It’s a crowded day: Up in Boston US Senator Scott Brown is reported to be telling ’60 Minutes’ on Sunday that in his new book (due to be released next Monday) he will reveal that he was ‘sexually assaulted’ as a 10-year old at a Christian summer camp.
This has prompted the standard complementary ‘report’on what victimist advocates think of that (they like it a lot). And ‘Salon’, the online kinda lefty mag has weighed in with a curiously schizoid article.
Brown has recently co-sponsored legislation in regard to sex-offenses here and here.
Meanwhile in the UK, apparently under the prodding of the European Court of Human Rights, the government is most reluctantly now going to give (see here and here) convicted “rapists and pedophiles” (however defined) a formally-established opportunity to petition for removal from the SO Registry.
Each of these links raises some worthwhile points so I am going to go over what strikes me as significant.
The ‘Boston Globe’ has never encountered a victimist or sex-offense initiative it didn’t like. But a couple of things stand out in the review of Brown’s book (the paper got an advance copy).
First, Brown – about 50 now – recounts a life “punctuated by violence” due to abusive step-fathers and extensive shoplifting (which in at least one instance landed him in front of a judge). He also posed nude for ‘Cosmopolitan’ and was also, for a while, a male model (whether that’s polite code for anything else I don’t know and the media should really put out code books now … but then, that would perhaps defeat the purpose of their code-words).* The point that strikes me is that this recounting works against the Conventionally Correct implication that abuse victims were leading perfectly fine and normal lives, were abused (definition uncertain) and suddenly were wrecked for life and became substantially damaged and often failed adults.
That is NOT to imply that a significant abuse experience or – more likely – pattern of abusive experiences at the hands of adults would not create consequences that could derail an otherwise mostly normal development track. But there seems in this case to be more than enough indicators that this kiddo was going to have some ‘issues’ whether sexually abused or not.
But then the ‘abuse’: at age 8 he recalls a 13 year-old neighborhood boy who pulled a knife on him and tried to force him into some kind of sex act out in a field; Brown hit the boy in the face with a rock and ran away. This strikes me as not so much a sex-offense matter as teen bullying, perhaps by a teen with violence issues at least as deep as any sex issues. Which is not to minimize the thing, but I note that if the government is going to start dismantling constitutional firewalls to get at behavior at this level then the Mania is – theoretically at least – committed to a long, extensive, and pervasive ‘war’ indeed. (So eerily similar to the Afghan War now being waged, as I mentioned in a recent Post, until the Afghans accept American-style feminism root and branch.)
The center-piece abuse incident, however, happened at a “Christian” summer camp when Brown was in the 4th-grade and around 10 years old: having gone to the infirmary, and then into the bathroom to take a wiz, he was followed by a counselor – a youngish male – who made a reach for Brown’s phallic area and – according to the article – “fondled” him, although Brown himself says he screamed and ran out and that the ‘act’ was “not consummated”. Which is kind of vague and, at any rate, this is an incident of ‘fondling’ or ‘groping’.
While it is still unacceptable and constitutes a violation, it is food for thought just how much psychic damage is going to be caused by such an experience. Yes, in a sufficiently unstable or fragile youth this could create more than simply pain and actually set in train some notable developmental derangement. That is an ‘evil’ of life that any decent society should be working to address.
However, again, if the government is going to deploy the criminal law – and derange its own constitutional and jurisprudential principles – to stamp this type of thing out, then again the Mania is going to be a long, pervasive, and invasive war indeed.
And you have to ask yourself if the American penchant for resorting to ‘war’ – whether domestically through the criminal law and government invasiveness or internationally through outright military invasion – is really working well for Us.
I haven’t seen the book yet; I think it would be relevant whether Brown – who clearly is ‘together enough’ and ‘strong enough’ to talk about all this in a book and apparently on an already-taped episode of ’60 Minutes’ – actually identifies this counselor (who couldn’t be more than 60 or so at this point). For that matter, has Brown ever brought charges under the Mania relaxation of Statutes of Limitation that have applied for quite some time?
At this point, really, as so often happens in this sort of thing, we are left with just a ‘story’.
Oddly, he says that he has never told his mother and that “she will find out for the first time ever when she reads the book”. He hasn’t told her prior to all this publicity? Or – pardon me, but you have to think about these things in a time of premeditated and sustained and professionally-advised Mania – is he setting the stage for a camera-ready scenario where his mother is taped reading the book’s story for the first time and producing a victim-friendly version of a ‘reality-show’? Does this oft-praised ‘family man’ intend for his mother to find out about this episode in the bathroom in a book? Or – more likely – as the media start banging on her front door (as they most likely already have started to do)?
This is the same mother one of whose consorts badly beat Brown as a child, but is also the mother whom he doesn’t blame for staying in an abusive relationship because “she had no profession or identity of her own”. Which, it has to be said, reads directly from the Conventionally Correct Script as to how one should conceive of women who purposely remain in abusive relationships yet are to be considered helpless victims. Without getting into a discussion of the pros and cons of the Script, I can’t help but note that Brown follows it even in terms of wording.
So he was abused but it wasn’t consummated, had a mother whose relationship decisions subjected him to substantial violence but he doesn’t blame her because she was just an example of just what feminism says is wrong with society and culture, and so is simultaneously a victim of male sexual abuse who hasn’t had sex with males and a victim of poor maternal choices who actually supports the feminist agenda. I can’t help thinking of Jesse Jackson, caught on tape some decades ago, telling a group of young drug addicts that he too was once addicted to drugs – although “under a doctor’s care and it never got out of control” (I’m quoting from memory here): which means that Jackson got the creds with his audience for being an addict himself while simultaneously denying each of the symptoms (self-medicated and with no control over usage and intake). It’s amazing what PR advisers can do for you.
Or rather, in this case, a ghost-writer, and the same one who helped Laura Bush to tell her story.
The ‘Globe’ then has an accompanying article that stenos the predictable but rather revealing comments of assorted victim advocates, heads of this and that group, and at least one interested attorney.
Leading off with a general summation, the piece reports that the overall gist was that these types “hope his acknowledgment will prompt elected officials to strengthen laws against predators, and convince more victims to come forward”. Which is OK, but again I note that if ‘predators’ now include 13 year-old neighborhood pals and groping camp counselors, then just how much ‘strengthening’ of the laws is going to be required here? Especially since the Family – with stable parental influence maternal and paternal – is itself under corrosive and sustained attack and it's the parents - especially the father with young males - who teaches the boy-child.
And while I think that it certainly helps a genuine victim to be able to confront his/her own experiences by telling the story, that’s best achieved in a therapeutic setting. Because once the setting becomes either a news-camera or police tape-recorder, then you exponentially and dangerously complicate the whole thing, in ways not necessary to therapeutic efficacy but ways which may well awaken a whole nest of demons not easily controlled by individuals, groups, or governments (among which: status-seeking, greed, revenge, and profit, just to name a few).
Another straw in the wind is that the focus of almost all of the commenters – as is true of Brown’s own material – is ‘child sexual abuse’, although the SO community is aware that while the ‘child’ is pushed forward like the hostage in the escaping-robber scenario or like those adorable baby fur-seals in the old environmentalist ads, the Mania laws somehow are aimed at a much larger and wider bunch of selected targets.
Another group boss singles him out for extending the Statute of Limitations so that an allegator (allegant, I suppose, if you wish) has 27 years after the 16th birthday to take legal action. Just last year Brown cosponsored legislation regarding restricting RSO’s from certain jobs (see below) and just last month cosponsored legislation under the rubric of international child-trafficking (ditto). Several years ago he also “called sexual abuse the number one public safety issue” facing the Commonwealth (of Massachusetts), so you can get a sense of where he’s been heading for a while.
Another group’s boss – her group had given him an award for his efforts – reported that to her the news of his own abuse was “shocking” but, she gushes, this just proves how strong he is. “He’s amazing, he really is”, she confesses, in accents that somehow evoke images labeled ‘McDreamy’.
“Other advocates said yesterday that they hope the Legislature will go even further in rolling back the statute of limitations and other protections for child predators.” I’ll be dealing with this sort of thought a bit further on, but suffice it to say that Thomas More’s character in Robert Bolt’s 1966 play “A Man for All Seasons” pretty much nailed it: You say you will flatten every tree in the forest of law in order to get at the devil and deny him a place to hide, but when then the devil turns round on you, what protection will you have, the laws being all flat?
You recall that this discussion involving More arose over the use of the government police and judicial power to eradicate those who did not fully support Henry VIII’s divorce in order to marry Anne Boleyn. The ‘devil’ is supposed to be those who were ‘evil’ enough to obstruct the King’s will (in the first clause) but is the King’s sovereign police power itself (in the second clause).
“Hopefully, Senator Brown’s revelation will send a message to the Legislature, which will serve as a wake-up call with regard to the statute of limitations and the need to abolish it.’’ Thus opines the civil action tort attorney who has not only represented hundreds of allegators in the Catholic abuse civil settlements (and made many millions for himself in the process) but who also recently released a list of all the priests on whose behalf, as it were, the Church was willing to pay settlements rather than undertake hundreds of separate defenses in civil trials. To this type of practice, the repeal of Statutes of Limitations will, by the most amazing coincidence, open up huge new vistas of potentially successful settlement-ventures. From a tort attorney’s point of view, it is manna from heaven, as it were.
A co-director of one of the specifically-focused priest-abuse group websites said that “she hopes Brown will be the elected official from the Massachusetts delegation who emerges as a leading voice for victims in Washington”. I find this a curious comment since Brown is a Republican and his election in mostly Democratic Massachusetts (he took Teddy Kennedy’s seat – the same having gone to face his own victim from Chappaquiddick and an unfixable Judge, perhaps waving a Plenary Indulgence and Get-Out-of-Hell-Free card signed by the heads of all extant feminist and victimist groups on the Beltway lobby roster) – most of the victim establishment would presumably be welded to the Democrats.
Does this mean that the Dems are trying to quietly back away from the SO Mania? Or realize that there are actual problems (the economy and the parlous state of American wages and jobs, perhaps the Afghan War) which require more attention?
And this is a Republican male, for heaven’s sake.
But perhaps there is some new thinking – or calculating, more accurately – going on among the cadres and co-directors. If Brown looks like he might actually be a major contender for greater things and higher elected office (than the US Senate … ummm … if you get my drift), then maybe for these certain interest groups a pinch less emphasis on ‘progressive’ and a dash more emphasis on ‘law and order’ might easily change the valence of their potion from Democrat to Republican?
Funny how the political night moves. Or rather, the creatures that are at home in it.
And this would fit in with the curiously schizoid article in Salon.
The writer acknowledges outright that Brown is “ambitious”. And that he “is looking more and more like a man who would like to be President”. Which in the present circumstances introduces the added possibility that this is an opening shot in yet another junior-Senator-to-President story.
But more along those lines, revealingly: that he might be able to wrest the Party from the Tea-Party types. I am not going to get into politics here, but there is a possible political motive here that also involves the SO Mania: if the current Republican establishment is thinking in such an anti-Tea Party mode then they could construct a genuinely marvelous vote-gobbling monster by making a ‘sensitive’ Republican, victim-friendly and thus, in the Republican mode, leaning to law-and-order, which in its essence is what the SO Mania Regime’s legislation and dynamics are all about, for all the roots in radical-feminism and sensitivity and victimism. And – although it is un-Correct to notice it – kinda hunky, which could appeal to additional sub-demographics.
And such a book-about-self gambit as this one of Brown’s could also be a pre-emptive strike in support of a Presidential candidate with a personal history that makes Bill Clinton’s I-smoked-but-didn’t-inhale history look like child’s play. Honest, victimized, vulnerable, shtrawng, and hunky-kewt … a potent vote-monster if some lab were interested in constructing the thing.
Let us pray.
And that Brown felt that being fondled, groped, grabbed – or not – was at the time “very traumatic”. Which I accept, after making the standard subtractions: that the term, which comes from surgical usage (traumatic amputation, traumatic fracture … that sort of thing) where you really are confronted with the indisputable objective catastrophic evidence of ‘trauma’, was shrewdly adopted by psychological types (the repressed-memory vaudevillians, you recall, have re-titled themselves ‘traumatology experts’ to keep up with the times and to keep a step ahead of Nemesis). So now it’s not only that the word applies to the mostly invisible realm of emotions (rather than the palpable realm of blood, guts, skin and bones); it’s also that in this invisible realm it’s not the doctor who gets to say what is and isn’t traumatic – but rather it’s the self-declared traumatized person him/herself.
