Dear Politics of Virtual Realities class,
A few things y'all need to remember:
1) When talking about transgender people wanting gender-neutral bathrooms, saying things like, "If you're a trans woman, why are you demanding extra things? You're a woman, use the woman's bathroom!" is a really shitty and disrespectful thing to say. As well as referring to trans* people as making a "lifestyle choice."
2) The student who tried to write the e-mail to the whole economics department blasting a certain lecture as racist, sexist, and classist is not some stupid wannabe activist who deserves to be laughed at. Yes, he probably could've worded his rant better, and I'll concede that
maybe trying to send the e-mail to all econ majors and minors wasn't the smartest thing to do (not that he could, anyway, since he doesn't have the clearance). But don't blast him for ranting when he "hadn't read the paper" the lecturer wrote and lectured about -- the student
did read the paper, and still thought it was racist, sexist, and classist. And the paper (and lecture)
is racist, sexist, and classist, and it's only fair that someone is protesting that his tuition money is going to people who espouse those views. And don't go, "But FREE SPEECH!" at me; if this college was truly committed to free speech, it would give people an appropriate public forum (not e-mail) to criticize and debate these views. (At least we can agree that the econ department chair's response was really condescending.)
3) The Tea Party is racist. I don't care if y'all think I'm "generalizing," or that I'm being "extreme," or that I should actually know some Tea Party members personally before I say such things. "But it's impossible that everyone in the Tea Party is racist!" Sorry, but you don't know what racism actually is. Get a fucking clue.
No love,
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quadruplify *************************************************************************************
In case you're wondering, here's the abstract of the paper/lecture in question in point #2:
This paper borrows from the tradition of other social sciences in considering the impact that “culture” (broadly defined as the economic and social environment in which the poor live) plays in determining early, non-marital childbearing. Along with others before us, we hypothesize that the despair and hopelessness that poor, young women may face increases the likelihood that they will choose to give birth at an early age outside of marriage. We derive a formal economic model that incorporates the role a woman’s perception of economic success may play in determining her childbearing and marital outcomes. We operationalize this perception mainly by using the level of income inequality that exists in a woman’s state of residence. We empirically investigate whether low socioeconomic status (SES) women are more responsive to differences in the level of income inequality in terms of their childbearing and marital outcomes. We find low SES women have more teen, non-marital births when they live in higher inequality locations, all else equal, supporting our hypothesis. The mechanism driving this finding is less frequent use of abortion. For women in their early 20s, higher inequality reduces the prevalence of shotgun marriages among low SES women, leading to more (fewer) non-marital (marital) births.
There was that, and there's the fact that I'm behind on two response papers for that class, and I have another response paper to write for African Politics for Friday. This is about all the frustration I can handle right now. :P
Other than that, though, this week has been going fairly well. Lots of cool stuff has happened over the past few days, but I'm going to hold off talking about some of them for a little bit. Hope everyone else is doing good! :D
In the meantime, have a meme....
The "What I've always wanted to tell you" Meme...and some music:
