Category: Control

  • 15 History Books You Didn’t Get Assigned In School But Definitely Need To Read

    15 History Books You Didn’t Get Assigned In School But Definitely Need To Read

    They say that history is written by the victors, but what happens when those victors decide to leave the important details out? All too often, history texts and academic courses leave out the narratives of indigenous Americans, immigrants, forced and otherwise, black Americans, including slaves, the LGBTQ community, and the…

  • AOC visits CBP concentration camp

    AOC visits CBP concentration camp

    I am not in any way outraged or even slightly surprised by the kinds of things that folx are seeing in these camps. I am not outraged or even slightly surprised because THIS IS NOT ALL THAT NEW. This is how America treats prisoners–and that is what the current administration…

  • Concentration Camp Czar Quits

    Concentration Camp Czar Quits

    Trump’s Border “Protection” chief–John “I Love To Make Foreign Children Suffer” Sanders–has resigned from his position. Vice News reports that not long after attorneys working for refugees and migrants found kids separated from parents by Custom and Border Patrol in Texas facilities that were living in complete squalor, the senior…

  • The Corporate Capture of Social Change

    The Corporate Capture of Social Change

    Rather than discussing social change as being rooted in rights, justice and systemic reform, the new corporate conception of social change sees inequality, climate change and poverty as a set of technical problems with market solutions. For these people fixing the world is not about challenging powerful interests and overhauling…

  • Neoliberalism promotes addiction

    Neoliberalism promotes addiction

    We live in a sociocultural situation that maximizes alienation at every turn. It’s the reason that even when most folx are “celebrating” in social spaces like bars, they mostly experience “being together alone.” This is why I have come to object to how much QUILTBAG* spaces center on alcohol or…

  • Queering and Wyrding

    Queering and Wyrding

    ‘Q’ then, will never be a coherent letter tacked as a bridge on some list of identities. The past decade shows the poverty or ruin of every attempt to do so. We’ve said already that these words are magic. We might add that they are wyrd – the Old English for fate…

  • 5 Things Straight Women Should Stop Saying to Queer Women – Everyday Feminism

    …if straight women can perpetuate oppression with one another, then it makes sense that they can perpetuate it with queer women, too – and across multiple layers. Although all women are oppressed because of our gender, straight women still have privilege because of their sexual identity: That’s the very nature…

  • The Hierophant: There is more-so than the just-so

    The Hierophant: There is more-so than the just-so

    The most intriguing nuances of experience cannot be wholly captured by words. Positive claims within consciousness-as-such can only apprehend so-much of our being-world as an encompassing phenomenon (Jaspers 1970b: 18-22). We have known this since the very beginning of recorded thinking. It appears as a running critique in diverse myths,…

  • A long tradition… Black Women leading a charge for justice with little or no help

    A long tradition… Black Women leading a charge for justice with little or no help

    Why has it taken more than 20 years and testimony by about 50 accusers to get to this moment [R. Kelly finally charged for all of his sexual abuses]? Because we live in a country where a history of racism and sexism — rooted in slavery — has made assaults…

  • OP/ED When the Suffrage Movement Sold Out to White Supremacy

    OP/ED When the Suffrage Movement Sold Out to White Supremacy

    A committed egalitarian, [Frances E. W. Harper] balked when suffragists embraced a definition of “women” that included only the educated and the affluent. In a now famous speechgiven in New York, Harper told the audience that fates of black and white, rich and poor were “all bound up together.” She…

  • Taking a razor to toxic masculinity

    Taking a razor to toxic masculinity

    Today, the battle for men’s souls reached an extraordinary new frontier: men’s shaving brands. On Tuesday, Gillette released an ad that takes stock of a handful of cultural issues that have always lingered just beneath the surface but became full-blown talking points over the past year: sexual harassment, bullying, and…

  • Julián Castro 2020 

    Julián Castro 2020 

    Julian Castro, Secretary of HUD in the Obama administration and a former mayor of San Antonio, Texas, …vowed to introduce universal pre-kindergarten for American children by expanding a program he introduced as mayor of San Antonio. He also promised to bring the US back into the Paris climate change agreement…

  • Mistaken Identity by Asad Haider | Books | The Guardian

    Mistaken Identity by Asad Haider | Books | The Guardian

    Identity politics finds critics everywhere. Throw a rock at a rack of newspapers and you’ll probably hit an editorial condemning it. Conservatives such as Republican House speaker Paul Ryan blame it for polarisation, while liberals like the Columbia University historian Mark Lilla hold it responsible for Donald Trump’s victory, applying…

  • Escape From the Trump Cult

    Escape From the Trump Cult

    Millions of Americans are blindly devoted to their Dear Leader. What will it take for them to snap out of it? …manipulating the media, Trump tore pages from the us-against-them playbook of the European far right and presented them to a segment of the American public already primed to receive…

  • The “Yellow Vests” Show How Much the Ground Moves Under Our Feet

    The “Yellow Vests” Show How Much the Ground Moves Under Our Feet

    About the only class of people who seem unable to grasp this new reality are intellectuals. Just as during Nuit Debout, many of the movement’s self-appointed “leadership” seemed unable or unwilling to accept the idea that horizontal forms of organization were in fact a form of organization (they simply couldn’t…

  • Four Days Trapped at Sea With Crypto’s Nouveau Riche

    Four Days Trapped at Sea With Crypto’s Nouveau Riche

    Wow. Cyber capitalism fetishized to the point of apotheosis. It’s only my first day, but it’s clear this is not the Burning Man-style celebration of the liberatory potential of decentralization I was promised. This is a locked-room, hard-sell pitch session to a literally captive audience of high-roller crypto investors, whose…

  • American Geographic Polarization

    Research shows that partisans aren’t purposefully walling themselves off. There is no intentional Big Sort. Such geographic polarization—where supporters of one or the other party cluster together in homogeneous enclaves, producing localities with lopsided distributions of political preferences—has been growing steadily in the United States since the 1970s. According to…

  • We need to understand that disaster is slow

    Defining a disaster as an “event” has a history extending to the 1960s, when federal funds were spent to model the social impact of a nuclear attack. To do this, Civil Defense officials commissioned studies of proxies of an attack, like earthquakes, tornadoes and hurricanes, all disasters that affect multiple…