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January 25th, 2014

Stare Fleetingly Into This Pit…

If your German is nonexistent or as poor as mine you will need Google Translate to read this Der Spiegel article but I highly recommend it, and then following the link at the end to the more in depth article on this man’s life.

A Find In Israel: hundreds of letters of SS chief Himmler

He signed with “Your Heini” or “Your Daddy”: In Israel, according to a newspaper report hundreds of letters from Heinrich Himmler have surfaced. The documents were apparently kept for a long time in a private household. The Federal Archives considers them to be genuine.

[Note: Google translation awkwardness in this post was corrected freely by me…my apologies to native German speakers if I got it wrong.]

Der Spiegel comes right out and says without Himmler there would have been no Holocaust, and their reasoning is that while yes the Nazi leadership were violent antisemites and ultimately on board with the final solution, it was Himmler who kept pushing mass murder as a policy forward at critical moments, simply by virtue of his utter remorselessness. He kept going where others hesitated, or simply never thought to go at the time. And that was simply, chillingly, because killing did not stir him emotionally one iota. He was neither attracted to it nor repulsed by it. It was simply a thing he regarded as necessary. That infamous quote of his, “It is because we can do such as this and still remain moral men, that we are great” captures him perfectly.

He was no raving vein throbbing ranter. Der Spiegel says of him:

Himmler is not a charismatic figure like the coarse and abusive Röhm, no pulpit thumper like Goering and no rousing demagogue like Goebbels. Steaming mobs, hypnotized masses – this is not the world of apparatchiks with pince-nez. He has other talents: He’s hard-nosed as Röhm, nerves stronger than morphine dependent Goering, and even more ruthless than the cunning Goebbels. This is where the evil hides behind the mask of the banal.

To the end he lived inside his own world, utterly disinterested in the human story beyond. To kill millions and then sit down to tea and cakes with your fellow Nazis as though nothing much happened, you need not to care that those people had lives, let alone thoughts and ideas of their own worth listening to. It is all just so much irrelevant static. A telling detail, according to Der Spiegel, is that after he’d concluded the war was lost he still believed he could work a deal with the allies to help keep the communists out of Europe. He bragged that after the war without him Europe would be in shambles and that he only needed one hour with Eisenhower to convince him of it too. But in the end he ducked down the same escape hatch Hitler did. I sometimes wonder if the prospect of killing himself moved him any more than the millions of others he killed, or whether in the end he simply did it because it was necessary.

I find it stunning there is not more written about this man who, in my opinion, even more than Hitler was the very heart itself of the Third Reich. That might be because the very banality of his person seems superficially to make him appear uninteresting. When you look inside the man, seeking to know what it was about him that was missing, that made everything he did possible, it stuns you to discover how little there is in there to begin with. And that leads to a very disturbing place, which may be the other reason he isn’t widely written about.

The myth that won’t die is the Nazis, and the War, and the Holocaust were possible because of an innate character flaw in the German people. It’s self serving bullshit.   The reality more likely is that there are many Himmler’s walking among us right now, right this instant. Quiet, prim, orderly men of orderly habits, and what they’re missing only is the power to act on their belief of what is necessary for the greater good.

 

Heinrich Himmler

by Bruce | Link | React!

January 17th, 2014

I’m A Reasonable Man…

After all…I only want to keep the kids safe…from your kind…

Putin: Gay people will be safe at Olympics if they ‘leave kids alone’

Putin met with a group of volunteers in the Olympic mountain venue at Krasnaya Polyana on Friday to wish them success at the Games. During a question-and-answer session, one volunteer asked him about Russia’s attitudes toward gays, a subject that has provoked worldwide controversy, and Putin offered what was apparently meant to be a reassuring answer for visitors to the Olympics.

How the homophobe, in trying to sound reasonable, keeps showing only their knuckle dragging prejudices.   If “alone” means “not sexually molest” then why of course gays should leave kids alone. Heterosexuals should also leave kids alone.   Everybody should leave kids alone.   And the law should punish people who don’t.   So why are you singling out gay people?

Because the homophobe thinks (or just wants everyone else to think) that to be gay is to be a sexual predator, and especially to be a molester of children.   But it’s more than that.   “Alone” means “Don’t Try To Turn Kids Gay”, because homosexuals don’t reproduce, they recruit.   Viewed that way, when gay people simply their lives openly and proudly that is recruitment.   When teachers and scientists refute the myths, lies and superstitions about homosexuality and teach science based facts about sex and sexual orientation, that is recruitment.   When artists create works that speak honestly to the lives of gay people, to the sanctity of their love, to the beauty of their desire, that is recruitment.

