Uh oh, is your privilege shrinking?

Good lord, people are truly insane.

Tom Tancredo went on CNN and got pissy about Sonia Sotomayor's being a member of La Raza--you know, the major Hispanic rights and advocacy org--and called it a "Latino KKK".

Meanwhile, some douche factory at my school has decided that what the world really needs is a Men's Rights and Advocacy Group. Not kidding. Apparently the framework of our entire society wasn't enough for them. Think I'm exaggerating? It's called Men In Power.

I know it must be scary to have your 100% privilege encroached upon when you either are not confident of your ability to compete on a truly open field or are simply unaware of your privilege. It feels like oppression because it feels unfair, because it's never occurred to you that the way things have always been might not be fair. It worked well for you. But for the love of god, do these people hear themselves? It just makes me want to take a nap and wait for it all to be over.

"Kids in Congo were being sent down mines to die so that kids in Europe and America could kill imaginary aliens in their living rooms," said Ex-British Parliament Member Oona King. Upsetting but not surprising, sadly. The need for a particular ore in making, among other things, PlayStations, has been fueling violence and conflict in Congo. (Note that the article emphasizes Sony's video game products--a frivolity--but glosses over the use of the same material in cellphones and other items that we aren't giving up, not from our cold dead fingers. Convenient, no?) You'd think in the Information Age these things would come up sooner. Oh, right, we don't care.


In other news, John McCain, supposedly the Second Coming of foreign policy, is seriously addled. Why, exactly, would we even bother talking about throwing Russia out of the G8? It's dumb, unproductive, and--oh, yeah--impossible.(The G8, for your edification, is the Group of Eight, a forum for the leaders of eight powerful nations in the world. They hold a yearly summit--the most recent was in Japan, where Bush made us all so very proud by signing off saying, "Goodbye from the world's biggest polluter!" Aww, what an authentic, beer-drinking cutie!)





IllDoctrine is pretty much always the shit. Now, what he's saying here I know well, and many of you do too, but it's worth spelling out always. Especially keep it in mind next time a public figure/politician is called on any form of discrimination--racism, sexism, sizeism, ableism, heterosexism, homophobia, classism, any and all of them, this kind of thing applies.

Because that's the thing about oppressions--while they're all different in whom they affect, how they affect them, and how they feel, many of the patterns are the same. That's why intersectionality is so everpresent, and why the Oppression Olympics a) won't go away and b) are useless.

Those last two paragraphs are total duh obviousness for those who are into the study of any of the above isms and I'm almost embarrassed to write them, but I guess that's why this is a livejournal and not a real blog--I get to be as dumb as I want! Eat it! Sucka FOOL![*]

[Obviously, that was written when I was still writing on Livejournal.]