Category: Blog
Empire Files:
In the first installment of this multi-part series, Trump Expanding the Empire, Abby Martin debunks the notion that Trump is an anti-interventionist president, outlining his first two years of aggressive foreign policy that has expanded US wars and occupations.
Originally posted on Babble: Empire Files: Trump is Expanding the US Empire
Today in the absolutely clueless and proud of it department:
https://twitter.com/carolusrex0/status/1087410234908393473
Let’s see dude live on $25k, up to maybe 37-38k to start – starting salaries for Transportation Security Agency personnel – in Philadelphia, while paying for healthcare (he apparently lives in a country with a national health system), food, housing, transportation, potentially school loans, oh, and kids, and let’s see how “financially negligent” he ends up.
I really, truly, honestly can’t stand people, sometimes.
TSA salaries are here: https://www.federallawenforcement.org/tsa/
Originally posted on Babble: “That’s financially negligent.”
In the last campaign before his assassination, King campaigned for a democratic socialist agenda. Called the Poor People’s Campaign, demands included a guaranteed job, [redistribution] of land and capital, and more inclusion of the poor in state decision-making.
Yes, taking land and money from rich people and giving it to poor people was part of King’s dream.
King’s own views of capitalism are often sanitized in textbooks and mainstream media stories, but he could not have been for explicit:
“You can’t talk about solving the economic problem of the Negro without talking about billions of dollars. You can’t talk about ending the slums without first saying profit must be taken out of slums. You’re really tampering and getting on dangerous ground because you are messing with folk then,” King declared. “You are messing with captains of industry. Now this means that we are treading in difficult water, because it really means that we are saying that something is wrong with capitalism. There must be a better distribution of wealth, and maybe America must move toward a democratic socialism.”
Originally posted on Babble: There must be a better distribution of wealth…
This. This this this.
This is what people who #notallmen everything they can get their hands on are intentionally distracting you from when they do this.
Of course it isn’t all men. It’s never all of anything. Humans are complex and messy and complicated, and when people talk about privilege, if you’ve never acted like an ass in public, well.
Good for you.
But you don’t get, nor do you need, special congratulations for that – which is, of course, what you’re demanding when you do this.
You want to take any discussion of the larger issue and make it about you.
Well, muffin, that’s not a good look on you.
If it ain’t you, then don’t make it about you. But we’re never going to fix this crap if we have to make everything about you, all the time.
And I don’t think that being white or a man means you behave in a certain way. But it does allow you to behave in a certain way, if you chose, generally without consequences. In public, in the classroom, throughout your life. That’s privilege.
So, so good.
Archiving this from a Facebook post.
Okay, so.
I was really hesitant to even post about this because… oh, lordy. Reasons.
So I get done with my therapy session yesterday and I get a Lyft home.
The driver was nice enough, pretty personable… offered to help me into his car (he was driving a delivery van, of all things, so quite a step up for my gimp behind to work my way into. Anyway.) He’s rather chatty, as a certain set of Lyft and Uber drivers tend to be, which is generally great. They’re usually quite nice.
Except.
He was around my age (for some reason, he needed to tell me he was born in the late sixties), and really needed me to know he dated “a couple of cute girls” in my housing development, a few years back; that Terrestria is known for “great looking girls,” and how he’s been in several local heavy metal bands.
Something, just something, ticked a warning switch in the back of my head that said, “um. Straight dude, be careful.”
Which, honestly, I haven’t really felt – at least to that degree, that sense of “is this paranoia, or do I have a reason to actually feel unsafe?” – in a while.
Maybe there was something about being a hundred percent vulnerable. I’m in a complete stranger’s car, and who knows what may happen if he decides he’s not dealing with fags today… my best-case scenario is that he pulls over, kicks me out, and I get another car home.
Best case.
Worst case? I dunno what happens. I am a moderately disabled gay man who’s been jumped before. Granted, it was years ago, but… that’s not exactly an experience that you really get over. If he decided to get physical, there’d be very little I could do to actually defend myself. I’ll fall over if you look at me sideways.
I decide – because I’m instantly 19 again and it’s suddenly 1989 and I’m hanging out in the parking lot across from the Cellar (Bakersfield will relate) – that I’m just going to try and keep things light, but I’ll scrupulously avoid disclosing a thing about me personally.
So, of course, his next question is, “do you have any kids?”
“Ooooohhh, no.” (If he’d been gay and pushing 50, he’d easily have read between the lines, because he’d have been here before, himself.)
At least he didn’t really push that particular line of questioning any further.
So, the tough bits:
I could have done any number of things that weren’t me – at this fucking age, having been out this long – intentionally closeting myself, or making shitty assumptions about this person.
Yeah, they weren’t great. I know that. I accept that.
I was also scared shitless.
Please try to see that, too.
I dunno what the right choice should have been. I dunno that there even is one.
But I do know that I feel exhausted, that in 2019, that this shit is still happening.
babble 