SEX OFFENSES AND WAR

It has often been mentioned on this site that there is some deep and thick connection between ‘feminism’ and the Sex Offense Mania Regime.

I don’t want to politicize this blog, and my primary concerns are beyond the purely political.

But a couple of articles have surfaced that prompt me to say a few things.

First, a further tightening of the focus on what is meant by ‘feminism’ here. I am not using it as code for ‘anti-woman’ or ‘anti-women’, just to get that out of the way. Also, if I use the term ‘women’ with those quotation-marks it is only meant to indicate that there is some doubt as to how many actual female persons really support the full, or even primary, feminist agenda; no disrespect or snideness of any sort is intended.

Being more of a political movement than a conceptual one, it has come to be defined by those who have been trying to get it established, as quickly as broadly as possible, in American society and culture.

Unfortunately, having drunk deeply of a lot of the ‘revolutionary theory’ stretching from Marx and Lenin and up through anti-colonial ‘oppression’ and ‘liberation’ theories from the 1940s, 50s, and 60s, the movement came to rely on a gameplan that sidestepped the slow and uncertain processes of wide (and democratic) public deliberation. Claiming, as sort of a piggyback on the American revulsion at both Nazi death-camps and Southern Jim Crow culture, that ‘women’ have been even more oppressed than either the Blacks under Jim Crow or the inmates of the concentration camps, the political strategy of feminism has been to cast it as a matter of undisputable ‘rights’, such that the ‘rights’ they asserted need not be deliberated or discussed, but rather must simply to be enshrined in law immediately.

Thus, coasting the Boomery wave that considered all ‘established’ stuff ‘bad’ and all ‘change’ as good and anything ‘anti-‘ as no doubt right and very good, the feminist agenda (meaning the radical and political elements) were force-fed into the American cultural and political bloodstream.

Most nowadays don’t recall that the first big boost, in 1964, was not through any wide public deliberation and consensus. Rather, since the Democrats were rather desperately casting about for new ‘demographics’ since they figured that they would lose the South through their Civil Rights legislation, and figuring even at the early stage that somehow the postwar economic employment miracle of American society would not be sustainable much longer, they were anxious to raise up new demographics, and thus came ‘women’ (as defined by feminism) as a huge (52% of the electorate) demographic.

Somehow, at the last minute, on the Floor of the House and with no deliberation and no recorded individual voting required of the Members (they did it by ‘teller vote’, which is anonymous), into the long-awaited Civil Rights Act of 1964, which was intended to undermine the Jim Crow regime’s genuine and carefully-constructed repression of Southern black civil rights through all manner of discrimination, a soon-to-retire Congressman who had – as Chairman of the House Rule Committee – had all the time in the world to raise the point in committee hearings, suddenly inserted “gender” as a second category of ‘discrimination’ into the text of the Bill. There was no debate (it was, after all, only ‘one little word’) and instantly ‘gender’ took its place beside ‘race’ as a major category of discrimination, to the surprise of most of the electorate.

I raise this bit of historical reality not to condemn feminism as such but to point out that its career as a major element of US social and cultural policy was effected kinda slyly (if not even sleazily) through legislation rather than deliberation (not only no public deliberation but no legislative deliberation either), and thus resulted in some verrrry bad habits on the part of organized feminist advocacies and the Beltway pols.

Because the SO Mania Regime legislation, especially in the beginning, sidestepped a great deal of deliberation precisely by such sleight-of-hand: proposed laws were rushed through the phase of committee hearings and debate (or perhaps that phase was skipped altogether because of the ‘emergency’) and – since by the 1990s the practice of manipulating public opinion through fear and outrage at selectively chosen and even mis-represented events and ‘facts’ was far more established than it was 30 years before – because the public was simultaneously ignorant of the true state of affairs and whipped into such a frenzy that folks would nod their heads to just about anything that was erected into law. Nor could any legislator, in such conditions of deliberately-induced public Mania, dare to voice objections on the Floor of a legislature.

So, un-boundaried by genuine and accurate information or by the necessity of having to survive skeptical scrutiny and debate (either in the legislatures or, through the media, in the forum of public opinion) these laws simply grew like poisonous kudzu, undermining solid legislative and jurisprudential structures and principles, including some verrrry basic Constitutional ones.

But the reality of the SO Mania Regime’s sustained hostility to ‘men’ and ‘males’ could not be hidden; nor – if you give it any thought – is it hard to see the dovetail with the more radical strands of the feminist agenda.

So much then, for the background.

We know that a decade or so after the explosion of ‘governance feminism’ in the 1990s – an innocent term for the sustained and organized effort to get various essential bits of the agenda erected into law (which resulted in the Domestic Violence and Sex Offense Regime legislation, among other things) – this type of sidestep-the-People gambit migrated to foreign policy: in the agitated waves of public emotion and confusion following 9/11, the government pulled out some old plays from the feminist game-book, misinforming, exaggerating, quietly doing what it said it would never do, and so on.

Thus the Iraq War. And the Afghanistan War as it has mutated in the past few years. And the ‘extraordinary rendition’ and the torture and now – the SO community will recognize it for what it is – the ‘preventive detention’ and ‘permanent’ detention’ at the will of the President, regardless of what any court has determined or beyond the authority of any American court to determine.

And if THIS last bunch of initiatives sloshes back and migrates into the SO Mania Regime, then things will get worse than they are now with the civil commitment procedures for SOs; which is a frightening prospect for the entire country, since the Rule of Law (traditionally opposed to the Rule of the Whim and Say-So of the Sovereign) will be effectively undermined.

There is now an article by the professor and author Christine Stansell.*

Stansell has recently written one of the several books recently published in the genre I call ‘victory-lap feminism’: here’s all the great stuff we did and here’s what remains to be done and ain’t we just grand?

My own thought is that this genre is flowering just now because the generation of feminists that supported what has been done so far is getting to a certain age and would like a) other people (including insufficiently respectful younger women) to know the ‘correct’ history of what they have done, and would like b) to go toward the Great Whatever with a burnished reputation for being the best and brightest of the feminist cause and c) to feel good about themselves as their handiwork reaches the point of being so far back in time as to be ‘historical’ and thus will be looked-at with an objective eye by historians the way feminism’s agenda has never been looked at by politicians and the mainstream media.

But interesting as that developing story is, it’s not my main concern here.

Stansell in this article speaks with a surprising candor. This is, I think, an advantage of ‘victory lap’ type writing: figuring the heavy-lifting has been accomplished, the author can reveal some of the trade secrets as to How We Did It and Where We Intend To Go From Here.

(You’d have to make your way into some of the rubber-chicken self-congratulatory dinners of the SO Mania Regime supporters to get this type of revelation about the Regime, or – I almost dated myself here – get onto the proper listserve.)

She starts with 1980 and Ronald Reagan’s election, which “brought the New Right to Washington” (which, she nicely fails to mention, had been the private deerpark of the New Left during the 1970s).

Curiously, she continues that “for feminists it was the culmination of a series of devastating setbacks”. Which is interesting because if the 1980s were a disaster, and that decade followed a series of “devastating setbacks” in the previous decade (the 1970s), then feminism hadn’t had a really successful decade since its inception as a recognized political player on the national stage (perhaps when the Democrats declared themselves “the Party of Women” in the run-up to the 1972 election – when they were repudiated by the nation’s voters 49 states to 1.)

“Feminist legislative and policy initiatives collapsed.” When she says legislative, she isn’t implying a really full and open sorta thing, and when she purrs policy-initiatives she’s talking old-fashioned smoke-filled room pressure politics without the smoke. Feminism has never been People-friendly, relying on courts and the federal bureaucracy, with the occasional but hardly inconsequential boost from legislators.

BUT THEN she lets this out: “Faced with blockage at home, one response of American feminists was to reorient their political ambitions to women’s movements abroad.” Which meant that the feminist agenda would now become part of the nation’s foreign policy. In other words, when ‘the Americans’ came to town, you weren’t only going to get tooth-wrecking candy-bars and the whiz-kids at the International Money Fund and their loan-officers and auditors; you were going to get ‘feminism’ – just as strong and sassy as the feminists could make it.

But she is Beltway-savvy and puts a nice, tasteful, and constructive spin on it – using deceptively high-sounding, abstract, and helpful phraseology: “A flourishing international women’s movement looked to be a hospitable venue for American energies and ideas”. These energies and ideas being the ones that the Americans themselves had pretty much rejected, back when they had the chance.

“Global feminism” was “enthusiastically endorsed and underwritten by U.S. foundations and women’s groups from across the political spectrum , from left to center – and eventually the New Right". (I’m going to say that the Right embraced the whole thing when it dawned on the Beltway that such a sensitive and urgent ‘mission’ would provide splendid cover for increasing American military intervention, as the US economy began to wobble with increasingly queasy intensity and it was clear that the forces would need to be sent out and get a hold of other folks’ stuff to shore the whole thing up.)

Thus, she quickly concludes and proclaims, global feminism “became from the American point of view a triumph in an otherwise vexed and clouded period”. Neatly, she evades the implicit question of how things looked from the other countries’ and cultures’ and societies’ point of view. Societal, cultural and civilizational arrangements that had structured their lives for millennia were going to be overturned with missionary zeal.

