December 2011
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2011
I tweeted this morning “I feel like I’ve been in a fight but I won. Physically, but that’s also a good description of 2011.”
It doesn’t even feel like the fight’s over—far from it. Today feels, instead, like a break between rounds, like I’m perched on the stool in my corner breathing hard but with a wicked grin on my face as I gulp water and wipe...
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“What we are wearing is political and has really high stakes! The conditions of...”
– Dean Spade in an interview with Queer Couture (via majesticlegay)
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milkeemountainmama:
heard a song this morn called the bitch came back. complete with “i like her better when she’s on her knees” and “my friends laugh at me”
:/
i need somebody to make a song about “the dick” coming back and i like him better when my heel is poised neatly over his scrotum sack…but that might be offensive.
this strikes me as a perfect example of the Ellen Willis...
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“The difference is privileging in literature a hero as opposed to a heroine. The...”
– Frances Farmer Is My Sister — All The Sad Young Pretty Girls
so I was reading this this morning because a friend had tweeted a line from this post that caught my eye, and I sent it to Melissa with the comments:
So we’ve had this conversation, but I think this reminds me once again of...
“For the past few years, the number of nonwhites in newsrooms has steadily and...”
– Where Did Black Journalists Go? (via tballardbrown)
OK so kudos to NPR for doing this story but FUCK THEM BIG TIME for titling it “Where Did Black Journalists Go?” as if they packed their shit en masse and left newspapers. No. No, the onus is NOT on Black Journalists to have Not Gone...
“If she could shut up, because she has some good songs, right? And she has...”
– my mom read the gaga vanity fair cover story (via isabelthespy)
seeee. even though yes Gaga is a white lady who is Very Well Off, it really, really bugs me to hear things like this said about women in the public eye because WHEN IS IT EVER SAID ABOUT MEN in the same way? not that you have to like...
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christmas with family
I skipped Christmas in the south last year, had Christmas Eve with friends and Christmas Day with my sister (and more friends) and I didn’t regret not going “home.”
People my age who still refer to going to our parents’ as “home”—serious question—when does where we make our lives feel like home?
I’ve moved so much in my life, hopped from...
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WatchWhat Chris said. What a year.
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having occupied my parents' couch
made my father watch Up with Chris Hayes on the flatscreen, and installed a wireless router so I can work while I’m here.
I am now on the couch with green tea (not strong enough), a fleece blanket, watching the cat from the other side of the sliding glass door that is such a sign of living in a “safe” neighborhood, eh?
(The cat hates me. Before I leave on Tuesday it will have...
very filled with dreams: this is taking thoughts... →
isabelthespy:
i guess this is also kind of (related to) my problem with narratives in which a person (usually a dude) acts in ways that make another person (usually a lady) unhappy but it’s supposed to be okay because ~love~. to me it’s not love if it’s About You before it’s about the other person. i wish…
I used to be the person who would forgive ALL if a character in a book or movie...
Lucero in the airport
“Girl built for trouble from Arkansas/Boy with the most metal heart of all/Said we’re gonna work on that/when I get back/when I get back gonna break this heart”
Flying south for just a couple of days; been a year since I’ve seen my mother. And what a year. So many changes I am surprised that I still fit into the same clothes (physically, I mean: emotionally most things no...
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“Pedestrians scowl, make anti-white remarks, and shout anti-white rap songs to...”
– Ron Paul*, “Washington, D.C.: A Black Thing,” The Ron Paul Political Report, December 1989
Ron Paul* on rap music: It’s deliberately designed to annoy white people!
(If you don’t know, he says things far more poisonous than this bizarre snippet. But I gotta bring you news about political...
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“But what if Planned Parenthood and other prochoice organizations are suffering...”
– Democrats Are Still Compromising Away Women’s Rights — What’s Wrong with the Pro-Choice Movement’s Strategy?
So I have tried to post this damn thing three times and my Internet is flickering. ANYWAY.
I pick a fight with Planned Parenthood’s spokesMAN, talk to badass...
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“Dress suitably in short skirts & strong boots, leave your jewels in the...”
