Intent! It’s Fucking Magic!
See, the great thing about this thaumaturgy is that it protects anything a privileged asshole says! So it fits in line completely with that glorious sense of entitlement that privilege tends to confer, basically, the idea that you can say anything you want and should never have accountability for what you say! Because you see, all privileged people have this ancient eldritch power called “Intent”. In fact, intent is one of the primary elements of the world (see figure 1). Like fire, water, wood, metal, air and earth, Intent helps make up an important part of the very existence of the universe. So when you invoke its ancient might, its tendrils of ephemeral power shift in the very fabric of the ‘verse, creating a magic so powerful that you can manipulate thousands upon thousands of threads of fate, just to protect the person you just said or did something supremely privileged and horrible to.
[...]
Intent is so unbelievably epic that it doesn’t just cover slurs. No, it covers actions as well! Because you see, the very threads of fate are not immune to this otherworldly flow of what you meant to do or say. So if you kick a trans woman out of a homeless shelter into the cold because she didn’t fit your views of what a woman should be and she didn’t want to be put in with the menz (where she faces a risk of rape and murder for her, or at least harassment), your Intent literally changes the tapestry of fate so that instead of freezing to death in the cold, she actually is heated by an unexpected fire, lit by a lightning strike from clear skies, onto a pile of garbage that can’t spread the fire to anything else, right next to where she just happened to fall in exhaustion! I know! Isn’t it awesome?!
Intent is a power that you only have if you believe in it. Because so many marginalized people don’t believe in the power of intent when it comes to their/our marginalizations, few of us are able to call on its supernatural strength. Some rare marginalized folk are able to, but only in given situations and generally only in relation to themselves.
[...]
Because you see, Intent is the ultimate alchemy. It doesn’t change lead to gold, it changes harmful, negative or damaging actions into happy, fun, “everyone hugs and no one is oppressed”, magical unicorn actions. It dips its eerie powers into the pools of time and space and counters each and every ripple of fuckery and pain created by the actions of an unthinking douchebag who was too privileged or self absorbed to see that their actions were a problem.
And because
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parlance made me remember it:Deepa's I Didn’t Dream of Dragons has been nomitated Best Non-Fiction at the British Science Fiction Association 2009 Awards. Hal Duncan withdrawn in favor to her piece. You go girl, congratulations and, really, so deserve to win.
Te quiero, corazón, de verdad te mereces lo mejor. Espero que tu día sea increíble porque vos sos increíble. ILU.
(Y última vez que toco la PC en una semana. Ya así no puedo seguir.)
I shouldn't be here. Like at all. I have to study without sleeping. But I was so waiting for this manga.
( Claymore 100 )
I came back! And you know what? I spend my days in Camboriú studying P-Chem. But I went to the sea once! And saw
bell! And traveling in car for 16 hours? Boy, that was the best part: there was rain, getting lost and persecutions with shooting.No, seriously.
See, there is something about coming back home, just crossing the frontier and finding oneself in the middle of a firing. Because this is Paraguay and we are extreme. And lawless apparently. You know the contrast with Brazil having actual laws and stuff.
We were passing Brazilian customs and my father was talking about how they don't ask for documentation because we were entering our country or something, he started talking about the two Brazilian cars behind us: a small Fiat, and the one behind it, a small white car which brad I didn't see. He noticed how a group of Brazilian cops immediately went after the small white car, he thought it was due to evading documentations or something, and well, this is La Triple Frontera, so that's routine. Then I saw the Fiat, whose driver probably didn't notice what was happening, giving space to the white car to let it go ahead. The white car did. Taking the Fiat's left rear-view mirror with it. Seriously. I just saw the mirror flying and hitting the floor and then the white car was behind us. Then we heard the shootings, and saw two armed Brazilian cops on a motorcycle following the white car. My father let them pass because he sure as hell didn't want our car end like the Fiat. And they passed some centimeter besides us (because this is "El Puente de la Amistad" and this is how you cross it) with the cops making shots to the air.
Next thing we saw were the Brazilian cops coming back without nothing, of course the guy went away (we theorize it was a robbed car, the guy driving wasn't armed and was alone), and of course there were our cops and militia in our customs looking very interested in all that was happening without moving a finger.
And yeah, when Brazilian people enter our country? They don't make any documentation, our customs are non existing. Paraguay, the paradise for... car robbers.
So yeah, pretty traditional welcome home.
(I will be talking about all the rest later because I have an exam on Monday, and I haven't studied for that one at all because it isn't P-Chem and I was vacationing. So yay me.)
