Like a taco in the sun

Of all the vile stupidity that the Fraudulency Administration has foisted on this nation the latest round of beaner-bashing - the promised elimination of the rule that allows people who were snuck into the United States as minors to remain in the United States - is perhaps the vilest and most stupid.

Vile because, like it or not (and the Trumpkins DON'T like it, which is why they're shrieking and stamping their widdle feet so hard to make this a thing) these people are U.S. nationals. Not citizens, but American in all effective senses of the word. Tossing these poor sonsofbitches into Guatemala City or Sinaloa would be no different than snatching some random gringo out of the nonexistent salad bar a Applebee's, stripping them naked and parachuting them out over San Pedro Sula. This will result in some predictable number of these people, whose "crime" is infinitely less egregious than the shameless grifting indulged in by some greater-than-random-percentage of Orange Foolius' appointees, being raped, murdered, robbed, beaten, and more-or-less enslaved.

Stupid because, frankly, this is more of the same nonsense I fulminated against here, here, and here.

Only worse.

Because the vast, VAST majority of the people targeted by this nasty little piece of xenophobic racism are, as I said, American. They are employed, many in college, many in position to be valuable contributors to any sensible civilization. But because of the gibbering lunacy of the GOP C.H.U.D. base they will be wasted, thrown away to appeal to a group of people who, by and large, appear as useful to the future of the United States as print-shop employees for a glossy skin mag.

One reason I really hate writing about politics these days is how utterly vile are the politics of the current ruling party and its' adherents. There's a point to be had in discussing controlling the entry and exit to the United States. There's no point to discussing that by shrieking demonization of the people trying to evade those controls. They're simply doing what every human being since Olduvai Gorge has done; make their lives and their families' lives better. A sensible polity would be trying to figure out ways to integrate many of them into the life of the nation, and to ameliorate the problems in the native lands of the others so as to wake them from the nightmares that drive many of the immigrants to flee their native lands.

But given the last year's history this nation is, quite obviously, NOT a sensible polity.

Aside from simple sensible policy, the deplorables that are squealing and squeeeeeing because His Fraudulency is punishing these "others" aren't even going to get the woody they anticipate out of this. They're highly unlikely to benefit from the expulsion of these people in any material way. Cletus and Lulabelle aren't going to pick tomatoes in the California sun, or sheetrock Houston in the swampy misery of late summer, or cook frantically in the back of a diner in Sherwood, Oregon. The "jobs" they think these people they hate are taking? They're not good jobs. These DACA people have no legal rights; they cannot afford to take any job that will do a thorough enough background check to expose their legal status.

That will make no difference to the deplorables; for them it's all about just wanting to make "those people" pay.

That's a fucking insane way to run a great industrial nation.

But insanity has never stopped modern Republicans before and it won't now. It's all tribal, all resentment, all whining and bitching all the way down, along with stooging for plutocracy and licking the guns of the ammosexuals and the cross of the God-botherers.

The dark heart of Treason in Defense of Slavery and the decades of segregation and racial oppression that followed was the the people who "counted" - the wealthy white elite that founded the U.S. based on what was good for wealthy white elites - conned the po' white trash into sucking up to them with the bestial promise that, no matter what, no matter how worthless and vile and shitty those white trash people were and would be, they would always be "better" than a nigger.

And a beaner.

And, as we can see, that hasn't changed an iota.

So, despite the obvious fact that, as I said back in February, that

"...the results will be at best underwhelming. The promised Day of Alien-Free Jubilee will turn out to be a quiet monotone of unpicked crops, uncleaned hotel rooms, unwiped asses, and uncooked meals.

The result of all this huge slug of spending - surely paid for by a tax hike, right? - will be, outside of personal hardship for those involved, a vast expanse of...very little."

his Trumpkins will fight for this like crazed hashashins because nothing, nothing, is more important to them than reminding those dusky little devils that this is still a White Man's Neighborhood.

Deus vult

I have gotten to a point where it is almost impossible to number the things about the United States (and much of the larger sphere of humanity, circa 2013) that drive me fucking crazy.

It seems incomprehensible to me that, given the options we have, that we seem bound and determined to drive this goddamn bus back into political and economic oligarchy, social inequity, and intellectual credulity and irrationality. But that seems to be the case in a fairly broad swath of the American and global publics.

Idiocies, ranging from tantrums of anti-science to an apparent longing for Dickensian unregulated capitalism, abound. People whose world-views range from simplistic to outright delusional find it childishly easy to convince the public to elect them to high office. Even our political "scandals" seem more boneheaded and ginned-up than the scandals of just a couple of decades ago...perhaps because we chose to deliberately obscure and forget those earlier scandals rather than look on them with critical eyes.

Obviously a hell of a lot of this that's happening in the U.S. has to do with the congealing of what's called "movement conservatism" in this country.

The U.S. GOP as currently constituted is less a political party as it is a cult. The GOP of my young adulthood believed in things like free markets, low taxes, strong armies, and "personal responsibility" as social goals and legislative objectives.

The current GOP believes in them as dogmas, the difference being that if you have a political position you can reasonably modify it or negotiate over it with people who don't agree with it to find as much of a compromise as you can but if you have an article of faith then it is either that or damnation. You would rather be dead, and your opponent be dead, and everything around you flaming wreckage than accept anything less than everything you demand.

But I think that this is just a symptom of a larger disease; the resurgence of fundamentalism.

The GOP is just one of the organizations that has been taken over by - or has deliberately absorbed within itself - people whose outlook is irrational based on belief rather than reason and conviction rather than questioning.

