and previously on Twitter*

People don’t like it when poor people write about poverty. We can’t possibly be the experts on our own lives.

It’s not the same thing, having poor people write about their condition, as it is having women write about feminism or POC writing about racism or PWD writing about abelism.

I think the reason for this is that everyone likes to think they KNOW what poverty feels like. Everyone except the highest ups has had that period where money was tight and Mac and Cheese was the only thing on the menu (or Top Ramen cause milk and butter for Mac and Cheese is expensive).

But this is generally a temporary situation while in school or between jobs or just after divorce. There is still hope of better things to come. There is a way out, sooner or later.

Real poverty is hopeless. It is the elimination of choices. It is being the stupid rat in a maze without a door to the cheese. It is a pit of despair with no way out.

So I ask myself, when reading other people who write about poverty, does this person know what the fuck they are talking about? Are they coming from a place of privilege, oblivious to the realities but trying desperately to sound like they care, or do they know, they way I do, what it feels like to have the Welfare office question your living arrangements to make sure you aren’t hiding a boyfriend with a paycheck so you can get food stamps for your kid?

This doesn’t mean the non-poor can’t be allies, but it does mean that they should sit down, shut up and listen real hard when an actual poor person tells them they’re wrong. Just like with all the other isms. It’s an oppression folks, and the people who understand it best are the oppressed.

*You trying writing several thousand posts over the course of many years and see if you don’t become a fricken broken record.

all that will be left of health care reform is a mandate to buy health insurance.

No single payer, no public option, no medicare expansion. No affordability, or price controls, or end to cherry picking.

Just a mandate to buy a flawed product from corrupt companies that have no interest in health or care.

There’s some change for ya. I never thought I’d say it, but at least Bushco didn’t want to charge those of us without health insurance for the privilege of not having to deal with the insurance companies.

So Haloscan is going away. I have 13 days to either pay the 10 bucks to keep my comments and transfer them to something called echo or find another free comment plugin that will let me import all the old haloscan comments. Not having internet access means I can’t spend the required hours searching the interwebs and reading reviews and playing with the template to find a new platform.

So peeps- advice, suggestions? Do you use a free commenting service that you like? Anyone using Echo? Is it worth the $10 (please remember that my income this month is about $100 – so $10 is ALOT of fricken money).

Things I like about haloscan- the power of the edit. I like being able to replace dickweed’s misogynist comments with songs about their tiny penii. I like that when the internet is gone away I can check haloscan comments on my phone (though i can’t comment back on my phone)so even when I’m lost in space I can see what you all are saying.

Things I don’t like- the totes anonymous nature of it. No screen name required, no email required.

18 months ago, had the same hullabaloo been made about Obama and the Dems lack of, well, Demmishness, I would have jumped for joy. Whoopee. People are paying attention. Finally.

I find myself in a bit of an odd spot at the moment though. My old self would have been all over Violet’s Justice Party. Sign me up- I’ll hand out flyers.

Current me sees the whole idea of Politics (capital P)as a lose lose lose proposition, especially for people like me (bottom of the pyramid poor poor poor).

There is no magic lever. There is no good combination of shiny hair, bright smile, and proper thinking to make politicians and politics workable to me.

Politics is the way we distribute power. People like me never get power- ever, unless we take it ourselves with a loaded gun. Then we become the oppressors. Nice trick there- power is very protective of itself. It makes those who have it into monsters who will protect it at all costs, regardless of who they were before.

But bullets are expensive and I am

Sure, yeah, there are lots of proggy types who talk a good game about expanding access blah blah blah. They’re the same ones who want to dictate our shopping lists cause us poor dumb slobs don’t know how to choose our own food. If we can’t be trusted with lunch, we surely can’t be trusted with power.

You darling peeps and your vote clicking got me the 3rd highest number o’votes in the 3 Quarks Daily best political writing contest.

And fan girl me is all “OMG- Tariq Ali is gonna read my post!” (Well maybe- 3Quarks Daily is picking 6 to 9 posts of the top 20 to forward to him, but I gotta hope that the voting influences it a wee bit.)

You peeps rock the casbah. Many many many thanks.

So here in the land of no internet I have had to resort to such old fashioned methods as newspaper reading and talking head watching to get the news.

In the local paper the there were 2 stories recently.

Story 1: (not local) a man lies in an emergency room waiting room for 90 minutes. During that time 3 homeless people steal his watch. The man dies.

Story 2: (local) A police car pulls up to a a car wash late one night to find 3 kids (a 15 year old boy, a 13 year old boy, and a 12 year old girl) trying to rip off a vending machine. The police officer chases them, and tries to TASER the 15 year old and the girl runs to where her mom is parked.

The mom is single.

The family is black.

They are poor and the mom is unemployed.

The entire family is arrested and charged with grand larceny, including the mother. Yes, they are charging a 12 year old with grand larceny.

What is the purpose of these stories? It is to reinforce the idea that stealing is bad. Common sense right- stealing bad, not stealing good.

