Monday, March 26, 2018

The Consistent Consent Ethic Volume 1: The Right to Fuck

One of the most common misconceptions about anarchism is that it's all about lawlessness. The truth is that laws aren't the source of tyranny, the hierarchical machinery of the state is, and statelessness does not inherently equal lawlessness. With that being said, when it comes to law and order, most anarchists tend to air on the safe side with a less is more approach and I count myself among them. The common libertarian dictum is 'don't hurt anybody and don't steal anybodies shit'. I would take it a step further and argue that the core philosophy on what constitutes criminality is the concept of consent.

If a man takes another man's property with his permission it's a gift but when he takes said property against his neighbor's will it becomes theft. The lack of consent makes this act a crime. The same should be applied equally across the board. When a government, stateless or not, taxes its populace upon the threat of imprisonment, this violates that population's consent and thus, in my eyes, constitutes a crime. Some call this philosophy voluntaryism, a philosophy that preaches that in a just society all human interaction should be completely voluntary. In spite of my Bolshevik roots, I've come to embrace this philosophy, at least in spirit. But I prefer to call it the Consistent Consent Ethic.

Under this ethic, laws should not be based on morals, taboos or even right and wrong. These values are a private matter that is only cheapened when they're forced upon others. Thus you don't have to love hard drugs, prostitution and gambling to believe that the government or any other body has no right policing consensual behavior. And this isn't as easy for even me as it sounds. I happen to think junk, whores and craps are fine as wine (pun intended), but I am strongly pro-life. My Consistent Consent Ethic is a spin on the Consistent Life Ethic, a Catholic philosophy that preaches against the taking of human life, whether it be taken through capital punishment, war or abortion. The first two are clear violations of both Ethics. Abortion is where things get a bit more tricky. While I personally disagree with abortion, forcing someone to carry a pregnancy to term is a clear violation of their consent and thus I cannot justify the prohibition of abortion even though I find it to be morally repugnant.

Another tricky moral playing ground for my philosophy is the age of consent. While I abhor the idea of an adult taking unfair advantage of a child, the uncomfortable reality remains that, biologically and psychologically speaking, the age of consent is not a fixed age. It varies from individual to individual. One person's age of being capable of making informed and mature decisions may come a decade before another's. While it is undeniable that pre-pubescent children are not equipped in any way, shape or form to handle adult sexuality, many young adults as young 14 or 15 make informed decisions to be sexually active and policing these actions, even with the best of intentions is a violation of their rights to express their own biological agency. Of coarse there are always exceptions. Authority figures, be they parents, teachers, law enforcement or legal guardians hold an undo degree of influence over young people that often coerces them into making decisions against their will. This, along with such predicaments as relations between correctional officers and prisoners, is the one place where the notion of statutory rape is not offensively absurd.

This doesn't mean that I advocate relationships between forty-something scuzzballs and teeny-boppers anymore than I advocate terminating a fetus out of a selfish sense of inconvenience. I just don't believe that the law is the proper place to enforce my own personal morals. I prefer education, which offers far less tyrannical and far more empowering solutions to the problems of fetal manslaughter and sexual exploitation. Children need to be taught from a young age about their bodies, about their developing sexuality and about the fact that only they have the right to them. Schools often avoid this kind of education, not just because of outdated taboos and puritanical morals but because it enforces the dangerous idea that even children have rights and the most important among them is the right to defy authority, the right to say 'NO!'. We go out of our way in this country to infantilize children because infantilized children grow up to be obedient and compliant adults. They also make for easy targets. Predators don't target young adults for their bodies. They target young adults because of their perceived naivete. Statutory rape laws only enforce this naivete and create generations of malleable victims ready to be violated by the ultimate perverts in the state.

Education has also been proven to be a sound way to prevent abortion and with advances in birth control and contraception like the morning after pill, an age in which abortion is rendered nearly irrelevant is not too far in the future to be described as Utopian any longer. My fellow self-proclaimed pro-lifers show their true colors when they reject such common sense miracle drugs out of hand. When your alleged opposition to abortion prevents you from supporting sound strategies to defeat it, it becomes painfully clear that your true concern is not abortion but policing other peoples lifestyles by manipulating their biology. I don't know if this is sexist but it's definitely immoral, disrespectful and above all else counter productive.

