Woolfork and her students counter the notion that the class was easy, despite some recent media attention. “It was a lot of work. It was a lot of debate, a lot of conversation, a lot of disagreement,” said the professor. “This is the point of what we can do when we apply the skills of literary analysis to both a literary and televisual adaptation.”
“I can understand how people could see that, but it’s actually frustrating because a lot of my friends are saying, ‘Oh wow, easy class,’” said Snead. “I had to put in a lot of work and the same analytical work that I would if I were reading the text, and in some ways it was harder because we don’t normally watch TV shows like that. We just watch them for entertainment or something to do.”
[…]
At the end of the first book, Daenerys Targaryen emerges from the fire with her dragons, but without clothing or hair. In the show, she still has all of her hair. “Is that about female desirability?” asked Woolfork. “Does it make her less attractive to the traditional male viewer? Why make these choices?”
I always find myself fascinated by classes like these, although they tend to reflect the professors teaching them even more than most college courses do. Comparing and contrasting the original text source (ASOIAF by George R.R. Martin) versus the visuals and interaction presented to us on the TV show is an unparalleled opportunity to read as both a fan and as a exercise in active engagement.
I find myself extremely curious as to whether questions of race, casting, and some of Martin’s very questionable assumptions about both history and its relationship to what he has written made it into the academic arena above at any point. For example:
Well, Westeros is the fantasy analogue of the British Isles in its world, so it is a long long way from the Asia analogue. There weren’t a lot of Asians in Yorkish England either.
Although the early Middle Ages in northern Europe tend to have a dearth of evidence that allows us to analyze this specific aspect of culture, historical periodization does not function as a “racial reset button”. Sadly, this knowledge has yet to be applied to popular culture, which is less than surprising considering that half the time, archaeological evidence has not even been seen or taken into account in art or history writing for the same period. Interdisciplinary projects in academia from this perspective are sorely needed, in my humble opinion, in order that educational materials can begin to reflect a more complete and nuanced view of the past, rather than one that serves current political agendas.
In other words, Martin seems to have fallen for regurgitating the same “Historical Accuracy” spiel that is based in assumptions, not fact. (Incidentally, or perhaps not so incidentally, I have in fact read every book in ASOIAF so far, as well as seen every episode of the Game of Thrones show. That doesn’t stop people who have done neither from telling me I’m being “too critical” of it!)
Once again, a concept like historical accuracy does not apply to fantasy writing, but is always invoked when a creator has been criticized for perpetuating the lack of diversity endemic to fantasy media, whether it’s of race, gender, sexuality, ability, or other aspect of human diversity, in what they have created.
And after all, if the creators themselves can’t seem to parse the difference between accountability to what they believe is history, and accountability to the present and the diversity of the audience, how can we help but be confused by it? I believe that the more we engage with the media we love, the better it can reflect those of us who love it.
*[“White people: your privilege lives in the fact that you can be outraged, horrified and upset about tonight. But you are not afraid.” - Jazmine Hughes
](https://twitter.com/jazzedloon/status/537093616741916672)*thought this was a super poignant, important quote. let’s keep reading and learning and not turn away as soon as the news cameras do. this stuff is insidious and disgustingly deep in the way the world works.
@OwningMyTruth: NYC Mayor de Blasio is now calling for #BlackLivesMatter protests to be put on hold until NYPD officers are buried. Two things-
#1 We now know that the shooter of the officers was NOT an activist and was NOT connected to #BlackLivesMatter, so that point is moot.
#2 Did NYPD stop brutalizing black people after they killed Amadou Diallo, Sean Bell, Eric Garner or Akai Gurley? Naw.
In summary: this is some bullshit.
By now many people have heard that 74 people were arrested Friday night for an action calling for justice for Dontre Hamilton, killed by former Milwaukee Police Officer Christopher Manney. I was one of those arrested. I was lucky to be in the first group released after 17 hours in jail. Some of my comrades were not released for 28 hours. It was a beautiful and intergenerational group, with multiple couples and whole families inside. The jail support on the outside was incredible. I’m grateful for all of the solidarity that occurred.
There are a lot of conversations happening - about the usage of the freeway in protest, about organizing, etc. I am down to speak to all of those in one on one conversations for anyone who might be confused about the point of the action. But here, I want to talk about one aspect of our experience on Friday night that I think everybody who has not had negative interactions with the police, especially white people, need to hear.
Often when somebody is killed by a police officer or a victim of police brutality, there is a narrative that emerges of “Why would anybody not follow police officer orders?” and “That person wouldn’t have gotten hurt if they had just listened to the cop.” What people often don’t understand is that directions are frequently unclear, contradictory, and set up to make people disobey. On the ramp, officers told protesters to disperse. Many people didn’t want to get arrested, and complied. Started to walk away willfully. They were told which way to walk to avoid arrest. When they started to walk that way, cops pulled up and handcuffed them. They got arrested for doing exactly what they were told to do. We were trapped.
As I was getting arrested, I handed my bag to a friend who asked the police officer if she was also getting arrested. He told her no and told her where she needed to go to avoid arrest. Doing so then got her arrested. This happened with many protesters who were lied to and derailed by the police when trying to follow directions.
Luckily for us, the consequence of doing exactly what we were told to do by the police and having it still be wrong resulted in only arrest, although a few protesters were handled violently and thrown to the ground. But when you hear stories about people getting shot and killed by police officers for refusing to follow directions, please consider where that story is emerging from. Police can say they gave orders and they went ignored, causing them to feel threatened. But in reality, sometimes following police orders is not just confusing, but downright impossible. This was the case on Friday night.
Most of this work requires white america to reevaluate everything we have been taught about the role of and trust in the police. It is difficult to do this when we often do not experience or even witness the police state at work. Please, I am asking you to try and do this work anyway. Really listen to the stories you are hearing. It is critical work. Lives depend on it. Again, please feel free to talk to me with any questions.
In solidarity with the Hamilton Family, the families of all those brutalized and murdered, the 73 people who I got to know in jail, and the 150+ people on the outside who stayed and waited for our release, building community overnight in the cold to make sure everyone was taken care of. May the resistance never, ever let up.
Many people with severe anxiety and/or depression are also anti-authoritarians. Often a major pain of their lives that fuels their anxiety and/or depression is fear that their contempt for illegitimate authorities will cause them to be financially and socially marginalized; but they fear that compliance with such illegitimate authorities will cause them existential death.
Everyone is so excited about the cloud, but the cloud is really a drunken Xerox machine making copies of pretty much everything that everyone has said anywhere and spewing it all over the place.
Xiao Wen Ju, Asia Chow, Jacob K, Liu Wen, March 2012, Millinery, Tim Walker, W Magazine .
Tim Walker <3
Frequent, high-profile hacks by the Free Syrian Army and their ilk are little more than momentary defacements, the modern equivalent of graffiti. The attacks on Target and Home Depot saw the theft of monumental amounts of customer and credit card information, but the inner workings of the companies remained as opaque as ever.
The Sony hack is something else entirely.
Even if not another byte is ever released, we’ve still been granted an unparalleled view inside the inner working of a vast corporation: Internship schemes, sexual harassment policies, the squabbling and fretting of executives—it’s all there, an immortal snapshot of how a billion-dollar company operates.
The closest comparison to the Sony hack isn’t the 2007 TJ Maxx attack, or the 2013 Adobe hack, it’s the WikiLeaks Cables—an explosive, unredacted look at a historically secretive industry, that will be still be read hundreds of years from now by historians and sociologists trying to understand the inner workings of power in our era.
Assata vs Posada: A Case Study in U.S. Hypocrisy
Now that the Obama administration has taken steps toward normalizing US relations with Cuba, liberals, conservatives, and the media are lining up to demand Cuba hand over fugitives taking refuge in the island nation, most prominently Black liberation activist Assata Shakur.
Unsurprisingly, I can’t find anyone in the media calling out the hypocrisy of making such a demand while the United States harbors Cuban exile and fugitive terrorist Luis Posada Carriles, a former CIA operative convicted of murdering dozens of civilians in terrorist attacks, including the 1976 bombing of a Cuban airliner in which 73 people lost their lives. The US refuses to hand Posada over to Cuba, where he would be tried anew, citing that he might be tortured there. Posada lives in Miami, free to roam around the country.
Compare this treatment to that of Assata Shakur. During the period that Posada was planting bombs around Latin America, Assata Shakur was present for the killing of a New Jersey state trooper. Though convicted of first-degree murder, Shakur never even held or fired a gun during the incident; evidence strongly suggests she was shot while trying to surrender, completely unarmed. Nevertheless, the FBI has seen fit to list her on its most wanted list, with a million-dollar bounty on her head. This of course is not due to the crime of which she was convicted but rather her revolutionary politics and persistent blackness.
Assata Shakur’s activism has focused on liberating her people (Black Americans) from systemic oppression. Luis Posada Carrile’s terrorism focused on expropriating the property of his people (Cuban and foreign capitalists) from Cuban collectivisation.
Yet if outlets like CNN, the LA Times, CBS News, and The Daily Beast have their way, you’ll learn all about Cuba’s harboring of a wanted American and nothing about the US’s protection of a terrorist sought by Cuba and other countries. Assata is labeled a “cop killer” and sometimes even a terrorist without qualification, despite not having killed any police, or anyone else for that matter. The actual terrorist mass murderer Posada? Well, he’s just not mentioned at all.
Kent Bellows, cover illustration for Rolling Stone of Philip K. Dick, 1975
“You gave me a reflected self or identity and I suddenly believed I was real…From the moment I saw your picture, I was changed back to my old, real self…you cured me of my identity-less sickness. This is heavy stuff, but true.”
—PKD to artist Kent Bellows
Listen to the defenders of the police in these latest cases… do you really want to live in the world they are promoting? One where you must immediately acquiesce to any request/order give by anyone in a uniform, without question or complaint… under penalty of death if you don’t comply, or comply too slowly for them? Do you really mean to give people in uniform the power to kill, maim, imprison any person simply because they questioned why they were being confronted or resisted rough treatment? Is the uniformed officers word to be deemed absolute, without recourse… and his/her power to punish to be deemed limitless?
Twitter all day every day since white liberals suddenly decided “all lives matter”
Me: White people saying #AllLivesMatter in reaction to #BlackLivesMatter need to check that shit.
White liberal tweep: You’re the real racist here. Why don’t you think all lives matter?
Me: I don’t think you know what racism means.
White liberal tweep: cites white-authored dictionary definition of racism
Me: Whatever. Then we need a word for racial bias in the context of structural inequality and institutionalized imbalances of power.
White liberal tweep: Racism works both ways.
Me: readies the block hand
White liberal tweep: Why don’t all lives matter to you?
Me: You never said #AllLivesMatter until it essentially meant “white lives matter” in knee-jerk response to assertions of Black validity. You’re clinging to your privilege.
White liberal tweep: So only black lives matter? Why are you so racist?
Beautiful shot of massive protest in #NYC today. #MillionsMarchNYC #BlackLivesMatter
Q: This is the second time I’ve seen this blog make an overtly anti-white comment. It makes me feel as though you do not want white people to fight racism along side of you. I really hope that isn’t what you intended by your comment. I live in the South Bronx and have for five years, learning a lot about race from multiple angles. I try to use my white privilege as a platform for a better world for all people. It makes me sad to feel unwelcome by a group doing so much good in an important fight.
Being anti-white supremacy is not being anti-white.
If I was anti-white, I would be calling for 500 years of invasion, genocide, rape, chattel race-based slavery, land theft, war, and the extrajudicial murder of white person every 28 hours in an institutional system where non-white people have complete social, political, and economic dominance.
SPOILERS: coming into my inbox with your white tears rather than educating yourself is the face of white privilege. We don’t need ‘allies’ like you.
In conclusion, shut the hell up and go get yourself buttered.
－Mod N
A cogent example of White Fragility occurred recently during a workplace anti-racism training I co-facilitated with an inter-racial team. One of the white participants left the session and went back to her desk, upset at receiving (what appeared to the training team as) sensitive and diplomatic feedback on how some of her statements had impacted several people of color in the room. At break, several other white participants approached us (the trainers) and reported that they had talked to the woman at her desk, and she was very upset that her statements had been challenged. They wanted to alert us to the fact that she literally “might be having a heart-attack.” Upon questioning from us, they clarified that they meant this literally. These co-workers were sincere in their fear that the young woman might actually physically die as a result of the feedback. Of course, when news of the woman’s potentially fatal condition reached the rest of the participant group, all attention was immediately focused back onto her and away from the impact she had had on the people of color.
