when the status quo frustrates.

Once more, I’m only shocked that everyone else is pretending to be. They ARE just pretending, right..?

Wednesday, November 18th, 2009

Many years ago, not too long after my military enlistment ended and back when I got most of the news from actual newspapers made of paper, I was confronted with the following headline:

SEX SCANDAL AT ABERDEEN PROVING GROUNDS!!!

I was remembering reading the story–in case everyone’s forgotten about it, the gist was that

at Aberdeen Proving Ground, a United States Army base in Aberdeen, Maryland…the Army brought charges against 12 commissioned and non-commissioned male officers for sexual assault on female trainees under their command.

Specifically, a bunch of drill sergeants had been having sex with a bunch of female trainees, with varying degrees of consent on the parts of the trainees. Now, this did not surprise me at all, but what did was the way it was being reported–as if it was a huge shocker, unbelievable!! etc. etc.

Mostly I remember just sitting there, staring at the story, and trying to swallow the fact that anybody, anybody at all was shocked by this. Maybe, I remember trying to think charitably at the time, the reporters on this case had absolutely zero familiarity with the military..? Because boy howdy, anybody who’d ever actually served in the Army knew quite well that Army basic training was a big ol’ sex fest of male drill sergeants and female trainees, right? In my basic training unit, one of our drill sergeants was having sex with at least four of the girls that I knew of, and another was having what could most gently be described as an emotional affair with a fifth, and another drill sergeant, not in my platoon but in my company, actually got married to a sixth girl after she graduated from training.

And yeah, the degrees of consent were variable. The time that the first drill sergeant collapsed our tent on me and a squadmate when we were out in the field and then, after I crawled out, crawled in with her and stayed there for about twenty minutes–that was absolutely consensual, to the best of my knowledge. The time I got sent back to the barracks to retrieve something or other and a girl in one of the other squads in my platoon was sitting on her bunk staring blankly at nothing..? Less so–

Me: Brady*, what are you doing here? Are you sick?
Private Brady, about five feet tall and ninety pounds soaking wet with big blue eyes and freckles, all of eighteen years old: No…I was waxing the floor, and Drill Sergeant Morris* came in, and told me that after I finished the floor I had fifteen minutes to get all the toilets in the bathroom clean enough to eat off of.
Me: Seriously?
Private Brady: I told him I didn’t think I could do it and he said I’d better do it, or I’d better learn how to fuck.
Me, only eighteen myself and totally bewildered: Oh. Wow. What did you do?
Private Brady: We fucked.
Me: Oh. …are you okay?
Private Brady: I guess so. (went back to staring blankly at nothing)

And, of course, there was graduation night, when we all got a four-hour pass to hit the base and wound up at the enlisted club, and another cycle (all male, as ours was all female–Army basic training used to be sex-segregated, the trainees anyway) that was graduating invited us to a party that two of their drill sergeants were having for them in a hotel room–I didn’t go, but some other girls did. When midnight rolled around (the expiration of our four-hour pass), two of them were missing. They did finally show up at the barracks a few hours later, though–one shoved past everyone and ran into the showers, where you could hear her screaming as she tore off her clothes and started viciously scrubbing herself, and the other one flung herself into my arms and started shaking hard enough to bruise my chin with the top of her head, though without making a single sound. The first girl managed to wash away most, though not all, of the evidence of her gang rape before the MPs showed up, but I kept a firm grip on the second girl after some advice from the cold-eyed female drill sergeant from another platoon that was first on the scene, and I heard later they got plenty of evidence off of her body.

My basic training experience was quite representative, really–so you can see why I was sitting there shocked that anybody else was shocked. I mean, everybody knew…we all knew everybody knew.

I had a similar experience last night, reading the following headline:

Uninsured trauma patients are much more likely to die

The risk of dying from traumatic injuries is 80% higher for those without any insurance, a study says. ER physicians say they’re surprised by the findings.

O RLY?

Patients who lack health insurance are more likely to die from car accidents and other traumatic injuries than people who belong to a health plan — even though emergency rooms are required to care for all comers regardless of ability to pay, according to a study published today.

The researchers also did a separate analysis of 209,702 trauma patients ages 18 to 30 because they were less likely to have chronic health conditions that might complicate recovery. Among these younger patients, the risk of death was 89% higher for the uninsured, the study found.

Rosen, now a surgical resident at USC’s Keck School of Medicine, said the group expected to find at least some disparity based on insurance status. But she said the group was surprised at the magnitude of the gap.

Dr. Frank Zwemer Jr., chief of emergency medicine for the Hunter Holmes McGuire VA Medical Center in Richmond, Va., said he was “kind of shocked.”

