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POPSTwo Common Objections to Capitalism The system of voluntary exchange and experimentation based on secure private-property rights — what we loosely call "capitalism" — expands rather than restricts our material and nonmaterial opportunities. Substituting elite power for voluntary exchange invites all sorts of epistemological problems and moral disasters. For these reasons, capitalism deserves to be defended.
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POPSPETA: Vegetarianism for Sexist Assholes More: You will undoubtedly be 100% unsurprised to learn that there are no videos or national tour featuring Rav, Paul and Ricardo making out with each other in their underwear to promote a healthier, planet-friendly lifestyle. That would be gay, and in its desperation to connect vegetarianism with priapistic heterosexuality, this site makes it very clear that vegetarianism is not for fags. In fact, there aren’t any other pictures of the Broccoli Boys…just their little bio sketches so we don’t miss the important point that they, unlike the Lettuce Ladies, are people. Any other treatment would, of course, violate Patriarchy’s First Law – you don’t treat guys like mindless dick-receptacles, because that’s what the ladies are for!
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POPSThey Thought They Were Free 4. Supremacy of the Military - Even when there are widespread domestic problems, the military is given a disproportionate amount of government funding, and the domestic agenda is neglected. Soldiers and military service are glamorized. 5. Rampant Sexism - The governments of fascist nations tend to be almost exclusively male-dominated. Under fascist regimes, traditional gender roles are made more rigid. Divorce, abortion and homosexuality are suppressed and the state is represented as the ultimate guardian of the family institution. 6. Controlled Mass Media - Sometimes to media is directly controlled by the government, but in other cases, the media is indirectly controlled by government regulation, or sympathetic media spokespeople and executives. Censorship, especially in war time, is very common. 7. Obsession with National Security - Fear is used as a motivational tool by the government over the masses.
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POPSOn ableist language More: If you think you should use a word because no other has the same impact, well, you’re right about the impact. Your usage has such an impact because it draws its power from disability=bad. You are forming a powerful sentence from disablism, our deep-set pain. It’s so much easier and better to just change your words. If you still insist on such usage, that’s lazy and cruel. If you’re not sure if your use of a word is offensive, err on the side of caution. Another message to take away is this. 1. If you are calling yourself progressive 2. and you are harming people with disabilities 3. you are not, in fact, progressive.
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POPSWhy inclusionary language matters More: You can believe with all your heart that sexism is terrible and evil, but when you call a woman a bitch, it kind of undermines your point. You can think that people with disabilities are oppressed and marginalized by society, and that this is wrong, but when you call something “lame,” you’re saying that you think it’s ok to continue oppressing people with disabilities. When you say that someone should “step up,” you are unconsciously erasing everyone in the population who cannot step, like wheelchair users and people who are bedbound. When you refer to someone or something as “insane” or “crazy,” you are using mental illness as a slur. So stop it. Stop using exclusionary language. Start including people. And stop trying to defend it. If you’re too lazy to find a better word or phrase to use, that’s your problem, not society’s.
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POPSThe sickening grunch of sexism More: We weren’t two students any longer; we weren’t two minds looking for common thoughts. We were two bodies. Bodies don’t talk about Irish penitentials. Note carefully, by the way, that I wasn’t the only woman in that incident to feel the sickening grunch. The woman I was talking with did, too. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if other women walking near us did as well, to a somewhat lesser extent; I have certainly felt grunched when women near me were the overt grunchees. Judging one woman that way turns every woman in earshot into a body.… Multiple experiences of the sickening grunch—not just once, not just twice, but over and over again, as grunchee and as witness—is what makes it so damned hard to take when “sexy” and similar social constructions of femininity haul my body unceremoniously into the conversation when it is utterly irrelevant to what’s going on. And whether I want it to be or not. I don’t control the conversation about my body. I can’t.
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POPSComplaining about sexism means you're a "ranty-pants"? More: You don't have to be anti-sex, or even anti-porn, to chafe at a dominant aesthetic that just happens to play right into the pocketbooks of the beauty and anti-aging industries. Our cultural preference for skinny, nubile women is at least as much about money as it is about male desire — and it's about the least taboo thing I can imagine. Rebelling against a system that actually tells men what to like — as well as, of course, telling women how to be — actually seems kind of sexy. And refusing to do what you're told — in this case, to quietly accept sexism so as not to seem "strident" — can be exciting. So rather than reading Turner's new column…as the blotter of the fun police, I'm going to think of it as a dispatch from the fun radicals, a textual Molotov tossed into the edifice of institutionalized misogyny. And I'm going to enjoy it.
