Pardon Me If I Can't be Bothered To Give A Rats Ass

The Kid has another abscessed tooth. This is what 10 years of medicaid dental gets you. His face is swollen. He's throwing up. He's in mountains of pain. He's cranky (and let me tell you, Kid is normally the chillest person in the room, cranky doesn't happen with him unless things are extreme). I am a sympathetic puker, so in addition to the giant hot rock of guilt turning my stomach, I am nauseous to boot.

But we finally have dental. Real dental. Not the "only for extractions done by a one or two providers in a 500k population metro area" medicaid dental. Not the "sometimes kids die of toothaches because they are poor" medicaid dental. Real dental, with deductibles and co-insurance that doesn't cover as much as it should but covers more than the nothing of medicaid. If I get up really early and start calling around, I may get lucky and find a dentist in our plan that can take him. If I clean out my tiny savings account, I might be able to pay for it. I was hoping we could make it to January 1 before using the dental, so I could skip this year's deductible. Oops. And we won't talk about how I am gonna have to call into work tomorrow. I'm going to push the fact that there were people let go last week out of my mind. I am going to cross my fingers and hope that taking a day off for a sick kid isn't going to put me next on the list of expendable employees.

This is a kind of violence. Economic violence. A thing that causes actual, physical harm to an actual living being. Kids not being able to go to the dentist because they don't have the right parents. That's violent. Hell, anyone not being able to see a dentist because that shit is expensive is a kind of violence. Parents skipping meals to stretch out the food budget to maybe last to the end of the month is a kind of violence. Choosing between drugs that keep you alive or paying the heating bill in the dead of winter is a kind of violence. Slow, creeping, scarier than anything Hollywood could come up with violence.

So while you're all throwing hissy fits about property damage, I'm gonna go deal with the inevitable outcomes of economic violence done to the poorest of us. Yeah broken windows suck. But I'd rather lose every single thing I own than have my kid suffer one more second of pain. Graffiti my door, piss on my sofa, steal my last dollar. That's all just stuff. My door doesn't feel pain. My sofa doesn't feel pain. My wallet doesn't feel pain. That's property damage. And having literally lost every damn thing that I own in the not so distant past, I am familiar with what losing everything feels like. It sucks. But it didn't end us.

And I just can't be bothered to give a rat's ass about property damage. Not when a real, live human being is sitting next to me in agony because he had the misfortune to be born to a poor woman in a time when things matter more than people.

Sunday Funnies

I freely admit that spending family tv watching (well internet) time watching almost exclusively BBC stuff is probably warping the child's brain. Probably. Since we've run through the only American shows he'll watch with me (Eureka and Warehouse 13) and Doctor Who is over and we've watched Torchwood America: Now with more graphic but strangely less sexy gay sex. So we needed something.

That Mitchell and Webb Look seems to be filling the bill at the moment.

One of these things is not like the other: Vandalism vs Violence

Let's get one thing straight, shall we.

Vandalism is not equal to, the same as, or even remotely like, violence. One is damage to property, inanimate objects that have no feelings what so ever. One is damage to people.

Graffiti, which may be the oldest form of political expression being that it is at least 2000 years old, is just that, political expression. Even when it's just some kid, who is probably not old enough to vote, leaving his or her tag on a wall somewhere. I love graffiti. Graffiti is not violence.

Window smashing, while scary and loud and full of breaky glass, is not violence. It is property damage.

Property is theft, and pardon me while I quote the Marquis de Sade: "Tracing the right of property back to its source, one infallibly arrives at usurpation. However, theft is only punished because it violates the right of property; but this right is itself nothing in origin but theft."

In order to get the elites to release their stranglehold on the rest of humanity, the elites must scared. Yes, scared. That's an ugly truth, but it is truth none the less. And to scare them without committing acts of violence means that they must be afraid of something else, loss of property. And they should be afraid of that. They should be shaking in their boots, unable to sleep at night, haunted by the ghost of Jacob Marley in the wee small hours telling them to repent.

We know what violence looks like at the Occupy sites. It looks like cops pepper spraying young women behind a barricade. It looks like war vets getting skulls crushed and spleens lacerated by "non-lethal" weapons. It looks like douchebags rapists who rape women in tents. Violence causes actual harm to the bodies of actual people and is generally performed by those with power over those with less.

Vandalism is acts of destruction done to pieces of property done by those with less to property owned by those with more.

These things are not the same, and should never, ever be uttered in the same breath as if they were.

Outlook Police

My French Microsoft Outlook has this menu item:

It turns out that in French police has two meanings:

• Cops
• Font

I had been wondering why Outlook was offering to call the cops on my email. I thought I had the Microsoft Outlook Feminist Blogger Edition.

"We should raise a statue to Nafissatou Diallo"

The tale of Dominique Strauss-Kahn gets worse and worse. In mid-October the story broke that a dozen people, including hotel management, police officials, business executives and underworld figures, were placed under investigation for running a prostitution ring out of the Carlton Hotel in Lille. According to the testimony of at least one woman, France's leading sex addict was a customer, both in Paris and Washington, right up to his final stay at the Sofitel. One police official has been taken into custody and questioned about a trip to Washington in which prostituted women were trafficked to the US for DSK.

The distinctive feature of this episode--besides the wide scope and the involvement of police--is that it has come to light afterthe Socialist primary. The chilling realization has crept over his erstwhile supporters that had he not been knocked out of the race by his arrest in New York there is an excellent chance he would have won the nomination and then brought this shit storm down upon himself and the entire party. They plead ignorance and are livid with him for endangering their careers and the election. Even his staunchest allies have dropped him like a ton of bricks and are saying on the record that they never want to hear of the guy again.

Nafissatou Diallo single-handedly saved the French Socialist party. That same party would not be saved by its own officials, who willfully overlooked what it knew of its leading prospect's increasingly vile behaviour out of fear and misogyny. Le Monde report that Socialists are saying, "We should raise a statue to Nafissatou Diallo."

Totally Appropriate Conversations With Children

So I am hanging up this way rad poster the T.O.E. sent me in the bathroom, while Kid is washing out a trash can that got rank in the bathtub. The poster is a French Feminist poster of a line drawing on the monds pubis and in French it reads (I think) "The Place of Pleasure".

Me: Is it going to totally mortify you if I hang up this poster in the bathroom?

Kid: No

Me: It's a drawing of naughty bits- that's not going to embarrass you?

Kid: (makes familiar teenage groan of annoyance) You raised me. Do you really think that I would be mortified by that?

Me: True. I raised you. But you are at that age where the mere existence of parents is embarrassing and you live in the house too. You get to have a say in what goes in it.

Kid: That's a good philosophy. I like that everyone who lives in a place gets a say in it.

Me: You know, there are people who think kids should not be allowed to have opinions at all. That whole "Children should be seen and not heard" shit.

And that is how it rolls in Casa de Elizabitchez. Also T.O.E should explain the significance of the poster because it's rad.

LinkFarming! Now with more something!

Yeah, I am out of pithy titles. Wevs. Enjoy the fruits of my reading.


It's different for brown kids.

It's still different for brown kids


It's different for WOC too

Well it's different for anyone of color, really


But ain't it always a woman's fault?

But at least we can all agree, Goldman Sachs is the unwashed taint of the financial sector.

And everyone's favorite new blog crush explains how Establishment Fauxgressives are trying to frame the Occupy movement as capitalism's savior.

What else should I be reading?