Looking Forward

With the latest crap coming out of the Oddly-Tinted Pile Of Psychotic Symptoms (aka: The Great Trumpkin Himself), here's the one question I really want the Press Poodles to ask every candidate, but especially every GOP candidate, and especially especially Lil Donny:

"What behavior will you expect from your loyalest supporters if you lose the primary; and/or you go on to lose the general election?"

And just to be sure - please look straight into the camera and tell your voters you want them to be civilized Americans who understand that politics in this country is about argument, voting and then abiding by the results of that voting without violent protests.

Take it to the streets, and do a sit-down thing, and go on strike, and do whatever you think will get your grievances heard and addressed, but this is not where the mob rules.

Well, OK - except for that "Recent Unpleasantness" back when the Yankees invaded our homeland.

But yeah - Exceptionalism, motherfucker. Do you get it?

A Sunny Day In Ireland

It's generally a lousy idea to put Human Rights to a vote, but in a country that's 85% Catholic, marriage equality is now the law in Ireland. 

Way to go, Irelanders.

With the world watching, the Republic of Ireland has become the first nation to enact marriage equality by popular vote.

The leader of the opposition, David Quinn, has already conceded the loss. “Congratulations to the Yes side on their win,” tweeted Quinn, who is director of the Iona Institute. And in a more lengthy statement Quinn is already pivoting to the next fight, saying "We hope the Government will address the concerns voters on the No side have about the implications for freedom of religion and freedom of conscience."

But today is a day of celebration for supporters of LGBT rights, both in Ireland and worldwide. The margin is still being finalized but all reports say Irish voters Friday overwhelmingly approved adding this language to the country’s constitution: “Marriage may be contracted in accordance with law by two persons without distinction as to their sex.”

Coupla things:
While Ireland is the first to make it official by way of popular vote, they're the 19th country in the world to make Marriage Equality the law nation-wide.  USAmerica Inc (aka The Land Of The Free and The Home Of The Brave) funnily enough isn't among them.

And also too:

Irish people from all over the world went to great lengths and considerable expense for the  chance to go home and vote.  We've seen similar phenomena in South Africa and Argentina and Panama and Iraq and Afghanistan and Poland and Ukraine and Egypt - and we never see it here in the US.  I guess it's just another good example of how fucking exceptional we are.

A Little Rational Thinking

...goes a long way.  From Rolling Stone:

After months of escalating protests and grassroots organizing in response to the police killings of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, police reformers have issued many demands. The moderates in this debate typically qualify their rhetoric with "We all know we need police, but..." It's a familiar refrain to those of us who've spent years in the streets and the barrios organizing around police violence, only to be confronted by officers who snarl, "But who'll help you if you get robbed?" We can put a man on the moon, but we're still lacking creativity down here on Earth.

But police are not a permanent fixture in society. While law enforcers have existed in one form or another for centuries, the modern police have their roots in the relatively recent rise of modern property relations 200 years ago, and the "disorderly conduct" of the urban poor. Like every structure we've known all our lives, it seems that the policing paradigm is inescapable and everlasting, and the only thing keeping us from the precipice of a dystopic Wild West scenario. It's not.

I have no plans to stop bitching about things - when I think something's wrong, I'm gonna bitch about it.  But while it's really lotsa fun to unleash a good cathartic-feeling tirade, eventually, there's no point in it if all I ever do is bitch about it.  So here's the thing: we've gotta come up with alternatives.

We have a problem with violence.  Recognize and deal effectively with that problem, and we're a big step closer to being able to solve some of the other problems that grow out of our problem with violence.

Right now, we look a lot like the townsfolk in the old westerns who hire a gunslinger to deal with (insert local bad guy here), but then realize they've only substituted one bully for another.

Violence in service of politics is at the heart of what we're supposed to be the exception to.

Let's try something else.

Leave It To Charlie

Charlie Pierce at Esquire:

Today, with the release of the executive summary of the congressional investigation into the American torture program, we have lost forever the right to moral leadership that we claimed at Nuremberg, and at the tribunals that investigated the actions of the Japanese in the Pacific. Those proceedings were based in two fundamental beliefs: a) that there are some activities that are beyond the law, even in wartime, and b) that the people responsible for those activities, even the worst of them, deserve a fair trial, and a trial that is open to the world, not only because the world needed to see the savagery of which humans are capable, but also because the trial would demonstrate to the world that there is a better way to resolve the issues raised by the native savagery of which people and nations are capable than the masturbatory exercise of blind vengeance. Justice Robert Jackson, in his eloquent summation for the prosecution in the trial of the Nazi warlords, saw all of this with coruscating clarity.

