WikiLeaks recently obtained and published a leaked CIA report (pdf) on influencing European populations to maintain support for the war in Afghanistan that includes such gems as:
Afghan women could serve as ideal messengers in humanizing the ISAF role in combating the Taliban because of women’s ability to speak personally and credibly about their experiences under the Taliban, their aspirations for the future, and their fears of a Taliban victory. Outreach initiatives that create media opportunities for Afghan women to share their stories with French, German, and other European women could help to overcome pervasive skepticism among women in Western Europe toward the ISAF mission.
What makes this even more awful than it is on its face is that conditions have not improved for women under the occupation. Indeed, the Karzai government is currently looking at bringing Gulbuddin Hekmatyar into the government. RAWA, an Afghan feminist organization that predates the 1979 Soviet invasion/Islamist insurgency offers this description of his past:
Hekmatyar’s fighters killed tens of thousands by deliberately shelling Kabul. They kidnapped, tortured, raped and killed countless civilians in ways so gruesome that many Afghans, especially Kabul residents, flinch at the mention of Hekmatyar’s name to this day. (An Afghan refugee once described to me Hezb-i-Islami fighters entertaining themselves by pouring hot oil on a freshly decapitated body to make it flail involuntarily.) When Hekmatyar was done with Afghanistan’s capital city, it looked like Hiroshima, and it will still be recovering decades from now.
He does, however, have a friendly past with U.S. and Pakistani intelligence services.
Resistnet.com got pretty angry this past week when people found out what was being said publicly on Resistnet.com. It’s like they don’t want anyone to know it is a cesspool of ignorance and hate! So they decide to once again repeat their unenforced zero tolerance policy. Wow, way to do nothing at all! The secret no one wants to admit is that if Resistnet.com got rid of all the crazy people, the only members would be the four fake accounts we set up to monitor them. And that is not enough of a source of donations for Grassfire.org president Steve Elliott to use to pay his mortgag— I mean, further the conservative cause!
Of course, right after this was posted, the Resistnet Admins and Moderators got right back to not moderating at all. Okay, they did do one thing, they came over to TarsTarkas.NET and started hanging around in the comments and acting like three-year-olds. Streetsweeper is our biggest fan! I guess that’s how they are moderating their site, they plan to yell at us.
Gun avatar, talking of REAL WAR, lying about Obama planning to murder children, been a member for a year – All Acceptable Resistnet.com Policy!
Racism – Acceptable Resistnet.com Policy!
Are all blacks prejudice? Why don’t they want to hang around with a bunch of old white racists? It must be racism!
Oh, yes, you are.
Thanks to the new Zero Tolerance policy, this post gets a warm welcome….
Gun Avatar Fuckwit is back, with more racism – Acceptable Resistnet.com Policy!
No, how can I convince these guys of my crazy beliefs?
All black countries are terrible – Acceptable Resistnet.com Policy!
The racism is even starting to annoy the guy starting the thread, who was asking for advice, not people screaming that blacks are the real racists
What is the chance that TWO guys with Star Trek episodes show up on Resistnet.com on the same week?
Wake up!
Old guys talking about kill zones and lying about HCR – All Acceptable Resistnet.com Policies!
Secession is inevitable – Acceptable Resistnet.com Policy!
America should see a marriage counselor
If your town doesn’t have its own money, you are DEAD!!! – Acceptable Resistnet.com Policy!
Pledging 100 heads for every patriot killed by government agents – Acceptable Resistnet.com Policy!
Wait, I thought we wanted our cities and states to be making their own money? And now Resistnet is just some guy ranting about the garbageman not taking his buckets of mystery goo.
Not having a problem with the n-word and even using it – Acceptable Resistnet.com Policy!
Chris Rock making that joke did not justify your racism.
As you can see, Zero Tolerance inaction! Will Resistnet ever enforce their site policies? Or will we just get more angry moderators posting here instead? Find out…next time!