Human life has always been hard. Human problems have always been difficult; usually complex, often prone to messy, unsatisfactory, unpleasant outcomes. Humans have always been contrary, irritating, perverse, unruly creatures who tend to defy commonsense and logic in pursuit of unreachable and unreasonable desires.

And reasoning or questioning your way through this mess is damn deadly difficult.

It's difficult to acquire bits of evidence, it's difficult to sift through evidence to discern fact from perifact and outright fiction. It's difficult to assess our own best interests to apply this evidence to our potential courses of action to decide on the one or ones that will produce the best outcomes for us. And even more difficult is then trying to apply this to our group; our family, our village or town, our region, our nation, our world. Instead of answers you get more questions. Instead of comfort you find more trouble. You end up feeling small, and alone, and helpless, especially if you're a person who is troubled by things you don't understand or don't like going on around you. You WANT to feel strong and untroubled. You WANT answers, not more questions.

That's where "fundamentalism" helps.

Having a simplistic creed makes those decisions a hell of a lot easier. You don't have to worry about the moral or spiritual or economic or political complexities of your actions; God (or Marx, or the free market, or Allah...) says it, you believe it, that settles it.

There's only one teensy-weensy problem with that; it makes you functionally insane.

If you choose not to apply human reason to human problems, if you choose to instead effectively print yourself a set of punch cards with a small range of standard answers to the Big Questions on them, then you have made yourself into a sort of meat computer and if your inputs are wrong then your outputs will be wrong.

David Atkins does a good job of summing up the immense problems with this approach to human life and human issues:

"Fundamentalism of any nature causes extraordinary harm. Fundamentalists believe that the ends justify the means, and that their ideology cannot fail--only people can fail their ideology. Christian and Islamist fundamentalists alike attribute any ills befalling the world as a sign of inadequate obeisance to their God, and do whatever it takes to remake the world more in keeping with their scriptural dogma. Market fundamentalists elevate the "free market" as a divinely infallible authority, attributing even the most obvious market and corporate failures to intrusions of "big government", and offer up only more deregulation, tax cuts and the occasional military coup as a solution. Even Marxist fundamentalists exist, looking at the failures of Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot not as refutations of their dogma, but as inadequate implementations of their ideology. The end result of all of these fundamentalist beliefs is mindless tragedy, violence and death."

When I look around what I see as the basis of a hell of a lot of this Vortex of Fucking Crazy is more than a willingness; an intense desire, almost a need to retreat from cautious ratiocination into simplistic answers driven by "faith".

The problem I have with that is that "faith", by its very nature, is personal. I believe some things because I am who I am and I have seen and done and learned what I have; I cannot transfer that to you anymore than I can slide the scar on right hand I earned by shoving it through a plate glass window when I was eight off my hand and onto yours.

I can tell you about that scar. I can try and convince you that the scar is a good scar, and one that should shape the way you live your life.

But the moment I try and force you to bear that scar - whether by law or might or social pressure - I put myself in a dangerous place.

And more and more I see people who want to force others to bear their scars, for no better reason than that they believe in their scars strongly enough to want to force those others to bear them, too.

That drives me fucking crazy.

What's worse, I cannot see a way around it.

We know more now, and more of us know more, about ourselves, about our world, about the natural processes, about politics and economics and societies of every stripe.

And yet we, many of us, seem to insist not on using that knowledge but deliberately ignoring it; making others' and our own lives more difficult, meaner, crueler, less tolerant, more violent and random and loveless rather than kinder and more rational.

And I have absolutely no idea how - if all that information and knowledge and communications cannot - you change that.

They will be with us always

The house is quiet now. Missy jogged out of her bed to the couch in the front room but immediately curled up there and went back to sleep; the other two - my Bride and the Boy - are our slow risers and have yet to wake. So I get to site here at the laptop near the front window and watch the gray Sunday begin.

I'm not sure whether the brown-streaked song sparrow is one sparrow or two, but it (or they) have been coming regularly to the platform feeder my family has set up outside the window. One of the few gains from the loss of Miss Lily is that Fat Nitty has never been an enthusiastic huntress, and with the Terror of the Backyard biding safe in a ditch we can resume putting out treats for the local birdlife. Nothing exotic; the song sparrows, a pair of chickadees I suspect of nesting in the Oregon grape, and a single massive scrub jay that arrives to standoff with the other local gourmand Mister Eatee the squirrel.

I was watching this little bit of Nature and thinking about the end of the Boston Bombing Week.

With the older brother - who seems to have been what passed for the "mastermind" of this business - full of holes as a colander we may never find out what the hell was going on and why. Certainly the likelihood of some sort of international jihadist conspiracy seems...unlikely. All the jihadi groups have denied these mooks, and their oddball odyssey Thursday and Friday - ambushing a campus cop, carjacking and careening through the streets tossing homemade demo out the car windows - makes them seem more and more like the couple of homicidal losers that Uncle Tsarni called them.



This hasn't stopped any- and everyone from using this episode as a platform for calls for this, that, and the other. My pals Lisa and jim over at RAW have a post up scolding the local security folks for their slipshod laxity in not securing the Marathon finish area better. Various pundits have drawn all sorts of inferences from this; everything from questioning the mental health system, the immigration system (despite the simple reality that the younger Tsarnaev was nine when he arrived here - nine!), to other calls for better security and more thorough assessment of the "threat".

I'm going to add to that but to perhaps something of a different end.

I'm going to suggest that we will ALWAYS have a Tsarneaev or two to strike at us.



For two reasons;

First, because we are and, I hope, will remain a relatively "open" society. I agree with jim and Lisa; the Boston Marathon organizers could have done more to make the route secure. When I go to soccer matches my bag and every bag is searched at the gates, and the gating and exclusion at public venues has become fairly standard. The price of safety is eternal inconvenience.

