Monday, July 23, 2007

The common ground

I'll give you a hint. I point a human being out to you. Can you show me the "Jew" or "Christian" in him? Can you point it out to me, hold it up to me so I can see what it looks like? If I fire up Google Earth and show you a piece of ground, do you see any lines drawn on that ground that say one side is somehow different from the other?

I guess the first and last items should have made it clear what I'm up to. It's all imaginary. Made up. Just the overheated delusions of jumped up monkeys with delusions of grandeur. There's the world, there's us, there's the stuff in the world, that's it. All this religion and nationality and ethnicity and shit is just made up bullshit. There ain't one single bit of genetic difference between the monkeys who call themselves "Palestinians" and the monkeys who call themselves "Jews", for example. They just made up that silliness and use it as an excuse to kill each other. There is no such thing as some invisible sky demon called "Jehovah" or "Allah" or "The Great Penguin" who strikes down evildoers with lightning bolts or fire from the sky or rains of herring. There's just a bunch of monkeys who try to avoid the knowledge that they're just monkeys by making up invisible sky demons to make themselves feel bigger than other people.

I've been called "anti-Semitic", "anti-Muslim", "un-patriotic" anti-lots of things. But what I really am is anti-bullshit. If you can't smell it, touch it, sniff it, measure it, or otherwise interact with it on a real life basis, it's just made-up imaginary bullshit. And if you come around flogging made-up bullshit, then you deserve the flamethrower you'll get.

The reason you'll get the flamethrower is that bullshit has consequences. "America" may be made-up bullshit, but the guns being carried by monkeys who believe in that made-up bullshit kill just as well as if there was a such a thing as "America" that could be smelled, touched, sniffed, measured. But I can't go and pick up something and show it to someone and say "this is America". I can show people a piece of dirt, but that's dirt. I can show people a building, but that's brick and stone and steel. I can show people a piece of paper with some blotches of ink on it, but that piece of paper isn't "Islam". There really isn't a such a thing as "America" or "Islam" or whatever that you can see and touch. It's just made up bullshit by monkeys with too much imagination and delusions of grandeur.

What we are, friends and mammals, are animals. We are just animals. Animals with big brains and a propensity to spout imaginary bullshit, but animals all the same. We are born, we eat, we defecate, we grow up (can't really say "mature"), we fornicate and reproduce, we grow old, we die. Just like every other animal on this planet. We're unique amongst animals in that we've figured out ways to communicate stuff between us, and figured out ways to build impressive crap, and figured out impressive ways to kill each other and other animals. But in the end, we're just meat. Meat stuffed into sausage skin and wrapped around bone. Meat that has a bad tendency to flap its meat at each other and slice open each other's sausage wrappers to let the meat fall out, but meat all the same.

As for all that other stuff.... it's just bullshit. Made up. Imaginary. Ladies and germs, the Easter Bunny is not real. Neither is "Mexican". Neither is "Jew" or "Muslim". It's all just made up silliness by monkeys that have lost their bearings and lost track of what is true and what is real. What is true and real is that, in the end, we are all just monkeys (well, except those of us who are penguins!), and all the rest of that stuff is just bullshit that we ought to just ignore while we get along with living our little monkey lives in peace. Sadly, though, deluded fools who think made-up bullshit is, like, actually real, keep using those psychotic delusions to give them excuses to kill other monkeys. Pathetic. Simply pathetic. If you're going to kill someone, at least do it for a reason that's real, not for some made-up imaginary nonsense like "race" or "religion" or whatever....

-- Badtux the Bullshit-spottin' Penguin

Labels: religion, righteous rants, the human condition, violence

Saturday, July 14, 2007

The blood of tyrants

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. Okay, you're back. So what do you think? Suitably bloodthirsty? Not exactly your typical national anthem, eh, what with all that bit about bloodthirsty ripping of babes out of wombs and such.

Some say that we need our own Bastille Day to overthrow the tyrants who control our nation (who, I might add, are not our elected officials -- they are, for the most part, puppets of the real rulers of our nation, the wealthy elite that prefers to work behind the scenes). The problem is what happens next. Once a people becomes accustomed to blood, there is no end to the blood. Rule of law is over, and rule of gun is the only rule. The end result, typically, is that the worst amongst us come out on top -- those with the least morals, the most willingness to kill upon the slightest whim, the least consideration for the least amongst us.

