20 Questions

From Townhall.com, a challenge: 20 questions that liberals can't answer. What they actually mean is "20 questions liberals can answer but I'm going to plug my ears and not listen, or pick at little things and use that as a red herring to avoid the discussion," thus rendering any "debate" with these people little more productive than masturbation (but nowhere near as enjoyable). Since I have a bit of a masochistic streak and I enjoy beating on the strawmen army they pony up, I figured I would take a little swing at this garbage and see if maybe I can't clear the stink.

So, let's take a look at these 20 questions I'm not supposed to be able to answer.

Skin Tone Markers

I'm a white guy. I've expressed that before (for a certain value of guy). And while I come from an area that's poorer than shit, and I myself am poorer than shit, that doesn't mitigate the privilege society awards to me for being the color that I am.

I've come along way in acknowledging that privilege, but I probably still have miles to go before I sleep. Today, I was reminded of just how far I've come, and just how blind some people are to the concept of privilege (and how insidious racism actually is capable of being). I was reading this narrative, and there was a little part of it that struck me:

Decades ago, in graduate school, a professor and I chatted as we prepared for a holiday party in the English department. I made decorations, digging around in a box that was loaded with miscellaneous art supplies – colored pencils, dried out markers, and broken old crayons 

“Nice crayon,” my professor said as I colored a poster.
“What?”
“What color is it?”
I turned the crayon around in my hand and read: “Flesh.”
“Got a problem with that?”
I was stumped. “With what?”
“Miss Grant, I think you’ve had just about enough gender studies courses,” he said. “How about giving a little more thought to race?”

I am an amateur artist. I used to have a lot more artistic talent than I do today; I've squandered it, but drawing is still something that I occasionally do for fun. I was drawing before I was writing; I stopped drawing sometime in early college, which was about the time that I started to pick up in my writing. I traded one talent for another, you might say. Today, a lot of my art is done in Daz Studio, and with 3d rendering. 3d rendering, with some help from photoshop, has its advantages. At the same time, though, I'm restricted in what I can and can't do (because I can't design my own models, and the selection of primitives, or basic shapes, isn't very broad) in a way that I'm not when I draw.

I still have a pile of primsacolor markers. I actually have several boxes of them; I still use them. I love primsacolor; they're my favorite type of marker, because they make smooth strokes and I can "layer" progressively darker colors, to create the illusion of shadow and depth in a picture. If you've followed that link, you probably see the prismacolor markers are expensive; one marker sells for 3 dollars. I probably have over 200 dollars worth of markers that I've collected over 5 or 6 yeas of art work, including Christmas gifts. Eventually, it just got too expensive. That's another reason I don't have many hobbies other than writing anymore: writing is free. Everything else costs money I don't have, and time I can't waste.

Reading the narrative above reminded me of a time when I was relatively young - I want to say this happened about 6 or 7 years ago, maybe even 8. I was sitting in my mom's room, and I was organizing the markers according to color type (so, these were greens, these were oranges, these were reds, etc). I had them all nicely organized, and I was going through the various color groups with my mom. I even had a group I called "skin tones." Unfortunately, that "skin tones" group was a rather restricted group - just like the "flesh" crayon in the narrative above, my "skin tones" were all various shades of pale. Blondwood (not peach; prismacolor peach is a lighter shade of this very vivid pink and only works if you're coloring the skin on a pig), Tan, Creme, Brick Beige; the one thing they all had in common is that they were all pale (with, as the case with some, yellow underscoring them). Browns had their own category, which I called "earth tones". 

I did not even register that. I just didn't. I erased an entire group of people and replaced them with dirt.

I recognize it today. I no longer separate my markers like that. I don't have a "skin tone" category, since I can use just about any marker ranging from creme to my dark browns* to represent skin tones (if I did break it up properly, that category would be about 75% of my maker total). I don't even break them up; they're all lumped in two boxes sitting in the corner of my room, but when I did after that, they were done strictly by color: blues, oranges, yellows (which included blondwood, creme, and brick beige), browns, blacks, whites, grays, reds (which included the umbers) and so on and so forth.