This is Berkley, CA right now. They tear gassed & beat people. Helicopters circling. The public wants police to stop killing us. This is the response we get. If you’ve seen The Hunger Games, that’s an excellent metaphor for the reality of life in the USA.
Subsequent to a previous report from Lawrence O’Donnell the Missouri Attorney General has confirmed with Last Word that they instructions given the Michael Brown Grand Jury describing the Police “use of force” laws was incorrect and misleading.
The background of this situation is that Lawrence O’Donnell reported that after reviewing the transcripts of the Darren Wilson Grand Jury, his analyst discovered that Assistant District Attorney’s working for Bob McCullough gave the Jurors an outdated copy of Missouri Lawthat all that was required for an Officer to use deadly force is their “reasonable belief” that there was a threat.
In 1985 the Supreme Court amended this law to include a “probable cause” requirement underTennessee v Garner and the Jury wasn’t informed of this until 3 months later just before their deliberations, nor even at that time was the difference and relevance of this explained to them clearly.
The misleading information was given to the Grand Jury directly before Darren Wilson’s testimony giving the impression that all that was required under the law for Wilson to kill Michael Brown was his belief that he was in danger, without the additional requirement ofprobable cause for such a belief.
The Missouri AG now proclaims that was wrong and the Missouri Law needs to be changed and updated to reflect the Supreme Court’s ruling.
Sean Bell was going to get married. One night, he was driving away from his bachelor party with his friends, Joseph and Trent. Suddenly, he hit a minivan. Four undercover police officers from the minivan began to shoot at them without warning, firing a total of 50 bullets at the three unarmed men. A wounded Joseph turned to Sean and said, “S, I love you, son.” Sean’s reply: “I love you, too.” Joseph and Trent survived, but their best friend, Sean, didn’t make it.
One of the witnesses in the Trayvon Martin trial, Rachel Jeantel, was on the phone with Trayvon moments before the scuffle with George Zimmerman that ended his life. One of the last things she heard the unarmed Trayvon say to the man who was following him with a gun that fateful night: “Why are you following me for?”
Michael Brown died August 2014. Ferguson, Missouri, police officer Darren Wilson shot him at least six times, twice in the head. Michael was not armed. His friend and eyewitness reported that Michael said: “I don’t have a gun. Stop shooting.” Minutes later, he was on the ground, bleeding. Dr. Michael M. Baden, the man who did Michael’s autopsy, told the New York Times, “In my capacity as the forensic examiner for the New York State Police, I would say, ‘You’re not supposed to shoot so many times.’”
Amadou Diallo died right outside his own apartment in the Bronx. He was unarmed. Four police officers shot 41 bullets, hitting Amadou 19 times. Later, they claimed that they had mistaken Amadou for a serial rapist. That same day, some of the last words he said to his mother as he spoke over the phone were, “Mom, I’m going to college.”
Eric Garner died July 2014. He was unarmed. Police officers were trying to arrest him forallegedly selling untaxed cigarettes. Eric suffered from asthma, and as a police officer put his arm around Eric’s neck during the arrest, he managed to gasp, “I can’t breathe!” The New York City medical examiner’s office ruled Eric’s death a homicide, pointing out that the officer’s chokehold might have been a big factor.
Jonathan Ferrellhad been in a traffic accident and was knocking on a homeowner’s door for help. He was unarmed. An attorney later described a video of the incident, which reportedly showed that when police officers approached Jonathan, he was holding his hands out in a non-threatening manner. The police officers never identified themselves. One of them fired 12 times, and 10 of those bullets hit him. Even as Jonathan lay on the ground, bleeding and dying from 10 gunshot wounds, the officers handcuffed him. Jonathan’s dead body remained handcuffed all the way to the medical examiner’s office.
**Oscar Grant **was on a subway train in Oakland when a police officer forced him out of the car and onto the subway platform. Oscar was lying down when a second police officer shot a bullet into his back. “You shot me! You shot me!” Oscar yelled before he died. That officer later testified that he meant to use his Taser on Oscar instead of his handgun. A court later ruled that the two had no legal reason to get Oscar — who was unarmed — off the train.
Kimani Graywas standing on a street in Brooklyn when police officers approached him. The officers claimed that when they approached Kimani, he pulled a gun from his waistband and pointed it at them. But one eyewitness, Tishana King, said Kimani never pointed a gun. She also said the police officers didn’t identify themselves when they approached. Police officers shot Kimani at least seven times, even though Kimani hadn’t shot a single bullet. One witness said some of Kimani’s last words were, “Please don’t let me die.”
Kendrec McDade died after a man called Oscar Carillo made a phony 911 call, telling police officers that he had just been the victim of an armed robbery. He later admitted that he had lied about the guns. The two officers eventually found Kendrec in an alleyway. They began shooting after Kendrec apparently moved his hands to his waistband. But Kendrec didn’t have a gun on him. All he had was a cellphone in his pocket. Court documents show that Kendrec’s last words were, “Why did you shoot me?”
On one occasion with a dear friend and fellow actor in Seattle (who happens to be white), I was sharing my perspective about race in the theatre and explaining some of the privileges afforded to him because he was a white actor.
One example of these recurrent advantages is being seen as “race-neutral.” In theatre, it’s an advantage to be white not because casting directors are racist, but because they’re human. Humans see color, whether they admit it to themselves or not. And in the absence of color, humans are more open to a first impression that isn’t tainted by their perception of a particular racial identity.
Just the thought of my friend having a tangible and unfair advantage over me because of his whiteness drove his sense of ideological stability into disarray. Suddenly, I was being made to feel as if I had inflicted harm on him by having an honest conversation. Simply making him aware of observable fact had caused perceived mental harm, and real psychological stress.
I’m seeing one too many white people bragging about de-friending other white people. I don’t need your condolences. I don’t need rash actions that absolve you of the responsibility of facilitating hard conversations with folks I will never be able to reach.
I need you to step up in a major way, and leverage the connections you DO have to address ignorance with conversation and interrogate white privilege with compassion. Because I will not do this. I cannot do this.
There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part; you can’t even passively take part, and you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop. And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!
According to whom? The pro-Wilson supporters? People who have ties to the Police Department? But it’s not proven or disproven by the evidence.
Ah yes, let’s believe their narrative since it’s easier to justify the death of an unarmed teenager than to recognize the police departments abuse of power and support of white supremacy.
The gov’t is gonna try to link black resistance to global terror as a basis for violating all manner of rights. Foundation is being laid for targeting any domestic resistance as potential terrorism, thereby justifying violation of civil liberties. Watch. 👀
Howard U students #ShutItDown at Union Station in #DC 12/2/14. DC goes hard bruh! #Ferguson #BlackLivesMatter #EndPoliceBrutality
Because most Whites have not been trained to think complexly about racism, and because it benefits White dominance not to do so, they have a very limited understanding of racism. Yet dominance leads to racial arrogance, and in this racial arrogance, Whites have no compunction about debating the knowledge of people who have thought complexly about race. Whites generally feel free to dismiss these informed perspectives, rather than have the humility to acknowledge that they are unfamiliar, reflect on them further, or seek more information.
“…Whites are in the position to legitimize people of color’s assertions of racism. Yet Whites are the least likely to see, understand, or be invested in validating these assertions and being honest about their consequences. This position, coupled with the need for racial comfort, has many Whites insisting that people of color explain White racism in the “right” way. The right away is generally politely and rationally, without any show of emotional upset.“
Are you following the story of young Tamir Rice? They’re already trying to tell us this 12-year old unarmed boy deserved to die— that he would have grown up to be a thug. Please spread the word of this child’s life. It mattered, and we won’t let them fool us into believing otherwise. #staywoke #farfromover
White people in North America live in a social environment that protects and insulates them from race-based stress. This insulated environment of racial protection builds white expectations for racial comfort while at the same time lowering the ability to tolerate racial stress, leading to what I refer to as White Fragility. White Fragility is a state in which even a minimum amount of racial stress becomes intolerable, triggering a range of defensive moves. These moves include the outward display of emotions such as anger, fear, and guilt, and behaviors such as argumentation, silence, and leaving the stress-inducing situation. These behaviors, in turn, function to reinstate white racial equilibrium.
When you try and turn #BlackLivesMatter into All Lives Matter, what you’re saying is “I don’t feel included.” You’re saying “I don’t feel like a part of the conversation.” Here’s the thing, though. White people aren’t a part of the movement, because the movement is about the oppression involved in institutional racism, and that’s something white people have NEVER experienced. Plain and simple. It isn’t including you because it isn’t about you. It’s easy to say “screw cultural identities, we’re all human” when your culture is not the one being exploited, marginalized and oppressed. It’s easy to say “screw borders” when your country is the one who puts up the borders. And it is really freaking easy to say “we all bleed red” when it’s not bodies of your people riddled with bullets because Western capitalism has a price. #notallwhitepeople - no, just enough so that we can be murdered without consequence.
That’s a real thing. Local police kill 400 black people a year nationwide. Police kill young black men at a rate 21 times higher than young white men. (And that’s only data from reported shootings. Po
That’s a real thing. Local police kill 400 black people a year nationwide. Police kill young black men at a rate 21 times higher than young white men. (And that’s only data from reported shootings.
Kim King “strangled herself” while in police custody, Kajieme Powell was shot in front of witnesses, and Vonderrit Meyers had either a gun or a sandwich when he was shot by police all within the St. L
The details and symbols of your life have been deliberately constructed to make you believe what white people say about you. Please try to remember that what they believe, as well as what they do and cause you to endure, does not testify to your inferiority, but to their inhumanity and fear.
In the very likely case that officer Darren Wilson gets away with murdering unarmed 18-year-old Michael Brown, one can guess how most white liberals will come down: sympathetic to Black America’s outrage, but eager to seek change exclusively through sanctioned channels. To please these liberals, resistance to the racist system would have to be strictly peaceful and orderly—petitioning legislators, voting, and “respectably” marching or vigiling. Liberals will argue against reciprocal hostility by black communities fed up with racist police forces and the system standing behind them.
Make no mistake: when authorities fail to convict or even prosecute Wilson, the state will be telling black people and other victims of systemic brutality that they just have to put up with institutionalized injustice. Failure to convict or even try Wilson will be the system saying to black folks, This is just how life is for you: live in a state of fear whites don’t have to. The message to police will be: There are some people you can just kill with impunity—in fact, your fellow racists will fundraise to reward you!
Liberals will join conservatives in counseling against “overreactions” to these messages from the system. They’ll suggest “peaceful” means of making change through a rigged political apparatus controlled by elites. For generations, mind you, there has been overwhelming rational reason to reform the system of police, courts, and prisons across the US, but if anything, we’ve lost ground. This incident and the tragic miscarriage of justice only adds one bit to the massive stack of compelling reasons for change. But actual reasons aren’t enough. The system hasn’t changed yet because it doesn’t respond to logic or facts or principles; it won’t change just because it would be overwhelmingly reasonable for it to change.
Black communities have long understood what is actually required to change the system: social movements and pressure. Being right has never gotten black people anything. Being strong has. Placating platitudes and promises of reform on the part of liberal politicians and pundits will not be enough. When Wilson walks, white supremacy will be inciting its own destruction.
Many activists of color will take steps, through a range of tactics, more or less in pursuit of one simple strategy: raise the social costs to White America until they exceed the perceived benefits of maintaining two distinct justice systems. Put differently, the objective is to make the two-tiered system of justice untenable by threatening whites’ very privilege in a wholesale fashion. Whites will only give up their slanted injustice system when it looks like hanging onto it may cost them far more.
The question for white people: what will we do at this critical juncture? Most white liberals will support suppression of the uprising, passively or vocally; out of fear, they will curate a narrative by which even brutal responses to righteously outraged black people will be justified for their own good. In so doing, they’ll actually be protecting the white privilege that keeps prisons and chalk outlines filled with black and brown bodies and lets white people walk away from police encounters, get off in court, and never fear trigger-happy stand-your-ground enthusiasts. A fairer justice system would inevitably expose and address contradictions in the rest of society, thereby challenging white supremacy and white privilege broadly. This frightens just about everyone benefiting from the current system, including white liberals.
