Here's some food for thought. (Hat Tip: Tim Scared Stiff)



That reminds me of how advertising of Big Pharma's drugs has made it difficult for people to get accurate information about drugs in this information overload.

The criticism of Wal-Mart as job killing has been verified by a study by Hunter College and New York City Public Advocate Bill de Blasio. Yet, Mubarek Michael Bloomberg insists on shoving their job killing stores down our throats.

 

Sound familiar?

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.

- Ben Franklin

This quote has been misattributed to Einstein and Mark Twain, probably others too. However, the source isn't the really interesting part. It's the social context.

Why do people keep referencing it these days? Well, with high unemployment, massive theft from ordinary Americans and the US Treasury by the banksters, rising bigotry promoted as a tool of social control, two major political parties that are disturbingly similar and disturbingly hostile to the interests of the vast majority of Americans, corporate media that get more monolithic and propagandistic with every passing day, massive environmental disasters, and so much else going terribly wrong, it doesn't take the wit of Franklin to figure it out.

Things aren't working in this country. America is horribly fucked up. The world around us is a mess as well, and "our" government and corporations play a huge role in that. People keep trying to do the familiar things to try to fix the areas of dysfunction, and they just keep getting worse.

Obviously, we need to do somethings differently. But what? Can we mine our nation's activist history, especially from the 1930s and 1960s for strategy and tactics? Is the metaphorical road so qualitatively different that we have to reinvent a new wheel?

 

I've long agreed with the Gay Liberationists and Feminists of the 70s who opposed the institution of marriage. The critiques ranged from the anti sex nature of marriage, to the failure of marriage to nurture relationships, and to the patriarchal nature of the institution, depending on the critics. All of those claims seem valid to me.

People forget that marriage's original purpose had nothing to do with love, nurturing, or affection. Marriage was designed to codify and enforce the status of women and children as property of men. The status of children within marriage is still that of property, though that property is more jointly held between wives and husbands. Trying to turn a patriarchal, property based institution like marriage into an equal partnership between women and men has been weak and unstable at best.

That's why I find recent polling from the Pew Research Center, in association with Time Magazine, quite interesting. Here are the results on the institution of marriage.

Is Marriage Obsolete?

Yes: 39%
No: 58%
Don't Know/Refused: 3%

When the pollsters asked if people were optimistic about "the future of marriage and family," the number jumped from 58% to 67%. The most logical explanation is that there are people who are optimistic about the family who don't necessarily tie that optimism to the institution of marriage, at least in its current form.

When sodomy laws were overturned by the US Supreme Court, the Christian Right decided to make same sex marriage their highest priority LGBT issue. They did this for several reasons. First, it was the one queer issue where the overwhelming majority of the public supported them. Second, same sex marriage inflames fundamentalist Christian donors like no other issue, making it a cash cow.

However, there was another psychodrama going on. For decades, the militant fundamentalists have tried to scapegoat feminists, queers, liberals, atheists, and everyone else they don't like for the decline of marriage. This resonated with members of their flocks who were divorced or miserable in their marriages and wanted someone else to blame. Same sex marriage has become the most frequent "whipping boy" for every misery that people are too afraid to blame on the institution itself.

In another 100-200 years, marriage will be considered a bizarre relic of a backward time. It's too bad there isn't a way for people to jump start that process.

Photo: Franco Folini

 

This starts with a clear argument refuting the right's "big government" rhetoric. It then discusses the conflicts between efficiency and security. (Hat Tip: Media Crashers)



 

"Kool Aid Gets Fired" is the title of a fab comic book I found last weekend at New York Comic Con NYC. It is topical in many ways, including job loss, jobs being replaced by technology, and the ruthless and arbitrary power of corporations over people. Seeing Kool Aid frown and smoke cigars alone was worth the reading. I liked it so much I bought the mug too.

