Author: muricaderp

Around the Web: The (tits and) ass end of the internet

muricaderp Links

I’ve discussed T&A in these pages before, and I surely will again.

There are websites that discuss sex with taste, manners, morals, that kind of thing. Then there are the kind that I’m about to profile. Some of this stuff is dark, dark enough that Geraldo will wear his sunglasses at night. This is one link dump, however, in which the most gratuitous bit of weirdness will be the least disturbing. Geraldo may not be entirely right, but as we’ll discover shortly, he isn’t as wrong as the kind of people who lead cults of mushheaded feminist ideologues and undersexed shut-ins.

Speaking of tits, I’m just about to link to some: probably not ones that you’d like to see, but if that was one of the search terms that brought you here, you might want to refine your search terms for specificity.

Selfies are wrong. You, too, will look like a damn fool preening at a mirror with a flat phone in hand, and equally a fool for having a forearm awkwardly extended in front of your self-portraits at popular tourist sites because you were too witless or bashful or something to ask anyone else to take your picture. On the other hand, when one is drunk and Geraldo Rivera at 2:30 am, there may not be anyone else present to take one’s nude self-portrait and post it to Twitter. Truth be told, if you have any more taste than I have, you probably don’t want to look at the result, but in consideration of the libertarian ethos on this site, I’ll let individual readers make their own decisions about viewing the masterpiece, on the understanding that they have been given fair warning and consequently bear full responsibility for any psychic damage.

In fairness, notwithstanding his rocking the Transitions Lenses and nothing else, much as Eliot Spitzer loved him some socks, Geraldo’s selfie isn’t nearly as weird as Anthony Weiner’s adventures in the Carlos Danger Zone. Geraldo had a certain confidence, even badassery, about him that Weiner inevitably lacked. Crucially, he also posted his self-portrait publicly instead of addressing it to specific female recipients, the better to freak them the hell out by being an overly familiar weasel.

Of course he’s from Long Island.

Why do I say such a thing about a place that I haven’t even visited? Because its reputation precedes it. #TeshTips: They raise ‘em right on the Guyland. Well, not always. And this. But(t) some names you just can’t beat. 

But let’s move off that terminal moraine while there’s still hope, and find us some even weirder stuff.

Here, Ken White responds to an accusation from Vox that he is a bully of other, slightly less creepy men and a “white-knighting gamma.” In this context, gamma is one of the letter designations used by “game” bloggers to shoehorn men (and, rarely, women) into fixed categories dictating their sexual attractiveness. To these bloggers, anyone below an alpha, or more charitably, anyone below a greater beta, is a loser who will never bed a woman unless she has run out of options and is forced to grudgingly settle for a member of the supplicating dregs of manhood. It’s a crude, paranoid worldview, and one that, judging from comment traffic on these blogs, is disturbingly resonant for a lot of people. It’s a nice pat explanation for why they’re losing out sexually, although the viciousness and crudity of the prevailing jargon on these sites can’t help socialize these guys to the point that women will start finding them attractive. Actually, I know for a fact that it is pernicious: one of the people I follow on Facebook is a dweeb who routinely alienates others by using the same kind of language because he finds it amusing and is too clueless and puffed-up to know when to hold his damn peace.

Vox also has some odd things to say about Bill Clinton and Anthony Weiner, among them, that Clinton isn’t handsome and that Weiner’s wife, Huma Abedin, is a lesbian whom he won over “through traditional Gamma acts of service.” Don’t worry if it doesn’t make any sense.

Next, we have an avowedly Christian mother who unabashedly uses a lexicon that includes “carousel-riding slut” and “whore,” the latter used as a slur with no regard to whether the target has ever used her sexuality in a mercenary fashion. Sunshine Mary’s often understated writing style minimizes the extent to which she’s a shrill Chicken Little authoritarian. The context of the “slut” reference in the second link above was an article in the Daily Mail about a woman who spent fifty years pining after the irresistibly aloof man who took her virginity, the premise being that the woman in question is typical of all women everywhere. Because the UK doesn’t have a gutter press that seeks out the most grotesque people in my country, too, so that it might luridly give their weight in stone. (The last article has been put behind a paywall since I first found it, but I haven’t forgotten about that lady’s custom truck. Or the stone measurements, because my Scotch battle ax of a great-grandmother was always weighed in stone.)

The disappointing truth is that anything less than thirty-stone dysfunction is too boring for the British gutter press. Just because you don’t read about it in the Sun doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist. Its absence from the tabloids will, however, limit its capacity to influence game bloggers towards something resembling sobriety and away from mouth-frothing idiocy on the basis of cherry-picked examples of lurid brokenness. Women who don’t get ruined into their old age and unto divorce by dormitory Lotharios are so boring.

The Daily Mail story about the woman forever ruined by teh Alpha Fux was originally dredged out of the English gutter and aired in the international manosphere by Chateau Heartiste. CH is more or less what would have happened to Richard Nixon had he become a professional cockhound instead of going to law school: brilliant, but clinically paranoid and all kinds of wrong. The biggest problem, as I’ve alluded to, is that weird guys with limited social stimulation read this sort of moral rot and become fully infected, with no defenses against the evil. I often feel that I should wash my mouth out with soap after reading some of the stuff on CH, and there’s no way that I’m at the socially stunted or socially isolated extreme of its readership. Extrapolating the reactions of the really hard cases is a sad thought experiment; many of those guys, I’m sure, go forth and earnestly regurgitate in public what they’ve read on sites like Chateau Heartiste, not fully grasping that it’s sick shit that they found in a weird cul-de-sac of the information superhighway.

Some of the greatest treats on CH are comments from Great Books for Men, who has parlayed his membership in the Chateau peanut gallery into his own blog. GBFM has been compared to James Joyce, but I think he’s much more readable. He’s a minor literary genius who specializes in strings of neologisms, most often about Ben Bernanke and anal sex.

At the opposite extreme from the manosphere, after a superficial fashion, is Hugo Schwyzer, professor of history and gender studies at Pasadena City College, “male feminist,” and grand lodestone of internet derp. For those who can’t get enough humblebragging from weirdos, he’s a blogger, too. His shtick is to abjectly self-flagellate for being a horndog, dramatically exit stage, then return for some more abject self-flagellation and pornographic luridness.

