Hate Walks With Me, and Hate Talks With Me...

PFC Manning was forced to strip naked in his cell again last night. As with the previous evening, Quantico Brig guards required him to surrender all of his clothing. PFC Manning then walked back to his bed, and spent the next seven hours in humiliation.

The decision to require him to be stripped of all clothing was made by the Brig commander, Chief Warrant Officer-2 Denise Barnes ["Barnes said she plans to take things to another level within her new unit."] According to First Lieutenant Brian Villard, a Marine spokesman, the decision was "not punitive" and done in accordance with Brig rules. There can be no conceivable justification for requiring a soldier to surrender all his clothing, remain naked in his cell for seven hours, and then stand at attention the subsequent morning. This treatment is even more degrading considering that PFC Manning is being monitored -- both by direct observation and by video -- at all times. The defense was informed by Brig officials that the decision to strip PFC Manning of all his clothing was made without consulting any of the Brig's mental health providers.

This is common, or SOP, for "military intelligence". From a 2004 piece about Abu Ghraib: "Detainees were paraded naked past other prisoners and guards; some were ordered to do jumping jacks and sing "The Star-Spangled Banner" in the nude, according to a several witnesses. Also, a father and his grown son were stripped, then forced to stand and stare at each other. The International Committee of the Red Cross, visiting in October, found prisoners left naked in their cells for days, modestly trying to shield themselves behind cardboard from meals-ready-to-eat boxes."

Remember...this is approved of by your Democratic President (if not, it would not be happening). Of course, this president has gone farther than the reviled GWB in that he has claimed the right to murder anyone in the world anywhere regardless of citizenship.

We are in a nation oozing systemic rot. These are not "insurgent" "bad actors" or mercenaries for hire who murder families while at weddings in foreign lands. This is your land, this is my land..."made for you and me" brothers and sisters. We are all in the brig with Bradley Manning. Manning is but one very clear example to you. Get with the program; Be "one of us". Or else. But that is really, the least of our worries.

Wisconsin's Governor is showing us the more of this same mindset--bullying and holding hostage the citizens of his state--defunding care for women; Ohio has already passed legislation to allow its labor force to be steamrolled into a third world existence; Arizona leads the nation in enacting hate legislation; systemic rot pervades our nation. We are lost. Were we ever the idyllic land our mythology proclaims? We are showing our true colors...the bully is in the ascendancy. He is your governor, your police chief, your president. He has the courts at his back. The bully is conservative; the bully says "my way".

I'm wondering when people are going to recognize that not only is the Tea Party socially conservative and uhm ... racially uncomfortable, their antipathy to taxes and government actually stems from those attitudes. It's not a coincidence or even a sympathetic constellation of various positions on the issues. They don't like government because they believe that government should not protect and support people they don't like. [bold emphasis added]

Please read that part in bold again. This is the animus--no government, small government, less government...means keep out of my business. I don't want to treat all people equally. I want to hate my neighbor if he's not like me--I want to hang him from a tree after I drag him behind my truck for a few miles. Having this kind of politician "in charge" will lead to laws that ALLOW this kind of hate-filled abusive behavior and call it "freedom". In this way your only real liberty will be your death.

I'm finished with my own polite response to this kind of inherent bigotry. I believe it is systemic in our white Christian nation. Poll the haters...poll the tea partiers...poll the Klan...poll the neo-Nazis...Do you believe in God, ask them...do you believe in Jesus as your savior, ask them.

I do not fetishize atheism (hate needs no religion or god) but I do not believe any good can come of a religion where the divinity walks with you while you carry your uzi and your flag and your noose.

You cannot disassociate the "ease" of coming to hate from within this religious system. Faith in Hate!

Do some comparative reading to discover which religions are the most warring, aggressive and hate-filled. If you belong to one of these, you really should be asking yourself why. Then take a gander at the tolerance inherent in Hindu religious traditions.

Blessed is Zuckerberg; Insecure Misogyny Inherits the Earth

Congratulations, you poor!
God's domain belongs to you.
Congratulations, you hungry!
You will have a feast.
Congratulations, you who weep now!
You will laugh.

(Jesus Seminar, "verifiable" beatitudes)

After seeing the "Facebook Movie" (I like to call it this as I assume the actual title, The Social Network, was chosen more for legal reasons than the verisimilar or aesthetic) I have decided that the meek have inherited the earth.

This is the Jesus of resentment and revenge.

The Facebook Movie proposes that the software was designed as vengeance--first against a single woman; then against the gender. It must take its place in the long line of misogynistic plans bent on denigration and domination of the female. But it has gone well beyond that.

Insecurity, inferiority, social ineptitude, immaturity, shallowness, impulsivity--all characteristics engendered by male dominance and proudly on display in our technologies, none more conspicuous than Facebook.

