MORATORIUM!

I'm declaring a moratorium on stupid radfems. No existing for a month.

In the mean time here's a time line:

22 june, 2006: I write a blog post pointing out that secret organisations never end well, in response to the revelation that Middle Managers like Kos and John Avarosis had been operating a little thing called "townhouse".

Quoth myself:

Now the thing that occurs to me is, WHY ON EARTH DO YOU NEED TO DO THIS THING IN SECRET!? Come on Kos, even you must be able to figure out that that was going to come back to bite you in the ass at some point, you’re coordinating and holding discussion with a group of left wing and democratic party supporting journalists, bloggers and activists via this mailing list, and you’ve sworn them to secrecy? Why on earth would you do that? Hell-fucking-lo Kos, did you not realize that a “new people-powered movement”, has to, you know, NOT involve an exclusive and secretive group of media peeps holding closed discussion that could effect the wider movement? Did you not understand that a freaking mystic oligarchy is probably not the best way to organize support for the democratic party? Are you not aware that you have justified any rightwinger who now calls you a “stalinist”? You’ve made a crazy right wing insult accurate for god’s sake, even Bill “I invented Gitmo for HIV+ Haitians” Clinton hasn’t done that.

Suffice to say that I am not a fan of secret oligarchies - if you can't run your conspiracy in plain view you probably shouldn't run it. transparency is an issue with such things, as is accountability.

And as with all things, knowing is half the battle. (The other half? Guitar Hero!)

Sometime in 2007: belle sets up a secret email list, for reasons that I can't help but call "abject laziness". From an outsider's POV it sounds pretty much like she just tricked some WOC into acting as gophers because she was too busy to bookmark some sites/type in their URL/follow links around herself - stuff that's neither time consuming or difficult basically, but which nonetheless was sold to the WOC as a sort of safe space for people who get crap thrown at them.

Of course the road to hell is paved with good intentions...

sometime in or around early december, 2007: flamefest erupts because of some stuff Amber starts by slapping people in the head with her racist parents (father or mother depending on what day you ask about it), leading to Donna and M leaving the secret email club, and thus depriving Belle of her two main gophers and thus causing the whole thing to devolve into a "we H8 Hrt" club...but *secret*, because otherwise bitching about Heart starting silly little (open) safe spaces wouldn't be ironic and fucked up.

God forbid someone take the higher ground and keep it for five fucking seconds....

Mid december 2007: Amber runs whining to Bitch|Lab, thus prompting this thread, which manages to make both BL and Amber look like complete assholes.

Some of the points BL makes are valid though, especially the ones about "wow, doesn't actually forming a little posse make everyone who scoffed at Marcotte accusing us of having a secret cabal, kinda look like idiots now huh?"

But Belle disagreed! And so calls BL and Amber self centered (presumably after fixing large brass rings around her head to stop it exploding from mental dissonance) in a post that neither mentions names nor links to anything, thus leaving anyone who didn't already know what the fuck she was talking about in the dark, and making a public post kinda...pointless, nonsensical? One can only assume following the advice she gives in her own post was too much for the poor little lambykins, aww.

Bonus Dilbert Points of course for complaining about how she doesn't have the time for the busy and complex business of moderating the groups she created primarily because she was too busy to just fucking read blogs in the first place.

And there's hte special honorable mention for how catbert there acts as though it's shocking, SHOCKING that BL might have been pissed off at the whole thing, "but we were BFF! I mean you've written a lot about how you object to those inner circle type cliques after having seen it tear apart so many other groups you've been involved with, and I did exclude you from the group, and insult your intelligence a bit when you did find out about it, but seriously why are you acting like such a jerk towards me, jeez..."

Skip ahead a bit, Belle has curled up into her email based womb (again), except the group is now a largely (upper-middle class) whites only affair, the blogosphere's not heard much about this because most of the people involved were hubbloggers - lots of the even smaller blogs tend to link into them, and they link into each other, so posts at BL or my blog don't really spread far because they would have to go through those blogs who have pinky sworn to silence on the matter... for the sake of group cohesion or something else that doesn't make any sense.

That's the slight problem with people who you think are smart, but who then go and set up secret white-only oligarchies; any assumptions you made about them being smart were clearly wrong, otherwise they wouldn't have thought that a secret whites-only oligarchy was a really neat idea.

During this period I'm a bit confuddled. Basically my life since july has gone:

- homeless.

- stay at friend's place.

- Start experiencing rage attacks along with massive stress based crying jags as a result of the homeless period.

- Anorexia goes into overdrive and my period disappears during late august, but fortunately it reappears when I get my eating pattern sorted out again

- Ren randomly insults me, her commenters go all borg-esque on me and join in. As the insults tend less towards "R is being stupid and btichy and needs to get a grip" and more towards "oh R is a terrible writer, everything she says is just wrong" and others that were basically their generic anti-heart comments with my name in place, even if that didn't make all that much sense.

- Due to the sheer randomness of the attacks and my general low self esteem, I flounce and do an impression of Zippy the pin-head. Admittedly not my finest hour.

- find new apartment, start moving in.

- I start blogging again. Amanda starts yet another round of bullshit.

- start new job.

- finally see BL's post about Belle's secret treehouse club and I'm pissed off, but not sure whether to really take it up because while it raises huge warning flags in my mind, just from the basic concept* of an inner circle like that developing, and regardless of the reasons for it, becuase I know from history that such things never stay true to their origins, no matter how noble. And then their's the issue of the massive empathy failier on Belle and Co's parts, I mean, anyone who's read BL's work during the sex wars or burkagate should have been able to tell that BL was going to have issues with such a thing, and for belle to turn around and pretend that it's totally invalid to have issues with such a thing...

And then as I'm starting to think that maybe I can just ignore it, let the whole thing be, Ren's brings the butt hurt.

Not just any butthurt though, we're talking prime A-grade racist butthurt.

With. Sprinkles.

I should point out that this came after another, almost as bad thread; where Ren let her commenter turn her place into a cesspit, and you remember how I accused Marc of humping his recently deceased dog to death? Well it turned out that I actually do have a standard of decency wrt rhetoric.

That level is reached at about the point where, in response to a relatively tame attack post for Ginmar, Ren commentariat suddenly decided that accusing Ginmar of being mentally ill as a way to dismiss what she was saying.

I think the fact that they were using Ginmar's PTSD, which she got from serving in Gulf War 1, as a way to dismiss her was as bad if not worse than the whole using a mental disorder someone suffers with to attack them, because it is ridiculously dehumanizing - and again this was from people, including Belle, who'd talked, previously, about the importance of empathy and how they stood against dehumanizing people and the violence that that leads to, who suddenly turned around and threw all that out of hte window.
So I wade in, as I am want...

Oh no, if Ginmar chose to join up... well it's what she deserved for helping american imperialism and she has no one to blame but herself...

Comment after comment like that. From Ren, from belle, from others who should know better.

And I'm looking around and I'm starting to get that odd prickling sensation on the back of my neck because I suddenly realise that all of her regular commenters are all, exclusively, upper middleclass, and spewing the most hateful classist bullshit imaginable, at women like me who are getting screwed over by the system they benefit from without the costs that we have to endure for their comfort.

Because anyone who pretends that the working class are not given three, equally evil, choices in life, to either join up with the military, turn to crime and get put in jail, or to be slowly killed by the soul destroying working that will, if we're really really Lucky, provide just enough to keep a roof over our heads and maybe put some instant ramen in our stomachs as well, is a fucking evil bastard themselves, who has decided to make themselves complicit in the oppression working class poeple like myself experience.

Because those rage attacks I've been suffering are due to both the way I got treated while out on the streets last year, and the first time I was homeless back in the 90's as well, by other people, and the little voice inside my head, that told me that it was all my fault and that I deserve that kind of treatment.

Because underlying all the oppression people face is erasure, both the willingness of the victims to accept the bullshit notion of some how deserving to be tortured by a system of Hate, and that willingness of seemingly rational human beings to, with out cause or seeming prompting, to suddenly declare that black people are just jealous when they complain, or Latin@s are just being lazy when they demand a human wage. Underlying oppression is a society that is willing to do any, ANYTHING, rather than admit that such oppression exists, let alone that We, that meta-textual Us, is in any way responsible for it.

And after witnessing that bullshit being thrown by Ren's pals with her tacit acceptance, after the shit with the email list, with Amanda's crap again and again...

That's when I saw this at ren's place.

Ren was told by Kate that a term she used made Ren's blog hostile to her. Kate is voicing how Ren's writing makes her feel, in a remarkably polite way, and asking Ren to do something that really doesn't cost Ren.

So obviously ren did what any Ally would do: she declared that she was asian and then started waffling about how she deosn't do Politically Correct while utterly dismissing Kate's expereince of racism, while dismissing the hurt that Ren's words can.

Because oppression of Ren is the One True Oppression, accept no substitute folks.

And the thing I have to ask, in retrospect, given the entire bushel of bullshit is basically this:

WHAT THE FUCK HAPPENED TO THOSE PEOPLE!?

I mean because we discussed that sort of thing, I rememeber conversations involving how to be a better ally that dealt with just that sort of sitaution, and everyone being a racist asshole in that thread has called other white people on pulling that crap so...

I'm looking at the people who are supposedly anti-racist, and who've demonstrated intelligence in the past and who has demonstrated that they know better and yet...