Even before his most recent quasi-downfall, Schwyzer had some eccentric takes on sex. Here, for example, he earnestly extolled the social benefits derived from straight men submitting to anal stimulation from their girlfriends.  Do we need Larry “Wide Stance” Craig to stand up and call bullshit? Maybe:

Want to make straight men better in bed — and better feminist allies? The path may be simple: fuck them up the ass. According to one brand new book, the path to making men more compassionate, appreciative and playful may be straight through their butts.

In The Ultimate Guide to Prostate Pleasure: Erotic Exploration for Men and Their Partners, Charlie Glickman and Aislinn Emirzian make the case that straight “men who get into anal penetration are among the most secure in their masculinity: because they’ve examined themselves, faced their fears.” Despite the title of the book, the authors make the case that the payoff for prostate play — specifically by a woman using a dildo or other toy — isn’t just pleasure. It’s liberation from the masculine straitjacket, with happy consequences that extend well outside the bedroom.

I feel for men who enjoy their butt play without the politics that Schwyzer and his ilk insist on accreting to the practice.

That’s far from Schwyzer’s career low. This eruption of craven flattery of sophomoric drama queens and inchoate anger was definitely worse:

Remind Girls They Have the Right to Want Sexual Attention From a Select Few.
When harassers are confronted on their behavior, they often offer the same classic defense: “she wouldn’t dress that way if she didn’t want attention.” Of course young people want attention — often sexual attention. Very few (if any) want that attention indiscriminately from every post-pubescent male with a pulse. “We always behave as if it’s a really selfish, dangerous and ultimately naïve way for girls to dress revealingly,” Clementine Ford wrote in an email. “A young woman isn’t allowed to dictate what attention she wants, because that’s her making a judgment on the kind of men she deems good enough for her.”

The virgin/slut dichotomy has long meant that a young woman is given two choices: have sex with no one, or give it up to everyone. One key way to fight slut-shaming is to reiterate that girls have the right to want to turn on whom they want to turn on – and still be treated with respect and care by those whom they don’t. That’s only an unreasonable expectation in a culture that expects very little from men.

In that case, I hereby demand sexual attention from my own select few, specifically, Christine O’Donnell, Mariska Hargitay, and Sarah Palin. I shouldn’t be getting attention only from Betty White types just because I’m chubby, balding and an underemployed farm laborer. Actually, a really cute barista in Orange County had a thing for me a couple of months ago, but that’s no excuse for Mariska Hargitay’s failure to force herself on me. Mariska, you’re pwetty!

I have to agree with Schwyzer’s critics that he’s a moral cretin. I don’t mind if he has Charlie Sheen-style three-ways, but he really should stop trying to atone for his horndog lifestyle by belittling other men and encouraging women to be immature, irresponsible and entitled. He is exactly what Vox accused Ken White of being. Apparently it actually helps him get laid, but it’s a scummy way to go about it.

Finally, I’ve written some other stuff about sex here and here. Not the most dignified stuff, perhaps, but my efforts at self-promotion are a bit more dignified than Schwyzer’s, and you’ll never see a selfie of me in Transitions Lenses. I’ve never owned a pair.

Around the Web: the underbelly of Portland

muricaderp Current Events, Economics, Law, Links

1. Trouble on the waterfront. White longshoremen, members of a union rife with open nepotism, go on strike at grain docks on the Columbia River, management brings in black strikebreakers, and racial nastiness ensues.

This is not a one-off episode. There is a huge amount of multigenerational animosity between longshoremen and port owners. It’s so bad and enduring that I’m inclined to think that the whole port industry in the US (and probably in many other countries, where it is at the very least corrupt) is deeply poisoned.

2. In which a tweaker named Axmaker stabs a man named Savage, then sings “Girl on Fire” over the dispatch radio from a stolen sheriff’s patrol car. The uncanny names of the parties only add to the righteousness of a scenario that was fated to someday happen somewhere between Tacoma and Medford.

3. Portlandia absolutely has to “honor” this bizarre tale from the Portland Police Bureau. The episode should be called “Nazi Behind the Bush.” Radley Balko originally brought Captain Mark “Ehrenbaum” Kruger to my attention when Kruger was controversially chosen to teach a leadership course to other police commanders, but the back story is even better, as it involves apparent collusion on the part of other city officials to hide evidence of Kruger’s scandalously Germanic extracurricular activities, an aptly named sensitivity course called “Tools for Tolerance,” a deputy city attorney named Manlove, and, Scout’s honor, a Cmdr. Famous.

4. Not quite the Majors-Cullen school of excellence in nursing, but still, smart money says that Jeffrey Neyle McAllister, RN, will be taking a long-term disciplinary assignment at Dr. Kitzhaber’s Big House.

There are at least two kickers to this story. First, the Oregon State Board of Nursing renewed McAllister’s license without disciplinary provisions while he was under police investigation for sexually assaulting patients. Second, a double kicker from McAllister’s employment history: before being hired as an RN, he worked as a hospital security guard and as a municipal police officer in the cities of Independence, Beaverton and Seaside.

About the time I did grassroots campaigning for a high-end gigolo

muricaderp Politics, Religion

That’s an impertinent way to refer to the Secretary of State. I’d certainly be ashen with embarrassment upon writing such a thing if I were the kind of whinging supplicant who gives a damn about the etiquette of not holding the contemptible in open contempt. If I should be embarrassed by anything, it should be by the fact that a boorish, condescending, socially climbing arriviste with no discernible grasp on American culture beyond Route 128 is my country’s chief diplomat.

Now, is there anything wrong with being a gigolo? That’s a backhanded question to ask, but one that’s still worth asking. It isn’t wrong the way the guys I profiled last night are wrong, so I’ll let other people Godwinize this debate. (And they will. The concern trolls always do.) Getting head-up about some posh bugger having gotten that way by marrying a condiment heiress would normally be a true First World Problem, but John Kerry made his marriage the people’s business by inflicting himself on his nation, as New England’s posh inevitably do. That crowd gravitates to “public service” like flies to a cow pie. Would that they were merely indolent. My position is that the sugar lifestyle in any capacity (momma, daddy or baby) is awfully gauche and in no way admirable. I just feel a certain uneasiness with the idea of paying or being paid for such services in increments longer than a few hours. It comes a bit too close to indenture for my taste. As I see it, sugaring is something that should be done on a woodlot come spring, but needless to say, that takes a different kind of New Englander.

