On the Latest School Shooting: Guns and Mental Health

A follow-up to yesterday's more emotional post. I've seen the reactions to yesterday's school shooting in which yet another unmedicated psychotic used an assault rifle to massacre innocent children and their teachers. This being America, the automatic first response is: ban guns! or expand gun rights! My position on that, as a generally pro-gun liberal, is: you can't ban guns anymore, since not only is it the kind of prohibition that enables criminal gangs but 3D printers are making it easy to make guns in your home workshop; but civilians don't really need the right to buy combat weaponry at will. But though guns are one of the great American obsessions, what with the Wild West and all, the usual pro-gun/anti-gun screaming match hides what I'm convinced is the greater issue: the almost complete lack of a mental health system in America. Americans raised in a religious environment emphasizing sin and retribution have a hard time believing that there's any such thing as mental illness at all, and they have disproportionate power in this country. In fact, too many Christians are blaming the absence of God from public schools (and the constitutional separation of church and state in as such) for all school shootings: make God our dictator and stone the infidels, they insist, and America will be at absolute peace by definition. Also, we tend to have a raging hostility to government support of anything. As for the "crazies": lock 'em up in squalid old-fashioned madhouses and leave 'em to die! Did I mention that civilization tends to be lacking here in America? I'm supposed to be this anarchist, but I was a Buddhist for many years, so I believe in "expedient means" to establish, in this case, social peace. Karl Marx, though neither Buddhist nor anarchist, insisted that the expedient means of "dictatorship of the proletariat" (over the bourgeois aristocracy, he meant, not the protofascist perversion that destroyed the name of Marxism in the 20th century) had to be established before the State could wither away to anarchy. The expedient means required in this case is to use government to build a strong mental health system that will take in mentally ill people and help them at least start to heal before they can take out their frustrations and delusions on the general public. Nearly all these spree killers are mentally ill. So are their counterparts in China responsible for the wave of mass-stabbing incidents with knives over there. China too has a corporatist government, and it has no mental health system at all, since its Stalinist brand of corporatism, like our vulgar-Calvinist variety, denies that mental illness exists. We need to help these people before they turn on us — again.

The War Comes Home: Another School Shooting, Another Normal Day in America

A rant concerning this latest incident: Twenty schoolchildren, eight others dead in Connecticut massacre One sign that your country is dying is that massacres of innocents by heavily armed psychopaths become normal. Now, America's fighting several blithely genocidal wars abroad, and trying to start several more, for the profits of the military-industrial complex that rules its empire. Sure, Barack Obama, blithe mass murderer of Muslims by drone and super soldier, cries for twenty innocent children in Connecticut. But none of us cries for the millions of innocent children in the countries America's conquering in order to steal their oil. This is utterly nihilistic — but Social Darwinism is our national faith, so this kind of thing is what our nation stands for! We call it the Wild West, or American values (e.g., God-given gun rights, "stand your ground", etc.). The civilized world, to which America has always refused to belong, calls it barbarism. Back in the 1920s, the general opinion of civilized Americans was that there is no such thing as "American civilization"; that phrase is, by definition, a contradiction in terms. America went directly from barbarism to decadence without passing through civilization. Sure, there's pockets of civilization scattered around here and there, primarily in the more liberal big cities and college towns. But this massacre of innocent children in a small New England town is a reminder of America's true nature — i.e. no different from those other jihadis — and that barbarism will hunt civilized people down and slaughter them anywhere. Even worse: the killer was a local who went to that school and whose mother — his first victim — was a teacher! I don't ever expect anything to be done to help the mentally ill in America; after all, Social Darwinism is the national faith, and the victims are eugenically inferior because they died and the killer proved himself inferior by killing himself. I don't expect anybody in power to call for restoring the ban on civilian ownership of assault weapons, either; after all, the right to bear combat weaponry was given to Real Americans by GOD!!! and is too much a part of the national faith. This is the empire of capitalistic Christian Egoism, after all. Instead, I expect America to share the fate of its symbiotic enemy, the Soviet Union. The Cold War never ended; only one of its evil empires went away. It won't end until the other empire — ours — falls too. Need more proof that American conservatism and Corporatism have gone completely insane? Just wait till the terrorist insurrections begin — and they will, believe me. The Götterdämmerung of Conservative America is at hand. A disclaimer: I'm not even pretending to be an objective analyst in this post. The blood of twenty innocent children murdered by a psychopath won't let me. I need to vent my outrage before I punch out any of my conservative relatives, who aren't enemies. Now that it's out of my system, I can finally be objective: After several decades of devotion to drug prohibition, some American voters in Western states (including my own) have started to rebel against it. Will massacre after massacre of innocent civilians wake Americans up to the danger of guns in the hands of psychos, or to the dire need for the kind of mental-health system genuinely civilized countries consider an absolute necessity? How many American civilians have to die like their "enemy" Muslim counterparts before Americans start to wake up? My hope is that it won't take many more. But there's a class-war element to this, too. Note that the most conservative states dominated by the richest conservatives are the ones with the laxest gun (and even murder) laws and the highest murder rates. The 19th-century robber baron Jay Gould bragged that he could hire half the working class to kill the other half. He meant right-wing terrorism, championed in his day by the Ku Klux Klan. This kind of thing is exactly what he was talking about. Just wait till the real terrorism begins...

