#if you haven’t actually read up on multiple better communicating activists

[always-a-slut-4-ghouls]

On the one hand I think it would be really funny if one of my posts blew up, but on the other hand I’d be more self conscious and I am almost certain that people would be annoying with me about veganism. There are literally blogs dedicated to countering dumb arguments and they are so much more eloquent than me. Acti-veg is right there you don’t need to pester me about it, they can word things a million times better than my clumsy ass. I don’t even post about veganism 24/7. It’s in my description because I do post about it, but i reblog memes more than anything else. I do wish I was better at debating for the sake of all the important things I care about. I care about humans as well, and no, those two aren’t mutually exclusive, I say this to people who resist animal rights because they think you can’t do that and care about human rights AND to vegans who, understandably, have become very disillusioned with the current dominant human cultures and outlooks on the treatments of animals. It’s always hard when you see something that is everywhere and is fucked up. It can be hard to not feel only bitterness and despair. For people who aren’t vegan, it could be compared to realizing how fucked up capitalism is and being surrounded by people who defend the system, even people who are hurt by it (so, real life). I can point people in the direction of others who are better at communicating (whenever I have a singular person who comes to mind first, so many things have so many people that I have trouble thinking of just one. Veganism is so weirdly shit upon on this website though that I can think of blogs specifically dedicated to it with far more ease) I didn’t decide to just go vegan on a whim. Going vegetarian was an easy choice to me, but the culture of using animals is so ubiquitous that I myself resisted veganism for quite awhile. This didn’t pop out of nowhere. I gradually noticed things until I went “what I’m doing is actually pretty fucked up and I can stop doing so many of these things” to minimize the amount of harm you do whenever it’s possible and can be done in practice. It’s not some crazy definition, it’s not some unattainable philosophy to do your best to live by, the official definition doesn’t say “stop taking your medication” but you can try to buy things without animal products or testing when I comes to like, shampoo. If you are like “but I don’t have options when it comes to shampoo!” Is there literally anything else you can change? That is what it’s about. The thing is, a lot of people can change more than they expect they can. I can’t show up at your house, look through your budget, check every store you can shop at, but if you can do even a little of that some time, you are at least doing better and are closer to doing everything you can in your own life. If you want to get more defensive and go “what about this person who isn’t me” or “what about this thing I haven’t really thought about for more than a literal minute” whatever it is, it has probably been addressed by someone who actually has a better way with words than me. I won’t just shut up about everything I care about, but I won’t pretend that whatever it is hasn’t already been addressed by a million people who are better than me, and you just don’t care enough to listen to them.

This has turned into me rambling but I am so so tired of encountering the same arguments a million times by people who think that they have some hot new take, and I know I’d have so many people doing that if I got more popular on main. I don’t really mind more people finding me funny or being exposed to a new idea by seeing something I’ve posted or shared, but I am fucking tired of being expected to be some professional or even amateur debater because I care about something and share that person’s post. I know some people are going to dismiss me because of that, but it has already been addressed by a million people better at doing it than me, and whoever is talking to me probably wouldn’t even listen to that anyway. It’s like someone asking you about “why is capitalism bad” and you have seen whatever they throw at you hundreds of times and you know a fuck tonne of people have already explained why capitalism bad. It’s just that whoever it is wants you, just some guy, to explain it and explain it better than you, a random meme guy who cares about things but isn’t practiced in explaining more than the definition of an English word or something.

[moontheoretist]

The show currently on had a bunch of stuffed shirts sitting at a round table. ["...my esteemed colleague, Professor Newell, gives too much credence to the ex-Avengers' education. I simply don't believe they all read and fully comprehended the document they were rejecting. Steve Rogers had a high school diploma and one year of art college."] Steve curled his lip. ["That doesn't mean he's illiterate," Newell, a brown-haired man with glasses, said. The other man, his tight coils of hair salt and pepper gray, raised an eyebrow. "As a lawyer, I'd be the first to say legal documents are needlessly complex, but no lay person can just sit down and read a 1000-page legal agreement and absorb the intricacies with nothing more than a high school education from the 1940s. Not without help." Newell ceded the point with a nod. "And Wanda Maximoff is a street orphan and doesn't even have that. Ditto Clint Barton, who grew up in a traveling circus. The Ant Man has an engineering degree, which makes me think he would have ample education to comprehend the Accords, but he had little time to do it in—only the flight to Germany, and investigators say he was likely shrunk and in Clint Barton's pocket, as there's no evidence of him on the passenger list, but he suddenly appeared at the Leipzig/Halle airport. It's questionable he bothered to shrink the Accords with him or bring the necessary resources to decipher all the legalese."] Scott got up and left the room. Wanda curled up and hugged her knees to her chest. Steve remembered the hasty conversation he'd had with Scott before the battle. Scott had no idea about the Accords back then. He thought they were there to fight over killer assassins. Steve rubbed his forehead. ["That leaves only Sergeant Sam Wilson, a man well-educated by the armed forces. I wondered what made him reject a document that his own government and one hundred and sixteen other countries supported, and then I read up on Lieutenant General Ross' record. Any man who has served in the military and heard of Ross' abuse of his own forces and how he used his own daughter as bait in pursuit of The Hulk would have zero respect for the retired general and Secretary of State. Ross was spearheading the US support of the Accords. Whether or not this influenced Sergeant Wilson's decision to reject them, I cannot say."] "This is bullshit," Clint said, obviously fuming. "I didn't need some stupid diploma to tell me the Accords are a shitty idea." ["You haven't said anything about the Black Widow," the moderator said, shifting his papers around on the big desk. "Ms. Romanov is an interesting case. Raised and educated by the top-secret Soviet training program called the Red Room, the Black Widow supported the Accords at first. She appeared to recognize their necessity, but then during the fight at the airport seemed to run into an issue of allegiance in fighting her friends. Understandable, I think. It's why the Avengers should never have been sent to contain the renegades. But who else could battle that sort of might? "In any event, it appears to be no coincidence that the Avengers who sided with the Accords all have master's degrees or higher." "Or much higher," the mediator said, abandoning neutrality. "Lieutenant Colonel Rhodes as a master's in engineering as well as officer's training, Stark has multiple doctorates, and the Vision is said to have access to the sum of all human knowledge. The King of Wakanda obviously has the finest political education as a leader of his nation, and I understand he is also an engineer." "Nothing is known about the Spider-Man," Newell said. "No, that's true. He'll have to remain an enigma." "But it's your contention that education had something to do with renegades choosing not to support the Accords," the mediator said. "I think it's obvious."] *** ["Hello, all. Thank you for time. "As Mr. Sjöberg mentioned, I recently came into some information regarding The Winter Soldier that I felt was of international importance, especially since he had the protection of some very powerful people. The ICC is just the place to turn when the State is unable or unwilling to carry out an investigation and prosecute the perpetrators."] Steve drew in a shocked breath. ["I found this information at a Hydra bunker in Siberia, where Rogers, Barnes and I had an altercation about whether suppressing this information was cool or not." Stark gave an acid grin. "In the course of this disagreement, Rogers disabled my suit and left me in the Hydra bunker to freeze, unable to radio a rescue team."] Sam sank his head into his hands with a curse. ["However, Rogers' 'leave our teammates behind' policy turned out to be useful, because while searching for a way to communicate with my rescue team, I discovered a trove of records spanning back decades on the Hydra supersoldier program. I looked through all of it, hoping to save it and get retrieved before Hydra returned. "What I discovered was more than enough: movies, photos, and detailed plans to assassinate political heads of state, industrial leaders, diplomats, prominent artists, radical leaders and activists, all of whom were murdered by The Winter Soldier. Included in these documents were the names of the ones who ordered the kills, the criminals behind the deeds. For the last three weeks, with the assistance of the Joint Terrorism Task Force, that's what we've been up to—rounding up the bad guys with a vengeance." The murmurs grew into a roar of approval. "Most of the Hydra operatives still living have been arrested for their complicity in murdering countless important figures who stood against Hydra's core principles of racism and fascism. Despite the unnecessary delay introduced by Rogers, who could have put us onto Barnes and thus the location of the bunker that much sooner, the loved ones and family members of the deceased will at long last know, and hopefully find peace in knowing, just what happened to their loved ones, and why."] Tony's voice trembled on the last part, and Steve felt a pit growing in his stomach that he couldn't shake off. ["My only regret is whom I have to thank for this. The man behind the Vienna bombing was the one who revealed the truth to me by showing me the video of my parents being murdered by The Winter Soldier. The man who told me the truth is a criminal. But then, the man who kept the truth from us all is a criminal as well. "Thank you all for listening. There will be no questions."] *** Tony lifted his hand and smacked away the letter he was writing as Rhodey walked in. "Sour patch! Look at you. How're the legs feeling?" "Better now that I tweaked the timing on the left one. Feels more natural now. But, Tony..." "Awesome. You should totally patent that port thing. That was really good work." Tony pulled up the schematics of Rhodey's braces to take a look at the timing adjustment port Rhodey had added. "I don't have time for—that's not why I came in here, Tones. Vision got a call—" "Time, shmime. I'll have Friday draft up the diagrams and application for you." "It would be my pleasure, Colonel Rhodes." "Yes, fine. Thanks, Fri. Tones, listen. Something's happened with the renegades." Tony stopped fiddling and gave Rhodey his full attention. "Tell me." "It's weird as hell." Rhodey dropped onto a lab stool and rolled over to join him. "Wanda contacted Vision to tell him she delivered Rogers to the US Embassy in Nairobi. I checked, and sure enough, according to embassy officials, she made him walk in like a zombie, then directed him to 'Wait here until Tony Stark comes to arrest you.'"

Into the Weeds by truet

This is literally the best Team Iron Man fic I read till now, and it includes all the things I missed from the other ones: acknowledgment of Rhodey’s smarts, acknowledgment of the education Rogues had, acknowledgment that Wanda may actually get angry at Steve when she learns what he did and what it means to her, acknowledgment that Hydra agents who ordered the murders should be arrested, acknowledgment of Tony relying on other people to actually accomplish or polish the things he engages with (JCCT, braces).

The only thing it doesn’t have is acknowledgment that Shuri doesn’t need BARF to help Barnes, but it’s only because the fact that the story never reaches that point, but damn, so many Team Iron Man fics mistreats other charas and I know it is not malicious, that it is because the authors love Tony and want him to fix the issues himself, but Tony isn’t omnipotent god of science and I would like people to get that Shuri is as mart as he is and can definitely handle helping Barnes and making his arm without Tony’s help, as much as Rhodey can fix his braces and doesn’t need Tony to constantly do it for him, because he has proper education to handle that, and also he is the user, so he knows best what is wrong and what is right and what works.

I also tend to like the stories which don’t demonize Wanda more than the ones which do, because I think she was radicalized, but not evil and those stories, where she is an evil Hydra agent or actually went mad long ago and nobody noticed, as much as interesting and enjoyable don’t really get what it means to be radicalized and then trying to de-radicalize and also heavily fall into the trap of demonizing a woman in the same way misogynist media creators usually do and the only thing I can blame is the fact that we all are raised in the society which hates women and even if we don’t actively believe in it some of it stays with us, in our subconscious and affects what we write and how. Everybody is capable of evil as long as they believe something very much and Wanda is more prone to that due to her background. Not to mention that those stories also usually infantilize her and I like to see her actually being treated like an adult she always was, who understands the consequences of Steve’s action for her and who would do something, albeit something stupid mind you, to mitigate her case, because she is an adult, and she like any other adult person would want to help her case somehow.

Oh, and author also knows how the whole “who arrests who” system works, so their stories actually show that nobody in the MCU creator board of creators, including the Russos, does a goddamn research about Europe. Most people don’t have this knowledge, so movies don’t seem off to them, but to people who do have this knowledge movies are weird and illogical.

[hopefulfestivaltastemaker]

September 13, 2020

My weekly roundup of things I am working on. Topics include wildfires, exotic energy sources, speculative energy sources, the Biden housing plan, and creative outlets.

Wildfires in Oregon

Oregon, along with the rest of the West Coast, has been in the news for devastating wildfires that are still ongoing. This is certainly the worst I have experienced, much worse that the 2017 fires in California. Both Oregon and California are having their worst seasons on record.

In Oregon, it started last Monday, when a strong (and unseasonably early) east wind came over an already dry state, drying the air further and spreading fires rapidly. The Portland metro area experienced sporadic bad air quality on Monday and Tuesday, and it has been consistently bad since Wednesday. Today is no noticeable improvement. The weather forecast is for clouds on Monday and some rain on Tuesday, which should finally bring about some improvement.

So far there have been dozens of deaths in the West and several dozen more people unaccounted for and significant property damage. My guess is that most of the damage will be harder to see: the impact of the poor air quality on people who are already vulnerable. These events bring about yet more disruption in a region that has already been reeling from the pandemic, economic hardship, and civil unrest.

