Archive for the ‘Open Post’ Category
Open post etc
[video of UK student protesters running away from the police, with Benny Hill music. Lisa has pointed out to me that video of the police chasing students may be upsetting to people, so be warned. I posted it precisely because the students have made the police look foolish in avoiding the kettle. It is as Laurie Penny's post below makes clear, quite beautiful.]
So we’re extremely late on this one. We’ve all been struggling with more Real World issues, so thanks for your patience. And most especially, thanks so much to those of you who so generously sent us money to help us get by. It made all the difference, and is more than appreciated.
This week’s links:
Gwendolyn Ann Smith at the Bay Area Reporter writes about the tendency among some activists to treat the Transgender Day of Remembrance as an excuse for a party.
Also on TDOR, the Kiev gathering was attacked by masked men and tear gas.
s.e smith at Socialism And.. on how debt culture never really went away after the crash. Also, Ezra Klein at the Washington Post on the disparity of the savings between Federal employee pay freezes and the Bush tax cuts.
Richard Seymour at Lenin’s Tomb about the necessity of solidarity with student protests in the UK, since the entire public service is being cut in some measure. Laurie Penny at the New Statesman too on the evolution of the student protests.
Given the vulnerability of trans people socially, I highly suggest those in the UK able to protest get out there and do so, since the removal of public services makes us astronomically more vulnerable. On that note, C.L Minou at the Guardian on how trans people are humiliated by the health care system.
Latina Lista about why the Associated Press should stop sanctioning the phrase “illegal immigrant”.
And last but not least, Ouyang Dan at FWD/Feminists With Disabilities with an important post about “submarine kitteh.”
Drop yer links in the comments.
The Return of the QT Wandering Open Post
TRIGGER WARNING: This post contains hyperlinks to external websites and blogs, some of which have comment threads and other material which some people may find triggering. The links here are posted in good faith but, as we have no control over the content of external sites, readers are advised to use their discretion and approach them with due caution.
Better late than punctual, here’s this week’s open thread for discussion and our regular round-up of some of the articles and blogs we’ve noticed over the last week or so but not had time to post about.
If you have a link or comment that doesn’t fit anywhere else and would like to share it, feel free to drop it in the comments here.
- Open door: The readers’ editor on the right pronouns and respect for transgendered people (The Guardian)
- Close shave for wife killer (Boston Herald)
- Civil Liberties are in the interest of National Security (Chris Mills blog)
- Male, female or neither? Gender identity debated at same-sex colleges (CNN International)
- A VERY peculiar engagement (The Daily Mail)
- Itchy genitals? There’s an app for that (Wired)
- Undercounting the Often Uncounted (Socialism and…)
- New FAQ: Charing Cross Hospital’s Gender Identity Clinic (Bird of Paradox)
- Androgynous woman seeks safe washrooms (The Daily Gleaner)
- ‘Straight Pride’ shirts become free speech fight at St. Charles North (The Daily Herald)
- Transgender prisoner Scott Konitzer rejects his underwear settlement (City Pages blog)
No videos of dancing robots or sparkly rabbits with floppy ears and twitchy noses, I’m afraid – so here’s a video of a woman with a cello and a computer.
Ain’t technology wonderful? [Y/Y]
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ETA: Added trigger warning at head of post.
Tuesday Wraparound Open Post Blah Blah Blah
So yes, I suck at open posts lately. Here are some links to take the edge off, and there will be no videos of dancing robots at the end. Just so everyone is aware.
http://www.deadline.com/2010/10/syfy-cancels-caprica/
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/10/how-to-set-the-bullshit-filter-when-the-bullshit-is-thick/
Iran says some academic courses too Western.
I lied about the video:
Shows the robot HRP-4C dancing to some J-Pop music that I cannot transcribe. Also, she has human backup dancers.
Anyway, if you have any links to share, any blogs to promote, etc, this is the place to do it. It’s better than self-promotion in, for example, threads involving news stories about murdered women.
Randomly Assigned Open Post
As an update to yesterday’s discussion, Mirai has written a second – more coherent – post at Devil May Rant:
From the outset, anything and everything related to “dickwolves” is to remind people of the rape comic. Clean cut and dry, this is what they are doing. There’s not even a joke anymore. The joke has become “people are hurt by rape and we don’t care.* Let’s make some money off it.” Mocking PTSD is their new ‘thing’.
Alex at Border House has written A Welcoming Place for All Gamers about the same thing:
No matter what you thought of the original comic that set off this chain of events, I think we can all agree that the behavior of these guys since the initial blowup has been nothing but totally assholish. I honestly thought this whole thing was over with, but apparently Gabe and Tycho are so very defensive about their privilege, they have to sell t-shirts to prove that people agree with them that it’s totally awesome to be a fucking asshole to rape survivors and people with PTSD.
