Category Archives: Social Justice

Extradite Polanski!

October 1, 2009 James O'Keefe Leave a comment

On "Getting Over It," by Lauren over at Feministe (cited from Boing Boing):

What
does rape do to you? Afterward? It changed me; there is before and
after. Before, a child, playing with Barbies, looking sideways at boys,
wondering. After, confusion. Depression. A litany of fuck-ups and
fuck-its, whatevers, mistakes, trusting no one, least of all myself.
Before, sex was mysterious; after, miasma. I was tarred as a Lolita. I
was called jail bait.

Rape is not the only assault. Around rape is a large segment of the
population that questions the victim, a culture that looks down on
victims for allowing themselves to be victimized, or keep them
victimized, questions about the victim's credibility, questions about
the legacy of rape and how bad it is, because how bad is rape really?
Rape, because various levels and forms of sexual assault are systemic
and pervasive across all societies, exists alongside one's experiences
of unwanted touching, wanted touching, sexual objectification, sexual
desire, sexual harassment, incest, love, leering eyes, cat calls,
roaming hands, consent, confusion, tits, vagina, rectum, penis, mouth,
rape and not-rape, all of it loaded, all of it veering at rape's ugly
legacy, co-mingling, the legacy that tells us to be more careful, to
dress more conservatively, to BE BETTER AT BEING VULNERABLE, or BE MORE
POWERFUL, or BE MORE FEARFUL, or GET OVER IT ALREADY. Rape leaks into
healthy, consensual experiences. It lingers. It pervades.

There is more at the Boing Boing post about Polanski using alcohol and a Quaalude to make it easier to rape her, a link to her testimony clearly indicating that she said no and a quote from Polanski that everyone wants to have sex with girls. This guy is amazing. Perhaps someone should give Polanski these tips when he is back in jail:

Sexual Assault Prevention Tips Guaranteed to Work!

1.   Don’t put drugs in people’s drinks in order to control their behavior.

2.   When you see someone walking by themselves, leave them alone!

3.   If you pull over to help someone with car problems, remember not to assault them!

4.   NEVER open an unlocked door or window uninvited.

5.   If you are in an elevator and someone else gets in, DON’T ASSAULT THEM!

6.   Remember, people go to laundry to do their laundry, do not attempt to molest someone who is alone in a laundry room.

7.   USE THE BUDDY SYSTEM! If you are not able to stop yourself from
assaulting people, ask a friend to stay with you while you are in
public.

8.   Always be honest with people! Don’t pretend to be a caring
friend in order to gain the trust of someone you want to assault.
Consider telling them you plan to assault them. If you don’t
communicate your intentions, the other person may take that as a sign
that you do not plan to rape them.

9.   Don’t forget: you can’t have sex with someone unless they are awake!

10. Carry a whistle! If you are worried you might assault someone
“on accident” you can hand it to the person you are with, so they can
blow it if you do.

And, ALWAYS REMEMBER: if you didn’t ask permission and then respect
the answer the first time, you are committing a crime- no matter how
“into it” others appear to be.

Government, Philosophy, Politics, Religion, Social Justice

Noble lies or Glad we got that out in the open

September 21, 2009 James O'Keefe Leave a comment

Irving Kristol, "godfather of neoconservatism", died on the 18th. A friend blogged about this quote from Kristol:

"There are different kinds of truths for different kinds of people.
There are truths appropriate for children; truths that are appropriate
for students; truths that are appropriate for educated adults; and
truths that are appropriate for highly educated adults, and the notion
that there should be one set of truths available to everyone is a
modern democratic fallacy. It doesn't work."

Here he is expounding on the need for "Noble lies". Glad we got that cleared up. Nice to know the "grandfather of neoconservatism" thought it was ok for elites to lie to us lowly citizens. Its for our own good after all.

Considering the last eight years of lies: Iraq has WMDs, we need to bail out the fat cats on wall street who save the economy, the planet isn't warming because of our emissions of CO2, housing prices will keep going up, the rich deserve their wealth, I'd rather some truth please.

The Reason magazine article, don't worry they are libertarians, that reports the previous quote has this little Kristol gem as well:

"If God does not exist, and if religion is an illusion that the
majority of men cannot live without…let men believe in the lies of
religion since they cannot do without them, and let then a handful of
sages, who know the truth and can live with it, keep it among
themselves. Men are then divided into the wise and the foolish, the
philosophers and the common men, and atheism becomes a guarded,
esoteric doctrine–for if the illusions of religion were to be
discredited, there is no telling with what madness men would be seized,
with what uncontrollable anguish." (cite).

Seems to me that the Golden Rule of "do to others what you would like to be done to you" is pretty universal. Whether given from a god, gods, or just something we developed in our long evolution, it doesn't much matter. However, Kristol seems to believe "he who has the gold makes the rules". How very Machiavellian of him. I'll leave out the Dante reference.

Economy, Social Justice

You’ve been robbed!

September 20, 2009 James O'Keefe 3 Comments

The Left Business Observer (LBO) just put out another useful issue. There is great deal there about the state of the economy, the fact that most of the increase in consumption is due to the increase in health care costs, the attempts to fix health care, and whether the economy really is deleveraging from the debt boom we have been in for over twenty years. Full with lots of good details while a quick read and pretty inexpensive to boot.

One thing I want to call out is one of the end articles on the rich. Thanks to Doug Henwood of LBO, I am able to provide you with two of the graphs in the article. By the way, the source data for the charts below comes from the IRS by way of economists Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty. See my previous post The rich continue to get richer to find a link back some of their papers.

The first graph I will share is the share of income received, I won't say earned, from the early 1900s to 2007 by those in the bottom 90%, top 10%, top 1%, and top 0.1%. Remember that the figures for the top 10% include those of the top 1% and 0.1% and those of the top 1% include those in the top 0.1%.

The graph speaks for itself, but for the post World War 2 period until the late 1970s/early 1980s, income for the bottom 90% was about 2/3. During Reagan, and later, the wealthiest 10% claimed a greater share of the income produced in the US, to the point that they receive about 50%. The dip in the end of the series is the 2000 recession. Clearly eight years of Clinton didn't hinder the trend of the rich getting more. One other thing to call out is that much of the change in the income share of the top 10% is due to increases in the top 1%. This will become obvious below.

What is not shown is the shares for those in the bottom 50% or even 20%. Based on other things I read, my guess is that those shares declined as well.

The next chart shows the percentage gains in income by group for the periods of 1948-1973 and 1982-2007. Both are 25 year time periods and the first period reflects the post-World War 2 economy while the later represents the last 25 years (since the data set goes up to 2007.)

Clearly the bottom 90% saw a doubling of their income in 1948-1973, but a much smaller growth in 1982-2007. Even the bottom 99% did better during 1948-1973 than in 1982-2007.

Clearly, the big winners were those in the top 1%, especially the top 0.01% who saw their incomes quintuple during the 1982-2007 period.

So if you aren't in the top 1% and you are wondering where yours went, you know who got it.