Syl MacDonald had a farm and on that farm she had some links
Great links, too — not nearly encapsulating all the wonderful and haunting articles, news, and blogs I’ve absorbed. Collected via email, Twitter, IM, and scavenging. (Speaking of which, I’ve been doing a lot of my damage on Twitter lately; add me if you’d like. My account name is “sylviasrevenge.” It’s private and the one I use most frequently to connect with mi gente. I’m also working on a public account, “mzsylvia,” and it will likely be used for live tweeting events I attend in the Baltimore area and elsewhere.)
Emergency actions to save Troy Davis’ life (Workers’ World)
Thousands of people are mobilizing in a last minute effort to stop the execution of Troy Anthony Davis on Monday, Oct. 27 in Georgia.
Emergency protests are scheduled in many cities on Oct. 23, with a major rally on the steps of the Georgia State Capitol in Atlanta from 6 p.m. until 8 p.m.
Amnesty International, the American Civil Liberties Union of Georgia and Georgians for an Alternative to the Death Penalty, which has worked tirelessly over the years to bring justice in the Davis case, report new letter writing campaigns by professors in Georgia colleges and clergy members, as well as students rallying on campuses.
The International Action Center has launched an online petition addressed to dozens of elected officials including presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain, major news outlets, U.N. bodies and the Georgia Pardons and Parole Board, which has the authority to stop the execution. Please go to www.iacenter.org and add your name to the hundreds of thousands who are saying “Innocence Matters! Justice Matters!”
Just so we’re clear, Campbell freely admits that Powell’s “support of such things as affirmative action and Roe v. Wade placed him too left of center for the bulk of the GOP electorate”. Indeed, John McCain has stated that he supports neitheraffirmative action nor Roe v. Wade, and his running mate, in addition to supporting the overturning of Roe, opposes abortion even in cases of rape and incest. Yet, for some reason, rather than putting two and two together (ie, Powell, much like McCain-supporting dissident Democrat-turned-Independent Joe Lieberman, chose to endorse the candidate who he believes best represents his ideals, regardless of partisan affiliation), this observation instead inexplicably leads Campbell to conclude that “[t]he only [emphasis mine] reasonable explanation for such a public about-face…is that Powell…wishes to see someone who looks like himself [ie, a fellow neeegro] in the White House”.
Searching for Robert Johnson (Vanity Fair)
As he pored over the mass of texts and thumbnail photos that the eBay search engine had pulled up on that day in 2005, one strangely worded listing caught Schein’s eye. It read, “Old Snapshot Blues Guitar B.B. King???” He clicked on the link, then took in the sepia-toned image that opened on his monitor. Two young black men stared back at Schein from what seemed to be another time. They stood against a plain backdrop wearing snazzy suits, hats, and self-conscious smiles. The man on the left held a guitar stiffly against his lean frame.
Neither man looked like B. B. King, but as Schein studied the figure with the guitar, noticing in particular the extraordinary length of his fingers and the way his left eye seemed narrower and out of sync with his right, it occurred to him that he had stumbled across something significant and rare.
Why Passports Are a Feminist Issue (WOC PhD)
The U.S. government has decided to stop issuing passports to Latin@s from the Southwest with only a birth certificate issued by a midwife as proof of citizenship.
The State Department argues that some midwives have falsified records of children born in Mexico and therefore all midwife issued birth certificates are suspect. Between 60-75 midwives since 1960 have been convicted of forging birth certificates for infants they did not deliver or who may have been born outside of the US. Unfortunately, many of the cases occurred almost 50 years ago and amount to a small percentage of the overall midwife delivered births in the Southwest region. Some 250 midwives operated in Southwest Texas this year alone.
The decision has multiple consequences for women. Midwives tend to be overwhelmingly female and their practices have already suffered serious cycles of discredit as a result of establishing distinctions between largely male doctors in hospitals and largely female midwives who may be without them. Some authors have even argued that medical establishment systematically targeted midwives in the hopes of ending their profession all together and funneling more patients-funds into the hospital system. The decision of the State Department to further devalue midwives credentials – ie their ability to certify births – on the basis of a few individual misdeeds, puts this female dominated profession at risk once again.
I hope this is in good taste… (Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Atlantic)
Barack Obama’s grandmother is gravely ill. My temptation yesterday was to say nothing. And then, this morning, I came across this picture at Andrew’s place. I’ve reflected a lot–personally–on Obama’s campaign and the values of parenting. I often think about how his Dad left him, and never knew that his son would be within days of the presidency of the greatest power in history. Think about this–what else could a father want? My own Dad often says that too many black men see child-rearing as “responsibility” and not “personal investment.” They forget about the joy that children bring, and instead focus on the bills, or on stupid, petty beefs with women. As my own son creeps past eight, I’ve been reminded of that.
Obama’s mother, a relatively young woman when he was born, will not be here to see him inaugurated, should he win. Whenever, I think of that I just get sad–mostly because she did know the rewards of parenting and threw herself at her kids. There’s something unjust in the fact that she won’t get to see the results of all her work.
But now, more than anyone, I am thinking of Barack Obama’s grandparents.
More Cobblestones on the Road to Hell (bastard.logic)
Here in the Great White North, accountability is out and banality is in as The Nuremberg Defence seems to be enjoying a resurgence in respectability.
The actions of Canadian officials contributed indirectly to the torture of three Arab-Canadian men in Syria, a federal inquiry has concluded.
“I found no evidence that any of these officials were seeking to do anything other than carry out conscientiously the duties and responsibilities of the institutions of which they were a part,” former Supreme Court of Canada justice Frank Iacobucci concluded in his report, made public Tuesday, 22 months after the inquiry began.
