Life, Love, and Liberty

Dear Blog Readers,

I am trying to jumpstart a freelance writing career, so I’m working on a piece or two for the Sex Worker’s Outreach Project. One of them is about the last International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers. It took place last December 17th, and I’d greatly appreciate it, if people pointed me in the direction of information about the events that took place that day.

Sincerely,

“Venus Cassandra”

Independent Citizen of “Cassandrastan”

Go read this chapter of Murray Rothbard’s Conceived in Liberty.

Then recall what you were told about the “heroic” Washington in school.

Then tell me if it bears any resemblance to the above.

Voltarine De Cleyre had this nailed down 100 years ago. To quote her:

Ask any child what he knows about Shays’ rebellion, and he will answer, “Oh, some of the farmers couldn’t pay their taxes, and Shays led a rebellion against the court-house at Worcester, so they could burn up the deeds; and when Washington heard of it he sent over an army quick and taught ’em a good lesson” – “And what was the result of it?” “The result? Why – why – the result was – Oh yes, I remember – the result was they saw the need of a strong federal government to collect the taxes and pay the debts.” Ask if he knows what was said on the other side of the story, ask if he knows that the men who had given their goods and their health and their strength for the freeing of the country now found themselves cast into prison for debt, sick, disabled, and poor, facing a new tyranny for the old; that their demand was that the land should become the free communal possession of those who wished to work it, not subject to tribute, and the child will answer “No.”

Who today, would stand up for liberty for these farmers like De Cleyre did? I fear that the number would be far too few.

I recently wrote the following:

Fuck the odious political entity known as the United States of America. Fuck its murderous wars. Fuck every member of the American populace that sees fit to defend this:

February 08, 2008
More Bombing Creates New Enemies

Inter Press Service
By Ali al-Fadhily and Dahr Jamail*

BAGHDAD, Feb 8 (IPS) - Now that the smoke has cleared and the rubble settled, residents of a group of bombed Iraqi villages see the raid as really a U.S. loss.

Many Iraqis view the attack Jan. 10 by bombers and F-16 jets on a cluster of villages in the Latifiya district south of Baghdad as overkill.

“The use of B1 bombers shows the terrible failure of the U.S. campaign in Iraq,” Iraqi Major General Muhammad al-Azzawy, a military researcher in Baghdad, told IPS. “U.S. military and political tactics failed in this area, and that is why this massacre. This kind of bombing is usually used for much bigger targets than small villages full of civilians. This was savagery.”

The attack on Juboor and neighbouring villages just south of Baghdad had begun a week earlier with heavy artillery and tank bombardment. The attack followed strong resistance from members of the mainly Sunni Muslim al-Juboor tribe against groups that residents described as sectarian death squads.

“On Jan. 10, huge aircraft started bombing the villages,” Ahmad Alwan from a village near Juboor told IPS. “We took our families and fled. We have never seen such bombardment since the 2003 American invasion. They were bombing everything and everybody.”

Residents said two B1 bombers and four F-16 fighter jets dropped at least 40,000 pounds of explosives on the villages and plantations within a span of 10 minutes.

“The al-Qaeda name is used once more to destroy another Sunni area,” Akram Naji, a lawyer in Baghdad who has relatives in Juboor told IPS. “Americans are still supporting Iranian influence in Iraq by cleansing Baghdad and surroundings of Sunnis.”

The cluster of Sunni villages was bombed just weeks after the U.S. military encouraged families to return to their village after heavy bombing earlier in which scores of people were killed. Many residents had fled fearing sectarian death squads, which they say were backed by the U.S.

Few people in the village now talk the language of reconciliation of U.S. President George W. Bush and of some Iraqis in the U.S.-backed government in Baghdad.

“We have no alternative but to fight this occupation and its allies,” a former army officer in Baghdad speaking on condition of anonymity told IPS. “We can see clearly now that Americans came with the idea that we, Sunni Arabs, are the enemies they have in mind no matter what we do to please them. We will fight for our existence, and this massacre will not go unpunished.”