The way you leave kids alone is you silence the teachers, burn the books, burn the works of art, imprison the scientists and the artists if they won’t shut up and force homosexuals into the closet by acts of law, or by acts of terror in the streets.   And the homophobe will do all of this with a clear conscience telling them they had to in order to protect the kids, not their mindless blood thirsty prejudices.

 

by Bruce | Link | React!

January 14th, 2014

So It Begins…

This from Towleroad…

Nigeria Has Arrested 38 Gay Men from List of 168

Dorothy Aken’Ova is executive director of Nigeria’s International Center for Reproductive Health and Sexual Rights. She said Tuesday the new law, already being dubbed the “Jail the Gays” law, will endanger and even criminalize programs fighting HIV-AIDS in the gay community.

She said police in Bauchi state have a list of 168 purportedly gay men, of whom 38 have been arrested recently.

There was a list all ready and waiting.   How unsurprising.

So it begins, while the rest of the civilized world a) wrings its hands, b) issues a strongly worded protest, c) washes, rinses, and repeats.   Practice makes perfect.

broken_glass

by Bruce | Link | React!

January 7th, 2014

Let Us Give Them Comfortable Little Graves…

This came across my Facebook stream just now…

Lawmaker questions including gays in human trafficking anti-discrimination regs

A lawmaker who helped author Kansas’ constitutional amendment banning gay marriage questioned a state official Tuesday about why his agency included sexual orientation in an anti-discrimination clause for safe houses for victims of human trafficking.

Now why on earth, you may be wondering, would anyone object to telling people who are providing services to kids who have been rescued from human trafficking rings to not discriminate against the gay ones?   You may be wondering that is, if you hadn’t been paying attention to the bottomless abyss that is the anti-gay industrial complex…

After rattling off a series of nondiscrimination categories for admission to the secure facilities that included gender and race, Rep. Jan Pauls, D-Hutchinson, asked Smith why sexual orientation was also included.

“I wasn’t sure what your origin was on listing sexual preference,” Pauls said. “Gender covers a lot of the sexual discrimination, potentially. I just wasn’t sure why the sexual preference was added.”

Smith said it was a safeguard to ensure homosexual victims get helped.

And there’s the problem right there.   There are no homosexual victims, there are only victims of homosexuals…

“The issue is, if you have a homosexual child who was prostituted out there, you don’t want a facility denying treatment to that child,” Smith said. “Not that we believe anybody would deny services based on that.”

But then, what do we mean…really…by “denying services?” We give them a place to stay. That doesn’t mean they have to feel comfortable here does it?   Behold:

Pauls also said she didn’t believe any human trafficking victims would be denied access to a safe house on that basis, but she said including it in legal nondiscrimination regulations could pose problems for religious institutions providing help, whether they be Christian, Muslim and other faiths that oppose homosexual activity.

“They might refuse if part of the followup treatment is to make the person comfortable in the alternative lifestyle they may have been forced into,” Pauls said.

You would expect that child services professionals would be making very sure every kid rescued from this sort of thing, not just the gay ones, knows in their heart that they aren’t to blame for what they were made to do.   Every kid was forced into it.   There is no “may have” about it.   But there’s something else going on in this woman’s line of questioning.   Something those of you reading this who haven’t been fighting this fight for so long may be missing here.   Homosexuals you see, don’t reproduce, they recruit.   There are no gay kids, only heterosexual kids that were abused by homosexuals and “turned”.   So really every gay kid was forced into that “alternative lifestyle”.   See how that works?

We are not denying these kids services, we are denying they are gay.   And these children need rescuing too…from the homosexual agenda.   So the religious institutions providing services to exploited children need to be able to tell those kids that Change Is Possible.   For God sakes don’t make them comfortable with being turned into homosexuals. Tell them they are not homosexual, that their homosexuality is only the damage their masters inflicted upon them.   And never mind this might only make them even more suicidal than they already were.

