A group of self-appointed moral guardians decides that there’s a cancer on society that only they really understand. People are “killing babies”! Obviously, killing “babies” is so wrong that extreme methods are justifiable, right? Such as showing up at clinics and harassing the customers and employees, and playing innocent when one of yours is emboldened to commit an act of terrorism. But society basically tolerates this horrible behavior, while laying down a few lines that legally can’t be crossed (though often are), because the harassers are so sincere. They love babies. And let’s face it: who wants to stand up for abortion? Everyone will think you’re a witchslut morally insufficient person or something like that. Let’s just all pretend the antis are a little dim and that makes them think there’s wee little babies in there, and not that this is some kind of terrorist-style assault on women’s liberation and sexual freedom.
Or not. I’ve made it clear that I agree with what Ellen Willis wrote in 1980 about the anti-choice movement:
I believe---and in saying this I intend no hyperbole whatsoever---that it is the cutting edge of neo-fascism, a threat not only to women’s rights and to everyone’s sexual freedom and privacy but to freedom of religion and civil liberties in general.
Turns out she was right. Because this group that’s terrorizing Amarillo, TX is using anti-choice tactics, but they aren’t even pretending that this is about “life” or any other cover story anti-choicers engage in. They’re the sex police, and they’re going to make your life a living hell if you don’t obey the sex rules they made for you. Which are, as you can imagine, very strict.
The group is Repent Amarillo, and they are very evocative of the Taliban---mostly young men who sport military drag to shore up their masculinity (though obviously they’re too busy screaming at fornicators to do things like actually join the military). I have racked my brain and I cannot understand why it is that this sort of thing happens, that young men can get so thwarted and hateful towards any and all expressions of freedom and sensual pleasure. This group focuses on sex, but if they were given power, I have no doubt they’d expand like the Taliban did into stomping out music, kite-flying, anything that could give human beings a moment of joy. In this case, an older man who is a leader’s motivations are easy enough to understand:
“I was a sexual sinner before I got saved. I got saved seven years ago. Prior to that–yeah, I’ve been to strip joints and porn shops. I’ve done all kinds of things,” he says. “We understand the destructive power of sin firsthand. We’ve lived it. We’ve walked in those shoes.”
I’ve stood by our radical black socialist magician President through thick and thin. I was with him when he threatened to kill Granny with bureaucracy, I was with him when the stimulus bill reserved $212 million to promote teenage pregnancy, I was even with him when he appointed Alger Hiss’ ghost to oversee Cash for Clunkers. And you know why I was with him? Everything he did was to advance the greater good.
However, when Barack Obama dares to tread upon the sacred American ground of September 11th by proposing a National Day of Service, that goes too fucking far. There is perhaps nothing more offensive than the idea of people gathering together in their communities in an organized fashion to help others - in fact, it may be precisely what the terrorists wanted, given bin Laden’s stated intention to plant trees and donate canned food in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.
Atlas Shrugs is worried that this will be the launch of Obama’s private civilian army, because it makes sense that the man in charge of the most advanced military force on the planet would build up a subsidiary army of college students and stay-at-home parents whose main training will be in phonebanking and pamphlet-stuffing.
Robert Stacy McCain pimps the 2,996 Project, because Americans are dumb and cannot both help people and remember why they’re helping them. Personally, I was helping an old lady across the street yesterday and halfway across left her there because I forgot I wasn’t supposed to get paid for it.
Michelle Malkin smartly points out that Obama believes that 9/11 happened because of “a fundamental absence of empathy” on the part of the attackers, which is a ridiculous statement, because I suppose they actually cared about the people they brutally murdered? Anyway, volunteering is for jobless libtards, so there.
