Phil Ochs once told an interviewer he was “born in Moscow in 1917.” In fact, he entered the world via El Paso, Texas in 1940, but neither truth in particular nor reality in general ever came easily for Ochs, the preeminent troubadour of the New Left and an ardent SDS and Yippie camp follower. A remarkably gifted songwriter and political propagandist, on the one hand he was known to sing the praises of Mao Zedong, Idi Amin, the Viet Cong and Charles Manson, while also admitting he probably would be shot for singing his kind of protest music in a country like China.
Phil Ochs was an ass. By the time he was born the beneficiaries of the Russian Revolution had already amassed a body count that rivaled the one Hitler was just starting to pile up, and those already massive mountains of those murdered by the commies would get bigger and bigger, even before Mao started his own mountain range of corpses even as the American left went from the old fashion for Stalinism to Maoism. I was there, I remember the enthusiasm of such atheist lefties for Mao, some of the old lefties of my age cohort still yearn for the days when Progressive Labor destroyed SDS out of Maoist principles. In China the cultural revolution was killing what is estimated as between two and ten million people.
Given that list of his enthusiasms above, compiled by one of his online admirers, I wouldn't be surprised if he hadn't offed himself if he'd have supported Trump. Loads of old lefty leftists took the baby step into fascism and Nazism, that started way back in the 1930s and continues today. Loads of the guys who named names for HUAC and Joe McCarthy had been full fledged Party members. I don't have any problem imagining any of them then or now taking that baby step into another anti-democratic ideology, what Marxism is by definition. Look at how the goddamned Nation Magazine tells us we need to be nice to Mr. Putin, the foremost sponsor of fascism and neo-Nazism, today.
The "new (now very old) left" SDS, the Yippies, total failures that should be left on the dust heap of history. They never produced anything but the Nixon presidency. Their antics probably delayed the end of America's war in Southeast Asia.
Showing posts sorted by relevance for query phil ochs. Sort by date Show all posts
Showing posts sorted by relevance for query phil ochs. Sort by date Show all posts
Thursday, August 16, 2018
Thursday, August 25, 2016
Hate Mail - "Why Don't You Just Not Look At It"
How typical of the preening, narcissistic, materialist-atheist, pseudo-liberal to consider what I objected to in the promotion of internalized hatred and the bashing, humiliation and abuse of gay boys and men as if it were a mere matter of personal distaste for something, ignoring the fact that what is promoted actually does harm real people, whether or not you see it or know the people so abused. No, merely not looking and ignoring that this is being promoted and, beyond any rational ability to deny it, modeling the behavior of people through appealing to both their narcissistic, egotistical feelings of supremacy and finding sexual arousal in hurting other people is too easy and entirely inadequate.
This is the American Firster way of dealing with the advocacy and the practice of fascistic violence somewhere out of sight, treat it as if the personal comfort of those bothered by it was the paramount consideration for you to have, pretending that it isn't there. We're talking about the abuse of real people in real life, not going to a bad movie or listening to a bad dance band. Though, considering the content of what's being objected to, the egotism of it, perhaps its not surprising that its champions would consider that to be a rational or adequate response to it.
If I were going to deal with only what's easy, what is not problematic, the common received consensus I wouldn't bother writing to post it, at all. If I were going to do that there wouldn't be any point to it because that's already done in things that are published for profit, either to sell magazines or by those who put up ads and links to Amazon. But, really, for someone who thinks the way to deal with things you don't like is to not read them, you spend a lot of time here looking at stuff you don't like and whining that it's been said.
I don't want my LGBT family members, including myself, to act in the ways taught and encouraged by pornography, or the straight ones. I don't want any of them abused and used in that way. The difference between us might be I don't want anyone to either be destroyed in that way or to be the people who give into any encouragement to act that way strongly enough to look at that awful stuff to know what's being advocated. Not people I merely know about, not people who I don't even know are alive and at risk for that. It's not all about us. It's not all about me. It's certainly not all about you.
Update: Let me guess, when Phil Ochs sang "A Small Circle of Friends" you thought the guy explaining his indifference really had a valid point. That's essentially what you're arguing this is about, its OK because only the people it's going to hurt and their small circle of friends need to care about it. And it's exactly the attitude to that the post-feminist "left" including so many "feminists" have gotten seduced into whenever sex is involved. In fact Ochs got suckered into it by the parts of the media that wanted to peddle smut - with no concern for real people whose lives were destroyed by that industry - as you can hear from the lyrics. It was such a groovy position to hold in the later 60s, before those second-wave feminists ruined the boys' fun. Hey, he wasn't someone who was being pimped to whoever wanted to beat him up while they corn holed him, infected him, wore away his soul or crushed it. So much for the educational value of pop music. Maybe the latter days of Ochs' life, before his suicide, were worn away by the hypocrisies and idiocies of materialism posing as an adequate substitute for real liberalism.
I wonder why Phil Ochs' creative imagination didn't extend to wondering how the man who stabbed Kitty Genovese got the idea that it was OK to do that to women, how that was and is a predictable result of seeing women as objects that men can do with what they like, exactly the kind of thing that pornography teaches. When Winston Moseley had been arrested for theft he had a stash of pornography in his car.
