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eretzyisrael · 3 years

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The Biden Administration and the “War of Return”

Judging from the few public statements made so far and what is known about his appointees, the Biden Administration will take the same stance toward Israel and the Palestinians as the last Democratic administration, led by Barack Obama.

That means that it will return to the idea of establishing a Palestinian state in Judea and Samaria more or less on the pre-1967 lines. It will go back to financing the Palestinian Authority, which will find a way to pay terrorists and support their families while pretending not to, in order to circumvent the Taylor Force Act which requires the US to deduct such payments from aid to the PA. The administration will likely close its eyes to the subterfuge. It will go back to funding UNRWA, the agency that supports the exponential growth of a stateless population made up of the descendants of Arab refugees from the 1948 war, despite the fact that it exists to perpetuate the problem posed by this population, not to solve it.

I believe that it will return to the principle that the main reason the conflict has not ended is that Israel has not made enough concessions to the Palestinians, and that the way to end it is to pressure Israel to give in to Palestinian demands: for Jew-free land, for sovereignty without restrictions, for eastern Jerusalem, and perhaps even for the “return” of the refugee descendants. Although not directly part of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it will probably reduce pressure on Iran and possibly even return to the JCPOA, the nuclear deal.

It’s too early to tell if it will also adopt the open hostility to the Jewish state that characterized Obama’s reign. That will depend on who influences Biden, both among his official advisors as well as the numerous think tanks, lobbies, and pressure groups that have an interest in the conflict – including the one operated by Barack Obama himself.

I suspect that the administration will have its hands full with other matters and so will not immediately launch a new “peace” effort. But one never knows. Sometimes rationality goes out the window when the subject turns to the Jews and their state.

Although nothing can be done with those who take a position because they see it as a step in the direction of the ultimate elimination of our state, there are still “people of good faith” who believe that the Land for Peace paradigm that inspired the Oslo Accords does provide a path to ending the conflict. If the new administration is dominated by the latter type of people, there is hope that correcting their fundamental misapprehensions might lead to a more productive policy.

These misapprehensions are spelled out persuasively in a recent book, The War of Return, How Western Indulgence of the Palestinian Dream has Obstructed the Path to Peace, by Adi Schwartz and Einat Wilf (All Points Books, 2020). Schwartz and Wilf fall on the left of the Israeli political spectrum (Wilf was a Member of the Knesset for the Labor Party), and they still favor a two-state solution. But unlike most of their comrades, they have listened to the Palestinians, and understand their actual concerns and objectives. In their book, they explain why the traditional approach has failed and propose the initial steps that are necessary for any settlement of the conflict.

All previous Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations have miscarried because Israelis and Western interlocutors have failed to realize the paramount importance of one issue – the “right of return” demanded by the Palestinians. This is possible because they have systematically misunderstood the language – whether English or Arabic – used by the Palestinians. The “constructive ambiguity” that often characterizes diplomatic language and allows parties that don’t quite agree with each other to nevertheless sign agreements has made it possible for the same words to have diametrically opposed meanings when uttered by Westerners or Palestinians.

The prime example of this is the phrase “a just solution to the refugee problem.” To an Israeli or Westerner, this can include the normalization of the refugees* in their countries of residence, their emigration to other countries, or their resettlement in a Palestinian state, should one be created. This has been the approach taken by the international community to the numerous refugee populations, including Germans living in Eastern Europe after WWII, Holocaust survivors, Jews who were forced out of Arab countries after 1948, and so on. But the Palestinian position is that there is only one “just solution”: anyone with refugee status has the inalienable right to “return” to his “home” in Israel if he wishes to do so, or to receive compensation if he prefers. And that is what this phrase means when they use it.

Naturally, given the numbers of Arabs who claim this “right,” such a mass return would change Israel into an Arab-majority state, even assuming Jews were prepared to leave their homes and peacefully give them to their “rightful owners.” The absurdity of the demand is evident. Yet Yasser Arafat walked away from Camp David precisely because Israel would not agree to it.

Another phrase whose ambiguity has prevented agreement is “two-state solution.” Virtually every Israeli that favors this understands it as “two states for two peoples.” But the Palestinians want one totally Jew-free Palestinian state, and one state in which the right of return for Arab refugees has been implemented (and which theoretically might contain Jews, at least for a while). They have never accepted the idea of any Jewish sovereignty between the river and the sea, and hence reject the formulation “two states for two peoples.”

Schwartz and Wilf explain that Western and Israeli negotiators have always assumed – perhaps because the demand is so extreme – that the right of return was a bargaining chip that the Palestinians would cash in for the currency of borders, the removal of settlements, or rights in Jerusalem. But they were wrong. The demand for “return” is the essence of the Palestinian movement.

Palestinian children learn about it, down to the particular locations to which each has the “right” to return, in UNRWA schools where they are taught by Palestinian teachers (99% of UNRWA’s employees are Palestinians). Someday, they are told over and over, they will return. Guaranteed.

Everything UNRWA does is geared toward increasing this population of angry people, convinced that a massive injustice has been done to them, and that the only solution will be for them to return, and through this return, wipe the Jews from the face of the land they are convinced we stole from them.

UNRWA was created after the 1948 war with the intention of providing temporary assistance to the refugees until they could be resettled and normalized the way all other groups of refugees had been. But the only country that cooperated was Jordan, which gave the Palestinians citizenship and allowed them to integrate into their own populations. In Lebanon there were especially harsh restrictions and poor conditions. Little by little, the Arab nations changed the temporary UNRWA into a permanent tool to mold a refugee army that they hoped would ultimately do what their conventional armies could not: eliminate the Jewish state.

Today UNRWA is the main obstacle to solving the refugee problem. But it need not be. Schwartz and Wilf provide a relatively detailed, step by step program for phasing out UNRWA in the various places that it operates, and providing solutions for the refugees from the host countries and other agencies. For example, in the Palestinian Authority areas, they propose shifting both the responsibility for the refugees, and the money that supports UNRWA, to the PA. Former refugees would study in PA schools, go to PA health clinics, and so on. There are similar programs for Gaza, Syria, and Lebanon where the remaining refugee “camps” (today mostly neighborhoods on the outskirts of cities) are located.

Real peace can only be achieved when the consciousness of the Palestinians changes and they understand that the dream of return will not be realized. This would be a long and difficult process that could only begin with the elimination of UNRWA. But it has to start before it can finish. It will require cooperation of all of the Western donor countries that have been supporting UNRWA. Perhaps the fact that from a financial standpoint UNRWA will soon be unsustainable (after all, the number of “refugees” is growing exponentially) will encourage them to cooperate.

In the short term, it’s essential that everyone involved in relations between Israel and the Palestinians understand the real issues that underlie the conflict. And it would be a good thing if all parties could agree to use words the same way. Schwartz and Wilf say that “constructive ambiguity” should be replaced by “constructive specificity.” If the European Union, for example, believes that the State of Israel should be replaced by a Palestinian state, it should say so. Otherwise, it should unambiguously oppose a right of return, and work to dismantle UNRWA as quickly as is practical.

Back to the incoming Biden Administration. I hope it will resist the attempts of the anti-Israel Left to revive the hostility of the Obama days, and instead choose to be a force for real peace.

To that end, I will be sending Joe Biden a copy of this book, with a suggestion that he read it and pass it around among his foreign policy team.

Abu Yehuda

#Peace process #American politics #Israel and Palestinian Arabs #US-Israel Relations

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antoine-roquentin · 4 years

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There is only one way to look at the UAE-Israel deal: The United Arab Emirates is seeking more support from the United States, and it believes it must go through Israel to get it. Mohammed bin Zayed figures if he pleases Israel and its lobby, he will gain favor from the reigning superpower. For instance, he will receive advanced weaponry that only friends of Israel can get. And so much for the Palestinians!

This understanding of the Israel lobby’s power goes well beyond the conventional view of the lobby as influencing US policy with respect to Israel and Palestine. But the assessment is not mine alone. It is a widely-held belief in world capitals. Even Vladimir Putin and Narendra Modi have acted in similar fashion: looking on the Israel lobby as a gatekeeper to Washington. And in power politics, perception is reality.

Israeli analysts regularly address this influence. Though no one in the American press does. It is just too undemocratic a truth. Our press has a hard enough time with the more limited theory of the lobby’s influence to even consider this wideranging role.

Let’s run down a list of countries and their conduct toward the US/Israel that confirms this theory.

—Egypt. The most direct predecessor to the UAE is Egypt. Anwar Sadat did not act out of altruism in reaching out to Israel in 1977. He wanted American support, and it was his “perception” that Jews were the gatekeepers, writes a powerful American Jew.

“Sadat had broken with the Soviets and was casting his lot with the Americans. He realized that if he wanted to replace Soviet weapons with meaningful American military and economic support, he could get it only by making a bold move with Israel, because of his perception of the political influence of American Jews and, more broadly, the support of the American public for Israel,” Stuart Eizenstat, the political veteran and Israel lobbyist in his own right, wrote in his book about the Jimmy Carter years.

It goes without saying that Egypt has gotten a lot, materially, from the U.S. out of its deal with Israel, even if the public is unhappy with it. And the consistent message to Egypt from the U.S. is, So long as you maintain your deal with Israel, you can do anything you want to your own people.

—India. For 45 years after the creation of Israel, India supported the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people. Then in 1992, it changed that policy to gain the favor of the United States, on the eve of the Indian PM visiting the U.S.

An Israeli thinktank reports that India reversed its stance on Israel because of the perceived “influence of the Jewish lobby” to release aid from the U.S., the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank too, which “India desperately needed at that time.” Vinay Kaura, an Indian scholar published by the Begin Sadat Center for Strategic Studies in Israel, writes:

It was also strongly felt in some circles in the Indian government that the establishment of diplomatic relations between India and Israel would improve India’s image in the US…

That perception of the lobby’s power continues to this day, as in Modi’s decision to visit Israel in 2017, Kaura writes:

It was recognition of the influence of the Jewish lobby in the US that promoted this positive development in Indo-Israeli relations. When Modi made his historic visit to Israel on July 4-6, 2017, the former US ambassador to Israel, Dan Shapiro, tweeted that the “stunningly successful visit of Indian PM Modi this week was a huge strategic win for Israel.”

—Russia. In 2018, Axios reported that the Russians had used the Israelis as an intermediary to Washington in a failed effort to cut a grand deal for removal of Iranian forces from Syria in exchange for sanctions relief with Iran. Barak Ravid, an Israeli reporter, said that Netanyahu was the gatekeeper on the offer, and blocked the deal because of sanctions relief.

‘They [the Russians] asked us to open the gates for them in Washington,’ one Israeli official told me,” Ravid wrote.

—Saudi Arabia. The Saudis have not officially normalized relations with Israel, but they are said to be working behind closed doors with Israel, in opposition to Iran. The Saudis have gained a lot from that cooperation: they have used the Israel lobby to protect themselves from criticism in the U.S. over the murder of Jamal Khashoggi and the genocide in Yemen.

In 2018, for instance, the Republican House blocked legislation critical of Saudi Arabia, and Eli Clifton reported that Saudi Arabia had a key political asset in lobbyist Norm Coleman, the fervent Israel supporter who as national chair of the Republican Jewish Coalition is very close to Sheldon Adelson, who of course is a major donor to Republicans, and whose only issue is Israel. Clifton said that Saudi Arabia was paying $125,000 a month for Coleman’s influence.

Norm Coleman sits at the hub of some of the House GOP’s biggest sources of campaign spending. And Coleman isn’t shy about saying what his Saudi employers are expecting from him.

Saudi Arabia also got support from United Against Nuclear Iran, a very pro-Israel group funded in part by Thomas Kaplan. Clifton reports that Thomas Kaplan attended an event with the Crown Prince three months after the murder of Khashoggi, when every decent person was avoiding Mohammed bin Salman like the plague. A leading supporter of Israel, Kaplan has connections to Sheldon Adelson and the Council on Foreign Relations, as well as to liberal institutions like the 92d St Y in New York and the Belfer Center at Harvard’s Kennedy School.

The fact that the Saudis relied on the Israel lobby was echoed last September on the Israeli channel i24News. Edy Cohen, an Israeli expert on Arab politics at the Begin and Sadat Center, said that bin Salman was cultivating Israel because the “Jewish lobby is very strong” in the United States. “AIPAC is very strong.” And in order to maintain American support, Saudi Arabia turned to the lobby and Israel, Cohen said.

Within days of the Khashoggi murder, Netanyahu interceded for the Saudis to try to get the U.S. to overlook the killing. And the U.S. has overlooked the murder.

—Honduras. In January 2019, Barad Ravid reported that Honduras had reached out to Israel so as to get a meeting with the U.S. Secretary of State. Netanyahu got him that meeting, for his own ends. Ravid wrote on Axios:

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is helping to open doors in Washington for Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández as part of his effort to push the Latin American nation to move its embassy in Israel to Jerusalem…

[Juan] Hernández asked Netanyahu to get him a meeting with Pompeo because he couldn’t reach him for a long time. They added that Netanyahu asked Pompeo to join his meeting with Hernández, which dealt mainly with the issue of moving the Honduran embassy to Jerusalem.

The short trilateral meeting lasted 15 minutes.

—Qatar. Qatar flew Alan Dershowitz and Morton Klein out to visit the country in 2017 as part of an effort to erase its “pro-terrorist” label over previous support for Palestinian resistance. Dershowitz promptly wrote an article for the Hill saying that Qatar should not be blockaded and isolated. And Qatar later came through for the Israel lobby itself– it killed Al Jazeera’s undercover four-part documentary of the Israel lobby’s activities in the U.S. Though the doc has come out in bootlegged form.

I could go on and on. Here are three more quick examples:

–In 2019, a Tunisian presidential candidate spent $1 million to hire a Canadian firm headed by a former Israeli intelligence officer to try and get a meeting with Donald Trump. The deal’s exposure hurt the candidate politically but it does follow a pattern of Tunisian politicians quietly normalizing relations with Israel and getting access in D.C.

–Juan Guaido the would-be leader of Venezuela has declared that he would restore relations with Israel that Marxist governments had cut off ten years ago out of concern for Palestinians. Guaido has of course had the support of the Trump administration against the Maduro government.

–The Democratic Republic of Congo hired an Israeli firm to do lobbying in Washington in an effort to skirt sanctions for human rights violations. “The Democratic Republic of Congo hired an Israeli security firm to lobby the U.S. government after criticism of President Joseph Kabila’s failure to hold elections and hand over power,” Bloomberg reported in 2017.

Call it conspiracy or the usual workings of a superpower and a client state; but this pattern of friendship-with-Israel-in-exchange-for-access is now widely emulated. Edy Cohen of the Begin Sadat Center explained last year in a piece for the Jewish News Service that the Gulf states were acting on that basis, for self interest:

The Gulf Arab states are interested in being part of the Western world—not necessarily out of a love of Zion, but because they understand that the path to warmer ties with the West and the United States runs through Israel…

[G]enuine peace is not the object of the Gulf states aspirations, but rather the outcome of interests, as well as the need to maintain security and stability and maintain U.S. aid.

Cohen believes in the power of the Israel lobby more even than I do. He once said that the Israel lobby drove down the Turkish lira to punish Erdogan for an anti-Israel stance.

What’s most fascinating about this theory of access is that there are unquestionably a number of examples to support it, but the American press would never touch it. And still the pattern is clear: many powerful leaders regard the lobby as a gatekeeper. And you can’t understand American foreign policy in the Middle East without assessing the role of the Israel lobby in Washington.

Barack Obama himself acknowledged the lobby’s gatekeeper role when he reached out to Malcolm Hoenlein, executive vice chair of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations– and a rightwing supporter of Israeli settlements– in order to hire Hillary Clinton as secretary of state. The New York Times reported six years after the fact:

Once elected, Obama seemed to understand that he needed someone to lend him credibility with the Israeli government and its American defenders, a tough friend of Israel who could muscle the country away from settlements and toward a peace agreement. An aide to Obama called Malcolm Hoenlein, the executive vice chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish American Organizations, and asked him to call Hillary Clinton to see if she would be “agreeable” to being named secretary of state.

So in his most important appointment, Obama needed to show “credibility” with the Israeli government and its lobby! That is real clout. And the pathetic powers of the presidency are revealed in the fact that though Obama reached out to the lobby to say he could “muscle [Israel] away from settlements,” per the Times, he did nothing to slow the settlements. Just as Obama could do nothing to punish Chuck Schumer for opposing him on the Iran deal. The lobby’s powers transcend party politics.

This is why even liberal Zionists urge that Israel support in the U.S. remain bipartisan. They want to preserve that influence by having no public differences in the lobby. Israel support must be as American as mom and apple pie– and Tammany Hall.

