Life, Love, and Liberty

“We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. Frankly, I have yet to engage in a direct-action campaign that was “well timed” in the view of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word “Wait!” It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This “Wait” has almost always meant ‘Never.” We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that “justice too long delayed is justice denied.”

We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God-given rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jetlike speed toward gaining political independence, but we stiff creep at horse-and-buggy pace toward gaining a cup of coffee at a lunch counter. Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging dark of segregation to say, “Wait.” But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she can’t go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five-year-old son who is asking: “Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?”; when you take a cross-county drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading “white” and “colored”; when your first name becomes “nigger,” your middle name becomes “boy” (however old you are) and your last name becomes “John,” and your wife and mother are never given the respected title “Mrs.”; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you no forever fighting a degenerating sense of “nobodiness” then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair. I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience.”

~ Martin Luther King Jr.

I read this piece on a plane trip to Maryland. I was simply emotionally floored by this part of it. I’ve highlighted the part where King really starts to shine.

The depraved thoughts of a defense attorney in Irvine, California provide a great lesson in misogyny and anti-sex puritanical attitudes. To quote Charles Johnson:

Last month, in Irvine, California, Officer David Alex Park, stalker and rapist, was acquitted by a jury of eleven men and one woman. He was acquitted, not because he is anything other than a stalker and a rapist—which he as much as admitted in open court, and which was proven well enough anyway by phone records, license plate requests, and DNA evidence. He was acquitted because he is a cop, and the woman that he harassed and sexually extorted danced at a strip club, and so the jury concluded that she made him do it, and besides, if she strips for a living, she must have been asking for it anyway.

You might think that I am exaggerating the defense’s position for polemical effect. No, I’m not. Here’s defense attorney Jim Stokke: She got what she wanted, … She’s an overtly sexual person. And in cross-examination of Lucy, the survivor: You do the dancing to get men to do what you what them to do, … And the same thing happened out there on that highway [in Laguna Beach]. You wanted [Park] to take some sex!

Let’s review what should be rather obvious points to any decent human being:

1. Women are not the property of men.

2. The expression of a woman’s sexuality is hers to make decisions about.

3. You should not act on the premise that a woman flaunting her sexuality is inviting anyone to lay coercive claim over her.

Is it really that hard to understand this?

Additional Info

Being a feminist has more to do with confidence, self-respect and common decency than political agendas or hating men. If you need inspiration, you could get online coupons and rent movies like Erin Brockovich, GI Jane or Thelma and Louise.  Pick up some retailer coupons and invest in a wardrobe that brings out your inner confidence. There are plenty of ways to express your feminine self. The rare coupons just make them cheaper.

In reading this, I ask that people please understand the horror of what I went through. I was literally locked up, and at the mercy of doctors complicit in a psycharistic-state alliance. All I wanted was to go home, and I had to spend nearly all of a day waiting for them to approve my transfer to the hospital that my psycharistist is connected to. If I had not been working with him, then they may have held me for a longer period of time.

I’ve prefaced it with two quotes.

“The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities.”

~ Ayn Rand

“Of all social theories Anarchism alone steadfastly proclaims that society exists for man, not man for society. The sole legitimate purpose of society is to serve the needs and advance the aspiration of the individual. Only by doing so can it justify its existence and be an aid to progress and culture.

The political parties and men savagely scrambling for power will scorn me as hopelessly out of tune with our time. I cheerfully admit the charge. I find comfort in the assurance that their hysteria lacks enduring quality. Their hosanna is but of the hour.

Man’s yearning for liberation from all authority and power will never be soothed by their cracked song. Man’s quest for freedom from every shackle is eternal. It must and will go on.”

~ Emma Goldman

I now know the meaning of confinement much more acutely. I now know the state’s destructive power much more personally. And I have had my convictions against coercion and anti-individualist ethics strengthened.

