Junk Activism

According to this post on New York Daily News, a protest of Rent-A-Center was staged last Saturday for renting computers and appliances at ridiciulously high prices.

From the article:

Activists feel the Texas-based corporation takes advantage of inner-city residents who can’t afford to pay outright for new appliances. Rent-A-Center offers seemingly cheap deals, but the numbers quickly add up, activists and some shoppers say.

Strangely enough, this protest is led by Al Sharpton, who has found a new niche in protesting with lousy consumers who victimize their bad spending habits.  Or maybe he just loves being loud.

Brooklyn, please.  Here’s a few tips from “Junk Activism’s Responsible Consumerism 101“:

1) Stop renting your toys and appliances.  It’s cheesy, it’s wasteful, and of course you’re going to pay a shitload more than something is worth.  For a business, that’s the point of renting instead of selling.

2) Read the fine print before you sign anything.

3) Do the math before you sign anything.

4) Relax.  You don’t need a 1,000,000″ HDTV ultra high-res Samsung plasma TV right away, anyway.  Idiot.

So, put your signs down.  Just go shop somewhere else.

Ah, my favorite Junk Activists of all time, the Westboro Baptist Church, has one again made the news. Their protests are always good times, but to say the least I’m pretty damn confused about the point of this one.

This time they’ve turned their attentions to Portland State University to spread their message of God-fueled hatred protest Portland’s gender neutral potties.

I always thought that the only reason we have seperate bathrooms to begin with is because each gender pisses on the seat in their own way and the other doesn’t want to deal with it….and maybe Portland doesn’t care who’s making a mess anymore.   Besides, don’t we all have “gender neutral” bathrooms in our homes?  It is sinful for a man to piss in a toilet instead of a urinal?  Is it wrong for a woman to piss where a man hath spilled thine urine?  Was that in the Book of Lavatory, Chapter 6, Verse 2?

All four of them show up to protest…well, we know “to get attention” is really why:

She [Libby Phelps],  seemed to be taking the melee in stride, even welcoming the counter-protests’ attention. “I love it! It’s awesome,” she said, with a kind of giddy glee. “This is my favorite part, I love it when people come and block my sign, it’s awesome. Cause it draws so much more attention over here, and so people come over and look and be like, oh what’s the big the big fuss over there? And they’ll come over and look.”

Um, yes, it’s so much fun to travel to Oregon to get blocked, laughed at, and publicly ridiculed by a large number of peaceful Portlanders.

To Westboro Church: Kudos you on the awesome scam you’ve organized to raise funds, travelling the country to perform rainbow-flag-stomping antics.  Is this from selling M&Ms in front of the grocery store or is it Church tithing?  There is an outlet for your kind.  It’s called Jerry Springer. A perfect place for those of us who respond to our lesser indulgences of ignorance and violence.  You’ll find the perfect concoction of trash to inspire fans and violence.  Important side Note: You can throw chairs at people, too.  And I hope they throw them back.  It will make me “LOL” and “WTF”.

And thanks for the link to my site.  Please send more visitors my way, I like the attention…you know what it’s like.

Wow.  So the weekend’s over and I’m doing my daily rounds, checking out what’s new in the Protest world when I realize one thing rings loud and clear:  Gay is “In” in the news world. Election is over, and while some of the media is following Obama around, Prop 8 protests are alive and well.

I’m not sure if anything has struck such controversy in the past two months since I launched Junk Activism as Proposition 8 in California.  All sorts of interesting tidbits as the gay community strong-arms the religious community into changing silly Mormon superstitions.

Melissa Etheridge is protesting that she has “not a full citizen” and is refusing to pay her taxes over the gay marriage ban.  With the IRS these days, I must say Melissa you must have brass balls.

100 Pro-Gay Protesters sang, “Jesus Loves Me” outside of a Dallas Church holding a sermon called “Why Gay is Not O.K.”

Thousands protested in San Francisco over the weekend, even painting their faces, dressing up in drag, rainbow flags a-flying.

The gay community is pissed.   And I can’t blame…what could be worse than having something you want taken away from you?  Especially something as institutional as marriage.

To me, that is the inherent problem that sums it all up:  Marriage is a very, very old institution.  And it’s a religious one – not a political one.  There is a lot of psychology here, and while the protests seem to be relatively peaceful, there’s a lot of animosity and very, very angry people on both sides.

I see the issue as having two entirely separate and distinct parts and both sides need to give a little.    My goal here is to find a reasonable medium so both sides can duke it out but neither one feels entirely shafted by the legislation involved as they do so.