People need to take a good hard look in the mirror and ask themselves what kind of a society they want to live in. Do they want their children to be controlled and sterilized and "safe" or do they want them to be educated, empowered and self-sufficient. Do they want all human life to be valued regardless of gender or age or do they want human life to be cheapened by arbitrary violations of privacy and self determination. Most of all, people need to ask themselves whether they want freedom or safety. Through education and social responsibility, the free can be safe. But through the strong arm of the state, the safe can never truly be free. And that is what voluntaryism, the Consistent Consent Ethic and anarchy are really all about.



Peace, Love & Empathy- CH



Soundtrack; songs that influenced this post.

* If You Want to Sing Out By Cat Stevens
* Loaded By Primal Scream
* Under the Wire By Haim
* Asking For It By Hole
* Mistake By Middle Kids
* Surrender By Cheap Trick
* Hey By the Pixies
* Waitress By Hop Along
* Venus as a Boy By Bjork
* Laid By James
* In the Street By Big Star

Monday, March 19, 2018

Give Peace a Chance

It's pretty rare for me to have good news to report on American foreign policy for this post. So rare that I'm not really sure how to fucking do it. But I have a hard time reporting on the recent advances in the Korean peace process without being cautiously optimistic. Not only are the North and South talking disarmament but our typically petulant Man-Child-in-Chief has pulled a fucking 180 and decided to join them.

That's right, dearest motherfuckers, Mr. Fire-and-Fury has made the unprecedented decision to take his finger off the button and meet with Kim Jong Un, making him the first sitting president to meet with a North Korean leader. Don't get me wrong, the summit has been tentatively scheduled for May and with the Donald's gerbil-like attention span and juvenile impressionability, a peace smashing calamity remains very possible. But with Spring on the horizon and the sonic winds of March blowing the dreary cold of Winter away, I've made my own unprecedented decision to stay positive and give peace a chance.

Unfortunately, the fair weather peaceniks in the mainstream left-wing "Resistance" have chosen a different tact. Rather than applauding when the president finally does something right for a change, they've allowed their partisan tribalism to poison their (half-hearted) zeal for diplomacy and thrown their lot in with the craven war junkies of the neocon jet-set. The common bitch made by these desperate dilettantes is that Trump doesn't know what he's doing, he's in over his head and he has no veteran "expert" Korean diplomats to back him up. And they're right, but I fail to see how that's a bad thing.

America's defunct Korean policy has remained frozen in carbonite since the grey flannel days of the early Fifties, when men were men, women were women, and we leveled the communist North for trying to reunify their peninsula after we sabotaged attempts for a unified Korean election which even Stalin supported. After drowning the peninsula in a tsunami of napalm, the US spent the better part of the next 65 years holding dress rehearsals for round two of the holocaust on the DMZ. The Kim dynasty responded with a decades long quest for a nuclear deterrent. Under the circumstances, I can hardly blame them. The US, in kind, over responded to this response by burying the North alive in crippling sanctions that made the hermit kingdom's already devastating floods and droughts down right genocidal in a despicable attempt to starve and terrorize the nations proud populace into purging the Kims and bowing to American influence.

With the exception of a brief Carter sanctioned reprieve in the 1990's, this has been the policy of our sainted diplomatic "experts", who the limousine liberals and their new neocon friends rotting away in Pelosiville want Trump to seek council with. And with the recent sacking of the shockingly sane Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, and his replacement with ex-CIA Director and known sociopath, Mike Pompeo, they might just get what they want.

Naturally, Trump's deluded fanclub remains equally delusional, suffering from the almost laughable notion that Trump's childish, Truman with dick jokes, tough talk scared the North into compliance. Quite the contrary. Trump's belligerent and downright deranged attitude towards the peninsula is probably what convinced South Korean president and probable Nobel Peace Prize nominee, Moon Jae-In, to make his own unprecedented decision to bravely defy the wishes of his increasingly unstable American handlers and go it alone in seeking a peaceful resolution with his slightly less unstable northern counterpart, the baby-faced trust-fund despot, Kin Jong Un. I suspect that Trump senses this loss of American influence on the peninsula and has decided that his best bet is to jump into the mix at the last minute and steal the credit to feed his own insatiable ego.

