MORATORIUM!

I'm declaring a moratorium on stupid radfems. No existing for a month.

In the mean time here's a time line:

22 june, 2006: I write a blog post pointing out that secret organisations never end well, in response to the revelation that Middle Managers like Kos and John Avarosis had been operating a little thing called "townhouse".

Quoth myself:

Now the thing that occurs to me is, WHY ON EARTH DO YOU NEED TO DO THIS THING IN SECRET!? Come on Kos, even you must be able to figure out that that was going to come back to bite you in the ass at some point, you’re coordinating and holding discussion with a group of left wing and democratic party supporting journalists, bloggers and activists via this mailing list, and you’ve sworn them to secrecy? Why on earth would you do that? Hell-fucking-lo Kos, did you not realize that a “new people-powered movement”, has to, you know, NOT involve an exclusive and secretive group of media peeps holding closed discussion that could effect the wider movement? Did you not understand that a freaking mystic oligarchy is probably not the best way to organize support for the democratic party? Are you not aware that you have justified any rightwinger who now calls you a “stalinist”? You’ve made a crazy right wing insult accurate for god’s sake, even Bill “I invented Gitmo for HIV+ Haitians” Clinton hasn’t done that.

Suffice to say that I am not a fan of secret oligarchies - if you can't run your conspiracy in plain view you probably shouldn't run it. transparency is an issue with such things, as is accountability.

And as with all things, knowing is half the battle. (The other half? Guitar Hero!)

Sometime in 2007: belle sets up a secret email list, for reasons that I can't help but call "abject laziness". From an outsider's POV it sounds pretty much like she just tricked some WOC into acting as gophers because she was too busy to bookmark some sites/type in their URL/follow links around herself - stuff that's neither time consuming or difficult basically, but which nonetheless was sold to the WOC as a sort of safe space for people who get crap thrown at them.

Of course the road to hell is paved with good intentions...

sometime in or around early december, 2007: flamefest erupts because of some stuff Amber starts by slapping people in the head with her racist parents (father or mother depending on what day you ask about it), leading to Donna and M leaving the secret email club, and thus depriving Belle of her two main gophers and thus causing the whole thing to devolve into a "we H8 Hrt" club...but *secret*, because otherwise bitching about Heart starting silly little (open) safe spaces wouldn't be ironic and fucked up.

God forbid someone take the higher ground and keep it for five fucking seconds....

Mid december 2007: Amber runs whining to Bitch|Lab, thus prompting this thread, which manages to make both BL and Amber look like complete assholes.

Some of the points BL makes are valid though, especially the ones about "wow, doesn't actually forming a little posse make everyone who scoffed at Marcotte accusing us of having a secret cabal, kinda look like idiots now huh?"

But Belle disagreed! And so calls BL and Amber self centered (presumably after fixing large brass rings around her head to stop it exploding from mental dissonance) in a post that neither mentions names nor links to anything, thus leaving anyone who didn't already know what the fuck she was talking about in the dark, and making a public post kinda...pointless, nonsensical? One can only assume following the advice she gives in her own post was too much for the poor little lambykins, aww.

Bonus Dilbert Points of course for complaining about how she doesn't have the time for the busy and complex business of moderating the groups she created primarily because she was too busy to just fucking read blogs in the first place.

And there's hte special honorable mention for how catbert there acts as though it's shocking, SHOCKING that BL might have been pissed off at the whole thing, "but we were BFF! I mean you've written a lot about how you object to those inner circle type cliques after having seen it tear apart so many other groups you've been involved with, and I did exclude you from the group, and insult your intelligence a bit when you did find out about it, but seriously why are you acting like such a jerk towards me, jeez..."

Skip ahead a bit, Belle has curled up into her email based womb (again), except the group is now a largely (upper-middle class) whites only affair, the blogosphere's not heard much about this because most of the people involved were hubbloggers - lots of the even smaller blogs tend to link into them, and they link into each other, so posts at BL or my blog don't really spread far because they would have to go through those blogs who have pinky sworn to silence on the matter... for the sake of group cohesion or something else that doesn't make any sense.

That's the slight problem with people who you think are smart, but who then go and set up secret white-only oligarchies; any assumptions you made about them being smart were clearly wrong, otherwise they wouldn't have thought that a secret whites-only oligarchy was a really neat idea.

During this period I'm a bit confuddled. Basically my life since july has gone:

- homeless.

- stay at friend's place.

- Start experiencing rage attacks along with massive stress based crying jags as a result of the homeless period.

- Anorexia goes into overdrive and my period disappears during late august, but fortunately it reappears when I get my eating pattern sorted out again

- Ren randomly insults me, her commenters go all borg-esque on me and join in. As the insults tend less towards "R is being stupid and btichy and needs to get a grip" and more towards "oh R is a terrible writer, everything she says is just wrong" and others that were basically their generic anti-heart comments with my name in place, even if that didn't make all that much sense.

- Due to the sheer randomness of the attacks and my general low self esteem, I flounce and do an impression of Zippy the pin-head. Admittedly not my finest hour.

- find new apartment, start moving in.

- I start blogging again. Amanda starts yet another round of bullshit.

- start new job.

- finally see BL's post about Belle's secret treehouse club and I'm pissed off, but not sure whether to really take it up because while it raises huge warning flags in my mind, just from the basic concept* of an inner circle like that developing, and regardless of the reasons for it, becuase I know from history that such things never stay true to their origins, no matter how noble. And then their's the issue of the massive empathy failier on Belle and Co's parts, I mean, anyone who's read BL's work during the sex wars or burkagate should have been able to tell that BL was going to have issues with such a thing, and for belle to turn around and pretend that it's totally invalid to have issues with such a thing...

And then as I'm starting to think that maybe I can just ignore it, let the whole thing be, Ren's brings the butt hurt.

Not just any butthurt though, we're talking prime A-grade racist butthurt.

With. Sprinkles.

I should point out that this came after another, almost as bad thread; where Ren let her commenter turn her place into a cesspit, and you remember how I accused Marc of humping his recently deceased dog to death? Well it turned out that I actually do have a standard of decency wrt rhetoric.

That level is reached at about the point where, in response to a relatively tame attack post for Ginmar, Ren commentariat suddenly decided that accusing Ginmar of being mentally ill as a way to dismiss what she was saying.

I think the fact that they were using Ginmar's PTSD, which she got from serving in Gulf War 1, as a way to dismiss her was as bad if not worse than the whole using a mental disorder someone suffers with to attack them, because it is ridiculously dehumanizing - and again this was from people, including Belle, who'd talked, previously, about the importance of empathy and how they stood against dehumanizing people and the violence that that leads to, who suddenly turned around and threw all that out of hte window.
So I wade in, as I am want...

Oh no, if Ginmar chose to join up... well it's what she deserved for helping american imperialism and she has no one to blame but herself...

Comment after comment like that. From Ren, from belle, from others who should know better.

And I'm looking around and I'm starting to get that odd prickling sensation on the back of my neck because I suddenly realise that all of her regular commenters are all, exclusively, upper middleclass, and spewing the most hateful classist bullshit imaginable, at women like me who are getting screwed over by the system they benefit from without the costs that we have to endure for their comfort.

Because anyone who pretends that the working class are not given three, equally evil, choices in life, to either join up with the military, turn to crime and get put in jail, or to be slowly killed by the soul destroying working that will, if we're really really Lucky, provide just enough to keep a roof over our heads and maybe put some instant ramen in our stomachs as well, is a fucking evil bastard themselves, who has decided to make themselves complicit in the oppression working class poeple like myself experience.

Because those rage attacks I've been suffering are due to both the way I got treated while out on the streets last year, and the first time I was homeless back in the 90's as well, by other people, and the little voice inside my head, that told me that it was all my fault and that I deserve that kind of treatment.

Because underlying all the oppression people face is erasure, both the willingness of the victims to accept the bullshit notion of some how deserving to be tortured by a system of Hate, and that willingness of seemingly rational human beings to, with out cause or seeming prompting, to suddenly declare that black people are just jealous when they complain, or Latin@s are just being lazy when they demand a human wage. Underlying oppression is a society that is willing to do any, ANYTHING, rather than admit that such oppression exists, let alone that We, that meta-textual Us, is in any way responsible for it.

And after witnessing that bullshit being thrown by Ren's pals with her tacit acceptance, after the shit with the email list, with Amanda's crap again and again...

That's when I saw this at ren's place.

Ren was told by Kate that a term she used made Ren's blog hostile to her. Kate is voicing how Ren's writing makes her feel, in a remarkably polite way, and asking Ren to do something that really doesn't cost Ren.

So obviously ren did what any Ally would do: she declared that she was asian and then started waffling about how she deosn't do Politically Correct while utterly dismissing Kate's expereince of racism, while dismissing the hurt that Ren's words can.

Because oppression of Ren is the One True Oppression, accept no substitute folks.

