A lovely little thing left in the comment mod by someone called “child of god”

god made man..satin made women…women are all evil by nature….hell is over flowing with the bitches…women turn mans heads away from gods will..and lead them into sin..by the use of seduction…and controll….women all love to be worshipede…that it self is evil..and agenst gods will…you are to love one and other…men are not to worship women….you worship GOD!

You heard it here first kids. Satin made women. Shiny, silky, soft flowy satin made women. Does this mean I need to start calling my satin lingerie “Mommy”?

Around this time of year, my neighborhood is usually awash in illegal fireworks. At any time of day or night, series of loud pops will stop us from whatever we are doing to play the time honored game of Firecrackers or Bullets.

It’s annoying, and it terrifies the kid. We spend the week before and the week after July 4th all tense and cranky. Shoulders get stiff from tensing repeatedly throughout the day and I usually spend a good chunk of time hiding under a hot water bottle because of stress induced migraines.

But this year, it’s quieter. There have only been a few games of Firecrackers or Bullets. People can’t afford their annual explosives splurge when the price of gas to go out and buy them is painful. And there isn’t any spending money anyways. Food prices are climbing while package sizes are shrinking. It may be the beginning of the month when even welfare recipients have some cash, but we’ve all been suffering through those last weeks of the month where we find a thousand and one creative ways to eat ramen noodles. Spending 20 bucks on fireworks means 2 days of hungry for a family (if that family can eat cheap).

They say it is going to get much worse here before it gets better. We already have Hoovervilles (some groups has started call them Nicklesville after our mayor) and the food banks have had to cut back because they can’t afford the gas to go pick up supplies. More people are hungry and there are fewer programs to help that. So few that our governor just raised the income limits on the state food stamp program so more people will be fed. But they will end up in the same boat with the rest of us. A couple of flush weeks per month where you eat like normal people, and a couple where you spend your days dreaming of meals with all the food groups. And we haven’t even hit the subprime bubble here yet. Oh it’s coming, but not just yet. And when all those people lose their homes to foreclosure, those of us who could never afford to buy are going to see the all ready high rents skyrocket.

This year, I don’t even want to waste the $3.00 in bus fare it would cost to drag the kid out to see fireworks. I don’t want to sit on a muddy blanket and oh and ahh over the pretty colors while internally wondering how the fuck I am going to pay rent this month. I’m skipping it. It’s hard to feel love for a country when you aren’t sure how you’re gonna feed and house your kid.

This year, Firecrackers or Bullets is more likely to be bullets. And this year, 4th of July tense and cranky isn’t from over excited kids trying to blow off their own hands. It’s from fear and struggle and worry.

So I am spending the night in. I am curling up with a trashy British spy show and hiding from the reckless drunk and revelry. I don’t see a lot to celebrate in this country right now.

When people do horrible things to other people, like say flying airplanes into buildings or becoming serial killers, we like to say that they are evil. We use words and phrases like that to disassociate ourselves from the act. It’s the same for rape apology and victim blaming. It’s a way to disassociate ourselves from the victim. The more different from us that we make them, the less likely we think we are to be them.
But we don’t just disassociate for the big, grizzly things. We do it all the time for relatively less difficult stuff. Disassociation is one way of othering people.

Back when I was still reading stalkerbot’s comments, he was pissed cause I just don’t get where prejudice and misogyny really come from. According to him, it all comes from parents teaching children to hate. If that were true, with 30 some odd years of fluffy tolerance lessons in schools and Peacock messages on TV, we should all love each other now.

Funny, it didn’t really work out that way.

Privilege is pragmatic. I’ve said that over and over again, I know. And for many of you reading this, it’s a no brainer of a statement. But many many people still think that it is simply the result of irrational hate. They think that if they can just make everyone play nice, then all the problems of a unequal society will be solved. And when that doesn’t work, we disassociate ourselves from the problem. They’re evil, or stupid, or violent, or whatever, but they aren’t us. Disassociation makes us feel better because it means we get to keep our privilege while pretending it doesn’t exist or that if it does, we aren’t the ones keeping it around. We don’t have to do the hard work of dismantling privilege brick by brick this way.