And I've been shying away from this, because like a crap Ally myself I've been afraid, cowardly even, my lifes chaotic, and the amount of emotional investment required to, once again, completely write off people I'd thought "Got It", thought were true allies, not with myself, but with the people who need allies, the people who get it in the neck when people like us don't pull through and don't speak up, and let them come for their children because they ain't coming for us yet, and it turned out I was nieve, stupid, cowardly and blind.

I could stand being personally insulted, because there is nothing any of those scumbags could say that is worse than what I say to myself, and I could stand silliness that was probably going to lead to an epic, mind boggling blowout that would at least be fun to watch.

But then Amanda goes and out does herself, and I see another good writer, not one of the heartless sychophantic hacks who buzz around Ren, for obvious metaphorical reasons, but a good writer, and a strong women, and a good woman, and I see how it affects all those other beautiful and I see these silly little cliqueish types, buzzing around it all, saing not very much apart from a bit of empty posturing that makes promises their hearts can't cash, and I'm torn between vomiting and killing myself, because maybe I did something wrong? Maybe the degeneration of these people from actual allies into pathetic self absorbed racists.
Except I'm still blaming mysefl for other people's failings, and I'm suffering because of their problems, and causing suffering because I'm trying to accomadate the feelings of such losers, and staying silent not for any valid reason, but to maintain some fantastic notion I have that the group that we're all tied up in is worth more than actaully supporting those beautiful women who get silenced while the hacks keep chortling to themselves in their dirty little whites only club.

The hell with that.

You still reading this?

I'll be back on the 20th of next month, and you remember that R. Mildred from waaay back who was kinda awesome, back before everyone turned into jagoffs? She'll be back too. I'm gonna clear my head, sort my self out, make out those clear boundaries between myself and the bastard world that got destoryed at some point, see if I can't squeeze a little more free time for RL activism and then I shall return.

And one more thing:

After burkagate, I vowed to punch Amanda in the face should our paths ever accidentally cross.

After this Seal house explosion let me make this promise; should I happen to bump into Bfp, or BA, or M, or Donna or yes, even Nez, I promise to pick them up and mercilessly soak their feet.

It's a tough job, but someone's got to do it.

Peace out.

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.

Brain and Brain, what is brain?

Uh, sorry about that ren, ahem, anyway...

Poking Heart

This is what a currently in moderation post over at IBTP looks like:

What I am saying is, the issue of woman-only space is a watershed issue because trans activists have made it a watershed issue. It’s clearly important *to them*. And they have, hence, made it an issue *for us*. It is such an important issue that radical feminist organizations — shoestring, mostly-volunteer — have been sued over it, and some have been closed down, or nearly closed down, *by trans activists*. There are important reasons for this which are obvious to those of us who have actually been involved in the discussion. Based on what I’ve read that you’ve written, I don’t think you have *been* part of the discussion.

umm… okay, but that still doesn’t actually explain anything really, I mean, why was it important enough in the first place to make enough of an issue about it to make them have an issue for you to then react to? And more to the point, if there isn’t an actual reason aside form a rather gender binary supporting definition of womanhood, that relies on some belief (and correct me if I’m wrong here) in everlasting spirit penii forever emprivelagemasizing people who, despite having once been born as men, and even socialised as men even as they themselves rejected that socialised masculinity to the degree that they fail to actually identify with at all, actually, as of the moment they’re going to a women’s only space as a fully transitioned woman, have to live as a woman does and also having to deal with a further level of oppression as a result of being transexual and having had the extra experience that neither cisgender women nor cisgender men have of being a transitioning transwoman, in a transphobic, homophobic, and misogynistic society that hates BOTH women and, for want of a better term, gender traitors such as femme men, gay men or transwomen, then what the hell is the overriding point of all this, exactly?

I love the whole idea that transpeople are just spontaneously oppressing cultural feminists to the point where the cultural feminists are forced to actually oppress transwomen back.

It all just happened guv'nor, nothing to do with me, he lunged at me while I was waving this knife of mine around and intentionally forced me to stab him repeatedly, honest!

Why am I hanging around IBTP you ask? Well I would be forced to point out that asking me that is oppresive towards catholics, again.

HAH!

Go Bug Oprah to visit the west bank as she and her Friend in the Military/Industrial Complex, Elie Weisel, tour Israel before putting on a show stopping rendition of "Peace Sells" for maximum disengeopoliticalpeaceificationing during their sold out (in all senses of the word) LiveHate: Tel Aviv Concert.

My other Hoo-Haa is a BlogRoll

Reading up about this whole blogroll atrios huffiness cuffle that may be a frackus or something I am left with one teensy tiny suggestion for Atrios in mind that I think everyone else is, hmmm, I dunno, unwilling or unable to say though they're probably all thinking it:

Get rid of the comment sections at eschaton meester black, really.

Having a blogroll didn't really seem to matter one way or another, but as long as those threads exist in which 500+ people say "FRIST!!!!11!!", I am still fully justified in laughing and pointing to Atrios whenever someone tells bloggers that they need to learn to write better to go up that A list, B list, C list Hut! ranking system.

See also Markos Moulitsa, John Avorosis, Jane Hamsher, Wonkette or Trexy-poo for altenative examples of this phenomenon.

Possessing of an A List status has not even got any apparent correlative relationship with good writing, or informed writing, or even particularly informative writing (Skippy is the exception that proves the rule in that case), however, A List status does somewhat seem to have a causitive relationship to people declaring mediocre, bad and terrible writers who spend their entire time copying and pasting from WaPo and other parts of the MSM and making passe attempts at snark, "good writers".

I swear, every year I hear someone tell people that good writing is neccesary for high status blogging, and yet year after year after year I've seen no evidence to back up this bizarre rumor.

Again I ask: Where For Art Though Reality Based Community? Are we liberal bloggers really so vain as to not see the plank in our own eyes?

*smacks reader on the head with a bamboo cane* Yes! Obviously, Duh.

No More With The Fighting Now Please!

It is an arguement that can only end with tears and no satisfactory resolution! Can we not for once eat the cup cakes of solidarity?



(The first bit does make me wonder how many spartans it takes to lynch one black guy, what wusses, no wonder they don't go for the manwichs, man-on-man action would snap their fragile little aryan bodies like they were so many twigs!)

Once again Donohue declares: "I don't remember jesus mentioning priorities, you hippy"

Pedophiles in the clergy? Never mind that, out with those celibate homosexual priests!

The murders, harassment and victimisation of hispanic catholics by american racists? Never mind that, The Other will wango it's homosexual voodoo at us!

Pedophiles in the clergy? Never mind that, someone mocked the common and catholicism non-specific conflation between the holy spirit and semenal fluids!

The war in Iraq? Never mind that! Sweet Chocolate Jesus!

Yes, Donahue is once again doing unspeakable things to that big old shark he loves to jump.

Unspeakable things.

Look, for all the people who, ala Ann Althouse, like to say "I'm a ___" and then ignore anything that is required to be an actual ___ here's the thing:

A horse in a bowlerhat is not neccesarily a stockbroker.

People know this, really, that news orgs don't bother to pay any attention to this ancient peice of wisdom is not my fault.

And another thing, since the rennaissance, there's been this wonderful invention.

It's called a list.

It looks a bit like this:

Things that Jesus told you to do:

• Love god with all your being
• Love other people as you love yourself

If we want to get really flash, you can even heirachalise the things you're listing, in a numbered list, like so:

Some books of the bible, ranked in order of most relevant to christians, to least relevant:

1. Matthew
2. Revelation
3. Exodus
4. Genesis
5. Leviticus

And if one wanted to, such a list could be used to prioritise actions, like a shopping list, where you might put milk first, so as to ensure that you'd make sure you got some milk before you got say booze, or even a non-essential.

So let's try a third list, priotised and numbered, with the lower numbers referring to actions that are more important for christians to really be a christian:

1. Minister to the ill, and the poor and the otherwise needy
2. Love God (see 1)
3. Love other people, as you love God (see 2)
4. DON'T JUDGE PEOPLE, that's god's duty (see 2)
5. DON'T HOARD WEALTH ON EARTH
6. DON'T KILL PEOPLE
7. Don't fuck children
8. Don't be a hypocrite
9. Treat every day like it's your last
10. Don't presume to be bigger than jesus, unless you're John Lennon
11. And even then, only metaphorically bigger than jesus
12. Be able to forgive judas

DO YOU NOTICE IT SAYING ANYTHING ABOUT CHOCOLATE JESII!? There are bigger fucking fish to fry, and there are actual atrocities being perpetrated against catholics, how about El Paso (TX) or New Bedford (MA) hmm? Do either of those names ring a bell!?

And for fuck's sake, they still throw nail bombs into catholic schools occasionally over in Northern Ireland, but this, THIS and some blogger who has been hired by edwards is what your panties are in a bunch about!?

Even as you're own so called allies in the far right waffle about freaking "death cookies"!? And are pretty much exclusively intent on throw all you papists in the camps along with the homos and sluts and feminists? Come on, did we learn nothing from Niemoller?

Excuse me now, I'm gonna go and repeatedly head desk at the sorry state of christianity these days, don't mind me...

Destructive Criticism Vs. Constructive Criticism: A Comment

A comment left in response to this buffoon:

Admitting bad judgment on your part if you are a rape victim (or victim of some other crime) is also not “blaming the victim”

Well yes but it's completely irrelevent to the issue at hand: which is rape.

