Feminism 101... and what to do about it

I've stated that I'm returning to the academic environment this spring with a specific purpose in mind, that being to put a foundation under my resolve to destroy the current fad and fashion of bdsm that is spreading through society like a malignant cancer.  If I thought I could wage war on bdsm with a firearm I'd buy stock in Remington and Winchester and set about making myself a wealthy man.  But I can't, and I know it, not even with the full and willing assistance of every redneck bigot in the land (which is what those in "the lifestyle" understandably enough live in absolute terror of).  You can't kill an idea with a gun.  So if you can't use a gun (and by extrapolation if a gun won't work neither will a half megaton thermonuclear warhead) then what can be used?

The answer to that is found in an old, old saying:  "the pen is mightier than the sword."   But to bring an enemy within the pen's range requires understanding, a superior understanding to that hosted by the enemy, and that is a critical, critical understanding in its' own right.  Virtually every institution of higher learning is host and home to some form of women's studies as a consequence of the feminist movements of the past century or so.  But in blatant discrimination, and total short-sightedness, very few if any host comparable studies in the masculine.  Perhaps such a course exists, somewhere, but if it does I've never heard a whisper concerning a class titled "Manhood 101." 

It's been ten years since last I was on campus, and if upon my return I don't find some rudimentary beginnings of such a class correcting that discrimination will be high among my first priorities.  If the girls can win equal funding for their athletics using gender balance then by Tesla's swingin' testicles the boys should be able to win a bit of academic support (pun penalty 10 pts... go ahead, cheap at the price) in understanding what it is to be a man so their lives and efforts don't end up co-opted into someone else's agenda (a great many of which are unsavory running down to Sodom and Gomorra grade evil). 

You might wonder what this has to do with destroying bdsm.  It has to do with denying a critical line of supply needed by the enemy.  From my observations a large percentage of the lies bdsm uses to seduce both male and female victims are leveraged from the social shear and psychological stress inherent to the current imbalance in gender definition.  Being a man has absolutely nothing to do with, shares nothing in common with the mechanisms of SCCD (slavery and coercion, cruelty and despair... bdsm restated to take it out from beneath the camouflage of that evils' current psycho-sexual  propaganda), a fact that if ever fully known would debilitate a sizable percentage of their recruitment.

A great deal of the despair bdsm promotes to make itself seem the better choice could not exist if the boys actually understood what it is to be an emotionally mature man not dependent upon the feminine (in this context equivalent the submissive) to validate his existence.  Again, from my admittedly limited observations a fair percentage of those involved in bdsm seem to be there simply because bdsm provides them a framework of gender definition, even though the definition provided is (in their mythology technically gender neutral) actually no more than a light coat of paint laid over the most chauvinistically brutal of obsolete patriarchal methodologies the same folks would utterly reject if presented to them under their original names.

So back to the beginning... what to do about feminism?  Absolutely nothing, except learn what can be learned from the girls about how to go about liberating not a nation or a race but rather a gender from a set of obsolete and unwise social conventions threatening to destroy the very society wherein they're found.

Please don't give up, things are startin to change...

I heard a conversation down at the diner the other night that was the most hopeful thing I've heard in ages.  I heard a couple of rather red-neck good ol' boys discussing climate change... and they weren't cussing it as a lie, they were putting some serious common sense to the problem, the kind of thought that in the long run is what just might turn the problem around.  A most hopeful thing, most hopeful.  These are the guys who feed the nation, and a bunch of folks beyond that, they're the ones who live closer to mother nature than 99% of folks, and they were talking like they were convinced the lady needs some help.  Yup, it was a most hopeful thing because these guys are the kind where if a lady needs help you put the beer back in the cooler and postpone the friday fistfight until you've gotten her taken care of.

I'm not among their number, I'm tolerated after a fashion as one of those crazy damn liberals who every now and then makes a little bit of sense.  But when I heard them talking about how to farm major plots of land without diesal power, when they were talking about the legacy technology of steam and starting the process of figuring out how to bring it back better than it was I was totally amazed, and totally delighted. 

I didn't butt in, I just listened, but I'm totally onboard with the idea of replacing diesal engines with hydrogen fired steam, and for more things than just farming.  Peterbuilt, Kenworth, Volvo, are you listening?  Totally clean burn, nothing but water in the exhaust and plenty of power to take a side stream and leave the combustion air cleaner than you found it.  And, being a crazy liberal and all I was looking a bit further down the line and thinking there's is an awful lot of sunshine falling on the south pacific that could be harvested to crack hydrogen off of sea water, essentially unloading at least part of the energy burden off the land areas.  As a side benefit of significant impact such a change would go a long way towards restoring the merchant marine as a major employer, someone would have to go fetch the full fuel cells and do the maintenance on the production bouys riding the currents.  That... would get the sailors back in the game, and if there's one bunch of folks who can compete with the farmers for making it happen one way or another it's the sailors.   

