Response to "Cynical Libertarian Society": Stating the Obviouis

 
The following includes an unsolicited tirade from anonymous "Cynical Libertarian Society" (CLS) ostensibly in response to my recently published book, Eco-Nihilism: The Philosophical Geopolitics of the Climate Change Apocalypse. But, honestly, it's hard to tell. 

You can find the complete CLS post here:

 http://www.cynlibsoc.com/CLS/2017/05/stating-obvious-0429-mother-single-fathers-no-better-single-mothers/

I have quoted the opening segment in total--but warning, it is graphic:

Wendy Lynne Lee is opposed to free speech zones. Who the fuck is Wendy Lynne Lee? She’s an unattractive cookie-cutter femistatist cunt.

I am a writer. I chose philosophy as the best possible tool with which to wrench into being what I saw to be true, beautiful, and knowable–often uncomfortable compatriots.
I have been intimately involved in the feminist movement, the queer identity movement, animal rescue, and the movement for an ecologically desirable future for many years.
I am a mother, a daughter, and an ally.
I’m a union member. I tattoo my experience and my commitments on my arms. I am a vegetarian. I have worked very hard for the movement to end industrialized fossil fuel extraction.
If I must sum up some semblance of my commitments and values, I might say this:

Beauty–over mere survival.
Wisdom–over willful ignorance.
Compassion–over smarmy indolence.
Wit–over mendacity.

Laughter–over every fucking evil thing.
https://www.blogger.com/profile/17591185266607991768

She has published three books. No surprises here.

Eco-Nihilism: The Philosophical Geopolitics of the Climate Change Apocalypse
On Marx
Contemporary Feminist Theory and Activism: Six Global Issues
https://bloomu.academia.edu/WendyLee

She is very confused about what violence is.

The denial of healthcare is an act of violence.
Bombing Yemeni children is an act of violence.
Vomiting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere is an act of violence.
https://thewrenchphilosleft.blogspot.com/2017/04/

When Hussein Obama murders Muslims with missiles launched from flying robots that is not violence. That is enlightenment for Hussein Obama is The Messiah, The Lightbringer, The Source Of The Cum Wendy Swallowed For Eight Years. All Hail The Messiah!

I tried to post a response to CLS at the website--but while he/she solicits comments, there's actually no mechanism for posting.

So I'll post my comment here, and then say a bit why I think it's important--sometimes--to confront folks like this.

Dear Cynical Libertarian Society:

It is most unfortunate that you're neither cynical nor a libertarian. First, mere name-calling isn't cynical; it's cowardly. It's the first indication that you have no argument to make. And you certainly don't disappoint!

Second, libertarians are among the most vocal opponents of free speech zones. They argue that cordoning off speech into safety zones is a violation of the first amendment--and they're right.

What's just laughable here, however, is that you call me a cunt, but then go on to make abundantly clear that you have absolutely no idea at all what I write about or why. In fact, you jump ship to another indecipherable topic altogether.

I do have to thank you. Posting your incoherent rant has generated even more interest in my new book, Eco:Nihilism: The Philosophical Geopolitics of the Climate Change Apocalypse.

It will also make an excellent example of the fallacy "ad hominem" for my students this Fall term.

If I'm irritating self-proclaimed Nazis like yourself, I must be doing something right.

But, hey, that's stating the obvious.

Cheers,

Wendy Lynne Lee 

I think it's tempting to hold the view that the best response to self-avowed misogynist bigots like this (presumably) gentleman is to just ignore them. Sometimes that's the case. But since the election of Donald Trump as president, I think we have a responsibility to get much braver than we've been in the past. I think, in fact, that we must confront bigots like this one for the following reasons:

1. They're in charge. Anyone who thinks that these plainly hate-filled rants are not mirrored--however much more gentile the language--in the worldview of people like Steve Bannon, or in ideologies like "economic nationalism" and "Make America Great, Again!" just isn't paying attention.

2. When we don't take a stand we allow for this kind of rhetoric to become normalized. Perhaps we think these are "just words." Absolutely not. Words like "I think the Muslims hate us," "grab them by the pussy,"  and "I don't want poor people in my cabinet" helped to get the willfully ignorant in chief elected to the presidency.

3. Our silence makes us complicit. You don't have to be a member of the Progressive Left to see what's wrong in this fellow's characterization of women, of Obama. And even a cursory scan of his website makes clear that the only people he thinks should get to speak, to act, and to rule are white men who share his dark worldview. We let that go at the peril of far more than mere hypocrisy.

4. Screeds like this are opportunities. CLS is neither unusual nor particularly more obscene than many of the blogs that litter the alt-right blogosphere. They offer us the chance to show thinking people just how violent and tyrannical is the far right--and how close it is. It is a pristine opportunity to exercise the right to free speech by showing through reason and evidence just how malignant and dangerous is the worldview at least some of those who support the Trump regime.


