The Big Turnarond

Theramin Trees - Weaponizing Self-Affirmation

Positive, therapeutic principles "...have been seized on by abusers, and twisted into weaponized parodies."

Lance The Boil

When it seems like the world's all fucked up, one thing we have to stop and consider seriously is that maybe the world's just all fucked up.

Eventually, ya gotta get all that putrefaction out. If you don't drain the abscess, it just gets worse.

The UVa rape thing:

...At that same moment, she says, she detected movement in the room – and felt someone bump into her. Jackie began to scream.

"Shut up," she heard a man's voice say as a body barreled into her, tripping her backward and sending them both crashing through a low glass table. There was a heavy person on top of her, spreading open her thighs, and another person kneeling on her hair, hands pinning down her arms, sharp shards digging into her back, and excited male voices rising all around her. When yet another hand clamped over her mouth, Jackie bit it, and the hand became a fist that punched her in the face. The men surrounding her began to laugh. For a hopeful moment Jackie wondered if this wasn't some collegiate prank. Perhaps at any second someone would flick on the lights and they'd return to the party.

"Grab its motherfucking leg," she heard a voice say. And that's when Jackie knew she was going to be raped.

The Bill Cosby rape thing:

If Shonda Rhimes had a show called How to Get Away With Rape, it would only need one episode, and it would be a short one.

The hot-shot lawyer main character would give her client this advice: be a respected figure in your own community and target victims with lower status than your own. If you follow those rules, people will be uncomfortable with the consequences of believing your victims. They will not want to do that work. In fact, they will go to extraordinary lengths to avoid it.

Show over; roll credits.

On Tuesday, Janice Dickinson became the 15th woman to accuse Bill Cosby of raping, drugging, or sexually assaulting her, and the fifth to do so publicly. These women tell a similar story: that they met Cosby when they were young women. That he spent time with them under the guise of professional mentorship. And that he, at some point, drugged their drinks and assaulted them while they were incapacitated.

First:

"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing." --Edmund Burke

And then:
"It is very tempting to take the side of the perpetrator. All the perpetrator asks is that the bystander do nothing. He appeals to the universal desire to see, hear, and speak no evil. The victim, on the contrary, asks the bystander to share the burden of the pain. The victim demands action, engagement, and remembering. . . . In order to escape accountability for his crimes, the perpetrator does everything in his power to promote forgetting. Secrecy and silence are the perpetrator’s first line of defense. If secrecy fails, the perpetrator attacks the credibility of his victim. If he cannot silence her absolutely, he tries to make sure that no one listens. To this end, he marshals an impressive array of arguments, from the most blatant denial to the most sophisticated and elegant rationalization. After every atrocity one can expect to hear the same predictable apologies: it never happened; the victim lies; the victim exaggerates; the victim brought it on herself; and in any case it is time to forget the past and move on. The more powerful the perpetrator, the greater is his prerogative to name and define reality, and the more completely his arguments prevail" --Judith Herman, 1997, Trauma and Recovery (pg 7-8)

What Ya Don't Do

• You don't fight terrorism by becoming a terrorist.
• You don't improve a democratic system by squelching the voting franchise.
• You don't boost Demand in a struggling economy by making it harder for people to buy stuff.
• You don't make your Democratic Party brand stronger by acting just like the Republicans.
• You don't ensure our precious way of life here in God's US America™ by turning the joint into some bullshit parody of itself, as we actually become something more like Noriega's Panama if you look too close.

I'm thinking there's more to this than we know (as usual - it's not about what they tell us it's about).  And what we don't know could easily either mitigate or exacerbate the "scandal", but even if I'm willing to give TeamObama some wagon room on this, I still have a hard time not thinking somebody in Obama's administration - up to and including Obama himself - needs to get kicked right in the nuts.  (And BTW, that goes for the Diane Feinsteins and Lindsay Grahams in congress as well)

At the very least, the politics and the "optics" make this look a lot worse than it may actually be.

I do have to ask one question tho'.  This kind of abusable power has been legal - and has been applied inside the US - for a very long time now.  That doesn't make it OK, even after "9/11 changed everything", but still, why are we gettin' all spastic about it now?

American Taliban

This jackass is a sitting judge in Texas who presides over a court that hears a lot of cases involving child abuse. His name is William Adams.

The Daily Mail has a good report.