"Mexicans who come here contribute nothing...," I hear the Rightniks cry. That is not true, especially not true just because they aren't paying income taxes. I believe the working-man's term for it is "sweat equity" which they pay into our economy by working very hard for less than a citizen must be paid, which enables the employer to sell his produce at a profit without making it too expensive for the working American to buy. Those are some very hard dues those people are paying, harder than most Americans would rather have to pay than their taxes. We should open the border fully and marry Mexico, not keep her on her knees at gunpoint at the fence.
You think that is naïve? You are so right, of course. The real American way would be to clear away a DMZ (De-Mexicanized-Zone), build a Tortilla Curtain, guard it with State and Federal guns and robot military camera airplanes, and start shooting those invading criminal drug terrorists, and their family members they are so cowardly hiding behind. As we did with Japanese in WWII, we could then round up anyone suspected of likely being loyal to the Mexican insurgents, and put them in a chain of residence and evaluation camps. Call it "Sheriff Joe's Gulag," in honor of that law enforcement hero whose head was found on a bullfighter’s pike. Halliburton and Blackwater could be paid on a DOD contract to operate it all, which would provide jobsjobsjobs for thousands of good Christian boys in uniform, khaki, green, black, and blue.
Most Mexican immigrants, legal or not, work harder in a week for what little they get than the megabux desk-jockey works in six months of trading in other people's money. You make it illegal for them to work, then call them lowlife when they go into crime. They risk their lives to work as dirt-grubbers to feed their children and then you cram them ten deep into prison cells where they are forged into criminal cadres of extreme anti-American homicidal fanatics, seriously dangerous people, and rightly so. As "a free-country movement of charitable Christians" the high-horse knuckle-whackers of the Bible-Right, well-intentioned or not, are hypocrites, assholes, and fools.
Monday, October 31, 2011
Friday, October 28, 2011
Why Not Vote Social Conservative?
“Social Conservatives” are good and sincere people, but they are the puritan crusaders, prohibitionists, finger-waggers, torch and pitchfork witch-hunters, censors of obscenity and of heresy, intolerant of perverts and false doctrines, each a self-justified moralist judge and ready executioner of the deserving sinner, likely motivated by a narrow but extreme religious viewpoint. Whatever you think personal liberty means, these are people who likely will religiously strive to prevent you from exercising yours, likely as not in the name of protecting your morality from self-abuse by license to sin, and protecting your children from the trauma of seeing you do it.
A century and a half ago, Lysander Spooner wrote eloquently about the folly of dealing with vice through enforced prohibition. In the 1930’s we recognized the folly of creating a huge and profitable criminal class by the prohibition of alcohol, and that was repealed. Later the pragmatic on both sides of the law recognized the profitability of maintaining prohibition of many other such highly desired substances and elements of various vices. The consumer suffers from the actions of both sides in the wars on sin, but the street money for it and the budget money against it both flows.
Therein lies the unforseen horror. The fact prohibition is profitable for both the suppliers of the desired commodity and those who enforce the laws against them does not change the folly of what is being done, but multiplies it. Both sides soon create in the other the thing they fear, and everyone suffers the terrible destructive effects of each trying to resist and destroy the other. The damage done far outweighs whatever could have been caused by the prohibited substance or practice.
If dancing is outlawed as something sinful, a vice, because it leads to fucking, soon only outlaws will be dancing, and the lawful who succumb to their sinful nature will kill to fuck. Even one such killing will be taken as proof the sins of dancing and fucking should be even more rigorously outlawed. The dance halls move underground and become more expensive, and more and more terpsichorian fornicators are hunted down, tried and appealed, imprisoned in huge new facilities, and hanged. The monster feeds upon itself, and grows.
Whatever you think of Barack Obama, the political ideology of the Republican Party, or the petty arguments of Congress over which of them gets all the money, it would be damaging to all of our personal and civil liberties to vote for any candidate who advertises himself or herself as a “Social Conservative.”
A century and a half ago, Lysander Spooner wrote eloquently about the folly of dealing with vice through enforced prohibition. In the 1930’s we recognized the folly of creating a huge and profitable criminal class by the prohibition of alcohol, and that was repealed. Later the pragmatic on both sides of the law recognized the profitability of maintaining prohibition of many other such highly desired substances and elements of various vices. The consumer suffers from the actions of both sides in the wars on sin, but the street money for it and the budget money against it both flows.
Therein lies the unforseen horror. The fact prohibition is profitable for both the suppliers of the desired commodity and those who enforce the laws against them does not change the folly of what is being done, but multiplies it. Both sides soon create in the other the thing they fear, and everyone suffers the terrible destructive effects of each trying to resist and destroy the other. The damage done far outweighs whatever could have been caused by the prohibited substance or practice.
