GrandpaLash
Posts: 133
Joined: 1/8/2005
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Over the years I have met and admired a number of Americans, either in r/t or on discussion boards of various kinds. On an individual level I have found Americans to be good people. But on a Government level, America terrifies me, and the way my own Government is following the Dubya line terrifies me almost as much.
This is not going to be another critique of America’s involvement (and Australia’s as part of the Coalition of the Witless) in the Iraqi war, that’s been done to death, and will no doubt be so again now that Hunter Thompson’s suicide has raised the issue again on these boards. But it is going to be a somewhat bewildered rant at the way in which the fundamentalist religious right economists have risen to power in the US, and to a lesser but still alarming extent here in my own country.
What has prompted this post is not Thompson’s apparent suicide, but the number of threads which have been deleted lately from the general BSDM discussion boards. The problem is not only at Collarme, but also at Bondage, Alt, Lavalife, and no doubt any number of other similar sites which I don’t belong to. I understand from some fairly frank posts by the Bondage management team that certain subjects are now forbidden because their Bank (and others they approached) threatens to refuse their business, thus making it impossible to collect revenue among other things, if these subjects are raised. It is so bad that even listing the subjects here in passing could get this thread removed.
One cannot even discuss the existence of these issues critically; that is, you can’t even come out against them, let alone support them or write about how to get involved in them. The political correctness has even extended to the fact that you must lie about the age at which you began your journey into BDSM if it is under certain ages – a puzzling issue, since age of consent varies so much from culture to culture.
This refusal to allow discussion is the same issue that can be shown to greatly increase the risk of contracting STDs through lack of education. The US, with it’s powerful Christian Right, is one of the worst offenders, and still has a high incidence of infections; Australia, I am happy to say, is one of the better ones in this respect, with a very low incidence of infection, and it seems clear that the highly disparate levels of public education have much to do with these differences.
Now, as I said above, I’m not interested in debating (yet again) the rights or wrongs of the Iraqi war, nor of the ins and outs of sex education. What I am concerned with is the attitudes that seem to lie behind both, and behind the absurd levels of political correctness that disallows any discussion of these ‘taboo’ subjects.
Denial is a powerful tool for self-delusion; one only has to look at the number of supposedly celibate Priests who try to deny their sexuality only to have it break out in entirely inappropriate, and often unethical and illegal fashions. Keeping people ignorant, a key theme among those who criticise the so-called education systems in place in Western culture, is a tool of power, but leads to the sort of ignorance that allows racism, sexism, and blind patriotism.
How many Westerners would be supporting the war on terror if they knew the real story, if they were taught the slightest bit about the economic imperialism and religious bigotry the West has followed in the third world and against the Islamic cultures, an economic and cultural war that has led to enormous, unnecessary poverty in non-Western cultures and an abiding anger and helplessness in the face of this overpowering economic and military strength? How many young people would be blithely promiscuous if they knew the dangers of mixing with high-risk partners?
It is especially galling on a site like this to find people who so cheerfully back the US policies when their own personal, private sexual behaviour is so at odds with the Christian moralism that is so evident in US Government circles. These moralistic prohibitions are part and parcel of the same tunnel vision that justifies economic and military warfare against the ‘others’, the arrogant belief that the US has a God-given right to manage the lesser races’ lives, and a God-given right to tell their own population what they can and cannot discuss, or do with consent and privacy.
I use the US as my exemplar here because it is the most openly fundamentalist Western Government, but the kinds of people who run this government can be found in every culture. The ayatollahs are the same breed; many of the Catholic hierarchy, throughout history (look at the Inquisition, for instance); both sides of the Irish, Israeli/Arab, Sri Lankan, Serb/Croat, and countless other religiously-driven conflicts are led by such people; the Maoists of Communist China, the Stalins and Hitlers of the last century. They are a breed, a bastard, mongrel breed, and they have always been with us.
I could find many other examples, but it is only the Western versions, and especially the US, which incorporate economic fundamentalism with religious fundamentalism, being governed currently by a bunch of ‘reptiles of uncommon greed’ (can’t remember the source of that quote unfortunately, an American nonagenarian woman of some note) whose religious leanings are as fundamentalist as their economic prescriptions. They will destroy us all, eventually.
What’s the point of this? Well, ranting and venting are an end in themselves sometimes, and that is part of it. But it was also to a small degree prompted by Mercnbeth’s thread on setting up a lobbying organisation to attempt to protect lifestylers from the excesses of public and official opinion. I suppose it is a cry (with faint hope only of any actual effect) for the members of such sites as this to actually make their money and their voices count. Show the reptiles and neanderthals that their time is past, vote them out of office, boycott them out of business. If a bank says to a site, don’t talk about these (unmentionable) subjects or we’ll close your accounts, then as members of the site remove your business from that bank and tell them why.
Many Americans on these and other boards realise that what your current government is doing is curtailing your rights to freedom of speech and private behaviour under a pretence of Security and/or Morality. Even if ideologically you are a believer in free enterprise (and I have no argument with the profit motive, just with fundamentalist versions of it) and the rights of America to rule the world for its own good (Manifest Destiny, thank you Dulles, may you rot in Hell), surely you value your own personal freedoms and rights enough to put aside our ideological differences? Yes, I am a radical (not a Liberal or a Socialist, which are two entirely different things anyway) and at the opposite end of the spectrum from Republican and Democrat ideology (which are the same thing under different names and with slightly different foci only), but we also share what I believe is a universal right to think and act as we please as long as we harm nobody else. And the freedom to discuss whatever subject we please without fear of punishment.
Grandpa Lash
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Sex without D/s is about as pointless as D/s without sex
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