The Evolution of Me

dirtyrichpolitical:

Looks like John McCain is having an unfortunate spell with dementia.

He firmly believes that there is no ‘War on Women,’ and it is an imaginary, politically motivated and fabricated narrative conjured up by Democrats to distract from real issues.

HUFFINGTON POST:

“My friends, this supposed ‘War on Women’ or the use of similarly outlandish rhetoric by partisan operatives has two purposes, and both are purely political in their purpose and effect: The first is to distract citizens from real issues that really matter and the second is to give talking heads something to sputter about when they appear on cable television,” he said. “Neither purpose does anything to advance the well-being of any American.”

“To suggest that one group of us or one party speaks for all women or that one group has an agenda to harm women and another to help them is ridiculous,” he continued.

McCain said he supports reauthorizing the Violence Against Women Act, which many of his GOP colleagues oppose because it extends protections to LGBT victims of domestic abuse and expands a visa program for victims who are undocumented immigrants.

“Women and men are no different in their rights and responsibilities,” he said. “I believe this legislation recognizes that. I don’t believe the ludicrous, partisan posturing that has conjured up this imaginary war does.”

Just recently, in the last few months,there have been a number of political attacks targeting women and their rights engineered by Republicans. Everything from trying to defund Planned Parenthood, to supporting legislation that mandates medically unnecessary ultrasound procedures for women seeking abortions, to vetoing funding for rape crisis centres, to pushing laws that deny employers providing contraceptive coverage to female employees on religious grounds, to the Rush Limbaugh / Sandra Fluke controversy, to the issue of equal pay.

Be clear here. There is a definite GOP War on Women and their rights.

MOVEON.ORG:

Top 10 Shocking Attacks from the GOP’s War on Women

1) Republicans not only want to reduce women’s access to abortion care, they’re actually trying to redefine rape. After a major backlash, they promised to stop. But they haven’t yet. Shocker.

2) A state legislator in Georgia wants to change the legal term for victims of rape, stalking, and domestic violence to “accuser.” But victims of other less gendered crimes, like burglary, would remain “victims.”

3) In South Dakota, Republicans proposed a bill that couldmake it legal to murder a doctor who provides abortion care. (Yep, for real.)

4) Republicans want to cut nearly a billion dollars of food and other aid to low-income pregnant women, mothers, babies, and kids. 

5) In Congress, Republicans have a bill that would let hospitals allow a woman to die rather than perform an abortion necessary to save her life. 

6) Maryland Republicans ended all county money for a low-income kids’ preschool program. Why? No need, they said.Women should really be home with the kids, not out working. 

7) And at the federal level, Republicans want to cut that same program, Head Start, by $1 billion. That means over 200,000 kids could lose their spots in preschool.

8) Two-thirds of the elderly poor are women, and Republicans are taking aim at them too. A spending bill would cut funding for employment services, meals, and housing for senior citizens.

9) Congress just voted for a Republican amendment to cut all federal funding from Planned Parenthood health centers, one of the most trusted providers of basic health care and family planning in our country.

10) And if that wasn’t enough, Republicans are pushing to eliminate all funds for the only federal family planning program. (For humans. But Republican Dan Burton has a bill to provide contraception for wild horses. You can’t make this stuff up).

Really GOP, how long will you guys keep denying this??

They say the night is cold and dark,

And I suppose that’s true,

But when else can you see the stars?

But that’s cliché, isn’t it.

-

Poets write about the blank slate snow brings,

But so can rain

To the upturned face.

But you’ve heard that before.

—-

How can I impress the world with my words

If I can’t impress myself?

This is every writer’s dilemma

And I promise none cease complaining about it.

-

Everything has been said before

In one form or another.

Even that statement is nothing new,

In fact, it may be the oldest.

-

But if it is the oldest,

Then it is most definitely false.

—-

Despite the aliens-are-everywhere theorists

I doubt the Mayans could imagine airplanes.