Painting Fool...

I read of art and artists, and the folks who write about them will usually point to some specific range of time and say "this was his productive period..." and then launch off into what is known of the artist's life at that time, the events leading up to that time.  Ok, it's taken me a few years to understand that strange habit, the first thing I had to understand was what actually drives someone to paint.  Yea, well, if you're smart (that is to say, not intending to destroy yourself) you paint instead of over indulging in alcohol or other mind shifting things to keep your attention focused on something relatively harmless while dealing on things anything but.  As I write it's give or take OH six hundred hours now (that classic Robbin William's "Goodmorning Viet Nam" OH my God it's to damn early to be awake...), and just to flatter me own vanity I think I'm going to pretend that someday someone might actually give a hoot about my paintings and write something about me, and what the whale, they should have something to work from.



No...a study in brown


This one marks the return of a sad sick memory a few days ago, one from that childhood hell house next door.  The memories are buried, thankfully in some regards I suppose, but buried memories are still memories and will still influence what happens after their making.  The memory that returned was seeing feet in the window, feet on a table, and realizing I'd seen similar several times and the screams were always the most agonizing when you could see feet.   They were caning their victims I'm sure, and caning is a brutal and bruising form of pain.  Even the arab and oriental barbarians who still use it as a form of capital punishment set a count of strokes, somehow I don't think the shitheads next door were counting, somehow I think they'd judge when to quit by when the screams started getting to weak to be entertaining anymore. 

How do I know it's a real memory?  When it crosses my thought everything, and I do mean everything, goes flat gray featureless without color or life, without emotion or motion, time stands still and all I can sense is a pain that reminds me of a heart attack, and then when life and light and motion return it's in a rush of pure rage, an anger beyond describing, which I'm sure is why my sleep schedule these days is rolling like a bowling ball down some ally... a piece of the blocking mechanism failed, and the subconscious is trying to get things back in order before something worse slips the line. 

Right.  No, not right.  As wrong as wrong can be, and I don't give a flying fuck who says otherwise.  Which is why I'm filling my time doing paintings, it's so much safer (and less of a temptation) than going out in the country and burning gunpowder practicing quick draw and rapid fire while trying to paint the face of those disgusting barbarian assholes (who are dead of old age by now, dammit, I want so badly to shoot them just for the satisfaction of watching them die and go to the hell they so ripely deserve) onto the tin cans on the other side of the ravine... yea, it's better to just paint, and plan a less destructive but more devestating way of getting to their heirs and descendents still polluting the world of today.  Painting is a good thing to do while you plan, keeps your hands busy and keeps other folks from asking you what you're up to...

The Dogs of War...bow wow m*f*

"Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition…" The quote originated on this date seventy two years ago, a Sunday, a navy chaplain who continued his sermon while chain passing ammo to the anti-aircraft guns trying to defend a doomed fleet. Sunday December 7, 1941… the surprise attack on a sleeping Pearl Harbor, the day to be remembered in infamy, the first day of the United States' involvement in what many will say was the last undisputedly righteous war.

Things have changed a lot since then, and nothing has changed more than the nature of war. Oh, there's still soldiers and sailors, ships and tanks and guns, armies and navies and of course combat aircraft, but the reality has become that those weapons are not the only weapons nor even the most effective weapons. As history has unfolded its' become ever more obvious they're primarily involved with minimizing the residual consequences of how the serious conflicts are being waged. Even without the nuclear arsenals the terrible destructive power of modern weaponry just doesn't make it very feasible for the major powers to engage in old school warfare anymore. Bad for business, very bad for business. But nothing is more foolish than to assume that since the major nations aren't shooting at each other, at least not directly, that they have renounced conflict one with the other. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The most serious campaigns are now being fought on terrain impossible to access before the advent of modern technology. In the days when the Big E and her sisters Hornet and Yorktown stood out of Pearl Harbor to engage their enemy outnumbered four to one it simply was not possible to wage the kind of wars known to the modern world. No, I'm not talking about satellite controlled drones and supersonic stealth aircraft, I'm talking about the ability to access the attention of major chunks of your enemies population, to manipulate and maneuver the developmental parameters of their youth, the ability to wage covert cultural warfare from behind the smiling façade of international trade. The media power to wage such conflict just did not exist.

It's totally ironic, really. The United States military stands ready to unleash biblical grade hellfire and brimstone on fifteen seconds notice in physical defense of the nation, and that's just while they're getting the heavy stuff warmed up, and yet no one had the good sense to challenge the Nintendo invasion. Oh well, we hit back with John Wayne and the cowboy mythos backed up by the Door's LA Woman brand of sucker fuck 'em into abandoning that oh so fragile cowboy ethic in favor of raw animal lust, and guess what? A scant twenty years later they've given up having babies, I think we're going to win that one. That's the Japanese. But the Chinese are a different story… Chairman Mao did a good job of getting them ready to fight, and they I'm afraid are kicking our ass, the caste and class systems of servitude they've operated out of for millennia making a serious try at destroying the once vaunted American freedom of thought, every perversion known to history implanted on the culture and on the upswing as the count of viable fertile families is falling like a rock... yea, I'm afraid we're in as bad a shape vis-à-vis the Chinese now as we were back in that dark day when a battered and beat up Big E was the only thing that stood between the Japs and victory. We live in interesting times. 

