. . . an examination of things of interest to jad

In a post from last month (probably the post from last month), I was thinking about ignorance as an excuse for poor and/or immoral choices. There’s a category of ills (racism, homophobia, misogyny) that have become decreasingly acceptable by society at large. While we might excuse the racist ramblings of great-aunt Edna, a member of our peer group with the same beliefs is willfully ignoring the evidence against 19th century theories of racial hierarchy; or is aware of them but wants to be a racist anyway.

The main thrust of the previous post: only a willing dupe still believes in government as a force of positive social change. Given a goal, no matter how universally laudable, writing it down on paper and handing it to a pack of unaccountable and heavily armed goons to carry out will never go well. It will rarely turn out otherwise than awful.

The same principle applies to police, military, and other members of the enforcement arm of the United States government. I’m not sure if it was ever the case that people trusted in the police or if Mayberry and Officer Friendly are just straight-up 1950s post-war propaganda. In any case, nobody in their right mind trusts in the police now.

This has several important ramifications (that we should all know by now):

1. Unless you want someone shot or in jail, do not call the police. Since we live in a largely disarmed and submissive society, there are many time and places where a person’s only recourse against violations of person or property is a government thug. In those instances, by all means, engage the police.

Necessary or not, it’s often a terrible and lifechanging ordeal. If you’re lucky, the casualty will be a family pet–either yours or one belonging to a neighbor. Otherwise, you may have unintentionally called in a hit on someone–maybe a member of your own family.

To reiterate, I’m not passing judgement on anyone who calls the police in self-defense. It should be an absolute last resort and you shouldn’t be surprised to find yourself, a loved one, or a neighbor shot or put in a cage. That’s what police do. Everyone should understand this by now.

2. If someone signs up to be an enforcer today without the full understanding that they’re accepting money to obey orders, no matter how immoral; they can’t reasonably claim to care about the possibility of having to murder, torture, or imprison innocent human beings. That’s what the job of law enforcement *is*.

If you sign up to “enforce the law”, you are not a hero. People don’t respect you, they are afraid of you. If you find yourself in harms way, it’s probably because you’re employed to be a thug who orders people around at gunpoint–or would if they didn’t comply with your barked orders. Some people don’t have the right psychological makeup to debase themselves and submit when bullied^[1].

The time has past when anyone who wants to be police can be considered anything other than a brute. If you really want to help or protect people, there are a million other avenues that will fulfill those needs. The only reason anyone is police today is that they are willing to do anything to anyone in order to get a paycheck. Most probably, they enjoy doing it–the pay isn’t *that* great if you have any marketable skills at all.

3. The same thing goes for “our troops.” Soldiers are mercenaries who will kill anybody they’re ordered to regardless of context. Sadly, for those who acting out of financial necessity, enough people still exist who blindly “honor the troops,” to provide a shadow of moral sanction. Countless souls on the margin have been tipped to the side of obeying evil for pay by the omnipresent message that their “fellow citizens” will “honor their sacrifice”.

The true nature of the United States military is willfully ignored by a huge number of Americans. As with all of our above examples as well as the the effects of smoking and the theory of evolution, the evidence is ample, universal, and unequivocal. 40 years of incontrovertible evidence plus an additional 180 years of less mainstream history indicates that the purpose of the military is to kill for the advantage of bankers, plantation owners, mineral extractors, and weapons manufacturers.

It’s time we stopped pretending that there’s anything positive about being a gang enforcer. Even if the gang is the biggest one on the planet.

1. ^[1] For the record, I totally do. Don’t shoot me. ↩

I’ll try to keep this one quick, though I could really go on for hours about it.

Apparently, Hillary Clinton was recently in Egypt, where her motorcade was the target of tomatoes, shoes, and other signs of “anti-american” behavior.

The New York Times (blog, I think) and Rachel Maddow (citing the Times), blame American right wing “conspiracy theorists” (Glen Beck, Michelle Bachman, two other people I’ve never even heard of) for riling up the Egyptians. Said riling took the form of said theorists claiming that the United States meddles in Egyptian politics.

You can watch/read if you want a reasonably convincing argument, source to “several protestors,” in support of this supposition. I’ll offer the following arguments against it.

The government of Egypt has been a creature of the United States for almost 60 years. The series of long ruling dictators were less than beloved by the Egyptian people who were well aware that the United States was providing the arms and intelligence that prevented them from any degree of political self-determination.
The Egyptians have watched several hundred thousand of their co-religionists starve to death, die from embargoes of medical goods and be vaporized and disappeared to concentration camps by various US lead coalitions. These atrocities happened in countries in extremely or relatively close proximity. Somewhere north of 30,000 were killed in a neighboring state just a less than a year ago. Outside of the US propaganda sphere and a handful of particularly callous western european commentators, these deaths are rightly seen as cold blooded murder by an invading empire.

