BroadSnark

This Christian kids video is …they are like children of the corn, but scary. I sincerely hope that some of these kids are someday horrified that they did this.

Great response to people who claim sex work entrenches gender inequality.

A pediatrician with a child porn collection. Ok. That’s creepy.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t actually want Central American journalists trained by the U.S. government.

Wounded Knee (aftermath of massacre pictured) is privately owned and the guy wants to sell it. He offered it to the Oglala Sioux, who did not come up with the $1 Million +++ he wanted. So this jackass says,

If they would just have taken $250,000 to 1 million, they could have bought that property and owned it today. But, for some reason, they cannot see economic development and they cannot see tourism and they cannot relate. They want everything for free is what it amounts to I guess.

Can you imagine them not coming up with that kind of money to buy the colonized land that their ancestors were murdered on?! The nerve, wanting “everything for free.” And how can they not see the giftshop possibilities?

If, like me, you are a Sherman Alexie fan, you might want to check out this interview on Bill Moyers.

One of the things Alexie talks about is the quality of communication on the internet. I agree that you are missing a lot when you aren’t face to face with someone. But I use the internet to keep in touch with people that I can’t be face to face with. And I have met in person a lot of people that I first came in contact with on here. Some guy decided to try living without the internet for a year. It didn’t go exactly as expected.

And finally – Kittens having sex! The horror! Better call the cops!

I’ve been catching up on some of my blog reading and came across this report about how Latino children are underrepresented in New York City public school gifted programs.

Data obtained by The Wall Street Journal shows that Latino children are dramatically underrepresented in the program, making up just 12% of the city’s 14,266 gifted elementary school students this school year. Yet Latino children make up about 41% of the 489,911 elementary students.

This controversy, about the homogeneity of gifted programs, has been going on since I was a kid. I distinctly remember a report (60 minutes maybe) where parents tried to get their children of color tested and the school system would not even test them. I’m fairly certain it was this controversy that was responsible for me being put in the gifted program in my elementary school.

I need to put a small caveat here. This is all my memory from more than 30 years ago. So I am not going to guarantee 100% detail.

When I was in first or second grade, and around the time our principal changed from a white dude to a black woman, the administration started asking teachers to submit students for gifted testing – particularly students who were not white boys. Because ALL of the students in the gifted program were white boys. That’s when I got IQ tested.

Here I could go into the controversies about IQ – the historic racism, the cultural bias…all that jazz. Perhaps someday I will. But even if you think that IQ measures more than privilege and socialization (I don’t), it doesn’t really impact my criticism of the gifted program.

I spent one day a week in gifted classes. While my other classmates were sitting in rows doing busy work, I was wandering around a trailer doing creative stuff. As a gifted student, I had access to the only two computers in my school. I got to make cool graphics using Apple computers that had pixels the size of your head. I made stop motion animated films and ceramic animals. There were plays and, if memory serves, a kooky report about the Bermuda Triangle.

In other words, I had the freedom to be creative and access to the tools that would let me do it. The gifted program was just a way to met out privileges to the already privileged.

As I got older, I dropped out of gifted and even honors classes. In part, I really wanted to coast through and smoke weed and be lazy. But I was also sick to death of seeing the same people in every class that I had. I went to a diverse middle and high school. But my classes were filled with the same disproportionately white, disproportionately Jewish, and disproportionately well-off people.

Once I started going to “regular” classes, the horrors of school really hit me. No matter how creative or curious you are. No matter how much potential you have. If you sit in a box doing mind-numbing worksheets while some babysitter socializes you to be a Walmart cashier, it is going to make you stupid. At least I felt like I got stupider every minute that I was in school.