-

And I’m pretty sure

That the colonists aboard ships

Did not factor iPhones

Into their image of a new world.

—-

But I wanted words,

Didn’t I?

-

I don’t think the poets of ancient Japan

Had stories about humanoids in time-machines.

-

And nomadic tribes

Passing tales about wizard-boys attending boarding schools

From generation to generation

Seems a bit far-fetched to me.

—-

But, there’s always a “but,”

The ideas and the feelings

Have still been conveyed

Just in a different form.

-

And in this day and age

Of literacy and easy access to written words

Each idea, each trope,

Has been told a hundred times over.

-

I’m left with words

Whose potency has been leeched out.

And I struggle to put my meaning

Clearly onto the page.

—-

Tired people shouldn’t have access to words.

Sick people shouldn’t be let near a marking stylus of any sort.

To those who say it should be the exact opposite,

Thank you.

Read More

• Sokka is gone too? *sniff*
• Why are there cars in my precious Asian fantasy land?
• Anti-benders? Hopefully they don’t know Ty Lee’s chi-blocking tricks.
• Stop it. You’re fantasy Asia, not dystopian New York.
• Although I like the music.
• Stop expecting favouritism, Korra.
• Also, Toph’s daughter is pretty, if that’s the right word to use for someone who is probably fifty or older.
• “Don’t bring my mother into this!”
• I was right! She’s a polarbear-dog! (I think it’s a he.) (I have been informed Naga is a she by the lovely Moira.)
• Ugh. Press. I don’t like cities.

Part II

• She’s so… hmmm…
• That’s dizzying.
• Are we going to learn about Zuko’s mother or not?
• Everything is so pretty.
• I likey.
• No! Don’t burn the pretty wood!
• It’s been what, two days? Have patience Korra.
• “I will make no such promises.” Says the girl with the book. I like her.
• I thought you were told not to do anything? *face palm*
• Of course you need to know air bending. Can we go back to the book girl? Or Naga?
• Oh Tenzin. :)
• I love the music.

Okay. I like this show. Now give me more!

-

P.S. (On Wikipedia)

• The voice of Iroh died? *sobs* R.I.P. Mako Iwamatsu

I do not write exceptionally good poetry. This does not bother me. I have friends who are absolutely amazing poets. Through them I can see what I do wrong.

What I do wrong terrifies me.

No matter how many or how few words I spend, I am hardly ever able to capture specific feelings. My paradisaical (apparently that’s a word) settings lacks the quirk, the element that grounds them, makes them believable. I tear my hair out trying to keep the thing focused on a point.

Why does this frighten me so? I said being a crappy poet isn’t a problem after all. So why do I care?

These are all elements used in telling a good story.

Namely making the story believable and immersive.

And I want to do that so badly. My dream is to be a novelist. I’m surrounded by excellent writers, some of which have no desire to pursue this particular talent (fine by me). I’m constantly reminded of a statistic I heard once, Two out of ten published authors can live off their earnings solely from their books (I have no idea why the statistic was presented that way instead of 20% or one out of five). That’s the battle one is thrown into after they secure publishing.

You know what my plan B career is? Theoretical mathematics. I’m fairly sure it’s just as hard if not harder to earn a living off of that as off of words.

Someone knock some sense into me.

-

Also, I wrote this as a way to procrastinate from taking the poems I’ve written for school during the past two months and polishing them up until I have four I like enough to read in front of a coffee shop packed with parents (and my class-mates). Sometimes I really hate going to an artsy-fartsy school.

fishingboatproceeds:

Step 1: Write about people who aren’t white.

Step 2: THERE IS NO STEP TWO.

You will very rarely see me curse, tumblypoos, but…but…I mean, what the fuck? How is this even possible? This reads like an Onion article.

To be clear, it is now ILLEGAL to teach de la Pena’s novel (which I’ve read and which is excellent) in schools, not because the book contains violence or drug use or massively unerotic blow jobs, but because it contains Mexican American characters. (The protagonist of the novel is only half Mexican, but apparently that is too Mexican for Arizona.)

