Category Archives: stupidity and violence

Thoughts - on 'foreign policy', terrorists, and power..

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So the discussion around “foreign policy” - Ministers saying but of course we wouldn”t change our foreign policy just because of some stupid terrorist threat, or what some stupid people suggested has something to do with the threat”. Right - if that”s the only reason you were going to change what is agreed by most people as a highly unethical “foreign policy” - (ooh i love that phrase - such a nice way of “externalizing” and removing the problem one or two steps away - “but dear, it”s foreign policy” doesn”t affect us here”) - clearly it”s not good enough.

How clever though - the reason we heard so much about this fine phrase of not changing policy “because we don”t negotiate with terrorists” - because then - if anyone does speak up about the lack of fit of being a democratic civilized nation and the shitty stuff that passes for foreign policy - why there”s a simple solution: Honey we don”t change policy to suit terrorists - okay? Even if it”s shit we gotta put up with it. We can”t be seen to be responding..

Well that might seem sensible except that it doesn”t seem to be understanding the point of terrorism. Which is to cause terror and gain power. If not “literal” power of the sort governments have - power nonetheless - power over how people see themselves, what they believe in, what they will do for those beliefs etc. - i.e. moral authority. As i”ve said elsewhere, terrorists and governments have much in common - a guy like Bin Laden has plenty in common with politicians who want power over “their people” - scaring your people, propaganda, etc. etc.

Terrorists are effectively similar to people who are career politicians - their end game is the same - terrorists use different means. ( and for those of you who believe the end justifies the means - think about this long and hard..) They”re all folks who basically in search of nation-states and the accompanying power and authority. ( remember what distinguishes the Nation-State from any other form of formal social organization - the monopoly on violence) So whilst some folks might not like my saying it like it is - some people use “legitimate” roots of gaining power within the existing model - and some - who feel they can”t get power in the system - find other ways of grabbing power. Power - also - manifests itself in different ways. Essentially the “War on Terror” gave Osama Bin Laden exactly what he wanted - to be seen as some sort of moral authority for Muslims. Machiavellian tactics in use here.

In any case - someone somewhere said if you magically wave a wand and change British foreign policy it wouldn”t mean the violence would end. Well - obviously, plumping for peace doesn”t mean all the violent idiots out there are never going to kill anyone any more. But it does mean that with less violence going about, we can spot the violence a mile off and say ah - this isn”t good, and in the process distinguish ourselves from these other criminals. otherwise one is permanently in the subjective state of oh well i can kill some people because I have justification, but these people cannot come and kill me which is fine for a lot of us clearly! but some of would rather be honest about the whole malarkey. In any case this is the basis for “law and order” in ordinary society “within” the nation-state - you can”t go about “taking the law into your own hands” because if you do, you are as guilty as the other party. Anyway, this is obvious so the people who don”t get it aren”t really interested I suppose. Still the point remains that in trying to condemn terrorism for the shitty thing it is, state-sponsored violence gets in the way of being able to do this properly. Pure and simple that”s what it is. Not this business of “justifying” terrorism - (which is actually what the countries are trying to do) but precisely the opposite - condemn terrorism and violence for what it is. If countries want to go about being violent - then obviously we ordinary individuals have tried but have not been able to stop them. Pointing to the cycle of violence which makes it much harder to stop future violence is hardly “justifying” violence - precisely the opposite - you want to stop ALL kinds of violence! if you wanted to justify violence you wouldn”t be much interested in stopping the overall cycle. I guess a lot of people are just too dumb to see that or frankly = not interested in the overall picture. They could just be honest about that.
And “justification” of violence is neither here nor there ( in a moralizing world it might be ) for those of us who”re interested purely and simply in providing a suitable environment to live in and enjoy ourselves however best we can - it doesn”t matter. We just want peace. I”m not bothered about “oh this person”s violence was good and this person”s was evil - that good and evil dichotomy is frankly nonsense and “religious” if anything. All this moralizing again simply reminds me of the sort of thing that terrorists are supposed to be about. “Oh we have a glorious cause for our violence. Some say it”s democracy** ( hah ) and some say its their religion.” Oh great. I”m not interested in either excuse thanks very much - no shrapnel or shards of glass in my skin is what i”m interested in! And being able to live to savour tomorrow.

Is this sooo difficult to understand? Surely not.

** Amusing sidenote: { ha- i suppose soon we”ll be hearing calls for “banning” democracy because their proponents have resorted to violence in their pursuit of it - in a similar way we hear that religion must be banned because of all the people who”ve resorted to violence in their pursuit of it..} Golly its the sort of oxymoronic thing where anti-war protestors stage a “war” with the other side to make their point. Oh then of course people would say “one should ban pacifism”. Really there”s no end to amusement - sit back and view the world..as long as we don”t take it seriously, you could fill a book with “can you believe they actually thought this one up..

back to the Amnesty Intl findings..