My point, after all of that, is this. We do not need to make gifted classes more diverse. It does not, in the end, really help us to have a more gender balanced and multicolored group of privileged people. It is true that a person in a position of power may change the rules a little for a few people – like the new principal of my school. And it is true that there is value in diversity – particularly in having relationships that cross all the barriers of gender, race, class…

But in the end, all kids need the freedom and resources to pursue their interests and to do the kinds of creative and mind-expanding things that gifted kids are allowed to do. Asking for more Latinos in gifted is the same as asking for more Latino CEOs or black generals or women senators. We don’t need a more diverse hierarchy or a less obviously racist and sexist way to met out privileges. We need to get rid of the hierarchy and the privileges.

Well, hello there. I took a lovely break from reading the news (see pic). But I suppose it is time to start figuring out what is going on in the world and whatnot. Feel free to share any interesting things in the comments.

Did you know that The World Is Marching Towards Anarchy? Of course, this guy thinks that is a horrible thing. He does, however, get quite a bit right – like democracy as we know it being domination.  I’m always amazed when people can be right and sooooooo wrong at the same time.

Oh. My. God. Some girls wore strapless dresses and tight pants and stuff that showed that they have…ummm…what are those called again….bodies. Will this ever stop?

While it is lovely that this shitbag is not going to get away with it, how often do judges get called out for anything that they do? Sorry, we don’t really mind you getting paid to lock up kids. You just got paid a little too much and a little too directly.

Let’s not forget that Guantánamo Is Not an Anomaly — Prisoners in the US Are Force-Fed Every Day

I haven’t read Graeber’s new book yet, but I enjoyed this excerpt on The Baffler.

And as long as we are on Graeber, not a horrible piece in The New Yorker (despite the snark).

Any of you planning on going to the Eastern Conference for Workplace Democracy this year?

Happy birthday to me.

As today I am forty years old. How the fuck did that happen? To distract myself from thinking about careening down that hill, I decided I should try to come up with a list of good things about being forty. Feel free to chime in with more – but only if you are over forty. I don’t want any bullshit from sprightly 25 year olds right now. Forty isn’t that old. So and so asshat celebrity is 43 and she looks great. Think of how much wiser you are…blah….blah….blah

Fuck you! When you are going through this shit, I am goint to be 55 years old. The only way I’ll be getting carded then is for senior discounts.

Ah shit. This positive thing isn’t going well. Ok. Here goes.

1. I still have all my teeth
2. I have not yet broken a hip
3. My gray hairs appear to be growing in a streak like Bonnie Raitt or Cruellla De Vil
4. People have mostly stopped asking me about marriage and children
5. When I meet youngsters who like old school music, I get to say shit like “Yeah. I saw Nina at the Paramount before she died.” or “That Ramones show at the Cameo was great”
6. 80s music is back. So, when I go to the Depeche Mode dance party at Black Cat on Sat, I will not be surounded by people who I look at and think – Hmmmm. Aren’t they a little old for this. And then realize they are my age.
7. I am now completely aware of the fact that I don’t know shit and I’m o.k. with it.
8. I pretty much get to do whatever the fuck I want – when Im not working – I need to work on that one.
9. I’m posting this from an island in Belize, a luxury only my 40 year old credit brings me

That’s all I got so far. But that last one is leaving me feeling pretty good.

I don’t know about you, but I know nothing about pastoralism. A few days ago, I had a chance to listen to Lalji Desai, a pastoralist from India. The whole time I was listening I kept thinking how much pastoralist ideology and culture reflects the kinds of values and goals that anarchists are working towards.

Interdependence, customary leadership, knowledge sharing, egalitarian community relationships, sustainability, commons, solidarity, direct action, art/culture as transformative…All the things that anarchists talk about are part of the pastoralist tradition. Of course, a lot of that tradition was lost with colonialism. Interdependence became dependence. Customary leadership became hierarchical/political leadership. Knowledge sharing became intellectual property. Community relationships and units were replaced by the nuclear family model. According to Desai, patriarchy, exploitation, disempowerment, the loss of social status…it all came with colonialism and capitalism. And, unlike many of our theorists, the pastoralists are close enough to their history to remember what things were like before.

I haven’t had time to process everything, but I have a few thoughts to throw out here.