This is not a David Horowitz-style political conversion tale. Indeed, I campaigned for John Kerry’s 2004 presidential bid, and I did so in an inhospitable jurisdiction: Lebanon County, Pennsylvania, whose electorate was voting for Republicans two to one back then. To this day, I see no shame in that game.

There should be shame in it, but I beheld the man’s competition, and I blanched. A lukewarm Nantucket Catholic ketchup gigolo with a penchant for windsurfing and a schmucky trial lawyer with a powerful head of political hair made for an objectively awful slate, one that called into question the sanity of the party nominating them. It would have been brilliant to vote against that rotten duo, had their opponents not been a dry drunk hereditary boy king and his regent Dr. Strangelove.

In the latter case, we were dealing with a party that wasn’t just insane, but also depraved. The Democratic Party was being strangled by myopic, tone-deaf BoBo status whores, the same facepalmably witless cohort that has lately been smearing Edward Snowden for being a high school dropout. As pathetic as that was, the Republican Party was being strangled by a rogue’s gallery of dangerous authoritarians: theocrats, sex scolds, capital punishment fetishists, prison brutality fetishists, boot-in-the-ass jingoists, martial law enthusiasts, ad nauseam. Nor was there any need to be bashful about doing a mix-and-match at the crazy buffet: the more kinds of religious-nationalistic atavism, the better.

As choices of poison went, it was an easy one. This wasn’t so much a choice between the gas chamber and the electric chair as it was between either following the neighborhood serial murderer into his basement or spending the evening being high-hatted by the local gentry at an estate party. George W. Bush strikes me as someone who spent his childhood performing vivisections on cats. It’s a subjective gut feeling: nothing provable, and probably not the case, but I can’t shake it, either. Many Americans, especially ones who vote in the Republican primaries, looked at him and saw a pious Christian. What, you ask, was Jesus of Nazareth’s relationship to the death penalty? Never mind that. W is a Bible-believing man of God who doesn’t make fun of Christians for attending snake-handling churches.

Oh, you say he did make fun of pious Christians behind their backs? It can’t be. David Kuo must have been a red diaper baby liberal atheist to say such a thing.

What the Democrats have is a communication problem. As a rule, the electorate isn’t so much alienated by their policies as by their personas. The opposite is generally true of public attitudes towards the GOP. I suspect that if equally effective communicators from the Left and the Right squared off, the Right would get creamed.

Libertarians have a communication problem, too, albeit of a different sort, mostly of a tin foil hat variety. This is how Pennsylvania ended up with Ken Krawchuk burning a five dollar bill on stage to demonstrate the worthlessness of fiat money, Mike Fisher sanctimoniously accusing him of criminally defacing US currency, and Ed Rendell, a slimeball, as governor.

Again, though, the communication problems bedeviling Democrats go beyond rhetoric. They have style problems, too. As befits every posh New Englander, more than a few of them have problems involving watersports. Maybe the other kind of watersports, too, but definitely the kind openly practiced around Nantucket. Just the other day, John Kerry was caught out on his yacht while shit hit the fan in Egypt. A major but tenuous Arab constitutional republic was disintegrating, and that fool was out fooling around on a rich person’s boat. It must be that when you’re an international gigolo, it’s always time for a cool change.

Notice that Republicans don’t get caught pulling that kind of shit. George W. Bush clearing brush on his ranch is a trustfunder’s form of recreation, but at the most superficial level, the level that counts in American politics, it doesn’t look bad at all. It’s the kind of thing that any red-blooded American man might do, especially if he has a late-model pickup and eleventy thousand acres of personal backyard. Republicans know that this sort of thing really resonates with inattentive goobers, and they do it skillfully. Dick Cheney may shoot people in the face when he goes hunting, but he doesn’t look like a pandering doofus from the city the way John Kerry does in a hunting coat.

Verbally and visually, Republicans know how to stay on message. Authoritarians make great communicators.

Mealy-mouthed moral relativism won’t carry the day. I’m amazed that it even carried Pennsylvania in 2004. Left-liberal, conservative, or libertarian, regardless of the angle of attack, the only way to take on authoritarians is with some principles. There is evil in this world. It exists. Newsday may be too sheepish to print the pictures, but it’s true: SATIN LIVES.

Our closing hymns today, both written by the truest son of the Guyland, will be a celebration of how not to make a political disaster of one’s boating habit and a survey of the activities of the major American political parties. Go in peace, gigolos.

Around the web: Casual Friday

muricaderp Economics, Law, Links

1. How to reduce absenteeism by monitoring the help instead of maybe abusing it less.

2. The Great Australian Sickie: “People taking a sickie are more reluctant to fake it to a kindly nurse on the other end of the phone line.”

If you’re thinking that of course you wouldn’t fake it with an Australian nurse, remember:

3. Men can be nurses, too.  See also Exhibit 3B.

4. Another reason not to give your son the middle name of Lynn. Some of this stuff just can’t be made up: “On March 2, 2005, the Park City council terminated Rader’s employment for failure to report to work or to call in.”

Because RULES. But it’s fitting. Rader has always believed in them, at once too much and too little.

5. Don’t believe me? Ask my buddy Kasper. D. Lynn Rader is much more of a model prisoner than some of my people are. The Roths left some real scuzzies behind.

Around the Web: Rumpy Pumpy

muricaderp Liberty, Links, Politics

Just one link tonight, since I have to be onsite at a vineyard in less than five hours for work tomorrow.

Here it is, in all its sharp English glory. What does Mark Steyn find so compelling about an almost unheard-0f British politician named Nigel Farage? Here’s a taste:

The wobbly boozer turned out to be the steady hand at the tiller UKIP needed. He was elected (via proportional representation) to the European Parliament, which for the aspiring Brit politician is Siberia with an expense account. Then, in 2010, Farage became a global Internet sensation by raining on the EU’s most ridiculous parade — the inaugural appearance by the first supposed “President of Europe,” not a popularly elected or even parliamentarily accountable figure but just another backroom deal by the commissars of Eutopia. The new “President” was revealed to be, after the usual Franco-German stitch-up, a fellow from Belgium called Herman van Rompuy. “Who are you?” demanded Farage from his seat in the European Parliament during President van Rompuy’s address thereto. “No one in Europe has ever heard of you.” Which was quite true. One day, Mr. van Rompuy was an obscure Belgian, the next he was an obscure Belgian with a business card reading “President of Europe.” But, as is his wont, Nigel warmed to his theme and told President van Rompuy that he had “the charisma of a damp rag and the appearance of a low-grade bank clerk.” A few days later, having conferred in their inner sanctum, the Eurocrats ordered Farage to make a public apology. So he did — to low-grade bank clerks for having been so ill-mannered as to compare them to President van Rompuy. He was then fined 2,980 euros (about $4,000) for his impertinence, since when he has referred to the European president as Rumpy-Pumpy, a British synonym for a bloody good shag.