Those men who did this to you…they made you think you’re homosexual…but God can heal you…   And when the healing doesn’t come, when the sexual attraction to their own sex does not go away, because homosexuality is a real thing and some kids after all really are gay, what is that kid supposed to think, except that the men who sold them, and the men who exploited them, damaged them beyond repair.   Raped once by the peddlers of children, raped again by the peddlers of righteousness.   And then what do those kids do? They do what bullied gay kids do year after year after year after heartbreaking year.

And thus the safe house becomes the final nail in a little coffin that didn’t have to be, but for the ignorance, but for the unmitigated unforgivable arrogance of some theoretically devout people, who just knew they knew better than that kid’s maker what that kid was meant to be, whose arms that kid was made to be embraced by, and loved.

It’s not a bug, it’s a feature.   We can’t let them just be homosexual.   We can’t just tell them they’re loved just as they are.   Dear Lord don’t tell us we have to let them be comfortable in sin.   Better dead than that…

 

by Bruce | Link | React! (2)

October 2nd, 2013

Pistol Whipping A Dead Gay Kid Because They Can

Debunking Stephen Jimenez isn’t hard…he was involved in the ABC 20/20 whitewash of Matthew Shepard’s murder and makes the same claims here that 20/20 did years ago.   But it is necessary, not only to defend a kid who can no longer speak for himself, but because it is a trope of the anti-gay industrial complex that hate crimes against gay people are nothing the nation need concern itself with.   Nothing to see here folks…the homosexuals bring it on themselves…and even like it.   There is no pattern of violence.   Homosexuals are not being targeted.   Nothing to see.   Nothing to see…

Debunking Stephen Jimenez’s Effort To De-Gay Matthew Shepard’s Murder

Journalist Stephen Jimenez’s  The Book of Matt: Hidden Truths about the Murder of Matthew Shepard makes the bombshell claim that illicit drug use, not homophobia, was the central factor in the gay University of Wyoming student’s brutal 1998 murder.  Shepard truthers in  the  right-wing media have pounced on the book to  assail hate crime legislation and the larger push for LGBT rights. But Jimenez’s argument is tainted by its reliance on wild extrapolation, the use of highly questionable and often inconsistent sources,  paranoia that critics of his work are engaged in a “cover-up” of politically sensitive truths, and the cavalier dismissal of any evidence that runs contrary to  his central thesis.

Go read the whole thing…you are going to be hearing more about it soon. His book comes out on the anniversary of the murder because that is the perfect time to spit in the faces of people who are still appalled at what happened that night, and determined to put an end to the hatred that fueled it. Jimenez and his soul brother Andrew Sullivan need everyone to stop making such a big deal out of one little gay kid because, perhaps for different reasons, perhaps not, they think it ridiculous.There’s a nugget in this article that I hadn’t understood before, which might explain Sullivan’s need to whitewash Shepard’s murder…

For an author trying to make the case that homophobia played no role in Shepard’s murder, his killer’s use of crude, anti-gay language would seem to pose a significant problem. Not so, Jimenez assures us. McKinney – who described himself as a “drunk homofobick [sic]” in a letter written from prison – was merely trying to imitate the thug image of the gangsta rappers he admired, according to Jimenez. This explanation  is  just as implausible as Jimenez’s bizarre speculation that President Bill Clinton spoke out on Shepard’s murder and championed hate crime legislation in order to divert public attention from the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

(Emphasis mine). So it’s about Sullivan’s Clinton hatred again.   Or back when the 20/20 episode was production it was, and now he’s just sticking to it because it’s out there, and anyway, isn’t all this outrage about what happened to a little twink a bit overwrought? Sullivan has always been an outspoken critic of hate crime laws, and the narrative that hate played any role that night in Laramie had to be debunked.   Because…liberals.

There is nothing mysterious or hidden about the murder of Matthew Shepard. The trial transcripts themselves show clearly, convincingly and overwhelmingly that Shepard not only did not know his killers, but that they beat the 112 pound Shepard mercilessly to the brink of death precisely because he was gay.   Some have said, a tad more plausibly, it was merely a robbery gone bad. But they targeted him because he was gay, and I have been to Laramie, I have driven the route that McKinney and Henderson took as they drove Shepard out of town to the isolated place where they tied him to a deer fence and beat him…I drove it at night around the same time…and I promise you that if you do the same you will, if you are even slightly open to the evidence, come to the only possible conclusion: that they had more than robbery on their minds on their way to the killing place.

