Sex and Violence

Why is it always, "sex and violins"?
--Ruth Buzzi, Laugh-In

The new pornography is left-wing;
and the new pornography is a vast graveyard
where the Left has gone to die.
The Left cannot have its whores and its politics too.” 
--Letters from a War Zone, Adrea Dworkin

I seen ev'ry blue eyed floozy on the way, hey
But their beauty and their style
Went kind of smooth after a while.
Take me to them lardy ladies every time!
 --Fat Bottomed Girls, Queen

Let them eat war
That's how to ration the poor
Let them eat war
--Let Them Eat War, Bad Religion

___________________

Not war pornography -- war AND pornography. Now that we have your attention ...

War is the specialized, systematic application of State violence, and it is a perversion of civilized values, yet it is an activity that few societies have extirpated. It is also an activity designated as a career track primarily for the disadvantaged of our society. But war is an exploitation -- if it were not, our politicians would seek active combat service (which they avidly do not.)

We all know what pornography is when we see it, and aside from those 5th Avenue feminists who have the luxury of arguing that women in the porn industry are empowered by selling their anatomy, porn has traditionally been but one realm of the exploitation and objectification of women. Yet we have now opened a new realm of women's exploitation, and we call this a good: putting women in the combat arms.

To allow women to participate in the perpetuation of the violence will raise their glass ceiling we are told, thereby facilitating their career opportunities. This is the bottom line for arguing for women on the front lines. But this "privilege" will only be seen as such by a certain segment of society.

--Gertrud Scholtz-Klink, 
Reich's Women's Führer

Why are women in porn seen as exploited, while sending them off to fight in war is well and good? Neither war nor pornography are held as social goods, yet our internet lives bathed in porn sites, and the acceptability and necessity of war are peddled as unquestionable. Hypocrisy, thy name is U.S.A.

Is this argument for sending women into combat a backlash to the feminist movement? While women have still not gained economic parity with men in the workplace, we are now fast-forwarding them to star in their own personal snuff films, while screwing them all the way there (20% of women in the military have been sexually harassed by their male counterparts, according to recent studies.)

Further, these women will be fighting and dying for the rights of women in foreign lands to be exploited at the hands of males, as they always have been. It is a historical Mobius strip, for the women who they die for may one day gain their rights to fight and die for some other women to be exploited, ad nauseam. This is presuming that these imagined future women will have the crusading American impulse to help the scapegoat. But few look beyond the present moment, to see the implications of their bravery or foolishness.

The same people who would criticize porn (overtly) are the same who would argue for (someone else's) women to kill, fight and die in the depravity and degradation of war. How is having sex with strangers and pretending to enjoy the encounter less socially acceptable than fighting?

Exploitation by any other name ...

--Jim and Lisa

Battles Long Ago: Khalkhin-Gol 1939

Over at GFT, some military history;

The Imperial Japanese Army becomes the first outfit in WW2 to discover that if you give Grigory Zhukov enough men, time, and armor that he will eff you up.

Sick man?

Something appears to be going on in Istanbul.

While the original protests do not appear to have had much, if any, political motivation at this moment there appears to be a relatively small but highly vocal series of protests going on against the government of Prime Minister Erdogan and his AK Party.

Why could this be significant?

Because - as our frequent commenter Sven Ortmann pointed out back in 2008

"Turkey is in a peculiarly important position geopolitically; It controls the Bosporus (exit/entry for Black Sea) and is NATO's access point to the Persian Gulf region (other than from the sea). Sea lanes through Suez Canal/Eastern Mediterranean can be threatened or blocked from Turkey's soil. It's the only almost-Western but Muslim country and could bridge the gap culturally between Europeans and Arabs, being in between both. I should add that the Pan-Turkic ideology (a nationalist party got about 1/8 of the votes in the 2011 elections) could put Turkey into a rival position to Russia in regard to influence in Central Asia (Turkic languages there). The West's encroachment has been stopped in Belarus (as long as the dictatorship doesn't crumble) and Ukraine (where any national election can change the trajectory entirely). Russia would not exactly be happy to face a Turkish challenge on its southern flank."

And, I would add that the intriguing aspect of these protests is the possibility of their bringing the Turkish Army out of its barracks, and I think that a lot will depend on the protesters themselves, the government, and how the Army perceives them both.

Here, for example, is a post from something called the "Social Action Network" that, I think, may overlook the possibility that the Army may step in if the Erdogan government appears to be in danger.

The author concludes with "This is not yet a revolution, but it is not only tear gas that marks the air in Istanbul. It is also a scent of revolutionary aspirations." without anywhere in the body of the article speculating or even acknowledging what might happen if the Turkish Army decided that the "revolution" threatened the Turkish state with either a leftist rebellion or an government-led Islamic reaction. The Army has a long history - beginning with the Ottoman years and continuing as recently as 1997 - of intervening in Turkish politics when things look sketchy.

