The Nightmare of Capitalism

"For us capitalism is not a dream to be pursued, but a nightmare come true. Our challenge lies not in privatizing the state but in deprivatizing it. Our states have been bought up at bargain prices by the owners of the land, the banks, and everything else. And for us, the market is nothing more than a pirate ship - the greater its freedom, the worse its behavior. The local market and the world market. The world market robs us with both hands. The commercial hand keeps buying from us ever cheaper and selling to us ever dearer. The financial hand, which lends us our own money, keeps paying us less and charging us more. 

"We live in a region of European prices and African wages, where capitalism acts like the kind of man who says, 'I'm so fond of poor people that I never think there are enough of them.' In Brazil alone, for example, the system kills a thousand children a day by disease or hunger. With or without elections, capitalism in Latin America is antidemocratic - most people are prisoners of need, doomed to isolation and violence. Hunger lies, violence lies:  they claim to be part of nature, they pretend to belong to the natural order of things. When that 'natural order' becomes disorderly, the military steps in, hooded or barefaced. As they say in Colombia:  'The cost of living goes up and up, and the value of life goes down and down.'"

-----Eduardo Galeano, "We Say No - Chronicles 1963-1991" p. 278

Legalienate Intercepts "The Sludge Report"

Things Fake News Won’t Dare Tell You

All accusers of Harvey Weinstein are anti-semitic, holocaust denying, jew hating criminals.

Shocking investigation of Trump links to Putin reveals shocking news that Monica Lewinsky and Bill Clinton shockingly employed Russian hackers to shockingly defeat Hillary.

New survey reveals that people who scratch their butts and pick their noses with the same unwashed finger are more likely to vote for lesser evils and teach economics at graduate schools.

Neo-Fascist White Supremacist Racist Psych-Support group formed for all media stars, starlets and wannabes not sexually compromised by Weinstein, Cosby, O’Reilly and others. Called “You Are Attractive and Gifted, Too!” the group offers its services only to registered voters.

Washington insiders make astounding discovery that just as pimps deal in dollars for sex, political pimps deal in dollars for democracy.

Supreme Court rules that marriage between neo-cons and neo-libs of opposite, same or neither sex is not only constitutionally protected but an absolute necessity in preserving global capitalism, private profits, the free market and all else that we hold sacred.

Person of no color elected president of new Republica of Democratica asks to be identified as “shim” and is proud to be first Albino of gender-fluid unknown parents to achieve high office on a platform of free pet food, book burning, meat eating and politely conducted wars.

Bulletin! Russian Plot To Enable Americans To Think

• This Just In From The Garlic
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• CNN: Special Counsel Robert Mueller has filed first charges in Russia investigation
  
• Breaking (from CNN): First charges filed in Mueller investigation 

The American Ministry of  The Mundane has presented evidence from an unimpeachable source - a Russian pimp who has asked for sanctuary from Putin's Gulag - that indicates numerous Russian inspired presentations of  critical thought seen on TV applied to the American Democratic System which is based on the least thought possible.

" We must rally around the flag as never before" said former presidents Obama and Bush in a joint statement made while holding hands  " and stop this attack on American political ignorance before it goes any further and causes more harm to sales of  guns, pet food , birth control and narcotic pills and the artificial intelligence that makes our colleges and universities expensive and useless, in the tradition of our founding fathers who had to get slaves to write the constitution because their hands were so bloody from beating their wives, boyfriends and gender fluid pets  the document would have looked awful with all that blood on it."

The shocking news caused an immediate cessation of the war on terror in the middle east to  focus all american power on the war on consciousness being waged all over the world, especially in  New York, Los Angeles, Tel Aviv, and Hoboken New Jersey.

Stay Tuned!!!

Dumb Means Dumb: Fighting Rape By Expanding Its Definition

“What dimwitted sort of feminism wants to shelter women from the richness of their own mistakes? . . . . Self-induced helplessness isn’t gender progress.”

