On the one hand: in general, welcoming immigrants is a good thing, and welcoming refugees and asylum speakers is a moral imperative. On the other hand: there are genuine reasons to think it’s not possible to welcome all immigrants who would like to immigrate.

For one of those reasons, we have what seems to have happened in Cologne and elsewhere in Germany. I emphasize “seems” because accounts differ.

The New York Times yesterday:

As 2016 neared on Dec. 31, however, some 1,500 men, including some newly arrived asylum seekers and many other immigrants, had instead assembled around Cologne’s train station. Drunk and dismissive of the police, they took advantage of an overwhelmed force to sexually assault and rob hundreds of people, according to police reports, shocking Germany and stoking anxieties over absorbing refugees across Europe.

“We were just pressed on all sides by people,” recalled one victim, Johanna, 18, who agreed to speak by telephone from Lake Constance, Germany, where she lives, only if her last name was not used, fearing hostility, particularly over social media. “I was grabbed continually. I have never experienced such a thing in any German city.”

It’s not a trend anyone should want to introduce, is it.

Much is still hazy about that night. But the police reports and the testimony of officials and victims suggest that the officers failed to anticipate the new realities of a Germany that is now host to up to a million asylum seekers, most from war-torn Muslim countries unfamiliar with its culture.

Working from outdated expectations, the police made a series of miscalculations that, officials acknowledge, allowed the situation to deteriorate. At the same time, both the police and victims say, it was not a situation any of them had encountered before. This was new terrain for all, and just one taste of the challenges facing Germany and its leader, Chancellor Angela Merkel, to assimilate a huge new population in an atmosphere of dwindling tolerance and volatile politics.

Lale Akgun, 62, a Turkish-born analyst who has lived in Cologne and worked on integration issues for decades, said in an interview that the New Year’s Eve incident highlighted the growing tension between those who see the new arrivals as a source of enrichment and those who see them as a burden, or even a danger.

What about the people who see them both ways? What about the people who think some of the new arrivals will enrich while others will burden? What about the people who frankly don’t know which will be dominant?

Another woman who was there, Sara, a 25-year-old from the Bavarian town of Aschaffenburg, said the situation was still precarious at 4 a.m., when she arrived at the station with a girlfriend. Hundreds of what she described as “foreign” men “began to circle around us,” she said, agreeing to speak only if her last name was not used, also for fear of being attacked over social media.

“I grabbed my girlfriend — I do social work with women who are affected by violence — and told her: ‘Don’t look any of them in the eyes. Keep hold of your purse.’ Then I got frightened, told them ‘Leave me in peace’ with a hand gesture — anyone in the world understands that.”

Sara said that she and her friend decided to seek safety outside the station with police officers, who were themselves helpless. “I never experienced that a policeman says, ‘I would love to help you, but I can’t.’ That was really the worst,” she said. “Who should I turn to as a woman? What should I do?”

Wouldn’t it be nice if women were considered and treated as human beings everywhere in the world? So that male immigrants and refugees would be no more likely to gang up on women than anyone else?

Chris Clarke points out that we don’t really even need a lot of deep background on the armed men occupying Malheur Wildlife Refuge. What they’re doing is stark enough on its own.

Actions speak louder than words, as they say, and in this case the group’s action says it all. They seized land that belongs to you, and now you can’t go there. And they say they’re just getting started.

I suppose this would be more obvious if they had seized the Grand Canyon or Yosemite or Yellowstone, but it wouldn’t be fundamentally different. It’s public land, and they’ve grabbed it, and now we can’t go there. I once knew a dedicated birder who spent two weeks there, his entire annual vacation from his job as a zookeeper.

The Malheur militants want a system of special rights for ranchers, and the rest of us can just butt out. Ammon Bundy says the Malheur NWR should be disbanded, and its lands handed over to a preselected group of local ranchers for their own use and enjoyment. They would establish Roman-Empire-style latifundia across the west, extensive tracts of essentially private land where a few families reap the benefits of public subsidies, and the public that pays those subsidies isn’t welcome.

It’s the familiar whimsical US version of socialism, i.e. socialism for the rich. We bail out the bankers after they destroy the global economy, but they don’t bail us out even when it’s our life savings they swallowed.

