This Post Has No Title, These Words Have No Clue

Insofar as a common and significant link ‘twixt the intimacy of driving a knife into another person, to the one, and coital penetration, to the other, is testosterone, the act of shooting the place up starts to seem very nearly masturbatory.

The psychoanalysis^α of that proposition is probably as fascinating as it is grim. At some point it seems to denigrate the American shooting crisis while exploiting the very notion of rape culture, and it is easy enough to call any mass-murderer a pathetic wanker. Yet the analogy persists, and it is easy enough to regret, before it is written or uttered, any phrase about shooting his load in public.

Killing is intimate. Killing is also distal.

He can tell her he loves her; she can believe him; it can be true; and the link between this passion he shares and the violence he might commit against another is testosterone.

____________________

^α The temptation to dismiss, out of hand, expected pop-culture strains of evolutionary psychology according to their obvious weakness presuming coital penetration as inherent to the existential justification of sexual differentiation, would be erroneous in at least one context, as the apparent fault becomes at least symbolically relevant; to the other, invoking semiotic values might be an overstatement. But where the pop strains of evopsych would discuss men evolving to penetrate women, Y previously evolved, and, indeed, continues to this day to adapt and select and evolve, not as delivery unto X, but as environmental distribution of gamete for X. Where human males may have specialized for gamete delivery, this is merely specialization of gamete distribution. And while it is true enough that word games are easy, and phagogenesis could, artistically, at least, be argued an intimate precursor to general environmental gamete distribution, the greater danger is the potential for evopsych to finally recognize the argument that masculine raison d’être really is to be a wanker.

Decades of Drudgery

#resist

The lede tells me that one of America’s most widely read right-wing journalists said something nasty about someone who went and said something spectacular in his own right, but I find myself wondering how anyone, even conservatives, still pay attention to the journalist who is essentially criticizing his commercial competition.

The most part of accepting that professional wrestling is not real combat comes down to just that, accepting the obvious. The hardest part about supermarket tabloid gossip was always the idea that anyone might believe it. Twenty-some years have Republicans denigrated themselves for a horde of alleged journalists whose apparent basis for competition has something to do with finding ways to pitch more extreme alternatives to a worryingly hungry audience.

What portion of what is happening, and how we got here, has to do with words like, “unwell”?

And to what degree does is it relevant, or is any notion of apropos merely a matter of aesthetic priorities, that over two decades after the widely-read conservative firebomb journalist accidentally helped a cartoonist win a Pulitzer …―

An established muckraker questions the psychiatric health of a competitor and market heir, and something goes here about the Pulitzer joke and nearly bringing down a presidency, and here we are all these years later and still drowning in rape culture because … I mean, say what we will about Republicans and conservatives and all that, but the rest of the nation has been finding ways to enable them. And yeah, yeah, yeah, I didn’t vote for them, either, but it is also true that we’re Americans, and we just don’t go lining them up in front of the ditch, so we should probably consider that somewhere in between we still simply haven’t done enough to forestall such spectacles as two excremental puckers fighting for headlines because that is the priority.

____________________

Image note: Detail of Lucifer, by Franz von Stuck, 1890.

It Almost Seems Deliberate

MEMORANDUM

To: YouTube

re: Really? I thought this part was obvious

So … you know that little thing you have where we click for the option to say we don’t want you promoting this or that kind of video? Why does it not work? No, really, when I tell you to not show me this, don’t turn around and promote the same damn video again.

Is This Thing On, and Why Would You Care?

It occurs to wonder what actually happens when the written word is dismissed from duty and argumentation is carried out via social media with links to other people’s YouTube rants.

No, really, I just don’t get that bit about how someone wants their voice to be heard so they send you a link to an hour-long YouTube rant. Honestly, they’re like really unskilled salesmen; getting you to sit through an hour of their favorite bigot is the point. Seriously; they know they’re not going to convince you. They just want to demand that you waste a bunch of your time in order that they might feel special, and then despise you for accommodating.

Sometimes it feels stupid to post these notes, but then we might recall the godawful narration explaining poker to a James Bond audience; and something goes here about the simpleminded moralist explanations in Hunter x Hunter mixed in with the sexual molestation scene and the nostalgic bit with the guy standing there in the middle of an emergency sniffing the scent of a woman from his fingers.

No, seriously, at first it’s a combination of Dragonball and Boobah―(“Look what I can do!”)―with infantile moral lessons describing character motivations, and then ....

Which actually might prove useful, for once. Perhaps the proper response to, “Here is a long-assed video in lieu of me actually doing any work to post a proper argument,” would be to simply post episodes of Hunter x Hunter and One Piece, the latter of which actually has the courage to denounce sexual harassment by its name.

On Morality and Hitting Children With Cars

Honestly, after everything else, to see a photo of Pietro with his arm in cast and sling―

Transgender mother Bárbara Pastana, and her 2 year old son Pietro, were victims of a transphobic assault on Tuesday October 4th in Belém do Pará, Brazil. The attack occurred when she was taking her Pietro to the kindergarten by bike.

