...the fuck?! PONY!

Okay Hivemind, riddle me this...

How, the FUCK, am I supposed to react to the written skidsmarks you monocleclub wankers have left in my comments? tell me this. I've got Ren asserting that some physical law of the fucking universe forbids me from objecting to anything she says, Octogalore fails at life (again, I would not want ot be you when you reincarnate...) with both another failed attempt at grammar criticism (I speak vernacular english Octagalore! get the fuck over this concept already) and some classic bad faith arguement in form of the hoary old "conspiracy theory" chestnut.

*le sigh*

I've got Daisy mad at me because of, I fuck you not, a misplaced hyphen and Ravenm failing at Ally work quite spectacularly.

But it's the good kind of failier, you know, the kind that is wrong in that way taht is begs for a correction that is oh so right.

Folks, MLK has explained this already; it is very easy to trick a POC, you just have to make them trust your crackery ass and then punished them for that misplaced trust.

It's a side effect of living in a racist, white supremicist society, where it is literally beaten into POC's heads that white opinions are far far more valid than their own, where white voices are given room while POC voices are shouted down.

Being an ally means creating spaces where POC are accomodated and treated like equals, so when, after several years in which Ren has humored every crazy ass MRA and white racist misogynist that felt like posting a comment on her blog, she decides to pick out and hold up for ridicule - how dare Kate tell you that a phrase you use makes your blog a hostile place for her! The nerve of the chink Other! She almost acts like she doesn't ph33r your We-sha-sha! the impudence of it! - a POC who was just expressing how something Ren said made her feel, I am obligated to make some noise about that, and too keep making a noise about that because silence is what the racist society needs me to produce to enable it's bullshit.

And the absolute ally-vacuum into which I shouted in that comment thread is... well that's what "the silence of our freinds" thing MEANS you idiot white people. And far be it from me to point fingers, but could someone please remind me why, despite the fact that I, unlike "radical" folks like Daisy, am not a regular commenter at Ren the Magical Asian-jews's ethnically challenged asian lady's blog, I was the only one who called bullshit when Ren;

NOT ONLY, used the racist "Political Correctness" dogwhistle to silence and dehumanise a POC,

NOT ONLY co-opted the oppression experienced by asian americans so that she could use it like a commodity rather than the fucked up bullshit women like Kate have to put up with every fucking day of their lives that it actually is,

NOT ONLY then proceeded to pretend that she and her white regular commenters (like Amber) had authority enough to decide whether or not that POC was ALLOWED to be offended by something Ren said, when only a sociopath would presume that what a person feels is a debatable thing.

No agree to disagree there of course, and no allies hanging around that blog neither.

Let me now go off on a seeming tangent for second:

My objections as an anarchist to the monocle club are not to the group per se, but the power dynamics inherent to such exclusive secret clubs, linked into the same mechanisms for utilizing social capital that you find in Kos's townhouse group, or in the little club Vallenti and Marcotte formed a year or so back, or like the "safe spaces" Radfems are always using to fuck over sex workers and transexuals - And we can know that groups like this impose a hierarchy onto the social groups they arise from because that's what all the other groups have done, even though the other feminist groups who have these groups are, just like you guys, allegedly against such abusive power structures and hierarchies.

And yes, calling a safe space a "book club", or a hippo for that matter, doesn't actually change those underlying dyanmics and hierarchies.

My second major, philisophical problem you could say, with such groups is that they generally require an acceptance of what Marx in manifesto call "critical utopian socialism", and thus are inherently flawed and self restraining for the same reasons, and I cannot repeat what Mardx wrote better than him so I'll just quote the relevent section:

We do not here refer to that literature which, in every great modern revolution, has always given voice to the demands of the proletariat, such as the writings of Babeuf [4] and others.

The first direct attempts of the proletariat to attain its own ends, made in times of universal excitement, when feudal society was being overthrown, necessarily failed, owing to the then undeveloped state of the proletariat, as well as to the absence of the economic conditions for its emancipation, conditions that had yet to be produced, and could be produced by the impending bourgeois epoch alone. The revolutionary literature that accompanied these first movements of the proletariat had necessarily a reactionary character. It inculcated universal asceticism and social levelling in its crudest form.

The socialist and communist systems, properly so called, those of Saint-Simon [5], Fourier [6], Owen [7], and others, spring into existence in the early undeveloped period, described above, of the struggle between proletariat and bourgeoisie (see Section 1. Bourgeois and Proletarians).

The founders of these systems see, indeed, the class antagonisms, as well as the action of the decomposing elements in the prevailing form of society. But the proletariat, as yet in its infancy, offers to them the spectacle of a class without any historical initiative or any independent political movement.

Since the development of class antagonism keeps even pace with the development of industry, the economic situation, as they find it, does not as yet offer to them the material conditions for the emancipation of the proletariat. They therefore search after a new social science, after new social laws, that are to create these conditions.

Historical action is to yield to their personal inventive action; historically created conditions of emancipation to fantastic ones; and the gradual, spontaneous class organization of the proletariat to an organization of society especially contrived by these inventors. Future history resolves itself, in their eyes, into the propaganda and the practical carrying out of their social plans.

In the formation of their plans, they are conscious of caring chiefly for the interests of the working class, as being the most suffering class. Only from the point of view of being the most suffering class does the proletariat exist for them.

The undeveloped state of the class struggle, as well as their own surroundings, causes Socialists of this kind to consider themselves far superior to all class antagonisms. They want to improve the condition of every member of society, even that of the most favored. Hence, they habitually appeal to society at large, without the distinction of class; nay, by preference, to the ruling class. For how can people when once they understand their system, fail to see in it the best possible plan of the best possible state of society?

Hence, they reject all political, and especially all revolutionary action; they wish to attain their ends by peaceful means, necessarily doomed to failure, and by the force of example, to pave the way for the new social gospel.

Such fantastic pictures of future society, painted at a time when the proletariat is still in a very undeveloped state and has but a fantastic conception of its own position, correspond with the first instinctive yearnings of that class for a general reconstruction of society.

But these socialist and communist publications contain also a critical element. They attack every principle of existing society. Hence, they are full of the most valuable materials for the enlightenment of the working class. The practical measures proposed in them -- such as the abolition of the distinction between town and country, of the family, of the carrying on of industries for the account of private individuals, and of the wage system, the proclamation of social harmony, the conversion of the function of the state into a more superintendence of production -- all these proposals point solely to the disappearance of class antagonisms which were, at that time, only just cropping up, and which, in these publications, are recognized in their earliest indistinct and undefined forms only. These proposals, therefore, are of a purely utopian character.

The significance of critical-utopian socialism and communism bears an inverse relation to historical development. In proportion as the modern class struggle develops and takes definite shape, this fantastic standing apart from the contest, these fantastic attacks on it, lose all practical value and all theoretical justifications. Therefore, although the originators of these systems were, in many respects, revolutionary, their disciples have, in every case, formed mere reactionary sects. They hold fast by the original views of their masters, in opposition to the progressive historical development of the proletariat. They, therefore, endeavor, and that consistently, to deaden the class struggle and to reconcile the class antagonisms. They still dream of experimental realization of their social utopias, of founding isolated phalansteres, of establishing "Home Colonies", or setting up a "Little Icaria" [8] -- pocket editions of the New Jerusalem -- and to realize all these castles in the air, they are compelled to appeal to the feelings and purses of the bourgeois. By degrees, they sink into the category of the reactionary conservative socialists depicted above, differing from these only by more systematic pedantry, and by their fanatical and superstitious belief in the miraculous effects of their social science.