We disassociate whenever we talk about how lazy the poor are or how violent blacks are or how women are bad drivers. As if there has never been a rich white man who was a lazy, violent and a bad driver. Nah, never happens. We do it when we complain about domestic violence victims who just won’t leave their abusers. We assume that we would never allow ourselves to be in that kind of situation, and if we were we would act differently.

But people are rational creatures, even badly beaten wives and racists. By othering both of them, we refuse to find the real solutions to problems. We refuse to even look at the problems because we have disassociated, and the problems are no longer ours.

I was thinking about those statistics from the women in academia slides. Why is it that both men and women in the Swedish study judged men and women differently? Why was men’s work overvalued and women’s work undervalued in the same process. What benefit does it give to the evaluators to undervalue women and overvalue men? Are these just evil misogynist who hate women and want them to fail? Nope.

For the male evaluators, there is a definite benefit to them in keeping lower standards for men than for women, even if they don’t realize they are doing it. By keeping standards lower for men, they are keeping themselves competitive. Without doing anything other than being male, they have just made their own chances better. They associate with the male candidates, identify with them. So they judge them as they would like to be judged. But when it comes to female candidates, they disassociate. They judge them more harshly, require higher standards, and keep women at a competitive disadvantage.

Think of it this way. (The following analogy is entirely the fault of AG and this post). For your entire life you have only ever eaten McDonald’s Quarter Pounders with cheese. You’ve never eaten at Wendy’s or Burger King, and you’ve never had a real gourmet burger either. Whenever you eat a burger, you judge it based on the other burgers you’ve had. Is it hot, fresh (comparatively) or did it sit so long the cheese started to get gummy? The basic parts are all the same every time, so you are very familiar with Quarter Pounders and you have a kind of shorthand in your head for judging good one from bad ones. Then one day, someone puts two burgers in front of you. One is the trusty quarter pounder, the other is something else. In order for you to choose the other burger over the quarter pounder, that burger needs to have all the components of the original, plus something that will make you choose it instead. It has to be much better than you are used to get you to pick it. .

As for female evaluators, in order for them to get to the position they are in, they probably had to do a lot of disassociation with their own sex.

More proof that I was right all along.

Speaking with reporters, Obama disputed that he is altering views.

“I get tagged as being on the left and, when I simply describe what has been my position consistently, then suddenly people act surprised,” he said. “But there hasn’t been substantial shifts there.”

Now will you all kindly go fuck yourselves. He ain’t no progressive folk hero.

I’ve rewritten this post in my head about a zillion times now. It’s one of those swirling ideas in my head that really needs more time to properly set up, but I’m impatient as all get out. So you get the raw brain bits.

I told Deek in one of our email spats that “I am the canary in the fucking coal mine” but that’s not it exactly. The canary at least gets to die off early. Instead, I think that I (and quite a few angry Anti-Obama Dems) are the frogs that feel the hot water first. We’re swimming around in a pot that looks like a jacuzzi and everytime we complain that the water just keeps getting hotter, the other frogs say “Get over it. Chilax. It’s a jacuzzi baby. It’s supposed to be warm”.

Thing is, we still boil with the other frogs, even if we know it’s coming.

Those distinctions that once made the Democratic Party better than the Republicans are gone. We say “hey, what about being the Big Tent Party. You can’t be the Big Tent party if you’re kicking people out for being working class or brown” and the other frogs say “Ahh we don’t need them”.

So we say “Hey we can’t be the party of equality if we’re insulting millions of women” and the other frogs say “Get over it you angry bitches”.

We say “What about privacy and freedom” and the other frogs swallow hard and try to pretend like the FISA vote never happened.

Then we say “What about separation of Church and State?” and a few of the other frogs throw a tantrum thinking they’ve been had. But we didn’t really think it was a surprise. The water’s been getting pretty hot in here for awhile.

Obama’s turning up the heat on the pot of water that is the Democratic Party. And we all boil together. We can leave the party, we can vote for someone else (or not at all) and we can hold our noses and vote for him. The result is still the same. We all boil together.

Obama wants to expand Bush’s faith based program funding.

Not a surprise to me. I never thought Obama was a progressive. Actually I’ve been calling him a Republican on economics for a long time. Now I have proof that he really is just a Black Republican.

I wonder how many back bends the Koolaid drinkers will have to do to make this policy fit in with their idea of Obama as the Great Progressive Uniter! THough they do think of him as a messiah. Perhaps faith based programs just continue the expansion of the cult.