I have to say, I like the guy. Nigel Farage is why we need Englishmen in Congress. But please no Belgians.

I’d round out this piece with some topical porn links or other suitable rudeness (autoerotic asphyxiation figures in Steyn’s piece), but I have  to be up before dawn. I’m the Help these days.

On the plus side of the ledger, the site where I’m working tomorrow is beautiful, and the grapes don’t talk back.

Yo, bro, suck it up and pray!

muricaderp Law, Liberty, Links, Religion

It’s time for the libertarian discourse to get rude again. Stephanie Drury called attention yesterday to a donnybrook over a Family Research Council prayer campaign graphic, a graphic one indeed, that has been construed to depict a man performing oral sex on one of his fellows.

Did that coalition of family men after God’s heart in fact publish such an obscene image? You be the judge. I suspect, however, that this is an instance in which Potter Stewart would have known it when he saw it. Ignore, if you wish, the civic mind rot in the preceding link about the Family Research Council having been “officially designated a ‘hate group.'” It’s unfortunate that such a bigoted organization’s opponents aren’t suggesting that its members get in line for the coming Sunday’s “services” instead of insinuating that their free speech be chilled merely because it offends a lot of people, especially since it’s so easy to demonstrate that the FRC’s modus operandi is to misuse concern about the health of American families for the purpose of censorious asshattery pending the nationwide implementation of Comstock-style theocratic government. Thankfully, it’s also an organization that tries too hard to be hip and ends up with slogans like this:

call 2 fall 

On our knees for America.

June 30, 2013

I’m in. 

Or, as General Petraeus said to Colonel Broadwell, “Yeah, baby, I’m all in.”

The whole thing has to be seen to be believed. I’ll note without further commentary that “I’m in” is written in white lettering on a smeared blotch of red.

For a counterpoint in defense of family values, prayer, and all that, let’s now turn to Drury’s “Facebook comment of the day”:

“Thanks for pointing this out. I did not know about the call to prayer which I certainly will join. The group that wrote this article would think a Christian sleeping is daydreaming of homosexual activity. They are mean, biased and christian-haters. That is rather obvious to anyone with the slightest bit of objectivity or integrity. Only a perverted mind would see a man praying and construe it as this article does.”

Project much? This “call 2 fall” is, of course, in response to Wednesday’s  Supreme Court rulings invalidating the Defense of Marriage Act and California Proposition 8 on equal protection grounds. A summary layman’s explanation of why these laws were properly held to be unconstitutional is that they denied numerous civil benefits to committed cohabiting partners on account of their sexual orientation, many of these benefits having nothing whatsoever to do with childrearing.

In other words, this is a national call to prayer for the sole purpose of reversing court decisions expanding equal protection under the law. It’s bigotry and bad civics. At the risk of causing further hurt to already tenderized religious right fee-fees, I should add that bigotry and bad civics are the stock in trade for much of the religious right. At rock bottom, much of the religious right’s agenda is the soft subversion of the United States Constitution.

To return to the subject of sexual purity, no prominent, Bible-teaching evangelical pastor has ever regularly consorted with a male meth whore and partaken of the crank pipe. That kind of thing is obviously the province of liberals: secularists, pluralists who are against religious tests for public office, low-class people who are too busy having unsanctioned sexytime to make it to church on Sunday morning, those of us who get a bit rattled or disgusted when the in-your-face nutters take over our congregations, those of us who find that morning services conflict with some combination of sleep and Face the Nation, those of us whose attitudes towards whores are at least as favorable as St. Augustine’s. We, not sexually repressed evangelicals in Colorado Springs, are obviously the ones with impure inclinations. We’re the ones who kick girls off football teams because they’re fixing to cause lust among teh boyz. It must have been a freak like Ron Wyden who publicly told an unsubstantiated story about bathroom privileges being restricted for high school girls in Southeast Oklahoma in response to an epidemic of lesbian sex, because it couldn’t have been a pious, conservative man of God like Tom Coburn.

If I dare say so, I have reasons for being all in for the return of the Victorian gynecological day spa, as well as an increase in the number of its manly counterparts. In fact, I haven’t come close to providing a comprehensive survey of these reasons. I just know that Senator Coburn is itching to get in on that action, no matter what he says. Methinks the doctor doth protest too much. Switzerland, with its sixteen-year-old age of consent and distance from the power centers of the Northeast Corridor, will be an appropriate jurisdiction for him and Chris Hansen to ply their new trade.

Ladies, don’t get any dirty ideas, but in an ideal world I’d be available for outcall massages in the Salem area. In the real world, I’m doing stoop labor with Yamhill County felons. There’s no sexual angle to that pathetic situation, so I don’t expect any intercession from the Family Research Council.

Blow me.

Tales of other cities: tweakers, hobos, some odds and ends, and Santa Rosa’s “welfare block”

muricaderp Liberty

Armistead Maupin I ain’t. Nor do I particularly wish to be. Even if every Millennial brat is working on his novel, my years around downwardly mobile bohemians in denial are too raw to fictionalize, and I find the upwardly mobile sort of San Franciscan too narrowminded and ideologically extreme to examine closely. Besides, I’d rather be the William Faulkner of Tacoma, not because there’s any taste in being such a writer, but because there isn’t any. Pierce County is a place whose dysfunction has gone surprisingly unexamined in American literature and film despite its having sheltered a mentally ill and ultimately murderous police chief (David Brame), a notorious killing spree duo (John Allen Muhammad and Boyd Lee Malvo), a disgruntled father who immolated himself and his kids in their house (Josh Powell), and an Army neurosurgeon (Dr. Dennis Geyer) who used a metal thermos to vent his road rage on the head of a man named, I kid you not, Robert Speed.

