Full Engagement is Enough

Honest, Smart, Christian: Pick any Two

2009-10-20T07:57:19Z

Hey, guess what? Christians are killing witches in the global south where they can get away with it. Not just any Christians, but ones supported by the rich colonizer countries like the U.S.

At first glance, there's nothing unusual about the laughing, grubby kids playing hopscotch or reading from a tattered Dick and Jane book by the graffiti-scrawled cinderblock house. But this is where children like Abigail end up after being labeled witches by churches and abandoned or tortured by their families.

There's a scar above Jane's shy smile: her mother tried to saw off the top of her skull after a pastor denounced her and repeated exorcisms costing a total of $60 didn't cure her of witchcraft. Mary, 15, is just beginning to think about boys and how they will look at the scar tissue on her face caused when her mother doused her in caustic soda. Twelve-year-old Rachel dreamed of being a banker but instead was chained up by her pastor, starved and beaten with sticks repeatedly; her uncle paid him $60 for the exorcism.

here

I'm tired of giving radical Christians a pass. The Catholic Workers who own nothing but the shirts on their backs are clearly committed, but good Christians are like good cops: they provide cover for the bad cops. Until I see "Christians against Colonialism" I will assume that good Christians are knowingly protecting cultural genocide.

We should kidnap Christian children, beat them into submission, and raise them as dance-naked-around-bonfires raving pagans. It would be nothing less than what fundamentalist fanatics and their moderate enablers have done all over the world, every chance they get.

Unearthed Arcana of Social Science

2009-10-04T19:49:05Z

(10/04/2009 12:30:14 PM) Marco: gotta be careful with the diaspora class though, the prof wrote some of the articles.
(10/04/2009 12:30:50 PM) moi: oh, no. i find teachers who do that are usually intellectual narcissists. chances are good you'll only get a good grade if you write about how right she is.
(10/04/2009 12:32:47 PM) moi: but then you know how burnt out i am on grad school.
(10/04/2009 12:33:37 PM) Marco: he. and yeah he comes off as a bit arrogant.
(10/04/2009 12:34:59 PM) moi: those are in the academic rogue class. careful, they have a high backstab.
(10/04/2009 12:35:36 PM) Marco: lol

This is What Denial Looks Like

2009-10-04T12:40:11Z

Re: Roman Polanski

In truth, the Julian Schnabels and the Monica Belluccis who signed the Liberate Polanski petitions were only under the same spell that most of us were under. We'd all simply forgotten. Now that forgetting has become impossible, it will be fascinating to see if Roman Polanski will be able to find as many, or indeed any, useful allies.

here

The spell always falls upon horrible things, in one way or another. This is why there wasn't serious talk about the Holocaust for a good decade after it happened. This is why there are still AIDS denialists and 9-11 "truthers." This why Bill O'Reilly is still loved in spite and because of the fact that he said Shawn Hornbeck would rather stay with his rapist than run. And this is why evil usually triumphs: nobody wants to see it.

And when we do see it, insanity ensues. Traumatic memories are disorganized, and trauma isn't limited to survivors. Witnesses and perpetrators are traumatized, too (which doesn't let the perps off the hook.) When we start talking about it, we don't just talk, we act it out. Now the survivors get to be the perpetrators, or the witnesses, or the rescuers, real or fantasized. These feelings, images, and thoughts are too much and too chaotic for words so they spill out into our actions, and as if we were hypnotized we come up with perfectly logical explanations for why we are playing out what was done to us, or what we did, or what we witnessed and did nothing about.

Group processing of traumatic events is what so many of those confusing rituals from indigenous societies are about. And until we find an equivalent for the industrial world, the most technologically powerful societies in the world will continue to be the most insane, to an extent that is actually on its way to rendering the planet uninhabitable.

anarchomo @ 2009-09-29T06:21:00

2009-09-29T06:22:18Z

A simple google search with the words “Palestinian violence” yields over 86,000 pages, while a search with the words “Palestinian civil disobedience” generates only 47 pages - this despite the fact that for several years now Palestinians have been carrying out daily acts of civil disobedience against the Israeli occupation.

here

Here's Your Change

2009-09-10T17:18:23Z

Obama says single payer health care is "too radical."

What most other industrial nations do is too radical for the US.

He's gotten where he is by playing the model minority. He's not going to do anything threatening, which means he's not going to do anything.

I'm a total geek about these things and I can boil it all down very simply: when the rich and powerful look out of their windows and see torches and pitchforks, things get better. When they don't, things get worse. Like playground bullies, like slave-owners, like domestic abusers, like anyone with easy access to force, they only change when they suffer consequences.

Screw the Open-Minded

2009-03-10T23:04:25Z

I owe a lot of people emails and phone calls. I've been playing scholar-monk because this school thing is really important--money-wise and passion-wise.

Passion-wise, bizarrely so. Most of my friends and ex-lovers complain that I'm not available enough, and yet I'm getting choked up over a review of the research on authoritarian personality, so much so that I drop everything to write about it in livejournal when I should be calling people back, or replying to their emails, if I'm not going to write papers like I should. There's something very odd about me, and I admit I don't understand it.

