominant world view.

This state of play is as a result of three factors:

1) The USA’s disproportionate role, as avenging policeman following the failure of the UN, the continuing Zionist oppression of Palestine, the failure of the Syrian and Afghan missions following 9/11. The USA, in seeking to deliver revenge for the terrorist outrage has attacked the wrong targets and as the collateral damage has multiplied, a genuine oppositional force is emerging through ISIS.

2) Russia, in copying the USA’s disregard of public opinion has taken to its own secret war games in Chechnya, Syria and Ukraine.

3) China, despite adopting a neutral voice has bankrolled both America and Russia economically, and is waging economic war on the rest of the world by becoming the economic super power of the 21st century.

The soldiers now don’t wear uniforms. Somewhere, a supermarket, a school, a taxi, a cafe, a night club, a restaurant is being bombed by drones. They are unconstrained by political accountability. They creep over borders, in radar immune helicopters, killing secretly with impunity. It used to be said that Justice wears a blindfold to prove that she is fair, when she weighed the guilt of the accused in her scales. There might be another reason. Maybe she simply cannot bear to look at the atrocities being committed in her name. Cleo, the goddess of history wept tears of forgetfulness, so that the living do not remember everything they did to get here. It was true then, and it is true now; except, in that we forget the world as we live through each aching moment of horror. When the drones bomb your schools suddenly, without warning, and some big man with a gun starts pushing you towards a truck taking you to fuck knows where, just remember that this is the price you pay for your indulgence to have have a retaliatory response, instead of an international law, that is respected and followed by all human beings. Everybody matters, that is an idea worth fighting for! 

Robot Death By Laura A. Munteanu

A lot of the kids in this area wake up from sleeping because of nightmares from them and some now have mental problems. They turned our area into hell and continuous horror, day and night, we even dream of them in our sleep.” Mohammed Tuaiman (2002-2015), Yemeni Camel herder, killed alongside two others by the CIA who believed he and his companions were Al-Qaida terrorists. The drone which carried the missile that killed Mohammed cost $4.03 million dollars. The American Army and CIA declined to comment on whether their execution was justified by any evidence of wrong doing, usage of the word intelligence seems extremely inappropriate in this context.

 Following the leak of sensitive documents in 2008, of HSBC’s swiss tax avoidance arm, only one tax avoider has been prosecuted. Despite an estimated £20 billion pounds worth of lost taxation revenue waiting to be siezed. The coalition government instead, made the executive chairman of HSBC bank Minister of Trade, despite receiving details of 6000 individuals who had deliberately defrauded the British government from tax revenue it was entitled to collect, to pay for public service or reducing the nation’s deficit. Instead of request that the Governments friends bear some responsibility for the reduction of the nation’s deficit, the government made the chief architect of their tax avoidance strategy Minister for Trade whilst at the same time sanctioning over 2.25 million legitimate benefit claimants, who have had their benefits sanctioned since 2010. 

Austerity is a political process of social control and social engineering, facilitating an endless party for the top 1 %, and drudgery for the rest of us.Whilst the celebrity status afforded to eighty years old Charles Manson is distasteful, his planned nuptials to a woman, fifty years younger than him has recently been called off, owing to his learning of his bride’s intention of presenting his embalmed corpse in a glass coffin as a sideshow attraction to the feckless, decadent and morbid gawkers on the american freak show circuit. William Burroughs once wrote that one of the key indicators of the fatal death of a culture would be the televising of celebrity autopsies. Perhaps this notion of embalming a serial killer for show is a step into this very brink.

Zombie Flocking Behaviour - By Laura A. Munteanu

Whilst we indulge ourselves in nationalistic posturing, as we celebrate the nationalities of the Grammy, Oscar and BAFTA winners, and we soberly watch documentaries about the martyrdoms of Edward Snowden and Aaron Swartz, we suddenly all find ourselves as Spartacus, when something worth downloading again perks its cheeky head into the schedules, as in the case of Better Call Saul, the follow-up to Vince Gillian’s acclaimed Breaking Bad.

I particularly liked the latter, especially its morality aspect, and I count myself amongst the multitudes eager to repeat the acquaintance of characters I had got to know. In addition, in the UK this is available through Netflix, who also broadcast Breaking Bad and House of Cards. Netflix charges £5.99 to £11.99 per month for its content which amounts to £71.99 to £143.99 per year. Netflix currently serves 2.25 million customers and posted profits of £32 million pounds. If I add Game of Thrones, Hannibal, Penny Dreadful, True Detective, Girls and Boardwalk Empire this will set me back an additional £252 pounds a year from Sky. Then there’s the BBC License of £145.50 a year. If I also add LoveFilm from Amazon and get The Walking Dead, Orange is the New Black, The Vampire Diaries, and Vikings I will need to find another £95.88 a year. 