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the-tribune · 3 years

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The Tribune: Chapter 1

A science fiction story The idea of the Galactic Parliament, not to mention it’s associated vast bureaucratic apparatus, would be absolutely absurd if it was not already an ancient and enduring institution. The galactic diameter was greater than 100,000 light-years, meaning even light speed communication methods took one hundred millennia to travel the galaxy’s wingspan. Half a million species of intelligent life across millions of worlds each with billions of inhabitants were governed by The Parliament. What’s more, there was no faster than light travel, for the laws of physics were strict in their regulation. The laws of biology were more lenient, however. A large proportion of the galaxy’s intelligent species were able to achieve biological immortality. This allowed for a communications infrastructure to be constructed which, while glacially slow, allowed for information to be disseminated across the galaxy within a lifespan. With the large distance between these so called “immortonations”, it is natural to ask why a structure was established to govern them. After all, if two groups of people cannot communicate without extreme effort, why bother attempting to impose a common set of laws on both? The answer lay in trade. There were certain highly useful trace compounds which were impossible for life to fabricate because they were formed in black hole accretion disks, neutron stars, or other extreme environments. These resources were not scattered uniformly throughout the galaxy, however, and existed in localized veins. Since these compounds were used in many advanced technologies, their exchange was desirable. Galactic governance thus evolved out of thousands of trade agreements, trade regulatory organs, technological sharing initiatives, and common currency deals. As cooperation intensified however, so did competition and interstellar war was born. Defense pacts and arms sales were therefore woven into the fabric of the emerging Galactic System. As species communicated — even at the slow rate afforded by physics — ideology, culture, and language mingled. Eventually people even began migrating across the void to other immortonations, driven by commerce, war, or exploration. The result was that the galaxy, while colossal beyond comprehension, began to shrink. Friction between democratic and authoritarian immortonations eventually escalated into a billion year period of violence, known simply as “The Struggle”. The Struggle was a brutal, all encompassing total war in which almost a quadrillion lives were lost. The conflict was eventually won by the Democratic Front. In the latter stage of the war, a Galactic Constitution was drafted and signed by the members of the Democratic Front. It established a democratic Galactic Commonwealth — led by the directly elected Galactic Parliament — and reorganized local governance. The independent immortonations became provinces under the new Galactic Commonwealth. In addition to codifying the structure of the government, The Galactic Constitution included a section outlining the inalienable rights and liberties of sapient beings. It also provided for the creation of an enormous Army of the Galaxy and outlawed locally controlled militaries. Because of the huge lag in communications between worlds, a system of closed party-list proportional representation was used to elect members of The Galactic Parliament. Political parties located on the capital planet Zaast created huge lists of people in the order which they would like them seated in parliament. The lists were then communicated to all the inhabited planets in the galaxy where local branches of the Galactic Commonwealth would hold an election and individuals would vote for the parties. Once the results of these elections were transmitted back to Zaast, seats would be proportionally allocated by party. Term lengths were one million years, and if an elected parliamentarian died part way through their term, they were replaced by the next person on their party’s list. Parties could also reorganize their list at any time, meaning that during a term, party leaders could promote or demote members from office at will. This system, while effective at allowing democracy to take place at a galactic scale, had the consequence of power being highly centralized in a political class ruling from Zaast. Only those who lived on Zaast could effectively become parliamentarians, and the parties controlled who was in office at any time. The ruling party could even demote the prime minister and promote someone else to their place without a vote, because the office was not legally held by individuals; it was held by the party itself. The struggle for power between the parties was a cutthroat affair. Alliances and coalitions shifted constantly due to political maneuvering and backstabbing. Competition for power was just as fierce within the political parties, as positions on the parties’ lists were fought over. The maxim of Zaast was “trust no one”. Darker still, assassinations were a normal part of political life on Zaast. Indeed, despite being the richest and most powerful class in the galaxy, the life expectancy of the parliamentarians was fairly low on average due to the murders. The one check on the powers of the Zaast based parties was the Jury of Tribunes. Every one thousand years, one thousand tribunes were selected at random from the entire immortal population of the galaxy (using a pseudorandom number generator called R-19, which had had it’s seed synced with all the planets of The Commonwealth). These tribunes were legally compelled to serve and had to make the long journey to Zaast to do so. Being selected through sortition, the tribunes were diverse in species, religion, language, culture, profession, and class but were joined together in their common duty to the galaxy. The Jury of Tribunes had extensive powers. The jury could propose legislation to be voted on by the parliament and veto and legislation which the parliament produced. In addition, the jury was able to prosecute and try members of parliament: an important role due to the parliamentarians’ immunity to prosecution in the courts. The tribunes were sacrosanct and violence against them was punishable by death. This hardly stopped the parliamentarians, however, who, as a rule, hated the tribunes. The tribunes lived in constant fear of persecution from the parliamentarians and their cronies. Cowed in this way, the tribunes were unable to effectively perform their constitutional duty to curb the parties’ power. The Army, which was usually close with the parliamentarians, would not protect the tribunes, nor would the Zaast Public Order Service (the local police force). The tribunes had to look out for each other on the cruel planet which they found themselves on. Ayr was a shepherd on the agricultural world of Ostlot IV. She lived a simple life with her husband and children moving an indigenous variety of livestock from pasture to pasture. She was content with her lot, worked hard, and loved her family. The animals were calm and easy to work with and the weather was temperate all year long. She only had one thing in her life to complain about: the annual trip to the local city: Qual. The family would bring the livestock to Qual yearly to sell some of them to local vendors and buy what they needed to survive for the year. Ayr loathed coming to Qual. The city was claustrophobic to her and, accustomed to a lifestyle of freedom in the wild, she took poorly to the city’s rules and customs. More than anything else she detested the local branch of the Army of the Galaxy, who would demand a huge sum of “protection money” on top of the taxes which were already due. This type of racketeering was just how things were done. The Army was strong, the people were weak, and there was no oversight. So once again she found herself paying the protection money at the local army office. This time, however, upon tuning to leave she was stopped by the soldier taking the money. “You should really stay in the city for a month until the jury selection happens.” The young soldier said. “Means we won’t have to track you down if you get picked.” This caused some snickers from other soldiers. “No, I’m serious!” the soldier protested. “Just because someone from Ostlot hasn’t been selected in forever doesn’t mean it couldn’t happen!” “I’ll take my chances,” Ayr said and left to find Elic, her husband, who was with the children in the bazaar. When she reached the bazaar and found Elic and the children, she looked at them from afar for just a moment before joining them. She saw her husband tenderly caring for scrape their youngest had just gotten from a little fall and had a sudden feeling like she was seeing them like that for the last time. She joined them and said to Elic “I think we should stay in the city for a month longer.” Surprised Elic looked up and asked “Why? You hate the city.” She paused for a few seconds. “Yes but Jury selection is in a month and you never know if one of us might be picked.” she replied. Elic smiled, he knew better than to question his wife when she had a feeling about something, and he knew better than to question his wife’s gut. “Ok, we’ll stay until Jury selection,” he said. One month later she was chosen. The army came to the inn the family was staying in, took her to the spaceport, and put her on a ship to Zaast. She somehow knew that it would be her. She didn’t know how, she didn’t believe in gods or fate or luck or the supernatural. But somehow she had known. Now she was leaving everything behind. Her husband, her children, her home, her life, even her place in time (for she would be put into cryosleep for the duration of the journey). But she wasn’t alone. Strangely enough, after the long drought, not one but two representatives from Oslot IV were chosen to be tribunes. The launch craft from Qual spaceport met up with the interstellar transport ship, and Mareen, the other green tribune, was waiting for her there. As soon as the airlock opened. Mareen appeared with her hand extended and a smile on her face. “Name’s Mareen, nice to meet you!” she said with a twinkle in her eye. Ayre shook her hand. “Likewise, I’m Ayre!” Ayre replied, happy to see such a friendly face. The two immediately got on well. Mareen, Ayre learned, was a farmer before being chosen. Ayre also learned that Mareen shared some of her more rebellious sensibilities. When no guards were around Mareen said “I mean it’s bullshit! They take a big fat cut of my profits on top of what I’m already paying in taxes! I’m going to give the parliament an earload when we get to Zaask. There’s no way they should let the Army rob us blind like they do.” After talking with Marreen about all manner of things for about three days, the cryopods were ready and it was time to go into suspended animation. “See you on the other side!” Mareen said as they were lowered into the pods. This was it. This was the end of Ayres old life. She would wake to an uncertain dawn on a dangerous planet. She steeled herself and felt the cold and the artificial sleep come.

#scifi #science fiction #fantasy #fiction #writing #dystopia #future

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dogsliampaynedoesntinstagram · 5 years

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Just out of genuine curiosity, what about Harry’s quote on society being divisive is inane and inaccurate? x

Hi anon,

So there’s two main problems with that statement - one factual and the other more fundamental (there’s also a gramatical problem in that I don’t think society itself can be divisive - but I’m assuming he meant divided - obviously we all often say things slightly inaccurately and that’s fine)

He said ‘society has never been so divisive’ - and that’s just obviously and absurdly untrue. I know we have to assume that Harry doesn’t know anything about the 1980s in order to be here in the first place, but they weren’t that long ago. They were a time of huge oppression and repression and large scale resistance. Lets start with the Miners’ strike - where there were 150,000 miners on strike and millions of people supporting them to some level. They were opposed by the police, who locked down communities and attacked people gathering and were called ‘the enemy within’.

But that’s just the start. When the Prime Minister gets up and says that children were being cheated because they were taught they had an inalienable right to be gay and then passes a law silencing and pathologising any mention of queerness - that’s a divided society. And perhaps more importantly - the reason she gave that speech was because queer people were organising to be recognised and found instiutional support within the Greater London Council. And more than 20,000 people came out in Manchester in oppposition.

To say that there was a deeply racist and violence police force is to suggest that that’s either notable or changed, but there were successive riots and uprisings against the police all across the country. More riots helped stop a government attempt to make poor people pay a higher proportion of tax than rich people. 96 people were crushed to death and blamed for their own murder. Families and entire city still haven’t stopped fighting for justice. And I haven’t even got to the actual civil war yet. You want to know a divided society? It’s when people joke that the guy who set a bomb off that almost killed the Prime Minister is the most hated man in Britain - because half the country hated him for setting the bomb and the other half for missing.

And he was talking to Timothée Chalamet in America. Is he really suggesting that America is more divided now than when Jim Crow laws were being fought? Or when they were fully functional? Or during slavery?

And that is why what Harry is saying is not just wrong, but in itself upholds existing power structures. He was born into a society that was fundamentally divided by race and class. Through most of his childhood the government and press were developing new ways of whipping up hatred, particularly against muslims and working-class kids. His whole adult life the government has been attacking disabled people and making their lives unliveable. Harry didn’t experience this as a society divided - it’s easy not to if you’re not the target.

Capitalist society, built as it is on colonialism, is always divided - it was designed that way. The question is how much resistance there is to those divisions. At times society can not feel divided for the people on the lucky side, but that doesn’t make the divisions any less real. What was notable to me about Harry’s framing is that he doesn’t seem to have any sense of the limits of his perception or awareness - he presents them as fact.

#My plan for today is to chill in the cool and answer asks #so we may be going back a bit #and I can't guarantee that this will be the only ask that I will interpret as 'please tell me about the history of 1980s Britain'#but I do pasionately believe everything here #both the importance of that history #and then also that suggesting that something is 'divided' or 'divisive' is notable or a negative thing #only serves to uphold power structures #Anonymous

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beinglibertarian · 5 years

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A Libertarian Defense of the Social Contract

I know, I’ve never signed the social contract either.

Now that that is out of the way, the real reason to defend the social contract is that it puts rights into a framework where they can be discussed and manipulated. Without an agreement, there are no rights in a literal sense; instead, there are any number of Platonic ideals which exist in the minds or philosophies of any number of different individuals or groups.

Were they simply articulated, they would only describe how people should act, and would not ensure that the parties involved act accordingly. The vast majority of the theories on human rights are never articulated at all, let alone put into practice. What is necessary to bring rights into being more concretely is an explicit, preferably universal framework defining the rule set used to interact with others; a social contract.

There is a tendency to claim absolute rights and not concern oneself with the corresponding responsibilities. Freedom of speech without the obligation to be subjected to speech that might be considered offensive is impracticable. Further, if someone does abuse their rights, for example, by committing an armed robbery, then the “inalienable” right to bear arms can be alienated by government or by civilians in the case of self-defense. These actions are predictable and reliable because of the social contract.

Rights, although supposedly self-evident, innate, and inalienable, defy being identified across groups at all levels of society. One can assert God-given rights, but it is clear that there is no agreement from people within the same religion – let alone between different religions – as to what those rights are. If rights are God-given, does the religion of a society change the rights of the people within it? While this was the prevailing thought throughout much of history, it is horribly outdated in modern society. Governments fare no better than religions at consistently determining what rights are, and the government of “the land of the free” fares no better, oxymorons notwithstanding.

The United States Constitution lists a couple of rights, then declares in the 9th Amendment that those not specifically stated still count too. The 9th Amendment in practice is grossly ineffectual; in Wickard v Filburn the US Supreme Court decided that a farmer who grew his own wheat to feed the animals on his own farm violated the interstate commerce clause. Even something so innate as the right to self-sufficiency is not obvious enough to be exempted from government attack in the “land of the free.” The inadequacy of unarticulated rights is shown clearly by the abject failure of the 9th Amendment to protect them.

The core of libertarianism is the belief in the primacy of the individual. History has shown us that in order to be real, individual rights must be backed by force. Without the ability to resist the state or other aggressors who may attempt to subvert one’s rights, those rights evaporate back into nebulous abstraction. Although the Kulaks in Ukraine may have been wronged during the Holodomor, pleas to the Soviets about the violation of their rights did not help to secure their farms or their produce from the state’s expropriation, and they were systematically starved to death by the millions. In practice, the only rights that the individual can rely on to exist in any real sense on are the ones that have been agreed to, and those are necessarily obtained and protected by means of resistance against oppression.

Positive & Negative Rights

A negative right is a natural right, an ability to do something that requires no action from others except to refrain from interfering. Usually, these rights are self-evident: one may have the right to travel and may expect others not to block the road, for example. These rights become less obvious when those who would interfere are restrained from “protecting” people, particularly when protecting those people from themselves. When people use heroin, or prostitute themselves, or to otherwise utilize their natural rights to self-abuse, a grey area appears. Most libertarians do not agree with the state interfering in such situations, but it is likely that most would also support friends’ or loved ones’ right to intervene, e.g. it is consistent with most peoples’ libertarian vision for a parent to use force to prevent a child from self-harm.

A positive right is one that requires resources from the collective to be used for an individual, so they impose a cost on society to offer a benefit to individuals. Positive rights raise the hackles of libertarians, generally speaking. This is not surprising, considering some of the positive rights that have made various lists. The United Nations Declaration of Human Rights has among its number the right to subsidized child care, paid holidays, and the right to enjoy the arts.

Some disapprove of positive rights because they impose costs on others. This claim is superficially plausible, but I contend that it actually renders all rights inert. Take for example Rand Paul’s supposition that universal health care imposes a claim on his labor and that this is tantamount to slavery. Why is the Senate exempted from this principle? Doesn’t Paul’s pay, derived from taxation, make all taxpayers his slaves by the same logic? If we take this principle to its logical conclusion there can be no government whatsoever.

Don Boudreaux wrote an editorial for Cafe Hayek where he said: “Rights pre-exist government. Therefore, even if – as most people believe – government is necessary to help secure individuals’ rights, government does not create that which it itself is created to help to secure.” I’m a fan of Dr. Boudreaux’s, but I don’t quite agree with his premise. What is right exists outside of government. Rights, outside of abstraction, exist as a function of the agreement between people. This doesn’t need to be an agreement with a government, but without an agreement, the rights do not exist in any real sense, they are just ideas.

Taking the argument too far in the other direction, Jeremy Bentham called the idea of natural rights “nonsense on stilts” and instead viewed utilitarianism – the idea that rights should provide maximal happiness for the people – as providing a means of determining which rights should and which should not exist. Bentham was also a master of the run-on sentence:

“As to the law of nature, if (as I trust it will appear) it be nothing but a phrase; if there be no other medium for proving any act to be an offence against it, than the mischievous tendency of such act; if there be no other medium for proving a law of the state to be contrary to it, than the inexpediency of such law, unless the bare unfounded disapprobation of any one who thinks of it be called a proof; if a test for distinguishing such laws as would be contrary to the law of nature from such as, without being contrary to it, are simply inexpedient, be that which neither our author, nor any man else, so much as pretended ever to give; if, in a word, there be scarce any law whatever but what those who have not liked it have found, on some account or another, to be repugnant to some text of Scripture; I see no remedy but that the natural tendency of such doctrine is to impel a man, by the force of conscience, to rise up in arms against any law whatever that he happens not to like. What sort of government it is that can consist with such a disposition, I must leave to our author to inform us.”

Unfortunately, after offering this superficially plausible argument against natural rights in which their weakness is that they are derived from scripture rather than reason and can be overturned by force, Bentham went on to support something he called “felicific calculus.” This is a method by which the amount of “happiness” derived from a law can be used to legitimize it. If a law is determined to create more unhappiness than happiness, then it can be opposed on that basis. This, I think, is a far worse proposition than the “nonsense on stilts” idea of natural rights that he took issue with, and the reason is primarily the same one that allows people to oppose democracy.