The authoritarian personality type has filtered into popular culture. Everybody already knows what one is. The AP is Archie Bunker. Or George Bush. The macho man who wants problems solved with simple aggression. The hypocrite who destroys freedom in order to save it. Here's how the authoritarian personality type came to be, and why it pisses me off.

Marxist psychologist refugees from fascist Europe established a scale to measure a given person's authoritarianism. At the time, their work was well-regarded, and people took to heart the warning that there are people in America who want a "strong" (aggressive,) leader, and who hate various (usually ethnic) out-groups, and who would be quick to join up if a movement advocating these things came along.

Then McCarthyism happened. Some of the people involved with the study who were still in America got fired (from UC Berkeley,) for refusing to sign an affidavit saying they weren't communists. And the research got put through the ringer. But it mostly survived: the scale definitely measures something, and conservatives definitely have it more than liberals do. It just might not constitute a discrete personality type.

The liberals who were trashing this scale were developing their own scale of open to closed-mindedness, and to this day there's a rich discourse in social psychology about prejudice and stereotypy, but the stuff about authority is obscure, or watered down, or in some tiny journal published in South Africa.

And after McCarthyism the liberals swore that there had to be a left-wing authoritarianism. And they looked. They looked quite confident that they would find. But they didn't find: communists score quite low on the authoritarianism scale. (Interestingly, British soldiers scored lower. Perhaps people who experience authoritarianism first-hand decide that they're not very fond of it.)

So there's this obvious problem: if there is no left-wing authoritarianism, why are there left-wing authoritarian governments? One possibility is that the rulers in these states were never sincere communists at all: they just saw an opportunity and they took it, mouthing the communist platitudes if that's what it took. Another is that most communists don't actually sit around reading Marx all day. It's in the denser parts of the Marxist discourse that you really see the excuses for authoritarianism: the dismissal of morality as "bourgeois," the possibility that "dictatoriship of the proletariat" really means a dictatorship. Most people who get involved in communism aren't interested in that. But the Marx-nerds who become the leaders are.

Back to authoritarian personality: what's really funny is that the conversation got buried. I can't find it in any of the social psychology textbooks anymore, though it used to be in all of them. One textbook writer explained that he left it out because the conversation was over, even though this stuff about left-wing authoritarianism was at its height at the time. Liberals just don't want to talk about authority unless they can say that equality is impossible in the modern world (like social dominance theorists do,) or that the left is just as authoritarian as the right (even though it isn't.)

This chokes me up because I'm so frustrated with talking to liberals who think social justice is all about prejudice. Whenever they find out there's something different about you, they get all patronizing and fetishy, they want to know all about your experience as a transgendered lesbian sex worker of color, whether you want to share or not. They love to demonstrate their knowledge of exotic locales as learned through NPR. Their photo album looks like the bridge of the Enterprise. And they think this gives them a free pass on their privilege, their complicity, and their moral cowardice. They'll get behind anything that doesn't require risk or sacrifice. They want comfort without guilt. Piss in their worldly, sophisticated eyes.

Athens is Burning.

2008-12-17T16:15:02Z

Q. What is going on, and where?

A. The revolt has exploded in virtually all the regional capitals. In Salonika, Agrinion, Yannena and across Crete there have been clashes between police and demonstrators. In Patras the police attacked demonstrators accompanied by a battalion of armed neo-nazis, so-called "outraged citizens". Every day in Athens there are two or three different demonstrations, with tens of thousands of participants. In solidarity 20000 demonstrators attended the funeral of Alexandros Grigoropoulos. This isn't about "blind rebellion" like the media claim, on the contrary it is a real movement and one that continues... The targets of the demonstrators are the banks and the multinational enterprises that are the symbols of poverty and suffering. The revolt unites young and old, militants and the non-politicised. It is the largest revolt in Greece since the Second World War and the Civil War which followed in Greece. It could be the largest revolt in the western world for the last forty years. For us this revolt is a completely legitimate response.

here

Police Are an Occupying Army

Q. What are the tactics of the Greek police?

A. Since the end of the dictatorship of the Colonels dozens of Greeks have been killed by the police. Amongst the dead are: Mikalis Kaltezas, a 15 year-old anarchist militant killed in 1985; Issidoros Issidoropoulos, a 16 year-old extreme left-wing militant killed in 1976; Koumis and Kanellopoulou, two demonstrators and also a number of immigrants and people from ethnic minorities (gypsies and Thracian Turks etc). Recently the police murdered a young disabled boy. At the same time we're seeing countless cases of militants, demonstrators and immigrants being tortured by the police; as well as a systematic and unjustified use of tear gas bombs and other gas weapons at all demonstrations. I'll add a final note, a police officer has never been killed by a demonstrator, furthermore no police officer, has ever spent more than two and a half years in prison.

here

A Rock for Each of His Dreams

Q. Can you describe the events surrounding the death of Alexis again?

A. For the last three years the Greek police's strategy in Exârcheia, a district famous for popular struggle and home to many students, young people and libertarians, has been one of provocation. Police patrols have become more frequent recently and on a daily basis the police are insulting the people in the area. When it comes to the murder of this 15 year-old boy all the witnesses (residents, passers-by etc) state that the police were provoking a group of young people by insulting them. When the youths responded the police parked their car and then returned to where the youths were sitting. Then they fired three times. The witnesses state that the murderer fired directly at Alexis who died on the pavement.

here

Who Was He?

