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Oh. My. Goddess!

This has to stop. I don't care if you believe magick is real, or nonsense, or whatever, but this cannot be tolerated anywhere by anyone. We have to get under the entitlement that tells people they have the right to kill someone for Witchcraft. I don't care if the victims were or weren't, did or didn't - no one has a right to kill someone else for this or any reason. STOP IT!

YOU DO NOT HAVE THE RIGHT TO KILL A HUMAN BEING, NO MATTER WHO YOU ARE!

This must be the basic understanding that is the foundation of our civilization. You don't have the right to kill. Period.

You don't kill Witches.
You don't kill gay people.
You don't kill immigrants, documented or not.
You don't kill women.
You don't kill children.*
You don't kill people who never did a damned thing to you, no matter where they live.

I don't care if you are a cop, a soldier, a parent, a spouse or a lover.

YOU DO NOT HAVE THE RIGHT TO KILL.


*A fetus is not a child. It might be a human someday if the mother so chooses, but it isn't human yet. The right lies with the Mother.

I left the following comment to a post about the racism v. sexism argument.

Feminist. Womanist. Bitch. Witch. Priestess. President. Labels don't really matter at this level. There are many women's movements co-existing, but that isn't the point.

There's no up side to arguing about who is the more oppressed party. We're dealing with 6,000 years of an unnatural social order called patriarchy, which is by definition sexist, racist, elitist, greedy, violent and intolerant. None of us is untouched by this no matter whom we are. America has had ignoble beginnings. It began with an act of genocide against the First Nations, prospered from the work of slaves, sustained itself by breaking the backs of women who had no say in the governance of their own lives or bodies. For the most part, we've been taught to overlook these waves of oppression and take what we can get.

The founders of the country knew intellectually that their society didn't meet the measure of their own philosophies. They did what they could get away with and left it to future generations to make the wrongs right as it became possible. We're chipping away at a power structure that oppresses everyone in one aspect or another, and even those with the most privilege are hobbled by that oppression in some way. Patriarchy hurts everybody.

Yes, the MSM is sexist and racist. It is owned by greedy elitists with a financial interest in keeping women subservient and people of color powerless and dependent, and our country at war. I've been told by people I respect that I am betraying my Sisters by not supporting Hillary, but I refuse to believe that having a vagina is enough qualification to justify my voting for and elitist, racist and dishonest politician. Yes, she has been the object of extreme sexism and that is wrong. I don't have to support her to recognize that she has been treated badly. My objections to her largely stem from her race-baiting. She is both a victim of bigotry and a bigot herself. Many people fit comfortably into both categories. We are all damaged by patriarchy to some extent.

The mistake is that we think there's a difference in racism, sexism, classism, or any other form of oppression. Social Justice exists for all or it exists for none, and the situation might be improving here or there, but we still essentially live in a state of social INjustice. It doesn't matter what element of our person or position provokes the oppressive treatment - the treatment is the problem. The sense of entitlement that tells some elite group or individual that they are "more" is what we need to challenge. No one has a right to own, oppress, cheat, hurt or kill another human being. (Some would extend that to include animals, too, but one fight at a time.) That basic truth is violated all throughout our society. We have an elite group that feels blessed by a white male deity who loves them best of all, and that love justifies anything they want, at the expense of anyone or anything else. While we fight over who is more oppressed - WOC or women in general, the elite class continues its vampiric drain on our money, our culture and our lives. Our anger toward each other keeps us down. Only directing that anger where it belongs, at the elite classes who have stacked the game against us, is going to make a difference in any of our lives.

We can't afford to be divided - that serves the elite class. Why do their work for them? Why make it easier for them t6 keep us down? Everyone who is not independently wealthy needs to work together. We're a giant game of whack-a-mole and the moles only win when they all rise up together and take away the hammer. Ok, it's a stupid metaphor but you see what I mean. They can keep some of us down over there, and some over here, but if we all stand up together we outnumber them. This is class warfare and the only resolution to it is revolution. Solidarity.

A person of color should feel just as offended by sexism and they are by racism. Women should be as offended by racism in every form or situation. It's all the same hate from the top of one dominant hierarchy we need to tear down. This should be the function of the Progressive movement. If we aren't directly attacking that power structure, our efforts are wasted. Let's put all that hurt and anger where it belongs and get something done. Barack just might be able to focus our energy and make some real changes. I wish he were more liberal, but the movement behind him is more important than the man himself, though he gives it a name and a face. He creates the potential for a kind of healing both here and in the rest of the world that simply won't happen if Hillary is in charge. It's a long shot, but it's our only shot at the moment.