The alternative is solidarity. This means doing what is asked of us by the movement to shake up the system. At its base, it means opposing repression and enabling the uprising to take its course. I can think of 100 ways the authentic leadership of this burgeoning movement might ask true white allies to participate, but it’s not for me to suggest them. My responsibility, for now, is to convince white people to listen to emerging black leaders at this amazing moment in history. When the shit hits the fan, will you be on the sidelines critiquing tactics, or will you find ways to actively support resistance, no longer able to stand living in a society with two different systems of “justice”?
If you’re white and you feel compelled to lash out: do it somewhere and in some way that does not lead to repercussions for people of color. By all means, find ways to distract authorities from brutal repression of black folks. Be tactically creative. But don’t do it to further your personal brand or ideology. Don’t tack on your preferred revolutionary message or a promotion of your organization. Don’t try to take media attention away from the black-led uprising or distort or distract its expression. Instead of your ideological flag or faction, redirect attention to messages like #JusticeForMikeBrown and #BlackLivesMatter.
The question, asked another way: When the chant is, “There ain’t no justice, just us”—will you be them, will you be you, or will you be us?
Brian Dominick is a street medic who has been participating in and analyzing social movements for 22 years. His hope in the power of protest was revitalized while supporting the Justice for Mike Brown actions on the ground in Ferguson last August. This commentary is the third in a series addressing how white activists can relate to the burgeoning movement. See also “White Do-gooders, Let’s Get Out of Ferguson” and “From John Brown to Mike Brown: Ferguson as a Modern Day Harpers Ferry?”
on the lack of specific charges being recommended by the prosecutor: “Normally, a prosecutor would go in and say, we propose the bringing of the following charges … . But to just go in and say her [you decide], no, that doesn’t happen.”
Officer Wilson testifying before the grand jury is also atypical, Goldwasser explained: “For someone to want to [testify], and for a lawyer to say, ‘sure go ahead and do it.’ That would be very unusual.”
When the announcement came out that this grand jury was going to listen to every witness, see every piece of forensic evidence, and hear everything there was, I thought, ‘wow.’ I had never heard of a case like that.
The Justice Department is scooping up data from thousands of mobile phones through devices deployed on airplanes that mimic cellphone towers, a high-tech hunt for criminal suspects that is snagging a large number of innocent Americans, according to people familiar with the operations. The U.S. Marshals Service program, which became fully functional around 2007, operates Cessna aircraft from at least five metropolitan-area airports, with a flying range covering most of the U.S. population, according to people familiar with the program.
Planes are equipped with devices—some known as “dirtboxes” to law-enforcement officials because of the initials of the Boeing Co. unit that produces them—which mimic cell towers of large telecommunications firms and trick cellphones into reporting their unique registration information.
The technology in the two-foot-square device enables investigators to scoop data from tens of thousands of cellphones in a single flight, collecting their identifying information and general location, these people said.
Ferguson Update (11/13/14): Looks like the Grand Jury will be wrapping up within the next 48 hours, with a decision to be announced in the following days. All signs point to early next week. #staywoke #farfromover
Now that I have children I can see how tuned they are to the world. Living crystals tuned to all manner of frequencies. And how urgently they need to be heard. They peer up and they say, look at me. And I put my phone away.
Justin Hall was the first blogger ever. He posted honestly and candidly about everything happening in his life, from how last night’s date went to what lifestyles he was exploring to his family’s bouts with health and his own relationship issues. Basically, everything you’re doing now on tumblr, he’s been doing for 20 years. Imagine what looking back on all that would look like.
I imagine it would look very much like his XOXO talk.
This is me in 45 years. She’s been out here since 6:30am. Each time a person leaves from voting she says, “Come back with 5 more!” #vote #electionday #election2014
“In the near term, world militaries are considering autonomous-weapon systems that can choose and eliminate targets; the UN and Human Rights Watch have advocated a treaty banning such weapons. In the medium term, as emphasised by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee in The Second Machine Age, AI may transform our economy to bring both great wealth and great dislocation …
“One can imagine such technology outsmarting financial markets, out-inventing human researchers, out-manipulating human leaders, and developing weapons we cannot even understand. Whereas the short-term impact of AI depends on who controls it, the long-term impact depends on whether it can be controlled at all.”
I think we should be very careful about artificial intelligence. If I were to guess at what our biggest existential threat is, it’s probably that. So we need to be very careful with artificial intelligence. I’m increasingly inclined to think that there should be some regulatory oversight maybe at the national and international level, just to make sure that we don’t do something really foolish. With artificial intelligence, we are summoning the demon. In all those stories where there’s the guy with the pentagram and the holy water and he’s sure that, yeah, he can control the demon. It didn’t work out.
“You work so hard and all you get is some chump change. And it hurts, you know? It hurts. I’m not saying it’s all white people, but today a white man called me ‘boy’. He said, ‘go get that other boy.’ It’s my dignity, you know? What y’all are doing out here, it’s important. 1 person can’t change it. We have to work together.” -man I encountered today while canvassing the neighborhood #ignitenc #stayupnc #peopleovermoney #blacklivesmatter #livingwage
Q: Hey, I’m a Nordic/Polish mixed race. Born in Poland. Does this blog apply to me? Or just american born white people? It seems more directed towards those. I am in NO WAY racist. I hate the way police treat PoC and I will advocate it till I’m blue in the face. But who is this direct towards? Just anyone with white skin? or European-American? Private is preferred, but please answer to your personal preference.
This isn’t directed to anyone. This is people of color talking to other people of color. It’s not about white people at all. I understand this might be difficult for you to comprehend.
2014 is the year that I probably need 99.5% of White “allies” to stay the fuck away from me in social media spaces. Honestly, I am tired of “educating” them. And I don’t even mean on anti-racism or feminist content. While I am not required to do that either, I understand that some of them learn…
“Before my son was born, I hoped he’d be a girl. I’ve never been a black man in America, and I can’t tell him what it’s like. I do know that much of society is still terrified of black males. But I also know that my son’s blackness really only presents a danger to himself.”
While it’s a well-established problem that too many Black men in the U.S. die every year at the hands of law enforcement, surgeons in the U.S. are also killing too many Black men — but thus far have largely escaped closer scrutiny, according to an analysis in The Washington Post on Tuesday by a public …
I’ve always had this belief but could never prove it. Bless this article
The old people used to always say, “Stay away from hospitals, you always come out sicker than when you went in.” I always thought they were talking about nosocomial infections. Eh, so it goes…
St. Louis County is overloaded with municipalities because white people kept creating new towns in their efforts to get away from black people. Now those towns have courthouses, police departments and a host of civil servants. All of them have to be paid. And extracting fines from people has become a critical way to raise the revenue to pay them.
Co-opting the language and posture of grievance is how members of a privileged class express their belief that the way they live shouldn’t have to change, that their opponents are hypocrites and perhaps even the real oppressors. This is how you get St. Louisans sincerely explaining that Ferguson protestors are the real racists, and how you end up with an organized group of precisely the same video game enthusiasts to whom an entire industry is catering honestly believing that they’re an oppressed minority. From this kind of ideological fortification, you can stage absolutely whatever campaigns you deem necessary.
OH S***. That’s raw bruh. That’s a real billboard via .@dreamdefenders in FL where #TrayvonMartin & #JordanDavis were both gunned down by people who claimed FL’s #standyourground law cleared them of wrongdoing. Studies show this law primarily only benefits whites who kill blacks and claim self-defense. When Marissa Alexander, a black woman, fired a gunshot into the air to scare off her abusive husband, she was prosecuted & sentenced to 20 years. #BlackLivesMatter #handsupdontshoot #Ferguson #fergusonoctober
If you’ve watched this clip, you can hear how uncomfortable the audience is throughout many points Ansari makes, and it’s so cool how he keeps plowing through. It’s really great stuff.
via @vippieee 1 of several demonstrations that happened last night during #fergusonoctober protests. This was 1 of 3 Walmarts targeted by protesters as a sign if solidarity with those demanding justice for #JohnCrawford, gunned down by cops in Ohio.
America is swiftly becoming the First World’s Mos Eisely. Everything remotely connected with drug enforcement or counterterrorism carries with it the stench of corruption and abuse.
FYI police got their start as slave patrols. The fundamental racial dynamics remain unchanged. #Ferguson #stl #policethepolice #policebrutality #handsup #dontshoot #ericgarner #mikebrown #JohnCrawford
Let me be clear about what I learned: Torture undermines all sound principles of good interrogation, intelligence collection, and assessment. It does not work, it is unnecessary, it is illegal, it betrays our ideals and our nation’s laws.
Facebook has officially relaunched the advertising platform Atlas in a new incarnation that will allow marketers to track users in new dimensions, according to a blog post from the company. Atlas will offer the ability to not only synthesize information about where users are seeing ads, but also to see how and whether those ad views play out into a purchase, even if it’s offline.
When I wrote in one of the controversial tweets, “Israel: transforming ‘antisemitism’ from something horrible to something honorable since 1948,” my point was not that there is any honor in anti-Semitism, but that calling legitimate criticism of Israeli government policies an act of anti-Semitism drains the word of meaning and undermines the very real experiences of those who suffer its horrors.
Ibrahima Sarr, a Senegalese coder, led the translation of Firefox into Fulah, which is spoken by 20m people from Senegal to Nigeria. “Crash” became hookii (a cow falling over but not dying); “timeout” became a honaama (your fish has got away). “Aspect ratio” became jeendondiral, a rebuke from elders when a fishing net is wrongly woven. In Malawi’s Chichewa language, which has 10m speakers, “cached pages” became mfutso wa tsamba, or bits of leftover food. The windowless houses of the 440,000 speakers of Zapotec, a family of indigenous languages in Mexico, meant that computer “windows” became “eyes”.
Protesters are angry about these strange negotiations to release protesters. What kind of practice is this?
September 28th
The arrest of political dissidents
Holy shit.
Timothy always told everyone to “Question authority and think for yourself.” I remember after an event where he and I spoke, a bunch of kids came up to Tim and said, “so what should we do?!?!” and Tim shouted at them, “Think for yourself!!” What I realized as I spent time with Tim was that people wanted gurus and that the more you tried to explain that you weren’t a guru, the more many people became convinced that you were in fact a guru and that they wanted in on the secret. People wanted “answers” and wanted to get to some kind of goal. The thing is, there is no answer and there is no goal. You don’t ‘win.’
my, my, my. I don’t reblog the nostalgic photos of Hill typically — because I know that they come from a very difficult/trying time in her personal/artistic life (even amidst her huge success) — but could not pass up the opportunity to share the power of this candid photo.
Protesters from across St Louis turned up and turned out for the first St Louis County Council Meeting since Mike Brown’s Death. (Part II)
The St Louis County Council meeting was a fiery afar, as residents from across the county demanded Darren Wilson’s arrest, answers for Mike Brown’s death, and expressed frustration at their own police force being turned on them like they were enemies of the state. #staywoke #farfromover
Given the endless ways we all often willingly grant these corporations and our government access into to our lives by how we use and sign up for these fucking devices and apps, I am unclear as to why so may folks are so shocked and angry about this.
While there is a lot of appropriate rage about Ferguson right now, the killing of John Crawford, III is getting less attention than it deserves. I put Shaun King’s tweets and history lesson on the matter in chronological order for easier consumption.
I blinked one day and when I opened my eyes, it was normal to have an American army battling Americans on American streets. No one even calls it a war. But it is.
The Ferguson City Council convened for the first time since Mike Brown’s death, and proved that they literally give no fucks about what the community has to say. Added to their vague, paltry proposed reforms, seems real change will have to come in Ferguson via the ballot box. I don’t care where you live folks— let this be a lesson in voting/participating in your local elections and government! #staywoke #farfromover
My people getting it!
these people are the real heroes. not the military, not politicians, not the Hollywood actors. they risked their lives and livelihoods to challenge white supremacy and institutionalized racism.
White privilege means that if you don’t school your sons about it, if you don’t insist on its reality and call out oppression, your sons may become something terrifying.
New York Public Library is experimenting with PETSCII to generate covers for books that don’t have one. Each letter in the title of the book is replaced by a corresponding PETSCII-character in one of its two character sets. So A become ▲ and F becomes ▂ and so on.
Last words of unarmed black youth gunned down by law enforcement.
“There are reasons why white gun’s rights activists can walk into a Chipotle restaurant with assault rifles and be seen as gauche nuisances while unarmed black men are killed for reaching for their wallets or cell phones, or carrying children’s toys. Guns aren’t for black people, either.”