Friends and acquaintances said Grigoropoulos was a reserved boy who spent a lot of time reading. His musical tastes ranged from punk to hip hop and he loved to skateboard.

A typical 21st century teenager. "He was a very good child," said Josef Gavlinsky, the janitor of the apartment block he lived in the Athens suburb of Palio Faliro. "He would always greet me and was always very polite... he was never any trouble," Gavlinsky was quoted telling the Ethnos newspaper.

here

What Did His Friends See?

Alexandros fell down, if I am not mistaken on the first or second gunshot, surely anyways before the third ... Afterwards, I didn't know what was going on. People were yelling and some people lifted up Alexandros' shirt. I saw that he had a hole in the middle of the chest and a little towards the heart. There was blood from the wound ...

here

Passivity is Violence

For those in the media and power, violence is only what destroys the proper order.

For us however:

Violence is to work 40 years for crumbs and to wonder if you will ever retire.

Violence is the bonds, the stolen pensions, the securities fraud.

Violence is to be forced to take a housing loan that you will pay back through the nose.

Violence is the managerial right of the employer to fire you at will.

Violence is unemployment, temporary employment, 700 euros a month.

Violence is the "industrial accidents" because the bosses cut costs at the expense of worker safety.

Violence is to take psycho-medications and vitamins to withstand the exhaustive work schedule.

Violence is to be an immigrant, to live with the fear that you can be thrown out of the country at any time and to be in a state of constant insecurity.

Violence is to be simultaneously a wage worker, a housewife, and a mother.

Violence is to be worked to death and then to be told "smile, we are not asking that much of you."

The insurrection of high-school and university students, of temporary workers and immigrants broke this violence of normality. This insurrection must not stop! Syndicalists, political parties, priests, journalists and businesspeople do whatever they can to maintain the violence we described above.

here

This Means You

We can't all take big risks, but we can all support the people who do. Occasionally we get the chance to feed, shelter, heal or protect them. The rest of the time we can call the DAs and tell them to drop charges, call the police to distract them at the wrong time, call the jails and tell them to let our people go.

Because like it or not, they also serve who throw bricks and firebombs. Without them, we would have no civil rights legislation, we would have no labor law, and we'd have never broken free from monarchy. So do your part for freedom. Support your local riot until it becomes and insurrection. Support your local insurrection until it becomes a saner world.

anarchomo @ 2008-12-17T05:33:00

2008-12-17T05:34:47Z

The status of women and children always seems to suffer in monasteries. This is because they always bring in more real problems. Women have a special role as distractions, human affections being the one thing most difficult to put boundaries around. Women have been excluded, or they are included but asked to act like men, or they’re asked to act like women, but to not have children, or they’re asked to not bring their children around the sesshin. Even women’s monasteries seem to have a patriarchal air - rigid and hostile to the obligations of the heart. Women in temples are often given the archetypal task of representing the world and its weight, its messiness. Naturally a woman will object because her real developmental task is something independent of the way a man reacts to her.

here

anarchomo @ 2008-12-08T04:11:00

2008-12-08T04:13:08Z

moi: btw bash back now has a chapter in ghana.
otherguy: nice
moi: si si. if you answer internet gay personals there you sometimes get met by cops, or gangs, or gangs who subsequently turn you over to cops. so they got some work to do.
otherguy: well they better get gay marriage started
moi: lol yes. that'll solve everything.

Bashing Back is the Only Realistic Option (I thought that was obvious.)

2008-12-06T09:25:40Z

A Tranny and His Friends Bash Back. Hard.

“Excuse me,” said the Lansing queer.

The man leaned down and forward and said, “I know you’re a bitch”!

This lead to an inevitable argument, which quickly escalated. Eventually a womyn appeared in the doorway and plead that the trans-phobe was just drunk, so therefore excusable. She then pulled the man into the “women’s” restroom, where Dru chased after. Here, the other lansing queers still happened to be. : ) As the argument was going on between Dru and the man’s friend, the man turned to look himself in the mirror and say to his reflection, “ok, so you are about to fight a bitch.” At this point, Dru flew around the womyn grabbing the phobe, slamming him up against the wall. At the same time the other Lansing kids came out from the stalls. A struggle ensued where both Dru and the tranny-basher exchanged a slew of punches. the man eventually ended up pinned to the floor of a stall with Dru on top of him bashing back! and another queer stomping him between his legs!

originally here

And People Don't Get It

Some folks wind up having to explain why that was the right thing to do over in sammhain's livejournal. Here was my contribution, though it was probably too late to be seen by very many people:

[S]ince some people wish the queers had offered a gentler response, I'll explain a little why that probably wouldn't work, though I'm not sure who will see it at this point.

