DagSeoul: Positions, Populations, Punk, Poetics

This is a hilarious attempt at theory by a right wing pundit who implements a discussion of liberal relativism and root causes. Perhaps we should be discussing “root causes” and “liberalism” because both are important and problematic topics for US discourse about almost anything historical and political. But this is a rather glaring miss.

FOXNews’ “The Five” is produced to look like it’s a panel of intellectuals speaking intellectually about American Life. Actually, it’s a lame attempt at the same shtick Chris Hayes and Rachel Maddow attempt to pull off on MSNBC. There are no intellectuals on corporate news channels; there is no intellectual discourse. It’s strictly prohibited. Dig the sexism in the video clip, too, as they focus on one woman’s response. You have to watch until the end to see how they end it with a misogynist sneer.

OK, well Marco Rubio has now weighed in on the suggestion that we should stop offering Muslim students Visas. Go figure. After Boston, he’d consider it. This is how conservative capitalist mind works. Something bad happens that gets international recognition and then they decide to think about it, by which they mean to choose the most reactionary and least helpful options out of all possible options to publicly reflect on. Both the panel’s and Rubio’s responses illustrate—it’s without fail ALWAYS the way they think about social problems. It’s as if Rubio woke up and said, “Well, I guess NOW is the time to consider NOT granting VISAs to Muslim students. Makes sense, right?”

Rights or Freedoms*, for right libertarians and conservatives, is always in the negative. The Freedom FROM Muslims, in this case. Or, they’d say, the right to not have those hateful violent people around.

________________

*When conservative say rights, they mean to say “freedoms”. When they use the word “right” they are attending to their bullshit notions about natural law. When they use they word “freedom” they are attending to their bullshit notions about human law. They improperly use the two words interchangeably, conflating the concepts of human and natural laws.

the different skins theory of not evolving

You may wish to read the short blog on NRO before reading my analysis.

As we have come to learn, conservative men and women simply cannot keep their fucking mouths shut when it comes to rape, assault, and sexual harassment. They will do whatever they can to shame victims who publicly suffer their abuse and seek help. For conservatives, an innocent victim is one who silently bears their abuse and associated trauma; one who can cope while remaining a productive employee and without retribution, rehabilitation, or reparation. To speak out and to seek aid is to illustrate guilt and the trauma becomes the result of poor decision making skills that can be blamed on feminism and prurient and permissive culture.

Heather MacDonald, in her recent blog for National Review Online’s blog, The Corner, attempts to explain what occurrences of Military Sexual Trauma (MST) actually signify: that many women who are raped are feminist sluts who are nothing more than the victims of their own poor decisions.

First, MacDonald bemoans the recognition of yet another syndrome.

So now there’s a name and, inevitably, an acronym for it: military-sexual-trauma syndrome or MST. Military-sexual-trauma syndrome is that debilitating condition that befalls female service members who have allegedly been the victim of sexual assault by their fellow service members. According to the New York Times, female veterans are becoming homeless and involved in street life because of the post-traumatic stress that results from having been victimized in a military “that failed to protect them.”

Right? UGH. The medical profession in cahoots with the government is always coming up with another illness and acronym for that illness. How droll. What is it with conservative rhetoric that insists one must introduce any and all social and political arguments with a tone of disgust and ennui? Worse, MacDonald blows her progressive-mischief dog-whistle by attributing the reasons for the new syndrome to the New York Times, when it’s actually the result of work with the Department of Veterans Affairs. However, baselessly attacking veterans and their support services is difficult; it’s much easier to shit on the New York Times and its imagined readers.

McDonald, having focused her readers’ attentions squarely on liberal filth, excuse politics, and the lazy, social-welfare-loving collectivists who read the New York Times, provides us an example of one veteran who suffers from MST:

Tiffany Jackson is the Times’ lead example. She says that she was savagely raped in the ladies room of a bar in South Korea by a fellow serviceman. She held a job “fleetingly” after leaving the military, but

Two years later, she had descended into anger and alcohol and left her job. She started hanging out with people who were using cocaine and became an addict herself, huddling against the wind on Skid Row here… . She grew up in a tough section of Compton, Calif., and served as a heavy equipment operator in the Army, exhilarated by her sense of mastery in a male-dominated environment. But after the rape — which she kept to herself, not even telling her family — her behavior changed. She assaulted a sergeant, resulting in disciplinary actions. Back home, she lost her job in sales after she passed out, drunk, during a business phone call. “It looked like I really had my stuff together,” she said. “But I was dying inside.”

