Jared is in every other car: You know, Jared Lougher is not much different than dozens of people I’ve known who either have used violence in support of their ideologies, or who are a hair trigger away from it. Right wing types, fundamentalists, rednecks, clergy, nearly anyone I’ve met who’s in law enforcement or private security. I’ve found it an extremely common trait among men – a willingness to become pugilists, bullies, or worse on behalf of their masters – the ideologies to which they are slaves. I’ve seen them like, trump up false accusations, intentionally inflict harm, blackmail – I’ve seen what they become when their masters calls. Not just men, either, but the women who support them – the ones who stand by and think such things are manly – tools of tools.

It’s also not just right wing types. How many left wingers have uttered the words “by any means necessary” in support of their causes? And just because not every one of them becomes a bell tower shooter, doesn’t mean they aren’t really the same thing, at the core. I attribute this to several things – something twisted and broken in machismo – but also Western culture is woefully, sickly Protestant and Latin. Thickly Protestant and Roman Catholic, right down to the atheists, the pagans, and all the other groups. And what is Protestantism and Roman Catholicism about? It’s about not wanting to let other people do things one thinks are wrong. It’s about making people live the ‘right’ way. That impulse, more than any other – the arrogant obsession with making other people live correctly and not live wrongly – is the bell tower impulse, is the ideological bully impulse.

And with that impulse is nationalism. Nationalism, of whatever stripe – patriotism – are crimes – crimes again one’s fellow man. You can always spot it, when one is taking measures to save the nation from the people presumably mucking it up – no moral cost is too great – one is willing to deceive or do any other dirty deed because the philosophy is an absolute. It must be served, and the end justifies any means.

Finally, it is absolutism itself that is the curse. It is moral philosophy. In reality, philosophy can never tell us anything about morality. It can tell us about ethics – those things which serve the survival of the species – but right and wrong in a moral sense are beyond it, because those concepts necessarily depend on a source of authority that is personal and transcends philosophy. And yet, philosophy desires to be absolutized – it yearns for it, so to speak. And when one does that, when one creates a moral philosophy, the abortion of philosophy, and absolutizes it, ethics take a back seat. The philosophy, which is all the believers really mean when they say the word “god” (after all – they really think “god”, if he’s there, hold to the “truths” in their philosophy) demands what it demands. Justice, mercy, honesty – the qualities necessary for us to live together, are set aside when expedient. That’s the meaning of ‘absolute’ – it takes precedent over other concerns or indications of reality.

Necessarily, an absolute philosophy isn’t human – it can’t be – for a philosophy to be absolute, it must transcend even such considerations as the persons who adhere to it. So killing people follows as a normative option to consider. The philosophy is absolute, people are living wrong or aren’t living right, one feels that affects oneself, so throwing that punch or shooting that gun are self-defense, it’s about fixing the world.

There’s a Jared in every other car in front of you. That’s the ugliest truth about the recent shooting. Not that a politician (as if that made her more important than any other victim) got shot, but that Jared is anyone who ever plotted to stop people from doing the wrong things, and was willing to hurt them or lie to make it happen. Hi, Jared. You’re listening, aren’t you. You’re half of anyone that might read this. We live in an ideological place, where you are always willing to do what you can – the gun is just a less efficient, less effective method – it’s a method for dolts. You’re much better at manipulating things in other ways.

You know, one of the reasons we don’t have national healthcare, is that there’s nothing quite so much as a threat to military/intelligence/black budget funding as healthcare – nothing quite so large. You do national healthcare, and it won’t be long before “defense” programs have to get cut. And so you have the most powerful intelligence apparatus of the century, with layers in industry, technology, education, religion, and every other sector of the society, working to ensure it doesn’t happen.

