Charlie Sheen is a shithead

You know, when someone with a long history of violence and a lot of money threatens to kill someone and allegedly holds them against their will with a knife at their neck, you’d think that you shouldn’t grant bail, let alone at $8500.

Man, it must be nice to be able to beat the shit out of pretty much woman you’ve been intimate with and threaten their lives and still make a cool million an episode when you’re out on a bail that looks like pocket change in comparison.

Take note ladies! The world, and especially the legal system, hates you. While you may have no protection against people firing you for finding topless photos in magazines, you can merrily abuse everyone with a vagina you’ve ever slept with (or almost slept with) and still be the highest paid actor on television.

Judges, by the way, can deny bail if the accused is a high flight risk or highly dangerous to themselves, their victim, and society at large. But since Sheen only abuses women, who aren’t people, it’s totally okay to release him on a mere $8,500.

Check out this rap sheet ‘yo:

– 1990: Sheen “accidentally” shoots then fiancee Kelly Preston in the arm. Since it was an accident and everything, Preston was totally nonplussed and totally didn’t hold it against him. She was so understanding that she called off the engagement, just to prove that she really didn’t think he totally did it on purpose or anything.

– 1995: Sheen admits to dropping a cool $50,000 on Heidi Fleiss’s escorts. Nothing displays your high regard for women like buying and consuming their sexuality.

– 1995: Two months into his marriage to Donna Peele, a model, Sheen is sued by a UCLA student that claimed that he hit her a year before when she refused him sex. The case settles out of court.

– 1997: Sheen pleads no contest to charges of battery and assault of then-girlfriend Brittany Ashland, whom was given stitches when he threw into their marble floor. He never goes to prison, but gets two years probation and a measly $2,800 fine.

– 1998: Sheen violates parole and is turned in by his father after being hospitalized for a drug overdose.

– 2005: Pregnant Denise Richards files for divorce. She makes allegations in court that he has a porn addiction (and appears to enjoy seemingly underage porn), threatened her life several times, physically abused her, and regularly verbally abused her with epithets such as “cunt” and “nigger”.

– 2009: Sheen holds wife Mueller to bed, at knife point, and tells her:

“You better be in fear. If you tell anybody, I’ll kill you. I have ex-police I can hire who know how to get the job done, and they won’t leave any trace.”

She calls the police anyway. The incident is sparked when she allegedly threatens to leave him and take their twins with her. Don’t cha know that all those stupid women need to do is leave their husbands? Unless of course, they’re just asking for the abuse or they secretly like it, the poor dears. I mean, it’s not like the abuse escalates after separation or anything. And everyone knows that the legal system takes domestic violence really seriously. I mean, $8,500 of bail is a lot of money for a guy that makes over $800,000 an episode of his hit show and totally sends the message that everyone genuinely thinks that women are people, not punching bags.

I fail to comprehend how anyone with that kind of history is walking the street, free as a bird. If I wasn’t afraid of what I’d find, I would research if crimes like abusing animals, property damage, having a joint, and peeing in public are taken more seriously.

Seriously, Democrats really hate women or I use the skills I got in law school to analyze shit that takes away my rights

So it gets worse.

Behold the absolute draw-dropping shittiness of The Stupak Amendment. Here it is, proof positive, that Democrats really hate women. What’s also awesome is that the first female Speaker of the House presided over a Democratic majority that passed the most expansive restriction on women’s rights in recent history. Not only was the amendment passed by 62 democrats (and all voting Republicans), the bill carrying the amendment was passed through Congress 220-215, with the majority of Democrats blithely signing the biggest roll-back of reproductive rights. Super.

Some Democrats (mostly women) did not take this shit sitting down. They tried to speak in Congress, only to have male Republicans heckling them and shouting “I object, I object, I object, I object” over them. Think Progress has the video. Thrown under the bus by their own party, some of the women we voted into office were forced to speak out against their own party signing away their rights while they were viciously silenced by the very men that orchestrated this new oppression. I’m sure that while the men in Congress, some of them in their own party, thought this was just business as usual, our minority of female lawmakers got a heady sense of deja vu. Men talking over them in a meeting? Nah, that never happens. Especially when you’re talking about your own freedoms and liberty. I mean, just shut up bitch. Know your place.

