One of the fifty million things wrong with hardcore

This really has nothing to do with the band Defeater or even the record label, Bridge 9. I do not know any of them, I know little about any of them, and I have never seen the band play. I have no interest in putting them down or any kind of such childish crap. This is a critique of ideas.

It's difficult to think of people in this country less deserving of aid than troops - cops, rich people, vivisectors, clergy, politicians...But here we have a month-long benefit for people in the military, with the help of Bridge 9 Records and the band Defeater, in honor of 9/11:

Boston, MA’s Defeater are no strangers to the themes of war with their conceptual albums Travels, Lost Ground and Empty Days and Sleepless Nights. All three albums tell the story of a family set in post-WW2 America and their trials and tribulations – from an alcoholic veteran father, his wife and their two sons. Consequently, Defeater has been well known for their support of US troops fighting for our country. With the ten-year anniversary of the September 11th tragedy just on the horizon, Defeater, along with Bridge Nine Records and All In Merch, will be donating proceeds from their merchandise sales to the soldiers returning home suffering from post traumatic stress disorder via the Wounded Warrior Project.

Starting today, $1.00 from every shirt sold on their webstores through September 30th will be donated to these soldiers that require assistance upon their return home. Additionally, Bridge Nine’s webstore will be carrying an exclusive t-shirt that will be sold for one time only this September, and 100% of the proceeds will also go to the Wounded Warrior Project. Defeater had this to say: 

“As the 10 year anniversary of September 11 approaches, we want to recognize the soldiers who have been fighting in the wars that resulted from the tragedy. Between now and September 30, defeater, Bridge Nine and All-In Merch will donate a portion of our merch sales, including every exclusive shirt, to the Wounded Warrior Project -- an organization that helps war veterans recover from the physical, emotional and psychological scars left by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. This organization allows these heroes to successfully return to the life they left behind to fight for our nation's freedom.
Whatever our political beliefs, each individual deserves to return home to a support structure that helps them heal from conflict. Every person we know and love that is willing to put their life on the line for the people they care about deserves our attention and what little we can give back in return. Thank you for your purchase, and to all of our deployed friends and family.”

Wow, no. So, so many things wrong with that. Why, oh why, should anyone aside from oil companies and weapons manufacturers be giving money to individual soldiers? Here are people who volunteered to join the military. That's what we're talking about. No one was drafted. A standard stint of enlistment is four years. Anyone who has joined the military in the last ten years had a pretty good idea what was going on - you're probably going to war. Pointless imperialist wars. Pointless. No glory. No defense of the country. Long-term occupation style wars. Invasions.

So there you were, kicking in people's doors, terrorizing kids, shooting camels for kicks. Harassing people on the street. Asking for ID. Making fun of them and their customs. Waving guns at them. Humiliating them. Screaming "orders" at them in a language they don't understand. You are their new gods. And now here you are, back in the country. And you deserve money? No. You don't deserve ANYTHING. What did Charles Manson's followers get? Jail.

"[E]ach individual deserves to return home to a support structure that helps them heal from conflict" - umm, what about the people who already were home (Afghanistan, Iraq) and never will be healed because now they are living in seemingly endless civil war, because they had their lives picked up and dumped on the ground? What about the people of Iraq who were living in a sovereign country that was no real threat to anyone, especially the United States, and now have had their infrastructure ruined, their past looted, and their future damn near stopped? And the people who did that deserve to "heal"? "Heal"? From the violence that THEY'VE done? From the misery that THEY brought? This is so deeply offensive to the annihilation that they have visited onto millions of people who had nothing to do with anything. This is a perversion of responsibility.

"[W]illing to put their life on the line"? For what? For whom? No one wants you there except people in business and government. You fools. Tools.

But they were just following orders, right? Ha. Classic defense. I'm sure people would respect that were this country invaded, by people just following orders.

