"Childess Cat Gentlemen"

Below is a LTE I sent to a local paper, a month ago, who didn't publish it. In a CNN article here, Vance kind of walked back his "Cat Ladies" statement.

Tom

Editor,

 

When JD Vance spoke about “childless cat ladies” I imagine most people outside the GOP thought it was offensive and ridiculous, and it is. But until a few weeks ago I didn’t recognize it as SEXIST and it seems like very few people have spoken of that aspect (I imagine most women DID recognize it as sexist from the very beginning, but as far as I can tell the media either never or almost never mentioned it).

First, there is another aspect of this that also hasn’t gotten much attention. Vance said that these “childless cat ladies” are miserable and want everyone to be miserable. That is ridiculous, although I’m not sure how FOUL (instead of FAIR) it is. On one hand it seems relatively harmless (it’s neither Watergate nor is it Bloody Sunday)) but I have to admit it kind of pisses me off. The most important thing to say about it is that encouraging GOP voters to think that liberals and progressives are (allegedly) trying to spread misery because they’re unhappy does nothing to encourage the kind of respectful, fact-based conversations about politics that this country desperately needs if we’re going to avoid civil war.

But the main point I want to make is that the initial statement said nothing about “childless cat gentlemen” and I don’t think Vance has fixed that. It stinks of misogyny and ignores the fact that men are also part of creating a new life and should take on about 1/2 of the work that raising a child involves. I can imagine a lot of “childless cat ladies” who WANT kids but can’t find an available man who meets their criteria and also wants to have kids.

Women are not solely responsible for the aspects of America that Vance sees as problems.

 

Tom Shelley

Gunbarrell

Musical Diversity

In the last 33 years I have probably listened to music an average of four hours a day (how is that possible? One factor is that I did about 40 hours a week, for a total of 4 years, at a job that allowed me to listen to music I chose as I was working). There was one period of about 3 years around 2006 where I didn’t listen that much, but in High School and the last 16 years I listened about 6 hours a day on average.

(The value of this post is fairly low- only about 45-55% of it will be political)

Before I get to the best part of it, let me first explain a few minor details and some background to my addiction to music. I pretty much exclusively listened to cassette tapes until some time around 1999. I also have bought very few CDs (my commitment to being a good fan went down at some point in the late 1990s and has pretty much stayed there in terms of buying CDs, etc. instead of mostly just listening to YouTube which is what I’ve done about 4/5 of the time in the last 7-8 years). I have never had an iPod, I don’t listen to streaming music sites (“muve” I believe is one example, or Last FM perhaps). I have been doing almost all of my music-listening the last 16 years on YouTube. About 2/5 of what I listen to is stuff that I paid for earlier when I bought tapes and/or CDs, and with a big chunk of the stuff I DIDN’T ever pay for, I’m very comfortable ethically with that (see “The Music of my Enemy” below).

When I was very young (about 9) I was a fan of Michael Jackson. At 13 or 14 I went to a massive concert which included Vanilla Ice, I BELIEVE MC Hammer, and I THINK En Vogue. I’m almost embarrassed by that, although in the last 35 years there is one En Vogue song that I really like (“Free Your Mind” (the main reason I like it is the moshing in the official music video)). I kind of liked Vanilla Ice and I just learned some stuff about him that is kind of cool. And in a brief spoken word bit on either Home Invasion or Original Gangster Ice-T said something positive about MC Hammer. But I’m still kind of embarrassed about it.  In one, two or three year(s) of Jr. High School I listened to a lot of rap- of the Beastie Boys (“License to Ill”), 2-3 albums by rappers Run DMC (and 1-2 albums by The Fresh Prince, but I think I stopped listening to him in 9th grade and since then I think I’ve listened twice (in the last several years) to two of his hits, just out of curiosity and/or nostalgia).

At the risk of getting a little personal, in 9th grade my two best friends got into Megadeth and some other heavy metal bands. I was sort of open-mined about it, but not very. For various reasons I won’t go into, at the beginning of 10th grade (1991-1992) we had a falling out. I WAS a little guilty in the first 1-2 months after that of suddenly discovering a strong interest in heavy metal and wearing combat boots and that might have been pathetic. But I kept listening to rap, I started listening to more hard-core rap like Public Enemy and Ice-T, and I started listening to miscellaneous stuff that was labeled “alternative.” The bands labelled that way in the 1990s that I still listen to a LOT today include: Rage Against the Machine, Soundgarden, Nirvana, Alice in Chains, Fishbone, L7, Faith No More, Ministry, and Biohazard (I didn’t listen to  Biohazard until 1993).

Starting in the Summer of 1992 I listened to the punk bands The Dead Kennedys and The Dead Milkmen (just an amusing coincidence). More recently I started listening a lot to a CELTIC punk band called Dropkick Murphys. Some of the bands that I lazily put in the metal category have some major connection to punk music. This includes DRI and Suicidal Tendencies who I enjoy listening to. Biohazard is also kind of a punk band.

Going back to my ex-friends in 1991/1992, I am, in one way and one way only, proud of the fact that when they started listening to Slayer and some death-metal bands I didn’t follow them (the thing is, since I didn’t follow them in that direction, it couldn’t be called pathetic). In early 1993 I bought one Slayer album (Seasons in the Abyss) and bought no more until 2 years later, when I was in college. Around the same time that I bought the Slayer album I bought one Napalm Death tape (From Enslavement to Obliteration) (Napalm Death are death-metal) but that was it for death-metal until about 25 years later).

In High School the main two heavy metal bands I listened to were Megadeth and Metallica. I listened a fair amount to some others including Anthrax, Sepultura, Pantera, Nuclear Assault, Body Count, DRI, and Suicidal Tendencies (unlike every other band I mention in this essay, I no longer listen to Sepultura).

There’s one minor heavy metal band that I listened to a little bit in High School that really should have been part of me transitioning towards being a socialist (a transition that took place in High School), but I don’t think it was. In a few minutes I’ll talk about how in general listening to music contributed to me becoming a socialist. The minor  band I just mentioned is called Sacred Reich, and even though in High School I had been less familiar with this, I’ve known for 1-2 decades now that they were progressive. In HS I had an EP of their’s with four songs. One was totally non-political and about evil or monsters or something. One was a cover of the anti-war Black Sabbath song “War Pigs.” The one I remember listening to was a (1980s) anti-intervention song called “Surf Nicaragua. The fourth song turns out to be a very progressive song, but I only identified it as such in the last 16 years. “One Nation” is anti-war, anti-racist, and even a little critical of economic injustice (there’s a brief reference to “greed”).

I can’t remember which came first, but the first bit of political activity I engaged in MAY have happened after I took a music-connected step towards identifying strongly with the cause of anti-racism. That step was going to the first concert I care to remember. It was in 10th grade and it was an Ice-T and Body Count concert. I saw the first band play and there was moshing which I quickly decided I liked and I saw Ice-T do some rap (which also inspired moshing), and then I had to leave before Body Count played because I had to get home before it was too late (my parents didn’t know I was at a concert and wouldn’t have believed that what I told them I was doing would go that late). (In High School and college I was into relatively non-violent moshing (and I felt very strongly about picking up people who fell down)).

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The High School Years: Becoming A Socialist

So, a focus on music and my political development. If I ever get around to typing it, a future post about how I became a socialist will overlap heavily with this post.

One aspect of this that I think about is, why did I come to focus more on racism than other symptoms of capitalism and get an Ethnic Studies degree instead of a Women’s Studies degree? I have no idea how I found myself listening to rap music in Jr. High. I wasn’t watching MTV and my parents were no more than moderately anti-racist. I didn’t have older siblings who listened to rap (actually, I might have been watching a LITTLE MTV because I have memories of watching 1-2 music videos by The Fresh Prince). On one hand, as far as I can remember, the rap I was listening to in Jr. High was non-political and only about 3/4 of it involved Black people, but It probably contributed to how I started listening to Public Enemy and Ice-T in late 1991.

I think that listening to that “Hard Core” rap is a huge part of why I did my first political act (and that may have been AFTER the Ice-T/Body Count concert I went to). In the Spring semester of 10th grade, in early 1992, I walked out of my 4th period class (I think it was 4th period) and joined about 50 of my peers walking around Boulder protesting the not-guilty verdict in a California trial of the racist white police officers who beat Rodney King a year earlier. That night I went to a march and rally for the community in general and/or the CU-Boulder campus and I was actually on the front page of the paper the next day (next to me was someone who later was the first or second person to get an Ethnic Studies degree at CU-Boulder, and there was someone wearing a Primus shirt and one person wearing a Body Count shirt).

This is a little embarrassing because I have heard things here and there indicating they’re not progressive, but I think some political stuff by Megadeth and Metallica nudged me towards the left in High School. Those songs are:

Metallica
“Fight Fire With Fire” is about the need to avoid nuclear war.
“Ride the Lightning” is in opposition to the death penalty.
“For Whom the Bell Tolls” could almost be mistaken for an anti-fascist song because it is indirectly inspired by an anti-fascist novel by Ernest Hemingway. The thing is, the MOVIE based on that book retained the anti-war message but not the ANTI-FASCIST message of the book.
“Disposal Heroes” is anti-war.
“Blackened” is about nuclear war.
“…And Justice for All” is basically about politics and power in this country, but I am very unsure about what EXACTLY is it saying. This one may have had no affect on me becoming a socialist.
“One” is anti-war.