But this is more than profiting off of rape culture, it’s also sending a loud and clear message to the greater gaming community about who is part of the club and who isn’t. And that message is: people who think rape is hilarious, people who mock people who have been through trauma and/or have PTSD, people who don’t understand what trigger warnings are and why they are used, people who think it is awesome to be an insensitive jackass–these people are all welcome in the gaming community. Rape survivors, people with PTSD, and people who think it actually isn’t cool to mock the first two groups can go fuck right off.
Now, moving away from that topic, Sarah Jaffe writes Whither Socialism at GlobalComment:
The U.S. right now, of course, talks about socialism a lot. But most of the people talking about it know very little of what it really means. Socialism is a catch-all term for “big government,” which lately seems to mean any government program that helps people of color–even if that program also helps white people. Tim Wise notes that when social services began to be seen as programs that helped nonwhite people, rather than, as the New Deal had, explicitly privileging white folks, they began to be much less popular.
Socialism now, then, is used as an epithet by people who hate one another–or perhaps fear one another would be more accurate. The Tea Parties are full of hateful language, from Sarah Palin’s “reload” to the chants of “Take our country back.”
The New York Times: Cheap Debt For Corporations Fails to Spur Economy
Salon.com: Libertarian Fire Department Lets Man’s House Burn Down
Crosscut.com: Are local courts overstepping by helping bill collectors apply the screws? More to the point, people are being sent to jail for being in debt, effectively. The situation is more complex, but it boils down to debtors manipulating the court system to punish people.
Carnal Nation: Chasing off Chasers
Then, after maybe weeks, maybe months, maybe longer of nobody seeming to find us attractive or even worthy of existence, someone takes an interest. An intense, sexual, maybe romantic interest. This somebody tells us that they like trans people; in fact, that they find us fascinating, beautiful, brave, and sexy. They claim to love us because of, not in spite of, who we are. They tell us everything we want to hear when we are lonely and naïve.
If we are unlucky, we get drawn in.
Nix has some discussion critiquing said article.
Feminism and Joss Whedon: The Contagion of Misogyny at This Ain’t Livin’.
Jobless Recovery for the Ruling Class in the Washington Post
Almost forgot: Static Nonsense on Kinky Disability: Of Abuse, Running Away and Erasure. A response to this post at Feministe.
And this week’s video will not be a song, but rather: Reconsider Columbus Day
I would appreciate if anyone could either find or make a transcript for this video. Thank you.
Anna made a transcript (thank you!):
The video is in black and white, and a variety of (I presume!) Indigenous people face the camera, each saying a line below:
> October 12th is Columbus Day
> A day that our government has deemed worthy of remembrance
> But with all due respect
> With all due respect
> With all due respect
> There’s an ugly truth that bas been overlooked
for way too long
> Columbus committed heinous crimes
> against the indigenous people of the Caribbean
> and millions of natives throughout the Americas
> And Columbus set the stage for the slave trade in the new world
> So please
> Please reconsider ff this is a man that you want to honour
> Reconsider If you want to celebrate the crimes of Columbus
> It’s not your fault
> It happened a long time ago
> But remaining neutral
> And pretending like it didn’t happen
> Or that it doesn’t still impact us today
> So please
> Take the day to learn the whole story
> Celebrate the people who were here first
> Petition for a nationally recognized indigenous holiday
> So please
> reconsider how you plan to spent October 12
> Reconsider the story of Columbus
> Visit ReconsiderColumbusDay.org
Open Post
So, I’m super late with this and it’s going to be so half-assed it can’t even sit down, but anyway.
I wrote a guest post for FWD (Forward) the other day. More ADHD stuff, but it’s getting a good reaction. It’s about the impact of ableism when you don’t even know you have a disability.
Anyway, I have some posts I really want to write and a zillion links I wish I were using but I have like, zero energy at the moment and already put this off for three days.
Share your links, talk about anything, etc. No topic is off-topic.
Thursday Open Post, Linkspam Edition
The bar on this just keeps moving, right? Anyway, share any links you might have, promote your own blog. Discuss anything. This post is as off-topic as you want it to be.
Happy 44th Birthday, Star Trek
Duy Huynh: A Magical Realist at the Crossroads of East and West
Civic Commons: Sharing Technology for the Common Good
New Clinical Practice Guideline: Intersex Genital Mutilation Still Recommended For CAH Girls
BP Report Shares Blame for Oil Rig Disaster
Gates Foundation Invests in Monsanto
Disaster Averted in the Gulf? Not So Fast
OkCupid Blog: The Stuff Real White People Like
Michigan Christians: Hate-Crime Laws Infringe On Our Right to be Hateful!
Videos, Science Edition:
The Grates: Science is Golden – Can’t be embedded
They Might Be Giants, “Why Does the Sun Shine?”
Tuesday Open Post
Unlike Queen Emily, I post the videos at the bottom. That’s how I roll.
Gallup: GOP take unprecedented 10 point lead in polls.
