Big Man With A Gun

American Conservatives appear to be engaged in cognitive dissonance when they defend the "right to bear arms" in the wake of yet another mass shooting. This is the one non-negotiable Right for them, all else being easily sacrificed to the Patriot Act should some swarthy foreigner happen to have a shoe-bomb or underwear bomb or no bomb at all, just an expired work visa. None of these people are murdering Americans at the same rate as American Citizens with legally purchased firearms, so earnest Liberals think they can shame the Red Staters and Reactionaries into adopting gun control laws.

"From my cold, sweaty hands!"

But this is a misreading of Conservatism - one which Conservatives encourage. The animus against Muslims and Latinos does not come from any concern for security but rather for preserving the hierarchy of Real Americans over and above Everyone Else. Within this paradigm, frequent flare ups like Las Vegas are acceptable and so is Trump's latest Muslim Ban, as both maintain the primacy of Real Americans over foreign and alien Others, whether from Syria or San Francisco. Further, the untouchable Right To Bear Arms ensures the hierarchy of private, local regimes of power exercised with all the impulsive terror of a medieval manor lord - a "democratic feudalism" in which the boss rules you but you can still rule the wife, who rules the kids, who set fire to the dog because that's how all these little pyramids of "order" play out. Assuming you don't decide to expand your own rule with an Armalite and duffle bag of spare mags, like Stephen Paddock.

So when Conservatives howl about Muslims and immigrants but turn into muddling Constitutionalists at any mention of gun control, they're not being disingenuous. They are being principled, but it's the principles of fascist assholes. And they deserve the same as any fascist.

The Great White Nope

The armies of this age are weak.

That was the takeaway from the neo-nazi march in Virginia this weekend, a spectacle of sound and fury signifying nothing but the weakness of the marchers themselves. They came, they saw, they scurried off when the kids talked back. A wave of preppies with tiki torches, bands of right-wing militia carrying their street-legal AR-15s, and they retreated from mouthy, unbowed college students without firing a shot. And even the Republicans are demanding criminal investigation after the one loser out of all the other losers staged a terrorist attack with his car, like a feckless European jihadi.

Keep that in mind as all the polite media types ring their hands over this terrible excuse for political violence: The armed right-wing militia never fired a shot, the worst violence being delivered by some chipmunk-faced shmuck from Ohio driving into a pedestrian mall. As terrible and tragic as that attack on the Downtown Mall was, it netted only a single casualty. Nineteen injured and one dead is a typical Cavaliers victory party.

Comparisons to ISIS are even more accurate than they typically are when talking about these alt-right types. ISIS sympathizers who plow through pedestrians in Paris and Berlin are making a tactical decision, using the best weapon they have available. Contrast this with Virginia, where you can buy guns. Loads and loads of guns. There's a gun show somewhere in the Commonwealth every month, so if you're serious about revolutionary violence you and your buddies can get strapped right quick. That's what many of the alt-reichers did for this march:

Something for folks who see these people as some sort of lower-class other: this gear is not cheap. These are middle class white men. pic.twitter.com/nsJMYqmmei

— Punching Nazis =👍🏻 (@inthesedeserts) August 13, 2017

The far right has been totally driven out. Militia evacuated, traditionalists flee. Anti-racists cry in victory. Watch all of this video. pic.twitter.com/0WZ9Ji5g1v

— Jack Smith IV (@JackSmithIV) August 12, 2017

Veterans for Bernie like to point out these guys aren't actual soldiers, despite all their tacticool gear. They showed up to menace everyone who isn't a nazi into silence.

It didn't work, as you can clearly see. But no one going to C-Ville knew that, especially not the UVa kids and locals who turned out to counter-protest without any weapons beyond hairspray. And it speaks all the more to their bravery  that they took on these self-styled brownshirts without any hope of protection from the Charlottesville police.

I lived in Charlottesville for three years after college. I can say from personal experience that the ruling institutions of that town are a microcosm of all the mealy-mouthed poshlost that passes for respectable discourse in this country. This is best illustrated by the Downtown Mall where the attack took place, where I once saw a C-Ville police officer ticket a black man for drinking a beer while fifty yards away the wealthy white liberals of UVa swilled wine at an over-priced restaurant. C-Ville cops are not there to protect you, but to protect the image of a college town that loves to talk up it's relationship to Thomas Jefferson without ever mentioning his support of free universities. Or his slaves.

This makes C-Ville an ideal place for the Alt-Right's big debutante ball but they couldn't even do that right. They came in their macho-wannabe uniforms, trying to look united and scary, and turned right around when they met resistance. One ISIS-style hit and run and trying to gang up on a guy in a parking garage, that's what happens when these nazi thugs try to make good on their violent rhetoric.

Like ISIS and other right-wing reactionaries, the Alt-Right is much more a support group for miserable middle class failures than a competent military force. That should be everyone's takeaway from the Battle of Charlottesville, that the nazis of the 21st century are a pale imitation of the Wermacht, that they have no stomach for a real fight and what's more they're real shit at fighting anyway.

Just be sure to arm yourself, because cops won't protect you. That goes double if you're not white.

Dallas Rising

This was bound to happen.

A week ago, Micah Johnson opened fire on police officers during a #BlackLivesMatter rally, killing five and wounding seven before committing suicide by cop. Every professional TV face in the nation has been weeping over the brave boys in blue since then and not one - pundit or politician - will admit that the only mystery about Johnson's shooting is that it's so far a very isolated incident.

In 2016 alone, leading up to Johnson's shooting, American police murdered over five hundred unarmed civilians. Some might quibble over Philando Castile, a registered gun owner and a repudiation of the all the NRA's claims to defending liberty, but any Virginian will tell you there's a world of difference between armed self-defense and politely informing the trooper you have a concealed carry permit before getting drilled in your own car. And even then - five hundred! We're fast approaching the numbers usually associated with tinpot dictatorships or our own imperial misadventures.

In fact, that latter is a good parallel. Despite the rhetoric of community and service, American police have mutated over time into something like an occupying army. A distrust, even hostility, towards the civilian population, driven by a siege mentality that manifests in everything from these rampant shootings to an Abu Ghraib franchise opening in Chicago.

