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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...”
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“[Judith] Butler’s argument against unequivocal gendered identities is most powerful when it is seen as a strategic response to the social emphasis on...”
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“As for white America, perhaps it can stop crying out against ‘black supremacy,’ ‘black nationalism,’ ‘racism in reverse,’ and begin facing reality....”
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Graduated from college today. This comic sums up my thoughts perfectly.
http://failnation.tumblr.com -
“Physical penetration is sex, which is a very superficial thing. Psychological penetration is love, which is far more deep, far more significant, far...”
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Mark Bergfeld: Across Europe we have witnessed three strands of resistance...
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And now for the leftovers of my dreams. #comfortfood
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“The story of progress up from slavery is a lie, the longest lie. The story of progress up from slavery is told juridically in the form of the rule of...”
Martin Luther King Jr. (via loveinfamine)
nb4: But MLK BELIEVED IN NON VIOLENCE SO DON’T CALL ME OUT ON MY RACISM
(via note-a-bear)
filed under quotes white people never use of MLK
(via wishicouldtwerk2damoon)
(via thatneedstogo)
The problem of distribution, sharp enough in the Britain of the ’30s, is far worse for the world as a whole. A billion or so people live in destitution, and billions more are poor by any reasonable standard. Nevertheless, for the first time in history, our productive capacity is such that no one need be poor. In fact, more people are rich, by any reasonable historical standard, than are poor.
Even more strikingly, perhaps, more people are obese than are undernourished. And this is not true merely in terms of basic nutrition. Right now, the world produces enough meat to give everyone a diet comparable to the average Japanese person’s. This amount could be increased by replacing grain-fed beef with chicken and pork, a step that would also reduce carbon emissions. With another 50 years of technological progress and even a modest effort to aid the poorest onto the path of rapid growth already being followed by most of Asia, poverty could be eliminated. The vast majority of the world’s population could enjoy a living standard comparable, in material terms, to that of the global middle class of today.
French President Francois Hollande has a new plan to fix economic inequality problems in his country: ban homework.
The move, designed to level the playing field between students who get help from their families at home and those who don’t, is just one piece of reforms proposed by Hollande. His…
Maps have always been a powerful way of highlighting London’s social inequalities (Charles Booth‘s and John Snow‘s are the most iconic examples of this) and they continue to show how the richest and poorest Londoners often live side by side. As the BBC’s “The Secret History of Our Streets” has demonstrated, stark inequalities in the wealth and health of Londoners have existed for centuries and, sadly, persist to the present day. A popular way of describing some of the inequalities is to use the analogy that a year in life expectancy is lost for every station eastbound on the Jubilee Line between Westminster and Canning Town. Since first hearing this a few years ago I have wanted to make a map for the rest of the Transport for London network. I have finally done this and you can view the interactive version here and read a more in depth article in the journal Environment and Planning A.
The map shows two key statistics: 1) the life expectancy at birth of those living around each London Underground, London Overground and Docklands Light Railway (DLR) station and 2) the rank of each London ward on the spectrum of Income Deprivation Affecting Children Index(IDACI). The inclusion of the IDACI rank highlights the linkage between deprivation and life expectancy, which is especially poignant in this context as it demonstrates that, without significant social change (obviously, if the social composition of London changes radically then the life expectancies at each station will change with it), the fates of many children living in the poorest parts of London are seemingly already sealed.
Stephen Graham - Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism (via effusionofbiopower)
this is Trinidad/Port of Spain and Eastern Corridor right now
The ‘politics of envy’ is a cliche of Thatcherite ‘meritocratic’ ideology. Mrs Thatcher, in a 1975 speech debunking the post-war consensus, attributed a saying to the Mid-West: “Don’t cut down the tall poppies. Let them rather grow tall.” If this doesn’t sound very much like a Mid-West homily, it is because it is derived from Herodotus. But the idea that this encompasses a folksy wisdom, a ‘common sense’ if you will, is important to Thatcherite and neoliberal ideology. It means, don’t cut down those who excel out of envy; encourage them, fertilise them, let them excel all the more. The idea is that people who succeed in markets deserve their success: their success is ‘meritocratic’. In this, she was not innovating: she merely gave fresh expression to an old conservative trope, present in Nietzsche as much as Rand. But its staying power as a free market fable is acc0unted for by its political uses.
The more sophisticated ideologists of neoliberalism, such as Hayek, recognised the danger in attributing merit to market outcomes: it was a thinly veiled social Darwinism that distorted the real justification for free markets, that being their superior productive capacity. But reactionaries like Thatcher understood that people do care about social justice, and are not enthralled by GDP figures. She thus took the logical step of binding the argument for free markets to a mawkish, simplistic morality fable, in which egalitarianism is a conspiracy against excellence. And to this day, Tory ideologues such as Jenkins, when in need of a quick social justice fix,alight on the old chestnut about the ‘politics of envy’.