Who can say why some people prefer their comfortable conceits to reality. Stephen Jimenez may simply be a publicity seeking asswipe. Or he and Andrew Sullivan may really believe that the facts in front of one’s nose are merely a veneer behind which the hidden conspiracies and plots that really move human events lurk. Perhaps they find the idea that the beating death of a pretty gay boy might genuinely shock anyone ridiculous, the thinking being Shepard was a little twink who went looking for rough trade and got what was coming to him. He’d already allowed himself to be raped once didn’t he? Whatever the motivation, ask yourself who is deeper in the human gutter, the knuckle-dragging killers who hated or the respectable upright whitewashers of hate.

by Bruce | Link | React!


I’ll Take ‘Who Poisoned The Well’ For $1000 Alex…

This, from Der Spiegel this morning…

German Press Review on US Government Shutdown

“What Washington currently offers up is a spectacle, but one in which the spectators feel more like crying,” writes the conservative daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.”Because Republicans and Democrats, House and Senate, Congress and president could not agree on a stop-gap budget, hundreds of thousands of federal employees were sent on involuntary leave and many agencies were forced to shut down,” continues the editorial. “The main actors in this dispute, which brings together many factors, both ideological and political, took a huge risk and, unhindered, proceeded to validate everyone who ever accused the political establishment in Washington of being rotten to the core — by driving the world power into a budgetary state of emergency. The public is left wondering how things could have been allowed to get to this point and why there is so much poison in the system.

(Emphasis mine…)   Poison in the system…did you ask…?


I became an American citizen only so I could own some U.S. TV stations…

Oh…I dunno…

by Bruce | Link | React!

September 11th, 2013

Still Conscience Undetectable

To: andrew@andrewsullivan.com
Subject: Putting Out Another Cigarette In Matt Shepard’s Body

Okay…I’m done with you. Finally. It looked like you grew a conscience after the Bush years but really you haven’t.

There is nothing mysterious or unexplained or hidden about what happened in Laramie that night. It’s all in the court transcripts and the news record of the days following the murder. This degenerate smear that he was having sex with his killers is appalling, especially considering what is in the fucking court record.

It’s so simple even you could get it. They asked him if he could read their license plate. This is according to their own statements. Why would that be necessary if he already knew them.

Look at it. No…really look at it. But that’s assuming you want to. That’s assuming striking out at the liberal menace isn’t still so much of an obsession with you that you’re perfectly willing to help others smear a murdered gay kid to do it.

Cancel my subscription. Do not automatically renew it or I will go to my credit card company and tell them you did it without my authorization. You have no conscience. You don’t. You cannot be trusted to tell the truth, and I have no use for an untrustworthy source of news Or opinion.


Bruce Garrett
Baltimore, Maryland

by Bruce | Link | React!


Knock, Knock. Who’s There? False Dilemma…

Surely one of them is an honest man…

Florida Police Chief: Either George Zimmerman Or His Lawyer Is Not Telling The Truth

Not necessarily.   George says he didn’t have his gun on his person.   His (ex) lawyer says he did, but he didn’t pull it out and wave it around.   I think there’s room here for another fairly obvious possibility.

by Bruce | Link | React!

August 25th, 2013

They’re Not All Closet Cases

It’s a stereotype of homophobes that they’re closet homosexuals, acting out of fear of discovery and/or self loathing.   And we’ve all certainly seen evidence in recent years that it’s often true.   But it isn’t always.

This came across my Facebook stream this morning…

Anti-LGBT columnist warns men: Lesbians will have your children and make you slaves

The Council for Marriage Policy (CMP), a Christian anti-LGBT group that is a division of the right-wing Renew America PAC, issued a frantic warning on Friday that if same sex marriage becomes legal in all 50 states, lesbians will trick gay and straight men into fathering their children and turn them into economic slaves. According to Right Wing Watch, the 37-pragraph column was written by CMP president David R. Usher and was entitled “Our last chance to save traditional marriage.”

On the face of it this is a rant about same-sex marriage, taken to extreme right wing dystopian fantasies.   But look closer.

Usher’s dystopian screed warned that the Supreme Court will create multiple classes of marriage. In a section called “Class 1: Mother-Mother marriages,” he predicted that “[w]hen two women marry, it is a three-way contract among two women and the government. Most women will bear children by men outside the marriage – often by pretending they are using birth control when they are not.”