I have a flesh-and-blood friend to whom I once confided that Facebook pictures of "friends'" parties that I didn't attend, didn't know about, wasn't invited to, made me feel, well, socially insignificant. He, though often in these pictures, confessed to the same kind of feeling.

This is the genius of Zuckerberg; he has made us all feel like losers desperately seeking approval. Now, it's not untrue that this is the whole modus operandi of advertising and is a major engine behind our drive to consume useless gadgets and seasonable fashions...but the sheer granular nature of this "network" can make even the most confident being feel his lack and wanting. One can dissect the methodology of market manipulations and stay objective about them; but Facebook attacks you via your personal, individual, daily, friendships. Just look what you missed--or better, what you were left out of, what was denied you.

Turn it off, Child.

Shepherding a Blessed Stock

It is a complex weave. The founding and history of this White Xtian land.

Often the only question that seems to matter to me is "why"--but I tend to disbelieve the narrative on offer if there seems an evasion of the motivating spleen.

The more I read about our Puritan heritage the more I am struck by a severe and revealing continuity of motivation evident in our current White Xtian land.

Obviously the prior post dealing with HR3 and marriage (and women) are examples.

I've also brought attention here and there to the "manufacture" and slaughter of vast numbers of "lesser" beings (i.e., those not human): I have argued that there will be no end to this practice in this White Xtian land as all things are given to us by the Lord. We are the image and the elaboration of His Will and Word and how should our own Will be aborted if we are borne of Him.

In this way all of life is property.

Now note, as I've likely said before, Susan Howe's The Birth-Mark is a revelation and it is within this text we find a founding voice: Thomas Shepard.

Consider the following in the light of a personal God, mothers, and women as property.

We are all in Adam, as a whole country in a parliament man; the whole country doth what he doth. And although we made no particular choice of Adam to stand for us, yet the Lord made it for us; who, being goodness itself, bears more good will to man than he can or could bear to himself; and being wisdom itself, made the wisest choice, and took the wisest course for the good of man.

I have seen a God by reason and never been amazed at God. I have seen God himself and have been ravished to behold him. [In other words, your bright shining and terrible fancy has more truth than your reason. And it is this God I have created that I will say is goodness and wisdom itself. Note how this is not a "transferable" nor deniable knowledge. It's mine, it's from God, it's real.]

thou wert in the dangers of the sea in thy mothers woombe then & see how god hath miraculously preserved thee, that thou art still alive, & thy mother's woombe & the terrible seas have not been thy grave.

[In an autobiography Shephard says, eulogizing his wife who has died in childbirth, that she was "the eldest daughter of mr Hooker a blessed stock."]

This rhetoric of 1637--the year when Anne Hutchinson was cast out of the Massachusetts Bay Colony for, primarily being a woman speaking about the familiar voice of God she heard within her, absent the mediary of male ministerial hierarchy--is not markedly different from what we hear still in our Puritanical times.

There is one God and he only speaks to White Xtian men; women are to be as chattel and their bodies managed in kind.

You can see in Shepard's claiming that God protects and saves him EVEN as from his mother's dangerous woombe that this is a rhetorical transference of parentage, from the foul physical seas of the womb to the heavenly preservation of the Word. Borne of the mind of God not of the body of woman, mother.

Peace be with you, as I've heard some among us say.

The Birth-Mark

Thomas Shepard

A Farm-Yard Conception

Found this today while looking for something else. Seems to me to be glimpse into our small-minded denizens of this world.

Yesterday I posted on FB a blog article about HR3, a bill that "is actually an attempt to shut down abortion coverage through all private insurance, including employer-provided insurance, which means that it’s beyond even the dreadful Stupak-Pitts amendment/executive order."

That article goes on to detail the clear misogyny and class warfare inherent in the Republican party (White Christian Men and their female servants).

And so this from Shaw is gentle in comparison but speaks of a "true" marriage as defined against a false institution offered by those whose conception of marriage is, as Shaw says, "a farm-yard or slave-quarter conception..."

Monogamy has a sentimental basis which is quite distinct from the political one of equal numbers of the sexes. Equal numbers in the sexes are quite compatible with a change of partners every day or every hour. Physically there is nothing to distinguish human society from the farm-yard except that children are more troublesome and costly than chickens and calves, and that men and women are not so completely enslaved as farm stock. Accordingly, the people whose conception of marriage is a farm-yard or slave-quarter conception are always more or less in a panic lest the slightest relaxation of the marriage laws should utterly demoralize society; whilst those to whom marriage is a matter of more highly evolved sentiments and needs (sometimes said to be distinctively human, though birds and animals in a state of freedom evince them quite as touchingly as we) are much more liberal, knowing as they do that monogamy will take care of itself provided the parties are free enough, and that promiscuity is a product of slavery and not of liberty.

WikiQuotes-Shaw