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POPS14 DEFINING CHARACTERISTICS OF FASCISM
Supremacy of the Military Even when there are widespread domestic problems, the military is given a disproportionate amount of government funding, and the domestic agenda is neglected. Soldiers and military service are glamorized. * Rampant Sexism The governments of fascist nations tend to be almost exclusively male-dominated. Under fascist regimes, traditional gender roles are made more rigid. Opposition to abortion is high, as is homophobia and anti-gay legislation and national policy. * Controlled Mass Media Sometimes the media is directly controlled by the government, but in other cases, the media is indirectly controlled by government regulation, or sympathetic media spokespeople and executives. Censorship, especially in war time, is very common. * Obsession with National Security Fear is used as a motivational tool by the government over the masses. * Religion and Government are Intertwined Governments in fascist nations tend to use the most common religion in th
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POPSStruggling together towards diversity and respect More: You have your comfort zone, where you are singing in the shower. And you have your danger zone, where someone is physically threatening you and you have to get away. In between are zones of dissonance, where you take risks and where learning happens. In order to learn, you have to be willing to explore those zones of dissonance. Hence, Experience Discomfort. Expect and Accept Non-Closure. It’s hard. My Spanish is pitiful, my Cantonese non-existent, and I don’t like being the one who is struggling to keep up. But it’s essential. To me, my work on intersectionality and race is an essential part of my geek feminist identity. It’s about deconstructing how I feel when I am the marginalized one, and applying those insights to other spheres of my life, where I am the one doing the marginalization. It’s about belonging to a community that does real work and overcomes real challenges. This is what I want for my daughters.
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POPSOn skepticism and sexism More: Some people wrote in suggesting that the topic wasn’t worthy of discussion, and that Carrie and I exaggerated the problems. Many of the responses showed that on the contrary, we underestimated the problem and were downright wrong to say that the only sexism in the community is unintentional.… Why is it that feminists are so often misrepresented as being too sensitive, when cases like this clearly show the opposite? Neither Carrie nor I ever told anyone “fuck you.” We never called anyone a sexist. We never lost our temper and we gave everyone the benefit of the doubt, assuming or accepting clarifications that an insult wasn’t intended. If only the same could be said for those who took offense to our discussion.
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POPSStart seeing micro-inequities More: A micro-inequity can be very micro. It can involve an action or words or even a tone of voice or a gesture. The inequity can be a deliberate attempt to harm someone or it can be unintentional, rooted in a person's perceptions about others. Whatever the source and however minor each separate event, over the years the cumulative effect of these little incidents, words, and gestures on an individual and on various segments of society (academia, business, even within families) is not so micro. There is a complete spectrum between the mini-incidents and the big unambiguous ones that most people would agree are sexist or racist. Clearly we need to eradicate the big unambiguous examples of discrimination, but are some (most?) people willing to accept micro-inequities because the incidents are, in many cases, so ambiguous? Where do you draw the line between deciding that someone is oversensitive vs. the target of habitual disrespect?
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POPSSomebodies and Nobodies: Understanding Rankism Examples of rankism based on pseudo rankings include the illicit hierarchies maintained by racism, sexism, ageism, classism, ableism, and heterosexualism (or, homophobia)--in short, the familiar isms that plague societies and that, one by one, are being discredited and dismantled. What can victims of rank abuse do to protect their dignity?Those abused on the basis of color unified against racism. Women targeted sexism and the elderly took aim at ageism. By analogy, "rankism" denotes abuses of power associated with rank. Once you have a name for it, you see it everywhere. More importantly, once you call it by name, everyone else will see it too, and perpetrators will find themselves on the defensive.
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POPSThe terrible bargain we have regretfully struck: confronting casual misogyny More: There are men who will read this post and think, huffily, dismissively, that a person of color could write a post very much like this one about white people, about me. That's absolutely right. So could a lesbian, a gay man, a bisexual, an asexual. So could a trans or intersex person (which hardly makes a comprehensive list). I'm okay with that. I don't feel hated. I feel mistrusted—and I understand it; I respect it. It means, for me, I must be vigilant, must make myself trustworthy. Every day. I hope those men will hear me when I say, again, I do not hate you. I mistrust you. You can tell yourselves that's a problem with me, some inherent flaw, some evidence that I am fucked up and broken and weird; you can choose to believe that the women in your lives are nothing like me. Or you can be vigilant, can make yourselves trustworthy. Every day. Just in case they're more like me than you think.
