bahahahahahaha. trees. getting revenge.

dannielle:

my love is never-ending.

(Source: youhadafastlifee)

TRUTH. BOOM.

dannielle:

barackobama:

idrownideas:

The best campaign counter-attack video I HAVE EVER SEEN. Obama 2012 

”So we’re going to call their BS when we see it and we need your help to call them on it too and set the record straight. So share this, tweet it, facebook it, I keep hearing about tumblr and whatever that is…please use that too. Thank you.”

-Stephanie Cutter / Deputy Campaign Manager at Obama for America. 

And a Tumblr shout-out. 

omg. the truth team. this is my new favorite thing. 

Important.

thespiritwas:

in 5 hours over 700 people reblogged my post about CeCe choosing a plea deal. wow! to me that communicates that we’re outraged by interpersonal & systemic transphobia, racism, ableism, sexism and classism that we know all to well happens every day. it communicates that we’re going to keep fighting…

Worth a read regarding teen pregnancy, body- and sex-shaming, capitalism, etc.

fatandtheivy:

Chanel Dubofsky and I have been galavanting around the city talking abortion, 16 and Pregnant, nail polish, and critiques of capitalism. She recently attended the CLPP conference and went to a panel discussion called “Teen Families Take the Lead.” Upon her return to the city and after…

comicallycool:

Don’t Ask, Don’t TELL

With the formal end of DADT less than a month away, GQ’s Chris Heath spent six months assembling an oral-history-of-sorts about what it was like to be a gay man serving in the U.S. military. The resulting piece, which appears in our Sept 2011 issue and runs a bit longer at GQ.com, is funny, sad, horrifying and, above all, surprising. Life under DADT is both everything—and nothing—like one might expect. A brief sample below, from a heartbreaking section of the piece titled “Invisible Partners”:

Air Force #4 (senior airman, four years): “Right now our relationships don’t exist.”

Air Force #3: “I’ve had three deployments [while] with the same person. Every time it’s been ‘All right, see you later.’ All the spouses get together, do stuff. He’s just there by himself, fending for himself.”

Marines #2: “The relationship lasted for about four years, but I always felt like I was disrespecting him, to have to pretend he didn’t exist when I went to work. When I got deployed, he was there with my family when I left. It kind of sucked—to shake his hand and a little pat on the back and ‘I’ll see you when I see you’ kind of thing. And when you’re getting ready to come back, the spouses were getting classes—here’s how you welcome your Marine back into the family—and my boyfriend didn’t get any of that. I had a really hard time adjusting to being home. We tried to make it work for a year but he was getting more and more paranoid about people finding out about us. It killed me that he felt that way because of me. I don’t think we ever really had a chance, ultimately.”

Air Force #3: “When I was deployed, every Sunday we would sit down on opposite sides of the world and we would each order a pizza and we would watch a movie together over Skype. We weren’t doing anything bad except trying to spend some time together. But there was no ‘I love you.’ Certainly nothing sexual, or anything like what some straight guys do over Skype.”

Navy #2 (captain, twenty years): “Personally, I haven’t had a lot of struggles. The hardest thing that I faced was about eight years ago. I was dating somebody for about two years who had gotten out of the army. He was HIV positive, and I didn’t know that, and he ended up dying—it just happened very quickly. I am not positive, luckily. So I had a lot of difficulties grasping with that personally, dealing with his death, and I had to take time off work, but still not tell them. I couldn’t go to the doctor or the psychologist. There wasn’t really anybody to talk to.”

A Report from the White House
Marines #1: ”Since I’m a single officer in the Marine barracks and I’ve got the highest security clearance you can get, I also serve at the White House in close quarters with President Bush and President Obama at social events. Very seldom was the president ever alone, but one time the president had said, ‘Go and get the vice president,’ and all the straphangers went, and the president went in the Blue Room and was just standing there waiting for Biden. And there was no Secret Service around or anything, and I went, ‘Fuck it, I’m going to go and talk to the president about “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” ’ He was looking out south—there’s an incredible view down past the Washington Monument to the Jefferson. And I just stepped in and said, ‘Sir?’ and he turned around and walks to me and I just started: ‘You know, sir, I want to let you know that there are a number of us that work very close to you who appreciate very much what you’re doing on “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”—more than you probably realize.’ And he was shaking my hand, he looks up and it’s like…he got it. I said, ‘I want to thank you for this.’ And he goes, ‘No, I want to thank you. Thank you for your service, and thank you for your courage.’”

That last one was pretty legit.