People, I miss you all! I spend an excelent day with
bell, who is uberly awesome and made me feel very comfortable even when I was completely lost (because I was), but I will talk about all that when I have more time.I love you, thank you to the people who send me wishes and whom I'm just reading, I will be answering you! XD
bell, because I will be seeing you!But yay! Brazil! Even if I will be studying. D: Will call you, Bell, but I advice you my spoken English is awful.
(The good thing is when I come back there will be lots of fanwork waiting for me, you know. It's not like there isn't a lot for my current obsession
Love you all!
deepad. She, as always, talks about a lot of things that have been bothering me lately.One of the most vicious and manipulative tools we humans have evolved is to use our individual impulses towards kindness and pity to build systems that reinforce oppressive and discriminatory practices.
"Clothe the pauper." "Heal the heathen." "Rescue the orphan." "Free the woman."
The discourse around disaster relief in Haiti has already begun to make me sick to my stomach. Because "natural disasters" are somehow painted apolitical, as though the sphere of human responsibility has been completely suspended.
This is crap, of course, because human beings and the things they do are as much a part of nature as the wind and water and earth and fire around us, and it is political when century-old housing habits evolved for a specific geological fault location get eradicated, or poverty forces urban encroachment into areas too close to the sea, or evacuation systems are ignored because the people they will save are considered expendible.
So donating money? Comes from a generous impulse, but is pretty easy to do. As Michael Maren says, "Although it's really easy to donate your dollars, it is unimaginably difficult to actually help people. The best fund raisers in the business are not the best relief workers in the business."
unusualmusic.Shock Doctrine for Haiti:
Good to see that, in the midst of the today's confusion, someone's focusing on what really matters: making sure America's 210 years of superhuman cruelty toward Haiti continue without respite.
Catastrophe in Haiti
THE REAL state power isn't the Préval government, but the U.S.-backed United Nations occupation. Under Brazilian leadership, UN forces have protected the rich and collaborated with--or turned a blind eye to--right-wing death squads who terrorize supporters of Aristide and his Lavalas Party.
The occupiers have done nothing to address the poverty, wrecked infrastructure and massive deforestation that have exacerbated the effects of a series of natural disasters--severe hurricanes in 2004 and 2008, and now the Port-au-Prince earthquake.
Instead, they merely police a social catastrophe, and in so doing, have committed the normal crimes characteristic of all police forces. As Dan Beeton wrote in NACLA Report on the Americas, "The UN Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH), which began its mission in June 2004, has been marred by scandals of killings, rape and other violence by its troops almost since it began."
First the Bush administration and now the Obama administration have used the coup and social and natural crises to expand the U.S.'s neoliberal economic plans. [...]
So while Pat Robertson denounces Haiti's great slave revolution as a pact with the devil, Clinton is helping to reduce it to a tourist trap.
At the same time, Clinton's plans for Haiti include an expansion of the sweatshop industry to take advantage of cheap labor available from the urban masses. The U.S. granted duty-free treatment for Haitian apparel exports to make it easy for sweatshops to return to Haiti.
No surprises here. But I just wish I could say fuck to them and get over it, but of course, that's never a possibility.
And via
skywardprodigal: Wonderful Why is Haiti so poor?. But please, do not read the comments.
There is also
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help_haiti which consists in fandom auctions.Updates here. voz_latina is doing a coverage here. Another earthquake, magnitude 5.7, hit today.
Hundreds are disappeared and the dead toll will probably be as big.
FailBlog on Avatar. Cameron. The plots of your celebrated movies are always so very cliché (and racist in some cases, but we all know that already).
is a dream a lie if it don’t come true / or is it something worse
A little while ago, Melissa was crossing the street in front of her apartment with her roommate, bringing home groceries late at night from the store right across the way. They were struck by a car in the crosswalk in what appears to have been an innocent, freak accident. Melissa’s roommate was killed instantly. She, because there was an ambulance less than a block away at the time, made it to the hospital with a shattered leg, head injuries, and Gods know what else, comatose.
I didn’t know, when I heard Melissa’s roommate was killed on the morning news, because the news said she’d been with a man, and my first thought was oh, God, is Melissa okay, does she know what happened, she must be so worried. I left a couple of voice messages, but couldn’t get through, and it was only once I saw a report with Melissa’s old name on it that it hit me: there was not a man hit in that accident. She was comatose, with friends there, and family on the way. The prognosis was very, very bad, like “we don’t think she’ll make it till morning” bad.
She made it till morning. And the next night. And the next. We all started passing around updates of how she was doing and taking time to mourn the schoolmate who hadn’t made it. Family arrived, connected with each other, and everyone took a few deep breaths. Melissa started improving, against expectations–eyes opening, snapping fingers when asked, responding in small ways to the people present though she was semiconscious at best and could not move. They made plans to fix her leg and skull and there was talk of moving her to a specialist facility closer to home, one with real support for people recovering from comas, and against all odds she was fighting. It should have been no surprise: she was always a fighter. She was going to be okay.