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POPSWhy I don't watch horror movies From a discussion of the movie Deadgirl . More: Nope, that’s all entirely coincidental… I think we should be more mindful of what we allow into our minds; whatever we put in stays there, and the sum-total of our thoughts and memories is who we are. There are many, many other things we can choose to absorb into ourselves instead that foster a brighter outlook on life or convey useful information (even if it’s in a disturbing way). In my opinion the problem isn’t disturbing or violent imagery per se, it’s subjecting ourselves to enormous amounts of it that lacks any constructive context.
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POPSBook Publishing: Intersection of Racism and Sexism
Ursula Le Guin spoke about the white-washing of book covers at the BookAmerca expo. Overexoticizing occurs too: click white-washed cover link. There is, in fact, a large audience for “black books” but they weren’t discovered until African American authors started self-publishing and selling their books on the subway and on the street and directly into schools. And, yet, the publishing industry still doesn’t seem to get it. Perhaps the whole “black books don’t sell” thing is a self-fulfilling prophecy? And then there’s the fantasy writer who had to user her first initial and borrow her grandmother’s name to use as a middle initial since her publisher didn’t think that kids would accept a woman writing a book with a male protagonist, this woman of course being J. K. Rowling. If we go back a few decades, there’s James Tiptree, Jr. Likewise, I don’t know of any men writing Romance, though there are probably some, but who write using female pseudonysm
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POPSRemarks by President Obama at Buchenwald Concentration Camp Deutsche Übersetzung: hagalil.com Bis heute gibt es jene, die darauf beharren, dass es den Holocaust niemals gab – eine Leugnung der Fakten und der Wahrheit, die jeder Grundlage entbehrt, ignorant und abscheulich ist. Dieser Ort ist die elementarste Zurechtweisung solcher Gedanken, eine Mahnung an unsere Pflicht, uns gegen jene zu stellen, die Lügen über unsere Geschichte verbreiten. Bis heute gibt es auch jene, die jegliche Form der Intoleranz fortsetzen, Hass, der seine Opfer herabwürdigt und uns alle herabsetzt. Dieser Ort lehrt uns, dass wir immer wachsam sein müssen, wenn es um die Verbreitung des Bösen in unserer Zeit geht, dass wir die falsche Behaglichkeit, dass das Leid Anderer nicht unser Problem ist, ablehnen und wir uns dem Widerstand gegen jene verpflichten müssen, die Andere unterdrücken wollen, um ihren eigenen Interessen zu dienen.
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POPSThe Old Double Standard I'd bet all of my earthly possessions that this question would NEVER be asked of a man! Sadly, the gender role bias that says a woman cannot be opinionated, strong, forceful in arguing her point is alive and well. I'm pissed!
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POPSFascism USA ---14 Points 2. Disdain for the Recognition of Human Rights - Because of fear of enemies and the need for security, the people in fascist regimes are persuaded that human rights can be ignored in certain cases because of "need." The people tend to look the other way or even approve of torture, summary executions, assassinations, long incarcerations of prisoners, etc. 3. Identification of Enemies/Scapegoats as a Unifying Cause - The people are rallied into a unifying patriotic frenzy over the need to eliminate a perceived common threat or foe: racial , ethnic or religious minorities; liberals; communists; socialists, terrorists, etc. 4. Supremacy of the Military - Even when there are widespread domestic problems, the military is given a disproportionate amount of government funding, and the domestic agenda is neglected. Soldiers and military service are glamorized. 5. Rampant Sexism - The governments of fascist nations tend to be almost exclusively male-dominated. Under fascist regimes, tradition
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POPS"The central tenets of 'natural childbirth' are racist, sexist lies"
More: Pain in childbirth served a very important function…it was the punishment that befell women who became too educated, too independent…The idea that "primitive" women had painless childbirth was fabricated to contrast with the painful childbirth of "overcivilized" women. Grantly Dick-Read was issuing a warning to women of a certain social class: if you step beyond the roles prescribed for women, you will be punished with painful labor… In light of this, the contemporary popularity of natural childbirth is more than a bit ironic. The central claims of natural childbirth, that childbirth is not inherently painful, and that if you "prepare" properly, your birth will be painless, too, were utter fabrications. Read would be delighted that these fabrications have been embraced by many women and that his philosophy has been propagated so successfully that most women don't even realize that the central tenets of natural childbirth are racist and sexist lies.
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