We can tell this because... well let's set up two hyperthetical situations where a rape occurs, both of which involve exactly identical conditions and actions on the part of the man and woman, but one has none of this "bad judgement" radiation emitted by the woman, and the other one does.

Okay so one woman is raped, but there's no "bad judgements" involved (let's ignore your rather curiously open ended and generic conception of "bad judgement", which seems to consist of... well... never giving any guy the benefit of the doubt ever and assuming that they're all rapists a priori) on the other hand another woman is raped, same circumstances, same sort of rape, same reaction to the rape as the first time, but there's this "bad" judgement stuff involved...

so?

That's the problem, you and many other bloggers like you have spent exorbinant amounts of time and billion upon billions of pages of text talking about "resposibility" and "bad judgement" and all that jass... the thing is I've yet to see any of you actually provide a point, a woman shows bad judgement this one time; and? A woman slips up and makes a erroneous assumption or makes a mistaken action; yes? What is the point of this exactly?

You see there's two sorts of criticism: one is destructive criticism, whihc is designed to tear down an arguement or person, and then there's constructive criticism, which is designed to help the target improve in some way.

This criticism you and many many others have whipped out again and again, with nearly the same arguements each time mark you, doesn't constitute constructive criticism, because it is useless for preventing rape, on account of it assuming that there is always things that are really accurate "tells" that the man you're with is likely to have sex with you against your will and basically consists of nothing more than conflating asocial paranoia with sanity.

And if we actually apply it in a real post-rape situation, the destructive nature of it becomes even clearer.

Scenario 2: I have just been raped, and I immediately start trying to figure out what tells were presented which I overlook in an attempt to figure out how to avoid such a situation in the future.

What's wrong with this scenario?

Well for one thing, the rapist's tells are unique to him, because everyone is a unique nad precious snowflake. Second off, I've probably gone out with any number of guys who, presented with the exact same situation that this rapist was, didn't rape me yet at the same time, gave off what, in hindsight, would look like a tell when it came from teh rapist - and which would be overlooked the next time I went on a date if I like the guy (and if I like someone I assume they're not a rapists, beacuse I don't like rapists).

This is called sample bias, and when the datum size equals 1, it's pretty much all biased and there's very little actual trustable data to be analysed because your analysis is running off of nothing less than unsubstantiated assumptions. What actually occurs in these silly little peices (which are produced after all news catching rapes) is that people start pointing out things that they think might be common to rapists, or more often, things that were exploited by specific rapists to rape a woman (which have ranged from "getting into a taxi", to "going out in public without wearing something to cover the temptatious female ankle", all the way to the crazy-ville of "being a lesbian") and which are completely useless if you're not being attacked by that singular specific rapist, or if random guess work and social training isn't correct in what it perceives to be "rapist-like" behavior.

And then there's the sheer uselessness of all this destructive criticism for cases of close aquaintance rape that is committed by people you not only know, but in fact have been going out with, or may have even married (which isn't exactly rare you know) because if you're having that sort of relationship with someone, you like them, you not only want to give them the benefit of the doubt, but you trust them enough to enter into a serious relationship with him.

And in fact, what the sort of presumption of him being a rapist would do is poison your relationship, and you would be doing while having no way of knowing if the tells you're seeing are even accurate warnings of him being a rapist.

Which gets to the ultimate problem with these essays: Ever bit of advice they give out is being ignored by millions of women across teh globe as I type, some woman out there is, right now, ending the evening, fucked off her face with a guy she barely knows who is taking her back to her residence, and will proceed to put herself in every situation that might potentially lead to her getting raped.

And in the morning, she will still not have been raped because merely eliminating instances that a rapist might use to rape you, or failing to, is no garuntee that you will/will not be raped.
Because if a rapists really wants to have you, they can distract you for a split second, slip a roofie in your drink, then take you off to the toilets when you're too drugged to stop him, and you'll spend most of the rest of the evening in casualty getting the rips in your asshole sewn up.
Because there are never enough precautions that could ever possibly garuntee that you won't get raped, and so someone will always be able to another variation of this essay explicating how, in that instance where through a wide variety of rather mundane reasons that largely involved you leaving the house that morning, you were in some way responsible for a man slipping drugs into your drink and violently raping you in the toilets.

And unfortunately there are a grand total of two sane ways to react to that information:

1) grab the shotgun, run to the hills, build a logcabin and live off the land avoiding contact with any other human being for the rest of your life surrounded by cats.

2) Accept fate, and focus on actually enjoying yourself considering that at any moment the next person you meet might be a closet ted bundy who'll rape and murder you (and not neccesarily in that order).

So take your pick of reactions, because I don't care because I don't personally feel a pressing need to pat myself on the back while also performing cunninglingus on myself because I have had the good fortune not to have been raped at some point in my life.

And because I don't engage in that sort of self-centred waffling, I don't have people say things like, I dunno.. GIVING DESTRUCTIVE CRITICISM TO RAPE VICTIMS IS JUST PLAIN WRONG YOU ASSHOLE.

because you're right, it's not blaming the victim exactly, but is still wrong in a whole special morally repugnant way all its own.

Ah, about the white guilt thing

Tried to post this at Chasingmoksha's for some reason, posting here in case it isn't let through her moddding process and because I think it's worth leaving somewhere on it's own:

Judging by the way we keep hearing about your husband, who's self and experiences are always off stage and out of sight...

I'm gonna go ahead and assume you are in fact Columbo.

I'd be really interested to hear his story btw, to hear how he was treated for marrying you and being a father, because so far you seem to only mention this whole relationship as an attempt to explain how you really do get it (despite stuff that flows from a place of ignorance, even if some of it is an understandable result of cultural training) and how you weren't treated as white by all white people, and therefore WOC HAVE to accept you because you got Othered this one time etc...etc...

The people you're talking to GET being Othered, they do not get only being intermittently Othered, being able to choose to be Othered, being able to point out that you were Othered in isolated incidents and oh how terrible it was to be Othered against your will and all.

Okay CM, we get it, you have had a glimpse beyond the looking glass - now what? because the more I read of this little thing of yours, the more I get that you're wanting to be carried, you want to be pampered and waited on and suffered through your ignorances while people dig and dig and assume hte best of intentions underly your actions that, all things being equal, offend and anger.

And now, because they didn't, didn't treat you like they were white people talking to another white person basically, but acted like you really were a white person, and that they really were a non-white person, and that there is a normative way they're supposed to treat you (as their superior) and how you're supposed to treat them (as inferiors), and while you held up your end of that normative interaction, they didn't and treated you as though they really aren't under any obligation to "get" and "get" what you really mean underneath all your words.

Because all of that you're calling foul play? Kicking up a stink

Wake up sister, you just got treated like a person, not a white person, but an actual, 100% person, and judging by the struggle to avoid it and push everyone away, probably for the first time in your pale little life.

Scary aint it?

Embrace it, headbutt it, whatever, but move forward, don't turn away.

trust me on this, I've had to deal with the non-white people who are exactly as you say WoC are, the racist ones and the ones who really do affirm racists by doing nothing more than react to them constantly.

You ever tangle with the new lot of Black Panthers and people associated with the Nation of Islam - they're racist far beyond that "the white man is the devil" sort of whineness, but go off into wanting a true black supremacy equivalent to the one they're having to live under. Unsurprisingly they're all homo/transphobic misogynists like the cultural feminists are racist homo/transphobes, people who worship oppression like that are always assholes.

But the people you're reacting to - that ain't them, really, and to hear you whine, like twisty at one of her father's "spit on the poor" company barbecues about how terrible life is for the poor rich spinsty aunts of the world, about shit that really, ain't all that, and hardly compares to the shit I've been through, little ol' white me, the crap that I've been through.

You want a dick measuring contest, well then fine, I'll go get a step ladder for you to stand on so I can slap you in the face with mine.

I've felt direct racism, at me you see? AND I've had it thrown at my freinds, in fact white folk just like you tend to have this nasty little habit of sauntering up to me and saying stuff that basically parses down to "those black folks, huh?" when they started shit with my freinds as though it was my freinds who did something wrong.

First time I lived in a neighbourhood that wasn't predominantly black that got thrown at me.

And up until I'd been spouting crap like you did about that asian america girl you once knew, spouting off about those nasty little back stabbing two faced racist black girls at school who'd give me shit.

Used to cuss them out to my friends, who weren't white, and I'd do it like you did, go on about those black people just like you went on about those asians.
My friends tended to quickly change the subject if I did, didn't think much of it personally.

Then the first white person in my life did the "you're one of us - and they're not" dance at me, pissed me off, told my friend who'd they started shit with about it after wards and she got pissed off - at me.

Didn't get it, didn't understand why she was pissed off.

next week the friend is really distant, the asshole saunters up to me at lunch, starts eating, her other white freinds join us, we're all chatting, laughing, and now my freind turns up.

I ask her to sit with us and the table goes silent.

Her eyes, I never again want to see what I saw in her eyes that time, pain, anger, even more pain, then nothing, body went tence, face went unreadable.

And she said no, walked off, sat down and ate FAST, rushed out of there afterwards before I was finished, didn't speak to her the rest of the day, she was always in a hurry someplace not near me, probably would have kept htat up if hadn't... I'm Getting ahead of myself.