The Malheur occupation is taking place in a larger context. In addition to Bundy senior’s ongoing resistance to paying his bills, there are increasing calls to privatize public lands all over the West. Some of those calls are coming from people who have clearly spent too much time reading Infowars, but some come from well-heeled representatives of the foundation-funded right.

Chris discusses the history of land and ownership in the US, from the fact that it was all grabbed from the original occupants to the perversities and otherwise of the Homestead Act.

But despite a few sales by the railroad companies, and the above-mentioned Homestead Act violations, ranchers continue to this day to rely on public lands. As essayist Bernard DeVoto put it in his 1947 Harpers’ piece The West Against Itself,

The Cattle Kingdom never did own more than a minute fraction of one per cent of the range it grazed: it was national domain, it belonged to the people of the United States. They do not own the range now: mostly it belongs to you and me, and since the fees they pay for using public land are much smaller than those they pay for using private land, those fees are in effect one of a number of subsidies we pay them. But they always acted as if they owned the public range and act so now; they convinced themselves that it belonged to them and now believe it does; and they are trying to take title to it.

I wonder how they managed to convince themselves it belonged to them. Something about the American passion for the hamburger, is it?

It’s long been a truism that no industrial sector has been so coddled, with so little economic benefit in return, as public lands livestock grazers. The entire public lands ranching industry generates just three percent of the beef produced in the U.S., and accounts for less than one percent of either jobs or income even in ranch-heavy states like Wyoming and Montana.

That’s despite significant federal subsidies. In 2016, it costs $1.69 a month to graze a cow and calf on BLM or Forest Service lands. That’s somewhere around a sixth of what it costs the Feds to administer the grazing program, and as little as a tenth what ranchers pay for their livestock to graze on private lands.

The Federal government also spends an undisclosed amount — certainly well into the millions of dollars each year — on killing predators ranchers fear may be targeting their livestock, said campaign being administered by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Wildlife Services division.

BurgerKing.

Ammon Bundy and the rest of his band seem stuck back in a 19th Century that never actually happened, where ranchers are “the people” and the actual people who might want to hike, camp, or watch birds on land they own are considered jackbooted thugs, good only for paying the bills and then staying away, carefully keeping to the front side of the No Trespassing sign.

As it happens, the socialist songwriter who penned This Land Is Your Land had something to say about that. Most of us learn just the first two verses of that song in grade school, but there are many, and one of them goes like this:

As I went walking I saw a sign there
And on the sign it said “No Trespassing.”
But on the other side it didn’t say nothing,
That side was made for you and me.

At least as long as we’re paying the bills.

And buying the burgers.

Oh hey, look at this – a news story from Egypt in October 2006.

CAIRO: As Egyptians began their Eid Al-Fitr holidays last week, rumors of a wave of alleged sexual harassment tainted the joy of what is usually a family-oriented festive occasion.

The wave of harassment, manifested by public groping and touching of women accompanied by pushing and shoving and even pulling at headscarves and shirts, has stirred dismay among outspoken young women and men across some popular blogs.

Across these web spaces, which provide a free forum of expression for many, bloggers posted and shared pictures of incidents in which crowds of men harassed women.

In one picture, taken in the downtown area and posted on Misr Digital blog, a sea of men surround a single girl, the caption reading that they were groping her as she tried to squeeze herself free but the picture is inconclusive.

Another picture shows a shop owner blocking the entrance to his store, as dozens of men huddle around, with a caption explaining that the aforementioned girl had to hide in the store to escape harassment.

Sound familiar?

Seen on Facebook today:

Being lumped in with women by being called “female-bodied” is insulting to me. So, maybe if you dont want to insult people on your wall then you should heed the words of trans people.

Yeah, really – how gross to be lumped in with those disgusting people, women. What an insult.

Also how dare you say “female-bodied”? There is no such thing. Forget all that business about how sex=bodies and gender=everything else – that’s out of date. A person whose gender identity is male has a male body because that person is male, so obviously HIS body is male. Apologize or be evicted from everything.

The Washington Post reports:

The Supreme Court found Florida’s unique system of imposing a death sentence unconstitutional on Tuesday, saying it gives power to judges that is rightfully reserved for juries.

The decision united the court’s liberals and most of its conservatives, who voted 8 to 1 against the system employed by a state that’s among the leaders in imposing capital punishment. Florida has nearly 400 inmates on death row.

400! That’s downright Saudi.

