So far, it seems like a slow news day, but because of this, I had an opportunity to read this revealing story in the NY Times about a bunch of paranoids buying slightly less hideous pants. The pants are a pair of chinos that have hidden compartments for a concealed weapon, but unlike most pants that have these kinds of compartments, they aren't quite as baggy. Here are the pants:
So you can just imagine how miserable the previous options were. Not that it mattered that much, in my experience. The kind of douchenozzles who loved carrying everywhere also enjoyed the big, baggy pants that screamed "I conceal carry and I'm too much of a man for stupid girly stuff like looking like I try to look remotely attractive". I suppose there was a point where that was unsustainable, and the need to at least be occasional presentable, if still broadcasting that you're too manly to actually look good, had to come into play. Maybe for going to dinner on your wedding anniversary or something.
As you can tell, I'm not fond of this overbearing anxious masculinity that drives gun culture. It's the platonic ideal of trying too hard.
This passage is rather important, I think:
Gun experts suggest that there are many reasons for the growth in the number of people with concealed-carry permits. They say it is partly due to a changing political and economic climate — gun owners are professing to want a feeling of control — and state laws certainly have made a difference.
I'm curious who these "gun experts" are, but not because I disagree with them. "Wanting a feeling of control" is a very nice way of describing "in a state of abject paranoia that manifests itself in fantasies that people are coming around every corner to kill you". So why is this feeling on the rise? It certainly has nothing to do with actual fear of crime, since crime rates are down, not up. Like way down. No, the predominantly conservative white men that are deep into gun culture are feeling out of control for another reason. They see women and people of color slowly making gains in society, and they fear that they are losing their unearned dominance and control over society. So they buy a gun and carry it around to regain that sense of control and dominance. Sure, your wife has more of a right to leave you if she wants and you may have to compete with a black person for a job, but you can comfort yourself by feeling like you could just up and kill someone if the opportunity arises. Which it won't, but you can fantasize about it all the time. Unfortunately for the rest of us, as the George Zimmerman/Trayvon Martin situaton demonstrates, for the occasional gun nut, merely fantasizing isn't enough. The desperation to make the fantasy come true can occasionally lead to extreme measures.
These conditions arise as a result of faulty bonding and identification with the same-sex parent, starting in early life. They indicate deep-seated gender self-alienation (TG's cross-identify with an opposite-sex figure), and are preventable and treatable.
The writings of well-known figures like Chastity Bono, James Morris, and Richard Raskind confirm this pattern.
Psychiatrist Richard Fitzgibbons's articles "Gender Identity Disorder in Children" and "The Desire for a Sex Change" are instructive.
The Left has been lying to the public for decades, with false science and false argument. "Gays" are a manufactured "minority" used for political purposes.
The National Association for Research & Therapy of Homosexuality has the real information (http://www.narth.com).
More and more Americans are learning the truth. GayScam, this fraud, will be ended. The laws will be adjusted accordingly.
--Sharon Kass Washington, D.C.
I responded:
Well, you weren't born an asshole, either, but I still think it's wrong to take your computer away.
And then, feeling like perhaps she doesn't have the mental acuity to get the joke, I followed up with:
I'll add that no one is born religious, either. That condition arises, often as in your case, because of a strong hatred in the heart that can't be rationalized by real world evidence. So fantasies of gods and demons arise, giving the religious person justifications for their ugliness and irrational hatred, in this case of queer people. These fantasies are preventable, and treatable.
Since you appear to have blanket refusal for giving anyone rights for conditions they weren't "born" with, to be consistent, you should work on banning the practice of religion. After all, the question of homosexuality or transgenderism being inherent at birth is still up in the air, but no one believes babies are born religious.
"Blame the mother" is an old, and thoroughly discredited theory. Quacks like to cling to it, often in all sorts of ways, for the same reason that anti-vaxxers talk vaguely about "toxins" in vaccines. The reason is that nearly anyone's experiences can be framed this way, if need be. If your mom showed you affection as a child---and mothers are known to do t hat---and you were clingy and needy---I have rarely seen a child that is not---then a manipulative bigot can use that as "evidence" that you overly identified with your parent. Perversely, if your mother was actually distant or unaffectionate, that also can be used, as you'll then be told that you were made clingier by lack of affection. Once you've determined that being queer is a "disease" with its roots in childhood, you're able to exploit anything from even the most idyllic childhood and claim that as the cause.
Ironically, Kass is not only wrong that "more and more" Americans are turning against gay people, but she has it completely backwards. As the real-world evidence piles in that being gay or transgendered is not inherently damaging, and certainly is not experienced as "choice" any more than being straight is, more and more Americans are coming around to support gay and transgender rights. This includes the American Psychological Association, which says:
There is no consensus among scientists about the exact reasons that an individual develops a heterosexual, bisexual, gay, or lesbian orientation. Although much research has examined the possible genetic, hormonal, developmental, social, and cultural influences on sexual orientation, no findings have emerged that permit scientists to conclude that sexual orientation is determined by any particular factor or factors. Many think that nature and nurture both play complex roles; most people experience little or no sense of choice about their sexual orientation.
They also take this position on transgendered people:
Many transgender people do not experience their gender as distressing or disabling, which implies that identifying as transgender does not constitute a mental disorder. For these individuals, the significant problem is finding affordable resources, such as counseling, hormone therapy, medical procedures, and the social support necessary to freely express their gender identity and minimize discrimination. Many other obstacles may lead to distress, including a lack of acceptance within society, direct or indirect experiences with discrimination, or assault. These experiences may lead many transgender people to suffer with anxiety, depression, or related disorders at higher rates than nontransgender persons.
In other words, what psychological distress stems from being transgendered is not inherent to the state, but a result of bigotry. Anyone who claims to be concerned about the mental health of gay and transgendered people should respond, then, with acceptance. Like I said in the comments at the Girl Scouts post, I hear a lot of complaints from bigots about how they don't like accepting people, but so far, I have not heard one give a substantive example of genuine damage to themselves that could occur by just accepting people for who they are.
