I've got the double barrel of an extreme pain level and spotty 'net right now, so I will try to keep this short and sweet:
After the fiscal cliff deal was passed in the house, GOP leadership stopped Hurricane Sandy relief from coming to the floor...as one of the democrats said in the house during the outrage that followed, this would not have happened if it was a red state...I have tried to not believe this, but this seems to be absolutely true...
Which is why I want to reiterate a statement I made a while back:
We need a cap on how much federal money a state can get compared to how much federal money a state puts out.
New York and New Jersey are among many of the (mostly blue) states that fund the lifestyles of people in the South. The same states that send members to the House that oppose the so-called 'socialist' policies of 'tax and spend' liberals have been sucking on the teats of states like New York for years, while states like New York (which, by the way, is still mostly rural, with 1/5 of the land being hardwood forest) have a terribly hard time affording things like teaching our children actual science instead of creationism...which are promises we've made to our citizens.
Bad things happen. Hurricanes happen, earthquakes happen, acid clouds happen...because of this, it would not be fair for us to completely pull the social safety net out from under states like Alabama, Louisiana, Georgia, and the like, but it should disgust anyone who votes for 'fiscal conservatism' that states that send people to Washington DC who want to cut taxes seem okay with taking money from people who disagree with them. Therefore we should arbitrarily draw a line. My preferred line is this: No state should receive over $1.05 in federal dollars for every $1.00 they put into federal dollars, and no state should get less than $0.95 for every $1.00 they put in...I also think that unpredictable natural disasters should not be a part of this calculation at all. If a state cannot prepare for a disaster because it's never happened before (say they've never encountered a Category 2 hurricane before, or an F3 tornado) then we can't very well expect them to build houses to withstand such things, can we? Natural disasters should not even be a part of this calculation, honestly...but I think the constant mollycoddling of these states by the donor states is why they are so nasty about sharing the money THAT THEY DIDN'T MAKE, ANYWAYS.
If you people in the red states want to not have marriage equality, fact-based education or other things found in civilized countries, you're welcome to do so (as long as you abide by the full faith and credit clause,) but I think asking the civilized states to fund your lifestyle choices is just terribly wrong...
Over one-hundred years of sucking at the teats of New York and her siblings has made these red states fat, lazy and stupid, and now they are just damned mean...If they feel they must stop federal dollars that are going to the people who paid into the damn fund (FOR A CHANGE!) then the last thing they should get is a shiny new Air Force Base on New York's dime, right?
So, to reiterate, here's the petition.
Wednesday, January 2, 2013
Monday, December 17, 2012
If you murder someone, you are mentally ill, full stop.
If you murder someone...not kill out of self-defense, or kill as part of a job (whether you think that's a legitimate job or not is unimportant) or kill accidentally...but deliberately take a life, there is something wrong in your brain. There are people, right now, who are using that fact to try to either promote or attack gun control, when the answer to gun violence will always require both mental health services and sane gun laws.
There is a legitimate concern that when we state the above-that murdering someone is diagnostic criteria, in and of itself, for a mental illness-we are restigmatizing those facing mental illness as crazy murders. Certainly, there are people who will choose to believe that in stating this I mean that all people who are mentally ill are potential murderers, but that could not be further from the truth.
To put this in perspective, let's take three people...we'll call them Abe, Bob and Carl. Abe, Bob and Carl are all physically ill. Abe has a norovirus, and is puking and crapping his brains out even as we speak. Bob fell down skiiing and tore muscles in his back and Carl has a terminal form of cancer and less than a month to live. NO ONE in the real world would say that since Carl has a really extreme illness, Bob and Abe aren't sick, and don't need treatment. No one would say that since Bob and Abe don't have cancer, they aren't really sick, and no one would say that since Bob did it to himself he's not sick. We all agree there is something wrong with their bodies.
When you murder, you can murder because you can't think in an ordered manner, you can kill without understanding you're killing. This is the kind of murder where we find people not guilty because of their mental illness. You killed, but you could not understand your own actions and you can't understand a trial or a sentence. Your mental illness, in this case, is so big that it overrules everything else. You're the mental illness version of the guy with cancer, your brain is a runaway train and it may or may not be able to be stopped. We do not judge if the damage to the brain is caused by a genetic condition, by a trauma to the brain, or your drug use, or if your mom stabbed you in the brain with a carving knife...we recognize that whatever the cause, you have a severe impairment as a result of it.
You might murder because of a mental illness that is transient. You may have the mental equivalent of poor Abe, above. Most people will get a norovirus at least once in their life and will describe it as the sickest they have ever been. I, personally, have had puke-inducing chemo pills that I would rather take than ever face a norovirus again. You could be so sick you didn't understand what you were doing at the time. You could be sick from a virus, an injury, even from a trauma caused by your own emotional reaction to stuff. You could be sick from an underlying condition that only bothers you sometime (consider the kids who get confusional migraine, or the people who kill themselves during cluster headaches.) You may or may not have known better when you murdered, that's a question for the courts, but you certainly were not capable of ordered thought when you murdered.
You might murder because of a community or shared delusion. There are people who want to call these cultural reasons...reasons of poverty, gang violence, etc. If you have been raised to believe the only way to escape your situation is murder, you have believed the delusion of another...maybe that delusion was plausible, but it is still a delusion. If you have been taught by your mother that your only hope is joining a gang where you have to kill a person to become a 'man,' or you have been taught by your mother that your only hope is killing a person with green eyes because they are lizardmen from planet X and they will eat you, you have believed a delusion, and we treat them (medically) the same, with education (and sometimes medication.) Think about not only people 'raised with' these shared delusions, but those who kill because of a powerful leader, the people we often call (incorrectly) cult leaders. These delusions might make perfect sense at the time...your brain may, in fact, be considered 'normal,' but you're still under the effects of a mental illness...even if the organic damage behind it (if any) resides in another person's skull.
Any of these reasons is a mental illness. They do not represent the full spectrum of mental illness in the universe. THEY DO NOT REPRESENT MOST MENTAL ILLNESSES. The vast majority of mental illnesses are nothing like this. To go back to the 'physical' illness example, most of us have vomited at some point in our lives....but most of us have not vomited up our organs. Mental illness is like puking, we're all going to face it at some point, either as a result of our own actions (ie: drinking too much), as a result of stuff we can't control (a blow to the stomach, food poisoning), or just dumb genetics...but the existence of these mental illnesses (I don't want to call them minor mental illnesses, because they are serious to those experiencing them) and the fact that they are mental illnesses doesn't change the fact that there are more severe and life-threatening forms of mental illness.
The events in Newtown do not call for an increase in sane gun laws or better access to mental health services. Either of those things could've helped. The events call for BOTH sane gun laws AND better access to mental health services...because no one who is capable of thinking in an ordered, rational manner is going to murder someone (They could kill them accidentally, or as part of a job, and that's a valid discussion, but it's not murder.)
If anyone, on either side of the debate brings up that OR... If they say that we can have (or that we need) sane gun laws or better access to mental health service, shout them down. We need BOTH.
There is a legitimate concern that when we state the above-that murdering someone is diagnostic criteria, in and of itself, for a mental illness-we are restigmatizing those facing mental illness as crazy murders. Certainly, there are people who will choose to believe that in stating this I mean that all people who are mentally ill are potential murderers, but that could not be further from the truth.
To put this in perspective, let's take three people...we'll call them Abe, Bob and Carl. Abe, Bob and Carl are all physically ill. Abe has a norovirus, and is puking and crapping his brains out even as we speak. Bob fell down skiiing and tore muscles in his back and Carl has a terminal form of cancer and less than a month to live. NO ONE in the real world would say that since Carl has a really extreme illness, Bob and Abe aren't sick, and don't need treatment. No one would say that since Bob and Abe don't have cancer, they aren't really sick, and no one would say that since Bob did it to himself he's not sick. We all agree there is something wrong with their bodies.
When you murder, you can murder because you can't think in an ordered manner, you can kill without understanding you're killing. This is the kind of murder where we find people not guilty because of their mental illness. You killed, but you could not understand your own actions and you can't understand a trial or a sentence. Your mental illness, in this case, is so big that it overrules everything else. You're the mental illness version of the guy with cancer, your brain is a runaway train and it may or may not be able to be stopped. We do not judge if the damage to the brain is caused by a genetic condition, by a trauma to the brain, or your drug use, or if your mom stabbed you in the brain with a carving knife...we recognize that whatever the cause, you have a severe impairment as a result of it.
You might murder because of a mental illness that is transient. You may have the mental equivalent of poor Abe, above. Most people will get a norovirus at least once in their life and will describe it as the sickest they have ever been. I, personally, have had puke-inducing chemo pills that I would rather take than ever face a norovirus again. You could be so sick you didn't understand what you were doing at the time. You could be sick from a virus, an injury, even from a trauma caused by your own emotional reaction to stuff. You could be sick from an underlying condition that only bothers you sometime (consider the kids who get confusional migraine, or the people who kill themselves during cluster headaches.) You may or may not have known better when you murdered, that's a question for the courts, but you certainly were not capable of ordered thought when you murdered.
You might murder because of a community or shared delusion. There are people who want to call these cultural reasons...reasons of poverty, gang violence, etc. If you have been raised to believe the only way to escape your situation is murder, you have believed the delusion of another...maybe that delusion was plausible, but it is still a delusion. If you have been taught by your mother that your only hope is joining a gang where you have to kill a person to become a 'man,' or you have been taught by your mother that your only hope is killing a person with green eyes because they are lizardmen from planet X and they will eat you, you have believed a delusion, and we treat them (medically) the same, with education (and sometimes medication.) Think about not only people 'raised with' these shared delusions, but those who kill because of a powerful leader, the people we often call (incorrectly) cult leaders. These delusions might make perfect sense at the time...your brain may, in fact, be considered 'normal,' but you're still under the effects of a mental illness...even if the organic damage behind it (if any) resides in another person's skull.
Any of these reasons is a mental illness. They do not represent the full spectrum of mental illness in the universe. THEY DO NOT REPRESENT MOST MENTAL ILLNESSES. The vast majority of mental illnesses are nothing like this. To go back to the 'physical' illness example, most of us have vomited at some point in our lives....but most of us have not vomited up our organs. Mental illness is like puking, we're all going to face it at some point, either as a result of our own actions (ie: drinking too much), as a result of stuff we can't control (a blow to the stomach, food poisoning), or just dumb genetics...but the existence of these mental illnesses (I don't want to call them minor mental illnesses, because they are serious to those experiencing them) and the fact that they are mental illnesses doesn't change the fact that there are more severe and life-threatening forms of mental illness.
The events in Newtown do not call for an increase in sane gun laws or better access to mental health services. Either of those things could've helped. The events call for BOTH sane gun laws AND better access to mental health services...because no one who is capable of thinking in an ordered, rational manner is going to murder someone (They could kill them accidentally, or as part of a job, and that's a valid discussion, but it's not murder.)