She served three years in prison for drug dealing and finally confided in a prison psychiatrist, who helped her see that many of her bad decisions had been rooted in the sexual trauma.

Ms. Jackson now is on full disability compensation for her MST, though she was at first denied benefits.

The framing of Tiffany Jackson’s story is clear. MacDonald is going to explain how social welfare rewards laziness and poor decisions.

Now here is a tentative alternative hypothesis: Some of these women come from environments that made their descent into street life overdetermined, whether or not they experienced alleged sexual assault in the military. To blame alleged sexual assault for their fate rather than their own bad decision-making is ideologically satisfying, but mystifying. Having children out of wedlock, as a huge proportion of them do, also does not help in avoiding poverty and homelessness:  

Monica Figueroa, 22, a former Army parachutist, lived in a family member’s auto body shop in the Los Angeles area, bathing her baby, Alexander, in a sink used for oil and solvents until, with help, they found temporary housing.

Michelle Mathis, 30, a single mother of three, has bounced among seven temporary places since returning home in 2005 with atraumatic brain injury. Ms. Mathis, who served as a chemical specialist in Iraq, relies on a GPS device to help her remember the way to the grocery store and her children’s school.

Don’t overlook the persuasive other-ing in the passage: “Having children out of wedlock, as a huge portion of them do, also does not help…”. MacDonald implements two kinds of composition in her blog. First she composes (invokes) a traditionally-ideal woman : a responsibly employed and/or married mother who is middle class and owns property. It’s easy for readers to miss this composition of an ideal American woman and the heteronormative demands such pleas make for the disgusting tone and claims of MacDonald’s argument. Explicitly, she composes victims of sexual assault and harassment who suffer MST and single mothers. Implicitly, she’s rewarding readers who identify with her.

More egregious, though, is an insensitive and silly error in reasoning. MacDonald insists, “To blame alleged sexual assault for their fate rather than their own bad decision-making is ideologically satisfying, but mystifying.” Suffering post-traumatic stress is not a fate. This stress is the result of a traumatic event that, by definition, is unnecessary. It’s no wonder MacDonald doesn’t understand MST as a result of assault and/or harassment; she believes veterans suffering MST earned their trauma as a just reward for their behavior prior to being harassed and/or raped. In other words, having a child out of wedlock earns poverty and sexist abuse.

MacDonald even projects her grotesque sense of social determinism onto veterans who suffer MST. She writes, “Some of these women come from environments that made their descent into street life overdetermined, whether or not they experienced alleged sexual assault in the military.” It doesn’t matter whether or not these veterans were, in fact, raped. MacDonald has overdetermined her position to the extent that coming from non-traditional environments is enough to earn or expect a future of victim-hood. It’s as if it’s only a matter of time for these women. MacDonald clearly doesn’t understand she creates two categories for women: women who will be assaulted and deserve it, and women who shouldn’t be assaulted.

And this is a rather gobsmacking problem with MacDonald’s argument, isn’t it? Not only does she not seem to understand what a disorder that results from persistent trauma is, she doesn’t seem to understand that she’s applying her admittedly conservative and demanding sense of propriety onto others who may or may not see the world the way she does. She really doesn’t seem to understand that a syndrome is not a made-up narrative that individuals can use to garner unearned rewards. The MST syndrome is a verifiable state of affairs that must be treated for the patients to be well. It’s clear MacDonald has never witnessed PTSD nor experienced anything traumatic in her life.

Following her alternative hypothesis that such trauma doesn’t exist but only “bad decisions” do, MacDonald flexes her con-muscles by criticizing college-campus feminists and her “tough as nails” approach to them. Basically, she knows a woman who was raped three times who doesn’t suffer trauma. So, feminism is wrong.

