feminist blogs

The last week, and my two years of blogging have had several themes, none of those more important than the fact that we live now, we act now, in the conditions we face now, like it or not. Reality is the bottom line, it has the potential to eat away at our most brilliant planning and thinking even as we try for perfection in those. While we fiddle, negotiate and sooth injured pride, our enemies are at work anticipating us and actively undermining us. As I have pleaded with you to understand, they are dishonest and cruel, they are crafty and deceptive, they aren’t stupid. Like all successful con men, they will deceive those they are robbing and destroying quite successfully. They are far from stupid.

The present contains whatever tools and opportunities we really have to work with, nothing which isn’t contained in our present is going to be available to us. Time taken up with the attempts to make basic tools from scratch is often time wasted, the left has wasted decade upon decade in just the planning for future tool making. What looks good on paper, is often worse than a flop. In the present conditions, here, now in 2008, we don’t have time to give to that speculation, we have got to use what we have at hand. If the tool isn’t available in time, it might as well have not worked.

We don’t have time to waste on the time wasters among us, we don’t have time to wait for their impractical theories to fall of their own, obvious weight. There are those among the worst of them who can prop up that lead balloon with the fine looking logo they are urging us to ride in, to sucker in generations that go nowhere. Some of them are half right, those can be some of the worst, Ralph Nader is the quintessential example.

Some of them are all wrong, those with a patina of what’s taken for liberalism or leftism while they offer only the promise of producing a small core of loud fanatics convinced of their superior intellects even as repeated failure demonstrates that their mastery of buzz words or even entire programs of intellectual theory is no substitute for practicality and good will.

Snobs, a dangerously proliferating invasive species on leftist blog threads, not only advertise themselves as those who will waste time and consume your energies with the damage they will do to the left, they advertise themselves as mock leftists, leftists who don’t possess the first requirements for being a leftist. Anyone who thinks the lowest among us are not worthy of our full respect, consideration and effort, is a conservative who hasn’t fully developed yet.

Sexism and racism and other forms of stereotyping and stigmatization as political strategy and posture should be stamped on vigorously, first and foremost because they are evil and unjust, secondly because those practicing them offend us, divide us, take up our time and do the work of our enemies for them.

I fully believe that the core belief of the left, that people are endowed with inherent rights equally held by every last person. People own their bodies, they have a right to an environment that will sustain them, they have the right to food, water, clothing, shelter, rest, sleep, respect, love and mutual support. People do not exist apart from each other, people have the right to have their rights observed, they have an absolute obligation to observe the rights of other people. I fully believe that governments are established to procure those rights and to protect them, equally, for every person. Education, one of the most basic means of obtaining, protecting and providing those things needed by people, it is a fundamental right. I believe that the core values of the left are correct and should govern our work in making progress.

I fully believe that people do actually have a spark of the divine in them and it is by that which their inherent rights exist. I believe that our bodies are provided to us as individuals for our use, though I’m not going to go into that here and now. I believe that we the living are different from the inert, that humans with the ability to think and learn and sympathize with other suffering life, are not the slaves of physical law in our actions. I believe The People, individually and collectively can take effective beneficial action that supersedes any possible theoretical impediment that the individual and collective genius of self-interested or merely deluded people can devise. Even those with a mighty good line and some involved equations attached. I'd better not go into the folly of trying to study vastly complex systems with science and that history is generally a better tool for understanding some of those, you know where that could lead.

In a practical demonstration of the fact that we are all subject to real life and time and that we had better not waste time on the impractical and theoretical, I am forced to inform you of the end of my regular blogging. I will post my last regular piece on Sunday, I don’t know if I will post any pieces or comments after that. Thought I’ve got too big a mouth to promise that I will remain silent forever. If I do have anything to say, Echidne’s blog is the first place I’ll come to say it, her admirable blog community those who I’ll think should hear it first. I’ll have more to say on this Sunday.

Heavy allergies, light posting. Will be back when I wake up in a Benadryl stupor. Do watch the program about fistula, it was a real reality check in this surreal atmosphere caused by our continuing election standoff. If you can't, read the things at the website linked to below, they are sobering.

Anthony McCarthy

posted by Anthony McCarthy

If you haven’t seen it yet and still can in your area, you should watch the Nova program “Walking to Beautiful” about Ethiopian women who suffer ostracism due to fistula and the Fistula Hospital in Addis Abba. It’s one of the best Nova programs in years, essential viewing, giving a hard to take look into the difficult lives of the women, what they have to go through to be treated and that there are a lot more women suffering with fistula than can be treated. Just saw it and thought you should know.

Here’s the program website.