This is my break with the statist authoritarian ideology of Barack Obama. By asking Americans to voluntarily pay tribute to the people whose lives were lost in the terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001 through aiding their communities and making the country we all love a better place, he is effectively Joseph Stalin. Also, Cash for Clunkers is over, and Ghost Alger Hiss is currently haunting my refrigerator. Thanks, Barry.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell asks what happens if Ahmed Ghaliani is found not guilty and...wait, let me clear this up a bit. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell asks what happens if evil terrorist and guilty-as-sin because he’s obviously a terrorist (and, oh, evil) Ahmed Ghaliani is found not guilty and is told by the federal government to rent out your garage apartment from the Twitter or Craigslist.
Today Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Kentucky, asked, “if we’re going to treat this terrorist detainee as a common civilian criminal, what will happen to Ghailani if he’s found not guilty? And what will happen to other detainees the administration wants to try in civilian courts if they are found not guilty? Will they be released? If so, where? In New York? In American communities? Or will they be released overseas, where they could return to terror and target American soldiers or innocent civilians?”
McConnell continued: “If Ghailani isn’t allowed to go free, will he be detained by the government? If so, where will he be detained? Would the administration detain him on U.S. soil, despite the objections of Congress and the American people?”
See, this sets up the fundamental disconnect between what our system of fighting terrorism is and what it should be. McConnell’s presumption (and tacit admission) is that we have people in custody despite not being able to prove that they’re actually terrorists, connected to terrorism or even able to locate Israel on a map of the world. The worry is that through some clever lawyer pointing this out, the non-terrorist (who actually is a terrorist, because, hey, he was in prison!) will be released onto our city streets, free to wander this alien land and eventually inspire some Neo-Nazis to stop their Eighty-Eight Quilts for Eighty-Eight Aryans craft fair and go try to blow something up.
The end goal of the closing of Gitmo should be that we arrest, try and punish terrorists in a way that ensures they are not only kept from harming others, but are also thoroughly and humanely interrogated for any other information they have. If and when we arrest someone who’s not actually a terrorist, they are again treated in a way that is as human as possible so that they don’t go back to their home countries and start pursuing a radicalized path, which is where a not-insubstantial number of “recidivist” terrorists come from in the first place. The problem with the current system is that it treats anyone who is accused of terrorist activity as if they’ve already been tried and convicted of that activity just by virtue of accusation.
There’s the obvious question of whether McConnell will be asking these questions when any of the right-wing domestic terrorists of the past fortnight or so go on trial, but not only do we know the answer to that, we’ve also all accepted it as an internalized risk of the justice system. At least for white people.
I find it touching that conservatives are willing to apply a deftness of perception and distinction between themselves and James von Brunn that they aren’t willing to apply to the billion Muslims around the world.
With the second such right wing terrorist attack in as many weeks, conservatives are scrambling to figure out how none of this has anything to do with them. The first tack is to declare that conservatism/extreme right-wing politics only come in one flavor - the not-shooting-people flavor. It’s yummy!
This is a bizarro version of the exact conversation Muslims have been having since 2001, which conservatives will never, ever recognize. Those who commit terrorist acts in the name of Allah do not act or speak for the overwhelming majority of Muslims around the world. Your average Muslim walking down the street shouldn’t have to explain the acts of murderers half a world away, yet they’re asked to. The words of their holy text are taken grossly out of context - first by terrorists, then by the people assuming that they are themselves terrorists - and then those out of context words are put back into their mouths by critics.
When Bill O’Reilly calls George Tiller a genocidal monster for providing legal services to women in need, or when Glenn Beck theorizes that Barack Obama is the Antichrist, or elected representatives legitimize the belief that the President of the United States is a secret Kenyan Muslim intruder, doesn’t that speak far more directly to a crazy, violent, deadly element in modern society than a shared 1400-year-old text with 1400 years worth of interpretation across a variety of social, cultural and political perspectives? Or does it not, because of this made-up distinction that I just pulled out of my ass?
UPDATE: Did you know that Nazis were a non-violent group before Muslims came along? Does this count as Holocaust denialism? Because I think it does.
Just another one of those oddball weekend posts; I’ll date myself—again. Whether you loved or hated high school, you’ll probably identify with some of it. I happened to enjoy my nerdy years at Stuyvesant High School in NYC (class of ‘81). The Beastie Boys gave a nod to Stuy in the 1986 video ”Fight for Your Right (to Party).” BTW, the group has pretty much disowned the song.
