There is an amazing post about rape and colonization up at Tiger Beatdown regarding Strauss-Kahn and feminist solidarity.

This ties in with Sasha’s post about calling the poor “weak”, even if it’s with good intentions. Since I’m a structuralist, I look at what happens when you erase one aspect of oppression in order to bring light on another aspect. In the case of “we are all chambermaids” it is erasing the major problems of both class and race. Those kind of erasures are why there is both feminism and womanism*, two philosophies with the same basic goals (crushing the patriarchy) but one is often a top down, white, middle class or better view while the other is a bottom up, intersectional view of gender, race, class, etc.

The benefit to existing structures that this kind erasure provides should be obvious. Obfuscation is one of the kyriarchy’s best tricks. It’s why the main issues talked about in feminism are the wage gap (which is bigger for well educated women than for less educated women), abortion (with minimal attention paid to the decision to parent instead of to not parent), and rape. Often ignored are things like the mommy gap,

Dear readers, I give you for the first time a picture of the Kid himself, lounging on our newly acquired sofa (and yes, he is wearing a 2L4O shirt. My shirt, actually.)

I’ve been relegated to the love seat, because he’s taller than me or something. Little bastard.

(Kid is now 16, I figure he’s allowed to decide if he wants a picture of himself up in the interwebs).

w00t w00t! I’m trying to remember the last time I sat on something squishy and comfy. I think it’s been 5 weeks.

So thank you, to you know who, for helping out with the delivery. I’ll post a pic when they get here. I’m so excited I could squee to break the windows.

EDT: After a paperwork kerfluffle, I am finally getting my mattress tomorrow. SWEET. By tomorrow night it will actually look like people live in this apartment. Right now it’s looks mostly like tidy squatters live here.

Via Facebook I found this link . You should click it if for no other reason than to see the Class Warrior’s t-shirt. The essay is slightly over-puffed in the way that academic writers are often over-puffed. If you ignore the seesaw rhythm and just concentrate on the dude in a class war shirt in a Circle K, you will give yourself happy thoughts.

As for the crux of the piece, the “join us” everybody, heart of America crux, the author is clearly not as familiar with us unincorporated peeps as he thinks. We don’t want to join a system that is fundamentally flawed in it’s structure, but if things keep on keeping on, we expect you all will be joining us soon. We’ll shove over, there’s room for all the unterbussen.

True story, this song, played over and over and over, helped me memorize the answers to 6 different essay questions on a political economy test once. Seven Nation Army got me through Ancient World History. The White Stripes- powering Lizzie through college circa 2004.

(If the blogger won’t lemme embed- here’s the link)

It’s been a year and a half and there are still over 1300 makeshift camps for the victims of this horrible disaster. Or at least there were over 1300. The new President (and friend of Baby Doc) Micheal Martelly seems intent of ridding the country of them as fast as possible. This would be good, if he was moving people into permanent, or even long term temporary shelters, but instead he’s just sending thugs into the camps to loot and destroy.

The only appropriate response is anger. But instead we have Republifuckers in our own country, like Eric Cantor, who are making aid to disaster victims in the recent tornado spree dependent on spending cuts. Republifuckers also want to cut spending for weather satellites that do the crucial job of predicting things like hurricanes and tornadoes. I wish had the faith that the dems would fight this, but grown ups don’t play make believe games like that. Soon our disaster areas will look just like Haiti’s, and that’s just what they want.

still has me locked out so I can only post via email. Argghhhhhhh

I can’t tell you how many time I’ve had the conversation with well-intentioned, environmentalist “progressive” folks about this one little (huge) bit of “common sense” wisdom. I’ve heard “Well we all know that the earth is overpopulated” and seen people who sneer “!@#$ breeder” when they see a poor woman with a couple of kids.

The planet isn’t overpopulated. There is a resource distribution problem, with the vast majority of resources going to the wealthy global north, and if the poor used resources at the rate the non-poor do, then yeah we’d be in a fuck of a lot of trouble. Thankfully, Sociological Images has a guest post about the exact same perception problem. In the future I may just tattoo the link on my arm so I don’t have to type this again.

Us poor folks, either domestically or internationally, have a fraction of the resource foot print that non-poor people do. We own fewer (or no) cars and walk or use public transit. We own fewer electronics and are more likely to get them second hand. We own fewer articles of clothing, eat less meat, etc etc etc all because these things are fucking expensive and every penny counts.

Now this doesn’t mean I don’t full-throatily support programs that give poor women (domestically and internationally) more control over their own reproduction and family size. Everyone should be able to choose if, when and how many children they want responsibility for. But I don’t support reproductive freedom as some backhanded form of eugenics because I’m scared of a brown menace. And that is what arguments about overpopulation often sound and look like.

And the coffers are pretty darn low. Rent and phone bills are due in the next 10 days and groceries must be bought. If you’ve got something to share, please throw it in the pot.

I now have enough money that if I don’t spend a penny of it, I got rent and phone covered. But I do have to buy groceries and do laundry, so more than a penny will be spent.

And off topic but Blogger is being a fucking tool again. Apparently it’s not letting a huge chunk of people log in to their dashboards, so I’m posting via email. Fucking Blogger, WTF?