People can be privileged in some ways and definitely not privileged in others. There are many different types of privilege, not just skin-color privilege, that impact the way people can move through the world or are discriminated against. These are all things you are born into, not things you earned, that afford you opportunities that others may not have.
On the left is a paragraph from the New York Times about Mike Brown’s “troubled” teenage years; on the right is a paragraph from Rolling Stone about Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, one of the Boston Marathon bombers.
What could possibly account for the difference in presentation of these two teenagers?
And let’s remember that one was unarmed when he was shot to death by a police officer who stopped him for walking in the street after allegedly stealing some cigars and pushing a store clerk, while the other was taken alive after allegedly setting off a bomb at the finish line of the Boston Marathon, killing a police officer, engaging in a shootout with a host of other police officers, and then hiding from a full-scale manhunt.
There’s some line editor up in the Times building right now, pondering whether they did enough editing on this piece.
“AG Holder is in St. Louis Today. I should go in early and punch him in the nose for so many different reasons.” - Tweet by Sgt. Mike Weston, Velda City Police
The above are the first 3 responses to Dr. Redmond’s spot on tweet. This is the boorish behavior that Black people have to deal with from white people for merely speaking out against white supremacy. The harassment from white people towards Black people is constant and virulent. If you’re a Black person speaking out against white supremacy, white people will attack you or at the very least, they will have a major problem with you. They will attack you more than a “good” white person saying the exact same thing. Tim Wise does not put up with an inkling of the abuse Black people endure and he isn’t saying anything new. Discourse about white supremacy from a white mouth is more palatable to the white masses than from the mouths of those victimized by white supremacy.
Ironically, the “good” white people become like the rest of their white brethren when they attempt to separate themselves by saying “not all white people”. They too become a nuisance that everlastingly badgers. They are largely silent about injustice, inequity and marginalization at the hands of white supremacy. However, the minute the marginalized speak out against their abusers, they are quick to lend a voice in defense of the abusers. It’s because even when white people are clearly abusers, other white people still see their humanity. In the face of this abuse, merely pointing out that the perpetrators of the abuse are white angers white people. The abuse itself doesn’t elicit the same level of anger from them.
Another problem are these alleged white liberals. Truth be told, I get more harassment from white liberals than from anyone else. White conservatives don’t hide their disdain for Blackness. For them, it’s a badge of honor. We know where they stand. White liberals in contrast tend to be silent, but will speak up to center themselves in a crisis or will be apologetic towards white abusers, instead of condemning them. Many will not acknowledge that white supremacy even exists. If they do acknowledge a problem, they will wrap it up in empty platitudes about everyone needing to get along, how they don’t see race, how we’re all human, how they have Black friends or whatever post-racial nonsense they ascribe to, as if that addresses white supremacy. They believe that the problem “goes both ways”.
If the above isn’t you as a white person, do not take this as your cue to respond with “not all white people”. As the saying goes, the hit dog will holler. If something does not apply to you, then why are you hollering? Did I hit you? Maybe I did. The only thing many white people can bring themselves to say in response to Black suffering and white supremacy is “not all white people” or “this is reverse racism” or their favorite chopped up MLK Jr. quote “hate cannot drive out hate”. The response from white people is never a unanimous “the system of white supremacy is a scourge that must end and we must fight to end it”. It is never that.
Whiteness will always justify the extermination of Blackness. Mike Brown was gunned down in Ferguson by officer Darren Wilson and the Ferguson police in turn releases video stills of what they claim to be Brown being an alleged criminal days after his murder. This was completely unrelated to his murder, but there is always a reason for dead Black bodies when whiteness governs. So why did they release these stills if the Ferguson police themselves have admitted that it is completely unrelated to Brown’s murder at the hands of officer Darren Wilson? They did it to smear his image. This is a tactic of white supremacy. It always smears the image of a Black victim.
When Black people are victimized and dehumanized, they still aren’t quite human in the eyes of many white people. At least not on the level of white humanity. It’s why a white terrorist like Dzhokhar Tsarnaev can be put on the cover of Rolling Stone, like he’s a heartthrob in a boy band, and be described as “popular and promising”, while unarmed Black people murdered by white people are criminalized in death. Their image gets smeared because full victimhood is relegated to whiteness. Innocence and chasteness will be awarded to a white murderer before a Black murder victim.
I don’t argue or engage with white people on this subject anymore. This Malcolm X quote is forever relevant. I’ll respond or say my piece if need be, but I won’t debate a white person about Black humanity. My response to “good” white folks will always be “go and get your people”. That’s all I have to say to them. Truly good white people don’t need to be told that. They know. Word to John Brown.
“On August 9, Raymond Wilford, who happens to be black, was walking to the Westlake Mall to meet a friend. He ended up walking through a confrontation between an unidentified man, who happens to be white, and protesters at a demonstration. In a matter of seconds, Wilford found himself being spit on by the unidentified man and then pepper sprayed by a mall security guard, even as eyewitnesses pleaded with the guard that he was apprehending the wrong man.”
[Image: a series of tweets by justified agitator (@Awkward_Duck) on August 19, 2014.
1:23 AM: We literally laid in someone’s backyard for what seemed like an eternity while tanks rolled down the streets #Ferguson
1:26 AM: I’m live tweeting because there’s a media blackout. #Ferguson
1:33 AM: I’m so shaken. They’re literally just rolling around throwing tear gas into neighborhoods-not aggressive crowds. #Ferguson
1:34 AM: I was pouring milk over one guys eyes when they came back around and threw another at us. #Ferguson
1:51 AM: Let me repeat, THEY ARE GASSING NEIGHBORHOODS not crowds of protestors.There was only a few of us walking. there is no curfew, so why?]
Want to make sure you saw this.
“Just because you’re Black and you live in a Black community, which has been projected as a community of criminals. This is done. And once the public accepts this image also, it paves the way for a police-state type of activity in the Negro community. They can use any kind of brutal methods to suppress Blacks because “they’re criminals anyway.” And what has given this image? The press again, by letting the power structure or the racist element in the power structure use them in that way.“
I was just thinking that. History has shown us MANY TIMES, that even when we have them caught on camera unlawfully kill someone, police still get off. Too much room for unreasonable doubt for a conviction in this case.
One of the biggest stories in comics and pop culture over the summer was from Marvel Comics showing their efforts in creating diverse characters. Much to a lot of fans dismay,they made Thor a woman and Captain America a black man. Sam Wilson aka The Falcon is now officially Captain America. While working today through my anger at the Ferguson, MO story which is still unfolding…I wondered what Sam would do if he were a real person. So, I did this image to deal with the madness.
“We had not infiltrated any group,” he said the day after police raided the warehouse that had become one of several gathering spots for demonstrators during the convention.
Noted liar John Timoney, one week after everything went wrong at the RNC protests in Philadelphia in 2000.
I am quoting this a thousand times today. RIP Mike Brown.
I went to the May Day protests this year, but mainly walked on the sidewalk, away from the bulk of the crowd. Once we got to downtown, the police presence was so heavy and crowded that I ended up ducking into a back alley. What did I find? An unmarked black van, with a bunch of burly 30 to 40 somethings wearing and putting on Black Bloc gear. They also looked quite startled when I stumbled upon them, but being a small woman wearing a nice shirt and jeans and a headscarf, I posed no threat to them, and they then ignored me as I walked past, doing the same to them. The ‘anarchists’ and Black Bloc people I actually know in Seattle? Skinny kids and 20 somethings, who don’t have the money for shiny tactical boots, and definitely don’t have the money for a black van. It was pretty obvious these guys were undercovers of some type.
my nigga looked at her like “this white bitch finna make me catch a case on national television”
Was this actually fucking something a newscaster said on live tv
Yeah cnn, she sounds British I don’t think she understood the historical significance of hoses and black people
Errol Barnett is my Ferguson News Media spirit animal:
We are being told that Michael Brown attacked an armed man and tried to take his gun. The people who are telling us this hail from that universe where choke-holds are warm-fuzzies, where boys discard their skittles yelling, “You’re gonna die tonight,” and possess the power to summon and banish shotguns from the ether. These are the necessary myths of our country, and without them we are subject to the awful specter of history, and that is just too much for us to bear.
A silent protest in Love Park, downtown Philadelphia orchestrated by performance artists protesting the murder of Michael Brown in Ferguson. The onslaught of passerby’s wanting to take photos with the statue exemplifies the disconnect in American society. Simply frame out the dead body, and it doesn’t exist.
Here are some observations by one of the artists involved in the event:
I don’t know who any of these folks are.
They were tourists I presume.
But I heard most of what everything they said. A few lines in particular stood out. There’s one guy not featured in the photos. His friends were trying to get him to join the picture but he couldn’t take his eyes off the body.
“Something about this doesn’t feel right. I’m going to sit this one out, guys.” “Com’on man… he’s already dead.”
(Laughs.)
There were a billion little quips I heard today. Some broke my heart. Some restored my faith in humanity. There was an older white couple who wanted to take a picture under the statue.
The older gentleman: “Why do they have to always have to shove their politics down our throats.” Older woman: “They’re black kids, honey. They don’t have anything better to do.”
One woman even stepped over the body to get her picture. But as luck would have it the wind blew the caution tape and it got tangle around her foot. She had to stop and take the tape off. She still took her photo.
There was a guy who yelled at us… “We need more dead like them. Yay for the white man!”
“One young guy just cried and then gave me a hug and said ‘thank you. It’s nice to know SOMEBODY sees me.’
What would white people do if being white were synonymous with being criminal? What would white people do if an unarmed teen were gunned down in the middle of the street and then his body left there for hours? What would white people do if this kind of treatment by the police were not simply commonplace but expected? What would white people do if other citizens of different races and economic classes reacted by saying white people should simply behave themselves, stop acting so “white”, and trust that not only will the truth about the shooting come out but that police officers should be given the benefit of the doubt?
Two screws, two washers and two nuts (if you are using a cabinet handle which is recommended)
Heavy duty scissors
Steps:
Get a trash bin or trash can lid.
If you can, split the trash bin in half to make two shields.
Drill or punch two holes, vertically, into you shield with the appropriate distance to fit your cabinet handle. If you are using rope, you can drill a hole approximately six inches from each other near the center of the shield.
Place your cabinet handle over the holes, put the screws through it, place the washers on the outside against the plastic and screw the nuts over them. If you using rope, cut a piece 8-12 inches in diameter, place each side into the hole and tie a tight knot. The rope should be tight so that it is easy to maneuver.
You’re done!
Some people like to spray paint a peace sign or anarchy symbol over their shields. Decorate and customize your shield however you like, get creative. Add a pouch onto your shield to hold items or use a retractable clip so you can put the shield over your shoulder when not in use.
How To Use The Shield:
Shields makes a group look intimidating and militant but they have a purpose. Protest shields are generally used for both defensive and offensive tactics.
Your shield can be used when the group charges at a police line to protect against batons (offensive tactic).
If the police are shooting flash bangs, concussion grenades, rubber bullets, tear gas, bean bags, pepper spray or other ‘less-lethal weapons’, you can get on your knees and place the shield in front of you for protection. This is an example of using your shield defensively:
(The photo above is from the Occupy Oakland march on January 28th. Watch the video)
For the first time, the woman who was captured on cellphone video being beaten by a California Highway Patrol officer on the side of a Los Angeles freeway has opened up about the frightening ordeal…
I was just watching Al Jazeera and they brought up Marlene Pinnock’s beating and I realized this was first time I’d ever heard her name
I can’t do the exact math but I probably spend half the time I’m awake absently worrying about my brother. He’s fine, but every time another black male gets shot for no reason, I start getting panicky and shut down and worry about him. He would never be in a position where this would happen to…
Almost a thousand people in West Africa die from ebola and nobody bats an eyelash, yet 2 white people in the US contract it and miraculously a cure is released and given to them because they’re an “extreme circumstance.” Satire is dead and real life is a dystopian hellscape
In my feed today there was a clip from a piece from May this year at BBC Africa: Kenya’s hidden sex tourism in Malindi. I used Google to find the article because having seen reporting on this issue previously, I wondered if something had happen, a new development.
The piece is by BBC producer Charlotte Atwood and was billed as an investigative piece. And heavens knows I’m not a qualified press critic, just someone who reads the news. The article disturbed me from a journalistic stand point.