They, therefore, violently oppose all political action on the part of the working class; such action, according to them, can only result from blind unbelief in the new gospel.

The Owenites in England, and the Fourierists in France, respectively, oppose the Chartists and the Reformistes.

And So I must also object to your group on communist grounds.

Thirdly; As an ally I must again Object to your group on practical grounds. to summarize, no gated community ever changed the world.

That is largely my objection to the radfems' silly little safe spaces, you can't change hte world from outside, and if you think that you can build a shangri-la so awesome that unreconstructed crackers will flock to you and demand to be let in...well I have news for you, the crakcers like being crackers, more importantly the system that made them crackers in the first place is bigger, and weilds more of the power that these sorts of groups are trying to weild.

This is one way to intrepret Audre Lord's "you cannot demolish the master's house with the master's tools" - you don't take a knife to a gun fight, and if your opponent has more guns than you have, then going to a gun fight at all seems stupid.

And here's the thing that I suspect I've been leaving unspoken when I should have: surely there's a better way to do things than this?

You can't deconstruct privelage in a secret little exclusive group because privelage works by it being kept invisible - if your attempt to tackle privealge doesn't consist of being LOUD and being PUBLIC rather than polite and private it WILL fail, because of what privealge is and how it works.

More importantly you can't build a community from exclusivity - you partition off the conversation between allies and you stop the silent majority (the lurkers) from being able to gain anything from it, and you create a circle jerk.

And you try to pass that off as "ally work", as "SRS Anti-racist bizness", then well... don't.

Because that's the thing, I can't force you to listen, I can't force you to actually think or have an open and public conversation about this group, about what it should involve and the draw backs of various approachs, and how maybe you should set up checks and balances to stop abuses of power and to limit the degree of damage an unhealthy and uncritical social cohesion can bring about.

Because you have far more social capital than I can bring to bear, and you have more social captial than I am willing to accumulate to fight you all.

And while I suppose I could hack into your accounts, your email, your bank accounts and similar, and dredge up your personal details and basically utilize the exact same pre-existnt power structures that your group, as it stands, has been supportive of, I have a horrible sinking feeling that I'm morally obliged to take the higher ground. Also I is lazy and personal bank details has not got a flavor

But I don't expect you to listen, you've shown that you don't want to take anything I say in good faith, you would rather prefer to dismiss and dehumanize me to protect your clique, and you're free to do that I guess.

This is a public space and public spaces are, in our society, by definition, the "safe space" of assholes - sure the neo-nazis have to skulk around stormfront, but you visit most of the "big blogs", and you'll find that any talk about race, or sexism, or whatever and privelage will be quickly shut down, shouted down and then locked down, because there's nothing worse than being called "racist" or "sexist" and it's all so unfair to the poor opressed rich white guy.

Don't be the poor oppressed rich white guy, don't be self pitying.

And even more unfortunately the old saying goes that you can't teach a student who isn't willing to learn, so as of this moment please take it as read that I am no longer going to self identify as an "ally", considering that you guys will undoubtably drag the term through the mud, and make us whtie folk who give more of a shit about people rather than privelage look really fucking bad by association, during this year - even more so than you already have of course, thank you for that Ren and Amber - and I have no power to stop you.

So I guess you win? Or whatever this is exactly.

Bon apetit XXX

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.

Obligatory Speech Post: Now with 100% more John Barrowman offering cunninglingus!

John Barrowman was in a movie once upon a time.

It was a bad movie.

Here is that movie cut down to a run time of 4 minutes.



I was gonna do a post about the way Obama juxtaposed the daily experience of being a POC in a racist society with the paranoid delusion some white people have about affirmative action, but Kai mostly covered it really.

The only thing I have to add is that, judging by his past speeches, Obama does, unfortunately, seem to be one of those ladder pulling types who's "thing" among his fellow white people is to be okay with white people who object to affirmative action, and even going so far as to apologise and approve of anti-AA politics.

It's why I get this little twiching eyebrow thing going on when people compare him to MLK - basically, affirmative action was something MLK thought was not the whole of the solution, becuase while it dealt with some of the long lasting problems facing POC as a result of the vast history of even-worse-than-current racisms it wasn't the magic bullet that would solve all of them, it was basically a good start to a process that still needs a lot of work to be done on top of that start. So when someone starts talking about how some white people are suffering under delusions of inferiority regarding AA, and that such delusions have just as much validity as does the daily lived experience of POC, (to the point where they can be treated, as Obama did, as equivalent and equal) I imnagine that MLK, if he hadn't been shotm he'd have responded with a stirring, heartfelt speech that could be summarized thusly:

How, in the name of God and all that is holy, is it fairer for white people to pretend they're not getting benefits from historical racism - which they certainly are - to the continued detriment of POC, yet unfair if something is done to counter act that assault upon justice, love and human rights?

I don't like it, I don't like the deep seated waft of Cosby that permeates anything Obama says with regard to race.

But on the other hand the tone, and the subject was new, and shiney and something which no other potential president in the history of our nation has even touched upon.

So my overall feeling is that time may tell if the speech is either a irrelevent peice of pretty sounding hogwash, or a "1.5 steps forward, 1 step back" sort of affair.

Though if Hillary does steal the fucking nomination, no one will even remember it by june so...


HOWEVER, let me point out to all the people who have decided to come out about hating Obama now that, for the first time in his fucking career, he's done something not weaselly and entirely meaingingless; I hated Obama back before it was popular, since 2005 in fact, when he whipped out the Letter To The Kossacks and declared that not only wasn't opposing AA programs racist (which is and was a factually inaccurate statement), but also that being anti-choice wasn't misgynistic at all.

Which was a nice thing for him and penis to declare.

However let me just point out the ways in which arch-sHillacrat Ferraro was in fact kinda right when she said that Obama wouldn't be in the position he is in today if he weren't black.

The surface level aspect of the statement was what caused all the controversy becuase it's playing the race card yada yada, but let's posit some way to make her statement accurate.

for instance, if by "position he is in today" she had meant "in a position where the Klan would threaten to shoot both him and his immediate family" then yes, he would not be in that position today if he weren't black.

But the sad thing is that Ferraro was partially correct in the context she intended as well, Obama is undeniably a token, and hence would not have gotten where he was today if he wasn't black.

But let me explain to you the great racist little twist to the stabbage of racial tokenism; no black person could get away with being as stupid, buffoonish, childish, badly spoken, ineloquent and prone to episodes of borderline kleptomaniacal greed and avarice as white politicians get away with every fucking day of their careers.

Which is to say that Condi and Powell were undeniably the smartest members of the bush administration, and their routine habit of being grossly incompetent is most probably an accidental side effect of the Bush admin's consistent commitment to massive incompetence, that would have seen either of them being thrown out of the administration if they had actually dared to be fully competent anyway.

