StumbleUpon | JoeLondon's blog posts

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Fri, 09 Mar 2007 10:13:58 -0800

http://JoeLondon.stumbleupon.com/review/7095752/

Sat, 23 Dec 2006 05:00:00 -0800

The mechanics of violence

by Joe London

Subject to violence in all its numerous, metamorphic guises, not last the one that goes under the name of pedagogy (the science of blindly perpetuating the original sin of abuse with good conscience), people will be shaped by it, build up amounts of rage and acridness which, like a viscous leak building up within themselves unacknowledged, just wait for any opportunity to make others, self included, pay for that violence, no matter if innocent, thus perpetuating its cycle.

[read more here]

http://JoeLondon.stumbleupon.com/review/6239884/

Sun, 29 Oct 2006 11:13:22 -0800

Where did the previous Lynne go?

Read this:

"Let us go away together, away from the anger and imperatives of men. There will be only the two of us, and we shall linger through long afternoons of sweet retirement. In the evenings I shall read to you while you work your cross-stitch in the firelight. And then we shall go to bed, our bed, my dearest girl."

or this:

"The women who embraced in the wagon were Adam and Eve crossing a dark cathedral stage -- no, Eve and Eve, loving one another as they would not be able to once they ate of the fruit and knew themselves as they truly were. She felt curiously moved, curiously envious of them. She had never to this moment thought Eden a particularly attractive paradise, based as it was on naivet�, but she saw that the women in the cart had a passionate, loving intimacy forever closed to her. How strong it made them. What comfort it gave."

Was this written by a lesbian militant? Well, not really. Or at least it appears she is not one now. The above excerps are from Sisters, published in 1981 by Lynne Cheney, the wife of the current vice-president of the United States, exponent of a party which, as it is well known, has quite grossly restrictive, uncouth views about sexuality.

[read more]

http://JoeLondon.stumbleupon.com/review/6218642/

Sat, 28 Oct 2006 09:29:06 -0700

The Benny Hinn Show

This is a video of some "religious" show by Benny Hinn.
This type of televised religious mass hysteria appears to be more likely to be found in the USA. If so, I wonder why?
In a country where the average time per week that children aged 2-17 spend watching television is 19 hours and 40 minutes, which become over 28 hours for the average adult (source tvturnoff.org), it is not surprising to have entire stadiums filled with crowds of people eager to delude themselves with the idea of experiencing a supernatural power. Sadly, these are people who vote too, but this is another, though important, story. [read more]

http://JoeLondon.stumbleupon.com/review/3761894/

Sat, 01 Apr 2006 15:18:25 -0800

Pious pro-life and war mongerers
by Joe London

Do you see any coherence in being a Republican who supports an illegal war based on lies, causing tens of thousands of deaths, polluting Iraq for millions of years with depleted uranium (thus causing abortions and/or genetic mutations of newborns in the future), a war which costs trillions, WHILE being at the same time a pious pro-life supporter?

South Dakota recently passed a legislation that bans abortion in nearly all cases. But, according to Karen Miller, co-chair of Democracy in Action's Women's Autonomy Group (quoted in this press-release by a group of South Dalota grandmothers) "12% of our families don't have health insurance, our public schools are under-funded, and folks are struggling to get by on rock-bottom wages," and, Miller asks, "What is the agenda of the politicians who claim to care about fetuses while refusing to provide for the health, welfare, and education of our children?".

Karen Miller has more than one point. America is run by an administration which has done nothing to increase support for families, and pregnant women, or to spread sexual and contraceptive education, rather quite the opposite. In short an administration which fosters the very conditions that cause abortion, while at the same time claiming to be 'pro-life'. And while spending trillions to cause death and destruction with illegal wars.

The current American administration might have in mind a model of woman-martyr who will not have an abortion even if alone, desperate and ostracised by her enviornment, even if risking to lose a job (or jobless) or to be kicked out of a school, and even if without money and social insurance. Or even if raped. Unless, perhaps, as /www.stumbleupon.com/to//http/rawstory.com/news/2006/Lawmaker_Religious_virgins_eligible_for_South_0310.html/t:4af9c268af1a5;src:blog"%3ESouth/t:4af9c268af1a5;src:syndicate" rel="nofollow" target="_new">http//rawstory.com/news/2006/Lawmaker_Religious_virgins_eligible_for_South_0310.html/t:4af9c268af1a5;src:blog">South Dakota state senator Bill Napoli twistedly puts it, she is a "religious virgin" who "planned on saving her virginity until she was married" and was "brutalized and raped, sodomized as bad as you can possibly make it, and is impregnated".

