On the Up & Up

Though no one would ever think of using the term honor violence (we reserve that descriptor for brown people who live somewhere else, motivated by religious something-or-other or tribal something-or-other), one-third of women murdered every year in the United States are killed by their intimate partners. In 2005 that amounted to 1,181 women, or three women every day. To put that in perspective, the UN estimates there are 5,000 honor killings every year in the entire world. 5,000 in a world of 6 billion versus nearly 1,200 in a single country of 300 million. In other words, a woman in America runs a greater risk of being killed by her husband or boyfriend than a woman in Pakistan.

A woman in America runs a greater risk of being killed by her husband or boyfriend than a woman in Pakistan.

How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love Feminists. (via popmuslim)

A woman in America runs a greater risk of being killed by her husband or boyfriend than a woman in Pakistan.

(via silverqueen)

Let me reiterate that for you all …

A woman in America runs a greater risk of being killed by her husband or boyfriend than a woman in Pakistan.

(via dank-potion)

I think you’ve missed a crutial point though, let me point it out:

A woman in America runs a greater risk of being killed by her husband or boyfriend than a woman in Pakistan.

(via themindislimitless)

I’m going to go ahead and guess that more men are killed by their wives or girlfriends in the United States than in Pakistan, considering women commit quite a few domestic murders in the united states each year.

(via espionagis)

The point is that we think of the Middle East as a terrible place for women with oppressive laws and honor killings, when the truth is that technically it’s more dangerous to be a woman here.

(via stfuconservatives)

Thank you, espionagis, for taking this very relevant and striking post and saying “BUT WHAT ABOUT TEH MENZ?”

(via alimarko)

privileged kids go to counseling, poor kids go to jail.

—judge mathis, speaking the truth (via thatprettyoddfeminist)

facts on facts on facts

(via dumbthingswhitepplsay)

(via goldenheartedrose)

I find it very interesting that a large number of the young adult ‘gay and lesbian’ section on Amazon’s search has begun to fill with Christian books. Many seem kinda queer friendly, but often they aren’t even directed for young adult readers.

That is the imperial mind at work. Its premises are often embraced implicitly rather than knowingly: American lives are inherently more valuable; foreign lives are expendable in pursuit of American interests; the U.S. has the inalienable right to take action in other countries that nobody is allowed to take in the U.S. (just imagine: “An Iranian drone fired two missiles at a bakery in the northwest U.S. Saturday and killed four suspected militants, Iranian officials said, as Iran pushed on with its drone campaign despite American demands to stop. This was the third such strike in the country in less than a week” or “Thirty five women and children were killed by a Yemeni cruise missile armed with cluster bombs which struck an alleged Marine training camp in Texas”).

These self-venerating imperial prerogatives are the premises driving the vast bulk of American foreign policy and military discourse. It is certainly what’s driving the spectacle of so many people pretending that the punishment of Dr. Afridi is some sort of aberrational act which the U.S. and other Decent, Civilized Countries would never do.

Glenn Greenwald: The Imperial Mind

Glad to see someone point out the hypocricy of the outrage over Dr. Afridi’s sentencing. If you start a fake vaccination camp, thereby exposing hundreds of children to Hep B while they’re under the impression they’re protected (all while essentially committing treason) I’m not sure why you’d expect to be let off without a prison sentence. Unless you’re siding with the US, of course, in which case… just read the article.

(via rcabbasi)

Yep. Hypocrisy always wins when it comes to American foreign policy.

(via mehreenkasana)

(via emeraldtriangleprincess)

emeraldtriangleprincess:

Thinking About Terrorism & Just War, Talal Asad (pdf)

abstract:

Since 2001 a new urge to moralize the use of violence as an instrument of state policy has appeared in liberal democracies. The American idea of a War against Terror, and the European notion of confronting a global terrorist threat, have together merged with a discourse on humanitarian military action: the political/moral ‘responsibility to protect’ is no longer to be conﬁned to one’s own citizens. Renewed interest among academics in ‘just war’ theory, the tradition that seeks to humanize war through law, reﬂects this development. This article questions the assumption that there is an essential difference between war (civilized violence) and terrorism (barbaric violence). It argues that their similarity appears more clearly if we set intentions aside—such as the deliberate or accidental killing of ‘innocents’—and focus instead on three main facts: (a) modern war strategies and technologies are uniquely destructive, (b) armed hostilities increasingly occupy a single space of violence in which war and peace are not clearly demarcated, and (c) the law of war does not provide a set of ‘civilizing’ rules but a language for legal/moral argument in which the use of punitive violence is itself a central semantic element.

wnyc:

One in five people stopped last year by the New York City police department was a teenager between the ages of 14 and 18, according to a WNYC analysis of recently released police data.

And there were more than 120,000 stops of black and Latino kids between 14 and 18. The total number of black and Latino boys that age in the entire city isn’t much more than that – about 177,000 – which strongly suggests a teen male with dark skin in New York City will probably get stopped and frisked by the time he’s graduated from high school.

