Zephyr Dear

Socialism, an economy in which:

• Society organizes production around its needs. We determine how much stuff society wants, and set to work making it.
• Money and wage-labor are abolished in favor of needs-based remuneration. Rather than being paid in a wage, the relationship between the individual and society is reciprocal. Through their labor, they contribute to producing society’s wealth, and in turn, they are entitled to consume the wealth they took part in producing.
• Workers manage their workplaces democratically. Markets are replaced with self-managed enterprises. Industries are consolidated. Rather than having a dozen car companies compete with each other, the auto industry is reconstituted into a single unit, so that all of the intellectual and manual labor that goes into building/designing cars can be combined for collective progress instead of “the anarchism of the market” where enterprises throw their commodities into the marketplace and hope they get absorbed.

P.S: Socialism is not “welfare-state capitalism.” Scandinavia is capitalist.

did i ever show y’all my Benedict Cumberbatch impression

personify-realism:

I was at the New Star Trek movie anD THESE OLD WOMEN IN FRONT OF ME START FUCKING GIGGLING WHEN SPOCK AND KIRK SMILE AT EACH OTHER IN THE BEGINNING AND THEY START WHISPERING SO I LEAN DOWN AND THEY’RE FUCKING TALKING ABOUT HOW THEY MET! THESE TWO FUCKERS MET AT A WRITERS CLUB AT THEIR SCHOL AND THEY WERE FUCKING WRITING KIRK/SPOCK FANFICTION AND THEY STARTED HANGING OUT AND THEY FUCKING BECAME FRIENDS AND GREW UP AND GOT MARRIED. ARE YOU FUCKING READING THIS?! THE FUCKING 80 SOMETHING WOMEN IN FRONT OF ME FUCKING MET AT WHAT WAS ESSENTIALLY A SLASH WRITERS CLUB LIKE 60ISH YEARS AGO AND THEY FUCKING GOT MARRIED AND NOW THEY CAME TOGETHER TO FUCKING WATCH THE NEW MOVIE AND THESE TWO WERE FUCKING GIGGLING LIKE TEENAGERS AND THEY’RE STILL TOGETHER AND IM CRYING HOW IS THIS NOT ITS OWN FUCKING MOVIE OH MY JESUSA;KLSHDG;KALDNFG;LADFHMGPV QDFNGCLKBVJSD

For his book Bad Paper, Jake Halpern investigated the world of American debt collectors. In a review, Thomas Geoghegan considers what makes people pay up:

In [debt collector and ex-con Brandon] Wilson’s case—and I admit I came to like Wilson—it’s because he knows how to “marry the debtor.” He doesn’t threaten; he doesn’t talk about bringing a suit, much less raise the specter of incarceration. It’s true that’s all illegal under the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act. But the real point here is that such measures don’t get results. No, as Wilson notes, a good collector is even and caring. The good collector will say things like “It’s the right thing to do” and “You’ll feel better about yourself.”

Here’s what collectors know: People want to pay. It’s what Porfiry knows about Raskolnikov: He wants to confess. The good collector helps the debtors get out of their mental jails.

After explaining, Wilson’s collectors dare the author to make a call; for me, and perhaps for Halpern, it’s the most unsettling part of the book.

This is not a writer who calls attention to himself unduly, so the encounter that prompts him to enter into the narrative stream of Bad Paper is significant. Halpern does try to marry the debtor. He tries to show empathy. He listens to the woman Wilson assigns him. She is not a deadbeat. She has been ill. She is bipolar, didn’t he know? But Halpern lets her go. He writes that he lacks a real collector’s rapport with people, together with Wilson’s “innate sense of when to segue from courtship back to the unpleasant matter of collecting.” But the real problem, he admits, is that he doesn’t have the drive. If he were desperate enough, if he had to do this for a living, if the alternative were to push dope out on the streets . . . well, he might be much readier to squeeze her. As he later quotes one collector, who happens to be African American, debt in America is the “white man’s dope.”

So a dealer can have only a certain amount of empathy. Or, as one collection manager tells the author: “You have to empathize with debtors but not have sympathy, because if you have sympathy you don’t get paid.”

According to an article by Megan Garber at The Atlantic, they did it for the drugs.

Starting in the 1300s, Europeans developed a taste for hallucinogenic drugs. Unfortunately, ingesting them often caused nausea and vomiting. Absorbing them through the skin came with fewer side effects and delivering them through the mucous membranes of the female genitals was ideal.

A physician quoted at The Guardian says the claim is medically sound:

Ointment would have been very effective as a delivery method… Mucous membranes are particularly good at transporting drugs – that’s why cocaine is snorted… Vaginal application would be pretty efficient, and the effects of the drugs would be noticeable quite rapidly.

According to legend, then, witches would coat the handle of a broom — a convenient household item — lift their skirts and get high.

The women who trafficked in hallucinogenic substances were often accused of being witches.  Or, conversely, women accused of being witches were also accused of making magic ointments (from the fat of murdered children, no less). And witch experts in the 15th century claimed that they used these ointments not just to get high, but to get high; that is, that they literally flew using ointments.

Hence, witches on brooms.

Vintage witch poster for sale here.

(View original at http://thesocietypages.org/socimages)

Last Wednesday in Jerusalem, a three-month-old American baby was killed, and eight other people injured, when a car plowed into a crowded sidewalk; the driver, a 20-year-old Palestinian named Abed a-Rahman a-Shaludi, was killed by police when he tried to flee the scene. The family of the driver insisted it was an accident, but Israeli officials immediately called it a “terrorist act.” Some Israelis speculated that it was in retaliation for the killing in the West Bank of a 5-year-old Palestinian girl days earlier by an Israeli settler who ran his car into her (and another Palestinian girl, seriously injured) and then fled the scene (Palestinian officials denounced that incident as “terrorism”).

Yesterday, a soldier in the Israeli military shot and killed a 14-year-old boy in the West Bank who was participating in a protest against the 5-decade Israeli occupation. The boy, Orwah Hammad (pictured above at his funeral), was a U.S. citizen as well as a Palestinian; he was born in New Orleans and moved with his family to the West Bank when he was 6. The IDF claimed he was throwing rocks at Israeli soldiers and that another man was preparing to throw a Molotov cocktail, and that this justified the live ammunition they fired.