That’s it. That’s the whole reason it can’t be taught in schools.

Unbelievable.

maureenjohnsonbooks:

 … .so I read this piece in the New York Times about parents who publish their kids’ books. As an author and a person who likes the internet and new media things, this sort of thing interests me a lot. But I did get a strange, queasy feeling about it that I wanted to parse a bit. Let me say a few things off the top.

1. I approve of kids writing books. I am FOR this activity! This is why I talk about give money to NaNoWriMo. If you are a kid who wants to write, you should be writing. You should be going for it with all your might.

2. I don’t really care what people do with their own time or money. That may be a *bit* of an overstatement, but it’s generally true. If you want to spend your every last dime on statues of koalas made out of butter or giant foam rocks or hilariously large cowboy hats, then let me be the first to say, “DO IT.” Because it’s your money. And if you want to spend $500-$3000 printing your child’s book of poetry, that is your business. Go nuts.

3. It’s a valid point that parents spend money on activities for their kids. Dance lessons. Sports. Music lessons. Space camp. These things all cost money. 

4. Self-publishing may be the way of the future. I say “may” because I don’t know the future. It could be. Or it could be a fad. I think it’s more likely that more and more books might go that way, though.

Having said all of that … here is why I think this is a bad idea. I will label THESE points with letters so they are clearly a different list, and that is fancy.

a. If you pay for something, it’s a service. I could go to any mall in America right now and get my face put on a shirt that says World’s Best Grandma. I’d pay for it, and it would be mine. It doesn’t matter that I have no grandchildren. I could pay for a good or service that would make that claim for me, and furthermore alert the world that I am best at it. It doesn’t make the statement true.

Likewise, if you pay to publish a book, you have paid to publish a book. Yes, it exists and is published … by you. Which is fine. It’s not a crime or anything. It might even be a good thing in some cases! But in the case of kids, I think it gives the message that they are now published authors, when in fact what they are are kids with generous parents who paid to have their work printed. Many of the kids in this piece are saying, “You can do anything if you put your mind to it!” When in fact, the lesson is, “You can do anything if your parents pay for it!” Which isn’t much of a helpful lesson.

My suspicion … and this may get me labeled as a bad person, but I’m going to take a chance here … is that those books will now be foisted on a bunch of people who don’t really want them. But you know what I mean, I hope. Like, that person the one parent works with? Who is guilted into buying that book? And all the friends on Facebook? “Buy this thing my kid did!” Everyone hates that person.

b. It takes a long time to learn how to write, and the process involves criticism. This is simply a fact. If you go through your life avoiding all criticism … well, it’s impossible, but if you do, you are missing all the tricks. Criticism is not a bad thing. Criticism makes us grow, it shows us things we didn’t see before, and it teaches us how to cope … sometimes how to cope with criticism itself.

99.9% of all writing is bad at the start. Whenever we start anything, we are almost guaranteed to be bad at it, because we don’t know how to do it yet! When we start playing sports or dancing or playing the tuba or cooking or driving a car, we are bad at it! Because we are learning! It doesn’t take away our worth as people—on the contrary, learning is wonderful and noble! We love to watch children learn!*

In the same way that you don’t rent out a concert hall to showcase your child who has taken three violin lessons (unless you are crazy, or like Charles Foster Kane in Citizen Kane who buys an opera house for his girlfriend who can’t sing and makes everyone go) … you don’t just print everything your child writes. Why the rush? Why highlight a developing skill long before that skill is ready to be showcased?

c. “But my child’s book is amazing! It will be a bestseller!” If you’re saying this, I’m already reaching for the restraints. Yes, I know about Christopher Paolini. I still don’t want to hear it. Because a). for every Christopher Paolini there are a million non-Christopher Paolinis, and b). is that really the goal? Writing is a business and a profession, and do you really want to put your kids into business at a young age? (I know some parents do, and that has always weirded me out. Sorry. I’m never going to be into it.) 