Ironically, the song was intended as a parody of party and attitude songs, such as “Smokin’ In the Boys Room” and “I Wanna Rock.” However, the irony was lost on most listeners. Mike D commented that, “The only thing that upsets me is that we might have reinforced certain values of some people in our audience when our own values were actually totally different. There were tons of guys singing along to ‘Fight for Your Right’ who were oblivious to the fact it was a total goof on them."…
Despite probably being the group’s most famous song, the Beastie Boys have expressed distaste for it. In The Sounds of Science liner notes, MCA jokingly says the song “sucks,” though they did not feel the album would be complete without it. The group has not performed the song live since 1987
My fellow Stuyvesant High School alums have been forever traumatized by gym class; each squad leader had to wear this infamous red Stuy T-shirt, so to see the shirt turn up in a video was pretty amusing.
That song isn’t in my collection, but these two are…
Intergalactic: this video is so out there. Definitely captured the Godzilla insanity vibe. My brother and I used to watch those awful dubbed flicks every Saturday.
Sabotage: this song has had a resurgence because of its use in the latest Star Trek film where kiddo Kirk steals his stepdad’s classic car for a joyride in the desert. The Spike Jonze video is another tasty gem for those of us who grew up on those ridiculous cop shows of the 70s.
***
To complete this weekend nostalgia trip, seasoned with a little personal humiliation, here are some photos from my days at Stuyvesant High School (at its old location at 15th Street and 1st Avenue in Manhattan).
Left: A serious OMG Big Hair day, taken at graduation outside of Carnegie Hall. This is what my hair looked like when it was processed to within an inch of its life, and humidity still got the best of it. Right: The infamous gym class. I never got to be a squad leader—they got the red leader shirts as I mentioned above. Anyway, NO ONE liked gym. For my classmates out there—remember the gymnastics rotation? I nearly killed myself on the uneven parallel bars. One semester, I convinced one of the teachers to let me bring in a jump rope so that I could teach folks double dutch.
Michael Goldfarb attacks those of us who believe that same-sex marriage is okay, but torture isn’t, because logically, you’d realize that those two things are inextricably joined at the gay terrorist hip.
As to the morality of the methods used, I don’t see anything immoral about smacking around a terrorist or making him sit in the cold or dunking him in the water, but you can argue it either way. Still, I wonder why the same people squealing about the alleged moral indignity to which these monsters were subjected are the same people who want the government to keep morality out of their bedrooms and doctors’ offices. Why should the government be forbidden from making a moral judgment about gay marriage or abortion but compelled to make a moral judgment about the treatment of terrorists plotting to murder Americans citizens?
This is an incredibly clever argument, if by “clever” you mean “using a word in one context and then putting a cloth over its mouth, dragging it to a basement, dumping it in a hole and spraying it with a fire hose until it breaks down crying”. Which you do.
A better (and marginally realistic) way of phrasing this argument would be “why should the government be forbidden from restricting people’s fundamental rights when it comes to gay marriage or abortion but allowed to restrict people’s fundamental rights when it comes to torturing the shit out of them?” And then you realize that when you phrase the question like that, IT’S TORTURE, YOU FUCKING IDIOT.
Someone should probably talk to, at least, certain members of the IDF about their decision-making process:
Israeli soldiers used an 11-year-old Palestinian boy as a human shield during the war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip, a group of U.N. human rights experts said Monday.
The Israeli Defense force ordered the boy to walk in front of soldiers being fired on in the Gaza neighborhood of Tel al-Hawa and enter buildings before them, said the U.N. secretary-general’s envoy for protecting children in armed conflict.
Radhika Coomaraswamy said the incident on Jan. 15, after Israeli tanks had rolled into the neighborhood, was a violation of Israeli and international law.
It was included in a 43-page report published Monday, and was just one of many verified human rights atrocities during the three-week war between Israel and Hamas that ended Jan. 18, she said.
