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Dragonlady7's Journal

dragonlady7
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11/05/2008 11:15 #46553

from jonathancarroll.com
This is from the blog of an author whose books I don't read, but whose blog is the kind of haunting, poignant beautiful kick-in-the-gut stuff that make me believe in the Internet again.

"An American novelist who won the Prix de Rome and is spending the year at the American Academy in Rome sent this report of American election night, Italian style:

"We stayed up all night. The first returns weren't due until one in the morning, but no one could sleep, or some people slept for an hour or two and woke around midnight and came downstairs where some other fellows had set up a party in the high-ceilinged Salone. Popcorn, chocolate chip cookies, chianti, olives, vodka, beer. The TV was set to CNN. People wandered down in their pajamas; others wore suits. Pennsylvania was called around two in the morning and the room broke into cautious cheers. A few of us drank café correto (espresso with grappa) to stay awake; others played pool to pass the still-nervous hours. The president of the academy came in--Carmela Franklin lives next door--wearing slippers and pajamas. The sky was just turning light outside when Obama came on the stage in Chicago. We ran upstairs and woke up the kitchen's executive chef. Everyone in the salone sat glued to the TV. A lot of us were crying. Outside seagulls were flying over Gianicolo in the dawn. It was a beautiful morning, marbled blue skies. The Tiber a grey ribbon. Even the armed guards across the street who protect the US embassy to the Holy See said, buon giorno, and then added an enthusiastic "Obama!""

11/05/2008 10:50 #46550

Obama on Gay Rights


So what happened is that the Yes on 8 campaign sent out a mailer featuring Sen. Obama's photo, implying that Obama endorses it. This pissed off Obama's campaign something fierce. The mailer was targeted toward undecided African-American voters.

"The mailer, from the Proposition 8 campaign, twists Sen. Obama's comments about marriage to suggest support for the unfair initiative -- when just the opposite is true. In a June 29 letter to the Alice B. Toklas Democratic Club, Sen. Obama wrote that he opposes the "divisive and discriminatory efforts to amend the California Constitution." "

Obama's letter, exerpted:
"As the Democratic nominee for President, I am proud to join with and support the LGBT community in an effort to set our nation on a course that recognizes LGBT Americans with full equality under the law...And that is why I oppose the divisive and discriminatory efforts to amend the California Constitution, and similar efforts to amend the U.S. Constitution or those of other states. For too long, issues of LGBT rights have been exploited by those seeking to divide us. It's time to move beyond polarization and live up to our founding promise of equality by treating all our citizens with dignity and respect. This is no less than a core issue about who we are as Democrats and as Americans."

The campaign then released a statement:
"Senators Obama and Biden have made clear their commitment to fighting for equal rights for all Americans whether it's by granting LGBT Americans all the civil rights and benefits available to heterosexual couples, or repealing 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell," said a statement issued by campaign spokesman Ben LaBolt. "Senator Obama has already announced that the Obama-Biden ticket opposes Proposition 8 and similar discriminatory constitutional amendments that could roll back the civil rights he and Senator Biden strongly believe should be afforded to all Americans."
________________________
This was on Oct 31st.


So. Maybe Prop 8 passed in CA, and similar measures in FL and AZ, but at LEAST the President-elect was goaded into making a definitive statement.

As we all know, a president's legislative actions have little to do with what he actually believes, and everything to do with the political climate. Clinton voted yes on the "Don't Ask Don't Tell" bullshit because he knew that he could not afford to take a stand on it, as it would severely lessen his chances in the upcoming election. Obama seems, at the moment, to have a very strong footing, and a sturdy platform upon which to stand. He has a lot of principles and has made a lot of statements.
Some of them are going to get thrown under a bus.
Which will get thrown under a bus strongly depends on how things go in the lead-up to his actually taking over the Presidency.

Homosexual rights have been one of the issues most likely to get thrown under the bus by politicians for decades now, because they remain so controversial-- either you have a firm grasp of both logic and biology, or you don't.
But here's hoping that we've reached the tipping point. Here's hoping we've reached the time when, finally, homosexual rights are too important, and understood as such by enough people, that they won't be the thing that gets chucked in to make room for whatever thing it is that the Democrats really need support for.

