Conservatism and cowardice go hand in hand.

Wow, it's been a very long time since I used this blog, hasn't it?

So, today I saw a friend of mine repost on Facebook a status which began by saying it was time for liberals to begin some "real talk" about Islam, lest we "give up the issue to conservatives."

I did not respond well to this, as you might guess. "Real talk about X" is a long-time dog-whistle for, "I want to say something bigoted about X group, but I don't want to look like a bigot, so I'm going to present my prejudices as common sense." And I responded to the status, saying, more or less, "What you're saying is, liberals need to agree with conservatives in hating and fearing Muslims." This triggered an exchange with the original status poster until my friend yanked his repost and stopped the exchange.

That said, there were several points that merit response.

First, on the original poster's claim that his "real talk" was not about hating and fearing Muslims; bullshit. The whole point of his original post is that liberals are silent about Islam and terrorism and that "real talk" is necessary, but has been censored by the left. Well, since the general liberal position on Islamic terrorism is that we need to dismantle the terrorist organizations that carry out attacks without blaming an entire religion for the crimes of fewer than one percent of its adherents, the "real talk" that is being censored is almost certainly the conservative view: "Islam is evil, Muslims are evil, and we need to punish Muslims regardless of their individual roles in anything at all."

Second: do you know how this person said this alternative view was being censored? "People are afraid to speak the truth because they'll be called racists."

Uh huh. So you believe something strongly, but won't say anything because you're afraid someone will call you a name? You think that, when someone holds an opinion and says it openly, that act by itself is censorship against anyone who differs?

Horseshit. 

I can't count how many names I've been called in online discussions about this and that: communist, socialist, statist, traitor, idiot, asshole, sheep, shithead, and worse and worse. I won't pretend I don't care about some of those labels, but I've certainly never let them even slow me down from expressing my opinion and arguing my position on anything and everything. I've certainly never felt censored because of namecalling. No epithet posted on the Internet has yet resulted in my loss of access to the Internet, my arrest or imprisonment, or my being sued or fined for my beliefs.

Your opinion, whatever it is, cannot force my silence; and my opinion cannot force your silence.

Third, and finally: if you're afraid that speaking your opinion on X might make you seem like a bigot, it might just be because you ARE being a bigot. If you're self-censoring yourself on that grounds, then you need to stop and carefully re-examine your beliefs and why you hold them. Hint: if you are classifying a group of 1.5 billion people as if they are all identical and interchangable, that's bigotry. If you believe that membership in any arbitrary group is sufficient cause to consider a person evil or criminal, with no further evidence, that's bigotry. And if your opinions sound anything like, "All X are dangerous," or, "We can't allow X into our country because they'll destroy us all," then guess what? That opinion is based on hate, fear, and prejudice- in other words, bigotry.

And guess what? That puts you side by side with the likes of ISIL, whose entire belief system is built on bigotry and anti-liberalism. It is the nature of liberals to disagree, but to accept the presence and equal rights of those who disagree with them. It is the nature of conservatives, and especially religious fundamentalist conservatives, to attack all who disagree with them and seek to drive them out or destroy them outright.

Because liberals are brave enough to accept that not everyone is alike, and that it is possible to be different or strange and not be hostile. Conservatives, on the other hand, are scared livid of anything different or strange, and hate, fear and hold in contempt all that is different from themselves.

And yet, while liberals defend their positions even when attacked and beaten, conservatives are such shrinking violets that they apparently silence themselves for fear that they might be called by the nasty, horrible name of "racist."

I suspect that's why Trump is doing so well among conservatives: with every bigoted and ignorant thing he spews from his mouth on the campaign trail, he's saying the things conservatives are too cowardly to admit they still believe. And he gets away with it.

Trump is "real talk."

And, ironically, Trump has pledged that the first thing he'll do when he becomes president is to make it illegal for anybody to criticize him. He's already put it into the contracts he makes his volunteers sign; anyone who works for him is never again allowed to say anything bad at all about Donald Trump, ever, for the rest of his or her life, on pain of lawsuit.

Because even Donald Trump is too cowardly to live in a society where other people don't agree with him on absolutely everything. Instead, while Bernie Sanders and even Hillary Clinton listen to their protesters and sit down with them and discuss their views, Trump silences them, then encourages his followers to beat them into submission and promises to pay the legal costs. 

Just as ISIL is too cowardly to live in a world where any religion other than their unique and ultra-fundamentalist sect of Islam exists. Instead they kill everyone who doesn't follow their faith in their exact way.

What happened in Brussels today is the act of an organization of cowards. And it is their devout hope that their acts of murder will empower our cowards here to respond in kind, to trigger the war of religious extermination they desperately desire.