Sharp readers will notice that I didn't engage in the debate over whether or not people are "born this way". Empowering Lady Gaga lyrics aside, the reason is twofold. One, the evidence is sketchy for any claims about where queerness "comes" from, and in fact, many of us think that's because we're asking the wrong question. Asking where queerness "comes" from implies that cisgendered and straight is a baseline, and anything that differs from that is deviant and needs an explanation. I think of queerness like I do being left-handed: most people are right-handed, but some of us are left-handed. We don't think of left-handed people as deviant so much as we accept that in any population of people, there's going to be some diversity in orientation, as in personality.
The second reason is that it's beside the point. My sense is that sexual orientation and gender identity are probably a mish-mash of genetic, environmental, and experiential influences, but even if you could somehow prove that it's all experiential, so what? It doesn't change the needs of queer people to get proper medical care, social acceptance, and legal rights. I don't give a fuck about this "choice" argument. There is a small subset of the GLBT community that can legitimately be said to be making the "choice" to be at least perceived as gay: bisexual people who really could date either way but have chosen a same-sex partner. So what? I still don't think they should face employment discrimination, being kicked out of community organizations, or being forced not to marry the person they love. It's a completely moot argument, in the pragmatic sense. A lot of identities are partially social constructs, but we still recognize them as real and extend legal protections from discrimination. On the far end, you have religion, which is 100% a choice and completely a social construct, but religious people, in fact, enjoy many legal protections for their religion. On the other end of the spectrum, you have things like race and gender, which are socially constructed but often have easily recognizable physical markers that let people know "what" you are. Gayness is rightly perceived as closer to the race/gender side of the spectrum, since all available evidence shows that it's mostly experienced as not a choice. But it doesn't really matter to me; what matters is that it's on the spectrum, and therefore people who are gay or transgendered deserve to be protected.
I'm taking the rest of the day off---though I'll be on Twitter for the debates tonight---to honor MLK Day. Everyone should celebrate by getting some relaxing in. That said, I had to take the time to respond to someone who had the nerve to use this holiday to send off bigoted missives.
Watch the video for Digby's thoughts on the process of right wingers dehumanizing Occupy Wall Street with an eye towards rationalizing the crushing of dissent with violence. I want to agree with what she says here and add another thought: dehumanizing the protesters is part of a larger process of dehumanizing all the victims of the economic recession. Since that figure includes, to one extent or another, most of us, that means the best bet for the right now is encourage a culture of complete alienation, where we not only can't feel empathy for people down the economic ladder from us, but also a culture where our attitude towards people like us is indifference and towards people up the ladder is uncritical and worshipful. Where Americans don't see each other as human beings at all, but where all relationships are about competition and dominance at all times. That includes and may even be especially true regarding romantic and familial relationships, which is why there's so much emphasis on the right on "traditional", i.e. male-dominated marriage and protecting "parental rights" to control your children with violence. It also explains the escalating hostility to even the most basic forms of sexual expression, unless they're tightly controlled and have all the eroticism squeezed out of them. Sex is a subversive force, after all, that encourages intimacy and affection and distracts you from constantly establishing dominance and submission in every encounter you have. (Ironically, this is true even in BDSM, where it's the dominance/submission aspects that are met with controls and limits, but value is put on self-expression and a sort of anarchy of spirit. Well, at least in the best examples of it.)
This is why the pepper-spraying incident at Wal-Mart bothers me so much. I all too easily can see how someone can convince herself that it's nothing more than weeding a garden. It stems from the same place as Republican voters cheering the idea of allowing people to die of preventable causes or a foreclosure firm thought it was a great idea to mock the people they foreclose upon for Halloween. We're being encouraged to stop seeing each other as people, and more as obstacles or annoyances. We're encouraged to look at another's suffering and think not of ways to relieve it, but simply, "Better you than me." It's the Ayn Rand-ization of America, in other words, and I'm not sure what it's going to take to turn the ship around.
I defended Black Friday (albeit in a tongue-in-cheek, pro-environment, pro-local business way) for a couple of reasons. One is that I'm not buying the sanctimonious anti-materialism that crops up in some sectors of the left in response to the holiday. It's liberal reactionary politics, in my opinion, and driven as much by a shuddering distaste for the aesthetics of the day as any genuinely thoughtful point of view. Plus, events like Buy Nothing Day make "materialism" a matter of personal moral worth and actually distract from larger, collective actions regarding our economy and the environment. (I suspect most participants still buy stuff for their friends and family, just on Saturday.) As a moral value, anti-materialism reeks of puritanism, because it brackets off certain pleasures as base and animalistic and therefore suggests we should be better than that. The parallels between leftists scolding me about how I don't know what I reallly want and need in terms of material goods and conservatives scolding me about how I don't really know what I want and need with regards to sex are just too uncomfortable for me. Plus, declaiming the pleasure of having a nifty new toy makes it a matter of individual worth, making it a culture war issue, allowing wingnuts to pretend they're defending the basic right to feel pleasure against nanny state liberals. There's multiple levels of irony there, but it's something to consider before you create more grist for their mill.
Plus, I just really don't like how most liberal commentators I see who address Black Friday sneer at people who try really hard to get the advertised deals, ascribing that behavior to madness and sheeplike conformity. Another possibility that I might offer, though it may burst your bubble, is that it's a lot of people who struggle to get by. The advertised deals may look like their one shot to get the cool new toy that others may take for granted. If you're not making a lot of money and Wal-Mart is advertising some really cheap game or toy or gadget to get your kid that will make up for a year's worth of not having the cash on hand to take her to the movies or amusement parks, I'm not going to judge you. I feel uneasy with any rhetoric that slides too close to wingnuts foaming at the mouth because they discovered that poor people have color TVs. In fact, the economic desperation of the times being what it is, the increasing frenzy around bargain goods was entirely predictable, as was the growth in at-home alcohol sales after the crash. People do not live on bread alone, and when times are tight, they look for ways to feel entertained and pleased that are more affordable.