His Name Was Willard Romney, Incorporated (Part 2)

Vulture capitalist turned presidential candidate Willard Romney, Inc. speaks his true opinion of the American electorate in an unguarded moment. In the language of Paul Ryan's guru Ayn Rand, that means nearly half the voters are moochers who exist only to loot the Producers i.e. the plutocratic class of Romney and Ryan. In the mountain tunnel scene of Atlas Shrugged (called "The Moratorium on Brains"), Rand blew a trainful of such people up. But what Romney and Ryan don't know is that corporatists like them are the villains of Atlas Shrugged — in fact, arguably worse: at least Orren Boyle was an industrialist, though an incompetent one whose company continued to exist because of government support. It's Boyle's kind that are behind protectionist laws. Romney himself is in fact worse: he got his fortune from destroying companies and exporting jobs to China. Apparently the vulture capitalist was too horrific a concept for Rand. But now we're stuck with an aristocracy of them. And Willard Romney, Inc. is their standard bearer, their point man in their Social Darwinist crusade against democracy and the common man.

The Republican Party Is Over

I've said previously that the Republicans have lost this election. The Mitt Romney campaign, it is said, are secretly conceding. But I wasn't confident enough to go one step further. But Laura Ingraham has. Even Rush Limbaugh has. The Republican Party is over. Of course, the conservative pundits add one caveat: "if Obama wins this election" (which they think is impossible unless Americans' faith is lacking). I'm saying Obama has already won it. Fact: The Democrats got a "bounce" in the polls from their convention. The Republicans got nothing. Not that polls are scientific or anything, but this is a bad sign. Fact: The Republican presidential ticket was upstaged at their own convention by an old man raving dementedly at an empty chair. (The chair became an instant star. Watch out, inanimate carbon rod!) Fact: This election the Republicans face not one but two spoiler parties (the Libertarian Party, which has picked up the Ron Paul libertarian vote; and the Constitution Party, which aims to be the party of the Christian Right); the Democrats face none, not even the Greens that helped cost them the 2000 election. Obama now has Clinton's spoiler advantage. Fact: There are five upcoming debates, two between the presidential candidates and two vice-presidential. So far, Willard Romney Inc. and Paul Ryan have not shown that they are ready to take on Obama and Biden. But these are reasons why the current Republican presidential ticket will lose the 2012 election. But here's some signs that the GOP may not survive this election at all:

1. Demographics. The older the generation, the whiter and more conservative, and the more likely voters will vote Republican. Also, in the wake of the Crash of 2008, the nation is becoming more urban, and cities are far more diverse and liberal than the suburbs and exurbs that are the traditional base of conservative power.
2. The libertarian wing was in effect purged. It is no longer part of the Republican coalition at all. It has its own party: the Libertarian Party. After 2012, not even conservative libertarians will vote Republican ever again.
3. Another major wing of the GOP, the Christian Right, has a third party of its own competing for Republican votes: the Constitution Party. In this election the CP is in perfect position to suck up votes from white Evangelical fundamentalists that would otherwise go Republican if only the GOP candidate were not Mammon-worshipping Mormon plutocrat Willard Romney Inc. More on the CP below.
4. At the Republican National Convention, the party establishment pushed through a rule change that would in effect eliminate any more populist "insurrections" like those behind Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, and Ron Paul. The Republican National Committee, in effect, established a dictatorship within the party, like that of the Communist Party to which so many neocons in the party establishment used to belong. The Sovietization of the GOP is now complete.
5. The plutocrats who currently control the GOP are not loyal to any political party; rather, they buy parties. The coming Republican Massacre will convince them that the GOP is now a failed investment, so they'll abandon their losses and shift their attention to the Democrats.