But I think back to the other big urban events like Seattle-to-Portland. The finish area is almost unsecurable; you have people arriving and departing all through the day. Riders with saddlebags, supporters with backpacks. Vendors, journos, and the whole thing ends in the park right between a mall, a big movie theatre, and the tram stop. To make that area secure you'd make a traffic jam and bottleneck that would make STP and everything around it slam to a stop.



Flick through the pictures I've posted. This is just one year's accumulation of the public events I've attended; me, personally. In one year, in a single mid-sized American city. And every single one of these events was just as open as the Marathon finish area. You could drive right up to them and park within car-bomb radius of a crowd of several hundred. You could walk amid the crowd with a backpack or tote bag competely un-inspected or unexamined.

Street fairs. Bike races. Sunday Parkways. Bridge Pedal. Saturday Market.

COULD make all of them utterly secure? Sure, you could.

But there's a cost there, not just in access but in thought. To really secure all of those venues would be a great deal of cost and personal committment; I'm not sure that anyone has any real idea of how much it would cost.

But, even more significant, you have to get the people, all the people; the organizers, the attendees, the competitors, the law enforcement and security agencies...into the sort of mindset that Israelis have to have; you have to have everyone on the constant lookout for the slightest hint of a threat. Every package, every backpack, every empty vehicle, every "odd stranger" has to be considered a danger.

You have to build that "fortress under siege" mentality into your people. Into your culture.

You have to see every venue as a potential massacre, and everyone as a potential enemy.

And we can do that. Of course we can.

But do we want to?



But, second, the other reality is that there will ALWAYS be human beings who want to do us harm.

They may be simply violent losers, more Tsarnaevs, more Columbine or Newtown shooters. There is almost no way to prevent a person from killing people if they're willing to work hard enough. You can make it more difficult. But stop them? Never.

And - giving consideration to the "Islamic" angle so many people have thrown at this - there are also some mindsets that will never live easily alongside each other.

Think about it this way; even if we stopped the "War on Terror" this minute. If we pulled every drone and every covert agent from every Middle Eastern country. If we halted every dollar and every round of ammunition sent to some loathsome dictator we support because he's friendly to the U.S. or supports our Middle Eastern policy. If we backed away from reflexively supporting the Greater Israel conservative faction. If we became scrupulously "neutral" in the great secular versus sectarian conflict over Islam now ongoing.

Would that bring us "peace" with the sorts of people who want an "Islamic Caliphate" in the Muslim world, the sorts of mad dreamers who founded outfits like Al Qaeda and Hizb-ut-Tahrir?

How could it?



The United States ideal represents everything that that sort of person finds appalling and dangerous. A nation founded on the ideal - often violated in practice, yes, but, still based on the notion - of personal and religious liberty. Open to "dangerous" ideals like the legal and social equity of men and women, the acceptance of homosexuality, even atheism. Tolerant of sexual liberties to the point of libertineism. Women in uniform. Personal choices on everything from abortion to educating women. You can almost hear the conservative mullahs shudder.

So in that sense they do, and will, always "hate us for our freedom". But not in the way that someone like Limbaugh or Coulter or Beck mean it; indeed, the sorts of Islamists who would like to bomb and shoot Americans for ogling nudie pictures and cuddling up to feminists and gays would probably get on famously with Operation Rescue and the boys down at the local John Birch Society.



And to make "peace" with these sonsofbitches really would be to have to change our society in some very fundamental ways, ways I cannot see happening if we are to remain true to our national ideals as I see them.

I hope that the nasty business of last week will, in some way, produce something of value. Some better way, perhaps, to help prevent this sort of brutality from striking somewhere else some time in the future.



But it may not.

Update 4/21: And this sort of idiotic crap doesn't help. "The accused perpetrators of these acts were not common criminals attempting to profit from a criminal enterprise, but terrorists trying to injure, maim, and kill innocent Americans." And you know this, McCain, how? By your extraordinary political ESP, the sort of brilliance that gave us Backwoods Barbie? And King, do I remember you calling for this when your IRA pals turned up in Boston back in the day? And Graham - is this what you had in mind when you were quoted as saying ”We’re not generating enough angry white guys to stay in business for the long term.” back in August?

Fuckadoodledoo, you gormless pinworms, we don't even know what these two gomers were in business to do, much less why. And you're already insisting on replaying the worst-selling of "Dubya's Greatest Hits" as covered by Obama?

Christ, but we're screwed.

More than a feeling

Couple of thoughts re: today's news:

One of the most unpleasant things about human beings and the world in general is sitting down and trying to figure out "Who would do something like that?" and within about two minutes generating a list that begins with various groups of Muslims that we are effectively warring on, right-wing militia nuts, diehard Tamil separatists, rogue PIRA fanatics and ends up with the ever-popular "random nutter". Homo homini lupus, damn it. We are our own worst enemy.

I cannot express how grateful I am that I do not have to sit my little daughter down tonight and explain the bad thing that happened to her first-grade teacher. I called the school and Mrs. Sammons' family has been in touch to let them know she's okay.

I cannot express how horrified I am that someone else is going to have to sit their little girl or boy down tonight and explain the bad thing that happened to their mommy, daddy, big sister, uncle, or their first-grade teacher...



We must be utterly fucking mad.

This Pretty Much Sums Up The "Gun Control Debate"

Wherein I am prescient.

Two days ago I wrote this:

"Then we really need to start accepting that so long as we're going to be okay with widespread private firearms that these occasional nutter-shootings are just going to happen. They are. And nothing short of a violent change in the way American society and public law works will change that. This is the thing about firearms; they're fucking easy. They're simple to work, especially modern military-style firearms which are designed to be used by deadhead draftees and Somali teenagers. They're quick to debug if they malfunction. And they're easy to use; just point at the nearest toddler and shoot.