Anyway, I will just refer you to Ellen Willis and her amazing essay about the "myth of consumerism" that really demonstrates why a pro-pleasure/anti-puritanical liberalism simply cannot have this simple-minded anti-materialist knee-jerk reaction while still laying claim to be humanist. I want to move on.
To discussing the woman-pepper-spraying-a-Wal-Mart issue. On social networks and on blogs, I saw most people react to this story with knee-jerk anti-materialism with a side dose of bemusement that anyone would be lured into Wal-Mart with the promise of really low prices on electronic doo-dads and the latest kid's toy. At least a few did try to be better than that, by offering consumer education information, by pointing out that the bargain goods are sold out immediately and the whole point is to lure you in so you buy something else in order to justify the time and hassle of shopping. But I was surprised to read not one blog draw a parallel between this woman's behavior and the dramatic upswing in police using pepper spray and taser guns as weapons to control and subdue (instead of, say, fight crime). Even at Hullabaloo, where Digby has spent years blogging about incidents where the police have pepper sprayed and tasered innocent people for everything from having inconvenient seizures to being school children who graffiti desks focused mainly on the consumerism when addressing the incident, and not on what I think is the most fascinating aspect, which is the normalization of casual torture of people for not bending immediately to your most childish will in our society.
Maybe it's not obvious because until now, most of the people wielding pepper spray on crowds have been cops? Maybe it's because many people haven't really been paying attention to the fact that the OWS crack-down is an outgrowth of the increasing militarization of the police (including pepper spraying for jay-walking)? Who knows why people haven't figured this out. What I do know is that by becoming accustomed to the idea that outsized force is acceptable for the police to get their way, we opened up the door for ordinary citizens to believe that they get to be violent to people who irritate them by being rude, being strange, or, in the case of the pepper-sprayed Wal-Mart, having the nerve to get to the limited bargain good before the woman wielding the pepper spray could get there.
I believe that the biggest problem with Black Friday is not people's desire to have goods at cheap prices (though god knows a more economically just society would de-escalate the situation as more people's time would be worth more than getting up at 3AM to buy a toy), but that we allow our corporate gods to play such an obvious con on the public. A little legislation to rein it in---for instance, by outlawing sales that last only a few hours and requiring any store advertising one to have a salesperson specifically hand out rain checks to anyone who got there after they sold out----could go a long way. But even if the excesses of Black Friday were curtailed, I think the pepper spraying incident is a harbinger of what has become of this country. One day it's a person of color caught jay-walking. Then it's protesters sitting peacefully at UC Davis. Then it's a crowd of bargain-hungry shoppers on Black Friday. What next? Are we all in danger of being doused with pepper spray for having the nerve to be in line in front of someone at the coffee shop? Are we going to see someone whip out the pepper spray on a retail worker who they want to move faster? The notion that inconvenience can be met with physical violence, as long as it's packaged in a neat weapon that keeps your hands clean like pepper spray, has been introduced to our society. And this incident at Wal-Mart suggests it's going viral.
Mary Elizabeth Williams has a great defense up of the new internet meme that puts John Pike, that cop who was photographed calmly---chillingly---pepper spraying innocent, non-violent protesters at UC Davis while they sat rather helplessly on the ground hurting no one. Pike is now being photoshopped into an endless array of situations, re-imagined as a man with a can dousing the entire world in pepper spray.
Like Williams, I think this whole thing is just awesome. Not the pepper spraying, of course, which is a distressing human rights violation and the cumulation of decades worth of our police turning from "serve and protect" to a militarized force that harasses people, tears up communities, and overreacts to all sorts of situations with unnecessary violence. This meme, however, is great.
The point of it is clearly to reposition Pike in absurd situations to drive home how absurd it is in the first place to have cops calmly pepper spraying innocent civilians for protesting, treating them like offal instead of human beings. It also helps remind us that we've become accustomed to images of police brutality, that some times our eyes just glaze right over them as we move on to the next Garfield comic of LOLcat. I also get a sense from some of these pictures that the point is that this kind of violence is now everywhere, woven into the fabric of our lives. By having Pike pepper spray the Fraggles, the image creator is saying, with humor, that no one is safe.
It's easy to overrate at times the importance of the internet as a democraticizing force, but in situations like the OWS protests and the support system that's developed online, you reall see how valuable it is. The sheer amount of modern day folk art like this in support of the protesters hijacks the narrative about OWS only being a handful of dirty hippies with nothing better to do, and sends a strong reminder that the support for these protests is broad, diverse, clever, and creative. And funny as hell. Power really hates it when you laugh at it, because the whole point of authority is that they take themselves far too fucking seriously.
I continue, as these protests go on, to be amazed at how predictably violent so many authority figures have been in response. They look like mindless robots programmed strictly to hate ordinary Americans for thinking we deserveto have a piece of this great country we actually did the work of building.
The discussion over whether or not it's "good" for Occupy Wall St. to have been attacked in the middle of the night by a police force sent by Bloomberg is being tested today, and I think the "yes" side will bear out. The protesters are, as I write this, having a giant protest at Wall St. itself, attempting to delay the bell (and failing, but that's to be expected), but definitely raising a stink. Prior to this, there was a push-pull over the issue of Wall St. itself, because the security apparatus down there being what it is, actually taking the fight to Wall St. on a permanent basis has heightened dangers for the protesters. But now that the campers have been kicked out of Zucotti Park, much of the rationale for keeping it at a small distance from Wall St. itself has disappeared. This could be a good thing, albeit maybe not so much for individuals who are going to get arrested more frequently and with more violence. But that, in and of itself, sends a message; it's telling that the ugliness escalates as soon as they get that much closer to the Masters of the Universe who will not be sullied by having to interact with the ordinary people who they have fucked royally by treating our entire economy like it's a big casino.