“Kind of” shocked? Gee, because I’m not shocked at all.

“We don’t ask people, ‘What’s your insurance?’ before we decide whether to intubate them or put in a chest tube,” said Zwemer, who wasn’t involved in the research. “That’s not on our radar anywhere.”

Good God. Did you just spear somebody on your nose, Pinocchio? The very first thing they do when you go to an ER is admit you, and before they ever ask you what’s wrong with you (but, I admit, usually after they ask you for your name) is if you have insurance. If you are unable to speak, they ask whoever has brought you in. LONG before they offer you any medical treatment. I speak from personal experience.

Well, I guess I should be glad that they’re willing to pretend this is some kind of news flash, right? Nothing like emphasizing your dirty laundry as publicly as possible to raise the chances of someone with actual power and authority being willing to do something about it, even if everybody did really already know all about it. Let’s hear it for the pressure of public shame.

But I’m not willing to go along with the pretense. Of course they all knew about it already, just like we all knew already about what went on in Army training barracks. Of course they did.

Disgusting.

*Names changed. Duh.

18.11.2009 Punkass!, Public Procrastination, Soapbox, This Vicious Cabaret, Wankers 4 Comments

But dear God what about the menz??

Thursday, July 10th, 2008

I followed this link back from Amanda at Pandagon and ended up in the comments section of Hugo’s original post. You can either read the comments too, or you can just read the title of this post–same content.

My ex-husband and I tried the marriage counseling routine. Clearly it didn’t work or I wouldn’t be referring to him as my ex-husband, but bear with me here, I have a point to make, darn it–it wasn’t the counsellor’s fault it didn’t work, it was mine and my husband’s…but anyway, one thing I remember the counsellor talking about was the mistake of ever using “tit-for-tat” arguments. (Well, a mistake if what you’re trying to do is genuinely resolve the conflict– it’s quite successful if what you’re trying to do is cause more discord and strife.) It doesn’t work for two reasons: (1) It constantly refocuses the argument on you, rather than the grievance the other person is trying to air, and (2) “tit” never does actually equal “tat.”

In (1), you are clearly demonstrating to the other person that you not only don’t care about their issue, you don’t care about them personally either. Of course you deserve equal time to air your grievances, and your grievances are just as worthy and deserving of resolution as their grievances, but by trying to take away their individual time to air and making it yours instead, you’re saying very clearly that you don’t think theirs ever deserves individual consideration–and by extension, they don’t deserve their own time to be the focus of the conversation and your caring attention. This naturally causes them to cease trusting you enough to communicate openly and honestly and also removes from them any desire to ever give you any individual time to air your specific grievances in return.

In (2), you are simply wrong. No two people ever actually have the same experience, not only because the details of the experience always and inevitably differ to some degree, but because every person is different and feels even very similar experiences to different degrees. The closest you can ever come to truly feeling what someone else feels is to shut your mouth, open your ears and really listen. And, rather than immersing yourself back into whatever issues you personally feel you’re having, genuinely try to be them,, with all their personal experiences and personal way of being, and feel whatever it is they are saying they felt.

I’m sorry Hugo closed the comments on that thread, though it’s very understandable that he did–he specifically stated that he wanted commenters to discuss his post from a feminist or feminist-friendly point of view, and instead was swamped by MRAs who apparently thought if they refrained from outright raving about bitches or cunts, what they had to say would somehow look feminist-friendly instead. (Kind of like toddlers who think they are successfully playing “Hide and Seek” by sitting in the middle of the floor and covering their eyes with their hands, cause if they can’t see YOU then..! except that, like many behaviors practiced by small children, it’s cute when they do it but rather disturbing in an adult.) The specific situation of women with serious health conditions being encouraged by large swaths of society to become pregnant and carry to term regardless of the crippling-to-fatal results for themselves–sometimes to the point where they may be outright obstructed by the law and/or medical professionals from terminating any pregnancies or even more bizarrely, made into official foci of worship by major organized religions after they die–is a fascinating and unique social dynamic. I would have liked to discuss it in of itself.

However, the aforementioned MRAs could not…literally could not…bear that.

If the comments had remained open, I could have jumped in and pointed out the fallacies of their various arguments in that specific instance–as in, there is no situation where terminally ill men are encouraged to refuse lifesaving treatment so that others can use their bodies to live that does not also occur for women, but there is a situation where terminally ill women are, this one! that never occurs for men–or, that the draft is not an example of men being discriminated against based upon their gender, it’s an example of poor men being discriminated against by rich men and young men being discriminated against by old men based upon their socioeconomic status and age–but why? That would simply have been buying into the “tit-for-tat” argument–that would have been agreeing it has any relevancy or legitimacy at all. And it doesn’t, any more than the recent Oppression Olympicsfest during the Democratic presidential primaries did.