So, really, who knows any longer what is and isn’t trauma? You have to take the claimant-individual’s word for it, much like ‘spectral evidence’ in the old witch trials. You can’t see it, nobody else can see it, but it must be accepted as true and cannot – effectively – be questioned.
But this is Salon, after all, and the New Left is what it is. Apparently (the link is in the article) the CBS website is already logging a lot of comments about Brown being a wuss for whining in public (the possibility that this is a calculated gambit for political-positioning seems to have escaped a lot of folks). This, the Salon writer sniffs, simply proves that the Internet has given a whole bunch of un-Correct yahoos a chance for a week of “victim blaming”. Mais oui.
“For all the attention childhood sexual abuse has received in the last few years -- tragically, because it's such a common experience -- the stigma of it remains.” Again I say that if it is “such a common experience” then the criminal law is no way to deal with it. There’s a reason why no State Police agency in the country actually WANTS its troopers to stop every speeder on the roads. But then too, if it is so common, how can it be so traumatizing, at least from the point of view of stigmatization ... ? It would be common knowledge among kids and this would especially be true nowadays (again, the SO Mania and its cadres continue to run many of the same game-plays as almost quarter-of-a-century ago, but they no longer make sense in the now-changed societal context: kids, however accurately or inaccurately, expect just about all adults to be potential gropers and grabbers and I can’t even imagine how pediatricians and clergy go about working with them now).
But the Cadre Talking Points have an answer to that: “It's a particularly taboo subject for men, thanks to the ease with which ignorant, petty minds leap from child abuse to ‘Dude, that’s so gay’.” But then, these generations of kids (and now 20-somethings) aren’t really uptight about orientation like kids and youth were 50, 40, or 25 years ago.
Worse – funny how the politically-Correct night moves – she now has to somehow blame the public for being duped by decades of Correct (but now suddenly no longer useful) propaganda: “And, unfortunately, plenty of people can't wrap their heads around the idea of a victim who isn't a tragic mess curled up on a shrink's couch. If you're not crying and broken and damaged-looking enough it didn’t happen. They put qualifiers on abuse, deciding that if it wasn't ‘consummated’ or it was just some ‘groping’ it wasn't bad enough to qualify as important.”
But this image was precisely what Americans were bombarded with for quite a while in order to lubricate the emergency** that putatively required the SO Mania Regime in the first place. So if you actually bought into all the agitprop imagery, you must now – necessarily and for the good of the Cause – be derided as an uninformed and unthinking lump who – wait for it! – just doesn’t get it. (And you thought that buying into all that propaganda precisely proved that you DID!) Take consolation: you may be a broken egg, but you were broken in the cause of the Revolution!
Just last month, Brown cosponsored S.185, a Bill to stop international sex-trafficking by erecting a consortium of countries whose governments will sign on to do what it takes. Let me say right off that I am not in support of sex-trafficking.
But the Bill lets a cat or two out of the general SO Mania bag.
In Sec. 3 (5) “Minor” is defined as anyone “who has not attained the age of 18 years”. You can, in this country, sign up as a military recruit (a rather adult matter) while still being a ‘child’ for purposes of the SO Mania Regime. And with the one exception of this definition line, the Bill’s text refers to “children”.
In Sec. 6 (d) (1), discussing the programs that participating countries must adopt, the Bill spells it out: they have to undertake “evaluations of legal standards and practices and recommendations for improvements that will increase the likelihood of successful prosecutions”. The American SO community knows this high-sounding and abstract code for the treacherous swamp it really is: undermine any constitutional or jurisprudential principles that obstruct the untrammeled power of the government to successfully prosecute. This objective, of course, is utterly antithetical to the core thrust of Western law since at least Magna Carta; and you can go further back if you assume that the Church’s canon-law, itself built on Roman law, stood as an ‘international’ model of putting limits on local sovereignties that sought to gather unlimited and un-boundaried power to themselves.
In Sec. 6 (d) (4) there is the simple and bald statement “Creation of victim-friendly courts”. Not, say, Truth-friendly courts ... no, this isn’t about truth or Truth; it’s about politics and the ‘victims’ (through their advocates) want to run things. Truth, as it was in the days of any and all of the historic tyrannies, can go take a hike. Or better, languish downstairs in some cell with the rest of the ‘obstructionists’.
This Bill, which died in the last Session, has been read twice and referred to the Foreign Relations committee. Since it calls for voluntary participation by other countries, at least it doesn’t authorize military invasion.
In December, Brown cosponsored S.4029, the “Preventing Sex Offenders Access to Children in Our Communities Act of 2010”. This Bill is sponsored by Charles Schumer (D-NY), last seen trying to wangle millions in pork and NCIC-access authority to the Megan’s Law advocacy group so that it can continue to hunt for sex-offenders even if the police won’t or can’t expend the resources.
The Bill seeks to amend the master SORNA (Sex Offender Registration and Notification Act) “to prohibit registered sex offenders from (1) accepting a position of employment, including a volunteer position, which by the inherent nature of the position places such sex offender in direct and substantial contact with minors or (2) obtaining a permit or permission to carry out an activity or performance that would present direct and substantial contact with minors.”
The prohibited activities seem too vague to survive judicial scrutiny, but it is certainly a text that your office can fax to this particular ‘base’ to show that you’re right in there takin’ a bite outta sex.
I also note that the Bill continues to rely on the thoroughly-disproven and thus now lunatic presumption that any RSO or SO is a threat to children.
But there’s more: “Authorizes the Attorney General to award grants and enter into contracts with public agencies or nonprofit private organizations to establish a community accessible sex offender tips and support program to provide for anonymous or confidential tips regarding sex offenders who are not complying with registration or other applicable requirements”. This, by amazing coincidence, sounds just like Schumer’s and King’s (R-NY)(in the House) gambit to get pork for the Megan’s Law bunch that are looking to spackle up the police and run the hotlines where anybody can anonymously call in and ‘report on’ somebody. As the money runs out and the danger is that the entire Mania will fail to maintain sufficient ‘airspeed’ such that folks will no longer simply accept it uncritically, then it will be necessary to get reliable cadres into ‘official’ or apparently-official positions so they can somehow harness what power the government has left to keep up the numbers.
But there is some possibility that this type of thing on the legislative level merely represents a cynical pandering in that the sponsoring pols don’t actually expect anything to pass, but merely that they can go to gatherings of this ‘demographic’ and proudly show copies of what they have ‘Introduced’, avoid the rubber chicken dinner, and get on to the next stop.
Lastly, per decision of the British Supreme Court, the UK now has to allow convicted rapists and pedophiles (however defined) the right to appeal their Registration on the Violent and Sex Offender Register. (Yes, the UK has already gone there and blended the two.) The decision stemmed from a pair of cases, one of which was an 11 year-old convicted in 2005 of raping a 6 year-old and who, his attorney submitted, should not have to be forced to be on the Register for the rest of his life and should have the right to appeal “as he matures”.
The Home Secretary, one Theresa May, is greatly unhappy. Although such persons must wait 15 years after release from prison, and can only then appeal once every 5 years thereafter if denied, and though it is the police – not a court – that will make the decision ... she is not pleased. And in her grief, lets a few cats out of the bag.
May told the House of Commons that "the government is disappointed and appalled by this ruling - it places the rights of sex offenders above the right of the public to be protected from the risk of re-offending”.
This is treacherous ground. The SO Mania scheme has always been to get the government – and, worse, the Citizenry – to accept that the common identity of Citizen should be overridden by the distinction between sex-offenders and a putatively ‘decent and good’ public. It’s a sort of Identity Politics, except with the valence reversed from positive to negative.
Worse, this distinction implies that the rights of Citizen are not primary, and opens the awful door behind which lies the ominous and ancient terror that anybody, any Citizen or group of Citizens, can suddenly become a declared ‘enemy’. Martin Niemoller’s rueful observation about life in Nazi Germany comes to mind: he let ‘them’ ‘come for’ this group and that group that was suddenly declared to be bad and evil and he did not ‘speak up’, until suddenly ‘they’ came for him and “there was nobody left to speak up”. You can, if your cardiologist permits, permit yourself a few minutes’ contemplation of the nation that took the point against Nazism adopting that monstrosity’s legal praxis decades later (just as over here you can do the same as the country that stood against the Soviet tyranny caved into Marxist-Leninist thought and practice while the corpse of the USSR was still warm).
It also continues the discredited presumption that most SO types have high re-offense rates (which is only conceivable if you believe that all men are sex-crazed and all sex is some form of rape).
The Brits, though, only allow the police to look at the Register. Although it also now has some modified version of a Megan’s Law policy whereby parents can also go to the police and make a “discrete check” if they have a reason.
Most other European nations, the article notes, “have chosen not to compile national sex offender registers, citing potential infringements on civil liberties” – perhaps governments and countries that either recall Nazi occupation or more recent Soviet occupation. Scotland, distinct from England and Wales, requires judges rather than police to hear appeals.
There is a dual complexity that also arises in regard to the courts. Some are angry that the judiciary is interfering in legislation passed by Parliament. In the US, the separation-of- powers and checks-and-balances traditions support judicial-review of legislation; while none of that proved effective in the formation of the SO Mania Regime (quite the opposite) it is only the courts, in the person of this or that judge or banc of judges, who have made any official remonstrance against the workings of the Regime at all.
No pol has come forward, nor do I expect that Mr. Brown is going to be doing so.
There is also the complication that the European Court of Human Rights – sitting in judgment over laws of member States – arouses in Brits the sense that foreigners, and foreign judges at that, are telling them how to run their country.
But when something has clearly gone wrong – and a country is violating even its own most fundamental principles – then it’s not a bad thing that some official body somewhere has the authority to point out the problem. (You may recall a discussion of the European Court and the British tradition in the recent Post about the Julian Assange matter.)
NOTES
*Curiously, nothing interfered with his admission to law school or admission to the Bar, nor – more curiously – with his acceptance in the military legal corps, the JAGs. I have often noted the ominous similarities between SO Mania law and the working dynamics of military-justice (not to be mistaken for the assorted bits of Constitutional furniture artfully placed on the stage). His Wiki entry notes shrewdly that he served “as a defense counsel”, apparently in an effort to distance himself from the vital, sharp-end of the job: prosecution in that rigged system. I can only think of the former SS officer recognized by a former subordinate in Billy Wilder’s 1961 classic Cold-War Berlin comedy “One, Two, Three”: said the former officer, now cornered, “Eet izz true eye vass in ze SS, baht eye vass only a pastry chef!” Ja!
**In his recent book “The New Road to Serfdom: A Letter of Warning to America” the British politician Daniel Hannan observes acutely that “most disastrous policies have been introduced in times of emergency”. I agree. Stovepiping – that by-passing of any potential objectors who have actual knowledge about something you have already made up your mind to do – wasn’t invented by Bush and Cheney in order to make sure they’d get no opposition to the invasion of Iraq. Propagandistic manipulators of Left and Right have for a century realized that you want to establish a quick and unobstructed flow from Public Emotion (either actually whipped-up to frenzy or made to appear numerous) up to the government authority. Then the government authority can either be cowed or – if it simply needs an excuse to be ‘responsive’ – can claim public support for whatever it has made up its mind to do. Adept deployment of one or another element of this game-play has been a hallmark, I’m going to say, of the SO Mania Era.
Showing posts with label SO Mania Regime. Show all posts
Showing posts with label SO Mania Regime. Show all posts
Thursday, February 17, 2011
Thursday, November 4, 2010
WHITE HOUSE AND DOMESTIC VIOLENCE
In an article on Truthout, assigned to a female intern writer and dated October 30, 2010, it is announced that “the White House acknowledged October as Domestic Violence Awareness Month on Wednesday”.
It’s not worth my time or yours to conduct a stereotypical blog-investigation to find out whether this is a typo or not.
Perhaps it is a typo, although the site didn’t put it up until the end of the month. Perhaps it isn’t a typo and the site put it up at the end of the month because the editors figured it wasn’t all that important. Or perhaps the White House announcement itself was put out at the end of the putative Awareness Month as an election ploy (the ‘base’ presumably not having the memory capacity to remember at the beginning of November what it read at the beginning of October).
When anything’s possible, then not even the Powers That Be can control what might be considered possible. (That was the premise of many an episode of the comedy “Hogan’s Heroes” back in the 1960s: since life in the Third Reich was so far beyond rationality in the first place, then no Nazi colonel in a remote camp could afford to imagine that Hitler or Goering wasn’t out in the yard to conduct a distracting conversation just for the hey or that Himmler himself hadn’t come to Paris just to take a buxom Resistance prisoner out of Gestapo headquarters .)
