If you’re a white person and you know that people of color face oppression for having black and brown skin, it is not enough for you to just know that racism exists, it’s not enough to be aware that institutional racism puts minorities in danger, and it’s not enough to admit white guilt with the selfish intention of getting sympathy and praise from people of color in proving that you’re now “woke” or to make a big deal that you’re now an “ally.”
Your goal should be to take direct steps to dismantle that system. To challenge it wherever you see it. To be on the frontlines and help with its destruction.
We have NOTHING to do with the actions of our ancestors
Do not let ANYONE tell you otherwise
This stuff should stay funny.
The antics y’all pull should at least get a bitter laugh. But I see stuff like this and I just stare at it. How can the nature of a human be so disgusting, so avoiding, so intentional.
To be this way…
I guess it’s yalls right.
I see literally no reason me or anyone else alive today should at all be held responsible for crimes committed centuries ago. It was nothing to do with us. Would you send a murderer’s grandchildren to jail for their crime? No. So leave us alone and stop punishing innocent people
Okay I guess I can go up to a Muslim or Chinese person and tell them that they oppress me just for existing because their ancestors oppressed my ancestors.
Or a Malaysian, Thai, or Singaporean person can come up to me and tell me the same thing.
Or does it only work that way with White people?
People who lay the blame with random individuals for structural issues are your enemy, and their own enemy. Anyone who insists on your shaming and your atonement is sacrificing your potential to change the world on the altar of their own ego. Everyone born in the West already profits from unequal relations with the Global South regardless of ancestry. Changing that sort of stuff is beyond any individual, but you can chip away at it, and that sure as fuck ain’t happening if you’re sitting on your thumbs at a Healing From Toxic Privilege wokeshop.
Barbara Mann said it better than I could, once again.
Fuck anyone who says I have to forgive everyone, “for my sake.” I worked hard for this anger. I worked hard to love myself enough to hate them.
Shit, yeah, this is a thing that is hard to articulate. Some people don’t feel healed by forgiving the people who hurt them, because that’s what they kept doing over and over and it only led to getting more hurt. Sometimes you feel healed when you’re finally brave enough to say “This person was horrible to me, and I did not deserve that treatment, and I don’t have to be okay with it.”
Sometimes you feel healed when you’re finally brave enough to say “This person was horrible to me, and I did not deserve that treatment, and I don’t have to be okay with it.”
Despite all the law enforcement resources expended, empirical research on the dangers or benefits of erotic services ads has been sparse. But a new study provides strong evidence that when law enforcement closes down sites like Craigslist or Redbook, women die.
The September 2017 study, authored by West Virginia University and Baylor University economics and information systems experts, analyzes rates of female homicides in various cities before and after Craigslist opened an erotic services section on its website. The authors found a shocking 17 percent decrease in homicides with female victims after Craigslist erotic services were introduced.
The data does not provide a single clear explanation as to why female homicide rates drop so steeply, Scott Cunningham, one of the paper’s authors, told ThinkProgress. It’s possible, for example, that when Craigslist opens erotic services ads, some women in abusive domestic situations decide to become sex workers, move out, and so escape violent homicide at the hands of their spouses or boyfriends.
The most likely explanation, though, Cunningham says, is that sex workers simply make up a huge percentage of female homicide victims. When sex workers are safer, female homicide rates drop significantly.
[…]
Once sex workers move indoors, they are much safer for a number of reasons, Cunningham said. When you’re indoors, “you can screen your clients more efficiently. When you’re soliciting a client on the street, there is no real screening opportunity. The sex worker just has to make the split second decision. She relies on very limited and complete information about the client’s identity and purposes. Whereas when a sex worker solicits indoors through digital means, she has Google, she has a lot of correspondence, she can ask a lot of questions. It’s not perfect screening, but it’s better.”
[…]
In theory, closing down advertising is supposed to reduce exploitation of women. In practice, when resources are taken away from people living on the edge of poverty, they have fewer options and are less able to protect themselves.
For all these reasons access to the Internet can transform the experience of sex work. Young women who have been able to screen clients using sites like Craigslist, “almost feel like this is a safe job because they have these tools,” DiAngelo said.
Sex workers report that free online advertising makes them safer. There is now data showing that erotic services ads significantly decrease female homicide rates. So, will law enforcement back down and allow these sites to operate again?
