I was fifteen the last time we invaded the Persian Gulf (something of a national pass-time). I was young, confused, and like most kids that age, a bit stupid. I was conservative like my parents, I thought Korn was the best band since Kiss, and I was so far in the closet over my gender identity that I thought it was a studio apartment. I was dumb as shit alright, but I was still smart enough to recognize that invading Iraq was a bad idea. Being stupid, I was fully on board with Afghanistan. I suffered under the national delusion that invading that black hole would somehow vindicate the deaths of the people killed primarily by American allies on 9/11. But Afghanistan made sense. It added up on some level. I mean, at least Bin Laden was there (maybe). But even in my nu-metal damaged teenage mind, Iraq felt insane.
None of the "facts" added up. All of the "evidence" seemed sketchy at best. And I couldn't fight the creeping feeling that people were rushing to drop bombs before they could come to their senses. But I was a conservative Catholic boy in a purple state and everyone who I loved and trusted seemed to buy into this bullshit hook, line, and sinker. Of coarse we should bomb Baghdad, Saddam Hussein is a wild animal, he funds his enemies in Al-Qaeda and runs a WMD program so incognito that even the UN can't see it. It felt like my whole universe had up and lost its goddamn mind. Up was down, black was white, and things would never be the same.
That was how it all began for me. I was radicalized the night they bombed Baghdad. I remember watching the skyline of that beautiful ancient city explode like fireworks that Sunday after my parents had gone to bed and feeling physically ill. People were dying and no one I knew seemed to fucking care. The next day I got up and horrified my tiny Catholic school by showing up with a peace sign strapped to my arm. I spent the whole day fighting, with classmates, with teachers, with clergy. By the time the bell rang I was exhausted. But I never felt more alive. I had taken a stand that not even my parents believed in and I held my ground. I was hooked on chaos. That was the day Nicholas Reid, good Catholic boy, died and, in many ways, that was the day Comrade Hermit, genderfuck anarchist fire-starter, was born. It would have been downright fantastic if it made a difference. But America has never been as smart as its stupid, rebellious, youth. And now it feels like 2003 all over again.
I invited you, dearest motherfuckers, on this stroll down memory lane because I'm pretty sure we're headed back for yet another clusterfuck in the Persian Gulf. Bibi Netanyahu has hit the road again with his classic "the sky is falling unless we bomb it black" prop comedy routine (now with PowerPoint!). And our latest man-child president has been paid handsomely by bloodsucking cretins like Sheldon Adelson to decertify the Iran Nuclear Deal and set the stage for a cataclysmic showdown that could easily end in World War 3.
At one time we might have been able to rest our hopes on the shaky ground of the Donald's spastic dog-like attention span but with the Wonder Twins of neocon doom, Mike Pompeo and John Bolton, jabbing their fork-tongues into his unwashed ears, I'm pretty sure we're shit out of luck. Our last hope may be praying to Mary Magdalene, the patron saint of righteous sex workers, that Stormy Daniels can sabotage Trump's mojo with raw footage of her pegging the war-monger in chief with a 13 inch strap-on and an apple in his mouth. Then again, sexual humiliation never slowed that Super-Predator and fellow Lolita Express frequent flyer Bill Clinton down, so this may be the end of the road.
Our best hope may be to fight war like fifteen year old fire-starters. Young, angry, and just a little bit stupid in the Quixotic sense of the word. It may be time to charge the windmills. That pied piper of youth rebellion, Abbie Hoffnam, would say in times like these the only thing left to do is shout Theater! in a crowded fire. Take to the streets. Jam the Capitol phone lines. Burn a flag. Deface a monument. Holler and cuss at any adult too emotionally tone-def to give a fuck about the piles of young corpses that may soon line the streets of Tehran like crimson snow-piles after a blizzard of shrapnel. This country doesn't learn lessons. Lets fucking blow it up like 1968. In the eternal words of H. Rap Brown, "If America don't come around, we're gonna burn it down."
Well gather your matches, dearest motherfuckers. We've got a theater to light. It may be what's left of the Persian Gulf's only hope.
Peace, Love & Empathy- CH
Soundtrack; songs that influenced this post
* I Won't Back Down by Tom Petty & the Hearbreakers
* Shoots & Ladders by Korn
* Nocturnal Me by Echo & the Bunnymen
* Rebellion (Lies) by Arcade Fire
* In the Streets by Cheap Trick
* Disarm by Smashing Pumpkins
* Kill For Love by Chromatics
* Mandinka By Sinead O'Connor
* Shout It Out Loud by Kiss
* Firestarter By the Prodigy
Monday, May 7, 2018
Sunday, April 29, 2018
Fake News and Despotism: Ours and Theirs
It's getting harder and harder to be a brutally honest muckraker in this country. It seems like you can't objectively cover anything related to foreign policy without being blackballed as a Putin puppet or an advocate for totalitarianism. According to even many alternative news outlets, you can't afford to point out the complexities of geopolitics in a dying empire without trafficking in "Fake News", a loaded term that started out as a way for the falling Fourth Estate to tar the rising Fifth, only to be turned into a political football that has lost all meaning in the era of Trump. Fake News has basically become shorthand for news that you don't like and when journalism becomes a popularity contest that no one can win, you know that despotism can't be far behind.
Well, I don't write to tell people what they want to hear. I write to tell people what they need to here. And sometimes what the people need to here is that the "Bad Guy" didn't do it. I'm a queer anarchist, I have zero love lost for authoritarians like Putin or Assad. But I also have zero love lost for authoritarians like John McCain and Nikki Haley, so you'll have to forgive me for not taking their word as bond. The gross reality of the new Cold War landscape is that, as fucked up as Vladimir Putin and Bashar Assad might be, they're not nearly as fucked up as the establishment press would have us believe and, even grosser, they're far from the sickest fucks on the block.
Putin's Russia is far from heaven. Truth be told, in many ways it's worse off than the Soviet Union. Say what you will about Brezhnev but at least he kept his prisoners fed. Putin is the top dog in a Social Darwinist oligarchy that would make Ayn Rand's panties wet (Think Hunger Games.With vodka!). You better believe he had to steal, fuck over and even kill to get to where he is today but, contrary to popular belief, Mr. Putin is not in fact the devil. Their is a reason that man is so goddamn popular in Russia and it's not just those saucy Tom of Finland pics. The main reason Russia loves Putin is that he isn't Boris Yeltsin, Putin's drunken predecessor that today's most hysterical Putin-phobes couldn't get enough of. This was a man who liquidated the constitution, literally bombed congress and sold entire Soviet industries to Mafioso's. He also stole an election, and we helped!