At any rate, there are some classic ploys deployed in the whole thing that make it of interest to the SO community, just as a handy drill for honing your field-recognition skills.
“Many advocates” report themselves “heartened”, although the only one quoted is Eleanor Smeal, formerly of NOW and currently President of the Feminist Majority Foundation, who opines that “they’re really doing a lot on the subject”. Stupendously faint praise indeed.
It was a “government-wide effort”, although this should not be meant to imply that the government had organized itself to total and ultimate victory like it did in late 1941.
Rather, it appears that the President or his staff was in need of whatever ‘progress’ might be cobbled together that would satisfy the demands of some snippet of ‘the base’ but that wouldn’t cost much in the long run and that wouldn’t expose the government to having to defend yet more Constitutionally-dubious laws (the torture and Guantanamo stuff, itself following the same ‘emergency-necessity’ path as the original DoVi legislation in a hell-hot irony, has cost the Pres dearly in both image and substance and at this point the damage is probably irreparable).
So a Senior Adviser said “in a press conference call Wednesday” (there’s that date thing again; and this is only a call) that “various federal governments have taken a solid approach to how we have tried to manage [the] challenge” of domestic violence. The punctuation and placement of quotation marks is confusing, but then she herself seems confused in her comments, referring to what appears to be more than one federal government. And since Our Modern American Reality is so far beyond rationality, especially in the matter of the Mania Regimes, who can say, really?
This Senior Staffer also “chairs the White Council on Women and Girls” then went on and “lauded the accomplishments of the Violence Against Women Act, passed in 1994” which, in the event, ran into Constitutional problems in the eyes of the Supreme Court. But it provided over a billion dollars to “support the investigation and prosecution of violent crimes against women” (about which more later).
I don’t think there’s that kind of cash lying around any longer.
She tries to re-frame the thing: it’s not just a women’s issue – it’s a national issue”. I was half-expecting the next phrase to be “it’s a national security issue” but apparently things haven’t gone that far inside the Beltway.
I would think that to the extent it’s a legitimate issue it’s also a men’s issue, but she doesn’t go there.
It’s a “tragic and senseless crime”, she says – which I would say is true of almost all crime.
AND THEN We are treated to – wait for it – “statistics”. And “the statistics noted in the White House report are grim”: “One in four women will be the victim of domestic violence in the course of their lifetime” – and nobody familiar with the mini-series on Victimology on this site can help but wonder just how reliable such a statistic really is. Ditto that “one in six will be sexually assaulted” – presumably by a husband, significant other, or person staying overnight. Or whatever.
There is no mention of how many of these assaults – and (see below) they are verrrry broadly defined – are committed by same-sex partners and thus perpetrated by females. Nor is there any discussion of how many of the victims might be males, with the female initiating the assaulting.
“Currently more than twenty million women in the United States have been the victims of rape” – which is again a statistic that seems rather inflated, although the definition of ‘rape’ nowadays is broad enough to encompass an awful lot of behavior and situations that wouldn’t strike somebody as ‘rape’ in the dictionary sense of the word. Nor is the statistic completely relevant here, since there is no indication that these ‘rapes’ took place in the ‘domestic’ setting – although ‘domestic’ is itself perhaps broadly defined. It gets to be a hall of mirrors, as so often is the case in the Mania Regimes.
But “since fewer than one in six rapes are reported to police” than this number “may not reflect reality”. That ‘reality’ would then be that there may be 120 million rapes, although how one arrives at reliable numbers of un-reported acts is anybody’s guess. The evidence might be ‘anecdotal’ – which means that somebody ‘says’ it at some point afterwards, or the evidence might be arrived at merely by taking the number of reported ‘rapes’ and multiplying by a factor of somebody’s choice: two, ten, a hundred or more. Once ‘facts don’t matter’ then you are into verrry fuzzy territory indeed.
Ditto that “nearly 15.5 million children are exposed to domestic violence every year” – and how that number is arrived at is equally curious. But of course it gives the opportunity to bring ‘the children’ into the matter – almost a requirement of the form nowadays.
These are the White House equivalents, I would say, of legislative Findings, those weird and deathless creatures by which the SO Mania Regime has been fueled from Day One.
So then, true to the form, the White House must “address” the emergency.
There are – gently put – “several initiatives to strengthen the legal system”. And nobody in the SO community can read that bit without concern and a dark sense of déjà-vu. Especially since the police-state gambits already enshrined in the DoVi Regime (the ones that survived the Supreme Court’s scrutiny) are already ominous and lethal enough: police intrusion into the home; deprivation of property and family and residence on the say-so of a single (and hardly uninterested) party; removal of any discretion on the part of investigating officers or prosecutors; the placing of an impossible burden of proof (that he did NOT do it) on the accused; the truly frakkulent scam of claiming that the entire process is ‘merely civil’ (although the violation of any court Order resulting from the foregoing is instantly and most assuredly and lethally ‘criminal’); and the erection of nearly-ineradicable ‘registries’ of all accused persons even if they are found not-at-fault by the court Hearing.
The goal is “to increase sexual assault arrests”, charmingly. Although again, whether this refers to DoVi incidents or incidents of the even more broadly and nebulously defined ‘sexual assault’ is unclear. But then, clarity has never been a major concern and – in Mania dynamics – is considered something along the lines of obstructive and counter-productive. Reality and ‘facts’ are the enemies of Mania Stampedes as a result of the very dynamics of Mania and Stampede.
“There has never been this kind of focus on sexual assault” says a “domestic violence policy expert and the first-ever White House adviser on violence against women”, although she apparently has forgotten about the previous two decades of the DoVi Regime. Or doesn’t figure anybody will remember. And again, the confusion in terms between ‘domestic violence’ assaults and ‘sexual assaults’.
Getting a bit more specific as to just what is being newly promulgated now in this White House activity, We are told that HUD will now “provide guidance to housing authorities and landlords, allowing them to ‘evict perpetrators of abuse, keep their properties safe and make sure victims do not lose their housing due to crimes committed against them’". Just how “perpetrator” will be determined (Accusation? Conviction?) is left unsaid. Just what housing authorities and landlords will be empowered to do to “keep their properties safe” is also left unsaid.
Further, “the Department of Justice Office on Violence Against Women is launching a national campaign against sexual assault, holding regional forums throughout the country to stimulate public dialogue”. I am going to imagine that ‘public dialogue’ isn’t really going to be the objective here, but rather a bunch of ‘consciousness-raising’, klatschy type sessions which since the beginning have been the source of ‘stories’ and ‘anecdotal evidence’ that fuel – far more than any stringently-conducted research – the fuel to keep the fires burning among the faithful.
And I am going to imagine that staffers of this Office are not going to take kindly to any information or opinion to the effect that things might be somewhat overstated. Government ‘Offices’ erected specifically to deal with X are not greatly interested in evidence that there isn’t so much X out there.
Meanwhile “the National Institute of Justice will investigate the root causes of backlogs in rape kit processing”. At this point, after almost two decades of government pressure, I’m going to imagine that the reason for the lack of prompt processing is not that the police are a macho, rape-friendly organization besotted with ‘patriarchy’, but rather that there are now so many accusations – allowable under the broad and vague definitions and conflations and conceptual confusions – that no police department larger than Mayberry can handle the load, especially given the other crimes which the police must also handle.
But given the fact that accused persons might actually be exonerated – at least in those cases of rape where sexual penetration and ejaculation was achieved, which is not necessary in all definitions of ‘rape’ – then it would help to move the processing along.
Smeal asserts that “One of the major [excuses] we got was that there's not enough money" to process rape kits, Smeal said. "Police departments find another reason to spend it... now [that] money has been appropriated, they say there's not enough scientists and labs to process them." Which could well be true. It’s possible that the police are finally realizing that this type of beyond-factual evidentiary Mania is impossible to keep up with, and it’s highly probable that not even the labs – civilian as well as official – can keep up with it.
But the kicker in this whole Mania type of thing is that even when the plan is proving to be unworkable in the field and on the ground, the advocacies can simply claim that the ‘badges on the ground’ are dragging their feet and diverting funds and coming up with “excuses”. Perhaps they might take a lesson from the ‘boots on the ground’ in Iraq and Afghanistan: when you’ve been tasked with a poorly-conceived and impossible mission, ‘victory’ is not going to happen.
Then things get interesting indeed. A 2009 Navy ‘study’ is mentioned, by way of a study of the study by a sociology Ph.D. candidate. Apparently the Navy interviewed 1,146 newly-enlisted recruits in 2009. And apparently from the answers that these gentlemen gave in some form of questioning or questionnaire, the ‘study’ decided that “repeat offenders committed 95% of completed or attempted rapes”.
Thus, the White House is apparently convinced, “because of the high rate of recidivism” something has to be done about the rape-kit processing problem.
“High rate of recidivism” is a phrase that should set the whiskers of any SO community-member twitching.
More curiously, the 2009 Navy study – itself a replicant of a 2002 college-male study – seems clearly focused on non-domestic ‘rapes’ (and given the ‘college’ setting, probably a lot of the verrry nebulously defined ‘date rape’). So its relevance to a DoVi initiative seems tenuous at best.
Even more curiously, the gist of the 2002 and 2009 studies appears to be that only a small group of repeaters – between 4 and 9% - are responsible for the rapes. Which seems to work directly counter to the DoVi claims of millions of incidents and, given the DoVi setting by definition, millions of (male) perpetrators.
And the studies asked about incidents that fit “or approximated” the definitions and legal elements of ‘rape’ or ‘attempted rape’. So they are casting a net that will ‘approximate’ the incidences of what are already nebulous and elastic terms (sexual assault, rape, attempted rape, and date-rape). The possibilities for conceptual error – let alone mischief – are stupendous.
Further, you wonder if the Navy kept the fellows that were apparently witless enough to admit to such things or so morally challenged as to perpetrate them. Although, the researchers crow about how they cagily asked only questions about ‘activity’ without mentioning that to answer the questions in the affirmative would be admitting to the elements of a crime – such as these crimes are defined nowadays – and presumably didn’t give their game away by asking about ‘intent’ (i.e. Did you intend to rape the woman?)
Further, since the studies found that the majority of the repeaters said that they knew their partners and were not strangers, it’s legitimate to ask if ‘domestic’ has been expanded now to quietly include anybody who isn’t a stranger. That’s how far things have become debased in these matters.
Further there's a bit about some of the 'rapists' going to the trouble of "drugging" their (intended?) partners, although I'd want to know if alcohol is considered - at least in DoVi-land - a 'drug', especially since college and college-age folks seem rather familiar with alcohol. These are the type of suble definition-shifts that don't make it into the scare-stats, the 'reports', the Findings, and the press releases.
However, you then can wind up at the lower end of the spectrum: “slapping or hitting”, “pushing, grabbing or shoving a partner”, or “throwing something at a partner that could hurt”. It is hardly beyond reason to imagine that if these latter categories are feeding into the figures of ‘twenty million’ and such, then there is a big problem here – and it’s not domestic violence itself. Because if the advocacies and advocacy-friendly ‘researchers’ are including in their actual or statistically-derived ‘numbers’ every incident where two humans in a relationship push, grab, or shove … well, yes, I would imagine that you could easily reach a figure next to which ’20 million’ would be conservative.
But there’s no word – and this couldn’t be an oversight – as to where most of these incidents lie on the spectrum.
And there’s no word – ditto – on who initiated the violent act. Or – and this would be of more than passing interest – to what extent individuals, especially females, in same-sex relationships are involved in this sort of thing.
And, as a matter of good research procedure, it has to be said that if you’re only going to study males in regard to perpetrating ‘rape’ (however defined) then you are only going to wind up with male perpetrators. But you aren’t going to wind up with an accurate picture of the overall ‘rape’ situation in the country.
Joe Biden is mentioned. You may recall him as the Senator who, in response to an objection to his original Violence Against Women Act (later found to have notable un-Constitutional elements), brayed that “it may be a bad law but it sends a great message”. This gentleman is the former used-car salesman who also professed himself greatly “bored” during his time at his not-first-tier law school.
In 2008, angling for a higher office, he promised to introduce a bill in the Senate that would “train 100,000 lawyers to represent domestic violence victims”. I don’t know if he ever introduced it, or if he did, if it was ever passed.
But it isn’t hard to imagine that such a promise could be fulfilled by simply printing up a brochure or mailing out a Power-Point Presentation to every Member of every Bar Association in the country. Although you would think that the already-graduated attorneys would know how to conduct a case.