FoxNation.com has been allowing terrible comments for months and months despite their moderation system (the moderators don’t seem to mind many of the horrible messages even if they are reported) and they have been part of the recent increase in noise by the fringe elements of the Teabaggers (by fringe we mean almost every teabagger). As the Tea Party continues to get more and more violent, their online rhetoric grows at the same pace. These comments are from just before the HCR bill passed the house, but the posting got delayed because Resistnet’s response was funnier and more crazy. But now it is time for FoxNation.com to shine!
Let’s start out with this guy, Liberal Pacifier. Foxnation.com let’s people use pictures as their user names (let’s might be another term for “not smart enough to figure out how to prevent”) and this guy takes the cake. You might think this is a one-off deal and he quickly got banned. You’d be wrong, as he posted over 100 times in a span of hours in just one article comments section I read, which gave the admins plenty of time to ban him had they had a problem with his name.
Another stellar debater, and he has a familiar friend!
America is so great we don’t have spell check or the Shift key!
Another idiot with a picture name. The best part of this article is picturing the tears streaming down Liberal Pacifier’s face when the Dems aren’t blown out in November.
You might think this comment was in response to something. You’d be wrong.
I have no idea what this guy is saying.
Giving health care to everyone=inciting rebellion. Good to know.
Funny how you don’t recognize the consent of the majority when it involves them voting in a black guy as president
Help, the cashier lady is saying we’ll all be cannibals because we are smart! Wait, what?
This guy is just full of win!
Probably because they aren’t insane. Okay, that insane.
Hey, someone calling for a military coup of the USA, on FoxNation.com, and the moderators approve the comment and leave it up for hours and hours!
I wonder what the other options Teri W is thinking of are…
Things are getting pretty stupid, but it’s your side doing the stupid.
Kill all Wikipedias!
FoxNation.com is a chore to read and their comments section is filled with bonkers idiots who probably went even more insane after health care passed.
A few days ago I posted about all the overtly violent threats and actions the folks over at Resistnet had to offer on the eve of the passage of Healthcare Reform. The world is no stranger to idiots making fiery threats towards others over the internet, some of the power behind websites like Resistnet lies in the fact that it’s a very small community echoing each other’s thoughts to the point that they believe these opinions (shared by maybe a dozen of their compatriots on the site) are in actuality the attitudes of everyone who feels discontented by the things President Obama has done.
Unfortunately for those of us who love the country and want to see it succeed (not secede like these Tea Party “patriots”) no matter who is in charge or what legislation they aim to pass, the populist violence party that used to be contained on the internet is now frothing up and spilling out onto the streets irl. Springboarding from my post a few days ago, I thought it would be appropriate to jot down all the real ACTUAL violence, threatening phone calls, vandalism, and other ironically “patriotic” acts that no doubt those who identify with the Tea Party, Birther, Militia, Oathkeeper, White Nationalist, and other movements are behind. It’s been less than a week since the vote on Healthcare Reform so what you’re going to read here are just the juvenile beginnings of what will prove to be a really ugly time in American History (as if everything since the election of President Obama wasn’t bad enough).
1. Sen. Bart Stupak’s threatening phone calls from loving concerned Christians who wish on him ass-bleeding cancer:
It’s great to hear from these angry God-fearing Christians who value the lives of other people’s unborn children so much that they wish death, anal cancer, beatings, bleeping bleep bleep, and other fun things on a fellow Christian. Its no use trying to talk or reason on a theological level with these people, it’s a wonder what they learn at church every Sunday. I don’t even think God himself could come down from the clouds and convince these people that they are the literal embodiment of brain-curdling migraine-inducing irony.
Rep. Louise Slaughter also received threatening phone calls indicating that snipers would kill her and her family. Oh and speaking of Louise Slaughter…
2. Bricks thrown through the office windows of Rep. Louise Slaughter and Rep. Gabrielle Giffords:
Nothing says “populist rage” like people throwing bricks through the windows of Democratic representatives offices. Incidents of window smashing was reported in New York, Arizona, Kansas, and Alabama, with some possibly linking the Alabama incident to a blogger in that area. Republican Whip Eric Cantor also reported that apparently someone had fired a bullet through the windows at his offices in Richmond, VA but it’s doubtful how true this is seeing as Cantor is a Republican and voted against Healthcare Reform. But hey, Virginians love firing those guns.