If Tacoma isn’t the anti-Seattle, it’s close. Actually, the Parkland-Spanaway-Graham corridor on the east flank of Fort Lewis is the real anti-Seattle, and a fairly awful place. My mom is right that it has too many nail salons. There are reasons why commissioned officers and those of us who associate with them often have bad things to say about the enlisted and their hangers-on, just as there are reasons why some of the common epithets for military wives (“dependent whales,” “commissary cows”) verge on being unprintable. To be clear, the dysfunction goes much deeper than limited education, intelligence, or finances. Fat women in the Nordic countries and the culturally Nordic parts of the Pacific Northwest don’t have that defiant slovenliness about them. Nor is the proliferation of jacked-up crew cab pickups with pristine paint jobs (or, as I like to call them, shlengtheners with room for the general staff) around JBLM a sign of poverty, even if the drugstore cowboys who drive them are in debt for the honor; I’d have to sell my trusty old Civic several times over to buy one, and the fuel bill on those things is obviously a bitch. These people aren’t lower-class; they’re classless. I’ve barely scraped the surface of the myriad pathologies that keep Pierce County social workers busy. One can travel in an arc from Lakewood through South Tacoma and back up the left bank of the Puyallup River to the edge of civilization without really leaving the gnarly shit. Actually, there are some pleasant agricultural districts and old villages up in the hills, such as Eatonville; there are also some picturesque but disturbing ones, such as Yelm, which features a gun shop in an old clapboard church. The northbound leg of this arc has a lot to do with generic West Coast ghetto culture, but the southbound leg, into the woods, is more readily explained by the kind of people who get dredged up for military service these days. There are exceptions, but as a rule these are not the kind of troops who incline me to support our troops, and I have backup from a family friend and Army captain who explained my disturbance about all the thugs on base quite simply: “Those, my friend, are the enlisted.”

You don’t read about these places in the tourist pamphlets. They’re a huge bummer. But as much as the Chamber of Commerce and some of our politicians would like to pretend that they don’t exist, they do. Contrary to popular (and aggressively propagandized) belief, they are not just a problem in and around big cities, either. For example, crystal methamphetamine, which tends to turn its addicts into pathetic wrecks, is largely a rural and small town problem. I lived for a time on the edge of the tweaker ghetto on the west side of Eureka, CA. One description I heard of the commercial strip a few blocks west of my apartment went like this: “If all anyone from out of town saw of Eureka was Broadway, no one would ever come back.” Most of Eureka’s residential motels are clustered along Broadway. These are exceptionally vile, dilapidated properties. Their tenants include tweakers whose five-year-olds stumble into the crank stash and get fucked up, as well as a rogue’s gallery of other gross dirtbags. It’s an accidental sort of truth in advertising, since 101 runs along Broadway and has made this skid row the main southern portal for tourists on their way to visit the quaint Victorians downtown. Only the locals know to detour through Henderson Center if they’d like to avoid the nastiness.

Many locals do not, however, have an inkling of how awful some of the city’s biggest landlords are. They don’t all have their heads in the sand; it’s just that they don’t rent or hang out with people who rent. They may live not two miles away and drive by these slumlord ratholes all the time, but the tenants aren’t doing silly walks out front with their pants on the ground, so the disorder and evil are a lot harder to notice.

I was recently told one of the most amazing stories I’ve ever heard about urban disorder in an unexpected place: Santa Rosa. Santa Rosans have always struck me as an exceptionally well-mannered and functional lot. It seems that I just hadn’t met the dregs because they don’t leave town.

My source for this story was a woman who described herself as a former “mental health token” in Sonoma County social services lobbying (“I was young and could string a sentence together, so they hired me”). She told me that she had several meetings with Nancy Pelosi in this capacity, and that she found Pelosi thoroughly unprincipled.

This woman does de facto social work on Santa Rosa’s “welfare block.” (The only neighborhood nickname I like more is the Pork ‘n Beans, the nickname for a housing project in Miami that is a staple on The First 48. As you see, it can be useful to watch too much TV.)  This term apparently isn’t so much an epithet used by disgruntled neighbors as a matter-of-fact name used by its residents. Asked where they live, they consistently say, “I live on the welfare block.” They don’t know their own home addresses or even the nearest intersection. Second-graders from the block can’t spell their own names. When residents invite friends over, they often tell them to go hang out on the welfare block and wait until they show up. Social life with the neighbors is largely an informal affair determined by who happens to show up on the block at the same time. Gang rivals see each other out on the block, head out for a fight, then go back home a few minutes later. The term I favor, however, is “yard,” because this is exactly the sort of thing one hears about in prisons. In no neighborhood where the usual custom is to work outside the home is the standard for social interactions among working-age adults nothing but a series of chance encounters with friends and enemies out on the street.

There doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of escaping the welfare block. Going to prison seems to be mainly a matter of changing yards for the time being, of mixing it up with a different set of homies on a different block before returning to the original block and mixing it up again with whomever isn’t off at one of the many big houses at the moment. With luck, if one can call it that, there might even be some continuity of residents between the welfare block and prison, kind of a poor man’s version of having buddies from the neighborhood at boarding school.

The woman who told me this story said that a lot of the adult residents resent her for hanging out with their kids and supposedly being arrogant because she has her life together. These are often the same parents who are too drunk to drive their young children to school functions or medical appointments.

I met this woman on a train that I was taking to San Jose to get a copy of my birth certificate for employment purposes. It was a short-notice, short-turnaround trip. On the train back north to Salem the next night, the crowd seemed dirtier and more disreputable. My main company on the trip back north was a grizzled transient en route to Portland who was dressed like Robin Hood and prone to wax eloquent in some of the most pretentious quasiphilosophical language imaginable about unfortunate rifts in the oneness of humanity. His type is legion on the West Coast hippie circuit. They’re the losers you see hanging out on business district sidewalks in Huntington Beach, Arcata, Ashland, and Portland, usually with a guitar and a puppy, the better to establish street cred as starving artists with poor animals in their care. They are the undeserving poor. They ruin the reputation of the homeless for the majority who aren’t like that and who didn’t choose to be such lowlives, the homeless who try to be discreet, keep themselves clean, and be productive members of society against stacked odds. Some of them aren’t actually homeless, but successfully act the part as their occupation. These include the trustafarian university students who used to panhandle at the Stanford Shopping Center.