But maybe partying with guys like William Kunstler diverted him from making that intellectual and personal connection. I remember those times really well. Boys didn't think much about the consequences for women unless something like reading about it in The Times forced them to and The Times didn't cover it much. Straight boys were pretty much a small circle of friends interested in what interested them. Even the ones who sang about that in their artistic life as a lefty protest singer-songwriter.
This is the American Firster way of dealing with the advocacy and the practice of fascistic violence somewhere out of sight, treat it as if the personal comfort of those bothered by it was the paramount consideration for you to have, pretending that it isn't there. We're talking about the abuse of real people in real life, not going to a bad movie or listening to a bad dance band. Though, considering the content of what's being objected to, the egotism of it, perhaps its not surprising that its champions would consider that to be a rational or adequate response to it.
If I were going to deal with only what's easy, what is not problematic, the common received consensus I wouldn't bother writing to post it, at all. If I were going to do that there wouldn't be any point to it because that's already done in things that are published for profit, either to sell magazines or by those who put up ads and links to Amazon. But, really, for someone who thinks the way to deal with things you don't like is to not read them, you spend a lot of time here looking at stuff you don't like and whining that it's been said.
I don't want my LGBT family members, including myself, to act in the ways taught and encouraged by pornography, or the straight ones. I don't want any of them abused and used in that way. The difference between us might be I don't want anyone to either be destroyed in that way or to be the people who give into any encouragement to act that way strongly enough to look at that awful stuff to know what's being advocated. Not people I merely know about, not people who I don't even know are alive and at risk for that. It's not all about us. It's not all about me. It's certainly not all about you.
Update: Let me guess, when Phil Ochs sang "A Small Circle of Friends" you thought the guy explaining his indifference really had a valid point. That's essentially what you're arguing this is about, its OK because only the people it's going to hurt and their small circle of friends need to care about it. And it's exactly the attitude to that the post-feminist "left" including so many "feminists" have gotten seduced into whenever sex is involved. In fact Ochs got suckered into it by the parts of the media that wanted to peddle smut - with no concern for real people whose lives were destroyed by that industry - as you can hear from the lyrics. It was such a groovy position to hold in the later 60s, before those second-wave feminists ruined the boys' fun. Hey, he wasn't someone who was being pimped to whoever wanted to beat him up while they corn holed him, infected him, wore away his soul or crushed it. So much for the educational value of pop music. Maybe the latter days of Ochs' life, before his suicide, were worn away by the hypocrisies and idiocies of materialism posing as an adequate substitute for real liberalism.
I wonder why Phil Ochs' creative imagination didn't extend to wondering how the man who stabbed Kitty Genovese got the idea that it was OK to do that to women, how that was and is a predictable result of seeing women as objects that men can do with what they like, exactly the kind of thing that pornography teaches. When Winston Moseley had been arrested for theft he had a stash of pornography in his car.
But maybe partying with guys like William Kunstler diverted him from making that intellectual and personal connection. I remember those times really well. Boys didn't think much about the consequences for women unless something like reading about it in The Times forced them to and The Times didn't cover it much. Straight boys were pretty much a small circle of friends interested in what interested them. Even the ones who sang about that in their artistic life as a lefty protest singer-songwriter.
Tuesday, May 17, 2022
"Why do you hate the ACLU so much?" Let The Counting Of The Ways Continue - Yeah, More Hate Mail
JOY REID a few days back, had a long segment on about the history of Protestant "evangelicals" and the issue of abortion in the wake of Roe v. Wade, showing what I remembered, after she reminded me, that right after Roe right-wing Protestants, who were still largely openly anti-Catholic, considered it a "Catholic issue" and they openly distanced themselves from it. She pointed out back then, as their central organizing issue opposing school integration and, more specifically, the Carter era Department of Justice Civil Rights Division going after government funding that went to the segregation academies that sprang up in the wake of that earlier decision was becoming less popular among the general public, they decided on an alliance with conservative Catholics. Though she didn't mention it, as I recall, at that time Catholics were the single largest denomination in the country. Also the reason, I fully believe, for the rise in such scum as William Barr's dad and other right-wingers joining the Catholic church, many of them openly embraced by right-wing priests, bishops and cardinals, even those with the marital-sexual history of a Newt Gingrich (just to show how sincere they are in their insistence on the traditional sexual morality they champion). The Roberts-Alito court will likely get to giving them their hearts desire of that period (and today) gutting if not outright overturning the largely dead-letter Brown decision against racial discrimination in education. They'll certainly adopt the Roberts tactic of destroying the decision while leaving its rotting carcass as a fiction to cover their shameless asses. I mean, there have been TV movies made about it so they can hardly mount a full attack on that sacred myth.
Reid also pointed out that in those latter days of widespread and growing acceptance of racial equality when even Carter's far from radical DoJ was pursuing equal justice, the lucrative central command of racist white fundamentalist Protestantism was looking for issues to rally their base to gain political power - something which they had, previously, not been so much all about - it's one of those issues, porn and its allied forms of commercial sex that this is about because it's what the hate mail comment fixated on. Maybe when my online presence is better I'll look more deeply at the pasties and g-string jurisprudence of the Supreme Court, which I would imagine could be seen as rather hilariously absurd, especially if the various amici curiae describing the "free speech right" to bump and grind in legalese can be found online.