To write a Villain...



Baron Vladimir Harkonnen

 I write stories, and perhaps my favorite part of writing stories, other than getting the dang thing out of my head, is the inventing of good characters.  Each character is a unique creature that evolves as the story gets told, the events and understandings within the plot impacting on them according to the nature I've given them just as they would on any human being.  Heroes and heroines are of course where the majority of the focus must fall, they're who carry the tale.  But for a hero to shine that character must be matched against a villain believably evil enough, believably powerful enough, to make his defeat a major accomplishment.

To create a believable character is an excellent exercise in introspection, for the fact is that all any writer can do by way of creating a character is to take some portion of his own persona and build it a different path of evolution whereby the character came to incorporate that fraction of the writer.  To write a hero or heroine is safe enough, most generally what you're doing is amplifying what you'd like to believe are, or would be given the situation, your more noble traits.  The only real risk is allowing ego and wishful thinking to take your character beyond the believable.   But to write a good villain is a decidedly more risky endeavor, for that involves a dance with your dark side, it involves taking what you'd consider one of your weaknesses and building a character where that facet came to be the driving force of a major player in your story.

For this reason a great many villains are flat and rather one dimensional, but the truly great villains are not.  They are full human beings, often almost a sympathetic creature the reader can full understand, understand and empathize with well enough to demand the reader condemn the villain not for any one choice to action but rather with the many choices and actions that all reflect the same weakness never challenged, never mastered.  Where a good hero may carry the plot and action of a story a good villain is as often as not where the moral of a story will ride in the form of a character who portrays the ultimate consequences of allowing some weakness, some deformity of psyche or soul to maintain dominance over a life.

I'm paying a bit more attention to my villains these days than I used to, and with very deliberate good cause.  To build a well crafted villain is to understand the human condition from the perspective of your own weaknesses and insecurities, it is to take those less than sterling attributes and set the chosen one into a scenario where that test of life will be failed and the character sinks rather than ascends. 

To write a working and believable villain is to understand how to understand the real villains in your life in such a manner that they might be defeated.  To write a solid villain is to understand how to avoid becoming one in reality, and when you're in the process of overhauling segments of yourself to go into battle against the evil and pathos of what you perceive as villainy full and complete that understanding is a very good thing.  It can, in the end, save more than your life.

Invasion Training...

How do you train for an invasion?  Hard, that's how.  Run 'em till they puke and then make them get up and run some more.  Abuse 'em, psyche and soul, and see how long they hold unit cohesion, how long it takes to break them down into cliques blaming each other for the life they're living.  Then scramble the pack and do it all over again.  When they're twice as tough as they were at first you begin to think they might be getting close to ready.  You train hard because no matter how hard you are on your boys the enemy is going to be harder.  That's how it is, that's how it has to be.

But that's talking about warfare in the physical... Guadalcanal or Normandy.  But there are other kinds of invasions as well, and truth is you train just as hard for those because the beachhead, that first absolutely critical fifty miles between your back and the water, will be just as defended there as anywhere.  I'm in training for the second kind, and I don't expect it to be an easy campaign.  I'll be going into the realms of those who think, who think, they understand the human mind, and they are not a lightweight foe.  I'm going in to correct some deep errors and deliberate ignorance in their thinking, errors that have over the years given rise to quite a collection of miseries including my prime enemy bdsm.  Those errors have been in that mode of thought since very near its' beginnings.  There are many and a many in there whose lives are dependent on those errors remaining in place, and beyond them there are probably ten thousand individuals for every one shrink whose life of sin and contagious misery is justified on some extrapolation of those errors.  It's going to get interesting, and quite possibly hand to hand (so to speak, actually head to head) before the end. 

So I'm in training, driving myself to emulate my enemies actions and intentions to test my own resilience.  It's a matter of pushing and pulling, grinding and cutting and eating cold food under a poncho hiding from an even colder rain so to speak, compelling myself to face now as many of the thoughts they'll be using as weapons as imagination is able to generate running at 110% under nitrous and a blower.  A great deal of this is occurring along the conscious/sub-conscious interface of lucid dreaming.  Let me tell you, lucid dreaming is a very interesting place to train.  There's simply no telling what the hidden back side of your mind will throw at you when you demand it cooperate with a conscious decision.  But, that is the terrain of the battle when the enemy counterattacks, it's really the only way to go about it.

*chuckle*  But no, I've not seen any monkeys trying to spit out an eel, my symbolism are even stranger than that.  Far stranger.