Because just as feminism benefits men, because all humans suffer in a patriarchy (both oppressors and oppressed are cheapened by the system!), so homosexual rights benefit heterosexuals as well. Demystifying marriage, and removing the artificial privelege associated with heterosexual marriages, will only serve to strengthen the actual institution of marriage. If it is no longer the default, then it becomes a much more meaningful choice.

Also it's totally retarded to insist that you don't believe in sex discrimination or racism but faggots are just wrong. Come the fuck on-- if you're a bigot, you're a bigot.
metalpeter - 11/05/08 17:55
Interesting post. The thing about "Don't ask, Don't tell" is that as weird as it seems gays where not allowed in the military so passing that was a step forward at the time. I think they need to get rid of it and let anyone one serve who wants to. I have heard that with the military now having trouble recruiting people sometimes they kinda look they other way sometimes. What I don't like about it is that it makes people lie. Say someone asks you what are you going to do when you get back home you want to go "kiss the Ground then Hug my girlfriend and never let her go" but see a chick can't say that she can be kicked out so she has to make up a boyfriend or step around certain questions and if you start to lie about that what else will you lie about.

I Myself would like to see Same Sex Marriare made legal country wide. But to be honest I don't think the country is anywhere near ready for that yet. As we see most states are not ready for it yet. I hate to do the prediction thing but I would guess at least 4 years and maybe 10 but I'm thinking closer to 20 till we get to the generation that might make gay marriage legal. You have to remember that there are so many people who don't want it legal and they teach that to there kids. I hope I'm wrong and hope it is much sooner but I doubt it.
jason - 11/05/08 11:29
Obama did talk about it during the debates. It isn't the first time he's made statements or talked about it.
dragonlady7 - 11/05/08 11:04
... But Obama's statement was *against* it, that was the whole point of this entry. Since he hadn't made a statement, the Yes people assumed he was on their side, which finally made him come out on the side of No.

Perhaps Obama could be blamed for not taking a side earlier, but at least he didn't support the bloody thing.
mrmike - 11/05/08 11:02
That's the part of the process that galls me a little. Candidates and office holders become human starting guns for debates. He got forced into a statement, which elevates the debate, campaign,whatever you call it...and just like that we got a thing that shoves rights back by a giant step that didn't need taking

11/04/2008 15:38 #46520

first tuesday of november
New usersound: "We Shall Not Be Moved", by Sweet Honey on the Rock.
Someone on my Livejournal friends-of-friends list uploaded that song and "Eyes On The Prize" in honor of today's election, which made me cry.
Keep your eyes on the prize
hold on, hold on
Hold on, hold on
Keep your eyes on the prize
hold on.

("Eyes" is a prettier song but it was 6 mb and I can only upload up to 5 here.)

To put things in perspective, here are the other things that made me cry today. I cry easily, especially today for some reason.

  • My friend Kat, a reporter in Schenectady, posting an essay about what it's like to vote when you're a journalist. 364 days a year, she says, we are not allowed an opinion, and must put our feelings into a little box and leave it on the shelf, and write objectively with no opinions, about politics, about everything. For one perfect moment, behind that curtain, I get to have a say. I get to have an opinion. And it gets to count.
http://kkatowll.livejournal.com/540090.html?mode=reply

  • This article in the Christian Science Monitor.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/csm/20081103/cm_csm/ycurley
My Wife Made Me Canvass For Obama. A man who voted for G.H.W. Bush twice and G.W.B. once gets dragged out by his wife, and learns something. I've learned that this election is about the heart of America. It's about the young people who are losing hope and the old people who have been forgotten.

  • This poem by Seigfried Sassoon:
Reconciliation
When you are standing at your hero's grave,
Or near some homeless village where he died,
Remember, through your heart's rekindling pride,
The German soldiers who were loyal and brave.