Map and story at WNYC.org.

(via motherjones)

There’s nothing wrong with being happy. There’s nothing wrong with enjoying something so much that it strips away all that irony and cynicism. And there’s nothing wrong with loving anything so much that it feels like it could pull your heart out of your chest and toss it on the floor. We build ourselves up to not do that, and then we build up the armor so thickly that we have trouble finding what’s underneath. We use that as an excuse to lash out at people who do feel stuff, who do like things (and I am, of course, mostly saying this about myself). It’s hard sometimes to remember that the world isn’t a place to glide through, so nothing can touch you. It’s a place to be experienced.

Todd VanDerWerff (via sparrowsarahnade)

(via suddeninevitablebetrayal)

smallrevolutionary:

peaceshine3:

Because its being done to poor black/hispanic kids.

thepeoplesrecord:

Why isn’t closing 40 Philadelphia public schools national news?

In what should be the biggest story of the week, the city of Philadelphia’s school system announced Tuesday that it expects to close 40 public schools next year and 64 by 2017. The school district expects to lose 40% of current enrollment to charter schools, the streets or wherever, and put thousands of experienced, well qualified teachers, often grounded in the communities where they teach, on the street.

Ominously, the shredding of Philadelphia’s public schools isn’t even news outside Philly. This correspondent would never have known about it save for a friend’s Facebook posting early this week. Corporate media in other cities don’t mention massive school closings, whether in Chicago, Atlanta, NYC, or in this case Philadelphia, perhaps so people won’t have given the issue much deep thought before the same crisis is manufactured in their town. Even inside Philadelphia the voices of actual parents, communities, students and teachers are shut out of most newspaper and broadcast accounts.

Full article

(via feministsbakecupcakestoo)

You start out in 1954 by saying “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968, you can’t say “nigger” — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like “forced busing,” “states’ rights,” and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now that you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things, and a byproduct of them is that blacks get hurt worse than whites.

Lee Atwater, a head republican strategist, in an anonymous interview in 1981. He is admitting that republicans use coded-language to appeal to the racists in their base. Because, as he always said, “people vote their fears.”

Lee, who would eventually become the head of the Republican National Committee, helped Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush win their Presidential elections by teaching them to use overtly-racist tactics.

When the N-word became taboo, Republicans began referring to black people in less-direct ways, with terms like “welfare queens.” They learned how to say the N-word, without saying the N-word.

Sadly, this still continues today. As seen in Newt Gingrich’s claim that Obama is a “food stamp President” and Rick Santorum’s assertion that he doesn’t “want to make black people’s lives better by giving them someone else’s money.”

(via thesoapboxschtick)

(via poweredbyavocado)

Oh, but this is not a matter of “glorifying” obesity. Glorifying obesity would take multiple TV shows depicting fat folks riding unicorns and devouring warm pies whilst counting the bags of money they’ve gained from being fat. Indeed, if simply putting fat people on television was enough to “glorify” obesity, then The Biggest Loser should have done the trick years ago. It hasn’t, because The Biggest Loser is a show built on the humiliation and punishment (self-inflicted or otherwise) of fat people. When we say that putting fat people on television will “glorify” their bodies, what we really mean is that we are uncomfortable giving fat people any attention that is not overtly negative. Because fat people need to be told: don’t be fat. Being fat means you are not entitled to a normal life. Being fat means you are not entitled to love. Being fat means you are not entitled to humanity, much less dignity.

http://www.fatshionista.com/ (via melasaurus)

(Source: blogzillaaaaa, via goldenheartedrose)

The vast majority of the 46 million Americans on food stamps don’t sign up because they want a handout or are looking to cheat the system. They receive benefits because times are hard, groceries are increasingly expensive, and they’re desperately trying to feed their families. We need to fight policies that put up insurmountable food access barriers, not encourage them. Outlawing mandatory fingerprinting is a good first step towards ensuring that all hungry people have a way to feed their families. New York is poised to end the system. Next up: Arizona.

How Fingerprinting Food Stamp Recipients Hurts Everyone - Lifestyle - GOOD (via sociolab)

(via feministsbakecupcakestoo)

queerio19:

fearlessfeminist:

historykrackenoftheabyss:

mothafickle:

so apparently tumblr did something awesome and connected all our tumblr accounts to facebook. it’s not directly logged in to our facebook accounts but just in case deselect that shit under ‘blog settings’.

SHIT.

Oohhhh Fuck no.

UGH wtf

(via feministsbakecupcakestoo)

"The amount of money an average woman loses to the pay gap could feed a family of four."

(Source: barackobama, via alimarko)

alimarko:

think-progress:

Romney vs. Reality

Rule #1: The Romney lies.

on tumblr: guys we need to have a serious discussion about the erasure of nonbinary trans* people
in real life: ok, I guess I have to explain to my entire class how "feminist" is not an insult