Favorites from ichomp
Subscribe:
Displaying post 1 to 50 of 2733
Into the Unknown Unknown
Donald Rumsfeld
GW Bush defense secretary is dead at 88.
SRLP and Laverne Cox
Last week, the Sylvia Rivera Law Project uploaded a YouTube video of Laverne Cox reading a letter written by a New York State inmate named Synthia China Blast, who described living in solitary confinement for the last decade. However, that video has since, at Cox's request, been taken down. (TW: descriptions of murder, sexual violence)
A man who wants to hear a Yes will find a way to drag it out of you.
I do not believe that most women — that most victims of sexual assault — freeze or shut down when faced with the prospect of coercive sex because they don’t really care what happens next, or because they're excited to push through the moment for the sheer joy of accusing the aggressor of rape after the fact. I believe that these women, these people, have a finely tuned sense for their safety, that when a woman reports having "a feeling that it would turn into an ordeal if I rejected him," she is not crazy and she knows what she is talking about.Mallory Ortberg explores the ongoing debate surrounding passive versus active consent as its effects echo through the Alt Lit community: On Deciding What Counts: Elizabeth Ellen and What Makes A Victim.
[TW: rape, sexual assault, child abuse]
Punished thirty years on
Adam Crapser was adopted from Korea to abusive parents who were arrested on multiple counts of child abuse and rape. Over thirty years later, one last sting of neglect from his parents came back to bite him: he has been served deportation papers because his adoptive parents failed to complete his naturalization process.
Was this sexual abuse or rape? Or what?
Please help me understand something bad that happened to me when I was a child. I hate talking about it but I feel like I need someone's thoughts on this.
When your local representation knows they can afford to ignore you...
How do you bug them to better represent you???
Current best practices for contacting senators and congressfolk?
Call instead of email? Single issue per call? What are the best practices these days, and will they change again as offices re-open?
I’ve never run for office before. My father wasn’t governor.
Chris Jones is a physicist and a nuclear engineer. He’s also just announced he’s running for Governor of Arkansas. This is his campaign ad: It’s about time.
Vintage photos of Juneteenth
“'There is no nationally recognized moment where this country takes a pause and says, you know what, this country enslaved people, broke up families, in perpetuity for generations. Juneteenth is becoming a time when the country can do that,' [Dr. Brian] Purnell told BuzzFeed News." But before it was signed into law as a federal holiday, Black communities in different parts of the country have been recognizing Juneteenth since 1866: Photos Of How People Celebrated Juneteenth 100 Years Ago.
Can the American Recovery Plan's Child Tax Credit be made permanent?
Something really good is happening next month. A celebration of the expanded Child Tax Credit in the American Recovery Plan, and a plea to make it permanent. "Children cost money, but a market economy does not magically allocate extra money to the parents of children relative to non-parents. In fact, it is somewhat more challenging to earn money when you have a kid because they impose logistical barriers to working. As a result, unless the government provides parents with extra money, the living standards of families with young children will be systematically lower than those of the childless. That’s one important reason why the poverty rate for children is so much higher than the poverty rate for adults."
How do I protect my baby girl?
I'm pregnant. How do I stop my family's cycle of sexual abuse?
residents of Manitoba Colony thought demons were raping the town’s women
"The Ghost Rapes of Bolivia: The perpetrators were caught, but the crimes continue."
[Trigger warning: Extended written descriptions of sexual assault and incest.]
[Trigger warning: Extended written descriptions of sexual assault and incest.]
DIY or Die in 1994
So it's 1994 and you're punk as fuck and nobody's gonna do it for you, so you wanna put together a show and need to know what bands and venues are around. Or you're a band and you want to set up a tour, or find a label, or maybe you just want zines and tapes from places outside your town. The internet's barely there, so it's a good thing you've got your grimy hands on the 1994 edition of Book Your Own Fuckin' Life, a full copy of which is being kindly hosted by the Internet Archive.
Punk Planet Archives
All 80 issues of Punk Planet are now available in full for free on The Internet Archive.
-- Punk Planet was a 16,000 print run punk zine, based in Chicago, Illinois, that focused most of its energy on looking at punk subculture rather than punk as simply another genre of music to which teenagers listen. In addition to covering music, Punk Planet also covered visual arts and a wide variety of progressive issues — including media criticism, feminism, and labor issues.