And the thing I have to ask, in retrospect, given the entire bushel of bullshit is basically this:

WHAT THE FUCK HAPPENED TO THOSE PEOPLE!?

I mean because we discussed that sort of thing, I rememeber conversations involving how to be a better ally that dealt with just that sort of sitaution, and everyone being a racist asshole in that thread has called other white people on pulling that crap so...

I'm looking at the people who are supposedly anti-racist, and who've demonstrated intelligence in the past and who has demonstrated that they know better and yet...

And I've been shying away from this, because like a crap Ally myself I've been afraid, cowardly even, my lifes chaotic, and the amount of emotional investment required to, once again, completely write off people I'd thought "Got It", thought were true allies, not with myself, but with the people who need allies, the people who get it in the neck when people like us don't pull through and don't speak up, and let them come for their children because they ain't coming for us yet, and it turned out I was nieve, stupid, cowardly and blind.

I could stand being personally insulted, because there is nothing any of those scumbags could say that is worse than what I say to myself, and I could stand silliness that was probably going to lead to an epic, mind boggling blowout that would at least be fun to watch.

But then Amanda goes and out does herself, and I see another good writer, not one of the heartless sychophantic hacks who buzz around Ren, for obvious metaphorical reasons, but a good writer, and a strong women, and a good woman, and I see how it affects all those other beautiful and I see these silly little cliqueish types, buzzing around it all, saing not very much apart from a bit of empty posturing that makes promises their hearts can't cash, and I'm torn between vomiting and killing myself, because maybe I did something wrong? Maybe the degeneration of these people from actual allies into pathetic self absorbed racists.
Except I'm still blaming mysefl for other people's failings, and I'm suffering because of their problems, and causing suffering because I'm trying to accomadate the feelings of such losers, and staying silent not for any valid reason, but to maintain some fantastic notion I have that the group that we're all tied up in is worth more than actaully supporting those beautiful women who get silenced while the hacks keep chortling to themselves in their dirty little whites only club.

The hell with that.

You still reading this?

I'll be back on the 20th of next month, and you remember that R. Mildred from waaay back who was kinda awesome, back before everyone turned into jagoffs? She'll be back too. I'm gonna clear my head, sort my self out, make out those clear boundaries between myself and the bastard world that got destoryed at some point, see if I can't squeeze a little more free time for RL activism and then I shall return.

And one more thing:

After burkagate, I vowed to punch Amanda in the face should our paths ever accidentally cross.

After this Seal house explosion let me make this promise; should I happen to bump into Bfp, or BA, or M, or Donna or yes, even Nez, I promise to pick them up and mercilessly soak their feet.

It's a tough job, but someone's got to do it.

Peace out.

I am being quiet

I am being quiet about the whoel Seal press bullshit/appropriation of BFP's voice/the silencing of BFP's Voice by Hillary Voters thing becuase I don't want to start off about Ren and Belle's general bullshit because:

A) I don't want to center something about white people that shouldn't be centered around white people because that's what the white people want me to do really.

B) I don't want to get into the habit of mocking people suffering from mental illness, and NPD is a mental illness as far as I'm concerned, even if the whole "being in a co-depedent relationship with The Seelhoff and the rest of the Nuns Who Say 'Ni!'*" thing isn't a mental illness (get well soon you two).

and C) I think I've proven with both Marcotte and chasingmoksha that I pretty effectively suck at the whole "teaching potential white allies that it doesn't cost you anything to not be a racist douchbag", especially in the face of Ren's intermittent illiteracy thing (and get well from that too hon, you have nothing but my pity atm).

So I'm just leaving it for hte moment, and hoping that BFP comes back when she's hungry rather than doing that whole Obi-Wan style "turn into a large blue ghost, appear randomly to despence advice".

Which you know can only lead to BA breaking her finger when BFP appears unexpectedly while BA's flicking the bean and some poor white ally getting stuck playing Whoopi Goldberg to BFP's Patrick Swaze and translating her for the betterment of other POC.

So I'm sending helaing vibes (well, I'm not actually sending vibrators, because they don't grow on trees you know, but I am using healing vibes at the moment, srsly, this one is allegedly a "back massager" for instance. And if being a white ally doesn't mean "showing largely hollow and meaingingless support for POC while avoiding inconveniencing myself" then I honestly and sincerely don't know what does**) and doing what will best help WOC in this chunky period asshole white ladies are throwing at them I.E. avoiding actually giving them more problems.

Just think of me as a Rodent Cheerleader - a mouse with little pompoms in its forepaws, dressed in a miniskirt and doing the splits for no satisfactory reason.

* So called because while they're probably fine with shrubbery, the whole political lesbian thing points to them having severe problems with honest to god bush ifyouknowwhatImean...

** Because I have a room temperature IQ (celsius, not farenheit), duh.

Holy fuck: Like slavery

(Via) I'm picking "holy crap!" as my witty commentary on this:

"I pulled up in a car and rolled down the window," he recalls. "Someone said, 'Do you want to get a person?'"

Though the country was in a time of political chaos, the street where he met the trafficker was clean and relatively quiet. A tape of the conversation reveals a calm, concise transaction. He was initially told he could get a 9-year-old sex partner/house slave for $100, but he bargained it down to $50.

"The thing that struck me more than anything afterwards was how incredibly banal the transaction was. It was as if I was negotiating on the street for a used stereo."

In the end, he agreed on the price, but told the trader not to make any moves.

"When I was talking to traffickers, I had a principle that I wouldn't pay for human life," he says.

This principle enabled him to keep a certain distance from the system, but not giving in to the temptation to free a suffering human being was an emotionally taxing struggle, he says.

"It's one thing when you are planning an effort like this, this is a work of journalism — I'm not going to interfere with my subjects. It's another thing when you are in an underground brothel in Bucharest, who has this girl with Down Syndrome, who you know is undergoing rape several times a day. When this girl is offered to me in trade for a used car ... I walk away ... it's not an easy thing to do," he says.

Dear Belle, in between crashing the gates, have you considered maybe introducing people to an IRC Channel?

So belle just randomly decided that a private mailing list that then devolved into some silly heavy breathing USEnet clone was a good idea:

How does that make everyone feel?

Cosby Kid Mychal Bell to perform Plea Perjory against the other 5 Jena defendants

The prosecution for the Jena 6 is back with a brand new vision: Mychal Bell advised to commit plea perjory make a plea bargain to avoid having his previous thrown in his face, on account of so called "overwhelming evidence". (via*)

Note of course that it is unlikely that Mychal bell's testimony will be considered invalid THIS TIME, due to not accusing poor ickle sawn-off shotgun weilding white kids of threatening him with a gun (which, remember, led to him being charged with theft), but is basically being forced to throw his co-defendants, some of whom were probably not even there a the start of the school yard brawl that culminated this mess into a national scandal, into the legal threshing machine to save his own ass.

What do you think Prognosticatory Deep Sea Anglerfish?**


Okay, now could everyone who whined and moaned in defense of the "poor" "boys" of the Duke Lacrosse team when they were "unfairly" "maligned", "had their lives ruined" and "persecuted", please take one step forward.

Okay, now note how much your hyperbole failed. because let's be honest, there was no bias with the Lacrosse Rape case.
There was no boys involved even. There was no year long fight just to get the Lacrosse rapists charged with a crime they might possibly have committed, rather than murder wiht a deadly weapon and conspiracy to commit murder with a deadly weapon. What the Lacrosse Rapists did, didn't occur after two previous fights had been started by the stripper, the penultimate one of which involved her waving a sawn-off shotgun around while threatening to rape the Lacrosse crackers herself. And the result of the stripper waving a sawn-off shotgun around certainly wouldn't have ended with the Lacrosse rapists being charged with theft because they wrestled the gun off of her. And even then, rape, unlike a randomised schoolyard beating, is never justifiable, whereas handing a beatdown to shotgun waving racist moron is something I find hard to condemn for some inexplicable reason. Can't think why. /sarcasm

So let's cut it down to the bone here; after a year of struggle by civil rights campaigners to get the ridiculously human schoolyard fight redefined as something other than assault with a deadly weapon, because, if the "why you're picking on us?" folks in Jena are to believed then Jena is full of people who believe that the Boxer rebelliion was put down through western jesustude, rather than because bullets work. After a year the decision to down grade "tennis shoes" from the status of a deadly weapon back to an item of clothing was forced upon Jena, so that instead of six minors being charged as adults we have... six minors being charged as adults, some of them for a crime they probably didn't commit anyway, even if you accept the whole nonsense of putting kids into adult prison for a schoolyard fight that even the most extreme pacifist would admit was kinda unavoidable at that point. But it's at least no longer a charge that's actively taking huge heaping ten gallon hats full of piss, and makes the marcottian style "buh...buh...buh...but we're not racist!" pleas form Jena residents stretch belief beyond the breaking point.