It seems likely that the ruling will have limited impact outside of Florida, because no other state has exactly the same procedure. Alabama, another state with a higher-than-average history of imposing the death penalty, allows a judge to overrule a jury’s findings about whether the convicted person should be put to death.

And the Florida legislature is planning to fix what it sees as a problem, so that the state can continue killing people.

Leaders of the Florida legislature, who gathered in Tallahassee for their annual session, said they will quickly change state law to meet the high court’s specifications.

“The Supreme Court has impeccable timing,” House Speaker Steve Crisafulli (R) said.

I love it when legislators make capital punishment jokes, don’t you?

The BBC yesterday on the Cologne attacks on women:

The men suspected of attacking women in Cologne on New Year’s Eve were “almost exclusively” from a migration background, mainly North African and Arab, an official report says.

…

Addressing state MPs on Monday, [North Rhine-Westphalia state’s interior minister Ralf] Jaeger criticised police for not calling for reinforcements on the night, and also for the way they informed the public about the investigation in the days after the events.

His report details how a group of around 1,000 men of North African and Arabic origin gathered on 31 December. Smaller groups formed, surrounding women, then threatening and attacking them, he said.

These groups were predominately made up of North African men who had travelled to Cologne from different cities.

There’s one new element, that I heard from other sources yesterday too:

Monday’s report into the attacks in Cologne says that the combination of group sexual violence with robbery had not previously been seen in Germany.

It notes that similar crimes took place in other parts of Germany on 31 December, including in Hamburg.

The report describes a modus operandi known as “taharrush gamea” in Arabic, meaning group sexual harassment in crowds, and compares it to incidents reported in Cairo’s Tahrir Square at the time of the Egyptian revolution.

Sex attacks on Tahrir Square

Friends of mine say that’s real, and that it started a couple of years before the Tahrir Square attacks. A new technology, enabled by the new technology of Twitter, perhaps.

Another high up Catholic dude explains that women are really irritating, so irritating that sometimes men are forced to beat the shit out of them.

Braulio Rodriguez, who is the Archbishop of Toledo, spoke to his congregation about relationships at a sermon held in Toledo Cathedral on 27 December, and his comments were later written up in the Our Father parish bulletin.

He criticised ‘false marriages’ and ‘quickie divorces’, and said that the root cause of domestic violence was a woman’s ‘disobedience’ to her husband.

Oh yes? So if I go to Spain and make my way to Toledo and track down the archbishop and tell him to do something, I can hit him with a baseball bat when he refuses?

The comments were met with anger by thousands across Spain and protests were held across Madrid.

Rodriguez was accused of having ‘medieval views’ and ‘inciting violence’.

One woman said he ‘should be locked up’.

Last year, 56 women were killed in Spain because of domestic violence.

Tell the archbishop something he actually cares about.

Originally a comment by Carlos Cabanita on If you say “I’m not Charlie,” you are not a liberal.

I agree. How come Western liberals love their liberties so much, conquered through centuries of bloody wars and revolutions (and we aren’t halfway through, I think), but for the oppressed people of the rest of the world they show the middle finger?

Stay with your mullahs, accept your theocratic dictators, hide under your burkas and leave us alone! As long as you let us play our world chess and get cheap oil to finish poisoning the planet, it’s all right for us.

This position is imperialist, the same as that other one that demonizes Islam as an unhistorical evil power that threatens the West and against which all neocon aggression is justified. It’s like the good cop-bad cop routine of the enhanced interrogation (torture).

I’ve seen the Maghrebi women working in a Paris saturday morning, happy to show off their miniskirts and fashion. Paris gives them a taste of freedom, so precious we can’t imagine, because it’s scarce. Returning home they have to cover again, but they were able to taste a bit of freedom and it’s addictive. So those defending the rights of the religious Islamic patriarchic men want to police them even in France, under the pretext of respecting their culture. Why respect the culture if we don’t respect people?

If we denounce the terrorist attacks of Islamists, we are accused of playing into the neocon discourse. If we denounce the imperialist “war on terror”, we are accused of supporting the terrorists. The only solution is to take a clear stance against terrorism but also give support to those of our sisters and brothers who fight for freedom and human rights in the developing countries and among the migrant communities. After all, they are the only hope that their countries one day would become really democratic, progressive and peaceful.

Despite all the obfuscation happening now, this position will win in the long run, I hope.