It took my mom pointing it out to me that how I was dividing the markers back then was racist. And the irony of that is my mom is not an egalitarian; she will admit she is a racist individual who does not like Black people**. It's never been very prominent, and I've only seen it on display once or twice. So I'm still not entirely sure, reflecting back on that story, how it turned out the way it did, and why, of all people, she was the one to point that out.

But yes, this is what people mean when they say you have privilege. It was nothing malicious on my part. It was not me intending to erase an entire population, completely and utterly, and prioritize "Earth colors" over them (which is stupid in retrospect; "earth colors" are everything from brown to blue, with green, orange, yellow, and everything else thrown in the mix). It wasn't me intentionally expressing some unconscious dislike for individuals with dark skin (which include more than just Africans; this includes Dravidians, some Pacific Islanders, Australian Natives, and some Southeast Asian populations, among others).

It was ignorance. That's all it was. And it doesn't excuse it at all; but it's like any mistake. You pick up and you learn from it. And that's what I did, and that's what I'm still doing.

* Dark brown is as dark as I can get when I'm using markers. If I wanted to create a darker skin tone (I know they exist) then I would do something like "Dark brown, dark umber, black", but I'd never use black as a solid, base color for a picture (because I rely on going from "light to dark" to create the illusion of depth, and there's not many colors darker than black. Also because I ink my pictures using black ink, which complicates it just a touch).

** My mom, and a few people that I know, makes a distinction between "good" black people and "bad" black people. It's a distinction that, growing up, I never understood. I point it out every time it gets brought up: If they're lazy good for nothings, why not just call them lazy good for nothings, since that's what we call whites who are like that (and don't get me started on passing judgement on people like that; until you understand their circumstances, you cannot morally make these judgement calls about people), instead of calling them niggers? And guess what? They don't have an answer, and it's because they don't know why, other than it being blind habit.

Maybe I'm the reverse. Rather than blaming the poor black people for the collapse of my neighborhood, and the collapse of my city, I'm more apt to blame the rich white people, since they're the ones with the money, the power, and the capability to come in and help us fix it - but they actively chose not to, and instead, continue to exploit poor people, black, white, Asian, Native, and any other group. Somehow, I feel the reverse is less acceptable socially, even though it's definitely the more moral of the two. And it's definitely not, like I heard some brain-dead libertarian tell me, "economic discrimination" because they have more money. Nobody chose to be black. You chose to be rich. You have all of the responsibility that comes along with it; the first thing Spiderman teaches is us that with great power comes great responsibility; money is power in this society. You don't want that responsibility? Give up the power, and the money with it. Stop being rich. It's a lot easier to stop being rich than it is to stop being black.

No Ann, You Still Don't Get it

Ann Romney suffered from MS.

I didn't know that. I feel sorry for her for having to go through that; it's something nobody should have to go through.

It's not going to make me like her or her husband anymore, because I feel both of them are aristocratic assholes who think they're better than everyone else because they've got money, but I am sorry that she had to go through that.

However, this is a message to Mrs. Romney:

Yes, you battled MS. No, that does not make you like us at all.

Ann Romney fired back Wednesday at critics who have accused husband Mitt Romney of being out of touch with average Americans, saying her own bout with multiple sclerosis taught the family what it means to suffer and lose hope.

"When people say that we've led a charmed life and we don't relate to people that are having trouble, I want to remind you that I've been in a very dark place, and I know what it is like to have no hope," Mrs. Romney said at a rally for women supporting her husband, the Republican presidential candidate, at the University of Findlay in Ohio. "So believe me when I tell you these words: We are there for you because we know what it feels like.

No.

No.

