May 2013
10 posts
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“Beyond even corruption, of which there is no shortage, the system itself is...”
– What bankers don’t know
iO Tillett Wright: Fifty shades of gay →
Artist iO Tillett Wright has photographed 2,000 people who consider themselves somewhere on the LGBTQ spectrum and asked many of them: Can you assign a percentage to how gay or straight you are? Most people, it turns out, consider themselves to exist in the gray areas of sexuality, not 100% gay or straight.
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“One of the greatest threats to liberty has been the government taking...”
– Tennessee Congressman Slams Holder on Pot Prosecution
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“This increasing empahsis on criminalization redefined domestic violence as an...”
– Priya Kandaswamy, “Innocent Victims and Brave New Laws,” in Nobody Passes: Rejecting the Rules of Gender and Conformity (edited by Mattilda, a.k.a. Matt Bernstein Sycamore (via brute-reason)
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German Sociologists Boycott Academic Ranking →
“Universities and institutions of higher education across the globe are being impacted by structural change, guided by principles of the entrepreneurial university. The imposition of New Public Management principles means that universities are increasingly being managed like private enterprises. Resources are being allocated according to performance records and target agreements. Academic...
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Sexuality and the State
One of the key tasks of anthropology is to make visible how power mechanisms like state practices, such as legislation and language, fix and construct what populations come to see and understand as “natural.” This sense of naturalness is often tied to a nation’s history and culture. And a state often uses criminal law to police and punish deviations from the dominant ideas of morality and...
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April 2013
18 posts
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A Nice Cup of Tea by George Orwell
If you look up ‘tea’ in the first cookery book that comes to hand you will probably find that it is unmentioned; or at most you will find a few lines of sketchy instructions which give no ruling on several of the most important points.
This is curious, not only because tea is one of the main stays of civilization in this country, as well as in Eire, Australia and New Zealand, but because the...
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“The list of “accidents” is long and painful. In April 2005, a garment factory in...”
– The Terror of Capitalism
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“Banks generally have become so corrupt and distorted in their incentives and...”
– Source
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An Anthropology of Traffic
Its 7 am and traffic is bad. Much like sitting in a traffic jam, paying attention to what traffic tells us about our society sounds mundane. Yet traffic is a social space unlike many others. It is a place where members of different social classes are thrown together in momentary, unavoidable and revealing encounters.
In the main, gated communities, office hierarchies, and private spaces are...
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“Money laundering is the life blood of organized crime. Without it crime would...”
– Making the Truth Illegal – revisited
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‘Tis in our nature: taking the human-cannabis... →
An Overview of the Endogenous Cannabinoid System →
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The Senate's gun control fail: dead children and... →
David Simon: The blocking of gun control legislation in the Senate exposes just how deeply corrupted America’s bought democracy has become
“A sane man’s contempt for the United States Senate must now be certain and complete. Given the inertia on even the most modest legislative response to the mass murder of schoolchildren, those still credulous enough to believe that our...
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“What kind of world do we live in when young men are so proud of violating...”
– “In Rape Tragedies, the Shame Is Ours,” my latest at The Nation (via jessicavalenti)
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“Corruption isn’t just people profiting from betraying the public interest. It’s...”
– Matt Stoller (via rumagin)
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“For a country that so often purports to be color blind, that insists too many...”
– David Sirota, at Salon, in regard to
…the blatant ethnic/religious profiling of an Arab student injured at the Boston Marathon bombing. In that…episode, he was…targeted as a suspect because—like thousands of others—he was running away from the blast…then came CNN’s declaration that police had...
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“Moments ago, the U.S. Senate decided to do the unthinkable about gun violence...”
– Former congresswoman Gabby Giffords’ group, Americans for Responsible Solutions
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Why can't we quit fossil fuels? →
Despite all the mounting scientific concern, the political rhetoric and the clean technology of the past decade, the growth rate in global carbon emissions has not reduced at all. Why? Because we continue to extract and burn fossil fuels more than ever before, reports Duncan Clark
“Seen as a technology-driven feedback loop, it is not surprising that nothing has yet tamed the global...
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“Economic coercive and controlling tactics of abusive partners have included...”
– Deborah Svoboda
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“To recognize that crappy is relative is to undermine our own fragile, tenuous...”
– Blanket “Don’t Go To Graduate School!” Advice Ignores Race and Reality?
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“A quarter of the American population is now engaged in “guard labor”—defending...”
– DAVID GRAEBER
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“The particular tragedy of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinian people is...”
– Iain Banks
March 2013
13 posts
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“When students ask me what I most want from them, I share with them that my...”
– bell hooks (via azspot)
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Feminism’s Tipping Point: Who Wins from Leaning... →
Brilliant review of Facebook executive Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In by Kate Losse
“It is well-known that Facebook clones small apps and rolls them out to Facebook’s broad user base when an outside app becomes threatening to Facebook’s business model. Given that strategy, it’s not hard to see how Facebook may want to incubate its own feminist movement in order to prevent a more activist and...
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“the demand to abolish banking is a demand to abolish the state of affairs that...”
– why do we need banks at all?
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Letter: benefit cuts undermine civilised society
As the UK’s leading experts on social policy and the welfare state, we urge the government to reconsider the benefit cuts scheduled for 1 April and to ensure that no further public spending cuts are targeted on the poorest in our society. We have two major concerns.
First, as the government’s own impact assessment has demonstrated, the 1% uprating in the Welfare Benefits Up-rating...
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“Defeatism is more often than not a psychological instrument designed to relieve...”
– Glenn Greenwald
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More money, more drugs →
“given the close knit nature of TT society, wealthier or politically affiliated persons would seek or send family members to treatment in Antigua, Barbados or the United States.”
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WatchLuis Suarez Amazing Goal vs Paraguay
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“Chagnon’s gung-ho research provides the origin story needed by the fading...”
– Camilla Power
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The point of intersection →
“Positioned by her race, Anita Hill had to deal with her harassment under constraints that white professional women do not face. She had to be a credit to her race. If her success came at a personal cost of enduring harassment, she had to weigh that cost against a more collective one: disappointing all those who counted on her success and who had supported her along the way. White...
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Tariq Ali: Hugo Chávez and me →
“The Bolívarians, as Chávez’s supporters were known, offered a political programme that challenged the Washington consensus: neo-liberalism at home and wars abroad. This was the prime reason for the vilification of Chávez that is sure to continue long after his death.
Politicians like him had become unacceptable. What he loathed most was the contemptuous indifference of mainstream...
February 2013
12 posts
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“What’s important for us to acknowledge and really reckon with is that this...”
– Michelle Alexander:
The school-to-prison pipeline: growing up in a system designed for failure
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Who ent dead, badly wounded
Last week I suggested that over the last 30-40 years, changing socio-economic circumstances have come to be reflected in the economics of pretty mas and specifically the all-inclusive mas band experience.
Over the same period, and particularly the last 15-20 years, there have also been increases in violent crime. We know that during 2000 to 2005 the murder rate in T&T increased 322 per cent....
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Unnumbered tears: Trinidad Carnival →
alinamaria:
Lots of people have written about the way Carnival has become seedier, more commercial, cheapened somehow. Working with advertising is exciting when it goes well but there’s so much pressure because we know we can be replaced just like that. Someone can not like the way you spoke to them, or not like something you wrote in an email. But watching the concert last night put on by...
How Companies Learn Your Secrets →
“Andrew Pole had just started working as a statistician for Target in 2002, when two colleagues from the marketing department stopped by his desk to ask an odd question: “If we wanted to figure out if a customer is pregnant, even if she didn’t want us to know, can you do that? ””
