(no subject)
Oct. 12th, 2011 01:55 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gwydion* Senate Republicans filibustered the jobs bill on the grounds that the top .1% of earners shouldn't have top pay even one dollar towards fixing crumbling roads and schools and creating 9 million jobs. After all,what is the suffering of 9 million people, the health of the economy, and the good off 99.9% of Americans next to the need of the richest .1% padding there savings account just a little more so they can sit on that capital.
* The last corporate tax repatriation amnesty cost 20 thousand jobs, so the Republicans are in favor of doing it again. After all, it simultaneously harms the economy, increases unemployment, and leads to less income for the Federal government and is thus bad for things like schools and the unemployed. In other words, win, win, win for Republicans, like most things bad for the country as a whole.
* Mitt Romney, having strongly denounced Occupy wall street as "class warfare" is now pretending he was always for it. a Mitt Romney contradicting himself reel would make a film the length of the LOTR trilogy, so I'm not surprised.
* One of the brave Olympians who endured an international shit storm for raising a fist to protest racism at the Mexico Summer Olympics, turned up at occupy wall street. How cool is that?
* The California governor signed the Gender Nondiscrimination Act and the Vital Statistics Modernization Act into law. The first one is obvious. The second makes it easier to update documents to conform to gender rather than birth sex. It's a big fucking deal on a day to day safety level for a lot of people. Let's hope folks in other states get the same soon.
* Anna Grodzka has been elected the first trans MP in Poland. Yay, Poland!
* Rm on National Coming Out Day: http://lettersfromtitan.com/2011/10/11/national-coming-out-day/
* sparkindarkness on National coming Out Day: http://www.sparkindarkness.com/2011/10/national-coming-out-day.html
* Shout Out to those not out: http://crankyskirt.tumblr.com/post/11325064075/heres-a-shoutout-to-the-folks-who-arent-coming-out
* It needs saying now and then that I consider the out or not out question a personal one. every individual that makes that choice has to balance questions of survival, employment, and safety against the long term good of the community as a whole. I am lucky that I can afford to be out because now I have my Federal benefits, i don't have to worry about the religious right picketing my workplace as has happened to others like me around the country. I am lucky enopugh to have a supportive family. I have made the personal calculation that if I get the shit beaten out of me by assholes I am no longer able bodied enough to fight off that they will look like colossal douches for beating up a cripple when it gets to court, and that most people don't dare harass me because I can still pull out the teacher voice and my war face when I need too. I also have the medical coverage to get real care if I get injured doing this. That's my personal choice and calculation. Some of you haven't the money and job security to do that. Some of you live in significantly less safe for queer folk areas than my lefty city on the I-5 corridor of the PNW. Some of you don't have a shit kicker vibe you can pull out of your ass in emergencies. some younger folks risk losing a chance at college, family violence, and homelessness if they come out right now. Some of you just want to live quiet, drama free lives, which is perfectly fucking valid, or have a myriad of other perfectly valid reasons to make your own decision. You will notice that I do not bully, harass, or judge folks who end up calculating in favour of some degree of stealth. The world is a messy, dangerous place and as a result decisions can get complicated. I have real sympathy with that. Yes, in the long run out is better and less exhausting, but people have to live in a now where food, shelter, money to pay bills, and safety sometimes trump the individual sense of freedom and the long term good of being out. so let's not be jerks to folks who decide otherwise, okay?
The only time I consider outing okay is when it's an anti-gay public figure actively working against people's civil rights.
May I add, leave Anderson Cooper alone. He is out enough to bring his partner to formal public events, but he covers news items on the ground in the Middle east, so a public statement would vastly increase his danger in countries with the death penalty for being gay. Also, he does a lot of pro gay rights reporting. He's not a hypocrite like Ted Haggard and Larry Craig. He's not even pretending to be other than he is, but a public statement could jeopardize the good he's doing in the world. He's made his private calculation about how out to be. he's not hurting you, so please let him get on with it.
