How is it that the term ‘cocksucker’ has become an insult instead of a description, or even a compliment? How could anybody who’s ever had their cock sucked think this way? Do you have a cock? Ever been in love? Wouldn’t you want the person you love to be a cocksucker? If you have a cock, and you like putting it in mouths, why would you allude to that experience as a way to express your dislike of a person? Why would you use a word that describes what you wish your girlfriend did more of to describe the person who cut you off in traffic? Is it sexism, homophobia, or has every blowjob you’ve ever received been nothing but teeth?
At a Glance
The Presidency of Hilary Clinton: A Cautionary Tale
The looming election of Hillary Clinton as the first woman president of the United States will be the opening of the final act in a revenge tale spanning multiple decades that saw her patiently biding her time before she could assume the office and take on the executive powers established by George W. Bush, and accelerated by Barack Obama, whereby the president could assassinate anyone in the world with no checks, balances, or oversight; even if they are US citizens, even if they are innocent of all crimes.
The one person worried most about this unprecedented rise of authoritarianism in America has not been some jihadist fomenting unrest in Syria, Iraq, or Yemen; not some lone wolf terrorist enthusiast ready to write his own jihad fan fiction in blood on the streets of a Western metropolis. No, it has been Monica Lewinsky watching the skies with growing unease over the past eight years, wondering at what altitude one could spot a predator drone, or whether or not she would be able to hear the hellfire missile when it came for her, even for a second; affording her enough time to reflect upon the days when she slept with the most powerful man in the world, never considering that his wife would one day become the most powerful person on the planet.
Watching the inauguration from an apartment she will henceforth not leave for months, Lewinsky will already have given up. In the early days of the Obama presidency, with Clinton as his Secretary of State, she still had hopes she could get off the grid. Live in the mountains, the desert, somewhere remote, sparsely populated, and beautiful; pay her rent by selling hand-knit doodads on Etsy via some alias, and remain anonymous. She knows better than that now. There is no grid, only a net, and the NSA has long ago caught her and her online personae within it, not to mention her semi-famous face and a back-story bordering on the legendary which still gets her recognized on a daily basis for certain deeds she never wanted once to define her as a person.
Lewinsky will survive the first years of a second Clinton’s presidency, owing not the least to the patience of her tormentor, who has waited so long that she could wait a few more years. Yet this patience, so conducive to cold-blooded revenge, will ultimately be Lewinsky’s salvation; as a newly aligned Supreme Court, tilted to the left by a Democrat administration’s appointed liberal judges, will stun the legal community and civil libertarians by ruling that the presidency of Hilary Clinton must, by law, pass the Bechdel Test. The dissenting opinion, a three word missive that will read, “Bitches be crazy,” will be universally acknowledged as the most succinct summation of the court’s views over the last 226 years, though now somewhat dated. The concurring opinions accompanying the majority view will go on to state that some cum stains are just incidental to the physical act of love, that the Other Woman is not the one who is cheating on his wife, and that the president cannot assassinate a US citizen unless they have done something truly ghastly such as having been born in the wrong country or having unpopular political opinions.
In Which a Lover of Liberty Attempts to Grapple with the Terrible Tragedy in France, and its Implications for Freedom of Speech
Editorial
This is not the first time that I’ve been outraged by the senseless death of innocent people at the hands of deranged savages. Far from it. Whenever there has a been a mass shooting at a school, or a terrorist attack in another city, I have sat by my television and watched the wall-to-wall coverage of slowly emerging facts, I have sat at my browser hitting refresh as investigations were underway.
I have nodded considerately at the dominant narratives to emerge, spun out by those in the media paid to think about these matters. When they said it happened because of poor gun laws, I was pro-gun control. When they said it was untreated mental illness, I was pro-pill. And when they said it was because of the terrorists, I was pro-war.
George W. Bush said that they hate us for our freedom. I never believed him. He was an untrustworthy man, I’ve been told. Did you hear he might of lied about something during the last Iraq war?
Clearly, history has vindicated Bush the Second, with the horrific events in France earlier today when men in balaclavas murdered the staff at Charlie Hebdo, a satirical magazine which fearlessly mocked everyone, including the Prophet Muhammad, despite the fact that they very well knew that something like this could have happened. For what else could this be, but a blatant attack on free speech?
Read the news, everyone agrees.
Granted, I was ready and willing to surrender my rights to due process and my freedom from search and seizure without cause in service to the War on Terror. But those freedoms were an easy offering. Nobody like me, nobody who looks like me actually felt the loss of those rights, nobody I know was detained at airports, renditioned or tortured. I’ve never had law enforcement investigate my friends, my family, my fellow mosque-goers, as ‘persons of interest’. I don’t even go to a mosque. Besides, it’s only temporary. Once the wise men who run our government win this war on a concept, an amorphous and semantically ambiguous foe, things will return to normal. Just like income taxes will go away when we no longer have to fear the Germans (almost there).
I was ready to accept living in a world where government monitored, or had the ability to monitor, all of my communications and online activity without a warrant. After all, I haven’t done anything wrong, so what would I have to worry about?
But my freedom of speech, especially my freedom to make fun of other people’s religion, this is something I hold sacred.
And even if the government tells me some day down the line that I need to, for a little while, give up my freedom of speech for the cause (I know, it can never happen here), I will gladly hand over that right to defeat an enemy who would rather take it away from me by force.
Why Canada’s Electoral Systems Need to Change
The second of my two-part critique of Canadian democracy is up at Provocative Penguin. The first can be found here. This one deals with the misguided reforms proposed in the Fair Elections Act earlier this year, and the need to implement proportional representation to ensure that every vote counts.
Something strange always happens on an election night. In the weeks building up to it a barrage of stump speeches, photo-ops, and debates are accompanied by a series of polls which are meant to indicate who is winning, who is losing, and what the electorate is thinking.
But when voters come home from the polling stations and turn to their television sets to watch the live election coverage, the polls have become irrelevant. The rules have changed. The relative success of each party’s campaign performance is no longer measured by the overall amount of voters who support them, but by which ridings their supporters are concentrated in.
Occasionally, the popular vote will be displayed onscreen, but only when there is no new data to report, and the anchors get bored.
The Supreme Court Acted While Elected MP’s Couldn’t
Head on over to Provocative Penguin, where the first of my two-part critique of Canadian democracy:
…when the Harper government introduced two controversial bills this year–C-13, the cyberbullying bill; and S-4, the Digital Privacy Act–opposition MPs were able to do little more than join the chorus of privacy experts, commissioners, and the media in decrying the legislation.
By chance, the Supreme Court made a ruling last month in R. v Spencer, a child pornography case, which undermined the government’s legal argument behind sharing personal data of internet subscribers, a practice which would likely have become more prevalent under both bills before the ruling.
While the court satisfied Harper’s critics, it remains an indictment of the electoral system when we must rely on unelected levers to check the power of a party most Canadians did not vote for.
Read the rest at Provocative Penguin.
Gods & Services 