I am being quiet

I am being quiet about the whoel Seal press bullshit/appropriation of BFP's voice/the silencing of BFP's Voice by Hillary Voters thing becuase I don't want to start off about Ren and Belle's general bullshit because:

A) I don't want to center something about white people that shouldn't be centered around white people because that's what the white people want me to do really.

B) I don't want to get into the habit of mocking people suffering from mental illness, and NPD is a mental illness as far as I'm concerned, even if the whole "being in a co-depedent relationship with The Seelhoff and the rest of the Nuns Who Say 'Ni!'*" thing isn't a mental illness (get well soon you two).

and C) I think I've proven with both Marcotte and chasingmoksha that I pretty effectively suck at the whole "teaching potential white allies that it doesn't cost you anything to not be a racist douchbag", especially in the face of Ren's intermittent illiteracy thing (and get well from that too hon, you have nothing but my pity atm).

So I'm just leaving it for hte moment, and hoping that BFP comes back when she's hungry rather than doing that whole Obi-Wan style "turn into a large blue ghost, appear randomly to despence advice".

Which you know can only lead to BA breaking her finger when BFP appears unexpectedly while BA's flicking the bean and some poor white ally getting stuck playing Whoopi Goldberg to BFP's Patrick Swaze and translating her for the betterment of other POC.

So I'm sending helaing vibes (well, I'm not actually sending vibrators, because they don't grow on trees you know, but I am using healing vibes at the moment, srsly, this one is allegedly a "back massager" for instance. And if being a white ally doesn't mean "showing largely hollow and meaingingless support for POC while avoiding inconveniencing myself" then I honestly and sincerely don't know what does**) and doing what will best help WOC in this chunky period asshole white ladies are throwing at them I.E. avoiding actually giving them more problems.

Just think of me as a Rodent Cheerleader - a mouse with little pompoms in its forepaws, dressed in a miniskirt and doing the splits for no satisfactory reason.

* So called because while they're probably fine with shrubbery, the whole political lesbian thing points to them having severe problems with honest to god bush ifyouknowwhatImean...

** Because I have a room temperature IQ (celsius, not farenheit), duh.

My policy on Hillary Clinton

I know this is really belated but I just want to say one very important thing:

Of all the stupid, poorly thought out down right mentally retarded ideas I have ever had the misfortune to witness being put forth in my entire life, the idea of Hillary clinton actually getting nominated is the most stupid by far.

Let me just lay this one out for folks who don't get what I'm talking about here:

The first, and for me the worst, problem with Hillary is that she has no policies, and her "message" is... there's no message, for fuck's sake, a goddamn Mime is better able to communicate what they're passionate about than she is.

So basically she's running on a platform of "vote for me!" period, full stop, end of message.

But wait, what about her voting record?

For the patriot act, both when it was foirst put ot vote and then again in 2006 when it was up for renewal(!), which means that even if you accept the "everyone else was doing it" nonsense rationalization that most dems throw out when called on doing what amounts to wiping their ass with the consitution and civil liberties, Hillary actually then went out and actively approved of it the second time around when a lot of otherwise spineless dems felt they could get away with being absent or actually voting against it.

She took a day off when the bankruptcy bill was put to the vote - despite being vocally against it, so not just a douche who hates the poor, but a two faced douche who hates the poor.

And as for the iraq war, well, can you say "for it before she was against it?".


The only democrat who's managed to brown nose the bush admin's worse excesses more than hillary is basically Lieberman - she is in short, not a nice woman, and she's married to the guy who set up a nasty little extra-legal holding facility for HIV+ haitian refugees, so when people discuss whether or not her time as first lady counts on her resume (it should in my opinion) they should bare in mind that they're basically discussing whether or not she's partially responsible for all the nastiness and bastardry Bill pulled off and which laid the ground work for the Bush administration to be as bad as it has been.

But wait you say, who cares about "idealism" and "litmus tests", you'll vote for any democrat just so long as they can beat the repugs? (go blue team go! We'll win the meaningless trophy of hollow authority this year!)

So you won't be voting for hillary basically?

because that's the thing - even the ol' cliche ridden, stupid as hell "pragmatic" voting strategy means Hillary is to be avoided like the fucking human plague she is. It's actually one of thsoe weird, once in a blue moon occurences actually: everyone from centrist tools to Radical progressives can coem together in their mutual hatred of Hillary.

