fandomsandfeminism:

fandomsandfeminism:

No one on Earth deserves to have a billion dollars.

The fact that a single person even could have a billion dollars is only possible through exploitation and human suffering.

You know what has become apparent on so many of the notes?

1. People really do not understand how much a billion is

2. A lot of conservatives are so fundamentally self obsessed that they can not discuss this topic within its proper scope.

Like, it doesn’t matter that we are discussing global economic systems that impact millions of people all over the world, that the majority of exploited people that allow for a billionare to have a billion dollars are sweat shop workers and child labor in china and formerly colonized countries.

They can only approach the topic in terms of “YOU are lazy or unskilled, you shouldnt complain, you should help yourself, you should get a better job/donate to charity if you care so much”

When like, the individual actions of a few people in America isnt what we are talking about. Its much bigger than that.

queernuck:

princeisalive:

softtrade:

The thing is that Hillary Clinton is so lucky that she is running against someone who is so viscerally awful and also a consummate liar because she’s managed to like get thru this election w basically 0 accountability for numerous actual shit things she has done, and even when her opponent brings things up that she should actually answer for (Haiti, her treatment of rape victims, etc), it gets drowned out by his general propensity for lying, misogyny, and also is easily hand waved away by his own flagrant offenses

the thing is that women are judged more harshly than their male peers, because everyone has been conditioned via the patriarchy to see women as either madonnas (pure and godly) or as whores (promiscuous and evil), since HRC (like all women) doesn’t fit easily into either category, we assume its the latter, and that she’s evil incarnate, making it easier to believe the most incredible (mostly right-wing) lies about her, or punish her for the sins of her husband (since we are also conditioned to believe that a woman’s identity is inextricable from her husband’s). this also has the ironic side effect of most women on the left feeling unable to celebrate that, for the first time ever, a woman will be elected president—less than 100 years after women were given the right to vote. the patriarchy wins again.

rather appropriately considering the argument made here about Clinton and your response, your specific recourse to identity politics would be almost unbelievable if we hadn’t seen Le Tigre come out of retirement to write a song for Hillary. 

you indeed bring up problems with how many are willing to consider Clinton, and that the structuring of womanhood as a series of machines controlling flows of violence, of signified by a circle of signs specifically limiting the expanse of subjectivity women are entitled to, is a structure difficult for Clinton to escape. but considering her position in regards to wealth, to politics, to whiteness, and her specific neoliberalism, collapsing critique of her into this structure is a specific sort of ideological turn that has been vital to her campaign.

the specific construction of merit as a manner of judging bodies as fit or unfit, and how Hillary is a candidate who has been involved in politics for a great deal of time, favors her against a reactionary actor such as Trump. the Democratic party has been running on a platform of maintaining a specific neoliberal order codified over the last two decades, one that began in the transition from Reagan to Bill Clinton through George HW Bush. the non-event of the Gulf War as the beginning of a specific globalizing push by America, one meaningfully different from the cloaked intervention that characterized America during the Cold War, is being torn apart by contradiction and the strain that the concept of the globe that results from globalization places upon itself. and whereas Trump is relying upon the microfascism of neoliberalism coalescing into an outright American fascist movement, Clinton is constructing herself as a candidate of the American global project, the specific neocolonialism that her politics rely upon.

the notion of a woman on the left celebrating Clinton requires a concept of politics so narrow, an individualism so detached from any structural analysis that i doubt such a woman genuinely exists. 

1. as a POC my first stance is identity politics, it’s not a “recourse”.

2. the argument that mainstream politics isn’t nearly as left as leftists need it to be, is an ideological argument that ignores the historical problems which caused us to be a center-of-right nation in the first place, it also devalues our constitutional framework that rightfully prevents us from leaning too far in either direction.

3. the notion that Hillary hasn’t spent her life trying to push the country leftward is a false one, driven in part by males threatened by a woman in power. the left and the right are obsessed with her perceived faults, but only one side chooses to remain ignorant of her progressive successes.

4. Are Elizabeth Warren’s politics narrow? Are Cecil Richard’s or Dolores Huerta’s? How about Angela Davis and Mary J Blige? or Trayvon Martin’s mom?