Audrey Mantey takes her students to the Gulf Coast

Watch it here.

This is remarkable.

Posted by stan as Analysis at 6:32 PM PDT

This link to the videos from the recent “Pornography and Pop Culture” conference in Boston. This is a goldmine of content; and serves as a very good primer on why pornography is more than a civil liberties issue.

Posted by stan as Analysis at 6:18 PM PDT

Thanks to YH for this link to Cheryl Cline’s “Payday” site devoted to the question of class. The bibliography alone is worth the time to check it out.

Posted by stan as Analysis at 12:30 PM PDT

…here is Black Agenda Report’s Richard Muhammad

Enabling Imus

American Life - Racism & White Privilege
Wednesday, 11 April 2007

by Richard Muhammad

In a horrific display of racist solidarity, white media men have circled their wagons around Don Imus, the career broadcast bigot who called the Rutgers women’s basketball team a bunch of “nappy headed hos.” All is forgiven, because “Imus is us,” say his defensemen. And they are right: Imus is them, irredeemably racist children of white privilege who believe their casual slandering of other races and genders are of no more concern than getting drunk at a frat party. The most important element of the tale is not Imus’ putrid outbursts, but the reflexive defense of him by his co-racists, who have “outed” themselves in the process. FULL

Posted by stan as News, Analysis at 2:50 PM PDT

[Hat tip to Lydia for this. Communications and the means of production of communications are in a completely recursive relation with every other aspect of every oppressive system. Funny how the whole Imus thing is morphing. More contradictions than you can shake a stick at. Defense of the team members as “not ho’s” because they fit good-girl archetypes. Defense of Imus as a free speech icon. Join Howard Stern - a misogynist asshole, and Larry Flynt - another misogynist asshole. Calling out misogynist song lyrics; never realizing that what is being called out is liberalism. I am reminded of Patricia Williams’ description of ethical dilemmas poised to law students in order to inoculate them from any but a liberal (abstract) interpretation of the law. I have a suggestion. Read this article, then go watch MEF’s Wrestling with Manhood. The most directly misogynistic violence is being legitimated as theater, or humor. There is a backlash against feminism, decades long now, that is amplifying its anti-woman message (and recruiting) by avoiding accountability via the internet. Raises fractious questions about “speech” to say this; but avoiding contradictions does not make them go away. It ensures that the ignored contradiction will rise up and one day bite us squarely on the ass. -SG]

How the web became a sexists’ paradise

Everyone receives abuse online but the sheer hatred thrown at women bloggers has left some in fear for their lives. Jessica Valenti, editor of Feministing.com, reports

Friday April 6, 2007
The Guardian

Last week, Kathy Sierra, a well-known software programmer and Java expert, announced that she had cancelled her speaking engagements and was “afraid to leave my yard” after being threatened with suffocation, rape and hanging. The threats didn’t come from a stalker or a jilted lover and they weren’t responses to a controversial book or speech. Sierra’s harassers were largely anonymous, and all the threats had been made online.

Sierra had been receiving increasingly abusive comments on her website, Creating Passionate Users, over the previous year, but had not expected them to turn so violent - her attackers not only verbally assaulting her (”fuck off you boring slut . . . I hope someone slits your throat”) but also posting photomontages FULL ARTICLE

Posted by stan as Analysis at 2:33 PM PDT

Not his words, mine. A suicide bombing in the Parliamentary cafeteria of the Green Zone means, basically, the most secure perimeter in Iraq was penetrated. That is a shift. Quantum.

The United States military, oxidized by four years of occupation, has crossed the event horizon for a tactical defeat in Iraq, more humiliating perhaps than Vietnam. Every day this continues is washing the hands of the United States Congress in blood.

Here is Escobar’s description from inside Iraq:

Apr 14, 2007

THE ROVING EYE
The Baghdad gulag
By Pepe Escobar

DAMASCUS - There are three overlapping wars in Iraq: the Sunni Arab guerrilla struggle against the US; strands of Sunni Arab guerrillas against assorted Shi’ite militias/death squads; and al-Qaeda in Iraq against the puppet, US-backed Iraqi government in the Green Zone. Make it four wars: the Sunni Arab guerrilla war against the government inside the Green Zone. Better yet, make it five wars: the Sadrists, from Sadr City to Kufa and Najaf, against the Americans.

All strands of these five overlapping wars will never allow the United States - or Anglo-American Big Oil - to control Iraq’s oil wealth. Even if the new oil law is ratified by Parliament before June, implementation will be a certified nightmare, and security for billions of dollars of necessary investment non-existent.

Strands of these five overlapping wars also will never accept the long-term imposition of vast US… FULL

Posted by stan as Analysis at 1:10 PM PDT

Stan here. I’ve been AWOL at Insurgent American and Feral Scholar. Just as I was about to get the 55-and-can’t-get-a-job jitters, I got hired, for a whopping $10 an hour, to work on a landscape crew in Durham, NC. It’s raining to day — and a good thing, too, because my body was creaking — so there has been no call to come in.

Swinging a mattock and carting dozens of loads of topsoil and mowing miles of grass are harder than they used to be, but just as mindless… so I have plenty of time to observe and think. I’ll just construct a list, in no particular order, of some of those observations and thoughts.

The boss is a 49-year-old white man, a hockey fan with six dogs at his half-million dollar home. The crew are five lads from Guanajuato state (that’s in Mexico). Their ages range from 18 to 35. So they are a pretty good demographic representation of the labor force now populating landscaping, construction, house-painting, grounds maintenance, et al. Male, Latino, between 18 and 35, and often hanging together with friends from down south. These guys are all from the same pueblo.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted by stan as Analysis at 1:34 PM PDT

Hipster-ism. n. 1. A largely generational and metropolitan-centered identity-set whose discourse is typified by irony and fixation with the superficial (clothes, music, hairstyle of an “indie / alternative” variety,) which is awash in self-serving cynicism (e.g. we can’t change anything, so we might as well just get drunk and mock those why try to) and which defensively shrinks from all expressions which could be characterized as “sincere.”

From Subject-and-Object.

James is a film maker on the West Coast. His film about the Veterans and Survivors March for Peace and Justice (Mobile to New Orleans) is linked here in the Video section. He is working on future AV concepts for Insurgent American.

Posted by stan as Analysis at 8:01 AM PDT

[Hat tip to Steve McClure for this link.]

Geography and time for occupier deaths in Iraq. This method communicates in a very unique and important way. From the portfolio of Tim Klimowcz.

Posted by stan as Analysis at 4:38 PM PDT