Damian M. Schloming ideas and information

Naomi Wolf on rape: "...ours is increasingly an age of geopolitics by blackmail."

This website is to allow me to present intelligibly my thoughts and insights on various social, political, historical and even scientific issues I've been studying in the past two years. 

Some of which I have background knowledge of due to having been involved with and interested in various political movements many years ago. 

My political viewpoint leans towards libertarian, except that I am not completely happy with the way some of them think. Libertarians want limited government and civil liberties. As a matter of principle, that is excellent. But then libertarians seem to suffer from this ingrained bias of Western Culture that you can somehow intellectually decide that government "should be" a certain way and then the perfect society can then be achieved by some legislative body sitting down and crafting some written rule decreeing that that is how society is to be from now on.

 

Actually, I think government and the larger society it is embedded in is more like some kind of living beast that you can train or that can morph in one direction or another, but it can't be so easily manipulated or changed as we think. Written rules don't have the exact effect they literally intend, but instead enforcement of the rules and all sorts of other considerations regarding government bureaucracies results in all sorts of ripple effects or unintended consequences. As a result, the most free society does not necessarily result from the one with the nicest and most free sounding written constitution or constitutional rights guaranteeing liberty. A very good example of this issue is the liberal Warren Court expanding all sorts of fifth amendment procedural and technical criminal protections for defendants. Liberals saying they want to do this might be arguing this is to help the poor. The opposite is the truth. This is to help defense attorneys, and why is that a bad thing? Because criminal procedures and technicalities of the liberal Warren Court only resulted in defendants having protection IF they could hire an expensive enough attorney to do a good enough job PRESSING them. Public defenders are part of the corrupt court system, they deliberately do a bad job so as to make sure well heeled defendants find it worth their while to pay extra. Huge sentences ALSO give well heeled defendants more incentive to pay extra. Thus, defense attorneys representing rich criminal defendants have a vested interest in maintaining the strict sentencing policies responsible for Mass Incarceration. Furthermore, there was a law school bubble which burst, and now law schools are doing poorly because lawyers are not finding it worth their while to spend so much money on a law degree. Fact of the matter is, those liberal Warren Court protections indirectly increased legal fees for defense attorneys, thereby contributing to the upward pressure on college tuition and law school tuition, simply because the amount of money attorneys could make from a law degree made it more worthwhile. 

It also is true that the regulatory state increased in many other ways, increasing demand for attorneys in other spheres besides the criminal justice system. But I am going to talk about the criminal justice system here for now to use it as an example.

This is just one example showing how a policy that, examined in the most superficial way you think it's designed to help criminal defendants overall in the long run has the exact opposite effect. Because these protections are ones that only can be accessed by those with the money to pay for top dollar attorneys. And, it isn't always necessarily related to the facts of the case. The attorney usually has an incestuous relationship with everyone else in the court system, so much so that basically if you pay the right attorney enough money, you will get off because he is friends with all the judges and prosecutors, and parole officers, etc.

And for me to say that could lead to others thinking it is rather awful to have a court system so incestuously corrupt. Except, these are all nice people who know each other and court systems have ALWAYS been like this, more or less. And they always will be this way. Government is incapable of being perfect. Understanding its inherent imperfections such as this are necessary when it comes to avoiding passing laws which interact with such a culture in a way to produce very bad outcomes.

 

After all, we have always had government and, for some reason, it would appear if we always have had it, that is because we need it. The inner workings of government are so awful, you discover after you observe it, it can easily lead many to think we should just abolish it. But, given that that is impossible, the best alternative is to understand it as inherently flawed, and realistically think of how to make things "the least bad."

This is what I have thought for a long time, yet only recently have I stumbled across some law professors who subscribe to a movement called "legal realism." It turns out they think exactly the way I do, and see the same flaws in our society (or in the thinking of popular culture which leads to wrong-headed policies in our legal system) that I see.

