People who are oppressed have always been used as lab rats, things to be experimented on rather than real people. Usually those doing the experimenting have a mild twinge of shame and try to keep the experiments secret (Tuskegee) so I guess it might be shocking to the un or less oppressed to see that experimenting done publicly.
For example:

In NYC, a program called Homebase that helps the nearly homeless stay in their homes is using a lottery system to decide who gets help and who doesn’t and then tracking the results to find out if the helped are less likely to become homeless than the unhelped.

I know, gentle readers, it’s shocking, horrible, awful, that for the sake of scientific results they would leave the fate of the desperate up to luck. Well, maybe it’s not so shocking for those of us who play the social services lottery on a regular basis. It’s almost always a crapshoot as to whether an agency is going to give you assistance. Did you fill out the gazzilion forms properly? Do you have the right proof of your circumstances? (Lemme tell you, proving that you are actually homeless is damn near close to impossible. And if you can prove you are homeless, you’re actually penalized for it when it comes to food stamps because you have no verifiable living expenses).

Homebase is just being upfront about about the randomness of who gets assistance. It’s still despicable that just needing help doesn’t actually get it for you, but I think I prefer the straight up lottery system to the clandestine methods.

I shared this video in my google reader the other day

I’ve heard, way too often, people complain about anti-racism work because “I’m not responsible for the actions of my ancestors” and use the guilt they feel (or think they should feel but don’t) as a reason to continue on in their little privilege bubble. That’s why I linked it. It’s a good response to those types.

However, Renee has some pretty damn valid reasons to be pissed off at the video. While watching it, I did have a fleeting thought or 2 about how it wasn’t calling people out on the privilege they currently enjoy.(And I get to have only a fleeting thought or 2 because of white privilege, that’s what privilege is about). You should feel guilt for those acts of racism (sexism, homophobia, abelism, classism, etc) that all of us with privilege commit at some time or another. You should feel the guilt, make the apologies, and do your best to never ever do it again. The video completely ignores the ongoing acts that perpetuate oppression.

So, I apologize for linking the video without addressing the problems in it. I promise I’ll work really hard to not let those fleeting thoughts and criticisms go by without examination in the future.

PZ Meyers has a great post up about the problem of naming women in science and a challenge to name 10 female scientists. I can’t name 10, I admit, but no one has gotten around to naming Emilie du Chatelet yet. So there. Without her, Einstein would never have figured out relativity.

But in that same vein, can you name 10 female revolutionaries? I think it’s important to remember that it’s not just dudely dudes who fight to change systems. And women don’t just fight for girly things like voting and abortion (girly not being used in a pejorative there- I am super fucking girly and a feminist. So what?)

1) Emma Goldman – anarchist, feminist, poor, funded her speaking tours with midwifery. It’s important to remember that FDR’s New Deal only happened because the elites were scared of the tactics of people like Emma. No matter what your stand on violence as a tool, it was a massive dose of fear of the violent unwashed masses that made reform possible.

2)Countess Constance Markiewicz– Irish revolutionary and politician. She was a lieutenant in the Eastern Uprising and founded the IRA version of the scouts to train girls and boys in the use of firearms. She was the first woman elected to the British Parliament, but she never took her seat there.

3)Patience Wright– the original wikileaker. Wright moved from New Jersey to England to practice her wax sculpture art just in time for the revolutionary war to break out. Loyal to America, she smuggled information she learned in England back to the states by hiding it in her art. Julian Assange doesn’t have to be quite that creative. (note that the wikipedia entry is very poorly written- consider this a personal plea to wikipedia to fix that shit)

4)

So you all get 2 movie reviews. One about a famous and awesome real woman, done by a man, and one about a fictional but courageous teenage girl done by a woman. I’ll try to keep the spoilers to a minimum, but here’s a spoiler warning anyways.

First, Agora. Rachel Weisz is Hypatia, philosopher, atheist, brilliant teacher in Alexandria right at the crux of the struggle between Christians and Pagans. She is perfect, so perfect that she’s more of a pedestal goddess than human being. But I don’t care, I’d watch her anyways. Also, it doesn’t pass the Bechtel test. (blah blah blah, it’s not like she’d have had a best girlfriend to confide in back then, blah blah blah).

That said, for who knows what reason, the director had to throw a rape scene into the movie. Perhaps because Hypatia was only allowed to do things she did in Alexandria because she was considered a virtuous woman, Amenabar threw in a rape scene so that there was some sexual tension. But the movie didn’t need it and it would have been better served if the rapey character was shown struggling with the choice between logic and Christianity more. That’s a much more interesting struggle than “I want a woman and she doesn’t want me”.

But watch the movie anyways because 1) Rachel Weisz 2)Hypatia 3) The atheist is the only reasonable person in the city. This ain’t no throwing the Christians to the lions, and the Pagans don’t come off any better.

Next, Winter’s Bone. 17 year old Ree Dolly has to go find her meth making father and get him to appear in court so that her family doesn’t lose the home and land he put up as bond. Her mom is nearly catatonic. Ree’s the only person looking after her and her little brother and sister. It’s written and directed by Debra Granik and Jennifer Lawrence’s performance as Ree is amazing. She’s tired and terrified and braver that anyone should ever have to be that young.