The first side is see is the “religious” side.  What I’m seeing here is this is a social struggle with a group of people that many Christians have ostrichized as sinful and immoral while the gay side argues that Jesus loves them the same. This battle plays in this space because marriage is a religious institution and until the Christian churches change their minds here, it’s going to be a neverending battle.  The gays say these folks are ignorant and unfair, these Christians say that it’s against their beliefs.

The other side I see is the “political” side.  Namely, legal recognition of partnership.  This side is the litigation that allows same-sex consensual partnerships and recognition as a “couple”.

The government’s job is not to be our moral compass.  We have that all within ourselves – and we all have our own sense of “right” and “wrong”.  This is America, we will never agree on all of these things, but it is not the government’s job to dictate our religious institutions regardless if the majority agrees with them or not.

However, this does not free the government from its obligations of serving its people fairly.  There’s a serious demand for same-sex partnerships, and a lot of people feel hoodwinked by the lack of ability to be registered in a consensual gay partnership.  We should legally allow this.  Why not?  What is the inherent problem with that?  Is it going to really be any different, other than people can actively pursue a lifestyle in peace?  We are all living together here, anyway, why should we let such a simple issue divide politically when its a matter of giving the same legal rights to all people.

So, the semantics are different.  My solution isn’t “marriage”.  But even legally, “marriage” is really only a “partnership” named so because of the religious superstitions behind it.

To be honest, with a something-like 80% divorce rate in America, I’m not really sure why ANY monogomous couple today would want to even associate themselves with being “married”.

Words of the wise: Be modern and progressive, and far more importantly than the gender of those involved, we all should be active in changing the way monogomous relationships are viewed, so we can actually have a working system in America.  We’ll go much farther that way.

I’m open to opinions on this subject, so I encourage you all to comment and let’s have some different perspectives.

Oh, yeesh.  The Westboro Church will once again dish out their hatred and homophobia, this time aiming at a Detroit high school for performing “The Laramie Project”.

If you’re not sure who Westboro Church is, they’re arguably the most perfect example of “Junk Activism”.  In fact, if “Junk Activism” ever makes it into the dictionary, it should have a picture of a Westboro Church protest. Expect me to write about them frequently…

The message is this: God hates us all (but especially Jews, Muslims, gays, and soldiers) and he’s wrecking his vengeance on the world for all of the evil in it by allowing/causing every mortal reality for humanity.

They go to the funerals of dead soldiers to tell their parents that their kids went to hell.  They pray and thank god publicly when someone dies of AIDS or gets a gay beatdown.  God gets credit for it all and they’re spreading His Word in the loudest, most offensive way possible.  Sort of like the KKK of Christianity.

From UPI.com: “‘The Laramie Project’ has a function — it’s to teach rebellion,” Phelps-Roper said.

Sort of like how a fringe hate group will drive hundreds of miles to protest homosexuality outside of a high school.  Other churches won’t even associate with you, dude.  Aren’t you teaching rebellion?

Inmates in Greece are refusing to eat in droves, due to overcrowded prison conditions.   Greece’s 12,192 inmates are crowded into jail spaces meant for 8,243.

Greece, you can’t handle a measly 12,192 inmates?  You need to take a lesson from the champs of incarceration.

You see, in America, and apparently in the UK, we believe in things called rights and freedoms.  And those rights are that every inmate has a right to Cable TV, libraries, 3 meals a day, a gym, basketball court, a job, a movie theater, the Bible, toilet wine, …….but only ONE prison bitch.

Let’s approach this protest as a business venture.  You know, by using solid metrics.

12,192 inmates – 8243 inmate capacity = 3,949 overflow
Overflow is est. 32% over the current capacity.

Since we’re talking about size and capacity, we need a better way to measure the success of a food protest to help increase capacity.  So, you shouldn’t be counting the PEOPLE incarcerated, you need to be counting the WEIGHT.  In America we do this in pounds.  Because the whole world is still in the dark ages (except America, of course), you will have to use the evil Kilometer.

So, as far as I can see your protest can go one of two ways:

1) Starve yourselves until the weight limit drops 32% as a whole.  Science tells us that the less people weigh, the less space you will all take up.  Find the average size of each inmate and calculate the average number of pounds that each inmate should lose to accommodate.  For help, I will refer you to this guy.

2) This requires a real fight for the long haul – eat as much as possible.  Estimate weight increase to force the desired outcome (increased number of prisons.)  You need to cut out the Gyro and Lamb diet to make this happen.  I would suggest a diet of McDonalds, Starbucks, Pizza Hut, and Ben N Jerry’s over the next several months and STOP MOVING AROUND SO MUCH.  Eventually, Greece will be forced to support the increased weight capcaity. You can also argue that you’re too fat for execution.

HEY GREECE:  Have you thought maybe there is a reason that your prisoners are not hungry enough for your meals?  It’s because they’re full from eating holes through the walls.