“It was a miracle that I could evacuate my family at the last minute,” said Omar Hussein, who fled for Dora in Baghdad from the bombarded area. “My house and farm are on the outskirts of the village. I took my family out the minute I saw the aircraft in the sky.

“Apache helicopters later fired at the trucks that were carrying the families out of the area, and killed so many civilians. They took some wounded people to their military base. I am sure hundreds of people would have been killed. It is just like the Fallujah crime.”

Thousands died in prolonged attacks on Fallujah to the west of Baghdad, particularly in 2004 and 2005.

Taha Muslih al-Joboory, his wife and three sons were among those reported killed in the bombing. Juboory was an Iraqi journalist who lived all his life in the area. Many families were reported buried under the rubble of their houses.

The U.S. military said that the aircraft which bombed the area targeted “suspected militant hide-outs, storehouses and defensive positions.”

“We know they will get away with their crime now, but we will teach our children that America and the whole West are our enemies, so that they take revenge for these crimes,” 35-year-old Nada, a woman who has relatives in the village told IPS.

(*Ali, our correspondent in Baghdad, works in close collaboration with Dahr Jamail, our U.S.-based specialist writer on Iraq who has reported extensively from Iraq and the Middle East)

I am usually much more restrained in my criticisms. I just lose it when I read accounts like the one I quoted though.

I mean, this is the reality of what the U.S. is doing in Iraq, and nobody with any major political power in America will acknowledge it. Instead, we get treated to odious comments from Hilary Clinton about how “Those savage Iraqis won’t do what we want”, to paraphrase this:

Our troops did the job they were asked to do. They got rid of Saddam Hussein. They conducted the search for weapons of mass destruction. They gave the Iraqi people a chance for elections and to have a government. It is the Iraqis who have failed to take advantage of that opportunity.

– Hillary Clinton, New Hampshire Democratic Presidential Candidates Debate, June 3, 2007

You know, because Americans would have constructed a Jeffersonian republic by now. It’s really easy when your infrastructure is shot to hell and military checkpoints abound. Furthermore, even if Iraqis don’t want to construct a Jeffersonian republic, why should the U.S. government be allowed to bomb them into dust?

A very intelligent person I know once told me that most Americans are on the ethical level of Germans during World War 2 or something. The nation’s main complaint with a war tends to be that Americans are dying and “we” aren’t winning. For god’s sake, what about the lives of the people on the receiving end? I don’t give a fuck about the nonexistent credibility of the United States. I don’t care if anyone turns up their noses at the U.S. government. In fact, I’d encourage them to do so. What matters to me are the lives of the dead and injured. Yes, it’s important to revolt against an unnecessary war, because the government is treating the lives of “its” citizens as expendable, but it’s not all about us.

As much of an egoist as I am, I still quite egoistically believe in the preservation of human life. I feel joy at knowing that others are alive and not dead. This cuts across national boundaries, and I will not reflexively take the side of “my” country over the preservation of human life.

The United States of America is a political entity that deserves to be consigned to the dustbin of history. In its place, a free America could take root.

Note: to be entirely clear, I am not advocating violent revolution in this post. I am talking about an ideological shift among the populace, and the subsequent creation of new social relations. I don’t really expect the people in Washington to care about the distinction though.

Aster of Wellington says what I was thinking:

I would also point out the continuity of this sort of child prison brutality with the generally accepted patterns of childraising in general. While reading through this chronicle of abuses I couldn’t help but think that it sounded like a compilation of all the things I’ve seen or heard parents do or threaten to do to ‘their own’ children.

Conservatives often say that ‘criminals are just children who never grew up’- i.e., that ‘civilisation’ is the project of breaking the stubborn will of the stubborn natural barbarism of children. In this view, which is obviously linked to Christian notions of original sin (or equivalent ideas in other authoritarian religions and moralities), ‘making people behave’ is precisely ABOUT beating them down into submission- ‘productive citizens’ being those beaten down enough, and ‘respectable’ people being those who have accepted repression and control as the norm. According to this view, there is a natural link between the proper treatment of children and criminals- the first have noy yet, and the second have failed to, internalise discipline adequately.