For the French, the result of overthrowing the monarchy led inevitably to Napoleon, who killed millions during his quest to conquer Europe, including over a million Frenchmen whose lives he threw away. While it would certainly be satisfying to take the puppet George W. Bush to the gallows and stretch his neck, and past that point take all the rulers of America and stretch their necks -- Richard and Helen DeVos, the Olin family, the Bradley family, the Scaife family, etc. -- then what? That road inevitably leads down the same road that the garroting of the French royal family led down -- blood, misery, and millions of dead.

One of the geniuses of our founding fathers is that, by and large, they did not massacre the supporters of the English monarchy once the pro-monarchy forces lost and American independence was secured. Instead, they exiled those supporters to Canada. There was no bloodbath on American soil outside the blood of soldiers. Perhaps, if we are forced to fight a new war of independence against a new monarchy, that would be a reasonable solution for dealing with our own monarchs. Except instead of sending them to Canada (which undoubtedly would not want them), I have a much better idea. Send them to Iraq. Naked. With no possessions. No servants. No soldiers or guards. Drop them naked and alone into the middle of the Sadr City suburb of Baghdad. Hey, if it was good enough for our founding fathers... oh wait, I forget, our founding fathers didn't ship the supporters of monarchy naked to Canada. They tarred and feathered them first. Hmm... stock tip: buy stock in feather companies.

-- Badtux the History Penguin

Labels: history, politics, violence

Monday, June 18, 2007

On good and evil and war

But what about Hitler, you say? Surely World War II was a "good" war?

No. World War II was a necessary war, in order to remove evil from the planet. But the absence of evil is not the presence of good.

Evil destroys. Good creates. But if you remove Evil, you don't end up with Good. You end up with... nothing. Just an empty vacuum.

War, since it is only destruction, is never Good. It is necessary, sometimes. I am not naive. I know that committing acts of violence, acts of evil, is sometimes necessary in order to prevent further evil. I am not reluctant, for example, to state that a serial killer should be subjected to the violence of the state -- seized by armed men, placed into a cage called a "prison cell", and kept there for the remainder of his life. Is this evil? Yes, violence is always evil, but in this case it prevents worse evil, it prevents the serial killer from adding yet more bodies to his tally of destruction.

But war never, ever adds anything. War, by definition as organized destruction on a mass scale, can never be Good, no more than black can ever be white.

But what about the miracle of democracy that arose in Germany and Japan after WWII, you say? Doesn't that prove that war is good?

No, what that proves is that if people decide to take another course, and have the support of the United States in terms of money and funding to do so, they can create Good. The removal of the evil that was Hitler in Germany and the military junta in Japan meant that the people were free to choose. But the people still had to choose, and they still needed assistance after they chose. The people chose Good. It was not war that chose Good for them. The people chose Good. If the United States had not been terrified by the Soviet Union into supporting Good against the advice of all the Republican nay-sayers who said that this was rewarding violence on the part of the Japanese and Germans and thus the Japanese and Germans should be punished, not rewarded with funds for rebuilding... well, what would have happened would have been something akin to modern-day Iraq -- a failed lawless state full of violence and death and Evil.

In short, it was the Marshall Plan and its Japanese equivalent that was Good, not the war which preceded it. All the war did was destroy. Amongst the things it destroyed, besides the lives of millions of people, were the evil of Hitler and Tojo. But that did not make the war Good. It merely made the war necessary.

-- Badtux the History Penguin

Labels: morality, violence, war

Sunday, June 17, 2007

War Porn

War does not create. War does not add anything. All war does is destroy. All war does is consume. War does not help economies, because everything created to fight wars does nothing to make people's lives better. Instead, the bullets and bombs and weapons are destroyed by the act of using them, as if the output of those factories had simply been thrown into a bottomless pit. War takes wealth, and turns it into murder.

Yes, murder. I use that word. War is murder. War is the taking of human lives. War is blood and guts and dead children lying in streets and the smell of piss and shit and the screaming of women and wails of children as they die in the crossfire. War is starvation and thirst, as the supply lines of civilization that keep civilians alive collapse in a hail of bombs and bullets and children shit their lives out in the street from drinking contaminated water and women are shot in the head and guts as they venture out of their homes searching for water and food for their children. Those who fight wars do not do anything glorious, unless you are the serial killer Hannibal Lector and believe that the removal of human life from this planet is the most reverent and sacred act that can be done. War is organized murder committed by governments in pursuit of whatever interests the leaders of those governments are pursuing.