The present day court is a direct result of the ACLU successes in opening up the way for the American media to lie for the benefit of its owners, its highly paid on-air and in print hacks, etc. Republican-fascism was born in the 1960s "free-speech-press" legal victories, freeing the media to lie to that effect. That alone is more than enough reason for me to despise a business I once contributed money to. I was as big a sucker as anyone was.
I'll go at it by pointing out that the "liberals" and "left" were played massively for suckers on that issue, first by the porn industry and its legal arm, the ACLU-"civil liberties" industry of lawyers and fundraisers, on the basis of misplaced sentimentality. The focus of that largely show-biz promoted sentimentality was "The First Amendment" and its absolutist language that "Congress shall pass no law" to tell a sleazy cigar chomping strip joint owner to tell his stable of for-show prostitutes they had to cover their nipples. Nor a city council. And the loony, ahistorical notion that that had meant that all and everything from ink on paper to strippers on stage to every depraved sex act that could be filmed or simulated on celluloid and video was to always be allowed no matter what.
I've gone into the stupendous and ignorant double-speak of that complete dope Phil Ochs both lamenting in the same song the terrible "injustice" done to the likes of Ralph Ginsburg on one hand and Kitty Genovese who was murdered by a man who admitted he was partly inspired to rape and kill by the porn the police found in his car, leading them to suspect him of that infamous but widely misrepresented murder. Ochs, like most secular lefties and too many liberals, especially those in pop-kulcha, were such huge suckers for the "free speech" industry that has, as I've continually pointed out, a. carried messages that were not only at odds with equal rights but encouraged the most brutal of inequality, b. exploited the poor and vulnerable, leading them to have short and blighted lives, c. were largely in the hands of rich, white men who were politically reactionary and certainly opposed to equal rights for women and others, for those whose real equality was the superseding legitimate business of any "liberals" or "leftists." Business that was swamped and drowned by such "free speech" and other lucrative "rights" pushed by the "civil liberties" industry.*
Worse than that, once the Republican-fascists decided they had a lot more to gain by using all of that free-speeciness" to corrupt the media to carry their propaganda than it could get by allying itself to the self-styled purity police, using the Supreme Court "free speech-press" rulings they threw them under the bus, imported the porn-merchant - fascist Rupert Murdoch to launch his fascist media here to do what it had done in Australia and Britain, etc. and Republican power, on the basis of the lies, the flagrant carrying of which the media had won for itself (and its largely white, male oligarch owners) to tell to its own financial benefit, the fascists and even neo-Nazis became the biggest fattest fans of "free speech-press" there are.
Which is why I have pointed out that the secular left and its "liberal" allies are the biggest fattest suckers in American history who got sold that line of self-defeating bullshit from the commercial media, show biz, the "civil liberties" industry who were largely financed by the big media and who financially benefited enormously from cutting the legs out from the real left, the real liberals who were all about equality, of real freedom which cannot be had except on the basis of responsible use of it so as not to impinge on the equality and legitimate freedom of others. That article I linked to from the NYT, started out with one of the old lions of the free speech-press industry lamenting how the ACLU's younger lawyers were, in many cases sacrificing that stupid "principle" of the ersatz, faux replacement of real morality for those piddling little things like opposing fascism and Nazism as they gained real power and turned back the clock to the worst days of inequality, discrimination and violent suppression of Women, Black People, People of other ethnic and religious identity, LGBTQ. Which equality those preening (well-paid) lawyers of "free speech-press" may mouth support for but whose actions and professional work has the effect of destroying and even killing.
No more benefit of the doubt for the "civil liberties" industry, the ACTUAL RESULTS of what they advocate are in and apparent with every targeted mass shooting of which there have been literally hundreds directly attributed to the results they got in court.
The old ACLU line lawyers are perfect examples of the kind of "liberalish liberalism" which has every intention, in action, of there never being real equality, real justice (especially not economic justice), real freedom on the basis of mutually practiced responsibility, they are like the "socialists" of Fabianism which was a cynical, preening attack by the wealthy against the British poor and supporters of the Brit caste system, even including the proto-Nazis like George Bernard Shaw who openly advocated the mass gassing of the underclass nine years before the Nazi party was formed and twenty-nine years before the Nazis put his Edwardian era wet dream into reality - as he openly supported Hitler as well as Stalin. I listen to some of the whining of the civil liberties hack lawyers and their media equivalent and I hear the echos of Shaw's witty advocacy of what the Nazis were tried and hanged for in the 1910s. Only without the . . . um. . "wit."
The left, here or anywhere, is all about a. equality, b. social and economic justice and equality, c. freedom in the context of MUTUALLY PRACTICED responsibility to use freedom equitably, or it is just another kind of oppressive gangsterism. The American left and some of those faux liberals has certainly had lots of phonies in it, especially in the media and show-biz. I've got no more patience with them anymore than I do for Susan Sarandon's professional let's pretend, rich white Woman bull shit.