I know I've said this before, but what's up with people not getting the idea that the troops ARE the war? They fight. They shoot. They invade. Rumsfeld ain't gonna crawl through the desert. You think Obama will? How about anyone on the board of General Electric? No. Put down your guns and the war is over. That's it. End of story. Troops made the invasion and keep it alive every day. They choose to do this.

Also, can I mention one more time that there is no relation whatsoever between 9/11 and Iraq? No one even claims that there is anymore. No one.

Even if you respect the concept of America having to invade Afghanistan and "go get em," which they really didn't, seeing as Bin Laden was alive until not so long ago, why are they still there, ten years later? What's going on?

All this shit is just nationalism. Blind patriotism. Giving money and "support" to people who've all engaged in horrible individual acts and one huge collective horrible act. Seriously, you look around, and when you think "Who could use some benefit money?", the answer you derive is the military? Fuck.

Sickening - care packages for Troops

Oh, how I loathe the cult of the American military.

Don't worry, there's "no political message, whatsoever." I guess "we love you, keep fighting, whatever you are doing is fine, we worship you, what you are doing is worthwhile and full of purpose" is not political.

Again, the troops ARE the war. They don't plan it, but they carry it out. They're the tools in the box. The people high above them are just the architects. You know that Obama wouldn't go shooting it out in Afghanistan. If it were really his war, it would be over immediately. So, yeah, fuck the troops. They do all the dirty work. Taking orders is not an excuse. Let us remember, no one is being drafted. If you don't realize that invading and occupying someone's country is wrong, then you should realize that kicking in their doors, blowing up their houses, creating a life of war for them and terrorizing their families is. And if you don't, fuck you. You've surrendered your right to live. I don't care what happens to you. You're being shot at because you are an invader. What would you do if Iran invaded the U.S.?

The American heroes in Iraq or Afghanistan are the ones who refuse to fight or turn their weapons on their commanders. Or someone like Bradley Manning. Taking it down from the inside. Resisters. They get put in jail and are remembered as traitors or enemy sympathizers. What else could they be when everything is so black and white? There is only right and wrong, with us or against us. What about "we don't want any part"? That is not an option.

How the Mighty Have Fallen, Part 1

Rancid. What a great band. A lot of people I know are real into the first self-titled record, but I am not one of them. After that, however, it's hit after hit - Let's Go, And out Come the Wolves, Life Won't Wait, and the second self-titled, or "Rancid 2000" as it's often known. Everything else after that sucked. Still, four (by my estimation) great, and I mean great, records is really something. There are no bad songs on those records (well, there is one, but I will get to it, and it's only lyrically bad). Fucking gold.

I was listening to Let's Go this morning and reveled in Tim's hatred of the police, listening to him singing in "Harry Bridges" about how "Bloody Thursday was July 5th, the pigs killed 3 workers, Harry Bridges grabbed the mic," and certainly best of all, when "every single cop got a bullet in the head" in "Sidekick." Even Lars gets in on the action, telling us about Mary being "out the door with a loaded .44 in her hand, shooting down the law that shot down her dear departed man." Fuck pigs, yes, fuck them all to hell.

It was bad enough to find out the man is a Christian (that's the one bad song I was referencing above, "Who Would've Thought" from Life Won't Wait - it's about him "finding god" or whatever bullshit. Unfortunately, I am not able to locate the interview in which I read that at this time.) but now he fucking writes songs about the troops. And not in the good way. No no, Tim unequivocally praises them. He's one of those all-too-common people who somehow views soldiers in a morality vacuum, seeing them as simply "doing their job," no questions of wrong or right being asked, never mind answered. Why, here he is, quoted recently in the Navy Times (not kidding):

“Whatever you think of the war — everyone has their own opinions — you’ve got to give respect to the soldiers,” Armstrong says. “I do, big time.”

