Wednesday, October 04, 2006

Feminazi Norway

Males not allowed to urinate while standing

A local decision that schoolboys must sit on toilet seats when urinating has provoked political debate. The head of The Democrats Party, a splinter group of former Progress Party hardliners, Vidar Kleppe, is outraged that boys at Dvergsnes School in Kristiansand have to sit and pee. Kleppe accuses the school of fiddling with God's work, and wants the matter discussed at the executive committee level of the local council, newspaper Dagbladet reports. "When boys are not allowed to pee in the natural way, the way boys have done for generations, it is meddling with God's work," Kleppe told the newspaper. "It is a human right not to have to sit down like a girl," Kleppe said.

Principal Anne Lise Gjul at Dvergsnes School would not comment on Kleppe's plans to make political waves and regretted if anyone was offended by the ban on standing and passing water. Gjul told NRK (Norwegian Broadcasting) that the young boys are simply not good enough at aiming, and the point was to have a pleasant toilet that could be used by both boys and girls.

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"Reverse racism" attacked in one Australian jurisdiction

Murderers in the Northern Territory will find it harder to plead manslaughter under reforms designed to eliminate "reverse racism" from the justice system. As foreshadowed by The Australian last month, Attorney-General Syd Stirling yesterday announced changes to the Criminal Code following concerns about the high rate of convictions in the Territory for lesser charges instead of murder. Mr Stirling said the reforms, to be introduced in parliament this month, would remove drunkenness and any reference to cultural or ethnic backgrounds as partial defences to murder. "The amendments will ensure that those who commit murder are convicted of murder," Mr Stirling said.

The Northern Territory has the nation's highest murder rate, with the majority of homicides involving Aboriginal people, alcohol and domestic violence. In the 10 years since 1996, there have been just 12 indigenous people in the Territory convicted of murder compared with 62 for manslaughter. Over the same period, 24 people have been convicted for dangerous acts causing death and 23 for doing a dangerous act causing death while intoxicated.

But the changes were attacked by Sharon Payne, head of the North Australian Aboriginal Justice Agency, who said removing the need to prove intent represented a "return to the Middle Ages". "Under homicide rules, you really have to prove an intent to kill. The onus has to be on the Crown to prove that they (the offenders) intended to kill."

The reforms come one month after a coronial inquest in Darwin highlighted the circumstances leading up to the brutal death of Jodie Palipuaminni, a 27-year-old Aboriginal woman from the Tiwi Islands who was killed by her husband, Trenton Cunningham, in May last year. Northern Territory legal figures have questioned why Cunningham was convicted for manslaughter, not murder, since no alcohol was involved in the crime and the killer was breaching the conditions of his parole at the time. Cunningham, who had inflicted 11 years of horrific abuse on his wife before he finally killed her, was originally charged with murder but faced court for manslaughter. In August, he was sentenced in the Northern Territory Supreme Court to 11 1/2 years behind bars, with a non-parole period of 6 1/2 years.

Mr Stirling said too many offenders had previously been able to get away with lesser charges than murder. "I've always ... thought that there's been somewhat of a reverse racism-type element in law," he said. Under the reforms, the defence of diminished responsibility will be clarified, with new provisions for defence to focus on the accused's ability to understand events and determine whether their actions were right or wrong. Mr Stirling said the charge of "dangerous act" would also be abolished to ensure offenders were "appropriately charged". "Offenders will face the full arm of the law," he said.

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FURRY COMEBACK

`Fur is dead', chanted the animal rights activists as they invaded a Burberry catwalk show in Milan a couple of days ago. `Burberry: fur shame', read their placards. In the Nineties, fur was material non grata. To wear fur was to appear selfish and callous - `scum' was the word most frequently used to describe those who wore it. Supermodels such as Naomi Campbell and Cindy Crawford posed in ads for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), and other famous figures said they would `rather go naked than wear fur'.

Similar protests are still around today. This week PETA launched another anti-fur advert featuring nude celebrities, including Sadie Frost, imploring people to `Turn your back on fur'. Heather Mills McCartney has not only been in the headlines for her big-money divorce from Paul, but also for her campaigning against the use of cat and dog fur in China.

However, there are signs that the tide might be turning. The International Fur Trade Federation announced $12.77 billion worth of global fur sales for 2005, a rise for the seventh consecutive year, and up from $9.1 billion in 2000. Campbell and Crawford are now back in their fur coats, and collections from names such as Prada and Louis Vuitton are dripping with a variety of pelts.

Still, many fashion houses and designers keep their lines free of fur, including Ralph Lauren, Sadie Frost, Stella McCartney, Topshop, Selfridges, Liberty of London and H&M. Those who use fur are frequently shamefaced. Burberry mumbled the following statement: `As a luxury brand there will be occasions where the use of fur will be considered important to the design and aesthetics of a product. In those instances we will continue to use fur. However, we will not use fur if there is a serious concern that the fur has been produced by the unacceptable treatment of the animals concerned.'