If a country can starve one smaller portion of its population to death to support the majority, do the natural rights of the victims of such a policy, who are forced to suffer and die, disappear? How about if the other population is another country that happens to be a long established enemy? What if that other country has a different religion with different God-given rights? In this case is the felicity accrued amongst all of the people subject to the “true” rights, and the harm is entirely put on those to whom the rights do not apply? Although Bentham rightly points out the contradictory nature of natural rights deriving from a god, his felicific calculus was nothing less than a philosophical well-spring of suffering that underpinned the worst social contracts that were responsible for many of the horrors of the 20th century, the aforementioned Holodomor being only one example.

In The End, Force Matters

Bentham was wrong. If either side of a dispute over rights finds the current agreement to be insufficient and is unwilling to accept it, force will be the deciding factor. Successful use of force by government will subdue the rebellion and end the claim to new rights that were the basis of the fighting. The other possibility is that the rebels subdue the government and create a new contract which includes the contested rights in a new social contract.

With no government there is no social contract, and rights evaporate back into abstraction. If on the other hand some amount of government is allowable, the issue revolves around a frustratingly arbitrary line of what constitutes too much. If “the ruler rules by the consent of the ruled,” the ruled need to have some way to make their dissent known and felt. The trick is to set up a government powerful enough to enforce a social contract, but not so powerful as to abuse it. What makes the United States the greatest country in history is that the rulers guaranteed the ability of the ruled to consent and dissent to government policy. The constitutional protection of speech and notably the right to petition government allows us to make our dissent known. The right to keep and bear arms guarantees us the right to make our dissent felt.

If you are an anarcho-capitalist and are now yelling at your screen, “What about no government as an option?!?!” you have a legitimate point at least insofar as the government has a heavily tilted playing field with respect to their monopoly on the use of force. Social contracts are not an unalloyed good. Governments expropriate money from their citizens and use the money to buy the weapons that they say protect their citizens, but which simultaneously give them the ability to suppress their own people. I would argue that this is not justifiable and that each individual needs to decide what level of dissent is a sufficient level of action against the government under these circumstances.

Despite myriad abuses of government, anarchy doesn’t solve the problem either, although I would agree that it might limit the size and scope of the wrongdoings. What happens when someone in an anarchic situation tries to infringe upon your idea of what your rights are? Seems that you’re back in the same predicament: force (or the threat of force) will be used to settle the matter. When the matter is settled, the result is a new social contract.

The problem with anarchy is that this dispute can happen innumerable times, whereas in a society with a social contract the rules are generally consistent and this allows people to act under the assumption that they will be treated accordingly, and given a means of resolving related disputes. If an anarchic universal social contract were established, it is my contention that this would be a government, and the agreement would be law which establishes rights. An example of such a society exists: the Icelandic Commonwealth.

Too many libertarians scoff at the statist’s view of the social contract. This is due to the apologist’s acerbic citations of it to validate the victimization of people by the government: “X government action is acceptable because the victims agreed to the social contract.” The social contract is not your rights, and it is not, properly understood, a justification of their limitations, it only states the rights which have been agreed to. The social contract is an imperfect concept with imperfect implementations; its value comes from the fact that it makes rights actionable and the contract itself can be changed, and that it can establish and manifest human rights as a modus operandi; this stands in stark contrast to the unspecified rights of disordered anarchy, or the capricious rights granted by authoritarian governments.

The post A Libertarian Defense of the Social Contract appeared first on Being Libertarian.

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ohnojustimagine · 7 years

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Dusk Till Dawn

Neville/Reader 3730 words; Smut

A historical vaguely medieval-ish AU with droit du seigneur.

(If you don’t know what droit du seigneur is, it’s the supposed legal or customary right of a feudal lord to have sexual relations with a vassal’s bride on her wedding night.)

***

You’ve never been one of those girls who dreams of marriage, wasting away her days with imaginings of a beautiful man on a grand, powerful steed who rides in and sweeps her away from her ordinary life. You’re far too practical for such fancies, so when your wedding day finally arrives, it’s only a small celebration, but that is all you need. The ceremony takes place at the village church, efficient and without fuss, and then afterwards you, your new husband and your respective families retreat to your uncle’s tavern for food and dancing.

As you arrive, you note that there are two royal guards from the palace loitering outside the tavern entrance, and you are well aware of the reason for their presence, but for now you pay them no mind.

The evening’s merrymaking is pleasant but not too merry, exactly as you would wish. Your father has slaughtered a pig for the occasion, and there is ale aplenty. One of your brothers plays the fiddle, and you dance with your new husband, blushing when everyone stamps their feet, encouraging the two of you to kiss.

You quickly peck each other’s lips, and the assembled guests applaud. You find such customs somewhat tiresome, but it is the traditional way. You are no romantic, having known your husband since you were both children, but he is a good, hard-working man who will treat you well, and that is all you would ask for. Perhaps you do not feel any particular thrill when you look upon his features, plain as they are, but in these troubled times you would always choose a safe, steady life over some fleeting infatuation.

The afternoon wears on, and as the dusk begins to settle in outside, the palace guards enter the room, yawning as they stare around. Your husband takes your hand, squeezing it reassuringly as the men approach you. “It’s time, miss,” one of them says, matter-of-factly, and you nod, swallowing, knowing there is no argument to be had.

You throw a wrap over your shoulders and head out into the fading light, the guards marching along either side of you. The King’s castle looms over the town, and you look up at it, the imposing towers of stone rising above you, huge and unyielding.

You have heard tell that in some realms, droit du seigneur is regarded as an old-fashioned, barbaric custom, but in your kingdom it is a long-established and unquestioned law. Every bride of the lower, indentured class is presented to the King on her wedding night, and if he chooses to make use of her, be the first to deflower her, then that is his inalienable right.

You know that while the current King views every bride, he rarely exercises his prerogative, as he is a selective man who prefers the company of woman finer than mere peasants such as yourself, but you’re still nervous, your heart beating at a rapid flutter inside your chest.

The guards do not speak as they lead you past the castle gates, making your way into the building through a hidden side entrance, climbing a long, narrow stone staircase that takes you into an open corridor. You stop in front of a large wooden door, and one of the men raps on it sharply.

An impatient-sounding voice calls out, “Enter,” and the guards open the door, motioning you inside. You note they both are resting their hands on the hilt of their swords now, as if wary that you will need further persuasion. You wonder briefly what happens to brides who choose to fight their fate, but then decide you would prefer not to be burdened with such a knowledge.

You walk into the room, guards close beside you, and observe a man, sitting behind a desk, writing. It’s the King, and in the past you have only ever seen him from a distance, dressed in his full ceremonial robes, an elaborately bejewelled crown perched atop his head, but this evening he is clad in ordinary clothes: a white shirt unlaced to expose the upper part of his broad chest, his dark hair loose, falling in waves over his shoulders.

He is not what you would call a conventionally handsome man, but his features are attractively distinctive, and there’s an air about him that many women of the kingdom seem to find appealing. Perhaps it is ego, or the simple charisma bestowed by the power he wields, but he is a man much desired, and standing before him, you feel yourself begin to understand why.

“Tonight’s bride, your majesty,” says one guard.

The King glances up, an irritated look on his face, and you’re expecting him to dismiss you with barely a wave, as you know he does most of the local girls, but his expression changes as he sees you. His eyes narrow, raking over your body with an appraising, speculative gaze.

“Well,” he says, slowly. “Are you not quite the surprise, pretty one?”

Your breath catches fast in your throat as he stands, looking you up and down.

“Take off her dress,” he orders the guards, and you start to speak, trying to say that if it is deemed necessary, you can remove your own clothes, as you would not wish for your wedding gown to be damaged, but the words are not past your lips before one of the guards is behind you, pulling away your wrap and tearing open your dress. You wince slightly upon hearing the many small buttons clatter on the flagstones as they are ripped away. Your mother spent hours sewing them, wanting your gown to be as fine as your family’s limited resources would allow.

The guard lets the dress fall to the floor, and it pools around your feet like some limp, discarded rag. You stand there in your new chemise, shivering, though the room is not cold.

“Oh yes,” the King says, quiet, almost to himself. He walks a circle around you, murmuring appreciatively.“Yes,” he repeats, more firmly. “Very nice.” He gestures nonchalantly at the guards, saying, “Take her to my chambers. I will be along shortly.”

“Yes, your majesty,” they say, each grabbing one of your arms and dragging you out of the room, so rough you struggle to stay balanced, keep pace with them. You stumble enough that your dainty wedding shoes are kicked off your feet but the guards pay no mind, marching you down the corridor until you reach another door.

One guard pushes you inside. “Wait here,” he says, forcing you further into the room. “And don’t touch anything,” he adds. He pauses for a moment, staring at your chest. Your chemise was supposed to be for your proper wedding night, with your husband, and it is of a finer material than you would ever normally wear, so thin as to be almost transparent.

You fold your arms in front of you, trying to protect the last of your modesty, and the guard licks his lips, lascivious. It is clear he wants to touch you, and you would assume he is only restraining himself for fear of angering the King. He grunts slightly, adjusting the front of his breeches, and then turns to leave.

“We’re right outside, love,” he says. “So don’t even think about trying to go anywhere.” He grins at you, exposing rotting, yellowing teeth, and you shudder as you hear the door close, a bolt sliding shut behind it.

You let out a deep, shaking breath, and look around the room. It is not quite as large as you would have expected the King’s chambers to be, but it is still most certainly bigger than your own entire home. There is a fire burning bright in the grate, and there are several large, cushioned chairs positioned in front of it. But by far the most elaborate object in the room is the bed. It is enormous; covered in fine, decorative carvings so delicate you can’t help but marvel at them, and there is a post rising from each corner, soaring high up to a curtained canopy of rich tapestries. The sheets seem to be of smooth silk, and there are thickly beautiful furs piled carelessly at the bed’s foot.

You would like to examine it more closely, perhaps see if it is as soft as it looks, but you do not dare do anything except stand meekly in the center of the room, waiting. A dreadful anticipation fills you, growing stronger by the minute, and you almost wish the King would hurry, simply so your ordeal can be done with sooner. This will all seem like some terrible dream when it is finished, you are sure, and you will return to your life, forget this night ever occurred.

But for now your fate is sealed, and when, at last, you hear the door open, you gather your courage, telling yourself that whatever is to happen, it will be over by the morning. Surely you can endure until then? You are not so certain, but there is no choice to be had.

The King enters, not saying anything as he strolls past you, seating himself on the end of the bed. You stand there, in front of him, watching as he bends to pull off his boots, tossing them aside. He sits up, leaning back on his arms, regarding you for a few long minutes, and you remain still, trembling slightly, feeling almost trapped by the intensity of his gaze.

When he finally speaks, it is to ask, “Have you remained pure for your husband?”

“Yes, majesty,” you say, and it is true. You have always found carnal temptations not so difficult to resist, preferring to focus on your future rather than distract yourself with the more fleeting, insubstantial satisfactions of the body.

The King nods, seemingly pleased. “Take that off,” he says, and you hesitate for a second or two, but there is nothing to be done, so you pull your chemise over your head, letting it fall to the floor beside you. You stand naked, fighting the urge to cover yourself, knowing that for this night, your body is not yours, belonging to the King, as is his lawful right.

He stares at you, eyes darkly menacing, moving to slowly rub the bulge that is forming in the front of his breeches, the heel of his hand stroking over it. He licks his lips, and you try to remember to keep breathing.

“On the bed for me,” he says, rising to his feet, his voice slightly hoarse. You obey, walking over, clambering up ungracefully and then lying back, the silken sheets soft as water against your skin, the sensation making you shiver, used as you are to the coarse bed coverings of your home.

Your hands are clenched at your sides, every muscle in your body stiff with tension, and you are expecting him to simply climb on top of you, forcefully have his way, but instead he sits beside you, staring down at your body. He reaches out, trailing his fingertips slowly up over your stomach, between your breasts, lingering at the base of your throat in a caress that, under any other circumstance, you would perhaps label tender.

“Are you afraid of me?” he asks.

“Yes, majesty,” you reply, truthfully.

He laughs at your answer, short and sharp. “I like that,” he says. “That you do not lie to me.”

He leans over you, pressing his mouth to yours, and while it is soft, undemanding kiss, you keep your lips closed tight, praying he will not ask for any more, wanting to avoid at least one violation on this night. But the King pulls away, looking at you.

“I hope we both understand,” he says, “that this will be far more pleasant if you do not resist me.” And there is enough of a warning in his voice that you comprehend his meaning, and this time, when he shifts towards you, you part your lips, allowing him to plunder your mouth fully, his tongue slipping inside, moving in ways you would never have even dreamed of.

When you were first betrothed, you allowed your now-husband to kiss you in this manner, but you did not enjoy it, finding his attempts clumsy and primitive, his tongue fat and lifeless in your mouth, but the King’s kiss is nothing that even resembles those efforts. This is like quicksilver, alive with warmth inside you, and you feel as if you are being consumed, in the best possible way. Your head is spinning with confusion, and, without even thinking of it, you find yourself responding in kind, your own tongue against the King’s, licking slippery and heated.

You hear yourself make a small, strange noise, and the King sits back, a bemused smirk hovering over his still-wet lips. “Perhaps you are not so innocent, then,” he says, thoughtfully, and you blush, knowing what he is intimating.

He speaks no further, pulling off his shirt, letting it fall aside as he shakes his hair back off his face, over his shoulders. His body is sculpted with muscle, more so than any working man you have ever seen, and he is strangely hairless, his skin so smoothly unmarked you cannot stop yourself from staring. For a brief moment you are tempted to touch him, suddenly somehow longing to know what such skin would feel like under your hands, but you push the thought away,

He kneels up over you, his legs at both sides of your ribcage, and unlaces his breeches, pushing them lower, revealing a thatch of dark, curly hair, and then… you swallow, trying to steady your breath as your heart begins to race, pounding inside your chest.

You’re not some sheltered princess born of nobility; you have older brothers, and you grew up on a farm with breeding animals, but still, it’s something, to see a man’s… member, you know is the more polite word, though prick or cock is what people mostly say, but to see it in this state, this close, is not a thing you have ever experienced.

It’s long and thick, jutting out from the King’s body like something proud, and he runs his hand over it, stroking from root to tip, up and down. He carelessly takes hold of your wrists with his other hand, and though his grasp is relatively loose, you can feel the strength of him, the physical power barely contained as he pins your hands over your head, leaning in, guiding it, guiding his cock you make yourself think, toward your mouth.

And it’s not… you know why you are here, and you accept that, but this is not an act you had expected would be required of you, and you can’t help panicking, struggling beneath him. You turn your face away from him, kicking your feet as best you can, arms held fast.

“Stop it,” he spits out. “Stop fussing.” He tightens his legs either side of you, keeping you in place with ease. “If I’m forced to bring the guards in to restrain you,” he threatens, “then I will let them have their way with you when I’m done, and I promise you, child, they will not be gentle.”

You still, willing yourself to calm, breathing hard, your chest rising and falling.

“There,” he says. “Good girl.” He does not release you, but for the moment he makes no further advances on you. “Have you never taken a man in your mouth before?” he asks.

“No, majesty,” you whisper. It is relatively common among the girls you know, but it is not a practice you would ever indulge in willingly.

“Well, then,” the King says. “What a find you are, my pet.” He looks down at you, a smug smile hovering brief over his features.“Perhaps we will begin more slowly,” he says. “Just a taste, yes?”

He takes hold of himself once more, drawing his cock across your lips, and you whimper with distress, but you do as you are bidden, pursing your mouth to kiss it.

“Yes,” he breathes out, encouraging. “Now suckle at it, put that pretty little tongue of yours to good use.” You inhale, steeling yourself, and do as he says, sucking at the tip, opening your mouth enough to take the topmost part of it in. It is not so bad, you think in surprise, sucking with a touch more vigor. And the act is not at all what you would have thought it to be; the taste of the King’s cock a mixture of salt and something sweet and clean, the thick feel of it in your mouth oddly natural, as if that is where it belongs.

You close your lips around the width of it, daring to move your tongue a little, unsure as to what is the proper technique, but your attempts seem to be more than acceptable, as the King moans, freeing your wrists, pushing more of himself past your lips. “Mind your teeth,” he says, and you are careful, even as his cock fills your mouth. There is a shamefully pleasurable ache beginning to throb at your core, and without thinking of it, your hands move as if of their own accord, coming to rest on the King’s thighs. You can feel the heavy bulk of him even through his breeches, and your fingers curl over his form, curious. “You like that,” says the King, softly, almost wondrously. He removes his cock from your mouth, sitting back, stroking himself once more, fist moving rapidly.

For a moment you think he is going to spend himself over your face, but instead he stops, then climbs down from the bed. He pulls off his breeches, facing away from you, and you can see the shape of his buttocks, rising high and firm behind him. His thighs are as huge and powerful as they felt under your hands, but they are smooth, hairless as his chest is. It would seem the only places where hair remains on his body are his head and beard and around his cock. It is a curious affectation, you muse to yourself, perhaps a current fashion of the nobility, but it is also strangely attractive to you.