Or at least, the current charges don't stretch belief taht far as long as you ignore the whole "juveniles being tried as adults" thing, and the whole "juveniles being tried as adults for a playground fight" thing and are prepared to ignore that the Jena courts have by this point earned enough contempt to make any unbiased bystander arrestable for contempt of court.

Oh, and the way that one of the adolescents is now being pressured with arrest on a prior offense - which of course the police and courts could ignore before because it's never "conspiracy to pervert the course of justice" when the police and courts make sure that crimes are just...forgotten, when it's convenient and when doing so helpfully allows them to get previously untrustworthy witnesses to say whatever the hell the prosecution wants them to say.

Especially when it's likely not true in the cases of a few of the Jena Remainders.

However, the one thing I really hope I don't see is people bitching about how Mychal Bell is a snitch and has let down the other Jena defendants. If you accept the charges, then a fair trial would likely find Mychal guilty enough to send him to one of hte institutional rape camps we call "prison". He's stuck between a rock and a hard place then, either sacrifice himself so that the authorities can't send the message they want to send*** or take the council his, likely very pale (I can't find a picture of mychal bell's lawyer so I might be wrong on that point), lawyer is advising. Yes, the noble thing for him to do is to take the butt raping for the team but let me reiterating that main point again:

He's a kid, not some 20-something Duke brat but an actual "boy", who shouldn't be being looking at an adult punishment for a crime that is still so unbelievably silly, and yet who is being advised by all the adults who are able to contact him at the moment to snitch. Damn right he's scared because the authorities are telling him that they can get him, irregardless of whether it makes sense or whether he actually did something, it's the message he's being used by the authorities to convey, and it's one that's clearly been conveyed to him already. And like a kid, he's not doing the noble self sacrificing thing instead of the dirt selfish thing.

Because.

He's.

A Kid.

That they're trying to send the message they're sending is disgusting enough, htat they trying to cosbify this kid into passing the message along to the black community, no doubt as an extra litle racist "fuck you" created in response to this year's earlier demonstrations and fight by the nation's POC to get the original extra-bullshitty charges dropped - which one will remember really annoyed alot of the white folk in Jena even as they *snort* plead innocent to the charge of racism - that manages to go beyond even the usual bottom feeding, slimy, scum sucking bastardry typical of say the LAPD and begins to chart whole new courses into the murky waters of Mare Strom Thurmond.

* and yet more from BA here.

** crappy picture courtesy of Photoshop Elements, which I finally got my hands on and which turns out to suck more than the free Ultimate Paint program I usually use. Photoshop sucks. bleh.

*** because the courts in Jena, due to them following through on this ludicrous charge, after the even more ludicrous charges they had before, are rather obviously trying to send nohting less than a rather obvious message to the black community of Jena and the surrounding areas that white folk can still "destroy you with a stroke of a pen". Which in my non-legal pov works out to what amounts to a hate crime - akin to, if not hugely WORSE than, the original noose hangings, except this time it'll end with the Jena 6 getting anally raped by vengeful white prison guards.

Ugly Is As Ugly be

Despite what Bfp's smoking, and to quote what the devil likely said when he saw Ike Turner walk into hell:

"I'd hit it."

"uglies" my ass...*

Am I right in understanding that the whole New Orleans Demolitions thing, where folks are having what they had, back before Hurricane Horse Doctor Bush Appointee fucked them over, torn down for reasons of yuppies, is going on at the same time as some shit where the same folks are having what they got given in replacement for the shit that's getting torn down, which consists of randomized trailors in randomized trailor parks surrounded by crazy racist white people usually, taken away because "it was just a temporary thing" and other various ways of explictly not saying "HOLY CRAP! BLACK PEOPLE! ICK EWW GET AWAY FROM ME AND MINE ALREADY!" and generally having the replacement for the shit that's getting torn down replaced with a huge heaping of jack and squat? Is my understanding correct? something about the land leases or something being withdrawn (so that the refugees from Katrina are literally having the ground pulled from under their feet), I forget where I saw it.

anyone else hear that? it wasn't just some horrible nightmare I had or something was it?

* which is not to say that I disagree with Bfp's metaphors and stuff, but it's backwards saturday and I see no reason to agree with her in an agreeable way, purely because I am that much of an asshole, and I had to work the Ike Turner gag in somehow.

Fun!Random Factoids

Here's the wiki page on the Mann Act (which some of the pro-stitution types might find interesting, along with the wiki page on the first guy arrested under this act).

And speaking of people arrested under the Mann Act, here's Charlie Chaplin's FBI file.

And in less hilarious news, some of you may have heard of things like the Active Denial System (which is where troops and hopefully police will be given huge microwave guns that they can use to cause huge amounts of pain to people they don't like).

Well I'm not going ot talk about that, but a related project that also involve evil crowd control lasers, known as PEP.

Now I was under the misapprehension apparently that PEP was evil because it was designed, primarily, to be able to flay the skin of people/cause their eyeballs/lungs to explode/all of the above so as to "subdue" them in a "non-lethal" way.

However, recent tests indicate that it can also be used as a long range taser, if tazers could cause people's lungs to explode with the side effect(!) of causing mere pain and paralysis in people hit by it.

And speaking of paralysis, it seems that some folks have been trying their hand at Weather Control experiments (again) - but the kicker is that they've decided to use a poisonous element called Barium to seed the clouds, thus showering folks with an element that is quite quite poisonous should it become diluted in water and drank.

And on that note, I should just point out that the weather will be fine until 12:07 AM, when a shower will commence, lasting until 1:30 AM...

Have a pleasant evening.

A Modest Proposal, for all those concerned folks out there

Posted this over at apostate's blog:

You do realise that the logical end point of your thesis actually still makes the parents of both ashley and leslie into barbarians monsters, if not actually communist traitors of some kind, right?

Because if we do accept that we must perform peter pan ops and start fiddling with little kids genitalia due to A) rape being an absolute known fact of their future* and B) the fact that they are aware enough of their surroundings to actually find menstruation, rape and giving birth traumatic**, then the only sensible thing to do to people suffering from severe mental disabilities is to either:

1) give them a full blown sex change, because if we accept premise A and B this half assed hysterectomy crap just isn't good enough, because she'll still be raped, she just won't be able to be impregnated, while changing her sex would actually solve the entire rape problem* to a large extent.

Or failing that, 2) fuck all this scooping out internal organs that her body kinda needs to regulate her endocrine system, instead, surgeons should just go in and cut off the various nerves that allow her to actually sense the world around her, because the problem vis a vis "her" "welfare" largely rests on her being able to be traumatised, which would be kinda hard for the hollow lump of flesh that has stolen the form of a human being in question to do if they did the truly kind thing, which is to make her even more disabled than she already is.

Also, full amputation of most of her body would be ideal with option number 2, in fact - if it was scientifically possible of course - we really should just parse her down to a head in a jar, as that would alleviate both herself and her carers of the burden of her having a body, with, like, fluids and other gross stuff.

* which is the most charming aspect of the whole thing if you ask me, "disabled women are being raped, quick! whip our their ovaries so we won't know about it!"
**which is where the constant fetii/teri schiavio comparisons stop working of course, because neither fetii nor teri were that aware, and teri had actually made it clear that she wanted to die if she became a vegetable, but never mind "logic" dude. Seriously, when comparing stuff, the things you compare must do so because they share some sort of commonality, if I compare pickles and baby seals because they're both abstract two dimensional shapes, that's gibberish, not logic.
*** this of course means that the ashley treatment is bad as well, because people who fuck mentally disabled women will fucked mentally disabled girls just as readily, therefore only a full FTM sex change operation has any real chance of keeping the plague of nursing home rapists that is sweeping the first world away from the genitalia of these poor ickly "pillow angels".

Too modest a proposal? not modest enough?

Random Fluffy Video Post

I love that the Jena spokeman is still complaining about his town's reputation being maligned and "stereotyped". Oh and the usual "but we're so nice around here!" thing

Yeah, like having a judicial system that is so racist it actually stands out amid the usual injustices and quickly-swept-under-the-rug acts of terrorism on the parts of the NY and LAPD is not a problem, or that your kids are prone to hanging nooses about the place as a "joke".

At this point it's the sheer blatantness of the whole "nice" "polite" "eloquent" "civil" code-wordpalooza that pisses me off, I know they're lying, I've been lied to before by other liars and bigots using those exact words, and they are not even words that could, even jokingly, be considered particularly subtle code words, because those words so consistently and routinely are used to excuse fucked up actions* that I have no idea what you're trying to achieve...

well I lie, I know what you're trying to achieve, and that is to sooth watching white lurkers that you're not really "bad", after all, you did the white minimum remorse dance, and can't we just move on? followed up by the ready dismissal of arguements you don't have any code words against, until the willing blindeness leads your temper to get hte best of you, and oops, now you gotta pull the "I didn't reply before because the exact same arguements I am now responding to were just people Stirring Trouble (dun dun dun!)" followed by a bad answer, a stupid answer, and finally marginal (but grumbling and reluctant!) acceptance that, yes, maybe I might have done something bad, you know"

"But can't we just move on?" you add with a impish grin, playing to the white lense, maybe with a bit of classism and/or sexism sprayed back and forth to cover your fifty foot high code worded bullshit.

