A pretty little setback

Take 'em anyway you can?

"A federal judge declared the Obama administration's health care law unconstitutional Monday, siding with Virginia's attorney general in a dispute that both sides agree will ultimately be decided by the U.S. Supreme Court...

...The central issue in Virginia's lawsuit was whether the federal government has the power under the constitution to impose the insurance requirement. The Justice Department said the mandate is a proper exercise of the government's authority under the Commerce Clause.

Cuccinelli argued that while the government can regulate economic activity that substantially affects interstate commerce, the decision not to buy insurance amounts to economic inactivity that is beyond the government's reach."

Don't care about the Constitution, rights, courts or arguments about the rule of law.  The upside of rejecting institutions and superstructure [I hear the gnashing of Fabian and tinkerer teeth]. But giving Obama a bruised nose, and declaring (however temporary) that it just ain't kosher to force a person to purchase a commodity?

Priceless.

The Falsehood Project, Particulate Cloud Number One

Jack: Donovan McNabb should punch a Motherfucker.

Landru: I think a political party is in order.

Unspoken, unspeakable internet ghost in the machine: the Punch A Motherfucker Party is born.

Good Liberal: Um, gentleman and crespucutacular yankee troglodyte, that would involve, um, violence.

Jack: Not necessarily.

Landru: Reese's Peanut Butter Cups.

Good Liberal: John Boehner is a very bad man.

Jack: I'm always shooting first, and then scrambling around picking up the casings. Someone take this keyboard from me because I'm never going to surrender it on my own.

Ethan: If I have to listen to another fucking Christmas song while corporate soul punches my kidneys with the mailed fist of a thousand future mornings that I've already sold off for today's twenty minute lunch break...

Jack: Ethan should punch a motherfucker already.

BDR: We have these complicities. We could make the best of them. Or the worst.

Randal: Could someone please be a chaos agent? Am I asking too much?

Good Liberal: You must fight the Republican chaos, not do your own. Organize. Organize. Organize.

Jack: Hmmm. Good point. How about we organize a Mountweazel Campaign? That could be a non-violent way to punch the hell out of a certain gaggle of motherfuckers. And we could still be complicit while doing it.

Drunken goat chorus: [indecipherable]

Capital Spoke. Now, It Declares.

The inestimable Jason Ditz, @ Antiwar.com:

"Already with enough egg on its face to endanger a species of birds, Amazon.com’s WikiLeaks headaches don’t appear to be going away. Having ousted the whistleblower’s website from their web hosting service under Sen. Joe Lieberman’s orders, Amazon has now taken to publishing the same cables it was insisting just a week ago were cause for termination.

Strange but true, Amazon’s UK website, Amazon.co.uk, began selling an eBook for its Kindle eReader that includes copious excerpts of the diplomatic cables along with the author’s analysis. The eBook is, according to the website, available only in the UK."

Capital says ~

Wikileaks: free, illegal, immoral.

Amazon.com: licensed, licit, justified.

You just can't make this shit up. Thank you, Wikileaks, for exposing the naked operation of capital and state, so many times, and with such simple clarity - whether you ever intended that outcome, or not.

Assange, the man, is not what Wikileaks, the group, does. And he may very well be a rapist. Deal with it.

Someone scribbles a bunch of dots on a list and events and traits, related to one of Mr. Assange's accusers, and then draws a number of lines betweens those dots, without much of an explanation (as in, none) as to why the reader should assume they are all connected:

"She’s a gender equity officer at Uppsula University – who chose to associate with a US funded group openly supported by a convicted terrorist and mass murderer. She just happens to have her work published by a very well funded group connected with Union Liberal Cubana – whose leader, Carlos Alberto Montaner, in turn just happened to pop up on right wing Colombian TV a few hours after the right-wing coup in Honduras. Where he joined the leader of the failed coup in Ecuador to savage Correa, the target of the coup. Montnaner also just happened to vociferously support the violent coup in Honduras, and chose to show up to sing the praises of the Honduran junta."