-------Laura Kipness, Unwanted Advances – Sexual Paranoia Comes to Campus

Now that the story of a Hollywood producer (Harvey Weinstein) using his position for sexual abuse of women has come to light (We at Legalienate were deeply shocked to learn that rich celebrities get sex on demand from Hollywood starlets. Who knew?), indignant calls to dispense with “rape culture” are once again the order of the day. Men are urged to “stand with” women and “always believe” the accuser in rape cases, because women rarely lie about rape, and the damage done to them in doubting their stories is far more serious than the lesser effects to men falsely accused. As activist and commentator Zerlina Maxwell put it in a 2014 Washington Post article, “We should believe as a matter of default what an accuser says. Ultimately, the costs of wrongly disbelieving a survivor far outweigh the costs of calling someone a rapist.” This comment was made in reference to a University of Virginia rape case that turned out to be based on a false accusation. Even after this was proven, Maxwell continued to insist that all accusations of rape be believed.

Of course, we’ve already tried believing - “as a matter of default” - women who claimed to have been raped, and it didn’t turn out too well. From the 1890s to the civil rights era thousands of black men falsely accused of rape were lynched in the South, and all black men feared being similarly treated. Surely it is a perverse sort of utilitarianism to suggest that the suffering of those men – tortured, mutilated, and burned - was relatively unimportant compared with that of actual rape victims when their stories are not believed. Who can make such judgments?

Unfortunately, this is hardly an isolated instance of dogmatic absurdity on this topic. At U.S. universities, definitions of rape have become ever more elastic over the years, shifting from forced penetration to lack of “affirmative consent,” a concept fraught with ambiguity. Furthermore, since college social life is saturated in alcohol, and alcohol is very often used precisely in order to eliminate the need to make a completely conscious decision about sex (assuming a fully conscious decision is possible about anything), we end up insisting that the most spontaneous of human activities justify itself on completely deliberate grounds. This peculiar outcome is in turn the product of an odd alliance of “social justice” crusaders and power-grabbing administrators ludicrously attempting to micromanage the sex lives of horny college students via careful bureaucratic control. Acts that are pleasurable only when spontaneous and uninhibited are now subject to long “affirmative consent” checklists that attempt to ban any behavior associated with an unpleasant outcome, even if the unpleasantness only becomes apparent retroactively.

In one famous case, (Emma Sulkowicz, the “mattress girl”) a Columbia student waited eight months to file a rape accusation against a fellow student she had had consensual sex with multiple times, while sending him dozens of explicitly sexual text messages, including "I wuv you so much," and  “f—k me in the butt,” even continuing friendly communication after the alleged rape occurred. Though begging to be sodomized would appear to be quite enthusiastic sexual consent, feminist activists insist to this day that Sulkowicz’s case was clearly one of rape.

Matters are now so out of hand that college students find themselves being urged to take a picture of their signed contracts granting "affirmative consent" to engage in sex (what a turn on!), in order to prove that the sex is free and voluntary for both parties. This has become necessary at least in part because of the many cases of retrospective regrets leading to assault and rape accusations well after the fact. These accusations are in turn guided by feminist ideology claiming that a gross power imbalance between men and women often disguises assault or rape as consensual intercourse even to those who least suspect this. Gender wage inequity alone can allegedly render women sexually helpless, so the theory goes, as men enjoy greater disposable incomes with which to make sex happen on their own terms. Even a friendly drink is often construed as though it were the equivalent of a forced injection of heroin, deliberately designed to incapacitate its victim.

Does any of this really make sense?  Suppose someone were to make similar claims about “voluntary” employment under capitalism, to wit:

I've been re-reading Das Kapital recently, and I now realize I've been economically raped by every employer I've ever had, going back decades, and I want to collect! I never truly gave voluntary consent to work for the wages they paid, because power relations were grossly unequal between us and outcomes hopelessly skewed by extractive "rape culture" instituted centuries ago by owners of capital who can only be described as sheer beasts. According to objective calculations by my lawyer I should long since have been made a billionaire. It's payday - retroactive!

This kind of “thinking” has unfortunately led to rampant sexual paranoia on U.S. campuses, with professors living in dread of inadvertent comments spiraling into career-ending disaster. Anything associated with sex – a joke, a risqué comment - is dangerous, and if one insists on outdated notions of inviolable constitutional protections against arbitrary punishment, this can only mean that one is an apologist for “rape culture”, in the same way that raising questions about the canonical Holocaust makes one a “Holocaust Denier.” Obviously, this is crippling to free intellectual inquiry, the supposed mission of universities, but emotions run so high on such topics that few people notice and even fewer care.