* Today was another round of exhausting and depressing driving around. Example: the apartment I went to see was taken, and all that was left was stairs. The worst was driving around and around the neighborhood where I lived with Skye trying to find a place that was a few blocks further out than I was led to believe.. I kept passing our old place. Yes, it hurt about as much as you'd expect. They tore down the house next door and put up another set of townhouses. The neighbors that lived there always seemed a little off when we talked to them over the fence, but we had no idea what was going on behind closed doors. Not long before we came out, the school turned them in to CPS. The kids went straight to foster care and the parents were institutionalized. They were violent unmediated paranoid schizophrenics on drugs. Those poor kids. Those poor cats. When they went to tear down the house and out buildings, they fond the bodies of the cats. Psych meds are really, really important, folks. Yes, side effects of anti-psychotics suck, but especially if there are children and animals depending on one, they are absolutely necessary. I noticed the scary guy across the street and his family were gone too, the house condemned for another development. I don't know that story, since it happened after I moved, but I can only hope his kids and dogs are safe.
Because of various housing related appointments tomorrow I'm getting crap for sleep again. I am running out of energy and patience. I need this done now. The level of physical pain alone is nearly unbearable, not counting the stress and interrupted sleep.
Before you ask, Greenwick, not only are there no accessible apartments in your complex, the management company that owns it only has one total for under age 55, and it's a couple dollars more than my housing allowance, so I'm not driving all the way out to look.
If tomorrow doesn't work out, I'm seriously considering putting money down on the place with stairs that was my second choice if an accessible came open, and planning to move to an accessible unit when it opens up next year. Yes, I'd rather literally risk breaking my neck every day than keep looking.
* I then spent four or five hours trying to get web pages to load on the laptop. Usually a few reboots will solve it, but I guess that's no longer the case Rebooting, no dice. Shutting down and restarting. no dice. Rebooting the rooter no dice. Uninstalling and reinstalling firefox. No dice. I guess I'm stuck with explorer, which I hate. I mean it's not like I'd had an exhausting and frustrating day or had anything better to do than fruitlessly try to get a useless year and a half old computer to work, right?
* So does anyone know of a free browser exactly like firefox only that loads web pages instead of stopping partway? Preferably one that will let me import Firefox bookmarks instead of me spending hours laboriously pasting them in. having to hand paste urls into explorer everytime I want top open a new page because explorer doesn't believe in hotlinks is pissing me the hell off.
* Twisted turned out to be the hardest and most painful thing I've read in a long time. It's brilliantly written and extremely important, but it is very intense. In my head, it's a companion piece to Speak, by the same author. Speak is pretty intense, but this is possibly even more so. I wish they'd let us teach them as a unit in schools, but most districts only let kids read Speak independently because of the subject matter. I had a prof last rotation who taught in a rural district with an unforgivably high date rape rate for high school students. he talked the district into letting him do a unit on Speak for Freshman English, and for that class and everyone after, the date rape rate dropped to almost nothing. You have to frame it right, of course, get the boys talking about what constitutes date rape, get them empathizing with the girls. The book is very good for that. It helps the girls form plans to watch out for each other too. Some people think the book's a bad influence because the character makes some bad choices and doesn't deal with things well in the beginning. Many teachers think that you can use that as a teachable moment for the kids, get them thinking about how better to handle things, but have to work it on the sly, one on one when they spot kids reading it.
Looking at Twisted, I think it'd be perfect right after Speak. Not only would it be good for the bystander boys to think through their responsibilities to the girls and women in their lives, but in a real sense it deals with trauma from the boy's side, with the shitty decisions guys make under pressure and how that can hurt not only themselves but those around them. It's the other side of the coin, a different meditation on grief and anger and bullying and frustration. It'd be painful and hard, but I think the way it deals with depression, bullying, and being trapped in a situation that feels out of control and the process of taking control back would be good for so many kids in distress out there. Even though the characters and circumstances are different, these two books just fit together, and i think they'd do a lot of good out in the schools if they let kids read them and teachers teach them, but I'm betting Twisted is banned a lot of places the way Speak is. Too many adults think ignorance will protect their children when all it does is leave them vulnerable without the tools to deal with the ugly stuff that happens to and around them.