Out of this process of ugliness came the unholy spawn of the Stupack Amendment. However, unlike some other places, I believe that the proof is in the pudding. I’m not doing to quote from some dude that quoted from some other dude that quoted from yet another dude. I’m including the full text of this steaming file of fail. Here’s your fucking hope and change, right here:

AMENDMENT TO H.R. 3962
OFFERED BY MR. STUPACK OF MICHIGAN
AND MR. PITTS OF PENNSYLVANIA

SEC. 265 LIMITATION OF ABORTION FUNDING

(A) IN GENERAL—
No funds authorized or appropriated by this Act (or an amendment made by this Act) may be used to pay for any abortion or to cover any part of the costs of any health plan that includes coverage of abortion, except in the case where a woman suffers from a physical disorder, physical injury, or physical illness that would, as certified by a physician, place the women in danger of death unless an abortion is performed, including a life-endangering physical condition caused by or arising from the pregnancy itself, or unless the pregnancy is the result of an act of rape or incest.

(B) OPTION TO PURCHASE SEPARATE SUPPLEMENTAL COVERAGE OR PLAN—
Nothing in this section shall be construed as prohibiting any nonfederal entity (including an individual or State or local government) from purchasing separate supplemental coverage for abortions for which funding is prohibited under this section, or a plan that includes such abortions, so long as—
(1) such coverage or plan is paid for entirely using only funds not authorized or appropriated by this Act; and
(2) such coverage or plan is not purchased using—
(a) individual premium payments requires for an Exchange-participating health benefits plan towards which an affordability credit is applied; or
(b) other nonfederal funds require to receive a federal payment, including a State’s or locality’s contribution of Medicaid matching funds.

(C) OPTION TO OFFER SUPPLEMENTAL COVERAGE OR PLAN—
Notwithstanding section 303(b), nothing in this section shall restrict any nonfederal QHBP offering entity from offering separate supplemental coverage for abortions for which funding is prohibited under this section, or a plan that includes such abortions, so long as—
(1) premiums for such separate supplemental coverage or plan are paid for entirely with funds not authorized or appropriated by this Act;
(2) administrative costs and all services offered through such supplemental coverage or plan are paid for using only premiums collected for such coverage or plan; and
(3) any nonfederal QHBP offering entity that offers an Exchange-participating health benefits plan that includes coverage for abortions for which funding is prohibited under this section also offers an Exchange participating health benefits plan that is identical in every respect except that it does not cover abortions for which funding is prohibited under this section.

The emphases are mine.

For those without a background in legalese, this is about as unequivocal and binding as law can get. There’s no wiggle room. No exceptions. What this creates is a health care system in which women are second class citizens, forced to choose between even private coverage of a perfectly legal procedure and all federal funding of health care. This, simply, is an outrage. As far as I’m concerned, this violates both Roe and the substantive due process of the 14th amendment, but for those without a background in law, rest assured that this shit is really, really, really, legally dubious.

So let’s digest this, line by disgusting fucking line.

Section A explicitly prohibits any federal funding governed by HR 3962 (the larger Affordable Health Care for America Act) going towards the provision of abortions. But if you thought that they really needed to put this in, that anyone was really ever in danger of seeing their tax dollars going to “kill babies”, well, you’re a fucking idiot. No, seriously. Behold the related 30-year-old shittiness of the Hyde Amendment. Passed in 1976, in the immediate backlash of Roe decision three years earlier, the amendment explicitly bars all appropriations for The Department of Heath and Human Service budget from going to the purpose of funding abortions. It does not prohibit all federal funding of abortion, just anything out of HHS. Since H.R. 3962 would be administrated by HHS, there was absolutely no way, shape, or form that its provisions would go to funding abortion. Got it straight?