And to be clear, it ain't just black people:

An extraordinary pair of paragraphs from the Breitbart reporter arrested in Baton Rouge. https://t.co/dOmhwO5tsR pic.twitter.com/YcZHpF0Mpg

— Matt Pearce (@mattdpearce) July 13, 2016

This is abetted not just by a news media industry reluctant to criticize police but also a popular culture that - wrongly! - prefers Dirty Harry over Columbo. Add in the discomfort the comfortable middle class feels every time race gets mentioned and many abuses by police simply disappear down the memory hole.

...[U]nless there's video, or multiple witnesses, there's usually no consequence at all for police violence, not even on the civil side. The overwhelming majority of incidents simply disappear.

Because for the longest time, this was all normal. That might be the worst aspect for the cloistered TV culture of America - the absolute normalcy of abuse and intimidation by armed agents of the state. The sort of thing seen in movies about Eastern Bloc underdogs, dodging Stasi and KGB on their way over the wall and into the American Dream of an office job and blue jeans.

This sort of oppression in a modern western democracy is abysmally normal though, and there's a very pertinent historical parallel: Ireland under British rule at the start of the 20th Century. White Americans love to brag about the one great aunt or great great grandmother who came from Erin, but they sure are ignorant of why...

The police state of modern America was very much the norm of British controlled Ireland, from subtle hiring prejudices all the way to casual brutality by the security services. And all normal - I cannot stress that enough, normal - leading to the bold and doomed Easter Rising of 1916.

Like #BlackLivesMatter, the Irish nationalists and republicans who barricaded Dublin were much more of a minority of Irish political life than one might assume from their volume. They were also similarly outraged by isolated if common instances of insult and oppression, the sort that can be easily ignored by the Anglo impulse towards authority and obedience. And the bloody crackdown that followed served only to spread nationalism and republicanism better than any pamphlet or Yeats poem.

While poorly organized and over in less than a week, the Easter Rising met with the sort of ruthless British response usually employed in the tropics against browner folks. The leaders were executed after brief, perfunctory trials, the Irish Volunteers and other militia were accompanied into exile and prison by those rounded up in sweeping raids that gave very little thought to evidence or due process, and even pacifists and Unionists - as in Irish Protestants who didn't want to be a damned republic - found themselves targeted by British authorities who didn't understand and didn't care to understand Irish grievances.

The singular case of Francis Sheehy-Skeffington best illustrates this clumsy, bully's response to the rebellion. A devout pacifist and a radical feminist when such a term actually had meaning - he campaigned tirelessly for women's suffrage and took his wife's surname - he was summarily executed by a British officer named Clothurst while trying to prevent looting. That is, Sheehy-Skeffington was trying to prevent the looting. Clothurst also shot an unarmed man who wandered out into the street to see what all the commotion was about, after issuing a command to get back inside which the man then couldn't obey because Clothurst murdered him.

The quintessential "bad apple" that American pundits try to blame the systemic problem of police brutality on, Clothurst was punished mildly by his superiors in a manner seemingly designed to rile up Irish sentiments. Much like even the most blatant cases of murder and abuse are either dismissed, buried, or declared a justifiable use of force in modern America. Taken along with the severe punishments meted out to rebels, this presented the very stark picture of the British government not giving a damn about Irish well-being, treating them as just another colonial property to be exploited and brutalized. So too does the constant stream of police shootings in America capped off by friendly grand juries and cable news rationalizations present the unambiguous statement on behalf of the System that black lives do not matter.

...But there's a snag in my comparison here. The Easter Rising, while rooted in resentment against an oppressive regime, was also an explicitly separatist act. The Fenians and Irish Volunteers and everyone else wanted not a redress of grievances but a complete break with what they saw as an alien power imposing itself on their own political and personal lives.

Further, the Irish nationalists organizations were really very organized. Not in a military sense, as demonstrated by the Rising, but as fully developed political parties with clearly stated goals. When previously apolitical Irish men and women felt outraged at the executions by the British, there were actual opposition movements ready to take them in. Sinn Féin, one of the smaller parties at the time, saw their membership boom after 1916.

There is no parallel in modern America. #BlackLivesMatter, while involving many different activist groups, is still just a hashtag without any coherent political purpose beyond "Stop murdering us." Further, neither of the major parties are willing to accommodate such a wacky and radical demand and the only party of any significance that can will likely lose out again to fussy white liberals voting for the Lesser Evil.

Most importantly, despite their behavior, American police are not an occupying army. They are the same citizens and subject to the same laws - theoretically - as the people they brutalize. This greatly complicates the problem: British troops in Ireland could always go home and the IRA pioneered the guerrilla strategy of outlasting the occupier. American police are already home, even if the schizophrenia of zoning and local economics makes their homes comparatively better and wealthier than the homes across town they raid. Insurgency serves no purpose other than to exacerbate the existing fear and spite of a police culture that already thinks everyone hates them. And if everyone hates you anyway, why not taser that mouthy old lady?

Micah Johnson had legitimate grievances but he is not James Connolly. And #BlackLivesMatter are not the Irish Volunteers, just as the many fragmented police departments are not the Royal Irish Constabulary. The Irish and the English could leave each other alone, American civilians and police are stuck with each other.

An All American Massacre

No matter how much the media and ruling class want to paint Omar Mateen as some swarthy jihadi, those pesky facts to the contrary keep surfacing...

Much is being made of Mateen's sexuality, though often in the most wrong ways. Such as how his former classmates at a police academy are saying they always thought he was gay - a story that relates to far more than just Mateen's orientation, but more on that in a moment. Add in his frequenting of gay clubs and his use of Grindr, and Mateen starts to look like other self-loathing homophobes who usually commit all their crimes while in elected office. Attempts to link his pathology to conservative Islam aren't entirely off-base, but only in the way it would equally apply to any of the myriad reactionary strains of Christianity. Mateen's self-hatred, manifesting as a nihilistic jihad of one against all, has many precedents in American culture.

The Mormon Church for example - that most American of churches - generated close to an Orlando body count earlier this year. And it's not an anomaly:

...youth suicides are twice as high in states with the highest levels of Mormon residents compared to states with the lowest levels of Mormon residents.