Now understand what I'm saying: I'm not saying that POC of color are smarter or somehow better than white people, what I'm saying is that politics is racist and that that racism means that there are limitations to how high a POC can go in government unless they act in ways that make them "not scary" to the eyes of the white politicians they'll need to fellate to get any where meaningful.

Imagine for instance you had a presidential candidate who spoke with a thick southern accent, couldn't get through a single speech without flubbing most of the words including the monosyllabic ones, constantly played up his ability to ape gross stereotypes of working class people, acting dumber than a rock in the process and looked a bit like a chimpanzee.

Now imagine he was black, how close to the presidency do you think he'd be able to get?

The deep seated and unintentional irony of Ferraro's declaration is that it preceded the Wright controversy, in which Obama's pastor, with classic black baptist bombastic style and righteous, justified, anger suddenly painted Obama as maybe not as antiseptic a black token as they had believed - which is why you've got the conservative talking heads on every crappy fauz-news type channel calling Obama and his pastor racist.

Because like with the "unfairness" and "racism" of Affirmative Action, there is no racism more unpalletable, no injustice less worthy of nasty little white people wailing and gnashing there teeth at though that maybe, just maybe, a black person somewhere out there is acting like a person, complex, multilayered and not neccesarily your loyal servant, without in someway bending and bowing and constraining themselves to act, at all times and in all ways, to standards and limitations that white people put upon them.

So here's the thing:

When Obama gets confirmed as the DLC's "boy", and he's tearing into senile old Grampa McCain like a small fat child goes at a mountain of ice cream shovel first, I will be delighted to tear both of the bastards apart as they present reasons to.

But while Hillary, extension to Bill's penis that she is, represents no one but herself and other waffling mercenary DINOs who will cling to any brief political fad that passes her way, Obama represents the flip side of the experiences of POC like Andrea Smith, like every POC who's been passed over for promotion, denied a raise or otherwise had their careers retarded because someone above them who's support they need to advance hates them for "what" they are and not how they perform their job.

Ferraro was right, he really wouldn't be where he was today if he wasn't black, just as he wouldn't be where he is today if washington wasn't powered by the heat of burning crosses and it's economy maintained by the pointy white hood industry. If politics weren't racist it's likely another, probably dumber, less well spoken black guy would be in his place.

And the funny thing is that Hillary would still be losing to that dumber black guy, not because of misogyny (because anyone who won't vote for Hillary "because she's a woman" is gonna vote for McCain anyway or is going to vote for hillary on the principle that doing so might give McCain an easy election, so they're not why Obama is doing so well) but because she went from being a reasonably okay politician back in the 90's to being the shallow, superficial rightwing hack she is today and we remember the difference, and hate that shift and her with it.

If it weren't for her immense experience as a campaigner, having helped both Bill on his campaigns and having fought her own various campaigns for senate and for the NYC mayorship*, she wouldn't even be in the position she's in to make those not particularly veiled threats about cheating Obama of his well deserved victory.

{ending goes here}

Who Says Published Writers Are Good: Piers Anthony Does To The Metaphor What Jack Bauer Does To Terrorists

I promised to post this months and months ago, yes, that's right, The Crackeristy Scene In The History Of The Written Language. So the hell with it, let's start this year of as it will likely continue - with a spice girls come back with another excerpt from Piers Anthony's seminal work of art: Tarot! gyaaaaah

This is from deep inside chapter 8: Emotion (Desire), the chapter after this happened actually.

That was something like the 18th rape scene in the book, and the one good thing about what you're about to read is that is involves absolutely no rape whatsoever. This is a small consolation though because it is actually more horrible than any mere rape scene.

Because Piers Antony can make whiteprogressives look like feminist anti-racist activists, and kinda like shaft because it is just so crackertastic, to the point of almost being overachieving in that regard.

I should probably introduce the scene properly though. Tarot is a book based around the idea that, somewhere out in the universe, God Himself has apparently decided to create a planet on which he gets to just fuck with the heads of the inhabitants, via these timey whimey floating holodeck-esque psycho-dramas that wander about the planet completely at random.

The planet got called "Tarot" after the first exploration team to find the planet, landed on it, immediately set out a sothern cross or something with their tarot cards, and one of the timey whimey acid trips made the skellington in the Major Arcana come to life and do an impression of that old WB cartoon with the singing frog.

Which says almost everything that needs to be said about the book: it's set in a universe where it's apparently normal for the redshirts on space exploration vessels to play Tarot after landing on unexplored planets, and to then write up that pictures from a pack of cards came alive with dancing skellington in the mission reports.

We don't know for sure that these doofuses were then fired for dropping way too much acid during their missions, but it's a safe bet if you ask me.

But that's just back story! The story proper starts when Brother Paul, Judo-Christian monk (and yes, I really do mean "judo") is sent to the planet Tarot to find out which Monotheist God (because even buddha found a monotheist god when he found nirvana apparently) is best, because obviously if you have a phenomenon that leads to what amounts to bad acid trips, it's not the result of some sort of gas produced by local flora or fauna, nope, it's clearly a Divine Message from the big guy himself.

So Paul steps onto the transporter from earth and gets teleported to Tarot, where he finds a remarkably religiously varied range of human settlers, including mormons, gay misogynistic racist satanists, muslims, a couple other sects of christians, and a few jews.

All of whom are pretty damn certain that their God is The God of Tarot of course.

It also turns out that the planet was inhabited by a single yeti, who was apparently native ot the planet, but who's religious beliefs are unimportant because he's not human. That says everything else that needs to be said about Tarot really. He immediately acts out the racist cover of Amanda Marcotte's book, and is promptly killed even though his shambling bestial nature made him the most likable character in the whole thing. Seriously, when you're deep in the bit where everyone's genitals are made of bits of string, you miss that Yeti with all your heart.

Or at least I did.

Anyway a shit load of bland metaphysics occurs, most of which seems to involve raping the single white female character, and then Paul finds himself reliving his past without any knowledge of his future. Which is where it is revealed that he was a druggie with an addiction to a memory enhancing drug, thus adding a whole DARE message underneath it all that is undoubtably supposed to make the reader feel superior to those gosh darn hippies and stuff, but is so forced that one finds it difficult to care all that much either way. People who set up their own universe with its own metaphysics don't really persuade me to their point of view when their arguement consists of yelling "SEE! IN MY FICTIONAL UNIVERSE DRUGS ARE BAD! SO THERE!" at me for a hundred and 81 pages. However, Paul then quite quickly and painlessly kicks his addiction and fless the drug cartel he was working for because someone talked to him about jesus and stuff.

The woman who does that (played by the same wome who has been raped a shit load by this point, because apaprently God can create complex psycho-dramas, but still has to mind control people actually on the planet into playing the various parts) is of course thrown out of a helicopter off page and a bit later, and thus prompts him to run away into the big bad Little Ethnic! Town of what ever the hell city he's supposed to be in, and attempt to get the protection of the Happy Multiracial Underworld...

