February 2012
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I'm sorry I sometimes use this as a place to tally...
The combination of this weather and the amount of moving about I’ve been doing lately has resulted in such an intense amount of pain that my body appears to be attempting to crawl out of itself. I just want to lay in bed and read and drink tea.
I always get such good suggestions from all of you, so I wonder: what are you currently reading?
Also, an addendum: I wish I weren’t so...
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I get drunk and yell about accessibility issues......
I just got back from a performance art showcase on the top floor of some building in Northhampton. It’s fun going to a place up three flights of stairs when one of your friends uses a wheelchair and others have various disabilities that affect mobility. It also helps that the lift on the public buses only works half the time and were antiquated 50 years ago. Also, thank you bus driver who...
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“People know what they do; frequently they know why they do what they do; but...”
– Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization (via lucjanlocke)
One of my favorite Foucault quotes, and I think perhaps one of the most useful for understanding his ideas, because placed in metonymic juxtaposition with his larger body of thought, it suggests not what Foucault’s philosophy is, but what...
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What the hell is wrong with me?
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The Native Object - Or Do Not Reduce Us to False...
selchieproductions:
Hippiesque environmentalists love indigenous peoples; we’re naturally all a homogenous group of people who, despite the fact that we come from 72 different countries and we amount to more than 300 million people, all believe that the earth has a soul and then there’s the money that we cannot eat and, perhaps most important of all, Chief Seattle’s words; ‘the earth does not...
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“The black revolution is much more than a struggle for the rights of Negroes. It...”
– Martin Luther King Jr., “A Testament of Hope” (1969)
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“The resolutely punitive turn taken by penal policies in advanced societies at...”
– Ordering Insecurity: Social Polarization and the Punitive Upsurge by Loïc Wacquant
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Ordering Insecurity: Social Polarization and the... →
Abstract: The sudden growth and glorification of the penal state in the United States after the mid-1970s (and in Western Europe two decades later) is not a response to the evolution of crime, but a reaction to — and a diversion from — the social insecurity produced by the fragmentation of wage labor and the destabilization of ethnoracial hierarchies following the discarding of the...
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I have quite a bit of reading to do, but all I’d like to do is sleep. This whole education thing would be a lot simpler if I didn’t have to gamble with the possibility of my pain level becoming worse. Is it too late to make coffee?
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“Haunting was the language and the experiential modality by which I tried to...”
– “Introduction to the New Edition” - Avery F. Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting And The Sociological Imagination (via effusionofbiopower)
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I've had a stressful and demoralizing day...
I’m also out of cigarettes and in a rather unpleasant amount of pain from my bitter bones. How are you doing? Anyone interested in a chat or possibly want to ask me something lighthearted?
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“It reminds me of the “bike to work” movement. That is also portrayed as white,...”
– comment left on the Racialious blog post “Sustainable Food & Priviledge: Why is Green always White (and Male and Upper-Class)” (via ouiominy)
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This whole frustration and rage thing isn't being...
I just fished out the remnants of tobacco from my coat pockets and am sprinkling it over paper tubes because it is too fine to roll using my machine. Should I be ashamed of this? This pathetic looking cigarette will be the only antidote for the clusterfuck that is my legal theory class.
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Chronic illness and PTSD.
alemonlemoned:
from the National Center for PTSD:
All people with PTSD have lived through a traumatic event that caused them to fear for their lives, see horrible things, and feel helpless. Strong emotions caused by the event create changes in the brain that may result in PTSD.
Most people who go through a traumatic event have some symptoms at the beginning. Yet only some will develop PTSD....
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“All white women in this nation know that their status is different from that of...”
– bell hooks (via partypropagandaprofessional)
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Tumblr, give me the patience to not go on a...
It will certainly be fun conversing about racism, sexism, and trans* discrimination in tort law with students who have clearly articulated their inability to understand basic feminist critiques in favor of prattling on about how they think these authors are self-righteous and irrelevant because they don’t feel comfortable grappling with ideas that challenge their pre-conceived notions...
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Damages at Trial: Reactions to Race-Based...
An important example of the tension between equal treatment and individualized claim resolution was the New York case of Griffin v. Brady, which was notorious at the time, but has since receded into obscurity. The New York Times on May 22, 1909 carried the headline, “Negro Not Equal to White: Suffers Less Humiliation in False Arrest, Court Holds.” George Griffin, a black Pullman...
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“You are going around to get a story of slavery conditions and the persecutions...”
– Thomas Hall, ex-slave of Orange County, North Carolina; from Been in the Storm So Long by Leon Litwack.
More than seventy years after emancipation, Thomas Hall, who had been born a slave in Orange County, North Carolina, could still shake with anger when he thought about the way his people had...
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I’m slipped into some sort of state of emotional numbness in response to a recent batch of readings. Perhaps it’s just gotten worse since I’ve been sick for a few days now, but I’m a bit embarrassed at my sensitivity. I haven’t had a panic attack related to my PTSD in a few months now. I suppose it’s expected that a topic so close to heart may cause a few frayed...
