so it’s fall in the tropics, which means 85 degree weather and the
constant threat of hurricaines. ugh.
i love real fall. i love crunchy leaves and fuzzy sweaters and knee
high boots. i love the misty grey sky shot through with red and gold
leaves. i love a little nip in the air, enough to want a scarf but not
a real jacket.
so friends and blog readers, tell me about your fall. please. pretty please.

—
The trouble with being poor is that it takes up all of your time.
Willem de Kooning

I’ve typed this same post so many times that I’m surprised I haven’t developed a Pavlovian nausea response to just thinking about it. But here I go again.

When a label or a symbol becomes more important than the thing or qualities that it is supposed to represent, there is a problem. A serious problem. Just about every lefty can give you numerous examples of the right failing on that, like making flag burning illegal in a country that is supposed to be based on freedom or calling yourself a Christian while being rabidly in favor of the death penalty. Or people trying to stop a community center being built in the land of religious freedom. But the lefties aren’t immune. Especially now.

I see alot of “my party, right or wrong”, from the Democrats and those who still vote for them. I want to know, really, what makes them declare themselves as liberals or progressives or Democrats. What do they think that means? I used to think that the Dems were the party of everyone else, those of us who didn’t get born with possibilities but were working to make more possibilities for everyone. When I saw, perhaps a few elections too late for some and perhaps a few elections too early for others, that my party wasn’t the party of possibility but the party of slightly less heinous than the other guys, I had to abandon the label. But I’m okay with that. The label no longer gave me a sense of belonging to something better. And oh do I want something better. I dream of a world that might look a bit like heaven if I believed in god. But I don’t. So I am going to have to make it right here instead of suffering till judgment day.

What would I label myself now? I would say progressive, in that I believe the only way for human beings to survive is to move forward. I would say expansive, because rights should be an ever growing, adapting, evolving thing. There are abuses committed in the world on a daily basis that we don’t even have a name for yet because others are so large and glaring as to absorb all the light. I would say communal, because the best things about human evolution have always involved cooperation, starting with language. We can’t go forward one by one.

But none of that is in a party platform. Instead we have compromises and half truths and blatant lies and sacrifice (on our part) without reciprocation. Democracy is broken, and the elites rotate in front of us like conveyor belt sushi. Sure, they may be slightly different from each other, but it’s all the same basic ingredients.

I could beg and plead, argue and debate and wait for the masses to “wise up”. But they won’t. They never have. People in general will tolerate a whole lot of abuse and most will never bite the hand that whips them. All changes for the better have always started with a handful of people who could imagine a better world. Imagine how very different things would be if Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin couldn’t shrug off the label of “British” to forge a new American identity.

That’s the fear. The loss of identity that comes with forward thinking and label changing. That’s what makes Democrats whinge about how “the other guys are so much worse”. They are people who cannot imagine a world that is so much better. Perhaps they deserve a wee bit of pity, but only a little. We don’t actually need them. (And I have found that a little look of disdain works much better than all the logic in the universe at just getting the fear mongers to shut up.)

*I freely acknowledge that the founding fathers’ idea of a new American identity were limited to white men only, and for most only land-owning white men. Doesn’t mean democracy is a bad idea, just that the world should be more democratic.

Oh the whiners, the wingers, the “bitch just wants my money”ers. You’ve all heard them. Women just trap men with surprise pregnancies so they can get those big child support bucks and the courts are just stacked against the poor dudely types.
You all know I love to debunk the MRA mythology. First and foremost, 70 percent of all child support cases in the country are in arrears. That means that 70 percent of all non custodial parents, mostly dudes, aren’t paying support on time. In many states, over 50 percent of child support cases haven’t had a single payment made in the last 12 months. (Numbers are from the US census, go forth and google).

But what about the “all the courts are stacked against the dads” myth?

Just a minute ago I was looking at my own child support case online (current back support owed is over $46,000) and ran across this little bit of info:
For those of you who can’t read the screen shot, that would be 5 resources for dads to 1 (one, uno, singular) for moms.

MRAs, full of shit. They just don’t want to take care of their kids.

So I’m reading ecconned and I’ve been thinking about propaganda. Corrente had a great piece on “The Fear” that desperate last act of the fauxgressives to make us vote D, or else the republicans will happen and the world will be worse off. Or not.

Yves Smith points out that in economics the neoclassical theory has been that even though it only works in a perfect world, working at second best with all the complications that are stripped out of the theoretical model will still get you to a perfect system. But that’s a load of crap. It not only won’t get you to a perfect system, but you will end up way more fucked up than you would have been if you just kept bartering with your neighbors. (It’s the A-Prime/C-Prime theorem by Diedre McCloskey. You should read it even though it’s a pdf. It will help you understand this post and a lot of other shit too.

But what if that same nice theory, doesn’t work in real life thing is true of our political system. What if we’ve been striving for second best democracy, only to end up with kleptocracy because second best democracy isn’t really democratic at all?

