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(via otherhiphop)
“…the graffiti work of 24 year old Shamsia Hassani, an associate professor of Sculpture at Kabul University in Afghanistan….A lot of her work features women in burqas, but with a modern silhouette, with hips and sharp shoulders or fish, trapped…. She says: Art can bring change, I am sure. If people see an artwork, it will perhaps only cause a small shock to their mind, but that can grow and grow.” (via Afghanistan’s female banksy | Maryam Namazie)
4 april 2012,
Today, in #syntagma square, just next to the Greek parliament, a 77 year old man shot himself in the head. His last words, according to passers-by, were “I don’t want to leave a debt on my children”. Since this morning, people have swarmed around the tree, next to which the man took his own life, leaving notes and silently honoring his memory.
His suicide note reads:
“The Tsolakoglou government has annihilated all traces for my survival, which was based on a very dignified pension that I alone paid for 35 years with no help from the state. And since my advanced age does not allow me a way of dynamically reacting (although if a fellow Greek were to grab a Kalashnikov, I would be right behind him), I see no other solution than this dignified end to my life, so I don’t find myself fishing through garbage cans for my sustenance. I believe that young people with no future, will one day take up arms and hang the traitors of this country at Syntagma square, just like the Italians did to Mussolini in 1945”
(Note: Tsolakoglou was the first collaborationist prime minister during Germany’s occupation of Greece during the Second World War and the 77-year-old man compared the currently assigned prime minister Papademos to the traitor Tsolakoglou.)
this post is by @iptamenos3
learn more about this story through this real-time storify post or through twitter via #syntagma hastag
BBC article about the 40% suicide surge in Greece
This has been given zero coverage by Greek media outlets.
(via maozedongisnotcool)
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“Languages like Spanish, French, German and Russian not only oblige you to think about the sex of friends and neighbors, but they also assign a male or female gender to a whole range of inanimate objects quite at whim. What, for instance, is particularly feminine about a Frenchman’s beard (la barbe)? Why is Russian water a she, and why does she become a he once you have dipped a tea bag into her? Mark Twain famously lamented such erratic genders as female turnips and neuter maidens in his rant “The Awful German Language.” But whereas he claimed that there was something particularly perverse about the German gender system, it is in fact English that is unusual, at least among European languages, in not treating turnips and tea cups as masculine or feminine. Languages that treat an inanimate object as a he or a she force their speakers to talk about such an object as if it were a man or a woman. And as anyone whose mother tongue has a gender system will tell you, once the habit has taken hold, it is all but impossible to shake off. When I speak English, I may say about a bed that “it” is too soft, but as a native Hebrew speaker, I actually feel “she” is too soft. “She” stays feminine all the way from the lungs up to the glottis and is neutered only when she reaches the tip of the tongue.” —
from the New York Times Article “Does Language Shape How You Think?”.
such a fantastic read.
[via leftist-linguaphile]
You know what’s even more mind-blowing? Speaking a gendered language with a neuter. In Greek we can also change the gender of a given referent to anything we want by adding suffixes such as ακι, αρα, ος (aki - neuter, ara - feminine, os - masculine). It’s such a rich language - your entire thoughtscape changes once you’re immersed in it.
(via bbthity)
(via maozedongisnotcool)
“
William Rehnquist referred to Mexican children as “wetbacks.” No one disputes that the future Chief Justice of the Supreme Court used the ethnic slur in front of his colleagues in 1981. When a shocked Justice Thurgood Marshall objected, Justice Rehnquist defended himself arguing that “wetback” still carried “currency in his part of the country.”
Justice Rehnquist would go on to author some of the most important immigration decisions of the late twentieth century. In those opinions, he did not refer to immigrants as “wetbacks.” Rather he employed a rich array of metaphors to describe a nation at risk. He wrote of “an avalanche of claims” coming from unauthorized immigrants. He described the fight against illegal immigration as a form of “‘national self protection.’” He argued that federal law must “combat the employment of illegal aliens.”
The larger cognitive frame structuring these statements might be described as IMMIGRATION IS A LOSING BATTLE. Illegal aliens are entering the country like an avalanche—dangerous, monolithic, overpowering, and unstoppable. Law enforcement officers are engaged in combat for national self-protection. In this metaphoric war, Supreme Court Justices become soldiers who must protect citizens against the impending alien offensive.
