March 2011
218 posts
February 2011
163 posts
Pantsless Progressive: Important update w/ correction from Glenn Greenwald's UN sanctions piece: →
pantslessprogressive.com
UPDATE/CORRECTION: Looking over the language of the U.N. Resolution again, I think it’s quite possible that The Telegraph — and therefore me — got a big part of this story wrong. There’s language in Paragraph 6 defining the scope of the immunity that is easy to overlook because of the…
An important point.
“To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never, to forget.”
—Arundhati Roy (via kari-shma)
Get Out of My Way, You Jerk! →
thewherefores.tumblr.com
Get Out of My Way, You Jerk!
Researchers Study ‘Sidewalk Rage,’ Seeking Insights on Anger’s Origins and Coping Techniques.
Shirley S. Wang, for The Wall Street Journal.
You don’t need a car to get road rage.
For many people, few things are more infuriating than slow walkers—those…
This used to be me as well, but then my grandmother got back surgery that’s permanently slowed her pace to about a tenth of a mile an hour, and so now I always think “I don’t know these people, maybe they’re disabled too, maybe they have a perfectly legit reason to be moving that slow, how much of a douche am I if I throw a shitfit over it?”
Now I only get mad at fast walkers, like when restaurant hosts go charging pell-mell across the building without once looking back to make sure their paying customers are actually keeping up. X(
Ha ha ha, you have humbled me and my undirected sidewalk rage with this.
Of course I know how ridiculous it is to get angry with complete strangers - there could be any number of reasons for their walking slow, and in all honesty do they really need an excuse? But it’s so easy to slip into a petty ragefit, isn’t it?
Haha, particularly when you’re late, which I always am. Which is probably why I’m really shameless about just casually darting through any tiny opening in a crowd like I was in the middle of a parkour run or something. I probably look really rude, or at least weird, navigating a crowd like it’s an Olympic sport, but hey, it works. It’s all those years of training at a high school with the population density of a brick of osmium. XD
As a sort of tall, often angry looking chick, I’ve always been the official crowd-parter for my friends. Regular crowds call for speediness; festival crowds call for speediness, surliness and elbows.
I’m ashamed to admit that I sometimes do that thing where one literally bounces in place with anticipation/frustration, mentally shrieking movemovemove.
Get Out of My Way, You Jerk! →
thewherefores.tumblr.com
Get Out of My Way, You Jerk!
Researchers Study ‘Sidewalk Rage,’ Seeking Insights on Anger’s Origins and Coping Techniques.
Shirley S. Wang, for The Wall Street Journal.
You don’t need a car to get road rage.
For many people, few things are more infuriating than slow walkers—those…
This used to be me as well, but then my grandmother got back surgery that’s permanently slowed her pace to about a tenth of a mile an hour, and so now I always think “I don’t know these people, maybe they’re disabled too, maybe they have a perfectly legit reason to be moving that slow, how much of a douche am I if I throw a shitfit over it?”
Now I only get mad at fast walkers, like when restaurant hosts go charging pell-mell across the building without once looking back to make sure their paying customers are actually keeping up. X(
Ha ha ha, you have humbled me and my undirected sidewalk rage with this!
Of course I know how ridiculous it is to get angry with complete strangers - there could be any number of reasons for their walking slow, and in all honesty do they really need an excuse? But it’s so easy to slip into a petty ragefit, isn’t it?
First public protests against the Kims’ regime →
asianews.it.nyud.net
Seoul (AsiaNews) – The wave of protests that began in the Mideast appears to have reached even North Korea. For the first time in the history of the Stalinist regime, groups of ordinary citizens have protested in three cities demanding food and electricity, sources say. The event is exceptional and confirms the economic difficulties, especially concerning food supplies, people have to face under the Communist government.
According to South Korea’s Chosun Ilbo newspaper, citing a North Korean source, demonstrations broke out on 14 February, two days before Kim Jong-il’s birthday, in the cities of Jongju, Yongchon and Sonchon, not far from the border of China.
The State Security Department (the all-powerful agency under Kim Jong-il’s direct control) investigated the incident but failed to identify the people who started the commotion when they met with a wall of silence.
“When such an incident took place in the past, people used to report their neighbours to the security forces, but now they’re covering for each other,” the source said.