It takes some strength, some determination, and some damn deadly difficult-to-learn homicide skills to kill someone with a nunchuck. Or a pickaxe. Or a bread knife.

But an AR-15?

Easy-peasy lemon squeezy, as the little ponies say."

And sure enough, like a deadly Fairie Queen in a pantomime, comes another.

I cannot really add to what I said at the end of the comments for the earlier nutter-shooting: "There will not be any change in the nutter-shooting situation until some advocacy group - "Mothers Against Autoloading Weapons" ("Maaw" or some damn thing) - begins doing what MADD did for drunk driving and jams the 2nd Amendment sideways up the NRA's ass.

Period."

But, honestly? I'm betting you that this will be off the heavy-rotation news cycle by NEXT Friday and forgotten by next week.

Sigh. Fuckin' people...

Clackamas Slayride

Another shopping day 'til Christmas, another whackadoodle takes his his buddy's rifle to the mall.

We could blog the hell out of this.

But why bother?

We pretty much know already what stories will come out of this. The shooter will turn out to be either the scary loner with the gun collection (He used to scare the kids! We almost never saw him but when we did he was a freakazoid!") or the sweet boy who seemed so normal ("He used to mow our lawn." "He was always so polite...").

The police will conclude that there was nothing that could have been done that wasn't.

The usual suspects will fulminate about how the loon managed to get his hands on an AR-15. The other usual suspects will bloviate about how a sturdy yeoman with a Glock could have put one into his brain housing group and stopped the rampage before it began.

The usual ghoulish fascination will erupt through the daily fire-and-murder-news cycle for a day or so and be off the heavy rotation by the week's end.

And the sad reality is that we know, we simply know, how to make these random nutter shootings more difficult. Firearms, especially autoloading firearms, make it ridiculously easy to kill random strangers. If this zombie had to indulge his bloodlust with an axe, or a scythe, or even a bolt-action rifle it would have been orders of magnitude more difficult for him.

It's really that simple. Really.

But autoloading firearms are also just plain fuckin' fun to shoot, and we love our shooting fun, and we, We the People, are perfectly content to let others die or live with their wounds so that we may have our fun.

We're just too canny to come out and say it that way.

But, hell, y'all know that.

In fact, we discussed the hell out of it back in the spring when another nutter went and shot up a theatre in Colorado.

So. Silent Night Deadly Night. Chopping Mall. Whatever.

What else is new?

Couple of quick observations:

First, we really live in an extraordinarily safe time and place. As little as three hundred, five hundred, a thousand years ago we'd be shocked if most of the people we knew weren't dead of the Plague, or raped, butchered, then raped again in the latest fill-in-the-blank invasion/civil war/pogrom. I think that's why these random mad minutes make the news; they shatter the illusion we live in that our lives and our homes are so perfectly safe. They're a little teensy one-nutter Mongol Horde thundering in over the horizon to rape and pillage.

Then we really need to start accepting that so long as we're going to be okay with widespread private firearms that these occasional nutter-shootings are just going to happen. They are. And nothing short of a violent change in the way American society and public law works will change that.

And the final, simple, reality is that humans kill each other, always have and probably always will. Homo homini lupus; Man is a wolf to Man. This little fracas is just another in the unbroken line that starts back with the first australopithecus that went doolally with a camel thighbone and brained some of the gang around the waterhole and will continue on until the first flare of the solar nova bakes all humanity to a delicate crunch.

Really...what else is there to say?

Only what we say here in Portland; forget it, Jake; it's Clackamas County.

Update 1, 12/12 p.m.: Here's some more detail on the idiot who did the shooting. He apparently lifted the Armalite from a pal, and for the record here's the part that gets me: "...the rifle jammed during the 22-year-old's attack, but he managed to get it working again."

So this numbnuts steals what we'll have to assume is a weapon he's completely unfamiliar with, manages to get it to double feed (or either fail to feed or fail to eject, all fairly typical AR-15-type malfunctions) while he's capping sweet white-haired grannies and grampies, and then manages to do some sort of immediate action and gets it working again.

This is the thing about firearms; they're fucking easy. They're simple to work, especially modern military-style firearms which are designed to be used by deadhead draftees and Somali teenagers. They're quick to debug if they malfunction. And they're easy to use; just point at the nearest toddler and shoot.

It takes some strength, some determination, and some damn deadly difficult-to-learn homicide skills to kill someone with a nunchuck. Or a pickaxe. Or a bread knife.

But an AR-15?

Easy-peasy lemon squeezy, as the little ponies say.

Update 2: Charlie Pierce, as usual, has more, and better, to say.

One Last Reluctant Post on the Recent Clusterfuck in Gaza.

The discussion on the whole question of who did and is doing what to whom in the portion of the Middle East where Jews and Arabs butt heads has gotten rather huffy, which is frankly what I expect whenever this issue comes up. As I've said here, and there, repeatedly, there IS no solution outside genocide of one faction or the other OR a massive concatenation of impossible actions on the part of a dozen different parties in the dispute.

For example, here's my friend Lisa, a brilliant and lovely person whose opinion I respect in every sense, commenting on this post;

"The very tiny nation that is Israel could not be defended without the Golan Heights."

Which just makes me tired and sad. Here we are, sixty years after watching two insane World Wars that were ginned up to a great extent because of Germany and France repeating this about Alsace-Lorraine, and look at where it got them.

The sad thing about the argument that we've been having here and at MilPub is how it just convinces me how insoluble this problem is.

