Thoughts on politics, religion, violence, inequality, social control, change, and random other things from an autonomous, analytical, adopted, anarchist, atheist who likes the letter A
It is about that time when us bloggers get out of writing a real post and just link to the stuff that you already read. And thanks for reading, commenting, sharing… I really love talking to you all.
I’m gonna start you off with a funny, cause the rest of these links are mostly gonna make you cry from rage, rather than laughter. Turns out, Africans do know that it’s Christmas. Who’d a thunk it?
Violet Blue, my go-to source for sex news and author of multiple books (including her new one on fetishes), is also a formerly homeless teen and general badass who was on a panel about homelessness. Kills me that they try to send people like her back to their parents.
I’m not super interested in the Sotomayor angle of this Slate piece, but the case itself is fascinating. How anybody can pay even five minutes attention to the way the federal government acts towards indigenous people and not become an anarchist is beyond me.
But hey, at least that woman wasn’t forced by a prison guard to drink his semen. That guy got 2 days. That seems fair.
Again with the inmates “working?” Poor Cali is going to lose some of its not-so-volunteer firefighters now that the prison population has to be decreased.
Have you all been following the UK scandal where undercover cops were sleeping with activists? The women are suing now. Note that some of those cops were married in their regular cop life.
Yes, Obama, what Wall Street firms did was illegal.
I’m pretty cynical, but sometimes I read something and actually marvel at how evil people can be. I hope one of those homeless women goes all Lorena Bobbitt on his ass.
It is tempting to be drawn in by arguments about the need for population control in a world of 7 billion people. But never forget how closely tied those movements are to eugenics and who suffers the hideous consequences.
The Lakota video that Rene posted over at Womanist Musings is amazing.
Swaay is protesting Google’s massive donation to some seriously anti-sex worker orgs. No protest scheduled in DC yet. Wish I had the time to organize one. I would definitely show up if any of you have the time.
As long as we are on the subject of orgs that support sex workers, HIPS is sure to be hit hard by the recent reinstatement of the needle exchange ban. They are a great organization. If you have a few extra bucks this holiday season, I’m sure they can use it.
You may have come across this article about a farmer who is being sued by Maine for having the audacity to sell his extra milk without state sanction. To put that in context, I highly recommend reading this grain report about how the dairy industry uses permitization and “safety” concerns to push small milk producers out of business.
If you have ever been poor, you have almost certainly taken advantage of layaway. Some person had the idea of going in and paying some random person’s layaway. The idea has taken off and spread to different cities all around the country. One person dropped $20,000. Regardless of how you feel about Christmas gifting and consumerism and all that crap, people really like to do things that are tangible. Good to keep in mind for activists planning stuff.
I attended my first Criminal Injustice Committee meeting for Occupy DC this past Sunday. The Wells Fargo boycott campaign, which you can read about here, continues. Lots of other cool stuff too. I’ll keep you posted.
My friend Graham sent me the below video where a guy goes around asking people if men and women can be just friends. All the guys he asks say they cannot. All the girls he asks say they can, but then admit that they think their guy friends would hook up with them if they had the opportunity. So the dude who produced the video claims that he has proven that men and women cannot be friends.
Dear Graham – my friend who I do not think wants to hook up with me – my requested response is below the video.
The first problem with the whole premise is the assumption that all people are straight. Lots of my guy friends are gay and most certainly have no interest in having sex with me. Or as my friend Lance gasped when someone told us we were a cute couple, “OMG! That’s my sister!”
So can straight women be friends with gay men? Can lesbians be friends with straight men? Do bisexual people not get to have any friends? And WTF do we even begin to talk about with people who identify as genderqueer. I mean if you don’t pick a gender our whole world may fall apart here.
Secondly, how are we defining “just friends?” Maybe some of the women who said that men and women can be friends are defining friendship differently. Why does sexual attraction, or even having sex, have to move you out of the friend category? As it turns out, there are a whole lot of different kinds of friends with benefits relationships out there.
Perhaps what the women mean is that they can have a relationship with someone, even including sex, that does not include romantic love or thoughts of weddings and white picket fences. Or perhaps those women aren’t sleeping with their friends but would be if they didn’t grow up in a place where people wear purity rings. Maybe they are sleeping with them and just don’t want to admit it because of all the baggage that comes with open acknowledgement of having sex with people you don’t want to marry.
