Dealbreaker

Dear homophobes who have "lots of gay friends whom they love and respect": Would it be a betrayal of my gay friends if I believed they should have fewer rights than I do as a straight person? I believe it would. Would they be justified in considering me less than a true friend, because I don't respect them enough to value their freedom? I believe they would.

If you don't believe in gay marriage, then all that should mean is you won't be getting one. If you call your gay friends sinners, perverts, deviants, freaks, or an affront to God, then let me tell you. Not only are you not friends, you don't know what the hell a friend is.

I cannot stand when gay-hating zealots suddenly call up the ideal of open-mindedness as a shield. No, you guys, I don't need to be accepting and open-minded when it comes to a view that you are actively attempting to shove onto other people. I can be accepting and open-minded and supportive of your personal choices, but once you start trying to limit the rights of others? Hell no, your view doesn't deserve my tolerance and good will just for being there. Pack up your sense of entitlement and get offa my yard.

All views are not equally worthy of respect, and views which do not allow for tolerance should not be heard later crying for it when they're criticized by the ones who ARE willing to "live and let live."

I am not intolerant for saying there is no supportable rational reason to limit the contractual rights of gay people, and your gay friends are not intolerant for deciding they don't want to be around someone like you who is constantly passing judgement on a life that you openly wish you controlled instead of them. You don't deserve tolerance, you don't deserve acceptance, and you don't deserve empathy.

"Empathize with stupidity and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot." -Perosteck Balveda

Sincerely,

Those of us who actually know how to be a friend, those of us who know what "agree to disagree" means, and those of us who don't want to hear about tolerance from people who want their intolerance to have the weight of law.

Of shelters and purebreds

Most people get the whole notion of going to the local animal shelter to get a pet. They see it as the more compassionate option, because 60% of animals who enter shelters don't come out again, and not because they're sick or dangerous. There is just a serious lack of resources to offer them, either in a shelter or someone's home. So the idea is to go get one from a shelter because you're saving a life in addition to acquiring a great new addition to the family.

So why do these same people treat adoption of human children like it's some last resort that only failures as women and men ever resort to? Why are they compassionate enough to want to save an animal's life, but when it comes to a human, it's gotta be their genes or no dice. "My way or the highway," except by "the highway" we mean "life in the foster care system potentially being abused and neglected until they become criminals and have only prison to look forward to in their retirement years."

Oopsie babies are one thing. That happens, and if you wanna have it, do it. I just don't for the life of me understand what's going on in people's heads where they'll spend hundreds of thousands of dollars desperately fighting to conceive a child, like they're in fucking short supply or something.

Useful confusion

I had a flash of understanding today when advised to be myself when I'm talking at the door. Class clowns have an advantage with concepts like "anatta." We realize more quickly that there is no essential self to be. Who we are when we're alone is no one.

"Agnostic"

I posted this elsewhere in response to someone's query as to whether their position was best described as "atheist" or "agnostic." Thought I'd repost it here, since it manages to sum up fairly well how I feel about stuff, and that might make it a useful thing to link to or copy-paste from the next time this comes up and I don't feel like repeating myself.

Stephen Batchelor defined agnosticism as saying "I don't know" when what you really mean is "I don't want to know."

I disagree with him about what atheism is or should be, but that does fit my experience of talking with people who are really attached to identifying as agnostic, whether the label makes sense or not (much like people who like to identify as conservative or liberal as a matter of identity, even though they may not really know or care what they're endorsing).

Personally, it is very rare that we can use evidence to say anything with 100% certainty. That doesn't mean we stop vaccinating our children or start teaching the flat Earth theory as a credible hypothesis. All we need is to have some point or marker where we say, "Okay. We have gathered enough evidence that it'd be kind of silly not to make a reasonable stab at what is probably happening and/or why it may be so."

Atheists are people who are willing to place such a marker even on hypotheses about the supernatural, and who are willing to say that we've been exploring the issue long enough that we can make a reasonable stab at answering the question. An agnostic is someone who says that the question can never be answered, that there is no point at which we can say we have enough information to place confidence in a theory.

If we would not be agnostic about the theory that reptilian Jews control the banks (for the record, while we cannot 100% disprove this, we can say it is probably not true), then why should we place the question of the supernatural in another category?

