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What We (meaning I) Have Learned from Costa Rica

    I flew to Costa Rica more than a month ago with the intention of learning Spanish (as well as indulging in a bit of wanderlust). For the majority of my time in the country, I lived in a hostel in Orosi and took Spanish classes for three hours a day, five days a week (after that I spent more than a week in a beach town). There were a number of things that I learned while in Costa Rica. The most valuable being my (still amateur, though much improved) Spanish speaking skills. But I also learned bits and pieces about the country and its people. One of the first things that I learned was that one should not travel to Costa Rica during the rainy season if one is not a fan of rain (I did, and I am not). Another is that while plantains taste wonderful when you cook them, there really is no good reason not to eat them raw, other than the perturbed stares and comments of observers.

The people in the places that I have been to before (much of the US, some of Canada, a smattering of countries in Europe) have been a mixed bag. I have yet to visit a place which offers a bag wholly free of dicks. With minor exceptions, I did not meet any dicks in Costa Rica. (More specifically, I didn’t meet any Costa Rican dicks in Costa Rica; there was, for example, an Australian guy that was a total dick.) In general, everyone I met was pretty chill. No one seemed to mind that I spoke with choppy, indelicate Spanish. Everyone I asked for help or directions gave it readily and was pretty friendly about it, sometimes offering assistance without my asking. (Two people, TWO, stopped to point me in the right direction at a bus terminal, intuiting that I, the furrow-browed gringo with the enormous backpack, wasn’t too sure where the fuck he was going.) And (nearly) everyone will smile and say, “Hola” or “Buenas” if you say it to them. (You might think that this is case everywhere, but trust me, not so much; in my experience, Swedes, Italians, and most Americans can be pretty standoffish.)

    Not all of my experiences in Costa Rica, and with Costa Rican people, were positive ones. There were a handful of unpleasant (non-weather related) incidents of shittiness.

I had close to thirty-thousand colones (roughly fifty bucks) stolen from my wallet at one point. This incident did happen, I should note, somewhere between a hostel in the small mountain town of Orosi and a hotel in San Jose. It is possible that the money could have been taken before I’d even left the hostel, in which case it would likely have been one of the hostel-dwellers that stole it, the majority of whom were European. Based on prior experiences with both Europeans and Central Americans, I believe it more plausible that it was some Euro-kid that robbed me rather than a Tico. I do believe it more likely that the cash was pilfered while at the hostel because my wallet, which has two metal snaps and a metal chain clipping it to my belt loop (yes, I wear a chain wallet, unironically), was snapped shut and securely clipped, chain and keys a-jangling, at the time I opened it to find it thirty-thousand colones light. There was also a day, after first arriving at the hostel in Orisi, that I believed my passport to be lost or stolen. After many hours of panicked searching and making aggressive (silent) accusations (in my mind) against the guests and staff of the hostel, I found the passport in the shaving kit pocket of my toiletry bag, where I had cleverly hidden it so that it would not be lost or stolen. So there’s a chance the cash will turn up later in some super clever hiding spot that I’ve cleverly forgotten about.  

A taxi driver in San Jose scammed me. I don’t ride taxis, ever. In the hierarchy of transportation methods, taxis fall well after bikes, non-taxi cars, trains, skateboards, buses, horses,camels, just about everything. So normally when a taxi driver tries webbing me in, I either ignore them or politely (usually; blood sugar level can be a factor) decline. But this guy roped me into a conversation, and told me that he’d take me to the best, cheap and authentic restaurant in the city, saying the trip would take only five minutes and cost two-thousand colones (like three-fifty), so I agreed. Twenty minutes later, the guy was insisting that I owed him something like seventeen-thousand (close to thirty bucks). So, yeah, fuck taxis.   

What I take away from my experience of vagabonding around Costa Rica, the prevailing impression and sentiment more than any particular incident, is one of good people. People were generally friendly and helpful, I believe genuinely kind. Being what I am, or more accurately (perhaps simply kinder to myself) appearing as I do, the people that I met would have been justified in harboring prejudices against me, being resentful towards me. I’m a white American male. Had I been born as any other classification of person, it’s possible I’d despise the shit out of people like me on principle. Not only are we (cocked crackers) the most privileged people on Earth (as a category, and not factoring in wealth, though that is significant and likely assumed), but the current political climate could make matters all the more acrimonious. Considering that the current representative of our kind is a senile and bigoted Doritos-dusted Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man who manufactured political clout, in part, by villainizing Central Americans (technically, yes, he said that Mexicans were rapists and murderers and did not, as I recall, broaden his brush to include Mexico’s southerly neighbors; and yes, Costa Rica, being a stabler and safer country than say, Guatemala or Nicaragua, has a lower number of people immigrating to the United States), one might think that they would hold a grudge. One might think that I, as a physical representation of some of the worst kind of people, with the most abhorrent beliefs and prejudices, might be considered fair game for violence and derision by the locals. But, no. Not one person told me to get out of their country. Not a single police officer or vigilante demanded that I present them with legal documentation proving my right to be there. No one committed or threatened any overt or implied violence against me, or said so much as a cruel word. Well… There were these two guys  who I am pretty sure referred to me as “muchacha,” but I take that possible jibe to have simply been a playful comment on the fact that I’m just so goddamn pretty.  

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Treat White People with the Prejudice they've Earned

    White people deserve to be, and should be, treated like Nazis and members of the Ku Klux Klan. That may seem unfair, considering that the majority of pale-skinned individuals have no such allegiance to these hate groups or any other such gaggle of degenerate fuckwits. That is beside the point, however, as members of any other demographic, members of any minority in America are often forced to bear burdens on behalf of the worst examples of their demographic. The majority of black people are not thugs and drug dealers. The majority of Muslims are not Jihadist terrorists. The majority of Asian-Americans are not Yakuza- or Triad-affiliated ninja-esque assassins cursed with micro-penises. Yet members among each of these groups have been made victims of prejudice arising in reaction to the crimes committed by a minority among them.  

    Perhaps the most common stereotyping prejudice against white people is that they are racist. When you think about that for a second, that is really getting off easy. The worst prejudice that gets casually lobbed at white people is that they are labeled guilty of being prejudiced against other people. Not only is this a far gentler label to be branded with than ‘terrorist,’ ‘criminal,’ or any of the others that members of minority groups suffer under, it is also one which implicitly elevates white people in a position of power and authority. Racism is a culturally instituted crime of systemic prejudice based on gross generalizations, rather than judgments on individuals. To be racist implies one’s perceived superiority. By definition, the charge of racism puts the person or persons being charged in a superior position. Racism is committed by a society’s empowered majority against its victimized minority. Therefore, in America, racism is a crime which can only be committed by white people against non-white people, making it laughably insulting, and impossible, when white people claim to be victims of racism. This is not to say that a white person cannot suffer some grievance at the hands of another party on the basis of their skin color, but whatever these words or actions may be, they are not, and do not deserve, the label of ‘racism.’ Partial disclosure: I’ve experienced insults and assaults predicated on my being white. That does not make me a victim of racism. White people cannot justifiably claim to be victims of racism. On that note, fuck any ignorant fuck who has ever used the phrase ‘reverse racism’ in response to some perceived slight.