No

This does not you know what it's like to be hopeless or suffer. Yes, the disease is painful (not that I'd know) but you know what? You had the money go and get it treated. You had an insurance company that would cover it. You had insurance, period.
This does nothing to me, other than convince me that you do live a charmed life. Yes, it's a shame you had to go through that; nobody should. But you had the money to get it treated. You had the money to get it fixed, and you had the insurance to help you. Furthermore, you could do it without losing time from work. If I ever got hit with something like that lady, I'd be fucked. There would be no way out for me. My life would be totaled for the next decade while I tired to cover the cost for the medication. I thankfully do not have MS. I hope never to get MS, and nobody should have to suffer through it. But suffering through it, Ann Romney, does not make you special. It does not automatically make you "one of us" because suddenly you know what it's like to "lose hope and suffer".

You have no idea what that's really like.

Take your silver spoon and go enjoy your cake, Ann. Stop trying to pretend that just because you had a terrible disease you suddenly understand what it's like to be poor and get the same disease, not be able to work, have several children at home, and be working temporary (or worse, have been working at a company that your husband ran... into the dirt). A nasty sinus infection cost me $31.00 in lost money at work. It cost me $100.00 in medication. I live on less than $15,000 a year. The only reason I can afford that is because I'm still stuck at home.

No.

You do not know what it's like. You have lived a charmed life, and you are a very self-centered woman to think that having a disease, when you have the money and the wealthy to treat it, is enough to make you "just like" the poor person who can't even scrap together enough money to pay for OTC cold medication when what they've really got is walking pneumonia. You have a lot of chutzpah to sit there an say that you know what it's like to lose hope, when you've never felt your heart sink in the doctor's office because someone told you that you need to see a specialist, and there's no way you can afford it. When you need to be back at work the very next day, because you don't get paid leave, even if you are a walking bacteria and virus colony. Money is more important than health to us, Ann, because you and your kind made it that way. You slowly strip us of our dignity, remove the healthcare and the safety nets there to help keep us safe, and then have the gall to say you know what it's like to "suffer" and "lose hope."

No lady, you don't. So stop pretending you do.

Politicized Facts, Politicized Language

I've got another rambling post today; somewhere in here is an idea, I'm almost sure of it. Maybe a couple ideas that might be related tangentially, if I'm lucky. I'm out of it today, for some reason, but I figure it better I post it here and drop it  all on my FB wall. More people can see my rambling here.

Not My Time Machine

There's an excellent essay documenting the nature of white privilege up over on Lean Left. It's a good read; it highlights the nature of white privilege, and lays bare some important points about it.

Toxic Memes and Poor People

I'm at home tonight with sinusitis, so I'm writing this while in pain. It doesn't make me a very happy individual at all, but compared to the pain this damn sinus infection has inflicted upon me before, what I'm feeling now is nothing.

It hurt worse earlier. So bad I had to admit myself into an emergency clinic and now I have to wall my wallet away inside of my tin can so it doesn't strangle me for it. There's a reason I've waited to treat it - I just recently paid for breaks, so I'm hurting financially enough as it is. I was just hoping that if I ignored it, it'd go away. It's been chronic for the last month or so, since the end of the last heatwave. Part of the problem, I'm sure, is the fact that my neighbor is an asshole. this guy hasn't mowed his lawn all summer (being in jail hasn't helped, but I have a right to be mad at the general situation because it's an eye sore and the city should, but won't, do anything about it) but the weeds - gawddamn. They're bigger than I am. And they've spent most of the summer flowering; kicking my allergies way into overdrive. Even my cat has been suffering from allergies this summer. So I'm sure that's what causing it; that and the fact that work they have something in the filters that just makes it utterly unbearable. I stayed at work as long as I could today - I had to clock out early so I could carry myself off to an emergency clinic because it hurt so bad I wanted to cry. I have quite sensitive teeth; any kind of pressure on that nerve makes it unbearable for me. My teeth were literally throbbing today. I could feel them; I can still feel them now. It felt like someone was trying pry my face apart. Motrin didn't even take the edge off. I kept my patience until I realized that I just couldn't do this anymore. It hurt to talk; someone drove a nail through my jaw and lit that nerve that runs along the chin on fire. That's when I left work early, losing 2 hours of pay. I'm on antibiotics now, so hopefully I'll see some improvement before I go back on Tuesday. I have a weekend off to get better, at least.