The missionaries need waste no more time thinking about the point of view of those other (‘target’) countries than they did thinking about the point of view of the American Citizenry (which had actually spoken rather clearly in 1972): after all, since they were all deliberately or unwittingly ‘oppressive’ and ‘patriarchal’ then their opinion didn’t matter (until it had been rendered Correct) and the principles and ethos of their governing structures need not be respected any more than the Constitution would be respected here as the Mania Regimes of Domestic Violence and Sex-Offense were to demonstrate so vividly and forcefully.

And now things start to come closer to home for the SO community. “The importance given to the subject of violence against women was the Americans’ signal contribution to expanding international discussions in the period after 1980". You may recall from the Victimology mini-series (which I promise to get started up again shortly) that even the international Victimology folks were concerned about the American preoccupation with criminalizing everything they could get a law passed about.

Thus (in the 1990s here, but a decade earlier internationally) American feminism was promising a criminal-law, government and police-heavy regime that – to add insult to injury – would have to be accepted as A) altogether righteous, just, and good and B) a long-postponed condign rebuke to every country on the planet’s millennia-long oppressions.

I can only imagine what this must have seemed like to governments and peoples newly-liberated from colonialism or beginning to emerge from the Soviet shadow: a new police-state regime replete with so many of the tactics and procedures long-practiced in Europe and around the world in darker days and times. The knock on the door, the removal on the say-so of a single party, the deprivation of property, family, and even livelihood, the courts already primed against you, the registration into police ‘files’ and even – a neat American twist that not even the Third Reich or Stalin thought of – the publication of your name as (not an ‘enemy of the people or of the state, but) a monster. And everything that flowed from that.

Ach.

Covering nicely all the dogmatic bases, Stansell confides how “revelations about violence against women as a central component of oppression – whether rape, domestic abuse, or sexual harassment – had surfaced early in feminist consciousness-raising groups in the late 1960s and early 1970s”. These were groups of like-minded, mostly female folk who got together in a more serious version of a college bull session to tell ‘stories’ – currently dressed up as ‘anecdotal evidence’, besides which no other evidence need be sought or indeed should be sought, since to doubt the pain is to re-victimize the (self-proclaimed) victim. The possibilities for lethal mischief were sufficiently glaring as to be visible from space, as they will before long become clear to historians starting to look back on the last years of American hegemony and wonder how the Americans threw it all away and became so unbalanced and – not to put too fine a point on it – unserious.

It goes without saying that each of those terms – rape, domestic abuse, and sexual harassment – is broadly and elasticly defined, and indeed is always increasing. The current Julian Assange case – where the US government has apparently put the Swedish and British governments up to nabbing the Wikileaks founder on sexual innuendoes that are so mushy no charges have yet been brought, but that seem to center on some form of ‘sex by surprise’ (which, in feminist-soused Sweden is a sex-crime) reveals both the government-heavy implications of sex-offense law in the American mode and the government-friendly uses to which such engorged police power can be put if you’re willing to drill through the firewalls of truth and the integrity of Western principles of justice.

She burbles proudly about the UN World Conference on Women in 1995 in Beijing: the trope of violence-against-women proved to be “one set of issues that generated unity, even as so many other fault lines developed … sexual violence transcended race, class and cultures, and united women worldwide in a common cause”. None of the other issues presented – education, reproductive rights, employment, land rights, property rights – “could … do the same work”.

But it’s clear then that ‘violence against women’ is now something that feminism desperately needs in order to retain a grip on some centrifugal force that will hold the whole incoherent mass from spinning apart.

Which goes to enlightening the SO community as to why it is that even when evidence of the SO Regime’s irrelevant, ineffective, and profoundly problem-causing strictures is presented to them, legislators seem impervious to it. To some very real extent, the laws about sexual violence aren’t really about sexual violence at all; they are about helping a politically influential pressure group hold itself together. This, I think, is food for some serious thought.

Rather than being a ‘planet’ – if I may – feminism seems to be like an old military helicopter: ten thousand independent pieces of machinery doing their own thing together until they decide not to. And, of relevance to the SO community, ‘monster sex offenders’ have been assigned the task of being the glue.

Oy.

But Stansell hasn’t finished revealing her revelations yet.

One of the problems that the international work has encountered is that “American feminists displayed little interest in the politics and problems that nourished violence in those other places”. That, and secondly the unhappy fact that the American feminists “displayed a penchant for hyperbolic and extreme depictions of universal male brutality”.

And so We have a noted feminist author and professor, in a passing by-the-by, acknowledging that the American sex-offense scene is and has always been permeated with American feminists’ preference for extreme and exaggerated depictions of that “universal male brutality” that I still can’t make out from the text whether Stansell deploys as a term of irony or whether she too actually buys into it.

So there’s been a lot of extreme stuff and exaggeration. No wayyyy! Wayyyyy!

But I don’t expect to see a rush to repeal these frakkulent laws or even for legislators to come clean at least to the point of admitting that their Findings that they said justified the laws were rather largely erroneous. That they did it all for political gain … I don’t expect to hear that until the final few minutes between the Last Trumpet and the gavel banged by the Unfool-able Judge, when I expect numerous desperate formerly official souls, honorable all, to be trying to confess and come clean while they still can. It should be a sight well worth the postponement of lesser recreations and honest folk should make plans to attend.

But that isn’t going to do much good for the many already caught up in the toils of these laws.

At this and that world conference, Stansell recalls with a decent ruefulness, “political arguments were missing yet none of the [conference] leaders minded”. Why should they? Achieving goals through any sort of democratic and deliberative politics was never part of the game plan. Revolutionaries don’t do ‘politics’ – the whole idea of revolution in the European and certainly the Soviet mode is to overturn politics because the oppressing classes are too entrenched to be voted out and the oppressed classes are too donkey-like even to realize they are oppressed. That’s Revolution 101.

You need enlightened cadres who have had their consciousness raised and who keep telling each other the stories that keep them juiced. That’s Revolution 101 too.

And so it was with the monster Manias and the laws of their Regimes here.

“It’s hard to talk in critical yet subtle terms to a panel made up largely of Third World sex-trade victims, older nuns, and moral champions.” Well, do you think it’s any easier to do so to sex-offense ‘panels’ in legislative venues in this country? (And are younger nuns more amenable to deliberation than older ones?)

So you get cartoon-thinking based on cartoonish-caricatures of the problem and, of course, the Necessary Monster who causes all of your problems. (Let me say right here that I am not seeking to ‘minimize’ genuine problems; but cartoon-thinking never provided an effective and lasting and just solution to any problem, although the usefulness of cartoon-thinking is Propaganda 101.)

She says, honestly enough then, that “the use of patriarchy as the one-size-fits-all paradigm and the dichotomy of injured-woman/male aggressor was totally inadequate”; she’s speaking here of the international conferences. Although I’d say the same has been true over here for decades, yet this fact has been ignored by legislators and most of the media.

It also seems like this kind of thinking that Stansell is proposing is going to take quite a bite out of that old 1990s chestnut, multiculturalism: clearly males and their 'traiditonal cultures' all over the planet are doing bad things. But that’s another Post for another site.

How, she asks, “did sexual violence become such a popular issue for global American feminism – arguably the dominant issue?” Notice that the global is also American. But it’s a good question.

She has some answers: “As a political theme, sexual violence was both sexy and sophisticated, unquestionably evoking a satisfying horror in Western audiences. It created an ersatz cosmopolitanism among feminists seeking international credibility.” And yet so it was over here too. And apparently feminists needed ‘credibility’ over here as well; in fact, though, given the moosh of unjustified or incoherent or mutually exclusive elements of their demanded agendas, the only way to get such credibility was to insist on public credulousness: believe the pain and the stories and don’t ask questions. One is reminded of the mantra repeated at the end of mid-1930s German broadcasts ‘proving’ that the Reich was doing a great job: “Mehr als dies braucht ihr nicht zu wissen!” – more than this you don’t need to know. And it was more than a mantra; it was an order.

She continues. “For one thing, it was an elastic, highly portable category that required no knowledge about the details of any one country, economic context, or political situation. Violence against women was instantly recognizable. Stories of brutality, escapes, captures, violations, torture, and dishonor, featuring many varieties of male villains … appealed precisely because they mobilized sympathy yet demanded little effort to understand … “

Elastic, oh yes indeed – nobody and no law has come up with a precise definition of ‘abuse’, which hasn’t slowed the laws down one bit. The concept of ‘rape’ has been expanded beyond any controlling reality at all.

And two or more decades of being soused with stories that don’t need to be and shouldn’t be ‘understood’ – let alone questioned – has undermined huge swaths of the American public’s civic competence. (Which became brutally clear after 9-11 when the public pretty much behaved , to use Abe Lincoln’s fine phrase, like a duck that’s been hit on the head.)

Stansell quotes an “activist”: “ … the omnipresence of violence in women’s lives provides them with a unifying agenda”. Always nice to have one. But males – it should come as a surprise to no one – are even more susceptible to violence and it remains a stubborn reality in the lives of all human beings, female or otherwise. So this is all a bit selective, more than the evidence would permit, I think.

