I'm lifting extensively from this article on one Frances Swiney (of whom I'd never heard before stumbling across this minor goldmine of delusionary thinking) because it combines several of my recently favorite themes: eugenics, Theosophy, Anglo-Aryan racial hubris, and all-purpose dumbass pig pucky. Let's get started then, shall we?

Eugenic ideas and language were... widely employed by English feminists to buttress their arguments for an ideology of liberation. Some feminists used eugenic language to construct an ingenious argument that women actually represented a higher stage of evolutionary development than men, and were thus eugenically more "fit." This "fitness" or superiority in turn would call upon women to regenerate society.

Seeing as Frances was born in 1847, we can see today how well this program has worked. To be fair, however, this shortfall is perhaps due to repressive laws prohibiting wholesale castration. Even from beyond the grave, I feel Swiney's pain.

No one made this case more emphatically or persuasively than British feminist, social purity activist, and Theosophist, Frances Swiney... a founding member of the Eugenics Society in 1907... Swiney argued for the biological superiority of women -- a theme she was to develop over the next twenty years in a series of books and articles that combined science with Theosophical mysticism. In her characteristically florid style, Swiney proclaimed that "science has ... abundantly proved that in the mysterious evolution of sex, the male element was first non-existent; and on its initial appearance was primarily an excrescence, a superfluity, a waste product of Nature, discarded or expelled by the female..."

"An excrescence, a superfluity, a waste product" -- hmmm, that pretty much describes how I feel this morning. I'd go looking for a grafik, except I don't think even Google Images would have a (fitting) representation of an excresence. So, pressing onward...

Swiney... cited physician Ludwig Buchner, that given women's smaller body size, they actually had larger brains than men.

Come again?

She quoted Havelock Ellis who posited that women's more delicate and hairless bodies represented a higher evolution than the more simian male...

I'd be tempted to say something here about Giant Hairy Bloggers, were that not a post best forgotten.

As further proving a higher stage of organic development, Swiney culled evidence from medical journals that suggested "fewer female monstrosities are born than male ... idiocy is everywhere more frequent in males than in females" and "men are also more liable to insanity than women."

You know, rhetoric like that drives me insane! So I guess she maybe had a point. The male corner on monstrous idiocy, however, I might debate.

In general, Swiney emphasized that men retained more animal-like characteristics, such as a keener sense of smell, while women possessed "superhuman," or psychic powers... Once more, women were leading the race, this time in the development of a sixth sense.

I smell dead people.

Speaking of whom, I'll spare you most of the stuff about Nietzsche that follows. Academic articles always have stuff about Nietzsche, but it's not usually too important. And neither are they. But they can be fun, no?

English feminist Catherine Gasquoine Hartley was also influenced by Nietzsche, and in works such as The Truth about Women and Women's Wild Oats she argued that women would regenerate the race because they were closer to NATURE, more instinctual than men, and thus better able to escape the stifling confines of a false civilization.

Emphasis mine. As if you couldn't guess.

But wait. Here comes the really good part!

For Hartley, women were "guardians of the Race-body and Race-soul" under whose tutelage "the universal creative energy, no longer finding gratification alone in personal ends, shall at last reach its goal and give birth to a race of new women and new men." ...

The physical culture movement of the early twentieth century tapped into women's Ubermensch fantasies. This is especially apparent in the activities and rhetoric of the Women's League of Health and Beauty, an interwar organization which combined calisthenics and gymnastic pageantry under the inspirational leadership of Mary Bagot Stack. Stack's daughter, PRUNELLA...

Emphasis... oh, never mind.

...was even presented in League literature as a kind of supergirl, the harbinger of the more advanced women of the future...

Yeah sure, Prunella the Supergirl. I get it.

I think.

But actually, this is the really good part.

English women's superiority was not only measured against men, but also against the "uncivilized" and "degraded" women of Africa and Asia. According to Swiney, "the Anglo-Saxon woman leads the van." English women were the most exalted of their high-ranking sex and would be the first to manifest "stupendous change in the reproduction of mankind." European women had already brought the West to its commanding position in the world, Swiney contended in Woman and Natural Law: "For let us reflect for a moment what woman has done already for humanity-in-the-making. Place a native Australian beside a Greek statue, when Greece was at her apotheosis of physical and intellectual achievement, and realise by a practical illustration what the mothers of the race have accomplished in anatomical structure alone. Compare a Madonna of the Italian school at its zenith with a negress of the African coast, and it will be gauged somewhat how stupendous has been the task of the mothers of mankind." In Swiney's formulation, Australians and Africans are not part of humanity, but lesser creatures whose degradation naturally highlights the superiority of white women. This view was typical of nineteenth-century feminism, which, by stressing the inferiority of colonial women, justified Western women's mission to uplift and comfort their oppressed sisters.