No, actually, I need give no respect to the soldiers. You see, the reality that no one wants to admit is that THEY ARE THE FUCKING WAR. Yes, Bush I, Clinton, Bush II and Obama could have all the plans they want, the Pentagon could draw up all the strategies it could muster and Lockheed Martin could stockpile millions of tons of weapons and munitions, but if no one actually went to fight the war, then there couldn't be one, could there? And seeing that there hasn't been a draft in decades, there is no excuse there. It's a volunteer military. Sure, people get conned into joining. But then they get enthusiastic about shooting whomever crosses their paths and kicking in strangers' doors and screaming at them in a language they do not understand. So, once you've gone and invaded someone's sovereignty for no reason at all, aside from because you elected to do so/were ordered to, you've forfeited all rights to life. As much as I hate to use the war makers' terms, you are then a thief of freedom and liberty and the people whose land you are invading and occupying, the ones whom you are terrorizing, they have a right to resist and expel you by any means available to them. Especially now! There is NO MISUNDERSTANDING about what is going on in Iraq and Afghanistan. These are not popular wars. All that shit about 9/11 and Osama Bin Laden and whatever else is a bunch of garbage. None of that has anything to do with what's going on in those countries and no one even bothers to claim it does any longer.

Simply put, you are no hero while you are there unless you turn your weapons back on your own side, absolutely refuse to participate regardless of the consequences to yourself or somehow manage to perform a substantial subversive function, like the tragically foolish traitor to the imperialist cause, Bradley Manning.

Right on, Bob Herbert

Bob is my new favorite person at the New York Times. He seems way more "left" than the most of the rest of their people, and is very frank. All of which means he is a real, thinking person who says what he means and what he believes. He doesn't seem like a bullshitter.

He wrote this mostly great op-ed piece on Memorial Day:

If a bank is too big to fail, it’s way too big to exist. If an oil well is too far beneath the sea to be plugged when something goes wrong, it’s too deep to be drilled in the first place.

YES, fucking YES. Why can't people get that? What the hell business do you have drilling a mile under the sea (assuming that people have a "right" to extract petroleum in the first place, which they don't) when you have absolutely no plan in place in the event of a ruptured pipe, aside from drilling a new well? So many people buy into that industry/business/capital worshipping bullshit where people can do whatever they want in the interest of "progress" and profit.

Some of the rest of it is straight-up liberal and oddly patriotic, but I guess you have to do that shit to get a job there and keep it. They aren't going to publish things that I typically write here, for sure. They've got an agenda, and it is not the same as mine. But the editorial board does seem to allow people to deviate from it, to an extent.

Read on:

When are we going to stop behaving so stupidly? We nearly wrecked the economy and we’re all but buried in debt. But we can’t break up the biggest banks, and we can’t raise taxes. Now we’re fouling the magnificent Gulf of Mexico and ruining entire communities along the southern Louisiana Coast.

And, by the way, we’re still fighting a futile war in Afghanistan that we’ve been fighting with nonstop futility for nearly a decade. (I’m sure the troops saddled with this thankless task were thrilled to see fans and teams demonstrating their undying support for their efforts by wearing fancy baseball caps on Memorial Day.)

For a nation that can’t stop bragging about how great and powerful it is, we’ve become shockingly helpless in the face of the many challenges confronting us. Our can-do spirit was put on hold many moons ago, and here we are now unable to defeat the Taliban, or rein in the likes of BP and the biggest banks, or stop the oil gushing furiously from the bowels of earth like a warning from Hades about the hubris and ignorance that is threatening to destroy us.

BP and the Obama administration have been equally clueless about halting the millions of gallons of oil that have flowed into the gulf since the Deepwater Horizon explosion more than a month ago.

It's nice to see someone hitting at Obama who isn't some conservative piece of shit who will take any chance they can get to take a dump on him, just because he's not conservative, and is black.

Bob Herbert, I will be on a team with him any day. Hell yes, Bob.

How to avoid getting redeployed to combat

This is fucking awesome:

[Army Spc. Marc A.] Hall has been jailed since Dec. 11, two days before his brigade with the Army's 3rd Infantry Division out of Ft. Stewart, Georgia, was scheduled to leave for Iraq. He was charged with the military offense of communicating a threat after telling his battalion commander that he might shoot or otherwise attack a fellow U.S. soldier, according to Army lawyers. He previously served in Iraq in 2007-08.