There is an historic pride in the fundamental goodness of the Dhamma which causes conflict and hostility. There are enough teachings in the Buddhist Canon that warns against such an attitude, but there are also many examples in Buddhist history where a strong sense of pride in one’s own tradition is supported. It is precisely where an attitude in which the most compassionate, the most Buddhist, the most traditional are valued – that intolerance in Buddhist culture comes into focus.
Dependence on apocalyptic thinking is one of the most destructive forms of present shock, and it’s the result of an intolerance for situations with no clear outcome, no winner or loser, no final “result”. It makes people and institutions almost constitutionally incapable of contending with chronic problems, adopting sustainable approaches, or even seeing sustenance as a victory in itself.
Now, if corporations are entitled to 1st amendment rights because they are people, it follows that they must also be entitled to 13th amendment rights. That is, corporations have a right not to be owned by other people. Thus, corporations must be set free from their owners and all such ownership must be declared null and void.
Blanket surveillance [of the kind the NSA has routinely engaged in] is highly unlikely to prevent a terrorist attack and is a dangerous misuse of resources that, if used in other ways, possibly could prevent attacks (such as the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing). Anyone with a reasonable sense of large numbers could surmise a similar conclusion. When the goal is to identify a very small number of key signals in a large ocean of noise, indiscriminately increasing the size of the ocean is self-evidently not the way to go. I reach my conclusion having spent five years looking at this problem in depth. From early 2002 until the middle of 2006, I worked on a Defense Department research project called NIMD (Novel Intelligence from Massive Data).
As the thrill of burning a dollar wanes you’ll move on to a five, maybe even try a twenty. Extracting a crisp new $100 bill will cause someone to say, “No!” but your own heart will beat a little faster. This is no longer a symbolic gesture. Will you burn a hundred? I hope so.
A system that greets a bag of frozen vegetables with a bar code like an old friend but draws a blank on a basket of fresh greens at the farmers market—that’s not just technical. That’s political.
When you go out into the woods and you look at trees, you see all these different trees. And some of them are bent, and some of them are straight, and some of them are evergreens, and some of them are whatever. And you look at the tree and you allow it. You appreciate it. You see why it is the way it is. You sort of understand that it didn’t get enough light, and so it turned that way. And you don’t get all emotional about it. You just allow it. You appreciate the tree. The minute you get near humans, you lose all that. And you are constantly saying ‘You’re too this, or I’m too this.’ That judging mind comes in. And so I practice turning people into trees. Which means appreciating them just the way they are. - Ram Dass
A post-racist society is a society where you really don’t have any white people. That’s the scary thing. . . . The idea of whiteness is tied to power. And the destruction of that power means the end of whiteness itself.
“The tools no longer need to be modal; they can be used in a very natural modeless manner. Pens, brushes and erasers are distributed all over the workspace.”
“The user experience is really like coming into a room with a special suited environment for one specific task.”
“The Spheroid Designer may seem to resemble glass balls dropped into mud, but actually it’s meant to be glass balls embedded in an ‘old stale brownie.’”
It is rare to find children rolling down hills, climbing trees, and spinning in circles just for fun. Merry-go-rounds and teeter-totters are a thing of the past. Recess times have shortened due to increasing educational demands, and children rarely play outdoors due to parental fears, liability issues, and the hectic schedules of modern-day society. Lets face it: Children are not nearly moving enough, and it is really starting to become a problem.
Gonna keep a tally of messages I get from a) white feminists completely proving my point and b) people who think this comic proves feminism is worthless because I criticized one part of it. (Even despite me writing these words underneath the comic.) Then I’ll add them all up, see which column has more, and then drink myself to sleep either way.
Haha… this is why we can’t have nice things.
In order to counter the attempts to marginalise progressive lifelong learning, and promote the cultivation of the Cooperative Gestalt, we need to address the needs, so to speak, of the head, the heart and the hands. The head needs to be reinforced with greater understanding. It is important to explain why it is better to learn continuously in an open and inclusive manner so that we are able to make the most of changing circumstances for the good of all. The heart needs to be stirred with passionate concern. We should explore diverse means – fiction, art, film – to fire up the desire to resist attempts to shut down the cooperative mindset. Last but not least, the hands need the practical tools to bring about changes. We should make use of the many resources available to strengthen the impact of progressive lifelong learning.
The sequence featuring a woman selling what she claims is “Madonna’s Pap smear” may be the most acute comment ever on the ludicrousness of celebrity worship.
Slacker anecdote: by 1991 I had moved to Houston. Rice University radio, ktru had a contest promoting the movie before it came out. They asked listeners to write a 25 word essay about why they were the biggest slacker. The winner would get to meet Richard Linkletter who no one knew who he was at this time: Slacker hadn’t been released yet. My future husband would win this contest by writing “cornflakes” 25 times.
He liked to say that the true slacker would have never even sent the 25 word essay in because in that day you had to get an envelope, address and stamp it and stick it in the mail. Far too many steps past the first conceptual idea.
He got a bus ticket to Austin and $9.17. 91.7 is the FM dial of the college radio.
My husband took a cab to Linkletter’s apartment - that place that used to be on Nueces in the movie - where he slept on a blow up matress for the night. Linkletter took him out to some pizza place, they drove around and looked at places he liked in Austin. Linkletter gave him a little promotional faux pap smear that they had made.
It’s been apparent to me for a while that most men can’t really imagine “equality.” All they can imagine is having the existing power structure inverted.
I cannot decide whether this shows how unimaginative they are, or shows how aware they must be of what they do in order to so deeply fear having it turned on them.
kara walker has been doing 2-d slavery scenes since the beginning of time and i always felt uneasy about how it was received by white viewership. with all of the white people viewing “a subtlety”, i wonder what are their reasons? where does their interest lie? how are they explaining these sculptures to their children? (if you haven’t gone yet, expect tons of babies running amuck) hell, how are they explaining it to themselves? is stopping by domino factory just the current “it” thing to do in nyc? are they leaving with a better understanding of the existence of black people in this country?
In honor of a proud, savvy people with a rich heritage
I couldn’t separate my viewing pleasure from the consuming white gaze. It was everywhere. I could barely take in the pieces of work because I was surrounded by jeering white people. Watching them consume these little black bodies and feel nothing like the sorrow that took me instantly. And then they were walking through the puddles of liquid sugar that was part of the art. Letting their children touch it. But in a way they became part of the artwork. It was like a presentation on the white gaze and their consumption of PoC.
PUSSIES & ANKHS on Kara Walker’s A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby (2014)
[Image: Two images. The first is of the late comedian Mitch Hedberg, a white man with shoulder length blonde hair, holding a microphone and smiling. The caption reads: “I don’t need a receipt for a donut. I’ll just give you the money, you give me the donut. End of transaction. We don’t need to bring ink and paper into this. I just cannot imagine a scenario where I would have to prove that I bought a donut.”
The second image is of comedian Patrice O’Neal, a black man speaking while holding a microphone. The caption reads: “I do a lot of stuff to protect myself. I keep my receipts. I collect receipts cause that’s a trail of where you been man. Everywhere I go I get a receipt. And I never go more than a half hour without buying something cause you could kill somebody in a half hour, and then you need an alibi.”]
White people hate receipts. My momma always told me to get a receipt for this very reason
Damn. Truth. And white supremacist shielding in a nutshell.
Also, it’s even doubly ironic because Mitch Hedberg was well known to have used a lot of drugs and a lot of his stand up was based on being a “stoner”. Which means that basically, he was funny by flaunting publicly that he did narcotics. And yet, even as a drug user, he never felt the need to keep receipts. Never imagined why - even as a person who regularly did things that broke the law (yes, even a shitty law) - he’d need to prove he bought a donut somewhere.
Patrice O’Neal who has never publicly - to my knowledge - talked about doing drugs, much less based his comedy on it - keeps receipts and can well imagine that he needs to have every half hour of his life accounted for.
Seriously. PERFECT EXAMPLE OF RACISM AND WHITE SUPREMACY.
*What it’s about: *An artistic depiction of several popular, fictional princesses envisioned as Black girls.
*Why I did this: *Sometime in my teen years, when I was tutoring elementary school children, I overheard two Black girls talking about wanting to be Cinderella for Halloween. Another girl interrupted them and said, “You can’t be Cinderella, because you’re Black!” It bothered me. When my little cousins came along and they began to take interest in princesses, I often wondered how they felt about not looking like some of the popular ones, such as Cinderella and Snow White. Would they play princess happily until someone came and told them that they could never be a certain princess, because they are Black? It’s no secret that when the majority of characters on TV are white, some young Black girls can have a hard time identifying with them without feeling as though they needed to change their appearance in order to look more like them.
This art series is not meant to merely change white characters into ones of color, but rather to encourage my younger girl cousins - and any other young Black girl I might inspire - to see themselves as any princess they want to be, without feeling the need to change their skin or their hair.
Please look out for this series which is coming to my shop on June 6th.
We pay for things all the time that we didn’t do. I wasn’t around when World War I happened but we’re still paying pensions. That had nothing to do with me, but I understand that I have to pay into that. That’s sort of what government means. If a state dies with every generation, what kind of state is that? When people talk about debt, or the state of Social Security, they talk about what kind of world are we leaving to our children. They understand that the country continues, that the country was here before us and that it will be here after we die.
I’m ready for people in positions of power at magazines and newspapers and movie studios to recalibrate their understanding of what it means to talk about race in the first place. If America would like to express that it truly values and appreciates the voices of its minorities, it will listen to all their stories, not just the ones reacting to its shortcomings and brutality.
Because these combat robots are coming, and many are already here, if we do not prevent their global deployment by the time you and I are old we will see robots on street corners with guns that run software we do not control, implementing policies beamed to them over the airwaves in encrypted communications, accessing databases of faces and retinas, ever watchful for enemies not of the State as we currently understand it, but of the people who own the right to program the machines which watch over us. The State will have become technocratic – fascism by remote control – and the dream of control, coveted by evil men for generations, will have come to fruition. We have a scant few years to arrest the development of these technologies or to rearchitect the social foundations of liberty to survive a situation where combat robots leave the population largely powerless to resist tyranny, whether they have their rifles or not.
No grand conspiracy, no ‘white guilt’ - I was playing the game, and when all 30 characters were unlocked, they appeared on screen at once, and I was struck by how the overwhelming majority of them were white. … I thought about what I saw on the screen, and formed the opinion “Nintendo can do better than this.”
Taking human life should always be a very serious thing. There’s something very close up about the Middle Ages. You’re taking a sharp piece of steel and hacking at someone’s head, and you’re getting spattered with his blood, and you’re hearing his screams. In some ways maybe it’s more brutal that we’ve insulated ourselves from that. We’re setting up mechanisms where we can kill human beings with drones and missiles where you’re sitting at a console and pressing the button. We never have to hear their whimpering, or hear them begging for their mother, or dying in horrible realities around us.
It amazes me how the seemingly most paranoid people are all “Software created by anonymous entities? Sign me up! I can’t wait to use it to store my most sensitive files/conduct illegal transactions!”
Where do these systems of obedience come from? Why do we recognize power instead of individual autonomy? These questions are fascinating to me. It’s all this strange illusion, isn’t it?
The thing to understand is why we’re fighting - understand, the purpose of segregation is to preserve the second-class status of blacks. And the main thing for you to understand is we must continue to fight.
I am mostly a pretty worried person. In conversations, I am always worried about what to say. The first time I took ecstasy, all of that lifted away. All the anxiety, which is the baseline of my life in some way, and I had this moment of like, wait a second! Are there people who feel this way all the time? This is like a whole way to be, where you don’t feel anxious? Oh my god! It was so amazing. In the months after that, it was a really helpful thing to have experienced. It remains to this day a feeling that is helpful to know about.
Short documentary on Greenbelt Knoll, Philadelphia’s first integrated development. We were driving by and the beautiful homes stopped us in our tracks. It’s delightful to learn that the neighborhood has such a remarkable history.
Just as clean tech is being thwarted by the trillions of dollars previously sunk into fossil-fuel infrastructure, our collective investment in capitalism itself is forestalling superior post-capitalist alternatives.
This Firefox addon iterates through all of the html text in your browser and whenever it finds a person or corporation from the data, it illuminates that relationship a little bit.
The main problem I was trying to solve was how to increase the spread of information about political…
I was told by another officer while in the car that recording a police officer was illegal because people are using iPhones as guns and shooting cops through the camera lens…I told him that I have the right to be recording a cop and he said that there were incidents, specifically in uptown Manhattan where a kid shot a cop with his iPhone. Straight face. Very serious.