If anyone, on either side of the debate brings up that OR... If they say that we can have (or that we need) sane gun laws or better access to mental health service, shout them down. We need BOTH.
Thursday, September 13, 2012
Up is down, Right is left, what Liberal really means.
When the internet was fairly new, the word 'irregardless' actually appeared fairly frequently on it. If you use this word in a forum today, it's pretty unlikely that you'll get away with it. Someone, somewhere, will correct you. You'll even get corrected if you use it ironically. Using ironically incorrectly out of a sense of irony gets silence, by the way.
I only bring this up for one reason: We can, collectively, decide that we're not going to tolerate the misuse of our language and change the dialog. It can occur in a few different ways. In the case of 'irregardless,' we mostly used shame and humor to end it. 'Irregardless' is actually a great example, because it's not a word you're going to use because they sound alike (people who 'think' in sounds, for example, might use the wrong 'your' because they are homophones, and they 'hear' their text, even if they know which is right cognitively) and it's not a word you're going to use because it has an irregular tense or second meaning (hanged vs. hung, lighted versus lit, inflammable, etc.). The only people for whom 'irregardless' makes more sense than 'regardless' are those for whom their first language allows a double negative to mean a really strong negative. In English, however, "not not doing something" means "doing something." (In other languages, not not doing something may mean REALLY not doing something...long time readers may know I think every human should experience a different language at least once, this is an example of something you might not understand without ever getting a different language experience.)
In the grand scheme of things, the word 'Liberal' isn't the word I'd fix if I lived in a world where I could press a button and get everyone to use one word correctly. If I had that button, the word I would pick would be evolution. Seriously, that is the word I would pick. Change in relative frequency of alleles in a population over time (or equivalent definition) or GTFO. Unlike Liberal (and Conservative), the word evolution requires a bit more background to be understood, and the raging ignorance of the people who use it wrong, and the self-indulgent smugness of some who use it only mostly right means fixing that problem means changing more than a lack of knowledge. Liberal is not a word that is being used incorrectly because of stupidity, it's a word being used incorrectly with the intention of discrediting more than 50% of the English speaking world.
In the Newspeak of the Republican right, Liberal means telling people what to believe and regulating the hell out of everything. I use the word Newspeak very intentionally here, because Newspeak includes the idea that one can kill ideas by changing the meaning of words, removing certain metaphors, etc. I believe the use of the word Liberal in a way completely contrary to the meaning of the word is an attempt to kill liberal ideas, which is why someone will look you dead in the eye, say something liberal, and say "but I am not a Liberal."
The above sticker sums up the literal differences between the Liberal point of view and the Conservative point of view. The distinction between the two actually comes from the Protestant traditions of Christianity, and historically that is where the dichotomy comes from. You might not like the above sentiment, but it is accurate.
Liberalism essentially states that as the facts come in, we have to change to deal with them. Liberalism notices that a thing is not fair or not right, and says we must change to accommodate this fact. Liberalism includes the belief that in order to have the best world we can have, we need to base our laws and other decisions on facts, not beliefs. For example, if we notice that a factory's workers are dying of black lung, Liberalism says "no factory should be killing people with black lung," it doesn't actually say you have to close the factory. If, for example, your competitor's workers are not dying of black lung, Liberalism says "you should do what your competitor is doing to prevent black lung. Again, Liberalism is facts based. Liberalism is sometimes called progressiveness, because it indicates a forward movement. As facts come in, we have to adapt to them. It is a type of evolution, but since most of you use that word wrong, it might be better to just define it as a change, based on facts. This change is as good as the facts. Sometimes the facts aren't very good, so we fail to adapt correctly. You can sum the Liberal stance this way: If something is not working, we need to try new things. It is better to fail by trying new ways than to fail by repeating things that don't work. If we treat all things as equal, the Liberal point of view errs on the side of what seems to hurt the least number of people.
Conservatism states that regardless of the facts, we need to keep things the same, that we need to conserve traditions because they work. For example, some conservatives in Islamic countries point out the importance of Muslim contributions in Math and Science, and point out that those contributions come from gender-unequal teaching. Since these contributions arose in situations where women got less (or no) education, they believe that reducing (or removing) the modern tendency to allow girls to be educated will conserve the tradition of Math and Science in that scenario. You can sum up the Conservative stance this way: If something is not working, we need to return to the prior way we did things to repair it. If nuclear energy is dangerous, we should go to coal, if kids are not learning in school we should return to having parents teach their kids, if divorce is happening it must be because of the new kinds of marriage, not a flaw in the old kinds. If we treat all things as equal, the Conservative point of view errs on the side of romanticizing the past. The assumption that because we didn't perceive an injustice (especially as children) that injustice in the past did not exist.
Both sides have their flaws. Liberals (myself included) are often quick to discard things when the facts come in to prove them wrong. This means we tend to get caught up in fashions and fads. We also tend to be more interested in new facts, not old facts. Liberals who are not good at distinguishing emotional appeals from actual facts can be swayed into really stupid points of view. Although they are not the majority of anti-vaxxers, the liberal anti-vaxxers are the best example of this as far as I am concerned. These are people who believe the 'new facts' about vaccines rather than the 'old facts' without actually understanding either. Liberals tend to get screwed up the most in situations where there is no way out that doesn't hurt someone. A very recent example of this was when the movement of the Space Shuttle to CSC resulted in the felling of 400 trees in LA. Educated populace=good. Trees=good. I watched fellow liberals bitch each other out over this one. My own answer, by the way, is fell the trees and replace them with better street trees. This is because in the past 20 years, we have totally learned what makes a great street tree, and now we've got way better data on planning them. My view here is because I lived through Arborgeddon*....and so did my trees.
So Liberal is often portrayed as meaning people who want to force changes on you that won't work, based on arcane or even fictitious things that are fuzzy or hard to understand. This isn't completely untrue, except liberalism requires facts to work, and generally believes that if you get the facts, you become invested in the change, and you want to try the new way. That may be overgenerous from the point of view of some people, but I am what is called a Libertarian Liberal, which means that I tend to err on the side of freedom. There are some situations where I go all the way to the other side of it and become an authoritarian Liberal... mostly science-based stuff. I have a big problem with people, for example, who kill their kids because they hate science (blood transfusions, anti-vaxxers, allergy ignorers [but also bubblewrap parents], anti-gay Quiverfullers who quintuple their chances of having gay sons, some crazy diet promoters, etc.) and I could probably get behind some very authoritarian ways to fight them (I generally err on the side of capitalism, for example, when we pay people to vaccinate their kids, we can save money...but that's hard for people to understand and we're never going to get a majority behind it.)
The ideal Liberal actually doesn't dislike the old way because the old way is old. I actually think stay-at-home parenting, for example, is incredibly important. I was late to finish college, and late to start a career, because we decided, in my family, that my kid needed a stay-at-home parent. One of us worked, the other stayed home. Of course, we were both women, so most Conservatives would say it does not count. I should add that, again, facts-based beliefs are what are important, here. For example, we live in a world where stay-at-home parenting is not something most can afford on a single salary, and I see the solution to this not as 'returning women to the kitchen,' but as a collection of things, which could include everything from group parenting to a living wage. Stay at home parenting is preferable to many things, but poverty isn't preferable to non-poverty.
In an ideal world, every time someone claims Liberalism is about regulating shit to death or forcing people to do things against their will, or forcing people to stop doing what works, people should point and laugh at (or at least pity) the deranged idiot claiming it. Likewise, every time a "conservative" advocates a return to things that did not work in the past, we should scoff at them. In the case of the meaning of the words Conservative and Liberal, we should all agree that the new meanings, which are NOT facts-based, and NOT what the words meant in the past, are just stupid.
*Contrary to popular belief, snow in Buffalo in October, especially mid-October, is very damn rare, and when it does happen it melts before it hits the ground. I had to bring zucchini and lettuce inside during this storm. It's not that uncommon to have a little snow in the air on Halloween, but in my ten years in Buffalo, the killing frost for my garden has always happened in the end of October/beginning of November. I think most of you who think this have confused Buffalo with Syracuse, which is almost 2 weeks ahead of us in this. Most Halloweens in Syracuse (or where Phoe is from, east of Syracuse) are cold as hell. We always planned our costumes to be worn with heavy jackets.
I only bring this up for one reason: We can, collectively, decide that we're not going to tolerate the misuse of our language and change the dialog. It can occur in a few different ways. In the case of 'irregardless,' we mostly used shame and humor to end it. 'Irregardless' is actually a great example, because it's not a word you're going to use because they sound alike (people who 'think' in sounds, for example, might use the wrong 'your' because they are homophones, and they 'hear' their text, even if they know which is right cognitively) and it's not a word you're going to use because it has an irregular tense or second meaning (hanged vs. hung, lighted versus lit, inflammable, etc.). The only people for whom 'irregardless' makes more sense than 'regardless' are those for whom their first language allows a double negative to mean a really strong negative. In English, however, "not not doing something" means "doing something." (In other languages, not not doing something may mean REALLY not doing something...long time readers may know I think every human should experience a different language at least once, this is an example of something you might not understand without ever getting a different language experience.)
In the grand scheme of things, the word 'Liberal' isn't the word I'd fix if I lived in a world where I could press a button and get everyone to use one word correctly. If I had that button, the word I would pick would be evolution. Seriously, that is the word I would pick. Change in relative frequency of alleles in a population over time (or equivalent definition) or GTFO. Unlike Liberal (and Conservative), the word evolution requires a bit more background to be understood, and the raging ignorance of the people who use it wrong, and the self-indulgent smugness of some who use it only mostly right means fixing that problem means changing more than a lack of knowledge. Liberal is not a word that is being used incorrectly because of stupidity, it's a word being used incorrectly with the intention of discrediting more than 50% of the English speaking world.
In the Newspeak of the Republican right, Liberal means telling people what to believe and regulating the hell out of everything. I use the word Newspeak very intentionally here, because Newspeak includes the idea that one can kill ideas by changing the meaning of words, removing certain metaphors, etc. I believe the use of the word Liberal in a way completely contrary to the meaning of the word is an attempt to kill liberal ideas, which is why someone will look you dead in the eye, say something liberal, and say "but I am not a Liberal."
Liberalism essentially states that as the facts come in, we have to change to deal with them. Liberalism notices that a thing is not fair or not right, and says we must change to accommodate this fact. Liberalism includes the belief that in order to have the best world we can have, we need to base our laws and other decisions on facts, not beliefs. For example, if we notice that a factory's workers are dying of black lung, Liberalism says "no factory should be killing people with black lung," it doesn't actually say you have to close the factory. If, for example, your competitor's workers are not dying of black lung, Liberalism says "you should do what your competitor is doing to prevent black lung. Again, Liberalism is facts based. Liberalism is sometimes called progressiveness, because it indicates a forward movement. As facts come in, we have to adapt to them. It is a type of evolution, but since most of you use that word wrong, it might be better to just define it as a change, based on facts. This change is as good as the facts. Sometimes the facts aren't very good, so we fail to adapt correctly. You can sum the Liberal stance this way: If something is not working, we need to try new things. It is better to fail by trying new ways than to fail by repeating things that don't work. If we treat all things as equal, the Liberal point of view errs on the side of what seems to hurt the least number of people.