Furthermore, as with the canonical Holocaust, a “preponderance of evidence” cumulative proof rather than tight deductive logic is used to determine what the truth is. And just how is “preponderance” determined? By a quantity of detail in the accusation, though it’s not clear why a more detailed accusation has to be truer than a less detailed one. In other words, it’s a matter of how much mud can be thrown against the wall, not whether any of it sticks.

Ironically, the image of women given to us by many feminists in alleged justification of all this is the proverbial helpless damsel-in-distress incapable of defending herself, and utterly without obligation to do so. In fact, for this type of feminist, even to suggest that women take preventive action against predatory males is to make oneself part of the problem rather than the solution. After all, it is men who must learn to “not rape,” not women who need to learn self-defense.

Is there any reason we can’t do both? The fact that robbers ought to learn not to rob is not generally thought to be a justification for banks to leave their vaults unlocked at night. Obviously, women would be considerably better off if male predators routinely faced stern verbal challenges to their unwanted advances, followed by swift physical damage if these went unheeded, just as gay males have benefited from gay bashers getting beaten up by gay men they mistook for hapless victims. Word spreads, and gay bashing wannabes learn a bit of self-restraint.

In any case, educational efforts to make men strive for “affirmative consent” before having sex have failed to reduce the incidence of rape on campus, though they have made it easier to punish men, even when they are innocent. Innocent men (often teenagers) are railroaded out of university, their academic and vocational careers ruined before they start. But this allegedly doesn't matter, because we must only believe their accusers, even when they are lying. If this is feminism, feminism no longer has anything to do with justice.

But all is not lost. Like so many other tragic features of life in the money-mad U.S.A., anti-rape paraphernalia sells, and is now bringing forth what feminist Laura Kipnis calls the “sexual assault industrial complex,” replete with alarming but questionable assault statistics (to guarantee continued funding), assault prevention smart phone apps, online training classes, web-based platforms to navigate sexual assaults and the reports made about them. By now, every school in the country is required to conduct trainings and surveys, which virtually guarantees that Anti-Rape Culture Inc. will be a rapidly growing industry with high profit potential for years to come.

Sources:

Laura Kipnis, “Unwanted Advances – Sexual Paranoia Comes to Campus” (Harper Collins: 2017)

Ann Coulter, “To Say, ‘Stop Raping Me!’ In English, Press ‘1’ Now,” May 10, 2017 www.anncoulter.com

Batya Ungar-Sargon, “In 2014, the Campus Rape Debate Drowned Out More Important Feminist Issues,” The New Republic, December 30, 2014

Zerlina Maxwell, “No  Matter What Jackie Said, We Should Automatically Believe Rape Claims,” Washington Post, December 6, 2014

Emily Yoffe, "The Uncomfortable Truth About Campus Rape Policy,” The Atlantic, September 6, 2017

Genocide and Competitive Victimhood: "I'm More Pathetic Than You" is a Chump's Game

One of the wonders of the internet is getting regular updates on political outrages from around the world. Part of this week's trawl relates to "braid-chopping" in Kashmir, hair crime not as bad as scalping (clearly), but certainly as serious (I'm told) as forcibly cutting off the long locks of Chinese immigrants in the years of yellow peril hysteria.

Such stories are the steady product of networks of political "radicals" apparently striving to become the best-informed atrocity buffs in the semi-free world. But to what end? The endless search for the most discrediting detail in capitalist/imperial brutality is a fool's errand, somewhat like trying to determine which food conglomerate has the crunch, crunch, crunchiest pickles or the crisp, crisp, crispiest potato chips. These are technical details, a distraction from the main story. Who has the evil, evil, evilest genocide? There is no reason to investigate or even care. The Holocaust Industry claims, via the homicidal gas chambers thesis, that the "evilest" genocide was committed against Jews during WWII; in fact, purists insist that it's the only true genocide in history, a notion that simply gives Israel unmatched political capital to commit endless atrocities.

Competitive victimhood may ultimately force us to retire the word genocide from our political lexicon, as it seems to distort and distract more than illuminate. For example, David Stannard's "American Holocaust" makes clear that the "genocide" against the Indians of the Americas was a far more thorough elimination of peoples than what the Nazis accomplished, but it is rarely described this way, nor does it have anywhere near the stature of Jewish suffering under Hitler. And this is because organized Jewry has a patent on genocide. (See Deborah Lipstadt's "Denying the Holocaust" for an example of the Jewish exclusivist dogma that reigns supreme in victim studies.)