Few of these losers, however, speak in the affected English accent that my buddy on the train used. At first I suspected that he was from Continental Europe, since there was something slightly off about his accent for an Englishman, but it was much more English than any continental accent I’d ever heard, and it seemed to change into a slightly American accent from time to time. When I asked where he was from, he very matter-of-factly told me that he had been raised mainly in New Orleans and around the Gulf Coast. After that, I noticed a mild, generic drawl crop up in his speech when he got animated.

Robin Hood was smart for heading to Portland at the start of summer. It may not be consistent with a belief in the oneness of humanity to milk some of America’s most guilt-ridden yuppies for walking-around money, but it’s good business, and as closely as I can tell that’s his line of work.

Around the web: other civil libertarian perspectives on privacy

muricaderp Links, Politics , , , ,

1) Scroll back through Umair Haque’s Twitter feed to June 10 for a series of salty, pointed critiques of David Brooks’ recent hatchet job-cum-subsidiarity Jeremiad.

2) Three essays from Jacob Bacharach:

A) “Peeping Thomism,” an accidentally timely call for, among other things, hiring managers to grow up and cut out their censoriousness about stuff that their applicants post on social media: “But, says the Director of Human Resources and the Career Counselor, social media is public; you’re putting it out there. Yes, well, then I’m sure you won’t mind if I join you guys at happy hour with this flip-cam and a stenographer. Privacy isn’t the responsibility of individuals to squirrel away secrets; it’s the decency of individuals to leave other’s lives alone.”

B) A calm but firm call for his own demographic to stop falsely denigrating the less educated (Bacharach is a novelist by trade).

C) On David Brooks, his “conservatism,” and the amazing entitlement of certain posh people.

3) From Karen Garcia, a week-in-review summary of the PRISM bombshell. Garcia is a top-notch blogger whose archives I’ve been combing since discovering a link in one of her comments on Brooks’ “unmediated man” column. Other essays especially worth reading, on tangential but related topics, include her back story about Cornwall-on-Hudson homeboy David Petraeus and her evisceration of the covert classism of the Obamas’ 2012 Christmas message to the nation.

Impeach James Clapper

muricaderp Politics , , ,

It’s very simple. The Director of National Intelligence needs to go. He lied to Congress about the NSA’s totalitarian PRISM program. That’s as serious and subversive a lie as can be told to Congress about any topic. It’s exactly the kind of official misconduct that the impeachment process was established to check and punish.

I encourage those of you who agree that Clapper should be impeached to reblog what I’ve written, either verbatim or modified as you see fit. So far, there has been a strong and encouraging grassroots response to the White House petition to pardon Edward Snowden, a fair amount of it from latent civil libertarians who have been shocked into engagement by the egregiousness of what Snowden has exposed. A campaign to impeach Clapper, whom Snowden’s leaks have exposed as a liar, would dovetail perfectly with the one to pardon Snowden. Clapper has already provoked a number of members of Congress with his lie about PRISM, so timely pressure from constituents could be what it takes either to pressure him out of office or to get him formally removed.

A couple of side notes on the official reaction to PRISM (the metadata, if you will):

1) Rudy Giuliani offered a cretinously jingoistic defense of Clapper in an interview with Greta Van Susteren last night (6/11), premised largely on Clapper’s distinguished service as a military officer, the underlying ethics being that we dasn’t criticize the troops. It’s worth noting that by that standard Edward Snowden would also be shielded from all criticism, although perhaps less fully shielded since Clapper had the patriotism not to truncate his military career by breaking both legs in a special forces training accident. It goes without saying, but shouldn’t, that one doesn’t hear this sort of defense offered on Bradley Manning’s behalf, and not just because he’s a young grunt. Nor does one hear it made in defense of Robert Bales or Nidal Hasan, except perhaps by their defense attorneys, because it would sound absolutely absurd to say such a thing about someone under court-martial for mass murder. I submit that it’s no less absurd or evil when said about a spook who has been caught lying to Congress about a totalitarian eavesdropping program.

The interview got weirder than that. When Van Susteren confronted Giuliani with a chronology of Clapper’s evasions, Giuliani suddenly changed tack and accused Clapper of being a loose cannon for not having formulaically stated that he could not answer the question or offered to answer it in closed-door session. By mayoral fiat, an esteemed officer and gentleman was turned into a blithering fool who didn’t know when to keep his mouth shut. This makes the notion of Giuliani as some sort of mobster at least look plausible.

2) This vile mashup of pop psychology, pop sociology, generational smears, class snobbery, and milquetoast despotism is bad even by David Brooks’ usual standards.

A note on compulsory IRS linedancing

muricaderp Current Events, Economics, Liberty

As a matter of course, I ignore the anti-government donnybrooks that consume Fox News, such as the recent furor over the IRS’s eccentric “conferences.” To my own surprise, I’m not inspired to do this out of any animosity towards Fox; although I find maybe half or two thirds of the politics that it promotes noxious, I enjoy watching it from time to time, and I have come to find it less frequently revolting than CNN, whose pomposity and sleights of hand tend to drive me up a wall. Rather, my reasons for ignoring Fox’s causes du jour are, first, that I just don’t have time to follow its donnybrooks on top of all the more important things that I’m trying to cram into my life, and second, that I find Fox’s signal-to-noise ratio too erratic to take its pronouncements at face value. In practice, this means that I usually insist on hearing corroboration from a significantly less shrill source before believing that Fox isn’t blowing its reports completely out of proportion for partisan and business advantage. Ronald Reagan called this approach “trust, but verify,” but by any honest appraisal it’s a form of distrust.

My corroborating source confirming the seriousness of this IRS linedancing/Star Trek role play idiocy is my mom. By her own admission she’s a hardcore leftist. What she is not, however, is a worshiper of bureaucracy. She spent too much time working for the Veterans Administration, an agency whose dysfunction she can describe in much greater detail and much more cynically than I can, to assume that the IRS is not run by the objectively deranged. So when my mom mentioned to me in a recent phone conversation that the IRS had gotten egg on its face over these ridiculous training seminars, I figured that whatever Fox had to say about the scandal, no matter how shrill, had some merit.