Moving on, the second clause is the kicker: “or to cover any part of the costs of any health plan that includes coverage of abortion”. You catch that? If you have a health plan that covers abortion, you cannot receive any federal assistance. Can’t make the last $300 for a root canal? Too fucking bad. Choose between your teeth rotting out of your face or abortion coverage. Want part of your “exchange” to go towards a consultation with an allergist for your seasonal allergies that you couldn’t otherwise afford? Too fucking bad whore, you got an abortion last year on that plan.

This amendment goes beyond limiting federal funds. This explicitly bars even private insurance companies from covering abortions.

Well, so can insurance companies just offer plans with abortion coverage and ones without? Sure, if you’re cool on getting totally substandard care and no government assistance whatsoever. Given that the majority of those who see themselves in low-paying part-time positions that don’t offer health coverage are women, there’s going to be a lot of women who need federal assistance. But they won’t get it unless they accept prohibitions on their rights, and start saving for out-of-pocket abortions if they need it, instead of putting away money for retirement. That’s other thing: men won’t have to save for expensive procedures that they need. They won’t have to choose between affordable health care and their reproductive rights.

But all this begs the question: will insurance companies continue to offer abortion coverage? The answer: probably not to the extent they do now. Providing abortion coverage will undoubtedly require additional administrative costs to make sure that the company remains in compliance with the amendment. Additionally, by section C Paragraph 3, those additional administrative costs will have to be covered entirely without federal assistance that insurance companies could get if they didn’t offer abortion.

The result is obvious: some companies will just not offer abortion coverage. It’s too troublesome and expensive. If they offer it, they’re required by Section C Paragraph 3 to provide identical coverage that doesn’t cover abortions. Notice that the amendment, however, does not require that companies offer plans that do offer abortion coverage. A company would be in compliance if they did not offer coverage for abortion at all. In fact, it’s transparently obvious that this is the goal of the entire amendment: to make it so that insurance companies will have lots of incentives to never cover abortions.

If a company decided to offer coverage including abortion, the coverage would be prohibitively expensive. Not only could the insured not use federal monies for any medical procedure so long as they are covered for abortion, they also would be forced to pay higher premiums. After all, the additional administrative costs of the plan could not be paid for with federal assistance, which would transfer the additional fees directly unto women. To really sweeten the deal, you’d also be ineligible for Medicaid matching even from your state while your insurance covers abortion. Awesome.

At the end of the day, you’re left with a tiered health care system. At the very top are men. They can purchase private insurance. They can use public funds. They can do what you want with them, within reason, and not have to worry about losing coverage.

Quite a way below them are women paying for identical insurance except for abortion coverage, but paying much higher premiums. They cannot use public funds for anything.

Below them even further are women who can’t pay for the prohibitively expensive private insurance of their female peers. Among them are women that need any assistance whatsoever for anything, even something as simple as a teeth cleaning. They must pay for abortion out-of-pocket or choose between any federal or state assistance.

And at the very bottom are the women who can neither pay for prohibitively expensive private insurance or out-of-pocket abortions. They get pregnant, and they’re forced to procure risky abortions by untrained providers or have a baby against their will. At best, they succeed. At worst, they bleed to death or lose their fertility to a massive infection.

Oh, and they will suffer from those cheaper abortions. I’d bet all the money I have that someone will make it so the prohibition against paying for abortions will extend to paying for the complications from botched abortions. Or they’ll extend it to birth control, IUDs, and all those things that wackos say “kill babies”. Before long, everything that has to do with your right to exercise your entirely legal reproductive rights will damn you to fork over big bucks. No assistance. No coverage.

Lo and behold, our fucking Democratic majority has opened its collective asshole and shat out a mammoth steaming pile of shit that only allows us to avoid bankruptcy by medical bills only if we promise to be good girls and never ever kill babies.

There’s your Hope™ and Change™. You thought that Democrats were cool with just throwing gays under the bus? We’re not stopping at anything. Fuck the poor. Fuck women. Fuck the environment. Fuck the Middle East. Fuck accountability. Fuck ending tax cuts. Fuck our progressive base. Fuck federal law and Roe v. Wade and the things we could do with a Democratic majority.