Someone else decides that these drawn lines paint a reliable portrait, and muses:

"It’s all a bit too coincidental, isn’t it? That a woman of this background accuses the person who has to be numero uno on the US state’s hitlist of sexual assault at exactly the same time as he is embarassing them again. Suddenly the story is no longer on what’s coming out of the leaked cables, but on whether or not Julian Assange is or is not a sexual sleazeball. Even if the charges are dropped again, or come to nothing, the insinuations will stick to him. It’ll be mentioned in any future profiles and op-ed pieces on Wikileaks, further discrediting him and the organisation."

I was uncomfortable with this argument the first time I read it. I actually kept the browser tab open for the better part of a day, waiting to decide if I had anything to write about it. So, whatever:

1. Working for right wing Cuban terrorists is not the same as "being connected to them." And it's that assumption of a unity of purpose, based on the assertion of undemonstrated connectedness, which oiled (however, sadly, momentarily) the rusty gears of my underused cranial contents, to consider and reject the conviction that it's okay to...

2. Trust Assange implicitly, while simultaneously assuming that his accuser belongs to a nefarious plot to undo the good work he has done...

3. Because Assange doesn't need to be a decent mate to do what he has done. I think some people really need to believe that Assange is a paladin in order to valorize his actions, his organization and his aims...

4. But I don't really see how Assange the man has any real bearing on Wikileaks, the group, and Wikileaks, the idea...

5. And in fact, perhaps the best thing for Wikileaks, as a technology (and a limited one) for disrupting state secrecy is for it to lose all the personality associated with it.

Which brings us back round to that personality. There's no reason to valorize Assange. And there's certainly no reason I can think of to assume that his accusers are lying, just because Assange has stuck a digital finger in Uncle's eye.

Especially in light of this (h/t Shetterly):

"The court heard Assange is accused of using his body weight to hold her down in a sexual manner.

The second charge alleged Assange "sexually molested" Miss A by having sex with her without a condom when it was her "express wish" one should be used.

The third charge claimed Assange "deliberately molested" Miss A on 18 August 'in a way designed to violate her sexual integrity'.

The fourth charge accused Assange of having sex with a second woman, Miss W, on 17 August without a condom while she was asleep at her Stockholm home."

I'm not going to sign off on prisons and cops and lawn order if Mr. Assange's accusers can accurately demonstrate that he raped them, anymore than I would if I argued that Roman Polanksi is a rapist pig (he is; he really is).  I will type this, though:

Assume she tells the truth. Assume it. And a guy who puts his dick in a woman while she's asleep and without her consent is a rapist. You don't fucking parse that. You don't blame right wing proponents of Disney Cuba. It's not Eric Holder's fault, even if he takes advantage of it after the fact, in order to draw Assange into his terrorism dragnet.

A man who rapes a woman...


...is a rapist.

*

On a completely unrelated note, I laugh in delightful and lighthearted mockery at "Green Marxists" who defend the rules of capitalist military organizations and capitalist state superstructures, with muscular impotency. Amusement abounds.

Intestines

The bulk of my referring traffic, since about March, has come from four sources  - SMBIVA, BDR, Oxtrot and Dirty Green Hippie.

Good company, and I am honored and humbled.

Not the last week.

The bulk of my referring traffic, over the last week, has come from facebook.

I am not amused.

On a redeeming bright note, one search chain, "self-evidently tasteless absurdity," directed someone here.

I can only hope it was negatory and that the searcher had successfully glommed on to the perfect description of every piece of bunk I've ever had the unseemly and unjustified audacity to post for public consumption.

Dialogue, truncated

Simon: I think we need to reexamine our Christianity. It's not a perfect thing, but we must engage the world in a manner in which people come to understand the necessity, or the desirability of it. Situations change, and we have to adapt to them. How we relate to the world must reflect the situation in which we find ourselves. I think, therefore, we should make sure as many people as possible have access to the images and stories of Vishnu, so that they can better understand their own transformations and experiences.

Thomas: Vaishnavism isn't Christianity.

Saul: Is it even possible to be Christian, Thomas? Why don't you prove your Christianity, pony boy?

Thomas: I'm just saying that you can worship Vishnu and Jesus at the same time, but your faith in Vishnu sort of negates your claim to Christianity.

Saul: The Christian vision is not practicable, so why don't you just grow up?