Mutual Aid – How can we better help each other. We could learn a lot from people that aren’t so far away from living by the values that we would like to see spread. And many of those communities are in constant struggle over rights and resources. If nothing else, they could use some more attention, especially during moments of crisis. Clearly, there has been a lot of anarchist solidarity with people in Chiapas. But there are so many more communities in the world.

Property – Many of us have a big blind spot when it comes to property. No matter what side of the debate someone is on (and here I am going beyond anarchists), the focus is almost always urban or agricultural. Too rarely do we talk about access to resources that are necessarily contradictory to the kind of private property model we have in the US. In other words, talking about land that can be fenced in is ridiculous when you are talking about fishing communities that need to manage ocean areas as commons or pastoralists who rely on the kinds of animals that can’t (and shouldn’t) be confined to a box.

Animal Rights – Undoubtedly, a big reason why most of us don’t know anything about pastoralists is that there aren’t many in or near our communities. But I wonder if another reason for our blindness is that there are too many people in the animal rights/vegan fundamentalist worlds who ignore cultural issues. In India, some pastoralists were kicked off of their land in order to provide a reserve for lions. They had been living with lions for generations, but suddenly the government made them out to be a danger to them. Now only lions and tourists get access to the land that pastoralists used to use and manage sustainably. How many animal rights folks would have fallen squarely on the side of the government story?

Environmentalism – Lefties in the US love our national parks. Rarely do I hear anyone on the left being critical when other countries start delineating territory as national parks for reserves. Yet those lands are almost always somebodies territory. Environmentalist movements have a horrible record with indigenous communities on those kinds of issues.

Feminism – The person before Desai spoke about indigenous rights, sadly leaving out any mention of North America. But worse than that, she mentioned the double oppression of indigenous women. She said that “traditional” beliefs sometimes negatively affected indigenous women’s rights. What she did not mention, and Desai did, was how many indigenous communities had much more egalitarian relationships before colonialism. That is definitely true with many North American indigenous communities. The belief that “western” women have more rights and that rural communities are backwards is so pervasive and so incredibly inaccurate. We need to get over that.

Taxes – One of the things he mentioned in his talk was how the government wanted them to give up their pastoral lifestyle in order to collect taxes. It is difficult to tax people whose territory is so large that it can take five years to get back to where they started. Of course, that got me thinking about libertarians and conservatives who hate taxes and love a certain conception of private property. I would love to hear an anti-tax debate between them and a pastoralist who would point out that their belief system is in opposition to itself.

That’s it for now, I think. Forgive any spelling or grammar errors. I’m typing this on a kindle with a shit wireless connection and very limited functionality.

P.S. That photo is of a worldwide women pastoralist gathering that I also spoke to Desai about briefly. The photo is linked from here. Haven’t read through the site yet, but it looks interesting.

You are not better than anyone else.

I don’t care how aware you think you are or how many books you have read on anarchism or racism or sexism or whatever. I don’t care what ist you are. I don’t care if you can quote Marx or Judith Butler. I don’t care if you eat animals or don’t eat animals. Whether you spend all day feeding the homeless or all night binge drinking. Whether you go to church every week or don’t believe in god. Whether you live in a penthouse or a group house. Whether you have a Rolls Royce or ride a bike. I don’t care if you have a closet full of Chanel or knit your own clothes from organic hemp that you grew on your commune.

None of those things makes you better than anybody.

Even if you disagree with everything a person thinks, hate the way they live, would die fighting against everything that they stand for – that still doesn’t make you better than them. I guarantee that you are wrong at least as often as all those people you feel superior to. Because we are all human and damaged. None of us has control of where we started in life. All of us are formed within the same oppressive systems. All of us have internalized the prejudices, the violence, the insecurities, and the fucked up desires – including the desire to find something that makes us feel superior to other people.

It is impossible to get it right. I don’t even know how to define what right is. How do you know how much of what you want is socially constructed? How do you know when you are acting purely in opposition to something and thus still letting yourself be defined by it? What magic is going to tell you that your mind is officially free and you can now judge everyone else by your standard?