Men fought like brutes; and hideous things were done;
And you have nourished hatred, harsh and blind.
But in that Golgotha perhaps you'll find
The mothers of the men who killed your son.

--Siegfried Sassoon
November 1918


  • The sound of the lever-action voting machines, resounding in the elementary school gymnasium with a sudden swooshing clack as a vote was literally cast with a sweeping gesture of the voter's arm, finalizing those little choices each lever signified. It's such a profound noise. I didn't know I cared about it. I didn't know I'd recognize it. But I could hear it from down the hall, and it made me cry a little.

  • This photo, referred to by Colin Powell when he criticized McCain's responses to Obama being a Muslim.
image
Elsheba Khan at the grave of her son, Specialist Kareem Rashad Sultan Khan.
Is he less of a patriot than you, Senator McCain, because he died of his wounds and you did not???? He was twenty fucking years old, and had been waiting since 9/11 to be old enough to join the Army so he could help.

I would have voted for you in 2000, Senator McCain, but you have squandered and squandered and squandered everything I believed in that you stood for since then. You make me sick now, you disingenous and sick, sick old man.

I admit. I was not a huge fan of Obama. I have known about him since '04, have had friends predicting his eventual ascendancy, and I looked into him a bit. I found him smug. I find many of his followers smug and virtually intolerable.
He is literally African-American, and has something that most of the so-called African-Americans in this country don't have: he got to go to Africa and see his father and grandfather's graves. Most black Americans have been here so long, many through decades of slavery, and most black American politicans rose up through the Civil Rights movement of the '60s. Obama didn't live in the US yet when MLK was shot. (My father was in the 1st Armored Division, which suppressed the riots in Chicago after this event. For whatever perspective that gives.)

I do find Obama to be occasionally smug. That crack about Hillary where he implied she was on the rag: I could have strangled him.

But I think it is important not to underestimate this. Most of the presidents we've had have come from a very select group. Most of them have been members of the same small denomination of Christians. I've always been cynical about the idea that "anyone could be President".
So the idea that the biracial son of a teenage mom and an actual from-Africa African, who has eaten government cheese and worn out the soles of his shoes campaigning-- it's compelling. No matter how much of an insider he really is, how much a product of his party's machine, at least he's something different. Even if it's an illusion of difference-- how much does that mean??
The very fact that the final rundown for the Democratic nominee was between a woman-- a woman!! and a biracial man-- no matter how much the fact remains that they were both products of the same machine that has fed us the same homogenized pabulum of priveleged elite politicians-- the very illusion of difference has meant so much, to so many people.
It's not smugness, to most of us.
It means that the thing that makes us different, that makes us not white men, that very thing can no longer, by itself, be viewed as a legitimate obstacle. It should no longer mean that we don't try. It will still mean that we're less likely to succeed. But it should no longer be believed, on its own, that this thing, this difference, is in itself an insurmountable obstacle.
(Should I here admit that, as a Roman Catholic, I'm actually a tiny bit excited about Biden, just from a demographic point of view? He's the first and only since JFK, who basically had to forswear his Catholicism in order to be a serious candidate.)

Aside: I don't find Palin particularly empowering. She is the kind of exemplar that makes you embarrassed to be remotely identifiable with her, the worst sort of hypocrite-- so pregnancies are only a private family matter if it's your daughter, and not if it's me?-- but that's a rant for another time. At least the GOP took Hillary seriously enough to offer us a marionette in her place? I guess?

The President him- or herself does not make or break the nation. We survived Buchanan (at the cost of 600,000 American soldiers ) , we'll probably survive Bush. We'll undoubtedly survive whoever we get this next time.

So, though I don't agree with all his policies, and can't promise I won't gnash my teeth repeatedly over the next four years (knock on wood; I'd rather gnash my teeth at him than at That Other One) I do find him a much-lesser of two evils. He probably won't make it illegal for me to make decisions about my body. He might make it possible for me to actually get timely healthcare in a reasonably affordable fashion. He probably won't make outright outlaws of my gay friends who want to own property and raise children together. (Maybe. He may not help them either, but at least it's unlikely he'll try to fuck things up worse for them.)