Of course under such a system there can never really be too much discipline, or any real objection to brutality. This is the same mentality which justifies torture- and insofar as the ideology of racism is linked very strongly with the perception of nonwhites as ‘half-devil and half-child’ (i.e., less naturally self-disciplined than white people), it’s very strongly linked to racism. And of course this psychology is the natural corollary of oppressive systems as such, which of course function primarily by pressing people to do things they just plain hate to do.

But none of it is comprehensible aside from a certain view of human beings- as bad things which need to be made ‘moral’ by constant orders and harangueing… and a certain institutional treatment of children. I personally don’t see this torture camp as something distinct from ‘normal’ childraising- it is merely a more extreme form of the way children are usually treated by conservatives. I think this kind of atrocity is implicit whenever one’s natural approach to evil is to yell and moralise and shame.

- Comment on Charles Johnson’s blog

Well, I wasn’t thinking of it exactly in those terms, but I wholeheartedly support her message! I am a staunch unschooler who supports the right of children to decide how they want to learn.

For liberty!

For happiness!

For children too!

I will be writing more on these issues in the future. I strongly believe that the libertarian and anarchist movements must understand that context matters. In this case, the context that children grow up in will have an effect on the type of society we live in. If you believe that the “good” comes from discipline with children, then you will be more likely to believe that the “good” comes from discipline meted out to adults by other authority figures.

Some of you might remember the post I wrote about a blogger named Rachel Kramer Bussel. I found some of her posts about the reality of her life to be very interesting–she’s also pretty cute. I saw some of my own tendencies in it too. Even when I identified more as a guy — right now, I am not so sure who I am when it comes to gender — I was pretty sappy about romantic things. And it’s always refreshing to see someone else who isn’t ashamed to celebrate these kind of feelings too. My more insecure side fears that the attributes I singled out might have turned her off from speaking to me, but she did add me as a friend on Myspace, so I should stop my usual self-deprecation! Needless to say though, I feel a bit embarrassed by that post now. That’s just me for ya.

Anyhow, if you’re in the New York City area or anywhere else; for that matter, then you might want to check out her singles ad. Just make sure that your sole interest in her isn’t that she’s a sex writer. In fact, her blog post gives me the impression that a person focusing on this at all is not who she is particularly looking for. Prospective suitors of either a female or male gender: take note! Remember; sex isn’t everything. There is also good Chinese food, wonderful literature, and passionate political protests — be careful about that last one.

Without further ado, I present to you a link to Rachel’s ad. I’d copy and paste it, but I am not sure what copyright law would say on that. And no, if anyone was wondering, I don’t believe in intellectual property rights, but I don’t like lawsuits either.

The beautiful Serena of the San Francisco Bay Area was kind enough to allow me to use the below picture of her. She is an author, singer, actress, model, and eccentric. This is one of my favorite modeling pictures of her, and I thought she was wearing a swimsuit. It turns out that it’s underwear! Sure fooled me.

I hereby invite the carnival members to participate in a discussion on the topic of anarchism and sexuality. After posting that Goldman essay on jealousy, I decided that this would be a good thing to talk about.

I encourage people to be as creative as possible in coming up with ideas for posts, but here are some suggestions:

1. Talk about the relation between anarchism and feminism. You’d probably be hard pressed to find a left-wing anarchist who doesn’t consider themselves a feminist, but there are Rothbardian influenced libertarian anarchists on here too. I am not sure if all of them would say they are feminists. I know Roderick Long is one though. And some would say that Rothbard wasn’t even an anarchist. If you want to hear my take on the issue, then just email me.