There is no cordoned off "free speech zone" in cyberspace--at least not here, not yet.

So my hope is that CLS will see this and respond. To him I say: bring it on. 

My greater hope is that my readers will take that opportunity as well. 

Trump's "Beautiful Babies" and the Profiteering Geopolitics of Death

"Beautiful little babies," he said.

It might be tempting to think that confronted with the carnage left of children's bodies by al Assad in Syria, President Trump has somehow grown into an adult, or emerged from his endless campaigning a decent human being capable of caring for some entity other than himself.

But this would be a grave mistake, and I fervently encourage my readers to resist this invitation to amnesia.

Indeed, we forget just what kind of self-absorbed reprobate Trump is at the cost of our own claim to moral agency.

And we need to remember that he is directly responsible for at least 261 deaths in  Yemin. 

Did the U.S. have a moral duty to respond to the likely chemical warfare attack?

Yes.

Should it have been through bombing an airfield?

Absolutely not.

This is so for at least three reasons:

1. This action will escalate the violence in Syria. al Assad will respond. It will be with violence. People will die. And we all know it.

2. The choice of action--cratering an air base near the scene of al Assad's act of atrocity--was a political calculation. And while this does not mean necessarily that it cannot have been an act of righteous retribution, the fact that there were and are far better alternative responses (see below) makes plain that this bombing was a calculated message to Putin--but far far more important to Xi Jinping of China  whose armies are far larger, and whose influence is far greater.

Indeed, were I vulnerable to conspiracy theories (and I'm not), I'd wonder about the incredibly fortuitous timing of the Chinese Premier's visit and the opportunity to flex this military muscle. To be clear--this isn't to suggest that Trump knew about al Assad's plans, but it is to suggest that the decision to engage in military action of any kind was surely even more attractive with Xi Jinping at the swanky Mar-a-Lago dinner table. 

That any of then could eat should give us pause.

But we'll set this aside.

3. Here's the alternative: 

Provide countries like Jordan the financial capacity and expertise to accommodate more refugees. Pursue this humanitarian objective aggressively and very publicly.

Announce immediately that the United States is prepared to take at least 100,000 Syrian refugees--particularly, but not exclusively, from the war torn regions of that benighted country.

Announce immediately that the Muslim travel ban has been rescinded.

 Establish a humanitarian aid arm of the president's cabinet devoted to helping refugees resettle in whatever country they have chosen.

Announce a new U.S. policy that the United States no longer bombs civilian populations--especially in Yemin, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Syria.

Announce the abandonment of drone strikes.

Announce a re-invigorated U.S. commitment to the reduction of greenhouse gases in light of the indisputable fact that one of the major factors in the Syrian Civil War was climate change accelerated drought.

It's an easy--easy--thing to clench our fists and denounce the killing of "beautiful babies." It's another to actually stand for decency, compassion, and justice. 

The courageous thing to do is to refuse to participate in perpetuating the very geopolitical violence that always demands an equally violent response.

The courageous thing to see is the global economic system and its multinational corporate kleptocrats that thrive on war.

But we're not going to open our eyes that wide. Why?

Because behind all the hand-wringing about "little babies" are the oligarchs, the nationalists, the white supremacists, and the kleptocrats--including Trump--who are poised like the vampires they really are to convert the bodies of the dead into the blood-money upon which they feed.

"Beautiful babies"?

Don't be fooled. Trump's response is no more about compassion--much less justice--than the response of his analogues in Syria and Russia.

What it is about is that collective psychosis of masculinity for whom torturous death offers the great aphrodesiac. 

What it's about are multinational money interests--weapons manufacture, fossil fuel extraction and transport, surveillance firms, communication technologies, the privatizing of clean water, the control of food security, the engineering of subjugation. These are the vampires surely salivating at their own Mar-a-Lagos over the capital conquest only geopolitical implosions of violence can offer.

"Beautiful babies"?

Hardly. Beautiful power. Beautiful profits. 
Beautiful perpetual war.

Wendy Lynne Lee

Some Thoughts on Violence, Nationalism, and Bigotry: 4th of July, 2016

-->

Photo Wendy Lynne Lee, 2015

To the editor:

It’s telling that the vote in the UK to leave the European Union is followed by calls for referenda elsewhere by nationalist, unfailingly far-right parties like France's National Front. Like our own "America First" pathology incarnated as Donald Trump, these “movements” pretend to be populist uprisings in defense of the working classes, but are in fact opportunistic exploitations of racist and xenophobic hornswaggle that, wrapped in the flag, suckers folks into voting not only against their own best interests but for a world that better resembles Game of Thrones than anything we’d want to leave to our kids. 

 

Then again, it’s not the Trumpster’s kids who’ll get their legs blown off in the next war—it’s yours.