Megadeth
“Set The World Afire” is about nuclear war.
“Holy Wars…. The Punishment Due.” The first half I’ve heard might be about international conflicts like Israel and the Palestinians and/or (possibly more specifically) Northern Ireland. Beyond that I’m not sure what to say about it.
“Take No Prisoners” is anti-war.
“Rust in Peace” is about nuclear war.
“Symphony of Destruction” is about politics but I can’t figure out what they’re trying to say.
“Architecture of Aggression” is sort of the same- it probably IS anti-war, but I am less certain than I am when it comes to “Take no Prisoners.” Megadeth just wasn’t consistently and explicitly progressive.
“Foreclosure of a Dream” is I BELIEVE about US federal farm policy in the 1980s. I am just not familiar with farm policy. I DO like the license plates in Colorado that say “No Farms, No Food” but I just don’t know anywhere near enough to comment on this song.

I think that is a pretty complete list of the relevant Megadeth and Metallica songs I listened to in High School that may have nudged me towards the left.

As I have said earlier, the harder rap I listened to, including three Ice-T albums, and 3-4 Public Enemy albums probably had a better effect on me than the Metallica and Megadeth stuff I just referred to. And then there was the Dead Kennedys stuff- some of their songs might not inspire progressive politics but about half of them do. And there was at least a couple that were about economic injustice- “Let’s Lynch the Landlord,” and “Kill the Poor.” There were several other political DK songs whose lyrics I’m too lazy to confirm- with the exceptions of “Police Truck” (police brutality), “Nazi Punks Fuck Off” and “We’ve Got a Bigger Problem Now” (about Ronald Reagan), which I definitely remember (as I was typing this I started listening to the DKs for the first time in about 4-5 years) (I believe that in High School and college I listened to 3/4 or 4/4 of the Jello Biafra DK studio albums).

There were a handful of songs by Suicidal Tendencies that contributed to me becoming   progressive:

“Two Sided Politics” is basically contrasting the life of a rich person with that of a working-class person, and there’ some anti-Reagan stuff, etc. One thing I think is noteworthy is that there’s one line that says “I’m not anti-government, government is anti-me.” I like to think that might be in part an anti-anarchist statement.
“Fascist Pig” could be a little more political (that is, deeper) but Mexican-Americans criticizing the police may have pushed me a bit to the left.
“I Want More” is about the class conflict with some references to the minimum wage.
“Give It Revolution” was a little vague but probably nudged me in the right direction.

There were a handful of songs by a thrash-metal band called Nuclear Assault that pushed me to the left in High School. Although I have listened to their other stuff in recent years, in HS pretty much the only album I listened to was “Handle with Care.”
“New Song” which was a fairly good anti-racist song.
“Critical Mass” is a pretty good environmentalist song.
“Inherited Hell” is also like that.
“When Freedom Dies” Although I’m not sure what it’s saying about US foreign policy during the Cold War, it IS saying that freedom and civil liberties, etc. shouldn’t be weakened in the name of national security.
“Search and Seizure” is sort of similar, but basically about law enforcement harassing metal-heads (I’m not sure whether or how the lyrics-writer would generalize that statement to include punks, hippies, etc.)

Another band that influenced me in High School was a “cross-over” hard-core punk/thrash-metal band called DRI (Dirty Rotten Imbeciles). In HS I saw them play live twice and listened to three of their albums.

First there was the album “Definition” which included the following songs:
“Acid Rain” was about the environment.
“The Application” is about multiple forms of employment discrimination and DOES include a line about racism and a line about homophobia, and one about religion and one that is probably about being HIV+.

The album “Thrash Zone” has several political songs.
“Labelled Incurable” might be about AIDS (as far as I can tell DRI were probably anti-homophobic).
“Kill the Words” is sort of generally about censorship and dictatorship but seems to be at least partly if not totally about that sort of thing in the Muslim world; I have no idea if they’re anti-Muslim or just consistently opposing fundamentalism, censorship, and dictatorship (there IS another song where they condemn religious discrimination in employment, so they probably aren’t anti-Muslim)
“Worker Bee” although it’s not written as a socialist song, I think it’s basically about economic justice and is by a band that I’m pretty sure is in favor of social justice as well (I’m suspicious of bands, people, etc. who are economically progressive but not socially liberal).

There was one Soundgarden song about the environment called “Hands All Over.” Although I don’t feel like looking at the lyrics, I believe that there were at least a few L7 songs I liked politically (one example is “Pretend We’re Dead”).

This will require at least one paragraph. Although I’m not real familiar with this, I have gotten the impression that Rage Against The Machine were a bit to my left politically. One social-dem critic told me that the political forces RATM admired either would have told RATM to fuck off, or alternately, should be killed (I think that may have been a reference to the Peruvian leftist army/terror organization called Shining Path). I sort of stumbled onto RATM a little earlier than most of their fans. Somehow I knew that their performance at a small club in Boulder around late 1992 or early 1993 would inspire moshing, so I showed up. I don’t remember thinking about it much but I guess I liked the music enough and the general vibe and bought their album shortly after the show. At some point at least a couple months later they came to Denver with House of Pain and it was great listening and moshing KNOWING that they were promoting dissent in this country. At that concert I learned about Leonard Peltier, and generally drifted towards the Left. (Right before House of Pain came on stage they played the music sans vocals of a song I mention below called “Just Look Around” by Sick of it All). Yes, RATM was alternately politically vague and/or leaning towards the hard-left. But they contributed to me becoming a dissident of some sort and it’s slightly possible that wouldn’t have happened if not for them. And musically they were pretty cool.

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The Last 16 Years

This next section will be pretty brief. It’s about what music I have been listening to in the last 16 years.

Between about 1998 and about 2009 I only listened something like 4 hours a day to music. In 2008, for I think the first or almost first time I got on YouTube. Since then I have listened to almost all of the Megadeth and Metallica that I missed, plus the older stuff. I started listening to practically all Slayer and I started listening to a LOT of death metal. The following bands are the death metal bands I listen to: Carcass, Napalm Death (I love their music and I think that if I paid attention to their lyrics I’d agree with a lot of them), Deicide (MUSICALLY I LOVE Deicide, but I assume I would be offended by their lyrics if I read them), Obituary, Cannibal Corpse, and Morbid Angel.

I got caught up on Body Count albums that I missed after Born Dead and also listened to the first two albums. Although I don’t listen to them much I listen some to stuff I missed earlier from Anthrax, Nuclear Assault, and Testament as well as what I listened to earlier. Although I’ve barely looked at the lyrics I some times listen to stuff I missed by Sacred Reich, and I am even more sure than before that they’re progressive politically.

Yes, my very favorite genre is thrash metal (and/or speed metal- at the risk of sounding stupid, I am not sure what differences there are, if any, between speed and thrash).

I listen to the following Suicidal Tendencies albums, both now and in High School: Their first (self-titled) album, How Will I Laugh Tomorrow When I Can’t Even Smile Today, Controlled By Hatred/Feel Like Shit… DeJaVu, Lights! Camera! Revolution! and The Art of Rebellion. I haven’t listened to any ST that I didn’t listen to in High School. On a related note, I would say the same about DRI albums Definition, Crossover, and Thrashzone.

Today and in high school I listen(ed) to three Ice-T albums: The Iceberg, Original Gangster, and Home Invasion.

Until recently I took a 10-15 year break from listening to more than three songs by Public Enemy.

In the last 5 or so years I listened a little bit to Run DMC (albums Tougher Than Leather, Raising Hell, and probably King of Rock) and the Beastie Boys’ License to Ill and Check Your Head. I listen A LOT to the House of Pain song “Jump Around,” but it has been so long since I listened to the entire album.

I have a huge number of YouTube mix-tape playlists. A large chunk of it is miscellaneous 1990s stuff (some mainstream, some not), and another large chunk is some stuff where the theme of the fan-made video was anti-racist skinheads.

I found a massive playlist of mainstream 1980s pop hits and placed the ones I liked (about 58 of them) in my own playlist. To some extent (not a large one) I was exposed to many of those songs as a little kid (I was born in 1975) when watching a 1980s movie or when I occasionally was listening to the radio. I listen to that playlist about once a week. And one of the songs on it I have kind of fallen in love with- the music, the images in the video, but I have not examined the lyrics. It’s Holding Out for a Hero by Bonnie Tyler.

I also fell in love with a great song by the Dropkick Murphys called “Out of our Heads.” In the last year I have probably listened to it an average of once a day and I listened to their first three albums once as well.

Since the early 1990s I have been a fan of two Tom Petty albums- Full Moon Fever and Into the Great Wide Open.

I was at least kind of exposed to ska starting when I got into Fishbone in High School and I’ve been increasingly curious about it in the last 23 years. Although they might be more accurately called “Ska PUNK,” I do enjoy listening to The Mighty Mighty BossTones for about half an hour a day on average in the last 5 years.