Conservatism states that regardless of the facts, we need to keep things the same, that we need to conserve traditions because they work. For example, some conservatives in Islamic countries point out the importance of Muslim contributions in Math and Science, and point out that those contributions come from gender-unequal teaching. Since these contributions arose in situations where women got less (or no) education, they believe that reducing (or removing) the modern tendency to allow girls to be educated will conserve the tradition of Math and Science in that scenario. You can sum up the Conservative stance this way: If something is not working, we need to return to the prior way we did things to repair it. If nuclear energy is dangerous, we should go to coal, if kids are not learning in school we should return to having parents teach their kids, if divorce is happening it must be because of the new kinds of marriage, not a flaw in the old kinds. If we treat all things as equal, the Conservative point of view errs on the side of romanticizing the past. The assumption that because we didn't perceive an injustice (especially as children) that injustice in the past did not exist.
Both sides have their flaws. Liberals (myself included) are often quick to discard things when the facts come in to prove them wrong. This means we tend to get caught up in fashions and fads. We also tend to be more interested in new facts, not old facts. Liberals who are not good at distinguishing emotional appeals from actual facts can be swayed into really stupid points of view. Although they are not the majority of anti-vaxxers, the liberal anti-vaxxers are the best example of this as far as I am concerned. These are people who believe the 'new facts' about vaccines rather than the 'old facts' without actually understanding either. Liberals tend to get screwed up the most in situations where there is no way out that doesn't hurt someone. A very recent example of this was when the movement of the Space Shuttle to CSC resulted in the felling of 400 trees in LA. Educated populace=good. Trees=good. I watched fellow liberals bitch each other out over this one. My own answer, by the way, is fell the trees and replace them with better street trees. This is because in the past 20 years, we have totally learned what makes a great street tree, and now we've got way better data on planning them. My view here is because I lived through Arborgeddon*....and so did my trees.
So Liberal is often portrayed as meaning people who want to force changes on you that won't work, based on arcane or even fictitious things that are fuzzy or hard to understand. This isn't completely untrue, except liberalism requires facts to work, and generally believes that if you get the facts, you become invested in the change, and you want to try the new way. That may be overgenerous from the point of view of some people, but I am what is called a Libertarian Liberal, which means that I tend to err on the side of freedom. There are some situations where I go all the way to the other side of it and become an authoritarian Liberal... mostly science-based stuff. I have a big problem with people, for example, who kill their kids because they hate science (blood transfusions, anti-vaxxers, allergy ignorers [but also bubblewrap parents], anti-gay Quiverfullers who quintuple their chances of having gay sons, some crazy diet promoters, etc.) and I could probably get behind some very authoritarian ways to fight them (I generally err on the side of capitalism, for example, when we pay people to vaccinate their kids, we can save money...but that's hard for people to understand and we're never going to get a majority behind it.)
The ideal Liberal actually doesn't dislike the old way because the old way is old. I actually think stay-at-home parenting, for example, is incredibly important. I was late to finish college, and late to start a career, because we decided, in my family, that my kid needed a stay-at-home parent. One of us worked, the other stayed home. Of course, we were both women, so most Conservatives would say it does not count. I should add that, again, facts-based beliefs are what are important, here. For example, we live in a world where stay-at-home parenting is not something most can afford on a single salary, and I see the solution to this not as 'returning women to the kitchen,' but as a collection of things, which could include everything from group parenting to a living wage. Stay at home parenting is preferable to many things, but poverty isn't preferable to non-poverty.
In an ideal world, every time someone claims Liberalism is about regulating shit to death or forcing people to do things against their will, or forcing people to stop doing what works, people should point and laugh at (or at least pity) the deranged idiot claiming it. Likewise, every time a "conservative" advocates a return to things that did not work in the past, we should scoff at them. In the case of the meaning of the words Conservative and Liberal, we should all agree that the new meanings, which are NOT facts-based, and NOT what the words meant in the past, are just stupid.
*Contrary to popular belief, snow in Buffalo in October, especially mid-October, is very damn rare, and when it does happen it melts before it hits the ground. I had to bring zucchini and lettuce inside during this storm. It's not that uncommon to have a little snow in the air on Halloween, but in my ten years in Buffalo, the killing frost for my garden has always happened in the end of October/beginning of November. I think most of you who think this have confused Buffalo with Syracuse, which is almost 2 weeks ahead of us in this. Most Halloweens in Syracuse (or where Phoe is from, east of Syracuse) are cold as hell. We always planned our costumes to be worn with heavy jackets.
Thursday, September 6, 2012
Labgrrl on politics: I'm not any of the above and my king of the world view.
When I say I'm a liberal, it is because the liberal party, with its facts-based views, is the closest party to my beliefs. So, let me show what my king-of-the-world world would be like...the if Labgrrl was in charge view, not the 'liberal' view.
Let me make this clear. None of these points exist in a vacuum. The requirements for most of them are dependent upon the others existing. My view, for example, that a second DWI (or a first with massive modifications to the charge) should pretty much lock you up for life requires the sane drug policy, sane legal system and sane healthcare paradigms. It doesn't work for today.
#1. Sane Educational and Child-Rearing policies.
We should spend the hell out of money on education. Our policy should be facts-based, and it should be multidisciplinary. In a perfect world, we don't even need the kids to do 6 hours of school, or even more, because they are saturated with facts. They get facts at home, in their games, in their entertainment. Education should be based on what works, not arbitrary grade levels. Or even age. Educational policy makes sense, and the conservatives like to say we like to need to spend money to make money. We need to send money to make money on our kids. We need to fund the hell out of it. If it takes 10% of us being teachers, then that's what we need to do. Make it competitive. Encourage parents to want to have the smartest kind on the block. Encourage situations where kids too young to be educated in schools have access to an educated stay at home parent, educated parents make educated kids. Yes, I support a concept of professional parenthood. I think the world needs to change before we go there. People on the right who oppose this should explain why, if they so love the 1950s model of parenting and school, they are not willing to even spend 1950s era percentages of money on education. If you went to school in the 1970s, or the 1980s, there is a very strong chance your school was built as a result of post-WWII spending on schools. You probably went to school in a 20-30 year old building. Unless you went to school in a 70 year old building, from the first time those policies were funded (and in part with private funds.)
Addendum: This goes beyond merely being pro-choice, by the way. I believe pregnancy should never be accidental. We don't have the current science to do it well, but if you GENUINELY BELIEVE that life begins at conception, you should be preventing conception that isn't intentional, and providing support to keep those who make the choice to have children to be as healthy as possible when they make that choice. Let's be honest, a lot of people who are against birth control or abortion aren't against 'killing' the 'humans' that they believe begin at conception. More than half of naturally occurring conceptions NEVER IMPLANT...people who genuinely believe a conception makes a human, even before implantation, will acknowledge that humans enjoy sex, and preventing that accidental life from ending is the goal, not stopping people from having sex. If you oppose people having sex, don't LIE and say it is about life. Just admit you oppose people having sex. If you don't oppose people having sex, and you believe that life begins at conception, preventing ALL accidental pregnancy is a no-brainer... More, and better, forms of birth control...not less. Since too many people is a real thing in the world, we should also support those who chose to not have children. Raising a kid to adulthood is estimated to run about $300,000 at a minimum. Maybe we should think about giving a serious tax break to non-parents. Since everyone would be invested in having everyone's kid healthy and educated, maybe we should offer a living stipend to people who voluntarily choose to become intentionally infertile. If we all knew our own health statuses and the like, it would be a big deal. This is close to me right now for two reasons: 1. If my 20 year old kid gets sick because of the autoimmune shit I have, it will devastate me. If I could've known it was there, and it turns out to be genetic, I would've not had a kid...under any circumstances. 2. I'm currently on a drug treatment that causes thalidomide-level birth defects (Pregnancy category X) and is one of the worst of the worst on that list. Fortunately, that drug usually induces miscarriage across the board, but if I somehow got pregnant the fetus would probably die, and take me out with it. I had to have a frank talk with my doctor about conception prevention...and I'm in a monogamous relationship with someone of the same gender. Maybe everyone should understand their risks like I do? Maybe we shouldn't even think about getting pregnant unless we've at least had a screening for some things?
#2. Sane Healthcare and Work policies.
As with education, we should spend the hell out of money on healthcare. If you have an educated populace, you will have a healthier populace, but there are things we can do (some we do not yet have the science for) that will encourage people to be healthier. There was a time when these views were universal: Access to clean water, vaccination programs, healthy lunches, research-based advice on what to eat, etc. Prevent the preventable, try to reduce the unhealthy things based on lifestyle (again, this should be science based, not 'judgement' based), encourage the things that make long life, and stop ignoring the facts. For example, if you could have 3 people work for 6 hours each, and be unlikely to die of exhaustion related disease or stress-aggravated conditions, it should be brainless to think to hire 1 person and expect them to do those 18 hours of work in 12 hours. Most science professionals are in this position, understaffed and underpaid, and doing the work of two to three people, we should see overwork as as dangerous as it is. And it is. Those are just facts.
For example, contrary to what a lot of people preach, obesity is not a result of being lazy. My pulmonologist's clinic has a great group for people who have lung disease and want to lose weight (that can be very hard, to use me for example, I'm supposed to limit walking around, so, as you can imagine, the gym 3 days a week isn't happening) and nearly to a one, these people are working 10-12 hours a day, eating one high-calorie meal a day because it's all they have time for and the Burger King is between home and work. The successes in the program aren't the people who spend the right number of minutes at the gym or take on a fad diet. The successes in the program are the people who change their lives to bring things into the correct ratio for their bodies. If, for example, a person takes a 10% pay cut but goes down to an 8 hour day, they stop eating the one high calorie meal and break the cycle of wake up-go to work-eat-collapse from exhaustion-sleep, their blood pressure goes down, their cholesterol goes down, and if their health hasn't been wrecked, they have an overall better chance of living a long time.