    The white people most frequently and easily offended by charges of being racists are, with little variability, guilty of at least dabbling in racism. As is often the case with broad sweeping prejudices, this is not always true, and the word ‘racist’ is not always applied fairly. But that is far beyond the point. Generally, the words ‘racist’ or ‘racism’ are bandied against someone who has said or done something which is, if not explicitly, then perceivably, racist. Now the average white person, those with only dustings of inborn racism, if accused of racism will either deny it or, more appropriately, apologize, even if they don’t view their statement or action as being racist. Denial is a generally dickish route to take, and made all the worse depending on how vehemently it is denied. If, for example, a person made the claim that they are ‘the least racist person that you will ever meet in your entire life,’ it can be safely assumed that this person is tremendously racist. The more emphatic the denial, the more should one’s guilt be assumed.  

    Along this same vein, it is arguably an act of racism to deny the existence and pervasiveness of racism in our culture. This argument has been made many times, and by those who’ve done so with more dedication and eloquence than I’ll attempt, that they cannot see color. Suffice to say that claiming ‘colorblindness,’ pretending that one is literally incapable of racism because they cannot identify racial differences, is racist as fuck. It is a denial of culpability not only on the part of the self-purported ‘colorblind’ shitwich (a sandwich made of white bread and human shit) in question, but a denial that the injustice exists, thereby discounting justified claims of victimization and attempting to discredit the victims. Claiming that one is incapable of racism, or taking that a further step of claiming that racism does not exist, is comparable to Holocaust denial. While I’m aware that many people (most of them racists) are fond of bleating that any comparison to Hitler, Nazism, the Holocaust, et al. kills whatever argument is being made, fuck them; it’s an apt analogy, if an extreme one.

Some prejudices of stereotyping have a complimentary nature, which while they can prove beneficial in some sense, are no more fair. It is not fair to assume, for example that every black man is a monster-cocked basketball savant who also dabbles in rap or stand-up comedy, or that every Asian woman is a gorgeous and sexually attentive math genius with mad kung fu skills. These stereotypes could be argued (and if they are, chances are it’s a white person making the argument) to be strengths, that these ‘positive prejudices’ serve to help those labeled with them. After all, who wouldn’t want the consensus of ignorant strangers to be that you happen to be endowed with physical prowess, beauty, intellectual skill or aesthetically enviable sex organs? The answer would be anyone who resents that these assumptions made about them are based on their most superficial qualities: their skin color, dress style, accent, eye shape, any trait which says virtually nothing about them as an individual human being which is used as a basis for preemptively determining their personality.    

    White Americans, as a collective, have far more crimes to answer for than any other demographic. While most white people may have never been in, been affiliated with, or expressed fond feelings for white supremacist shitsacks, or any of the actions or beliefs born of their shitsackery, these groups, by definition, are comprised entirely by, and for the ‘good,’ of white people. They, though technically a minority whom many among the majority regard as the worst examples of their demographic and express a disgust for being in any way associated with them, represent whiteness. They are white. They’re entire entity and purpose is built on the melanin- and common decency-deficient foundation of whiteness. All white people are therefore deserving of bearing the brunt of whatever collective vitriol may be sprayed at white people’s shitwich minority.

    The Klan and the Nazis are among the easiest and most evocative groups with which to unfairly/justifiably associate the entirety of the white population, but there’s no reason to stop there. If you’re feeling creative and down for a little quick research, you can find any number of racially-disparaging statistics for white people. Do a quick search for the number of white serial killers and rapists. Pretty much any horrible act has a rich history of anglo saxons doing the fuck out of it.   

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Graveyards: Ostentatious Waste or Irrational Drain of Resources?

    Inarguably, among the greatest wastes of space and resources in society are graveyards. Apart from being lovely locales for picnics, birthday parties, self-spooking, seances, uncomfortable and clandestine teenage sex and petty vandalism, graveyards serve no useful purpose. The practice of erecting gravestones is a gaudy and silly exercise in ego. Planting a pretty, expensive stone into a plot of land, land which would have otherwise been put to beneficial use, is, if we are being honest with ourselves, tacky. It’s a passive-aggressive way of a former-person’s surviving relations saying, “Look at me! I love a dead person! And I can prove the measure of my love with money!”; or in the case of the deceased, “Look at me! I’m dead and of no use to anyone, but I still demand to be acknowledged and take up physical space!” And don’t kid yourself, that is precisely what they are shouting, if not literally. A gravestone, depending on whether you cheap out on one of those flat little sunken-in ones or you splurge on one of the classic upright models, is going to put you out anywhere between a few hundred and ten-thousand dollars. Mind you, that is only the cost of the stone itself, not factoring in the considerable expenses of the plot of land in which to plant the thing and the service of having someone do it for you.   

Cremation has its strengths as a corpse disposal method in terms of minimizing waste, conserving space, and, in the case of funeral pyres and viking funerals, being awesome (name a better way to go out than floating out to sea on a burning boat ~ you can’t ~ being incinerated by dragons doesn’t count), but cremation has its drawbacks. First is the waste of natural gas used to cremate bodies in your standard mortuary/morgue corpse disposal assembly line. Then there is the matter of throwing more harmful greenhouse gases, pollutants, volatile acids, carcinogens into the environment (carbon dioxide carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxide, sulfur oxide, hydrogen chloride and hydrogen fluoride). While these murder-fumes are produced in smaller quantity than in the average car’s exhaust, why jam another straw into the already straw-massacred camel’s back? There is also the matter of cost. A cremation can run you anywhere from $1,500 to $4,000, assuming that you arrange for it to be done through an at least moderately reputable funeral home or crematory. Thousands of dollars for something that could theoretically be done in a backyard bonfire.   

There are advantages to burial, but they are in most cases unutilized. The deceased human body, like the body of any formerly living creature, is a rich treasure trove of nutrients. Our bodies, once having evacuated our consciousnesses, are calorically and nutritionally valuable husks which could and should prove invaluable resources for those life-forms still living. The most immediately obvious use to which corpses could be put is as fertilizer. In a sense, this is already how they are being used in graveyards, except the only plant life drawing any benefit from them are flowers and grass, showy things which are far from being the most expedient usage. The great untapped resource for human corpses is as fertilizer for agricultural production. Farms. Now, I am not suggesting that we ship truckloads of dead bodies out to American farms and dump them unceremoniously onto farmers’ fields. That would be grotesque, not to mention ridiculously inefficient. What I am suggesting is that human corpses be ground into a fine paste, or perhaps a dehydrated powder, which can be safely, easily and respectfully transported to farms, or sold commercially in your neighborhood home and garden store. This use has the advantage not only of being rational and economically practical, but the potential of producing organic produce of a quality and quality heretofore unenjoyed.

    Among the more practical methods of corpse disposal is the practice of sky burial. Practiced in some Chinese provinces and the autonomous regions of Tibet, Qinghai, Sichuan and Inner Mongolia, as well as in Mongolia, Bhutan, Nepal, and parts of India, sky burial is a process through which dead bodies are taken into the mountains, to specially designated sites, where they are left for vultures and weather to strip their bones of flesh and viscera. The theological thinking behind this practice is that it is returning bodies to nature, sending the departed on their journey onward into the sky. It is also, practically thinking, a conscientious way of sharing a meal with our favorite scavengers and birds of prey, and takes little effort on the part of us living humans. We simply drag (or drive, or perhaps arrange a conveyor belt or ski lift situation) our corpses up to the mountain peak and leave them there, allowing nature to clean them to their bones. Now, sure, right now you’re no doubt thinking, Where am I going to find a mountain peak in my middle-American suburban neighborhood? And I’d rather not spend my day off chauffeuring my uncle’s corpse in the trunk of my car. Valid concerns, but worry not. Naturally, there would be corpse depositories conveniently located throughout the country who would handle transportation. This operation would admittedly have expenses, particularly in the early phases of recruiting corpse-handlers and laying tracks for the corpse-trains. For those libertarian types, seeking to look after their own business, they need go no further than their own backyards. Zoning laws permitting, people would be welcome to dispose of their corpses on their own property. A tall flagpole or tree could be a functional substitute for a mountain top, or, failing that, and if acceptable to the property owners, a picnic table or patio could suffice, assuming one is not deterred by the presence of feral scavenger animals on their property for the duration of time it takes them to provide their service.

