Dear Michaela MacMoor:

It’s the sort of personal question I do not answer via any social media, not even with someone who has known me personally for decades; not even with family (exception: live, public posts).

I don’t mean to exclude you though of course, having never met and neither of us wishing to push oneself upon the other in defiance or disrespect of personal boundaries.

Michelle, you say (accuse) that I am "caught up" in something, and you ask is if you had rights: WHAT IS IT...?! The only singular thing I am caught up in is this DM (or “PM”) exchange. 

Why do you ask what I’m doing?

I tell you: I do not communicate online in private.

Ever.

In order to have peace between us, must we resort to platform UXUI block/mute? Neither of us is anything like that stupid or ornery; I know this. You have been utterly respectful, except for the spike of curiosity just displayed: only just now.

It is the least and easiest thing in the world to say what I mean. Works with complete and utter strangers. Works with blood. Works with water. Works even with my own hard spirit.

____________

Gin, of course. Trumps! 

TRUMPS everything in any glass ever raised to the king, queen, or Lorde. Now that’s a matter of longstanding public knowledge, but a bit early in the day for that!

Another matter of longstanding public knowledge:

Coffee’s on. 

Good morning and cheers off. 

Get The Flag Out Of The Pledge.

You know what's seriously weird? The idea of pledging allegiance to a flag. Yes, of course they do add in the "...and to the Republic for which it stands," but why even put the flag in there at all? Who cares, the flag. Piece of cloth! I mean, it's old, and it's glorious, I KNOW. I love the thing, myself - I salute it on its many self-evident and resplendent merits! I'm a great lover of banners, sigils and symbols, and the power they have to carry meaning. I love that!

But to pledge allegiance to it?

It's a bizarre call. Swearing an oath to protect or uphold the Constitution, now, that's a pledge with some meaning to it. The Constitution does more than stand for something. It enumerates rights. It lays down guarantees. It's a sheet of paper, maybe, but its words pin down what is best and to the greatest benefit of all - it is an anchor, not a pennant. It doesn't just flap in the breeze. To pledge allegiance to a FLAG? ABSURD!! Might was well say, "I pledge allegiance to Air Force One, to Mount Rushmore and the Lincoln Memorial, and to the Republic with which these things are generally associated..." WHO DOES THIS? Who pledges allegiance to a symbol? Far more meaningfully these days, in a cynical sense we might indeed stand with hand on heart, and declare: "I pledge allegiance to the Almighty Buck, and to the Republic by whose full faith and credit it is backed..."

You know? You know what I'm saying? Are people feeling me on this one? Just flip the two, and see how dumb it sounds to even bother to include the flag in there. "I pledge allegiance to the Republic of the United States of America, and...also to the flag, which is used to represent it visually..." What does that add? What does that add?

The flag does NOT belong in the pledge.

Look, even if you want to say "Hey buddy, the use of flag here is pretty clearly intended as metonymy" - nice try! You're still so off-base, there, you might as well be trying to play cricket on a basketball court. THAT is how off-base you are - FIGURATIVELY. Because if it's true what you say, that the flag is clearly meant as metonymy, then the shout out to the Republic is just-as-clearly redundant.

The Vaccination Debate!

Well, the point is there is no medical intervention without risk. But immunization for most major contagious diseases is SO MUCH provably greater benefit vs. miniscule risk, compared to other interventions. Benefit hugely first for the patient - the one immunized; benefit HUGELY second, for every human being they come in contact with.

Every un-inoculated person is a plague vector, for whatever they missed their shots on. And these chumps, these poor sacrifices, these burnt offerings offered up by their parents on an altar of ignorant nay-sayage, these children - left unprotected just to prove some political point about "we don't let the government tell US" - these kids will burn. Across every vector that intersects them, fire is coming, torches are already lit - polio, measles, other preventable diseases will burn through them and every kid whose asshole, incompetent, ACTIVELY EVIL PARENTS have chosen to sacrifice THEIR CHILD to this utterly childish myth, this wish that "we good, gov't evil, always..."

These poor kids will burn. And I hope when every single one of these pandemics comes, the now childless parents will be rounded up and shot like the christian scientists they fucking are. It is god damn mother fucking murder. It is criminal negligence, and it's bad enough that under some interpretations, we let you kill your own kids - but by slacking on inoculation requirements, we let parents kill others' kids too. Breeding disease vectors, raising up your offspring for the express purpose to convey plague. "Good job!"

Opt out of that.

