People who benefit from feminism trash feminism, film at 11.

This ties into today's quote:

There were quotas for women[circa 1968, England]; their admission was limited to 15 percent of incoming classes, and most of the successful girls were chemistry applicants right out of the exclusive private schools. But, even so, I believed I could get in. I wrote to the dean of every medical school I could think of. All the responses were the same: I was deemed 'unsuitable' and told, in so many words by one school, to go back to the kitchen sink. In the meantime, I watched medical schools accept my younger male classmates, with poor grades, on the basis of their rugby skills"

-Sue Fisher-Hoch from Level 4: Virus Hunters of the CDC

Luckily, she didn't go back to the kitchen sink, and the world is richer for it. But what about all the talent that was wasted back then? We can't get it back.

"In his memoirs, Bertrand Russell described what made life worth living for him: the search for knowledge, a longing for love, an empathy with those who are suffering"- Unwinding the Clock by Bodil Jonsson p. 87

I wonder if thoughts like that can coexist with our think happy thoughts and good things will happen culture. We can't feel empathy with the suffering without feeling negative emotions, and both love and knowledge have agony as well as joy contained within.

"you see,to the very poor black kids that I teach...it doesn't matter much what bridge you might have stood on 30 years ago. They want to know what bridge you stand on now"- a teacher quoted in Jonathon Kozol's Amazing Grace

"Somebody has power. Pretending they don't so they don't need to use it to help people- that is my idea of evil"- David Washington, quoted on page 23 of Jonathon Kozol's Amazing Grace.

I have more thoughts on the Glass Castle. In the last chapter, the author's brother says something about food not being hard to put on the table, and I admit that I feel a bit skeptical about that. I can't put my finger in why that gives me a funny feeling. It seems just like if everything was so easy, then we'd be living in the land of sugar and pie...

I still think that the breast feeding is better than a screaming kid. I can ignore the breastfeeding but not the crying.

"Like every other man I knew, my dad hated all black people and loved Bill Cosby"- Haven Kimmel, She Got Up Off the Couch, p. 228.

A really funny story about an ignorant white little girl, her racist family, and some tacky ass black people[gold toilets?! all black couches?! even with the 70s being the setting, I can't forgive that!] follows.

Spoilers for Fire Logic [note: I'm amused by the reviews that act like all the homosex is a reason to mark the book down. We have people using what is essentially magic, and what's unrealistic is a bunch of gay people, yea right] and Earth Logic Possible.

"When Clement looked at the silent warrior, she looked into the other face of Shaftal:unbowed, unforgiving. Every attempt to overcome the people had not only increased their resentment, but also their ability to resist. Clement's acts, and the actions of all the soldiers like her, had created this unrelenting enemy and all the enemies like her. With a great deal of effort, they could be killed, but they could not be eliminated." - Earth Logic, Laurie Marks, p. 387

"Every stupidity of the last thrity-five years had come from the Sainnites' unwillingness and inability to change. Certainly, they had not been welcomed, permitted or encouraged to belong in Shaftal. But neither had they tried to be anything other than conquerers. To attempt it now might be so difficult it verged on the impossible, and it might take the rest of Clement's life to achieve. But wasn't her only other option to take Cadmar's well trodden road, a coward's way of self-induced oblivion and obstinacy to delude her people with visions of heroism as she marched them to destruction?"
-Earth Logic, p. 388

My whole left arm hurts and I swear I'm getting another bump.

Are you suffering from not eating? Wondering why you feel cold and lightheaded? Call these people for help. Did you know that being pretty is OH SO IMPORTANT that you need to develop a deadly mental illness to achieve it? From the Obesity Myth:

"That someone[Susan Estrich in her book Making the Case for Yourself] who is among one of the half dozen most distinguished women lawyers of her generation should openly admit to taking more pride in moving to a size 12 to a size 6("sometimes a four") dress than in any of her professional accomplishments is tantamount to an admission that she has simply surrendered to the cultural judgment that, in terms of her value as a person, nothing a women does can ever be as important as her appearance"

Quotes:

"CLS[Critical Legal Studies] devotees attacked the idea that law could be a system of neutral principles, ore even one that could create a fair and more just society. Rather they viewed law mainly as a tool of oppression that the powerful used against the weak. Whatever its ultimate merits, CLS was ultimately inconsequential outside the confines of law schools, its nihilism and extremism rendering it largely irreverent in the work of judges and lawmakers"- Jeffery Toobin, the nine pg. 13.

This quote fails in so many ways. The reality of what many people who go through the judicial system deal with has nothing to do with the work of judges and lawmakers! Yep! That poor woman getting her kid taken away for what a rich woman could get away with? She don't count. White kids allowed to beat folks up, but black kids having the book thrown at them for the same thing? Has nothing to do with lawmakers and judges in white world!

"The bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham in 1963 broke my father's resistance[to desegregation], and his heart...The bombing seemed to seal a permanent judgemeent on the city. 'The shame will be ours forever' editorialized a local newspaper at the time. But Martin Luther King Jr., foresaw ultimate salvation in the tradgedy. 'At the funeral for three of the four girls, he said 'The deaths may well serve as the redemptive force that brings light to this dark city'. And it did. What happened in Birmingham in 1963 not only redeemed the oppressed. It also redeemed my people, although we haven't been able to accept that yet. We haven't yet taken that particular snake out and lifted it aloft in the light- that dangerous unloved thing about us: where we came from, what we did, who we are"- Salvation on Sand Mountain p. 152-153.

When I read this, I remembered a quote attributed to a Holocast survivor- the oppisite of forgetting is not remembering, but justice. People try to say it was a long time ago, or it wasn't my fault. You can't heal a rift so wide and so deep with words like that. The people who have been hurt have kept the memories. We pass them down orally, we pass them down in writing, we pass them down so that we can never forget that our pain is real and that we are just as human as those who hurt us. If you can't remember what has happened before, you can't move forward. We keep these memories not only to save ourselves, but to save you as well.

This is why I laugh at white guilt. People try to disconnect the races so much that they try to say that feeling bad about what you and others have done to people of other races is some sort of pathology. Blow up people's churches, fight for decades to block their being educated with your children, say horrible and nasty things to them to their faces, but god forbid, heaven forbid, you feel a drop of remorse! That remorse gives you strength. When you're connected to the reality that when you hurt someone, that's bad and wrong, you can work to heal that hurt. When you try to disconnect completely from the idea that other people are worth as much as you, you hurt your own humanity.

This is some prime stupid here. The evil lord of the breeders is pissed.

Sex workers in south africa.

Whitefolks blog or something. I didn't attend yearlykos because I don't got money out the ass for crap like that.

"We were a naive little church, always prey to a good sob story- the missonary we sponsered in what was then Southern Rhodesia[Zimbabwe], for instance. Years later, we discovered he actually owned a fairly sizable rubber plantation, on which local villagers worked for next to nothing. The young men lived in barracks on the plantation and the owner would have informal Bible study with them sometimes at night. For this, he was called a missionary, and we would send him a good portion of our foreign missions budget every month"- Salvation on Sand Mountain, p. 9