Having now watched Greta van Susteren’s coverage of these training exercises, I agree with her and with my mom that they were absolutely ridiculous and should never have been undertaken. The IRS has clearly delegated responsibility for its employee training to a bunch of useless nutcases. Governments that spend their money on stuff like that are troubled.

Where I disagree with van Susteren is on her insistence that these junkets stand out as wastes of taxpayer money. As a matter of principle, it’s certainly improper to misallocate tens of millions of dollars on ridiculous staff training exercises at posh resorts, but the sums in question ($52 million or so) are chump change in the context of federal spending. Preventing these particular instances of featherbedding and cronyism would have done nothing to appreciably improve the federal treasury’s prudence and solvency. There’s just too much systemic fiscal laxity and corruption for the prevention or redress of these really juicy scandals to make a real difference. The real improvements have to come from concerted, systematic reform. The Inspectors General responsible for curbing this kind of waste are important internal watchdogs, but by its very nature their work has to be done incrementally, often at a pace that seems glacial because the rot is so pervasive. In any event, they’ll be cleaning out the Augean Stables until such a time as the underlying cultures at their agencies start undergoing genuine reform. In a very real way, we’re stuck dealing with the hearts of men, and doing so in a country where the systemic corruption extends far beyond the public sector. I honestly don’t see how systemic reform is viable as long as so many Americans so sincerely believe in hustling, and in being hustled, rather than in plain dealing.

At rock bottom, I believe, it’s a matter of what Vaclav Havel called living in truth. I’d love to see an American leader of Havel’s prominence spread that message with such clarity, but I don’t expect to come across one, especially given the chronic tendency of so many Americans to reject reasonable politicians of goodwill in favor of abject demagogues of the lowest character imaginable this side of the genocidal.

Clearly, one of the factors that drives this deference to openly sadistic leaders is servility. There’s a powerful cognitive dissonance between the rhetoric of American freedom and independence and the reality of a population hesitant to challenge even its most ridiculous and pointless degradation at the hands of its superiors. This is how we’ve ended up with our proliferation of idiotic, disingenuous corporate “teambuilding” exercises, motivational posters and videos, and rude, bumptious, grandiose, incompetent managers. We let them get away with it. Walmart employees in Germany responded to mandatory motivational rallies by fleeing to the restrooms and calling their union reps. They recognized petty tyranny and had too much self-respect to submit to it; American workers generally don’t.

That’s the buried lede in the IRS “conference” scandal. These “training” seminars and the videos made of them had nothing to do with the employees’ job duties, and they must have caused sentient employees who were unwillingly drawn into the fray great annoyance, if not also discomfort. Extraneous seminars of the sort, although rarely extreme enough to involve Star Trek costumes, are so ubiquitous in American corporate and bureaucratic life that they’re widely regarded as unremarkable.

Submitting to such degradation under duress is not a hallmark of a free people. There are certainly extenuating circumstances for doing so, in fact, usually powerful ones, given the abusive dynamics at workplaces where management inflicts this sort of thing on subordinates, but meek, servile submission to this sort of belittling idiocy is not honorable. The proper response is to tell the instructor, “You’re a moron, this is bullshit, and I’m getting a gin and tonic.”

Around the web: class, work, and a call for the totalitarian oppression of servants

muricaderp Economics, Law, Liberty, Links, Politics

In the course of a recent internet search for “lazy millennials,” “entitled millennials,” “milliennial brats,” and the like (call it an effort at self-diagnosis, if you wish), I came across one of the most biting and clearheaded blogs I’ve found to date covering work and the workplace. Normally, everything that I find on these subjects in any medium is some combination of banal, derivative, sycophantic, foolish, and intellectually dishonest. Perhaps this is in part because, although I disclose this at some risk to my credibility, I follow John Tesh on Pinterest (but mainly to enjoy him ironically and hipster-like; he, and Wilford Brimley, are my PBR). Tesh, however, does not set the lower bound for workplace advice; browsing workplace-themed blogs at random or the book section of any office supply chain is weirder and more disgusting. Michael O. Church, then, is a welcome relief from the endless drivel, and a fine writer and political thinker to boot.

One of Church’s favorite concepts is “libertarian socialism.” Outwardly, this may sound as ridiculous as the UK being governed by a Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition, but what he proposes, a government safety net beneath a dynamic private sector, is exactly what most Western governments have attempted, with varying degrees of success, since the Second World War. Church’s proposal avoids by a wide margin the sclerosis of command economies (which, in extreme instances such as North Korea’s, causes an outright death spiral), but it also renders moot the sclerosis of large, ossified corporations, with their legions of marginal-to-useless bureaucrats, layers of political intrigue, and penchant for regulatory capture. His model is for an advanced sort of Jeffersonian yeomanry as an alternative to, and eventually a replacement for, the Hamiltonian model that predominates today. Here’s one of his critiques of the current system: Continue reading →

Update on the “tunnel people”

muricaderp Liberty

The “tunnel people” of Las Vegas were featured on Inside Edition last night (5/28). Yes, it’s an atrocious show on the whole, the breathlessness of the field reporting was unnecessary, and someone should have fact-checked the report closely enough to keep the reporter from erroneously referring to the storm drains as sewers, but even so, it was a surprisingly well-done piece. Inside Edition’s liaison in the storm drains was a photojournalist who had covered them previously and whose commentary was intelligent and decorous. More impressive was the footage of a young man hauling a number of his possessions, including a guitar, through another couple’s living space, which occupied the entire width of their drain between his quarters and the nearest exit to the outside world. This footage conveyed the difficulty of living in the storm drains and the resourcefulness of the residents with a power that still shots would have trouble equaling. The report was half-cocked at times, but it was exactly the kind of serious journalism that should be broadcast more often.  

This is especially true of television broadcasts, which reach an audience that for various reasons simply cannot be reached in writing. Reform becomes much easier and more viable when one is able to get through not only to an engaged minority, but also to the lazy and the disengaged. Merely presenting more or less honest, accurate reporting in lieu of propaganda and sensational tripe is an incremental improvement. It’s one less piece of rubbish distorting the senses of the citizenry.

The effects are subtle, perhaps even imperceptible, but they’re meaningful because their aggregate effects are huge. Nicolae Ceaucescu, for example, tried to propagandize his subjects about the evils of American capitalism by liberally broadcasting Dallas on Romanian state television, but instead he ended up confirming his subjects’ suspicions that he was mismanaging their country to the point of penury, and that he and his wife were why they couldn’t have nice things of the sort enjoyed by scheming Texans. Had he been less tone-deaf, he might have broadcast that other Inside Edition classic from last night, an update on the boy who divorced his parents. 

