Monthly Archives: October 2009

Every revolution needs

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a manifesto. So while I am not regularly interneted that is what I am working on.

So far I’ve got the Poor People’s Union/Revolution or PPU/R

That’s just not very catchy as a name, is it? Suggestions?

Also- for the non-poor but sympathetic (Like Blue Lion) of course you can be part of it, we always need allies. But like allies of other groups, self determination of poor people is the central idea. It’s not about charity, or pity, or trying to make the middling meddling middles feel better (not the Blue has EVER done anything like that- I’m talking about the standard charity model of not really helping the poor much while at the same time making poor people feel ashamed because the system chews them up and spits them out at the bottom)

So what would you all like to see in a manifesto? I want it to be as inclusive as possible, no leaving people behind because their flavor of oppression has too many intersections to be easily summed up.

I’m in a doing kind of mood

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After reading about higher jobless rates becoming the new norm, real unemployment being about 20%, homeless families on the street while new apartment buildings sit empty, and fucking fauxgressive douchebags who wanna fat hate at the poor- I’m in the mood to do something.

I also just watched The Future Is Unwritten about Joe Strummer (who I love with the passion of a 1000 fiery suns).

It’s time to get our punk rock, DIY, fuck your authority figures and the shiny horse they rode in on, on.

Nobody is gonna speak for us, the poor and ignored. Handouts and charity may feed you for a bit, but we are tired of begging for our fare share. I want to kick and break and punch and bite and scream.

And then I want to build.

I’ve been thinking that what we poor people need is a union. It shouldn’t matter what your job is (or if you have one). We need to band together and scream for ourselves. We need the boots off our necks. We need the boots off our kid’s necks. We need to be louder than the poor pitying tones of the middling middles.

It’s time for a class war, is what I’m saying.

10 things that shame and punishment and restriction have never “cured”

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Quickly- I am at the library with a scant few minutes of internet time before closing. Watch me type so fast my fingers flame

Here’s your top ten list of things not “cured” by shame, punishment or restriction:

1) Homosexuality
2) extra-marital sex (either pre marital or adultery)
3) rape (when the shame, punishment, restriction is aimed at victims or potential victims instead of rapists)
4)disease (did shame ever cure an AIDS patient? Or a lung cancer victim?)
5) obesity (if fat shaming worked we’d all look like Ralph Lauren models)
6)mental illness
7) immigration- legal or otherwise. (go back and ask the Irish if “No Irish Allowed” kept them from immigrating 150 years ago. Ask the Chinese in San Francisco if shame kept them out?
8) poverty
9)poverty
10)POVERTY

Einstein famously said that “insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting to get a different result”. I think it’s more stupidity.

Several things above don’t need to be cured at all, they are blights on society (homosexuality, extra-marital sex, immigration, obesity)

The others are illness or disease, which last I checked only got cured through medical science, and poverty.

Poverty has been a source of shame for those who live in it since forever. Punishment doesn’t cure it either, whether it’s Workhouses or debtors prison or Welfare to Work policies.

We’ve tried shame, punishment, and restriction for eons to end poverty. Perhaps it’s time we tried something less stupid. Perhaps it’s time we realized that poverty is not the result of personal, individual failures but of a society that refuses to provide basic living requirements to the least powerful of it’s members.

(It is probably a good thing that our internet died when it did- as I was so angry at the fauxgressive, sexist, classist, fat shaming going on at Change.org that my blood pressure was seriously rising. I have no more patience for helpful wolves in sheep costume)

PPS– I cannot type blog posts from my phone, but I can read comments and might be able to respond, so consider this an open thread. I miss you peeps.

Relay messsage from the Red Queen

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Okay, this is my third attempt to make Blogger my pal and get it to post the WHOLE post. Please, Blogger, be my fwiend?

Got word this morning from the Red Queen herself. She, the Kid and all are fine–it’s just her internet connection that’s fubar. RQ, here’s hoping it’ll all be straightened out to your satisfaction soon. The joint ain’t the same without ya.