Message of hope, or the possibility of hope
From the Los Angeles Review Of Books comes a long read in three parts by Michael Nava: Creating A Literary Culture: A Short, Selective, and Incomplete History of LGBT Publishing. Part I - Out from the Shadows: Beginning, 1940–1980, Part II - The Golden Age (1980–1995), Part III - Picking Up the Pieces: Queer Publishing Now
Pro-Trump group seeks to divide Democrats by posing as leftists
"Vote against corporate interests and greedy politicians. Vote against the two party system. VOTE for our future and our children's future. Vote Jo Crain to represent Missouri in the U. S. Senate!" America Progress Now ran Facebook ads promoting Green party candidates during the 2018 US midterm elections. Who is America Progress Now? Turns out that it doesn't really exist: the ads were actually run by Rally Forge, a digital marketing firm closely linked to the pro-Trump Turning Point USA. The Guardian: Rightwing firm posed as leftist group on Facebook to divide Democrats.
Getting Reconciled to It
While a bipartisan group of Senators is trying to reach agreement on a budget package, progressive Democrats in Congress are signalling opposition to the likely outlines of such a deal, and White House officials have now told House Democrats to prepare to go it alone on infrastructure. Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer also announced that Wednesday he will begin the process known as reconciliation, to allow Senate passage with simple majority votes.
An earthquake with pirates at the Southern Baptist Convention
Next week more than 16,000 Southern Baptist pastors and leaders will descend on Nashville, Tennessee. Some of them will be bringing pirate flags, part of an ultraconservative attempt to "take the ship" back. They want to take it back from people like Russell Moore, former president of the denomination's Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, who wrote a pair of long, scathing letters condemning the racism and lack of support for sexual abuse survivors in the SBC's leadership. The letters have caused an “earthquake,” not just in the SBC but throughout conservative Christendom. Some are blaming the current state of the church not only on the marriage between Republican politics and the SBC, but also on the theology and institutions of white evangelicalism itself.
America teaches us that America is a racist country.
Why Everyone Is Wrong About Critical Race Theory In Schools
A Very Special Clapback Mailbag by Michael Harriot, from The Root "The problem with this controversy is that there is no controversy. In fact, there are more states who are trying to ban Critical Race Theory than there are schools that teach Critical Race Theory."
A moment of reflection
It Wasn’t Just Another Nightclub "Five years ago, I went to cover the Pulse shooting—and found myself unexpectedly close to the story." Ari Shapiro writing in The Atlantic. Alternate link.
The Historian and the Murderer
Historian Dominique Kirchner Reill: "[M]y job in the almost 80 questions that followed was not to disabuse the court of ideas of adulterous encounters but instead to explain what this strange profession of 'historian' was, and what role it played in bringing Klinger into that Astoria park on the day he died."
What does it condition us to see?
The Zoom Gaze: Video conferencing offers an illusory sense of unilateral control over conversations (Real Life): Film scholar Laura Mulvey theorized a “male gaze” that was structured and reproduced through cinematography, presuming a male hetero viewer and depicting women primarily as sexual objects rather than subjects. In this interview, Toni Morrison describes how she rejected centering the “white gaze” in her fiction: the presumption of a white audience and the white perspective as neutral. If Foucault used the idea of a “medical gaze” to describe how doctors objectify patients’ bodies to treat them, and the “panoptic” gaze to explore how carceral discipline is internalized, what might we say the Zoom gaze accomplishes? Whose perspective does it seek to naturalize? Whose subjectivity does it center, and in what sorts of forms? What does it condition us to see?
“If you surrendered to the air, you could ride it.”
Toni Morrison, the first black woman to win the Nobel Prize in literature, has died at 88.
Morrison won the Pulitzer Prize for her novel, Beloved in 1988. She authored 11 novels and was a professor of literature at Princeton from 1989 until her retirement in 2006. Her vivid descriptions of the black American experience were groundbreaking, and her powerful prose influenced countless readers and writers.
What to do in Palm Springs?
5 fully vaxxed adults staying in Palm Springs, CA for a week in late February. What should we definitely do?
☯️ Benebell Wen is a pseudonym ♎
Taiwanese American tarot author, occult practitioner, deck creator*, and (day gig) intellectual property lawyer Benebell Wen has reviewed dozens of tarot and oracle decks on her blog, including decks by fellow Asian diasporic creators such as Way of the Panda tarot, Morning Calm Oracle, Witchling Academy Tarot and Tarot of the Divine. Check out her suggestions on Asian tarot readers , her critiques of reiki in the West and the tarot certification process, her video on cultural appropriation of spiritual practices, and her comments on cultural alienation at PantheaCon.
They still said no
You Ain't Never Been No Little Girl, Taylor Townsend
"America hating fat Black women — it’s just part of life. It’s in the culture. It’s in the health-care system. You see it in Hollywood, you see it in sports. You don’t have to look around very hard."