Thomas: That may very well be true, and I probably still have more growing up to do, but I think it's curious that Simon calls his Vaishnavism Christianity, when it's not. Whether or not Christianity is all one thing, or can have different interpretations, I'm not sure the worship of Vishnu can actually qualify as Christian.  Christianity has varied over the ages, but its practice depends upon a clear, almost universally exclusive relationship to the Christ. Vaishnaivism does not. A Hindu who worships Vishnu as his primary god can still believe in Shiva, and the Christ. The Christian who worships Vishnu, especially as a means of supposedly spreading the good news of Christianity, or because the environment is not suited to Christian practices, ceases to be one, no?

No Title

When I was younger, I wrote thorough, adequately documented, cited and corroborated positions papers, sometimes for politicians whom I liked in person but with whom I had intellectual disagreement. Because the challenge amused me. Because I believed that some sort of compromise promised to remind people with power that they were beholden to their own liabilities.

I was also young and believed I had something to prove.

I believed in persuasion.

I don't think I believe in the efficacy of persuasive reasoning anymore, in part because the continent spanning ideological superstructure in which I lived is gone. I "grew up" when there were clearly marked boundaries (the loss of the which I do not lament) between the world which assumed a right to my loyalties and the world against which I had to least nominally express disagreement. Us good, Soviets bad. Political and ideological persuasion tended to work within this superstructure, so that persons who disagreed fundamentally about how to be us still had an anchor in their expected agreement to not be them. The stable adversarial environment provided those within it with a fulcrum for their arguments, whether or not the were aware of it.

I think, in part, this may explain the manichean virulence of the Tea Party and similar movements - the enduring urge to recapture a stable fulcrum about which adversaries may disagree, but against the necessity of which they rarely argue. A shared loyalty. I've seen perhaps innumerable attempts to recreate this condition by persons arguing for a host of moral fulcrums which they believe, honestly I think, should be established and then just left alone: an attitude towards Islam, the necessity of deficit reform, or Wall Street reform, the need for universal health care or full employment, an anodyne faith in the goodness of "America," Judaeo-Christian values, et cetera. For the angry conservative, and the disappointed progressive, something is missing in the ideological environment, something which allows them (and us) to agree, something that places them in an agreed to context, so that they can believe they are on the same team with their current political and moral adversaries.

Because, without that context, their adversaries may very well be mortal ones. People have a difficult time persuading each other, if they believe in their own enmity.

I don't know if this angst is or can be experienced by the younguns, especially those who have come of age in the last decade or two. I have my suspicions, but no real way to confirm or refute them. So I guess I'll leave it at this: all that self-regard and digital solipsism might be explained as the moral autism of the unpersuadable.

You can sell to them - in fact, I cannot imagine a more perfect consumer - but can you really persuade them?

I don't mean to suggest that they cannot reason and draw conclusions based on arguments made - but that they just might be immune to argumentation, especially in an adversarial dispute, because the assumed anchor to a commonality - that fulcrum which can be moved, but not abolished - doesn't exist. 

How can you appeal to the logic of a shared universality if one of the parties doesn't know or care that it might exist?

And this isn't akin to disagreements between angry conservatives and disappointed liberals, who accept the faith in a commonality over which they must dispute but would not abolish, and so can therefore find points of agreement, but who have begun to feel the loss of it and have subsequently started to hunker down in moral bunkers, reinforcing belief with a hardening of temperament, until agreement and persuasion become impossible and contest becomes war.

I could be wrong, and I am fact writing these words with a perfect surety of my own error.

But what the hell, I'll die sooner than later and my past now casts a longer shadow than the landmarks of my possible futures.

I watched "Scott Pilgrim against the World" last night, with my wife snoring gently behind me. The first film I've ever watched, after which I felt old.  So dice, meet table, I'm aging and I'm ready to be wrong in the view of others again...

The naming of names, or something...

Demarchism is not anarchism. The enforcement of the popular will is still enforcement. Since unanimity is a chimaera, the popular will must reduce the individual will to an adjunct subject, or those who claim to represent it cannot enforce the will they ask you to believe they represent.

Devolved power is still power. Devolution may reduce, for a time, the size of the subject populations which an authority can claim, and capture, but it does not alter the fundamental relation of subject to command.