Now fully and completely naked, he lies himself down next to you, on his side, licking his fingers thoroughly before reaching down between your legs. He smiles in delight as he feels the wetness there. “Oh,” he says, the word almost crooned. “You did like that, didn’t you?” You close your eyes, humiliated at your body’s betrayal, but the King only laughs. And yet his amusement does not seem to be unkindly meant. He is obviously gratified by your response to him, quite clearly so, and you feel the smallest, guiltiest sense of pride at being able to serve him in this manner.

His fingers explore your most private places with casually expert skill, caressing you with unhurried precision, finding the nub of your pleasure without the slightest fumbling or hesitation. He rubs circles over it with his two middle fingers, and you gasp, your hips arching up off the bed at the sensation. He watches you, your reactions, adjusting the pressure and pattern of his touch in accordance with your responses, and you can feel yourself opening up to him, the ache inside you deepening into a desperate yearning, longing for what you have never known you could need so very badly.

“Do you want me?” the King asks, and you nod in reply, unable to say the words aloud, but it seems that is answer enough, as he is quickly on top of you, positioning himself between your legs, and you swallow, trembling with nervous anticipation, breathing as you feel him, feel his cock, right there.

There’s a quick, sharp pain as he slowly enters you, but it is not so bad as you would have thought, and as he seats himself fully inside you and you adjust to the feeling, the hurt fades away to nothing, forgotten, replaced by a new, unfamiliar urgency, and you whimper, helpless to resist it.

“Oh yes,” the King says, and he begins to move his hips, cock thrusting in and out of you, the pace of it at first almost careful, but then with an increasing amount of force and speed. “God,” he mutters, licking at your neck, tongue hot and needy on your skin,“what a tight little cunt you have, pretty.” You could never have imagined you would find such crude words exciting or even flattering, but they spark something within you, and you also start to move, your body finding its own, instinctive rhythm to meet the King’s.

Something begins to build inside you, an intensity so violent it is as if you cannot contain it, and you feel as if you are balanced at the edge of a great height, about to fall but certain you will fly. You cry out as it peaks, clinging to the King as your body spasms around him, heat sparking through you.

The King throws his head back, mouth open in silent ecstasy for a long, endless moment, before his weight falls down onto you, and he lies there, spent. His hair is damp and curled with sweat, and for a minute he does not move, but then he shifts slightly, just enough for you be more comfortable beneath him.

After a little time has passed, you dare to speak. “Majesty,” you say, your voice tremulous to ask so boldly, “may I have leave to return to my husband?” You are not entirely sure you wish to depart, but you know this is merely an interlude, something that cannot last. “Now that my duty is done?”

And he does not reply, lifting his head to gaze down at you before he once more claims your mouth, wide and hungry, and this time you do not hesitate in your response to him, kissing him back with a lust and fervor equal to his own until he shifts away.

“The night,” the King says. “I have the night.” He kisses you again, fierce, almost vicious, nipping at your bottom lip with sharp teeth. “I am your master until dawn, my sweet, and my pleasure is far from being satisfied. Understood?”

“Yes, majesty,” you reply, trying to sound meek, but your blood is already aflame with anticipation, and you are impatient for more.

#wwe imagine #wwe smut #adrian neville #adrian neville imagine #adrian neville smut #neville imagine #neville smut

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genx3791 · 4 years

Text

Here are 51 reasons why Alberta & Saskatchewan would enjoy better lives as citizens of a U.S. state.

1. No more French language

Say goodbye to French on signs, products, government documents. No more French taught in schools. No more being greeted in French when you speak to customer service.

2. Free to travel to sunny states for as long as you want

Want to live in Florida, Arizona, or Maui for a while without raising eyebrows with U.S. border patrol or risk being double-taxed by IRS & CRA?

3. 2nd Amendment rights

The right to bear arms is an inalienable right ingrained in the U.S. Constitution, which can't be taken away. In Constitutional Carry states, you can even carry a concealed firearm without permits or red tape. In Canada, you will just have to watch your family get mowed down by bad guys.

4. Donald Trump

You get the ultimate leader of the people, a non-stop machine who works for you 20hrs a day instead of Trudeau who uses you to fund his vacation. You get an alpha male leader you can be proud of & truely loves his country instead of a sissy.

5. Protection from US military

You get the full protection of the Pentagon and its 1.3 million active duty personnel.

6. Safety of US dollar

You'll be earning US dollars which are the world's stable, standard currency and a safe haven of investment.

7. 1st Amendment

The right to free speech is ingrained in the U.S. Constitution. You are free to speak your mind without being fined or jailed for offending people.

8. Benefit from economies of scale

320 million people create a lot more buying power than 35 million. That's why prices of consumer goods and services tend to be better in the U.S. That's also why the U.S. has better infrastructure.

9. Better postal service

USPS is thriving in the digital age while Canada Post is cutting services to stay afloat. Order something cross country and USPS has it to you in 3 days or less at a fraction of the cost of Canada Post.

10. More banking options

You get a multitude of banking options rather than being stuck with Canada's banking oligopoly.

11. More phone & cable plan options

You get more choice of carriers and greater coverage in the States. Plans are usually cheaper as well.

12. More electronics, lower prices

There is so much more competition in the home electronics/appliances industries that it keeps prices lower in the U.S. than in Canada.

13. Cheaper car insurance

Car insurance tends to be about 40-50% lower in the U.S. than in Canada. Again, it's probably due to a larger economy of scale.

14. More famous restaurant franchises

You favorite U.S. restaurant chains will be more eager to operate north of the 49th when they're not faced with Canada's over-regulation of food, language and labor.

15. More affordable air transportation

How come you can fly from Phoenix to Las Vegas for $50 but flying from Calgary to Vancouver (same distance) is $200?

16. Better quality groceries, more choice

While Canada only has two big grocery companies that control 90% of the market, the U.S. has a multitude of options. With greater competition comes better quality and more options. Also, many great food companies in the U.S. won't export to Canada because of the cost of complying with Canada's food and labelling regulations.

17. Don’t pay duties for online shopping

Let's face it, all the good stuff online is shipped from the States. Then it gets dinged for up to 35% by Canada Customs when it comes in. This won't happen when Alberta is a U.S. state.

18. Won’t get made uncompetitive by Carbon Tax

Canada's obsession with climate change has mandated a carbon tax that is about to render its industrial output unable to compete with countries that haven't fallen for this hoax.

19. Won’t get made uncompetitive by new US import taxes

Trump is going to play hardball on trade. When he has leverage, he will use it to the advantage of the USA. He will start making Canada pay for the protection it gets from Uncle Sam, and if Canada won't pay, he'll make it up on increased tariffs.

20. Tougher justice system

The prime minister of Canada doesn't even think terrorists should lose their citizenship. Canada is a very liberal country that is soft on criminals in hopes that they can be rehabilitated. Meanwhile, very bad people are walking our streets.

21. Fewer refugees

Trump is proposing a total, temporary pause on refugees coming into the US until they figure out a way to vet them properly. Canada is simply an open borders country that will invite in as many refugees as it can to prove a point about how liberal it is.

22. Melting Pot, not Salad Bowl

The United States with its melting pot culture encourages immigrants to assimilate into English-speaking American culture. Canada encourages immigrants to maintain the cultural identities and customs of the home countries. This creates a lot of tension and a lack of shared identity in Canadian society.

23. Military industrial complex creates jobs

There is no arguing with the fact that the U.S. military industrial complex, with its world-leading innovation and massive productive capacity generates a tremendous amount of jobs and economic output. Canada's is nearly non-existent by comparison.

24. More diverse economy than Canada’s oil & health

Canada has put all its eggs in the oil and health care industries. This lack of diversity is very risky, as witnessed after the fall of oil prices. All the brightest minds in Canada who aren't working in oil or health move to the States to work in other industries.

25. Get to vote for President, not just watch

No longer will Albertans have to just sit on the sidelines and watch Americans elect the leader of the Free World.

26. Get a national culture & identity (vs “post-national”)

Americans have a strong sense of shared identity, cultural practices and values. Canada's leaders have declared it a "post-national" country, having no single shared identity. This encourages Canadians to stay in their ethnic cliques rather than work together like Americans do.

27. America first vs. globalism

Alberta will become part of America; a country now lead by those who put American priorities ahead of matters abroad. Canada is becoming the last bastion of globalism and makes domestic matters take a back seat to "virtuous" acts of saving people in faraway lands.

28. U.S. conservative values align with Alberta's

Canada's political spectrum is sharply to the left of the United States. The Conservative Party of Canada would be to the left of the Democrats if it was part of the U.S. Alberta keeps voting conservative which means it belongs in a more right-oriented political system like the U.S.

29. No more monarchy

Americans had the balls to evict the Crown 240 years ago, while Canada is still appeasing the Royals.

30. Access to better quality health care

You probably know at least five people who have had to go the the U.S. for serious health procedures. Most affluent Canadians go to the States for procedures. Why would any good doctors want to work in Canada's socialist health care system, when they can live in the States, make more money and work with the best technology?

31. Shorter wait times for operations

No more waiting days in a hospital corridor to get your rupturing appendix removed!

32. Might get an NFL franchise

Sure, you love your CFL teams, but wouldn't it be more exciting if your local franchise was NFL?

33. Help MAGA

You get to apply your energy to making America great again, instead of being trapped in a socialist country where your blood, sweat, and tears (and tax dollars) go to a leftist government that makes terrible decisions which work against you.

34. Be proud of your country again

There has never been a better time to be American. Those who support MAGA are walking with pride as their country is rebuilt, while Albertans walk with hunched shoulders, not proud of the country that mocks and exploits it.

35. Don’t have to feel second class around Americans anymore

You will be a first class, American citizen rather than being teased about being from wimpy Canada, eh?

36. Earning $USD, you can go to BC and shop/vacation in CAD pesos

When Alberta becomes part of the U.S. and Albertans are earning $USD, they will be able to go to BC for cheap cross-border shopping and holidays because the $CAD will be worth less than $0.50 $USD.

37. Elected Senate

You'll get to elect your senators rather than having them appointed by the elites.

38. State that treats you like grown up, not a nanny

Albertans are freedom-loving people. Why should they be over-regulated and talked down to by a government that thinks it knows what's best for its people and treats them like babies? The American society treats you like a grown up by default.

39. No more CBC

No more of your tax dollars going to support the government-backed Canadian Brainwashing Corporation.

40. No more forced CanCon

You will no longer be forced to ingest watered down versions of Netflix, Pandora, iTunes or having to listen to Nickelback, Bieber, or Alanis 50% of the time by law. No more government-funded shows like Little Mosque on the Prairie.

41. No more draining equalization payments

Less of your hard-earned dollars will go to buying beer and cigarettes for unemployed Quebecers.

42. No more government in absentia

The ruling government in Ottawa currently only has 4 MPs from Alberta. Alberta voted conservative and now has almost zero representation in government. This is complete political alienation.

43. Lower corporate tax better for small business

Trump is proposing dropping corporate tax to 10-15%. This will give American small business a major boost and Canada's small businesses will be unable to compete.

44. No longer lagging 8 years behind the US

Isn't it frustrating to have to repeat the same historical mistakes as the U.S., 8 years later? Canada elected its Obama (Trudeau) just on the eve of America rejecting him.

45. Lower gas tax

Gas taxes are lower in the U.S.

46. Lower liquor tax

Liquor is taxed at a lower rate in the U.S., too. Why pay more tax if you don't have to?

47. Won’t be trapped in Canada by a plunging Loonie

When America steps up their economic & trade games to a whole new level, the Loonie is going to be driven down by so much money flowing from Canada to the U.S. This will hurt Canadians' ability to buy vacations, real estate and consumer goods from the US.

48. Your children will have more job opportunities

America's economic diversity, military industrial complex, and world-leading innovation provide orders of magnitude more opportunity than Canada's narrow oil & health focus. By the time your children are old enough to join the workforce, Trump will have made America even stronger with even more opportunities, which will dwarf Canada. With Alberta part of the U.S., your children won't have to leave to get jobs.

49. Your children will have more education options

As U.S. citizens, your children will benefit from having the choice of hundreds of great American colleges and universities where they can make great connections with the leaders of tomorrow, rather than being marginalized nobodies who graduated from some unknown Canadian school.

50. Cheaper to heat your home with no CO2 tax

No more having to choose between heating vs. eating in the frigid winter months.

51. Never be ruled by another Trudeau!

Nothing needs to be said about this one.

Feel free to copy n paste, I did.

0 notes

pamphletstoinspire · 5 years

Photo

Part 3: On Catholic Social Teaching: The Common Good, Part 2

Last time, in this space, we mentioned that, while the Church condemns atheistic communism for, among other things, denial of the right of private property, it is also leery of the dangers of capitalism. Why? As G.K. Chesterton put it, because it produces too few capitalists and, instead of concentrating wealth and power in the hands of the state, tends to concentrate it in the hands of a tiny oligarchy. Original sin affects capitalists as well as communists.

Here’s the deal: The Church — so far from wanting private property abolished like the communist or concentrated in the hands of the 1% like the laissez-faire capitalist — wants everybody to own private property. This, yet again, is rooted in the biblical tradition — specifically, the Seventh Commandment: “You shall not steal.” If there were no such thing as private property, there could be no such thing as theft. So the Compendium of the Catechism of the Catholic Church says:

“Private property is an essential element of an authentically social and democratic economic policy, and it is the guarantee of a correct social order. The Church’s social doctrine requires that ownership of goods be equally accessible to all, so that all may become, at least in some measure, owners.”

Whatever else that is, it’s not Marxism and is, indeed, 180 degrees the opposite of the state owning everything.

Indeed, so insistent is the Church that ownership of the goods of creation is necessary to our survival and proper to our dignity as creatures made in God’s image that she says the right to private property is “innate in individual persons, in every person, and has priority with regard to any human intervention concerning goods, to any legal system concerning the same, to any economic or social system or method.”

Some libertarian-minded Catholics badly misread this quote by applying it only to themselves or to the corporation, as though the rest of the human race is not also made in the image of God. Erring thus, they take the Church to mean that the right to personal property is the absolute be-all and end-all and that, should an individual or corporation legally acquire ownership of vastly more property than is necessary for normal functioning or control access to something that is vital to the common good, there is no obligation before God or man to consider anybody else. Such a theory, in addition to being blind to the deadly sin of greed, simply twists the Compendium’s obvious meaning.

For the Compendium goes on to declare that the Church is, in fact, referring to the universal destination of goods and the right of each person to own property and have access to the goods of the earth necessary to human life: “All other rights, whatever they are, including property rights and the right of free trade, must be subordinated to this norm [the universal destination of goods]; they must not hinder it, but must, rather, expedite its application. It must be considered a serious and urgent social obligation to refer these rights to their original purpose.”

In short, the law (including the laws of economics) was made for man, not man for the law. Just as the state does not have the right to destroy the access of persons to the common good, neither does the corporation or the greedy individual.

The shocking (to Americans) upshot of this is that private property, while certainly a good, is not an absolute right. It must give way to other considerations sometimes. This, again, is a thoroughly biblical idea. John the Baptist tells his followers, “He who has two coats, let him share with him who has none; and he who has food, let him do likewise” (Luke 3:11). Why? Because my neighbor’s right to life (and therefore to not freeze to death) supersedes my right to my second coat. Notice that, just as with abortion, the Church places the right to life ahead of the right to property.

Again, take water, the most basic element of human existence. The Compendium says:

“‘The principle of the universal destination of goods also applies naturally to water, considered in the sacred Scriptures as a symbol of purification (Psalm 51:4; John 13:8) and of life (John 3:5; Galatians 3:27). As a gift from God, water is a vital element essential to survival; thus, everyone has a right to it [1009].’ Satisfying the needs of all, especially of those who live in poverty, must guide the use of water and the services connected with it. Inadequate access to safe drinking water affects the well-being of a huge number of people and is often the cause of disease, suffering, conflicts, poverty and even death. For a suitable solution to this problem, it ‘must be set in context in order to establish moral criteria based precisely on the value of life and the respect for the rights and dignity of all human beings.’

“By its very nature water cannot be treated as just another commodity among many, and it must be used rationally and in solidarity with others. The distribution of water is traditionally among the responsibilities that fall to public agencies, since water is considered a public good. If water distribution is entrusted to the private sector, it should still be considered a public good. The right to water, as all human rights, finds its basis in human dignity and not in any kind of merely quantitative assessment that considers water as a merely economic good. Without water, life is threatened. Therefore, the right to safe drinking water is a universal and inalienable right.”

The guiding principle here is simple:

“Christian tradition has never recognized the right to private property as absolute and untouchable: ‘On the contrary, it has always understood this right within the broader context of the right common to all to use the goods of the whole of creation: The right to private property is subordinated to the right to common use, to the fact that goods are meant for everyone.’”

Systems that make water available at a profit are fine, just as long as those who cannot pay for this elementary and fundamental right are not cut off. In such cases, some other way of covering the cost must be found.

