Tag Archives: Pandagon

Some words about suburbs

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I came across this excellent comment on Pandagon today. I’m just going to leave it here, as there’s not much I can do to improve upon it.

As a transportation planning professional and a student of environmental science, I can tell you that it is an objective fact that “cities rule, suburbs drool.” Suburbs are a modern anomaly of human geography, born of the brains of hundreds of elite-educated, white, straight, Christian cis men who never even considered the idea that women who stay home with their children might want to move themselves and their children from place to place during the day. These planners eschewed sidewalks and connected streets for car-only cul-de-sacs, on-ramps, and interstates. The physical layout of cul-de-sacs is in itself wasteful of automobile fuel and actively prevents bicyclists and pedestrians from using the street network to move around in space. Every new suburban development requires new installations of waterworks (treated water to, sewage from), electrical and communications infrastructure, and of course lots and lots of road-building. The acres of green lawns are a waste of space, an ecological monoculture that is a nightmare for local wildlife to negotiate. The runoff from the same is a major source of pollution in local waterways. Besides all the environmental impacts, segregating residential areas from business, education, and civic infrastructure is now widely recognized to be a lousy idea in terms of cultural development and cultural enrichment. And don’t forget that the reason that suburbs are so overwhelmingly white most of the time is because the federal government, in partnership with private lenders, conspired to prevent people of color from moving into them.

While I don’t fault people who prefer a quiet, safe environment in which to raise their kids, suburbs are not the only sort of development that can provide this. Plenty of urban areas have lots of green space and low crime rates, as do small town and village centers. Unfortunately, small town and village centers are not the norm in a lot of America, so I can’t really fault people who end up in suburbs by default. But please, let’s not pretend that there’s a smidge of controversy about how utterly toxic suburbs are, both for the environment and for human communities.

America – First-world prosperity at third-world distribution levels!

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It sort of reads like a commercial for America, directed at millionaires and billionaires of course. Not only is America the wealthiest country on the planet, but the majority of that wealth is in the hands of a few. Which means that those are some rich-ass mofos sitting at the top of the wealth pyramid. Via Pandagon, this graph compiled by ThinkProgress shows where America’s sitting now in terms of income inequality:

So, y’know, basically we’re sitting in the company of a bunch of third-world countries. Nothing wrong with third-world countries, of course, but their high rates of income inequality tend to spring from the fact that their average citizens are making pennies a day. And do you know how many pennies there are in just a single dollar? A hundred!

But America just has no excuse. The last time income inequality was this high, there was a Great Depression. And people back then were not afraid to blame the people at the top of the income pyramid for the Depression. This FDR speech is a good example.

And FDR did his bit to push income inequality down to sane levels. But after a string of presidents – Reagan and the Bushes in particular – who were determined to aid the upper-class in its war on the lower classes, we’ve backpedaled by decades and erased a lot of the progress FDR made. And yet, in a period of record-low taxes on the wealthy and record-high income inequality, the wealthy still piss and moan about being “punished for success” by America’s supposedly oppressive tax code.

One of the commenters in the Pandagon thread linked to this NYT article (written by Ben Stein, oddly enough):

[Warren] Buffett compiled a data sheet of the men and women who work in his office. He had each of them make a fraction; the numerator was how much they paid in federal income tax and in payroll taxes for Social Security and Medicare, and the denominator was their taxable income. The people in his office were mostly secretaries and clerks, though not all.

It turned out that Mr. Buffett, with immense income from dividends and capital gains, paid far, far less as a fraction of his income than the secretaries or the clerks or anyone else in his office. Further, in conversation it came up that Mr. Buffett doesn’t use any tax planning at all. He just pays as the Internal Revenue Code requires. “How can this be fair?” he asked of how little he pays relative to his employees. “How can this be right?”

Even though I agreed with him, I warned that whenever someone tried to raise the issue, he or she was accused of fomenting class warfare.

