Child abuse. posted by Richard Seymour

I don't know quite how Gore Vidal ended up in a studio with a Tory MP who happened to be blustering about the need to reintroduce corporal punishment into schools, but when asked what he thought on the matter, Vidal replied: "I am all for corporal punishment, as long as it is between consenting adults."

Quite. I've never understood why anyone beyond sadistic perverts, authoritarian cranks, deluded weirdos, Tory MPs (or, as is more common, all of the above), would want to inflict violence on children. It strikes me that the assumption of a natural parental right to smack kids about derives from the same identification with power that once said it was okay for husbands to beat their wives. Social violence - sexual or physical - is almost always meted out to society's weakest: women and children. This, surely, is a tradition to vilify and fight rather than nostalgically mythopoeticise and yearn for. Which is not to say that I can't understand why people might sometimes get so fucked off with a kid that they want to beat him or her about for a few long minutes: it's just not to be done, that's all.

That said, a Japanese beer company seems to have come up with an excellent way to handle noisy, quarrelsome children: give them a drink . It's a non-alcoholic substitude called Kidsbeer. You see:

The drink started out as Guarana, a cola beverage that used to be sold at the Shitamachi-ya restaurant in Fukuoka, run by 39-year-old Yuichi Asaba.

Asaba renamed the sweet carbonated drink Kidsbeer, a move that made it an instant hit....

..."Even kids cannot stand life unless they have a drink," reads the product's advertising slogan. ( via )

Just what will all the manufacturers of cheap synthetic cider do now?