Anyway, this post stems from something I've seen too many times.

America is a culture of soundbites.

It's a culture that compresses complex ideologies and multifaceted problems into a few words that, at most, give only a cursory and biased glace at the problem itself. This is what happens when you have a culture of soundbites. As a result, people begin to think in soundbites and begin to expect immediate solutions to present themselves almost as easily as the soundbites are tossed out by our ignoble leaders.

This isn't the first one of these that I've seen, but it is the most recent. And I've commented on almost every one that I've seen, including several arguments with people who thought they supported this stuff. I can't say how many minds I've changed; I doubt the people who support measures and rhetoric like this want their mind changed (as Fred Clark calls it, the "Good Jackie/Bad Jackie test". To my understanding, it works like this: if you tell someone some wild and fanciful story they're repeating is a lie/wrong, how do they react? If they react with "oh, I didn't know that", then you're looking at Good Jackie. If they get mad because you're telling them the truth and they storm off, then you're looking at a Bad Jackie. Most importantly, I reserve the right to be wrong about this. I hurt, y'all. This is not fun).

So, America is a culture of easy and simple soundbites for complex and complicated problems. Here's a very simple solution approach to a problem so complex it has bedeviled people since society first began.

The TRUE Middle Class Scored a Victory In Wiscousin...

Unfortunately, the actual middle class just got fucked over something fierce. It's like how anything good for TRUE America, the REAL America, is disastrous for the physical, corporeal United States (I should start up a corporation and trademark "True America/n", "Real America/n", and "True Middle Class" so I can laugh when I send cease and desist orders for trademark violations to the stupid people who run around saying this garbage).

I aimed to rant about how frustrating this thing is; I whip-lashed today between "well they deserve it for voting him in" and "how do we know this wasn't a case of fraud? In the lead up to the election there were all sorts of rumors of freelance right wingers out in the field lying about who could and couldn't sign the petition, or destroying petitions, of stuff along those lines - there was an entire FB page devoted to it. How do we know these people not only stopped there (providing they started at all)? How do we know they didn't fuck with the votes, too? And more importantly, isn't it really sad it's even gotten to that point?" I suppose as your country spirals down the toilet to 3rd world status, rigging elections becomes a natural thing, and I'm just jumping the gun (maybe).

I'm friends on FB with a group called "Being Liberal". You can gasp in awe now; I know that comes as a total surprise. Now that we're done, I occasionally get updates on my news feed from them. One of them was a letter that family members of a fellow friend received; the back story behind it is that they live in West Bend, WS., and they got this letter in their mail box today:

Yet Another Party Idea Finds a Home In The Real World

I can't take any credit at all for predicting this stuff, because anyone with a brain can look down the road and see what's coming. However, those who've read The Blue Pimpernel are aware that the school system is privatized, although the private company runs the schools out of the former, state-owned building. I don't go too in depth into how the system works; mostly because it's not entirely relevant and partially because I still want stories like this to echo it.

Ever since the idiots in Michigan voted Snyder into office, shit has only gotten worse. Snyder is a corporate crony; what can you expect from someone who takes his marching orders from the Koch brothers, in much the same way that Scott Walker, the former governor of Wisconsin and future convict (I'm being optimistic, I know), is. Snyder, however, has succeeded in undermining democracy far more successfully than anything Walker has been able to push through. Case in point is his Emergency Manager law; which basically allows the governor to appoint someone to come in and do whatever is necessary to fix local debts.

I can smell the democracy. Can you? I know King Snyder can. With this law, he can appoint any criminal, corporate capitalist* scumbag to come in and undermine the democratic elected process - and he was elected by the same people who whine, moan, and shove an oversized suppository of indignation up their ass over "how we should vote on the rights of minorities". This law has been in place for several years now; I want to say it's been in place for about three years. This story, however, is more recent: it shows exactly what happens when you let capitalist shitheads run things: Muskegon Heights has their entire school district on the chopping block.

