Big Fat Hairy Living

MacHeist is a great bundle of 12 cool applications for only $US 49. It includes cool stuff like 1Password and CSSEdit. Even if you only need two of the applications in the bundle, it’s still worth it. Hurry up, though, because there are only four days left to buy it.

Update: The sale’s over!

Just off the top of my head, I can think of eight nine ten bears (and one additional non-bear) I know who have moved up to Canada from the US. I wonder if this is a trend? I’ve tried searching the net to see if I can find any news stories or statistics about gay immigration to Canada from the US, but I can’t seem to find any.

In any case, this is good news. I want bears to keep coming here until we have them all. Flee the incipient American theocracy and come to the land of gay freedom, my hairy brethren! I promise free blow jobs for you all!

I just went to the Apple Store to pick up a copy of Office 2008 for my Mac. I ended up picking up Office 2008 and a hot fat raunchy pig bear.

In the past week, I’ve discovered that two bear gays I interact with on Livejournal have electrical engineering degrees. Until this week, I thought I knew only one other gay electrical engineer, and now I’ve discovered I know three.

A loyal, red-bearded reader sent me a link to a video clip of some hot cops in action. Excuse me, officer; there’s a disturbance in my pants…

When you tell a six foot two, 350 pound bear with a donkey sized cock that you want to lick his size 13 boots and he replies with “Maybe I’ll make you blow me until I nut all over them, then set you to work cleaning them up while I fuck you as incentive to do a good job.”

A meme about privilege originally designed as an exercise for first year university students has been making the rounds, and the reaction has been decidedly negative. The fact that so many people have reacted so negatively to it probably proves the point the exercise was trying to make. People usually get uncomfortable when their core assumptions are challenged, and one of the thing most people in our society want to believe about themselves is that they’re just regular people who have never had any special advantages.

So in that post, someone complains that people made fun of him because he was perceived as rich. As bad as that is, I can’t imagine a better reason to be mocked. Really. Imagine how much more awful it would be for kids make fun of you for being poor, then to go home to a family that can’t afford to put food on the table, can’t afford books or bus fare or toys or computers or college education or medical care or the time to do anything other than work constantly trying to make ends meet. Economics and social class make a great difference in people’s lives and that’s what privilege means.

The sad fact is that children make fun of pretty much anyone different and nobody is special for having been taunted as a child. I had kids make fun of me because my parents couldn’t afford the latest style in running shoes, because I was fat, because I was smart, because I wore glasses, and a zillion other things. Lots of people suffer, and suffering doesn’t erase the fact that the economic and social class of one’s parents is one of the biggest predictors of future economic achievement.

I don’t think need to say anything more about such a vicious, defensive post. Just read some of the comments to find a bunch of people who think that their suffering means that they didn’t also benefit from privilege. Happiness is not privilege.

Some people complain about the list being too Amerocentric. I disagree and think that’s completely appropriate. Despite the American mythology that anyone can make it if he just works hard enough, there are few industrialized countries that are more class stratified than America. Take the country I live in, for example. It has a culture that’s very similar to, and in some cases almost indistinguishable from, that of America, but by some measures it has almost two and a half times the relative social mobility.

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In response to a comment I made on his post about that meme, Bullneck wrote to me: (emphasis mine):

My parents both put themselves through college with their own debts, and my dad didn’t graduate until he was 36 (after a long delay in Southeast Asia). The books they owned collectively did not cost more than $100 in 1980s dollars, and we’d head to the library when we didn’t have books on hand at the house — for free. It chagrins me to see this listed as ‘privilege’ when what it really shows is that my parents worked hard and had the prescience to make time to read and share things they enjoyed with me.

and

Are there any dilettante asshole millionaires who’ve never worked a day in their lives on your friendslist?

and

I have lots of hard-working people who’ve had to struggle to get their due, and who primarily occupy a working class/middle class/student bracket of society. To chalk this all up to unearned privilege is frustrating, especially as written by teachers for an introductory college course (the origin of the meme).

Without trying to single out Bullneck, I’m hard pressed to think of quotes that more clearly encapsulate the underlying assumptions of our society’s culture than these, especially the bolded part.

The whole point of the exercise is that one does not have to be a millionaire to be privileged. Look at me: I have a home with heating and air conditioning, with indoor plumbing and running hot water, with a bed to sleep on that’s free of bugs, with access to medical care, and with a childhood with parents who were there and who provided for me and loved me. I live in a society where there are free libraries, where credit is available to allow people to go to university — where there is a functioning post-secondary education system in the first place! — and where my parents had money to spare to buy books and music. I have had and continue to have opportunities that literally billions of people throughout history and people who are living right now could never and will never have. There are plenty of people who work just as hard as me and plenty of people who work way harder who never have the opportunities I’ve had. You know how easy the middle class have it in our society? Easy. Really fucking easy.

The first step toward a true meritocracy where people are not just rewarded for hard work but also supported by a social safety net is awareness: people need to realize that one of the biggest factors predicting their economic success is completely out of their control and that people are where they are largely because of who they are, not how hard they work. I am privileged, and I don’t apologize for that — how can I apologize for something that I’m not responsible for? — but I am aware of it, and I’m very, very grateful. There’s a kernel of truth in that old saying, “There but for the grace of God go I.”

Update: My sympathy for the suffering and downtrodden upper class: watch it wane.

Scott kindly pointed me toward the hot bear in today’s issue of the Mope and Wail.