You won't be able to. The check's already in the mail, this won't be about opinion anymore. Within this now living adult generation, that check - more than one of them - is already, brutally, mailed. And with plenty of cold sick death in the germ bank to draw against.

You want to leave your kids un-vaccinated? Well, we apparently give you that right. Know what I say? You just did the gene pool a favor. Your kids will burn, and that was your choice.

Autism my ass. Apart from the five times repeatably-proven fact that there is no link between vaccination and autism, the plagues these vaccinations protect your kid - and every kid your kid touches - against make autism look like a birthday present.

I hope your kid fucking dies, you barbarian luddite. But in the process of conducting the disease you actively chose to give your kid, I hope that at least your dead kid doesn't take out the six next kids, too. There are a lot of kids out here who don't even have access to the medicine you haughtily spurn. And every little bit of this is not on your kid.

It's on you.

A Proposed War on Proposed Moral Equivalents Of War

Language has dangerous power to reframe a problem in terms that will lend legitimacy to absolutist (or "zero-tolerance") solutions. This is the climate, day, and age of The Moral Equivalent of War.

Now I haven't read the book of the same title (I started it...it's a little dry...), but the idea is clear, and has wide currency. Establishing a problem as a moral equivalent to war is a sort of holy grail for policymakers: to spin the struggle they're selling, to get us to buy it at a level where we accept that "all is fair" in that fight, because it is war - or the moral equivalent of war. And so it cries out for all means necessary.

Once we accept that a thing Not War can be equivalent to the horror, tragedy, degredation and depredations of war, we soon find how easy it is to declare as many as we want to. Any cause at all can be trumped up to this level, if only people are willing to buy the tradeoff that is being sold.

Much is at stake in that tradeoff. Declared wars on drugs, terror, and obesity are far more than rhetorical. The insidious attempt to get people to believe the scale of the problem is one that justifies all means pays off big, for the demagogues and policy jockeys. Once you accept the scale of the problem justifies all means, next you may find that unless you have better means handy, you will have to accept their means.

An atrocity on our side? Ahhh that's justified, because what we're fighting is worse, and we "have to." Liberty? Oh, we needed to curtail liberty, for now, because something more important came up. Nah, those protections against surveillance? You weren't really doing anything with those. We need the latitude - don't you WANT the illusion of safety? No, you can't get the effective over-the-counter cold remedy anymore, people were using it to make drugs. Don't you WANT the appearance of something being done? No, you can't enjoy your favorite meal out anymore - the chef has been legally prohibited from adding salt during the preparation of the meal. PEOPLE ARE DYING OF BAD HEALTH! YOUR YUM is MURDERING THEM! Tighten your belts, buy war bonds and keep the home fires burning. YOU MUST ACCEPT THE MEANS WE PROPOSE. Our means won't achieve the end we say, but they will achieve yours.

The end of your life, maybe. Liberty, definitely. Pursuit of happiness, mostly. Our means will achieve our most cherished ends: to increase our control. To increase the approved uses of power - publicly approved, nothing sneaky! To win acceptance of the idea that we, government, need to be able in a crisis to void any human being necessary, for the greater good. And then, to expand the idea of crisis until it covers...whatever is necessary. Once you've allowed one moral equivalent to war, you'll allow them all.

Or maybe you don't realize the magnitude of this crisis! 250,000 to 300,000 people die every day. Something must be done. Don't worry, we'll tell you what must be done. You signed away your veto power years ago, didn't you? "Greatest good for the greatest people"? As decided by...well, who did you think?

As decided by those in charge. In crisis, we'll decide the greatest good for you. We've all agreed on "whatever is necessary." Never mind your rights, or anyone else's. All tough calls will be made exactly as we please. This is WAR, people.

We know what to do. All you needed to do was consent that the people don't. Don't know what to do. Aren't competent to know what to do. An individual can't control itself. It needs to be controlled. Happy to help.

Oh, we know exactly what to do in every situation: whatever we want. Whatever we say: whatever is necessary. Fire up the Permanent Emergency Code, start prosecuting people for antisocial sex! Okay.

Reality break.

There is no moral equivalent to war.

None. Nothing on earth remotely approaches to that horror. The only way to get something to approach to it is if you can convince people to go along with....whatever is necessary. If you can do that, you will be able to make a very great many things quite as horrific as war itself. You will be able to make pretty much anything as horrific as war, with that kind of support from the public.

Where policymakers ratchet up stakes to the point the public at large abdicates personal responsibility (something all too many of them are all too willing to do), yielding up all the call to authority - you could characterize it as paternalism. To be more precise, call it a demagogracy. To be exact, there's no better term than tyranny.