A growing body of research in cognitive linguistics demonstrates that human beings view the world in metaphoric terms. In attempting to comprehend new ideas, people borrow from familiar concepts. The metaphors floating in our minds determine our linguistic choices, which in turn affect social discourse and ultimately social action.
Thus, how we think metaphorically affects how we talk about problems and the solutions we formulate in response to those problems. This becomes a self- fulfilling prophecy: the more we repeat, circulate, and repackage certain metaphors, the more our conceptual domains become tied to a limited set of associations.
” —“Keith Cunningham-Parmeter, who wrote the piece, makes an argument for the ways in which language choices shape the broader immigration discussion, getting into the history of immigrant terminology in the courts and the legal and social consequences of simple words.” - Multi-American
(via informate)
(via robot-heart-politics)
nrdc:
“The return of wolves to Yellowstone is a powerful story about nature’s need for apex predators on the landscape – and a striking cautionary tale about what can happen when we remove them.” - Matt Skoglund, NRDC wildlife advocate. Read more: Predator Control is a Risky Road
Photo: NPS
(via mohandasgandhi)
Atheists in Pennsylvania Use Slavery Image for Billboard - COLORLINES -
What is wrong with people. UGH.
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But we need to consider that recognizing bias, blind spots and subject positions, predicting consequences, hesitating, following rigorous methodology, being open to the possibility of having made mistakes, and not simply assuming the correct answer but instead questioning and testing and questioning and testing and questioning and testing over and over your hypothesis, that is the core of skepticism and science. That’s what they’re about. The above examples, the atrocities “committed by science and reason” are in fact failures of individuals to remain true to the principles of science and reason. Science isn’t some kind of totalitarian epistemological monopoly on “ways of knowing”, it’s simply a concession to the difficulty and limits of knowing and trying to find the best available coping methods so we don’t all end up paralyzed in relativism or blindly (dangerously!) dashing off after intuitions and faith.
And perhaps most importantly to this particular topic, the tools with which we were able to push back against and undo the damages of previous bad science and bad reasoning were provided by better science and better reasoning. We now have evidence, and substantive arguments, with which we can counter claims that black people are lower on the evolutionary ladder, that women are less capable in logic and sciences than men, that homosexuality is a mental illness, that gender dysphoria can be successfully treated with therapy, electroshock or lobotomy, and the idea that nuclear weapons are a viable means of winning a war. If we didn’t have that evidence we’d be unable to fight against those claims, and they’d still be entrenched in our cultural consciousness. If we still were around to have a cultural consciousness, anyway.
” — A Matter Of Survival | Sincerely, Natalie Reed
“I have been exploring the night in a new way, stripping away normal visual references to focus not on the landscape itself, but on the vivid scars of light that pierce the darkness. Vast industrialized cities and iconic landmarks are represented as anonymous patterns of light, whilst the contours of buildings are stripped away to reveal the contents within.”
“
I mean, seriously, if “raising important issues” is all it takes to get some kind words from liberal authors, bloggers and activists, and maybe even votes from some progressives, just so as to “shake things up,” then why not support David Duke? With the exception of his views on the drug war, David shares every single view of Paul’s that can be considered progressive or left in orientation. Every single one. So where do you draw the line? Must one have actually donned a Klan hood and lit a cross before his handful of liberal stands prove to be insufficient? Must one actually, as Duke has been known to do, light candles on a birthday cake for Hitler on April 20, before it no longer proves adequate to want to limit the overzealous reach of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms? Exactly when does one become too much of an evil fuck even for you? Inquiring minds seriously want to know.
Meanwhile, at what point do you stop being so concerned about whether a presidential candidate is pushing the issues Paul raises (so many of which do need raising and attention), and realize what every actual leftist in history has realized, but which apparently some liberals and progressives don’t: namely, that the real battles are in the streets, and in the neighborhoods, and in movement activism? It isn’t a president, whether his name is Ron Paul or Barack Obama who gets good things done. It is us, demanding change and threatening to literally shut the system down (whether we mean Wall Street, the Port of Oakland, the Wisconsin state capitol, Columbia University, a Woolworth’s lunch counter, or the Montgomery, Alabama bus system) who force presidents and lawmakers to bend to the public will.
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