If the relation of subject to command is justifiable under any circumstances it is justifiable under all - because the exercise of power has no immediate relationship to the justifications given for it. The responsibility to enforce the enactments of authority requires a means by which those who claim to represent the general will can, and do, impose that assumed will. They require, in short, coercion. Once justified, the argument that coercion has useful limits, or can be limited according to a common good, fails to answer the original justification, because that justification itself demands the enforcement of a defining good by an arbitrating group or class which must remain separate from the mass it governs, in order to govern it. The capacity to delegate relies on the ability to compel the person to whom a task is given to perform the required task, and to accept the obligation of it. A justification for the exercise of authority does not confer that authority. It only explains why some believe they have it, or must obey it.

Democratists and democratizers may intend to devolve power until it reaches an assumed point of identity with representation, meaning that the will of all persons is represented in the identity of the democratic judgment - but they cannot resolve the disconnect between assumed universality of judgment and a single instance of dissent, unless they whitewash or ignore the mechanisms by which they enforce those judgments which they believe have an exact identity with a presumed social will.

Which, of course, doesn't even begin to address the (assumed) validity of the idea of social will, or popular will, which informs the social contract implied in demarchism and democratization.

Advocate demarchism, or democratization, or devolution. Assume whatever you want about the potential for non-coercive coexistence.

Let's just not pretend that these systems of rule are anarchism.

Capital Speaks

"4.14pm: Charles Arthur, the Guardian's technology editor, points out that while MasterCard and Visa have cut WikiLeaks off you can still use those cards to donate to overtly racist organisations such as the Knights Party, which is supported by the Ku Klux Klan.

The Ku Klux Klan website directs users to a site called Christian Concepts. It takes Visa and MasterCard donations for users willing to state that they are 'white and not of racially mixed descent. I am not married to a non-white. I do not date non-whites nor do I have non-white dependents. I believe in the ideals of western Christian civilisation and profess my belief in Jesus Christ as the son of God.'"

Source. (hat tip)

Who We Owe

"Manning, a former army intelligence analyst in Iraq, faces up to 52 years in prison. He is currently being held in solitary confinement at a military base in Quantico, Virginia, where he is not allowed to see his parents or other outside visitors."

Source. (h/t WiC)

As I've stated elsewhere, I'm of mixed opinion about the efficacy of the Wikileaks data dumps. Al, Mr. Smith and Ethan have shown why the mixed opinion ought to be mixed, and how to temper an existential doubt with a modest appreciation for modest snubs to power - but the universe has never given me any reason to abandon cynicism (modern and ancient meanings, both) and I'm not about to start now.

All the same, I am a big fan of disobedience, for its own sake. It's a damned good habit, a human one, a necessary one. Get enough sleep, love lightly, eat well, play for joy, breathe deeply, do the job and leave it done, keep your promises, make few of them to start with, stay loyal to friends. Punch a motherfucker if he's got it coming. Raise your kids like they're going to outlive you and then hurt anyone who tries to get in the way of that.

Disobey anyone who wants to live your life, or tell you how to live it.

And defend those who make the choices which give you space to be your own person, on as many terms as you can make and keep.

Bradley Manning has done that. I can place my cynicism in limbo and type those words out with heart.

Bradly fucking Manning has done that for all of us, especially the ungrateful bastards who will lock him up or kill him if they can. They'll never know it, but he has offset the evil that they do, if only for a moment. A moment we owe him, in our memory.

And I don't care about his motives. As Richard spotlights, an act can be anarchistic and anti-power, even if the person does not claim the identity of anarchist. The act and its consequences have a distinction which separates them, especially as time leaves its impact on memory, from motive.

I don't care if the worst possible narrative about Bradley Manning proves true - that's he's a vengeful, resent consumed little twit. I sincerely doubt it, but it does not matter.

It does not matter.

I guess should tell you why, eh?

Because Bradley Manning may very well have given his life - and at least his liberty - to add a significant chapter to the Long Memory - our memory, our class history.

