-- SEX POLITICS RELIGION ARTS -- SERIOUS AND HUMOROUS --
It is just a place to come with an open mind,
though ours are not always-Please tell us if they're not!
I'm just trying to be happy like anybody else. So I try to replace the bad with goodness. The hard part is knowing which one is which
A brief introduction: I am one whose identity is not tied up in one's name, but in her soul; not in her position, but in her relationship with others; not by what she owns, but by what she let's go.
In this article, I would just like to address a philosophy of she not being a part of him but with them either in pleasure or pain. Simone De Beauvoir once said in her book, Second Sex:
"For him she is sex - absolute sex, no less. She is defined and differentiated with reference to man and not he with reference to her; she is the incidental, the inessential as opposed to the essential. He is the Subject, he is the Absolute - she is the Other."
In this section, Duly Consider will seek to find the voice of women, unfiltered by men, so that men may truly know us and that we may know ourselves within our own context. We are so often defined and judged by men and though it is not the intention of this author to separate women from men but to allow women to define themselves. If you are a woman, please discover that which is you. If you are a man and you care to know women, welcome and taste from our lips. If you are a woman who loves women, express your unique voice here. It is a safe place for open minds and expressive souls.
To begin, let me offer a method by which women may submit ideas for articles or pieces you have already written that speak to this request above. If you want to be read or only to have a place where your words go out for scrutiny without judgment, this is the place. As we have many voices, no two shall be the same, but all shall be from the heart first, then the head as we do not pretend that the thought came first before the beating, throbbing of blood through our veins. We are self-aware and independent, and only with these sentiments can we truly allow men to know us as we won ourselves and we will let men own only what is truly theirs.
Men who wish to reflect on women may find many places where they can be lord. As I have been assured by Duly Consider that men's voices are common on this site. It is with this idea that we wish to let men know who we really are and what we really want, but also what we give.
Herstory, politics, love, psychology, art, philosophy and even the sciences are things into which we will delve. It is not ours to endorse ideas here but to encourage them. Welcome all who want to know women. To those who don't, we ask you to allow for the possibility that someday you will see us for who we are, not for who you think we are or want us to be.
Editor's Note: She DC and Duly Consider are TM and will we treated as such if there are attempts at infringement. She DC is in no way intended to suggest a certain way to be a woman as such presumption would be counterproductive to our goal of open minds and sufficient basis for ideas. All contributions will be read and those published will meet the high standards we have tried to build throughout the site.
It is sad that political moderates see nations around the world allowing their 'tails to wag their dogs', but it is absolutely true that we see a vocal minority alive and well for 1000's of years, whose hate and vitriol is most often ignored until they commit massive genocide. Then they are noticed and briefly stifled but never extinguished. Somehow, in these cases, patience is seen as a virtue by the remaining logical and responsible majority.
But, patience and tolerance are the worst things we can exercise in the presence of such extreme potential damage to our world, politically, economically, morally and in regard to the ultimate preservation and protection of life and liberty.
"Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.
Benjamin Franklin (1706 - 1790), Historical Review of Pennsylvania, 1759
We have, in recent years in America, seen the rise of a new fascism in the form of a rabid and rapid growth of power among a group that has gone so far as to call itself the "Moral Majority" when they are neither moral nor a majority at least in the populace. They may very well have the majority of power at the moment. Of course, throughout history, those in the middle have always kept quiet until entirely too much damage has been done. Such forces fed racism and slavery in early America; then later led the further impoverishment of poor whites and blacks through their exercise of voter suppression efforts, sharecropping and now the building of a military industrial complex that threatens to destabilize the entire world.
All of this throughout history, in its various phases, has depended on an inner fear fed by an institutional prejudice against those different than ourselves.
