Well, if the world economy really does implode at a yet-to-be-determined date in the not so distant future, we can't claim we weren't warned.
And make no mistake, it will. Why? Because apparently we've some how lost our ability to take in new information and form new beliefs based on this new information. I believe they called it “learning” before it completely went out of fashion.
The always interesting, and usually quite right nobel laurete in economics, Paul Krugman, offers an excellent take-down of the alternative reality that the hard right finds themselves stuck in these days.
As he explains, they continue to delude themselves that all is well, despite the fact that their beloved business mavens have been the recipients of the largest and most shocking display of public largesse, um, ever, because their utterly unregulated business transactions blew up in their faces and their first reaction was to go running for the shelter of the welfare state.
Which, to recap, remains a bad thing for individuals, but apparently a good thing for companies and the wealthiest individuals the world has ever seen.
Oh, and he doesn't spare what passes for a left in American politics either, pointing out that the utter lack of meaningful reform by the bought-and-paid for by finance Democrats pretty much guarantees a repeat because, in the words of philosopher George Santayana, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
And, as an added bonus, enjoy Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi's well-deserved drubbing of the Obama administration's craven cave-in to big finance, delivered in the fine form of a first class polemicist.
Showing posts with label Bottomless Rage. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Bottomless Rage. Show all posts
12.14.2009
12.06.2009
Sunday Sermon: Unhappy Anniversary
Today is the 20th anniversary of the Montreal massacre. Twenty years since a disturbed hater took his insane politics and a rifle to a Montreal school and murdered 14 female engineering students because his life was garbage and in his mad little brain it was somehow the fault of successful, independent women.
Twenty years later, and everything still sucks. (Toronto Star)
In some ways it sucks more, since the Conservative minority government has no idea what the hell it needs to do for women. Here's an article on that by Bernadette Wagner, which we published last year (reprinted on Rabble).
Anyway.
Twenty years ago I was a know-nothing volunteer at a student newspaper. On Dec. 6, 1989, the production night of the terms' last issue, we got the Canadian University Press wire story of the shooting. It was late, the paper was nearly done, and we decided not to run it. For the next month, the University of Manitoba's holiday edition newspaper sat in it's distribution stands shamefully free of any reference to the biggest story at a Canadian university in memory.
Oopsies?
The thing is, this oversight is just typical. Every day women are menaced, threatened, frightened, hurt, abused and killed by their partners, co-workers, acquaintances and strangers. The scale of violence is so enormous we can't even see it right before our faces. And when we do give our attention to the horror we look at it as "isolated incidents" rather than seeing the bigger picture--that even now, in a time and place where many things are better, there is what amounts to an undeclared war on women.
This "can't see the forest for the trees" problem is what makes governments like our current awful Conservative one comfortable dismantling the programs and protections women need, from attacks on Status of Women to killing national day care to wrecking the firearm registry to undermining reproductive rights. The way right-wingers see things, there are no patterns or trends, only individual situations. It's deranged. But I'm getting off topic.
The point is, we as a society have problems. And pretending that we don't or that they're all behind us does not help us move forward.
I'll wrap up by sharing something I realized today. I have a friend who's an engineer. I've never thought of this friend as an engineer--I think of her as a fun pal, a comrade in restaurant adventures, a travelling companion to NHL games and my second-most despised arch-enemy in our hockey pool. (Her partner, code-name "Flipper", remains villain #1.)
But if my friend was older, and if she'd gone to a different school to be an engineer, I might not have met her. She might have been shot. Because she was female, succeeding at something some people still think women shouldn't be allowed to do.
Kind of brought it home today.
Reginans are invited to attend a candlelight vigil today with special focus on Bill C-391, which would scrap the federal long gun registry. The vigil starts at 4:00 at Conservative MP Ray Boughan's office, 2631 28th Ave. More information here.
Twenty years later, and everything still sucks. (Toronto Star)
In some ways it sucks more, since the Conservative minority government has no idea what the hell it needs to do for women. Here's an article on that by Bernadette Wagner, which we published last year (reprinted on Rabble).
Anyway.
Twenty years ago I was a know-nothing volunteer at a student newspaper. On Dec. 6, 1989, the production night of the terms' last issue, we got the Canadian University Press wire story of the shooting. It was late, the paper was nearly done, and we decided not to run it. For the next month, the University of Manitoba's holiday edition newspaper sat in it's distribution stands shamefully free of any reference to the biggest story at a Canadian university in memory.
Oopsies?
The thing is, this oversight is just typical. Every day women are menaced, threatened, frightened, hurt, abused and killed by their partners, co-workers, acquaintances and strangers. The scale of violence is so enormous we can't even see it right before our faces. And when we do give our attention to the horror we look at it as "isolated incidents" rather than seeing the bigger picture--that even now, in a time and place where many things are better, there is what amounts to an undeclared war on women.
This "can't see the forest for the trees" problem is what makes governments like our current awful Conservative one comfortable dismantling the programs and protections women need, from attacks on Status of Women to killing national day care to wrecking the firearm registry to undermining reproductive rights. The way right-wingers see things, there are no patterns or trends, only individual situations. It's deranged. But I'm getting off topic.