Putin may be a cold blooded, fag-bashing, autocrat but he also mopped up a lot of Yeltsin's mess and refused to take orders from his former handlers back in Brussels and Washington. This is the real reason why he gets blamed for everything from Hillary's biological unelectability to those meddling kids in Black Lives Matter. I could care less about Putin but when the mass media becomes an echo chamber for our own derelict government's lies about the motherfucker I'm gonna fucking say something. The one thing that Russiagate, the assassination of Boris Nemtsov and the Skripal poisonings have in common is that there remains zero proof connecting these dirty deeds to Vlad the Terrible. That doesn't mean that the man isn't a first class cunt, he's just not likely guilty of putting a lunatic in charge of the bombs pointed at his head or wasting a critic across the street from his house or setting free a rat from the gulags just to wack him in a hostile country. Their's a big difference between evil and strategically retarded and Putin didn't climb his way from being a burned out KGB taxi driver to the top of the Kremlin pile by being stupid.
Assad is another grotesque creature that I wouldn't piss on if he were on fire (I'd probably wait until he's nice and crisp and then wash away the ashes). Like his daddy, he's a barrel bombing sociopath who's zest for torture porn is so great that he outsourced his black sites to Uncle Sam. Sadly, as far as the hellscape that we turned the Levant into is concerned, he's also the lesser of several evils. The basic math that our human rights loving media seems incapable of solving is that if Assad goes, the Salafi whack-jobs will take his place and a half dozen genocides will begin. Say what you will about Assad but the creepy pencil-stashed bastard has kept the minorities of his country (Christians, Alawites, Druze, etc.) relatively safe, albeit for largely self-serving reasons. And in spite of his decidedly inconsistent commitment to humanity, the chemical attacks he's been blamed for remain shrouded in the noxious fog of war. We know for a fact that both he and the so-called rebels likely have access to chemical weapons but with Assad's victory all but a forgone conclusion, only the rebels have a sane reason to use them.
Try and remind most people in this country of these uncomfortable truths and you get treated like a goddamn goose-stepping fascisti. But is there anything more fascist than people who take their government at its word with the unblinking obedience of a small child? These same small children with big microphones now seek to regulate the internet, the last bastion of America's moribund free press, to silence anyone who questions the infinite wisdom of the state with "Fake News". And these are the same children who have helped this same state lie us into war repeatedly with their own fake news, from the Gulf of Tonkin to Yellowcake. Putin and Assad must be so jealous. Maybe we should work on reigning in our own despots before we set our sites on others.
Just a thought. But you don't have think about it, dearest motherfuckers. After all this is only Fake News.
Peace, Love & Empathy- CH
Soundtrack; songs that influenced this post
* This Time by Land of Talk
* Roseblood by Mazzy Star
* Dive by Beach House
* The Crying Game by Boy George
* Kill For Love by Chromatics
* I'll Be You're Mirror by the Velvet Underground & Nico
* When I Was Done Dying by Dan Deacon
* Gobbledygook by Sigur Ros
* Ocean Size by Jane's Addiction
* Fireworks by First Aid Kit
* Shark Smile by Big Thief
Well, I don't write to tell people what they want to hear. I write to tell people what they need to here. And sometimes what the people need to here is that the "Bad Guy" didn't do it. I'm a queer anarchist, I have zero love lost for authoritarians like Putin or Assad. But I also have zero love lost for authoritarians like John McCain and Nikki Haley, so you'll have to forgive me for not taking their word as bond. The gross reality of the new Cold War landscape is that, as fucked up as Vladimir Putin and Bashar Assad might be, they're not nearly as fucked up as the establishment press would have us believe and, even grosser, they're far from the sickest fucks on the block.
Putin's Russia is far from heaven. Truth be told, in many ways it's worse off than the Soviet Union. Say what you will about Brezhnev but at least he kept his prisoners fed. Putin is the top dog in a Social Darwinist oligarchy that would make Ayn Rand's panties wet (Think Hunger Games.With vodka!). You better believe he had to steal, fuck over and even kill to get to where he is today but, contrary to popular belief, Mr. Putin is not in fact the devil. Their is a reason that man is so goddamn popular in Russia and it's not just those saucy Tom of Finland pics. The main reason Russia loves Putin is that he isn't Boris Yeltsin, Putin's drunken predecessor that today's most hysterical Putin-phobes couldn't get enough of. This was a man who liquidated the constitution, literally bombed congress and sold entire Soviet industries to Mafioso's. He also stole an election, and we helped!
Putin may be a cold blooded, fag-bashing, autocrat but he also mopped up a lot of Yeltsin's mess and refused to take orders from his former handlers back in Brussels and Washington. This is the real reason why he gets blamed for everything from Hillary's biological unelectability to those meddling kids in Black Lives Matter. I could care less about Putin but when the mass media becomes an echo chamber for our own derelict government's lies about the motherfucker I'm gonna fucking say something. The one thing that Russiagate, the assassination of Boris Nemtsov and the Skripal poisonings have in common is that there remains zero proof connecting these dirty deeds to Vlad the Terrible. That doesn't mean that the man isn't a first class cunt, he's just not likely guilty of putting a lunatic in charge of the bombs pointed at his head or wasting a critic across the street from his house or setting free a rat from the gulags just to wack him in a hostile country. Their's a big difference between evil and strategically retarded and Putin didn't climb his way from being a burned out KGB taxi driver to the top of the Kremlin pile by being stupid.
Assad is another grotesque creature that I wouldn't piss on if he were on fire (I'd probably wait until he's nice and crisp and then wash away the ashes). Like his daddy, he's a barrel bombing sociopath who's zest for torture porn is so great that he outsourced his black sites to Uncle Sam. Sadly, as far as the hellscape that we turned the Levant into is concerned, he's also the lesser of several evils. The basic math that our human rights loving media seems incapable of solving is that if Assad goes, the Salafi whack-jobs will take his place and a half dozen genocides will begin. Say what you will about Assad but the creepy pencil-stashed bastard has kept the minorities of his country (Christians, Alawites, Druze, etc.) relatively safe, albeit for largely self-serving reasons. And in spite of his decidedly inconsistent commitment to humanity, the chemical attacks he's been blamed for remain shrouded in the noxious fog of war. We know for a fact that both he and the so-called rebels likely have access to chemical weapons but with Assad's victory all but a forgone conclusion, only the rebels have a sane reason to use them.
Try and remind most people in this country of these uncomfortable truths and you get treated like a goddamn goose-stepping fascisti. But is there anything more fascist than people who take their government at its word with the unblinking obedience of a small child? These same small children with big microphones now seek to regulate the internet, the last bastion of America's moribund free press, to silence anyone who questions the infinite wisdom of the state with "Fake News". And these are the same children who have helped this same state lie us into war repeatedly with their own fake news, from the Gulf of Tonkin to Yellowcake. Putin and Assad must be so jealous. Maybe we should work on reigning in our own despots before we set our sites on others.
Just a thought. But you don't have think about it, dearest motherfuckers. After all this is only Fake News.