As an old friend I've never meant once said,

 "When I went to high school - that's about as far as I got - reading my US history text book, well, I got the history of the ruling class. I got the history of the generals and the industrialists and the presidents who didn't get caught. How about you? I got the history of the people who owned the wealth of the country, but none of the history of the people that created it. Y'know...so when I went out to get my first job, I went out armed with somebody else's class background. They never gave me any tools to understand or begin to control the condition of my labor. And that was deliberate, w'n'nt it? Huh. They didn't want me to know this. That's why this stuff isn't taught in the history books because we're not supposed to know it. You understand that. No...if I want the true history of where I came from as a member of the working class, I had to go to my elders. Many of them their best working years before pensions or social security. Gave their whole lives to the mines, to the wheat harvest, to the logging camps, to the railroad. Got nothin' for it...

...but they lived those lives that can never be lived again, and in the living of them, they gave me a history that is more profound, more beautiful, more passionate and ultimately more useful to me than the best damned history book I ever read...

...The long memory is the most radical idea in the country. It is the loss of that long memory which deprives our people of that connective flow of thoughts and events that clarifies our vision, not of where we’re going but where we want to go.”

~ Utah Phillips, The Long Memory, (with Ani DiFranco, and Rosalie Sorrels, combined)

Bradley Manning disobeyed. The act alone has value. A value we would do well to remember. On its own. On its own terms. On our fucking terms.

Very, very powerful people want to kill him for it.

I'm of the opinion that Bradley Manning is someone we owe.

And if we cannot save his life - and I think every possible effort in that direction, right up to conjuring a particularly nasty and bad ass Robin Hood out of myth and mythopoesis and teaming him up with the Furies, Nemesis and the human embodiment of every trickster god or goddess we've ever dreamed up, to break him free and break the heads of his captors - we had better goddamned remember him.

Because Bradley Manning is who we owe.

*

In that spirit (a reprise):

Anti-Salute

McEwan:

"The latest leaked document to garner outrage at WikiLeaks is a "long list of key facilities around the world that the US describes as vital to its national security...

...'An unhelpful development' is a really good way of describing it, IMO. The release of this list doesn't strike me as quite warranting profound alarm, if only because most of the sites on the list would be evident targets for disruption even if they hadn't been officially sanctioned by this document as important to US interests. And terrorists aren't stupid. "World Trade Center" didn't need to be on a list to be a target.

On the other hand, it doesn't seem particularly necessary to hand this list to people who might be interested in causing maximum chaos and/or destruction, nor particularly scandalous if the document had been kept concealed.

So. Unhelpful development. Yeah."

(emphasis mine)

Liberals - not much different from conservatives, but with more gay, black and female. Take it away, Walter Benn Michaels (h/t Shetterly):

"...And once we succeed in convincing ourselves that the poor are people who need our respect more than they need our money, our own attitude towards them becomes the problem to be solved, and not their poverty. We can now devote our reforms not to removing class but to eliminating what we Americans call “classism.” The trick is to analyse inequality as a consequence of our prejudices rather than of our social system, and thus replace the pain of giving up some of our money with the comparative pleasure of giving up (along with our classism) our racism, sexism, and homophobia..."

*

Um, Jack - the two quotes just aren't all that related, fool.

But, yes they are.

No, Jack - they're not. McEwan's just a well intentioned institutionalist liberal. She stands for good stuff, you know. Without McEwan we wouldn't know that rape is like wicked bad, dude; and don't forget that she repeatedly notes that Barack Obama is a corporate tool who's not very good at keeping his promises or loyalties in order. And let's be frank, asshole, she's making a really good point.

Which is what?

That Wikileaks threatens to provide demonstrably bad people - many of whom oppress their women and minorities - with a list of targets, along with a host of other nefarious revelations, that will damage the ability of the government to keep doing governmenty things. Plus, chaos and shit. Don't forget maximum destruction. It's just not necessary to point out the government has security interests - and properties - relevant to the performance of its tasks, because there are people who want to disrupt that work.

What kind of work?

You know, government stuff.

Like bailing out predatory lending institutions and banks, waging resource wars at the behest of transnational energy and defense firms, covering for oil companies that poison entire ecosystems, imprisoning environmentalists as terrorists, militarizing every possible social space, especially at those points of transit which allow for maximum humiliation, handing the Commons over to media concerns, insurance houses, investment firms and extraction industries, fiat executions, rounding up and imprisoning "undocumented workers" fleeing regions run by US state and industry back oligarchies and coup juntas, mandating involuntary consumption of private insurance services, oh unreal gods make it stop already...

