Indentured Labor

Welcome, citizen. 

To ensure the safety of our democracy from outside tampering, please make submit your identification card, and present your eye for a retinal scan. Please do not forget to pay the mandatory 25 cents. Thank you for your cooperation. 

Our databanks have identified you as an individual currently receiving government finances. Please submit your identification card again, as well as the last check stub that you received. Thank you. While we scan your identification card, we would like you take this time to answer to answer the following questions. When you are done, click submit and your name with the answers will be attached to the back of the voter form to ensure voter accuracy in the event that there should be fraud. Please not that you must answer all of the questions correctly to vote today. Please note that all answers will be made public:

Question 1. 
Answer with a simple Y/N: Have you not started looking for a job yet? ____

Question 2. 
In order to vote, you must first have a job. This is to confirm your status as an American Citizen. Please identify the last position that you are still working at. ______________________________
_______________________________________________________________________________

Question 3. 
Our records indicate that you have 3 children at home under your care, and are African-American and a single woman. Do you make use of our public school system?  Y/N _____ Have you stopped buying your children expensive shoes? Y/N ____ Have you stopped purchasing expensive cars? Y/N____

Question 4.
Read the following passage and state exactly what it means below:

Extended revolutionary methodologies must be applied in order to ensure the growth of our current mission-based relationships, thereby ensuring innovative, out-of-the-box, paradigm-rearranging systems that help the survival of our democracy. Empowering bleeding-edge logistical facilities means granting that certain freedoms must be integrated into point-and-click mortar initiatives.

Please provide what the phrase means exactly here: ______________________________________

Question 5. 
Answer with a simple Y/N: In the event that your identification is no longer valid, you will be notified that you are required to renew your identification. Renewing identification requires a valid identification card, so in the event that this happens, do you have a valid identification card? ______

Question 6.
You submit that your name will be attached to the vote, so in the event that the vote returns as a fraudulent vote, the law will be notified of you and your current whereabouts. You must agree to this in order to participate in the American Electoral System. I Agree ____
 
Thank you for your time, citizen. We have determined that your card is no longer valid, as you are currently receiving government aid in the form of EBT, and your last purchase indicates that you bought $23.30 in cigarettes and alcohol using non-EBT money, invalidating your current identification due to abuse of government funds. Your status has been changed on the government network, and your identification has been tagged with this abuse for all to see. Would you like to present a valid identification card? 

There are countless alternative questions for number 3. Because I live in a city that's majority African-American (one of the few places in the country like that), I'm very familiar with all of the stereotypes, because I hear them all the time from the white people who live here. Any stereotype here will do, but because we all know that Poor = Black, stereotypes about African Americans work best for this circular question.

Speaking of poor = black, you'd think that Mitt Romney would have gotten the hang of knowing when to keep his mouth shut. That doesn't seem to be the case, though: apparently 47% of America supports Obama, and that 47% has no initiative, are leeches on society, and are just in general fucking lazy.

Thing is, that's almost half. That's 47% of people who he will never have on his side.

In a better world, in a better country, that would've torpedoed his chance. As it is, there are people in this nation who will read my little introduction up there and say "That's cool! We need to do something like that to keep them lazy [insert pejorative here] from voting!"

And yes. This is what it feels like trying to vote in the United States sometimes. 

Once Again, It's This Stuff Again

So, the clowns in Georgia (yep. To quote Adam Savage: There's your problem) are setting up for a fight with the ACLU and the rest of the civilized world. They've set up the Ten Commandments inside of a court house (Why do they do that? Why; of all the places to put them, why blaspheme them by sticking them up in front of one of the most dysfunctional justice systems on the planet?), and to my knowledge, even passed a bill making it "perfectly legal" to do so.

The common argument I routinely here is that they're the foundation for American Law and the foundation for Western Law. Western Law I can't speak too, but I know they sure as hell are not the foundation for American Law; explicitly, the Constitution.

How so? A lot of atheists say that, but very few of them actually stop to explain the number of ways that the Ten Commandments violate the Constitution, expecting people to either know or go and look it up themselves. Well, I have some free time tonight (and an earache; the sinus infection wasn't bad enough, you know. I really hate living in this state, with it's unpredictable weather), so I'm going to lay out exactly how and why the Constitution, if it was inspired by the Bible and the Ten Commandments, as is so commonly claimed, it was as an example of what not to do in a system of law.

The very first thing you have to do when talking about this is decide which of the various versions you want to use. Exodus and Deuteronomy both give two versions with their major and minor differences, and each Christian sect has their own variation on the theme. There are some things that run in common, however, but they're not as many as you would think. When you think about it, the very concept of a "generic" list of 10 Commandments is offensive to at least some Christian sect somewhere, because "generic" usually means "dominate group", which in this case would be some form of Baptist. Because it becomes a theological clusterfuck trying to determine which set to use, however, I'm going to just role with whatever set is easiest for me to find - and because Wikipedia is there for me, and Exodus comes before Deuteronomy, that's the version I'm going to be using. I have no fetish for "original commandments" because, if you recall, Moses supposedly broke the original ones on the ground when he saw that the Americans were worshiping Adam Smith, money, and the golden idol of Capitalism Hebrews worshiping the golden calf, so I personally couldn't care less. I just need an example list to show you how wrong this is, so Exodus will do.

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.