I made a facetious remark on Twitter about solar radiation management, but I really have been struck at how much the weather has cooled down. The temperature is at least 20 degrees (F) cooler than it should have been, due to soot particles reflecting sunlight. In my neighborhood, the light-sensitive streetlights are on during the day. I can look directly at the Sun without hurting my eyes. Needless to say, I will need to be convinced that any solar radiation management scheme will not significantly harm air quality before I will believe it’s a good idea.

If anyone is actually reading this, I would implore you not to use the fires merely as a talking point for your pet climate policy. This is something that irritates me greatly. In the immediate term, we need relief and a stronger firefighting force. In the medium term, we need better forest management practices. Greenhouse gas mitigation helps only marginally in the long term. Don’t try to tell me that building a bike lane in New York City is the solution we in the West are looking for. Once the fires are extinguished, most climate activists will lose interest in our land use needs and move on to the next disaster.

Exotic Energy Sources

This week I added an Exotic Energy section to Urban Cruise Ship. I had been considering this for a long time, and I went ahead and did it mainly because I have been stuck on some harder projects and wanted to do something relatively easy. There are no graphics planned, as I don’t see the topic as important enough to justify assigning more work to our graphics guy, but there are a few interesting things.

One recurring scheme is various ways to capture piezoelectricity, which is generated through pressure on a surface, such as when people walk over a plate or cars drive over it. One study in Australia found that with more advanced generators, an educational building at Macquarie University might recover 0.5% of its electricity usage by installing generators at high traffic points. With technology that was current at the time of the study, it’s probably more like 0.06%.

As for roadways, I cited several studies that report levelized costs of electricity in the range of multiple dollars per kilowatt-hour (wholesale prices tend to be in the range of 3-6 cents/kWh and retail on the order of 10 cents). The exception was a California study that reported 8-20 cents/kWh, which as far as I can tell is just an uncritical repetition of claims from the vendor. Also not discussed is the fact the source of energy is kinetic energy from cars, so unless the car is braking, the generators are stealing energy from motorists. We might as well be using diesel generators then.

If I were to make a guess, the pilot project is little more than California burning several million dollars on a patently unworkable scheme because of some marketing by a shady vendor. I’m all for trying bold ideas that are not guaranteed to succeed, but one must draw the line at ideas that clearly won’t succeed or where basic feasibility questions haven’t even been asked.

Biomechanical energy harvesting is an idea that got a bit of hype a few years ago, but now few people seem to still be interested. Making some extremely generous assumptions, I estimated that it would have a theoretical of about 1 exajoule per year, or about 0.2% of primary energy supply. More medium-case assumptions would cut that by at least a factor of five. Plus that doesn’t account for extra exertion required by the person or embodied energy in the devices.

There are probably some niche use cases for piezoelectric generators and biomechanical systems, such as low power distributed sensors and personal electronics respectively.

I even commented on the power from rainfall paper earlier in the year, an idea too silly to take seriously.

Speculative Energy Sources

But even with the above we’re not done. I decided to venture into the realm of speculative physics.

In quantum physics, even a system with zero temperature must have some latent energy due to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. This has been termed the zero point. So naturally that leads people to speculate that zero point energy could be harvested for useful purposes. The near-consensus seems to be that this is impossible, that it must violate thermodynamics somehow, though I found it surprisingly difficult to find a rigorous explanation of why this is the case. This paper from 2019 is all I found, and even then, it only rules out two of three proposed ZPE extraction methods based on thermodynamic principles. Incidentally, the authors hold a patent on the third method and claim there is inconclusive evidence that it works.

Additionally, there is the NASA Eagleworks project to use the quantum vacuum to develop a spacecraft that can operate without onboard propellant.

There is a lot of interesting physics here that I don’t understand. I was expecting to write a short, dismissive comment for the website, but it would seem that ZPE is a legitimate area of scientific research. Maybe this will actually work for energy production someday. But there is no solid evidence yet, and any claims of a currently working ZPE device can be safely rejected.

Some other ideas that pop up, based in speculative physics, including hydrinos, neutrinos, quark fusion, and the ever popular perpetual motion machine. At least neutrinos and quark fusion are legitimate physics, but as far as useful energy production goes, these are all pathological ideas. I’ll add more as I see them. I briefly covered cold fusion a while ago on the Fusion page.

I expect that when the site is finally done, of the many things people could fairly accuse me of, not being comprehensive will not be one of them.

The Biden Housing Plan

Evidently I am a few weeks late, but the Biden-Harris campaign has a housing plan. The tl;dr is that there might be a few good things here, but I’m not too impressed.

When it comes to housing affordability, the principle I’ve tried to reiterate over and over again is that it comes down to supply. If there are 1,000,000 people who want to live in a city with a zoned capacity for 800,000, then 200,000 people will not be able to live there. It doesn’t matter if you impose rent control, eviction moratoria, inclusionary zoning rules, offer Section 8 or other subsidies, or whatever. As long as the supply is fixed, all these do is change the rationing mechanism from price to something else. Which, it must be acknowledged, is often the intent.

Traditionally, the federal government has a limited role in zoning. That could change of course; the federal government today has major roles in many areas where it previously had a limited or no role. As it is now, I see two plausible hooks for federal involvement in the near term. The first is the Fair Housing Act, where it can be argued fairly convincingly that zoning rules have disparate impact on protected groups, and in some cases intentional impact; and the second is to tie zoning reform to federal Community Development Block Grants or transportation funding, where reform is a matter of insuring that federal spending is actually used effectively.

The Biden plan calls for reinstatement of the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing rule, which while imperfect, I think is better than what the Trump Administration decided to go with, which is nothing. As for the second, I momentarily got my hopes up when I saw that they were promoting legislation to do just that. But upon reading the details of the HOME Act (which was introduced last year but I was unfamiliar with until now), I see that the list of measures the bill calls for to promote “inclusive land use” are wide-ranging, and only some of them can reasonably be expected to increase the housing supply. It could be a good piece of legislation, but much rides on the implementation. Zoning reform advocates at the state level routinely underestimate the creativity that municipalities will show in evading the intent of their laws.

Anyway, there is a lot of other stuff here on racial discrimination, energy efficiency, and the Davis-Bacon Act (which probably makes housing less affordable by running up construction costs), but I won’t belabor the issues. All in all, it’s a plan that reflects the set Democratic interests pretty well, has a lot of stuff in it, and would do little to achieve broad-based housing affordability.

Creative Outlets

Like many people, I have been continuing to struggle with a variety of stressful circumstances. I took more time than usual this week on some creative projects, which has helped.

The newest one I am calling Project Epsilon, which for now is a maze generator. I’ve long had a fascination with generative content, and I would like to see how far the concept can be taken, but for now it is really just for fun. It is not deployed, but someone knowledgeable with Python and Flask in particular can download and run it fairly easily. Not that there is much to see yet. All it does it let the user input a few parameters and make a maze.

The other is Repair the Cosmos, which is deployed but hasn’t been updated publicly in a long time, despite considerable local activity. This is an incremental game that is meant to tell the story of humanity from the Paleolithic to the far future. I started it in January and have been working very intermittently since then, but I finally have a burst of creativity going for the first time in months. I still expect at least a few weeks before the next update, and I can only go for so long before I start feeling guilty about not doing real work.

[l2gkiug-blog]

PhD as a job

I recently reread this passage in David Graeber's _Bullshit Jobs_ (by the way, I highly recommend reading the book):

In the spring of 2013, I unwittingly set off a very minor international sensation.

It all began when I was asked to write an essay for a new radical magazine called Strike! The editor asked if I had anything provocative that no one else would be likely to publish. I usually have one or two essay ideas like that stewing around, so I drafted one up and presented him with a brief piece entitled “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs.”

The essay was based on a hunch. Everyone is familiar with those sort of jobs that don’t seem, to the outsider, to really do much of anything: HR consultants, communications coordinators, PR researchers, financial strategists, corporate lawyers, or the sort of people (very familiar in academic contexts) who spend their time staffing committees that discuss the problem of unnecessary committees. The list was seemingly endless. What, I wondered, if these jobs really are useless, and those who hold them are aware of it? Certainly you meet people now and then who seem to feel their jobs are pointless and unnecessary. Could there be anything more demoralizing than having to wake up in the morning five out of seven days of one’s adult life to perform a task that one secretly believed did not need to be performed—that was simply a waste of time or resources, or that even made the world worse? Would this not be a terrible psychic wound running across our society? Yet if so, it was one that no one ever seemed to talk about. There were plenty of surveys over whether people were happy at work. There were none, as far as I knew, about whether or not they felt their jobs had any good reason to exist.

This possibility that our society is riddled with useless jobs that no one wants to talk about did not seem inherently implausible. The subject of work is riddled with taboos. Even the fact that most people don’t like their jobs and would relish an excuse not to go to work is considered something that can’t really be admitted on TV—certainly not on the TV news, even if it might occasionally be alluded to in documentaries and stand-up comedy. I had experienced these taboos myself: I had once acted as the media liaison for an activist group that, rumor had it, was planning a civil disobedience campaign to shut down the Washington, DC, transport system as part of a protest against a global economic summit. In the days leading up to it, you could hardly go anywhere looking like an anarchist without some cheerful civil servant walking up to you and asking whether it was really true he or she wouldn’t have to go to work on Monday. Yet at the same time, TV crews managed dutifully to interview city employees—and I wouldn’t be surprised if some of them were the same city employees—commenting on how terribly tragic it would be if they wouldn’t be able to get to work, since they knew that’s what it would take to get them on TV. No one seems to feel free to say what they really feel about such matters—at least in public.

It was plausible, but I didn’t really know. In a way, I wrote the piece as a kind of experiment. I was interested to see what sort of response it would elicit...

[Graeber reprints his poignant essay]...

If ever an essay’s hypothesis was confirmed by its reception, this was it. “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs” produced an explosion.

It occurred to me that, just as "bullshit jobs" was taboo to discuss but of wide resonance, the same might apply to **the steps one should take to pick, perform and/or leave jobs if one has internalized that one's job or career is indeed bullshit.**

At least it seems that way in my university's PhD programs. I suspect many of my peers don't like their PhD jobs, and distinctly, many have jobs they "secretly believe [do] not need to be performed." I suspect many of those peers are actively interested in how to deal with these situations: should I leave PhD? If not and if I haven't yet chosen a boss, how should I choose? If I'm already stuck with a boss, should I switch? Should I try shirking and see what happens? Should I just keep working as I am and stop worrying about the utility of my work, which could very possibly make me happy? Will bringing in my own funding give me more negotiating power? I'll call these questions "bullshit job considerations." But it's taboo—I haven't found students talking about these questions, and almost always I'm the first one to bring up that I've even _considered_ these questions (which evokes one of a few reactions: giggles, "don't say that!" or rarely, "yeah maybe I should think about that too") before meaningful discussion ensues.

This is not to say that there aren't many students who enjoy their PhDs: it seems highly variable. On the question of the usefulness of their jobs, I suspect many students would say that they feel they're contributing to knowledge, teaching others and helping advance health and medicine.

But for those students who don't feel so positive, I think it could be very helpful to open up spaces in which to discuss what to do in reaction to those feelings, to make this area of discussion and thinking non-taboo. For example, many students entering PhD are confronted with the decision of which boss and lab to work for in their thesis research. Each PhD program, older PhD student and postdoc will recommend criteria with which to make this decision. Commonly, I've heard "Make sure your PI [principal investigator, aka boss] and you get along," or "Look for a PI has your interests at heart." I agree that these are important criteria, depending on the definition of "your interests." I think these criteria would be greatly supplemented by "Look for a PI who gives you ample free time," "Look for a PI and lab that don't believe in 'work as an end and meaning in itself' (Graeber), e.g. a PI who won't be happy or sad with you depending on the number of analyses or experiments you run," or "Look for a PI who won't pressure you into working on a project whose usefulness you don't understand or believe, even if that means long spells of no visible production." I myself am unsure whether I can realistically find a PI matching these criteria, given that my university research environment feels very productivity-focused, but I think these criteria are at least worth acknowledging as things to aspire to.

Talking about leaving the PhD is even more taboo, although surprisingly, I've heard more talk about that than about tactics for increasing free time, either by shirking (which seems to be more commonly discussed and practiced in other industries) or by winning negotiating power with your boss by "providing value" to them. The latter is a major subject in multiple books, including Tim Ferriss's _4 Hour Workweek_, which enjoys popularity outside my university's academic bubble. (This again deepens my stereotype that we have a longer way to go on these issues in academia.)

I sometimes feel, inspired by Nassim Taleb, that a very good work setup for me would be either complete freedom (i.e. retired and pursuing my own projects) or sinecure-cum-freedom (i.e. having a job that disappears after I leave the office at 12pm each day, and complete freedom afterwards)[1][2]. Another good setup would be in an organization I really believed in (a combination of many factors) and could contribute to. At this point, these feel mostly compatible with my PhD, pending finding a compatible boss, but I haven't seriously imagined if life not in the PhD would be better for pursuing these.

