NATO Airstrike …

NATO Airstrike Kills Six Afghan Children, Parents

http://news.antiwar.com/2012/05/27/nato-airstrike-kills-six-afghan-children-parents/

Afghan Govt. Announces Probe After Family Slain in Attack

by Jason Ditz, May 27, 2012

 

A Saturday evening NATO air strike against a village in Paktia Province, Afghanistan, has killed a family of eight, including six children. The strike is the latest in a growing series of attacks against civilians.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai has ordered an investigation into the attack, and provincial officials confirmed that the only adults killed, a man and his wife, had no connection to any terrorist factions.

NATO initially rejected the claim of an attack, saying there was “no evidence” of any civilians actually being among the slain. NATO later retracted the statement, however, and instead said that it was responding to an attack and was “aware” of the civilian deaths.

Karzai has repeatedly demanded that NATO stop launching air strikes against populated areas, but NATO officials have rejected this, saying that the UN rules of engagement don’t allow Karzai to restrict the types of attacks it launches.”

self-care is one hell of a drug.

and i am high on it right now.

the dangerous thing about caring for yourself is spotting the evidence of neglect over time.  learning where your sore spots are.  finding ways to heal them.  it’s like your life is rigged with trip wires and the wrong reaction can set off dangerous traps and limits.

i’ve lived in this skin for nearly 27 years and i don’t know how my body works.  i don’t know what its optimal state looks like.  and my mind… my mind needs calibration.

but i can get back to this later.  my body and my mind need sleep.

 

a letter to a Black child

I want you to be your best self.  Whatever that means for you, I want you to be your best self.

I want your wit.

I want your curiosity.

I want your cynicism.

I want your quirkiness.

I want your queerness.

I want your street smarts and your book smarts and your gut smarts.

I want you bright, beautiful, and bold as fuck.

Because as long as you are what you are, you can reach any height.

You can be your best and reach mediocrity.  That’s okay.

You can be your best and reach notoriety.  That’s maybe not as okay; but you know what?

You’re still doing you.

If you have a question?  Please ask.

And don’t just ask one person, ask a lot of people.

Then go investigate answers for yourself.  This is how you cultivate judgment.

When you develop a how, it helps to have a why in your back pocket.

Sometimes you don’t even need a good why.  But whys give your hows peace of mind.

Don’t take that as a message that you have to justify everything you do to the world.

You don’t have to do that.

But you are your most important person.  If you don’t know why you’re doing something? Ask yourself.

Learning is your evergreen state of being.

Always learn from your circumstances, your peers, and your environment.

It can be as complex as astrophysics or as simple as “don’t get shot.”

Life is full of rich lessons to make you excel.  Learn them.

There may be moments when it feels like nothing’s happening.

This is a teachable moment.  What were you expecting to happen?  Ask yourself the question.

Then make it happen.

You are what the world is waiting for, and so much more.  Be yourself, and make the world smile.

 

accountability process disaster

So…I’m really not liking how often the first response after I talk about my experiences is that my abuser “needs support”. How does that center the survivor? How does that break entrenched gender norms that dictate that I should be meek, forgiving, caretaking, not take up too much space and “heal” on demand? How does that disrupt the power dynamic in which this man -who turned out to be a serial abuser- used his age, gender, community connections (queer poc/radical desi circles) and phd-track credentials to to dehumanize and retraumatize me around sexual assault? This man was ten years older, made snarky comments about my aspirations and condescending comments about my style of speech and my lack of Ivy-League cred, and has had several pieces published on immigration policy issues – and they’re worried about “demonizing” this privilegefest, like it’s his humanity that was fundamentally attacked in all of this over the past several years and not mine. At the moment, he is trying to get my crew to feel sorry for him, give mushy support to him, and pay attention instead to the ways he is marginalized – his usual fallback pattern with women specifically.

I have been looking for NY-based community groups to contact and I have been adding on friends scattered around the country and abroad to cc on the email correspondences for the accountability process and to take part in the next conference call. Their role is be to serve as an extra pair of eyes and to have my back; to basically make the accountability process group is itself accountable. Yes, it’s a headache. This process is going badly, as they tend to do. They’re outsiders, so I don’t know how much clout they can have in this context. There are really not many people in NY I know; it was my isolation here to begin with that facilitated the abuse.

