87 Comments

1. Gerry.Agnosia:

   ‘Ey-ya Stan,

   What the continuing cycles of these debacles say about us is that we’re now so desensitized to the implications and consequences of these acts that we almost feel satisfied attempting to show support for the moral high-ground via liberal talk shows and the ‘moral’ blogosphere.

   In reality, we all know these acts are happening on a far wider scale than we’re comfortable with, but as a nation we’re o.k. with it all as long as the effects don’t reach our doorsteps. I’m tempted to dredge up Mickey Z.’s comments on the true sadness in our general inability to empathize with those that our Armed Forces are occupying in Southwest Asia… But it’d feel just like preaching to the choir with the same sermon repeated over the last 8 years or so…

   I guess my question is:

   [1] To what extent and how overtly do y’all think these tortures will become before they are conveniently swept back under the rug?

   What is even more sad is that I suspect that the public outcry against the greater conditions that foster these tortures won’t come to a level to make Congress nervous enough until the brutality of these tortures reaches a level when they can no longer be conveniently swept under a rug.

   [On a Lighter Note: Stan... How are you enjoying the "Parables" series?]

   [I received this bulletin in the newly restarted Durham Area NC Powerdown Peak Oil Group Mailing List... I figure you're already aware of most of the community garden projects within the triangle area, but I felt it was worth a mention anyway:

   "Also, on Sat. May 23rd from 2-4 pm, come to the groundbreaking for the Asbury Temple UMC community garden, to benefit the Angier Ave. neighborhood , on the grounds of the church, at corner of Alston Ave and Angier Ave., Durham. Event organized by yikes!, Public Allies of NCCU, & Asbury Temple." ]

   [ Last but not least, I was wondering if you were aware of the 'New Monasticism' movement that started in Durham at the Rutba House?

   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Monasticism

   http://www.newmonasticism.org/

   All I can declare, with child-like glee is: "Cool!"]

   15 May 2009, 8:59 pm

2. Oarwell:

   (cross-posted from torture/Obama debate going on at ‘A Tiny Revolution:’

   There was certainly a time in our country when no public intellectual would have dared endorse torture, even though, in the quonset huts of Empire, torture was taking place. Not even Max Lerner would have endorsed torture. Out of curiousity, I just took Arendt’s ‘The Origins of Totalitarianism’ off the shelf. There are two index entries under ‘torture:’

   “If the reports of arrested NKVD agents can be trusted, the Russian secret police has come uncomfortably close to this ideal of totalitarian rule. The police has secret dossiers about each inhabitant of the vast country, carefully listing the many relationships that exist between people, from chance acquaintances to genuine friendship to family relationships…” (imagine! And without Facebook!)

   “In totalitarian countries all places of detention ruled by the police are made to be veritable holes of oblivion into which people stumble by accident and without leaving behind them such ordinary traces of former existence as a body and grave…” (Ghost prisoners, anyone?)

   “The methods of dealing with … the human person are numerous…They begin with the monstrous conditions in the transports to the camps, when hundreds of humans beings are packed into a cattle-car stark naked…for days on end…the well-organized shock of the first hours, the shaving of the head, the grotesque camp clothing; and they end in the utterly unimaginable tortures so gauged as not to kill the body, at any event not quickly. The aim of all these mthods, in any case, is to manipulate the human body–with its infinite possibilities of suffering–in such a way as to make it destroy the human person as inexorably as do certain mental diseases.

   “It is here that the utter lunacy of the entire process becomes most apparent. Torture, to be sure, is an essential feature of the whole totalitarian police and judiciary apparatus; it is used every day to make people talk …To this rationally conducted torture another, irrational, sadistic type was added in the first Nazi concentration camps and in the cellars of the Gestapo….This type of torture seemed to be not so much a calculated political institution as a concession of the regime to its criminal and abnormal elements…Behind the blind bestiality of the SA, there often lay a deep hatred and resentment against all those who were socially, intellectually, or physically better off than themselves, and who now, as if in fulfillment of their wildest dreams, were in their power..

   “The real horror began, however, when the SS took over the administration of the camps. The old spontaneous bestiality gave way to an absolutely cold and systematic destruction of human bodies, calculated to destroy human dignity; death was avoided or postponed indefinitely. The camps were no longer amusement parks for beasts in human form, that is, for men who really belonged in metnal instituions and prisons;…” etc.

   This is where we find ourselves, in 2009, in the United States of America. It is nothing but shameful. Anyone of conscience can read those passages in Arendt’s book and immediately see the parallels between the Gestapo, the Nazi SS, and our own military. And twisted, hate-filled individuals like Krauthammer, who truly belongs in a mental institution, are put on television to argue for the practices engaged in by the Gestapo and SS. Just tonight I heard some pusbag named Crowley telling John Mclaughlin that Obama’s reversal shows “how right George Bush was about all of his national security decisions, starting with Guantanamo….” And that was PBS.

   Kurt Vonnegut was right. We have lost our fucking minds.

   15 May 2009, 10:33 pm

3. latte lenya:

   The cover article in the current Harper’s Magazine, entitled ‘Jesus Killed Mohammed’ is about this ‘weaponized Jesus’ culture in the US military. If you only have time to stand in a bookstore and read the first page, which relates the incident in Iraq that gave the article its title, it’s worth it.

   16 May 2009, 10:25 am

4. David Parish:

   “Did they teach you how to lie yet?”
   — “A Country Such As This” (1983), James Webb [now Virginia Senator]

   Stan,

   Yesterday I managed to call into the Diane Rhem radio show on NPR [5-15-09; 11:33:45] on her Friday News Round Up program. I asked if Congress has been trying to protect General McChrystal from close scrutiny of his central role in the Army’s cover-up of Pat Tillman’s friendly fire death. Below, I’ve expanded on my remarks:

   . . .

   This past Monday, Defense Secretary Gates nominated Gen. Stanley McChrystal as the new commander of the War in Afghanistan. The Chairmen of the Armed Services Committee, Senators Carl Levin and John McCain, don’t foresee any problem with McChrystal’s promotion to four-star general.

   Last year, McChrystal’s actions in the aftermath of Tillman’s fratricide were reviewed by the Senate Armed Services Committee in a closed hearing (5-15-08). On May 26, 2008, they approved McChrystal’s promotion to his current position as Director of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

   Shortly afterward, I happened to speak with Senator Jim Webb on The Diane Rhem Show (5-27-08, 40:56):

   Webb said, “What we do know … is the Army knew that this was a friendly fire incident fairly quickly, they did not tell the family, … I’m not sure where responsibility for that decision really lies, in terms of the chain of command … You cannot help but still feel angry about how his death was used.”

   [When I followed up, Webb’s Military Legislative Assistant Gordon Peterson replied: “Regarding your questions about the radio interview, I’m not in a position to elaborate. I did not participate in the review that Senator Webb mentioned and have no information to provide to you. The senator’s involvement occurred in his capacity as a member of the Senate Committee on Armed Services. I checked with Senator Webb, and he has nothing more to add to what he said last week. If you have any additional questions you should contact a representative for the Committee—Gary Leeling, 202 224-9339. He is out of the office until next week.”
   To my regret, I never followed up by contacting Leeling (legal counsel for Senator Carl Levin). I figured I was just getting blown off.]

   I share Senator Webb’s anger. But, I don’t understand why Webb was unable to determine “where responsibility … really lies.” General McChrystal was the central figure in the cover up of Tillman’s fratricide. McChrystal decided not to notify Tillman’s family, approved the fraudulent Silver Star award, and wrote the P4 memo sent to protect President Bush from making embarrassing comments about Tillman’s heroism IF his friendly fire death ever became public.

   In her book “Boots on the Ground by Dusk”, Mary Tillman strongly criticized McChrystal’s handling of Pat Tillman’s friendly fire death:

   “Not only is he lying about the circumstances surrounding Pat’s death, … he is proposing false language for the Silver Star narrative. … His statement [P4 memo] indicates that no one had any intention of telling us, or the public, that Pat was killed by fratricide unless forced to do so.”
   It doesn’t appear that Senator Webb and the Armed Services Committee did a thorough job of reviewing McChrystal’s role in the Tillman coverup. Maybe they will the second time around? As Mary Tillman said this past week in an e-mail to the AP, “It is imperative that Lt. General McChrystal be scrutinized carefully during the Senate hearings.”

   . . .

   On August 1, 2007, Congressman Henry Waxman’s Committee on Oversight and Reform held the hearing: “The Tillman Fratricide: What the Leadership of the Defense Department Knew.” The phrase, “I don’t recall,” was uttered repeatedly by witnesses.

   Mary wrote, “General Brown, retired generals Meyers and Abizaid, and Rumsfeld have great difficulty remembering what they knew and when they knew it. Someone sitting next to me whispers, ‘They have collective amnesia.’ Rumsfeld was asked several times in various ways when he learned of Pat’s death, but he couldn’t recall.”

   Last summer, after reading Waxman’s House Oversight Committee’s report (7-14-08), I was surprised to find that the Committee never interviewed General McChrystal! McChrystal was the key link in the chain of command between Col. Nixon (Ranger Regiment) and Abizaid (CENTCOM), he wrote the P4 memo, and he approved the false narrative of the Silver Star citation. Initially, the Committee had wanted testimony from McChrystal, but he “declined” to appear at their hearing. Why didn’t the Committee follow up and interview McChrystal sometime during the following year until their report was issued? Were they (and the Army) protecting McChrystal? Was the Waxman report just the final layer upon the cover-up of the Tillman fratricide?

   Mary wrote in her book, “… we were not happy with the hearing at all. We had spent weeks helping getting questions prepared and sending information. The Republicans on the committee were at best indifferent … Most of the Democrats disappointed us as well. They were not prepared and they didn’t think on their feet. We expected more from Congress.”

   . . .

   Has Congress been protecting General McChrystal from close scrutiny into his handling of Pat Tillman’s friendly fire death? Perhaps Congress is afraid of being critical of senior military leadership? Or McChrystal is considered indispensable to the War effort? Perhaps they just don’t care.

   Five years ago, Pat Tillman’s family were handed a tarnished Silver Star. It will be a travesty if McChrystal is confirmed by the Senate, handed his fourth star, and promoted to the Army’s highest rank.

   . . .

   Excerpted from a April 3, 2008 letter to Senator James Webb:

   [Note: I don’t know if Webb ever saw this letter; I don’t think it got past his “gate keeper” Gordon Peterson]

   During Congressman Waxman’s April 24, 2007 hearing, Mary said, “… Congress is supposed to take care of their citizens. … Pat died for this country, and he believed it was a great country that had a system that worked. It is not perfect. No one has ever said that. But there is a system in place to allow for it to work, and your job is to find out what happened to Pat.”

   In your novel, “A Country Such As This”, Senator Judd Smith argued: “And no, the military isn’t just fine. The point is, it isn’t corrupt. It’s a system with human failures.”

   But when “human failures” systematically extend up every single link in the chain-of-command (to include the Chair of the Joint Chiefs, Army Chief of Staff, and the Secretary of Defense) up to and including the White House, how is this not a corrupt country? Every single institution in this country has failed the Tillman family, including the Army leadership, Congress, White House and the mainstream media.

   Perhaps Senator Rowland, in your novel, “Something to Die For”, hit the nail on the head:

   “How lofty it must have been to have burnt with the purity of the Revolution! Before the days of multi-million dollar election campaigns that brought politicians to their knees before the monied temple of the contributors. Before the time of computerized politics that cause them to await the wisdom of those oracles known as pollsters before they spoke. Or maybe it had been trash from the get-go, myths to feed the public.”

   Your novels over the past thirty years have dealt with themes of honor, integrity, loyalty, and betrayal. I believe you might feel a sense of kinship with Pat Tillman and his family. Perhaps you could arrange to meet with Mary Tillman during her May [2008] book tour? And perhaps you would consider becoming an advocate in the Senate for the Tillman family’s struggle for the truth?

   . . .

   Here’s more on McChrystal taken from a letter sent to Mike Fish (ESPN) July 26, 2008:

   Last August, the Wallace Report singled out General Kensinger as the primary reason many people believe the Army covered up Tillman’s fratricide. Secretary of the Army Pete Geren said “General Kensinger failed in his duty to his soldiers, and the results were a calamity for the Army …”. “He made false official statements”, “failed in his duty to inform the family about the friendly fire incident in a timely manner …”, and “failed to inform the acting Secretary of the Army of the fratricide investigation.”

   COL Nixon merely received a letter for his “well-intentioned” decision to keep information close-hold within his staff.

   On the other hand, General McChrystal was praised for his handling of the Tillman fratricide. General Wallace concluded that McChrystal acted reasonably and quickly when he alerted his higher headquarters about the fratricide investigation. Secretary Geren said “General McChrystal, when notified of the friendly fire incident, he alerted, through his P4, … his chain of command. … General Abizaid testified that “General McChrystal reported the incident in a forthright and timely fashion.” “…General McChrystal did exactly the right thing. He sent a timely message [P4] in a timely fashion through the most secure channels.”

   However, I believe General Kensinger was merely the scapegoat for the sins of the Army and Bush administration. I would argue that General McChrystal, COL Nixon, and GEN Abiziad were just as guilty of the same charges for which Kensinger was singled out.

   Quickie summary: I believe that Tillman’s probable fratricide (“70% sure”) was passed up the chain of command on April 23rd, 2004. Confirmation of Tillman’s fratricide by the investigating officer CPT Scott (“I’m certain, I’m sure”) was passed up the 24th to at least COL Nixon. Yet, General Abizaid testified that General McChrystal told him on the 23rd only of Tillman’s death. McChrystal was praised for sending his “timely” P4 message six days later! I believe that Nixon and McChrystal wrote the P4 to cover their butts. McChrystal failed to send a supplementary casualty report after he learned of Tillman’s fratricide. And some of Abizaid’s statements at different times are inconsistent.

   . . .

   SUMMARY OF TILLMAN FRATRICIDE NOTIFICATION

   Early Confirmation of Tillman Fratricide:

   The Army leadership claimed they waited to inform the Tillman family of fratricide until they were sure of the facts. COL Nixon said it took a “considerable time to get the truth”.

   Yet, the day after Tillman’s death, on the 23rd, CSM Birch was “70% sure” and LTC Bailey “was certain” it was fratricide. CPT Scott, the first 15-6 investigating officer, confirmed Tillman’s fratricide just two days after Tillman’s death (not five weeks), and immediately passed that information up the chain of command to LTC Bailey who told Col. Nixon:

   “And certainly, by the next day [24th] when we did the investigations, I [Col. Bailey] confirmed it. Because I called him [Nixon] back within a day or two and said, “Sir, I want you to know now, after getting the first five interviews” in fact, that was, I guess, the next day.” … “So, after [Scott] did his first five interviews, he came back to me and said, “Sir, I’m certain. I’m sure.” And then I called [Nixon]. … I think it was the 24th. (p. 53)

   COL Nixon’s “Failure” to Report Fratricide to CENTCOM:

   The IG report claims Nixon “failed” to notify CENTCOM (i.e. Abizaid) of fratricide. Yet, GEN Wallace found that Nixon “did keep his chain of command informed of the investigation.” Even though Nixon said he “compartmented” the information flow to prevent outside communication, he testified “the Joint Task Force [McChrystal] continued to be informed throughout.”

   According to the IG report, on the 23rd LTC Bailey told Nixon about possible fratricide and the 15-6 investigation, then Nixon told McChrystal only about Tillman’s death, and then McChrystal told Abizaid only about Tillman’s death (no mention of fratricide or 15-6 investigation). Supposedly later, on the 24th or 25th, Nixon told McChrystal about the possibility of friendly fire.

   How is it possible that Nixon was notified of possible fratricide and investigation on the 23rd, yet did not pass that information up to McChrystal that same day? And if Nixon waited a day or two to tell McChrystal, why didn’t he tell him about the fratricide confirmation? (On the 24th, Nixon was told that fratricide had been confirmed by CPT Scott, the 1st 15-6 investigating officer).

   There was no need for Nixon to inform McChrystal of Tillman’s death on the 23rd. McChrystal’s own Chief of Staff approved the KIA report and would have told him on the 22nd.

   McChrystal told GEN Jones that Nixon called him about possible fratricide “about a day or two after the incident” [23rd or 24th] (McChrystal’s testimony to GEN Jones was taped, but “defective and unintelligible”. How curious this was the only Jone’s interview that was “lost.”). Yet the IG report says Nixon told McChrystal only of Tillman’s death on the 23rd. Which account is accurate?

   Is it possible that there were two separate notifications by Nixon? Even if McChrystal was told about friendly fire after the 23rd, how is it possible that McChrystal never updated Abizaid on the 24th? Weren’t they both still in Qatar for meetings? Or couldn’t McChrystal have merely picked up the phone? (He called GEN Brown on the 24th).

   McChrystal’s “Timely” Fratricide Report:

   General Wallace concluded that McChrystal acted reasonably and quickly when he alerted his higher headquarters about the fratricide investigation. General Abizaid testified that “General McChrystal reported the incident in a forthright and timely fashion.”

   Yet, there was nothing timely about McChrystal’s fratricide notification to his chain of command: On April 22nd, Tillman was killed. On April 23rd (or 24th), Nixon told McChrystal about probable fratricide and the 15-6 investigation.

   Even if McChrystal was told on the 24th, how was waiting five days to send a P4 considered “timely”? How is it possible that McChrystal never told Abizaid about fratricide while they were both in Qatar or never picked up the phone to tell him later?

   McChrystal’s P4 “Warning”:

   Why did McChrystal send his P4 on the 29th? The recipients of P4 already knew about fratricide and investigation. Kensinger and Brown (McChrystal called Brown a week earlier) and presumably Abizaid had already been notified of possible fratricide shortly after Tillman’s death. The only new information was that the Silver Star had just been approved by the Secretary of the Army.

   I believe the purpose of the P4 was just to provide a paper trail for Nixon (the IG Report states that the P4 was drafted by Nixon) and McChrystal to document they knew about friendly fire when they approved Tillman’s Silver Star and still felt the award was deserved. If pressed, they could show they had informed their superiors.

   Kensinger’s Failure to Send Fratricide Casualty Notification:

   Kensinger was blamed for not sending a supplemental casualty notification telling the Tillman family about the fratricide investigation. General Cody said that “… we do not encumber the JSOC commander [McChrystal] with all of that; that’s done by the regiment and done by the Army through USSOC [Kensinger].”

   However, if you take a look at the flowchart on p. 80 of the DOD IG report, you’ll see that McChrystal’s Chief of Staff was responsible for sending a supplemental report to USSOC after learning of friendly fire. It’s also noted on the flowchart that both McChrystal and his Chief of Staff knew about the fratricide by the 25th and yet did not send the required report as required.

   Gen. Abizaid’s Inconsistent Testimony:

   The official story is that Gen. Abizaid was informed by Gen. McChrystal only of Tillman’s death on the 23rd. Although McChrystal was probably informed on the 23rd of possible fratricide (no later than the 25th) he supposedly never bothered to pick up the phone to update Abizaid? Instead, McChrystal waited six days to send a “timely” P4 message that was “misplaced” by CENTCOM. Abizaid claims he first learned of suspected fratricide when he eventually received the P4 on about May 6th:

   1. The IG report claims that on April 23rd “COL Nixon … calls MG McChrystal … to inform him of CPL Tillman’s death.” Correspondingly, Abizaid told Congress McChrystal told him only of Tillman’s death on the 23rd during a meeting in Qatar.

   Yet, Nixon had already been informed of fratricide on the 23rd! Further, McChrystal testified Nixon told him of suspected fratricide while in Qatar on the 23rd or 24th. And Nixon testified that he had told Kensinger “almost immediately” and Yellen on the 23rd or 24th. Why would Nixon not inform McChrystal of possible fratricide on the 23rd as well?