You can find out more about this and other work by Tim Piotrowski at www.glitchworks.com. "Kool Aid Gets Fired" even has its own webpage, with a funny animation. One difference between comic and graphic novel signings and regular book signings is that the artists often draw little illustrations with them. The one of a cranky and dejected Kool Aid rocked.

This was the first time I went to a Comic Con, and I got lucky, stumbling into the Small Press and Artists Gallery section before going to the main convention hall. That's where I found out about the trials of poor Kool Aid. I also bought a few issues of "How to Survive Working in Retail," a zine format book which details the tribulations of young people stuck in the lower rungs of our service economy. I found fab queer content in the form of the "Cavalcade of Boys" set by Tim Fish which I'm looking forward to reading.

The quirkiest thing I found was "God the Dyslexic God." I bought the first issue with a blenderized version of pantheism and an apparent opposition to animal experimentation. I also found a printouts of a couple of promising web comics, "Curls" and "Revolvers."

I should point out that the American Library Association also had a booth, where they promoted their 2009-2010 banned books brochure. The ALA also has a list of resources on stopping bullying against queer youth.

I got burnt out on superhero comics a while back. Maybe being middle aged is part of the reason. In any case, New York Comic Con, like comics in general these days, has subject matter much broader. My first senses of this were buying "Ghostworld" after seeing the movie and with Alison Bechdel's autobiographical "Fun Home", the latter being something that every queer should read.

Rediscovering the comic book art form is really refreshing, especially since there is a lot of content that appeals to my interests later in life. I wonder how much could be done with comic books and graphic novels to communicate liberal views and values. There was a lot of nutty rightist content at Comic Con too, but it didn't have a monopoly by any means. I hope the voices in comics from the left get more numerous and louder.

 

The highest duty of any patriot is to work to make his or her country the best it can possibly. That represents the highest value of liberalism, and liberals have fought for generations to do just that. We need to ask ourselves something.

Are we still living up to this standard?

There are some rather unpleasant realities that very few people in our society want to face. There is very little difference between the politicians on matters of substance. Whether you are talking about Barack Bush or George W. Bush, Sarah Palin or Hillary Clinton, Newt Gingrich or Nancy Pelosi, you are talking about a set of politicians whose values and political agendas are almost identical. They vary in terms of style and the ability to coherently articulate positions, but they all have pushed for same substantive policies the overwhelming majority of the time. Those policies are overwhelmingly rightist.

Spectator sports and brand loyalty marketing have conned people all over the political spectrum into picking teams or selecting brands and obediently going with them without giving much thought to the whole process. Rationalization and denial have become national pastimes.

In the real world, the differnces between the Democrats and Republicans are no more meaningful than those between Coke and Pepsi, the Yankees and the Mets, Dodge and the former Plymouth, or the Patriots and the Jets. Yet, people beat their chests and root, root, root. During campaigns they buy, buy, buy.

The political discourse is poisoned by this not only in terms of substance, but also in terms of style. Having little important to disagree with from Democrats like Obama, Reid, and Pelosi, Republicans just keep getting nastier, more bigoted, and crazier.

Why are most liberals going along with this? Why aren't we questioning more? Why aren't most of us swing voters with a Green Party that agrees with us on the vast majority of issues? Why do so many on the left pretend that voting for the overwhelming majority of Democrats is anything but a wasted vote?

We need to start thinking critically and logically. We aren't helping ourselves or our country by going along with this rightist crap.

 

There has been a lot of controversy in Europe about Muslim women wearing the versions of the veil that cover up nearly all the face but the eyes. Some of the objections many Westerners have are based on perfectly legitimate feminist and anti religious critiques of the practice. Some objections are based on disturbing hostility against Muslims as a class of people. Some European fears are based on centuries past Muslim conquests of much of that continent and the way that Muslim rulers mistreated Christians.

However, there is a very basic area of discomfort that doesn't get much discussed, at least in media readily available to Americans. I read this 3/31/10 Guardian article on the efforts in Belgium to ban that kind of veiling which actually touched on this (bolding mine).