In the face of unprecedented human migration, 65.3 million women, men, and children in 2015, decisions like BREXIT and the emergence of the ugly face of nationalist bigotry in the U.S., make it clear that the geopolitics of the planet are driven not by thoughtful deliberation, but by exploitable fear. 

To think that closing borders and building walls will protect us from terrorism is daft.  Indeed, quite the opposite is likely to be true in virtue of the fact that a world characterized by divided and competing fiefdoms, turf devoted only to their own version of “My country right or wrong!” is a world made very brittle by its own arrogant medieval territorialism.

 

The tremendous and sad irony of BREXIT, Trumpster-mania, and all forms of xenophobia is that none will have the slightest mitigating effect on the threat that endangers human life, indeed, all life, the most: climate change. We wring our hands over ISIS, all the while failing to see its biggest driver isn’t the religion that smug born-agains like Mr. Trump love to demonize; it’s the drought, flooding, loss of arable land, and lack of potable water caused by a human hubris that pours greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere as if the planet’s capacity to recover is limitless. It’s the desperation that makes young men ripe for recruitment to their own religion’s version of self-righteous hatred. 

It’s the same staggering callousness to the lives of others that excuses the moral depravity of four Southern Columbia football jocks who beat animals to death for fun. Indeed, if we think that these upstanding young men are any different that the young bucks recruited by ISIS, we’re both blind and stupid. Both have been taught the appalling lesson that some life has value, and other does not.

 

Is it apples and oranges to compare a local story with international events? Hardly. What torturing nonhuman animals, demonizing “others,” sealing borders, and building moronic walls all have in common is a human chauvinism whose psychotic sense of unearned entitlement is going to burn the planet down—or, well, not the planet—just the ecological and existential conditions that make living worth the struggle. Laughable it is that we’ll risk even speedier dissent into 500 PPB just to drill the hydrocarbons we need to fuel the weapons of “the war on terror,” and in so doing create the conditions of more terrorism. 

Make no mistake about it: that lethal combination of arrogance and willful ignorance that excuses beating animals to death is not one whit different manifest as racism, misogyny, homophobia, religious intolerance, and bigoted nationalism. Exploited by those like Donald Trump or Boris Johnson to advance their own egomaniacal agendas, the ends are all the same: violence, suffering, and oppression meted out by those who think they have the right to make of “others” objects for their own use.  

Wendy Lynne Lee

Lightstreet, PA

590 words.

The World Made Ever More Brittle by BREXIT

It is very telling that the vote in the UK to leave the European Union is followed by calls for referenda in France and the Netherlands--by their own nationalist far-right parties like France's National Front. 

The face of nationalist movements--like America's own "America First" incarnation in Donald Trump and Boris Johnson's "leave" campaign--are thinly veiled forms of racism and xenophobia wrapped in the flag. 

Even more surprising is that such movements would garner support in the UK--a union of countries whose societies reflect reason, great value for multiculturalism, and a deep sense of pride in their compassion for the plight of other peoples.

I understand that among the drivers that set BREXIT into motion is the widening gap between the wealthy and the poor in the UK. 

I understand that this is about class, and that there's a more complex story accompanied by decades of economic struggle and social injustice.

But what I also know is that what infuses the very bone marrow of nationalist campaigns like Trump's "America First!," France's National Front (Marine Le Pen), Belgium's Flemish Nationalist Party, and the anti-immigration Sweden Democrats is that fear of the "other" that, simmering just beneath the surface of legitimate discontent, readily becomes fodder for those who'd exploit it to their own geopolitical advantage.

In the face of unprecedented human migration--65.3 million women, men, and children in 2015--decisions like BREXIT suggest that the geopolitics of the planet are driven not by thoughtful deliberation--but by fear, bigotry, and the desperate attempt to save the thing that cannot be saved: the geographically bordered nation state.

To think that such decisions to close a border will protect from terrorism the turf on the other side is daft. 

Indeed, quite the opposite is likely to be true in virtue of the fact that a world characterized by divided fiefdoms--chunks of land devoted only to their own version of "Me First!"--is a world cancered by fissures and faultlines. 

It is a world made very brittle by its own arrogant and medieval territorialism.

What is the difference between the UK determining to leave the EU--and the psycho-maniacal Trumpster's promise to build a wall at the border of Mexico?

 Not really very much. 

Both aim to keep out the "other."

Both exploit shallow flag-waving patriotism to ends far more about privilege, and ethnicity, and money than about respect for country.

Both will make a very few of the already wealthy even richer.

Both will fuel the recruitment campaigns of terrorism. 

There's no doubt: the European Union is beset by many and serious problems. But these will not be solved by flag-waving claims to sovereignty--especially in a world set ablaze by climate change.
 
Especially at a time when the greatest and most profound issues the world faces demand unified global commitment--not the entrenchment of geographical borders antiquated by the hegemony of multinational corporations. 

BREXIT betokens a very sad day for the UK--and perhaps an even sadder day for the world.