But, dude, we so like need the government because without it there would be bad men who treat women poorly, and racism and bullying of gays and shit. What's the problem with you, man? Do you want a world full of sexist rapists and Klansman and homophobes?

Isn't that all going on right now, with the State in charge? Perhaps, because the state maintains these divisive distinctions, where it can, and "ameliorates" them where it must? Isn't it possible that some middle and upper class liberals don't think bad thoughts all the time and get offended by gross displays of social regressiveness? Why does the state work to maintain social distinctions and identities while at the same time working to soften the impact of them in very specific social environments?

Why would that be?

Why would what be, Jack?

Why would it be in the interest of the best government capital has ever bought to maintain race and gender distinctions in some regions, but work to ameliorate the appearance of them in others?

Um...

Could it possibly be because those regions, in territory and in social space, which produce the managerial segments of the ruling class also reproduce the social circumstances necessary to maintaining the capitalist capture of these servants? In some cases, that means an environment of social tolerance which masks an otherwise and ofttimes more trenchantly capitalist set of relations...

Um, dude, rape and racism are bad, guy...

We are in complete agreement, but...

Guy, there is no but. That shit is bad. It's the worst. It makes me sick, you fucking pig fucking fucker.

Take it away again, Walter Benn Michaels:

"...But the inequalities between masters and servants (and rich and poor, bosses and workers) are not produced by racism and sexism: They are the products of capitalism and liberalism. With respect to economic inequality, racism and sexism function as sorting systems, technologies not for producing that inequality but for distributing its rewards. Hence, even the most successful battle against racism and sexism will not close the gap between the rich and the poor; it will just rearrange their sexes, sexualities and skin colours. A France [or US, ~ Jack] where more black people were rich would not be a more economically equal France; it would just be a France with a wider gap between rich black people and poor black people...."

See how this stuff relates, yet?

And do you see why, just maybe, maximum disruption of the operation of the state might help you achieve your admirable goals, without all the resource and drug wars, military rape units and thirty three percent of all black men in prison?

Salute

Greenwald - whom I neither care for, nor have much of an opinion against - doesn't like photographic leader worship.

He decided to tweet (a fucking ridiculous medium, but whatever) that some Obama adherent's fan site was like if "Leni Reifenstahl were an Obama fanatic and had a blog."

He's spot the fuck on, personally.

I get it. But, that's perhaps because the only leader worship I prefer looks like this:

If that offends you, too bad.

Especially if this doesn't offend you:

In which case you are patently a lost cause and you should just submit your requisition form for your party uniform and roll out for your head count, already.  Because you will probably excuse any fucking abuse, so long as the abuser is your dear fucking leader.

So color me unsurprised that the militaristic (redundant, I know) liberals of Balloon Juice would find a cause celebre to champion, accompanied with appropriate frothing and loyalist whimpering (you've gotta read the comments section...):

"Really? Comparing Blackwaterdog—a Jewish pro-Obama supporter/blogger, whose only crime, as far as I can tell, is blogging positive news and pictures about Obama—to Leni Riefenstahl, a fucking Nazi propagandist?

Blackwaterdog is a blogger who got ran out of DailyKos for daring to express support for Obama, and now, in the dickiest of dick moves, you’ve used your much larger platform to pick on her.

What the hell is wrong with you? You’re a paid columnist for a major online publication and you’re picking on a blogger using inappropriate and inflammatory rhetoric—do you not see anything wrong with that?"

Nice touch there, pointing out the ethno-religious identity of the blogger, as if it matters, you know, what with Greenwald also having the exact same identity (which was not, curiously, pointed out). Hundreds of thousands of Israelis daily replicate the oppressive fascism with and by which the Israeli colonial garrison state holds territory and power, imprisoning an occupied people in concentration camps. All the while holding a hundred million of their neighbors in constant fear of nuclear and martial retaliation. Their Jewishness does not prevent them from going full hog for either leader worship, nationalism, statism or militarism.

So, this one's for Greenwald:

Salud, sláinte, skaal, cheers mate. Keep it up.

Nutshell

"The champion of transparency in state affairs says what happened between him and two women in Sweden is a private matter, and he won't return to face his accusers. But sex crimes are crimes against the state. Assange may be innocent, but he has a responsibility to answer to prosecutors."