But it was a CD recording of a rap song that Hall wrote and sent to the Army's personnel office in July 2009 that gained notoriety for the case.

At that point, Army lawyers said, Hall knew his unit was scheduled to deploy — just two months before he was to finish his four-year enlistment contract. An unpopular Army policy known as "stop loss" requires that soldiers who are assigned to a unit at the time it deploys will be kept in the ranks for as long as the duration of the yearlong tour.

On the recording, Hall denounced the Army for the policy and rapped about opening fire with his military-issue M-4 rifle.

"I got a (expletive) magazine with 30 rounds, on a three-round burst, ready to fire down," Hall rapped. "Still against the wall, I grab my M-4, spray and watch all the bodies hit the floor. ... I bet you never stop-loss nobody no more, in your next lifetime of course. No remorse."

Pretty great. This guy seriously did not want to go back to war, and was willing to do just about anything. He fucking mailed a CD of the song to the Army! Man, that's gutsy. Good for him. It should really say something to people that he'd rather spend an indefinite period in jail that go back to combat. It probably won't though.

Fuck military service, at least in this country. You're just a tool of imperialism, suppression and oppression.

I despise your killing and raping...You're...despicable

More war. For nothing. Fight and fight. Attack. Return the attack. Go nowhere. No progress. Just moving sideways. Domination. New masters. Old masters return. No one wins. Same process, new participants. Ad nauseam. Ad annihilation.

Arms Sent by U.S. May Be Falling Into Taliban Hands

As opposed to a few years back, when they were sent by the U.S. and put into Taliban hands. The article completely ignores that point, that Americans are fighting a force that the CIA funded, armed and trained. Fucking brilliant. Forget the past, they tell us every day. But remember the parts that serve them well, like 9/11. That one, you're supposed to never forget. You know? As though they'd let you forget anyway.

From the New York Times today:

KABUL — Insurgents in Afghanistan, fighting from some of the poorest and most remote regions on earth, have managed for years to maintain an intensive guerrilla war against materially superior American and Afghan forces.

Arms and ordnance collected from dead insurgents hint at one possible reason: Of 30 rifle magazines recently taken from insurgents’ corpses, at least 17 contained cartridges, or rounds, identical to ammunition the United States had provided to Afghan government forces, according to an examination of ammunition markings by The New York Times and interviews with American officers and arms dealers.

Haha, pretty good contribution to the spectacle.

Still hoping for that change?

That's cool. Let me know when it comes, k?

A Harvard law professor wrote an opinion piece in today's New York Times on what separates the current and former presidential administrations' handling of their detainees, "enemy combatants," "terrorists," others confined in Guantanamo Bay and those who will find themselves in similar situations. Here are some highlights:

HAS the Obama administration changed the legal rules for detaining suspects in the war on terrorism, or is it continuing in the footsteps of the Bush administration?

We got a clue last week when the Justice Department filed an important document “refining” the government’s position in lawsuits over those held at Guantánamo Bay...Cautious and modest where George W. Bush was ambitious and brash, Mr. Obama still claims the authority necessary to sustain almost everything his predecessor did.

Perhaps what’s most important here is what Mr. Obama’s lawyers do not say. The Bush White House long insisted that the president had inherent power as commander in chief to do whatever it took to defend the country — including overriding American and international law. The Obama filing, however, is silent on the topic of inherent executive power. Indeed, the magic words “commander in chief” never even appear.

Technically, the Obama lawyers have not abandoned the argument for broad presidential power, just implied that such authority is unnecessary to get them what they want...

The upshot is that the Obama approach is potentially broad enough to continue detaining everyone whom the Bush administration put in Guantánamo in the first place. The legal theories are subtler, and the reliance on international law may prove more attractive to our allies...

