It’s been a bit since I’ve done this, since I’ve been unholy busy, but here it is.

1. La Lubu has a comment on Octo’s Feministe post that says a lot of what I was trying to say below far better than I did. Octo also linked to this post at La Lubu’s blog that, well, yeah. Because without the basics, we can’t do any of it.

2. And Octo yet again has a thought-provoking post, this time on individualism. She’s seriously on a roll over there, and instead of freaking out because she’s violating lefty dogma, take a minute to think about it. Then think about what La Lubu said. Then…synthesize?

3. Hilzoy on why John McCain gets scarier every day.

4. A post at Racialicious about the true purpose of satire.

5. Emily about the latest round of trans wars (do we really still have to have this discussion, people?) but more importantly, again: A woman is dead, and her killer got off.

6. Debi has a round-up of things you can DO. She has lots of other goodness, too, including a big kiss-my-ass to everyone who’s treating her like a wayward child. Rock on, Debi. And thanks for the Arcade Fire.

7. The Jaded Hippy actually went to see Tropic Thunder to tell us all about it. Frankly, no matter how much Robert Downey, Jr.  was involved, I wouldn’t have been interested in that movie before I heard anything about protests about its racism and ableism. And she’s aware that she’s white and able-bodied. Something to think about, especially in terms of the successful-satire post above.

8. Finally, I’m stealing this quote from Pop Feminist.

“We have lost the relative strength and security that the old moral codes guaranteed our loves either by forbidding them or determining their limits. Under the crossfire of gynecological surgery rooms and television screens, we have buried love within shame for the benefit of pleasure, desire, if not revolution, evolution, planning, management–hence for the benefit of Politics. Until we discover under the rubble of those ideological structures — which are nevertheless ambitious, often exorbitant, sometimes altruistic–that they were extravagant or shy attempts intended to quench a thirst for love. To recognize this does not amount to a modest withdrawal, it is perhaps to confess to a grandiose pretension. Love is the time and space in which ‘I’ assumes the right to be extraordinary. Sovereign yet not individual. Divisible, lost, annihilated; but also, and through imaginary fusion with the loved one, equal to the infinite space of superhuman psychism. Paranoid? I am, in love, at the zenith of subjectivity.”

- Julia Kristeva (1987)

Posted: August 16th, 2008 under Feminism, Love, Movies, Politics.
Comments: 3

Yeah, catchy title, eh?

I started to think about this stuff the other day when talking with my mother about Michael Phelps. See, I love to see people excel at things. I like athletic competition of many sorts because I like to see what people can do when they really put themselves to it, and yes, I believe that some of that is innate–I don’t think that everyone could be Michael Phelps. Or Georges St. Pierre. Or Serena Williams.

I tend towards socialism in my personal philosophy not because I want to see everyone exactly the same–the “vanilla world” argument or the Harrison Bergeron one, depending on which angle  you come from–but precisely because I think humans are such beautiful, individual things and I think that with the basics provided for, we could all be free to develop in whichever ways we wanted to. I want to see everyone able to reach their potential. And I think that if we didn’t have to worry so much about making a living, we’d be able to.

Octo has an excellent post up at Feministe about being a capitalist. I agree with many of her points, and of course disagree on the basic one–I’m not a capitalist. I’m in graduate school in part because I fled the retail world because I hated working for nothing but money. I made good money for a while. I could be running the entire business by now, and I could own my house and be well on my way to financial security, but I gave it up for a job I love (as a grad assistant) learning about things I love, writing all the time, and living in a city I love (while cheating on my city with THE city, NY).

I beat myself up constantly because I’m 28 and I’m already interviewing people who are younger than I am and already have what I want in life. I wish that I hadn’t made decisions based around money. I wish I’d been able to just hole up somewhere and write until I was good enough at it to make a living at it.

And I’m privileged. Most people wouldn’t have even been able to make the choices I did. Capitalism tends to tell us that if we’re good enough, we’ll get what we deserve. It just takes work, right? Yeah, George W. Bush is a good enough argument for that system being completely broken (though one could say that Barack Obama is a good argument for that system working, but we’ll see how November turns out, eh?).

There’s been plenty of talk about the Chinese athletes and the Chinese system leading up to the Beijing games, and hell, we can even look back at the parable that is the Miracle on Ice (posited of course as the victory of Us over Them in the Cold War, because the Soviet hockey team was supported by the state and the US team was a rag-tag bunch of athletes who hated each other–and a bunch of privileged college kids). Read this mostly-related post about the relative ages of women gymnasts, too.

This post isn’t really anything but me thinking out loud. It doesn’t offer any coherent arguments, so please don’t even try to poke holes in it. I just think…governments would serve us better providing things that we need, rather than trying to control what we do and say, and certainly better than blathering about what other governments shouldn’t do.

Posted: August 15th, 2008 under Politics, Sports.
Comments: none

American Gangster and There Will Be Blood

(Spoilers ahead!) Read more »

Posted: May 12th, 2008 under Movies.
Comments: 1