Obviously, the Olympics are going on, and they're being held in Bejing this year.  There has been lots of talk of boycotting the Olympics from both neocons and neoliberals.  I suppose I ought to define those terms for your pleasure:

Neocon - the new conservative class.  They're rich, old, white, male, Christian, and straight (except for their celebrity fucklist (see Friends), which features Georgie Jr., Georgie Sr., Ronnie's corpse, Rush, Bill, and Sean.)  I hate them because they increase spending exponentially by bombing people in other parts of the world (thus tripling our deficit every couple of years), and they use this as a justification to take away MY civil liberties.

Neoliberal - the sensitive type.  They're young, racial minorities, grew up poor and abused, bisexual, transgendered, female, "enlightened," and generally"oppressed" (or want to pretend they are, anyway.)  I hate them because they play the more-disadvantaged game, lie to themselves and others about the state of the world, hate/love things because it's popular to do so, support raising taxes to redistribute wealth in a socialistic-style quagmire, and want to take away MY civil liberties (environmentalism?  spare me!)  These types don't need a fucklist, because they would never be in something so restrictive as a monogamous relationship.  But if they did have one, they'd be sure to make it look like a college admissions brochure with a calculated ratio of individuals from every possible background.

Anyway, neocons want to boycott the Olympics because China is anti-Christian.  Chinese communists are atheists, they cry (erroneously).  How dare that government repress my views!  I mean, I'm okay with shutting up those annoying atheists* over in America, but that's different!  The atheists want to destroy my family and eat my flesh raw!  Often, they come up with other excuses, but at the end of the day, it comes down to the confrontation against their religion.  No wonder neocons are all old - their brains have deteriorated to the point that they now no longer understand basic logic.

*According to the neocon, an "atheist" is any non-protestant, excluding Muslims, Catholics, and Jews, who are terrorists, the antichrist, and manipulative bastards, respsectively.

Neoliberals want to boycott the Olympics because of China's abominable history of human rights violations.  I mean, it's like, so horrible, what they do and stuff.  Hey, you!  Turn off that TV!  You're supporting tyranny!  What?  You want to know what they've done?  Well, it's all over the news, geez, just go google it.  [Note for those of you who may not get this element of satire: I'm not saying China hasn't violated human rights, just that in this, as in most things, people are too lazy to look up the "facts" they use to justify telling me what to do.  If you want me to do something, at least tell me why.]

Both groups claim that watching the Olympics on tv will directly support the Chinese government.  However, all revenue from the Olympics comes from tourism, not from tv advertisements (which profit only the tv station itself).  Yeah, yeah, China could get the Olympics again if we watch the tv!  But even then, it will still only be the people traveling there who will be lending any kind of support to their government.  For that matter, those of us who live here need to take a good long look at our own government before we condemn foreign systems, particularly when we're supporting them every day in other ways, which brings me to my next point...

This weekend, I had the fortune (or misfortune, depending on how you view it) to attend a retreat for student leaders.  At one point, they gave us these cute little engraved recycled-paper notebooks.  We were all admiring them, when one girl at my table saw the inevitable sticker bearing those dreaded words: MADE IN CHINA.  She was horribly affronted, and immediately went to go complain to the adult staff members in charge of the retreat.  She did this less because of China's political policies and more because of the famed sweatshop labor that gets us cheap goods from the country, among others.

Now imagine that you are a woman in China.  You work at a sweatshop - long hours of hard work for little pay.  But it's enough to keep your family surviving.  Your life is full of fatigue and often misery, but you do not starve, and you have time to live and play with your family.  If Americans stop buying those factory products?  Your friend is fired, for no good reason, just because they didn't want to pay her anymore.  Not enough profit, they said.  You watch her leave, sobbing.  A month later, you hear that she starved to death.  You work even harder, hoping for a raise, or anything - just keeping what you have will keep you and your family alive for at least another week.  One day, they announce that Americans simply aren't buying their products any more.  You can all go home.  "Home?" you ask, "But what will we eat?"  No one seems to hear you - their eyes are glazed over, their brains refusing to feel what they've just heard. There's nothing you can do.