God help me, but I say let him. The only thing consistent about Trump's ADHD-style of global leadership is his colossal ego. The neocons know this and milk it like a dairy farmer. Remember the jumping jacks and cartwheels those cunts did after he bombed Syria? Trump is a malignant man-child who thrives on positive reinforcement. So lets bite the bullet and suck the Orange One's micro-cock for peace. Lets make it abundantly clear that Trump can only be a big boy when he plays nice with others. I know it's fucking gross (not to mention a long-shot) but I'd do worse things for peace, dearest motherfuckers. How about you?

So three cheers for the Ginger Caligula and Korean peace! After all, we can always impeach the son of a bitch after the ink dries.



Peace, Love & Empathy- CH



Soundtrack; songs that influenced this post.

* Give Peace a Chance By John Lennon
* Don't Get Me Wrong By The Pretenders
* Like Dylan In the Movies By Belle & Sebastian
* I Am a Scientist By Guided By Voices
* Mr. Tambourine Man By Bob Dylan
* In Bloom By Nirvana
* Satellite of Love By Lou Reed
* The Boy With the Arab Strap By Belle & Sebastian

Monday, March 12, 2018

Putin is Everywhere

Ever since the untimely disintegration of the Soviet paper tiger, America has been an empire in search of a scapegoat to justify its own violent existence. These scapegoats have usually taken the form of a third world tin-pot despot who the Mandarins of the mainstream media have dutifully spun into a cartoonish monster-of-the-week worthy of a stale Outer Limits rerun.

Who could forget our old frenemy, Saddam Hussein AKA the Great Porn-Stash, a dastardly Arab madman who hid his WMD's so far up his ass that even Rumsfeld couldn't shake them loose at the end of a noose. Or the Slamming Slavic, Slobodan Milosevic, who's holocausts were so efficient that the bodies vanished into midair the moment NATO boots touched Balkan soil. And Muammar Gaddafi, that Mad Dog of the Middle East who threatened American (in)security with his gold Dinars and his support for unsavory terrorists like Nelson Mandela and Steven Biko.

But America finally hit the fucking jackpot with Vladimir Putin. Finally, a boogeyman we can all believe in. For conservatives, he's the reincarnation of Josef Stalin, come to reclaim the lost glory of the storied Evil Empire. For progressives, he's a fag-bashing Orthodox nationalist with his sight set on that equally mythic Fabian miracle of globalism. And judging by his latest state of the nation address, even Vlad is sinking his teeth into the roll with his Bond-villain Ted-Talk about reducing Mar-a-Lago to nuclear vapor, albeit with the true intent of inspiring boners from crippled Russian nationalists who long for an age when being Russian didn't mean being impotent.

It's all bullshit of coarse. Smoke and mirrors. As crafty a chess master as old Vlad has proven to be in Georgia, Ukraine and the Middle East, he is merely the quasi-democratically elected leader of a rusting petro-state with a Jurassic nuclear stash that's about as funky-fresh as Gorbachev's port wine stain. Well over a year into the fakakta Russiagate witch hunt, with every intelligence organization known to man or beast taring the White House apart like a pig-tossed crack house, the most that neocon super sleuth and torture porn addict Robert Mueller has managed to scrounge up in the way of Russian collusion is a handful of right-wing, B-grade oligarchs attempting to suck up to the Kremlin with fruitless Trump Tower rendezvous', mercenary island retreats and half-baked click-bait farms. None of which has anything to do with Darth Putin, at least not in meaningful sort of way.

But just try telling that to the hysterical Hillary-ites over at MSDNC, who's wild eyed Russophobia makes Joe McCarthy look like Allen Ginsberg. To them, Vladimir Putin's strings can be seen behind anything if you look hard enough to make your eyeballs bleed. Putin is more powerful than god. He's kind of like Elvis is to hillbillies, just waiting for them behind every Burger King drive-thru window. This strange phenomenon was best personified by the great Mojo Nixon's college rock cult classic "Elvis is Everywhere". But I think the Rachel Maddow's and Joy Reid's of this world could use their own rendition....