A while back on here, Antigone provoked a minor shitstorm of MRAs when she dared criticize an article by Glenn Sacks, and one of them suggested that she (or possibly the rest of us heathens, since she’d already stated that she did) visit Glenn Sacks’ site and read what he had to say. I didn’t feel in the least tempted. Not because I don’t find men’s issues and the points of view of those focused on them fascinating and relevant and moving–indeed I do! But why would I want to discuss them with people who make it abundantly clear that they don’t care about my issues and my interests, that their only interest at all is to shout their way into them declaring that NO one but no ONE has suffah’d as they and their fellow men have suffah’d! Now, there’s nothing wrong with having your own personal space to vent and there’s absolutely no requirement of any kind that you give equal air time to anybody…in your own space…but why on earth would you invite someone in and THEN behave like that..?

Well, like me and my ex-husband, obviously their desire to hurt and obstruct are stronger than any desire to heal and come together. I decline to be fodder for that–why should I be? I don’t demand that anybody else come be my whipping boy. I don’t even try to tempt anybody into it with false promises of civil and rational discourse. Quite, quite mad.

Busting into somebody else’s space and deliberately violating their polite request that their own actual issue be discussed is the same dynamic. I’ve been trying to come up with a phrase to characterize the state of mind of the types that do this and all I can come up with is “narcissistic rage.” Unsettling, unpleasant and frankly uninteresting. And transparent. It’s clear what they’d really like is to make us all submit, bleh! Luckily, that ain’t legal. (And these are often guys who wonder why their marriages didn’t work out…imagine.)

10.07.2008 Dudes, Feminism, Mutterings Of The Disturbed, Shame on you for being a woman, This Vicious Cabaret 6 Comments

Americans don’t need no stinking immigrants serving their frozen drinks or rescuing their children from drowning.

Thursday, July 19th, 2007

Every cloud has a silver lining. The best part about any needlessly reactionary legislative battle is waiting for the unintended consequences to pop up. Like remember when a bunch of states made vague anti-gay-marriage Constitutional amendments and now it’s harder in those states to get a DV conviction if you’re not married to the guy who’s punching you? That will always be the classic example, but now we have another example that is almost as good.

Remember that Senate immigration bill clusterfuck? The one that when we heard ‘immigrant’ we were supposed to think ‘Mexican’? The one that pleased exactly no one?

Well, it turns out that there are other countries besides Mexico, and some of the people who live in those countries would like to work in America for a short amount of time. Who knew? And we’re not talking filthy brown leprosy-spreading farmhands, here – we’re talking about the sexy young Eastern Europeans who guard your pools and ski slopes. Yes, that’s right, in our rush to prevent the bad kind of immigrant- you know, your poor huddled masses yearning to breathe free- from undercutting Americans who might want to do excruciating farm work under an unrelenting sun for sub-minimum wages, we accidentally hurt those we need the most: the young foreign adventure-seekers who keep our seasonal attractions running smoothly.

Among the casualties when the bill collapsed was the expansion of a visa program called H-2B, which allows employers to recruit 66,000 foreigners a year to fill jobs for up to six months. The bill would have lifted the cap to 100,000 and would also have made permanent an exemption that now allows in thousands more temporary workers but is set to expire on Sept. 30.

H-2B has become so popular among resort operators, race tracks, casinos, landscapers and others that this summer’s supply of visas ran out in March. Democratic Sen. Barbara Mikulski of Maryland, where the seafood industry depends on Mexican H-2B workers to pick the meat from Chesapeake Bay crabs for canning, has vowed to attach an expansion of the program to other legislation.

Ignore the bit about the crab canning, because we will not be seeing too much of those Mexicans again for the rest of the article.

Stephen Lavery, president of Virginia-based High Sierra Pools Inc., says that he hired neighborhood kids as lifeguards when he began his pool-management company 18 years ago, but that the labor source soon began to dry up. College students began taking internships that would buff their post-graduation résumés, or sought jobs they could continue during the school year. High-school students signed up for summer courses or exotic travel to build up their college applications.

…Mr. Lavery, whose company provides lifeguards and maintenance to 250 Washington-area pools, says his first H-2B hires a dozen years ago were Germans. But the dollar has weakened against the euro and Western European students have flocked to European Union countries where they don’t need visas and can earn more money.