I refuse to be a coward, and I refuse to be silent while cowards call for "real talk" as a way to veil their prejudices and fears in a haze of respectability.

The religion of Islam has many different sects and subdivisions, just as Christianity, Judaism, and Buddhism do. The crimes of one particular group of Muslims lie on the head of members of that group and no one else. Any policy which treats all members of a group as culpable for the crimes of a small group of individuals, without regard to any facts on an individual basis, is injustice to those affected. And no matter how much you hate or fear a group, for whatever reasons, such policy remains now and forever unjust.

That's not "real talk." That's just truth.

And if you disagree, have the courage of your convictions and say so- and don't fear whatever names I or anyone else might call you.

Post-Convention Cull Day

Wow, a LOT apparently happened while I was busy at, or recovering from, the convention I worked at this past weekend. Too much for me to keep track of, or research, or comment in detail on.

So... it's Cull Day!

First off: Oklahoma becomes the first state to begin organizing its secessionist army.

Frustrated by recent political setbacks, tea party leaders and some conservative members of the Oklahoma Legislature say they would like to create a new volunteer militia to help defend against what they believe are improper federal infringements on state sovereignty.

. . .

"Is it scary? It sure is," said tea party leader Al Gerhart of Oklahoma City, who heads an umbrella group of tea party factions called the Oklahoma Constitutional Alliance. "But when do the states stop rolling over for the federal government?"

Incidentally, folks, it should be borne in mind that, just before the Civil War, most newspapers in the South were agents of the fire-eating secessionist wing of the Democratic Party, deliberately ginning up fear, hatred and paranoia among their readership. Today... we have Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, NewsMax.com, Drudge, National Review... so, yeah.

The Tea Parties are trying to unite... except, well, it's only those tea party groups funded and run by Republican Party activists that are uniting:

Mark Skoda, a Tea Party leader from Memphis (and a founder of the recent Tea Party Convention), is serving as the chief spokesman for the effort, and appears to have played a leading role in putting it together. Skoda, working closely with Judson Phillips of Tea Party Nation, had helped organize and promote February's convention, at which Sarah Palin delivered the keynote speech and which enjoyed widespread media coverage. Also part of the new coalition is the Tea Party Express, the brainchild of a team of California Republican political consultants.

But one prominent group, the Tea Party Patriots (TPP), doesn't appear to be joining the party. Jenny Beth Martin, a leader of TPP noted to TPMmuckraker that her group already considers itself the largest grassroots Tea Party organization, and said it hadn't been involved in planning the new federation. TPP had also stayed away from February's convention.

It should be noted that Tea Party Nation is the group founded and led by former Republican leader Dick Armey. This is a clear case of the Republican Party trying- and failing- to co-opt the teabaggers, who are definitely much more radical and bigoted than the national average. Even Fox News is calling the teabaggers out on their lunacy, now that they realize they won't be controlled.

Even as Virginia Governor McConnell apologizes and backtracks on his leaving slavery out of the Civil War, Mississippi governor Haley Barbour brushes slavery off as unimportant:

CROWLEY: You know what I'm trying to get at here is that there's a sort of feeling that this is insensitive. But you clearly don't agree?

BARBOUR: To me, it's a sort of feeling that it's a nit, that it is not significant, that it's not a -- it's trying to make a big deal out of something doesn't amount to diddly.

So, yeah: slavery was wrong, "everybody knows that," but apparently it wasn't important at all to the Confederacy. Riiiiight.

Matthew Yglesias cuts right to the heart of both the Republican desire to celebrate the CSA, and the core of teabagger support:

... something that links the mentality of today’s right to the mentality of the slaveowners and segregation proponents is the white southern political tradition’s very partial and selective embrace of majoritarian democracy. As long as national institutions are substantially controlled by white southerners, the white south is a hotbed of patriotism. But as soon as an non-southern political coalition manages to win an election—as we saw in 1860 and in 2008—then suddenly the symbols of national authority become symbols of tyranny and the constitution is construed as granting conservative areas all kinds of alleged abilities to opt out of national political decisions. Even if you think opposition to the Affordable Care Act has nothing whatsoever to do with race, the underlying political philosophy by which a George W Bush or James Buchanan is a national president but an Abraham Lincoln or a Barack Obama merely a sectional one remains incoherent and pernicious.