* "Loving A Transwoman Doesn't Make You Gay :" http://transgriot.blogspot.com/2011/10/loving-transwoman-doesnt-make-you-gay.html
* Fall Cake: http://cakewrecks.squarespace.com/home/2011/10/9/sunday-sweets-fall-treats.html
* The last corporate tax repatriation amnesty cost 20 thousand jobs, so the Republicans are in favor of doing it again. After all, it simultaneously harms the economy, increases unemployment, and leads to less income for the Federal government and is thus bad for things like schools and the unemployed. In other words, win, win, win for Republicans, like most things bad for the country as a whole.
* Mitt Romney, having strongly denounced Occupy wall street as "class warfare" is now pretending he was always for it. a Mitt Romney contradicting himself reel would make a film the length of the LOTR trilogy, so I'm not surprised.
* One of the brave Olympians who endured an international shit storm for raising a fist to protest racism at the Mexico Summer Olympics, turned up at occupy wall street. How cool is that?
* The California governor signed the Gender Nondiscrimination Act and the Vital Statistics Modernization Act into law. The first one is obvious. The second makes it easier to update documents to conform to gender rather than birth sex. It's a big fucking deal on a day to day safety level for a lot of people. Let's hope folks in other states get the same soon.
* Anna Grodzka has been elected the first trans MP in Poland. Yay, Poland!
* Rm on National Coming Out Day: http://lettersfromtitan.com/2011/10/11/national-coming-out-day/
* sparkindarkness on National coming Out Day: http://www.sparkindarkness.com/2011/10/national-coming-out-day.html
* Shout Out to those not out: http://crankyskirt.tumblr.com/post/11325064075/heres-a-shoutout-to-the-folks-who-arent-coming-out
* It needs saying now and then that I consider the out or not out question a personal one. every individual that makes that choice has to balance questions of survival, employment, and safety against the long term good of the community as a whole. I am lucky that I can afford to be out because now I have my Federal benefits, i don't have to worry about the religious right picketing my workplace as has happened to others like me around the country. I am lucky enopugh to have a supportive family. I have made the personal calculation that if I get the shit beaten out of me by assholes I am no longer able bodied enough to fight off that they will look like colossal douches for beating up a cripple when it gets to court, and that most people don't dare harass me because I can still pull out the teacher voice and my war face when I need too. I also have the medical coverage to get real care if I get injured doing this. That's my personal choice and calculation. Some of you haven't the money and job security to do that. Some of you live in significantly less safe for queer folk areas than my lefty city on the I-5 corridor of the PNW. Some of you don't have a shit kicker vibe you can pull out of your ass in emergencies. some younger folks risk losing a chance at college, family violence, and homelessness if they come out right now. Some of you just want to live quiet, drama free lives, which is perfectly fucking valid, or have a myriad of other perfectly valid reasons to make your own decision. You will notice that I do not bully, harass, or judge folks who end up calculating in favour of some degree of stealth. The world is a messy, dangerous place and as a result decisions can get complicated. I have real sympathy with that. Yes, in the long run out is better and less exhausting, but people have to live in a now where food, shelter, money to pay bills, and safety sometimes trump the individual sense of freedom and the long term good of being out. so let's not be jerks to folks who decide otherwise, okay?
The only time I consider outing okay is when it's an anti-gay public figure actively working against people's civil rights.
May I add, leave Anderson Cooper alone. He is out enough to bring his partner to formal public events, but he covers news items on the ground in the Middle east, so a public statement would vastly increase his danger in countries with the death penalty for being gay. Also, he does a lot of pro gay rights reporting. He's not a hypocrite like Ted Haggard and Larry Craig. He's not even pretending to be other than he is, but a public statement could jeopardize the good he's doing in the world. He's made his private calculation about how out to be. he's not hurting you, so please let him get on with it.
* Today was another round of exhausting and depressing driving around. Example: the apartment I went to see was taken, and all that was left was stairs. The worst was driving around and around the neighborhood where I lived with Skye trying to find a place that was a few blocks further out than I was led to believe.. I kept passing our old place. Yes, it hurt about as much as you'd expect. They tore down the house next door and put up another set of townhouses. The neighbors that lived there always seemed a little off when we talked to them over the fence, but we had no idea what was going on behind closed doors. Not long before we came out, the school turned them in to CPS. The kids went straight to foster care and the parents were institutionalized. They were violent unmediated paranoid schizophrenics on drugs. Those poor kids. Those poor cats. When they went to tear down the house and out buildings, they fond the bodies of the cats. Psych meds are really, really important, folks. Yes, side effects of anti-psychotics suck, but especially if there are children and animals depending on one, they are absolutely necessary. I noticed the scary guy across the street and his family were gone too, the house condemned for another development. I don't know that story, since it happened after I moved, but I can only hope his kids and dogs are safe.