Also, I have major problems with the concept of someone taking a child’s work and publishing it. I am not saying it is being taken by force or from an unwilling child (though it might be) … but I am saying that you need to give consent for the publishing of your own work under any circumstances, and that consent must be informed. I question whether or not a kid can make really informed consent on a matter like this.**

d. You need to give your writing a chance to grow. This is the most important one. I was going to say that you don’t pick the flower before it blooms, but I don’t really know how to grow or pick flowers, so maybe you do pick a flower before it blooms. But I know you don’t pick it before there’s even a flower on the plant. You don’t pick it when it’s just a little green nub in the ground. When you take someone who’s learning and you rubber stamp their work as DONE, you aren’t actually doing them any favors. Really. 

e. “You don’t even have kids. What do you know?” About this, a lot. I have ten books under my belt, over ten years of professional experience with almost every major publishing house in the country and twenty or more around the world. I write and deal with publishing every day of my life. I’m surrounded by it at all times. This is the one thing I do know.

I write under pressure all the time, and I can tell you, it’s hard. Sometimes it sucks. But I can do it because I am an adult and a professional. I’ve been criticized and rejected and corrected. I don’t freak out or take it personally when someone doesn’t like my work (99% of the time). I can handle the pressure in the way that we all learn to handle the pressures of our chosen walks of life. And let me tell you, it’s really, really hard to take chances or do new things when people are staring at you. When people expect something of you. And your work can be admired or derided for more or less any reason. Some people will be right and some people will be wrong. You need a few years of experience to figure out who to listen to in the great clamor of voices. And the voices, I promise you, are only going to increase in number and vociferousness. The internet is a wild and wonderful ocean, but you need to know how to deal with it.

To be clear … I have no problem with the writing part. I am for the writing part. I also like the idea that the kids are reading their stories out and sharing them. I like all of that! What I object to is this commodification of the process that gets you the label published. And this is a label we are all trying to sort out now, because published is a word that sort of gives you the laurel wreath, isn’t it? It used to mean that someone read your work, judged it worthy, worked on it, and printed it at great expense. It meant that there was the high possibility of rejection, and perseverance. Now none of us know what it means, really. Some great stuff is going to be coming our way from the self-publishing world. But why push so hard to give your kid the label of published? That’s the question for me. I feel like something very, very important is being short-circuited here in favor of this more or less meaningless label, like my fictitious World’s Best Grandma shirt.  

Let the kids write. Let the rest come in time.

* I realize this sentence could should a bit creepy out of context. But there’s something: we must learn to read in context!

** I don’t really mean this in a heavy legal sense, nor do I think the consequences will be dire. I just put the idea out there that publishing your writing must be an informed process.

Lot’s of homework, I’m slightly sick, and I need to finish my lots of homework while slightly sick early to see the Hunger Games midnight premier. So yeah, run-on sentence is run-on, and I’ll probably be back between one and two weeks.

stfuconfederates:

skirtingtheline asked:

I’d like to know where I’m supposed to find a definition of racism, if I’m not allowed to quote from a dictionary, an encyclopedia, or any other reputable source. Can you actually give me a source for this definition of racism that Tumblr seems to have come up with (because that is my experience)? I mean, please. I really do want to know. It’s why I bothered to comment in the first place and not just ignore you. Also, no, I don’t think calling someone a cracker is the same thing as, for example, calling someone a n****. I don’t even say the word aloud unless absolutely necessary. It’s disrespectful, rude, and INCREDIBLY racist. Actually, I don’t even like black people using that word. Kind of the same thing as if a gay person was going around calling other people f****ts. (I’m a lesbian. And would never use that word either.)

Ok. Here’s an analogy that may help you understand the situation surrounding what exactly racism is.

