Religion is a Mental Illness

And finally, New Rule. Someone needs to tell the people who block traffic in the name of a cause, no one likes you. And you're probably hurting your cause.

In case you haven't seen what's going on lately, activists for ending the war in Gaza have taken to gathering on roads and bridges and stopping commuters from crossing. It happened last week in New York and San Francisco, Chicago, Seattle. They also blocked traffic here on the 405 but no one noticed.

What they did notice was this. That you have to be pretty dumb to think that the way to bring people around to your point of view is to make them late to pick up their kids from daycare.

And that's what most normies are thinking: I have a kid. I have a job. And yes, I'm sure there are injustices on both sides in the Middle East, as there are injustices all over the world, but I'm going to be late for work. Something you protesters on the bridge seem to have the luxury of not having to worry about. Which seems kind of privilege-ey. You can glue your hands to the street because your hands don't have to do any work today.

I'm not saying there aren't sincere passions about Gaza, especially among people from the region, but social justice warriors? For a lot of them it seems like it's more about the warrioring than about whatever the cause is. If you really cared about apartheid so much, which Israel does not actually practice - Arabs there vote, they serve in Parliament, they sit on the Judiciary - wouldn't you start with this? With the hundreds of millions of women in the world who live under a true apartheid. A gender apartheid of the most brutal kind?

Are you really speaking truth to power, or do you just think you look cool in a keffiyeh? Which is really just the new Che Guevara t-shirt. Another historical figure you never researched and so think is a hero but was actually a sadistic racist monster fighting for communism, the worst form of government ever.

But these are small matters when small matters when activism merges with narcissism. Less about the cause and more about me. Look at me. Watch me, and if you like the way I'm fighting injustice, remember to like and subscribe.

In February, a sad confused man even lit himself on fire in front of the Israeli Embassy, and in his last Facebook post he said, "Many of us like to ask ourselves 'What would I do if I was alive during slavery?'" Interesting cocktail question, sir, and I guess the right answer is "kill myself." But it wouldn't have actually fixed the problem. If General Ulysses S. Grant had immolated himself and his last words were, "hey Lincoln, are you using that log?"

And then last week, another sad confused man set himself on fire at the Trump trial in New York. So, you can tell yourself you're a martyr for the Palestinian cause, but it's a lot less special when the next guy does it for Stormy Daniels.

I don't want to diminish how sad it is that someone would take their own life for any reason, but maybe from now on, before anyone commits an act of civil disobedience, they should ask themselves a few questions like, "is the most important thing in my life something I hadn't heard of six months ago?" "Do I even know what the fuck I'm talking about?" "Am I really here for the cause, or is the cause here to bring you me?"

Hey, if it makes you feel good to cosplay as revolutionaries, knock yourself out, burn yourself out. Just don't drag Gaza into it. Also, throwing stuff on paintings is just stupid. No one sees mashed potatoes on a Monet and thinks, "he's got a point, I should recycle my cans."

Last week, Google employees staged a sit-in to protest their company doing business with Israel. Their t-shirts said "Googlers Against Genocide," but they could have just as well said "look at me, see me." And Google did see them. To the door. They fired all 28 of them the next day. Yes, Cojones Award coming to you guys next year!

But maybe the question that today's protester needs to ask themselves more than any other is, "why do I care so much about this particular cause?" North Korea starves its people. China puts them in concentration camps. Myanmar brutalizes The Rohingya. Boko Haram kidnaps whole villages of women. The president of Burundi says gays should be stoned to death because the, quote, "deserve it." Nothing? Ukraine?

Maybe if these Google employees had the slightest idea what kind of fundamentalist oppressive assholes they're supporting - Hamas, the Houthis, Hezbollah, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard - they might take it a little easier on the world's greatest monster, Genocide Joe.

Genocide, by the way, is when you want to wipe out an entire people. That's the stated goal of Hamas. That's what "from the river to the sea" means. Hamas would do that to Israel but can't. Israel could do that to them but doesn't. And you know how you could find that out? Google it.

And, not to rub it in, but you know who all this posturing-for-a-cause reminds me of? This fat guy from Florida, who's always pretending that he's all about the cause of making America great again, when plainly he's simply history's greatest attention-whore? He's always finding some new Injustice. From Obama's birth certificate to rigged elections, learning nothing about it and making it personal. So, chew on that my warrior friends. The person you most resemble is the guy who looks like he's always jerking off two guys at once. There it is, I got it in.

"I can only assume the absence of mass outrage from Muslim countries over Boko Haram must be due to lack of coverage in cartoon form." -- @GSpellchecker (Stephen Knight)

Just because you don’t hear about something, doesn’t mean it isn’t happening.

Because tragically, too often, boys and men suffer in darkness.

There is perhaps no better example of this than the horrific actions of Boko Haram, and the countless boys and men they have taken, without trace, and to very little outrage.

For it is not just the education of women and girls that the group are implacably against, Boko Haram are against all Western education, for all people, including men and boys.

For years they demonstrated this through enacting unspeakable war crimes onto innocent Nigerian men and boys, often releasing women and girls, and for years they were ignored by a disinterested world.

Boys disappeared. Men were killed. Nobody said anything.

And certainly nobody especially important.