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Having read the comments on the ‘perceptions of women’ post below- i had something to say which i didn’t want to simply reply to in the comment thread - i realized it’s quite a big deal so i thought i’d have a separate post.

Someone commented that ‘In a lot of instances, what the women was doing and wearing at the time of rape are key factors in the occurance.

Key factors indeed.

i suppose part of the problem is that a lot of people seem to think only young attractive women get raped. what about men- this happens a lot in prison and in the army- Hmm im sure what they were wearing were ‘key factors’.

Rape is about Violence. it’s something completely separate to ‘attracting attention’ and the ‘mating game’. it’s one thing to say people need to be aware of the fact that the way they dress and behave will attract varying amounts of attention/different kinds of attention. Sure - that’s a valid point in itself- but again - unrelated - it’s not going to explain rape, or indicate ‘mitigating circumstances’ . It might influence how many people you have asking for your phone no. or even trying it on with you. You could even say that women if they are wearing x or y that they are encouraging male attention. well fine - maybe they do - maybe they want to find a boyfriend, a one-night stand -whatever. Maybe they are looking for sex - so fucking what? If they meet a man they want to sleep with - fine - their business, no-one else’s. How can anyone ‘logically’ jump from the assumption that if someone is ‘looking for sex’ they have ‘encouraged’ rape. In case people haven’t realized - there’s a big difference between sex and rape. In connecting these two things people seem to be implying that they don’t think there is a big difference - and that’s really in my mind what is the big problem. The conflation of these two things is seriously problematic. I worry about the fact that lots of people don’t seem to think so.

So given the fact the media and popular culture of the day represent men as a bunch of ’sex-hungry’ people who are always on the lookout for sex - by this sort of thinking - any violent nasty person can come along and rape them and say - “well they’re a bunch of tarts, they’re looking for sex, they should realize that they ‘encouraged’ me to come and rape them. They should realize that their ‘attitude’ is a key factor in me raping them.”

Would that make a lot of sense ?!! Obviously it wouldn’t.

The problem with conflating sex and rape is that by doing so it is in a way rationalizing rape and diminishing its dysfunctional nature. Doh! you’d think you wouldn’t really have to point this out. ‘ oh there was some pretty young thing about why shouldnt i want to have sex with them’. Well i’m sorry that’s completely different to ‘oh there was some pretty young thing about why shouldnt i want to have sex with them. But they said no but i dont care so i will do it anyway’. The violence factor completely changes the dynamic. Studies of rape indicate that what it is generally about is power - power to overtake someone - and usually goes together with issues like feelings of powerlessness/inadequacy. I’m no expert but i think its fairly clear that there are usually some serious psychological problems involved.

quite a different kettle of fish.

perceptions of women

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One in three blames women for being raped :

” One in three people believes that women who behave flirtatiously are at least partially responsible if they are raped, a report published today reveals. A similar number think that women are partially or wholly responsible for being raped if they are drunk, and more than a quarter believe women are responsible if they wear sexy or revealing clothing”

well at least amnesty agree with me that this report’s findings are ’shocking’ but i suppose we shouldn’t be really surprised should we?

pah.

the robert swipe show has a very amusing post on this- check it out- i think its particularly interesting given the fact people seem to not want to acknowledge that women globally face these issues. yah it depends from place to place what ‘modesty/leading on..’ is - but there you have it.

then take a look at the BBC’s have your say forum on this topic…

following extract from that forum:

“I was in Wales at the weekend. Freezing cold and foggy Wales. The boys/men in the town were wrapped up in coats, but the girls were wanding around half naked. Do they not have a single brain cell? They were shivering, crouched over hobbling along with horrible blotchy skins. And why? Because they are so vacuous that they believe existence for the opposite sex is the number one priority.”

well ok it maybe isn’t so clever to wander around in the cold. but there’s no point making it sound like the boys are so smart. for goodness sake the girls are conforming to the ‘norm’ - which does happen to include things like well you’re going out so you’d better look like this - it might be different somewhere else, but most people follow the norm, and it so happens in society that seen to be attractive is very important.
And if it happened to be the norm for boys they’d be no doubt doing it too. ( not like a lot of them are able to stand up to peer pressure when it comes to drinking someone under the table, or whatever else it’s supposed to be ‘macho’ to do. )

anyway the other thing that amuses me is that a lot of what people have to say about this topic ( on the forum) makes them sound like a bunch of mullahs. There you go.

state of emergency

5

state of emergency for three months!

red alert

people are cunts

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thats it. ive said it. loud and clear. did you hear that you lot? every group out there has been violent and been on the receiving end of violence - i don”t see why some of these funny indian hindu fundamentalists think they should send links to “violence” against Hindus in Bangladesh - and that it will come as a surprise to me? Goodness as if i would defend that sort of despicable violence -and pretend it didnt happen! i thought the whole point of writing about this sort of stuff is that what ive seen all over the place - people behave in the same nasty way in groups against “other” groups, and that”s why its so important to realize that its all unnecessary. people everywhere keep behaving like cunts. wake up and smell the coffee.