3. Gas line cut at Rep. Tom Perriello’s brother’s home
This one is not as big of a deal on the surface. Reports would suggest that Tea Baggers dug through the man’s backyard and severed a natural gas pipeline or something, but in reality they disconnected the propane tank from the man’s outdoor grill and let the gas escape, maybe hoping for God to throw down a lightning bolt and ignite the whole thing.
The fucked up thing about this item however is that Tea Partiers posted online the home address of what they though was Rep. Tom Perriello’s house and encouraged their community members to go to the man’s home address and express their discontent over Healthcare Reform to him personally. I guess “express yourself” to these people means “fuck with that guy’s shit”. If I get a brick through my front window in the next few days I’ll know it’s from these same people with poor address skills.
4. Rep. James Clyburn receives faxes of nooses
The same guy who the same tea partiers were calling “nigger” on the steps of the Capitol building a few days ago are now faxing the offices of of Rep. Clyburn, a man who fought alongside the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s (another movement that was wayyyyy unpopular with the Republican party), receiving images synonymous with lynching and death. Keep it classy Tea Party!
5. “White Powder” sent to Rep. Anthony Weiner’s office in Queens
This one is sort of breaking today, a suspicious package containing white powder was sent to the offices of Rep. Anthony Weiner in Queens. The news isn’t confirming if this is like the many many incidents of people just sending flour through the mail to create some chaos at a government office or if it’s like those two cases of Anthrax or other poisons being sent to a government office in order to kill people (but those were terrorists who did that, these Tea Party “patriots” would never stoop to the actions of terrorists, right?). We’ll see how this one plays out.
But yeah, pretty much those fuming mad Tea Partiers who are fuming mad that their tax dollars might go towards public programs that help other people (unlike where their tax dollars have been spent on years), are now turning their internet rage into real life rage and throwing bricks and threatening people and all the rest of it. It’s unclear who exactly are perpetrating these crimes, but we here at TarsTarkas.net are pretty sure that they follow and post on the same networks as Resistnet.com, TeaPartyPatriots.org, and the same ilk who would love to abort all those lawmakers who helped pass Healthcare Reform.
And the kicker? Those lawmakers on the side of the Tea Parties aren’t condemning any of this. They love it! They support it! They want to see these people throw bricks and threaten and hurt people because it’s good for their politics. Not quite good for the country, but when have guys like John McCain cared about “Country First”?
Oh yeah, and Sarah Palin is declaring open season on hunting Blue Dog Democrats, here PAC releasing this map targeting the congressmen’s home district locations with rifle sights. No one would ever interpret this in terms of guns, right?
SUPER EDIT:
It seems as though I missed a few incidents in my initial post, so here are a few extra Tea Bagging tricks to update you about.
6. Coffin placed on the front porch of Rep. Russ Carnahan’s Missouri home
A coffin is substantially harder to propel through a window than a brick, a concept I don’t think the people behind this act initially realized. Coffins are expensive though! I wonder if this was just a simple pine box that some proud Missourian built or if some lout decided he’d rather die on the battlefield with his Tea Party brothers rather than be buried in the coffin he bought for the coming 2012 apocalypse.
An update to item #3:
The administrators at the Danville Tea Party seem to be the ones responsible for posting the incorrect address of Rep. Tom Perriello’s house where a gas tank line was severed. The AP spoke to the Tea Party group’s leader, Nigel Coleman, who had the following words of remorse:
Nigel Coleman, chairman of the Danville Tea Party, said he re-posted the comment that originated on another conservative blog, including the address, Monday on his Facebook page. The posts were taken down after the mistake was discovered.
“We’ve never been associated with any violence or any vandalism,” he said. “We’re definitely sorry that we posted the incorrect address.”
From Deadheads in Davos to Nobel-laureate economists, from paleoconservatives to New Democrats, American leaders in the nineties came to believe that markets were a popular system, a far more democratic system than (democratically elected) governments….in addition to being mediums of exchange, markets were mediums of consent. Markets expressed expressed the popular will more articulately more articulately and more meaningfully than did mere elections. Markets conferred democratic legitimacy; markets were a friend of the little guy; markets brought down the pompous and the snooty; markets gave us what we wanted; markets looked out for our interests.