Feminists claim (speciously) that a whopping one-quarter of college co-eds are sexually assaulted by their fellow students in college; I am not aware of comparable claims that huge numbers of female college graduates are as a result ending up on the street. (The difference between the outcomes for college graduates and vets does not lie in the relative availability of services: College rape crisis centers and hotlines are barely used.) I am not even aware of claims that victims of stranger rape are more likely to end up dealing drugs and homeless, but that evidence may in fact be out there. (I recently wrote about a tough-as-nails, pro-police building superintendent in the Bronx who was raped three times, including by her mother’s boyfriend as a child; she is only one case, obviously, but she was not on disability benefits or on the streets.) 

I’m just going to leave that paragraph alone because MacDonald saves her worst work for last. I’m so frustrated by it that I decided to write this post just so I could get to this last bit. Everything up to this point is boilerplate conservative, anti-feminist hate. Pure contempt and smug sanctimony. You’ve all likely heard it before. But her last paragraph is simply nuts.

But let’s say that for these homeless female vets, it really was their sexual experiences in the military that caused their downward spiral into, as the Times puts it, “alcohol and substance abuse, depression and domestic violence.” Why then have those same feminists who are now lamenting the life-destroying effects of “MST” insisted on putting women into combat units? Arguably, coming under enemy fire or falling into enemy hands is as traumatic as the behavior one may experience while binge-drinking with one’s fellow soldiers or as scarring as being “bullied and ostracized” by a female superior. Are women on average going to be more able to emotionally handle the former than the latter? Isn’t there a contradiction in expecting the military to “protect” you while it also sends you out to face mortal risk? And do the feminists believe that there will be fewer of these alleged rapes in combat training and duty? Perhaps they think that with enough multi-million-dollar gender-equity training contracts showered on the gender-industrial complex, the problem will go away. Or perhaps they think that keeping before us proof that the patriarchy is alive and well is more important than protecting women from “MST,” especially if that image can serve as grounds for remaking the military.   

Apparently, there’s no editors for The Corner. First, MacDonald thinks so poorly of certain kinds of women, the them she’s referring to throughout the blog, that rape and assault is sex for them. MacDonald sexualizes harassment and assault as a characteristic of sexuality for certain kinds of women: namely, women who don’t abide by patriarchal traditional family values. It’s not often a conservative would conflate having sex—even of the loose variety that social conservatives are always whining about—with being raped, but MacDonald pretty much does in the first sentence of her closing argument. Is it so hard to imagine that a woman who is raped also has positive sexual experiences? Isn’t it a problem to define an victim of assault by the assault and the oppressive associations that have been improperly attached to it? Not for MacDonald. It’s another horrible association and assumption based in prejudice and misrepresentation that receives prominence in rhetoric over cool-consideration of facts, events, medicine, and evidence.

The rest is just hyperbole. I have no clue what female service members fighting in combat has to do with women being assaulted while on active duty. Nor was I aware of the “gender-industrial complex”. What the fuck is that? In conclusion, MacDonald’s reference about patriarchy is instructive. Nobody having anything to do with treating MST is talking about The Patriarchy, but conservative pundits like MacDonald will always bring it up because it is a sine qua non for conservative ethos.

The Hispanic Leadership Network memo simply asks Republicans to publicly use less offensive language. It’s a racist memo. They aren’t relenting. 

Republicans believe immigrants are dupes.

Know what’s really grotesque about Romney’s and Christie’s speeches? I know it looks like they were trying to express their love for women, but they were actually both addressing their fidelity to masculine love and men. The GOP conservative base is so deeply misogynistic that two speeches meant to cheer women and drive conservative women to vote were written in a manner that their husbands and boyfriends would authorize. And both were much more interested in respect. 

Republicans cannot talk about love. Ann Romney had to first address her love for her husband before talking to women and Chris Christie led with a trite and clichéd memorialization of his deceased mother before talking about respect. The paean to respect is about earning and value, and that’s capitalist cultural crap. Where is the address to love?

Haters. Every one.

Hands Santorum Hands

dagNotes: Why Intersectionality Matters

dagseoul:

First, you have to do a little homework. Here’s recent research illustrating how, over the last 40 years, the US legislative process has favored the affluent classes. It’s not a matter of speculation; it’s simply The Case that our electorate and its elected officials and their actions consistently favor the rich. You’d think common sense would be enough to know this to be the case, but common sense is about denying paradox and simplifying complex discourse. It’s not simple because the problem is a result of The Bargain with White Power. It’s a result with how such a bargain works.