The question is, as always, what it's going to take to keep going forward. I think most mainstream media has taken it too much as a given that the protesters will lose interest as quickly as our media culture loses interest in any one non-adultery story, and one of the best things Occupy Wall St. has done has been to subvert that narrative and keep themselves in the news. What I hope is that they really do realize and commit to the idea that this is a long term project that won't take just months, but years. The civil rights movement has to be the model going forward, even as the Arab Spring was the initial inspiration. After all, the demands of the protesters in Arab Spring countries were usually the ouster of dictators, and Occupy Wall St. is calling for extensive policy changes to address the fucked up economic system we have here. That's a long-range battle. That's why the library is so important; boning up on history can be inspirational.
I'm sure the occupiers are on it, but it seems to me that a smart move for phase II would be to maintain the occupation, but in a slightly more spread out way: safe houses and churches for stashing stuff, and maybe a bus or two, especially for housing the library and other information-gathering and transmission operations. Repeated protests at Wall St. itself, varied up so as to avoid the problem of media boredom. I think this can be done; I just hope that the occupation doesn't believe the media hype that petering out is inevitable.
Samhita from Feministing and I are doing a weekly chat podcast for our friends at Citizen Radio. This show will be completely different from my weekly podcast at RH Reality Check, which has a more NPR-style news and opinion format. (By the way, RH Reality Check is having a fund-raising drive. Since they're the best source of reproductive rights news on the internet, please consider chipping in and supporting them.) This new podcast is going to be more freeform and chatty, much like Citizen Radio. It's called Opinionated and we have a cat for a logo. You can check out the first episode here. We discuss the library situation at Occupy Wall St., which has since been updated with news that at least some of the books survived. It remains to be seen this morning what the return of the library to protesters will look like.
Speaking of Occupy Wall St., I went out there last night to re-donate my book and take some pictures/show support (I would have re-donated others if I'd had second copies, but I only have, for obvious reasons, multiple copies of my own), and was thrilled to both meet commenter rowmyboat, who is working as a librarian, and to find out how frigging organized they are with the People's Library. They were entering ISBN numbers on an iPhone, presumably so they could be registered on this database. You can look around and see if there's holes in their collection of books that would be useful to their cause and donate here, if you're not able to get down there. If you are able to get down there, they need help retrieving books from the storage facility that is holding them. I know we all look forward to hearing about how well the books survived the raid, as well as hearing about the other stuff that was confiscated. My friend Darcy was tickled to have contributed the first copy of No Logo to the rebuilt library.
Observations about last night:
*People were in surprisingly high spirits, though there was still lingering ill feelings about the raid. I think the combination of adrenaline, thrill at surviving, and disgust about what happened is easy enough to understand. People showing up who were released from jail still seemed shell-shocked.
*The crowd was heaviest around 8PM, probably around 1,000 people. We left and came back after a couple of hours, and it had thinned considerably, but the General Assembly was still going on (and probably the reason that the crowd thinned, honestly. The work they do is important, but it's also hard to sit through.)
*The police strategy for keeping people from rebuilding their camp was, as you can imagine, controversial. They barricaded most of the park and were searching anyone with heavy bags to make sure they weren't smuggling in tents, sleeping bags, or blankets (though some people did get in with blankets). Some times they seemed to think food was banned, and some times they let it in. People yelled at them for doing this, and it seemed to bother most of the police tremendously. In fact, I would say the most relevatory thing to me was the way the police were behaving. Most of them seemed genuinely unhappy that the city was using them as schoolyard monitors to harass the hippies, who are, after all, advocating for police economic rights along with everyone else. When accused of being fascist, they seemed less pissed and more hurt, at least the ones I saw, though I'm sure some cops get off on pushing hippies around. Some cops were quietly supportive. Two separate officers went out of their way to help us find our way into the park, and I saw at least one cop engaging the protesters in a friendly fashion as they explained their views.
*Funniest exchange heard all night, when there was yelling because the cops started getting aggressive about bag searching. Protester 1, at cop: "Nazi!" Protester 2, at Protester 1, "Don't say that. He may be a fascist, but he's definitely not a Nazi." Real life Godwinning! Also, I suspect from the cop's reaction to this that he is neither.
We left before it even really came close to the point where questions would be asked about camping out. In my time there, no one even talked about it, honestly. I haven't heard word yet about what they eventually did.
I was on Bloggingheads with Erica Grieder yesterday, and we talked about the raid:
I'm not sure why people are acting like there's a debate over whether or not it's good for the cause to have a political crackdown like this. From what I understand, the whole point of non-violent protest is to provoke authority figures into showing their true colors, and garner sympathy for your cause.
Updated: The Gothamist has a timeline that shows exactly how long the books went missing, which certainly added to suspicions that they had been maliciously destroyed.
Whoops! Mayor Bloomberg's office has come to the realization that tearing down and carting off a 5,000 book library particularly looks bad in a situation that already makes him look like a tone-deaf authoritarian. The mayor's office put up a picture of some of the library contents with this caption: "Property from #Zuccoti, incl #OWS library, safely stored @ 57th St Sanit Garage; can be picked up Weds." The only property shown in the picture is books:
That the books will be returned is excellent news, and let's hope the rest of the belongings of the protesters will also be returned.
It's telling that this defensive retort to the understandable panic in response to having all the protesters' things carted away in the raid is to display a picture of the books. As I noted earlier, there's nothing that says authoritarian overreach like the destruction of books. Bloomberg is trying to create the illusion that he's not interested in anything but a clean park, and so it's in his interest to dispel the notion that he sicced the cops on a people-built, ragtag library. For some, this picture of books will, in fact, dispel that notion. I would warn people not to make too much of this, however. Bloomberg can't undo the attempted media blackout, and the fact that all this property was seized from peaceful people in an unnecessary raid is still outrageous.