The true test of whether Mr. Obama has improved on the Bush era lies in how his administration justifies its decisions on the 241 remaining Guantánamo detainees, whose cases will now be evaluated internally and reviewed by the courts. If the new legal arguments actually affect who goes free and who stays in custody, then they will amount to meaningful change. Without real-world effects, though, even the most elegant new legal arguments are nothing but words.

It seems as though president Obama will be taking the route of doing shitty things and not speaking of them. That way, he feels better about himself, more liberals/progressives/civil libertarians will support him and the American image abroad improves, at least for a while. I think that a lot of people really want to believe that this guy is a real departure from the past and have so far convinced themselves that since he speaks differently and chooses to verbally address and engage different agendas than the former president, than he must be. I haven't seen it.

Report to distort

No analysis provided this time, just headlines and the first few lines of the article. Are you ready? OK. This is yesterday's big news item:

13 civilians killed in Afghanistan: US military

KABUL (AFP) – The US-led coalition in Afghanistan confirmed Saturday that 13 civilians were killed in an operation against insurgents, with such casualties a major source of tension between Kabul and its allies.

The US military at first said that 15 militants were killed in air strikes in the western province of Herat late Monday but local officials said six women and two children were among the dead.

Now, with seemingly no acknowledgment of the previous day's news, here is today's:

14 militants killed in southern Afghanistan

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan – A battle just outside southern Afghanistan's largest city has killed at least six Taliban fighters, while an airstrike against militants elsewhere in the south killed eight, officials said Sunday.

Oh, capitalist media, YOU SO FUNNY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

An eye for an eye

will hopefully leave at least one man blind. As CNN reports, Ameneh Bahrami, an Iranian woman was blinded when a relentless stalker, Majid Movahedi, threw acid on her face about four years ago. In a measure of respect for women that surprises me, he has been imprisoned since then, awaiting further punishment. As far as I know, these attacks, which are not uncommon throughout the Muslim world, often go unpunished.

Ms. Bahrami has insisted that her attacker receive the same sentence he gave her - blindness. Supposedly, he will be blinded within a few weeks, his appeal having been recently rejected.

Good.

I do not support capital punishment, but this is different. Men carry this out with impunity. They believe, generally correctly, that they can do whatever they like to women. Here is an example of that in Pakistan. "Because women usually don’t matter in this part of the world, their attackers are rarely prosecuted and acid sales are usually not controlled."

This is a very specific behavior that could be severely curtailed if men thought that they would face the same punishment in return. It needs to stop. By any means necessary.

Fuck every liberal "human rights advocate" who looks at this and makes some blanket declaration about violence being "bad" or "immoral." Fuck every one of them who says that these women are wrong. Fuck their senses of superiority that tell these women what they should do. Fuck their arrogance, fuck their condescending attitudes. Sometimes, violence does work.

Barack Obama's Op-Ed in today's New York Times

Using war to make politics. Through all of the death, suffering, ruined lives, reopened wounds and abject loss, all the man can see fit to do is use it as leverage to bolster his own standing. His repeated mentions of John McCain's positions and George Bush's actions make it hard for me to see his own words as sincere. It's all about positioning himself against them. Them, them, them. Why couldn't he just state his positions without swiping at others? This article seems so dirty, so impure of purpose.

After reading his piece several times, I'm still not sure why he wants to end the war. He makes a nebulous statement that "Ending the war is essential to meeting our broader strategic goals, starting in Afghanistan and Pakistan, where the Taliban is resurgent and Al Qaeda has a safe haven." What does this mean? War in Pakistan? Move the war east? Were that to happen, will the people of Pakistan be more appreciative of a drastically increased number of Americans on their soil? Doubtful. What are these "broader strategic goals," anyway?

Regarding Afghanistan, Senator Obama proffers that "We need more troops, more helicopters, better intelligence-gathering and more nonmilitary assistance to accomplish the mission there." Which mission is that? Wiping out the Taliban? Good luck with that. No recommendations on how to do that one, huh? Oh wait, more troops and helicopters. Yeah, that usually does the job.

No mention of dead Iraqis.