For the best use of dead bodies as a food source, we turn once more to farming. While cattle may turn their vegan noses up at any meat presented to them as a meal, swine and fowl have no such pretensions. A pig or a chicken will eat virtually anything edible presented to it, happily. While many farmers may skimp on the dietary needs of their livestock, fattening them with corn and ostensible garbage, those who can afford to take more pride in the animals they raise, who perhaps cater to more high-end consumers, supplement the diets of their animals with more nutrient rich foods, animal fats and proteins. Quality chicken farmers, for example, will feed their birds fish, either the bodies or scraps of fish or a readymade dehydrated feed. This produces healthier, more nutrient-rich chickens and eggs, with a higher omega-3 fatty acid content. Granted, your average American may not be quite as healthy as your standard sardine, not to mention rife with hormones, antibiotics and drugs, but this is still a far better use for our corpses than we’ve thus far employed.    

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Leave the Baby, and Yourself, at Home

    Do not ever take a baby on an international vacation. No decent person would do this. This is something that only egotistical monsters would even think to do.

    If you are a new parent, or a seasoned vet with fresh brood, you are not entitled to even be on vacation. Consider having an infant in tow as a disqualification for vacation eligibility. If you have time off from work, spend that time at home with your baby. Don’t drag that baby along with you to foreign lands. Take it to the park, or maybe, maybe, to the beach or something. Perhaps rent a room at some nearby destination. Do not travel abroad.

    To start with, there is the issue of danger. In taking a baby to a foreign country (say, by way of example, a central American country; and say, by way of a more specific example, Costa Rica), you are endangering that baby in myriad ways. Think of the illnesses that could be incurred! The unfamiliar climate and food-borne bacteria! Sure, the chances of your pale little (let’s say, French) baby contracting a potentially debilitating or even fatal disease may not be huge, but that there’s even a possibility should preclude your taking that risk.

    Apart from diseases, viruses and unfamiliar bacteria, you should not be exposing this little (pale, French) baby to the everyday risks of any foreign country, particularly one with which you (evidently) have only passing familiarity. Anything could happen. Your baby could be eaten by wild dogs (not specifically dingoes, per se) or a snake, a panther, any number of carnivorous animals not present in the affluent and urban (French) home to which you and your (pale French) baby are accustomed could swoop up out of nowhere and gobble up your (pale French) baby.

    I wonder, do you think that there is some benefit for the (pale, French) baby in hefting it along on this trip? There’s not. It will remember none of this. You are serving no purpose other than satisfying your own desperate need for a time and a circumstance in your own lives which are dead.

Putting aside your personal stupidity and undervaluation of inherent risks, you should also consider how inconsiderate it is to travel with a baby. Wherever you go and whatever you do, the planes you fly in, the restaurants where you eat, and the hostels in which you sleep (despite your obviously having enough money from your rewarding French jobs to spend a few extra bucks on a hotel room), you are forcing everyone else within your personal vicinity to be exposed to your whining (pale, French) baby. There was a time when the term “youth hostel” meant something. It meant that young, unmarried, childless people, vagabonds and broke twenty-somethings, could sleep in a bed (presumably) free of parasites at a price they are able to afford with only moderate risk of being robbed, assaulted or murdered. If you can afford to travel to a foreign (central American) country (like Costa Rica) and tool around it in a rented SUV, then you can afford a private room in a hotel. You should not be in a hostel. If you did not arrive at the hostel by foot and public transport, shouldering a backpack the weight of a small person, your shoes dirty and your clothes smelling ripe, you do not belong in that hostel.

Oh, and if your (pale French) baby is at that stage of development where it is toying with its fledgling ability to walk, do not let it run all around the hostel like a free-range chicken, shrieking, picking up the possessions of the other guests in the public area and throwing them, messing around with pots in the kitchen’s low shelves, getting the dogs riled up, making it unpleasant for people to eat and difficult to get any work done. If you do let your (pale French) baby run around with abandon, do not then admonish it constantly, loudly repeating its name every time it does something that you should not have enabled it to do in the first place. (Do not, for instance, shout, “Sasha! Sasha!” over and over again, to the point that I cannot get that name, spoken in your pretentious, wheedling accents, out of my head for more than a day after you have finally, mercifully, left the hostel with your free-range baby and your perpetually sour-faced grimaces in your expensive rented SUV.) Either lock your (pale French) baby away in your room, or in the SUV, for the duration of time that you are out cooking and in the common area, or perhaps (if that suggestion sounds at all brutal and cruel) you should consider being a leash parent. Buy that kid a collar (avoid slip leads and metal choke collars), clip on the leash and tie the handle end to a table leg. These practices, though better than those in which you’ve thus far been engaging, are not ideal. Ideally, you would not be here, in this hostel. Go home.

If you are in possession of a recently spawned child, and are at this time considering going on a vacation, but have not yet taken the ill-advised commensive leap, stop. Stop right now. Stop. You are done. You belong in your home with your (pale French) baby, not out here in the world with us real people. We have put (what passes for) our lives on hold and dipped into our modest savings to travel. We have paid just as much as you have for airfare and for a bed, and you do not have the right to rob us of our comfort and freedom and sleep. You having given up those rights for the opportunity to sell the remaining duration of your time in this life to the shrieking (pale, French) spawn at your feet, and that does not entitle you to violate the rights of others. You are shitty parents and inconsiderate people. Stop, and go home. Go home before you’ve even taken the opportunity to leave.  

And look, I get it. I understand why you’ve undertaken this trip. You’re feeling your age and progressing unattractiveness. You want to go out and do the fun, adventurous things that you’d be doing if you were still young and moderately less unattractive. But you can’t. That time in your life has passed and you are no longer eligible. You got old, and you chose to have a baby. That is your life for the foreseeable future. Your fate from here unto death is to stay home and devote your attentions to your needy little (pale, French) child. Get used to it. Stop trying. And stop ruining it (Costa Rica) for the rest of us.    

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The Necessary Futility of Political Condemnation

Whether discussing a DIY terrorist attack, human rights violations committed by a sovereign state, or the rantings of an overly vociferous blogger, the response from politicians is consistent: condemnation. When people are killed en masse, physically maimed or grievously insulted, we’ll rarely be waiting long for our leaders (or someone else’s leaders when the aggrieved belong to another nation, possibly one abused by our own) to go on the radio (if we were living five decades ago), television (if we were living two decades ago), or Twitter (sigh…) to publicly condemn whatever the reprehensible actions happened to be and whomever happened to have (allegedly) committed them. This is standard for all leaders on local and global levels. It is what we expect, what we (in a sense) demand. And it is entirely asinine, but also kind of essential.