The White Woman's Burden, I guess you could say. But here I need to jump over a bunch of wordy verbiage to get to the really really good part. (What can I say? This thing just kept getting better and better.)

The growing popularity of spiritualism and what today would be called "new age" philosophies among middle- and upper-class English women at the turn of the century was in part a response to the "biology is destiny" arguments of science. Recent scholarship demonstrates that occultism attracted many feminists because it emphasized that women were more spiritual than men and were destined to lead men upward, away from the physical and the sexual.

Oh yeah, baby, lead me upward! Oh White Madonna Goddess, please! Gimme some-a that Old Time Occultism and save me from my inner-African male malevolence. Oooga-booga.

Amen.

from: Eugenics, Spirituality, And Sex Differentiation In Edwardian England: The Case of Frances Swiney by George Robb
source: Journal of Women's History, 22 September 1998
via: HighBeam Research
Copyright © 1998 Indiana University Press

I picked up a book tonight at my local Boulder Barnes & Noble emporium called THEM: Adventures with Extremists by Jon Ronson (pictured at right). Two things made me curious about this book. First, it covers (among others) one David Icke, who seems to be one of the planet's foremost nutjobs. Take a look, for instance, at his DVD, The Reptilian Agenda, about which his own site (worth seeing only for how godawful ugly it is), says things like this:

"While people still argue over Roswell and the extraterrestrial beings apparently found there, African tribes people have been interacting with these ET "gods" for thousands of years, sometimes eating them, as Credo Mutwa did on one occasion with unforgettable consequences."

Credo Mutwa, btw, is a "zulu 'sanusi' or shaman." But nevermind that. I want to know about those "unforgettable consequences." My curiosity is killing me!

But back to Jon Ronson. The other thing that intrigued me about his first book, THEM, is his second book, The Men Who Stare at Goats. Here's a taste from the author's site:

In 1979 a secret unit was established by the most gifted minds within the US Army. Defying all known accepted military practice - and indeed, the laws of physics - they believed that a soldier could adopt the cloak of invisibility, pass cleanly through walls and, perhaps most chillingly, kill goats just by staring at them. Entrusted with defending America from all known adversaries, they were the First Earth Battalion. And they really weren't joking. What's more, they're back and fighting the War on Terror. 'The men who stare at goats' reveals extraordinary - and very nutty - national secrets at the core of George W Bush's War on Terror.

OK, but I didn't see that book on the shelves tonight. I saw the one about THEM. Here Ronson reads a little bit of it...

The road that took me up to the headquarters of Thom Robb's Knights of the Ku Klux Klan was strewn with abandoned pickups and "No Trespassing" signs with pictures of snarling dogs, and the signal on my cell phone had failed along the way. I'd come to see Thom Robb because he was undertaking an unusual task. He wants to give the Klan an image makeover and slide into the mainstream. He wants his own TV show, he said, with jokes and music like David Letterman...

Thom Robb told me that his intention to rejuvenate the image of the Klan was influenced by popular self-help books. He told me his favorite ones: "Successful Positive Mental Attitude," "How to Win Friends and Influence People." He gave me a copy of "The Magic of Thinking Big." He said it had a positive influence on him, and it might on me, too.

When I arrived home, I decided to buy another book, a vicious book that had influenced neo-Nazis for 80 years. It was Henry Ford's "International Jew." Ordering it made me feel terrible, but I wanted to try and understand why these people had hated my people for so long. So I gave Amazon my credit card details. A few weeks later, I logged onto Amazon again, and I was surprised to find a helpful message: "Customers who bought the "International Jew" also bought "Mein Kampf" by Adolf Hitler." So I ordered "Mein Kampf." And when it came, I put it on the shelf next to "The Magic of Thinking Big"...

from: Review: Excerpt from Jon Ronson's latest book "Them: Adventures with Extremists" by Liane Hansen
source: All Things Considered (NPR), 29 January 2002
via: HighBeam Research

An instance of websites without borders. The following takes up a significant chunk of Amazon.com's front page. Just passing it along here. Please donate generously.

Total Collected:	$850,251.48
# of Payments:	17078

from The Washington Post...