Gay men, he said, will have the worst time of it under legalized same sex marriage because “[i]n most cases, these men will become un-consenting ‘fathers’ by reproductive entrapment,” although how the devious Class-1 lesbians will accomplish this is left to the reader’s imagination.

I find his concern touching.   But I don’t think what he’s suggesting there is that lesbians will offer to be surrogate mothers for gay male couples and then back out of the deal once they become pregnant.   He’s saying there that they’ll lure gay men into having sex with them.

Now, we gay males are not all perfect Kinsey 6’s, and a lot of us have tried desperately over the course of our lives to be straight, often with hostile clergymen and/or family members pressuring us into it. It isn’t that a homosexual man can’t have sex with women, it’s that he’d much rather have it with men.   But the decent humane society is one that encourages self honesty, trustworthiness, and a habit of truth seeking and truth telling in its own.   The decent society also treats its women as the equal of its men, and this is what I think Usher has a problem with.   It isn’t homosexuality or even lesbianism specifically.

Usher writes…

Men will be forced to labor for the economic benefit of marriages between women – marriages men have been “redlined” out of – by the choice of two women who married with intention to have children by men outside the marriage. This approaches the definition of slavery – and perhaps sexual trafficking or bondage

It’s a crude stereotype that gay men are gay because they’re afraid of women. I am not afraid of women nor do I hate them, they were just never on my radar the way they are for a straight guy.   For most of us, gay and straight, sexual desire is what makes life sweet and we love and cherish the ones that do that to us.   But as some never forgive their libidos for making them gay, and go on a never ending warpath against The Homosexual as a proxy for beating up on themselves, some straight guys never forgive their libidos for giving women power over them.

Usher might well be a closet case but I suspect he’s a straight male supremacist who really hates how a pretty girl can make him all hot and bothered. The homophobia of men like that is really misogyny; gay males draw his contempt for making themselves into woman. That his libido recoils at the thought of having sex with another man makes him feel justified in that contempt.   But really, that contempt, or fear, or loathing, or all of it mixed together, is directed at women.

Usher writes;

“Progressive terminology morphed from “gay marriage” to “same-sex marriage” over the past five years because the feminist power-agenda is not attached to orientation. The feminist goal has always been to create an institution where any two women can marry each other, have children out of wedlock, and force individuals who cannot be part of the marriage to support it economically, with government as a statutory guarantor.”

Look at that…really look at it.   This isn’t about lesbians…it’s not about homosexuality…it’s about women.

[Edited a tad for clarity…]

by Bruce | Link | React! (1)

May 21st, 2013

France Awaken!

Via Huffington Post…

Dominique Venner committed suicide on Tuesday in front of the altar of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. The death of the 78-year-old essayist and historian sparked numerous reactions from French nationalists.

Several executives and members of the country’s far-right National Front party took to Twitter to praise Venner. Directly referencing Venner’s last blog post, National Front party leader Marine Le Pen called the writer’s act an “eminently political” gesture destined to “awaken the people of France.”

“All our respect to Dominique Venner whose last gesture, an eminently political one, attempted to awaken the people of France. MLP”

There is no doubt in my mind that he did it to incite violence against gay citizens and provoke a political crisis for the current government. One final grand gesture to rouse the hatred of the street, wave the bloody flag, shout to the army of the gutter that their indecision was wretched. He died for the cause of civil war against the hated Other.   In June of 1865, Edmund Ruffin, American white supremacist, ardent supporter of the Confederacy, killed himself after Lee’s surrender, wrapping himself in a confederate flag before shooting himself in the head. Venner wrapped himself in a French Catholic church.

[Update…]

Just saw this on the Christian Science Monitor site..

Hours after the suicide, a message apparently written by Mr. Venner was read by a friend on a conservative radio station: “I believe it is necessary to sacrifice myself to break with the lethargy that is overwhelming us,” the friend read on the air. “I am killing myself to awaken slumbering consciences.”

Yes…that was what this was all about.   France Awaken!

by Bruce | Link | React!