But then, of course, given the numerous hidden agendas, elastic definitions, systemic biases against the accused, and the general complexity of he said-she said (or he-he, or she-she) legal proceedings, perhaps even in these degraded times law schools don’t provide attorneys with clear training in the particular treacherous waters of DoVi cases. Or of any of the jurisprudential challenges that arise when trying to administer the laws in a time of Mania and under a Regime of Mania.
The article concludes by noting that Obama has put 130 million dollars into the budget for 2011 for all this stuff. But, the article hastens to add, 100 million of that will come “from the Crime Victims' Fund, which is supported by criminal fines, penalties and forfeited jail bonds rather than taxpayer money”.
That’s about one-seventh of all the monies available for annual distribution in the Fund (which holds about 4 billion this year) and if you take a look at its responsibilities, that money could – and apparently does – go quickly. (It also got itself into the Patriot Act, somehow.) I’m thinking that there’s going to be a lot of ‘resistance’ organizationally for dedicating a full seventh of its disbursable funds to so nebulous a crime-category. And no doubt that will fuel the claim of even more “excuses”.
Well, that’s my take on this curious article and even more curious ‘initiative’.
My assessment is that it’s yet another political effort to keep part of ‘the base’ happy in the run-up to a difficult election.
But it’s a sad state of affairs that the Mania Regimes are part of that ‘base’ to begin with, and a direct result of ‘pressure’ (in the Alinsky-ite sense) from various elements in that ‘base’.
ADDENDUM
Let me say again and again and again that I do not support the infliction of violence by any human being upon any other human being, sexual or otherwise, in the 'domestic' or any other setting. But when the Mania Regimes of Sex Offense and its immediate predecessor, Domestic Violence, are so arranged as to create Stampedes in public affairs and in law and law enforcement, and highly dubiously justified Stampedes (which almost goes without saying, given the nature of Stampedes and Manias) then I think a certain amount of Tire has to be Kicked.
It’s not worth my time or yours to conduct a stereotypical blog-investigation to find out whether this is a typo or not.
Perhaps it is a typo, although the site didn’t put it up until the end of the month. Perhaps it isn’t a typo and the site put it up at the end of the month because the editors figured it wasn’t all that important. Or perhaps the White House announcement itself was put out at the end of the putative Awareness Month as an election ploy (the ‘base’ presumably not having the memory capacity to remember at the beginning of November what it read at the beginning of October).
When anything’s possible, then not even the Powers That Be can control what might be considered possible. (That was the premise of many an episode of the comedy “Hogan’s Heroes” back in the 1960s: since life in the Third Reich was so far beyond rationality in the first place, then no Nazi colonel in a remote camp could afford to imagine that Hitler or Goering wasn’t out in the yard to conduct a distracting conversation just for the hey or that Himmler himself hadn’t come to Paris just to take a buxom Resistance prisoner out of Gestapo headquarters .)
At any rate, there are some classic ploys deployed in the whole thing that make it of interest to the SO community, just as a handy drill for honing your field-recognition skills.
“Many advocates” report themselves “heartened”, although the only one quoted is Eleanor Smeal, formerly of NOW and currently President of the Feminist Majority Foundation, who opines that “they’re really doing a lot on the subject”. Stupendously faint praise indeed.
It was a “government-wide effort”, although this should not be meant to imply that the government had organized itself to total and ultimate victory like it did in late 1941.
Rather, it appears that the President or his staff was in need of whatever ‘progress’ might be cobbled together that would satisfy the demands of some snippet of ‘the base’ but that wouldn’t cost much in the long run and that wouldn’t expose the government to having to defend yet more Constitutionally-dubious laws (the torture and Guantanamo stuff, itself following the same ‘emergency-necessity’ path as the original DoVi legislation in a hell-hot irony, has cost the Pres dearly in both image and substance and at this point the damage is probably irreparable).
So a Senior Adviser said “in a press conference call Wednesday” (there’s that date thing again; and this is only a call) that “various federal governments have taken a solid approach to how we have tried to manage [the] challenge” of domestic violence. The punctuation and placement of quotation marks is confusing, but then she herself seems confused in her comments, referring to what appears to be more than one federal government. And since Our Modern American Reality is so far beyond rationality, especially in the matter of the Mania Regimes, who can say, really?
This Senior Staffer also “chairs the White Council on Women and Girls” then went on and “lauded the accomplishments of the Violence Against Women Act, passed in 1994” which, in the event, ran into Constitutional problems in the eyes of the Supreme Court. But it provided over a billion dollars to “support the investigation and prosecution of violent crimes against women” (about which more later).
I don’t think there’s that kind of cash lying around any longer.
She tries to re-frame the thing: it’s not just a women’s issue – it’s a national issue”. I was half-expecting the next phrase to be “it’s a national security issue” but apparently things haven’t gone that far inside the Beltway.
I would think that to the extent it’s a legitimate issue it’s also a men’s issue, but she doesn’t go there.
It’s a “tragic and senseless crime”, she says – which I would say is true of almost all crime.
AND THEN We are treated to – wait for it – “statistics”. And “the statistics noted in the White House report are grim”: “One in four women will be the victim of domestic violence in the course of their lifetime” – and nobody familiar with the mini-series on Victimology on this site can help but wonder just how reliable such a statistic really is. Ditto that “one in six will be sexually assaulted” – presumably by a husband, significant other, or person staying overnight. Or whatever.
There is no mention of how many of these assaults – and (see below) they are verrrry broadly defined – are committed by same-sex partners and thus perpetrated by females. Nor is there any discussion of how many of the victims might be males, with the female initiating the assaulting.
“Currently more than twenty million women in the United States have been the victims of rape” – which is again a statistic that seems rather inflated, although the definition of ‘rape’ nowadays is broad enough to encompass an awful lot of behavior and situations that wouldn’t strike somebody as ‘rape’ in the dictionary sense of the word. Nor is the statistic completely relevant here, since there is no indication that these ‘rapes’ took place in the ‘domestic’ setting – although ‘domestic’ is itself perhaps broadly defined. It gets to be a hall of mirrors, as so often is the case in the Mania Regimes.
But “since fewer than one in six rapes are reported to police” than this number “may not reflect reality”. That ‘reality’ would then be that there may be 120 million rapes, although how one arrives at reliable numbers of un-reported acts is anybody’s guess. The evidence might be ‘anecdotal’ – which means that somebody ‘says’ it at some point afterwards, or the evidence might be arrived at merely by taking the number of reported ‘rapes’ and multiplying by a factor of somebody’s choice: two, ten, a hundred or more. Once ‘facts don’t matter’ then you are into verrry fuzzy territory indeed.
Ditto that “nearly 15.5 million children are exposed to domestic violence every year” – and how that number is arrived at is equally curious. But of course it gives the opportunity to bring ‘the children’ into the matter – almost a requirement of the form nowadays.
These are the White House equivalents, I would say, of legislative Findings, those weird and deathless creatures by which the SO Mania Regime has been fueled from Day One.
So then, true to the form, the White House must “address” the emergency.
There are – gently put – “several initiatives to strengthen the legal system”. And nobody in the SO community can read that bit without concern and a dark sense of déjà-vu. Especially since the police-state gambits already enshrined in the DoVi Regime (the ones that survived the Supreme Court’s scrutiny) are already ominous and lethal enough: police intrusion into the home; deprivation of property and family and residence on the say-so of a single (and hardly uninterested) party; removal of any discretion on the part of investigating officers or prosecutors; the placing of an impossible burden of proof (that he did NOT do it) on the accused; the truly frakkulent scam of claiming that the entire process is ‘merely civil’ (although the violation of any court Order resulting from the foregoing is instantly and most assuredly and lethally ‘criminal’); and the erection of nearly-ineradicable ‘registries’ of all accused persons even if they are found not-at-fault by the court Hearing.
The goal is “to increase sexual assault arrests”, charmingly. Although again, whether this refers to DoVi incidents or incidents of the even more broadly and nebulously defined ‘sexual assault’ is unclear. But then, clarity has never been a major concern and – in Mania dynamics – is considered something along the lines of obstructive and counter-productive. Reality and ‘facts’ are the enemies of Mania Stampedes as a result of the very dynamics of Mania and Stampede.
“There has never been this kind of focus on sexual assault” says a “domestic violence policy expert and the first-ever White House adviser on violence against women”, although she apparently has forgotten about the previous two decades of the DoVi Regime. Or doesn’t figure anybody will remember. And again, the confusion in terms between ‘domestic violence’ assaults and ‘sexual assaults’.
Getting a bit more specific as to just what is being newly promulgated now in this White House activity, We are told that HUD will now “provide guidance to housing authorities and landlords, allowing them to ‘evict perpetrators of abuse, keep their properties safe and make sure victims do not lose their housing due to crimes committed against them’". Just how “perpetrator” will be determined (Accusation? Conviction?) is left unsaid. Just what housing authorities and landlords will be empowered to do to “keep their properties safe” is also left unsaid.
Further, “the Department of Justice Office on Violence Against Women is launching a national campaign against sexual assault, holding regional forums throughout the country to stimulate public dialogue”. I am going to imagine that ‘public dialogue’ isn’t really going to be the objective here, but rather a bunch of ‘consciousness-raising’, klatschy type sessions which since the beginning have been the source of ‘stories’ and ‘anecdotal evidence’ that fuel – far more than any stringently-conducted research – the fuel to keep the fires burning among the faithful.
And I am going to imagine that staffers of this Office are not going to take kindly to any information or opinion to the effect that things might be somewhat overstated. Government ‘Offices’ erected specifically to deal with X are not greatly interested in evidence that there isn’t so much X out there.
Meanwhile “the National Institute of Justice will investigate the root causes of backlogs in rape kit processing”. At this point, after almost two decades of government pressure, I’m going to imagine that the reason for the lack of prompt processing is not that the police are a macho, rape-friendly organization besotted with ‘patriarchy’, but rather that there are now so many accusations – allowable under the broad and vague definitions and conflations and conceptual confusions – that no police department larger than Mayberry can handle the load, especially given the other crimes which the police must also handle.
But given the fact that accused persons might actually be exonerated – at least in those cases of rape where sexual penetration and ejaculation was achieved, which is not necessary in all definitions of ‘rape’ – then it would help to move the processing along.
Smeal asserts that “One of the major [excuses] we got was that there's not enough money" to process rape kits, Smeal said. "Police departments find another reason to spend it... now [that] money has been appropriated, they say there's not enough scientists and labs to process them." Which could well be true. It’s possible that the police are finally realizing that this type of beyond-factual evidentiary Mania is impossible to keep up with, and it’s highly probable that not even the labs – civilian as well as official – can keep up with it.
But the kicker in this whole Mania type of thing is that even when the plan is proving to be unworkable in the field and on the ground, the advocacies can simply claim that the ‘badges on the ground’ are dragging their feet and diverting funds and coming up with “excuses”. Perhaps they might take a lesson from the ‘boots on the ground’ in Iraq and Afghanistan: when you’ve been tasked with a poorly-conceived and impossible mission, ‘victory’ is not going to happen.
Then things get interesting indeed. A 2009 Navy ‘study’ is mentioned, by way of a study of the study by a sociology Ph.D. candidate. Apparently the Navy interviewed 1,146 newly-enlisted recruits in 2009. And apparently from the answers that these gentlemen gave in some form of questioning or questionnaire, the ‘study’ decided that “repeat offenders committed 95% of completed or attempted rapes”.
Thus, the White House is apparently convinced, “because of the high rate of recidivism” something has to be done about the rape-kit processing problem.
“High rate of recidivism” is a phrase that should set the whiskers of any SO community-member twitching.
More curiously, the 2009 Navy study – itself a replicant of a 2002 college-male study – seems clearly focused on non-domestic ‘rapes’ (and given the ‘college’ setting, probably a lot of the verrry nebulously defined ‘date rape’). So its relevance to a DoVi initiative seems tenuous at best.
Even more curiously, the gist of the 2002 and 2009 studies appears to be that only a small group of repeaters – between 4 and 9% - are responsible for the rapes. Which seems to work directly counter to the DoVi claims of millions of incidents and, given the DoVi setting by definition, millions of (male) perpetrators.
And the studies asked about incidents that fit “or approximated” the definitions and legal elements of ‘rape’ or ‘attempted rape’. So they are casting a net that will ‘approximate’ the incidences of what are already nebulous and elastic terms (sexual assault, rape, attempted rape, and date-rape). The possibilities for conceptual error – let alone mischief – are stupendous.