This strikes home for me because I probably would not have gotten sick the way I got sick, or as young as I did, if I had been aware that my lifestyle was killing me. I did not work 12 hours a day, but I worked more than 8 most weekdays, and an additional 4-6 every day on the weekend. I went months without a day off. I was fortunate enough to have the skills required to not do the job-to fast food-to sofa-to bed thing, but I literally could not tell when the exhaustion was from lack of sleep or when my blood started to not get enough oxygen. It took almost 4 years before I even began to see that going months without a day off was *wrong.* We need to listen to the experts on this. We do. We need to completely change the way see a 'hard worker.' We need to work *smarter* instead of work harder. And yes, that might mean our future world has a 4 day a week workweek, or a 6 hour a day work day. I don't know. What I do know is that we can use technology and the like to reduce the number of work hours needed, and instead of having one person working 18 hours, we can have three people working six hours. Here's another thought. The reason a company will often hire one person to cramp 18 hours of work into 12 hours, instead of hiring three people for three 6-hour shifts is because of having to fund benefits for people. If we see healthcare and retirement benefits as something you get because you are born in a place that values your citizens, and separate them from the work place altogether, it becomes financially advantageous for the company to hire those three workers, who can keep on top of their health and wellness, instead of that one worker, who may well become disabled because they can't. I also think that people who can no longer work should have other opportunities other than doing nothing. More retraining, and more alternate means of doing work.
3. Rational drug views, and harsh penalties for violating the facts-based laws.
I manage, somehow, to piss off both sides on this one. I believe that every drug should be legal, over the counter, and taxed to hell (which MAKES US MONEY.) I believe we should have fully funded science based treatment programs. Those treatment programs will not just be for the guy who abuses cocaine. If you are 'that guy' who can't function without pot, the wake and bake dude whose life is fucked up because you spend every waking minute either stoned or trying to get stoned, then we need to treat the underlying condition that's causing that. If you've never met that guy, good for you, but those of us who've been friends with that guy know better. We need to see addiction as the problem, not what you're addicted to that's the problem. People should be allowed to experiment, preferably in a safe environment, with tested compounds, and the ability to get help if things go wrong. Yes, I do believe if you have a job that requires you to work 36 hours in a row once in a while to get out the top product, you should be able to go to the cocaine machine if that's how you want to do it. I also believe that if the thing that makes you cope with the crazy job is being able to melt into a warm pool of morphine-laced goo when you get home, that should be available. This view of mine is based on being in the real world. I know at least 20 products in your house that the designer was probably drugged when he made it. I know more health care providers in high-stress positions who are doing narcotics off the job than those who ARE NOT (some of them, who are in positions with drug tests, just drink instead.) We've rationalized this by "medicating" for many people who are only barely in need of their medication.We've got college kids on ADHD drugs because it makes them focused beyond what's normal for college kids. We are already doing this stuff, let's make it based on science instead of who holds the patent on your drug.
This means actual science, not fake science. So, yeah, if your drug of choice is bad for you, you don't get to claim that you want to support it because it helps another person's nausea. If you want it for escape from pain, then that's why you take it. If you take it because it feels good, that's why you take it. Don't lie about why you like it.
...and you don't take it while you're pregnant, because you don't get pregnant by accident in this world where I'm in charge.
This one makes my wife furious, but I believe in this scenario you have no excuse for a second DWI, for example, and you need to face the maximum possible penalty if you do it. Getting into a vehicle, and trying to control it, while you're under the effect of a drug that stops you from being able to control it is exactly like spraying bullets into a house. Sure, you MIGHT NOT hit anyone, but we'd never say it was okay because you might be able to do it. This one, too, may require a change in the way we do things. If we're on top of our health, and driving with a critically low blood sugar, we're as out of it as the guy with a few beers in him. Maybe there are people who CAN drink and drive...or maybe the solution is something else altogether. Maybe cars are just too big to be driven around by us...I don't pretend to know. However, if the world with rational drug laws, education and healthcare were to exist, people who tricked others into doing drugs, people who decided to be stupid when they knew better, and people who intentionally risked the lives of others could not be tolerated. Which leads to...
4. Educational and culturally based Prison reform.
I've worked for a prison, do not tell me that prisons do not form cultures. There is a subset of crimes that are heavily influenced by a person's culture, and putting them from that culture into prison culture is like substituting one addiction for another...it doesn't work. These aren't cultures based on your race, ethnicity or religion, but gang cultures and the like. Maybe you can't get released from prison on a gang offense unless you've learned a new trade, changed your name, removed all your tattoos and swear to never contact your old associates again. I DON'T KNOW. What we do know is that "punishment" rarely works and "rehabilitation" doesn't work often enough. So we need to change what we do. I have a suspicion, however, that the second you fix the drug laws, keep people healthy (including mental health), stop 'accidental,' pregnancy, educate people and put people to work....I suspect that suddenly the number of people in prisons goes down, and this MAKES US MONEY.
5.If you preach "American Exceptionalism," STOP DENYING IT IN THE NEXT BREATH.
If the United States is "The Land of Opportunity" and "The Greatest Place on Earth," and if capitalism is "The Best form of Financial Governance," if you believe these things are true, then facts-based government is something we should have no problem doing. This means healthcare and childcare, sane work rules and sane drug laws. It means schools based on what works, and hospitals based on what works, and prisons based on what works. IF THE UNITED STATES IS AS GREAT AS YOU CLAIM, WE CAN HOLD IT TO HIGH STANDARDS.
6. It should be competitive to get into the armed forces, and going to college should rely on the poverty draft and people with no other choices.
This may be the hardest cognitive change for anyone who has made it this far to deal with reading. Let's not lie. Let's not say that there are not bulletheads in the armed forces who are too stupid to breathe. LET'S NOT LIE ABOUT SHIT ANYMORE. I know this, some of my friends and family are (or have been) their commanding officers. There are a lot of members of the armed forces who are smart, savvy, dedicated to their country, people who follow rich familial military traditions, people who believe the military is a worthwhile endeavor. There are also people who join the military because they are "big dumb jocks" who think that's all they can do, or who join because there is nothing else they can do to get out of their community. We have intentionally created this military. On dark days, when I am in a bad mood, I think we do this because we give them guns and technology. Think of it, if the only people who can operate a tank are too stupid to foment a revolution, those are TOTALLY the people who the government needs to be driving a tank, right? I've had one of these bulletheads stand not three feet from me and say "I'm just serving out the rest of my time until I can get out and" then proceed to list a slew of benefits he can actually get (as a veteran) and then a bunch of benefits he must've imagined. He believes this because of his recruiter, and that man is the last person who should be representing our country in the military. I've got another friend who constantly complains his life after the army is the same as his life before it...he was promised a lot by the poverty draft.
If you're in high school, and you show exceptional abilities, we should recruit the hell out of you. We do this to an extent. I won't lie. I was a full-scale hippy in high school, and after I took my PSATs, the Marines contacted me once a week for the next year..even though I said very mean things to the recruiter. Phoenix, whose standardized test scores were better than mine, was recruited even harder, but that's her story, not mine. Everyone in the same 'gifted kids' classes as mine got recruited hard. NOT A ONE JOINED THE MILITARY (Well, I don't know that none did EVER, but we all planned to go to college).
We like doing tests on our kids. If a kid shows ridiculously high spatial reasoning or problem solving, or is exceedingly strong, or is exceptionally curious or whatever, we should recruit them. The Army and the Navy should fight over the smartest kid in the High School like college recruiters over the best football player in the state.
Our founders did not want a professional military, and we basically ignore that, so let's admit that we believe they were wrong and make a professional military that's hard to get into and has serious benefits for the people who do it. Something big...more than 'we will get you out of poverty.' Furthermore, let's change it so that you don't need to be able to march for miles in the sun to serve your country. You know that kid drinking Mountain Dew and pwning everyone in the FPS? I would like HIM to be piloting the drones. If we're going to use that technology, do it.
Maybe we need another military force altogether for the smartest kid on the block? Maybe we need the actual Chair Force...or have the NOAA and Public health people better funded. I don't know. I want my military to have the biggest brains in the world. I want my government to take the only guy I ever met who was scary smarter than me and recruit him into military intelligence...I want my government to be giving the department of defense cancer research money to the government-sponsored lab with 6 people born here with a combined IQ above 1100 instead of the 60 people, half of whom are post-docs from other countries only here until they the credential or experience their government sent them here for. I want to have a military smart enough to worry about. Not just for us to worry about, but for other people to worry about.
Leave the going to school forever and ever to the people who either need extreme education because their fields are so specialized they need that level of detail or who are otherwise too stupid to breathe.
I say this as a person whose body (the meat) is killing her, and who does have a graduate degree (which I pulled a 4.0 for.) Let college be the default when you don't know what the hell you want. Throw a student at classes until they find what they can do. Leave the exceptionalism to the exceptional people and use them to our benefit.
Let me make this clear. None of these points exist in a vacuum. The requirements for most of them are dependent upon the others existing. My view, for example, that a second DWI (or a first with massive modifications to the charge) should pretty much lock you up for life requires the sane drug policy, sane legal system and sane healthcare paradigms. It doesn't work for today.
#1. Sane Educational and Child-Rearing policies.
We should spend the hell out of money on education. Our policy should be facts-based, and it should be multidisciplinary. In a perfect world, we don't even need the kids to do 6 hours of school, or even more, because they are saturated with facts. They get facts at home, in their games, in their entertainment. Education should be based on what works, not arbitrary grade levels. Or even age. Educational policy makes sense, and the conservatives like to say we like to need to spend money to make money. We need to send money to make money on our kids. We need to fund the hell out of it. If it takes 10% of us being teachers, then that's what we need to do. Make it competitive. Encourage parents to want to have the smartest kind on the block. Encourage situations where kids too young to be educated in schools have access to an educated stay at home parent, educated parents make educated kids. Yes, I support a concept of professional parenthood. I think the world needs to change before we go there. People on the right who oppose this should explain why, if they so love the 1950s model of parenting and school, they are not willing to even spend 1950s era percentages of money on education. If you went to school in the 1970s, or the 1980s, there is a very strong chance your school was built as a result of post-WWII spending on schools. You probably went to school in a 20-30 year old building. Unless you went to school in a 70 year old building, from the first time those policies were funded (and in part with private funds.)
Addendum: This goes beyond merely being pro-choice, by the way. I believe pregnancy should never be accidental. We don't have the current science to do it well, but if you GENUINELY BELIEVE that life begins at conception, you should be preventing conception that isn't intentional, and providing support to keep those who make the choice to have children to be as healthy as possible when they make that choice. Let's be honest, a lot of people who are against birth control or abortion aren't against 'killing' the 'humans' that they believe begin at conception. More than half of naturally occurring conceptions NEVER IMPLANT...people who genuinely believe a conception makes a human, even before implantation, will acknowledge that humans enjoy sex, and preventing that accidental life from ending is the goal, not stopping people from having sex. If you oppose people having sex, don't LIE and say it is about life. Just admit you oppose people having sex. If you don't oppose people having sex, and you believe that life begins at conception, preventing ALL accidental pregnancy is a no-brainer... More, and better, forms of birth control...not less. Since too many people is a real thing in the world, we should also support those who chose to not have children. Raising a kid to adulthood is estimated to run about $300,000 at a minimum. Maybe we should think about giving a serious tax break to non-parents. Since everyone would be invested in having everyone's kid healthy and educated, maybe we should offer a living stipend to people who voluntarily choose to become intentionally infertile. If we all knew our own health statuses and the like, it would be a big deal. This is close to me right now for two reasons: 1. If my 20 year old kid gets sick because of the autoimmune shit I have, it will devastate me. If I could've known it was there, and it turns out to be genetic, I would've not had a kid...under any circumstances. 2. I'm currently on a drug treatment that causes thalidomide-level birth defects (Pregnancy category X) and is one of the worst of the worst on that list. Fortunately, that drug usually induces miscarriage across the board, but if I somehow got pregnant the fetus would probably die, and take me out with it. I had to have a frank talk with my doctor about conception prevention...and I'm in a monogamous relationship with someone of the same gender. Maybe everyone should understand their risks like I do? Maybe we shouldn't even think about getting pregnant unless we've at least had a screening for some things?