I really hate what they’ve done to women, culturally. It’s like what years of oppression did to Blacks. So many women have cultural Stockholm Syndrome. You actually hear them say things like, “We’re a Verizon family” or “I just believe in my leaders”. Mentally, they’re gone. They’re just not there anymore – lights on, but no one’s home. They’ve checked out of any moral integrity – oh they may be prudish or religious or whatever, but I mean actual moral integrity – and they’ve checked into a fascism that allows them to acquiesce to a world in which, while they’re no longer powerless, intellectually they’re irrelevant. They’re just ornaments propping up the existing system, signing off on the status quo. They’d make good nazis, and a lot of them are excellent Republicans. But in the end, so many women have traded away the birthright of their full humanity for the comforting willful delusion that everythings OK. It’s OK. It’s all OK. Everyting is OK. And watching the men in their lives, when they’re among ‘buddies’, talk about the women in their lives as irrelevant in a myriad of different ways w/o actually having to resort to outright saying it, with another face ready for when women are listening, and these women actually go for those men, is the most telling. Baby making machines, household workers, sexual instruments – that’s what so many women have allowed themselves to be reduced to. I’d accept it, however much I may disagree with it, as the self-destructive choice of adults who must be responsible for becoming the equivalent of addicts, except for the pretense. Knowing what I know, and seeing what I see, I don’t like having to cater to their insistence on being taken seriously. I mean, I’ve met women who right off, in right-wing religious circles, would tell you women shouldn’t be allowed to vote, intellectual things are man things, etc. – but then fine, don’t speak to me – send your husband for any business your family has for me – don’t ask me to take you seriously when you want to criticize something, as if you were worthy of debate. Send the man, or send a woman who hasn’t sold out to her captors, otherwise leave off. You might think *those* people are extreme. But I think a soccer mom who says “We’re a Verizon family” or “I trust our leaders” is just as insipid and ornamental, and just as fascist. She just doesn’t realize it, not that her opinion counts – she’s already acknowledge who owns her – it’s only their opinions we have to debate.

I don’t accept either the traditional definition of a man or the newer soft-male definition. I do think there’s something that makes a man a man besides his dick – he’s chemically different, so he’s emotionally and mentally different. But if it’s neither of these things, what is it?

Basically, I think both ideals are incorrect solutions to a problem, that adherents can’t answer, because they’re stuck in a dialectic. Is man strong and brave? Yes. Is man tender and kind? Yes. But those are just words that don’t mean anything by themselves – concepts without flesh. Unless we describe what they look like, we’re just doing philosophy – we’re talking about nothing real. Man is not hypothetical.

I think both sides have taken a true thing and butchered it. I don’t blame them – again, it’s the first premise – the dialectic – that hobbled their minds. But still: man is strong and brave – to me, that means he doesn’t cower from being considered weak or cowardly – he is strong enough and brave enough not to have to guard his reputation so fiercely. He is not afraid of seeming effeminate. I don’t think much of men who talk about being manly men but cower like scared little chipmunks from being unguarded, vulnerable, open, or honest about their feelings, or from some other man calling them (incorrectly) “a girl”. Poor little scared boys, yes – but such are not men.

I don’t think men have to eat meat, like sports, be fascinated by trucks, support war, or talk about women in purely animalistic terms – “I like fuckin’. I need me some pussy.” That’s the lingo of permanent adolescents, not grown men. And the other stuff is just trappings – if a man isn’t a man without them, then he truly isn’t very strong, is he? That kind of thinking is for the weak – not for men.

I don’t think men walk around on the apron strings of a woman, either. Following her around shopping, pretending to be interested in banalities (which are often a sign of the depletion of womanhood, not something particularly of woman – but that’s a separate article), and “being” sensitive. For such ‘men’, there’s no distinction between being and pretending, so of course they consider themselves truly sensitive. They’ve learned to drink their own Koolaid, but they’re not men – men aren’t afraid to come out from that – aren’t afraid to say I don’t like shopping and I’m not interested in cosmetics. Men don’t cower from being thought insensitive and anti-woman any more than they cower from being considered unmanly and girlish.

What is a man? I’ll tell you, since you asked. A man sets his own standard. A man stands on his own, without letting other people define him. A man, a “real” man if you like using that redundancy, eludes definition – because every “real” man is an open question mark – he both is something, and is capable of being something, that he determines. A man isn’t defined by his “guy” buddies, and he’s not defined by his female “relationships”. That’s what a man is – a man is a continual self-definition in the face of others trying to define him.

And, while we’re there, though it may have a different flavour (or, more accurately, as many flavours as there are examples), that’s largely what a “real” woman is. A woman isn’t a “lady”, a “whore”, a “wife”, or a “mom”. A woman is her own, or she’s a cardboard cutout from someone else’s book of dolls. And before you pounce on that – I’ve known a woman or two – they do exist. They’re as rare as men, but they are out there. As surely as frat boys like ranch on their pizza.