The U.S. State Department issued a statement about the two incidents. Here’s the one it issued about last week’s Jerusalem incident where the Palestinian driver killed the American baby, issued on the very day the incident took place (i.e., prior to any investigation):

Terrorist Attack in Jerusalem

The United States condemns in the strongest possible terms today’s terrorist attack in Jerusalem. We express our deepest condolences to the family of the baby, reportedly an American citizen, who was killed in this despicable attack, and extend our prayers for a full recovery to those injured. We urge all sides to maintain calm and avoid escalating tensions in the wake of this incident.

Here’s the markedly different statement the State Department issued last night about the fatal shooting by an Israeli soldier of the 14-year-old American boy:

Death of a U.S. Minor in Silwad

The United States expresses its deepest condolences to the family of a U.S. citizen minor who was killed by the Israeli Defense Forces during clashes in Silwad on October 24. Officials from the U.S. Consulate General in Jerusalem are in contact with the family and are providing all appropriate consular assistance. We call for a speedy and transparent investigation, and will remain closely engaged with the local authorities, who have the lead on this investigation. We continue to urge all parties to help restore calm and avoid escalating tensions in the wake of the tragic recent incidents in Jerusalem and the West Bank.

There is certainly nothing wrong with waiting for the results of an investigation before making definite statements, but that’s not what the State Department did in the Jerusalem incident, which was instantly labelled a “despicable” act of “terror.” Moreover, when the U.S. calls for a “speedy and transparent investigation” of the West Bank shooting, what they mean is that they want the IDF – the occupying force which killed the American teenager – to investigate (and inevitably clear) itself (Rania Khalek today documents how reflexively Israeli authorities clear Israeli settlers and soldiers while instantly finding Palestinians guilty in similar circumstances). As the driver’s family told Israeli media:

A few days ago a Jewish settler knocked over two girls near Ramallah. He killed one and the other is in serious condition. The police immediately said it was a car accident. In our case they said the opposite in seconds. This is because the driver was an Arab driver. When a Jewish driver was involved in an accident the attitude was different and no one shot him.

Whatever else is true, IDF soldiers should not be in the West Bank given that the occupation they are there to enforce is regarded as illegal by virtually the entire world.

Most importantly, the U.S. Government has a remarkable history of exhibiting indifference, or even support, when Israel kills American citizens. The State Department never uttered a peep of protest over the Israeli bulldozer killing in 2003 of peace activist Rachel Corrie, and then implicitly endorsed the killing by Israel of the Turkish-American teenager Furkan Dogan aboard the anti-blockade Mavi Marmara flotilla (in stark contrast to the Turkish government, which – acting as most governments would – was furious that Israel had killed its citizens).

In general, countries become indignant when other nations kill their own citizens. But all of the normal rules are inapplicable when the countries in question are the U.S. and Israel. Thus, when a Palestinian runs his car into an American child, this is instantly declared a “despicable act” of “terrorism” which is condemned in “the strongest possible terms”: no investigation needed. But when an Israeli occupying soldier shoots and kills an American child, the most tepid, nonjudgmental and careful language is used to politely call for an “investigation” by the very occupying military responsible for the killing.

Photo: Majdi Mohammed/AP

The post Compare How U.S. Responds To The Killing Of American Kids Based On Identity Of The Killers appeared first on The Intercept.

Last week, the Pentagon announced the death of the first American serviceman in the war against ISIS. Marine Lance Cpl. Sean Neal was killed in what was described as a “non-combat incident” in Iraq, making him the first American to die in “Operation Inherent Resolve” – America’s latest military excursion into that country.

Cpl. Neal was only 19 years old. He would have only been eight at the outset of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and merely six on 9/11 – a child at the time of both these events.  The fact that he ended up losing his life in Iraq is on one hand tragic, and on the other completely absurd.

The tragedy here is that a young man with a long future ahead of him ended up dying in a distant country before even reaching the age of twenty. The absurdity is that men such as him are still losing their lives as a result of still-inexplicable decisions made over a decade ago. The Iraq War never ended, but now it’s being fought by men who were just children when it started. Walter Lippman once said, “I don’t think old men ought to promote wars for young men to fight.” In our time, old men have been promoting wars that kids would ultimately end up fighting.

This is not just the case on the American side. Most of the Iraqis who have joined up with the utopian nihilists of Islamic State are themselves young men whose upbringing occurred against the backdrop of the American occupation of their country. They grew up watching their fathers and brothers being rounded up and detained by foreign soldiers, and bore witness as their once-stable country violently went to pieces around them. As shocking as the actions of IS have been, it’s not hard to imagine why so many people who grew up in such brutal circumstances might find a movement such as this attractive.

And again, behind their inglorious martyrdoms, are the machinations of former-Baath Party officials who once organized young Iraqis to die for the cause Arab Nationalism and who now do the same for religious extremism. The cause may be different, but in many ways the results are the same.

In this context it is stunning to remember the statements of those who assured us over a decade ago that the war in Iraq would take “weeks rather than months” to bring to its completion. The more cautious and conservative among them gave us an absolute maximum estimate of “five months” before we could go back to normalcy, and start watching America-friendly democracies begin to bloom across the Middle East. If this prediction had been in any way honest or correct, Cpl. Sean Neal may have been sitting in a college classroom today rather than lying in a flag-draped coffin on a military flight back home. Alas, it wasn’t.

One thing is certain however: Neal won’t be the last. Current and former American military officials are already preparing the public for a new conflict in Iraq – with scarcely suppressed and genuinely creepy elation – that they say will be “generational” and will take decades to bring to its completion.  If recent history is any guide, their prediction of decades-long conflict means we should actually be preparing ourselves for a war which is going to last perhaps for a century. That’s not derisive rhetoric; history actually seems to be pointing in just that direction.

At the outset of the first Iraq War, in what would later become a deeply ironic statement, Christopher Hitchens predicted that war would last “something like one hundred years”. His prediction seems to have been prescient. Since the first bombs started dropping on that country in 1991, they have scarcely stopped falling since. We are 23 years into our forever war with Iraq and are already being girded for another long time-horizon before it will supposedly “end”.