“There’s class warfare, all right,” Mr. Buffett said, “but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”

Thank you, Mr. Buffet. Please join me for tea and a bout of weeping for America sometime.

Today in mainstream media failure: What is this “women’s health” you speak of?

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I’ll let Amanda Marcotte take this one:

What Is and Isn’t Abortion: A Primer

Repeat after me: The recent standoff over the budget came down to funding for contraception, STD testing and treatment, and cancer screening. Make special note of what word was not in that list: abortion. That’s because abortion wasn’t on the table in the fights—there was pre-existing consensus that the government will not subsidize abortion care.

Of course, if you read the mainstream news, you would not know this.

The War on Contraception is Only Beginning

Unfortunatley, as long as the mainstream press continues to adopt the right-wing tendency to characterize safe childbirth kits, HIV medications, cancer screenings, condoms, pencillin, and birth control pills as “abortion,” the public will probably be less incensed than they should be.

In non-contraception-related media failure news, Paul Krugman points out an instance of bad financial reporting. This is worth noting because public understanding of economics is already abysmal.

Bad Financial Reporting 101

But my point isn’t so much that I’m right and others are wrong. It is that we’re seeing a mere theory, not at all the only plausible explanation of the data, reported as a fact.

Perhaps 2010′s best one-sentence summation of conservatism

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Amanda Marcotte, she of the constantly getting linked to on my blog, has written one of the best sentences of 2010, and just in time for the New Year.

It’s absolutely fascinating the way a lot of culture war politics are constructed around this model where conservatives see themselves as children who have to be prodded into doing things adults do just as a matter of course because it’s the right thing to do—everything from paying your taxes to eating green stuff—but then think they’re wearing big boy pants because they can actually make real trouble for their imaginary mommies. (source)

There’s not really anything to add to that. It would probably take me several paragraphs to sum up the conservative mindset as effectively as that one sentence does.

Although on a somewhat random note, which I’ll address because it comes from the same post:

Sarah Palin is on a rampage to shore up the idea that Real Americans eat nothing but crap, and proceed to show liberals whose boss by sitting on their asses, angled correctly so that the fat can line their arteries most effectively.  But as KJ at XX Factor notes, Palin regards her own body as a temple that she actually takes real care of, particularly by being an ever-so-un-American exercise nut.

The conservative ambivalence about exercise in particular seems pretty straightforward to me. I’ve read enough male conservative pundits launching into wet dreams of their perfect conservative wives, and those descriptions invariably include regular trips to the gym. And the purpose of this exercise, predictably enough, is that it’s her wifely duty to look sexy for her husband.

Basically, if you’re a woman, there’s two ways to be a Real American. If you don’t give conservative men boners, you’re a Real American for rejecting all that liberal health food and organic produce and arugula. If you do give conservative men boners, you’re a Real American because… well, because you give conservative men boners. Conservative men need women they can respect for being kindred lardasses, but they also need conservative women that they’re willing to prong. Obviously the two groups don’t overlap much.

The TSA Nude Body Screening/Junk Touching Saga Continues: Obama remains a douche, wingnuts claim moral high ground

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The Obama Administration has got to be the dumbest group of people since whenever the last Geek Squad staff meeting was. They campaign on a platform of not being George W. Bush, and are now dismayed to find that, after almost two years of being strikingly similar to George W. Bush, albeit with a veneer of faux intellectualism rather than faux cowboy homeyness, people didn’t want to vote for Democrats in the midterms.

For example, Obama came into office promising to reverse Bush’s egregious rights violations and protect the American people from the power Bush’s executive branch seized in the midst of a wave of fear and paranoia. Instead, his administration now defends the use of nude body scans and enhanced pat-downs (colloquially known as “touching one’s junk”). At a time when Republicans are calling out the TSA for being overly invasive, Obama should not be taking the authoritarian stance on this.

Don’t get me wrong, the Republicans aren’t doing so out of genuine concern. They’re doing it because the oppose the Obama Administration, which at the moment means every single thing the government does at any level can be disingenuously blamed on Obama. For Obama to lend them credibility by defending the TSA’s actions is going to do serious, serious harm to the Democrats’ image.

