sophiaserpentia | Entries tagged with empire

The Bush administration envisions a decades-long U.S. presence in Iraq.

One Republican presidential candidate, John McCain, said, "We aren't talking about staying forever." But he said a long-term training and advisory presence is possible.

"The fact is that if we can withdraw to bases and then eventually ~~close those bases and~~ Iraq will run out of oil and then we can come home, that's the plan," the Arizona senator said.

from Richardson seeks total Iraq withdrawal

Fixed.

There are many odious things about the new immigration compromise bill between Bush and congressional Democrats. One in particular caught my attention.

In perhaps the most hotly debated change, the proposed plan would shift from an immigration system primarily weighted toward family ties toward one with preferences for people with advanced degrees and sophisticated skills. Republicans have long sought such revisions, which they say are needed to end "chain migration" that harms the economy.

from Deal may legalize millions of immigrants

Okay, this has set off all kinds of little alarms in my brain. The United States is becoming more and more an "employer-ocracy" and it's killing freedom.

Our model of employment is that we are theoretically employed "at-will," meaning that each of us is free to pick up and move on if we don't like our jobs. Show of hands -- how many of you would rather be doing something else? ::counts:: A-yep, thought so.

If so many people are unhappy or underwhelmed or dubious about the ethical ramifications of what they do, why don't we just leave? Well, there's countless variations on this, but what they amount to is, we happen to like those habits of living in comfortable homes and eating. Most of us do not have any way to cover the costs of finding a different employer. There's another factor, which is: many of us don't really know how to do anything else. And: there's probably not going to be much difference where we work, it will more or less be the same. Or maybe: you've punched a timeclock your whole life and don't have the discipline to be a free agent (found this to be true of myself, at least).

Some of us are our own boss, but this is becoming harder and harder to maintain because in one way or another it's being squeezed out. Need to borrow money, find an apartment, buy a home? More and more we've gotta punch a timeclock if we want those things. Our schools are designed to acclimatize us to spending our days on someone else's time.

This limits our freedom considerably. An employer can dictate how you dress, how you color your hair, how you spend your free time, what you put in your body. They can force you to hide things about your life. They demand half or more of the time you are awake. They pay you less than they are making off your labor. And the whole process of being an "employee" detaches you from what it is you spend your time doing, causing a rift Marxists call "alienation." As summarized in that article,

In a nutshell, Marx's Theory of Alienation is the contention that in modern industrial production under capitalist conditions workers will inevitably lose control of their lives by losing control over their work. Workers thus cease to be autonomous beings in any significant sense.

Back to the immigration proposal.

As it stands now, employers already have a tremendous amount of sway over people who come into the United States. Many people enter the US under work visas which require them to stay with their employer. In history class we called that "indentured servitude," only back then, people could stay in America after their contract was up.

Immigrants anywhere are particularly vulnerable, and this is no different in the US. They are far away from their familiar support systems, they may not speak the language well, and their economic resources are limited. Abuse of all kinds -- exploitation, physical abuse, sexual abuse, psychological abuse, you name it -- of immigrants by employers is all too common.

But, even beyond this consideration, i have trouble with the way this new proposal makes the INS a big temp agency, and reduces people to what they can provide not for their communities or their families but for employers.

Think about it this way. Every person in your life -- what are they good for? That's an offensive question, right? You wouldn't care to put a dollar figure on the good things that a friend, acquaintance, or lover brings into your life. A lot of it is intangible and qualitative. They are fellow human beings. We live our lives together. A person brings more than economic value to a community; they bring vitality, presence, creativity. They are the community.

Dammit, what gives the government or the employment cartel the right to step in and say that what a person can do for an employer is more important than that? Is that really what we want to be the foundation of our society? Not companionship, family, togetherness, but what you can do for an employer?

The Epoch Times is a newspaper which was founded primarily to report on human rights abuses in China. I have on my desk here at work a copy of a similar paper which was handed to me a few months ago in Harvard Square, carrying a story about the Chinese government basically farming dissidents for their organs -- rounding them up, carving them up while they are still alive, and putting their organs on the transplant market.

Excuse me, i don't mean to speak out of line, but didn't we, as a species, decide that we wouldn't tolerate this kind of thing the last time a government rounded people up and farm-cannibalized them? Every now and then some government or other will make a statement about this, but so far not a damn thing has been done about it.

And i don't know what to say to the people who stand on the street trying to hand these newspapers out to people who, for the most part, don't want to be confronted with it. It's truly chilling to know that you can stand on a streetcorner all day and talk openly about terrifying crimes going on against thousands of people right now, here's the evidence, and few will even care to listen, and fewer still will do anything about it.

Elsewhere in the world, millions of girls have had their developing breasts ironed by their parents to keep them from growing. This is ostensibly to protect them. The city of Bangalore in India is considering a law that would forbid many employers from scheduling women to work at night. This is ostensibly to protect them.

Elsewhere in the world, the Virginia Citizens Defense League organized a gun giveaway to pointedly spit in the eye of New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg, who complains that people are buying guns in Virginia, where laws are lax and enforcement of them even laxer, in order to commit crimes in New York City. Gun control may or may not be the answer, but the message is clear: for trying to stem violence at the source, you get ridiculed.

At the source -- that is the key to what i am getting at with all of these things, the thread that connects them all. No one ever wants to talk about what is wrong with bullies and abusers; instead the attention goes on the victims, the survivors, or the potential victims. For example, the most popular answer to widespread gun violence in the US is to propose that more people get guns, so they can have standoffs with would-be gun criminals. Perhaps that may even work.

But what troubles me about this approach is that it leaves completely unquestioned the observation that people buy weapons and commit crimes with them. Try to address the problem from that angle, and people get furious. Why is the most popular solution to take thuggery for granted and meet thugs at their level, rather than try to change them?

Many cities in the US have a shelter system for battered women. These operate on shoestring budgets because abuse survivors are not a social priority. But this system is frustrating and disheartening because everything falls on the survivor. The abuser almost always gets off scot-free. The survivor often loses everything, including whatever social standing they had. After seeing this happen to one survivor after another, after seeing one abuser after another getting away with it and facing no consequences whatsoever, it becomes really disheartening. Is this truly a world where someone can beat a person they claim to love and no one will do a goddamned thing about it?