Agnosticism just isn't really a useful step toward figuring anything out. Skepticism, yes. When many people talk about agnosticism, what they really want to convey is that they're skeptics--they're not making a statement of faith that there can be and must be no God. They just aren't convinced. However, the crushing majority of atheists don't make this as a statement of faith either. They're just no more agnostic about God than about the reptilian Jew bankers.

CAN YOUR SCIENCE EXPLAIN HOW IT RAINS?

"Not everything has to be proven, the best things aren't. Can you prove that you love your parents or your children? Can you prove that your romantic partner really loves you?"

CAN YOUR SCIENCE EXPLAIN HOW IT RAINS?

(TO which Sokka insists yes, yes it can.)

Anyway, seriously. I've been getting this from a couple of people, and I thought that I'd just put my thoughts on it here. Saying, "It doesn't matter whether there's any proof of X Supernatural Event/Entity, because not everything that matters is about proof. Sometimes you just have to have faith."

When, um. Lots of things that matter are about proof.

This is the kind of thing that people say who haven't been shown evidence of the kinds of things people ordinarily take on faith. I know my partner loves me because I have evidence from the way he treats me. I know my parents love their children because I have seen the sacrifices they made for them.

I wouldn't believe my partner loved me if he didn't treat me in ways that gave me a reason to believe it. I wouldn't believe my parents love their kids if they didn't act in ways that lead me to this conclusion.

Very few of the things people say must be taken on faith are actually taken on faith by anybody.

Why should I treat the love of God any differently than the love of my partner? More to the point, shouldn't I have some evidence that I have a partner, and then proof that he loves me, and then belief?

Dear Indiana Meteorologists:

This is why we can't have nice things.

Take a wild guess precisely where in central Indiana we are right now.

Firearms

A lot of people I know hold the (in my opinion, rather unnecessarily extreme) position that nobody needs to own guns, and that things would be better if nobody did. These people are usually the sorts of well-meaning leftists that I agree with on damn near everything else.

However.

Here are the facts: I don't need some middle-class, white, nominally-Christian straight man telling me that I am safe without a gun. What does he know? Does he live with a target on his back because he's a woman? Because I do. Does he live with a target on his back because he's an ethnic or religious minority? No? Because I do, at least in the latter case. Does he live with a target on his back because there are seriously people in this country arguing we should burn fags not flags? Does he live with a target on his back because he's poor and nobody cares what happens to poor people?

Then why in the world should I let him look me in the eye and tell me that I'll be okay without a knife in my pocket? Without a gun in my bedside table? He lives in a completely different universe than I do, a universe in which nothing about him screams, "If you brutalize me, nobody will care."

I don't want to hear from that guy that I don't need a gun. Let him live in a world where a glance, a word, or a gesture can be a threat, and then he can tell me when I should feel safe, and what I should need to make that happen.

After all, what could possibly be scarier to the gay-hating misogynist theocrats who want people like me to disappear than the idea of gays with guns? It's been suggested that this is the real reason why people are afraid to have gays serve openly in the military: the potential horror of a half dozen men with M16s turning around and asking, "Who you callin' a faggot?"

Newsflash to the TEA Party: Middle-class straight Christian white people aren't the ones under siege. It's us.

Gun rights for everybody means for me, even if it means I'm protecting myself against the racist paranoid conspiracy theorists in the NRA who fought hardest for those rights in the first place. Thanks, guys. Now stay off my goddamn lawn.

Ancestry

This came up because someone asked me what I thought of PETA the other day.

My paternal grandfather moved to Massachusetts from Sicily. I seem to recall that he was a firefighter or something, but because he and my paternal grandmother were both married to other people, there isn't a lot of information about him to be had. My biological father reconnected with his half-siblings after his father's death, and I heard that this was kind of done in a... sort of crass manner. Knowing him, he probably walked in with a big sense of entitlement to the family he never had so everybody start loving him, damn it.

My mother's side is more complicated, and it's more interesting because we have more detail about it.

She did some geneology tracing, for which I am grateful. Means we have records of a lot of cool stuff now. Her great-grandfather (whom I remember, though he died when I was very young) was half-Kennebec (a tribe which was absorbed into the Penobscot, which was part of the Eastern Abenaki confederacy, for those of you who are curious in the whatnots and whyfores). He was a "half-breed" at a time when you DID NOT WANT to be of mixed-race. I guess he didn't like to talk about it, but I think my mother managed to make some connections anyway. I have a small sweetgrass basket and a silver and turquoise (and porcupine quill?) necklace that she was given to keep for me until I was old enough, and I do indeed still have them.

