*sigh*
So, Trump has been acquitted in his second impeachment....
I mean, I could talk about how a vote of 57-43 shouldn't mean "he's off the hook", or I could talk about how the Democrats choice not to bring witnesses shows that they cared more about getting the whole thing over with as quickly as possible rather than the result that they would get, or I could talk about how members of a jury shouldn't be talking strategy with the defence (as certain members of the Republican party did), or how there are a lot of people in congress/ the senate who also incited the riots and should not be there any more (and certainly shouldn't be deciding whether or not the president should be indited for the same thing).
But, hey, maybe the Democrats were right when they didn't call witnesses. I mean what's the point? The system is so far past broken it's basically unfixable. And you know what, it will cost America its democracy. The Republicans now know they can gerrymander, supress votes, throw out legal ballots, refuse to certify elected officals and incite riots without any recourse. They have a virulently motivated base, who are inspired to violence through a combination of Cold War Red Scare propaganda, doomsday cult conservative Christianity, internet conspiracy theories about child abuse and Jewish world domination plots, left over Civil War resentment and literal Fascism.
There will not be any healing, no reconciliation, no coming together. There's 2 years before the next mid-terms, that is all the Democrats have to get anything done. Too many people are thinking "well Trumps gone, now we don't have to worry". That mindset will lose the Democrats the house and the senate, because the Republican base will show up for the mid-terms. And then in 4 years, there's going to be another Republican President, possibly even Trump again. And they'll do more damage than anything Trump did in this term.
Well, that is unless something drastic happens. I dunno, the Democrats could just arrest Trump for all of the numerous crimes he's done, do the same to all of the GOP congressmembers who have been embezzling, insider trading and inciting riots. Arrest all of the members of the Proud Boys, the Boogaloo movement etc. for terrorism and shut down the platforms they use to organise and spread their propaganda. Purge the police and armed forces of anyone with know ties to right-wing terror groups (and maybe shift some of their funding while you're at it and make them actually accountable to the public).
Or, maybe, fuck the Democrats as well, tear the entire system down and build a new one? If one side is commited to injustice, the other side refuses to stop them and the system is built in such a way that there's no third option within it, maybe going outside the system is the way to go. I dunno. I mean, my country is just as fucked for exactly the same reasons, so...
So, yeah, I'm Trans
Ok, I don't really know what I'm going to write here. It's kinda difficult to articulate where my head is at the moment.
For the best part of the last 10 years (so for a part of my teens and the entirity of my 20's) I've felt that there's been something wrong with me, like my body isn't who I really am. That sounds really generic, but, like I said, I'm having a hard time putting this into words. Anyway, I tried to ignore it, thought I had bigger problems, finishing uni/ trying to get a job (multiple times), you know, normal problems. But over the last 2 years it's just been getting worse. I've been starting to get quite bad dysphoria, specifically about my hips and my chest, like to the point where I stuggle to look at myself in the mirror some days. Doesn't help that last year I was in a pretty bad way mentally anyway, at the start of the year my Grandad (my dad's dad) had a second heart attack, putting him in the hospital for a while. Then about a month later, my nan (mum's mum) died of cancer. I was really, really close to her (probably the closest out of anyone in my family), so her death hit me really hard. Around the same time, a lot of changes were happening at work, a lot of my friends left, the manager got promoted and the new manager was a dick, pretty specifically to me, but he got his ass fired for being fucking shit at his job, so then we got a new manager. And then at the end of the year, my Grandad had a third heart attack and didn't survive it. So wasn't in the best of headspaces coming into this year. But, I guess that having a lot of time to spare does help clear your head about things, plus my family is moving in the new year, well away from where we currently live, so it's a chance at a new start. I mean, still not in the best of shapes on the mental front (my recent inability to sleep can attest to that), but I am pretty sure about one thing:
I am a woman. I am trans.