Peace, Love & Empathy- CH
Soundtrack; songs that influenced this post
* This Time by Land of Talk
* Roseblood by Mazzy Star
* Dive by Beach House
* The Crying Game by Boy George
* Kill For Love by Chromatics
* I'll Be You're Mirror by the Velvet Underground & Nico
* When I Was Done Dying by Dan Deacon
* Gobbledygook by Sigur Ros
* Ocean Size by Jane's Addiction
* Fireworks by First Aid Kit
* Shark Smile by Big Thief
Thursday, April 19, 2018
Making Peace with Deplorables
The latest American war crime in Syria had all the predictable, deja vu makings of a cheesy cable reboot, with all the same players playing all the same parts. We have Bashar Assad playing the pencil-mustachioed demogorgon, slaving over his bubbling cauldron of noxious chemicals. We have Vladimir Putin playing the Nosferatu-domed Sith lord puppet master who's long shadow somehow covers every grave from Douma to Salisbury, with no evidence needed to prove his inevitable guilt. We have the gallant White Helmets playing the tireless and spotless crusaders for truth with their cameras always set on the right place at the right time. And, of coarse, we have Donald Trump, Emmanuel Macron and Theresa May shedding their usual clown attire to play the part of the guardians of justice, brazenly defying the laws of man to achieve only what the gods can do and restore the precious sanctity of the global order.
Of coarse, like most cheesy cable reboots, the narrative provided by the mainstream press was roughly 80% bullshit. For the umpteenth time, the anti-Assad propagandists delivered sketchy evidence of a supposed poison gas attack that came just in time for a massive Syrian Army victory and our scatter brained president's latest empty threat to finally pull the troops out of that fucked to death hellscape we created in the Levant. Trump and his French and British counterparts wasted zero time waiting for pesky details like evidence before pronouncing Assad and his eternal partner in crime, Putin guilty as sin of committing an atrocity that they had absolutely nothing to gain from, with everything to lose. The western mass media for their part dutifully regurgitated the baseless accusations of their collective governments verbatim as if they were scientific fact. The Russians and Syrians welcomed an international investigation with open arms and the self-sainted masters of the universe (aka the First World) dropped bombs before one could take place and ruin their little war crime.
It all felt so damn normal because its all happened a million times before. Bill Clinton mastered the art of the micro-intervention back in in the nineties when he bombed some god forsaken place every time another sex scandal resurfaced. Donald seems to be a big fan of his ex-buddies playbook. Stormy who?....
Pretty much the only thing that didn't go according to plan was that Trump's seemingly indefatigable fan club didn't follow their dear leader into disaster this time. Apparently America First was more than just a nifty catch phrase for the deplorables, who nearly jammed up the White House phone lines in the days before the bombing, voicing their righteous fury over their beloved Donald's latest and most egregious act of hypocrisy.
The predator propagandists in the right wing media reacted in time with their demo audience's outrage, with former neocon saber-rattlers like Anne Coulter and Laura Ingraham following the money onto the peace train and Tucker Carlson, of all people, delivering some of the most stunningly eloquent antiwar prose heard on a major news site since Bill Donahue got shit-canned from MSDNC for the unforgivable crime of speaking out against the invasion of Iraq in 2003. It was nothing short of surreal. If you would have told me even a year ago that Fox News would become a veritable hotbed of non-interventionism, I would have called you crazy then doubled my meds.
I shouldn't have to tell you, dearest motherfuckers, how unprecedented this sea change is. I take zero pleasure in being proven right (repeatedly) about Trump anymore than I took pleasure in being proven right (repeatedly) about Obama. But I am overjoyed to be proven wrong about Trump's deplorables, at least in one respect. As an anti-imperialist trans person in Trump country, being able to find common ground with my redneck neighbors on issues of war and peace is beyond refreshing, it's goddamn empowering. For all their many, many, many flaws, the deplorables have shown a level of moral fortitude that the woke Obama progressives failed at miserably when their hero went to war. They have taken a stand against the supposed leader of their movement and I believe it may have had an impact.
In the days after the alleged gas attacks, Trump showed every sign of being primed and ready for a full blown, scorch the earth, shock and awe, bomb-a-thon. But after a couple of days of having his bridle ego raddled by his former cheerleaders' defiant disapproval he settled on just three targets in a largely symbolic and ineffectual (albeit, still grossly illegal) strike. This could be a coincidence, another sign that Trump is more bluster than bite, but I doubt it. While the "Resistance" busied themselves defending the sanctity of Bob Mueller's dead end Russiagate investigation, the deplorables were taking Trump's orange ass to the fucking woodshed over crimes he actually committed (what a concept!). I believe there is an opportunity here, if the truly radical left and the populist right can get over their respective prejudices to embrace it. Their is no reason why intersectionality can't benefit poor white trash and queer folks can't put America (or at least peace) first.
Many people forget that the original major league antiwar movement in this country wasn't the Students for a Democratic Society but the America First Committee, an organization that brought together left and right, from isolationist race-baiters like Charles Lindbergh to Christian socialist doves like Norman Thomas, and kept this country out of a brutal and senseless world war for years before being outflanked by the furor over the sanction provoked attacks on Pear Harbor. Donald Trump bastardized this dynamic movement by hijacking its name for a cheap popcorn headline. But the movement that formed around this lie has grown a mind of its own and I say we engage it.
Anti-imperialism makes for some strange bedfellows, dearest motherfuckers. But I'm open to sharing my bed with some white trash deplorables as long as they're willing to get down with a tranarchist like me and Trump isn't invited. Let the bed-in begin.
Peace, Love & Understanding- CH
Soundtrack; songs that influenced this post
* Knights In White Satin by the Moody Blues
* My War by Black Flag
* Pilot Can At the Queer of God by Flaming Lips
* Iron Man by Black Sabbath
* Pepper by Butthole Surfers
* Baby's On Fire by Brian Eno
* Crisis Fest by Sunflower Bean
* Minor Threat by Minor Threat
* E-Pro by Beck
* Wild In the Streets by Circle Jerks
* Seven Nation Army by the White Stripes
* Eat the Rich by Motorhead
Of coarse, like most cheesy cable reboots, the narrative provided by the mainstream press was roughly 80% bullshit. For the umpteenth time, the anti-Assad propagandists delivered sketchy evidence of a supposed poison gas attack that came just in time for a massive Syrian Army victory and our scatter brained president's latest empty threat to finally pull the troops out of that fucked to death hellscape we created in the Levant. Trump and his French and British counterparts wasted zero time waiting for pesky details like evidence before pronouncing Assad and his eternal partner in crime, Putin guilty as sin of committing an atrocity that they had absolutely nothing to gain from, with everything to lose. The western mass media for their part dutifully regurgitated the baseless accusations of their collective governments verbatim as if they were scientific fact. The Russians and Syrians welcomed an international investigation with open arms and the self-sainted masters of the universe (aka the First World) dropped bombs before one could take place and ruin their little war crime.