The trouble, pragmatically speaking, is that the right wing has spent hte last ten years, at a conservative estimate, turning Hillary into the human avatar of their myriad strawliberals and strawfeminists so that by this point she's basically just a woman who's spare time is spent having unprotected sex with terrorist commumuslims and then aborting the resulting preganacies just for fun, and putting forth all the skeevy flag burning amendments and acceptably hysterical anti-video game legislation she has put forth in the past few years (because they don't have anything important to deal with in government these days, because it's just one of those slow decades you know?) will only achieve one very very simple fact: those who'll care about your actual voting record will hate you more, and those who won't care, won't care because you will always be "hitlery" in america's eye you vinegary backwash of crotch pus.

However, you may notice that this raises the small question of, if she's so fucking unelectable, why the hell did Edwards drop out and not her? Why, in short, did she get so fucking far if she's so "unelectable"? Surely the very fact that you're worried enough by her remarkable success to finally bother to slam her like this disproves your central thesis?

Let me make this clear then; I have found no one who would vote for or has voted for hillary clinton who is not also a complete bastard of some kind.

Case in point: Heart AND Ann Coulter AND Rush Limbaughn have all endorsed her.

Now that pretty much proves my point, but bellatrys mentions a ladder-pulling Latina bus driver and this I think pretty much represents the demographic that Hillary has inadvertantly tapped into.

Basically there are uncomplicated racists and there are complex racists. the uncomplicated racists work on the principle that if you're not one of Us you're one of Them, and then they set you on fire and rape your culture and children (not neccesarily in that order).

These bastards vote republican.

the complex racists are the sort of people who "aren't racist but" or are into the general fun and games of being a ladder pulling ethnic group members of one kind or another, often with a side order of Cosbyite waffles rounding off their specific bastardry.

These people are the "fence sitters" (who are actually solid democrats, have always been solid democrats, and are, in some instance at least, most probably Kos himself taking on the form of one of the lost soul's his vile demonic masters require him to collect each year) democrats have been playing too for the last couple of election cycles, and these people would rather knaw off their own limbs than vote for a black guy.

And while it may seem horribly reductionist to basically just call people who vote for hilalry racist, ladder pulling authoritarian brown noses, but it's the only thing that makes sense.

She's a terrible woman, she's a terrible politician and undoubtably smells of vinegar.

She's someone who normal non-idiot people can't even vote for, and even among idiots only a very special kind of idiot who ensure that "the race isn't about race" (which is why everyone keeps mentioning how race isn't a factor) can hold their noses long enoguh to vote for the Evil Creature of the White. Though maybe it isn't so impressive to find out that mouth breathers are kinda good at holding their noses for long periods of time, but you know what I mean. They're too stupid and horrible to be nauseated by the thought of voting for the vile alleged human basically.

And anyone trying to shovel some crap about her being "the feminist" choice can suck my wazoo - Obama is at least someone who wouldn't personally vote for parental consent laws or the repealing of Roe, even if he'd be perfectly fine with them being made into law as long as other people voted for them - because he's got that whole upperclass liberal sophistry thing going on, you know, no one but him exists, and so anything that happens in politics is just a point scoring thing and people's lives aren't, you know, at stake or anything.

But hillary? Hillary would personally enjoy watching women who survive illegal abortion being melted in a vat of acid as a form of execution. She's just that evil basically.

And in case you think that I'm going too far, maybe engaging in a bit too much hyperbole, let me just point out that I tried to think of something to make Hillary less likeable, and for a second I thought that, maybe, if she were to put on a strapon and anally rape an orphanage live on natioanl TV, and ended ever rape by dislocating her jaw and biting the child's head off... she'd probably come across as not only more human and down to earth than she does at the moment, she'd also be both more generally likable than she currently is and far far more likely to win an election should she actually get the nomination (Bush has done worse after all).

So unless Hillary rapes an orphanage and bites the heads off a bunch of kids therein, and the DLC still goes ahead and tags her for the presidency camapaign, I swear to god some of the DLC are gonna find themselves awoken in the middle of the night by me giving them an acid and broken glass based enema.

beacuse if Hillary gets tagged for the Dem's candidate, then we know for certain that the DLC is intentionally throwing these elections as some of the more cynical out there have been guessing in a half joking fashion. And that makes them accomplices in the Bush Admin's evils.