I've taken a few steps to try to aleviate my dysphoria (nothing too drastic, but hopefully it helps), but now I've got other things that are going to be eating at me. Firstly, I really don't know how my parents will react. They're kinda conservative, like not American Tea Party Conservative, more British Brexit Is A Good Idea Conservative, so I'm not sure how they'd take it. I mean, they're not openly homophobic or transphobic, but there have been some off-hand remarks/ jokes that have made me a little uncomfortable. Secondly, I live in the UK, which is really not the safest place for transpeople at the moment, especially not transwomen, and the law states that, before I can be legally recognised as my prefered gender, I have to have lived as that gender for 2 years. Now I obviously want to do that, I want to transition as soon as I possibly can, but obviously moving to a new area and having to apply for a new job whilst presenting as a different gender to the one on all my legal documents, in a very transphobic country.... it makes me kinda scared. I hope I can get through it alright.
So, yeah. Last couple of things. If you could refer to me by She/ Her pronouns please, that would be much appreciated. I don't mind they/them, but she/her would be preferable. Also, I don't know how many of you know my old "real" name, but if you do, my new name is Jessica (or Jess will do), but you can still just call me JR, that's pretty gender neutral and I respond to it anyway.
I guess that's all I've got to say for the moment. Thank you for reading.
JR out.
So, let's talk about Jeff Bezos
So, there was this thing going around Twitter yesterday where a guy, trying to defend Jeff Bezos' obscene hoarding of wealth, saying "would you give up your savings account to solve world hunger and poverty?" (I've just found the tweet, you can find it here, just so people don't think I'm taking him out of context and the replies are kinda great).
Right...
So, let's unpack Jeff Bezos' "savings" shall we. So, how many people do you know IRL that are millionaires? Well a billionaire is 100 times richer than they are. Jeff Bezos is 178.2 times richer than a billionaire. The man makes over $2000 A SECOND. His net worth would make him the country with the 13th highest GDP in the world, right between South Korea and Spain. He is richer than most countries, just let that sink in. He has so much money that he could end world poverty and still be a billionaire. He could give up the net worth of the second richest person in the world (Bill Gates at $99.9 billion) and still be a multi-billionaire. And yet it all just sits there, with him giving out a couple of million each year to charity (in fact last year he gave 98.5 million to 32 charities to combat homelessness, which is a lot and will help a lot of people, until you realise that that is 0.05% of his wealth and he did it through his foundation which means he gets to write it off of his taxes, and that's not even getting into the shit that the super-rich do with their charitable foundations that really make you think whether or not their "altruism" really is altruistic, I'd advise checking out Thought Slime's video on Bill Gates for this one, because the shit his foundation does is very questionable indeed). He literally cannot spend the amount of money he has and he could do so much good with it, so much more than he already does, but he has decided that it is better just left sitting there, accumulating, rather than being spent on improving the world.
The argument I hear most often to justify there being billionaires, other than "they earned it" (which, no, Jeff Bezos didn't program Amazon, he didn't even write the code for Amazon, that was open source, he doesn't do any of the factory work, he "earned" his money by paying his workers so little that in some states the majority of Amazon workers need to be on food assistance and, due to the US tax system, if you live in the US, for the last 3 years, you've paid Amazon not to pay their taxes thanks to rebates), is "they use their money to invest into new businesses". Then why isn't all of that money that Jeff Bezos cannot spend not being invested. Sure he's planning to build a rocket to go into space (because billionaires would rather play astronaut than fucking help people), but is that project going to create long term, sustainable jobs for a wide range of people with differing skillsets? Fuck no, he's just going to poach guys from NASA or Elon Musk's vanity car cam.
If you want billionaires to invest into new businesses, maybe we should look into laws that mandate that any earnings up to a certain amount must be invested into a start up business. It can be a business that the billionaire starts themselves or a completely unrelated business and they can still earn from that investment, as long as earnings are paid along to help another start up, and so on and so on. This would help small businesses (which any politician will tell you are the back bone of the economy), create jobs and de-monopolise numerous sectors of the economy. Which is obviously why it won't happen, rich people hate the idea of competition almost as much as they love the idea of being rich.
Or, of course, we could just, I dunno, fucking get rid of money (a thing we, uh, made up).
NOTE: Ok, Mermaids (the UK's leading Trans Charity, who deal with support for Trans youth and their families (also, please support these guys, they are regular targets for celebrity transphobes and general ass hats)) just released a statement regarding J.K. Rowling. You can read it here. I'm adding this after I wrote everything else, but I feel it should go at the top here because, well, the people speaking here are much more qualified to speak on this subject than I am. I am obviously a lot less civil about this than they are and my main point differs, but I do believe that both points are valid (though Mermaids are infintely more valid in this arena than I am and I defer to them in every aspect).