Well, mark me down for the geezer I am, but I’d not known about Somi before looking for a You Tube of Abby Lincoln singing “African Lady” to the jazz genius of Eric Dolphy. I didn’t find that great recording from 1961 but I found this song of the same name by Somi with Herve Samb on Guitar performed last year.

Somi: African Lady

I think you might like it. Here’s her website.

posted by Anthony McCarthy

but they can get people killed.

Suzie’s post yesterday is about one of those first level issues that are much more important than the election campaign squabbling I’ve been dealing with. If you haven’t read it yet and donated, it’s very important and is a chance to do something real about the world.

The point about what we can do for people in another country where our best intentions are thwarted by politics and the history of the West in the Middle East came up at Digby’s blog. The issue is one we’ve discussed here a lot, the murder of a young woman that goes by the obscene non sequitur, “honor killing” Here’s one of my comments lightly edited.

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You might be too young to remember the dispute of PBS showing the film "Death of a Princess" about the beheading of a young woman living somewhere among the royalty of the House of Saud and her lover. There were all kinds of threats about retaliation from Saudi Arabia, mostly taken by people at the time to mean another 1970s style oil crisis. I remember all the talk about "understanding their culture" by those who advocated PBS be stopped from showing it. Well, I heard Elizabeth Drew say that she thought the Saudis should be told that in our culture you don't censor the news media, that’s our culture. I thought it was one of the more intelligent points made in the arguments about the issue. The Saudi aristocracy, much more of an enemy of the people who they rule over than they are to us, had a potent tool to use, an implied oil embargo. We don't even have that to enforce our ideas in a case like this.

The murder of women like this is a crime against humanity, it's terrible and it's disgusting and outrageous. What do you propose we do about it? I mean what do you propose that will actually do, to do something for these women, not what will allow us to pretend that our outraged words, full of moral indignation and reason, will have any effect at all. And those reasonable and justified words don't stand alone, they are sent out in a sea of racism, imperialism, counterproductive religious invective, etc. When they get over there the most enlightened Western words are tainted with the Sam Harris and the neo-con kind of crap.

Has anyone here asked some Islamic feminists what they think? Some actually living in the middle east instead of some white man in a college town in the United States? I'm sure you'll get different and conflicting opinions from them, some probably in line with what I'd disagree with. But I am a white man in the United States, I don't have to live with the consequences that could flow from whatever other people here do. Women in the middle east, who have the advantage of knowing the first thing about their own situations, have more information that any one else does. They're the go to people on this issue.

I don't see what people who witnessed the reaction to those stupid anti-Islamic cartoons don't get. They don't care what we think, though they obviously can care about what we say. Our ability to influence their societies for the good is a lot weaker than our ability to piss them off stupendously and a lot of people get killed when that happens. Islam-baiting is certainly a way to get that accomplished. I can speculate what the assholes here who indulge themselves that way get out of it, they're the only ones who do get something out of it. But I don't know why any decent adult would want to get that out of a situation that gets people killed. I don't count them as among the enlightened.

On first bite -

*Oh, it’s a store-bought cake.*

Then -

What do they put in store-bought cake that makes it taste like Play-Doh smells?

I don’t have a transcript but remember what was said on the program. It was one of those moments when someone say something that crystalizes an idea that had been only vaguely thought before. In a discussion of five members of the Boston media on Emily Rooney’s program on WGBH TV the subject was the handful of reporters and journalists who don’t vote out of principle. The idea being that reporters are supposed to be objective and unbiased so they shouldn’t vote. Callie Crossley, the accomplished and erudite journalist, producer, you name it in media, she’s done it... said that with the people who had sacrificed their lives to allow her, a black woman, to vote, there was no way she was going to give up her vote. Which was the most sensible thing I’ve ever heard a journalist say on that subject.

Voting, participating fully in politics, is the birth right of every single person. It is a right as much as any other, including the right to own your body, politics is what produces the limits under which we will be allowed to exercise our inherent rights. Anyone impeding someone from voting is assaulting all of their rights from the most vital to the least, they are telling, asking or encouraging people to give up their rights. That is just as immoral now as it was during Jim Crow when black people were passively discouraged as well as violently prevented from voting at all, never mind exercising the luxury we, we with the leisure to read blogs are being encouraged to give up, voting in their best interests. Women should certainly understand this issue, since their participation has been discouraged on the basis of their gender as well.

I’d go farther than that for the purpose of blogging. Those on the blog threads who are discouraging people from vigorously opposing and voting against the Republicans, in the only way that will affect reality in January, are acting as Republican agents provocateurs. I know that they will have some idealistic sounding reason for it, they will have some line, but reality is real*, that is the real life effect of what they are saying.

