You are currently browsing the monthly archive for November 2010.
“Recessions are for the little people, not for the corporate chiefs and the titans of Wall Street who are at the heart of the American aristocracy. They have waged economic warfare against everybody else and are winning big time.
The ranks of the poor may be swelling and families forced out of their foreclosed homes may be enduring a nightmarish holiday season, but American companies have just experienced their most profitable quarter ever. As The Times reported this week, U.S. firms earned profits at an annual rate of $1.659 trillion in the third quarter — the highest total since the government began keeping track more than six decades ago.
…What’s really needed is for working Americans to form alliances and try, in a spirit of good will, to work out equitable solutions to the myriad problems facing so many ordinary individuals and families. Strong leaders are needed to develop such alliances and fight back against the forces that nearly destroyed the economy and have left working Americans in the lurch.”
“It is very important for ordinary citizens, who have no direct interest in maintaining the status quo, to take part in a constitutional review.”
-Icelandic Prime Minister Johanna Sigurdardottir
Iceland will soon elect 31 ordinary citizens to redraft their constitution. Quelle idée! Or perhaps I should say, þvílík hugmynd!
Links!
Sheriff Tom Dart & a family facing eviction.
Illinois Sheriff Refuses to Evict Homeowners
Sez Sheriff Tom Dart: “I can’t possibly be expected to evict people from their homes when the banks themselves can’t say for sure everything was done properly. I need some kind of assurance that we aren’t evicting families based on fraudulent behavior by the banks. Until that happens, I can’t in good conscience keep carrying out evictions involving these banks.”
Apparently, men suddenly care about groping. Now that it’s happening to them.
Texas Cheerleader Kicked Off Squad for Refusing to Cheer Player Who Raped Her The court supported the Silsbee High School’s decision when she sued.
The Impact of SB1070 on Native Peoples
Guess who else “looks illegal”? That’s right, the people who have been here since before white people illegally entered what is now the United States. Huh, that’s weird.
Black people should stop whining about racism and concentrate more on why black people are so violent. Or so sez Jason Riley at the venerable Wall Street Journal.
Germany’s perspective on the American Great Recession is at least interesting, if nothing else. A Superpower in Decline: Is the American Dream Over?
Guess what they decided?
The United States is a confused and fearful country in 2010. American companies are still world-class, but today Apple and Coca-Cola, Google and Microsoft are investing in Asia, where labor is cheap and markets are growing, and hardly at all in the United States. Some 47 percent of Americans don’t believe that the America Dream is still realistic.
The Desperate States of America are loud and distressed. The country has always been a little paranoid, but now it’s also despondent, hopeless and pessimistic. Americans have always believed in the country’s capacity for regeneration, that a new awakening is possible at any time. Now, 63 percent of Americans don’t believe that they will be able to maintain their current standard of living.
A Different Kind of “Wedding Dress” by TheElchang:
This music video survived the first round of the Krazy K-Pop Music Video Battle and will be heading to the final round!
Check out Privilege Denying Dude here. But be warned: sometimes he’s a little too real.
Por ejemplo:
Too real?
Update 11/16/10: I am not making this up: the model in the photograph, as well as the owner of the photograph are claiming that being an internet meme is not lawful use of this image, and have convinced Tumblr to take down the Privilege Denying Dude website.
But, all is not entirely lost. PDD has continued to flourish on the Meme Generator, now with several new faces, belonging to white men who don’t mind contributing to feminist and anti-racist critique!
Things that I think are more likely to make positive change in the world than Democrats:
“No matter what anybody tells you, words and ideas can change the world.”
Dead Poet’s Society, written by Tom Schulman
“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world.”
Margaret Mead
“Cautious, careful people, always casting about to preserve their reputation and social standing, never can bring about a reform. Those who are really in earnest must be willing to be anything or nothing in the world’s estimation.”
Susan B. Anthony (1820-1906)
“”Realistic” people who pursue “practical” aims are rarely as realistic or practical in the long run as dreamers who pursue their dreams.”
Hans Selye
“Transformation is only valid if it is carried out with the people, not for them. Liberation is like a childbirth, and a painful one. The person who emerges is a new person: no longer either oppressor or oppressed, but a person in the process of achieving freedom. It is only the oppressed who, by freeing themselves, can free their oppressors.”
Paulo Freire
“Small acts, when multiplied by millions of people, can transform the world.”
Howard Zinn
“The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never allow us to bring about genuine change.”