Footnotes:

I've experienced complete freedom and I think that some balancing force of commitment, i.e. the sinecure-cum-freedom, might actually feel better. It's hard for me to pinpoint exactly why—perhaps some routinized social interaction or feelings of immediate usefulness to your co-workers.

What counts as a "very good work setup" probably depends a lot on the person, but at the same time, I do think many people look for similar things. I think control and freedom over one's time and one's self is a common value, and I think the work setups I mention above are trying to honor exactly that value.

[jageunyeoujari]

hello yaejin. i wanted to apologize for last night. i'm sorry i brought your mental health into an argument, and i'm sorry i invalidated your feelings. that was out of line, and i honestly fucked up. i saw a pattern ive seen before and i jumped to conclusions and it was inappropriate and cruel, especially while we were having an argument. i was dealing with a mental health crisis of a friend and i let it influence me and i wasn't good enough to walk away and say i couldn't talk rationally.

 (sorry, limit). my own situation doesn’t make it okay what i said, and i don’t want to imply it, i just wanted to let you know the context. i’m sorry again.

apologizing for what exactly. sorry for what exactly. you “brought up my mental health” as if it was just a little no-big-deal comment when you used my vulnerability in talking abt my recent mental health struggles as proof that i’m going insane & thus everything i say is illogical when i was talking abt racism in white ace/aro discourse. the ableism was literally a vehicle for you to derail a conversation about race so by copping to just the one, you’re not actually acknowledging the underlying issue framing it. this is such a vapid, spineless, fake apology that doesn’t acknowledge the underlying intent or impact of what that ableism did which was to derail my points abt RACISM & my experience as a lesbian woc who’s also ace. you’re just copping to the obvious thing that even some of the ppl in your clique might feel vaguely bad abt & ignoring everything else.

& you say you just “invalidated my feelings?” LET’S GO IN-DEPTH. first, you were openly hostile for even daring to question you. you brought up corrective rape as a gotcha bc you knew that was an explosive thing to drop & you could derail any objections i have to your ranting as invalidating survivors. & when i asked for proof for your claims of ace/aro oppression & them facing corrective rape, you said you didn’t want to look at triggering material when YOU were the one who dropped corrective rape in the first place w absolute no warning & w no thought if it would trigger ME (which it fucking did btw, thx.) it was curious to me that you used corrective rape as a gotcha for ace/aro oppression when it was created to describe the violence that black lesbians face in south africa. esp in light of how you seem to have this pattern of insinuating how lesbians are somehow so accepted by the lgbt community when we’re so uniquely bigoted & we never try to keep out terfs but don’t seem to take into account how ace/aros can can also be transphobic/terfs as well as homophobic & lesbophobic. that’s not a matter of a few “shitty” ppl. lgb ppl are also allowed to be wary of any non-same sex attracted person being homophobic as they necessarily benefit for not being same sex-attracted esp when have been oppressed for displaying any kind of sexual desire & deemed better if we are asexual. & it seems like you have a pattern of only calling out lesbians instead of like also gay/bi men which i find curious. maybe you do tho & i just haven’t seen. but lesbophobia in the lgbt community esp against lesbians of color is real so it’s just odd that for you to keep saying that we have a completely comfortable position in it. also you positing lesbianism & ace/aro identity as exclusive categories does play into the stereotype that lesbians are hypersexual which is esp damaging to lesbians of color. 

anyway, when i researched on my own & found no convincing evidence to support your claims, you threw a tantrum bc NO MY PERSONAL EXPERIENCES & FEELINGS OF BEING OPPRESSED = ULTIMATE TRUTH OF ACE/ARO OPPRESSION. your experiences are valid & all. you’re allowed to feel upset by them. but i fail to see being ace/aro constitutes institutional oppression.  in my search, i mainly saw claims of individual microaggressions and acts of verbal violence as evidence of oppression when those things by themselves don’t prove that there’s an explictly anti-ace/aro system of oppression. i can experience microaggressions for being asian & also not being into sex but those are entirely on different levels for me. i know instinctively that racism is an institutional oppression. i’m literally ace & microaggressions for that mean nothing to me in comparison. you feel differently abt it & you’re allowed but again, personal experience of microaggressions doesn’t prove institutional oppression. i also saw vague citings of a study of ppl apparently being more likely to say they’d discriminate against asexuals than lgbt ppl. the study seemed too flawed to me & doesn’t seem to take into account how ppl might know it’s bad to admit they’d discriminate against lgbt ppl but that doesn’t prove they’re not actually homophobic/transphobic. like liberal white ppl likely won’t admit that they’re racist bc they know that looks bad. doesn’t mean they’re not racist. as for corrective rape, i don’t remember finding anything that wasn’t abt violence against black lesbians & certainly not any that cites specifically anti-ace/aro motivations. i’m not saying it can never happen. but in comparison, it can be proven that cr is part of an explicit system of homophobia & misogyny against black lesbians in south africa but i didn’t see any for ace/aros. & i mean, i researched this while reading abt cr which is deeply upsetting to me as a lesbian so it’s not like this was easy for me. but i don’t rly think you have a leg to stand on in this instance bc you never provided any proof & didn’t say what your exacting reasoning on this is. it didn’t even have to be abt cr & i’m not saying you should disclose traumatic experiences, but just… say something to help me understand where you’re coming from. otherwise you look like you’re just expecting a woc to blindly accept & follow you.

& i have to bring up white ace/aro discourse elides how misogyny & patriarchy & racism & other -isms impact pressures to be sexual or asexual.  poc esp black ppl are stereotyped as either hypersexual or asexual. being seen as hypersexual is dehumanizing & can be traumatic & lead to real life serious consequences. i’m literally asexual but i empathize w non-asexual poc esp woc & the struggles they face & thus have no interest in white ace/aro rhetoric that posits being sexual as a universally normal, ideal, uncomplicated privilege & asexuals are oppressed by them. also being seen as asexual/actually being asexual can be so damaging & traumatic to poc which is why so many of us are alienated by white ace/aros who posit it as a universally positive thing to be proud of. white ace/aros also imply that they can somehow face oppression by like non-sexual poc which is concerning in light of the history of racist/colonialist ideas of backwards, hypersexual black & brown menaces & seductresses versus the purity & chastity of whiteness. controlling the sexuality of poc is a key part of white supremacy so there isn’t an obvious oppressor/oppressed dynamic here like men/women, white/poc. & considering how reproductive justice is constantly under fire & how there’s societal pressure for women to be effectively asexual until (hetero) marriage, it’s hard for me to think how non-asexual women not in hetero relationships actually… benefit from being non-asexual. there’s also different expectations abt being sexual for men, esp white men, than women & white ace/aro discourse tends to ignore that. sure, men are generally encouraged to be sexual & the shaming of asexual men likely sucks. but shaming doesn’t necessarily mean ace/aro oppression & seems more like to me a symptom of patriarchy/gender roles & heteronormativity.  so in my estimation, misogyny & patriarchy & racism as well as other systems of oppression like ableism, homophobia, transphobia, & classism better explain these differing expectations for being sexual or asexual rather than ace/aro vs non-ace/aros being an entirely separate dynamic. i literally couldn’t find any evidence for your claims & you got so upset at me for that but never tried giving me one piece of proof. yes, i know that oppressors demanding the oppressed to prove their oppression to them is a legitimate thing & the oppressed don’t need to feel obligated to educate them. i’ve experienced this frustration many times myself. but your behavior in this instance strikes me as white entitlement & again, a sign of you being frustrated that a woc isn’t blindly accepting you’re automatically right.

& when i started getting rly into the racism in white ace/aro discourse, you rly lost your shit. you dropped your abuse history & claimed i was invalidating you being abused for being ace when i literally never did. you straight up lied abt that. & also i know you know that i have experienced abuse & if you like bothered to think, you would take into account that i could be triggered by you dropping that out of nowhere, but instead you dropped it in an attempt to derail & get me to shut up. now this is when you suddenly rave abt how it’s obvious i’m on a bad mental health spiral & i’m believing in conspiracy theories & i’m paranoid, all a transparent attempt to make everything i said abt racism apparently wrong. w/o giving me a chance to reply, you promptly blocked like a coward. oh, also truly hilarious how you’re such a hypocrite for bringing up your friend’s mental health crisis as an excuse for your racialized misogyny when you literally used my mental illnesses to derail & attack me & dropped 2 instances of potentially triggering shit as gotchas & never took into account how this all could impact MY mental health. 

rose also sent me a long ass screed abt how i’m rigid & narrow-minded & crazy & paranoid & lied abt how i’m guilting her abt not being an activist which i explained multiple times i wasn’t. she blocked before i could respond. so not just you but your clique sure seem to love throwing tantrums abt how your feelings equal the ultimate truth & how dare some bitch try to think critically abt institutional oppression & process her thoughts on her private twitter & be, god forbid, socially conscious. who does that chink think she is, am i right? why isn’t she just a doormat & shut up? why is she making us UNCOMFORTABLE?!?!?!! like maybe ask yourselves why you take it so personally & you all don’t like it when i talk abt sj & activism. rly look inside yourself for why that is. 

& as soon as you’re all done with your ravings, which are full of lies & deliberate misinterpretations of what i said & massive projection & anti-intellectualism & manipulation & guilt-tripping, you all block so you don’t have to face the consequences or have to hear me out. that’s so fucking spineless & cowardly. & that’s so loaded since you all prevented me from saying anymore on racism. that’s just classic white fragility & a fear of outspoken, critical woc making you uncomfortable abt race. oh, also shout out to runa who acted “impartial” but did effectively the same thing as you. she acted concerned abt my mental health so she could convince me i’m crazy & get me to shut up abt institutional oppression & racism & instead focus on “fun things” (i.e. non-political, safe topics so she could feel comfortable). i feel esp disappointed in her bc that kind of wishy washy behavior is extremely irritating & patronizing & two-faced to me. i hated her acting like she was worried abt me when she was effectively doing the same thing as you, silencing me & making me feel crazy which means everything i say is wrong. 

really try to reflect why you all thought it was threatening when i tried to facilitate a productive dialogue, i did try to be level-headed & open-minded, emphasized that i just want to understand your pov, researched on my own for your claims, & processed my thoughts on institutional oppression & my experiences as a lesbian woc who’s also ace. i tried to open up a dialogue but you refused & threw a hissy fit bc i dared to not join your echo chamber & tried looking at actual data instead of just believing that you’re automatically right w no proof which is esp loaded in this situation bc you’re white. sjc also pulled this on me too so yes i am angry you also did the same. you all treated me in such bad fucking faith & pulled such fucking passive aggressive, manipulative, cowardly, idiotic bullshit.

god, you know what? your behavior in this indicated a huge sense of white entitlement & a problem w black & white thinking & accompanying self-righteousness. i try so hard to be nuanced & compassionate & flexible & see from your pov & i clearly stated i wanted a dialogue.. what did i get in return for it? not even the bare minimum. you treated me like fucking shit & never gave me even a tiny bit of effort or consideration. that’s racialized misogyny. how fucking dare you give me this fucking insipid half-assed fake apology. you didn’t even fucking try to think abt how you actually hurt me. all i’m getting here is you attempting to assuage a vague sense of guilt FOR YOUR OWN SAKE. not even attempting to think abt how i’m an actual real human being w my own emotions, thoughts, & will. how fucking selfish can you get. not the first fucking time white ppl wanted me just be a doormat, to be their submissive smiling oriental doll only there to validate their stupid, self-centered asses & not the first time their apology was abysmal. actually, you know what, i don’t even know why i even bothered writing all this fucking shit trying to explain myself & wasting my time on you again when you’ve never tried to do anything for me, not even make a fucking decent apology.

in conclusion, this was all v obviously steeped in racism & white entitlement/fragility all in an attempt to silence me bc how fucking dare some woc bring up social justice issues in a way that’s not catered to you. you’ve all shown your asses & clearly demonstrated ableism & racialized misogyny. i’m profoundly disappointed in all of you & you’ve all hurt me so much. i’m blocking you now bc you’ve proven yourself to be a lost cause. 

[7toked]

**WHY I’VE DISABLED THE COMMENTS SECTION AND WILL NOT BE USING THIS CHANEL FOR A WHILE**

I’ve Disabled the comment section of my most recent video for a variety of reasons, and will not be using this channel till December. Here’s a conversation I had with a very belligerent man which I believe illustrates why:

Holly Lemyre:  Hi everyone! The comment section of my videos are not going to be a space for hateful declarations and close-mindedness. If you have questions or concerns, and are excited to listen to alternate perspectives, you are MORE than welcome to discuss the issues… but if you’re out here making conclusive statements like “no first world country needs feminism”, or violently using language that does not belong to your community like the word “dyke”, or bashing on other people’s religion, you have been (and will from now on be) blocked.

The comments section is a privilege. I can turn it off completely if I want to, but I’d rather hold a space for debate. Please use “I statements”, and if you don’t have something constructive to say don’t say anything at all.