But as she walked off to sit down, the conversation started up again and the asshole from before nudged me while I'm looking at my friends' back, I turned and the asshole said "oh don't worry, you know what they're like." I smiled my fake smile at her, little nostril exhale of "mirth" at htat, and ate, didn't say anything at that table for the rest of the meal, walked off when I was done without saying bye.

Because it clicked, that asshole nudged what ever little thing that had been teetering on the brink of awareness for fucking years over the edge and... it clicked, commonalities and interstices.

She didn't return my calls, txted her, still no reply by about 10 o'clock, we'd been talking about going out and getting drunk.

I did.

Turned up on her doorstep with some seriously smudged eyeshadow - just the waiting and thinking about what to say to her had me in tears, and when she opened the door (a little, followed by a lot in a big angry slamming as she realises who I am) I just dived at her knees and cried and cried and apologised between ever other sob "didn't mean to be white to you, didn't mean to be so fucking stupid don't hate me i'm so sorry."

After she finally let me in and pried me off her knees and we started to talk - but afterwards we weren't friends like we had been, not for a good long while, but we were at least friends, and here's the thing; once you go that route, your freinds have no obligation to accept you back - your credit is poisoned forever by pulling shit like that, if I hadn't realised that, first of all, nothing would have happened, I could of rode up to her house on my big high horse and waffled about racist constructs this, and waffled about how I'm less of a racist because i think everyone's green and murdered that freindship like ted bundy at a wet t-shirt contest that was offering an "all you kill then rape" buffet because as a friend it is my obligation not to add to the crap the rest of society piles on her, and she had no obligation to be my black tonto.

And as such, she kinda objected to me treating her like it was.

And the thing is, she was there when, back in HS and we were doing maya angelou, the clique kids would snigger and look my way whenever the "po' white folks" were mentioned (and that's the stuff that didn't involve me getting beat up and sat on and having my head flushed in the boys toilets by the girls while they pulled my underwear down and wrote "white trash ¢2" on my butt. So yeah, I been there and then some with actual racism being directed my way.

But that's just shit people gotta put up with in general, if it hadn't been black girls spewing crap like that, it'd have been white spewing their brand of idiocy at me, and trust me, I tend to react to insults and those beat downs tneded to come from the idiots being unable to reply with anything that didn't involve two of them sitting on my arms, one on my legs and the fourth wailing on my stomach.

But seeing the look in her eyes before she shut it off, then having the stupid asshole nudge me and make me realise what I'd actually done.

You talk about white guilt, but you don't seem to know that it's not black people calling us white that creates it - hell, you're doing what white guy after white guy always does when that happens, react and whine and run from what they're trying to get you to understand.

Oh no, that's not where the white guilt comes from, and htat's not where the pain should be coming from because being called a "nigger" or a "race traitor" by other white folk? HAH! That's fucking music to dance to, a status to, as you and heart make so fucking clear, revel in because being a white women in a white man's world means fucking freedom from having to accept the checks they try to make you cash in.

No, the guilt should stem from the other white people accepting you, sucking you into those habits of saying "Them" and generalising and Othering, that leaves you seeing black people, or asian people, when you should be seeing nothing more complex than just plain assholes - and all assholes are brown, even the ones on white people (ignoring asshole bleaching for a second).

You should be feeling guilty for pissing on asian women, and asian progressives, and asking them, and asking their friends of various hues to just be white with you, and to call it lemonade and get them to suck it down.

Because you can denounce whatever you like, you're actions, your words, have been white.

And that's what matters, not whetehr some white girl cussed at you once.

That is very true professor, and perhaps my mistake, I actually thought someone would at least once not veiw every single white person as the enemy

They can't walk into a dialogue with white women and assume what you wanted them to assume, or they get screwed over.

And when you ask them to let down that justified guard, because you've suffered, and you can sympathise whoah-ah-oh-oh, and any number of other declared attributes you want to throw out there, you're asking them to risk more than you've so far been willing to show.

This results in what one calls a "monologue" because no one with any sense'll listen to you, rather like that whole "bipartisan" thing the repugs go on about.

There's a power dynamic beneath all that as well.

(the word verification for that comment was "jbnbaaby" btw, make of that what you will)

And yeah yeah, I know, she asked me not to comment at her place, and usually my policy is to act like an anti-vampire, don't go where I'm not invited and all that, but I had a mad on, okay? Fuck you.

"Holy ghost, this is not an episode of scooby doo"

To put all that nasty february business behind us, here's eddie Izzard...



ETA: BA wins March

The valenti/pollitt thing is, to put none too fine a point on it, immensely stupid, it's like a bunch of people who tried to harness the power of eugenics to "free women" (where "Free" means "doing what I tell you to do biyatch" and "Women" means heteronormative WASPs of any gender except trans) getting sniffy when a bunch of self obsessed bleached assholes point out that the eugenicists haven't been showing the bleached assholes enough inexplicably due respect.

So to "shorter" the whole thing; Pollitt to Valenti: Come back when you've danced on the backs of a few non-rich, non-white, non-heteronormative women before you give me any of that young "diss" of yours young lady!

Damn the Black Jewish Female Hispanics who wadded up my silken panties!

I'm sure there's a word for this other than "stupid". (hat tip to BA)

Can't think of one yet.

It's an interesting whine, one does however wonder what manner of crazy nonsensical fairies she's batting at with the post.

Of course she, like many of these conservative, *sigh*, "shock" bloggers doesn't seem to know what the "bad words" she's flinging around actually mean.

And I do actually sigh everytime I encounter this pathetically dull brand of comedy, because I like intelligence in my comedy, that's why I like hip-hop, there's word plays and irony and puns that don't suck toast - and best of it has tragicomic elements.

I also love the work of Spike Milligan, and most of it is, unabashadly racist - it was written in the 50's and 60's, even if it was written in britain which didn't have segregation or anything, so the lines of comedic taste are further towards pandering to the tastes of racists than otherwise.

but does any goonshow episode have the sort of words that the modern "shock" "anti-PC" "comedians"? No.

Why? Because it didn't need to, Milligan could whip out actual satire, and wierd little surrealistic things, could even play with racist stereotypes, there's one episode where they have a ridiculously over the top "Umm me big chief" type character, who of course shows up to give the cowboys (who's fort has of course moved over onto "Indian" land because it was built on shifting sands) a bill for unpaid taxes on the booze that was transported across the border in the fort.

The juxtapositioning of the uncultured savage stereotype with the idea of customs inspectors is the source of the comedy in that joke, not the stereotype itself - and it's practically a mcguffin, because the rest of the episode revolves around the sheer stinginess and cowardliness of the cowboys who are trying to do everything in their power to avoid paying taxes on the booze - until the episode culminates in Commander Bloodnock declaring that they'll have to "drink their way out" of the predicament.

However the best "joke" from the Goonshow is, imho of course, something from the episode "the yeti".

It's an odd joke, which I haven't even seen done elsewhere - probably because it only really works with radio. It relies not a traditional punchline of any kind because the punchline is that, during an inexplicable shift from a dialogue based narrative structure to a first person narrative structure, the point of view suddenly gets switched around between two people so that one voice actor ends up narrating from the first person for the character played by the other voice actor.

That's a rather dry of explaining it, basically, the usual narrative of the goon show is expounded through characters talking to each other and the sound effects, but for no real reason (other than to satirise the radio serials of the day which resorted to first person narratives, but you don't have to know that to get the actual punchline) the narrative suddenly shifts to a first person narrative, told from the perspective of the character Neddy Seagoon (played by harry seacombe)...

Neddy Seacombe: As I was sitting down to watch the telly in the house next door but one, we had thins walls you see, there came a knock from the front door...

*sound of two knocks and a crashing noise*

Gridpipethin: I appear to have put my fist through your door...

NS: He said. don't worry about it, a bit of plaster should sort it out.

G: He said. Oh don't worry I only grazed my knuckles.

...And somewhere during this is a bizare interchange with lots of "he said I said he said" after which NS ends up with the part of gridpipethin and G ends up finishing the skit with; "and after gridpipethin left, I sat down to watch the telly in the house next door but one..." and the audience is left confused but amused at the way the switch round was done so fluidly that you know that the narrative perfectly justified the switch round while at the same time the actual switch around makes no sense whatsoever.

You may at this point wonder why I'm waffling like this, well that's a simple question to answer - because I'm amused but confused at that anti-PC post, except with out the amused part because there's no actual switch around, nor build up or set up for the gag, she just comes out and basically says "political correctness was created by oppressed peoples".

Now I'm going to say what all progressives know but probably don't say to often because it's so pathetically obvious that it'd be like stating the color of the sky or pointing out that things fall towards the ground - you don't have to state it, it's that obvious and well known.

but I'm gonna say it, because it should clarify what's so very very very wrong with that post, what is in fact wrong with every single post any conservative has ever written about the great beast called "political correctness". In so doing I will of course be agreeing with the original post, but I shall then explain away the nonsensical juxtapositioning of reality with conservative fantasy which, I'm reasonably certian, is what is sucking "teh funny" out of every single attempt by conservatives to be humorous.

So here's the blatantly obvious: Political Correctness is racist.

Yes, I know, they actually brought me down to their level of pathetic-obviousness-cum-revelatory-gnostic-truth, but it obviously needed saying by a non-idiot.

Why is it racist though? Ah yes, I know, I know, "because political correctness is a term for the 'polite' 'civil' and otherwise politically acceptable ways for white people to screw over the downpressed, hence the name 'political correctness'", I know that, and you know that, but the poor little dearie at violent acres doesn't, nor do any of the other half witted o'rly-wannabe buffoons out there.

it's not their fault, they're stupid, it doesn't make them bad people.

