Problem Chlyde has a beautiful post on the view that poor people shouldn't have nice things. I connect it to the idea that you should have a horrible life unless you were perfectly moral and never did anything wrong in your life. "Wrong" is pretty loose here- it can be anything from owning a television to only working eight hours a day instead of 18. It's the sort of attitude that ends with people lecturing small children on the virtues of hard work because they asked for some chips.

I think really we should stop hewing to the whole idea that basic rights like food, shelter, health care, etc, should be doled out based on how moral we think people are. That's why they are called rights. People inherently deserve food, water, shelter, health care. We don't starve the very worst, the dregs of society- the psychopaths who have killed and raped and maimed. We don't force them to freeze in the cold.

We understand that to have a civilized society, we need to guarantee certain things even to the worst people. So why the hysteria if we see a poor person with a cell phone slightly nicer than we think they should have? Why the OMG, HOW DARE SHE HAVE SHELTER GIVEN TO HER IF SHE REPRODUCED IN A WAY I DON'T AGREE WITH? We have more moral outrage over seeing a woman put 2 for $5 bacon wrapped steak fillets in her cart than we do over the war in Afghanistan and the flooding in Pakistan.

When we have a society, people have rights. That means that poor people can have entertainment and beauty in their lives, people can work hours that allow them to have lives not just a living, and yes, families can be started, and children cherished even if the conditions aren't perfect. We just need to stop being assholes.

On the #browntwitterbird issue:

DR Goddess reflects on how on twitter, we're a community. When I use twitter, I want a far flung wide reaching conversation not just a one way watching Kayne tweet.

Shani-O unraveals the 'mystery' of black folks using twitter- it's adapted to mobile internet.

Yep, black folks with similar interests cluster. People don't wonder why etsy folks use twitter or why manga obsessives use twitter. I mean as this lady says, there's no just one black twitter. Activists group, rap folks group, people who spend all their time on twitter obsessing about Arcade Fire and Scott Pilgrim group.

We all have our baseline 'blackness'- American blackness, British blackness, Carribean blackness, African blackness- all different. But within that blackness, there's multitudes. Multitudes who want you to know that #itsallfunandgamesuntil

I wish we could bring up stuff without it being about white folk's feelings and shit.

Eh, welcome to the world of us plain women, lady. Many folks didn't have looks to trade off when they were young. That said, age discrimination is real. The sad part is that people are living longer nowadays, and soon we'll have more people over 60 than kids under 5.

People aren't like machines. We can't toss them out because they are old. Of course people of my generation are also screwed with huge amounts of debt, and of course, merely being young doesn't make us able to work 18 hour days without cracking, despite the myth.

Man, folks who say ghetto for bad drive me nuts.

A collection on radical mothering? Awesome.

MS tells men to step up and be accountable for sex trafficking.