Then you cycle once more around the ever so merry meritocracy-go-round.

This liberalism, conservative, moderate, centrist, thing, it's revolutionary, truly, nothing revolves quite like it.

NOTE: Aristrocracy means "rule by the best", Meritocracy means (roughly, give or take a neologism) "Rule by those who deserve to".
NOTE: both are used as after the fact and hugely revisionist bullshit phrases to validate and normalise dysfunctional systems.
NOTE: both descriptions' failure to go into anything about the method by which they are "aristocracies" - even with the still really vague term "democracy" you know that a system that is not a democracy is one which does not actually entertain rule by "the people", even if that does leave legalese wriggle room for careful definitions of who are "the people" - and this therefore leaves a huge aching gap wherein can be placed any system you like.

While ignoring the teeny tiny point that no system has ever existed where people sat down and actually worked out a way to intentionally ensure that only the worst and most incompetent were given power to rule countries (which means that the term "meritocratic" is completely redundant, as all systems have set out to be so, but are not for various reasons).

Though countless groups of "well meaning" people with quite... err... loudly stated... "good" "intent" have managed to consistently ensure that such a wankocracy has existed - in so far as people who are most prone to assure their critics that they "meant well" and are most likely to describe their system as a "meritocracy" are quite spectacularly prone to being complete and utter shitheads who shoudn't legally be allowed within a hundred yards of a kindagarten, let alone allowed to run a country or two.

All current systems are revisionocractic in nature, reliant on the lies and carefully censured histories that support the validity of their adminstrations and rules.

A working system will, by definition, not be so.

* first thing I'm doing with a time machine will be to go back and shoot Kant. Srsly. goddamn "intent" obsessed revisionist mother fuckers, fuck your tents, fuck those who are in those tents, fucking tent fucking fuckers.

The Crab Louse

So, false conciousness, whatcha going to do?

False conciousness was an idea posited back in Marx's day, it was basically a "woods for the trees" style of thing then - workers given slight privelages as a result of enabling the exploitation of the workers by, say, breaking a strike or something so as to get short term gains, such as being paid for working during a strike during a time of high unemployment, over the long terms gains of there being A) more work for all (so that cake could be had while it was also eaten - through the simple means of having more than one cake at a time) and B) that everyone who works isn't horribly mangled to death inside machinery for a non-living wage.

A slightly clearer and more common sense example of false conciousness is substance abuse - for the length of the buzz the person with the chemistry problem can avoid the problems they're running from, making it, in most cases, a sensible solution to life in the short term, even if it does more often than not lead to that most ultimate of long term solutions; death. Of course the trouble iwth substance abuse is that it often gets in the way of dealing with the problem you're running from in the long term - not least of which because the long term solution will provide short term problems, which are not really helped if you're DTing or tripping off your tits at the same time.

In modern feminist terms then, the best example of false conciousness is... men.

Now I know, I know, normative feminist discourse pretty much requires that talk of false consciousness be focused on how women ain't to knowing what they be wantin' - but that's bullshit, and some what contradicts Feminist's Law (women are people too).

as Amy's Brain Today quite rightly points out, Again and again we talk about how men hate us, how men screw us over:

When a 30-year-old man forces his penis into the mouth of a child, it’s not date rape, it’s not some necking that got out of hand. He’s not thinking she’s consenting; he doesn’t care. When three college students viciously beat and rape a woman in a houseful of people, it wasn’t because she didn’t say “no” loudly enough. When three 18-year-olds purposely drug the drink of a 16-year-old woman and violate her in every way possible with penises and objects while she’s passed out, and make a video of it, it’s not a misunderstanding. She’s an object to them, a thing to be used, and the damage to her doesn’t even matter because there will be more where she came from.

Of course she then goes on to try to rationalize seperatism, which I reject on the simple grounds that I plan to spend my retirement waving the petrified penis of dick cheney around on the end of a key chain while yelling "dick cheney! Dick CHAINEY! Geddit? Eh, eh?" at random people in the super market, which revolution by seperatism doesn't allow.

There are good reason to reject seperatism of course, it's just that most of them start of with the holocaust, then points out that the jews tried seperatism, and it really didn't work on any level.

Which'd be kinda dull, and whipping out the holocaust as a sensible, non-bolic, point in a well reasoned arguement is not in the spirit of the intertubes.

The thing is that, seeing as men are the problem, and men are the lubricant of patriarchy, as it were, which allows the butt secks of female oppression to... I don't like that metaphor.

Ahem.

If men are the problem, then the solution should, as it were, involve solving this great "male problem"** shouldn't it? I'm just going by logic here, but if we're not able to sort out the male problem, then we can't raise sons, cannot be heterosexual, cannot be free unless we totally keep women and wermen seperate - and the slight trouble with that is that any freedom that relies on such totalistic control over human interactions is not really a free kind of freedom, and therefore kinda pointless.

Because if we seperate before we've got sexual equality, we'll be seperate but unequal, which ain't that big a difference in the status quo really, and we'll be on the ass end of a power imbalance controlled by those weremen we'd be running from.

So let's think of it from a strategic point of view.

The key strategic axioms are:

• Never try to negotiate with your enemy when it isn't in their best interest.
• Never help to increase an imbalance of power between you and your enemy if it's not in your favor.
• Never forget that a pyrric victory is a contradiction in terms.

Okay, well segregation violate the second one clearly, but is it possible to create a power imbalance in the favor of women?

Well no, because that violates the third axiom - you can't create an equal society from a society that rests on slope.

which leaves axiom the first - and that means...

REVOLUCION! Dibs on the meathooks!

Or we could check that there's not some point on which this whole patriarchy thing isn't a bad thing for them too.

This is where false conciousness should be predominantly used with feminist theory.

And of course, such is not how it is used.

After spending any amount of time in the feminist blogosphere you should be familiar with the normative uses of false conciousness - as an ass covering maneuver for poorly thought out theory.

AS far as I can make out, it was introduced when, sometimes during the forelash, circa AD 1949 or so, when society and its feminism were both preparing for some serious cresecendo, some feminists fro mthe upper classes, awash in the socialism that only upperclass, mildly disposessed persons have routinely turned to, started messing around with some marxist.

Now marxist theory has always been a bit problematic when weilded by the upperclasses, by the time Marx and Engels were publishing The Manifesto of the Communist Party in about five languages it already had critiques of contemporary examples of marxist theory used in the most mind bogglingly way.

One of the worst, aside from the precursor to modern "social liberalism" - and yeah, it was a method of protectionaism for the privelages of the "well bred" back then as well, was of course utopianism.

Seperatism is of course a key point within the matrix of the utopianist's thought, the idea being that we should make a unique little protected habitat for the revolutionary, in which noble revolutionary gate keepers would ensure that no stray weeds from the outside world would seep in and corrupt the society from the inside.

Because the movment is so fucking fragile, not being a naturally occuring reaction to oppression that occurs whenever a woman fights to be free, that any interaction with hte world outside the commune would instnatly and without remorse cause teh shoddily built lean to of a movement to collapse upon itslef with a faintly disappointing puff as displaced air pushed some dust out of the windows.

Strangely enough, radical politics doesn't quite work like that, and the utopianist's attempt to find a cheap short cut to a revolved society cannot, a priori, work, due to the most important part of the revolution being the journey, not the destination.

Which is less a physical place, or a building or a city or nation but rather a completed mandala imprinted on the path that the revolutionary walks, made up by the wake we leave with our tread upon the ground, and which is shaped by the obstacles we meet along the way.

In buddhist terms then, utopianism is a buddha needing to be killed to complete the journey, at best a benign obstruction in the radical's path, and at worst a malignant one causing active harm to all and sundry, even able to erase part of the pattern that has already been walked out with a shouty "UR DOIN IT RONG!" now and again if you try to stop it.

Of course, due to it being an inherently false start, and due to it being the sort of false buddha that's kind of hard to miss (I mean, at least with the buddhist version you can't open up a newspaper which carries a front page story that disproves your supposed buddha mind, with color pictures and jesse jackson commenting on it no less) the falseness ended up affecting the theory supporting lesbian seperatism, because they'd bound their ego too much in having the answer to just kill their buddhas.

So they did what most reactionaries do when this sort of problem arises; they blame everyone but themselves.

In this case they decided that, because patriarchy utilises certain activtiies, kinds of clothing, and genderizes behaviors in certain ways, the behaviors, activities and kinds of clothing are therefore oppressive in and of themselves.

You see, in classical radfem analysis the thinking goes from the personal out to political - They see from the "I"; I am oppressed by the normativity of activities X, Y and Z, therefore activities X, Y and Z are oppressive.