"Free speech - free press" is not immune from the limits of rights and freedoms in real life (though not in the fictions of the law) that they are practiced responsibly and in line with equal rights or they are oppressive of someone else. And, peculiar to those particular areas of freedom and rights, TELLING THE TRUTH, or they are no more real than the fictitious "rights" erected by the gun industry, gun cultists and fanatics, duped hunters and Republican fascists elected and seated on judicial benches. Hate speech and lies are to free speech as selling semi-automatics is to "gun rights." At times, as so many recent massacres have proved, they end up with the same body counts.
To miss that while being alleged "liberals," "lefties," and merely allegedly rational professionals is rightly to be suspected as convenient pretense, none of them are as stupid as they pretend to be. The fact is any old-style ACLU lawyer who doesn't understand who they were empowering with their advocacy for the "rights" of Nazis to proselytize and gain political power and influence, pornographers to profit off of promoting the rape and abuse of Women and Children and others, is lying through their teeth. The carefulness and . . . um, "reasoning" their work contains proves they had to knew and know what they were doing. They just weren't honest about not caring about the results. No wonder it didn't bother them to get such a "right" for the media to do what they knew their clients and those who they wrote amici for openly intended to do, to destroy the real rights and lives of those they targeted.
I never would have suspected that I would look back fondly on the Attorney Generalship of Griffin Bell, that's how far this stuff has rotted. Merrick Garland and those under Obama make him seem like a Democratic AG. The bloom on the rose of the law industry dried up for me entirely in the first Judaical and Intelligence committees' hearings into the first Trump impeachment. I'm no big fat fan of lawyers these days.
* "Gun rights," the "rights" of the hard-liquor industry to advertise on TV, the "smokers rights" smoke screen rightly seen as a co-production of the tobacco industry and "civil liberties" lawyers who got money from the, the prescription drug industry "right" to directly advertise even the most dangerous and addictive products which should never have been given FDA approval, and a myriad of other money-making judicial issues for the ACLU and their ilk could, if someone like the truly honorable Sheldon Whitehouse wanted to do a multiple series expose of it, open as many eyes as his masterful exposure of Court Capture and the fossil fuel industry prevention of real climate change legislation should open. I am not capable of doing that series right now, perhaps I'll get around to it but someone with the resources of a Sheldon Whitehouse or a decent investigative journalist-lawyer could probably do far better than I could.
Friday, August 26, 2016
Using Kitty Genovese - "Where is all this coming from?"
Where it's coming from is the reaction to a post I did exactly one week ago in which I documented just a tiny fraction of the kind of pathological self-hatred of gay boys and men, setting up a hierarchy of "alpha men, gay men" really Nietzschian "supermen" types who, by their superior strength, sociopathy, and, very occasionally, superior intelligence, are encouraged to seduce and oppress, abduct, rape, torture, humiliate, degrade, insult, and generally abused what are presented as inferior boys and men for the sexual gratification as self-aggrandizement of said "alpha men" all of it as found in gay porn available for free consumption by anyone on the web. And you will find every aspect of fascistic and Nazi role playing, white supremacist psychosis and whatever other depraved aspect of human thought or history that can be mixed into the stinking mess and sold with sadistic porn images, gifs and videos, as gay porn. I will repost that original piece below this.
I am a gay man who has the radical idea that every gay man, every person who falls under the LGBT acronym, every straight woman who doesn't, in fact every single person in the world, deserves entirely better treatment than that. And when I say "ENTIRELY BETTER" I mean in every single way. I think everyone deserves to have sexual relationships of the highest kind which will be an equal experience of love, affection, committed caring and honest fidelity. I think that Lesbians and gay men deserve to have truly equal same-sex marriages, equal to the best of straight marriages of equally practiced and experienced love, affection, committed caring and honest fidelity. I don't think fighting for the right to reproduce the worst kind of straight marriage would be worth the effort of anyone. But that and entirely worse is being sold through porn in its idiotically enabled and ever worse form, encouraging the worst that any sick mind can encourage in other sick minds and those who can be enticed by that kind of fantasy to practice ever more degraded, ever less loving and affectionate, ever more hating and indifferent, uncaring, dishonest sexual acts by them.
You can't have both, the best, most moral sexual relationships, an expression of equality, of respecting equal rights, the dignity of each other embodying the moral obligation to treat everyone that way can't co-exist with the regime of the kind of pornography I'm talking about. They are mutually exclusive, both ways of thinking, both ways of acting cannot exist in the same mind without damage to the better of them, both programs of behavior cannot be encouraged in the same society without damage to the better, never mind the best of it which we might aspire to. Individuals might be able to sustain such a duality in appearance but it will be at a cost to their front of virtue maintained while their worst part is undamaged and will come to corrupt even what appears to the world to be good. The same is true for a society, perhaps even more so through the powers of magnification.
When Jimmy Carter was mocked for his statement that he "had sinned in his heart", making reference to what Jesus said about the consequences of seeing other people as merely sexual objects instead of the full human beings, the full living beings they are, it showed how far the American society was on the road to this kind of thing.