February 27th, 2013

No…I Will Not Stand Side-By-Side With The Likes Of You…

A one time shooting buddy of mine offhandedly remarked that my support of gun control democrats over right to keep and bear arms republicans   was, of course, all about my favoring sex and my sexual orientation over my right to self defense.   I countered as I usually do when that comes up, simply by stating that while I think a lot of gun control rhetoric is simplistic and naive at best, at least it’s grounded in one basic fact, that guns are dangerous, whereas getting whipped up in a hysteria over homosexuality not only makes no sense whatsoever, by attacking people’s ability to love and accept love from another you’re actually making civilization that much harder to sustain.   To nurture civilization, nurture things in its people like love, sympathy, trust, kindness. A little more love, or for that matter even a little more carefree happy sex, would probably go a long way toward making this poor angry world a much more peaceful one.   If I have to come down on one side of it, I will come down on the side of love, Every Time.

But there is also this…

Larry Pratt Agrees Race War Will Pit ‘Christian, Heterosexual White Haves’ Against ‘Black Muslim and/or Atheist…Have-Nots’

Last week, we reported that Larry Pratt of Gun Owners of America joined conservative talk show host Stan Solomon to warn about President Obama’s alleged plans to incite violence and bring about a race war against white Americans.

I can’t begin to describe how much I despise it that people like this man have so thoroughly identified their cheapshit racism and hatreds with gun ownership.   I can appreciate how it is that bigots and thugs like guns.   But in a decent world they’d be keeping their mouths shut about it for the same reason Klansmen kept their faces hidden.   No sense in telling the cops who to talk to when there’s been a beating or a lynching.

Behold, the human gutter…

Later, Solomon mused that “the best thing that can happen to a liberal is to be mugged,” and wondered why Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-MD) still supports gun control after she was mugged in 1995, to which Pratt replied: “Well, maybe she liked it.”

There’s the other reason I’ll stand with the democrats on this issue, even if it means they go further than I’d care to see on it. This element needs to be thoroughly defeated, humiliated, at the polls, so we can set about building a more peaceful and prosperous tomorrow.   The root of violence, the root I put it to you of all criminal behavior, is right there, in that man’s sneering contempt for a women who was mugged.

by Bruce | Link | React!


Religion As The Mirror In Which You See God

The author Mary Renault once said (and I’m paraphrasing now because I don’t have that exact quote) that all politics, like sex, was merely a reflection of the person within, and that if you are mean and selfish and cruel it came out in your sex life and in your politics when what really mattered is you aren’t the sort of person who behaves like that.   To that I would only add religion.   If you are mean and selfish and cruel it will come out in your religion too, when what really matters is you aren’t the sort of person who behaves like that…

New study raises questions about religion as deterrent against criminal behaviour

A provocative new study is challenging assumptions about the deterrent effect of religion on criminal behaviour.

The U.S. study found that through “purposeful distortion or genuine ignorance,” hardcore criminals often co-opt religious doctrine to justify or further their crimes.

Among the interviewees…

A 25-year-old criminal nicknamed “Cool” said he always does a “quick little prayer” before committing a crime in order to “stay cool with Jesus.” As long as you ask for forgiveness, Jesus has to give it to you, he said.

He also suggested that if a crime is committed against another “bad person,” such as a dope dealer or child molester, “then it don’t count against me because it’s like I’m giving punishment to them for Jesus.”

The interviews show that criminals will often employ “elaborate and creative rationalizations” to reconcile their belief in God and their serial offending, the researchers concluded.

As you read this article it isn’t hard to hear in the voices of these criminals every justification the religious right uses to prey on other people.   Here is the voice of predatory christianism as if spoken on a minimalist stage.   Strip the frippery away and you have a prison gang.   How is it that murderers, robbers and thugs don’t see themselves that way?   Well, don’t blame religion for it either.   Humans have an amazing capacity to see only what we want to see…to lie to ourselves even when it is killing us, rather than admit an uncomfortable truth. Yes, actually…I’m a dick… The religious right uses Christianity the way a thief uses a crowbar.   Here in that study, are the professionals.

by Bruce | Link | React! (2)

February 20th, 2013

That Pleasure You Feel While Victimizing Others That You Keep Mistaking For A Sense Of Humor

The thing sociopaths never get is the difference between laughing at the powerful and laughing at the oppressed.   Apparently some Colorado state representative spoke up recently in favor of a bill banning the carrying of guns on college campuses. Now I happen to think that’s a perfectly reasonable position for everyone, gun owners and second amendment believers like myself to take.   I also understand perfectly that the likes of the NRA and other Kultur Krieger would howl bloody murder over it for reasons that have essentially nothing to do with the ability of people to defend themselves from violence.