Because of various housing related appointments tomorrow I'm getting crap for sleep again. I am running out of energy and patience. I need this done now. The level of physical pain alone is nearly unbearable, not counting the stress and interrupted sleep.
Before you ask, Greenwick, not only are there no accessible apartments in your complex, the management company that owns it only has one total for under age 55, and it's a couple dollars more than my housing allowance, so I'm not driving all the way out to look.
If tomorrow doesn't work out, I'm seriously considering putting money down on the place with stairs that was my second choice if an accessible came open, and planning to move to an accessible unit when it opens up next year. Yes, I'd rather literally risk breaking my neck every day than keep looking.
* I then spent four or five hours trying to get web pages to load on the laptop. Usually a few reboots will solve it, but I guess that's no longer the case Rebooting, no dice. Shutting down and restarting. no dice. Rebooting the rooter no dice. Uninstalling and reinstalling firefox. No dice. I guess I'm stuck with explorer, which I hate. I mean it's not like I'd had an exhausting and frustrating day or had anything better to do than fruitlessly try to get a useless year and a half old computer to work, right?
* So does anyone know of a free browser exactly like firefox only that loads web pages instead of stopping partway? Preferably one that will let me import Firefox bookmarks instead of me spending hours laboriously pasting them in. having to hand paste urls into explorer everytime I want top open a new page because explorer doesn't believe in hotlinks is pissing me the hell off.
* Twisted turned out to be the hardest and most painful thing I've read in a long time. It's brilliantly written and extremely important, but it is very intense. In my head, it's a companion piece to Speak, by the same author. Speak is pretty intense, but this is possibly even more so. I wish they'd let us teach them as a unit in schools, but most districts only let kids read Speak independently because of the subject matter. I had a prof last rotation who taught in a rural district with an unforgivably high date rape rate for high school students. he talked the district into letting him do a unit on Speak for Freshman English, and for that class and everyone after, the date rape rate dropped to almost nothing. You have to frame it right, of course, get the boys talking about what constitutes date rape, get them empathizing with the girls. The book is very good for that. It helps the girls form plans to watch out for each other too. Some people think the book's a bad influence because the character makes some bad choices and doesn't deal with things well in the beginning. Many teachers think that you can use that as a teachable moment for the kids, get them thinking about how better to handle things, but have to work it on the sly, one on one when they spot kids reading it.
Looking at Twisted, I think it'd be perfect right after Speak. Not only would it be good for the bystander boys to think through their responsibilities to the girls and women in their lives, but in a real sense it deals with trauma from the boy's side, with the shitty decisions guys make under pressure and how that can hurt not only themselves but those around them. It's the other side of the coin, a different meditation on grief and anger and bullying and frustration. It'd be painful and hard, but I think the way it deals with depression, bullying, and being trapped in a situation that feels out of control and the process of taking control back would be good for so many kids in distress out there. Even though the characters and circumstances are different, these two books just fit together, and i think they'd do a lot of good out in the schools if they let kids read them and teachers teach them, but I'm betting Twisted is banned a lot of places the way Speak is. Too many adults think ignorance will protect their children when all it does is leave them vulnerable without the tools to deal with the ugly stuff that happens to and around them.
* "Loving A Transwoman Doesn't Make You Gay :" http://transgriot.blogspot.com/2011/10/loving-transwoman-doesnt-make-you-gay.html
* Fall Cake: http://cakewrecks.squarespace.com/home/2011/10/9/sunday-sweets-fall-treats.html
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2011-10-12 03:41 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-10-13 12:44 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-10-13 12:51 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-10-13 02:20 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-10-13 05:58 am (UTC)I've heard that Opera is pretty similar, and that one is also supposed to be very safe. Maxthon is supposed to be like explorer, but with tabs. It also has similar security flaws to IE.