.. that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, ...
subtitle (with all due respect), what complete and utter bullshit!
-=*=-
From my admittedly poor recall, I think it was David G (g'day) who 1st alerted me to the error in the above.
It's only partly correct (a feature of lots'a (lying!) propaganda); for although there's equality in that every human born will sooner or later die, there's lots in between that's drastically *not* equal.
(As a not just BTW aside, it is this rather inconvenient truth, that all must die, that the religions of most concern to us are 'hung.' Specifically, they promise some sort'a 'life after death' for the so-called 'immortal soul' (utterly unprovable, also undetectable, both by definition) part. On the way, they (these religions) more or less promise some sort'a justice - after death, say. The more clever will appreciate that justice delayed - sooo long - is justice denied - absolutely, at least as far any non-believer is concerned. Justice, daaarlings, must be seen to be done.)
-=*=-
Now back on track; the most amazing binary splits occur, sorting people into us, we the sheople® on the one hand, and a so-called élite, aka 'rulers' on the other. These rulers may be of the political type or the commercial type - or a special sub-class, the military-command type. This ruling élite is the "military-industrial complex" warned about by Eisenhower, now extended by the integration of Congress (i.e. parliaments); what I refer to as the M/I/C-plex, which is 'served' by the mostly corrupt '4th Estate,' aka the venal MSM.
We the sheople can laughingly be called "The Mushroom Club" (as in kept in the dark and fed on bullshit. Har, har - but not really funny at all.) The 'dark' is caused by a corrupt education process - which fails almost totally to encourage any sort'a critical thinking, and hides the true history of the world - a history of almost unrelieved barbarism - behind a smokescreen of trivialities. The 'bullshit,' aka lies are served up to us by the (venal!) MSM. One of the worst, most cruel lies is that we live in democracies; this is a lie because our so-called democracies deliver us no real choice. In the US, UK, Aus & Israel, no matter who is elected, basically the same policies will be followed; Ta Ra! - namely, any number of variations of murder for spoil.
Of the three most basic requirements for a properly functioning democracy, to wit a) a switched-on, informed and engaged electorate, b) free and fair information flows and c) a meaningful choice of honest candidates, we have effectively none.
-=*=-
Then, to the 'rulers.' They have adopted the "Rights of Kings," namely the right to go to war, to rip us off; basically to drive the systems into the current catastrophic environment which we the sheople find our hapless selves in.
(As another not just BTW aside, the current 'market' system is built not on a "Fair go, ya mug!" - but rather on "Buy low, sell high;" in other words not "Cost plus a fair profit," but rather 180° in direct opposition, "What the market will bear." One might say "So? Nobody is *forced* to buy!!?" - but we the sheople have little choice; we've gotta eat, clothe and house - and drive, say, lacking better options. But no *must* vis-à-vis TV.)
It used to be (somewhere, perhaps only in hopeful imagination), "One rule for all," but it is in fact "One rule for us, we the sheople, and hardly any rules at all for the 'rulers.'"
And right there, we see how to fix this horrible mess: return, with no exceptions, to "One rule for all."
-=*end*=-
PS (Reprised) How? Just how can we save our once jewel-like planet?
a) Get a morality, see my attempted formalisation the chezPhil morality.
b) Demand honesty, from the MSM (AusBC!), from business and from our so-called leaders.
c) Demand honest representation (or devolve to direct citizen government - by CIRs, say.)
After all, daaarlings, it's 'only' our democratic right.
2008/05/12
we hold these truths to be self-evident ...
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G'day Phil, yes, that bit about "all men are created equal ..." did (and does) have some holes in it. Please excuse a lengthy extract from this Arthur Silber piece, but some who should read it would likely not follow the link - keeping their heads safely ensconced in the dark.
I've discussed some of the historical background that helps to explain Wright's AIDS commentary. Let's discuss it a bit more, and try to break through the wall of comfortable denial erected by almost all Americans, including many liberals and progressives. From Margaret Kimberley:
The name Josef Mengele is so infamous that it needs no introduction. Mengele was the German doctor who performed medical experiments on prisoners at Auschwitz, the Nazi death camp. An American doctor, James Marion Sims was equally monstrous, but his name is less well known.
Sims was a doctor who routinely performed unnecessary and sadistic surgeries on slaves in Alabama. He opened the skulls of babies and performed gynecological surgeries on women. They were forced to endure unimaginable treatments, all without the ether that had by then become available as an anesthetic. Of course, being enslaved people, they had no choice in any decisions that Sims made about their bodies or their lives.
Sims allegedly sought to treat vaginal fistulas caused by complications of child birth. One woman underwent this treatment, without anesthesia, 30 times. He obviously didn't cure her of anything.
Because Sims' victims were black Americans their stories remained largely untold. They were not the first or the last black Americans to be subjected to what can only be called torture in the name of scientific investigation. Sims is called "the father of gynecology" and eventually became president of the American Medical Association. He has been immortalized in a monument that still stands in New York's Central Park.
...
A newly published book Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present, is a comprehensive chronicle of surgeries performed without anesthesia, the notorious Tuskegee experiments that prevented 400 men from being treated for syphilis over a 40 year period, and forced sterilizations.
Harriet Washington, the author of Medical Apartheid, has performed an invaluable service. White Americans love to point fingers at Germans who won't apologize for Hitler, or Japanese who claim that the rape of Nanking didn't take place. There is little interest in acknowledging, much less apologizing for atrocities that took place on American soil.
