The ginger with a soul - helping the helpless

[T.W FOR RAPE] I think the whole nice-guy phenomenon is like, rape’s capitalist cousin. Both understand women as capital and sex as a commodity, essentially, but where rape understands it in a feudal might-is-right kind of ownership, nice-guy-ness dominates through “voluntary” exchanges and contracts - i.e the exchange of “friendship”-as-a-commodity for sex-as-a-commodity. Either way, it’s coercive and reduces women to property, but nice-guy-ness has the appearance of being perfectly innocent, just like exploitative capital-worker relations have the appearance of being fair. So then the non-having-sex-with-“nice-guys” is, like, a ripoff, and the notion that women are people deserving of no-strings-attached legitimate friendship runs contrary to free-exchange ethics.

I think that’s also why victim blaming is so rampant and vehemently defended. Within this paradigm, rape is basically stealing, so it needs to be rationalized in market terms. “Provocative” dress/behavior is only provocative because sex is seen as a commodity, and it is seen as an advertisement of that commodity. As such, dressing provocatively is “asking for it” because why would one advertise something they’re not going to sell? 

Also the phrase “giving it away for free” when used by slut-shamers is pretty telling.

I’m really just trying to organize my thoughts so please let me know if I’m being an idiot or if I’m out of place.

When you base your conclusions, no matter how “left wing” they may seem, on “classical liberal” premises, what you end up with always still perpetuates some really toxic shit.

So lemme get this straight: the same folks who want to cut teachers’ pensions and bust their unions want them to be trained to use firearms so they can double as security guards?

It’s like we’re living in Arrested Development

Do these folks ever consider that gun bans serve to protect property from the poor, not to protect the gubment from middle class white dudes who watched Red Dawn too many times? An armed populace rising up in arms against anybody is going to be 90% POCs and working poor folk against the banks that foreclosed on their homes and the executives who laid them off, and only 10% against the Fed by Civil War re-en-actors whose zombie-apocalypse shelters have gadsden flags flying over them. 

If you constantly insist that violence is an unpreventable and inherent part of “human nature” it’s because you feel the need to vindicate the systems of hegemony and oppression that cause most violence - probably because you benefit from them. You recognize on some level that when you consider that violence might be socially determined, you have to question the legitimacy of a system you desperately don’t want to question.

One thing I appreciate about the show Criminal Minds is how power is acknowledged. Most of the “unsubs” are either asserting their social power through delusional fantasies or otherwise antisocial means, or are reacting to their own marginalization/social victimization and powerlessness by lashing out. This is always especially evident through the “un-sub’s” modus operandi and how the un-sub chooses their victims. For example: some form of extreme misogyny is always shown by straight, white, male offenders through their methodology and their motivations. There was even an episode in which a serial killer was a rape survivor whose case was dismissed because she was “asking for it,” who targeted men that fit the profile of her attacker, and described them as “asking” to be killed. The writing/direction was very clear in showing this behavior to be a product of her oppression, rather than the actions of some crazy, delusional girl. 

I mean, given the subject matter the show predisposed to being somewhat problematic, but I really appreciate how well it does in portraying violent/antisocial behavior as a product of the inherent violence of our society’s inequalities. I guess it gets away with it by not “being preachy” about it idk.

EDIT: I haven’t seen every episode so there might be one that completely contradicts me and if that’s the case my b.

Obama cut Pell Grants. I swear, the way he keeps dropping his base he should consider becoming a dubstep artist.

Wahh wahh “I want to keep what I earn.” Shut up. If you didn’t actually labor for what you recieved, you didn’t earn shit compared to what you got, and if you worked for a wage you didn’t get shit compared to what you earned.

What a subjective, nonsense idea to base an entire argument on.

Wealth isn’t earned, it’s accumulated.

Part of me really wishes all the angsty Teabaggers, neoliberals, and conservatives currently threatening to “divorce” the rest of the country, or secede, or “start a revolution” would actually try. How revealing that would be. Think about how that would change politics in this country - the right officially alienating itself from any semblance of civility, democracy or popular interest in defense of privilege.

And, honestly, corporations like Papa Johns and Olive Garden having a temper tantrum over the election and the 14-cents-per-pizza cost of providing employees with basic healthcare, and almost literally holding jobs hostage, turn themselves into the perfect argument against capitalism. There is something very wrong with a society where the supposed “job creators” need to be treated like volcano gods that we must appease to avoid being burned alive.

My dad made a good point yesterday: for these companies to actually do that on principle, they’d have to hold some kind of principles in the first place. But I honestly kind of hope they’d give their little Atlas Shrugged fantasy a shot. If they think people are going to react by kissing their ass and sacrificing a virgin, they’ve got another thing coming. They’ll just show themselves and their economic system for what they are.

Economic conservatism is blaming hurricane Sandy on a government weather control conspiracy rather than admitting climate change is real and accepting the economic implications of that fact.

“Feminist” dudes who wanna act like the victim because women don’t think you’re being sincere, and whine about how “they’re being dismissive of men”:

You’re the problem. If you honestly look at the concern that “feminist” men are just after cookies, and your first reaction isn’t to think critically about your actions/attitudes as an ally, you need to get your shit straight. If your reaction is to reflect on what a sad state of affairs it is on the part of women, you are literally, completely, 100% the problem exemplified. 

Take a flying fuck to the moon.

What if we thought of “entitlements” as subsidies to businesses who insist on externalizing the cost of maintaining their workforce by not paying wages people can live on? 

I guess it would be easy to then blame low wages on the existence of social-safety nets (which is ridiculous anyway, since below-subsistence wages existed long before safety nets, were always determined by the market, and were never determined by what a worker really needed to survive), but done carefully it could make a useful rhetorical point - as long as you make clear that a) businesses will always externalize this cost regardless of whether or not society will pick it up, and b) it is absolutely necessary to the function of society that workers somehow receive enough to survive on. That way, the blame is shifted away from workers, and away from the safety nets themselves, and is shifted towards businesses not fulfilling their responsibility. This need has to be fulfilled somehow, and is fulfilled by the state because of business’ shirking of responsibility.

I mean, it is sorta mired in a neoliberal way of thinking, but as a rhetorical point (or counterpoint, I guess) for reform-minded folks and unions it’s not half bad.

When businessmen claim they built everything they had with their own two hands they’re not consciously lying by omitting the workers, they just don’t regard the workers as anything more than an overhead cost, and they definitely don’t regard them as any more human than overhead. To them the notion that the workers are predominantly responsible for what has been built is as absurd as saying the same thing about a rake or a hoe. The labor force isn’t a class of individual people, it’s a pool of interchangeable and expendable commodities.