More have been killed in the name of religion than any other factor. We could go back further in world history, but let's just begin with the initial foothold of extremism among Christians that led to the holy inquisition, wars and the killing and slavery of millions. Eventually, Protestantism quelled the fervor, ironically in Germany with Martin Luther, and even Henry the 8th of England did his part in the establishment of the Anglican Church, which initially slowed the killing (if you don't count Henry's wives). Queen Elizabeth led a period of balance against the Catholic-led killing of those with whom they disagreed.
However, fighting fire with fire, the English became the new imperialists with their new found power and they began killing and enslaving their foes until the Americas stood up to them and their Spaniard equivalents and declared independence, relatively successfully, or so it seemed. Franklin, Washington, Jefferson, Payne and others led a secular movement in recognition that religious states were not the answer to permanently ending the potential for imperialism and hate. They thought they had created a system impervious to such separatism, but they failed to address the seeds that they themselves fertilized, those of slavery.
They didn't see that this would grow into a new religion of bigotry, justified by Christianity still, in an insistence that we were not to be "unequally yoked", thus they ignored their own words that " all men were created equally" and they built America on the backs of a new underclass of slaves and non-landowners.
Of course, they later pretended that they were fighting a civil war in order to liberate slaves, but they only continued it in the form of sharecropping as they had not attacked the real problems of "royal inheritance" and the resultant reestablishment of an oligarchy in the US.
France destroyed its royalty and established a form of socialism that has apparently endured, but we are still waiting for the other foot to fall there, as they never dropped the arrogance of "national pride" which feeds bigotry even today. England didn't destroy their royalty but instead, created a system that put them in a luxurious prison (Buckingham Palace) and creating a toothless House of Lords, hoping that would keep them quiet and content while they pursued a parliamentary form of government augmented by relative socialism. Russia removed their Czar and began a period of seeming egalitarianism, but maintained a firm authoritarian form of government which still allowed the re-growth of abusive wealth, again fed by other forms of bigotry and scapegoating despite their false pretense of "communal" sharing.
Meanwhile, Asia experienced a much more successful and enduring form of communism that maintained hierarchy but redistributed wealth. Their homogeneity and isolation seemed to allow their systems protection while enduring social philosophies of Confucianism, provided transition slowly but surely toward an interesting mix of capitalism and socialism which exists today, despite a close call while Japan enslaved them briefly.
Japan and Germany were led by similar dreams of racial supremacy in which they had agreed to carve up the world into the "best whites" (Protestant Christians) and the "best Asians" (a successful industrialist system led by a figurehead royalty). Japan enslaved Korea and China while the Arian Germans did the same with Western Europe, and appeared invincible until the US regained its strength after its civil war.
Having seemingly dealt with its domestic divisions, the US was ready to provide moral authority over the world and with the assistance of technology and natural resources we firebombed Germany and Japan, dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, then proclaimed ourselves policemen of the world with the threat of a newfound nuclear superiority. Though Russia had also eventually developed their own nuclear weapons and had struck a deal to share Europe, they didn't have reliable delivery systems. By the time they did, both sides had built enough weapons to guarantee "Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD)" which became the fear necessary to keep neither US nor the Russians from taking over the world.
Those nations who had not the burden of massive military industrial complex were free to acquire wealth through industrialization. Meanwhile, the thing which fed worldwide "progress" became oil. It lubricated and energized. It made the wastelands of Texas and the Middle East the most valuable land in the world. Business alliances were made between the two and both found a new tool to maintain social control, a fear which again fed on religious bigotry.
England had been so weakened by WW2 and their own internal civil war between Catholics and Protestants, that they had to reassert a continued and strengthened alliance with the US. Still, much of the world kept their nose clean and developed stable socialism, i.e, Europe, Japan, China and Korea.
People had not noticed, but a similar rift began to develop between the Shia and Sunni Muslims, analogous to Catholic and Protestant Christians. No one really understood its significance as there was little expertise in Arabic language or culture outside the Middle East. The British, French and US had failed to imperialize them along with back-to-back failures to capture the hearts and minds of India and Indo-China (Vietnam/Cambodia). The Russians tried to add Afghanistan to their fold but found that you could not win a war militarily if you failed to win the hearts and minds, no matter how hard they tried.
