I have said similar as Charlie Brooker to friends.
Male and female.
I’ve even touted legislation for the past years years that I call “affirmative action voting.” It’s a kind of compromise between those who believe in “voter testing” and actually having womyn’s voices and lives represented in the law of the land.
For something like a hundred years, womyn were denied the right to vote, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony were literally laughed out of Congress (read: white men) when they first presented the Constitutional amendment giving womyn the right to vote to that ‘noble body’ (read: male body, writ into the law).
Over forty years later, after the death of both womyn, the amendment written by Ms. Stanton was finally ratified.
As a corrective to those years, I’ve proposed “affirmative action voting.” This voting test requires a physician’s statement of biological gender. Have a penis? Sorry, outta luck for a few decades. (And guess what, size won’t make a bit of difference.) Take a number and wait your turn.
Silly?
No sillier than the presumptions that governed this country for over a hundred years, and it is in fact the precise standard that was applied in denying the womyn the right to vote.
Perhaps not so silly as it sounds. Or perhaps it is only silly if a womyn proposes the standard be applied to men.
I think it more than fair to employ a little affirmative action voting for a few decades, making everything the way it should be, evening things up a bit, giving the little ladies the reigns for a few years.
Let’s see what happens after a decade or two.
I am so glad Charlie Brooker wrote this column.
So much better coming from a man.
Honesty, you gotta love it.
Though I doubt many American men are ready for this strong a dose of it. Honesty, that is. G-d bless them, it’s a hard habit to develop, and there is certainly little in this testosterone driven culture compelling to behave so.
I have Liddy and Congress on this afternoon in the background, in between writing spurts.
I have to admit, though I may be tarred and feathered for this, that I’m feeling pity for Liddy, after a particularly scathing examination by a Democrat whose name I didn’t catch, but has repeated about 40 times that he is “a contract attorney.”
The amount of posturing by our “public servants” all for the good of the “American people” is really underwhelming and grating at best.
On one level, these hearings are ludicrous . . . the inbreeding between big business and American government has been so deep for so many years now, it’s obscene.
But you wouldn’t think it to listen to these hearings.
The public servants arise anew, reborn for the good of We The People.
<yawn>
I get the public’s anger. I am one of those who understands that the money is one tenth of one percent that weighs in at 50 percent, given our current economic hardship.
The money is symbolic, gets to the heart of what most Americans live in everyday, the most invisible layer of culture, because unlike race and gender, its markers are elusive: class division, in a culture devoted to to denial through acquisition’s narcotic effects.
Making Liddy a scapegoat is just wrong; he jumped on the boat late in the game, and many in Congress are more than happy to crucify this man to make themselves look good. He’s no angel. But he’s no Devil, and Congress members ought not feed the hate for their own good.
And Liddy’s having to stand in for the incompetence, greed, and class entitlement of all the AIG executives, though his term there has been relatively short, a fact that many Congress members choose to ignore.
Very little moral high road here, in this viewer’s opinion.
Just more theater, on both sides of the aisle.
With a few exceptions, a self-serving debacle for our elected officials.
For those of you lucky enough to miss Uncle Dick on John King’s “State of the Union” Sunday, I’m posting links to the YouTube uploads.
One of the prize moments, though you’ll have to suffer through all the segments, because I don’t remember when exactly the praise started, is when Uncle Dick talks about the great and wonderful Uncle Rush.
Enlightening.
This first segment is particularly rich for anyone with half a wit, but each segment offers its own “insights”:
Though this stream is a bit dated, it deserves attention.
The photos later in the stream are the most poignant, in my opinion.
View Ms. Farrow’s photostream at Flickr. Please note, the “snapshot” feature on the preceding does not show the Darfur pictures, you must click on the link and go to her Flickr album to view.
Ms. Farrow has given permission for the use of these photos, by anyone who wishes to raise awareness about the 450,000 slaughtered and over 2 million displaced.
A link to her blog can be found in my blogroll, to the right.
I lived the first twenty-one years of my life in the nation’s most populous state, and was no stranger to its subcultures.
I have never understood why the obsession with marijuana as a drug as opposed to alcohol has blinded vast swaths of the population, as though marijuana carries an intrinsic bogey evil eluding distilled spirits.
I think that bogey evil is called “ignorance.”
So now that hard economic times have fallen on California, some folks are suddenly weighing the economic benefits of legalization versus their own bizarre, shortsighted moral stance.
Shocking, isn’t it?
To think that economics might influence the depths of our morality, well that certainly takes the wind out of the sails of my idealism for today.
Years ago, the conservative writer William F. Buckley, Jr. argued that all drugs should be legalized and taxed; I believe his argument ran (but please don’t quote me on this) that it was the most morally consistent position and that if people chose to use recreational drugs, well that was their decision. They should be free to make such a decision, no matter the demon. Most important, the government should be able to control and tax such substances, including heroin, just as alcohol was controlled and taxed.
