August 2012
91 posts
July 2012
321 posts
STFU, Conservatives: Reddit, are you aware how dangerous the ask-a-rapist thread is? →
stfuconservatives.net
(trigger warning for rape)
From the front page of reddit, user DrRob discusses with other users why the ask a rapist thread was dangerous.
Hi all. I’m a psychiatrist. My main area of clinical work is emergency psychiatry, and my main research interest is functional…
Book: Julian Assange Held Back Wikileaks About U.S., Israel →
infowars.com
From Infowars here
“People on both sides of the argument have been quick to rush to judgement on the motivations of Wikileaks’ Julian Assange. Moral crusader or compromised egotist? In a new book about Assange written by the Guardian journalists with whom he worked closely, Assange is quoted as saying that negative cables concerning the United States & Israel were deliberately omitted from initial Wikileaks releases last year to prevent the organization being stereotyped as anti-American.
” ‘We shouldn’t go exposing, for example Israel, during the initial phase….the exposure of these other bad countries (Russia, Arab countries) will set the tone of American public opinion,’ Assange is quoted as saying in the book.”
Encounters with FARC-EP in Toribio, 'Caucagistán,' Colombian
This is a marvelous and insightful piece on the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia - People’s Army and where it stands today in the struggle to liberate Colombia from imperialism and the neoliberal oligarchy. Rough translation by redguard; read the original Spanish here.
By Valerio Tomassino
In less than three months a team of journalists traveled to several guerrilla camps in southwestern Colombia. This is a region where life is intense activity of the Colombian armed conflict. One of them wrote this story.
The news last night completed its ideological work: in a few minutes we will meet with a commander of the Joint Western Command of the FARC-EP, and despite knowing the capacity for deception of the Colombian mass media, we continually feel a certain fear that we will find a kind of Pancho Villa and a barbarian.
Upon arrival, the image disappears; RCN sold us immediately. Out of uniform, the commander is as much a Colombian peasant as any. Talkative and happy, he warmly welcomes us and tells us about his work as a guerrilla strategist that protects the Cordillera Central of a huge military operation. From his head emerged many of the stratagems of what a colleague called the “Stalingrad” of Colombia. His easy speech and friendly talk gives the impression of not being aware of the magnitude of his military responsibility — not abandonment, but the tranquility and humor with which he discusses the military adventures of the fighters under his command in this ice cream parlor.
Play
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This expectation for Asian American artists to represent one’s community “positively” at the expense of an expansive and complicated portrayal — the “burden of representation” — is something that Parreñas-Shimizu feels strongly about. “The demand to make films that represent your community does an injustice to the actual work the filmmakers are trying to do,” Parreñas-Shimizu says. “You can’t film an idea. You have to film very concrete things, a very concrete person who’s going through some kind of dilemma. This person may not be a positive person. I’m thinking of the work of Quentin Lee’s Ethan Mao, which features a character who’s bullied and silenced by his own father for his sexuality, and then wields a gun against his own family. I think it’s a story worth telling. But once you make the demands of, ‘Is this the kind of visibility we want?’ it can be unfair to the goals of the filmmaker, which is to tell stories that help make spaces for these people.”
At the same time, Parreñas-Shimizu understands and feels the importance of Asian Americans wanting to see themselves in a way that hasn’t been seen before. This is why she was instantly mesmerized by the breakout of NBA player Jeremy Lin, whose sudden emergence was coined “Linsanity.” “It’s interesting to watch all the cameras look for Asians in the audience, but Asians have always been there,” insists Parreñas-Shimizu, a long-time fan of sports teams from her hometown of Boston. “Participation in sports is itself an assertion of citizenship and belonging. For me, being a Filipina immigrant in Boston and just loving the Celtics and basketball, I remember loving that school was canceled because the Celtics won the NBA championship and you’re part of that group in the subway going to the celebration…But yeah, you see that hunger. I know that hunger. It’s painful.”
But the medicine that so many Asian American men use to heal that pain — what Parreñas-Shimizu calls a “phallic masculinity,” or what other scholars call a “hegemonic masculinity” — only hurts others in the process. “I think it’s very easy to define masculinity in terms of the hero who saves the day and beats everyone up and sleeps with a ton of women. So if you define masculinity in that way, the Asian American man has to fall short. You’re still proposing a straitjacketed definition of what is gender and sexuality for Asian American men,” says Parreñas-Shimizu. “I want to open up a world where someone like William Hung can be sexy! And the thing is, people did find him sexy! He got marriage proposals! So if we look at masculinity, and what people want from it, it reveals that there’s something very limited in that kind of phallic masculinity. It’s not really good for people.”
