How's that war on drugs working out, again?

Mass graves in Mexico. Even the Taliban have not racked up that kind of kill ratio or so terrified government officials that they won't prosecute crimes.

Failed states in Iraq or Afghanistan would be a tragedy for Afghans and Iraqis, but not really for us. But Mexico appears well on the way to being a failed state -- government has basically collapsed in northern Mexico now, and it's only a matter of time before the rot spreads southwards -- and there would be real consequences for *us* if this happens. As in, millions of terrified Mexicans swarming across our border fleeing the terror groups and death squads, a complete disruption of trade on our southern border, and the possibility of the violence crossing the border into the United States itself. We need the U.S. Army here, now -- not in Afghanistan, not in Iraq, but *here* -- because this isn't going to be getting better anytime soon and it's *not* going to stay south of the border forever.

-- Badtux the Southward-looking Penguin

Things are getting scary out there

By now you've heard of the attack upon the Holocaust Museum by a crazed right-wing Freeper.

The problem is one that David Neiwert has been sounding the alarm about for over eight years now -- right-wing extremists pumped up by demagogues on the right, who, when fed untruths by people like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck and etc., go even further unhinged until they crack and do bad things like attack the Holocaust Museum, kill an abortion doctor, make two different attempts upon President Obama's life (it has now been revealed), etc. Even Shepherd Smith at Fox (soon to be unemployed) is now sounding the alarm about the craziness out there, even though he doesn't point fingers at his own employer's contributions to it.

The level of rhetoric, of outright hatred, is reaching a level that even the Clinton Derangement Syndrome of the 1990's never reached. Like Neiwert, I've been following this for years, and the failure of all their nutty ideas during the Bush Administration has sent the extremists on the right completely off the ranch to the point where their connection with reality is absolutely non-existent. They really *do* believe that the guy in the phone company van below their tenement window is a FBI agent come to take their guns away on behalf of that Communist Nigerian Muslim secret Soviet mole, Obama Hussein. They've lost it, entirely. And you wonder why I blog as a penguin? Open your eyes, the friggin' crazies are out there and they're scary as hell and I like my fine feathered plumpness far too much to risk getting a beakfull of birdshot when I walk out of church one day!

-- Badtux the "The DHS was right" Penguin

Why nobody is invading North Korea

Okay, so as Brian at Why Now mentioned, the Chinese are pretty pissed at North Korea for exploding a nuke and firing off some more missiles. As in, pissed enough that they voted for some U.N. security council resolutions and basically told Li'l Kim, "Stop that shit - or else!" The "or else", though.... ah yes, therein lies the problem. Sure, China could cut off its economic support for Li'l Kim's regime. But then a) you got a lot of starving peasants (what, you don't think Li'l Kim would go hungry? Perish the thought!), and b) it doesn't hurt Li'L Kim a whole lot because most of the country *already* has devolved economically to pre-industrial times with animal power and all that.

Which brings up the real reason nobody has invaded North Korea since Li'l Kim started being a bad boy. That million man army? Bah. They spend most springs planting crops, and most autumns harvesting crops, and do fuck-all little training and none of their advanced weapons actually work anymore due to age and lack of fuel. They're basically a hoard armed with AK-47's, RPG's, and mortars, and any modern army (or even China's only halfway-modern army) could crush them like a bug. The problem is, once you do that, then what? You invade the place, you own it. And what you own is a medieval hell-hole where the entire population has been brainwashed and indoctrinated into some weird-ass cult shit, and the economy relies on having a million soldiers planting rice in the spring and harvesting rice in the fall and that's the million soldiers you just crushed, remember? Meaning, economic collapse. Meaning, you own this shit unless you want pictures of starving North Korean babies showing up on the Western news. Both South Korea and China have plenty of capability to invade and conquer North Korea any time they like (South Korea's modern army is some real hard-asses, they basically model themselves on the old Imperial Japanese Army but with modern warfighting equipment like some damn fine Hyundai tanks and supporting F-15's), but the question of "then what?" still remains, and nobody has the slightest inclination to hurry up the answer to that question until they have no choice at all.

- Badtux the Geopolitical Penguin

Ending the violence of a Civil War, Part II

At this point I will take an aside. I referred to the Palestinian-Israeli Civil War in my previous post. Before we go on to applying the principles of how to end the violence of a civil war to this particular conflict, a significant chunk of history is necessary.

Note: For the sake of convenience, I use these terms in the following manner:

Jewish: Those who follow the Jewish faith.
Palestinian: Those peoples currently or formerly residing in Palestine who practice a religion other than Judaism. (Note that this is a religious differentiation, since there is no genetic or racial difference between the two populations, due to the fact that most of the Palestinians are descendants of Jews who converted to Islam).
Palestine: The area comprising modern Israel plus the Gaza Strip plus the West Bank.
Palestinian Civil War: The conflict between Jewish and Palestinian inhabitants of Palestine.