“Every day I go out (in the Bengui neighborhood) and take my son to school by bicycle, in a front seat. Today, a car approached and followed me slowly. I kept pedaling but the driver sped up the car and hit on the bike, “she said.

Bárbara fell toward the sidewalk above her child and said that after the impact, her only concern was the health of the child. “I could not see anything, just saw my injured son. I do not know who did it, I can not imagine, “she said.

(Santos)

―is just too much. Today is one of those days.

Then again, today is one of those days insofar as I get to have such days. Brazil is a killing field for transgender, and I won’t tell anyone to feel thankful we Americans are merely fighting over restrooms, or anything like that. Still, though, I don’t know: Is there comfort that it’s not so bad up here, or are we just not there yet? And, you know, it never really helps to tell anyone to cheer up, at least they’re not running you down or … or … okay, at least they’re not doing all that stuff as much. Right. Never really helps.

I don’t know; this reminder that they would kill the children, too? Attacking children is hardly unique, but remember, these are the moralists.

____________________

Santos, Eduarda Alice. “Transgender mother and son victims of hit and run”. Planet Transgender. 1 November 2016.

If It’s Tuesday I Must Be Whining

Microcosmic: As Rachel Maddow asks Michael Beschloss his opinion on campaign norms―e.g., releasing tax returns―it occurs to me that we are quite possibly witnessing a microiteration of a problematic thumbnail sketch: If achieved, then change standard.

As Maddow asked, what about the future? And that would approximately make sense: Hillary Clinton is about to be elected president of the United States of America. We’ve already decided that everything else in her career is just that much more volatile and alarming and inappropriate than any man who came before her, repeatedly suggesting with each iteration that we will, in fact, attempt to change the rules in order to forestall certain outcomes.

For instance, who remembers the One-Drop Rule? Was there nothing incongruous or untoward about the proposition that we finally laid the One-Drop Rule to rest when Barack Obama was elected? Okay, that’s not fair; we lynched the One-Drop Rule and then put the corpse in whiteface: If Barack Obama is one-drop white, we haven’t yet elected our first black president.

Remind me all you want that it didn’t work; I’ll just shrug and wonder why we bothered trying.

Still, though, if we call off the customary tax return release? It’s easy enough to expect the ritual to survive Donald Trump, but we’ve seen this happen before. No, really, did you know that politicians were never supposed to get paid for public speaking when they weren’t in office? Apparently this has always been the rule, and Hillary Clinton just wasn’t smart enough to know. And since her predecessors didn’t really use the private email systems that they actually did, Secretary Clinton should have known that behaving like her predecessors was forbidden; I mean, it’s not like we suddenly invented this standard that what she did was unacceptable out of thin air just because she’s Hillary freakin’ Clinton, right? It’s not like we didn’t care when it was anyone else and then just decide to care because some scandalmongering political opponents decided to pretend something entirely ahistorical and―you know, since it’s “Her”―well, yeah, why not, sounds great. Sorry, I guess that’s just a distraction, isn’t it? Because while we’re spinning pay for play fancies because transparency means we can, the only reason we don’t care about the idea of pay for play through Colin Powell’s foundation, while he was Secretary of State, is because he’s Colin Powell, not Hillary Clinton, so that sort of thing could never, ever happen.

Nor is it just about girls, though it’s true in this case it kind of is. But the underlying principle of schoolyard socialization dynamics includes a function whereby a bellwether among the despised might achieve a threshold of respectability, and the communal response is to alter the threshold in order to maintain exclusion. That is to say, some kids will simply never be allowed by their peers to be cool; it’s a general bully principle, because without it the list of people bullies are allowed to treat poorly pretty much crumbles to dust in the wind.

____________________

Image note: U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton works from a desk inside a C-17 military plane 18 October 2011. (Kevin Lamarque/Associated Press)

Maddow, Rachel. “Historic debate could reset campaign norms”. msnbc. 27 September 2016.

Brother, Can You Spare an Answer?

Every once in a while a question occurs, and it’s true I only ask it in limited circumstances. Still, it persists, because I never have encountered an actual functional answer.

Okay, guys, work with me, here.

Why is female reproductive and urogenital anatomy an insult?

The Zuckerberg Atrocity

How about some crass humor?

For some, the costs are higher. In 2010, 12-year-old Amanda Todd bared her chest while chatting online with a person who’d assured her that he was a boy, but was in fact a grown man with a history of pedophilia. For the next two years, Amanda and her mother, Carol Todd, were unable to stop anonymous users from posting that image on sexually explicit pages. A Facebook page, labeled “Controversial Humor,” used Amanda’s name and image—and the names and images of other girls—without consent. In October 2012, Amanda committed suicide, posting a YouTube video that explained her harassment and her decision. In April 2014, Dutch officials announced that they had arrested a 35-year-old man suspected to have used the Internet to extort dozens of girls, including Amanda, in Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The suspect now faces charges of child pornography, extortion, criminal harassment, and Internet luring.