So if the idea is that we can’t have a perfect democracy (too many people for us to vote on every single little issue, have reps do that for us instead blah blah blah) we can have near perfect. Except near perfect is anything but. With democracy, we are supposed to have representation of everyone, unlike the previous system where only those acting in the king’s best interest were represented. But we still have a king (or kings) class. It’s just now they don’t have to worry about any actual governing because the people have the illusion that they are doing that themselves, what with the voting and the choice between the king’s rep who wears blue ties or the king’s rep who wears red ties. But make no mistake, both are working for the king. But you know, we do get to vote so it is technically democratic. We have democracy within the letter of the law, but not the spirit of it.

Anyways, I just cleaned out the mod que (so sorry peeps! I can’t check the que on my phone and this is literally the first time I’ve been in front of a real compy in months) and it was full of screaming obamabots who think I am just as bad as a tea partier because I won’t bow to the supreme leader. I have to wonder what those self-labeling liberals would say if they realized that they are the political equivalent of NAFTA champions and people who want to kill the epa and end public schools.

Anyways, it’s a working theory. Not quite fleshed out. Feel free to fill in the blanks and check my work. I do find that the realization that this kind of democracy doesn’t work actually doesn’t make me any less democratic. Actually, I’m becoming more radical about it. Fuck elections. We should just draw social security numbers out of a hat every few years and choose our reps that way. Everybody goes in the hat. Everybody gets a chance to serve. But I haven’t figured out how we would kill the bureaucrat class that would pop up as the power behind the peeps if we did that. We still need their technical skills, but they would become the entrenched power players.

please, kindly, move on. you say you need 1.1 million bucks and
100.000 volunteer hours to beat the republicans. why? what do we,
those of us with either the money (rare) or the hours (less rare with
severe unemployment) get for our troubles? a jobs gaurantee- not even
on the agenda. infrastructure rebuilt, only a token. social security,
well obama is making sure we won’t have that teet to suck in old age
or disability. what do we get if we throw what little resources we
have left in with the dems? if it’s just a matter of people liking
blue better than red, i think you’re fucked. and after watching
middling, meddling obama milquetoast his way to bipartisan hell,
perhaps what he needs is a republican foe to make his focus the
democrats ire on someone who isn’t us unterbussen.

—
The trouble with being poor is that it takes up all of your time.
Willem de Kooning

if people’s religious beliefs were treated as if they were as personal
and most importantly, private as people’s sexual fantasies are. i
don’t care what god you do or don’t worship, just like i don’t care if
you have a foot fetish. but i am made as uncomfortable by people
evangalizing on street corners as i am by cat calls. both are
instances of people trying ti hijack my time and attention in
unsolicited and unwanted ways. and everytime i hear a politician talk
about god i cringe in the same way i did upon hearing about larry
craig’s wide stance. i want to hear about your personal jesus as much
as i want to hear about your golden showers.

—
The trouble with being poor is that it takes up all of your time.
Willem de Kooning

i quit smoking (again) a little more than 3.5 days ago. this is
probably attempt number 12 in the 20 years i’ve been smoking, and i am
more (cautiosly) optimistic about my success this time. i’m using the
gum, which tastes like ass and leaves my mouth a painful blistered
wreck, so at least quitting the gum will be easy. i haven’t killed
anyone yet, or even yelled at anyone, but i do feel myself to be
lacking my normal level of sympathy. i think it would be easier to
give up food and water than to give up smoking, but it turns out i’m
not really suicidal and surprise, if i’m going to live a long life i
would rather not do it strapped to an oxygen tank. my lungs already
feel a little better. since i have 11.5 weeks of gum smacking ahead of
me, donations of nicorette 4mg gum would be deeply appreciated. it
would suck to run out of gum and have to bum a smoke to compensate.
oddly, not smoking is temporarilly more expensive than smoking, but
there is a light at the end of the tunel.

—
The trouble with being poor is that it takes up all of your time.
Willem de Kooning

after the dead or displaced humans, is human compassion. i’ve seen so
very little info on the tv about the floods in pakistan. certainly
less info than just after the earthquake in haiti. are we suffering
from disaster burnout, unable to invest the concern and cash after
having our heart strings plucked so frequently and so recently?
but what’s really stupid is that we are in afghanistan in order to
save nuclear pakistan from the taliban. it might be easier to shore up
pakistani goodwill if we were the ones helping rebuild and recover.

—
The trouble with being poor is that it takes up all of your time.
Willem de Kooning

that the things we hate most about other people are things they have
little to no choice or control over? i don’t mean hate on an
individual basis, like i hate libertarians and ayn rand fans, but
oppressive, institutionalized group hate. we hate people based on
race, gender, poverty, health, nationality, sexual orientation,
etc,etc. even religion, to some extent, is not a choice in most cases
(and in many cases even if you weren’t a practicing irish catholic or
a practicing jew in germany, you were still treated like you were)
i wonder why that is? i wonder why our most heinous biases aren’t
based on something people can control, like favorite foods or musical
taste? but maybe i just answered my own question. if we could control
the things about ourselves that make others hate us into oppression,
then there would be no way to restrict the flow of resources to an
oppressed group.

—
The trouble with being poor is that it takes up all of your time.
Willem de Kooning