....Cause Putin is everywhere. Putin is everything. Putin is everybody. Putin is still the king. Putin is in your jeans. Putin is in your Big Mac. Putin is in your iPhone! Putin is in your mom! Putin is in everybody. Putin's in the young, the old, the fat, the skinny, the Alt-right and Black Lives Matter. The brown and blue people got Putin in em too. Everybody's got Putin in them. Everybody except one person that is....  Yeah, one person! The Beautiful opposite of Putin....  John McCain has no Putin in him....  And Putin is in Bernie Sanders but Putin's trying to get out! Listen up Bernie baby! Putin is everywhere. Putin is everything. Putin is everybody. Putin is still the king.

But man, there's a lot of unexplained shit out there in the world. Lots of people say, what the fuck's going on? Let me tell ya! Who brought down the Twin Towers? Putin! Who shot up Sandy Hook? Putin! Yeah man, you see guys walking down the street, pushing shopping carts, and you think they're talking to Allah, they're talking to them self. Man no, they're talking to Putin! Putin! Putin! And you know what's going on in that Bermuda Triangle? Down in the Bermuda Triangle....  Putin needs boats. Putin needs boats. Putin. Putin. Putin. Putin. Putin. Putin. Putin needs boats....  Yeah cause Putin is everywhere. Putin is everything. Putin is everybody. Putin is still the king. Man o man, what I want you to see, is that the big V's inside of you and me....

That's right Democrats, you're the stupid party now. Well, the other stupid party. You got a problem with that? Tell it to fucking Putin. The one place that caviar slurping motherfucker really is, is in your head.



Peace, Love & Empathy- CH



P.S. I'm Putin in drag.



Soundtrack; songs that influenced this post.

* Elvis is Everywhere By Mojo Nixon
* Crazy By Patsy Kline
* Karma Police By Radiohead
* Everybody Wants to Rule the World By Tears For Fears
* Lithium By Nirvana
* Bae By The Front Bottoms
* Party At Ground Zero By Fishbone
* Personality Crisis By New York Dolls

Monday, March 5, 2018

Gone Gun Crazy (Again)

Every time this country has another mass shooting the whole damn nation loses its proverbial shit. When it happens during an election year that 'shit' goes ballistic. Since the Parkland tragedy, the media sphere has been gassed by a veritable potpourri of preposterous "solutions" that will fix this nation's centuries old jones for mass slaughter. Democrats and Republicans alike have mounted the caskets of the victims like soapboxes to tell a country kept petrified by the 25/8 news cycle that this country is just one donation away from a cure for human nature. America has an uncanny habit of revealing its own abysmal stupidity during times of great crisis and Washington loves to milk it dry. The masses, infantilized by the strong arm of the state, beg for tyranny like bread as if it were synonymous with safety.

Well, I'm here this week to do what I do best, wake you stupid shits the fuck up with a gong called reality. I know I'm a bitch but bitches get shit done and someone needs to rise above the reactionary rabble and call a spade a spade. Gun control is bullshit. It doesn't matter how you dress it up, it still reeks to high heaven of tyranny. I get why people are upset, I am too, but you all need to get a fucking grip. The last thing you should do when confronted by a madman is lose touch with reality.

One of this country's major flaws on firearms is the chasm of ignorance that exists between hunting country and the suburbs. I don't even own a damn gun but having grown up in the sticks of a purple state, I have a full appreciation for the fact that the only real assault weapons in this country are in the hands of those tax-funded gangsters in law enforcement. An assault weapon is a fully automatic firearm designed for state sanctioned mass shootings like Waco. AR-15's are not assault weapons, they just look like them. Calling an AR-15 an assault weapon is like calling the Texas Chainsaw Massacre a snuff film. The total absurdity of assault weapons bans can be revealed by the fact that, under Clinton's post-Waco regime, you couldn't buy an AR but it was practically fucking raining Mini-14's, another high-capacity hunting rifle chambered at the same damn caliber, but it wasn't frightening enough to gives the Jones' nightmares so it got a pass. Assault weapons bans are a joke, arbitrary political theater designed to massage the fears of the ignorant. Their are no assault weapons to ban, Just technologically retarded soccer moms who can't tell the difference between a hunting rifle and a hunting rifle in drag.