And what about age? The Harold and Maude scenario isn’t exactly an everyday occurrence. Actually, any kind of relationship across generations seems to be kind of unusual. But they do occur. And I can attest to the fact that the dynamic is a lot different when you are friends with someone who is old enough to be your grandfather or young enough to be your kid.
I think most, maybe all, friendships involve attraction. That includes the friendships that mostly straight people have with people of their own gender. That doesn’t mean I want to have sex with all my girlfriends, hot as you all are. Then again, we women are more likely to admit to being gay or bisexual and are apparently turned on by a much wider range of things than you dudes are. As Mary Roach wrote in Bonk,
A series of studies by Meredith Chivers and colleagues at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto showed that men are more discriminating than women when it comes to how they respond to pornographic images. Women, both gay and straight, will show immediate genital arousal…in response to films of sexual activity, regardless of who is engaging in it – male, female, gay, straight, good hair or bad. Men, contrary to stereotype, tend to respond in a limited manner; they are aroused only by footage that fits their sexual orientation and interests…To test the limits of the phenomenon, Chivers gamely ran a follow-up study in which men and women viewed, in addition to the usual gamut of human sexual scenarios, footage of bonobos mating. Here again, the women’s genitals responded – though not as strongly as they did to images of human beings – and the men’s did not.
Uh oh. Guess no friendships for any of us. Possibly no pets either.
Where does this bullshit come from? It comes from a strict gender binary. It comes from thinking sexuality is rigid rather than a spectrum that can change over time. It comes from a very narrow range of relationship options, where women are only supposed to have sex with people they love and all relationships are supposed to end in monogamous marriage.
It comes from too many dudes who don’t see women as human beings, or as one charming commenter on the YouTube video put it,
there’s this girl who wanted to be “just friends with” me, meaning no sex…i told her “hell no” my friendship comes with certain sexual requirements…either that or take the highway girl…point being, a straight male can’t be just friends, even with a semi good-looking chick, so long as she has a hole to dip it into
I think its pretty clear that if you see women as “a hole to dip into,” then you probably can’t be friends with them. Thankfully, not all guys are as douchey as you.
The video focused on presumably single, young people. But the bfriend had a similar conversation to this at his work a while back. Of all the coupled people, only the non-heterosexual and him thought that men and women could be friends. Mostly, there was a lot of “my husband would never let me be friends with a man” blah blah blah.
What is that about? Do people think that love equals possession? Do men think they are conquistadors and their dick is a flag? Do women think their men are just walking hard ons who have to be kept in the house? Is everyone so insecure? If your relationship is so fragile that a friendship can break it, you already had problems.
My bfriend has a lot of women friends. One of the things I love most about him is that he actually likes women. He doesn’t just like to have sex with women. He likes to hang out with us. I wouldn’t trade that for anything. I wouldn’t be with him if he couldn’t be friends with women. That doesn’t mean there haven’t been one or two occasions where I might have had a twinge of jealousy. But that was my insecurities, not his behavior.
Let me just end by saying that life is about relationships. It is one thing to make the very reasonable decision that you want to have a monogamous, sexual relationship. But if you cut the person you supposedly love off from having even non-sexual relationships with at least half the population, then you cut them off from life. And if you really think that sexual attraction means you can’t be friends, you are cheating yourself and probably lying to yourself about how attracted you are to the friends you have now – of whatever gender.
Let me start off with the things that I missed – your comments. Seemed a bit strange that I didn’t get any comments for a month, but I thought maybe I had been gone so long that you forgot about me. But no, it is just that I am technologically incompetent.
So I changed my settings and went through about a thousand spam posts, which was great fun. On the up side, if I ever need a gorgeous Russian bride or a penis enlargement, I know who to contact.
If you wouldn’t mind putting a comment on this post – a smiley face, a fuck you, whatever – that would help me make sure I have actually fixed the problem.
And yes, I am smoking again – hence the cartoon.
I haven’t a particle of confidence in a man who has no redeeming petty vices.
- Mark Twain
As many vices as I have, you should all have the utmost confidence in me.
Nicely done to the port staff who refused a shipment of U.S. tear gas probably to be used on their fellow Egyptians.