I've previously predicted that the Republicans would shrink into a sectional religious party. But the Constitution Party is already that; a religious GOP is redundant. So I am now confident enough to take that one step further: It's not just the end of an era of Republican dominance. It's the end of the Republican Party, period. It's about to join its predecessors, the Federalists and Whigs, to oblivion. And after that? Consider that the Constitution Party is the existing sectional religious of the South, and the main base of Libertarian popularity is the West. That would make the Democrats the only remaining national party in 2016. You know the corporatists who now own the GOP will attempt a hostile takeover of the Democrats, complete with a purge of the liberal base and

The Republicans Have Already Lost; or, Barry Goldwater All Over Again

Willard Romney, Incorporated was already losing in the political polls. Then on Saturday the 11th, he made what he thought was the winningest pick for vice president: Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin. Romney-Ryan has already lost. Here's why. In 1964, Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona ran his Republican presidential campaign on a more or less ideologically pure platform and got his butt handed to him by President Lyndon Johnson, who proceeded to sign the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts. Paul Ryan is the architect of this year's GOP platform. His plan ends Medicare, privatizes Social Security, raises taxes on the middle class and the poor, and all but subsidizes the rich. He justifies this with Ayn Rand's ethics, which states that the big industrialists are the true producers and everybody else is a mooching looter and moral cannibal living off their totally deserved wealth. The not-so-hidden assumptions are "vulgar Calvinism", the belief that wealth is the mark of virtue or is itself virtue, and Social Darwinism, the cult of "the survival of the fittest" — combined in the assumption that the rich are the fittest and the poor are the unfit that must be destroyed. Seems the Corporates have not evolved one bit since they tried to destroy President Franklin Roosevelt during the Great Depression. Hell, some of them even supported Hitler in his Kampf or jihad against America. America is evolving and changing around them, yet they haven't changed one bit. Wealth and power can be very regressive forces indeed. Ryan's plan to destroy Medicare and sell off Social Security to his predatory Corporate friends will lose him the senior vote that the GOP previously relied on as the core of their base. It's even threatening the GOP down-ticket: Ryan is now every GOP politician's running mate, since he wrote the party platform he's now running on as VP nominee. There are two potential Ralph Nader/Ross Perot-type spoilers. First, there's the Libertarian Party, whose nominee Gary Johnson is running on essentially the Ron Paul platform. He will siphon away at least a significant proportion of Paul supporters from Romney-Ryan. The other is the second biggest third party, Dominionist party variously called Constitution, Independence, and American Taxpayers. If they can nominate a top ticket with a high enough profile, they could take away a good chunk of the Religious Right. The platform Romney and Ryan are running on is essentially Corporatism, an ideology with little mass appeal precisely because it scorns the masses. Its current basis is Ayn Rand's ideology of Objectivism, which is basically Stalinism turned upside down: she replaced Marxism's revolutionary proletariat with a revolutionary bourgeoisie, and replaced Christian and Marxist altruism (the ethics of self-sacrifice) with an equally extreme egoism. Now combine this disadvantage with the threat of two competing right-wing third parties. The result? A second term for President Barack Obama, the guy the Right hates because the Great White Father isn't supposed to be black. Note that I never mentioned the Democratic Party once in the above paragraphs. Democratic Presidents, yes, but not the party. That's because, as I've been saying since last year, this election is the Republicans' to lose. Now I'm convince that they've already lost it.