And Victimologists (that mini-series again) in their more honest moments do admit the danger of persons who otherwise cannot seem to get their lives together being attracted like moths to a flame around the experience of being a ‘victim’: the victimization goes a long way to ease the burden of a life that has not fulfilled its potential. Not that human life has ever managed to fulfill its potential even when provided with all the abundance and opportunity available. The America of the pre-1975 period was, in the feminist telling, a cesspool of violent under-fulfillment, and there was a lot more abundance and opportunity around then than We are ever likely to see again.

And of course, every Victim requires a Victimizer – the Necessary Monster. As the poet Cavafy put it neatly: “the barbarians were a kind of solution”. The inferred question following that being: And what would we do without them?

She goes on, a bit more in the professorial mode: “A second less obvious reason was historical, I think. The preoccupation with sexual violence stirred up the passions of the feminist political semiconsciousness by transposing a Victorian dramaturgy of innocence and evil onto twentieth-century globalism.” (You can maybe see why feminism feels safer with cartoons and stories than with its own theoretical stuff.)

What she’s going for here is the Good-at-the-mercy-of-Evil scenario, which the Victorians did hold in high esteem. (Although Good-vs-Evil goes wayyyy back beyond them in Western and world culture.)

But the Victorians precisely embraced the Helpless-Good endangered by the Strong-Evil in order to encourage the third factor, the Necessary Hero who would come to the aid of Good. It was a way of giving males a more constructive role and a more socially useful outlet for their energies in an increasingly urbanized and industrialized society, where the old ‘Christian’ virtues were no longer robustly embraced. The ideal of the Victorian Male was an impressive effort in its way.

Surely the feminist ideal - if the term is acceptable in those circles at all – is of a totally autonomous person bound by responsibilities to nobody (family, husband, and children included); a person who is freed from the oppressions of piety toward any male sky god and even from the demands and limitations imposed by ‘character’ but who, for the sake of doing something useful, becomes a ‘moralist’: insisting upon her particular, deeply and sincerely felt conception of what is and isn’t universally moral, and considering herself empowered to go out and change what needs to be changed.

Which sort of sounds like a runaway version of a Victorian nanny in some dusty imperial backwater, spackling up the natives. And makes you wonder, maybe, if life among at least the better three-quarters of the Necessary Monster roster wouldn’t be more decently livable than life under the Red-Guard reign of such fearsome engines of morality.

But certainly, if Good is going to be cast as helpless victim, then you need that Necessary Evil Monster.

And the Hero in this case, would be the totally autonomous, enlightened, suitably field-dressed and booted cadres of feminist Heroines (if the term is still acceptable; I don’t get all the Memos).

Again it seems to me that the Sex Offense Mania Regime involves Sex Offenders only insofar as the equation calls for one part Monster in order to make the desired reaction work.

It stuns to think that such dynamics played a large, perhaps preponderant role, in the construction of the Regime, but there it is.

Stansell, again to her credit, disapproves of American women trying to forge a just-add-oppression ready-mix bond with their sisters in suffering around the planet: “[T]he claim to sisterhood was not entirely spurious. Yet conflating the situation of women in liberal democracies with that of women living under dictatorships or theocracies, while rhetorically effective in the United States, ignored fundamental facts.”

Who can disagree?

Yet again, it seems as if the Sex Offender of the 1990s became the Necessary Monster in order to provide the feminists of the 1980s with the ‘creds’ to go out for their international rescue missions while bonding with their sisters around the planet. (Do the dead civilians – men, women, and children – in Iraq and Afghanistan have no female relatives who might be oppressed by their sudden, violent, bloody and perhaps unnecessary deaths?)

And any astute reader who read Betty Friedan’s “The Feminine Mystique” in 1963, where she compared the life of the American woman of that (now long-ago and never-to-return) era to an inmate at Dachau, realized that in order to have a Dachau you are going to have to have a Nazi – and sure enough males were cast in the role.

Just as Russian workers shook their heads in disbelief in the 1930s to hear that American workers drove to strikes in their own late-model automobiles, I am sure that women in villages and occupied countries around the world in 1963 must have shaken their heads when told of American women of that abundant and bustling American era driving to consciousness-raising klatsches where, over copious Chardonnay, they asserted their stories of woe.

But Friedan was “rhetorically effective” here, and for far too many that was good enough to get the job done. “Fundamental facts”, as was later declared to be dogma, “don’t matter”. After all, the donkey-like oppressed and the ape-like oppressors are too unenlightened to see beyond facts to the Great Revolutionary Reality. That’s Revolution 101 too.

And it all went into the construction of the Mania Regimes: Facts? We don’ need no stinkin’ facts!

That sort of thing.

And the Monsters rolled off the assembly lines like Model-T’s.

“Easy identification substituted for political debate.” Not only in the international forum of feminism. Starting with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that was pretty much the game-plan here too.

Stansell then explains things this way: “The crusade against global violence against women was tailored for a conservative age. It was the one form of feminist activism that proved able to draw right-wing support.”

So before George W. Bush made the mistake of calling a crusade a crusade …

And the whole thing was “tailored”. This was no accidental development; no sudden response to an emergency. There is a heavy flavor of premeditated strategizing, and of “ignoring fundamental facts”. (And can you say “Iraq War”?)

But worse is the satisfaction derived from imagining that if nothing else it was all a pretty good and shrewd bit of political stitching: putting together a ‘thing’ that could combine the New Left feminists (and their revolutionary content and method) with “Protestant Evangelicals” who also wanted to do their bit to make the world better as only Americans can do that job. I’m going to imagine that the Protestants wound up being junior partners in the international gambit.

But as it turned out the Fundamentalist law-and-order right in this country was more than happy to go after Monsters. Fundamentalisms, like revolutions, need their ‘barbarians’ (and ‘perverts’ and ‘incorrigibles’ and so on). And this made the Sex Offense Mania Regime irresistibly seductive to politicians who could, at a stroke, please their far Left and their far Right constituencies (while expanding the federal police power and getting the public to be complicit in the type of witchcrafty hysteria which, alas, did not die out with the Puritans of 17th century Salem).

But it gets just a bit worse.

A one page piece in the January 2011 issue of “The American Conservative” magazine** by William Lind, the noted international military affairs analyst, presents a warning that everybody should have seen coming.

The interesting question about the war in Afghanistan is: Why does it continue?

He will not credit the standard response: 9-11. Al-Qaeda is no longer a presence in Afghanistan and “its bases in Pakistan are more useful than any potential Afghan camps”, since the al-Q’s seem to realize that Pakistan is “strategically a vastly more important prize than Afghanistan”.

Wondering why, then, we are still fighting there, Lind considers an answer most folks haven’t considered: “feminism”.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, he notes, was quoted in “one of the better recent pieces on the war”*** as listing among America’s remaining war-aims in Afghanistan the requirement that Taliban fighters “lay down their arms and respect the Afghan Constitution, including Western-inspired provisions to respect human rights and the equality of women in the public sphere”.

As Lind puts it without pulling punches: “All of these conditions are fanciful and together they represent a diktat that a victorious American might impose on a beaten Taliban – an unlikely situation."

But, he goes on, America has enough trouble on its own hands in this war without adding what “the White House regards as domestic political requirements”.

“No Democratic administration would dare say to feminists, who are a key component of the Left’s coalition, ‘Sorry, but feminism doesn’t travel well to Afghanistan.’ … The banshee wails would rise to heaven.”

Worse, Lind the military analyst concludes that “American feminists are no doubt willing to see the war go on indefinitely in pursuit of their fantasy”.

That is a stunning and numbing thought. But after what Stansell has said (last Spring) Lind’s recent comments do not appear outré at all. “We are at war for feminism.”

Surely, if the US isn’t going to pull out until the Afghans are forced to accept feminism, this is going to be a long war indeed.

And again, if I may raise a domestic issue after Lind has raised such a shocker of a war issue, I think the SO community can see just how powerful the pull of politics is now, on a Beltway so demoralized by decades of Identity Politics that nobody can see – or dares to try to see – how to tell one of the larger Identity Advocacies that its demands are too much and that the Beltway is going to Just Say No.

You don’t Just Say No in the era of Identity Politics. You can’t even try to explain the reasoning or facts that have led you as a political leader to decide to Say No. Facts don’t matter anymore. And there are now generations of Beltway pols who have learned that lesson.

Nonetheless, the SO community must continue to present facts and truth at every opportunity. Just as bad stuff ‘migrates’ in the Beltway, so does good stuff. There are no guarantees but it’s the best hope everybody has. And I define ‘everybody’ here verrry expansively: Americans on all sides of the SO Mania, Americans in general whose government is losing its essential competence to govern, all the troops who are kept over there under fire and the most lethal conditions, and all the human beings whose lives continue to be ‘acceptable losses’ in a dual crusade, from the Right and from the Left.

So much remains to be done.

NOTES

*”Global Feminism in a Conservative Age”, in the Spring 2010 issue of “Dissent” magazine, pp. 49-53. It is available on the magazine’s website only to subscribers.

**”War for Women”, p.27. The site is here, but this issue is current and not yet up; until the next issue comes out the article is only available in the print version of the magazine.

***”Turning the Taliban Against Al-Qaeda”, in ‘The New York Times’, October 27th, by anthropologist Scott Atran. See here.

HOMELESS SEX OFFENDERS

An article today reports on an interesting Opinion by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court (SJC).

A homeless sex offender was found by a hearing judge to be in violation of his probation because he could not find a shelter that had the connections that would enable him to re-charge the GPS unit that he was required to wear as a condition of probation.