"But, Sabrina, the prisons are overflowing. We do hold thugs accountable." Yes, prisons are overflowing, but to what extent does this actually address or fix the problem? This subject demands its own series of journal entries actually, particularly the extent to which the prison system is itself a form of institutional bullying, and the extent to which crime survivors feel bullied by the justice system. Suffice it to say for this entry that the justice system and the prison-industrial complex takes for granted the existence of thugs and bullies.

Our justice system examines individual events as if they occur in a vacuum, excluding social and economic factors from consideration as much as possible. The goal of the court proceeding is to establish guilt or innocence with regards to single isolated incidents, with everything else being deemed irrelevant. The bigger questions of social environment are thus kept out, are never scrutinized; a verdict is reached, someone is imprisoned or goes free, and justice is said to be served. Court proceedings are part of the enforcement of laws which have been crafted to call attention to some forms of bullying while legitimizing other forms or creating loopholes for abusers.

And this criticism is not meant to say that we shouldn't examine individual events and seek accountability in such cases, but to say that this is not all there is to justice. We are leaving out the biggest part. Instead of addressing the systemic problems in society that cause and perpetuate abuse, our edifices of justice play whack-a-mole and, as often as not, whack survivors instead of perps. It is a reaction, not a response.

Not only are we accustomed to treating thugs as "inhuman others," we are unaccustomed to thinking of injustice as something that permeates a society. Catch the bad guy and you're done, right?

Lasting justice will require sustained focus and interest on thugs themselves, why they do what they do, and how they play on our fears in order to avoid scrutiny and accountability. It will require every single person to look inside themselves and face what they do not want to face -- the piece of them that sympathizes with bullies and sees their point of view as normal or even normative. It will require sustained scrutiny of our institutions for encroachment by abusers and their sympathizers. It will require facing head-on the culture of fear that keeps each one of us scrambling for our own survival instead of seeing the interconnected threads of injustice. It will require keeping some of the focus on the big picture, to recognize when our pursuit of injustice on the small scale has made it possible for some to get away with injustices on a bigger scale because no one was looking.

But most of all, we have to start expecting better from thugs and bullies. If we resign ourselves to the "fact" that there will always be bullies, we enable them.

A conservative beat a socialist in the election in France, and many are using this as an opportunity to declare socialism dead in Europe.

The reality is much more complex than that. The last hurrah of state socialism notwithstanding, what is actually happening is a revolution within the revolution, which is precisely as it needs to be.

It's fair to say that a century of experiments have demonstrated that top-down, state-imposed socialism doesn't work. Economies and societies are too complex to be run from the top. Bureaucracies are too slow, too entrenched, to react to changing conditions. And we have seen, to our great disappointment, that there is no edifice we can establish as one generation's solution that cannot be undermined by unscrupulous cronyism and mutate into the next generation's problem.

But, at the heart of the problem is this: it is just not feasible in the long run to achieve the central goal of socialism within the state aparatus. There are some things, like accountability for wrongdoers, which will probably always require government. But the heart of socialism -- unraveling the web of control so we can be free -- is only hindered thereby.

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, writing in the middle and late nineteenth century, envisioned the global scheme of exploitation inevitably hitting a kind of rock bottom, causing ire among the working class to conflate to the point of violent revolution. They could not have foreseen the effects of technology between then and now; the effectiveness of advertising and television in numbing people to the inhumanly cannibalistic nature of the global economy -- nor could they have foreseen the widespread consciousness-raising potential of the internet.

They also imagined that the state could be transformed into an instrument for carrying out the will of the people. They were no doubt influenced by the grandiosity of American and French Revolutionary language -- the proclamation of "we the people" as the granter of governmental authority "by consent of the governed" (implying that consent can be withdrawn) instead of brute force and coersion and fear. That's a wonderful theory but it never seems to work out in reality.

At the other end of it, it is not enough to brew up a new critical rhetoric, bash a wine bottle on the bow and send it off into the world. Time has demonstrated that there is no rhetoric which cannot be misappropriated. Revolutions of this sort really only have to be waited out. A while back i proposed the (admittedly not very catchy) term "hypostatic reverie" to refer to the conceptual apathy by which people, over generational time scales, forget the 'revolutionary' character of new institutions and ideologies, and accept them as part of the landscape. And with this apathy comes the opportunity for misappropriation.

In terms of class struggles, it's been a very educational 140 years. We've learned, foremost, that we can't take the easy way out when unraveling the control paradigm. There is no single route to undoing the ideological and institutional hold of sexism, classism, and racism on society. It can't be imposed from the top; it can't be achieved in an adversarial-style uprising. If it were that easy, it could have been accomplished by now. The control paradigm operates on every level; it is embedded in our brains, implanted during childhood and, figuratively if not literally, beaten into us by parents, peers, and adults in authority.

Views become entrenched, even within the revolution; and "the revolution" has become such a fixture that it now is itself an edifice against which people of conscience must struggle. "The revolution" has been misappropriated so that it now is just another cog in the great machine of violence that chews people up. It is only with hindsight that we can comprehend that the monster often takes the guise of two factions, espousing different ideology, who grind away at each other, with children and women in the crossfire paying the highest price.

The Sixth Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle reflects this shift in awareness -- acknowledgment of the need for those with socialist consciousness to greatly re-think the unraveling of control and domination.

The revolution has been changing. It has taken the form of an emphasis on individual efficacy, a fondness for observing with Gandhi that we should "be the change," to recognize one's own place in the pyramid of control and understand that actions carry repercussions.

For example, once you become aware of "fair trade" products, you are directly confronted with the reality of exploitation overseas. You are also confronted with the understanding that if you continue to buy products you can no longer pretend you don't know were made in sweatshops or by slaves, that no matter what political positions you espouse you are a cog in the machine.

It may be, because of limited income or family size, that you have no choice but to continue to buy the cheaper product -- which in itself bears interesting insights about the way the game works, the way we are all swept along with the tide and, scrabbling for our own individual survival, rarely take the time and energy to see the greater pattern.

That fair trade products cost more reflects to a degree the economies of scale, but also the reality that what makes many products affordable is wage exploitation, low labor and safety standards, and even slavery. The difference represents the degree to which it is profitable to have a global empire which does not care about oppression.