Emphasis mine, because it seemed to need pointing out.
The worst part about this is that I can construct an entire LGF comment thread in my head on how to defend this kind of an action. So since we can assume I’ve considered all the possible justifications and rejected them pre hoc, I hope that we’ll consider keeping them the hell out of comments. (As well as, it goes without saying, any excesses from the opposite bank of crazy. If you know what I’m saying. And I think you do.)
I suppose that there may have been some tiny, naive part of me (the same part that wistfully turns past Saturday morning cartoons wishing that I still had any interest in watching them) that sort of hoped al-Qaeda were equal-opportunity mass murderers, discriminating based solely on infidel status and unwilling to get involved in petty concerns of race and ethnicity.
However, I’m glad in a way that al-Qaeda’s now willing to not just be a group of callous, mass-murdering monsters, but callous, mass-murdering monsters who are actively searching for new and inventive ways to be even bigger fuckfaces. They were running the risk of becoming stale, let’s be real.
Thank god for this Salon interview with Bill Ayers, which is quite possibly the only intelligent thing to come out of the disaster that was the McCain campaign pretending a) that Ayers is currently a terrorist b) that the Weather Underground is any kind of threat to us now c) that the Weather Underground has anything to do with Islamic terrorism d) that Ayers and Obama are best buddies and e) that modern politics should be about endlessly rehashing the 60s. It’s a good interview---Walter Shapiro and Bill Ayers are able to talk about their differences of opinion on the effects of radical action in the 60s without getting upset, even though it’s obvious this wound is still open and probably won’t heal as long as the people who remember that time are still alive and kicking. Ayers is ambivalent about his participation in the Weather Underground---obviously they were doing way too many drugs and hadn’t really thought about the ramifications of their behavior. It’s farcical to think that you can set out to destroy property without running the extremely high risk that you’ll kill someone, and I don’t know if he’s really grappled with that fact as much as he should. But he’s also right that their behavior was peaceful and moderate compared to the government’s behavior at the time.
The problem with that, though, is when you start comparing yourself to the people you hate and using them as a benchmark for your behavior, it’s really easy to slip into paranoia and start rationalizing all sorts of fucked up shit. To make it worse for people on the left, people on the right are pretty much in a perpetual projection and rationalization loop, as you have to be when your worldview is fundamentally based on oppression. They don’t really need an excuse to make up all sorts of vile accusations about how evil liberals are, because in order to get to sleep every night, they have to invent an evil that keeps them from looking inside. Homophobia is refashioned as “protecting the children/traditional marriage”. Racism is made a tolerable philosophy by projecting violence, subversion, and sexual perversion onto the targeted group. Sexism is justified by people who claim they’re “saving babies”, and once you have a rationalization like that, turning to violence to enforce your will becomes easier to rationalize as well.
If the Republicans don’t clean out the bigots, mouthbreathers, and domestic terrorists in their midst, patriots like this filth in Louisiana will be party leaders before long.
An Oklahoma woman invited to a rural Louisiana campsite for a Ku Klux Klan initiation ritual was shot and killed after she asked to be taken back to town, the sheriff of a New Orleans suburb said Tuesday. Eight people were arrested after authorities found the woman’s body hidden under some brush, on the side of a road several miles from the remote campsite where the initiation was planned.
...Investigators found weapons, several flags and six Klan robes at the campsite, St. Tammany Parish Sheriff Jack Strain said in a news release.
Strain said the woman, whose identity was not released, was recruited over the Internet to participate in the ritual and then return to her home state to find other members for the white supremacist group.
...Authorities said the group’s members called themselves the ”Dixie Brotherhood.The IQ level of this group is not impressive, to be kind,” Strain said, adding, “I can’t imagine anyone feeling endangered or at risk by any one of these kooks. This is not what I would call an established Klan group. The Klan has a pretty high association with violence. Some of these guys are just crooks, sociopaths.”