...[Paul] wove around and through knots of people until he had lost the narc. Soon he was on a different street. A huge nova-neon sign illuminated as his approach activated its mechanism: CHRIST=GUILT.
Paul smited. Was this unintentional irony? One never could tell with religious cults. He passed under it and glanced back. from the side it said: SEX=SIN. No mistake, evidently; to many religionists, any form of pleasure was immoral, and no person could be holy unless he felt guilty. Even in the joy of true faith, he had to feel guilty for that very emotion of joy.
Yet in some people it assumed and attractively demure quality, and there could be a certain allurement, the security of belonging. What was that one Sister Beth was in? The Holy Order of Vision. His memory had not failed! Maybe that was just another repressive cult, reacting to repressive soceity--but she had been one sweet girl. Why had she had to die?
Paul Paused, feeling a kind of explosion in his chest. Heat erupted and sperad out under his ribcage, a burning tide, slowly fading. Suddenly he understood what was popularly called heart-break. There was no physical pain; the sensation was oddly pleasant. but something that had been subtly vital was gone, evena as he realized its existence. In its place was--guilt.
There was a moment of confusion, then it was late afternoon and he was alone, entering a rundown building. It was unmarked, but everyone who had business here knew its name. It was the Dozens--the hangout of the disowned. More specifically, it was the expressly nonwhite enclave of an age when there was, by law, no societal discrimination based on race or creed. So this institution had no legal foundation.

I should note that that is apropos of nothing really - this was originally published in 1979 from what I can make out, nor was it ever published in South Africa, so he's not writing to an audience who come from a legally segregated country, though he did grow up in one, so maybe it's a relic of an early draft form back in the 60's or something. Or maybe it's all Reagan's fault. who knows.

But neither did the menm cartel [mnem is the memory drug he was hooked on, and yes he just compared a bar where nonwhite people hang out to a drug cartel. - RM] Legality deviated from fact, and no white person was foolish enough to set foot inside the Dozens.
Paul's presence caused an immediate stir. In moments, three husky men blocked his progress. One was the reddish hue of an almost full-blooded Amerind; another was oriental; the third was black. Maybe you just lost your way, snowball?" Black inquired softly.
A snowball was a hundred-percent white person, and would not survive long in this colored hell. Paul dropped into a balanced crouch whose meaning could not be misinterpreted. "No." He refrained from using the counter insult, "pitchball."
"Mine" yellow said. The two others gave way. The Oriental stood opposite Paul, standing naturally. "Karate?"
"Judo."
"Kodokan?"
"Ikyu," Paul replied.
"Nidan," Yellow said.

For some reason I always start to get nostalgic for the days when Jet Lee, Chow Yun Fat and Jackie Chan used to star in their own movies, rather than co-starring against generic american comedian #342, when I read this part. I don't know why.
Also, feel free to make you own "and gesundheit to you too!" jokes in response to that little dialogue, or to imagine a perfect world where this is an introduction to a badly!good slashfic of some kind. Alas...

They bowed to each other, a stiff little motion from the waist. They had just identified their schools of martial arts and respective ranks. Yellow outranked Paul by two grades, and these grades were not casually acquired things; he was quite likely to tromp Paul in a normal match. Paul could fight Yellow if he wished, but he would not remain long the Dozens premises. It would be better to desist from this approach. he had, at any rate, obtained his hearing, which was his purpose.
"I belong," Oaul said. "I am one-eighth black. I'm a casino dealer, a skilled mechanic, and the feds are after me. Mnemdict." This was the one place where he would have nothing to fear from either fed or cartel; the Dozens took care of its own with fiendish efficiency, and its resources extended as far as nonwhite blood did. But first Paul had to gain admittance.
Yellow stepped back and Black came came forward. "We can use a mechanic. But you're seven-eighths white." The tone made it an insult.
"Yes. My name is Paul cenji. I was raised white. But you can verify my ancestry with the bureau of records."
Black produced a button transceiver. "Paul Cenji," he said into it.
In a moment it responded, "Twelve-point-five percent black. Three percent yellow. Trace admixture of other nonwhite. On the lam from fed and cartel this date."
Black studied him critically. "You are in trouble. Your body makes it, by the skin of your prick. But your soul is white."
"try me," Paul said. He knew they would--and before they were through, the truth would be known.
Black spoke into his unit again. This was evidently no standard computer terminal; the Dozens had information more current and extensive than he had believed possible. They knew about his mnem complication and the federal man' offer already! And that three-percent Oriental ancestry; this was the first Paul had heard of that. It must derive from somewhere in his white component; he had not checked that out as thoroughly as the black. "Karrie."
In another moment a brown-skinned girl about six years of age joined them. black gave way to her with a certain formal courtesy reminiscent of the martial arts practice. What was developing?
The child gazed at Paul with open contempt. She had a slightly crooked lip that lent itself admirably to a sneer. "Know the dozens?" She asked.
She was not referring to this building. Not directly. Disconcerted, Paul raised his hands in partial negation. "I know it some---but not with women or children."
"Then haul your white ass home." the girl said.
Paul stared at her. He did know the "dirty dozens," or contests in insult, a typically black form of ordeal. Black humor, in a very special sense. the name of this club derived from it. This was a most appropriate challenge; if he could beat the house champion, he would prove the blackness of his soul, for Whites seldom competed and were not good at this.

Note that when he is facing a big guy who's clearly able to whup his ass in a pull down drag out, he doesn't engage in it, but the moment he's faced by a little girl - who by Paul's own "logic" is gonna be better at cussing his ass into next week than him, because white people seldom competed and were not good at cussing each other out, and Paul was raised white.

Yeeeeaaaah.

I personally would prefer to get my ass handed to me by a grown adult than a little girl personally, but this guy is by this point kind of a serial rapist, so the piss ant cowardice is kinda in character really.

What's really interesting in this seciton however is not merely the fact taht Piers Anthony is seriously trying to convince us that this dweeby racist SOB is a good guy, but the way Piers Anthony managed to write the fantasy equivalent of The Bell Curve, and yet, via some magical depth that he's achieved by just being so shallow in that delightfully faux-intellectual manner of his, manages to pack more complexity into the vast array of fucked up racist language and metaphors than most other racists can manage on purpose.

Now that's talent.

He had come prepared, but he had thought of it strictly as man-to-man. This man-vs,female-child situation was extremely awkward.
Yet this was the way they had set it up. If he wanted to join the club, he would have to perform.
He focused on the child, Karrie. She had demonstrated her readiness to fight with shocking directness. this was as real an encounter as the prospective judo match with Yellow, and rather more to the point. Little Karrie had invited him to depart with an unknid reference to the color of his ass. He had to refute this, turning the insult on his opponent, and rhyme it if he could.
"I'll haul ass home/when you learn to use a comb," he said--and was immediately disgusted with himself. He had gotten the refutation and rhyme, but it was a pretty weak attack. A girl her age would use a comb--if she chose to. Often it was a point of pride to need no comb, or to borrow one from a male companion. So he hadn't really scored. He had merely entered the lists.

Suffice to say Piers Anthony, like many who have gone through life being carefully and passive aggressively middle class, doesn't get "the dirty dozens". It's not about "rhyme" or just refuting what your opponent says. It's about wit, and intelligence, and making your freinds and your opponent's freinds laugh at your opponents expense, because it's fundamentally Afro-American culture's addition to the fine and ancient art of trolling really - except unlike internet trolling it's gotta be fast and it's ideally gotta be fresh and original for maximum effect, and it requires not just genitalia ovals of prodigous size, but a willingness to risk looking a fool - a thing which so often scares people far more than physical violence itself, which at least can be spun after the fact so that your ego doesn't get bruised along with your body.

