It's Always More Complicated

I recently came across the existence of Mink Hunts.

While it is true that the mink is a dangerously invasive non-native predator species, there are, I have Done The Research to discover, wildlife and conservation organisations which are tackling the problem in an organised, ethical and appropriate way:
Is eradication of invasive mink now possible?
Waterlife Recovery Trust: Vision and Strategy: A Mink-Free GB
Wildlife Management - Mink Control

None of these strategies involve having a fun time

hunting and killing mink with packs of hounds. Some mink hunts actively target otters and all of these summer hunts cause substantial disturbance to the fragile riverside environment.
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Both mink and otters will go to ground in burrows or tree roots when pursued by hounds. For this reason, terriermen will always be present on a mink hunt. The image below, of the Dove Valley Mink Hounds terriermen, is typical – note the terriers, spades and T-bar being carried. As we have recently highlighted, hunted mink will also seek refuge in trees, so don’t be surprised if the hunters are seen lifting terriers up into pollarded willows or using their otter poles or other implements to poke about in branches.

Otter are native and after being on the brink of extinction due to hunting, habitat destruction, and water pollution, have been making a comeback.

This is very very creepy and spooky and proves that just being an atheist doesn't mean you can't also be a horrendous cultist: America’s premier pronatalists on having ‘tons of kids’ to save the world. (And homeschooling them.)

So much wrong there one hardly knows where to begin, but these people are not heating their house - with small children in it, though their child-rearing practices are pretty horrendous, we find - and allegedly 'give everything they can spare to charity (their charities)' - heating the house in winter is apparently 'pointless indulgence'.

Readers of Victorian novels will already be ticking boxes 'Reverend Brocklehurst' and 'Mrs Jellaby', no?

I really, really wanted to know exactly WHAT their charities were, because they are probably some woowoo Effective Altruism futuristic crap that does no good to anybody. Wot, me, cynical?

Also, as a historian of eugenics, I so do not give them a get-out on what they're doing not really being eugenics, because it was not 'state-sponsored selective breeding to influence the dominance of certain genes', it was totally this mindset, except, actually, I am now feeling positively benign towards all those early C20th proponents who thought maybe they themselves shouldn't be contributing to the gene-pool because of their myopia or some minor problem somewhere in the family tree.

I am also thinking, why not put the effort and dosh into improving the lot of the struggling?

Do we want the 'civilisation' that these people are saving....

And talking of cults and who gets to define 'civilisation': was I the last boy to be flogged at Eton? (in 1984, there records are not entirely clear on the subject....)

Um, exactly who is the snoflaek here? (The second husband - who I think we might consider a 'nepo kid', hmmm? - in question is notorious anti-woke woezerer about cancel culture): Before the interview I’m told that, for legal reasons, she can’t discuss [2nd husband], whom she divorced in 2016 and who is the father of her two sons... their relationship seems fraught, to say the least.

We feel that he should take the Wellington line and say 'Publish and be damned' at least, rather than go the writ-waving route, no?

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World’s oldest recorded tortoise [and LGBTQ+ icon] prepares for 190th birthday party.

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I'm trying to remember that thing that was going around, oh, maybe in the 90s/early 00s about hormones in sweat and their influence on persons of opposite gender - was it on men of women in different stages of menstrual cycle - on women of men when they were at different stages of cycle - know I heard a very I thought dodgy paper at some conference which was leaning on this, and on how hormonal contraception suppressed these Natural Urges - anyway, this was what made me think of this, which seems to have died away? (all the refs I could find were of older date) - Is birth control turning women bi? (author there is sceptical, go them) - in fact article they refer to is by an ev-psych type person, which I think might have been in the mix with what I remembered.

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Sort of by a process of association: “A Toste wett in Muskadine”: Preventing Miscarriage in Early Modern English Recipe Books c.1600–1780:

[I]nduced abortion and family limitation practices have received much attention in the historiography, which consequently marginalises the experiences of women who desired children and took active steps to improve their fertility and retain pregnancies until birth.

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A Victorian woman of middling status who managed to obtain a divorce (post 1857, true, and her husband was obliging enough to commit bigamy, which I suspect was the deciding factor): Hannah Brutton and the Divorce and Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857. On account of bigamy was an actual crime, whereas courts could be very iffy as to whether what husbands had done was really cruelty sufficient to count.

What’s in a Name? Erasing women writers in the name of uplifting them:

It is easy to get caught in the trap of historical revisionism when it comes to women writers, but this revisionism is rarely along progressive lines – despite its claims. Instead, it is a conservative reimagining of women struggling to survive in a man’s world that erases the long and fascinating history of women writers and their achievements, contributions and impact. The truth is much more exciting.

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Diane Watt, a professor of medieval literature, shows that the earliest English women writers lived centuries before Julian of Norwich or Margery Kempe:

Women’s contributions to medieval literary culture have been obscured for complex and various reasons, and misconceptions remain about their involvement in literature in the premodern period in Europe as both creators and consumers. Watt’s study ends in 1100, but misconceptions govern the entire medieval period. There is a common assumption, for instance, that the first women authors were nuns who, educated in Latin at a convent in order to read scripture, learned to write only in order to write about God.