Lisa - for all her wisdom and humanity - refuses to see the Arab residents of the former Palestine as anything but "the problem", and meanwhile here are bb and Ael - for all their intelligence and decency - saying exactly the same thing in reverse about the Israelis.

Here Lisa is equating "liberal sympathy" with the Pals with anti-Semitism, while here are the guys - who I have to assume from mere politeness if nothing else are not arguing from a base of "Jews suck" - arguing for sympathy for the Pals because of the actions of the Israeli Right.

I don't think either one of them is "wrong"...and yet, in terms of solving this clusterfuck, they're BOTH appallingly and terribly "wrong".

The simple reality is that Israel is and always will be a Middle Eastern colonial solution to a European social problem.

Israel may very well be "warred upon" - certainly the Arab residents of the Levant chose to fight rather than accept its existence - but what the fuck else could the Zionist founders expect? They were Normans in England, colonists in New England, Portuguese in Brazil. They tried and succeeded in doing what hadn't been done since the late 19th Century; founding a colony. And this was just as the rest of the world had turned it's face decidedly AGAINST colonialism.

Now I'm more than willing to own my own country's atrocities and vileness in genociding the pre-1492 residents of the place I live. If a native American "terrorist" organization started rocketing North Portland and blowing up Tri-MET buses I'd shake my head in grim sympathy - before arming up to exterminate them like vermin. In that fight I'd completely understand WHY my enemies were fighting, and at the same time understand that there was no middle ground there; we both wanted exactly the same thing, and for them to win I and mine would HAVE to lose. And I'd choose for their women and kids to die rather than mine.

But at the same time, I'd also understand that that would make me a monster. I wouldn't make excuses for myself. I would be doing wrong, and willingly, because that's the nature of colonialism.

The very nature of Israel and its situation in the Middle East makes for monstrous choices. Lisa has made hers, Ael and basil have made theirs. And so it goes.

But here's the thing; as a citizen of the U.S. I don't HAVE to make a choice. I can blithely wish a curse on both the houses in this colonial mess. I can wish that everyone involved in the business had made better choices. I can wish that Truman had offered Utah to the Zionists. I can wish that David Balfour had choked on a kipper at the age of 16. I can wish a lot of things, and none of them will made a half-damn's worth of difference.

But one thing I cannot do is change the utterly-fucked condition of the eastern Levant, and the only thing I mourn is that it sets my friends at each other's throats.

Geeks bearing gifts

I sort of bumped into this by accident, but the discussion is kind of fascinating. It's about the whole question of "what is geekiness, and who gets to decide?"

Let me start by nailing up my qualifications.

I was a sort of geeky nerd dork in high school and college.

I was fairly introverted until my sophomore year in college, had a decent but very limited set of social skills, and was clueless as to the value of physical exercise and sports in general not so much as a path to mens sane in corpore sano but as a route to wider social skills and adulthood in general.

I was a geek in the John Scalzi sense; I was a deeply immersed fan of militaria and tabletop wargaming (at a time when war in general - this was the Seventies, remember - and gaming were both in deep cover). I was a comic fan and cartoonist, and a science-fiction freak at a time when both genres are still pretty much outside the mainstream.

I got decent grades (without throating, though - I was stunned to find out that you actually had to WORK hard to get decent grades in college, and my GPA reflected that).

I loved women (hmmm...still do. Must be something to think about there) but between my social ineptitude and intellectual immaturity was unable to do much more than fantasize about having female friends, much less an actual "girlfriend".

And in that I'm sure I was in a hell of a lot of company.

So one the Scalzi Scale I was, oh, probably about 64% geek, 5% nerd, and 31% dork.

But I grew up, and out of my awkwardness. Found that my passions had worked their way into the mainstream. Figured out how to talk to women not as life support systems for vaginae (vaginas? What the hell is plural of "vagina" and does anyone every have the occasion to use it?) but as people, and found out that they're often - not always; it's kind of shocking that for as nice an example of structural design a woman can be as compared to us hairy Y-chromosome type how they can be just as big a jerk as we can be - fascinating as people. People in the have-interesting-ideas-about-things sense and in the enjoyable-as-companions sense.

I even found a woman (well, women, actually, but no more than one at a time; I am not from Havana!) who I liked and liked me enough to form a long term relationship with.

And that was nice.

But in some ways, I'm still that geeknerddork.

I still enjoy wargaming, which is something that I fortunately share with my son. I am an uncloseted science-fiction fan, which is something that I fortunately share with my wife.

But...I'm NOT a big enough geek to go to comic or sci-fi conventions without feeling horribly self-conscious about it, though.

If I were, though, and if I ran into the "booth babes" that this character "Joe Peacock" ran into in San Diego I would a) probably react with a mild sort of "gee...I sure hope she doesn't feel silly having to dress up like that to make a living..." and b) simply enjoy the pretty lady's pretty prettiness.

But, then, I wouldn't be "Joe Peacock".

(Is it me, or does that sound like the name of some guy playing one of the non-non-fucking roles in one of those softcore (i.e. non-fucking) porn films? [Have you ever seen one of those things? They tend to turn up on some of the weaker cable channels, places like Showtime. There's never any actual, y'know, sex - or, for that matter, any actual male or female junk visible - but the lead actors get naked and rub their junk-areas together and moan a lot.]

Perhaps the most classic of the genre is something called "Tarzeena; Jiggle In The Jungle" and should you care you can say I said so. Hell, the scene in which the mad doctor bursts into the prison-break scene and instructs the actor in the mind-controlled-Tabonga-the-gorilla costume to "Kill them all before they escape! And make sure you do a good job; nobody appreciates sloppy work!" alone is worth the price of admission.)