The point is, we as a society have problems. And pretending that we don't or that they're all behind us does not help us move forward.
I'll wrap up by sharing something I realized today. I have a friend who's an engineer. I've never thought of this friend as an engineer--I think of her as a fun pal, a comrade in restaurant adventures, a travelling companion to NHL games and my second-most despised arch-enemy in our hockey pool. (Her partner, code-name "Flipper", remains villain #1.)
But if my friend was older, and if she'd gone to a different school to be an engineer, I might not have met her. She might have been shot. Because she was female, succeeding at something some people still think women shouldn't be allowed to do.
Kind of brought it home today.
Reginans are invited to attend a candlelight vigil today with special focus on Bill C-391, which would scrap the federal long gun registry. The vigil starts at 4:00 at Conservative MP Ray Boughan's office, 2631 28th Ave. More information here.
Je m'en souviens trop...
20 years later and I still feel like crying.
"Au-dela du 6 decembre" is a firsthand doc of the experience, filmed in 1991.
Other coverage:
CTV Montreal has a few good pieces on the anniversary, including a typical "Marc Lepine was crazy (but you can't blame him, can you?)" comment, as enraging now as it was then. I remember many men saying this at the time, or variants of it, in the days after the killings. Many men didn't. 20 years later and that divide is exactly where it was then.
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The Sunday Edition had a great anniversary show in its second hour today. The audio for the show is posted on Monday.
The Globe and Mail on the Conservatives scrapping the gun registry. There are a few doozies there in the comments too, from men and women. Yikes.
Oh, and JohnInMtl?
Fuck off.
12.02.2009
Faces of Douche
Meet Monty.
Monty is a Mountie.
More specifically, Monty is one of the Mounties who killed Polish immigrant Robert Dziekanski at Vancouver airport last March.
Apparently he also killed a guy while driving drunk. But he's not getting charged, because he pulled some bullshit prank.
Naturally. Why? Well, because he's a cop, of course, though naturally they'll put some sort of spin on it. Which we'll all believe. Because the police always tell the truth at all times, right?
10.21.2009
Greed is God
Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi takes down Wall Street yet again with an entertaining and easy-to-understand explanation of what when wrong.
A shorter version: a group of borderline sociopaths exploited weak regulations to ensure that the playing field is so tilted that your average mom-and-pop investor never stood a chance.
And when they ran out of innocent victims this pack of jackals began to eat each other last fall, with the unintended consequence of consuming all our pension plans.
A shorter version: a group of borderline sociopaths exploited weak regulations to ensure that the playing field is so tilted that your average mom-and-pop investor never stood a chance.
And when they ran out of innocent victims this pack of jackals began to eat each other last fall, with the unintended consequence of consuming all our pension plans.
10.05.2009
(Un-) Holy Crap
So, there's an online "Christian" encyclopedia-thing called Christopedia. You can find it here.
This is their entry on Barack Obama as of 8:14 local time tonight. And oh, you better believe this is going to get changed fast now that it's out. Here's an excerpt. Warning: it is pure, evil hate:
And it goes on and on and on and on and on.
Who is the constituency for this website? Who's reading this stuff? Who's sharing these ideas? Is it a small group of fringe militia types? thirteen-year-old boys thinking they're funny? Or something more widespread?
I don't know. But after reading this, just knowing this is out there, I will say, yeah. Sure all this shit-talk coming out of sewer-mouthed, conservative American bigots about the black president and his health care plan isn't motivated by racism. Surrrrrrre.
Fake-Christian psychos. Well at least I have a topic for this week's editorial. Let the angry typing begin.
(Found on Slog.)
This is their entry on Barack Obama as of 8:14 local time tonight. And oh, you better believe this is going to get changed fast now that it's out. Here's an excerpt. Warning: it is pure, evil hate:
On November 4, 2008, the nigger defeated John McCain in the general election and became the first niggerid-American to be elected President of the United States.[1][1][1][1] In his victory speech, delivered before a crowd of many thousands of his supporters in Chicago's Grant Park, the nigger proclaimed that "change has come to America."[1]
The nigger's assigned Secret Service codename is "Renegade."[1][1] "Renegade" was first used to describe someone who had turned from their religion, coming from the Spanish word renegado meaning "Christian turned Muslim."[1]
And it goes on and on and on and on and on.
Who is the constituency for this website? Who's reading this stuff? Who's sharing these ideas? Is it a small group of fringe militia types? thirteen-year-old boys thinking they're funny? Or something more widespread?
I don't know. But after reading this, just knowing this is out there, I will say, yeah. Sure all this shit-talk coming out of sewer-mouthed, conservative American bigots about the black president and his health care plan isn't motivated by racism. Surrrrrrre.
Fake-Christian psychos. Well at least I have a topic for this week's editorial. Let the angry typing begin.
(Found on Slog.)
8.07.2009
Ugly in Pink
I just want to say this right off: I am not a seething ball of hate.
