raybear: (scream)
[personal profile] raybear
I have an anonymous conservative reader of my journal. It is perhaps a one-time thing, they happened to click on me and glanced at that post and got all frothy and wrote their rant. Which, whatever, I get all frothy and write rants all the time here -- but you know where to find me when you want to engage me about it. I'm not sure what this person is intending with their commenting anonymously to accomplish, other than irritation. Cause if they wanted to dialogue for real, well, its a slow night at work and I have two more hours, so we can have this discussion. We can talk about fears and misplaced anger and excessive retaliation and economy and solutions. I'll go there with you, we can do it together.

Date: 2007-08-17 02:13 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] eloquentwthrage.livejournal.com
I disallowed anonymous comments in my LJ for that reason. If you don't have the balls to tell me who you are, I don't need to know your opinion.

Date: 2007-08-17 04:50 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] prettyboi.livejournal.com
that is an excellent idea *goes and changes settings*

Love won't pay the bills.

Date: 2007-08-17 07:46 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] 0595.livejournal.com

I love getting anonymous comments, especially ones with good grammar.

Re: Love won't pay the bills.

Date: 2007-08-17 12:18 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] raybear.livejournal.com
I don't get them very often, and 90% of those are spam. This one was sort of exciting to me for being so well-written, if not exactly well thought out.

Date: 2007-08-17 05:10 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] broqued.livejournal.com
apparently, methodists like cruising your LJ. that's comforting to know, no?

Date: 2007-08-21 01:12 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] raybear.livejournal.com
i grew up in a methodist church that was really good to me, so i have a soft spot for them -- so i was excited that Elvira Arellano sought refuge in one! then this commenter had to go and disillusion me by reminding us of the other methodists......

Date: 2007-08-17 06:20 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] thedemonnemo.livejournal.com
While I am a NON-anonymous conservative reader of your blog (Actually I don't think I'm THAT conservative, it's just that you kids on the El Jay are really really really liberal) I find it odd that that poster would choose to go "stealth" you seem genial enough about intellignet discourse and furthermore what they wrote was pretty civil in that no epithets were slung and no one's mama got insulted, so it seems they would do the courtious thing and sign-in or if they didn't have an account, at least leave an explination of who they are and how they found you.

and PS

Date: 2007-08-17 06:27 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] thedemonnemo.livejournal.com
That being said, I agree with the poster in spirit, except I would chose to only deport as opposed to long-term imprisonment, historically that's how our government deals with non-violent, non-citizen, seditionists.

Re: and PS

Date: 2007-08-21 01:06 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] raybear.livejournal.com
Ok, I've spent 4 days formulating a response to this argument.....well, not really, I was out of town at a family gathering and just got home late last night. While I was gone, someone else responded with some interesting points I hadn't immediately thought of: http://raybear.livejournal.com/805591.html?thread=3364311#t3364311

I was thinking about the "criminal" aspect of the argument. One, I find it strange that people get so up in arms about "social security theft" when it comes to undocumented workers doing work. From my understanding, the majority of people are using a false number to get/keep a job, and then they are paying taxes to the government. On behalf of this mysterious number, so really, the government gets their money and some random citizen is benefiting by having more money in their SS account. Its not like credit card fraud or something, where money is being stolen -- its actually being contributed.

Also, as far as the Methodist Poster's argument about her being a criminal who gets what she deserves....this seems like an outrageous over-punishment for what amounts to a civil crime. Sending a mother to another country and leaving the son behind, parent-less? What about his rights "as an american citizen"? Or hell, just as a human being. That is amazingly cruel and I'm always astounded at how people get so upset about the issue to such a degree that they don't seen to think about the long term effects of this actions to simply "teach a lesson". And what lesson are we even teaching?

The MP also starts off the comment saying that Elvira is no Rosa Parks because she isn't a u.s. citizen, but then refers to Elvira's son, a u.s. citizen, in a dehumanizing way as "an anchor baby". Ok, this point is less an argument and just an observation that bothered me as far as how callously people talk about real people's lives for the sake of politics.

From what I've read Elvira was issued a deportation demand (or whatever the proper term is) 5 years earlier, but she appealed to local and national congress people, who fought on her behalf and assured she could stay and they would work to make her a citizen or at least a legal permanent resident, etc.. So this is a rather muddled issue, the whole "she broke the law" thing is fuzzy when the law is in the process of being changed, bent, excepted, erased, rewritten, etc. and you have some lawmakers telling you one thing and some law enforcers telling you another and internet bloggers telling you something entirely different.

Wrt the issue in general, the whole argument of "they are taking jobs" feels to me about pitting two groups, both battling poverty, against each other. Especially since the majority of people declaring it are people would never go near those jobs, people who are firmly middle- and upper- class and who are benefiting from corporations who do not pay living wages to workers -- any workers. I'm also curious as to why we always want to extremely punish the undocumented workers to taking the under-the-table jobs, but we rarely ever punish the people/companies who hire them. Well, I'm not that curious -- it seems to be very plainly classism, just like in sex work, it seems to be sexism that clients are rarely caught/punished. I bet if offering sex for money was punished like a speeding ticket or even a DUI, but soliciting sex was a felony, that business would go under very quickly. I'm not advocating this position, just a hypothetical that illuminates who there's more than one way to view the situation and I don't think the one way we see it is objectively correct.

If businesses would lose their licenses almost immediately for knowingly employing undocumented workers (and suffer LARGE fines for even unknowingly doing it, to encourage them to make the effort to confirm/know), then there would be no jobs for people to take, and no motivation to come over here and work. Then we wouldn't even need a fence. Hell, we could welcome people to come as long as they want and stay as long as they want, since they aren't working, they have lots of time to shop, to spend money here in our economy and maybe we could stop borrowing so much credit from overseas.

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