I’m not saying we should not have opinions or try to live by our values. People should say what they feel. They should fight for whatever they think will make things better. But it is possible to do that without having the kind of contempt and hubris that I see too often from people who like to pretend that they have worked way more shit out in their heads than they actually have.

The big news this week is that white paper. I read it last night at the bar. I wasn’t drunk enough for that shit. Greenwald’s breakdown here.

A must read interview of Lynn Paltrow over at Guernica about what is happening to pregnant women. In short, get pregnant and kiss your rights goodbye.

This American Life is harassing Siouxsie Q of This American Whore. Melissa Gira Grant wrote a letter.

Good piece in Vice on Why Barrett Brown is facing 100 years in prison. Hint: It’s called investigative journalism.

Cornelius Harris (also known as Soja) has been on hunger strike at Ohio State Penitentiary for more than 30 days now.

Db0 responds to whether or not humans are ready for anarchism. Hope this means he’ll be blogging more again.

Normally I am very supportive of drugs, especially x. But something about telling people to take drugs so that they can stay in a relationship longer seems a little wack. I mean, maybe it is just time to move on.

If not for racism, we might all be drinking cocaine every day.

About an Art at War exhibit – art in France under Nazi occupation. I don’t know about you, but I cannot separate an artist from their art. Once I find out someone was a tool, I can never look at their work the same again.

Wish I could go see this exhibit on anarchist schools.

O.k. everyone. I have a little bit of time on Saturday. Let’s go to Virginia and see how many laws we can break in a day. I’m going to need a bullhorn, a car, a married dude, and a lot of booze.

At least Virginia didn’t only make it illegal for girls to curse.

A few weeks ago, a piece by Suzanne Moore called Seeing red: The power of female anger started a bit of a shitstorm. Moore was looking to get women riled up and she succeeded – just not the women she was aiming for. Trans women were furious at her comment that women are angry with themselves for “not having the ideal body shape – that of a Brazilian transsexual.” Roz Kaveney explains.

In the first place there’s the implied dichotomy between women on the one hand and Brazilian trans women on the other – as if Brazilian trans women are somehow not women. But far more important is the fact well over a hundred Brazilian trans women were murdered in the last year alone.

And if there had been any doubt that people were right about the trans hatred that lingered behind Moore’s words, we had only to wait for her and her friends’ responses. The most vile of which came from Julie Burchill, best bud and godmother to Moore’s children. Click through and read the hate if you can stand it. I’m just going to give you one quote. The first part refers to another of Burchill’s friends who has been supposedly harassed by the “trans lobby.”

she refuses to accept that their relationship with their phantom limb is the most pressing problem that women – real and imagined – are facing right now.

Similarly, Suzanne’s original piece was about the real horror of the bigger picture – how the savagery of a few old Etonians is having real, ruinous effects on the lives of the weakest members of our society, many of whom happen to be women

I had to google Etonian. That would be somebody who went to Eton College, one of those boys boarding schools where upper crusty Brits go. Do you see what Burchill did there? She just made conservative legislation in the UK take precedence over every other thing that women are fighting.  Apparently, what some Tory does to a relatively privileged Brit is supposed to matter more to me than hundreds of dead Brazilian women, or even the  trans women killed right in my own city.

I may still have a lot of 101 to do when it comes to pressing problems facing the trans community, but I feel quite secure saying that “phantom limb” doesn’t make the top ten. Moore thinks it is terrible that women are getting laid off from government jobs. I have news for her, U.S. trans people have double the rate of unemployment. A fifth of trans people have been refused a home or apartment. A fifth have been homeless. Those who are homeless are regularly turned away from shelters, even in the dead of winter. And trans people face massive discrimination when it comes to health care. Even those who have insurance can be denied routine care due to a trans exclusion. The stats are even worse for trans people of color.