Fuck academic qualifications, if you can explain in an interesting and witty way why and how exactly someone else's mother routinely engages in sexual intercourse with a herd of bison, you're fucking intelligent and smart, you may still end up living in a cardboard box under the bridge because you failed school (and vice versa obviously), but you ain't stupid. Monkeys beat the shit out of each other, monkeys can play professional sport (except lacrosse, but that's because monkeys consider lacrosse to be an insult to their poop flinging dignity), but the one thing monkeys can't do is crack wise about sleeping with their opponents' mothers and make them look like a fool.

Also advanced tool use, but I'll assume that's a given.

I'll forgoe pointing out what his failure to "get" the basics of a cussing match says about Piers Anthony and everyone else who turn their noses up at both the concept and the language employed. I should howeverwanr folks that it gets worse from here. Much worse. Putting drinks down and keeping a bucket to vomit into nearby worse.

Fine. Assume I'm employing hyperbole then, see if I care when you vomit all over your keyboard.

Note that weird declaration that little brown girls apparently collect men to carry around their combs. If anyone knows what the hell is up with that I'd appreciate it, because it's a weird thing to say, even for Piers Anthony, six year old girls keep men around to carry their combs, okay then Piers, now could you please share whatever the hell you're smoking?

And it should be "haul my ass home", otherwise the beats completely off for what you're trying to do. Man, even your attempt at dialectical grammar sucks the balls of a large and irritable goat. Even though, strictly speaking, any come back from being cussed by a child should emphasis how beneath you engaging in a cussing match with a six year old child is, something like "haul my ass home? Why honey, don't you recognise your own father?" would have worked a bit better than some waffles about combs. Not that that's saying much admittedly.

She snapped right back: "I'll take that comb/and jam it through your chrome." She paused, then struck hard: "With foam."
This was no innocent, despite her age! chrome generally reflected white, not black. Foaming agents were still used by minority group for prophylactic purposes. Score a couple of points for her, she had adapted his concept to his disadvantage.
"If your mama had put foam in, you'd never have come out." he told her. No rhyme--but the insult was stronger: the suggestion that she had been an accidental, unwanted baby. It was hard to put it all together, relevence, rhyme, and insult, without time for thought. But that was what it made it such a challenge. Even many blacks could not perform well at the dozens, lacking the ready wit. If he could handle it, it would more than compensate for the marginal quality of his genetic. Now, too late, he thought of the rhyme: "you'd never have been."
A crowd was gathering. This was their kind of entertainment. Not all of them were against him; he was beginning to prove himself by fighting dozens-style, and a number of them were light-skinned blacks like himself. A dozen or so. A pun, perhaps; the dozen had nothing to do with the figure twelve.

And what a figure! hubba hubba! Sorry.

It derived from a white expression applying stunning or stupefying. If he won this contest, he would have instant friends, and his future would be feasible, if not absolutely secure. "Good shot," one murmured.
Stung, Karrie came back viciously: "Your ma's squirted out/when she fucked that white lout."
"reversed," one spectator commented with professional acumen. He meant she had taken Paul' insult and applied it to him, reinforced by rhyme and another racial reference Those "white" shots were hurting him, here!
He had to take off the gloves. He could not afford to think of Karrie as either female or child;

Yeah, this isn't really gonna be a situation you can rape your way out of methinks.

she was the enemy, out to destroy him. "That was no lout, that was her man. Your ma got two bucks for baring her can."
There was a smattering of applause. Paul had topped her verse with his own, implying that her mother was a prostitute. The mother was always the target of choice in such contests, the vulnerability of every living person. "Two bucks!" someone muttered appreciatively. that figure had been traditional half a century ago; now it denoted impossible cheapness, barely the price of the required shot of foam---which improved the quality of hte gibe. He was hiting his stride now, after a shaky start.
The girl felt the thrust and knew she had been wounded. Maybe she was the accidental child of a prostitute. the insults were not intended to b accurate reflections of one's opponent, but if one struck close to home to make a person lose his composure he was also losing the contest. "Get out of here, seven-eights ball!" she screamed. "Go back to your ma's lily-white cunt!"
"Hoo!" someone exclaimed admiringly. Losing ground, Karrie had struck hard indeed, producing a marvelous eight-ball pun on his white ancestry, and calling him a motherfucker. That was close to the ultimate insult, almost impossible to top in the normal course of the game, and in this case he was unable to reply in kind. She could not convincingly be called a motherfucker. He realized now that the match had been weighted against him; some prime insults did not apply females or children. karrie presented a disconcertingly small target.

"females"? What, like if you ever end up in a situation where you need to cuss out a female elk or something? Not even women or girls...

Still, he was warmed up now, and not out of it by any means. "My ma's africa; I never saw her cunt./And it's none of your business, you little black runt."
No comment from the gallery. Paul had defended himself aptly enough, but had not taken the attack to her. He had lost the initiative.
Karrie sensed victory. She went for the kill. "Her ass is in afirca so she can see/how to get a cure for your pa's veedee."

Oh say can't you see/VD is easily treatable with antibiotics these days.

Making him the child of venereal disease. How was he to top that?
Suddenly it came to him: the irrefutable implication, utterly dastardly. The fecal connection! [!!! - RM] "when you pa fucked your ma, he missed the slit;/he peed up her ass and didn't quit;/and you came out as brown as shit." A triple rhyme, yet!
Karrie stared at him, defeated, unable to respond. He had really nailed her, making her the spawn of urine and defecation. but there was no applause from the audience; all stood in stony silence.
Then he realized: he had won the dozens, but lost his objective. for he had by implication likened all brown people to feces, and yellow people to urine, including his own nonwhite components. In his heat to win, he had let the means justify the end, and so destroyed the value of that end. Only a white soul would have conceived and executed that insult.
Once again, he had grasped salvation--and discovered a turd.

Few! well it's over, people hiding under your keyboards can come out, out long national nightmare is over, and with it, 2007.

I think I hate 2008 already.

for those who were feeling nauseous before, and still are, let me just give you a smooth, contextless chaser of subtext from E.E. 'Doc' Smith's classic sci-fi yarn Galactic Patrol:

"Clamp a leg-lock around my waist, Kim," he directed, the flashing thought in no whit interfering with his prodigious axe-play, "and as soon as I gt a chance, before the real tussle comes, I'll couple us together with all the belt-snap I can reach-whereever we're going we're going together! Wonder why they haven't ganged up on me, too, and what the lizard is doing? Been too busy to look, but thought he'd've been on my back before this."

Whew, the year's looking better already. Just stay vigilante and remember: The fecal Connection!

Cosby Kid Mychal Bell to perform Plea Perjory against the other 5 Jena defendants

The prosecution for the Jena 6 is back with a brand new vision: Mychal Bell advised to commit plea perjory make a plea bargain to avoid having his previous thrown in his face, on account of so called "overwhelming evidence". (via*)

Note of course that it is unlikely that Mychal bell's testimony will be considered invalid THIS TIME, due to not accusing poor ickle sawn-off shotgun weilding white kids of threatening him with a gun (which, remember, led to him being charged with theft), but is basically being forced to throw his co-defendants, some of whom were probably not even there a the start of the school yard brawl that culminated this mess into a national scandal, into the legal threshing machine to save his own ass.