Of course, at the time, all of this starkly contradicted Ronald Reagan’s “War On Drugs,” though the right had melded the two figures as inseparable ideological mastheads for the party. But Buckley recognized the futility of such government machinations on human behavior. Not surprisingly, the “War On Drugs” has proved to be a fiasco about as cost efficient and effective as our invasion of Iraq.
Perhaps if Reagan had listened to Buckley on this issue, and not just on the cold war issues of freedom, we’d have made progress on the biochemical and genetic markers for addiction predispositions with those tax dollars we’d have pocketed. Moreover, we’d have not thrown billions and billions down the toilet in some of the most futile spending of our government’s money, second only to Vietnam and Iraq in the past decades, or so it seems to this armchair observer.
After all these years of mostly failed drug policies–quite different from the alcohol bogey, which apparently isn’t a serious drug to these woefully well-intentioned folks–and the practical wisdom of letting people choose their own demons with which to live . . .
I try to steer clear of the obvious, and I give few of my life minutes to people like Limbaugh and his ilk.
But Timothy Egan’s piece in the Times today warrants this short entry. Mr. Egan makes excellent points that go beyond the usual diatribes against Limbaugh, and his column today is insightful and well written.
Two points which struck me, impressively written by Mr. Egan:
As someone who spends a lot of time on the road, I used to find Limbaugh to be an obnoxious but entertaining companion, his eruptions more reliable than Old Faithful. But now that Limbaugh has become something else — the face of the Republican Party, by a White House that has played him brilliantly — he has been transformed into car-wreck-quality spectacle, at once scary and sad.
(bold face added)
We again see why Barack Obama is the man for this job at this time: we need leadership skilled enough to deflate those self-aggrandizing toxic hot air balloons that have floated too long over the land.
And it was this paragraph which I thought brilliantly summarized our current economic state of affairs, and crystallized reality as few have to date:
But therein lies the main tactic of Limbaugh, an old demagogue technique: create a straw man, then tear it down. The latest example was Saturday, when Limbaugh presented himself as the defender of capitalism, liberty and unfettered free markets. Obama, he has said since, is waging a “war on capitalism.”
There is a war, all right. We are witnessing the worst debacle of unfettered capitalism in our lifetime brought on by — you got it, capitalism at its worst. It cannibalized itself. Government, sad to say, had nothing to do with it — except for criminal neglect of oversight.
Now that government has been forced to the rescue, just who is insisting on taxpayer bailouts? Who is in line for handouts? Who is saying that only government can save capitalism? The very leaders of unregulated markets who injected this poison into the economy, the very plutocrats that Limbaugh celebrates.
(bold face added)
Capitalism cannibalizing itself. Perhaps the most succinct summary of the global economic meltdown yet articulated.
The corrective will be a cannibal like swing to government regulation and nationalization, until the equilibrium is restored.
The day America sees real Socialism will be the day the heavens open and Jesus returns in the clouds with the angels, her black breasts bared ready to feed the poor, her scepter prepared to spread the wealth and even the playing field quicker than you can say, “Mike Huckabee ♥ economic equality.”
‘Socialism!’ Boo, Hiss, Repeat: an entertaining New York Times article on the current deluge being spewed by the far right fear mongers, warning of the Republic’s imminent transformation into the U.S.S.A. under Comrade Obama, and Mr. Huckabee serving up wisdom like, “Lenin and Stalin would love this stuff.”
You just gotta love the drama queens of the far right–but then, politics is all about theater, isn’t it?
As the Times reports, “the socialist bogey-mantra has made a full-scale return after a long stretch of relative dormancy.”
Praise the Lord.
We’re doing something right . . . uhhhh, I mean left, after way too long.
Two of the Bogey Meisters, from the New York Times article:
A draft or some such thing of the Federal Budget was released today, and I happened to have the boob tube on (allusion to its mind numbing effects, not the female anatomy, but the way the two are linked is striking, isn’t it?) this afternoon while rushing to get out the door.
CNN showed Ms. Pelosi holding the budget proposal in her hands and saying, “This budget reflects our national priorities and the President’s agenda . . .,” etc., etc., etc., the statement a swipe at what has been going on for the past eight years, and the past administration’s abandonment of American fundamentals.
Just a guess, but literacy and skill might serve We The People well.
Ya think?
Following Ms. Pelosi, John Boehner gets on flapping his lips about the deficit and the woeful and glib way the Democrats and the President are reacting to the budget deficit.
Excuse me?
The Republicans gave Bush a rubber stamp for eight years and basically racked up this mess, for the most part, in Iraq. Mission. Still. Not. Accomplished. Afghanistan is collapsing by the day. Meanwhile Halliburton went skipping off with billions and billions of dollars from its war profits (we love you Uncle Dick), and then moved to Dubai to avoid paying taxes. Not to mention the other contractors who made off with uncounted cartloads of American taxpayer money.