The act of verbally condemning some action and the purveyors of said action is ridiculously

stupid in probably 99% of cases. First of all, for the simple reason that it should go without saying. When something horrible happens, when people die, it should generally be taken as given that our leaders are not feeling too hot about it. If we can’t assume that our leaders are at least a little displeased when a stabbing spree, an act of vehicular mass-manslaughter or a bombing affects their people, then we have saddled ourselves with some really shitty and useless leaders (which is broadly the case, but let’s not get distracted by tangents for the moment). Is anyone stupid enough to believe that if a politician does not hold a press conference in the wake of a majorly disastrous crime to announce that they are not happy about it, it means that they must be happy about it, that they approve of it? Probably. People are stupid. And there are more than enough media commentators to chastise them if they don’t, to seize on the politician’s apparent lack of a fuck as an opportunity to push an agenda.

The second reason that the practice of public verbal condemnation is stupid as hell is that it doesn’t actually do anything. Nothing is accomplished when the US and any number of other nations condemn Kim Jong Un and the North Korean regime for performing nuclear weapons tests, or when Bashar al-Assad and his regime are condemned for ordering military strikes which kill his own nation’s citizens. Saying that you condemn something does not do a goddamn thing. I condemn carpenter bees; that doesn’t stop them from eating holes and building nests in the table on which I am writing this. To say that you condemn something, in the way that our leaders use the word, means hardly anything more than “I don’t like that,” or “Woah, not cool, dude.” To call it a passive aggressive response is giving it more credit than it deserves. It’s maybe a quarter notch above utter passivity.

But then we get to why, even though it’s an idiotic exercise in impotence, verbal condemnation is kind of necessary. If it were not done, if our leaders made no public condemnation, if they were to eschew vocally wagging their fingers in the figurative faces of those parties guilty of whatever crime and/or travesty happens to be in the zeitgeist on a given week, they would be harangued for their passivity. They would be condemned for not condemning whoever they were meant to have condemned. If the prime minister of the UK or the president of France doesn’t stand in front of a wall of cameras and say that they condemn this or that terrorist attack, or otherwise branded event of mass slaughter or harm, then the public and all the other world leaders would work themselves into an uproar about how weak the hypothetical prime minister or president in the given scenario is, how in not condemning the offenders, they are supporting these individuals and their actions. In the case of contemporary terrorism, this is a false supposition. At least false in the sense of believing that the best course of action, following a terrorist attack, is for the politician responsible (for the affected people and locale, not the attack itself, hopefully) to make a statement through international media condemning the attack and its executors. That is what modern terrorist organizations thrive on. To be condemned on such a wide venue by representatives of their purported enemies is the best marketing they can hope for. Repeatedly showing clips of the damage wrought by an attack, juxtaposed with tame, ineffectual insults lobbed underhand by a ‘Western’ (quotation marks used because distinguishing nations by criteria delineating east and west is asinine if you’ve ever looked at a globe) leader is better than the best propaganda commercial they could hope to buy. To condemn them empowers them. But, heavens, just imagine how weak we’d look if we didn’t. Ah, dilemma…

What we (or rather, our political leaders) must do is find a new way to respond to terrorist attacks, human rights violations, et al. They need something more effective than their usual go-tos of either condemning or carpet bombing the possible locations of offenders. Here’s a suggestion: ignore them. Radical, yes, but do you remember what it was like to be ignored and unpopular during your adolescent years? If you’re a politician, then I know you remember. No one liked you. You were an awkward overeager tool purse in school. That’s why you got into politics. Now people have to pretend to like you, or failing that, respect you, and failing that, at least acknowledge your existence and recognize your goofy nonthreatening potato face when you flash your orthodontic grill. You know how painful and frustrating it can be for others to ignore you. I understand  that your first instinct when pushed is to push back, to fight and bully. But you have really weak pushing arms and you fight like a punk. Your bullying is seen for the bland and passionless cowardice that it is. Imagine if you were walking down the street with your friend and someone steps up and slaps them hard across the face. What do you do? Do you say, “That was rude and cowardly. I condemn your actions.” No, you respond in kind, you-- No, wait, that makes it sound like I’m encouraging violence. Scratch that.

Okay, imagine you and Canada and the EU are strolling down the hall, minding your own rich-kid business. You pass by Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Russia (note: it is not my intention to disparage these countries, only the fascist assholes that rule them) who are, in this scenario, represented by rather scrappy, poorly dressed kids with less firm social standing. One of them hurls some insult at you. Oh no! What do you do?? Not a damn thing. Ignore them. Continue being powerful and affluent, and allow their own insecurity to consume them.

Please don’t bother pointing out that that’s not a very good analogy.

[karlamazov-blog]

Legalize it (all)

    Everything should be legalized. Or, wait, no. Let me Clarify. (Put the baby and the bottle rockets down.) Every drug should be legalized. This is not to say that drugs should be done, that they are good or harmless or that everyone should empty their bank accounts, rush out and get as fucked up as they possibly can right this second. Not saying that. Although I won’t stop you either. I won’t stop you because it’s not my business, because I recognize that rather than you being a problem, you have a problem, and because I know that trying to stop you would cost billions in taxpayer dollars.

    As a recovering drug addict, it is not from a place of ignorance and frivolity that I insist on the merits of full drug legalization. I have known both addicts and dealers intimately. They are not, for the most part, the diseased wretches and maniacal bloodthirsty monsters portrayed in much entertainment media. They are, in general, people who simply ended up in their positions by chance and circumstance. The “bad” things that they do are often the result of treatment they’ve received from law enforcement, judiciaries and societal constructs.  

    Attorney General Jeff Sessions (noted bigot and sentient lawn gnome) has made it very clear (as clearly as his slow Gumpian drawl enables him) that under his authority, all drug crimes can and should be treated with utmost severity. It would be easy to dismiss Sessions’s stilted, bullet-time slow speeches as the unhinged rantings of a belligerent excommunicated leprechaun or a little cracker lad who got lost on his way home from a lynching a century ago and hasn’t yet been made privy to our newfangled ideas of actually reading and listening to statistical evidence or the experienced opinions of qualified professionals, and not behaving like worthless pieces of dusty backwoods turds.

A soundbite you’ve doubtless heard too many times (if you, like me, listen to upwards of five news programs daily at 1.5X speed) features Sessions explaining (with the cadence of a child portraying an effeminate grandfather in a school play) that (paraphrasing:) “When you go to collect a drug debt, you don’t do it in a court of law, you do it with the barrel of a gun.”

Yeah, no shit. Because the backwards laws and draconian punishments that you (Sessions) are enforcing ensures that this is the case. If drugs were legal, dealers could settle their disputes through civil suits rather than shootouts. But, of course, if drugs were legal there would be no “dealers,” there would be doctors, pharmacists and licensed distributors. Drug dealers do not get into their line of business for their love of providing customers with the finest organic and sustainably sourced heroin. They do not kill people because the simple act of handling drugs alters the chemical composition of their brain, resulting in their being compelled to commit violence. Drug dealers sell drugs because people want drugs and they conduct their business by criminal means because it has been criminalized.

If maple syrup was criminalized, the cartels, syndicates and streetgangs would be all about that shit. Mules would be tunneling under the Canadian border smuggling syrup-filled condoms packed into their colons. Criminals would be warring in the streets to hold down the hottest syrup spot. Gangsta rappers would be boasting about all the jewels they bought pushing syrup. And you’d be paying twenty dollars an ounce to pour that sweet sticky shit on your waffles.