Even Stannard seems to recognize this, albeit unconsciously, for about half-way into his well-researched tome he starts quoting Elie Wiesel - favorably - without the slightest awareness that the man is a charlatan. In fact, Stannard goes to considerable lengths to imitate the Wiesel style, talking about literal rivers of human blood in the wake of Spanish massacres in the same way that Wiesel refers to geysers of blood spurting several feet in the air in the wake of Nazi atrocities in Europe. Sure.

The obsession with tit-slicing, baby-skewering, entrail-oozing, testicle-chopping horror, as though eliminating entire societies without such sickening details wouldn't be horrible enough, no doubt owes a great deal to centuries of Christian descriptions of the writhing of the damned in Hell. St. Thomas Aquinas described the ability to peer over the battlements of Hell to watch sinners being tortured for all eternity as the chief delight of being in Heaven. (This perspective makes it extremely difficult to morally distinguish the saved and the wicked.)

 Seven-and-a-half centuries after Aquinas we seem to regard one of the principal satisfactions of dissent as the opportunity to search out and relish knowledge of utmost depravity.  Sadly, we are increasingly atrocity-obsessed and analytically deficient, unaware that the search for the most diabolic form of evil is just another kind of status seeking via competitive victimhood. This cannot lead to peace, only further horrors.

 

Edward Abbey Vs. Liberal Dogma on Immigration

To The New York Review of Books, 12/17/81:

             “John M. Crewdson’s review of Miller’s On the Border and Hansens’s The Border Economy, though lengthy, provides little essential information on the illegal immigration problem, and misinterprets what information it does provide. Those of us who actually live in the U.S.-Mexican border region owe it to other readers of the NYR to correct Mr. Crewdson’s misunderstandings and fill in his lacunae.

            “It is absurd, for example, for Mr. Crewdson to repeat Tom Miller’s facetious ‘calculation’ that it would take two and a half million men, standing shoulder to shoulder, to close the Mexican border to illegal aliens. In fact most of the border runs through flat, wide open, sparsely vegetated desert country. Except for the far-scattered towns and cities, most of the border could be easily patrolled and easily ‘sealed’; a force of twenty thousand, or ten men per mile, properly armed and equipped, would have no difficulty – short of a military attack – in keeping out unwelcome intruders. In and near the few towns and cities a physical barrier is obviously needed, of the type routinely used everywhere else to restrict and control access. People do not cut holes through fences when the fences are watched and guarded.

            “Furthermore, there is widespread popular support for closing our southern border to the Latino invasion. A recent NPR [National Public Radio] broadcast (the All Things Considered program) cited various national polls indicating that 80 to 90 percent of Americans now object strongly to these mass immigrations from Mexico and other Hispanic countries. A poll by Arizona’s Senator DeConcini revealed that 79 percent of his constituents (and this in a state with a large and rapidly growing Hispanic population) want the illegal aliens deported and the immigration laws strictly enforced.

            “No doubt there is an element of ethnic chauvinism in this hostility to Mexicans et al. – and that element will grow violent and much larger if the influx continues – but the sentiment is based on the clear awareness that these aliens do indeed take jobs away from American citizens and that the estimated ten billion dollars remitted annually from Mexican aliens to their relatives still in Mexico is money that should be going into the pockets of American workers.

            “To say, as Mr. Crewdson does, that the presence of these foreign millions ‘creates’ employment for American workers is [in line with] the magical economics of Reagan & Co., that wondrous world wherein food is produced in supermarkets and rabbits are born in hats. If, as Mr. Crewdson seems to believe, the proliferation of human bodies somehow ‘creates’ new wealth for all, then Mexico would be a rich nation without need to push its surplus population northward, and India and China would be the richest nations on earth.

            “The actual reason why our immigration laws are not enforced is simple, obvious and well known, (though seldom mentioned in polite print): there are small but powerful groups on both sides of the border who benefit from this expanding northerly migration.

            “Cui bono? Is now as always the appropriate question, and the answer is, first, American employers in all fields, from industrialized agriculture to factory manufacturing, who thrive on this unlimited supply of cheap, docile, non-union labor. One simple way to halt the alien incursion would be to penalize employers, with jail sentences if necessary, who hire illegal aliens. Simple but politically unlikely to be enforced; no doubt it will be easier to militarize the international border.