That no Mormon LGBTQ youth have sought to take others with them, at least on the scale of Orlando, is sheer luck at this point. If you're comfortable thinking that it's because kids can't get their hands on the sort of firepower used by Mateen, you've clearly never heard of Harris and Klebold. Or been through a gun state.

I grew up in a gun state. I fired rifles and shotguns before I was old enough to drive. In more rural areas, kids get their first gun before their first car. And that was still in the relatively civilized DC sprawl of Northern Virginia. Utah, Florida, Texas - all places where being gay is still considered deviant and where guns are the cure for what ails ya. Hell, the entire point of the Pink Pistols is using one of those cultural norms to protect against the other!

But easy access to guns and a homophobic culture that fosters self-loathing still won't lead to a massacre. As Mark Ames demonstrates in his analysis of rage massacres in the first Clinton era and today, gun control alone will not end these killings because of one final ingredient: a truly toxic culture.

This is speculation, but I am relatively certain the seeds for Mateen's shooting were planted not by homophobia - whether from his religion or the dominant American culture - but from his work as a security guard. Just the title, "security guard," for someone it has been established attended a police academy speaks volumes about the trajectory of his life before this past weekend.

Further, there is the homophobia of every such academy in the United States and Mateen's entire vocation. I've never been in a police academy but I've been in a locker room, which was exactly like Stan Goff's description of that pinnacle of the police state, JSOC:

They like sports, pornography, gun culture, video games, alcohol, and misogynist humor.  Gunslinging is dick-swinging – the dare-ya atmosphere we males know well, what I call probative masculinity.

You can call this toxic masculinity if you want. It sure is a popular pejorative, but it obfuscates the deeper and much more structural sources of this brutishness. This particular strain of masculinity, from Goff's former comrades in Tier 1 all the way down to Florida badges, exists in service of a post-industrial capitalist ideology. An ideology championed by Reagen and Clinton and the source of a twenty year upsurge in mass shootings from workplaces to middle class suburbs. One that continues today, in ever more manifestations and driven by further compound bitterness by a culture that sanctifies happiness - and profit - but endeavers to place everything out of reach through ever worsening inequality.

Mateen's rage is the same as Seung-Hui Cho's and Elliot Rodger's, a savage and nihilistic reiteration of Michel Clouscard's brief but penetrating analysis of democratic capitalism: "All is allowed, but nothing is possible."

Business As Usual

Hey look, another mass shooting! I wonder how Americans will desperately deny reality this time?

No surprise, they've picked the "terrorism" angle. I figured the shooter wasn't a white guy the minute Orlando PD used the T-word on the radio Sunday morning - that's an adjective that only ever means "Muslim" in mainstream discourse. And the shooter himself, Omar Mateen, helped solidify that comforting delusion by babbling about Islamic State and the Boston bombing in a 911 call:

Hopper [head of FBI in Orlando] did not comment on whether Mateen declared his allegiance to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also know as ISIS) group as reported in US media, but said the caller made references "to the Islamic State."

Mateen's own father also stated in an interview that the boy was more outraged by men kissing than by America's dabbling in Syria's gore, but that hasn't slowed anyone down. The stupid people are blaming it all on "Islamic Extremism." Just like everyone blamed white women after Dylann Roof declared he was protecting their honor.

But the veracity of a source is less important than whether or not it confirms existing assumptions of the world. In that regard, Omar Mateen is entirely trustworthy because it's not like any non-Muslims go on shooting sprees in service to some crackpot ideology. Nope, those are all lone nuts who need psychiatric help. Mateen was clearly an existential threat to American national security.

Even though the FBI disagreed. Once again proving you can't profile a rage murderer, the Feds interviewed Mateen twice over "inflammatory comments" he made to co-workers in 2013 and 2014. Anyone who's held a job in America knows that just disagreeing with your boss over Game of Thrones can constitute "inflammatory" but they insist it was for reals about terrorism and national security and all that jazz.

The Feds let him go because everything was inconclusive, something you think all the liberty-loving small-government types would understand. But as the waffentwerp-in-chief Donald Trump demonstrates, principles don't count for shit among Americans. They're all for draconian police state actions when it involves brown people - so long as y'all don't touch their guns.

And with that, you can see the Standard Mass Shooting Response wrapping up in the media. While calls for stronger gun control and to classify this a hate crime have come up from everyone without a job inside the Beltway, exactly fuck-all is being done in either case.

In retrospect Sandy Hook marked the end of the US gun control debate. Once America decided killing children was bearable, it was over.

— (((Dan Hodges))) (@DPJHodges) June 19, 2015

The next week will see lots of weeping, hand-wringing, and indictment of the American gun lobby. And the only lasting effect will be dumb racists rallying around the dumbest racist, citing the massacre of fifty people they'd have dismissed as debauched catamites at any other time. And when it all happens again - whether for Islamic State, the sanctity of white women, or just another layoff - Americans will again be shocked that such things occur.

UPDATE: Apparently Omar Mateen was motivated by Larry Craig levels of self-loathing. This has naturally prompted Clinton and Trump to argue over how to bomb the most Muslims.

Philosophy in the Bathroom

Sometimes it helps to take a step back and consider the premises driving public life. Especially in America, where no one can ever speak the truth without endangering their ever diminishing career prospects. As I don't have a career to speak of, I can speak any truth that happens across my radar - namely that the current trans-panic over restrooms and other facilities is driven by delusion.

Hands up, all of you who have used a public toilet designated for the opposite sex. And that should be everyone reading this who isn't a Mormon as there is a time honored tradition of practicality trumping propriety in the dive bars of this Great Nation. I know I'm not the only one to skip the line for the Men's room and go into the unoccupied Lady's when I've had a couple beers and you're lying right now if you say you haven't. Or you're really boring.

But that's admittedly a low bar as so many bars don't differentiate their two restrooms that much. Some places just have two identical closets with a single toilet, a sink, and usually a lock on the door. The more economical establishments will have a single head, with men and women using it without any anxiety.

A large public restroom is another issue entirely - or it is if you never ask why that's so. Gentlemen, do you worry a trasman might check out your junk at the urinal? How is that any different from every other time you've taken a piss in public? Maybe I haven't seen every possible layout but in my experience there ain't a whole lot of space between those things.