There is no reason to be ashamed. A fur coat is the best possible use of fur, and fashion is the best possible use of a fur coat. Anti-fur campaigners claim that we don't need to use fur. In the words of sex symbol turned animals rights campaigner, Bridget Bardot, fur is just a `superficial luxury' to satisfy our own vanity. `Designers who still use fur are heartless and shameless', said a PETA spokesperson after the Milan catwalk invasion. The fur-defending American Vogue editor, Anna Wintour, had a dead raccoon thrown in her soup while she was sitting at a restaurant table; a 2002 PETA ad featured the singer Sophie Ellis Bextor holding up a skinned fox with the slogan, `Here is the rest of your coat'. In the 1980s, ads included a woman trailing blood from her fur coat, with the line: `It takes up to 40 dumb animals to make a fur coat - but only one to wear it'.

Fur fashion gets reduced to the bloodied corpse, the manacles, the cries of pain. Looking at a beautiful coat, they see not the artful object but the slain animal. `Fur looks better on its original owners', says PETA, with the implication that on the animal fur is alive while on us it is merely dead stuff. This is exactly the opposite of the truth. Just as a butterfly is never aware of the beautiful patterns on its wings, so a mink will wear its soft coat until death without ever appreciating it. For the mink, fur is just something that it carries around in the battle to survive, like claws or teeth. By being made into a fur coat, that mink's pelt is raised into something higher, just as a tree made into a violin is raised, or a cow made into a sumptuous steak is raised. A raw material becomes part of the human world; fur isn't just on the back of an animal scratching around for food, but is instead worked on and admired as art. Indeed, it is only really by becoming a coat that a mink's life can be said to have had any purpose at all.

So-called `superficial luxury' is when our use of fur is at its highest. Fur was human beings' first clothing (`unto Adam and also to his wife did the Lord God make coats of skins, and clothed them', says the Bible). As humans made their way out of Africa some 100,000 years ago, their naked skins could not endure the cold of Europe and northern Asia. At this stage they had not yet learned to weave and knit their own cloth, so they borrowed the fur of the animals of their region. It was fur use that allowed humans to spread throughout the world, reaching even the inhospitable wastelands of Siberia and crossing the icy Baring Straits into the Americas.

As societies developed, fur took on a richer and more symbolic significance. Fur became not just a material for survival but a mark of status and character - hence the leopard skin pelts of African chiefs, and the lion skin worn by the mythical Greek hero Hercules. In the Middle Ages there were strict rules limiting the wearing of different furs to different classes, with the richest and rarest pelts restricted to the backs of the nobility and commoners allowed only sheepskin. Fur now wasn't just used for warmth but also for decoration, with the introduction of fur trimmings for cloth garments.

Yet it was only with modernity that fur became fashion, which meant that it could be appreciated purely as a beautiful material. A designer thinks of the texture, look and feel of a fur pelt, choosing those that are most suitable for the design he or she has in mind. It's strange that the aesthetic use of nature is seen as decadent, because it actually makes the most use of different natural features and characteristics. A designer's choice between mink or bear or fox isn't made because they are cold and have to grab the nearest animal, or because they are restricted to a particular category of fur because of their status; rather it is based on reflecting on and appreciating the qualities of mink, bear and fox fur.

These qualities of genuine fur - both the shine and the soft feel - can't yet be achieved with artificial fur replacements. We've come a long way since the first fur coats of early humans. These were crude, cut out around the shape of the animal skin, with little thought to appearance. Inuits wrapped up in their furs look square: the shapes of their bodies are submerged as they battle to stay warm.

By contrast, fashion fur products are designed around the wearer, and huge amounts of effort are invested in getting the right effect. Madame Paquin, the dress designer at the head of a developing international fashion scene in the early twentieth century, made a coat in Canadian mink that used 300 skins, and took 100 hours of cutting and 1,000 hours of sewing. Fur coats were a key part of Edwardian elegance, cut to emphasise the figure of the wearer; and later, in the 1960s, designers experimented with dyeing fur crazy colours and introducing sweeping folds.

Today there are new and exciting possibilities for fur on the catwalk. As well as dyeing, and working fur into hip-hugging skirts and voluptuous cloaks, designers are also experimenting with new techniques. Some are `knitting' fur into a mesh, to create lightweight and soft shining material; others are plucking it, removing the longer outer hairs to leave only the softer shorter hairs; or sheering it; or embellishing it with crystals. To designers who say that they don't want an animal to die for their art, I say their art clearly isn't worth much. Fur shouldn't be consigned to the Stone Age: we're just finding out what it can do.

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