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Snoop-Women with Notebooks: Naomi Mitchison, Mass Observation, and the Gender of Domestic Intelligence:

[T]he subsequent turn towards quantitative data devalued women’s experiences by favoring institutionalized patriarchal approaches to analyzing public opinion.

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Mary Vezey, Sarah Chapone, and the Hardships of the English Laws in Relation to Wives (1732-35) (CW for domestic violence):

Media reports could be driven by commercial interests and might seek to sensationalize and to entertain from the misery of others. But they might also do more. Chapone recognized such reports as double-edged swords, ones that might on the one side defend the despotic power of husbands but which might also, potentially, cut complacency to the quick and thereby prompt reforms of the laws.

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Before the vote was won: women and politics, 1832-68:

Although females were excluded from the parliamentary franchise before 1918, it would be wrong to suppose that they were previously unable to play any part in parliamentary politics. Our research on the House of Commons, 1832-68 project continues to highlight the role of women in many aspects of Victorian politics.

AP Herbert, noted 1930s divorce law reformer and novelist, who once gave a parliamentary speech in rhyme, wrote a novel about the 1923 Matrimonial Causes Act entitled Holy Deadlock. Its extremely narrow terms - adultery only, readers of interwar fiction may recollect the 'put-up adultery in hotels' thing in order to obtain freedom from unwanted matrimonial shackles - were not widened, in spite of the recommendations of the 1912 Royal Commission on Marriage and Divorce, until Herbert's own 1937 Act, which finally brought in cruelty, desertion for more than 7 years, and insanity as grounds for dissolution, rather than separation. (It still, however, could not get rid of the guilty/innocent party dynamic, alas.)

I am strongly of the opinion that many people who write on the Victorian era - not just novelists, alas - are insufficiently acquainted with how late these changes came about and how very restrictive the terms of the 1857 Matrimonial Causes Act were.

Okay, it opened up divorce to people who were not in a position to undertake the fanfaraw of a) getting a separation decree in the ecclesiastical courts b) bringing an action for criminal conversation against the wife's seducer c) obtaining a private act of parliament dissolving their marriage.

However, although husbands were entitled to divorce their wives for a single act of adultery - or in the case discussed in Kate Summerscale's Mrs Robinson's Disgrace, a possible sexual fantasy of adultery recorded in her diary - wives could not divorce their husbands except for adultery plus. Plus cruelty, or desertion, or having been convicted of a major sexual offence, e.g. sodomy. Even under these conditions, women did obtain divorces. Some may even have been covertly collusive - there came to be the convention that if a husband left a wife, and she petitioned for restitution of conjugal rights, and he failed to return to the matrimonial home, this counted as desertion. If there was another woman in the picture, bingo.

There were also judges who began to bring in a nuanced understanding of what constituted cruelty in marriage, including the 'wilful communication of a loathsome disease'.

Nonetheless, there were marriages, 1857-1923, which were massively toxic but not rising to the condition where courts would grant a divorce.

We may instance the case of Frank Russell, 2nd Earl Russell. He was the son of that Lord Amberley who once lost a parliamentary election for the scandal over his promotion of 'preventive restrainst', i.e. birth control, and his wife, that Lady Amberley whom Queen Victoria thought should be 'well whipped' for promoting women's rights. He was the elder brother of Bertrand Russell, who also had some colourful days in the matrimonial courts.

Anyway, his first marriage quite rapidly went pear-shaped, with his wife alleging unreasonable behaviour amounting to cruelty and hinting at 'unnatural desires'. In 1900 Frank Russell went to the USA, established residence in Nevada, obtained a divorce there and remarried.

He then returned to the UK and was tried by his peers, i.e. in the House of Lords, for bigamy, US divorces not being recognised in English law, and actually did time for it.

This marriage also broke up, and he then married Elizabeth von Arnim, a marriage which also went bad very quickly - it is said to have provided her with the material for her novel Vera which is not in the least about whimsying around gardens.

Anyway, the state of the divorce law was a major reason why bigamy was such a thing during that period - see Ginger Frost's Living in Sin: Cohabiting as Husband and Wife in Nineteenth-Century England (2011).

The general state of the law at the period is not hard to discover, although some of the more detailed studies of how it played out in the courtrooms is more difficult to come by: some of the best work is by a specific scholar who has been said for years to be producing a massive study of the topic, but so far all we have had is articles and chapters in edited collections, good though those are.

Dept of, did you do any research?

That Uber vs TfL thing, with TfL refusing to renew their license - okay, I do not use Uber (I am probably not their target market) and everything I hear about it makes me deeply suspicious - but when I read various articles claiming that London black cab drivers are the trad white working class, I wonder how often, if ever, any of these people have ridden in a black cab. Because in my limited and anecdotal experience, finding a Trad London Cabbie who will give you his Salty Cockney Opinions whether you want him to or not, is not the default at all.

