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Peace News log archive: November 2020

The Peace News log is a space for reflection, reportage and analysis, by activists from the UK and beyond. It is the blog of Peace News, the grassroots peace movement newspaper. If you have an article that you would like to contribute to the Peace News log, please contact us.

Articles from the Peace News log.
For archive articles from the whole site, look here

The Clit Test: changing the sex script
Ian Sinclair | 08 November, 2020

Image

Ian Sinclair reports on a new feminist-driven initiative

Coined by cartoonist Alison Bechdel in 1985, what has become known as The Bechdel Test – whether a movie includes at least two women who talk to each other about something other than a man – is now widely discussed by consumers and creators of popular culture.

But just as we have got our heads around one necessary and very welcome feminist-driven test, along comes a shiny new challenging feminist-driven test: the Clit Test.

...Read More
The joy of painting and the decline of the West
Robin Holtom | 08 November, 2020
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Henri Matisse, CC BY-SA 4.0. via Wikimedia Commons

The politics of sound bites and Twitter  need to be replaced with a refreshed politics of sensibility, argues Robin Holtom

'Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world' - Shelley

Suppose that Shelley is right and poetic sensibility (and by extension) artistic sensibility really does create the underpinning of decisions by the legislature. If so, a country with a taste for good poetry and art will make good laws. It also follows that bad poets and bad artists lay the foundations for bad laws.

The Joy of Painting with Bob Ross is a salutary lesson in this process.

For those who are not familiar with it, this is a TV series made in the 1980s supposedly to help ordinary people learn to paint pictures. In the series, Bob Ross teaches facile tricks of how to paint very unimaginative landscapes or blandscapes.

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Nuclear ban treaty will become law on 22 January 2021
Janet Fenton | 08 November, 2020

Nuclear weapons states applied enormous pressure to try and stop the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, recalls Janet Fenton.Image

Castle Romeo nuclear test, 27 March 1954. PHOTO:United States Department of Energy, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

On 24 October, Honduras ratified the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), becoming the 50th state to signal its binding agreement with the treaty. Passing the 50-ratifications threshold means that the TPNW will now actually ‘enter into force’, 90 days from Honduras’s ratification.

The Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, WILPF, as its known to its friends, has a unique perspective on the TPNW that has been a significant driver in bringing it to this wonderful moment of entry into force.

With the 50th ratification, the treaty is irreversible.

...Read More