The lie told by the professional porn promoters in the media, the legal profession, such "social scientists" as they could pay to push their lies is that porn and the industrialization of sex for profit was not only not harmful but an alleged benefit to society, is a lie. It is a lie which, through the basest of coercion and corruption has become the required, de rigeur framing of this issue in what passes as respectable thought these days.
Of course feminism, in even its earliest phases, knew that was a lie due to the experience of women who had to fight against sexual objectification as the most basic aspect of their struggle for equality, just as black people had to most directly address the forms of objectification that were the substance of their inequality. The aspects of the inequality of gay men was more directly done primarily through our sexual natures and, so, the mixture of that with the huge burden of internalized self-loathing and hatred which burden us could easily create this kind of pathology. Lesbians, being women as well as defined by their sexuality had to deal with both forms of oppression and that informed their struggle for equality. Gay men, being men, are, perhaps, more prone to have the same expectations of unequal relationship that can be the worst aspect of many straight sexual relationships. The kind of thing I am dealing with here plays off of those vicissitudes of gay male identity as men who are attracted to men but men who have been, in so many cases, raised with all of the same screwed up expectations of inequality and unequal benefits from sex that are taught in the wider society and the media. No two groups are discriminated against in exactly the same way, each struggle for equality will have its own aspects peculiar to that group as well as features which are common to all.
It's all a lot more complex than the simplistic, reductionist program of making general absolute statements and facile arguments can admit to. Journalism and its advocacy seldom practices the kind of depth that you need to get past the slogans, the lies, the deceptions, the inadequate and dishonest framing of this issue just as it seldom got real feminism, creating a phony substitute for it for easy and quick sale. The results are the backlash against real equality for women and the increasingly pathological sex lives people are encouraged to have because objectification is easier and more profitable than relationships of equal love, affection, support and commitment. And the sale of the cheap imitation, the gaudy knock-off results in what I've been writing about for the past week.
Filthy ε Brutal ε White
Reblog if you want it Unsafe Insane and Non-Consensual
via Degradation and Destruction
Drugged, raped, and pozzed [to be intentionally infected with HIV]
Yeah, we make snuff movies glad you could come over tonight.
Rape me like a faggot
Superior white men
This site is dedicated to the restoration of the rights of the straight white man that have been stolen by faggots over time
Live your fantasies [That one comes right after encouraging raping and killing a young "man" who looks about 12]
Those are accompanied with porn photos, gifs, videos, that are intended to sell the messaging with sex.
And that's just on one site. Tell me why letting this stuff be posted online, where any psychopath can get their worst inclinations encouraged with sexual imagery is good for democracy or how any prosecutor or judge couldn't figure out that it's encouraging fascism, racism, violent domination, harm, rape and murder. Or why you are afraid that coming to that would endanger the right to encourage the opposites of those? .
The lie that we aren't capable of regulating those decisions by courts and so we MUST allow this kind of stuff, and, believe it or not, far worse, to be considered to have the right to be distributed to the susceptible, is so willfully stupid that you have to be even more willfully stupid to pretend you really believe that. Somehow, the Franklin Roosevelt administration, with all of its enormous advances, the advances in civil rights during the 1950s and early 60s happened in a country where the distribution and sale of that stuff would have been illegal and gotten you a prison term, and yet democracy was advancing during that period. It's in the period when the Supreme Court permitted its distribution without restriction that has seen the destruction of civil rights progress, the corruption of democracy, the putsch that stole the presidency and the elevation of a TV created fascist strong-man to be within one woman from the presidency and the ability to appoint justices to the Supreme Court who will obliterate democracy.
You people are total fools if you can't see the problem. I don't want to be part of any "left" that pushes lies like that.
Post script: I didn't realize until yesterday the relevance of that song, Small Circle of Friends to what I was talking about. Thinking about that Phil Ochs song that begins with an evocation of the infamous murder of Kitty Genovese but, in its iconic treatment focusing on the supposed urban anonymous indifference of those who heard her being killed, as first read about in the New York Times. Ochs and the media, then and now, ignore the facts of what led the man who killed her to believe he should do what he did, that that was permissible, that he had a large stash of straight pornography presenting women as objects for the use of men found with him when he was arrested for breaking, entering and theft. The extent to which him having that stash of porn tipped off the police that he might have been involved in the sexual murder of several women, including Kitty Genovese, is certainly worth thinking about. They certainly made the connection. I would imagine they were used to seeing rapists, sex murderes having stashes of porn and that having one might be an indication of what to suspect. That its relevance went over the head of Ochs, to the extent that he, later in the song presents a porn publisher's prosecution as another instance of injustice on par with the others in the song. That isn't a surprise, the lefty media had been pushing that line for more than a few decades, already. Those guys, who, no doubt, believed themselves to be more sophisticated than police detectives, didn't seem to get a glaringly relevant aspect of the case and what information it carried. How its relevance could be denied and that denial could be pretended to be credible also carries a lot of information but about how willfully dishonest the media, mostly men but with a few women, are about this.
