Some kids not too far from here beat a forty-seven-year-old man to death, preserving it for their children via cell phone video, strictly and solely because Abelino Mazaniego, father of four, was not born in the United States. There was no provocation. There was no conflict other than the one the kids made. There was no history of bad blood. He was a stranger to them. They saw him sitting on a bench after he got off work and decided to have fun, because they learned that American lesson that immigrants from south of the border are not people - they are problems, they are criminals, they are welfare-sappers, parasites and at best, landscapers. Racist demagogue politicians and talk radio garbage love to ride that crap to power. See the "Tea Party Movement," Sheriff Joe Arpaio, or the most recent Arizona Hispanic/Latina/o racial profiling legislation for current reference points.
He's fucking dead. Some kids beat him for kicks. Now he's gone, and his family is left with no father, no husband, and no source of income. He was their sole provider.
The kids who killed him weren't even interested in robbery, as a nurse at the hospital did that:
But it apparently wasn't an attempt to get the $640 in cash that Mazaniego was carrying.
Police found the victim after the beating and took him to the hospital, where, officials say, nurse Stephan Randolph, 39, of Flemington, took the money out of the unconscious victim's wallet.
Family members noticed the missing money and told authorities, who charged Randolph with third-degree theft Monday, six days after Mazaniego died.
Pure fun, they wanted. And they got it.
The racial aspects of this are pretty interesting. At least two of the teenagers who killed him are African-American. It took prosecutors about a week to upgrade the charges against them from manslaughter to murder. If they were white, I think it would still be manslaughter, at the most. If Abelino were white, they would all be up on the highest murder charge possible. The fact that prosecutors didn't put them up on murder right away reinforces the idea that Abelino and people like him are not people. Their office had to get pressured to act.
Duh. But this is for a reason other than being in Fall Out Boy. I finished reading this really interesting book a few weeks back, Sober Living for the Revolution: Hardcore Punk, Straight Edge and Radical Politics. It's an anthology of interviews and writings, as the title says, on straight edge and the ways in which people have politicized it, through connections with such (not necessarily) disparate ideas as feminism, veganism, radical queer analysis, anarchism, and communism. The book is international in perspective, including people from Brazil, Israel, Poland, Sweden, Holland, the U.K. and of course the United States. Some of the interviews are great (Ian, the two people from Poland and one of the dudes from Point of No Return), some are really good and some are pathetic for what they reveal about the interviewees.
In the midst of all this is Andy Hurley, whose interview is entitled "Straight Edge, Anarcho-Primitivism and the Collapse." Yup. I guess it's to present the ideas of primitivism through the mouth of someone a bit more recognizable than anyone from Gather or Peregrine. Andy doesn't seem to be too into his own ideas and just kind of regurgitates stuff from Derrick Jensen and the great Klan sympathizer/apologist (he writes that "Nonetheless, the loathsome nature of the KKK of today should not blind us to what took place within the Klan 70 years ago, in various places and against the wishes and ideology of the Klan itself.), John Zerzan.
First, take a look at Andy's ultraprimitive 6,000+ square foot lakefront home, with its five bedrooms, four bathrooms and multiple BMWs in the driveway
Nice house. So in the interview, on page 254, he talks about how veganism is only relevant in our modern industrial world:
I always understood that in a better way of living, in the way of living that humanity is supposed to live [what the fuck does this mean?], I wouldn't be vegan. There is just a different connection, a different relationship. There's a relationship between predator and prey that has nothing to do with the relationship that civilization has to the animals it uses in the meat and dairy industry, in factory farming etc. So I definitely don't agree with the analysis that veganism saves the world. Not at all, because the whole question is still about civilization, and about farming and agriculture.
Of course veganism doesn't save the world. But it does more than you talking on your fucking iPhone and taking orders for your "Fuck City" shirts while fishing "naturally" on land you bought cause you're fucking rich. I'm super tired of this "relationship between predator and prey" bullshit that Derrick Jensen loves to propagate through his fetishized ideas of "the" Native American and how he/she honored the kill. Yeah, as though something is right because Native Americans did it. The Mayan people (in their civilization, which is really inconvenient for primitivists who idealize Native Americans, considering that they were Native Americans who built a pretty serious civilization long before they had most unfortunate contact with European death bringer parasites) performed human sacrifices, which seems like not a good idea. All that relationship shit is an excuse. Just admit that you are killing and that's it. The relationship is that you kill something and eat it. Whatever animal you are killing has no relationship with you, other than the one of great fear that you give it when you take its life. Like a deer is coming to offer itself to you, knowing that it's the right thing to do, living in this newly re-wilded natural world again.