But it would be about time that the current American administration did something for the people, instead of spending money for wars or to help its cronies and corporate friends, while expecting common people to be martyrs.

Read also: "My dinner with Napoli" by Nancy Goldstein, an interesting post which inspired me to express my take on this matter.

http://JoeLondon.stumbleupon.com/review/3253021/

Tue, 07 Feb 2006 20:25:17 -0800

"A tyrant must put on the appearance of uncommon devotion to religion. Subjects are less apprehensive of illegal treatment from a ruler whom they consider god-fearing and pious. On the other hand, they do less easily move against him, believing that he has the gods on his side." - Aristotle

http://JoeLondon.stumbleupon.com/review/3021068/

Thu, 12 Jan 2006 02:10:37 -0800

You scored as Linguistics. You should be a Linguistics major!

Linguistics83%Sociology83%Art67%English67%Psychology67%Dance58%Theater58%Philosophy50%Journalism50%Biology33%Anthropology33%Engineering25%Mathematics25%Chemistry17%
What is your Perfect Major? (PLEASE RATE ME!!<3)
created with QuizFarm.com

http://JoeLondon.stumbleupon.com/review/2787138/

Tue, 13 Dec 2005 04:16:42 -0800

Stanley Tookie Williams is dead
by Joe London

One more man murdered for that you call justice.

Violence adds to violence, death adds to death, in a perpetual pernicious cycle.

How can those who survive rejoice for judicial acts which make them alikes of those they murder?

Is justice a process by which the pious and the righteous macabrely disguise themselves as criminals and with complacent aseptic rituals in lime-green execution chambers, without tribal dances but with barbaric satisfaction, kill other human beings, challenging their own fallibility, while perhaps invoking God?

You keep celebrating your greatness and myths, with an incessant mantra of hypnosis and self-indulgence, suggesting that God himself has a special spot for you, America.

But when you give to those who have already, and take away from the destitute, when you neglect to strengthen the levees that protect your children against the floods of poverty, despair, self-destruction and violence, and when, despite all this, you kill those who have not been lucky enough to grow in a sound and fertile soil of security and love, and deny that they might live, if only in a nine by five foot prison cell, pursuing a legal homicide instead, when you do all this, America, if God exists, he blesses those you kill, those you have failed to help, not the self-complacent and murderous justice of the fortunate.

http://JoeLondon.stumbleupon.com/review/2783638/

Mon, 12 Dec 2005 16:56:12 -0800

Arnold Schwarzenegger denies clemency for Stanley Tookie Williams

If Stanley Tookie Williams were not the man he has become, the man who has written books against violence, helped thousands of people to renounce gangs life and giving up violence, a Nobel Prize nominee for Peace and for Literature; were he still the thug and young criminal he was when he was condemned in 1981 for murder, even in this case I would say "save him".

Because no man can have the right to kill another man, claiming to administer justice in doing so. Because justice should not have anything to do with barbaric vindictiveness and "eye for eye and tooth for tooth". Because capital punishment clashes with any modern concept of sentence as a possibility of redemption. All this without mentioning the too frequent errors and misjudgements, and the differences in sentences according to whether the accused can afford a decent lawyer or not, and the fact that any crime is, without doubt, also associated to the chronic incapacity of society to give relief to vast masses of hopeless people who live in moral and economical poverty and without the same access to culture as others.

It just does not make sense to say thou shall not kill, and then make exceptions, if only for claimed justice, which being human is fallible anyway.

In 2004 the USA was the 4th country in the world for numbers of capital punishments, after China, Iran and Vietnam. What a company for a country which claims to be a nest for democracy and civilisation. Capital punishment is simbly barbaric and repulsive.

Stanley Tookie Williams is living his last few hours, unless any unpredictable fact occurs. Read a very interesting interview with him here.

Here you can find his The Tookie Protocol for Peace. On Amazon, here, a choice of books he has written.

http://JoeLondon.stumbleupon.com/review/2778671/

Mon, 12 Dec 2005 02:23:09 -0800

"If this were a dictatorship, it'd be a heck of a lot easier, just so long as I'm the dictator." George W. Bush
(source: here).

Surely some will say the above is taken out of context. But without mentioning Freud, I think by now there is enough evidence to wonder whether the above statement somehow animate or not the actions of George W. Bush, the "compassionate" and "Christian" neo-con theo-president.