I listen to a small amount of Irish Republican music. I bought an entire album by Black 47 but for some reason, even though I get the impression they’re progressive, all I listen(ed) to were/are the two republican songs (one of which I believe is a Celtic rap song).

In the last several months I’ve started listening to about seven Beach Boys songs, I have fallen in love with the song “Wooly Bully” by Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs and I like “Smokey Joe’s Cafe” by The Robins.

I have studied (i.e. read articles on the Southern Poverty Law Center’s web-site) skinheads in general and totally opposed Nazi skinheads specifically, and I listen to a fair amount of “Anti-Fascist Oi!” Oi! In general, both fascist and anti-fascist, might bear some resemblance to punk and might be defined by the lyrics (about violence, the working-class, and being a skinhead). The main such band I listen to is The Oppressed.

I listen to a small number of songs by the progressive (largely folk and/or punk) singer-songwriter David Rovics.

In the last 4-5 years I have spent a fair amount of time listening to YouTube playlists of music from the Vietnam era. For some reason I have used that word to find good mix tape playlists of classic rock, including classic rock that I vaguely remember from movies about Vietnam. (I believe that what we did there was wrong and I have evidence from more than just left-wing sources)

Alternative
Rage Against the Machine (the first two albums) Soundgarden (Badmotorfinger and Louder Than Love, and a little bit of some others that I didn’t listen to in High School), Nirvana (all 3 studio albums), Alice in Chains (Dirt and Facelift), Fishbone (Truth and Soul, The Reality of my Surroundings, and Give a Monkey a Brain and He'll Swear He's the Center of the Universe), L7 (Smell the Magic, Bricks are Heavy), Faith No More (The Real Thing and Angel Dust from High School, and We Care a Lot in the last several years), Ministry (The Mind is a Terrible Thing to Taste and ΚΕΦΑΛΗΞΘ), and Biohazard (I didn’t listen to  Biohazard until 1993) (Urban Discipline, State of the World Address, and Mata Leao)

I THINK that covers about 99% of the songs and albums that I should mention here.

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The Music of my Enemy

Since late 2008 I have spent probably an hour a day on average listening to Nazi Skinhead music. For multiple reasons, some a little vague, I enjoy listening to the music of my enemy. I stumbled onto it shortly after I first got on YouTube in 2008 and I recognized the name Skrewdriver that I had learned about in 10th grade when researching the racist right for a paper I was writing (primarily about the racist right in this country, but I’m not surprised some of the sources I read mentioned the BRITISH Skrewdriver). Anyway, I liked most of the music (not the lyrics) and just really enjoyed listening to the music of my enemy (yes, I also listen to a small amount of anti-Catholic N. Ireland loyalist music). I also learned a handful of things by studying the lyrics and the imagery in fan-made videos. Crucially, I quickly started to alter the lyrics into anti-fascist poems- in many cases, so that my poems were saying the exact opposite of what the original was saying (when there was a change in topic, there was always at least some conflict between my poems and what the authors of the original lyrics believe (and some times a LOT of conflict- a lot of the N. Ireland poems were based on lyrics by people who supported the British and Unionist causes)). The first poetry post is here.

I wish I could explain in better detail why I enjoy listening to the music of my enemy.

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The High School years- the PMRC and “musical intolerance.”

In 11th grade one of my best friends (James, of Portland, OR) and I did a “‘zine” (a very small and unprofessionally written/edited magaZINE). It was kind of political, kind of creative (well, James’ stuff was creative, my stuff less-so but the ‘zine in general (called The Conformist Monthly) seemed pretty popular with our friends and probably about 10% of the BHS students). One thing I did that I am a little embarrassed about is an essay about what I called “musical intolerance.” Although actually typing that and making copies of an issue that contained it is something I probably shouldn’t have done, I DO believe that most of my peers in High School were close-minded about different kinds of music, and at the time I believed that I was better because I listened to metal, rap, alternative, and punk.

Something I wrote for The Conformist Monthly that I AM proud of was an essay about the Parents Music Resource Center. The PMRC was created in the mid-80s, primarily by Al Gore’s wife Tipper Gore, and Susan Baker, the wife of senior GOP leader James Baker. It was largely supported by the religious right and practically no one to the left of Bill Clinton supported it. It’s been decades since I studied it, but the main thing it did was successfully push for an industry agreement to place “Parental Advisory: Explicit Content” stickers on certain albums.

I really am not insensitive to the desires of many parents (probably around 95% of them) to keep young children from listening to songs about sex and drugs and songs which use swear words (I believe there is a spectrum between two situations- one involving children under 13, and one involving young adults who are around 15, and at the latter end of the spectrum I’ll be honest I am not sure if I care about parents wanting to keep their teenage kids away from that kind of content). And these stickers were a problem. In the past, MANY music stores wouldn’t sell those albums. In the past MANY of the artists negatively affected were people of color, and in general, many of the albums targeted contained songs with political messages that were liberal or progressive. This country might have been a better place in the 1990s if those songs had been heard by more people.

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“There Goes The Neighborhood”

(The title of a Body Count song about their presence in the punk and metal genres)

As I near a conclusion, the climax to this is something I want to talk about that is very special to me. That is the intersection of rock (or at least the heavier and/or faster variants of it) and rap (I’ll be honest, I think I’ve always failed to understand that many fans of rap and/or hip-hop define one as corporate and the other as something closer to the street, and I’m just going to use the term “rap”).

I don’t listen to a lot of music made between 1998 and today, so I’m going to focus almost exclusively on stuff from the 1980s and 1990s. Here is I think a complete survey of that topic up until some point in the mid- or late 90s.

1. In 1986 Run-DMC and Aerosmith collaborated on a new version of the latter’s song “Walk This Way.”
2. In 1989 industrial metal band Ministry did a song with a rapper- the song is called “Test” and is a great combination of rap and industrial.
3. In 1991 Anthrax and Public Enemy collaborated on a new version of the latter’s song “Bring Tha Noise.”
4. Shortly after that, Public Enemy and Anthrax went on a national tour together.
5. Ice-T and his musician friends created Body Count in 1990.
6. In 1991, Rage Against The Machine was formed with music that was sort of heavy and/or sort of fast and vocals that would often be labeled “rap.”
7. I am having some difficulty nailing down the details, but in the early and mid-1990s Biohazard, who were more or less a hard-core punk band, did at least two songs with a rapper (Onyx) and, crucially, did music videos for the two songs that involved Onyx that I can remember (one reason this is VERY significant is that I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s true that Biohazard had, years earlier, toyed with white supremacy as a marketing tactic in NY City’s competitive music scene, and may have done these 4-5 collaborations (including TWO videos) to make up for that).
8. In 1993 the soundtrack for a movie called “Judgement Night” was entirely devoted to collaborations between rockers and rappers.

I could and probably WILL do a lot of research on this topic in the next year or two and write something very substantial, but I have always had very positive political thoughts about this series of collaborations because I THINK they had some potential to positively affect race relations in this country. IF they HAD that potential it wasn’t something permanent, as 35 years later we are struggling to prevent a white supremacist from occupying the White House. I am not sure what is the status today of that potential- I’m not sure I should be making a big deal about the need for such intersections today, especially because there might be plenty in recent years and/or they are having no impact on American race relations.

When thinking about this topic, I wish I had a better grasp of sociology and psychology.

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Some miscellaneous thoughts

1. For about 10-15 years until recently, I took a break from being a fan of Public Enemy, although in hind-sight that didn’t involve changing the “Favorite Music” section of my blogger/blogspot profile page. I have listened over the years to about four albums by PE, all of which were either in the 1980s or the very earliest 90s. On one of them, there’s a song that includes two lines I have always found offensive, but which really got me pissed off about 10-15 years ago. One line is applauding homophobic VIOLENCE and another one implies it’s okay for a man to beat his partner if he takes her on vacation around the world. I am still very offended by those lines, but decided to listen to those albums from High School again).
2. In the early 1990s there was one song by the hard-core punk band Sick of it All that I really liked and which I have always really liked. For some reason I have practically never listened to any other SOIA songs. The one I listen to is called “Just Look Around.” The thing is, in 2001 I was at a party for progressives and one person asked the room what is the most progressive hardcore punk band? Part of me DID know that the correct answer was Fugazi, but because of that one SOIA song I said it was SOIA. The guy who asked the initial question said something about a pirate flag and slapping women. For some bizarre reason I didn’t respond. But if you look at the lyrics you’ll see that something like 2/3 of the lyrics are completely acceptable to progressives. The other third is some slightly questionable lines (i.e. mentioning anti-Semitism among blacks when that might not be helpful (for all I know it IS helpful)) and the very worst of the lyrics in that 1/3 is a reference to the “workingman” when “worker” or “working person” would be a lot better (this might be what the guy at the party was talking about when he suggested I wanted to slap women).