For now, I'm glad that the books were not destroyed, and hope they are all returned promptly without being damaged. This is reportedly only a fraction of the library that's been accumulated, so we won't know the full story until the protesters get their things back.
As far as I know, we're still having a writer's protest to show support for the basic right to free speech and community education at Zuccoti Park at 6PM, though that may change depending on the ongoing clusterfuck at the courthouse. Details available here and here. Regardless of whether or not the mayor's office gives the books back, the whole raid has shined a light on the admirable efforts of Occupy Wall St. to use this opportunity not just for protest, but for education and expanding one's worldview. That affirming the value of reading has been so central to the protest should warm the hear of all writers and lovers of the written word, and we should show our support.
Contrary to the claims of conservatives, our Constitution does not guarantee the right to unfettered, utterly corrupt capitalism to allow the top 1% of our society to suck up all the wealth created by the working people of this country, leaving the rest of us to live paycheck to paycheck, constantly worrying about homelessness or bankruptcy (if we're lucky enough to have mere worries and not actualities). What the Constitution does guarantee, and which pains our wealthy ruling class so much, is the rights of the 99% to vote, to speak out, and to organize. And these rights have been under attack in an unprecedented way in the past year. Republicans have spent the past year using all the power they have to destroy the right of workers to organize and of large numbers of people to vote. Now Mayor Bloomberg, who likes to play at being the "good" Republican, has shown his true colors by escalating the assault on freedom of speech with last night's raid of Occupy Wall St. (If you're in NYC and want to go show support, they're reconvening in Foley Square by City Hall.)
Bloomberg would have you believe that he's not attacking basic First Amendment rights. His press release says:
No right is absolute and with every right comes responsibilities. The First Amendment gives every New Yorker the right to speak out – but it does not give anyone the right to sleep in a park or otherwise take it over to the exclusion of others – nor does it permit anyone in our society to live outside the law. There is no ambiguity in the law here – the First Amendment protects speech – it does not protect the use of tents and sleeping bags to take over a public space.
This is bullshit on its face---closing in on arguing that since print or digital media isn't "speech", it's not protected, since the tents are part of the necessary materials to speak---but even within this framework, Bloomberg is lying. The attacks on freedom of speech and press went well beyond evicting protesters and banning tents. Allison Kilkenny, writing for In These Times, explains how thorough the assault on speech and press was:
"Cleaning" is the city's favorite excuse to close down the protest, though the attempt at an innocent facade by the NYPD became all the more absurd when numerous reports began to trickle in of press being bullied and intimidated into leaving the area. Rosie Gray, a writer for the Village Voice tried to beg her way into gaining access to the plaza, which the police quickly quarantined during the raid, preventing media from seeing what was happening. "I'm press!" Gray reportedly exclaimed, to which a female officer replied, "not tonight."
Josh Harkinson from Mother Jones reported being "violently shoved" by police as he tried to photograph a man being placed into an ambulance on a stretcher, in addition to being removed from the park's area even when he told police he is press and has the "right to be here and observe what is going on." As the officer dragged him from the square, he told Harkinson if he stayed in the park he "could get hurt."
Additionally, Jared Malsin, the former chief English editor of Maan News Agency, was arrested alongside City Council Member Ydanis Rodriguez, who was reportedly bleeding from the head by the time he was arrested.
The obstruction of witnesses seemed a high priority for the NYPD, who in addition to blocking media access, also prevented residents near the park from leaving their building, and told doormen to "lock up," according to NBC New York reporter Melissa Russo.
According to the Tech Herald, the airspace over the area was also closed, forcing helicopters to land instead of getting pictures. many reporters on Twitter asserted that they'd been removed from covering the raid, and many were threatened with arrest and stripped of their press passes. In addition to Mother Jones and the Village Voice, the NY Observer was blocked, and Tech Herald is also claiming that the Wall Street Journal, CNBC, NBC, CBS, and Reuters were denied access. There are AP pictures, but because of all this, the pictures of the raid are pretty thin. Even without direct reports from reporters being denied access (or arrested), the timing of the raid makes clear Bloomberg's media blackout intentions. They clearly hoped that by doing this work while most reporters are in bed, they would gain an advantage over the press and prevent them from getting there on time.
Protesters locked arms and tried to keep the dumpsters full of books and tents from leaving, but obviously to no avail. Personally, I donated about a dozen books to OWS, mostly about feminism in response to requests for more feminist discourse and history. Some of them weren't exactly books you can just saunter into a local library branch or Barnes & Noble to find, either, such as the radical feminism reader. So this image of the books being tossed into the trash is just adding to the emotional distress of this situation.
So don't believe the lies. If this was just about a clean park, there would have been no need to go over the fucking top in the asssaults on speech and press that included threatening journalists (and arresting one), squelching witnesses, and destroying over 5,000 books that were provided, free of charge, by supporters who want to assist protesters' desire to educate themselves and, frankly, give them something to do during their downtime.
I travel a fair bit, too, and have noticed there being a strong correlation between getting the "friendly" TSA search notification and the presence of modern lady conveniences of the more fun sort. Which always sucks, because then you have to call the front desk to have a bottle of rubbing alcohol sent up to ease some of your more paranoid concerns. With this in mind, I've concocted a strategy of making sure that someone isn't fondling your sex toys out of your sight just because you have the nerve to remain orgasm-interested while traveling.
1) Don't check bags. I used to scoff at this advice as inadequate for my shit-carrying needs, but since then I've learned the rolling method of packing, which is truly life-changing. I just got back from a week-long trip and I went all carry-on, and I had about twice as many clothes as I ended up using.
