links for 2009-04-23
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"He was the eldest son of a military family, and named after his father, a decorated officer.
In addition to the group beatings, waterboarding, electric shock, sleep deprivation, sound/noise torture, starvation, dehydration, he was also forced to eat human feces and vomit, in accompaniment with the beatings. They had replicas of 'tiger cages' they kept him in. He wrote me that after awhile of knowing it was all a training, he couldn't hold the frame anymore and it became nothing but his reality. His sense of time and self evaporated.
Mission accomplished.
Although his captors were supposed to be Vietcong, they were largely white kids who'd been instructed to scream everything in 'fake' Oriental accents that would have been absurd if they weren't so sadistic. They were supposed to target his vulnerabilities, which in his case, meant humiliating him for being African-American. It was more racist and sexual abuse than he'd ever face from the Vietcong, that's for sure."
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"I associate debate with power games, attempts at manipulation, and a confrontational mindset. Is this gendered? Well, maybe — I’ve noticed that 90% of the people who have attempted to wrangle me into debates and refused to let me stop talking about the subject even after I’ve expressed my clear desire to stop… are men. Often men who are around my age, who say they’re delighted to find someone articulate! political! and informed! The mere fact that I’m capable of debating means I must want to listen to their theories on Ayn Rand or… whatever. And then rebut them! Rather than ignoring the argument I’ve heard 100 times and talking about cute graphics on Animal Crossing, which isn’t any less productive, certainly, and doesn’t make my heart pound or make me think the other person is a jackass."
I *so* relate to this.
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"I won’t be bullied into responding on someone else’s terms. I do the best I can to be faithful to the online communities I’m a part of. I’m limited by my offline commitments to my activism, to my work, to my life and my self-care. The truth is that for some people, nothing I do will ever be enough. I have to sit with that and know it’s true and there’s nothing I can do to change that fact.
I’m sure I’m going to screw up along the way, as we all do. Call me out, say how you feel about something I did or said. But personal attacks and vendettas aren’t going to be where I engage."
LOVE this.
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"It occurred to me that perhaps a more appropriate phrase might be ‘the new etiquette’. That is – things like how to ask a transperson what gender identity they prefer, or what ethnic description, etc. doesn’t really bear any relationship to a government sending the secret police to stamp out those criticising it. But they do bear a strong relationship to Victorian Britons reading manuals on how to propose marriage, how to discuss religion, or whatever.
I think this is quite a nice way to look at the matter – though like any analogy it’s not perfect. I like it firstly because it locates the ideas of politeness and rudeness at the centre of the issue, downplaying the element of ‘politics’. It also clarifies the relationship of political correctness to freedom of speech – an etiquette manual aims to help people to do certain things more smoothly and confidently, rather than dictating what they should and shouldn’t do."
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"A couple months ago Audacia Ray, one of the day’s two trainers, spoke at KinkForAll and said something that made me sit right up: 'Damn right I have an agenda.' Of course I have an agenda, too: everyone has one, especially the media. An agenda is not a bad thing, and what’s more, it’s necessary.
Our first exercise: How do we get from this powerful, inarticulate drive we all share to messages we can express? From there, we could move on the core of Speak Up: what can we do to make sure our messages stand up to disinterested, distorting, or actively destructive media interactions?
It was an emotional day for me, not least because we did our first ‘message’ exercise on the recent murder of a masseuse in Boston."
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Some really powerful stuff here.
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"The law, in other words, needs to center the emotional, sexual, and physical safety of young people; it does not need to center the scandalized indignation of adults."
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"And even worse than that, I bet that the defense attorney expected the woman to be offended, upset, and flustered by her outrageous, misogynistic, insulting, accusatory, and downright triggering line of questioning. She would have expected her to nervously deny it, perhaps with a quaver in her voice, perhaps a little 'too' adamantly. How could most of us not? And she would have hoped that a jury would see her quavering voice not as upset and shock but as uncertainty, and a vigorous denial as an attempt to cover up a lie rather than valid self-defense."
thanks for the link!
i didn’t say it but a commenter on a woc blog carnival post. i can no longer find the post or the comments.
Thanks for the link. I didn’t check my tweets until now! (I’m still such a Twitter rookie.)