(emphasis mine)

No doubt she'll become an anarchist in due time.  All the signs point that way, no? She's just harmonizing her mind modes to a future anarchism. I mean, like omigod, dude, it's right there between the lines...

Does the truism cover a falsehood?

"It’s standard knowledge on a feminist blog that rape isn’t about sex; it’s about power, entitlement and violence. It’s about keeping women in their place, and keeping women as a class fearful. It’s at least a step forward that large media outlets are catching on, and aren’t characterizing rapists as simply sex-crazed maniacs." 

Source.

I think this is a curious formula. A "curiouser and curiouser" kind of curious. Because it asserts a truism in order to promote a completely undemonstrated assertion.

Some background, first:

I belong to that very small percentage of total rape victims who have male genitalia. I understand that most rape victims are women, and that most rapists are men. I don't want to give any impression that I dispute that - or that rape is "just as much a man's problem." It's not. It's just fucking not.

After the final incident, I contacted a high school friend who worked at the local YWCA, coordinating that organizations outreach to rape victims, as well as its shelter for abused women. To put it as lightly as possible, I was having a hard time coping. So, I went for a resource I knew, and in doing so learned that there just aren't a lot of resources for rape victims, in general. I know this is fairly common knowledge, but it wasn't for me at the time.

I would come to understand that as a man I still ended up having a privileged position as a victim. When I asked for some help (my friend wasn't in, the first day I went) finding resources, it was rather sharply pointed out to me that I had the whole world as a resource, because of the dick between my legs. I didn't agree then, and I don't fully agree now - but I understand the sentiment. It was a rejection of the privilege I was assumed to have. I get the rejection, though I think that sometimes the assumption falls on the wrong target.

Women's resources are rightly used for women, and I was essentially asking that some of those precious few resources be devoted to my pain. I didn't really see it that way at the time, because I was consumed with my own shame and pain, but I was eventually able to comprehend that whether or not I had any real privilege in the everyday world (I didn't), in the context of an underfunded women's shelter and rape counseling service, I was asking for a privileged position. I was asking for some some women's time to be devoted to me, a man. It took a while, but I figured it out. Dick between my legs and all.

I ended up getting a private counselor. Which is where we get into the applicable background. Out of contact with that therapist, I would eventually gain the opportunity to speak with a number of sexual assailants, all men, from varying economic and social, racial and national backgrounds. Nearly all of them were also non-sexual abusers, but I don't know if that is representative or not. It was just my particular experience. A sizable percentage of them were abused as children. But less than I would previously have imagined.

Not one of them was a political rapist, as is argued in the quote above.

I have never interviewed nor encountered a rapist who was consciously and deliberately attempting to dominate women as a class. I'm not suggesting that this sort of rapist does not exist. I assume the full set of possible universes, when it comes to human depravity. And I certainly understand that rape is itself often a deliberately political act - especially for soldiers and occupation forces attempting to subjugate a population.

I've just never encountered any evidence to support the claim that rape is "about keeping women as a class fearful." It is my actual experience that rapists are a selfish and often solipsistic type of men, with very immediate and parochial urges towards domination.

Rape is about domination. That's the truism, and even though it is obviously a sexual violation, and therefore strictly "about sex," despite the quoted claims to the contrary above, I have met very few rapists who actually had the goal of sexual satiety. For the majority of them, the goal - the expressed, stated, conscious, understood goal - was to hunt and capture a woman as a prey animal.

To kill her, in his mind, by penetrating her. To own and dominate her. To leave his mark on her mind.

I accept this truism. It is valid, and my own limited work in the area sure seems to bear it out.

But the undemonstrated assertion that men rape as a class act of domination bothers me - because I think it ends up as tenet of belief that has no solid corroboration, and one which serves to confuse the issue more than it can or could shed light on it, at least without a data set.

Is it possible that rapists tend to see women as interchangeable victims, as types of a categorical class - even if they couldn't put it in those terms? Sure. But, I'd be very interested in corroborating data.

If anyone has real data, I'd very much appreciate a link to it.

Thanks,

Jack

Pardon Me

Leonard Peltier still rots in prison. Turkey goes free. Need I type more?