However, this sort of approach only works, over any given period of time, if you posit somekind of stasis on patriarchy's part, and pretend that it's not an inductive and responsive creature - it reacts to feedback and changes with time and changes in circumstances.

It flows in other words.

In that flow however is one constant that doesn't change - oppressive systems Oppress.

This means that instead of working from the whole "I'm oppressed like so" logic, we can lay it down with a simple, and slightly more flexible and responsive approach of:

Given that we're dealing with an oppressive system, pretty much everything is going to be oppressive (note we're agreeing with dworkin so far), therefore merely "proving" that activity X is oppressive is akin to saying "activity X exists under an oppressive system" becuase making shit oppressive is what oppressive systems DO, full stop.

So to analyse the system, we have to not merely identify that something IS, we need to know the hows and whys of it, and even more than that, we have to falsify the fucking thing, showing what conditions under which activty X, Y and Z would not be oppressive. Which then becomes something we could use to show, via a ridiculum ad absurdum proof, that activities X, Y and Z are normally oppressive under the oppressive system wihtout having to send Bobby Jensen down the road to rent $45 worth of porn from blockbusters! Because it shows the working out of how the normative modality*** of those activities oppress people!

And so, by a round about way, all sex, under patriarchy, is rape, to within a 0.45% tolerance or so.

but of course, that's a really round about way of saying what it can, if you squint and have brain damage, mean, so let's improve it.

Under patriarchy, rape is, in a remarkably radfem fashion, conflated with consensual sex, because being forced to have sex when you don't want to do is traumatic and oppresses women - thus the normativity of rape is how patriarhcy utilises sex to oppress people.

Now, having pointed out that sexuality is used to oppress people, we must point out the hows and whys of it.

So how does rape oppress people?

Well for starters there's the whiplash effect - the trauma and psychic shadow produced by the ever present fear of rape serves to keep women in their place, it also serves as a tool to use to keep men in line, both as a threat against men who threaten rape normativity, and also to give men a ready and easy method by which they can transfer their oppression by patriarchy and other systems onto women and other men low down the hegemonic heirarchy.

There's also the actual trauma itself, which is pretty oppressive.

Not only that, but there's also the way that rape feeds into, via the whiplash effect, into the homosocial solidarity between men that is needed by patriarchy to utilise normativity for it's own ends, but sex under patriarchy is also used to reinforce patriarchal homosocial bonds between women, and to fuck up solidarity between us that would be used against it. We are taught to place women into the same madonna/whore dichotomy that men put us into, we are taught to hate not only our sexualities, but to hate others for their sexualities.

Now solidarity doesn't mean agreeing with each other, any more than being a penjort - that is to say, a sister-fucker - means disagreeing wiht other women. Indeed, if we cannot disagree, we are not producing paradigm shifting newness, hence a movement without disagreements is a dead one.

Solidarity just means Not Actively screwing othe women over, that includes not telling WOC to get to the back of the bus, not waffling about the fucking "obesity epidemic", not tut tut tutting because you've used your blaming rays to discern the collagen contain of a working class woman's lips, not pretending that anyone under the age of 40 is a fucking 2 year old, not calling transwomen men, not declaring that the "good" whores are all faceless, volitionless victims first, and people second, and that the "bad" whores are all evil scumbags who need to be raped by a police night stick to teach them what whoring is really all about, not calling pornstars whores, not calling femme women whores as well while mistaking butch women for the sterotypical transperson who only lives in your head...

Just, in general, NOT, just not piling these huge mountains of crap onto each other's backs while laughing whenever we stumble under the weight of it all anymore.



Now the falsification. Under patriarchy, sex fails to oppress people when it A) is consensual and is therefore not rape, B) when we are not afraid to be sexual, or conversely aren't afraid to not be sexual if we do not feel like it, C) when it is not seen as something icky or wrong, D) when we are not judged according to our past or present sexual behaviors as long as the sex is sex, and is therefore a consensual act performed between consenting adults, and E) when we do not judge outselves according to the sexual activites of others.
This is because A) Rape is inherently oppressive due to it being an attempt to rob people of their personhood by pretending that such personhood never existed. B) fear of both sexuality and fear of not being sexual crush men and women within the rape culture, prompting men to rape because they feel they must have sex, and forcing women into a mindset whereby sex and sexiness both become a duty and reason to hate oneself. C) an attitude towards sex as something wrong, both teaches men that they should rape women because no woman "worth" sleeping with would want to have sex with them, and produces a society in which "sexual" women, such as prostitutes, are some how dirty and thus acceptable to be abused. So for those really fucking slow radfems at teh back, this means that the abuse of sex workers is reliant on, and produced by, the stigma attached to sex work by patriarchy. And if you don't grasp that the very simple first step towards helping sex workers is nothing more complex than to refuse to see sex work as something inherently wrong, as you routinely state it is, then kindly Fuck. Off. D) When we stigmatize male virignity, or female sexual experience we are teaching men that their personhood is reliant on them fucking women by any means neccesary, which leads to rape, and we teach women that having sexual experience is wrong, which is bullshit. E) When we judge ourselves by others, we get caught up in keeping up with the joneses, become so intent on overcoming those we are jealous or fear that we forget to be ourselves, to satisfy our own needs, and feel the urge to drag others down to validate ourselves. It does not matter, we have no need to care about what they do or do not do, in this life we have the duty to be only two things: Ourselves, in our most honest form, and Good people - empathic, happy and compassionate - by whatever means neccesary. this is the way that we can never become any of those things, it corrupts empathy into jealousy, happiness into greed, compassion in hatred, and so are we forced to lie to both other people and ourselves about our true nature.

It's late and I'm getting philisophical here, do excuse me.

The falsification is to a large extent the crucial part, because by figuring out how an activity ceases to oppress us, we figure out how to act rather than why we should constrain ourselves in our possible actions. I picked sex in this case because that's apparently the only thing the radfems who wave their idiot theories around can think about, but it should apply to other things just as readily.

The point of course is not to merely liberate ourselves, because it can be applied on a larger scale as well; what situations are women only spaces useful for the larger feminist movement, rather htan obstructions to our collective freedom?

First of all, when they are not put forth as the be all and end all of feminism, when they are not put forth as the solution to the problem, but as an aid to building solidarity by giving us breathing spaces from which we can gather and network, and from which we can egress into the real world, and as long as we recognise them as the traps they are and are willing and able to do without them if neccesary. They should work for us, and we should not work for them.

And so even utopianism becomes something that can be used, if understood, recognised for what it is, and its limitations taken into consideration prior to use for the furtherence of our goals.

* i.e. the feminism of the second wavers, and the upper class first wavers too, but basically Dworkin, the other one who's name I forget, Greer, ad nauseum, et al, and the lengthy and quite impressively complex theoretical frame works they've Mcguyver'd out of old jerry cans, some used rubbers and a paper clip since they got swept to prominence during the backlash of the 60's.

** that's an intentional feminazi meta-pun btw.

*** academic speak in that case is covering up a brainfart which robbed me of pertinent words that weren't "normative modality"

Putting the "Realist" back in "Surrealist Comedy"

Scene: An unexploded living room in Baghdad.

WIFE is sitting in a chair facing doorway, arms crossed and an angry expression on her face.

*door opens, and in walks HUSBAND, a bit worse for drink*

WIFE: Oh I'm so glad you felt like coming home tonight.

HUSBAND: *looking sheepish* Sorry darling! I had a metric ton of stuff that needed converting into imperial measurements, those wacky americans! *grins trumphantly*

WIFE: A metric ton of BULLSHIT no doubt! You've been out drinking and carousing again! *she gets up and squints suspciously at HUSBAND's face* I'd bet you even quaffed as well, didn't you! Admit it!

HUSBAND: *drawing himself up in mock indignation* I resent the implication! I promised to stop my quaffing ways when I married you darling! *grabs WIFE by the shoulders in an embrace* Please say you believe me, my days of quaff and cavorting with floozies has been over the moment I met you, my love.

WIFE: *shakes HUSBAND away and strides off angrily before turning back to him* FLOOZIES! Why I never! Here I am, working my fingers to the bone, worrying myself sick that you'd been kidnapped or killed by some american street patrol out, and you've been off diddling some air headed secretary behind my back! Admit it!

HUSBAND: *looking put out* Well I never expected this kind of American trained and supported death squad interrogation.

*suddenly 5 men (1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 5th Death Squaddie) in military uniforms with black face covering hoods over their heads, bursts through the door*

1st DS: Nobody expects an American Trained and Supported Death Squad interrogation! Our chief weapon is surprise!

*3rd DS shoots HUSBAND in the head, killing him*

1st DS: ...And guns. Our TWO mains weapons then, are Surprise!..And guns!

*3rd through 5th DS grab WIFE and proceed to rape her on the floor*

1st DS: ...and rape. Our three main weapons are Suprise! Guns and random acts of brutality and violence (such as rape)!

2nd DS: Don't forget tacit support or at least rampant indiference from the occupational authorities Boss.

