Shameless Self-promotion Sunday #52
Here's a pretty old post from the blog archives of Geekery Today; it was written about 15 years ago, in 2009, on the World Wide Web.
It’s Sunday. I’m in Detroit, and have to run in just a minute to help prepare a big family cook-out today. But, while I’m out, leave a message and I’ll get back to you.
What have you been up to this week? Write anything? Leave a link and a short description for your post in the comments. Or fire away about anything else you might want to talk about.
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I wrote about personal assistance, disability and anarchism here – responses from anarchists of all types appreciated, although i suspect some here may find my anarchism a little too communist for their tastes – but ideas of what it might look like in more market-oriented forms of anarchist society would also be very interesting…
I linked to an interview of (and PDF book by) anarcho-anthropologist and ex-Yale professor David Graeber.
Here is an article from the Omaha World Herald (May 17) about a transgender 8 year old. I think some readers will find it interesting. http://www.omaha.com/index.php?u_page=2798&u_sid=10636013
One Dodge franchisee, upon learning that he’s getting royally f*cked as a result of consolidation asks, “How can this happen in a free market?” My answers, probably not to his liking.
I went to a party last night to visit my Progressive Green Party type activist friend Wick. It was a real blast ~ lots of laughs and interesting people. I am in Kansas City, Missouri right now visiting my friends and family. It’s so small compared to D.C….I am still happy to see my friends from highschool and whatnot. I joked about my bitchiness on Facebook with Wick and company. My Facebook feed frequently includes me making snarky angry comments about every political issue under the sun ~ not to mention attacking both “Progressive” and conservative material.
I am afraid that Arthur and I have a nominally similar rhetorical style ~ he’s just waaaay more in your face than me/practiced. I have a real penchant for dark sarcasm too ~ not to mention volcanic passionate opinions.
I get to hang out with Angela Keaton, Brad Spangler, and some others this weekend. There’s going to be some Boston Tea Party event in Platte, Missouri. I’ll probably make some social-business contacts for future reference there. Angela Keaton’s website is one giant lovable bitchfest ~ am very happy to be meeting her in person.
Soviet and I are going to head up to Porcfest together. I’ve now listed counter-economics as an interest on my Facebook ~ set to private viewing for everything out of rational paranoia lol. I figured I didn’t care about promoting my political persona as much anymore, so why give info to random people?
Along with some notable others, we shall be giving a presentation on the subject ~ if they want to speak up, then they can. I just don’t know if they want me to “out” them.
In other news: Angela Keaton has quoted a head U.S. military guy saying the problem is our intelligence on Iran is too focused on what we do know…
That does NOT sound good. The “problem” is that the U.S. military is too broken to attack Iran, but there’s always conscription ~ or me being wrong about the military’s capabilities. This whole diplomacy game is a sham. The reformist Iranian candidate in the June presidential election doesn’t reject Iran’s alleged right to a nuclear program. Of course, he insists it’ll be for civilian purposes and is willing to open up relations with the West ~ not to mention loosen social controls at home to an extent. Predictably, the Iranian government has now banned Facebook ~ it being a media outlet that might be used by opposition forces. The problem with liberal candidates winning and effecting change in Iran is that the Guardian Council doesn’t want to give an inch. It might take another Iranian revolution to do the mullahs in.
In which case: I fully expect Soviet to become a gun runner for the Iranian resistance ~ being the ruffian he is. You could probably have them trade you some decent opium for arms ~ Iran has a long history of the drug.
Oooooh: I also maybe get to meet a friend of mine I am flirtatious with ~ as specific as I can get for privacy concerns.
Life doesn’t suck entirely! Yay. Now; if only the government would stop being stoopid.
Curses
I actually think Arthur needs to be linked to more often. Yeah, he does go over board with the tarring of entire groups of people as dumbasses. The work he’s doing now is really good ~ intermixed with more self-referencing with old posts.