It would take several more years before the second-wave feminists pointed out that presenting people as objects in pornography had real consequences, for the women so used and for the general society as men, so informed and encouraged, treated women like objects for their use. The men of the media retaliated rather fast painting that insight of feminism in about the worst and most dishonest of lights, including the entertainment industry. Feminism would have made it harder to crank out the same kind of crap they'd relied on to make money for a long time, its writers, directors, producers, would have had to have learned entirely new ways of writing and, worse, they'd have had to have thought about a situation that, still, largely, is for the benefit of men. It certainly was harder and more complex than would fit into a preachy protest song of the period.
They used Kitty Genovese for their own purposes and still do without caring much about what it was that led the man who killed her to do what he did, what he did to other women, what is done to millions of other women and children and men who can be subjected to someone with a physical advantage and the idea that they are entitled to use them and dispose of them as they like. It's easier to make up stuff about the neighbors and concentrate on that, instead. They don't even bother with the other women, just the one the New York Times used.
I am a gay man who has the radical idea that every gay man, every person who falls under the LGBT acronym, every straight woman who doesn't, in fact every single person in the world, deserves entirely better treatment than that. And when I say "ENTIRELY BETTER" I mean in every single way. I think everyone deserves to have sexual relationships of the highest kind which will be an equal experience of love, affection, committed caring and honest fidelity. I think that Lesbians and gay men deserve to have truly equal same-sex marriages, equal to the best of straight marriages of equally practiced and experienced love, affection, committed caring and honest fidelity. I don't think fighting for the right to reproduce the worst kind of straight marriage would be worth the effort of anyone. But that and entirely worse is being sold through porn in its idiotically enabled and ever worse form, encouraging the worst that any sick mind can encourage in other sick minds and those who can be enticed by that kind of fantasy to practice ever more degraded, ever less loving and affectionate, ever more hating and indifferent, uncaring, dishonest sexual acts by them.
You can't have both, the best, most moral sexual relationships, an expression of equality, of respecting equal rights, the dignity of each other embodying the moral obligation to treat everyone that way can't co-exist with the regime of the kind of pornography I'm talking about. They are mutually exclusive, both ways of thinking, both ways of acting cannot exist in the same mind without damage to the better of them, both programs of behavior cannot be encouraged in the same society without damage to the better, never mind the best of it which we might aspire to. Individuals might be able to sustain such a duality in appearance but it will be at a cost to their front of virtue maintained while their worst part is undamaged and will come to corrupt even what appears to the world to be good. The same is true for a society, perhaps even more so through the powers of magnification.
When Jimmy Carter was mocked for his statement that he "had sinned in his heart", making reference to what Jesus said about the consequences of seeing other people as merely sexual objects instead of the full human beings, the full living beings they are, it showed how far the American society was on the road to this kind of thing.
The lie told by the professional porn promoters in the media, the legal profession, such "social scientists" as they could pay to push their lies is that porn and the industrialization of sex for profit was not only not harmful but an alleged benefit to society, is a lie. It is a lie which, through the basest of coercion and corruption has become the required, de rigeur framing of this issue in what passes as respectable thought these days.
Of course feminism, in even its earliest phases, knew that was a lie due to the experience of women who had to fight against sexual objectification as the most basic aspect of their struggle for equality, just as black people had to most directly address the forms of objectification that were the substance of their inequality. The aspects of the inequality of gay men was more directly done primarily through our sexual natures and, so, the mixture of that with the huge burden of internalized self-loathing and hatred which burden us could easily create this kind of pathology. Lesbians, being women as well as defined by their sexuality had to deal with both forms of oppression and that informed their struggle for equality. Gay men, being men, are, perhaps, more prone to have the same expectations of unequal relationship that can be the worst aspect of many straight sexual relationships. The kind of thing I am dealing with here plays off of those vicissitudes of gay male identity as men who are attracted to men but men who have been, in so many cases, raised with all of the same screwed up expectations of inequality and unequal benefits from sex that are taught in the wider society and the media. No two groups are discriminated against in exactly the same way, each struggle for equality will have its own aspects peculiar to that group as well as features which are common to all.
It's all a lot more complex than the simplistic, reductionist program of making general absolute statements and facile arguments can admit to. Journalism and its advocacy seldom practices the kind of depth that you need to get past the slogans, the lies, the deceptions, the inadequate and dishonest framing of this issue just as it seldom got real feminism, creating a phony substitute for it for easy and quick sale. The results are the backlash against real equality for women and the increasingly pathological sex lives people are encouraged to have because objectification is easier and more profitable than relationships of equal love, affection, support and commitment. And the sale of the cheap imitation, the gaudy knock-off results in what I've been writing about for the past week.
Friday, August 19, 2016
Hate Mail - Tell Us Which Of These Things Being Sold With Sex On Porn Sites This Month Are Compatible With Democratic Morals
Reblog if you want it Unsafe Insane and Non-Consensual
via Degradation and Destruction
Drugged, raped, and pozzed [to be intentionally infected with HIV]
Yeah, we make snuff movies glad you could come over tonight.
Rape me like a faggot
Superior white men
This site is dedicated to the restoration of the rights of the straight white man that have been stolen by faggots over time
Live your fantasies [That one comes right after encouraging raping and killing a young "man" who looks about 12]
Those are accompanied with porn photos, gifs, videos, that are intended to sell the messaging with sex.