Further, you wonder if the Navy kept the fellows that were apparently witless enough to admit to such things or so morally challenged as to perpetrate them. Although, the researchers crow about how they cagily asked only questions about ‘activity’ without mentioning that to answer the questions in the affirmative would be admitting to the elements of a crime – such as these crimes are defined nowadays – and presumably didn’t give their game away by asking about ‘intent’ (i.e. Did you intend to rape the woman?)
Further, since the studies found that the majority of the repeaters said that they knew their partners and were not strangers, it’s legitimate to ask if ‘domestic’ has been expanded now to quietly include anybody who isn’t a stranger. That’s how far things have become debased in these matters.
Further there's a bit about some of the 'rapists' going to the trouble of "drugging" their (intended?) partners, although I'd want to know if alcohol is considered - at least in DoVi-land - a 'drug', especially since college and college-age folks seem rather familiar with alcohol. These are the type of suble definition-shifts that don't make it into the scare-stats, the 'reports', the Findings, and the press releases.
And as I’ve mentioned in prior Posts, the definition of “battering” in DoVi-speak includes not-talking-on-a-phone, so you really have to be inquisitive in order to get an accurate picture of the claims and assertions that are spewed into the air like smoke-stacks used to do it in the pre-EPA days.
Another piece by this same sociology Ph.D. candidate (not part of the White House material) gives you an indication of just what might be included in the range of DoVi actions: at the extreme end, there is “forcing a partner to have sex when they did not want to” and “threatening a partner with a gun” or “beating up a partner” or “choking a partner”. So far so good, as it were.
However, you then can wind up at the lower end of the spectrum: “slapping or hitting”, “pushing, grabbing or shoving a partner”, or “throwing something at a partner that could hurt”. It is hardly beyond reason to imagine that if these latter categories are feeding into the figures of ‘twenty million’ and such, then there is a big problem here – and it’s not domestic violence itself. Because if the advocacies and advocacy-friendly ‘researchers’ are including in their actual or statistically-derived ‘numbers’ every incident where two humans in a relationship push, grab, or shove … well, yes, I would imagine that you could easily reach a figure next to which ’20 million’ would be conservative.
But there’s no word – and this couldn’t be an oversight – as to where most of these incidents lie on the spectrum.
And there’s no word – ditto – on who initiated the violent act. Or – and this would be of more than passing interest – to what extent individuals, especially females, in same-sex relationships are involved in this sort of thing.
And, as a matter of good research procedure, it has to be said that if you’re only going to study males in regard to perpetrating ‘rape’ (however defined) then you are only going to wind up with male perpetrators. But you aren’t going to wind up with an accurate picture of the overall ‘rape’ situation in the country.
Joe Biden is mentioned. You may recall him as the Senator who, in response to an objection to his original Violence Against Women Act (later found to have notable un-Constitutional elements), brayed that “it may be a bad law but it sends a great message”. This gentleman is the former used-car salesman who also professed himself greatly “bored” during his time at his not-first-tier law school.
In 2008, angling for a higher office, he promised to introduce a bill in the Senate that would “train 100,000 lawyers to represent domestic violence victims”. I don’t know if he ever introduced it, or if he did, if it was ever passed.
But it isn’t hard to imagine that such a promise could be fulfilled by simply printing up a brochure or mailing out a Power-Point Presentation to every Member of every Bar Association in the country. Although you would think that the already-graduated attorneys would know how to conduct a case.
But then, of course, given the numerous hidden agendas, elastic definitions, systemic biases against the accused, and the general complexity of he said-she said (or he-he, or she-she) legal proceedings, perhaps even in these degraded times law schools don’t provide attorneys with clear training in the particular treacherous waters of DoVi cases. Or of any of the jurisprudential challenges that arise when trying to administer the laws in a time of Mania and under a Regime of Mania.
The article concludes by noting that Obama has put 130 million dollars into the budget for 2011 for all this stuff. But, the article hastens to add, 100 million of that will come “from the Crime Victims' Fund, which is supported by criminal fines, penalties and forfeited jail bonds rather than taxpayer money”.
That’s about one-seventh of all the monies available for annual distribution in the Fund (which holds about 4 billion this year) and if you take a look at its responsibilities, that money could – and apparently does – go quickly. (It also got itself into the Patriot Act, somehow.) I’m thinking that there’s going to be a lot of ‘resistance’ organizationally for dedicating a full seventh of its disbursable funds to so nebulous a crime-category. And no doubt that will fuel the claim of even more “excuses”.
Well, that’s my take on this curious article and even more curious ‘initiative’.
My assessment is that it’s yet another political effort to keep part of ‘the base’ happy in the run-up to a difficult election.
But it’s a sad state of affairs that the Mania Regimes are part of that ‘base’ to begin with, and a direct result of ‘pressure’ (in the Alinsky-ite sense) from various elements in that ‘base’.
ADDENDUM
Let me say again and again and again that I do not support the infliction of violence by any human being upon any other human being, sexual or otherwise, in the 'domestic' or any other setting. But when the Mania Regimes of Sex Offense and its immediate predecessor, Domestic Violence, are so arranged as to create Stampedes in public affairs and in law and law enforcement, and highly dubiously justified Stampedes (which almost goes without saying, given the nature of Stampedes and Manias) then I think a certain amount of Tire has to be Kicked.
Tuesday, September 7, 2010
EVEN MORE FRESH ASSANGE
I am keeping up with this Assange matter since it seems clear to me that we are seeing a clear example of the widely-emplaced SO Mania Regime now being deployed as a cover to ‘go after’ people whom a government (and the US government in this case) finds somehow ‘inconvenient’.
It should not be surprising.
In my view of the Regime, it was always about ‘convenience/convenience’: a powerful political demographic element on the Left found ‘men’ inconvenient, mixing themselves with another large swath of folks found it psychologically convenient to demonstrate that they really were pro-family and pro-children, while on the opposite side of the spectrum a whole bunch of folks just feel better when standing up for law-‘n-order any time the opportunity is presented, and a bunch of other folks just don’t like weirdos, different people, and – in classic sociological terms – ‘Others’.
Needless to say, all of the above find the Constitution, for all practical purposes, to be inconvenient.
(None of the foregoing is to be construed as my desire to ‘approve’ the infliction of unwanted sexual experience on any human being by any other human being. And I write with the clear awareness that the vast number of SOs are not slavering incorrigible monsters.)
Now the accused (although he hasn’t been charged with anything, which at this point is ominously interesting all on its own), Julian Assange, founder of Wikileaks (which still has those 15,000 documents about military frakkey in AfPak that it’s preparing to release), is being urged by to step down as the operational head of Wikileaks.
The suggestion is being made by an “organizer” of Wikileaks, a woman who is a former resident of Sweden but is now “an Icelandic parliamentarian”.
Once again, her headline-grabbing public comment actually turns out to say much less than the quick reader would be led to believe.
He should just “give up his management” (which would include managing the release of the next 15,000 documents), but only while “he fights the charges filed by two Swedish women”.
But as we know, those two didn’t actually file charges (shrewdly, for the sake of their future legal vulnerability if this thing doesn’t work).
But this is one of those ‘suggestions’ and ‘invitations’ that is delivered with an alluring and – given the dynamics of these things – seductive sadness. The sad one says that “I am not angry with Julian, but this is a situation that has clearly gotten out of hand”. Nothing about the fact that the situation was made to get out of hand by the too-shrewd activities of the original allegators and a couple of Swedish prosecutors who are keeping the thing going – yet without bringing any charges.
And, of course, there’s absolutely no reason for Assange to step down in order to ‘deal with’ these charges. It’s not like he’s writing a major piece of work and needs all his concentration to keep focus on his writing. All that remains is to press the Send button on that cache of 15,000 documents that reveals a lot or a little that is new about American military badness in AfPak. He could do it from his PalmPilot while sitting in a courtroom … although there is no court in sight at this point, despite all the brouhaha.
Listen to her justification: “These personal matters have nothing to do with Wikileaks. I have strongly urged him to focus on the legalities that he’s dealing with and let some other people carry the torch”.
But if – as she rightly says – these matters have nothing to do with Wikileaks, and if all he has to do is press a Send button, then why does she think he needs to quit his job? The documents will speak for themselves, so it’s not even as if it’s bad for company business if its Founder is embroiled in a made-for-media sex-offense dust-up.
And I can easily imagine that if some Wikileaks subordinates are getting nervous about whether they’ll be next on some hit-list, then Assange’s stepping-down may well result in the 15,000 documents not being published.
But Birgitta Jonsdottir, the Icelandic parliamentarian and somehow connected to Wikileaks, also goes to great lengths to cover all of her bases, shrewdly enough. She’s not mad at him, but she “doesn’t support his claim that the allegations were part of a plot designed to damage Wikileaks”. If that’s true, then she shouldn’t be allowed to operate heavy machinery – which would include a microphone. While I am not going to make any bloggery sensational claims, I am going to say here and now that there is more than enough possibility that – regardless of the sex-offense ‘reports’ (which at this point is all they are and have been since Day One) – the heavy thumb of politics and ‘reasons of state’, especially with the US lurking in the background with a whole lotta motive, is impossible to discount on its face.
Ms. Jonsdottir, by the by, is now serving in the Parliament of a nation that is publicly pretty close to sovereign bankruptcy, and therefore in no position to annoy international monetary organizations – rather largely influenced, as it happens, by the US government.
Nor can I say with any seriousness that ‘feminism’ – even ‘international feminism ‘ – has the chops to roam this far afield for ‘support’ while simultaneously holding the theoretically well-grounded charges from being filed.
With even more careful – painfully careful – wording, Jonsdottir then undercuts herself by suggesting that maybe this is all just a “cultural misunderstanding” between himself and the two women.
But then, immediately, “And he’s a classic Aussie in the sense that he’s a bit of a male chauvinist”. Aha. So the old feministical stuff is trotted out; and when did we ever hear of a ‘man’ being just “a bit of a male chauvinist”?
She covers all the bases, balancing her ‘support’ with a shopping-list of all the classic male-hostile tropes of the feministical panoply. It’s a remarkable performance, but – as they would have said in the pre-electrical age of the world – ‘smells much of the lamp’. Meaning that somebody stayed up really really late last night putting this thing together verrrry verrrrry carefully.
And frankly, it reminds me of the dying Vito Corleone’s advice to his son and successor, Michael: whoever comes to you and offers to set up a meeting … he is the one who will assassinate you. And sure enough, loyal old sub-boss Tessio soon shows up, smiling and gentle, and purrs a proposal to set up a meeting between Michael and the drug-mob that wants to use the Corleone connections to bring in drugs. Old Vito had been saying No; but he’s behind the times and it’s a new era and there are new possibilities and … you saw the movie.
And I think we’re seeing a script here, and for all its weaknesses the US government is still capable of putting out a 'movie'.
Assange has said that he is “losing confidence in the Swedish justice system”. Nobody in the American SO community can be too surprised at such an observation.
That justice system, by the by, has now gone a week and hasn’t filed its charges. Which doesn’t prove that there are no charges that might be justifiably filed (especially given the frakkeries of SO Mania Regime jurisprudence), but it does suggest strongly to me that this is all about intimidating him to not-publish the documents. If he caves, then the Senior senior prosecutor might simply say that it was all a “cultural misunderstanding” and Nevvvvvvvvvvverrrrrrrrrrrrr Minnnnnnnnnnnnnd (as the late great Roseanne Rosannadanna character would have said on Saturday Night Live).
And the Swedish and Icelandic governments will get the Great Thumb off their necks.
Assange – in the article linked-to in the link in this Post – says that he doesn’t know if this is just a couple of people pursuing the matter for personal or ideological reasons, or whether this whole thing is driven by “geopolitical reasons”. I would suggest that it is both, given that the SO Mania Regime and its demographic support groups are both deeply enmeshed with the US government and have been for quite some time.
And let’s not forget that there’s an election coming up in these parts very soon; those 15,000 documents, possibly even more than the previous 72,000 or so, might not make certain parties to the election look very good.
Nor can I credit either the wits or the integrity or both of Ms. Jonsdottir when she says in that same linked-article that she reviewed all the documents in the case (you can do that in Swedish law?) and “quickly determined that this was not part of any western conspiracy against Wikileaks”. Which only makes me wonder that if the Icelandic folk had elected more insightful legislators their government might not have gone bust. In fact, since no actual 'case' has been formally brought, then what court 'documents' can she have seen? Or has she simply reviewed the written-up allegations of the two females?