I knew I had reasons for only watching that crap by accident. 

Adventures in Christian Vulgaria

muricaderp Liberty, Religion

A couple of weeks ago, my dad and I were in a hotel elevator with a group of conference-goers when, within twenty seconds of the door closing, one of the latter gents said, “I thought the whole point of this conference was not to play with ourselves.” His comment was apropos of a discussion about who was responsible for pushing the elevator buttons for the rest of us, but not  apropos by much. My dad and I laughed at this witty commentary somewhat more sheepishly than the other eight or so passengers, some of whom reacted with ostentatious gusto. Neither of us considered thinly veiled references to masturbation appropriate to the circumstances, but there were only two of us.

I didn’t have nearly enough presence of mind at the time, but I realize in retrospect that the equitable and salutary response would have been to promptly ask: “Dude, what the fuck?” That earthy, worldly query would have struck precisely the right tone. By most likely provoking a frenzied protestation of hurt Christian fee-fees, it would have offered me a timely opportunity to note that it was not I who had just raised the specter of masturbation in front of strangers in a crowded elevator. To adopt the parlance of the present company, it would have been edifying, a word, if not the Word, to strengthen a Christian man in his Walk.

The religious angle to this episode is bizarre but fascinating. The goofiness, subtle overfamiliarity, and faux self-deprecation with which these men approached the world was circumstantial evidence for their being Christian fellas after God’s heart, but I glanced down long enough to see the smoking gun: a study guide for “Every Man’s Battle.” Continue reading →

Around the Web: Disappearances

muricaderp History, Links, Politics , , , , ,

1. Ron Unz, founder and editor of The American Conservative, skewers the mainstream American media for dropping the ball on all sorts of major scoops, including:

2. Richard Nixon’s abandonment of hundreds of surviving American prisoners of war after the end of hostilities, at a time when he had declared that all surviving POW’s had been repatriated; and

3. John McCain’s exceptionally weird and disturbing role in the decades-long stonewalling of investigations into the fate of these men and efforts to repatriate any survivors.

4. On a separate but similar topic, a discussion of some possible fates of Indian independence leader and Axis collaborator Subhas Chandra Bose. Bose, aka Netaji, officially died in a plane crash in Taiwan, but is widely believed to have died in the Soviet Gulag, to have disappeared into civilian life in asylum in the Soviet Union, and to have lived into his eighties as a “mysterious holy man” in Uttar Pradesh.

More graveyards of the American Empire

muricaderp Religion

It’s hard for me to know where to begin in evaluating the possibility of a foreign military intervention in Syria (read: US, maybe with some meaningful help from NATO or Middle Eastern allies), except to say, “Oh, no, here we go again.” I find the international reaction to the situation in Syria so absurd and naive that I have trouble articulating a response to it that isn’t inchoate and sputtering. The recent talk about Bashar al-Assad crossing a “red line” strikes me as a bit ridiculous and reinforces my gut feeling that diplomats aren’t generally honorable or trustworthy. This language has the same tone as the inane imagery of the “reset button” that Hillary Clinton and Sergei Lavrov indulged in a few years ago, but the stakes are much higher and more immediate in this instance, so I can’t help but worry that there is something fundamentally deficient, to put it very charitably, about the international response to Assad’s escalation.

Intemperate and uncouth though this may sound, I’d be more comfortable if the language used in the diplomatic press conferences were crude and concrete, e.g., “If Bashar doesn’t go into exile by Friday next, the US Air Force will level the presidential palace and the general staff headquarters.” That’s more or less what’s at stake, to use a conservative prediction. Any “international response” to Bashar al-Assad crossing the “red line” will be nothing short of an air war on Syria, in other words, raining down hellfire that will kill or maim anyone in its path. Regardless of whether or not this is an appropriate response, it is not one whose reality should be sanitized. If it happens, it will be gruesome, and its gruesomeness should not be censored in that fashion.

When I describe an air war as a conservative outcome, I have in mind the likelihood of a foreign ground war in Syria. Just because the Western experiences in Afghanistan and Iraq have proven this to be a disastrous course of action for the occupying armies doesn’t mean that it won’t be tried a third time in Syria. US leaders have enough hubris to think that their military, unlike the Soviet military and Alexander the Great’s, will ultimately be able to control Afghanistan. They think this despite presumably having some understanding of what the proto-Taliban “freedom fighters,” US proxies at the time, did to the Soviets (with American weaponry). They assume that they, unlike the Soviets, will be able to control the Pashtunwallah and channel it to their own benefit, instead of seeing it used however the Pashtun warriors possessing it, the ones fighting on home terrain, see most fit.

And now they’re considering a military attack on Syria, a country where an autocrat in the mold of Saddam Hussein and Josip Broz Tito is futilely trying to keep the lid on a sectarian powder keg. They insist that Assad’s use of chemical weapons against his own people is unconscionable, and they’re right, but what of the alternatives? There is no civil society waiting in the wings to take over upon Assad’s resignation or death; that vacuum will almost certainly be filled by sectarians, likely Sunnis hellbent on revenge for decades of repression and marginalization at the hands of the Assads. The interventionists do not have a credible plan for a post-Assad Syria. Despite their experiences with Iraq and Afghanistan, they can’t think months ahead.

The shorter version is that Syria is an intractable bloodbath that foreign powers are hopeless to resolve militarily, and the Western powers that seem most eager to intervene are exactly the ones least suited to the job. They should limit themselves to humanitarian and peace-brokering efforts; anything else would be foolhardy at best and suicidal at worst.

On a final note, it occurs to me that US officials have had a very muted response to the Bahraini government’s violent repression of its own protesting citizens and its politically motivated imprisonment of medical personnel who treated them, that the US Navy’s Fifth Fleet is based in Bahrain, and that Bashar al-Assad has historically had cordial relationships with Russian and Chinese leaders. These circumstances make the response to Syria look less like straightforward humanitarian concern than a sick combination of craven realpolitik and harebrained retribution against a strongman who annoyed his US counterparts by becoming too cozy with the United States’ quasi-enemies.