In the official music video, when the lyrics refer to “diseases and modern plagues of our times” they flash the “Silence=Death” symbol of the movement calling for a better national response to the AIDS crisis. I guess it could be a negative statement, but I have always assumed it was a positive statement about that symbol, which would probably also mean that SOIA are anti-homophobic. Lastly, another song on that album seems to be about attacking Reagan over Iran/Contra.
3. I organized my first fund-raising show (it was a VERY small venue) in 1995 to support the Left Hand Bookstore (in Boulder) and the college-years ‘zine that James and I did (it was called Subliminal Prison). The opening band was called Sonnus and I don’t have much to say about them. The other two bands were A) a High School band from the Denver area who were probably influenced by punk, and an amazing band called D-Town Brown. The latter’s music I have difficulty describing. I believe it was possibly influenced by rock (at least one of the 2-3 times I saw them playing a regular show there was moshing and 1-2 band members had earlier been involved with a band that was either thrash/speed-metal or death metal)) but I think it was more influenced by some other stuff (mariachi perhaps? (There were 4-5 members in the band and all but one were Chicano (the last member was black)). Although James and I did a publicity campaign in waves, very few people showed up. Not sure why.
4. The second fundraiser I did Involved Sonnus, D-Town Brown and a punk band called Dead Silence. It was for the Colorado Coalition for Single-Payer (the Canadian health-care system) and I gave Denver CCSP a LOT of flyers to put up in Denver (the venue was in Denver, where I didn’t live) and I don’t think any of those flyers were put up anywhere. I’m not saying I was totally blameless, but I do think that most of the blame was CCSP’s. The only reason that a significant amount of money was raised is that the owner of the venue (The Mercury Cafe) took less money than she usually did in that situation.
5. In high school and college, when I went to a show/concert I would dress in the spirit of taking nonconformity as far as I could. If I was at a Dead Milkmen show, I’d wear a Megadeth shirt, if I was at a Primus concert I would wear a Public Enemy shirt, etc.
6. You might like a post I did about whether or not Slayer is racist.

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Conclusion

Although there was one gap that lasted about 3 years where I listened to very little music, it was a huge part of my life in High School and college and in the last 16 years. I find listening to it very enjoyable and it contributed to the several factors that led me to embrace progressive political values, and it generally makes me feel very good. Although I don’t think I’ll be expanding my interest in music any further (I don’t think I’m going to try bluegrass for example) I am (perhaps too) proud of the fact that I have fairly wide-ranging interests in music.

Most of the time I was typing this up I was listening to a song from the very early 1990s by a band called EMF. It’s called “Unbelievable” and I think it’s sort of a dance song but could also inspire moshing. The song, and to a greater degree the video as well, is very energizing and I got so much done with the multiple writing assignments I gave myself.

Law and Order Reviews I

 I have done reviews of many episodes of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit and published some more general thoughts about it here. In that post I offer a smaller number of general thoughts about the original Law and Order show (the one that went from 1990-2010). Although I do not like L&O as much as I like the SVU version, I do like it. There’s some liberal or even progressive stuff here and there and they’re good detective stories, and they’re homicide detectives- if they were narcotics, I’d probably be a lot less fond of the show.

Although I’m not sure I have done and will do this consistently, with the original Law and Order show I will make a note and maybe offer some comments when the issues that are at the core of Law and Order: SVU appear on this show.

“Scoundrels” Season 5. See this for a plot summary.

To a large degree this is about a convicted white-collar swindler (who headed a mainstream “Savings and Loan” financial institution) who arranges for a threat to him to be eliminated (killed). The Assistant DAs prioritize prosecuting the swindler over the man who actually pulled the trigger. Earlier, when we first hear about the swindler, one of the detectives says that instead of being sentenced to a short stay at “Club Fed” (a very minimum-security prison) he should have gotten life.

“Progeny” Season 5. See this for a plot summary.

This episode is about abortion and is generally pro-choice. The commanding officer of the two detectives speaks briefly about how massive chunks (probably less than 100% but still a large majority) of the pro-life community don’t care about what happens to babies after they are born. SO MANY of these pro-lifers consistently support centrist or center-right economic policies which make it very difficult for children born to poor people (and to a large degree you could say something very similar about the children of working-class people).

“Seed” Season 5. See this for a plot summary.

There was a gay couple.

“Wannabe” Season 5. See this for a plot summary.

This is generally about classism. I don’t talk a lot about classism on my blog because A) it’s not the same thing as Capitalism, and B) I don’t believe it’s quite as dehumanizing as racism or homophobia or sexism, etc. But I think it’s usually a good thing to expose it once in a while.

There is one minor aspect of this episode that I want to talk about. Towards the very beginning there’s a brief reference to unions by someone who is a corporate opponent of unions and the senior detective cautions him to watch what he says because the cops are in a union. I get the impression that occasionally it’s a good thing that cops are unionized (i.e. when there’s some kind of attack on public sector workers below the federal level, they MIGHT, to a SMALL degree stand in solidarity with the other public sector workers in that area). But I also get the impression that a big part of the contracts negotiated by cop unions make it easier for cops to get away with murder, etc. And cops are FREQUENTLY mobilized in support of management during strikes, organizing drives, and lock-outs.

Sometime around 2004 “The Labor Exchange” (the pro-labor bi-weekly show on Boulder’s progressive KGNU radio station) interviewed a representative of the cop union in a nearby city (Longmont). It was very non-confrontational and I’m open-minded that maybe it was okay. As I said, I am not in favor of constant hostility towards cop unions. But I also remember reading, at some point between about 2002 and about 2008, that when a strike in Longmont was broken, management had the local SWAT team present when the workers first came back to work. On one hand, the strike was already broken, so in all fairness this probably wasn’t as offensive as it would be if they had tried to intimidate pickets with the police DURING the strike. But it still pisses me off (and it’s possible they DID try to intimidate pickets but the article I read left that out for some reason).

“Bad Faith” Season 5. See this for a plot summary.

This is about the Catholic Church sex abuse scandal.

Anti-Semitism In Student Protests Is A Problem, But Not As Much As You Might Think

Below is an essay which, after some editing, was published as a guest opinion in the Boulder Weekly here.

Tom

**********

 

As I write this I am having trouble staying on top of what is happening at this or that university campus- it’s wonderful that so much protesting is going on. Although, as I’ll explain below, I am concerned about the likely fact that there is at least SOME anti-Semitism among American progressives supporting the Palestinians, I recently decided that it is probably a smaller problem than what I thought most of the last seven months. What prompts me to say that? A 4/23/24 video on CNN’s web-site (not some far-left web-site) about how the Columbia encampment included a Passover meal.

 

I believe that there IS a substantial amount of anti-Semitism in the sense that these activists are probably not condemning Oct. 7th. I believe most American progressives supporting the Palestinians don’t understand that intentionally killing civilians in war is wrong. I believe that they also don’t understand that Hamas is not a progressive organization. The military wing of Hamas are religiously fundamentalist socially conservative mass murderers.

 

On the other hand, so many Americans, including a dwindling percentage of the Democratic Party, just don’t understand what the Palestinians have gone through- as horrible and unjustified as it was, Oct. 7th did not happen in a vacuum. The Palestinians did experience, to various degrees depending on what part of Israel/Palestine they live in, some pretty serious injustice for decades BEFORE Oct. 7th. A very good source about that is the blog of an expert on the Middle-East who has written negatively about Oct. 7th but generally supports the Palestinians. His name is Juan Cole and his blog is at- https://www.juancole.com/ . If you want something less partisan, there’s an online Israeli newspaper called The Times of Israel, at- https://www.timesofisrael.com/ .

 

The problem of anti-Semitism among progressives might be greatly exaggerated by allies of Israel, but it is a problem. And I believe that Oct. 7th was anti-Semitic. You had an organization like Hamas targeting only Jews and mostly Jewish civilians. I am not sure what has happened recently in the investigation of the alleged use of rape as a weapon of war on Oct. 7th, but I read a handful of things in the last several months, from non-Zionist sources, making me think that it happened (see “UN: 'Convincing information' sexual violence committed against hostages in Gaza” BBC 3/52024). Even without this I am comfortable calling Hamas anti-Semitic, but if there was organized rape of Jewish women, that says something about the acute HATE that Hamas had for their victims.

 

I think that a lot of progressive supporters of the Palestinians need to seriously consider that Hamas doesn’t deserve their support and they need to take the threat of anti-Semitism more seriously. They need to understand that it will be easier to refute accusations of anti-Semitism if they DO condemn Oct. 7th. I think that American supporters of Israel (although the Jewish zionists are a small part of the Israel lobby, this is aimed more at them than at the MUCH larger population of conservative Christian zionists (who are less likely to care about justice)) need to think more critically about Israel and consider that it is impossible for a state to be based on religion and ethnicity and to simultaneously be democratic. There is a lot of material on my blog about these issues, at- https://theblackandthegreen3.blogspot.com/ .