No. The trans community isn’t concerned about a “phantom limb.” They are concerned about the basic necessities of life – work, housing, medical care, personal safety. Concerns that are, by the way, a hell of a lot more important to me than how many women are in the UK parliament, how patronizing UK leaders are, how women do more housework, how women feel bad about themselves because they don’t look a certain way – the things Moore was complaining about in her piece.

It is a shame that so many women are blinded by their animosity towards those who don’t neatly fall into the boy/girl roles they were assigned by some doctor at birth. I have to wonder how the Moore and Burchills of the world think that gender discrimination is going to end. Do they not realize that it is based on a false binary, on differences that are largely socially constructed? Trans people, queer people, any people who challenge rigid conceptions of gender, are on the front lines smashing those tiny gender boxes for all of us.

If anything, it is the liberal bullshit that the Moore and Burchills of this world focus on that is a distraction. They don’t really want to shake things up, just for Tory politicians to be less patronizing and for there to be a few more tits in parliament. They might claim radical women’s movements when it suits them – as Moore did when she claimed Pussy Riot and Tahrir Square in that piece – but ultimately all they really want is a little more power and champagne money.

And I might add that, far from distracting me, learning about trans issues has made me more aware of the social constraints that affect me as a cis woman. I am more conscious of the safety calculations I make on the streets and of how safe for me is not safe for everyone. I’m more aware of how much of femininity is stagecraft. And I am more aware of misogyny and self hatred. Because while it is often kept in check around me, that hate spews out freely when it comes to trans women.

Suzanne, Julie, et al. You can take your freely spewing hatred and shove it. You aren’t just making life more difficult and dangerous for trans women. You are standing in the way of dealing with the core issues that hold up this mess. And, as a dear friend of mine likes to say, I ain’t got time.

I really loved this essay on joy by Zadie Smith. The pursuit of joy may actually explain a lot of the ridiculous shit I do.  Though I don’t know if it now seems more or less sensical.

Fascinating article on Why Anti-Authoritarians are Diagnosed as Mentally Ill.

Our friends at Red Emmas are still trying to raise money for their new space. They are about halfway to their goal.  Pitch in a bit if you can.

There is a new movie coming out about anarchists called The East. I’m not holding my breath that it will be in any way thoughtful. But I am going to go see it.

More evidence that laws change long after people start ignoring them. “Shacking Up” May Soon Be Legal in Virginia.

Four days in jail over an $85 court fine and a 22 year old warrant related to stealing a carton of cigarettes. Seems reasonable.

But that is a walk in the park compared to what happened to this mentally ill woman in prison.

A juvenile judge in Georgia testified that approximately one-third of their cases were school related and mostly misdemeanors, the result of police in schools. Story here.

The Catholic Church is in full damage control mode. First, there is this amazing piece of investigative journalism in the Guardian showing How the Vatican built a secret property empire using Mussolini’s millions. But they don’t want to use any of those millions to settle a malpractice suit related to childbirth. Nope, for that they will do a 180 and claim a fetus is not a person with legal rights. And then, of course, they will 180 right back again and turn away rape victims so that the Catholic hospital doesn’t risk having to recommend a morning after pill. Charming. Charming people.

Ok. I hate the anti-abortion protesters too. I’m sure this guy is vile. But banning? I mean if we let those dregs go in and out of the congressional building every day, I don’t think we have much of a case banning anyone else.

I stole that graphic up top from Facebook, but I can’t remember from who. Oops. Anyway, a good illustration of how confrontational tactics are wildly unpopular until they work.

According to Oliver Willis, some of us on the left are dumb because we aren’t ready to declare that a woman arrested for prostitution with her son present is an open and shut case of wrongness. He claims it isn’t about whether or not we think prostitution should be legal. It is illegal. She brought her kid. She involved “her child in what is very clearly illegal activity.” End of story.

But does Willis really think that people should never do anything illegal? Back in November, Willis claimed that Martin Luther King was one of the most important figures in black American history. And in this piece, he asked “Do people on the left think that Martin Luther King simply held one protest and those in power immediately rushed to pass the Civil Rights Act?”