     Jeff Sessions said another monumentally stupid thing in that speech, invoking Nancy Reagan and her coined phrase: “Just say no.” That approach proved itself to be no more effective than giving teens abstinence-only sex education (a concept akin to a foodless diet plan). Both approaches are flippant avoidances of serious issues which, if the adults involved had the maturity and sense to behave as such, create worse problems than they purportedly seek to prevent. Rather than taking the “tough love” (more accurately, the simpering cowardice) approach, saying “Don’t do that,” and then punishing people when they inevitably do, instead acknowledge that people probably will do things that you think they shouldn’t and be prepared to assist them in doing so safely or help them when an inevitable problem arises.

The conservative approach to enforcing drug laws has long been punitive action, punishing those in anyway involved in the drug trade, many of them low-level peddlers and users rather than legitimate dealers, kingpins and wholesalers. If these people were truly conservatives, they would realize how asinine and fiscally irresponsible this approach is. Their solution for dealing with a drug addict is to pay to hold the addict in prison. It costs roughly $40,000 (I read this number somewhere; Can’t remember where, but it was a reliable source; Feel free to refute it or offer a more accurate citation) a year to house each inmate in our country’s prison industry. Many Americans (like this one with the two thumbs) live on less than $40,000 a year. Think about that. For each person locked up on a weak drug charge, we could instead be providing a year’s salary for them to work a job and be a productive member of society. Or we could give that money to someone else, someone both in need and sober; until they get clean, it’s probably imprudent to provide lots of cash to addicts. Locking addicts away in prisons accomplishes nothing. It does not provide the resources or environment for them to get clean and stay clean. It does not improve their chances of finding work once they get out. It sure as shit does not help their physical and mental health or self-esteem. For a fraction of the cost of imprisonment, we could be providing recovery services. The big difference, one of the real, pivotal reasons that hasn’t happened, is that the aim in rehabilitative services, the intention of those providing the service is ensuring that those they help will leave with the skills and support system sufficient for them to never need those services again. Prisons, despite contrary lies of proponents, have, by and large, zero intention of rehabilitating anyone, be they the more serious violent offenders or victims of drug addiction. The prison industry profits greatly from repeat customers/offenders. Then there’s all the law enforcement officials, local police and federal agents, who waste their time and our money punishing people for petty drug offenses. Decades of waging a never-ending drug war in this country has proven the pursuit idiotically ineffective and absurdly costly.    

    So that’s the rational (money) side of things. Now for a quick examination of the compassionate side:

    Drug addiction is an illness. Those afflicted can and should be helped rather than persecuted.

[karlamazov-blog]

An Argument Against Capital Punishment (and, Oddly, for Torture)

    The fact that branches of the United States justice system still cling to practice of the death penalty is a disgrace which shames us as a nation. By holding onto the barbarism that is capital punishment, we are keeping ourselves on the same clickbait polls as China, North Korea and Iran. Now while each of our fellow institutionally-murdering countries surely has some admirable traits as well, this is one category where we can and should distance ourselves from them. Proponents of the death penalty will argue that, first, there is a difference between murder and execution, and, second, that there are some cases, crimes so heinous, where the only possible punishment for a convicted felon commensurate with their crime is execution. That latter situation is one of so many mires and pitfalls that I’m going to put it aside for the moment, but the first conceit, the idea of their being a fundamental difference between state-sanctioned execution and garden-variety murder is asinine. Murder is the premeditated killing of one human being by another. A person who grabs a knife in a fit of rage and buries it in another person’s chest could hardly be argued to be guilty of more premeditation than the justice system which sentences them to death. The judge, the governor, the prison warden, the executioners, any number of people, all of them are culpable and all of them exercised an unnerving level of premeditation. They’ve been planning to kill this stab-happy schmuck for months or years before all is said and done. They’ve had far more ample time to decide whether or not to kill this theoretical murderer than the murderer surely took. I’m not suggesting that murderers be excused for committing murder on impulse, what I am suggesting is that the individuals who took their time, deliberated, thought about killing this murderer are murderers as well. They are government-sanctioned murderers, standing behind a riot-shield of law and order, or more accurately, statute and precedent.  

Apart from the very concept of government-sanctioned murder being fraught with moral quandaries and, frankly, plain sick, it is also ineffective as a method of punishing criminals and deterring future crimes. Rather than throw statistics and dissertation excerpts at you, I’ll posit this simple argument: If the death penalty were an effective deterrent against murder, people would have surely stopped murdering each other by now. We’ve had centuries for this experiment to present results. And it has. The threat of the death penalty hasn’t made potential murderers do a doubletake and amend their intents out of fear. Those with the intent to kill carry on killing, regardless of their awareness of potential consequence, and the rest of us go on not killing people, not because we’re afraid of retribution, but because we don’t want to kill people.

To satisfy the more sadistic, schadenfreudean pockets of our society, perhaps we could do away with the institutionalized executions in favor of instituting government ratified practices of torture. Of course, torture is a controversial subject, and there would certainly need to be guidelines, clear rules on approved methods of torture and the extent to which they may be implemented, depending on a community’s particular level of desire for draconian sadism. Now, hold your horses, before you get up in arms, shouting from the rooftops to the chagrin of your neighbors that I am endorsing torture, hear me out. I am not suggesting that convicts be waterboarded, beaten with truncheons, shoved into iron maidens, have pointy strips of bamboo shoved under their fingernails, be tied down while drops of water plunk metronomically onto their forehead, or sit in a pit full of cat feces while being aurally assaulted with Kiss ballads at high volume. We need to be careful to steer clear of marching into ‘cruel and unusual punishment’ territory. Or rather, we need to acknowledge that there is a great degree of variance in the phrase, “cruel and unusual.” Such a subjective term can offer a wealth of different meanings depending on individual perception and interpretation. To one person, they may perceive it to be a cruel and unusual punishment that they have to wait in line for three hours in an emergency room to have one part of their body stitched back onto another while they’re bleeding through the paper towel they taped around their wound as an ersatz bandage, and the TV hanging from the ceiling in the shitty Roxborough Hospital’s dingy little waiting room is stuck on a channel which apparently only plays judge shows and the controls are covered by a shield of plexiglass so you can’t turn it off, change the channel or even turn down the volume, nor can you do anything about the other impatient patients wailing, swearing, crying or shouting into their cell phones, all while knowing that this visit will not be covered by my insurance!

...

And then there are people whose opinion of what qualifies as cruel and unusual punishment could fall anywhere on the spectrum between riding public transportation and being blasted with the paint-stripping pressure and scalding hot water of a gas-fueled power washer. What I am suggesting is a middle-ground method of torture which falls closer to the former on the torture-scale. Acts of violent abuse against inmates (practices which, to varying degrees, are already inflicted upon inmates by correctional officers) should under no circumstance be permitted. There are far more humane and less obvious ways to torture a person and effectively crush their spirit. Those convicted felons deemed to be the ‘worst of the worst,’ the people whom the justice system has decided are so irredeemably evil, their actions those of the worst imaginable criminals, they, instead of being barbarically executed, could (should) instead have mild methods of torture inflicted upon them. For example, the temperature in their cells could be keep at a changing, but consistently uncomfortable temperature. I am not talking bitter cold and sweltering heat here. Anything that could cause them true bodily harm shall be forbidden, but never will they enjoy a temperate seventy degree temperature again. Instead, the temperature of their cell shall always either be around either forty-five and ninety-five degrees fahrenheit. No bodily harm will be done to them, but gosh, will they be uncomfortable. Imagine being always just a little too chilly or a little too warm. It’d be maddening. Next, while blasting people with stereos is clearly abusive, you can still drive them mad with music played at a moderate volume. We could have the Jack and Jill ice cream truck jingle, played ad infinitum. I would certainly feel tortured to the point of penitent in that situation. I would feel sufficiently punished. And while it may be cruel and unusual, it’s about as mild as we’re going to get. There’s also food. I’m going to be clear up front: do not poison, poop or pee in inmates’ food. Just give them really bland and unsatisfying food. Eliminate  variety and flavor, keep nutritional value to a minimum. From what I understand of prisons as they currently function, this form of torture has already been implemented.      Our country is long past due on making meaningful and effective prison reform. Electric chairs and lethal injections, apart from being violently torturous themselves, have proven passe. We can continue to be a vindictive and petty society, but we can finally start being sensible about it.