The crew got one of his male friends to be a “male ally” in the process. So the first time I spoke with this man to gauge where he’s at. But what happened was that this guy told me he “cares about [the abuser] deeply” and doesn’t want to “demonize” him. I found this offensive and problematic and it made me feel undervalued. This type of reaction is pretty endemic to accountability processes and to male friends of male perpetrators. So, this guy is refusing to apologize, and the rest of the crew has barely responded to this even though it’s been 3 days.

My concern is that we can’t even hold the “male ally” accountable; how
the heck are we supposed to hold the abuser accountable? I don’t think
they have the skills to mediate a conversation with someone who is
very savvy with manipulative language. I got a “I’m sorry you were
offended” pseudo-apology from the “male ally” and they seemed to think
this was enough. He followed this up by saying that he is stepping out
of the process and doesn’t think engaging with the concerns/criticisms
I raised will help. No apology for his phone comments.

I am familiar with other accountability processes, and that they tend
to go badly because of how much they can end up coddling perpetrators
for a number of reasons – because the perpetrator comes from a more
highly valued social position and is therefore fully human and more
relatable than the person who was harmed, or because being “mean” is
falsely equated with the prison system, etc.

I think there is a very gendered way that people respond to this
particular type of situation – call upon the woman to respond with
grace, compassion, forgiveness, and to”heal” on demand, not show
frustration, not take up space. Be ladylike. I find these expectations
completely outrageous. On the other hand, the perpetrator must be
handheld through the process; we must all fret about whether he’s
being “demonized”/”exiled”. Such melodramatic language when he’s
hardly showed remorse or made any real efforts, and it’s the first
concern some people have. It all just seems to solidify the
hierarchies in place.

Action for Troy Davis

Clemency denied for Troy Davis. Contact Chatham County’s District Attorney’s office NOW: Telephone: 912-652-7308, 404-656-5651. Fax: 912-652-7328, (912) 447-5396. Tell them to withdraw the death warrant against Troy Davis.

more contact numbers here: http://blog.amnestyusa.org/deathpenalty/resisting-troy-execution/

http://www.thenation.com/blog/163498/tomorrow-georgia-murders-troy-davis

“It’s with shock that I report that the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles on Tuesday denied clemency for Troy Anthony Davis. The 42-year-old Davis is now due to be executed tomorrow, Wednesday September 21, at 7 pm. For those unfamiliar with the case, let’s be clear: Davis’s execution is little more than a legal lynching. This is a demonstrably innocent man that the state is about to execute in the premeditated manner of a murder.

The facts speak for themselves. Back in 1989, nine people testified that they saw Troy Davis kill Officer Mark MacPhail. Since that time, seven have recanted their testimony. Please allow me to repeat: of the nine people who testified that Troy killed Officer Mark MacPhail, seven have recanted their testimony. Beyond the eyewitnesses, there was no physical evidence linking Troy to Officer MacPhail’s murder. None. Three jurors have signed affidavits saying that if they had all the information about Troy, they would not have voted to convict. One juror even arrived in person to the Board of Pardons and Paroles to say to their faces that she would not have voted to convict if she’d had the facts. Another woman has even come forward to say that a different man on the scene that night, Sylvester “Redd” Coles, bragged afterward about doing the shooting. Of the two witnesses who still maintain that Troy was the triggerman, one is Sylvester “Redd” Coles.

From day one, Troy has maintained his innocence. But he was the wrong color, in the wrong place, at the wrong time, with the wrong bank account and the wrong legal team, so he was thrown into the death house with little fanfare. Yet the tireless work of Troy’s family, particularly his sister Martina, brought international attention to the case. From former President Jimmy Carter, to Archbishop Desmond Tutu, to Georgia Supreme Court Chief Justice Norman Fletcher, to Pope Benedict XVI, to Reagan’s former FBI Director, William Sessions, to the more than one million people who signed petitions, the call has gone out to spare Troy’s life. But the Board of Pardons and Paroles didn’t care. Previously the Board issued a statement that they would only allow the execution to go through, if there was “no doubt” as to his guilt. They lied.