There are therapy programs for domestic abusers. And almost everyone in them is court-mandated to be there. And the therapists use that: they say, "look, your behavior got you into the situation you're in now, where one false move will send you to jail. Maybe you should learn some new ways of relating to people while you still have some freedom." Things almost always have to get to that point with wife-beaters before they'll even think about changing. They have to be in imminent danger of being violently dragged to a very unpleasant place, where even more violence might happen to them.

This is a well-known dynamic with alcoholics, too. And the would-be trannybasher here might very well be alcoholic. His drinking is clearly causing problems for him, and he seems to have a wife or girlfriend enabling him, as alcoholics usually do. If they're dragged into it, drunks might go through the motions at AA meetings, but generally alcoholics only get serious about change once they "hit bottom," i.e. things have to get desperately, often life-threateningly fucked up before they'll seriously try to stop drinking, because it's all that they know and they naturally don't want to have to rebuild their personality all over again.

People do horrible stuff because it's the only thing they know that works. They're not going to give it up unless they suffer serious consequences.

If you're a Gandhi or MLK who's clever enough to find a way to create serious consequences for the other guy without having to resort to violence, more power to you. But those struggles (a) had lots of violence affecting their outcomes in one way or another, and (b) get talked about so much precisely because they're the exception to the rule. Most of the time it takes violence to counter violence, and demanding moral purity from someone who has very few options is a passive-aggressive way of re-victimizing them. And it's incredibly hypocritical unless you refuse to pay your taxes, since most of that money pays for--guess what?--violence.

So Jainists and vegan sharecroppers may have the moral authority to tell the rest of us not to violently create consequences for our oppressors, but everyone else should really shut up before someone decides to test their commitment to their principles.

here

Hey, Fags! Tired of Losing at the Ballot Box?

2008-11-13T08:38:12Z

Let's go back to what worked!

Bash Back! Raises Hell at Anti-Queer Mega-Church

A group stood up, declared themselves fags, and began screaming loudly. Upon hearing the loud interruption, other affinity groups went into action. A team that had been hiding under the pews in the closed-off balcony dropped a banner and pulled back the curtains to reveal "IT'S OKAY TO BE GAY! BASH BACK!". Another group threw over a thousand fliers to the entirety of the congregation. The fire alarm was pulled. Queers began making out in front of the pastor. And within a matter of minutes, everyone had evaded the guards and made their escapes.

From the comments:

Of all the talk recently about what the American Left should do after the recent elections, most of the attention has been focused on begging the Obama regime for changes. One thing that should go on the Left's agenda is a broad payback that people should visit upon the Republicans for years of their horrible policies. People shouldn't be complacent about the right wing being out of power. Now is the time to take part of the struggle to places like these right wing churches. They need to understand that there will always be consequences for supporting politics that fucks over the lives of other people. If your church is going to support shitty government policies, don't be surprised when people show up in your pews and tell you to fuck off.

Queers Raise Hell!

Bash Back!

As Gay Lib pioneer Harry Hay was found of pointing out, we got the rights we have with no help from anyone. And we will keep them with no help from anyone. And we will get more with no help from anyone. Stop begging and start fighting.

anarchomo @ 2008-11-06T02:20:00

2008-11-06T02:21:16Z

Vote Pinchbeck/Strieber in 2012!

anarchomo @ 2008-11-01T22:54:00

2008-11-01T22:55:50Z

lol hope

2008-10-16T10:39:57Z

Tried to post this on a blog about the debates, but since literally ten different servers wanted to poke around on my machine with Javascript before it would let me contribute to the discussion, I'm posting it here instead.

Blah, two tyrants pretending to argue about how best to exploit the rest of us. The progressive reforms the Republicans are destroying were won through popular struggle, not elections. Whether it's abusive husbands or politicians, oppressors only capitulate when they're scared. They feel entitled to their privilege, they're identified with it, they won't budge an inch without a credible threat.

Of course there are differences between them, but there is near-consensus among our masters that root problems like imperialism and cutthroat uber-capitalism are good things. The Democrats just want to screw us a little more gently. FISA is the beginning of eight long years of betrayal and disappointment unless we start attacking Obama from the left, just as brutally as we attack the right.

There will be no lasting change as long as we keep falling for the good cop-bad cop game.

Re: Reality

2008-10-16T06:41:55Z

Attn: people who still believe the TV.

Giving seven hundred billion dollars to the rich and powerful gamblers who broke our economy has absolutely nothing to do with socialism.

That is all.

Getting To Know You Meme

2008-10-12T07:23:52Z

Welcome to the 2008 edition of getting to know your friends. Change all the answers so they apply to you, and then send this to your friends including the person who sent it to you. The theory is that you will learn a lot of little things about your friends that you might not have known

LOOKING BACK AT Y'ALL

1. What time did you get up this morning?

Morning?

2. Diamonds or pearls?

Diamonds. Don't want to support the horrible shellfish conflict created by the pearl industry.

3. What was the last film you saw at the cinema?

It was so mediocre I don't remember it. Which probably means it was one of those indy-flavored rightwing proganda pieces from Fox Searchlight where a promising young woman has a very unprepared-for pregnancy and no one even says the word abortion.

