Hiromi_X

I mentioned in my previous post that people ought to be concerned about pro-ana (pro-anorexic) websites, but I wasn't suggesting that there should be any sort of criminal charges brought against anyone who created such a site or hosted one. Issues of enforcement aside, how culpable are the people who provide such information anyway?

When I was suicidal, I did a lot of methodical research, all of it through the internet. I found a motherlode of information on different ways to do yourself in and where to get any equipment needed to do so. A suicide attempt can go horribly wrong; you could end up a vegetable, a partial vegetable, injured, or disfigured in some way. If you're serious about offing yourself, you can't take half measures.

However, I was seriously suicidal long before I did the research. It wasn't like I was bored and impressionable and happened to stumble upon that information. It takes some interest and determination to find it. My decision to die had nothing to do with whether or not I had any information. Is a website for suicidal people somehow different from a group of us getting together and exchanging advice and cautionary tales about suicide attempts. Should such conversations or meetings be banned as well?

Posted by Hiromi at 3:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)

My mind is boggling. Polls are now showing that 19% of Obama's supporters will vote for McCain if Hillary wins the nomination, while 28% of her supporters would do the same if Obama were nominated.

1) I wonder what proportion of the Disaffected 19%/28% are independent voters. Probably only a very few are.

2) Of those who are not independent voters -- i.e., Democrats -- precisely what the fuck do they think they're doing? I'm assuming that affiliation with the Democratic Party is motivated by a support for progressive policies. What's in their mind, then, voting for a conservative like McCain?

3) I don't think that the Disaffected 19/28 can be glibly explained by identity politics. I don't want to hear them stereotyped as angry minorities or angry women. Or as sexist or racist. Nor do I want to dismiss them as personality cultists, or petulant babies. This is indicative of serious divisions in the party. I should hope that members of the party would help and support each other with their complementary strengths, whether it be experience/ability or the ability to lead and unite people. I hope that's not asking too much.

Seriously, what the fuck? Look, I'm not crazy about Hillary. I would vastly prefer Obama as president, but I'd also vastly prefer Hillary over another goddamn Republican president! Let's also not forget that there is a risk of fallout in Senate and House races. And John Paul Stevens is gonna be 88 soon. He seems pretty healthy, but who knows?

Please, let this just be a weird blip in the polls. Please don't let us damn ourselves to four more years of Republican fucking bullshit at our own hands.

Posted by Hiromi at 6:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (17)

I hope that everyone's had an opportunity to either watch or read Barack Obama's speech on race yesterday in its entirety. Soundbites won't do the speech justice; it's a complicated, nuanced point of view that can't be conveyed in just a few sentences. I haven't heard any other politician successfully cross both racial and class lines to get at the heart of the problem.

Importantly, he addresses the anger of all those who feel themselves disenfranchised, not only blacks who still suffer from the legacy of institutionalized racism, but also whites who have lost economic security as the global economy has been restructured and do not feel that their whiteness has conferred them any privilege. He includes the struggles of more recent immigrants (read: Hispanics and Asians). People are angry for a reason. It is no cliche to suggest that we listen to them, black, white, or whatever, and understand where that anger comes from. They are our fellow citizens, after all.

In that speech, his calls for change and unity are substantial, not mere catchphrases. He tackled a difficult topic with subtle understanding and substance. He didn't dodge or duck any punches, and neither did he deny the seeming contradictions in his loyalty to his pastor. I really hope that the rest of the public has the patience to sort through the complexities there.

No "Buyer's Remorse" for me. I'm more convinced than ever that I made the right decision voting for Obama in the primary.

Posted by Hiromi at 8:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Did early voting today for the Texas Democratic Primary -- yay me!

For the first time ever, my vote as a Democrat in Texas for a national election has not been a grudging, symbolic gesture; it might actually count for something.

I mean, the electoral college will still make my vote moot come November, but I feel like I at least get to influence the choice of the Democratic candidate.

Posted by Hiromi at 6:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (10)

So.....I'm carless. I got rid of it because I'm sick of life-sprawl and the literal sprawl of our cities that sucks the life out of living.

At first, the financial downsizing I experienced after my marriage fell apart was hard to bear because I had to support so much extra weight. I had to call in artificial life support from my parents. By getting rid of my new car, I can function more on my own.