We can argue about this from a bicameral tradition that pits Democrats against Republicans and Liberals against Conservatives, but that would be a waste of time. Libertarians? They can’t hack this debate either because they don’t understand class; they choose to fetishize individualism vs (a) collectivism (that has never existed). And this stupid debate about the direction value can trickle is just awful. From above or from below, ain’t nothing going to change until we change the paradigm.

The fact is if we were to only examine this problem as a class problem, we’d have to bracket and ignore that it’s poor whites and their middle-class cousins who daily invest in the bargain to fund capitalist interests via legislation that maintains our free market. They have a stake in the game in spite of their lack of privilege relative to the excesses of privilege the wealthy possess. Not-white citizens also participate in the bargain, but for a variety of reasons and not with the same interests. They always already have less at stake.

Affluent Americans have nothing to lose in elections and the legislative process. They have amassed the kind of capital that no longer calls for participation in the market in any meaningful manner. To focus on the rich is a liberal ploy to cultivate a kind of capitalism that permits more people to become unjustly wealthy, unjustly ambitious. The ploy is not to alter traditional, capitalist class structure. Worse, Libertarian pleas for more liberty and more voluntarism are part of the same wish, just more grotesque. Libertarians wish we could live in a market permitting them what they want, when they want it, without having to worry about anybody else’s interests, and without ethics, and without a state, and without aggression (which means, and without being able to do something about it). The fleeting and fantastic to be free from others is a really a demand to be free from economy. All that anti-state crap is a liberalism moving to voluntarism. It’s still problematic.

We need instersectionality when examining class because it permits us to see that poor whites who want to be “self-reliant” and “upwardly mobile” “individuals” have accepted their stake in a white supremacist bargain. They may only presently own the “to be white” gift they receive for purchasing the bargain, but they want to own the “to be free” part next.

Intersectionality is not problematic. It’s a matter of welcoming something into traditional dialectics that has only been excluded because most of the white men who historically shaped the discourse were racist and sexist pigs.

Intersectionality or bust.

dagNotes: Why Intersectionality Matters

First, you have to do a little homework. Here’s recent research illustrating how, over the last 40 years, the US legislative process has favored the affluent classes. It’s not a matter of speculation; it’s simply The Case that our electorate and its elected officials and their actions consistently favor the rich. You’d think common sense would be enough to know this to be the case, but common sense is about denying paradox and simplifying complex discourse. It’s not simple because the problem is a result of The Bargain with White Power. It’s a result with how such a bargain works.

We can argue about this from a bicameral tradition that pits Democrats against Republicans and Liberals against Conservatives, but that would be a waste of time. Libertarians? They can’t hack this debate either because they don’t understand class; they choose to fetishize individualism vs (a) collectivism (that has never existed). And this stupid debate about the direction value can trickle is just awful. From above or from below, ain’t nothing going to change until we change the paradigm.

The fact is if we were to only examine this problem as a class problem, we’d have to bracket and ignore that it’s poor whites and their middle-class cousins who daily invest in the bargain to fund capitalist interests via legislation that maintains our free market. They have a stake in the game in spite of their lack of privilege relative to the excesses of privilege the wealthy possess. Not-white citizens also participate in the bargain, but for a variety of reasons and not with the same interests. They always already have less at stake.

Affluent Americans have nothing to lose in elections and the legislative process. They have amassed the kind of capital that no longer calls for participation in the market in any meaningful manner. To focus on the rich is a liberal ploy to cultivate a kind of capitalism that permits more people to become unjustly wealthy, unjustly ambitious. The ploy is not to alter traditional, capitalist class structure. Worse, Libertarian pleas for more liberty and more voluntarism are part of the same wish, just more grotesque. Libertarians wish we could live in a market permitting them what they want, when they want it, without having to worry about anybody else’s interests, and without ethics, and without a state, and without aggression (which means, and without being able to do something about it). The fleeting and fantastic to be free from others is a really a demand to be free from economy. All that anti-state crap is a liberalism moving to voluntarism. It’s still problematic.

