By Iris Vander Pluym - January 18, 2015

I have written about the debacle known as Obamacare ever since I first started blogging, and many times since. In a nutshell, my primary objection is and always has been that it entrenches our wildly expensive, unjust, inefficient and deadly for-profit system, and forecloses any sort of bridge to transition the vast majority of Americans to a single-payer system. For-profit means just what it says: it puts health care in the business of producing profits, and not, you know, health....

By Iris Vander Pluym -12.14.14

‘Tis the season, my friends, when it is your patriotic duty to shovel your ever-diminishing dollars into the great big gaping maw of the capitalist imperialist white supremacist Christianist heteropatriarchy. Well, it is if we are to believe Wal-Mart and Target and Macy’s and storefront purveyors of conflict diamonds, anyway. But fret not! Iris is here to show you a better way: thrift shops.

By Iris Vander Pluym - 11.04.14

As a lifelong student of the deadly scourge known as "conservatism," I read with great interest a recent piece by Ezra Klein in Vox entitled Standing near hand sanitizer makes Americans more conservative. So what will Ebola do?. Klein reports on a growing mass of evidence that human social and political cultures are emergent properties of our responses to infectious disease threats—or "pathogen stress," as the fancy lib'rul eeleet perfessers like to call it. The gist of the theory is this: through all of human history, infectious diseases have been the single greatest threat to ..

By Iris Vander Pluym on 10.12.14

My dear readers, I’m afraid there might be something seriously wrong with me. Because when I read this, I laughed. Like, really hard. And then I could. not. stop.

One cost of war: U.S. blowing up its own Humvees

The United States is spending millions of dollars to destroy U.S. equipment in Iraq and Syria — gear the U.S. gave the Iraqi military that was later captured by ISIS forces. The U.S has hit 41 Humvees since attacks began in August, according to data from United States Central Command.

By Iris Vander Pluym - 09.14.14

[A version of this post was published at Secular Woman.]

I have long been interested in subverting the U.S. conservative movement, which I am certain is the root of all evil despite what you may have heard elsewhere. If you are not convinced of this proposition, consider for a moment precisely what it is that conservatives wish to conserve: a status quo that is violently racist and sexist, patriarchal and heteronormative, ubercapitalist and imperialist, ableist and classist, Christian supremacist and anti-intellectual, sadistically punitive and social-Darwinist—I could go on (and on and on).