But I think you can see just how the insidious SO Mania Regime can now be deployed for purposes far beyond – or beneath – its original and publicly-stated justifications.
But of course, the SO Mania Regime has always been vigorously and lethally alive, crawling beneath its surfaces with all manner of ulterior and far more lethal motivations and purposes than were originally stated.
And that will come as no surprise to the SO community at all.
It should not be surprising.
In my view of the Regime, it was always about ‘convenience/convenience’: a powerful political demographic element on the Left found ‘men’ inconvenient, mixing themselves with another large swath of folks found it psychologically convenient to demonstrate that they really were pro-family and pro-children, while on the opposite side of the spectrum a whole bunch of folks just feel better when standing up for law-‘n-order any time the opportunity is presented, and a bunch of other folks just don’t like weirdos, different people, and – in classic sociological terms – ‘Others’.
Needless to say, all of the above find the Constitution, for all practical purposes, to be inconvenient.
(None of the foregoing is to be construed as my desire to ‘approve’ the infliction of unwanted sexual experience on any human being by any other human being. And I write with the clear awareness that the vast number of SOs are not slavering incorrigible monsters.)
Now the accused (although he hasn’t been charged with anything, which at this point is ominously interesting all on its own), Julian Assange, founder of Wikileaks (which still has those 15,000 documents about military frakkey in AfPak that it’s preparing to release), is being urged by to step down as the operational head of Wikileaks.
The suggestion is being made by an “organizer” of Wikileaks, a woman who is a former resident of Sweden but is now “an Icelandic parliamentarian”.
Once again, her headline-grabbing public comment actually turns out to say much less than the quick reader would be led to believe.
He should just “give up his management” (which would include managing the release of the next 15,000 documents), but only while “he fights the charges filed by two Swedish women”.
But as we know, those two didn’t actually file charges (shrewdly, for the sake of their future legal vulnerability if this thing doesn’t work).
But this is one of those ‘suggestions’ and ‘invitations’ that is delivered with an alluring and – given the dynamics of these things – seductive sadness. The sad one says that “I am not angry with Julian, but this is a situation that has clearly gotten out of hand”. Nothing about the fact that the situation was made to get out of hand by the too-shrewd activities of the original allegators and a couple of Swedish prosecutors who are keeping the thing going – yet without bringing any charges.
And, of course, there’s absolutely no reason for Assange to step down in order to ‘deal with’ these charges. It’s not like he’s writing a major piece of work and needs all his concentration to keep focus on his writing. All that remains is to press the Send button on that cache of 15,000 documents that reveals a lot or a little that is new about American military badness in AfPak. He could do it from his PalmPilot while sitting in a courtroom … although there is no court in sight at this point, despite all the brouhaha.
Listen to her justification: “These personal matters have nothing to do with Wikileaks. I have strongly urged him to focus on the legalities that he’s dealing with and let some other people carry the torch”.
But if – as she rightly says – these matters have nothing to do with Wikileaks, and if all he has to do is press a Send button, then why does she think he needs to quit his job? The documents will speak for themselves, so it’s not even as if it’s bad for company business if its Founder is embroiled in a made-for-media sex-offense dust-up.
And I can easily imagine that if some Wikileaks subordinates are getting nervous about whether they’ll be next on some hit-list, then Assange’s stepping-down may well result in the 15,000 documents not being published.
But Birgitta Jonsdottir, the Icelandic parliamentarian and somehow connected to Wikileaks, also goes to great lengths to cover all of her bases, shrewdly enough. She’s not mad at him, but she “doesn’t support his claim that the allegations were part of a plot designed to damage Wikileaks”. If that’s true, then she shouldn’t be allowed to operate heavy machinery – which would include a microphone. While I am not going to make any bloggery sensational claims, I am going to say here and now that there is more than enough possibility that – regardless of the sex-offense ‘reports’ (which at this point is all they are and have been since Day One) – the heavy thumb of politics and ‘reasons of state’, especially with the US lurking in the background with a whole lotta motive, is impossible to discount on its face.
Ms. Jonsdottir, by the by, is now serving in the Parliament of a nation that is publicly pretty close to sovereign bankruptcy, and therefore in no position to annoy international monetary organizations – rather largely influenced, as it happens, by the US government.
Nor can I say with any seriousness that ‘feminism’ – even ‘international feminism ‘ – has the chops to roam this far afield for ‘support’ while simultaneously holding the theoretically well-grounded charges from being filed.
With even more careful – painfully careful – wording, Jonsdottir then undercuts herself by suggesting that maybe this is all just a “cultural misunderstanding” between himself and the two women.
But then, immediately, “And he’s a classic Aussie in the sense that he’s a bit of a male chauvinist”. Aha. So the old feministical stuff is trotted out; and when did we ever hear of a ‘man’ being just “a bit of a male chauvinist”?
She covers all the bases, balancing her ‘support’ with a shopping-list of all the classic male-hostile tropes of the feministical panoply. It’s a remarkable performance, but – as they would have said in the pre-electrical age of the world – ‘smells much of the lamp’. Meaning that somebody stayed up really really late last night putting this thing together verrrry verrrrry carefully.
And frankly, it reminds me of the dying Vito Corleone’s advice to his son and successor, Michael: whoever comes to you and offers to set up a meeting … he is the one who will assassinate you. And sure enough, loyal old sub-boss Tessio soon shows up, smiling and gentle, and purrs a proposal to set up a meeting between Michael and the drug-mob that wants to use the Corleone connections to bring in drugs. Old Vito had been saying No; but he’s behind the times and it’s a new era and there are new possibilities and … you saw the movie.
And I think we’re seeing a script here, and for all its weaknesses the US government is still capable of putting out a 'movie'.
Assange has said that he is “losing confidence in the Swedish justice system”. Nobody in the American SO community can be too surprised at such an observation.
That justice system, by the by, has now gone a week and hasn’t filed its charges. Which doesn’t prove that there are no charges that might be justifiably filed (especially given the frakkeries of SO Mania Regime jurisprudence), but it does suggest strongly to me that this is all about intimidating him to not-publish the documents. If he caves, then the Senior senior prosecutor might simply say that it was all a “cultural misunderstanding” and Nevvvvvvvvvvverrrrrrrrrrrrr Minnnnnnnnnnnnnd (as the late great Roseanne Rosannadanna character would have said on Saturday Night Live).
And the Swedish and Icelandic governments will get the Great Thumb off their necks.
Assange – in the article linked-to in the link in this Post – says that he doesn’t know if this is just a couple of people pursuing the matter for personal or ideological reasons, or whether this whole thing is driven by “geopolitical reasons”. I would suggest that it is both, given that the SO Mania Regime and its demographic support groups are both deeply enmeshed with the US government and have been for quite some time.
And let’s not forget that there’s an election coming up in these parts very soon; those 15,000 documents, possibly even more than the previous 72,000 or so, might not make certain parties to the election look very good.
Nor can I credit either the wits or the integrity or both of Ms. Jonsdottir when she says in that same linked-article that she reviewed all the documents in the case (you can do that in Swedish law?) and “quickly determined that this was not part of any western conspiracy against Wikileaks”. Which only makes me wonder that if the Icelandic folk had elected more insightful legislators their government might not have gone bust. In fact, since no actual 'case' has been formally brought, then what court 'documents' can she have seen? Or has she simply reviewed the written-up allegations of the two females?
But I think you can see just how the insidious SO Mania Regime can now be deployed for purposes far beyond – or beneath – its original and publicly-stated justifications.
But of course, the SO Mania Regime has always been vigorously and lethally alive, crawling beneath its surfaces with all manner of ulterior and far more lethal motivations and purposes than were originally stated.
And that will come as no surprise to the SO community at all.
Thursday, September 2, 2010
MORE FRESH ASSANGE
The SO community will not be as surprised as the ‘civilian’ world to find out that on Wednesday, Sept. 1st, an even more senior Swedish prosecutor not only reversed the overturn of the warrant against Julian Assange, but totally and utterly set the entire matter up as a sex-offense (rape) case all over again – just as it had been set-up when the two self-proclaimed victims went to the police station (perhaps after consultation with a lawyer) and “asked for advice” (which gambit nicely prevents them from ever being liable for a charge of filing a false report with police).
As best I can make out, the rape occurred when Mr. Assange refused to stop after a condom broke, in one victim’s case, and after the condom had been removed, in the other. Mr. Assange must have been in remarkably good shape that evening (although it is well-known that among their other demonic super-powers, SOs are capable of amazing performance at sustained high levels).
The Senior senior prosecutor claims that on the basis of “new evidence” that materialized Tuesday she has concluded that a crime was committed, and that the crime was rape. Although no fresh warrant or charges have been brought against Assange by prosecutors.
Such remarkable reversals “are not entirely uncommon in Swedish law”, she said, “especially allegations in sex crimes”. Well, the SO community is no doubt well ahead of the ‘civilian’ population in regard to this phenomenon. Given the elasticity of definitions as to what constitutes the elements of a sex-crime, and the elasticity of evidentiary-proof rules, and the wide divergence in how this or that prosecutor or court can be expected to interpret all the fuzziness, but given the tantalizing possibility that an allegator and her counsel might score a trifecta and get a ‘friendly’ cop and prosecutor and judge … well, you can see where things might go.
Nor, in matters sex-offensual, do you need the trifecta to get your money’s worth out of a day at the legal track. The media may well make up for any reservations one or another official might have about getting into harness for a spin around the track. And ‘friendly’ government officials might also compensate very nicely for any principled qualms.
In this case, as I have been saying in earlier Posts, it is easy to see the current level of shenanigans as attributable to either standard sex-offense regime dynamics or to ‘reasons of state’ by foreign governments pressuring the Swedish government. Or both – which may well be what’s going on here.
From the sex-offense regime material, I can envision a passel of ‘justifications’ (they can’t be dignified as genuine Principles) such as: a) it sends a good message to see important men held accountable for their sexual activity; b) it is a good ‘symbol’ of the needs and power of ‘women’ that this sort of case can be brought; c) ‘facts don’t matter’ anyway since men are what they are (rapists by nature) and so you can presume that even if they don’t mean to, they ‘rape’ as naturally as they munch Ring-Dings;* and therefore d) you can do whatever it takes whenever you have a chance to drag a male’s eternally violent sexuality into the Klieg lights.
Perhaps it is clear that such a set of presumptions are hell-and-gone from the principles of the jurisprudence envisioned by the Constitution of 1787 (but of course that problem is solved by declaring the said document “quaint” and “insufficient”).
From the government point-of-view (which, wickedly, is now itself tainted by decades of Feminist, Victimist, and SO Regime ‘thinking’): a) this guy refuses to not-publish materials the US government would rather not have come to light; b) this makes him an enemy and therefore – since America is God’s Deputy – Evil; c) he will also ‘victimize’ everyone involved in the dark-doings by exposing them to publicity; d) since he is both Evil and an enemy of the US and a potential victimizer, then it is not only OK but absolutely required morally to do whatever it takes to stop him.
And you can also see where both the Feminists and the Government would see an opportunity here where both of them can ‘win’. Assange can be discredited as a ‘sex offender’.
I’m not sure, though, what use his ‘sex offender-hood’ (assuming he is tried and convicted – and most SO cases don’t do well in the bright light of day, much like most Government dirty-tricks cases) would do to discredit the material (15,000 more documents ready to go out) he is putting forth to the world. He’s not publishing his own ideas (and in a better world, an idea would be judged on its own merits, not on the ‘purity’ or ‘Correctness’ of its proponent)**; he’s publishing reports made by US officials at all levels, including the lower, boots-on-the-ground levels were ‘stuff gets done’ and ‘stuff happens’.
So I don’t think that from the Government’s point of view, the full SO treatment (all the way to trial and conviction) is going to do any good. The key would be to intimidate Assange so as to induce him to not-publish the reports; clearly, especially in light of the Senior senior prosecutor’s stunningly vague comments, they want to give him a little time to think about caving in to them. Then perhaps the charges will simply disappear.
But whether that will suit the other Party to this theoretical scheme – the Feminists – I don’t know. They may want to go for the full SO scenario: accusations and (possibly) trial and conviction … but again, unless you can really guarantee all the Players, a genuinely adversarial and honest trial process is an iffy things and most people with an agenda don’t prefer to subject their hopes to it. They try to ‘fix’ the outcome, much as has happened in American venues, but not so much perhaps in Swedish venues.