We need instersectionality when examining class because it permits us to see that poor whites who want to be “self-reliant” and “upwardly mobile” “individuals” have accepted their stake in a white supremacist bargain. They may only presently own the “to be white” gift they receive for purchasing the bargain, but they want to own the “to be free” part next.

Intersectionality is not problematic. It’s a matter of welcoming something into traditional dialectics that has only been excluded because most of the white men who historically shaped the discourse were racist and sexist pigs.

Intersectionality or bust.

dagNotes: The Regressives (Saying What We Mean)

In everyday politics, we like to implement a problematic binary that has a left and a right, that improperly imagines a central, moderating axis upon which a balance can be managed or else all tilts towards partiality and inequality. It’s a comforting fantasy for millions of people. It’s a product of populist common-sense that works to rid discourse of complexity and paradox. It’s a-philosophical.

As a teacher, I hear the rhetoric of left and right all the time. Students always want to find The Other Side in an argument because they have been taught that a balance must be sought. As if there are only ever two sides worth considering and that society and its culture are monolithic. On the other hand, this searching for a center upon which to moderate disagreement doesn’t occur when a student visits my office to discuss writing or class. It happens when the students are in discourse within the classroom. This implicates me, their teacher. This implicates their parents, their friends, in other words, society. At least, it illustrates how two people discussing significant problems can talk freely only when isolated from the public discourse community, that, once we are engaged with it, will slowly locate our claims within a pre-designed social space that seeks a fantastic mean as a solution to our complex problems. In another post, I would be able to illustrate that the center in political discourse is similar to the grotesque representation of an ideal American—that racist Middle-Class, White, Christian Male, himself one who has never existed.

Liberals are certainly not left of an imagined center. They are not progressive. I argue, they cannot be progressive. Populist conservatives are little more than proud authoritarians. We can see their lack of progressivity through simple observation. They simply cannot look forward. They choose not to look forward while liberals claim to choose to look forward. However, this disposition to look back should not be used to oppose liberals to conservatives as progressives. Liberals are entirely backward looking. It’s just that liberals look back to an imagined complex of ideals to find peace and harmony whereas conservatives look back to find authority and stability. To be sure, both want to bolster the same corrupt capitalist culture.

Let’s drop the popular “progressives” tag, shall we? Let’s take liberals, “moderates” (whatever they are,) and conservatives, strip away their precious Binary, and replace it with something that will cause a critical stir. Insist on bringing conflict into the placid pond of popular American political discourse. These folks do, after all, have something in common. They are not-progressive; they are regressive. Within the popular social regressive movement, liberals and conservatives attempt to reach consensus about how to reconstruct a society that has yet to exist. They like to think the attempt to reach consensus enacts Democracy and celebrates a Liberty to do so. They believe this illustrates their superiority to an imagined other. It’s a matter of fact, that this is not the case.

Key to my claim: Social regressives project their disorder onto others, but projection of disorder is not enough to justify a stupid binary.

Not that we need to throw stupid titles around to talk about politics. I need not know or accept individual sentiment in every participant in a discourse community in order to participate in a political discussion. However, identity is important and we should be able to be honest about the form of rhetoric and space within social movements. Liberals and Conservatives are not members of wings of US politics. They not only share but actively cultivate the same regressive social space(s) in which they speak the same language and seek to fulfill similar if not the same objectives. They are already in consensus about the status quo. In addition, they are incapable of looking ahead. In other words, they share similar if not the same morality.

Liberalism and Conservativism may sound different because we have a recent past in which philosophers and theorists worked to construct distinct traditions. We have left those projects behind. Pointing to them does not make them relevant. 

desertcuties:

So, let me get this straight, Barack Obama ignores people who are here illegally, but his campagn has a contest ‘Dinner with Barak’ in which rule number says in order to enter you must BE A CITIZEN OF THE UNITED STATES. What a blaring turd this guy is.

Whose administration has increased the number of deportations?

“The Obama administration had deported about 1.06 million as of September 12, against 1.57 million in Bush’s two full presidential terms.”

