Tag Archives: death-penalty

Mavericks in a Metropolis of Millions…

by in 2SLGBTQ+ Community Issues, Aesthetics, Art, Über-Transgression..., Keyly Committed Core Components of the Counter-Cultural Community, Literature, Politics, Post-Transgressive Fiction and tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Trump has won again.

I can’t believe I’ve just written those words.

I don’t wanna believe I’ve just written those words.

But I hafta.

’Coz they’re true.

Toxically, traumatizingly, tear-tappingly true.

So how’m I gonna respond to the toxic truth of tyrannical Trump’s triumph?

Welp… how better than by publishing some fiercely unbowed words of anti-fascist resistance from one of the core counter-cultural components at one of the world’s leading anti-racist publishing houses?

Yes indeedy, this Papyrocentric Performativizer is positively pulsating with pride and passion to present an exclusive antifa extract from arguably the best interview in Titans of Transgression: Incendiary Interviews with Eleven Ultra-Icons of Über-Extremity (TransVisceral Books 2024), which has just seen its third edition.

Please raise your revolutionary fists for Jay Guinness, Artistic Director and Ipsissimic Aesthetician at Manchester-locused Savoy Books, long hailed as England’s most transgressive publishing company…

Readers’ Advisory: Interview extract contains strong language and uncompromising counter-cultural contrarianism. Proceed at your own risk.

[…]

Miriam Stimbers: Manchester was in the headlines for all the wrong reasons in 2017 [editor’s note: Miriam is referring to the murder of twenty-two people by the homophobic and misogynist Islamist suicide-bomber Salman Abedi at the Manchester Arena].

Jay Guinness: It was, yes. Sadly it was.

Miriam Stimbers: How did you react at Savoy?

Jay Guinness: We in the Savoy community were badly affected. Clearly, we’ve engaged fictionally, artistically, aesthetically with issues around fascism, hatred, intolerance throughout our professional lives, but to have those issues strike on your own doorstep, as it were, strike for real, well, it’s something you could never be prepared for.

Miriam Stimbers: So you think what he did was fascism?

Jay Guinness: I think it was echt fascism, fascism pur sang. Pun not intended. Let’s not beat about the bush. It was fascism.

Miriam Stimbers: Much has been made of the fact that the terrorist––

Jay Guinness: I don’t think “terrorist” is the mot juste. Not at all. For me, he’s just a criminal with a diseased mind. And I don’t mean that as a compliment!

Steve Bell of The Guardian excoriates the Manchester Arena Bomber

Miriam Stimbers: Okay. Much has been made of the fact that the criminal was born and brought up in Manchester. Have you any thoughts on that?

Jay Guinness: You’re right, much has been made of it. But for me and my colleagues at Savoy what he did merely underlined the fact that Manchester is a state of mind far more than it is a physical and temporal Sitz im Leben. It’s about a locus of values, not about geography. I mean, I was born in Huddersfield myself, but I felt that I was Mancunian from the moment I first hung my hat here, because I subscribe to Mancunian values. People who were born here but don’t subscribe to those values aren’t part of the city. Not for me, not for the Savoy community, not ever. I think Dave [Britton] put it best when we were processing the news of what he’d done. Dave’s words have stayed with me: “He’s not a fucking Manc, he’s a fucking cunt. The fucker should be fucking strung up.”

Miriam Stimbers: Metaphorically speaking?

Jay Guinness: No, not metaphorically. Literally. We in the Savoy community are a pretty progressive bunch. We’re not instinctive supporters of the death penalty, to put it mildly. But if you took a vote at Savoy in terms of whether people who do things like that should be hanged, it would be a unanimous yes. No dissenters.

Miriam Stimbers: I’m taken aback. It seems a little extreme. A lot extreme, to be honest.

Jay Guinness: The Savoy community might be progressive, but we’re not bleeding-heart liberals. As Dave said, the fucker should be fucking strung up.

Miriam Stimbers: But what could you hope to achieve by it?

Jay Guinness: Well, for one thing it would be a deterrent to others. Just as importantly, it would ensure he doesn’t do it again.

Miriam Stimbers: But he won’t be doing it again. How could he?

Jay Guinness: Very easily. And he will do it again. We in the Savoy community are confident of that. Leopards don’t change their spots.

Miriam Stimbers: But how could he do it again? He’s dead.

Jay Guinness: I’m sorry, you’ve lost me. Who’s dead?

Miriam Stimbers: Salman Abedi, of course. The suicide-bomber at the Manchester Arena. Who else?

Much More Mucking Maverick Than You, Monkeyfunker!

Jay Guinness: Oh no, no, no, you’ve got entirely the wrong end of the stick. I wasn’t talking about that poor British-Muslim boy. He was quite possibly the biggest victim in that unfortunate business at the Arena.

Miriam Stimbers: Then who were you talking about?

Jay Guinness: That despicable creature Morrissey, of course. Those comments of his about immigration and Salman’s background were utterly unforgivable. Utterly. But no more than one would expect. As Dave went on to say: “That fucking crypto-fascist cunt’s just a fucking attention-seeker, always fucking has been, always fucking will be. String the fucker up!”

Miriam Stimbers: And you really think there’d be a majority at Savoy in favour of executing Morrissey?

Jay Guinness: I don’t think it, I know it. But it wouldn’t just be a majority, it would a unanimous vote, nem. con. What has Morrissey ever done but bring Manchester into disrepute with his dire music, his shitty fashion sense and his toxic racist agenda? As Michael Moorcock once said: “Fascism never sleeps and nor must the anti-fascist community.” In terms of saying it all, it does. Definitively.

