April 29, 2019

The problem is, Trump is not an original thinker. This meme has been around a long time ...

...in the "pro-life" community. It's why my evangelical neighbor thought I approved of a "Holocaust of Babies" 35 years ago -- my Planned Parenthood bumpersticker that said "Pro Child. Pro Family. Pro Choice" was clearly code for "I support ripping viable babies from their mommies' wombs," you know?

It's not new and is unlikely to be treated as news. It's just vile.

April 29, 2019

Trump is a sadistic sonofabitch who turns stuff like this into a species of pornography & strokes it

Remember when he was going on about human trafficking at the border? All those poor women tied up, tightly bound by their captors, duct tape over their mouths, stuffed in trunks by evil coyotes? He looooved repeating that story, with embellishments. Now that we have homegrown white militias on the border, he's gone on to the next thing.

Trump deliberately instigates violence. In the case of people who are fanatically anti-choice, he has an already-violent core who willingly support the murder of doctors who abort zygotes, and have been calling pro-choice people like me "baby killers" for 30+ years.

All that matters to Trump is whipping his cultists into a murderous frenzy.

April 29, 2019

It's only a short step from the lie about "partial birth abortion" to this lie...

The fanatics have been calling pro-choice advocates "baby killers" for 30+ years, and I am talking about abortion of a zygote. They are so unhinged they call nearly every form of contraceptive an abortifacient.

They are violent people who stalk the children of clinic workers and gun down doctors. And you know how Trump loves violent people.

As for the media, they have never known how to deal with the issue because anti-choice fanatics made it a religious issue and painted the rest of us as dirty people who believe in sex without consequences. There is an American white Christian terrorist network that kills doctors and destroys clinics, but since they aren't Muslim we can't call them terrorists, can we?

April 29, 2019

For all those who have not been paying attention to anti-choice fanatics and terrorists for 30 years

...he is not talking to you. He is talking to violent people, and he will double down and tell this story again and again until he needs another vile lie to whip up his cultists.

Remember the "human trafficking" story he told to justify the border wall and his abuse of migrants? How lovingly he detailed the picture of helpless women being tied up, the duct tape over their mouths? He stroked this image, and told the story over and over.

He gets pornographic in his descriptions of violence being done to the helpless. Do you think he cares about captive women or slaughtered children even a tiny bit? No, but he sure cares about whipping his audience into a frenzy and aiming them like a cannon at the rest of us.

He will double down. Facts be damned.

April 29, 2019

Thanks for taking us on a thoughtful ramble...

The May issue of Atlantic has a long article called "Elegy for the American Century" by George Packer, who says it only lasted 50 years anyway. "Doomed" featured somewhere in it, as did "Bosnia." I started to read it last night, but was too exhausted so put it aside and went to bed.

Yesterday's Los Angeles Times has an Op-Ed by Virginia Heffernan on Joe Biden: "The white male savior we've outgrown." She really did not like his announcement video, which she called, "an elegy for an obsolete American dynamic." There's that word Elegy again.

In the case of Joe Biden, I object, and surprisingly I feel rather hurt. I don't believe much in saviors myself, and I know Joe's a Catholic and probably doesn't confuse himself with Jesus, either. Personally, I started out hoping Biden would stay out of the race because of his age -- and I could practically write Andrea Mitchell's snarky jabs about "gaffes" in my sleep, as well as DU fights about Anita Hill.

But then Joe released his video, and I practically wept. The old warrior, I thought, had got it exactly right for this moment. While the others are going to spend their time arguing over fine points of what is already in the Democratic platform and worrying about whether they should ignore Trump or engage with him by name, and how to make the deplorables vote for them, Joe went straight for the jugular of the Mad King and called him and his cultists out. My God, somebody has to do it, and I find myself grateful that it is Joe Biden. If what he is telling us in that video is obsolete, we really are doomed and damned.

Thanks for letting me ramble on a bit myself. I think I needed to.

April 28, 2019

The anti-choice fanatics have been calling us babykillers for decades.They're devoted to overturning

...Roe vs Wade, and case law has been working its way up to the SCOTUS. It is now a tossup as to whether a majority on the Supreme Court will overturn Roe in the next few years.

Many states now have few if any women's clinics that will perform abortions. This creates particular hardship and dangers for rural women and abused women, who must arrange transportation, and time off work and away from home -- overnight, sometimes a couple of days -- to have a legal procedure that should be a private matter.

The legislatures of many states attempt to pass laws and nowadays do pass laws that effectively outlaw abortion at any stage and for any reason.