So, for my investment of £637.86 a year I get transgressive morality drama, zombie survival, political machination, procedural crime, gothic fantasy, serial killer soap opera, lesbian prison drama, period crime and dark ages beefcake. Even if I restrict myself to just the top shows in my mega package and say one feature film a week from the thousands on offer, and maybe one sports game from my several exclusive sport’s packages, this means I will need to make a time commitment of at least two and a half hours a day to keep abreast of the additional content I have bought. Things like reading, watching the news or documentaries, meeting people, all need separate scheduling, and who knows when I will have time for Facebook, Skype or Twitter. 

As the pay walls grow higher and the content available more seductive, hyper-real and attractive, I find that I will need to work overtime to keep up with the competing scheduling. None of this stuff is essential, but the embedded advertisers, masquerading as journalists in the faux-independent media rave about how much I need to watch this or watch that. And unless I want to be ostracised at the water cooler at work I must work harder to share in and consume this unchallenging, bland, pre-digested homogenised culture, that inserts itself in front of my eyes in place of the reality, it pretends to represent.

As it happens, the reality of the world I live in, this constitutes about a fourteenth of my annual income. I’m more interested in why the 43 protesting trainee teachers were arrested by the police in advance of a public meeting on the behest of the wife of the mayor of Iguala in Mexico, who then handed them over to a group of professional hit-men for a Drug cartel who executed them. I’m interested in why Mark Wood starved to death, following the reduction of his health benefits after being declared fit to work by Atos. I'm interested why the British Government has made no attempt to claim tax owed by the super-rich, revealed in the leak of HSBC’s Swiss Bank, despite numerous examples of deliberate tax avoidance, by a company anxious to support the Conservative party’s re-election in 2015.

In my country, the tax and fiscal propriety of my government is continually judged wanting, with a degree of justification. We expect our leaders to be greedy, corrupt criminals and we attempt to select the most altruistic rogue from the candidates on offer. In my adoptive country, they pretend they are honest men, living by the regulation of a legal system that dispenses the same justice to all. 

I fear that this is just more bullshit, from the bastards raising their paywalls to profit from our desire to indulge in fantasy, because the real world is too horrible to live in. The lies that run the real world, are probably written by the same bastards who structure the fake one. According to BARB, only 8.6 % of the TV audience, now watches news and current affairs. Within 24 hours of its release on TV, the Pirate Bay has recorded over 50, 000 downloads for the latest episode of The Walking Dead, which sees the zombie soap move into a church. When I cite these facts, my listeners shrug and say that’s the way it has always been, why worry about it? If you're not sure, ask Mark Wood. Except sorry, you're too late, you were probably watching the Walking Dead whilst he starved to death. 

Fucked by the rich! By Laura A. Munteanu

Whilst the rockets fly over Donetsk, the Spooks at GCHQ continue to run their hands through our dirty digital laundry, despite their activities being declared illegal. A doctor’s reputation, sullied because he assisted a Somali woman give birth for the first time, a process rendered dangerous by her prior, female genital mutilation in her native Somalia, in trying to repair her post-natal damage, the doctor is tried and then acquitted by the legislation designed to protect British women from this cultural practice. The fact that this is the first time the law has been used is perhaps some testimony less of Britain’s role in the fight against FGM, but rather the country’s reticence to even consider the vagina and its environs. One assumes there would be a more robust protest if a group of religiously motivated women were insisting on the mutilation of boys by removing the glans of the penis and then stitching up the wound with thorns. African women do not seem to encourage quite such commitments, despite the hot air vented on their behalf. 

Maybe the Greeks stand alone against the international banks, but their people have declared they are prepared to stand against the forces of austerity, that keep the rich wealthier at the expense of the poor, whose additional productivity is rewarded with increases in costs of living, and erosions of their social contract. In the early modern and the medieval period, the wealthy had a symbiotic relationship with the poor, and supported and sheltered them in times of scarcity. Mass market capitalism has freed the rich from this sense of community, and instead of being part of our world, we are simply cattle to feed their monstrous appetites. So long as the members of the super rich remain in their exclusive isolated communities, pausing only occasionally to inflict war, increase prices, degrade protective social legislation, and maximising labour inequalities. 

George Orwell’s Winston Smith was told of a vision of the future was of a boot kicking the face of a man into submission. Hitler, Mao and Stalin’s disastrous experiments with totalitarian regimes have taught us the simple truth that force is an insufficient means for global domination. World domination has been achieved rather by a more sinister set of principles, using the carrot, and our endemic greed to hoard and consume the vegetable. 