If this continues to be a problem I’ll just turn off the comments on this video :)

Ps. We’re clearly going to have to have our first lesson on Feminism because y’all are (collectively) severely  misinformed.  Read more REPLY

Comment From Adam ???: 3 hours ago Holly Lemyre If you are all for debates, why do you insist on blocking others when they bring up good points and evidence to back it up? Are you advocating for echo chambers? REPLY

Holly Lemyre: 3 hours ago Adam ??? There is a massive difference between  “healthy debates” and the epistemic violence that is being reproduced by viewers on my channel. Nothing I’ve deleted has been based in fact, or grounded by “good points”. And I’m sorry, but I will not fall into the “tolerance of all ideas requires tolerance of violent ideas” paradox.

Honestly, running this channel and receiving ya’lls comments is fucking exhausting. I thought I could run a short series about rape culture, and after receiving people’s questions and concerns realized that for ANYONE on this channel to understand the systems of power, privilege, and oppression that support the structure of rape culture the series I’d be making would have to be dozens of videos long. It’s just too much.

In my real life I’m an activist and an academic, working in several classes and organizations that deal with issues of violence (including rape culture). My two majors (and currently 9 classes) are focused on topics of race, class, and gender in politics and social movements. I am not a leftist. I am not a liberal. But for me, the topic of “rape culture” isn’t a debate— it’s an active reality that I am trying to combat by joining forces with others who are deconstructing systems of power (racism, sexism, classism, etc) that allow it to exist in the first place.

MY POINT IS that until I finish my degrees in December this channel is the least of my concern. All I’ve had time for is policing the extremely violent content that I couldn’t tolerate. I am too busy to have a debate about sometime I do not consider to be debatable.

If anyone wants to talk about how we deconstruct systems of power that allow violence against women to be a leading issue in this country, or are actually ready to learn about sometime they previously thought was a “myth”, great. We can talk in December. Read more REPLY

Adam ???: 2 hours ago (edited) Holly Lemyre If you’re busy with schoolwork, I’d rather not bother you, but understand that you’ve made a lot of baseless claims with your video in question and your comment.

Nobody here, as far as I saw, was directing violence toward you. You sound a little defensive. You’ve blocked the other account for absolutely no reason at all.

Women in the developed world are cared for and are cherished members of our society. They have access to abuse shelters, receive the benefits from a divorce, they serve easier prison sentences than men for the same crime, they don’t have to serve in a war draft, and female genital mutilation is illegal.

I’ve seen your other videos of you on stage, and I’m very confused about this supposed rape culture. How can it possibly exist in the 1st world?  Convicted rapists go to prison and are looked down upon in society, even getting attacked in prison by other inmates. Even making a small rape joke is enough to get a man fired from his job. Why are you generalizing an entire society based upon the sections of a few horrible individuals? Read more REPLY

Holly Lemyre: 1 hour ago Adam ??? I’m so sorry, but there’s a big difference between “baseless claims” and not citing my sources. This video did not aim to give direct examples and description, it was an announcement about the information that was to come. And now, after realizing the level of information that I would have to disseminate, I do not have time to do so until the circumstances of my life are different.

Additionally, I need to make it very clear that I am not claiming people are directing violence at me. I’m saying that people were sharing violent ideologies that I will not host on my channel. If you care to know more about rape culture RIGHT THIS SECOND, or wish to educate yourself on the systems of oppression and levels of violence that make it possible, go look it up. I am not the only person promoting these ideas, and it’s not my job to give you facts on demand. But just to prove my point..

In 2016, U.S. Department of Justice reports that 17,700,000 women have been raped in the United States since 1998. 1 in 5 women experience attempted rape. Women are 2X as likely to be raped than they are to get breast cancer, and nearly 13% of women in the U.S. get breast cancer…

Women in the military are 4x more likely to be raped than a civilian. 3% of male civilians have been raped, but 1 in 7 people in the military (a majority male institution) have experienced rape or sexual assault. Women with disabilities are 2X more likely to be raped than able bodied people. 64% of trans folx experience rape or sexual assault in their life time.

The great majority of rape cases go unreported, and only 2-10% of rape accusations are false. Almost none of those have ever lead to conviction. The U.S. justice department also reports that 99% of the perpetrators of reported rapes walk free, and 89% never face criminal charges.

These are statistics from the United States Government in 2016. These are the bases of my claims. This is rape culture. Read more REPLY

Adam ???: 53 minutes ago Holly Lemyre If i were to present you various sources and videos from women, would you be willing to look into the matter? REPLY

Adam ??? 47 minutes ago Holly Lemyre I would like citations for these claims. And furthermore, why are supposed rape from twenty years ago evidence that we live in a rape culture today? That’s like saying Europe is still under threat from Adolf Hitler. Also no one here is presenting anything violent toward you. You’d have to posses a victim complex to see that. And technically men experience rape more, it’s just that society doesn’t care. It was feminists that protested and eventually shut down a potential home for abused men.

If we live in a rape culture, exactly how does modern society advocate these actions? They don’t, that’s why we aren’t living in a rape culture. You’re thinking of the Congo Republic in Africa. Read more REPLY

Holly Lemyre 45 minutes ago Adam ??? You don’t seem to understand, I’ve already looked into the matter. I’ve spent the last 5 years of my life studying this issue (and others) from multiple angles, and this is the conclusion I’ve come to. Furthermore, the fact that you can look at those statistics and still not see the systemic issue of rape in this country shows me that you are part of the problem. You are more willing to convince yourself of false realities by grasping at the exceptions instead of doing the work it takes to confront the issue we have in this country: violence against women and female identified folx is a huge problem.

THIS is the reason I can’t run this channel anymore. I did not open this forum to debate rape culture, I opened this a space to share ideas that can help us better understand what rape culture looks like so that we can fight it.

But THIS, this right here, the conversation WE ARE HAVING is a perfect example of rape culture: you are being presented with facts from THE US GOVERNMENT that says roughly 20% of our society experiences rape with almost nobody being convicted, and STILL want to deny that rape is an overwhelming issue in this nation based on your notion that we’re “first world”. That level of crazy denial is what MAKES RAPE CULTURE POSSIBLE.

I think I’ll just disable the comments on these videos until I want to use this channel again because y’all are too much. Read more REPLY

Adam ??? 39 minutes ago Holly Lemyre How do you know that most rapes go unreported if they were never reported?

Where are you getting the citation that 2% of rapes are false?

If these women were raped, why didn’t they report it to the police?

Have you any idea how easy it is for a woman to lie and get her spouse arrested and imprisoned for a crime they did not commit? It’s happening more and more often, and these women often face  only a few months in prison, meanwhile the accused men resort to suicide after having their reputations tarnished, sometimes even their mothers. Give me a break already.  You are fighting an imaginary war. Read more REPLY

Adam ??? 32 minutes ago Holly Lemyre You can spend a million years convincing me that the moon is made of cheese, it won’t make it so. You haven’t substantiated any of your claims, nor have you provided any links whatsoever. People like you reduce that meaning and actions of rape into nothing by constantly banging on about it. How am I a part of a non existent issue when I’ve brought into attention countless times that rape is taken very seriously in the United States? You spread cliche feminist myths that even women are starting to debunk. You constantly see yourself as the victim and anybody else who dare think different is automatically the problem. You are a perfect example of how far feminism has fallen since its inception. What, you think you can just share your beliefs online, publicly, and not expect any disagreements? I’ve spoken to you in a respectful manner, and now you’re resorting to acting like a child that didn’t get their way.

I thought you were different, Holly. I thought you had some decency.

Don’t even bother speaking to me again. Go back to Tumblr and continue punching at shadows. Show less REPLY

—End of Conversation–

I just want to highlight the fact that I did cite my source (A United States Justice Department Report on Sexual Assault, Published in 2016).

I’m not going to take the time to pick apart “Adam’s” final reply, because I don’t have the time or energy for it. But this type of denial and dilution is not what I signed up for when I reopen my channel.

Additionally, everything I’ve said within that conversation stands true: I was not here to debate, I was here to inform open minds. And while I always encourage healthy dialogue, there’s no hope in convincing someone that US Government stats are equivalent to claims that the “moon is made of cheese”.

Instead of focusing on this channel, as much as I would have liked to,I’m going to focus on organizing with people in the real world and getting through the last semester of my Bachelors degrees.

Oh, and Adam, you don’t need to worry– I will not talk to you again. In fact, you were the only person trying to have this conversation in the first place. But you know that, and I trust that I don’t have to post all the other pathetic comments you tried to bait me with. Xo

[womenofcolor15]

VIDEO: Malik Yoba Throws F-Bomb Laced Fit & Storms Out Of Interview After Being Asked About Accusations Of Sex With Underaged Trans Women

Malik Yoba lost his whole sh-- during an interview with a media outlet Wednesday while he was on his "I'm a cis man who am trans attracted" tour.  Now, the very group he's been claiming to be standing up for over the last several weeks is questioning whether his motives and education are valid.  Video of his f-bomb laced tirade inside.

  Malik Yoba was finally confronted about those allegations from multiple trans women that he solicited sex from them and others while they were underaged.  We shared earlier this month about the stories Mariah Lopez had about having sex with him allegedly while she was underaged.  She was a sex worker.

For whatever reason, media outlets haven't really brought these allegations up to him, despite the fact many in the trans community have spoken out about how the timing of him being so vocally pro-trans is quite, interesting.  He started speaking out around the same time that the allegations were made, so folks wonder if this was his way of diverting attention or protecting his image. 

So when Malik made his way to The Root the week to discuss his participation in Thursday's upcoming Trans National Visibility March, one journalist, Terrell Starr, questioned him about it.  And ish went VERY left.

  I asked Malik Yoba about concerns that his motives to support trans causes were seen as insincere & allegations he solicited sex from a minor performing survival sex work. He stormed off the set cursing and throwing our equipment to the floor. FULL VIDEO: https://t.co/2e0zPa9Sv1

— Terrell J. Starr (@Russian_Starr) September 25, 2019

Mariah Lopez,34, says Yoba paid her for sex when she was 13 and 16 while performing survival sex work. A trans woman, Ja'nese Bussey, collaborated Lopez's claims to me in an interview. Bussey, also told me Yoba asked her to find him "young girls" for sex. https://t.co/2e0zPa9Sv1

— Terrell J. Starr (@Russian_Starr) September 25, 2019

During the interview, Yoba also made troubling statements in which he compared harsh reactions to his IG post with the plight of trans women. pic.twitter.com/3UHvpzYMjF

— Terrell J. Starr (@Russian_Starr) September 25, 2019

The Root explained the fury Malik unleashed after he was pressed about the allegations:

  Yoba [7:34]: I say that, you know, when I heard that, and I actually didn’t read it until last Thursday, what she actually said, I don’t know the woman, number one…

The Root [7:44]: So, you’re saying you never met her, you don’t know her?

Yoba [7:47]: That’s exactly what I am saying. I don’t know her. I have no idea who she is. I am familiar with that pain, I’m familiar with that trauma. I’m familiar with people who are crying out for help. I’m familiar with the lack of regard for this population, which is, again, my point. So, when I heard it, for me, to hear something so heinous, right, number one, and to see someone post something with no proof of anything and to see the world embrace it, or a portion of the world embrace it, that toxicity, speaks exactly to the reason I do the work that I do.

So, it’s an oxymoron almost. It’s like wow, the first cis-gender man who stands up for the community and gets attacked by that community. But that’s true for anybody that’s ever stood up for oppressed people. It’s happened to Gandhi. It’s happened to Mandela. It’s happened to Marcus Garvey. It’s happened to Malcolm X. It’s happened to anyone who has said, ‘I am gonna stand up for these oppressed people.’ Think about who we are, right? There was a time we couldn’t drink from water fountains, we couldn’t sit on the bus. Think about how ridiculous that is. And so, for me, having a view of a community that I grew up with and seeing the suffering. The very thing that motivates me to help people out of it is something someone tried to accuse me of…

When The Root tried to interject, Yoba interrupted.

Yoba [9:11]: I wanna finish the point. So, the point is to be on the other side of that tells me that the work has to continue and the blessing will be greater because the truth will always outweigh a lie. Right? So the truth is people are suffering. The truth is there are kids in the street. Right? But the other truth is for my entire life, I am someone who has been working with young people since I was 16 years old, making sure that there are better pathways for other people, so, that’s a very loaded question for you to ask me that and we discussed that before.

  Malik then started talking about his bullet wound he got on the streets of NYC and also how he could put himself in LGBT members' shoes because the "New York Undercover" actor had to go undercover as part of the community years ago....on TV.

When the interviewer wouldn't let Malik gloss over the accusations, ish got real.  He yelled F-bomb laced profanity, knocked over their equipment, and demanded the footage be given to him, then stormed out.

Yoba walked away from his chair, threw his microphone to the floor, yelled “fuck you” to this reporter and the production team and demanded that he be given the SD video cards that recorded the interview, which The Root’s producers refused to do.