The reality of course is that this war not going to end. In all likelihood many children growing up today are going to end up fighting and dying to continue it at some point. As implausible as this may sound, it would’ve probably come across as similarly unlikely to anyone who predicted that American kids who were just eight during the invasion of Iraq would still be perishing in that country over a decade later.

The fact that our wars are now being fought by people who were just children when they started is one of those grim, uncomfortable realities that we tend to elide in the interests of continuing on with business as usual. But, needless to say, it would be a lot fairer if the Cheneys, Rumsfelds and Frums of the world sent their own children to finish what they started instead of sending everyone else’s.

Photo: Facebook

The post Iraq War Now Being Fought By People Who Were Just Kids When It Started appeared first on The Intercept.

jobhaver:

some nerd: communism will never work because human nature

me:

Rintrah roars, and shakes his fires in the burden’d air; Hungry clouds swag on the deep.

mr-reblogbutton:

webuiltthepyramids:

thispopculture:

legallyblained:

hips don’t lie by oxford university’s all male choir

wow

Yes.

I have been waiting my whole life for this. I didn’t know this was something I needed, but not I can’t deny

my hips don’t lie about how much I need this in existence

what a time to be alive

Rachel Held Evans stirred things up a bit with a post last week on the akedah, the story of the binding of Isaac told in Genesis 22 and on side 2 of Highway 61 Revisited. “I would fail Abraham’s test (and I bet you would too),” she wrote:

It’s a test I’m certain I would have failed: Get your son. Get a knife. Slit his throat and set him on fire.

I’d like to think that even if those demands thundered from the heavens in a voice that sounded like God’s, I’d have sooner been struck dead than obeyed them.

If this was a “test,” then I think this means Rachel would’ve actually passed it. (And that’s not just my view — there’s a long tradition of interpreting this story this way.) But many Christians disagree, as she notes:

I have often been told by pastors and apologists that my misgivings about these biblical passages represent a weakness of faith, and that my persistent questions about suffering, evil, and violence in God’s name betray a deep distrust in a God who owes me no explanations.

Those same pastors and apologists pounced on this post as an opportunity to repeat all of that yet again — chiming in with another round of threatened banishings, anathemas and “farewells.” Yawn.

Rachel has a good collection of some of the more thoughtful responses to her discussion of this (in)famous Bible story, and so does James McGrath.

For my part, I wouldn’t likely either fail or pass this “test.” I would flee and fail to take it.

Here’s how the story begins in Genesis 22:

After these things God tested Abraham. He said to him, “Abraham!” And he said, “Here I am.”

He said, “Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains that I shall show you.”

Already I’m in trouble. I’m hearing voices. I’m hearing a voice in my head that’s telling me to kill a child.

The possibility that this is the voice of God testing my faith isn’t even going to be among the first thousand possibilities worth considering. The thousand other possibilities are all Very Bad, of course, but that one’s even worse — including and encompassing all the Very Bad possibilities that go before it.

Initially, though, I’d do what anyone would likely do if a voice in my head commanded me to kill and burn a child. I’d ignore it, desperately hoping it would go away, fearful of telling anyone that I’d ever even thought of such a thing lest they think — rightly — that I am a monster.

And if it didn’t go away? Well then I’d have myself committed. I’d remove myself from the presence of chlidren, driving to the nearest inpatient facility to inform the nice people in admissions, as calmly as possible, that I believed I was becoming a danger to myself and others. I’m hearing voices. The voices want me to do Bad Things.

No, no, no, the “pastors and apologists” say — that violates the spirit of the story. It’s about obedience, not epistemology. For the sake of the story, you must accept that you receive this command from God as an unambiguous revelation: You know with certainty it is a command from God.

But that just restates the problem, it doesn’t solve it. Obedience is always about epistemology. I cannot respond to this “divine command” as such until I know that it is, in fact, a divine command. It is not humanly possible to engage this story unless the story can explain just what it would mean to be able to know with certainty that this was an unambiguous bit of divine revelation, a clear command clearly from God.

And I cannot imagine any form of direct revelation that could convince me of that. I cannot imagine any way in which I, as a human bound by my finite human reason and my fallible human senses, could ever have access to such inhuman, infallible certainty.

The “voice of God”? Auditory hallucinations. Hearing voices in your head is a textbook symptom of many well-documented forms of mental illness. We’ve already covered what hearing such a voice giving such a command would mean and what it would require me to do.

And, no, it doesn’t make any difference to try to distinguish between a “voice in your head” and a voice outside your head. All voices are in your head — the “real” ones just as much as the delusional ones. That’s what’s so terrifying about actual auditory hallucinations. They do not sound like hallucinations — like something that’s “only in your head.” They sound exactly like any other voice you’ve ever heard.

How about giant flaming letters carved in the sky? No good. Everything we’ve just said about auditory hallucinations is also true for visual ones.

Well, what if other people hear God’s voice as well? What if everyone else hears it?

That’s to be expected, isn’t it? All of this is just confirming the likeliest possibility: I’m a very, very sick man. Paranoid and delusional, and now imagining that everyone else is saying the same horrible thing as the voice in my head.

There simply exists no form this divine revelation could possibly take that would exempt it from the fact that I, as a finite and fallible human, would be required to perceive it. And so it would always be possible that I was perceiving it wrong — that I was misperceiving it.

And one doesn’t want to kill and burn a child based on a misperception.

One doesn’t generally want to kill and burn a child at all — which brings us to the second problem here. It’s not just the form of this divine command that is a problem, it’s also the substance. The repugnant substance of this alleged divine command reinforces all of the formal reasons stated above for doubting it. The substance of the command presents a whole Wesleyan quadrilateral of reasons to conclude that it cannot be divine. Scripture, tradition, reason and experience all scream that it cannot be so.

Imagine again that scenario in which a unanimous horde of witnesses confirms that I have, in fact, been given a divine command that I cannot ignore or deny. Just what would these witnesses attesting to this divine revelation say? “God is speaking to you, Fred. God wants you to kill and burn this child. You need to do what God tells you to do.”