To the extent that any argument is being made here, it’s that guns in the hands of women can prevent rape, therefore banning guns from college campuses makes rape more likely to happen to young women, therefore if you believe in banning guns on college campuses you must think rape isn’t so bad really.   The level of cheap bar stool demagoguery here is breathtaking.   But wait…there’s more…

Naturally the right wing noise machine kicks into gear and tries to make this Colorado state representative into some kind of liberal Todd Akin.   The problem with doing that when you never saw anything wrong with Akin’s crack about legitimate rape in the first place completely escapes them…

#LiberalTips2AvoidRape: The Most Horrible Hashtag Of The Week Thus Far, Explained

There’s this new hashtag #LiberalTips2AvoidRape that’s now on its second day of trending on Twitter: A really, really great expression of our shared humanity, and of the possibilities of feel-good, thoughtful conservative satire… this is not…

Satire, as every political cartoonist knows, is a powerful weapon against the brutal and the ignorant.   And never more so than when the brutal and ignorant try wielding it themselves.   It’s like one of those magical swords in fantasy stories that turns on its unworthy bearer.   Behold…

If you have the stomach for a torrent of rape jokes you should go browse that hashtag on Twitter.   Pay attention to what’s going on here.   This isn’t about guns.   This isn’t about the second amendment.   This isn’t about the ability of people to defend themselves from violence…

The ability of the common man and woman, and particularly of the weak and vulnerable, to be secure in their homes and their streets, to defend themselves from violence, is an eminently liberal concern.   That is not what the reactionary right is about.   They vigorously thump for their own right to self determination and self defense and sneer when the powerless and outcast assert those same rights.   This is about culture war.   Nothing else.

Here’s how some liberals are responding to the hashtag…

That’s the right approach.   And in that spirit I have some of my own.

#LiberalTips2AvoidRape: Focus on putting violent offenders in jail, not pot smokers

#LiberalTips2AvoidRape: Remove judges that think women provoke rape by dressing slutty and walking alone

#LiberalTips2AvoidRape: Teach boys their manhood does not depend on their ability to dominate women

#LiberalTips2AvoidRape: Prosecute those who protect rapists from the law, even if they happen to be Catholic priests or the Pope

#LiberalTips2AvoidRape: Fire any politician who even utters the words “transvaginal probe” in the context of an abortion bill.

by Bruce | Link | React!

February 14th, 2013

They Make Valentine’s Day Lawn Cigars?

This just popped up in my Facebook stream…

Why how very helpful!   Yes, I’ll just do that Facebook.   Happy Valentine’s Day my dear friends.   When do I get to meet Robbie?

Hahahahahaha…

I know…I know…   People who look like that…

by Bruce | Link | React!

February 13th, 2013

We’re The Victims Here, Not The Kids We’re Spitting On…

…because after all, they deserve to be spat on…they’re homosexuals.

Homosexuals don’t love, they just have sex. It always comes down to this.   It is the one unmovable unshakeable belief more essential to the faith than the Resurrection.   Homosexuals don’t love, they just have sex.   Behold…

“dates”.   “dates”.   “dates”.   The scare quotes say it all.

This is the mindset.   You will not reach it with reason or appeals to sympathy.   It is simply incapable of seeing the people for the homosexuals.   In its regard, comparing what homosexuals do with the higher, nobler feelings of love that heterosexual couples experience is an insult, a profane slur, an attack on our very humanity, on love itself.   They are not attacking anyone, they are defending ourselves from attack by those who sink to practice the most degrading form of base animalistic lust imaginable which, by demanding that it be regarded as the equal of normal heterosexuality, can only drag civilization itself into the gutter.   “dates”.   “dates”.   “dates”.

Meanwhile

The Superintendent of Schools who oversees the Indiana teacher who told a local news station that gays have no purpose in life is supporting the teacher’s exercise of her “First Amendment rights.” Dr. Mark A. Baker, who is in charge of Sullivan County’s public schools system, the Northeast School Corporation, released a statement noting that special needs teacher Diana Medley ”at no time was … representing the Northeast School Corporation,” but indicating she had the right to publicly state her beliefs, presumably without endangering her position.

I see.   So if she told that reporter her students were a bunch of retards you’d stand up for her right to publicly state that belief.

by Bruce | Link | React!

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