Please disregard any other definitions of the above terms that you may have in mind.

Anyhow: During the period of Ottoman rule, the Jewish population of Palestine gradually declined until, around 1890, Jews consisted of approximately 6% of the population of Palestine. Now, this was not because of Muslim violence against Jews. The Muslim world, during the period from the Ottoman conquests to the British mandate of Palestine, was generally a peaceable place for the world's Jews. When Spain expelled their Jews, they migrated to the Muslim world and became known as the "Sephardim", for example. It was more a combination of a number of things. First, while Islamic law did not encourage or condone violence against Jews (indeed, they were explicitly tolerated as "people of the book" by Islamic law), Jews were heavily taxed, not allowed to participate in the government, and encouraged to convert to Islam. The majority of the Jewish population of Palestine converted first to Christianity, then after the Islamic conquest, to Islam by 1000AD. Secondly, the Crusaders slaughtered most of the remaining Jews in Palestine when they conquered it in 1096. The net result was that the Jewish population of Palestine fell significantly during the period 600AD to 1900AD.

Or did it? Here is the salient point: Because of conversions from Judaism to Islam, *MOST OF THE ISLAMIC POPULATION OF PALESTINE WAS GENETICALLY IDENTICAL TO THE JEWISH POPULATION*. That is, most of the Islamic population of Palestine was, in fact, converted Jews. At that point (roughly 1900), the trend of a declining Jewish population reversed significantly, due to two factors -- increased pogroms against Jews in Russia due to the instability that eventually led to the overthrow of the Tsars causing large numbers of Jews to flee, and the Zionist movement, which encouraged Jews to move back to Palestine. It was a perfect storm where these two things happened at the same time to funnel many of those Russian and Polish Jews to Palestine (Poland was largely ruled by Russia at the time and also suffered pogroms). By 1920, when the British took over from the Ottomans, the Jewish population of Palestine was probably up to around 15-20% of the population. During the runup to WWII in the 1930's, another 600,000 or so Jews managed to slip past the blockades and make it to Palestine, raising the percentage of Jews to probably around 35% of the population.

This caused frictions, because most of the land in the Ottoman Empire mandate of Transjordan was owned by absentee landlords in Istanbul. The Jewish settlers coming in from Europe were wealthier and could buy land from the absentee landlords and evict families that had been living on a particular plot of land for generations. This ran afoul of a major cultural and legal difference between European culture and Middle Eastern culture. The incoming Jewish settlers saw no problem with this because in European culture land leases are short-term affairs that are negotiable on a year-by-year basis, while the existing Palestinian inhabitants saw it as a breach of the traditional Middle Eastern landlord-tenant contract, where a landlord was supposed to stay in his proper place (i.e. far away) and a lease was actual property that could be passed on to their children and their children's children etc. This was all a relic of the feudal system that the Ottomans had imposed when they conquered Palestine from the Mamluks of Egypt.

The end result was civil war between the Jewish and Palestinian segments of the population -- who, remember, are genetically identical. There apparently was no attempt by either side to understand the cultural differences causing the conflict or to negotiate a reasonable settlement of the issue (such as, perhaps, buying out tenant rights for a sum of money in exchange for the Palestinians going away). Palestinians evicted from their land migrated to the towns and cities and hung out on the street corners where they engaged in acts of violence against Jews who happened to pass by (and against others too, most likely, but Jews decidedly felt their sting). Jews organized militias and concentrated in their own fortified villages and went on their own hunting expeditions to push Palestinians off the land in areas where they intended to buy land and set up their own villages and farms. By this time the British, who'd taken over the area after the Ottoman Empire disintegrated, were decidedly put out by all this uncouth violence and slammed the door on Jewish immigration to their Palestinian Mandate in hopes of preventing further violence. It did not work, of course. Jewish immigrants continued to filter in, if more slowly, Palestinians evicted from lands their families had worked for generations continued to take out their frustrations on the Jewish settlers who replaced them on those lands, and so it goes until complete and total civil war broke out in 1947-1948.

Yes, I call it civil war, because just as the North and South had major cultural differences that caused frictions between them that ended up with the two regions of the United States fighting a bloody civil war, so, too, did the Palestinian and Jewish inhabitants of the Palestinian Mandate have major cultural differences that led to civil war. The European values of the incoming Jewish settlers and the Middle Eastern values of the existing Palestinian inhabitants were as starkly different as the values of a Confederate slave-owner and a Northern factory owner. This caused friction, then hatred between the two factions and, eventually, war. The structure of the war was starkly different because Palestine is a tiny geographic area and both populations were intermingled in the same area, plus various outside powers invaded hoping to scoop up portions of Palestine while its occupants were busy with civil war, but civil war it was -- remember, by this time probably half the Jewish population in Palestine had been born there and many of the remainder had been there for 20 years or more (with the exception of the European concentration camp survivors who arrived in 1947-1948 after Britain was shamed by U.S. publication of British concentration camps for Jews into letting the Jews they'd imprisoned proceed to Palestine), so it was no longer a question of outsiders vs. the locals. They were *all* locals by that time.