He appealed that violation-finding to the SJC. The case is Commonwealth vs. John. J. Canadyan, Jr., SJC-10669.*

As is my practice, I’ll just make comments on what I see as significant bits in the text.

Mr. Canadyan (DFDT) was sentenced to 18 months confinement and 5 years probation after pleading guilty to 2 counts of Indecent Assault and Battery on a Child Under 14. He was released from confinement in December 2008, and in March 2009 was declared to be in violation of his probation conditions as a result of not being able to secure housing that would permit re-charging of his GPS device.

(I note here that the offenses to which he pled guilty were sufficient to classify him as a Level 3 offender and trigger the statutory GPS requirement.)

He requested a Hearing, held on March 24, 2009, at which time the Probation Department advised the Hearing Judge that alternative arrangements for re-charging had been made in his case. Nonetheless, the Hearing Judge found him in willful violation, citing his failure to find employment. Although he had made efforts to find employment, and the Probation Department seemed sympathetic to his situation, the Hearing Judge declared that his efforts were insufficient for employment that was required in the context of probation conditions, and required him to make two certifiable efforts per day to do so.

DFDT appealed to the SJC for direct appellate review and it was granted. DFDT only appeals the finding of violation and not the other requirements.

Let me say here that the SJC in this State has not always impressed me. It’s most recent significant performance was last January’s highly dubious rejection of former-priest Paul Shanley’s request for a new trial, citing grounds of judicial deference to the established science of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual in the matter of ‘recovered/repressed memory’ – although other Courts, including the US Supreme Court, had declared that judges need not consider themselves bound to consider that (hugely dubious) ‘diagnosis’ as solidly established scientific fact. (The gravamen of the Shanley case consists of pretty much nothing else but alleged recovered-repressed memories.)

Worse, the SJC released its rejection on the Friday afternoon before (the following Tuesday) special election to fill a vacant US Senate seat; the Democratic candidate was the State’s female Attorney-General, who had made quite a record in prosecuting sex-offenses and supporting various elements of ‘victimist law reforms’. In the event, the Republican candidate won, leaving the SJC with a palpable dent in its integrity.

But that was then.

Thus to this Opinion.

The Court notes that evidence has been introduced to the effect that it is extremely difficult for homeless sex-offenders under a GPS mandate to find shelters with the necessary phone-line or even electrical circuits to handle the GPS equipment. It also notes that DFDT had made sufficient effort – and the Probation Department did not disagree – to try to find appropriately equipped housing such that he could not be considered to be willfully homeless in order merely to avoid the GPS tracking.

It notes also that DFDT “had been given an extended deadline to work out this problem”. Which, with all due respect to the SJC, approaches the ludicrous, akin to saying that a defendant had been generously given extended time to figure how to walk on water or pass through solid walls: given the Mania and the numerous housing restrictions imposed on SOs (especially if classified, for whatever reason, as Level 3, the highest and putatively most dangerous Level), then no human being in such a situation is going to be able to find the housing.

In DFDT’s case, his daughter had offered her home but since she had children under 18 her home was legally disqualified, his sister lives in Europe, and his brother lives in another State (Michigan) which politely opined that he would not be acceptable as a resident – even under GPS monitoring – there.

With a refreshing candor the SJC notes that “The facts and circumstances of this case bring more fully into view a tension between mandatory GPS monitoring of sex offenders released on probation, see G.L. c. 265, § 47, and the practical reality of homelessness--a circumstance facing an increasing number of former sex offenders”.

This is a small but real bit of progress, especially when you consider the pie-in-the-sky Op-Ed dampdreams that were delivered from the Bench in the 1995 Poritz case in New Jersey, where that State’s high court sniffed that it would be ungenerous to imagine the probability that SOs would be placed under almost-impossible strains in trying to re-integrate into the community (that had already been whipped up by the assorted elements of the Mania). Surely, that Court bleated, the public could be trusted not to go overboard – although since the Sex Offender was painted as such a horrible and incorrigible monster, you had to think that Pollyanna and the Red Queen had both joined in the Opinion or at least filed Amicus Briefs for the State.

I also note that it is gratifying to see the SJC refer to “former sex offenders”, which is another small but substantive straw in the wind now. Previously the SO had been consider as unable to change his ‘nature’ as a vampire (Joss Whedon’s ‘Angelus’, the vampire-with-a-soul in the TV show ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’, had yet to make his screen debut, not that I think it would have made much difference back then).

In Footnote 7 the SJC observes that both employment and housing agencies (not particularly SO-friendly) “provided substantial evidence about the extraordinary obstacles facing sex offenders attempting to secure employment”.

While the SO laws, the SJC asserts, “plainly serve a public purpose, they also affect the ability of former sex offenders to reintegrate into the work force and into the community”. And who can deny it?

But, not without reason, the SJC notes that “This larger problem is not one that can be, or need be, solved in this case”. The SO Mania Regime laws are now so deeply and broadly enmeshed that no single Court can be expected to fix things, and – in this case – the SJC takes the careful road and doesn’t attempt to.

The Hearing Judge was declared to be in error by finding that DFDT had not made sufficient efforts to comply with the State-imposed conditions of probation.

The Hearing Judge further erred in finding “that the defendant had violated the GPS condition of his probation by not, in the judge's estimation, making sufficient efforts to find employment. Securing employment was not a condition of probation”. In other words, the State cannot make as a condition-of-probation an outcome over which the SO would have no control. Which is a refreshing bit of logic in a Mania Regime not known for its logic.

Thus, the SJC decides, “For the reasons stated, we set aside the finding that the defendant violated the GPS monitoring condition of his probation. So ordered.” I have to say, it’s nice to see that type of conclusion.

In the Footnotes (FN) the SJC also makes two other interesting points.

In FN 8 the SJC acknowledges and accepts that somewhere between 65-74 percent of Level 3 SOs are homeless. And who could be surprised?

But even more remarkably, in FN 10 the SJC states frankly and clearly that “Throughout the proceedings, the [Hearing] judge was both dismissive and condescending in her treatment of defense counsel, the evidence ably presented on the defendant's behalf, and the defendant's circumstances. Such demeanor creates an unacceptable appearance of bias and partiality.” [italics mine]

Now this is an impressively decent observation, and deserving of a bit of recognition, since you don’t often see this sort of thing coming from the Bench, especially from so high a court.

But so much remains to be done.

Let us continyuh!

NOTES

*To access the short text you can go to the Mass Reports site here; then under ‘Slip Opinions’ click on the ‘Opinions’ link; that will give you a current list and the text of this case is Number 2 on that list, and you click on it. BUT if you do this after a certain period of time, then the Opinion is no longer new; in that case, just go to the Mass Reports site home page and click on ‘Opinion Archive’.

EXTRADITION

I have mentioned from time to time how certain gambits or approaches can behave geologically: a move or idea starts up in one area of activity and then after a bit pops up in another area of activity. It migrates.

The ‘extradition’ gambit in the Julian Assange Wikileaks case, based on dubious and creakily contrived Swedish sex charges but somehow connected to a US government effort to get its hands on him and shut him up (and make it look like the trouble isn’t the fire but the guy who pulled that noisy fire alarm hook), is one clear though complex example.

And there are layers to it. What started out over here as the basis of the Sex Offense Mania Regime has popped up as a way to go after people whom the government itself (and not simply as an agent for this or that domestic pressure group) wants to get.

You can, by the way, review an extended discussion of the ominous legal complexities of the Assange case here. And you can get a picture of the actual substance, such as it is, of the Swedish sex complaints here.

But today there is now an ‘extradition’ case closer to home. A Colorado man named Phillip Ray Greaves II self-published a book entitled “The Pedophile’s Guide to Love and Pleasure: a Child-lover’s Code of Conduct",  wherein he wants to offer guidance on how “child-lovers” might and must remain within bounds when conducting their relationships.

The book created a stir and was pulled from Amazon, leaving him only the option of selling and mailing the books more or less on his own.

Let me say right now that regardless of whatever benefits might accrue to children from such an experience, they are hugely overridden by the potential dangers and damages to the child. Children are not sufficiently developed to have any ability to process overt sexual experience, no matter how delicately and carefully the romantic and relational elements are finessed.

And in so vital an area of development and experience, the Family and the Parents are – there can be no workable alternative – the primary adults responsible for so vital but truly awesome a task.

In current American society and culture, then, this is already an at-risk situation, since significant pressure-groups with much Beltway clout are, for reasons of their own, rather seriously bent upon reducing the Family and Parental Authority and Parental Responsibility.

Which has, humans being humans, opened up an avenue for other persons – with their own needs and agendas – to step up to the plate and offer their services, so to speak.

At the very best, I would say, such services are simply not workable. I’d sort of put this type of relationship into the same category as wanting very much to have a relationship with a favorite movie or TV star: it may be something you can imagine in the privacy of your own mind and it will help you get through the day (although in that case I’d advise developing constructive and workable alternatives), but you can’t be going to Hollywood and trying to get into your star’s house or somehow show up in his/her life.