† † †

Hildur Lilliendahl Viggósdóttir, decided to draw attention to similar problems by creating a page called “Men who hate women,” where she reposted examples of misogyny she found elsewhere on Facebook. Her page was suspended four times—not because of its offensive content, but because she was reposting images without written permission. Meanwhile, the original postings—graphically depicting rape and glorifying the physical abuse of women—remained on Facebook. As activists had been noting for years, pages like these were allowed by Facebook to remain under the category of “humor.” Other humorous pages live at the time had names like “I kill bitches like you,” “Domestic Violence: Don’t Make Me Tell You Twice,” “I Love the Rape Van,” and “Raping Babies Because You’re Fucking Fearless.”

Thus:

• zuck/zucked/zucking: Shorthand term describing online rape threats for the sake of humor; named after Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook.

• Raping Mark Zuckerberg page on Facebook: Why not see how long Facebook lets that one stand as a humor page? Doll up photos of Mark Zuckerberg and have at it.

• Taking the Piss: A bit of a twist on the classic English phrase; put photos of Mark Zuckerberg in urinals, snap the photo, post them to a Facebook “humor” page.

• Use your imagination: Really, I can’t keep thinking like this. It’s actually uncomfortable. (See below.)

One would think the problems are obvious. To wit, how do we define fair? Do we really think this sort of thing would stay confined to activism? Of course it wouldn’t. And while fair is fair insofar as Zuckerberg is apparently just fine with how things go at Facebook, so why not treat him the same way, isn’t that also kind of the point? It’s wrong to treat any person that way, regardless of how much the Facebook CEO might occasionally look like he’s hoping you don’t get squirt in his face, and please not in the hair. (Spit or swallow?) Poor Mark. But then, billions of dollars do a lot to relieve the stresses of having a conscience.

Then again, it would be a good thing to hear people on television starting to refer to how a person got “zucked”. Shame might be the only way to test whether or not Mark Zuckerberg has a conscience left.

And if you’re confused? Just read through Catherine Buni and Soraya Chemaly’s article for The Atlantic. There’s a reason Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg are atrocities against humanity.

____________________

Buni, Catherine and Soraya Chemaly. “The Unsafety Net: How Social Media Turned Against Women”. The Atlantic. 9 October 2014.

Personal Reflections on Politics and Priorities

Let us speak of love and life and the beauty of this Universe.

What? Oh. Right. Sorry.

Look, to the one it seems really simple; to the other, we all have people in our lives who will, when they don’t like the obvious implication of an obvious fact, chuff and puff and stutter: “Wh-wha-what? What are you talking about? What does that even mean?” The thing about this behavior is that except for the fact of contention, these people in our lives know damn well what we’re talking about, and if there is any confusion about what it means, they’re certainly tipping their hand by going from zero to attack in zero-point-two-one-seven-three seconds. You know that common tease, “Struck a nerve, there”?

Sometimes it seems tragic: Perceived competitive pressures can seem so permeating in and of the perspectives subscribing to or advocating its processes and outcomes as to inhibit normal, healthy social function. More accessibly: Capitalism escalates mental health risk factors. Or, more generally: People who believe in or advocate the dog eat dog rat race can fall into it so deeply that their social faculties degrade into dysfunction.

And sometimes we think, “Huh? But you knew what this meant yesterday. And you even believed it last week!”

Just … I Don’t Know, Say It’s Missouri, and Just Move On?

What part of this would be believable if Quentin Tarantino tried it in a movie?

A Naylor man faces domestic assault charges after allegedly shooting his wife during an argument Saturday morning.

Bobby S. Leonard, 59, was charged Saturday with first-degree domestic assault and armed criminal action or first-degree domestic assault ….

…. Ripley County Cpl. Earl Wheetley was sent to a home on H.E. White Drive in Naylor about 8:25 a.m. Saturday in reference to a “female being shot by her husband.”

Wheetley found a woman, Carolyn Leonard, “laying on the front porch covered in blood,” according to his probable-cause affidavit. A man, Wheetley said, was holding a towel on the victim’s right shoulder.

When Wheetley asked what had happened, “she stated her and her husband was arguing, and he shot her,” said Wheetley, who was told Bobby Leonard was inside the trailer.

Wheetley said he was telling emergency medical services personnel what had happened when a man came out onto the porch. When the man identified himself as Bobby Leonard, Wheetley handcuffed him.

“I asked him if he had any weapons on him, and he stated, ‘No, the gun is in the house on the counter,'” Wheetley said.

After being told of his rights and acknowledging he understood those rights, Leonard asked whether his wife was dead, Wheetley said.

“I asked Bobby what happened, and he stated: ‘I got tired of her and shot her,'” Wheetley said.

(Friedrich)

So … right. It’s a reminder that cheap punch lines, while certainly worth a chuckle, are sometimes best kept to oneself. No, really. I mean, take your pick, right? Sanctity of marriage? Middle America? Family values? Oh. Well, damn. Right. Anyway, you see what I mean.

____________________

Friedrich, Michele. “Man admits to shooting wife because ‘I got tired of her'”. Southeast Missourian. 9 July 2014.