And, as we all know, one side -- the Jewish side -- won this civil war. But the aftermath of this civil war unfolded in a much different manner from the American Civil War, probably unsurprising given the different motivations, limited geographic area, larger cultural differences between the two sides, and given the fact there was not a third people (blacks) to use as a convenient proxy for the hatred of each side for the other...

So now we go on to Part III of the series, "Ending the violence of a Civil War", where we look at the current state of the Palestinian Civil War and apply our basic principles of "how to end a civil war" to suggest what has to be done to end it.

-- Badtux the History Penguin

How to end a civil war: Part 1

In the period 1861 through 1865, two regions of the United States fought a very bloody civil war. The two regions that fought each had a very distinct culture and different dominant religions, and deep and seemingly irreconcilable differences. Then came the military defeat of one region -- the South -- in 1865, after Sherman's army ripped the guts out of the Southern economy and rendered the South incapable of feeding its armies, at which point its armies disintegrated.

And thus the war was over. Or was it? Abraham Lincoln certainly was concerned that it wasn't, as was General U.S. Grant and General W.T. Sherman, both of whom took steps to reduce the possibility of continued guerrilla warfare. Unfortunately, Lincoln got assassinated and his Vice President, a genial plantation owner from Tennessee, was incapable of dealing with the virulent hatred of Northerners who wished to collectively punish the South for their treason of rebelling against the central government.

So they did. They put President Jefferson Davis of the South into jail as a traitor. They considered bringing up various Southern generals up on charges of treason (at which point they would be hanged). They imposed military rule on the South and stripped the South of all representation in Congress. Despite the fact that General Sherman had destroyed a year's crops for the South and thus they had no food, there was no attempt to feed the hungry Southerners who were literally starving in their fields.

The results: If you go to any town or city in the South today that existed in 1865, you will find a plaque. This plaque says something along the lines of, "Here was fought the Battle of Coushatta, May 5, 1871." Or "Here was fought the Battle of Jackson Square, August 5, 1874".

Now I hear you say, "Hold it, wasn't the American Civil War over in 1865?". No. The American Civil War actually was not over until 1877, with the Hayes-Tilden Compromise that removed military occupation from the South and finished the job of pardoning the last remaining Confederate prisoners. Until then, the former Confederates fought a very effective guerrilla war -- not against Union troops (they didn't want General Sherman turned loose to burn all their farms down again, after all), but against the organs of civil government installed by those Union troops. This was a bloody, violent effort that occurred wherever the Union troops weren't. But once the former Confederates were allowed to resume their positions of power (after promising to pretend that the South was part of the United States and promising to pretend that slavery was over), that was the end of the violence. The hatred was still there -- 100 years later, when I was born, native Southerners would still spit at the mention of the name "General Sherman", talk about "damned Yankees", and whine that Abraham Lincoln was "a tyrant who illegally stole our property[slaves] from us". But the violence was over.

So, what lessons can we learn from this? I think these lessons are pretty clear:

1. Collective punishment does not work. As long as the North imposed collective punishment against the South, there was violence against Northern interests in the South. Undoubtedly if other Northern targets had existed within firing range of the South they would have been targets of violence too.
2. The right to vote and be represented in the national government eliminates violence. Once the South was allowed (by the Hayes-Tilden Compromise) to install its own legislators in the national government, violence stopped literally overnight, because violence would have threatened the power that the newly-elected legislators had won.
3. This participation in the national government cannot be a token participation. The newly-elected legislators had real power in the U.S. Congress, especially in the Senate, where any Senator could filibuster and stop legislation that would adversely impact the South. If not given real power via the political process, they would have continued attempting to achieve real power via force of arms.
4. All "war criminals", "traitors", and "terrorists" must be pardoned and allowed to participate fully in government.. It took ten years of sticking in the craw of Northerners for them to do this, but finally they realized that as long as the right to vote and the right to hold office was denied to former Confederate leaders, there would continue to be unrest in the South. This despite the fact that the former Confederate leaders were clearly traitors who had taken up arms against their lawful government under the terms of the Constitution and thus the proper response as laid out in the Constitution would have been to hang them all. But it was realized that hanging the former Confederate leadership would cause more problems, because each former Confederate leader had friends and family would would thus be even more embittered and motivated to take up arms against the federal government.
5. Most people just want to live a normal life. This is the hardest thing for some people to understand. The average Southerner had no desire to take up arms and "kill Damnyankees". It was only while they were under military occupation, half-starved, not allowed to participate in their usual professions, living abnormal lives where they had no say in their governance, that they were willing to do this. Once the occupation was over and they could live normal lives, they just lived their lives and anybody who dared try violence against the "damnyankees" was ostracized and reported to the proper authorities, who, because of the above, were happy to hang'em from the nearest tree (because violence against the "damnyankees" threatened their own power).
6. Blame is not useful. The first thing that happens when I go into a company to rescue a failing product is that I get everybody in a room who has done work on the product, sit back, and listen. Inevitably, they start blaming one another for the failure to produce a working product. About fifteen minutes after this starts, I lean forward, and at the first breath where I can get a word in sideways say, "You know, I'm getting bored. I don't care who's to blame. I want to know how to fix this. I need to know what we need to do to get a product out the door, and then we need to walk out of this room and do it." And then keep shutting them down every time they start pointing fingers at one another rather than telling me what we need to do to get this product out the door. The North and the South were quick to blame the other for the American Civil War. Heck, even today it's called "The War of Northern Aggression" in some parts of the South, and the "War of Southern Treason" in some parts of the North. But paying any attention to that is completely useless when trying to solve the problem of how to stitch a nation together from two seemingly hostile and irreconcilable populations.