(Click the link for the full article, quotes posted for brevity)
I recall that I think it was Florida got caught with internal memos and stuff years ago, with an “unofficial”-official policy of automatically denying applications regardless of eligibility in hopes that people would just go away and not be able to appeal. And that was stuff like TANF, where they knew full well that little kids were bearing the brunt.
That was just one case where it was documented and they faced scrutiny over it. I am sure that other states (very much including Virginia, where I was–and it’s at least as bad as Florida in a lot of ways) are doing the same crap, besides all the paperwork “losing” and “oops, you’re just not in our system!”. Besides similar bureaucracies at the federal level.
The only reason I had any kind of disability or medical benefits for years was because my mother knew her stuff and was persistent. A lot of people just don’t have the knowledge or the ability to keep chasing after them and making effective threats. I just don’t have the ability, at all, and never have. If something happens to my partner, I’m just screwed now.
It struck me as particularly ridiculous how they kept dumping me off Medicaid, which I shouldn’t have even had to submit a full application for since SSI makes you automatically eligible. Because they did have to cover the gap with back payments every time. (Unlike the food stamps, where they did actually save money.)
But, I was temporarily very limited in the medical care I could get, though thankfully my grandmother could temporarily cover any regular prescriptions that the doctor couldn’t make up in samples. (My main doctor was a good guy and would see me anyway, but you can bet pharmacies aren’t giving stuff out and billing later. And a lot of medications are bad to stop suddenly…) A lot of other people wouldn’t have that kind of backup available. I was lucky.
It was disruptive, and I suspect that was the main point. Besides the fact that it would have been hard for Social Services to claim they’d never heard of me to avoid paying out the huge $25/month in food stamps, without also dumping me off Medicaid–with their administering both programs. 😐
Reminded of this again, with the most recent Medicaid fuckery. Glad I found an earlier post I thought I remembered, not to have to repeat.
Haven’t been running across much discussion of this crap as an additional goal with the application changes. When pretty much anyone who has dealt with the system has already run into enough deliberate obstructionism as things stand already. Just another way to try to weed people out–and generally the ones who need it the most.
It does frustrate me, how many people who have not needed to rely on these programs want to assume they’re working fine now.
(Including with the “Medicare For All is the only way!!!” crowd. If you truly think that, you probably haven’t dealt with Medicare yourself or had people you care about harmed by the system as it exists in reality. Let’s fix it to be fit for purpose, and then maybe we can consider the rest. Yeah, some coverage in theory is way better than nothing at all. But, I am not going to pretend that’s ideal in practice. Those are not the only choices.)
I would probably do well to take a break, anyway, the way everything has been happening too much lately.
But, I just get so tired of the endless stream of discussions like this, working so firmly from one very specific set of background assumptions about How Things Must Inevitably Work. While nobody involved seems to even be aware that there have indeed been actual working examples to learn from. (Again, not trying to single out anybody there, because it is such a common pattern.)
From my own sufficiently different perspective, what gives me major trouble is trying to figure out how to adapt some (tested!) approaches to actually work with very different social structures/frameworks as a starting point. Or even successfully get across some ideas, again dealing with some very different sets of base assumptions.
Definitely not an easy proposition, but not the same sets of concerns involved. At all.
Where I really start despairing sometimes ties back in with that little Asshole Wars ramble from the other day. Not going to get much of anywhere other than more AW when you’ve got a significant chunk of the population treating those patterns of interaction as not just normal but inevitable.
Much less get anywhere near that good old “self-control and neighborly co-operation as the only acceptable form of government”. When too many people haven’t learned to do either thing that well, and really don’t seem to see the point.
Getting a headache again just thinking about how self-fulfilling this crap can turn, tbh.
I don’t have a lot of wording spoons right now, and possibly less patience. But, several earlier reblogs tie together pretty well to describe some of the frustrations I keep running into with people Doing Politics.
There was one post from comcastkills, then two connected posts from theunitofcaring. (I picked that reblog of one not so much to point at the commenter specifically, but because that does express such a common set of ideas which are unfortunately relevant here.)
It gets frustrating enough sometimes, trying to deal with people who really do not seem to recognize or value many modes of interaction other than Asshole Wars. That obviously does not describe everyone trying to Do Politics, but the ones going for AW as praxis are difficult to avoid. They want it that way, and the weird self-righteous dominance behaviors apparently keep working for them.