Granted, the concern here is that the TSA agent will flag your carry-on right in front of everyone. This, I believe, is a preferable situation to having them go through your shit behind your back. Having seen a friend have a bag flagged for dildo-related materials in the checkpoint, I can safely say that it's not as bad as you'd think. The woman searching said friend's bag blushed to her toes and let us go on our way with no further fussing, nor touching of the item. No concerns about gross perverts doing gross things to your stuff.
2) Disguise it. A lot of people have wondered why there are so many vibrators shaped like things you wouldn't think would be appealing as vibrators. A sampling:
Well, now you know. So nosy people think it's a toy of the non-adult sort and move on. As a TSA-dodging strategy, this one works surprisingly well.
Of course, that makes you wonder why it's less shocking for a grown woman to be traveling with what looks like children's bath toys than with sex toys, but thus is the way of our fucked-up country.
Early morning amusements: Salon caught Fox News being taken in by a satirical article, and reprinting it as straight news. Not-so-amusing is that they did it as straightforward hate-mongering, and still have not taken the story down or apologized for it.
The story, which is still featured on Fox News’ Fox Nation website, was illustrated with a picture of a woman’s mid-section and carried the headline “Pakistan: Islamic Clerics Protest Women Wearing Padded Bras as ‘Devil’s Cushions.’” The lead of the Fox Nation story, which sources the piece to the Indian news website sify.com, reads:
The Council of Islamic Ideology in Pakistan has protested the use of padded and colourful bras by Muslim women, and recommended that Pakistani Muslim researchers should try to invent an innerwear that makes female assets unnoticeable.
The problem is, if one takes the time to track the story back to its source, the whole thing is an obvious Onion-style satire—a fact first pointed out by Arif Rafiq of the Pakistan Policy Blog.
Naturally, the comments are filled up with wingnuts using this as an excuse to lambast every Muslim in the world. Salon quoted one commenter calling Islam a “cult”, just to give you an idea of the levels of stupid and bigoted we’re dealing with here. Yet again, I find myself irritated lately, because it’s not like I’m Team Islam or anything, since I think all religions are pretty silly. But American conservatives aren’t making the case against religion. (LULZ.) They’re just playing the game of “my made-up bullshit is better than your made-up bullshit”.
Most of the panels/speakers I saw at the Women in the World Summit were awesome, but by far the most troubling—-though definitely interesting at parts—-panel was one hosted by Andrew Sullivan titled “The Multiculturalism Debate: Is Europe Stigmatizing the Veil?” It was supposed to be a debate over banning the niqab, which is a face veil, and while some pains were made to try to differ between wearing a niqab and wearing a hijab of any sort that covers your hair completely or just partially, the distinctions got blurry. Some good points were made by Liesl Gerntholtz about how bans—-or requirements—-on religious garb of any sort usually serve only to limit women’s movement, because women who object to the requirement, or are forced to do so by their families, will just find themselves staying at home or being forced to more often. Ayaan Hirsi Ali made a lot of interesting points, mostly objecting to how this debate swallows up larger discussions about how religion is used as cover to control and oppress women in ways that are significantly more damaging than anything clothes could do to you. But mostly it was a confused mess, and not helped by the fact that no practicing Muslims, much less anyone who wore a hijab (which Ali sensibly pointed out can often be a non-obtrusive item of clothing, instead of one that says, “Look at how modest I am.”) was part of the panel. They said they couldn’t get anyone to agree to do it, which to me should have been an indicator that it was time to go back to the drawing board.
Anyway, setting aside the debates on the legal restrictions, one thing that annoys/amuses (we need a word for this in English) me about the whole debate—-and thankfully this was something that was alluded to by people who got up and asked questions—-is that it presupposes that only Muslims fall into the trap of obsessing over how much skin is too much skin, or other questions of women’s “modesty”. (And it presupposes all Muslims do, which is simply not true.) I guarantee every fucking person frothing at the mouth at this satirical story has spent some time judging some woman or other for being immodest. I was thinking about this while watching the panel, and tweeted an observation, I think, about skirt length and bra thickness.
Which is the irony here. While all these wingnuts are frothing over an imaginary ban on padded bras, in America, the padded bra is, in and of itself, an object of modesty obsession. While some communities are more liberal, and thus this falls under the radar, in other communities, leaving the house without a solid amount of padding to conceal your shameful natural breast shape is a big fucking deal. At Slate, Emily Yoffe dealt with this concern. The question:
I find myself at the age of 31 wondering what proper nipple etiquette is. I recently read an article that led me to realize that some people are offended by the sight of the outline of a woman’s nipples showing through her clothing. I own a variety of bras, some padded and some not. I know that if I wear an unpadded bra and it gets cold, the outline of my nipples will show through my top. My mother never mentioned anything about this when I was growing up (she didn’t object when I sometimes went braless as a teen), and the only person who has ever said anything about my nipples is my boyfriend. I am inclined to think that it is not improper, and I have never been offended by the sight of nipples. Would you please educate me?
This is the part of Michael Moore’s interview on “Rachel Maddow” last night that was lighting up Twitter, because this is the clip where he changed his tune about the accusations against Julian Assange, admitting they were credible and saying that the women who accused him should be heard in court. I was fortunate enough to be in the audience for this, but on this entire issue I have more to say later. Right now, I want to talk about something else that Moore and Maddow discussed, in the second part of the interview. But I will bring it back to the rape case.
Maddow made an interesting argument, which is that a problem with Wikileaks is that incorrect propaganda can be leaked along with factually true information, which is incidentally exactly what happened to Michael Moore. A cable was released claiming that “Sicko” had been banned in Cuba, which was published to great sniggering all over the place. And was also total bullshit. (And also incoherent bullshit, but it seems like it was mostly because it was internal propaganda for the Bush administration. No joke.) Moore countered by pointing out that the record was corrected in this case, and in fact, the Wikileaks cables are improving journalism because every cable the news medias wish to cover they have actually follow up with investigations. In other words, the cables are the starting point. I think there’s this belief out there that Assange and the Wikileaks crew are all about information as some kind of solution in and of itself (or that they support a secret-free society, when they’ve actually redacted information in the cables and worked with seasoned professionals in journalism to decide what to release). But the idea of Wikileaks is to put the government on notice, which is working very well.