That was actually the source of my first little "a-ha" moment, the beginning of whatever racial consciousness I can claim. We were there for some kind of circle dance, and I remember being aware that it was important not to break the circle, not to leave, but I REALLY REALLY REALLY HAD TO PEE AND OMG I HAD TO PEE and I was a little girl so they laughed and said it was okay and I went back to their trailer to use the bathroom.

They had towels drying on a rack in the tub. There was a Barney towel. This blew my mind. INDIANS HAD BARNEY, TOO. It was then that it hit me. This world of beautiful jewelry and skilled crafting and dancing and reunions was actually the same world I lived in. Their kids watched the same television shows, whined in the store for their parents to buy them the same sorts of TV-inspired towels I owned (Power Rangers bath towels REPRESENT).

My mother traced her grandparents' ancestors back, and found that we've basically always been New Englanders. A ship came to our Eastern shore in the sixteen-hundreds (though I don't recall the year), and on that ship was an ancestor of my great-grandmother, and of my great-grandfather. New England is a small small world. When my great-grandparents met, did they realize that their ancestors might have known each other? Stuck on a boat for weeks or months at a time, how could they not?

Then things get fuzzier, and there may have been a union between a French royal and his favorite whore in there somewhere, but who knows. Makes a funny story, but I don't think there's good evidence to be had on that one either way.

As a nod to my Italian heritage, I took four semesters of Italian in college. It was the language that my grandfather's family spoke, and I wanted to know some of the rhythm of the words that would have seemed so familiar and automatic to them. I wanted to know how my grandfather's parents told each other that they loved each other. I wanted to know what they called their son when he was a boy.

My Native American heritage requires something a little more complicated. It requires that I at least learn SOMETHING from what European colonists did to Native American nations living in North America, doesn't it?

My lesson is this: Oppression matters because it's always closer to you than you think. You think you're a white New Englander whose ancestors didn't even own slaves like those bastard savage southerners? You think being from New England, where we fought in the Revolution and refused to own slaves, means that oppression is something that other people did to other people? It's closer than you think.

When movies like Dances with Wolves and AVATAR tell us that everything would have been different if Native Americans had just had a white guy to lead them in every battle and every negotiation, their lives wouldn't have been taken over and run by white people, I boggle and think, "How the hell dare you?" Because you're not talking about people who don't exist anymore, whose fates are mere hypotheticals. You're arguing about people who are still struggling to own themselves and their own lives, who are still fending off white people who want to come in and gobble them up until there's nothing left but whitewhitewhite. You're not telling people who are totally unlike me that they don't think right, and need somebody who can think a little "whiter" before they can succeed; you're telling people like me that they don't think right.

When a bunch of rich white celebrities from PETA come in to tell Native sealhunters that their culture marks them as animal-abusing savages, and that if they want to be good people they should chuck their culture and use the land like white people do (and yes, there are people who miss the monstrous irony in white people telling Natives how to live sustainably), I can't say, "those sealhunters aren't like me." Because they are. They may not be related to me, we may never meet, and they'd probably not see me as kin if we did. But damn it, those are my people you're shitting on, PETA, and you knock it the hell off.

When museums talk about Native Americans like they stepped out of history in the eighteen-hundreds and into museum dioramas where they would be enshrined next to mammoths and mastodons for the rest of time, part of me shouts, "Damn you, we're not extinct, I'M STANDING RIGHT HERE." Why is some little millionth-of-a-percent white girl the only one in the place who gets angry? Isn't there somebody more qualified who notices?

I'm not "Native enough" to claim membership in a tribe, and I wouldn't try. But just being connected to the people in Maine who are related to the people who are related to the people who are related to the people that my great-grandfather was so ashamed of has impacted who I am, and taught me a great deal. Those people are mine, y'know? And there's only so much I can do for them without taking their lives away from them and being part of the problem.

There are efforts right now to preserve the languages spoken by the people my great-grandfather was related to. I'm so glad they're doing that, and I hope that when I finally get back to New England, they'll still be offering lessons. Maybe it's not my tribe, not really. Maybe it's not my language, not really. But if I can help keep their language from dying by being one more person interested in learning it and passing it on... maybe I can be some use to them, after all. I owe them that much for all that they taught me.