More importantly, I chose to drop out. I hate what car-centric policies have done to our cities. The metastasization of roadways, which feeds into and off of relentless capitalism, has not only destroyed the aesthetics of public spaces, but has also created empty homogeneity. Imagining ourselves as little more than economic animals, we accept the soulless logic of office parks and suburbs connected by concrete slabs. Places have been stripped of history and meaning. That is our world and we don't care.***

Well, like a hippie throwback, I'm opting out of this system. I'm on my bike or on foot or on a bus. But boy does it really suck at times, especially in the shitty weather we have here, where the sun doesn't feel like a distant star but like an angry schoolmarm smacking all exposed skin areas with a wooden paddle. And I find my range is necessarily limited to those friendly to me and my bike or the bus. It's hard to live by your personal philosophies, trust me. But I just could not reconcile my strongly held beliefs with my own lifestyle.

What I like best is being part of the environment, natural and manmade. When you're walking, you're down there in the bottom of the ecosystem. Likewise if you're on a bicycle. You can look out, across, and up. When you're in public transport, you rub elbows with people you'd never normally encounter, and from whom you insulate yourself. On my motorcycle, I'm not only part of the environment, I'm actively participating in my journey from A to B. I have to operate this machine that's an extension of myself. I have to be hyperaware or I get squashed by a cager. I'm doing shit; I'm not passive.

I'm well aware that my actions alone won't transform Austin or any other place. But I refuse to participate anymore. Slowly, I'm going to walk the walk, and not simply be angry. It's uncomfortable and inconvenient as fuck, but it feels good to have principles and live by them, here in my hippie commune of one.

***While polemical, The Geography of Nowhere explains a lot of what pisses me off.

Posted by Hiromi at 2:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)

Boy, I did not see this coming. Here's a list of my top anticipated scapegoats for the Virginia Tech shootings:

1. Too many guns
2. Too few guns
3. Furriners
4. Lax campus security
5. "Lack of awareness" on how to handle the shooter's prior weird behavior
6. Random crazy motherfuckers (my own personal scapegoat)

I didn't think of Foucault. Thank you Rich Lowry for pointing that out. I never woulda thunk it. Here are his illuminating words, taken from this National Review editorial:

There are many reasons for this [why nothing was done about Cho] — the rise of psychotropic drugs, budget cuts, expanded conceptions of civil rights — but one intellectual current behind the trend was a moral disempowerment of sanity. One of the most influential academics of the late 20th century, Michel Foucault, argued that attempts to label and treat madness were inherently arbitrary and repressive. Academia has been celebrating “transgression” ever since.

Any attempt to romanticize madness has an incontrovertible answer in Cho Seung-Hui. This is what madness truly is: lonely, painful, shattering, and potentially murderous. After seeing the sick trail of misery left by such transgression, can we expend some of the same intellectual energy honoring wholesome normality?

The above two paragraphs are an astoundingly rich motherlode of stupid. Do I even need to rip it apart? I mean golly...I didn't know that leftist intellectuals with a penchant for French philosophers called all the shots at V. Tech. Or that the ghost of Foucault hovers over the shoulders of administrators like some creepy floating Jesus, telling them, Non! Zat Cho, hees not eensane, he's "transgresseeve..." (apologies to the French for my crap rendition of a French accent).

Lowry's argument above is just a laughably bad attempt to paint the incident as yet another example of the moral decay of Amurrica as caused by the intellectual left. However, the below is downright scary:

But Virginia Tech also had to cope with an extremely strict state commitment law that requires that someone represent an “imminent danger” to himself or others before he can be compelled to seek treatment. A judge ruled in 2005 that Cho met this standard, but nothing much came of it (although he reportedly was on an antidepressant). Virginia hasn’t caught up to other states that have begun to recover from the excesses of deinstitutionalization and have made it easier to compel treatment.

What does he mean, "compel treatment"? I somehow doubt he means, "Send the person to a well-funded facility with a hgh staff-to-patient ratio, with his or her livelihood protected by laws forbidding his or her suspension from school or termination of employment, and with all costs covered."

And had Lowry been paying any attention to leftist intellectuals, he would have understood that the lesson to take away from them is that it's much easier to strip away the civil rights of those lacking "wholesome normality."