But, to pass the time while you’re offline, would anyone like to contribute an ode to Sen. Al Franken for his overall awesomeness? (Or one decrying the 30 male Republican senators who thought the suffering of gang-rape victims should be secondary to Halliburton’s profits?) I’ll start:

The clown speaks the truth
and helps the sufferers more
than their “protectors.”

Other people have kittehs

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or otters or alpacas to make themselves feel better when the crappiness of the world leaves them to mad to do anything but plot violent revolution.

I have this. A cartoon flying bison named Appa.

Yes I am a grown up. Yes I am addicted to this silly cartoon. I blame Ouyang Dan for getting me hooked. She is also responsible for making me watch (and love) a show about people I would hate in real life, cowboy libertarians.

Sorry for the sappy music in the vid- it is a youtube video after all.

Why so mad little girly?

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Let’s talk about agency and intent for a minute, cause I’m so fucking pissed off right now I could tear the heads off “well meaning” fauxgressives and bathe in their blood.

Agency. We feminists use that term a lot. Agency is the idea that people get to choose their own lives, without restraint or coercion. For straight up white middle class feminism, that means freedom to choose when and with who to have sex or not have sex, and whether or not to get pregnant, stay pregnant, be a mother, not be a mother. Those are all important things to decide for yourself, but they aren’t the end all be all of agency.

Agency means different things to different people (and we ain’t even gotten into intersectionality) but at it’s core it means having the access to tools and resources to choose your own life. For a person with disabilities those tools might be cars with wheel chair lifts or internet access and video conferencing for those who are bedridden.

For a poor mom, it might be access to enough resources so that they can plan their family’s meals with nutrition and tastiness, not cost, as the deciding factors.

That’s it, that’s all agency means, It means getting to choose for yourself. Period.

Now let’s talk about intent. There are lots of well meaning people in the world who just fuck up grandly when it comes to us poor oppressed types. People who talk down to people in wheel chairs may think they are just being friendly and their intent is good, but by treating a PWD as less than they are removing the PWD’s agency.

And when people talk about helping the poor by placing MORE restrictions on poor people, by say limiting what kinds of food poor people (or fat people) are allowed to buy, they are removing that poor person’s agency.

Even though their intent is to help.

And I get pissed, really, blood bloodcurdling, pissed off when one more person with good intentions talks about the poor like we’re misbehaving housepets who need to be kept from eating the garbage.

Cause they’re talking about me. They are treating me, a real live intelligent person, like I have no more sense than a 4 year old with a bag of Halloween candy.

To be a sexist, racist, ableist, homophobic, transphobic, classist oppressor does not require intent to be any of those things. It simply requires the removal of someone elses’ agency, even if you think it’s in their best interest.

When you’re done with math, try some vocabulary

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Anglachel, bless her awesomeness, has gotten some shit from the virtuous foodies who who don’t like my take or her spin off on why poor people eat what they can afford.

Since we’ve already covered the math, let’s work on basic reading comprehension and vocabulary.

It’s called poverty people. It’s not called “inability to budget”, or “spends unwisely cause they’re too ignorant to know better” or “they just wouldn’t be in this situation in they handled money more wisely”.

Now I hate to be the pretentious blogger who pulls out definitions of words so brutally common as poverty in order to prove a point, but since it’s either that or I start carrying around a large wooden mallet to beat sense into virtuous foodies and other asswipes d’jour, you’re going to have to suck it while I get pretentious.

Poverty, via wikipedia, “is the condition of lacking basic human needs such as nutrition, clean water, health care, clothing, and shelter because of the inability to afford them“. Bolds mine.

See that- it’s part of the definition that poverty is defined by the inability to get proper nutrition because of lack of money. It’s kinda central to the whole idea of poverty actually.

So next time some dickweed wants to explain how he lives above the poverty line with a grocery budget that is more than adequate and doesn’t understand why these poor people can’t live just like he does, you can smack him over the head with a dictionary until he learns some vocab. And while he is lying on the floor reeling from a concussion you should totally raid the condescending prick’s fridge. It’s cheaper than paying full price at the farmer’s market or whole paycheck foods.