Now, the next step is to see how this applies to the Palestinian-Israeli Civil War. What? The Palestinian-Israeli Civil War? I bet you never knew such a thing existed! Well, you'll just have to wait to see what I mean, eh?

-- Badtux the History Penguin

A sad post-script: The abandonment of the South's black population in 1877 is commonly condemned by contemporary dilettantes. Sadly, widespread racism and discrimination against black Americans is pretty much a side note to the post-Civil War history of the United States until the 1950's because discrimination against black Americans was not a Southern thing alone, but happened throughout the nation (the bastion of the KKK hate group was not the South, but... Indiana, a Northern farm state which doesn't even *have* many blacks). Ending strife and the death and killing does not, alas, somehow cure racism. All it does is give the opportunity for descendants of current racists to change their mind.

Dead dreams and lies

Spent a few days with some of the folks that liberals sneer at. Most of them either had served, were serving, or knew someone who was serving, though few of them had actually been in combat. Which brings up the question: Why are so many of the people who will be directly affected by a decision to go to war, in favor of going to war?

One thing to point out, I suppose, is the socio-economic background of most of today's military. With the exception of the officers, most of today's military personnel are in the military because it's all there is for them. They lack the skills -- both social skills and academic skills -- to succeed in today's economy (and of those the social skills are the most important). They don't know what fork to eat with. They've never worn a tuxedo in their entire lives, and their entire wardrobe consists of t-shirt and jeans. They "talk funny" in the eyes of the elite who hire and promote. They are God's misbegotten children, forgotten by mainstream America, condemned to a life of no future and an early death courtesy of poverty and ignorance (and not just their own poverty and ignorance, but also the poverty of spirit and ignorance of soul of the elite who hire and promote, who view anyone who doesn't talk "right" or act "right" as sub-human). So they turn to the military.

But it's not just that. It's the fact that, for the most part, they like to destroy. They enjoy blowing shit up. They enjoy shooting things. They like killing critters. They fantasize of killing the folks who keep them from enjoying their favorite pursuits -- the environmentalists who close off their favorite 4x4 trails, the Washington bureaucrats who erect barriers to prevent them from visiting backwoods cabins and ghost towns, the faceless "liberals" who take their money in taxes but, somehow, never seem to do anything for these people except kick these people off their mining claims and take their land away from them at gunpoint. It's all that's left for them to do. They can't create. That option has largely been taken away from them, if they have work at all it's something dehumanizing and degrading such as plucking chickens or slaughtering hogs in a factory setting. The days when working men could feel proud of building a nation with their rail laying and spike-hammering are over, most of that is gone or is now done by Mexicans who can be treated like slaves because they have no legal status in America. If you can't build, if you aren't allowed to build, why not destroy?

You ask, "so why do they keep voting for Republican politicians?" But the thing is, none of the promises liberals ever made to them came true. FDR's "New Deal" was a great deal for the middle class, but the working class? Nope. Then Truman busted the unions. LBJ sent them to die in Vietnam, and starved his "Great Society" programs to the point they benefited only a few urban poor, not the masses of poor white trash living outside the urban core. What have Democrats done for the working man? What did 60 years of Democratic control of Congress from 1932 to 1994 do for these people? Nothing. Less than nothing. Took away much of what they had, in fact -- their freedom, their dignity, their ability to get by on their own without needing handouts or special treatment. I wander the desert and I see the mine workings where men like these pursued their dreams. Why are there no men there now pursuing their dreams? It is simple. They've been locked out. Forbidden. Kicked out. Had whatever they built taken from them at gunpoint as their workings and mill sites and cabins were declared to be "wilderness", and given nothing in return. Condemned to then watch helplessly as everything they ever built crumbles to ruin because some elite somewhere else thinks they're not human enough to be allowed to follow their dreams.

And most of the time this has happened, it has been Democrats passing the laws that make it happen.