[karlamazov-blog]

Of Love and Dogs (Another Way in Which Dogs are Better than Human Children)

    Dogs love us. If you have a dog, there is a good chance that you will agree with this statement with little reservation. If you’re even a moderately decent person with even a shred of a soul, then you love your dog and they love you. But while you and I do not question this, there are those that do. There are those who insist vociferously that love, real bonafide legitimate love, cannot exist between humans and dogs, or they’ll go a step further and proclaim that dogs cannot love, that they as a species are incapable. These people will say that all non-human animals are incapable of love. Fuck these people.

    When we question whether or not animals are capable of love, we are getting ourselves into tricky specist territory. In questioning the emotional natures and capabilities of non-human species, we are presupposing a lot about ourselves, unfairly so. Humans have always done this, assumed with little justification or evidence that we are beings evolved beyond others, that we exist in a category which has no parallels with those of other species or genuses. I won’t get too deeply into how similar human beings are genomically with other primates, or with many other mammals, pigs for example, because I would grow bored and frustrated if I tried. Suffice to say that our DNA is not so dissimilar from other species that we deserve to dance around in the thrall of our uniqueness above them all.  

    Think about the people you love (this exercise is assuming that you, the reader, are not a sociopath; you’re welcome) and ask yourself why you love them, what it is about them that makes you feel love, and what is the nature and composition of the cocktail of emotions and thoughts which you call love. (Note: Let us restrict this discussion to the variety of love that one feels for family and close friends, and skirt around the topic of romantic love because that is a case where I believe that legitimate love cannot, and probably should not, exist between species, particularly those as intellectually and anatomically disparate as dogs and humans, and I haven’t the interest or stomach to discuss bestiality this morning.) What are the reasons that you can ascribe for loving those people you love? What is it about them? What have they done to earn your love? If you consider those questions thoughtfully and answer them honestly, I believe you will find that the criteria you follow for human-human love is hardly different from human-dog love.

    Let’s start with what is arguably the most primal manifestation of love, that between children and parents. Many dog owners (pet owners of any kind, really, but let’s stick to dogs) have been “guilty” of referring to their dogs as their “kids,” their “babies.” (Disclosure: I frequently apply the affectionate sobriquet, “babyboy” to my own dog.) As dog owners, both our language and our treatment of our dogs is often not dissimilar from the way that human parents speak and interact with their human children. We care for our dogs, feed them, protect them, treat them nicely. They in return treat us with affection and (presumably) a degree of loyalty and obedience. Depending on the type of dog (in terms of both breed and personality), your dog may also provide services to the extent they are able, whether that means menacing potential threats, retrieving a quail you’ve shot or leading you around (presuming you are blind and need leading, in which case, please give my thanks to the person reading this entry to you; if your dog is reading this to you, thank your dog and alert the media, your dog deserves an award).    

    Decriers of love between dogs and humans will often use as the crux of their arguments that dogs only like humans because humans feed them, pet them, treat them kindly. And yes, there is certainly truth to that, but it does nothing to discredit the claim of love for humans by dogs. What did your parents do for you when you were a child? They fed you, held you and treated you kindly (I assume/hope this was the case on all counts; if not, I’m sorry, none of this applies to you and that your parents were jerks, or dead). It could easily be argued that the reason children love their parents comes down to this early-life treatment. This could mean that humans are equally opportunistic compared with dogs, but it certainly doesn’t prove that human children feel love and dogs do not.    

In some ways, I would go so far as to say that the love between humans and dogs can be purer and more rewarding than that between adult humans and their spawn. For one thing, the power structure between a dog and human will never shift to the extent that it is typically fated to do in human parent/child relationships. It is taken for given that human babies are born helpless and so rely entirely on their human parents until such time as they are intellectually and physically capable of surviving on their own, at which time the human parents will (presumably, assuming the absence of their premature death) grow enfeebled and will have to rely on their offspring, who will hopefully step up. Essentially, humans care for their human children for years or decades with the knowledge it is likely that they will one day need their children to return the favor. With dogs, such concern is never a consideration. Your dog will not, with advanced age, come to be your physical and intellectual superior. They will also not be able (unless impeccably trained) to cook your meals, change your undergarments or do your shopping for you. There will never come a time (again, excepting instances of phenomenal training) when your years of caring for a dog will be flipped so that the dog is ready to take care of you. Another clear advantage that dogs have over human children, is that no matter how profusely or frequently you tell your dog how sweet, pretty, beautiful, smart, etc. it is, your dog will not grow up to be a narcissistic monster. The same can hardly be said for human children.  

    When we get onto the subject of other, non-domesticated-canine species, and whether or not they are capable of love, either between one another or with humans, the subject grows in trickiness. For fear of opening myself to the slings and arrows of the pro-cat lobby, I will, for the most part, avoid the subject of feline love. Permit me only to note that I no longer regard all cats as soulless, solipsistic monsters who care for no one and value no life other than their own, but I am still unable to prevent myself wincing reflexively when I hear a cat owner referring to their cat as their “baby” or expressing with surety that their cat loves them.  

[karlamazov-blog]

Slandered for Giving a Shit

    The term SJW (Social Justice Warrior, for those fond of spelling) has become a trendy contemporary slur hurled against anyone that expresses the giving of a shit for any disenfranchised or marginalized people.

There are people, subsections of the population of America and the world, who need to be defended. This is not to imply that they are weak, or needy, that they are incapable of defending themselves, and I am not suggesting that members of these minority groups have made demands for special treatment. If you speak to activist members of any American minority group on this subject, chances are they’ll tell you that they do not want special treatment, that they do not want to be treated differently and they do not feel an entitlement to be treated ‘better.’ What most people, of any class, race, religion, orientation, et al. want is to be treated fairly, treated with equal rights and protections. How these rights and protections are given should be a natural function of the social structure. It should be within the social contract of society that everyone follow that golden rule of not treating others like shit lest thee wish to be treated like shit as well. While there is some credence for the argument that such issues should be handled outside of the courts, that it should not be necessary to make laws which govern social interactions, when bigotry runs unchecked, when people violate the social contract, act like assholes and treat people without the respect and human dignity that every one of us deserves, then it is necessary to instate some manner of anti-asshole-behavior law. While in many cases, our country’s laws do set out guidelines by which all people should be treated fairly and equally, those laws are flexible, malleable to individual will. Depending on the status of an individual, laws can be subverted or ignored with relative ease, and there is no universal law forbidding the broad spectrum of behaving like an asshole. We therefore need the implementation of laws to ensure that the actions of assholes not be given impunity to proceed unabated.   