I was reminded today that former Pirate Dock Ellis has always been one of my favorite athletes.
1. He pitched a no-hitter while he was tripping on LSD
2. He used to wear these curlers in his hair onto the field until the league banned him from doing so.
3. He once tried to hit every player on the Reds with a fastball to start a game. He hit three batters, and attempted to hit two more before getting thrown out.
4. He once chased a racist heckler into the stands with a baseball bat.
5. He was in general outspoken and intolerant of racism in baseball during an era when not many players would be.
(The “hate better” quote came after he sued the Cincinatti Reds for macing him before a game because a security guard didn’t know he was a player trying to get into the stadium. He won his lawsuit.)
I’ve had countless requests to buy text links, do link exchanges, and create hidden links on mefi to lame spammy companies. I’ve also had content companies ask if I wanted to institute a NYTimes type of system where archive pages cost a buck to view after 30 days, and I’ve gotten offers from ad firms to do keyword smart tag type advertising on all old archive pages. I’ve refused them all, and developed a mix of self-service ads and donation/payments for new users that supports the site and my time well.
Today was a landmark day in the city of Philadelphia and the commonwealth of Pennsylvania as a federal judge within the state ruled the state’s ban on gay marriage to be unconstitutional. If the ruling is not successfully challenged, it will mean that Pennsylvania will become the 19th state to…
It is generally understood that women get paid less than men; that white women get paid more than black men and women and hispanic men and women. However, recognizing this macrocosm functioning intimately, in the immediate, personal, local context — in our friend groups, in our teams, in our companies, and in our communities — remains massively taboo.
I realized that if you swapped out the word housework for Facebook that 80 percent of this text was still totally crystal clear, and it really freaked me out.
As of this writing, I have blocked more than 500 Twitter users, including accounts belonging to at least 20 of the 30 companies in the Dow Jones Industrial Average as well as dozens of startups. I have blocked government agencies and industry lobbies, print publications and new-media ventures, burger chains and probiotic yogurts, top-shelf spirits and sports drinks, financial institutions, automakers, cell-phone providers, over-the-counter medicines, Hollywood movies, Broadway musicals, and public television shows.
I realized that if you swapped out the word housework for Facebook that 80 percent of this text was still totally crystal clear, and it really freaked me out.
As of this writing, I have blocked more than 500 Twitter users, including accounts belonging to at least 20 of the 30 companies in the Dow Jones Industrial Average as well as dozens of startups. I have blocked government agencies and industry lobbies, print publications and new-media ventures, burger chains and probiotic yogurts, top-shelf spirits and sports drinks, financial institutions, automakers, cell-phone providers, over-the-counter medicines, Hollywood movies, Broadway musicals, and public television shows.
But the notion, even expressed jokingly, of punching people in the face for wearing Google Glass — as if the device somehow signals a traitor to the cause of humanity — pushes things over the top. Yes, we can all imagine how people wearing an augmented reality device might be annoying: They can surf the Web while pretending to converse with us or, worse, record us when we don’t know it. No sooner had the very first prototypes been spotted last year than TechCrunch reported a new, purely apprehensive moniker for its wearers: Glassholes. But it’s as if the public is now being primed to go after early adopters — almost to a point where one might be reluctant to put on the device.
That these people, at this point of reasoning, seem to both want and not want something, to no ends, is vaguely an example of the base desire of conscious beings to want to stop being conscious, as a means of fulfillment, while knowing that if they stop being conscious they won’t require fulfillment, a paradox present in all consciousness-related phenomenon after 2-4 steps of cognition.
The page includes a little description/explanation of each principle.
Thinking about this again.
It is becoming clearer to more and more people that none of the institutions which claim to represent us are ever going to act in the interest of communities.
“The brutal truth is that the bulk of white people in American never had any interest in educating black people, except as this could serve white purposes. It is not the black child’s language that is in question, it is not his language that is despised: It is his experience. A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him, and a child cannot afford to be fooled. A child cannot be taught by anyone whose demand, essentially, is that the child repudiate his experience, and all that gives him sustenance, and enter a limbo in which he will no longer be black, and in which he knows that he can never become white. Black people have lost too many black children that way. And, after all, finally, in a country with standards so untrustworthy, a country that makes heroes of so many criminal mediocrities, a country unable to face why so many of the nonwhite are in prison, or on the needle, or standing, futureless, in the streets—it may very well be that both the child, and his elder, have concluded that they have nothing whatever to learn from the people of a country that has managed to learn so little.”
No doubt, some will find the idea of engineering platforms to promote diversity or adapting existing laws to curb online harassment unsettling and paternalistic, but such criticism ignores the ways online spaces are already contrived with specific outcomes in mind—they are designed to serve Silicon Valley venture capitalists, who want a return on investment, and advertisers, who want to sell us things. The term ‘platform,’ which implies a smooth surface, misleads us, obscuring the ways technology companies shape our online lives, prioritizing and upraising certain purposes over others.
Because today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups…So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing.
We’ve spent the last 30 years losing every battle with kleptocracy and government support of corporations so enthusiastic it has become a merging. Political protest is a Potemkin village, and everyone knows it. It is pure spectacle, free of real world consequence. It can be safely ignored or marginalized on the edges of real American politics, as long as it doesn’t interfere with the kleptocracy. If it does, or even threatens to talk about the kleptocracy, it will be violently put down.
Turns out, as with all things political, there’s money involved in here. In order to entice Huy Fong from Rosemead - where they’ve been operating for years without complaint - Irwindale offered the company a low cost loan and expected to collect the interest. Huy Fong built the plant, moved and immediately refi’d and paid off the loan, screwing the city out of the interest. Irwindale, like a lot of these little LA satellite cities is a crooked cesspool. The Mayor and the Deputy Mayor are both under indictment for fishy practices with money. Also, the vast majority of the complaints have been filed by one household - who’s the nephew of one of the city councilmen. It’s a shake down pure and simple.
It has a neck. No fish has a neck. And you know what? When you look inside the fin, and you take off those fin rays, you find an upper arm bone, a forearm, and a wrist.
This is the age of the obvious. You must prove, beyond a reasonable doubt, what any educated individual already should know because there is a lot of money in obfuscating the obvious.
It is suspected that in this case, Hubble had locked onto a bad guide star, potentially a double star or binary. This caused an error in the tracking system, resulting in this remarkable picture of brightly colored stellar streaks. The prominent red streaks are from stars in the globular cluster NGC 288.
When I first got this role I just cried like a baby because I was like, “Wow, next Halloween, I’m gonna open the door and there’s gonna be a little kid dressed as the Falcon.” That’s the thing that always gets me. I feel like everybody deserves that. I feel like there should be a Latino superhero. Scarlett does great representation for all the other girls, but there should be a Wonder Woman movie. I don’t care if they make 20 bucks, if there’s a movie you’re gonna lose money on, make it Wonder Woman. You know what I mean, ’cause little girls deserve that.
While the physical space of the urban school is often understood to serve as preparation for factory work, with the rise of a deindustrialized economy it can be argued that students are being prepared instead for the enclosed space of the prison.
"The hidden curriculum is generally understood as the process by which daily exposure to school expectations and routines transmits norms and values of the dominant society to students. We argue that in the present the hidden curriculum no longer simply prepares students for work. Through both teaching and disciplinary practices it strives as well to injure and demoralize students by restructuring the school day as a sequence of low-intensity pedagogical assaults. In this way, the hidden curriculum anticipates the conditions of domination and abjection that students will encounter not only in the workplace or in prison proper, but also in social life generally." Doing School Time: The Hidden Curriculum Goes to Prison, José García and Noah De Lissovoy. (PDF)
My 5-year-old recognized this before I did, during his single week in kindergarten. So thankful he resisted with all his being.
Ducks is about part of my time working at a mining site in Fort McMurray, the events are from 2008. It is a complicated place, it is not the same for all, and these are only my own experiences there. It is a sketch because I want to test how I would tell these stories, and how I feel about sharing them. A larger work gets talked about from time to time. It is not a place I could describe in one or two stories. Ducks is about a lot of things, and among these, it is about environmental destruction in an environment that includes humans. Thank you for taking the time to read it.
-Kate
If you are 35 or younger - and quite often, older - the advice of the old economy does not apply to you. You live in the post-employment economy, where corporations have decided not to pay people. Profits are still high. The money is still there. But not for you. You will work without a pay rise, benefits, or job security. Survival is now a laudable aspiration.
Passover to me is informed by the Seder ritual, but it’s more than just that. It’s a Jewish holiday par excellence because every day should be a day where we remember the drive towards freedom. It’s something we should strive to preserve and protect. The month of April marks Passover, and it is the same month that the Civil War ended in 1865. During this time my great-great-grandfather and his brother were at the courthouse the day we signed the terms of surrender with Grant. They had been enslaved Africans at a tobacco plantation in Virginia. And on this day, their former slaveholder comes up to them and says, “You’re free.” I like to think of them as the first black people to realize that the nightmare was over.
Facebook wants my data to sell me stuff. I like to think of this as a feudal model. At a most fundamental model, we are tenant farming for companies like Google. We are on their land producing data.
If a person makes an unreasonable complaint at one of the stores, security camera footage of the person is processed into facial data with the recognition system and classified as “complainer”.
You speak English, a futured language, and what that means is that every time you discuss the future or any kind of a future event, grammatically, you’re forced to cleave that from the present and treat it as if it’s something viscerally different. Now suppose that that visceral difference makes you suddenly disassociate the future from the present every time you speak. If that’s true, and it makes the future feel like something more distant and more different from the present, that’s going to make it harder to save.
If, on the other hand, you speak a futureless language, the present and the future, you speak about them identically. If that suddenly nudges you to feel about them identically, that’s going to make it easier to save.
[…]
Futureless language speakers, even after this level of control, are 30 percent more likely to report having saved in any given year. Does this have cumulative effects? Yes. By the time they retire, futureless language speakers, holding constant their income, are going to retire with 25 percent more in savings.
Can we push this data even further? Yes. Think about smoking, for example. Smoking is, in some deep sense, negative savings, right. If savings is current pain in exchange for future pleasure, smoking is just the opposite. It’s current pleasure in exchange for future pain. What we should expect then is the opposite effect. And that’s exactly what we find. Futureless-language speakers are 20 to 24 percent less likely to be smoking at any given in time compared to identical families. And they’re going to be 13 to 70 percent less likely to be obese by the time they retire.
In a fascinating episode of NPR’s TED Radio Hour titled The Money Paradox, behavioral economist Keith Chen shares some absolutely astounding research on how the tenses in a language influence that culture’s attitudes about saving and spending money.
Complement with this excellent, albeit flawed by virtue of being written in the futured English language, read on how to worry less about money.
As the white father of an African-American son, I am keenly aware that I never face the suspicion and indignities that my son continuously confronts. In fact, all of the men among my African-American in-laws—and I literally mean every single one of them—can tell multiple stories of unjustified investigatory police stops of the sort that not a single one of my white male relatives has ever experienced.
I just love these guys. So coordinated, tight, and talented. And the music’s not bad either. I also love that they filmed in New York, one of if not the greatest city in the world.
I’m still mad at Will I. Am. and Justin Bieber for ripping these guys and Daft Punk off.
The morning of machine civilization
akai tate kage mayoi
haiiro no fuku matoi
rizumu ni torawareta asa
itsumo to onaji shunkan
tomenai seisan rain
nanika ga kakete'ru
In the twilight of machinery
In the morning of machine civilization,
lost shadows, behind their red shields,
wrapped in their grey uniforms,
are imprisoned in the mechanical rhythms.
It's always the same scene everyday,
where production lines march on nonstop.
However, something is missing
in the twilight of machinery.
Where’s the world going
Won’t somebody tell me
Are these thoughts illusion
Are we all one
kono sekai wa kawareru no ka
kono omoi wa maboroshi ka
Where’s the world going?
Won’t somebody tell me?
Are these thoughts illusion?
Are we all one?
Will this world be able to change?
Are these thoughts illusion?
People find work to be done
hito wa hataraki tori utau
nemuri ni ochita yume
me o samase kare sakebu
itsumo to onaji shunkan
kono setsuna ni ikiru
itsuka kakumei motome
In the twilight of machinery
People find work to be done.
Humans work, birds sing,
and then they fall into a deep slumber.