And then there is the question of what Assange actually did that night. Since the two females approached him and things went on from there, and since – at least as far as I can make out from the various reports – everything started off consensually for the actual encounter with each of the allegators – then if this turns out to be ‘rape’, it’s one of those ‘coded’ cases of rape where what really happened doesn’t fit any average person’s understanding of the word and concept (much like, say, most reasonable citizens would not say that by remaining silent in a long-distance phone call you were ‘battering’ your partner). Or perhaps he did nothing at all and all this has been created without any basis in fact or act at all.
I also think that it’s a relevant coincidence that he is applying for Permanancy status in Sweden (he is an Australian citizen) where the master servers of Wikileaks are located. Perhaps as a ‘sex offender’ – either convicted or merely accused – he is automatically ineligible for such status.
OR perhaps – as either a convicted or accused ‘sex offender’ – he either won’t be able to return to Australia or, having returned, won’t be able to leave again, at least not without all sorts of official procedural requirements that will both complicate his life AND let the US government know just when and where he is going.
Such is the Net and Web into which the SO Mania Regime – now gone international – can throw somebody
Verrrrrrry shroooooood indeed.
Allons, enfants de la patrie!
NOTES
*And once again, this to me indicates the lethal infection introduced through the misappropriation by the feminists of the civil-rights paradigm.
Martin Luther King was presented with a thorny problem when Bull Connor – the in-your-face Jim Crow ogre police chief of Birmingham, whose philosophy was beat’em down early and often – began to take a page from Chief Laurie Pritchett of Albany, Georgia, whose philosophy was ‘don’t confront, don’t be violent, always be polite, and be patient’.
As King relates in his book ‘Why We Can’t Wait’, this created a significant problem on several levels. If the police were being decent enough on any given day, then the demonstrators were deprived of the Ogre and the Violence – freely applied to them as they proceeded nonviolently – that gave them, with almost no effort at all, the High Ground in the campaign.
It became clear to King and his staff that THEY NEEDED THE POLICE TO BE VIOLENT.
But wouldn’t that be immoral and dishonest? To GOAD the police into violence?
The solution, carefully reasoned out, was something like this: the police are thoroughly steeped in the Jim Crow system; the Jim Crow system is a vicious and violent system that has been in place for so long (80 years in the 1950s) that its rawness is now thoroughly ‘civilized’; but the heart of the system is dark and repressive violence; and so the cops – whether they know it or not – are ultimately in the service of that dark and repressive violence IN THEIR VERY HEARTS; and so it’s not dishonest or ‘violent’ to create a situation where that violence would be drawn forth for all to see.
King’s assessment here strikes me as a good one (although fraught with unhappy possibilities in the matter of consequences). BUT I say that precisely because he was actually and genuinely facing the unspinnably noxious and violent reality of the Jim Crow regime, which over the course of generations had come to genuinely and profoundly taint the Southron culture and traditions and all the persons raised according to that culture and those traditions.
HOWEVER, when radical-feminism tried to run the same play and game-plan, they had to literally create what King had merely had to confront: an incorrigibly and profoundly violent and oppressive ‘enemy’ that sought eternal repression and oppression.
Thus ‘Patriarchy’ was to be the Jim Crow of the radical-feminist gameplan; ‘men’ were to be the Southern cops and officials; and on the basis of those assigned roles, the radical-feminists could then proceed to ‘do whatever it takes’ to get their agendas imposed, since they dwelt in the sure and certain knowledge that they were Good and Men were Evil (the they-are-Evil gambit Bush would try to run against the Arabs and Islamics after 9-11, although it was shrewdly combined with the Churchill-vs-the Axis Menace gambit as well).
I think you can see where, in due course, the ‘Sex Offender’ was simply an intensification of the image of the ‘Male’ as uncontrollable oppressor and rapist. And while I have no doubt that nowadays most feminists would try to defend it all by saying that all that is in the past and was just a lot of hyper-excited talk back in the early days, YET I will answer that it was precisely all that hyper-agitated stuff that became the motivational force for all the frakkulent beliefs and Findings that fueled the SO Mania Regime. And still do.
**I can’t help but notice the same dynamic here that is so often seen in the Catholic Church abuse cases: by destroying – at least for public purposes – the credibility of one or a few priests, you hope to weaken the credibility of all priests and – more importantly – of the Ideas or Beliefs that they stand for.
In that regard, I recall an episode of the TV show “House, M.D.” where the usually professional and sane and upright friend and colleague, Wilson, is discovered by House to have been sleeping with a female patient consensually. At the end of the episode, Wilson says to House: a principle is still good and still worthwhile and and still real even if you can’t always live up to it.
Which strikes me as very relevant to everything under discussion here.
LINKS
You can check the stories I looked at here, here, here, and here.
ADDENDUM
The BBC has also put up a report, available here. This BBC report has the Director of Public Prosecutions (who overruled the Stockholm prosecutor who overruled the weekend duty-prosecutor in Stockholm) saying merely that “more investigations are necessary before a final decision can be made”.
As best I can make out, the rape occurred when Mr. Assange refused to stop after a condom broke, in one victim’s case, and after the condom had been removed, in the other. Mr. Assange must have been in remarkably good shape that evening (although it is well-known that among their other demonic super-powers, SOs are capable of amazing performance at sustained high levels).
The Senior senior prosecutor claims that on the basis of “new evidence” that materialized Tuesday she has concluded that a crime was committed, and that the crime was rape. Although no fresh warrant or charges have been brought against Assange by prosecutors.
Such remarkable reversals “are not entirely uncommon in Swedish law”, she said, “especially allegations in sex crimes”. Well, the SO community is no doubt well ahead of the ‘civilian’ population in regard to this phenomenon. Given the elasticity of definitions as to what constitutes the elements of a sex-crime, and the elasticity of evidentiary-proof rules, and the wide divergence in how this or that prosecutor or court can be expected to interpret all the fuzziness, but given the tantalizing possibility that an allegator and her counsel might score a trifecta and get a ‘friendly’ cop and prosecutor and judge … well, you can see where things might go.
Nor, in matters sex-offensual, do you need the trifecta to get your money’s worth out of a day at the legal track. The media may well make up for any reservations one or another official might have about getting into harness for a spin around the track. And ‘friendly’ government officials might also compensate very nicely for any principled qualms.
In this case, as I have been saying in earlier Posts, it is easy to see the current level of shenanigans as attributable to either standard sex-offense regime dynamics or to ‘reasons of state’ by foreign governments pressuring the Swedish government. Or both – which may well be what’s going on here.
From the sex-offense regime material, I can envision a passel of ‘justifications’ (they can’t be dignified as genuine Principles) such as: a) it sends a good message to see important men held accountable for their sexual activity; b) it is a good ‘symbol’ of the needs and power of ‘women’ that this sort of case can be brought; c) ‘facts don’t matter’ anyway since men are what they are (rapists by nature) and so you can presume that even if they don’t mean to, they ‘rape’ as naturally as they munch Ring-Dings;* and therefore d) you can do whatever it takes whenever you have a chance to drag a male’s eternally violent sexuality into the Klieg lights.
Perhaps it is clear that such a set of presumptions are hell-and-gone from the principles of the jurisprudence envisioned by the Constitution of 1787 (but of course that problem is solved by declaring the said document “quaint” and “insufficient”).
From the government point-of-view (which, wickedly, is now itself tainted by decades of Feminist, Victimist, and SO Regime ‘thinking’): a) this guy refuses to not-publish materials the US government would rather not have come to light; b) this makes him an enemy and therefore – since America is God’s Deputy – Evil; c) he will also ‘victimize’ everyone involved in the dark-doings by exposing them to publicity; d) since he is both Evil and an enemy of the US and a potential victimizer, then it is not only OK but absolutely required morally to do whatever it takes to stop him.
And you can also see where both the Feminists and the Government would see an opportunity here where both of them can ‘win’. Assange can be discredited as a ‘sex offender’.
I’m not sure, though, what use his ‘sex offender-hood’ (assuming he is tried and convicted – and most SO cases don’t do well in the bright light of day, much like most Government dirty-tricks cases) would do to discredit the material (15,000 more documents ready to go out) he is putting forth to the world. He’s not publishing his own ideas (and in a better world, an idea would be judged on its own merits, not on the ‘purity’ or ‘Correctness’ of its proponent)**; he’s publishing reports made by US officials at all levels, including the lower, boots-on-the-ground levels were ‘stuff gets done’ and ‘stuff happens’.
So I don’t think that from the Government’s point of view, the full SO treatment (all the way to trial and conviction) is going to do any good. The key would be to intimidate Assange so as to induce him to not-publish the reports; clearly, especially in light of the Senior senior prosecutor’s stunningly vague comments, they want to give him a little time to think about caving in to them. Then perhaps the charges will simply disappear.
But whether that will suit the other Party to this theoretical scheme – the Feminists – I don’t know. They may want to go for the full SO scenario: accusations and (possibly) trial and conviction … but again, unless you can really guarantee all the Players, a genuinely adversarial and honest trial process is an iffy things and most people with an agenda don’t prefer to subject their hopes to it. They try to ‘fix’ the outcome, much as has happened in American venues, but not so much perhaps in Swedish venues.
And then there is the question of what Assange actually did that night. Since the two females approached him and things went on from there, and since – at least as far as I can make out from the various reports – everything started off consensually for the actual encounter with each of the allegators – then if this turns out to be ‘rape’, it’s one of those ‘coded’ cases of rape where what really happened doesn’t fit any average person’s understanding of the word and concept (much like, say, most reasonable citizens would not say that by remaining silent in a long-distance phone call you were ‘battering’ your partner). Or perhaps he did nothing at all and all this has been created without any basis in fact or act at all.
I also think that it’s a relevant coincidence that he is applying for Permanancy status in Sweden (he is an Australian citizen) where the master servers of Wikileaks are located. Perhaps as a ‘sex offender’ – either convicted or merely accused – he is automatically ineligible for such status.
OR perhaps – as either a convicted or accused ‘sex offender’ – he either won’t be able to return to Australia or, having returned, won’t be able to leave again, at least not without all sorts of official procedural requirements that will both complicate his life AND let the US government know just when and where he is going.
Such is the Net and Web into which the SO Mania Regime – now gone international – can throw somebody
Verrrrrrry shroooooood indeed.
Allons, enfants de la patrie!
NOTES
*And once again, this to me indicates the lethal infection introduced through the misappropriation by the feminists of the civil-rights paradigm.
Martin Luther King was presented with a thorny problem when Bull Connor – the in-your-face Jim Crow ogre police chief of Birmingham, whose philosophy was beat’em down early and often – began to take a page from Chief Laurie Pritchett of Albany, Georgia, whose philosophy was ‘don’t confront, don’t be violent, always be polite, and be patient’.
As King relates in his book ‘Why We Can’t Wait’, this created a significant problem on several levels. If the police were being decent enough on any given day, then the demonstrators were deprived of the Ogre and the Violence – freely applied to them as they proceeded nonviolently – that gave them, with almost no effort at all, the High Ground in the campaign.
It became clear to King and his staff that THEY NEEDED THE POLICE TO BE VIOLENT.
But wouldn’t that be immoral and dishonest? To GOAD the police into violence?
The solution, carefully reasoned out, was something like this: the police are thoroughly steeped in the Jim Crow system; the Jim Crow system is a vicious and violent system that has been in place for so long (80 years in the 1950s) that its rawness is now thoroughly ‘civilized’; but the heart of the system is dark and repressive violence; and so the cops – whether they know it or not – are ultimately in the service of that dark and repressive violence IN THEIR VERY HEARTS; and so it’s not dishonest or ‘violent’ to create a situation where that violence would be drawn forth for all to see.
King’s assessment here strikes me as a good one (although fraught with unhappy possibilities in the matter of consequences). BUT I say that precisely because he was actually and genuinely facing the unspinnably noxious and violent reality of the Jim Crow regime, which over the course of generations had come to genuinely and profoundly taint the Southron culture and traditions and all the persons raised according to that culture and those traditions.
HOWEVER, when radical-feminism tried to run the same play and game-plan, they had to literally create what King had merely had to confront: an incorrigibly and profoundly violent and oppressive ‘enemy’ that sought eternal repression and oppression.
Thus ‘Patriarchy’ was to be the Jim Crow of the radical-feminist gameplan; ‘men’ were to be the Southern cops and officials; and on the basis of those assigned roles, the radical-feminists could then proceed to ‘do whatever it takes’ to get their agendas imposed, since they dwelt in the sure and certain knowledge that they were Good and Men were Evil (the they-are-Evil gambit Bush would try to run against the Arabs and Islamics after 9-11, although it was shrewdly combined with the Churchill-vs-the Axis Menace gambit as well).