   2. Abizaid testified to the IG investigators that McChrystal told him only of Tillman’s death, that he received “no details” and “did not know friendly fire was suspected. Yet, Abizaid testified during the August 1, 2007 Waxman hearing that Tillman’s death was “heroic”. How did Abizaid go from knowing “no details” to “heroic” death and yet hear nothing about friendly fire?

   3. Abizaid testified at the Waxman hearing that after reading the P4 on about May 6th, he called Meyers and told him “there is a possibility of fratricide” and “McChrystal has appointed the necessary people to investigate.” It’s curious that Abizaid’s testimony sounds just like Gen. Brown’s testimony that “McChrystal called shortly after [Tillman’s death]… to say there was a possibility that this was a friendly fire incident and that he was investigating.” (And, if you carefully re-read the P4, it refers to a “15-6 investigation nearing completion”, not to an investigation just starting with people appointed to investigate!).

   4. Abizaid told Waxman’s committee at the 8-01-07 hearing that he told Rumsfeld about the fratricide between May 18th and 20th. Yet Abiziad had previously told the IG that he never spoke with Rumsfeld after learning about Tillman’s possible fratricide.

   16 May 2009, 10:29 am

5. Michael Anderson:

   This post hit really hit me, at a time when we are moving to a less populated area of the state (Coos Bay), and one where the gun culture is widely accepted, and where there are few minorities. On the way back to where home is for a short time longer (Salem), I found myself musing on a couple of bumper stickers attached to a Toyota pickup in Reedsport. One said “Don’t be a pinhead, watch the O’Reilly Factor”, and the other said “Gun Rights For Oregon”.

   Strangely enough, one of my first thoughts was “why is this meatball driving an import?”

   The details of the muse have been lost to the road, but—We don’t raise our hands in anger against another man, or at least we try not to. What do we do when we’re faced with creatures who would kill us for God and sport, and worse yet, who view us as dispassionately as an exterminator would view a cockroach?

   May the power of our convictions carry us on….even if our knees shake a bit, as mine do on occasion.

   16 May 2009, 11:03 am

6. Stan Moore:

   I think this situation reveals more about Obama. Obama wants to WIN in Afghanistan by increasing targeted lethality, brutality and hostility against anyone who might be perceived to be a threat to US forces or goals in the region.

   I can guarantee that military intelligence in Iraq has a more complete census of the entire Iraqi population than the U.S. Census Bureau has for American residents. That is why the military systematically detained thousands and thousands of Iraqi men and pumped them for information to be entered into permanent databases.

   I don’t think this is possible in Afghanistan, so the idea now is to survey from the air by drones or any other intelligence gathering methods available anywhere, and then assassinate any questionable characters, taking out their families, villages, etc. if necessary. This mentality cares little about “collatoral damage”, and in fact, the mindset is to treat American lives as of supreme value and to treat “enemy” or even “suspected” or even “anyone within twenty meters of enemy or suspected enemy” as a target for bombing from the air. McChrystal adds new forms of lethality no doubt by sending “operators” to lethally target “hostiles” anywhere in the theater or in the world they can be eliminated as threats. This is similar to what the Israelis have been doing with their “targeted assassinations”.

   Kill first, and ask questions later, if at all.

   Obama wants to control Afghanistan and is willing to shed lots of blood to do it. The more secret the killings are, the less the accountability.

   At the same time, Obama will proclaim a desire to do what is best for the people of Afghanistan. But he will pay more for gear for Special Forces operators than gear for Afghan schools.

   Blood will flow in secret and many humans will disappear from this earth.
   McChrystal is another Petraeus chum. Petraeus puts the boot on the neck of the population; McChrystal puts the knife to the neck. They work well together. Obama has signed the death warrant and this is his war and his responsibility.

   I an imagine what Pat Tillman was thinking in the days and then the minutes before he, too, fell victim before he could get out of theater and tell people what was going on in their special forces.

   Stan Moore

   16 May 2009, 8:11 pm

7. eatbees:

   So where does Obama fit in all this? Is he part of the culture of impunity too? A true believer? Why do you think he feels he needs a guy like McChrystal, who I wouldn’t want anywhere near me? After Geithner, Emanuel and now this, I’m beginning to think Obama actually respects the mercenary mindset, because he recognizes a kindred spirit of cold-blooded pragmatism. And that’s upsetting.

   17 May 2009, 1:59 am

8. Stan:

   FYI all: Special operations and Special Forces are not synonymous. Special Forces is a subset of SO, and has its own branch designation.

   On Pat Tillman, he was not assassinated. After reviewing the documents of the investigatinos with the family for two years, I can say that without the slightest hesitation. He was killed in an accident, which was preciptated by a bunch of meddling from officers who were not on the ground, and who were motivated by their career metrics.

   17 May 2009, 7:18 am

9. Stan Moore:

   The Wikipedia page for Pat Tillman is very interesting; it even cites a Stan Goff essay, and it contains numerous direct links to published materials on the Tillman death and related matters. Among other things it reveals that Pat Tillman was calling the Iraq War (not the Afghanistan War) an “illegal” war, and that he had plans to meet personally with Noam Chomsky after his release from the military, and that Chomsky confirmed those plans. It also reveals that Tillman has killed by a tightly spaced cluster of three bullets to the forehead, and that Army medical people (if I recall correctly) demanded a murder investigation.

   I don’t know that much about this sort of thing, but I don’t think the M-16 is a sniper weapon, or that snipers would be needed in a battlefield assassination, as suggested in some articles. I also don’t think Pat Tillman or anyone else would let an enemy get within ten feet to shoot him in such a setting, but he very well could allow someone he trusted, such as uniformed military personnel, such as a “Special Operations” operator attached for the day to his unit to approach him with an m-16 and suffer having his brains literally blown out of his head before he could react.

   Pat Tillman was a celebrity, a sports hero before becoming a U.S. Army Ranger and thus a “war hero”. If he had left the military and joined the anti-war movement it would have been very, very damaging to the war effort and very strengthening to the anti-war effort. Would the military/government assign a highly trained operator or team to initiate and engineer an incident in Afghanistan, use it as a platform to eliminate a perceived threat, and then lie about it?

   And would the Tillman family be well advised to ultimately shut up and forget about it, for fear of their own safety?

   There was a lot at stake once Pat Tillman joined the war effort, and the way his death was initially treated demonstrates how the government and the military desperately wanted to benefit from him, even as they assassinated him. The last thing they would or could ever do is to tell the truth, or even allow it to be told if they could stop it.

   I know what I believe the truth it, but I don’t blame the Tillman family for keeping it to themselves now. Everybody wants to live.

   Stan M.

   17 May 2009, 1:16 pm

10. Stan:

    The members of his own platoon who fired the lethal shots ranged from the rank of Staff Sergeant to Private First Class, all in the infantry. They were in the same vehicle; and they also fired upon and wounded the Platoon Leader and his radio operator.

    No military or paramilitary organization working for the government uses enlisted men who have never been trained in clandestine warfare (none of the shooters had) to do anything like what is being suggested here. The time and place of the incident was not choreographed, but the result of a long day of mishaps and errors on the part of many people in ways that could not have been either predicted or planned.

    The probable weapon that killed him was the Squad Automatic Weapon (SAW) on SSG Baker’s vehicle, based on two independent forensics experts that accompanied me to the government’s forensics lab in Rockville, MD to study the autopsy photos. The distance was around 40 meters away; and Pat’s final postion was directed by a separate enlisted supervisor who he was handed off to in a snap decision by the Platoon Leader only moments before.

    Would the military/government assign a highly trained operator or team to initiate and engineer an incident in Afghanistan, use it as a platform to eliminate a perceived threat, and then lie about it?

    No. (1) There were no highly trained operators there, nor could anyone have “engineered” the string of contingencies leading up to the incident and the string of decisions made by dmll unit leaders in response to these emergent situations. (2) The number of people who would have been party to a plot in this situation would have had to have been the entire platoon, sans Pat and his brother Kevin (who was in the trail section of the same platoon). Kevin does not believe for a moment that any such “assassination” happened either; and he actually likes conspiracy theories.

    I know both Dannie and Kevin Tillman, as well as Richard (Pat’s and Kevin’s other brother) and Pat’s dad, Pat. None of them is likely to be intimidated by fears of the government coming to get them. I personally watched them all verbally abuse a hapless panel of Generals and DoD flunkies in San Jose who were sent to calm the family down with yet another amendment to the official conclusions. It was so bad that at one point, young Richard shouted at a chastened briefer, “Don’t you roll your fucking eyes at my mom.”

    McChrystal’s special impunity (remarked above) certainly has something to do with his long association with the inner circle during his TF 6-26 days; and don’t forget that JSOC is the gray-to-black unit that is used by the NCA for illegal actions (like Camp Nama). McChrystal has dangerous knowledge reaching all the way to Rumsfeld and past (and vice-versa). The reason asking sensible questions about this incident in Congress is so radioactive is that it takes us all back to the bipartisan support for this war, these wars, and to things like the Pelosi denials and accusations in her recent tiff with the CIA. Congress-critters never ever ever want to be seen publicly confronting or humiliating a military man… this is the true harvest of inaction in a culture so utterly in the thrall of its own idealization of the military.

    The details are linked above in a three-part series done for Counteprunch. Read it before jumping to conclusions based on cinematic conventions. It is a story of bureaucracy, careerism, incompetence, confusion while under stress (the Abu Ghraib scandal was also going on), opportunism, and really bad luck. The conspiracy was not to kill Pat, but to turn his death into a recruiting poster as an antidote to the politico-military defeat in Najaf and the scandal at Abu Ghraib. When McChrystal and others realized that the real story — fratricide — was already out among the hundreds of members of 2nd Ranger Battalion, they had to backtrack. What they could not backtrack again, however, was the award, for which the paper trail could no longer be obliterated. The phony narrative was right there, with a string of signatories.

    The McChrystal memo (above) was telling the National Command Authority to stay quiet about Pat Tillman, because the original cover story’s shelf life was limited. More than 500 people were returning to the states who knew the real deal. He doesn’t say, hey this was wrong. He says, we can’t contain this. Shut up. We have to start developing a CYA strategy.

    18 May 2009, 5:49 am

11. Stan Moore:

    Thanks for the review Stan. After I wrote that last posting I did some Googling and found various pieces written by you and placed on several discussion groups, including Counterpunch, From the Wilderness, InsurgentAmerican, and maybe another one or two.

    Everything you say is plausible and I would have to consider you to be an expert in such evaluations. But there is so much uncertainty at various levels. For instance, if Pat Tillman was deliberately silenced, it did not necessarily mean that the Department of Defense made a secret decision and passed the decision down the chain of command in typical fashion. I don’t know what happened, but there are so many lies and levels of lies and subterfuge that it is hard to sort out what is what. It does seem unlikely that an incident would be engineered in which others would be harmed or even killed, but it is not out of the realm of possibility, either. I happen to believe that the entire events of 9/11/2001 were engineered by the government with the full knowledge that many innocents would die, and it is almost a stroke of luck that “only” around 3000 died on that day.

    I also do not understand why Kevin Tillman was very vocal to the public and against the war, the politicians, the torture, the mindset, etc. and then all of a sudden seems to have gone silent. I think the generals and the politicians could take personal insults at more or less closed meetings much easier than they could take the idea of celebrity Pat Tillman converting from “their” war hero to a war resister and public figure against the war(s).

    But there are more questions I cannot understand from anything I have read. It appeared that you (Stan Goff) determined that there may have been three “enemy” personnel involved, and they were probably armed with an RPG launcher and Kalashnikov rifles. Even if there were additional enemy, why would these “elite” professional soldiers not be able to determine by the sound of the discharging of the weapons whether they were being attacked by AK-47′s versus American weaponry. A motorcyle rider could tell the difference between a Harley Davidson and a Kawasaki really easily even in the noise of a big rally. Why did these soldiers not recognize by their own training that they were shooting at each other?

    And why did they not respond to the smoke grenade used by Tillman and recognize that the Taliban do not use smoke grenades (I assume they don’t).
    Or why did Pat Tillman believe the use of the grenade would stop the firing? Was he mistaken or violating known protocols for avoiding fratricide?

    And why would Pat Tillman stand up and expose himself to further likelihood of accidental fratricide after detonating the smoke grenade if it was unsafe to do so?

    Is it possible that he had eye contact with the soldier who shot him and felt he was safe?

    I wonder how often humans shot with that squad automatic weapon show tightly spaced multiple wounds in their head or anywhere else? Even at that rate of fire, I would think tightly space shot clusters would be very unlikely due to the movement of the weapon or the target as the weapon was fired. A tiny fraction of an inch of movement would seem to separate the rounnds moreso that the speed of firing could compensate for in creating such an occurance.

    And what did the forensic investigation show as to what happened on the overall scene at the landscape level? Did they find freshly spent AK-47 or other enemy small arms rounds on the ground, indicating a real firefight? Was the entire firefight a product of one RPG round fired and then a bunch of terrified elite American soldiers opening up on everything all around them, including each other and continuing to fire even as their fellow soldiers were begging them to stop?

    If Tillman and the soldier who shot him were forty meters away, had there been any further attempt at radio contact during the fight by either section of men? Surely if the two separate forces converged that close they could have been in radio contact with each other if they had tried.

    It just boggles the mind that if one American Ranger was killed in that firefight, it would be Pat Tillman and noone else. And then his private journal was destroyed or lost and not returned to his wife and loved ones?
    How could that be?

    If nothing else, it teaches us that military “honor” is an oxymoron” and as hollow as a weatherbeaten stump where a log used to be. The military that you describe, where perfection is a career-mandatory pretense is downright scary. And where accountability is of necessity countered and impunity deemed necessary at all costs at virtually all levels of the military.

    And yet it seemed that Stan scoffed at “conspiracy theorists”. Hell! The whole military structure and operations appear to be a conspiracy with many sub-conspiracies embedded throughout. The whole shebang is a conspiracy to kill humans on an industrial scale and many inner conspiracies occur to make that happen and to do it without accountability even according to internationally recognized “rules of war” or “laws” of warfare. We know that in the aftermath of the Tillman death that various units were told not to talk about it — what is that other than a conspiracy of silence directed from above?

    I for one, find it just amazing that these men, all the way from private to general to Secretary of Defense, feel compelled in the most severe way, to lie to preserve “honor”. And at the same time they declare that honor is worth fighting and dying for. There is an awful lot of chicanery done in the name of “honor”, to the point of offering Pat Tillman a posthumous Silver Star for heroism in the face of enemy fire. Too bad the enemy wore the same uniform. Did they withdraw the award after it was proved to be fraudulent on the part of the military itself? Probably not — as a matter of honor once again.

    I don’t buy the argument that you have to be in or have been in the military to understand what goes on there. You may have to be there to grow acclimated to that sort of bullshit in the name of honor. The same sort of thing goes on in other human organizations, though without the lethality of warfare, which is the essential purpose of military function.

    But the sad truth, I believe, is that even if Pat Tillman had lived and become a poster boy against war, he could not stop it. He would have found himself under personal attack and efforts made to discredit him or negate his message. If his death was an accident, the circumstances of it are themselves a great indictment against the profession of arms. We can live without it.

    I think it would be a great idea for all men to learn to live without war.

    It is, after all, 2009 and the “war to end all wars” concluded somewhere around 1918. Yet, we keep struggling with this…

    Stan Moore

    18 May 2009, 10:01 am

12. Stan Moore:

    Regarding McChrystal and Afghanistan –

    I recall seeing a book several years ago that was the product of an investigation by French reporters. It demonstrated that the invasion and war in Afghanistan were planned BEFORE 9/11/2001 and were all about control of strategic oil pipeline routes.

    It has also been demonstrated, even in the Michael Moore movie, that the Taliban were brought to Texas by W. Bush for negotiations over such matters. The Taliban at that time were already in control of much of Afghanistan and they were offered “a carpet of gold or a carpet of bombs” depending on their support of Western plans to build pipelines through their country. The extreme conservative Islamic governance by the Taliban was not an issue at that time, and was only made an issue after the Taliban refused to cooperate with Western reource planning. The same pattern was generally true with Saddam Hussein himself, who could have saved his life and his despotic rule by cooperating fully with Western plans for his country.

    The bottom line is that the invasion and war in Afghanistan is a resource war, not a war for “democracy” or for the sake of benefiting the Afghan peoples.

    The Obama Administration is a continuation of the Bush Administration in its goal to secure those resources for the future benefit of the American economy and U.S. strategic realities as relate to Russia, China, and the rest of the world. Obama is deadly serious about this.

    McChrystal is deadly serious about being deadly in pursuit of national goals.
    McChrystal is an attack dog whose leash is ultimately held by Obama. He is trained to kill on command and he trains others to kill on his command. But the nation’s military is under civilian leadership. McChrystal can be kept on a short leash, a long leash, or put in the kennel depending on what the president wants.

    Our nation is allegedly a democracy with a division of power between executive, legislative and judicial branches. The military is not part of that equation, but directed by the executive, funded by the legislative, and held under law by the judicial.

    The citizenry elects the executive and the legislative, including Obama and Pelosi. The public can remove them for incompetence and can even impeach and remove them in expedited fashion if public sentiment determines that this must be done.

    None of this is new or profound. The point I am making here is that McChrystal is a hired hand under the control of our elected officials. If he seems out of control, he is not. He is following orders and while his “expertise” may be a matter for consultation by his controllers, they ultimately hold that leash.

    Truman sacked Douglas MacArther, who was straining too hard at that leash.
    Lincoln sacked generals who did not strain hard enough.

    Obama wants to control Afghanistan and Iraq and he believes that Petraeus and McChrystal, among others, are the right attack dogs for the job and they spill blood and consume national treaure at his prerogative. The dogs of war are doing what they were bred to do and allowed to do. They cannot be blamed for being and doing what they are and were bred to do. They can be controlled and they can be sacked because they are ultimately under civilian leadership and directed by a former “community organizer”.

    Stan Moore

    18 May 2009, 10:56 am

13. Timothy R. Anderson:

    The thing about Tillman that I think needs to be brought up. Uhhhhhh, the person who is a major-leagues-level professional athlete and volunteers ( SIGNS UP ! ! ! ! ) himself / herself into the current American military ? ?
    Who’s that ? Can anyone name even one ? One person ? Who ?

    Timothy R. Anderson

    18 May 2009, 11:11 am

14. Stan:

    @ Stan Moore, you’re right, of course. But here is Obama’s real situation from the Obama POV: When he faces the military-paramilitary-clandestine services axis, he is not looking at a few leaders. He is lookling at a vast, vast bureaucracy in which others have spent decades putting their own people’s hands on the levers of everything, starting with day-to-day administration. Stalin did not prevail in his power struggle with Trotsky because he had stronger theory. He was effectively in control of the administration of the nation. Leaders change, but the culture of a place does not disappear in a day, and gutting this axis to cleanse it just destroys one of the pillars of the executive power that Obama does have. Obama is not a risk-taker. And someone has convinced him that this Afghanistan-Pakistan adventure is the least risky alternative.

    To get outside that box, we need a moral perspective that swallows it up. Torture and the pretzel-twists that politicians achieve in talking about it takes us into a different, more visionary dimension than deconstructing the tactics of empire. This is a place, this torture issue and the fact of torture, where we are obliged to say that there is right and wrong; and torture is wrong. Period. If you torture, we are not brooking any excuses.

    De and I took a look at the subject of “just torture” and imperial masculinity a couple years back by studying the film, Man on Fire. Now that I think back on it, we saw that movie as softening up the public for acceptance of torture as a legitimate foreign policy tool.

    18 May 2009, 1:29 pm

15. Stan Moore:

    Whitney Venting on Obama :

    http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=13645

    It took a few months for Mike Whitney, and many others, to see what I saw before the election, but I was not burdened by the imagery of television news reporting and campaign advertisements.

    But no, I disagree with M.W. that it would be better to have elected McCain. When the history of our failed republic is written, it will be hugely important to note that BOTH political parties were equally complicit in collapse. And that the heartwarming symbolism of a black man elected to the presidency was of very limited value because the wrong black person was elected and the right one (Cynthia McKinney in this election) had no chance in hell of being elected.

