1. Don’t vote. Or do, I mean, if you, like, care about, well… anything. But if you don’t care, don’t vote. A very well done bit of reverse psychology, I think.
2. TCHO is this new “startup” style chocolatier which also does social programs that are sort of open source experiments with chocolate growers to systematize the method of growing, picking, fermenting cacao, and making your own chocolate from hulled beans. Expensive but looks interesting. Boingboing TV factory visit.

hlwiley asked me in a recent comment whether I thought were any useful analogies to be made in the -isms spaces. I responded that while I thought in general, analogies are really sticky and tricky and dangerous things, I would think about it and get back to it.

Here’s my attempt at starting the conversation.

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In which I shall attempt to explain how I think entitlement/privilege is related to docentry/tokenism, reverse racism and how I think you can use your entitlement/privilege for good.

Updated: To try to clarify a bit.

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After a particularly good talk with H, I have a lot to say. I want to break it down and talk about it in chunks both from the point of view of not knowing exactly how much energy I’ll have tonight to do it and also from the point of view of being able to manage any ensuing discussion.

First, let me talk about my posting, as a reminder for regular readers and for those who’ve missed previous discussion.

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An almost 17-year old New York Times article.

An aware (we presume) surgeon.

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Feel free to join in, if you like.

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I got an e-mail last night that got me thinking. It was from someone who’d taken exception to the language I used in my latest “Dear White People…” post. At issue were many interrelated things, but one primary concern expressed to me was my choice of the pronoun “you” when I spoke to and about white people. One point brought home to me was that at least this person in specific felt like those “you” pronouns were calling em out to speak on behalf of all white people.

I want to say a little bit about both language and rhetoric in my essays as well as my feelings about my allies, and finally touch a little on tokenizing and being tokenized (i.e. being called upon to speak for a group either in a formal or an informal capacity).

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I won’t give specifics, but I want to say that H is my best friend and co-conspirator and am very happy to have her in my life.

The mere fact that when I am feeling most at sea and most doubt my own sanity, I can talk with her and be reassured that I am okay is worth, well, anything. But it’s definitely worth being able to provide the same sort of support for her when she needs it.

Beyond all her other wonderfulness, this is what I enjoy the most - simply getting each others’ backs, being able to care for each other, being able to provide the support for each other that allows us go go out into the world and do the work that’s important to ourselves and to each other.

I feel like I can never thank H enough for that.

It seems to me that this kind of system could be used for other -isms aside from sizeism, but the folks over at Big Fat Blog have a new scoring system for blog entries and other Internet sources that support reader comments. The scoring system is based on both the tenor of the original article/post/entry as well as on how long it takes for an -ism comment to show up.

Obviously the scoring system presupposes that both the scorer and the scorer’s audience have the same sort of sense of what’s pro- and anti- to whatever cause you’re talking about, but I think it is helpful to overall civil rights movements that are based on rhetoric to have a shorthand for talking about the rhetoric of the opposing side(s) when talking about those sides.

Here’s the post, and also the comment that really gives specifics on the scoring system.

In other news, my WordPress blogging host is being really slow and laggy, and I can’t honestly tell if it’s the network set up at work, or that the host is effed up. It was working fine yesterday, though, unless my time sense was a lot more screwed up from having food poisoning than I thought.

In the tradition of Jonathan Swift:

The post.