And that's just on one site. Tell me why letting this stuff be posted online, where any psychopath can get their worst inclinations encouraged with sexual imagery is good for democracy or how any prosecutor or judge couldn't figure out that it's encouraging fascism, racism, violent domination, harm, rape and murder. Or why you are afraid that coming to that would endanger the right to encourage the opposites of those? .
The lie that we aren't capable of regulating those decisions by courts and so we MUST allow this kind of stuff, and, believe it or not, far worse, to be considered to have the right to be distributed to the susceptible, is so willfully stupid that you have to be even more willfully stupid to pretend you really believe that. Somehow, the Franklin Roosevelt administration, with all of its enormous advances, the advances in civil rights during the 1950s and early 60s happened in a country where the distribution and sale of that stuff would have been illegal and gotten you a prison term, and yet democracy was advancing during that period. It's in the period when the Supreme Court permitted its distribution without restriction that has seen the destruction of civil rights progress, the corruption of democracy, the putsch that stole the presidency and the elevation of a TV created fascist strong-man to be within one woman from the presidency and the ability to appoint justices to the Supreme Court who will obliterate democracy.
You people are total fools if you can't see the problem. I don't want to be part of any "left" that pushes lies like that.
Post script: I didn't realize until yesterday the relevance of that song, Small Circle of Friends to what I was talking about. Thinking about that Phil Ochs song that begins with an evocation of the infamous murder of Kitty Genovese but, in its iconic treatment focusing on the supposed urban anonymous indifference of those who heard her being killed, as first read about in the New York Times. Ochs and the media, then and now, ignore the facts of what led the man who killed her to believe he should do what he did, that that was permissible, that he had a large stash of straight pornography presenting women as objects for the use of men found with him when he was arrested for breaking, entering and theft. The extent to which him having that stash of porn tipped off the police that he might have been involved in the sexual murder of several women, including Kitty Genovese, is certainly worth thinking about. They certainly made the connection. I would imagine they were used to seeing rapists, sex murderes having stashes of porn and that having one might be an indication of what to suspect. That its relevance went over the head of Ochs, to the extent that he, later in the song presents a porn publisher's prosecution as another instance of injustice on par with the others in the song. That isn't a surprise, the lefty media had been pushing that line for more than a few decades, already. Those guys, who, no doubt, believed themselves to be more sophisticated than police detectives, didn't seem to get a glaringly relevant aspect of the case and what information it carried. How its relevance could be denied and that denial could be pretended to be credible also carries a lot of information but about how willfully dishonest the media, mostly men but with a few women, are about this.
It would take several more years before the second-wave feminists pointed out that presenting people as objects in pornography had real consequences, for the women so used and for the general society as men, so informed and encouraged, treated women like objects for their use. The men of the media retaliated rather fast painting that insight of feminism in about the worst and most dishonest of lights, including the entertainment industry. Feminism would have made it harder to crank out the same kind of crap they'd relied on to make money for a long time, its writers, directors, producers, would have had to have learned entirely new ways of writing and, worse, they'd have had to have thought about a situation that, still, largely, is for the benefit of men. It certainly was harder and more complex than would fit into a preachy protest song of the period.
They used Kitty Genovese for their own purposes and still do without caring much about what it was that led the man who killed her to do what he did, what he did to other women, what is done to millions of other women and children and men who can be subjected to someone with a physical advantage and the idea that they are entitled to use them and dispose of them as they like. It's easier to make up stuff about the neighbors and concentrate on that, instead. They don't even bother with the other women, just the one the New York Times used.
Friday, September 25, 2020
Those Prophets Are Often Not As They're Marketed As Being
When we move from the primal paradigms to the concreteness of the prophets, we may pause to consider what a prophet is and what a prophet does. I suspect that our own self-concept is as would-be prophets is most often too serious, realistic, and even grim.
Breaking in here I'll say that most of what I was led to believe about "the prophets" in the Bible is in line with this joyless and dour and arrogantly self-righteous concept of what is not at all realistic when you consider what is actually said. Yes, the prophets deal with the terrible reality that we create when we go along with the "royal consciousness" that is permitted, and in the United States, in Britain, in many places under the secular, even the republican form of that (gangster consciousness, really), without an officially admitted monarch, that is the product of everything from academic respectability to commercial pop culture to the officially respectable "art" even poetry that remains in the prescribed limits of that consciousness.
I'll throw in that when I re-read that just now, the first thing I thought of was John Singer Sargent's famous and admittedly beautiful frieze of The Prophets at the Boston Public Library.
But as David Noel Freedman has observed, the characteristic way of a prophet in Israel is that of poetry and lyric. The prophet engages in futuring fantasy. The prophet does not ask if the vision can be implemented, for the questions of implementation are of no consequence until the vision can be imagined. The imagination must come before the implementation. Our culture is competent to implement almost anything and to imagine almost nothing. The same royal consciousness that makes it possible to implement anything and everything is one that shrinks imagination because imagination is a danger. Thus every totalitarian regime is frightened of the artist. It is the vocation of the prophet to keep alive the ministry of imagination, to keep on conjuring and proposing alternative futures to the single one the king wants to urge as the only thinkable one.