Is Hockey For Everyone In The Age of Cherry and Tortorella?
The NHL Says ‘Hockey Is For Everyone.’ Black Players Aren’t So Sure.
This is about how overwhelmingly white professional hockey is and whether Black Canadians and Black Americans feel safe playing hockey while adapting in a very conformist culture that does not support the same level of activism like NFL and NBA....several coaches like John Tortorella who changed their anthem kneeling stance reluctantly......
a crime not of lust, but of violence and power
Scholars and activists, poets and playwrights have been writing about rape for centuries. What would the conversation around sexual assault, police bias, and the legal system look like if investigators, police officers, and judges read deeply into the literature on sexuality, racial justice, violence, and power? It is in view of this question that the following syllabus is offered as a scholarly resource—and object of critical discussion and debate—on "rape culture" in the 21st century. Public Books presents a 13-week Rape Culture Syllabus.
Dearly Beloved...
I just finished Beloved by Toni Morrison and it was astonishing. It gave me, upon almost every page, the sort of palpable literary rush I received when reading Wolf Hall for the first time or Gilead or The Hare with Amber Eyes. I am unclear why I neglected Morrison for so long but I am hungry to rectify this immediately. So: where next? Continue with the loose Beloved trilogy (Jazz and Paradise), start at the beginning with The Bluest Eye, jump into the middle with better known books like Song of Solomon, go for some essays...?
The Best American Novelist Whose Name You May Not Know
When her first novels were published, in the mid-1970s, Gayl Jones’s talent was hailed by writers from James Baldwin to John Updike. Then she disappeared.
Jones’s early novels were shepherded by Toni Morrison, then an editor at Random House, who’d dedicated herself to publishing Black writers, especially women. To put things in perspective, at the time Corregidora came out, Morrison had only recently published her first works of fiction, The Bluest Eye and Sula. She had yet to hit her stride as a writer, while Jones burst forth in her early 20s all but fully formed and requiring little editing. Jones needed a champion, however, someone who could understand and appreciate the sophistication of her approach to subject matter as well as language. “No novel about any black woman could ever be the same after this,” Morrison declared after reading the manuscript of Corregidora.
A valedictory speech like no other.
The heartbeat law recently signed into law by the Republican governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, outlaws abortion as early as six weeks into pregnancy as soon as a heartbeat can be detected and before many women are aware they are pregnant. The Texas bill joins at least a dozen other states that have enacted measures designed to ban abortion in early pregnancy. Unique to the Texas bill is a provision that would allow private citizens to file civil lawsuits against anyone (doctors, staff, family or friends) who assists a woman in obtaining an abortion. The people of Austin Texas protested, but what’s getting the most press is Paxton Smith, Dallas area valedictorian who ditched her approved speech: "I couldn't keep my mind on the project. My mind kept wandering to the 'heartbeat bill' and what it meant. So, I started making some notes," she told The Associated Press. The speech she gave is one for the ages.
"If places aren’t adapting, they’re not magically entitled to labor."
The Mississippi Free Press talks to restaurant workers and employers who HAVE adapted about the narrative demonizing workers who media say "don't want to work." Can we now begin a fierce and honest conversation about what John Lewis called "plantation capitalism"?
Legal and practical ideas for dealing with a possible assailant/stalker
Looking for advice on how to deal with a potentially violent stalker in the state of Georgia, in the USA.
let me in your windoooow...
Where can I find a decent replica of Kate Bush's red dress in the Wuthering Heights music video for Halloween costume purposes?
At which prison in/near McAllen Texas can I start a prison chess Club?
I used to run a prison chess club in another part of USA. I mostly just need help identifying a prison near McAllen Texas that will be a viable option, then I'll reach out to the warden. The closest one I've found is Federal Correctional Institution Three Rivers. Is there a closet prison to McAllen? Thanks!
"Do you believe in peace?" "Of course. Peace is... very good."
For those who were interested in the recent thread on the thriving artistic life of Ramallah: here are four contemporary Palestinian artists (one musician/painter, one photographer, one director, and one visual artist) whose work you might not know.
Progress Studies: Uplift
How to change the course of human history
- "The story we have been telling ourselves about our origins is wrong, and perpetuates the idea of inevitable social inequality. David Graeber and David Wengrow ask why the myth of 'agricultural revolution' remains so persistent, and argue that there is a whole lot more we can learn from our ancestors."[1]
psychologist, diplomat, information clerk, confidant, mathematician
A brief and incomplete history of Black bartenders in the US. A brief and incomplete history of women bartenders in the Michigan. (With secondary links to paywalled academic library stuff.)
