lff12

Well the good news is that I seem to have finally, by virtue of silence, gotten through to my stalkerette that I ain't interested her somewhat distorted form of friendship.  It was a tough week, unnerving as when you don't know somebody you haven't really got the luxury of being able to take a chance on whether or not they are going to turn psychotic or not.  Thats not a chance you can take.  Easy talking about "be kind" as one or two people did say to me, when you are not getting uninvited calls from somebody while you are at work (despite having said "do NOT call me during working hours" when its not you.  When you are not getting the "please please please please please" begging calls.  When you are not getting the "pity me pity me pity me pity me pity me PLEASSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSE" texts.  When the pathos starts to taste even worse than the revulsion you already feel at the persistent desperate begging, the self-demeaning, the lack of a connection between the Dr Phil language of self-empowerment and the behaviour that is just ignoring the situation.

What I found rather odd was this lady constantly telling me"don't put yourself down."  Well HELLO, I am NOT going to fall into the everso moderne trap of self-entitlement, ignoring ones faults and pretence of self-acceptance which is really just ignoring the need for constant self-improvement and effort.  You cannot just sit there and take on the mantle of "self acceptance" instead of looking at what is really, really wrong and changing that.  "Self-acceptance" is for suckers and for people who want to go on living a life of denial and self-pity.  The truth might be painful, but it will at least start a reflective learning cycle which you will never get onto if you choose to live under the pretence and delusion of "self-acceptance."  You accept things you cannot change, such as inevitable health problems, deaths of people close to you, or massive changes in your living environment which you don't have any influence over.  You accept that you are a person with faults and failings.  What you do not accept is bad behaviours or habits that you can change.  What you got to learn is how to cope with these things and make minute constant changes that hopefully will improve your own situation, and perhaps minimise or eleiminate problematic behaviours.  For example, I know I am horribly intolerant, so I need to constantly work on learning empathy and compassion.  But I ultimately got to do it in a way that doesn't open me up to either exploitation or being hauled underwater by others who want me to "rescue" them.  Likewise a lot of people suffer from clinical depression or are chronically overweight.  To suggest that you simply accept yourself as overweight whilst ignoring that you take no exercise and eat like a pig is just leading somebody into even more misery as intermittently they will be forced with the reality of the consequences of their actions.  It took me a long time to realise that "I can't lose weight" was more to do with the fact that I ate unhealthily, and took no exercise.  Accepting that would not have achieved anything.  The reality for me was poor health and I simply couldn't go clothes shopping except in sheer self-effacing misery as it was near nigh impossible at the time to get large clothes to fit me that were anyway attractive.

Like this lady really was really painfully self-conscious of her own role in her not having had any relationships (not even a sneaky little shag) by her forties.  Yet, I would say, that for an awful lot of gay women living in Cork, there is a HUGE likelihood, if they are gay and conscious of this, that they may never meet anybody on the local scene because of the massive and powerfully exclusionary power bloc held over by a certain group of man-dykes who are determined to exclude anybody who doesn't meet their approval from the organized events which masquerade as THE lesbian scene in Cork.  What fortunately has started to happen over the last 2 years is this exclusionalary quango has increasingly split away from most of the rest of the scene, leaving it open to use by normal, ordinary Cork women who just happen to be gay, but don't feel a desperate need to look like male builders, behave like the worst misogynistics pigs and run the womens scene like a miniature police state under the illusion of it being a democratic and censensus based community.  It is nothing of the sort.

Like so many other women have described to me, this lady talked about going to these events and being simultaneously stared at and ignored at the same time.  Basically, this is the power bloc which is created - you are subjected to blatant and obvious scrutiny, but not an iota of kindness, welcome, or even an ounce of compassion.  Why has this become the dominant culture of the Cork bulldykes?  Why is there a sanctimonious desire to provide suicide prevention courses whilst the very staff in some of the organizations involved have been heard to bitch about people who are part of a social circle where 2 people have taken their own lives in the last 4 years?  What level of hypocrisy is necessary to carry out this pretence of "caring" whilst being at the very heart of the problem if viciousness, exclusion and bitchiness that is isolating and dividing the community?

My big question, however, is why there is so much fear of the power of this articifical quango.  Is it the massive funding they've managed to squeeze out of the HSE and Equality Authority for the organizations that help sustain the structure?  Is it the fact that they appear to be such a strong and settled group?  Why is it that nobody aside from myself have ever dares turn around and challenge their intentions?  Or is it the powerful image projected by the subtle bullying that goes on at Loafers and via the social network?  Frankly I think its time that Cork women took back the scene from this crowd of self-serving bullies and enabled a proper social circle to develop that is genuinely welcoming, open and tolerant.  And NOT just for certain focus groups, as is the current situation.  Its really important that the Cork scene is let loose from the heavy handed judgementalist mentality and police state thought processes.  We are not all 2nd wave radical feminists who are uncomfortable in male company and so feel a justification for their exclusion.  I think there is a serious need to recognise the fact that the "scene" in Cork is not centred around just one pub, one social clique and one community centre and related activities.  It is a living and breathing entity which extends into workplaces, homes, straight bars, clubs, political groups, cafes - lots of places.

There is a huge need to break the Ghetto mentality which I think is not only strangling the womens scene, its making it near nigh impossible for ladies like the lady who fell madly in love with me to do anything but stand helplessly by while she is systematically ignored by the great clique, which only adds to her sense of isolation and enables the kind of desperation that made her cling onto me for dear life.  I think there is a real need to recognise that true diversity includes women who might not be feminists, who might be very uncomfortable in the wimmin-only hothouses so favoured by the clique, and even a need to outreach into non-traditional environments like straight social places.