The bottom line is that those factories are horrible places to work or (in some cases) live.  You work long hours, often every day a week, often in unsafe or uncomfortable conditions.  You earn just enough to scrape by, for all that work.  But where would you be without it?  When the factories close, the workers starve.  Boycotting is NOT the way to solve that particular issue.  I don't like the situation any more than you do, but try finding some real, productive ways to solve it, besides just shutting down their industry altogether.



And I swear, if I hear ONE MORE FUCKING WORD about race or racism, I'm going for scream loud enough for you ALL to hear me.  I got hit by Xanga and whiny college students about it at the same time.  Ugh.  People keep talking about it and politicizing it so much that they're making it into an issue even when it isn't one.  Or, rather, they're addressing hardcore, recognizable racism.  They don't address the fact that 90% of the black students at the retreat had isolated themselves at a single, homogeneous table.  They don't address the fact that a black student organization feels like it needs to exist on campus - and it's one of the three biggest groups!  If anyone ever tried to start a white student organization, there might be all of five interested students, even though Agnes Scott is primarily white.  As much as I hate the handicap of appearing white in this country (YES, it's much more of a handicap than being anything else, except maybe Asian), I think I would much prefer being white and not having any sense of racial pride than being any other race, and holding these insidiously racist beliefs.  Of course, I think that even if I had been taught pride in being a racial minority, I would have shed it, as I have shed my mother's even more blatant white pride and racism, but again, it may be partially cultural, so there's no real way to know for sure.  I just have a really good hunch.


In summation: buy stuff from China if you need it and shut up about melanin and marginal facial bone distinctions.  kthxbye.

For the purpose of this entry, I will be refering to all militaristic totalitarian political systems in a chunk.  Basically, the main one I have in mind is fascism, but in case my readers haven't noticed, I believe in a vast political spectrum and "chunking" in this manner is the only way to accurately describe all political-economic systems.  Furthermore, to me, politics and economics are so entertwined that I use them virtually interchangably.  I understand the nuances, and I just don't want to get bogged down in those tiny details (and particulars about precise phrasing) in this blog.  Also, this is the second in a four(?) part series on politics that I'm planning, so hold on.  I'm going somewhere, I promise.

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Militaristic political systems are based on a few essential founding premises:

1. National govenment should exist
2. Encouragement of blind patriotism
3. Religion as a tool of and partner with the state
4. Basic in-group psychology

Obviously, all of these things are related, and all are fundamentally designed to increase the power of the state.  Hence, we have "totalitarian/militaristic" in the title.  There are theoretical totalitarian political systems that are peaceful, but generally they would never last too long, because they have to convince the public that there's a need for all this money that's being stolen in taxes.  A notable exception could be some variety of a collectivist political system, discussed below.  This sort of system would still grant dictatorial powers the latitude to take as much money as they desire "for the public good," but it is somewhat less realistic than the militaristic variety of despotism, because it gives people entirely too much credit.

Collectivistic political systems as defined below require that the general public either voluntarily gives up or accepts the theft of the products of their labor.  They require compassion (at least in the easy sense), trust, and some manner of cohesiveness without a binding factor like in-group psychology.  Militaristic political systems, however, feed people's instinctive need for releasing aggression, tribal warfare, emotional comfort, intellectual complacancy, and most of the needs fulfilled by watching sports.  It is much easier to gain control of an unwitting populace by convincing them that they need to "defend" themselves, or by convincing them of theology and nationalism, than it ever would be to convince them that they need to give up their income to feed an unknown starving family five thousand miles away.  Personal need will always be a greater motivator, in the large-scale political sense, and this is why we have not historically seen peaceful large-scale collectivist societies; in order to maintain existence, they must morph from collectivism to militarism.