Chances of getting much constructive done plummet, the more of that behavior gets tolerated and the more other people get driven off by it. AW as praxis mostly leads to more AW. Hardly surprising, but such a depressing pattern.
I just really do not have the spoons to start into some of the reasons I think this keeps happening right now. But, I wish I had more reasonable expectations of those factors getting successfully addressed anytime soon. Without some serious cultural changes.
But, I even started writing this because I got reminded yet again of how much I love the frequent conflation of approaches rooted in progressive pragmatism (or assorted other non-Western political philosophies), with being a Filthy Centrist Collaborator who expects people to kiss up to The Oppressor.
There are some pretty big differences there, to the point that it’s not really part of the same game at all.
(Righteousness is a very dangerous word in English and in European history…
Both idealism–the idea that God is on someone’s side–and vilification–the idea that one side is evil or fundamentally in the wrong–are barred from this process. #)
But, too many people don’t know or care to find out what someone is even talking about when it’s easier to force-fit everything into their existing widgets. Crucial to the Asshole Wars, whatever the front. And disturbing how many people do seem to regard that as the default.
This is what happens when you’re so stuck on your ideology you’re incapable of nuance. Example: In Finland, infant mortality decreased after the government started providing new parents with basic necessities to care for their baby. Libertarians would say this is bad because it’s “statism”, despite the fact that it is helping people live. Same with easily accessible and inexpensive healthcare.
The fact is you can’t wait for conditions to be ideal to start helping people. If something works, it works. If you’d rather people die, then your politics are not only useless, they’re actively harmful.
This goes for leftists as well. Don’t leave people behind. If there’s a way to improve the lives of your fellow human beings, don’t reject it simply because it isn’t ‘radical’ enough. If people, especially people in countries targeted by economic imperialism, form a state to protect themselves, they aren’t automatically evil or unworthy of your support. Quit this bullshit.
I think that sex work should just be legal, on both ends, it is legal to advertise that you are a sex worker and it is legal to solicit sex workers, and then whatever harms we expect to come of this, we should address directly. Teenagers are fleeing their abusive homes and then ending up doing survival sex work? That is awful, let’s have shelters and support for them so that they do not have to. People addicted to drugs are being abused and exploited? That is awful, let’s arrange them safe and legal access to the drugs they are addicted to so they don’t have to do dangerous things to get drugs. People are abusing sex workers? Let’s arrest them for assault.
I follow some sex workers, and virtually all of them want full legalization immediately. This seems like a case of ‘listen to the people who are actually affected by this’ if there ever were one.
There’s a reasonable response to this, which is “okay, but live in the real world. The police are terrible, the law is terrible, the system is terrible, even if we legalized sex work we would not be taking any of those other steps. Even if legalizing sex work would be good in an ideal world that also sought to give sex workers more options, it might be bad in the real world, which doesn’t.”
But I don’t think this is true. Right now, sex workers who are raped or assaulted by clients can’t go to the police because they might get in trouble for sex work. Right now, sex workers are often raped or assaulted by the police. Right now, it is hard for sex workers to vet their clients because clients don’t want to give out enough information to vet them because they are breaking the law. Industries that are legal are not free of abuse, but they are better than sex work all by themselves. Getting rid of the negative effects that directly result from criminalization makes sex workers’ life better, even if we don’t go on to fix other problems.
I also think that it’d be easier to get subsequent problems fixed if sex work were legal, because sex workers’ organizations could openly organize, openly lobby, and openly fight for their rights and protections if it were not illegal for them to be sex workers at all.
Legalization will lead to more sex work. That’s because currently there are people who would choose to do sex work if they weren’t risking jail for it, and people who’d choose to hire sex workers if they weren’t risking jail for it. If you think all sex work is exploitation and no other work that people do to pay their bills is exploitation, then yes, legalization will lead to more exploitation. I still do not think it’s okay to try to reduce the amount of sex work in the world by ruining peoples’ lives for it.
Also, people are very different from each other. There are people for whom doing sex work would be very harmful; there are people for whom it’s great; there are people for whom it’s a shitty job that pays the rent and beats the other shitty jobs that pay the rent. The important thing is that it is not my business to decide which of those experiences are legitimate and then throw people in prison and ruin their lives for doing something that I think they should be prevented from doing. My business is giving people more options, and if I ever, ever find myself saying “people taking this option is harmful, so I will have cops break down doors with guns and stop it”, then I need to stop and figure out if I’m really sure about that.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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