1st DS: Uh, YES! So our *counts them off on is fingers* FOUR! Main weapons are... *surveys scene in front room* Oh bugger it, no one's listening to me dammit. *turning to 2nd DS* Tell them when they're done to tie her up and set fire to the place when they're leaving, I'm going out for a smoke.

2nd DS: Sure thing Boss, can do!

*1st DS turns around and leaves*

THE END

Seung Cho had 99 problems but a bitch ain't one

Cho was Asian...

Cho was disturbed...

Cho was an immigrant...

This is the retoric with which the nation is reacting to the virginia tech shootings.

Bellatrys lays the connections down between this set of shootings, the history of randomised gun killings, and our post-9/11 responses to revenge ourselves upon afghans and iraqis with... randomised killings.

Of course while everyone else is psychoanalysing crappy vent fics by Cho, I think I'll focus on psychoanalyising the nation itself.

Because for one thing, the context in which he wrote those are gonna get retconned to make him fit into easy stereotypical conceptions of the lone gunman.

Of course as with all other past shootings, the proceedings are quickly devolving into what is hard to describe as anything other htan a good old fashion freak show.

Here's what Fox has on it's front page right now:


"A Loner", "Disturbed Writings", "Quietly Seethed"...

Aside from the way FOX has decided that a woman sniffing some purple panties should be the face of the virginia shootings hysterics (unless prince was somehow involved)... It's also funny how, year after year after year after year after year these things occur and yet, despite the fact that the gunmen are always revealed by our benevolent news media to be the stereotypical Wolfman Lone Gunman, and there's never a lack of apparent warnings about the state of mind of these monsters... they still happen.

Of course once you're portraying something that horrifies you as monstrous, and describe it using the same route narrative structures and memetic constructs you used the last time some horribly monstrifiable event occurred you're acting in a way that most psychologists would describe as "compulsive" if it's how you react to something.

And the thing is that the more I think of it, the compulsive disassociation that tends to mark the national reaction to these events is pretty normative for it's reaction to anything that's salaciously horrific, the attention of the news orgs seems...to...slip past the true horrors, and cut everything down into simple, pre-existing, concepts, each of which do the exact same thing to all the wildly different topics they're used to cover - whether it's terrorism, or war or whatever - put emotional distance between the readers and the events that unfold, the world gets cut down into peices because if you focus on one shard of the mosaic you can't see the bigger picture and so don't have to deal with the full implications of it all.

There are probably thousands upon thousand of "loners" in this nation, seething and festering and undoubtably entertaining wonderfully histrionic revenge fantasies* - however only one of them shot up Virgin Tech on monday, but even a passing familiarity with the news media would tell you that despite the fact that him being a loner was probably only at best partially the issue with him going postal, this is the probably going to be the core aspect of the reporting of the massacre.

Of course the point of that is to of course mark him clearly as outside the community, outside the connections that would place an obligation upon the community he lived in to either have some way of dealing with people who were as socially disfunctional as Cho was, or to at the very least attempt to find solutions to this recurring problem - not to shift the "blame" as the news orgs are doing when they're not monstrifying Cho, which of course is just another way to disassociate from the tragedy, except instead of Cho being the Outsider, the victims or the school for whatever reason, because if we can peg someone with the blame and Other them, then we can absolve ourselves of any responsibilities we as a society have for what went on that day.

However, let me point out that no matter how I look at the events that day, the school authority could be said to have done anything but fucked up after the shootings began - the hyperfocusing on the "domestic dispute" hypothesis, combined with the apparent blase attitude towards the fact that there was, no matter how you cut it or interpret the initial murders (which included both a man and a woman, and thus makes the whole domestic dispute excuse somewhat nonsensical), a murderer loose upon the campus.

Now you don't need to have a magic 8ball to realise that not warning people that there was an armed killer who wasn't particularly picky about who he killed, and that the VT authorities dropped a rather large ball that turned out to be filled with 30 corpses inside it on that count.

But here's the thing: VT's problems are the nation's problems.

That's what's missing in so much of news coverage, it's so rife with this constant compulsive need to disassociate the readers and viewers from whatever is being covered - not just geographically or emotionally, but socially as well.

This is very interesting because newsmedia and the rightwing especially use disassociation very selectively, and quite maliciously.

You see, the VT authorities' reaction to the shooting didn't just happen - there was a cause, a cause made of a smidgin of racism coupled with a soup con of misogyny on top of a big heaping pile of the it-could-never-happen-heres all of which mean that instead of two murders and a suicide that VT would have been hard pressed to stop, we've got 30 more dead, taking with them not just their personal futures but ideas and concepts and knowledge that will probably have to be recovered from wherever the students and professors killed last decided to write down their notes.

The disassociation from people like cho, and the victims and the events last monday, is the reason why we'll probably have another similar tragedy as a result of the it-could-never-happen-heres - the media Othering of not just the killer, not just the victims (who's personalities are erased quite neatly by all the 2-Dimensional and deeply objectifying "tributes" to the dead while the Pundits are musing on what the victims did wrong, like they foolishly jumped in front of the bullets for giggles and shit or something) but of the event itself.

I didn't pick the term "freak show" up thread as an empty perjorative, the media disassociation of these events, their perpetrators and the victims is the velvet rope or the glass barrier seperating the freaks from the audience - it marks the clear Us/Other dichotomy that is essential if you're gonna suppress any sort of feedback either into teh greater society as a result of the event, or into the specific society that it occured in as result of the greater society's reaction to the event that trickles down to the focus point for all the waves that would otherwise be created by the central event itself.

And what's interesting is that this effect extends far beyond the VT shootings, and is present in the reporting of things ranging from the various middle eastern crisii to Imus or Kramer's respective bigotry blowups.

In the Kramer incident we get this wonderful effect whereby, when he starts making jokes about lynching black members of his audience, the white majority audience hoots and laughs but then he says "nigger" and suddenly, BAM! The trained disassociation kicks in, as suddenly he is marked as outside and other.

Which is a wonderful way to deal with the problems of societal racism, you know, by always marking anyone who says the wrong trigger phrase - not the horrible concept that black folk should shut up and be thankful that they can be in the presence of white folk without getting lynched, oh no - as outside the racist society itself so that their actions can't be linked to any sort of wider propensities towards racism that is posessed by soceity itself.

This of course means that this whole disassociation dance that is so apparent in Cho's treatment by the news orgs, is yet another aspect of Political Correctness.

And of course it works in reverse too, because once you're able to just randomly declare members who, by any sane way of reckoning things, are actually part of the community and society they get disassociated from by the pundits and media, it becomes equally easy for those same pundits and media to associate people with groups and people who they are in no way connected with.

Of course the greatest trick involved in that is to of course create or adapt mythical groups that permeate the racist, sexist, heteronormative and cisgender dialogue, and attach things or behaviors or people to those groups - and then when you want to say attach behavior that you want ot present as abbarent among a favored community to some community of people who are targeted for hate - Imus is a classic example of this because not only did he try to excuse his actions by declaring that "the black community" said stuff like that all the time**, but the media coverage of that event played into that and linked his behavior, and hence himself considering that people are defined by their actions, into the "black community" (whatever taht is).

Which is why when a racist asshole tries to get a public appearance with an african american, and I'm talking largely to you jackson and sharpton, as though you were the frigging pope of the negros and able to absolve him of all sins - DON'T DO IT! No person from an Othered group can absolve a white person of being a racist, forgiveness can be given, but there's no real point to it other than to get you to shut up about it - but for the rest of us white folk, those connections to the black community are crucial becuase they absolve his listeners and the station and the entire rest of society from any responsbility for finding his bullshti to be perfectly acceptable until he tripped over the PC phraseology that requires this complex system of othering.

becuase what the media did was paint imus up in black face - which doesn't say "imus is racist" as hamsher and billmon thought blackfacing would do becuase htey're idiots who didn't bother to even try to research the nasty little concept they were using, but labels imus as black, I.E. Non-White and thus outside the confines of any greater need for the other white folk that made Imus to accept guilt or repsonsibility for making Imus pretty normative for public figures these days.


And this all again applies to the virginia shootings just as much - they declare Cho to be korean or a loner or a nut case, and then they say "We Are VT" and all that other trite bullshit that serves to assure people that they are affected by the shootings as much as those in VT are when they're not, nor could they be.

Imagine if instead of saying "we are VT" we talked about how "Those Around Us Are Cho" in the wake of this tragedy, and we faced up the pain and anguish and challenges this tragedy presents us now...
Could such a thing happen again in that sort of country? Probably, but would it happen as often, and would as many people die?

I doubt it somewhat. And mores to the point, not even trying, not even attempting it, demonising Cho and disassociating from both the tragedy and him, is plain Wrong, no matter how you look at it, no matter you religion or faith or personal ethics, marking him apart when pretty much anyone could have been that 33rd body on the VT campus if only things had been slightly different.