Meanwhile, if you haven't had enough reminders of innate Republican evil, Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell's chief of staff in the State Department, testified that George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld knew full well they were imprisoning- and torturing- innocent people in Guantanamo and elsewhere:

I came to understand that there were several different reasons for the refusal to release detainees in Guantánamo, even those who were likely innocent. These reasons continued to the time of my departure from the Department of State in 2005. At least part of the problem was that it was politically impossible to release them. The concern expressed was that if they were released to another country... the leadership of the Defense Department would be left without any plausible explanation to the American people...

. . .

Another part of the political dilemma originated in the Office of Vice President Richard B. Cheney, whose position could be summed up as “the end justifies the means”, and who had absolutely no concern that the vast majority of Guantánamo detainees were innocent, or that there was a lack of any useable evidence for the great majority of them. If hundreds of innocent individuals had to suffer in order to detain a handful of hardcore terrorists, so be it. That seemed to be the philosophy that ruled in the Vice President’s Office.

Of course, with Dawn Johnsen's nomination to the Office of Legal Counsel scuttled, the last faint hope of Obama ever following up on this testimony has long since flown away.

And finally, a recent federal court ruling puts a major kink in plans for net neutrality regulations. That said, it was almost certainly the right ruling:

If “ancillary jurisdiction” is enough for net neutrality regulations (something we might like) today, it could just as easily be invoked tomorrow for any other Internet regulation that the FCC dreams up (including things we won’t like). For example, it doesn't take much imagination to envision a future FCC "Internet Decency Statement." After all, outgoing FCC Chairman Martin was a crusader against "indecency" on the airwaves and it was the FCC that punished Pacifica radio for playing George Carlin’s “seven dirty words” monologue, something you can easily find on the Internet.

Of course, this ruling can- and probably will- lead to more direct and stringent regulation of telecoms and internet providers by the FCC, since they won't be allowed to do spot-checks on egregious incidents. This issue is by no means settled.

Australia Hates Small Tits

Two of my friends on LiveJournal posted on this, so I think I'd better say my piece on this.

Australia is banning adult films, publications and websites that feature small-breasted women.

The National Classification Code dictates that anything that describes or depicts a person who is, or appears to be, a child under 18 (whether the person is engaged in sexual activity or not) in a way that is likely to cause offence to a reasonable adult is Refused Classification.

State Crime Acts are also similar. Victoria’s Criminal Code includes the ‘or appears to be’ clause in its definition of child pornography and it doesn’t need to cause offence to a reasonable adult for it to be illegal.

Even if you are 18 years old but you look younger, taking a photograph of your breasts and uploading it to the Internet could land you or someone you know in serious trouble.

According to the Register, they've also banned female ejaculation:

The films are being banned on one of two grounds:

1) That the depictions are a form of urination which is banned under the label of ‘golden showers’ in the Classification Guidelines or

2) Female ejaculation is an ‘abhorrent’ depiction

However, as Ms Patten points out, one of the objections raised the Board is that film performers have been faking the production of ejaculate: this suggests that they are trying to both have their cake and eat it on this issue, since if the liquid in question is fake, there is no policy requiring the censorship of douching or enemas.

They're also ordering that all violent movies (what would be R in America) be packaged in plain brown wrappers, so to speak- effectively, adding "gore stores" to porn stores.

Now, those of you who know what I do for a living either know or have guessed that my personal sexual kink includes a strong preference for the big'uns- the bigger the better. And although small breasts can be nice, flat chests do indeed give me uncomfortable feelings, "um, this is a child, I don't want to look at this."

But that is just me. Other people- and I'll go out on a limb and say more normal people- don't have this problem, and can see a small-breasted woman as a grown, sexual adult, both desirable and eligible for desire. The Australian government's claim that this move is meant to stop pedophiles is, put bluntly, bullshit.

Also bullshit is the Australian government's official response to the news articles above. "We evaluate on a case-by-case basis," they say. In fact, any such evaluation, to be just and legal, must be by set uniform standards- which means that yes, there IS at the very least a strong inclination to ban members of the Itty Bitty Titty Committee from appearing in skin mags.

But the size of the boobs (or the squirt, or whatever) is beside the point. Hustler's Barely Legal magazine and the like is under attack because it is an easy first target. The end goal- and the current conservative Australian government has campaigned on this- is the eventual banning of all erotica and violent entertainment from Australia.

And that, for purposes of full disclosure, would likely mean that all of my tiny company's websites would be inaccessible in Australia. Some of my most supportive fans are Aussies- and it'd be damn annoying if they just vanished one day, or I vanished, either way.

So I say, to hell with conservative pro-war, pro-discrimination, anti-freedom Australian politicians and their "think of the tiny tots" campaign.

I think I'll start my own campaign:

STOP AUSTRALIAN CENSORSHIP: Think of the Tiny Tits.