    The American public has gotten away with self-inflicted bad governance with impunity for far too long. The Empire thrived, but was unsustainable economically or ecologically.

    A great, but lengthy review of the American predicament and impending collapse is on a new website at:

    http://www.wakeupamerika.com — read the lengthy analysis and weep if you thought it would just go on and on and on

    James Howard Kunstler at today’s Clusterfuck Nation posting at http://www.kunstler.com continues to sharpen his focus on Obama and his ongoing obfuscations from reality and fairness.

    Whitney’s venting. Kunstler’s venting. The economy is still in the early stages of disintegration and the Obama ploy of averting panic by use of smoke and mirrors is losing its effectiveness. I think that Obama will have to play the “you are under threat” card soon and the result may very well be martial law or worse. This summer will be hot and hectic and the least fun of our lifetimes, I am afraid…

    Stan Moore

    18 May 2009, 1:35 pm

16. Sam:

    Re:
    They can be controlled and they can be sacked because they are ultimately under civilian leadership and directed by a former “community organizer”.

    I don’t think so. Just who would be the controllers and the sackers in this scenario?

    18 May 2009, 3:20 pm

17. Stan Moore:

    In response to Stan Goff –

    If I understand you correctly, I have to disagree with any assumption that Barack Obama is actually against torture as absolutely indefensible. He uses rhetoric that gives that impression, but he turns around and leaves wiggle room for himself and his underlings down the entire chain of command. And he plays with words and with truth, not unlike George W. Bush, who could say with a straight face that America did not torture anyone because he did not equate any of the “extreme” methodologies used in interrogation to actually reach the level of torture.

    Obama plays a similar trick — he can say with a straight face that he opposes torture as being contradictive of American “values” but he does not choose to unconditionally prohibit it by all U.S. personnel at all places and all times.

    When Obama was Senator, I never heard of him calling for investigations of General Geoffrey (or is it spelled Jeffrey) Miller who brought torture techniques from Bagram AFG to Abu Graib and was another perpetrator in league with McChrystal. I don’t know if
    General Miller is still working in theater, but he is a good example of a war criminal waiting for prosecution, and yet Obama wants to look forward and not deal with the recent past that occurred when he was a Senator from Illinois.

    Obama is almost military in thinking in his ability to compartmentalize realities into actionable and forgivable subsets of wrongdoing.

    And I am unaware of the existence of “anti-torture” general officers who would see to it that no form of torture would be allowed to occur anywhere in theater or in the world.
    Maybe such personnel exist, but they have successfully stayed under the radar screen as far as I can tell.

    By the way, I seem to recall interviews in the media that said military and intelligence personnel actually too hints and corresponded with entertainment media, such as the TV show “24″, which I have never watched. If the military is duplicating the entertainment industry, then I would love to see a “made for TV” movie highlighting investigation and criminal prosecution of torturers and enablers all the way up and down the chain of command. THAT would be the kind of “reality tv” that might make me want to actually obtain a television and watch it once in a while!

    18 May 2009, 3:41 pm

18. Michael Anderson:

    Speaking of administration:

    http://men.style.com/gq/features/topsecret

    Weird enough, given the present “weaponized Jesus” thread—-DAMN weird when a fashion mag breaks it.

    18 May 2009, 6:55 pm

19. Guy Montag:

    Excerpt from John T. Reed’s “Lesson’s to Be Learned from Pat Tillman’s Death” from his website, johntreed.com

    Some media types have treated the McChrystal cable as evidence that McChrystal was some sort of good guy whistle blower opposing the cover-up of the truth of how Tillman was killed.

    Excuse me.

    Whadya have to be—stupid nowadays to become a mainstream journalist? How’s about reading the damned cable.

    Here it is and I will analyze it line by line:

    Sir, in the aftermath of Corporal Pat Tillman’s untimely:

    Does the Army have any types of death other than “untimely?” If not, why put such trite, superfluous words into a “personal for” private cable? It sounds like McChrystal was already figuring this cable was going to become public so he’s putting public relations phraseology into it to make himself look good if and when it does become public.

    yet heroic death in Afghanistan on 22 April 2004:

    What did he think was “heroic” about it other than the fact that Tillman quit the NFL to be there?

    it is anticipated that a 15-16 investigation nearing completion:

    If he is already anticipating the finding of friendly fire, why is he still saying Tillman’s death was heroic? Wouldn’t Tillman’s death at the hands of his own Rangers be more accurately described by the other trite word that goes with “untimely”: “tragic?”

    will find that it is highly possible:

    You cannot use the word “highly” as an adjective to modify the word “possible.” Either something is possible or it’s not. “Highly possible” is like “We have a very full plane today.” Either it’s possible or it’s not. Either the plane is full or it’s not. There is no difference between “possible” and “highly possible” or between “full” or “very full.” Flight attendants talk that way to be as obsequious as possible. So do three-star generals. Obsequiousness by flight attendants is arguably necessary for an airline. It’s creepy for a high-ranking general. It sounds like he means highly “probable,” which would make sense, but he caught himself in mid-sentence and weaseled it back to “possible.”

    that Corporal Tillman was killed by friendly fire.

    Everybody who was there when it happened knew that it was friendly fire within minutes of Tillman’s death. Why was any investigation necessary at all? Just ask the guys who were present when it happened how he died. It sounds like the investigation was begun for one purpose and one purpose only: to cover the asses of the brass for not immediately admitting it was friendly fire as in, “Oh, we couldn’t say it was friendly fire until the results of the investigation were in.” In fact, there was never any question about it.

    At least this sentence has finally ended. They teach writing at West Point, but not everyone gets it. And this guy is only at the second highest rank in the U.S. military.

    This potential:

    He means “certain.”

    finding is exacerbated by the unconfirmed but suspected reports:

    “Unconfirmed but suspected reports” is the obsequious, awkward, diarrhea-of-the-mouth, bureaucrat version of the word “rumors.”

    that POTUS:

    That’s the government acronym for President of the United States. We normal people would have just said President Bush.

    And the Secretary of the Army:

    In other words, two really big shots who outrank us and who could end our careers in a heartbeat.

    might include comments about Corporal Tillman’s:

    This is the third time in two sentences he has used the phrase “Corporal Tillman.” Why not just call him Tillman after the first one? As with many ostensibly private communications in the government, Lt. Gen. McChrystal seems to be covering his ass with extremely respectful news release type language in anticipation of this cable becoming public.

    heroism:

    Why can’t POTUS and the Secretary comment about Tillman’s “heroism?” Lt. General McChrystal did in his first sentence. Why is Tillman “heroic” when McChrystal talks about him “privately,” but not when the President or the Secretary do publicly?

    and his approved Silver Star medal:

    Excuse me. In view of the fact that it is “highly possible” that he may have been killed by friendly fire, and the Silver Star requires “gallantry in action against an enemy,” how can such a medal be approved at this point? If the Army has to wait for the “15-16 investigation” that is “nearing completion,” why isn’t the Army waiting until the completion of that investigation to decide whether Tillman earned the Silver Star? Obviously, the awarding of the Silver Star is some sort of undeserved public relations move in furtherance of the cover-up of the circumstances of his death. Were they perhaps expecting that his family and the media would not want to ask any rude questions that might cost Tillman his posthumous Silver Star?

    The potential that he might have been killed by friendly fire in no way detracts from his witnessed heroism or the recommended decoration for personal valor in the face of the enemy.

    Gee! It’s only five days after the incident that occurred on the other side of the planet from McChrystal’s Fort Bragg, NC location but McChrystal is absolutely certain about Tillman deserving the Silver Star, which normally requires a highly subjective assessment. However, he has to await the outcome of an investigation to determine whether Tillman was killed by friendly fire, which was a no brainer in this case. Apparently, public-relations efforts like awarding dubious medals require virtually no investigation or thought, but revealing unattractive truth, well, we gotta do a whole formal “15-16 investigation” before such an unnatural act.

    in speeches currently being prepared,

    How does he know this? Do POTUS and the Secretary send a heads up to McChrystal, (Joint Special Operations Command), whenever they ask their speech writers to start work?

    not knowing the specifics surrounding his death.

    As stated above, those present knew the specifics form the start. Who did not know the specifics and why?

    I felt it was essential that you received this information as soon as we detected it:

    “Detected?” The incident occurs. The commander of the unit reports it as soon as conditions permit to his superior and up the chain of command it goes until it reaches the Commander in Chief. Since this involved the death of the most famous enlisted man in the U.S. military since Elvis, I expect it would have traveled from the platoon leader to the President in about one hour—unless someone stopped it. The only reason anyone would need to “detect” it would be if someone in Tillman’s chain of command behaved criminally, like filing a false report

    in order to preclude any unknowing statements:

    What is all this jive!? Why is this being discussed with Abizaid? Why not just make sure the entire chain of command knows everything immediately? Why would anyone have to take any extraordinary steps to achieve this “precluding” if everyone told the truth as the report moved up the chain?

    by our country’s leaders:

    Again, this guy sounds like he’s writing a speech—as if he expected this cable to end up in the newspaper, which is where I got it. You can see the cable at http://www.hosted.ap.org/specials/interactives/_documents/tillman/mcchrystal.pdf. Why not just say “POTUS or SOTA” here?

    which might cause public embarrassment:

    That’s public embarrassment of the President and/or Secretary. Note that General McChrystal has not shown the slightest interest in this cable about Tillman’s family or the plain old truth or right and wrong. It’s all about McChrystal and Abizaid avoiding getting in trouble as a result of their bosses being embarrassed by repeating Army chain of command lies.

    if the circumstances of Corporal Tillman’s death become public.

    Aha! Note the word “if.” In other words, at this point, the cover-up is ongoing. McChrystal figures it might succeed forever. But just in case it gets exposed, Plan B is to prevent the President or Secretary of the Army from saying anything that will make them look bad if the cover-up is found out.

    McChrystal appears to be advocating the rather improbable course of having the President of the United States comment about the death of its most famous enlisted man in 50 years without mentioning the “heroic” early public reports of how he died or the award of the Silver Star for that “heroism.” Seems to me the media would jump on such omissions instantly. “Mr. President! Mr. President! Why didn’t you mention that Pat Tillman died a hero and was awarded the Silver Star?”

    18 May 2009, 10:26 pm

20. Guy Montag:

    Speaking of Presidents …

    President Obama gave a commencement address on May 14th at Arizona State University’s Sun Devil Stadium where Pat Tillman played college football.

    Obama was staged inside the football locker room (with a prominent picture of Pat Tillman), walked right up and out of the Tillman Tunnel to reach the stage.

    A few quotes from his speech:

    “I’m talking about an approach to life — a quality of mind and quality of heart; a willingness to follow your passions, regardless of whether they lead to fortune and fame; a willingness to question conventional wisdom and rethink old dogmas; a lack of regard for all the traditional markers of status and prestige — and a commitment instead to doing what’s meaningful to you, what helps others, what makes a difference in this world.”

    “That’s the great American story: young people just like you, following their passions, determined to meet the times on their own terms. … they had passion, a commitment to following that passion wherever it would lead, and to working hard every step along the way.”

    Sounds a lot like Pat Tillman to me.

    How many times did President Obama mention Pat Tillman during his speech? Nada.

    An oversight? I doubt it. On the 11th Gates announced McChrystal as his pick to head up the war in Afghanistan. On the 12th, Pat’s parents expressed their dismay at McChrystal’s selection because of his central role in the cover-up of Pat’s fratricide.

    I don’t think Obama (or McCain who is the senior Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee which will confirm McChrystal shortly) want to bring up Tillman’s name in public. They don’t want to open up that can of worms.

    18 May 2009, 10:49 pm

21. Stan:

    Let me try this again… swimming against what is obviously a powerful current.

    The Tillman case is important to me because I spent months working with the family to make sense of the statements, investigations, maps, and motives of the investigators. But in this post, my own motive was to point out a danger with at least four aspects: the lunacy of expanding the war in Afghanistan into Pakistan, the culture of impunity that prevails among the people who are trained and perpared to conduct the kinds of operations that fit this invasion-by-infiltration, the glaring masculinity-dynamic that fuels these kinds of idiocy (now lethally combined with the chiliastic Cult of the Weaponized Jesus), and the hypocrisy of the Democrats (with Nancy Pelosi now being hoisted on her own petard) who signed off on this until its popularity came into question.

    News yesterday on tv — Rumsfeld’s intel summary cover sheets with Bible quotes to maplify the Crusader mentality of the war effort for the prez, and Pelosi’s “missteps” as she is confronted with her own foreknowledge ande complicity (noted here more than once) that torture was being used by government employees of the military-paramilitary-clandestine services axis.

    Hoping we can talk about how the talk about torture is a miner’s canary, at least. Also gender, gender, and gender.

    This is male culture that idealizes the conquest of women, the conquest of colonies, and the conquest of nature. It is probative conquest, too; and it requires trophies for the other men to whom you are proving yourself, and as proof of masculinity to display for women.

    If you can think back to the time in this terrible occupation of Iraq when Abu Masab al-Zarqawi was the boogy-man — when the media propagated the lie that every attack and every bomb was being made by this one wicked being — and if you can remember when Zarqawi was killed, the Central Command Public Affairs Officer who stood before the breathless media in the Green Zone was backgrounded by a giant photograph of the obviously dead face of Zarqawi.

    This was a hunting trophy. [McChrystal's, by the way]

    In displaying this most dangerous game, the Central Command was demonstrating its prowess in a war story that has been a social convention for so long that it has become a cultural memory, an axiomatic belief accompanied by deeply enculturated emotional resonance.

    The idealization of the military, of the warrior, of the armed defender is so sacrosanct that every politician in the country feels obliged to genuflect as they talk about “heroes in uniform,” and “our brave men and women in the military.” The addition of women to that idealization has not fundamentally changed the fact that warfare is still the testing ground for masculinity; but it is a cultural advance — albeit a contradictory one — by liberal feminism, that public figures have to include women in this sinister idealization at all.

    Manliness is at the root of this shit.

    Everything except gender will get talked about. Elephant. Living room.

    19 May 2009, 5:09 am

22. Michael D:

    the hindus smear butter on ancient stone lingams, we fetishise the phallus in a different way…
    which is the younger, callower culture?

    great writing, stan, as per.

    19 May 2009, 6:59 am

23. Stan Moore:

    While I agree with Stan Goff that males are obviously superior warriors and tend to dominate the culture in general, I don’t think, for instance, that if Hillary Clinton had been elected President of the U.S. that it would changed changed things one whit. Margaret Thatcher had the Falklands War and its accrued “glory” and Golda Meir is still revered amongst Israelis for her philosophy that the Palestinians were not a people at all and therefore could not be a matter of concern on a humanitarian, legal, or any other level. American women support war and Empire.

    I would venture to say that most all of those macho soldiers of all ranks have wives and girlfriends who support their missions, and who must be aware of their methods. The Congress has more women openly in support of Imperial Wars than against them.

    What is even more bothersome to me in this regard is very closely related. It is the criminal manifestation of macho culture within the military itself. Large numbers and even a large proportion of female soldiers are harassed and assaulted verbally. Many are sexually assaulted and they are laughed at, intimidated, ignored, ostracized and tossed into the gutter by men all the way up the chain of command. The Congresswomen seem to have nothing to say about this culture. Ann Wright seems to be the only woman of military background to keep working on this issue, which is a criminal issue, a moral issue, a cultural issue and an organizational issue all rolled into one.

    If the U.S. military personnel do this routinely to their own comrades in uniform who are their own sisters and girl cousins and wives, etc. their consciences are not working at all and they can be trained to do any manner of evil and to get away with it in that atmosphere of impunity. If you can rape your sister in uniform without batting an eye, you can sure rape an Iraqi girl and then blow her and her family away and not miss a beat.

    Really this is a continuum of behavior at objectifies people and makes victimization normal. The ultimate victimization is lethal and massive, but every day acts by violent men (and women) are integral. And we know that some women are influenced negatively by the mindset, as seen in the “thumbs up” photos at Abu Graib.

    And where are the feminists in the civilian population? Are they willing to challenge that culture in the military? I don’t seem to notice it — I haven’t heard of any marches at Mill College to promote female participation in the military in a safe environment free from abuse by male soldiers.

    I think Stan Goff is working on a book on this matter. I have not seen notice that the book is published yet. It is a major issue that receives little public attention but deserves a public airing. One would have thought that the increasing numbers of women in high Federal office would address this issue, but I guess some don’t want to be perceived as not in full support of the latest war effort. And that is part of the root of the problem…

    Stan Moore

    19 May 2009, 9:02 am

24. Sean:

    Stan, I think the reason that gender gets avoided is this: okay, we blame masculine aggression. Now what?

    I’m a man and I don’t use my testosterone-fueled aggressive tendencies to support militarism or empire.

    So how is gender the root cause?

    I think spreading interest in examining the aggressive male impulse is good, as it goes unsaid and/or unexamined far too often. But to say this is all about gender, that’s too broad-brush in my view.

    Greed is not male-specific. Hubris is not the exclusive domain of men. Arrogance is not limited to the XY genetic complement. Women in American politics and punditry are just as guilty as men when it comes time to seeing who excuses murderous imperialism.

    Here’s the root cause: war being distinguished from murder, when there is no basis for the distinction.

    That’s not gender-oriented at all.

    19 May 2009, 10:39 am

25. Stan:

    I’d say “greed” is a broader brush than gender. Greed for what?

    I never said males are superior warriors…. never in my recollection. I said masculinity and militarism share the same origins in the history of ideas and practice.

    The book I wrote, with De as the priceless editor, was Sex & War. It’s available, free, right here.

    Just posted the text from a recent talk on related issues, too.

    19 May 2009, 4:15 pm

26. Stan Moore:

    If our “civilization” were to continue (and I believe it is doomed at the scale we have known it within 25 – 50 yrs. max) the evolution of warfare would increasingly separate the dominance of males in the warmaking arena. Those drones could be operated by girls as easily as boys, and new weaponry is headed towards more automation, more use of robotics, more use of lethal weapons that can be deployed and used by women as easily and as effectively as by men (lasers, particles, chemicals, etc).

    If that were to continue, I think you would find that woman in the American warmaking culture would “progress” in their destructive roles and that gender would not be a substantial difference in dominance of one nation by another.

    I do think men are superior warriors by virtue of physical power and strength, but women are fully capable of emerging as equals as we “evolve” away from physicality and towards more cerebral forms of warfare. Women politicians are certainly every bit as cutthroat and partisan as males, every bit as duplicitous, and every bit as capable of authorizing wars of conquest and exploitation.

    That being said, I am somewhat surprised that more women, especially in the military, do not kill their abusers in self defense or preemptive self-defense. Maybe there is a cultural or genetic component there that I am failing to understand.

    I look forward to reading Stan’s book and comments, which are always revelatory to me.

    By the way, the Pat Tillman case is interesting to look at in parallel to the Jessica Lynch case as far as military duplicity goes. They lie coming and going, in good times and bad, and possibly would not tell the truth even if it were advantagous because it could be habit forming and dangerous.

    Lastly, Noam Chomsky wrote a good piece on http://www.commondreams.org today about torture and “American exceptionalism” from a historic perspective that bears close review.

    Stan M.

    19 May 2009, 5:25 pm

27. Stan Moore:

    A quick (rhetorical) question for Stan Goff –

    I have seen reports that female U.S. personnel used their own nudity and lewd acts to sexually humiliate Arab prisoners in Iraq. If true, and I am pretty sure it is, how does this fit into the evolutionary picture that you have been assessing? Is this “progress” for women? Is it coincidental that the American culture which has produced Bob Guccione and Larry Flynt also produced Madonna and Brittney Spears and Marilyn Chambers and Lyndie England while Arab culture which objectifies women as possessions refuses to tolerate open promiscuity, pornography and homosexuality?

    .