“She positioned herself as Cherokee"
A Genealogy of a Lie.
Sarah Viren investigates another academic who has claimed an identity that they should not have. (SLNYT; Archive.org snapshot)
[US Elections] Vice-Presidential Debate
Tonight starting at 6 p.m. pacific time is the 2020 Vice-Presidential debate between Kamala Harris and Mike Pence; there's a C-Span livestream.
Internment Camp Survivor, Preserver Of Salish, and Nazi Resistor
Names chosen for three new Spokane middle schools [Spokesman-Review, local coverage] shows how well-deliberated choices can lead to inclusive and affirming results in the public square.
When great powers continually destabilize each other and foment unrest
The future of war is bizarre and terrifying
[thread(reader)] - "Drones, eternal cyberwar, info ops, and the specter of biological warfare."[1,2]
They are going to refuse to certify Democratic wins.
They tried to overturn the 2020 election. Now they want to run the next one.
@kenvogel: "At least four Republicans who sought to undercut or overturn the 2020 presidential election are launching campaigns to become the top election official in key states that could decide control of Congress in 2022 — & who wins the White House in 2024." (via)
Be clean-cut, work in secret, appear reasonable, don’t use memes
“One person last February invited members to help build a national College Republicans Discord server, which would be run by Identity Evropa members, who were told not to use “overtly alt right usernames of profile pics.” Some members said they were either current lawyers or plan to attend law schools in an effort to provide legal support to the group, while at least a dozen people said they are currently or formerly in the military. One member asked, “What are our long range goals? Other than taking over the GOP and spreading white identity? What is the end goal for IE?”
Unicorn Riot is releasing more than 770,000 messages from chat servers associated with Identity Evropa. This is the first report in a series about this large US-based neo-Nazi organization. (CW: antisemitism Neo-Nazism, hate speech and images) Leaked Discord Chats Show Plan By Alt-Right To Infiltrate Local GOP (Splinter) Chats Outline Plot To Keep Steve King Elected (Washington Post)
Nothing left in my tank
I’m having trouble dealing with the hand I’ve been dealt in life. Many snowflakes inside.
Why is one dose Johnson and Johnson better than 1 dose of Pfizer/Moderna
Why is one dose of Pfizer at 80% effectiveness worse than one dose of Johnson and Johnson at 60% effectiveness?
Seeking a Paradigm Shift
What is an article or essay that you have read that caused a dramatic change in your thinking / perspective / life?
On the situation in Gaza, and MeFi discussions
The situation in Gaza is awful, and as a moderation team collectively we are horrified by the violence and destruction and loss of life the Israeli government has been causing in Palestine. As a Jew, personally, I am too; for the mod team and for many people in the MetaFilter community this isn't just a terrible situation but one with very direct and personal resonances. Jewish identity and history is complex; overt and oppressive violence isn't, and what the state of Israel is doing right now to the people in Palestine is wrong.
The desire to talk about and react to the situation on MeFi is completely understandable. But it's also a topic that has, in particular during times of open conflict, been incredibly difficult to manage as an open discussion without it escalating to a point of being more harmful than helpful, and that's something we can't knowingly support playing out in the community here.
It's hard to say when and how a broad discussion of this can go well; we are going to have to exercise a lot of care in assessing whether the framing of a post and available moderator resources will make for a workable thread. In the mean time it feels necessary to me to make this MetaTalk post acknowledging both that site dilemma and the actual situation at large since MeFi, as a place built around posts, can end up feeling conspicuously silent when there's not a thread happening organically.
I'd like to try and fill the gap left by the lack of an open thread by using the space inside this post to round up informational resources; the mod team will aim to add to this post periodically if folks will forward good links to us via the contact form.
The desire to talk about and react to the situation on MeFi is completely understandable. But it's also a topic that has, in particular during times of open conflict, been incredibly difficult to manage as an open discussion without it escalating to a point of being more harmful than helpful, and that's something we can't knowingly support playing out in the community here.
It's hard to say when and how a broad discussion of this can go well; we are going to have to exercise a lot of care in assessing whether the framing of a post and available moderator resources will make for a workable thread. In the mean time it feels necessary to me to make this MetaTalk post acknowledging both that site dilemma and the actual situation at large since MeFi, as a place built around posts, can end up feeling conspicuously silent when there's not a thread happening organically.
I'd like to try and fill the gap left by the lack of an open thread by using the space inside this post to round up informational resources; the mod team will aim to add to this post periodically if folks will forward good links to us via the contact form.