Welcome to the dance

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Cross posted from The Red Queen Strikes Again

I was hanging out with The Kid yesterday and we had to go downtown so I could buy some books for a class. We happened to hit the end of the the immigration protest and the streets were filled with people. But not your regular patcholi and piercings protesters, the streets were filled with families, brown families. It was nice, like a parade day but with political impact.

So this led the kid and I to a discussion about the immigrants and the law. Kid was horrified and said “I’ll never be racist”. Huhm. I do my best to make sure that’s true, but I did point out to The Kid that he happens to have been born really lucky. I said “Kid, you were born a white male with American citizenship- this is just luck. There are lots of people who are born lucky and think that because they have luck they somehow deserve the privledges they get and that anybody else can have the same experience they do if they tried hard enough, but the truth is- it’s just good luck”.

Kid thought about it for a while. Then we went into Left Bank books and I got a fantastic little comic book called Addicted to War (I have a 2 page paper on it due tomorrow) and Persepolis. After spending all day reading for my macroeconomics class, I needed something non-school issued to read so I read Persepolis on the bus and Kid read the war comic. He was mortified.

“Mom, we are evil! We are sooooooooo evil!”

“Oh kid, all societies are evil, we just don’t usually hear about how our own society is evil”.

And that’s the truth. We can idealize or romanticize all we want, but all societies have histories (past and present) of violence and war and inequality. And because society is stratified (and will always be. See Michels’ Law of Oligarchy) that won’t change much.

Don’t go thinking I’m all pessimism and hopelessness though. Someone once said to me “The world isn’t fair, but sometimes people can be”. So we work in little bits to make it better. sometimes we take one step forward and two steps back in a weird little dance for justice. But we have to keep on dancing. That was what made me so happy about the protests, people who are usually afraid to dance because of the costs to them (deportation for coming out of the shadows and demanding to be treated fairly) joined the dance.

Welcome to the dance.

Women and Progress

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Who, generally, are the poorest people in the world? Women. Why? Too many answers to list. In this case the reality matters more than the result.

Unless we, meaning our entire population, can come to grips why our mothers, our wives, our girlfriends, our friends, sisters, co-workers and equal contributors (actually women probably work harder, but I have no evidence) to our economies have been and remain such targets of hate, we cannot consider ourselves living in a progressive society.

The only justification I can determine for women’s lesser status is that men are physically 1/3 stronger. Women think differently than men, but difference does not better or worse make. I could list other differences, but the point has already been made.

A major “disadvantage” women have is that they have and continue to be responsible for children. I don’t simply mean that women bear our offspring, I mean that if a man chooses to walk away from his prodigy, generally, the woman must, for many socially justified reasons, assume the feeding, development, clothing, education etc., of her minions. For some reason this glaring inequity is lost on about half of the population. Whether it is from physical prowess, tradition or nature does not matter, women are tied to their offspring. That men have an advantage is indisputable. That they exploit it is unexcusable. It is this same mentality that encouraged trans-Atlantic slave trade: the slavers and its consumers because of geographical luck stood in a better position to exploit a group of people. No matter how defenders of the institution try to justify its use, slavery wronged millions.

In a way the hate men still show women is worse. Slaves were hidden from the view of most, a distant problem that few saw. Women are such an integeral part of our lives, the parties who determine the survival of our species far from hidden from view. The only explanation is that we are still so filled with self-loathing that we need to destroy or at least control the beings that bring us life.

So no matter how many distant planets we discover, what we do with quasars, whether or not we leverage nano-technology, until we progress to the point where women do not have to constantly live in fear, we are no better than the primitive peoples we think we are so much better than

Pro-life or Anti-sex?

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Some of you still seem to be laboring under the misunderstanding that the pro-life folks are really about protecting life. Ha. It is actually an effort to keep women from being able to make their own choices about sex.
So here’s a handy chart (cribbed from Alas, A Blog). Since I can’t seem to de-fuzzy the chart, just click the link and go read the real thing.

And in case you still think this is the overly-paranoid ramblings from feminist, go read about how the next frontier (after baning abortions) is eliminating birth control here.

What has happened since women have gained the control over their own bodies that makes these people so afraid? We entered the workforce, we got better education, we got some financial independance. I am still trying to figure out how those things could possibly be bad for society. All that we want is the same autonomy over our bodies that men have always had so that we can participate in society as equals.

PS- anyone know why the spell check isn’t working? Seriously, I freely admit to not being able to spell to save my life and not having spell check work really sucks.