Audre Lorde
Please help yourself to this magickal Psychic TV experience, involving one very awesome little girl:
My mistake. I forgot to throw this up on the blog when it began a couple weeks ago. Now, here it is:
Pictures of Muslims Wearing Things
From the site:
Former NPR analyst Juan Williams, among other ignorant people, has an irrational fear of Muslims, and thinks you can identify them based on what they look like. Here I will post pictures of Muslims wearing all sorts of things in an attempt to refute that there is such a thing as “Muslim garb” or a Muslim look.
If you have the memory of the newt, the statement that got Juan Williams fired and provoked the ire of the above blogger was:
[W]hen I get on the plane, I got to tell you, if I see people who are in Muslim garb and I think, you know, they are identifying themselves first and foremost as Muslims, I get worried. I get nervous.
Amina Tariq is garbed in organic Muslim lettuce.
Muslim and legendary jazz drummer Art Blakey often wore the traditional suit and tie of his culture.
Madhubala had no problems donning traditional Muslim glamor in her prime.
I have Lithuanian friends!
I found this feminist Lithuanian blog that links to me on their resources page: Do you fucking mind us?!
Yay! And here is another feminist Lithuanian blog they link to: kam reikia feminizmo? } grįžta (Who needs feminism?)
I took me a minute to figure out what the .lt country code was for.
I have been thinking about voting recently. About what it means to cast a vote, what voting means in our society (I mean the US), and why some people choose to vote and others do not.
In my experience, the people who the most invested in equality and justice and social change, and who have the least to lose, are the people who are most marginalized. Those who are winning the game have little reason to change it, and so are not likely to be radicalized. So I find that poor people, people of color, women, trans people, immigrants, young people and queers or people with several of these identities are where you find those most dedicated to a just society—they are the ones with something to gain from it.
So I began to do some critical thinking when I noticed that to a certain extent, people with marginalized identities are less likely to vote. See this Pew Research Center study for the numbers. I thought, wouldn’t those most motivated to change society be more likely to vote? Wouldn’t those who feel the most comfortable with the status quo be complacent and likely to skip voting? That’s what I would have expected.
A common theory about why the marginalized don’t vote as much as those who feel mainstream is that they are stupid and/or ignorant and/or uneducated. The numbers do indicate that people with less education tend to vote less, and people who are marginalized tend to have less access to education. However, as individuals out struggling in the real world without the comfort of a self- or media-constructed façade, I have noticed that the marginalized often have a better grasp on reality than those with money, education, and advantageous skin colors. Without an ivory tower, cubicle cloisters, suburban self-segregation, or much mobility, marginalized people can’t escape the more depressing realities that anyone with advantage would escape from. So the claim by mainstream people that marginalized people don’t vote out of ignorance doesn’t ring true.
People with money and comfortable lifestyles often assume that poor people make inscrutable choices because they are stupid. This is of course pure self-serving prejudice, because it sets the comfortable up as the ‘smart’ standard bearers to whom everyone else must be compared. Perhaps the marginalized are also rational decision makers. Perhaps they too make the best choices given their options, and it is the comfortable who don’t understand the options they face. It is a safe assumption that people, regardless of income, sexuality, race or other such distinctions, make their choices out of rational self-interest. So when a marginalized group, such as poor people, decides to a large degree to abstain from voting, perhaps they have a reason.
I started to contemplate this reason. Assuredly, for different people the reasoning behind the choice to vote or not will be different. But perhaps there are some trends, or over-arching patterns that lead certain people to vote less than other certain people.
That brings us back to my question: why would those with the most to gain from social change choose not to exercise the most highly touted way for the common people to enact change?
What if some of us don’t believe that voting is an effective way to achieve social change? If we take the assumption that marginalized people’s brains work about as good as mainstream people’s brains, that means their choice not to vote is motivated by rational self-interest as much as the choices of mainstream people.
And if, as I suggest, marginalized people are compelled to deal with the harsh realities of our society more often than mainstream people, than their decision not to vote is potentially based on better information than the decisions of mainstream people. For example, when Indians were granted the right to vote in 1924, Chief Clinton Rickard of the Tuscarora declared that he had no interest in “white men’s elections”.
What does that say about voting as a tool to enact change?
Read the rest of this entry »
So many scary stories, so little time to blog! Here’s the most frightening things I’ve read in the news lately:
Harvard’s “Conquistabros and Navajos” Frat Party
First Annual Salon Baity Awards for Excellence in the Field of Race-Baiting
The Most Racist Campaign in Decades, and What It Demands of Us
School Board Vice President Who Wants All Gay Youth to Die Resigns
Prison Economics Help Drive Arizona Immigration Law
Documents Released by WikiLeaks Confirm Massive US Human Rights Violations
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