Oh... Now This is an Interesting Post

While running through the backlog of articles over at H+ (archive panic! I haven't been over there in a month or two, so there's a huge amount for me to sift through), I ran across this very interesting and this very relevant article.

John Galt is Homeless.

And I bet that selfish bastard expects us to take care of him, too...

A Teapublican's Paradise

This came across my feed this morning, and when something like this comes up, it's always worth a look-see. It posits itself as a response to God's Own Party, and with it, the Randian fantasies and Teabagging Rhetoric that seems to be tying together the Big White Tent of "boys-only" bootstraps and bigotry.

It even starts off with an awesome pitch, too:


Imagine, if you will, a country where there is:

No Obamacare
No Obama
The Fair Tax is the law of the land
The Income Tax code is simple and the forms are easy to fill out
The IRS is as toothless as a plate of Jello
There is a complete Laissez Faire free market
No Labor Unions
No Government involvement in Business, Health Care, Labor matters or pretty much anything else except national security.

So where is this mythical Tea-paradise?

Because Being Poor wasn't Humiliating Enough

The United States must have some kind of envy towards poor people. I'm not entirely sure what it is, but there's just something about being poor that means you become the envy of the middle class. Everyone goes out of their way to talk about multitude of different ways that they want to make your life miserable, and this fellow from The Daily Caller is no exception.

I'm not all that familiar with the Daily Caller, but because they let a publication like this on their webpage, I'm going to assume that they have a mild right-wing bias. Lately, it seems like we're seeing a furious attempt to reinstate the power of masculine authority - putting the father in the Fatherland, as it were. Attacks on POCs, attacks on trans and gays, attacks on women's rights, xenophobia, a strong nationalistic bend with a worship of men who were nothing like the people being worshiped, the merging of corporate interests and "heroic capitalism" with the "grassroots" movement... why, if I didn't know any better, I'd suggest that these folks were fascist. But they're not, clearly, because they say they're not. And that's all that matters, because you'll be damned before you can convince them that they're wrong about the historical truth about the positions that they hold.

I digress. This guy from the Daily Caller is a piece of work. He believes that poor people who have to survive on government assistance - who don't have it hard enough as is - should be punished even more. They should have a scarlet "P" stamped on their forehead. It's their fault for being Black Latino poor (don't you dare tell me that's what I'm thinking when I say "poor", you racist liberal). The Right has turned out a parade of monstrous, sociopathic clowns over the last 10 or so years - so much so that the Joker would feel right at home, if he hadn't made it clear that he was an "American villain" when he refused to join forces with the Red Skull. Brion McClanahan is little different, with the exception of the fact that he'd readily jump at a deal to work with the Red Skull.

The Third Position of Centrism

In the United States, there is this mythical existence called "centrism." If you listen to our media, or our political parties, there's always a call for bipartisanship. There's always this idea that, if you call the right out for being the frothy fucking liars they are, then you've got to be "balanced" and reassure the population that the leftists are just as bad. You have to appeal to this mythical centrist unicorn; this rare, neigh invisible creature that exists less as a corporeal entity and more as an idea that is aspired to.

It isn't an idea we need to aspire to reach. Centrism is not a good thing. Being middle of the road doesn't make you more "mature", and it doesn't mean you put anymore thought into your positions than someone on either extreme of the political spectrum. A centrist is someone who hasn't decided anything, doesn't believe in anything, and doesn't take a stand for anything. A fence-setter - that is, someone who always answers poll questions like "Do you think the sky is blue" with "undecided" - is a centrist. I'm not saying you need to be an extremist, I'm just saying that centrism is not a state to aspire to. In a way, centrism is every bit as dangerous as extremism.

Centrism is not revolutionary. Centrism is reactionary. Centrism is a toxic, destructive force - it is not "capitalism with a human face." It's "corporatism with a Citizen's United mask".