I realize I'm treading old ground here. Joe Bageant has a couple of excellent books out there on the same basic thesis. But I saw this up close and personal these last few days, and figured maybe this would let some Democrats know why working people hate them. It's because Democrats have talked the talk... and that's it. As the saying goes, bullshit talks, it takes a real man to walk the walk -- and there ain't a real man in the whole Democratic bunch, and hasn't been for a long, long time.

-- Badtux the Western Penguin

The common ground

What do Santa Claus, Israel, Iraq, the United States, Jews, Muslims, Palestinians, Christians, Tuxologists, the Great Penguin, Jehovah, Allah, and the Easter Bunny all have in common?

I'll give you a hint. I point a human being out to you. Can you show me the "Jew" or "Christian" in him? Can you point it out to me, hold it up to me so I can see what it looks like? If I fire up Google Earth and show you a piece of ground, do you see any lines drawn on that ground that say one side is somehow different from the other?

I guess the first and last items should have made it clear what I'm up to. It's all imaginary. Made up. Just the overheated delusions of jumped up monkeys with delusions of grandeur. There's the world, there's us, there's the stuff in the world, that's it. All this religion and nationality and ethnicity and shit is just made up bullshit. There ain't one single bit of genetic difference between the monkeys who call themselves "Palestinians" and the monkeys who call themselves "Jews", for example. They just made up that silliness and use it as an excuse to kill each other. There is no such thing as some invisible sky demon called "Jehovah" or "Allah" or "The Great Penguin" who strikes down evildoers with lightning bolts or fire from the sky or rains of herring. There's just a bunch of monkeys who try to avoid the knowledge that they're just monkeys by making up invisible sky demons to make themselves feel bigger than other people.

I've been called "anti-Semitic", "anti-Muslim", "un-patriotic" anti-lots of things. But what I really am is anti-bullshit. If you can't smell it, touch it, sniff it, measure it, or otherwise interact with it on a real life basis, it's just made-up imaginary bullshit. And if you come around flogging made-up bullshit, then you deserve the flamethrower you'll get.

The reason you'll get the flamethrower is that bullshit has consequences. "America" may be made-up bullshit, but the guns being carried by monkeys who believe in that made-up bullshit kill just as well as if there was a such a thing as "America" that could be smelled, touched, sniffed, measured. But I can't go and pick up something and show it to someone and say "this is America". I can show people a piece of dirt, but that's dirt. I can show people a building, but that's brick and stone and steel. I can show people a piece of paper with some blotches of ink on it, but that piece of paper isn't "Islam". There really isn't a such a thing as "America" or "Islam" or whatever that you can see and touch. It's just made up bullshit by monkeys with too much imagination and delusions of grandeur.

What we are, friends and mammals, are animals. We are just animals. Animals with big brains and a propensity to spout imaginary bullshit, but animals all the same. We are born, we eat, we defecate, we grow up (can't really say "mature"), we fornicate and reproduce, we grow old, we die. Just like every other animal on this planet. We're unique amongst animals in that we've figured out ways to communicate stuff between us, and figured out ways to build impressive crap, and figured out impressive ways to kill each other and other animals. But in the end, we're just meat. Meat stuffed into sausage skin and wrapped around bone. Meat that has a bad tendency to flap its meat at each other and slice open each other's sausage wrappers to let the meat fall out, but meat all the same.

As for all that other stuff.... it's just bullshit. Made up. Imaginary. Ladies and germs, the Easter Bunny is not real. Neither is "Mexican". Neither is "Jew" or "Muslim". It's all just made up silliness by monkeys that have lost their bearings and lost track of what is true and what is real. What is true and real is that, in the end, we are all just monkeys (well, except those of us who are penguins!), and all the rest of that stuff is just bullshit that we ought to just ignore while we get along with living our little monkey lives in peace. Sadly, though, deluded fools who think made-up bullshit is, like, actually real, keep using those psychotic delusions to give them excuses to kill other monkeys. Pathetic. Simply pathetic. If you're going to kill someone, at least do it for a reason that's real, not for some made-up imaginary nonsense like "race" or "religion" or whatever....

-- Badtux the Bullshit-spottin' Penguin

The blood of tyrants

Today is Bastille Day in France, a celebration of the overthrow of the French monarchy. Here is a song which celebrates the overthrow of tyrants. It is the French national anthem. Please go read the English translation of the lyrics and come back.

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. Okay, you're back. So what do you think? Suitably bloodthirsty? Not exactly your typical national anthem, eh, what with all that bit about bloodthirsty ripping of babes out of wombs and such.

Some say that we need our own Bastille Day to overthrow the tyrants who control our nation (who, I might add, are not our elected officials -- they are, for the most part, puppets of the real rulers of our nation, the wealthy elite that prefers to work behind the scenes). The problem is what happens next. Once a people becomes accustomed to blood, there is no end to the blood. Rule of law is over, and rule of gun is the only rule. The end result, typically, is that the worst amongst us come out on top -- those with the least morals, the most willingness to kill upon the slightest whim, the least consideration for the least amongst us.