History tells us that torture and murder are considered acceptable if the perpetrators are white and the victims aren't. The population of American Indians was decimated from an estimated 15 million before European occupation to 200,000 in 1890. Simply put, they were murdered. They were shot and scalped and infected with disease. Millions of Africans taken into slavery in Africa perished before reaching the western hemisphere where they faced the prospect of being the property of Dr. Sims and his ilk.
The litany of atrocities documented in Medical Apartheid shocks the soul and the senses. Yet it must be pointed out that those atrocities are all logical results of the white supremacy that was manifested in chattel slavery, and the terror that followed it. There isn't a better candidate for torture than a person who isn't really considered a person.
It is indeed valuable that some of the most racist crimes committed in this country have finally been exposed. But it will be of little use if this history is dismissed as vestiges of another time instead of revealing an ideology that has never disappeared from the American consciousness. The use of black Americans as guinea pigs didn't end with the slavery era and wasn't confined to the South.
From a Washington Post review of Medical Apartheid featured at Amazon:
A fresh account of the Tuskegee study, including new information about the internal politics of the panel charged by the Department of Health, Education and Welfare with investigating it in 1972, lies at the center of Harriet A. Washington's courageous and poignant book. The balance of Medical Apartheid reveals, with arresting detail, that this scandal was neither the first chapter nor the last in the exploitation of black subjects in U.S. medical research. Tuskegee was, in the author's words, "the longest and most infamous -- but hardly the worst -- experimental abuse of African Americans. It has been eclipsed in both numbers and egregiousness by other abusive medical studies."
Although medical experimentation with human subjects has historically involved vulnerable groups, including children, the poor and the institutionalized, Washington enumerates how black Americans have disproportionately borne the burden of the most invasive, inhumane and perilous medical investigations, from the era of slavery to the present day. (This burden has become global in the last few decades.) In 1855, John "Fed" Brown, an escaped slave, recalled that the doctor to whom he was indentured produced painful blisters on his body in order to observe "how deep my black skin went." This study had no therapeutic value. Rather, fascination with the outward appearance of African Americans, whose differences from whites were thought to be more than skin deep, was a significant impulse driving such medical trials.
...
The infringement of black Americans' rights to their own bodies in the name of medical science continued throughout the 20th century. In 1945, Ebb Cade, an African American trucker being treated for injuries received in an accident in Tennessee, was surreptitiously placed without his consent into a radiation experiment sponsored by the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission. Black Floridians were deliberately exposed to swarms of mosquitoes carrying yellow fever and other diseases in experiments conducted by the Army and the CIA in the early 1950s. Throughout the 1950s and '60s, black inmates at Philadelphia's Holmesburg Prison were used as research subjects by a University of Pennsylvania dermatologist testing pharmaceuticals and personal hygiene products; some of these subjects report pain and disfiguration even now. During the 1960s and '70s, black boys were subjected to sometimes paralyzing neurosurgery by a University of Mississippi researcher who believed brain pathology to be the root of the children's supposed hyperactive behavior. In the 1990s, African American youths in New York were injected with Fenfluramine -- half of the deadly, discontinued weight loss drug Fen-Phen -- by Columbia researchers investigating a hypothesis about the genetic origins of violence.
...
Given the history presented in Medical Apartheid, it is no surprise that some African Americans continue to regard the medical system with apprehension, despite more stringent safeguards enacted by the federal government in the 1970s. Washington attributes this outlook, which she calls iatrophobia, to the seeds of distrust sown in black communities by the Tuskegee scandal and a history of lesser-known mistreatment.
Washington, a visiting fellow at Chicago's DePaul University, intends that Medical Apartheid serve a socially therapeutic -- if not cathartic -- function. Laying bare these atrocities, her logic goes, will foster healing and frank but necessary conversation. Clearing the air may encourage a better informed African American public to participate in clinical trials.
Despite the author's best intentions, the scale and persistence of the "dark history" she delineates may well preclude such a development. Precisely because Washington's account of racially stratified medical exploitation is so gripping, it may be difficult for the public to muster enthusiasm to enter clinical trials, no matter their cultural background. And with the experimental research burden shifting from Americans of African descent to Africa itself (which Washington calls a "continent of subjects"), Asia, and Latin America, where some cavalier researchers are seeking more plentiful and pliant subjects, readers may be more convinced than ever of the durability of the medical color line.
Note the reference to practices that occurred in the 1960s and 1970s. Also recall that US forces in Iraq referred to Iraqis as "untermenschen".
On Iraq, from Chris Floyd.
Tell me that this doesn't sound like something out of a history of Nazi tactics in World War II:
The rules [of engagement]t explicitly allowed the killing of unarmed Iraqis under certain circumstances...Specifically, the snipers were allowed to shoot unarmed people running away from explosions or firefights....Of course, it's not unusual for innocent people to run from explosions.
Didier, who has since been promoted to captain, said that "if that individual makes contact with you and then breaks contact of their own accord and disarms themselves while they are breaking contact, they are still an engageable target because they are not wounded, nor did they surrender." He explained, "They are only breaking contact so that they can engage coalition forces at a later time." In court, Sgt. Anthony Murphy, one of the snipers who was responsible for a questionable kill, testified that he interpreted this order about breaking contact so they can engage at a later time as: "Engage fleeing local nationals without weapons."
In other words, if an innocent, unarmed Iraqi runs away to seek safety from a suicide bombing, a missile attack or a gunfight -- which any human being would instinctively do -- then he is fair game to be killed by an American sniper.
Did someone say that all evil needed to be wiped out? Oh, was that the sound of a head being even more deeply inserted?
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