– Countess Markievcizv, 19th century Irish revolutionary, dispensing eternally relevant fashion advice. (via sharkyteeth)
Yes, it’s eternally relevant fashion advice, and yes she was born in the 19th century, but she didn’t become a revolutionary until the 20th century.
(via bronze-by-gold)
my...
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“But Occupy mercilessly exposed that the politics of Bloomberg – a kind of...”
– Life after Michael Bloomberg: New York looks to the left | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk
Twinkles to THIS.
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since
Hitchens died I’ve been thinking about writing. Not just reporting but the writing of it, the sentence-by-sentence level, choosing the right word, the right order, why it makes me so angry that someone will redo my sentence because they think they can do it better.
Maybe they can do it better but they can’t do it more me.
I’ve been going back to my favorite writers wherever...
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“What happens if you’re long-term held in captivity, as in a political prisoner,...”
– Derrick Jensen (via cultureofresistance)
(via guerrillamamamedicine)
all of this was lovely, but this bit right here really struck something with me. it’s resonating right in bits and pieces of my own personal damage.
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“I can’t help but think what an appropriate time it was–almost exactly a year to...”
– Václav Havel: From the Prague Spring to the Velvet Revolution to the Year of the Protestor | emptywheel
what a year, and it just keeps going.
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“Imagine the Angels of Bread
This is the year that squatters evict landlords,...”
– from Imagine the Angels of Bread
Martin Espada.
In May, when I’d lost my job, all my friends stepped in to keep me from being despondent. One offered solutions, advice, the calm support I’ve come to rely on so much from him. Another kept me smiling with jokes and flirting.
And a...
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“Some of the people at we are the 99% offer at least partial views of their...”
– Letter to a Dead Man About the Occupation of Hope | | AlterNet
Rebecca Solnit.
bronze-by-gold:
champagnecandy answered your question: So basically the difference between a professional troll and an admirable contrarian is prose style and social standing?
no. Hitchens was a professional troll. and a great writer. one can be both.
Having a nice prose style is not enough to make a great writer, though it’s popular—and safer—to think so. Joanna Russ, whose death earlier this...
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Watchmelissa:
Take This Book: The People’s Library at Occupy Wall Street
This is one story of the People’s Library at Occupy Wall Street, as told to me by many of the librarians behind it: how the library began, what happened after the November 15 raid on Zuccotti Park, and why they’re rebuilding. It’s a story about books, danger, and freedom.
Take This Book is an extended essay — just over 10,000...
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“This basic extension of empathy is one of the great barriers in understanding...”
– A Muscular Empathy - Ta-Nehisi Coates - National - The Atlantic (via guerrillamamamedicine)
this is why Ta-Nehisi Coates is amazing. Just read these two sentences over. Read them out loud. Taste them.
I do not mean a soft, flattering, hand-holding empathy. I mean a muscular empathy rooted in...
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Silence Exile and Crumpets →
Roz, who I had the pleasure of meeting and listening to tell stories over a bottle or two of crappy white wine with Laurie and Kieron in London last year, wrote this about Christopher Hitchens in 2003.
She knew Hitch the person from his Oxford days, and told us lovely tales of the beautiful young leftist who even then was a star.
I’ve only ever known Hitch as the person glamorizing the...
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The Wage Gap and White Privilege + Trans-Misogyny
transfeminism:
amydentata:
[TW: Economic violence, racism, rape]
iamateenagefeminist:
I’m very tired of hearing that women only make 77 cents on the male’s dollar. It’s not a correct statistic. It should read: White women only make 77 cents on the white man’s dollar.
That’s the real statistic.
Not all women are white. WOMEN don’t make 77 cents on the dollar, WHITE WOMEN do.
It’s...
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“That they were mine and not hers and it had been a competition this whole time,...”
– DEAR SUGAR, The Rumpus Advice Column #90: 94 Ways Of Saying Thank You - The Rumpus.net
what a beautiful way of saying what’s wrong in too many bad relationships. how perfect. and painful.
I have to talk myself constantly out of seeing things this way. Into instead just giving what I have to...
context-free texts from my friends
“I will pray for that to our goddess of slutdom.”