It's A Wonderful Lie

Everybody remembers from The Matrix where Neo first finds out that his entire world is a lie upheld by those who don't want to see. Everyone who saw Dances with Wolves or Avatar knows when the hero discovers he's been fighting on the wrong side. I assure you, the realization is far more chilling in real life.

I made such a discovery just today.

As anyone who reads this is sure to know, I'm not a fan of modern-day feminism. However, I've always stood up for the protection of women against abuse. Now, let me clarify that such a position is not going to change. I am still vehemently against the abuse and exploitation of women and I stand staunchly against the Limbaughs and Hannitys of the world and their campaign to turn women into a slave class.

That said, my eyes have been opened to one of the few legitimate conspiracies on this Earth. This is a conspiracy perpetrated not by a nebulous evil organization such as the Illuminati or Freemasons; rather, it is a road to hell paved with good intentions and whose upkeep is provided by tacit agreement to the status quo of popular opinion.

I present you with a video I stumbled upon entirely by accident but which definitely caught my attention and - to run the risk of sounding like a stoner - opened my eyes, man: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ZAuqkqxk9A

This analysis of institutionalized misandry is amazing and shocks you into a realization of how men are portrayed in the Western world. Think of the last time you saw a news story about a tragedy: did they single out women and children as victims and ignore what the men went through? Did the news single out a man or group of men as the perpetrator(s)? And even when the entire group of victims was male, did the newscasters ever describe the victims with any male terms? Or was it just gender-neutral monikers?

Have you ever wondered why roughly 90% of the homeless are men? Why, in a society supposedly so dominated by men, are they so swept under the carpet and left to literally die in the streets?

In Western society, men don't exist unless they're doing something evil or hateful. Now, in America of course we have the Republican movement but it's not like they're actually doing anything to help men. It's just more abuse toward women and advocacy of programs that don't actually help men. When was the last time you saw a Republican arguing for prostate cancer awareness or for male victims of domestic violence to be taken seriously? Just as in everything else Republicans are so convinced of male superiority that they can't tolerate acknowledging that men may be imperiled. Of course, it helps that the majority of men so victimized aren't in the Conservatives' holy upper-upper-class.

Now, speaking of domestic violence, there's another incredible eye-opener regarding misandry, American misandry in particular: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5lHmCN3MBMI

Male victimization from domestic violence is never reported in the published sections of any sponsored study. The National Coalition Against Domestic Violence (NCADV) is happy to publish blatant lies stating that 85% of domestic violence victims are women. However, this is a vicious lie. The NCADV's own studies reported that, while 1.3 million women are victims of domestic violence each year, nearly 900,000 men are also victims. That means that, out of 2.2 million annual victims, women barely constitute half of the domestic violence victims. Far lower than the 85% the NCADV argues, isn't it?

Oh, but the NCADV never advertises the fact that their own studies turned up over 40% of the total domestic violence victims having penes. You have to dig through their full reports in order to reveal this lie.

In fact, domestic violence has skewed about even in man-on-woman and woman-on-man attacks since about 1984, when there were already more than twenty peer-reviewed and certified studies noting the violence as being roughly 50/50.

It gets even worse, though: In 2010 the CDC did a massive and intensive study across the country in the form of the National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey. This survey came back with staggering results, which of course were never publicized: According to this survey, men constitute at least 53% of domestic violence victims! This doesn't even include male rape victims, who weren't tallied AT ALL. But nowhere in the NIPSVS' results will you find this fact except buried deep in the full report. Again, the CDC only publishes the female results of the survey.

The true statistics aren't published in the executive summary. They aren't even in the letters released to the US Department of Health and Human Services. The male victims are made not to exist. In fact, yet again in another heinous lie, the basic NIPSVS summary page states that women are vastly and disproportionately the victims of sexual violence, stalking and domestic violence. The survey's findings on victims of violence and shelter clients are equally disheartening: 53% of physical violence victims are men, and while women are higher on the "severe physical violence" list, that list includes rape which, again, was not tallied for men, meaning that the male victim percentage in that area most likely also skews even if not higher.

The worst part, however, is that 99.3% of domestic violence shelter clients are women. Less than 1% of the total abuse victims who use shelters have a Y chromosome. This is just unbelievable.

Actually, I lied. The worst part is what happens to men who actually build up enough courage to fight against the social stigma against male domestic violence victims and actually try to find some help:

A Douglas/Hines survey in 2011 titled Men's Helpseeking Experience found horrible statistics. When men sought aid for domestic abuse, barely a quarter were referred to a helpful program, and that was only with a domestic violence hotline or an online resource possibly completely unrelated to domestic violence agencies.
More horrible still is that men who went directly to the most lauded DV agencies were told, "We only help women." More than half the responses from any conventional method were this. And when it rains, it pours. About a fifth of the men seeking help were outright MOCKED AND INSULTED for having been the victims of domestic abuse.
And then, a good portion of men were referred to "batterer's programs," implying or outright telling the help-seeker that he was the batterer and not the victim at all.

My new sign-off has become, "Goodnight, and stay safe." I'm not just ending it with that this time. I usually call for action but leave it to my readers exactly what kind of action to take. This time I'm telling you what to do: call or email your Senators and Representatives and tell them to do something about this. Men are being erased from the world's sight and are being erased just as steadily by violence and tragedy that always goes unacknowledged. No one, man or woman or alien from the planet Glorboks, deserves to suffer abuse and disenfranchisement. This must change.