#2. Sane Healthcare and Work policies.
As with education, we should spend the hell out of money on healthcare. If you have an educated populace, you will have a healthier populace, but there are things we can do (some we do not yet have the science for) that will encourage people to be healthier. There was a time when these views were universal: Access to clean water, vaccination programs, healthy lunches, research-based advice on what to eat, etc. Prevent the preventable, try to reduce the unhealthy things based on lifestyle (again, this should be science based, not 'judgement' based), encourage the things that make long life, and stop ignoring the facts. For example, if you could have 3 people work for 6 hours each, and be unlikely to die of exhaustion related disease or stress-aggravated conditions, it should be brainless to think to hire 1 person and expect them to do those 18 hours of work in 12 hours. Most science professionals are in this position, understaffed and underpaid, and doing the work of two to three people, we should see overwork as as dangerous as it is. And it is. Those are just facts.
For example, contrary to what a lot of people preach, obesity is not a result of being lazy. My pulmonologist's clinic has a great group for people who have lung disease and want to lose weight (that can be very hard, to use me for example, I'm supposed to limit walking around, so, as you can imagine, the gym 3 days a week isn't happening) and nearly to a one, these people are working 10-12 hours a day, eating one high-calorie meal a day because it's all they have time for and the Burger King is between home and work. The successes in the program aren't the people who spend the right number of minutes at the gym or take on a fad diet. The successes in the program are the people who change their lives to bring things into the correct ratio for their bodies. If, for example, a person takes a 10% pay cut but goes down to an 8 hour day, they stop eating the one high calorie meal and break the cycle of wake up-go to work-eat-collapse from exhaustion-sleep, their blood pressure goes down, their cholesterol goes down, and if their health hasn't been wrecked, they have an overall better chance of living a long time.
This strikes home for me because I probably would not have gotten sick the way I got sick, or as young as I did, if I had been aware that my lifestyle was killing me. I did not work 12 hours a day, but I worked more than 8 most weekdays, and an additional 4-6 every day on the weekend. I went months without a day off. I was fortunate enough to have the skills required to not do the job-to fast food-to sofa-to bed thing, but I literally could not tell when the exhaustion was from lack of sleep or when my blood started to not get enough oxygen. It took almost 4 years before I even began to see that going months without a day off was *wrong.* We need to listen to the experts on this. We do. We need to completely change the way see a 'hard worker.' We need to work *smarter* instead of work harder. And yes, that might mean our future world has a 4 day a week workweek, or a 6 hour a day work day. I don't know. What I do know is that we can use technology and the like to reduce the number of work hours needed, and instead of having one person working 18 hours, we can have three people working six hours. Here's another thought. The reason a company will often hire one person to cramp 18 hours of work into 12 hours, instead of hiring three people for three 6-hour shifts is because of having to fund benefits for people. If we see healthcare and retirement benefits as something you get because you are born in a place that values your citizens, and separate them from the work place altogether, it becomes financially advantageous for the company to hire those three workers, who can keep on top of their health and wellness, instead of that one worker, who may well become disabled because they can't. I also think that people who can no longer work should have other opportunities other than doing nothing. More retraining, and more alternate means of doing work.
3. Rational drug views, and harsh penalties for violating the facts-based laws.
I manage, somehow, to piss off both sides on this one. I believe that every drug should be legal, over the counter, and taxed to hell (which MAKES US MONEY.) I believe we should have fully funded science based treatment programs. Those treatment programs will not just be for the guy who abuses cocaine. If you are 'that guy' who can't function without pot, the wake and bake dude whose life is fucked up because you spend every waking minute either stoned or trying to get stoned, then we need to treat the underlying condition that's causing that. If you've never met that guy, good for you, but those of us who've been friends with that guy know better. We need to see addiction as the problem, not what you're addicted to that's the problem. People should be allowed to experiment, preferably in a safe environment, with tested compounds, and the ability to get help if things go wrong. Yes, I do believe if you have a job that requires you to work 36 hours in a row once in a while to get out the top product, you should be able to go to the cocaine machine if that's how you want to do it. I also believe that if the thing that makes you cope with the crazy job is being able to melt into a warm pool of morphine-laced goo when you get home, that should be available. This view of mine is based on being in the real world. I know at least 20 products in your house that the designer was probably drugged when he made it. I know more health care providers in high-stress positions who are doing narcotics off the job than those who ARE NOT (some of them, who are in positions with drug tests, just drink instead.) We've rationalized this by "medicating" for many people who are only barely in need of their medication.We've got college kids on ADHD drugs because it makes them focused beyond what's normal for college kids. We are already doing this stuff, let's make it based on science instead of who holds the patent on your drug.
This means actual science, not fake science. So, yeah, if your drug of choice is bad for you, you don't get to claim that you want to support it because it helps another person's nausea. If you want it for escape from pain, then that's why you take it. If you take it because it feels good, that's why you take it. Don't lie about why you like it.
...and you don't take it while you're pregnant, because you don't get pregnant by accident in this world where I'm in charge.
This one makes my wife furious, but I believe in this scenario you have no excuse for a second DWI, for example, and you need to face the maximum possible penalty if you do it. Getting into a vehicle, and trying to control it, while you're under the effect of a drug that stops you from being able to control it is exactly like spraying bullets into a house. Sure, you MIGHT NOT hit anyone, but we'd never say it was okay because you might be able to do it. This one, too, may require a change in the way we do things. If we're on top of our health, and driving with a critically low blood sugar, we're as out of it as the guy with a few beers in him. Maybe there are people who CAN drink and drive...or maybe the solution is something else altogether. Maybe cars are just too big to be driven around by us...I don't pretend to know. However, if the world with rational drug laws, education and healthcare were to exist, people who tricked others into doing drugs, people who decided to be stupid when they knew better, and people who intentionally risked the lives of others could not be tolerated. Which leads to...
4. Educational and culturally based Prison reform.
I've worked for a prison, do not tell me that prisons do not form cultures. There is a subset of crimes that are heavily influenced by a person's culture, and putting them from that culture into prison culture is like substituting one addiction for another...it doesn't work. These aren't cultures based on your race, ethnicity or religion, but gang cultures and the like. Maybe you can't get released from prison on a gang offense unless you've learned a new trade, changed your name, removed all your tattoos and swear to never contact your old associates again. I DON'T KNOW. What we do know is that "punishment" rarely works and "rehabilitation" doesn't work often enough. So we need to change what we do. I have a suspicion, however, that the second you fix the drug laws, keep people healthy (including mental health), stop 'accidental,' pregnancy, educate people and put people to work....I suspect that suddenly the number of people in prisons goes down, and this MAKES US MONEY.
5.If you preach "American Exceptionalism," STOP DENYING IT IN THE NEXT BREATH.
If the United States is "The Land of Opportunity" and "The Greatest Place on Earth," and if capitalism is "The Best form of Financial Governance," if you believe these things are true, then facts-based government is something we should have no problem doing. This means healthcare and childcare, sane work rules and sane drug laws. It means schools based on what works, and hospitals based on what works, and prisons based on what works. IF THE UNITED STATES IS AS GREAT AS YOU CLAIM, WE CAN HOLD IT TO HIGH STANDARDS.
6. It should be competitive to get into the armed forces, and going to college should rely on the poverty draft and people with no other choices.
This may be the hardest cognitive change for anyone who has made it this far to deal with reading. Let's not lie. Let's not say that there are not bulletheads in the armed forces who are too stupid to breathe. LET'S NOT LIE ABOUT SHIT ANYMORE. I know this, some of my friends and family are (or have been) their commanding officers. There are a lot of members of the armed forces who are smart, savvy, dedicated to their country, people who follow rich familial military traditions, people who believe the military is a worthwhile endeavor. There are also people who join the military because they are "big dumb jocks" who think that's all they can do, or who join because there is nothing else they can do to get out of their community. We have intentionally created this military. On dark days, when I am in a bad mood, I think we do this because we give them guns and technology. Think of it, if the only people who can operate a tank are too stupid to foment a revolution, those are TOTALLY the people who the government needs to be driving a tank, right? I've had one of these bulletheads stand not three feet from me and say "I'm just serving out the rest of my time until I can get out and" then proceed to list a slew of benefits he can actually get (as a veteran) and then a bunch of benefits he must've imagined. He believes this because of his recruiter, and that man is the last person who should be representing our country in the military. I've got another friend who constantly complains his life after the army is the same as his life before it...he was promised a lot by the poverty draft.
If you're in high school, and you show exceptional abilities, we should recruit the hell out of you. We do this to an extent. I won't lie. I was a full-scale hippy in high school, and after I took my PSATs, the Marines contacted me once a week for the next year..even though I said very mean things to the recruiter. Phoenix, whose standardized test scores were better than mine, was recruited even harder, but that's her story, not mine. Everyone in the same 'gifted kids' classes as mine got recruited hard. NOT A ONE JOINED THE MILITARY (Well, I don't know that none did EVER, but we all planned to go to college).
We like doing tests on our kids. If a kid shows ridiculously high spatial reasoning or problem solving, or is exceedingly strong, or is exceptionally curious or whatever, we should recruit them. The Army and the Navy should fight over the smartest kid in the High School like college recruiters over the best football player in the state.
Our founders did not want a professional military, and we basically ignore that, so let's admit that we believe they were wrong and make a professional military that's hard to get into and has serious benefits for the people who do it. Something big...more than 'we will get you out of poverty.' Furthermore, let's change it so that you don't need to be able to march for miles in the sun to serve your country. You know that kid drinking Mountain Dew and pwning everyone in the FPS? I would like HIM to be piloting the drones. If we're going to use that technology, do it.
Maybe we need another military force altogether for the smartest kid on the block? Maybe we need the actual Chair Force...or have the NOAA and Public health people better funded. I don't know. I want my military to have the biggest brains in the world. I want my government to take the only guy I ever met who was scary smarter than me and recruit him into military intelligence...I want my government to be giving the department of defense cancer research money to the government-sponsored lab with 6 people born here with a combined IQ above 1100 instead of the 60 people, half of whom are post-docs from other countries only here until they the credential or experience their government sent them here for. I want to have a military smart enough to worry about. Not just for us to worry about, but for other people to worry about.