As Brian Kammer, one of Davis’s attorneys, said Tuesday after the decision was announced, “I am utterly shocked and disappointed at the failure of our justice system at all levels to correct a miscarriage of justice.” He’s correct. Demonstrations have been planned for today in cities around the country. I know that Washington, DC, will see people come out at 6 pm at 14th and Park Rd. NW. I know the Supreme Court could still intervene or the board could withdraw its death warrant. These are slim options, but I also know that this isn’t over until they send the poison into Troy’s veins. Troy himself has refused a “last meal,” choosing to fight until his last breath. We owe him nothing less.”

US/NATO Military Invasion of Libya

*I am welcoming links from non-US-based commentators, if anyone would like to add them

 
Wanted: An Anti-War Movement

Medea Benjamin and Charles Davis

http://nation.com.pk/pakistan-news-newspaper-daily-english-online/International/17-Jun-2011/Wanted-an-antiwar-movement

“After campaigning as the candidate of change, the man awarded a Nobel Prize for peace has given the world nothing but more war. Yet despite Barack Obama’s continuation – nay, escalation – of the worst aspects of George W. Bush’s foreign policy, including his very own illegal war in Libya, you’d be hard-pressed to find the large-scale protests and outrage from the liberal establishment that characterised his predecessor’s reign (and only seems to pop up when a Republican’s the one dropping the bombs).
That’s not for a lack of things to protest. Since taking office, Obama has doubled the number of troops in Afghanistan and now looks set to break his pledge to begin a significant withdrawal in July. He has unilaterally committed the nation to an unapologetically illegal war in Libya and in two years has authorised more drone strikes in Pakistan than his predecessor authorised in two terms, with one in three of their victims reportedly civilians. In Yemen, he has targeted a US citizen for assassination and approved a cluster bomb strike that, according to Amnesty International, killed 35 innocent women and children.
But these war crimes, which ought to shock the consciences of the president’s liberal supporters, haven’t spurred the sort of popular protest we witnessed under Bush the Lesser. At a recent congressional hearing on the bloated war budget, a handful of CODEPINK activists were the sole dissenters. Thousands poured into the streets to cheer Osama bin Laden’s death, but no Americans were in the streets decrying the drone attack that killed dozens of Pakistani civilians weeks earlier.
While diehard grassroots peace activists continue to bravely protest US militarism, with 52 people arrested last month protesting outside a nuclear weapons factory in Kansas City – if they’d been Tea Partiers protesting Obamacare, you may have heard of them – there’s no denying that the peace movement has taken a beating.”

Libya and the Passive Repeaters: Deploying Depleted Information Warheads

http://zeroanthropology.net/2011/03/27/libya-and-the-passive-repeaters-deploying-depleted-information-warheads/

“the video below in part shows how the use of social media to make falsified versions of Libyan reality can go viral–radioactive–(re)producing an intellectually toxic swarm of passive repeaters. Critical questions are like static, they interrupt the clarity of the message: dictator vs. revolutionaries, support the people, implement a no-fly zone right now. But this is so patronizing, it denies “agency”–just like the agency of the consumer who must decide and then boldly act on which colour iPod™ to buy. Have a look at The Guardian‘s “Revealed: US spy operation that manipulates social media: Military’s ‘sock puppet’ software creates fake online identities to spread pro-American propaganda.” The video has many rough edges, but some of the critical questions and points about propaganda deserve some consideration. Also check “‘Post-Qaddafi Libya’: on the Globalist Road,” “Who are the Libyan Freedom Fighters and Their Patrons?” “US-trained [and U.S.-based] economist, Libyan rebels’ new finance minister,” and “New Libyan rebel leader spent much of past 20 years in suburban Virginia.”

I haven’t been seeing a lot of sources that are talking about the impact of the bombing campaign on civilians in urban areas. Most of the sources I have seen have been pro-intervention and it reminds me of the propaganda for the Iraq war, except this time around the usual anti-war left in the US seems confused.

Congressman Kucinich has a petition up: http://www.kucinich.us/libya/

The pain is cyclical.

There is a reason why the kyriarchical apparatus recycles the same dualistic tropes.  Black bad, White good.  Fat bad, Thin good.  Woman bad, Man good.  Non-Citizen bad, Citizen good.