For the French, the result of overthrowing the monarchy led inevitably to Napoleon, who killed millions during his quest to conquer Europe, including over a million Frenchmen whose lives he threw away. While it would certainly be satisfying to take the puppet George W. Bush to the gallows and stretch his neck, and past that point take all the rulers of America and stretch their necks -- Richard and Helen DeVos, the Olin family, the Bradley family, the Scaife family, etc. -- then what? That road inevitably leads down the same road that the garroting of the French royal family led down -- blood, misery, and millions of dead.

One of the geniuses of our founding fathers is that, by and large, they did not massacre the supporters of the English monarchy once the pro-monarchy forces lost and American independence was secured. Instead, they exiled those supporters to Canada. There was no bloodbath on American soil outside the blood of soldiers. Perhaps, if we are forced to fight a new war of independence against a new monarchy, that would be a reasonable solution for dealing with our own monarchs. Except instead of sending them to Canada (which undoubtedly would not want them), I have a much better idea. Send them to Iraq. Naked. With no possessions. No servants. No soldiers or guards. Drop them naked and alone into the middle of the Sadr City suburb of Baghdad. Hey, if it was good enough for our founding fathers... oh wait, I forget, our founding fathers didn't ship the supporters of monarchy naked to Canada. They tarred and feathered them first. Hmm... stock tip: buy stock in feather companies.

-- Badtux the History Penguin

On good and evil and war

I made a bold statement in my War Porn message, one that I'm surprised nobody called me on. I said, "All war does is destroy."

But what about Hitler, you say? Surely World War II was a "good" war?

No. World War II was a necessary war, in order to remove evil from the planet. But the absence of evil is not the presence of good.

Evil destroys. Good creates. But if you remove Evil, you don't end up with Good. You end up with... nothing. Just an empty vacuum.

War, since it is only destruction, is never Good. It is necessary, sometimes. I am not naive. I know that committing acts of violence, acts of evil, is sometimes necessary in order to prevent further evil. I am not reluctant, for example, to state that a serial killer should be subjected to the violence of the state -- seized by armed men, placed into a cage called a "prison cell", and kept there for the remainder of his life. Is this evil? Yes, violence is always evil, but in this case it prevents worse evil, it prevents the serial killer from adding yet more bodies to his tally of destruction.

But war never, ever adds anything. War, by definition as organized destruction on a mass scale, can never be Good, no more than black can ever be white.

But what about the miracle of democracy that arose in Germany and Japan after WWII, you say? Doesn't that prove that war is good?

No, what that proves is that if people decide to take another course, and have the support of the United States in terms of money and funding to do so, they can create Good. The removal of the evil that was Hitler in Germany and the military junta in Japan meant that the people were free to choose. But the people still had to choose, and they still needed assistance after they chose. The people chose Good. It was not war that chose Good for them. The people chose Good. If the United States had not been terrified by the Soviet Union into supporting Good against the advice of all the Republican nay-sayers who said that this was rewarding violence on the part of the Japanese and Germans and thus the Japanese and Germans should be punished, not rewarded with funds for rebuilding... well, what would have happened would have been something akin to modern-day Iraq -- a failed lawless state full of violence and death and Evil.

In short, it was the Marshall Plan and its Japanese equivalent that was Good, not the war which preceded it. All the war did was destroy. Amongst the things it destroyed, besides the lives of millions of people, were the evil of Hitler and Tojo. But that did not make the war Good. It merely made the war necessary.

-- Badtux the History Penguin

War Porn

War. Death, destruction, killing. To quote a great poet, "War. Huh. What is it good for?"

War does not create. War does not add anything. All war does is destroy. All war does is consume. War does not help economies, because everything created to fight wars does nothing to make people's lives better. Instead, the bullets and bombs and weapons are destroyed by the act of using them, as if the output of those factories had simply been thrown into a bottomless pit. War takes wealth, and turns it into murder.

Yes, murder. I use that word. War is murder. War is the taking of human lives. War is blood and guts and dead children lying in streets and the smell of piss and shit and the screaming of women and wails of children as they die in the crossfire. War is starvation and thirst, as the supply lines of civilization that keep civilians alive collapse in a hail of bombs and bullets and children shit their lives out in the street from drinking contaminated water and women are shot in the head and guts as they venture out of their homes searching for water and food for their children. Those who fight wars do not do anything glorious, unless you are the serial killer Hannibal Lector and believe that the removal of human life from this planet is the most reverent and sacred act that can be done. War is organized murder committed by governments in pursuit of whatever interests the leaders of those governments are pursuing.