So, let's address this shall we. For those not in the know, Harry Potter creator and writer of a lot of otherwise mediocre books and movies, Joanne Rowling has recently started using her twitter to push a number of transphobic ideas (including an apparently accidental incident where she replied to a childs drawing by half way through going on a rant about being called a TERF (Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist), which isn't a slur and was actually a term that Transphobes came up with for themselves). Her defence being (broadly) that she is defending women from transpeople who could be predators (of course, a claim that is often made, has minimal proof behind it and is yet another extension of the "black man coming to steal your women/ gay men want to rape straight men" bigotry that has been around since forever).
Now, of course, I am a Cis-man (and no, Cis is not a slur either. Cis and Trans are scientific terms used to describe simularity and difference, so if you were to breed two plants of different species together they would be Transgenic, where as breeding two plants of the same species together that is Cisgenic), so I cannot speak on the trans experiance, which Rowling cannot either, nor can I speak on the life experiance of a woman, which she can. But I can explain how her using her platform like this is incredibly harmful.
For this we are going to put aside any moral arguments about transphobia (because frankly, if you need convincing that transphobia is morally wrong, what are you doing here? Please leave). We are also going to be ignoring Rowlings literary work, it has no relivance to the current conversation. If you do like her work (which I did as a child, Harry Potter was a big part of my childhood), it is up to you to decide how to deal with this (I would ask you to consider some of the things in the books, such as the happy-slave house elves, the anti-semetic stereotype goblins, the transphobic descriptions of Rita Skitter and the fact that she, in interviews, compared being a werewolf to having AIDS (which, considering the time the series is set, queer codes all werewolves, whether intentionally or not) and then introduced a werewolf who actively attacked and infected others, especially children, which is boiler-plate gay panic. Honestly there is so much in there, the only irish kid blowing everything up, Cho Chang having her entire name be surnames for some reason, the only lgbt characters not actually existing within the text but being retroactively pasted in etc. etc. etc.). We shall also not be bringing up the fact that she compared transitioning to gay conversion therapy (which is completely wrong anyway, trans people don't invalidate gays, lesbians or bisexuals) whilst also having the pen-name Robert Galbraith (which was also the name of a famous American psychologist and purveyor of electro-shock treatment for homosexuality aka gay conversion therapy, Robert Galbraith Heath).
No, for this all we need to do is look at the act of saying these things. There is a curious thing about certain kinds of speech, the act of saying something and being allowed to say it matters more than what is being said. You see this a lot with far-right propaganda (of course, not saying Rowling is a nazi, she obviously isn't, but the far-right are the best example). If you allow Fascist speech, it normalises the fascist position and allows them to talk to new people who aren't currently invested in their ideology but might be on the verge of heading down that route, whilst also signalling to their current group of believers that they can be more open about their beliefs. This, in a way, is what Rowling is doing, whether intentionally or not and it is where the harm is. I'm sure she absolutely believes that she is doing the right thing and she is not being harmful by saying these things, but she is normalising a position of intolerance using her very large platform. She may not be the one to capitalise on this with a political goal in mind, but there are people who will look at this, see all of these people jumping to defend what she is saying and think about what little push these people might need to get them that bit further down the pipeline.
So yeah, it doesn't matter how you feel about Harry Potter or J.K. Rowling. What she is doing is harmful, not just because of what she is saying, but the very fact she is saying it. She is attacking a vulnerable group and, in doing so, enabling and enboldening others who may take it further, whether or not she means for it to go that way.
#BlackLivesMatter
It's hard to really know what to say about what is happening at the moment, other than I support all of the people out there peacefully protesting against systemic racism and police brutality, especially the people of colour who face these problems every day. Obviously, as a white guy, I do not know how that feels, nor would I ever want to know, but that doesn't stop me from wanting to make sure that nobody else should ever have to know what it feels like.
Now, I could just up and leave it at that, but there is more that can be said and should be said. This is not just an America issue and it is not just a police issue, it is a problem with the entire system across the world. Here in the UK, people of colour are far more likely to die of CoronaVirus because they are more likely to take the low paid "essential jobs" in the service sector, and people of colour are more likely to be arrested (and fined) for non-criminal activites. These patterns are repeated around the world and it's because of the system.
