So who the fuck am I supposed to vote for, asshole?

I owe some fun posts here, but I need to vent politics right now and there are more feminists I can depend on here on DW than on FB where I've been posting my political thoughts and links the past year or so. So feel free to scroll on by if this is not your topic.

I was so livid last night it took hours to get to sleep. My fault for looking at the news before bed. Yes, I am responding to Joe Biden's 'If you believe her, you shouldn't vote for me." which is addressing me, personally, directly. And a whole lot of women, mostly, who have written eloquent, reasoned, principled articles and essays on believing Reade, and why they are voting for Biden anyway. Some with despair and anguish at making this choice. And fucking Biden just kicked sand in all our faces.

There are ways to thread this needle, to address her accusations, even if he believes himself innocent without making further offense, difficult as it is. But to attack all the people supporting her who have planned to vote for you anyway is beyond the pale. No, he does not get to express his feeling of offense that we dare take his accuser seriously anymore than Kavanaugh did and have it believed that he is any ally to women--and I'm tired of having his work on the Violence Against Women Act toted out as feminist credentials. You can be a complete patriarchal sexist and be opposed to violence against women, and work with feminists on it, without being in the least feminist. "We must protect the frailer sex" comes to mind, without a thought for how patriarchal oppression compounds size and physical differences.

But I do take his statement as a kick in the face when so many have written about the difficulty with which they have chosen to vote for him and of which he has to be well aware. What he is saying is "I am not your candidate and I don't need you to win", when he knows we are over a barrel because we can't vote for Trump and believe kicking Trump out is better for the world, including rape survivors and Reade herself, and chose voting for a man we believe to have sexually assaulted Reade. It is nastily manipulative, and remarkably echoing Reade's report of him telling her, "You are nothing to me!" when she proved non-pliable to his wishes. We are nothing and our votes don't matter. Fuck you, Biden.

And it's not just how absolutely incensed I am to be insulted by this politician for saying my vote doesn't matter to him. I think it's dangerously malevolent. Though plenty non-feminist reporters are finding his response wonderfully unexpected and honest, I think they are enjoying watching feminists get kicked by a man in power--it's a very traditional sport for misogynists. Is this how he's going to govern when crossed? How about all those progressive ideas the left is being told he will consider and how well he will respond when crossed? I don't trust him to not further punish feminists and other progressives when we cross him when he's in power. I don't trust him to not sell out the right to abortion. I could just as well see a move toward the Handmaid's Tale under him as well as Trump.

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I'm going to write about Trump's dangerous cooption of a famous quote, the wonderfulness of Doug Jones, and a bad idea Jones stated that I hope he can correct.

Giving up Liberty for Prosperity

I'm not a Twitter user and found my peace of mind easier to maintain when I stay away from media reports on Trump's feed, and just note the topic on which he spoke; was it racist, sexist, islamiphobic, etc. rather than reading for the quote.

But I read the speech Trump released yesterday and am stuck on his theft of Benjamin Franklin's phrasing to state, "Any nation that trades away its prosperity for security will end up losing both." This time, it's our liberty he's swindling from us with his paraphrase.

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For baranduin: One more reason why Carrie Fisher is the Goddess of the Resistance, and Princess General for all times and places can be found in this story related by a friend of hers who was sexually assaulted by yet another man with power in Hollywood, as reported in The Guardian and other papers today.

Here are more pics from Saturday's Women's March in Annapolis.

Adults and kids in purple and pussy hats and doggies heading down to the gathering spot at the city docks:



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From a great snarky op-ed in the Washington Post about Steve Bannon by Alexandra Petri:

I have no doubt that a real racist sexist chauvinist white supremacist will be easy to spot. “I am coming for minorities now,” he will say. “I am an actual racist. I am, literally, Hitler, or at the very least Goebbels.”

Read the whole piece here. It's fun and thinky. And no, no giving him a chance--he's made himself perfectly clear already where he stands and it's hateful and a danger to democracy.

I called my Congresspeople, Senator Barbara Mikulski and Rep Steny Hoyer today to ask them to protest the appointment of Steve Bannon, that he has every right to publish alt-right screeds, but I do not want him in my government and how frightened to the core his being there makes me. As lbilover said we cannot allow them to normalize what Trump is doing, let alone white supremacists and neo-nazis as viable representatives of our democracy.

