Gallows Humour

...is funny when one prisoner is telling it to another. It's commiseration, a way to cope with shared hardship. When the executioner is the one telling it, it's just cruelty. This is why jokes about some terrible things, like the general unfairness of the world, work: because we are all in Schopenhauer's words fellow-sufferers. Nuclear war, death, and aging all fall into the same category. When you belong to the group that is statistically far more likely to rape - not to mention the group that benefits from rape culture - telling rape jokes is not funny.

Look at it this way. Police brutality jokes work best when they're being told by members of the groups that suffer the most abuse (say, Dave Chappelle), but they work pretty well in general because most of us exist below the cops in the hierarchy of everyday power. If, on the other hand, a policeman is telling police brutality jokes...

At best it's grossly insensitive. At worst, it's a threat.

(h/t to the Pharyngula commentariat)

I Get Plagarized

I write articles about things to do in major Australian cities. One of those articles - about some strange illegal things to do in Melbourne, so it might have some interest for you filthy anarchists - was recently copied almost word-for-word on the site of one guy who has since taken the article down for good and will remain unnamed. Apparently he paid for some freelance content that he didn't know had been stolen from me. Here's a tip for people soliciting articles: do a quick Google before you put work up on your website, just in case the writer has, ah, cut corners.

IOZ Is Seal Team Six

Every time IOZ takes a vacation, the top man of al-Qaeda dies.  I can't be the only one who's noticed this.

Anwar Al-Awlaki Dead

Well, this appears to have happened at last.  Some choice quotes from the article:

He was one of the most dangerous men alive, apparently.

He was credited with inspiring or directing at least four plots on US soil in recent years - is that more or less than the FBI?

Now we know that his fingerprints are also all over failed plots to target British and European interests - well, uh, metaphorical fingerprints.  Rhetoric is dangerous!


The US president, Barack Obama, authorised a request to target Awlaki in April last year, making him the first US citizen to be a legal target for assassination in the post-9/11 years.

Why Cyclists Shouldn't Break Road Rules

I believe that bikes are important.  I believe this because cars are bad.  Cars are bad mainly because they fill the air with exhaust fumes.  They are also terribly convenient, and this is why we need to ride bikes: to show people who drive cars that bikes are pretty convenient too.  I am using simple words and short sentences because I want the man on the road bike who ran five red lights in a row in front of me tonight to understand how much of an irredeemable fuck he is. 

Every cyclist, deliberately or not, is raising public awareness for other cyclists just by riding their bike in traffic.  You can all be proud of yourselves.  But if you break the road rules in front of cars; if you endanger other people’s lives by not waiting at the lights; if you have the fucking temerity to think that getting home thirty seconds earlier is worth tarnishing the public image of every other cyclist who you share the road with, worth undoing all the good us other cyclists do to show drivers that cycling is a viable option, then fuck you. 

You have no right to be proud that you ride a bike.  You have no right to act like riding a bike frees you from some environmental karmic debt.  We’d all be better off if you gave away your bike and drove round in a four-wheel-drive.

(Of course, if that guy was rushing to his wife in labor or suchlike, I’m totally off base and arrogant.  But I doubt it.)