But this is the level on which the revolution needs to happen -- not "us versus them" antagonism, but waves of lightbulbs lighting up in individuals on every level of the pyramid. If you're reading this, you're probably pretty close to the top of the pyramid, like me. The closer we are to the top, the more effect our individual choices can have as they propagate down the line. As each of us makes more and more humane choices, this change progresses until it becomes a building wave, a ripple which sweeps across the world.

from Elayne Boosler's blog, We are getting tired of prying your guns out of your cold dead hands

If 33 people were killed by apples instead of guns at Virginia Tech, there wouldn't be an apple left on the shelves or in the homes of this country until apples could be made safe. ... If 2500 children under the age of 17 were felled by apples instead of guns every year in America, there wouldn't be a congressman or senator left serving who took one penny from the National Apple Association. The shame and admonishment would be too great. And if there were even incremental steps to take to make apples safer, and even they were fought tooth and nail by your blood money National Apple Association, claiming the straw man of the "slippery slope" to "regulation", America might better see you for the mercenary and shameful organization you truly are.

... I watched President Custer speak at the Virginia Tech memorial yesterday. How dare he "express condolences". How DARE he. Here is how his administration helped kill 33 people at Virginia Tech:

Passage of gun industry immunity bill. That's right, you can sue every industry in America, except gun manufacturers and dealers. Your family gets murdered by a madman? Tough.

Refusal to aid in renewal of federal assault weapons ban, even though the law had already been eviscerated by the gun industry. Get it? INDUSTRY.

Fighting background checks. The Virginia shooter had been committed to a mental institution. In Virginia that means you can't buy a gun. Oh yeah? Thank goodness the gun shop owner who sold it to him can't be sued.

So, Don Imus was suspended by MSNBC for two weeks for the recent racist/sexist outburst by him and Bernard McGuirk on his show. Who says "jigaboos" anymore -- i mean, really?

Someone on my friend's list (please step forward if you want to be attributed) predicted that of course he wouldn't be fired because he speaks for MSNBC. The more i think about this, the more obvious it seems. Of course he speaks for MSNBC, he has been a mouthpiece for institutional racism/sexism/homophobia/classism for 30 years. It suits the interests of the upper class to have people saying what he says.

A while ago i pondered whether it is Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder that makes oppression possible, and if i ever create a "Sabrina's greatest hits" tag, that one will be on it, because it is an idea i continually return to. Let me be a bit more specific, though, and modify that hypothesis just a bit: it is perhaps more accurate to say that it is Complex PTSD that makes oppression possible.

From an essay on C-PTSD:

It's widely accepted that PTSD can result from a single, major, life-threatening event, as defined in DSM-IV. Now there is growing awareness that PTSD can also result from an accumulation of many small, individually non-life-threatening incidents. To differentiate the cause, the term "Complex PTSD" is used. The reason that Complex PTSD is not in DSM-IV is that the definition of PTSD in DSM-IV was derived using only people who had suffered a single major life-threatening incident such as Vietnam veterans and survivors of disasters.

... It seems that Complex PTSD can potentially arise from any prolonged period of negative stress in which certain factors are present, which may include any of captivity, lack of means of escape, entrapment, repeated violation of boundaries, betrayal, rejection, bewilderment, confusion, and - crucially - lack of control, loss of control and disempowerment. It is the overwhelming nature of the events and the inability (helplessness, lack of knowledge, lack of support etc) of the person trying to deal with those events that leads to the development of Complex PTSD. Situations which might give rise to Complex PTSD include bullying, harassment, abuse, domestic violence, stalking, long-term caring for a disabled relative, unresolved grief, exam stress over a period of years, mounting debt, contact experience, etc. Those working in regular traumatic situations, eg the emergency services, are also prone to developing Complex PTSD.

"lack of means of escape, entrapment, repeated violation of boundaries, betrayal, rejection, bewilderment, confusion, and - crucially - lack of control, loss of control and disempowerment" -- these are par for the course when you live in a sexist, racist, classist culture. That is pretty much what those terms mean.

Suppose people were not capable of being beaten down and broken. Suppose they would object to every mistreatment and slight, no matter how big or small, no matter how often it had happened to them, no matter how vicious the repercussions. If this were so, then over time, it just wouldn't be worth it for one person to expend the energy to lord it over another human being. The benefits would be outweighed by the costs involved.

It wouldn't be possible for employers to exploit the people who work for them. It wouldn't be possible for an entire nation to lock women up in their homes and keep them separated. It wouldn't be worth the grief to build walls dividing neighborhoods and populations.

But, because we hear about our worthlessness in subtle ways every day, week after week, month after month, year after year, we DO get beaten down and broken. We learn that when we complain, instead of finding solidarity in others who have been wronged as we were, we get left to twist in the wind and take the heat alone, and be made an example of; and maintaining one's defiance in the face of that takes more and more energy by the day. Eventually the complaining stops, because tending to the emotional injuries (and, not infrequently enough, the physical injuries) on top of the disadvantages we are asked to accept become so costly that there is no energy left to complain any more.

Bit by bit, so slowly that we rarely see it happen in real time, the efforts we expend make those with privilege wealthier and better-fed, while we lose sleep and make do and struggle to pay our bills and say "it's nothing" when we're sick but can't afford to see a doctor. The pattern is so widespread there is nowhere we can go where we aren't under the net, we can't even talk about the net without people saying we're crazy or exaggerating, and nothing we can do will stop us being slow-motion cannibalized.

And then there are people like Don Imus and Michael Savage and Ann Coulter. These are folks who keep up the steady drumbeat of negativity, the slow pulse that reminds you how and why you're broken. Polite society hems and haws and says they are out of line, but if they were really out of line, they'd be out of work, wouldn't they? They wouldn't have audiences of millions and millions, would they? They wouldn't be living high on the hog 14 years after comparing the New York Times' White House Press correspondent (at the time) to "the cleaning lady", would they? Their "rowdy words " (hey, can't you take a joke?) wouldn't be repeated again and again and again in the mainstream media if they were truly offensive, would they?

So, yes, Don Imus speaks for MSNBC and all of corporate America. Don Imus speaks for people who don't want us to complain about their privilege.

Yesterday was the 40th anniversary of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "Beyond Vietnam" speech. It is as relevant today as it was then.