Editorial
A Response to Enormity

Wednesday, December 29, 2004; Page A18

THE DEATH COUNT has mounted with a horrifying momentum. The first reports of the earthquake and subsequent tsunami that devastated shorelines around the Indian Ocean spoke of 500 deaths. In Monday morning's newspapers the number had reached 13,000; by yesterday morning 25,000. This morning, the newspapers will deliver the sickening estimate of at least 55,000 deaths -- in Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India, Thailand, Malaysia, Somalia, Maldives and Burma, among other countries. The raw figures are attached to appalling stories: of 1,000 people killed in the Indonesian province of Aceh when a three-story-high wall of water slammed into a sports field during a match; of at least 1,000 people killed on a single train in Sri Lanka that was swamped with waves; of more than 700 dead at Thailand's Khao Lak beach resort, including hundreds of vacationing tourists. One senior Red Cross official in Southeast Asia put it succinctly: "The enormity of the disaster is unbelievable."

This tragic toll will go on rising in the coming days as more bodies are retrieved; even worse, it will grow by the tens of thousands unless one of the largest international relief operations in history can quickly be mounted. The World Health Organization warned yesterday that unless clean water and sanitation can be provided, as many people could die from communicable diseases such as cholera and malaria in the stricken areas during the coming weeks as from the earthquake and tsunami. Just behind disease comes the threat from exposure: There may be 1 million homeless in Sri Lanka alone. Scores of seaside fishing villages, together with their boats, have been obliterated.

Yesterday morning, Fortune magazine published its forward-looking top 10 Tech Trends, the first of which is titled Why There's No Escaping the Blog. For those readers new to the term, "blog" is a sort of portmanteau contraction of bog lemming (synaptomys cooperi), a small rodent of the family Muridae, which also includes mice, rats, and voles.

Although Blogs are well distributed in the United States and Canada...

...their population is relatively miniscule compared with others of the genus Rodentia, and economic impact on agriculture and wetland security is practically nil. So why the sudden interest on the part of Fortune?

Although it only hints at the entire truth, the Fortune article is indeed well timed, since it has recently come to light that radiation leaks at several Federal Laboratories previously engaged in nuclear weapons production and storage has seeped into the water table along the transverse subcontinental rift and from there entered the aquifers feeding the southern tier of South Dakota.

The project, called the Advanced Mixed Waste Treatment Project, will be built at the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory on the Idaho desert. It is controversial with residents in Jackson, Wyo., who fear emissions from the 90-foot smokestack could be hazardous... DOE plans to treat at least 65,000 cubic meters of plutonium-contaminated waste...

Up to 22 percent of the waste would be burned... partly to destroy chemicals that are too toxic to be dumped in the ground or that pose safety hazards. After the waste is treated, it would be able to go to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, an underground waste dump near Carlsbad, New Mexico.

from: Nearby Residents, Idaho Legislature Skeptical on Waste Treatment Facility by Gene Fadness
source: Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News, 20 February 2000
via: HighBeam Research
Copyright © 2000 Knight-Ridder/Tribune Business News

For reasons not yet known to science, this deadly effluent has triggered dramatic genetic changes in one of the smallest inhabitants of the area: the Blog. Specimens have recently been collected measuring up to 30 feet in length and weighing more than the full grown Woolly Mammoths that roamed the same bio-region over 50,000 years ago.

The Giant Hairy Blogs, as they have come to be known, were first discovered in an ATF raid on a right-wing extremist militia compound in Idaho. The skull pictured above -- approximately 10 feet long -- was unearthed under several discarded pickups and a score of broken washing machines. Evidently, the Giant Hairy Blogs have become a favorite game animal of such paramilitary groups, not only for their high yield of meat, but also for their much prized cooking lard.

Now, as Fortune points out with understandable alarm, hunting the Giant Hairy Blogs has spread from relatively isolated acts of neo-nazi eco-hooliganism, and is being taken up by white suburban teens. One group, BloggerBaiters.com, is even breeding Giant Hairy Blogs and importing them in significant numbers into major American cities, where they are released -- for an extra thrill-of-the-hunt -- into Fortune 500 boardrooms.

Merriam-Webster notes the inevitable neologisms this phenomenon has spawned...

Main Entry: blog
Function: verb 
Inflected Form: blogged, blogging, blogger
Date:1999

transitive verb: 
to hunt, or cause to be hunted, the Giant Hairy Blog 
(see also get a life)
intransitive verb: to become stuck, as with a sharp object
such as a spear or spearlike pointy thing

The authors of the Fortune piece note that Bill Gates has appointed Robert Scoble to protect the company from both berzerker Blogs and roving bands of heavily armed Bloggers. "We're glad to have Robert on the job," Gates is reported to have said to a trustworthy source outside a Redmond 7-11 store. "I sure wouldn't want to run into one of these fucking things in the restroom."