The same question holds for the women who worry about a transwoman primping in front of the mirror with the rest of them. How is it different from the norm? And how could you tell anyway, check to see who pees standing up? That might say more about you than you're ready to admit...

This fear of boy's in the girl's room and girl's in the men's room loses whatever flimsy rationalization it had once you account for homosexual desire. Getting back to urinals, a dude can easily check out another dude - if he's a creeper - and no state legislatures are fretting over that scenario. If the legislators themselves are any indication, it's already a common occurrence.

Which brings us to the subject of high school locker rooms, and all the Victorian malakas begging us to think of the children. Does a transgirl's right to use her preferred room trump a cis-girl's right to not potentially see a penis? I didn't know teenage girls were in the habit of going commando in front of each other enough for this to be an issue, which is probably why it's phrased much more vaguely. "What if it makes the other kids uncomfortable?" ask people who have clearly forgotten what it's like to be a teenager.

You know what else can make kids uncomfortable in a locker room? Everything! From body image problems to the still socially normative homophobia to just wearing the wrong brand of sneakers, kids will never feel safe around each other. That's a reality every American over the age of fourteen has experienced first-hand, and yet it never enters this conversation.

So what's the solution? You could just not give a flaming toss - that's my view and the view of everyone else with more important things to worry about, like a paycheck or utility bills. A law restricting your access to a toilet by what it says on your birth certificate is less enforceable than SOPA, so go forth and crap freely. And if you're really that invested in the anatomy of the person in the stall next to you, you have problems no state laws could ever fix.

UPDATE (04-16-16)

 Predictably, one of the men responsible for the bathroom bill has been creeping on thirty-four women. Jeremy Durham joins Larry Craig and Mark Foley in the august collection of Republicans who personally need legislation to keep it in their pants.

The Sanders Question

Do not ask if Bernie Sanders can win. He can. He has more popular support than Clinton and anyone in the GOP Clown Car. He's gone from 0 to lightspeed in an election everyone expected to be the sole domain of Hillary Clinton since about 2013. He's not only got the support, he's got the political savvy to convert it into real electoral victory and maybe even into some desperately needed policies.

Rather ask: Will Bernie Sanders win the nomination?

That's a much harder question to answer, less because of the fickle electorate and more because of the forces of traditional power arrayed against Sanders. His bottom-up campaign looks all the more impressive when you look at how the very party he is running for is determined not to have him.

By April 2015, over half of the Democratic Senate caucus had already backed [Hillary Clinton's] bid for the nomination — far more early endorsements than any candidate in either party has gained in this century. To date Clinton has won the backing of 38 of 46 Senate Democrats, 148 of 188 House Democrats, and 12 of 18 Democratic governors.

In contrast, Sanders has two House Reps and many many many people whose only influence is the ballot. If he can win against his own party he's certainly passed the ever crooked "electable" test so often used to weed out dissident voices, so why would a Democratic Party that actually wants to hold on to the White House still oppose him?

It's not his foreign policy - the biggest point of criticism among his Leftist detractors. Which do indeed exist. While not voting for the Iraq War, Sanders is just as pro-Israel and pro-Empire as every other D on Capitol Hill. This would do nothing to hurt his "electability" either as rank and file Democrats - whatever their protestations in the latter half of the Bush II presidency - are just as eager for war as the Republicans they post snarky memes about on Facebook. War may be bad for children and other living things but plenty of American liberals can find a way to rationalize it as long as one of their own pulls the trigger.

Just look at that Kenyan Islamo-Socialist, Barack Obama. Mister Hope and Change may prefer drone warfare to boots on the ground, but the results are much the same. Drones make good cold, imperialist logic but it's still a far cry from the radical peace based foreign policy advocated by Kucinich in 2008 and the Green Party today.

And as gross as it may sound, being a peacenik really would make Sanders unelectable. The Cruise Missile Liberals want America to kick ass just as much as the muzzie-hating conservatives, they just want it done humanely - as if humane war is even possible! - and their rhetoric isn't as obviously racist. These two factions have never been as opposed as the culture war noise would have you suspect, as they've always been little more than feuding sides of the same white middle class family.

It's not his conventional foreign policy that has the party brass so scared, but rather Sanders's economic priorities. He calls himself a democratic socialist but his proposals are little more than reheated New Deal policies. That's still too far to the left for history's second biggest fans of capitalism, whether out of fear of change or because it would drive away the corporate money that post-Clinton Democrats use to win elections. That they haven't done anything very liberal since the New Deal doesn't stop people from arguing about the importance of their winning elections.

Which gets to the very heart of opposition to Sanders: He challenges the fundamental assumptions of American elections. His economic populism has already crossed the usual Red versus Blue divide, uniting working whites with urban people of color. That's something very new and very frightening to a party that thought it could run on the fear that a Republican would overturn Roe V. Wade indefinitely, much as Karl Rove thought the GOP could run on the false promise of doing just that.

Sanders, like Occupy, has re-oriented the political dialogue to the basic needs of the citizenry - prompting Hillary Clinton and her daughter to disparage any notion of universal healthcare with rhetoric straight out of Mit Romney's campaign. That blue collar Christians, atheist vegan programmers, and black nurses all think it's a good idea doesn't matter because there is no business support for such an unprofitable venture.

And this is what Election 2016 comes down to. A test not just of the Democratic Party but of American democracy in general. If a popularly supported insurgent candidate like Sanders is defeated by money and privilege, what chance do the rest of us little people really have?

Dictatorship of the Yuppies

I have never used Uber.

Let me put that in context. I am a white guy with decent income residing in Brooklyn, I am between the ages of 25 and 35, I have a smartphone, and I have never used nor felt the need to use Uber. I know plenty of other New Yorkers who can say the same and I live and ride the subway with even more non-members of the much talked about "sharing economy" of which Uber is so often Exhibit A.

Unlike many of these same New Yorkers, I grew up far away in the Commonwealth of Virginia, where a service like Uber would be hard pressed to even get off the ground. It's a frequent joke that the town I grew up in only exists because people on I-95 ran out of gas. Cabs are for DC and the airport, which makes them a rarity even among the upper middle class DOD employees - more often, it's taken as a given you can drive yourself or get a lift from someone. This arrangement has never been viewed by anyone as a problem and there is nothing in the transportation system to "disrupt" other than the HOV lane.