Daniel Bacquelaine, the liberal MP who proposed the bill, said: "We cannot allow someone to claim the right to look at others without being seen.

"It is necessary that the law forbids the wearing of clothes that totally mask and enclose an individual. Wearing the burqa in public is not compatible with an open, liberal, tolerant society."

In Western culture, wearing masks has generally served three purposes:

1) A naughty attempt to get outside of oneself while in costume. (In the US, that nearly always means Halloween.)

2) A way to avoid being identified during criminal activity, usually violent.

3) A way to keep warm during really, really cold weather, usually when skiing.

The visceral reaction that one gets to seeing someone whose face is covered up outside of a masquerade party generally is one of alertness and danger. Seeing someone do this on a normal city street during summer automatically sets off alarm bells. Some non Muslims have taken advantage of the burqa to commit robberies in Europe, which speaks volumes on how the Western mind interprets the covered face. This follows in the more common practice of criminals using ski masks when they rob.

The problem isn't limited to this sense of alarms. We communicate very heavily using facial expressions. That is a big part of how we establish trust. Until confronted with such a cultural practice, we don't even think about how much face to face communication means to us.

Westerners have often been criticized with good reason for being culturally insensitive when they travel to other countries and even when they move there (e.g., "ugly Americans"). We aren't used to having people from other countries coming to us and setting off our cultural sensitivities.

Obviously, this isn't the only reason why the facial covering by some Muslim women bothers Westerners. But, it is an important part that seldom even gets discussed.

Photos: CharlesFred

 

Photo: foxypar4

It's not often that someone says something in blog comments that is beautiful and profound. Yet, it happened on my blog. I'm delighted to do a posting featuring it in order to give it the attention it deserves. It was a response to my post on the Deceptive Nature of Appearances. I'm giddy to have gotten such an amazing response.

One of the things I love about the internet is that someone's physical appearance has nothing to do with my opinion of them. Most folks that I admire or downright love I have never seen a picture of.

- Dusty (of It's My Right to Be Left of Center)

Biases based on appearance are something I hadn't given much deep thought to until recently. Two things sparked it. I heard Susan Boyle sing for the first time not long ago. We usually are marketed at in a way which suggest that singers have to be beautiful, sexy, fashionable, or rebellious in the way they look. None of that has jack to do with singing ability, yet I have to admit to being surprised at how great of a singer she is. Now, I wish she could be sent back in a time machine to do vocals for Heaven 17 or Culture Club. The results would have been absolutely amazing.

The second thing that sparked this line of thought was an unconscious bias I had about men. I knew that I always have found big sideburns on men to be very sexy. There was no revelation there. But, after meeting this guy who had nice sideburns and was gorgeous in lots of other ways, I started realizing that I had other completely silly associations with long sideburns that I wasn't even aware of. For some reason, I have had this unconscious belief system where men with big sideburns are more intelligent, cooler, more fun, appreciate the arts more, and lead more interesting lives. Now that I examine this, I can't help but think, WTF? I can't help but think that part of this is a reaction to Morrissey and other musicians with long sideburns, but I'm sure it goes deeper than that. Sideburns are definitely part of why I think James Callis is cute, though there are a lot of things about him that are hot.

(Note to the Mos Reading This: The sideburns reference is completely literal. It is not a euphemism for penis size.)

I wonder how much of evaluating people based on their appearance is innate and how much of it is the result of marketing techniques. I'm not just talking about good looks vs bad looks. We get bombarded with messages saying that certain clothes and styles will make us more like this, that, and the other thing.

Social justice activists often talk of unconscious racism, sexism, and heterosexism. When you think about your own appearance based perceptions that are politically and socially neutral to the larger culture, it helps make it obvious that such activist claims are not just smoke and mirrors.

Photo: Brocco Lee