Monday morning
I slept like a rock after the day of chores, and with T back in the house, but now I'm awake. It's a Maids Monday, but we're pretty much ready for it because I did all the prep yesterday. And it's the last day before Election Day, although 77,317,453 people have already voted, which is almost half of the total turnout in 2020. So many early
( Read more... )
I hadn't focused on how most gun violence victims are men - over 80% in the US. There has been discussion in the US recently about how boys and young men are finding it more difficult to succeed and that it isn't fair to lump all males into the category of "oppressor". Gender roles oppress everybody, and capitalism oppresses everybody who has to work for a living.
There are a lot of discussions online about our election, of course, and yesterday I was reading an exchange between somebody who called Democrats "center-right" and somebody who loyally supports Democrats because of LGBTQ rights, especially same-sex marriage. I've long felt that instead of focusing on the benefits of marriage that we should focus on benefits for EVERYBODY. For example, a lot of LGBTQ people wanted marriage so they could join their employed spouse's health insurance. Why can't we have government health insurance for EVERYBODY, regardless of marriage? And with all the other benefits given to spouses, why can't we just let a person designate another person as a beneficiary on their benefits form, why does it have to be a "spouse"? It seems to me that extending marriage benefits to same-sex partners is a "center-right" policy, in that it preserves the exclusive rights of legal marriage rather than extending benefits to everybody and every family.
And I hear you with respect to racism and sexism - rather than obsessing over residual bigotry, just extend universal benefits to all. Increase the minimum wage so a working parent is above the poverty line. Provide free education, health care, child care, mass transit, so everybody who wants to work can hold down a job.
But it's a lot easier for Democrats to wave a rainbow flag at Gay Pride and to march with black leaders on Martin Luther King Day and to talk about all kinds of diversity, while not doing much to help working families of any race, ethnicity, or gender combination.
Reply
For 1 women who dies through a violent act, count, maybe, 10 men (don't know how many children to include) who get killed and nobody gives a fuck or thinks "hey, if every day, 10 people lose their lives here because of violence or theft, then we are a horrible society!".
Welll, to be fair, the proportion of males in the statistics for deaths through gun violence also comes together like this because, if speaking about gang violence or violence committed by criminal organizations (no matter if guns involved or not) - the perpetrators are mostly emen, and the male victims often are from other - competitor - gangs/organizations. Or from parties like the police or customs who try to stop or prevent their business.
But, on the other hand, also many innocent people die in between if two rivaling gangs meet on the street and start a shootout.
Then count the usual crime on top of it...
How probable is it for a man to become victim of random voilence committed by anyone who suddenly passes him by or pops up out of nowhere, someone which he doesn't even know personally?
Or become a victim of theft?
It's not women who are exceptionally vulnerable here, but men are nearly hit as many times as them, if not a little bit more. Because of the factor "a man who commits a crime against a woman is considered a corward".
And female victims of crime are cared about or at least have like half a dozen organizations which they can go to with their story, receiving empathy for it - but where the heck do man go? Except, maybe, if it was violence because of his homosexuality?
All who approach this gap are either called "bigots" or members of the far right, partly the far right even is the only fraction which take this gap on the board (just to get future sympathizers or new members).
And then, there you stand in between as a guy who might need help - and you get to experience that nobody gives a fuck about you because of your sex, that your life practically is considered as "expendable" by society... And then anyone from here, from these countries of the West, wants to judge the horrible human rights situation in third or second world countries. While the situation at home is quite questionable too because of the luxury of narrow-minded intellectual ideologies. Fine... (not)
What I'd be for is: Approaching problems strategically. Meet and fetch people from the place where they stand in their life. And look what you can do for them in the problem situations they have.
Regardless of such stupid ideologies like from Identity Politics. Neither prefer someone, nor disadvantage anyone - except, maybe, for anything they did themselves and which they can be held responsible for.
Skin color, heritage, sex identity, sexuality - all those things are aspects of your personality which you couldn't choose consciously like simply grabbing something from a shelf. But what you can choose is: If being an asshole, if being unrealiable, if not wanting to quit drugs (even if they got you into trouble several times and notable don't do your health any good), of if exploiting air organizations or structures just for your own benefit.
Reply
I think, the most important thing to me in this would be that institutions, like hospitals and such, don't treat you like a stranger to the person in question if you are "just only" the partner, but not a spouse.
I feel like faintly remembering that I once wrote something small on this too, or somewhere in between a larger entry...
That, by extending the classic marriage to gays, the petit bourgeois conservative image of what to achieve or do with one's life, founding a family with biological kids and building a house, was just extended to gays too.
And they fucking ate that shit. Copycat the crap now.
On a systematic level, it appears to me like "the system" let that happen because the meaningful people in it recognized "let them have their petit bourgeois dream - they'll still be faithful capitalists and faithful servants to us; they gonna be even the more because the petit bourgeois dream firmly chains them to the need of making money for a family".
Making gay marriage legal had fewer disadvantages to "the system" than staying with the previous strategy to let it be exclusive for heterosexual couples. On top, it got a topic which is frequently fought over from the table.
The reason to complain about this is: Once walking on a pathway that wouldn't necessarily lead you to have kids of your own, made people think about and discover other types of "happiness". Different ways to lead a life, and none is automatically worth lesser than living in the petit bourgeois style just because you don't mary and breed.
With opening marriage to gays, and implementing an agenda around it which includes own kids and everything, just like heterosexual couples. I feel like this kind of "not following a petit bourgeois lifestyle, but getting happy with one's life even though" has quite disappeared to the sidelines.
Although this is an age where you should best congratulate everyone who decides against having a biological child!
...Yeah, it feels like the usual conservatism about one's personal lifestyle had been extended to another "audience" and that now tries to live it unquestionedly in the same way like everyone else.
Biological barriers in that are overcome through surrogate mothers (in countries where it's legal; here it isn't) and whatnot - , and, in the end, gays turn into the same very image of sucking up resources like all heterosexual people which have nothing else in their heads than their petit bourgeois dreamy dream.
Reply
What's the fucking trouble or reason to shrink back to take in a child which is already a couple of years old and raise it as "one's own"? Doesn't it regard you as its parent just the same, if it doesn't know anybody else in that role to it? Doesn't it regard you as its parent just the same if it experiences you as a care person to it, unlike how its mothers or other biological relatives have behaved towards it?
What's the problem with just finding "child is a child, it doesn't care about biology or whatever, as long as it experiences you treating it well"?
Insisting on biological children as a gay person, while not dropping the pride once to do what creates you a biological child the natural way ( = heterosexual sex without contraception) - it seems to me like somethng quite egoistic. It shows a lot how it's not about the child, but about some kind of dreamy image that someone carries within their head and how much they don't want to come down from it because reality, maybe, says "no" to their dreamy images and plans.
Same for heterosexual people/couples who move heaven and hell to get a biological child while nature clearly says to them "no, you ought not to replicate; that's how life can be; deal with it or just drop dead immediately".
All the other things you mention - well, let's say... before getting to that, before being able to let mututal responsibilities and rights be legally registered without having to marry or become relatves formally, let's first stay with those things which have the higher probability to convince the masses in favor of it.
I mean... it's so far away from the social mainstream these days, you'd have literally no chance to get this turned into reality at this point in time. No matter how desirable it would be.
One thing is to convince people - and then another subject are institutions from "the system" which currently see their benefit in keeping up the social current order between people.
(You don't get to revoke ca. 400 years of focusing on the "nuclear family" quickly just like that with a spell or so.)
Reply
Leave a comment