People like me.

I attempted suicide -- obviously danger to self. I am also an alcoholic -- definite danger to self, possible danger to others. Lowry suggests we loosen interpretations of what constitutes "imminent danger."

So, friends, what should be done with Hiromi, a source of potential danger? Should I have to report to a probation officer of sorts? If I miss an appointment or an AA meeting, do I get whisked off for "treatment?" What if I didn't have insurance? Would I be "compelled" to seek treatment at the nightmarish state mental health facilities? I shudder to think what would happen to me there.

Not that Lowry and his ilk would shudder. I mean, what the fuck? Who cares what happens to nut cases like me -- y'all are safer, right?

Posted by Hiromi at 9:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (14)

I made an informal vow never to talk about abortion on my blog, because conversations of that sort tend to go nowhere fast. I was tempted back in January, after I read the January 21 NYT Sunday Magazine article titled, "Is there a Post-Abortion Syndrome?" (I can't link to the article because it's been archived, and you have to pay to read it). The article featured women activists who, based on their own personal experiences, wished to create a nationwide crusade to ban abortion because women who get abortions end up with serious mental and emotional problems. However, the post-abortion syndrome crusade hasn't gathered much momentum and remains fairly small, and the article pointed out that many women in fact do not suffer emotional issues after having an abortion. The issue resurfaced in this week's Sunday Magazine, in this letter from a reader. He did some googling and came up with an article in The Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry that supports the views of the above crusaders. The article suggests a link between abortion and "elevated rates of subsequent mental health problems, including depression, anxiety, suicidal behaviors, and substance-abuse disorders."

I'm not interested in addressing this debate on its own terms, or in tilting at the patriarchal windmill. What I found compelling was how this particular crusade signals a shift in the abortion debate from arguments based in morality to those based on medicine. The idea of mental health being used as a justification for law is disturbing to me. It's hard for me to say exactly why this is so. It seems new somehow; it's different from moral injunctions by the church, which have been around for centuries. Preventing women from obtaining an abortion on the grounds that it's harmful to their mental health is something that can happen only in our modern "free" societies.

I've been trying to wrap my head around this for a couple of days. The abortion debate usually gets framed as the state's intrusion upon private lives as a violation of rights, but I think that misses a larger point. I've been trying to piece together how the "argument from mental health" is a not an attempt to undermine our rights, but is instead a natural extension of the rights debates that are so integral to our political process. Although women claim to have a "right to privacy" on this matter, there is no "private" any more. The whole rights debate makes what is private public.

What do I mean? Let's look at laws against domestic violence or the neglect of children. By calling upon the state to protect women and children within our homes, we open our private lives to regulation by the state. I'm not saying this is necessarily a bad thing; my point is, the state can now define what is an "acceptable" or "unacceptable" home, and enforce these norms to protect the rights of citizens. When, as a minority, I insist upon laws protecting my civil rights, I am projecting my private designation as Asian female into the public sphere. Again, I'm not saying these things are instrinsically bad; rather, these are examples of the blurring of the distinction between private and public in our political system. The problem is that there is another side to the protection coin: intrusion and oppression.

Back to the post-abortion syndrome crusade. I want to stress that I don't see this as a vast conspiracy, but what I do see is an increasing trend within the mental health professions toward psychopathologization, and an increasing willingness among the general public to accept this. There have always been desirable and undesirable behaviors, but nowadays, these behaviors have been medicalized. So we don't have unruly and unmanageable children, we have children suffering from ADHD. And we have women suffering from post-abortion syndrome. Because we have a system that allows regulation of our private lives, groups that oppose abortion for whatever reason -- and there are many, not all of which are limited to patriarchal concerns -- can call upon the state to outlaw abortion for our own good. And this is not a perversion of the system, but a logical application of it.

You might argue that there are safeguards against excessive intrusion. In a democracy, citizens have input as to what the state regulates and how it does so, but is there equal access to the system by all citizens? Who gets to be a citizen, anyway, and under what criteria? And these days, with the Bush administration increasingly calling for the suspension of legal norms, do citizens really have any say so, and if so, for how long?

I'm sorry if this post is long and rambly, but I'm still trying to make sense of my own thoughts.

Posted by Hiromi at 7:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (22)