Wiccans, Druids, and other Pagans are part of an international coalition of
religious leaders and others who have signed a letter to King Abdullah bin
Abd al-'Aziz Al Saud of Saudi Arabia pleading for the release of a Saudi
Arabian woman, Fawza Falih, who has been condemned to death for
"witchcraft." She was accused for "bewitching" a man and making him
"impotent." She was imprisoned and beaten, her confession was coerced, the
limited appeals process is now exhausted, and she is awaiting execution, a
public beheading.

The coalition seeking her pardon and release also includes Muslims,
Jews, Christians, Hindus, Native Americans, Buddhists, and those of other
faith traditions. The letter will be delivered soon to the Saudi
ambassadors to the United Nations and the United States.

ACT NOW -- sign the petition to save Fawza Falih's life:
http://www.petitiononline.com/AIDFAWZA/petition.html

NETWORK -- Please circulate this request for signatures and support. Time
is of the essence. Post this email to lists, blogs, websites, elsewhere.

Besides taking very kind notice of my article in The Freeman, Roderick Long (2008-01-18) and Micha Ghertner (2008-01-14) each also mention the epigraph that I included — a long quotation on the experience of oppression by the radical lesbian feminist philosopher Marilyn Frye. The quotation is one of my favorite passages from her essay Oppression, in The Politics of Reality. I had originally hoped to include more of it, but the epigraph had to be trimmed back in the interest of space. The full version would have been:

The experience of oppressed people is that the living of one’s life is confined and shaped by forces and barriers which are not accidental or occasional and hence avoidable, but are systematically related to each other in such a way as to catch one between and among them and restrict or penalize motion in any direction. It is the experience of being caged in: all avenues, in every direction, are blocked or booby trapped.

Cages. Consider a birdcage. If you look very closely at just one wire in the cage, you cannot see the other wires. If your conception of what is before you is determined by this myopic focus, you could look at that one wire, up and down the length of it, and be unable to see why a bird would not just fly around the wire any time it wanted to go somewhere. Furthermore, even if, one day at a time, you myopically inspected each wire, you still could not see why a bird would gave trouble going past the wires to get anywhere. There is no physical property of any one wire, nothing that the closest scrutiny could discover, that will reveal how a bird could be inhibited or harmed by it except in the most accidental way. It is only when you step back, stop looking at the wires one by one, microscopically, and take a macroscopic view of the whole cage, that you can see why the bird does not go anywhere; and then you will see it in a moment. It will require no great subtlety of mental powers. It is perfectly obvious that the bird is surrounded by a network of systematically related barriers, no one of which would be the least hindrance to its flight, but which, by their relations to each other, are as confining as the solid walls of a dungeon.

It is now possible to grasp one of the reasons why oppression can be hard to see and recognize: one can study the elements of an oppressive structure with great care and some good will without seeing the structure as a whole, and hence without seeing or being able to understand that one is looking at a cage and that there are people there who are caged, whose motion and mobility are restricted, whose lives are shaped and reduced.

—Marilyn Frye (1983), Oppression, in The Politics of Reality. pp. 4–5.

In the case of poor people — and especially poor people who live in the socioeconomic or racial ghettos of large cities — both state socialists and state capitalists have spent no end of time looking at one or two wires, and wondering why the bird behind them builds its nest in such a funny, cramped shape. Since their perspective has excluded treating state oppression of the poor in any systematic way, the state socialists, rightly understanding that poor people are basically alright, wrongly figure that the problem must be the inherent vices of the market process. The state capitalists, rightly understanding that the market process is basically alright, wrongly figure that the problem must be in the vice, folly, or ignorance of individual poor people, or poor subcultures. But both of them are wrong. To understand the problem aright, you have to start by stepping back to see the whole cage. Then, and only then, can you meaningfully talk about what poor people can do about breaking out—and what you, if you are not yourself poor, can do to help them in their efforts.

I was at the mall last night. I loathe the mall, and yet, I find myself there fairly frequently. The village where I live has no pharmacy, nothing other than a small convenience store that charges convenience store prices. So all necessities come from the mall and the large grocery store next to it. Thus, my position at a table in the Food Court, eating Subway sandwiches with my daughter for our late dinner.

As usual, I was people watching. The college students are gone, flown like robins in reverse. They’ll return in the waning days of summer, and change the character of this area. Last night, it was locals. And I started noticing something. Virtually everyone was carrying around extra weight. Lots of belly fat. Some of them were so slowed up by the extra weight that they lumbered. I started looking for lean people. There were a few, but as a percentage, it was less than 20 percent.

I know that we’re engaged in a national crisis over American obsesity. We blame television, and our sedentary lifestyles, and the availability of cheap, high-fat food. We drink too much soda. We eat too much candy and potato chips and fast food. We don’t exercise. It’s all our fault. We’re the richest nation on earth and we’re a bunch of slobs. Blah Blah Blah.