Over at Corrente they are talking about the possibility of violent uprising when you have large groups of angry young men. You should all go read the comments, they are very illuminating.

When you’ve done that- read the follow up.

I’ve actually read a lot about this stuff, being that my 8 year old pretty princess dream involved both a tiara and a bandolier of bullets. So here’s my 5 cents.

1) Angry young men are good at destruction, but no so good at the reconstruction. They can be a useful tool, but you better have a pretty damn short leash or everyone gets the guillotine.

2) When women get involved, there is always a back up force, if you will, when the menfolk (inevitably) all get arrested. This is how the Irish Revolution was able to carry on after everyone at the Dublin Post office got arrested and most were summarily executed. Their wives, sisters, etc, continued recruiting, organizing and gun running.

3) Progressives should never ever ever make a pact with slightly less heinous neolibs to form a revolution. It will not work. Period. Back to the irish- if you ever need some inspiration go read about James Connolly.He was a socialist and a republican (in the Irish sense, which means a democrat). He was executed after the Easter Rising without a trial. There were those in the revolution who just wanted England out but were otherwise okay with the abject poverty of their fellow citizens, and there were those who wanted England out and for Ireland to be not just free but fair. Connolly and his ilk were of the latter breed.

England, not wanting to lose their financial interests in Ireland, gave the neolibs a choice, sell out the the socialists and Northern Ireland, and well let you go. Eammon De Velara saw which way the wind was blowing and set up Michael Collins to make the devil’s deal, which led to civil war between the socialists and those against partition, and the neo lib, pro treaty people.

It’s 88 years later. Northern Ireland is still British, and while Ireland has a better social system than the US, it ain’t no Sweden. I think it might even have a worse social system than England, which is why Northern Catholics stayed put. They got more money on the dole there than they would in the republic.

We cannot, whether it is in elections or revolutions, muddy justice by allying ourselves with those who would throw us under the bus. It never works.

4) The best non-violent protest are those with a purpose. Sit in and marches are all lovely ways of meeting like minded people, but real change only comes from real disobedience that proves the ridiculousness of the current system of law. Think about Ghandi walking to the sea to make salt, or Rosa parks taking a seat on a bus. Protests should be pragmatic. This is why I am in awe of the people who can afford to pay their upside down mortgages but are choosing to default anyways. And priests who advise their poor hungry congregants to steal from megastores. Protest must be pragmatic. It should produce an image in the minds of the watchers that strikes the very core of justice. They should see it and go “why the fuck would anyone be against (whatever activity you are attempting)”.

5) When revolutions happen, the people with the guns win before the people with the ideas get a chance to get started. Seriously folks. Take a look around. It’s the fricken teabaggers who are going too blow violently first. Do you really want them to be the ones running the country? Then perhaps we need to do more than just talk about things. Am I saying we should all go out and arm ourselves? Well I’ll leave that to each of you individually. But it might be a really good time to remind those in power that our way will cost them dollars and power , but the teabaggers way will cost them their heads.

6) OMG- are we really talking about this? I mean not in an abstract “I wish” kind of way but in the “it’s just a matter of time till someone forms a militia kind of way. Peeps, I am thinking the Chinese proverb, may you live in interesting times.

or king, gender not important, and you got to do whatever you wanted to change the current economic system?

I like playing the What if game, it’s always so much more hopeful than the What new fresh hell is the government serving up now game.

So here goes…..

1) Medicare for all, private insurance outlawed, dental included, Hyde amendment lifted.

2) Everyone who is unemployed or under employed gets a full ride to college, including living expenses and child care costs without having to jump through stupid hoops OR taking crappy certificate courses approved by Welfare. It takes a huge chunk of people out of the labor market (thus eliminating the current glut) AND trains workers to replace the baby boomers in high skill fields who are all about to retire. It also throws a shit ton of feed money into the educational budgets of states who are cutting secondary funding left and right. And all those people getting living expenses will be spending money on food, transport, books, etc.

I’d also allow community colleges that use PhD’s to offer 4 year degrees. Education doesn’t have to be prestigious, it just has to be effective.

3) Mortgages – upside down, in foreclosure, whatever get renegotiated to 1) their current market value or whatever is owed on the home, whichever is lower and 2) not to exceed 30% of the borrowers income. That should teach the banksters to stop playing fast a loose with the world economy.