If dancing is outlawed as something sinful, a vice, because it leads to fucking, soon only outlaws will be dancing, and the lawful who succumb to their sinful nature will kill to fuck. Even one such killing will be taken as proof the sins of dancing and fucking should be even more rigorously outlawed. The dance halls move underground and become more expensive, and more and more terpsichorian fornicators are hunted down, tried and appealed, imprisoned in huge new facilities, and hanged. The monster feeds upon itself, and grows.
Whatever you think of Barack Obama, the political ideology of the Republican Party, or the petty arguments of Congress over which of them gets all the money, it would be damaging to all of our personal and civil liberties to vote for any candidate who advertises himself or herself as a “Social Conservative.”
Sunday, October 23, 2011
Just What Do You Pledge?
This came by my email recently:
Aw, horse chester. What high-horse blowhardism. The right-wing extreme certainly does not support these premises, for all their applauding the iconifying of them, or their characterizing themselves as loyal patriots, honorable mutineers taking back The Ship Of State from a rogue Admiralty. In fact, their behavior is quite the opposite.
What do those words we children were taught to chant actually say?
A pledge is more than just a promise, it is an irreversable act of submission, as in formal marriage or joining a brotherhood of bikers. To “pledge allegiance” means to take one as your liege, that is your King, and so to faithfully serve – not to judge, not to obstruct or bring down, but to give fealty, obedience. “The Flag” is obviously not literal, but what it stands for does not mean a body of particular ideas you choose to agree with or not like an armchair barrister, it means the seat of authority. Especially in a Republic, that means the ones elected call the shots, and you obey whether you voted for him or not, whether he orders you to fight or to farm, and whether he wears your color hat or not. You do not follow command on ship, or refuse to, because of how you feel about the Admiral, or where he orders the ship to sail, but because his authority is what is represented by his Flag, and that you have pledged to serve. Personally, having been both a hippie and a Marine, I prefer a more libertine than authoritarian status quo, but that is what the words mean.
Next it says, “The United States Of America.” That means the “one nation indivisible” and not one particular State, or one particular Party. That national organization, that body of definitions and agreements, is the Republic for which the Flag stands, the legal corporate national entity which exists as defined by the Constitution and the Laws. It is that which we loosely refer to as “the government” or “Washington” including the Congress, the Supreme Court, the Treasury, all the other agencies and bureaus, the lands and properties it owns, its accounts and assets, its population of citizens, and the Presidency, which is the seat of the Flag. You pledge allegiance to that Flag of that Republic as an existing thing if you pledge in reality, and not to some fantasy ideal you would imagine to be better, or to some faction within it you presume to define it apart from all the rest of us.
“Under God” would seem universally redundant, if we presume all of the created universe is under whatever we mean by God. The obvious error of the Christian right or any religious group lies in presuming that means God as defined by their establishment of religion, and the government should therefore in some way be subject to the dogma, doctrine, scripture, or influence of persons of power in that religion, that is, “loyalty to the higher authority” of their own interpretation and enforcement of God’s Law. It is what the First Amendment was written to prevent, and what the Dominionists of the evangelical Christian faction of the hard right are deliberately and quite openly doing.
As for “liberty” it is abundantly clear the Social Conservatives of the right wing would define that to be liberty for all to walk freely within the lines they draw, and liberty for them to draw those lines where they will, in accordance with morality as they define it. Those who object they declare to be seeking not liberty to choose, but license to sin. For its connotations of promiscuity, the word liberal itself has become an unexamined label of wrongness among the rightniks, with a terrible dark stereotype presumed to all upon whom they stick it, like nigger or commie. What’s wrong with liberals? Duuuh, Pelosi!
Across the political spectrum from right to left, and from authoritarian to libertarian, good people all sincerely wish for “justice for all” but every one of us can easily point to injustice somewhere in that system of agreements to which we pledge our allegiance, and within which we all no doubt sincerely hope to accomplish some good. To suggest that right wing extremists somehow have the edge on any of these things is unfortunately benighted. As easily as they say others are not “real Christians” the right-wing extremists are able to say others are not “real Americans” – and somehow they believe only themselves are either of those, and therefore only themselves qualified to make the decisions and laws of a Christian America, and by God, they will defend that with their 2nd Amendment rights.