And what's more: he doesn't fill my European friends and relatives with creeping crawling horror and revulsion. I lost friends over Bush, even when I cried that I hadn't voted for him: he just disgusted them so much.
Maybe I can go abroad again without pretending to be Canadian.
I know it's vain. But a world that thinks our President is kind of cool is a lot less likely to launch more terrorist attacks against us than a world that thinks our President is a second-generation imperialist pigdog asshole dictator wannabe.

It would just be nice, for a change, to have someone who didn't routinely feast upon his own feet during public discourse. Is that so wrong?
dragonlady7 - 11/05/08 11:00
Hey, my dad was in the Army from 1967 until 2007. (They delayed his mandatory retirement by a year because there was a war on, but they wouldn't send a 61-year-old to Iraq-- much to his disappointment, because my father is a contrary bastard.)
So I know about the politics of the military thing. Those little things can get you and I can't think of an example right now. But I do routinely run outside when I hear a helicopter, and try to identify it, so I can call my dad and tell him. (He doesn't need to look; he knows how they sound, even though his hearing was damaged permanently in Vietnam.)
jenks - 11/04/08 21:40
and I know what you mean about the sounds that make you cry, to your own surprise. I have an uncle who is retired navy.... he was an F-14 fighter pilot, top gun, all that jazz. They live in Virginia Beach, near a big, active, base. And the constant, thundering roar of the jets... that to me was just sort of deafening and annoying- well it makes my cousins cry to hear it, b/c they call it "the sound of freedom". And whether or not you agree with the politics of the military blah blah blah- sometimes those little patriotic things just get you when you least expect it.
jenks - 11/04/08 21:36
nicely put.

11/03/2008 10:25 #46490

NaNoWriMo update 1
Last night I sat down and finally started in on NaNoWriMo. I'm revisiting an old novel, which is contrary to NaNo's rules, but I need a new plot-hole-full hastily-written shitty first draft to add to my considerable portfolio of them approximately like I need a new ventilation hole in my cranium, so I say screw the rules. I'm adhering to the spirit of the law, anyway: I have been writing everything in a document creatively called "new draft", but last night, the first time I had written since November began, I split off and started a new document called, creatively, "NaNo2k8", and am writing everything new in there so I can easily count the words written just in November. I am going to have some trouble at some point when I fold in previously-written stuff, but I'll just have to track that somehow-- probably by putting in a marker in the NaNo2k8 document and leaving out the reused stuff.
I'm doing all I can not to cheat.

And on that note, it is the 3rd and I have written precisely:

274 words.
james - 11/03/08 11:43
rock on!

11/02/2008 22:54 #46483

Dear Red States (fixed formatting)
Dear Red States
I posted about this on LJ but thought that y'all here would enjoy it too.

Someone sent my sister this forward and she read it to me today, and I just about pissed myself laughing.

""""""""""""""""""""""
Dear Red States:
If you manage to steal this election too we've decided we're leaving. We intend to form our own country, and we're taking the other Blue States with us. In case you aren't aware, that includes California, Hawaii, Oregon, Washington, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Illinois and all the Northeast. We believe this split will be beneficial to the nation, and especially to the people of the new country of New California.

To sum up briefly: You get Texas, Oklahoma and all the slave states. We get stem cell research and the best beaches.
We get the Statue of Liberty. You get Dollywood.
We get Intel and Microsoft. You get WorldCom.
We get Harvard. You get Ole' Miss.
We get 85% of America's venture capital and entrepreneurs. You
get Alabama.
We get two-thirds of the tax revenue, you get to make the red
states pay their fair share.
Since our aggregate divorce rate is 22% lower than the Christian Coalition's, we get a bunch of happy families.
You get a bunch of single moms.

Please be aware that Nuevo California will be pro-choice and anti-war, and we're going to want all our citizens back from Iraq at once. If you need people to fight, ask your evangelicals. They have kids they're apparently willing to send to their deaths for no purpose, and they don't care if you won't show pictures of their children's caskets coming home. We do wish you success in Iraq , and hope that the WMDs turn up, but we're not willing to spend our resources in Bush's Quagmire.