Does the Church, then, teach that a perpetual welfare state of parasites should be established? Of course not. The principle way the poor are to have a share in the common good is, as we have already seen, through work at a living wage. And what is a living wage?

A living wage fulfills four criteria:

1. Families in general seem to be living at a standard of decency appropriate to their society;

2. They do so without working undue hours;

3. They do so without wives being forced to work outside the home or children forced to work inappropriate hours or under inappropriate conditions (if they choose to do so, that’s another story);

4. They do so without undue reliance on government support or consumer credit.

That is the goal. But in this fallen world, the goal is often not met. Therefore, the community must help those who cannot find the means to access necessary goods such as food, shelter and water.

Someone may ask, “What about Paul’s command that those who will not work shall not eat?” To begin with, Paul is speaking not about the obligations of the state, but of Christians in the Church at Thessalonica who were ignoring their obligations to the community on the theory that Jesus’ return was imminent. He is speaking to those within the household of faith and telling them to get off their duffs — ironically, so they can provide for themselves and the common good. He is not writing the First Epistle to the Americans on Congressional Welfare Reform.

Meanwhile, Jesus gives us our marching orders as Christians moving in the world outside the household of faith, and they are shocking and radical: “Give to him who begs from you, and do not refuse him who would borrow from you” (Matthew 5:42). Note that there are absolutely no qualifications put on this command. Indeed, his counsel on generosity is so countercultural and counterintuitive that, so far from talking about giving to “the deserving poor” who will thriftily earn a percentage on our largesse and give it back with interest, he instead commands: “When you give a dinner or a banquet, do not invite your friends or your brothers or your kinsmen or rich neighbors, lest they also invite you in return, and you be repaid. But when you give a feast, invite the poor, the maimed, the lame, the blind, and you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you. You will be repaid at the resurrection of the just” (Luke 14:12-14).

“For if you love those who love you, what reward have you? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you salute only your brethren, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? You, therefore, must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Matthew 5:46-48). The Gospel, as Dorothy Day says, “takes away forever our right to distinguish between the deserving and the undeserving poor.” Because in God’s eyes, we are none of us deserving, and we are all of us poor.

And so, just like the Church, Paul urges not the abolition of property, but its generous sharing modeled after that of Jesus, who, “though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that by his poverty you might become rich” (2 Corinthians 8:9). And the Tradition of the Church on this is unbroken from antiquity to the present:

St. Ambrose: “You are not making a gift of your possessions to poor persons. You are handing over to them what is theirs. For what has been given in common for the use of all, you have arrogated to yourself. The world is given to all and not only to the rich.”

St. John Chrysostom: “Not to enable the poor to share in our goods is to steal from them and deprive them of life. The goods we possess are not ours, but theirs.”

St. Gregory the Great: “When we attend to the needs of those in want, we give them what is theirs, not ours. More than performing works of mercy, we are paying a debt of justice.”

St. Basil: “Are not thou then a robber, for counting as thine own what thou hast receivest to distribute? It is the bread of the famished which thou receivest, the garment of the naked which thou hoardest in thy chest, the shoe of the barefooted which rots in thy possessions, the money of the pennyless which thou hast buried in the earth. Wherefore then dost thou injure so many to whom thou mightest be a benefactor.”

St. Bede: “He then who wishes to be rich toward God will not lay up treasures for himself, but distribute his possessions to the poor.”

Leo XII: “Every person has by nature the right to possess property as his or her own. … But if the question be asked: How must one’s possessions be used? the Church replies without hesitation in the words of St. Thomas Aquinas: ‘One should not consider one’s material possessions as one’s own, but as common to all, so as to share them without hesitation when other are in need. … .’ True, no one is commanded to distribute to others that which is required for one’s own needs and those of one’s household; nor even to give away what is reasonably required to keep up becomingly one’s condition in life. … But when what necessity demands has been supplied and one’s standing fairly provided for, it becomes a duty to give to the needy out of what remains over.”

Pius XI: “The right to own private property has been given to the human by nature, or rather by the Creator himself. … At the same time a person’s superfluous income is not left entirely to one’s own discretion. … On the contrary, the grave obligations of charity, beneficence and liberality, which rest upon the wealthy, are constantly insisted upon in telling words by holy Scripture and the Fathers of the Church. However, the investment of superfluous income in securing favorable opportunities for employment … is to be considered … an act of real liberality, particularly appropriate to the needs of our time.”

Gaudium et Spes: “God has intended the earth and all that it contains for the use of all people and all peoples. Hence justice, accompanied by charity, must so regulate the distribution of created goods that they are actually available to all in an equitable measure. . . . Therefore, in using them, everyone should consider legitimate possessions not only as their own, but also as common property, in the sense that they should be able to profit not only themselves but other people as well. Moreover, all have the right to possess a share of earthly goods sufficient for themselves and their families. This is what the Fathers and Doctors of the Church had in mind when teaching that people are obliged to come to the aid of the poor, and to do so not merely out of their superfluous goods.”

Paul VI: “Private property does not constitute for anyone an absolute and unconditional right. No one is justified in keeping for one’s exclusive use what one does not need, when others lack necessities.”

St. John Paul II: “It will be necessary above all to abandon a mentality in which the poor — as individuals and as people — are considered a burden, as irksome intruders trying to consume what others have produced.”

In short, the Church desires that wherever possible people have the dignity of work at a living wage so they can both have their own property and enough resources to raise a family and share with the community. But where this is not yet possible, the Church calls us to exercise a “preferential option for the poor” in the keen awareness that our gifts belong to them and their prayers for us may well spell the difference between salvation and damnation.

As Jesus says, “Make friends for yourselves by means of unrighteous mammon, so that when it fails, they may receive you into the eternal habitations” (Luke 16:9).

BY: MARK SHEA

From: https://www.pamphletstoinspire.com/

#catholic social doctrine

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aftaabmagazine · 5 years

Text

The Texture of Time

By Tom Cole

From the October - December 1998 issue of Afghan Magazine | Lemar - Aftaab

[caption: A 19th-century torba fragment, cut and shaped for use as an ok-bash.]

Tom Cole, an "old Afghan hand", returned to Mazar-i Sharif in Afghanistan's northern province of Balkh during early spring 1997, little realizing how brief the window of opportunity for such a visit was to be. He reports for HALI on some of the realities in a much-beloved land that for almost two decades has endured the tribulations of revolution, invasion and civil war.

The idea of returning to Afghanistan come to me suddenly, with no time given to contemplation or trepidation. It was ten years since I had been to Kabul, then controlled by the Afghan communists, while their Soviet masters wreaked havoc throughout the country, destroying an ancient culture and lifestyle which, for all the harsh realities of the environment and traditional abuse of power in Central Asia, was not entirely uncomfortable. It was a land that gave so much to its people.

My plan was to go to Mazar-i Sharif in the northern sector controlled by the Uzbek warlord, General Rashid Dostum. It had been a full nineteen years since I had visited the north. How much had things changed? What could be found in an area now visited by few Western rug and textile dealers?

[caption: Conscripts pose under the watchful eye of General Rashid Dostam.]

Flights went from Peshawar in Mazar on what my Uzbek friend Mohammed Khalid called "Dostum's planes", Balkh Airlines had no association with any of the travel agencies in Peshawar, so I ventured across town to the new city where I spent some time trying to locate the "airline office". After being repeatedly misdirected, I finally stumbled upon it in the building housing the local office of the premier national newspaper, The Muslim.

Two Pakistani manned a bare desk with two chairs for visitors: no travel posters, no airline brochures with flight schedules, and no Afghans in sight. They assured me a ticket could be purchased without a problem. No one seemed interested whether I held a valid visa or by which of the authorities claiming to represent Afghanistan it had been issued. No one enquired about my reasons for going. No one cared about anything, just the money. I left with a ticket of sorts in my hand -- three pieces of paper cut into the size of a ticket and stapled together -- and high hopes for the coming week.

Checking in at Peshawar airport (after my "scheduled" flight had been delayed for a week) was bizarre. I had requested an aisle seat but, without explanation, was told that all seats were aisle seats and that this would be a flight I would never forget.

The plane was a converted Russian military transport with benches on either side and luggage stacked in the middle, unconstrained. We piled in as if boarding a country bus, I was seated shoulder to shoulder with Uzbeks, Turkmens, Hazaras, and Farsiwans (Tajiks), the principal inhabitants of Balkh Province. The usual admonitions about seat belts and hand luggage were distant memories as the pilot revved the propellers and we took off into the azure sky.

An Uzbek and his unshrouded wife clung to each other in fright, eyes rolling up, lips moving silently in prayer. Another Uzbek man constantly dabbed his brow with his unrolled turban, contorting his face in apprehension. A modern looking Farsiwan nervously tried to engage fellow travelers in light-hearted banter, though he was the only one laughing. Others feigned sleep. Life is notoriously cheap in Asia, but not to those who face the imminent prospect of losing it.

As we cleared the precipitous Hindu Kush, which had shielded the northern steppes from the Islamic fervor of the Kabul government, the relief was palpable: a reaction to our imminent arrival in Mazar, as well as to leaving behind the battle-scarred territory held by the Taliban, where most of the war has been conducted. Fear of heat-seeking SAMs lurked in the back of my mind, though I consoled myself with the knowledge that no planes had been lost on this flight route.

Mazar airport is small, close to the outskirts of the city. The military presence was unobtrusive: security was tight without being abrasive, an overriding theme of the laissez-faire (in Afghan terms) Dostum regime. Not once did I see aggressive action by soldiers at checkpoints outside the city, and there were none in Mazar itself. Nor did I see the young conscripts point a weapon at anyone or raise a voice, testimony to the manner in which the government had engaged the people's support. Dostum had long held power in the north, first as a lackey of the communist puppet state in Kabul, later as a mutinous opponent of the ill-fated Najibullah regime and then as a self-anointed warlord whose portrait adorned every public building, leaving no doubt that he considered himself to have an inalienable right to lead northern Afghanistan.

It all looked pretty much how I remembered it. Turkmen shepherds tended flocks of fat-tailed sheep, small camel trains ambled into the city loaded with fodder and wool. Signs of battle were limited to a few burned-out Russian tanks and armored personnel carriers, left as reminders of the Soviet invasion. Close to the border with former USSR, Mazar has never experienced the shelling and mass destruction of other Afghan cities and has always been a relatively secure place.

Mazar is the site of the most revered Islamic shrine in Afghanistan, the Tomb of Ali around which the city is built. The Shrine dominates local life: pilgrims from all over the region traditionally pay homage here, hands raised in prayer as they converge from all directions. Aged and handicapped mendicants, astrologers, purveyors of medicinal herbs, as well as widows and orphans of the war throng the surrounding square. Oral historians animatedly recall the glories of Islam and the teachings of the Prophet for the illiterate masses. The fabled white pigeons thrive, nurtured by the faithful. Life has not changed here, on the surface, everything is as it has always been.

Mazar is full of refugees from other parts of the country, now most notably from Kabul. The rebellion in Tajikistan too has produced a sizable refugee population, but they are confined to UN agency camps on the northern outskirts.

I was told that the rug market had grown during the war. Before, most goods went directly to Kabul, but the influx of refugees and uncertain road conditions through the formidable Salang Pass have contributed to an expanded marketplace. The main rug bazaar is adjacent to the Shrine, just east of the city center. I had been warned in Peshawar not to expect much in the way of carpets but the textiles were abundant and I soon found that my hopes for a good score would not come without relentless rummaging through the dusty piles.

Only five stores out of perhaps forty prided themselves on dealing in old rugs. I bought a beautiful and unusual Turkmen embroider in the I wandered into for a mere 100,000 Afghanis (about $2), but rug pickings were slim and the Lakai silk embroideries were rarely of sufficient age to satisfy me. I had also hoped to find Tajik needlework but saw only one piece, which had an unappealing purple dye also used by the Lakai. The shopkeepers were ecstatic to see a foreigner looking to buy; few Westerners have made it to this city in the past eighteen years, though a well known British antique dealer had flown up from Peshawar just a few days before me. His luck must have been better than mine.

All the carpet dealers are also engaged in the lucrative antiquities business. Northern Afghanistan has been a cultural center for thousands of years -- from the time of the Scythians to Alexander the Great and the Bactrian era through the Seljuk period and the zenith of Islamic civilization. Excavation of possible sites was previously forbidden and under strict government control. Now the people are free to dig as they please and treasure is slowly being unearthed.

[caption: Feeding the famous white doves of Mazar.]

The prices asked by the diggers themselves preclude the idea that there must be bargains about. I was shown a rusty steel axe-head engraved with the profile of a lion for which its owner had paid $1,500 to the man who had actually taken it from the ground! I did manage to buy a small Seljuk gold ring, for a pittance really, considering it is about seven hundred years old, but I was lucky. Some people are getting rich from this business, and the wealth still underground is astonishing.

It takes many forms, from antiquities to semi-precious and precious stones (agate, lapis, tourmaline and emeralds), natural gas, oil, and other minerals. It is, of course, the gas and oil (not to mention uranium) which tempted the Soviets, as well as the dream of building a pipeline from Turkmenistan through Afghanistan to that coveted warm water port of the Arabian Sea. The "Great Game" goes on.

Incredibly, it is the United States that has in effect created the Taliban, providing ample money to buy loyalties in a push for total control of the various ethnic groups and their lands. The war has become an essentially ethnic struggle with the Pashtun Taliban battling Farsiwans, Hazaras, Turkmens, and Uzbeks. The stake in this game are high, alliances fickle, and loyalty is often paid to the highest bidder, as evidenced by the rapid chain of events which led to the fall of Dostum's regime a matter of weeks after my visit.

The north is a country all unto itself. Dostum printed his own money in Russia, mimicking the Kabul currency in appearance, even though there are no banks at all in the city. Rates on the private money market, housed in a new building known as the Kefeyat Market, fluctuated wildly depending on the proximity of the Taliban forces; the closer they got the higher it went. The rate had been as high as one lak (100,000) Afghanis to the dollar at an open point. I caught it on the downside, a mere 56,500 Afs(Afghanis), but I was still a multi-millionaire; I could have lived in Mazar for the next twenty years without a thought to earning money! But this was Dostum's money and one wondered on what it was based.

Dollars were in high demand. In the parallel economy, no Afghan currency is accepted for imported goods. If one wants a Japanese TV or a satellite dish made in either Iran or Pakistan (about 20% of the population of Mazar have these), or even a Japanese thermos, one pays in dollars. Afs are good only for food and other humble household necessities. There is a premium on dollars in small denominations: no one wants to accept Afs in change for a dollar purchase.

[caption: Balkh-- the ribbed dome of the ruined mausoleum of Parsa. ]

Telecommunications are handled through Uzbekistan and Russia. If one wants to call Mazar one must first dial the Russia country code, then the Moscow code, then the Uzbekistan country code and finally the four-digit local number. And the connection is good! The Iranians have recently installed a new local phone system but are far easier to make an international call than to dial across town.

Trade with Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan flourish and it is these traders, with their truck and transport businesses, who bring textiles and rugs to the Mazar marketplace. I had the good fortune to meet one them, Habibullah Dost, who had established himself in Charjui in Turkmenistan. he remembered me from times past in Kabul and generously dined me in the evenings, offering Uzbek textiles and a few Tekke tent bags, though none were quite my taste. I bought a Lakai needlepoint from another dealer who had a shop in Dushanbe, a transport business and a suitcase of embroideries in hand. Oddly, the Kungrat style of Lakai embroidery is shunned by these Afghan dealers. Asking about such pieces, the invariable reply was that they knew what I was talking about, that such things are still available from the Lakai, but that they thought no one wanted them! The allure of silk is compelling and the Afghan traders could not understand why I would want to buy an "unrefined" woolen embroidery.

[caption: An itinerant rug vendor in Mazar-i Sharif.]

My search for old rugs continued with more hope than success. Two Hazara brothers who manned an unassuming hole-in-the-wall shop invited me to their home to see the old rugs which they had been amassing for some years. Expectations ran high as we flagged a taxi. Their home was a traditional Afghan estate established by their grandfather some fifty years before, with beautiful gardens of almond trees intermingled with grapevines surrounded by high mud walls and the domed medieval roofs of neighboring houses. I did find an absolutely wonderful fragment of an Uzbek torba, cut and shaped for use as an ok-bash. Their ambitious starting price was laughable, but it rapidly fell spectacularly to a more affordable rate. I paid happily and we headed back to the Shrine, sharing public transport with a few woman and children.

[caption: Woman in full chador passing the Shrine of Ali at the heart of the city. ]

Women walked freely in Mazar, either in full chador or completely unveiled, as they had been doing for many years. Unveiled students from Balkh University strolled the dusty streets chatting, holding hands and laughing as young girls do everywhere, I walked around this great city, brandishing my camera and feeling perfectly relaxed. One woman wearing complete chador approached me, asking me in English to which country I belonged. I replied, she nodded approval and hurriedly rejoined her young daughter, excitedly relating her adventure.

[caption: An old shopkeeper in Mazar.]