    It is a conundrum and I think that among other things, self-professed Christians are far more likely to be hypocrites than Moslems. Can you imagine what it would be like if the Taliban captured a U.S. Marine and tried to sexually humiliate him with naked Afhan girls displaying their tits and private parts? I see the Marine begging for more of that sort of “torture”. On the other hand, I can’t imagine Muslim fighters raping American female soldiers if they happened to capture one. But American female soldiers have been documented as sexually humiliating Arab males in the name of duty to God and country (ostensibly). Or were the female American soldiers forced to do so against their will?

    Clearly, war creates complex male/female relationships, and all the moreso the more females get involved in the nitty gritty of warmaking. And those complexities evolve within the context of the underlying cultures which find themselves in conflict.

    Stan M.

    19 May 2009, 7:46 pm

28. Stan:

    There is no doubt that some women are exceptions to the rule(s) — rules being behavioral norms and tendencies of whatever origin that apply to most men and most women. But whether its Lyndie England or Hillary Clinton, these are still the handful of women who are trying to fit in with the boys. They are not transgressing anything except various segregations to achieve what men achieve — without much fuss — in the dominant culture… wherever.

    The liberal solution to the persistence of gender (we might even say, the existence of complimentary male and female subculture within any given culture) is to deny that men and women are different. But the radical feminists (and others) have acknowledged what we all know from experience — prior to our intellectual reflections about that experience — that men and women are different from one another. Their issue is the valuation of male-ness — however constituted — over female-ness. What’s unfortunate is that we moderns have no frame of reference with which to assess actually-existing gender except liberalism (with its progress-myth), a male political and ideological production from end to end, beginning with contract theory (which Carole Pateman has critiqued VERY well in her book, The Sexual Contract).

    It becomes paramount, then, to offer an alternative to a patriarchal, phallocentric point-of-view that critiques not what it is to be a woman (there has been a great deal published about this by women themselves), but what it is to be a man in this culture. My own method — at this point — is to study the recursive mutual influences of culture, nature, and personhood.

    Masculinity as we now know it was forged, and evolved, as a conquest-ideal; and so we have come to think of power-over as some essential masculine essence. Warfighting has become probative masculinity; and this is an aspect of war that is little remarked even by the left in its (generally shallow) critique of militarism (because many on the left still harbor masculine fantasies about the “enemy’s” comeuppance).

    Anecdotal accounts of seeming-exceptions are inherently inadequate because they cannot take into account the complexity of real people accommodating themselves to real power in actual circumstances too numerous to count.

    Gotta go to work. I can see the “consent” conversation cominmg down the pike at us… what is or is not against one’s will. More important is how are we pressed by circumstance to make accommodations to power, how do we pick and choose each day to get by? The difference between what males have to do to accommodate power and what females have to do is very telling, in all the varying forms of patriarchy. Seldom is anything a simple matter of choosing… this is the liberal reduction of human activity to a series of pristine choices. We are each finding our way; but the paths available to men and women are different, and even the same paths are different — more or less difficult — for men and women.

    20 May 2009, 5:42 am

29. Stan Moore:

    Stan’s comments are obviously valid. But it appears to me that an important point may be overlooked. There has to be an evolutionary advantage in our species for these differences. The history of our species is relatively short in geological and even in biological time. Males dominated in a hostile world. They dominated their environment, and they dominated their mates and households. With the advent of agriculture and cities and communities, they formed hierarchies that consolidated power for its own sake and then worked to maintain those hierarchies, whether they be commercial, religious, military, etc. This was the basis for human survival and “advancement” and it worked to make the species dominant on the entire planet. It created victims at every level, but the tradeoff was that even the victims tended to survive at higher rates than without the “protection” of the dominant male class.

    I live on a farm in Sonoma County, CA and my landlord grew up on the farm. He inherited the land and property and is a wealthy man on paper. He increases his wealth by exploitation of people and land and animals. He has a chicken house with 20,000 chickens packed together like sardines, pecking each other and producing eggs for sale to market. He cares nothing about the comfort of the chickens and is perfectly willing to provide them tortured lives to make a profit on the sale of the eggs. His farm labor is also exploited, as most farm labor is. The labor consists mostly of immigrants, including an exchange student, a female from Japan, who works like a dog day and night. He hires Latino immigrants to do other labor on his property. Even when he hires skilled white labor, he has the ability to force wages down. My landlord’s own former neighbor, a contractor, works for him at low wages because that is the only work the former neighbor can get and that is all the landlord will pay. It is exploitation up and down the line, and it bothers me. But the interesting thing is that the exploited workers themselves are happy to have jobs at all. They feel exploited, but not abused. They wish they had better pay and work conditions, but exploitation seems to be better than the alternative of starvation and homelessness.

    If women were in charge of the world — how different would the world be? Would people be more affluent or less affluent? Would the world’s wealth be fairly distributed or would inequalities prevail?

    If women gained control of the world, would they become power mad and dominant like men are now? There is a saying that “power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely”. Would this apply to women if the roles were reversed universally?

    In raptors, which are my primary passion in this world, the females do tend to be larger and more powerful than the males. A female golden eagle weighs about 12 pounds and is much more powerful than her 7 pound mate. In fact, he comes to her for help if an intruduing female enters the territory. A female eagle rules her world and she does it with power and violence because she is superior in those assets.

    If human women gained power, not necessarily by physical strenth, but by guile and maneuvering, would they try to consolidate power and form their own hierarchies? If “feminists” ruled the world, would they try to eliminate the men whom they sometimes so obviously despise, perhaps retaining a few specimens for sperm extraction?

    I don’t know the answers to these questions, and I don’t think we will ever know. Males have done such a thorough job of dominating society and unfortunately, the planet and its resources that they will lead civilization itself to destruction, I believe, in the foreseeable future and before female leadership can be thoroughly tested, or anything like it.

    Females as victims have an enormous ability to console, to nurture, to support and to endure. That is proven. Females can obviously manage households and they can manage businesses. But I think that human evolution has already determined the fate of our species. There is not enough time remaining to reform before our collapse, but the survivors of our societal collapse may very well have that opportunity.

    20 May 2009, 8:35 am

30. Stan Moore:

    see:

    http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/05/20-7

    Here is a new article by a woman journalist in a journal called “International Women’s Perspective” about the future of warfare.

    She seems to think a lot like me, or is it me thinking like her?

    Or are there universal concerns that are the province of neither male or female to the exclusion of the other?

    Stan M.

    20 May 2009, 9:34 am

31. Sean:

    Stan, greed is a broader brush than masculinity for sure. And maybe I don’t know where you’re headed with the focus on masculinity, but let me take a guess. I’ll guess that you’re suggesting man is more aggressive as the hunter and the marker of hunting territory, evolution-wise, and that such evolutionary roles are simply displaced onto imperial conquest in the present, since most men no longer hunt for sustenance and therefore hunting and territorial protection aren’t really valid outlets for those impulses in the present. So they’re sublimated, or extrapolated, or projected… as the case may be.

    I don’t disagree with such an analysis of human behavior, socially speaking. I’m just saying it seems more complex than that. I guess I’m saying that your argument is valid, but doesn’t explain everything satisfactorily for me. Why? I know and have known plenty of aggressive women who are eager to see empire expand and heathen slain. Clearly they’re not running on XY genes. Clearly they’re not running on hunter-territorialist latencies.

    I’d say it’s about greed triggered by fear, and the fear is primal and insect- / lizard-brain stuff that transcends social manners like politeness and consideration for one’s fellow human.

    Yes, greed is broader-brush than masculinity, because it applies to XY and XX equally. Greed is also an American social value, our culture exalts it and becomes overwhelmed by it every 20 years or so. Those of us who aren’t driven by such fear-based greed wonder how it is people behave in such a short-sighted, destructive manner.

    20 May 2009, 11:46 am

32. Sandy:

    At the risk of incurring ire here, I’ve always wondered why in the world women would want to join the armed forces in the first place. My conclusion is that sexuality comprises degrees, and “it takes all kinds to make a world.” Also, the armed forces offer job security of a sort.

    20 May 2009, 12:18 pm

33. Stan:

    I’ll guess that you’re suggesting man is more aggressive as the hunter and the marker of hunting territory, evolution-wise, and that such evolutionary roles are simply displaced onto imperial conquest in the present, since most men no longer hunt for sustenance and therefore hunting and territorial protection aren’t really valid outlets for those impulses in the present. So they’re sublimated, or extrapolated, or projected… as the case may be.

    You would guess wrongly then. Masculinity is a cultural construction. Inevitably and originally cultural. It can’t be pinned on biology, even though no one escapes biology.

    Human beings are genetically determined to not be genetically determined.

    20 May 2009, 4:19 pm

34. Stan Moore:

    I’m not exactly sure what Stan G.’s definition for “masculine” is. My dictionary gives as the primary definition “Male” and the second definition is: “having qualities appropriate to a man”. I guess having a penis would be a good starting point, but I cannot really say if a body builder is considered to be more masculine than a “nerd”. I used to know a guy years ago who was a physical “stud”. I would see him in the showers after work and he looked awesome, but he was so uncoordinated and mentally goofy and good natured that he probably would not have frightened a flea and could not have fought his way out of a wet paper bag.

    Is there masculinity in a lesbian relationship? Is a “butch dyke” considered to be more “masculine” within the female gender than her partner/mate? Was Cary Grant, a gay man, more masculine than Al Franken, a hetero wimp? That reminds me of an old Saturday Night Live sketch of a game show, called “Que Es Mas Macho?” that I thought was pretty funny at the time? I think the host was Bill Murray, and he would conduct the show in simple Spanish, asking contestants questions such as: “Que Es Mas Macho, Fernando Lamas o Ricardo Montalban?” and the contestants would see large photos of the men being assessed. Too bad it was before the career of Benecio Del Toro, who did a great job in a recent movie on Che Guevara, and interestingly portrayed Che as a warrior who also had compassion as a doctor and lover of humanity. I think that is an very interesting area in which Che Guevara was probably unique and special as a human being, and why his is still beloved by many.

    This (masculinity) issue seems like a complex issue and to me is not cut and dry. And the fact is that cultures change over time and so have the interrelationships between males and females in American society. Think about the “Archie Bunker” character of decades ago. I was appalled when I first saw that show “All in the Family” and could not believe my parents were laughing at that “humor” with Archie calling his wife, Edith, a “dingbat” and his son-in-law a “meathead”. I thought the level of disrespect was inappropriate for viewing as entertainment. But I saw no violence. Even earlier in television history the Jackie Gleason Show would show Jackie Gleason getting mad at his wife and threatening to smack her and verbalizing that threat, which was also supposed to be funny.

    I daresay that such behaviors would not be tolerated nowadays as humor, though a television movie might depict abuse as a social issue. Yet, in homes around America, women get physically and mentally and sexually abused by their mates far moreso than by strangers. Some judges find it impossible to dispense justice for those women and a woman who actually kills an abusive spouse can usually expect to spend significant time in prison, no matter how severely she was abused. Unfortunately, most women are more honest than most policemen, who literally can get away with murder by declaring a fear of imminent harm; whereas abused women often continue to be protective of their abusive mates and partners and if they do kill in self-defense they have a hard time making the severity of the threats understood by juries.

    It is a complex mess and often a psychological mess for many abused women who are lonely, have financial needs, have ability to forgive almost endlessly and who often have low self-esteem as a direct result of their abuse, creating an endless cycle of problems.

    I think society is evolving very slowly in a positive direction. One interesting component in the changes is the emergence of feminist attorneys, such as Gloria Allred, who are fearless and bold in protecting the rights and interests of their clients.

    Enough rambling…

    Stan M.

    20 May 2009, 10:36 pm

35. Gerry.Agnosia:

    STAN SAID:

    “You would guess wrongly then. Masculinity is a cultural construction. Inevitably and originally cultural. It can’t be pinned on biology, even though no one escapes biology.

    Human beings are genetically determined to not be genetically determined.”

    …

    My question is: How do you explain the almost universal patriarchal, sexist and overall domineering behavior demonstrated by men towards women throughout most if not all cultures in the course of human history?

    20 May 2009, 10:54 pm

36. DeAnander:

    @Gerry — one explanation would be that patriarchal cultures, being oriented towards violence and conquest, tend to displace and dominate less patriarchal neighbours; so that over time, one would expect the militaristic/violent cultures to expand and destroy more pacifistic alternatives. That’s one way to read history, as a kind of Gresham’s Law effect.

    The prevalence of patriarchy does seem to beg for explanation… but if we assume that patriarchal organisation of culture is inevitable because of testosterone (simplistic, but that’s the nub or kernel of the sociobiologists’ argument) then we have another problem: how then do we explain the significant number of cultures where women have had more influence, power, autarky, etc. than is normal under patriarchy? for example how did the people of Bougainville evolve a social order in which land tenure passes in the female line? How did the “Marumakkathayam system” evolve in Kerala? Why were the grandmothers and “aunties” so influential in some First Nations cultures? and so on. Even if we restrict ourselves to nonhuman primates we still have to ask why female Barbary macaques seem to be socially more domineering than males, and why these apes transmit social status in the female line.

    We have a history problem no matter how we slice it: there are enough patriarchal cultures, highly “successful” ones too (at conquest and cultural transmission), to make us wonder why patriarchy is so common and recurring — surely it must be “natural”? and yet there are enough matrilineal/matriarchal tendencies in human history to make us wonder *how* patriarchy came to be so predominant, since it clearly isn’t/wasn’t universal. I tend to suspect that there was a wide variety of adaptive social organisation strategies at one time, and that patriarchal/warlike cultures tended to simplify that palette of choices by overrunning their neighbours and forcing them into the patriarchal mold, in ever-expanding circles. But that’s just a WAG since none of us was around to witness these early phases of human history and the archaeological record is, to say the least, ambiguous and subject to a lot of interpretation. Gerda Lerner’s _The Creation of Patriarchy_ is a worthwhile read. Here’s an interview with Lerner which sums up her main points:
    

    Greek philosophy, Greek science, and the Bible are the mainstays of the idea systems on which Western civilization is founded, and which pretend, or assert, that they explain the world to us, right? These systems all took the subordination of women for granted, because at the time they were created that subordination had already been completed. And that is the subject of my book, The Creation of Patriarchy — to show the historic origins and the steps that were taken in order to create patriarchy as a system.

    There are also a lot of shades of patriarchy. Even in the most apparently egalitarian cultures (like the !Kung of the Kalahari) there’s eyewitness testimony to sexual harassment and bullying of females by males. And even in deeply patriarchal cultures there are niches of power and influence for women (often related to caste, class, hierophantic/religious structures). In some cases relics of pre-patriarchal or pre-conquest memes stubbornly persist (such as the Marianist tradition in Catholicism, which suggests the incomplete assimilation of some kind of earlier Goddess-faith).

    And then there is fairly well attested research that suggests a strongish link between testosterone and aggression/violence, so that we can’t imho entirely rule out the influence of “raging hormonal imbalances” in male behaviour, particularly in adolescence (a time of rapid hormonal development). But how the culture perceives such behaviour — what the culture *does* with e.g. restless youthful male energy — and what the consequences of male violence are — that varies widely. In patriarchal societies there is a culture of impunity for violence committed by men against women and children; in matrilineal societies such bad behaviours might be punished by shunning or exile from the kingroup. In some traditional cultures, women can divorce their husbands on short notice if the husband is cruel, lazy, violent, impotent, unfaithful etc. So, while the influence of the male-attribute cluster of hormones on behaviours such as aggression, cruelty, violence, infidelity, etc may be worth considering, what’s more interesting is that human cultures vary widely on how *acceptable* such behaviours are and what sanctions (if any) should be imposed on those who indulge in them.

    Notorious misogynist extrema like the witch-hunts of Europe, foot-binding in China, stoning and acid-throwing in some Muslim countries, sati in India, seem to accompany “advanced” imperial patriarchal culture. Why this hostility and sanctioned violence towards women should develop independently in several different “high” civilisations is a question worth asking; but I doubt that hormones alone can explain such refined, systematized, ritualised *cultural* cruelties.

    21 May 2009, 2:12 am

37. Sean:

    Gee, Stan, I’m not picking a fight. I’m wondering what you’re aiming at, and so I guessed wrong. I can’t be faulted for a bad guess when you’re not spelling it out.

    Masculinity is a social construct, eh? That’s interesting. I have to wonder how someone concludes as much with such authoritative certainty. As I see things, you’d have to be around for the first human grouping and witness their behavior, and investigate that behavior personally with pointed questions that uncover true motives and not just whatever conscious excuses the actor can provide. If you’ve managed to do that, you’re the first anthropologist to have the powers of time-travel and forensic interview wrapped up into one person.

    It’s an interesting theory, but I will hazard another wrong guess and offer my surmise that you’re being coy because it’s the subject of your upcoming book. That’s fine, you don’t want anyone stealing your publishable writings so you keep mum.

    I’m interested to learn how masculinity is both globally at fault for so many problems, and yet also a social construct fabricated for some purpose. The theory is interesting — a social construct that is destructive, yet propagated for millennia.

    I guess I’ll have to wait for your book.

    21 May 2009, 9:52 am

38. Sean:

    PS to Stan — I’d be interested in hearing how your theory squares with the observations Robert Greene made in his collection called The 48 Laws of Power. In that book he collects 48 laws of human interaction where people wrangle for power over other people by direct and indirect ways, by physical and verbal means. Greene’s book shows plenty of examples of women behaving in a cruelly manipulative way, without being the least bit “masculine” as you are using that term.

    21 May 2009, 10:04 am

39. Gerry.Agnosia:

    Thank you, DeAnander. I never even considered that patriarchy may have had its origins in tribal deracination.

    I’ll be adding Gerda Lerner to my ever-increasing list of “Writers to Read” since I started reading y’all. I literally have an education for a lifetime ahead of me.

    21 May 2009, 10:25 am

40. Stan Moore:

    Why had patriarchy dominated the world of humanity even though alternatives have succeeded on small scales for limited durations of time?

    I would say that if you look at evolution as a testing for “fitness” over very long periods of time, and that the goal of every living organism is to replicate its genes to the maximum over time, then it is clear that patriarchal societies have been more successful at accomplishing that fundamental life goal within the framework of existing conditions over long periods of time.

    Jared Diamond studied a parallel principle in his book “Guns, Germs, and Steel” based on a question posed to him by an indigenous man of New Guinea, asking “why does the white man have so much cargo”. Why did Spaniards subdue Aztecs and Mayans and other cultures and destroy evolved civilizations and why did they want to do so? Why did American Indians, once exposed to products brought by white men, want to switch from bows and arrows to guns and from boiling water in bison stomachs to iron pots? Ultimately, the Indians saw fitness advantages in European civilization, and only later figured out that those advantages included the disadvantage of subjugation and land theft and even genocide. Ultimately, patriarchal societies have been more powerful and might trumps good. It should be evident in the world all around us that power and might trump justice, goodness, fraternity, equality, fairness, or any other measure of equity. That is what power is all about, though usually power is tempered by other considerations, if for practical reasons alone. Capitalism has worked best when a trickle-down effect makes the underclasses more comfortable and lest desperate and makes society more productive and allows the powerful to skim huge wealth from the top and is thus much more beneficial to all.

    I have not studied historical matriarchal societies, which I suspect would thrive in their own environments, but which could not persist in a larger, more hostile environments where male-dominated humans had advantages of power rooted in male physical dominance. These incidences of history are noteworthy, but so miniscule in their impact as to almost be irrelevant at large scales of time and place.