What do you think Prognosticatory Deep Sea Anglerfish?**


Okay, now could everyone who whined and moaned in defense of the "poor" "boys" of the Duke Lacrosse team when they were "unfairly" "maligned", "had their lives ruined" and "persecuted", please take one step forward.

Okay, now note how much your hyperbole failed. because let's be honest, there was no bias with the Lacrosse Rape case.
There was no boys involved even. There was no year long fight just to get the Lacrosse rapists charged with a crime they might possibly have committed, rather than murder wiht a deadly weapon and conspiracy to commit murder with a deadly weapon. What the Lacrosse Rapists did, didn't occur after two previous fights had been started by the stripper, the penultimate one of which involved her waving a sawn-off shotgun around while threatening to rape the Lacrosse crackers herself. And the result of the stripper waving a sawn-off shotgun around certainly wouldn't have ended with the Lacrosse rapists being charged with theft because they wrestled the gun off of her. And even then, rape, unlike a randomised schoolyard beating, is never justifiable, whereas handing a beatdown to shotgun waving racist moron is something I find hard to condemn for some inexplicable reason. Can't think why. /sarcasm

So let's cut it down to the bone here; after a year of struggle by civil rights campaigners to get the ridiculously human schoolyard fight redefined as something other than assault with a deadly weapon, because, if the "why you're picking on us?" folks in Jena are to believed then Jena is full of people who believe that the Boxer rebelliion was put down through western jesustude, rather than because bullets work. After a year the decision to down grade "tennis shoes" from the status of a deadly weapon back to an item of clothing was forced upon Jena, so that instead of six minors being charged as adults we have... six minors being charged as adults, some of them for a crime they probably didn't commit anyway, even if you accept the whole nonsense of putting kids into adult prison for a schoolyard fight that even the most extreme pacifist would admit was kinda unavoidable at that point. But it's at least no longer a charge that's actively taking huge heaping ten gallon hats full of piss, and makes the marcottian style "buh...buh...buh...but we're not racist!" pleas form Jena residents stretch belief beyond the breaking point.

Or at least, the current charges don't stretch belief taht far as long as you ignore the whole "juveniles being tried as adults" thing, and the whole "juveniles being tried as adults for a playground fight" thing and are prepared to ignore that the Jena courts have by this point earned enough contempt to make any unbiased bystander arrestable for contempt of court.

Oh, and the way that one of the adolescents is now being pressured with arrest on a prior offense - which of course the police and courts could ignore before because it's never "conspiracy to pervert the course of justice" when the police and courts make sure that crimes are just...forgotten, when it's convenient and when doing so helpfully allows them to get previously untrustworthy witnesses to say whatever the hell the prosecution wants them to say.

Especially when it's likely not true in the cases of a few of the Jena Remainders.

However, the one thing I really hope I don't see is people bitching about how Mychal Bell is a snitch and has let down the other Jena defendants. If you accept the charges, then a fair trial would likely find Mychal guilty enough to send him to one of hte institutional rape camps we call "prison". He's stuck between a rock and a hard place then, either sacrifice himself so that the authorities can't send the message they want to send*** or take the council his, likely very pale (I can't find a picture of mychal bell's lawyer so I might be wrong on that point), lawyer is advising. Yes, the noble thing for him to do is to take the butt raping for the team but let me reiterating that main point again:

He's a kid, not some 20-something Duke brat but an actual "boy", who shouldn't be being looking at an adult punishment for a crime that is still so unbelievably silly, and yet who is being advised by all the adults who are able to contact him at the moment to snitch. Damn right he's scared because the authorities are telling him that they can get him, irregardless of whether it makes sense or whether he actually did something, it's the message he's being used by the authorities to convey, and it's one that's clearly been conveyed to him already. And like a kid, he's not doing the noble self sacrificing thing instead of the dirt selfish thing.

Because.

He's.

A Kid.

That they're trying to send the message they're sending is disgusting enough, htat they trying to cosbify this kid into passing the message along to the black community, no doubt as an extra litle racist "fuck you" created in response to this year's earlier demonstrations and fight by the nation's POC to get the original extra-bullshitty charges dropped - which one will remember really annoyed alot of the white folk in Jena even as they *snort* plead innocent to the charge of racism - that manages to go beyond even the usual bottom feeding, slimy, scum sucking bastardry typical of say the LAPD and begins to chart whole new courses into the murky waters of Mare Strom Thurmond.

* and yet more from BA here.

** crappy picture courtesy of Photoshop Elements, which I finally got my hands on and which turns out to suck more than the free Ultimate Paint program I usually use. Photoshop sucks. bleh.

*** because the courts in Jena, due to them following through on this ludicrous charge, after the even more ludicrous charges they had before, are rather obviously trying to send nohting less than a rather obvious message to the black community of Jena and the surrounding areas that white folk can still "destroy you with a stroke of a pen". Which in my non-legal pov works out to what amounts to a hate crime - akin to, if not hugely WORSE than, the original noose hangings, except this time it'll end with the Jena 6 getting anally raped by vengeful white prison guards.

fluffymacrocunt hates Amanda Marcotte

Ugh.



Now for anyone out there, remember that you can pick one of these two to represent yourself with, but you cannot pick Both.

Random Fluffy Video Post

I love that the Jena spokeman is still complaining about his town's reputation being maligned and "stereotyped". Oh and the usual "but we're so nice around here!" thing

Yeah, like having a judicial system that is so racist it actually stands out amid the usual injustices and quickly-swept-under-the-rug acts of terrorism on the parts of the NY and LAPD is not a problem, or that your kids are prone to hanging nooses about the place as a "joke".

At this point it's the sheer blatantness of the whole "nice" "polite" "eloquent" "civil" code-wordpalooza that pisses me off, I know they're lying, I've been lied to before by other liars and bigots using those exact words, and they are not even words that could, even jokingly, be considered particularly subtle code words, because those words so consistently and routinely are used to excuse fucked up actions* that I have no idea what you're trying to achieve...

well I lie, I know what you're trying to achieve, and that is to sooth watching white lurkers that you're not really "bad", after all, you did the white minimum remorse dance, and can't we just move on? followed up by the ready dismissal of arguements you don't have any code words against, until the willing blindeness leads your temper to get hte best of you, and oops, now you gotta pull the "I didn't reply before because the exact same arguements I am now responding to were just people Stirring Trouble (dun dun dun!)" followed by a bad answer, a stupid answer, and finally marginal (but grumbling and reluctant!) acceptance that, yes, maybe I might have done something bad, you know"

"But can't we just move on?" you add with a impish grin, playing to the white lense, maybe with a bit of classism and/or sexism sprayed back and forth to cover your fifty foot high code worded bullshit.

Then you cycle once more around the ever so merry meritocracy-go-round.

This liberalism, conservative, moderate, centrist, thing, it's revolutionary, truly, nothing revolves quite like it.