So, let me explain a little bit about "in-group/out-group" psychology.
Basically, in the field of psychology, there are all sorts of different perspectives - lenses, if you will - by which to examine a particular phenomenon.  For instance, dreams can be looked at from a neuroscience perspective (the physical causes and reactions in the brain that trigger dreams), from a Freudian perspective, from a developmental perspective, from a social perspective.... I think you get the idea.  The present topic is largely relevant to two fields or perspectives of psychology: evolutionary and social.  Evolutionary psychologists seek to find historical sources for our instinctive genetic psychological tendencies.  In particular, they examine how a trait would have been advantageous and facilitated survival, reproduction, and childrearing, thus enabling the gene(s) coding for the trait to be passed on and become more prominent in the species as a whole.  Social psychologists seek to explain our needs and behavior in the context (or absence) of other human beings.  They study things like the influences of other people on individual decisions, thoughts, and feelings, particularly in a certain context.  For instance, Stanley Milgram's famous experiment demonstrated that, when asked to administer electric shock to people in the next room, nearly everyone went all the way to the highest level of shock, which was marked as lethal.  Why did they do this?  Perhaps they "trusted" the experimenters.  Perhaps "someone else will just do it anyway."  Perhaps they felt cowed by apparent authority.  (Interestingly, more people went higher on the scale when an "authority" figure in a white coat told them to, as compared to people who were directed by a scientist in plainclothes.)  Perhaps they had extreme bloodlust.  (I'm kidding there- the experimenters noted that almost all the subjects were under deep distress).  At any rate, it's obvious that people, in general, can be convinced to do horrible things when the conditions are right.

In-group/out-group psychology theorizes (again from the evolutionary perspective) that in early human development, tribes of people which were protective of close relatives (tribe members) and critical of or violent towards distantly related groups (other tribes), would be more likely to survive as a whole.  The altruistic soldier willing to give his life for the clan may be bad for his own genetic survival, but he is good for the survival of similar genes in his whole tribe's population.  This has been adapted to social psychology, in the sense that people (especially those who are uneducated/untraveled) are likely to shun people who are seen as "different" in appearance, culture, language, or religion, and accept and welcome people who are seen as similar.  Furthermore, most people are capable of dehumanizing such different, "out-group" individuals, to the extent that they can morally justify murder.  Just look at many modern evangelicals, who strive to dehumanize atheists and homosexuals, among others.  They are definitely not the only culprits, as there are racists, linguistic superiorists, and other ethnocentrists evident in our society even today.  Clearly, many of these groups have heavy overlapping; that's because the people who are most susceptible to one (culturally or genetically) are also equally susceptible to another, and many people require more than one in order to be completely convinced.
[For more information on the foundations of the formation of this theory in social psychology (independent of evolutionary theorizing), see this for a basic introduction to "social identity theory".]

"In-group/Out-group" psychology explains patriotism/xenophobia (which usually go hand-in-hand), religious intolerence, and racism, which are some of the prime components of a totalitarian/militaristic system.  If the public can be convinced that their godly country is the best, and that others outside of that country are godless, savage heathens, then that public can start to dehumanize the "out-group," which makes it "ethical" (and sometimes "necessary") to harm or kill them.  People start to see warfare as a game to be "won," like a sport.  They become justified in their aggression by the (inappropriately applied) "need" to protect their own family, or even divine mandate.  Religion is a useful tool in controlling the minds of individuals, convincing them that even their thoughts are monitered and will be punished.  And, of course, the winners in all of this are the dictators who, in holding their political, economical, and social tyranny over their public, gain virtually limitless power, worship, and money.

I can't pick one.  I loved GHP, TIP, SPECTACLES, Girl Scout Camp (Misty Moutain!), warm summer nights with George back in high school, hanging out in my dorm-house with Michelle or Gina, graduation, walking outside in shorts and a tank top, sunscreen, sandy water, short haircuts, light and carefree music, staying out with friends until 2AM - not drinking or anything stupid, just hanging out, frozen fruit and ice cream bars, swimming pools, cooking and hanging out with Steven, random sleepovers and midnight kroger runs with Courtney, long showers after a sweaty day, crisp grass under the shade of giant trees, sneaking into the school after it was seasonally out-of-order, and getting takeout to eat while sitting under the stars in the open trunk of my car.

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Of course they can!

Generally, the problem with teenage mothers is that the same characteristics that caused them to get pregnant in the first place will continue to cause insurmountable road blocks (for instance, they probably won't choose long-term planning over short term rewards).

Also, having a child (and keeping it) can be very physically, emotionally, and academically stressful at that age.  The social stigma attached, and the requirements for taking care of the child, will drain the mother, and she may not even want to succeed.

Regardless, she can still make the proactive decision to do something she loves with her life.  She can hold a steady career once her child is old enough for preschool, she can find love and get married, she can go back to school once her child(ren) are a little older, and she can make a happy, healthy life for herself. Almost anyone has the capacity to do these things, regardless of what tragedy they have experienced.  I just wish more people recognized the awesome power of their own determination and skill.
   

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