Dunno about losing it "forever".  I guess we can only hope the republic lasts long enough to get some of it back.

Almost In Passing

I've been trying to think my way through all this Mike Brown / Eric Garner stuff; crashing around in my head looking for some boiled-down guiding principle to apply that might help me sort it out.

And then: The law must be a shield, not a sword.

For a good 2,000 - 10,000 generations, The Law was used and abused as a way to rationalize Might-Makes-Right.  As long as I had some reasonable expectation of being able to take you in a fist fight, I could jack your shit; and fuck you if you don't like it cuz fuck you, that's why. All the big guys did it cuz that's just what a big guy could do.  And it worked - Egypt, Assyria, Greece, Rome, Britain, etc etc etc - you get the idea.

Unfortunately, saying it that way makes it sound like we'd have to look way far back to find good examples, and that makes me think we're feeling a little too comfortable about ignoring the need to examine our motives and our reasoning, and our willingness to shrug it all off like a buncha fuckin' Eloi.

But gosh, it seems we don't have to look back very far to find some examples of people doing some pretty fucked up things because they had the juice to make the law do whatever they wanted it to do in order to pad their bank accounts or act out their domination fantasies or whatever their issues were at the time.

--slavery in America was lawful; and so was Jim Crow after that.

-- the genocide committed by Nazi Germany was mostly lawful under German law, and according to most written international law in effect at the time.

-- apartheid in South Africa was established by law.

-- Saddam Hussein claimed at his trial in Baghdad in 2006 that his order mandating the execution of 148 persons in response to an attempted assassination of him was lawful.

-- the Israeli military justified their heavy use of cluster bombs during the 2006 war by stating that “[a]ll the weapons and munitions used by the IDF [Israeli Defense Forces] are legal under international law and their use conforms with international standards” (Shadid 2006, A01).

-- the 2003 US invasion and occupation of Iraq was lawful according to American interpretation of law.

The law has to be a shield.  It has to be there to protect us from overbearing, over-reaching, evermore ambitious and power-craving despots.  When the law instead protects the police (eg) from being held to the same standards of justice as apply to everybody else, then the law has become a sword against the people, and it will be changed by the people one way or another.  It has to be changed because it's become a contradiction.  And while contradictions exist, they can't prevail.
(all you 'conserva-tarians' might recognize that one from the Sacred Texts of Our Lady Ayn of Rand)

For my own self, I kinda like The American Exceptionalism way, and I'll keep trying to do it that way.  But if it has to be changed the old-fashioned way, then I'll be sadly watching from the bench, unsurprised.

I just really hope we can get back to being that exception.

An Observation

Guys like Bloody Bill Kristol and Leo Strauss and practically any other NeoCon Proto-Fascist pus pocket you care to name - these guys are always pushing for doing things "the old-fashioned way", which for my purposes here is all about "society manufacturing good citizens".  Which is exactly the way it's been done for 400 centuries in every other place in the world, under every system of government ever; which is exactly the opposite of how we're supposed to be doing it here in the USofA.

American Exceptionalism is what happens when citizens make for a better society (which in turn makes for better government) - not the other way around.

If we remember only that one thing; if we can keep that one precept in mind whenever we listen to the politicians and the pundits and the Press Poodles and the Think-Tankers and whoever else believes he's entitled to a few minutes in the spotlight (usually because his daddy owns the theater) - maybe we get outa this mess in one piece.

Now, if I can just figure out how all o' dat doesn't mean I'm in line with the TeaBaggers on this one fine point, I'll feel a lot better about it.

A Question

Repubs are trying to "save face" by offering to fund the federal government piece by piece - which I think is another lie being peddled to us by the Press Poodles because the Repubs have mostly won already. The Dems are in practical agreement on budget numbers that are very near to Paul Ryan's wet dream of a government funded at Wal-Mart Wage levels.  But that's another rant.

Here's my question: Which part of Da Gubmint do you think this guy was fighting for?



Or do you think that maybe he just kinda understood that it makes no sense fighting to  improve something if you don't fight to keep it alive?

Street Justice

In a way, I don't like the fact that I still get a kind of zesty feeling inside when something like this happens.



There's an element of Instant Karma to it that I think is not completely unjustified.  I guess what I worry about is that people seem to take a small-ish incident like this one and then try to apply the principle to every situation.  Over time, we start to lose not only our sense of proportionality, but we get further and further away from the basic tenet of Due Process itself.