Yes, there was – maybe still is – that band ‘roadie’ bit, where smitten music-lovers can actually entertain a semi-realistic expectation of at least a ‘hook-up’ with a current ‘idol’, but that’s not much of a basis for national policy or building and sustaining a civilization and raising the young. There are boundaries in life, especially when it comes to imposing yourself in the lives of other human beings, and genuine Maturity consists to great extent in learning – disciplining yourself, actually – how to constructively live within certain boundaries created by the rights of others.

All of this stuff about Boundaries, self-discipline, distinguishing fantasy from reality, postponing gratification or actually ruling out certain types or venues of gratification, respecting others, and in general doing the ancient Greek thing about Knowing Yourself so as to Conduct Your Life Well … these haven’t had a lot of good press in the postmodern, Boomery, revolutionary post-Sixties world (and Hugh Hefner probably didn’t do Us any favors with his Playboy-philosophy (and Playgirl, a bit later) back in the 1950s).

It’s always been curious to me – and will be to cultural historians in the not-too-distant future – how a Left pretty much dedicated to Deconstructing ‘maturity’ in the name of ‘total autonomy’ and a Right pretty much dedicated to imposing Law-and-Order could comfortably make common-cause. But they have, to some extent, and the Sex Offense Mania Regime – still very much legally a reality, even if the daily frizz is starting to wear off – is the unholy spawn of such a union, such a ‘deal’. Such a deal, indeed.

Anyhoo now, Mr. Greaves of Colorado has been arrested on a warrant issued by a Sheriff in Florida. The Sheriff was outraged by the afore-mentioned book, had a couple of his undercover deputies buy a book (apparently the undercover bit consisted in writing to him for a copy while posing in writing as a buyer, sending along a money order to cover purchase, postage, and handling, and – so very slyly – asking him to autograph the book, all of which he did).

The Sheriff – wait for it – plans to extradite Mr. Greaves from Colorado to Florida, where he will, if matters pursue their statutory course, stand trial on charges of obscenity and child-endangerment and whatever Sex-Offense Regime charges are applicable.

There are some large questions of law, although the SO community knoweth full well that such nit-picking hardly deserves to be allowed to slow things down.

Initially, it was presumed that Mr. Greaves could make a stand in Colorado and fight the extradition. But as best I can make out, and he was represented by a public defender who had a bunch of other cases that day, Greaves has accepted extradition.

Whether he is in over his head or playing a much larger and deeper game than the authorities in Florida had originally envisioned is still an open question. Custer had envisioned the afternoon going much differently, and the Sioux neatly helped him along in his imaginings by initially running away from him, causing him to gallop after them without sufficient reconnaissance into the Little Big Horn’s valley.

My concern doesn’t stem from any support for the vision and project of his book. But I am alert to the dangers of using ‘extradition’ as the AWA used the Commerce Clause, simply as a pretext to go after people who aren’t really in your jurisdiction and who are expressing opinions that you don’t hold-with.

A law is like a watertight-bulkhead: integrity is essential, and that integrity comes from its seamless strength. To puncture it here and there, figuring that this small hole you’re drilling won’t really do much damage, is actually creating a lethal danger much larger than the measurable circumference of your little drill-hole would appear to suggest.

And if the ship’s officers don’t mind a whole bunch of folks drilling this and that little hole, then before long your watertight integrity – here, the rule of Law – is fatally compromised, even though on a nice calm day no lubber with a nifty drill can imagine the awful consequences of an agitated ocean exerting its awesome pressure against the bulkhead now riddled with small – and maybe even patched - holes.

I recall a 1950s TV episode of Steve Canyon (USAF colonel in the Cold War days) where some kids out for laffs just beyond the perimeter fence of a SAC base take a potshot at a taxiing nuclear bomber with their BB-guns; one of the pellets nicks a porthole in the plane, it takes off, heads toward its patrol area along the edges of Soviet airspace, the huge pressures at its operating altitude widen the crack, the crew freeze into snowmen, the plane is heading straight into the USSR, and poor Canyon has to go up in an armed fighter and shoot the plane down (its crew already frozen to death).

That scenario has remained with me throughout the SO Mania Regime.

And then there is Titanic, whose imbecile lubber of an owner ordered her constructed with lower watertight bulkheads so he could fit in more nice stuff for the first-class passengers; he figured that she was unsinkable anyway so what was not to like? You want to keep your best-performing passengers happy – that’s what you’re in business for.

The American Rule of Law – I think – was also (like the American economy) considered to be unsinkable … and now We know.

I don’t know how things will develop at this point. Surely, any publisher might be liable, now, to warrants from this or that locality if a book is not well-received.

The fact that the folks in that locality don’t buy the book might reasonably be considered to be a corrective that will impress itself upon the publisher. Though in the case of self-publishers, who may simply want to say something and not necessarily maximize profits as corporate publishers do … another interesting element.

Nobody in this affair is completely ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ from a legal standpoint.

Something to keep an eye on as this thing migrates and mutates.

ADDENDUM

The latest on this case is here.

It appears that the Florida warrant is for an obscenity charge, and not a child pornography charge. The obscenity laws are "local" in the sense that a local community can set some standards for itself. But how that can apply in a case of a book that is nationally distributed raises some significant questions.

As you read the article, note the supporter who thinks that the Florida Sheriff and warrant is right "morally" and (he sorta figures) therefore "legally". This is precisely the type of thinking - or rather emoting - that has fueled the Mania Regime from the get-go.

I am NOT saying that morality is merely subjective and personal 'emotion'. The question here is a legal one: can an indidual community not only "ban" a book it finds offensive and without redeeming social value (which a local jury has not yet determined) BUT ALSO arrest and extradite a person who has never been to that community but whose book is available through a non-local distribution?

This is not a 'technicality': the precedent to be set is a huge one and there is a sizable chance that the US Supreme Cout will need to get involved.

ARREST FOR FALSE REPORT

A New York City TV news anchor has been arrested on two counts of filing a false report to police. She claimed that a Hispanic male tried to rape her while she was jogging in Central Park on September 24th, and later stalked-harassed her by phone.

Police investigated but could turn up no witnesses or suspects.

She confessed upon arrest, and attributed it to unspecified personal problems that may spin her gambit as a “plea for sympathy”.

You wouldn’t want to stay up late at night tallying up how many times this has happened during the reign of the SO Mania Regime, especially since making such a ‘report’ is a sure-fire guarantee of attention and concern. This has always been one of the ‘moral hazards’ of the Regime: its guaranteed trip-wire attention and the status of ‘victim’ that goes with it is sure to attract assorted unhappy and not-quite-together persons who, from the depths of their problems see only the chance for a little ‘sunshine’, however artificial.

This is in addition to the moral-hazard we see in the Assange case, where, by the by, the first female, whom I called ‘A’ in my previous Post, has suddenly left Sweden and gone to work with refugees in the Israel-Palestine area, after refusing to cooperate with prosecutors any further. Perhaps, now that Assange is safely embroiled in the international legal system, she decided to get out of town; although if any CIA connection is suspected, it’s only going to heat up now that she has taken a vacation in the land of the Mossad.

There is increasing commentary about Assange’s arrest – you can’t even say on trumped-up ‘charges’ since he hasn’t been charged with anything – being a “witch-hunt”; see for example this article.

I think that the world is beginning to finally realize just what happens when you work up some ‘offense’ into the subject of a Mania Stampede, simultaneously inflaming the public with manipulative misinformation and then removing vital legal protections and procedures in order to ensure successful prosecution. The SO community has been somewhat alone for the past decades, having ‘seen the terrible Eye’ (to use Tolkien’s fine image for it) while everyone else saw not a dark and terrible wizardry but only the eager ministrations of a ‘sensitive’ and ‘responsive’ government police power.

But then, the SO community is still rather alone because although many worthwhile commentators are now seeing the government with its gloves off (and its mask off), there is no talk of the SO Mania or the SO Regime of laws. There is talk of the Espionage Act of 1917 and the legal ins-and-outs of trying to prosecute Assange with that, but nobody has actually discussed the fact that it was the SO Mania Regime that broke so many of the traditional jurisprudential safeguards for accused. And, of course, there was the stunning debasement – debauchery, even – of a national legislative authority that would allow itself to embrace so many inaccurate Findings, and continue to do so even as evidence mounted to the contrary.

This article is actually sub-titled “This Can’t Be Happening” – which is a sentiment with which the SO community can easily identify.

It goes on to actually sketch the gravamen of the sex-offense “charges” (that aren’t ‘charges’ at all at this point) being claimed against Assange. And it’s a thin and fragile tissue of accusations indeed.

It’s interesting that even advocates against rape are now joining the outcry against what is being done to Assange, since it weakens the legitimate claims of those who actually have been victims of rape. I can agree with that, although the SO Mania has so skewed the process that the credibility of any allegations must arouse the caution of reasonable observers. (Which is NOT to say that all allegations of rape are false.)

But while I sympathize with the advocates’ concerns, I have to bear in mind that for decades now the credibility of any allegations whatsoever was not only assumed, but any skepticism about such charges was cartoonishly and lethally presumed to be ‘re-victimizing’ and ‘proof’ that the skeptic was ‘for rape’. And THAT has been a glaring problem with the Mania from Day One.

So I think that this Assange matter, and the hugely fraught and now sooooo obvious machinations of both the US and Swedish governments, is having the effect of exposing some of the most profound problems with the entire Sex-Offense concept. Although, as I have said, no major commentator is ‘noticing’ the connection to Sex-Offense stuff (although the folks who leave quick comments in response to this or that article seem to be making the connection for themselves).