Then things changed in April 2014, when nearly 300 Nigerian girls were taken, and the world woke up to what was going on.

Celebrities marched the red carpets, political leaders spoke up, Michelle Obama fought for justice, god damn, we had China and America working together for once.

#bringbackourgirls rang out, as it should, and the much awaited outrage and long overdue horror finally took flight.

Most of the girls were saved, and the world went about its business as usual…

The following three years saw not 300 boys taken, or 500… but 10,000, and as before, silence reined supreme.

So who will speak for these forgotten boys?

Who will bring back all Nigeria’s children?

Patterns in Making Victims’ Gender Visible or Invisible in News Media Reporting of Boko Haram’s Massacres and Kidnappings

Boko Haram, a terrorist group based in Nigeria, has systematically conducted gender- based mass kidnappings and killings throughout its history, and these gendered crimes have included both male and female victims. This research examined newspaper articles on Boko Haram’s gendered crimes reported from July 2013 to February 2021, with a focus on the relative visibility of the gender of the victims. The genders of male and female abductees were clearly identified; however, the gender of male massacre victims was relatively invisible irrespective of whether they were men or boys. A failure to report the gendered nature of the massacres may contribute to lower awareness and, thus, reduced security resourcing needed to address such severe human rights violations.

The name Boko Haram can be loosely translated as “Western education is sin” (Sergie & Johnson, 2014, para. 4). The group has strongly advocated radical social and educational reforms throughout Nigeria (Bello, 2021), aiming at eliminating all Western influences and replacing Western education and standards with “undiluted” Islamic laws and procedures that are identical to Sharia. Boko Haram might have deemed offensive any consideration of improving women’s empowerment through education instead of seeing it as a key issue of human rights and development. Thus, in April 2014, the group gained international notice and notoriety for the kidnapping of 276 schoolgirls and the subsequent #BringBackOurGirls campaign promoted by the then First Lady of the United States, Michelle Obama. The crime garnered international outrage and support to seek the return of the girls, of which at the time of publishing, 90 were still missing (Lewis, 2023). Boko Haram also used female kidnapping and suicide bombers as part of its strategy to increase its media coverage (Zenn & Pearson, 2014).

The gendered nature of Boko Haram’s tactics was used before and after the Chibok kidnapping. Boko Haram has committed gender-selective kidnappings and executions against adults and children throughout much of its history. This insurgent group is believed to have kidnapped up to an estimated 10,000 boys and men to be forcibly conscripted or enslaved (Hinshaw & Parkinson, 2016; Topol, 2017) and kidnapped hundreds of women and girls for pressured conversions to Islam, to marry Boko Haram combatants, to be used for sexual and domestic enslavement, or to be used for tactical strategy (Amnesty International, 2015; Omilusi, 2015; Zenn & Pearson, 2014). While Boko Haram has also engaged in bombings where the killing has been more indiscriminate or done based on religion or engagement in secular education, a significant portion of the abductions and killings were gender based.

Academic literature to date has addressed Boko Haram’s gendered crimes with an almost exclusive focus on women, girls, and children. Barkindo, Gudaku, and Wesley (2013) report on Boko Haram’s violence against Christian women and girls, defining gender-based violence as that conducted by males or male institutions against women and girls, thus definitionally excluding recognition of boys and men as victims. Pereira (2018) and Zenn and Pearson (2014) directed their attention to female victims of Boko Haram’s violence and briefly mentioned that insurgent violence is also directed toward men and boys. Pogoson and Saleh (2019) focused on female vulnerability to violence in Nigeria and argued that Nigeria’s security forces needed to prioritize the protection of women from violence. When discussing Boko Haram’s and al Shabaab’s1 tactics, Matfess (2020) omitted any mention of men and boy victims and compared the violence toward women with violence against civilians, thus comparing female gender identity with noncombatant identities. A report of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (2015) on Boko Haram mostly excluded recognizing men and boys as victims of this gender-based violence while also acknowledging in other parts that men and boys were specifically targeted to be murdered or kidnapped. Likewise, Boukhars (2020) identified Boko Haram’s gendered crimes as being solely about the kidnappings of women and girls. In an edited book titled Boko Haram and International Law (Iyi & Strydom, 2018), a section containing three chapters focused on the welfare of girls and women in the conflict while the entire book mentioned the word “boys” a total of three times in reference to incidents of their victimization. The Boko Haram academic gendered victim discourse and analysis relates almost exclusively to females and tends to exclude males. To date, there appears little attention and acknowledgment of the civilian male victims in the literature or discourse.

“As I see it, the fundamental problem is that the majority of otherwise peaceful and law-abiding Muslims are unwilling to acknowledge, much less to repudiate, the theological warrant for intolerance and violence embedded in their own religious texts.

It simply will not do for Muslims to claim that their religion has been "hijacked" by extremists. The killers of Islamic State and Nigeria's Boko Haram cite the same religious texts that every other Muslim in the world considers sacrosanct.

Instead of letting Islam off the hook with bland cliches about the religion of peace, we in the West need to challenge and debate the very substance of Islamic thought and practice. We need to hold Islam accountable for the acts of its most violent adherents and to demand that it reform or disavow the key beliefs that are used to justify those acts.”

-- Ayaan Hirsi Ali