    Testosterone is part of it. But females thrived in patriarchal environments within a framework of their own roleplaying. My mother was my major influence as a child and I loved her and hated my father. I recall that once I told my mother, when I was around ten years old, that I wanted to kill my father with a knife as he slept in a drunken state because he had hit her in front of me. I wanted to kill him, but my mother told me that I must not do that and that she could make up with him in bed. And she knew at the time that she was dying of breast cancer and felt that I would need him for support after she was gone. She did die of breast cancer in 1967 when I was eleven years old. Many years later, during a heated discussion with my father, I told him that I wish I had killed him back then and that becoming an orphan and perhaps adopted by a foster family would have been better than staying with him, because I would have been wanted by the foster parents. I tried to resolve my relationship with my father several times, but within the last year I discovered how much he continues to hate me and I asked him and my step-mother to leave (they were visiting me in California after driving out from Texas) and I do not expect to see or have dealings with them ever again. I pretty much sealed the deal by formally disassociating from their religion, which was the religion of my mother. And my mother had taught me that the woman’s role was in submission to her husband, even as the husband was in (theoretical) submission to Christ. So, it has been a sometimes painful and circular experience for me.

    If the world was dominated by women, it could only be because men allowed it. I have two cats, a brother and a sister, named Boris and Natasha. Boris used to pick play-fights with Natasha and he would utterly dominate her and make her scream with angst. She acted as if he was killing her. She left for days. Both like to play-fight. Now Boris allows Natasha to stalk him, charge him, and knock him over despite the fact that she is half his size. He chases and jumps her, but much more gently than he used to. I hear them romping through the house at night and then they come up to my bed and curl up together and groom each other. Boris is more powerful and could easily dominate his sister any time he wants, but he likes her companionship and so he chooses not to dominate all the time. Any matriarchal society in which men allow women to control things is only done because men feel comfortable in that setting and see advantages in it. I don’t think it will happen on a large scale because men tend to see advantages in dominance moreso than they see advantages in equality or submission.

    But there are varying degrees and dynamics within this conceptual and historic framework, and some men can be more just than some women, some kings can be fair and equitable and so on and so forth. It is the Big Picture that tells the story, though. We can find mutations in biological evolution, such as albino hawks and five legged calves and snakes with two heads and triads of mated adults, but the Big Picture tells what works on the larger scale over long periods of time.

    Stan Moore

    21 May 2009, 11:46 am

41. Gerry.Agnosia:

    SEAN SAID:

    “I’m interested to learn how masculinity is both globally at fault for so many problems, and yet also a social construct fabricated for some purpose. The theory is interesting — a social construct that is destructive, yet propagated for millennia.”

    …

    You mean social constructs like slavery? Colonization? Human sacrifice? I don’t disagree with what you’re proposing entirely as I have a similar interest and lack of understand of what Stan means as well. But for the sake of your argument may I suggest that you reprhase your counter-point and decrease what could easily be perceived as a condescending writing style in your posts?

    …

    Also, where did this rumor that Stan is writing another book come from? If it is true it is news to me.

    Personally I’m still waiting for the Humanure Guide DeAnanader hinted at on European Tribune. *poke*

    21 May 2009, 1:14 pm

42. Gerry.Agnosia:

    @SEAN:

    On the point of Robert Greene’s [who as a historian, social engineer and sociologist I find awesome] book, “The 48 Laws of Power”, the example of women behaving just as badly as coercively as men throughout reinforces Stan’s point of women having to take different and often more difficult measures to compromise with Power Structures.

    21 May 2009, 1:19 pm

43. Shaukat:

    “I’m interested to learn how masculinity is both globally at fault for so many problems, and yet also a social construct fabricated for some purpose. The theory is interesting — a social construct that is destructive, yet propagated for millennia.’

    Sean, I think a plausible answer to your question would be that masculinity was not deliberately designed or fabricated by anyone for some specific purpose, but rather functions as an ideology which reflects and legitimates an underlying division of labor and social power, similar to how free trade or mercantilist ideology reflected a specific international division of labor social power.

    How this sexual division of labor was first established is, as stated by Deander, unclear, though anthropological evidence does offer some interesting theories. For example, in her book Patriarchy and Accumulation, Maria Mies offers an explanation based on the work of the anthropologist Elizabeth Fischer, who argues that full fledged male dominance and the sexual subordination of women arose when pastoralists domesticated animals for the purpose of breeding. Thus, Fischer theorizes that the deprivation of the animal’s sexual freedom and the castration and killing of weaker cattle likely led to the emergence of an ideology based on sexual appropriation after men started to observe their own generative capacities and began to engage in the kidnapping and rape of women while invading other communities.

    As to why masculinity persists and continues to be propagated, I think a partial answer would be that the conquest themes of masculinity and patriarchy have been incorporated by, and interlock with, capitalist ideology, though the latter does not necessarily supersede the former.

    21 May 2009, 2:44 pm

44. James M:

    @Sean: You don’t have to wait.

    21 May 2009, 2:56 pm

45. Stan:

    The non-biological evolution of human society that differentiates it from other species is the evolution of a remarkably plastic culture. This is supra-biological.

    Anthropology has been helpful in denaturalizing culture by showing how very different cultures can be within the same Homo sapien genome.

    Human individual plasticity is simultaneously a determiniant and a reflection of this plasticity of culture. Culture, personhood, and our environment can be teased out as subjects for analysis in our thinking and in our communication (verbal-textual-linguistic communication, though there are many signs between many things that are not lingusitic). But in the world, these categories are neither extricable nor independent. The irresistable urge to (1) conceive of the world in this analytically-separated way and (2) accept analytical separation as the most valid way of knowing, is itself a cultural norm… one that appears to us as “natural.”

    Oftentimes, our urge to consult history or archeology or (more problematic) pre-history as something more authoritative than observation of our present, complex, and constantly emerging circumstances, is an attempt — acknowledged or not — to “trump” points of view that make us uncomfortable. But there is no way to conclude, for example, that biology accounts for 20% of behavior and culture accounts for 70% of behavior, and 10% is “aberration”… or whatever additive formula you want to apply. Society is not a pallette where colors are simply mixed. It is safe, however, to say — I think — that there is not a single person anywhere for whom the unfolding character of her existence is not influenced by biology-culture unsplit.

    We are physically embodied beings, and culturally conditions beings, at the same time.

    Moreover, we do have an example of culture that is readily available to us for observation and reflection right now… and that is our culture. In that culture we can establish empirically many of the kinds of differences between various groups and kinds, though empirical difference does not tell us much about origins — which time swallows up and conceals, and it certainly doesn’t tell us anything about what we “ought” to do, about what is right or wrong. I’m not concluding anything about the comments here, because I can’t see into the minds of the authors; but in our discussions and debates over the last few years (De has been along on this conversation with me as a reliable and insightful mentor ever since she consented to edit Sex & War), there is a tendency to withdraw into this blind zone of speculation that is the past in order to deflect the discussion away from observable behavior in the present.

    There is also the tendency to deploy the “counterfactuals,” anecdotal accounts (often paradoxically generalized), like “women can be violent, too.” I don’t jump to the conclusion that everyone who says these things is being disingenuous, even though I think the argument is disingenuous. Mimesis, after all, is a huge aspect of how we learn and adpat to our culture. Exceptions to a stated tendency do not disprove a tendency. They just disprove any oversimplification of the statement of a tendency.

    Social power is part of culture, but it is not all of culture; any more than competition and violence are the motive force in evolution (symbiosis and cooperation are far more common than we imagine, because we have been brainwashed by a century and a half of social darwinism that emphasizes competition). Nor is social power enginered from the top. It is an overgrowth; but as history has shown, power waxes and wanes. The actual people in positions of power are juicy, vulnerable bodies just like us, and they get sick and die just like us, and their ability to adapt into positions of power is not the same as them being in caculated control of the society. Barack Obama, as I have said before, is the least free man in the world in one respect. The influences of our actions exceed our span of control. Culture is constituted by and contained within systemic structures that are supra-personal. Personhood is diverse, but still contained within and shaped by culture. Culture impinges on nature — the industrial revolution as one example — whereupon the changes wrought in nature influence culture, which alters personhood… it’s recursive, dynamic, and stable… until it’s not.

    I can only speculate about the origins of patriarchy. It didn’t happen in one instant at one point like some big bang. I feel safe in assuming that various divisions of labor set the situation up for the gradual imposition of hierarchies, just because that’s a safe assumption — that division of labor open the door to hierarchical dominance.

    I don’t have to speculate about something like military culture and masculinity as it is currently constructed (and it is a cultural construction, that’s not to say that that is all it is). We learn masculinity and femininity from our culture. That doesn’t seem like a risky (or presumptuous) assertion at all.

    Masculinity defined as conquest, being more specific now, is a notion that we can get a historical handle on, because it is enshrined in the cultural productions of the past. The Iliad? Beowulf? War movies? You name it. Nancy Hartsock’s book, Money, Sex, and Power, unpacks the warrior-hero convention very nicely by studying Greek classics.

    Sorry again for the rapid-fire nature of these comments. I get on the computer before work in the morning, so I have little time to make myself as clear as I’d like. I ain’t mad at anybody… though text is a dangerous medium in this regard, because it can seem abrupt. Just hurrying generally.

    22 May 2009, 6:21 am

46. Stan Moore:

    I think that Stan Goff’s comments above are a great demonstration that “isms” like feminism are self-applied filters that change and shape and color one’s view of the world, its history, its potential, etc. Reality is different for different people because they tend to look through various filters. I think Stan Goff has jumped from one extreme filter (hyper-mascunity/militarism) to the opposite extreme (feminism) and so within one lifetime his views have changed 180 degrees.

    And yes, there are obviously and necessarily differences in perception by many individuals about what is right, what is wrong, what is advantageous, etc.

    As Stan pointed out in his book on Sex and War, black women feared the police more than they feared men, so they tended to filter their appraisal of O.J. Simpson’s guilt through that lens. White women tended to fear men in general more than the police, so they considered O.J. guilty by looking through the same evidence with different filters.

    Feminists do not represent the worldview of most women. My mother and every other woman I ever knew in my childhood would never, ever, ever approve of abortion, even to save the life of a pregnant woman. To them, abortion is murder and not justified under any circumstance. Many, many women feel that way. But my mother worked outside the home and I am sure she would have felt that equal wages for equal work was necessary and important. She certainly did not approve of my father beating her when he was drunk.

    With the feminist filter in place, you can review world history and your appraisal will be altered compared to viewing the same history through a different filter.

    Most feminists would surely believe that their excercise of feminism and attempts to “liberate” the world from bondage to masculinity, violence and dominaton to be a good thing. Other persons may see abortion as evil, insubordination to be wrong and against the laws of god, and a collaborative mindset to be inefficient and thus burdensome.

    It is all a matter of perspective. I have gone to environmental meetings such as the Public Interest Environmental Law Conference at the University of Oregon and seen committed young vegans sincerely arguing against the “cruelty” of eating meat or taking animal parts for human subsistence.
    Of course, they may very well plow up the habitat for other life forms in order to grow their gardens — I know of an organic commercial vegetable garden in my area that obtained its water illegally by damming a local creek and putting endangered trout at risk in the name of organic farming. That inconvenient truth escaped the filter of the vegan community, but not of wildlife advocates.

    Would an end of worldwide violence and domination be a good thing? A lot of men and women think so, and disagree as to how to accomplish that goal. But a lot of the violence comes from competition for survival resources due to overpopulation for a given area. I have yet to notice feminists promote zero population growth or sustainable human population numbers, and their approval of abortion is not an ecology or environmentally oriented worldview, but a matter of concern for the convenience of the woman who has become pregnant.

    In short, I think feminism has its good points. All of us, including all men, are victims at some level and I think the feminist worldview attempts to eradicate victimhood in general. But the feminist worldview also includes its own shackles.

    But it is valuable to consider reality through various filters so that (hopefully) the better points of each can be reflected in an evolving society.

    At least that is my personal view, through my own life filters.

    Stan Moore

    22 May 2009, 10:07 am

47. Henry:

    Re: Inevitably and originally cultural.

    This argument just shoves the difficulty further back: “originally cultural….” What is the “original” culture and how were its characteristics determined?

    Re: Human beings are genetically determined to not be genetically determined.

    This very elliptical statement implies that sex is not exclusively biological. The “scientific” bias of today assumes human beings are exclusively biological, culture being simply a more complex epiphenomenon. We are supposed to be clever monkeys, subject to Darwinian pressures of adaptation, and that is pretty much all. Technology does not change a thing in such a view, it just makes matters more complex and dangerous. Such a mentality does not conceive of reality–this is the root of the issue–as being more than physical. Biology, economics, culture–it is all just atoms and electrons; the rest is fantasy. At the end of the road is death, and lights out. Meaning is what you “create” here and now, within the framework of nothingness.

    22 May 2009, 11:51 am

48. Stan:

    @Stan Moore, there are a lot of things claiming the name “feminism.” How are you defining it?

    22 May 2009, 5:27 pm

49. Stan Moore:

    Hi Stan –

    I have never discussed feminism in any other venue than this one and do not have a profound personal interest in feminism or feminist philosophy for its own sake.

    While I am certain that feminism could be described and defined in various ways, I have been discussing feminism within the context of remarks by yourself primarily. To be brief, it appears that the context of recent discussions here portray a mindset that focuses on masculinity as inherently dangerous and says that femininity offers a necessary alternative. It tends to focus on “black and white” areas instead of “gray” areas of understanding. Feminism is thus a mindset that follows from that starting point, from which followed assessments of evolution, world history, intergender relationships, colonialism, all sorts of domination, etc. All of these phenomena are real, and feminism provides a filter by which the bearer of that philosphy interprets and understands the world around themselves. It also provides a bias against alternate understandings. And it underlies an agenda that attempts to change the world according to its understand thereof.

    That is how I am defining/describe feminism in the context of what I have read here.

    I hope this answers your question and I invite alternate views or even disagreement that is illuminating and constructive, as I have found discussions here to be.

    Stan M.

    22 May 2009, 8:04 pm

50. Gerry.Agnosia:

    @STAN [GOFF]:

    I doubt this post will garner a response, but I wouldn’t be a good ‘student’ if I didn’t try to ask questions…

    My interpretation of Stan Moore’s argument isn’t that he’s questioning feminism itself, but questioning your viewpoint that feminism is an objective or pragmatic ‘lense’ to analyze, connect and maybe even repair the world’s greater issues with.

    I am currently reading “Sex & War” and just finished reading “Energy War” and I have enjoyed how you linked patriarchy, racism, ecocide, Peak Oil and other greater issues together but I imagine that like a lot of folks — including Stan Moore and Sean — we’re trying to grasp the conclusion you’ve set forth many times that masculinity and its linked ideologies stand as the crooked foundation of these issues and radical feminism may be the best means to study and reset the foundation.

    The other issue seems to be the argument over whether ‘masculinity’ and ‘femininity’ are natural/static or cultural/dynamic… Honestly I think neither side is going to convince the other as from what I’m seeing the argument has become philosophical rather than scientific… Shifting back and forth between the same points, rephrased, each time… [And we all know the difficulty of trying to alter someone's philosophical beliefs through debate over the internet.]

    Anyway, that’s just my $0.02.

    22 May 2009, 9:00 pm

51. Gerry.Agnosia:

    …Andddd, I didn’t actually ask a question in that last post. D’oh!

    I guess what I’m personally asking is if you believe that radical feminism as an analysis and method is absolutely objective, more of a positive subjective viewpoint that has the potential to overthrow and take the place of a greatly more dangerous viewpoint or …?

    This question has less to do with the debate in this thread and more to do with the multitude of questions I find myself wondering about as I read “Sex & War”.

    22 May 2009, 9:41 pm

52. James M:

    I’ll tell you how I define it: Feminism for me is the inclusion of certain perspectives that heretofore were invalidated / suppressed by the (male, as it so happens) power structure, due to their penchant for intellectually deconstructing that edifice and its power relations. And it is too varied at this point, as Stan G. implies, to really be one unified ideology or “ism.” You seem, Stan M., to place an outsized emphasis on its abortion stance, which is only one part of it. And if you include the feminist perspective(s) into your worldview, it doesn’t prevent you from being an environmentalist or pro-population-reduction or whatever.

    And I would disagree that it necessarily is always a “filter,” something designed to only include various inputs and exclude others – used properly, I think of it as more like a puzzle piece. A big one, but just a piece.

    “Feminists do not represent the worldview of most women.” It’s interesting to me that no one here seems to have made that claim, though I carry the sneaking suspicion that most women, if faced with a rollback of the advances (cultural, legislative, etc.) spurred on by feminism in the 20th century and beyond, would go on strike and / or riot in the streets. I would, were I in their shoes.

    To the earlier point about systems of domination and exploitation being advantageous in a Darwinian sense: Maybe. (And btw, the meme of Darwinism being equated / reduced to “might makes right” has been extensively challenged and debunked, from what I’ve read.) But stretch the timeline of civilization (the polite word for our system of domination & exploitation) out long enough (say, into the latter part of this century,) and you might – as many scientists & thinkers are suggesting – see this species of ours hitting its apocalyptic, evolutionary dead end. On the other hand, absent a comet smacking into us or some such thing, human beings living in cooperative / non-exploitative / ecologically-homeostatic societies could carry on & propagate their genes practically indefinitely.

    22 May 2009, 10:08 pm

53. xenia:

    stan moore, malthusianist ideas like are ultimately genocidal, and imply that there is worthy vs unworthy life. o

    of course, the family of any (presumably white and relatively wealthy) administrator who would implement such policies would never be touched. somehow, it’s always the browner and/or the poorer of this earth that “breed like rabits” and need to be controlled. jared diamond, as successful as he is, is a cynic and i cannot take him seriously in his biologistic fantasies. (btw,
    are you really implying that women who support access to abortion should be malthusianist? wow.)

    i also do not believe that most native americans died through the spreading of germs, aka hand of providence. easy biologism does not explain why, let’s say, so many people in central america are mestizos and have clear physiological and cultural aspects stemming from the time before the conquest. it does not explain why so much of peruvian population still speaks quechua, aymara etc. in order for people to be exterminated, it is not enough to unleash germs on them: starvation, severe legal restrictions and deprivation of their land is necessary.

    need i say more? malthusian solutions cause a very unnerving sensation to both my mind and my guts.

    23 May 2009, 5:19 am

54. xenia:

    ps personally, i cannot afford a child now or at any point in the last 10 yrs. if i have to have an abortion because of poverty, i would not precisely call it “convenience.” also, which god-damned authority should tell a raped woman that she must keep the child?

    23 May 2009, 5:59 am

55. Stan Moore:

    In my view, the world is a complex place and that includes humans, their societies, their behaviors and the evolution thereof. To say (in effect) that testosterone is some sort of toxic hormone that wreaks havoc at everything it comes into contact with is like saying that the gene for Caucasian heritage makes a man evil, as some blacks have asserted. But black emancipation was only accomplished through white acquiescence due to the work and the deaths, no less, of committed white people who operated on conscience and not chromosomes.

    If testosterone was the primary influence on male behavior, and little else mattered, then armies would not have chaplins and medics. They would self-destruct and war amongst their own members when they did not have foreign enemies to attack. But we know that is not the case.

    And if testosterone were the key factor in domination, then Norway would be trying to dominate Sweden or Finland because Norwegian men in the Norwegian society and armed forces have the same testosterone levels as American men and we are attempting (and largely succeeding) at dominating not only our immediate neighbors but the world at large, consisting of billions of humans.

    Inconvenient realities intervene with such a mindset. Even in the US, men who enter the armed forces have to be reconditioned mentally and emotionally to kill, even in wartime. And in participating in brutal warfare, many, many men sustain emotional and mental harm (stresses) that can literally ruin their lives and affect them negatively for years and years afterwards, despite the presence of testosterone in their bodies.

    Yet American women are similarly supportive of domination through Empire and have little to say about the root causes of conflict. I see the group Code Pink protesting war, but I tend to think they should be named “Cold Pink” because they do not address consumption of resources and overpopulation as major issues. But how could they — Medea Benjamin is a merchant herself selling “baubles and beads” (not literally) or nonessential goods that consumer women desire in a highly consumptive economy. And that (in principle) is the root of the wars that she is protesting by putting herself repetively into the media spotlight.