It’s also an interesting portrayal of the codes of violence. There are rules, even in the poorest segments of society, of who you can hurt and how. It’s a fucked up kind of chivalry (chivalry in itself is fucked up- but that’s a whole other essay). Trying to keep track of the complicated rules of who you’re safe with and who you’re not safe with and what kind of behavior gets you hurt requires a flow chart, or as Ree says being “a Dolly, bred and buttered”.

Winter’s bone is sad but really good, and deserves every one of the awards it’s up for. And it totally passes the Bechtel test. Some of the most crucial moments of the film are between Ree and the wife of the most feared man in town, and he doesn’t get more than a line or two.

So what are you all watching?

Have you all discovered the magic that is smoked Spanish paprika yet? Have you? Cause if you haven’t- GO GET SOME RIGHT NOW OMG WHY ARE YOU STILL SITTING THERE READING THIS.

No seriously, I just put goulash in the crockpot and used the smoked paprika (and a little of the cheap regular paprika) and the smell is soooooooooooooo amazing i would eat a hunk of raw meat. I do not think I can wait the

Julian Assange may very well be a rapist. He’s also very likely to be an egomaniac who hates America. These things can be true, and it’s still important that we get information on the secret things our government has been doing in our name.

(I should note that part of my belief in radical democracy also includes a belief that neither governments nor business have the same right to privacy that individuals have. A government is not a person in the same way a corporation in not a person.You can’t fire a non-employee from a business, and you shouldn’t be able to prosecute a non-citizen for going (nonviolently) against a government that isn’t their own.) (On second thought, you shouldn’t be able to prosecute a citizen for non-violently going against a government that is there own.)

It’s not hard. It doesn’t take a leap of logic to say that Assange is very likely a misogynist asshole, but the dumping of government documents means the people of Spain can see just how much influence a foreign government has over their judicial system, or the people of Honduras can find out what was going on behind closed doors during their recent coup.

A lot of the arguing I see happening are the same arguments we saw about Polanski. “But he’s a great artist!” “But he had a horrible life!” “Nazis!” “Sharon Tate”. All those things are true, and Polanski is still a child rapist.

The difference, of course, is that Assange’s masterpiece is not a film or even a carefully crafted and researched piece in the New York Times, but the dumping of massive government documents so that people can figure out for themselves what is going on. It’s slightly more important than pretty camera work, but doesn’t negate the rapey parts of his personality.

Oddly, this is one of the few cases where you can actually be bipartisan. Assange should answer for his crimes in Sweden against women, but perhaps we should all simmer down a bit on the calls to assassinate him or to deify him.

Besides, it’s much more interesting to check out what the leaks have done. Being that the elites are supposed to be the cream on top, it’s entertaining to me how often they end up acting like tantrum throwing children. That’s diplomacy in a nutshell, diffusing tantrums with promises of lollipops.

Let’s imagine for a second the Obama is the person people thought they were voting for: a stealth progressive, a grassroots community organizer type, a pro the-little-people democrat, the anti-war candidate.

We’d still have:

Health care reform that mostly benefits the insurance companies.
A mortgage crisis with nothing being done to help the homeowners.
A 24% disemployment rate (9 percent counted, 18 percent actual, the rest are underemployed and I think that number is low)
2 wars with more wars brewing
Guantanamo
DADT
No extension of unemployment benefits
Skyrocketing wealth disparity
A federal freeze on spending and COLAs for federal employees.
TSA getting grabby and the continued erosion of the bill of rights.

So even with a Democratic House, Senate and presidency, democratic platforms can’t be enacted. That is one seriously broken system. The representational part of representational democracy is broken.

That’s what I mean when I say that voting doesn’t make a damn bit of difference, the powers that be simply won’t let us get what we voted for if it’s not in their best interest. I don’t know if this is new, or worse than it was before, but it’s bad.

How we fix that is a big scary question, one too big for me or you to figure out by ourselves. But I know one thing, you never ever get what you want if you don’t ask for it (or in this case, demand it). I find it a far better use of my time thinking about the kind of world I want the Kid to live in. It’s what gives me hope, the idea that things have not always been this way, and they won’t always be this way.

100 years ago, 40 hour work weeks and women’s suffrage were pipe dreams. 60 years ago, trips to the moon were impossible. So perhaps it’s wistful daydreaming. Perhaps I have replaced a belief in god with baseless optimism. Perhaps I am just audaciously hopeful. But here’s a few things that I want in a better world:

20 hour work weeks. I know! Shock, awe, how could we possibly live with 20 hour work weeks? But think about all the downsizing, the “increases in productivity” which are just code words for “we make one person do the job of 2 or more”. We would solve unemployment in a heartbeat. If working 20 hours a week means you can afford the basics like food, housing, medical and education, then the rest of your time is yours to do with as you please. Want to make more money and buy shiny toys- congrats, you now have the time to do that. Want to spend time puttering around making music or art or baking pies. Do that. Want to raise your kids instead of sending them to 8 or 10 hours a day of daycare, do that. It would make it easier for PWD to work if endurance is one of their problems. (still have to work on that tricky ableism thing, I know the hours are not the only thing causing high unemployment rates among PWD). It would make being a poor student who has to work full time possible, because full time would now be as many hours as you’d spend in a work study job (well slightly more, but you get the drift). Boomers who don’t have enough money to retire? Well now you can work half time while opening up a position for someone else.

