Taxes: totally like slavery. And genocide.

You've probably already seen this ad. No doubt it's making the rounds online right now. I saw it on the news last night. Obviously it's blatantly ridiculous and hurtful and wrongheaded and dilutes the seriousness of big issues like actual real-world slavery and genocide.

But it's also a great example of a popular misconception bandied about by the tea partiers and their ilk. According to their version of history, the founding fathers broke with England and established a new nation because they didn't want to pay taxes. Period. They just did not want to pay one penny in taxes. And so now when our government taxes us it's a terrible injustice akin to slavery and genocide.

So first of all, to set the record straight, the founding fathers were opposed to taxation without representation. See how that's all one package? It's not taxation. period. It's taxation without representation. In other words, you give us representatives who will reliably bring our concerns and wishes into the political decision-making process, and we're cool with the taxes. No voice in the political arena? Then no taxes. See, the founding fathers thought the two should be tied together. That's actually how it worked. For white property-owning males, that is.

I think all Americans would pretty much agree to that: taxation without representation sucks. It's rather straight-forward. Which is why it's strange that most people don't realize that for more than 5 million people in the U.S., taxation without representation is exactly the condition they are currently living under, and they will probably remain in this condition for the rest of their lives. Because they have felony convictions. Many of them have done their time and "paid their debt to society." They're "rehabilitated." Right? Except that they'll never be a full citizen again, because they'll never have a political voice again. And in a democracy, having a political voice in the form of a vote is a constitutive part of what it means to be a citizen. And paying taxes is the flip side of voting. It's the old reciprocal privileges and responsibilities that my parents used to yammer on about. Or if you're into those Existentialist types, freedom always comes with terrible responsibility, and abdicating your responsibility amounts to abdicating your freedom, and all that.

But if you're a felon in the US, you fall through the giant loophole. You get to keep the responsibility - the paying taxes bit - without the reciprocal privilege. And this, my friends, is in fact anti-American. It does defy one of the most fundamental tenets of our democracy. It also serves to maintain the status quo - in terms of both race and class - by disproportionately excluding the groups who were most vulnerable to begin with and have thus landed in a bad position with the criminal justice system. But does anyone (least of all the libertarians and tea partiers) give a shit about that? Doesn't seem like it to me. I'm not hearing any kind of public outcry. Correct me if I'm wrong...

Monday Miscellanea

This morning on NPR there was much talk of Elena Kagan's confirmation hearings. In one clip, Jeff Sessions mentioned that he would like to mansplain to her how supreme court justices serve under the constitution. It's interesting how gender is so clearly present in the very language they use in these cases. If the ranking member on the Senate Judiciary Committee happened to be a woman, and the dean of Harvard's Law School and Supreme Court nominee happened to be a man, I doubt we'd hear much talk about whether or not the nominee "understands" the role of the constitution in supreme court decisions. There might be talk of interpretation, about whether the nominee views the constitution as a living document, and undoubtedly the perennial talk about "activist judges" would occur. But framing it as a lack of understanding is a distinctly male thing to do when the person who allegedly lacks the understanding is female. Apparently getting a grasp on the basic workings of our supreme court is just too much to ask of any ladybrain, even when that ladybrain has been educated at and affiliated with law schools that make Huntingdon College and the University of Alabama look sort of ... provincial and benighted.


I'm told there's a play-doh scented perfume out there, which is kinda awesome, if any product of the the beauty-industrial-complex can be awesome. I tend to think that anything which issues forth from such a problematic source is inherently problematic, but if you have to have perfume...


Then there's this: Baby’s first bacteria depend on birth route, featuring a study showing that babies born via c-section lack a wide range of bacteria on their bodies that babies born by vaginal birth have. The current speculation is that these bacteria are of the beneficial type, since babies born by c-section experience higher rates of allergies, asthma, and various immune-system issues. Of course, babies born by c-section also tend to have more issues with breastfeeding, which makes sense given that babies who were born vaginally had lots of lactobacillus (the good stuff in yogurt that helps you digest milk) on their bodies, while c-section babies had lots of the scary stuff like staph. Interestingly, most of the early feedback from the medical community reveals that, rather than using this as a reason to work to reduce c-section rates, the medical community would simply come up with a pro-biotic mix to administer to babies born by c-section. In other words, it's the same old "anything a woman's body can do, we can do better" song and dance.