Whatever part of me wanted to cling to my own sanity wouldn’t reasonably conclude that this means God wants me to kill a child. A more reasonable conclusion would be to realize, in horror, that I’d stumbled into some terrifying Wicker Man scenario. These “witnesses” must be speaking of some other God. And the voice I was hearing and the fiery letters in the sky would force me to realize that their God was real.

C.S. Lewis toyed with the idea that something like this might be true. So did H.P. Lovecraft. So did whoever wrote Psalm 82. And now Molech or dread Chthulhu or raging Talos or three-crowned Cyric or whichever child-eating deity it was is after me.

So at that point, I’d be praying like I’d never prayed before, asking God — the God I worship, the God of Abraham, the God of the Gospels and the creeds – to deliver me from this evil lesser god who was attempting to claim me for his own. Monotheism would no longer be an option, but I’d still be monolatrous — faithful only to the God of gods and Lord of lords, the God revealed in Jesus, the God described in 1 John as “God is love” and the God mocked by Jonah for being “gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love.”

Or perhaps there could be a less radical theological explanation. I don’t believe in a “literal” Satan — mainly because I don’t see such a character literally present in the biblical literature — but this overwhelming experience of voices and witnesses and flaming letters would likely cause me to re-evaluate that conclusion. If the voices and signs and wonders and attestations weren’t all just delusion, then here would be apparent evidence of the reality of some supernatural, evil being very much like the Satan figure we find in Dante and Milton and Stephen Vincent Benét and all the other canonical sources of this doctrine.

This is the most reasonable, defensible and biblical second possibility. If the voices and signs and wonders telling me to kill a child are not a form of delusional madness, then this must be Satan speaking to me.

No, no, no, say the pastors and apologists — it’s not Satan, it’s God. This is, they stress, the whole point of the story — that it’s God — and undeniably God — telling me to kill and burn a child.

I’ve got it backwards, they say. The story isn’t about Satan pretending to be God. It’s a story about God pretending to be Satan.

I’m don’t think that helps.

The bottom line here is that for all of these self-proclaimed defenders of God’s sovereignty, this story is not at all about obedience to God. It’s about obedience to them.

Because obedience, remember, is always about epistemology — about the possibility of knowing, with certainty, what it is we are commanded to do, and the possibility of knowing, with certainty, the source of that command.

They like to talk about God’s sovereignty, but the real substance of their claim has to do with their own certainty. Their own ability to access certainty and to proclaim it to and for others. We know what God has commanded, they say. We know. And therefore you must obey [what God has commanded as articulated by] us.

Here’s another bit from Rachel’s original post on the binding of Isaac:

“You have to take your emotions out of it,” a Reformed pastor once told me. “You’re letting the humanism so pervasive in our culture affect your sense of justice.”

“But why would the very God I believe imprinted us all with a conscience — with a deep sense of right and wrong — ask me to deny that conscience by accepting genocide as just?” I asked. “And how could I ever bring myself to worship a God who, if these accounts are true, ordained and derived glory from actions I believe are evil?”

“Stop right there,” the pastor said. “I want you to hear the pride in that statement: ‘how could I ever worship a God who…?’ That is not for you to decide, Rachel. God is God. You worship God because He’s God.”

The unspoken assumption in that “God is God” is that the nature and character of God is self-evident and obvious. The pastor Rachel cites there dismisses her understanding of God as shaped by “emotion” and by “the humanism so pervasive in our culture,” while presuming that his own understanding of God is exempt from all such human factors. How does that work?

He doesn’t say. He can’t say. It’s just like the unambiguous revelation these folks insist as the premise for the story of Highway 61.

But they cannot ever explain what such unambiguous revelation would look like. They cannot ever describe a form that such revelation could take. They cannot ever explain how we humans could ever have access to such a thing, exempt from all that defines the human condition.

They offer no explanation for how they know what they claim to know when they claim to speak as surrogates of the sovereign God. They just assert this certainty — condemning anyone who doubts their claim as a doubter of God.

It is Adventure Time. I’ll let Comics Alliance deliver the news:

“Of all the sentences I’ve read in comics news this week, none have been as much of an emotional rollercoaster as this one: Ryan North is leaving the Adventure Time comic, and will be replaced as writer by Christopher Hastings.”

Read More: Christopher Hastings Replaces Ryan North On ‘Adventure Time’

That’s right! Starting with Issue #36, out this coming January, I’m the new writer on the Adventure Time ongoing series, with art by Zachary Sterling. Ryan North’s a dear friend, and I’m honored to be taking the reins from him. I am also terrified to fill his enormous shoes. Ryan’s Adventure Time run is one of the finest collection of humor comics out there, (multiple awards and the ridiculous sales numbers agree) and he’ll be a tough act to follow.

-Christopher

WHAT TIME IS IT? is a post from: The Adventures of Dr. McNinja

Ads by Project Wonderful! Your ad could be here, right now.

seiya234:

frenchtoastcomix:

From this Tumblr post by Rachel Edidin; drawn by me.

There will definitely be prints in the near future!

Yiss

A federal jury in Washington, D.C., returned guilty verdicts against four Blackwater operatives charged with killing more than a dozen Iraqi civilians and wounding scores of others in Baghdad in 2007.

The jury found one guard, Nicholas Slatten, guilty of first-degree murder, while three other guards were found guilty of voluntary manslaughter: Paul Slough, Evan Liberty, and Dustin Heard. The jury is still deliberating on additional charges against the operatives, who faced a combined 33 counts, according to the Associated Press. A fifth Blackwater guard, Jeremy Ridgeway, had already pleaded guilty to lesser charges and cooperated with prosecutors in the case against his former colleagues. The trial lasted ten weeks and the jury has been in deliberations for 28 days.

The incident for which the men were tried was the single largest known massacre of Iraqi civilians at the hands of private U.S. security contractors. Known as “Baghdad’s bloody Sunday,” operatives from Blackwater gunned down 17 Iraqi civilians at a crowded intersection at Nisour Square on September 16, 2007. The company, founded by secretive right-wing Christian supremacist Erik Prince, pictured above, had deep ties to the Bush Administration and served as a sort of neoconservative Praetorian Guard for a borderless war launched in the immediate aftermath of 9/11.

While Barack Obama pledged to rein in mercenary forces when he was a senator, once he became president he continued to employ a massive shadow army of private contractors. Blackwater — despite numerous scandals, congressional investigations, FBI probes and documented killings of civilians in both Iraq and Afghanistan — remained a central part of the Obama administration’s global war machine throughout his first term in office.

Just as with the systematic torture at Abu Ghraib, it is only the low level foot-soldiers of Blackwater that are being held accountable. Prince and other top Blackwater executives continue to reap profits from the mercenary and private intelligence industries. Prince now has a new company, Frontier Services Group, which he founded with substantial investment from Chinese enterprises and which focuses on opportunities in Africa. Prince recently suggested that his forces at Blackwater could have confronted Ebola and ISIS. “If the administration cannot rally the political nerve or funding to send adequate active duty ground forces to answer the call, let the private sector finish the job,” he wrote.

None of the U.S. officials from the Bush and Obama administrations who unleashed Blackwater and other mercenary forces across the globe are being forced to answer for their role in creating the conditions for the Nisour Square shootings and other deadly incidents involving private contractors. Just as the main architect of the CIA interrogation program, Jose Rodriguez, is on a book tour for his propagandistic love letter to torture, Hard Measures: How Aggressive CIA Actions After 9/11 Saved American Lives, so too is Erik Prince pushing his own revisionist memoir, Civilian Warriors: The Inside Story of Blackwater and the Unsung Heroes of the War on Terror.

While the Blackwater verdict is an important and rare moment of accountability in an overwhelmingly unaccountable private war industry, it does not erase the fact that those in power—the CEOs, the senior officials, the war profiteers—walk freely and will likely do so for the rest of their lives.

What is so seldom discussed in public discourse on the use of mercenaries are the stories of their victims. After the Nisour Square massacre, I met with Mohammed Kinani, whose 9-year-old son, Ali, was the youngest person killed by Blackwater operatives that day. As he and his family approached the square in their car:

“[T]hey saw one armored vehicle and then another, with men brandishing machine guns atop each one,” Mohammed recalls. The armored cars swiftly blocked off traffic. One of the gunners held both fists in the air, which Mohammed took as a gesture to stop. “Myself and all the cars before and behind me stopped,” Mohammed says. “We followed their orders. I thought they were some sort of unit belonging to the American military, or maybe just a military police unit. Any authority giving you an order to stop, you follow the order.” It turns out the men in the armored cars were neither U.S. military nor MPs. They were members of a Blackwater team code-named Raven 23.

As the family waited in traffic, two more Blackwater vehicles became visible. Mohammed noticed a family in a car next to his—a man, woman and child. The man was staring at Mohammed’s car, and Mohammed thought the man was eyeing Jenan. “I thought he was checking my sister out,” Mohammed remembers. “So I yelled at him and said, ‘What are you looking at?’” Mohammed noticed that the man looked frightened. “I think they shot the driver in the car in front of you,” the man told him.

Mohammed scanned the area and noticed that the back windshield of the white Kia sedan in front of him was shattered. The man in the car next to Mohammed began to panic and tried to turn his car around. He ended up bumping into a taxi, and an argument ensued. The taxi driver exited his car and began yelling. Mohammed tried to break up the argument, telling the taxi driver that a man had been shot and that he should back up so the other car could exit. The taxi driver refused and got back into his vehicle.

At that point, an Iraqi police officer, Ali Khalaf Salman, approached the Kia sedan, and it started to slowly drift. The driver had been shot, and the car was gliding in neutral toward a Blackwater armored car. Salman, in an interview, described how he tried to stop it by pushing backward. He saw a panicked woman inside the car; she was clutching a young man covered in blood who had been shot in the head. She was shrieking, “My son! My son! Help me, help me!” Salman remembered looking toward the Blackwater shooters. “I raised my left arm high in the air to try to signal to the convoy to stop the shooting.” He said he thought the men would cease fire, given that he was a clearly identified police officer.

“As the officer was waving, the men on the armored cars started shooting at that car,” Mohammed says. “And it wasn’t warning shots; they were shooting as in a battle. It was as though they were in a fighting field. I thought the police officer was killed. It was insane.” Officer Salman managed to dive out of the way as the bullets rained down. “I saw parts of the woman’s head flying in front of me,” recalled his colleague, Officer Sarhan Thiab. “They immediately opened heavy fire at us.”

That’s how the Nisour Square massacre began.

“What can I tell you?” Mohammed says, closing his eyes. “It was like the end of days.”

Mohammed would later learn that the first victims that day, in the white Kia, were a young Iraqi medical student, Ahmed Haithem Al Rubia’y, and his mother, Mahassin, a physician. Mohammed is crystal clear that the car posed no threat. “There was absolutely no shooting at the Blackwater men,” he says. “All of a sudden, they started shooting in all directions, and they shot at everyone in front of them. There was nothing left in that street that wasn’t shot: the ground, cars, poles, sidewalks; they shot everything in front of them.” As the Blackwater gunners shot up the Rubia’ys’ vehicle, Mohammed said, it soon looked like a sieve “due to how many bullet holes it had.” A Blackwater shooter later admitted that they also fired a grenade at the car, causing the car to explode. Mohammed says the Blackwater men then started firing across the square. “They were shooting in all directions,” he remembers. He describes the shooting as “random yet still concentrated. It was concentrated and focused on what they aimed at and still random as they shot in all directions.”

One of the Blackwater shooters was on top of an armored vehicle firing an automatic weapon, he says. “Every time he would finish his clip, he would throw it on the ground and would load another one in and would start shooting again, and finish the new one and replace it with another.” One young Iraqi man got out of his car to run, and as he fled, the Blackwater shooter gunned him down and continued firing into his body as it lay on the pavement, Mohammed says. “He was on the ground bleeding, and they’re shooting nonstop, and it wasn’t single bullets.” The Blackwater shooter, he says, would fire at other Iraqis and cars and then return to pump more bullets into the dead man on the ground. “He sank in his own blood, and every minute the [Blackwater shooter] would shoot left and right and then go back to shoot the dead man, and I could see that his body would shake with every bullet. He was already dead, but his body was still reacting to the bullets. [The shooter] would fire at someone else and then go back to shoot at this dead man.” Shaking his head slowly, Mohammed says somberly, “The guy is dead in a pool of blood. Why would you continue shooting him?”