Jesus said*** that as we treat Cho, so do we treat Jesus himself, something a so called "christian nation" and those people who presume to act in His place seem to have forgotten.

Those of us with actual morals and who actually truly feel for the survivors, and weep for them and the dead equally, cannot, and are unable to forget that.

God is long dead to America, and has taken any Beauty this country might have with it, but these scum bags can't take the beauty from our hearts, not if we don't let them - Cho was Jesus, as indeed we all are, and while we still walk and refuse to falter or give up that sacred duty, God walks with us.

* Though of course, the way I'm reading his plays is with the violent swearing protagonists as the people around him who he bitches at in his suicide note, not as himself, and with the step dad from the mr McBeef play being a representation of himself - put upon, trapped and abused by those around him, which fits neatly with the usual Nice Guy messia complex, and even portrays a stereotypical undeserving "jerk" archetype as getting the affection of the single woman figure in that play, while the poor suffering guy is hated and killed by those stuck up assholes who seems so skilled at getting everyone to listen to them and not him.

But on the gripping hand, describing a guy who shot up a school as "a Nice Guy" probably breaks some sort of law about hyper-irony. Rain on your wedding day this is not, but still, a guy who goes around and acts put upon because the world isn't acknowledging his mediocre commitment to social norms of politeness and is basically fetishing how people around him break the alleged social standards of behavior that he holds himself to is far from the sane side of the crazy dichotomy.

** And while I've bitched at Chris Rock in the past for adding to the acceptability of that excuse because he misused the term "nigger" somewhat, it has to be remembered that it's not actually his fault white people are racist assholes who cling to that to justify their bigotry - no african american ever owned a white person, let alone was responsible for their actions and until I have reason to believe it's fair to think that's changed, anyone who tries to pretend that black people are responsible for white folks' actions is a really big fool. Really big.

*** I get really preachy here, don't worry, I've not gone christian again, but the language I'm using expresses what I feel as accurately as I can express otherwise - I think of jesus as a rather secular figure technically, and God as something a damn sight more complex and deep and spiritual than a mere guy with a beard who occasionally waffles about knitting sea monsters (or something) if you question him, so read this bit in that light or at face value if you are a christian.

Oh that's why ren likes it

Ah, Ren has explained it all.

I saw “300” yesterday. I loved it. Visually, I found it to be amazing. The music was amazing. And for all the criticisms of it, the sexist and racist and nationalistic themes and all, I absolutely loved the movie. I will see it again. When the DVD comes out I will buy it. Just like I bought “Gladiator” and “Troy” and “Sin City” and all those other movies that people had issues with but I loved. I loved “300” because you knew they were doomed, but they fought anyway. They fought hard and brutal and bloody and without thought or care or back up, without anyone telling them how or why they could, without remorse or sympathy because they believed in what they were fighting for. They fought because that is what they do. And it made them happy. It made them feel alive. Feeling alive is not always an easy thing to do, you know. Sometimes it’s more like being that body on a table than a Spartan…

I prefer the Spartan feeling…because that’s about fighting, not just being a body. You may die, and it may be futile in they eyes of some, but at least you did something. Your own way. Without support. In a way no one else approves of. Because. It’s what you do.

Ah, oh.

Okay, before I start with stuff that is actually interesting, let me first regale everyone with my historical knowledge of sparta and the battle of thermopylae (however it's spelt, the ancient greeks unfortunately decided that if you didn't have at least two vowels stuck together or had super elongated recurring phonetical structures going on it wasn't a real word, and I am bad with names anyway, and worse with geography) on which historical event the movie "300" is based on...

Okay, what's really pissing me off about what I'm hearing from people who've seen the movie is that the movie doesn't deign to point out why the 300 stood and died there.

This seems to me to be a teensy tiny oversight, I get the impression that it's being presented as the spartans (alone by the sounds of it) who are fighting the persians (who are looking phenomenally black in the advertisements, when modern day persians (not to be confused with "iranians" who are people from iran (which is arabic for "persia"), persians are a distinct ethnic group in iran) are basically "swarthy" to the same degree as the greeks and turkish are, black to white folk, white to black folk - hated by golf clubs in other words, who explode trying to figure out whether they're allowed let them in or whether to discriminate against them, resulting in a Barackian Explosion of racialist confusion) and that's the greco-persian conflict - if the spartans don't hold the line greece will be overrun by those barbaric woggy types.

Ah. I hate to drop history into the mix but my soul is irritated...

Okay, what happened in reality was that sparta and athens realised that they couldn't possibly fight the persian army fairly so they decided to funnel the persian forces into the small valley (thermopylae) that the persians would have to pass through on their way to the greek city states, classic military strategy - if you have the smaller army, make them more effective, your enemy less effective and pick a battle ground that favors the smaller army and makes it very very easy for your to win, and makes it as easy as possible for them to lose.

So the greek coalition took up at Thermopylae, and the combined force managed to hold off the first attacks of the persian army but it became clear that the persian army could quite happily just throw men at the greeks ww1 style until the greeks lost through pure atrition.

So a cunning plan was needed, and one was devised: all of the greek army but 300 volunteers (leonidas steps forward and volunteers a large bit of the spartan forces. "nah worries mate, we'll stay and sort these fuckers out nah problems" - leonidas always strikes me as australian for some reason) would retreat, but the 300 who stayed behind would keep the persian army occupied while the athenian navy went around to the ass end of the persians' supply lines and won the war by cutting the persian army off - once again, logistics wins the a war - forcing them into retreat.

And so the greek forces, prior to retreating and leaving the 300 to it, built a little wall (apparently) which I mentioned in the previous post.

Now what you've got to understand is that the wall didn't exist, most likely, it's too good a symbol of greek unity from a time that post-dates thermopylae by a few hundred years - during the polyponesian wars, the spartans and athenians went at each other, and the spartans prided themselves on how they didn't need walls like those sissy athenians, because their proud and gay (in all senses of the word) Spartan Manhoods could protect sparta from any one - especially the helot slaves who made up the majority of the spartan society, and who were, as a race, owned by the spartan noble men from birth with no hope for freedom, except if they actually pulled off a successful uprising for once - and so the athenians kept their wives locked in doors all the time and became extremely good architects and proceeded to gradually move beyond Phalanx-centric warfare (yes, it was as Manly and Heterosexuals as it sounds, most greeks fought in the nuddy apart from their armor), while the spartans buggered each other senseless to instil a sense of espirit d'corps in their very phallanx-centric armies.

A small side issue: spartan women were known as thigh flashers because of an exercise they were expected to do to keep fit so they'd be able to give birth to strong spartan children. They were also "empowered", though to be fair the entire of spartan society was merely differently misogynistic than athenians one - largely because women had to run society while the men were all off buggering each other in the barracks (all spartan men were conscripted into the military, and trained into it from birth) so the traditional greek pursuit of keeping women locked up inside to stop their wombs running free and eating some one (again) was waivered - they were however second class citizens (but still above the helots) who existed purely for hte purpose of giving birth to the next generation of spartans.

And the spartan marriage ceremony was rather encouraging of rape - after the women had done the whole prancing through the woods naked pretending to be bears (don't ask, it's got stuff to do with how artemis was the patron saint of sparta...) things the night before, the spartan groom was expected to kidnap his wife to be, cut off her hair to make her more masculine, and then take her off to his barracks where he'd spent the night doing her.

Which could have been consensual, but what with it being ancient greece, expecting anyone to care about such nuance is expecting too much really.

It is also the most intensely homosexual sounding marriage ceremony I have ever even heard of - largely because spartan men were trained to form ridiculously close bonds with other men to the exclusion of women, like most of those abstinent only anti-gay fundies, to the point where their entire experience of intense emotional affection would be scewed towards men only type stuff.

Ironically for the anti-gay military types, this intensely homosexual military training made them work together better as soldiers - Nobody fights like a big poofy boy who's fighting to protect his closest lovers and friends who are standing shoulder to shoulder with him (with their cocks out of course, the tag line for an accurate 300 movie would have been "tonight they pee in hell!", what with how the phalanx was basically a long line of naked guys standing at a public urinal with their patriotic poking devices in their hands)


But I digress, the wall, well because the wall was the symbol of athenian military might during the polypenesian wars, having it at thermopylae was A) a way to sort of placate athenians, who had buggered off and were doing the unglamorous winning of the war, and also B) to act as a symbol a united greece fighting the abominable Other (who weren't black, but were instead basically gaijins (japanese - lit. foreign bastards) - Not Greeks) that would obviously invade greece at the drop of the hat because of the enlightened nature of greek culture and art.

And the romans did eventually, so there you go; there's always a bigger white man, waiting for you to fall on your face.

I'm rambling, it's late, so let me move onto my next issue with the historical innacuracy; the 300 spent their entire time after the other armies had left, basically oiling their naked bodies up and grooming their hair a lot - this is one of the things that makes the 300 look really cool, leonidas is informed of how the persian arrows will blot out the sun, he says THAT line, and then the 300 spends their time between and before battle grooming a lot - thus inventing the metrosexual.