There is no justification for a therapy based on guns — metaphorically, of course — and bondage. In the future, I refuse to deal with any therapist or social worker who refuses to renounce their monstrous “right” to have me civilly committed. Whether they know it or not, they are my enemies. They are the people who accept the fundamental ideas that are destroying America and other parts of the world. They prop up the legitimacy of the creeds of morally mandatory self-sacrifice, the nationalization of human beings, and the exercise of coercive domination in the name of benevolence and charity.

Don’t you see the connection between the mentality that can justify the military draft, and the mentality that can justify coercive commitment? Both of them are based on the fundamental conceptual premise that man does not belong to him or herself, but to the society that he or she happens to live in. And it doesn’t change a damn thing when you dress it up in the language of helping the person being coerced. There is no equal power balance between the psycharistist and the person on the receiving end, so the talk of consent is all a sham. Most likely designed to help monsters sleep at night.

And they are monsters. Never forget it, and don’t let a Christian sense of “love thy neighbor” make you feel guilt for being profoundly angry at them.

In light of what they help make possible, they have earned it. And the path forward for the world is away from their anti-individualist ethics. The world needs an intellectual revolution in favor of the supremacy of individual rights and individual thought. The friend of liberty and individual rights is simultaneously the foe of the racially motivated lynch mob, the tyrannical employer who mandates intrusive drug testing, and the vice cop who helps destroy the life of a sex worker. And this promotion of individual self-determination should make no distinctions between private or public tyranny.

When the peoples of the world become consistent friends of liberty, then I will dance and make merry, until I can do so no more. Please consider joining us today! Not for my sake, but for your own.

(I threw in that point about opposing both private and public tyranny, because I want the libertarians to see that the oppression of employees by private employers should be met by us with a demand for social justice. In other words: the libertarian philosophy should be connected to a wider philosophical totality concerned with individual self-realization, rather than just starting from the premise that the state must be opposed)

Well, my updates haven’t been daily lately — and I didn’t have enough quotes to keep up the quote of the day feature. I do want to get back to that eventually, but I’ve been suffering a major depression. I even had a suicide attempt that got me involuntarily confined to a mental hospital for a good part of a day.

Needless to say, I wasn’t very pleased. I’ll have a beautiful and passionate denunciation of involuntary commitment written soon. I am hoping it will make me feel happier, because I absolutely adore passionate writing!

Tell me what you think, folks! It’s not done yet, but I am looking to finish it sometime this weekend or next week.

        Sex workers face violence from multiple directions. They not only end up dealing with abusive clients, but they also have to worry about the violence of the state being brought to bear against them. Every year, the violence against sex workers is spoken out against, and this year was no different. The annual International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers took place last December 17^th. This report was written to bring you the scoop on what went down last year.

        First off, I want to thank all the following organizations for being sponsors. The respective groups were:

1. SWOP (Sex Workers Outreach Project)

2. Desiree Alliance

3. SWANK (Sex Workers Action New York)

4. Scarlet Alliance

5. Stella

6. ESPU (Erotic Service Provider’s Union)

7. SWIRL (Sex Worker’s Internet Radio Lounge)

8. Spread

9. PONY (Prostitutes of New York)

10. Venus Envy

11. Charis

12. Star Light Ministries

13. Lady Monster

14. SWAN (Sex Worker’s Advocacy Network)

SWAN is a coalition of groups from Central Europe, Eastern Europe, and Central Asia. It includes:

Aksion Plus, Albania, www.aksionplus.net
HESED, Bulgaria, www.hesed.bg
Bliss Without Risk, Czech Republic, http://www.rozkosbezrizika.cz/01_htm/100_ENGLISH.htm
MPEE, Hungary, www.prostitualtak.hu
Kovcheg, Kazakhstan, fsz@mail.ru
Tais Plus, Kyrgyzstan, gkurmanova@yandex.ru
Dia+Logos, Latvia, dialogs@diacentrs.lv
I Can Live, Lithuania, www.galiugyventi.lt
HOPS, Macedonia, www.hops.org.mk
Tada, Poland, www.tada.pl
ARAS-Romanian Association Against AIDS, Romania, www.arasnet.ro
Humanitarian Action, Russia, www.humanitarianaction.org
Siberian Initiative, Russia, http://www.sibin.ru
Jazas. Serbia, www.jazas.net
Odyseus, Slovakia, www.ozodyseus.sk
All Ukrainian Association on Harm Reduction, Ukraine, www.uhra.org.ua

(I was able to copy and paste the above list from the SWAN press release on December 17th)

        The events that took place that day occurred in multiple venues. They were not only limited to the United States of America – my current country of residence. And one of them even occurred online – the Sex Worker’s Outreach Project held an online conference.