“Open your eyes!” He shouts.
It’s always the same scene everyday,
and we live in this brief moment.
Someday we’d surely want a revolution
in the twilight of machinery.
Where’s the world going
Won’t somebody tell me
Are these thoughts illusion
Are we all one
kono omoi o kaerareru no ka
itsumo yume ni waraikakeru
Where’s the world going?
Won’t somebody tell me?
Are these thoughts illusion?
Are we all one?
Will we be able to change these thoughts?
We will always smile to our dreams.
(Are these thoughts illusion)
(Are these thoughts illusion?)
Where’s the world going
Won’t somebody tell me
Are these thoughts illusion
Are we all one
kono omoi o kaerareru no ka
itsumo yume ni waraikakeru
Where’s the world going?
Won’t somebody tell me?
Are these thoughts illusion?
Are we all one?
Will we be able to change these thoughts?
We will always smile to our dreams.
break through
paradigm
in your mind
revolution
desire
science
ascension
thirteen
white shirt
white shirt
white shirt
black shirt
black shirt
singularity
we are all one
are we all one
break through
paradigm
in your mind
revolution
desire
science
ascension
thirteen
white shirt
white shirt
white shirt
black shirt
black shirt
singularity
we are all one
are we all one
totalitarian dystopian future lit is like “what if the government got so powerful that all the bad stuff that’s already happening ALSO HAPPENED TO WHITE PEOPLE?”
Hari Kondabolu on the Late Show with David Letterman. I think I might be the first standup comic to say “race is a social construct” on late night television.
I have a digital subscription to the New Yorker. I love it dearly when I make time to read it. I haven’t made the time in… about two years… and I would like to read the best articles I’ve missed in that time. So: which articles published in the New Yorker in 2012 and 2013 are absolute must-reads?
Once we made it to the lobby, Ross and Lebenthal reassured me that what I’d just seen wasn’t really a group of wealthy and powerful financiers making homophobic jokes, making light of the financial crisis, and bragging about their business conquests at Main Street’s expense. No, it was just a group of friends who came together to roast each other in a benign and self-deprecating manner. Nothing to see here.
…
The first and most obvious conclusion was that the upper ranks of finance are composed of people who have completely divorced themselves from reality.
Go ahead, say it out loud. The internet is a utility. There, you’ve just skipped past a quarter century of regulatory corruption and lawsuits that still rage to this day and arrived directly at the obvious conclusion. Internet access isn’t a luxury or a choice if you live and participate in the modern economy, it’s a requirement.
I’ve never understood this argument, which is sometimes cited as a reason to go to a non-Indian restaurant on a given day. How should people cope who live in India? They have Indian food many, many days in a row, and often (not always, by any means) poorer Indians are choosing from a less varied menu of that food than Americans who visit Indian restaurants. Would it be so terrible to eat only Indian food, whether at home or in restaurants, every day for a week? Every day for a month? I don”t see why. So how about two days in a row? Or two meals in a row? Three? What if you had Indo-Chinese food somewhere in the middle of the sequence? Momos cooked by Nepalese immigrants?
Until a group meal yesterday, I had Korean food five days in a row, three meals a day, much to my joy. I bet some Koreans, in Korea, did the same.
He told the story as-is, but instead of the whole notion of the intergalactic thing which was too hard and too silly, he maintained that the existence of Doctor Manhattan had changed the whole balance of the world economy, the world political structure. He felt that THAT character really altered the way reality had been. He had the Ozymandias character convince, essentially, the Doctor Manhattan character to go back and stop himself from being created.
This neural network—which you can read about here, basically it’s a computing network modeled on animal nervous systems—has eleven layers of neurons, which makes it possible to ID millions of house numbers a day from the Street View raw image data. “We can, for example, transcribe all the views we have of street numbers in France in less than an hour using our Google infrastructure,” write the engineers in a new Arxiv paper about the project.
What about the numbers that are too blurry for this giant brain to make sense of? No prob—those are identified by humans as part of a second generation CAPTCHA program. So you may have already contributed to the cause, without even realizing it.
In 1955, a crowd gathered in a hotel ballroom to watch as feed salesmen climbed onto a scale; the men were competing to see who could gain the most weight in four months, in imitation of the cattle and hogs that ate their antibiotic-laced food. Pfizer sponsored the competition.
[Its Chief of Operations and Customer Relations] Mark Onetto in his lecture describes in detail how Amazon’s present-day scientific managers go about achieving speedup. They observe the line, create a…
For many white people the only kind of anti-black racism that exists is one of slurs, overt discrimination, and stand your ground style violence. This mode of “opt-in white racism” is almost useless as an analytic tool for discussing issues in which race plays a role, but is very useful in distancing oneself from the necessity to engage those conversations. What is more interesting to me is why white people find comfort in white spaces, seemingly without the ability to see those spaces as white.
Erecting more balcony guardrails won’t persuade frat brothers to stop hosting offensive Asian-themed ragers and sending mass emails referencing “rapebait.” It won’t stop them from from throwing beer bottles at black students, calling them “Trayvon Martin,” or more or less getting away with sexual assault.
If you look at the way that the world works now, you can point to very specific things, like Twitter and blogging and the changes that are happening in the music and publishing industries, and you can actually point to this set of people, this set of thinking, and the stuff that came out of it and say, “Holy shit. That worked.”
The first hundred or so times Expereal asked me how I was feeling, my assessments were the kinds of superficial ones you might respond with if a stranger asked you on the street: “I’m fine.”, “All good.”, “Frustrated by a supermarket line.” Reviewing my answers after the first few weeks, it dawned on me: I had been politely lying to my smartphone.
My own concern is primarily the terror and violence carried out by my own state, for two reasons. For one thing, because it happens to be the larger component of international violence. But also for a much more important reason than that; namely, I can do something about it. So even if the U.S. was responsible for 2 percent of the violence in the world instead of the majority of it, it would be that 2 percent I would be primarily responsible for. And that is a simple ethical judgment. That is, the ethical value of one’s actions depends on their anticipated and predictable consequences. It is very easy to denounce the atrocities of someone else. That has about as much ethical value as denouncing atrocities that took place in the 18th century.
This warms the cockles of my heart for so many reasons:
1.) When asked about the lack of diversity, Steve gets right to the point by basically saying, “Why the fuck you asking the black guy, the minority in the room? How about asking the 8 other white guys who don’t cast minorities as leads in their films?” Thank you for that, Mr. McQueen.
2.) The white panelists’ complete refusal to participate in the conversation is representative of their refusal to address/acknowledge the problem of a lack of minority representation in film. One even has the audacity to say, “I”m not getting into it.” As if the issue at hand is completely irrelevant to his job as a director. As if to say, how dare they, despite being part of the problem, be asked to engage in a conversation about…the problem. The lunacy of it all!
3.) Steve’s utter disregard for white feelings.
THE LAST BIT ABOUT ALTERNATE REALITY IN FILM/ I’VE BEEN SAYING THAT FOR A MINUTE, WHEN MCQUEEN CAME OUT WITH IT I NEARLY FLEW OF MY CHAIR
They never did anything to me personally, or even threatened me, but they didn’t need to. You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows. They were über-right-wing. Now, I’m not talking about Rush Limbaugh; I’m talking about the people who make life-and-death decisions. And it’s not necessarily evil; it’s more realistic. Charles was ex-CIA. It’s weirder than you can possibly imagine. I certainly never got the truth. Since then, everything that’s happened—from Nirvana going crazy and on and on and on—none of that holds a candle to how weird that situation was. That’s David Lynch weird.
"Just being black in the US is often all it takes to arouse suspicion. Here are 21 examples from the last five years of some of the things black people can’t do without others thinking they’re up to no good.
“All mammals play when they are young and those that have the most to learn play the most. Carnivores play more than herbivores, because hunting is harder to learn than grazing. Primates play more than other mammals, because their way of life depends more on learning and less on fixed instincts than does that of other mammals. Human children, who have the most to learn, play far more than any other primates when they are allowed to do so. Play is the natural means by which children and other young mammals educate themselves. In hunter-gatherer bands, children are allowed to play and explore in their own chosen ways all day long, every day, because the adults understand that this is how they practise the skills that they must acquire to become effective adults.
The most important skills that children everywhere must learn in order to live happy, productive, moral lives are skills that cannot be taught in school. Such skills cannot be taught at all. They are learned and practised by children in play.”
“Why is black pride OK but white pride is racist?” If students are taught that whiteness is based on a history of exclusion, they might easily see that there is nothing in the designation as “white” to be proud of. Being proud of being white doesn’t mean finding your pale skin pretty or your Swedish history fascinating. It means being proud of the violent disenfranchisement of those barred from this category. Being proud of being black means being proud of surviving this ostracism. Be proud to be Scottish, Norwegian or French, but not white.
I think a person should be able to dial a number, make a purchase, send an SMS, write an email, or visit a website without having to think about what it’s going to look like on their permanent record.
Amazing visualization of the psychogeography of running with smartphones.
When I run, I’m an invisible observer of my city, a ghost forgotten by the people I pass almost as quickly as I disappear from view. I’ve gotten a broad, hard look at this city and its people. Some of it is challenging to see, but at times I think I can see the things that connect every citizen of the city. … We run across the invisible divides that segregate us from neighbors and, in that way, we come to understand where we live.
Whiteness was never about skin color or a natural inclination to stand with one’s own; it was designed to racialize power and conveniently dehumanize outsiders and the enslaved.
We have surveillance video from the hotels that shows people turn on the shower, direct the nozzle at the wall and then leave the room for the whole day.
As Americans have grown increasingly comfortable with traditional surveillance cameras, a new, far more powerful generation is being quietly deployed that can track every vehicle and person across an area the size of a small city, for several hours at a time. … A single camera mounted atop the Washington Monument, McNutt boasts, could deter crime all around the Mall.
It looks more and more as if high levels of extra antioxidants can actually give people cancer, or at the very least, help along any cancerous cells that might arise on their own. Evidence for this has been piling up for years now from multiple sources, but if you wander through a grocery or drug store, you’d never have the faintest idea that there could be anything wrong with scarfing up all the antioxidants you possibly can.
This goes perfectly with Outkast’s “Hey Ya” Update: Also perfect with Shaggy’s “Boombastic”. Don’t take my word for it!
The key is to remember that the surveillance and the abuse doesn’t occur when people look at the data, it occurs when people gather the data in the first place.
Much as we marvel at Babylonian clay tablets listing measures of grain, future generations will find just as much meaning in our log files as they will in the media we consume.
Talk a little to your delivery guys. Get to know them. Ask them if the credit card tips are getting to them, and if not, complain at the restaurant and at Seamless, because that shit ain’t right. But mostly, just tip in cash.
You want to make metro areas of 6 million people prepared for things like this? Stop subsidizing the automobile. Stop making it so damned easy for us to build a society that’s so fragile, that’s so close to the breaking point, that the world ends and we have to sleep in our offices when we’re seven whole miles from home (as one tale had it). This isn’t solved by various Atlanta area regional governments providing more services, more salt and plow trucks, or even more transit facilities. This is solved by not subsidizing a lifestyle that makes it completely impossible to have any sort of resilience.
The people who say that are idiots. Blogging was never alive. It’s the people that matter. There will always be a small number who are what I call “natural born bloggers.” They were blogging before there were blogs, they just didn’t know what it was called. Julia Child was a blogger as was Benjamin Franklin and Patti Smith.
Rep. Michael Grimm’s response to NY1 reporter asking about federal investigation into campaign spending fundraising after last night’s State of the Union address. Full video here. (via officialssay)
So I was asked to be on Roger Ailes’ television program and the moment we sat down I said, “Mr. Ailes, I’m the most conservative person you’ve ever interviewed.” (laughs)
And he was surprised, said, “What do you mean?”
I said, “Well, most conservatives just want to turn the back the clock 100 years, but I’d like to turn back the clock thousands of years, to when we lived in small communities and took care of each other.”
He said, “Well, isn’t that just romantic?” And I said, “No, I don’t think the human race will survive unless we do something like that.”
Ripping up the playground rulebook is having incredible effects on children at an Auckland school.
Chaos may reign at Swanson Primary School with children climbing trees, riding skateboards and playing bullrush during playtime, but surprisingly the students don’t cause bedlam, the principal says.
The school is actually seeing a drop in bullying, serious injuries and vandalism, while concentration levels in class are increasing.