It uses these patterns because they are simple to absorb and they work.  Having a good guy and a bad guy is the equivalent of a psychological nervous system.  No pain is good.  Pain is bad.  No itch is good.  Itch is bad.  Our responses to our bodies do not necessarily have middle ground; we tailor our remedies to the severity of what’s ailing us.  But any sign of an ailment that cannot be managed, adapted, or eliminated is bad, and that’s how we navigate from day to day.

But that’s where critical analysis sets in.  With our bodies, we learn to recognize what problems can be managed ourselves and when we  need to consult trained professionals to help with larger issues.  We learn to recognize the difference between a paper cut and the loss of an appendage, despite different pain thresholds between us.

For our body politic, I can’t point to the same urgent care operation.  It’s not that simple.  If it were, we would not be battling the same tropes stemming from the same root causes — racism, gendered hatred, homophobia, ablism — on a regular basis.  The pain is cyclical, it is constant, and it is debilitating.  With each battle, we lose time and loving energy.  Every onslaught is perpetuated so that there is no time to recover and to prepare for the next fight.  The pain is cyclical.

I have learned during my distance from blogging and from writing on political issues that I have allowed my psychic pain threshold to rise astronomically.  There are concerns with self-care, concerns with self-sustenance, and concerns with self-preservation that can successfully keep me from caring about other human beings who struggle with the same things in similar or worse circumstances.  Staring at that realization is incredibly painful; yet my day-to-day living permits me to realize it coldly, clinically, as if it is a part of another person who will do all my feeling for me so long as I travel to work on time and refuse to make waves.  It’s enough to make me furious, and anger is punished when it accompanies any sort of observational truth or categorical imperative to move towards peace.  That pain is one I can’t face and I avoid it as surely as I type this out.

But the onslaughts keep coming.  What can one person do to face them without fear?  What can I do to face them with absolute certainty that the pain I witness while fighting is nothing compared to the pain inflicted on the world?  Do I dare disturb the universe?  Depends: is peace a disturbance or a balm?

My role in any struggle is to speak.  I am not good with my hands, and I do not have many redeeming qualities beyond putting words in the ether and letting them move.  If the pain is cyclical, I must write and speak to stop it.  But where is the time?  Where is the courage?   What sacrifices must I make and accept before this life becomes bearable?  Because even though I may grow numb, the pain doesn’t stop and it won’t until its root causes are eliminated.

reasons why the left shoots itself in the foot

1. the left actually believes in a cacophony of voices designed to enrich debate. so centralizing a voice for a long-term cause is often daunting.
2. short-term causes can get places across divisions but once the immediate goal is satisfied or leftists feel adequately pompous, no follow-up is conducted except by a few die-hards.  these die-hards are then criticized for being holier-than-thou.
3. see #1.
4. groups dedicated to a single left-leaning cause are criticized because they have decided sticking to their goal is important and not to be sacrificed for periodic election seasons or favor with others.  these groups then become holier-than-thou when their issues receive lip service for an election cycle and gets tabled again. and again. and again.
5. see #1.
6. left leaders must eschew money. or fame. or publicity. or exposure beyond the kind that causes them to bald prematurely, go gray, or develop ulcers.  if you want to lead on the left, you cannot do anything to indicate you enjoy leading, you like money, or you favor the establishment that can enable your ability to not die before thirty-five.
7. see #1.
8. RIGHT WINGERS!! DAMN YOU AND YOUR MONEY-MAKING MEDIA-OWNING INTRANSIGENT WAYS!!  WE WILL CRUSH YOU!! WE WILL CRUSH YOU ONCE WE FIGURE OUT HOW TO INTERPRET YOUR MYRIAD WAYS OF PROTECTING YOURSELF!! SHAME!!!
9. see #1.
10. unlikely allies are spat upon because one faction of the left remembers what the other faction of the left said about Our Malcolm X.
11. see #1.
12. leftist thought is like blood quantum. if you think just a little like a lefty, you are a leftist.  this merges everyone together into an uncomfortable armpit funk of reluctant activism and screaming about individuality.
13. #1.
14. if you do not conform to the million leftist causes immediately upon finding out you are 1/1200000000th leftist, you are a traitor, or even worse: a moderate.
15. did i say #1?  oh, i did.  forget my head next!
16. some leftists think marches are important.  they are right.
17. some leftists think marches are obsolete.  they are right.
18. there’s no context for 16 and 17!  leftists often times forget that too.  which leads to…
19. #1.