    And it is of interest to note that as American society has evolved and women have obtained greater equality for themselves, the participation of women, sans testosterone, into the military has increased, as Stan Goff also pointed out in his “Sex and War” book.

    I am not saying that testosterone is not a major factor in human behavior and culture and history, because indisputably it is. But it is one of many factors. And men, singly and collectively, have been a force for good, conscience, justice, fraternity, and yes, feminism as much as they have been a force for war, conquest, domination, and harm. Think Pete Seeger and compare with Joan Baez.

    But men and women can be forces for war and for empire, even if they happen to be from formely oppressed racial groupings. Think Barack Obama and compare with Condoleeza Rice. Think Dick Cheney and think Lynne Cheney (Dick’s wife and confidante). Think Michael Savage and think Anne Coulter.

    Lastly, victims spawn more victims. Men whose fathers beat their mothers are often wife-beathers themselves. Children born to drug-addicted mothers are often drug addicts themselves.

    The causes of victomhood are far more complex than the presence of testosterone, though that is a major factor. There is no single universal truth and the fact that some can survive their victimhood and thrive is an indicator that we can develop tools to work with to change society and males have every bit as much to offer as females. One definition of “masculinity” is “the traits of the male” and those traits include a range of good and bad possibilities. The trick is to harness the good in all of us and not be overly fixated on what our gender, color, nationality, etc. is.

    That is how I see it, but I certainly am open to other ideas.

    Stan Moore

    23 May 2009, 10:49 am

56. Stan:

    While I am certain that feminism could be described and defined in various ways, I have been discussing feminism within the context of remarks by yourself primarily. To be brief, it appears that the context of recent discussions here portray a mindset that focuses on masculinity as inherently dangerous and says that femininity offers a necessary alternative.

    Nein.

    It says that masculinity is constructed (from whatever origins) as conquest, but not solely as that. It is the masculinity-as-conquest meme that makes masculinity a problem from the point of view of peacemaking. But nowhere in my book did I ever say that femininity is the answer to the problems with masculinity. In fact, I quoted Jessica Benjamin iirc as saying that we should beware of the “reactive valorization of femininity.” Each of these poles is defined by the other, the way left is defined against right. They are complimentary — which is not the core problem, though striving for something more akin to “mutuality” might be a more helpful way of thinking about it. The core problem is that this is a hierarchical complimentarity, in which one sex is devalued as a full member of the community and one sex gains social advantages from that devaluation.

    No Sacred Feminine here.

    The issue is torture, and I suggest there is a gender connection that is relevant to the public discussion about torture… as a practice and a topic. We published a movie review thing about Man on Fire, the Denzel blockbuster, a good while ago. The entire film was an apology for torture as a necessary practice to seal off Safe World from Dark World. Take a peek at that, and pay attention to the role of the “tempo task” that knocks us all as a society back to a patriarchal default. The “tempo task” is the core of the argument for torture; and in this film the sexual allusions — along with how the audience was supposed to respond to them — present some very familiar archetypes on masculinity constructed by conquest, yes, but more: a masculinity that crosses the permable boundaries of class or ethnicity — and held together by the belief that it is Man’s duty to be the agent of redemptive violence. Even the Taliban share that with the 10th Mountain Division.

    “We may be enemies, but enemy-killing is still a man’s game…” even when a small minority of women participate. Male power doesn’t mean female absence or opposition, but female accommodation to a male-dominated world, based on (justifiable) fear and (often inescapable) dependency. This comparing women’s actions with men’s is as liberally dishonest as claiming that black rage against white power is “racism,” equivalent to white racism. No account of power, and a whole lot of defensive bullshit.

    23 May 2009, 8:41 pm

57. Stan:

    Obama did not shut down the practice of torture, Nairn observes, but “merely repositioned it”, restoring it to the American norm, a matter of indifference to the victims. “[H]is is a return to the status quo ante,” writes Nairn, “the torture regime of [president Gerald] Ford through [president Bill] Clinton, which, year by year, often produced more US-backed strapped-down agony than was produced during the Bush/Cheney years”.

    FULL by Chomsky

    Of course, there is still no account of gender; but he explodes the Obama change-myth. All the history Chomsky describes is the history not simply of power in the US, but of male power in the US. When the left decides to include this as reflexively — and with the same clarity (and not its simple adopotion of pomo liberalism that leaves sex unexamined as power) — as it includes accounts of class and race, then I will begin again to take the left more seriously.

    Doesn’t mean I don’t agree with what is being said… about class, race, empire, et al. It’s just that there’s this elephant…

    And here is from Cockburn on Obama (re my own contention that Afghanistan is Obama’s Vietnam, only he’ll likely survive to be both JFK and LBJ):

    How long does it take a mild-mannered, antiwar, black professor of constitutional law, trained as a community organizer on the South Side of Chicago, to become an enthusiastic sponsor of targeted assassinations, “decapitation” strategies and remote-control bombing of mud houses the far end of the globe?

    There’s nothing surprising here. As far back as President Woodrow Wilson in the early twentieth century, American liberalism has been swift to flex imperial muscle, to whistle up the Marines. High explosive has always been in the hormone shot.

    The nearest parallel to Obama in eager deference to the bloodthirsty counsels of his counter-insurgency advisors is John F. Kennedy. It is not surprising that bright young presidents relish quick-fix, “outside the box” scenarios for victory.

    Whether in Vietnam or Afghanistan the counsels of regular Army generals tends to be drear and unappetizing: vast, costly deployments of troops by the hundreds of thousand, mounting casualties, uncertain prospects for any long-term success – all adding up to dismaying political costs on the home front.

    FULL

    24 May 2009, 8:52 am

58. BuddhalovesPaine:

    Stan Goff’s book reminds me of a book written by Erich Fromm attempting the explain Nazism. I read Fromm’s book word for word because it was a subject that I was already familiar with. But one thing that I see a bit differently is the role of conspiracy in the military. I base my premise not on personal experience, but to me there is a smoking gun that indicates that the conspiracies in the military are not “contingent”. I believe that was the way Stan phrased it.
    The smoking gun for me is the attack on the USS Liberty in 1967. The evidence that this attack was deliberate is overwhelming. Look in to it yourself if you have any doubt. The deliberateness of this attack then raises so many questions. Israel is in no way shape or form an independent country. It receives billions from the US officially and reputedly billions more unofficially. Why would it deliberately attack a US naval vessel? To me it is inconceivable that they would launch such an attack unless they were ordered to. Why on earth would people in the US government order an attack on a US naval vessel? Well some of my friends think the answer is that the attack was supposed to have been blamed on the Egyptians so that the US could have entered the Seven Day war on the side of Israel. I mentioned to them then why did the planes that attacked the ship not have Egyptian markings? It would seem to me that such deception is the minimum that would have been needed to pull off such a false flag attack. The use of Migs rather than Skyhawks or Mirages would also have been a prudent choice. So that tells me this attack was never designed to be sold as a false flag attack.
    Then a phony investigation was ordered. It came to a conclusion that was recognized as false from day one.
    There is a huge difference between this investigation and the one for 9-11 or the JFK murder. The people involved came clean and admitted to others that they were ordered to do a phony investigation. Why? Does anyone have any guesses? Well I have my own idea and perhaps I am wrong why but this event to me indicates much more that just contingent or ad hoc conspiracies in the highest levels of the US military and the US government. To me it indicates an ongoing criminal conspiracy. Just like the Costra Nostra.
    Now there are many possible critisims that can be directed against such a view but I think that they can all be answered. Well at least the ones that I have faced so far. Maybe some one here can give some news reasons why such a view is unlikely to be true that I have not thought about yet.
    Since the Generals have been protecting my freedom so long, God Bless them on this Memorial Day weekend, perhaps I should not critisize their work.

    24 May 2009, 4:02 pm

59. Stan Moore:

    see: http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=13716

    Here is a very good essay that should be addressed to Obama’s delirious supporters under the theme: “Don’t be happy. Worry.”

    Those members of the U.S. military who joined to protect “freedom” are going to realize soon enough that their efforts were in vain on the domestic front.

    Stan M.

    24 May 2009, 6:45 pm

60. latte lenya:

    For me, feminism is really more a dynamic than a definition. Definitions are abstract and seemingly static, and the experience of being female demands a different, even fluid, response to reality, if part of being a feminist means defending one’s right to be fully human. But it’s hard to make an argument without defining terms, so my definition of feminism is the notion/idea/ideology that females are fully human. It means acknowledging that living as fully human in this world is a stance that brings struggle. It means acknowledging sexism, both external and internal, as an oppressive force that will take, through violence either implicit or explicit, a woman’s humanity away. It snuffs our power, our intelligence, our physical strength, our voices, our ideas. I say ‘force’ as if it’s disembodied, which of course it is not. Males are positioned as the agents of sexism, and they look like they’re the beneficiaries of sexism, but really it’s a system that robs both males and females of their full humanity and we need each other to get beyond it. What getting ‘beyond it’ means brings us back to fluidity…so different one from the other, but each and all in Martin Luther King’s ‘inextricable web of mutuality.’
    This can be a hard conversation for males and females to have together. Men can get defensive about it, and likewise women can forget that sexism is a system that we were all trained in together. We all have many identities, some of which position us as the ‘oppressor,’ some the ‘oppressed.’ Nobody has the moral high ground, really.
    It’s not hard to follow the argument from masculinity to torture—it’s a straight line. But as Americans, or even as people with the leisure to discuss this in this way on the Internet, we’re the ‘good Germans’ here. I, a female, a feminist, a radical feminist, even, work hard to pay my taxes to keep the bombs falling and the victims screaming. I fund the empire as I watch it kill us. In this dynamic, I am clearly the oppressor, and although not as active as those (men) in uniform, morally just as culpable.
    My point is that in all these power dynamics—gender, class, ‘race’—the system that divides us along these arbitrary lines (and some, like race, are pure inventions) robs the oppressor along with the oppressed, and what’s really powerful is when both oppressor and oppressed figure out that the system that pits them against each other is more the problem. This is not to scramble the issues (black anti-white racism, for instance), or to create equivalency where there is none, but the ultimate goal is to get to a place where former enemies can ally their thinking about how to create a better world.

    24 May 2009, 10:29 pm

61. Stan Moore:

    I can understand how this person who labels herself latte lenya can feel this way. It makes sense when looking through a certain filter. But what does being “fully human” entail? Does that entail the right to sexual liberty (as men often enjoy) resulting in pregnancy (a “burden” males do not endure, from a certain perspective) and then the right to terminate the pregnancy at will, thus taking the life of an unborn human? Many women (not just men) would not call that being “fully human”, but a criminal act, just as killing another human after their birth would be a criminal act.

    Do abortion rights mean a tacit rejection by females of their own female-ness?
    Do they want the “right” of freedom from their own female biology by insisting on life without accountability to their own unborn offspring, half of which are female (which can be verified prior to birth)?

    Does being “fully human” mean that the male should be able to have sex with every willing partner he can find during his lifetime, since that is what male culture and biology both seem to agree on?

    I have been reading a biography of the late Howard Hughes, formerly the world’s wealthiest man. He pursued women with pathological fervor and was uniquely possessive and obsessive at the same time. He handed one famous actress a box with $250,000 in cash as a means of attempting to win her acceptance and bed her. Another Hollywood starlet received a package with $2 million worth of jewelry as a means of getting a relationship started. He maintained separate residences fo various “kept” women simultanesouly, and on one New Year’s Eve plotted a scenario in which he attempted to woo three different actresses the same night in three different locations by claiming to have their dates interrupted by business phone calls requiring immediate attention. In short, Howard Huges attempted to dominate women using money instead of violence, and in turn, was often manipulated (quite justifiably) by the women. And that is the underlying point I am trying to make — women have often successfully adapted to male attraction to themselves by manipulating male desire to their own advantage. How many girls are taught by their mothers to “marry a doctor or lawyer” using their beauty or other physical or other assets to their own advantage? Is this a form of sexism? Is this a part of being “fully human”?

    I guess that the question of being “fully human” boils down to whether externalities determine our humanness. Is a woman who works at home, like June Cleaver of the old “Leave it to Beaver” series, less of a human than Carly Fiorina in real life? Is she less of a human even if she does not believe herself to be? If a woman believes her human-ness depends on her marrying a man who is already happily married to another happy woman, does her human-ness take priority over the others’?

    It really gets complicated. How “fully human” is a Mexican woman who crosses into the U.S. illegally and become pregnant within the US and gives birth to child who by virtue of the U.S. Constitution is automatically a U.S. citizen, and then who is deported because she herself is not in the country illegally, but leaves her small infant or other child in the U.S. in the care of strangers? Is it human for a woman to abandon her child so that her family can receive future benefits through the child’s citizenship in a foreign country after being deprived of its mothers’ maternal love during its upbringing? Most Mexican women successfully raise their children in Mexico, but some choose to come to the U.S. specifically to bear children north of the border in order to provide the children with U.S. citizenship, and there are organized, commercial endeavors to accomplish exactly that. Is that what a “fully human” woman does?

    I understand why humans do all of these things. The point is that whether being “fully human” is a good thing or not is a subjective matter, colored by the filter by which one views the world and life. To some, demanding to be “fully human” is a form of selfishness and bad. To others, it is noble and just. To some, the end justifies the means, and to others, the means are just as important, if not more so, than the goals.

    In my personal view, people should do what they believe is right. That means different things for different people, and it often means conflict and irresolvable conflict. A “battle of ideas” is critical and what is right or wrong have to be tested and weighed. Unfortunately, the world is not a fair place, and that, too is part of the result of people being fully human, because humanity itself includes war and peace, love and hate, justice and injustice, etc. Remember Pete Seeger’s song taken from Ecclesiastes “For Everything There is a Season”. Pete Seeger is often thought of as being a pacifist, but he sang songs during World War II in support of the war effort and obviously believed there is a time for war and a time for peace.

    It all gets back to what I said earlier. Feminism is a filter by which certain people see the world and live their lives accordingly. To some it is great and to others it is awful, depending on which facet of the complexity you are seeing at a given time and what your own filter allows you to see.
    Life is very complex and the more one thinks about it, the more the complexity can become bewildering and even paralyzing. At some point, we have to act and damn the torpedoes. Life is to be lived and a good way of living, as far as I am concerned, is to think about things, develop a conscience and abide by it, review it from time to time, and get out there and live and do your best.

    Stan Moore

    25 May 2009, 7:32 am

62. Henry:

    Latte lenya–that’s got to be one of the best pen names I’ve seen.

    25 May 2009, 1:35 pm

63. NLK:

    I think that Lenya is right to emphasize how social relations are dynamic and do not proceed from fixed, dictionary abstractions. “Feminism” is just a handy word for describing the grueling, endless struggle of women against patriarchy over the millenia, as Deanander suggested above. To me, the debate about feminism, like the debate about torture, becomes rather pointless when it is isolated and compartmentalized from the male/female (or U.S./Afghan, etc.) power relations that bring it into existence. Why, for example, do liberals almost always discuss torture separately from American violence more generally, which has inflicted pain on incomparably more people in Afghanistan, Iraq, etc. than waterboarding and the like? Why is it always safely enclosed from that greater violence in an abstract legalistic universe? This is what Stan is getting at, too, in his critique of liberalism in relation to gender, inspired by MacKinnon, etc. Feminists have, for a very long time, been pointing out the tendency in patriarchal culture to compartmentalize things into free-floating abstractions. I detect more than a bit of this tendency in Stan Moore’s critique of feminism as just one “lens” among many (a kind of postmodernist spin on an old argument for trivializing it).

    25 May 2009, 1:43 pm

64. Stan Moore:

    Am I a Malthusian because I am concerned about overpopulation of the planet? I don’t know because I don’t know very much about Malthus and what his deep beliefs were, other than that he pointed out that population tends to grow exponentially while food supply grows arithmetically. I agree with that point of view, which is one of the fundamental background concerns over Peak Oil Theory and sustainability of the planet for mankind (including women of all colors).

    My prime mentor in raptor research was a woman, a very famous raptor and wildlife biologst named Frances Hamerstrom of Plainfield, Wisconsin. Fran and her husband, Frederick, married in the 1930s and felt even then that the earth was overpopulated with humans and they made the conscious decision to have two and only two children. Fran was a longtime member of the organization Zero Population Growth, and her political orientation was generally liberal. For ecological and biodiversity reasons, I would like to see the earth’s human population stablized at its natural sustainable maximum level of perhaps 1 to 2 billion humans, and I think the earth will within the next twenty to fifty years force that reality upon humans in an involuntary manner. It will be hard on billions of people already born, but ce la vie. Professor William Catton put it sort of crudely when he called our species Homo detrivorus and said that the “standing crop of human flesh” would likely be reduced involuntarily to carrying capacity within the foreseeable future.

    My concern over human population issues is ecological and not philosopical. I care about wildlife and biodiversity and ecosystems apart from humanity. Human impact on the planet is not a simple matter of numbers, though, because per capita impacts of some societies, such as that of the typical American, are far higher than that of other cultures, such as China or India or Bangladesh. The most destructive persons on the planet per capita are white Americans. I am not one with a high ecological foot print because I have chosen deliberately to not pursue wealth and I barely, and I mean just barely scrape by. I have been homeless in the past three years for a period of over half a year, sometimes sleeping out in field in frosty winter nights. My possessions are minimal and so is my income. I will not be as deeply affected directly by the forthcoming crash of our society because I have few possessions, no debt, and an ability to endure hardship.

    I certainly do not despise the poor of the earth, including people of color. Huge numbers of them are victims of people who look like me. It is a testament to human durability and resilience that humans can survive poverty and victimhood. But the sad truth is that there are far too many humans on this planet for sustainable populations, and the poor will probably be the first to suffer and die from the impacts of the affluent, including global warming, Peak Oil, wars, famines, etc. That is a coming reality whether we like it or not. And we should try to mitigate it as best we can.

    I suppose that Xenia was looking through her feminist filter to reach her conclusions about me, which I believe are inaccurate, but understandable if viewed through a mindset that makes certain assumptions based on worldview.

    By the way, I used to work on a golden eagle project in the Altamont Pass of California and I got to handle and work with a rehab female golden eagle named Xenia, who was big and very impressive. One day I went to pick her up to take her to a place to feed her, and despite her falconers hood she saw my bare hand as I went to untether her leash and she slammed her foot down and would have really done a number on my hand if I had not been alert. I was quickly reminded of the awesome power of the female eagle.

    The abortion issue is a real conundrum. I use it for illustration because it offers clear cut, easy to visualize contrasts between different worldviews and also because American women, for the most part, are equally divided between support and rejection of it philosophically. I see abortion as a benefit to the planet in that it inhibits the pace of expanding overpopulation, but it is murder of a fetus. I am willing to support the idea of women having the right to murder their fetuses because I think it is in the common good that they do so. By no means am I insistent on criminalizing abortion, though I believe it is murder. War is not necessarily murder because some killings are justifiable, but war includes a lot of murders that are clearly illegal but never prosecuted.

    This whole issue of violence is an interesting one to me. People are more afraid of violent crime than of financial crimes. A ten dollar burglary with the use of a firearm (not even fired during the crime) might send a brown or black man to jail for a far longer term that a millionaire or billionaire who embezzles millions and put poor people out of their pensions or robs little old ladies out of their savings. While violence is often wrong and counterproductive and harmful, the fear of it compared to other threats can be irrational. Here we are warming the planet and threatening the extinction of our entire species in a worst case scenario and there are no criminal laws against corporations that clearly put society at risk. We have power companies that generate electricity with coal and refuse to scrub their smokestack emissions and cause thousands of ashtma cases and some deaths in inner city children, but they are not only not acting illegally, but they are heavily subsidized by the government. Tobacco growers kill far more people than all the terrorists in the world have ever killed, but people are deathly afraid of “terrorism” to the point that they sign away their constitutional liberties while subsidizing tobacco agriculture.