NOTE: Aristrocracy means "rule by the best", Meritocracy means (roughly, give or take a neologism) "Rule by those who deserve to".
NOTE: both are used as after the fact and hugely revisionist bullshit phrases to validate and normalise dysfunctional systems.
NOTE: both descriptions' failure to go into anything about the method by which they are "aristocracies" - even with the still really vague term "democracy" you know that a system that is not a democracy is one which does not actually entertain rule by "the people", even if that does leave legalese wriggle room for careful definitions of who are "the people" - and this therefore leaves a huge aching gap wherein can be placed any system you like.

While ignoring the teeny tiny point that no system has ever existed where people sat down and actually worked out a way to intentionally ensure that only the worst and most incompetent were given power to rule countries (which means that the term "meritocratic" is completely redundant, as all systems have set out to be so, but are not for various reasons).

Though countless groups of "well meaning" people with quite... err... loudly stated... "good" "intent" have managed to consistently ensure that such a wankocracy has existed - in so far as people who are most prone to assure their critics that they "meant well" and are most likely to describe their system as a "meritocracy" are quite spectacularly prone to being complete and utter shitheads who shoudn't legally be allowed within a hundred yards of a kindagarten, let alone allowed to run a country or two.

All current systems are revisionocractic in nature, reliant on the lies and carefully censured histories that support the validity of their adminstrations and rules.

A working system will, by definition, not be so.

* first thing I'm doing with a time machine will be to go back and shoot Kant. Srsly. goddamn "intent" obsessed revisionist mother fuckers, fuck your tents, fuck those who are in those tents, fucking tent fucking fuckers.

...And For My Next Trick I Shall Poke A Killer Whale

For those of you who've seen the really fucking long incredible and astounding True Front of Progressivism post by The unapologetic mexican, have probably become really interested in the possibility of a blow up between Nezua and David Neiwert of Orcinus. Well it ain't happening.

However I'm still gonna take Orcinus' (And note that I'm gonna call Neiwert "orcinus" for the rest of this post for the sole and singular reason that I'm never quite sure I'm spelling his name correctly, but orcinus refers to killer whales, who are cuddly. I get really dyslexic with names and words with lots of I E and As near each other, largely because the bits of my brain that should care about the order the letters should go in, doesn't) complaints and stuff from the Jesus General thread and faf with them for the very sensible seeming (at least to my mind) reason that all the white people who want to play pretend that they live in a cuddly world where Obama Barack is not a token, are looking like they're gonna latch onto Orcinus' reaction to Nezua's post to rationalise their willfull ignorance about matters that no white person has ever had a legitimate excuse to be ignorant about in the first place (other than our innate laziness of course).

So it should therefore be noted that this is not an attack on orcinus, who is one of those blogs that I think does very important and insightful stuff, along with all the other such blogs, and I really really liked strawberry days.

But still, the only way to fight the slimy critters who hide under rocks such as the one Orcinus unwittingly provided for them (for understandable reasons, which I'll cover in a bit), is to pick the rocks up and expose the worst of the bunch to daylight, or to pour salt on them, depending on the slimey critters in question.

So with no further moderation of what I'm about to say let's hit it:

Look, I think Nez's overarching point is valuable, but I'm fucking furious about this.

When the hell was I designated "the face" of the left blogosphere on race?

I spent much of last week traveling and dealing with a family death, and what posting I did was done on the ferry and late at night when I could squeeze a little time in.

When the fuck was it that I was named the White Man in Charge of the Race Discussion? I'm just a guy posting in his garage and I do the best I can.

Nez, not only do you hold me to a ridiculously high standard, but it's one that you're not willing to meet yourself. Where were the links from you when I wrote the eliminationism series, especially the stuff on immigration? You're just getting around to reading it now!

Incidentally, I had been warning about the likelihood of concentration camps resulting from immigration policy well before Hutto came up. See here, here and here for example.

You'd know that if you'd been reading me all along, Nez. But you haven't, so you don't really know what I've been saying. Now you want to come in and tell me what I need to be writing about? I don't think so.

Now this is a comment of rage and fury which is kinda out of proportion to what Nezua actually said about Niewert, which was this:

Reading Digby yesterday, I was enjoying a post called It's Baaack, where he writes that "Via Dave Niewert at Orcinus I see that America's ugly white underbelly is showing again" and goes on to inform his readers that "Niewert's work is very important at a time like this because he has documented how these racists and eliminationists are given permission by mainstream figures to let their bigot flag fly:"

And I thought America's ugly white underbelly is...'back?' Really? I thought to myself where had it gone, then? And I went to Niewert's blog, which so often has very well-researched articles that tie in historically. The man does an astounding amount of research, and also posts very beautiful pictures of whales. Still, I had to ask myself why it was that Digby thought "America's ugly white underbelly" had gone anywhere. Was it because he reads Orcinus to keep up on it?

Now it's understandable that orcinus might get a bit angry about this, Nezua is after all snarking on digby and quite a few other a-listers using a technique known as "taking them at face value, and running with it".

Now you wouldn't think that taking what people say at face value would be that annoying really, after all, Amanda Marcotte and any number of other people have pointed out that it's not very fair to expect white writers to actually be aware of the contexts and subtexts that are contained in and surround their writings - unfortunately they've yet to explain why this is so, but I'm sure they'll do it one day - but nonetheless it is one of the most clever ways to convey snark because writers use subtexts and context to convey thoughts, and actually taking a blog post literally enugh that you fail to engage with the context the writer intended to center the post around, and thereby change subtexts that relied on that context, leads to the entire blog post itself being read in a way the original writer never meant for it to be read.

In this particular instance, Nezua takes Digby's statement that "Niewert's work is very important at a time like this because he has documented how these racists and eliminationists are given permission by mainstream figures to let their bigot flag fly:" and makes you view it from a different angle than the one Digby intended.

Of course, the entire rest of Nezua's post should lead the reader to realise that the context that's being substituted for the intended one is of course the one in which the A-Listers have been soaking in furiously for the past year or so. For those just tuning in, that's the one in which they've been engaging in petit eliminationist tactics towards POC, radical and feminist bloggers, not to mention the careful watering down of truly progressive politics to the end of "passing" as members of the political punditocracy, which goes on top of the overtly racist, sexist, and just plain bigoted stuff those A-listers have been churning out of late, in the name of "progressive politics".

One of the favorite statements by these A-listers to rationalise all that, has been a routine and constant declaration that "they don't have time" (in between setting their threadbots up in the morning and counting their six figure ad revenue in the evening, she said snarkily), either to read the blogs that would give them the information and education they frankly need if they're gonna have any hope of not being such fucking idiots (ffs), or to blog about all those issues... Like hte detention centers, like the intersection of immigration policies, that a lot of their pet politicians support, with reality, and like the more subtle and routinely accepted aspects of the whole wider system of white supremcy and colonialism.

So when an A-Lister declares that a blog is important, because it deals with issues like racism, and eliminationism, well that's a huge fucking statement! Here we have a time poor blogger, who usually just cannot find the time to deal with such things, declaring that not only is dealing with such things very important, but that at last someone, among all the millions of blogs, is finally actually doing what the poor hard working A-lsters are unable to do!