"Western culture" is based on White Supremecy, it always has been. Britain, France, Germany, Spain all made their wealth on the backs of imperialist conquest and resource extraction at the expense of native peoples around the globe. America, Canada, Australia, New Zealand were all founded on stolen land and expanded by stealing more land. America couldn't even give up the practice of human slavery without fighting a civil war over it, and you can see the effects of denying this history today. All of this purely to benefit the white men who made profit by it.
So we have a system that is based on benefiting one race at the expense of any other, how do the police fit in. Well, outside of the ingrained racism that the system imparts, you have to look at what the police actually do. And it isn't "serve and protect". The police (and the army) are the manifestation of the implicite monopoly of lawful, sanctioned violence by those in power. And we're not talking about those who we elect (though they are a part of the "power structure"). The police are there to protect the status quo, to keep those who have the majority of power in power and keep those with a minority of power from gaining more power. It's why crimes against business are taken more seriously than crimes against personal property (if you aren't rich that is). * And this is before we even start on the built-in inequalities of the justice system within the rest of the system, how cops are trained, the laws they uphold, police accountability etc. etc. etc.
* As an aside here, if you care as much or more about the property damage done during protests (whether or not the damage was done by protestors, or bad actors trying to bring disrepute onto the protestors) than the loss of human life that sparked the protest, sorry to say this, but you're just plain fucking wrong. There is no "can't I care about both" here. Sure, property damage is sucky, people are going to have to fix it all, but you can't fix a dead man.
So, what do we do? Where do we go from here. Well, hopefully not to where my most cynical inclinations are telling me, which is "back to where we were" because this shit ain't new. It happens time and time again with seemingly no progress. But what do we do if we want to make progress? Well, wiser people than me have tried to answer this question and I sure as hell don't have all the answers, but I can say this. We need a new system. One that when it says all men are created equal actually means it, and lives by it. Oh and maybe not pouring as much money into the police as some places do and instead using that money to address actual social issues like housing, education, healthcare, access to food and clean drinking water, maybe cleaning out all of the lead paint in low income area public housing that has been shown to cause long term brain damage to children exposed to it, you know, things like that which might have a tangible effect on the crime rate without getting black people murdered.
But that is going to be a long road. It means showing solidarity. If you are white, you have privalege (i.e. the cops aren't as likely to shoot you), use it. Help people of colour, not just now but whenever you can. If you can afford to do so donate to justice causes, especially those that help protestors that have been arrested and can't afford bail. And remember that, after all this dies down the system will try to get things to go back to the way things were, as they have done countless times before. Don't let this happen. Change doesn't happen overnight. And if we actually achieve a lasting, meaningful change, it won't just benefit black people. It will benefit asians, native americans/ australians, latinos, white people, the lgbtq+ community, Christians, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Bhuddists, Atheists, everyone. Everyone benefits from a more equal and fair world. It's just a shame that so many people of colour have to die before some realise that.
Some Links To Places You Can Donate To:
https://minnesotafreedomfund.org/donate
https://actionnetwork.org/fundraising...
https://siliconvalleydsa.org/donations/
This page also has a pretty good list: https://www.autostraddle.com/43-bail-funds-you-can-absolutely-support-right-now/
And if you're in the UK and want to support protest causes in this country maybe try some of these places:
http://www.stop-watch.org/about-us/donate
https://greenandblackcross.org/get-involved/donate/
Oh and a little Adendum to this. The question of voting. Yeah... I can't speak for France or Germany or Australia etc. but certainly in the UK and the US there is obviously one party that is way way worse on these issues than the other, but that doesn't make the party that's less shit actively good. Minneapolis has a Democrat mayor and Democrat DA and the state of Minnesota has a Democrat governor. Joe Biden is the defacto Democrat nominee for President and his record on race is appalling (he's openly praised segregationists, opposed busing and proposed multiple crime bills that has dispropportionately disenfranchised black Americans). Vote, if you have a candidate that is actively running on issues that will improve the situation, but don't expect that to be enough. America had a black man in the highest office in the land and systematic racism and injustice didn't go away, hell it didn't even get better.