So then why bother being vegan at all? Don't worry, Andy (by way of his friend Kevin Tucker) has got that one all figured out:
Besides, within civilization veganism is important to me because, again, I'm against oppression and this applies to the meat and dairy industry and all that, and so that's another thing I just can't support. But I've been planning on buying some land up north in Wisconsin, to at least have something that can never be clear-cut and used for timber, and to have a place that's wild, a place that I can utilize natural survival skills on. And then maybe one day I'll start looking for roadkill, start fishing in natural ways and stuff. I don't know when I'll get to that bridge and when I'll cross it, but I assume it will happen. As I said, I've been struggling with this for a while now and have had lots of talks with [Kevin] Tucker about it. It's become kind of a running joke.
There you have it, veganism and vegetarianism are merely protests against civilization. They don't deserve consideration once we switch back to living like we're "supposed to," as though anyone can know what that means. People have lived so differently over so many centuries, and here we see people claiming THE TRUTH, going back to that original moment, where everything was great. Then what happened, aliens came down and gave us bad ideas, or those creatures who live at the center of the earth crawled out and showed someone advanced technology? No. We happened. People. Or rather, we kept happening. The same fucking species, year after year, has continually fucked things up more and more. I'll write another post about this later.
What's the running joke? "LOL, I'm gonna eat meat soon!!" "Yeah right, non-primitivist, privileged industrialist!! LOL LOL LOL!" So funny right now.
Perhaps you wonder why I care. It's not really anything about Andy Hurley. Certainly, I do not look to him for ideas on anything. Before this interview and doing some subsequent perfunctory research (which turned up the episode of Cribs), I only knew that he played in Fall Out Boy and used to be in Racetraitor and Vegan Reich. Some people I know who think that anyone who is vegan and straight edge rules told me that he is a primitivist. So yeah, Andy Hurley is not an important part of my thoughts.
The issue is that his notion of veganism is just so offensive to my own. Sure, it's good that the dude is vegan for the time being (if he even still is at this point) and has (had?) been for a long time. It's way more than I could say for most people. I guess he promoted it, somehow. Maybe not, I don't know. Fall Out Boy is a pretty stupid, meaningless band, after all. But to just say that, "Hey, when it comes down to it, animals really are here for us to eat," that fucking SUCKS. What the fuck? Seriously. That is anthropocentrism at its core. It's like that food chain chart from the "Lisa the Vegetarian" episode of The Simpsons - we are the center, everything goes to us.
I've never viewed veganism as a relativist concept, that it's only desirable under industrial conditions. It's like saying that racism was only bad as long as black people were slaves or that dumping a little raw sewage in the ocean is ok, as long as too many people aren't doing it.
And what's up with this dichotomy that we either hunt animals or have industrialized agriculture? Why can't we plant for ourselves and work little plots of land? Sustenance is not exploitation. Stupid, shortsighted shit.
At the end of the day, I find it sad that Andy Hurley has this internal dissonance where he feels that he has to beat back his compassionate desires and kill. He refers to it as a "struggle." I would imagine it causes a good deal of anxiety. It's like he can't be a good primitivist if he doesn't eat meat. I guess that's what you get when your only thoughts on primitivism/how to live life come from reading Derrick Jensen, John Zerzan and hanging hard with Kevin Tucker. It's like he has to turn himself into some kind of robot, some idealized version of primitive man that is not likely based on much research. And he's choosing food as the primary method of that. I don't get it. If someone were of the opinion that hunting and killing is the absolute only method of survival post-collapse, and that person were also heavily disposed to veganism, why not train yourself to do the necessary killing and trapping and whatever and then leave it at that? It ain't like the collapse is imminent. Really. I don't see what the imperative is to abandon veganism at this point, if its something you still believe in.
We have obviously better ideas than killing to survive, but we're supposed to abandon them because we think that our ancestors behaved in certain ways. They also attacked one another with axes and lived in caves, wiping their asses with leaves at best. I wonder which "wild" version of humanity is most popular.
I'm (we're) back, sort of. I had to take a break from the "news" for a while. It was kind of killing me. I hate everything enough as it is, and reading about the Gulf of Mexico several times a day was not helping the situation. As much as I wish for every piece of shit at BP to catch on fire, it will not happen and it was making my life worse. I have enough problems as it is; I don't need to give myself more. I also really don't have the time to keep doing that. It's unsustainable (ha, lolf). Really though.
But, I will start posting again, although it will be the occasional "news" story that makes me want to stab people interspersed with things I'm thinking about, like this book I just finished called Sober Living for the Revolution: Hardcore Punk, Straight Edge and Radical Politics. It made me think about a bunch of new things, and I plan on putting them up here soon.