[…]

Interview extract © Jay Guinness, Dr Miriam Stimbers, TransVisceral Books 2024

• Jay Guinness is a Huddersfield-born artist and aesthetician, and the subject of Dr Joan Jay Jefferson’s incisive and exhaustive biography Art-Bandit: Interrogating the Outlaw Aesthetics of Über-Maverick Gay Atelierista Jay Guinness (University of Salford Press 2012). See reviews of Art-Bandit at: Pink News, The Guardian, London Review of Books, Quietus, and Huffington Post. Visit Jay’s website for news of his latest projects.

• Miriam Stimbers is a Glasgow-born psychoanalyst, literary scholar and cultural commentatrix whose most recent book is the updated edition of Morbidly Miriam: The Mephitic Memoirs of Miriam B. Stimbers (TransVisceral Books 2023). See a review of Morbidly Miriam at Papyrocentric Performativity. Visit Miriam’s website for news of her latest projects.

Previously pre-posted on Papyrocentric Performativity…

• Il Nano e il Necrofilo… – an earlier exclusive extract from Titans of Transgression…

• The Hurt Shocker – an even earlier exclusive extract from Titans of Transgression…

Live and Let Dice

by in Geometry, Mathematics, Probability, Statistics and tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

How many ways are there to die? The answer is actually five, if by “die” you mean “roll a die” and by “rolled die” you mean “Platonic polyhedron”. The Platonic polyhedra are the solid shapes in which each polygonal face and each vertex (meeting-point of the edges) are the same. There are surprisingly few. Search as long and as far as you like: you’ll find only five of them in this or any other universe. The standard cubic die is the most familiar: each of its six faces is square and each of its eight vertices is the meeting-point of three edges. The other four Platonic polyhedra are the tetrahedron, with four triangular faces and four vertices; the octahedron, with eight triangular faces and six vertices; the dodecahedron, with twelve pentagonal faces and twenty vertices; and the icosahedron, with twenty triangular faces and twelve vertices. Note the symmetries of face- and vertex-number: the dodecahedron can be created inside the icosahedron, and vice versa. Similarly, the cube, or hexahedron, can be created inside the octahedron, and vice versa. The tetrahedron is self-spawning and pairs itself. Plato wrote about these shapes in his Timaeus (c. 360 B.C.) and based a mathemystical cosmology on them, which is why they are called the Platonic polyhedra.

An animated gif of a tetrahedron

Tetrahedron


An animated gif of a hexahedron

Hexahedron

An animated gif of an octahedron

Octahedron


An animated gif of a dodecahedron

Dodecahedron

An animated gif of an icosahedron

Icosahedron

They make good dice because they have no preferred way to fall: each face has the same relationship with the other faces and the centre of gravity, so no face is likelier to land uppermost. Or downmost, in the case of the tetrahedron, which is why it is the basis of the caltrop. This is a spiked weapon, used for many centuries, that always lands with a sharp point pointing upwards, ready to wound the feet of men and horses or damage tyres and tracks. The other four Platonic polyhedra don’t have a particular role in warfare, as far as I know, but all five might have a role in jurisprudence and might raise an interesting question about probability. Suppose, in some strange Tycholatric, or fortune-worshipping, nation, that one face of each Platonic die represents death. A criminal convicted of a serious offence has to choose one of the five dice. The die is then rolled f times, or as many times as it has faces. If the death-face is rolled, the criminal is executed; if not, he is imprisoned for life.

The question is: Which die should he choose to minimize, or maximize, his chance of getting the death-face? Or doesn’t it matter? After all, for each die, the odds of rolling the death-face are 1/f and the die is rolled f times. Each face of the tetrahedron has a 1/4 chance of being chosen, but the tetrahedron is rolled only four times. For the icosahedron, it’s a much smaller 1/20 chance, but the die is rolled twenty times. Well, it does matter which die is chosen. To see which offers the best odds, you have to raise the odds of not getting the death-face to the power of f, like this:

3/4 x 3/4 x 3/4 x 3/4 = 3/4 ^4 = 27/256 = 0·316…

5/6 ^6 = 15,625 / 46,656 = 0·335…

7/8 ^8 = 5,764,801 / 16,777,216 = 0·344…

11/12 ^12 = 3,138,428,376,721 / 8,916,100,448,256 = 0·352…

19/20 ^20 = 37,589,973,457,545,958,193,355,601 / 104,857,600,000,000,000,000,000,000 = 0·358…

Those represent the odds of avoiding the death-face. Criminals who want to avoid execution should choose the icosahedron. For the odds of rolling the death-face, simply subtract the avoidance-odds from 1, like this:

1 – 3/4 ^4 = 0·684…

1 – 5/6 ^6 = 0·665…

1 – 7/8 ^8 = 0·656…

1 – 11/12 ^12 = 0·648…

1 – 19/20 ^20 = 0·642…

So criminals who prefer execution to life-imprisonment should choose the tetrahedron. If the Tycholatric nation offers freedom to every criminal who rolls the same face of the die f times, then the tetrahedron is also clearly best. The odds of rolling a single specified face f times are 1/f ^f:

1/4 x 1/4 x 1/4 x 1/4 = 1/4^4 = 1 / 256

1/6^6 = 1 / 46,656

1/8^8 = 1 / 16,777,216

1/12^12 = 1 / 8,916,100,448,256

1/20^20 = 1 / 104,857,600,000,000,000,000,000,000

But there are f faces on each polyhedron, so the odds of rolling any face f times are 1/f ^(f-1). On average, of every sixty-four (256/4) criminals who choose to roll the tetrahedron, one will roll the same face four times and be reprieved. If a hundred criminals face the death-penalty each year and all choose to roll the tetrahedron, one criminal will be reprieved roughly every eight months. But if all criminals choose to roll the icosahedron and they have been rolling since the Big Bang, just under fourteen billion years ago, it is very, very, very unlikely that any have yet been reprieved.