I certainly don’t think that MLK held one protest. I know that he held many protests. I also know that he spent quite a bit of time in jail for breaking the law, as did a whole lot of other people in the civil rights movement. It was, after all, MLK who said “Never forget that everything Hitler did in Germany was legal.”

But perhaps Willis just meant that children should never be involved in illegal activity, even the illegal activity he might find moral. It so happens that I am currently reading Freedom’s Children, interviews of people who were children during the civil rights movement. Kids were actively recruited by MLK and others to participate in protests and nonviolent disobedience. They integrated movie theaters and restaurants. They went to jail. They got their asses kicked. Does Willis think that shouldn’t have happened? I doubt it.

What about immigration, Oliver. You said Romney lost because he “embraced in a bear hug the most fringe anti-immigrant position out there.” You seem to support immigration reform and scoff at Republicans who use the term “amnesty” to refer to legalizing those who crossed our borders without papers. Do you think immigrants who crossed the border illegally with their children should be strung up from the nearest lamppost?

No. I don’t believe that this is really about legal or illegal. I think Willis would agree that disobeying unjust, immoral laws is perfectly acceptable. If not, he has some explaining to do about his love of MLK. This is about Willis’s opinion of sex work and the people who do it. It is about his willingness to dismiss and dehumanize someone because they did something he finds icky.

Back when I took my first class on the drug war, I had this click moment in my head. Even though I had never been in favor of the drug laws, even though I knew many people who were caught up in the injustice system, I never really recognized the scheme for what it was. How I never saw the process of dehumanization is incredible to me. I mean, I had been reading about Nazi Germany’s laws against Jews since grade school. I knew how vagrancy laws were used during Jim Crow. I understood how laws were enacted to criminalize certain groups and justify their oppression. But somehow I never saw it clearly when it came to the drug laws.

And it wasn’t until relatively recently that I really gave a lot of thought to the laws against sex work. Who are they meant to control? Where did they come from? Who is getting their freedom taken away? What is the result of the War on Sex Workers?

But Willis doesn’t want to ask those questions. He doesn’t want to ask why a person might do sex work. He doesn’t want to ask why sex work is looked down upon more than working for Goldman Sachs. He doesn’t want to ask why someone might have to bring their kid to work with them. To ask those questions would mean seeing that woman as a human being and not a “criminal” – that classification which justifies taking someone’s freedom, taking their children, marking them for life.

When someone dared suggest that perhaps the woman’s choices were limited and that we should try to understand more about her circumstances before we judge, Willis chose to get butthurt that people had lower standards for the poor. Apparently, he thinks that following the rules and working hard will eventually pay off for everyone – despite all the evidence to the contrary.

No, Willis. Asking questions, refusing to completely dehumanize that woman, is not a “degrading” assumption that “a poor person must break the law to eat and that that’s somehow okay.” It is an understanding that some human beings have more limited choices than others. It is an understanding that laws are often made for the purpose of controlling certain groups of people. It is the unwillingness to dehumanize and degrade.

Willis believes in “absolutes, ” by which he means that laws are laws and should be followed by all. Nobody gets a break. The guy who stole millions in mortgage fraud schemes is exactly the same as the starving guy who stole bread.  For him, anything else means “no moral guidance, no right and wrong… anarchy.”

Except that “no moral guidance” is not what anarchy means. Anarchy means no rulers. It means no hierarchies that allow a few powerful people to make laws that oppress the rest. It means understanding that moral and legal are not the same.  It means freedom, mutual aid, and respect. It means trying to understand what your fellow human beings are experiencing and not assuming that your morals and choices are universal.

Laws against sodomy, laws against miscegenation, laws against drugs, and laws against sex work have all been used to target marginalized people. And even when some of the people who support those laws have good intentions – like those who know how destructive drug abuse can be – they cannot just close their eyes to how the laws are used. That is immoral.