> On Tue, Jun 23, 2009 at 11:03 AM, Michael Smith<mjs at smithbowen.net>
> wrote:
>> One can sympathize with lifestyle demands -- I like seeing girls
>> in bikinis as much as anybody -- but still regard them as rather
>> shallow.
>
> Jesus H. Spoken like only a First World white male could say it. How
> far do you want to go with typifying something as a "lifestyle
> demand": segregated water fountains, buses, and schools seem like--I
> mean, who cares, it's just a bus? Abortion, like transgender and
> homosexual politics, is definitely a lifestyle choice, and pretty damn
> shallow. Who cares about the desires of a bunch of fags and women and
> in-betweens? Their needs are all shallow and no substitute for a real,
> manly politics: class-based, anti-imperialist, anti-U.S., absolutely
> nothing smelling of identity politics.
aside from which, it missed the point.
doss decided that the economic concerns in Iran were just like those in the Soviet Union.
I pointed out that it wasn't comparable since iran was also dealing with gender segregation and a theocratic state and used a few examples of how that played out in daily lives.
They all decided that what I'd been saying is that people are in the streets because they can't wear lipstick.
The problem was entirely mine: I used representative examples that assumed some modicum of knowledge about the daily lives of iranians. I haven't been watching the news, so I thought this was being covered.
E.g., baby names are significant if the names are Kurdish and you're a Kurd and you can't name your kid a kurdish name because the government wants to needle the Kurds some more. They do this periodicially to punish religion and political minorities and outcasts. They are significant because such rules have been enforced in order to refuse to let people use Persian names because Persian names represent the possibility of another way of imagining nationality that competes with Islam.
The rest of my examples were illustrative in just this way, but to get it, would require some semblance of interest in the topic at hand: iran.
shag
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