In his vehicle, as the shooting intensified, Mohammed yelled for the kids to get down. He and his sister did the same. “My car was hit many times in different places. All I could hear from my car was the gun shots and the sound of glass shattering,” he remembers. Jenan was frantic. “Why are they shooting at us?” she asked him. Just then, a bullet pierced the windshield, hitting Jenan’s headrest. Mohammed shows me a photo of the bullet hole.

As gunfire rained on the SUV, Jenan grabbed Mohammed’s hair, yanked his head down and covered him with her body. “My young sister was trying to protect me by covering me with her body, so I forced myself out of her grip and covered her with my body to protect her. It was so horrific that my little sister, whom I’m supposed to protect, was trying to protect me.” Mohammed managed to slip his cellphone from his pocket and was going to call his father. “It’s customary that when in agony before death, you ask those close to you to look after your loved ones,” he says. Jenan demanded that Mohammed put down the phone, reminding him that their father had had two strokes already. “If he hears what’s happening, he’ll die immediately,” she said. “Maybe he’ll die before us.”

At that moment, bullets pierced the SUV through the front windshield. A bullet hit the rearview mirror, causing it to whack Mohammed in the face. “We imagined that in a few seconds everyone was going to die–everyone in the car, my sister and I and our children. We thought that every second that passed meant one of us dying.” He adds, “We remained still, my sister and I. I had her rest her head on my lap, and my body was on top of her. We’d sneak a peek from under the dashboard, and they continued shooting here and there, killing this one and that one.”

And then the shooting stopped.

Kinani thought his family had somehow miraculously survived the massacre. But then the silence of the aftermath was shattered by relatives in his car shouting, “Ali is shot! Ali is shot!”

Mohammed rushed around to Ali’s door and saw that the window was broken. He looked inside and saw his son’s head resting against the door. He opened it, and Ali slumped toward him. “I was standing in shock looking at him as the door opened, and his brain fell on the ground between my feet,” Mohammed recalls. “I looked and his brain was on the ground.” He remembers people yelling at him, telling him to get out while he could. “But I was in another world,” he says. Then Mohammed snapped back to consciousness. He put Ali back in the car and placed his hand over his son’s heart. It was still beating. He got in the driver’s seat of his car, tires blown out, radiator damaged, full of bullets, liquids leaking everywhere, hoping still that he could save [Ali’s] life. Somehow he managed to get the car near Yarmouk Hospital, right near the square. He picked up Ali and ran toward the hospital. He nearly collapsed on the road, and an Iraqi police officer took Ali from his arms and ran him into the hospital.

Mohammed checked that the other children were safe and then dashed to the hospital. “I entered the emergency room, and blood was everywhere, dead people, injured people everywhere,” he remembers. “My son was in the last bed; the doctor was with him and had already hooked him with an IV line.” As Mohammed stood by Ali’s bed, the doctor told him that Ali was brain dead. “His heart is beating,” the doctor said, “and it will continue to beat until he bleeds out and dies.” The doctor told him that if there were any hope to be found, it would require taking Ali in an ambulance to a neurological hospital across town. The fastest route meant that they had to pass through Nisour Square. Iraqi police stopped them and told them they could not pass. “The US Army is here and won’t let you through,” the officer told them. The driver took an alternate route and was going so fast the ambulance almost crashed twice. When they got to the hospital, Mohammed offered to pay the driver–at least for the gas, which is customary. The driver refused. “No, I would like to donate blood to your son if he needs it,” he told Mohammed. A few moments later, Mohammed stood with a doctor who told him there was nothing they could do. Ali was dead.

Filmmaker Richard Rowley and I produced a 30 minute documentary on the Nisour Square massacre and the story of Ali Kinani for Democracy Now! and The Nation magazine:

Photo: Susan Walsh/AP

The post Blackwater Founder Remains Free and Rich While His Former Employees Go Down on Murder Charges appeared first on The Intercept.

Roberto Saviano believes that it’s a large part of its allure:

[E]ach clan offers its own form of insurance. If you have a disabled child, your base salary rises. If (or when) you are killed, your family receives money for your funeral and a “death allowance.” When a member of a powerful clan is killed, the family can decide to receive a lump sum of $130,000 to $260,000 or a monthly stipend, which is paid to the dead man’s widow, mother, or girlfriend (provided she is the mother of his children). There are also prison allowances. ……

The number one thing criminal organizations like the Mafia offer their members is security. If you do well, you’re rewarded. If you make a mistake, you die or go to prison for a long time. But even then, someone will take care of your family, and someone will pay for your lawyers. That sort of deal is fairly rare in this day and age—how many workers are guaranteed to get money if they’re injured on the job? How many people labor honestly for decades in the same job without getting a decent raise? This is the true power, and appeal, of the Mafia.

bootsnblossoms:

femininefreak:

Gloria Steinem and Dorothy Pitman-Hughes, 1972 and 2014

Both by Dan Bagan

Wanna see my cry like a baby? Ask me who these women were.

Hughes’ father was beaten nearly to death by the KKK when she was a kid, and what does she do? Become an activist to try and stop that from happening to other people. She raised money to bail civil rights protesters out of jail. She helped women get out of abusive situations by providing shelter for them until they got on their feet. She founded an agency that helped women get to work without having to leave their children alone, because childcare in the 1970s? Not really a thing. In fact, a famous feminist line in the 70s was “every housewife is one man away from welfare.”

Then she teamed up with Steinman to found the Women’s Action Alliance, which created the first battered women’s shelters in history. They attacked women’s rights issues through boots on the ground activism, problem solving, and communication. They stomped over barriers of race and class to meet women where they were: mostly mothers who wanted better for themselves and their children.

These are women are who I always wanted to be.

Some great photos by reader A. Cromwell, shared in the Boing Boing Flickr Pool. Read the rest

What are the real world consequences to signing up for a Twitter or Facebook account through Tor and spewing hate toward other human beings?

Facebook reviewed the comment I reported and found it doesn't violate their Community Standards. pic.twitter.com/p9syG7oPM1

— Rob Beschizza (@Beschizza) October 15, 2014

As far as I can tell, nothing. There are barely any online consequences, even if the content is reported.