Let’s say that, on a triangular world, three independent nations, all people of the same color, are separated by an ocean. In one corner is a nation consisting only of people with four fingers on each hand and four toes on each foot. The second nation consists of people with five fingers on each hand and four toes on each foot. The third nation consists of people with four fingers on each hand and five toes on each foot.

Now the first nation, with 16 fingers and toes, travels to the five-finger nation in search of wealth and notices that the natives of that land have 5 fingers on each hand. Based on this difference, the first nation calls them ‘savages’, rapes, enslaves, and commits horrible genocide against the ‘fivies’, steals their land, and kneels over it to thank God for this wonderful place that they had discovered. If only there hadn’t been all of those ‘fivies’ there, it would’ve been so much simpler.

Then, the Fours send ships to the five-toed land, discover that the inhabitants have five toes, pack a bunch of ‘em up in the ship, and bring them back to the land that was originally inhabited by the five-fingered people (most of whom are dead or live in impossibly horrible conditions, because the Fours are so incredibly fiveist against them). The five-toed people are then publicly sold at auction, babies torn away from mothers, they are brought to plantations, they are worked and starved and beaten to death. They are raped and humiliated. They are murdered for being able to read. They are murdered for being too intelligent. They are degraded and abused in every imaginable way possible, and all of this is justified because they have five toes on each foot, and are therefore different.

A hundred years later, the enslavement of the five-toed people ends. Most of the Fours try to send the five-toed people back to five-toe-land because they can’t even imagine having to live in a nation where five-toed people can walk free. When the Fours discover that they can’t do this, some of them organize into secret groups which operate with total anonymity. They work against the rights of both the five-fingered and five-toed people. They murder many more. They keep businesses owned by these people from prospering by picketing them or burning them down. They work toward keeping the Fours segregated and higher than all of the Fives in every imaginable way possible. This continues through a civil rights movement which gives the Fives some additional consideration, but how can things be equal? The entire relationship between the Fours and Fives has been dominated by the Fours.

One hundred and fifty years after the large scale enslavement and rape and genocide of the five-fingered and five-toed people has ended, Fives are still being arrested and imprisoned at a disproportionately higher scale than Fours. Fours still control the government and own virtually every organization with any real power. Fours also write the dictionaries

As Fives attain gradually higher positions in society, the media, education, art, etc, many Fours feel threatened by these advances. Every aspect of their culture for hundreds of years has been carefully crafted to ensure  them that they, the 16-digited people are superior in every way, and that things would never change. Because after all, it’s nature. God gave them four fingers and four toes because he wanted them to be in control, to run things as they saw fit.

The Fives are somewhat happy that things are better than they used to be, but there’s so much Fiveism that runs rampant everywhere that it makes daily life difficult in many cases, and makes true equality in society impossible.

There are still billboards everywhere, signs, TV shows, books, and magazines which hold Fourness to be the norm, the correct way, and make ‘others’ of the Fives. This behavior is also normalized, because the Fours are so fiveist that most of them don’t even notice, because their all-four privilege ensures that they will be insulated and will never have to deal with these issues on any actual personal level. This means that most of the Fours, by default, are incredibly fiveist.

However, Fours write the dictionary, and Fours have guilt. Fours can relieve this guilt by claiming that equal rights for Fives equates to oppression. So Fours claim that saying the 4-word is just as bad as saying the 5-word. So Fours write the legal definition of ‘Fiveism’ as being:

Fiveism: (n)

1: Discrimination or prejudice against another person based on the amount of fingers/toes they possess.

2: The belief that one finger/toe count is superior to another.

see also: fiveist, reverse fiveism, playing the ‘five’ card.

There’s your source. White people invented the idea of race in order to justify our abuse and oppression of other people. White people invented race and racism. We own it.

Just because we tried to make ourselves feel better by changing what the definition is, that doesn’t mean that the actual definition has changed one bit.

Also, white is not a race. It’s an invasion.