This article about Some Artist's exhibition on what he calls 'pseudo-Georgian architecture' in the UK and dates to the 1970s.

Marvel at a London Waitrose – “the pearl of Holloway Road”, according to Bronstein’s caption – with a cupola-crowned tower floating above its entrance. That oddly proportioned line of columns, running above the shopfront windows, suggest the architect once glimpsed a photograph of Vicenza, but not for long enough.

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Dept of, is that really the solution? PETA co-founder says we should stop wearing wool. I cannot help feeling that if there is no longer any economic reason for rearing, even if 'sheep are so gentle, they’re so dear!' they are likely to vanish from the face of the earth except in zoos (to which I imagine PETA are also opposed). Might not doing something about introducing legislation for more humane shearing practices be a better use of their time and energies?

I might say, shooting's too good for them.

Devon student guilty of planting homemade bomb on London tube.

Well, okay, not shooting, but if somebody put something that was 'only' a prank bomb on a Tube train “for a bit of fun” I would throw the book at them, even if the evidence did not, as it does, suggest that the item in question could have caused severe damage. (A sentiment I would suspect is shared by the vast majority of Londoners who are obliged to use the Tube system to get about.)

What people who intend 'pranks' should ask themselves, I depose, is a) whether any harm involved, from minor inconvenience to loss of life and limb, is really worth the very transient amusement gained and b) is it actually funny.

Will concede that views of what is funny differ, and during the week came across the gruesome case of a family that would do various things to send one or other of their children into panicky flailing &/or hysterical sobs, video the entire thing, and put it on YouTube, where these got megahits. I understand that there is a prosecution for child abuse in the pipeline. That was a light onto certain of my fellow-beings I'd rather not have had.

Though, really, I fear that were public executions, bear-baiting, etc, brought back, there would be enormous competition for tickets, and the live-streaming would go viral.

Started wondering last night whether Dawkins realises that he sounds like all those apologists for brutality in education, with particular reference to the public school system, or whether he just doesn't care?

Because 'It never did me any harm' was surely the tribal cry of Disgusted Tunbridge Wells, in spite of the clear evidence of the atrophy of the compassion gland and the curious psychosexual aftereffects caused by an elite education.

One wonders if this in fact embeds a whole anthropological dimension of intiatory rituals and rites de passage, where living in accommodation that would have been regarded as unnecessarily austere by a Dickens orphanage manager (all that breaking the ice on the wash basins, etc, that we read of in memoirs, and let's just not go near the food), corporal punishment, being fiddled with by masters, gangbanged behind the fives court by the First Eleven, etc, was all part of the process of creating MEN fit to RULE.

And as for the claim that no-one was bothered about paedophiles back in the day, we can only suppose that Dawkins never, ever, saw a copy of the News of the World.

Mi uninterrogated assumptions, let me show u them (from this piece in today's Guardian G2):

The decade before 1914 was an age very much like ours, one in which the most innovative technologies were those that produced greater freedom of action and thought: the motor car, the cinema, the phonogram and the telephone. The Austrian writer Stefan Zweig summed up how it felt to be young before 1914, and what was lost when war, revolution and the swing towards totalitarianism ended it all: "Before those wars," he recalled, "I saw individual freedom at its zenith and after them I saw liberty at its lowest point in hundreds of years."

Years we do not want to go back to, srsly. I will grant you that 1912 saw the foundation of the African National Congress and the pioneering radical feminist periodical The Freewoman being published, but I don't think that really outweighs other factors, like hunger-striking and forcefed suffragettes, the International Eugenics Congress in London, the US occupation of Nicaragua, the outbreak of the First Balkan War, etc.

Also having me looking around for a lamppost: Sports involving the hunting and killing of wild animals are okay if done by toffs on horseback? or possibly as ye tradde countrye persewte? -

Louise Robertson of the League Against Cruel Sports says there is no link between the ban on fox hunting and the resurgence of underground "sports" such as badger baiting. "It's a very different kind of person who is doing your dog fighting and badger baiting. Hunters are obsessed with the sport of hunting. The badger baiting and dog fighting tends to be lower classes of people involved with criminal activity who are doing it for sick pleasure," she says. Thorpe agrees. "I know it's not politically correct but it can be a housing estate thing," she says. "Country people do it quietly. You don't tend to catch them. The housing estate people tend to be gobby and shout about it and that's how you find out."

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In more amusing news, I love a good literary ruck: Geoff Dyer on Julian Barnes' latest:

"I didn't get the book when I first read it. I still didn't get it when I reread it ... To me, there seemed less to get second time around. If such a thing is possible, I didn't get it even more than I hadn't got it first time around."

But Dyer's criticism goes deeper. It is contrived, he argues. But perhaps most damningly of all, Dyer says the book is not terrible, "it is just so … average. It is averagely compelling (I finished it), involves an average amount of concentration and, if such a thing makes sense, is averagely well written: excellent in its averageness!"