There is no rational reason for someone who doesn’t want the Bush-Cheney nightmare to continue under a new name to discourage people from voting for the Democratic nominee. There is either an irrational reason for them doing it or they are actually working to continue the policies of the Bush-Cheney nightmare. The six months before November will be too busy trying to prevent disaster to try to sort out the moles from the dupes. Until after the election, I’m considering them all Republican operatives, because they’ll be doing the same thing.

* Anticipating the usual eloquent appeals for “the future”, well, January 2009 is as much “the future” as their age of their glorious millennium. I am pretty sure January will come next year, I haven’t seen any evidence that their fantasy future will get here. And since time goes all in one direction and only on one road, the road to whatever future there is will have to go through next year. That’s the reality of it. People are going to have to eat next year, have health problems next year, need an environment that will grow them food and sustain their lives next year, keep from getting involved with McCain’s war on Iran next year. We need a good next year to have a future beyond it. Next year could get us all killed.

Paul Hindemeth Sonata For Viola and Piano Op. 11 No. 4

Ori Kam, violist [Tatiana Goncherova pianist (?) ] .

For my mother, a violist, on mother’s day. posted by Anthony McCarthy

I’m reading this article about career tracking young teenagers in the public schools for the third time this morning and can’t tell how I feel about it. My initial feeling is uneasy, it sounds too much like what they did in Britain to reinforce class rankings at the behest of social science charlatanism (See The Mismeasure of Man by S. J. Gould) . It also has more than a few points in common with the Booker T. Washington - W.E.B Du Bois dispute.

The push for a greater link between school and work is most apparent in low-income communities, where, advocates say, career themes engage kids who might otherwise drop out or lose interest in school.

That’s what you'd have suspected, a way to turn low-income children into a work force for the service and corporate oligarchs. The article begins with one 13-year-old giving up her acting when she was convinced to enter on a career path leading to her becoming a physician's assistant. Being a physician’s assistant is an entirely laudable goal and an admirable profession, certainly better than many better paid ones which are a blight on humanity. But why did she have to give up acting so early?

Other students in the article have other stories, some very positive, some I wonder about. And if it’s such a wonderful thing for lower income children, wouldn’t those in the upper class be pushing their way into it? I’m trying hard to remember a boon to anyone which wasn’t hogged by the upper class.

It will take a long time for me to figure out if I think it’s a good idea or not. Probably, like just about every practice in education it will be for some and not for others. I wonder why they couldn’t come up with a way to provide more of a liberal education within a vocational program. Having a child who can have a decent income is a laudable goal but a broad enough education for them to be a fulfilled person throughout their lives and fully participating members in a democratic society are as important. I'd like people to get back to realizing that they work to have a life of their own, that it isn't the other way around.

Get back to you on this.

If you don't get the most votes you will not have to worry about "selling out", you will be out.

I'm a gay, socialist, leveler who believes, roughly, in the Quaker idea that each person has a spark of the divine in them and that they have inherent, absolute rights which they must exercise in full recognition of the rights of every other person. I could go into my leftist credentials further but I think you would agree this puts me on the far left side of things.

Nancy Pelosi is, beyond any dispute, the person farthest on the left to have held leadership in the House, the Senate or the executive, there is no evidence that anyone farther to the left is going to achieve power during our life times. Some individual members of congress are to her left, though not that many, arguably one or two of the senators, other than dear Senator Sanders, might be to her left. When we are talking about national office, the universe of what constitutes "the left" is not the same as that when we are talking about those of us who have either been unable or unwilling to achieve election to a public office*. We, old chum, are not going to constitute the governing left any time in our life times. For us, assuming you're roughly in my age cohort, when we are talking about national office, considering our "left" is a waste of time.

I'd rather have a more progressive tax code and a reduced carbon load in the atmosphere in the foreseeable future than in arguing about what will not be.

And, I assure you, a politician who has to win an election will have to deal with the much larger constituencies who aren't as far left as we are, in any case.

I'm done with pretending that unachievable principles are worth sacrificing the possible. That "ideal" isn't an ideal, it's a feel-good pose. It will feed no children, provide no one with health care or preserve one hectare of land or ocean. All of which are more important than any abstract ideal I happen to hold.

* Volunteering in a political campaign, seeing what they go through, I’m sick and tired of hearing people run down our politicians. They are just about all dedicated to pubic service. Few moderate to liberal Democrats serving in elective office at the national level couldn’t be enjoying a much more comfortable and profitable life pursuing a wealth-making career. With considerably fewer headaches. You think it’s such a bed of roses, try getting yourself elected. Try dodging the bullets and balancing the pressure groups. Anyone who wonders why they ignore people acting like crybabies should stop wondering. Acting like a crybaby is you inviting them to ignore you. They have to.