4. What is your favorite TV show?

American Gothic, RIP.

5. What do you usually have for breakfast?

Breakfast?

6. What is your middle name?

McFuckerson.

7. What food do you dislike?

Beef tongue. Don't like being tasted back.

8. What is your favorite CD at the moment?

cd .pr0n

9. What kind of car do you drive?

lol cars

10 Favorite sandwich?

Anarchomo on cute punk rock boy.

11. What Characteristic do you despise the most about others?

Belief in the system, hope for a better world through electoral democracy, and general gullibility.

12. If you could go anywhere in the world on vacation, where would you go?

GLOBAL ANARCHIST REVOLUTION

13. Where would you retire to?

GLOBAL ANARCHIST REVOLUTION

14. What was your most recent memorable birthday?

Hm. For my twenty-fifth I stayed up all night in downtown SF setting up the radical faery village for Gay Pride. I got better.

15. Furthest place you are sending this questionnaire?

Eighteenth century Europe, where it will assassinate the man who invented the modern state. And you know it was a man.

16. Person you expect to send it back first?

The man who invented the modern state, only he will have reprogrammed it to kill me. Statists are clever bastards.

17. When is your birthday?

Novermber 5

18. Morning person or a night person?

I'm pale, skinny, and my only coat is a black leather trench. Guess.

19. What is your shoe size?

Ten. Eleven if I'm stomping the faces of my capitalist oppressors, like the crowd trampling Mussolini after Italy's defeat.

20. Pets?

The black mold in my bathroom.

21. Any new and exciting news you'd like to share with us?

I secretly enjoy Starbuck's coffee.

22. What did you want to be when you were little?

Big.

23. How are you today?

I am, by the grace of almighty God.

24. What is your favorite flower?

The pink puckerblossom.

25. What is a day on the calendar you are looking forward to?

GLOBAL ANARCHIST REVOLUTION

26. What are you listening to right now?

Sam painting to his emo music.

27. What was the last thing you ate?

Starbuck's coffee. *shame*

28. Do you wish on stars?

Yes, for ~~GLOBAL AN~~ world peace.

29. If you were a crayon, what color would you be?

Flesh, duh.

30.How is the weather right now?

IT'S FAR MORE INTERESTING THAN THIS QUESTION, BY WHICH I MEAN IT'S DOING ABSOLUTELY NOTHING WHATSOEVER.

31 Last person you spoke to on the phone?

*yawn* Penis.

32. Favorite soft drink?

Have I ever talked to you about the evil of banality?

33. Favorite restaurant?

Argh! Andre Breton where are you when I need you! All power to the imagination!

34. Hair color?

lone, there came a moment with a thought, profound and all-encompassing, inexpressible in words alone. If I could hold that moment, I would show it to you. It came, and gently touching me, I heard, "Whether one becomes a king or the greatest leader of a powerful nation, all this does not bring liberatio

35. What was your favorite toy as a child?

About this site
Because hearing voices is a much stigmatised experience we wanted to create a safe place where you can find out more about hearing voices and to create an interactive online community whe

36. Summer or winter?

Pyschosistic (14 hours ago) Show Hide
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Does anyone else think that as Cartoons and the graphical abilities of the makers got better, the cartoons quality and ability to touch hearts got worse?

37. Chocolate or Vanilla?

Seriously. Five thousand generations of human evolution culminate in your decision to ask me about whether I prefer a South American bean or a North American one? Have you considered the fact that you could do worse than suicide?

38. Hey, that's hardly fair. This is just a getting-to-know-you quiz. I have many other interests.

So does your mom.

39. Now who's being banal?

You are so right. Let's do something less banal like administering severe beatings to makers of boring quizes.

40. Hey, now. Don't confuse the author with the first-person narrative voice. Perhaps the writer was merely reflecting the triviality of these quiz memes, rather than unproblematically endorsing it.

Oh, fuck you and your deconstructionist lit crit sophistry. If we want to play on that level, the author--excuse me, the "first person narrative voice"--is consenting to a beating by engaging in such provocative behavior.

41. So your justification for violence against innocent disembodied dialogical interrogators boils down to, "she wanted it"?

No, the difference being that first-person narrative voices occupy a more privileged position than raped women under Patriarchy.

42. What did you do last night?

watched lots of whose line is it anyway on youtube lol

43. Now just a minute, are you saying that a narrative voice, divorced from identifying context, can occupy a place in your unmeasurable, postulated social hierarchy?

You can never divorce something from context. Granted you can recontextualize, marginalize, appropriate, and deconstruct, but none of those options leave us with a perceptual object free of context. Since context is conceptual, even an object surrounded by empty space would have a context. Everything does, unless we believe the contemplative Asian traditions that say it's possible to have only a single perceptual object in consciousness at a time, and even they would agree that such a state is hard for most to achieve, and even those who achieve it are surrounded by those who have not, who can imopse themselves on our mystic in various ways, thusly forcing other objects into his consciousness if he wants to survive in our dualistic world. So no, I say nothing about a narrative voice divorced from identifying context, for I find such a thing to be as real as the Easter Bunny. Furthermore there's nothing unmeasurable about social hierarchy. There are haves and have-nots, and most of the haves have penises, unless we postulate a very widespread and well-hidden underground transgenderism fad among the ruling class, which might explain Condoleeza Rice, but a lone imperialist race traitor is hardly adequate evidence for such a genderqueer cabal among the top one percent.