The fact that they seem to wallow in these childish cries for attention they portray as "humor" at the expense of oppressed people does however make them both bad people, and even worse than that: Bad comedians.

That's what's so wrong with evil clowns, The Clown is a creature designed by evolution over millions of years to be amusing, but never is, and I think you'll find that in nature, the eviller the clown, the more convinced they are of their own jocularity.

And make no mistake, the sad, warped and just plain unfunny nature of the evil clown's attempts at humor are no accidental coincidence, but is in fact causative - the evil clown is unfunny because it can't take being told that it's not funny, it cannot accept that its jokes do not tickle peoples' funny bones, and these facets of the evil clowns' personality lead it to also be evil - evil is inversely proportional to a person's ability to laugh at themselves, which is what allows comedians to actually grow as comedians in the first place, that ability to adapt and refine their act until it actually becomes funny. And with that, they end up learning to accept heckling and/or criticism without being a whiney baby.

Evil Clowns laugh at their own jokes, but never at themselves, and thus can never grow as comedians.


*waves at Bill O'rly*

In part, this is due to the fact that comedians have to know what they're tlaking about, comedy is a form of poetic almost scientific examination of the world, a method of parsing down reality to its basest form.

This has largely taken the form of fart jokes through out the millenia, especially with thomas edison for some reason (he invented a rectal stovepipe to direct farts out of smell and out of mind), largely because life is pretty fart-like - stinky and socially awkward.

But I would be very surprised if those early cave paintings of well endowed men weren't an early form of satirical cock mockery that has evolved into today's humorous progressive bloggers. Of course the modern progressive bloggers mock the modern republican party's obsession with man love, especially in light of which ever gay republican has unveiled his "no homo pro bono" policies this week, rather than just pointing and laughing at the tribal leader's bizarre propensity for adding padding into his banana hammock.

Of course why conservatives aren't funny is also due to the fact that, while they have troubles laughing at themselves, this is in large parts due to their inability to actually stop and observe reality prior to trying to laugh at it - they just know how the world works, mexicans are lazy, jews are greedy, black people are scum - they know these things so why should they bother actually trying to learn anything?

But this leaves them deeply unfunny because you can't pun if you don't understand what two homophones each mean.

So when violent acres says "nigger", she's using it as she understands the word - she knows what it means, it means "black person", and damn the eyes of anyone who tries to add context or baggage to that word - and of course she's using it in the infantile way conservatives always have used it outside the confines of political correctness; like a child saying "shit" to their parents, wiht about as much subtly or depth.

But what does "nigger" actually mean?

Well it doesn't just mean "black person", it means something along the lines of "slave/scum/untermenschen/blackperson" - actually that's not quite right because it doesn't mean any one thing exactly, but rather refers to a whole range of attitudes towards black people, and all of them are negative.

This is why PoC started reclaiming it - they call each other "nigger" to say "yes we're 'niggers', and we're proud of it", and this has gone on and gone on until it has gained its present meaning among PoC communities, so that when they say "nigger" they mean; "I am spartacus."

It's a method of showing solidarity.

This may also explains why Chris Rock was gibbering crap with his "and then there are niggers" skit, because nothing quite says responsible, politically aware black dude quite like using nigger with the exact same meaning as it has when Klansmen use the word.

Now don't get me wrong, he's got other material, and some of it is even funny, but the bit with the niggers seems to be the only bit that white people ever see for some reason, and way too many see that, go "woohoo!" and run off with some presumption of having license to divide "good" black people from those slave/scum/untermenschen/niggers and get attention from mommy by saying that oh so shocking word.

No you don't. Also, grow the fuck up already.

So with all this context, all this meaning, what of white folk using the word? And more to the point of violent acres' original post, what does this mean as far as political correctness goes. So let's get back to defining what we're actually talking about when say stuff.by

Now political correctness, as its name suggests, is the process and phenomenon where by white people now say and do certain things in a way that is politically acceptable.

What political correctness isn't, is black people, or jews or whoever getting pissed off and threatening white people until they shut up. Alas, it'd be nice if it was because then white people, who for some reason are deeply in love with sucking authoritive cock, wouldn't go about being deeply pleased that they can still verbally whip the plantation slaves, but it isn't.

What it is then, is that politicial correctness is racism via other means - white people aren't allowed to call black people niggers in public these days, not because it pisses off black people, but because it interrupts the business of screwing over black people through politically correct methods, because actually locking black people up by their ankles and forcing them to work for no money is only acceptable, if the black people in question can be labelled "criminals" in some way.

For instance, it is politically incorrect to call a black person "nigger", it is however politically correct to try to drown a city full of poor black people through gross incompetence.

Slavery is not politically correct, but maintaining a system of immigration laws and policies that enable white businesses to efficiently control non-white laborers through fear of deportment, incarceration and direct physical violence so that the non-white laborers are working for next to no pay , is politically correct.

Segregation is not politically correct, but linking property values to the major public services like schools, hospitals and public transport so that the dirt poor and non-white areas of the country that have the lowest property values as a result of segregation have disproportionately shitty public services while white areas that became incredibly affluent as a result of segregation have excellent public services, is politically correct.

Throwing jews into the siberian work camps is not politically correct, funding and arming the most violent and anti-semitic anti-isreali organisations is.

Funding and arming people who throw jews into gas chambers is NOT politically correct, funding and supporting the most incredibly reationary Isrealis who squelch non-violent anti-zionist groups, and who get the IDF to engage in atrocities and provocations that justify and support the most violently anti-semitic militant palestinian groups is very politically correct indeed.

"foul mouthed" is PC, "irrational and overly emotional woman" is un-PC.

"eloquent" is PC, "somebody shoot that uppity nigger already" is un-PC.

Asking "can't we just discuss keeping this minority from having full civil rights under law for the most asinine of reasons?" is PC, saying "I hate homosexuals" is not PC.

Saying "Affirmative Action means giving jobs and college places away to unqualified people" is both inaccurate, a lie, and deeply deeply Politically Correct.

On the other hand, saying "the legacy system and old boy network gives jobs and college places to unqualified people, and has in the last 6 years led ot the deaths of several thousand americans through incompetent people being placed into positions that required competent people - but at least they were white unqualified people, and most of the people they killed were either poor or black so that's alright then" is not PC.

"class war" is un-PC, "eminent domain" is PC.

"Anti-PC" is PC , "bigotry" isn't.

Are we seeing a pattern here yet?

Oh but that's unfair, what evidence exists to support these claims that Political Correctness is some doublethink method of making common racism and bigotry more acceptable?

Well because the basic logic that underpins the whole the thing doesn't make sense...

"Okay, so there's this grand conspiracy that is persecuting us right, that is in fact interfering with our constitutional right to free speech right, right, and this grand conspiracy, the sort of conspiracy that has launched the careers of countless radio and tv unpersonalities, which in fact justifies their existence to battle against this awesome force that oppresses countless middle class heteronormative cissies to the point where they spend every waking second of their day obsessing about whether or not some stray and entirely thoughtless action or utterance might bring down its almighty wrath upon them!"

Ooh-kay, and what does this conspiracy look like Dr. Oppressed?

"uh, well, you see when we call Them, you know, people who aren't heteronormative middle class cissies, names and things they find deeply offensive, or do things which makes their working and home lives unbearable, or when we, you know, sexually assault them or beat them up or murder them and blame it on our glands or make up other fake stories to justify it all they... well they complain! And then we feel guilty or people fail to treat us like we're nice people after they find out what we did!"

Uh...

"Why I remember this one time, at bandcamp, I raped this woman, and the lying bitch told on me..."

... err, how exactly was she a 'lying bitch', if you don't mind me asking?

"huh? Well she told people I raped her against her will! Can you believe it?"

O_o movingswiftlyon, and then what happened?

"yeah, where was I? Oh yeah, she fucking tattled on me, and then it got around camp people treated me like a complete jerk, and well, you can imagine how I felt after that can't you?"

I'd rather not. Uh, well thank you Dr Opressed, please be with the shutting up now!

You can, I'm sure see the serious fuckedupness of that strain of thought, basically you have freaking adults, grown boys and girls, crying foul when they limit themselves and then make up some mystical fucking force that means that the most privelaged, the people born with all the advantages it's possible in society to get, are whining, motherfucking whining, about how they have to actually moderate the tone ratehr than the intent of their language so that they're not obviously calling Obama Barack a muslim terrorist nigger.. Mark that htough; they don't even have to moderate their deep seated thoughts and beliefs as african and native americans and muslims and jews and catholics have all been expected to change their deepest held convictions over the centuries on the fucked up whims of colonialists and imperialists. If there was any frikking justice in this world...

They're being asked to use nothing more than the semblence of intelligence to proudly and boldly express their bigoted little thoughts in public and what do they say?

"I'm being oppressed by being expected to actually put even the most rudimentary amount of thought into what I say and do!"

It makes a kind of sense when IDers and evopsychics and Libertarians and gnostic cultural colonialists and other members of similar religions of wilful ignorance start whining about being expected to put the most rudimentary amount of thought into stuff.

But for you weirdos to be complaining about how your own demogogues are asking you to be less obvious about your assbaggery while at the same time complaining about how hte people your own consciences seem to be telling you to stop opressing are in fact opressing you by not allowing you to oppress them and...