Aster,
If your blog is a group one, then may I recommend getting Arthur on it? Or at least listing him on the sidebar. He’s in dire straits and needs people to donate to him ~ solidarity and all.
Trying to get the inspiration to post something “appropriate” for Memorial Day. Find myself looking at photos of horribly burned — but surviving — children in Afghanistan, hideous mutant stillborn infants thanks to depleted uranium, severed limbs and shattered bodies from various warring factions’ bombings, etc… Dunno if I can do it, really.
not doing much, just trying to figure out why the FeedWordPress Plugin will not let me save the settings for each individual feed… The “Save Changes” button that is on the main settings page is not present for the individual feeds making there no way to say the settings for individual themes. Its been very frustrating trying to figure out. Any Help?
Mike,
Post comedy? We all need it sometimes, but it may be best to do something serious. I dunno.
“MCCAIN: Now, now I want to be clear on something. I hate war, my friends. I hate war almost as much as I hate vigorously masturbating to it. But this war in Iraq is a necessary war. An honorable war. A war that’s been beaten by its captors for five and a half years. And without it Saddam Hussein would be free even now to fly pretend airplanes into our fictional buildings with weapons of mass imagination. FB: None of us will ever forget that day – that terrible, hypothetical day. MCCAIN: And right now in Iraq we have a, a wonderful general there, General Petraeus. He’s very courageous. He is very broad-shouldered. He was beaten by his captors for five and a half years. And when you get close to him, very close, there is the distinct aroma of fresh-baked pie. And, and the first thing we have to do is let General Petraeus finish the job of securing Iraq for the Iraqi people, a proud and united people, so that it doesn’t fall into the hands of their enemies, the Iraqi people. FB: Well that sounds good, John McCain, but how do we really get the Iraqis to stand up for themselves against the Iraqis? MCCAIN: Oh, we already have, by arming the Iraqis to fight back against the Iraqis and make sure they can live in peace without fear of Iraqis. But if we don’t stay and finish the job Iraq will fall to Iraqi influence, and we cannot allow that, my friends. FB: See I used to be all confused about all this, but it just makes so much sense when I hear it from you! Now between half a million and a million Iraqis have been killed since the start of the war, in a country of twenty-nine million Iraqis. Do you feel kinda glass-half-full about it, like “hey look at all the Iraqis we got left!” Or is it kinda glass-half-empty, like “oh man, look at all the Iraqis we got left!” MCCAIN: Oh, no, no. With time I believe we can eliminate the threat of Iraq within Iraq. The first thing we have to do in order to win is to win, which I believe we can accomplish through means of winning. And the second thing we have to do is cut taxes and pork-barrel spending. Let’s not tax these dead Iraqis, my friends. Let’s kill them again so they don’t have to pay three million dollars for a planetarium in Chicago. FB: Well I’m almost sold, John McCain, but Barack Obama says he’s gonna make war cool again in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Why shouldn’t I vote for him? MCCAIN: Because I know war, my friends. I’ve lived with war. Slept with war. Fondled war. Has Barack Obama ever made sweet love to the outer casing of an intercontinental ballistic missile? Or was he too busy teaching kindergartners how to have sex with federal earmarks to show his support for our troops? FB: Now there’s some crazy people who say we should negotiate with other countries like Iran and Venezuela before we bomb them. Are these crazy people crazy? MCCAIN: Absolutely. We cannot dignify these countries by meeting with them, because if we meet with them we give the world the impression that we are willing to meet with them, and that just makes our country look like the kind of country that meets with other countries. And where does that lead, my friends?”
http://fafblog.blogspot.com/2008/11/fafblog-interviews-john-mccain.html
As long as we’re raising technical questions — clicking on a comment in the sidebar used to take one straight to the comment. No longer.
The Porcfest preparations continue. In addition to tabling, we’re also doing a presentation on Agorism, probably the first in front of a large live audience since the one Brad Spangler gave in Utah back in 2007.