Anyway, this Peacock - sorry, I promise to try and not giggle the next time I say that - guy is all pissy about these pretty costumed ladies because, apparently, they're not there to be all geeky at all!

Now, like I said, I just don't have the stones (or the obsessive level of fandom) to go to a comic convention dressed up like Batman, or a 501st Legion trooper from Star Wars, or Erwin Rommel, forchrissakes.

But I understand that some of us sometimes have to let that Inner Geek go wild. And that some of us are sometimes women(like the gal at the link - she's fun, and funny, and her site is well worth the visit, trust me). And that some of those women like to go wild with the costumes at the conventions.

(The image below is one of Amy Mebberson's "Pocket Princess" cartoons, BTW, and as a Disney-movie-raised-kid and a lover of all things adorable they just tickle the ass offa me. I've GOT to show them to Missy, the princess-lover...)

And, frankly, that's fine. The world's too big to get all inquisitorial about what other people do with their time, their money, or themselves.

But apparently this isn't OK with this Peacock...okay, OKAY, I said it'd try, I didn't say I wouldn't giggle...guy unless they're TRUE geek-girls. The dress-up-booth-babes apparently offend geek-boys because they're there to...tease them, or something. They're not "real", meaning, I can only suppose, that the fact they're there somehow...cheapens? Degrades? Mocks? the true spirit of uber-geekiness that this Peacock (snort! SORRY!) dude and his fellow genuine-geeks represent.

Anyway, all of this got me thinking about the genuine but bizarrely human...need, is all I can come up with, to find some reason for slagging off on other people for things that those people do that do no material harm - neither break the leg nor pick the pocket - of the slagger-offer. Sometimes it's harmless, like Joe Peacock (mmmrphmsnert! I give up...) ripping on women he doesn't approve of.

Sometimes, it's not.

Sometimes it's about preventing lovers from ever being together in public. Sometimes it's about "slut-shaming" other lovers, or witch-hunts for imaginary religious enemies, or finding reasons for afflicting the "undeserving" afflicted, or hating on and bullying people who don't have the ability to successfully fight back.

But trivial or malign, it's beyond just a crime. It's a mistake.

Because I'm convinced that the sort of person who can spout this sort of self-justifying inanity is the sort of person who can be persuaded to acquiesce and eventually participate in, first, injustice and then, perhaps, even cruelty. OR atrocity.

Because first they came for the cosplayers...

Anyway, I can't say it better than Scalzi, so I won't try:

So what if her geekiness is not your own? So what if she isn’t into the geek life as deeply as you believe you are, or that you think she should be? So what if she doesn’t have a geek love of the things you have a geek love for? Is the appropriate response to those facts to call her gross, and a poacher, and maintain that she’s only in it to be slavered over by dudes who (in your unwarranted condescension) you judge to be not nearly as enlightened to the ways of geek women as you? Or would a more appropriate response be to say “great costume,” and maybe welcome her into the parts of geekdom that you love, so that she might possibly grow to love them too? What do you gain from complaining about her fakey fake fakeness, except a momentary and entirely erroneous feeling of geek superiority, coupled with a permanent record of your sexism against women who you don’t see being the right kind of geek?

These are your choices. Although actually there’s a third choice: Just let her be to do her thing. Because here’s a funny fact: Her geekdom is not about you. At all. It’s about her.

Geekdom is personal. Geekdom varies from person to person. There are as many ways to be a geek as there are people who love a thing and love sharing that thing with others. You don’t get to define their geekdom. They don’t get to define yours. What you can do is share your expression of geekdom with others. Maybe they will get you, and maybe they won’t. If they do, great. If they don’t, that’s their problem and not yours.

Be your own geek. Love what you love. Share it with anyone who will listen.

One other thing: There is no Speaker for the Geeks. Not Joe Peacock, not me, not anyone. If anyone tells you that there’s a right way to be a geek, or that someone else is not a geek, or shouldn’t be seen as a geek — or that you are not a geek — you can tell them to fuck right off. They don’t get a vote on your geekdom. Go cosplay, or play filk, or read that Doctor Who novel or whatever it is you want to do. Geekdom is flat. There is no hierarchy. There is no leveling up required, or secret handshake, or entrance examination. There’s just you.

Anyone can be a geek. Any way they want to. That means you too. Whoever you are.

Are we good? Great, because you gotta excuse me; my son has got my 3rd Guards Tank Army caught in a hell of a pincer and I've gotta get some Sturmoviks airborne, and quick.

Ni shagu nazad!, damn it, boy...

...et pacem appelant

More ghost cities. This time, Hiroshima, 1945.I can't help thinking the same thing the woman in the article muses:

“The thing that affects me most about the photographs is what isn’t there. The absences, like the photograph of the chalk marks of the feet on the bridge. People know what we did at Hiroshima,” she says pensively, “but we just don’t want to think about it.”

We never do. We like to think we make decisions based on "facts" and "reason", that the fact that we are in "control" is a good thing. And don't get me wrong; penicillin, flush toilets, clean food...these ARE all good things.But the default setting for almost all of us - if I do it, if it benefits me in some way, it must be good - is a dangerous foolery, and we would do well to be more suspicious of our own intentions and more skeptical of our rationalizations.Because once you get to the point of standing there on the Aioi Bridge looking into the sun appearing 1,963 feet above your head, there is nothing you can do except become part of the sunrise.

Solitudinem faciunt

One of the commentors on the previous post about Verdun (thanks, Leon!) gave us this; a website showing views of the abandoned city of Pripyat, killed by the implosion of the nearby Chernobyl nuclear power plant.While it doesn't have quite yet the same time-haunted loneliness or the loom of the awful destruction visited on Fleury-devant-Douaumont there's still something of a similar, frightening stopped-clock desolation there.