Meanwhile, Russia was financially weakened by their failed attempt in Afghanistan, and their military spending in the Cold war against the US and they crumbled into several parts, all wanting what they thought the US had, capitalist luxury and freedom.
What the world didn't realize was, that the US had not dealt with its own inner bigotry before they started trying to evangelize the world with its form of democracy. We still had a serious problem with a racial fascist tendency and only succeeded in changing laws but we failed to change our minds (de jure vs de facto). Our civil rights movement looked good in theory but failed in practice and eventually, a backlash of racism created a new system of private schools (primarily white, some wealthy, some simply racist) and public schools (primarily poor and middle class whites and minorities).
The US, still driven by white Christian bigotry, elected conservative Ronald Reagan and a "thunder on the right" gave the impression that most Americans were in agreement that we were a "Christian Nation". The reappearance of Arian supremacy was inevitable as we had not truly addressed and condemned the racist whites across our nation. The wealthy industrialists saw a fertile collective mind in which racist fear could be fueled by religious ignorance. Christians didn't understand each other, much less the growing Muslim nation. Internally, Christianity was still very conflicted; Catholics vs. Protestants, Race vs Race, and Fundamentalists vs Moderate Scientists.
Fundamentalism became a magnet for political demagogues to feed on the citiizen's fears both in the Mideast and in the US. It was easy to twist the superstitions as industrialists began to attack the only potential savior against ignorance, education. Slowly but surely while pretending to improve education in the US, the "New Conservatives/Neo-cons" began to destroy and dismantle the public school system as this would make it easier to plant seeds of fear. They fed on the differences in our diverse nation and suggested that the very thing that made us great initially, was a threat to the "American way of life". This threat was political dissent.
Somehow it never occurred to people that the very thing upon which our nation was built, was under attack. Protection of the establishment is now the law of the land after easy passage of the Patriot Act after 9/11. It was a convenient excuse to remove the liberties we had previously fought for. The very thing that built our nation, revolution, has become renamed, "terrorism" and anyone who did not support our military solutions became labeled as traitors and those who were willing to kill and let poor people die for oil became the patriots.
Together, oil and the military have marched forward, raping us of freedom, political stability and our last dime if we let them. At this moment, 24% or less of America pretends it is the majority and all of us serve the benefits of a much smaller percentage of super wealthy. As they take away more of our freedoms and education, they dig in further to protect their power while destroying ours.
Many in the middle are confused and reacting with embarrassment to the loud cries by the vocal minority that anyone who opposes them is a traitor. But the real traitors are the Fascist extremists of Christianity, Islam and even Zionism; strange bedfellows indeed, except that, at their core, they don't care about religion at all, other than the religion of "money" and the power that money creates. We have created a new race of superhumans who consider themselves "Gods" and many confuse them for the Gods of their respective religions but they are really the very thing that all their religions are supposed to oppose.
The capital of American military industrialism and oil is Texas, and the message of Protestant Christian Fascism is resounding through puppet Bush as they walk hand in hand with their Saudi Arabian Royal Sunni Muslim Fascist partners who, in turn, use the fear of their people to promote weakness and violence as they partner with the Shia Fundamentalist Fascists and their puppet, Ahmadinejad. They scream that they hate each other while making deals behind closed doors. We and they condone killing women and children and tell the people that the enemy is other nations and their religions.
Israel, a religious nation, joins the US, a religiously controlled oligarchy, and Saudi-Arabia, another religious controlled oligarchy, have joined forces and whether for or against Iran, another group of Islamo-fascists, they carve up the economic world by controlling energy.
Wow, sounds complex, but it is so clear when you break it down. Somehow, the rest of the world, basically devoid of religious bigotry, sees us for who we really are, the greatest threat to the Earth in its history, a combined menace that envisions a world government led by religious extremists.