Common sense for who though?

For the 3 homeless people who stole the watch, common sense is finding a way to eat that night. A dying man’s watch might provide it.

For the family? I can think of several reasons those kids might have been out trying to steal from a vending machine, one not terribly noble but common one. I was a kid once, what kid hasn’t tried to rip off a vending machine or tried to shoplift a lipstick. Kids are kids because they don’t have the fully functional brains of adults.

The other reason is tragic.They are poor. Their mother isn’t working. They are hungry, or the lights have been shut off, or the rent is due, and the easy money from a vending machine seems like temporary relief.

But the spectacle says “Stealing is bad”.

What is stealing? Stealing is about property rights, ownership, control of resources. If you steal a little, common sense says you are bad, not deserving of human rights. You are a scared black teenager who deserves to be tasered for committing a horrible crime on an inanimate object.

Nature disagrees. Nature tells us to survive. However you can, you must survive.

We ignore the human issues. We ignore that a man lay dying in an emergency room for 90 minutes while havering a heart attack and being ignored by the doctors and nurses. We ignore that because his property rights are more important than his life. Should we ask him? Would you trade that watch sir, in exchange for life?

We ignore the poor hungry family, the violence of an officer of the state against a child committing a crime so small that most of us did something similar. A crime that hurt not a single living being. We ignore that those kids whose lives were awful before the vending machine incident have now lost each other, and their mother, and their freedom.

This is common sense. Stealing is bad. Well stealing small things like a watch, change from a vending machine, a couple hundred bucks from a convenience store is bad. Steal big, extort a couple hundred billion from the federal government or a pension plan, or electricity customers and you get bonuses. Property rights before human rights. Property rights for only those who own enough property.

This is the spectacle. This is not real.

The thing about Afghanistan is that it’s damn near impossible for an outside force to take it. India gave up on it long ago. You know what the name of the mountain range Hindu Kush means? Killer of Hinuds. The Brits couldn’t do it at the height of empire. The Soviets failed.

Now I may be skipping the Roman empire- I don’t know that they even tried for it, but the only successful occupation of Afghanistan that I know of was Persia under Cyrus, Darius and Xerxes and that was because of the fundy Zoroastrians in Bactria.

So forgive me if I am just a wee bit skeptical that this whole increase troops to decrease troops strategy will work, or the idea that to save Pakistan we have to conquer Afghanistan I mean the Taliban.

History is on my side, after all.

What I would do, if I was queen for a day- would be to pay for every girl between the ages of 8 and 18 to go to boarding schools where they would learn practical skills like medicine, engineering, etc. I would pay their families for the loss of their manual labor. I would send the boys to school too, but I wouldn’t send them to a boarding school(boys don’t need to worry about acid attacks to the face just for learning how to read).

Within a generation you would have educated women with earning power and the ability to choose a husband with liberal ideas or support herself and her family without a husband. Those men who hold dear to ideas of honor killings and child brides will find themselves without anyone to marry, and without anyone to marry they have no sons and no power.

That’s how you kill the Taliban and other fundy, extremest religions (works for the polygamists in Utah too). Not with guns, but with school.

And if you want to save Pakistan- I suggest the same methods there.

Did that sound bitchy and demanding-oops.

Being off the intertubes- I couldn’t tell you all to GO VOTE FOR ME at 3 Quarks Daily. Voting ends tomorrow December 9th. I could so use the 1000 bucks, see post below.

See the list of nominees here and go vote– vote early, vote often. Baby needs new shoes and all that.

You may (or may not) have noticed my recent disappearance from the intertubes (again).

My lovely family has been footing the entire cost of housing and feeding us for the last 3 months. We are not a cost neutral addition to an already pinched household.And the internet is an expense they didn’t have before we got here. They’ve already got a house they are trying to save from foreclosure (think predatory lending + one of the few homes that isn’t upside in a mortgage in the state of Florida and you can understand why a bank might be keen to get it from them)and more out of pocket medial expenses than you can shake a stick at. It’s bad, but they took us in anyways.

I need help, to buy groceries, to pay the internet bill and get it turned back on, to play Santa Claus for the kid and for these people who took us when we had no where else to go. I also need the internet back on so I can find work. There isn’t a lot of it out there, but what I am qualified for requires me to apply online.

So if you’ve got some spare kibble- please throw it in the donation box.

The other day the Auntie was talking about the movie The Burning Bed. I have not seen it, but it made me think of In the Bedroom which was a great but horrible movie.

I am a big fan of the great but horrible movies, they are probably my favorite genre. These are movies that you NEED to see, that have important messages or give a concrete image to something horrific, that make you think and squirm and feel uncomfortable, but are well crafted, excellently acted and just incredible. Movies like Sophie Scholl: The Last Days or 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days.

We need a word or a phrase for the great but horrible movies. Help me out people? And please feel free to leave your favorite great but horrible movies in the comments.

On that note- I just watched The Last Enemy on Hulu last night and thought it was pretty good.