    To me it is fascinating how people look through lenses/filters of personal experience, often focused on victimhood of themselves or people like them, and they devote their entire lives to these issues and ignore larger issues.
    I think that feminists tend to look at female victimhood, which is real, and tend to look past human victimhood, which is a larger problem. But such is human nature, and humans are affected by nature and nurture and personal experience. And that is more than enough said for now…

    Stan Moore

    25 May 2009, 8:29 pm

65. Stan Moore:

    reference: http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=13737

    Here is a good essay by Professor Marjorie Cohn, president of the National Lawyers Guild, about the travesty of Obama’s evolving position on indefinite detention, military tribunals, and failure to close Guantanomo.

    Amd it occurs to me and I wonder what others think, that indefinite detention itself is a form of mental torture. Imagine a man kidnapped and sold to foreigners for bounty monies, kept isolated for weeks and months and years, never charged with a crime at all, accused of criminal wrongdoing but with no opportunity to defend himself or question his accusers, and then kept without any prospect or knowledge of if or when he may be released… ever.

    My guess is that more prisoners attempt suicide from the uncertainty and unfairness of indefinite detention and not knowing when or if they will ever see their loved ones again, than attempt suidice from waterboarding or physical torture. Bodies heal more quickly than psyches, and the sadists who run those prisons are now being directed ultimately by Mr. Obama. If Obama’s mother were alive today I am certain she would be appalled by what her son is doing.

    Stan Moore

    26 May 2009, 12:01 am

66. James M:

    I think that feminists tend to look at female victimhood, which is real, and tend to look past human victimhood, which is a larger problem. But such is human nature,

    Stan Moore, I appreciate much of what you have to say and the person you seem to be, but emphatically, emphatically … this is bullshit.

    Talk about a filter! These words constitute a massive, indefensible over-generalization from someone who, I can only assume, has never cracked open even one of feminism’s primary-source texts. (Enlighten me if I’m wrong.) It betrays evidence of only a limited acquaintance with feminism, most likely shaped by popular media portrayals, and even though its tone is “kinder, gentler,” it is typical of the kind of uneducated knee-jerk commentary that abounds whenever the topic is mentioned, particularly on the internet.

    When you say this about feminists, by the way, you are saying this about me, the writers & moderators of the site, and a lot of other people here. If you think we care solely, exclusively about “female victimhood” then you have not been paying attention to the writings here. Our perspective and our concerns are bigger than the “filters” you have assigned us and the pigeonholes into which you would place us. Please open your mind and at least temporarily set aside your preconceptions before you insult anyone further.

    27 May 2009, 2:00 am

67. Stan Moore:

    addendeum to my reply to James M. –

    I had already shut down my computer and was almost out the door when an important idea hit me. The new Obama nominee for the Supreme Court, Ms. Sotomayor (if I got it correctly), whom I support absolutely, is on the record and I heard her recorded views several times yesterday, as stating her view that judges, in their professional capacity, are affected by their own “filters” (my term, not hers). Specifically, in a recorded speech, she said words to the effect that a woman judge of color will bring a different perspective to judging (maybe even a superior perspective, if I got it right) than a white male judge. She is absolutely correct — how could this not be true? All the more reason to have a Supreme Court judging the laws of this nation that reflects the population at large. Unfortunately, some of the attempts to allegedly do this have been blatently disingenuous; for example, Clarence Thomas is an insult to many black people because he does not represent their experiences and worldview as Thurgood Marshall did. I hope Ms. Sotomayor gets in there and uses her formidable intellect and her “filters” to balance the court, and counterbalance people like Scalia and Thomas and even the allegely moderate Roberts and Alito. I would personally think Scalia and Thomas should be sued for fraud in claiming to represent “justice” at all; I think their biased worldview precludes administration of justice by those men.

    But my main point is that everyone has their filters and Ms. Sotomayor said so publicly in a professional context of a profession where many people would say that “justice is blind” (whatever that means). I don’t even know that Ms. Sotomayor self-identifies as a “feminist”. This is universal. And by the way, I think the self-identification of anyone with terms like “feminist” or “conservative” or “progressive” is a way of saying about oneself “I am biased — look at me!” The labels I have put on myself would be “citizen conservationist” because I am a wildlife and environmental conservationist, and “person of conscience”. I tend to look at “conservatives” and “liberals” and “Democrats” and “Republicans” and “feminists” and other self-identified extremists with suspicion as having a likely agenda that may or may not be beneficial in the world in which I live.

    27 May 2009, 9:28 am

68. Stan Moore:

    response to James H. –

    For some reason my first reply did not get posted, so I will attampt a second one.

    I am sure your little diatribe was heartfelt. But on its face it was shallow, lacking in understanding, non-specific and therefore useless except as a means of venting your lame vitriol.

    For starters, I did not say that feminists look solely or exclusively at this or that. I spoke of tendencies. So right of the bat you erred by mistating the very quote that you singled out of a long posting of mine.

    But more importantly, you do not seem to grasp the concept of “filters”. I do not assign your filters or those of anyone else, including myself. I recognize their presence in you (or others) by the limits to your vision, and I recognize that I have my own filters as everyone does. For you to think that anyone can assign a filter to anyone else means you are completely unclear on the concept and therefore spewing forth jibberish. Think Sonia Sotomayor, who acknowledged some of her own filters. Did I assign them to her? How could I assign a filter to anyone? Anyone’s life experiences are their own and not of my making, even if I can recognize them for what they are.

    So, I suggest that you apply your own advice and try to kickstart your own mind and begin to think a little more deeply and communicate more substantively, if you can. Of course, that might be asking too much and therefore it is understandable that you would want to hide behind a cloak of anonymity. That is human nature, too (at its worst). But it is interesting that you try to shame me for insulting you, yet you prefer to remain anonymous. I find it hard to stir up much empathy in such a strange scenario.
    Should I try harder, James?

    Stan Moore

    27 May 2009, 11:12 pm

69. James M:

    Perhaps one day when I am wiser and more postmodern in our outlook, I will, like you Stan Moore, have attained to the state of enlightened filterless neutrality, and have the confidence to issue blanket pontifical judgments about people despite having next-to-zero acquaintance with them or what they actually stand for. I will be able to label them “extremists” for finding agreement with certain bodies of research and literature that address unequal power relations, and that happen to stand in opposition to the mainstream. And I will enjoy rambling at length on internet blogs in the sanctimonious tone of a wise elder.

    Until then, I still say “bullshit.”

    28 May 2009, 1:57 am

70. lado shay:

    Lara:

    I am genuinely glad to read this thread – so rare on the web – of good hearted men (of varying degrees of knowledge) debating their own conditioning as men. There are those who thought this would happen in the 1970′s. After all, men have so much to gain from debating their conditioning. And still they haven’t, en masse. Do the rewards still outweigh the benefits? Even as we face catastrophic climate change? Please say not.

    That being said, one participant’s assertion on this thread, that the discipline of feminism be reduced to “another filter” mirrors an error in the general population. After some five decades of concerted exploration, this thing called feminism is a profound discipline, taught well at numerous universities across the planet. Despite that, Tom, Dick and Harry feel they can draw valid conclusions without having done the requisite reading, simply because they live in the world. Would they, with similar certainty, pontificate on matters related to engineering, quantum physics, fibre optics or the mysteries of mathemathics?

    I think not.

    Gender is the most nuanced, problematic and astounding of subjects. Its’ study entwines the most powerful elements of human existence – genetic inheritance, environmental influence, culture, biology, time and place. Because of its complexity, it must be approached with a solid grounding in epistemology. How do we know what we think we know? How can we be mistaken? The answers to these two questions fill vast libraries. If not grounded in epistemology, the entire field of gender becomes a tsunami of subjective emotionality. When approached with a solid epistemological grounding, we can hope for well grounded conclusions. Reduced to personal anecdote, the field is a travesty.

    In areas of great complexity, our “knowledge” must be based on correlations and probabilities. Answers do not come simply from biology or any other single discipline, but from a complexity of probabilistic factors, changing over time and place. The closest study of these factors has been made by the discipline known as feminism, now called gender studies. It is the first and most basic step of that ancient proverb – know thyself. I know of no person who has studied gender seriously, who has not been deeply convinced of its basic findings.

    I hope those who wish to contribute to an enlightened debate will have the humility and the courage to do as much reading as Stan Goff has obviously done, and Deanander. There is no point in trivial observation. We are decades past the time when gender issues could be discussed as a series of personal andecdotes based on localised experience of male and female behaviour in a small corner of a single country. Please, have the courage to examine the lives of women and men across the planet and across the aeons. And it takes great courage to expose oneself to the horrors of that examination. See the vastness of the difference, the monumental, mindboggling inequality.

    If you do not come to some very swift and clear conclusions, your defences are monumental. This is not just “another filter”. This is core. This is profound. This is ground. A great many (male) scientists agree that our world is vastly out of kilter in ways that must bring catastrophe, and are correlated with a specific type of power, far more likely to be associated with male conditioning. Please note, there are no absolutes. Nothing correlates 100 percent, and arguments based purely on one’s personal experiences, are clearly not useful.

    Gender strikes deep – so deep that men and women experience its effects as personal in the extreme. Hence the difficulty of extricating one’s own story from that of the huge gendered world story. Not much time left for more men to heed the message, read, study, and extricate themselves from that deadly male gendered tsunami. Good men are out there. Can’t they form a movement to uncouple their collective identity from war, torture, death, power, genocide and catastrophe? Can’t they agree to multiply the good men have done, not the genocidal?

    28 May 2009, 2:55 am

71. Stan:

    Feminism was not the topic; torture was… and I naively thought that we might discuss probative masculinity (or escalating masculinity) as one gender-policing mechanism that encourages cruelty by males.

    @ Stan Moore, I doubt anyone here is incapable of “grasping” the notion of filters; it’s a metaphor that is widely understood, even if it attempts to re-segregate The Individual from his/her culture and environment. “Each of us has filters,” etc., like each of us was endowed with a different nose. One of the points that is being overlooked in this kind of evasiveness is that culture is the carrier of these ideas, values, memes, even the “appropriate” way to feel about events or ideas. Nationalism, for example, since that is the most widespread ideology — the one that both major political parties compete to demonstrate… loyatly to nation, my nation first and best. No one is born a nationalist; nor does anyone get up one da, with no prior thought given to it, and decide — all on her own — to become nationalistic. The culture carries that crap; and our conditioning begins very early, complete with the affective resonance that allows us to feel the emotion choke us up when Old Glory flaps and the jets fly over.

    If you don’t want to be confronted on comments like calling feminism (undefined) “extremist,” then don’t say them. James M is no more anonymous than I am. He has links to his own stuff all over this blog.

    Defensiveness is characteristic of masculinity, because everything is seen as a probative contest. Generalizing about “feminism,” then trying to establish one’s cred by talking about what women with whom we assoicate, in this context, recalls the old comment in racial discussions… “some of my best friends are black.” It’s not an argument. It’s reaching for phenotype authenticity by association as a way of evading responsibility for what was said before.

    What exactly do you think the “agenda” of this amorphous feminism is? I don’t deny that we all have agendas. We are, by and large, political activists of one stripe or another, so I’m not taking “agenda” as an indictment, even if it’s meant that way. Just saying, you claimed “feminists” have an agenda. I personally don’t know what you mean by feminism, as you have refused to define it in any concete way, but I’m curious about what this “agenda” is that corresponds to this now-reified term.

    The reason this is frustrating is not because Stan Moore is playing fast and loose on defense. It’s because we have seen this before, and it is tiresome. It is tiresome, because people have been studying and writing and taking action on gender in a thoughtful and rigorous way for decades; and men still refuse to familiarize themselves with this body of work even as they feel perfectly entitled to spout off about it. It is tiresome, because we have to go over the same ground of non sequiturs, red herrings, and ad hominems — like it comes from a secret playbook somewhere — again and again and again. In the face of that sense of tedium, however, we keep gender near the front of the crowd here at FS because the tendency to employ these distractions and fallacies is so persistent (and predictable); and we go back over the same ground again and again in the hope that we can break through the “filter” of masculinity (and less often, femininity as its compliment) and get men to acknowledge the profound ways in which our socialization as males has disrupted our ability to be genuinely in community with our sisters (or brothers, for that matter, when we first “reduce” them to women then wateroard them).

    It never fails that when we bring up masculinity — the constellation of behavioral expectations associated with maleness in our culture — the discussion will revert hastily to primatological speculations (which I don’t mind on ther own) from 80,000 years ago… anything, omigod, to steer us away from a critique of the way men act now, and the examination of why male behavior and male talk and male culture puts such a high value on violence, imagined or actual.

    Here is an exercise, since we’ve already been hustled along in the redirection of the conversation from male behavior to “feminism”:

    Name the major currents in feminism since, say, 1960. Identify at least one intellectual or activist associated with each. Write a summary of the basic postulates describing each current. Then tell us — here at FS — what are the outlines of the debate within whatever is called “feminism,” on pornography. Tell us if there are any such things as anti-abortion feminists. Tell us what the concerns are of Black feminism (or womanism, and why the change in terminology). Tell us anything that differentiates “liberal” feminism from “radical” feminism, “Marxist” feminism, “materialist” feminism, “postmodern” feminism, “third world” feminism, or the faux feminism of Camile Paglia, et al.

    Get back to us on these topics, and you’ll get a better hearing here. Meanwhile, I’d still like to know how we can stop our sons and uncles and husbands and brothers and fathers from identifying — as males — with the employment of “redemptive” violence, with compartmentalizing our emotions, and with the fantasies (as well as practices) of controlling and humilating women, or men who have been “feminized.”

    28 May 2009, 5:00 am

72. r graves:

    if someone were to start with, say, 5 books on feminism, what short-list would folks recommend?

    28 May 2009, 7:52 am

73. DeAnander:

    There are so many “feminisms” running around loose that it gets difficult after a while to define the word (which is probably just the point of some of the more mischievous variants like “free market feminism” and “pro-porn feminism”, but then I’m getting a bit cynical in my old age). A definition I fall back on is the familiar quote “the radical notion that women are human beings.”

    A minor anecdote (sorry, SG, but an anecdote can sometimes lead us to useful questions as well as flippant or dismissive sidetracks) may provide an entry into the discourse. I was working in the boatyard with some (quite friendly and nice) guys the other day. The son of one of the skippers, a frisky young feller in his 20′s, was exclaiming over our near-success in lowering a half-ton winch onto the foredeck of Dad’s troller with reasonable success (7 out of 8 locating bolts went through the flanges correctly, one was misaligned). The misaligned bolt was in an awkward location, up against a deck beam and hard to access.

    Looking straight into my face and grinning, the young feller said “Gee, isn’t that in just the cuntiest place? right where you can’t get at it!”

    Without a feminist analysis this incident leads nowhere — “the boy is rude and shouldn’t talk that way in front of a lady” perhaps, or even “women don’t belong in the boatyard, and if they insist on pushing their way in here they can just put up with guy-talk.”

    Feminism, imho, is the intellectual discipline that tries to explain not only *why* a 20-something male would use a woman’s intimate parts as his ultimate metaphor for what is bad, nasty, awful, horrid; it also tries to explain why he would feel comfortable and easy doing so in the presence of a woman old enough to be his mother, and directly to her face, without the least sense that she is a human person capable of feeling insult. That the phatic insult is not even perceived as insulting speaks volumes about the dehumanisation of the insulted person/group. Further, feminism would try to understand larger ramifications: how this kind of slow drippage of insulting and demeaning speech acts would discourage women from entering, or staying in, the trades, and how the resulting informal discrimination (low-level quotidian harassment) end-runs around formal (legislative) attempts to make workplaces more egalitarian. Psychologically oriented feminists might study how the training of boys to accept and use this kind of misogynist language helps to inculcate a disrespect for, and hostility to, women — with the cultural purpose of separating them from their mothers and bonding them with the world of “grown men” in solidarity against all things feminine (a kind of adulthood ritual, manhood being defined as adult and womanhood as perpetual childhood); the emotional pain (and often physical danger) that this “boying” process entails for gentler-spirited men, young gay men, etc. could be discussed as collateral damage of patriarchal conditioning.

    Liberal feminism might then also analyse the income disparities caused by a culture-wide, pervasive hostility to women in many lines of work. Gender studies might ask to what extent men express this hostility (the endless twittering of misogyny and homophobia that characterises most of the “manly” trades) to shore up their own insecure gender identity, and *why* hostility and put-downs should be so intrinsic a part of culturally conditioned maleness and male bonding, in our own and many other cultures. And how this hostility, culturally organised, can lead to such extreme manifestations as foot-binding, sati, witch-burning, purdah, clitoridectomy (not only in “heathen Africa” but medically performed in North America, btw), rape (within or outside commercial transactions between men), and other highly gendered punishments and tortures (official and unofficial)… and so on.

    Radical feminism might dig deeper into our own intimate life, and ask about the psychology of men who at one and the same time view women as desirable, attractive, etc — and yet also find women’s bodies disgusting; who use “fuck” as a verb of hostility and domination and “cocksucker” as a profound insult, yet also hope to persuade women to have sex with them (in penis-centric ways of course). Radical feminism might ask how the still-obvious gap in income and opportunity between men and women may abet the prostitution industry by driving more women to prostitution as a “career” more remunerative than other menial/service jobs (just as racism and class discrimination drive poor and non-white people into the armed forces as the employer of last resort); and it would further ask about hostility to women in the family, the devaluation of daughters, and how the widespread sexual abuse of daughters, nieces, and younger sisters also feeds the prostitution industry. And so on.

    Radical feminists would not be at all startled by the revelations of sexual abuse of prisoners at AG, and the rape of female US soldiers by their “brothers in arms.” These sexual manifestations of dominance and rage/hatred are predictable outcomes of a patriarchal culture which constructs (male) sexuality as conquest, and sex/conquest as the proof of masculinity. Radical feminism is the discipline that asks how this culture, and these outcomes, can be changed by “striking at the root” (Thoreau, I believe): by challenging our ideas about gender, by challenging the prevailing definition of masculinity in our culture as conquest, domineering, bullying.

    And radical feminism also attempts to explain and even respect the opinions of “conservative” women (cf Dworkin’s insightful book *Right Wing Women*); views on the sanctity of the family and ordained male/female roles can be seen as ways (often clever, highly adaptive ways) of negotiating a treaty with male supremacy. Parallels with the variety of strategies adopted by factions within an occupied country seem so obvious as hardly to require exegesis

    Mr Moore seems to feel somehow threatened by feminism, needing to marginalise it as an “extremist” point of view like Likudite Zionism or sectarian Marxism. This is by no means an uncommon response from people who have had their social privileges questioned or challenged (just listen to wealthy Republicans proclaiming how “radical” wealth-taxes would be, that were commonplace only 60 years ago). Sure, there have been instances of sectarian feminism that could be called “extremist” in the sense that they experienced the kind of rhetorical and organisational dysfunction common to most dissident/minority political struggles (doctrinal purity obsession, self-cannibalising organisations, personality cults and so on). But the question of gender (and its urgency) never goes away or gets any less important, any more than the question of class or colonialism or xenophobia/racism; and the reflexive defensiveness of men, whitefolks, and richfolks never seems to go away either. This weariness and repetition seems to be what political struggle is all about… patience and perseverance in the hope of a closer approach to justice.

    Many people — anthropologists, archaeologists, psychologists, all kind of people — suspect that the division of labour by gender may have created the first social hierarchy on which all other hierarchies and enslavements were modelled. Others suspect that animal husbandry created the model of enslavement which was swiftly applied to gender relations as soon as the male role in fertilisation was understood and the control and enclosure of animals replaced the “sibling” relationships with animals reflected in gatherer-hunter mythology. The chickens and eggs of social power structures can be debated ad infinitum (and ad nauseam if you have been working on these problems for a few decades now); but whether gender was the first or second hierarchy, one thing remains indisputable: ideas about manhood and manliness are deeply connected to violence and domination in many/most cultures, and this connection means that men commit an awful lot of awful crimes — against women, children, the biotic world, each other — which they might be less inclined to commit if their gender identity and self-worth were not so inextricably tied up with bullying and dominating. Radical feminism would like to extricate, untie, and disentangle the physical sex called “male” from the socially constructed gender called “masculine.” When the masculine fantasies of authority, control, and domination are equipped with nukes, orbital weapons platforms, and all the planet-stripping might of industrial society, it does seem that this task is more urgent than ever.