I think it really says so much that part of Linc's "upgrade" to its website included letting go of the very useful forum.  This enabled a lot of people from outside the existing user groups of Linc to discuss issues, seek advice and opinions of others and engender a sense of genuinely inclusive diversity.  Until this happens there is a real risk that the existing social circle will die off completely as Cork women choose newer and more inclusive social groups such as those around the newer bars and non-gay specific groups.

It seems insane that Ireland burns while Cowen fiddles.  Meanwhile the rest of the world is looking at extricating itself from the awful financial crisis we hit last year.  Ireland, meanwhile, hurtles not only towards the horrendous spectre of having 500,000 adults on the live register, but the rarely considered and terrible consequences of massive levels of people unable to meet repayments on mortgages, loans etc, not to mention the loss of business which must be crippling companies right now cannot be underestimated.

It seems shocking that the current "NAMA" solution only deals with the twin peaks of banking and construction and effectively solely "bails out" these business sectors - ignoring services, manufacturing and retail, some of which are literally dying on their feet.  There is a real lack of investigation of the way in which the credit crunch has damaged businesses - for example, a lot of businesses have lost lines of credit and flexibility which is squeezes them hard.

Meanwhile, obscene profiteering in commercial and residential rents seem unaffected by the crunch.  Landlords are still looking for rent levels that are simply not justified in terms of real world profits.  Its incredible that the "social dividend" suggested by hypocrite Dan Boyle (I call him a hypocrite because he is effectively shutting down Musgrave Park in Cork as a viable concern by helping to stymie the redevelopment of the site by voting against planning for apartments on part of the site that would finance the redevelopment while moaning on his website about sports facilities moving out of urban areas, as they are being forced to move out by policies such as his that deny access to mixed zoning in order to finance redevelopment costs, leaving the sports groups with no choice but to entirely sell off the land and purchase cheaper out of town facilities).

What is worrying is the lack of access to finance and suitable office/industrial leases at a reasonable cost.  Likewise the current Fás scandal is terrible considering that this agency is so desperately needed right now and it is currently facing the spectre of total reorganisation.  Too little, too late.  What are the IDA and Enterprise Ireland doing?  We are effectively financing also the removal of industry and services from Ireland by happily refunding the cost of "redundancies" where jobs are relocating to cheap locations.  Why is the tax payer's money being taken in order to finance the relocation of Irish jobs?  These are not true redundancies and the companies involved need to be forced to pay the full cost of relocation, not be subsidised in profiteering by exploiting tax laws in Ireland.

Community and Voluntary Pillar today bleated away with impunity about the dreadful suggestions last week that would easily add 3000 euros a year to working families tax bills, suggesting it be diverted to the "most vulnerable."  Now I am sick and tired of this sequaling away about the "most vulnerable" as in reality this group are often the most protected and sheltered members of society, sponging away while everybody else pays for it.

It was depressing to read last week that many of the new college places would be reserved for "long term" welfare recipients - in other words precisely the ones who opted out of the world of work while jobs were available, so now we are giving them the long term chance to opt out for a few more years.  Why is the back to education schemes as they currently operate so open-ended that people appear to remain in welfare-funded full time education for as long as 5 years and more?  Why is it made so much easier for social opt-outs to go back to college than people who are genuinely seeking work?  Its not surprising to hear the consistent ignorance of Father Sean Healy, who clearly hasn't spent the many years of living in rented sector, where a large proportion of the welfare-sponger group are concentrated, and seen at first hand, the nice cosy lifestyles of many of those on welfare.

There was a couple of years I spent as the only working tenant in a house of maybe 6 or 7 flats.  It was really amazing to see the great social lives and not at all uncomfortable lifestyles which the guys (they were all single males in the their 20-40s) enjoyed.  Some even had cars at their disposals and a few seemed to have jobs on the black economy also.  Yet they are considered "vulnerable" even though many of the newer taxes don't apply to them - for example I know of people working in public sector roles who are already 200-300 a month worse off than they were last year.

the Community Pillar has made this group into the untouchables.  I live in a terrace in Cork city which is mostly rented and about 50:50 self-funded tenancies and welfare "rent allowance" tenants.  The incredible thing I see is that there is a far higher proportion of car ownership amongst the welfare tenants than there is amongst the working tenants.  This is astonishing considering the very high cost of petrol, car maintenance and insurance.  Yet it seems to be relatively affordable for welfare tenants.  The vast majority of the working tenants don't have cars, presumably because most of them are paying 120-150 per week rents out of their own pockets.  If you consider many of them are only earning low wages - somebody on 1500-2000 a month will thus be easily forking out 500-650 a month on rents while the welfare brigade will consistently get 800 a month roughly.  Add to this the cost of going to work - bus and train fares are easily 80-100 euros a month for those who work out of town so a lot of these guys will only have 1000-1300 left after paying rent.  Take into account doctors fees, prescription charges, and you can see that a lot of the local tenants are only maybe 50-150 euros per week better off than the rent allowance tenants.  Its no wonder that there is such a high proportion of RA tenants.

And interestingly, partially due to wear and tear and wanton vandalism by evicted former RA tenants, most of the RA houses are in horrendous conditions - some of them are the Cork equivalent of African shanty towns.  The tenants leave the doors wide open all day, so security must be non existent.  It seems crazy that there is so little knowledge of the real lifestyles of the so-called "poor" by the community fascists.  Maybe they should come and live on Wellington Rd for a week and see the truth about the lifestyles of the people they are trying to "protect" - in reality they are creating a priveliged class of societal opt-outs at the expense the true vulnerable - low paid workers and non home-owners.