For decades a widely-dispersed domestic terror network has concentrated on forcing clinic closures by harassing clients as they attempt to enter; by vandalizing and destroying clinics; by stalking and threatening the children of clinic workers; by threatening and sometimes murdering clinic doctors and workers.

Planned Parenthood is a favorite target. PP's mission is to help women and men decide when and if they want to have babies, to educate, to provide contraceptive services to both women and men, to provide prenatal services and even fertility services.

Only about 3% of PP's services involve abortion, and almost all of that is at an extremely early stage.

You really need to educate yourself. I'm not picking on you -- unfortunately I have recently noticed
an uptick in new DUers who express opinions very like yours, and I realize that misinformation cuts both ways. Trump repeats vicious lies -- and women's healthcare is is grave peril because these lies have been abroad for over 20 years already. It's not enough to dismiss them -- we have to fight them.

April 1, 2019

Wait wait wait: just found Kaulana Na Pua from Project Kuleana again...

Do you know that one? Lots of countryside. Originally a mele of opposition to annexation 1893.

When I said "earlier version" that was weird, because it's not the same song at all, just the same era of composition.

April 1, 2019

A bracing op-ed from a recent vet: highly recommended

NOTE: It has taken awhile to cut this down to the required length (I hope I cut it sufficiently) and to add the link to the Los Angeles Times. But it hasn't been easy to get this far, and I've already lost it once. It's a good piece of writing, and maybe we'll see Danny Sjurson entering politics one of these days.
~~Hekate

https://enewspaper.latimes.com/infinity/latimes/default.aspx?pubid=50435180-e58e-48b5-8e0c-236bf740270e

I was an obsequious Army grunt. But no longer

I’m one of the lucky ones. Leaving the madness of U.S. Army life with a modest pension and all of my limbs intact feels like a genuine escape. Both the Army and I knew it was time for me to go. I’d tired of carrying water for empire and they’d grown weary of dealing with my dissent and with footing the bill for my PTSD treatment. I entered West Point in July 2001, a bygone era of relative peace, the moment, you might say, before the 9/11 storm broke. I leave an Army that remains, remarkably, engaged in global war, patrolling an increasingly militarized world.

>snip<

I recognize that there’s a paradox at work here: The Army and the global war on terror made me who I am. Deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan in particular turned a budding neocon into an unabashed progressive, an insecure aspiring dealer in violence into a pacifist, or as near to that as a former military man can get. What the Army helped me become is someone whom, in the end, I don’t mind gazing at in the mirror each morning.

>snip<

I am not sorry to leave behind the absurdity I witnessed. .... Farewell to the generals who knew tactics but couldn’t for the life of them think strategically ....Who shamelessly traded in their multi-starred uniforms for six- and seven-figure gigs on the boards of corporations that feed the unquenchable appetite of the military-industrial beast. ...... So long, too, to the chauvinism in the senior ranks that asserts a messianic American right to police the globe. Farewell to the faux intellectualism of men like former Gen. David Petraeus who have never seen a problem for which improved counterinsurgency tactics wasn't the answer and are incapable of questioning the efficacy of force....

Goodbye to the devotees of American exceptionalism who filled the Army’s ranks, and to the hypercapitalism and Ayn Randian conservatism among officers in what is the nation’s most socialist institution. Godspeed to the often-hypocritical evangelical Christianity and the rampant Islamophobia infusing the ranks. Ciao to the still-prevalent patriarchy and homophobia that affects everyone in uniform.

>snip<

Sayonara to the adrenaline junkies and power-obsessed freaks atop so many combat units, folks who lived for the violence, the rush of nighttime raids without a thought for their often counterproductive and bloody consequences. It’s a relief to leave them behind as they continue to feed the insurgencies the U.S. battles far faster than they kill “terrorists.”

Toodle-oo to the vacuous “thanks-for-your-service” compliments from civilians who otherwise ignore soldiers’ issues, foreign policy and our forever wars.

Maybe it’s hopeless for a former Army major to fight American militarism. .....And here’s the truth of it: I’m not alone in my views; as supportive texts and emails to me have made clear, there are more silent dissenters in the ranks than you might imagine. I hope more serving officers and troops gather the courage to speak their minds and tell Americans the score about our brutal, hopeless adventurism. ..... Goodbye to all that, and hello to what’s next.

Danny Sjursen retired from the Army in February, after tours with reconnaissance units in Iraq and Afghanistan, and teaching history at West Point. He is the author of “Ghost Riders of Baghdad: Soldiers, Civilians, and the Myth of the Surge.” Twitter: @SkepticalVet. Podcast: “Fortress on a Hill.” A longer version of this essay appears at TomDispatch.