A Look At Modern Libertarianism

I've mentioned before Libertarianism is racist. I wasn't kidding, and that wasn't snark. American libertarianism is all about White Male privilege expressing itself and justifying itself through the presence of the Free Market. If there's nothing to make sure that the corporations are playing fair, and regulate them, then who gets trampled on? The poor. And no, you can't just sue them - you can't see someone if you're fucking dead. And your family can't sue them if they're poor and can't afford multimillion dollar hot-shot lawyer to take on a corporation run justice system - what did you expect, a public justice system? That's a vehicle for the government.

Like most other Right-wingers, Libertarians are all over the "I got mine, fuck you" mentality. In addition, they're all over the whole "government for me but not for thee" business; after all, they have to get to work somehow, and they certainly aren't using private roads to do it.

Society is geared towards a certain group of people. That's what privilege is, and that's how it works. Now, privilege is formed of interlocking gears and wheels; one person might have White male privilege without having Christian or wealth privileges, or cis-gendered straight privileges. It generally sets itself up as a tiered system; at the very top you have White straight cis-gendered wealthy Christian males, and it takes itself apart from there. Libertarianism is geared towards protecting this White, straight, cis-gendered wealthy Christian male privilege. After all, if there's no government to lift up people who are disadvantaged by the system, then these White, straight, cis-gendered wealthy Christian males (WSCWCM?) don't have to worry about sharing their social privilege - or, rather, the privilege that society awards them. If there's no entity to try to equalize the playing field and make sure that nobody is starting at a serious disadvantage, then the only people who benefit from it are WSCWCM.

And that's before we get into corporations and such, and how they exploit everyone. Modern libertarianism is just a tool expressed by those who want to exploit.

And if you need a look into that mindset, just take a stroll through the comment thread over on Ashley Miller's blog. She asks the question "Why does anyone like Ron Paul?"

I'll admit that Ron Paul is like the stopped clock of modern politics. He's done a handful of things that I agree with - not because he's Ron Paul, but because I'm a liberal social libertarian myself (in the class sense; I believe that the government should level the playing field for everyone so that nobody is starting this race blind with two broken legs, while things like the "War on Drugs" are a waste of money). However, like a stopped clock, he's wrong most of the time, but we're not talking the "five-o'-clock somewhere" wrong; we're talking incredibly, egregiously wrong.

Like his supporters, more than a fair share of whom are misogynistic gasbags, asshole racists, and generally blind to the faults of their "messiah." It's popular to mock libertarianism as a religion, but I think there may be more than just a fair share of truth to that. It's certainly one of the weirder economic cults.

I have no respect for most modern libertarians, or modern libertarianism. I view them with the same disdain I direct towards anti-vaxxers and creationists, or towards birfers, or 9/11 trufers.

10 Differences Between the Religious Right and Jesus

h/t Confessions of a Former Conservative

He does a pretty good take down of this silly little list of points built on strawmen and distorted ideas of what the Religious Right think and what the actual reality around President Obama is. This "10 differences" list is a joke through and through, built around a number of fallacies and straight up stupid claims. As I was reading their list, I couldn't help but think "you know what? I can do better than this." And because this is likely how all great things in this universe being, I concocted my own list of 10 differences - in this case, the 10 differences between the Religious Right and the Jesus they claim to worship.

A heads up - do not refer to the Religious Right as "the Pharisees". For starters, there are still Jewish people who practice Pharisical Judaism, and that's insulting to them. Second, the Pharisees were concerned with the rule of law and the way that the law was carried out. The Religious Right doesn't give a rat's ass about religious law. They only want the religious law insomuch as it benefits them - which is why you hear this made up garbage about how Jesus made it "okay" to eat shrimp and wear mixed fabric clothing while still making it "wrong" to be gay, when there's nothing in the New Testament or any of Jesus' teachings to back that up (oh, sure, you can get Paul to help by quoting maybe two verses out of how many? But you know what? Paul was an asshole. And Paul was not Jesus). So no, let's stop calling them the "modern Pharisees." That's an insult to the practitioners of Pharisical Judaism ancient and modern, and it's not clever or remotely correct.