Those who fight wars stink. Literally. For the warrior, war means that bathing becomes a seldom-done thing. The cake of dirt and rancid sweat and oil turns your hair into an oily greasy stuff on top of your head that, trapped under your helmet, fells like some sort of animal clasping your scalp. The acrid smell of rancid body oil and sweat and dirt is a bitter taste in your mouth (your nose has long since shut down and no longer smells it). Your underwear is filthy with urine and with feces because toilet paper is in short supply on the front lines. Sometimes you lay on top of your shit -- if your squad is pinned down and you can't move and you gotta go, well, it's a case of shovel a little dirt out on one side of whatever hole you're hiding in using the butt of your rifle, roll over, drop pants, dump, wipe with whatever you got to wipe with, roll back over, shove a little dirt back to try to cover it up enough to keep from squishing it all over you when you move around. This is oh so glorious and glamorous. And never seen when the war porn comes on.

If the war porn -- the movies, video games, and books that describe war -- ever tried to reflect the reality of war rather than some airbrushed glamorized fiction, people would run screaming from the movie theatres. Teenage boys would stare in shock at their video games as their brother or sister or mother or father were dismembered by a bullet in front of their face, begging for mercy, begging for a bullet to put them out of their misery. But of course the war porn does no such thing. Instead, it paints war as glamor and courage and bravery, as a glorious quest that turns a boy into a man.

And so we soak in war porn, every day. War porn comes on our evening news, a curiously sanitized pornography where war happens, yet nobody dies, where there are no dismembered bodies of children lying around on the ground after a 500 pound bomb blows up a daycare, where the men fighting the war look like movie stars instead of people who are very much in need of a bath, where the smell is never described. The smell. Ah yes, the smell. It is, indeed, lucky for the war pornographer that television has no way to transmit smells.

And so the death and destruction goes on, and everybody salutes and goes "hip hip hoorah!" as the war porn plays on their movie and tv screens. And the word "war", which should be a filthy word like "cunt", "nigger", "fuck", and "bitch", instead is used as a word for glorious quests like the War on Drugs, the War on Terrorism, the war on... well, I suppose this is all appropriate, in a way, since the War on Drugs, War on Terrorism, etc., involve the mass destruction of thousands of human lives as white American claps and says "Yeah! Another porch monkey caged! Another spic sent to jail! Another sand nigger killed like a dog! U S A! U S A!". But the horror of war is not, of course, what most people think of when they see the word "war" used in this way. Instead, all they see is the airbrushed glamor of the war porn in which they are immersed each day.

And so it goes, in the Delusional States of America, land of the war porn and home of the sheeple...

-- Badtux the Porn Penguin

Comment on this over at the Mockingbird's place

Time to talk gun control again?

Unless you got kidnapped by aliens, you know that a South Korean college kid shot up a college yesterday, killing dozens of other college kids. As conservative blogger Jon Swift reports, this is all the fault of liberals. Why, if liberals simply allowed college kids to pack heat, they woulda capped that gook before he even got his first dozen kills!

Naturally, as a snarky penguin I must agree. I believe that every American should be armed with an AK-47, 5,000 rounds of ammunition, a RPG-7 anti-tank grenade launcher, and 100 rounds of RPG ammunition. Then we can be a peaceful and polite society just like Iraq and Somalia. After all, just ask Rep. Mike Pence of Indiana, who will be swift to tell you that going to the market in Iraq is safer than going to the market in Indiana. Especially when there's a blue light special on sexy lingerie, in which case you best have your body armor on or a herd of women and transvestites and Rudy Giuliani will send you on to the great beyond...

Remember, gun control is hittin' what ya aim at! As for the notion of a national dialogue on gun control... oh look! Over there! It's a missing young blond girl!

-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin

Below: A couple of shoppers at an Indiana market prepare to obtain the last Playstation 3's in town.

Prison State USA: Round up the kids!

Now they're coming for the children. And I'm not talking about teenagers. Read some of the links Jurassic Pork's commenters helpfully rounded up for us.

I have absolutely no respect for adults who cannot handle a six year old child without calling the cops. None. This is a complete and utter failure in training. A child seeking attention has been rewarded for misbehavior with a *lot* of attention, and thus will misbehave more in the future. This is the dumbest, stupidest, most ignorant thing I've ever heard of -- and it is rampant today, apparently, from the links at Jurassic Pork's site.

The solution isn't the paddle. As I pointed out in my post "On Violence":

When it comes to the raising of children, or disciplining of children, much the same applies -- violence is never moral. The problem isn't that we've banned the paddle or whatever other rot the tighty righties want to trot out. The problem is that we have a very punitive and violent society that views punishment -- violence -- as the solution to all problems. But while violence can *stop* a behavior, that is all it can do -- it can never add something to a child's understanding of the world. It can never add something to society. Love, encouragement, setting clear goals and expectations and rewards (note I say rewards, not bribes, there's a difference), making life a pleasant and rewarding experience rather than something harsh and punitive... what works for raising a happy child, also works for raising a happy society. Alas, our punishment and violence addicted society seems to have forgotten this, thus why our society is so unhappy, violent, and prone to addictions such as crack cocaine, black tar heroin, and neo-conservative politics.