There’s been a bit of talk about Browncoats and outlaw culture on this “forum” in the past few days. Anyone who know me knows how I love the wonderful mythology that Firefly has given libertarians, and culturally attuned left-libertarians especially. I have no idea how a left-liberal like Joss Whedon was able to channel it so perfectly.
At the same time, there’s a lot of good libertarian mythology in the truly classic Westerns, where the Wandering Stranger’s search for purpose and the need to continue find more subtle manifestations. I everyone to go rent Once Upon a Time in the West at some point if you’ve got the time for a three hour movie. Also anything from the “Man With No Name” trilogy (For a Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.) Any film with a soundtrack by Ennio Morricone is worth watching. Just listen to these pieces and tell me you don’t love them:
The Ecstasy of Gold Once Upon a Time in the West
I have a slightly technical question of my own. Was changing the right column (containing links to recent comments, etc) from fixed width to proportional deliberate?
It’s a minor quibble, but I like to magnify the page in my browser so that the text is huge. The right margin crowding screen real-estate is a (very minor) pain. If there are others who like their text large, it could be a problem for them too.
I have accepted a proposal of marriage! I shall be deviously forwarding various counter-economic causes by greatly expanding my kinship network. Mwahahahaha!
Congrats! Laura. You’ll have to bring your new kin into the counter-economic fold.
Laura-
My congratulations as well. If you’ve found true love, then thank you for sharing this beautiful moment. When’s the wedding!
Not to distract from L’s marriage, but I wanted to update people on Prop 8. The Supreme Court just released a decision upholding it today, but the 18,000 gay couples wedded previously are still legally married. This is going to get interesting…
I suspect there will be a push to overturn it via ballot. The other option is to appeal to a higher level Federal court, but I don’t see the major organizations going for it ~ perhaps because a losing Federal decision would have a standing of some finality.
On the bright side, concubine sounds so much kinkier than wife or partner…
Congratulations, Laura! It’s a noble sacrifice, to get married solely to advance the agorist cause. I hope that as a patriotic devotee of the Revolution you will name your firstborn Niknok (Konkin backwards).
I seem to have responded to a post which no longer exists, so my response no longer makes sense.
I recall that someone suggested moving marriage into the grey market – to the extent that private groups rely on, or refer to, marriage for various purposes, they should cut the state, and if need be, the church, out of the process. Of course, some of you may disagree that there’s anything to save in it…
Nick, Aster,
Many thanks! We have not set a date just yet, as we are planning on staging a rather unconventional celebratory event, which we will need to crunch some numbers for and make some enquiries about before we can divine an appropriate particular time and place for it all. We shall keep the Intarwebz informed on our exploits.
Roderick,
Likewise, many thanks. Receiving large quantities of delicious Caribbean cuisine and free Spanish-language conversational practice from in-laws over the next few decades in exchange for looking cute and providing free consultations on East Asian languages and cultures will be difficult, but someone has to do it.
Regarding the appellation “Niknok”, I think we already have a sufficient pool of amusing potential names generated for any offspring that may occur, such that its usage in legal names is somewhat improbable, but we shall gratefully accept the suggestion for entry into the pool of possible childhood pet names.
Roderick,
What kind of Randian esque dude are you? Talking about the “nobility” of sacrifice ( :
On a more serious note: I look forward to hearing more about this exotic celebratory event. My stepmother and father were married at the gem theater. I’ve seen one non-church centric wedding.
Selfishness is such a noble ideal that we should be willing to immolate ourselves for it.
Selfishness is such a noble ideal that we should be willing to immolate ourselves for it.
Actually, it occurs to me that that’s not a bad description of the attitude that a good many high-church Randians seem to take (often conjoined with the attitude that the non-initiation of force is such a noble ideal that we should be willing to annihilate others for it).