I don't think that we can be certain that even the officially deemed "poets" of opposition will speak a real, alternative that breaks out of the allowed limits and not become a troubador or some brand of gangster consciousness or other. Recently I remembered getting into a couple of brawls over one of the official "prophets" who for a time fell into the comfortable realm that allows for even the odd top-40s sales, the late Phil Ochs over him being very comfortable with the "rights" or pornographers - one of the most putrid of expressions of this "royal consciousness" as translated into American secular "liberalism." A "liberalism" in which the actual lives and bodies of the prostitutes who work, occasionally, within that prostitution for viewing, the enablement, protection of which and normalization of which has been one of the greatest achievements of that secular "liberalism" as is allowed by the corporate state. He also notably was a huge fan of Soviet Communism even as he admitted that if he lived there he would certainly have been imprisoned or killed, which he seemed to think was a joke. He was hardly alone among the "poets" and "prophets" of the American secular left in finding that either not serious or important. Which I think is a dead giveaway as to what is genuine in prophetic consciousness and what is merely a cheap knockoff made for easy sales and profit. So much of what was officially, or, really the same thing, commercially was deemed prophetic in my youth was that. The real thing was seldom mistaken for fasionable or sold on top 40 radio that might play, "Small Circle of Friends" - where I heard it.
The prophets of Israel were not categorizable in the way that LPs used to be in record stores. They defy that kind of categorization. Categorization is something that should signal to us that either what is being labeled is being done so for a selling con job or for some other fraudulent purpose. I think it was always necessary for that to be done with this body of prophetic poetry, poetic literature because when taken the way Brueggemann and others take it, it is dangerous in ways that the corporate establishment and our own weakness can't tolerate.
Indeed, poetic imagination is the last way left in which to challenge and conflict the dominant reality. The dominant reality is necessarily in prose, but to create such poetry and lyrical thought requires more than skill in making rhymes. I am concerned not with the formal aspects of poetry but with the substantive issues of alternative prospects that the managed prose around us cannot invent and does not want to permit. Such an activity requires that in the center of our persons and communities we have not fully embraced the consuming apathy espoused by the royal consciousness. It requires that we have not yet finally given up on the promise spoken over us by the God who is free enough to keep his promises.
I am not talking about local pastors spouting poetry that is an assault on the corporate state. What I mean is that the same realities are at work in every family and every marriage and every community. In our achieved satiation we have neither the wits nor the energy nor the courage to think freely about imagined alternative futures. When we think "prophetic" we need not always think grandly about public tasks. The prophetic task needs to be done wherever there are men and women who will yield to the managed prose future offered them by the king. So, we may ask, if we are to do that alternative constructive task of imagination, if we are to reach more than the most surface group prepared to be "religious," do we begin? What I propose is this:
The royal consciousness leads people to numbness, especially to numbness about death. It is the task of the prophetic ministry and imagination to bring people to engage their experiences of suffering to death.
Remember that the next time you hear someone making breezy comments about "herd immunity" about people dying of "preexisting conditions" as being expendable and not worth taking into consideration, about the other people whose lives are breezily wiped out of consideration in the media or in public discourse, in the kind of talk that issues so easily out of Dr. Senator Rand Paul and so many of the MD Republicans. But it comes out of those who out of secular "liberalism" are quite willing to casually disregard the lives of the "actors" and "models" the prostitutes who are used and spit out by the porn industry or, in fact, the movie and TV industries and the commercial prostitution which good "liberals" are supposed to want to protect as some kind of freedom of expression or association or commerce.
Wednesday, March 13, 2019
Hate Mail - But . .. But. . . What About The Poor Pornographers!
You must be new to my blog. It's one of my longest standing positions that liberals got sold the hugest load of bullshit when the lawyers getting paid by media companies and thinkers living lives as contented ivy-fed cattle and the lefty scribbling class convinced them that the ability of the porn industry to freely publish, sell and otherwise distribute the photographed and filmed abuse and degradation and commodification of people was in some way a worthy liberal cause.
Liberal politicians who sacrificed anything in a real liberal agenda so they could speak up in favor of pornographers are too stupid to trust.
Pornography is, literally, against everything to do with the inherent equality and status of people as being above the level of commodities for use, exhaustion and disposal, porography is an anti-liberal entity,especially as it is a profit-making industry that destroys the health and lives of the children, women and men it uses as raw material.
Search in the box at the upper left hand corner for the word "pornography" and you can see that I have no sympathy for porn. Idiots in the scribbling and singer-songwriter class who champion porn are slimy idiots or just idiots who adopted their position by rote without ever thinking it through. Phil Ochs was just one such idiot.
I am not a knee-jerk, rote-line-learning liberal. I take equal justice seriously, I take the status of people as the possessors of inherent rights beyond commodification and assigned value seriously, I take every persons status as being created in the image of God, seriously. No one who does that could favor pornography. I'm ashamed of how many alleged liberals sacrifice real liberalism for that line of libertarian crap.
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