Two years ago, I was laughing in the face of people who said that Democrats and Republicans are basically the same. It’s still not really true, but the Democrats have been so ineffective this whole decade, and so afraid of the Republicans that they’d rather defend an atrocious policy inherited from Bush than actually reverse it, that they might as well be. The Republicans’ policy platform was replaced by rhetoric and prejudice a long time ago, but the Democrats’ policy platform appears to have been replaced more recently by watered-down centrism that basically amounts to total inaction.

Let me throw in a quick reminder of a law I read once. You know, one of those really important laws that constitutes the very core of our government? Okay, I’ll stop being subtle; it’s from the Constitution.

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

In other words, you may, with probable cause, issue a warrant describing “my junk” as the place to be searched. Until then, you cannot touch it. (Side note: I happen to be in the business of authorizing people to touch my junk; any interested ladies should call me sometime and we’ll see if we can get you a warrant. Hint: probably.)

But the worst part of all this, besides the reminder that Obama is a toothless moderate, is the way conservative pundits are flocking to this issue and pretending to be its liberty-loving champions. To wit (yes, to wit):

The hoi polloi revolt against such outrages is beginning to resemble the TEA Party awakening in 2009. Watch not just for the Goverment pushback to such audacity but some pragmatic hand-wringing from the usual corners of the blogsphere. (source)

Krauthammer’s take, however, is even more hilarious.

Don’t touch my junk is the anthem of the modern man, the Tea Party patriot, the late-life libertarian, the midterm election voter. Don’t touch my junk, Obamacare – get out of my doctor’s examining room, I’m wearing a paper-thin gown slit down the back. Don’t touch my junk, Google – Street View is cool, but get off my street. Don’t touch my junk, you airport security goon – my package belongs to no one but me, and do you really think I’m a Nigerian nut job preparing for my 72-virgin orgy by blowing my johnson to kingdom come? (source)

Racism? From Krauthammer? Why I never! Every ounce of disingenuous bullshit in Krauthammer’s “champion of human rights” spiel is revealed when he basically says that he’d be A-OK with the junk-touching if they were just touching brown Muslim junk. He and the rest of the wingnuts are convinced that they’re the ones fighting nobly against government intrusion.

But as Amanda Marcotte points out, they’re really just championing white male privilege:

By the way, the choice between scanners and searches isn’t anything new.  I was pulled for a random search in El Paso in August, and I chose the full body scan, because I’ve been patted down with the old procedures before, and if you’re a woman you still feel pretty molested by that.  The shift that’s created all the anger is that the procedures have gotten invasive to the point where men might feel molested.  Don’t fuck with the privileged, man.  The procedures already had a heightened humiliation factor for women, which I’ve experienced myself, but it took making white men feel like women and people of color often do for this to be pushed into the next zone of full blown anger.

So conservatives feel like they have a right to bitch about, and even blame liberals for, security practices that are a logical extension of the policies that began – with those same conservatives’ hearty approval – under Bush. It’s only when their junk is under scrutiny (gross) that they suddenly remember that Benjamin Franklin quote about trading a little liberty for a little security. Before now, they were all for trading liberty for security, as long as minorities made the lion’s share of the sacrifice.

In essence, something that has always been the case is that conservatives will scream BIG GOVERNMENT about two things:
1. Policies that benefit minorities in any way.
2. Policies that chip away in the slightest at white Christian male privilege.

And they won’t even buy you dinner first

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The TSA wants to see you naked. As a strident opponent of modesty, I might be willing to get naked for them if they asked, but they don’t. And while I wish I lived in a world where nobody cared about being seen naked, that doesn’t mean I’m going to believe that the TSA or any other authority has the right to see a person naked without that person’s willing consent.