The building of healthy working nations, with increasing openness and civil freedom is the only way of development that works for their societies. That’s what they have been doing all along, as soon as they managed to come out of the colonial stranglehold. Look at all those Latin American countries. Who liberated them? Themselves. Who torpedoed their independence and wealth all the way? The US.

Who scuttled the Sukarno Indonesian government in a terrible bloodbath to impose Suharto? Who chased Mosadegh to enthrone the Shah? More recently, who destroyed Libya? (No, they did not destroy the Qaddafi regime, they destroyed the country with Al Qaeda troops under the command of NATO military cadres and covered by the attacks of their Air Forces.)

Now the US/NATO is trying to do the same to Syria, after destroying Iraq (once more, they did much more than destroying the regime, they ruined the country).

Why do I say all this? Because racism, as much as it is prevalent in Europe and the USA against the Muslim immigrants, is not what stings the millions that are still in their countries. It’s imperialism.

And I return to Obama. He gloats that the US is the mightiest country in the world. Sure. And shows his hands red with the blood of the people he has been killing in illegal covert wars and drone attacks. His hands are not cleaner than Bush/Cheney’s, they are perhaps dirtier. Nobody knows, it’s all secret now.

So fuck him.

Hmm.

A new publication, in Cultural Studies <=> Critical Methodologies.

Intimacies of Rock

Ethnographic Considerations of Posthuman Performativity in Canada’s Rocky Mountains

Here’s the Abstract:

This essay engages feminist science studies and theories of performativity to inject with dynamism familiar figurations of static being. Through the modalities of ethnographic writing, memory, and embodied experience, I enact a lively engagement with Canada’s Rocky Mountains. By shifting the way we understand this unique, constitutive feature of the Canadian West, I suggest an approach to ethics that expands categories of agency, disaggregating it from realms of human exceptionalism. Through the analytic of performativity, I attend to the dynamic and agentive capacity/ies of glacial bodies, mountains, and lichen—nonhuman bodies considered passive and inert by prevailing epistemologies—to make/materialize meaning. I animate the argument that what we call nature is not a passive, immutable surface on which culture is inscribed, but rather is the production of active, agential practices, each containing divergent wills to power immanent with the capacity to make cuts of their own. The aim of this writing is to think through how mountains, and other such complex living systems, might pose a necessary series of questions to prevailing epistemologies and systems of epistemological capture.

I’m particularly interested in the part about the dynamic and agentive capacities of glacial bodies, mountains, and lichen, and the description of them as nonhuman bodies considered passive and inert by prevailing epistemologies. I’m deeply curious about the non-prevailing (the marginalized, the minority, the Other) epistemologies that consider rocks and mountains active agents. I’m very curious about what kind of will to power a mountain can have. I also wonder how feminism comes into it.

Bad news from Pakistan:

Pakistani officials said at least 14 people have been killed in a bomb attack outside a polio vaccination center in the southwestern city of Quetta on Wednesday. The attack appeared to target police, and came before vaccination teams were due to launch a three-day immunization campaign.

Nobody has stood up to say “we did it!” yet, but al-Qaeda is suspected.

Militants have claimed that polio vaccination programs are a front for espionage or used to sterilize Muslims.

Islamic clerics have told their followers that the West conspires against Muslims, and that they use a substance found in the polio vaccination to sterilize Muslim men.

The clerics also point to the case of a Pakistani doctor who was said to have run a fake vaccination program for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to help track down al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden.

I think the US has admitted that last item.

Senator Ayesha Raza Farooq, head of Pakistan’s anti-polio program, says fewer people are falling for the propaganda used by Islamist extremists.

“Far fewer parents are refusing the vaccine, while the number of newly infected children so far this year is less than 40,” the polio chief told the German news agency dpa.

However, Pakistan is still at risk, as more than 35,000 children are said to be without the polio vaccination.

Last year Pakistan declared a national emergency when a record 306 cases where tallied, the highest since 1998.

Of polio – a horrific disease.

Sarah Ditum at the New Statesman:

Daria Pionko was supposed to be safe. Or safer, anyway. That, at least, was part of the thinking behind the “managed prostitution area” established in the Holbeck area of Leeds in June 2014 and officially announced the following October. It was also a tidying-up exercise, in response to locals’ concerns about living alongside street prostitution. By suspending the laws on kerb-crawling and soliciting between seven at night and seven in the morning in one non-residential part of town, Leeds City Council hoped to draw all the city’s outdoor prostitution to one unobtrusive place.