Dennis, thank you for the link to the story of one eight-year-old transgender girl blessed with unusually kind and enlightened parents. It’s very good when a story like this appears in the media, because other parents whose child expresses gender identity opposite that assigned are now a bit more likely to accept it calmly and rationally as the normal expression of biodiversity that transgenderism actually is when freed from patriarchal, authoritarian religious disinformation and brainwashing. This reporter has made a worthy contribution to the open society, and I thank her for it.
I do a fair amount of peer counseling and support groups and most everyone I’ve seen in the TG community has been deeply damaged–including myself–by parental, church, school, and peer abuse over the issue of gender identity. Fewer parents will freak out at their kids if they are well informed early in their child’s life, as to what might arise, so as to not lash out in rage at a TG child, as most seem to do. All my mother wanted was for me to be ‘normal’; what I want is a little Respect.
As I see it, the philosophical shift that has to be made, is to begin to respect the identities of individuals: if a child says she’s a girl, a girl is who she is, even if the delivery room team had announced by her external genitalia that she looked like a boy to them. We are finding that self-identity is considerably more compelling than the physical structures, and that the emotional disabilities associated with transgenderism are the logically expected post-traumatic results of this never-ending dispute over essential identity between the transgender individual and all the authorities over them in this world. Public school being only one of many ‘slaughterbenches of the individual’. I don’t see that Alice Miller ever mentioned transgenderism as such, but she says much about the loss of the true self through abuse by parents, especially in Drama of the Gifted Child: The Search for the True Self (1981).
The longer I live with it, the more certain I become, that there is absolutely no objective defect in a trans person’s identity, but rather much post-traumatic injury from abuse. I am who I am…absent religiously based disinformation which is so pervasive…the Inquisition of the Burning Times continues…..
Which brings my rant to the Cali Supremes’ decision to uphold Proposition 8 (widely called Prop Hate) which defines marriage in California as only between a man and a woman. I live near San Francisco’s City Hall, and quickly found a proudly defiant crowd surrounding the intersection of Van Ness and Grove Sts., and people sitting down in Civil Disobedience to shut down traffic on this major approach to the Golden Gate Bridge. I found one of my friends, and then another, and many friendly strangers. A couple of hundred cops-not all in riot gear-arrested people and escorted them to a fleet of paddy wagons. One preacher appeared with a bullhorn, clerical collar, and Bible waving in the air; a large number of protesters rushed him and chased him into City Hall. This, too, is a struggle between the Dark Ages and the Enlightenment.
Victoria-
That post above is writing of meritorious quality by any objective standard, and it is wonderful to see you speaking with such strength. It’s also true, every word. And, on universalist grounds, important.
The left-libertarian community has just proved that it’s so up-to-the-minute avant garde hypermodernist(=) that nearly every one of them will go the barricades to demand the equal social citizenship of transgendered persons. If you would like a community where you may develop your talents in an atmosphere of both acceptance and respect for your growing skill and competence, then you have a place here. And we need you.
The ALL blogosphere is open to you every hour of the day, except at a third past 1600 hours, when some of us ‘siviled people have to break for tea and tarts.
And anyone who wishes to give you trouble on trans issues had better know their rhetorical steps and stances, because all you need to do is call on myself and the gallant Soviet, and we’ll have lots of fun putting them in their place. And if that fails… well, of course I believe in total, by-the-ACLU-book freedom of speech. But I’m not responsible for the action of others, who don’t necessary acsribe to picky little American technicalities when real people are getting hurt.
It never hurts to keep a true friend with an ANTIFA membership card around in case civil society starts breaking down and a diversity of tactics proves necesse est.
Please feel free to invite any of your Radical Faerie friends to take a look and see what they think of a politics that both asks for social justice for all and supports the right of every individual to do what we damn well please. We hate cops and we hate patriarchs. And all Gods and gods allowed, just respect the church-and-state thing and keep them outside the door on matters of politics, where we need to speak a language we can all understand. We need them to.
We need everyone who has both the heart to see both what we vulnerable human beings need and know what a fair society looks like, and the brain to know how to do the math and get it done. I think you know some people who need that conjunction. Bring ’em over sometime to meet the folks.
