Antiauthoritarianism: Illustration via Juxtaposition.

If the above vid is not the perfect illustration of concept I don’t know what is.  This is the most recent YouTube upload by Royalty Soaps, what used to be a one-woman soapmaking business that has grown over several years into something else.  The backstory here seems to be that at some point, the eldest yet still teenaged daughter in some freakishly large Quiverfull-type family consisting of a mother, a father and a dozen(ish) Irish twins* started making soap and with the help and support of that family has become very successful and has now delegated some of her substantial duties to others.

As described in this vid, this woman’s business recently experienced an unexpected and frightening setback and she relied heavily on her family to correct the situation and save the day, which they did in spades.  They also had the time, energy, material resources and desire to throw her an Insta-worthy backyard 25th birthday party in the midst of this family project.  The party was beautiful and the familial love and care given and received there, as documented in this vid…well watch it for yourself and see what you think.  For me, the experience of watching this was somewhat complicated.  I enjoyed it, was moved by it but it made me deeply uncomfortable and thinky…and hungry for salad, cake and sun tea.

What was so deeply disturbing to me about this footage was the backdrop against which it was shot and I’m not referring to her (albeit somewhat disturbing) home state of Texas, or a photo prop.  The backdrop here, as it is most everywhere, is the social context of capitalism and patriarchy and what that means is that, in order for this situation and this footage to exist, this woman has had to comply, comply, comply in order to reap what must be conditional rewards of love; affection; physical presence and caretaking; emotional care and concern; and finally, material things that, under the current system, really only money can buy.  Doesn’t it?  In her case, she has had to buy into the religious, political and social traditions of her family including the patriarchal authority of her parents, the heterosexual and mommy mandates and more in order to have what she has.  Of course, the traditions of her family mirror the traditions of her culture more or less exactly.

Luckily for her there does not seem to be any obvious conflict between her own values, conscience etc. and that of her family (or culture) but what if there was?  What would happen to her if she woke up one day with, say, environmental concerns implicating overpopulation and natalism, or economic concerns implicating capitalism and the money system and the ethics of making and selling soap (or doing anything) for profit?  What if, God forbid, this Quiverfull (or whatever) daughter woke up one day with feminist concerns which implicate all of that plus the destablization of the patriarchal authority of her father/parents, her husband, her church and the State?

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Benefits Attorneys are Professional Gaslighters. Language Itself is Gaslighting. Discuss. Or Don’t, It Really Probably Doesn’t Even Matter.

I spent my entire brief career as an attorney trying to get income- and disability-based benefits for vulnerable people.  It was a grueling and traumatizing career track that I realize now (and kind of realized at the time at different times) was based not in actually helping people by understanding their circumstances and getting people what they desperately needed, but in cruelly gaslighting them and wasting their time and energy doing “intakes” and whatnot when they could least afford the expense.  I have written here before about one potential client that was referred to me by a medical provider because he said people were threatening and following him.  Turns out, this man was quite mentally ill and was having delusions and it was left not up to his doctors (who palmed him off on me) but to me, a young attorney, to put the pieces together for him and to figure out what was really going on, but not before wasting a significant amount of his time.

Of course, even if there were people following and threatening him there is little to nothing a lawyer could’ve done about it.  I told the man to call the police if he felt threatened, and as was the policy of the nonprofit I was working for at the time, got the man’s consent to speak with the referring medical providers about his “case” when what I really wanted to do was punch the lot of them in the mouth for failing their own patient so egregiously and palming him off on me like he was garbage and I was a can.  Don’t even get me started on how much I hated that job.  I wasn’t well liked either and after 10 months was invited to leave.  To be fair, if I hadn’t needed the money myself, having just quit a perfectly good job at a for-profit law firm (which I also hated) in order to take that one, I would’ve quit my dream job at this nonprofit after a couple of weeks once I realized what really went on there, and that “case” with the elderly Spanish-speaking mentally ill man is a decent example of what a day at the office looked like there.  Here’s another:

PSA: How To Report A Threat Of Violence to Increase Chances Of Arrest, Hold & Criminal Charges (Or, The One That Maybe Didn’t Get Away).