I offer no solutions but provide a beginning by attempting to unravel the lies that obscure the truth, by logically dissecting the body politic that has developed. The one thing we should agree upon is that this dialectic of equal evils must be stopped before we no longer have the power to stop them, either through diplomacy or revolution. And there are many kinds of revolution.
As logical words can only be properly supported by a more complex logic at the core of the human mind, music best organizes my final thoughts.
You say you want a revolution Well, you know We all want to change the world You tell me that it's evolution Well, you know We all want to change the world But when you talk about destruction Don't you know that you can count me out Don't you know it's gonna be all right all right, all right
You say you got a real solution Well, you know We'd all love to see the plan You ask me for a contribution Well, you know We're doing what we can But when you want money for people with minds that hate All I can tell is brother you have to wait Don't you know it's gonna be all right all right, all right,
ah, ah, ah, ah, ah...
You say you'll change the constitution Well, you know We all want to change your head You tell me it's the institution Well, you know You better free you mind instead But if you go carrying pictures of chairman Mao You ain't going to make it with anyone anyhow Don't you know it's gonna be all right all right, all right all right, all right, all right all right, all right, all right
Editor's Note Post Publication:
The amazing thing is, no matter how careful one is with words, many moderate Christians find an indictment of the extremists (not really Christians at all, unless we ignore Jesus) is viewed as an indictment of religion itself.
Somehow, there is a kneejerk to any logical clarification and separation of extremism from moderation.
Some use words like "rhetoric" to describe only the positions with which they disagree. Meanwhile, they themselves use rhetoric without any logic to simply state conclusions without any facts to support them.
As this article focused on the "Fascism" within parts of organized religion, it was assumed by many that my failure to indict Lenin, Stalin and other despots was somehow an endorsement of them.
Such an assumption would be completely wrong. The definitions of fascism and/or consequent despotism are clear. The blind support, above all the interests, of a Federal govt. and its establishment elements is the purest and most dangerous part of Fascism.
When the people lose their ability to know when they are being enslaved, we are vulnerable to the "final solution" that every fascist state has brought forth.
Inevitably, once the despots have taken hold, they extinguish all signs of resistance. Yes, this has happened many times in history. And sometimes, it has been in the name of an entirely different religion of the worship of man to whcih Nietzsche referred.
Hitler called himself a Christian as a matter of Machiavellian bastardization and cooptation. It was only a tool of manipulation of the otherwise good Christians of Germany.
Even Popes have done such and I am often reminded of Dante's Divine Comedy and the Inferno, in which he suggests that the most severe parts of hell are reserved for Popes and false prophets. Some Popes have been ruthless; some were truly saints.
Lenin, Pulpot etc. were only espousing a religion in which they were evangelically hailing atheism or self as God. It is interesting we even find "churches" of Atheism all over the world, and on the web.
Their position of the non-existence of God makes them equally religious and zealous. Just as within the inquisitions before, they would eventually kill those with whom they differed.
Pulpot of Cambodia went so far as to kill all people who wore glasses, as he saw that as a sign of intelligence, thus a threat to his regime.
Whatever words we use for these blind expressions of faith, "religion" is what I would call it as it requires one to follow without scrutiny the spiritual commandments of the authors. Mind that I don't proclaim that religion is the problem but the twisting of good intentions with blind faith that threatens us all.
Sadly, I couldn't possibly cover the whole of historical ground in an essay, but to touch on many points in history which satisfy the argument. Arguments can be constructed to support additional positions and I invite the submission of points that our readers may Duly Consider to our email address.
I only hope to remain a servant of truth and an open mind and some may see my truth as lies. They can, I suppose, start their own sites. I hear the Nazi Party of America is looking for good writers. But please don't file your application here.
America is soon to adopt a new acronym to replace USA. The new, easily remembered replacement will be LCD. The "dumbing down of America" is both the cause and the effect of our eventual destruction if we let it.