Barring the mentally ill from firearms ownership sounds rational... if you don't believe in the Constitution. Millions of Americans suffer from some form of mental illness, such as myself, and we're statistically far more likely to be victims of violence than perpetrators. But because a small minority of wack-jobs go postal apparently we should all be stripped of our constitutional rights. And where do we draw the fucking line? At schizophrenia? Postpartum depression? Social anxiety? Do we need to interrogate every person who wants to buy a twenty gauge? Do we force them to medicate first? How about piss tests, Rorschachs and lie detectors? I'm fucking serious here. I'm asking you, not telling you; where do you draw the line?  Do I need to remind you people that state-regulated mental illness was the primary way the Soviet Union kept dissidents in line during the Brezhnev years? Oh, wait, I forgot, Americans don't read history books that aren't penned by sexual predators and sold at the airport. But, shit man, that's no reason not to discriminate against an entire class of people, as long as it makes YOU feel safe.

The age limit is fucked up for the same damn reason. What right do you have to tell a 19 year old girl not to pack heat on campus to keep herself from getting raped? Furthermore, the majority of accidental shootings are the product of ignorance. Is depriving young adults of learning firearm safety at an impressionable age really a virtue? If kids can be offered the option of drivers-ed in school then why not educate them about their constitutional rights? Guns can be locked away on campus just as easily as power tools in shop class and for the same reasons. Not to mention the fact that they could be handed out just as easily to straight-A students during the unlikely event of an active shooter situation. People love to harp about "the children", but what about their goddamn rights? Shouldn't the Constitution apply to them too? Or are children's rights only convenient to you when they keep your kids under your thumb? "Darlene's stepdad got grabby, but Darlene has a Glock. Now stepdad pees sitting down." Yeah, I like the ring of that bedtime story. Treat your children right, because they might, be packing....

And the liberals don't own the block on shitty ideas either. The NRA solution to the Parkland problem is to feed the arms industry it serves in heaps of corporate welfare by turning schools into goddamn super-max prisons; metal detectors, bullet-proof windows, armed guards, surveillance cameras, landmines, drones, concertina wire, fuck it! we'll take it all. Put it on the taxpayers tab. The Prison Industrial Complex must be shooting their collective wads over the prospect of quadrupling their prisons. I'm fine with allowing concealed carry for teachers, but the last thing we need is to be filling inner-city schools with white cops. Schools should be a police state free zone.

The biggest misconception on mass shootings is that guns are the problem, which is quite simply not true. Over the last few decades gun violence has steadily declined with little correlation to changing standards in gun regulation. During this same period we have seen a precipitous increase in mass shootings. This trend shows few signs of being affected by gun control. Columbine, the former record breaker for primary school violence before Parkland, happened during the Assault Weapons Ban. This rise in active shooter situations does however correlate perfectly with the decline of the middle class and the rise of cable news. At a time when people have never felt more powerless, the mass media has given round the clock coverage to anyone desperate enough to shoot up a movie theater or a college campus. With their bottomless appetite for salacious details, the talking heads of Fox, CNN and MSNBC have offered the pathologically isolated the low-hanging fruit of immortality. If these prime time jackals truly gave as many fucks about these dead kids as they tearfully claim to, they would end the fucking circus and just report the goddamn facts.

The cold hard reality of these tragedies is there are no easy answers. But, sadly, their is no shortage of Washington scum-fucks and media whores willing to exploit people desperate to believe there are. It's only natural to want someone or some benevolent force to save us from ourselves when we feel helpless but the only people who can truly save us is us. Gun control is only effective in a world devoid of all guns. This is impossible without giving the state enough power to crush us into a fine powder. The other option is to become a better armed and educated society. This option may not make us a peaceful society but it will make us a freer one. I don't own a gun (yet) but I do own a brain that leads me to advocate the latter.



Peace, Love & Empathy- CH



Soundtrack; songs that influenced this post.

* Hard Love By Strand of Oaks
* Hate My Way By Throwing Muses
* God Gave Me Everything By Mick Jagger feat. Lenny Kravitz
* Only Acting By Kero Kero Bonita
* Disarm By Smashing Pumpkins
* The Lord's Favorite By Iceage
* It'll Never Happen Again By The Scientists
* You Can't Put Your Arms Around A Memory By Johnny Thunders
* Jesus Etc. By Wilco
* Drunk Drivers/Killer Whales By Car Seat Headrest