A very interesting read. Even if I do make it a habit not to read most of what comes from GQ.

psychotropicpolitics:

emilytheslayer:

spastasmagoria:

confuzzeldmind:

fearknot:

mishahasherpes:

joy-joyous:

Badass motherfucker of the century.

My hero

 #another motherfucker wanna tell me we don’t need libraries? #another person want to tell me that librarians fighting for social justice is not my calling? #kiss my ass #this is where i need to be

I think it’s the morally correct thing to do, given the circumstances. Also, I think it’s awesome that kids think these books are cool because they’re banned :) I love teenagers so hard sometimes.

Loooove. I hope this kid grows up to be a librarian. This is amazing and I want to write papers about it.

A radical militant librarian after my own heart, says this former president of a club that read only banned books

fatandtheivy:

Fat discrimination.  Because that’ll make fat people healthy. 

wicked-grin:

alliterate:

[video is the music video for Beyonce’s “Run the World (Girls)”]

inkstone:

squintyoureyes:

hopesichord:

I’m sorry, but the fact that there exists any progressive human being who thinks this song is inappropriate in its politics is unfathomable to me.

#THE MEN HAVE FUCKING BODY SHIELDS #YOU CAN ALL GO HOME #did you all sleep through the girl power movement or #god damn #actually my biggest issue with the girl power movement is that it was always very white and very thin and very peppy and very safe. so i will happily take this WOC-filled music video about militaristic feminism any day of the fucking week

check out those tags

hadn’t seen this yet. had been avoiding the commentary because i figured it would all be coded in racist and slut shaming language - or just plain overt fucked-uped-ness.

but this is fucking badass

When I wasn’t looking, Beyonce became one of the most fascinating people for me to pay attention to.

(Source: demarches)

I once spent a year only reading books written by women. If I remember correctly, this was one of the first years I was living in Seattle - on my own, fresh faced from college - and I think a lot of my motivation came from not being surrounded by a lady community and a political community and trying hard to hold onto some straws. Which may sound like I don’t think it was a worthy effort - it was. It was also hard. Maybe because I spent six months trying to read one book, so I a) didn’t read as much as I would have liked in total that year; b) spent half a year reading a book I didn’t particularly like; and c) unfairly came to kind of resent the whole project, even though I spent six months trying to read Crime & Punishment a couple years later. (Incidentally, after finishing each book I had the same reaction: in whole, and in hindsight, I liked both a lot; I just am not sold on how long they each took me to read.)

Sometime around August of that year I started looking at books in bookstores written by men with a certain amount of longing. Books I really wanted to read but through some self-imposed regimen I was forbidden from reading for another five months. My “To Read” wish list grew exponentially as I continued to count down months until the next January. When, in my head, it seemed like the floodgates would open. I admit I probably wasn’t working very hard at my project. I could have put some more effort into finding books that intrigued me just as much as the ones I wasn’t letting myself read. Still, in bookstores of any size and any ownership (independent, chain, small, giant, full price, half price, etc) - the vast majority of books written by women, that were being featured on the “New and Noteworthy Paperbacks” tables, were all about the same thing: either a romantic comedy, a romantic drama, a romantic thriller, a health scare, a career vs. home dilemma, how to hold a family together in this crazy world, or trials and tribulations of best friends. I don’t pretend that the books I read by men are all that different from each other either, their story lines just appeal to me more maybe or they’re easier to find (yes).

I also don’t think there aren’t any women writing stories I want to read. It was also in this year that I read Margaret Atwood, Zadie Smith, Octavia Butler, and Jhumpa Lahiri made it to my shelf. At the beginning of this, I said I spent a year on this project. More accurately, I spent a year not reading books by men from North America or Western Europe. Which I realized even then was a cop out - but also remarkaby more difficult than I had anticipated. I think after Darkmans I read One Hundred Years of Solitude and then I read a history of queer politics which was co-edited by a man.

Still, my favorite authors are men and I feel a little guilty about that. I know I still haven’t done enough work to shake up my reading list. I also blame lists like Esquires and the publishing industry and the book selling industry and the agents involved in making it easier for men to have books made and marketed. For the people who create a climate where the majority of books by women on the “New and Noteworthy Paperbacks” tables will be print versions of Julia Roberts movies (movies, by the way, that I love and some of which, are actually pretty great). And I’m a part of that climate too. Voting with my dollar and my library card.

fatandtheivy:

“When the show went to No. 1 in December 1988, ABC sent a chocolate “1” to congratulate me. Guess they figured that would keep the fat lady happy—or maybe they thought I hadn’t heard (along with the world) that male stars with No. 1 shows were given Bentleys and Porsches. So me and George Clooney [who played Roseanne Conner’s boss for the first season] took my chocolate prize outside, where I snapped a picture of him hitting it with a baseball bat. I sent that to ABC.”