I have a major thing about unpaid internships. In fact, I just kinda went off in an email to one of my coworkers. I wish more people would write critical pieces about that system, especially related to NGOs. Way to make sure poor people will never be able to work for you.
DC has been harassing head shops. Apparently, it is not only bongs that they have a problem with. They also hate informational videos. Only a criminal would possibly want to know their rights.
I’m going to kick off with the lulzy item. That would be this manboobz post on us women with our slutty clothes. I can’t even hate these people. They are too funny.
I thought this post about buy nothing day was really interesting. While I understand the anti-materialist sentiments, the messages that come across tend to be sexist, racist, and classist.
I do not agree with everything in this piece, not even close, but I really hate how we have let certification/education (university degrees) become some sort of faux social justice issue. Fuck asking for free education until you are forty. Start asking why you need alphabet soup at the end of your name to earn a living wage. Ok?
Interesting post on the lack of farmers in the U.S. The romanticization of farming doesn’t usually confront the fact that few farmers want their kids to be farmers and few farmer’s kids want to farm.
Finally, I’m sure I will annoy some of you, but I was not impressed with that Naomi Wolf piece being passed around. Short on fact, in my opinion. I’m not alone. But I am happy to be convinced. Go for it.
I thought this article about the connection between authoritarianism and sexism/racism was really interesting.
It would make such a difference if pop culture showed racism in the complicated ways that it actually plays out. This piece on racism in Sons of Anarchy is worth a read.
I don’t know what is more appalling – this article about forced sterilizations in Peru or this article about the recent suicides in California prisons. (And note the part about notifying the families of their loved ones deaths with a fucking recording.)
This post about the work that amazing and gorgeous women are doing all around the world is inspiring. And they are right that the video about land grabs in Colombia is a must watch. It is an hour long, but it is totally worth it. Take the time.
I expect that I am going to be posting quite a bit on drug war issues in the near future, especially since I am at a drug war conference today. There has been some good reporting in the news lately, specifically:
I don’t know what is better, the title of this post or the photo that accompanies it.
I think this UConn appearance by Jasiri X will result in many new fans. Can you believe they tried to tell him he couldn’t do a political song at a political rally? WTF.
A whole bunch of people who were sentenced to ridiculously long prison terms for crack are now getting out. But, to paraphrase my friend Nu, what the hell are they going to do now? Not a lot of opportunities for ex cons.
I can’t believe there are still people telling women to learn how to cook in order to find a man. But don’t learn how to cook professionally, that’s for dude’s only.
If there is one thing that pisses people off in poor countries, it is how we let their petty dictators steal all their money and deposit it in our banks. This piece makes the argument that it costs us a shit ton of money. It’s also just fucking wrong, but since people aren’t likely to listen to that argument…
There is a great piece about Emma Goldman in the Chronicle of Higher Ed. I can’t wait to read the book it is based on.
I’d also like to read this book on the Collapse of American Criminal Justice. I don’t particularly buy that it was ever good enough to “collapse,” but I do agree with what he says about nullification and the need for local democracy (for lack of a better word).
It will be interesting to see if the United Nations focus on cooperatives has any effect this year. It does feel like coops are on a role. When do we start talking about being co-opted?
It is about that time when us bloggers get out of writing a real post and just link to the stuff that you already read. And thanks for reading, commenting, sharing… I really love talking to you all.
I’m gonna start you off with a funny, cause the rest of these links are mostly gonna make you cry from rage, rather than laughter. Turns out, 
This may be the best post title ever – 
My friend Graham sent me the below video where a guy goes around asking people if men and women can be just friends. All the guys he asks say they cannot. All the girls he asks say they can, but then admit that they think their guy friends would hook up with them if they had the opportunity. So the dude who produced the video claims that he has proven that men and women cannot be friends.
Let me start off with the things that I missed – your comments. Seemed a bit strange that I didn’t get any comments for a month, but I thought maybe I had been gone so long that you forgot about me. But no, it is just that I am technologically incompetent.
I’m going to kick off with the lulzy item. That would be 
I thought 
I expect that I am going to be posting quite a bit on drug war issues in the near future, especially since I am at a drug war conference today. There has been some good reporting in the news lately, specifically:
There is a great 