The AKP was elected largely due to popular dissatisfaction with the military and the Army has so far respected that. At the same time I cannot believe that the Turkish Army is at all pleased with the openly sectarian policies, the pan-Turkish rhetoric, and the Syrian adventurism of PM Erdogan.

But...in the comments section one of our regulars (thanks, BB!) links to a pretty good summary over at TPM that concludes that at this time the AKP has pretty much destroyed the Army's ability and willingness to intervene in politics. That adds even more uncertainty to what's going on.

One of the big reasons I am peculiarly fascinated by this is the implications it has for the wider Middle East. Turkey and the political career of the AKP was until recently perhaps the only test-case for an "Islamic state lite"; the possibility that a polity with a largely Muslim population could, in the absence of an Islamic Enlightenment and a thoroughgoing rejection of sectarian politics, have an "islamic" party in power without that party using that power to attempt to implement islamic social policies. Much of the recent governing that the protesters are calling despotic centers around attempts by the ruling party to enact conservative islamic shibboleths into public law; restricting things like alcohol sales and advertising and public displays of affection.

If the Turkish islamic party cannot rule without imposing or trying to impose sectarian law on its secular fellow-citizens I think it bodes poorly for everywhere else in the Muslim world where the traditions and practices of nonsectarian government are less entrenched than Turkey. I consider this a big part of this story and I think that this aspect is being poorly covered. I suspect that to a degree this is "urban hipsters who want to go West" versus "rural hicks who like them some religious limits" but I can't get a feel for to WHAT degree.

I also suspect that the U.S. press, assuming that it bothers to cover this much at all, is likely to frame it in the context of the "us versus them" way that it has taken to reporting events from the Middle East, with the islamist AKP taking the "them" part. But that the larger import of potential instability, or military coup, or the potential failure of the "nonsectarian islamist project" in the pivotal nation of Turkey and its role in a fractious part of the world is likely to go unexamined...

Hard to tell at this point if all this will blow over or blow up, but I'd suggest that events in Turkey are well worth keeping an eye on.

Bomb-bomb-bomb, bomb-bomb Iran...

This is one of the reasons we can't have nice things.

Fallows does an excellent job of describing why this is superbly hacktackular, but let me just add that in a sane polity you'd get politely asked to step out into the alley behind the studio after getting caught saying stuff like this and then biffed about the head and shoulders with a stuffed eelskin.

And never, ever invited back to spew this sort of nonsense to a credulous public.

This is exactly the sort of thing that seydlitz used to rave at; a senselessly myopic focus on "how can we/they/"somebody" do this" without any of the adults stepping in to ask "why the fuck would you WANT to do this?" Or, as Fallows himself sums up the geopolitical inanity of this "discussion"; My at-home version of similar analysis: "would plastic explosives, or a ball peen hammer, be more effective in destroying the neighborhood leafblowers, if it must be done?"

And the problem is that We the People, most of us, depend on people like these mooks to "inform" us, which this article does the exact opposite of. Especially when - buried in the blogosphere far from the popular reach of journals like The Atlantic - there are far, far better analyses of this very issue.

Honestly. I know that you're not supposed to attribute to malice what's explicable by incompetence, stupidity, and hubris, but really...

Psst. Somebody's pissed off HR, Moktar, and I don't think it's me.

"After years of trying to discipline him, the leaders of al-Qaida's North African branch sent one final letter to their most difficult employee. In page after scathing page, they described how he didn't answer his phone when they called, failed to turn in his expense reports, ignored meetings and refused time and again to carry out orders. Most of all, they claimed he had failed to carry out a single spectacular operation, despite the resources at his disposal."

Well, I think this pretty much confirms that "we" have won the War on Terror.

When "The Terrorists" are bitching about unreturned phone calls and backbiting about expense reports? Quitting to form competing start-ups?

They're well on their way to becoming as bloated and inefficient as the DoD. All we need to do is wait for the various jihadi groups to form a weapons-contracting system and we're on the way to decisive victory.

Meanwhile, somewhere in Samakhand an Al Qaeda death squad is stealing organizational cell-phone minutes and fiddling with their TDY...

Dies Irae

I post this every Memorial Day. I don't feel quite the same level of suppressed anger this year as I did in the "Support the Troops" Dubya Years when this weekend became a pep-rally for wars that most U.S. citizens were utterly indifferent to other than as entertainment. But, still.

I have little or no hope that I can ever change the way this "holiday" is celebrated. There will be parades and movie festivals. Warplanes will flyover baseball stadiums. Flags will wave. People will "thank" someone in a uniform for service that was neither done for them nor has profited the serviceman or the civilian.

Few, very few, will visit a war cemetery and ponder the reasons we seem incapable of not making more war dead.

But I will continue to post this every year and hope.

It seems to me that the VERY best thing for the majority of Americans would be to think of this Memorial Day not as time reserved for barbeques and softball in the park, but as the time it took a 19-year-old private to bleed out, alone amid the dying crowd in the grass before the wall at Fredricksburg.The time it took a husband and father to convulse his way into death from typhus in the tent hospital outside Santiago de Cuba.