War, Or Something Like It.

I wonder if all peoples who consider themselves civilized could agree that war is stupid, horrible and to be avoided as it is? Even wars declared by nations, and conducted according to the conventions of war as agreed by the global community of nations - even such war as that is terrible, horrific, disgusting. War is bad enough.

But when someone steps forth to sanction "war" not declared by a nation or against a nation but rather, "war" declared by individuals or groups of activists - I confess I despair. I waver. I begin to consider giving up all my ideals, rather than live in a world where that can be made true.

It can be made true, if we allow war to be redefined in this way: it will be true. Such support, if carried, will make it true.

As a last ditch effort, I feel I'd have to advocate (or at least, sanction) a tyranny. To prevent that worst coming true. Said tyranny should keep every other single one of our rights in place! Including all right to criticize the governments of nations, including one's own. This tyranny would be very focused, targeted: an Amendment would be passed, making it overtly legal for the government to abduct, try, and murder the irresponsible scumbag who supports and justifies terrorism.

Terrorism, put plainly, is to kill a bystander/secondary target in order to make a statement to the primary target. That statement is designed to sow fear in the enemy's populace, and to destabilize the enemy's power structure.

Terrorism's justification could be stated thus:

"A personal act of war is an appropriate response for whatever injustice offends us."

Support for terrorism would be anyone claiming the above.

Under my proposal, people offering such support and justification to terrorism would be eligible for government abduction, prosecution, and public murder. I won't dignify the acts of a tyranny with niceties like "execution." Still it's a small price to pay, to kill those who openly support and offer justification to terrorism. Leave all the rest of free speech in place, just make that one exemption - better that than giving up on the whole thing, right? Because if such justification is countenanced, if such support is carried, is made generally accepted, then an act of personal, political war becomes appropriate response to whatever you like. Whatever you hate.

We can't survive that.

War is bad enough when we restrict it to declaration by nation against nation, and expect that it shall be conducted according to convention - or else violations of convention may be subject to prosecution under legally-convened war crimes tribunals. Even such "civilized" war is horrific. The world can't survive us extending the envelope of war to personal (non-officially-publicly-state-sanctioned) political vendettas.

Mind you, it would be a terrible state of affairs, a tyranny such as the one I propose. It would mean scumbags who justify that maybe terrorists have a good point would have to fear for their lives, if investigators could track them down and tie them to their words (and of course, if their statements could be proven to have been made after the Amendment when through - no retroactive application of penalties to what was then not a crime!). Even with clear limitations laid out, I fear the slippery slope that could take further liberties from us. That slope leads to a nasty cliff.

But at least we'd have the chance of climbing back from it. The slippery slope of allowing private moral justifications as equivalent to war leads to an abyss. There is no bottom, no climbing back.

The Bomb-Throwing Anarchist

I am scared to see this happening again. I always wonder why stuff like this stopped happening, to be honest. At least, stopped happening with regularity.

I mean, it was in the late 1880s and '90s, all the way into and through the early prewar 1900s and '10s, with powerful explosives becoming widely understood and easy to make and use, when bomb outrages first became - well, not common maybe, but common enough to make the hated and feared archetype (stereotype?) of the "bomb-throwing anarchist" as prevalent then as the hated and feared archetypes of "mass-murder-by-any-means-available fanatical terrorist," or "bullet-strewing unhinged troubled youth" are prevalent now.

What scares me is, as far as I can tell, effective measures were never brought to bear to stop the bomb-throwing anarchist. I mean, sure: investigations conducted, culprits identified where possible, books thrown - but there never really seemed to be anything we ever came up with to "make them stop." They just kind of tapered off. My personal theory was, maybe when the Great War and the Spanish Flu Epidemic came along, people got distracted by outrages and tragedies of far huger scale. By the time WWII came and went, most of those then living had experienced an overdose of aggression, and the death of most ideals as things worth killing for. A numbed world, glad just to get through to some kind of peace, was more than ready to sublimate hatreds into playing some role or another in the coming cold war. The bomb-throwing anarchist - pretty stupid-looking, by comparison with pandemic, blitzkreig, systematic genocide and nuclear annihilation - just more or less seems to have...stopped. Stopped being an issue, at least.

