“But the 8-hour workday is too profitable for big business, not because of the amount of work people get done in eight hours (the average office worker gets less than three hours of actual work done in 8 hours) but because it makes for such a purchase-happy public. Keeping free time scarce means people pay a lot more for convenience, gratification, and any other relief they can buy. It keeps them watching television, and its commercials. It keeps them unambitious outside of work. We’ve been led into a culture that has been engineered to leave us tired, hungry for indulgence, willing to pay a lot for convenience and entertainment, and most importantly, vaguely dissatisfied with our lives so that we continue wanting things we don’t have. We buy so much because it always seems like something is still missing.”
No matter how much Conservatives scream about it, the world continues to advance, become a more just and fair place. They are kicking and screaming, doing whatever they can to stop it, but the truth is no matter what they do, progress can only be slowed, not stopped.
All those benefits that came with some jobs were due to UNIONS, which were responsible for the creation of a Middle Class. The Republicans in particular, along with some complicit Democrats, have waged a war on unions for many, many years. Without unions, workers are on their own and businesses generally do not negotiate with individual employees.
Baby Boomers came of age with the help of a robust societal safety net. As they gained more political power, they proceeded to slash it to ribbons, passing the consequences onto their children. And now they sit around whining, being all, “Why haven’t you solved all of our problems for us? Why aren’t you spending as much as you should? Whaddya mean, ‘You’re too busy trying to survive in the economy we ruined?’”
I think said safety net was done in by the same problem that vaccines suffer from: it was a victim of its own success. The safety net provided so much support that the generation who grew up with it, forgot what it was like before it.
“As the Bechdel Test began to creep into the sightline of mainstream movie criticism, it was notable to see the surprise of some male critics that their favorite movies—One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Goodfellas, The Princess Bride, Clerks, the original Star Wars trilogy, the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy, and even Tootsie, when you get right down to it—so soundly flunked it. For many women, the reaction was more of a shrug, along with relief that, finally, there was a simple way to help writers and directors step over an embarrassingly low baseline. To be clear, applying the rule isn’t about snatching away the well-earned status of Raging Bull or The Godfather or even This Is Spinal Tap. As Anita Sarkeesian, creator of the Web site Feminist Frequency, noted in a 2009 video about the rule, “It’s not even a sign of whether it’s a feminist movie, or whether it’s a good movie, just that there’s a female presence in it.” The latter point is something that many people fail to grasp when trying to explain away why their favorite movies don’t pass the test (“But Batman is the hero of the movie! Of course the women characters are going to talk about him!”): the Bechdel Test is not a judgment of quality or nuance. After all, the beautiful, moving Gravity fails the test, while a formulaic rom-com like 27 Dresses passes with no problem. But the test itself is a simple, bloodless assessment of whether female characters are deemed important to a story—and a way to conclude that, most of the time, they aren’t.”
— We Were Feminists Once: From Riot Grrrl to CoverGirl®, the Buying and Selling of a Political Movement (Zeisler, Andi)
This makes me happy that it has an explanation, because too many people misunderstand the point of the test. “It sets the bar too low!” They say. That’s the point. It’s the lowest bar possible and many movies can’t pass it.
I wish the terms the Mako Mori test or the Sexy Lamp Test, were more prominent. They can address issues the Bechdel Test can’t.
The Mako Mori Test came about due to a critic’s review of “Pacific Rim.” The critic recognized that the film didn’t pass the Bechdel Test, but felt that Mako Mori was such a great feminist character that she deserved her own test. A female character passes the Mako Mori test if she has her own character arc, separate from that of a male character’s. Or in other words, she has her own issues and doesn’t solely exist to supplement a guy’s storyline.
The Sexy Lamp test is basically “Can you replace this female character with a lamp without affecting how the plot unfolds in the slightest?”
If the bell has rung, why is Trump standing in the middle of the ring?
*
So I can’t continue the ‘Hillary in 2018′ counter because, well, it’s not 2018 anymore. And ‘Hillary in 2019′ feels like so much wheel-spinning. Last year proved that conservatives won’t let go of Hillary (just as they never let go of Bill Clinton or, recently, Barack Obama), and non-partisan cartoonists won’t mind bringing her back when she’s actually in the news (something I honestly don’t begrudge them).
But 2018 also portended the return of Nancy Pelosi to the speakership, so there’s now both a prominent Democratic leader AND it’s a woman to boot. So the Right will have a go-to figure to cast as a stand-in for the Democrats as a whole and they can work in some misogynistic jabs if they’re so inclined, all without having to rely on a woman who hasn’t held any office or title for years now.