Except when they didn’t, especially starting in 2008. A different Nobel-laureate economist, Joseph Stiglitz, said of the economic crisis, “In this sense, the fall of Wall Street is for market fundamentalism what the fall of the Berlin Wall was for communism….This moment is a marker that the claims of financial market liberalization were bogus.” This is not the first time the ideology has been discredited either. In 1926, three years before the onset of the Great Depression, John Maynard Keynes wrote about a “disposition towards public affairs, which we conveniently sum up as individualism and laissez-faire,” that sounds all too familiar, right down to its origins:
Nevertheless, that age would have been hard put to it to achieve this harmony of opposites if it had not been for the economists, who sprang into prominence just at the right moment. The idea of a divine harmony between private advantage and the public good is already apparent in Paley. But it was the economists who gave the notion a good scientific basis. Suppose that by the working of natural laws individuals pursuing their own interests with enlightenment in condition of freedom always tend to promote the general interest at the same time! Our philosophical difficulties are resolved-at least for the practical man, who can then concentrate his efforts on securing the necessary conditions of freedom. To the philosophical doctrine that the government has no right to interfere, and the divine that it has no need to interfere, there is added a scientific proof that its interference is inexpedient. This is the third current of thought, just discoverable in Adam Smith, who was ready in the main to allow the public good to rest on ‘the natural effort of every individual to better his own condition’, but not fully and self-consciously developed until the nineteenth century begins. The principle of laissez-faire had arrived to harmonise individualism and socialism, and to make at one Hume’s egoism with the greatest good of the greatest number. The political philosopher could retire in favour of the business man – for the latter could attain the philosopher’s summum bonum by just pursuing his own private profit.
Ten years later, he published his greatest work, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, which revolutionized economics until the 1970’s when our leaders decided to try the magic markets thing again.
What I’m getting at is how strange it is that this remarkably stupid doctrine keeps managing to come back with disastrous consequences. Concerning the market–the one that’s rebounded to bring us a “jobless recovery” despite increasing unemployment and underemployment–public relations legend Edward Bernays noted in 1928:
…[I]t would be rash and unreasonable to take it for granted that because public opinion has come over to the side of big business, it will always remain there. Only recently, Prof. W. Z. Ripley of Harvard University, one of the foremost national authorities on business organization and practice, exposed certain aspects of big business which tended to undermine public confidence in large corporations. He pointed out that the stockholders’ supposed voting power is often illusory; that annual financial statements are sometimes so brief and summary that to the man in the street they are downright misleading; that the extension of the system of non-voting shares often places the effective control of corporations and their finances in the hands of a small clique of stockholders; and that some corporations refuse to give out sufficient information to permit the public to know the true condition of the concern.
Yet people continue to invest in it despite being more or less told to piss off when they complain about the absurd pay going to executives that should theoretically be going to them:
Group Inc.’s board of directors has received several demand letters from shareholders relating to compensation matters, including demands that Group Inc.’s board of directors investigates compensation awards over recent years, take steps to recoup alleged excessive compensation, and adopt certain reforms. After considering the demand letters, Group Inc.’s board of directors rejected the demands.
Still, they never learn. In a recent column about the prospects of shareholder activism, the “executive director of the Millstein Center for Corporate Governance and Performance at the Yale School of Management” was quoted as saying, “Up until now, it’s been sort of a Soviet system…We have been operating in the United States under the myth that boards have been accountable to shareholders.” What does this have to do with the Soviet Union? Its collapse didn’t bring about any magic change accordingto the population.
Update:
It would also be nice to see something new on this front:
You may recall the Kabul embassy guard scandal [1] that broke last fall—the photos documenting drunken, lewd behavior by embassy guards—all to the embarrassment of the U.S. State Department. Shortly thereafter, the Department fired [2] eight guards and announced it would not renew [3] the contract of ArmorGroup North America after it expires in July, but that it would grant the contractor a six-month extension “to allow for an orderly transition between contractors.”In the meantime, since ArmorGroup is still on the job until the end of this year, the State Department wants to toughen its oversight of the private security contractor, and it intends to do that by hiring another contractor [4] to oversee this one.