The time that the battalion runner, a former mill hand from Utica, New York, spent in a shell hole in the Argonne staring at the rest of his life drizzling out of his shattered legs.

The time it took for the jolting trip down the Apennines to the CCP, unfelt by the father of three because of the jagged rip in his gut wall that killed him that morning.The time required to freeze a high school kid from Corvallis, Oregon, to the parched, high ground above the Yalu River.

The time it took for the resupply bird to come to FSB Albany for the plastic bag that contained what had been a young man from the Bronx who would never see the Walt Frazier he loved play again.

The time taken up by the last day in the life of a professional officer whose fiance will never understand why she died in a "vehicular accident" in the middle of a street in Taji.I've been proud to be a soldier, and don't kid myself that there will be a day when the killer ape "studies war no more". But the modern view of war as video entertainment for the masses sickens me. Every single fucking human being needs to have it driven into his or her forehead with a steel nail that every single day in every single war some person dies a stupid, meaningless death that snuffs out a world in a moment. That those empty eyes zipped inside a bag or covered by a bloody blanket were the windows to an entire universe, once.

That the price we pay for "forging our national will" is paid in the unlived futures of those we kill and those of us who die to make it so.

Maybe then we'd be sure of what we want to achieve before we open the doors of the Temple of Janus.

Pegging the Moron Meter

Yesterday we finished voting in our "special election" in northwest Oregon.

I've been following this little treasure mostly as a way of checking on the credulity and stupidity level of voters in the Portland metro area, and the final readings of the Moron Meter are now in.

First, on the issue of fluoridation of Portland's water supply, a bizarre coalition of looney Left and looney Right defeated fluoridation because...well, because fluoride isn't natural. God alone knows what these people - about 85,000 of them, by the way - think about pasteurization, immunization, the Germ Theory of disease, and quantum mechanics.

At least we're safe from those goddamn polio monkey serums.

I should note in passing that there are about 446,000 registered voters in Multnomah County, Oregon. And this election was, like almost all elections in Oregon now, done by mail. You didn't have to devote any time or effort to it. You opened the envelope, filled in the little ovals on the form, stuffed the thing back in another envelope and shoved it in the mailbox.

Only about 36% of the electorate - about 160,000 people - even bothered.

But aside from the usual non-interest in the election the real red light on my Moron Meter was pegged to these two guys:

First was a gomer named Lasswell who was running for a position on the Multnomah Educational Service District. Leaving aside the actual role of and value of the MESD, the part that caught me about this guy's ad in the Voter's Pamphlet was is complete and utter incompetence for anything relating to education or any other sort of political administration, for that matter.

The giveaway was his observation about how he was gonna do to the MESD what he'd done in the city of Anfal when he was a'servin' of his Country in Iraq. Because, as we all know, an impoverished Third World city rife with sectarian strife in a former Ottoman province now devastated by war is exactly the political equivalent of the Multnomah Educational Service District.

This goop got 25% of the vote.

Got that? This means that of the some 93,000 people in Multnomah County engaged and motivated enough in the political process to register AND to actually vote in this contest, one in four - 23,382 theoretically-sane individuals - were equally unable to make the same distinction Lasswell could not, between a smashed city in a Muslim state in the Third World and the educational administration of a mid-size American city.

One in four, people. One in four.

But wait; it gets worse.

This goof, name of Morrison, a genuine full-on, rubber-room, unapologetically whackadoodle bull-goose looney whose only issue as a reason for running for Portland Public School board was because WiFi makes your brain all funny (and I tend to agree that someone's brain was all funny here but not that WiFi had anything to do with that) got 18.7 percent of the ballots cast.

Almost 19 percent. Of the people who are probably in the uppermost quintile of engaged and politically aware and socially motivated citizens in the People's Republic of Portland. Nearly one in five. 12,165 people - more than were in the crowd attending that Thorns match I went to watch Sunday.

Voted for a complete and utter tinfoil-hat-grade lunatic.

You can say that, well, fine; the "process worked". The loonies lost.

But think; these are people who shouldn't have gotten anyone's vote. Lasswell, yeah, okay, maybe a handful of people who liked the idea that he was an ex-GI. But Morrison? For fuck's sake, people, the man is certifiable. Around the bend. Ripe for a canvas sportjacket with wraparound sleeves. And yet more than twelve thousand of you fuckers voted for him!

And then you complain about how we can't have nice things.

This is why, people. This is fucking why.

Because a critical minority of you will vote for absolutely goddamn anything no matter how idiotic.

Think about it; if almost one out of five of the most well-informed, motivated, and civically-engaged people in a nationally-known hotbed of social progressivism and intellectual liberalism will vote for a lunatic who is mumbling about electrical radiation melting his brain what the hell is going on out there in places where they think people like Limbaugh, Imhofe, Palin, and Bachmann have a functioning cerebrum?

Jesus wept.

We Are So, so, so, SO Fucked.