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WB: An Inconvenient Al
Billmon:
In my darker moments, it sometimes seems as if the entire world is in the middle of a fierce backlash against the Age of Enlightenment, the Scientific Revolution and the ideological challenges they posed to the old belief systems. The forces of fundamentalism and obscurantism appear to be on the march everywhere – even as the moral and technological challenges posed by a global industrial civilization grow steadily more complex.
Climate change is only one of those challenges, and maybe not even the most urgent one – at the rate we’re going, civilization could collapse long before the Antarctic ice shelves do.
An Inconvenient Al
gylangirl- to backtrack.
I said I was hopeful because An Inconvenient Truth might break through the blinders of too many Americans…that, with my already stated tendency to give Gore slack, I wished he were president (and this wish also goes back to wishing 2000 played out differently, including a wish that I had gone to Florida and fought off the repukes who worked to stop the vote).
You replied by trashing the movie because, seemingly, it was made by Gore, the same Gore who has been Gore all along. I replied that while you knew all, others didn’t.
You then said I was “defending the DLC” (I thought I was defending a movie) and attacking “us” moonies, to place yourself in some privileged inner circle from which I was excluded.
So, I responded in kind with an attack on your complaint about tax breaks as less important than more desperate economic hardship…and on from there.
You don’t know me. For all you know, I’m a trust fund baby who sees class issues as central to all issues of equality in this nation. Maybe I’m a “class traitor.” Maybe I gave away my trust…to know what it’s like for other people…you don’t know, you assume by what I say relating to issues of poverty.
I didn’t say you were unqualified. My remark implied that there are more pressing issues, and even tho you volunteer, you are ABLE to volunteer…an idea that is apparently lost to you because your feelings are hurt. Do you also get insurance benefits from being married? A tax break from owning a house? A tax break for volunteering? Social security vesting from marriage? Pension allocation in the event of your husband’s demise? it’s sort of like the difference b/t not being able to afford a car to drive to work to not being able to afford a hybrid car because it’s better for the environment. the first issue for everyone is to be able to get to work, by whatever means.
Sexual harrassment has nothing to do with a tax break, so I don’t know how that came up, but, okay, I’ve been sexually harassed too…one boss stood behind me and put his hands down my shirt. One guy assumed that I planned to give him a blow job because we were discussing work-related issues…I was shocked by this, but it was, seemingly, the nature of that particular bizness, but I was too naive to know this was the “assumption.” I was constantly propositioned in another job, but, unless I wanted to quit, I didn’t have any recourse at the time. So I quit. I was told over and over by men that it didn’t matter what I did because of what I looked like…cause men assumed I would always “be taken care of.” As an object. –this was from men in my own family, even–this was the message I got about my “worth.” Outside my family, men joked that I got what I got because of what I looked like, not because of what I was able to accomplish through hard work and study or talent.
what that has to do as a difference between the two of us is… nothing.
I didn’t try to find someone to help…I’m in contact this sort of person constantly, in part because of the peculiar place where I live. I’m glad you’re helping people in your volunteer work because I know how frustrating and hard it is, and how low-paying it is…and it’s very important and needed. again, that has nothing to do my claiming a disconnect between someone who has the luxury of volunteering vs someone who, say, couldn’t go into that line of employment because they couldn’t afford to feed their family if they did…or they would have to go on food stamps to supplement and income that does not meet a living wage standard.
this is not about a tax code, per se, but about the value given to particular jobs…jobs that are labeled “caring” jobs and are thus devalued, whether someone is male or female. You are assigning worth for a particular job according to tax relief. I didn’t say you shouldn’t get paid for your work.
You have taken a snarky remark as a remark against all women of a certain income, when in fact it was about a particular set of comments on a blog thread.
Again, you know nothing about my “class” –and in fact, I would think it might be fairly obvious that I’m not part of an undereducated lower class that does not have the ability to work the system to put myself in a better situation (once I got beyond some grief.)
In any case, it is up to those who are in a better situation to help those who aren’t. Whether the issue is something like finances, education, ability to cope with present reality…and that was what I was responding to with the movie that started this whole issue. If that is offputting to women who have more options, then what can I say.