It all felt so damn normal because its all happened a million times before. Bill Clinton mastered the art of the micro-intervention back in in the nineties when he bombed some god forsaken place every time another sex scandal resurfaced. Donald seems to be a big fan of his ex-buddies playbook. Stormy who?....
Pretty much the only thing that didn't go according to plan was that Trump's seemingly indefatigable fan club didn't follow their dear leader into disaster this time. Apparently America First was more than just a nifty catch phrase for the deplorables, who nearly jammed up the White House phone lines in the days before the bombing, voicing their righteous fury over their beloved Donald's latest and most egregious act of hypocrisy.
The predator propagandists in the right wing media reacted in time with their demo audience's outrage, with former neocon saber-rattlers like Anne Coulter and Laura Ingraham following the money onto the peace train and Tucker Carlson, of all people, delivering some of the most stunningly eloquent antiwar prose heard on a major news site since Bill Donahue got shit-canned from MSDNC for the unforgivable crime of speaking out against the invasion of Iraq in 2003. It was nothing short of surreal. If you would have told me even a year ago that Fox News would become a veritable hotbed of non-interventionism, I would have called you crazy then doubled my meds.
I shouldn't have to tell you, dearest motherfuckers, how unprecedented this sea change is. I take zero pleasure in being proven right (repeatedly) about Trump anymore than I took pleasure in being proven right (repeatedly) about Obama. But I am overjoyed to be proven wrong about Trump's deplorables, at least in one respect. As an anti-imperialist trans person in Trump country, being able to find common ground with my redneck neighbors on issues of war and peace is beyond refreshing, it's goddamn empowering. For all their many, many, many flaws, the deplorables have shown a level of moral fortitude that the woke Obama progressives failed at miserably when their hero went to war. They have taken a stand against the supposed leader of their movement and I believe it may have had an impact.
In the days after the alleged gas attacks, Trump showed every sign of being primed and ready for a full blown, scorch the earth, shock and awe, bomb-a-thon. But after a couple of days of having his bridle ego raddled by his former cheerleaders' defiant disapproval he settled on just three targets in a largely symbolic and ineffectual (albeit, still grossly illegal) strike. This could be a coincidence, another sign that Trump is more bluster than bite, but I doubt it. While the "Resistance" busied themselves defending the sanctity of Bob Mueller's dead end Russiagate investigation, the deplorables were taking Trump's orange ass to the fucking woodshed over crimes he actually committed (what a concept!). I believe there is an opportunity here, if the truly radical left and the populist right can get over their respective prejudices to embrace it. Their is no reason why intersectionality can't benefit poor white trash and queer folks can't put America (or at least peace) first.
Many people forget that the original major league antiwar movement in this country wasn't the Students for a Democratic Society but the America First Committee, an organization that brought together left and right, from isolationist race-baiters like Charles Lindbergh to Christian socialist doves like Norman Thomas, and kept this country out of a brutal and senseless world war for years before being outflanked by the furor over the sanction provoked attacks on Pear Harbor. Donald Trump bastardized this dynamic movement by hijacking its name for a cheap popcorn headline. But the movement that formed around this lie has grown a mind of its own and I say we engage it.
Anti-imperialism makes for some strange bedfellows, dearest motherfuckers. But I'm open to sharing my bed with some white trash deplorables as long as they're willing to get down with a tranarchist like me and Trump isn't invited. Let the bed-in begin.
Peace, Love & Understanding- CH
Soundtrack; songs that influenced this post
* Knights In White Satin by the Moody Blues
* My War by Black Flag
* Pilot Can At the Queer of God by Flaming Lips
* Iron Man by Black Sabbath
* Pepper by Butthole Surfers
* Baby's On Fire by Brian Eno
* Crisis Fest by Sunflower Bean
* Minor Threat by Minor Threat
* E-Pro by Beck
* Wild In the Streets by Circle Jerks
* Seven Nation Army by the White Stripes
* Eat the Rich by Motorhead
Monday, April 16, 2018
Revenge of the Invisible Girl
Cis-gender people take mirrors for granted. For most people a mirror is just a reflection of what the rest of the world sees, for better or worse. Mirrors can be cruel in the straight world, particularly if you're female, but it's a magnifying glass, pointing out and distorting the harsher fringes of reality. For trans and genderqueer people, mirrors are something much more cruel, something much more cerebral. It's a hissing funhouse mirror twisting the truth into knots until reality itself becomes a opaque concept. For most people outside the binary the mirror is a tool of dysphoria, pointing out all the things we aren't and all the things we'll never be. I've had my own struggles with the tyranny of the mirror and gender dysphoria, but my problems seem to be different, even from other queer folk.
You see, when I look in the mirror I see my true self. Even with the burly body hair and six o'clock shadow, I still see that angry little girl who rages beneath. My hirsute only adds to her androgynous mystique. The problem is, no one else sees her and trying to convince people that she's really there becomes unbearably tiresome. Being something no one else can see makes you feel fucking crazy. What's even worse, it makes you feel invisible. This is my dysphoria, being haunted by the invisible girl that only I can see in the mirror. And the damnedest thing is that she rarely feels more invisible than when she's among other queer people, my people.
I spent most of my life suffering from an affliction that I didn't even know existed. Being neither male nor female but a fluid mix of the two and everything in between, I didn't exactly grow up feeling like a girl and I just assumed that I must be male because that's what everyone told me I was. But I never felt right. I never felt content. And the older I got, the louder these feelings became. As I entered the maelstrom of my twenties, my dysphoria reached a late full bloom and being male began to feel like a cruel prison sentence, life without parole. It was only through my isolated agoraphobic autodidactism that I discovered that the universe was so much more colorful than pink and blue. After voraciously consuming the incendiary ideas of gender renegades like Judith Butler, Julia Serrano and Justin Vivian Bond, not to mention my online mentor, Angela Keaton, and a shitload of David Bowie, Lou Reed and Courtney Love songs, I came to the conclusion that I was queer and I made a conscious decision to reject the gender binary entirely.
After a disastrously failed attempt to find more answers through therapy (see Comrade Hermit Vs. the Tranny Whisperer), I decided that I couldn't trust a psychiatric establishment who's understanding of gender identity belonged in the Nineteenth Century with leech therapy and exorcisms. So I sought to find myself by finding my tribe. I began attending the few local queer support groups that exist in my agrarian corner of Trump Country. At first it was great and in many ways it still is. Its given me a sense of community and belonging that I had long gave up on ever finding. But the more time I spent with these wonderful people, the more dysphoric I seemed to get.
It was through zero fault of their own. They were all open and welcoming and I now count them among the few truly close friends I've made since high school. The damage was all self-inflicted but it hurt like a bitch regardless. When I looked at these beautiful people, my people, I didn't see myself. I didn't see anyone who looked like me. I didn't see anyone who felt like me. And that made me feel like an impostor. And that made me feel invisible. I'm not pretty. I'm not girly. I don't fit the standards of a modern day androgynous femme. As queer and female as I feel, I still like to wear my facial hair thick and I feel much more comfortable in sweats than skirts. I didn't fit in and for the first time in my life, I wanted too, I wanted too so bad.