With the Blue States in hand, we will have firm control of 80% of the country's fresh water, more than 90% of the pineapple and lettuce, 92% of the nation's fresh fruit, 95% of America's quality wines, 90% of all cheese, 90% of the high tech industry, 95% of the corn and soybeans (thanks Iowa!), most of the U.S. low-sulfur coal, all living redwoods, sequoias and condors, all the Ivy and Seven Sister schools plus Stanford, Cal Tech and MIT.

With the Red States, on the other hand, you will have to cope with 88% of all obese Americans (and their projected health care costs), 92% of all U.S. mosquitoes, nearly 100% of the tornadoes, 90% of the hurricanes, 99% of all Southern Baptists, virtually 100% of all televangelists, Rush Limbaugh, Bob Jones University, Clemson and the University of Georgia.

We get Hollywood and Yosemite, thank you.

Additionally, 38% of those in the Red states believe Jonah was actually swallowed by a whale, 62% believe life is sacred unless we're discussing the war, the death penalty or gun laws, 44% say that evolution is only a theory, 53% that Saddam was involved in 9/11 and 61% of you crazy bastards believe you are people with higher morals then we lefties.

Finally, we're taking the good pot, too. You can have that dirt weed they grow in Mexico.

Peace out,

--Blue States
""""""""""""""
It's complete fantasy, sadly. Not the statistics-- those are, as far as I can tell, perfectly accurate. But the idea that you can actually split red states and blue states apart along neat and tidy state lines.
Palin bought into this complete fabrication when she made the asinine blunder of referring to certain states as more American than others. Bitch, please. Not only does my state have 171 years of seniority over yours as a part of this Union of states, but for your information as recently as the 2006 Senate races no less than three of the counties went completely red. Yes. New York.
Lookie.

image

This is the 2006 version of that famous Purple America map: pure red is 100% Republican, pure blue is 100% Democrat, and in between it is proportionally hued in more or less-blue or red shades of purple according to the percentage of Democrat or Republican vote results.
There are no 100% red states. Nor are there 100% blue states. Some of them are pretty deep-hued one way or the other, but none are completely monolithically pure.

The idea that there is a "great silent majority" is complete horse shit.
As is the idea, sadly, that we could have another mass secession. We can't do any more than joke about it. And if you're that enamored of the idea... maybe you should be voting libertarian. Not that you want to hear it from me, but really. State's rights, baby!!
(Incidentally, that's actually what the Civil War was ostensibly about.)
ajay - 11/03/08 12:18
Looking at a county map is a bit misleading. There are counties in California and Nevada that are 100x the size of San Francisco, with 10000x fewer people (yes, there are counties with less than 1000 people).
mrmike - 11/03/08 11:10
I loved that letter. REally great, sitting here laughing like a damn fool.
dragonlady7 - 11/03/08 10:19
Ahh, the mobile site!!! Never even occurred to me that there'd be another way to get to it. I just kept thinking if I, like, snuck up on the delete button I could make it work.

Maybe if I click it really fast!
Or maybe if I click on some other stuff, like I'm not interested, then BAM!
No.
Computers don't work like that. Cats do. Computers don't.
paul - 11/03/08 09:48
When you something crazy like that b tag drama happens, try the mobile site. I was able to delete it from there.
dragonlady7 - 11/02/08 23:13
Oy. I am actually trying not to pay attention to him.


Just FYI-- Canada's actually fairly conservative too, and has its fair share and then some of redneck fucks. Worse, it has old-style Europeanish conservatives, which is downright fucking scary. We think of Europe as being this enlightened haven, but seriously, I've been gay there [trufax: 99% of the time I was actually actively gay I was a resident of the UK] and hung out with a dude whose face had been broken in a queer-bashing, so. Yeah.
james - 11/02/08 23:00
There are days I look at how conservative Obama is and it makes me want to move to Canada.