44. You don't turn off do you?

No.

45. Perhaps we should devote some time to this. Do you escape your feelings by intellectualizing? When do you think this started?

It's incredibly difficult to prove that you're not mentally ill, which is why oppressors have found the category so useful. I could just as easily suggest that you ask incredibly mundane questions of people to escape ... yourself, or else the existential abyss of lonliness and confusion that is the condition of all honest-minded humans outside the realms of mindless faith, which is usually and admittedly placed above experiment and rational extrapolation from observable phenomena. True gnostics may be an exception: perhaps people know connection and meaning by direct experience, but such experience is not communicable in a textual medium, or at least not outside of art, which is experientially real but unexaminable in much the same way that one can dissect a frog but not find life.

46. Now I'm not sure who's side you're arguing.

Side?

47. Favorite day of the week?

GLOBAL ANARCHIST REVOLUTION

48. Do you make friends easily?

What do you think?

49. How many people will you send this to? (view all by) ::: October 10, 2008, 06:31 PM:

Some people pick up information, the way some people pick up belly-button lint.

If there's a flaw in modern British education, it is that teachers have been pushed into teaching the test. Ther50. How many will respond?
Re: Show the world your desktop! [Killing 56K since January]

Postby Shizo on Fri Jan 25, 2008 9:06 pm UTC
Spoiler:
Image

I lol'd. Just the wallpaper. None of my icons have changed, I swear. 51. Do you like finding out all this stuff about your friend? Akarsu (4 hours ago) Show Hide
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Fill your heart with love and don't ever let it go. love is the key to all. keep loving, and as you keep loving, the feeling will grow within you and it will spread all around. and this is what matters the most
. BARIS AKARSU ...R.I.P.

Don't forget to send this back to the person that sent it to you...!!!!

Never Never Never Let Words Escape Your Lips Near a Cop

2008-09-25T07:10:55Z

Funny that something so banal breaks my long lj silence. Still: here's the long version of why you should never talk to a police officer even if you're innocent, the cop says you're not a suspect, etc.

http://www.brasschecktv.com/page/342.html 40 mins.

Back to Posting (parts of) Papers

2008-07-02T05:49:50Z

Like a Fish Through Water;
Subculture as a Shortcut to Therapeutic Alliance

It is possible that subculture in our postmodern world takes on some of
the same functions as tribal identity in indigenous cultures, or
national identity in feudal or modern cultures. Particularly so, one
might imagine, for youth. The construction of an adult social identity,
which came ready-made in past eras, is likely one of the developmental
tasks of adolescence, which would explain the common adolescent interest
both in subculture and in labeling oneself with appearance, even to the
point of reviving (and re-interpreting,) tribal body modification
practices. While adults are less likely to say of their subcultures, as
an aging punk rocker once said to me, "it still means everything to us,"
social identity seems to remain important to many adults, even if its
symbols are more likely to be vanity license plates than mohawks.

Social identities are seriously fractured in our contemporary milieu,
perhaps more than ever before. On a historical scale, it was not long
ago that social mobility was rare and travel even moreso. Starting from
the colonial era and its "stone age feeback," the West has been
confronted with the fact that other societies do things differently,
influencing dissident movements from early modern republicanism to
Romanticism, Marxism and beyond.

Colonialism creates both concentrations of wealth and incentives to
improve technology, especially in areas of travel, communication and
warfare. These technologies increase awareness of other societies,
bringing the West face to face with unconscious elements of its paradigm
(and perhaps its psyche,) thereby emboldening dissidents, who use some
of these very same technologies created by and for colonialism to spread
their message, at times violently. The dissidents' messages often
undermine the colonial project, which must then be re-conceptualized for
a new generation, both in colonizing societies and in the colonized
ones.

In this way true colonialism has given way to imperialism and finally
"globalization." In true colonialism, civilian settlers work for their
own profit as well as that of the colonizing government. In
imperialism, armies occupy lands and then recruit from the impoverished
population to take over other lands, while in "globalization,"
postcolonial societies, ravaged by the previous two methods of
exploitation, accept high-interest loans from global financial
institutions created by the colonizing countries, and so are doomed to
permanent debt even before the lenders demand the selling off of vital
social services in return for continued tolerance of the colonized
nations' permanent debt.