As a non-bomb-thrower with some pacifist anarchist sympathies, I'm glad the bomb-throwing anarchist per se pretty much went away. But eventually, anti-established-powers sentiment began welling up in its new guise of "terrorist." Whether Irish, Semetic, Balkan or otherwise, a terrorist is one who attacks a bystander/secondary target to cause fear in and destablize the primary target. You'll note: pretty much the same as what the bomb-throwing anarchist attempted to do. What is the difference, really?

Sadly, as far as I can tell, we have never come up with any really good way to stop it, recently or in past times. We just waited it out, the world went on, other horrible shit happened and it went away. When it came back, we relabeled it "terrorism" and blamed religion. Everyone knows religion is a problem no one wants to try to solve! Blaming something on religion is a get-out-of-solving-the-problem-free card. As if problems in the Middle East (or Ireland) don't have their strong roots in rulership and ownership wrangles - in hard and ugly political and economic realities.

"Wait and see if it goes away" isn't much of an action plan to be comfortable with. Nor is pretending that killing bunches of strangers over claimed reason X is any better than killing bunches of strangers over any claimed reason why.

I don't know what to say, except this was disgusting. The Boston Marathon. Holy hell, why is that even on anyone's list of things to target? What can we do?

Investigate, I guess. Identify culprits where possible. Throw the book. I dearly hope we catch the bastards responsible for this. Whether acting alone or supported by a group, I hope we catch the bastards responsible - and if they weren't acting alone, I hope we go after and get as many of the supporters as we can find additionally responsible, under the law. It's a hard thing to be, legal.

Every bomb-throwing anarchist attempted to terrify. Every death-dealing terrorist attempts to sow anarchy. The goal is always the same: to destabilize and undermine the power structure of the enemy population. To show its people that their power structure is powerless to stop the outrages. To make the people, terrified, clamor for any new power structure that can "protect them." Perhaps a fundamentalist power structure could protect us? Perhaps a fascist power structure can do it?

The only way they win is if we let them change who we are.

A Word On The Establishment Clause

The so-called "Establishment Clause" of the 1st Amendment protects all of us - those who are religious, and those who are not - from a government establishment of religion. The 1st Amendment's protection from government interference in any person's religion is inextricably bound to its prohibition against governmental establishment of [ some person's ] religion. Of all points government can pronounce upon, there are no significant points on which all major religions unite. Why, some religions even sanctify murder - with damnable and abominable justifications!

Now I personally believe there is only one blasphemy. It is: "God says kill." However, I wouldn't enshrine even this into the Constitution. Why?

Well first, I trust God. Great Lord God will strike those blasphemers down, or failing that, God will judge them eternally - each according to the justice God has. In the meantime, I say: "Let 'em all live! And let God sort 'em out."

Second, because there's no need to enshrine sins. We already have the crime of murder. God can prosecute sins: let go, and let God. Meanwhile, we have the crime of murder. Murder includes all killings of homo sapiens not officially sanctioned by government. Nice, right? There are a ton of ways to get your killing of a homo sapiens sanctioned by the government - check your federal, state and municipal codes of law for details. Yet God-based killings probably don't ever meet the criteria for government sanctioned approval. If someone wants to test it in a given case, of course it falls to the D.A., the judge and the jury - but ultimately, I doubt they will find in law any blessing for a killing whose sole claimed basis is supernatural ("God says!").

For one thing, the Establishment Clause of the 1st Amendment forbids laws whose basis consists solely in the supernatural.

So it would be so weird if there were an exemption on the books for a specific type of killing where "God says." Now when I say "Let 'em all live! And let God sort 'em out," I don't mean I'm against letting them live behind bars. Society can show basis to deprive a person of liberty, if they meet the usual and not-too-cruel standards. If accused, tried, and found guilty - the usual penalty is fair to apply. Forfeit liberty - fine. Forfeit property - fine, literally. Throw the book.

We don't need God-based law to put someone away. Any one of those "render unto Caesar" type laws will work. We have tons of these, and the law prohibiting murder is one of them. It's one of the easiest of all laws to justify, even using purely secular means. There's ample and compelling non-supernatural basis, to demonstrate the compelling necessity of murder being a crime.

Which is a very important point. Because in a society where there is liberty, no law of prohibition, no law of confiscation, no law of compulsion can be allowed - except where government can show the compelling necessity of that law.

In our society, in our Revolution which continues to roll, the 1st Amendment and its Establishment Clause forbids that government make any establishment of law whose basis consists solely in the supernatural. For the protection of the religious and the non-religious alike, law whose basis consists solely in some person's or persons' idea of what God wants is invalid. Such law is very simply and clearly, an establishment of religion - and nothing else.

Get that shit out of here.