(Source: fountainsound)

So there’s this law being debated in Germany right now that would prevent employers from using Facebook (and other strictly social sites) when recruiting. This provision is part of a larger bill aimed at workplace privacy. Employers would still be able to access profiles on professionally aimed social networking sites like LinkedIn.

There are a few things that rile me up about social networking and privacy: 1. People who expect complete privacy online. 2. People who don’t take the steps that are available to protect their privacy. 3. People who then get worked up about the access people have to their information.

And the biggest pet peeve: 4. The fact that people in a position to make a decision about someone else’s future would use public information to disproportionally judge a person’s character and potential. This goes hand-in-hand with the idea that every employee is an extension of their employer. That the employee’s opinions are the employer’s opinions.

I realize that some of these are at odds with each other. I realize that there are perfectly legitimate reasons to use what someone finds on Facebook and other social networking sites to discipline or terminate an employee. However, from stories I’ve heard, it’s more often than not a really classless move. Co-workers using what they see on Facebook to leap to conclusions about a person and then report them. Employers assuming that because a person enjoys XYZ activity, they won’t be professional or respectable at work (or that their experience which otherwise would qualify them for a position is invalidated). Customers who see a personal opinion from an employee and assume that it represents the employer or that it represents the complete context of that opinion.

In this day and age, with all these conversations around privacy controls, we can’t keep the conversation focused on how you control privacy. We have to also have conversations about what someone does with the information they discover. Some may think we do talk about this when we talk about privacy laws preventing companies from selling our personal information. Yet a company responsible for keeping our identifying information in their servers is not the same as other, actual people relating to us using the same information.

Do I think people should be more careful online? Yes. Do I think people who aren’t careful, and then complain when they’re surprised their information is public, are being ridiculous? Yes. But do I think that that same public information justifies any consequences? Unless the person is admitting to or actually committing crimes, then not in the slightest.

We shouldn’t expect The Government to hold our hands and legislate privacy concerns into a nearly forgotten nightmare. We should expect The Government to provide the infrastructure, support, and tools to protect ourselves.Germany’s new bill is taking some interesting steps to drawing that line.

wicked-grin:

sexartandpolitics:

unburyingthelead:

Tensions Flare Over Proposed Mosque on Staten Island

In the last few months, Muslim groups have encountered unexpectedly intense opposition to their plans for opening mosques in Lower Manhattan, in Brooklyn and most recently in an empty convent on Staten Island.

Some opponents have cited traffic and parking concerns. But the objections have focused overwhelmingly on more intangible and volatile issues: fear of terrorism, distrust of Islam and a linkage of the two in opponents’ minds.

“Wouldn’t you agree that every terrorist, past and present, has come out of a mosque?” asked one woman who stood up Wednesday night during a civic association meeting on Staten Island to address representatives of a group that wants to convert a Roman Catholic convent into a mosque in the Midland Beach neighborhood.

“No,” began Ayman Hammous, president of the Staten Island branch of the group, the Muslim American Society — though the rest of his answer was drowned out by catcalls and boos from among the 400 people who packed the gymnasium of a community center. […]

But just 20 minutes earlier, as Bill Finnegan stood at the microphone, came the meeting’s single moment of hushed silence. Mr. Finnegan said he was a Marine lance corporal, home from Afghanistan, where he had worked as a mediator with warring tribes.

After the sustained standing ovation that followed his introduction, he turned to the Muslims on the panel: “My question to you is, will you work to form a cohesive bond with the people of this community?” The men said yes.

Then he turned to the crowd. “And will you work to form a cohesive bond with these people — your new neighbors?”

The crowd erupted in boos. “No!” someone shouted.

(via @chrislhayes)

Things get ugly when America’s whiteness is threatened, don’t they?

blarg… blarg. blarg. blarg.

God, it just makes me really, really sad. All of this - people unable to look past their own fears, their own privilege, the fact that maybe they’re part of an oppressive network of systems that privileges them over other groups, and that unless you’re actively fighting those systems you are a part of the problem.

Ditto to all below. I think I’ve seen this - or similar - before, but it’s always a good refresher.

genderqueer:

pansexualpride:

queerwatch:

bitterbuffalo:

What’s this? An anti-rape campaign that focuses on preventing rape instead of preventing women leaving the house? Holy crap it’s Christmas. 

mencanstoprape.org

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