Korean sources told AsiaNews that this represents a crack in the prevailing mindset. “Different factors are at play. On the one hand, the country’s worsening economic situation is certainly one reason. The regime is in fact unable to feed most of its people. On the other, changes at the top are another as Kim Jong-un gets ready to succeed his father on the throne in Pyongyang.”
The younger Kim is “feared by the population,” the source said. “He is viewed as bloodthirsty and mad. “Almost everyone thinks he was behind the military attacks against ROKS Cheonan and an island under South Korean control, which led to restrictions on humanitarian aid from the South. This has further worsened standards of living in the North. North Koreans are ready to do just about anything to stop the succession.”
U.N. Security Council takes up Libya sanctions.
http://edition.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/africa/02/26/libya.un/
I believe this is something you all may be interested in.
tiny fists of rage. feel them.: thewherefores: tinyfist replied to your post: censoring manga for fun... →
tinyfist.tumblr.com
tinyfist replied to your post: censoring manga for fun and profit
I can’t support the Beguiling any longer - I mean, I always had issues with its centrality in White Canadian Boy Comics - but after Butcher’s sneering hatred for fan productions like scanlations…
This is all really useful - and disappointing - stuff.
As for the project, I’d love to talk about it, but preferably via email. We have a (revised) soft launch date of late March, early April, and have been keeping things (sort of) on the dl until we’re ready to get into actual promotion. I don’t have a contact email for you, but you can hit me up at mad[dot]kitteh[at]gmail[dot]com.
Carthage Sacked... →
artinfo.com
Again. Tunisia’s dictator plundered the ruins for priceless artifacts and re-zoned this piece of world heritage to have luxury apartments built on top. Here’s a petition you can sign asking that Tunisia’s new government make right.
And from the linked article:
According to the Tunisian newspaper La Presse, the Trabelsi clan around Ben Ali trafficked in antiquities for years, using private jets to transport pieces of the country’s heritage abroad. In a Machiavellian scheme, the family is said to have broken up smaller rings of Iraqi smugglers and then tap into their network of contacts, frequently based in London, in order to mount their own trafficking operation. They are said to have sold thousands of items including Roman and Byzantine coins, mosaics, and sculptures.
While this pillaging of Tunisian heritage is shocking, it’s certainly in keeping with the proliferating accusations that Ben Ali and his wife Leila Trabelsi and her family have pocketed vast amounts of wealth from the country. Tunisia’s central bank chief said on Wednesday that the country’s banks had made €1.3 billion ($1.75 billion) in loans to businesses linked to the ruling family, with 30 percent of them having no guarantees of repayment, AFP reports.
On a more positive note, Tunisia’s culture minister reported recovering 130 artifacts from historic residences that the Ben Ali clan had taken over for their personal use, according to La Presse. Since they’re less portable than cash, there’s still hope that Tunisia’s ancient artifacts and Roman ruins can be salvaged.
Get Out of My Way, You Jerk!
Get Out of My Way, You Jerk!
Researchers Study ‘Sidewalk Rage,’ Seeking Insights on Anger’s Origins and Coping Techniques.
Shirley S. Wang, for The Wall Street Journal.
You don’t need a car to get road rage.
For many people, few things are more infuriating than slow walkers—those seemingly inconsiderate people who clog up sidewalks, grocery aisles and airport hallways while others fume behind them.
Researchers say the concept of “sidewalk rage” is real. One scientist has even developed a Pedestrian Aggressiveness Syndrome Scale to map out how people express their fury. At its most extreme, sidewalk rage can signal a psychiatric condition known as “intermittent explosive disorder,” researchers say. On Facebook, there’s a group called “I Secretly Want to Punch Slow Walking People in the Back of the Head” that boasts nearly 15,000 members.
On sidewalks across America, slow-paced foot shufflers, window gawkers and photo snappers are causing fellow pedestrians to lose their cool. We ask some New Yorkers what pushes their buttons — at least the ones who stopped long enough to talk to us. WSJ’s Shirley Wang reports.
Some researchers are even studying the dynamics that trigger such rage and why some people remain calm in hopes of improving anger-management treatments and gaining insights into how emotions influence decision making, attention and self control.
“We’re trying to understand what makes people angry, what that experience is like,” says Jerry Deffenbacher, a professor at Colorado State University who studies anger and road rage. “For those for whom anger is a personal problem, we’re trying to develop and evaluate ways of helping them.”