What Moore is saying is also very interesting, which is that once information is out there—-such as the fact that this cable was sent—-we can actually deal with it. So, yes, a lie got out about his movie and Cuba. But then the lie was corrected, and what we learned from the whole shebang is that the Bush administration had a lot of internal propaganda going on. This is an important thing to know, and will influence our understanding of history from here on out. (It shores up the sense that conservatives lie to themselves in order to gin up enthusiasm for lying to others.) Of course, that doesn’t deal with the problem of deliberately leaked propaganda, but still, he had a point.
And what better proves it than the Guardian publishing the leaked documents from the Swedish police regarding the Assange rape case? It’s ironic that Assange is so angry about this, because I can’t think of a better example of how effective the principles of free information are. Before the documents were published, there was a dearth of information, and when there is a dearth of real information, people start to fill in the holes with their own prejudices so they can make judgments. People who wished to believe that they were supporting a noble man in every way with Assange were eager to grab on to any scrap of information that shored up their hopeful arguments that the accusers were the strawfeminists of right wing imagination, women who cry rape if a man looks at them funny.
But when the actual depositions got out, that changed everything. Now people had something to work with. Granted, some of them are so dedicated to the “hysterical bitches” narrative that they read it into the information at hand. But others, including Keith Olbermann and Michael Moore, seem to have revised their opinions dramatically on the case, because being exposed to the information made them realize their knee jerk reaction that the allegations couldn’t be credible was simply wrong. The people arguing that we shouldn’t attack the accusers without evidence ironically got a better foothold when we got some information, because at least we had something to point to when making our case. It narrows down the field of possibilities. Before the release, those defending these rape accusers and rape accusers in general from scurrilous accusations had many tangents to go with—-you don’t have any idea what they said, it doesn’t seem likely that the only issue was a broken condom, there’s a possibility of hysteria but experience suggests to me most women aren’t just childish hysterics. Now it’s narrowed down to pointing to the details in the deposition and saying, “Look, X, Y, and Z are definitely wrong and should be punished if the prosecution can prove the case.” Meanwhile, if experience on #mooreandme is any indication, the rape apologists are still working with bad information that was imagined into existence when there wasn’t real information to work with.
Point for getting it all out on the table. Ironically, then, point for Wikileaks and the arguments for them. But like Moore said in the interview, this isn’t about Assange or one man, but about Wikileaks as a group, and the argument for free information in general.
Couple of things before I dig into this post: last night’s interview on “Joy of Resistance” on WBAI was a lot of fun, especially since Jill Filipovic was in-studio with me. You can listen to the archived version here, along with their last episode. A lot is covered, but we do talk some about Julian Assange. (Well, Jill was on to talk about it. I just pipe up with one thought.) I was also interviewed on Vancouver’s “The F-Word”, this time about feminist blogging.
Michelle Dean has a typically thoughtful and interesting post on the Wikileaks phenomenon and the annoyingly predictable response from people when someone they admire is accused of rape. (My favorite irony is how people who can manage to acknowledge someone is a creepy misogynist and does things they admire cannot make the leap into suggesting that someone could be a rapist and also do things they admire. Convenient! Once again, for the people who struggle with walking and chewing gum, I’m not accusing Assange of anything. I’m just objecting to the notion that the rape accusations are beyond credibility.) The rape stuff has been rehashed here, so I won’t get into it. But I do want to answer some questions she raises about Wikileaks itself.
There is a strong, if rather incoherent, sense on the left that Assange’s work is deeply important, and thus worth defending at all costs. And yet, at this juncture, the articulations of that value are rather unclear. Like everyone, of course, I’ve enjoyed the occasional bitchy statement that Cablegate has revealed from some State department lackey. (A personal favorite is the whiny memorandum about American stereotypes on Canadian television – we’re just glad you even care what we think of you, American brethren!) But so far, the information has been widely agreed to reveal no particular smoking gun, no admission that UFOs exist or 9/11 was planned or that Bush spent much of his time in office improving on prior MarioCart scores. And even when Wikileaks reveals something truly shocking, like the video of the murder of journalists in Iraq that it circulated some months ago, little seems to actually happen.
It’s possible, of course, that that argument sees too many trees to bother taking in the forest. Noam Chomsky, for example, has suggested that the takeaway from the cables is that they reveal a “profound hatred for democracy on the part of our political leadership”, and perhaps that metanarrative will actually win out among historians. But in terms of actionable specifics, things that will galvanize targeted calls for political change in the here and now, well, there’s not a whole lot to be found there. Yet, of course. Which is the rub, and the thing we all rely on when we think about why what Wikileaks is doing might be valuable to us. If one needle comes out of the whole haystack, that is probably enough to justify the entire Wikileaks enterprise. It’s probably true in this case that the very idea of Wikileaks is worth preserving in the abstract, even if we’re not sure about how it’s played out in the real world so far. So let’s be generous and say that it is that abstract value, Wolf et al. are relying on, after all, in their largely speculative adherence to the theory that fear of Wikileaks may be so strong that some covert agency has trumped up sexual assault charges against its mastermind.
Actually, I don’t think we have to be generous. I’m skeptical of covert agency claims, especially with regards to this rape case, but the fear of Wikileaks is actually that strong. That part isn’t speculation. The funniest and most amazing aspect of Wikileaks is how the project managed to expose how fragile certain kinds of power on, since they rely so heavily on consensus. In this case, the consensus around government over-secrecy—-turned out that you only needed a handful of truly determined dissenters and suddenly everyone is running around like their asses are on fire.