If you have a Senator that would otherwise vote to pass this bill (mine are all Republicans), please, for your rights, send them a letter. Give them a call. Do something! Otherwise, I’m afraid that this is the death-knell for reproductive rights.

Letterman and poisoning the well

As anyone with an internet connection will know, the last week has been a series of failures when it comes to male celebrities breaking the law and treating women and girls like shit. Everything I could say about Polanski, however, has already been said.

With Polanski, however, it seems like few people outside of Hollywood are engaging in overt rape-apologetics. The people I happen to run into on a daily basis are mostly in agreement that Polanski is a filthy fucking rapist and that the portion of Hollywood signing that “Free Polanski” petition have all lost their fucking minds.

So, I at least have some faith in humanity.

Although it is very shaken when it comes to Letterman. I was always of the opinion that he was a swarmy asshole. Most men in power tend to be, and there were no indications that he was an exception to the rule.

Thus, the news story about how he slept with many female staffers in his long tenure as a talk-show host didn’t surprise me at all. Hey, another famous male abusing his power to harass, rape, or exploit women. In other obvious news, the sky is blue. I bet you would have never guessed that! What really bugged me about the story, however, wasn’t really that Letterman was an unadulterated douchebag of the highest order. It’s the public reaction to his revelation that got my panties in a twist, so to speak.

Unlike Polanski, most people seem to have filed Letterman’s shenanigans either under the “ha ha, that’s funny” category, or moved right into “bitches blackmail men because they didn’t get what they wanted out of seducing them, the whores”.

And the second assumption bugs the ever-living shit out of me. It’s like the entire world has no idea of what power imbalances are created when your boss is a very famous man hell-bent on seducing you, or the fact that sexual harassment in the work place is illegal.

Because that’s what Letterman did: he sexually harassed, coerced, and exploited the women and men under him. He turned the staff of his entire show from the meritocracy it was supposed to be into a harem of peons he assumed were only there to assuage his massive self of self-entitlement and/or his prick. He deprived women of the positions they’ve earned because they wouldn’t sleep with him or he wouldn’t want to sleep with them. He deprived men of the same, because sleeping with him was not an option, and that seemed to be the most sure-fire way of climbing the ranks quickly.

In short, Letterman poisoned the well. He forever twisted the fair and equal power structure that he was legally and duty-bound to uphold into whatever suited his overwhelming sense of narcissism.

And when he revealed what he did to the public, they laughed.

They laughed like it was not a big deal. Like he wasn’t responsible or that an offense against morality hadn’t been committed. They laughed like every powerful man is entitled to behave as such because such men have “earned” the right to viciously undermine fairness and exploit everyone around them, especially if the exploited are women.

Honestly, that scares the crap out of me. What Letterman did isn’t rare or uncommon. It’s very prevalent. People in power use that power, and the threat inherent when they have that power and other people don’t, to do all sorts of unconscionable shit. It’s an endless cycle of cronyism and exploitation/corruption that irrevocably taints most power structures.

Yes, most. Corruption underlies most hierarchical structures in most societies. Letterman’s actions are just more evidence of the same. They’re not a laughing matter.

For shit’s sake, when are people going to stop laughing at corruption and demand some goddamn accountability? Whether it’s Polanski or Letterman or George W. Bush, it should be really fucking obvious by now that most people in power behave as if that power gave them carte blanche to do whatever the hell they want.

Furthermore, this shit doesn’t happen in a vacuum. When Letterman uses how well women please his cock to determine his advancement policies, people who deserve it don’t advance. When Polanski uses the promises of fame to rape girls, girls don’t have a safe way to get fame or trust those that could help them achieve it. When George W. Bush uses how much contractors are chummy with his interests to determine who does what in Iraq, billions upon billions of taxpayer dollars just disappear and resurface in generous Halliburton compensation packages or are spent on mercenaries that slaughter civilians.

When corruption earns laughter rather than moral culpability, corruption flourishes. It undermines every concept of fairness and justice we think we have. It poisons the well and engages in behavior like rape, sexual exploitation, or outright murder.

