lotusland - nervous politics from a laid-back city

do you have half an hour to kill?

i don't, but that definitely did not stop me from watching

THE POLITICS EPISODE OF YOU CAN'T DO THAT ON TELEVISION!

kids these days dont see the value of mocking the democratic process.. grumble grumble.

bonus: this includes retro tv ads.

men who have had sex with men banned from donating to cbs, gay virgins and closet cases a-ok!

i took this from this website - its author was on a local news channel this morning.

Canadian Blood Services explicitly states: "all men who have had sex with another man, even once, since 1977 are indefinitely deferred [from donating blood]."  The organization's rationale for adopting this policy is allegedly based on information that suggests a higher risk of HIV/AIDS infection among men who have sex with men (MSM) compared to other groups. Blood Services' practice of rejecting MSM blood donors is being challenged for three reasons:    

* It is illegal under Section 5(a) of the Canadian Human Rights Act.    
* Assessing the overall proportion of HIV/AIDS infection among MSM is impossible, since the exact population of this group in Canada remains unknown.    
* Given that 54.3% of HIV positive tests in 2004 were attributed to causes other than MSM activity, all Canadian blood donors should be equally subject to rigorous testing and screening.

For more information, please read Hossein Kia's open letter to Canadian Blood Services CEO Dr. Graham Sher, which explains each of these points more specifically.  The news release also provides additional information.

my take?  test the blood for freakin aids!  thats how you tell if blood has aids.  hot and steamy unprotected gay sex since 1977 may be one of a few risk factors but asking people if theyve had gay sex as a means to counter this risk is pretty dang unscientific and unreliable.

petition found here

mason loh and everyone like him: why do you do these things?

im sure youve all heard about this, because its old news.   

what i want to know is whether the bit i heard about dinnergate was true.   people were using " b: Student ID - Senior Card - Immigrant Card - Landing Paper - Citizenship Card - Care Card - or any other photo ID." as their id and the letter that invited them to the dinner as confirmation of their address.  someone who handled the letters noted that a lot of them were addressed c/o other folks.

the person who reported this to me is completely uninterested in politics and was working at the event because she 'needs' volunteer hours (compulsive resume ho with friends in the young liberals). 

liberals, you really get off on looking like turds in front of me, dont you.  how in the name of  fuck am i supposed to take you seriously when:
a) a letter c/o someone elses mothereffing house counts as proof of address, and
b) these letters come from the campaigns themselves, and
c) people get a free dinner for showing up

this is so stupid and so depressing.

but what is cute are the comments on the sda post.

first, i think its just charming how conservative bloggers really think their cacophony-based echo chamber is some kind of revolutionary 'new media' that picks on the liberals, unlike the old media which is rife with bias.  i didnt know that the way to deal with bias wasnt critical reflection but setting up your own politburo.  this is charming because they wont shut up about the significance of their individual action (while ignoring how much they are *not*challenging), which is so my parents generation of them.

secondly, that guy who pressed send 8 times and spammed the comments.  this revolution is kind of funny because the soldiers refuse to let their children send them to guerrilla training camps where they might actually learn how to use their weapons.

id say posting a meme is worse than not posting... so readers, please take this bitchslap from me in stride

this meme is old but i dont care:
A new tag game about “five things feminism has done for me” is going around the net. The purpose of the game is to raise awareness against federal conserative efforts of eliminating the status of women commission.

All you have to do is name five things feminism has done for you.

let me begin by saying that this project of feminism was formalized and codified by my mothers generation and all my generation has done is absorb it uncritically as a meaningless catchphrase.  we suck.

so here are five things i may like about feminism initially but serve to establish how much we suck:

1. free birth control.  if you happen to know any of them men ive had the occasion to boink, youll note that the world has been spared the belligerent and numerous superbreed that would have resulted if i was crossed with burly musclemen and science nerds.   my brood would be singularly equipped for world domination, people.

yay for science and funding those people who improved the iud.  now its the most popular birth control in the world (except in retarded ass north america where most girls i know who are on birth control are choosing the pill because they just want to take what everyone else is taking, theyre too fucking pathetic to just endure menstruation, and they uncritically accept that we live in a pill-popping culture.)

2. separating the men from the boys on the left:  its popularly accepted that the left is a nice political home for feministas, but this is not the case.  marx discussed economic class societies and exploring racial and gender inequality was also articulated as this type of critique as well.  needless to say, the folk who resist, whether revolutionaries or incrementalists, have this stupid tendency to ignore or mock feminist issues because they characterize the movement as a way for hypereducated bourgeois daughters to stop thinking critically and just blindly accept oppressed status despite their privileged backgrounds.  there is also criticism of the judith butler type feminist who engage in pedantic bullshit about 'performing gender' that only speaks to the proverbial hypereducated bourgeois daughter, which diverts academic resources from valuable emancipatory projects to this indulgent crap.   also, we find criticism of the martha nussbaum incrementalism type feminism that relies on man-dominated electoral structures to advance its goals (which is apparently proof women are not oppressed since we can force men to listen to us). 

so when some dude goes on and on about non-gender forms of oppression and how people need to be empowered and given a voice and how we cant decide for others and in the same breath decides for all women that feminism is now useless, this is your cue to lean back in your chair and silently scoff at the person who (probably hasnt been laid in yonks) refuses to accept that sometimes women see things that he does not and that he is not some fucking transcendental  prophet who he can decide what women require.

3. stupid spoiled whores:  women are hoes these days, and feminism approves.  too bad that for every delectably skankalicious jewel of womankind who is out there half-naked performing gender and emasculating all the stupids who buy her drinks, there are 20 insecure little tarts who are hating on her skankpower (while dressed just as whorish) and throwing themselves at mates in vain hopes that such contact may result in marriage and personal validity. 

its ok if men like us for being sexy but we should like it more than they do.

4. coochie wipes and other reasons women spend ridiculously more money on shit than men:  while feminism has demonstrated what can be achieved by pushing for reform within the system, the failure of feminism to engender critical womanhood has kind of left women slaves to the market.  we are so stupid and we spend so much money on shit and trinkets as a source of identity-affirmation, fun, and freedom and men are usually the ones being paid for this at the end of the day.  this is why things like individually-wrapped moist towlettes attached to pads which help you get rid of your awful lady smells exist and  individually-wrapped disenfectant q-tips for the dick do not.  men dont get off on buying things to solve their problems the way we do.

the 'freedom' to express yourself through consumer goods (which makes you work more and subsidizes some rich wanks leisure) does not sit well with any definition of freedom worth my time.

5. as a kid i had a lot of female figures to look up to.  maybe it was tokenism but there were women in charge, from people in my community to famous folk.  there are groups of people who still lack representatives in the public sphere and that shit is just wrong.  its evidence of my privilege and this age that i could go to the library in elementary school and see history books with female figures and content about female life.  and yeah, i dont find jeanne sauvee and kim campbell inspiring anymore, but there is something to be said for going to the library, getting a book called 'prime ministers of canada' and finding at least one representative of my gender in there.  yeah, its tokenism, but symbols can be powerful in their own limited way.