I would take issue that feminists are losing ground because of class divisions that feminists create. Why women who are relatively well off would disavow the gains they enjoyed because of feminism is another issue entirely, from my experience..and is something that has been going on for years and years.
the same divisions could be marked for homo vs heterosexual females, or women of color vs white women, and while class has some stake in this, it’s not the only issue. the biggest schism in feminism, after sublimating feminism to the cause of civil rights for blacks, came about when hetero females felt excluded by the emphasis on lesbian identification, and the accusation of “false consciousness” on the part of hetero females, iirc.
anyway, I do apologize for going after you personally when you made a remark about the movie that, to me, was another example of why the left loses because they cannot appreciate when someone tries to do the right thing. when I see the speeches Gore has given, the work to create a different media, the attempts to remember what gave him fire in the belly…it’s just as frustrating to me as when you read what you see as “reverse classists.” I’ve obviously hit a nerve, but so did you.
in real life, we have more in common than not, but this is something that gets erased by pixels on a screen.
Posted by: fauxreal | Jul 11 2006 20:24 utc | 80
fwiw- some articles on Gore’s Environmental Record
…Carl Pope is the executive director of the Sierra Club.
CARL POPE: The Vice President is clearly the strongest environmentalist ever to be nominated by a major party for the post of president. He, over the years, has demonstrated a really exceptional understanding of and commitment to environmental issues.
Pope also gave Gore props on greenhouse gas legislation, while the head of Friends of the Earth was more critical, as noted in the article linked above.
From a Gore apologist:
KATIE McGINTY: We have completed with the vice president’s leadership more than three times the number of Superfund cleanups than any of the previous administrations, so the record is very strong. However, the administration has also put on the table time and time again over the last seven years, important new legislation that would update the Superfund program, that would improve it. And at every turn, the majority in the Congress has failed to pass that legislation.
From American Prospect
In 1997 the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) undertook a routine reassessment of its national air pollution standards. After reviewing new public-health studies, EPA Director Carol Browner proposed strengthening limits on two major pollutants–ozone, the source of smog; and particulates, tiny particles that lodge in the lungs and cause respiratory illness. Her proposal promised to anger car companies, the trucking industry, and oilmen. President Clinton let the proposal sit for weeks while the heads of the Commerce, Energy, and Transportation departments expressed skepticism and downright hostility. Then Vice President Gore weighed in. Gore put all his clout behind Browner and broke the impasse. The president approved the new standards, setting off a political and legal battle that will culminate before the Supreme Court next year.
and more, not all of it praise-
League of Conservation Voters President Deb Callahan has labeled Gore, on the other hand, “the most knowledgeable and committed environmental candidate for president, ever.” Yet rank-and-file environmentalists have been more cautious than effusive in lining up behind the vice president. As favorable to them as his political record may be, he has sometimes disappointed those who expected even more from the author of the erudite and impassioned Earth in the Balance.
As a senator, Gore filibustered legislation that would have allowed oil drilling in the Arctic. As vice president, he has been out in front of the administration on traditional crusades like restoring wetlands, setting aside roadless areas in national forests, and limiting offshore oil drilling. But Gore’s real passion is for science and technological innovation, not wilderness preservation. Developing new, clean technology, he believes, is the key to environmental progress and will also be essential to economic leadership in the next century. And in part as a result of that faith in the technological fix, Gore’s positions have sometimes been more accommodating to presently polluting industries than environmentalists would like. Gore’s votes when he was in Congress won only a 64 percent approval rate from the League of Conservation Voters. He broke with the environmental community over nuclear power, for example, just the kind of forward-looking, controversial technology that attracts him. (Also, the Oak Ridge nuclear facility is in Tennessee.) Opposition to nuclear power is a shibboleth for many environmentalists, and Gore’s iconoclasm indicated that he could not be trusted to follow a party line.
About Gore as a local vs national politician from the NYTimes -a raging moderate.
Republicans trash Gore for calling the internal combustion engine a “mortal threat.” via Washington Monthly
Before the rest of the world had ever heard the term “global warming,” Gore was holding the first congressional hearings on the subject–in 1980! While Republicans like George H.W. Bush were denying the existence of global warming, Gore was helping gather evidence. While researching his book, Gore took a trip to the North Pole on a nuclear submarine and realized that the U.S. Navy had 40 years’ worth of data on the thickness of the Arctic ice cap. Recognizing the untapped potential in the vast and largely unused information, he brokered a deal to release it to civilian scientists, who discovered that the ice cap had thinned by 40 percent just since 1970, a story that made world headlines.
Posted by: fauxreal | Jul 12 2006 4:16 utc | 91
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