Those who fight wars stink. Literally. For the warrior, war means that bathing becomes a seldom-done thing. The cake of dirt and rancid sweat and oil turns your hair into an oily greasy stuff on top of your head that, trapped under your helmet, fells like some sort of animal clasping your scalp. The acrid smell of rancid body oil and sweat and dirt is a bitter taste in your mouth (your nose has long since shut down and no longer smells it). Your underwear is filthy with urine and with feces because toilet paper is in short supply on the front lines. Sometimes you lay on top of your shit -- if your squad is pinned down and you can't move and you gotta go, well, it's a case of shovel a little dirt out on one side of whatever hole you're hiding in using the butt of your rifle, roll over, drop pants, dump, wipe with whatever you got to wipe with, roll back over, shove a little dirt back to try to cover it up enough to keep from squishing it all over you when you move around. This is oh so glorious and glamorous. And never seen when the war porn comes on.

If the war porn -- the movies, video games, and books that describe war -- ever tried to reflect the reality of war rather than some airbrushed glamorized fiction, people would run screaming from the movie theatres. Teenage boys would stare in shock at their video games as their brother or sister or mother or father were dismembered by a bullet in front of their face, begging for mercy, begging for a bullet to put them out of their misery. But of course the war porn does no such thing. Instead, it paints war as glamor and courage and bravery, as a glorious quest that turns a boy into a man.

And so we soak in war porn, every day. War porn comes on our evening news, a curiously sanitized pornography where war happens, yet nobody dies, where there are no dismembered bodies of children lying around on the ground after a 500 pound bomb blows up a daycare, where the men fighting the war look like movie stars instead of people who are very much in need of a bath, where the smell is never described. The smell. Ah yes, the smell. It is, indeed, lucky for the war pornographer that television has no way to transmit smells.

And so the death and destruction goes on, and everybody salutes and goes "hip hip hoorah!" as the war porn plays on their movie and tv screens. And the word "war", which should be a filthy word like "cunt", "nigger", "fuck", and "bitch", instead is used as a word for glorious quests like the War on Drugs, the War on Terrorism, the war on... well, I suppose this is all appropriate, in a way, since the War on Drugs, War on Terrorism, etc., involve the mass destruction of thousands of human lives as white American claps and says "Yeah! Another porch monkey caged! Another spic sent to jail! Another sand nigger killed like a dog! U S A! U S A!". But the horror of war is not, of course, what most people think of when they see the word "war" used in this way. Instead, all they see is the airbrushed glamor of the war porn in which they are immersed each day.

And so it goes, in the Delusional States of America, land of the war porn and home of the sheeple...

-- Badtux the Porn Penguin

Comment on this over at the Mockingbird's place

Labels: global warming, violence, war on brown people, war on drugs, war on poor people, war on terror, war on women

Tuesday, April 17, 2007

Time to talk gun control again?

Naturally, as a snarky penguin I must agree. I believe that every American should be armed with an AK-47, 5,000 rounds of ammunition, a RPG-7 anti-tank grenade launcher, and 100 rounds of RPG ammunition. Then we can be a peaceful and polite society just like Iraq and Somalia. After all, just ask Rep. Mike Pence of Indiana, who will be swift to tell you that going to the market in Iraq is safer than going to the market in Indiana. Especially when there's a blue light special on sexy lingerie, in which case you best have your body armor on or a herd of women and transvestites and Rudy Giuliani will send you on to the great beyond...

Remember, gun control is hittin' what ya aim at! As for the notion of a national dialogue on gun control... oh look! Over there! It's a missing young blond girl!

-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin

Below: A couple of shoppers at an Indiana market prepare to obtain the last Playstation 3's in town.

Labels: iraq, sick society, violence, wingnuts

Wednesday, April 11, 2007

Prison State USA: Round up the kids!

I have absolutely no respect for adults who cannot handle a six year old child without calling the cops. None. This is a complete and utter failure in training. A child seeking attention has been rewarded for misbehavior with a *lot* of attention, and thus will misbehave more in the future. This is the dumbest, stupidest, most ignorant thing I've ever heard of -- and it is rampant today, apparently, from the links at Jurassic Pork's site.