Nuh uh YOU'RE a bigot!

Evidently complaining about racism, homophobia, and misogyny is just as bad as complaining about black people, gays, and women. Solution: refuse to have a problem with anything ever. Safe! (Bonus points for silencing minorities who don't realize yet that anger makes them bad people. TOP SCORE.)

I am really tired of being called angry and hateful because I have the gall to dislike the people who feed a system that shits on me (and several other sorts of people who may or may not be a lot like me) every day. I am particularly bothered by all the "bullying" language being thrown around. Here's what I feel is happening (and this is just my perception, but since it's coloring my reactions, I feel obligated to explain it).

A lot of people have a "zero tolerance" view of disliking other people the way that my junior high had a "zero tolerance" policy toward fighting. I ran afoul of this policy, and I think that the way it played out says a lot about how I approach these situations.

I was being bullied by a girl who not only followed me around the halls, but cornered me for what was clearly going to be a fight. It didn't come to that, but the administrators told both of us that fighting is wrong, wanted both of us to apologize, and we both got a suspension for in-school violence.

Seeing the connection? For those who aren't catching it, I'll beat the dead horse. Sometimes it isn't right to paint all parties to a conflict as though they are all equally wrong and all equally bad and all equally to blame for the situation. There are situations where this is the case, but they are far more rare than a lot of people would like to think.

The people who treat hatred of homophobia as though it were as bad as hating gay people, the people who treat revulsion toward racism as though it were as bad as revulsion toward other races, and the people who treat bitterness at misogyny as though it were as bad as bitterness toward women? They are doing to marginalized people what my school administrators did to me when I was a kid, and I don't stand for it now.

Just because there's a conflict doesn't mean everybody involved is a bad person, and just because someone finally hits back doesn't mean they're just as much of a bully as the person who's been brutalizing them all along. Conflating these two things is not only logically screwy, but it only serves to shame and silence people who are trying to finally stand up for themselves.

So yeah, I'll say it. I mistrust conservatives, mainly social conservatives. I mistrust social conservatives because people who identify that way have tried in many identifiable and clear ways to make my life less fulfilling than theirs, because I belong to several classes of people who have faced identical objections over and over to our desires to live as equal citizens in this country (whether it's my voting rights as a woman, my right to be free from religious coercion as an atheist, or my right to equal contractual rights when it comes to civil marriages).

My dislike is different from that of homophobes, religious zealots, or sexists, or racists, because I am not trying to deny them any rights except for their perceived right to hurt me. That means the roots of our dislike, as well as our intended aims, are not just a totally different animal, they're a whole world apart.

Every time somebody equates the two, calling both me and the people who hurt me "bullies," I kind of want to bite them in the face.

And a day later...

I just posted an entry on Friday about the fact that I lost my job at CAC. Well, on Saturday at noon I had a meeting with someone I used to work with. He's been keeping in touch with me off and on since October, trying to get me to come work for him.

At the meeting yesterday, I was really impressed. I think this is going to be a great chance to do more than be someone's mouthpiece going out and saying what I'm supposed to say to the people I'm supposed to get money from. I think that Matt, the guy who'll be canvass director and with whom I canvassed for a while at CAC, has a lot of experience with canvassing and running canvass offices. I think that he's going to do a better job bringing out the best in me, because he wants me to do things that I'll be good at.

He asked me what kind of role I see myself having, what I want to do. I mentioned that I tend to keep an eye on the tone and climate of places, and I think I'll enjoy being at an office as it's just starting because wherever I go, after about a year, I find some long-buried conflict drama nonsense and step on the landmine. That kind of repressed drama makes me crazy, so I detonate it so that it won't be lurking under there anymore. I'll be really glad to finally be in a position to make sure those things never occur in the first place, and he seemed really pleased that I was thinking about it. He said he wanted the same thing, to have what he called "dignified, professional canvassers."

He wants me to be his "training guru," focusing on training new canvassers. I told him that once I have an idea of the kind of tone he wants to set and what kind of climate he wants to create, I would love to help pass that on and keep it going, but that I want to make sure I have a sense for it first. I've only ever known CAC's canvassing office, so I want to make sure that I'm not bringing in habits that won't help.