Here we go folks. With the political fates that have been sealed due to the historic passage of Healthcare reform, this November’s mid-term election cycle is now having they key turned and the engine is slowly starting to turn over into first gear. Why is it going to suck so much? Well, besides the normal barrage of television, radio, print, bus stop, and picket-sign ads that we’ve all come to know and love, the robo-calls and people knocking on your door asking for your support, and this great political climate we’re now entering into the second stage of, a few Supreme Court rulings and recent media trends are sure to damn us all to political hell from now until election time.
First the small point. I keep my television off for many good reasons, rarely turning it to C-SPAN when something really neat is happening like Congress passing Healthcare Reform, but if you need even more reasons to hate your digital set, especially in an election year, you have to look no further than Carly Florina. She is running for the Senate in California and if you haven’t already heard her name you’d surely recognize her campaign from their crazy ridiculous Demon Sheep TV ad. It’s a retarded ad to begin with, but even more so the people behind its production, Fred Davis III of Strategic Perception Inc., understand that in today’s viral video-obsessed internet world the more bizarre and weird the videos you produce are, the more people will talk about how their weird and bizarre your videos are and the person(s) attached to that video, thereby getting people to talk about the person the ad campaign is promoting.
What’s that mean for the American TV watching audience? For one it means you’ll probably be talking to your friends a lot this summer and fall about all the utterly stupid, nightmare inducing, repugnant, fact-less, commercial hallucinations you were seeing on television every day until you decided to put a shotgun to the screen so you could end the madness. Already the Florina campaign has a new epic 10-minute spot where they depict Senator Barbara Boxer’s head as a floating doom zeppelin of bitch coasting through the cities and green valleys of California (presumably where the Demon Sheep graze) to find her next meal in the form of a newborn Republican baby. Maybe this weird political campaign Florina is running is just a product of us wacky Californians and the chemicals in our drinking water, but what if every candidate with as much money as Florina talked to Fred Davis III and asked to get an equally batshit retarded TV campaign going? This balloon ad will not be the weirdest part of a political campaign we see this year, mark my words.
But on to my second and much graver point. With the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United v. Federal Elections Committee it was established that corporations can use as much money as they please to fund political campaigns and candidates for elected office. When a business incorporates and becomes a “corporation” they become legally recognized as a “business entity” instead of a company owned by a bunch of people. This incorporation protects the individuals who run the company if someone happens to sue them, the lawsuit is instead directed to this incorporated “person” and the money derived from the lawsuit comes out of the “pockets” of the corporate “person”, the income and revenue of the business not the business owners.
This idea of corporate personhood has now been stretched so far that under the Citizens United ruling the “corporation” is now basically considered to have all the same rights as an average living breathing American citizen, including the right to throw their money around in any direction they choose, and as much money as they choose. In short this means that big business will now be directly influencing politicians and their campaigns to an even more exponential degree than they were before. Rulings like this will make damn sure that Carly Florina, an ex-CEO from a variety of big tech companies, will definitely have the funds to keep making her epic multi-million dollar feature-length campaign ads. A victory for political theater!
Some Republican for State Representative, sponsored by KDR Development Inc. I can’t find the website for KDR, I don’t know what kind of business they are in, but according to this article on The Economist the president of KDR had run against incumbent Chuck Hopson in a previous election. The ad doesn’t even say “vote for this guy we support him”. It simply says “vote for one of these Republicans over this guy in office cause the guy who runs the company who bought this ad lost out to him in a previous election”. I can only imagine how much more fun this ad game will get.
On a related note, through their interpretation of the Supreme Court ruling, the corporation Murray-Hill Inc. has decided that due to their new found corporate personhood their choosing to back the living, breathing, political figure known as Murray-Hill Inc. Murray-Hill Inc. is running for office in Maryland and part of me really hopes that Murray-Hill Inc. will win the race and be able to enact all that political legislation that Murray-Hill Inc. has worked so hard to get across during his (its?) political career. And just so you know, Murray-Hill Inc. is running for exactly the same reasons you might expect Murray-Hill Inc. to run for public office. Let the mockery that is our brave new corporate-funded political world commence!