But, getting back to the NYC TV anchor, it strikes me as very significant that she was arrested at all. And that it happened after the past weeks and months of the Assange matter cannot be a coincidence . Police agencies have – as far as I can determine – rarely held false-accusers to account in matters of Sex-Offense.

Perhaps, after two or more very long decades, police agencies are finally mustering the insight – or perhaps the courage – to enforce those lonely and long-neglected laws against false reporting. Ignoring them have made the temptations to make such false reports and accusations that much more attractive: there would be no legal consequences if, improbably, you were discovered doing it.

This can only be a good thing.

I wouldn’t go popping any champagne corks. The chances of any retrospective investigation of false-accusations are almost as slim as the Justice Department ‘looking back’ to the government types who authorized torture and ‘extraordinary renditions’ (a program to which that nice little Swedish government gladly lent its territory and authority).

But then the wheels of Truth, like the wheels of Justice, grind slowly but they just keep grinding on and who knows where they might grind “in the fullness of time”, as Scripture saith.

ASSANGE 8 DECEMBER

I’m running out of cutesy ways to entitle these Posts on the Assange matter, as it continues to spiral and jink like those old launch-gone-wrong missiles of the Cold War days, 50-plus years ago. So I’ll simply date them in the title.

Matters remain of interest to the SO Mania Regime since we are now beginning to see some sort of (unavoidable) effort to sort out the actual sex-offense charges.

I invite your attention to this article by an Australian attorney who represented Assange in London and this article by ‘The Guardian’ of London.

Call the two self-reported victims 'A' and 'W', both females.

Both are over 30, both have above-average international experience, either working for the Swedes in embassies or conducting international symposia. Both of them have left a Tweet and text-message communication trail boasting after the alleged events of their respective hook-ups with Assange, and never in that time implying rape or any large dissatisfaction with the course of the encounter. (It was not until almost a week after the alleged rapes that they both sought out the police for ‘advice’.)

‘A’ had invited Assange to speak at a conference or symposium she, a politically active and involved person, had set up, held in a Swedish town. She invited him to stay the night at her apartment although she had never met him. She had been employed as a university gender-equity officer, fielding the panoply of gender-related complaints that now constitute a hefty chunk of collegiate alarums these days. The Australian attorney speculates that ‘A’ may now use some of her own old field notes, claiming that Assange’s “celebrity” created an imbalance-of-power relationship, overwhelming her better judgment, and that Assange wielded this like a weapon to conquer her.

‘A’ is well-known for her claim that all males deploy a “master suppression technique” against her and all women: she had reported one male student in a (Swedish) college class in which she was speaking for taking notes instead of looking at her, and, when advised by of the sexual-harassment complaint she had lodged against him he tried to speak to her to apologize, she reported him a second-time for that, apparently because he was trying to use the male ‘master suppression technique’ to avoid the consequences of what he had done the first time. The Looking-Glass world of the Red Queen as government policy.

While on the subject of Sweden, this article by a Swedish defense attorney limns some of the problems Assange might face, since – perhaps news to many in the American SO community – the Swedish government has come even more lethally under the sway of radical-feminism than the American. (As best I can make out, Sweden’s substantial Socialist Party saw its future salvation in an embrace of radical-feminism as Communism began to wane; a variant of Saul Alinsky’s effort to cast the 1960s New Left cadres as merely historical replicants of the Old Left labor-organizers of the 1930s who would, he fondly hoped, continue The Struggle).

‘Gender equality’ – which is a pleasant and decent-sounding phrase, a harmless-looking suitcase that is yet stuffed with all manner of things not necessarily good – was adopted by the Swedish Socialists as the replacement for the failed Marxist ‘economic equality’ and the Swedish polity and its laws are now rife with it.

While this suggests that the entire Swedish polity has taken on the tone of an American college campus at the height of the Gender-Multiculti whackery of the early 1990s, it bodes lethal difficulties for males accused of rape in Sweden. Courts not only tend to ‘believe the woman’ in all of the often he-said/she-said scenarios BUT ALSO refuse to accept recantations from women who had made charges, assuming as a matter of Correct dogma (once a socialist, always a socialist!) that a) the woman was ‘raped’ in some form or another simply because all sex is rape and that b) the woman’s recantation is probably nothing more than her being temporarily overpowered by the ‘male master suppression technique’ either as deployed against her (magically, one would have to imagine) by the defendant-male at bar OR simply deployed against her from the larger male-tainted social surround. In which case the court will do her the great favor of ignoring her recantation and finding the defendant-male guilty anyway.

There is something verrrrrry wrong with this.

And if there is any up-side to it, it is that the American Constitutional tradition was still strong enough to prevent American feministical cadres from pressuring the Beltway pols and jurists to go this far. The Swedish polity, far more European and Socialist in orientation and far less grounded in the American Constitutional ethos, was apparently taken as far down the garden path as any American college campus.

It seems to me that in this frakkulent symbiosis of radical-feminists and a socialist-leaning polity looking for a replacement ‘Vision’, there has been created some feminism-based government, in a dynamic that resembles nothing so much as the Mob – in the immediate postwar era – finding in a dictator-run Cuba a sovereign entity that would host and protect its operations; think of Lee Strasberg’s mobster character, in the film “Godfather II”, hosting other Bosses at a rooftop birthday party he threw for himself at a Mob-run Havana hotel, giving thanks that the Mob had finally found a ‘friendly government’ that would not interfere with the Vision they all shared. What was not to like?

At present, there is official talk in Sweden of erecting into national law the campus policy that made Antioch College the laughing-stock of this country 2 decades ago (it has since closed up shop entirely): sex requires a step-by-step approval-and-permission process. Which may actually sound like a halfway good idea for college-campuses in the ‘hook-up’ age, but is certainly not prudent for erection into national criminal law and policy.

I can strongly invite your attention to this 3rd hyperlink, since the article offers a view of what has gone off the rails in Sweden, under the intense pressures of a radical-feminism getting control of sex-law legislation.

The relevance for the American SO community is, I think, that this sort of thing has been held off here for this long only by a Constitutional ethos that is, alas, weakening. And while it is possible that the Assange case – as it may play out in a Swedish trial – might well bring a great deal of this whackulence to light, there may well also be increased pressure (recall your Alinsky) over here to ‘reform’ or ‘strengthen’ or ‘close the loopholes in’ sex-laws over here.

Additionally, the current Swedish attorney representing ‘A’ and ‘W’ is – see below – a longtime feminist and bureaucratic office-holder in gender-equality type matters, and he and ‘A’ have worked together before on gender-equality issues (which, of course, strongly increases the possibility that ‘A’ and ‘W’ knowingly colluded or collaborated with him on this case, whether simply for feministical reasons or as pretext-fronts for larger government forces).

Assange and ‘A’ apparently agree that they had consensual sex on the night he stayed at her apartment.

The following day, while ‘A’ was apparently Tweeting happily, Assange met ‘W’ at the conference, they attended the luncheon together and then went to the movies where, apparently, W performed oral sex on him, after which they went back to her place, spent the night together, and parted amicably the next morning with both in agreement that a condom had not been used.

Although they had apparently not known of each other’s sexual encounters with Assange beforehand, ‘W’ then contacted ‘A’ and the compared notes, subsequently leaving a post-‘rape’ series of SMS communications to each other discussing if not also planning their moves vis-à-vis the Swedish media and the attorney they selected and the Swedish police .

‘A’ has been trying to delete her Tweets but – I’m no expert in this technology – it’s apparently too late for that; either the Tweets are undeletable or else by now they have been reviewed and copied and put up on the Internet.

‘A’ has previously published an internet guide and some blogging about the “7 steps” by which you can get back at a cheating boyfriend using “legal revenge”, in which she writes: "Go to it and keep your goal in sight. Make sure your victim suffers just as you did."

As best can be made out, the gravamen of each of the alleged victms’ plaint is centered around condoms: ‘A’ claims that Assange purposely ripped the condom and ‘W’ claims that she had consented to sex only with the proviso that a condom be used, which – she claims – wasn’t used.

The attorney representing both ‘A’ and ‘W’ first earned his spurs at the beginning of the feministical Nineties by getting a female candidate for Prime Minister off a fraud charge, after which, by amazing coincidence, the government hired him as a factotum in the marvelously named “Bureau of Equality”.

He has now come forth to try to square the impossible circle between Swedish prosecutors asserting there was No-Consent or Withdrawn-Consent and the two victims’ undeniable declarations that there was Consent and that it was great. Says the attorney: the two ‘victims’ aren’t to blame because the law there is sooooo complex that “you would need a law degree to know whether you are raped in Sweden”.

On this point, surely, the SO community can well sympathize: the SO Mania Regime has passed so far through the Looking-Glass that in this most intimate, personal, interpersonal, and rather vivid and unmistakable of human encounters, you as a participant still need the advice of a trained attorney to know if what you’re doing is legal or – since the encounter began – has remained legal all the way through to completion.

Oh, and of course it is also possible that the encounter may also become retrospectively illegal (and criminal) if on second thought on some unspecified future date the party of the first part decides that s/he had indeed been criminally raped by the party of the second part. And yes, I am thinking of the Marx Brothers’ famous ‘contract scene’ in “A Night At The Opera”. You may recall: Da pahty of da foist paht, hereinafter refoyyed to as da pahty of da foist paht … et cetera and et cetera and et cetera.