And vici french get vici strung up by meat hooks and stabbed by local children as A-grade edutainment about not selling your soul for fucking peanuts.

Do Not Want Dammit.

Puppy Swallowing: a metaphor for the democratic party

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baka to the left of me, hentais to the right, stuck in teh middle with you, oh interdimensional mallet, my love

Just posted this over at Hugo's post yonder:

Given how much ground Jessica was covering, every topic she talked about got, in some sense, only a little of what it deserves

You haven't understood your critics.

The problem is not how many pages the WOC section got, though the idea that the book is made up of about 200 pages of what by deductive reasonsing must be "white american feminism" (what ever the hell that is in actual fact, though I'll just ignore it right now and assume that anything that hopelessly parochial is not a "good" kind of feminism in and of itself) and 10 pages of "WOC feminism" is somewhat alarming even if that was the actual criticism being laid at the damn godamn fucking book, which it most certainly is not. The problem is that the fucking book wasn't inter-fucking-woven with the fucking POC "section", a thing it needs to have done for the simple fucking reason that it's 2007 going on 2008: We should be beyond little seperate but equal ghetto chapters in "feminist" primers, we should in fact be beyond the very notion that WOC's struggles are some how NOT equally and far from seperately as much the struggle that white women go through, even it sometimes zigs for WOC where it zags for white women, the essential effect, and essential answers will mesh and interweave as the fuckign text of FFF should have done.

Of couse that's been said already by the POC who've been routinely and consistently ignored during this whole debacle, and it's largely been replied to with the same missing hte point reply again and agina: it's targetted towards "girls" who are mostly going to be white.

Except it's not the WOC who need to be told that Feminism is letting WOC down, because Duh-oh! Cuz strangely enough they kinda already know! what with the "living it" and the "needing white women to pick up the fucking slack already on their end thankyouverymuch". It is the very white girls with their white barbies in their white schools who'll be going onto white-with-tokens colleges and work places eventually just like Jessica did, who need to hear THAT sort of feminism, who need to be taught THOSE truths.

Jessica, and her ten page chapter, don't let WOC down, hell no, she's let the women the book's supposedly aimed at down.

It's empowering to be there for those of our sisters when they need our support, and it's empowering to not be like a cat on the stairs tangling up their feet when they need to be moving. And this book, with it's silly token chapter is gonna break a lot of WOC's necks because a lot of white girls grew up without learning that the WOC can't stroke them right at this second, and to be please be getting with the out of underfoot now like! because they need to be getting down those stairs in a condition that is still kinda breathing and moving and stuff.

but you want practical advice to improve your shit, okay. You need to learn, and that's not something we can just tell you, or teach you in 5 easy steps, it's something you've got to work at, and if I was you I would take the coming semester as an opportunity to learn stuff yourself. Focus on moving away form the WOC/white women dualism you've got going on, and which Jessica's book is packed with, maybe interlacing each lesson with WOC writings and perspectives in a way that isn't too forced. work at finding the ways, and there are a fuck ton let me tell you, in which POC's experiences cross over with women's experiences under patriarchy. You won't do it perfectly all the time, but you can't just throw your hands up in the air and expect WOC to use their magical negress powers to distil a lifetime's worth of nerve deep life experience dealing with the problems white people and women produce and pour it like orange juice straight into your brain. If you can get a non-white person, ideally someone you're already friends with, who you can ask questions to, that'd help, but you can't treat them like a lab rat or tes subject. You want ot listen more than you talk, you want to hear what they're saying more than you judge or assess. You want ot try to feel what they feel without the lenses you view the world through as a white person, and with the lenses they view the world through. You got to be able to see the way they're treated by your fellow white people, the odd looks, the way white people pause and change hteir body language slightly when they're noticed by the white people. the way and whens of them not being noticed at all, that invisibleness that their skin tone gets them.

Like I siad, it's not something you can learn in a day, or even a year, and it's not easy because you have to find the wiring that makes you act in certain ways and view things in a certain way, and then find out where it leads and what it's actually doing, exactly, and where it came from, before you even think about getting rid of it.