Maria Kotronakis of Sydney, Australia, whose two sisters were killed [in the Bali bombings], said she was angry that the men never showed remorse, but with the executions, “justice has been served.”
By executing them, the Indonesian government has said, ‘No terrorists allowed,’” she added…
Hundreds of members of hardline Muslim groups have arrived in the village. Some threaten revenge and say others will take the place of Amrozi and Mukhlas.
There’s regular stupid and then there’s 9/11 stupid.
James S. Robbins is making an argument that we need the constant threat of terrorism and/or attack to keep us hypervigilant in the face of yet more attacks that then shouldn’t happen, which would in turn make us less vigilant and therefore in need of further attacks. I always labored under the impression that the point of our foreign affairs, whether or not we agree with the manner and method in which they’re conducted, was to protect and improve our way of life.
We’ve already begun some of the post-9/11 romanticization of the 9/12 world, how everyone was together and frolicking through fields of daisies while giant videos of Rudy Giuliani assuring us played on standard-definition TVs and we had crazy end-of-the-world disease-free sex. What I remember, however, is a bunch of us standing around a bag that someone had left in a hallway at school and debating whether or not to call 911. I remember looking up at every airplane that seemed a little bit too close and wondering if this was the next one. I remember feeling powerless and clueless and having as my only guidepost a color-coded strip that told us we were either fucked, super fucked or Assbangers 9: Return To Glory Hole, depending on the day.
That feeling we all had for the two or three years following 9/11 was only desirable from the perspective that Robbins is shilling for - the rise to power type of neoconservatism which only thrives in moments of great national crisis and soul-searching angst. There’s no actual benefit to a constant national freakout for any of the people freaking out...and why would there be? You don’t freak out if you have a plan, and if you have a plan that’s working you remove the need to freak out. If you’re not freaking out, you return to your normal way of life, perhaps a bit warier but still enjoying your morning coffee and hoping you don’t have to argue your way out of a late penalty for your cable bill.
I don’t know that there’s anyone outside of conservative intellectual circles who’s really wishing that we could all live as if the sky were falling. If there is, however, I would then ask what it is that we’re supposed to be fighting for as we take on Islamofascitarianistism? If our very way of life welcomes the things that destroy it, then we’re paradoxically better off not doing anything, welcoming attacks, and letting those who hate and kill us dictate to us the course and nature of our wants and needs.
If that’s the case, then, I have but one request: stop trying to govern us before you kill us, please. Go get a leftover replica of the set from Passenger 57 and relive Flight 93 to your heart’s content, if you must, but I’d rather keep my family safe than satisfy your sloppy warrior’s lust for a nation of paranoiacs ready to nuke anyone who looks at us funny.
McCain’s new ad accuses Barack Obama of sending his wolves to Alaska to savage Sarah Palin:
Now, I’m very much on the “associated uses of words and images” tip at this point, and the use of that imagery reminds me of nothing so much as George W. Bush’s famously effective “Wolves” ad from 2004:
The use of wolf imagery in the context of a Republican presidential campaign, particularly one so focused on national security acumen, can’t help but be intentional. Why is John McCain comparing Barack Obama, a man who has patriotically served his country in the U.S. Senate and who has run an honorable campaign for president, to Islamic terrorists who have slaughtered thousands of Americans?
I’ve stood by our radical black socialist magician President through thick and thin. I was with him when he threatened to kill Granny with bureaucracy, I was with him when the stimulus bill reserved $212 million to promote teenage pregnancy, I was even with him when he appointed Alger Hiss’ ghost to oversee Cash for Clunkers. And you know why I was with him? Everything he did was to advance the greater good.
Just another one of those oddball weekend posts; I’ll date myself—again. Whether you loved or hated high school, you’ll probably identify with some of it. I happened to enjoy my nerdy years at Stuyvesant High School in NYC (class of ‘81). The 
To complete this weekend nostalgia trip, seasoned with a little personal humiliation, here are some photos from my days at Stuyvesant High School (at its old location at 15th Street and 1st Avenue in Manhattan).