2. Is monogamy or polyamory more consistent with the anarchist ideal? Does it really matter? Is jealousy innate, and does that undercut notions of “free love”? Is polygamy or polyandry compatible with anarchism?

3. Does the existence of patriarchy provide the ideological basis for the existence of the state? Does matriarchy also do so? If not; why not?

4. What can anarchist philosophy help us understand in the area of gender and gender roles?

Please start posting your responses on the 29th of this month.

Happy Writing!

Fuck the odious political entity known as the United States of America. Fuck its murderous wars. Fuck every member of the American populace that sees fit to defend this:

February 08, 2008
More Bombing Creates New Enemies

Inter Press Service
By Ali al-Fadhily and Dahr Jamail*

BAGHDAD, Feb 8 (IPS) - Now that the smoke has cleared and the rubble settled, residents of a group of bombed Iraqi villages see the raid as really a U.S. loss.

Many Iraqis view the attack Jan. 10 by bombers and F-16 jets on a cluster of villages in the Latifiya district south of Baghdad as overkill.

“The use of B1 bombers shows the terrible failure of the U.S. campaign in Iraq,” Iraqi Major General Muhammad al-Azzawy, a military researcher in Baghdad, told IPS. “U.S. military and political tactics failed in this area, and that is why this massacre. This kind of bombing is usually used for much bigger targets than small villages full of civilians. This was savagery.”

The attack on Juboor and neighbouring villages just south of Baghdad had begun a week earlier with heavy artillery and tank bombardment. The attack followed strong resistance from members of the mainly Sunni Muslim al-Juboor tribe against groups that residents described as sectarian death squads.

“On Jan. 10, huge aircraft started bombing the villages,” Ahmad Alwan from a village near Juboor told IPS. “We took our families and fled. We have never seen such bombardment since the 2003 American invasion. They were bombing everything and everybody.”

Residents said two B1 bombers and four F-16 fighter jets dropped at least 40,000 pounds of explosives on the villages and plantations within a span of 10 minutes.

“The al-Qaeda name is used once more to destroy another Sunni area,” Akram Naji, a lawyer in Baghdad who has relatives in Juboor told IPS. “Americans are still supporting Iranian influence in Iraq by cleansing Baghdad and surroundings of Sunnis.”

The cluster of Sunni villages was bombed just weeks after the U.S. military encouraged families to return to their village after heavy bombing earlier in which scores of people were killed. Many residents had fled fearing sectarian death squads, which they say were backed by the U.S.

Few people in the village now talk the language of reconciliation of U.S. President George W. Bush and of some Iraqis in the U.S.-backed government in Baghdad.

“We have no alternative but to fight this occupation and its allies,” a former army officer in Baghdad speaking on condition of anonymity told IPS. “We can see clearly now that Americans came with the idea that we, Sunni Arabs, are the enemies they have in mind no matter what we do to please them. We will fight for our existence, and this massacre will not go unpunished.”

“It was a miracle that I could evacuate my family at the last minute,” said Omar Hussein, who fled for Dora in Baghdad from the bombarded area. “My house and farm are on the outskirts of the village. I took my family out the minute I saw the aircraft in the sky.

“Apache helicopters later fired at the trucks that were carrying the families out of the area, and killed so many civilians. They took some wounded people to their military base. I am sure hundreds of people would have been killed. It is just like the Fallujah crime.”

Thousands died in prolonged attacks on Fallujah to the west of Baghdad, particularly in 2004 and 2005.

Taha Muslih al-Joboory, his wife and three sons were among those reported killed in the bombing. Juboory was an Iraqi journalist who lived all his life in the area. Many families were reported buried under the rubble of their houses.

The U.S. military said that the aircraft which bombed the area targeted “suspected militant hide-outs, storehouses and defensive positions.”

“We know they will get away with their crime now, but we will teach our children that America and the whole West are our enemies, so that they take revenge for these crimes,” 35-year-old Nada, a woman who has relatives in the village told IPS.