(via socio-logic)
I’ve got a weekly column in the Trinidad Guardian. Will be writing about local power relations. First one came out yesterday…
Zamudio et al., Critical Race Theory Matters: Education and Ideology (via humanformat)
this is true. However, i would state - just to make it clear - that what is most important here is not the discussion of ideology but that of the “organisation of power” discussed in the last two sentences.
It is an argument made by Deleuze and Guattari and one, imho, worth taking on…
Deleuze: Instead, one talks of “ideology”. But ideology has no importance whatsoever: what matters is not ideology, not even the “economic-ideological” distinction or opposition, but the *organisation of power*. Because organization of power— that is, the manner in which desire is already in the economic, in which libido invests the economic — haunts the economic and nourishes political forms of repression.
Q: So is ideology a trompe l’oeil?
Deleuze: Not at all. To say “ideology is a trompe l’oeil, ” that’s still the traditional thesis. One puts the infrastructure on one side— the economic, the serious— and on the other, the superstructure, of which ideology is a part, thus rejecting the phenomena of desire in ideology. It’s a perfect way to ignore how desire works within the infrastructure, how it invests in it, how it takes part in it, how, in this respect, it organizes power and the repressive system. We do not say: ideology is a trompe l’oeil (or a concept that refers to certain illusions) We say: there is no ideology, it is an illusion. That’s why it suits orthodox Marxism and the Communist Party so well. Marxism has put so much emphasis on the theme of ideology to better conceal what was happening in the USSR: a new organization of repressive power. There is no ideology, there are only organizations of power once it is admitted that the organization of power is the unity of desire and the economic infrastructure. Take two examples. Education: in May 1968 the leftists lost a lot of time insisting that professors engage in public self-criticism as agents of bourgeois ideology. It’s stupid, and simply fuels the masochistic impulses of academics. The struggle against the competitive examination was abandoned for the benefit of the controversy, or the great anti-ideological public confession. In the meantime, the more conservative professors had no difficulty reorganizing their power. The problem of education is not an ideological problem, but a problem of the organization of power: it is the specificity of educational power that makes it appear to be an ideology, but it’s pure illusion. Power in the primary schools, that means something, it affects all children. Second example: Christianity. The church is perfectly pleased to be treated as an ideology. This can be argued; it feeds ecumenism. But Christianity has never been an ideology; it’s a very specific organization of power that has assumed diverse forms since the Roman Empire and the Middle Ages, and which was able to invent the idea of international power. It’s far more important than ideology.
FELIX GUATTARI: It’s the same thing in traditional political structures. One finds the old trick being played everywhere again and again: a big ideological debate in the general assembly and questions of organization reserved for special commissions. These questions appear secondary, determined by political options. While on the contrary, the real problems are those of organization, never specified or rationalized, but projected afterwards in ideological terms. There the real divisions show up: a treatment of desire and power, of investments, of group Oedipus, of group “superegos”, of perverse phenomena, etc. And then political oppositions are built up: the individual takes such a position against another one, because in the scheme of organization of power, he has already chosen and hates his adversary.
http://deleuzelectures.blogspot.com/2007/02/capitalism-very-special-delirium.html
(via fauxmosexualtranstrender)
Last May, one of the largest hedge funds in the world paid me $100 to eat gourmet popcorn and explain why I wasn’t applying for one of its (lucrative!) jobs. As I sat in a hotel suite with six other Yale students – musicians, biologists, dramatists, other-ists – and answered questions about my future plans, I got this uneasy feeling that the man in the beautiful suit was going to take my Hopes and Dreams back to some lab to figure out the best way to crush them.
And indeed, they have it down to a science. Each fall, our country’s top-tier banks and consulting firms cram New Haven’s best hotels with the best and brightest to lure them with a series of superlatives: the greatest job, the most money, the easiest application, the fanciest popcorn.
They’re good at it. They’re unbelievably, remarkably, terrifyingly good at it. Every year around 25 percent of employed Yale graduates enter the consulting and finance industries. At Harvard and Stanford, the numbers are even higher.
“Conservative advocates of pure free markets, in this view, fail to acknowledge how concentrated economic power converts into political power. The right, for example, has hailed the evisceration of the estate tax and the lifting of restrictions on campaign contributions, despite evidence that such policies work to restrict competition — by further concentrating wealth in the case of the estate tax, and by further empowering corporate America to control political decisions in the case of campaign finance.
Stiglitz and his allies argue that a free and competitive market is highly beneficial to society at large, but that it needs government regulation and oversight to remain functional. Without constraint, dominant interests use their leverage to make gains at the expense of the majority. Concentration of power in private hands, Stiglitz believes, can be just as damaging to the functioning of markets as excessive regulation and political control.”
