Thanksgiving

It's easy to get mad at the stores that open their doors today forcing their low income workers to miss time with their families. It's easy to call for a boycott of these stores. It's probably pretty easy to actually stop shopping at these stores.

Huffington Post is leading with the headline "Happy Thanksgiving... Now get back to work!" due to these businesses that think sales are more important than respecting their employees.

But here's the thing, these stores are actually getting sales. People are actually forsaking their own time with their family to shop. Why are we not yelling about the people doing the shopping. Stores will keep opening up their doors on thanksgiving if we keep shopping there. All of these stores pay their workers extra for working on the holiday which means they need even more sales than normal to make this a good business decision. What's the outcome after stores were open last year? They're open even longer this year! Meaning they need even more sales to make it a good decision.

Many yell and complain about the corporate greed but we are only fueling it. Corporations don't do things that they think will lose them money. And they aren't. We're handing them money for being open on thanksgiving.

If you really want people to have a happy thanksgiving and you or somebody you know was planning on going shopping today, it's time to stay home, read a book, watch some football, eat some turkey, and spend it with your friends and family.

The only way to stop the black Friday creep is to starve it out. And on thanksgiving, that's the only acceptable form of starving around.

Happy Thanksgiving 

Some more sexism

This is getting ridiculous. After seeing a TV show talk about the realities of sexism in the media and politics, I decided I'd finally read one of the many articles that have been using a headline regarding Miley Cyrus smoking a joint while on stage at the EMAs. Like all articles about an award show it contained some information about who won certain awards, but most of the article was focused on Miley Cyrus. And in an article supposedly about her smoking weed, they couldn't help but mention that she twerked with her female dance partner in two different places in the article. Fine I guess. Whatever.

The part that shows the sexism is they have a gallery of pictures from the event in the article as well. After a few Miley pictures you come to some of Robin Thike, the man that performed at the VMAs with Miley Cyrus singing his high performing, pro-rape, song. The same man that was assigned zero blame in the outrage over what was done on stage even if Miley was just dancing, and he was singing a song that is, again, pro-rape. Not to mention that certain parts people took offense to, like the foam finger, comes directly out of Thike's own music video for his pro-rape song. And, of course we can't forget the part where he has an explicit music video of his pro-rape song that has all the women dancing topless in it. No outrage for him after the VMAs though.

And no outrage for him after the EMAs, despite the fact that he was, once again, singing a song that's pro-rape onstage. And wouldn't you know it, his backup dancers (all female obviously), were all wearing even less clothes than Miley Cyrus during the VMAs. The amount of clothes Miley had on was another source of outrage remember. Except in this case it was for backup dancers who would've had no say in what they wore. It was Thicke's choice to make them almost naked. Is Thicke going to get any large segment outraged for further reducing women to sexualized objects while singing his very pro-rape song? No. But are we going to hear that Miley twerked again? Yes.

Lisa Kudrow couldn't have been more right.

Sexism, with a healthy dash or racism

Isn't that topic a fun one? Don't worry, I'm keeping this one brief.

Yesterday was election day in America and Albany elected it's first female Mayor, Kathy Sheehan, after having the same guy at the helm of the city for the last twenty or so years. I saw on facebook today a friend in Albany posting about her win and the historic nature of it. Of course sexism is alive and well in our country so somebody commented saying:

Now hopefully; she's competent. I find a lot of people are obsessed with this notion "its (sic) time for a woman ins ((x)position)) -- for what reason? Because we need a woman!" Sort of like what we did for presidencies. 

Now perhaps this white male isn't being sexist or racist. Maybe, when a white male wins an election he says something like:

Now hopefully; he's competent. I find a lot of people are obsessed with this notion "it's time to keep white men in ((x) position) -- for what reason? Because white men are better! Sort of like we've done for most of our history. 

Of course, that's almost completely unlikely. Considering he posted a second comment about how he was willing to concede that the other options against President Obama were awful choices but he adds the caveat that we've romanticized the notion of a minority leading America, or as he put it: 'murrica (yes, double r and all). After my friend posted a thing about everybody being equal he had to add on that comments like that stank of affirmative action which is a bad mindset because

being someone outside the norm of things doesn't make you more qualified for the sake of equality, it simply makes you different.

I didn't see that last comment by the time I responded to him. I was focused solely on the Albany Mayoral election. I did a quick fact check since he brought up how we've romanticized electing minorities I checked. And it turns out that women outnumber men by about five million people in this country. Looking more specifically I found that white women also outnumber white men by about three million people in America. In other words, electing Kathy Sheehan is a member of the majority of the majority. How crazy is that? Did you have any idea that women outnumber men both across the board and among whites? Or have white men been so steadfast in their (our) privilege that they've (we've) hoarded the power and influence so that we can think of women as being a minority group?

This is the heart of white male privilege. We are so privileged that if you're not one of us, you're a minority. Louis CK has made a joke about this. He says:

I read something in the paper that really confused me. It said that 80% of New Yorkers are minorities... Shouldn't you not call them minorities when they get to be 80% of the population? That's a very white attitude, don't you think? I mean, you could take a white guy to Africa and he'd be like "look at all the minorities around here! I'm the only majority!

It's time for true equality. We should ask whether Kathy Sheehan is competent to be mayor. But we should ask that of every person we vote for, not just women and minorities.

Also if you want an extra little helping of humor know that Kathy Sheehan got over 10,000 more votes than the other three people on the ballot combined. The second place candidate didn't even hit 1000 votes. It was known that whoever won the Democratic primary would win the general election. And Kathy's opponent in the primary? A black male who would've also made history if he had been elected. Turns out sometimes your options are making history, or making history. And some people just can't stand that.