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Beetham Gardens by Miquel Galofré
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“Institutionalised homophobia exposes the hollowness of our aspirations to “first world” status. It punctures the Trini delusion of cosmopolitan...”
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“There are various ways of dealing with the fact that all lives, including those of the people we love, have an end. The end of human life, which we...”
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Treated myself to a banana split for breakfast before my last day of school and oh my god it was too good - banana filled with...
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The question is how we react to this great prejudice against women. The rule of law and social activism certainly are crucial. But no matter how...
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“Be of service. You are taking your degree into a society dominated by concentrated poverty and a vulnerable middle class, a society where it is...”
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Word x 100 !!! Via @imanisublime #PR #cancer #truth #woc
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Homosexuality has a long history in Africa, says anthropologist Patrick Awondo, contrary...
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“I think marriage in general is not a healthy institution in our society. If people want civil rights, then that’s what I feel we should be fighting...”
(via socio-logic)
(via teachingliteracy)
(via perfectlycontradicted)
—Toni Morrison (via queergiftedblack)
This is something I believe in with my whole heart.
(via femmefatalist)
(via colouredcollective)
[W]e did a study in which capuchin monkeys received either a grape or a piece of cucumber for a simple task.
If both monkeys got the same reward, there never was a problem. Grapes are by far preferred (as real primates, like us, they go for sugar content), but even if both received cucumber, they’d perform the task many times in a row.
However, if they received different rewards, the one who got the short end of the stick would begin to waver in its responses, and very soon start a rebellion by either refusing to perform the task or refusing to eat the cucumber.
This is an “irrational” response in the sense that if profit-maximizing is what life (and economics) is about, one should always take what one can get. Monkeys will always accept and eat a piece of cucumber whenever we give it to them, but apparently not when their partner is getting a better deal. In humans, this reaction is known as “inequity aversion.”
(via venuschild)
Two college roommates, a webcam, and a tragedy.
By Ian ParkerIf anything can take me out of my posting rut, it’s this article from The New Yorker. Ian Parker brings to light many things related to the Tyler Clementi suicide case and his roommate Dharun Ravi in particular. While I was never really sure what kind of person Ravi was, this article certainly confirms he is an asshole. He’s a prick in the same vein as a pre-reformed Tucker Max. He sounds like the person who’d call himself an asshole before you even had the chance to. He prides himself on being an insensitive dick. He finds other people to be beneath him for silly, trivial, and materialistic reasons. We’ve all met the type. The sad thing is, he probably doesn’t even realize how much his insensitive comments and actions hurt people. I’m not psychologist either, but this is the impression I get.
I also know it’s not good to judge people, and I try my hardest not to, but the presented evidence makes it all too easy. Ravi IMs “FUCK MY LIFE / He’s gay,” and “If gay people were like carter, there wouldnt b a problem with gay hatred / Its the fags like this guy that just cause all sorts of trouble” — as if there’s a “good” versus “bad” kind of gay. He judges Clementi for being born in January, using Yahoo Mail, liking violins, and concludes with “Dude I hate poor people.” I guess Ravi and Mitt Romney have something in common.
Please read it when you get the change. Sure it’s a bit lengthy for an internet audience, but it’s well worth the effort. You really get a sense as to what kind of a person Tyler Clementi was, and still is to so many people. It sheds to light so many interesting things about the case including more previously unreleased IM conversations between Ravi and his friends and Clementi’s confessions to internet message boards and his high school orchestra buddy.
When you’re done, also check out Tyler’s older brother James Clementi’s piece for Out Magazine entitled “Letters to My Brother”.
(via filsdelalune)
“It’s not rocket science… it’s the basic things we were taught as children. Empathy is doing onto others as you would have them do onto you. Tolerance is to live and let live. It is a question of helping people to respect others and to understand that everybody has intrinsic human dignity that has to be respected.”
Advocating the mere tolerance of difference between women is the grossest reformism. It is a total denial of the creative function of difference in our lives. Difference must be not merely tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic…Only within that interdependency of different strengths, acknowledged and equal, can the power to seek new ways of being in the world generate, as well as the courage and sustenance to act where there are no charters.
Within the interdependence of mutual (nondominant) differences lies that security which enables us to descend into the chaos of knowledge and return with true visions of our future, along with the concomitant power to effect those changes which can bring that future into being. Difference is that raw and powerful connection from which our personal power is forged. As women, we have been taught either to ignore our differences, or to view them as causes for separation and suspicion rather than as forces for change. Without community there is no liberation, only the most vulnerable and temporary armistice between an individual and her oppression. But community must not mean a shedding of our differences, nor the pathetic pretense that these differences do not exist.
Audre Lorde
“The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House”
damn but that audre is good.
(via discosherpa)
So so soooo good
(via discosherpa)
(via teachingliteracy)
“But perhaps you’re not convinced by these clever lab experiments performed mostly on undergrads. Perhaps you think the paradigms smack of artifice. One of my favorite studies of power corrupting comes from Deborah Gruenfeld, a psychologist at the Stanford Business School. She was interested in how positions of power altered our reasoning process. After analyzing more than 1,000 decisions handed down by the United States Supreme Court between 1953 and 1993, Gruenfeld found that, as justices gained power on the court, or became part of a majority coalition, their written opinions tended to become less complex and nuanced. They considered fewer perspectives and possible outcomes. The bad news, of course, is that the opinions written from the majority position are what actually become the law of the land. The larger lesson is that Foucault had a point: The dynamics of power can profoundly influence how we think. When we climb the ladder of status, our inner arguments get warped and our natural sympathy for others is vanquished. Instead of fretting about the effects of our actions, we just go ahead and act. We deserve what we want. And how dare they resist. Don’t they know who we are?”