Garrison can’t let her go, however. You didn’t have to pay close attention to guess that; nobody invoked Hillary in 2019 as much as he did. I didn’t crunch the numbers, but I’m willing to bet no two cartoonists featured her as much as he did.
Why? Well, I’ve said before deep down the right-wing wishes Hillary had won in 2016. They’d get to keep pummeling her without appearing desperate and they wouldn’t have Donald Trump as the face of the Republican party. Plus I don’t believe many conservatives actually want to be in charge; it’s much easier to be out of power and to gripe.
And while I don’t doubt that Garrison is ecstatic to have Trump in power (he’s good at deluding himself into thinking Trump stands for anything and is working to achieve a specific policy agenda), he also laments that Hillary has retreated from center stage and he isn’t justified in talking about her non-stop.
It’s sort of a monkey’s paw thing: his guy won, but now he doesn’t get to draw unflattering caricatures of the woman he hates every week. Only every other week.
So instead of cataloguing every cartoon that features Hillary this year, I am going to focus exclusively on Ben Garrison’s ongoing infatuation with her. I couldn’t think of a pithier title than ‘Ben wants Hillary 2020,’ but it’s serviceable.
“In the first place, it is not true that with a change of social conditions the
nature of the government and its functions would also change. Organs and
functions are inseparable terms. Take from an organ its function, and either the
organ will die, or the function will reinstate itself.
Place an army in a country
where there is no reason or fear of foreign war, and this army will provoke war,
or, if it does not succeed in doing that, it will disband. A police force, where there
are no crimes to discover, and delinquents to arrest, will provoke or invent crimes, or will cease to exist.”
though looking at the comments the folks who live in the red part think this is why the electoral college has got to stay. because they like getting 3.5 votes per capita.
Tyranny of the few is a pretty sweet deal if you belong to the few.
The wild part is how those people view this as the equal version. Like their votes counting as more than other people’s votes is fair because if it wasn’t like that then they’d be in the minority.
Americans, particularly American conservatives, have a horrible habit of equating area with population. Yeah, if we ditched the electoral college a small section of the country would have more power. Because that’s where most of the country lives. Hate to break it to the rural folks in Nebraska, but they are not what the “real” face of America looks like. They’re not even average Americans. The average American lives within commuting distance of a medium to large city. We simply act like they’re average because they have power disproportionate to their actual numbers.
California is the most populous state in the country. We make up more than 10% of the US population, fully a third bigger than Texas which is the next most populous state. We are also the biggest contributors to the US economy and get back almost nothing of what we pay in federal taxes. But politicians get elected not by listening to us and our needs, but by actively dismissing us as those crazy hippies who don’t understand what “real” Americans are like. Instead they focus their efforts on Ohio and Michigan which have smaller populations than the LA urban area alone.
Now, I do think we need to care about rural populations. Everyone deserves to have their basic needs met and both parties have failed at helping with that for some time now. But your vote shouldn’t count for more than mine just because there’s more empty space around you.
This reminds me how in the wake of the 2016 presidential election when I was bitching about the electoral college, a few people had the audacity to claim that rural people NEED heavier weighted votes over city dwellers because they will “vote with the interests of our farm lands in mind” which urban residents are not capable of doing (or some shit.)
Of course for racist, backwards fucks like this, the fact that the EC is systematically diluting the voting power of urban residents, and therefore predominately people of color, is just a bonus for them…a bonus they can attempt to wrap up into some convoluted nonsense about farmlands. (Never mind the fact that the EC is ONLY about the presidential race and not agricultural policy more widely, obvi.)
The EC is just another piece of crap we need to leave behind.
As I recall, wasn’t the electoral college one of those things the Founding Fathers put in to appease slave-owners?
In any case, the majority of the Founding Fathers didn’t want large numbers of people to vote at all. The general consensus among them was that the vote should go to rich, property-owning white males. The fact that ordinary Joes, women, and PoC have the vote is due to activists raising hell, not the Founding Fathers.
The Founding Fathers had some good ideas, but they also bled sick people with leeches, considered women to be property, and they freakin’ owned SLAVES. It is perfectly okay to examine their ideas, hold onto what works, and jettison what doesn’t. The EC doesn’t work, so let’s get rid of it. In any case, the Founding Fathers saw the Constitution as something of a stop-gap measure, something that will hold until we can get together in a few years and come up with something better.