The Hazara brothers told me that their uncle had a shop in Peshawar, as do all the other shopkeepers who deal in old rugs. They ship everything to Pakistan as soon as they get it, thus accounting for the lack of anything good in the Mazar bazaar. Their uncle, though, has a shop selling new rugs. Those that I saw were being made for the Afghan market only: typical red rugs with fil poy (elephant foot) or octagonal gol designs filled the bazaars, as did new flatweaves. Many of these were made by the Farsiwan rather than the Turkmen masterweavers of the area. Mazar is divided into neighborhoods, not strictly determined by ethnicity. The weaving of traditional "Afghan" red rugs also takes place in the predominantly Turkmen districts where the craftsmanship and wool are slightly better than the inferior product of their Tajik neighbors.

[caption: A rug and kilim seller.]

With the bazaar yielding so little of interest, I negotiated an excursion by taxi to Balkh, 18 kilometers west of Mazar, for 400,000 Afs. Balkh, ancient Bactra, the "Mother of All Cities", the seat of great empires including that of Alexander the Great, is now a tiny village with not much happening. Ruined walls surround it and the entrance is manned by malangs (itinerant Muslim mendicants) tending the tomb of Baba Koo Mustaan, a legendary saint in ancient Afghan history. To the rear of the city is another ruin, the remnants of city walls from the time of Genghis Khan. The Mongols overran Balkh and slaughtered every soul within the bleached bones unbelievably still litter the ground. Reading the accounts of Balkh written by Elphintone in 1815 and Vambery in 1863, it is clearly not much has changed in two centuries.

[caption: A chopendoz (buzkashi player) en route to Mazar for the traditional Now Roz (New Year) contest. ]

We left Balkh under a certain amount of duress. During a final commiseration with the malangs, while I observed them partaking in a holy sacrament, a notorious badmash (bandit) approached to get a closer view of us, perhaps intending to commit unspeakable depredations upon the strange foreign visitor. He was cautioned that I come as a journalist and guest of the Governor of Balkh Province. This was not entirely untrue as I had spoken with the Governor only minutes before, declining his generous offer of green tea and pilau. It as enough to send the badmash away in search of easier prey. I remained oblivious, immersed in Afghanistan of the distant past.

[caption: Crumbling mud-brick walls near the gateway to Balkh, "Mother of All Cities".]

Returning to Mazar, we passed through a huge for situated between the two towns. Its walls were built by the great Nader Shah in the mid 18th century when he to conquered this land. General Dostum's troops were firmly ensconced, and it seemed inconceivable that this would be the scene of the last great battle in the Taliban offensive to come. Sadly, as we go to press, that battle rages, much sooner than I had ever hoped or imagined.

[caption: A rug seller on the street in Mazar. ]

Afghan hospitality is legendary and I fondly recall how generous, gracious and inquisitive the people were. The common person on the street was still able to smile as our eyes met. Young Afghan students who have only known war were anxious to practice their English: the young man at the desk of my hotel was honing his computer skills on a sophisticated laptop, navigating Windows 95, hoping to contribute to a brighter future for his country.

[caption: Two boys in an Afghan rug and silk ikat shop in the Mazar-i Sharif bazaar.]

But the future is a mirage in shifting desert sands. The past is much more real, while the present is an incongruous source of unease and exhilaration. Vladimir Nabokov wrote of "the texture of time": returning to Afghanistan provided a remarkable demonstration of this graphic imagery for me, as the past and the present are so closely intermingled, with so little definition. As for the future, the Afghans will inevitably say that only Allah can know what will happen. Let us all hope that Allah is merciful and compassionate: these people deserve much better than they have had these past two decades.

This article is reproduced courtesy of HALI, The International Magazine of Antique Carpet and Textile Art.

Read more from Tom Cole

Central Asia Travelogues and Rugs

#afghanistan #northernafghanistan #balkh #mazar-i-sharif #rug

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alasdaircannon-blog · 5 years

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How Much Would You Pay For Privacy?

Words by Alasdair Cannon

This is the bizarre question I have found myself pondering as of late. The question is bizarre because, well, one would assume that we have some inalienable right to privacy in a democratic nation. Right? Simply asking this question surely indicates a fundamental failure of governance, of regulation, or the market. Conversely, one might conclude that the notion of privacy has been plunged into a kind of Coasean nightmare, where our ability to be free from invasion is subject to bargaining, to the market logic of efficient distribution, to the skyscraping (campusing? If we’re gonna speak in the language of the companies in question) power differential between the individual and corporations in modern economies. One may be correct in either instance, too, which leads us to something of a truism: it is never easy when we must negotiate something we have perennially taken for granted, or when we must value what we believed to be invaluable (and not because it could not be measured, either).

In any event, the question is certainly a new one - or at least it probably isn’t something that people 30 years ago were overly concerned with. Why would they be? You (or the government) would have to be active, to the point where it was comparatively a non-issue, in telling (or collecting) your entire demographic and psychometric profile, and the history of your activities and movements, and all your wants, desires, preferences and interests. One couldn’t tacitly or incidentally just reveal all of this. Hell, even if you were utterly dedicated to revealing all these measures of your individuality to the world, even if you were possessed by a data-point exhibitionism of the most pathological kind, and you perversely wanted everybody to know you fundamentally, information-wise, you would still have a hard time of it. Data simply could not be collected comprehensively or efficiently enough to ground even individual concern over being so thoroughly revealed.

Today, however, we can and do give our whole selves away with a single click. And we do it in a manner that suggests an equilibrium solution: we value our privacy exactly in proportion to whatever it is the company stands to offer us.

Here’s an article from the Guardian that can help you freak out over that point.

No doubt, it is a question that I ask in light of recent events: yes, I specifically mean Cambridge Analytica, whose databases include ‘four to five thousand’ data points on every adult in the United States; whose platform relies on mass psychographic analysis of vast swathes of people as a means of generating a predictive model of personality for individuals and groups; whose product was employed in the most recent US election of Donald Trump, and in the primary campaign for Ted Cruz. (Watch this video to get a little taste: the man seems really quite proud of his product, and he really does give you a good salesman’s spiel about all the amazing things they know.) The public consciousness is properly fretting, perhaps for the first time ever, over the true influence of social media. We have been building to this for years of course – talk of shady contractual provisions and fake news being the breaking point for the outpouring of our collective anxieties.

I share a lot of sympathy for these emotions. The rise of social media and ICT as an overwhelming force for individual identity is something I have wondered about in increasingly panicked tones over the years, my internal intonation creeping ever closer to ‘paranoid-hysteric’, to that of a bug-eyed, frothing conspiratorialist, all fervour, dual-wielding copies of Huxley and Orwell, with Foucault buried somewhere in their coat pockets. No, I don’t own Discipline and Punish, but I certainly wasn’t far from this point. Indeed, there has been something of a positive correlate between the frequency of my tech-anxiety and ‘distance stumbled down garden path’: though mitigated to some extent by the countervailing forces of ‘kinda getting used to it’, ‘are you surprised by this?’, ‘who cares?’, and ‘there’s nothing you can do about it’, it has increased, absolutely. Crucially, I do not believe I am unjustified in feeling this way: recall, well, what I said a couple of paragraphs ago.

From when I first listened to OK Computer through to April 2018, the fear has escalated. Some discontinuous leaps were made: discovering the Google Beacon, for example, a nifty device that will be just, oh, everywhere in certain developed economies, which interacts with your smartphone as you move through public spaces, transmitting and presenting data constantly, an activity directed at unifying your subjective motives into one glorious vector of consumption. On a corollary note, here’s another good one: that day I bumped into someone I hadn’t seen for five years, and an hour later, Instagram lets me know I can follow them: now that’s convenience. Mutual benefit off the charts. There was also the day I realised (that is, I read what former Facebook developers had to say about their own platform) that, given we do not pay for Facebook or Google, that we were in fact, their products. That was a knock-your-hair back kind of moment for sure.

Before the Cambridge Analytica scandal, the object of my concern was the advertising revenues of Facebook and Google. Check out these graphs of their lifetime advertising revenue, for example. Between them, they grossed $135bn in ad revenue in 2017 alone. Facebook boasts 2.2 billion users, and though I lack an exact statistic, I believe we can safely assume Google likely has a similar number of unique users. If we assume the groups overlap entirely, then this puts the ad revenue per user at roughly $68 per user. To be safe, if we instead calculate the ad revenue per person alive today, it comes out at $18.50. So, the real number is probably somewhere in between – and given the past performance of these companies, don’t be surprised if it keeps growing. Their net profit per user is more modest than this: search engines and social media platforms aren’t cheap to run, after all. They also do provide an undeniably valuable service, and so these figures are justified, economically speaking. Crucially, though, the entire foundation of their revenue base rests upon the willingness of the consumer to simply give away something that is, evidently, extraordinarily valuable to these companies: their life in data. Irrespective of the value they add via their database and network effects, or the advertising services they sell, or the entertainment and utility they provide for free, these companies are wholly reliant on our initial, unwitting consent to donate to them our time and information.

And for what reward? What mutual do we derive for sacrificing our privacy at the altar of the internet, for slapping our knowable selves down on the counter? Their products of course; platforms that are today extraordinarily popular, and not only because they are useful and powerful. In the words of Sean Parker, early investor in Facebook, their design motive was couched in exploiting addiction and vulnerability: ‘How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible,’ he says. (Google is not complicit in this regard – it seems pretty hard to give a dopamine hit from a search bar, after all. Their product actually is that useful. It does, however, have a couple of implications for freedom of information and control of opinion – a topic for another time, maybe). Their bottom line relies on the maximum exploitation of the consumer at the lowest cost possible – an historic market relation that encourages continuous and absolute loyalty of the consumer to your product. And what better than the inelastic demand created by suckering the user into a state of addiction? As Thomas Pynchon writes in Gravity’s Rainbow: ‘The classic hustle is still famous for the cold purity of its execution’. Addiction, indeed, creates an ‘inelastic demand for that shit.’ It is a profoundly simple arrangement, based upon simple economics and human fallibility, reductive enough to a symbolically dichotomous relationship – despite its cynicism and denial of human good. Any degree of observation can confirm that both the consumer and the corporate giants have become entwined in an archetypal relationship, with each side of the historic dichotomy played unflinchingly: the naïve fool who, unware of the value of what they possess, is unknowingly exploited by the powerful. And in a fashion that righteously emboldens the cry of ‘abuse’, they have treated us with the disrespect a tyrant affords to the vulnerable.

Facebook’s Ad Revenue Worldwide from 2009 – 2017, in millions of dollars

Ahem. Well, if it wasn’t already self-evident, essentially, what I am saying is that these companies are no longer fucking around, socioeconomically speaking. When combined with the fact that our vulnerability and our proclivity for addiction is their product, this becomes problematic, to say the least. This therefore brings me to my point: I ask my initial question on whether we should pay for privacy in the broadest possible terms, for my concern fundamentally lies in relation to the growing dominance of the sociocultural forces constituted by social media, by search engines, by algorithmic targeting, by gargantuan psychometric databases, and by utterly pervasive online and mobile advertising. We are the known, the manipulated: the consumed and the consumer. Queue images of the snake eating itself, or perhaps more fitting for a late capitalist society, that weird rumour about Marilyn Manson and his rib surgery.

Clearly, Google and Facebook value the contents of our privacy quite dearly, and it is this fact which tacitly establishes the value of privacy in our economy. Giving it away for free, or for any amount equal to the perceived value of the product on offer is clearly foolish: to do so, unmediated by regulation or subjective concern and awareness can only serve to reinforce the pre-existing paradigm of our exploitation and disempowerment. Choosing to maintain this relationship would only attests to our indifference; to the absolute normalisation of the invasion and harvesting of our privacy; the colonisation of our mental space via the wonderful corporate algorithm; phenomena which all testify in unison to the powerlessness felt by the average consumer in a social media market controlled by some of the most advanced and powerful entities in human history. Maintaining this relationship is to welcome its logical conclusion, the inevitable and absolute extreme of personalised advertising: a utopia of prior-decidedness, of subjugated contingency. Is that a life lived in bad faith or good faith? It’s an authentic you, imposed upon you externally: a Sartrean knot if there ever was one.

Of course, the big one has only just arrived, the paradigm shifter par excellence as I would hope – the Watergate for the Zuck, if you will. Time will tell whether this brings about meaningful reform in the digital sphere. Given how long they have staggered untrammelled over the landscape of technological societies, how focused and efficient they have become in their practices of exploitation, I am not necessarily optimistic. Unless, of course, we learn from these companies, and come to realise the unmistakeable value of knowing ourselves: a condition that is inseparable from power over our own lives.

http://adage.com/article/digital/sean-parker-worries-facebook-rotting-children-s-brains/311238/

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/nov/09/facebook-sean-parker-vulnerability-brain-psychology/

https://www.statista.com/statistics/266249/advertising-revenue-of-google/

https://www.statista.com/statistics/271258/facebooks-advertising-revenue-worldwide/

#economicswriting

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deanwinchesterjournal · 7 years

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Kyle

That night it ended up trending on Twitter.

By the next day there were links all over Facebook.

Buzzfeed picked it up a little after that.

By the next Monday we were getting calls from the networks asking for quotes.

In five days this went from being a nothing little lawsuit in a nowhere town to being a national debate on the news networks. It was one of those sit down, talking heads thing you see on cable news all the time. They sent a camera crew and set up a background to make it look like I was in their studio but I was just in a suit sitting on a stool in my office.

They had picked two people and had asked me if I had anyone I wanted on my side. When I said I knew a catholic priest who would show up they seemed a little confused.

They wouldn't be confused for long.

A voice in my ear started talking. “We're here with the lawyer that's bring suit against the school. Thanks for being here Mr. Stilleno.”

I smiled at the camera, trying to imagine it was a person. “Thanks Cindy, a pleasure to be here.”

“So you've brought suit against the school district, why is that?”

“Well you see Cindy, a student tried to form a Gay-straight Alliance, which is a club for all students to come together and ask and answer questions dealing with sexuality. A practice that has had overwhelmingly positive results worldwide in clearing up the fear and stigma related to homosexuality among teenagers.”

“So it is a club about sex? In high school?” nervous chuckle on her part. “That seems a little risky.”

“No Cindy not about sex but sexuality. It's a safe place where people can ask questions without judgment. Where straight students can ask what it is like being gay and gay students can ask straight students why there is so much hostility towards them. It's a place to come together and understand each other, not a dating club.”

“Well it still sounds controversial to me. Let's ask the rest of our panel. We have George Miller, head of the Collation to Preserve Family Values, Jeannie Potts, President of the Foundation to Make America Great Again and lastly Father Thomas Mulligan, head of the First Calvary Church in Foster, Texas. Thank you all for joining us.”

George Miller, a man whose corporation existed just to lobby Congress for more church friendly laws spoke first. Oh yeah, if you are struggling to define what a church friendly law is it's one that bans other Americans from getting married.

“Thank you Cindy, I take offense to Mr. Stilleno's characterization that the default position of a normal American is hostility towards homosexuality. Recent history has shown that to be otherwise.”

Then it was Jennie Potts, a woman whose foundation supplied logistical support for people who wanted to protest gay marriage, gay adoption and once gay home ownership was quick to agree with him. “Yes Mr. Stilleno, you have the right to marry, I mean how much more do you want?”

Oh she did not.

“Well Mrs. Potts I want exactly what you have. The full freedom granted to me by the Constitution of the United States.”

“And you don't have that now?”

“Ask the people in Texas, Oklahoma, Florida, Georgia, North and South Dakota, Arkansas, Tennessee, South Carolina, Alabama if they do. There are laws on the books that blatantly allow people there to not hire someone based solely on their sexuality. I'm curious Mrs. Potts, if that law said female instead would you be defending it?”

George answered for her. “Those laws protect people from violating their religious beliefs.”

Father Mulligan smiled and asked nicely. “What beliefs are those?”

George began to address Mulligan directly. “The ones that are clearly stated in the Bible.”

“Really? The bible says that?”

“I would assume you would know that.”

Mulligan held up a bible. “I know a lot about this book Mr. Miller, do you?”

“I'm a good Christian.” he said defensively.

“So then you'll have no problem showing me where exactly our lord and savior Jesus Christ condemned homosexuality.”

George stammered for a moment. “He pointed out Sodom and Gomorrah was proof of God's wraith and that was all about homosexuality.”

“Actually it was about rape, not homosexuality.” Mulligan corrected him gently. “You're talking about the men who wanted Lot to send the angels out to have sex with them, are you not?” George nodded. “I thought as much, what is at issue here that the people outside wanted to force the angels to have sex and that is what caused them to react. It was a reaction against rape, not gay sex. And there were many other reasons that God struck those cities down, so again I ask. Where did Jesus bring up homosexuality?”

Potts went in for an attack. “Jesus also didn't mention rape, incest or domestic violence Does that mean he condoned that?”

“Of course not but if he didn't mention it by name we can't go around saying we are shunning people because he would have wanted us to. And it's a good thing he didn't mention those either because he would have had to condemn Cain, Lot, Nahor, Issac and many more.”