A new study found a fairly effective way to predict the age at which a woman will hit menopause, potentially giving women more control over their reproductive lives. But experts worry that women will "become too reassured by this." I'm interpreting this warning about becoming too reassured as a preemptive means of holding onto the fear-mongering tools based on women's "biological clocks." Because losing the power of intimidating women with the threat of childlessness is a tough prospect to face.


Finally, police in Toronto are taking a preemptively violent approach in dealing with G20 protesters. In order to avoid some of the bad PR they might earn from this, they're also using plain clothes officers and trying to isolate smaller groups of protesters and remove them in unmarked vans. Of course, the most violent thing most of the protesters seem to have done was make a lot of noise banging pots and pans together. Which is totally the kind of offense one ought to get beaten and imprisoned for.

Webcomic of the Day

Source

WTF

So, I'm looking for a particular kind of cheese slicer on eBay for a friend. And then there's this. Out of the blue. I was unprepared, y'all. It's a high-heel cheese slicer. With a pink heel, no less. It appears to be a real thing in the world. Which you need for your kitchen. The seller assures us it's very sex and the city. I would say some other stuff, but ... I'm not sure what to say.

Shocking...absolutely shocking...except not really

Nations fail to limit whaling, Japan still hunts
Of course, since Norway and and Iceland also hunt whales I'm not sure why American media outlets continue to focus only on Japanese whaling activities. I could take a guess but don't know enough about each nation's whaling activities to feel very confident about it.

On the other hand, since tissue samples taken from whales show that many whales have increasing amounts of toxic and heavy metals (mercury, cadmium, aluminum, chromium, lead, silver, titanium) in their systems, maybe we should just say "eat up." You wanna kill and eat a whale? Go for it. Apparently they're doomed because of the toxins we've dumped into the oceans anyway, so help yourself to a whale steak, laced with sixteen times the levels of mercury thought to be dangerous to humans in shark and swordfish. Bon appetit.

Unemployed? Think immigrant laborers are to blame?

Then fight back. Go take those American jobs away from them. Be proactive. Be patriotic. Be a farm laborer.

To apply for a seasonal job as a farm laborer, click here: Take Our Jobs.org


Disclaimer: Job may include using hand tools such as knives, hoes, shovels, etc. Duties may include tilling the soil, transplanting, weeding, thinning, picking, cutting, sorting & packing of harvested produce. May set up & operate irrigation equip. Work is performed outside in all weather conditions (Summertime 90+ degree weather) & is physically demanding requiring workers to bend, stoop, lift & carry up to 50 lbs on a regular basis.

Lyrics from the god-awful

Lyrics from the god-awful country song at the dentist: 'where would we be without the love of a woman, standing behind her man even when he's wrong.' For serious. I'm not making this shit up.

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The earth in chalk

How my stepdaughter sees the world. She's six. And awesome.

Of Course

... Judge who nixed drilling ban has oil investments ...

Video of the Day

Since clean coal seems to be back in national conversations:



Click here for more info: This is reality.

Civilization and the Death Penalty

First, a couple of pictures:

This is the chair Ronnie Lee Gardner sat in as he was executed by a firing squad in Utah.

And this is the wall the executioners stood behind.

I've discussed Jeffrey Reiman's argument about capital punishment here before as it relates to torture. But the recent execution by firing squad got me thinking about it again, particularly as it relates to the reality of the need for executioners in a government which allows for capital punishment. Here's how I summarized it in the earlier post:

Being a civilized nation entails that we turn away from cruel and horrible ways of treating people. We like to believe that we've evolved past the enjoyment of public hangings, drawing-and-quartering criminals, and displaying the heads of beheaded criminals on public fenceposts. But to evolve past this, we need to also move past the necessity to have executioners among us. What does it do to an individual to be the one whose job it is to kill people? Can someone who has this job comfortably live among others in a civilized nation? And what must our self-conception be if we're OK with the fact that our criminal justice system necessitates the existence of executioners?

Obviously there's an executioner, or several executioners, in every form the death penalty takes. But in particularly violent methods like firing squads, the question of what it means to adhere to a system that requires some of the citizens of your nation to get paid for killing others seems particularly salient. Obviously military service is an instance of getting paid to kill. But something about the quiet calculation involved in executions, the protection and anonymity provided by the wall the marksmen (markswomen?) stand behind, the helplessness of the convict as he's strapped to the chair, the spectacle an execution always becomes as friends and family watch from behind darkened glass... I'm not really sure what arguments could be made that this is the action of a civilized nation.


Incidentally, while writing this post I learned that markswoman is not a recognized word in our language, while marksman is. And they say language isn't normative. How cute.

Webcomic of the day

from A Softer World