Leave the going to school forever and ever to the people who either need extreme education because their fields are so specialized they need that level of detail or who are otherwise too stupid to breathe.
I say this as a person whose body (the meat) is killing her, and who does have a graduate degree (which I pulled a 4.0 for.) Let college be the default when you don't know what the hell you want. Throw a student at classes until they find what they can do. Leave the exceptionalism to the exceptional people and use them to our benefit.
Wednesday, September 5, 2012
Sunday, September 2, 2012
A long post culminating in a statement about why the DNC is unsafe for people like me.
The republicans in the United States right now are absolutely insane. Let me get that out of the way, first.
The republicans in the United States right now are absolutely, certifiably, not operating in the realm of reality. They have taken batshit crazy to a new level. From candidates who not merely talk to their deity, but take dictation from Him, to people who think that our president is responsible for the wacky use of the filibuster, to people who claim the President wants to take our guns when he's been the most gun-friendly president in my voting age son's lifetime...the republicans are crazy. In fact, the republicans are so crazy that I (who once had drug-induced mania from a prescription) don't want to call them crazy because it insults people with genuine mental illness. The republicans, right now, are so distanced from reality that all the sane republicans I know preface their description of being republican with "I don't agree with so-and-so's crazy comments on rape/guns/god/Obama's birth certificate."
I hope I've made it clear I do not respect the current republican ticket's opinion on much of anything. I am in a blue state, in a blue district, and I am probably voting Obama. There is a small chance I might give my vote to a 3rd party candidate, but probably not. I will probably vote Obama on a 3rd party line, however. This is something people in other states don't have an option of doing. The party I originally joined as a young voter has almost no power in New York State anymore, and I became a democrat, officially, because while I agree with most of the Green Party, I believe it is wrong on Nuclear Power and it's GMO stance is so broadly and stupidly written that it would accidentally outlaw everything we eat, and while I agree with a lot of the Working Families Party, I think it was invented to kill my own political party when we didn't say how high whenever EVERY UNION says jump. (Not all unions are created equal.) The lies about what a Liberal is killed my real party, and I can't do diddly about it, but the democrats welcomed us (sort of) and since even the chewy red center of New York State (where I was born) agrees with what our party stood/stands for: Equal rights, equal pay, fair work laws, fair healthcare laws, etc., I can live with it.
I won't say people don't lie about what the Liberal Party is/was. You can read the platform here. It was formed in part to fight communism, but people call us communists. It promotes the idea that your doctor, not your government or your tax bracket, should determine how your healthcare is handled. It says your kid should get a good education if you choose public schools, and if your kid makes a mistake and gets arrested, he should face a fair family court system. It is literally the only party in New York State that gets hydrofracking right, saying that instead of curling up in a ball and saying "no, no, no, no, no" we should have rules that protect water, air and people in place before hydrofracking is allowed. The Liberal Party IS the party of subtle, reasoned, thoughtful political views based on science, math, and reason...after all, since people lie about the very meaning of the word Liberal, no one is going to use the word unless they already have the ability to listen to more than soundbytes.
I was asked why I was not a democrat (before I was one) and I said something that is still true today: The democratic party doesn't want me. The democratic party makes it very clear they don't want me. They are happy to crush reasoned, subtle, thoughtful political views for Jingoism and pandering to an American electorate that has been duped into thinking they are center-right when they are all center left...but let me give you an idea of the difference between a liberal and a center-right democrat with two things that happened:
George W. Bush wrote me a check. Not literally, although he liked to take all the credit for it. My neighbor at the time, the sort of woman my Arkansas-bred Mother in Law would say "well, bless her heart," about, asked me if I had received my check yet, and what I was going to do with it. I was obviously not pleased about it, and I said something along the lines of this: "Sending this check kills the economy. We need to save this money for a rainy day, it might feel good now, but it won't when we're all jobless and homeless."
My neighbor thought I was joking. She was jobless and homeless a few years later. I want to make a quick diversion here. Republicans say democrats are the party of hand-outs and spending that kills the economy. When I say they are removed from reality, this is what I mean. This was not a democratic handout, this handout was from a republican, the party of 'gimme, gimme.'
The other thing that happened happened a few days ago. My wife went to the library and it was closed. They'd cut the hours back to three days a week, and I was sitting there not paying enough attention when she came back and told me and I responded "your lower taxes at work." Since it was during the RNC, basically my wife said something along the line of "I know someone not voting Romney" in a playful way. It got me thinking about how a republican might view that library-a waste of space, a waste of money and a waste of time. I see it as a waste of time, money and space for it to be sitting there *closed.* My neighborhood is pretty poor, it's blue-collar, and yes, many of my neighbors work in the few factories left around here, yet that library has people in it every time it is open. Many of the kids come in to that library in the middle of summer just because it has air conditioning and they don't. Some of those kids seeking the cool sit down at a computer or pick up a book because they are bored...and some of those kids never put the books down, afterwards.
I don't think a democrat would respond to the library being closed with disgust that taxes aren't being apportioned properly and probably could stand to be a few cents higher to support the library (I would prefer, personally, that they go to things like libraries first, and a shiny new van for the SWAT team second, rather than raise taxes, but that's okay, we don't have to agree on everything.) I don't think most democrats responded to the hand-outs of tax and spend conservatives like George W. Bush with disgust and knowing exactly what that kind of crap led to. A Liberal, however, does respond like that, because the liberal position is the position of worrying about what we're leaving to our kids and grandkids. Do we scrap the public utilities that make America great for a new washing machine when we could afford to keep the old?
[We bought a washing machine with our handouts from Uncle Sugarbush, by the way. We wanted to spend extra to get one made in the USA. We ended up settling on one that was assembled in the USA, and built by a USA-owned factory, from a small chain appliance store owned locally. The only wholly made in the USA one we could find didn't come in the kind of machine we wanted. We had to have a reasoned, subtle, thought-out, science-based process of determining who our money went to...that's the Liberal way. Before the washing machine, we went to a laundromat. By the way, we also bought an American Made dryer with those checks. It doesn't match the washer, but it WAS 100% made in the USA. ]
I am not, we are not, "Obama democrats." In fact, everyone I know is aware that I was perfectly willing to support Obama for president....in 2016. I felt that he was not experienced enough, and I felt that his 'No Drama Obama" persona would let the GOP roll over him. I was given a choice between Obama and batshit insane. I voted Obama. I am given the choice, again, between Obama and batshit insane, and I am probably still voting Obama. Obama is like my dryer...not the model I wanted, but the best option I had, and 100% made in America... I guess you can call us Clinton Liberals, or Cuomo Liberals, but that's not accurate. We're Americans without a party, under the big tent of the democrats, because the other option is insanity.
So after this half-hour of writing, which is all I can do most days, I come to what started me on this. The democrats don't want me. They know they can get me because my other option is tax-and-spend conservatives who favor big government loans to companies that turn around and claim to have 'built it' themselves (my view? If you built it yourself, you didn't need that loan, so we'll be taking the money back now, thanks). These republicans favor letting infrastructure fall down by not maintaining it, then spending more to replace it, all the while claiming infrastructure doesn't work. (Seriously, how stupid can you be? Our bridge that we refused to invest in and allowed to collapse collapsed because we refused to maintain it! This shows government doesn't work! Well, yeah, it doesn't work when you are trying to kill it, duh.)
The democrats can depend on me to vote for them because the other option is crazy, and the democrats demonstrate that they have me over the proverbial barrel by having their convention in a state that would GLADLY KILL ME.
I'm not exaggerating, actually. As long time followers and friends know, I'm dying slowly of an autoimmune lung disease, a disease so rare that it doesn't have a name. Right now, I'm at a stasis point where we give me drugs to keep my lungs from damage, and I'm so good about protecting my lungs and taking my pills that we actually manage to reverse some of the reversible damage. The problem is that every time I get a cold, instead of just coughing and hacking, I run the risk of developing more scar tissue in my lungs. Since I'm a never-smoker, and since I have worked as a professional singer, I have some of the strongest lungs around, which is one reason why we don't know how fast this is killing me. The last-gasp (ha ha) medical care for the end-stage of this is transplant, and one reason we treat me with aggressive therapy is that I've already refused transplant. I'm not even really sad about it. I think I've lived a pretty awesome life, and I know I've got a few years left (unless I develop pneumonia again, in which case all bets are off.) I would like those last few years to be lived in more comfort, and it looks like I'm stuck with poverty, but I've had an awesome kid grow to be an awesome adult, and I married the love of my life, and the things I do to prolong my life (stay inside when air quality isn't good, avoid the hell out of smokers and car exhaust, not scream even if I am furious, do lung 'stretching' breathing exercises for hours a day, watch what I eat, avoid the hell out of drugs and alcohol, stay on top of bloodtests, monitor my blood pressure [too low], and my blood sugar [too low] and my oxygen [way too low], monitor my platelets [too high], my cholesterol [better than most vegans], and my water intake [2 gallons a day] and my, uh, the other end of the spectrum [not going there], watch my weight [I'm weirdly supposed to be 50lbs lighter but have been told to NOT try to lose weight because most people with this are or end up underweight, and it used to be *75* extra pounds...], give up some of the raw foods I love because the drugs I'm on compromise my immune system [bye, sashimi, bye real caesar salad, bye tartare, etc.] avoid stress, pray [if I think it helps, and for me it does], meditate [if I think it helps and I think it does], not exercise but also exercise [I'm having a hard time with this one] and sometimes sob like a baby because it isn't fair and holding it in isn't healthy) are things I can live with. It is not easy, but I am pretty hard to kill. At about 3 years in with this, I still probably have less scar tissue in my lungs than anyone over the age of 18 reading this. I'm not allowed to work, or go far out of my house, but the other option is dead, so I can live with this.
Sorry for that diversion, every time I say I am dying of this disease and spend my time fighting it, people don't believe me. I literally have to take about 30 things into account deciding what I want for breakfast, everything I do has to be carefully planned...it's hard, but it's not terribly hard. It isn't easy, at least.
Well, geeze...now it's been an hour of writing.
So, my point. Let me see if I can find it. Oh, yes, the democrats, who can count on my vote because they are the only choice I have, are showing their 'respect' for that choice by having their convention in a state where the laws of the land could kill me. The points above are to show you why they have my vote, and why the laws could kill me, but let me clarify.
North Carolina.