 

I am concluding with a quote from the hard-working opponents of organized hate, right-wing politics and economic injustice at the Southern Poverty Law Center. In one of the articles in the Fall 2008 issue of their publication, they wrote the following (it’s a statement by the author of that article):

 

“College campuses are particularly susceptible to anti-Semitism that originates in certain sectors of the far left. This source of anti-Jewish sentiment often begins with condemnation of Israeli policies and devolves into derogatory statements about all Jewish people. Although criticism of Israel does not typically amount to anti-Semitism — and many critics of the Jewish state are unfairly accused of bigotry — in some cases those who denounce Israel also cross the line into denigration of Jews as a group.” (My emphasis)

 

The most important part is the last sentence. Both opponents and supporters of Israel need to think about that seriously.

 

Two Brief Essays About The Artifical Electoral Equality Between The Small States And The Big States in America

The first one is an LTE I sent about 4 weeks ago to the Daily Camera who published it a few days later.

Editor,

 

The attempt at killing Donald Trump brings up the claim that republicans in this country are oppressed. Some republicans even compare their situation with that of Jews during the Holocaust. This is total nonsense.

 

Members of the GOP are far from oppressed. Part of this is how the Senate works- the GOP have an undemocratic advantage in that institution. Every state, no matter it’s size, has two senators. This creates an unjustified equality between the large states and the small states when California SHOULD have 52 times the voting power in the Senate that Wyoming has. Democracy is one person one vote, not one state flag one vote. And there’s also the fact that state Senates are based on the former principle and do not involve every county in the state having the same number of State Senators.

 

The problem is, to one degree or another depending on how you define small and big, a majority of the small states at least lean towards red and a majority of the big states at least lean towards blue. Until that changes (and I doubt it will anytime soon) the way the Senate works makes it unjustifiably easy for the GOP to elect a majority of the upper house, even when the number of residents represented by the GOP in the Senate is smaller than the number of residents represented by the Dems in the Senate.

 

We need to either abolish the Senate or reform it so that every senator gets a number of votes equal to how many congressional districts there are in their state. Not only will this end the unfair advantage the GOP has, it will, independent of which party benefits, make the legislative PROCESS in this country more democratic.

 

Thanks,

 

Tom Shelley

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The second is another LTE about a related subject which was published by the Boulder Weekly today. This is what I submitted plus a few small changes made after I submitted it. The edited version is here. 

Editor,
 
The Electoral College is pretty unpopular- a recent Pew Research Center poll says that in 2023 2/3 of Americans wanted to get rid of the EC so that the winner of the popular vote becomes President. In 2000 and 2016 the GOP candidate who won in the EC lost the popular vote. We need to do SOMETHING about it (assuming that the moderately democratic nature of the US survives the next year). I believe that the key thing that needs to be done is to amend the constitution so that all states (and Washington DC) are stripped of the two extra votes they get because all states have two senators.
 
One fact that should be considered is that since the 2000 election some people did the math and found that, if it wasn’t for the two extra votes that every state and DC get, Gore could have totally lost Florida and yet would have won in the electoral college (I found a couple of good web-sites and did the math myself and it’s true). Gore would have won by either 12 or 13 electoral votes (one EC voter who was supposed to vote for Gore abstained). Although this isn’t a massive distortion of democracy like the related problem with votes in the Senate is, it IS undemocratic to create even a small yet false degree of equality between the big states and the small states (California SHOULD have 52 times (not 18 times) more voting power in the EC than Wyoming does). And depending on how you define small and big, to one degree or another a majority of the small states at least lean red and a majority of the big states at least lean blue. So, currently the set-up helps the GOP, but even if undoing that wasn’t part of this, addressing the problem with the EC WOULD move the US political system closer to the (small-d) democratic end of the spectrum.
 
Besides what I propose above, what other options do we have? I think that getting rid of the EC completely might be a bad idea. I’ve read that that might result in EVERY SINGLE STATE doing at least one recount. I at least kind of support the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, which would require states who have signed up to it to (when the electoral votes of Compact states add up to a majority) have their EC voters vote for whoever won the popular vote. I think it’s flawed but a lot better than nothing. On the other hand it doesn’t seem like a very permanent solution and says nothing about the horrible idea, that comes up at least four times in our political system, that there should be some degree of equality (or total equality) electorally between the small states and the big states.
 
Because the US Constitution sometimes DOES say (erroneously) that democracy is one state flag, one vote instead of one person one vote, and that applies to amendments, the permanent solution I propose might be elusive. But I would like to see the EC reformed so that the votes are based solely on the number of congressional districts. And until we get there the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact is a good idea.
 
Tom Shelley
Gunbarrell

My Review of Larry Bond's 1991 Anti-Apartheid Novel "Vortex"

In a book report (it wasn’t very analytical) I did in 2022 about a sort of sci-fi/sort of techno-thriller novel with a left-wing message, I admitted that a big chunk of the fiction I read is by Tom Clancy or authors like Tom Clancy (1989-2009 it was about 70% and since 2009 it’s been about 25% (hopefully I won’t go to Socialist Hell)). As far as I can tell, the author of the book I just referred to (David Mace) is progressive. If you look at the books I’ve read in the Tom Clancy genre there’s a handful with some stuff that is liberal or even progressive. It’s usually a small island of progressive viewpoints (by characters you’re supposed to like) with an ocean of center/center-right politics. There is one book which is written by someone much more right-wing than left-wing but which can nonetheless be greatly enjoyed politically by progressives, if you think about it the right way. I’m talking about Larry Bond’s 1991 novel “Vortex.”

“Vortex” is about Apartheid South Africa, and a “last gasp” attempt by hardliners to maintain Apartheid and Afrikaner colonialism. I believe the story starts in May of 1992, although it’s not clear what the year is. I am not sure how much or how little progress was made in the Peace Process between Mandela’s release and May of 1992 (in reality). Towards the very beginning of the book the President of SA talks about significant progress being made, which prompts the main villain (Karl Vorster, a Cabinet member) to carry out something which is basically a coup, but which appears to be the ANC’s military wing (MK) assassinating the rest of the cabinet (although this is known by almost no one until the last 1/3 of the book, the MK operation was manipulated by Vorster and the Intelligence agency he runs). He then reverses the small number of reforms that had been made to Apartheid, invades neighboring Namibia, and turns the security forces loose against Blacks and any dissent by whites.

The situation becomes chaotic. The leader of the Zulu population (who, in reality, may not have been as militant as the ANC was during the anti-Apartheid struggle) calls for the rest of the world to take action against the new regime and his people take up armed struggle. A large chunk of the military in Cape Town refuses to massacre white civilian protestors and rebels against the government.

Things also start to fall apart for Vorster in Namibia, whose government asks the Cuban Army in Angola to help repel the invasion. Although this is more complicated, to one extent or another during most of the book you can root for the Cuban Army. The head of the Cuban Army in Africa (General Antonio Vega) convinces Castro that Cuba should resolve the conflict by invading South Africa and overthrowing Apartheid. With some help from other “anti-Imperialist” countries (including three Libyan units probably the size of battalions) three columns (probably around 2,000-3,000 men in each) enter SA from the east, north and west. Because the Cubans hid their preparations for the invasion the SA military is still focused on Namibia and rapid progress is made, especially the column approaching Pretoria from the West. Because it is a desert and a sparely populated area (and because he is psychotic) Vorster eradicates that column with a nuclear bomb. SA is on the verge of using two more nukes to attack strategic targets when the US military captures them and removes them from the country in a massive airborne operation. Shortly after that the US military lands something like a division on the east coast of SA (at Durban) and starts fighting the SA Army on it’s way to Pretoria. Naval aircraft start attacking the East column of Cubans.

As you might guess, the US military stops the Cubans from reaching Pretoria until they (the US) can get there first. The aftermath of this victory for the US is largely a GOP fantasy. Because of some significant friction with the Cubans (see below), the ANC abandons it’s commitment to socialism. There IS something about recognition of the trade-unions, something proposed by the occupying US military, but I think we’re talking about something that is probably engineered to foster a pretty centrist labor movement.

There are two large aspects of this story relevant to how close it is to being a progressive book.

First, the US government moves very slowly at each stage of the crisis and are usually far behind Cuba. And they (characters who are officials of the US government) are pretty honest about why they are initially very slow and behind Cuba, and they’re also very honest about why they DO send their own invasion force after Cuba invades- they don’t want Cuba to get credit for overthrowing Apartheid. I will add a lot of details to this in about a year when I read this book (for the 6th or 7th time) and take some notes, but in general, Cuba looks better than the US government.

On the other hand, there are some things Bond has the Cubans do that A) usually involve quite a bit of imagination on Bond’s part and B) make Cuba look bad. After one of his columns is wiped out by a nuke, Vega decides to compensate for that by using chemical weapons. In all fairness to Vega and in all fairness to Bond who was probably tempted to really slander Cuba at this point, they use NON-PERSISTENT chemical weapons which become impotent pretty quickly after they are released into the air. This means they’re not quite as indiscriminate as they would be if they were persistent. We don’t know how many battles involved Cuban chemical weapons, but there was at least one. And some small part of the nearby black population was affected, with some deaths.