All of this leads to the conclusion that Uber - and by extension the sharing economy in general - is simply a non-issue outside a very limited, urban, and well-to-do demographic.

It just so happens that the same demographic contains the primary writers and readers of the New York Times, the Atlantic, and every other respectable publication - to say nothing of the narrowly focused tech publications.

So a narrowly urban yuppie service like Uber ends up getting a much larger share of reporting and commentary than, say, the toxic water of Flint Michigan. Despite reports for more than a year, it's only been in the last few weeks that anyone remembered Flint even existed. And then they looked at the hashtag and asked "Is Michael Moore making another movie?"

Because social media is a product of the same insular, upper middle class culture as Uber users and as such is simply not engaged with the majority experience in modern America. Instead, we get a closed system of materially secure yuppies arguing over an app-based utopia that only they will ever experience.

That's what the sharing economy and all the other "internet of things" dithering comes down to: a gated community for people residing in America's urban coastal enclaves. A community many of them don't even want, but they don't have the guts to leave.

How Mark Zuckerberg Causes Mass Shootings

While the ruling class in the Western democracies debate the merits of bombing yet another poor country, US citizens spent the week murdering each other again. The non-shooting at UNC Chapel Hill was overshadowed in the same day by an attack in San Bernardino targeting social services because pure nihilism drives these American jihadis.

That might be a loaded term, seeing as the perpetrators were an Illinois-born Pakistani-American and a Saudi respectively, but their motives were pure American: an “office dispute” between Syed Farooq and one of the many victims in the office park. That little detail will get lost in the paranoid noise over what the GOP clown car will declare a terrorist attack, thus compelling them to get balls-deep into another Middle Eastern country that was never involved.

Of course, every mass shooting in America is an act of terrorism but the political correctness of the right demands we never use the “T” word when the Second Amendment is involved…

But even gun control on the scale of the United Kingdom wouldn’t stop this sort of thing from happening. The motivation, the many many office disputes at the root of these All American massacres, is a byproduct of the extreme capitalism the US has embraced since Reagan and is best exemplified by the self-satisfied mediocrities of Silicon Valley.

While fourteen people were dying for your Second Amendment rights in San Bernardino, Facebook maven Mark Zuckerberg announced his new not-a-philanthropy. He sure tried to make it look like a charitable organization, adopting the same his-and-her naming convention as that Bill Gates tax write off and offering up some noblesse oblige platitudes alongside family pictures, but all in support of an investment vehicle. The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative is an LLC and under no legal obligation to actually perform any acts of charity. Zuckerberg spent the day bragging about donating his many billions of dollars to himself.

And the rubes ate it up.

Major media companies have been working overtime to emphasize Farooq’s Muslimness, much as they tried to paint Major Nidal Hassan as some crafty al Qaeda sleeper agent. That both were American with American grievances - which they expressed in the most American way of all - doesn’t get as much airplay because it invites uncomfortable questions...

“Sometimes, you don’t earn enough to buy things for what the children need for school, or food for the house, or personal expenses … like house payments or bills.”

The environment that drove Farooq is the same post-industrial hellscape immediately familiar to every American outside the coastal urbanite enclaves. A place of tract homes, big box stores, and toxic bitterness over an economy that has left you behind. The Reagan revolution still continues, transferring wealth upward whether in tax breaks, federally mandated private insurance, or just good ol’ fraud.

Like Zuckerberg’s purported “charity” company. He stands to make back his investment to himself with interest in the very near future, while maybe squirting a few research dollars into one of Silicon Valley’s dead-end Singularity projects. A government with actual social welfare in mind could have taken that 45 billion and given everyone real universal healthcare - with free college as a chaser - but even a Democratic White House is more interested in Reagan’s failed neoliberal experiment than in providing for the general welfare.

For proof, just look at the other folks in Zuckerber’s tax bracket. Like former Massey CEO Don Blankenship, who will maybe serve a whole year in jail for killing 29 people. Or Cerberus Capitol's Stephen Feinberg, a literal vampire who got a federal bailout and invested in Bushmaster right before the Newton shooting and turns a hefty profit on farming human plasma from impoverished Mexicans bussed across the US border. If that sounds sociopathic, that’s because it is. Neoliberal capitalism is not some free and fair market but a deliberate system designed by and for sociopaths like Blankenship and Feinberg and Google.

Syed Farooq and John Lewis Dear are terrorists. They’re also the logical result of a socio-economic system that conflates wealth with worth as a human being.

Things You Cannot Say on TheHill.com

There is probably no “respectable” political rag in America more craven and reactionary than The Hill. Billed as the paper everyone in Congress reads, one look at it’s front page explains why those screwheads are so utterly out of touch. The Hill is both stridently provincial in its analysis and avoids real news like the terrorist attack on Planned Parenthood so it can breathlessly rehash whatever slap fight some staffers had the previous afternoon. It is the apotheosis of the neoconservative brainwave, an adaptive combination of the mean and the stupid.

And its readers are bitterly opposed to any conflicting viewpoints appearing in the comments. Here are the Things You Cannot Say on TheHill.com:















And just for perspective, here are some things you can say:















Suddenly the blatant fascism of Donald Trump makes perfect sense, don’t it?

American ISIS

Friday, a citizen of the United States perpetrated a terrorist attack that left three dead and over a dozen injured. Three guesses as to which god he cited as inspiration.

"Allahu akbar!"

Admittedly, Robert Lewis Dear only invoked the “dead baby parts” meme conservative presidential candidates were pimping earlier this season. Whether Dear was avenging said dead babies in the name of Jesus or Allah hasn’t been explicitly stated yet but come the fuck on.

Look at all this outrage over a dead lion, but where is all the outrage over the planned parenthood dead babies.

— Marco Rubio (@marcorubio) July 29, 2015

People with a little awareness are going to be pointing out the obvious terrorism of things like this and the murder of George Tiller and the past bombing of clinics - and no one in power will do a goddamn thing about it. Because Robert Lewis Dear and others like him are useful idiots to American Erdogans up until they go postal.