Meanwhile, in American Politics

Mitt Romney has said that Russia is the United States’ biggest adversary.

In the US, white people used to look to black people to learn about themselves. We have a lengthy history of literary and political culture that aggressively examines the lives of black Americans in an effort to milk them for the mysteries of white culture. You’ll be our mirror, says 19th and 20th Century Mr. & Mrs. White Folk.

It strikes me what with the re-emergence of the popular Birther movement this election cycle that white culture seems determined it has exhausted black Americans as a resource for the understanding the mysteries of whiteness. Now, white America is ready to return the favor, is willing to explain to black folks what lies deep within their dark anti-American hearts.

Black Laughter has given way to White Testimony.

dagRepeat: Social conservatives do not want to regulate abortion, birth control, marriage, and families. They want to regulate bodies.

It’s not about birth control, it’s about regulating both sex and women’s bodies.

It’s not about abortion, it’s about regulating both reproduction and women’s bodies.

It’s not about marriage, it’s about regulating (hetero)sexuality.

It’s not about families, it’s about regulating fatherhood while subjugating mothers and daughters.

Do not permit your socially conservative friends to get away with ignoring regressive white masculinity, sexism, heterosexism, and misogyny.

What we can learn from Rush Limbaugh’s recent hateful ranting to Rick Santorum’s weak catechismal understanding of reproduction and sexuality is that social conservatives do not understand biology, anatomy, medicine, sexuality, and reproduction. And they aren’t interested in understanding. Don’t permit them to be authoritarian dunces when talking to them. Focus your discourse. Insist they confess their ideological demands.

Common Sense Nonsense: The Myth of Both Sides

angryconservative:

I feel that everyone’s discriminated against in some way, shape or form. Jocks can be discriminated against, Men can be discriminated against, it’s all the same for both sides, Black or White, Male or Female.

From the conservatives’ Bushel of Common Sense comes the Ultimate Binary: every thing or idea has two, equal sides that combine to form a whole.

seltaire asked: Hm, I think I understand. I know, historically, that “liberty” was very narrow and ideological considering rights such as voting, representation, etc. were originally for land-owning Caucasian men. So the concept of “returning to liberty, etc.” is a “mythical” concept? Sorry, there was another term I was a bit confused by: “possessive whiteness.” What does that mean? (Google gave me no answer :- ( )

This is going to be a bit of a rambling response. But I’m hungry and posting this before I leave my flat to eat. Bear with me.

Liberty is actually a broad concept, drawn with broad strokes in an attempt to construct a reality for a varied populace—this is white power. It’s not narrowly defined.

The ideal American has always been white. How come? Why aren’t Asians ideal Americans? You never see Asian Americans representing ideal Americans. Never. How come it’s George Clooney and not Denzel Washington? Do you know how many people know who Ruby Dee is compared to, say, Katherine Hepburn. It’s not natural. We live in a society that privileges white identities, white people, white cultures. It’s constructed and that construction should be seen to prohibit liberty rather than define it.

Whiteness appropriates what it admires in cultures of color and then re-defines it as white. Liberty works in this way, too. The ideology of liberty changes with society but always maintains its white core.

Basically, white people are the default Americans. Everyone else is left to achieve whiteness. That’s how white power works. So, liberty is a white power term. Let’s not forget that you were at liberty to be an American citizen only if you were white until the middle of the 20th Century. Let’s not forget that white power is also sexist. Until recently, you were at liberty to own property and wealth only if you were the husband. The husband was the owner of his wife’s property in many places, right?

Liberty has yet to be freed from whiteness and from traditional masculinity.

If you notice from my other posts, today. Many white tumblr users explicitly argue that whiteness is under attack. They discuss this attack as an attack on the liberty to freely associate with others. Why is eugenics becoming popular again in the US? It’s an explicitly racist movment throughout US History, and yet libertarian conservatives are beginning to embrace it. Why? Because they feel liberty and freedom are part of their heritage, their racial identities.

I’ll be explicit. Whiteness is not a real ethnicity, a real race. It’s a legal and social construction. To refuse to betray white power is to participate in white supremacy. It’s that simple. To talk about liberty without addressing white power is to be ignore the reality that we are a racist society.