Witnesses to Yoba’s profanity-laced meltdown were two video producers for The Root, two people representing Yoba, his 18-year-old daughter, and The Root’s senior video producer. Yoba’s publicists and The Root’s video producers tried to calm him down, but Yoba continued cursing until he finally left the studio.

Chile.  You can watch below:

Folks have been commenting about whether Malik was right to lash out:

Hmph.

The Root reports that Malik's appearance at the upcoming Trans National Visibility March isn't being praised by everyone:

Trans activists have expressed concerns to The Root that Yoba has not demonstrated adequate knowledge to speak on behalf of trans issues and that his public statements are designed to elevate himself at trans people’s expense.

Sheesh.  

  Photo: lev radin/Shutterstock.com

[Read More ...] source http://theybf.com/2019/09/26/malik-yoba-throws-f-bomb-laced-fit-storms-out-of-interview-after-being-asked-about-accusa

[roidespd-blog]

Chapter Twenty-Nine : THE HISTORY OF PRIDE

As we celebrate all Queer individuals with the “Marche des Fiertés” (yeurk, I hate that name) today in Paris, I want to take a look back at the History of Pride, its worldwide impact and finally, FINALLY retire the adage “The First Pride was a RIOT”. No, it wasn’t. Quit it.

This article is a direct follow-up to the events of the Previous article about the Stonewall Riots. If you haven’t read it, now is the time. I’m waiting. Still waiting. Take your time, it’s quite long. … We good ? Kay Kay.

FIRST PRIDE(S)

Actually, the first pride were multiple Prides, in two consecutive days and Four different American cities. The first in line was the Chicago Gay Liberation on Saturday June 27, 1970. A year after the Stonewall Riots almost to the day. For those who know their Chicago streets, it was organized as a march starting from Washington Square Park to the Water Tower at the intersection of Michigan and Chicago avenues — I don’t know Chicago. Interestingly enough, the participants did not follow the originally planned route and spontaneously marched on to the Civic Center Plaza. The next day, first anniversary of the Riots, Los Angeles, San Francisco and New-York marched (well, San Francisco organized a “Gay-In”).

In L.A., a Parade was put together down Hollywood Boulevard. To counter the hate still targeting the Queer community, Queer activists in charge of this Pride named their organization “Christopher Street West”, as a way to not put too much attention on themselves while asking for permits. A chief of Police from L.A. once told one of the organizers “As fair as I’m concerned, granting a permit to a group of homosexuals to parade down Hollywood Boulevard would be the same as giving a permit to a group of thieves and robbers”. Battles ensued, fees were so high it became outrageous and a last minute court decision ordered the Police to do their jobs and go protect people’s “constitutional guarantee of freedom of expression”. In other words, suck it. Despite death threats, over a thousand people participated to the L.A. Parade.

But the first official Pride was held that same day in New York City. If you recall, we left Craig Rodwell with a desire to keep the momentum going and do something big for the Community. It came in the form of a Parade. On November 2, 1969, Rodwell and and three close friends proposed to held the first parade in NYC at a Philadelphia meeting of the Eastern Regional Conference of Homophile Organizations (ERCHO). Except for the Mattachine Society (which abstained), the vote was unanimous and prompted the organizations to held others (previously mentioned) marches all across the country. On Rodwell’s corner was the newly-formed Gay Liberation Front (GLF). It took close to six months to organize the first Pride. Finances through donations (from either the Homophile groups or the citizens) were difficult to come by. Originally intended for a Saturday, it was postponed to Sunday as to give more opportunities for people to show up. Luckily for the march, Mattachine changed leadership in April 1970, giving the organized event less opposition.

The permit for the march was delivered only two hours before the beginning of the event.

The march covered the 51 blocks to Central Park. It took less than half the time due excitement and was a mix of respect and fun. People were also in a hurry to walk because of their fear of rejections due to them holding signs and gay banners. Fortunately, the participants encountered little resistance from onlookers. The New York Times coverage said “There was little open animosity, and some bystanders applauded when a tall, pretty girl carrying a sign “I am a Lesbian” walked by”.

AND THE YEAR AFTER THAT, AND THE YEAR AFTER THAT, AND THE ONE AFTER THAT.

In 1971, marches were organized in Boston, Dallas, Milwaukee, London, Paris, West Berlin and Stockholm, while still being organized in New York City, Los Angeles and Chicago. The following year, Atlanta, Brighton, Buffalo, Detroit, Washington D.C., Miami, Philadelphia and San Francisco (not a “Gay-In” anymore) joined in. They adopted different names over the years, from “Gay Liberation Marches” to “Gay Freedom Marches”.

As of Today, marches are organized (in one form or another) in Africa, South Africa, Uganda, China, India, Israel, Japan, Korea, Nepal, the Philippines, Taiwan, Vietnam, in Canada, Puerto Rico, Mexico, Australia, New Zealand, Argentina, Guyana, Barbados, The Trinidad and all over Europe.

While the 70s’ Prides were mostly about activism and had a rooted ideology to critique the space producing heteronormative norms by bringing homosexual behavior into it, the 80s gave us a cultural shift in the gay movement. Activists of a less radical nature began talking over the march committees all over the cities, replacing the “Liberation” and “Freedom” with “Pride” (while still keeping the “Gay” part, although it wasn’t ALL ABOUT THE GAYS).

With the arrival of the word “Pride” onto the scene came bigger notions of celebration. Large parades involve now floats, dancers, drag queens and amplified music. It attracts larger and larger crowds and is being taking over by governments and corporate sponsors and being used as major tourist attractions for hosting cities. Which is disgusting but more on that later.

With the HIV/AIDS epidemics of the 80s, many of the pioneers of the Stonewall Riots and the first Pride were no longer there to keep the memories of those events alive. Things that were supposed to endure, disappeared and the sense of “annual relief” from the participants became more present year after year. The one good thing that (recently) came with time is the name change. The language became more accurate and inclusive, as GAY is not EVERYTHING. It became Lesbian and Gay, then LGBT, and now the event is simply known (to the organizers) as “Pride” (I would argue for Queer Pride but that’s just my preference).

Today, Pride is not just ONE DAY. It’s an entire month, chosen to commemorate the Stonewall Riots. We can thank Bisexual activist Brenda Howard aka “The Mother of Pride” for that. She was the organizer of the first Pride in NYC, then she originated the idea for a week-long series of events around Pride Day which became a worldwide June celebration of our identities. Activist Tom Limoncelli later stated “The next time someone asks you why LGBT Pride marches exist or why LGBT Pride Month is June tell them “a Bisexual woman named Brenda Howard thought it should be””.

99 PROBLEMS (BUT A DANCE PARTY AIN’T ONE ?)

I often compare Pride with Almodovar’s movies. I liked it better when it was a ugly and messy than now, full of colors and boring as shit. For that’s not entirely fair. Political and social events in the country determines the level of political and social consciousness present in each Pride. In France, we pretend like everything’s okay. So the Pride becomes more of a dance party than a political event. Uh. So be it.

France’s first “Pride” was held in 1971. Well, actually no. Queer participants took the opportunity of the May 1st celebration to march alongside the usual syndicates and unions. That year, FHAR was created, replaced in 1974 by GLH. We can talk about a shy start for the Queer community in France since they took part of the march until 1978. But on June 25th 1977, the first independent Pride started from Place de la République to la Place des Fêtes, thanks mostly to the help of the MLF (Mouvement de Libération des Femmes). The next two years would see the same number of attendees (around a thousand) and would concentrate of the anti-homosexual discriminations laws still effective in the country. On the election year of 1981, 10,000 people showed up, prompting François Mitterand to declare soon after his win that those laws would disappear (and they did).

Shit got stinky started in 1986 when the CHLOEG (Comité Homosexuel et lesbien pour l’Organisation des Etats Généraux de l’Homosexualité)passed the baton on the organization of the pride, leaving space for exterior forces (business men) to take over. But I would also point out that the AIDS crisis was also an important fact in the transformation of the Pride, allowing difficult day-to-day lives to let go of their problems just for one day.

People lost interest and by 1991, only 1.500 marchers took to the streets. The “Gay Pride” Collective was created. They went to the press and to the AIDS associations and asked for unison against the disease so that by 1993, as many people were together as in 1981. The year after that, Prides were getting organized all around the country. The collective successfully found equilibrium between the politically active queers fighting for survival and the younger generation who wanted to have some fun.

In 1997, France hosted the Europride, leading to 300.000 people walking alongside one another. That’s good. And for the first time ever, businesses sponsored the event (SNCF, RATP, Virgin Cola, Kronenbourg, Yves Saint Laurent…). No so good. As of today, the collective Inter-LGBT is responsible for the annual event that usually ends up with around 800.000 participants.

I didn’t go to Pride this year, or the years prior due to me being employed all day on Saturdays. But I’m pretty sure that the Political is up front and the Fun part (most of the rest) is behind. Or something like that. That’s fine. No everybody needs to be politically-active but there’s not enough people to truly care about the urgency of some situations. For example, this year was probably all about the PMA. Great ! It’s urgent. But are we not concerned about the Trans community ? What about the Bi-Invisibility syndrome ? The Intersex right to not get butchered ? Last time I was there, I got stuck behind a very loud Electro Dance Party that was not fighting for anything but the right to be seen. It was by Gay Men for Gay Men. enough, Gay Men ! We see you. How can we not ? You’re loud and you are Men (and mostly White).

I’m personally very sick of Pride. I wish I could be more into it but it disappointed me year after year. Last year, I heard of a thing called “Pride de Nuit”. I can’t remember if it was the night before and the night after Pride but it was sold as a event entirely political, with the little march then a get together in which multiple politically motivated speeches would be heard. I was so in. I stayed 20 minutes. Why ? I was marching with two other gay people and the crowd started yelling in unison “Straight People suck ! Straight People suck !”. Are we Heterophobic now ? We got out and went drinking by the Seine.

Every time I see people just having fun with music and drugs (so much drugs) at Pride, I can’t help but remember the 1973 speech that Sylvia Rivera made at New York City. Find it, it’s on Youtube and it’s heartbreaking.

Here’s the transcript :

Sylvia Rivera: I may be —

Crowd: [booing]

Sylvia Rivera: Y’all better quiet down. I’ve been trying to get up here all day for your gay brothers and your gay sisters in jail that write me every motherfucking week and ask for your help and you all don’t do a goddamn thing for them.

Have you ever been beaten up and raped and jailed? Now think about it. They’ve been beaten up and raped after they’ve had to spend much of their money in jail to get their hormones, and try to get their sex changes. The women have tried to fight for their sex changes or to become women. On the women’s liberation and they write ‘STAR,’ not to the women’s groups, they do not write women, they do not write men, they write ‘STAR’ because we’re trying to do something for them.

I have been to jail. I have been raped. And beaten. Many times! By men, heterosexual men that do not belong in the homosexual shelter. But, do you do anything for me? No. You tell me to go and hide my tail between my legs. I will not put up with this shit. I have been beaten. I have had my nose broken. I have been thrown in jail. I have lost my job. I have lost my apartment for gay liberation and you all treat me this way? What the fuck’s wrong with you all? Think about that!

I do not believe in a revolution, but you all do. I believe in the gay power. I believe in us getting our rights, or else I would not be out there fighting for our rights. That’s all I wanted to say to you people. If you all want to know about the people in jail and do not forget Bambi L’amour, and Dora Mark, Kenny Metzner, and other gay people in jail, come and see the people at Star House on Twelfth Street on 640 East Twelfth Street between B and C apartment 14.

The people are trying to do something for all of us, and not men and women that belong to a white middle class white club. And that’s what you all belong to!

REVOLUTION NOW! Gimme a ‘G’! Gimme an ‘A’! Gimme a ‘Y’! Gimme a ‘P’! Gimme an ‘O’! Gimme a ‘W’! Gimme an ‘E! Gimme an ‘R’! [crying] Gay power! Louder! GAY POWER

For context, Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson were banned from the Pride and the speech list of that year for making other gay activists “look bad”. It was a time where the organizers didn’t want to be represented by Transgender folks and People of Color, and to satisfy a larger number of white gay middle-class folks attending the event and tired of politically-motivated speeches.

I believe that in 2019, we are living exactly the same situation. We’ve put the “weird” looking — scary different people under the rug and while we allow them to be with us, we don’t give them the platform they deserve. 46 years later, we are still silencing our people. Black causes, Intersex questions, Transgender rights. We only care about the things that heterosexual societies reject the most at the moment : yesterday was the Mariage pour Tous. Today’s it’s the PMA. One battle at a time while the rest of us stay behind ? Fuck no.

Anyway, I wish everyone a Happy Pride. I wish I could have wished it sooner but I got sick on Friday and wasn’t able to finish this article on time. There’s one more article due tomorrow or in a couple of days, depending on how I’m feeling. Until then.

“Hell hath no fury like a drag queen scorned” — Sylvia Rivera, 1995.