So when you think of Letterman, don’t laugh. What corruption does isn’t funny. And it’s about time that we stopped laughing at men who abused power, and started demanding some fucking accountability.

Women and children: Guilty until proven innocent

Mum’s been the word around these parts on the Rihanna domestic violence case around these parts. I figure that my input is just unnecessary and encouraging people to further invade the woman’s privacy. Which, obviously, I do not approve at all. So, here you will not see pictures or run-downs of police statements. Plenty of other sources have already covered that, and you have Google at your disposal. Look it up if you so wish.

What I will say is that the framing of this case in the media disgusts the ever-living hell out of me. It did from the first second I heard about it at the Grammys from that Seacrest douche. I recall working on some International Ethics paper at the kitchen table, and hearing Seacrest announcing on the television in the next room that neither Rhianna nor Brown was going to be performing that night because of “alleged” reports of assault and battery. Seacrest finished with some sort of sentiment that boiled down to that “we don’t know all the facts” and “our hearts go out to both of them”. Huh?

Immediately, I rolled my eyes in disgust. It didn’t occur to me that there was anything “allegedly” about it. I know far far too much about domestic violence to be stupid enough to assume, without anything concrete, that reports were false. Furthermore, the sentiment that I was supposed to feel bad for the both of them just blew my mind. What the ever living fuck? I mean, when reports surfaced about Michael Vick, that asshole, it didn’t occur to me to pray for him. I felt horrible when I imagined the dogs that suffered at his hands, but I would be have to brain dead to pray for Michael Vick. The only thing I prayed for was swift justice and a long prison sentence for such a sick asshole.

So when the Rhianna/Brown case broke that day, I didn’t want to pray for Brown. First, I’m not one to pray to begin with. Second, I have a lot better things to pray for than accused woman beaters. Like world peace, starving children, and the women  abused by said batterers.

I knew that the case was only going to get worse from there on out. If Seacrest’s sentiments weren’t already mind-bogglingly stupid, the media coverage was about to go from plain ignorant to malicious and then lovingly embrace the abyss of bat-shit-crazy. And fuck me, I also pessimistically thought that the negative media about to leveled square at a woman who really didn’t need to be victimized again by a society that ought to have her back would probably drive her right back into the abuser’s arms for lack of better options.

Fuck, I hate when I’m right.

So the shit came outpouring from every media mouthpiece. Rhianna was slandered: did she make him do it? Did you hear that she gave him an STD? Did she read his text messages and need to be “put in her place”? Then some shithead at TMZ got a hold of her picture taken for evidence (no, I’m not linking to it) and posted it all over the Internet, regardless of how illegal and violating that is. Anything for a buck. Pictures of Brown surfaced: defending himself, “remaking his public image”, partying on a boat with friends, hanging with fellow rap artists that would eventually push Rhianna to reconcile with him, which she did.

And I gagged on bile the whole way through. I was forced to consider that people I thought were intelligent were actually dump as stumps when they started spouting nonsense about Rhianna too.

So, back to that first day. I recall asking my mother, “did they just seriously insinuate that I ought to feel bad for Brown?” Her response was the very thing falling from most ignorant lips, “well, we don’t know the details. Innocent until proven guilty”.

Except not. That excuse to rally behind batterers, rapists, and murderers always left me dumbfounded. “Innocent until prove guilty” is a legal doctrine. Which means, that it is not something that ordinary citizens are held to, nor should they be. And most people plainly do not really believe in “innocent until proven guilty”.

Most people simply take cases as they hear them and decide without all the information. The media usually gleefully rips to shreds any celebrity accused of anything. I can’t tell you how many times I had to watch Paris Hilton cry as she was shipped back to jail. Not once did anyone ask, “did she really do it?” Same thing with Winona’s stealing, Lindsay’s DUI, and Vick’s dogfighting. Nobody started spreading rumors about police framing, dogs asking to abused, or entrapment. If there was someone that did ask such things, they were labeled a fucking idiot and dismissed, rightly I might add.