In 1957 a sensitive American official overseas said that it seemed to him that our nation was on the wrong side of a world revolution. ...[T]he words of the late John F. Kennedy come back to haunt us. Five years ago he said, "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable."

Increasingly, by choice or by accident, this is the role our nation has taken -- the role of those who make peaceful revolution impossible by refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investment.

... A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand we are called to play the good Samaritan on life's roadside; but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life's highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say: "This is not just." It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America and say: "This is not just." The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just. A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war: "This way of settling differences is not just." This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into veins of people normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

Yesterday was also the 39th anniversary of King's assassination.

The other day i posted this link to a video of the Mooninite guys refusing to talk to the press about anything other than haircuts. There's a lot to learn from this, not from what they're saying but from what this event represents on several levels.

The first is the nature of advertising in the future. The 'paid spot' in media presentations -- commercials during TV programs and ads in magazines and newspapers and on billboards, and that sort of thing -- is becoming a thing of the past. They'll still be there in abundance, of course, but mostly as reinforcement more than anything else. The thing is, they just aren't effective anymore; we go around them on TiVo and simply ignore them when we can.

What advertisers want now is to embed their message into the viral information networks of the internet, into the culture itself, so that you cannot have a cultural experience or interchange without receiving a paid advertising message. They've already been doing product placements in movies, TV shows, and video games for some time now. And now, i've seen the future and the future is 'guerrila marketing.'

See, for advertisers the holy grail is getting their product widely seen as 'cool.'

In fact, i've been pondering the nature of what it means for a person or thing to be 'cool' or 'not cool' for quite a while, and i keep coming back to the relationship between popular culture and advertising. Most attempts to brand a product as cool are just darn predictable: a cartoon character with sunglasses and a leather jacket telling kids to buy a particular brand of cereal, that sort of thing. Every now and then, though, an advertiser hits paydirt and product awareness takes on a life of its own. When this happens, the promoter just has to sit back and watch consumers gleefully do their product placement for them. If people are posting in Myspace and YouTube and Livejournal about how great and cool they think a product is, their work is done.

By that measure, the success of this Mooninite thing in Boston is immeasurable.

The other thing i saw in that video was the first stirrings of a new form of dissent against the news media. I don't know if it was a genuine display of youthful rebellion or whether it was a contrived attempt to simulate youth rebellion (i kinda lean towards the latter) but either way i sense a large and growing current of discontent and distrust among young people for the mass news media.

And who can frickin' blame them? The news media are polished, professional manipulators and liars. Anyone who has ever been to an event -- especially a protest -- and then watched news coverage of the event afterwards knows what i mean. They've been spouting crap for years, and in the name of "getting both sides of a story" have been lending credence to discredited ideas that otherwise would have died out years ago, like Intelligent Design and global warming doubt. The news media rely on the fiction that they are without agenda, when a critical examination of their viewpoint shows a distinct tendency to reinforce the corporatist, classist, white supremacist agenda.

The thing is, nothing happens very far from a blog these days. People who witness or experience events firsthand are writing in their blogs about it -- or, even more impressively, posting cellphone video of it -- and this news spreads virally. Speaking from direct experience brings a dimension of meaning lost in accounts by the news media. The Mooninite guys didn't need sympathetic coverage by the news media (you can clearly hear threats from reporters of unfavorable coverage if they didn't take the conference 'more seriously,' by which they meant, going along with the reporters' script) because they knew every kid with a Myspace was going to post a link to the video -- and that THIS form of information exchange is what really counts these days.

There is always a place for objective coverage, but we are finally balancing this out with a much needed infusion of subjectivity. (For the record, i wouldn't want only subjective news to spread either, but we've really needed this.)

We're about to see a real live experiment in benevolent dictatorship:

President Hugo Chavez is set to assume unbridled powers to remake Venezuelan society as the National Assembly prepares to grant him authority to enact sweeping measures by presidential decree.

The assembly, which is completely controlled by Chavez supporters, is scheduled to meet Wednesday in a Caracas plaza to approve a so-called "enabling law" that will give Chavez special powers for 18 months to transform 11 broadly defined areas, including the economy, energy and defense.

Chavez, who is beginning a fresh six-year term, says the legislation will be the start of a new era of "maximum revolution" during which he will consolidate Venezuela's transformation into a socialist society. His critics, however, are calling it a radical lurch toward authoritarianism by a leader with unchecked power.

from Chavez to get powers to remake Venezuela

I don't believe in benevolent dictatorship and have serious doubts about this. But i guess if anyone can pull it off, it's President Chavez. Ok, Hugo, let's see what you got. Prove to us that socialism works better from the top down. Prove to us that the "socialist state" is not an oxymoron and a horrible mistake.

Three items i saw yesterday paint a bleak picture of freedom and liberty in the United States.

First item: The Empire Turns Its Guns on the Citizenry by Paul Craig Roberts. I'm putting the whole article behind a cut because it's that important.

( Read more... )

Second item: Military shows off new ray gun

The military calls its new weapon an "active denial system," but that's an understatement. It's a ray gun that shoots a beam that makes people feel as if they are about to catch fire.

Apart from causing that terrifying sensation, the technology is supposed to be harmless — a non-lethal way to get enemies to drop their weapons. ... The weapon is not expected to go into production until at least 2010, but all branches of the military have expressed interest in it, officials said.

All branches of the military... and many US police forces, you can bet your patootie.

"Non-lethal," my eye. Any time someone comes out with "non-lethal" weaponry, some jerk finds a way to kill someone with it, usually by using it with much more intensity than the thing is designed for. This non-penetrating heat ray is designed to be used from 500 yards away. I am willing to bet anything that within five years we'll see a news story about someone killed with one of these things being used at close range.

Third item: America's Slave Labor by Christopher Moraff.

There are a number of troubling questions about the prison system in the United States, and the "prison-industrial complex." The first is that the War on (Some) Drugs has been a boon for local police departments (who benefit from ordinances which allow police to confiscate and auction property even in cases when someone is not charged with a crime) and the increasing profitability of prison supplies and privatized prisons and prison services.

Alright, you know it's getting bad when i'm linking to sites like WorldNetDaily. But, if there's one thing that right-wingers and a lefty like me can agree on, it's that we should not stand by and quietly let any government claim free reign to step in and take people's property and incarcerate them without due process.