The solution, rather, is to have adults behave as adults. Physical intervention was necessary in this case because the child was behaving in a way that interfered with the education of other children and refused to leave the classroom, but violence against a child was completely and utterly unwarranted, unnecessary, and totally counter-productive. All that this child has learned is that by behaving like a complete ass, she can get lots of the adult attention that she apparently craves. She should have been gently physically restrained for as long as it took to round up her mother or bring herself under control, then removed to the custody of her mother for several days' suspension, or to emergency foster care if her mother or some other relative was not available to take custody. Then she should not have been allowed back into class without a behavior plan in place, preferably one based upon a "levels" system where she had to earn her way back into the good graces of the school via exhibiting clearly defined and observed desirable behaviors and receiving a specified set of priviliges back. This is how I was trained by the Houston Independent School District to handle this situation fifteen years ago, and H.I.S.D. isn't particularly known for excellence in education or discipline, but this is what worked and it worked even for the mentally ill children that I was charged with teaching.

But that conflicts with the violent and ignorant nature of our society, so these Florida crackers think that "being tough" is the solution. Violence against children is never the solution. Never. Some very limited violence may be necessary in order to stop a behavior that presents a danger to herself or others, but as I have previously pointed out, violence never adds anything to the world. It only takes away. You have to fill a child with something to fill that hole, with joy and love and doing things together and making life a pleasant place for that child the majority of the time, or all you end up with is a child that is unhappy, misbehaving, and violent. We have decades -- yes, *DECADES* -- of behavioral research confirming this. Yet as a violent and ignorant society, we still insist upon violence as the solution to all societal problems...

-- Badtux the Behavioral Psychology Penguin

Granny's got a gun...

Old people these days. They're just no good. Whatever happened to just stayin' home and bakin' cookies and bouncing the grandbabies on your knees and shit? Nowdays old farts are robbin' banks and gettin' 21 innocent people killed while doing a campaign op while runnin' fer President and such. And they're even pirating music, sometimes even after they're dead. Now, you know what this penguin thinks of baby boomers (what have baby boomers born after 1950 ever accomplished, other than scoring a ton of hash during the early 70's and managing to ruin America's economy with their unwarranted sense of self-entitlement?), but sheesh. If this is what old farts are like 'nowdays, I ain't so sure I like old people either. Why, soon 'nuff, we're gonna have to build yet more prisons to house their wrinkled old butts. Ick!

-- Badtux the Misanthropic Penguin

On violence

This is an expansion upon a posting by Quaker Agitator, entitled Truth from Mr. Gandhi, v. 2., which has the following quote by Gandhi:

"I object to violence because when it appears to do good, the good is only temporary; the evil it does is permanent."

Indeed. Violence cannot add anything to the world. Violence cannot create anything. The best that can be said about violence is that sometimes it is necessary for self defense or the defense of others -- sorry, I disagree with the Quakers on this one, while I do not believe violence can ever be moral, it can (very occasionally) be necessary for perpetuation of the organism -- i.e., necessary.

That said, "necessary" and "moral" are two different words. If I kill a man in self defense, I have removed a man's life from this earth just as certainly as if I killed him just for the fun of it. The best that can be said is that if it is a choice of him taking my life or me taking his life, there is no moral choice that can be made, because a man is dead either way. At that point the inner monkey takes over, the primitive beast whose struggles for survival in the African veldt far surpassed anything that we can imagine. And said monkey wants to *live*...

When it comes to the raising of children, or disciplining of children, much the same applies -- violence is never moral. The problem isn't that we've banned the paddle or whatever other rot the tighty righties want to trot out. The problem is that we have a very punitive and violent society that views punishment -- violence -- as the solution to all problems. But while violence can *stop* a behavior, that is all it can do -- it can never add something to a child's understanding of the world. It can never add something to society. Love, encouragement, setting clear goals and expectations and rewards (note I say rewards, not bribes, there's a difference), making life a pleasant and rewarding experience rather than something harsh and punitive... what works for raising a happy child, also works for raising a happy society. Alas, our punishment and violence addicted society seems to have forgotten this, thus why our society is so unhappy, violent, and prone to addictions such as crack cocaine, black tar heroin, and neo-conservative politics.

Folks are prone to dismissing Gandhi as an "impractical dreamer". But in this case, at least, he was being a practical observer. There has been no instance of violence that increased the amount of good in the world. Violence has never added anything to the world. Violence can only take away. Violence can only stop or remove things. Violence cannot dream, or create, or invent, or provide salvation for lost souls. Violence can only destroy dreams, destroy creations, squash innovations, provide damnation for lost souls. It is sad that punishment -- violence -- seems to be the only response that our sick society has for a wide variety of societal problems. It is sad, because there is so much more that could be done, if only we embraced creation rather than destruction as the fundamental force of our society.

-- Badtux the Creative Penguin