Iacobucci greywash into Canadian torture-by-proxy and rendition-lite (The Galloping Beaver)
Does ‘conscientiously carrying out their duties and responsibilites’ include outsourcing torture-by-proxy and rendition-lite to third party countries?
Rendition-lite : No, we don’t bag em here; we wait till they’re attending a wedding or visiting their dying Mom in Egypt and then put the word out. Or we just go along with the US doing it.
Torture-by-proxy : Hey, if you’re gonna beat the crap out of our citizens anyway, I got a coupla questions you could put to them for us.Because without testimony from those US and Syrian and Egyptian officials, who have been more than willing to finger Canadian complicity in these deals in the past when our own officials were denying it, what’s the point of your secret inquiry?
Leaders of LASA Write Obama (The Unapologetic Mexican)
“…The current impetus for change in Latin America is a rejection of the model of economic growth that has been imposed in most countries since the early 1980s, a model that has concentrated wealth, relied unsuccessfully on unrestricted market forces to solve deep social problems and undermined human welfare. The current rejection of this model is broad-based and democratic. In fact, contemporary movements for change in Latin America reveal significantly increased participation by workers and peasants, women, Afro-descendants and indigenous peoples–in a word, the grassroots. Such movements are coming to power in country after country. They are neither puppets, nor blinded by fanaticism and ideology, as caricatured by some mainstream pundits. To the contrary, these movements deserve our respect, friendship and support…”
Untitled (Having Read the Fine Print)
When you first mentioned Taking Over , I remember distinctly reading the article reviewing it and getting furious. I was especially incensed about the articles definition of characters as multifaceted because and I paraphrase till I can properly find the link ” hated gentrification but like almond croissants”. I hated that and was frankly prepared to be annoyed when we went to the show. It is an argument that I hear often whenever I am among people at work, online ( I swear to god If it wasn’t for BRent,Carlos Kwaru and the other artists I knew I’d incinerate my facebook with glee), at social events ” it can’t be all bad if you get to consume ( insert random thing that is presumed only to have arrived with the gentrifiers)”
As a New Yorker for all but four years of my life, I in short terms HATE THAT SHIT. So here I am talking about necessities, safety, love,shelter,security, food and you are gonna define it as fair because of pastry and or some random fricking amenity that you only assume was lacking before hand. Because truly if our neighborhoods change we aren’t supposed to be in tehm anymore we should boycott and not eat or drink or play even if we had been trying toget those things for years.
RDPulpit: The Intolerance of Tolerance Movements (Religious Dispatches)
“This is an LGBT list, not a GLBT list.”
That was the single line sent back from a gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender mailing list informing me why the post I had just submitted was rejected. It’s been said that you can’t really convey emotion within the flat one dimensional world of email. Conventional wisdom be damned, the snide, superior tone of this one line came through loud and clear. I had breached an unspoken protocol of the GLBT– er, the LGBT — community.
Well, I suppose it’s unspoken now. After a bit of controversy over who should be first in the corporate identity for our community — all the truly good, and honorable, and tolerant LGBT people know that GLBT is anathema to the community. Put the “G” in front of the “L” and you’ll be tagged as a woman-hating, Falwell-loving, pitiable Neanderthal. Everyone knows that it’s LGBT, not GLBT. In an effort to be good feminists, lesbians must always trump gay men in the alphabet soup of acceptance and tolerance. Letter switching is unacceptable and must not be tolerated.
Which brings me to my question: Why is a community that has spent decades seeking tolerance — if not acceptance — from wider society so intolerant of members within its own community?
A very long windy tangling post about Toby and sexual healing. (La Alma de Fuego)
Life was something that people attempted to negotiate *along with* death. People only understood life because they understood death. Every time they killed and animal so that they and their community could live, they understood and contemplated that from death came life. They understand that brutality often lead to beauty.
And if you look at many of the ceremonies people from around the world (not just indigenous peoples) celebrated–you see the confrontation and acceptance of the brutality of nature as an integral part of the ceremony.
Confronting the scariest most unknowable parts of the natural world are an intricate part of human life. But far too often, especially in this day and age, the avoidance of even looking at the scary parts of life is a regular and normal practice. We don’t like pain, we don’t enjoy pain–which is all fine and dandy, but we don’t even *imagine* pain any more. We don’t contemplate pain, we don’t consider that which would/could hurt us the most–we do our best to pretend that nothing out there even exists that could possibly hurt us. We avoid thinking about the worst that could ever happen, even as the worst that could ever happen is actually happening to us. Think: drinking, drugs, sex, chocolate, etc.
Now, in some ways, I totally identify with the need to avoid pain. Some times, pain, or the possibility of pain is so horrific, so overwhelming, so *real* (where it becomes not just a possibility, but reality), that it’s only through avoidance that people even survive.
On the other hand, I think that the metaphysical confrontation of the possibility of pain, brutality, death, the underworld, the evil side, etc, is as necessary to humanity as the confrontation of life.
Springtime for Skinheads: Murdering People for the Colour of Their Shoelaces (Natalia Antonova, Global Comment)
I didn’t find out about this murder in Irkutsk, Russia, on the news. I discovered this first through the blog of a friend of a friend. An independent media source has highlighted this incident, the mainstream news is rather quiet.
Olga Rukosyla was sixteen years old. She enjoyed dressing like a punk, and wore red shoelaces which, to some, signify the famous “Antifa” (anti-facism) movement.
Indymedia reports that on the 8th of October, Olga was surrounded by three young men dressed, as witnesses say, in typical skinhead fashion. One of them grabbed her hand. She said something angrily to him. This was when the men surrounding her threw her on the ground and literally kicked her to death.
Three men, murdering a teenage girl in broad daylight.