It really bothers me that I’m sitting on all this legal knowledge, experience and skill and there’s nothing I can do with or about it.  Because of the pain and symptoms of my disease I am definitely not physically or mentally able to practice law full time anymore, but as I learned early on, to my crushing dismay, there is really no such thing as a part-time attorney.  This profession is still a bros club which means that it requires long hours and plenty of so-called face time, exactly as much as you would expect in order to squeeze most women out of most of the best positions while simultaneously providing cover, excuse and alibi under which powerful men commit adultery, avoid emasculating and squikky domestic chores, and otherwise abuse their power at women’s and everyone’s expense.  Seriously, don’t let the relatively high rate of female law graduates fool you into thinking the law is a reliably safe, lucrative or accessible field for women because it’s definitely not.  Fuck me did I learn that one the hard way.

But you know what?  I’m not dead yet and I’m still breathing and conscious and pissed off enough to write this post so I’m going to write it.  Today, my upstairs neighbor had what was apparently a psychotic break and started throwing bottles of piss and garbage into my yard and threatened my life.  I called the cops and made a report.  He was arrested and removed based on my statement and that of other witnesses (crime victims are technically just witnesses ourselves) and my property manager cleaned and disinfected my yard at my request.  The cops, firemen, first responders and the whole damn town apparently turned up to watch the show.  What they didn’t get to see was the man who threatened and assaulted me get off with a warning or with no consequences at all.  Who knows what the second act will be but the first act saw my assaulter arrested and taken to the hospital first, then presumably to jail.

I am writing this post to give a practical, technical example of proper reporting behavior/content to victims who report threatening or violent behavior, which reporting will leave the cops with little choice but to arrest, hold and charge the perpetrator with a crime.  Little choice is not no choice of course and they could still let him out/off at any time.  That’s probably exactly what will happen in the end, but I gave them as little choice as possible and increased the chances of an arrest, hold and charge the best I could.  Here’s what I did.  The short answer is, you have to answer YES to both of the following questions if you want the incident to be taken as seriously as possible at the reporting stage, hopefully ensuring that your attacker is arrested and taken to jail, that he is held there, and that he is properly charged with a crime.

American Feminism Was (Is) a Psy-Op. Western Medicine Shored up Male Power. Discuss.

This post is about American feminism specifically since that’s the brand I know the most about and the one that affects me every day of my life.  I am not talking about other “feminisms” in other places but here in my own country where, after 100 years of feminist activating, including actual and/or perceived successes American women still face the following oppressive realities of living under American men’s particular brand of patriarchy:

1.  We are removed from natural food and water sources and rely on necrophilic men to supply us and our dependents with the material necessities of life including food, water and plant-based medicine;

2.  Our land including our soil, air, water and biomass (i.e. food, pets and ourselves) have been consistently poisoned since the 1940s (that we know about) with male-made nuclear radiation where this kind of ionizing radiation is known to be dangerous and not compatible with life or health;

3.  Physical and mental “health” have been medicalized where “health problems” are synonymous with “medical problems” meaning that in America, health and Western (capitalistic patriarchal) medicine are the same thing;

4.  All institutional power remains in men’s hands with only token female representation in positions of military, economic, academic, scientific, police, media, regulatory and all relevant political and social power in every area.  This includes 100% male control over Western medicine and therefore over sick and dying bodies.

This is a partial list and a specific progression but it will do for now.

What is a psy-op?  A psy-op or psychological operation appears to be a propaganda campaign including slogans aimed at a political enemy in order to get them to activate toward and achieve state interests.  For our purposes “state” interests is interchangeable with patriarchal interests and refers to male interests and male power achieved at women’s expense while “propaganda” refers to American media including representations of so-called feminist speech.  Working backwards, we can see that once feminists (of all people!) started activating towards and achieving patriarchal goals, there was indeed a propaganda/slogan campaign that preceded it.  Also for our purposes, we can presume both causation and intent where the result of this propaganda campaign — women activating towards male interests — was completely foreseeable and besides, if men didn’t like the result of women activating towards male and against female interests men could’ve stopped or changed it at any time.  Of course they never did.