NY Times: Border sweeps in North reach miles into US:
ROCHESTER — The Lake Shore Limited runs between Chicago and New York City without crossing the Canadian border. But when it stops at Amtrak stations in western New York State, armed Border Patrol agents routinely board the train, question passengers about their citizenship and take away noncitizens who cannot produce satisfactory immigration papers.
“Are you a U.S. citizen?” agents asked one recent morning, moving through a Rochester-bound train full of dozing passengers at a station outside Buffalo. “What country were you born in?”
When the answer came back, “the U.S.,” they moved on. But Ruth Fernandez, 60, a naturalized citizen born in Ecuador, was asked for identification. And though she was only traveling home to New York City from her sister’s in Ohio, she had made sure to carry her American passport. On earlier trips, she said, agents had photographed her, and taken away a nervous Hispanic man.
Shakesville: Police State Newz:
At some point I may have mentioned that while my family was riding the train between Chicago and New York last December, we were rudely awakened by armed government agents on the hunt for foreign looking people that may have boarded at South Bend, Toledo, Cleveland, Erie, or any number of totally not Canadian stations. They really didn’t pay us much mind. Mostly they were interested in the folks seated in front of us speaking a foreign language (Russian, FWIW). That and yelling at the deaf woman in the next row.
Yeah, this is beyond out of hand. Can we start talking about police states yet?
Miami Herald: Should a parent seek therapy for a child who crosses the gender divide?
Refusing to Wait: Anarchism and Intersectionality for your class and oppression analysis needs. I really recommend reading this if you’re interesting in intersectional and kyriarchal viewpoints.
And of course, a music video! Emily in Love, Sow the Seeds:
(Not) An Open Post
“I’m obsessed with the mess that’s America”
Lisa appears to have given this week’s open post a miss so I thought I’d step into the gap once again and tide you lot over til next week’s. Today’s Links of Interest are:
I wrote at Global Comment about the paradox of the Tea Party, a “radical” party dedicated to making things stay the same.
Australia had an extremely boring election with an interesting outcome. Does Australia have a government yet?
Religion Dispatches had an interesting but problematic piece on Christian churches and their trans parishioners.
My always lovely co-blogger Helen posted at her own spot a PSA about trans women and prostate checks.
And that’s it..
The further adventures of Open Post Girl
This week’s video is a quite amazing fan vid of Ariel Pink’s “Round and Round,” set to clips from 80′s aerobics movie Perfect. Both song and vid make me feel slightly nostalgic and slightly queasy at the same time.
This week’s open post has things:
Vanity Fair has an interesting piece about the dubiously short-term view of Washington politics. Jack Abramoff’s assessment of the culture of “legalised bribery” seems about right to me.
Anna Lekas Miller has a good post up at Global Comment about the manufactured “Ground Zero mosque” “controversy.” Sarah Posner at Religion Dispatches uses that as a jumping point to suggest that this is a move in a wider Christian Right strategy to eliminate Islam altogether in the US.
Keeanga-Yamahhta Taylor in the Socialist Worker on how the Right has re-defined racism, stripping the concept of all meaning.
And lastly, Brentin Mock at Colorlines has a post up about the terrible working conditions people cleaning up the oil spill in face, and the desperation for work for many people in Louisiana.
Drop yer links in the comment section, cheers.
Queen Emily Rules This Open Post
“a teenager in love with Christ and heroin”
I have decided to step in to help Lisa out with today’s open post. I haven’t really posted much at the new site yet, hey how’s it going? Me? Oh, you know. Things that I have been reading lately that are tremendously interesting…
The Washington Post had an article about how corporations are moving towards a new business model that can–already has–create profits without resuming hiring after the economic crisis. To whit:
In the mildly halcyon days before the 2008 crash, the one economic outlier was wages. Profit, revenue and GDP all increased; only ordinary Americans’ incomes lagged behind. Today, wages are still down, employment remains low and sales revenue isn’t up much, either. But profits are the outlier. They’re positively soaring.
Among the 175 companies in the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index that have released their second-quarter reports, the New York Times reported Sunday, revenue rose by a tidy 6.9 percent, but profits soared by a stunning 42.3 percent. Profits, that is, are increasing seven times faster than revenue. The mind, as it should, boggles.
It turns out Target’s executives are quite significantly less gay friendly than the 100% HRC rating might have suggested. I, for one, am shocked (ie I am not shocked).
I wrote some music criticism at Global Comment about millennial rnb.
Peter Laarman at Religion Dispatches writes about why taxing the rich is the godly thing to do. Couldn’t agree more about the alliance of distorted Protestantism and supply-side economics that dominates American political discourse.
The Australian election is depressing me, but this debate between the Australian Sex Party and far-right fundamentalists Family First was quite entertaining. Seriously though, if Tony Abbott gets in, I am taking away the entire country’s dessert for a whole month.
And lastly, Lisa wanted you to read this post about cats and Science.