To quote General Valery Gerasimov, “In the 21st century we have seen a tendency toward blurring the lines between the states of war and peace. Wars are no longer declared and, having begun, proceed according to an unfamiliar template.” This state of uncertainty applies to every aspect of modern society. We are motivated by greed and fear. We are continually informed about the success, achievements and wonderful aspects of the lives of the privileged, whilst we are asked to endure increased costs, demands for unpaid labour, and the erosion of our welfare protections. If we protest, we are warned that we are not team players, and cautioned that there are hundreds of people who would like our job. Our mass media distracts and anaesthetises us. We are hobbled by our fears, misled by our leaders, and are prey to our own naked self interest and greed. 

Female genital mutilation will still continue, until the resources of the world stop wasting money on war, and maintaining the gross appetites of the super rich, instead of basic infrastructural investment in basic health care, education and political education of all world citizens. I am not interested in shallow nationalisms, or corporate interests. I am less inclined to the parochial, and more to the international. World government is a simple reality that could be achieved almost over night, at the level of science and technology we have already achieved. The internet could be a library rather than a masturbation peepshow. All the people of the world could flourish grow strong, without the need of selfish rich men selling guns to encourage fear. 

Let's live in a world that eliminates poverty, ignorance and violence. That is something worth fighting for, and the only people we would need to fight are the super-rich, who constitute less than 1% of the total world population. To me, the mark of a civilised society is the degree by which cultural diversity can successfully co-habit within the same meta-cultural context. Everyone is born equal, everyone should have the same opportunity to find their place in the world. I don’t yet live in this world, but I believe it is a world worth fighting for, and I invite you to join me. That’s how we do something about FGM!

Fixing the internet! By Laura A. Munteanu

The Internet is broken. It should be a ladder lifting us to the stars, but instead it’s a ladder leading to our own scaffold. Imagine what we would look like to visitors from another world, if the internet were considered as humanity’s crowning achievement. Instead of a free reference academic library available to all, scientific and academic debate retreats behind ever higher paywalls, whilst at the same time creative endeavour is beggared by piracy. 

Instead of the books and translation services which could facilitate greater inter-cultural communication, we have mountains of nationalist-themed, semi-consensual pornography, where the poor get their clothes off for the rich, masturbatory public. These towering pinnacles which support the male gaze do not facilitate greater communication between the genders they rather stifle, chill and eradicate the concept of shared eroticism, with their gaudy, repetitive representations of coitus. The champions of the digital age, claim we have no right to judge, and the internet is the living proof of the vital importance of free speech. 

Personally, I don’t want the freedom to watch torture porn, child pornography, religious bigots massacring the innocents, live executions, gang rapes, live incest shows or the more exotic representations of zoophilia. I don’t think my freedom of speech needs protecting, so that paedophiles could hide the evidence of their non-consensual sexual adventures from the eyes of the law. Even the simple matter of trolling, the practice of anonymously abusing people, is unregulated. 

Dick Costolo, the CEO of Twitter (worth about 11 billion pounds) writes: “I’m frankly ashamed of how poorly we’ve dealt with this issue during my tenure as CEO. It’s absurd. There’s no excuse for it. I take full responsibility for not being more aggressive on this front. It’s nobody else’s fault but mine, and it’s embarrassing.” Despite these words, he has not resigned from his job or its stock options yet. So you don’t need to watch it, I hear you say. There’s no evidence that it has any lasting effect on the viewer. It's cathartic. I say you are all wrong. The internet needs policing by two simple principles. 

Firstly, by the principle of labelling, is this a factual piece with references that can be examined or is this piece an opinion piece, whose statements are unverifiable, or is this piece a work of speculation. A simple red, yellow, green coding would do. 

Secondly, I am happy with freedom of speech, providing that the speaker is correctly labelled and is prepared to respond to the comments they have made. An internet passport is important, no post without a verified identity. 

Finally, with regard to pornography, I appreciate that we live in a world where women and men will receive financial compensation for performing in representations of the sexual act. Ok, I don’t like this, but I accept that it exists. We know that every website visited triggers a recording of who visited the site, and which computer is watching which website. I think the secret identities of those watching porn should be publicly available, and linked to their digital passport. 

I am a discriminating citizen of the world. And by discriminating, I mean I'm not going to be watching journalists being beheaded by criminals disguised as religious fanatics, rather than applying lazy stereotypes to whole ethnicities. I know that the world makes judgements about me, on the basis of the information I present about myself. I stand by the statements, poetry and works of fiction I write. I publish them under my own name, and I have in time, ambitions to make my words so entertaining that people will pay to read them. The ending of anonymous posting is the biggest step we can take not only to fix the broken internet, but to perhaps grow up, and enter the digital universe together.