On top of this are enterprises like UNICOR (aka Federal Prison Industries, Inc.) which hires prisoner labor at $.23 to $1.15 an hour. Many government agencies are required to buy their office supplies and furniture from UNICOR. Given the racial demographics of the prison population, it's hard to see how this is much different from a continuation of the pattern wherein the edifices of Federal government were largely built with slave labor.

The United States has a frighteningly high incarceration rate: close to 1 out of 100 Americans are incarcerated. This is the highest official incarceration rate in the modern world and may in reality only be topped by China and North Korea.

An aside: some would argue that increased incarceration rates is what it takes to drive down the crime rate. From my perspective, though, this is cart-before-horse thinking, because it takes the focus away from considering what social factors drive the crime rate up in the first place, and disallows the question of what social changes (other than increasingly militarizing and incarcerating the nation) might also lead to lower crime rates.

This weekend i spent a fair amount of time pondering what peace is and how it should be achieved.

Whenever we have a war, there's a bunch of shooting and bombing and fear and rape and famine and torture and maiming, and whole nations are deeply traumatized and face environmental and economic crises for years or decades. And after the primary spasms of horrific violence end, there are "peace talks." Or, often the "peace talks" happen when there's been some terrorism and skirmishing and threats.

This whole idea of "peace talks" though enshrines a number of unspoken presumptions and agendas that i want to unravel a bit.

First, look at who gets to be party to the peace talks: the generals and warlords and state leaders and other people who masterminded the war in the first place. Does anyone ever speak for, or listen to, the refugees, the broken families, the orphans and widows, the children who were prostituted or drugged and made into soldiers?

Also absent are the war profiteers. They would prefer to stay in the shadows, because they benefit most when no one pays any attention to their role in all this and everyone just assumes that they are passive merchants, not power brokers. They want people to think that it wouldn't matter if they stopped selling arms or hiring out mercenaries because the demand exists independent of their supply, so if they got out of the war business someone else would just offer the same products anyway.

The people who do get to participate in peace talks do so in order to advance their agenda -- and i assert this to be the case for all parties no matter what ideology or doctrine they epouse: they want to duck any kind of accountability they might otherwise face for war crimes, and they want a seat in the cartel that has a monopoly on violence in the region. Throughout the peace talks, it is in their interest to make it seem that they are willing to return to violence at the drop of a hat -- as if being violent is the easy option, and not being violent is a perpetual struggle. Running and outfitting an army is not cheap, the resources for training, weapons, and provisions have to come from somewhere, and yet we are to believe that being nonviolent is the harder option? At peace talks, the biggest asset one has is the appearance of having limitless capacity for violence, and how backward is that?

So the idea of "peace" promoted by the state is the absence of factional organized violence, enforced by a cartel who assert the unique authority to use sanctioned violence in that region. Anyone else uses violence, they are criminals; the state uses violence, it is just and heroic. This is "peace:" unrealized potential violence. The state wants you to believe that peace comes at the point of a gun.

Which is where, like so many of the matters i consider, this comes down to one's view of human nature. If people are fundamentally unruly animals, for whom it actually is more difficult to be nonviolent than brutal, then pacificism doesn't make sense, and neither does compassion. Under the pessmistic view of human nature, we should be thankful if we live in an area with a strong state and a healthy culture of fear-respect for God, police and military.

However, i'm not inclined to think that way, for several reasons, not the least of which is that what we are witnessing is not the action of humans in our natural habitat but the action of humans under the severe stresses of crowding and being caged. If our unruliness is fundamentally the reaction to this stress -- along with stress from various other stressors -- then adding the stress of perpetually-threatened state violence cannot be a lasting solution. The better solution, it seems to me, is a more direct response to the stresses which cause our unruliness.

Is peace more than the absence of war? I believe instead that it is the steps we take to foster greater understanding, less prejudice, and reduced stress. If this is the case, then we all have a stake in promoting and developing peace. And we, all of us, not just the ones with the guns and bombs, have a voice in saying what it looks like.

Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack said Tuesday he favors removing most American troops from the Baghdad area and southern Iraq while maintaining a smaller security force in northern Iraq for a limited period.

Vilsack, who announced last week he would seek the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination, said Iraq may have to endure a period of heavy violence following an American troop redeployment, but that it was the only way to force the Iraqi government to make the hard decisions about restoring order to the fractured country.

"It's tough love, no question about it," Vilsack told The Associated Press in a wide-ranging interview. "It may very well require them to go through some chaotic and very difficult times for them to finally decide it is not in their interest to continue down that road."

... Vilsack called the continued presence of American troops in Iraq "both a crutch and an excuse," delaying the Iraqi government from seizing control of the country and tamping down the sectarian violence.

from Vilsack wants smaller U.S. force in Iraq (emphasis added)

This is basically the mainstream view taking form among our politicians, so this is not so much a knock against Vilsack, with whom i am barely acquainted but already beginning to dislike, so much as it is about the attitudes and unspoken assumptions that underline our country's approach to war, politics, and power.

"Going through some chaotic and very difficult times" sounds eerily similar to Bush's comment about the Iraqi people "tolerating" a remarkable level of violence in the aftermath of the invasion.

He thinks they're going to see worse than they're seeing now? The UN is already saying that torture in Iraq now is worse than it was under Saddam Hussein, which is astounding and chilling to contemplate. It's worse than it was when Uday had free reign to put people in wood chippers feet first?

In this view, chaos (IOW, civil war) will rage unabated until the Iraqi government makes "the hard decisions" which will bring about the cessation of violence. NOT the people of Iraq -- you know, the ones who are burying their children -- but the government. Because, unspoken assumption here: peace comes when rulers impose it. Not from neighbors of different ethnicities and sects who talk and work together and shop at the market together and help each other rebuild after bad weather. Not from parents who want to protect their children.

"The hard decisions" is a codeword which means the US government's idea of victory in Iraq now is for another dictator to take over and impose "peace" through violence, intimidation, and strongarming. So basically, Vilsack's proposal boils down to: "We're going to step aside and covertly support the most promising dictator who comes along. We'll ask the media to kindly refrain from posting about the human rights violations of the new regime during the 'transitional period.'"

