Ironicwarcriminal posted:

2010 South Australia Shiraz, some Port Royal tobacco with grape rolling papers, bit of dexamphetamine, Vegemite and avocado on toast and settling in to watch Bamboozled, what a delightful Sunday night.

Okay, so I am starting to get some feedback from the interview I did with Matt Saincome for SF Weekly. It turns out to be as controversial in the diverse San Francisco market as it was here in little ol’ Punta Gorda, as evidenced by this response from “suzeaa”:

Since he knows he was molested he also knows how sick and twisted it is, yet he does it to the most innocent on Earth. Cut his dick off.

Let me repeat that: She calls on somebody, somewhere, to cut my penis off. She advocates sexually mutilating me, a human animal. Some animal rights advocate!

Dolphins are “the most innocent on Earth”? Obviously, this woman is no marine biologist! Also obviously, she did not read the whole article. Or she didn’t believe it. Her response is – probably – merely the jerking of a knee, the running of a mouth.

But… do I want to take that chance?

As a journalist of the extraordinary, I am a public person, not a person of privilege. I do not live behind gates of wrought iron, walls of stone or electrified security systems. If anyone, and I mean ANYONE, reading this is tempted to put “suzeaa’s” plan into action, let me forewarn you: I am not now, and never have been, a believer in the doctrine of pacifism. I take my right to self-defense deadly seriously. I believe in meeting force with overwhelming counter-force.

Let me spell out this doctrine: If you come at me with your fists, I will use a knife. If you come at me with a knife, I will use a handgun. If you come at me with a handgun, I will use a shotgun. And so on. I reserve the right to defend my life and my physical integrity with whatever means I deem necessary, and worry about the legal niceties of the situation later.

Are we quite clear on that, self-styled moral police and sexual vigilantes? I certainly hope so, because I don’t want to be responsible for harming anyone who tries to harm me, or for defending my property. But I will if I have to.

Am I armed? You don’t know, and that’s how I prefer it.

Don’t get me wrong. I am not stupid enough to say “Bring it on!” On the contrary, I mean KEEP AWAY. It’s a very clear and simple message, don’t you think?

Interestingly, I also have my defenders, people who get it, like the un-pictured “Sine,” who wrote:

The relationship was clearly mutual. Where’s the problem with it? He didn’t rape the dolphin, and the dolphin wanted it. Excellent read.

Thank you, Sine, whoever you may be, for your sympathetic comment. Not only did the dolphin want it, she convinced me to want it, too. She wanted it enough to drastically modify her sexual behavior toward me, which is something not many other species of mammal can do.

But supporters of my right to freedom of expression on this issue are outnumbered by the angry knee-jerk mob ten to one. And they don’t need to be bothered by no stinking facts about the behavior of humans, or dolphins.

I suppose I am bound to find these kind of people wherever I go, there’s no escaping them and their rabid opinions. My feeling is, I am not compelling or forcing anyone to buy my book and read my words, an ode to a long-lost dolphin lover. But by the same token, I will actively resist all attempts to use compulsion and force against me, and stand my ground. I am not afraid of the likes of this castrating woman.

Please let me know how you feel about me affirming my right to self-defense.

Lysenko posted:

happy moscow is really great:

But now! - now it was essential to understand everything, because either socialism would succeed in penetrating into the most secret recess of a man's insides and cleaning out the pus that capitalism had accumulated drop by drop over the centuries, or else noting new would happen and the inhabitants of the earth would go off to live separately, keeping this terrible secret place of the soul safe and warm inside them, so as to sink their teeth into each other once again in voluptuous despair adn transform the earth's surface into a lonely desert with one last weeping human being..

"I shall die on my feet here on this sixth floor of Santisima Trinidad Street, watching the stars. It will be night. Silence will break out for a few moments. That arresting silence of the universe. I know that the stars when I vanish will remain pegged way up there, fixed, immutable, gazing on the absurd hustle and bustle of men, small and ridiculous, striving with each other during the sole second of life allotted them to learn and to know about themselves, wasting it stupidly, killing one another, the ones fighting to avert exploitation by the others."

- Dolores Ibárruri

The dead sleep cold in Spain tonight. Snow blows through the olive groves, sifting against the tree roots. Snow drifts over the mounds with small headboards. (When there was time for headboards.) The olive trees are thin in the cold wind because their lower branches were once cut to cover tanks, and the dead sleep cold in the small hills above the Jarama River. It was cold that February when they died there and since then the dead have not noticed the changes of the seasons.

It is two years now since the Lincoln Battalion held for four and a half months along the heights of the Jarama, and the first American dead have been a part of the earth of Spain for a long time now.

The dead sleep cold in Spain tonight and they will sleep cold all this winter as the earth sleeps with them. But in the spring the rain will come to make the earth kind again. The wind will blow soft over the hills from the south. The black trees will come to life with small green leaves, and there will be blossoms on the apple trees along the Jarama River. This spring the dead will feel the earth beginning to live again.

For our dead are a part of the earth of Spain now and the earth of Spain can never die. Each winter it will seem to die and each spring it will come alive again. Our dead will live with it forever.

Just as the earth can never die, neither will those who have ever been free return to slavery. The peasants who work the earth where our dead lie know what these dead died for. There was time during the war for them to learn these things, and there is forever for them to remember them in.

Our dead live in the hearts and the minds of the Spanish peasants, of the Spanish workers, of all the good simple honest people who believed in and fought for the Spanish republic. And as long as our dead live in the Spanish earth, and they will live as long as the earth lives, no system of tyranny will ever prevail in Spain.

The fascists may spread over the land, blasting their way with weight of metal brought from other countries. They may advance aided by traitors and by cowards. They may destroy cities and villages and try to hold the people in slavery. But you cannot hold any people in slavery.

The Spanish people will rise again as they have always risen before against tyranny.

The dead do not need to rise. They are a part of the earth now and the earth can never be conquered. For the earth endureth forever. It will outlive all systems of tyranny.

Those who have entered it honorably, and no men ever entered earth more honorably than those who died in Spain, already have achieved immortality.

babyhueypnewton posted:

The spanish civil war is awesome, but the idealization of it over equally important revolutions, such as the Chinese civil war, the Angolan civil war, and the many civil wars in the third world white people didn't bother to fight in is disturbing. It may be that so called "anti-racist" anarchists and trots are in fact racists who can't identify with non-white people, it's also likely that if the Spanish revolution had been a success it would have immediately become worthless and a betrayal of the ideal failure.

Not saying you're doing that, just weird that even today people like Chomsky and Graeber bring up a short period of time almost a century ago that ended in disaster as the only example of real socialism.

lysenko's post reminded me of a similar quote by la passionara, and then I started to think about the international brigades. the next three posts were all specifically about the international brigades, not the wider conflict. besides, the international brigades were organized by the communist parties of the time. it wasn't an anarchist initiative.

gyrofry posted:

he didnt say anything about how hot she is

no duh, he told her what a great artist she is, dont you know anything about girls? anyway lend me some of your lunch money, ill pay you back promise