But what was remarkable is that nobody touted out “innocent until proven guilty” or “we don’t know all the facts”. I don’t recall the media scrambling to assemble excuses for the crime, or reasons to condemn those that accused them of such crimes. It was just basically assumed that if you were caught stealing, drinking and driving, or gambling on abused dogs fighting, that you were probably guilty of what you were accused of. In fact, most people I know were upset that they didn’t get enough time in jail for their crimes.

Notice something striking about these cases though: none of them involved a man being accused of hurting, killing, or abusing a woman.

Which cases do?

Well, Rhianna and Chris Brown. Roman Polanski, who got someone to direct a biopic about how the 13 year-old girl he raped asked for it and won a fucking Oscar in overseas exile to avoid being brought to justice. O.J. Simpson, who people still to this day defend. Michael Jackson, who need no further explanation. Mike Tyson, who has high-profile celebrities defending him from accusations of date rape. Kobe Bryant who said he didn’t “view the encounter the say way she did… I believe that it was consensual.”

All of the above were, and still are, defended by the media. Their accusers were slandered, their names leaked, and their lives ruined. Many of them still are extremely wealthy, and their careers are unaffected. When Kobe dunks at a Lakers game, nobody prefaces their play-by-play with references to his crime. People still buy Jackson’s music and think of him as the King of Pop. Polanski is still hailed as a hero in Hollywood. The 13 year-old that he raped? She’s considered a whore.

Innocent until proven guilty, but only if you’re a man accused of hurting a woman. Everyone knows that women and fucking children, for shit’s sake, are just a bunch of liars.  The only people in the media who are ever accused of crimes without proof are the very women and children that have been killed, beaten, raped, and victimized by sick male celebrities. The media and plenty of citizens will go to any lengths to invent crimes the victims of such horrible crimes are guilty of.

You and I know better. Their only crimes are not being silent when a man decides to use his penis as a weapon against them. Guilty for slaking the male right to sex, consensual or not, and then objecting to the Natural Order of Things.

Good God, this shit makes me mad as hell. I’m ashamed to live in such a sick world populated by such delusional woman-hating fucks.

Zionism: the importance of being Politically Correct

When it comes to foreign issues, I generally find that my political opinions aren’t exactly as informed as they could be. But with the Israel-Palestine conflict all over the news recently, my thoughts have been wavering in a state of limbo.

With a variety of issues, I find it pretty easy to lean to one side or another. With this issue though? Nobody has gotten it right. I’ll read opinions condemning the human rights violations of Israel, and I’ll agree only to find—two paragraphs in—that the essay has turned into a completely anti-Israel screed with antisemitic undertones.  I’ll watch Congress continue to conflate Israel’s aggressive actions with “defense” and mindlessly funnel tax dollars into bombs that will be used to kill innocent people. Then I’ll listen to conservatives affirm Israel’s right to exist, only to launch into a rant about killing terrorists and how Muslims want to kill them for their freedom.

And then I’m struck with this sense of how completely and utterly wrong everyone is. As you can see by the picture I grabbed from this story, protesters in Germany are comparing Israelis to Nazis. The article is titled, “European guilt about the Holocaust is receding in the face of Israeli aggression – and there’s nothing anti-semitic about it”. Excuse me? There’s nothing antisemitic about purposely exploiting one of the most heinous acts of history to make a political point to the descendants of the victims of that genocide when you are the descendants of their killers? Well color me surprised. I thought that was about as antisemitic as you can fucking get.

It’s because of shit like this that I really don’t trust many people to be at all tactful or progressive about this sort of issue. Every political commentary I’ve come across is seething with an undercurrent of war-mongering, racism, antisemitism or anti-Muslim sentiments. My city publishes a newspaper called the “Jewish News” which my mother is subscribed to. Even they have gotten it all wrong: the front page is filled with some of the most anti-Muslim sentiments I’ve ever seen, not to mention deliberate distortions of the truth.

Honeymoon is over.

Didn’t take long, did it? Sometime after midnight on November 4th, the fervor died down. The night was quiet, but my mind was not. Over and over, I turned over questions in my head: have we accomplished anything?