Victoria, you’re among friends here, and good company. And I for one would very, very much like to see more writing of quality like the one above. If you ever want your hand at shaping up your thoughts into a powerful essay on any human liberation issue, I’ll recommend that our soon-to-be-more-than-vapourware Barbarians for Civilisation website invite you to guest blog.
You can do it.
-Aster
{)(*)(}
(=) Is there a page or software in the virtual Anglosphere which makes it reasonably easy to use acute accents and the like?
(==) Not to mention transhumanist-friendly, no offense to all you pre-cyborgs. (I have to wear this @#$%!! mummy thing for TWO MORE fraggin’ months)
Victoria, The letters to the editor which appeared regarding that article were very supportive of Katie and her family. While that might not be an accurate gauge of the way the community at large viewed the story, I take it as a good sign.
Aster, Thank you so much! I’m excited about the Barbarians for Civilisation project and about reaching out to the Radical Faeries…the Rad Faes are a community of individualists, mostly gay men, a few trans women and a few cis women; politically progressive to anarchist–Emma Goldman is very popular, spiritually mostly neo-pagan. I still attend the weekly Faerie coffee klatsch, host Full Moon Circles, and post on the Faerie email lists.
And of course I prefer the un-American spelling of civilisation.
Thanks, Vic.
Not that the Bridds are doing any better.
grumbles . . .
Why the grumbles, Soviet? I will personally volunteer my writing talents for this blog ~ should I be welcomed. I would happily welcome being a full fledged member of a blog with the potential to reach a wide audience ~ am a homeless refugee a la Rand’s quote in need of a political home like this prospective one.
Nick-
I would be happy to support a consensus to invite you to join our project, but not yet. At present, there are several reasons of statelessness which would which make what you ask impossible at the moment without a self-sacrificial conflict of interest. Please develop your confidence, composure, and writing talents to match your excellent passion and intelligence, and it would be a pleasure to discuss the matter again in another year or so.
Aster.
I would like your advice. It looks like I’ll be able to lead a good life, or I’ll be able to crush the puny hearts of pathetic men. Each looks quite enjoyable, but I doubt I will be able to pursue both.
Aster,
My writing talents are fine. Please learn that condescending to me is not a way to smooth relations. You have praised several of my high quality blog posts before. Forgive me for failing to live up to your lofty standards of literary purity. I suppose Soviet Onion, William Gillis, and Victoria are so markedly superior to me in this department.
STOP reading confidence issues into everything I write on here. I just got back from loudly and passionately discussing my views with people of somewhat differing philosophic approaches. You only see a small fraction of my life.
There is a need for further explanation of why I react so harshly to comments like the above. Aster is making a comment upon my self-confidence. This is not a philosophic response to anything I have said on here. It’s an attempt to comment upon what is ultimately a matter of my subconscious.
Nick-
All I said what that you don’t have the right to invite yourself into my house or my projects, while leaving the door open if you changed the way you relate to me and to others. I tried to say this diplomatically, and obviously failed badly, for which I apologise.
Anna-
Please try walking a mile in red shoes and get back to me. Nick isn’t puny. I just don’t personally wish to closely work with him, and have been telling him this for what is now nearly two years.
I wasn’t inviting myself. I was just objecting to the tone.
I wasn’t suggesting that Nick is any worse than other men. I wrote “pathetic men” for emphasis, not to define a subset of men.
Anna,
Thanks…
I guess ( :
I don’t think I have a right to anyone’s attention. Feel free to disassociate yourself from me.
Nick,
I believe I have a right to your attention. Gimme attention!
For the record, hugs and cuddles are still free; sex is still verboten to you. hugs
P.S. It’s kinda cool, really. Like Alice’s radio show…
Anna,
LOL
I do indeed think we’re sexually incompatible. What a dreadful exchange this was. I find conflict icky icky. I am glad you have a sense of humor here ( :
I miss watching The L Word with you…
Good times!