(*Ali, our correspondent in Baghdad, works in close collaboration with Dahr Jamail, our U.S.-based specialist writer on Iraq who has reported extensively from Iraq and the Middle East)

Can anyone read accounts like this and still talk about supporting the troops? There may be individual soldiers in Iraq who are quite wonderful individuals. I know there are troops who are caught in a terrible bind and can’t leave. I am not opposed to individual Iraqis and groups of Iraqis enlisting the services of Americans in defending themselves from Muslim statists, but I am not going to defend individual members in the military, who are acting as enforcers for the gang of thugs in Washington D.C. I am not going to defend the pilots who dropped these bombs. They are murderers, and they deserve no respect from anyone concerned with the sanctity of human life.

I’ve pulled an Arthur Silber with this post. I’ve stopped playing it nice, and I am speaking from the heart. Like Arthur said, I am prepared to go to Guantanamo now. Let me just kill myself before the state’s minions show up to cart me off.

If anyone is concerned about me actually killing myself, then I want to assure them that the above was a rhetorical flourish. Consider it very dark humor.

In closing, I want to make it very clear that I am most definitely not a supporter of anti-American terrorists. What happened on September 11th was truly horrific, and I have shed light tears in viewing a slideshow of what happened that day before. I am referring to the “United States of America” which is simply the idea that there should be a central Federal government with layers of authority beneath it. I am not advocating the violent destruction of Americans.

Any NSA or FBI people reading this should take note of that.

To be frank, I sort of still lean towards the more pessimistic myself. I see the Democratic candidates as being kind of to the left of the Republican wing of the ruling class, but there is plenty of common ground still. Obama and Hilary both can’t seem to imagine healthcare reform that doesn’t include threatening government violence against those who don’t want to buy insurance. Obama doesn’t go as far as Hilary, because he says only parents will be forced to buy it for children, but it’s still a wholesale attack on the principle of individual liberty.

So, Americans will have a choice between corporatist health insurance or neo-fascist “liberal” mandated health insurance. Hilary recently said she might garnish the wages of workers who refuse to buy into it. What a great way to help the working class. If this be socialism, then I’ll pass. What happened to empowering workers rather than exercising control over them? Isn’t that what’s wrong with the present system? Being offered two varieties of fascism is not enticing.

I mean, we have to get beyond thinking of politics in terms of domination and coercion. A whole new paradigm needs to be developed, and the anarchist tradition holds the key to this.

People assume that either large corporations or large government agencies have to run things, but this is not true at all. Anarchist thinkers — among others — have developed conceptions of “order” that rely on decentralization of power, and there is a wealth of literature out there about neighborhood self-sufficiency, worker’s self-management, and so forth.

And, this is a crucial matter of survival for countless people. The planet is being devastated by countless tyrannical regimes and other oppressive entities. For god’s sake, is there no place free from this savagery? Am I doomed to abandon any political dreams, so that I don’t have to endure the pain of living in fear? Truth be told: I want to speak like Emma Goldman did. Not so much, because I want to create a celebrity persona, but, because I want to touch people with my words. I want to ignite the passions and intellect of others, so that they can begin the ceaseless journey for truth. Endlessly back and forth I go, between this desire to just refuse all constraints and speak my mind, and a desire to withdraw in preservation of my life.

Below is an article about the price we pay for centralizing power: http://fff.org/comment/com0802a.asp

What makes me despair is knowing that the above bill effectively criminalizes some of my thoughts. Just calling yourself an anarchist is enough for them to make a case of “promoting ideologically based violence”. Somehow, I don’t think that my serious reservations about the use of violence will be taken that seriously by them. Regardless, it is the grossest of hypocrisies for a government that routinely uses violence to promote its social objective of stopping people from enjoying pot, and slaughters people by the thousands in impoverished nations to preach about violent ideologies. And, the mere promotion of proportionate resistance to this is grounds for making someone’s life a living hell. Totalitarianism isn’t only about Nazi esque stormtroopers marching in parades. It’s also about forcing emotionally sensitive and aware people to cower in fear.