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if you enjoy being sad and feeling kind of... →
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“For medical experts, the appearance of external genitalia tends to be considered...”
– Regulating Middlesex by Anne Bloom, found in the anthology Fault Lines, edited by David M. Engel and Michael McCann
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“When a child is born, we ask: “Is it a boy or a girl?” When we ask...”
– Regulating Middlesex by Anne Bloom, found in the anthology Fault Lines, edited by David M. Engel and Michael McCann
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Fantastic anthology of articles pertaining to...
I considered posting sections of this book, but the entire thing is so informative and groundbreaking (in the sense that most legal scholars don’t actually evaluate the effects of cultural bias or systemic oppression in cases of injury, or torts).
The chapter it directly links to, Regulating Middlesex, gives an insightful and relatively easy to digest introduction to forced gender...
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Skramz is coming to visit in a month or so!
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I am sick and alone in the burrow.
I’ve got Frederic Jameson articles and several chapters about racism in U.S. tort law to get through.
I also just realized I have roughly 800 books, articles, zines, etc. on my computer and if anybody is looking for something in particular… I may be able to help you out.
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“Absurdity is what I like most in life, and there’s humor in struggling in...”
– David Lynch (via cosmicpebble)
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What are your plans for tonight?
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I’m having the sort of night where I’m battling with sleep. Guess I’ll watch another movie that will remind me of how sad everything is sometimes.
I’m more happy than not nowadays, I just wish the pain wouldn’t keep me from sleeping.
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Disabled people face unlimited unpaid work or cuts... →
flapjackstate:
Had to post this on account of it being SICKENING
Some long-term sick and disabled people face being forced to work unpaid for an unlimited amount of time or have their benefits cut under plans being drawn up by the Department for Work and Pensions. Mental health professionals and charities have said they fear those deemed fit to undertake limited amounts of work under a...
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Oh, downstairs bathroom window, how many times have we had to decide who is going to strip down half-naked in the freezing rain to squeeze through you?
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Fund for Troy Davis's family →
numol:
[via Dread Times (link to post)]
AFAICT the new deadline is the 28th [of February]. they’re only at 69% of their goal as of now, please pass this around and donate if possible.
The Davis family has had to bury three warriors for justice in the past seven months. Virginia Davis, the matriarch of the family, passed in April, just two weeks after the US Supreme Court denied Troy’s...
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Foucault and Feminism
workandentropy:
gfbertini:
Poststructuralism and contemporary feminism have emerged as two of the most influential political and cultural movements of the late twentieth century. The recent alliance between them has been marked by an especially lively engagement with the work of French philosopher Michel Foucault. Although Foucault makes few references to women or to the issue of gender...
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“This omnipresent cult of the body is extraordinary. It is the only object on...”
– Jean Baudrillard, America (via grandejouissance)
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There’s a party at my house tonight but all I wanna do is sleep.
I am too boring to be in college.
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Watchdoctorswithoutborders:
For six years the drug company Novartis has refused to back down on its legal case to stop the production of affordable generic medicines in India. MSF, with others, continues its resolute opposition to this attack on life-saving medicines that save millions of lives in developing countries.
Watch this one-minute summary of key events leading up to the Supreme Court case...
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NYPD's racist Stop-and-Frisk hits new record →
fuckyeahmarxismleninism:
Feb. 14 - New York Police Department officers last year stopped and questioned more than 680,000 people on the street.
The so-called stop-and frisks totaled 684,330, a record since the NYPD began yearly tallies of the tactic in 2002.
It’s a 14 percent increase over 2010.
The Wall Street Journal (http://on.wsj.com/yF0Re4 ) reports that it couldn’t be determined how many...
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“The modernist nation-state has, from the first, been grounded in a culture of legality. Its spirit, with a nod to Montesquieu, has always been the spirit of the law. Globalization and the growth of neoliberal capitalism intensify this by an order of magnitude. The latter, because of its contractarian conception of human relations, property relations, and exchange relations, its...
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“Well, for starters, I’d like us to think beyond and outside Stonewall. While...”
– Yasmin Nair, on radical queer history and the prison industrial complex for an interview about Captive Genders, edited by Eric Stanley and Nat Smith (via funkyfest)
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I apologize if posting sections of my readings for class is aggravating any of you. I figured that if I was going to wallow in the misery that is non-stop readings on neoliberalism and toxic tort cases, I would spread it around a little.
Even though no one whose opinion I hold in any regard has expressed this sentiment, I can’t dissuade myself from feeling that my extended medical leave...
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“The paradox of class at the millennium, in sum, must be understood in these terms. Neoliberalism aspires, in its ideology and practice, to intensify the abstractions inherent in capitalism itself: to separate labor power from its human context, to replace society with the market, to build a universe out of aggregated transactions. While it can never fully succeed, its advance over the...
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“The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the...”
– Karl Marx, The German Ideology: Part I: Feuerbach, Opposition of the Materialist and Idealist Outlook
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things are not okay