As I watch people talk about Wikileaks, using words like “should” and “shouldn’t”, I would characterize the real question they’re presuming to answer as “Should or shouldn’t we simply accept what an authority figure wishes us to accept as real, or should we want to know the truth independently of any presumption of authority?” This is, in fact, how I would characterize the difference between neoconservative and neoliberal. Sure, the neoliberals lie just as much, but neoconservatives are big advocates of false reality – for them, to be patriotic, Christian, reasonable, loyal, and acceptable (meaning they don’t want to kill you), is to accept the falsehoods delivered by the FDA, the Energy Commission, the Executive, the Pentagon, Multi-national Corporations, Neonconservative lobbyists and think tanks, and Neoconservatives as a group. It’s a kind of fictional construct that “good” people are expected to treat as real, unless they have “authority”, in which case they merely craft “reality” for others but are allowed to deceive at will.

Neoconservatives, and their religious branch – evangelical fundamentalists, are, philosophically speaking, the children of antichrist, in that they exist to create and serve strong leaders who are exempt from ordinary morals, while preaching a morality of compliance, pretense, and groupthink. Usually, we call that facism, but in the US it’s called neoconservatism. This is part of what I’ve always said about why people poo poo conspiracies, which are the most interesting parts of what the Wikileaks releases demonstrate – people roll their eyes not because there is no evidence, not because there is no proof, not because they are not true, but because to accept outright that the various authorities in the world are routinely fabricating a false reality specifically designed to be accepted by everyone else, and use it as cover for activities that would be considered immoral in the extreme if everyone else were to do them, is to admit that one is a tool, that the one’s ideas are all, down to the last iota of thought, predicated on willing participation in a deception (again, children of antichrist), and that all the discussion one participates in to feel intellectual, clever, wise, right, correct, etc. is fake and masturbatory. The naysayers against Wikileaks aren’t complaining that the revelations are untrue, but that we’re telling people the truth – they prefer that the lie have prevailed. They are the children of lies.

To willfully believe whatever comes out of an authority’s mouth means you must acknowledge you are little more than “the bitch” of your betters, to use an otherwise unacceptable derogation, and the issues you deal in (China’s rare earth, or whatever else you’re told to talk amongst yourselves about) are like car keys dangled before children to occupy them – children who, though they’ve outgrown them, wish always to be children, so they don’t have to do anything, think thoughts that might lead to action, make them socially unacceptable (an acknowledgement that society as a whole is made up of liars) – or else one must, finally, take responsibility for helping create a fake world, must do something to change it, and must accept the social, economic, political, and possibly life-threating consequences of doing so.

In other words, it’s a choice between, on the one hand, cowardice, lazyness, and willful neurosis – yes, I think all neoconservatives are cowards, lazy, and mentally ill – I mean, isn’t that where the logic leads us? – and, on the other hand, social, political, and economic martyrdom (not the stuff for cowards or lazy persons feigning belief in pseudo-realities) – at least those kinds of martyrdom, if not other kinds. This brings us to one more necessary observation. Neconservatives (patriots, “Americans”, whatever you want to call them) are all liars. Watch them closely – they care less about whether a thing is true, than whether it is ideologically proper to think it – whether it fits the platform, whether it’s consistent with the desired ideology and ideological outcome – whether it agrees with their understanding of their ‘bible’ of influences. In other words, the purple Koolaid of pseudo-reality which they willfully devour, and the pretense at actual belief in it, which is more of a “position” than real epistemology – real seeking of the truth, amounts to a continual act of lying – self deception and pretense – their grandmas would call that lying.

Observe the prepared, canned discussion – the things we’re supposed to be talking about – the choice of topics – and the questions framed as we’re supposed to be asking them – “should they have or shouldn’t they have” – and if you accept them, accept that as the ground – the basis of what matters, what’s important to look at – if your eyes are following the dangled keys – then, regardless of your ideology, you might as well be a neoconservative, a fundamentalist, a cowardly – lazy – neurotic liar – because, functionality, accepting that ground, is the same thing. The children of antichrist – that’s what we all are – those who preferred mass deception, the lies of ‘leaders’ (which is most often simply organized wealth) who wield control, over truth itself, unless… unless we can free ourselves. As Morpheus would say, in that brilliant film The Matrix, “free your mind”.

When nearly everyone is bowing down to the leader (it doesn’t matter which one – the question is not “who is the antichrist?” but “aren’t they all, antichrist – and what, if anything else, are we?”), when nearly everyone is accepting the mark (bar codes? come, now. – the mark, philosophically, is acceding to the pseudo-reality of the giant corporations and their nexus with political power – without which, one cannot buy and sell – the mark is defending Monsanto, Walmart, Exxon, Haliburton, Blackwater (by any other name), etc. – blindly, as the amorphous authority of corporately organized wealth – it is the form of “American” religion, the substance of “American” politics, and the basis of the “American” economy) – when the worship of antichrist is going on, and you can be deprived of work – and therefore economic freedom – without it, and people want to lynch you if you speak against it: “You’re not a real American! You’re not one of us!” (as a prophet said, “In the last days, men will go mad and will say “you’re mad – you’re not like us”) – unless you participate in the neurosis – in such a time, can you keep the faith? Can you say that reality is more important than being acceptable, than being in the group, perhaps even more important than survival? If you can’t, you know who your father is, and so do I.