Those black deaths contribute to the erosion of congeniality between the Cuban Army and the ANC’s military wing, Spear of the Nation. There is one bizarre incident that was a pretty good example of Bond trying to reassure most of his readers that he did not go commie while writing this book. The Cubans ask the black population in one town to help them make an airfield they took over functional again. There weren’t enough volunteers so a small number of Blacks were forced to help. This of course contributes to the conflict developing between the Cubans and the ANC. Bond does sort zig-zag a bit and quotes Vega’s thoughts, pointing out that he has Black officers on his staff- who he describes as brave and competent.

There is something I really need to say about Bond. Vortex is his second book. His first and third books are politically fairly centrist overall. His fourth and fifth books, I thought were racist towards Muslims and I will never read them again and I haven’t read anything he wrote after book five. (see this and this (and look for my name)). (I lost track of those two novels in my collection for several years but in the end I made a decision about 5 years ago to throw them away instead of taking them to a thrift store (I’m not totally okay with that, because it resembles book burning, but throwing them away was probably the right thing to do))

There is one last thing I need to get out of the way. In the very first sentence of the book, in a section that includes maybe 500 words, it sounds like Bond is saying that rural, uneducated Zimbabweans think that helicopters flying at night are “demons.”  There’s a bit more to that short first section, and I also think after I explain this next part, progressive readers will feel comfortable assuming that Bond is not racist towards Black people. In his first book (about a second Korean War), one of the main characters is an Air Force pilot who gets shot down behind enemy lines, and is rescued at night by a helicopter. This character does say that the helicopter appears like a demon.

It’s a massive book- 896 pages in paperback. If you’re not totally against anything military and you hate Apartheid, you will probably like this book. In about a year I will probably read it again and take some notes and have more to say.

We Need MORE Criticism of Hamas, not Less

 Since Oct. 7th I have read a lot about the war between Israel and Hamas, I have done a small amount of protesting on the street, I have gotten a letter published in the Boulder Weekly (a widely-read alternative newspaper), I have sent a few messages (in support of the Palestinians) to federal politicians, and I have also taken part in a fair amount of email discussion among a lot of the Boulder County people supporting the Palestinians. In those discussions I encountered two ideas that I think overlap and which I would like to address in this essay. First is the idea that it’s okay for the Palestinians to kill civilians because it’s an “asymmetrical” conflict where the Palestinians don’t have the resources, power, and environment to fight in that the Israelis have. The second idea is that the Israelis have the power to wage peace and the Palestinians don’t and therefore it is the former who need to take the first few steps or so towards peace and the latter can wait until those steps have been taken to reciprocate.

This essay will address these two ideas and to a lesser degree some other aspects of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

*****

Since Oct. 7th I have read something like 2,000 words a day about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict- 50% from the BBC, 10% from Juan Cole’s site Informed Comment, 10% from CNN and the rest is miscellaneous. Looking at the 30 years before that I probably read an average of 100-200 words a day about it and it broke down like this- 20% from Juan Cole and about 20% is from the BBC. The rest, about 60% is from various sources, some  mainstream, some progressive, including The Nation, the Washington Post, the Times of Israel, etc.

*******

Although I only have a BA, it’s in Ethnic Studies and mine includes three courses taught by Ward Churchill (I don’t think this affected how much I learned from him, but he was my faculty advisor (I got an A in all three of the courses he taught)). I have also spent a huge amount of time studying the recent conflict in Northern Ireland (in the last 26 years about 1,000 words a day on average), and that included some things that made me more familiar with the violence than most outside observers (A: I heard a lecture in 2002 by someone who had just months earlier been Chief of Staff of the IRA and B: in 2002 I was in the middle of two riots with the security forces).

In general, I support the Palestinians- in some ways more than many people who support them (in 2002 I got a CU-Boulder group called “Students for Justice in N. Ireland” to endorse the campus Coalition for Justice in Palestine), but in some ways less so (I wasn’t among the brave young people who went there in solidarity with them around 2002). I did a post where I do a pretty good of taking down Zionism and explaining why a one state solution would be better than a two state solution. Here and there in the last six months I say that although I condemn what happened Oct. 7th, I would support something that resembled what the IRA did during The Troubles (a detailed explanation of how I reached the conclusion that the IRA were (OBJECTIVELY) not terrorists is here and a description of the Republican Movement’s (1970-1997) strategy is here).

On the other hand I hate Hamas and always have. Recently I decided that I no longer consider the Palestinian Authority/Palestinian Liberation Organization to be worthy of my support.

I did a post about how incredibly appropriate it is to use the word Apartheid in relation to Israel. That is largely about Israel, East Jerusalem and the West Bank. In one way or another, to one degree or another, in the last 17 years residents of the Gaza Strip have had it worse than Palestinians in the West Bank (until recently Gaza was dominated by Israel even though it had no soldiers there (now it’s still dominated (if that’s the right word), in part because there ARE soldiers there)). Those Palestinians in the West Bank and in Gaza are state-less and thus very close to powerlessness.

So, it’s true that Israel is MUCH more powerful than the Palestinians, and is allied with the most powerful country in the world. The resistance is underground in East Jerusalem, Israel, and the West Bank. Israel has an advanced and conventional military that includes, for example, tanks. Does that asymmetry mean that Hamas shouldn’t be seriously criticized for focusing overwhelmingly on intentionally killing civilians Oct. 7th?

No, it doesn’t mean that. Crucially, the IRA almost never intentionally killed civilians and almost never unintentionally killed civilians and almost never TRIED to kill civilians (I explain how I came to those conclusions here). The IRA was of course an underground army and the British had, for example, many helicopters that were used extensively (especially in South Armagh, where, without helicopters, the British Army would have been defeated by the IRA). In the struggle against Apartheid, operations by the military wing of the ANC (in English known as “Spear of the Nation”) were even less likely to result in civilian death, and they were definitely fighting under difficult conditions.

I should say at some point here that I believe there is a spectrum between completely legitimate targets on one hand and completely innocent civilians on the other hand. This is reflected in my opinion of Hamas’ military wing and my opinion of the IRA, among others. It doesn’t mean that I think less-than-totally-innocent civilians are legitimate targets, but I don’t attach much value to such killings when deciding if I consider the group responsible to be a terrorist organization or something better.

Although I do not totally agree with international law on this, international law is so unfavorable towards the killing of civilians that I believe killing civilians is not excused by the conditions that an underground army fight under against a technologically and institutionally superior foe.

Although this may not be the fairest thing to say about them, it almost seems to me that progressive supporters of Hamas believe that there is something akin to a Law of Physics about the inevitability of underground armies intentionally killing civilians- their argument seems to be, “you don’t condemn an apple for falling to the Earth.” But there are at least two such armies that never or almost never intentionally killed civilians. One of them was totally successful (although it should be mentioned that their economic agenda was not realized, the ANC’s primary goal was the end of Apartheid) and the other was sort of successful (the Good Friday Agreement isn’t that bad and in recent years Sinn Fein and the EU have forced the British to create a border of sorts between N. Ireland and Britain).

The second and overlapping idea is that the Palestinians don’t have the power to wage peace and can only wage war until Israel takes the first few steps towards peace on their own. In my opinion Israel is a lot more responsible for the conflict than the Palestinians are. The average Israeli Jew is a lot more comfortable than the average Palestinian is and could survive the re-distribution of resources (i.e. water) that peace would require. I’m sure a lot of Palestinians would say that they have little or nothing to lose and that for decades now Israel has been brutalizing them and undermining the possibility of a two state solution and many of them will fight until Israel makes the first moves.

Although I am not a pacifist, A) I overwhelmingly support non-violent political efforts and B) what I’m about to say needs to be seriously considered by supporters of this theory that Hamas cannot wage peace at this point. The Black population in America was seriously dis-empowered in the decades before and during the Civil Rights Movement (there was SOME militancy and looking back at that history, I support some of that militancy). But Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was almost 100% against the use of violence and saying that he “waged peace” is putting it mildly- it was a scorched Earth version of “waging peace.” I have a theory that intentionally killing civilians in war is further from “waging peace” than exclusively targeting combatants. I am not saying that liberation movements out there in the world need to completely abandon the use force in order to respect the legacy of Dr. King. But I believe progressives should be careful with who we support when it comes to armed liberation movements. And although I am not going to go into a lot of detail beyond looking at the Civil Rights/Black Power era and N. Ireland, I also think we should ask ourselves, “what would Gandhi think?”

The Republican Movement (Sinn Fein and the IRA), as I mentioned above, conducted a very honorable struggle and DID do a lot of non-violent stuff. In all fairness to Hamas, they did successfully contest an election in 2006 and didn’t have much more in terms of opportunities for non-violent political efforts. But I am still going to point out that starting in the mid-80s SF members who got elected to local councils took their seats and engaged their unionist opponents non-violently and democratically- a move towards waging peace in the acutely imperialistic Thatcher years. When the conditions seemed right, in 1994 the IRA went on cease-fire for about a year. After a brief return to war, they went on cease-fire again in 1997 and to a VERY large degree have become less and less relevant and I wouldn’t be surprised if they pretty much ceased to exist in the last 15 or so years.