The Problem with July 4 and Other High Holy Days of the Chosen Nation

Happy America's Birthday, readers! Sorry if I'm skeptical, but I'm one of those people who grow radical as they grow older (I'm approaching middle age already, though I don't look it) and I haven't called it "Independence Day" since the day I found out America is the reincarnation of the British Empire. Before then, America stood for freedom or something. Now it stands for one and only one thing, Total World Domination (called in our official State religion, Americanism — you know, the one that claims the Second Coming of Christ occurred on this day in 1776 which we're supposed to be celebrating? — Manifest Destiny, freedom and democracy be damned). America Takes Over The World — and after that, United Space of America! Sure enough, what started as the celebration of a young nation's freedom is now the cult day (one of many) dedicated to the supremacy of Our Heroic Imperial Armed Forces who keep the world in subjection. It's the ultimate example of mission creep, which should be in school textbooks after the American Empire follows all other empires in history into the proverbial trash can of history. The worst part of the day, according to my mother (who, among other things, owns two dogs), is that this day's gigantic fireworks orgy terrifies all the animals, sometimes to madness. I've come to the conclusion that it symbolizes America's national strategy of bombing all opposition to smithereens for the sake of our nation's corporate profits, freedom and democracy and the lives of innocent civilians be damned. The conquest of Earth is America's Manifest Destiny, you liberal homosexual commie Eurotrash traitors! Four years ago, I posted here my opinion that patriotism is a sin. Now I know better: nationalism is a cult, the cult of the State, and patriotism is its expression of faith. In other words, a nation is just a glorified tribe. Me, I'm an atheist, and the nation-state strikes me as a pseudo-secular neopagan replacement for the God who abandoned Old Christendom, a search for a God where there is none. Every State believes it and it alone is by definition the one true God, the same way every tribe by definition is the one true master race. But what is a State, really? A giant corporation whose business is tribalism, no less monopolistic and predatory than any other giant corporation. I'm an anarchist because I'm an atheist. So I'm not treating the Fourth of July like the High Holy Day of the Nation that it's supposed to be, any more, say, than I sing "O Canada" three days earlier. I'm going to enjoy the company of my family and tonight's fireworks show (maybe even take pictures). I won't spoil the occasion for my friends and relatives because, hey, I like them. Besides, America belongs to its oligarchs, not its people, and the people — all the people of the world — belong to them too, by definition. Manifest Destiny, y'know. This opinion is my addition to these posts: "When Americans Understood the Declaration of Indepencence", Thomas J. DiLorenzo, LewRockwell.com "How to Celebrate July 4", Sheldon Richman, Free Association (End the empire — now!) "Founding Fathers Quotes You've Probably Never Heard", David O. Atkins, Hullaballoo ("Buncha commies!") "'Deriving Their Just Power from the Consent of the Governed" (as long as they can prove to Republicans that they're worthy)" by Digby, Hullabaloo ("I don't think Thomas Jefferson had this sort of thing in mind when he wrote the great document [Declaration of Independence].") "To be a patriot: Adlai Stevenson, McCarthyism and a message for Independence Day by MrLiberal, Daily Kos (how the liberal Democratic candidate tried to wrest the word "patriot" from Joe McCarthy and lost) ...and other comments by skeptics of the Empire's Birthday. Note that these are posts by liberals, genuine libertarians, and Old Right conservatives. The true Left is, of course, against the very idea of nationhood on principle: humanity is one and should stop listening to the divisive siren songs of would-be messiahs and their giant corporations of tribalism they call nations; We the People need to control our destiny together, collectively, because our future depends on it.

Yes, Reverend, Atheists Grieve Too

I read this post quoting from this article about this opinion in which an Episcopal priest claims that atheists are incapable of grieving because they don't believe in God. Say what? So I felt I had to spell out my own position on this:

1. People who believe in God almost always believe in Heaven as well. Some atheists (not me) surely wonder why they don't celebrate when a dead loved one goes to Jesus or gloat when an unbeliever is "rewarded" with eternal punishment in Hell. (I know of some believers who do just this.)
2. Most atheists don't believe in an afterlife (I'm agnostic on specifically this). If a loved one dies and you've lost them, wouldn't you have more reason to grieve?

The assumption of some believers, especially those most involved in spreading the religion, is that belief in God is the prerequisite for morality. If there is neither God nor heaven, the reasoning goes, then morality does not exist because by definition it comes only from On High. Presumably the converse is therefore true, that believers are by definition moral — against which I give you examples such as the Crusaders, the Inquisition, Al-Qaeda, and the Cult of Reason that justified the Jacobins' massacres during the Reign of Terror that ultimately destroyed the French Revolution. Against the main point (God makes morality possible), there's the uncountable number of unbelievers who are good people living moral lives based on relationships with themselves and other people as opposed to some absolute monarch ruling from Heaven. I'll probably get counterexamples thrown at me, atheists who the believers believe prove their point: Ayn Rand, Joseph Stalin, Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins. All this proves is that dogmatism is as dangerous and destructive among atheists as it is among believers. The pessimistic case: life is short, we all die, eventually it's as if we never lived, so some kind of escape is necessary, even if only into fantasy. The assumption here is that the lack of an afterlife drains life of all worth. But from the viewpoint of objective realism, isn't it truer that if one life is all we have, it's the most valuable thing in the world? And since we humans are social animals, it also means we need to value each other all the more. It's not true that lack of religion necessarily leads to nihilism. (I skirted close to nihilism myself once — when I was young.) In fact, it may be a sign of a mature and realistic worldview. And whereas the devout aren't required to mourn those who after all are going to Jesus, those without religion who have just lost someone forever have all the reason in the world to grieve.