Which isn’t to say that I think order through consensus is a bad thing. For instance, the police and the courts only work because everyone basically agrees on the justice of the laws, keeping their workload to a manageable level and keeping the money flowing into their systems. When people don’t agree, that actually makes their jobs impossible. For instance, drugs. Even if people will tell phone pollsters they believe anti-drug laws are just, the widespread use of drugs suggests that we’re far from consensus on this front. Thus, law enforcement is inadequate as a response, even if you believe they should be doing something about it. (I’m skeptical, at least about the buying and selling, though obviously the violence that attends to black markets is a legal matter.) Sadly, lack of consensus that rape should be a crime—-a lack of consensus that’s exposed every time a famous man is accused of rape and large numbers of people go on the record saying that you should totally get to rape some women—-means rape is widespread in the way other crimes aren’t.
Heather at C&L posted this 13-second video of Reihan Salam saying that the TSA dust-up is just one of many examples of conservatives getting back to caring about civil liberties. This is naked bullshit, of course, and that he bothered to utter it just proves what I said at the Guardian about this:
The influx of money, tied to a perceived political imperative not to be seen as being “soft on terrorism”, means the battle lines over this are being drawn in such a way that real change over security protocols is unlikely. Conservatives who are up in arms about this will likely shut up if their team wins by getting security privatised, even though it will remain as invasive. Meanwhile, many Democratic-leaning journalists and pundits seem content to attack dishonest and shady rightwing TSA critics – without examining in detail why such security procedures are invasive and need to stop.
It’s been really unpleasant, dealing with conservatives on this. Plenty of liberals think the TSA searches are out of line, but making alliances with conservatives on this is a scary proposition. From my article:
[A]ligning yourself with the American right means bringing on quite a bit of baggage: bad faith arguments, outright lying, racism – and hidden agendas, usually serving predatory corporate interests.
The notion that there’s some great pro-civil liberties sentiment on the right makes as much sense as saying Sarah Palin is a feminist. Which is to say, only if you’re too stupid to figure out how to work a zipper. Those of us who support civil liberties mostly find ourselves fighting the right on this one. We are talking about the conservative movement, to whom the term “ACLU” is a dirty word. Indeed, most of the energy on the right on this TSA thing is about restricting civil liberties—-the problem for most isn’t that there are invasive searches. It’s that white people have to endure them.
As far as I can tell, the right only cares about civil liberties if they can make it about provoking the emasculation fears of a bunch of bitter assholes, thus the gun nuttery aspect of the right. But should said emasculation fears support restrictions on liberty, then they’ll all for it. You can’t take their guns, and no woman should have the right to reject a man’s seed, which is practically like taking his balls from him! Freedom of speech is sorely misunderstood on the right—-their interpretation appears to be, “No one should criticize me when I speak my mind, liberals should shut the fuck up, and how come white people can’t say the n-word, like black people can?” (Which goes up to the first point—-they seem to treat having people snarl at you as an infringement on liberty akin to actual infringements, like going to jail.) Religious liberty only means that Christians should have a right to impose their bullshit on everyone else with taxpayer money, but it certainly doesn’t mean you should have the right to build a community center on private land. There appears to be exactly zero right wing anger, outside of a couple of eccentrics working at libertarian think tanks, over police abuses of the citizenry.
Actual supporters of civil liberties are out there as they always have been, mostly working for the left. Which isn’t to say that there aren’t liberals who buy into fear-mongering and support actual infringements on our liberties—-I’m not naming names, but I’ve seen some pants-wetting about terrorism used to justify the TSA searches on the left. But most of the work done in this area is and will continue to be done by liberals. And we tend to be more whole cloth about it. As I note in a podcast I do every week that’s devoted to a certain aspect of civil liberties, people shouldn’t have to have their junk touched to get on an airplane, but nor should the price they pay for delivering a baby in a hospital while being in an interracial relationship be that their baby is taken from them on spurious grounds.
I defended Black Friday (albeit in a tongue-in-cheek, pro-environment, pro-local business way) for a couple of reasons. One is that I'm not buying the sanctimonious anti-materialism that crops up in some sectors of the left in response to the holiday. It's liberal reactionary politics, in my opinion, and driven as much by a shuddering distaste for the aesthetics of the day as any genuinely thoughtful point of view. Plus, events like Buy Nothing Day make "materialism" a matter of personal moral worth and actually distract from larger, collective actions regarding our economy and the environment. (I suspect most participants still buy stuff for their friends and family, just on Saturday.) As a moral value, anti-materialism reeks of puritanism, because it brackets off certain pleasures as base and animalistic and therefore suggests we should be better than that. The parallels between leftists scolding me about how I don't know what I reallly want and need in terms of material goods and conservatives scolding me about how I don't really know what I want and need with regards to sex are just too uncomfortable for me. Plus, declaiming the pleasure of having a nifty new toy makes it a matter of individual worth, making it a culture war issue, 
Contrary to the claims of conservatives, our Constitution does not guarantee the right to unfettered, utterly corrupt capitalism to allow the top 1% of our society to suck up all the wealth created by the working people of this country, leaving the rest of us to live paycheck to paycheck, constantly worrying about homelessness or bankruptcy (if we're lucky enough to have mere worries and not actualities). What the Constitution does guarantee, and which pains our wealthy ruling class so much, is the rights of the 99% to vote, to speak out, and to organize. And these rights have been under attack in an unprecedented way in the past year. Republicans have spent the past year using all the power they have to destroy the right of workers to organize and of large numbers of people to vote. Now Mayor Bloomberg, who likes to play at being the "good" Republican, has shown his true colors by escalating the assault on freedom of speech with last night's raid of Occupy Wall St. (If you're in NYC and want to go show support, they're reconvening in Foley Square by City Hall.) 
Early morning amusements: 
Couple of things before I dig into this post: last night’s interview on “Joy of Resistance” on WBAI was a lot of fun, especially since Jill Filipovic was in-studio with me.