Mein Gott! Do you see the convuluted nature of that last sentence? You see what I'm driven to?



And why the fuck do they even think that people who aren't them would want them to address them at all, let alone by some intentionally derogatory term? I'm a white het girl and I don't particularly like you using the same language as me, because you're kinda making them feel dirty, and not in that sexuality type way but in that "Richard M Nixon" kinda way.

So to help facilitate communications in future, let me give you a quick guide to how to address Other people:

Step 1: If you meet an Other person in the road, RUN AWAY! If they're black they might rape you and inject you with their evil bootilicious jungle fever, if they're gay you might catch homo-cooties, and if they're hispanics they'll probably retroactively get you hooked on hardcore narcotics in highschool.

Step 2: If step 1 for some reason fails and you are unable to get away from the Other person, as soon as you have the urge to cry "Yo! Queer!" or "Waaassup homey!" or "Hola my nigger! Clean my room!" simply think of them having sex with another of their kind, this will cause your sphincter to contract and promptly rob you of the power of speech until they are out of hearing range.

Step 3: If all else fails, I can only give you two further options to deal with the scourge of political correctness. First of all there is suicide, don't worry, it's less scary than you think it is because the distinction between brain death and your usual state of being is far greater than the bias on most medical instruments, the transition should therefore be neither difficult nor particularly shocking. the second option involve whining some more about it, because that's just so fucking productive dontchaknow.

But do it quieter, please, it's not that I object to you being loudly stupid, I'm white and therefore used to people like you, the problem is that what you're being stupid with is so void of content that I actually find myself liking creationists, because at least their evolving theories about biblical dinosaurs are amusing by comparison.

Whining incessantly while the point goes whoosh over your head? How is that even worth the time it took you to one-finger-type that all out?

My position on the Primaries and The Vice Loser

First of all let me clarify one thing: My opinion, if it is really needed, on Amanda (and apparently Shakesspeare's Sis) getting picked by the Edwards Campaign is that they should take Crowely, or McCartney, or whoever it was's infamous phrase "Let 'Take Ye Money & Rune' be the whole of ye Lawe" to heart and milk that sonuvabitch like a "pro-life" "non-profit" milking its flock - If I see Edward's udders contain any milk whatsoever after this primary I shall be sorely disappointed.

And hten there's things like this, which just, meh, why is he supporting the coming war on Iran again? Why infact is he supporting the America-Israel Axis again? Is this that whole seeming like a "Tough War Dem", like wot Kerry was supposed to be, thing, again? Thank you but no thanks, we don't need another gungho militaristic nutjob in the white house, the last one has given us truly monsterous gas.

But if I had to pick a dem to support during the primaries, he'd be the man anyway.

Why? because he's not Obama, and he's not Hillary, and does, as sad as this is, constitute the "lesser" of all possible evils wiht regard to the primaries, and "lesser of all recognised evils" is the best the dems ever manage on the best of days anyway.

To be brutally honest none of them are qualified to be president, they are however far more qualified to be president than any republican, but only in that whole morally relative way.

So that in the same way an object that is standing still will seem to be moving away at quite a fast pace compared to something moving backwards away from it, so do the dems represent a viable political party in relation to the ever in reverse republican party.

This is not a good thing.

But the arguements for Edwards are of course not really arguements for him, anyone who does try to argue for the man on the basis of his personal merits is gonna have to lie heavily, the man is a tool, and so arguements for him are at best gonna consist of arguements against Obama and Hillary, which I shall lay out, and follow up with why those bad points pretty much ensure that one of those two douchebags will actually get the pick, and the results of either of them getting the pick, which are not gonna be pretty folks.

The thing ot remember with Hillary, who is the weaker of the two, being neither male nor a big enough "minority" token in many ways, often being called "a man" even by liberals, is that she is a mercenary of immense proportions. Not a whore of course, because that would be a major insult to all prostitutes, who I'm sure have not only got a better fashion sense than her, but also command slightly more faithfulness from their sexual partners.

they also don't sell themselves quite so cheaply, and generally haven't been partly responsible for the mass slaughter of iraqis. the trick as far as I can make out for hiring Clinton to support your particular dumbass cause is to A) make sure it is a really really stupid cause, it must be ineffectual, pointless and doomed from conception and B) it must be one of those stirringly symbolic causes, like the whole video game censorship thing, it basically must have no practical value is point A does not stop it from actually getting through the legislature and courts. all of which is why the DLC lurves her little rubber panties, because she's sooo DLC, a useless tool? Perfect DLC material, Kos is not even as toolie as she.

but LOLMGWTFBBQ!!! She's like totally a chick, and it'd be like totally rad to have a chick president for once!!!!11!!!

Come on people, if we must have a democratic president, could we not have a democratic president who will put off all future little women from ever even aspiring to the presidentcy because she's such an immense douchebag?

Can we, in fact, not have a Women President of Quality? Or can she at least spread that tokenism across multiple oppressed groups so as to minimise the damage done to any one particular group? Maybe a black disabled left handed lesbian transwoman president, for maximum tokenistic value? Why pick on the wimenz huh?

And then we've got Obama, Obama Obama Obama...

What are we going to do with you Obama?

You're just as toolie as Hillary basically, oh sure you're not a unerringly useless as she is, but you make for your general competency by your brown nosing to the far right democrats.

I speak of course of the wonderful obstructionist streak he took in defense of the far right anti-choice dems after the first of the two great anti-choice SCOTUS victories.

The infamous DKos Letter, in which he all but handed the Kossack stalinists knouts for their downpressing amusement as he defended the "openness" of the democratic party and whipped out gems like;

A pro-choice Democrat doesn't become anti-choice because he or she isn't absolutely convinced that a twelve-year-old girl should be able to get an operation without a parent being notified.

So obami-wan, let me, as your father, brutally rape and impregate you. Okay, now ask me for permission to get an abortion, go on, I dares ya.

Yes it does mean they're anti-choice you fuck wit, they're anti-choice, their position are anti-choice, anti-woman and pro-incestuous-rapist. We're not holding our positions for shits and giggles buddy, we hold them because they are righteous and true you idiot.

His whole thing is just a twisting line of doublethink bullshit after doublethink bullshti, all in defense of the far right members of his own party.

And think about this now: If he won't even stand up to the far righters in his own party, nor seem to even grasp the most basic concept of what it means to even BE a progressive politician and all that entails and obligates him to, how can he be expected to stand up to the far righters in the republican party should he become president?

But I find it hard to blame him all too much, familiarity breeds comtempt and it's all too obvious by the way dems and Kossacks all treat him as a huge token black guy that he's got as high up as he has by pandering to the great white fathers in the DLC, fellating and minstrelling as needs be to get ahead, probably playing up the incredibly pale pallor of his skin when in those back room gentlemen club sessions while his PR people dehumanise and tokenise him into the inhuman "eloquent ethnic politician" creature he is in public.

And like with Clinton, is this the best we can hope for as the first (or second if you count the first clinton's ability to play a saxamaphone) President of Color? A hapless, house slave who minstrels as the DLC tells him to?

To summarise: Fuck that!

But of course both Clinton and Obama's downsides are of course the reason why you cannot really expect Edwards to win, The Vice Loser just hasn't had the suck up skills, nor can he play the token card, and as such the DLC just won't support him and give him the job as readily as they would Obama or Clinton.

It also probably doesn't help that he does look like both the terrorist/freedom fighter poltician guy from Battle Star Galactica, and like an older version of the Evil Senator/president guy from The Dead Zone. Okay, he doesn't look like Baltar, but he does look like a generic Charismatic And Slightly Cultish Self Centered Politician.

But hte DLC's opinion is hte final one, because, alas, any part of the duopoly that calls itself "democratic" is of course, doing sick and disturbing things to Irony's poor abused body (and then arresting it and denying it EC just for good measure) and who the DLC really backs will win it, because htat's how this game works.

My bet would be on Obama.

Now the nature of the primaries also means that outside of the unholy triumvirate of Edwards, Obama and Clinton, none of the other schmucks are gonna get a look, they don't have the brand name recognition that the repugs have built up for those three, though The Vice Loser is still running on fumes from '04 to some extent in that regard. As such, the appearance of being "popular with voters" or "triangulating to important demographics" or whatever manner of Kosian managment-nuspeek is used to justify those three toolbag's pick from the DLC, is gonna be all important with regard to the DLC's final decision.

It is gonna be a propaganda war between three DLC figureheads, a battle of wits between unarmed opponents in other words.

And as sad as I am to say it, Edwards, fucking Vice Loser, IDF enabling, "I speak to the working class behind my havana smoke hyuck hyuck" Upperclass Edwards, is the best of the three, not htat he has a chance in hell of beating the Tokenism Twins, but he's the most likely third placer.

Personally I'll be voting for Cthulhu if I have to vote for someone, he's got the only honest platform out there that doesn't seem to consit of dissembling and doublethink. After all, the dems have consistently made it damn clear htey don't want progressive in their party, nor do they want us dragging them down with our icky Truth and Justic cooties, so why are we going where we're not invited again?

Haven't heard a better reason than "desperation" yet, and by george I think I will need something better this time round, they did after all win one election on their own (allegedly, those potentially dem voting invisible "naderite" goblins apparently didn't win the elections for the dems quite like they lost the election for Gore and Kerry, so they obviously can't be quite as important as they've been made out to be) so logcially they should be able to do it again.