deathday party

someone just blew out your last candle–
fire on the dais! let’s dance around the fact
we haven’t killed your legacy.

let’s keep on murdering peace with
cynicism: war must be fought and
can’t be truly won.  we must rob

well-being from your kids and your parents
and your parents’ children, we must burn
their books and steal their homes

because war is impossible. no vagrancy
for you: we will not let you travel like a
griot to pretend you are fighting

for something other than the man we
killed once, the men we’ve murdered
millions of times! this is a party

and you must join in the march of
the dead.

“Feminist” Men

       I have been thinking a lot about “feminist men” (whether they self identify/are involved in writing about or organizing around gender issues) because of experiences in organizing, academia and elsewhere in my personal life, and also because of a recent Incite post about the disruptive role of abusive men in organizing projects . I also came across this post entitled, “Are You a Manarchist?”, which listed a bunch of familiar behaviors. I am also sick of ways others also enable this; I am recalling the time a white male organizer who surrounds himself with qwoc  grabbed me inappropriately at a queer party and I was told to ”get over it”, as “everyone makes mistakes”.

       Most recently, I criticized a male organizer for uncritically presenting an objectifying and shallow poem at a predominantly female youth conference. I got a long, back-patting sort of apology back. Apparently the female partner he wrote it about had called him out a bunch of times on the patriarchal dynamics in their relationship and he’s supposedly changed and grown so much since. I was baffled by why I was expected to congratulate him or something, because clearly he decided to present it anyway after all this processing. He admitted he had clung to a more hetero version of the poem bc of his insecurities about his queerness in south asian settings. 

      I’m sick of men who blithely continue doing what they’re doing and and then remind me that it’s a “process” for them to be less sexist. I’m tired of hearing about this arduous “process”, in other words, that I am impatient and should wait it out while he continuously shits on women. This is what I heard a lot from someone I have come out of some sort of abusive and manipulative relationship with; I realized that the guy pulled the same thing with other women and will probably go on doing so, all while surrounding himself with female activists and gender studies profs. I can’t say I have any sympathy to the idea that it’s this huge effort to see me as a full human being. His guilt and self-loathing were twisted into indicators of his lofty complexities that people like are too simple to comprehend, reasons to wallow in self-pity than to take responsibility and engage with others with decency and care. I’m tired of the expectation that I should coddle some guy’s compensatory sexism because his life is so hard as a queer and/or brown man. I feel like I’m running into the same excuses over and over again, including the expectation that I should function as a aid for men’s personal growth (particularly in this email exchange, along with with lip service to being mindful of caretaking dynamics). I will also mention the experience of having my gender analysis dismissed because Party B has read lots of feminist theory, always knows better than me about my own marginalization, and has somehow rationalized away the fact that he screams at me. And the experience of having a man in domestic violence policy work make a joke about how I should find a date to feel better about being punched.  

 A lot of the interpersonal traps that we’ve discussed wrt white defensiveness apply, but I guess I’ve been late to this party due to where I’ve been for the past few years.

this is what i had written:
“you know, i’ve noticed that in a lot of male poetry about love/sex, the body of the female person is abstracted and fragmented, not unlike mass advertising representations. when i was harassed and assaulted on the street this year, it was made clear to me that the other person saw me as body parts and not as a whole person with her own subjectivity. for this reason, i had a discomfort with the initial draft and left the room when it was presented. i felt there were some interesting differences with the other poem that was read at the time. i understand there’s a race angle being represented too – the feeling of racial alienation and intimacy with another poc. but at the same time, the other person seemed to be represented in the abstract as brown skin and t+a. fucking a brown woman isn’t inherently revolutionary.” I really didn’t learn much else about this person besides that they were brown and bangable to you.
 
* i’m also not sure how to use more open, non-binary, non-essentializing language here and i’m open to suggestions.