But there should be.

The problem is that Twitter and Facebook aim to be discussion platforms for "everyone", where every person, no matter how hateful and crazy they may be, gets a turn on the microphone. They get to be heard.

The hover text for this one is so good it deserves escalation:

I can't remember where I heard this, but someone once said that defending a position by citing free speech is sort of the ultimate concession; you're saying that the most compelling thing you can say for your position is that it's not literally illegal to express.

If the discussion platform you're using aims to be a public platform for the whole world, there are some pretty terrible things people can do and say to other people there with no real consequences, under the noble banner of free speech.

It can be challenging.

How do we show people like this the door? You can block, you can hide, you can mute. But what you can't do is show them the door, because it's not your house. It's Facebook's house. It's their door, and the rules say the whole world has to be accommodated within the Facebook community. So mute and block and so forth are the only options available. But they are anemic, barely workable options.

As we build Discourse, I've discovered that I am deeply opposed to mute and block functions. I think that's because the whole concept of Discourse is that it is your house. And mute and ignore, while arguably unavoidable for large worldwide communities, are actively dangerous for smaller communities. Here's why.

• It allows you to ignore bad behavior. If someone is hateful or harassing, why complain? Just mute. No more problem. Except everyone else still gets to see a person being hateful or harassing to another human being in public. Which means you are now sending a message to all other readers that this is behavior that is OK and accepted in your house.

• It puts the burden on the user. A kind of victim blaming — if someone is rude to you, then "why didn't you just mute / block them?" The solution is right there in front of you, why didn't you learn to use the software right? Why don't you take some responsibility and take action to stop the person abusing you? Every single time it happens, over and over again?

• It does not address the problematic behavior. A mute is invisible to everyone. So the person who is getting muted by 10 other users is getting zero feedback that their behavior is causing problems. It's also giving zero feedback to moderators that this person should probably get an intervention at the very least, if not outright suspended. It's so bad that people are building their own crowdsourced block lists for Twitter.

• It causes discussions to break down. Fine, you mute someone, so you "never" see that person's posts. But then another user you like quotes the muted user in their post, or references their @name, or replies to their post. Do you then suppress just the quoted section? Suppress the @name? Suppress all replies to their posts, too? This leaves big holes in the conversation and presents many hairy technical challenges. Given enough personal mutes and blocks and ignores, all conversation becomes a weird patchwork of partially visible statements.

• This is your house and your rules. This isn't Twitter or Facebook or some other giant public website with an expectation that "everyone" will be welcome. This is your house, with your rules, and your community. If someone can't behave themselves to the point that they are consistently rude and obnoxious and unkind to others, you don't ask the other people in the house to please ignore it – you ask them to leave your house. Engendering some weird expectation of "everyone is allowed here" sends the wrong message. Otherwise your house no longer belongs to you, and that's a very bad place to be.

I worry that people are learning the wrong lessons from the way Twitter and Facebook poorly handle these situations. Their hands are tied because they aspire to be these global communities where free speech trumps basic human decency and empathy.

The greatest power of online discussion communities, in my experience, is that they don't aspire to be global. You set up a clubhouse with reasonable rules your community agrees upon, and anyone who can't abide by those rules needs to be gently shown the door.

Don't pull this wishy washy non-committal stuff that Twitter and Facebook do. Community rules are only meaningful if they are actively enforced. You need to be willing to say this to people, at times:

No, your behavior is not acceptable in our community; "free speech" doesn't mean we are obliged to host your content, or listen to you being a jerk to people. This is our house, and our rules.

If they don't like it, fortunately there's a whole Internet of other communities out there. They can go try a different house. Or build their own.

The goal isn't to slam the door in people's faces – visitors should always be greeted in good faith, with a hearty smile – but simply to acknowledge that in those rare but inevitable cases where good faith breaks down, a well-oiled front door will save your community.

McDonald's earnings are down 30%. The company has bet everything on its Monopoly promotion. Or maybe McRib will help.

slint:

pimpmypaws:

the Mountain Goats - No Children (Middle East Downstairs 9/26/06)

jd says “oh it is butts. just butts” so please listen

They're licensed CC-BY-SA and designed for use in mobile apps and other interactive stuff -- there's 750 in all! It's part of Google's Material Design project. Read the rest

Researcher Helen Weng suggests that certain forms of meditation amount to “weight training” in empathy:

In a study my colleagues and I conducted at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Center for Investigating Healthy Minds (directed by Dr. Richard J. Davidson), participants were taught to generate compassion for different categories of people, including both those they love and “difficult” people in their lives. Doing these kinds of exercises is a little like weight training – the compassion “muscle” is strengthened by practicing with people of increasing difficulty, like increasing weights over time.

After only two weeks of online training, participants in our study who practiced compassion meditation every day behaved more altruistically towards strangers compared to another group taught to simply regulate or control their negative emotions. Not only that, the people who were the most altruistic after receiving compassion training also were the individuals who showed the largest changes in how their brains responded to images of suffering. These findings suggest that compassion is a trainable skill, and that practice can actually alter the way our brains perceive suffering and increase our actions to relieve that suffering.

Check out this SPECTACULAR Legend of Zelda: Clockwork Empire cosplay by Ainsley Bircher. Magnificent attention to detail and style. The glow effect on the gauntlet, in particular, is delightful.

You can find more of her cosplay at Pigtails and Power Tools on Facebook, and @PigtailsPower on Twitter!

idk about bicameral mind theory but i still love this

In truth, I didn’t pay a tremendous amount of attention to iOS8 until a post scrolled by on my Tumblr feed, which disturbed me a good deal: The new iteration of Apple’s OS included “Health”, an app that – among many other things – contains a weight tracker and a calorie counter.

And can’t be deleted.

Okay, so why is this a big deal? Pretty much all “health” apps include those features. I have one (third-party). A lot of people have one. They can be very useful. Apple sticking non-removable apps into its OS is annoying, but why would it be something worth getting up in arms over? This is where it becomes a bit difficult to explain, and where you’re likely to encounter two kinds of people (somewhat oversimplified, but go with me here). One group will react with mild bafflement. The other will immediately understand what’s at stake.