No, we haven’t. No, we can’t.

President-Elect Barack Obama is more valuable as a symbol than a flesh-and-blood president. November 5th dawned bright and clear, and with it all the inequalities, abuses, and horrors of the day before. None of that had been washed away. None of that had been lessened.

Some of it had been worsened. California voters used their irrational hatred to take away the rights and happiness of a minority they despise. Arizona voters kept a sheriff that has wrongfully killed prisoners, violated the federal and state constitutions, and uses tax payer money to fund his crusade of racial profiling rather than doing anything to reduce the skyrocketing crime in our poorest urban centers.

Democrats now control the Congress, Senate, and White House. So? So what? What has that changed? Nothing at all.

Need I remind anyone that Obama’s health care plan is even worse than the shitty choices we already face? Do I need to explicate the fact that his stance on a woman’s rights to bodily integrity are so porous that I could park a jet in the holes? Must I really sit down and explain the fact that nobody seems to give a flying fuck about the majority of the population— the working and lower classes, women, homosexuals, and the population of the rest of the goddamn world?

You know, I’m really quite glad that McCain lost. I truly am. But that doesn’t make me happy. Not in the slightest. It means that my standards are so low that I can still feel hope or good about this stupid nation for a couple of minutes while the majority of our population—and basically the entirety of the rest of the world—suffers for the selfishness and hubris of the American ruling class.

This makes me a sorry piece of human waste. Because I bought it. I smelled the shit, I put in my mouth, and I lied and said it tasted good.

It didn’t taste good. No we can’t.

Our environment is nearing the breaking point every second. Millions in our own country have nothing to wake up to the next morning but insurmountable poverty, bigotry, and the ugly fact that they will never stop paying for who they are, or who their ancestors were. Billions in the rest of the world celebrate with our new President-Elect, because we have broken them. We pat ourselves on the back like the self-entitled fucks we are, and we all don’t seem to give a damn that while our new president might not like warfare as much as our last president, he still supports the American hegemony over the entire globe. He still voted to redistribute billions of dollars made on the backs of hard-working Americans and even harder-working exploited foreigners to a bunch of greedy bottom-dwellers who celebrate an economic downturn of their own making with another yacht.

He’s still a part of the American ruling elite, no matter how dark his skin or how foreign his roots. And he will operate within their parameters, or else. He will do their bidding, or else.

And we will smile. The rest of the world, because they are broken beyond repair, will too. The 1% will have their cake, eat it, and the 99% will thank them for the priviledge of being used as footstools.

November 4th: a day in which it looked like a lot was done, and maybe it was, but not nearly enough.

Makeup is relevant

You’re going to talk about makeup? Isn’t that, well, entirely regressive of you?

Yes and no. It’s true that things like the rape culture or horrible exploitation of women around the world look obviously more dire and disgusting than the American beauty double standard. It’s also true that they ultimately result in more death and abject misery.

But this sort of brush-off of the beauty double standard entirely misses the point: sexism is pervasive and maintained by things as meaningless as grooming regimens. The reason women are required to wear makeup, and men are not, and the reason why women own less than 1% of the world’s wealth while working two-thirds of the world’s working hours—paid and unpaid—are exactly the same. That reason is patriarchy, sexism, bigotry, and chauvinism. Whatever the name, it’s all just hatred of women.

Talking about make-up is a big no-no among the liberal feminist crowd. Even those that are not adherents of “SexyFun Feminism” ask those man-hating radical dykes to lay off their precious powders lest they be painted with the same brush as those disgusting radical feminists or lesbian separatists.

I’ll be honest here: talking about make-up and plucking my eye brows seems completely and totally irrelevant and superficial. I catch myself making that assumption based on a sort of “common sense”. Well this common sense might be common, but it’s certainly not sensible.