It’s true, I’ve expressed, within the Prairie Dogs pages, both actual and virtual, a fear and loathing of many things, from emo to the Smurfs to Twilight, to ill-mannered individuals who peel and eat hard-boiled eggs in public. (Okay, that last one got cut before publication. I’m expressing that one now.) But there are so many things I love and adore. Bicycles. Butterscotch. Too-clever power-pop lyrics. High heels. Ridiculously cheap banh-mi. Well-written television comedies. Sicilian-style lemon ice. Dirty jokes. Gender equality. Worn magazine. Nice-looking men. Independent retailers. Baseball statistics . Steampunk novels. Etc. Just to name a few.
But to blog is to vent, and somehow, I end up writing most about stuff I can’t stand. But I am really a sweet, appreciative, loving human girl. Really.
I am in no way capable of mourning John fucking Hughes.
Pretty in Pink was Reaganomics on a high school level, with Molly Ringwald’s Andie as the Deserving Poor, Horatio Alger type heroine. She is entitled to her mating ritual with the rich boy, because she is virtuous capitalism personified. The rest of the wrong-side-of-the-tracks characters? Who cares? Clawing/dating your way up the food chain is the way to win, losers.
Ferris Bueller was a high school Patrick Bateman. Cruel, narcissistic, obsessed with status, willing to walk on anyone’s face for a giggle. You think Ferris didn’t grow up to kill ladies? Ferris is a fucking nutcase. (Best 80’s film festival lineup evar: Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Roger and Me, and American Psycho. You get the era’s self-congratulatory fantasy, it’s bleak reality, and posterity’s verdict.)
The Breakfast Club? Because all you really need, young lady, is to scrub that shit off your face and put a pretty pink bow in your hair. Then you’ll get a cute, violent wrestler who, no, never will take his nasty daddy issue temper out on you, and the rest of your life will be dandy peaches.
And let’s not even talk Weird Science, cause, as the existence of mail-order-brides and Real Dolls and lame-o plastic porn can attest, lots of people really, really dig the notion of not-real, biddable, robot slave girls.
So no, Stephen, I actually don’t find Hughes’ body of work “gentle” or “entertaining”. I find it creepy, patriarchal, racist, (You know what’s hilarious? An Asian guy with a name that means penis!) and repugnant, and have since I was a child. Hughes was responsible for what I consider some of the most insidious lies and fucked-up mythologies ever perpetuated on youth by Hollywood film. I’m sure his friends and family mourn him, it’s always sad when a human dies early, but that guy put a lot of evil shit in the world.
It’s true, I’ve expressed, within the Prairie Dogs pages, both actual and virtual, a fear and loathing of many things, from emo to the Smurfs to Twilight, to ill-mannered individuals who peel and eat hard-boiled eggs in public. (Okay, that last one got cut before publication. I’m expressing that one now.) But there are so many things I love and adore. Bicycles. Butterscotch. Too-clever power-pop lyrics. High heels. Ridiculously cheap banh-mi. Well-written television comedies. Sicilian-style lemon ice. Dirty jokes. Gender equality. Worn magazine. Nice-looking men. Independent retailers. Baseball statistics . Steampunk novels. Etc. Just to name a few.
But to blog is to vent, and somehow, I end up writing most about stuff I can’t stand. But I am really a sweet, appreciative, loving human girl. Really.
I am in no way capable of mourning John fucking Hughes.
Pretty in Pink was Reaganomics on a high school level, with Molly Ringwald’s Andie as the Deserving Poor, Horatio Alger type heroine. She is entitled to her mating ritual with the rich boy, because she is virtuous capitalism personified. The rest of the wrong-side-of-the-tracks characters? Who cares? Clawing/dating your way up the food chain is the way to win, losers.
Ferris Bueller was a high school Patrick Bateman. Cruel, narcissistic, obsessed with status, willing to walk on anyone’s face for a giggle. You think Ferris didn’t grow up to kill ladies? Ferris is a fucking nutcase. (Best 80’s film festival lineup evar: Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Roger and Me, and American Psycho. You get the era’s self-congratulatory fantasy, it’s bleak reality, and posterity’s verdict.)
The Breakfast Club? Because all you really need, young lady, is to scrub that shit off your face and put a pretty pink bow in your hair. Then you’ll get a cute, violent wrestler who, no, never will take his nasty daddy issue temper out on you, and the rest of your life will be dandy peaches.
And let’s not even talk Weird Science, cause, as the existence of mail-order-brides and Real Dolls and lame-o plastic porn can attest, lots of people really, really dig the notion of not-real, biddable, robot slave girls.
So no, Stephen, I actually don’t find Hughes’ body of work “gentle” or “entertaining”. I find it creepy, patriarchal, racist, (You know what’s hilarious? An Asian guy with a name that means penis!) and repugnant, and have since I was a child. Hughes was responsible for what I consider some of the most insidious lies and fucked-up mythologies ever perpetuated on youth by Hollywood film. I’m sure his friends and family mourn him, it’s always sad when a human dies early, but that guy put a lot of evil shit in the world.
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