I think one of the things that frighten us so badly about these places is the awful familarity about them. We can get angry or frustrated about the destruction visited on the wild places, the Deepwater Horizons, or the Exxon Valdezes, but somehow these places don't seize our hearts and minds like the scattered homework in the Pripyat elementary schoolor the empty field where the little village of Kopachi used to bebefore ionizing radiation made it too dangerous to live in, or near, and the Soviet engineers buried it and sowed the ruins with grass and poplars...These sorts of man-made wastelands always come to mind whenever I hear some fathead (and, sorry, Republicans, but most of the fatheads saying this stuff are your fellow Republicans) talking about how the real problem is "too much regulation" and how the job creators and the Magic of the Market needs to be unleashed to get us all to the Magical Happy Money Place, or when some idiot (see Santorum, Rick) flaps his gums about what a great fucking job humans have done "controlling" their world.

You'd think that "conservatives", who are supposed to be skeptical of human altruism and motives and grounded in a realistic assessment of human failings, would be the first to look at places like this and demand that there always be a second, disinterested, opinion about the gains and costs of human risktaking.

But, as humans always have, we will probably continue to fuck up and then blame everything but ourselves. Being optimists, we will believe ourselves to live in the best of all possible worlds.

Being a pessimist, I tend to agree.

Evergreen

My neighbors to the north just declared the shocking fact that boys who like boys like to get married to boys and girls who like girls like to get married to girls and that's pretty much okay with them.

Now I understand that the "conservative" enemies of all things not-heterosexual are declaring that they will "refer" this new law to the ballot in November so the homo-hatin' good people of Washington state can hate them on some homos and save the precious institution of marriage for other good people like the Kardashians.

Or something.

And then the people who want to get married will file a lawsuit. And then the entire damn thing will get played out in court. Over and over, all the way up to the Supreme Court, I assume, who will probably in the sort of steal-bread-and-sleep-under-bridges wisdom they are famed for will decide they don't know what the good people of Washington should do but that homos eating wedding cake is icky.

Well, fuck.

Is there a point where we can stop going through this ridiculous kabuki? I mean, pretty much every constitution from the federal on down says "you don't get to pick legal rights based on X" where X includes race, religion, hat size, etc.So the eventual defense for these sorts of lets-write-our-bigotry-into-law always seems to come down to "ooooh, icky!" (Dahlia Lithwick sums up the particular version used in the defense of CA Prop.8 nicely here)

The Supremes will continue to tap dance around this so long as the SCOTUS reactionaries draw breath, but eventually somebody will have to accept that the constitutions say what they say, and that if you extend the legal right to co-sign a loan to the hets you gotta do the same thing for the gays and pretty much everyone else of legal age. How freaking hard is that?That civil and criminal law, that government-provided penalties and services shouldn't be based on what you think is icky but merely what serves the people of the United States, and the various states, best, and that a legal contract - and let's just call it "marriage" because, well, that's what it is - is a legal contract, regardless of how squicky the things that the co-signers do in bed makes you feel.

It won't mean that the Catholic Church, or any other church that hates them on some icky homos, will have to marry them.Just that a church that doesn't, can, and the scrap of paper they will get will carry the full faith and credit of the issuing authority and let them do all the things that any other couple can; spend stupid money on crap they don't need, have screaming fights that piss off the neighbors and frighten the cat, raise a loving family, get old together, and end up broke in a rundown retirement home changing each others' adult diapers.

So in effect the only real, long-term result of this ridiculous bullshit waste of time is that a lot of gay people will have to ride in the back of the bus for many years.And how effed up is that?

All the Troubles in the World

...are listed here - the source of the graphic below:I find it interesting to note that some of what we think as truly appalling human conditions - chattel slavery, for example - last for years, decades, even centuries...and yet take a relatively small toll in human lives compared to, say, World War 2, which many of us still consider a Good War and one of the United States' "great adventures".

Which, I think, points up the caution needed in placing a price on horror in death alone. Slavery has always been considered one of the truly heinous human acts because of the wealth of misery it contains. There are, indeed, "fates worse than death" and few of them are remitted the slave.

What I do find interesting to note is the apparent increase in horror over the past hundred years or so. But then you stop for a moment and think of the centuries of human atrocity that have simply disappeared into the memory hole. Rome alone fought nearly constantly during her Republican and Imperial periods - Plutarch says

"[Janus] also has a temple at Rome with double doors, which they call the gates of war; for the temple always stands open in time of war, but is closed when peace has come. The latter was a difficult matter, and it rarely happened, since the realm was always engaged in some war, as its increasing size brought it into collision with the barbarous nations which encompassed it round about. But in the time of Augustus it was closed, after he had overthrown Mark Antony; and before that, when Marcus Atilius and Titus Manlius were consuls, it was closed a short time..."

I wonder; what will some future Plutarch write about our own country in our own time?

One Mean Mother

"And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth,""...and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea,""...and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth."Aah...

Wait!

What?

(h/t to Pharyngula)

Wars and Lechery

So I'm driving to work this morning and, working where I do and living where I do, I pass the Acropolis "Steakhouse Plus" down in Southeast Portland just north of Milwaukie.First let me explain something; Portland is the nation's Strategic Titty Bar Repository.

I'm dead serious. I'm lived in some of the United States' most noxious hives of scum and villainy, from Balboa when it was part of the Canal Zone to Southern Pines, North Carolina, where cousin-marriage is both sport and tradition. And most of these places featured the usual line-up of scummy businesses; tattoo parlors, dive bars, pawnshops, check-cashing and payday-loan grifters, and girlie joints ranging from just dive-y-er bars with a pole where the bored employee would occasionally perform a bit of indifferent gyrating in hopes of attracting an otherwise unused five-spot into her undies...all the way up to the full-on, all-nude skanky juice bars where a former grocery cashier from Kuala Lumpur will attempt to corkscrew herself onto your belt buckle for a hundred bucks and an overpriced glass of Jamba Juice.