I've spent the last few months suffering silently, twisting myself into knots trying to figure out how to get the rest of the world to see the invisible girl and every time I looked in the mirror she was still there, taunting me with the fact that I was the only one who could see her. Finally, it hit me like a bolt of lightening, that I had put myself into another closet. In spite of the fact that I felt perfectly femme and queer in my own burly skin, I let the perceived expectations of other queer people dictate how I should behave. This is the polar opposite of what being queer is all about. Being queer isn't about lipstick and pretty dresses or hiking boots and butch hairdos. Being queer is about being free, being free to be who we wanna be, to fuck who we wanna fuck and to fuck how we wanna fuck.
I'm through sweating my masculine idiosyncrasies. I'm done beating myself up for not being queer enough. When I look in the mirror I know what I see. I see a hairy genderfuck femme and she looks beautiful to me. I see the invisible girl in the mirror and fuck anyone, straight or queer, who is too goddamn blind to see her. They're the ones with the fucking problem, not me. I am my own gender, a serpent who has slithered its way out of the binary swamp that once enslaved me and, against all odds, I've sprung arms and legs and an identity all my own. I am a prototype of queer evolution. A bearded bull-dyke with a dick and a blog, hear me roar. And ignore the invisible girl at your own risk, dearest motherfuckers. She's pissed and out for revenge. Call her sir and she'll slit your fucking throat.
Peace, Love & Empathy- CH
Soundtrack; songs that influenced this post
* the Middle by Jimmy Eat World
* When It's Cold I'd Like To Die by Moby
* Rebel Rebel by David Bowie
* Boyish by Japanese Breakfast
* What Goes On by the Velvet Underground
* For Once In My Life by the Decemberists
* Pretty On the Inside by Hole
* Suedehead by Morrissey
* List of Demands by Saul Williams
You see, when I look in the mirror I see my true self. Even with the burly body hair and six o'clock shadow, I still see that angry little girl who rages beneath. My hirsute only adds to her androgynous mystique. The problem is, no one else sees her and trying to convince people that she's really there becomes unbearably tiresome. Being something no one else can see makes you feel fucking crazy. What's even worse, it makes you feel invisible. This is my dysphoria, being haunted by the invisible girl that only I can see in the mirror. And the damnedest thing is that she rarely feels more invisible than when she's among other queer people, my people.
I spent most of my life suffering from an affliction that I didn't even know existed. Being neither male nor female but a fluid mix of the two and everything in between, I didn't exactly grow up feeling like a girl and I just assumed that I must be male because that's what everyone told me I was. But I never felt right. I never felt content. And the older I got, the louder these feelings became. As I entered the maelstrom of my twenties, my dysphoria reached a late full bloom and being male began to feel like a cruel prison sentence, life without parole. It was only through my isolated agoraphobic autodidactism that I discovered that the universe was so much more colorful than pink and blue. After voraciously consuming the incendiary ideas of gender renegades like Judith Butler, Julia Serrano and Justin Vivian Bond, not to mention my online mentor, Angela Keaton, and a shitload of David Bowie, Lou Reed and Courtney Love songs, I came to the conclusion that I was queer and I made a conscious decision to reject the gender binary entirely.
After a disastrously failed attempt to find more answers through therapy (see Comrade Hermit Vs. the Tranny Whisperer), I decided that I couldn't trust a psychiatric establishment who's understanding of gender identity belonged in the Nineteenth Century with leech therapy and exorcisms. So I sought to find myself by finding my tribe. I began attending the few local queer support groups that exist in my agrarian corner of Trump Country. At first it was great and in many ways it still is. Its given me a sense of community and belonging that I had long gave up on ever finding. But the more time I spent with these wonderful people, the more dysphoric I seemed to get.
It was through zero fault of their own. They were all open and welcoming and I now count them among the few truly close friends I've made since high school. The damage was all self-inflicted but it hurt like a bitch regardless. When I looked at these beautiful people, my people, I didn't see myself. I didn't see anyone who looked like me. I didn't see anyone who felt like me. And that made me feel like an impostor. And that made me feel invisible. I'm not pretty. I'm not girly. I don't fit the standards of a modern day androgynous femme. As queer and female as I feel, I still like to wear my facial hair thick and I feel much more comfortable in sweats than skirts. I didn't fit in and for the first time in my life, I wanted too, I wanted too so bad.
I've spent the last few months suffering silently, twisting myself into knots trying to figure out how to get the rest of the world to see the invisible girl and every time I looked in the mirror she was still there, taunting me with the fact that I was the only one who could see her. Finally, it hit me like a bolt of lightening, that I had put myself into another closet. In spite of the fact that I felt perfectly femme and queer in my own burly skin, I let the perceived expectations of other queer people dictate how I should behave. This is the polar opposite of what being queer is all about. Being queer isn't about lipstick and pretty dresses or hiking boots and butch hairdos. Being queer is about being free, being free to be who we wanna be, to fuck who we wanna fuck and to fuck how we wanna fuck.
I'm through sweating my masculine idiosyncrasies. I'm done beating myself up for not being queer enough. When I look in the mirror I know what I see. I see a hairy genderfuck femme and she looks beautiful to me. I see the invisible girl in the mirror and fuck anyone, straight or queer, who is too goddamn blind to see her. They're the ones with the fucking problem, not me. I am my own gender, a serpent who has slithered its way out of the binary swamp that once enslaved me and, against all odds, I've sprung arms and legs and an identity all my own. I am a prototype of queer evolution. A bearded bull-dyke with a dick and a blog, hear me roar. And ignore the invisible girl at your own risk, dearest motherfuckers. She's pissed and out for revenge. Call her sir and she'll slit your fucking throat.
Peace, Love & Empathy- CH
Soundtrack; songs that influenced this post
* the Middle by Jimmy Eat World
* When It's Cold I'd Like To Die by Moby
* Rebel Rebel by David Bowie
* Boyish by Japanese Breakfast
* What Goes On by the Velvet Underground
* For Once In My Life by the Decemberists
* Pretty On the Inside by Hole
* Suedehead by Morrissey
* List of Demands by Saul Williams
Monday, April 9, 2018
The Consistent Consent Ethic Volume 2: The Right to Die
A couple weeks ago I laid down the basic principles for a voluntaryist philosophy of law and order called the Consistent Consent Ethic. The theory goes that the notion of criminality should be based on consent and consent alone. Any "crime" committed with the consent of the "victim" is not a crime at all and should thus be left to the teachers and philosophers to govern through education rather than by the government through coercion. I specifically chose the morally challenging examples of abortion and statutory rape in order to underscore the fact that legal doesn't always mean right and that the law isn't always the best way to handle moral dilemmas.