That tension between the desire for national recognition and the danger in subscribing to a phallic masculinity (which undergirds the nation) is what drove Parreñas-Shimizu to unearth the vast filmic repertoire of Asian American masculinities. “After I toured for two years for my first book, people kept asking, ‘Now that you’ve proven the hypersexuality of Asian American women, what do you have to say about the asexuality of Asian American men?’ I thought, “We have to historicize it and see if that’s really what’s going on. Because if it’s true that Asian American men have only been seen as asexual and effeminate, then how do you make sense of Sessue Hayakawa or James Shigeta? These huge heartthrobs from almost 100 years ago, fifty years ago? So many women fainted at the sight of their sexiness and beauty. So we have to be very careful about creating that blanket statement.”
” —So loving Terry K Park’s interview with Dr. Celine Parreñas-Shimizu about her creative life, her scholarship, and her latest book, Straitjacket Sexualities: Unbinding Asian American Manhoods in the Movies on the R today. (via racialicious)
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South African runner Caster Semenya will carry South Africa’s flag at the opening ceremony of the London 2012 Olympics.
“It’s such a privilege for me to do such a big thing like that,” Semenya said in a recorded statement, according to The Guardian. “To carry the flag for the team, it’s such a big thing.”
In 2010 Semenya became a household name not because of her athletic abilities but because the 21-year old faced a year of dehumanizing public speculation about her sex.
“I have been subjected to unwarranted and invasive scrutiny of the most intimate and private details of my being,” Semenya said in late March 2010 when the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) declared her to be “female-enough” to compete as a woman.
” —Jorge Rivera, “Caster Semenya To Carry South Africa’s Flag In Olympic Ceremony,” Colorlines 7/26/12 (via racialicious)
Nuclear power plants shut down during heat wave threatens health of millions →
nytimes.com
In this must read piece (one that defines my career and the core theme of this tumblr), the New York Times contextualizes the issue of climate impacts on America’s aging infrastructure in this solid piece, “Rise in Weather Extremes Threatens Infrastructure.”
I’ve written about about weather-related nuclear power plant shut downs before (see here). When a power plant shuts down in the middle of a summer heat wave and drought, people’s lives are threatened, especially the elderly and children if they lose air-conditioning or power to essential products.
Nuke plants suck water from either a river or a lake. And the water is used to cool the reactors (those big, wide towers you see with “smoke” billowing out is actually steam). After the water circulates through the plant, it’s dumped back into the river or lake (this impacts fish and wildlife, because the water is very hot, killing or making ecosystem uninhabitable).
The water has to be below a certain temperature range in order for it to effectively cool the towers. But, what happens if the river water is too hot? The plant has to shut down.
Up until 2007, this has never happened in the United States before. But now it’s a regular occurrence. Rivers and lakes are heating up. Nuclear power plants in France shut down during a dangerous heat wave that killed 10s of thousands(!) of people in the early 2000s. Now, the US is experiencing a similar situation. Browns Ferry nuclear power plant shut down several times since 2007 because the lake it uses for cooling became too shallow and too hot. The result? No power (and therefore no air-conditioning) for nearly millions of people during the hottest and most dangerous summers in the south.
The Times does a way better job than I ever could covering the many issues of climate impacts on America’s aging and weakening infrastructure. As an climate adaptation professional, the list of problems is what I specialize in. Have a look:
Weather Extremes Leave Parts of U.S. Grid Buckling
“From highways in Texas to nuclear power plants in Illinois, the concrete, steel and sophisticated engineering that undergird the nation’s infrastructure are being taxed to worrisome degrees by heat, drought and vicious storms.
…a US Airways regional jet became stuck in asphalt that had softened in 100-degree temperatures, and a subway train derailed after the heat stretched the track so far that it kinked — inserting a sharp angle into a stretch that was supposed to be straight. In East Texas, heat and drought have had a startling effect on the clay-rich soils under highways, which “just shrink like crazy,” leading to “horrendous cracking,” said Tom Scullion, senior research engineer with the Texas Transportation Institute at Texas A&M University. In Northeastern and Midwestern states, he said, unusually high heat is causing highway sections to expand beyond their design limits, press against each other and “pop up,” creating jarring and even hazardous speed bumps.
Excessive warmth and dryness are threatening other parts of the grid as well. In the Chicago area, a twin-unit nuclear plant had to get special permission to keep operating this month because the pond it uses for cooling water rose to 102 degrees; its license to operate allows it to go only to 100. According to the Midwest Independent System Operator, the grid operator for the region, a different power plant had had to shut because the body of water from which it draws its cooling water had dropped so low that the intake pipe became high and dry; another had to cut back generation because cooling water was too warm.”