4) The tax system gets a serious overhaul and simplification. No more deductions except for the standard deductions. No more itemizing. These things only ever serve as a way to make the rich pay less, really. And then I’d implement a real progressive tax system. The rich have gotten a 400 percent increase in their incomes over the last 10 years, perhaps it’s time they had a 400 percent increase in their tax payments.

And no more fucking capital gains shit. It’s income, pay taxes on it like it’s income. You shouldn’t get to slide out of half your taxes just because you don’t have to work for your money.

As far as business taxes, the only deductions they get to take are labor costs for people working in the US and goods and services bought or provided in the US. Deductions are an incentive, let’s make paying people well and buying local economically worthwhile.

5) it doesn’t have much to do with the economy as a whole (though it has a shit load to do with home economics) I’d lift DOMA and DADT and include homosexual couples in all benefits currently provided to hetero couples. Then I’d remind the states that the full faith and credit act of the constitution says they have to suck it up an honor marriages they don’t approve of.

6) I’ve said this before (I’ve said most of this before) but I’d eliminate Social Security, Welfare, and Unemployment benefits all together and replace them with a mandatory minimum income that puts people just above the poverty line regardless of why they aren’t working and tag the payout to inflation.

7) Require deadbeat parents to do the same Welfare to Work activities the poor (mostly) single moms have had to do for a decade. Don’t want to sit through 8 hours a day of job search and lectures by social workers? Pay child support.

So that a pretty fucking long list, and it doesn’t include universal childcare (but it would really!)

What would you do?

My dear friend Sylviiiiiiiiaaaaaaaa (always said in the accent of an aging English lady) sent the kid an email with this in it, cause it reminded her of him and she misses us. (We miss you too!!!!!!!!!!!)

Kid sent this back:

Thank you so much!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! We miss you!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! My mom wants a box o wine

There ya go folks, the Kid is out hustling boxes o wine for me on the intertubes.

I am a person who almost always has a song stuck in my head. The other night Wonder started playing “your song” by Elton John, and I was maniacally compelled to sing along. It is just one of things. I get songs, phrases, ideas, what have you, stuck in my head. If you said to me “the sun” I would have to finish by singing “is a mass of incandescent gas, a gigantic nuclear furnace”. Have to. Can’t not finish the song.

It’s ridiculous, I know. But of all the problems in the world, it is one of the more minor ones. Or so I thought.

Because now it is happening with idiotic feminine hygiene commercials.

Now everytime I go to refresh (shit, I even almost spelled that with a ph) my email page, which is often because this compy doesn’t do well with anything beyond basic html, I hear “rephresh” in that morphine dosed lady voice from the commercial.

This may be the thing that finally cracks my fragile hold on sanity for good, the compulsive repeating of vagina cream commercials.

Help?

via Corrente

So I keep mentioning this whole spectacle thing, and while the newness of the idea takes some time to gel in my brain, little connections keep being made.

You can think of the spectacle like the Matrix, minus a swishy black trench coat. The spectacle is all the crap that keeps us from seeing what is real. It is the creation of need/want, to use an econ term, to keep us distracted so that we don’t see beyond our own little manufactured desires.

To create need, you have to convince people that they are lacking to begin with. And boy howdy, do they ever. Gidget and I were talking in comments about how you can never be a good enough rape victim. That’s part of creating need (I’ll get there, just hold onto your horses).

For women, we are never good enough. We are too fat, unless we are too thin. We are too flat, unless we are too big. We are too tall or too short. If we are pretty (by mass production beauty standards of white, thin, young, able bodied etc) then we aren’t beautiful. If we are beautiful by those same standards) then we are either a bitch or an idiot or both. If we are smart we are too smart, otherwise we are airheads. if we are brown, we are too brown and if we are white we have to get a tan. We always have a flaw that needs to be fixed. Always. With the gazzilions of ways that we are imperfect and in need of fixing, it’s amazing any of us ever leave the house.

So women, from the time we are born, are socialized to think we need constant fixing. We are never good enough. (Men don’t have it any easier, btw. They just get a few more perks from this system, like having the other half of the population on tender hooks for fear of violence from them).