.

[wellesleyunderground]

#FollowFriday: The Badass Women of Identity Politics

The Women of Identity Politics: Ikhlas Saleem ‘11 and Makkah Ali ‘10

In case you haven’t heard, Identity Politics, the brainchild of Ikhlas Saleem ‘11 and Makkah Ali '10, is a podcast on race, gender, and Muslims in America—and it’s just what the doctor ordered.

May Sifuentes ‘09, a Wellesley Underground editor, had the chance to talk to this #blackgirlmagic duo about their podcast and why you should tune in. Read their interview below, and better yet, share it with the world.

You can find them on Facebook, Twitter, and online. You can also subscribe to their podcast on iTunes, Soundcloud, Acast, and Stitcher. E-mail them with questions and ideas at identitypoliticspodcast@gmail.com.

May: Thank you so much for meeting with us! I was listening this morning, I’m so excited that you started this project. I want to hear more about Identity Politics—what the series is, how did you start it, why did you start it, and also, what does it mean to have a podcast that is named very similarly to, perhaps, one of the most controversial terms of the last election?

Ikhlas: Back in 2010 I started my blog Haya wa Iman, which literally translates to ‘Modesty and Faith’. I was inspired after going to a conference with Makkah called ‘Pearls of the Quran’ in DC and one of the speakers talked about the notion of modesty and faith. Typically you see Muslim women in the media and it’s always about what they are wearing, when we talk about and care about so much more than that. I wanted to spin that into a spiritual reflection of what it means to be Muslim in America today.

For a year and a half I blogged on that topic and had been talking about starting a podcast because I wanted to reach more people. I wanted to be able to share more stories and experiences from within the Muslim community. My husband put a date on the calendar for January 7, 2016 and said “this is the day you are going to release your first episode.” It actually happened on January 9, but that was the push I needed. After the first few episodes, I asked Makkah to join as a co-host and the rest was history.

Makkah: To add on to that origin story, Ikhlas went to Harvard Divinity School and got her Master’s in Theological Studies. I remember visiting her in Boston years ago and talking about how there weren’t adequate discussions happening publicly about life at the intersections of different topics. You can study and discuss classical Islamic texts or you can discuss contemporary gender studies or you can focus on critical race theory. We were frustrated that it was hard to find folks looking at these topics from multiple lenses, even though we live our lives that way. I don’t wake up one day and live just as a woman with all of my experiences happening purely from a woman’s lense, and then wake up the next day as a black person or a Muslim and experience life from those perspectives, one at a time. 

Even outside of academia, we were seeing people speak about “Muslim issues” with flat portrayals of our community that didn’t reflect our rich diversity. Muslims are not a monolith. So having a Muslim expert on the news or a Muslim character on a TV show isn’t enough unless there’s an explicit recognition that the way they understand and experience their Muslimness is also influenced by their race, nationality, gender, language, and so much more. We are more complicated than any one checkbox that we are told to check. These conversations are ones we are having with our friends. It’s like a Tower Dining Hall brunch conversation, brought to your headphones. I’m super grateful that Ikhlas launched this platform and feel very fortunate to be part of it.

May: So what are those conversations that you are having with your friends, your communities, and with your families that you want to infuse all over Identity Politics as a podcast?

Makkah: For example, both of us are the daughters of converts to Islam. For Ikhlas’ first episode, she interviewed her mom; in a later episode about Muslims in love, I interviewed my parents about their love story. Ikhlas and I always talk about how when we were in our early 20s, we don’t think we would have been down for a major life change like choosing a new religion. This is also a conversation I have with my friends who are children of immigrants, whose parents moved to new countries when they were our age. We like learning about what motivated those choices and how different identities influenced the way they experienced these changes—whether it was coming from another country to America as a woman, or converting to Islam from Christianity as a Black American.

We also did an episode about race with some of our white friends. I talk to my white friends all the time about feminism, spirituality, and race. But more often than not, you just see people of color talking about race and white people listening. While it’s important to let people of color narrate their own lives, I also recognize that if we exclude white people from conversations about race, they will continue to just sit in their privilege and never have to assess their own problematic cultural baggage in the ways that POC are often called to do.

We aren’t just two black women talking about race to other black people. We talk to descendents of slaves and African immigrants and Asian Americans and Arab Americans and white Americans because we know that being Muslim is not a single race, practice, or culture. Being Muslim is a spiritual and religious identification and American Muslims are the most diverse Muslim community in the world. We talk to American Muslims of all backgrounds about real issues to give a fuller, deeper, broader picture of what it really means to be Muslim in this country.

May: I think that all of us Wellesley Women who are not white are having similar conversations. As an immigrant to this country, as a Latina, I’ve been trying to see how to get Wellesley Women who may be activists and allies and white to take action—what is the next level for folks that we went to school with and that are our friends? In the era of Trump, it is now very important for them to step it up. For you, what are some of the most interesting outcomes from the many conversations you’ve had with your friends and what do you want to happen with those allies?

Ikhlas: This is something that I thought about early on when starting the podcast. Of course I had a target audience, and we still do, where our primary audience is black Muslim women. But we also try to make the podcast accessible to any group.

One of the earliest pieces of feedback I received was from a white woman who wasn’t Muslim. She listened to the podcast and she said “I had to stop listening because I felt that this was a conversation that I shouldn’t be hearing, that I shouldn’t be a part of.” I thought that was such interesting feedback and I understood where she was coming from. We should be talking about these things within every community—how are we navigating race, how are we navigating gender, how is that influencing how we relate to each other? Even if you aren’t Muslim, you aren’t black, you aren’t South Asian, you aren’t Arab, these conversations translate into our lives in America, into our world. Where do we draw from when we are thinking about “how am I going to treat this black person walking into the store?” Where are those things coming from, and how can we work to improve that?

Our audience has widened over time. We do have a lot of Wellesley Women that are white and love our podcast and listen to every episode. It’s meaningful because they are sharing these episodes with their networks and we are just getting a greater understanding of who we are and how we relate to each other.

May: In this particular space, you are filing a void. You are sharing some stories that are not being shared. So as young women, as Americans, what does it mean to be young, black, and Muslim in the United States to you? Life pre-November is very different that it is now and what it’s going to be. You have so much to share with us.

Makkah: What does it mean to be young, black, and Muslim in America? It is to be on constant alert. I don’t have the luxury of not paying attention to what is happening around me in the world, whether it’s through conversations about race, about police brutality, about sexual assault, about student loan debt, about terrorism. I have to know a lot more about what’s happening because it’s so closely tied to who I am. It’s a burden but also a blessing because, again, this podcast is about understanding that we live our lives as full, complex beings, not just as one thing. So I feel like my experience right now is a complete manifestation of that complexity, of really understanding that the world is grappling with a lot of complicated topics right now and that each thing is not happening in a vacuum. What is happening with Islamophobia in this country is tied to what has happened with black movements in the past, it’s tied to feminism, white supremacy, immigration, it’s tied to many things that I know about from different contexts. It’s been very interesting, particularly being black and Muslim, talking to Muslims who are not black. We’ve found that many of aren’t as familiar with the history of surveillance of black communities in this country, for example. Or even the history of the surveillance of Black Muslims in this country. So the surveillance of their Muslim communities came as kind of a surprise.

I think it’s been a real privilege and blessing, in some ways, to be able to pull from different contexts and different historical backgrounds and talk to people who may be at different cultural intersections about how their understanding compares to ours. Ikhlas, does that make sense?

Ikhlas: That totally makes sense! I’m still thinking about how earlier, May you mentioned that life is very different post-November. And if you listened to our Life After the Election episode you kind of know that I’m a little pessimistic about politics, so life for me kind of still feels the same under Trump. I feel like a lot of my life—being young, black, and Muslim—you are pretty much ignored and not seen as legitimate outside of black American Muslim circles. So, just having those encounters where you constantly have to -- and I don’t do this anymore-- but where you have to prove that you belong, prove that your identity as a black person matters, and you have to constantly remind other Muslims that black lives matter and this should be a concern for the Muslim community. I think we are improving upon that as a “Muslim community,” which is exciting.

I’m excited because black people and people of color in general—I’m seeing the height of our creativity right now. Digital platforms have allowed our voices to be heard, our work to be heard. Whenever I go on Facebook and I see that a friend has this new art piece out, it’s very exciting. People of color are still living under terrible conditions, but we have this young force that is pushing back on that and forcing everyone to take steps towards improving conditions for everyone. To even have you asking us about this podcast is exciting because I really did think that only a small circle of people would be attracted to this.

May: It’s kind of incredible, isn’t it, how even just the three of us seem to be so different. We have different lived experiences. But as you are talking and as you are sharing your own experiences I am remembering feeling those feelings-- in different circumstances, of course-- but feeling them nonetheless. And it’s kind of incredible how we’ve walked different paths but at the same time we do have shared experiences, shared feelings. It’s awesome. Thank you for being here and sharing.

What’s the final pitch for those folks reading the interview—Why should people listen to Identity Politics? What should they expect in the next few months?

Ikhlas: Wow, you really come with the big questions, eh? I think a big thing about Identity Politics is just learning to value human life and, this is a big statement, how to learn to take people for who they are, you know? Recognizing and embracing all of their identities—as a Muslim person, as a black person, as a woman—and factoring in all of these things when we are learning how to be in relationships with one another. I think that’s one of the big things, when people listen to Identity Politics I would hope that they would listen and not just listen for the laughs, but that they take these learnings and implement them in their daily lives so we can be in better relationships with one another. This is my lofty goal for the podcast: that we learn to value one another and treat people with the respect and dignity that they deserve.

Makkah: You know, we got kind of lucky with the name “Identity Politics.” We decided on this name last summer and then it became a huge media catchphrase. So props to us, I guess, for having the foresight and understanding that this was going to be an important concept!

On a serious note, with the name Identity Politics, we are intentionally referencing this idea that who we are— our social groups, our racial, cultural groups— who we are can influence our politics and our decisions. And that’s a controversial concept and people are now trying to figure out whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing. But we chose this name because although we know that one’s identity can influence their behavior, we also know that people have multiple identities. So the question then becomes, how are we negotiating which parts of our identities influence which decisions?

Through this podcast we just want to bring people of different backgrounds together to discuss which parts of who they are, on any given day, are impacting their perspectives on various topics and their lives as Muslims in America. There are many other awesome podcasts hosted by Muslims, but there are none dedicated to covering the intersections between Muslims and the many other communities that we are part of in this country. That’s what we’re adding to this space — we want to unpack what it actually means to be Muslim to different people in America.

Ikhlas and I want to break through this two-dimensional portrayal of Muslims as model minorities that you should respect because we’re your veterans and engineers and doctors. No! We are also your cab drivers, your security guards, we run your gas stations, we’re incarcerated, we succeed, we fail, and we do everything in between. We are human and that is why you should respect our humanity. But if people don’t know who we are and what we care about, they definitely aren’t going to know how to “stand with” us. Hopefully listeners are deepening that understanding so that we can build stronger alliances across our differences.

May: Wow, mic drop. I feel like I have so many questions. I’d love to invite you back in a few months to chat, especially about feminism, womanism, and about this constructed notion of womanhood. It would be awesome to talk to you about it.

Do you have anything final you’d like to say, any final comments before we close up the interview?

Ikhlas: We’re always open to new ideas and suggestions. We are currently in a growing phase, figuring out what the issues are, and sometimes we miss things. As intersectional as we are, there are still things we don’t know about. So we encourage you to listen to the podcast, and to e-mail us, Tweet us, Facebook us, so that we can learn from you and so we can grow.

Makkah: If you are interested in better understanding the diversity of Muslims in America, whether you are part of the Muslim community or not, then this is the podcast for you. If you are interested in smart but accessible conversations about race, about gender, about religion, and about how this very distinct marginalized community in the United States is grappling with some of those issues—that maybe your community is grappling with in a different way—then this is the podcast for you. I think, in these trying times, we really do need to build more solidarity, more empathy, and more knowledge about different communities. And there are great lessons to be learned across different groups.

So listen today! And don’t forget to review us on iTunes to make it easier for others to find us.

[chocolate-brownies]

Mindfulness is often packaged as an individual pursuit: you carve out a space in a comfortable setting or a studio that suits your needs so you can take time to calm down, relax, or focus better for work. The benefits advertised are very me-oriented.

This personal project, essential to mindfulness, overlaps with an inherent tendency in society to stack or silo individual and community, says Rhonda Magee, mindfulness teacher and law professor at the University of San Francisco, in a recent podcast with Mindful’s Editor-in-Chief Barry Boyce. In other words, we see an opportunity for mindfulness to make us better team leaders, community members, and activists, but we don’t see where the personal and social agenda can align—indeed, would they cancel each other out altogether?

“The problem is that in our society it’s sort of either or, it’s either about the personal or it’s about the social. And yet, if we can open to our own experience we know we’re always already both individuals and a world,” she explained.

