Via delux_vivens:

Silicon Valley companies don’t get the full range of dangers involved with online advocacy.

It therefore baffles me how little consideration they have for those individuals who need to be protected online especially if they use the internet as a resource to engage in risky (but necessary) activities. Anything from discouraging anonymity on the likes of Facebook and Google+ to requiring legit photos on sites like LinkedIn, not realizing that some of us live in areas where human rights advocacy is not just frowned upon but severely punishable by our governments. Anything you do to protect yourself – these companies consider to be against their “user agreement” forcing you to reveal sensitive information, making this field 10 times more dangerous just so these companies can be more “relevant” and therefore profitable. The problem is that we can’t just simply quit these services. We need them as tools to empower our work.

Every other week I’d get an email from an internet service stating that my account has been deleted or disabled.

Why? “You’re not using a real photo.” No, I use an avatar, which they deleted, and then another avatar, which they also deleted, and attempted to keep it empty, which they didn’t allow, and then finally resorted to just having a logo – but uh oh! Disabled again. This is despite my several attempts at communicating this to customer service reps at these companies. They couldn’t care less. Regardless of what their CEOs say at tech conferences. Irrelevant. They do not abide by these values when it comes to managing their companies and reviewing their user agreements and privacy policies. Do we matter?

But they will never understand it. They think everyone is a rich white cis man in a first world country and "it's not a big deal" to share personal information. But sometimes, it is a big deal. Also, they get money and publicity from "personal information" so...

Am I the only one who wants to spit on people's faces over this shit?

Yes, because the world is all about USA and their two right-winged political parties. What they do in Somalia? Just business that are useful to make their president look good and to rescue white first worlders. As my classmate uses to say, damn if they don't want to make everything look like one of their action tv-shows/movies where their Navy is heroic saving the world from brown non-westerners and it doesn't exist a biggest context for this shit (Somali pirates and sovereignty).

Meanwhile, in Afghanistan...

Also. We know kidnapping, stealing is wrong yadda yadda, but some people are way to naive, and believe everyone lives in a idealized middle-classed first world. Which doesn't happen. And no one gives a REAL shit about other people's tragedies. Way complex problems that have to do with poverty, lack of access, lack of resources in their own countries. Thank to... well, some shit against global south and its people.

Bogota appoints first transgender public official.

The department in which she is taking up her position is described as responsible for the development and implementation of social policies which guarantee citizens of Bogota "the ability to exercise their rights, in conditions of equality."

[...]

In the interview Piñero -- who has 13 years experience of managing public resources at district and national levels -- also outlined her priorities as newly-appointed director. They include addressing the needs of children and the elderly in the city, and setting up control points within the department to prevent corruption.

No. 6 and its always pretty AWESOME talk about power imbalances/inequalities in relationships and. Privilege:

( Spoilers for direct quotation of the novel. Talk between Nezumi and Shion. )

Bolding mine. My goodness, I love Nezumi.

Hablando de "Piratería" y "economía de compartir", este es un artículo en español muy interesante:

Para ti, Lucía.

Existe, cada vez más, un mundo flamante en el que el número de descargas virtuales y el número de ventas físicas se suma; sus autores dicen: «qué bueno, cuánta gente me lee». Pero todavía pervive un mundo viejo en el que ambas cifras se restan; sus autores dicen: «qué espanto, cuánta gente no me compra».

El viejo mundo se basa en control, contrato, exclusividad, confidencialidad, traba, representación y dividendo. Todo lo que ocurra por fuera de sus estándares, es cultura ilegal.

El mundo nuevo se basa en confianza, generosidad, libertad de acción, creatividad, pasión y entrega. Todo lo que ocurra por fuera y por dentro de sus parámetros es bueno, en tanto la gente disfrute con la cultura, pagando o sin pagar.

Dicho de otro modo: no es responsabilidad de los lectores que no pagan que Lucía sea pobre, sino del modo en que sus editores reparten las ganancias de los lectores que sí pagan.

[...]

Abro el archivo adjunto, leo el contrato. Me fascina la lectura de contratos del mundo viejo. No se molestan en lo más mínimo en disfrazar sus corbatas.

Al cuento que me piden lo llaman LA APORTACIÓN. En la cláusula cuatro dice que «el EDITOR podrá efectuar cuantas ediciones estime convenientes hasta un máximo de cien mil (100.000)». En la cláusula cinco, ponen: «Como remuneración por la cesión de derechos de la APORTACIÓN, el EDITOR abonará al AUTOR cien euros (100 €) brutos, sobre la que se girarán los impuestos y se practicarán las retenciones que correspondan».

Pensé en los otros autores que componen la antología, los que seguramente sí firman contratos así. Cien euros menos impuestos y retenciones son sesenta y tres euros, y a eso hay que quitarle el quince por ciento que se lleva el agente o representante (todos tienen uno), o sea que al autor le quedan cincuenta y tres euros limpios. No importa que la editorial venda dos mil libros, o cien mil libros. El autor siempre se llevará cincuenta y tres euros. ¿Firmará Lucía Etxebarría contratos así?

They closed MU. The FBI closed it and arrested the owners for piracy. The company operated worldwide, but its owners worked in places like Hong Kong and New Zealand.