Militarize Everything

"An unusual breed of Asian snakes can glide long distances in the air, and the Department of Defense is funding research at Virginia Tech to find out why...

...As video of the reptiles show, they undulate from side to side, in almost an air-slithering, to create an aerodynamic system. It allows them to travel from the top of the biggest trees in the region (almost 200 feet high) to a spot about 780 feet away from the tree's trunk...

'The snake is very active in the air, and you can kind of envision it as having multiple segments that become multiple wings,' he said. 'The leading edge becomes the trailer and then the trailer become the leading edge.' 

It gets stranger. During a technique not yet understood, some of the snakes can actually turn in air. What's more, they all take a flying leap off their perch to get airborne, then drop for a while to pick up speed before starting the motion that keeps them aloft much longer than they would otherwise. 

Socha's initial research was sponsored by the National Geographic Society, but his most recent work and paper were funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. The agency is involved in advanced military technologies of all kinds, and Socha said the physical dynamics of snake flight (and how other creatures stay in the air) is of great interest to the agency
.
DARPA did not respond to an e-mail asking for more information. However, Socha's upcoming paper on the dynamics of gliding snakes in the journal Bioinspiration and Biomimetics does list DARPA as its financial sponsor..."

Source.

  ...everything is a resource to capital, and to its enforcement organs. Everything. When they've militarized snake flight, it will be to militarize more of the human mind. Unless, of course, your mind flowers from a body which happens to have been stupid enough to be born underneath capital's bombs...

My Kind of Grifter

"KABUL, Afghanistan — For months, the secret talks unfolding between Taliban and Afghan leaders to end the war appeared to be showing promise, if only because of the appearance of a certain insurgent leader at one end of the table: Mullah Akhtar Muhammad Mansour, one of the most senior commanders in the Taliban movement. 

But now, it turns out, Mr. Mansour was apparently not Mr. Mansour at all. In an episode that could have been lifted from a spy novel, United States and Afghan officials now say the Afghan man was an impostor, and high-level discussions conducted with the assistance of NATO appear to have achieved little. 

'It’s not him,” said a Western diplomat in Kabul intimately involved in the discussions. “And we gave him a lot of money.'” 

Source.


All was right with the world for about 3.68 seconds, today. Grifting impostor takes US money, takes lesson from Israeli negotiators, applies it to Israel's primary benefactor.

The God of War Loves Barack Obama

"(Nov. 23) -- North Korea fired more than 100 artillery shells onto a South Korean border island today, killing two southern marines and wounding 18 others in a brazen attack that prompted the South to return fire and put its military on its highest non-wartime alert."

Source.

Smacking North Korea around has the added benefit of letting Iran know what's in store.

Clustered Sitdowns, Management Has Spoken

BDR:

"...These clusterfucks, the romantic egoist in me wants to believe them the awesomest clusterfucks ever, but I wonder, doesn't every generation think their time the clusterfuckest ever? Are humans fundamentally shittier than ever or just as shitty with enhanced surveillance capability? Here, let me type anti-Corporate invective into googleblooger and plunge send.

In any case, those patdowns in airports are training whacks on your snout to sit the fuck down and STFU when told to sit the fuck down and STFU. Our overlords are busy negotiating the terms of our complicity too..."

There is a service we can provide here, if so inclined. Get. This. Message. Out.  

The internet may be going pyramids and skyscrapers, soon - but it still has its back alleys and speakeasies and a lot of us chill on the doorsteps and fire escapes of both. Spread it by way of poor man's balconies; whisper it on the doorsteps. Spread it beneath the street lights. Spread it.

We have other complicities available to us. Ones which the bosses can learn to fear.

Learn It

Wealthy white dude (starred in a baseball movie, and in a movie about Vietnam), who makes stupid faces in a stupid show about fucking lots of women, goes after wife with knife, gets time in rehab:

Wealthy black guy (starred in the same baseball movie, and in a different movie about Vietnam), who makes movies about a martial arts loner against the world, neglects Uncle's portion of the Empire bill, gets three years in the custody of the federales:

The Devil Swings

He does, he really does. Yep - the great imaginary rebel against a tyrant god has got some groove.







I love a band that combines my two favorite forms of music - swing jazz and metal. Not everyone may appreciate Annlouice's vocal style - but fuck it, right?