Oh no you didn’t!

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I started this blog so that the people who I think are cool and have good ideas would have a place to bring them out, discuss, and improve them as well as providing a platform for voicing objection to the current powers that be.

I thought that since I have smart, open-minded, progressive friends that I wasn’t gonna have to give you all a smack down and a primer on the power of the patriarchy. Man was I wrong. After Redd Herring’s comment “don’t let the facts get in the way of a good story” on the El Salvador abortion story, I know I have 2 choices when it comes to you boys- I can give you all the bitch slap you so desperately need and try to remember that I like you while I’m doing it- or I can close this thing down cause I’m really pissed and I don’t want to spend my time getting pissed off teaching people who should know fucking better what the deal is.

I will not play Professor Bitch to you boys more than once- so learn this and learn it now or I am yanking privileges. This is not a blog for “Anti-misogyny 101”- you should know better already.

1) It is different for girls. Flat out. Most boys do not spend every day from the pre-puberty on with the fear of rape hanging over their heads. Just this one fact, that 50 percent of the population knows that at any given moment their body can be invaded and abused and that they will be blamed and scorned for it alters the power dynamic. Most of you boys have never been in a situation where someone could forcibly enter your body and hurt you. To those of you that have been in that situation- you shouldn’t need to have it explained how powerless it makes you.

If a girl is raped- society says she is responsible because of where she was, what she was wearing, what she has done before, what kind of girl she is (see the comments made by Napoli of South Dakota on what kind of girl can get an abortion- only church-going virgins who have been sodomized -and then go back and read the comments about the black stripper who was raped at Duke). We don’t do this to boys. We don’t hold soldiers who get hurt in wars responsible for their injuries (but they we asking for it- they went to war), we don’t blame men who are robbed or beaten by saying they were asking for it by what clothes they were wearing. But girls are somehow responsible for bringing out the animalistic rape urges in boys. Boys are not held responsible for bringing out the animalistic kill urges in other boys.

2) Girls are given 100% of the responsibility for sex and few of the tools to guard from the consequences of it.

If a girl decides to have sex, she is responsible for birth control and the failures of birth control- but every method that might give a girl a chance to choose her own fate is being systematically stripped away. Yet it is biologically programmed for people (men and women) to have sex. We can no more control the desire to have sex than we can control the desire to eat or breathe. Sure, it can be put off, delayed, squelched, whatever- but I think I safely say that only a very tiny minority of adults die virgins.

Right now, today, in this very country, girls are having access to birth control, emergency contraception or abortion services limited on every front. Funding is being cut. New laws are being passed to make it difficult for clinics to stay open. Pharmacists and doctors are not only refusing to provide medications for abortions, but also for birth control and emergency contraception (which is just a really high dosage of birth control pills and not an abortifacent- though you would never know that from the news). Laws are being written so that birth control doesn’t have to be covered by insurance, though Viagra still is.

Now I will make some allowances for differences in anatomy. Girls carry more of the responsibility because we carry the risk. We are the ones who risk our lives and health to have babies. Until there is a major change in biology, girls will be the only ones who carry that risk. Until that time comes- you boys are gonna have to give up some of the power and let us control our own bodies. Pregnancy impacts every aspect of a girl’s life from the moment she finds out she’s pregnant. We have to decide if we willingly give up control of our bodies to another. I know of no similar situation where a boy can be forced to give up control of his body.

It is this ability to temporarily give up the control of our bodies for the good of another that has let society think we should give up control completely. But they (you) don’t get to decide that, society doesn’t get to decide that. The only person who can decide is the one whose body it is.

As an example- pretend that I have a fatal kidney disease. You have the only kidney in the world that is a match. You are risking your health and even your life if you give me your kidney. Your life will never be quite the same afterwards, though modern medicine has come far enough along that the risk to health and life have been drastically reduced. Should you be forced by society or the government to give me a kidney? Should you be placed in jail if you decide not to give me a kidney? You may decide for your own moral or altruistic reasons to give me a kidney out of kindness, but if it’s a risk that you don’t want to take or can’t take, should you be charged with murder when I die from kidney disease?

You boys think that this doesn’t have anything to do with you, or that it can’t possibly get as bad here as it is in El Salvador (or, and this is specifically for you Redd, that the story from El Salvador is not based on fact). Fuck you. No really. Civil rights had nothing to do with privileged white males either, except that they had to give up some of the power they had. Slavery had nothing to do with privileged white males either, except that they had to give up some of the power they had. And the privileged white males that understood that they had to give up some of their power because it was wrongly gained were part of the reason that things changed.