“I think we wandered off course.” the announcer said. “So what is the end goal of your lawsuit Mr. Stilleno?”

“My goal is simple Cindy, I want equal rights for Jackson Trent and the millions of other students worldwide who are suffering like him. Mr. Miller is right, we have come a long way but that does mean we should stop. We have far to go as a country when laws like this are still in place to prevent teenagers from expressing themselves without persecution.”

Mrs. Potts, who was still worked up from Father Mulligan didn't wait to be called on.

“What about the other children at the school? Is it fair to force them to acknowledge this deviant lifestyle?”

She was baiting me but honestly, that was an idiotic try.

“Yes.” was all I said.

“Yes what?” she asked.

“Yes it is fair.”

“How can you say...”

And I cut her off.

“Mrs. Potts, America is not an easy concept. It isn't something that you can just do and not have problems. We are forced every day to deal with things that we find offensive, ignorant or even deviant and that is the price we pay for our freedoms. Want Freedom of Speech? Then you have to accept pornography. You want Freedom of Religion? Then you have to accept that covers the religions you don't agree with too. America is too complicated to fit into one narrow view, it has to encompass all of us, even the ones you might not like.”

She opened her mouth to counter but I kept talking.

“You don't like homosexuals that throw their sexuality in your face? Fine, I don't like religious people who insist I live my life by a set of rules I don't agree with. But see I'm not here to take a bible away from you. I'm not here to say we should outlaw Christians or round up all the bibles in the world. Despite my personal opinion I respect your belief system an have no desire to stop you from living your life. Can you say the same?”

Mr. Miller chimed in. “I can, we are not here to force people to do things they don't want to. We are simply looking out for the welfare of our children.”

“Is that so Mr. Miller? So then the Collation to Preserve Family Values spent nearly a billion dollars last year lobbying Congress to repeal the Supreme Court decision to allow same sex marriage you were doing that to do what? Give homosexuals more rights? When you spend over 600 million dollar in various local elections to change state law to try to get round the ruling you're what? Protecting homosexuals from the burden of marriage and the ordeals that come with it? Come now sir, if you're going to discriminate against us just admit it and let's move forward but lying on national television about what your company does is a disservice for everyone.”

“He is not a liar!” Mrs. Potts yelled at me.

“OK, let's take a deep breath...” Cindy started to say.

I was breathing just fine.

“Do you know that for sure Mrs. Potts? What about you? You mind telling the viewing audience what your firm does?”

She paused.

“Just look into the camera and explain to the American public what service you offer.”

“We help and nurture grass root movements that are trying to defend their way of life in America.”

“You give money and resource to people who are trying to stop gay people from being equal citizens.”

“That is one way of looking...” she started to say.

Nope.

“True or false, you gave a group in Wyoming over two hundred thousand dollars to protest a gay couple from buying land in the area.”

“My firm does a lot of...”

“It's true, trust me. And that money was used to drive those men out of the area how?”

She said nothing.

“By burning cow manure in front of their house, by buying a backhoe and destroying the plumbing leading to their property, by shooting at their windows in the middle of the night screaming they will be back. Your firm is being sued right now for aiding and abiding in a hate crime Mrs. Potts. So unless you want to tell me exactly what your firm does in simple English then you're as much of a liar as he is.”

“We need to take a break...” Cindy tried again.

“You started this by saying you were offended I assumed normal Americans are hostile towards a homosexual lifestyle. And I'm telling you I am offended that you would say it was anything but hostile. People like you and Mrs. Potts here have made it your life's goal to stop people like me and Jackson from having equal rights because you don't like us. That's it, you want to say it is religious freedom but you know that doesn't hold water because this man here.” I pointed to Mulligan. “Taught me nearly eight years ago that God doesn't hate gay people, just the people who say they like God hate us. You don't like me because Jesus told you to, you don't like me because that's how you feel.”

There was dead air as we all just glared at out cameras.

Cindy cleared her throat. “We'll be back after these messages.”

“You little faggot.” Mr. Miller screamed at his camera as soon as we were clear. “You think you can talk to me like that?”

“Should I have founded a company and used my money to deprive you of your inalienable rights like a coward? We both know what you do sir, so don't come screaming to me when I tell others.”

“You're damn right my company is there to stop homos like you from gaining power. If I had my way I'd just ship you all off to an island so you can get AIDS and die.”

That was it. I looked over at Brad who was standing behind the camera crew looking down at his phone. He looked up at me and nodded.

“Well thank you for your cooperation Mr. Miller. I could not have done this without you.”

He paused “Done what?”

Brad tossed me his phone and I pressed the screen.

And his hate filled rant played back at him.

“If I had my way I'd just ship you all off to an island so you can get AIDS and die.”

I turned it off. “Couldn't have taken this to the next level without you. So thank you.”

I pulled off my mic and tossed it to the crew. “You guys got everything you need?”

The camera went dead and the guy behind it just looked at me in shock and nodded.

“My people will help you clean up.” I looked over at Brad. “You ready?”

He had a huge smile on his face.

#john goode #tales from foster high #dream of a waking man

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hbcreativeblogs · 7 years

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Criminals or Heroes

('commentary I wrote for the latest edition of All the Art Magazine) Heroes or Criminals? When citizens take a stand or speak out against the oppressive, unjust laws imposed by their governing body; are they heroes or are they criminals? The answer depends on who you ask. To the oppressed, anyone that would fight on their behalf, sacrificing their own comfort and freedom for the liberation of the many would be considered a “hero”. On the other hand, I’m quite sure that those who support and/or engage in activity that oppresses others and denies them their inalienable rights, would view such “freedom fighters’ as criminals. The answer to the question of hero or criminal, also depends on when you ask? Most of the time, those actively engaged in fighting for our freedom(s), are often mislabeled, misunderstood and under appreciated. They threaten the status quo, they challenge us to stand up and fight and they shake things up. It often looks like they may be making things worse for us, and we don’t always see the value of what they are trying to accomplish until much later. As I ponder this question, Dr Martin Luther King Jr. comes to mind. He stated that we have a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. King, a Freedom Fighter who practiced what he preached, was arrested on multiple occasions doing just that, disobeying unjust laws. Dr King, a passive, non-violent freedom fighter and messiah of sorts (hero) to some, was still viewed by others as a trouble maker and a terrorist (criminal) while he was alive. Now in 2017, 31 years after the establishing of a National Holiday in his honor, 49 years after his assassination, many people around the world, government leaders and common citizens alike hail him as a hero. Heroes or criminals? I can’t answer that question for everyone, because the answer is subjective and depends on a host of factors including the two I mentioned. For me personally I can honestly state that the last few decades of my adult life have involved me personally revisiting those (freedom fighters) who have been labeled as criminals and terrorist, especially those who were fighting for civil rights, equality and freedom for all people, and determining for myself whether I will view them as hero or criminal. While at the same time challenging myself to actively pay attention to what it going on in the world around me, observe people’s actions, not be so quick to rush to an opinion and most importantly refuse to blindly accept any narratives the “powers that be” try to force me to believe about who they feel are heroes and criminals…might I suggest you do the same.

#dr martin luther king jr #social justice

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cluelessrebel1988 · 4 years

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I've maintained for a while now that Donald Trump will indeed make America great, but not in the way he means nor in a way he intended. And I still believe that. Because what I've seen happen over the last few years, both in the election of an increasing number of women and people of color and LGBT people to offices around the country and in actions like the city of Minneapolis voting this week to dissolve their police department and replace it with some other kind of peace keeping force have served to enforce my belief that what Donald Trump has done, more than anything else, is make people pay attention. To question themselves and confront their privilege and to stand up and demand that change happen.

I believe there is a great America, or at the very least a better America, to be made. I do not know what it will cost to make it or how it will look. But I believe that it is there. And it will not come from the likes of Donald Trump and his supporters. It will come from the people. The same people who have been declaring since 2016 that they will not tolerate inaction and injustice any longer. That we have tolerated it for too long, and we demand that all people in this country be treated better, be treated equally, be safe in their own neighborhoods and homes and not be killed or targeted simply because of the color of their skin, be allowed to enter this country without fear of being separated from their children or kept in cages or treated as something less than human -- to finally live up to the words we wrote down when we decided we wanted to be our own country and not live under the rule of a king anymore: "All men are created equal and they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."

Do you hear the people sing? Because I sure as hell do.

#personal #Can I be real a second?#For just a millisecond?#Let down my guard and tell you people how I feel a second?#I may not be the best person to judge what a 'great' America looks like #And I'm willing to concede that to people of color and women and LGBT people whohave been the targets of the worst of this kind of shit #But I have to believe that at our core humanity is better than this #Is better than the systemic racism that has defined our country for its entire existance #I know it won't be easy to fix #but it needs to be fixed

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tartaricing · 6 years

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Doctarded: Act 4 - Gustave Kateb vs The People

With any remaining dregs of audacity gone, Doc faces Team Rainbow. This was originally made from a larger so I split it up for dramatic effect. R&R!

"Okay, from the top…"

"SHIT!"

"ASS!"

"FUCK!"

"HAMBURGERS!"

"Fuze, hamburgers is not a curse word," Tachanka gave critique, "It is something we call the Americans, yes?"

"But doesn't most instances of this condition have only benign words?" Fuze stood his ground.

"While that may or may not be true, we need to put our backs into it. Kapkan, flail more excessively! Glaz, make that shuddering believable!" Tachanka continued, having his claps echo in his tiny room, "Okay, again, from the top-"

"Tachanka, dear what are you doing?" Finka burst into the room, jaw dropped.

"Ah, Finka!" Tachanka bellowed a greeting, "Have you heard about what happened about the Spetznaz?" He motioned to give a bear hug, but was rebuffed by the younger woman.

"No, I have not but this is not acceptable," Finka's jaw hadn't lowered, pitch increasing, "First Doc loses his mind, but now this?"

"Love, we are just trying to show that our brothers and sisters back home need the money."

"By deceit? What is going on here?" She still stood, shocked.

"Oh…" The man's voice went monotone at the realization, "Love… We have received bad news. The Spetsnaz is losing funding from the UN."

"That makes no sense…"

"We're all aware here, Finka," Kapkan spoke up, "But yes, it's happening."

"What is your plan here?" Finka asked, "Are you going to deceive the UN by by doing a charade of a poor excuse of Tourette's syndrome?"

"Well… yes." Tachanka was blunt, "But we are proving a point."

"What kind of point?"

"Well, the UN has a soft spot for the disabled. And if we make light of the fact that we have the disabled in our ranks, maybe they'll retract their decision. It's not wrong, is it?"

"Technically, you are not wrong," Finka put her fingers on her chin, and whispered in Tachanka's ear, "I am one of them."

"See?" Tachanka whispered back, "And we'll posture ourselves as such, so you don't have to."

"…Fair enough," She blushed, "It's not the most moral decision, but speaking of morals, Lion's been injured."

It was CQC practice in the boxing area and Lion and Bandit were duking it out. Bandit was incredibly ferocious today, taking more punches than usual. Lion dodged back and forth and landed a few on the other. Bandit didn't care, as he shook them off and kept punching.

"What's up your ass?" Lion chuckled, dodging in rhythm.

"You're awfully slow," Bandit tersely replied.

"Oh, come on," The atoner chuckled some more, "What is it? You can tell me."

"You already know."

"No, really I don't."

"No."

"Please?"

"I will not."

"Pleeeeease?"

"NO." Bandit gave an undercut to the atoner's shit-eating face, causing him to collapse onto the floor, giving a loud, dry, echoing smack, "You already know." He came in closer to his face, and then unceremoniously walked away.

"I don't think he's breathing," Sledge casually said, checking Lion's face, "Oh, wait, there it is."

"Well I did my part," The German walked away, wiping the sweat off his brow. He then turned to Blitz, who was on the bench, unmoving, "I'm… sorry, Elias."

"I don't need your fucking pity," Blitz droned, monotone.

"Hey, hey," Bandit gave a mild pat on the shoulder, "You'll get through this. On the bright side, at least I saw it loud and clear. God knows what schisse you'd do if you saw it."

"That doctor's gonna pay…" Blitz started with a growl.

"It's unfortunate, but he's going to be the one to heal Lion here," IQ joined in, wearing her green dance uniform.

"Good."

"Greetings, brahtan!" Tachanka burst into the room, with the rest of the Spetznaz following him.

"Ooooh Lion's fucked up," Fuze laughed. Glaz took out his sketchbook, went into the ring, and started to sketch out Lion's form.

"…Pugilism," Kapkan scoffed.

"Where is the doctor; he should be coming any time soon?" Tachanka asked.

"My question exactly," Sledge agreed.

At Mute's notification, Doc rushed out of his office. Lab coat and medical bag in hand, he went towards the boxing room. Mute then locked the door behind him. Doc then asked everyone to clear out of the way, hopping into the ring. As much as his relationship with Lion was rocky, he wouldn't neglect him. He started to check his vitals: blood pressure, pulse, breathing, heart rate, and eyes. Seeing that it was all normal, he started to drag Lion out of the ring.

Only for him to suddenly wake up and give him an uppercut. Doc landed on his back, swearing all the way down.

"Merde! Of course you'd fake it!" He looked up at Lion, who was now standing up and pounding a fist into his palm.

"I've been waiting for this day, Gustave!" Lion cackled, now picking Doc up and holding him up by the arms, "I swear the day you slip will be the best day of my life, and here it is!" He broke into an evil laugh, "Anyone care to take a swing?" There was a glint in his eye as Doc struggled to get out, but Lion's strength restrained him.

"Me first!" Blitz got up and undid his jacket, revealing a wifebeater and sweatpants. He turned to Doc, "What kind of logic do you have to sleep with Rook? The Rook I'm with? Did you think fucking him would solve your problems?"

Doc's eyes widened and he stared wordlessly at Blitz, "I needed him. I'm sorry."

"THE HELL HE DOESN'T!" Blitz snapped, letting out a barrage of punches, "HE WAS MY FUCKING BOYFRIEND AND YOU FUCKED HIM! YOU FORCED YOURSELF ON HIM! Yet you think you're hot shit because you're a rich doctor who did Doctors Without Borders. Doubly so that you're Rook's best friend. Well guess fucking what? YOU AREN'T! You fucking aren't… You act like you're the savior of Team Rainbow. WELL BULL FUCKING SHIT!" He then gave a variation of Bandit's uppercut and a swift kick in the groin, voice starting to break as he inhaled, "You're not fucking sorry, and all these mistakes, they just pile up… And worst of all, Rook was so open and so kind. He doesn't let me love him anymore. You ruined your best friend. You sir, are a shit altruist…"

Blitz turned his back and walked to a dark corner of the room, suppressing his sobs. Bandit and IQ joined him, soothing him.

"Well, who wants to go next?" Lion bellowed.

"Me," Tachanka said, getting into the now bloody and beaten Doc, "You caused Lera to almost die. That makes me angry," He gave a direct gut punch, causing the doctor's eyes to snap open and his mouth to cough blood. The Russian walked away.

"…I think you were too harsh with him," Glaz followed him, "I don't feel like drawing anymore."

"Nyet," Tachanka disagreed, "After all the shit he did, it was coming."

"Infidelity is pretty shit," Kapkan added, "Even though Blitz will be fucked for even breaking fraternization policy. I'm surprised you didn't do more."

"I think it's fitting."

Twitch emerged from the shadows, unmasked. Everyone started to whisper, shocked. She blew the stray strands of hair out of her face and walked towards Doc, head held high. Holding his chin, she looked up at him. His eyes were near death. Hers were warm with pity and contempt. She let go of his chin and knelt down to his level.

"Gus," Twitch began.

"…Emmanuelle?" Doc weakly replied. His eyes fluttered, "Are you angry?"

"Not really," Her warm smile made it sincere, however, "Mira and I fixed it."

"…I'm… sorry," Doc started to cough, "…I was being selfish. I felt neglected."

"…That's the thing. I looked up to you as a paragon of ethics. We all did. It's not that you were deprived of whatever that was. It's not how you casually let all these mistakes pile up on your person. You taught us all that all life is precious and everyone has inalienable rights. In effect, it's you. I don't know what's wrong with you and I'm afraid to guess, but… it's all you: you shooting a child, you swapping Finka's medication with said child's, and now you having sex with Rook even though he's with Blitz. I know this is a tired sentiment from your conscious, or whatever's left of it and from the rest of us at Team Rainbow, but…" Twitch put a palm up to her head, leading into a deep sigh of consequences, "You need help. Professional help. World class help. Because that's what you are to us. World class. It's still in there somewhere, you just need to find it." She stood up and walked away. Her head was buried in her hands.

Somewhere in the dark and the empty space between the operators, there was a jiggle of the lock. The jiggling went faster and faster. Until it fully stopped.

A blanket of light emerged from the door.

"What the hell is going on?"

The entirety of Rainbow Six was in the debriefing room. Six was at the main podium while Doc was at the left podium. Doc was taken immediately to the hospital, with Finka as the residing physician. After a few hours of rest and treatment, he sat up bandaged with an eyepatch. Everyone else sat in chairs facing them, with those in the gym at the front.