I have less evidence for this last point, but I just can’t imagine too many Egyptians watch Glen Beck. I didn’t even know Michelle Bachman was still in congress.

Now, every person living in Egypt is, of course, an individual. I’m sure there are a couple who believe that Obama is secretly a Muslim bent on the creation of a neo-caliphate because Michelle Bachman told them so. Who knows, this entire protest could actually have been peopled by an unlikely seeming Egyptian Glen Beck meetup group.

Allow me to assure you, though, that the average Egyptian is not indulging in conspiratorial thinking along the lines of lizard people and alien visitations by thinking that the US might–just might–be fucking with their political system. It’s akin to one of us hypothesizing that Exxon or Goldman Sachs might be, in some way, trying to influence the outcome of American elections.

There’s a good deal of really, really well founded anger directed at the American ruling class by a whole world of victims of American foreign power. The anger would be universal except for soothsayers like Maddow and the New York Times (and the rest of the media establishment for that matter) insisting that everyone else in the world’s anger is directed at our government because of “our freedom,” “our prosperity,” or because they’ve fallen victim to zany tinfoil hat conspiracy theories.

Update: Jon Stewart makes the point funnier.

My opinion, that NPR is a particularly insidious source of propaganda, is not new. As psychologists continue to demonstrate (behind paywalls, for the most part, the bastards), smarter people don’t hold a world view more in line with reality, rather they are better able to rationalize whatever worldview they happen to hold. Arguments with religious scholars about the tenets of their respective faiths demonstrate this amply.

Given the time pressures and competing political agendas, most smart people want to believe that things are going, at least passably well in some part of our sprawling empire. An ongoing series, “The Revolutionary Roadtrip,” by Steve Inskeep gives a 5 minute daily balm to any concerns the NPR audience might have.

I should interject, now that you’re three paragraphs in, that this isn’t some outstanding specimen of NPR state-narrative reinforcement. It’s pretty pedestrian actually. I just happened to hear it right before I read this counter-punch article which covered similar topics. I thought the comparison was fairly striking. To wit, Steve Inskeep:

Orwell came to mind for me as we traveled through Libya, because it was Orwell who said, “He who controls the present, controls the past. He who controls the past, controls the future.”

For forty-two years, Moammar Gadhafi controlled the present, rewrote the past to suit his ends, and seemed likely to hold on into the interminable future.

Now Gadhafi is gone, killed by rebels in his home city last October, and Libyans are still finding fresh and original ways to display the bloody images of his final moments on Facebook.

His death finally released Gadhafi’s grip on Libya’s recent history, and his people are just beginning to revise the record.

He goes on to talk about visiting the national museum, where all of the Gadhafi related installations have been removed.

And now, Counterpunch’s treatment of narrative-control in Libya:

It was decided long ago that no supporters of Gaddafi would be allowed to stand in the upcoming elections, but recent changes have gone even further. Law 37, passed by the new NATO-imposed government last month, has created a new crime of ‘glorifying’ the former government or its leader – subject to a maximum sentence of life imprisonment . . . Even more indicative of the contempt for the rule of law amongst the new government . . . whose only power base remains the colonial armed forces – is Law 38. This law has now guaranteed immunity from prosecution for anyone who committed crimes aimed at “promoting or protecting the revolution”. Those responsible for the ethnic cleansing of Tawergha – such as Misrata’s self-proclaimed “brigade for the purging of black skins” – can continue their hunting down of that cities’ refugees in the full knowledge that they have the new ‘law’ on their side.

Counterpunch also highlights the 50,000 killed by NATO forces, the necessity of removing Gadhafi before the US Africa Command (AFRICOM) could operate freely on the continent–until now AFRICOM was headquartered in Germany; and the US combat troops now engaged in South Sudan, Congo and Central African Republic. Counterpunch addresses the topic of Libya repeatedly and in depth, the archives are a phenomenal resource.

The rest of “the Revolutionary Roadtrip,” thus far, has highlighted North Africa’s favorite hot-sauce, camel meat as food, and a scare story about the danger of radical Islam derailing NATO’s “democratic reforms.”

It’s indicative that the very tippy-tip of the left-leaning mass media can’t even so much as hint at the return of brutal colonialism on an already tortured continent. It’s disinformation at it’s worst to highlight the brutality of the previous regime without mentioning that the current one has retroactively and in perpituity legalized death squads It’s the height of dark irony to allege Orwellian control by a very weak dictator from the gobal platform of the state radio of the most powerful and narrative dominating empire the world has ever seen.

It’s an illustration of the power of the human intellect. Such a flimsy and transparent touchstone will suffice to shield the public conscious from the blatant, deep evil of our rulers.

From the Onion-or-Real-Life dept, Austin Police Department has “altered its guiding set of policies by adding a ‘preservation of life standard’ that tells officers that their main responsibility is to preserve human life.”