His Name Was Willard Romney, Incorporated

When F. Scott Fitzgerald began one of his novels with the statement “The rich are different from you and I,” he wasn’t talking about mere cash flow, but worldview. Willard Mitt Romney, the Overclass’ designated robocandidate, exemplifies that worldview so central-casting perfectly that it’s not even funny. Now that he’s won the Republican Party nomination for President, everyone is about to find out how.

First, a relevant digression. In his cyberpunk short story “Sunken Gardens,” Bruce Sterling introduces the story’s dominant character (not the main character, a near-nonentity) with this sentence: “Her name was Arkadya Sorienti, Incorporated.” Later he repeatedly refers to her as “The Sorienti.” And of course I “homaged” that notation to refer to my High Corporate villains in Chaos Angel Spanner.

Willard Mitt Romney is the very archetype of the High Corporate aristocrat. He’s slick, soulless, and robotic to the point of activating the “uncanny valley” response in actual humans. He drips with contempt for the “inferior” orders. He’s a “vulture capitalist” who specializes in destroying American businesses and jobs. He’s on record as saying that inheriting great wealth is equivalent to inheriting great looks or talent, in denial of all the evidence which shows that inheriting great wealth sucks away all talent and personality. He shares his caste’s delusion that being rich means being genetically superior by definition. His goal is that of his caste: to abolish democracy worldwide and establish the global dictatorship of American Corporatism.

A candidate so stuck up, so cluelessly arrogant, would have to be a bottomless fount of campaign-destroying gaffes of the caliber of Carly Fiorina’s demon sheep. So Romney. There’s the dog-atop-the-car incident that has pet lovers hissing and growling. There’s the time he publicly confessed he enjoys firing people — and it’s not just firing yard work contractors; it’s firing people, period, that turns him on, or he wouldn’t have made it his life’s work. There’s how he gets testy with angry poor people and talks down to them. There’s how he looks so artificial that people have taken to calling him a robot (e.g. RomBot) and a zombie (Zomney). And the gaffes will not stop. They cannot stop because Romney completely lacks the ability to connect with people below his own aristocratic caste.

Last year, surveying the much broader field of Republican candidates in what had already turned into a tawdry reality show by the time The Donald briefly entered the race on a “birther” platform, I predicted (privately and on Twitter) that even though there’s no way Obama, unmasked as a Nixonite conservative, could win the 2012 presidential election, the Republicans would find a way to lose it. As it turned out, they found several: Trump, the pizza man and his Sim City tax plan, the crazy lady, the debate reality show, Newt’s ego, Santorum’s sanctimony, the replacement of democracy with corporate fascism, tax cuts for the rich and tax war against the poor, and a relentless war not just on workers but women. The Gang Of Plunderers are certain that they are invincible because God and infinite wealth are on their side. The triumphalism of their 2010 victory has made them arrogant enough to make Ayn Rand look humble. Spitting on your constituents on behalf of your corporate owners is not a recipe for electoral victory.

The primary-ending duel between Romney and Rick “the Preacher” Santorum made me realize another thing. Santorum, of course, lost. There are a lot of poor people in the Christian Right, and they voted for Santorum. If I were to bet money, I’d bet big money that the Christian Right will defect from the Rich Man’s Party and vote for the candidate of the party that claims them as its own, called by various names (here in Washington state, the Constitution Party; Independence Party elsewhere). It should be clear by now to the theocratic reactionaries that the GOP worship another god as the Supreme Being, not Jehovah but Mammon, god of money. Between liberal anticorporatism, religious conservative revulsion (and not just because he’s Mormon), and, well, just being a robot or reptoid masquerading as human, Romney looks to be even more the sure loser than fellow flipflopper John Kerry was in 2004. The Republicans are well on their way to losing.

His name is Willard Romney, Incorporated. Pass it on.