This  all seems fairly obvious, but we live in a post-9/11 world, which means that terrorists are hiding inside your vagina people are scared enough to give up basic freedoms if the government promises to protect them from brown people. The same government that shouldn’t be trusted to provide for your health care or regulate the economy is eminently sincere and trustworthy in its mandate to keep us safe from those outside the straight white male bubble. And if you disagree, you hate our troops and such. (See any of Amanda Marcotte’s many posts on what she calls “security theater” for some excellent reading about this attitude.)

This is the reason that my friend Mike segued immediately from naked TSA scanners to a great dissection of authoritarianism in America. It’s not just the people in authority who are authoritarians, after all – it’s the people underneath them who willingly let them maintain that authority. To use the ever-tasteful prison rape metaphor, they’re basically bending over and letting the government have its way with their buttholes.

There’s not much to say about it that Mike hasn’t already said, so I’m going to look at his point from a different angle: economic authority rather than political and social authority. Granted, the three are inseparably bound together, but that’s the very reason I felt that the economic angle was noticeably absent from Mike’s discussion of governmental authority.

Something I’ve observed in the past few years is the way people submit themselves to the authority of corporations, millionaires and billionaires, property owners in general. To their minds, they’re submitting to the power of the free market, by which reasoning the billionaires deserve their power because something something hard work mumble most productive cough cough invisible hand. Or to put it more legibly, they earned their money – and thus their power – through hard work.

But money is power, and that means that anyone who would tell you that money is a legitimate source of authority is pushing a philosophy of “might makes right.” This alone should be enough to make people shy away from the authority of the free market, except that America as a society actually does believe that might makes right. We have a right to stomp all over Middle Eastern countries precisely because we can, and no matter how many layers of justification we build about WMDs or freedom or security, when those all break down there are still conservative pundits arguing that we have a right to pick a third-world country willy-nilly and shove it against the wall just to show the world how tough and manly America is.

So pointing out the fact that the American people are basically being financially bullied into doing what the rich people want isn’t going to get very far. After all, we live in a country where John Boehner can stand in front of Congress and explicitly state that he’s favoring corporate interests over the good of the people and not get immediately impeached. Democracy can never function if the people want a king, whether that king has a crown or a gigantic net worth.

The rich use their power to influence the political process, as everyone knows, but they also use it to influence social attitudes. They want people to believe that what’s best for the richest is best for everyone; that an unregulated free market will favor people at every income level; that corporations can provide for people’s interests better than government can. And nowhere has this attitude gained more traction than in the US.

Gavin, in a rare bout of coherence, explains it thusly:

On this day in history, that first sentence could be the one that’s the most dense-packed with stupid of all sentences in an Erickson post, and therefore, until proven otherwise, in all of human discourse. “Continue to screw consumers with laws against business” is almost beautiful. It’s a stark, unadorned construction of ideas that required literally decades of work by the postwar right, first in the building of institutions and infrastructure, then in releasing payload after payload of bad-faith claims and contorted analyses into the atmosphere, until at last, a sufficient degree of besozzlement was realized that a sensible moderate-income American might expect to encounter such a phrase outside of the nearly plotless string of laugh-lines that make up a Sinclair Lewis novel.

[...]

The almost-beauty of Erickson’s word-sculpture, and I’ll repeat it: “continue to screw consumers with laws against business,” is that anybody with a lick of, and I quote again: “basic economic sense,” knows that consumers and business are inherently, tautologically, by the nature of what ‘consumers’ and ‘business’ are, opposed in their basic interests. For example, buyers want low prices, while sellers want high prices.

In a larger sense, the great project of the right in America since the reaction against Jacksonianism, or fundamentally since Hamilton, has been to advance the interests of the propertied and wealthy, the employers and sellers, in a system set up to respond to the will of the majority, who necessarily will mostly be employees and buyers.

