Emboldened by drinking Iron Tusk (the Oort Cloud Mariner was off), and feeling metal as a sidequence, I have unwisely decided to share my thoughts on the tendency to handmaidenly self-sacrifice: if you see me walking down the street, try not to cry each time we meet, just scroll on by....

Warning for oblique mention of suicide by self-sacrifice.

I was thinking about places we tour as spectators, as differentiated from times and places we might choose to live in.

Which in turn led me to wonder about fandom, and how much human behaviour has or hasn't been modified by the wider availability of (more-or-less accurate) information through mass media.

For example, many human cultures used to indulge in the supposedly voluntary mass sacrifice of young people at the death and burial of a cultural idol. Not only a loving partner, whose motive might be more understandable to us, but also multiple handmaidens (of any sex/gender). And I'm sitting here idly wondering if such spectacular "high status" (i.e. resource-hoarding) funerals were still de rigueur in our contemporary global cross-culture then how many young women would want to sacrifice themselves as a public display of grief at the death of a mass media idol or in the belief they'd accompany him to an enticing afterlife (as historically it was usually hims - or perhaps we have achieved equality of exploitation)? Would being one amongst hundreds or thousands of ghostly handmaidens, instead of a select few, encourage or discourage potential victims of self-sacrifice? Would their families and societies encourage or discourage them from joining the ghostly horde / hoard?

What about young warriors sacrificing themselves en masse at the funerals of their dead idols? As far as I know there isn't even a fashion for mass sacrificing virtual gaming characters to honour a fallen leader....

When did humanity change its mind about this previously widespread fashion for terminal self-sacrifice and why? Or is it merely better disguised now as millions willingly throw their lives onto the pyres of billionaires? I dunno, but I am interested in whether a fashion for young people to mass sacrifice themselves for a dead idol could ever return.

- Reading: 81 books to 13 Aug 2025.

DNFs: 5/86. I've had a higher percentage of dnfs than usual this year. Can't decide if my sense of personal mortality and the easy availability of other reading material is causing me to be pickier or whether I'm finally inside a demographic targeted for enough marketing guff to negatively effect my choices. Woe is me - the algorithms fail again &c. An especially surprising dnf was a book about trains and train travel that the author had mysteriously managed to make dull!

Current reading: 81. Perspectives by Laurent Binet, a library reservation with a waiting list, which was recommended by a discerning friend and is a good read so far (approximately 30% in).

Finished reading: 80. The Rings of Saturn, by WG Sebald, (translated by Michael Hulse), 1995 (1999), a patchwork of fictionalised (?) autobiographical essays and historical fact-tion and I-refuse-to-call-this-a-novel, 3/5. As I previously mentioned, I read this meditation on death and destruction while in similar settings to the framing story of a walk along the East Anglian coastline, and with the addition of extreme and bizarre weather this occasionally became a near-hallucinatory experience. I didn't find it engaging, however, nor as depressing as reading too much poetry by Thomas Hardy. Although I admit I over-identify with the habit of living like a refugee in your own life, as I'm sure many people exiled traumatically from their roots would. This is a better review of Rings of Saturn than I could ever write, lol (and, yes, three stars):
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/221843487

- Holiday history, enslavement: there was a debate about whether I'd visit Castell Penrhyn while I was in the area (I'm a NT member so get in free). I'll note here that I have a permanent bee in my bonnet about the way enslavers such as the Pennants are described and especially the following normative wording (not this author, whose book I enjoyed, but the whole normative framing):

"the Pennants [family], received £14,683 17s. 2d. (around 1.3 million today) for the freeing of 764 enslaved people in Jamaica"*

Because what actually happened was that the British people collectively through the British state bought people enslaved legally under British law, and the British people chose to free those enslaved people after changing British law to make owning people as chattel slaves illegal (although that didn't end other forms of "slave" labour, as the continued use of "indentured labour" and the need for a Modern Slavery Act in 2015 demonstrates). Owners of enslaved people in the British Empire could have legally "freed" those people any time but they didn't want to do so. The act of the British state buying and freeing enslaved people is framed as "compensation" for the owners "freeing" slaves, but the owners were forced by law to allow their slaves to nominally go free, and I for one refuse to accept any framing that credits the enslavers and not the people who made them stop (and British taxpayers continued paying for that from 1833 until 2015). This belated, and expensive, partial justice isn't worthy of any praise or pride but we should at least be honest about who did what, and what exactly they did. Reminder: the abolition of chattel slavery only became a popular cause after successful revolts by enslaved people, and the British "sugar strike" that hit enslavers' profits (the boycott was mostly participated in by working and middle class British women), and William Wilberforce et alia wanted to slow down the freeing of enslaved people.

* Note: the ex-slaves received no compensation, obv.

Amnesty International, amongst many other local and international human rights organisations, have yet again warned the British government of Keith Starmer about its disturbing overreach in outlawing peaceful protest and enforcing the arrest and criminal charging of ordinary British subjects as "terrorists" for sitting quietly while holding anti-genocide cardboard signs in public places (such as below statues of Gandhi and Millicent Fawcett). According to my tally over 720+ politically-motivated arrests of peaceful protestors have been committed within the last few weeks. The 521 arrests in London on Saturday 9 August 2025 were the most in a single police action for at least a decade according to the Met. I will be thinking of Jeremy Shippam, 71, and Judit Murray, 71, and Fiona Maclean, 53, on 16 September when they become the first of these political prisoners to be tried for the "terrorism" of peacefully sitting where they could be seen silently expressing anti-genocide sentiments in public.

Amnesty International's statement on their website.

It horrifies me that I live in a nation state in which people peacefully protesting against genocide are targeted for the utter destruction of their lives through misuse of the legal system, although it's unsurprising that abuse of the legal system is Keith Starmer's choice of weapon and England does have recent historical form for destroying people who stand up against genocide by foreign powers (if that genocide is perceived as profitable for UK PLC). /the ghost of Roger Casement and every Brit who campaigned against genocide in the Belgian Congo stares over my shoulder... amongst many others....

The nation state of Israel continues its genocide of Palestinians in Palestine. The UK continues to export arms to Israel for use in this genocide. The UK continues to supply arms used in several ongoing genocides (and the UK taxpayer subsidises this).