Magee’s research focuses on issues of social justice and inclusivity. In a world that faces increasingly complex problems, Magee argues that mindfulness provides an opportunity to understand issues through multiple points of view.

The following excerpt explores the difficulty of achieving both personal and social growth, and the role mindfulness plays in balancing the two:

  Rhonda Magee on Mindfulness and Inequality

9:28

Rhonda Magee: We largely continued to live in very segregated communities and cultures and systems. And that’s a fact that is one that we struggle to keep coming back to. You know, we know that part of the way we’ve been taught to look at these issues is that we were segregated officially, and now we’re not. And now if communities are racially identifiable or culturally distinct, it’s all a matter of choice. It’s all, you know, a matter of the market. It’s not, about patterns or conditioned habits and also structures, the way we do schooling, public and private, the way we continue to structure our religious communities. We tend not to really see how we are very, very, very deeply still embedded in and committed to, actually, we have a taste for, it seems like, segregation.

Barry Boyce: We reinvest invest in boundaries that we think we’ve gone beyond, mentally, in our media, we reinvest in those boundaries.

Rhonda Magee: We really do.

Barry Boyce: …that you are more different from me than is really the case.

Rhonda Magee: Yes, and we reinvest meaning, we send our kids to schools that are still very isolated. We move around the country. I live in San Francisco. I hear people find various and sundry different ways to explain why they leave a very diverse region. And often my white friends, for example, find themselves in much more white spaces after the “stresses of the city.” And, you know, sometimes this racial piece of it is mentioned, often not widely, but maybe in these quiet conversations. I had a young woman come and talk to me about a friend of hers; it’s often, you know, speaking about a friend, not myself. This young woman was an immigrant from Eastern Europe and she had another friend, an immigrant from Eastern Europe, who came to San Francisco and said she wanted to move away because she wanted to be around more Americans, and by that, she actually meant more whites.

There still is a way that part of the legacy of white supremacy in America is that we define what it means to be American, still and in the eyes of many both domestically and internationally, as white. And that is what we are still up against, is what we have been seeing emerge in the political culture and the discourse around making America great again. So there’s a deeply embedded desire, or kind of a way in which we keep moving into segregation and reinforcing it, reinvesting in it, as you say. We’re all in that world. So, even mindfulness organizations are built up in networks that are already very segregated. All of our networks for reaching out, finding potential teachers, finding people to come to our organizations, our events, they’re already very segregated. And so, we are up against that challenge of, again, living in a society that’s already structured to push us apart. And those dynamics are coming from so many different institutions that it’s actually very hard for any institution to start reaching out to adults, adult learners or adult practitioners, and saying let’s come together from these very different places of relative segregation and isolation.

And so a concrete way to address that is, I mean, there are short-term steps, but I actually think a longer-term cultural change is what has to happen. This effort must outlive our own lifetimes. It will. Another problem we deal with in the West is very short-term focus. If we can’t imagine our efforts realizing some gain tomorrow, or at the outside six months from now, we’re not sure it’s worth our time. We are not going to change these patterns in this country that took hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years to embed without a commitment to changing them that is at least as farsighted.

There still is a way that part of the legacy of white supremacy in America is that we define what it means to be American, still and in the eyes of many both domestically and internationally, as white.

Barry Boyce: Are you suggesting that if you have too much of a hunger for immediate results, you won’t really commit? That you really have to take on that notion that we’re planting seeds in a garden that we will not see flower? I haven’t really thought of it that way: If silently in your mind you think you want to see a short-term gain, you just give up…

Rhonda Magee: It’s very easy to get frustrated.

Barry Boyce: You think… this neighborhood isn’t going to change.

Rhonda Magee: Yes, the community isn’t going to change, this meditation group isn’t going to change.

Barry Boyce: Yeah. So yeah that’s very helpful. Keep going.

Rhonda Magee: So, we need both a very long-term commitment and a lot of patience, both of which, I think, are gifts from me of my own mindfulness practice. And not that I’ve gotten there, right, I’m a work in progress just like everybody else. But to be able to sit with the frustration that comes with, oh, here we are again trying to address this same issue of the denial of white supremacy in our history with people who, once again, don’t want to talk about. It’s frustrating.

Barry Boyce: How does patience square with the possibility of falling into apathy or not being willing to call somebody on something?

Rhonda Magee: So it’s “both and” again. You know, realizing there’s time for, and a place in our own being in the world, for patience. And there are times for, and a place for, being in action. And it’s again, it’s not either or. It really is both. So there are ways we can call people into conversations about white supremacy with compassion for the fact that we all are in this together. We’ve all been trained away from this conversation. So, it’s going to be hard. It’s going to have to go by fits and starts and be interrupted, maybe even for years in a single organization because we’re not ready for it yet. To really deal with these issues is high pay-grade level mindfulness work. It isn’t for people who have not really come to see the depth of what it means to see clearly, what it means to work with our own conditionings, to sit in the fire of the painful recognition that, oh my mind actually does orient me to people who look like me. Oh, I do feel safer. Honestly, I wish I didn’t, but in fact I do feel safer when I’m in these places. Mindfulness can help us with a lot of the really subtle difficulties of doing the work that must be done to dismantle these patterns and habits that draw us to reinvest in segregation. Mindfulness compassion practices, these actually can help.

Mindfulness can help us with a lot of the really subtle difficulties of doing the work that must be done to dismantle these patterns and habits that draw us to reinvest in segregation.

So, it’s actually, it’s both that kind of patience that comes with a mindful holding of a multi-generational looking back and forward at the same time type of project. Because we are both, looking at a particular history is how we got here and trying to imagine a future for our children and our children’s children that will be much different. And then trying to work towards that future, in part by trying to redeem our past, looking at the role our particular communities, our particular families, our cultures have had in setting us on this journey that we’re on that keeps pushing us in corners and polarizing us. What’s been the role of our family, our culture, my neighborhood, my own conditioning in those tendencies? How can I address those and at the same time realize that we’re not going to address them overnight? We can’t. It will not happen overnight. We didn’t get here overnight. But we can take steps, we can take steps.

This conversation is adapted from Episode Seven of the Point of View podcast with Barry Boyce.  

read more

Mental Health

Four Ways People of Color Can Foster Mental Health and Practice Restorative Healing 

A resource guide to help people of color destigmatize mental health issues, find culturally competent therapists, and practice self-care. Read More 

Threads of Solidarity

January 10, 2019

Work

How Good People Can Fight Bias 

In her new book, Dolly Chugh provides us with tips for recognizing bias and reducing its effects in ourselves and our workplaces. Read More 

Jill Suttie

December 10, 2018

Well-Being

Healing Racial Fault Lines 

How the simple act of sharing personal stories can help uncover divisive thoughts buried deep within ourselves. Read More 

Barry Yeoman

August 11, 2016

The post Can Mindfulness Helps Us Dismantle Inequality? appeared first on Mindful.

[transhumanitynet]

ZS Mythos (2/3): Sections & Sessions

This article is part of a series about the Mythos (worldview-narrative) underlying the Zero State (ZS). Part 1 is about our highest concept, ideal, and level of organization, which we call The Array. Part 2 (below) explains the Sections & Sessions our core activity revolves around, and Part 3 covers the Twelve Foundation Stones that form the basis of our story.

There is a lot of information in this article. You may wish to bookmark it, and use it as reference material, regardless of whether you view the Zero State (ZS) as a game, or as a real-world activist network, or just take an interest in online subcultures.

  1. What’s in a Game?

Some people choose to think of the Zero State (ZS) in terms of being a game, specifically an Alternate Reality Game, which is basically an immersive narrative which deliberately blurs the boundaries between reality and fiction. ZSers are definitely not obliged to think it as a game, that’s their choice; we don’t mind how people engage and do their part, as long as they engage and do their part.

Regardless of whether any given individual prefers to view ZS activity in terms of a game or not, there are three nested levels of such activity, like the rings of an onion or a tree. In this article I am going to refer to these three levels as an outermost game, and two levels of game-within-a-game within, which we might call metagames. Using the analogy of an egg, let’s refer to these three levels as the yolk, the white, and the shell, starting from the centre as follows (and yes, yes, I know you could count the ‘metagames’ as the two innermost or the two outermost levels, that’s up to you):

The yolk is obviously the innermost level of the game, where it manifests as a mysterious puzzle, which we call the “Glass Bead Game” (after the Hermann Hesse novel). If you want to know more about this level of the game, then I’m afraid you will have to play the outer levels first, to search for it. The one thing we can say here is that, at this level, playing the game and developing the game are very similar things, perhaps one and the same. At this level the game is pure strategy – pure logic completely abstracted from all personality and narrative.

The white is a kind of bridging or hidden layer, connecting the worlds of pure logic with our pragmatic activity out in the real world. This is the level of the Sessions, which will be explained in part 3, below. For now, let’s just say that this level most resembles an online Role Playing Game (RPG), where ZSers adopt roles (the Core ZSers already have assigned roles, and all others are free – even encouraged – to craft their own within the established framework of the ZS Mythos), and participate in storytelling sessions which connect those roles to developing plans for our actions in the real world. This is the level where the ZS Mythos is most vibrant and alive. To learn how to join the game at this middle level – even if you choose not to view it as a game at all (as many of us do not) – then please be sure to read this entire article!

The shell is the ZS–ARG, which is to say the outermost, and most public level of the game. At this level, all distinctions between reality and fiction, truth and media, are deliberately blurred beyond all recognition. That is not our choice, but the nature of the world now; We hold to our Principles and the respect for Truth that they insist upon, but we all must play the game as we find it.

At this level it really doesn’t matter in the slightest if you think it’s a game or not; all that matters is how effective an activist you are. If you are ineffective, if you are inactive, then we really don’t care what you think. Sure, we’ll care about your wellbeing as our Principles dictate, but you haven’t earned the right to tell us how to do anything. If you want to change that, then wake up, and get involved!

Core ZSers don’t always use their role names at this level – although they are encouraged to do so – and what anyone else wants to do is up to them. At this level, ZS is in the business of growing activist networks, and the extent to which you’re involved is the extent to which you can be active, or at the very least support those who are. Game and Mythos narratives infuse our activity at this level, but they are entirely secondary to the practical results of our actions, as a network, out in the real world.

  2. What are the Sections?

ZS is divided into seven functional groups called the Sections. Four of those (S1-4) concern the proper functioning of a balanced society, while the Higher Sections (S5-7) act as our deepest organizational structure, collectively representing the core functions of a cybernetic organism. The three Higher Sections are not only used to organise our core game sessions, but also to inform their themes and narratives. We will discuss the nature and logistics of the Sessions in the next section, below, but here are the themes which Sections 5-7 bring to them:

SECTION 5 / VR & internal “world-building”

Wyrd, Zero State, Illusory realities, Info-ops, strategy games.

  SECTION 6 / AI & perception

Fyrd, Social Futurism, search for redemption or final frontier.

  SECTION 7 / OS/UX & metaprogramming

Ásentír, Array, Reality hacking, neo-Gnosticism, and Transcendence.

  3. What are the Sessions?

So finally, now, let’s focus on the Sessions, which draw upon the structure of the three Higher Sections, and are the very essence of ‘the white’, the bridging structure of ZS’ three game levels. As mentioned above these are essentially Role Playing Game (RPG) sessions, although they serve a number of practical non-game purposes and do not need to be viewed as a game by participants. Remember: What matters is outcome.

In the Sessions, every participant plays a role, based on the idea of a traveller from the future who has a mission to alter details of the past (our present). The Sessions are based around the teams that ZS members operate in to achieve their mission goals. Session activity is split (in no obvious or consistent way, and deliberately so) between narrative to establish your characters and relationships, and actual planning to go out and do things in the real world which help ZS and give your team prestige.

You will have a full say in what those things are, as part of your team. Team members who reach a certain level of accomplishment are encouraged to branch out and run entire teams of their own. The entire thing hangs together around a “league table” – an important function of The Array as an organizational entity – of the most accomplished teams. The better the players are at playing, the faster and more effectively ZS grows.

Logistics

The Core Sessions are based on a network of six factions. There are two such factions per Higher Section, arranged in loose alliances, each of them representing one of what we call the six Metahouses. The Metahouses are organizations within ZS which go by the colourful names of The Foundation, Cloud Nine, ZODIAC, The Black Parade, The Beast, & Club 21. Mythos narrative associated with all of these groups will be covered by the final article in this series (which is about the so-called “Twelve Foundation Stones”).

Most Session logistics are now being worked out within Discord itself, among the people who choose to participate in them. Basically, you just need to stick your head in there, sniff around until you have some sense of which faction you fancy belonging to (there are chat and voice channels for each of the three Higher Sections, so it shouldn’t be too hard to find where you fit, and you can always change your mind or join multiple teams) – or want to pretend you belong to! – and from there small groups of ZSers can self-assemble and request to arrange Sessions at whatever time suits them as a group. Don’t worry, it will all make sense… you just have to start by doing. Get involved, and see where the narrative leads you! The best way to get a head-start on understanding that narrative is to read the third and final article in this series.