The superego can be viewed as a colonizing force in the psyche, the id
a colonized, infantilized, "savage," and the ego can function as a
colonial bureaucrat or a liberating activist. It is even possible that
these structures in our world lead to such structures in our minds, or
else the reverse, or perhaps they relate dialectically. Regardless,
where humanistic values have not filtered down to childrearing (often
one of the last areas to change in a society,) the family can also be
viewed as a colonial project. Because of the caregiver's internal
drives and deficits, she must, unconsciously or otherwise, raid and
perhaps occupy the child's psyche, stealing emotional resources which
the caregiver cannot acquire more appropriately. Once the child has an
ego and is able to resist, the psychological colonialism must become
imperialism, in which the child is not so much occupied as controlled by
force and, once fully subdued, sicced on other children. Finally, the
adolescent and adult psyche is "globalized," seemingly autonomous but
owing a crushing debt to the memory of its former caregivers, which will
play it against other psyches in literal and figurative markets, and of
course, prompt the psyche to repeat the process on his own children.

Much as colonialism is a holdover from pre-modern eras, at least as old
as the Roman empire, our childrearing is still pre-modern, even if
elements of our society are post-modern. The nuclear family in which
most of us are raised is far more like a monarchy than a republic (let
alone a collective,) with a king (whose "home is his castle,") a queen
(who usually only has power in the absence of the king,) other
household adults functioning as feudal lords who only have power at the
whim of the royalty, and the children as serfs, doing most of the
emotional labor if not the physical kind.

Our present youth subcultures are all born of the anti-colonial
struggles of the Sixties and their still-unfolding consequences. The
optimistic, uninhibited hippie subculture, when thwarted, gave way to
the blatant dissociation of disco, followed by the rage of punk rock and
then the despair of goth. Developments since have been variations on
these themes, for instance despair returned with a more shame-ridden,
cynical flavor in indie rock, which then collapsed into the openly
manufactured sterility of boy bands and the
identification-with-the-aggressor of pornified pop, partly undermined by
emo grief and rejection of traditional masculine stoicism.
Interestingly, hope only seems to be reborn when combined with
dissociation, as in the frankly artificial world of techno.

These responses to the ongoing power of the colonial mindset are
recapitulated in the individual psyche. Individuals shift between
optimism, rage, despair, disconnection, and submission as they struggle
with their internal oppressors. Confronted with the irrelevance of the
nuclear family in a changing world, an individual might settle into or
shift between optimistic exploration of other options, rage at a family
member, despairing acceptance of a miserable situation, a disconnected
"going through the motions," or a submissive cleaving to a situation
that is not working, even to point of displacing anger onto the
optimists. It may be possible that none of these responses will prove
sustainable until the source of the problem--the superego--is confronted
in an internal policy change, evolution, or revolution.

Development happens unevenly, in the mind and the world, and so whether
defending from her drives with willfully naive optimism or directly
confronting her mental empire, a dissident of the mind and the world
will meet resistance external as well as internal. She must respond by
raising an army, or at least an activist group, by either finding or
creating like-minded people with whom to create the social support that
more "traditional" living strategies take for granted. With luck or
persistence, the therapist can be part of the client's army, hopefully
more of an adviser than a part of the chain of command.

The cynics have said that even our revolutions make us more enslaved.
Perhaps the persistence of oppression is rooted in our failure to
complete the Enlightenment project by deposing the most brutal despot
the world has ever seen: the superego. If this is so, the therapist
must be a guerrilla. Neither an autonomist building tiny utopias on
irrelevant land, nor a reformer helping an archaic psyche make
superficial adaptations, but a guerrilla, exploding the foundations of
our collective monarchist hangover while moving, with the therapeutic
alliance, "through the people" of the psyche "like a fish through
water."

Return of Link Orgy

2008-06-23T07:27:27Z

Policing is a racket:

Last week I was in Minneapolis, and spent a couple of nights getting drunk with a friend, an apartment building owner, who in his younger years did hard time for burglary. Things were somewhat different then, he avowed. In the fifties and sixties a prisoner may or may not have worked off his “debt to society.” But in these times, he says, “The system demands that you just deliver payment in cash. It’s more efficient. But not fundamentally different. Back then, the rich still profited for our crimes more than we did. We stole $10,000 worth of stuff. Next day in the paper we found that the guy we burglarized claimed it $30,000 worth for insurance purposes. Getting robbed was a winning situation for him. He made 20-K on us.”

It’s also is a wining situation for the 20 percent of Americans in what we call the middle class – those actually living the middle class life as advertised by the commercial and financial state’s marketing department. It works well for Stokes’ psychologist, his piss tester, his lie detector service contractor, the people with the sex offender website contract, and all good citizens with investments on Wall Street.

Joe Bageant

Expanded Beard Types:

http://www.dyers.org/blog/beards/beard-type-chart/

Joseph Palmer: Perscuted For Wearing The Beard:

http://www.dyers.org/blog/archives/2008/04/14/joseph-palmer-perscuted-for-wearing-the-beard/

The Secret Lives of Stormtroopers:

http://www.dyers.org/blog/archives/2007/08/20/the-secret-lives-of-stormtroopers/

***How’s Work Going?

This should be made into pamphlets and airdropped into financial districts around the Western World:

http://www.dyers.org/blog/archives/2007/08/14/hows-work-going/

And furthermore, observe the door to Hell:

http://www.slightlywarped.com/crapfactory/curiosities/doortohell.htm

Requiescat in Pace David Solter

2008-05-16T00:54:18Z

David Solter was the most sensitive, gentle man I have known. The world is poorer without his conscience, his passion, and his artistic inspiration. A bad fit with his Mormon upbringing, he never reconciled himself to religion or spirituality, though, contrary to the assumptions of fundamentalists, his atheism only deepened his existential commitment to human compassion. I was the best friend I could be to him, but no one could match his empathy, his moral development, or his horror and grief at man's inhumanity to man.