Now we have the housing bubble which came to full fruition under these good ol’ boys and their financial buddies, the credit card companies, the investment banks, Wall Street, Rupert Murdoch, et al, but hey, let’s just blame the new Democratic agenda and its task of trying to clean up the country while getting us back on track for the almost diminished notion of “the greater good.”
I am certain we all know the real solution to this problem:
“Tax cuts. Tax cuts. Tax cuts.”
Education won’t help.
Health care reform won’t help.
Infrastructure repair and creating jobs is a waste of time and money.
No, none of the above. Tax cuts. The cure to our ills.
If it weren’t so pitiful to watch, it would make for great comedy.
I am thinking to send Mr. Boehner my prayer beads from India, so he can count off how many times he chants the mantra during the day.
An ancient and revered custom, mantras and prayer beads.
In my 8 November 2009 entry, “Never Doubt It: The Enduring Double Standard,” I predicted that Michelle Obama would become our First Lady of Fashion, and the indigestible political pablum that such a cultural preoccupation would create.
Although I’ve regretted a couple of my predictions in that entry (“the almost certain glaringly homogeneous cabinet”), not fully appreciating Obama’s agenda at the time, on this one I have been validated repeatedly. And once again, today.
Probably because it was tethered to a general truth of gender and identity in America, rather than the specifics of Obama’s game plan.
On the front of the on-line edition of the New York Times today, readers were greeted with the following bit of reverence given to Ms. Obama: Michelle Obama Goes Sleeveless, Again.
There are moments of notable parsing about the strength and sculpting of the First Lady’s arms, and what her arms mean to all of us.
Too predictable.
Too depressing.
Too much tripe in a time when we should be focusing on problems of substance, and the intellectual power driving Ms. Obama’s rise to the top.
To her credit, she does nothing deliberate to fuel such ruminating–or if she does, it is with an awareness that style’s language is powerful and persuasive.
Rather, it seems to me simply rank and file ignorance dictating such “observations,” ones grounded in a universal, unconscious sexism and a continued preoccupation with the woman’s body, by both men and women.
Still an object to be evaluated, regardless of what lies between the ears. All that brain matter is nice, after the fact, but get a load of the Gap dress and those well developed biceps.
The most well educated First Lady in American history.
While editing my Hero of the Week entry this morning and adding a few links, I happened to read about the recent brouhaha between Ashley Judd and Governor Sarah Palin.
Photo pilfered from the Huffington Post article, linked below.
Apparently, Ms. Judd has spoken in “an ad campaign accusing the Alaska governor of supporting the aerial slaughter of wolves and bears.”
Okay.
Ms. Palin responded that the “ad campaign by this extreme fringe group (italics added), as Alaskans have witnessed over the last several years, distorts the facts about Alaska’s wildlife management programs. These audacious fundraising attempts misrepresent what goes on in Alaska, and I encourage people to learn the facts about Alaska’s positive record of managing wildlife for abundance.”
And what ‘extreme fringe group’ might this be? (more…)
Honesty, You Gotta Love It . . .
June 1, 2009 · 10 Comments
I have said similar as Charlie Brooker to friends.
Male and female.
I’ve even touted legislation for the past years years that I call “affirmative action voting.” It’s a kind of compromise between those who believe in “voter testing” and actually having womyn’s voices and lives represented in the law of the land.
For something like a hundred years, womyn were denied the right to vote, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony were literally laughed out of Congress (read: white men) when they first presented the Constitutional amendment giving womyn the right to vote to that ‘noble body’ (read: male body, writ into the law).
Over forty years later, after the death of both womyn, the amendment written by Ms. Stanton was finally ratified.
As a corrective to those years, I’ve proposed “affirmative action voting.” This voting test requires a physician’s statement of biological gender. Have a penis? Sorry, outta luck for a few decades. (And guess what, size won’t make a bit of difference.) Take a number and wait your turn.
Silly?
No sillier than the presumptions that governed this country for over a hundred years, and it is in fact the precise standard that was applied in denying the womyn the right to vote.
Perhaps not so silly as it sounds. Or perhaps it is only silly if a womyn proposes the standard be applied to men.
I think it more than fair to employ a little affirmative action voting for a few decades, making everything the way it should be, evening things up a bit, giving the little ladies the reigns for a few years.
Let’s see what happens after a decade or two.
I am so glad Charlie Brooker wrote this column.
So much better coming from a man.
Honesty, you gotta love it.
Though I doubt many American men are ready for this strong a dose of it. Honesty, that is. G-d bless them, it’s a hard habit to develop, and there is certainly little in this testosterone driven culture compelling to behave so.
This week’s must read opinion, because instead of bantering about the specifics, let’s start getting a good look at the forest amid the trees.
Gaurdian Commentary: Charlie Brooker Calls On Women To Rule The World.
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