As the Australian attorney notes, the solution to the problem posed by the fact that you are trying to prosecute a rape charge brought (or at least reported) by two adults who had previously proclaimed themselves quite happy with their experiences … that solution, smugly thrown down before the incredulous eyes of the world is: You aren’t a Swedish lawyer so you wouldn’t understand.

Ovvvvvv courssssssssssse.

We have now reached the point in sex-offense law where apparently the government can step in if the party of the first or second part didn’t actually realize she (more rarely he) had been raped at all. What has happened to rationality and the grounding of good law? What will happen to the majesty – as the jurists like to call it – of the Law as all this plays out?

The Swedish jurist is going to start looking more like the Swedish Chef (and upon Jim Henson be peace).

It used to be the mantra that You aren’t a woman so you wouldn’t understand because you just don’t get; then it was You aren’t a Victim so you can’t judge me (as if every human being on the planet has not at one time or another been cast into the task of being a victim of one thing or another!). Now it’s: You’re not a Swedish lawyer so you don’t really know if you’ve been – within the jurisdictional boundaries of Swedish law – raped.

There is some speculation that ‘A’, having worked for the Swedish government and put out some anti-Castro or post-Castro writing, is a CIA plant. This has got the non-SO laity all worked up. But to the SO-savvy, the CIA connection is a red-herring and unnecessary to boot. Because there is more than enough room for skullduggery and conspiracy and revenge-lying and everything else already built-into the sex-offense Mania Law Regime, with the primary framing power assigned to whomever can get to a microphone to proclaim victimhood in a past sexual encounter.

The SO Mania Regime, in other words, is so crooked and rigged that any CIA involvement would just get in the way.

NOTES

I would advise that if you decide to follow the articles relating to this case on your own, take a moment to read any Comments as well. I am finding – even on avowedly feminist sites – that the majority of the Comments to this or that article demonstrate a healthy skepticism and a legitimate impatience with much of what had been for so long the ‘SO Mania-Victim Script’. And that is encouraging.

THE LONG MARCH OF VICTIMOLOGY


I came across the following articles on the Salon online-magazine site. They struck me as interesting especially since this is a site with a significant ‘women’s issues’ bent, although it not a narrow advocacy site.

Glenn Greenwald, the Constitutional lawyer who maintains an acute column on public affairs for the magazine, observes that a number of ‘conservative’ voices – many highly placed – are now seeking to tar Julian Assange the WikiLeaks founder as some sort of “new Osama bin Laden” who can in all good conscience be termed a “terrorist”.*

Greenwald says “to accomplish that they’re actually advocating – somehow with a straight face – the theory that if a single person is harmed by these disclosures, then it proves Assange and WikiLeaks are evil monsters who deserve the worst fates one can conjure … that is what the permanent National Security State has spawned”. He continues then to observe that even the Secretary of Defense “disdained hysterical warnings about the damage caused as “significantly overwrought”.

To many readers – and surely Greenwald has to keep an eye on the magazine’s demographics – this may seem the consequences of an engorged National Security State.

But the SO community will recognize the queasy fingerprints of Victimology all over this type of ‘if even only one’ approach; in order to garner all kinds of support for even the most dubious ‘emergencies’, ‘outrages’ and ‘programs’ the gambit was not to consider how widespread the alleged problem might be but rather how monstrously damaging even a single instance might be (thus justifying the demands for eradication or what-have-you).

As you may well imagine, this results in a bias toward the sensationalistic and the overblown and the manipulative (you have to make even a single instance seem soooooo baaaaad) and away from the deliberative (let’s think about this), the analytical (is this really that bad?), and the prudent (is it actually workable to try to eradicate this?)

This is not to say that the New Left invented Victimology; it was Hitler’s genius, as he slyly ate his way step-by-step through the surrounding countries, that Germany was always cast by the propaganda machine as the victim in the matter: the Czechs were oppressing the Sudeten Germans, the Poles were violently despoiling German nationals (women and children, of course), the Russians were both Slavs and Communists threatening Germany’s Western values, and the Jews – oy – were by their very existence a threat to the integrity and vitality of German-hood.

It actually seems as if Victimology – which got its big boost after World War 2 and as some sort of effort to use the United Nations apparatus as a way of quickly spreading its doctrines throughout the nations of the world – had tried to ‘baptize’ the old Nazi propaganda in a ‘good’ cause.

Which reminds me of the great mistake that was not made when – in Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings” – representatives of the free peoples of Middle Earth gather in secret conference at Rivendell to decide what to do with the one Ring of Power. There is a temptation to try to use it for their own good purposes. But saner and wiser and more realistic heads prevail: the Ring is evil and answers to only one Master – the evil Sauron – and cannot be used by the well-intentioned nor can it be turned to good: sooner or later, the effects of whatever the Ring might be used to accomplish will prove themselves to be destructive and dangerous and evil. Thus the free peoples cannot use the Ring, tempting as it may appear to be that close to so much ‘power’ that surely must be able to be turned to ‘good’ purposes.

Untruth, I would say, is certainly a candidate to represent what the Ring stands for: tempting as it may seem for people and governments to wield it in ‘good’ causes, Untruth answers to only one Master and can ultimately only produce evil effects; it cannot be ‘baptized’, as it were. Nor is there any human strong enough to overcome Untruth’s essentially evil core-power: it will work its evil consequences no matter how well-intentioned the use to which eager humans try to put it.

Victimology – and surely Saul Alinsky – figured that there was a way for them to deploy the Ring (Untruth) in the service of a ‘good’ intention. So too the New Left and, with the speedbumps and firewalls of public integrity and civic competence and Constitutionality all punctured or worn-away, the jingo Right. Until things have gotten to the point now We are sore bethump’t both by the National Nanny State and the National Security State.

Nor do I apologize for using what is technically classified as ‘fantasy literature’ to shed light on all too real world and national events. Anybody who has read the assorted Findings and assertions that ground the SO Mania Regime knows that in the realm of national affairs – domestic as well as foreign – We passed into the realm of fantasy quite some time ago.

A second piece currently up on Salon discusses recent additions to Idaho’s “rape by fraud” laws. That state is trying to enhance its sex-laws to cover women who are, it appears, tricked into having sex by a person who masquerades as their husband. At present, apparently, it is against state law for a husband to try to somehow trick his wife into having sex, but it is not against the law for a sex-partner who is not-the-woman’s husband to deceive her into thinking she is having sex with her husband.

(Yes, I know – read the article for what further clarity there might be.)

The ‘situation’ that ‘demands’ expansion of the sex-offense laws in Idaho is the first interesting bit in this article: this is what happens when you try to bring the criminal law into the complexities of humans’ intimate relations, especially in a cultural context where you have pretty much assured that the younger and more sexually-driven are assured that all sex is liberation and that there is no morality or integrity except what you want and decide for yourself.

But the second interesting bit is to read the Comments sent in by readers: there is, even on this Salon site, a significant amount of – to put it politely – skepticism about the whole rape-by-fraud initiative. Which gets me to wondering just how many people support the SO Mania Regime any longer.

And lastly, there is on this same site a piece on the dangers of a new type of Barbie doll that contains a small camera and USB port and somehow can be used by owners who want to use the doll as a camera. The FBI, apparently, mentioned in an internal document the possible ‘dangers’ of the doll somehow making it easier for – wait for it – “pedophiles” to … well, to do something.

Decently, the article quotes at great length and supportively a former FBI agent who specialized in these matters to the effect that the threat is greatly overstated and that every new piece of technology, even in toys, could be hypothetically spun as a fresh danger to this or to that.

And again, the Comments are interesting because so many of them are equally level-headed and sober, and skeptical of the ‘threat’ potential.

Straws in the wind – but food for thought.

NOTES

*This link will take you to a list of his recent articles. Scroll down to the entry for December 1st, entitled “The Moral Standards of WikiLeaks”.

ADDITIONAL MORE FRESH ASSANGE

You might not expect too much reliable to flow from Fox News, but I’m of the opinion that regardless of intent and agenda and assorted other subsurface tides, one can still find interesting bits in ‘reports’ from all over the spectrum.

So here’s this piece from just this morning.

Assange remains free in the UK, “protected” – Fox would like to think – “by the slowly grinding wheels of the law”. Ah those pesky wheels! In this Fox and the SO Mania Regime, its flames eagerly fed by both Left and Right, are of one mind: a legal process that gets in the way of what you want to see happen (vengeance for the alleged victim, vengeance for the nation, “security concerns” for all) is a baaad thing.

You wonder, after a while, why Left and Right just don’t come right out and declare the American Experiment over and demand a whole new approach – something a little or a lot less obstructed by the rule of law. Victimology – the perfect storm Trojan Horse of Left and Right – pushes for one of those more government-heavy, order and organization polities that the Enlightenment thinkers and administrators sought to build upon the backs of the European peasantries. And which the Framers soundly rejected. (But what did they know – being patriarchal, oppressive, violent, essentially rapist ‘men’?)