"Is everyone present?" Six called to order. A flurry of whispers, chair squeaks, and cell phone noises filled the room.

It all came to a hold as Vigil and Echo rushed into the back, holding hands.

"I see everyone is here," Six continued, "So we'll proceed with the hearing." She cleared her throat, shuffling documents in hand, "Today, we are all here to discuss the elephant in the room. Starting with today's events." Blitz shook in his seat, "From witnesses in the boxing area, we have a beating of our doctor, Gustave Kateb. Callsign Twitch, would you give your account please?" Twitch got up to the right podium.

She had bags under her eyes and her hair was messy. With a heavy sigh, she began her testimony, "Apparently Lion, Tachanka, Bandit, Mute, and Blitz had planned on this. Bandit and Lion were having a boxing match and Bandit knocked out Lion. Mute asked for medical help and Doc came. He then locked the door. Lion apparently faked being unconscious and hit and restrained Gustave. He then offered him to anyone who wanted to punch him. Blitz came in with a flurry of punches while Tachanka punched him once. I talked to him only about his issues. He came in my scrapbook… I don't want to talk about it any further-" She started to hyperventilate and ran back to her seat. Mira held her as she broke down.

"A clear witness account. Before we let the men plead guilty, I want to know what drove this premeditated beating," Six replied, "This month has been rough on all of us. Mute, I'll let you come first." Mute took his place on the podium.

"If you want to know my motive," Mute mumbled through the mask, "Doc shot a child. Who the fuck shoots a child?"

"For your information, that was already fixed! The child is alive and healthy," Doc defended himself.

"It doesn't matter Doc! That's unacceptable at any angle!" Mute countered, "The media would kill us quick if they learned. That's a goddamn liability-"

"Enough, Mute!" Six cut him off, "Do you plead guilty?"

"Yes!" Mute curtly answered, "It's a violation I'd take." He threw his hands up in the air and sat down.

"Lion, you're next."

"You see, mademoiselle," Lion took Mute's place, starting with a haughty air, "I do not have the best relationship with ze doctor here. So I was willing to aid in this beating of justice-"

"Lion, NO!" Rook interrupted, "Doc's actions don't excuse yours, Lion!"

"Shut it, fuck toy!" Lion hurled the insult loudly. Rook sat down heavily in a huff, arms crossed and fuming.

"Language!" Six intercepted, "Of course you're guilty, Lion. Sit down."

"At least I own my sins," Lion walked off, tagging in Tachanka on the podium.

"…And what is it this time, Tachanka?"

"…He swapped Finka's medication for the child's. He's the reason why she froze in Mosul. I'll take whatever charge," Tachanka sat down. Bandit went up next.

"What is your issue here Bandit?"

"I…" Bandit stammered, eyes on the ground, "I witnessed infidelity and felt incredibly offended on Blitz's part. I felt like I had to do something. Why are you punishing us, Six?"

"…I understand the host of issues that Doc has stirred up, but in this environment, mob justice isn't the solution," Six gave a heavy sigh, "I'm conflicted, but regulations are regulations. Blitz, you're up next."

Bandit walked off the podium, only to have it filled by Blitz. "I know Rook and I are a violation of the fraternization policy. But it's so goddamn obvious. You even see it." Blitz breathed through clenched teeth, "It's not right that Gustave here had his way with Rook. It's not fucking right."

"Elias, I'm sorry but it isn't like that," Rook interrupted again, "As Twitch said, he's not completely bad."

"You didn't have to cheat, Julien!" Blitz yelled back, "It hurt to see you and Doc in the same bed after I come back from Munich."

"There was some issues that I solved wrong, yes-"

"THEN WHY THE FUCK DIDN'T YOU DO IT RIGHT?"

"ENOUGH!" Six moderated with an iron fist, "All of you are guilty. Lion, Tachanka, Bandit, and Mute for a count of premeditated assault. Blitz for premeditated assault and a fraternization violation. And Doc… Where do I begin with you? Sexual misdemeanor, fraternization violation, assault, and negligence!"

People burst into a gossipy whirlwind, with them whispering to each other.

Six put a swift end to it with a few pounds from her gavel. People went silent. "As I was saying, as severe as these counts are, they don't take away from your abilities as operators or your accomplishments. You are still valuable. However, the punishments need to be served. Lion, Tachanka, Bandit, and Mute have kitchen and janitorial duties for three weeks. Blitz, you have kitchen and janitorial duties for four plus house arrest for the first week. Doc, you have kitchen and janitorial duties under house arrest for six weeks. You are only allowed to practice within the halls of Herefordshire and even then, you will be monitored by a medic. You are all dismissed."

#rainbow six siege #r6s #r6siege #fanfiction #fanfic #my art #gustave kateb

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clubofinfo · 6 years

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Expert: Is ours a government of the people, by the people, for the people, or a kakistocracy rather, for the benefit of knaves at the cost of fools? — James Russell Lowell, 19th century American poet/critic/editor/diplomat, in a 1876 letter to Joel Benton. Let us not mince words. We are living in an age of war profiteers. We are living in an age of scoundrels, liars, brutes and thugs. Many of them work for the U.S. government. We are living in an age of monsters. Ask Donald Trump. He knows all about monsters. Any government that leaves “mothers and fathers, infants and children, thrashing in pain and gasping for air” is evil and despicable, said President Trump, justifying his blatantly unconstitutional decision (in the absence of congressional approval or a declaration of war) to launch airstrikes against Syria based on dubious allegations that it had carried out chemical weapons attacks on its own people. “They are crimes of a monster.” If the Syrian government is a monster for killing innocent civilians, including women and children, the U.S. government must be a monster, too. In Afghanistan, ten civilians were killed—including three children, one an infant in his mother’s arms—when U.S. warplanes targeted a truck in broad daylight on an open road with women and children riding in the exposed truck bed. They had been fleeing airstrikes on their village. In Syria, at least 80 civilians, including 30 children, were killed when U.S.-led air strikes bombed a school and a packed marketplace. In Yemen, a U.S. drone bombed a caravan of vehicles on their way to or from a wedding, leaving “scorched vehicles and body parts … scattered on the road.” As investigative journalist Tom Engelhart documents, that 2013 bombing was actually the eighth wedding party (almost 300 civilians dead) wiped out by the U.S. military, totally or in part, since the Afghan War began in 2001. “Keep in mind that, in these years, weddings haven’t been the only rites hit,” notes Engelhart. “US air power has struck gatherings ranging from funerals to a baby-naming ceremony.” Then there was a Doctors without Borders hospital in Kunduz that had 12 of its medical staff and 10 of its patients, including three children, killed when a U.S. AC-130 gunship fired on it repeatedly. Some of the patients were burned alive in their hospital beds. Yes, on this point, President Trump is exactly right: these are, indeed, the crimes of a monster. Unfortunately, this monster—this hundred-headed gorgon that is the U.S. government and its long line of political puppets (Donald Trump and before him Obama, Bush, Clinton, etc.), who dance to the tune of the military industrial complex—is being funded by you and me. The blood of innocent civilians is on our hands whether we choose to recognize it or not. It is our tax dollars at work here, after all. Unfortunately, we have no real say in how the government runs, or how our taxpayer funds are used. We have no real say, but we’re being forced to pay through the nose, anyhow, for endless wars that do more to fund the military industrial complex than protect us, pork barrel projects that produce little to nothing, and a police state that serves only to imprison us within its walls. The only alternative to paying one’s taxes is jail, and there are few people willing to go to jail for a principle anymore. Still, while we may not have much choice in the matter of how our taxes are used, we still have a voice and a vote, and it’s time the American people made their voices—and their votes—heard about the way our taxes are used and misused by this government of wolves and thieves and liars. Consider: we get taxed on how much we earn, taxed on what we eat, taxed on what we buy, taxed on where we go, taxed on what we drive, and taxed on how much is left of our assets when we die. Indeed, if there is an absolute maxim by which the federal government seems to operate, it is that the American taxpayer always gets ripped off. This is true whether you’re talking about taxpayers being forced to fund high-priced weaponry that will be used against us, endless wars that do little for our safety or our freedoms, or bloated government agencies such as the National Security Agency with its secret budgets, covert agendas and clandestine activities. Rubbing salt in the wound, even monetary awards in lawsuits against government officials who are found guilty of wrongdoing are paid by the taxpayer. Not only are American taxpayers forced to “spend more on state, municipal, and federal taxes than the annual financial burdens of food, clothing, and housing combined,” but we’re also being played as easy marks by hustlers bearing the imprimatur of the government. With every new tax, fine, fee and law adopted by our so-called representatives, the yoke around the neck of the average American seems to tighten just a little bit more. Everywhere you go, everything you do, and every which way you look, we’re getting swindled, cheated, conned, robbed, raided, pick-pocketed, mugged, deceived, defrauded, double-crossed and fleeced by governmental and corporate shareholders of the American police state out to make a profit at taxpayer expense. Yet as Ron Paul observed, “The Founding Fathers never intended a nation where citizens would pay nearly half of everything they earn to the government.” The overt and costly signs of the despotism exercised by the increasingly authoritarian regime that passes itself off as the United States government are all around us: warrantless surveillance of Americans’ private phone and email conversations by the NSA; SWAT team raids of Americans’ homes; shootings of unarmed citizens by police; harsh punishments meted out to schoolchildren in the name of zero tolerance; drones taking to the skies domestically; endless wars; out-of-control spending; militarized police; roadside strip searches; roving TSA sweeps; privatized prisons with a profit incentive for jailing Americans; fusion centers that collect and disseminate data on Americans’ private transactions; and militarized agencies with stockpiles of ammunition, to name some of the most appalling. Meanwhile, the three branches of government (Executive, Legislative and Judicial) and the agencies under their command—Defense, Commerce, Education, Homeland Security, Justice, Treasury, etc.—have switched their allegiance to the Corporate State with its unassailable pursuit of profit at all costs and by any means possible. As a result, we are now ruled by a government consumed with squeezing every last penny out of the population and seemingly unconcerned if essential freedoms are trampled in the process. As with most things, if you want to know the real motives behind any government program, follow the money trail. When you dig down far enough, you quickly find that those who profit from Americans being surveilled, fined, scanned, searched, probed, tasered, arrested and imprisoned are none other than the police who arrest them, the courts which try them, the prisons which incarcerate them, and the corporations, which manufacture the weapons, equipment and prisons used by the American police state. It gets worse. Because the government’s voracious appetite for money, power and control has grown out of control, its agents have devised other means of funding its excesses and adding to its largesse through taxes disguised as fines, taxes disguised as fees, and taxes disguised as tolls, tickets and penalties. The government’s schemes to swindle, cheat, scam, and generally defraud Americans have run the gamut from wasteful pork barrel legislation, cronyism and graft to asset forfeiture schemes, the modern-day equivalent of highway robbery, astronomical health care “reform,” and costly stimulus packages. Americans have also been made to pay through the nose for the government’s endless wars, subsidization of foreign nations, military empire, welfare state, roads to nowhere, bloated workforce, secret agencies, fusion centers, private prisons, biometric databases, invasive technologies, arsenal of weapons, and every other budgetary line item that is contributing to the fast-growing wealth of the corporate elite at the expense of those who are barely making ends meet—that is, we the taxpayers. Those football stadiums that charge exorbitant sums for nosebleed seats? Our taxpayer dollars subsidize them. Those blockbuster war films? Yep, we were the silent investors on those, too. Same goes for the military equipment being peddled to local police agencies and the surveillance cameras being “donated” to local governments. In other words, in the eyes of the government, “we the people, the voters, the consumers, and the taxpayers” are little more than indentured servants. We’re slaves. If you have no choice, no voice, and no real options when it comes to the government’s claims on your property and your money, you’re not free. You’re not free if the government can seize your home and your car (which you’ve bought and paid for) over nonpayment of taxes. You’re not free if government agents can freeze and seize your bank accounts and other valuables if they merely “suspect” wrongdoing. And you’re certainly not free if the IRS gets the first cut of your salary to pay for government programs over which you have no say. It wasn’t always this way, of course. Early Americans went to war over the inalienable rights described by philosopher John Locke as the natural rights of life, liberty and property. It didn’t take long, however—a hundred years, in fact—before the American government was laying claim to the citizenry’s property by levying taxes to pay for the Civil War. As the New York Times reports, “Widespread resistance led to its repeal in 1872.” Determined to claim some of the citizenry’s wealth for its own uses, the government reinstituted the income tax in 1894. Charles Pollock challenged the tax as unconstitutional, and the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in his favor. Pollock’s victory was relatively short-lived. Members of Congress—united in their determination to tax the American people’s income—worked together to adopt a constitutional amendment to overrule the Pollock decision. On the eve of World War I, in 1913, Congress instituted a permanent income tax by way of the 16th Amendment to the Constitution and the Revenue Act of 1913. Under the Revenue Act, individuals with income exceeding $3,000 could be taxed starting at 1% up to 7% for incomes exceeding $500,000. It’s all gone downhill from there. Unsurprisingly, the government has used its tax powers to advance its own imperialistic agendas and the courts have repeatedly upheld the government’s power to penalize or jail those who refused to pay their taxes. All the while the government continues to do whatever it likes—levy taxes, rack up debt, spend outrageously and irresponsibly, wage endless wars that make no one safer but fatten the bank accounts of the defense contractors—with little thought for the plight of its citizens. Somewhere over the course of the past 240-plus years, democracy has given way to kleptocracy (a government ruled by thieves), and representative government has been rejected in favor of a kakistocracy (a government run by the most unprincipled citizens that panders to the worst vices in our nature: greed, violence, hatred, prejudice and war) ruled by career politicians, corporations and thieves—individuals and entities with little regard for the rights of American citizens. The American kleptocracy continues to suck the American people down a rabbit hole into a parallel universe in which the Constitution is meaningless, the government is all-powerful, and the citizenry is powerless to defend itself against government agents who steal, spy, lie, plunder, kill, abuse and generally inflict mayhem and sow madness on everyone and everything in their sphere. This dissolution of that sacred covenant between the citizenry and the government—establishing “we the people” as the masters and the government as the servant—didn’t happen overnight. It didn’t happen because of one particular incident or one particular president. It has been a process, one that began long ago and continues in the present day, aided and abetted by politicians who have mastered the polarizing art of how to “divide and conquer.” By playing on our prejudices about those who differ from us, capitalizing on our fears for our safety, and deepening our distrust of those fellow citizens whose opinions run counter to our own, the powers-that-be have effectively divided us into polarized, warring camps incapable of finding consensus on the one true menace that is an immediate threat to all of our freedoms: the U.S. government. We are now the subjects of a militarized, corporate empire in which the vast majority of the citizenry work their hands to the bone for the benefit of a privileged few. Adding injury to the ongoing insult of having our tax dollars misused and our so-called representatives bought and paid for by the moneyed elite, the government then turns around and uses the money we earn with our blood, sweat and tears to target, imprison and entrap us, in the form of militarized police, surveillance cameras, private prisons, license plate readers, drones, and cell phone tracking technology. All of those nefarious government deeds that you read about in the paper every day: those are your tax dollars at work. It’s your money that allows for government agents to spy on your emails, your phone calls, your text messages, and your movements. It’s your money that allows out-of-control police officers to burst into innocent people’s homes, or probe and strip search motorists on the side of the road, or shoot an unarmed person. And it’s your money that leads to innocent Americans across the country being prosecuted for innocuous activities such as raising chickens at home, growing vegetable gardens, and trying to live off the grid. Just remember the next time you see a news story that makes your blood boil, whether it’s a child being kicked out of school for shooting an imaginary arrow, or a homeowner being threatened with fines for building a pond in his backyard, remember that it is your tax dollars that are paying for these injustices. So what are you going to do about it? There was a time in our history when our forebears said “enough is enough” and stopped paying their taxes to what they considered an illegitimate government. They stood their ground and refused to support a system that was slowly choking out any attempts at self-governance, and which refused to be held accountable for its crimes against the people. Their resistance sowed the seeds for the revolution that would follow. Unfortunately, as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, in the 200-plus years since we established our own government, we’ve let bankers, turncoats and number-crunching bureaucrats muddy the waters and pilfer the accounts to such an extent that we’re back where we started. Once again, we’ve got a despotic regime with an imperial ruler doing as they please. Once again, we’ve got a judicial system insisting we have no rights under a government which demands that the people march in lockstep with its dictates. And once again, we’ve got to decide whether we’ll keep marching or break stride and make a turn toward freedom. But what if we didn’t just pull out our pocketbooks and pony up to the federal government’s outrageous demands for more money? What if we didn’t just dutifully line up to drop our hard-earned dollars into the collection bucket, no questions asked about how it will be spent? What if, instead of quietly sending in our checks, hoping vainly for some meager return, we did a little calculating of our own and started deducting from our taxes those programs that we refuse to support? If we don’t have the right to decide what happens to our hard-earned cash, then we don’t have very many rights at all. If the government can just take from you what they want, when they want, and then use it however they want, you can’t claim to be anything more than a serf in a land they think of as theirs. This was the case in the colonial era, and it’s the case once again. http://clubof.info/

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