I think you can see where, in due course, the ‘Sex Offender’ was simply an intensification of the image of the ‘Male’ as uncontrollable oppressor and rapist. And while I have no doubt that nowadays most feminists would try to defend it all by saying that all that is in the past and was just a lot of hyper-excited talk back in the early days, YET I will answer that it was precisely all that hyper-agitated stuff that became the motivational force for all the frakkulent beliefs and Findings that fueled the SO Mania Regime. And still do.
**I can’t help but notice the same dynamic here that is so often seen in the Catholic Church abuse cases: by destroying – at least for public purposes – the credibility of one or a few priests, you hope to weaken the credibility of all priests and – more importantly – of the Ideas or Beliefs that they stand for.
In that regard, I recall an episode of the TV show “House, M.D.” where the usually professional and sane and upright friend and colleague, Wilson, is discovered by House to have been sleeping with a female patient consensually. At the end of the episode, Wilson says to House: a principle is still good and still worthwhile and and still real even if you can’t always live up to it.
Which strikes me as very relevant to everything under discussion here.
LINKS
You can check the stories I looked at here, here, here, and here.
ADDENDUM
The BBC has also put up a report, available here. This BBC report has the Director of Public Prosecutions (who overruled the Stockholm prosecutor who overruled the weekend duty-prosecutor in Stockholm) saying merely that “more investigations are necessary before a final decision can be made”.
Tuesday, August 31, 2010
FRESH ASSANGE
Just a bit more as things continue to come out in this Wikileaks ‘sex offense’ brouhaha in Sweden.
Under some pressure (see below) the Swedish police are back to questioning Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks – whose site has published those 92,000 US military reports that indicate how wrong things have been going in Afghanistan.
At this point, the focus is on the charge that he “mistreated a woman”. I notice how much less than ‘rape’ or ‘sexual abuse’ this ‘mistreatment’ is. And from what I’ve seen of the SO Mania dynamics, when this sort of thing happens then you can be sure that if ‘advocates’ could in any conceivable way make their target seem more sensationalistically ‘evil’ they would certainly try to do so.
But they can’t, I think, and yet still want to keep the thing alive.
Apparently, if you read the article linked-to above, it is now said that the two women “befriended” him the night that he gave a seminar in Sweden on the Wikileaks-related stuff. Then, “six days later” the two women “filed their complaints together”.
We already know that they didn’t quite do that: they slyly went down to the police station on a drowsy weekend like a pair of innocent Goody-Two-Shoes and “asked for advice” – which (I can’t imagine that they didn’t know this) under SO Mania regime laws as they exist in Sweden required the police to immediately open a ‘sex offense’ case, which led to a trip-wire warrant by the weekend-duty prosecutor, which was then recalled within hours by a more senior and experienced prosecutor.
But, alas, the Swedes aren’t Americans. When the case was considered as a ‘molestation’ matter (which is not a sex-crime and not a felony in Swedish law) they still couldn’t find much.
The women’s attorney (who in previous bloggers’ Comments was identified as feminist-friendly – and I wonder if the women had visited the attorney BEFORE they dropped by the police station to ‘ask advice’) complains that (in best SO Mania style) that the women were dis-respected by the legal system and still wants both of their complaints re-opened as ‘sex crime’ investigations.
So now “a separate prosecutor’s office is investigating [the attorney’s] complaint”.
Of course, it is perfectly plausible that the US government – foreign affairs division – is behind this as a “smear campaign”. After all, as I’ve said before, if the government has gone to all the trouble and expense of creating the SO Mania Regime, then it sort of has a right to get its money’s worth on the investment: multi-tasking SO charges so that they serve the purposes of foreign-affairs and assorted types of international ‘security’ skullduggery would be a two-fer ever dear to the Beltway calculations.
But as I’ve also said, it’s quite possible that the US government – feminist and/or sex-offense advocacy divisions – could also be in on this. The Mania is self-sustaining (and self-licking, as in ice-cream cone) and once a match is put to any wood, then the fire will feed itself, granted there’s enough surrounding oxygen (meaning: a manipulated and stampeded public opinion and outrage).
And quite possible the SO Mania is operating along its own dynamics, but simultaneously fronting-for and masking the larger governmental purposes of squelching a class targeted by the government: whistleblowers.
After all, the SO Mania was initially designed to strike terror into parents and families so as to mask its original and core ‘feminist’ campaign against males. Then ‘the children’ were raised up as the poster-victims to front-for any ‘feminist’ elements of the thing that might scare off allies on the Law-and-Order Right who wouldn’t want to be seen lending their creds to any merely-feminist agenda.
And after all, the SO Mania was itself constructed as a way of squelching a class (‘men’, re-scripted by advocacy central-casting as monstrous, incorrigible, recidivist committers and perpetrators of ‘sex’) so squelching a selected target is just what the program was designed to do in the first place.
Which also make you wonder if this gambit would ever have been tried if Assange were an … ummm – OTM (other-than-male).
Anyhoo, I want to re-affirm what I said in previous Posts: it must be taken as a vitally significant fact that in all the commentary – official and mainstream and by bloggers and Commenters and Letter-writers to assorted sites – nobody is discussing the Sex-Offense Mania Regime itself. Even though the allegations were for ‘sex offenses’, all the discussion is limited to foreign-affairs angles.
Which leads me to say again to the SO community: it is profoundly strange and significant that the SO Mania, even when it is officially involved in a ‘story’, remains invisible to Americans: it’s as if they had trained themselves not to see what’s right in front of them, AND EVEN clearly labeled as such.
I have always been interested in the history of the First and Second World Wars, and – History being what it is – I have found certain themes and tropes and dynamics that occurred back then to be occurring now (in altered form) nowadays.
I am not trying to go for a ‘Nazi trump’ point here when I observe that all of this reminds me of the German people (NOT all or mostly Nazis, by any stretch) who saw the Jews with their Yellow Stars being paraded in front of them on the streets and yet managed not to ‘notice’.
Which was a self-serving and self-protective and self-forgiving gambit that came back ,eventually, to bite them with verrrry big teeth indeed.
I have two final thoughts then.
First, that the SO Mania Regime is quietly recognized by many Americans as being repugnant and repellent, so much so that they dare not even think about it – let alone comment about it. While in the short-term this serves the interests of its ‘advocates’ and indentured political and judicial official supporters, yet in the long-term this is an ominous harbinger indeed. Because when it finally becomes clear to the American people just what a lethal and corrosive scam has been pulled on them, they are going to be verrrrry displeased (nor will it be able to be dismissed merely as ‘backlash’).
Second, that when public opinion and public discourse are so deformed that they are partially blinded to realities well within the purview of public matters, then the public itself – The People – is profoundly weakened in its competence as governors-of-the-government.
So the SO community’s Resistance against this increasing Occupation of American public discourse by the dark forces of Ignorance and Manipulation must continue.
As the club-goers sang in the face of Major Strasser’s goons that eternal evening at Rick’s Café Americain: “Allons enfants de la Patrie! Le jour de gloire est arrive!”
Under some pressure (see below) the Swedish police are back to questioning Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks – whose site has published those 92,000 US military reports that indicate how wrong things have been going in Afghanistan.
At this point, the focus is on the charge that he “mistreated a woman”. I notice how much less than ‘rape’ or ‘sexual abuse’ this ‘mistreatment’ is. And from what I’ve seen of the SO Mania dynamics, when this sort of thing happens then you can be sure that if ‘advocates’ could in any conceivable way make their target seem more sensationalistically ‘evil’ they would certainly try to do so.
But they can’t, I think, and yet still want to keep the thing alive.
Apparently, if you read the article linked-to above, it is now said that the two women “befriended” him the night that he gave a seminar in Sweden on the Wikileaks-related stuff. Then, “six days later” the two women “filed their complaints together”.
We already know that they didn’t quite do that: they slyly went down to the police station on a drowsy weekend like a pair of innocent Goody-Two-Shoes and “asked for advice” – which (I can’t imagine that they didn’t know this) under SO Mania regime laws as they exist in Sweden required the police to immediately open a ‘sex offense’ case, which led to a trip-wire warrant by the weekend-duty prosecutor, which was then recalled within hours by a more senior and experienced prosecutor.
But, alas, the Swedes aren’t Americans. When the case was considered as a ‘molestation’ matter (which is not a sex-crime and not a felony in Swedish law) they still couldn’t find much.
The women’s attorney (who in previous bloggers’ Comments was identified as feminist-friendly – and I wonder if the women had visited the attorney BEFORE they dropped by the police station to ‘ask advice’) complains that (in best SO Mania style) that the women were dis-respected by the legal system and still wants both of their complaints re-opened as ‘sex crime’ investigations.
So now “a separate prosecutor’s office is investigating [the attorney’s] complaint”.
Of course, it is perfectly plausible that the US government – foreign affairs division – is behind this as a “smear campaign”. After all, as I’ve said before, if the government has gone to all the trouble and expense of creating the SO Mania Regime, then it sort of has a right to get its money’s worth on the investment: multi-tasking SO charges so that they serve the purposes of foreign-affairs and assorted types of international ‘security’ skullduggery would be a two-fer ever dear to the Beltway calculations.
But as I’ve also said, it’s quite possible that the US government – feminist and/or sex-offense advocacy divisions – could also be in on this. The Mania is self-sustaining (and self-licking, as in ice-cream cone) and once a match is put to any wood, then the fire will feed itself, granted there’s enough surrounding oxygen (meaning: a manipulated and stampeded public opinion and outrage).
And quite possible the SO Mania is operating along its own dynamics, but simultaneously fronting-for and masking the larger governmental purposes of squelching a class targeted by the government: whistleblowers.
After all, the SO Mania was initially designed to strike terror into parents and families so as to mask its original and core ‘feminist’ campaign against males. Then ‘the children’ were raised up as the poster-victims to front-for any ‘feminist’ elements of the thing that might scare off allies on the Law-and-Order Right who wouldn’t want to be seen lending their creds to any merely-feminist agenda.
And after all, the SO Mania was itself constructed as a way of squelching a class (‘men’, re-scripted by advocacy central-casting as monstrous, incorrigible, recidivist committers and perpetrators of ‘sex’) so squelching a selected target is just what the program was designed to do in the first place.
Which also make you wonder if this gambit would ever have been tried if Assange were an … ummm – OTM (other-than-male).
Anyhoo, I want to re-affirm what I said in previous Posts: it must be taken as a vitally significant fact that in all the commentary – official and mainstream and by bloggers and Commenters and Letter-writers to assorted sites – nobody is discussing the Sex-Offense Mania Regime itself. Even though the allegations were for ‘sex offenses’, all the discussion is limited to foreign-affairs angles.
Which leads me to say again to the SO community: it is profoundly strange and significant that the SO Mania, even when it is officially involved in a ‘story’, remains invisible to Americans: it’s as if they had trained themselves not to see what’s right in front of them, AND EVEN clearly labeled as such.
I have always been interested in the history of the First and Second World Wars, and – History being what it is – I have found certain themes and tropes and dynamics that occurred back then to be occurring now (in altered form) nowadays.
I am not trying to go for a ‘Nazi trump’ point here when I observe that all of this reminds me of the German people (NOT all or mostly Nazis, by any stretch) who saw the Jews with their Yellow Stars being paraded in front of them on the streets and yet managed not to ‘notice’.
Which was a self-serving and self-protective and self-forgiving gambit that came back ,eventually, to bite them with verrrry big teeth indeed.
I have two final thoughts then.
First, that the SO Mania Regime is quietly recognized by many Americans as being repugnant and repellent, so much so that they dare not even think about it – let alone comment about it. While in the short-term this serves the interests of its ‘advocates’ and indentured political and judicial official supporters, yet in the long-term this is an ominous harbinger indeed. Because when it finally becomes clear to the American people just what a lethal and corrosive scam has been pulled on them, they are going to be verrrrry displeased (nor will it be able to be dismissed merely as ‘backlash’).
Second, that when public opinion and public discourse are so deformed that they are partially blinded to realities well within the purview of public matters, then the public itself – The People – is profoundly weakened in its competence as governors-of-the-government.
So the SO community’s Resistance against this increasing Occupation of American public discourse by the dark forces of Ignorance and Manipulation must continue.
As the club-goers sang in the face of Major Strasser’s goons that eternal evening at Rick’s Café Americain: “Allons enfants de la Patrie! Le jour de gloire est arrive!”
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