And of course, for those who don't get the other side of teh joke, Nezua is actually mocking the fact you'd have to be pretty fucking ignorant of what Orcinus usually contains to talk about Orcinus' work documenting instances of racism and eliminationism, and at the same time name the blog post "It's baaack!", given that Orcinus makes it quite clear in post after post after post that the racism didn't actually go anywhere, that it in fact has always been there, teetering on the very brink of public awareness.

But given that, well why is Orcinus angry?

Well lets look at his next comment, and deal with this whole "safe" issue he raises:

As I said, I think Nez's underlying point is important. You know, I think a lot of white folks who are sincerely progressive about racial issues like to think that it's not "their issue" -- they leave the advocacy up to the minorities who they see as that constituency. I happen to think racial issues affect us all and are the provenance of every progressive. I'm kind of baffled that I'm one of the few who does talk about those issues consistently, particularly the immigration debate.

But really, it's against my nature -- and part of the parcel -- to bang my shoe on the table when no one pays attention. You know, this idea that I'm an "A-lister" really doesn't hold up: I get about 3,000 hits daily, which is very healthy, but far below what the General gets, or Digby, or many many others. And frankly, the more I've talked about immigration, the more traffic, and more especially my links for the real A-listers, has tapered off -- but that hasn't changed my focus.

What really dismayed me, though, and still does, is being described as "safe." What I do isn't safe. Confronting neo-Nazis and racists isn't safe. Pointing out the flow of extremism into mainstream conservatism, and calling it for what it is (namely, fascism) isn't safe -- what happens, actually, is what has happened to me, namely, that you get tagged an alarmist and a race-monger. Again, that hasn't changed my focus.

Being called "safe" really takes for granted the many risks I've taken over the years and continue to take, both personally and professionally. And I insist on taking them when necessary because it is, after all, my job.

Now aside from that most inexplicable reading of Nezua's post, where I'm confused as to where exactly orcinus is called an A-Lister in that post, let alone where Nezua makes (rather than mocks) any assertions that Orcinus is the spokesperson for anti-racist blogging or something, the whole "safe" issue is the crux of the whole affair.

You see, one of the things is that Orcinus is the most well known anti-facist blogs. in part this is due to his status as some who blogs about the extreme end of the far right, the neo-nazis and skin heads, the violent nutters and the vocal eliminationists. In short, orcinus is very emotionally safe for a lot of the "I'm not a racist but..." types on the left, because he does focus on the overt and the unsubtle aspects of white supremecy and racism.

This focus makes him highly accessible, to some extent, to people that cannot read blogs like Bfp's or BA's or Silence of Our Friends or The Unapologetic Mexican, because all of them focus quite heavily on the day to day insults and hatreds that get thrown at POC, and all of them make no bones about attacking the subtle bigots right alongside the more overt ones that unfortunately seem to be in charge in the government and media. Which, as you could imagine, would be something of a major turn off for people who themselves are those subtle bigots and unreconstructed Class White Folk.

Orcinus does not require that a reader face their own bigotries and prejudices, and therefore, orcinus is quite clearly far far "safer", emotionally, for those leftwing assholes to read and to praise as doing "important work".

Now don't get me wrong, I'm not saying Orcinus should suddenly change tact and start attempting to talk about what it's like to be a black woman in a white man's world (to grossly insult all WOC who's blogging could be summarised as such, but I'd have to stab you in the neck if you did), largely because A) Orcinus as it is works, it does everything you could want such a blog to do and B) I don't think Orcinus could be that sort of blog and work anyway, wrong sort of writer, wrong sort of blog.

But just because I cannot fault Orcinus for being what it is, and being damn good at the same time, doesn't mean that it isn't what it is: emotionally safe for the closet racists to view and point at and say "look at them righties! Oh what nasty nasty peopel they are! Unlike us, and please please vote for Barack 'the eloquent negro' Obama!"

But WHY IS ORCINUS ANGRY!? You cry, after I avoid the question again, well I'm getting to that.

Now I want it noted that I read through Nezua's post, and I asked myself at several key points; is he talking about me? Do I need to...err...blog harder about...erm...stuff? (and then thought: That was a really stupidly phrased thought, is the Synonym Lobe drunk again?)

When non-white people talk about white people, there is that nasty tendency to assume that they're talking specifically about you, becuase there's always that fear that you are just that bit more racist than you realise, that bit less self-aware than you thought you were, becuase you walk around day after and see all the unreconstructed white racists who are convinced, absolutely fucking convinced for no discernible reason anyone can make out, that they're not racists, that they're Nice Guys and good and pure and the model of Die Colorblind Ubermenschen.

But they're not, and their unslain buddhas hangs over you and you wonder... are they talking about me? In that wonderfullly self centered way that members of The Normative Groups for some reason excel at, that makes it all about MeMeMeMeMe.

However, I'm someone who has already killed a shit lot of buddhas, when people talk about JG or World O' Crap's comments being cesspits, I know what they're talking about because I was one of those strange beige turds that are so often found in such public toilets.

"Mann coulter" and similar jokes, check.

Michelle Malkin manatee + ping pong balls jokes, check.

Been there, want to hurt myself at the memory, got the T-Shirt that says "What an Asshole" on it.

Yes... you mutter, your point?

Well back when I had more buddhas, the biggest, and always the worst, the ring leader of all the other buddhas in fact, was the one that puts it's arm around your shoulder whenever people criticise you about certain, shall we say, hegemonically approved behaviors and attitudes, and calmly says to you "hey baby, you ain't gonna take that are you? Did you hear what they called you? Whatcha going to do about it hmm?" and will spend a heck lotta time reassuring you that you're the one who was wronged here, they said this! They said that! How dare they insult MeMeMeMe!?

That Nezua was essentially talking over Orcinus, and pointing to the "safe for tender white tuckuses" anti-racist blog's own language to basically say "Wow, he's right, Orcinus really is saying stuff that needs to be said, which really is interesting and useful... shame the A-Listers didn't actually read it eh?"

But if Nezua had mentioned me by name in the way he mentioned Orcinus, well yes, I'd have assumed he was criticising me personally until I caught myself thinking in so utterly self centered a fashion.

Admittedly I am, at all times, just about barely restraining myself from killin someone for irritating me, and thus probably not exactly the best example from which to judge what's normitive in this matter, but nonetheless, the reaction, being as it is a hugely self importance misreading of Nezua's post, is all white privelage (those assumptions that it's all about us, and that we are probably not really at fault, not really, that excuse us from double checking to see if we're actually being attacked before reacting to it), all buddha, and a shame really, because it feeds the problem that Nezua was attacking, and which Orcinus is quite firmly against in the first place. But it's not even really his fault, expecting perfection at all times is a good way to find nothing but disappointment, and it must be said that he came off it far more gracefully than I would have (thought, again, note the whole "barely restraining myself from killing people" thing), but still, fundamentally, he was chatting crap, but at least would be the first person to object to the slimey tools who want to forgive blatant and rampant willingness on the part of the Big Name blogs to avoid talking about serious issues like racism and immigration, because it's a matter that they fucking well should make time For, because it has to be dealt with, because as everyone for whom racists damn well makes time to oppress will tell you; only a total idiot would think that it wasn't fundamentally important, otherwise what the fuck is the point of all this blogocubing business in the first place?

Also this post of donna's is really really good.

...And now I shall stop speaking for Nezua *cusses*.

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!)