Who will stand with the American people, and who will stand with Planned Parenthood’s selling of aborted baby body parts for profit. (4/8)

— Dr. Rand Paul (@RandPaul) August 3, 2015

Ted Cruz is already offering prayers to the same God who gave Dear his marching orders. Because once the GOP base snaps they cease to be part of the broader conservative movement - a movement startlingly similar to the reactionary Sunnis who've been mass murdering French people this year. Shooters like Dear are instead declared lone nuts, whose behavior was impossible to predict despite fitting a clear profile again and again. Because that's a lie American conservatives need to believe even more than the notion Jesus actually likes them.

Also, Matt Walsh is a cunt.

In the Land of the Four Eyed Kings

Since Eddie Snowden went and told everyone that the NSA was actually doing it’s job, encryption has been a big deal among people in the know. That is to say, it has been made a big deal by people who like to think they’re in the know. Chief among these is the DOD-funded Tor Project and its many Twitter evangelists who embarrass themselves in 140 characters or less.

But one niggling little fact never seems to pop up in all the cypherpunk nattering on social media. One of those inconvenient and very uncomfortable facts, namely that no one in the current privacy movement is threatening to those in power.

Really. Take a look at the who’s who in crypto or whatever the people trading kiddie porn through Tor call themselves. Filter out all the natsec contractors and you’re left with maybe a few randos who escaped from Reddit. A government with a billion dollar military isn’t scared of such a crowd. Even a government without an air force wouldn’t be scared of such a crowd.

Still, you’ve got encryption and privacy getting headlines because unobserved porn browsing is very important to people with money. And not just money, but a stake in the game we call capitalist society. Cypherpunks, for all their posturing, are as wedded to this nation and its bloated security services as any oil exec or arms contractor. Possibly moreso since the absolutist freedom they espouse is only possible when other pressing needs - like food and shelter - are so ubiquitous as to be wholly taken for granted. The closest to homeless anyone in this movement has ever gotten is Julian Assange’s coach surfing in Europe, which is a hardship shared by every half-bright grad student on the East Coast.

And while I’ve said it before, it bears repeating that hiding your “revolutionary” rhetoric in the latest crypto-tool is worse than useless. Real opposition to tyranny has been and always will be a very direct and confrontational act. And that means blood. Your blood, my blood, the police state’s blood - all of it getting spilled out there in the streets. Like in Ferguson. And Baltimore. And every other effective mass movement of the past century.

The crypto kiddies won’t ever do that. Their metric for success begins and ends with no bleary-eyed government functionary seeing what they’re grabbing with bittorrent. The ruling class just doesn’t care about that, despite the scare stories surrounding the RIAA. And since the encryption movement will never violently oppose said ruling class, they are simply of no concern.

They want to be a concern. That’s clear from all the tough talk twerps direct at Yasha Levine, who escaped real pogroms and oppression in Soviet Russia. American culture long ago decided suffering - that is the appearance of suffering - is a desirable thing. It makes you look cool and edgy to the other twenty-somethings living in basements. And there ain’t no suffering more sexy than being one of the Elect battling some dystopian superstate through computer wizardry. The tech culture brainwave that leads to a dozen versions of Python that still don’t work is also why these upper middle class milquetoasts are so insistent that they are fighting the good fight: "I just want to be special :("

All is Allowed, Nothing is Possible

Much like the Soviet Union co-opted Marxist rhetoric to justify Russian imperial ambitions, so do American libertarians co-opt the language of radicals from Bakunin to Bookchin to justify their own material comfort.

Case in point: John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods. The organic "green capitalism" grocery chain beloved by white liberals and supplied through cheap prison labor. That might seem a little incongruous at first - an avowed supporter of personal liberty benefitting from state incarceration - but it really makes perfect, awful sense when you factor in Mackey's hatred of unions and labor rights. 'Cause prison workers don't get that kinda liberty at all:

And it’s not just that Colorado’s prison laborers are cheap: Smith made clear that, as director of a prison labor program, he had more ways to motivate an employee than an ordinary boss. What would happen if a worker was late? I asked. “Straight back into the general population,” Smith said.

But that's par for the course for "libertarians" these days, isn't it? What once included such anti-property revolutionaries as Proudhon has degenerated into rationalization for the status quo. Rand Paul, of the perennial dark horse candidates, even took the side of the police against outraged protesters of Baltimore - a position that both goes all the way back to his father in the 1990s and reflects the dominant sentiment among the conspicuously white middle-class males who identify with the L word.

The most pressing "liberty" issue in America today - besides a woman's liberty in reproductive health - is the rate at which police assault and murder unnarmed citiznes. But you never hear modern libertarians talk about it; their victories thus far consist of lionizing Edward Snowden while conveniently forgetting all about Chelsea Manning. This highlights the solipsism at the heart of modern libertarianism: Manning exposed US complicity in war crimes while Snowden exposed a meta-data collection project. The thought of other office drones reading their emails is a much more threatening and galvanizing issue to libertarians than the murder of a couple thousand brown people whether abroad or in their own neighborhoods.

It gets down to the ugly guts of American culture, specifically the culture of not-too-rich but not-poor white dudes. The sorts who spend more time on Reddit than on dates and who swing their atheism like a cudgel, eager to "debate" religion despite their only experience being the bland Protestantism of Middle America. "Libertarianism" for this vast cohort isn't so much a coherent political theory as an identity, like a gamer or a furry (both disproportionately represented in this same crowd). The very name Reason Magazine is a signal to these sorts: "Come, our analysis is rational. If you parrot our pundityr, you too shall be as logical and infallible as Mr. Spock." They decry the opinions of others as sentimental  while celebrating their own cranky fixations as some empirical Good. They are, put simply, insufferable assholes.

And they never achieve real power. They can be born to it, like the Trumps and the Pauls and the Mackeys who arrived in this world with all the hard work of accumulation and network building done by their parents, but there's a noticeable lack of people who started from poverty and followed the Horatio Alger path to the Fortune 500. There is only hereditary plutocrats and a mass of suckers. While that's nothing new in history, these neofeudal dupes then go and piss all over the great works of the original libertarians, embracing the "privilege of some founded on the slavery of the rest" because it furnished them with an Xbox. They are not only authority-worshipping reactionaries but mendacious creeps who conflate the full expression of human liberty with rote, blinkered consumerism. Their ideal "freedom" is nothing but a gilded cage.