Also, before we go any further - yes, I have read the Bible. Most atheists have read it. I've read it even further, and I've made an even stronger effort to understand it, because I'm both an author and a student of literary criticism. You can't study Western Lit completely without understanding the Bible.

When Your Government Sells You Out...

What happens when the law becomes illegal? When the government, in an act that can only be described as a proto-fascist power-grab, way over steps it's bounds and, as an end result, threatens to imprison anyone, indefinitely?

The United States is the proto-typical police state. I know there's a lot of readers out there in the developing world who scoff at that, but the U.S. has always been this way, since it's very founding. Our police have been militarizing since the birth of the so-called "War on Drugs" - we have an almost military-like police, if not a military police system in place, accountable only to it's own and nobody else. The legal system is turning from a legal system against people because of their skin color to against people because of their economic class. On top of all this, theofascists have been trying since the beginning of the Civil War and even earlier to inject their pitiful little god into the government.

Well, today, the U.S. Senate sold us out.

An amendment that would limit military detentions to people captured overseas failed on Thursday afternoon. The Senate soundly defeated a measure to strip out all the detention provisions on Tuesday.

So despite the Sixth Amendment’s guarantee of a right to trial, the Senate bill would let the government lock up any citizen it swears is a terrorist, without the burden of proving its case to an independent judge, and for the lifespan of an amorphous war that conceivably will never end. And because the Senate is using the bill that authorizes funding for the military as its vehicle for this dramatic constitutional claim, it’s pretty likely to pass.
It would be one thing if the military was clamoring for the authority to become the nation’s jailer. But to the contrary: Defense Secretary Leon Panetta opposes the maneuver. So does CIA Director David Petraeus, who usually commands deference from senators in both parties. Pretty much every security official has lined up against the Senate detention provisions, from Director of National Intelligence James Clapper to FBI Director Robert Mueller, who worry that they’ll get in the way of FBI investigations of domestic terrorists.

#Occupy: Bahrain

To the average American, the "Arab spring" is this thing we see on TV between reports about how loopy and spiteful our congress is being and what celebrities are dating who or going into rehab. We saw videos of Egypt, and we saw videos of Libya, and we got some info, but not much.

Of course, we're not seeing videos from Syria. We're getting the occasional new feed, but really, not much. Syria isn't an ally of the the United States, but neither was Libya, and Egypt was neutral at best. So, it's no surprise that we hear about that.

But what about the places that are the ally of the United States?

Let's take a look at what the "Arab spring" looks like in Bahrain, a close ally of the United States, and one generally considered a "liberal" Arab country (I suppose when your neighbor is Saudi Arabia, any morals more advanced than the stone age can be considered liberal). Keep in mind - the United States supports the regime in Bahrain.

WARNING: The video below the fold is extremely graphic; it contains graphic in images of death, mutilation, and general mercenary brutality. And even this disclaimer won't prepare you.

FOX Shoots Itself In The Foot

I don't like internet polls. I think they're a waste of time.

That said, I still enjoy watching them blow up in the faces of the people who set them up. For instance, this poll on FOX, about the 99% Movement:

Those numbers read as follows:

Do 'Occupy Wall Street' protestors represent your views about the nation's economic problems?

Maybe, I'm not even sure what they want: 2.58%
No. They have no idea how jobs are created or how free-enterprise system works: 27.47%
Yes. These folks are right about corporate greed and what's happening to the little guy: 69.15%
Other (post a comment) 0.8%

70% support the 99% movement.

In a FOX news poll. I'm shocked they didn't try to doctor the results, to be honest with you. But I don't see how there's anyway they could spin that to allow their viewers to keep the illusion they're still a majority.

h/t Think Progress

Not Your Father's 99%

The Occupy Wall Street movement is a legitimate, grass roots organization. You can tell because of the high level of initial disorganization. This blog supports the Occupy Wall Street movement, not just because it's author is one of the 99%, but because solidarity is a necessity in this world, when the predatory upper class is constantly looking for a means to hold down the lower class.