So he's going to train me to train. We'll be canvassing for Grassroots Campaigns, Inc., and this summer's client is the ASPCA. After that might be Save the Children, or the DNC doing get-out-the-vote work for democratic candidates.

Matt wants to train us to be canvassing directors. He wants to train directors for other campaigns, so that we can go provide leadership to the progressive costs that need us.

I have a boss who appreciates me, and who thinks I can do more than I've been doing. I have a boss who is competent and experienced enough to take input (since it's not a threat to him, and he trusts that we may also know what we're doing). And y'know what? I have opportunities for promotion that frankly... I didn't see happening at CAC.

It was time to leave CAC. While I am grateful to the office for being precisely what I needed precisely when I needed it, and while I'm grateful to CAC for doing badly-needed work in this state (seriously, even though I don't work there anymore, please be nice to CAC canvassers, because they're hugely important to everyone), my time there is well-ended. I have to move on and do other things now.

Love, peace, and doughnuts to all. I'll let you know how things pan out with this new gig when I know more, but I'm really optimistic about it.

Just another field canvasser.

Well, that's that.

Went out on review at CAC. What this means is that I had to make my weekly quota three weeks in a row, or else... y'know. that's that. For all that our job description covers motivating each other and the contacts at the door and generating letters and phone calls and all sorts of important things, because the fundraising is the only thing we can quantify... really, the fundraising is the only goal that can make or break you as a canvasser. It's hard to escape the impression that it's the only thing which matters, but we always try.

Hard to see it just now. But you know. That's now. For the past two days, all anybody has been looking at are the numbers, if only in the desperate hope that the numbers would be good enough to give them an excuse to retain me. Canvassers have many jobs, many responsibilities, and they all matter to the organization, to our campaigns, and to the people of Indiana. Really, though, the only one of those that affects us personally is our fundraising. So it's hard to see those other things, sometimes. Like now. But y'know. That's now.

Honestly, I think other people will mind more than I mind, at least right this second. I'm not used to thinking of myself as the popular girl, but I guess at CAC I was. I just tried to make people laugh. Old survival strategy: make them laugh and they won't hate you for being smart or pretty or... or whatever it is you are. So I tried to make them laugh. I guess it worked.

It'll hit the new people hardest. They haven't seen people come and go like I have, and like the people have who've been there even longer than any of the field canvassers. The newer people will miss me. I give everybody else a week, maybe.

The office is the same, no matter who's in it. I didn't change it when I came, and it won't become something else because I'm not there. That's how it is when you have a lot of people moving in and out. Nobody gets a foothold, makes a change, fills a space that will leave a gap when they're gone.

I feel bad for my canvass director who had to do it, though we both knew I'm just sick to death of doing what I've been doing. I needed a change, and whether that was finding a way to get promoted or shifted elsewhere or simply leaving... it was going to happen, or I was going to make it happen. So I'm not jarred or shocked or anything.

But then, maybe it just hasn't hit me yet. Up until yesterday, there was actually a damn good chance I'd still be going back on Monday. But that was up until yesterday. I went to staff night for the first time in months yesterday, and I think it was largely to say goodbye (even if they won't realize this until sometime next week). I came, I sang, I rocked out, I reminded them that we're awesome together, and now I'm out.

The people who notice I'm gone will feel it at first, but it's like every time a move happens, or people graduate, or switch jobs. It hurts at first, because you're pre-emptively missing that person or that group of friends. When the time comes for the actual "missing them" bit, it never quite lives up to expectations.

When you graduate, you promise your friends you'll stay in touch. I made those promises too, because to do otherwise was to hurt the feelings of the people who just didn't understand yet that the parting ritual is hollow. We don't really mean we'll stay in touch. We don't really mean we'll always be friends. What we mean is that we're friends now, and we're sorry that that is ending (if not forever, then at least for now).

It's like every time I moved as a kid. I'm the one who's leaving, I'm the one who's losing, and yet I'm the one who has to comfort everybody else. I'm the one who has to repeat over and over again how all right I'm going to be and yes of course let's stay in touch and definitely we'll hang out. I say it, because if I don't go through the parting ritual they'll think I never liked them and never valued them. They say it because if they're afraid if they don't go through the ritualistic assurances, I'll think that our friendship never mattered.