This week I want to take my philosophy a step further and explore a right that I have come to believe is every bit as fundamental as the right to life; the right to die. To some this may ring hypocritical coming from an unapologetic (albeit decidedly unorthodox) pro-lifer. After all, as I've noted before, the nucleus of my Consistent Consent Ethic is the Consistent Life Ethic I was raised to cherish. The cornerstone of this philosophy, like my own, is the basic maxim of "do no harm". The ultimate harm being the taking of another human life. But there is another equally egregious violation of human rights that I believe thoroughly violates the consent of the individual and that violation is forcing life.
If a person has the basic inalienable right to live then it only follows that they have a basic right to die and criminalizing that right in any way violates both the principle of the law as based on consent and the consent of an individual who wishes to end their own life for any reason. The prohibition of euthanasia is the most obvious example of this violation. If a person has the right to die then a person should also have the right to assist another person in achieving this goal. After witnessing the long, slow and painful death of his own mother, Dr. Jack Kevorkian devoted his life and career to assisting other terminal patients in dying with dignity. Being a known eccentric with many unorthodox philosophies in the regions of life and death (wonder what that's like?), it wasn't hard for a government committed to the violation of the consent of its own citizenry to railroad the good doctor and send him up river for the crime of assisting others in their darkest hour.
Kevorkian's first euthanasia patient was a victim of Alzheimer's Disease who didn't wish to spend the final years of her life slowly disintegrating both mentally and physically. As a person who has lost both grandmothers to Alzheimer's, I can personally attest to the diabolical cruelty of that affliction. The only thing I can think of that is crueler than that despicable disease is forcing someone to slowly die from it out of some perverted need to protect the patient from themselves. This renders the suffering to the status of prisoners of their own biology (not unlike mothers kept from making the morally questionable decision to terminate a pregnancy) and, unlike Dr. Kevorkian, I believe that the abolition of the Patient Prisoner Complex should liberate all of us, not just the physically terminal.
There is a popular saying about suicide, that it is a permanent solution to a temporary problem. The son of a bitch who said that clearly had very little understanding about the hellish reality of living with depression. I have lived with depression my entire life and I can personally attest that there is nothing temporary about that disease. It is a nagging, relentless, rabid animal that sinks it's dull fangs deep into your soul and never lets go. I've been to some dark places but I have never been suicidal. I have always relied on that old Marxist concept of the Eternal Struggle to give my life of suffering meaning. I have devoted myself fully to the creation of a better world no matter how many lifetimes it takes and I will die fighting that fight with a pen in my hand. But that's my right and I would never dream of denying another persons right to end their suffering. Suicide is a tragedy but so is living a life of pain simply because our society stigmatizes and many times criminalizes the right to die by ones own hands.
And suicide isn't the only form of consensual death. In the early 2000's, in rural Germany, a lonely young man named Armin Meiwes was at the end of his rope trying to tamp down a paraphilia that had consumed him since childhood with the urge to consume others. Rather than going down the path of many similarly troubled souls before him and violating an innocent person's right to life and dignity, Armin made the principled decision to seek out a consenting participant in his dark fantasies. After putting up an add online seeking a well built man interested in being slaughtered, Armin visited with many curious suitors, nearly all of whom ultimately changed their minds and all of whom Armin made zero attempt to force his will upon. Finally, Mr. Meiwes came into contact with a young man named Bernd Brandes who's aching desire to be consumed coalesced perfectly with Armin's own unorthodox sexual appetites. Here is where the story ends. Two men who could only be loved by one another and who could only truly love each other once, engaged in a bizarre act of consensual homicide and cannibalism. Brandes gave his life for love and in many ways Meiwes did too, he remains in prison.
But I say, where is the crime? Who is the victim here? The man who consented (on film) to end his life for the sanctuary of knowing love as he understood it for just one night? Or the man who is imprisoned for having the moral discipline and fortitude to channel his dark desires into consensual behavior? Men like Jack Kevorkian and Armin Meiwes are not monsters. They are mavericks and dare I say role models who sacrificed themselves completely for the struggle of achieving a truly consensual society and I for one choose to honor them.
Life is a precious gift. But what kind of giver gives a gift that can't be given back if it doesn't fit? The Consistent Consent Ethic is not an easy philosophy to follow. It involves accepting the fact that not only will there always be people who will do things that make us uncomfortable but that they have every right to do them, rightly or wrongly, as long as they don't violate the rights of others. And by standing in their way and using the precious power of the law to govern their behavior just because we may find their consensual actions abhorrent, we not only violate the rights that even these transgressive figures have chosen to respect but we violate the very notion of a truly free and egalitarian society. By violating the Consistent Consent Ethic, we violate ourselves. We become the very monsters we abhor.
Government should not be a hammer to bludgeon away the things that make us uncomfortable with our own humanity. It should be a paint brush that connects every color in a tapestry of voluntary behavior. We abuse the careful use of this delicate tool at the risk of the masterpiece we call society. Sometimes the hardest thing to do is to put down the paintbrush and let the colors speak for themselves.
No more painting by the numbers, dearest motherfuckers, let all the colors shine bright and strange and beautiful and ugly. Let freedom reign and let consent be the reignmaker.
Peace, Love & Empathy- CH
Soundtrack; songs that influenced this post
* Freedom of Choice By Devo
* Rainmaker By Sleigh Bells
* Love Will Tear Us Apart By Joy Division
* Here Is Where the Story Ends By The Sundays
* Flesh Without Blood By Grimes
* Fourth of July By X
* Saturdays By Twin Shadow & HAIM
* Sappy By Nirvana
* She Drives Me Crazy By Fine Young Cannibals
* The Mercy Seat By Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds
This week I want to take my philosophy a step further and explore a right that I have come to believe is every bit as fundamental as the right to life; the right to die. To some this may ring hypocritical coming from an unapologetic (albeit decidedly unorthodox) pro-lifer. After all, as I've noted before, the nucleus of my Consistent Consent Ethic is the Consistent Life Ethic I was raised to cherish. The cornerstone of this philosophy, like my own, is the basic maxim of "do no harm". The ultimate harm being the taking of another human life. But there is another equally egregious violation of human rights that I believe thoroughly violates the consent of the individual and that violation is forcing life.
If a person has the basic inalienable right to live then it only follows that they have a basic right to die and criminalizing that right in any way violates both the principle of the law as based on consent and the consent of an individual who wishes to end their own life for any reason. The prohibition of euthanasia is the most obvious example of this violation. If a person has the right to die then a person should also have the right to assist another person in achieving this goal. After witnessing the long, slow and painful death of his own mother, Dr. Jack Kevorkian devoted his life and career to assisting other terminal patients in dying with dignity. Being a known eccentric with many unorthodox philosophies in the regions of life and death (wonder what that's like?), it wasn't hard for a government committed to the violation of the consent of its own citizenry to railroad the good doctor and send him up river for the crime of assisting others in their darkest hour.