If you are feeling as anxious as me, please call your Congresspeople:

http://www.senate.gov/senators/contact/
http://www.house.gov/representatives/

Thanks to rydra_wong for the quick links and she has many more good links on why it is better to call than email our Congresspeople or sign petitions, why it is better to call them at their state offices rather than the above linked DC offices, and script ideas in her post here. But just stick to calling the DC offices if doing the extra work to get the state offices will delay you or use up more spoons than you have.

Funding suggestions if you can spare it:

Good organizations to contribute to for protecting all of us and especially our most vulnerable and immediately threatened Dreamer kids and Muslim Americans are the ACLU, Southern Poverty Law Center, and the Anti-Defamation League.

And since I've been seeing sexist arguments on the left that it's too risky now to run a woman for president in the immediate future, block that noise and if you have more funds, contribute to Emily's List. Since Christian extremists have long been normalized in US government and are now in control, Planned Parenthood needs funds now more than ever.

Feel free to post other suggestions in comments.

Also posted at http://lavendertook.dreamwidth.org/215038.html with comments

First off, here's the green heron pic I promised lbilover. I took this pic at the swampy entry pond by the lake the other week. It's such a different looking bird when its neck is all tucked in.



It's way too hot this weekend to be walking around the lake, maybe too hot to go to the gym to swim. So I saw Ghostbusters yesterday--it was a fun piece of fluff.  Seeing a group of women working together in a zany way without being objectified was much more important than it felt to me while viewing it. The feeling was an "of course, no big deal that women are people."  The big deal was the hunger I felt all these years for the depictions that should have been there all along. Once it’s set right, it’s just normal and to be taken for granted. 

This is why it's hard for leftists, liberals, and progressives to generate enthusiasm.  It's hard to celebrate something that should be taken for granted because it is so obviously the right way things should go according to values based on the notion of equality. That is the challenge--it only becomes visceral in comparison to the past--it's a two step process to re-ignite the enthusiasm that got burned up getting to that point.  It involves reflection, not just immediate feeling.

Backlash is fueled by the visceral excitement of tearing down, while projecting the feeling of fighting back. It generates its own enthusiasm--we have our work cut out for us in pushing back against it.

I hope the Dem's can put on an inspiring convention this week. I hope it is made clear how much more progressive Sanders has made HRC’s platform—that isn’t lost with the choice of a more moderate VP—and one of the only choices whom removing from Congress would not lose a seat to the Republicans; Virginia has a Democratic governor who will designate a Democratic replacement. And it’s not lost by the revealing of the bullshit the party partisans plotting against Sanders had to say, as if we didn't know this already. Like Obama, the HRC/Kaine ticket is still to the left of where Bill Clinton and Gore stood—not a lot, but I’ll take it—it’s progress I am happy to get after years of Reagan and Bushes and in the scary face of what the Republicans are fielding now. Throwing into the mix the first woman president is not a consolation prize and not a Thatcher/May pyrrhic non-victory—HRC is far better than them and on the moderate left and will continue the hard won progress Obama achieved, more so if we can move the court and Congress left, which, unfortunately, would have been harder to achieve if she removed Warren from the senate to be her VP.

Untrustworthiness is a misogynist meme, maybe the most ancient woman hating meme, being used against HRC to dampen our enthusiasm for her. “Lock her up” shares the cadence of “Burn the witch.” It’s just as violent rhetoric, and as repellent and dishonest as appropriating Michelle Obama’s words and saying it is no big deal, while bashing everything she stands for. Notice the Republicans made sure women were responsible for that oh so unimportant lie they perpetuated--you can't accuse Melania or her speechwriter of plagiarizing, as they were set up to do, without furthering the "women lie" meme. I don't know if they were clever enough to stick them with it deliberately, but they are clever enough to make hay with its results.

The thing that HRC can’t say about the email issue is that we have a long way to go to making government email secure because no one can keep up with the hacking of the changing technology at this time and government systems are large and, therefore, harder to secure. Look at the big OPM breach of personal data this last year. In light of this, and with security on the internet being an ongoing problem for everyone everywhere piecing it together as best we can, the email issue is such a non-issue. And I would not be surprised if HRC’s private server was more secure than the government servers could be made at the time and kept vital information more secure. However, she can’t say this without giving the Republicans more fuel to put down government, the only imperfect instrument we have to defend us against corporations (such as arms manufacturers) through regulation and to put our money to use for services to benefit everyone, including those corporations, but only if we vote.

It's still up to each of us to inspire ourselves and push forward and believe we deserve a better government than the sad vision the Republicans presented last week. We must do this. Go Democrats for a great week!