I'm not a lesbian, but I'm married to one. I love saying that to conservatives, because I've actually studied human sexuality and am comfortable with mine. I am a Kinsey 3. I am the rarest, most awesomest, least studied of the human sexuality flavors. I don't fall in love with people's genders, I fall in love with people's people. I don't lust in my heart after the presence or absence of boobies, I lust in my heart over the whole package. It's not accurate to say I'm pansexual, because I know people who are, and there are gender flavors in the world that I don't respond to. People lacking all or most secondary sexual characteristics confuse my brain...I don't know why. To put it in terms others can understand, I can respond to man parts on a lady, or lady parts on a man, but I can't respond to no parts on an I'm not sure. I had a friend, several years back, who described hirself as just that. This friend thought it was funny as hell that I didn't have any response to hir attempts to hit on me (part of this is why we're no longer friends.) I honestly understood (I think) what it was to be gay or straight, then. So, instead of my body saying no way to men, or women, my body says no way to people it can't categorize as adults. If you have a waif-like, hairless, teenager body with no hips or boobs, with big, anime-girl eyes and protruding ribs, my brain says you're a kid even if you are 30, and that you should not hit on me until after puberty and several sandwiches. Most fashion models, for example, gross me out. Since they'd probably see me as a disgusting fatty fat, I guess it is fair. My sexuality, like my politics, does not fit on a little box, it takes a paragraph....and even in a paragraph, there will be people who are offended by it. (I'm not threatened by, and I don't dislike androgyny, it just has zero sexual response from me. It took me almost 6 months to realize an androgynous person was hitting on me. If there is a gender that doesn't work for you, it's exactly like that...exactly.)
So, I'm not a lesbian. It's not accurate to say I am, in sheer number of lovers in my life, men outnumber women, but in length of relationships, I've been with my wife almost half my life at this point. Sometimes I am angry with her or just unhappy, but that's part of marriage, some days you get frustrated, but when you total the sums at the end, you find in a good marriage that the good days far outnumber the bad, and the positive emotions are stronger than the negative. What a lot of people don't get is that when you and your spouse are different sexual orientations, just like when you and your spouse aren't the same IQ, or have different amounts of schooling, or make different amounts of money or come from different social classes, that can be a source of friction. About once a year we have a 2-3 hour fight over the fact that I'm not gay, and that's one reason I'm disclosing that. If the person I love now were to go away, there is a 50% chance that the person I would come to love (if any) in the future would be a guy, and no one would know by looking at me that I wasn't straight, so some people in my community view that my same-sex marriage is somehow lesser than their same-sex marriage. Imagine that, hard to believe, right?
The love of my life, the person I've been with for almost 20 years, the yin to my yang, the peanut butter to my jelly, the mint to my chocolate chip ice cream, is a woman.
That woman is the second best informed person about my medical condition. She knows the names of all the doctors and who prescribed what. She knows what I'm allergic to and what drugs could kill me. If I were to pass out, unconscious, which is unlikely but possible, she knows to check my pulse and give oxygen, and that if I smile it's a crooked smile, with dimples on one side, and that when I'm semi-conscious one of my eyelids droops from a damaged muscle I got as an infant...that it's not a stroke. She knows to get between the door and the hospital respiratory therapist when I'm hospitalized...albuterol doesn't make my condition better, it makes it worse, and jeopardizes my health. It's not asthma. I can beat any of you on a PFT any day. The oxygen just can't do anything once it's in my lungs. She knows my platelet count is off the chart and my cholesterol is low and that some fairly benign bloodthinners they give for protective benefits to suspected stroke and heart attack victims could, paradoxically, cause a bloodclot for me.
That woman knows I don't use recreational drugs, that my current weight is the result of having almost no thyroid left but that I can't be given artificial sweeteners and I'm not diabetic-I'm hypoglycemic. She knows my blood pressure is low, but that steroids will make it skyrocket. That woman knows the medicine I'm on for my tremor is also a blood pressure medicine, and that if they pull me off it because my blood pressure is low and I clearly 'don't need it,' it won't affect my blood pressure at all, but it will cause my tremor to become incredibly severe, even if I am asleep. (This actually happened at a hospital here, they thought I was having some sort of withdrawal...I was, beta blocker withdrawal.) She knows that the only thing my body can't do is homeostasis, the easiest thing for most animals to do.
That woman is my legally recognized, married in my state, marriage certificate holding wife. She also holds my healthcare power of attorney, and every similar thing that we can afford. Since I'm no longer permitted to leave the house freely, I have nearly no money, and I can't afford to get a new set of documents for everywhere I could theoretically go if I managed to be in remission. In North Carolina, the law tells the hospital that they are free to ignore her, because my marriage is less valid than someone married in their state. Our relationship is a non-relationship to them, and therefore even the healthcare proxy and other out-of-state paperwork is suspect, and one administrator in the hospital who decided to be an asshole would have legal reasons to push his agenda and punish the dykes. The law is wrong, and the vast majority of people who work in a hospital would not think about not listening to someone clearly informed and on the ball about an unconscious woman, but the law says that they could, and such a law could result in my death. That death could happen in a matter of minutes, before a judge could be summoned to rule or the cops called or anything. It could happen in the moment the person treating me decides to not listen to "the dyke." One homophobe, one choice, and my life is done.
And that is where the democrats are holding their convention. In the state that could kill me with their patently illegal laws. Sure, after I died my wife would sue the hell out of them and win, but I would still be dead...and, even though I'm not dead, there is not diddly I can do about it. My other choice is to vote for the crazy people who would kill me on purpose, not the careless people who'd accidentally let me die.
Thanks, democrats. Thanks for nothing.
The republicans in the United States right now are absolutely, certifiably, not operating in the realm of reality. They have taken batshit crazy to a new level. From candidates who not merely talk to their deity, but take dictation from Him, to people who think that our president is responsible for the wacky use of the filibuster, to people who claim the President wants to take our guns when he's been the most gun-friendly president in my voting age son's lifetime...the republicans are crazy. In fact, the republicans are so crazy that I (who once had drug-induced mania from a prescription) don't want to call them crazy because it insults people with genuine mental illness. The republicans, right now, are so distanced from reality that all the sane republicans I know preface their description of being republican with "I don't agree with so-and-so's crazy comments on rape/guns/god/Obama's birth certificate."
I hope I've made it clear I do not respect the current republican ticket's opinion on much of anything. I am in a blue state, in a blue district, and I am probably voting Obama. There is a small chance I might give my vote to a 3rd party candidate, but probably not. I will probably vote Obama on a 3rd party line, however. This is something people in other states don't have an option of doing. The party I originally joined as a young voter has almost no power in New York State anymore, and I became a democrat, officially, because while I agree with most of the Green Party, I believe it is wrong on Nuclear Power and it's GMO stance is so broadly and stupidly written that it would accidentally outlaw everything we eat, and while I agree with a lot of the Working Families Party, I think it was invented to kill my own political party when we didn't say how high whenever EVERY UNION says jump. (Not all unions are created equal.) The lies about what a Liberal is killed my real party, and I can't do diddly about it, but the democrats welcomed us (sort of) and since even the chewy red center of New York State (where I was born) agrees with what our party stood/stands for: Equal rights, equal pay, fair work laws, fair healthcare laws, etc., I can live with it.
I won't say people don't lie about what the Liberal Party is/was. You can read the platform here. It was formed in part to fight communism, but people call us communists. It promotes the idea that your doctor, not your government or your tax bracket, should determine how your healthcare is handled. It says your kid should get a good education if you choose public schools, and if your kid makes a mistake and gets arrested, he should face a fair family court system. It is literally the only party in New York State that gets hydrofracking right, saying that instead of curling up in a ball and saying "no, no, no, no, no" we should have rules that protect water, air and people in place before hydrofracking is allowed. The Liberal Party IS the party of subtle, reasoned, thoughtful political views based on science, math, and reason...after all, since people lie about the very meaning of the word Liberal, no one is going to use the word unless they already have the ability to listen to more than soundbytes.
I was asked why I was not a democrat (before I was one) and I said something that is still true today: The democratic party doesn't want me. The democratic party makes it very clear they don't want me. They are happy to crush reasoned, subtle, thoughtful political views for Jingoism and pandering to an American electorate that has been duped into thinking they are center-right when they are all center left...but let me give you an idea of the difference between a liberal and a center-right democrat with two things that happened:
George W. Bush wrote me a check. Not literally, although he liked to take all the credit for it. My neighbor at the time, the sort of woman my Arkansas-bred Mother in Law would say "well, bless her heart," about, asked me if I had received my check yet, and what I was going to do with it. I was obviously not pleased about it, and I said something along the lines of this: "Sending this check kills the economy. We need to save this money for a rainy day, it might feel good now, but it won't when we're all jobless and homeless."
My neighbor thought I was joking. She was jobless and homeless a few years later. I want to make a quick diversion here. Republicans say democrats are the party of hand-outs and spending that kills the economy. When I say they are removed from reality, this is what I mean. This was not a democratic handout, this handout was from a republican, the party of 'gimme, gimme.'
The other thing that happened happened a few days ago. My wife went to the library and it was closed. They'd cut the hours back to three days a week, and I was sitting there not paying enough attention when she came back and told me and I responded "your lower taxes at work." Since it was during the RNC, basically my wife said something along the line of "I know someone not voting Romney" in a playful way. It got me thinking about how a republican might view that library-a waste of space, a waste of money and a waste of time. I see it as a waste of time, money and space for it to be sitting there *closed.* My neighborhood is pretty poor, it's blue-collar, and yes, many of my neighbors work in the few factories left around here, yet that library has people in it every time it is open. Many of the kids come in to that library in the middle of summer just because it has air conditioning and they don't. Some of those kids seeking the cool sit down at a computer or pick up a book because they are bored...and some of those kids never put the books down, afterwards.
I don't think a democrat would respond to the library being closed with disgust that taxes aren't being apportioned properly and probably could stand to be a few cents higher to support the library (I would prefer, personally, that they go to things like libraries first, and a shiny new van for the SWAT team second, rather than raise taxes, but that's okay, we don't have to agree on everything.) I don't think most democrats responded to the hand-outs of tax and spend conservatives like George W. Bush with disgust and knowing exactly what that kind of crap led to. A Liberal, however, does respond like that, because the liberal position is the position of worrying about what we're leaving to our kids and grandkids. Do we scrap the public utilities that make America great for a new washing machine when we could afford to keep the old?
[We bought a washing machine with our handouts from Uncle Sugarbush, by the way. We wanted to spend extra to get one made in the USA. We ended up settling on one that was assembled in the USA, and built by a USA-owned factory, from a small chain appliance store owned locally. The only wholly made in the USA one we could find didn't come in the kind of machine we wanted. We had to have a reasoned, subtle, thought-out, science-based process of determining who our money went to...that's the Liberal way. Before the washing machine, we went to a laundromat. By the way, we also bought an American Made dryer with those checks. It doesn't match the washer, but it WAS 100% made in the USA. ]
I am not, we are not, "Obama democrats." In fact, everyone I know is aware that I was perfectly willing to support Obama for president....in 2016. I felt that he was not experienced enough, and I felt that his 'No Drama Obama" persona would let the GOP roll over him. I was given a choice between Obama and batshit insane. I voted Obama. I am given the choice, again, between Obama and batshit insane, and I am probably still voting Obama. Obama is like my dryer...not the model I wanted, but the best option I had, and 100% made in America... I guess you can call us Clinton Liberals, or Cuomo Liberals, but that's not accurate. We're Americans without a party, under the big tent of the democrats, because the other option is insanity.