The late, great Joe Bageant said it best:

Freedom is freedom, and you have it across the board or you do not. It does not come piecemeal and is not defined by any single freedom. Human freedom is holistic -- full spectrum. It covers everything because, well, it's freedom.

The world of American libertarianism, with its reactionary twerps and hypocritical oligarchs, is about as far from freedom as you can get. It deserves to join it's cousin, Soviet Communism, in the trash bin of history.

Juneteenth

This past June 19th was the 150th anniversary of the United States Army's glorious victory over the fascist trash that called itself the Confederacy. Sadly, it was overshadowed by a white terrorist trying to keep the Lost Cause of the South alive - and, for the really thick among you, that Cause is terrorizing African Americans.

Let's get that perfectly clear right off the bat: Dylan Roof is a flag-burning, anti-American twerp who is one tan away from being another ISIS shovelhead. He explicitly killed the three men and six women of Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church because they are black and he had appointed himself the vanguard of an expected race war. And every single pol and pundit who has tried to distance his crime from that hideous Confederate rag is a fool, an enemy, or both.

If you've been here before, you may have noticed a fondness for Grant and Sherman and the other brave boys in blue who battled the worst fascist state in history from 1861 to 1865. That's because, for all it's ridiculousness and mindless cruelty, the United States is still leagues better than the Confederacy and fer chrissakes, those treasonous creeps started a war to preserve chattel slavery! No, it was not something more nuanced or "states rights" or whatever other lies you've heard:

Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery-- the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth. These products are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun. These products have become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization. That blow has been long aimed at the institution, and was at the point of reaching its consummation. There was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the Union, whose principles had been subverted to work out our ruin.

Straight from the monster's mouth. The Confederacy was of, for, and by the slave-holding class of the South who didn't want to grow up and join the modern world. The vain dream of rich imbeciles who wanted to preserve their feudal demesnes and compliant serfs. And the best thing that ever happened to them was Sherman burning down their sad little kingdom.

We don't need no water, let the motherfucker burn!

Though clearly it was only temporary. The sore losers of the South, even in the wake of a blatantly Neo-Confederate terrorist attack, are still crying that old saw about "Heritage Not Hate." Claiming that removing their precious traitor's flag from the South Carolina capitol is some sort of "cultural genocide." Even asking the stupid question of "Are white people safe in black churches?" because they are perpetually scared of warmer, browner, and more industrious peoples. They're even trying to call the suckers who fought for the Dixie Dumbass Dream "brave" and "Americans."

Rot all of that. The Confederates, from the lowliest private to Robert E. Lee himself were at best dupes and more commonly vicious reptiles disguised as human. Nathan Bedford Forest, who pioneered the concept of war crimes, spent his years after the war forming the Ku Klux Klan. A dozen other Southern "gentlemen," magnanimously spared from the gallows by a too forgiving Union, endeavored to re-create slavery in everything but name: blacks were barred from suing or even testifying against whites, blacks could be "bailed out" of jail by whites in exchange for indentured servitude, and black men were lynched en masse for the crime of merely existing. A greater reign of terror than the Jacobins ever managed and all because these dumb crackers still couldn't accept that they'd lost.

Monuments to this grand state of denial exist in all the former traitor states. Statues and monuments to the American ISIS who fought for slavery and tortured even other white people at the infamous Andersonville POW prison. Taking down their flag should be just the first step, followed by toppling these edifices of treason and fascism. Just like Saddam Hussein's statue in 2003, Old Glory wrapped around their ugly mugs. To all the cries of "heritage" and who cares what else these dead enders might offer, there is the reply voiced by Sherman 150 years ago:

All the powers of earth cannot restore to them their slaves, any more than their dead grandfathers. Next year their lands will be taken, for in war we can take them, and rightfully, too, and in another year they may beg in vain for their lives. A people who will persevere in war beyond a certain limit ought to know the consequences. Many, many peoples with less pertinacity have been wiped out of national existence.

The Confederacy is dead. Good riddance. Now let's see it buried.

Children of the Famine Queen

You've probably read the Vox article "I'm a Fussy Yuppie and I'm Scared of the Same Things as Your Racist Uncle." It's been all the rage on the interwebs, so much so that Vox published a counterpoint that is getting much less traction because it talks about labor rights among academics, rather than how the feminazis are taking over the world. Which is a shame because the rotten career prospects for academics is screwing up higher education way more than a few touchy knobs.

But that's exactly why so few people care - Americans, liberal or conservative, are always more concerned with propriety than people.

This is why "identity politics" and "political correctness" are such bugaboos of the American rightwing. As the most terminally Victorian people since the Pontifex family, they just can't abide any higher education that isn't on Jesus or "practical" things like bricks. Really, so much of rightwing criticism of academia in America boils down to "We're stoopid and we likes it!" So any sign that university culture might be bad - real or imagined - is paraded around on social media as just more proof that the world is going to Heck in a handbasket.

They're morons, but you knew that already.

But what to make of all the earnest liberals decrying identity politics in the classroom? That very earnestness is the clue - like their neovictorian cousins at Fox and Brietbart, many a white American progressive isn't so much concerned with progress as politeness. It's why they initially jumped on the PC bandwagon, not out of sympathy for those oppressed by the systemic racism of an inhuman capitalists system, but because words like "spic" and "queer" are uncouth. Not the sort of thing you want to say in a job interview.

And that's what really has Anonymous Yuppie Proff's pants in a knot - how an offended student may damage his career prospects. As Taub points out - with actual statistics - getting sacked for not putting enough trigger warnings in the syllabus is practically unheard of, despite the supposed powers of the PC students' lobby. Yet Anonyprof lives in terror of this bogeyman for precisely the same reason of any other muddling American - his career is the be-all-end-all of his existence. Not the pursuit of knowledge, not teaching waterheaded undergrads, but the comfort and security of the tenure-track.

Careerism is the unspoken, bipartisan principle of all Real Americans. That's where this united front against "PC Totalitarianism" is coming from. Much like the original Victorians, these modern Southeys are more offended by threats to their careers, to the imagined security of their dull middle class cages, than by the very real bigotry and suffering that still goes on in America. Like Tennyson traveling Ireland in a sealed carriage, desperately ignoring any sights of "Irish distress."