Our country’s culture is one which, for the majority of its history, has had double-standards of legal and social justice. Actually, ‘double-standard’ is not the most accurate term for it, as while everyone who is not born with the privilege of being a white heterosexual male is treated more poorly (however subliminally, in some cases) than those who were, there are degrees of mistreatment dependent on the column into which each of them falls; a homosexual Asian man, a Latino transperson and a heterosexual black woman may be treated differently under the law, and experience different treatment in social contexts, so what we’ve really had is more of a multi-standard. This multi-standard long existed without its being successfully challenged or properly questioned. It was the status quo which has existed by the will of the privileged majority. While there have unquestionably been improvements made since the times of Native American genocides, the enslavement of Africans and African-Americans, and the public immolations of gay men and uncooperative women, the multi-standard has not disappeared. This is what the privileged, the sort of ignorant people who bandy the SJW brand, are in the habit of insisting upon: everything is good and fair now; prejudice no longer prevails. If you are anyone but a willfully ignorant person of privilege, you know this assertion to be bullshit. Prejudice is alive and well. It may have gotten better at hiding. Prejudiced people may have gotten better at disguising their prejudices, by denying the existence of prejudice, for example. It is upon this platform, built of ignorance, denial and thinly veiled hatred, that the privileged stand, pointing and laughing at anyone with the personal interest, empathy or common sense to challenge social injustice. It is because they are privileged, because they have not experienced prejudice personally that they feel justified. They, personally, have not participated in or experienced a cross-burning, lynching or mob assault, so those things don’t exist, or are tropes of the past. Or, by way of a less extreme example, they have never been called a truly hurtful pejorative term, experienced physical or verbal abuse based on generalizations outside their control, or had aspects of their culture appropriated (Appropriation: a fancy word for when white people steal cool shit), so they do not appreciate the damage done to those who have.

There are, perhaps, a small number of cases in which SJW may be used with appropriate irony. If a person were championing a cause which does not need championing. Say, for example, a white man were to protest the presence of Black, Asian or Latino Santa Claus decorations in a department store; or if another white guy, this one heterosexual and likely exploiting a mask of religious authority, protested the presence of an LGBTQ person in a school, television show or public bathroom. Fuck both of those white guys; they are begging to be mocked. When people of privilege (affluent white heterosexual men of the Christian persuasion being the most extreme example) are vocally oppositional on a subject which does not so much affect them (in terms of doing harm) as it offends them (in terms of challenging their superiority by attempting to give others fair, inclusionary treatment), then they deserve to be treated with commensurate contempt and mockery. These people who are not speaking out and standing up in the name of social justice, who revile such actions, are thin-skinned reactionaries worthy of scorn and derision. If anyone is deserving of an ironically disparaging label, it is these people.

    The discouragement, the attack on disenfranchised minorities, or those who stand with and speak in support of disenfranchised minorities, for drawing attention to social injustices and working to remedy them is an expression of support for the propagation of social injustice. To use the term SJW to disparage others’ concerns for the well-being and fair treatment of those who are at risk or have been unfairly treated is a flaunting of one’s status, their privilege, and indicates to others either an attitude of self-centered apathy or outright disregard and contempt for those not granted the same privilege. It is the feeble, gasping declaration of bigots who resent the fact that they may be in some way opposed for making racist, misogynistic, homophobic, transphobic, (et al.) statements. It is the (hopefully) dying rallying call of bigots who live in a culture which is slowly, gradually changing to (hopefully) eventually expunge bigotry.   

    As “SJW” has already, quickly, found its way into wide usage, it can’t rightly be used as an ironic label for America’s aforementioned self-serving privileged class, and because they frankly don’t deserve the label, even ironically (knowing them, they’d find a way to co-opt and reappropriate it, anyway), I propose finding a new label, a new term of disparagement for these people. Sure, bigot works well enough, but this specific brand of bigotry deserves a fresh name tailored to its particular flavor of ignorance. Suggestions?

[karlamazov-blog]

Do you have a vagina? If not, shut up.

   Men have no business participating in any form of legislation which makes decisions specifically for women. For that matter, men have hardly any right to even express an opinion when it comes to matters which only affect women. On the subject of women’s healthcare in particular, men have long passed the point where they need to shut the fuck up, take a seat and allow women to make decisions for themselves. If it is not clear at this point, I am (in large part) referring to the subject of abortion.

Since the rise of Christian Right reactionaries in the Reagan era, abortion has become one of, if not the most, contentious topics in politics. While each side of the debate is entitled to their opinion, there are members of each side in the argument who haven’t the right to express their opinion and, again, need to shut up and sit this one out.

Full(ish) disclosure: if I were to stick one of the opposing labels on my face to signify my stance in the abortion debate, it would be ‘pro-choice.’ Pro-choice, to get this out of the way up top, does not mean ‘pro-abortion.’ It means exactly what it sounds like: Women should have a right to choose what they do and what is done to their bodies. Taken by itself, without the contextual prejudices that certain people attach to it, that statement should be in no way controversial. It’s a fucking no-brainer on its own. To say that one is pro-choice is to say that it is, or damn well should be, the right of every individual woman to decide whether or not she has a child, whether she will or will not ostensibly give away much of the rest of her life to that of another. Women, and only women, have the right to make that choice.

There’s something of a spectrum to people’s differing stances on the abortion debate. The most simplified way of expressing this is that there are people who believe that whether or not to have an abortion should be a woman’s choice in every circumstance, those who believe that there should only be a choice in certain circumstances (the most popularly cited: the pregnancy is the result of rape and/or incest; the mother’s life is endangered by the pregnancy), and those who oppose a woman’s right to choose to have an abortion in any and every circumstance. Before going any further, fuck that last group of heartless fascists straight to the depths of a hell of their own making. Further disclosure: I believe that women should have the right to choose whether or not they have an abortion or give birth in virtually every circumstance. I do not believe that a fetus is a child, and that a fetus does not earn the status of ‘baby’ until it is ready to be born. I acknowledge that this is, to some, an extreme stance to take, but before you decide to lash out against me for expressing it, take a look at your genitals. If you’re looking at a penis flopped atop a pair of testicles, then shut the fuck up, preemptively. If you’re looking at vulva or (if you’re looking really hard) inside a vagina, then by all means say whatever you wish.

There are many women within the anti-choice community, and a number of female legislators who champion anti-choice agendas (not a large number, but a number, in the way that there are ‘a number’ of black or gay Republicans). They are entitled to their opinions and (I guess) to introduce or vote on bills relating to abortion and anti-choice laws, but they are the only ones with that right. We’ve all seen and heard male politicians making speeches, pushing laws which dictate to women what they can and cannot do with their lives and their bodies. We’ve shaken our heads and made (valid) snarky comments when we’ve seen photos of elderly men standing proudly around as they pass one asinine law or another relating to abortion, choice, women’s health. These politicians, however, deserve far worse than social media mockery. I’m not saying that they deserve violent retribution for their callous and overreaching actions, but I’m also not not saying that. These male politicians will make the argument that they are making moral decisions, that their actions are based on their belief that all life is precious, or that they’re acting in the interest of women’s health safety. To these fraudulent and hypocritical male politicians, let us all say, ‘Fuck you, you worthless autonomous masses of human feculent.’  