Oddly enough, they seem to describe themselves as leftists yet they are not the kind of ordinary mainstream leftist most people would understand to be "of the left." Which is strange because I never would have thought of myself as a liberal -- but not a conservative either. But maybe this is because of certain strands of liberalism I have been exposed to which are quite awful. 

In any case, why categorize oneself? As I study and learn more about society, I like to share various insights and not limit myself to any one "box" or "category" that I pigeonhole myself into.

OK, so I have been commenting on various websites regarding cultural issues, and been at times drawing upon my own experiences with gay community abuse and rape to help "inform" my opinions or insights in some way. And it has become desireable, given the whole political correctness issue, for me to post documentation and evidence proving that the experiences I allege happened really did happen. 

However, there are A LOT OF THEM, and there is A LOT OF INFORMATION, and this is a long complicated convoluted story, with tons and tons of evidence I could produce -- in which case, how do I organize it? Or how do I begin to organize it?

This all is much more difficult for me in light of the fact that the abuse I suffered was very severe, and there is such a thing as post traumatic stress disorder and suppressed memories. Except with me I don't really suppress a memory, I just don't want to think about something, but one wants to think about something or needs to when having to coherently explain one's experiences. 

And it's painful. One has to try to make one's audience understand what really happened, which is best done by thinking about it in a way that constitutes reliving it, in which case one wants to do the mental equivalent of "averting one's gaze" and just burying certain memories even while allowing oneself to remember other memories out of context. 

This is because some of what was done to me was really twisted, I must say. But, actually, the burden of fully describing the depth of the cruelty is not fully on me, I don't think, simply because maybe later on I can simply quote from some others who have articulately described abusive situations in ways I feel captures it. 

In any case, I'll just say, the need to avoid thinking about certain details has led me in my wordpress account to gloss over certain issues. Sort of like I am whitewashing a few things, just because it is simply too bad, some of it, and I am just not going to go there for now. 

And that is that. 

Here is the link to my wordpress account, which starts to tell of my experiences:

http://dmschlom.wordpress.com 

One has to ask oneself, why would a lot of people go so far out of their way to be so outstandingly cruel? So much so, one can instantly see it's an art and some are geniuses at abuse? 

I will leave you to speculate on a piece by Naomi Wolf criticizing the handling of the Dominique-Strauss Kahn rape case here: 

http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2011/05/23/a-tale-of-two-rape-charges/

And, unlike the stereotypical "rape witchhunt fomenter" argument you tend to expect from most feminists (combined with requisite outrage), describes the corruption of rape as being linked to an era defined by "geopolitics by blackmail." 

We now live in a world in which men like former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer, who was investigating financial wrongdoing by the insurance giant AIG, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and Strauss-Kahn — whose efforts to reform the IMF gained him powerful opponents — can be, and are, kept under constant surveillance..., [where] policy outcomes can be advanced nowadays, in a surveillance society, by exploiting or manipulating sex-crime charges, whether real or inflated.

In other words, ours is increasingly an age of geopolitics by blackmail. Why, after all, were U.S. operatives asked to secure the “biometrics” and DNA of subjects abroad, as some of the U.S. diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks were revealed?

Looking at it this way, one can suppose that while some people might be naturally more cruel than others, if the amount of money one can derive from blackmail is proportionate to the potential scandalousness of a crime, motives of greed will inspire a great deal of creativity among certain sociopathic people with really sick minds. 

Now, when Naomi Wolf first wrote this column, I have to say I suspect she was probably somewhat on the forefront of this issue. Namely, few have broached the topic before. On the other hand, note that, since then, the resignation of Pope Benedict of the Catholic Church was accompanied by a "Vatileaks" scandal involving allegations of the Catholic Church compromised by "outside influences" acting upon a closeted gay network (or gay mafia) that was vulnerable to blackmail, all of which adds a huge amount of additional material to this "geopolitics by blackmail" theme.

NEXT: 

SUMMARY of my own personal experiences which has led to a unique interest in these issues....

https://damian-schloming.squarespace.com/summary/