Now a thing about those arrows: The bow and arrow was considered the cowards weapon by the greeks compared to the manly and erect grooviness of men getting naked, putting on bronze armor and waggling their poking sticks at their enemies.

I read an evopsych litcrit wannabe reading the iliad and that bit where ajax or who ever mentions that he's spent a lot of time fighting other men for their women - and the evopsych guy then declared that to be totally heterosexual and a good justification for his warped furry belief that all men have the innate soul of a chimpanzee or gorilla.

No mention of bonobos cock fencing for pleasure of course.

The bow and arrow thing is why the Amazons were all supposed to have monoboobed themselves - to stop their humongous tatas getting snapped up in the bows that they primarily used, because obviously a society of women could only capture big strong men via sneaky and cowardly methods like the bow and arrow - and of course heracules defeats them anyway with his super charisma (inherited from his relative - zeus, who was able to convince women to fuck geese or at any rate, that's what they claimed when they were caught at it) because women like teh wang, especially the lesbians.

Some themes never change I guess.

Okay, so the 300 has been fighting the persians for a few days now, keeping them at bay, but then they're betrayed, the persians sneak up their back passage and give them a good poking - all is lost right? Unless there's more proud spartan warriors to replace them...

Well no, like I said, they were buying time not for land based reinforcements to fight off the persians in noble one of one battle, but for the athenian triremes to fuck up the persians' supply system by basically head butting the supply ships to death.

now the athenian navy never gets credited in the mythos of thermopylae, they won the war, and quite frankly they're more likable than the spartans.

The spartans were all slave owning monarchists (possibly constitutional binarchists - they had two kings, leonidas was one of them at this point, and they had a voting system for the senate type creature they had, but only for spartans) who had been conscripted from birth and trained in teh ancient arts of buggery and being naked and feirce - they didn't choose to fight, they were obligated and guilted into it.

The athenians manned their navy with true volunteers, all of them free men, and they built a navy out of that which wasn't really matched until the arabs and vikings came onto the scene a few thousand years later.

And they won the fucking war with that - they didn't beat off the persians because they were better at hitting the persians with rocks than the persians were - the greeks thought global, acted locally, and got sneaky with it, using geography, spartan psychopathy, and athenian rowing power to the maximum to beat an enemy that was so fucking stuck up and self assured that they thought that all they had to do was throw an endless supply of dead bodies at their enemies and they'd crumble.

Personally, thermopylae is of course the weakest and least interesting of all the things about sparta - who are undoubtably interesting, but you have to see how they kept fucking up during the polyponesian wars, and things like how, the first time the spartans surrendered, the athenians let freed helots punish them - and so the spartans were thrown down a deep dark rocky chasm where, if they were lucky, they'd be killed on impact, and if they were unlucky, they'd ahve their landing cushioned by the dead bodies of previous spartans, and then be left to starve, dehydrate or catch something nasty from the rotting corpses they were surrounded by, if the next spartan falling down the chasm didn't kill them that is.

And of course, some spartans were released, because they were given the condition of grovelling and begging the helots to let them go, and they would be released.

And of course they returned to sparta and were mocked and hated by the spartan version of the yellow elephants - forerunners of the white feather ladies who called men cowards if they didn't volunteer to fight in the ww1 european armies - for surviving rather htan being killed in a horrible and agonising fashion.

Because once the fucked upness of sparta is laid bare, you can look at the less fucked up aspects, like how spartan women were proud members of the pythagorean mystery cults - which were a mish mash of a pagan religion and math camp for grown ups, and how they effectively owned property.

And of course how that privelage was gained through the subjagation and exploitation of the helots.

Which is why I can't go watch 300.

You see, it's not merely because it's politically inedible, and historically it's so wrong in all the wrong ways to make me want to spit.

No no, those are all window dressing to mask the real problem.

Look, it's a racist, homophobic, misogynistic, transphobic, ablist peice of war porn, for me to see it I have to ask myself one question: can I justify embracing my heterosexual, cisgender, white, able privelage (I don't get any choice in suffering through misogyny through out the rest of the day, so it's not such a big deal, but still, the issue of paying to watch misogynistic fluff is galling as well) to watch it?

ArandhanaD says "no", inso far as she says there is no real man-on-man action (which would be historically accurate, as well as improve it infinitely), so waht would happen if I did pay to see it is that I'd get half way through it and then I'd get so pissed off by all those problems that I'd either have to walk out (thus wasting that money) or set the theater on fire, and possibly my freinds at the same time just to spite the Gods that are obviously trying to send me mad.

But of course, the reason why ren likes it has nothing to with all that racism, or misogyny or various other -phobias and -isms, here's why she says she likes it:

I loved “300” because you knew they were doomed, but they fought anyway. They fought hard and brutal and bloody and without thought or care or back up, without anyone telling them how or why they could, without remorse or sympathy because they believed in what they were fighting for. They fought because that is what they do. And it made them happy. It made them feel alive. Feeling alive is not always an easy thing to do, you know. Sometimes it’s more like being that body on a table than a Spartan…

Well why didn't you fucking well say so!

For those who aren't wu xia, and chop socky geeks as well as martial arts geeks - here's a little secret: All those themes that ren is attaching to in troy and 300 and other htings - Hong Kong, and specifically Jet Li, did that ages ago.

Here's a brief list, off the top of my head;

Last Hero in China - any of the jet li ones (all good)
The Barefoot Kid (not hugely rated, but I like it)
Chinese Ghost Story (1 more than 2, much more tragic and quality, but 2 is still fun)
The legend of Fong Sey Yuk (might be misspelling that) - the first one is excellent, the second tries for tragedy and fight set peices, but fails laregly in comparison to the first outing, the scene with the samurais and the princess onthe river is still awesome - also contains one of the comedic mainstays of the comedic wu xia flicks - the drag king potential romantic interest.

That's about 8 good movies, and that's just the good jet li ones I can remeber off the top of my head.

However, only two of them fit the standard that ren is looking for - The Barefoot Kid and Chinese Ghost Story 1, both end in tragedy, and largely consist of the protagonists fighting against odds they can't possibly win against - but they fight anyway because the alternative to fighting and losing, is to not bother fighting at all - and still losing.

That's one of the great Wu Xia cliches, and in fact is a major routine in all good hong kong action movies - hong kong action movies are the movies that are most likely to end with everyone of the main characters dying in a hideous blood bath against insurmountable odds.

Pedicab Driver (sammo hung) should also be likable, however a large aspect of the plot does put prostitutes (one of whom is the main romantic love interest in the peice for one of the main characters) in the role of defenceless acted upon victims - which is actually something of the hong kong variation on the infamous "girlfriend in the fridge syndrome" seen in western comics - prostitutes are generally acted upon or used as McGuffins to advance the plot towards the final fight scene.

However, despite using that cliche in a lot of hong kong action movies, in the wu xia genre there is something to balance it out like the feisty spunky female archetype of the film noir genre balanced much of the sexism:

The Female Kung Fu Protagonist.

They're pretty much unique to the Wu Xia genre (though they did segue into the mainstream hong kong action movies during that period when they were all modern wu xia flicks - which all contained bendy swords for some reason that has never been fully explained) because that's the only genre that really emphasises extremely pretty wire fu wushu set peices - and of course the original wu xia flicks were all adaptions of traditional opera peices (hence their tendency towards tragedy) so of course there was a source of women who had all the training in acrobatics and drama to handle being fully active members of cast - and the writers included them, basically because they could.

So what you've got in most of the wu xia flicks is at least one large set peice fight where these women really just show off - fong sey yuk is something of a mockery of those, because the main character is taught kung fu by his mother - and she really mothers him and is included in most of the fights (and if played by an exceptional actress who's names, I'm ashamed to say, I've forgotten.

But I mentioned the modern wu xia flicks, and what I'm thinking of is things like Heroic Trio or Naked Killer - those films will undoubtably cause radfems to explode (heavy T&A in both) but both of them center around strong female leads.

Of course, while I'm talking about hong kong action movies, I've gotta point out that Tarantino's style over substance rip off of City On Fire is vastly inferior to City On Fire itself, more pathos, and a better plot despite tarantino stealing the plot of City on Fire and making no real addition or subtractions.

As I've mentioned before however, this is all the stuff I can remember off the top of my head from back when I was an anime fangirl - if you delve and are prepared to suffer through the occasional clanger (sturgeons laws: 99% of everything is crap) you'll find stuff that is tragic, and inspiring and heartfelt and just plain Pretty - and you don't even have to piss around putting up with this badly done war propaganda that rapes history and then calls it a slut for complaining.

And now a funny garfield comic for maximum justice:



Some smart ass discovered that if you remove garfields' dialogue from teh strip, it suddently becomes hilarious.

I can't wait to do this to Day by Day and Filmore to see if it can improve them too.