Can't be too hard after all, the repugs can manage it and they're made up of people with ingrowing chins ffs.


Of course so are the DLC and all their little figureheads...

(no this isn't me just being anti-edwards because he hired amanda, he's an objectionable little stain, policywise, retoric-wise and chance-in-hell-of-being-president-wise)

Glorious News!

I, like Amanda Marcotte, have also been picked to be part of the Edward Campaign's backing singers: The Third Placers, so huzzars!

Our job, I am informed, shall be to kick Edwards in the crotch repeatedly during the primaries so that the pain of his inevitable defeat doesn't seem so bad, but to a tune picked out for him by the DLC.

So huzzars for the acclimatisation to pain and rhythmic kicking! Hyah! Hyah!

R. Mildred: Ghost Writer to the A-Listers

Yay! It appears that MyDD actually did publish my satirical exercise in the passive voice.

The only thing that I find a teensy bit erksome is that Matt Stoller appears to have misattributed it to himself. But I don't care because I know that, in his heart of hearts, Matt Stoller is giving me a huge compliment, and is therefore now my official A-List blog bitch.

Now that I have, once again, made it onto a highly ranked blog (even if it is only as an uncredited ghost writer) I feel I have earned the right to toot my own, rather impressive, horn somewhat so let me now take you through a tour of this peice, which I have to admit, is pretty fucking good, even for me.

I've greatly enjoyed the discussions on the 1960s left and our movement. It's a complicated story with lots of swirls and eddies, and since we're all in the thick of what we're doing, it's hard to have any sense of distance. It's not clear that the internet left matters, but I believe that it's important to know who we are and where we come from as we concurrently develop a vision for the country we want to live in. As a nascent movement, we could flame out or not rise to the level of modern challenges, but hey, that's life. Sometimes stuff, even really cool stuff, doesn't work.

Now this is a great opening, the way I meshed the phrase "as we concurrently develop a vision for the country we want to live in." with it's overly jejune and just plain waffly "concurrently" with the next sentence's focus on "stuff", which I felt added a certain paradoxically jungian symbolic dynamic to what ever the hell the paragraph was actually about. Something about The Left and its swirly eddies, though what norbizness has to do with anything is a mystery to me, and why anyone should care about the ins and outs of his toilet's flushing activities is an even greater mystery (though I'm sure the International Transexual Toilet Rapists are involved somewhere in all this).

First I'd like to state a couple of assumptions. This is not a '1960s kidz' versus '2000 kidz' pissing contest.[Irony; it's an oldie, but a goodie] While there are inherently generational gaps in how I'm describing what's going on, I am not representing the internet left as a youth movement confined to one generation. The white part of the 1960s left movement was youth-based, but this one includes lots of people of all ages, including many who got their start in the 1960s.[You heard it here there first folks!] I am young for a blogger, at 28 - there are plenty of people working in this movement who are much older. In fact some commenters who bristle at how I characterize their memories are themselves part of the new progressive movement. I'm not just making this up to encompass as many people as possible. If you take the internet left as a coherent group, just look at some of the major concentrations - Moveon members are not young, and Dailykos readers are not young either. I was at Yearly Kos, and I was a whipper snapper. Certainly that's not representative, but still I don't see major college organizing centers today as catalytic to what we're doing, unlike in the 1960s when the Students for a Democratic Society or Student Non Violent Coordinating Committee played major leadership roles. Maybe that's because we have the internet and the 1960s generation had pop culture, though I would trace it differently.

Now you'll probably start to see why I'm just so fucking proud of this piece, note hte vacuous talk of "the 1960s", talking over and over again of some mythical "Left" which I know, and you know, and everyone with half a brain knows due to the basic facts of reality, that "The Left", as some cohesive well organised entity which can be viewed like some singular freak under this Big Top Circus Tent that can be found at, obviously, frikking Vegas, is a complete and utter fiction, thought up by the right so that they could scare a whole bunch of anti-semitic racist greedy kleptomaniac psychopathic pharisee pagan christian nutjobs who all want to be at the top of a heap of oppressive downpressing asshollery at the same time for different reasons and who basically don't like people at all, let alone people who remind them of themselves, in the same room and working together.

And the way I top all the lies and blatant bullshit off with this wonderful and constant repetition of how "The Left" has some old people in it (I don't say how I know this of course because the key with bullshit is to just state it as fact, and let reality catch up with you at some later date, if ever) and while this is quite frankly the most irrelevent and pointless statement in the history of irrelevent and pointless statements, it does give me the excuse to boast, fucking boast I tell yahs, about having been "at Yearly Kos", which is totally my generation's woodstock, complete with hardcore narcotics and shiftless men with too much hair lazing around painting their cocks in a wide variety of colors as a political statement.

But wait, there's more.

Second, in terms of capturing the political system, the New Left, the liberals, and radical organizers of the 1960s failed, and the New Right of that period won. Culturally it's a very different story (they lost, we won), but institutionally speaking right-wingers have as much or more power than they did in the 1960s, though it's manifested less through cross-burning and more through extreme ghettoization, inequality, a fear-based health care system, and radically higher economic risk for the middle class. We can't pretend that this isn't the case just because it makes the right feel good. The 1960s left lost, and politically speaking in terms of strategy they should NOT be emulated.

I honestly don't know what I was on to reach this nirvana of ironic satire, the way I seamlessly ignore the fact that the "New Right" used the democrats to neuter the truly democratic activist culture that got shit done, the strange way I compare segregation and a culture of coat hanger abortions to a "radically higher economic risk for the middle class" (again, this is the hollowest of hollow retoric, where one is left to either ignore the vaguene emptiness of the statement or just go mad at the utterly pathetic bourgious self obsession I don like so many giant furry winter socks) and a level of inequality that... hasn't really changed much since forever.

But at least it's not actually legal to just sterilise black women for shits and giggles, too often, if they're not disabled, any more.

The Art! The Skill! To suggest that we ignore the one success story for progressive politics in recent history, to even go so far as to declare that the problem of the politicaly active and election ignoring activists, who took to the streets not the ballot boxes because their choices were between the parties of Nixon or Thurmond, and built a bullhorn through which the voice of the people could actually be heard in such a manner that the people were no longer forced to compromise eternally with the evil whims of the demons and repugs to achieve effectively nothing, but could begin to dictate terms down to the two parties, as it should always be in a true democracy, all to the end of shaping the nation into something that didn't consider over half of the population of the country sub-human scum who deserved to die bleeding from their crotchs, or at the end of a white man's rope.

To suggest that "their" (you know, "The 1960s Left's") problem, their fatal error, was that they did not join in on the little ping pong tournament the demons and the repugs play every four or so years, and play with peoples lives like it was all a high school football game, enough...

To say that, and to say it in so deadpanned a manner, to suggest it so casually.

Face facts folks, I am your god.

This is not a universally held assumption.

Again, the understatement that emphasises so deliciously the absurdity of what I suggest! Genius!

This comment from Frenchman and this one from Paul Rosenberg bristle at this idea; these two insightful and brilliant commenters are defending the purity of the 'Dirty Fucking Hippy', and point out that this archetype has been mischaracterized for all these years. Rosenberg argues that bloggers need to dream big and stop following the ins and outs of the 2008 race - in this they should imitate the DFHs. I don't really understand why 2008 shouldn't be a vehicle for debate over vision and big dreams, but I do have a question for those who want to defend the 1960s left and the strategies that generation pursued. Just where have all the DFH's gone?

Indeed, I close my eyes and cannot see them, where have these DFHs gone?

I'll tell you where they haven't gone - into the electoral system. Do you know who the 1960s left created in terms of successful political leadership? Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Joe Lieberman, and John Kerry. And those are the best of the bunch - sitting under them is an entire superstructure of less talented or less fortunate political figures who aspire to their place. Those are transactional leaders, a far cry from the transcendental revolutionary ardor of the time focusing on social justice. The 1960s left-wing didn't just cool of ardor, it disappeared and allowed its legacy to be captured by triangulating reflexively anti-liberal political creatures who trip up their immense talent with caution and big money politics. And it's ironic, because it's not necessary to do this anymore within the liberal culture that the 1960s New Left helped create.

Ah, triangulation, a word so sweet, so delightful in bouquet, flush with color and pleasing to the eye, one would almost overlook it's devilish evil, it's subtle, cancerous nature, to say "capitulate", to say "sell my allies down the river", to say "screw you, I got mine", none of those would suffice, for this, this masterpeice, to mince words so absolutely to the end of flattering and protecting the very people I briefly pretend to be castigating.

The failures of the 1960s left are legion - from splinter groups supporting North Vietnam and third world tyrannical revolutionary movements and castigating America as an evil force to not working within the electoral process to venerating flashy conflict over organizing to valuing cultural conflict over persuasion. And yes, the right-wing likes to use these memes to discredit left-wingers as unAmerican, but that doesn't mean that these stereotypes had no basis in reality.

For did not Jane Fonda sit at the NV AA battery and laugh at the thought of gunning down our brave napalm dropping boys in their fabulous flying machines? How dare anyone care for this "cultural conflict"? What good a living womb? Who cares for the well hung black man?

And some even denigrated the electoral process! The Gall! The infamy, to reject a process for selecting monsterous plutocrats in favor of street level democracy in its rawest form!