This is not possible to achieve except by fooling the majority that their interests are different from what they are, manipulating them to exert their political power in various foibles and whoopsies: to shoot wealth away in a circus cannon; to be maneuvered into quarrels with the Blacksons next door and the Juanses around back; to put the car in gear and have the garage door pulled off by a sneaky chain, and that night to have the car driven off skidding and beeping from the wide-open garage; to find clowns switching your water and sewer lines, then run out to have other clowns switch the sewer and gas, then run in and someone flushes the john and blows out all the windows, then run out as clowns enter through the windows, then run back in, etc.

Conservatives were a nervous bunch back in the 40s – the Great Depression had shattered the country’s faith in the unregulated market, not to mention exposed millions of Americans to the realities of living poor; the New Deal had demonstrated that economic regulation actually does benefit most Americans; and World War II took an understandable toll on the popularity of fascism. FDR was more popular than a woman in the men’s locker room, and the Republicans were sweating.

And thus was born the seed of the modern Republican Party, which in recent years has reached the apotheosis of reality-denial, batshit rhetoric, and the replacement of policy with prejudice. It began with Yalta and the replacement of blacks with Communists as the scary group trying to take over America, and they never looked back.

It wasn’t merely a political coup – the wealthy benefit as well from this shift in political discourse, as was the intent. A scapegoat is created. The Pentagon is built to protect against that scapegoat, and to create more enemies to scapegoat later. And ultimately, those who question or attack the authority of the wealthy can be accused of sympathizing with or being a member of the scapegoated group. Basically, you want the Communists/hippies/Satanists/liberals/gays/terrorists to win. And the final result is that, in the middle of a recession so severe that it mirrors the Great Depression in many ways, John Boehner can stand in front of the nation and say, without subtlety or guile, “Don’t worry, rich people. We’ve got your back.”

In Italy, it really is a crime to be this sexy

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Last month, an Italian woman was accused of trespassing in two teenage boys’ fantasies. Or, to be more precise:

A TOPLESS sunbather is being investigated by police after being accused of sensuously rubbing sun cream on herself on a public beach.

Police were called to a beach at Anzio south of Rome by a furious mother who said the way the “attractive” sunbather was rubbing lotion on her body had “troubled her sons aged 14 and 12.”

Source

Uh, mom? That bulge in their swim trunks? “Troubled” isn’t the usual adjective for that.

The police, of course, fully sympathize and are determined to punish this woman for corrupting two young boys who were previously unaware that breasts are appealing:

“We have opened a file on committing an obscene act as we are committed to following the complaint. From what I heard she was very attractive,” the spokesman said.

The implications of- oh, for Christ’s sake. Why am I even bothering? It’s typical slut-shaming, the kind Amanda Marcotte discusses frequently. If you cut through the thin layers of bullshit involved in accusing a woman of being too damn sexy, you see the ambivalence at the core of supposedly liberal societies.

See, I’m developing this theory. I’m no sociologist, so somebody with more education than me has probably said this better than I’m about to. But the way I see it, no matter how many people in a given society are liberal and progressive, societies as a whole have an enormous conservative-ward momentum that shows up every time there’s a conflict between the two like this. This is how countries known for being pretty liberal, like Switzerland, can ban minarets.

Italy’s a good example, because unlike in most of the US, you can take your boobs out on a beach there. But Italy is hardly a haven of gender equality, and in fact this kind of sexism and slut-shaming is as common in Italy as it is anywhere else. Individuals can be liberal, because they want their freedoms. If they feel comfortable taking their boobs out on the beach, they want the freedom to do that. But societies maintain those conservative impulses, and in this case the freedom to go topless clashes with the conservative hand-wringing over women who walk around acting like they have a right to control their own body. Don’t get me wrong, sexist men like boobs as much as any straight man or gay woman. They’re not against women showing off their boobs. They’re just against women doing so on their own terms, and especially against women who do so for their own reasons.

I mean, it’s not like this lady could’ve just been enjoying the beach and the sun and applying lotion so as not to get a sunburn. No, she was clearly being a Slutty McSlutterton prancing around being all slutty. When there are kids around! It’s enough to give you a case of the vapors.