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.

The quote of the day feature is back!

“It’s no secret that after 9/11, the administration authorized the use of waterboarding, and that the technique was used on a number of detainees in 2002 and reportedly stopped in 2003. But the administration has never explicitly admitted that.

In fact, when Dick Cheney, seduced into loose talk by a friendly interviewer, confirmed that “a dunk in water is a no-brainer if it can save lives,” the White House furiously backpedaled, and Tony Snow did his best to proclaim that “a dunk in water” had not been a reference to waterboarding, but just “a dunk in the water.”"

~ Paul Kiel

Thanks, Tony. I feel much more reassured now.

“I feel John Mackey is advising we listen to everything *wrong* with the left- the Puritanical moralism characteristic of the original Progressives, while simultaneously slamming the door in the face of the liberatory impulses that represent the left at its best. While I do think libertarians should learn more empathy and compassion, that is a far cry from absorbing the notion that moral idealism equates with transcending selfishness. In my opinion versions of idealism which tell people to subordinate their interest to a greater good are the problem- ultimately because I think they destroy and torment the best passions in individuals. It is worth noting that Mackey makes no arguments for unselfishness but merely appeals to popularity and ‘common sense’.”

~ Lady Aster

I swear, by my life and my love of it, that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.

~ Ayn Rand

You might be getting tired of just quotes of the day by now, so I’ll be sure to diversify a bit.

Anyhow, I lost the desire to be on the PC last night, before I posted a quote of the day. I was trying to fall asleep and didn’t want to get any extra stimulation. I ask for your forgiveness by offering two quotes today.

Enjoy!

“Writing is like making love. Don’t worry about the orgasm, just concentrate on the process.
- Isabel Allende

I found the delightful quote above on the Erotica Readers & Writer’s Association
website.

“Every actual State is corrupt. Good men must not obey the laws too well.”

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Our topic tonight is hate. Yet so far I’ve spoken about anger rather than hate. One might suppose that what I’ve said about one will apply mutatis mutandis to the other; but I think there is an important difference. Anger is often justified; but hate, I think, is never justified, at least against a person.

Where does the difference lie? Well, we can be angry with a person and still wish that person well; after all, we are often angry with those we love, and we do not stop loving them while we are angry with them. But we cannot hate a person and still wish that person well. I think this makes hate morally problematic in a way that anger is not. For I accept Aristotle’s conception of happiness as a life of virtuous rational activity. Surely we should wish our enemies to be more virtuous and more rational; after all, if they were more virtuous and more rational, they wouldn’t have hijacked two airplanes and sent them crashing into the World Trade Center. Any move, by anybody, in the direction of greater virtue and greater rationality should always be met with approval. But if Aristotle is right about happiness, then to wish for our enemies to be more virtuous and more rational is ipso facto to wish for them to be happier.

I think this must be what such moral teachers as Socrates, Jesus, and the Buddha mean when they advise us to wish our enemies well. Obviously we should not wish success to our enemies’ projects; for those projects are evil, and they could not cease to be evil without ceasing to be the projects they are. Hence hatred for those projects is quite in order. But people can always cease to be evil without ceasing to be. If they refuse to cease being evil, we may find it necessary, in self-defense, to make them cease to be; but we should always prefer that our enemies cease being evil. But what is that, but to prefer that our enemies become better people—that they live better, more worthwhile, less destructive, hate-filled lives? And if that is what we ought to prefer, then we ought to wish our enemies well. And while that is compatible with being angry at them, and with killing them if necessary, it is not compatible with hating them.D”

- Roderick Long