So goodnight, and take action.

Kill Whitey

After the Sandy Hook massacre I had to remove myself from all media for well over a month. The gun-loving crowd's mania that firearms trump the lives of innocents was just too much for me to handle. Well, zip-a-dee-fucking-doo-da; the old saying is, "when it rains, it pours." Here in America the saying should be, "when it rains, it's actually somebody pissing on you."

Murder, murder, murder, murder, murder. With mass-murder as a garnish. That pretty much sums up the entirety of our country in two sentences. We're more concerned with Gomer being able to have a dozen pistols than we are about Little Suzy being able to have one meal a day.
Our country is so mired in hatred and ideological trench warfare that we're paralyzed from being able to do genuine good for anyone. In the sixteen years since Great Britain passed their laws banning all civilian firearms, gun-related deaths have numbered in only the double-digits annually, sometimes cresting one hundred on a particularly bad year. Conversely, the average death toll from firearms in the good ol' US-of-A is somewhere between ten- and fifteen-thousand.

Our nation is divided right down the middle and never the twain shall meet. On the one side we have the ideological patriarchy: cannibalistic monsters who think they're the only ones deserving of a free meal and who are sociopathic enough to wish death on others just so that they don't have to pay a cent more in taxes. This includes gun enthusiasts, corporate vultures, hyper-aggressive rednecks, and gender-"rights" extremists from both Mars and Venus. In case you hadn't noticed, the vast majority of those folks fall into the Republican party's wheelhouse, except for women's-rights extremists, who wouldn't get along at all with the "barefoot and pregnant" goal that Republicans have for women; still, anyone who's willing to sacrifice other innocent human beings in order to push their own agenda fall into this category, so that includes modern pseudo-feminists. This also includes PETA, because fuck anyone who claims to want to protect animals but whose activism results in a nearly 100% kill rate of animals "rescued" and brought to their shelters.
On the other side we have the ideological pussiarchy: a bunch of mostly well-intentioned people who want equality and safety for all but are too incompetent, naïve or pacifistic to actually affect positive change. This mostly includes Democrats, the majority of college educators, charity workers and activists. Basically anybody who thinks that they can win people over and affect change with a well-reasoned argument without a good heap of fire-and-brimstone or pathos winds up in this category.

A lot of you might be wondering where the hell I'm going with this. The answer is, I'm not really going anywhere. Reason being, if you can't see my point already then I'm never going to convince you. We as a country have no chance to survive this century if we can't find some way to move past this polarization; unfortunately, we pretty much have no common ground any longer. Even the dead bodies of children can't bridge the gap, because apparently the life of a fetus is sacred but once it's been popped out the little fucker can go die in a ditch.

As far as I can see, there are only three potential outcomes that could prevent the US from falling the fuck apart.
The first is that the aggression and hatred grows to be too much. Ignorance and oppression from right-wingers eventually reaches the overflow point and the sensible human beings in this nation stage a mass-disembarkment from a failed experiment. This would likely result in the fearmongers remaining either falling on themselves in an orgy of conspiracy-driven madness or, more likely, attacking every nation on Earth at once in an attempt to force their ideology onto the world. This would leave millions if not billions dead and the US annihilated.

The second, and sadly the least likely, is the exact opposite: somehow the mass paranoia causes the maniacs to snap and stage a nationwide exodus to somewhere else, where their hatred will fester freely. This would likely result in a new aggressive nation infested by rednecks, but who cares about that? The real problem would be that suddenly Liberals would lose their own common ground. Without a threat to unify the differing points of view, strife would continue on. The only silver lining is that, without the rampant paranoia and hatred brought on by the Far-Right, perhaps the more minor difference could be overcome.

The third possibility is of a second Civil War: militant Right-wing madmen raiding their neighbors' homes and slaughtering them for thinking freely, corporate demagogues hiring private-security firms to act as their own armies against the National Guard, and the end result a scorched husk of a former nation. Whoever the victor, the US would limp along as a shadow of its prior greatness, falling into a third-world state similar to Haiti.

I understand that all of this is quite grim and nothing like the snarky nature of my other posts. I agree but, sadly, I see nothing humorous about the current events within this country. I can see only smoke from blazing charnels on the horizon as we hurtle toward an inevitable negative outcome. It would take a miracle to change things for the better, and I've noticed a distinct lack of those in my years on this earth.
Perhaps we as a people can affect change by standing up and making our voices heard. Perhaps we'll only be barking in the dark as the walls close in around us. But we have the obligation to try, if not for our fellow humans than for ourselves, for our survival instinct.
Freedom is not free. This is true but the price of freedom is not, as many would claim, the corpses of our children or the sacrifice of our safety. The price of freedom is that we must all stand together, forego our petty differences and work toward a better community for ourselves and future generations.

"We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."
Forget the Amendments and what you think they mean. Those were added on. This right here, the preamble, the very first words of the Constitution, this is what matters. The unification and protection of our nation and our people supersedes any petty grudges or ideological demands. This isn't a contest to be won by forcing half our people to concede; this is a duty that we owe to ourselves, our neighbors and even our hated rivals.

Goodnight, and stay safe.