The mechanics of how and why the beauty and fashion industries operate the way they do—here and elsewhere—all return back to the fact that the natural state of a woman is something that is vile, disgusting, and dirty in this world. Like Dworkin postulates in Pornography, women are regarded as nothing more than “cunt”. By cunt, she means an object whose entire nature is encompassed by a sexuality that is sinful and wrong and an object which is hurt because it wants it, and must be hurt because the aggressor has no choice… being manipulated by the object the way that he is.

Women are naturally cunts, or so the dominate social doctrine goes. Our bodies are shameful. All of are parts may be dissected and separated from our individuality, because they all—in sum or in parts—have the mysterious power of sexual arousal in the male viewer. We cover our breasts, the center of substance production for infants, because their purpose has been usurped by the unwanted reaction of the male gaze to that which they deem dirty. We carefully groom our body hair into pleasing shapes, or remove it all together, because of its socially-defined connection to filth, to smell, to age, to masculinity—all things a woman cannot possess. We cover our acne, painfully groom our eyebrows, lengthen our lashes, and paint our lips with a cocktail of chemicals considered, by some, too toxic to even test on animals.

Obama wouldn’t care if they confiscated my uterus

I am a lazy no-good navel-gazer. With the advent of the new semester my routine has transformed from sitting on my ass at home to paying thousands of dollars to sit on my ass on campus. Nevertheless, I have woefully neglected my blog and my loyal readership of three, maybe four, people that serve as my awesome echo-chamber of personal superiority. Or so I’ve been told.

Nevertheless, there is this nasty story about the federal government’s newest scheme to reassert dominance over the wayward uterus that I feel miserable about not covering when it was first brought to my attention. Scheduled to go into effect in late September, the proposal requires all agencies receiving aid from the Department of Health and Human Services to sign agreements stating that they understand that “discriminatory” actions taken against those who object to abortion on either moral or religious justifications will result in a loss of federal aid. Long story short, Bush and his godbag posse would like to make it illegal to “discriminate” against people that refuse to do their jobs, assuming that posing a significant barrier to someone’s full exercise of reproductive agency is protected by law, while the actual exercise of that reproductive agency itself is not.

Furthermore, the proposal seeks to redefine abortion as:

…any of the various procedures — including the prescription, dispensing and administration of any drug or the performance of any procedure or any other action — that results in the termination of the life of a human being in utero between conception and natural birth, whether before or after implantation.

Obviously, Washington has now decided that it knows a hell of a lot more about abortion and pregnancy than every credible gynecologist on the planet. Since 1965,  the American Academy of Obstetrics and Gynecology (ACOG) has defined pregnancy as the advent of “conception… the implantation of a fertilized ovum”. The horseshit proposed above (pay attention to the emphasis added by moi) would classify things like hormonal birth control and Plan B as “abortion”, whereas the ACOG–a far more credible source–has defined such measures as plain-Jane birth control. If this measure goes into affect next month without challenge, millions of women across the nation could be denied access to simple birth control by the whims of people permitted to not do their jobs and still get paid.

Race literacy: what differences make a difference?

I found this awesome race literacy test at the California Newsreel website, where I discovered that despite the brillance of the points raised in the test, it was self-scoring. Hopefully to give it the audience and look it deserves, I reformatted it with the quiz-making site Helloquizzy. Go ahead and take it!

Hopefully tomorrow when I’m more awake, I’ll be able to do a longer post about the things I learned with this test.

Americanism and Thought-Crime

Stop saying bad things about the world! Seriously. I mean, nothing’s more American than being happy and loving everyone. Which means that me and the CEO of the company dumping toxic waste into the town lake are totally on the same page, man. We love each other, we’re good neighbors. We both want some good old harmony.

Let’s play the analogy game! Force is to Authoritarianism as what is to Democracy? If you guessed Propaganda you win the grand prize! It’s called thinking. Sometimes it sucks. May cause feelings of intense hopelessness and pessimism. Use with caution.

Unhappiness, dude, that’s not American. If the state of the world sucks, then don’t think about it! In fact, ignore and alienate agitators. Like the government told you to. Or your boss, he’s pro-American just like you. You ever hear of the Mohawk Valley Formula? No? That’s good. Ignorance and bliss is the American way.