Cannabis Refugee, Esq. One Year Later. (Meta Discussion)

As my readers may’ve seen or sensed from the recent comments and content on this blog, I have become disillusioned with the CRE writing project and may decide not to continue writing about my experience as a Crohn’s patient trying to survive outside the Western medical system that was not helping me and was only making me worse.  As far as I can tell, this project has not inspired any additional writing or critical thinking on this subject, my posts have not been widely shared or inspired much interesting feedback, and this work has not opened up any additional opportunities for me in the way of writing or activism.  Of course, those were not the reasons I started this blog in the first place but they are to be considered when looking into the future of this project and whether it is in my or anyone’s best interest that it continue.

My original intent in starting this project nearly one year ago was to document my experiences as a seriously ill woman for whom conventional medical treatments were not working including the social, financial and health-related fallout of this system that seems designed to control and punish sick people while we carry the blame and shame for Western medicine’s failures and even its lies.  At times my health and financial situation have been so precarious that I actually believed (and still do believe) that I am going to die here, alone and in the middle nowhere, and I wanted the truth about what happened to me to be known or at least knowable by those who would wonder what the hell could’ve possibly happened that led to that sad and lonely end.

The Absurdity of the Euthanasia Discussion in the Absence of Effective Medicine and Social Support for the Seriously Chronically Ill.

I cannot tell you how absurd it is to be seeking euthanasia as the final end to this awful Crohn’s journey when I’m not suicidal and I don’t want to die.  What I do want, all of which is illustrated brilliantly in this clip, is 1. effective medical treatment for my disease, or failing that, consistent access to effective pain and symptom relief, in my case medical marijuana which has been used successfully for thousands of years to ease specifically gut ailments and which use is supported in contemporary peer-reviewed medical literature particularly for Crohn’s; 2. social support with fulfilling basic tasks and the activities of daily living like shopping, cleaning, cooking and the like; and 3. to be relieved of external constraints that make existing as a chronically ill person a living fucking hell and a consistent nightmare, which constraints have nothing to do with being ill and everything to do with being an oppressed person and failed consumer/producer under capitalism and patriarchy.  Constraints like poverty.  Fear of (and actual) male violence.  Disability-based (and all) discrimination.  Things like that.

But I can’t have any of those things — effective medical treatment, social support, and freedom from oppression — because under the current system those things don’t actually exist so the easiest thing for everyone would be for me to simply disappear or to have never been born in the first place.  Failing that we have euthanasia otherwise known as assisted dying or medically assisted suicide.  Of course, poor and other unsupported “euthanasia candidates” — who likely don’t have $12,000 and the good health and social support needed to have their efforts rubber stamped/make it official — just know and experience this process as good old-fashioned suicide.  Who knows what Chris Rock really thinks about euthanasia for seriously ill and dying people but he’s not wrong to see the absurdity in it, at least under the current system.

Crohn’s Disease is a Terminal Illness. Coming to Terms.

After researching this disease for going on 6 years now, I believe I have come to a rational conclusion about Crohn’s disease which is that it is not a so-called incurable progressive disease but a fatal one: based on all the evidence including anecdotal evidence from patients themselves I now believe that Crohn’s disease is a terminal illness.  I have more or less concluded that before but for some reason I hadn’t yet come to terms with it.  It’s not easy to come to terms with something like that but not because I suffer from what is almost certainly going to cause my untimely death but because everyone, and I mean absolutely everyone is lying their asses off about Crohn’s disease including how “treatable” it is, what kind of quality of life Crohn’s patients can reasonably expect, how predictably disabling it is and why, and how it’s probably going to end.

But before we get to the end it’s important to start at the beginning and admit what Crohn’s disease is at base: Crohn’s patients, including myself, have to medicate in order to eat.  And that is serious, very serious indeed.  If there is anything that is any less compatible with life than a disease that prevents the sick person from eating I can’t think of it.  A disease that prevented the sick person from breathing wouldn’t be any less compatible with life than Crohn’s is, it would just be quicker.