Kevorkian's first euthanasia patient was a victim of Alzheimer's Disease who didn't wish to spend the final years of her life slowly disintegrating both mentally and physically. As a person who has lost both grandmothers to Alzheimer's, I can personally attest to the diabolical cruelty of that affliction. The only thing I can think of that is crueler than that despicable disease is forcing someone to slowly die from it out of some perverted need to protect the patient from themselves. This renders the suffering to the status of prisoners of their own biology (not unlike mothers kept from making the morally questionable decision to terminate a pregnancy) and, unlike Dr. Kevorkian, I believe that the abolition of the Patient Prisoner Complex should liberate all of us, not just the physically terminal.
There is a popular saying about suicide, that it is a permanent solution to a temporary problem. The son of a bitch who said that clearly had very little understanding about the hellish reality of living with depression. I have lived with depression my entire life and I can personally attest that there is nothing temporary about that disease. It is a nagging, relentless, rabid animal that sinks it's dull fangs deep into your soul and never lets go. I've been to some dark places but I have never been suicidal. I have always relied on that old Marxist concept of the Eternal Struggle to give my life of suffering meaning. I have devoted myself fully to the creation of a better world no matter how many lifetimes it takes and I will die fighting that fight with a pen in my hand. But that's my right and I would never dream of denying another persons right to end their suffering. Suicide is a tragedy but so is living a life of pain simply because our society stigmatizes and many times criminalizes the right to die by ones own hands.
And suicide isn't the only form of consensual death. In the early 2000's, in rural Germany, a lonely young man named Armin Meiwes was at the end of his rope trying to tamp down a paraphilia that had consumed him since childhood with the urge to consume others. Rather than going down the path of many similarly troubled souls before him and violating an innocent person's right to life and dignity, Armin made the principled decision to seek out a consenting participant in his dark fantasies. After putting up an add online seeking a well built man interested in being slaughtered, Armin visited with many curious suitors, nearly all of whom ultimately changed their minds and all of whom Armin made zero attempt to force his will upon. Finally, Mr. Meiwes came into contact with a young man named Bernd Brandes who's aching desire to be consumed coalesced perfectly with Armin's own unorthodox sexual appetites. Here is where the story ends. Two men who could only be loved by one another and who could only truly love each other once, engaged in a bizarre act of consensual homicide and cannibalism. Brandes gave his life for love and in many ways Meiwes did too, he remains in prison.
But I say, where is the crime? Who is the victim here? The man who consented (on film) to end his life for the sanctuary of knowing love as he understood it for just one night? Or the man who is imprisoned for having the moral discipline and fortitude to channel his dark desires into consensual behavior? Men like Jack Kevorkian and Armin Meiwes are not monsters. They are mavericks and dare I say role models who sacrificed themselves completely for the struggle of achieving a truly consensual society and I for one choose to honor them.
Life is a precious gift. But what kind of giver gives a gift that can't be given back if it doesn't fit? The Consistent Consent Ethic is not an easy philosophy to follow. It involves accepting the fact that not only will there always be people who will do things that make us uncomfortable but that they have every right to do them, rightly or wrongly, as long as they don't violate the rights of others. And by standing in their way and using the precious power of the law to govern their behavior just because we may find their consensual actions abhorrent, we not only violate the rights that even these transgressive figures have chosen to respect but we violate the very notion of a truly free and egalitarian society. By violating the Consistent Consent Ethic, we violate ourselves. We become the very monsters we abhor.
Government should not be a hammer to bludgeon away the things that make us uncomfortable with our own humanity. It should be a paint brush that connects every color in a tapestry of voluntary behavior. We abuse the careful use of this delicate tool at the risk of the masterpiece we call society. Sometimes the hardest thing to do is to put down the paintbrush and let the colors speak for themselves.
No more painting by the numbers, dearest motherfuckers, let all the colors shine bright and strange and beautiful and ugly. Let freedom reign and let consent be the reignmaker.
Peace, Love & Empathy- CH
Soundtrack; songs that influenced this post
* Freedom of Choice By Devo
* Rainmaker By Sleigh Bells
* Love Will Tear Us Apart By Joy Division
* Here Is Where the Story Ends By The Sundays
* Flesh Without Blood By Grimes
* Fourth of July By X
* Saturdays By Twin Shadow & HAIM
* Sappy By Nirvana
* She Drives Me Crazy By Fine Young Cannibals
* The Mercy Seat By Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds
Monday, April 2, 2018
Enter John Bolton: Bringer of Doom
Generally speaking, the cabinet of one Donald J. Trump has been a veritable rogues gallery of lunatics and imbeciles, a revolving door of dangerously disturbed dilettantes who seem to be the invention of some fevered SNL employ on the ass end of a bad acid trip. Who could forget the foot gobbling antics of the king of panic, John Spicer, the dreamy eyed dominionist mysticism of billionaire bible thumper, Betsy Devos, or the near comatose mumblings of that hammer swinging Thorazine addict, Ben Carson.
Then there's the scary ones. The Hannibal Lecter's of Donny's TV Funhouse: The Goebbels-esque Rasputin of the alt-right, Steve Bannon. The cross burning DARE jihadist, Beauregard Sessions. The bullet headed desk-chair wedding butcher, Mad Dog Mattis. Not to mention a craven coven of other trigger-happy ex-officers like John Kelly and H.R. McMaster, the latter being the latest victim of a long line of irate Trump shit-cannings. On the one hand, it couldn't have happened to a nicer piece of shit. On the other, his replacement takes the cake as the single most deranged creature to grace the administration-who-couldn't-shoot-straight with his malevolent presence, the reigning king of neocon lunacy, John Bolton.
For those of you who aren't familiar with Mr. Bolton's blood spattered resume, let me introduce you to one of Satan's finer prototypes for the Antichrist. The man is one of the least apologetic architects of the Iraq War, which has gone down in history as the single most moronically suicidal military cluster-fucks since the Third Reich crossed the Danube. He spent a jarringly brief stint as the Ambassador to the UN before being chased out of the Beltway by both parties with pitchforks and torches like Frankenstein's monster in a rare feat of bipartisan sanity.
Since then, Mr. Bolton has served the twin roles, as Fox New's resident doom sayer, advocating the preemptive military strike as a solution to every conceivable problem from the Venezuelan constitutional crisis to autism, and as America's leading lobbyist for spooky Persian death cult, Mujahideen-e-Khalq (MEK), a terrorist organization that has earned comparisons to the Khmer Rouge for their zeal for civilian body-counts. Recently Bolton has become best known as the leading advocate for solving the Korean problem Hiroshima-style, which makes his new position as Trump's National Security Adviser a month before historic peace talks with the Kim Regime are set to take place more than a little troubling.
Personally, I believe that Bolton's presence probably won't have a big affect on Trump's position in regards to Korea. The North and South are making peace whether Bolton likes it or not and the only way for Trump to turn this rebellion against American hegemony into a win is to photobomb the handshake then tell the naysayers that even crazy Old-Man Bolton has his back. The real danger here is and always has been Iran.