Assange is “wanted” in Sweden “to face allegations” … which makes for a sorta police-procedural script easily recognizable to Americans whose knowledge of law comes mostly from TV anyway. Except that you don’t face ‘allegations’ – you face “charges”. Without noting any of the foregoing, the article mentions, by the by, that neither the US (for his Wikileaks document dump) nor Britain (for nothing I can discern) nor – wait for it – Sweden has actually charged him with anything.

The Assange case is a target of a European extradition process which “normally takes months to produce an arrest”. If you put aside the cartoon-world of Fox’s old ticking-bomb show “24”, which helped assure the Beltway elites that they were doing the right thing half a decade and more ago, you might wonder if this isn’t a good thing in a case where nobody seems to be bringing any actual charges.

When you consider the alternatives to extradition’s process – say, the much more efficient and highly successful ‘black ops’ kidnapping and spiriting away (“how refreshingly Nazi” as ‘Family Guy’s Stewie might say) – then ‘process’, an integral bit of the old Rule of Law, doesn’t seem such a bad idea.

As the SO community knoweth full well.

Fox being Fox, it notes that Assange’s defense lawyer, apropos of nothing, is also counsel for some fellow charged for hacking into NASA and military computers “back in 2001”. Fox no doubt wants you to presume the guy was guilty and that it is the ‘process’ (and that pesky Rule of Law) that is the only thing standing in the way of vengeance (politely called ‘justice’ not to stampede the herd too early in the script); but there is also the clear possibility that after 9 years no evidence has been produced or the delivering-country (the UK in this case from 2001) can’t be sure the guy won’t simply be ‘disappeared’ (like in the bad old days of Augusto Pincochet).

Sweden has apparently fixed it’s ‘warrant’ up a bit and has now sent it along to the UK. There was a formality about disclosing the maximum penalties for the charges lodged against the person being sought for extradition. But since there actually are no charges, then this is like sending a tub of frosting without the birthday cake itself and expecting the party to be successful.

Thus when Fox then says that Assange “denies the charges” it is playing fast and loose with the truth: in the actual sense of formal legal charges, Assange has nothing to deny even if he wanted to. The ‘charges’ are merely those questions asked by Fox.

But then this simple single-sentence paragraph with its attendant bombshell: “Swedish prosecutors questioned Assange on Aug. 30.” BUT the whole reason for this current brouhaha is that the prosecutors precisely have NOT – they swear – been able to interview him (at least, not in Sweden, though they could have hopped across the North Sea at Assange’s expense and interviewed him in the UK and they have consistently refused … this reminds me of a problem child who refuses to eat dinner unless it’s served in the rumpus room in front of the TV, and then calls the police to claim child-starvation).

The Brits, as I noted in the previous Post, have all Assange’s contact information, provided by him.

The article also refers (apparently) to Swedish prosecutor submissions to the court that the two alleged and self-reported ‘victims’ filed their “complaints” six days after the alleged events. This is another bit of strategically vague ‘reporting’: a formal legal Complaint is precisely what the two ladies did not do: they merely went to the police station, ‘reported’ what they felt happened, and ‘asked for advice’. Of course, having already consulted with a feminist-friendly lawyer they no doubt already knew that in SO law – even in Sweden – even the merest ‘suspicion’ of a sex-offense requires the police to act. Neat – the ladies haven’t actually filed a false police report, but now the police have only ‘suspicion’ and the prosecutors have no actual ‘charges’ to bring.

Hence this burlesque kabuki about interviewing him ‘in connection with’ the whole thing.

But gets even MORE interesting. Sweden actually may not have filed an arrest-warrant with Interpol at all, but only a “red notice” – and that is not the same thing; it is a notification to all 188 participating countries that Swedish police would take it very kindly if the subject of the Notice were noticed, sort of an APB or be-on-the-lookout-for … and yet Interpol, the article reports, says that only “a few” of its member countries consider a Red Notice to be equal to an arrest-warrant. The official definition notes clearly that a Red Notice is specifically not an “international arrest warrant”.

Now this IS curious. Except, perhaps, to the SO community.

To show just how heavy are the hands manipulating what they are trying to present as merely a simple working out of justice, the article inadvertently gives hints of much larger and darker games going on: the Brits would be on the hot-spot if the US tried to also extradite Assange on some charges related to the Wikileaks dump, because there is a growing public sense there that the US is capable of shockingly repugnant skullduggery nowadays when it comes to ‘terrorist’ or terrorist-supportive prisoners (and the definition of terrorism and terrorism-support are verrrrry loosely, vaguely, and broadly defined – no surprise to the SO community).

BUT if the Swedes were to have a trumped-up pretext for getting Assange back to Sweden, then the US could request his extradition from them, perhaps claiming that US ‘terrorism’ charges are more important than any Swedish sex-offense charges (if they ever come); therefore with Assange in the hands of the Swedes, the US could get its hands on him legally – so to speak – without putting the already shaky ties to the Brits in jeopardy. Let’s not forget that cutesy, nice little Sweden was part of the black-ops ‘extraordinary rendition’ circuit by which persons were shuttled around the planet, most often to torture-friendly sites.

In which case, this whole sex-offense thing is quite possible a pretext; a pretext so shaky that even under the mushy prosecution-friendly conditions of SO Mania Law the Swedes cannot bring themselves to lodge actual charges (which is a complication the American SO community hasn’t often experienced).

There are two aspects of this that strike me strongly. First, that the actual SO Mania approach, so prosecution-friendly and government-friendly, reveals just what can be done with ‘law’ once the underlying seriousness and integrity of a legal system are undermined. And that in the age of instantaneous communication, the consequences of this Mania Law can be transmitted almost instantly around the world.

Second, that the entire cynical, play-dough approach that underlies the SO Mania Law Regime (who cares if it makes sense or is compatible with basic principles so long as it’s in what we consider a good cause?) has spread to international diplomacy and politics, the monster ‘sex-offender’ now being merged with the ‘terrorist’ – both defined with gross plasticity – and aimed at whatever targets the government wants to go after.

The plague is spreading.

LATEST ASSANGE

In the on-going SO travails of Julian Assange, founder of Wikileaks and somebody with whom the US government is surely not amused, a new twist.

You may have noticed over the past week that while some sort of warrant was issued by a lower Swedish court and sent to Interpol, nobody on the planet seemed to know where he was – which was odd on its very face since any organized country on the planet has passport control.

Turns out that Scotland Yard says he’s in England, has been in England, they have been in constant contact with his defense team over the past month and even have his address and phone number where he’s staying in England.

BUT they are waiting for instructions since – wait for it – there is “some confusion over what authorities should do” if they indeed arrest him on the Swedish ‘warrant’.

In a curious and queasy legal whackery that cannot be unfamiliar to members of the SO community, he hasn’t been charged with anything, so this is a warrant for ‘detention for questioning’ (although as his lawyers have said, Swedish prosecutors have had every opportunity to meet with him in England at his expense and have consistently refused).

Remarkably, the Swedish Supreme Court refused an appeal by Assange’s lawyers to vacate the ‘order to detain’ him, but the Brits point out – rather impressively given how things usually go in SO cases – that it’s “not a properly certified warrant” so they can’t act on it.

Now we have seen a whole bunch of official oddness in this case: the two queasily self-proclaimed victims did not make charges, they simply ‘reported’ their experiences and asked the police for ‘advice’; on a weekend, when the junior prosecutor on duty issues a warrant and released his name to the public; then on the Monday morning following a senior prosecutor quashed the whole thing; then some days later an even more senior prosecutor said she was re-opening the investigation; months passed (and he made his latest huge document dump) during which the Swedish prosecutors refused Assange’s offer to come and interview him to their heart’s content at his expense, and then the relevant lower court issued this ‘order to detain for questioning’ a week or so ago, and now Scotland Yard says the Swedish authorities – although this is a case that has gone as high up as the Swedish Supreme Court – have issued a flawed document authorizing the arrest.

I also note that there hasn’t been much brouhaha from the usual advocacy suspects that you would expect in a high-profile sex-offense case; standard operating procedure is that you always jump right into the surf with your ever-waxed board when your cause is blessed with a high-profile perp so as to make sure the spin goes the way you want it to.

Curiouser and curiouser.

But it’s impressive that the Brits are observing legalities – which in Victimist practice is an obstructionist ‘excuse’ and merely commits a further victimization when the police don’t start breaking down legal firewalls in response to a self-reported victim’s allegations.

I’m still curious as to why the Swedes have to have him physically in the country. I’m thinking that it would be easier to intimidate him (another standard gambit), although he doesn’t seem to be the type of person who’s going to buckle under like the average schmuck caught in the sights of the Mania; and he can afford some serious legal counsel.

I would say that matters shouldn’t be so complicated; law is not THIS complicated. At least, decent and reasonable law is not this complicated. But in the murky and treacherous and jellied swamp-mush that is SO Mania Law there are so many queasy and sleazy dynamics operating under the surface even more than above the surface, then things become quite complicated indeed. If for no other reason, governments are up to some skullduggery in SO matters that they’d rather not admit, and so we always seem to be confronted – sorta like Moses and the burning bush – with the report of a major fire and yet no flames. And in this case, the Brit ‘fire department’ isn’t even sure it can respond to the purported alarm.

The SO Mania, held in and for the County of Through-the-Looking-Glass, the Honorable Red Queen presiding. Oyez, oyez!

Oy.