Thanks, local activists, for getting “not killing people” on the APD todo list. I’m guess dogs are not included in the radical new life preservation policy. It’s too bad, APD is missing out on an opportunity to drastically reduce its munitions budget.

Another new addition says, “We must realize our main responsibility is the protection of the community, and the preservation of human life and dignity.”
Mannix [ Assistant Police Chief ] said police officials have discussed adding the standard for about three years.

I wonder if the implementation phase will take as long the discussion phase. It doesn’t go into effect until July 1st, so keep any people or animals you love away from the police for a few more weeks.

Mannix said that the spirit of the policy has always been followed in the department’s culture, code of conduct and training procedures. He said the department’s goal in adding the standard is to help residents understand that this is the case.

I’m no public relations expert, but I’m pretty sure the best way to help residents understand that the police intend to preserve life would be to have the police stop shooting people, animals, and other living things.

You’ll want to void your bladder before you read this next part:

Mannix said preservation of life goes beyond shootings. He said he feels a good example of the policy in action came in April, when 35-year-old Ahmede Jabbar Bradley was fatally shot during a confrontation with an officer . . . after Bradley was shot, police attempted to revive him with CPR, Mannix said.
“The concept of preservation of life is not just about use of force,” Mannix said. “It’s about everything our officers do, like pulling a kid from a burning car or performing CPR on someone.”

You read that correctly: Mannix feels a “good example” of preserving life is a case where police fatally shot someone and then performed CPR. I wonder if the kid-from-a-burning-car example occurred after the police shoved the kid into the car and set it on fire.

On second reading: you’ll probably want to continue to avoid the police at all reasonable costs even past the July 1st implementation of life preservation, “he [Mannix] said he doesn’t think it will affect the way officers perform their duties”. Yeah, I bet it won’t.

Amanda Marcotte makes note of a study that indicates religious homophobia is the primary force driving the young out of the church, with 60% quitting religion when they leave home. The claim, she concludes, that morality comes from religion is precisely backwards:

The church needs people in the pews to survive, and while those people are constantly told their role is to submit and obey, if they just decide they don’t want to, the church is shown to be an emperor with no clothes. Thus, religion throughout history has had plenty of takebacks. The churches that used to preach segregation and white supremacy don’t do so anymore, at least as openly. A lot of churches, especially more mainstream ones, are giving up on the argument that women are just support staff, and many are even letting them be ministers and priests. Either they get with the times on gay marriage, or they find their ability to exert power diminish. Since churches are about power, most of them will adjust over time. That’s why they’re freaking out now; they know what’s coming.

While the “common wisdom” is that the church creates and maintains a moral code, the reality is that the chuch adapts the moral code of the majority in order to maintain the largest cohesive flock (for continual fleecing).

Religious doctrine is simply the encoding of popular morality, both the good, doing unto other an’at; and the stone evil, usually sanctifying existing hierarchies. As Amanda observes:

the historical purpose of religion is not to comfort but to control. Religion’s primary function is, if you look at the whole of history, about creating rationales for unjust power hierarchies. Kings have used “god” as their excuse for absolute power, and religion is the primary reason that men in a diverse array of cultures over cite as the reason they should be the lords of their wives and daughters. Even liberal Christians are tied to the long history of power-grabbing through religion, using the language of submission and calling believers a “kingdom”.

As humanity shakes off the various barbaric hierarchies of our past, religion has had to adopt. It gets dragged kicking and screaming into modernity. In the future, of course, religious adherents will highlight the work that some christians somewhere have probably done to advance gay rights and claim that christianity and its message of all encompassing love lead the way to a more perfect equality.

Most of us–the historically literate anyway–will call bullshit. We can cite the nearly infinite counter-examples where red faced douchebags stomped around waving the bible around and screaming about the evils of homosexuality.

Like the myths that the German catholic church opposed Hitler, or that American churches opposed slavery, only believers will, well, believe.

The timing of this article is interesting. Coming, as it does, the day after Barack Obama publicly supported gay marriage. Government is the other stone-aged human superstition that humanity has dragged along through the centuries. Very much like religion, it has always claimed to be a bringer of order in the midst of chaos.

Rest assured that, like future religious hagiographers, future historians will tell a convincing tale of how the government, with its commitment to civil liberties, boldly legislated marital freedom for everyone–in between pacifying the borders and protecting the world from terrorists. We’re hearing the first draft of the story right now. The one your grandkids learn, should they fall into the hands of government schools, will be far more epic.

Which really is the only difference between the chuch and the state in this regard. I’d wager it’s the only reason there are more atheists than anarchists: the state has 15,000 more hours to propagandize children than the church. The state’s stories aren’t remarkably more believable, and a few hours of research on a particular issue will reveal the nature of both church and state as reactionary anchors against human progress.