So after this half-hour of writing, which is all I can do most days, I come to what started me on this. The democrats don't want me. They know they can get me because my other option is tax-and-spend conservatives who favor big government loans to companies that turn around and claim to have 'built it' themselves (my view? If you built it yourself, you didn't need that loan, so we'll be taking the money back now, thanks). These republicans favor letting infrastructure fall down by not maintaining it, then spending more to replace it, all the while claiming infrastructure doesn't work. (Seriously, how stupid can you be? Our bridge that we refused to invest in and allowed to collapse collapsed because we refused to maintain it! This shows government doesn't work! Well, yeah, it doesn't work when you are trying to kill it, duh.)
The democrats can depend on me to vote for them because the other option is crazy, and the democrats demonstrate that they have me over the proverbial barrel by having their convention in a state that would GLADLY KILL ME.
I'm not exaggerating, actually. As long time followers and friends know, I'm dying slowly of an autoimmune lung disease, a disease so rare that it doesn't have a name. Right now, I'm at a stasis point where we give me drugs to keep my lungs from damage, and I'm so good about protecting my lungs and taking my pills that we actually manage to reverse some of the reversible damage. The problem is that every time I get a cold, instead of just coughing and hacking, I run the risk of developing more scar tissue in my lungs. Since I'm a never-smoker, and since I have worked as a professional singer, I have some of the strongest lungs around, which is one reason why we don't know how fast this is killing me. The last-gasp (ha ha) medical care for the end-stage of this is transplant, and one reason we treat me with aggressive therapy is that I've already refused transplant. I'm not even really sad about it. I think I've lived a pretty awesome life, and I know I've got a few years left (unless I develop pneumonia again, in which case all bets are off.) I would like those last few years to be lived in more comfort, and it looks like I'm stuck with poverty, but I've had an awesome kid grow to be an awesome adult, and I married the love of my life, and the things I do to prolong my life (stay inside when air quality isn't good, avoid the hell out of smokers and car exhaust, not scream even if I am furious, do lung 'stretching' breathing exercises for hours a day, watch what I eat, avoid the hell out of drugs and alcohol, stay on top of bloodtests, monitor my blood pressure [too low], and my blood sugar [too low] and my oxygen [way too low], monitor my platelets [too high], my cholesterol [better than most vegans], and my water intake [2 gallons a day] and my, uh, the other end of the spectrum [not going there], watch my weight [I'm weirdly supposed to be 50lbs lighter but have been told to NOT try to lose weight because most people with this are or end up underweight, and it used to be *75* extra pounds...], give up some of the raw foods I love because the drugs I'm on compromise my immune system [bye, sashimi, bye real caesar salad, bye tartare, etc.] avoid stress, pray [if I think it helps, and for me it does], meditate [if I think it helps and I think it does], not exercise but also exercise [I'm having a hard time with this one] and sometimes sob like a baby because it isn't fair and holding it in isn't healthy) are things I can live with. It is not easy, but I am pretty hard to kill. At about 3 years in with this, I still probably have less scar tissue in my lungs than anyone over the age of 18 reading this. I'm not allowed to work, or go far out of my house, but the other option is dead, so I can live with this.
Sorry for that diversion, every time I say I am dying of this disease and spend my time fighting it, people don't believe me. I literally have to take about 30 things into account deciding what I want for breakfast, everything I do has to be carefully planned...it's hard, but it's not terribly hard. It isn't easy, at least.
Well, geeze...now it's been an hour of writing.
So, my point. Let me see if I can find it. Oh, yes, the democrats, who can count on my vote because they are the only choice I have, are showing their 'respect' for that choice by having their convention in a state where the laws of the land could kill me. The points above are to show you why they have my vote, and why the laws could kill me, but let me clarify.
North Carolina.
I'm not a lesbian, but I'm married to one. I love saying that to conservatives, because I've actually studied human sexuality and am comfortable with mine. I am a Kinsey 3. I am the rarest, most awesomest, least studied of the human sexuality flavors. I don't fall in love with people's genders, I fall in love with people's people. I don't lust in my heart after the presence or absence of boobies, I lust in my heart over the whole package. It's not accurate to say I'm pansexual, because I know people who are, and there are gender flavors in the world that I don't respond to. People lacking all or most secondary sexual characteristics confuse my brain...I don't know why. To put it in terms others can understand, I can respond to man parts on a lady, or lady parts on a man, but I can't respond to no parts on an I'm not sure. I had a friend, several years back, who described hirself as just that. This friend thought it was funny as hell that I didn't have any response to hir attempts to hit on me (part of this is why we're no longer friends.) I honestly understood (I think) what it was to be gay or straight, then. So, instead of my body saying no way to men, or women, my body says no way to people it can't categorize as adults. If you have a waif-like, hairless, teenager body with no hips or boobs, with big, anime-girl eyes and protruding ribs, my brain says you're a kid even if you are 30, and that you should not hit on me until after puberty and several sandwiches. Most fashion models, for example, gross me out. Since they'd probably see me as a disgusting fatty fat, I guess it is fair. My sexuality, like my politics, does not fit on a little box, it takes a paragraph....and even in a paragraph, there will be people who are offended by it. (I'm not threatened by, and I don't dislike androgyny, it just has zero sexual response from me. It took me almost 6 months to realize an androgynous person was hitting on me. If there is a gender that doesn't work for you, it's exactly like that...exactly.)
So, I'm not a lesbian. It's not accurate to say I am, in sheer number of lovers in my life, men outnumber women, but in length of relationships, I've been with my wife almost half my life at this point. Sometimes I am angry with her or just unhappy, but that's part of marriage, some days you get frustrated, but when you total the sums at the end, you find in a good marriage that the good days far outnumber the bad, and the positive emotions are stronger than the negative. What a lot of people don't get is that when you and your spouse are different sexual orientations, just like when you and your spouse aren't the same IQ, or have different amounts of schooling, or make different amounts of money or come from different social classes, that can be a source of friction. About once a year we have a 2-3 hour fight over the fact that I'm not gay, and that's one reason I'm disclosing that. If the person I love now were to go away, there is a 50% chance that the person I would come to love (if any) in the future would be a guy, and no one would know by looking at me that I wasn't straight, so some people in my community view that my same-sex marriage is somehow lesser than their same-sex marriage. Imagine that, hard to believe, right?
The love of my life, the person I've been with for almost 20 years, the yin to my yang, the peanut butter to my jelly, the mint to my chocolate chip ice cream, is a woman.
That woman is the second best informed person about my medical condition. She knows the names of all the doctors and who prescribed what. She knows what I'm allergic to and what drugs could kill me. If I were to pass out, unconscious, which is unlikely but possible, she knows to check my pulse and give oxygen, and that if I smile it's a crooked smile, with dimples on one side, and that when I'm semi-conscious one of my eyelids droops from a damaged muscle I got as an infant...that it's not a stroke. She knows to get between the door and the hospital respiratory therapist when I'm hospitalized...albuterol doesn't make my condition better, it makes it worse, and jeopardizes my health. It's not asthma. I can beat any of you on a PFT any day. The oxygen just can't do anything once it's in my lungs. She knows my platelet count is off the chart and my cholesterol is low and that some fairly benign bloodthinners they give for protective benefits to suspected stroke and heart attack victims could, paradoxically, cause a bloodclot for me.
That woman knows I don't use recreational drugs, that my current weight is the result of having almost no thyroid left but that I can't be given artificial sweeteners and I'm not diabetic-I'm hypoglycemic. She knows my blood pressure is low, but that steroids will make it skyrocket. That woman knows the medicine I'm on for my tremor is also a blood pressure medicine, and that if they pull me off it because my blood pressure is low and I clearly 'don't need it,' it won't affect my blood pressure at all, but it will cause my tremor to become incredibly severe, even if I am asleep. (This actually happened at a hospital here, they thought I was having some sort of withdrawal...I was, beta blocker withdrawal.) She knows that the only thing my body can't do is homeostasis, the easiest thing for most animals to do.
That woman is my legally recognized, married in my state, marriage certificate holding wife. She also holds my healthcare power of attorney, and every similar thing that we can afford. Since I'm no longer permitted to leave the house freely, I have nearly no money, and I can't afford to get a new set of documents for everywhere I could theoretically go if I managed to be in remission. In North Carolina, the law tells the hospital that they are free to ignore her, because my marriage is less valid than someone married in their state. Our relationship is a non-relationship to them, and therefore even the healthcare proxy and other out-of-state paperwork is suspect, and one administrator in the hospital who decided to be an asshole would have legal reasons to push his agenda and punish the dykes. The law is wrong, and the vast majority of people who work in a hospital would not think about not listening to someone clearly informed and on the ball about an unconscious woman, but the law says that they could, and such a law could result in my death. That death could happen in a matter of minutes, before a judge could be summoned to rule or the cops called or anything. It could happen in the moment the person treating me decides to not listen to "the dyke." One homophobe, one choice, and my life is done.
And that is where the democrats are holding their convention. In the state that could kill me with their patently illegal laws. Sure, after I died my wife would sue the hell out of them and win, but I would still be dead...and, even though I'm not dead, there is not diddly I can do about it. My other choice is to vote for the crazy people who would kill me on purpose, not the careless people who'd accidentally let me die.
Thanks, democrats. Thanks for nothing.
Saturday, September 1, 2012
Please don't jump to conclusions about this. (link dump)
As my 7th friend working in my field has now developed a rare autoimmune disease, I'm sort of collecting data for a dump on the safety of laboratories and autoimuune diseases. So, this collection of links in just some related data that I might investigate. I'm posting it here for people who are researching the same thing.
As many people know, I am convinced my own autoimmune disease is genetic.
Renaud's from solvents in histology labs
No findings of increased autoimmune disease in Idaho lab, but, again, workers seem to know people w/it.
Etiologic possibilities for the development of rheumatic diseases through environmental mechanisms
Lab worker's lung. [rat urine protein]
http://www.chronicberylliumdisease.com/news/nw_022502_argonnelab.htm
As many people know, I am convinced my own autoimmune disease is genetic.
Renaud's from solvents in histology labs
No findings of increased autoimmune disease in Idaho lab, but, again, workers seem to know people w/it.
Etiologic possibilities for the development of rheumatic diseases through environmental mechanisms
Lab worker's lung. [rat urine protein]
http://www.chronicberylliumdisease.com/news/nw_022502_argonnelab.htm
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