Principal Bruce McLachlan rid the school of playtime rules as part of a successful university experiment.
"We want kids to be safe and to look after them, but we end up wrapping them in cotton wool when in fact they should be able to fall over."
Letting children test themselves on a scooter during playtime could make them more aware of the dangers when getting behind the wheel of a car in high school, he said.
"When you look at our playground it looks chaotic. From an adult’s perspective, it looks like kids might get hurt, but they don’t."
Swanson School signed up to the study by AUT and Otago University just over two years ago, with the aim of encouraging active play.
However, the school took the experiment a step further by abandoning the rules completely, much to the horror of some teachers at the time, he said.
When the university study wrapped up at the end of last year the school and researchers were amazed by the results.
Mudslides, skateboarding, bullrush and tree climbing kept the children so occupied the school no longer needed a timeout area or as many teachers on patrol.
Instead of a playground, children used their imagination to play in a “loose parts pit” which contained junk such as wood, tyres and an old fire hose.
If I had revealed what I knew about these unconstitutional but classified programs to Congress, they could have charged me with a felony.
The choice is not whether to allow the NSA to spy. The choice is between a communications infrastructure that is vulnerable to attack at its core and one that, by default, is intrinsically secure for its users.
I’m almost surprised the stock market hasn’t crashed yet.
Roger said that he didn’t know if he could believe in God. He had his doubts. But toward the end, something really interesting happened. That week before Roger passed away, I would see him and he would talk about having visited this other place. I thought he was hallucinating. I thought they were giving him too much medication. But the day before he passed away, he wrote me a note: “This is all an elaborate hoax.”
I probably would not live in Southern NM if it had not been for my being unlawfully arrested in New York City during the week of the 2004 Republican National Convention. I am in fact the yoga teacher mentioned in this New York Times article(while on the page I recommend that you watch the embed video). I spent three days in jail that week, one night in what was later nicknamed Guantanomo on the Hudson, while Mikey waited for me to arrive at Burning Man and wondered what had happened. It was an eye opening experience. I learned about freedom. Mainly how fragile it is and I had a chance to see how dangerous commodified people are. Most of us are commosified but when you add guns and power people become capable of doing all sorts of terrible things.
It was this event in my life that prodded me to leave New York. After the arrest each time I saw the blue uniform of the NYPD I’d have a body response that I’ve learned to call PTSD. Machine gun army thugs at the entries to bridges subways, common place after 9-11, was more than I could take. Besides, as an artist who was then sponsored by New York Foundation for the Arts, I could no longer be someone that the city has boasting rights over after having been so betrayed.
Excerpt: The Good Life Lab, Wendy Jehanara Tremayne published by Storey Publishing.
Commodified People We’ve got the same genes. We’re more or less the same. but our nature, the nature of humans, allows all kinds of behavior. i mean every one of us under some circumstances could be a gas chamber attendant and a saint. — Noam Chomsky Some time later, when my friend Marina and I emerged from the sub- way, we were swallowed up in a crowd. Cops and protesters mingled with people in business suits going to and from skyscraper offices; there were cops on bikes, reporters, and a clown wearing a rainbow wig. It was probably the worst day to be picking up a friend from out of town in midtown Manhattan. There were protests all over New York that summer, and it was hard to avoid running into them. In spite of the crowd, we managed to find our friend Ben, who had just flown in from New Orleans, and we headed to the subway station a block away. A few feet short of the station’s entrance at Bryant Park, walking traffic slowed and then stopped. There was a commotion and an elevation of energy, some yelling, and fast movement. Some people standing nextto me put their arms in the air and made peace signs with their hands. Our trio plus one piece of wheeled luggage dropped to the ground in response to a cop shouting, “Get down! Everybody get down!” Police in riot gear stood shoulder to shoulder, holding orange nets up to their chins. Ben, Marina, and I, along with about 50 other people I’d never seen before, were encircled. Trapped. One by one, cops pushed those captured inside the net over the edge of it, face forward, hands held behind our backs by uniformed police. Noses were bloodied as people hit the pavement too fast and face-first. I was cuffed tight andput on a city bus that had been taken over by the nypd. It delivered me to a temporary jail built for this occasion.
I learned that the old bus terminal on Pier 57 on the West Side had been converted to a makeshift jail weeks before the Republican National Convention. Inside the terminal I was stripped of my posses- sions, ID, phone, money, and joy and pushed into a cell with 50 or so other women and a 12-foot-long bench. I was in jail. Not for any pro- test, but just for being on a New York City sidewalk at the wrong time.
In jail the only water offered came out of black greased pipes stick- ing out of old rusty fountains protruding from the peeling cinderblock cell walls. While many did not pause over the water, I worried about my kidney infection. I’d left my antibiotics at home. How would I maintain the regimen of ten 8-ounce glasses of water a day that my doctor had advised? I’m going to die in this place, I thought as I watched others sip the water. The next day the group was bused to a real jail in downtown Manhattan. On the way a college student had a genuine panic attack. Crying, screaming, and panting for breath, she was dragged from her seat and chained to a metal pole that divided the bus as though this shift in position would calm her down. It didn’t. I met a lot of people over the course of three days in jail. A woman whose daughter was having a baby that week; she missed her first grandchild’s birth. A father from Wisconsin who had just finished cram- ming a U-Haul’s worth of his daughter’s belongings into her tiny New York University dorm and had stepped out to get Chinese food. We all had simply been taken out of our lives. After I begged hard, a cop slid his quarter-full water bottle through the bars to me. I asked the tall, soft-faced, middle-aged African American man, “Do you know that your civil rights were won by people who protested to gain them?” “In just a few more years I get my pension,” he said apologetically, turning away.
I thought back to the time after September 11. Letter-by-letter on the back of the fire barrels we’d made, Mikey and I had carved the initials NYPDto honor the New York City Police Department. We had etched, Thank you for your service. It seemed bizarre now, mixed up. But I knew that the fear I felt toward the police was not a fear of the people who wore the blue civil-servant costumes. I feared what commodified them.
While I started tracking my steps with both my Fitbit and Nike’s app at first, the clincher for me was when the Fitbit app for iOS was updated at the end of 2013, allowing the standard Fitbit app to track steps using the iPhone 5S’s internal hardware. Now I could get nearly the same activity tracking us… u…[Read more]
I recently got asked to shoot photos for a show called “The Haves and HaveNots” for the Oprah Winfrey Network. I’ve shot many shows in my career and I always enjoy these shoots because there are so many challenges involved.
There’s tons of “talent” aka celebrities involved, all their teams, all the hair, makeup and wardrobe involved, there’s very limited time, there are tons of shots to create, there’s an immense pressure to “nail” the creative concept and obviously there is usually lots of money involved. These are high budget, high-pressure shoots. It’s diving into the deep end for sure, as far as photography is concerned. And I love that challenge. I love stepping up to the plate and going for the homerun.
But one of the things I DON’T love about these shoots is that I never really get to connect with the people I’m shooting. They’re in and out in minutes. Sometimes I literally am only able to take a few pictures before they’re wisked away.
This is one of those VERY few rare occasions where I was able to connect. And I have my subject to thank for allowing me into his story.
One of the cast members was John Schneider. You might know him from his work on “Dukes of Hazard” or “Smallville”. John was one of my many subjects that day and like the rest of the cast, he was extremely professional, humble and a lot of fun to work with. He was killing his portraits… smiling, goofing off and he even threw in several impressions of famous actors and presidents. I was very impressed by his talent and good-natured humor. You can see some of those portraits below.
Towards the end of his session, we brought in one of the female cast members to interact with. They were dancing, laughing and having a great time. Again, I was very impressed by his ability to light up the camera and have a good time.
Once we wrapped up his session, the female walked off set and John came to me and whispered in my ear “Hey can you sneak a few more portraits of me?” and I said “sure of course”. He said “there’s something going on and I just need a photo.”
So I grabbed my camera again and John walked back on set.
He immediately began weeping. Legitimately crying. He was so good at impressions that I thought this was another impression and I thought “wow, what an acting talent.”
But then after a couple of frames, I could tell that this wasn’t an act. He was really somewhere else.
Finally, I put my camera down. This was too real. It didn’t feel right to keep shooting.
So I walked up to him and hugged him.
He whispered in my ear “My Dad died about an hour ago. I found out during our lunch break. And I wanted you to capture that for me.”
Then he walked up to my screen, looked at the portraits and pointed to the last one (seen above, last) and said “That’s it. That’s my Dad.”
“I’m so sorry.” I said. I was stunned. Shocked. And deeply moved, obviously.
I didn’t want to ask any further questions out of respect.
John took off shortly thereafter to go back home to plan the next steps with his family.
I’ve since received official permission from John to share this story and these portraits with you. I will never forget this moment. And I want to thank John for inviting me into his story, even just for a moment and for allowing me to capture this for him.
As a father myself, I wept for him. We all did that day.
About the author: Jeremy is a Celebrity Photographer, Entrepreneur and a Humanitarian. He founded a global photography movement called Help-Portrait and recently launched an iPhone App/Social Network called OKDOTHIS. His goal in life is to use his platform, ideas and creativity to inspire and help others in need. You follow him and see more of his work on his website, Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and OKDOTHIS. This article was originally published here.
Our quote “Defense of the free world” is an aggressive hypocrisy that has damaged the very planet’s chance of survival. Now we have spent thousands of billions on offensive War in decades, and half the world is starving for food. The reckoning has come now for America. 100 Billion goes to the War Department this year out of 300 Billion Budget. Our militarization has become so top heavy that there is no turning back from Military Tyranny. Police agencies have become so vast – National Security Agency alone the largest police bureaucracy in America yet its activities are almost unknown to all of us – that there is no turning back from computerized police state control of America.
Solo recordings of Allen Ginsberg playing a small hand-pumped harmonium from India and singing mantras and songs to the cosmos. These recordings were made in the early seventies by the American poet and bibliographer George Dowden. From the vaults of Gerard Bellaart’s Cold Turkey Press (who also made the cover). 100 copies.
We can assume that people like to notice when their phone is ringing, and that most people hate missing a call. This means their perceptual systems have adjusted their bias to a level that makes misses unlikely. The unavoidable cost is a raised likelihood of false alarms – of phantom phone vibrations.
Government surveillance within social networks didn’t arise out of nowhere; instead, it is a product of longstanding inequalities in power in technology that have historically privileged white men above all, who have been much more likely to control surveillance technologies than be targeted by them. The outrage over NSA surveillance has occurred and received massive coverage not because the deployment of technology for citizen surveillance is new but because white, technical, American men have finally become targets of the surveillant gaze rather than its aloof masters.
I think I’m looking at something Orwellian. It’s a government, many-tentacled operation to gather daily information on what everybody in the country is doing. Your daily transactions on the Internet can be monitored with this kind of system, not just your Web surfing. All kinds of business that people do on the Internet these days — your bank transactions, your e-mail, everything — it sort of opens a window into your entire private life, and that’s why I thought of the term “Orwellian.” As you know, in [George] Orwell’s story [1984], they have cameras in your house, watching you. Well, this is the next best thing. …
In the early 90s I desperately wanted to blow the whistle on racism in the market research industry, but with no Internet, not as easy to do that as it is today. Basically the company that did most of the market research for consumer product advertising (pop tarts, for example) refused to allow us to turn in surveys with more than ten percent black people in the sample. They had no other restrictions, on anything like age or gender. They were 100% clear that 0% would be fine with them, and in fact, preferred. I was doing surveys in a mall with a customer base that was probably 30% black at the time. We often had to tell people that we recruited that we couldn’t use them when the manager told us that we were over quota. The office manager would ask them what their zip code was, and whatever they said, she would say, oh, sorry we’re over quota for that zip code. Then they’d tell us that we couldn’t survey any more ‘zips’. Sometimes black people would directly even stop and ask us why we didn’t survey them, if I ignored them and asked a white person that walked by after them. I never had a good answer.
Teens aren’t addicted to social media. They’re addicted to each other. They’re not allowed to hang out the way you and I did, so they’ve moved it online.
Seriously.
Seriously.
Waxy.org Links.
Popular Posts Across MetaFilter.
Waxy.org Links.
Popular Posts Across MetaFilter.
Tyler Cowen’s Ethnic Dining Guide.
Holy Scrap.
iPhone Atlas: Apple iPhone tips, how-tos, troubleshooting, and news - CNET Reviews.
PetaPixel.