Although I’m not gonna go into much detail here (I talk about this in a 2009 post) the RM and the Nationalist community in general bent over backwards to make the peace process work. It would have been VERY reasonable if they had refused to sign up to anything that failed to guarantee a United Ireland after some transitional period. The republican argument is something I go into some detail about here. Around 1997-2005 the IRA took several steps leading up to the full decommissioning of their arsenal, steps that kept the Peace Process going forward, despite frequent provocations by their opponents (i.e. for about 3 months in late 2001 loyalists terrified little Catholic girls (aged about 11) on their way to school just inside a Protestant area (there’s a fairly good article about it here)). 

When the conditions seemed right, the IRA was quick to wage peace. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Palestinians in the West Bank or Gaza have less power than the 1998 Catholic population of N. Ireland, but it’s also relevant that on a per-capita basis, Catholic civilians might have been slaughtered in The Troubles to a greater degree than was the case with Palestinian civilians since 1967 (that is, until Oct. 8th 2023 when that situation changed dramatically) (below, starting with the sentence “As I write elsewhere 856+” I try to illustrate how the Catholics were slaughtered). Even though the Catholics probably had more power in 1998, when it came to support from the global community, the Palestinians definitely have more (i.e. the Catholic population of N. Ireland didn’t have a representative at the UN) (and the British, although I don’t believe they used this to win diplomatic battles with Dublin, are permanent members of the UN Security Council and have a veto and they might have benefited from that in terms of discouraging support for the IRA). I talk about the Irish half of that comparison with South Africa in the middle third of a post here (starting with a paragraph that begins by mentioning South Africa). Crucially, the US government was, to one degree or another, on the side of the British as I describe in note #17 of a post here. As I said, the IRA waged peace not when they had the global community behind them, not just when British politics made peace more likely, but when it appeared there was an opportunity to stop the violence and the inequality, the hate and the injustice. In 1994 that meant after very few moves by the British and the Unionists. In 1996-1997 there were a few more moves by the British, but also some provocation by London and the unionists- which was ignored.

As I was typing this I increasingly came to understand that in terms of power, the Catholic population had more than their brothers and sisters in Palestine. But what I wrote about the latter having more support globally is true. Also, in terms of forgiving your oppressors and waging peace, you have to consider what I write below about the Catholic civilian population, on a per capita basis, being slaughtered to such a great extent that it was possibly worse on a per capita basis than what the Palestinians have been through between 1967 and Oct. 7th (it’s not a perfectly symmetrical comparison and for multiple reasons I am not going to hunt down solid figures for deaths of the Palestinians, but you might agree with me when you read that section after the next paragraph).

I don’t think anything excuses much less justifies what Hamas did Oct. 7th. I’m not saying that they are anywhere near as responsible for the conflict in general as Israel is but Oct. 7th was a massive and (sort of) unprovoked escalation (I say sort of unprovoked because it was disproportionate to what Israel was doing- nowhere near as disproportionate as Israel’s response to Oct. 7th, but still disproportionate (you have to consider that targeting civilians is more provocative than attacking soldiers)). If they were fighting offensively as the IRA did, I’d be pretty supportive. Coming back to reality, what do I think Hamas and the PLO and the Palestinian people in general should do? I think their allies worldwide need to continue to take a stand and communicate to Israel that it had better stop bombing Gaza and allow humanitarian aid into Gaza like never before, and stop going towards what I think would be something fairly genocidal. And they need to get the US to stop supporting Israel. (I believe that when it comes to genocide  there is a spectrum between 100% dead and, at the other end of the spectrum, what Ireland experienced during the Famine). I have no idea how making Gaza livable for 2.2 million people will be accomplished in the immediate future. But worse than that is the possibility that Israel will try to push Gazans out of Gaza and into Egypt, which would be pretty genocidal. I have almost no idea what should be done beyond an end to the violence and a return of aid to Gaza and and an end to American support for Israel. Normally I would say that a one-state solution must be pursued as I argue here, but after what has happened to both the Jewish population and the Palestinian population, I am thinking of going back to supporting the two-state solution. I imagine the reality is there will be no peace process worthy of the name for a very long time.

*******

As I write elsewhere 856+ Catholic civilians were killed in the years 1969 to 2005 by either loyalist paramilitaries or the security forces. A comparable scenario in America would have meant around 67,000 unarmed people of color killed by cops or Nazi skinheads (etc.) in the same time period. A: based on what I’ll describe below, I would guess that the actual number for that was probably somewhere around 7,000-8,000; B: I'm not saying the racist system in this country wasn't, ideologically or programmatically, capable of killing 67,000 people of color in those years if the "rebellion" among people of color here had been as militaristic as the one among Catholics in N. Ireland; but the reality is that as bad as it was for people of color here in those years, it was, in terms of deaths, MUCH worse for Catholics in N. Ireland.

What makes me confident about my statement “probably somewhere around 7,000-8,000”?



1. Between 1996 and 2005 according to the FBI there were 38 racist murders. I have read that the Department of Justice officially estimates that for every hate crime reported to the FBI there might be 20-30 that aren’t reported because not all local law enforcement agencies report such crimes to the FBI. So I came up with 1,140 for those years.


2. I heard that in a 12 month period during a 2014 (apparent) surge in police murders of black people including those of Eric Garner in NY, Tamir Rice in OH, and Michael Brown in MO among other highly publicized such cases, that around 200 black people armed or unarmed, had been killed by cops in America. Although I’m very open-minded about accusations that cops plant guns, this country also has a ridiculous number of guns.


3. Bear in mind that decades ago the number of people of color and the number of cops in this country were both smaller or much smaller than they are today.


4. If it’s worth much, about 10 years ago I read a huge amount of what the Southern Poverty Law Center put on their web-site in the previous 10-15 years. I also got an Ethnic Studies degree if that’s worth much.


5. There was little or no talk about “Brown Lives Matter” so I get the impression that very few Latinos/Latinas/Chicanos/Chicanas have been killed by cops in recent years (as far as I know, even Arpaio’s sheriff’s department in AZ didn’t kill a single such person) and that might reflect the situation in earlier decades. I have practically never heard of Asian-Americans being killed by cops. And if Native Americans were being killed at a high rate in the 80s and 90s I would have heard (a massive chunk of my major was Native American Studies).
 

UPDATE 6/9/21 I just found a Democracy Now! story relevant to this. It's about the last 20 years, but there's a small overlap between that and the period I was looking at Catholics and people of color (1969-2005), and it's possible that what I said about this comparison is off a little. Bear in mind that the figure I refer to in item #2 above came from organizers of a Black Lives Matter protest.

******

In that first part (ending just above this line) I addressed the issues of asymmetry in war and waging peace. Here I need to address some other aspects of Hamas that contribute to me being hostile.

I believe in being consistently against religious fundamentalism and social conservatism. Towards the bottom I will explain how I don’t have a racist double standard in the favor of the Irish.

Hamas is an Arabic acronym for “Islamic Resistance Movement” and they’re very friendly with Iran, so I think I am on pretty good ground saying they are fundamentalists. I’m not an atheist and I’m certainly not a NEW atheist (see this). I believe in the separation of religious institutions and the state, I believe in secular politics (although I have nothing against religious socialists I am not one myself) and I believe in “Intelligent Design” not creationism.

I won’t apologize for consistently being against social conservatism, including sexism and homophobia. I’m sure some readers are groaning at that sentence in this essay, but please read what I write below.

I get the impression there is something close to a consensus among American progressives that criticizing the allegedly misogynist attitudes of MANY Muslim men is inappropriate. Are Muslim women oppressed to one degree or another in many (perhaps most) muslim societies? I think the answer is pretty close to “YES, although I have gotten the impression that some progress has been made on the issue in recent decades. I need to make clear that I don’t support laws (in France, for example) where muslim women are banned from dressing in a way that might be considered religious and/or traditional and/or conservative. I believe that Muslim women are adults and don’t need the government, or male relatives, or random males in the street telling them what to wear, when men are not treated that way as well.

What about homophobia? In general I get the strong impression that the VAST Majority of Muslims are homophobes. I wish I had a lot of evidence specifically about HAMAS being homophobic, but I am comfortable just assuming that they are. I DO know that in recent years Hamas and Iran get along very well and Iran is DEFINITELY homophobic. I also read a brief accusation of homophobia that Meredith Tax leveled against muslim fundamentalists in her book “Double Bind.”

Do I have a racist double standard in favor of the Irish and/or Catholics? No. Republicanism is mostly secular. There were a few Protestants in the IRA (is Sinn Fein as anti-protestant as Hamas is anti-Semitic? See this), and there are a LOT of atheists in Sinn Fein. Going back to the IRA, I was told that at one point, perhaps in the mid-1990s, a significant minority of IRA POWs were housed together in the same part of the prison because they were all devout. But I am certain it was a minority and probably a small minority of the POWs.

The first (or at least close to the first) Vice President of Provisional Sinn Fein (the SF that Gerry Adams was President of for a long time), in the early 1970s, was a woman. In the era of the Civil Rights Movement (late 60s/early 70s), if there was only one leader of the CRM it was Bernadette Devlin (McAliskey). She was also perhaps the main leader of those, around 1980, who were supporters of republican POWs demanding political status. In the mid-1980s for one year SF was pro-choice and between then and now (or at least most of that time) their position was only MODERATELY pro-life, and they might be pro-choice today. In recent years the two most senior leaders of SF are both women. When Gerry Adams stepped down as President of SF he came out as pro-choice.