If men want to earn the right to decide what women can and can’t do with their bodies, there is a fair common sense way to put that option on the table. It is quite simple really. The first thing that a man wishing to earn himself the right to vocalize his opinion in the abortion debate must do is to be fully castrated, meaning removal of both testicles and penis. While this should probably be taken care of in a hospital and performed by a qualified surgeon, since these are the same kind of people who oppose a woman’s right of access to safe abortions, working to pass legislation which outlaws abortion, thereby forcing women to turn to unsafe methods, there’s no reason why these men should have the aid of a licensed professional, clean facilities or anesthetic. If you are a man who wants to pass a law policing what women can do with their bodies, or hurl abusive vitriol at women going in or coming out of an abortion clinic, or hold your anti-choice sign up high and proud at a parade, then you should have the courage and will to match your convictions. So down some oxies and bourbon, tie your slipknot tourniquet good and tight, and bring your hatchet, skilsaw, kitchen knife or whatever (you have a right to choose the tool of your self-castration) down hard and true. After you’ve healed from the trauma well enough to stand without immediately thereafter collapsing in sobbing pain, you’re going to have to go out and get yourself some hormones. Again, this is the point at which one should see a doctor, ensure that their hormonal balance is shifted in the safest, most effective way possible. But again, there’s no reason for these individuals to be granted better treatment than women (consider the treatment women are subjected to in certain states when seeking birth control), so they can do what they can to obtain their hormone injections through black market means or, failing that, eat a shit ton of soybeans, smoke pounds of marijuana and drink case after case of beer to raise their estrogen levels (those latter two methods will also aid somewhat with the horrible pain and depression that they’ll no doubt be feeling). While these actions will not result in one becoming biologically female, in the sense of being capable of becoming pregnant and giving birth, it should be sufficient enough a demonstration of one’s commitment to the issue and arguably gives them some say in the matter.  

In closing, I fully acknowledge the paradoxical, or oxymoronic, nature of this article. In arguing that men haven’t any right to make any decisions or express any opinion on this topic, I’ve essentially discounted every part of my argument. So if you take me at my word, then you must also ignore all my other words, which I’m totally fine with. As a man, I have neither the authority nor right to make any determinations on this matter, and I need to shut the fuck up.  

[karlamazov-blog]

Introducing: Land Ferries! (not fairies)

    The trucking industry is anachronistically destructive, and stupid, and must be phased out. Though there are some people who will take this as an attack, an assault on their livelihood, it’s an uncomfortable truth which must be addressed. I’ve had the ‘Hess Truck’ jingle festering deep in my brain for most of my life and for many of those years I wanted that damn truck. This was/is of course the intention of Hess, to indoctrinate children into believing that massive death-filled tanker trucks are cool and that the soulless and evil company which owns and profits from them are not soulless and evil. And they are. Make any excuse or justification you will, but every corporation contributing to the fossil fuel industry is an evil, soulless enterprise working daily to ruin lives and ensure the long-term degradation and destruction of life on Earth in pursuit of short-term financial gains. While the individuals who comprise each tier of a given corporation may not themselves be irredeemably corrupt and morally bankrupt, every one of them contributes to an industry which is, and is therefore culpable. While the ‘gas giant’ CEOs are worthy of far more of the blame for damage done than are the miners, drillers and truckers, every one is marked by a cut of that bad karma. Every one of us should be working to correct the mistakes that have been made, remedy the damage already done, and this endeavor begins with phasing out the existence of interstate ground transport through the use of semi-trailer trucks.

    Lest this argument be taken solely as an assault against truckers (or rather the act or profession of trucking), which it has admittedly thus far been, my insistence that the transportation of goods be changed from massive, dangerous, environment-abusing behemoths applies also to the transportation of people, as well as other vehicles. The thousands of miles of ugly, crumbling infrastructure that is America’s highways have outlived their practicality. They are long overdue for replacement and improvement. There is no sense in the status quo which has been accepted, even lauded, for the wrong reasons. The highway has long been promoted with an undue romanticism, associations with freedom and adventure, thanks in no small part to songs, films and, more overtly and less shadily, car commercials. We’ve all fallen for this con. With good reason. We all like to think that we were born to be wild and that by burning rubber over seemingly endless asphalt we are embodying this wildness. But if we think about that for more than a minute, it’s bullshit. Okay, it’s cool to drive way too fast. It’s fun. But for the most part long distance driving is a tedious, boring and uncomfortable endurance test.   

    At this point, you are doubtless thinking, perhaps shouting at your screen, shaking fists for emphasis, at my attack on the standard, long-accepted method of ground transport without offering any solutions. You are perhaps damning me for my ignorance and the myopic tree-huggery of my diatribe. If this is the case, then thank you for sticking with me to this point. This is the point where I get to the ‘land ferries.’ The working premise of land ferries is that they will very much resemble trains, in that they will run on tracks, though far larger, large enough to accommodate large quantities of goods, cars, and the people that go with them. At the start, land ferries will serve purely as means of interstate travel and transport, their tracks will replace the longest and most heavily overused stretches of highway between states. Trucks and cars will still be needed, for a time, for routes between cities and townships. Privately owned motorized vehicles of some sort will continue to be used. But never again, following construction of the land ferry lines, will you drive from one state to another. And you’ll glad for it. Have you ever, for example, driven the highway that spans the distance between Utah and Nevada. If you haven’t, I can tell you, having done so, that there is nothing to see, nothing of value, no point in driving that road. There is no justification for the amount of fuel burned and belched into the atmosphere to make that trip.

    Granted, moving the land ferries across long distances, carrying enormous weight, will expend a great deal of energy. While cars and trucks are given a lot of (deserved) grief, they are not the only way in which we burn fossil fuels. The production of electricity is, to a far too large percentage, achieved by fossil fuel-burning power plants. Under these circumstances, if we were to power our land ferries with massive batteries charged at coal-burning power plants, we’d be achieving little with the whole land ferry endeavor, apart from saving time and reducing auto accidents. That’s why we would never settle on powering the land ferries with massive batteries charged by coal plants. That would be an entirely stupid thing to do, and we are not entirely stupid people. Ideally, the land ferries will be solar-powered. The roof of every car will be covered with solar panels. For that matter, every exposed, non-moving external part of the land ferries will be covered with solar panels. Yes, there are certain places in the country, certain seasons and weather conditions which would render having the land ferries be fully solar powered impractical. But this will hardly ever be an issue throughout the south and across the southwest. Also, it’s not as though batteries can’t charged on sunny days and be stored for use in winter. And, for that matter, the land ferries will not get their energy from solar generators alone. They will also utilize in situ wind turbines. What are ‘in situ wind turbines?’ you ask. Good question, as I’ve only just imagined these mechanical marvels into existence. In situ wind turbines, stated simply, are big propellers which would be placed across the length of the land ferries. They would not be much use in getting the land ferries started, but once the land ferries are in motion and the propellers are spinning, producing electricity through their attached generators, they will provide ample energy to keep the ferries in motion. Solar power will get the land ferries going, and from there they will continue drawing energy from the sun whilst the motion of the land ferry itself will be producing additional wind-drawn energy. While I am not a mathematician or an engineer, it is with unbridled confidence that I declare it is entirely feasible for there to be enough energy produced, via self-contained and environmentally friendly means, to move goods, vehicles and people across long distances, from one place to another, without exploiting any harmful finite resources. This could perhaps be the closest that humanity will ever come to creating a machine capable of perpetual motion, not to mention being the most innovative producer of clean energy, and means of mass transport, ever conceived.