History's greatest monster.

As the past seven years have shown everyone, America is still a very un-enlightened place. A whole political movement was birthed out of Calvinist contempt for the poor and blatant racism. The most recent Supreme Court cases have all been about limiting access to contraception - a fight most sane people considered finished - and income inequality is fast turning the celebrated City on the Hill into Russia circa 1997.

There is certainly a lot of distress in America today. Not just in the systemic racism laid bare by one police abuse after another, but also in that the crux of Anonymous Pisser's original article is the lack of labor rights in academia. That bit should have tipped everyone off it's not the oversensitive undergrads who are the problem but rather university administrations running their schools like a business, complete with squeezing workers for more labor at less pay. That the white liberals are trying to sneak out of this particular conflict now through hand-wringing over the very "language policing" they pioneered should really come as no shock though. If they had the stomach for a real fight, they wouldn't have abandoned Marx half a century ago.

UPDATE: "I'm a professor. My colleagues who let their students dictate what they teach are cowards" by Dr. Koritha Mitchell.

On Satire and Obscenity

Sometimes you need to take a step back and appreciate the absurdity of the world.

Like how twelve French journalists were murdered over cartoons. In all the commentary and nombrilisme over the Charlie Hebdo attack, you often see that point left out. These people were murdered over cartoons, that is the exact reason the attackers who were posthumously claimed by Al Qaeda Yemen gave for their bloodbath. They were pretty unambiguous, as reactionaries often are since nuance is one of those things for wishy-washy liberals.

Although, going by the reaction in Anglo-American media, those same wishy-washy liberals can lock it down like the best neocons. First you had all the cable news companies "refraining" from showing the cartoons because they're pussies so as not to offend, then you had dozens of online lefties - even the excellent Jacobin! - offering the argument of "Yes murder is bad but Charlie Hebdo is racist."

Now that's pretty damn absurd too. And it's a rare case of a commie agreeing with a Catholic:

Religious freedom and freedom of expression, [Pope Francis] said, are fundamental human rights. But they are also not a total liberties... "If [a close friend] says a swear word against my mother, he’s going to get a punch in the nose," he explained. "One cannot provoke, one cannot insult other people’s faith, one cannot make fun of faith."

Yep, Pope Franky is totes for free speech but wants you to understand that it'll get you ganked. Like how you should expect sexual assault if you go out dressed like a whore.

John Dolan, in a bit of a rant, makes the point that Anglo-American culture just doesn't get French satire. That's certainly true, the gleeful irreverence of French comedy being alien even to liberal Americans. That's also what makes it so goddamn brilliant, the utter lack of sanctimony. That's why Republicans are so unfunny and also why AlterNet publishes the occasional complaint about The Daily Show - sanctimony is as American as Apple Pie or crediting upper middle class protesters with ending the Vietnam War, as opposed to the bravery and ingenuity of the Viet Cong.

That deeply normative sanctimony is why so many Americans are dithering over Charlie Hebdo. They know the proper response should be "free speech," but there's just something too salty about those anarcho-atheist Frenchies. The charge of "racism" even uses the very broad American definition, which is obsessed with skin color, rather than the French concept which has much more to do with national identity. In France, if you drink wine and sneer at religion you're In, whereas in America even Darius Rucker still gets shit from country fans just because of his melanin.

The only sensible thing out there is this article by sci-fi fantasy author Saladin Ahmed. He examines the "punching down" of Charlie Hebdo's vendetta against Islam without condemning them. And thank Allah for that because it moves past the shaky - and blitheringly ignorant - debate about racism and brings us to the much more real problem of the rising right-wing hysteria in Europe over what's a meager single digit percentage of Muslims in the  population:

"In an unequal world, satire that mocks everyone equally ends up serving the powerful."

There are real issues of power here that the attack on Charlie Hebdo has brought up for discussion. French Muslims are as powerless as Shias in Saudi Arabia while being just as demonized - though they likely don't get whipped and beheaded as much as said Shia. Truly bold satire denigrates wealthy Sunnis like the House of Saud and the Catholic Church that continues to retard sexual health in the developing world while molesting children. Speaking truth to power is a vital necessity of any free and progressive society.

So in that spirit, here's a caricature of Sarah Palin getting hammered in the ass by Joel Osteen a closet-case pastor:

"So, did you see the upstairs?" Madame President's hand was roughly kneading inside his back pocket. "They've got this new... thing."

Damn woman! Couldn't She leave him be for just one evening? "Love to."

She dragged him up the wide staircase. He could feel eyes flitting to them from the now drunk crowd. "There they go again," they would all be thinking. Bad enough Feely had to pleasure the goddamn whore but now everywhere he went, everyone he met just saw him as one more of her playthings - and oh how many She'd already had!

That was one of the many elephants in the room he'd learned of in this town, how She'd been fucking everyone but Her husband since the moment She took office. He'd seen all the anonymous blogs, claiming firsthand accounts of the affair - even the paid journalists couldn't keep a straight face anymore in denying it. His congregation had a field day once getting righteously pissed over executive infidelities which left him wondering if now they didn't care or they were really too dumb to notice.

The second floor was empty, save for the two of them and - as always - Klein. He gave the usual nod, a silent "I've cleared out anyone who might hear her moose noises." Feely had to admit that, despite the work he did, he genuinely liked Klein. He was quiet, professional, and never judged. And that chiseled jaw line -

"Let's do a quick one in the bathroom," She said, Her tongue slithering over his ear.

It didn't bother Feely as much anymore. He'd gradually learned how to tune everything out while still "performing." Alcohol usually helped, as did Her seemingly endless supply of cocaine. Really - he frantically told himself - he actually enjoyed this blanked out mental state. It gave him time to relax, to remember happier times of sneaking past Anita to go cruising Denver for a tight-assed boy and some meth -

The brief reminiscence died - as always - to Her slobbering grunts of, "Fuck my pooper! Fuck my pooper!"

Get my filthy and disrespectful novel One Nation Under God on Kindle or the ereader of your choice!

Look At These Thugs

Walking around with them gats, thinking they all hard and shit...

"Straight up dude this bitch is all sad and crying like awwww they killed my baby but she obviously didn't care enough to raise him right..." ~ a concerned citizen.