Marxist theory is probably the best way to explain how this works. See, in the Marxist view of history, there are three classes: the poor, the middle, and the wealthy. Contrary to popular belief, the wealthy are not the bourgeois. That's a title reserved for the middle class - that is, the shop owners, the employers, etc. According to Marxism, history is nothing but one long struggle between the ruling classes (the bourgeois, who answer to the wealthy) and the proletariat, or the poor people who are exploited by both the bourgeois and the wealthy, repeatedly. Different individuals have taken this in different directions, although I find that Lenin was amazingly accurate in his predictions of what would happen when commodities find themselves controlled by one group of people, or when banks become private enterprises (read his essay, On Imperialism, for a more thorough view.)

I'm not going to spend to much time on Lenin or Marx. I wanted to bring them up because the current OWS movement highlights the ongoing division of the rich verses the poor that's been happening ever since humans developed an economy for their society (and even before that; the god/desses only spoke to certain people, and faith is a currency all it's own, more potent than any paper bill or gold coin minted in history). This is the same vein as the Bonus Army or the Wobblies; it hasn't become the Peasant Revolution of the 1380s yet, and with any luck, it won't morph into a full blown French Revolution (despite what I've heard people say, I don't think it'll go that far. I doubt that we'll see a Lenin-style October Revolution. But if it does, dibs on manning the guillotine. I'd rather be behind it than under it.)

Instead, I found one of those typical responses that pissed me off, so I'm going to look at that. I just wanted to make it very plan and very clear that, as a student of Marx and Lenin, I understand how class warfare works, how it's shaped the history of humanity, and how I'm not scared to admit that I've read either man (dismissals of my arguments on their faces because of who I'm influenced by will be laughed at and pitched aside with the other ad hominem garbage. The most vocal critics of Marx and Lenin don't know a thing about either man or what they said to begin with, and usually resort to making things up anyway.)

So, let's take a look at this thing that's gotten under my skin.

Right-Wing Pundits Are Wrong About Everything (Example #232,120,100)

For those not caught up to speed with what's happening in London, there's a series of riots that have been happening (or perhaps it's one continuous riot) over the last five days or so. While the reasons are complex, and I don't have a full grasp on British politics, I can sum it up the best I know how as it follows: London is burning, some people have been hurt, the cause is austerity measures (read: open economic warfare on the poor), David Cameron reminds me of Adam Susan from V for Vendetta, and the Right-wing Media in America is using it as yet another chance to make themselves look like fools. While I can't speak for the full depth of British Politics, the BBC article I linked to above is very in depth on the matter. I'll trust the BBC before I trust any American News Outlet any day of the week.

While I can't dissect the full reasons behind the riots, due to my inexperience with the British political system and the danger inherent in watering it down or simplifying the causes, what I can do is analyze the impact that the riots have had on the political right in this country (this country being the U.S.) This article by the Guardian (another news outlet I'd trust before I trust any American media source, but not before the BBC) does a good job of recording the Right-wing noise-machine's reaction in this country to the riots, for me to pull apart and mock viciously. So, here we go.

Let Me Take A Look In My Crystal Ball...

Ah, yes. The future. That wonderful time that I'm sure will be pleasant. Eventually. However, it seems to me that there is a very vocal segment of the American population that doesn't want a future. And these people have gotten into power, and they're making policies in a not-so-veiled and not-really-well-though-out attempt to stop it. So, following the whole economic crisis we had this past weekend, I've been prompted to take a step back and look at the direction we're heading. Keep in mind, some of this stuff I've been predicting now since the early part of the century (2004/6 at least.) I predicted the rise of something similar to the Tea Party. I know it has no bearing now, because I have no proof, but let met make a similar set of predictions/promises based on what's happening now. Let me look into my crystal ball at the future, and show you what I see. And trust me. It's not pleasant.