That’s the question that Wikileaks is merely one example of in a long stream of askings: Who is your father? To what do you bow your head? What’s amazing, sometimes, is seeing people call it “god” or “right”. This is prophesy too, you know, at least the philosophical meaning of it – “in the last days, they will bow down to the beast, and worship it, and will believe a lie.” This has been a religious moment, with Asher Black.

As the German government starts rounding up Muslims who call for the imposition of Islamic Law (like that’s ever going to happen – it’s an imaginary shibboleth), one wonders if Western countries will similarly jail and ban fundamentalist Christians and Jews for advocating the enforcement of Judaic Law (e.g. persecuting and limiting the rights of gays) and a range of vice laws related to everything from alcohol to prostitution to gambling. We think they won’t – why? Well, the Jews (and Christians) control everything – right? Proof’s in the pudding, buddy – you might be scandalized, but which rules are being trumpeted by half the population, and which are being hunted down?

Why do people go on about this or that civilian leak getting soldiers killed, when soldiers are getting civilians killed continually? Have you been tracking the number of civilians killed in Serbia, Iraq, and Afghanistan? We’re constantly told what sacrifices we must make to protect the lives of soldiers. Why is there an assumption that somehow soldiers are more valuable than other people, more significant, more important? After all, ostensibly (we know it’s a fiction), they’re supposed to serve everyone else. Why don’t civilian interests take precedent? Frankly, I get a little tired of it – who is getting hymnodic about my interests, about the people soldiers put in danger, about my liberties that soldiers are supposed to defend, not ransack for the sake of protecting their asses? Just being a soldier puts everything about civilian life in jeopardy – every aspect of it. Why not harp on that a while, instead of how civilians should suck it up for the sake of soldiers everywhere?

2010 displays a series of state hypocrisies, ironies, and double standards. Nobel winner Liu Xiaobo can’t attend his own award of the prize, because he’s under arrest by his own country. The attendees go on about ‘democracy’ and freedom from state control. But those same states are in an uproar over Julian Assange, having also arrested him under similar trumped up charges as those applied to Liu. In other words, we want freedom to say what you want, as long as it’s what Western governments want you to say. The US and EU call for release of Liu and arrest of Assange. Why? Liu offered an opinion – Assange offered fact. What’s Amnesty International doing about Assange’s arrest? Attacking him, that’s what. Utter tools, that they are. Fuck Amnesty.

Julian Assange (wikileaks founder) says Hilary Clinton should resign for ordering diplomats to violate international law by spying on UN officials. Hilary’s response? ‘When do we listen to one guy with a web site?’ That’s someone who doesn’t have any clue what has happened, what’s coming, and why in fact she damned well should listen. Truth is? She’s listening – she’s just blowing it off with snide belittlements. We’re all listening to the data coming out, though it’s a drop in the bucket, from Wikileaks. I love how all those little Republican girls (“I just trust my government. They wouldn’t do anything that wrong.”) are having to swallow their muffs on this one. And all the Republican males can do, those blonde-haired, blue-eyed (in principle) “leaders” of their pack, is complain that they’re being outed. Perfect time to end “don’t ask, don’t tell”. Which is worse, porking some other guy in the arse, quietly, and in the privacy of your own apartment, or doing the same thing to the entire population and what shreds of intellectual integrity it might retain?

Wherever people talk seriously about going to war, or even talk just to inflame others, the old Nazi blood and soil language comes out. Yep, all warmongers are Nazis – call it what you like. South Korea is talking of the recent “attack on South Korean soil”. Attack the soil? No, it was an attack on people, and people that were killed. No soil was seriously harmed. There’s more harm to soil in any given moment from South Korean run off and pollution than if North Korea had shelled them for a week. The NPR language is similar, saying the North “hit an island” in South Korea. They hit an island? Again, I think the hit was on human beings – the island is just a geographic phenomenon. Concealed beneath the exaltation of the place, the soil, the land, the territory, the turf over the person in all this, is the political fiction of the nation and the rhetoric that somehow to defend the soil, to love the soil, to harm the soil, is to do all these things to one’s people. Blood and soil. Blut und Boden.