A handful of facts about SF and homophobia are here.

******

(I believe that Hamas is anti-Semitic. This is primarily based on 2-3 facts. They’re religious fundamentalists and they went after Jews, and some of them raped Jews (if you can prove that they raped a lot of non-Jewish people, I’ll reconsider that statement). I have decided that the PLO are anti-Semitic (based on a BBC article here) and if THEY’RE anti-Semitic I feel comfortable assuming that the socially conservative religious fundamentalists are, too. When I have made this accusation in the past 1-2 American supporters of Hamas have said that the anti-Semitism of some Palestinians can be traced back to Europe- that doesn’t make it okay!)

There are two last things I need to say. This post is partly a response to a blog post  by a woman named Helena Cobban here. The main theme of her post is that “it’s past time to end the demonization of Hamas.” Combined with everything else I have written above, I need to explain that Hamas weakens, it doesn’t strengthen, the cause of Palestine. Large numbers of people in the world believe it’s wrong for civilians to be targeted in war. Large numbers of people believe that anti-Semitism is wrong. Hamas’ targeting of civilians and their anti-Semitism turn people away from supporting the Palestinians. I mean Oct. 7th did nothing to increase support for their people. ISRAEL’S REACTION has, and that might have been Hamas’ plan, but I think that was a pretty bad plan and doesn’t change the fact that Oct. 7th was anti-Semitic. I guarantee you there would be more support for the Palestinians if they were not associated with Hamas.

I imagine that when anti-Semitism in the Palestinian population is not challenged by American supporters of the Palestinians, it might be noted by the younger and more impressionable progressive activists who might adopt that bigotry as their own. That means that ignoring anti-Semitism among the Palestinians can have an effect on how Jews are treated HERE.

We need to criticize Hamas MORE not LESS.

Britts Out! (Katie Britt, immigration, and sex-trafficking)

(That’s what I say about Ireland and the US Senate!)

As you probably know, a month ago GOP Sen. Katie Britt was under a storm of criticism in response to her rebuttal speech after the State of the Union address by President Biden. She told the story of a Mexican woman sex-trafficked when she was a young teen in Mexico- well, for the most part Britt didn’t want you to know it was in Mexico. Britt’s been less than consistent about this, but the idea was to make you think it was in this country and on Biden’s watch (when in fact it was during the George W. Bush administration).

In addition to everything else that has been said about Britt’s rebuttal, I have some more to add. Crucially, read the two paragraphs towards the bottom that are in italics, they’re very important.
 
She was talking about the surge in migration from Mexico to the US, but she also talks about sex-trafficking and Mexican drug cartel activity and she is conflating all three of them (it should be noted that the Mexican woman who was trafficked was not a victim of the cartels contrary to what Britt implied). Has sex-trafficking surged? I’ll be honest- I don’t know, but I think Britt wants you to think it has and that it's coming here with Mexican migrants.

At one point in a March 10th The Guardian article, she is quoted as saying:
 
“We have to tell those stories, and the liberal media needs to pay attention to it because there are victims all the way coming to the border, there are victims at the border, and then there are victims all throughout the country.”
 
I believe that although this is in conflict with what she was saying the rest of the time, she was trying to say in that quote that this kind of sex-trafficking is common in Mexico and Mexicans want to come here and rape your wife or daughter, etc. and only Donald Trump can stop them. She was saying that the sex-trafficking inside Mexico, deaths of migrants at the border and deaths of Americans at the hands of immigrants inside America are one unbroken chain that can only be addressed comprehensively by Trump’s approach to immigration. This is nonsense.

Tough immigration policies will not affect the Mexican drug cartels (it certainly wouldn’t have stopped what happened in Britt’s anecdote because the cartels and the the border had nothing to do with it). Separating children from parents at the border will do absolutely nothing to the cartels. I’m not sure what WILL stop the cartels because I’m not as familiar with recent Mexican history as I should be, but tough immigration policies are not going to help.

As far as “there are victims at the border,” I am not sure what she’s talking about, but there are reports that migrants waiting to cross the border often find themselves in bad situations, which probably does include all kinds of sex crimes. I am not sure how much time is spent at the border by migrants who are not asylum seekers, but as far as the asylum seekers, you must remember that Britt’s party and her hero, Trump, strongly support the “Remain in Mexico” policy where asylum seekers must wait in Mexico until a decision is made about granting them asylum. So, the GOP believes that Mexico is just one big nightmare for teenage girls trying to get to America, but they want such survivors to either wait in Mexico for months or years, or to just stay in Mexico permanently.

As far as victims in this country, yes, it occasionally happens as it might have recently with Laken Riley (I said it- satisfied, MTG?) (I said “might have” because of the presumption of innocence). Those are tragedies but you need to consider a few things:
1) From what I have read non-immigrants here are more likely than immigrants here to commit crimes (yes, that statement probably is based on ignoring the “crime” committed when they enter this country without documents- but that’s a victimless crime).
2) That percentage of the immigrant population that commits violent crime must be incredibly small- why punish everyone in that population because of a very few bad apples?
3) I cannot remember a lot about how often this happens but what about the immigrants who die at the hands of racist and violent white people who listen to the anti-immigrant rantings of people like Britt? Fueling that racism as Trump does will only increase the number of immigrants who get viciously beaten to death by angry teenage males.

In her statement that I quoted above Britt implies that liberals ignore what she's talking about. There are probably better counter-examples than this, but I’m going to go with something that I think is important and probably doesn’t get mentioned very much. The TV show Law and Order: Special Victims Unit FREQUENTLY makes it clear that NYC is a "sanctuary city" where cops don't collaborate with Immigration authorities and not only do they oppose all kinds of sex crimes in general, there was one season 19 two-part episode (Remember Me and Remember Me, Too) about a "coyote" (someone who helps undocumented immigrants get across the southern border and to their destination in the US) who repeatedly raped women he was transporting. Another episode, “911” in season seven, is about a young girl who was brought over the Mexican border by someone who then sold her to child pornographers. In season 16 there is an episode “Girls Disappeared,” about sex-trafficked teenage girls crossing that border. There might be other episodes like that.

 

(UPDATE 7/19/24 The woman Britt talks about was sex-trafficked far from the border)

Liberals and progressives believe that migrant women and girls being sexually exploited and/or assaulted is a serious problem, but they don't support Trump's extreme approach to immigration.

Law and Order Reviews H

 I have done reviews of many episodes of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit and published some more general thoughts about it here. In that post I offer a smaller number of general thoughts about the original Law and Order show (the one that went from 1990-2010). Although I do not like L&O as much as I like the SVU version, I do like it. There’s some liberal or even progressive stuff here and there and they’re good detective stories, and they’re homicide detectives- if they were narcotics, I’d probably be a lot less fond of the show.

Although I’m not sure I have done and will do this consistently, with the original Law and Order show I will make a note and maybe offer some comments when the issues that are at the core of Law and Order: SVU appear on this show.

“Kids” Season 4. See this for a plot summary.

Although it’s a minor aspect of the story, the main characters are concerned that police friends of the defendant’s father (an ex-cop) may have conspired to get a key witness killed, without whose testimony the defendant would probably be acquitted.

“Old Friends” Season 4. See this for a plot summary.

This episode is about a whistle-blower being killed by someone trying to protect a small (or at most medium) sized business from lethal exposure about moldy baby food that could easily sicken or even kill babies. On the other hand, I am not absolutely sure I should be doing this review because it’s a mobbed-up business and the mob is responsible for the murder, so it’s less damning of capitalism than it would be if there was no mob involvement.


“Blue Bamboo” Season 5. See this for a plot summary.

There is one small part of this episode I want to highlight. It sounds like one of the detectives is saying there should be more funding for education. I realize that’s hardly something the Left has a monopoly on, but it is also an important part of our agenda.

In general there’s something that’s a bigger part of the episode but which I am unsure I should comment on. It basically says that there is some massive problem with anti-Japanese bigotry in America. It says nothing about bigotry towards Japanese-AMERICANS. I think it might be exaggerating how much anti-Japanese bigotry there was in the mid-1990s in America. I do have one little anecdote about this. When I was about 6-7 years old in the early 1980s I saw that in a men’s room stall someone had written “Remember Pearl Harbor, stone a Toyota” (or something very similar to that). To be honest, at the time I thought it was clever and/or neat. I had no idea that shortly before or after that day a Chinese-American (Vincent Chin), mistaken for a Japanese-American by two white Michigan auto-workers, was killed in a hate crime in 1982.

“White Rabbit” Season 5. See this for a plot summary.

To some degree this episode could be considered in conflict with the New Left of the 1960s, but the DA and the senior ADA, to one degree or another express some degree of sympathy with those who passionately opposed the Vietnam War. Although I’m not that familiar with him, William Kunstler was for decades an important civil rights and civil liberties lawyer, and in this episode he played himself.

Overall, politically it’s one of the best episodes.