            “The second group of beneficiaries are the merchants on the American side of the border towns, who do a brisk trade in selling American goods to Mexicans. A third group are the Mexican-American politicians in the Southwestern states, eager to expand their power base. The fourth group are the wealthy and dominant classes in Mexico itself, who require the safety valve of emigration in order to postpone for as long as possible the next, and inevitable, revolution in their desperately overpopulated nation.

            “American ‘interests’ (the term ‘ruling class’ is now taboo, right?), anxious to secure access to Mexico’s oil, must therefore appease Mexican ‘interests’ by overlooking illegal immigration while at the same time offering at least a token response to the popular demand for a halt to it; thus we have the cosmetic but ineffectual proposals of the Carter and Reagan administrations.

            “These are harsh, even cruel propositions, but in fact the American boat is full, if not already overloaded; we cannot allow further mass immigration. The American public is fully aware of this truth even if our ‘leaders’ prefer to attempt to ignore it. We know what they will not acknowledge, that the tendency of large-scale immigration is to degrade and cheapen American life. Anyone who has made a recent visit to Mexico, to East L.A., or even to Miami, Florida, knows what I mean.

            “When the call for compassion is raised (a word now hopelessly corrupted by its use in the mouths of such as Nixon, Carter, and Reagan), we must answer that the most compassionate thing we can do for nations such as Mexico is to encourage them, somehow, to commence the policies of radical internal reform and vigorous population control that are clearly necessary.” 

 -----Edward Abbey

(Quoted in Postcards From Ed - Dispatches and Salvos From an American Iconoclast, pps. 109-11)

When Edward Abbey TKOed Alexander Cockburn

The following letter from the late Edward Abbey (popular author of "The Monkey Wrench Gang" and "Desert Solitaire," among other great works) appears to be the letter  Alexander Cockburn refers to in "The Golden Age Is In Us," which he says he left unanswered because he didn't know how to respond to it. The non-response illustrates a peculiar inability to engage real political dialogue on the part of the American left, particularly surprising in Cockburn himself, who was at least open to listening to right-wing libertarians and populists on occasion. But here not. Note the closing line, more relevant today than ever.

To Alexander Cockburn 5/5/88: 

        “I’m a regular reader of your column in The Nation, always with interest, usually with general agreement. You can easily imagine, then, how deeply you have wounded my feelings by calling me (and my good friend Dave Foreman) “fascist,” “racist,” etc. I am accustomed to such childish name-calling from sectarian fanatics like Murray Bookchin, but I would have assumed that you would adopt a more rational tone.

         “Opposition to mass immigration, legal or illegal, from any source, does not make one a fascist or racist. It merely makes one an opponent of mass immigration, as are the overwhelming majority of American citizens, including most Mexicans, blacks, Indians etc. (If we can believe the polls. And the response of Congress to years of complaint.) Most labor leaders and unions are against more immigration, for good and obvious reasons; almost all conservationists are against immigration, for reasons even more good and obvious. The basic fact is that America is sinking under an overload of political, social, economic and environmental problems; we are in no position to take on those of Latin America, Asia and Africa as well.

          “Of course much of the Third World’s misery is caused by European and American imperialism. Among our many moral obligations is to bring that infernal meddling to an end. E.g., no more loans, no more weapons, no more medical missionaries, no more CIA chicanery. Agreed. But it’s merely a white middleclass liberal guilt neurosis to imagine that our domineering arrogance is the sole or even the central source of mischief. Africans were murdering, eating and enslaving one another long before Vasco de Gama appeared off the Angolan coast. The endless horrors of Mexico go back at least to the Mayan and Aztec empires and their culture of war, massacre, slavery, torture, human sacrifice and cannibalism. To most Mexican Indians, Cortez probably appeared (at first) as a liberator. And Asia: India and its caste system, China, Japan . . . Ah well, you see my point.

  “If you hope for any sort of dialogue and unity with all factions on the vaguely leftist or radical side of politics, you must cease from silly verbal abuse. If you don’t want it, then we go on as we are, fractious and impotent.”

-----Edward Abbey

(Quoted in "Postcards From Ed - Dispatches and Salvos From an American Iconoclast", pps. 239-40)