    Meanwhile, the young man in the boatyard believes it makes him Manly to trash-talk women, and so he goes on doing his bit to make his workplace an unpleasant and hostile environment for female workers. And the world wags on, highly gendered, highly unjust, highly dysfunctional and heading for some kind of crash. But then, worrying about impending crashes is sissy stuff; Real Men say “damn the torpedoes full speed ahead,” right?

    28 May 2009, 12:01 pm

74. Stan Moore:

    It is fascinating and disturbing at the same time to see the portrayals of me by people here, including Stan Goff, De Anander and others. You are absolutely wrong in your assessments of me to begin with. And your apparent idea that feminists have a profound, unique understanding of the world is laughable.

    First, I am not defensive of anything. I certainly have not defended violance, masculinity, war, rape, white privilege, or anything else. To state or imply that is utter ignorance. Period. And no feminist has surprised me by telling me that women get raped with frequency and impunity that are appalling to me as much as to any radical woman feminist. And, by the way, I have seen writings to self-identified woman feminists who would never in a million years agree that Stan Goff of James H. or any man could actually be a feminist or an asset to feminism. The whole concept of power dynamics are well known and understood by lots of men, and even lots of women who do not agree with De Aaander’s worldview.

    Also fascinating is that you seem to think that anecdotes are of little value until you decide to share your own. You seem to think that there is a need to read and study a “gender study” curriculum, but you cannot or will not name a good source of information to provide an overview or starting point for those who do not want to spend their entire lives studying the views of people who obviously are so absorbed in their own biases.

    And most importantly, you offer no real solutions that I have been able to determine for the obvious problems you feel you have profoundly described, other than mimicking Nancy Reagan’s mantra: “Just say no to drugs”, except morphed into “Just say no to masculinity/testosterone/violence/war/whatever”.

    But the fact remains that when women exist in an evolved society where they have new opportunities to participate in formerly all-male domains, they begin to mimick male behaviors. When women are allowed to join the army, they become trained killers or supporters of trained killers within the ranks of their comrades. When women are allowed to join commerce in high positions of authority, they begin to mimick men in business chicanery and exploitation of resources. When women gain high political or government office, they begin to mimick men in similar positions, both on the Right and on the Left. George W. Bush and Condi Rice are offset by Ralph Nader and Winona LaDuke.

    It is sad to see the angst of persons of conscience who are so uncomfortable in their posturing that they cannot stand scrutiny and feel like they are on the attack. It is you, my friends, who are on the defensive of your status and more particularly, you defend your own blind spots by pretending that they do not exist. It is you who claim that having filters is some sort of insult, because it is not an insult to recognize reality, and it is absolutely stupid for James H. to state that I claim to have no filters. No wonder he must resort to profanity, which can be defined as the feeble attempt of a weak mind to express itself forcibly.

    I see my job as to challenge your comfort zone. I think I have done a good job and in so doing, it is amazing how much error you emit in trying to be both defensive and to counterattack at the same time. Sounds very masculine to me. Is this another manifestation of what happens when feminists and females obtain latitude to become more “fully human”?

    Stan Moore

    29 May 2009, 8:47 am

75. Gerry.Agnosia:

    And like alchemy, DeAnander comes in to transform awkwardness to awesome. Much thanks for derailing that Train to Nowhere!

    Anyway, a tangent:

    ‘Ey Stan [Goff],

    Just thought that you might be interested in this new and wonderful blog, Catholic Anarchy… http://catholicanarchy.org

    I was a bit hesitant to delve into it at first, but I was delightlfully surprised to see the mentioning of Rosemary Radford Ruether, Yoder, William Cavanaugh and the linking of sex & war as regular topics.

    It has joined my regular blog rotation along with the likes of John Michael Greer, y’all and a few others. Good stuff! ^_^

    29 May 2009, 8:52 am

76. Gerry.Agnosia:

    @R GRAVES:

    From what little I’ve learned of the subject, the following books are considered good introductions into radical feminist theory:

    “Toward a Feminist Theory of the State” by Catharine MacKinnon

    “Money, Sex, and Power: Toward a Feminist Historical Materialism” by Nancy Hartsock

    “Cunt: A Declaration of Independence” by Inga Muscio

    “Sex & War” by Stan Goff [Linked to for free download earlier in this thread. I'm reading it right now and really like it.]

    “Ain’t I a Woman?: Black women and feminism” by bell hooks [Or really, anything by bell hooks.]

    I’d like to suggest a specific book by Andrea Dworkin, but I can’t really say I know much about her… I mean, I’m pretty ignorant of radical feminism in general but I’m finding it really hard to find untainted [unbiased] information about Andrea Dworkin while attempting to research her life and works via the web.

    Anyone else want to chime in?

    29 May 2009, 11:21 am

77. Stan:

    @Stan Moore, your heat is far exceeding your light. And your whole post was defensive. Take the chip off your shoulder; and actually study something about gender before you take up this much bandwidth again.

    On books, I nominate Carole Pateman’s “The Sexual Contract,” Robert Connell’s “Masculinities,” Jessica Benjamin’s “The Bonds of Love,” (edited by Rebeca Whisnant) “Not For Sale,” Maria Mies’ “Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale,” Carolyn Merchant’s “The Death of Nature,” and Patricia Williams’ “The Alchemy of Race and Rights.”

    29 May 2009, 12:58 pm

78. Michael Anderson:

    Thanks for the suggestion, DeAnander. Am in the process of reading “Sex and War”, and just ordered “Right Wing Women”. Trying to evolve in, as the Chinese put it, interesting times, and grabbing what I can, as each new day comes along. I will echo another suggestion of Stan’s that I finished last year that left me sort of “PTSD” for a couple of days—White Like Me. The connections between Race (racism), Gender (Patriarchy enforced at gunpoint), economics, and energy (money) become clearer every day. We all work in our own ways to unmask the Matrix…to ourselves first, then to others.

    29 May 2009, 1:16 pm

79. Michael Anderson:

    PS—helps that feeling of cognitive dissonance that seems to be a part of our lives these days.

    29 May 2009, 1:18 pm

80. Shaukat:

    “But more importantly, you do not seem to grasp the concept of “filters”. I do not assign your filters or those of anyone else, including myself. I recognize their presence in you (or others) by the limits to your vision, and I recognize that I have my own filters as everyone does.”

    @Stan Moore-The above statement and your previous comment regarding the supposed bias of feminists seems to miss, in my opinion, a crucial aspect of how filters actually work in any class structured society. On this point I would recommend reading Nancy Hartsock’s work on feminist standpoint theory. By this I don’t mean the kind of pure standpoint that automatically confers legitimacy on the views of someone who has experienced oppression, but rather, as Hartsock argues, the kind of standpoint that seeks to tear away the layers of ideology that shape and condition how the vast majority of people perceive reality, and which therefore makes it more than just a biased position.

    Hartsock builds her standpoint argument on the two class model of accumulation that Marx constructs in Volume I, which he used to dig below the surface reality of bourgeois ideology in order to reveal the exploitation of workers within the production process. Feminists have long sought to dig below the surface reality of gender ideology in order to reveal the structures of male domination that appear natural to the vast majority of the population, due to the filters they have internalized as “common sense,” as Gramsci would put it. In other words, to state that when scholars and activists attempt to tear away these filters in order to lay bare the dynamics of class and gender power they are themselves blinded by their own filters is to miss the point entirely. In reality they have actually shaken the filters away.

    29 May 2009, 5:41 pm

81. skol:

    It’s true that debate is often a very manly-esque thing; I think we’re all guilty of that to some degree. I know it’s cliched, but there’s a tendency to fight fire with fire, or sword to sword. You can only win by burning or stabbing your opponent.

    I think that that, at least, is a blind-spot worthy of consideration. It’s a tendency in I’m Right/You’re Wrong arguments; and, as a mediator for Wikipedia (Israel/Palestine, The Troubles, Armenian Genocide, etc, all very large and exhausting debates), I can say that more than half of the time someone is right and someone is wrong. But getting them to that realization almost never works by brute force; more than half of the time, that’s the method editors try.

    I’m not saying that one party is really using brute force, either, but it often appears to the other party that they are. This usually sucks everyone in until everyone is whacking each other over the heads with rhetorical hammers, getting no-where fast.

    It’s hard to find the point between too much and too little; it’s even harder when the scale you’re using is aggression and passivity.

    29 May 2009, 8:34 pm

82. Stan Moore:

    Those who think they have found some sort of ultimate truth in feminism ought to be aware that for generations the same has been thought by economists in their field. (False analogy)

    Now we know that economics is flawed and ruinous as it has been applied to the behaviors of humans and nations. (Guilt by association)

    Ditto Zionism, which is another unique worldview held as “truth” by its own proponents and demonstrably harmful to millions. I know that western “feminists” (scare quotes, designed to reduce the credibility of the enemy-view)

    have gone on the record as opposing Zionism as a a manifestation of domination, violence, racism, and colonialism, but I am unaware that feminists within the Israeli society have opposed the Zionist project on that basis. I suspect that Zionist feminists continue to support the violent subjugation of Palestinians on the basis of their own people’s historic victimhood. (Reinforcement of guilt by association from anecdotal accounts)

    In short, it is probably a waste of time to argue with a Zionist, an economist, or a feminist (MORE guilt by association, even though no definition for feminism has been offered, nor any response to the descriptions that HAVE been proferred)

    because these are worldviews with some relevance to truth but with gaping blindspots as well. (reduction of several bodies of thought to “worldview,” thereby trivializing it and giving it the same status as “everyone has an opinion,” followed by a truism presented without examples or evidence)

    That is what filters are all about. (Yes, filters. Stan, everyone gets your filters thesis; and that hasn’t been the subject under discusssion except for your constant reiterations.)

    And people, including university-based “academics” and “scholars” can spend their entire lives accumulating data, but just as economics is not a science and free of biases, neither is feminism. (False analogy — economics claims to be scientific, while the various currents of feminist thought are not… and science is not free of biases either) (Attribution of a false claim to the enemy-idea)

    It is all about bias (WHAT is all about bias? Feminism? Defiine it, give us the current to which you refer, state their premises, and challenge conclusion and premises bsed on some kind of evidence next time you take this public. This just sounds like a pissed-off male, which is something with which many women and male allies are already tediously familiar.)

    and so the academic study of feminism is only valid as a point of reference, not as any repository of purely “actionable intelligence”. (Attribution of a false claim — putting words in the enemy’;s mouth)

    But it obviously impresses its own possessors! (Followed by sarcasm and an implicit ad hominem attack on us fools)

    Stan Moore (with parentheticals by Goff)

    STAN GOFF: The following post was related to Zionism and Andrea Dworkin, whose name was spelled Dorkin as a peurile slap. (So I zapped it.) Again, all heat and no light, and the continued reification of “feminism” into something like a recipe. We do not post that kind of screed here, especially when it devolves to this adolescent style of discourse. This is just a small blog with a small following; and all we want to do is think together with a bit of intellectual rigor (precisely what is missing from a post like this). Now you can accuse us of censorship… that’s what people usually do when we interrupt the infiltration of standard blog-blather laced with clueless male privilege. There are many, many sites out there that like food-fight debates. I suggest you search them for kindred souls.

    30 May 2009, 3:09 pm

83. Michael D:

    @ stan:

    Feral Scholar » Blog Archive » McChrystal & Pelosi
    

    Meanwhile, I’d still like to know how we can stop our sons and uncles and husbands and brothers and fathers from identifying — as males — with the employment of “redemptive” violence, with compartmentalizing our emotions, and with the fantasies (as well as practices) of controlling and humilating women, or men who have been “feminized.”

    i think there’s a small window of opportunity when male children are very young.

    i ‘raised’ a son who is now 30 and a peace-loving man.

    you have to model a version of manhood that eschews violence, accentuates fun and male bonding (surfing was ours), and emphasises honesty and affection.

    of course i failed to live up to this noble creed many, many times, but i believe the times i succeeded outweighed them and so i was able to pass on a more peaceful style of parenting than the one i grew up with, which included all manner of sadism and cruelty.

    many fathers are doing this, and some very balanced, pleasant men are around to help ‘prove’ my point, but to look at the general scene planet wide, the view is blood-curdlingly regressive.

    feminism tries to balance out masculinism, and sometimes goes overboard, but i think we can look at the duality of gender to study it, but at root our problems are human even before we ‘agree’ on gender roles, and violence takes many forms. for example it is much better to be unfairly and physically punished by a parent, then quickly forgiven and moved on into something joyful, than to be punished mentally by a parent who holds grudges for years and has a much harder time moving on.

    funnily enough, i think war toys are where it starts most these days. a century ago i would have been quicker to blame old testament tales of smiting and annihilations blessed by the Author of the universe, (gwb was a museum piece of this kind of ham-brained mentality).

    people draw a tremendous amount of their peace of mind and identity from being in harmony with their peers. this of course leads directly to ‘good german’ behaviour at its most extreme, however i think it’s better to see it as a form of ‘rhythm entrainment’, exemplified by the sound of marching jackboots and pounding deathmetal.

    and it starts with the toys, you come home to your two year-old pretending to ‘kill’ you with his plastic toy gun, (or wooden stick, if you managed to ‘disappear’ the gun).

    walk the backstreets of jerusalem and see the 5 year old boys playing with their toy ak47s.

    sports try to channel the natural violence in male blood, but though they bring joy to millions, i look at the brutality and cheating, and wonder if it was worth it.

    violence CAN be channeled, expressed, and followed by a gloriously mellow, post-coital type of pleasure.

    my point being, that if we don’t find ways to enjoy our violence and grapple with it harmlessly, beating the shit out of huge drums, like that amazing japanese troupe, surfing big waves, yelling for joy at a good orgasm, we as men will feel atavistic attractions to crowds where we can get in touch with it, yelling for your home team along with 20,000 others is a hell of a hormone rush, as was charging a bunch of the enemy waving your spear, or facing a cornered predator.

    the fiercest copulate more, because their passion has a place, for better or worse.

    so we have a million-plus year-old hangover from when these skills were absolutely fundamental, and the feminine side was suppressed for most, for much of that time.

    feminism i see as a baby half out of the womb. we’re never going to stuff it back in there, even though it was comfortable living there till it got to be too big.

    but women merely aping the worst in men is a nightmare too.

    women can run businesses, run for president even, but they have to do still far too much ‘double duty’ when it comes to child and home care, why?

    because men don’t get educated to cook and sew and cuddle babies? because if the little boy doesn’t want to pretend he’s killing daddy, or ‘waste the bad guys’ as if life was a bad western, or wanted to dress up in his sister’s clothes?

    sooooo many often invisible lines of cultural force running through each stratum of conditioning, as we munch our wheaties to grow big and strong and watch transformers with magic powers become our little alter ids…

    women are doing their best to come to meet us men halfway, but i don’t see nearly enough reciprocal behaviour from men.

    until women finish claiming whole person recognition, we men need to honour Jung’s ‘feminine principle’ much more until we have finished balancing out the millennia of testosterone-dominated, fuck’n'fight behaviour, with more tenderness, caring, emotional vulnerability, heart-centred actions, that are so easy to lampoon with jokes about quiche etc, that really betray how out of touch most men are with their own _anima_.

    i talked with an italian man in his 60′s yesterday, he shared with me that in his father’s time it was considered shameful for a man to be seen cleaning a baby, or seeping a floor, or helping the women with their work, which continued while the men rested after their meals. as if cleaning the crap off their own baby was threatening to their pitifully petty vision of what manhood is!

    the mediterranean men have a lot to learn from our more liberated, less sexist northern cousins in this respect.

    thanks to all for an extremely interesting discussion.

    31 May 2009, 8:22 am

84. Stan:

    I hope you’re wrong about a “small window of opportunity.” That’s very scary. I think (hope!) everyone will seek after her/his own redemption…liberation… whatever you choose to call it, under the right circustances (so creating circumstances seems important, no?). I know a goodly number of men who were adept and even at home many times at their own standard-male (and even over-achiever male) enculturation, who went on to become gender subversive. Most of my own hopes for anything at all are based on the unceasing possibility of redemption… the bright side of this entropic uncoiling we call time.

    2 June 2009, 11:20 am

85. Shaukat:

    @Moore-Your posts continue to miss a fundamental point. Zionism and economics are above all ideologies concealing specific power relations. And what kind of economics are you referring to above-mercantile, classical, Keynesian, Marxist?

    Feminism, like Marxism, provides us with an analytical framework to understand and deconstruct power and domination. This is a concept that has consistently eluded you.

    2 June 2009, 8:49 pm

86. lado shay:

    How to get a Macho – ectomy.

    You have nothing to lose but a killing disease.

    It’s a delicate operation. But the good news is, you can do it yourself.

    Resources are All Over the Place. Any number of men on the web (including SG right here), any number of books in the local library (Bob Connell’s, Masculinities, is one of the best), any number of good men who can tell you how they did it.

    The tools to perform your own macho-ectomy are everywhere.

    Switch on the lights. See how your gender identity was formed. Feel the freedom when you get it.

    Wonderful.

    Quarantine your false macho self. Work on it every day. It’ll take a while.

    But it’s worth it. Like standing on a mountain top for the first time.

    A whole new life to gain.

    One good man at a time.

    Lado Shay

    2 June 2009, 8:51 pm

87. Gerry.Agnosia:

    ‘Ello,

    Becoming gender subversive is another issue that has a whole lot of complexities. Especially when it comes to the interplay of gender and race.

    Personally, I relish any time I can de-escalate the expectation of machismo when interacting with others. I find that as a young large black male that often travels between the ‘white’ and ‘black’ cultural centers of Durham, Chapel Hill and sometimes Carrboro it is of great comfort and satisfaction to myself when I can quiet the [unfortunate] initial fear response folks might have when coming into proximity with me. Or Hell, just to completely surprise them once I open my mouth to speak.

    But then again, some issues often come of this… Like how hard it is to socialize with some younger and older white and black males without falling into the ‘Machismo Wars’.

    Or how many sometimes perceive these strategies as being timid or assimilative and seek to take advantage of what they see as ‘naivety’ or ‘extreme willingness to please’.

    Or how any display of intelligence to some folks is met with the perception that they can finally vocalize their [not-so-]subtle racist opinions without fear of reprisals ["Aren't THEY so [insert dagger into my back here]? I’m glad you’re not like THEM!”].

    But, egh, I’m not going to lie — As much as I hate ‘this side’ of everyday compromises I must admit that those I’ve had to see women of color make daily — From my mother, to my aunts, to my cousins to my friends — Are of a depressingly more severe variety.

    In a recent conversation a female co-worker of color and I were talking about the strange juxtaposition of slums and middle class areas in Durham. We both admitted that we thought it was cool if not completely insane some times. We also talked about how our race and genders played a role in interacting with people when we went to some of these ‘hipster’ areas of Durham.The subject of Duke’s East Campus came up and how we both often visit those areas surrounding it… Especially the Whole Foods off of 9th and Broad St. We are both bus riders.

    At the end of the conversation she half-jokingly/half-seriously made the point that being who I was and how I looked I “would never have to worry about being assaulted or raped walking from Whole Foods to the Bus Station at night time.” I countered with some of my own disturbing experiences while walking in this area… Many probably obvious to any other men of color…

    Anyway, we both chuckled nervously and went back to work… But it was only later that night that after REALLY thinking about our conversation that I realized she was absolutely right — As much as I hated my experiences due to being who and what I am, I had almost never felt extreme fear for my safety as a daily way of life because of it…

    And sadly, I’ve only now come to realize it.

    Just my $0.02.

    3 June 2009, 8:21 am

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