Sometimes I wonder if I'm the only one who sees it, or if we're both just going through the motions so that each of us knows that the other--at the end--at least cared enough to lie.

Roleplaying Characters and the Rape Fad

So... I know that on a lot of roleplaying boards, the way to have an edgy backstory for a tough female character is to say she's been raped. There inevitably will be at least a couple of characters like this (and should be, frankly, because it isn't uncommon).

What pisses me off is that on some boards (particularly one Star Wars board that I left a while ago), this is apparently the only way to create a tough female character or a fragile female character or... really, anybody with tits. Evidently the only kind of woman anybody can think of to RP is... well... a rape victim.

Disclaimer: I think that online collaborative writing and roleplaying is an awesome way to raise awareness and create teachable moments about all sorts of things that most people don't directly confront in their lives. Want to say something about racial inequality? A scifi setting is an awesome place for this. Want to say something about commodification of women's bodies? A well-written character who is or has been a slave, or who is tangentially connected with that whole messy business in Star Wars is totally doable and potentially hugely awesome, because it can get people thinking about things they're not ordinarily exposed to. It can also be a potentially-useful way for assault victims to work through that in their writing, and I get that, too.

It's gone too far, though. Somewhere a line was crossed. I've started being surprised when a player thinks of something to do in a woman's backstory BESIDES rape her. I can probably count on one hand the number of female characters I've RPed with from this place who were not raped at least once. Can't we think of something else for women to do in their lives besides be assaulted?

I mean, women do have other things going on besides being raped all the time. Sometimes we have other problems, or other obstacles, or even goals. Sometimes we even succeed at things. But from these characters all I see is rape rape rape rape. It's like every plotline in a female RP character's life is just a forgettable transition period between rapes.

Summary: Teachable moments GOOD. Rape as a shortcut to character development BAD.

Am I the only person who gets really pissed about this? It says something seriously creepy that nobody from this board knows what goes on in a woman's life or in a woman's head if they're not being raped.

I have no idea what to do about it, either. I don't want to tell people, "Some of you need to write this shit out of your backstories, because I'm sick of it and your little clone army of identical stereotypical rape victims is beginning to piss me off." But right now that is exactly what is going through my head.

Anti-authoritarian musings...

I think I might be a libertarian-socialist.

Or:

When did capitalist right-wingers get so trusting, anyway?

Here's libertarian-socialism in a nutshell (at least as I understand it, and if someone can correct me in the comments, PLEASE DO, because I will consider your insight here to be a personal favor).

Libertarians don't want the government controlling their behavior, because having your freedom curtailed by people who are not accountable enough to you SUCKS, and shouldn't happen. Coercion is terrible, and you shouldn't feel coerced by your government. People like myself take this one step further.

I feel that corporations and powerful individuals have too much power to control my life and coerce me, and they're even less accountable to me than the government. At least the government I can vote in or out. Therefore, the answer seems to me that we should be as wary of companies or individuals with power as we are of governments.

We agree that being controlled is bad. But I am willing to point the finger at more entities than the federal or state government, and tell them they're too coercive. More than that, I'm willing to actually stand up and kick them down a notch.

I'm not a socialist because I want the government to control me. I'm a socialist because I'm tired of rich people and the companies they own controlling me, and if I have to use the government to get free, then so be it. I'll use that as long as it's pleasing me, and if the government upsets me, I'll turn that upside-down, too.

Libertarian-socialism (as I understand and practice it) means treating everybody who has power with the same distrust that Libertarians feel toward the government. If you don't want the government rationing your health care, you shouldn't let Blue Cross/Blue Shield do it, either ( so we need health reform). If you don't want the government telling you what you can think or read, you shouldn't let your internet service provider hide parts of the internet from you (so we need net neutrality). If you don't want the government treating you like a servant, you shouldn't let your employer treat you that way either (so we need worker collectivization).

To me this is the only consistent approach. The Libertarian approach, where we eliminate all regulation and accountability except for the right of each individual to spend his or her dollar where he or she pleases, actually curtails personal liberty in a lot of the same ways that state-socialism or state-communism does, because either way you're telling a certain class of people (whether that's a government or a corporation), "You can do whatever you want. We trust you."