Now imagine the kyriarchy. Say hi to the big fucking pyramid of oppression, wave at it even. That’s what the spectacle is trying to distract us from, and most of the time it works. When i see the kyriarchy in my head, I see a pyramid made up of people stuffed into animal cages, one on top of the other, and every time someone up high shits, it hits the people below. . (Hey PeTA, everytime you objectify women in your ads-you are shitting on people in animal cages, how’s that for fucking irony!) If you have that magic combination of “flaws” that puts you at the bottom – you are shit out of luck. Everyone shits on you.

The spectacle gives us the illusion that we can get out from under the mountains of shit, if we work hard enough and want it bad enough and “make the right choices”. But really we are just animals in cages running on hamster wheels thinking that if we just go faster we can dodge the shit bombs from above.

Like any kennel, the kyriarchy needs guards, people who make sure that other human animals don’t get it into their heads to try and break out. In exchange for policing the masses, these people get extra privilege. Whites get privilege over non-whites, men get privilege over women, heteros get privilege over gays, TABs get privilege over PWD. Adults get privilege over children. The guards still get shit on, but they get to dump on people below them and they think this makes it “fair”. It’s how the world works, or something.

Now back to the economics. The kyriarchy must eat, and what it eats is labor. Your labor, my labor. It eats work. It’s like an evil baddy in a cartoon that goes around sucking energy out of power plants, but instead it’s sucking energy our of us in the form of work. And it needs us to work more and more, all the time. But like any energy sucking beast, it wants to expend as little energy of it’s own as possible getting that labor from us. If the kyriarchy was just a mean personal trainer standing behind us yelling insults while we run on the hamster wheel, it would have toppled ages ago. Instead, it uses the spectacle. Oh look, if I run for three more hours a day on this hamster wheel I can afford a 3 bedroom/ 2 bath house which will move me up from the dreaded renter section of the kyriarchy. Perhaps then I won’t get hit with so many shit bombs from above. Oh look, if I run on this treadmill for this much longer, i can get that shiny new pair of designer shoes. While we are running to nowhere, the spectacle flashes big, bright, pretty pictures of the things we didn’t even know we needed. This is called “media” and “advertising”.

But the kyriarchy is nothing if not a good businessman. One way it gets cheap labor (and replacement humans) is through motherhood. Actually motherhood is a naturally occurring phenomena. What the kyriarchy needs is free labor plus replacement humans. So we get this idea of the nuclear family, will-work-for-free or for sappy cards on mother’s day mom, dad the guard of the kyriarchy, and little replacement batteries, I mean babies. In exchange for ensuring the survival of the kyriarchy, guard men get their socks washed and dinners made and sex whenever they want it, regardless of whether a woman wants it.

The shit with my fucking mother and Kid’s dad has got all sorts of atrocious memories swirling around in my head, and the recurring theme is shame.

Now lemme tell you a little something about shame, at least as it relates to domestic violence and rape. It isn’t the violence of the act itself that causes the shame. No, really. Would you feel shame if you got rear ended in a car accident? Nope, you’d feel pissed off that the fuckwad behind you wasn’t watching where they were going. There isn’t anything you can do to avoid being rear-ended. Period. I think even most states’ laws treats the rear-ender as the person solely responsible for the accident, and insurance companies follow. Get rear ended and it’s over and done, not your fault.

The shame for victims comes from how people treat you after the fact. Will you be believed or blamed? Will you get support and empathy, or punishment? I think from the amount of shame attached to abuse, we all know what the most likely answers are. And it gets really tricky. I was reading Fugitivus’ post (and damn if that ain’t a familiar story) and thinking about all the shit I had to go through to get away from “but he’s such a nice guy” Kid’s dad.

I mentioned the other day that sometimes you have to choose, safety or justice. Those things shouldn’t be mutually exclusive, but they are. But you also have to be willing to put up with a mountain of shame if you take either route. To be safe means explaining to people why you are afraid, and praying, fingers crossed, eyes closed, that the person you are relying on with this information is not going to judge you for it and cause you harm “for your own good”. (See- my fucking mother making friends with Kid’s dad for a concrete example of that).

To get justice means that you have to tell people what happened, pray, fingers crossed, eyes closed, that they believe you and then put a mighty large amount of faith into the “justice system”. I have not yet met a victim of domestic violence or rape that has actually gotten justice from this system in a way that restored their faith in the world. Not a single one. Ever.