Sadly, though the citizens did not cause its own dumbing down; the corporatists, in an attempt to separate the intelligencia from the support of the people, has conditioned us to accept the best of the worst, a "lowest common denominator (LCD)" approach, like everything else in modern society. It is the source of the causes of our electing actors and idiots as Presidents, because they are as "ordinary as us", as opposed to celebrating brilliance. All of this is a consciousness that stupid people are more easily led, like rats into the sea following the pied piper.
If a basketball player has skills, we celebrate him; he scores more points; evidence of his superiority. Many never consider that the largest part of this is the superiority of his mind. They wrongly attribute this to his physical prowess, but somehow the tallest, most muscular player is not the highest scorer.
It appears many Americans would rather have a President with whom they could drink a beer and from whom they could hear a good joke, than to have one who knows how to improve their lives. It is not Mr. Bush's fault he is by far the least intelligent President to be elected in recent history. He is a product of the citizens and the devious puppet-masters who surround him. I am sure Mr. Bush is smarter than the average grocery store manager, but couldn't we have had higher expectations of the the requirements to become the "decider" for the world's only military superpower?
Regarding politics and even business, somehow it never occurs to many Americans that intelligence and logical persuasion are characteristics of an executive or lawyer that any of us would want to hire if we fully expect to win our cases, make more money and/or stay out of jail, yet somehow that has a taint when considering our number one legal and business minds in America. We have watched so many movies where emotionality won out over pure logical intelligence and truth, that we think demagoguery is the modern dogma of success. It never occurs to them, companies and the country should be run by the most intelligent, and that intelligence should feed our effective persuasion rather than weaponry and a loud mouth.
Then we wonder why the rest of the world laughs at us in the world frontier of policy and action. We have recently fallen from number one to number seven in a particularly important category:
U.S. falls from first to seventh place in global information technology ranking (Article)
This is a factor that will quickly translate into a poor economy for the USA/LCD. Somehow we have let anti-intellectual businesspersons convince us that there is a paramount value that something being profit driven/capitalistic is automatically going to make it superior. Now, by calling them "anti-intellectual" I am not saying they, themselves, are "stupid"; they just believe that keeping us that way will make them more money.
This may very well be true, in the short run, for those who became successful through inheritance instead of better ideas and hard work. The less intelligent the US is, the more we will celebrate the lazy, stupid sons of their fathers rise to the top as if they are royalty.
For example, it never occurs to many people that insurance companies are driven by profit, therefore the least likely to make decisions based on giving the best product for the lowest price. Their job is to spend the least by any means and to provide the very least. This is why America has the worst yet most expensive medical care among industrial nations. Some people will defend to the death, the right of insurance and pharmaceutical companies to make more money while providing less and less services to consumers.
After all, "profit is the measure of success" right? If I am CEO and I make a higher profit this year, you might assume I am the better businessman than the CEO who has a longterm plan for maximized profits. We have come to believe that making a million dollars overnight is preferable to making a billion over a period of ten years. Some couldn't tell you that 1- million is a thousand times lower than 1-billion. I can easily increase the profit of any company by selling off its most valuable assets all in one year while laying off its most experienced and highly paid middle managers. But this "instant results mentality" is killing America.
This is exactly how this super-corporation called America is being run today. We are allowing our executives to run up debt so they can pay themselves more and appease the impatient stockholders with a better standard of living, even if their actions will inevitably kill the goose that laid the golden egg, and I don't mean the company itself; I mean the consumers that support its growth.
Some may think it is a "conspiracy" but that would require greater intelligence than these overnight successes actually have. No, it is the system itself that has been ignored and abused. Anti-trust laws encourage the long-term health of a system; they are now intended to destroy profits but to guarantee that profits go to companies that make a better mousetrap instead of playing accounting games through mergers and acquisitions.
