One more time folks-

There is no magical piece of clothing that will save you from oppression. A bikini is no more freeing than a burka, and vice versa. Women all over the world, in every kind of clothing imaginable, have been raped, harassed, groped, cat called, killed, etc.

There is no magic piece of clothing because clothing is always just an excuse or a symptom, and not the cause of abuse.

We will know we are free when a woman, any woman, anywhere, can walk down any street naked as the day she was born and not be bothered. Since that day is still very far off, arguing over the merits of one form of clothing over another as tools for liberation is silly.

The clothes don’t dictate the oppression, the oppression dictates the wardrobe.

Who says feminists hate men, or that women aren’t visually stimulated?

For Gidget Commando- Cade Courtly (how have I been missing him on my tv?)

And since I tend towards the very British when it comes to imaginary crushes:

And from the best spy show ever (Spooks) :(Ruth watched one episode of this show with me and her immediate comment was something about how I was totally having gay sex fantasies about these two- and she was right)

And the ONLY thing that make the Twilight movie worth watching is this guy- granted he is totally breaking the french rule for age difference (half your age plus 7) and my own personal “if they can’t buy their own drink they are too young” rule. But he’s still pretty to look at.

Leave your lusty requests in comments.

It should not be the only option available to poor young people. It should only be performed by people who truly want to do it, and not people who are only selling their bodies into service because safer methods of making a living are unavailable. And the people that choose to perform these kinds of jobs should have every single measure of protection available to them.

then we have to have public option NOW.

And we need the public option for the exact reason that insurance companies are afraid of. If people have the option of choosing a non-profit based, government run system where merit is measured by health outcomes rather than profit margins, then they will choose the public option just as soon as they can. And insurance companies will fail.

And I think that is a good thing.

I’ve spent the last 24 hours feverishly writing, discarding, rewriting, and finally finishing 3 sample pieces for some actual paying freelance work. Sample pieces are currently with the lovely Ms. J for editing. Then they shall be sent off into the blogosphere where hopefully my (much dampened) dazzling wit and clever insights will win me some pay.

And my brain is hurty now.

So friends, bloggers, country-people, lend me your links. I need entertainment and to not be required to string comprehensive sentences together.

Consider this and open thread. Lurkers, please feel free to de-lurk and say hello. I promise I won’t bite.

We don’t value work.

We value money. That’s not the same thing. We disdain those who make less than us and worship those who make more than us, but we don’t value the actual labor of people.

We value investment, which is not work. We value finance, which is not work. We value interest, also not work. We value the people who does these kinds of jobs, the pushing of money from one place to another, not because of the work but because of the money. If those same men were pushing something less important around, like a broom on a dirty floor, they would not be valued so highly.

So here’s a little econ 101 lesson for you. There are 3 segments of society: business, government, and the rest of us who are both consumers and laborers. Economists will tell you that all three are inter-dependent, (well libertarians will tell you that government is superfluous, but they are idiots so we will ignore them) and that you need all three sections for a society to work.

But they are wrong.

Both government and business need us, the laboring consumers. Without us nothing gets made or bought, no taxes get paid or votes get cast. Armies don’t exist, business meetings aren’t made. When we don’t work, the economy fails and governments tumble. When we can’t buy, the economy fails and businesses falter.

But we still exist. Even unemployed and broke. We are the thing that the entire system is dependent on. We can, and have lived, without trade, without rulers. We need them less than they need us.

That is what Labor day should be about.

People have died to prove that point. We don’t remember, and we are not taught in school, but neither business or government has ever gone gently into labor reform. People usually have to die first. They died so that we aren’t locked into unsafe buildings. They died so that we could work only 40 hours a week instead of 72. Children died (and still do) doing horrible tasks for tiny pay that no adult would ever agree to.

Our labor is important. And there is no reason why a full days work shouldn’t be enough to provide for the basics, when a full days labor now provides 20% more productivity than it did 30 years ago.

We did that. But wages don’t keep up and when times are hard we pay the price. We are not the ones being bailed out with massive government funds and getting bonuses for failed ideas. We get pink slips. We can’t get our government to provide for the basic health and safety of us laboring consumers by instituting single payer healthcare. We are asked to make the sacrifices of our time, our health, our families, but we do not reap the benefits of those sacrifices. That is for the business class alone.