[...]
They had ultimate power over her–her body, her brain, everything. She was disabled, and couldn’t speak for herself, and couldn’t express her own preferences, and they were next of kin, and they knew best, and the authority for medical decisions was in their hands. They loved her more than anyone, and had her best interests in mind, and were just looking to her recovery, just listening to the doctors.
And if she woke up as from a deep sleep, she’d wake up into a world where her best friend was dead, where her body had been forcibly edited back to its pre-transition state and given a few more years of the influence of testosterone to boot, where her memory and self were hazy and confusing and nobody was calling her by the right name and pronouns, they were in fact pretending four years of her life, the four years she finally got to be honest and true to herself, those had never happened, and shh, she’s just confused, shhhh, calm down, let’s work on fixing your memory some more.
If she was–as many people deemed unconscious, or low-functioning, or unaware by medical professionals, as many many people with disabilities who can’t communicate the “right way” are–aware in any way of what was going on, laying there helpless and voiceless while her body and life and mind were edited and mutilated by loving people, wise professional people in complete control…I actually can’t finish that sentence, because I am shuddering too hard, because I have a hard time imagining a real scenario closer to Hell.
This is not an unusual scenario. It happens all the time, and in worse, far worse, forms. This is still practically standard in the history of how people with disabilities are get violated, and the intersection with trans status only magnifies it. If I got into a car accident tomorrow and fell into a coma, it could happen to me–I can’t marry legally, and my parents who are not part of my life could walk into the hospital and have my partner removed and do pretty much whatever they please with me, a possibility that gives me dry-heaving panic attacks.
( Kinda spoilery, but not very detailed thoughts about Michiko e Hatchin )
I will always recommend it to everyone. It's amazing.
I was out all day and managed to get lost twice: going to a friend's house and coming from the same friend's house. I drove there, and, funnily enough, going was easier than coming. I just confused some blocks going there. Coming back home? Oh boy. Because she lives in a neighbor city, changing my route totally got me lost. I ended... traveling for all my fucking city.
We saw two movies, 2012 and The Proposal. Both were amazingly bad. 2012 was at least (unintentionally) hilarious and managed to have characters of color. The romantic comedy was just depressing and extremely racist, even if it had a better writer than 2012 (it was still bad though).
bell! We are going to Camboriú this year for my mom vacations, and we will probably visit Florianópolis! I can go to see you if you will be there and have no problem. It will be around next week, still not sure when though because my mom still is working.HAPPY BIRTHDAY, MARI. I love you, hon, never change, I hope you keep being awesome and writing awesomely, and I wish you a great, great day.
Also, the light bulb of the room I'm in right now (where my computer is) got burn, and I'm too lazy to change it, so since some days ago I'm in darkness. It's kinda annoying.
Fascinating, isn't it?
I have to dissapoint you, but let's talk about other things.
Gorgeous Shohreh Aghdashloo started her acting career in Iran in movies like Shatranje bad, Gozaresh, and Sooteh-Delan. She stared in Guests of Hotel Astoria, which was her first work in the West. She also was in House of Sand and Fog, The Exorcism of Emily Rose, and did a lot of TV; more prominent, 24, Smith, Flash Forward, and miniseries House of Saddam where she played Sajida Hussein. She starred in The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2, The Stoning of Soraya M., X-Men: The Las Stand, The Nativity Story. And boy, she is working a lot. For 2010 she has six different projects, I will just link to her IMD profile later.
Enjoy the beauty you all.
( Shohreh Aghdashloo pics )
Born in Tehran, Iran. Completed her education in Englad, and has a degree in International Relations. Her IMDB bio says something interesting: However, it was not easy getting work in Hollywood as a middle eastern actress with an accent; she had roles in some decent, though not great, films, including Twenty Bucks (1993), Surviving Paradise (2000) and Maryam (2002). She had to wait quite some time to get a "Hollywood" break.. And still, seeing some of her roles, you know The West has issues. Filmography here.
It's pretty unfortunate that my first post of the year (decade? there is a lot of debate about that) comes, and surprise! Yet again ranting against humanity.
But let me tell you something internets. Truly, you may not believe it, but there are more important matters than your enjoyment of slash fiction. You are not trivializing important issues because you are darker and edgier, you are doing it because you are young and very privileged and cannot grasp the severity of the matter in question.
No love, me.
People, I wish you all a great new year. 2009 wasn't so kind so I just hope for the best 2010 you can think of.