Signs of a sidewalk rager include muttering or bumping into others; uncaringly hogging a walking lane; and acting in a hostile manner by staring, giving a “mean face” or approaching others too closely, says Leon James, a psychology professor at the University of Hawaii who studies pedestrian and driver aggression.
__
This is basically me. Read more.
“This is why we stress that it is vital for democratic politics to acknowledge that any form of consensus is the result of a hegemonic articulation, and that it always has an ‘outside’ that impedes its full realization.”
—
Ernesto Laclau & Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (2nd Edition)
Laclau and Mouffe are always interesting.
I can’t support the Beguiling any longer - I mean, I always had issues with its centrality in White Canadian Boy Comics - but after Butcher’s sneering hatred for fan productions like scanlations and selling fanart at cons, I was done. ):
As a North York person, The Beguiling was never central to my geek experience. Of course I’ve heard the gushing, but it’s too far out of the way to be useful to me in the day to day. Fullofwhoa and I are working a project relating to the TO comics scene - I’d love to learn more about this history. Can you point me to where some of this sneering went down? (Like, on his blog frex?)
wow that sounds really interesting, I wish I could teleport to Toronto. :(
You should visit some time!
censoring manga for fun and profit
Went to a talk called Censoring Manga For Fun and Profit, by Chris Butcher of The Beguiling. Because of time constraints and the need to keep things general, it was a quick survey. This was censoring manga and the wider censorship debate, rather than deep look at the nitty gritty of manga censorship, international jurisprudence and culture clash.
Probably the best part - for me - was that an old university friend (from my first time round in undergrad) happened to be in attendance, and we reconnected.
In any case, Butcher’s an engaging speaker and I’d love to see him again.
He’s one of the TCAF organizers, btw. Segue alert! I hope to see some of you Toronto local folks there. I’m thinking about volunteering my good right (and left) hand(s) to shlep things at the festival. I’ve heard tell of free t-shirts.
The Toronto Comic Arts FestivalSaturday May 7th, 9am-5pm
Sunday May 8th, 11am-5pm
@ Toronto Reference Library
789 Yonge St., Toronto, Canada
416-533-9168
Admission to TCAF is Free.
D:
ARE THEY REALLY
IT IS A TRAGEDY, OK? RICH PEOPLE, FIGHTING IN PUBLIC. WHAT WILL WE DO? /o\
(Somebody said somebody else wasn’t nice. My heart goes out to… somebody. Atheist prayers, bb).
Celebrities fighting on Twitter.
I ask you Tumblr, where are their ‘people’?
“
To the average uninterested American eye, however, a turban is just a turban. And it symbolizes the revived, erect, and violent patriarchy of the East, of Islam, and of the Taliban; the oppression of Afghan women; the castration and the penetration of white Western phallic power by bad brown dick and its turban. (Lest one think that the backlash is “over” and that Americans are now educated about Sikhs, a gurudwara (temple) in upstate New York that was burned to the ground a few days before Thanksgiving was declared to be arson.)
The turban is a complicated and ambivalent signifier of both racial and religious community as well as of the power of masculine heteronormativity (the shaving of the heads and beards of the suspected Taliban and Al Qaeda nonlegal combatants before being brought to Camp X-Ray at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, is one indication of just how powerful). As such, we are as troubled by the increasing forms of turban profiling and its consequences as we are about the reemergence of cultural nationalism in Sikh and South Asian communities, which often obscures issues of gender and sexuality (for example, the ongoing violence against women in the domestic spheres and the racist backlash against women wearing the hijab). The turban becomes a contested symbol for remasculinization and nationalization in the strategies of numerous middle-class Sikh communities. Such strategies, we should note, respond to and are in conversation with the initial emasculation of the white male state (signaled by the castration of the trade towers on September 11) and the ongoing remasculinization through the war on terrorism.
In the contemporary discourse and practice of the war on terrorism, freedom, democracy, and humanity have come to frame the possibility of thinking and acting within and beyond the nation-state. We have sought to show how the uncanny monster-terrorist-fag is both a product of the anxieties of heteronormative civilization and a marker of the noncivilized—in fact, the anxiety and the monster are born of the same modernity. We have argued that the monster-terrorist-fag is reticulated with discourses and practices of heteronormative patriotism but also in the resistant strategies of feminist groups, queer communities, and communities of color. We suggest that all such strategies must confront the network of complicities that structure the possibilities of resistance: we have seen how docile patriots, even as they refuse a certain racist positioning, contribute to their own normalization and the quarantining of those they narrate themselves against. This genealogy takes on a particular urgency given the present disarray of the antiwar Left, as well as the lack of communication, debate, and connections between white progressives and communities of color, especially those implicated by changing immigration laws, new “border” hysteria, the Patriot Act, and the widespread detention of noncitizens.