Three police officers charged in the killing of two unarmed residents on a New Orleans bridge after Hurricane Katrina and a cover-up that followed pleaded not guilty on Wednesday.
Sgts. Robert Gisevius and Kenneth Bowen and Officer Anthony Villavaso stood before a federal magistrate in green prison garb, shackled at the waist and ankles. They will remain jailed at least until a hearing Friday. A tentative trial date is set for Sept. 13...
Five former officers already have pleaded guilty to charges they helped cover up the shootings. Prosecutors have said police fabricated witnesses, falsified reports and plotted to plant a gun to make it appear that the shootings were justified.
The shootings at the Danziger Bridge happened Sept. 4, 2005, six days after Hurricane Katrina smashed levees and left the city flooded and in chaos. Bodies floated in filthy flood waters. There were reports of looting and gunshots rang out throughout the blacked-out city.
It was in this backdrop that police, desperate to regain control, were called about 9 a.m. that morning after reports of gunfire at the bridge.
Seven heavily armed New Orleans police officers stormed the bridge. Prosecutors said they shot at the first people they saw, people they say were crossing the bridge to find food.
When it was over, two men were dead and four others lay wounded on the hot concrete.
The indictment claims Faulcon shot mentally disabled Ronald Madison, 40, in the back as he ran away on the west side of the bridge. Bowen is charged with stomping and kicking Madison while he was lying on the ground, wounded but still alive.
Stomped him to death. After shooting him in the back. Stomped.
Here's a related story that details the pigs shooting at the aforementioned unarmed family:
The indictment alleges that officers Bowen, Gisevius, Faulcon and Villavaso open fired on an unarmed family on the east side of the bridge, killing 17-year- old James Brissette, and wounding Susan Bartholomew, 38; Leonard Bartholomew III, 44; the Bartholomew's daughter, Lesha, 17; and the Bartholomew's nephew, Jose Holmes, 19. The Bartholomews' 14-year-old son ran away from the shooting and was fired at, but was not injured.
Madison's brother, Lance, was arrested and charged with trying to kill police officers. He was jailed for three weeks before being released without indictment.
They tried to cover their filthy pig asses by charging the dead man's brother with trying to kill them. They say, "Well, when you have people who are trying to kill the police, we have the right to use any violence available to us in order to defend our lives." Yeah.
These are some standup pigs:
Bowen, Gisevius, Faulcon and Villavaso also are accused of shooting at an unarmed family on the east side of the bridge, killing 17-year-old James Brissette and wounding four others.
Sgt. Arthur Kaufman and retired Sgt. Gerard Dugue, who helped investigate the shootings, were charged with participating in the alleged cover-up. Charges against them include obstruction of justice.
Kaufman and Bowen "specifically discussed using Hurricane Katrina to excuse failures in the investigation, and thereby to help make any inquiry into the shooting go away," the indictment states.
Kaufman allegedly took a gun from his home and claimed to have found it at the crime scene a day after the shootings, then lied about that gun under oath and in reports, prosecutors said.
This part actually made me laugh:
Gisevius cried quietly as he stood with his lawyer.
I would legitimately pay money to watch a pig cry in court. Coward piece of shit.
Also, they're potentially facing the death penalty. Yes, please.
Yeah, that's right. This song's kind of good and kind of terrible. This video, though, is the shit. The song is fairly irrelevant. Pretty much everything rules about it, from the very beginning. Crazy-ass mountain man singer, guitar player in a white suit, bored as FUCK drummer, mountain man singer going off, the mustaches, the singing keyboard player's kidtoucher stache and wonderful hair, so on and so forth. Just watch, we'll talk more after:
Ok, so how about that keyboard player singer guy getting fresh with the bongos? Sometimes you see the white suit guitar player guy off in the background with an acoustic guitar. He looks like he is being punished. Then in the middle of the first keyboard solo, the keyboard-playing singer slaps the mic stand out of his way, goes back to the bongos, gets crazy with the cheeze whiz, and then the mountain man comes over to support him in his struggle against the mic stand, by enthusiastically tambourining at him, so much so that his mouth opens. That man's hair, when viewed straight-on, is simply incredible. Shit is that drummer bummed.
Then the mountain man goes over to the other guitar player to support him while soloing. He's a really good guy, that mountain man. He serves a vital role. If you've ever seen Avail, you will see that Beau clearly took great inspiration from him. I would say that mountain man is a dirty rock and roll precursor to Beau, but thinking a bit more on it, they really are not very different, aside from hair length and Beau's higher energy level.
93 stop and frisks per 100 residents. Yikes. Make sure you don't spit on the sidewalk next time you are in Brownsville. They'll probably let you go though. Check the video. The fat white pig is my favorite. You can tell he's new.