Dharma

For some time we have intended to develop a “Dharma” system, which is to say a way of keeping track of status and achievement within ZS. That system couldn’t exist before now (aside from a few credits which we will of course honour by reflecting them in the new system, going forward) because there was no functional context for it, but now it has an important place at the very heart of our community.

As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, among other things The Array is a kind of “league table” that keeps track of the most accomplished ZS teams, using Dharma as the points representing their achievements. The exact details of the Dharma system will be developed within Sessions, as part of the game via our Discord server, which you can find here: https://discord.gg/R4t7V8U

One particular aspect of the Dharma system to take note of is its capacity to measure who should be allowed to branch out with entire session-teams of their own, which represents a higher level of achievement and responsibility within ZS. Again, we will be discussing (and deciding, collectively) exactly how this works within the mechanics of Discord over the coming days, and that conversation will be held via the Discord server itself, so you need to join there if you want to be part of it.

Resources

Finally, let’s take a moment to talk about resources. This idea – of the need for resources – was pivotal within ZS at the beginning, and for very good reason: Without resources, you can do nothing. If your resources are low enough you don’t have a network (not one you have any reliable control over, anyway), you can’t protect yourself or your loved ones, and push come to shove, you can’t feed them either. Late Capitalism’s gross materialism may give one pause about attaching any value to material things (I must admit, I’m no fan of money or status-symbol-objects myself), but at the end of the day if you don’t have enough resources, it’s game over for you and yours.

That sadly, is the basic and uncomfortable reality of life. So, as a matter of sheer pragmatism and also in order to live up to our Principles (most notably our commitment to mutual aid), we must take the question of network resources very seriously indeed. If we don’t, then there is no network, simple as that. Game Over.

In short, at every level ZS must now demonstrate an ability to secure resources, and use them wisely for the benefit of the entire network. Yes, that raises many (many) questions, which we will work out together, but the bottom line is that either we do that, or we forego any notion of an effective mutual aid network whatsoever. It really is as simple as that, I’m afraid. So, going forward, please be prepared at every step to ask yourself one question: What Have You Done For ZS, Lately?

ZS Mythos (2/3): Sections & Sessions was originally published on transhumanity.net

[multiracialmedia-blog]

The Problem with Identity Policing Paris Jackson

In January 2017, Paris Jackson, daughter of The King of Pop Michael Jackson was interviewed by Rolling Stone magazine. In it, she proudly identifies as Black.

This past week the article resurfaced in social media and now people are losing their minds.

Although I rarely weigh in on celebrity gossip, I felt I needed to because this hits too close to home. Let me just state up front I am pissed off that people are identity policing Paris Jackson. I had just finished reading TaRessa Stovall’s “Wait Up! Who Called the Mixed Identity Police?” piece and thought the timing couldn’t have been more poignant.

I’ve seen multiple people post this article and then decide that Paris Jackson is not Black, as if someone actually gave them or anyone the authority to just decide someone’s race or how they should or can identify. Those people are ignorant and damaging to Biracial people and continue to perpetuate the issues that Biracial Americans face!

Full disclosure: these are my feelings about both Paris Jackson and Biracial people in general. If other Biracial people feel differently about how to self-identify, I completely respect that, but I don’t appreciate people who are only one race telling Biracial people how we should identify.

NEWSFLASH: Paris Jackson and Other Biracial People Do not Have to Choose One Race or the Other!

And you do not get to throw us in one category or the other because it makes YOU more comfortable with our identity. The fact of the matter is, as a Biracial person you should never have to identify as anything other than Biracial (unless it’s how a Biracial person wants to identify, not because it makes others feel better).  And asking people the question “What race do you consider yourself” or “What race do identify with more?” is problematic and oppressive in its nature. Answering this question with anything other than “Biracial” is quite frankly, not the truth. Furthermore, Biracial people are either pressured into this falsehood and not identifying as Biracial, so they instead “choose”… or they feel like “choosing” is norm, instead of feeling that identifying as they actually are is the norm.

In addition, despite how we identify ourselves, society also feels the need to decide how they will identify us for themselves, and it is rarely Biracial. This is a problem on its own, but since society has chosen to lump us into one racial category or the other with or without our consent (most often without), you absolutely DO NOT get to decide FOR US which category we get to go into!

People Claiming that Michael Jackson is not Paris Jackson’s Father are Ignorant and Vacuous!

You have no proof of this and using the logic “she doesn’t even look Black” is about as scientific and logical as people claiming that climate change doesn’t exist! 😒 I have a Black mother. Biologically. Most people feel that I do not look “Black” … at all. My son, who would be considered 75% Black, looks just like me, with straight dark hair. I have family and friends who have both “fully” Black parents and have my skin tone or lighter skin tones and straight hair. Anyone who believes that in order to be biologically  Black they MUST present stereotypical Black characteristics and phenotypes, please educate yourself! Your thinking and colorism are hurting both the Biracial and Black communities.

In addition, how many of you have been DNA tested to prove either of your parents you grew up with are your actual parents? Please, I’d like to know. If you haven’t, how do you know your parents are actually and biologically your parents? Other than the fact that you grew up with them and you have always called them mom, dad, etc? If Paris Jackson has always been told that a Black man is her father and a White women is her mother, how dare anyone decide that she cannot identify with being a Black female but you call Barack Obama the first Black president! If you have decided that Barack Obama (Drake, Bob Marley, Rhianna, or any other Biracial celebrity) is Black because he / they look stereotypically Black despite having a Black father and White mother, but you decide that Paris Jackson isn’t Black when she has a Black father and White mother, you are perpetuating ignorance, and are no better than the men deciding what women should get to do with their bodies. Hypocritical and over-stepping. In actuality, you’re worse!

So to recap: no one gets to decide someone else’s race, and especially not just to justify your narrative or to make you comfortable. It’s not fluid, nor is it up for debate. You don’t decide the races of non-Biracial people. You don’t get to decide ours either.  Let Biracial people be Biracial to begin with. Stop telling us to choose which race we want to be considered. Stop feeling like you can decide which Biracial people meet the criteria for you to consider them one race or the other. How about you just consider us Biracial? Leave it at that. Let us leave it at that? This applies to Paris Jackson and other Biracial people.

My name is Brittainy Horton. I’m a 28-year-old Biracial woman (Black mother, White father) raised in the south. I have an 18-month-old son who has a Black father. I have a bachelors degree in psychology and am working on my Master’s degree as a physician assistant. I am also in the process of enrolling in a PsyD program to obtain my doctorate in psychology. I have always been an activist for civil rights, and especially the Black community. My mother was a long term president of our local NAACP chapter and National Black Caucus member, so it is a passion I got honestly. Of course never quite being fully and homogeneously accepted into the Black community because of my Caucasian appearance, I quickly began  to delve into the deeper layer of Biracial identity and what that means in American society and culture.

        Photo credits: YouTube: Paris Jackson: the truth about her father Michael Jackson and herself, courtesy of Celebrities TV

The Problem with Identity Policing Paris Jackson if you want to check out other voices of the Multiracial Community click here Multiracial Media

[cosmic-irrelevance]

the 451 dystopia/paradoxes of conviction

i've just finished reading ray bradbury's fahrenheit 451. it's a book that stroke nothing in me when i finished reading it. no scene actually made me feel anything- not when clarisse died, or montag killed beatty. shock, maybe. emotional stirring? no. but it's impact truly came after i read the book and let it simmer. it came the moment i decided that i was "done with thinking for the day" and stopped learning, favouring listening to a generic pop track instead (work from home by 5h, it works when i rly don't wanna think about anything). then it hit me. that the 451 dystopia is, in actual fact not very far from me at all. all my life, i've done good without thinking. i read my first real book outside my syllabus at 17. and i didn't even read alot until i got to university. life was fine. it was fine without thought. i liked watching tv, listening to music. in fact, when i'm tired after getting overloaded with information after school, that's all i want to do. not think. engage in more sensory experiences. 451 really shocked me otherwise. there is value in knowledge. i can't even articulate what the consequences of a superficial life is, but i know it. ive seen it before. they are in people all around me. mildred knows it. she attempted suicide. she suppresses it. i've grown more aware in the past few months, but this feels like the catalyst, the catalyst to me abhorring ignorance. ignorance destroys the garden of earth- nature and thought and relationships and empathy. ignorance brings me to the next point is kind of, the myriad of viewpoints i've been bombarded with in the past week. it kinda sheds light on something i've been wondering for a really long time, that is, why those people would vote for trump. we did a reading today on refugees and exile, and while i can't say i fully comprehend the whole reading, part of what the author (david morley) was saying is that the way people define ourselves is through excluding others. we belong here, and we do because there are people who don't. and i guess trump played on this-not sure if i can call it- basal instinct in people to want some place they can protect as their homes that he managed to garner support from the white masses. the opposing view ive heard though is from lauren's talk at the urban outfitter's event. i share the same stand as her, but i've never really thought about why. it's just, when you look at people and their individual stories and sufferings, it's just not possible for me to not want to help them. it's out of my moral compass to look at these vulnerable groups, with all due innocence, seeking a place they can hide and recover from all the trauma of having their homes destroyed, only to deny them of an asylum. i'm doing a course on human rights now, and the thing about human rights is that if you believe in it, there's no reason to deny these people the right to meet their needs with dignity. it's their rights, their rights they have on the sole basis that they are human. nothing else. and if you disagree with me that all humans deserve rights, how would you like if someone treated you like a slave? and if you think that can't happen, what do you have in you that makes you superior to these refugees? lauren's view though, is that all of these stem from self love. if you love yourself, this love spreads to others. because they are human too. they are genetically coded the same way we are. they are our brothers. they are our sisters. i 100% stand by that, but my mind will take a little while to pry open. and on human rights and activism, there's something else. lexicon seems like a line of weakness of every activist- language is, afterall the cornerstone of thought. all around activists are trying to stop us from using labels- thordis elva goes as far as to say that using the term “rapist” to describe the entity who had committed that act doesn't help in solving the problem. i don't deny that. we think, therefore, we are. but here, i guess i'm going back to the 451 dystopia. ray bradbury actually had letters written to him getting him to remove the racism (one of the MINOR antagonists in the book which montag gets back at is called Black, i'm pretty sure intentionally) and portrayal of women (mildred and her friends). to which he smartly says that that's the first step towards burning books. because people cannot tolerate other's opinions. montag could jolly well be gay, and mildred be his gay husband, and there'll be outcry saying bradbury targets the homosexual community. and if he changes his stand, that'll be akin to writing to please. and writing to please is too troublesome, too hard, he might as well not write anyway. i don't know how to reconcile these polarising stands. maybe i'll write again, when i do. i've a copy of milk and honey in my bag now, which i'm totally stoked to pull out and read for the sole reason that i haven't read poetry in a while. but i guess it's the 451 dystopia again, reminding me of something. i'm starting to be freaked at its penetration In my life. basically there's this guy, faber. an old university professor. he says that books alone aren't enough to change the world, to score beneath the surface. there must be books, leisure time to understand their meanings, and the freedom to act upon them. so i guess that's what i'm doing now. was just reading about the paradox of conviction. it's interesting, but it would've hit me harder if i actually had something i was brought up to believe. it's not to say i wasn't brought up to believe anything, there are certain things my parents believe in. my dad, for one, is devoutly anti government. it's just that i don't share their views. they weren't inserted into me before i was washed over by social studies, before i knew how to think. but i guess it gives me reason to think that things might've been different if my dad preached all of these to me earlier. bear with me i'm just rehashing the argument here: so i guess i shall go with the example that i was brought up to think that there are multiple gods (i'm buddhist, though not as devout a follower as my dad). say i have a friend. my friend is monotheistic (she's christian). just because she believes the way she does, and i do the way i do, doesn't mean that i think i have better grounds for believing the way i do. that is, i don't have evidence that there are indeed, more than one gods, which makes her belief less reliable. it's just the way things are. or rather, it's the way our upbringings are. she was raised christian, i'm buddhist. if you see where i'm going, yeah there's actually no reason for me to believe that my beliefs in buddhism are rational. and being the rational being i am, i should actually not believe in buddhism. i also know i've checkmated myself because no one says religion is rational, but what if i was raised to think otherwise? for example, that the earth was flat? i don't know what to think of this argument because firstly, i do not hold to a lot of thoughts i was raised to believe. my family doesn't communicate all that much, so most of my thoughts come from books and the media. secondly, there can be empirical data proving some beliefs better than the others. that doesn't mean either party should give up on their beliefs though. not everything has to appeal to reason. to the chagrin of every rational brain is the actor of the heart, the existence of emotions. it's like how vladimir and estragon continue, irrationally, waiting by the tree for godot. not because they believe they have strong grounds to do so (they have, indeed, no grounds at all), but because it brings them feelings of hope and purpose. i feel a tad better now that i've got my thoughts out. it's hard thinking in your brain.