I am not saying I support fundamentalist obedience to elected leaders, or there should not be an active confrontational dialectic in the democratic process, but only pointing out that supporting the decisions of the elected officials of our government, whether that’s how you’d have it done or not, is what Allegiance to the Flag literally means. It is what those words mean that the right-wing extremists are most objecting to under this administration, and most openly refusing to actually do, for all their touted oaths of allegiance, patriotism, and duty.
Americans who do not knowingly and wholeheartedly support the agenda of their blatantly sectarian coup de etad are advised to be prudently wary before voting for one of them, no matter whom they oppose, or how they wave Old Glory.
James Nathan Post
Aw, horse chester. What high-horse blowhardism. The right-wing extreme certainly does not support these premises, for all their applauding the iconifying of them, or their characterizing themselves as loyal patriots, honorable mutineers taking back The Ship Of State from a rogue Admiralty. In fact, their behavior is quite the opposite.
What do those words we children were taught to chant actually say?
A pledge is more than just a promise, it is an irreversable act of submission, as in formal marriage or joining a brotherhood of bikers. To “pledge allegiance” means to take one as your liege, that is your King, and so to faithfully serve – not to judge, not to obstruct or bring down, but to give fealty, obedience. “The Flag” is obviously not literal, but what it stands for does not mean a body of particular ideas you choose to agree with or not like an armchair barrister, it means the seat of authority. Especially in a Republic, that means the ones elected call the shots, and you obey whether you voted for him or not, whether he orders you to fight or to farm, and whether he wears your color hat or not. You do not follow command on ship, or refuse to, because of how you feel about the Admiral, or where he orders the ship to sail, but because his authority is what is represented by his Flag, and that you have pledged to serve. Personally, having been both a hippie and a Marine, I prefer a more libertine than authoritarian status quo, but that is what the words mean.
Next it says, “The United States Of America.” That means the “one nation indivisible” and not one particular State, or one particular Party. That national organization, that body of definitions and agreements, is the Republic for which the Flag stands, the legal corporate national entity which exists as defined by the Constitution and the Laws. It is that which we loosely refer to as “the government” or “Washington” including the Congress, the Supreme Court, the Treasury, all the other agencies and bureaus, the lands and properties it owns, its accounts and assets, its population of citizens, and the Presidency, which is the seat of the Flag. You pledge allegiance to that Flag of that Republic as an existing thing if you pledge in reality, and not to some fantasy ideal you would imagine to be better, or to some faction within it you presume to define it apart from all the rest of us.
“Under God” would seem universally redundant, if we presume all of the created universe is under whatever we mean by God. The obvious error of the Christian right or any religious group lies in presuming that means God as defined by their establishment of religion, and the government should therefore in some way be subject to the dogma, doctrine, scripture, or influence of persons of power in that religion, that is, “loyalty to the higher authority” of their own interpretation and enforcement of God’s Law. It is what the First Amendment was written to prevent, and what the Dominionists of the evangelical Christian faction of the hard right are deliberately and quite openly doing.
As for “liberty” it is abundantly clear the Social Conservatives of the right wing would define that to be liberty for all to walk freely within the lines they draw, and liberty for them to draw those lines where they will, in accordance with morality as they define it. Those who object they declare to be seeking not liberty to choose, but license to sin. For its connotations of promiscuity, the word liberal itself has become an unexamined label of wrongness among the rightniks, with a terrible dark stereotype presumed to all upon whom they stick it, like nigger or commie. What’s wrong with liberals? Duuuh, Pelosi!
Across the political spectrum from right to left, and from authoritarian to libertarian, good people all sincerely wish for “justice for all” but every one of us can easily point to injustice somewhere in that system of agreements to which we pledge our allegiance, and within which we all no doubt sincerely hope to accomplish some good. To suggest that right wing extremists somehow have the edge on any of these things is unfortunately benighted. As easily as they say others are not “real Christians” the right-wing extremists are able to say others are not “real Americans” – and somehow they believe only themselves are either of those, and therefore only themselves qualified to make the decisions and laws of a Christian America, and by God, they will defend that with their 2nd Amendment rights.
I am not saying I support fundamentalist obedience to elected leaders, or there should not be an active confrontational dialectic in the democratic process, but only pointing out that supporting the decisions of the elected officials of our government, whether that’s how you’d have it done or not, is what Allegiance to the Flag literally means. It is what those words mean that the right-wing extremists are most objecting to under this administration, and most openly refusing to actually do, for all their touted oaths of allegiance, patriotism, and duty.
Americans who do not knowingly and wholeheartedly support the agenda of their blatantly sectarian coup de etad are advised to be prudently wary before voting for one of them, no matter whom they oppose, or how they wave Old Glory.
James Nathan Post
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