But not one of them had as many topless and nude dance places as Portland.

Because...well, first of all, because the Oregon state constitution of 1859 says "No law shall be passed restraining the free expression of opinion, or restricting the right to speak, write or print freely on any subject whatever." This has been interpreted by Oregon's courts to include public performance, and to include public performance whilst clad only in Nature's garb. A number of attempts have been made to variously limit or regulate the ecdysiasts working across the Beaver State, but the beaver has resolutely remained...unclad.

And then, of course, there is the inexorable Law of Strip Joint Supply and Demand; men with money will demand women's saucy bits, or at least a look at them, and women with that equipment and no money will supply them, or at least a look at them, in return for money.Talk about the Invisible Hand. Sheesh.

I should say up front that I've never really enjoyed most of these places. The food is usually bad, the drinks are, too, and expensive, as well. The women clearly either pity you, loathe you, or could care less about you which, in my opinion, is a fairly sound attitude seeing that you've turned up for no better reason than to look at them naked for money.

Anyway, that's not really the point of this post. The point is that no matter where you go in Portland, you're going to pass these places. You just get used to them, which is either sad or just sort of expected, but there it is.(The above photo is of the old "Sandy Jug" that is now one of them called the "Pirate's Cove". Last time I drove up Sandy their sign said "You'll treasure our chests". Well, okay, then.)

But the thing I noted as I went by today was that, along with the typical "Steak Special $5.98", and "Wow 54 Taps!" and the "Cherry Girl School Teacher!!" (okay, I made the last one up...) the Acropolis sign advised that they were "Open at 7".

Now.

Let me say that while I don't consider myself some sort of satyr I suspect I'm as lusty as the next guy, and that while my wife is not a supermodel I believe, and my casual observations reassure me, that her breasts are as lovely as the next woman's.And as it happens in my marriage as in most marriages, several relationships, and even more than a few casual hook-ups, I have had the rather pleasant experience of encountering my bride while un- or barely-clad in the early morning not long after waking.

And I am afraid to admit this, but as ravishing as she is, sashaying down the hall in Eve's raiment on the way to the bathroom, the sight of her pulchritude is unlikely to get more than a brief grunt of appreciation out of me before my first cup of coffee.

So I can't imagine why I...I can't imagine why anyone...would drive down McLoughlin Boulevard at 6:45 in the morning to look at some stranger's breasts at 7 o'clock. My inamorata's breasts? Maybe. Sure. But some boobs-for-hire? A pair of rent-a-breasts?I just don't get it.

Maybe I'm missing something. But I can't think of what.

And speaking of missing something...

The woman who works in my office is a Boston Bruins hockey fan, and that is how I come to know that after the Vancouver hockey team lost this year's Stanley Cup a part of the hockey crowd there tore up the center of the city and had to be chased off by the local constabulary after doing some free-lance burning and looting.Apparently they were upset about the outcome of the series.

You all know that, in the words of the song, I am a Timbers fan and I am an Oregonian. I know I want the Boys in Green to win, and I'm disappointed when they don't.But...it's a game, for fuck's sake. A hobby, a pastime, an entertainment. I don't actually KNOW any of the Timbers, I have no deep emotional stake in their fortunes. I love the sport, I love the team, I love to go to matches and sing and chant for them.

But to burn up my town, the city I love as much as I love both sport and team, because they lost?

There has to be something deeply wrong with you to do that. I'll bet the LaBatt's helped. And the hard times; if I was out of work and on the dole I'll bet there's a lot better chance I'd use the excuse of a lost championship to try and stuff the red flag up your hole...but...probably not.Perhaps I'm a bit overcivilized. Perhaps I'm just unwilling to spend the night in the carcel with the other drunks. But, like staring at titties at seven in the morning, there's something there that just seems deeply wrong to me.Let me know if you can figure it out.

I should add that one worthy thing did emerge from the flaming wreckage of downtown Vancouver; this snapshot.I've heard that some viewers have already stated that they dislike this image intensely, and when a friend of mine posted it and the link to the Vancouver Sun story about it on her Facebook page it drew some fairly scathing comments about drunken hoolies, public indecency, and the general decline in Western Civilization.

Again...maybe it's me, but I love this little image. The way I see it, the moment it captures helps restore my faith in human nature.

Here these two people are, caught, possibly by intent but just as likely by accident, in the midst of a sudden outbreak of violent stupidity. Just moments ago they were part of some sort of liquored-up mob whose intelligence, like all mobs, is the intelligence of the stupidest individual in the mob divided by the number of the people in the group. The mob was angry, the cops were angry, the cars are burning, the (from what I recall) pleasant city of Vancouver has become a fucking mess...and what can a man and woman do about that?

Make love, of course.

There's never a bad time to kiss, never a wrong moment to gift your lover with a tender word, a fierce embrace, a warm, strong hand, whether that hand is on a cheek for comfort, or a thigh for lust.

There's never a wrong time to get a little sugar for your bowl.So maybe there IS a reason to get up and drive down McLoughlin to see breasts...if the breasts belong to the one who can make you forget everything around you except how they make you feel. Perhaps these two felt that way. I hope so.

And I hope that perhaps they will grow old together, pass through the hard times and the dark times together, make themselves a mainland together, and in the end look back at this moment when they were the only sane and sensible people in a world gone mad and share a smile as full of savor at the memory as a midnight is dark and a silent pool is deep and still.