Good distillation of my political outlook

Someone commented on a Feministing post:

This country is fascinated with revolutionary change as the solution to everything. Maybe it's the short attention spans or possibly just a lack of patience that drives it, but quick fix revolutionary change doesn't happen very frequently.
The alternative is incremental change. You make small steps towards your goal and let people get used to the new "normal" so that you can push a little further. This often culminates with a very large change in the end (ie: the slippery slope). This is far easier to accomplish than revolutionary change and can ultimately take less time.

I know I frequently sound like a conservative when I'm faced with my revolutionary brethren on the Left, but this is exactly my outlook: I'd rather accomplish discrete goals than tilt at windmills and ultimately harm the long-term goal more than I advance it. I'd also like to compel my intellectual allies to follow the same course.

This comment came out of a criticism that said that gay marriage shouldn't be a goal because it only helps rich white people-- that is, if you have no assets to pass on as inheritance, you have no health insurance, you have no money to pay in alimony, you have no established homestead or stable child-rearing environment, then it doesn't really matter whether you can marry or not. This... is retarded. I recognize that one of the luxuries of privilege is being able to segment and solve your problems-- the system is in your favor, so whatever problems exist, they're not systemic. Nonetheless, the non-privileged benefit from this too, because the structure of our socio-economic system and its unfair prejudice against disempowered groups is a series of problems, and solving one does concretely advance a revolutionary goal. Revolutionary structural change can only follow revolutionary paradigm shifts in the zeitgeist, which only occur with incremental changes that underline a new ethic or philosophy.

But this also gets into the psychology of revolution, and one of the things I hate to face is that most activism is not sincere, it's temperamental. People aren't revolutionaries because they're reasoned out that revolution is the only way to accomplish real change; people are revolutionaries because they're assholes.

Things Republicans Have Ruined for Me

1. Guns. Idiot gun fundamentalists make me feel guilty for entertaining the idea that some measure of self-defense weaponry is okay; they use this as their justification for collecting arsenals. You don't need the automatic rifle with the night-vision scope and the fingerprint-proof stock/trigger. And you definitely don't need ten of them. In New York.

2. Country music. I have to equate it with hating anyone who doesn't fit into the country-music-universe. Points to Dolly Parton for rolling this back a bit with her embrace of the transgender movement, and to Willy Nelson for touring with John Kerry.

3. Texas. I want to love Texas. I do. Pop Iris' family is there, and Austin is a really cool place. I've seen some beautiful scenery there. Had some excellent times. All the same, I walk down the street and think "the people around me are proud of George Bush".

4. Family values. I would LOVE to talk all the time about family values and the virtue of the nuclear family. It's just that I'd sound like a douchebag who doesn't believe in gays, working women or loving your children as more than objects.

5. Libertarianism. Republicans have co-opted libertarianism to advance a level of economic deregulation that they don't even WANT. The kind of capitalism espoused by Republican libertarians would degenerate into a mafia economy so quickly they wouldn't even have time to say "copyrights are good" before they'd find themselves only being able to shop at Walmart, and Walmart abusing its pricing power like a drug dealer with the police force in his pocket. Meanwhile, these supposed libertarians seem to be fine with government involvement in people's private lives; prayer in public school is GREAT for these guys, who send their kids to private school anyway. Not a whole lot of sympathy for the poor Jewish or Hindu or atheist kid who has to sit there listening to people invoke the name of their savior, and who can't join the school newspaper without signing a pledge to abstain from homosexuality.

6. Economic/Military realism. I'm okay with blood for oil, if it's another country's blood and we get the oil. There will always be rich and poor in this world. I'm on the rich side. I'd like it to stay that way. I'd feel bad if I'd had a role in being born here, but I didn't. If I'd been born poor, I'd want to be rich just as much, I just wouldn't be able to do as much about it. I'm part of the power structure, and unless someone's figured out a way to eliminate power structures, I'm sticking with the one I'm in. It's worked for me. I'm eager to make the existing structure more fair, but I will not give up my place unless I can see I'm accomplishing something in the process. Communism is no option; it trades one kind of elite for another less transparent and more brutal one.

Sue Simmons gets real

So, NBC local news anchor Sue Simmons dropped the F-bomb (hey! look at me using the phrase "drop the F-bomb"! I'm a huge tool!) Monday night on a promo commercial for the 11 PM news... apparantly, they were doing a live feed without a delay, so they couldn't bleep it out. Anyway, there's been lots of news coverage of this slip, but NONE OF IT SAYS WHY SHE WAS CURSING!!!!! Leave a comment to let me know if you have found an explanation.

I am reminded

I am reminded that the reason I set this blog up to be white-text-on-black-background is that black backgrounds use less energy to present on your computer screen. Look here for more information.