A serious commitment to body autonomy. I am just so freaking tired of it being every bodies business what someone else does with their own body. I don’t fucking care what you put into it (food, drugs, medicine, penises, babies, etc) or take out of it or who you do those things with as long as you’re all adults with informed consent.

And since California’s prison situation has been in the news lately (let’s just say that all those non-violent drug offenders fall under RQ’s body autonomy dream) how about an end to the prison industrial complex. My ultimate dream world involves a world without prisons. I’d much prefer a society of choice, you choose not to follow the rules then go live elsewhere. I don’t care where, but not here. Sure there end up being whole societies made up of rapey mcrapersons, but since they’d be hard pressed to get women to stay it might die out pretty quick. But since exile is only possible now for people who kill in the 10s or 100s of thousands, how about we make the whole penal system a bit less racist, classist, and horrible all around.

And while I’m on the whole society of choice thing, no more nationalist bullshit. Pick where you want to live, anywhere in the world. Agree to to follow that society’s rules and your in. No “illegals”, no scary border guards. No handwringing about the immigration problem. We like to think that America is all about freedom, but most of us never got to choose the society we live in. We can choose 100 types of breakfast cereal, but not our social identity. That’s not really freedom.

And while we’re dreaming, and end to the fucking kyriarchy. No more isms. No more excuses for making one person worth less than another.

What do you want? You’ll never get it unless you ask, so ask away.

So this is a meme that’s been going around a bit:

Have you read more than 6 of these books? The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books listed here. Instructions: Copy this into your NOTES. Bold those books you’ve read in their entirety, italicize the ones you started but didn’t finish or read an excerpt. Tag other book nerds. Tag me as well so I can see your responses!

1. Pride and Prejudice- Jane Austen

2. The Lord of the Rings- J.R.R. Tolkein

3. Jane Eyre- Charlotte Bronte

4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling

5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee

6 The Bible

7. Wuthering Heights- Emily Bronte

8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell

9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman

10. Great Expectations- Charles Dickens

11. Little Women- Louisa May Alcott

12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy

13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller

14 Complete Works of Shakespeare

15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier

16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien

17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulk

18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger

19 The Time Traveler’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger

20 Middlemarch – George Eliot

21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell

22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald

24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy (nobody finishes War and Peace, nobody!)

25. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy- Douglas Adams

27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky

28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck

29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll

30. The Wind in the Willows- Kenneth Grahame

31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy

32. David Copperfield- Charles Dickens

33. The Chronicles of Narnia- C.S. Lewis

34 Emma -Jane Austen

35 Persuasion – Jane Austen

36 The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe – CS Lewis

37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini

38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres

39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden

40. Winnie the Pooh- A.A. Milne

41. Animal Farm- George Orwell

42 The Da Vinci Code- Dan Brown

43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez

44 A Prayer for Owen Meany – John Irving

45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins

46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery

47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy

48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood

49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding

50 Atonement – Ian McEwan

51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel

52. Dune- Frank Herbert

53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons

54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen

55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth

56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon

57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens

58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley

59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon

60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez

61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck

62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov

63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt

64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold

65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas

66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac

67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy

68. Bridget Jones’ Diary – Helen Fielding

69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie

70. Moby Dick- Herman Melville

71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens

72. Dracula- Bram Stoker

73. The Secret Garden- Frances Hodgson Burnett

74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson

75. Ulysses- James Joyce

76. The Inferno- Dante

77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome

78 Germinal – Emile Zola

79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray

80 Possession – AS Byatt

81. A Christmas Carol- Charles Dickens

82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell

83. The Color Purple- Alice Walker

84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro

85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert

86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry

87 Charlotte’s Web – E.B. White

88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom

89. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton

91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad

92. The Little Prince- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks

94. Watership Down- Richard Adams

95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole

96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute

97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas

98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare

99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl

100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

So I’ve got 49 read (that I remember. I feel like I’ve read Les Miserable and The Count of Monte Christo and a bunch of others that were also made into movies, but I may just remembering the movies). And I’m not going to count the starteds. I’ve read a bunch of Shakespeare but never sat down with the complete works.

Whaddaya got?

A federal pay freeze!!! Santa, it wasn’t even on your list!

I’ve never been the kind of poor person to hate on the slightly less poor, so I’m feeling some serious empathy for people whose pay starts (in my location) at $21,641 and maxes out at a grand $27,075.

Happy holidays. You ain’t getting a COLA this year (or next) cause someone wants to play bipartisan weasel.