” —Jasbir K. Puar and Amit S.Rai “Monster, Terrorist, Fag: The War on Terrorism and the Production of Docile Patriots” Social Text 20.3, Duke University Press, 2002, Pg. 117-148 (via queerfury)
Really interesting excerpt.
something I was working on last year...
I’m an atheist. I have been one since I was eight years old, and had a crisis of unfaith during recess. I have spent the intervening years exploring the problem: being struck dumb by it, finding pain and joy in it. I am, and have long been a confirmed atheist and never an agnostic: I do not believe and do not want to believe; there is no hole at the center of me, waiting to be filled with faith.
What I do believe in is a mysterious universe that we will forever try to know better, but never fully understand. A beautiful world full of marvels; an infinitely precious biosphere. A species with terrifying, humbling potential for good and evil that I am sometimes honored, sometimes ashamed to call my own. No gods, no spirits. Nothing divine save our ability to imagine the divine.
My unbelief is as integral to me, as fundamental a part of me, as faith is to the religious. I live every day in an atheist universe; this vast collection of matter and energy, dancing together, dancing apart, all thanks to rules we’ve only just begun to learn. Existence that will always be uncertain, verified only through existence itself and our awareness of it. Lives lived fully, or in half measures, cautious quarter measures, but lived only once.
When I was eight years old I stood on a hill, looked to the sky, then looked to the ground. The sky was the bleached, interrupted blue of a late summer day; a scattering of clouds and the rest of it so clear it was blinding. The hill had an equally sparse scattering of grass, vividly green despite how little of it there was. Behind me were trees and the other kids playing - around them, not climbing because climbing was forbidden and the trees were too big for that besides. The bottom of the hill was a path, a shallow dip until another, lower hill began to climb, and at the top of that hill was the soccer field. The path led to a park, and past that, the middle school. Past that, the high school, but none of that is important right now.
It was recess and I was spending it alone.
We must be nothing less than fabulous.: We are not all Libyan →
alliterate.tumblr.com
I see this cutesy thing (no doubt with good intentions) claiming that “today we are all Libyan”.
Not only we are not all Libyan but we all hold a degree of responsibility in the oppression of Libyan people. If you live anywhere in the Western world (as I do), you have…
“I have not yet ordered the use of force, not yet ordered one bullet to be fired … when I do, everything will burn.”
—Muammar Gaddafi (via missindianajoanie)
notes for something longer--
- If your politics has become recitation, a constant regurgitation of talking points and jargon, then it is a stale politics. A dead politics. Politics is about people more than it is about point-scoring or even principles. It’s the hows, whys, whens of organizing ourselves socially.
- Politics is the interface between people, and socially determined, dynamic principles that appear to be set in stone (justice, ownership, crime, the good life). This absolute steadiness and naturalness give such principles added weight, but it is not a necessary weight. The human animal is all that underwrites the whole system, and there are few things less steady, and less understood. But— that’s ok.
- The talking points politician is successful because zhe speaks to empty bodies of demographically researched cliche. Zhe is recognized as fake for the same reason. The perfect talking points politician finds the balance between regurgitation and resonance, and connects with us through the stories we tell ourselves (as individuals, nations).
- This is and isn’t politics per se. There is a point at which politics crosses over into management, what Ranciere calls policing. Can we say that it is politics so long as it is a hot process, and not a cold one? Or is it better to demarcate things at the point of codification and reification?
can we stop using the phrase "why is nothing being done"
in regards to the revolution currently in motion? a lot is being done, people are not dying because they are doing nothing. ask why more isn’t being done, ask what can be done, but please, stop phrasing your despair in a way that ignores or invalidates the work of people who are trying to free themselves.
[content warnings] 900 dead and Special Forces are EXECUTING DOCTORS & taking over hospitals in #Libya
I know a lot of people don’t care about Libya but they really need OUR HELP to get more media attention AND A RESCUE PLAN! PLEASE REBLOG!!!