I know MLK jumped the shark with his disgusting pacifism, I know that there is no hero like the FBI and ATF agents who strode with their heads held high on the reservations that they weren't welcome on, doing God's work and spreading the "Right Kind Of Democracy™" to the Wrong Kind of People, without thanks or encouragement.

The way I focus not on the truly monsterous aspects of the Old Left, the people who felt they could give up the rights of other people for inclusion into that democratic system, the stalinists, the vici left and people who actually did declare the MLK had jumped the shark with his traitorous anti-war rhetoric while wishing those uppity negros would just settledown and accept the occasional murder and rape of their fmaily and friends as a neccesary compromise that needed to be paid so that they could deal with the White Devil himself in the hopes that the boot on their neck.

30 years ago america still had legal eugenics programs being carried out on minorities and the disabled, 30 years ago rape was legal in more states than not.

And I suggest that the problem with the movements that put an end to that was that they said fuck the system and did what needed to be done without caring about the niceties of a system designed to mediate such excessive attempts at change, to mediate into insignificance actual democracy and replace it with the bastard erzatz immitation we still deal with - which enables only those like Kerry, the Clintons and Liebermanto into office because they are the ones who are least likely to do anything good or right with their position - I fear my satire may have reached too far here, was I too obvious? Surely no one could take such a doublethink style retconning of history as anything but the most utterly hyperbolic satire?

Right?

They did, and they were excesses of a minority of the New Left that felt betrayed after years of organizing work. But they did exist, and the later abandonment of politics hardened these youthful passionate excesses into serious branding and institutional obstacles to liberalism . Even if the unAmerican 1960s left was all PR, the problem is still one of abandonment - PR needed to be rebutted, and it wasn't. There was no Atrios in 1971, just technocratic liberalism. Our right flank was totally exposed.

My satirical skills began to fade here, alas, see the low grade cry of "but where were all the liberal bloggers in the 1960s?" A tad purple, as the saying goes, too ludicrous, far too farcical.

I'm not trying to frame this as the right does, that New Left radicals were funded by Communists and hate America. They weren't. There was some excess. Lots of people did and do stupid things. The war in Vietnam was much much worse than smoking dope and throwing a pie in someone's face on TV. And Bohemianism and attacks on radical leftism and liberalism go back to World War I, and prior to that. But so does economic populism and anti-corporatism, yet the PR battle of 1970-2000 was left to those who characterized the left as a bunch of pot-smoking lazy dilettantes and the right as manly soldier fathers. I don't care that DFHs existed, and I don't doubt that a bunch of them thoughtfully made critiques of contemporary politics (though many were apolitical young people that just wanted sex and fun). What frustrates is the abandonment, the capitulation to the reaction. It was as if Nixon won, and so everyone went home.

ugh, I'm really losing it, pretending that liberals had any control over the media from that period that I, in the guise of a dipshit-no-nothing-asswipe-with-the-historical-knowledge-of-a-goldfish-liberal, might actually have knowledge of, that the media sources through which The Great Glorious Ever Noble Left would counter such propaganda would be known to me, a mere "28" year old who probably wouldn't touch a pamphlet in case it had Prole-cooties on it even if it was covered in chocolate and balanced on the six pack of an insanely hawt guy.

Much too much too purple.

T

he consequences of the abandonment were severe. Where is the defense or institutional memory of the War on Poverty? John Edwards is running with poverty as a major theme, but I don't hear any defense of LBJs masterstroke, or that of government as an organizing force. Indeed the left-wing intellectuals that should have emerged and forcefully argued for liberal politics against a right-wing onslaught just seem to have disappeared. Now of course I'm not going to paper over the civil rights struggle or feminism, but where was the 1960s left when the crack epidemic was destroying urban America? Why is Joe Lieberman still allowed to tread on his few weeks in Mississippi in the 1960s?

I mean, who could possibly forget the terrible toll the "crack epidemic" took on urban america? Paging Bill Cosby, Pagin Bill Cosby...

The failure of the 1960s left goes back to two structural weaknesses - one is the assumption that liberals, radicals, and Democrats all made, that America was post-scarcity. The failure to understand that economic security allowed a political left led directly to the right-wing manipulation of economic risk to our current situation. The students of the New Left and the liberals of the time just assumed material progress, which left us unprepared for oil shocks. But instead of coming up with new ideas, the New Left turned inward and the liberals were scared away from political combat. You can see this today in how the new and progressive movement is basically without institutional help, mentorship, or funding. Retreat to academia and the personal sphere happened because the 1960s left ignored economics and failed to defend the public as a meaningful concept. So when a pugnaciously liberal populist force emerges, we ally with people like Jim Webb and not groups like NARAL or checklist liberals like Chuck Schumer.

In case you're wondering, I really do blame no one but myself for the 1970s oil crisii.

I can't begin to describe how sorry I am about that.

The second biggest structural flaw was failing to coopt the liberal establishment, the big institutions. With the exception of unions (which have turned sharply more liberal), potentially liberal institutions - big foundations, media, government, progressive corporate entities - are all either conservative or cautiously technocratic. The lack of discussion over the War on Poverty, which is accepted as a failure even though it was not, contrasts deeply with the incessant carping about Vietnam.

Now that I reread that, I realise that I don't actually know what noise a carp makes.

If anyone knows, please leave an appropriate comment.

When Nixon took the air out of that tire, the New Left had nothing. The right-wing in the 1960s through the 1990s focused on institutional takeover, which is why many of us see them as people to be emulated and why we see the 1960s left as a group of good-hearted people that just didn't step up to their own ambitions.

I'm starting to get back into form here, note the way I, after putting opposition to the vietnam war forth as a pathetically insignificant thing next to The War on Poverty (who's end goal involved some muttering about "social mobility" and "the american dream", iirc) I then declare that the period which saw the end to the daily slaughter of hundreds of americans and thousands of vietnamese was the ultimate example of The Left's Failure, while the rightwing, which already had total control over government and corporations, suddenly noticed that, SHIT! they hadn't taken over the government and corporations yet.

Yes, Declaring that the corporatists "suddenly" turned their jaundiced eyes towards control over the corporate world, now That's good satire folks.

Todd Gitlin, who many of you suggested I read, and his passage on page 436 of 'The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage', discusses this phenomenon.

The odds have been against the Left in laissez-faire-loving, race-divided, history-burying America from the start. The two-party system, solidified by law, militates against the ideological margins - even as the parties lose their hold on the voters. The New Left, like its predecessors, failed to create lasting political forms; when the SDS was torn apart, so was the chance for continuity. In the Seventies, affinity group models of participatory democracy helped discredit Leninist politics, but often at the price of discrediting leadership and lucid debate altogether. Whipsawed between anarchism and Leninism, the New Left failed to produce the political leaders one might have expected of a movement so vast; it devalued too much intelligence, was too ambivalent abut personal prowess. The millennial, all-or-nothing moods of the Sixties proved to be poor training for practical politics. The premium the movement placed on the glories and agonies of the pure existential will ill equipped many of us to slog away in coalitions in a society crisscrossed by divisions, a society not cleanly polarized along a single moral axis, a society not poised on the edge of radical change. Therefore, for both long-standing and recent reasons, a substantial Left has been conspicuous by its absence since the McGovern debacle. When Nixon and then Reagan went too far in tier efforts to damage or circumvent legitimate opposition, and suffered the crippling of their war-making powers, there no was Left to say: These are the consequences of imperial passion run amok. With its moderating genius, the political system worked to contain the scandals as matters of lawbreaking, bad judgment, bad character, shoddy administration.

Gitlin is wrong in certain respects, but the book was published in 1987 and at that time few could foresee the rise of the extreme right. What I sort of hope we can do is acknowledge that the left of the 1960s failed in some very serious ways, and move forward from there in not repeating those mistakes. If you want to talk vision, the 1960s left could 'feel' politics with the best of them, but if you want to talk solid institutional structures, it's the New Right or the radical organizers of the 1930s who are the right model.

Note that last bit: "...it's the New Right or the radical organizers of the 1930s who are the right model."

How cna I not be proud of it? Out of a huge waffling, rambling, vacuous and historically inaccurate steaming pile of cowpat, I manage to actually sneak in an endorsement of the nazi party in there, while continuing the theme I've kept up through the rest of it all where I pretend that politics is an end unto itself, and that the concrete societal changes that this The Left I keep talking about achieved was unto nothing because they didn't care about engaging in politics that didn't actually achieve their goals - which was that societal change I speak so badly of.

They created a movement that allowed people to be liberal or conservative even after they started families,

*Yawn* Feminists hate families, it's an off hand thing, but probably a bit too much again.

to build their participation in the public sphere into their economics and their lives.

I'm making a direct reference to the old economists faction of the pre-revolution russian communists btw, don't worry if you don't get that, it's a leninist in-joke.

Now of course as a child of the 1980s, I was apolitical until 2002, so it's not like I'm blameless. None of us are. And the point isn't to cast blame, since hey, we can all be part of this newfangled cool internet progressive thingy and all of us are going to have to pitch in if we are going to dodge very angry Arctic ice. And there's a persuasive argument that the internet was built by progressive radicals from the 1960s who went to Silicon Valley, that the culture of the time made strides that I am overlooking. Still, that Arctic ice is very angry.

Well it is, you would be too if your near future involved a phase transition from solid to liquid followed by being peed in by copious fish.

And if that isn't a metaphor for all sorts of things in american politics, I don't know what is.