Well, guess what. I'm not an obedient person, and I DON'T trust them. I don't trust the government, or my insurance provider, or my ISP. But at least the government has to maintain a pretense of accountability, and at least there is some power to influence it (though it's far more of a grind than it should be, it's more power than I have over Comcast).

Here's a super spiffy real-life example. You know how the state can lay highway through your property using eminent domain? This is something of a necessary evil that can be used right, but that we should always be wary and mistrustful of, and we should always make it a huge pain and potential public relations nightmare to do it. That way we put barriers up to make sure it's not abused.

There was a bill introduced in the Indiana state house which would have let utility companies declare a project a "public good" eligible for eminent domain. Seriously. There is legal precedent for this, and in many states it's legal for utilities to use the same power to use or sieze property that the government has.

Here's my problem with it: Huge energy and utility companies cause more than enough trouble for their ratepayers without the right to straight-up take their property. At least with the government using eminent domain you can hold them accountable and vote them out of office if you don't like the way they're acting. With a utility, you generally don't even have the ability to take your business elsewhere. You can't even stop giving them your money (unless you want to stop having electricity).

This is bad. I think this is bad because it just goes to show how much trust people have in these companies. People who flatly refuse to support the right of the government to chip away at people's property rights will nonetheless completely bend over for a company that wants to do it. CAC killed that bill, and now we're just watching to make sure they don't slip that language into something that they think will get past us.

But seriously. This is what happens when you talk a good line about questioning authority and being free from government control, but turn around and let private businesses do whatever they want. Someone is going to have the right to take your land. Would you rather vote that person into office and out of it, or would you rather it be someone who knows you can't even stop paying them no matter how pissed you are?

Yeah, that's what I thought. The fact that your property rights mean shit at all is because there are laws protecting you. That's right. Laws. Laws mean "government regulation." When you chip away at the government and let private businesses fill the gap, you get crap like power companies with the right to lay pipeline through your land.

I'm not satisfied with that, but then... I'm not a Libertarian-capitalist or a market-anarchist or whatever. I'm not required to be satisfied with it, because I'm not the one who created that situation by arguing that the "invisible hand" of the free market/God/Santa/etc. should be the only control placed on what a business or individual can or can't do. I'm not required to be satisfied by this situation, because I never argued that I would be.

Can't say the same for Libertarians.

People are stupid.

Dear Indiana ratepayers and taxpayers:

No, I'm not afraid of your power company. No, I'm not afraid of the government. No, I'm not afraid of your employer, or your lawyer, or my own employer, or their lawyers, or anything anybody says. I'm not like you, and that's why I'm going to win.

You can thank me later.

Lots of love, Ashley.

Sundays.

I dread going to work on Mondays like everybody else, but at the same time, I think I appreciate my job most on the weekends. When I wake up on Saturday and think about what I did that week, I can say that I fought for something. I decided what I wanted, and spent my time and energy pushing us closer.

On Sunday when I think, "Hell. I have to go to work tomorrow," I'm also thinking, "I'll get something done this week. I know it."

People at the doors are stupid, and blind, and too preoccupied with the petty proscribed lives that they were always told they'd have, and never thought could change. But when I leave their doors, they're a little less so. It's exhausting, and I'm always a hair's breadth from not raising enough money to keep coming back to this job every day. But hell. At least it's worth doing.

Sometime this week when someone tells me that they don't get involved in this stuff, or that they don't want to talk to someone from CAC, I'm just going to smile, and tell them, "That's cool. In the end... we're going to win."

Because we will. Because we're the only ones who have something to wear ourselves out for, and that means everything. During the week I'm tired but on weekends it's easier to see what my job is for, and who I am when I'm doing it. I can get a better perspective on those things, and I really do like what I see.

Man...

Why in the world should it take me more than an hour to try and explain to a Marine that using the word "Hajji" to refer to all terrorists/Arabs/Muslims/whatever is racist, and that this makes it bad?

Gaaah, such a waste of my time and energy. But whatever. Maybe some white person that he'll actually listen to will give him the lecture again later, and then maybe he'll get another one, and eventually we'll wear his ignorant ass down into something resembling decency. If the best I can do for the universe is to waste a little time explaining to someone that it's not okay to talk about people that way... then hell, I guess I can do that much.

Seriously obnoxious, though. This shit is not fucking sorcery, people. I get that in the military the norm is to be racist to the enemies you kill and rape the allies you serve with, but the rest of the world cannot fucking operate that way. At least, not in my goddamn IM windows. If that's the only space I can police, then so be it.