Paris Riots..

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goodness the paris riots have been carrying on for the last week, more violence is erupting, and now apparently there have been riots across the country. oh dear. such places highlighted in news reports include Dijon, Rouen, and around Marseille.

the bbc news articles indicate that the unrest was sparked by the ‘deaths of two teenagers of African origin’.

clearly there is a lot of trouble afoot, needless to say. the indication from news sources is that a lot of the rioters are ‘North African Muslims’ , ‘locally-born French citizens’ “who feel that poverty, sub-standard housing, high unemployment and discrimination give the lie to France’s Republican principles of liberty, equality and fraternity”. Apparently the police “hurled a tear gas canister - some believe deliberately - into the Bilal mosque in the Paris suburb of Clichy, on Sunday evening” ..and this has added to the already bubbling mix.

{ i say apparently - frankly since i’m not there and you can’t ever trust what the media says really - and especially in violent situations no-one really knows what’s been going on and who’s doing what so i keep an open mind. }

the fact that it’s eid hasn’t managed to put a stopper to the violence.

but anyway, of course there’s a big fuss from all sides. Sigh. Le Figaro newspaper quoted right-wing former interior minister Charles Pasqua as asking Chirac “to account to the nation,” and France’s anti-immigrant National Front leader, Monsieur Jean-Marie Le Pen, said “France is under attack from hordes of foreigners”.

so some things don’t change. the simmering pot explodes and everyone will blame everybody else. very sad. the right-wing anti-immigration crew who think of ‘assimilation’ as a perfectly normal concept - and then there people who think that they are being ‘othered’ -and then other people in the middle..

Sounds to me pretty similar to most of the trouble in history: You - you’re different. you must be more like us. oh im different? really? [well i shall be different then] well if you’re different, you’re not one of us . You must be like one of us. and it goes on and on and then what a surprise - someone kills someone else. Oh i said they were trouble didnt i? We must kill ‘them’. oh yes - you kill us - you are against ‘us’ . [ fine we may put up with it now - but then maybe we'll go somewhere else and repeat the aggression ..and pass it along]

any of this sound familiar to anyone?

fugly???

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really the things you find out there! so for some reason i manage to get on to TIME magazine”s top 50 “coolest sites of 2005″ . And what do you find under the top 50 blogs? well you find one site…go fug yourself” - and you think - eh? ” fugly” is supposed to be “frightfully ugly” - and you guessed it - its a variation of “oh lets slag the celebrities off for wearing x y or z”

goodness i realized that “ordinary” people have to get their kicks somehow and somewhere, but who even finds such silly petty bitchiness funny, or amusing? its not even witty, its just petty.

really women are their own enemies. people always say things about women wanting to look a certain way for the approval of “men” . pah - ha ha! as far as i”ve been able to see tis the women out there “regulating” each other. ( and the natural extension of this is of course the woman”s magazine. Ah! just in case you hadn”t been inculcated by your “friends”..) oh shock horror! if you try not to participate in this regulation - you turn into a proper outcast. in this context - single-sex schools can be singled out for exacerbating this problem: they ought to be abolished! - the no. of women you meet who went to one who are filled with dreadful stories of how they were made to feel terrible for looking/wearing x, y, z. ( and of course, later on in life they like to pass the buck along - so lovely of them..must share the goodwill around and all that sort of thing) Talk about conformity - you are always reading about “fashion faux pas” - what the hell is that? you wear what you wear what you want to wear. if people don”t like it - tough that”s their problem! why do they presume to think that because they go around “dressing for approval” the rest of us are as well? and why presume that they”re doing us a favour by pointing out such “mistakes” ? its presumptuous because its assuming that everyone else is “buying in” to your “belief system” - which frankly as far as i can see is the problem people have with “religious people”. Hah - as you can see its more a function of conventionality and conformity than just a feature of “relgious people”. of course some say fashion is a kind of religion so there you go. if you dare to break the “code” then of course you must be made to be aware of it and perform penance ( read: social ostracization)

sisterhood my foot. spitehood more like. funnily enough these fug people don”t allow comments on their blog..ooh i wonder why> perhaps in the interests of equality they ought to show us what they”re wearing everyday/what they look like??

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