It's a thing lefties in the UK used to say to each other. "Keep your anger up." The idea was not to get complacent about oppression. Lefty acquaintances of mine argued with me when I was a student long into the night sometimes, full of piss and vinegar. Until I knew enough to see what was actually going on, I thought their attitude was counter-productive...eventually I saw what they saw and got angry myself.

The left in the UK was heavily protest based for a long time, grounded in the suffragette movement, strikes, and in more recent times the Poll Tax riots. One of my exes, when were discussing how change could come, said that if a revolution was needed, he personally didn't mind that much if it was bloody.

Does anger actually work?



?

Winter has begun as has your rise to VICTORY!!!! I think.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sol_Invictus

"QUACK, QUAAAACK."

I may buy a duck call.

This bullshit has been going on in my life now continuously since I was born. I am 43.

When I was 11 my parents refused to let me carry on seeing my friend after we'd moved town as they were convinced he was going to turn me gay.

When I was 13, my mother instructed me not to come back to her house gay after I'd been away to University as she didn't want AIDS in the family.

When I was in secondary school I was beaten up every lunchtime, pretty much every single day, for loads of reasons of which being supposed to be gay was only one by the same group of four fucking jocks who decided they'd taken a fancy to me.

When I finally got a job, the entire nation was on the brink of repealing Section 28, which forbade positive depictions of homosexuality in the classroom. Brian Soutar, who owned a stagecoach company, pulled together a "referendum" out of his own funds and achieved an ~80% NO REPEAL vote in his little poll.

During that little debacle, the staffroom at my place of work was alive with talk of how those awful homosexuals should learn to LEAVE PEOPLE ALONE. These were people who knew I was gay and had worked with me for over 5 years. They just came right out with it in front of me as if I wasn't even there. These were people I had actually respected.

There was a brief period of about a year when the political climate looked as if it was about to change and then South Park re-popularised the word "gay" as an insult rather than a primarily descriptive term, by pretending it was really supposed to mean something else and was hence "ironic".

Youtube has "gay" written all over it by sniggering heterosexual teenagers.

During the 90s and early 2000s a whole pile of "metrosexuals" appeared who apparently I was to regard as a kind of tacit approval of my sexual orientation by virtue of their willingness to "take a walk on the wild side".

Also during the 90s and 2000s, the phenomenon known to speakers of languages like Greek and French, in which nouns have genders, acquired a peculiar cousin in the form of objects, abstract concepts and forms of behaviour acquiring sexual orientations. "Is this shirt gay? Is this table gay? Are wind chimes gay? Is checking out porn with your buddy gay? Are sandals gay? Is owning an aquarium gay? Is having facial hair of THIS length or THIS length gay?"

In recent times it has apparently been my fault that heterosexuals can't keep their marriages together, and their marriages don't really mean anything because promises made in front of God only count if there's something weird and unwholesome about gay people, if there ISN'T, well God will be JUST fine if you do whatever the hell you like after swearing an oath in his house.

There are executions of gay people all the time in Middle East... Vladimir Putin can't think of anything to do to deflect attention away from his thick-as-pigshitness and total incapacity to do anything of any meaning with his country except squash the demographic least able to effectively fight back... Is anyone surprised that it's Teh Gays?

And now we have a TV show with some beardy guy being honest and humble and just "expressing his opinions".

There's a reason for all this.

There are never really going to be enough gay people in the world to make our votes count enough for any of the people who can change anything. We are too small in number. They don't really need to take us into account for any more reason than a kind of political vanity project. I don't think the Right's homophobia is as clearly expressed near the top of its rickety pyramid anywhere near as strongly as it is in the foundations.

Anyway, they can use discussions about me and all the other gay people out there as statements of their wider intent. As ciphers.

It's okay to pretend openly that gays are secret pederasts among certain demographics, so you can use that to legitimise wider, more subtle forms of bigotry. After all, if the behaviour of one entire demographic can be reduced to a few simple lies, why not other demographics too? It's very useful to have one demographic that you can just squirt your adjectives and your "HOW does this make ME feel about ME" theories all over with impunity. It supports the subtler forms. One great big tentpole of "GASP! LOOK AT THE FURRRRREAKITY FREAKS!!!"

I'm afraid I've sort of resigned myself to the idea that this is probably how it will always be.

I blame Putin for this, as he pulled his "EEEEEK TEH GAYS" trick out of the hat for no identifiable reason at all.

http://ca.finance.yahoo.com/news/exclusive-cataclysmic-snowden-affair-nsa-032218664.html

"FORT MEADE, Maryland (Reuters) - The U.S. National Security Agency has made dozens of changes in its operations and computer networks to prevent the emergence of another Edward Snowden, including potential disciplinary action, a top NSA official said on Friday, as a White House review panel recommended restraints on NSA spying.

Former NSA contractor Snowden's disclosures have been "cataclysmic" for the eavesdropping agency, Richard Ledgett, who leads a task force responding to the leaks, said in a rare interview at NSA's heavily guarded Fort Meade headquarters.

In the more than hour-long interview, Ledgett acknowledged the agency had done a poor job in its initial public response to revelations of vast NSA monitoring of phone and Internet data; pledged more transparency; and said he was deeply worried about highly classified documents not yet public that are among the 1.7 million Snowden is believed to have accessed."

http://thinkprogress.org/lgbt/2013/12/10/3042771/michigan-republican-committeeman-gay-couples-want-health-benefits-die-early-aids/

"Dave Agema, a former Michigan state representative and current member of the National Republican Committee, told attendees of a holiday party last week that he wants to protect “traditional marriage” so that gay couples don’t abuse the system for health care benefits. When he worked as a pilot for American Airlines, he claims that some gay people pretended to be partnered to get benefits if they had AIDS..."

Interesting theory.