Alongside this effective decriminalisation, a Sex Work Liaison officer was appointed to work with women in prostitution, who are often (and reasonably) too fearful of the law to appeal to it. On top of this, outreach workers reported that the area made it easier for them to bring them health and social care to women in prostitution. If you have any concern at all about the wellbeing of women in prostitution, those are both excellent developments – as is the release of women from the threat of prosecution, breaking the grim cycle of punishment and crime that catches so many.

But – in spite of that, Daria Pionko was found unconscious inside the managed area, and was pronounced dead on arrival at the hospital. She’d been beaten on the head and face. She wasn’t the only victim of violence.

In September 2014, Abdul Fulat picked up a woman from the managed area and subjected her to a prolonged, violent sexual attack. Two months later, Anthony Riley raped and robbed a 27-year-old woman who had been selling sex there. Ten months after that, the council declared the managed area “a success”.

The violence can’t be surprising to anyone, I should think. Even if the managed area is packed with cops (which it isn’t), the cops don’t oversee the actual fucking. The john ends up alone with the woman.

Yet in official documents about the managed area, the punters are astonishingly absent, gently muffled in circumlocution. “Consider the place where the sexual transaction happens as the place where there is most risk for sex workers,” runs one recommendation from the evaluation, as though danger were a matter of geography: it’s not being away from the managed area that creates the risk, it’s being isolated with a man who has paid for sex and feels entitled to take his satisfactions from a female body…

Because the problem with prostitution always comes from one thing without which it could not exist at all: the men. A man who pays for sex knows that the woman he’s paying anticipates no satisfaction from the encounter beyond a financial reward that she may direly need (after all, there’s be no need to pay if she was having sex for her own genuine pleasure), and yet he doesn’t find anything obnoxious about purchasing her consent. Maybe it’s even a turn-on for him. How much do you have to dehumanise a woman to think it acceptable to use her like that? How much easier to be violent to someone you already see as inferior?

But at least the neighbors aren’t disturbed.

I saw a ridiculous item on Facebook yesterday, comparing Obama urging reform to gun laws while surrounded by children with Hitler urging reform to gun laws while surrounded by children.

Our friend Stewart found and translated an item from the Deutsches Nachrichtenbüro, 21 March 1938.

A new weapons law.

Berlin, 21 March. In the latest edition of the Reich law gazette a new weapons law is announced which was recently decided upon by the Reich government and which replaces the defensive weapons law of 1928, as well as a series of weapons directives from the emergency period.

The new law is the result of an examination of the weapons law in order to see which relaxations could be made in the current legal situation in the interests of the German weapons industry, without endangering the maintenance of public security. The pre-condition of any relaxation of the current weapons law must naturally be that the police authorities remain in a position to prevent without hindrance the acquisition and possession of weapons by unreliable persons.

The obvious fundamental point of ensuring that weapons are not possessed by enemies of the people and the state, as well as other elements that pose security risks, will be taken care of in the new law by enabling the police to forbid such persons from acquiring, possessing or using weapons of any sort. As this makes it possible to forbid any ownership of weapons considered undesirable by the police, it was possible to permit, among other things, a relaxation of the restrictive directives, in order to permit an improvement of conditions which would benefit the economic situation of the public in general and particularly that of the German weapons industry and the workers employed in it.

Thus, the acquisition of weapons will in the future only be possible with police permission, as far as pistols or revolvers goes. The necessity to obtain a permit to purchase ammunition is no longer in force.

The restrictions on the free circulation of cutting or thrusting weapons dating from the emergency period are, for the most part, rescinded.

In other ways, too, the law contains a series of relaxations compared to the current law. Of the many other new points, one should mention the basic prohibition on selling weapons or ammunition to those under 18 years of age. In addition, the granting of a permit for manufacturing or acquiring weapons will be linked to being of German nationality, to personal reliability and to functional aptness. Jews may not receive a permit.

The provisions of the new law, which goes into effect on the 1st of April this year, are supplemented by a comprehensive set of rules by the Reich Minister of the Interior, which has also been published in the Reich law gazette.

“Deutsches Nachrichtenbüro”, 21 March 1938

Not quite what Obama is suggesting.