That has forced pool operators to recruit further east each year. This year for the first time, Mr. Lavery has workers from Kazakhstan and Russia, in addition to such mainstay H-2B suppliers as Bulgaria and the Czech Republic. “I’ve heard there’s options in Thailand,” he says.

This actually does suck a lot because the H-2B seems like a great way to see America. It kind of makes me wish I’d typed “work in Europe” into Google at least once back when I had summers free:

On a recent bright Saturday, Patricia Fajtova, a 21-year-old Slovak marketing student, explained how she came to be sitting guard at an apartment-house pool in Washington using a temporary cultural-exchange visa: “I typed ‘work in the USA’ into the Google,” and up popped the Sierra Pools Web site, she said.

…All three women said they opted for jobs in the U.S. after concluding that careers and marriage will soon limit their opportunities to visit. “We have more chance to see Europe later,” said Ms. Ivosevic.

So this was kind of a win-win situation for everyone. Sure, it was kind of a pain in the ass for employeers, but they were clearly getting quality workers and young people were getting an opportunity to fund some travel and anyone who’s worked seasonal jobs at recreational facilities knows that that’s normally a blast. I’d worked in an amusement park for three summers, and I’d jump all over the chance to do that in Spain or Germany or even Japan.

Then we had to go all “gahh! Mexicans!” And while we absolutely failed to do anything useful about the Mexican ‘problem’ (whether you defined the problem as the mere presence of Mexicans in America or the way they’re exploited once they get here) we did manage to bone our ski resort managers and those nice Slovakian kids who guard the community pool. Good on us.* I guess we’ll put that in the ‘ironic victories’ pile, with all the others.

*Since this will largely inconvenience those with the means to go skiing or to resorts, I actually mean that. Somethings got to wake these people up because if we were thinking then this sort of thing wouldn’t be happening, right?

19.07.2007 Punkass!, Governmental Failures, Immigration, This Vicious Cabaret, Work No Comments

This is what Civil Discourse looks like

Sunday, October 15th, 2006

Like the guy at the end asks “are you on our side or theres?”

Which I find is never a bad question to ask yourself. (via)

15.10.2006 Immigration, Soapbox, This Vicious Cabaret, Video 14 Comments

Where for art thou, Oh Reality Based Community?

Monday, October 9th, 2006

Hold up, Hold, the fuck, up lindsay, What the fuck are you talking about?

I am of course referring to this ghastly burkatuter grade evil creature of a paragraph:

Amanda’s insight undercuts ethnocentrism. It’s harder to think of your culture as the measure of all others when you realize that humanity’s most serious problems repeat themselves everywhere under different guises. If you assume that there are commonalities, awareness of an oppressive practice in another culture should lead you to wonder if your own culture might be doing something similar but less obvious to you.

Let us step the fuck back and examine what the fuck it appears Lindsay is accusing Amanda of here: (more…)

09.10.2006 Blogitics, Filtered Propaganda, Lick My Jackboots of Love, Purposefully Inflammatory, Racism, This Vicious Cabaret 129 Comments

I was also unable to think of any western patriarchal traditions

Sunday, October 1st, 2006

…Except marriage, obviously.

I love you amanda, but the thing is that while a burka is a handy dandy symbol of patriarchal oppression, it is not Your symbol to use you silly cracker.

You see, one of the ways the islamic patriarchy pushes hijab onto women who would otherwise prefer not to wear head scarfs or burkas or any of that stuff is to use the KultureKampf that western imperialists are waging against muslims as an excuse to guilt trip young muslim women into donning the patriarchy uniform that goes with the particular family’s cultural background.

So many muslim women have been raised and told over and over again by their famlies that they’re betraying their culture and their fellow muslims if they don’t wear the headscarf or dress super modestly that they start to go along with it as they realise how incredibly racist western society is towards them, and you can justify any patriarchal bit of bullshit with that line – way too many of the FGM victims I’ve met (all of whom were fundigelical christians) used the line to justify chopping their daughter’s clits off. (more…)

01.10.2006 Blogitics, Feminism, Filtered Propaganda, Imperialism for Dummies, Purposefully Inflammatory, This Vicious Cabaret 90 Comments

Oh, Will you just look at the state of this union?

Tuesday, August 22nd, 2006

Before figuring out a solution to a problem, it’s always good to figure out what the problem really is in the first place.

So let’s review: (more…)

22.08.2006 Blogitics, Bush is a cock, Politics, This Vicious Cabaret 5 Comments

Bacon Prohibition – The Adult Choice

Wednesday, August 16th, 2006

Some may have noticed that I somewhat hate Kosimandius and Jerome Armstrong and most of the Dems and every single wanky, floppy, woman hating, homophobic, sociopathic “win at any cost” centrist and rightwing collaborating “liberal” who’s willing to throw everyone’s rights away to the four corners of the earth just so they can have a feel good win by voting for a political party that actually gets elected for once.