How is it that programs designed to address racial disparity, like court-mandated integration of public schools and affirmative action, have come under fire as perpetuating disparity and racial stereotypes?

Put simply, the opponents of these programs have misappropriated the language of dissent. Misappropriation is easy: a lie is stated, and because it appeals to the pro-racist, pro-sexist "common sense," it catches like fire and takes on a life of its own. This tactic works because the defenders of the status quo far outnumber activists and so can easily wear them down in a basic numbers game.

In the bizarro world of misappropriation of dissenting language, activists can then even be blamed for perpetuating the same stereotypes they are working against.

In the case of affirmative action the charge goes like this: "Activists want a color-blind society, right? So doesn't affirmative action actually make it harder for us to be color-blind and therefore perpetuate racial stereotypes by requiring employers and schools to take race into account?"

This is a classic straw-man, but this argument has been taking hold, and in fact drives the opponents of racial consideration who today argued before the US Supreme Court that any sort of consideration of race in assigning students to schools in a given district is un-constitutional.

Part of the problem comes from the phrase "color-blind society" and the assumptions behind this. What the heck does this mean? Popular parlance describes it as a society where people are judged on their own merits and abilities regardless of their race and gender and income background.

But this is problematic for many, many reasons. It presumes that the ideal non-sexist, non-racist society has some sort of "level playing field." On a "level playing field," it 'wouldn't matter' whether the person performing a job was male or female, black or white, Christian or otherwise.

It does matter, though, and it always will. Each of us brings something unique and special to any situation. The solution one person proposes will differ from the solution another person proposes because they are different people with different ways of thinking and different sets of experiences. And they shouldn't be homogenous. Diversity is to our advantage.

What defenders of the status quo want instead is for women admitted to act just like men, and for black people admitted to act just like white people. If a black woman competes with a white man on the "level playing field," who sets the standards by which their performance will be judged? Of the two, who was more likely better prepared to give the performance more likely to win the approval of the people who now sit at the top [PDF; see in particular page 14 of 39, about racial bias in the development of standardized tests] -- considering the possible affects of childhood nutritional deprivation, the trauma of discrimination and its subsequent disadvantages, and other forms of conditioning? The different solutions or strategies more likely to arise from the perspective of being able to bear children or from being a stranger in one's own society are not truly welcome.

And yet it can be said, and repeated, and believed by many, that activists who advocate affirmative action are the ones responsible for perpetuating racial disparity -- and, to boot, they are discriminatory themselves, for promoting so-called "reverse racism."

Never mind that even after several decades of affirmative action in the United States, there is still disturbing racial disparity in income and education level. If anything, this tells us that efforts to give people of color better access to educational and workplace environments need to be intensified, not dropped altogether.

I can't say with absolute certainty that affirmative action is the best possible solution. But what else do we have to work with? Wishing the problem away doesn't work.

Now the government is targeting unmarried adults up to age 29 as part of its abstinence-only programs, which include millions of dollars in federal money that will be available to the states under revised federal grant guidelines for 2007.

The government says the change is a clarification. But critics say it's a clear signal of a more directed policy targeting the sexual behavior of adults.

... Wade Horn, assistant secretary for children and families at the Department of Health and Human Services, said the revision is aimed at 19- to 29-year-olds because more unmarried women in that age group are having children.

... The revised guidelines specify that states seeking grants are "to identify groups ... most likely to bear children out-of-wedlock, targeting adolescents and/or adults within the 12- through 29-year-old age range." Previous guidelines didn't mention targeting of an age group.

"We wanted to remind states they could use these funds not only to target adolescents," Horn said. "It's a reminder."

from Abstinence message goes beyond teens

Let that sink in for a moment. The government is paying people to tell adults they shouldn't have sex out of wedlock. Anyone want to guess who is going to be particularly targeted here? Here's a hint: have you ever been to a government assistance office?

The government does not exist to tell you how to live your life. The government exists to facilitate the decisions you, as a free person, make.

The government does not exist to tell you what language you may or may not speak, the government does not exist to tell you what religion you may or may not practice, the government does not exist to tell you what chemicals to put in your body or not put in your body, the government does not exist to tell you to have children or not have children, and the government sure as hell does not exist to tell you who to have sex with or who not to have sex with.

Some of these choices might not be as economically efficient as others, but economic efficiency is not the end-all-be-all of human existence, not even close.

Reading about

heysteph's experience at the Qalandia checkpoint between Jerusalem and Ramallah (the link is to an unrelated youtube film), and pondering the big wall that the United States is about to build on its border with Mexico, it strikes me to wonder if maybe walls, not money, are the root of all evil.

For a couple of weeks now, i've been thinking about the Parable of the Vineyard Workers. This is one of the more bizarre parables, and that's saying quite a lot as many of them are quite odd.

( the parable )

Those who say the primary or sole focus of Jesus' message was "saving souls" say this teaches us about getting into heaven. If you are born again while young and do good your whole life, you'll get the same reward as someone who converts on their deathbed after a life of wickedness and iniquity. This is because God is "merciful." Don't forget that the twisted assumption behind this is that God doesn't care about how good we might or might not be, just whether or not we have "accepted Jesus" (whatever that actually means).

Let us say that the above interpretation is correct. Even if so, this parable is hardly a ringing endorsement of the doctrine, because in that case at least a third of the parable is given to considering that maybe it's not fair for someone to "toil" all their lives (as if living an ethical life is necessarily drudgery) and get the same heavenly reward as someone who comes along at the last minute and converts right before they die.

Essentially, we are supposed to accept that god tells do-gooders, "Suckers! Gotcha!"

But all of this strikes me as an excuse to overlook the parable for what it is on its face: an examination of the way wage labor works. What we see here is that the person who pays the wage has the opportunity to set the terms, to give favor or not as they see fit; and that those who are forced to work for wages have very little input into the way they are paid -- creating opportunities for exploitation. The landowner is hiding behind "the tyranny of the contract" to exploit the day laborers who worked for him all day, under the guise of generosity towards the later laborers.

