Think of the children

… but please don’t make them into lamps after poking their eyes out with scissors. Especially on a children’s TV show in Sweden, unless you want to cause a storm in a teacup. Via Metafilter, a Norwegian site reports (do I detect a hint of anti-Swedish glee?) that “Swedish children’s TV channel is forced to remove clip of doll murder.“

Luckily (for them) Sweden is so utopian that some people have nothing better to worry about than dolls being mutilated on a TV show for children, Philofix, complaining vociferously that it was “perverse”, “macabre” and “crazy”, and that the presenter should be dismissed. Clearly these people have never met a real child or they’re a very long way from their own childhoods, because otherwise they’d know that many children adore this kind of business and need no encouragement or instruction whatsoever in play-sadism with any vaguely humanoid figure. Given half a chance they’ll fuck up a doll in ways that make presenter Rakel Wärmländer’s interventions with scissors seem very tame. This project definitely is perverse, macabre and crazy… but guess what? Children are perverse, macabre and crazy too. What’s wrong with being perverse, macabre and crazy anyway?

Not to mention that– old lefty that I am– I think it’s preferable for a child to know that the world is there for them to learn from, tinker with and enjoy in their own private and individual way instead of just passively accepting objects and products as they are given, and never doing anything without permission.

Watch Rakel get medieval on a doll’s ass below. UPDATE: What a shame, the miserable bastards have purged it from YouTube already.

Kids today… (in the Assyrian Empire, 2800 BC)

(Photograph ©Alistair Gentry)

“Our Earth is degenerate in these later days; there are signs that the world is speedily coming to an end; bribery and corruption are common; children no longer obey their parents; every man wants to write a book and the end of the world is evidently approaching.”

From an Assyrian clay tablet, circa 2800 BC. The Assyrian Empire’s capital (Nineveh, now gone but the site is adjacent to modern day Mosul in northern Iraq) was captured over two thousand years later by a loose alliance including Babylonians, Cimmerians and Scythians. We should all be so lucky as to have our civilisation take so long in (supposedly) degenerating. Ashur-uballit II held onto one last city as a bastion of Assyrian culture for a while, but the empire was finally overcome in its entirety by Babylon in 605BC. The empire ended and was replaced by another, but the world didn’t end. Some useful perspective for all the middle aged-to-elderly whiners who say the world isn’t what it used to be, that the interests and recreations of young people don’t bear comparison to those of one’s own youth, or that basically everything has turned into a load of shit since they were young.

Well, guess what? The world has always been ending and it’s always been mostly crap, teenagers have always been stupidly dressed, disrespectful pains in the arse and there have always been boring old farts who felt threatened by the energy and ambition of the young.

On the other hand, I totally understand my anonymous Mesopotamian colleague’s exasperation at everybody thinking they can and should write a book. Knock that shit off, nobody wants to read your pathetic attempt at writing a novel.

Spoiler Alert: Spoilers (Warning: Spoilers)

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Americans dominate the Anglophone internet, and Americans hate spoilers. “WHERE’S THE SPOILER WARNING, ASSHOLE?” is a relatively mild and restrained example of the incandescent rage Americans unleash when they deem themselves “spoiled” by innocuous scraps of advance narrative information about TV shows, films and other popular entertainment. The aforesaid information can usually be gleaned from a cursory or even an accidental viewing of a trailer, a general article, a synopsis or a publicity picture, like for example “in Avatar that Australian actor who isn’t Russell Crowe or Hugh Jackman nobs a blue space cat lady, flies dragons and fights a battle against baddies.”