But ever since I passed my Abortion with flying colors (my doctor put a smiley face sticker on my report card and everything) a while ago I’ve felt a change come about me.

Yeah, sure, legal abortions, civil rights and freedom are nice to have and all, but are they really more important than the feel good buzz that can only come from supporting a team political party that actually wins for once?

I think not. (more…)

16.08.2006 Blogitics, Cock!, Dudes, Remember November, This Vicious Cabaret, Wankers 10 Comments

Jihad Bowl ’06

Friday, July 14th, 2006

There’s been alot of talk during Jihad Bowl ’06, as there always is during the Jihad Bowl, about how Palestians – or whatever other populace gets caught in the middle of the whole eternal war between different colored Godzillas that is Jihad Bowl – should just deal with the trouble makers in their midst, like HAMAS or Hizbollah are some pissant street punks who just need a good talking to and Palestine is an actual fairly governed democracy.

HAMAS is a very powerful, highly opportunistic and well funded militant organisation, and expecting the palestinian people – who HAMAS has occasionally kidnapped, tortured, sent to syrian torture camps, and killed for pissing them off politically – to deal with them is stupid, especially when it makes much more sense for the Isreali populace, who are not, as a general rule, under the constant fear of HAMAS stormtroopers (as in the Nazi SA stormtroopers who they most accurately resemble politicaly) kidnapping them in the night for anti-HAMAS dissent and actions, to deal with the politicians, who’s reaction to anything done by anyone else in the middle east is to start these bullshit dickmeasuring contests that form the meat and potatos of Jihad Bowl.

And that’s before you even start to deal with who’s actually in charge in Lebanon, Syria is not just a place we send the occasionaly spare torture victim, oh no, it also basically rules Lebanon by proxy, and again, blaming the Lebanese or Palestianian people for Syria or hizbollah or HAMAS, especially given that the last two groups are more like organised crime syndicates than actual political or revolutionary groups, is unfair and unjust.

Isreal, as a democratic nation, on the other hand has no one but itself to blame for its actions, and it is one of the few countries on earth that should really be held to the high standard of moral behavior its constant use of the holocaust canard calls for. (more…)

14.07.2006 Imperialism for Dummies, This Vicious Cabaret, Torture, War 2 Comments

Obligatory London Bombing remembrance post

Friday, July 7th, 2006

Now it’s 7/7, a day when, one year ago to the day, largish sections of the London Underground network got blowed up.

This was of course, the Bush Admin’s fault, they leaked the name of an Al Qaeda double agent before the operation that probably would have led to the various London bombers being arrested, because of the intel and misinformation Khan had been pumping out for the relevent parties, was complete.

The question of whether they would have been sent to a secret torture camp after being arrested is academic now that they’ve turned themselves into so much useless medical waste.

Now I had the dubious, honor… privelage… whatever, of being in London during the bombings (but because my prognition was somewhat off that day, I learnt about it first from the World o’ Crap comment section, of all places), as well as the distinction of being teh sort of poor sap who was trying to catch a flight out of JFK during 9/11 so as to become one fo those fancy pants expats I’d heard so much about, in london (which has always been the city I truly love, ever since the day I first encountered it as a whelp on a family excursion some time back in ’91) where a talking cat had assured me the streets were paved with gold (a terrible thing to tell a young nieve woman who proudly wears the Sidewalk Vandalism badge she earned from her time served with the Girl Scouts) and health care was free.

While I may sound glib about all this, what this means is that on 7/7/2005, I only tried to call everyone I knew who might have been killed in the blast, and everyone else too, once, before I remembered the utter hell that was going to be trying to make sure anyone you knew was safe by high technological means, and vowed to just go around their houses over the next few days to check on them, or until the cell networks stopped being so chaotic, which ever came first.

I wasn’t worrying too much, I’d realised early on during the whole mess that was america immediatly after 9/11, that you could react in two ways, 1) you could spaz out completely, tearing your hair out in dismay, and anger and grief and, most important of all, fear.
Or 2) you could simply accept that whatever was going to happen would happen, think about things sensibly so as to figure out what you personally could do for whatever reason, before pouring some whisky into the tumbler, downing it in one smooth motion, and then refusing to let the fear control your life while you try to find out if anyone was having a “survivor” party and if not then start trying to organize one.

What’s the point of fear after all? (more…)

07.07.2006 Governmental Failures, Imperialism for Dummies, This Vicious Cabaret 3 Comments