I know you think you have the moral high ground, but I am telling you that choosing to ignore the struggle of half the population to gain control over their own bodies is as immoral as choosing to ignore slavery because you live in a free state.

I don’t ignore the struggles of other people because they are a different race, or in a different country, or because they have a penis. You cannot dismiss the struggle for reproductive rights simply because you will never have to face the fear of carrying an unplanned pregnancy. By doing so you discount half the people on the planet for having less power than you.

Monday Reads

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I’ve always had a thing for the thinning-haired political-economist types (see Jonh Rawls, John and James Galbraith, and Mephistopheles) but Greg Palast could cause me to become a groupie (you say stalker- I say groupie).

So check out what he has to say about the Bush Leaks

Here’s how the law works (and hopefully, it will). The Bush gang’s use of the telephone in this con game constituted wire fraud. Furthermore, while presidents may leak (“declassify”) intelligence information, they may not obstruct justice; that is, send a grand jury on a wild goose chase. Under the ‘RICO’ statute (named after the Edward G. Robinson movie mobster, ‘Little Rico’), the combination of these crimes makes the Bush executive branch a “racketeering enterprise.”

Next, I realize that I am one of the few girls writing on a blog full o’boys who seem to clam up like I’m giving out Too Much Information whenever the topic of abortion comes up. However, I’m giving you all another shot to put your two cents in after you read this horrifying article from the NY Times magazine about what a Pro-Life (forced pregnancy) Nation looks likes in El Salvador. And if you don’t think it can’t happen here, this is what our own domestic wingnuts say in the article:

The legislative battle and its outcome did not escape the attention of leaders of anti-abortion groups in the United States. Rev. Thomas J. Euteneuer, the head of Human Life International, based in Virginia, is intimately familiar with the campaign in El Salvador and says that there are lessons for Americans to learn from it. For one thing, as Euteneuer sees it, the Salvadoran experience shows that all moves to expand abortion rights are pushed through by “elite” institutions of government (the U.S. Supreme Court, for example); by contrast, Euteneuer contends, when the laws are tightened, a grass-roots campaign is inevitably responsible. “El Salvador is an inspiration,” he told me recently, an important victory in what he called “the counterrevolution of conscience.”

Forgive any spelling errors as I am at work and firefox hates me too much to let me check spelling.

Happy Monday

Going Nuclear in Iran

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Just in case the prospect of a new war in the middle east wasn’t enough to curl your toes. The administration, apparently unchastened by their string of glaring failures & absurdly optimistic military projections is seriously considering the use of tactical nuclear weapons in Iran. This is a HUGE deal. It would erase the taboo on nuclear use & weaken the only firebreak that kept us alive for the long decades of MAD. It has very serious potential consequences in the India/Pakistan, the Taiwan strait… Not to mention the potential human & economic costs in the middle east. Be Very Afraid.

“The Bush Administration, while publicly advocating diplomacy in order to stop Iran fro pursuing a nuclear weapon, has increase clandestine activities inside Iran and intensified planning for a possible major air attack…The lack of reliable intelligence leaves military planners, given the goal of totally destroying the sites, little choice but to consider the use of tactical nuclear weapons. “Every other option, in the view of the nuclear weaponeers, would leave a gap,” the former senior intelligence official said. “ ‘Decisive’ is the key word of the Air Force’s planning. It’s a tough decision. But we made it in Japan.”

http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/060417fa_fact

A military insider sounds off against the war and the “zealots” who pushed it

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An interesting article that closely mirrors my view on Iraq being a distraction. I know that it’s something of a heresy in the progressive company that I keep…but I was pro- Afghanistan. In any event, it’s worth a read.

LIEUT. GENERAL GREG NEWBOLD (RET.)

“I’ve been silent long enough… What we are living with now is the consequences of successive policy failures. Some of the missteps include: the distortion of intelligence in the buildup to the war, McNamara-like micromanagement that kept our forces from having enough resources to do the job, the failure to retain and reconstitute the Iraqi military in time to help quell civil disorder, the initial denial that an insurgency was the heart of the opposition to occupation, alienation of allies who could have helped in a more robust way to rebuild Iraq, and the continuing failure of the other agencies of our government to commit assets to the same degree as the Defense Department. My sincere view is that the commitment of our forces to this fight was done with a casualness and swagger that are the special province of those who have never had to execute these missions—or bury the results.”

(http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1181587,00.html)