Labor for wage is a good thing to question, because in an empire, jobs which relate directly to the business of empire tend to earn the highest wages. Look at our present-day American empire and see how many positions of prestige and wealth are ethically bankrupt and involve directly increasing American power or profiting from disparity with developing nations. Note, too, that many of the most important jobs in human society -- bearing and caring for children, teaching, maintaining house, day-to-day caretaking of sick relatives -- pay almost no wages at all. Wage labor is a system designed to push people into working for the perpetuation of empire.

If the hypothesis i've offered in the past is correct, and Jesus wanted his followers to turn on, tune in, and drop out of the monstrous imperial machine, then the second view of the parable makes a lot of sense. Jesus would have wanted his followers to examine the true nature of wage labor.

John Dominic Crossan demonstrated in his complex anthropological investigation of Galilee at the time of Jesus (detailed in The Birth of Christianity) that a considerable upheaval was going on in which many peasants were driven from their land so that rich Roman developers could build large villas and other pet projects. Displaced peasants have a much lowered standard of living and are forced to take up crafting or day labor -- which Crossan pointed out added a dimension of significance to the fact of Jesus' career as a carpenter: he was a displaced peasant.

Property ownership is the key to power in a human society. Any class of unpropertied renters are kept in a state of perpetual debt to them. This is particularly hard to swallow when many of the unpropertied renters once owned their own land.

This is why throughout human history, mass displacement of peasants -- usually from families which had owned their land for generations -- is one of the primary causes of armed rebellion.

Christianity, which may have had its roots as a pacifist and egalitarian response to lower-class unrest, was over the generations misappropriated by the Roman upper-class and became a primarily "spiritual" movement, with all vestiges of its former radicalism painted over and spliced out. It became dominated by the heirarchical edifice of the church and became eventually a gear in the imperial machine. The "spiritual" interpretation of this parable, as an instruction on god's endorsement of the moral unfairness of deathbed conversions leading to eternal reward in heaven, is revealed as not simply being nonsense, but a deliberate burial of radicalism beneath a memetic morass.

A couple of weeks ago i wrote that i believe the idea of the "culture war" is a lie.

When i say that, keep in mind that i DO believe there is a war going on in our culture. I think though that it is a real war. I don't think it should be called a "culture war" for reasons i will outline in a second. But in this war, just as in any war, people are beaten, raped, kidnapped, lined up and shot in classrooms, stabbed, hanged, dragged on the street behind a moving car; people are traumatized, shell-shocked, hide in their houses because they fear attack at any time; people are denied rights, discriminated against, driven away from their homes, shamed into silence, driven to drink, drugs, or suicide, survive by passing as members of the invading army; a people is silenced and isolated from one another as their history is erased and their language is suppressed and misappropriated; the invading army turns its subjects against one another.

This is a real war, not a culture war.

In a "culture war," the conflict is said to be between competing sets of ideas. The idea of culture war is used to gloss over the real death, the real torture, the real discrimination going on. If all we have is a war of words, then the people on both sides are both "equally responsible" for the incivility.

Instead what we really have is this: most people on all 'sides' have experienced some degree of being subjugated by force, but then we are all turned against one another because we've been fed various sets of lies about who is to blame for our pain. And in the process some of us continue the process of subjugating others because they are more vulnerable than we are, so we can.

The words that are spoken on top of all of this are not spoken by people who stand at positions of equal authority. There is no "free marketplace of ideas" any more than there is a "free market." Discourse appears to be 'dying' because it has never been alive; it is a facade propped up to keep us distracted while the poor scrounge for a way to live and rail against whoever their leaders are scapegoating this generation (one generation it's the Jews, next it's the gays or maybe the blacks; misogyny is always in fashion too).

I've been thinking a lot lately about what it means to put a price tag on something.

It works like this: if you have the money to buy it, whatever "it" is, then you can claim ownership of it. It seems a more civilized way of acquiring things than stealing them or taking them by force. There is also the illusion of egalitarianism (assuming you don't have laws prohibiting women or people of color from buying land in wealthy suburbs) in the unspoken assertion that every person's $1 bill has the exact same worth.

But you're not required to ask whether anyone was harmed in the making of it. You're not required to ask whether the animals invovled were treated humanely. You're not required to wonder whether the purchasing of mass-produced items is ecologically sustainable. As far as you know, the blouse you buy for $14.99 at WalMart came into existence on the clothing rack; and so, as far as you know, purchasing that blouse is not in any way a political decision or an action in support of child labor or animal cruelty.

There was nothing in human tradition to prepare us for the industrial age because throughout most of human history, we knew who made the objects we're buying. We didn't have to inquire about cruelty or sustainability because we could see for ourselves the conditions under which things were produced.

This privilege turns around and comes behind us as an obligation. In general we don't have time to make our own clothes and barely enough time to make our own food. Many of us, increasing numbers of us, have little choice about buying the inexpensive blouse at WalMart because it's the only way our children will have something to wear. We don't have any way of asking whether children or animals were harmed halfway across the world to make it because our attention is consumed with keeping ourselves afloat.

Many of us do not have the property and resources to be self-sufficient, either as individuals or as a community -- i've seen varying estimates on whether such a thing is even possible with the world population at 7 billion and rising. If you do not own your own plot of land, you are at the mercy of the social economy.

The price tag creates an illusion that one's ethical duty in a given transaction begins and ends with spending money for something -- that if you have $750,000 to spend on a diamond-encrusted Sit-n-Spin for your child, that you have the right to spend it and give no further thought to the ethical or social ramifications of your purchase.

In saying that, i don't mean to imply that no one has the right to spend money frivolously -- i mean to point out that our concept of money makes it easier to mask any unethical implications of one's actions. The primary ethical ramifications of our purchases are likely to be collective, by which i mean, the combined effect of decisions made by lots of people. (To flip that over, bringing an end to a particular kind of unethical pattern will mean many seemingly small choices by millions of individuals.)

I studied a lot of economics in college. My minor was officially in "social science" but in my junior and senior year all of the social science i took was economics. Economics is defined as the study of human decision making regarding limited resources. They say this, and then you spend all of your time talking about theoretical conditions which bear varying degrees of resemblance to the real world.

It is only with hindsight, and experience, and conscious exertion, that i am able to see the depth and meaning of what was left unsaid in all of those lessons. I am also able to see this now because it is the same thing left unsaid in virtually all of our culture's discourse.