But there is one other choice. You shut up. You can surrender to the victim blaming and not say a word. You won’t get justice. You won’t be safer. But as long as you’re quiet about it, you don’t have to join the ranks of the publicly shamed. There will still, most likely, be a giant swarming of blaming going on in your own head. But at least the whole world isn’t chiming in to say how much you deserved to be hurt for being an imperfect person.

When we put conditions on victims, when we require them to be “perfect” in order to be believed, we set an impossible standard that perpetuates rape culture. The shaming is part of that. There is no difference between a wealthy, educated, white woman who gets hit once and leaves, and a poor, less educated, less white woman who can’t. Neither deserves shame for their situation. They both have been rear-ended by an asshole. There is also no difference between the lily white virgin, sober and modestly dressed, who never leaves her house except to go to church and is raped anyways, and the prostitute whose john decides he wants a freebie at knifepoint. Neither of these women deserve shame. But we shame them all. The educated lady had “bad choice in men”, the virgin should have fought back harder. Nobody tells the rear-ended driver that he shouldn’t have been at that stop light, or shouldn’t have been driving a shiny new car.

Shame is a silencer. It keeps us from screaming because we know, not that we won’t be heard, but that we will be punished for screaming in the first place. Punished for not being perfect enough, for “getting ourselves into bad situations”, for “not knowing better”.

So I broke my own cardinal rule of how to avoid having your life turned to shit by stalkers .

I’ve been avoiding them (my douchtastic mom, Kid’s fuckwad dad) for many many years. I follow Gavin de Becker’s advice from Gift of Fear, and normally I refuse to acknowledge any contact. Emails go to my spam box. My phone number is unavailable. My twitter, blogger, facebook all have them blocked. Somehow mom still manages to get around these blockings, but wevs. I’m not spending my whole life trying to figure out what crappy thing she’s gonna do next.

But my douchetastic mother is a fucking crafty ass nugget. She keeps sending presents to the Kid. Presents he doesn’t want. Things that he gets no joy from, hasn’t requested, and is generally annoyed by their existence. This is a form of abuse. The gifts are meant to instill a socially programmed sense of obligation on the recipient. Serial killers use this tactic to get women to trust them. “Oh hi lady, let me carry that grocery bag for you, I insist” right before they throw you in the trunk of their car.

I refuse to let the Kid become a victim of that kind of manipulation out of politeness.

So now she is teaming up with Kid’s fuckwad dad. Seriously. It’s like a manipulative stalker convention. They’re friends now. I can’t even imagine that. If someone hurt my kid, the only thing they’d get from me is a giant hole where their throat used to be. If someone neglected my grandchild, (hypothetical grandchild- I’m not that OLD yet) the only thing they’d get from me is a job application delivered with a swift kick in the ass.

So I am pissed (see violent imagery above). And I sent a rather pissy email backing saying exactly the same shit, minus the violence, above.

Stupid, stupid, stupid stupid. I gave her fucking fuel for her obsession. I should have just left it. I know that there is a huge difference between justice and safety and that often you can only choose one. I know that safety is usually the better route. I know all this shit. And still, still.

Stalking is a long fucking game. The Kid is about to be 15 (hence yet another round of inappropriate and and unasked for “gifts” meant to instill a sense of obligation). So i’ve been dealing with his dad on and off for oh 14 years-ish. And this was the first time I have contacted my mother in 7 years. Over all, that’s a pretty good no-contact record. But one little fuck up and they’re back. It’s like lice.

All I want if for the Kid to grow up peaceful and happy and without abuse, physical or emotional, and for me to be free of these asshats so that I can concentrate on more important things like finishing this damn novel I’m writing. That’s all. It’s not a big thing to ask. Really. To just be left alone, that is all.

The good news is- one more year and the Kid can get his passport. One more year. I’m thinking France would be good, what with their new laws against psychologically terrorizing someone. A girl can dream………….

For Gidget, who I think has my same big squishy soft spot for Disco Punk (Mission of Burma?)

For Sylviiiiiiiiiiiiiiaaaaaaaaaaaaa- Because the first line of the song makes me think of Sylvie dinner nights with big ass boxes of Franzia. I miss you! My birthday is gonna suck without you.

Gang of Four- To hell with poverty

And since I’m on a disco punk kick (but really, when am I not?)

Franz Ferdinand- The Outsiders

The Clash- Magnificent Seven

The Fall- Victoria