At he moment, America suffers from the bloat of having been number one for so long that it became a monopoly. Now, it acts like one; stifling innovation and shooting messengers of bad news. It has become the greatest incentivizer of saying "yes" to the boss and "no" to the employees, and refusing change. The worker or the citizen, in this case, has the greatest motive to steal from the supply room, and to blame failure on others. There is no reason for self-improvement, as that would just draw attention and make him a target of petty office politics, as it is much easier to shoot down ideas than to have them or promote them. Destruction is much easier than creation and invention.
In fact, to some, it would make the most sense to let things fall apart so they may more easily steal from the company as it falters. Using Katrina and New Orleans as a perfect example, despite the destruction of the city costing the larger corporation a huge fortune in the long run, it has made many companies a small fortune through the contracts of rebuilding it. So, the incentive was to let the levies fail knowing that reconstruction contracts would be very profitable to a few companies while costing the larger consumer base a huge loss.
It is time America become aware that it has a mental deficit, so that it may first choose to improve itself. You cannot possibly solve a problem until you see it "as a problem". We have to lay down our egos and admit we have become stupid, not looking for blame but realizing the cause of our current failure as a nation. Denial will do no good; it will only make things worse. If we realize there is such a problem, when is it appropriate to solve it? I have always heard, "NOW" was a good time.
by 0-SukiDesu-0 DC Woman's Editor
Editor's Note Post Publication:
The amazing thing is, no matter how careful one is with words, many moderate Christians find an indictment of the extremists (not really Christians at all, unless we ignore Jesus) is viewed as an indictment of religion itself.
Somehow, there is a kneejerk to any logical clarification and separation of extremism from moderation.
Some use words like "rhetoric" to describe only the positions with which they disagree. Meanwhile, they themselves use rhetoric without any logic to simply state conclusions without any facts to support them.
As this article focused on the "Fascism" within parts of organized religion, it was assumed by many that my failure to indict Lenin, Stalin and other despots was somehow an endorsement of them.
Such an assumption would be completely wrong. The definitions of fascism and/or consequent despotism are clear. The blind support, above all the interests, of a Federal govt. and its establishment elements is the purest and most dangerous part of Fascism.
When the people lose their ability to know when they are being enslaved, we are vulnerable to the "final solution" that every fascist state has brought forth.
Inevitably, once the despots have taken hold, they extinguish all signs of resistance. Yes, this has happened many times in history. And sometimes, it has been in the name of an entirely different religion of the worship of man to whcih Nietzsche referred.
Hitler called himself a Christian as a matter of Machiavellian bastardization and cooptation. It was only a tool of manipulation of the otherwise good Christians of Germany.
Even Popes have done such and I am often reminded of Dante's Divine Comedy and the Inferno, in which he suggests that the most severe parts of hell are reserved for Popes and false prophets. Some Popes have been ruthless; some were truly saints.
Lenin, Pulpot etc. were only espousing a religion in which they were evangelically hailing atheism or self as God. It is interesting we even find "churches" of Atheism all over the world, and on the web.
Their position of the non-existence of God makes them equally religious and zealous. Just as within the inquisitions before, they would eventually kill those with whom they differed.
Pulpot of Cambodia went so far as to kill all people who wore glasses, as he saw that as a sign of intelligence, thus a threat to his regime.
Whatever words we use for these blind expressions of faith, "religion" is what I would call it as it requires one to follow without scrutiny the spiritual commandments of the authors. Mind that I don't proclaim that religion is the problem but the twisting of good intentions with blind faith that threatens us all.
Sadly, I couldn't possibly cover the whole of historical ground in an essay, but to touch on many points in history which satisfy the argument. Arguments can be constructed to support additional positions and I invite the submission of points that our readers may Duly Consider to our email address.
I only hope to remain a servant of truth and an open mind and some may see my truth as lies. They can, I suppose, start their own sites. I hear the Nazi Party of America is looking for good writers. But please don't file your application here.