In high school, I had nicknames like Satan and Jeffery Dahmer. I'm not sure if I was more hated or feared, but there seemed to be consensus in our small town that I was something different and spiritually dangerous. And I was, though even I didn't understand it yet.

David sat next to me in Latin class, the preserve of only the most dedicated nerds. He didn't hate or fear me, in fact he was the only other person I knew who played Dungeons and Dragons, had read The Screwtape Letters, and not only enjoyed my satirical comics in which teachers appeared as demons, but contributed to them. When others would approach David saying I was a Satanist, he would give them an ironic tirade about my superiority to him in Our Satanic Lowerarchy. Only now can I see the compassion, creativity, and social bravery in David's choice to endanger his own position in the high school hierarchy, for the benefit of a largely ungrateful and oblivious stranger.

I was not close to David when he moved on, but I know what led to his choice: he could no longer live in a world so firmly wedded to brutality. If David was wrong and there is a benevolent, omnipotent being, I have faith that David rests forever in Her arms. So mote it be.

More Non-Stupidity About School Shootings

2008-04-10T07:09:53Z

We are used to the warning that alerts us to the risk of angering a bully, but we seem caught unaware by the violent reactions of the bullied. Upon reflection, however, it is quite logical that the availability of guns levels the playing field, or should we be more accurate and say, the warring field.

In the past, the adage, "Boys will be boys" encompassed fist fights and verbal or physical beatings where the strongest or dirtiest fighter established his manhood by winning the fight. The loser was ridiculed and left to slink away in humiliation and defeat. Adults were told to let boys fight it out as part of the ritual of coming of age. We have a long tradition of legitimizing bullies and disdaining or neglecting the bullied. They are supposed to learn to handle the situation and not whine about it. Their manhood comes in "taking it" without a whimper.

But then there were guns. The element of surprise coupled with the deadly force of automatic weapons freed the bullied to become the bully. Now we take notice. They have deviated from their role which was to accept their lot, feel diminished, become alienated and keep it all inside, suffering in silence. Eventually they would grow from the experience and be better for having endured it. But, the bullied have turned the tables. If they are to be participants in the violence of the bullies and the bullied, they'd rather be the violators, not the violated. The bullied now use their anger and hurt to fuel rage and fantasies of revenge. They have arrived at the pitch of emotion that demands that others pay for what has been done to them. In exacting from others the price of fear, injury or even death, their own feelings of humiliation, alienation and hurt are resolved and their stature restored. Even if they kill themselves, the avenging bullied believe they will die as men who got even and proved their worth.

We actually deserve this outcome. It is the natural outgrowth of our tradition of proving masculinity through violence. If we want a different outcome we must be willing to change our tradition.

here

This Is Why I Quit Teacher-School

2008-03-08T00:11:22Z

A Calfornia judge admits to the real purpose of education while issuing a ruling that outlaws homeschooling:

A primary purpose of the educational system is to train school children in good citizenship, patriotism and loyalty to the state and the nation as a means of protecting the public welfare, [emphasis added]

here

I'm Not Dead (for better or worse.)

2008-02-18T08:42:57Z

Pigs fly and in other news, something non-idiotic has been said about a school shooting:

If we bracket his massacre as the work of an evil lunatic on drugs, we'll miss yet another opportunity to genuinely examine what life is like for most Americans today, who live in that terrifying gap between the official propaganda about a nation of happy fun-loving Number Ones, and the reality of mediocrity, petty malice, and a flat physical setting that reflects the malice and mediocrity of its town elders.

here

I Saw Superbad

2007-09-14T08:05:19Z

When are these "honest teenage sex" comedies going to show straight guys jerking off together?

Yes.

2007-08-28T11:09:05Z

What I have come to realize from my entire 9/11 experience, and also from the tepid reception of my "physics explanation" articles (like New Orleans dikes) is that the public is basically irrational. It is ultimately pointless to worry about Bush and global warming and fascism and the rest, because they will always win. It has to be this way, because people are fully in the grip of fantasies they would rather die to preserve than become aware of factual reality. Those who do have some sense use it to manipulate the public mind for the benefit of the exploitative systems. We are doomed. When I began writing for a public audience, my naive technical idea was that if people understood the facts, they would move out of superstition, and we "all" could agree on the nature of "the problem" and then it would be almost obvious what actions to take to fix it. But, people live for their superstitions.

here, emphasis added.

He was talking about 9-11 conspiracy theorists and similar, but my experiments in the occult, politics, and sexuality all lead me to the same conclusion. As Draja Mickaharic puts it: People don't want to be enlightened. They want to be comfortable with their ignorance.