The Health app is literally dangerous, specifically to people dealing with/in recovery from eating disorders and related obsessive-compulsive behaviors. Obsessive weight tracking and calorie counting are classic symptoms. These disorders literally kill people. A lot of people. Apple’s Health app is an enabler of this behavior, a temptation to fall back into self-destructive habits. The fact that it can’t be deleted makes it worse by orders of magnitude.

So why can’t people just not use it? Why not just hide it? That’s not how obsessive-compulsive behavior works. One of the nastiest things about OCD symptoms – and one of the most difficult to understand for people who haven’t experienced them – is the fact that a brain with this kind of chemical imbalance can and will make you do things you don’t want to do. That’s what “compulsive” means. Things you know you shouldn’t do, that will hurt you. When it’s at its worst it’s almost impossible to fight, and it’s painful and frightening. I don’t deal with disordered eating, but my messed-up neurochemistry has forced me to do things I desperately didn’t want to do, things that damaged me. The very presence of this app on a device is a very real threat (from post linked above):

Whilst of course the app cannot force you to use it, it cannot be deleted, so will be present within your apps and can be a source of feelings of temptation to record numbers and of guilt and judgement for not using the app.

Apple doesn’t hate people with eating disorders. They probably weren’t thinking about people with eating disorders at all. That’s the problem.

Then this weekend another post caught my attention: The Health app doesn’t include the ability to track menstrual cycles, something that’s actually kind of important for the health of people who menstruate. Again: so? Apple thinks a number of other forms of incredibly specific tracking were important enough to include:

In case you’re wondering whether Health is only concerned with a few basics: Apple has predicted the need to input data about blood oxygen saturation, your daily molybdenum or pathogenic acid intake, cycling distance, number of times fallen and your electrodermal activity, but nothing to do with recording information about your menstrual cycle.

Again: Apple almost certainly doesn’t actively hate cisgender women, or anyone else who menstruates. They didn’t consider including a cycle tracker and then went “PFFT SCREW WOMEN.” They probably weren’t thinking about women at all.

During the design phase of this OS, half the world’s population was probably invisible. The specific needs of this half of the population were folded into an unspecified default. Which doesn’t – generally – menstruate.

I should note that – of course – third-party menstrual cycle tracking apps exist. But people have problems with these (problems I share), and it would have been nice if Apple had provided an escape from them:

There are already many apps designed for tracking periods, although many of my survey respondents mentioned that they’re too gendered (there were many complaints about colour schemes, needless ornamentation and twee language), difficult to use, too focused on conceiving, or not taking into account things that the respondents wanted to track.

Both of these problems are part of a larger design issue, and it’s one we’ve talked about before, more than once. The design of things – pretty much all things – reflects assumptions about what kind of people are going to be using the things, and how those people are going to use them. That means that design isn’t neutral. Design is a picture of inequality, of systems of power and domination both subtle and not. Apple didn’t consider what people with eating disorders might be dealing with; that’s ableism. Apple didn’t consider what menstruating women might need to do with a health app; that’s sexism.

The fact that the app cannot be removed is a further problem. For all intents and purposes, updating to a new OS is almost mandatory for users of Apple devices, at least eventually. Apple already has a kind of control over a device that’s a bit worrying, blurring the line between owner and user and threatening to replace one with the other. The Health app is a glimpse of a kind of well-meaning but ultimately harmful paternalist approach to design: We know what you need, what you want; we know what’s best. We don’t need to give you control over this. We know what we’re doing.

This isn’t just about failure of the imagination. This is about social power. And it’s troubling.

Sarah Wanenchak is a PhD student at the University of Maryland, College Park. Her current research focuses on contentious politics and communications technology in a global context, particularly the role of emotion mediated by technology as a mobilizing force. She blogs at Cyborgology, where this post originally appeared, and you can follow her at @dynamicsymmetry.

(View original at http://thesocietypages.org/socimages)

Last weekend’s post about mind-controlled artificial limbs left a reader his shaking head:

It frankly drives me crazy to watch videos about developments in myoelectric upper-extremity prosthetics like the one you posted and to read commentators like Victoria Turk “herald this breakthrough.” Yes, I can choose not to watch or read, but I’m an upper-extremity amputee, and I’ve worn a body-powered prosthesis most of my life. So why wouldn’t I let my curiosity reign?

Reports like this are crazy-making because for me, the products they tout inevitably disappoint. Indeed, I probably wouldn’t wear the prosthetic device with implanted electrodes, even in the very unlikely event that I were offered the opportunity. They evoke the hoary sci-fi cliché of the melding of man and machine, and while mildly interesting, they aren’t the answer for the everyday, prosthesis-wearing amputee.

I once tried a myoelectric arm with surface electrodes.

I promptly went back to my body-powered prosthesis, which is fitted with a hook for a terminal device. It’s far lighter, easier to manipulate, more dexterous, and more robust, and it’s not subject to the involuntary opening and closing of the surface electrode prosthesis. It also doesn’t discolor in the sun (that ‘hand’ is a silicon glove, of course) or run out of power.

Look at the video and see what the terminal device (the hand itself) can do: open and close. The end. It’s gross motor movement, at best. Dexterity at the individual finger level is coming, but it’s still a long, long way off (decades, if you ask me) from what you, the ‘handed’ majority, enjoy and take completely for granted. As it is, given the prosthetic hands in this video, give me a hook any day.

Then, there’s the bottom line: price. Who pays for these fantastically expensive myoelectric limbs? My new arm cost $7,500 and is as basic as they come. A myoelectric starts in the tens of thousands of dollars. One with implants? Few know, but I imagine that we’d likely start the conversation at $100,000. Impractical, in other words, for anyone but the well-off or those lucky enough to live where the state funds their prostheses (I live in Canada, and the state paid 65 percent of my artificial-limb cost. My supplementary, work-paid health plan covered the rest, but it would have capped at $3g).

For the working man, the poor, those who live in countries where state health care is weak, or in other words, likely for the majority of upper-extremity amputees in the world, simple, body-powered prostheses are the past and for the moment, also the future.

Forgive the rant, but this touched a nerve, as it were.

Brilliant analysis that's part of Tony Zhou ongoing Every Frame a Painting series. (more…)