Shameless Boasting

Look what we have!



Handfasting hasn't happened yet, and we won't be doing any of the legal end of things for quite some time (changing of names mainly, since we aren't signing a marriage contract as long as the laws are discriminatory), but we have our indestructible engagement rings. Look at them!

Yet another "Oh, except you" for LGBT Americans

So pissed.

From reannon.

Iowa, we were so proud of you. Now two Republican state reps have proposed to EXCLUDE LGBT kids from the Safe Schools law that protects kids from harassment and bullying. What. The. Fuck. It's right here: the bill itself.

What bothers me more is the utter lack of news coverage. It's all on the blogs. Come on, Iowa newspapers! I realize TV's been on Super Bowl for the last three days, but you still have pages to fill!

Windschitl, the guy who started this, is part of Iowa's "Liberty Agenda." (He also looks about 12 years old. It has brilliantly camouflaged itself by putting two conservative-friendly and fairly inoffensive ideas around this: "Allow Iowans to vote on the definition of marriage." The other two are "restore the number of state troopers to pre-1998 levels" and "the Iowa Good Neighbor Act," which lets neighbors and grandparents watch kids after school without registering as day care providers.

Iowa Pride Network has more. This is the sort of thing that sneaks in under the radar, guys. Iowans, wanna shout some? Clearly no one's hearing yet.

*tears her hair out*

We're gonna be hearing about this for a while...

You know how California is getting sued over Prop 8 because it's a flagrant violation of the Constitution?

The anti-equal-rights activists just realized they got randomly assigned a gay judge.

Oops!

I mean, we're all having a good laugh over this because they're seriously standing up in front of a gay man and attempting to convince him of the essential depravity of gay people (including predictable but bizarre assertions about their propensity to rape children). Their case was shit before--and they knew it (and you can tell they've known it from the start by the way they've tried to hide their arguments and lie about their motives and backing), but now this.

The down-side is that they'll obviously turn this into another narrative about the oppressive liberal establishment imposing its Supah Sekrit Homo Commie Agenda on the Good Decent Christian People of this nation. Never mind that according to the Constitution, we have judges to doublecheck laws and make sure they're Constitutional; actually using them is "unamerican."

Walker here is damned if he does, damned if he doesn't. On the one hand, he has the option to cement into judicial precedent his own status as a second-class citizen. On the other hand, if he brings the 14th Amendment into the discussion, the defendants in the case will slink off growling about how gays are so mentally twisted that they aren't even qualified to evaluate the Constitutionality of laws.

Can't be teachers, can't be parents, can't be judges, can't be married, can't be people. Same old, same old. They were going to find a reason to pretend an unfavorable ruling isn't legitimate. We just know now in advance what that's going to be.

"Discussing this purely scientifically."

You want to talk about abortion, fine. You want to look at numbers to make sure your impressions are in line with facts, awesome! That's great! But please remember that this is more than an intellectual question, with more at stake than how many angels can dance on the head of a fucking pin. People who are calmly and curiously discussing just exactly how to take away my rights, and to precisely what extent they can get away with it, should not proceed to get pissy and huffy with me when I point out that real people are involved. Seriously.

I am not violating the rules of proper debate by appealing to emotion. I am reminding you that when you make policy, you may harm real people. You should face the fact that they exist, and if you're going to hurt them knowing they're there? Fine. At least I'll know that you're doing it fully conscious of and comfortable with the damage you are causing. Call my rights an acceptable loss if you like, but do not look down on me for polluting the perfectly-detached academic nature of your debate.

My rights are not an interesting curiosity or a diverting puzzle to me, you fuckheads. You are playing games with my life, and the lives of people like me, and the lives of people who aren't like me, and you had better believe I'm going to remind you that we're real people and not merely statistics for you to play with.

I hate that every discussion of abortion turns women into numbers based on how their pregnancy happened, proceeded, and was resolved. I hate that every time I protest being reduced to a number based on the circumstances of my reproductive history, men and even women in the thread will get upset, like I'm missing the point of the discussion.

I am fucking not missing the point. You are missing the fucking point. You're missing the point because you have the culture-granted privilege to sit and talk about this like the consequences don't matter, simply because the consequences will be happening to people you don't care about.