Politicians would be well advised to look in the mirror once in awhile. Who is really the violent one here? Me or George Bush? Or the Democratic senator (I can’t remember if there were multiple sponsors) who introduced this bill?

Enough for now. I love to write, but I have only so much tolerance for thinking about the United States regime right now. And, I imagine that you might be turned off by excessive length.

More to come!

It’s not that surprising to me when Ann Coulter drops another ridiculous bombshell, and this latest one reveals some extremely appalling racist tendencies. The concocting of the line that the proper response to September 11th was to forcibly Christianize — please count me out in the next Crusades — the Middle East was bad enough, but she unfortunately didn’t stop there.

To quote her:

In 1960, whites were 90 percent of the country. The Census Bureau recently estimated that whites already account for less than two-thirds of the population and will be a minority by 2050. Other estimates put that day much sooner.

One may assume the new majority will not be such compassionate overlords as the white majority has been. If this sort of drastic change were legally imposed on any group other than white Americans, it would be called genocide. Yet whites are called racists merely for mentioning the fact that current immigration law is intentionally designed to reduce their percentage in the population

I have to wonder what American reality — past or present — that Coulter is familiar with, when I read a statement like “One may assume the new majority will not be such compassionate overlords as the white majority has been.”

Has she forgotten about a not so insignificant phenomenon called slavery? And the subsequent horrors of Jim Crow or the present day mass incarceration of black males via The War on People Who Use Some Drugs. It’s true that the last example has included the enforcement of heinous drug laws by minority police officers, but the notion that the white establishment has been remotely compassionate is still entirely ahistorical. And no, any historical reformist measure like the reduction in daily slave beatings from 4 to 2 wouldn’t make up for the preservation of the institution itself.

She also compares the phenomenon of one racial group peacefully overtaking another in numbers with the very horrific phenomenon of genocide. I suspect that the rising numbers in minority populations has to do with higher birth rates and migration patterns — leaving aside the question of how genuinely voluntary a given individuals choice to migrate may be. This is a far cry from the mass deportation or targeted mass murder of white individuals that would merit the use of a word like genocide. If the amnesty policy constitutes genocide, then, I’ll have to conclude that there is such a thing as a good genocide.

In the end, what is most striking about Coulter’s column is that it reveals the silly tribalism that dominates her perspective on racial issues. Why should it matter, if minority individuals are becoming more numerous than white ones? I wouldn’t be troubled if I were the only white skinned individual left in my community. I am out to seek friendship and joy with people based on their individual character. The color of their skin has absolutely no importance to me. I urge that others try to think of human beings as individuals, rather than as stereotypes or caricatures of a given ethnic or racial group.

Also, let me give a thumbs up to Arthur Silber, for alerting me to this Coulter piece in a very passionate essay he wrote. It earned a spot on my insightful reads section

Note: In a society dominated by violent racial tribalism, it may be wise to look upon one racial or ethnic group overtaking another as increasing physical danger or the likelihood of conflict, but this would just be a tragic necessity for physical survival. It doesn’t mean that the principle of racial tribalism is worthwhile.

“A strong shield against the vulgarity of jealousy is that man and wife are not of one body and one spirit. They are two human beings, of different temperament, feelings, and emotions. Each is a small cosmos in himself, engrossed in his own thoughts and ideas. It is glorious and poetic if these two worlds meet in freedom and equality. Even if this lasts but a short time it is already worthwhile. But, the moment the two worlds are forced together all the beauty and fragrance ceases and nothing but dead leaves remain. Whoever grasps this truism will consider jealousy beneath him and will not permit it to hang as a sword of Damocles over him.

All lovers do well to leave the doors of their love wide open. When love can go and come without fear of meeting a watch-dog, jealousy will rarely take root because it will soon learn that where there are no locks and keys there is no place for suspicion and distrust, two elements upon which jealousy thrives and prospers.”

~ Emma Goldman