The solution isn't the paddle. As I pointed out in my post "On Violence":

When it comes to the raising of children, or disciplining of children, much the same applies -- violence is never moral. The problem isn't that we've banned the paddle or whatever other rot the tighty righties want to trot out. The problem is that we have a very punitive and violent society that views punishment -- violence -- as the solution to all problems. But while violence can *stop* a behavior, that is all it can do -- it can never add something to a child's understanding of the world. It can never add something to society. Love, encouragement, setting clear goals and expectations and rewards (note I say rewards, not bribes, there's a difference), making life a pleasant and rewarding experience rather than something harsh and punitive... what works for raising a happy child, also works for raising a happy society. Alas, our punishment and violence addicted society seems to have forgotten this, thus why our society is so unhappy, violent, and prone to addictions such as crack cocaine, black tar heroin, and neo-conservative politics.

But that conflicts with the violent and ignorant nature of our society, so these Florida crackers think that "being tough" is the solution. Violence against children is never the solution. Never. Some very limited violence may be necessary in order to stop a behavior that presents a danger to herself or others, but as I have previously pointed out, violence never adds anything to the world. It only takes away. You have to fill a child with something to fill that hole, with joy and love and doing things together and making life a pleasant place for that child the majority of the time, or all you end up with is a child that is unhappy, misbehaving, and violent. We have decades -- yes, *DECADES* -- of behavioral research confirming this. Yet as a violent and ignorant society, we still insist upon violence as the solution to all societal problems...

-- Badtux the Behavioral Psychology Penguin

Labels: education, prison state USA, sick society, violence

Friday, April 06, 2007

Granny's got a gun...

-- Badtux the Misanthropic Penguin

Labels: culture, prison state USA, sick society, violence

Wednesday, April 04, 2007

On violence

"I object to violence because when it appears to do good, the good is only temporary; the evil it does is permanent."

Indeed. Violence cannot add anything to the world. Violence cannot create anything. The best that can be said about violence is that sometimes it is necessary for self defense or the defense of others -- sorry, I disagree with the Quakers on this one, while I do not believe violence can ever be moral, it can (very occasionally) be necessary for perpetuation of the organism -- i.e., necessary.

That said, "necessary" and "moral" are two different words. If I kill a man in self defense, I have removed a man's life from this earth just as certainly as if I killed him just for the fun of it. The best that can be said is that if it is a choice of him taking my life or me taking his life, there is no moral choice that can be made, because a man is dead either way. At that point the inner monkey takes over, the primitive beast whose struggles for survival in the African veldt far surpassed anything that we can imagine. And said monkey wants to *live*...

When it comes to the raising of children, or disciplining of children, much the same applies -- violence is never moral. The problem isn't that we've banned the paddle or whatever other rot the tighty righties want to trot out. The problem is that we have a very punitive and violent society that views punishment -- violence -- as the solution to all problems. But while violence can *stop* a behavior, that is all it can do -- it can never add something to a child's understanding of the world. It can never add something to society. Love, encouragement, setting clear goals and expectations and rewards (note I say rewards, not bribes, there's a difference), making life a pleasant and rewarding experience rather than something harsh and punitive... what works for raising a happy child, also works for raising a happy society. Alas, our punishment and violence addicted society seems to have forgotten this, thus why our society is so unhappy, violent, and prone to addictions such as crack cocaine, black tar heroin, and neo-conservative politics.

Folks are prone to dismissing Gandhi as an "impractical dreamer". But in this case, at least, he was being a practical observer. There has been no instance of violence that increased the amount of good in the world. Violence has never added anything to the world. Violence can only take away. Violence can only stop or remove things. Violence cannot dream, or create, or invent, or provide salvation for lost souls. Violence can only destroy dreams, destroy creations, squash innovations, provide damnation for lost souls. It is sad that punishment -- violence -- seems to be the only response that our sick society has for a wide variety of societal problems. It is sad, because there is so much more that could be done, if only we embraced creation rather than destruction as the fundamental force of our society.

-- Badtux the Creative Penguin

Labels: Gandhi, non-violence, quakers, violence, wingnuts

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