We are still leaving these things unsaid in economics classes 150 years after Marx tried to raise the subject. The academic field of economics is in collective denial, and this denial reflects in policy recommendations by economists which lead to the perpetuation of suffering.

Why, for example, do economists never speak about the fact that many people use violence, intimidation, and discrimination to get more resources? This is, after all, human behavior in response to resource scarcity, no? So by all rights it should be relevant. Also left unsaid is any insight into how our attitudes towards a thing change when we place a price tag on it. This too is human behavior in response to resource scarcity, and it affects the course of the economy and the shape of human society and even the pursuit of justice.

These matters are deemed irrelevant, or perhaps it is said that we can come back to those matters as soon as "the model has been developed." The model assumes rational behavior. The model assumes human equality, perfect information, a "level playing field."

Such a model, of course, has no room for violence or discrimination -- and no room for these things to even be tacked on as an afterthought, as a mathematical modifier, because the ubiquity of violence, discrimination, and injustice brings reality too far from from the abstract model.

It's like trying to represent a fractal with line segments; you might learn a little about the shape, but in the process you lose too much of the important detail of the shape's character to understand it.

Perhaps graduate-level economics is different, but somehow i doubt it; most discussion i see about graduate-level economics is mathematical, building on the "supply and demand curves" model. I've seen a few things here and there about "behavioral finance" or "neuroeconomics" but these fields seem to have the same blinkers to violence and oppression (or, even worse, are rooted in awareness of these things with the goal of using them to individual advantage, thereby perpetuating them).

The Echo 9 launching facility for the intercontinental nuclear missile Minuteman III is about 100 miles northwest of Bismarck, North Dakota. Endless fields of sunflowers and mown hay dazzle those who travel there.

... On the morning of June 20, 2006, three people dressed as clowns arrived at Echo 9. The clowns broke the lock off the fence and put up peace banners and posters. One said: “Swords into plowshares - Spears into pruning hooks.” Then they poured some of their own blood and hammered on the nuclear launching facility.

[Fr. Carl Kabat, 72,] is a Catholic priest. [Greg Boertje-Obed, 52,] is an ex-military officer, married and the father of an 11 year old daughter. [Michael Walli, 57,] is a Vietnam vet who has worked with the homeless for decades. Greg and Carl are members of the Loaves and Fishes Community in Duluth. The three are called the Weapons of Mass Destruction Here Plowshares.

They placed a copy of the Declaration of Independence, the US Constitution, international legal condemnations of nuclear weapons, bibles, rosaries, bread, wine, and a picture of Greg's daughter on the top of the missile silo.

Then they waited until the air force security forces came and arrested them.

From Bill Quigley's article CONVICTIONS: The Trial of the Weapons of Mass Destruction Here Plowshares Clowns

The Plowshares Clowns were convicted and each face up to 10 years in prison. What caught my eye in this article was this:

The defense asked for two instructions about justice – one from the preamble to the US Constitution another from Judge Learned Hand – both were denied by the judge. Defendants asked that the jury be read the First Amendment – denied. International law? Denied. Nuremberg Principles? Denied. The US statute defining war crimes? Denied. The US statute defining genocide? Denied.

The judge then went forward and instructed the jury to disregard anything about nuclear weapons, international law, and the good motives of the defendants. The effect of these instructions was to treat the actions of the defendants the same as if they had poured blood and hammered on a Volkswagen – pure property damage.

... One of the jurors told people afterwards that many on the jury learned a lot in the trial and were sympathetic to the defense, but “the judge's instructions left us no option but to find them guilty.”

Of course they had no option but to find them guilty. The whole process had been rigged from the beginning to reduce the various perspectives and nuances of the situation to a single black-and-white renduring of "innocent or guilty." It is not a process by which the truth of the matter is discerned; it is a process by which all of the meaning and significance of life, the big picture, is filtered out as much as possible.

This is what i've referred to in various entries as "the tyranny of the written word." By that i don't mean that written language is somehow evil or tyrannous (although that idea has been explored); i refer to a way of looking at the world which deliberately examines details in a distinctly literal and direct way... pouring over the words of contracts and laws, with the net result that the greater meaning of things -- which many of us might be inclined to think of as the really important part -- is filtered out in favor of a stultifyingly limited cross-section of events.

How else is it conceivable that three people, avowed pacifists, protesting in a less than placid and well-behaved way their lack of voice with regards to the distribution of resources and labor in their society, can be essentially reduced to vandals? The ability of people to speak their wishes aloud, and act in accordance with their words and beliefs -- in short, to act in accordance with their will -- is perhaps the most fundamental right there is. And it is NOT in the best interest of the ruling oligarchy to allow people that right, or to even let them think that right exists.

Hence, we have this "rationalistic" method of smashing reality with a hammer and looking only at the little bits that best suit our goals.

The justice system meets the needs of the state rather than the needs of people. The needs of people would be best served by mapping out a route from here to the maximum empowerment of every person involved. Even though the ideal "government of, by, and for the people" would (according to the US's founding documents) have a similar concern (and would therefore have no interest in restricting people's non-harmful actions or expression), the government we have is not in the least interested in the empowerment of people. It is interested in the self-preservation of ongoing institutional concerns.

The "big picture" is threatening to the state -- not just because, as Stephen Colbert put it, "Reality has a well-known liberal bias" -- but because thoughtful, engaged citizens are not so easily swayed by shepherding tactics. People can only become aware of the inequality and injustice which permeates our society, of the truly small amount of control the state allows them to have in the direction of their lives, if they are able to deeply contemplate the big picture. Being conscious and aware is one of the most radical things you can do.

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The Serpent's Wisdom

Eat of this fruit; your eyes shall be opened, and you will be as Gods.

Entries tagged with empire

fixin your news stories

timeclock nation (or, the employer-ocracy)

abuser planet: where the right of bullies to have their way is never questioned

the revolution within the revolution

(no subject)

on being slowly worn down

(no subject)

'coolness,' advertising, news media, and viral information spreading

no, hugo, don't do it!

life in the land of the free

peace versus the absence of violence

the hard decisions

the bizarro-world of misappropriation

in which sabrina might almost be mistaken for a libertarian

(no subject)

spirituality as misappropriation: the parable of the vineyard workers

it's a real war, not a culture war

(no subject)

saying the unspeakable

the devil's in the details

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December 2021

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