Both the Donald and Bolton have been outspoken advocates of total war against the Islamic State for years and, as I've stated above, Bolton has the connections to make this nightmare a reality. This, I believe, is part of the reason for Trump's sudden lust for peace on the DMZ. If he can take credit for a historical peace deal it will make it just that much easier to go to war with Tehran before the 2020 elections, giving Trump the wartime presidential kick he'll need to beat a neoliberal crypt-keeper like Joe Biden.
I shouldn't have to tell you, dearest motherfuckers, that this would be a humanitarian disaster the likes of which we've never seen. Unlike the infamously dodgy regime of former Reagan playmate Saddam Hussein, the Islamic Republic represents the regions one semi-successful popular revolution and the only stable bulwark to Saudi Arabia and Israel's plans to expand the Red Sea with an ocean of blood that stretches to the peaks of the Hindu Kush and beyond. Any war with Iran will also be a war with Putin's Russia, who may have taken our Syrian escapade on the chin (relatively speaking) but would sooner dance with Dr. Strangelove than see their number one allie in the region left to the mercy of the psychopaths in the MEK.
So... yeah, dearest motherfuckers, we're kind of fucked here. In spite of his recent election year isolationist ramblings, Trump is too far in hoc to Sheldon Adelson and Crown Prince Bin Salman to abandon the Iran project now and Bolton is just the cheerleader to keep his scatter brain on course. Our best hope is that John Bolton's own notoriously colossal ego clashes with Trump's and gets his Loony-Tune ass canned before he can effect any irreparable damage. Otherwise it's 'goodnight John-Boy' for Iran and 'hello nuclear holocaust' for the rest of us. This is where we're at in this year of our lord, twenty-hundred-and-eighteen; praying for the whims of a malignant narcissist to save us from a diplomatic serial killer. And people ask me why I'm an anarchist....
Keep your fingers crossed, dearest motherfuckers. The days are getting longer but the shit just keeps getting darker.
Peace, Love & Empathy- CH
Soundtrack; songs that influenced this post.
* My Little Dark Age By MGMT
* Last Caress By the Misfits
* Debaser By the Pixies
* See No Evil By Television
* Erasure By Superchunk & Katie Cruchfield
* Territorial Pissings By Nirvana
* Double Dare By Bauhaus
* The Cutter By Echo & the Bunnymen
* Heroes By TV On the Radio
Then there's the scary ones. The Hannibal Lecter's of Donny's TV Funhouse: The Goebbels-esque Rasputin of the alt-right, Steve Bannon. The cross burning DARE jihadist, Beauregard Sessions. The bullet headed desk-chair wedding butcher, Mad Dog Mattis. Not to mention a craven coven of other trigger-happy ex-officers like John Kelly and H.R. McMaster, the latter being the latest victim of a long line of irate Trump shit-cannings. On the one hand, it couldn't have happened to a nicer piece of shit. On the other, his replacement takes the cake as the single most deranged creature to grace the administration-who-couldn't-shoot-straight with his malevolent presence, the reigning king of neocon lunacy, John Bolton.
For those of you who aren't familiar with Mr. Bolton's blood spattered resume, let me introduce you to one of Satan's finer prototypes for the Antichrist. The man is one of the least apologetic architects of the Iraq War, which has gone down in history as the single most moronically suicidal military cluster-fucks since the Third Reich crossed the Danube. He spent a jarringly brief stint as the Ambassador to the UN before being chased out of the Beltway by both parties with pitchforks and torches like Frankenstein's monster in a rare feat of bipartisan sanity.
Since then, Mr. Bolton has served the twin roles, as Fox New's resident doom sayer, advocating the preemptive military strike as a solution to every conceivable problem from the Venezuelan constitutional crisis to autism, and as America's leading lobbyist for spooky Persian death cult, Mujahideen-e-Khalq (MEK), a terrorist organization that has earned comparisons to the Khmer Rouge for their zeal for civilian body-counts. Recently Bolton has become best known as the leading advocate for solving the Korean problem Hiroshima-style, which makes his new position as Trump's National Security Adviser a month before historic peace talks with the Kim Regime are set to take place more than a little troubling.
Personally, I believe that Bolton's presence probably won't have a big affect on Trump's position in regards to Korea. The North and South are making peace whether Bolton likes it or not and the only way for Trump to turn this rebellion against American hegemony into a win is to photobomb the handshake then tell the naysayers that even crazy Old-Man Bolton has his back. The real danger here is and always has been Iran.
Both the Donald and Bolton have been outspoken advocates of total war against the Islamic State for years and, as I've stated above, Bolton has the connections to make this nightmare a reality. This, I believe, is part of the reason for Trump's sudden lust for peace on the DMZ. If he can take credit for a historical peace deal it will make it just that much easier to go to war with Tehran before the 2020 elections, giving Trump the wartime presidential kick he'll need to beat a neoliberal crypt-keeper like Joe Biden.
I shouldn't have to tell you, dearest motherfuckers, that this would be a humanitarian disaster the likes of which we've never seen. Unlike the infamously dodgy regime of former Reagan playmate Saddam Hussein, the Islamic Republic represents the regions one semi-successful popular revolution and the only stable bulwark to Saudi Arabia and Israel's plans to expand the Red Sea with an ocean of blood that stretches to the peaks of the Hindu Kush and beyond. Any war with Iran will also be a war with Putin's Russia, who may have taken our Syrian escapade on the chin (relatively speaking) but would sooner dance with Dr. Strangelove than see their number one allie in the region left to the mercy of the psychopaths in the MEK.
So... yeah, dearest motherfuckers, we're kind of fucked here. In spite of his recent election year isolationist ramblings, Trump is too far in hoc to Sheldon Adelson and Crown Prince Bin Salman to abandon the Iran project now and Bolton is just the cheerleader to keep his scatter brain on course. Our best hope is that John Bolton's own notoriously colossal ego clashes with Trump's and gets his Loony-Tune ass canned before he can effect any irreparable damage. Otherwise it's 'goodnight John-Boy' for Iran and 'hello nuclear holocaust' for the rest of us. This is where we're at in this year of our lord, twenty-hundred-and-eighteen; praying for the whims of a malignant narcissist to save us from a diplomatic serial killer. And people ask me why I'm an anarchist....
Keep your fingers crossed, dearest motherfuckers. The days are getting longer but the shit just keeps getting darker.
Peace, Love & Empathy- CH
Soundtrack; songs that influenced this post.
* My Little Dark Age By MGMT
* Last Caress By the Misfits
* Debaser By the Pixies
* See No Evil By Television
* Erasure By Superchunk & Katie Cruchfield
* Territorial Pissings By Nirvana
* Double Dare By Bauhaus
* The Cutter By Echo & the Bunnymen
* Heroes By TV On the Radio
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
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
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