Do I need to say it? DO I? We kind of had the piracy discussion some... time ago (months? years?), but. Fuck you, USA. I could say a lot of things, but I'm childishly sore, the kind of sore of someone who had their pretty things taken away, and I feel kinda vindictive. Just going to say that it SO doesn't go both ways. In the matter of things big companies in the US can do, and things everyone else can do.

Also? Don't come butthurt at me? I have had in this journal lately some shitty comments going on about how REALLY some thing or another is also happening and it shows some experience isn't really privileged, and WHY don't you care about this, and... I don't want to hear it. I'm going to ban you if you come with shit like that to me. I'm sore.

(Yes, I can like my pretty things, and I can't have them like you people can thanks to some of the shit YOU -I mean, YOUR GOVERNMENT- and your companies put around here, and DID around here. So be quiet.)

I don't know if I already linked it some time ago, but if you really, really need to say something? Please, read this first: Media Piracy in Emerging Economies.

ephemere! HAPPY BIRTHDAY! Honey, I hope today will be better than the days before it, and so tomorrow. You deserve the best; you are a wonderful, amazing, talented and smart person who deserves some happiness.

Via laurus_nobilis:

What's Wrong With #FirstWorldProblems.

I don't like this expression "First World problems." It is false and it is condescending. Yes, Nigerians struggle with floods or infant mortality. But these same Nigerians also deal with mundane and seemingly luxurious hassles. Connectivity issues on your BlackBerry, cost of car repair, how to sync your iPad, what brand of noodles to buy: Third World problems. All the silly stuff of life doesn't disappear just because you're black and live in a poorer country. People in the richer nations need a more robust sense of the lives being lived in the darker nations. Here's a First World problem: the inability to see that others are as fully complex and as keen on technology and pleasure as you are.

One event that illustrated the gap between the Africa of conjecture and the real Africa was the BlackBerry outage of a few weeks ago. Who would have thought Research In Motion's technical issues would cause so much annoyance and inconvenience in a place like Lagos? But of course it did, because people don't wake up with "poor African" pasted on their foreheads. They live as citizens of the modern world. None of this is to deny the existence of social stratification and elite structures here. There are lifestyles of the rich and famous, sure. But the interesting thing about modern technology is how socially mobile it is--quite literally. Everyone in Lagos has a phone.

Completely belated "South Asians for Justice" (SAJ) statement + my response.

The letter that SAJ send her is there. I'm just going to quote her words:

They coddled and protected a man who is ten years older than me, phd-track and from a highly class privileged background. The perpetrator is also jeering, spiteful and self-justifying about what he did to me, and tries to elicit pity and caretaking from women when talking about his current sexual violence ideations. All of this is transcripted through chats and emails. But unfortunately, Amita and co. were more concerned about preserving his access to organizational spaces.

I find the handwringing piece about state intervention ridiculous, since there has even never been any remote possibility of Saurav going to prison. The part that says that they don't want to be "punitive" ludicrously equates making safer spaces with the U.S. prison system. They demanded that he leave spaces ONLY if I am there. This is a man who has put in writing that he is a sexual predator. Apparently there are no minimum standards for participating in anti-oppression oriented spaces. Saurav perpetrated sexual violence against me after I experienced police violence. But I doubt anyone in these spaces would ask me to cry about the wounded psyches of the cops who harmed me.

They also left out that the "male ally" they used in this process told me my criticisms weren't worth engaging with and ditched the process. He was more dedicated to his friendship with the perpetrator than the process. Two months later, we finally are having a side accountability process to hold him accountable as well. Ridiculous. The accountability process group was itself not accountable.

It became evident through Saurav's own written admissions about his sexual violence and homicidal ideations via creepy emails to me, as well as information through others he harmed, that he has had an ongoing pattern of emotional and physical abusiveness and misogyny, despite his savvy utilization of feminist/social justice language and paid work on gender issues. He had also utilized his academic credentials and age to put me in my place; these were hierarchies that were being reinforced elsewhere in my life during my college years. He had also presented himself as a major source of support over the years, but opportunistically utilized multiple status differences and my vulnerabilities when I came to him for support last year during a time of crisis (which included trauma from recent gender-based stranger violence on the street). He repeatedly dodged responsibility over the course of the last year or so.

[...]

Due to the age gap, his peers/"friends" included my supervisors and professors, some of whom cofounded SAJ. I had outed him as an abuser to them by selecting "reply all" to a mass email he sent to to them and to me last year. Almost no one (including Aley, Svati, Linta) responded. One person, Thanu, outright dismissed my story as "gossip". Amita indeed sent out an email to those people early this year, trying to use her leverage as their peer, and only 3 of them responded. I don't think they're all particularly close to him, but I did feel uncomfortable sitting at the SAJ potluck with someone who I know used to hang out with the perpetrator (Linta), but basically silenced me before hand via email and told me to stop talking about it. I felt jarred when I first read the list of ten or so names behind the cofounding of SAJ and behind the mission statement, because of the incongruence between the language of the statement and the actual actions of those individuals. Many of those individuals are gender studies professors, anti-violence activists, etc.The SAJ mission statement includes language around gender justice and recognizing internal hierarchies around power/privilege, as well as the importance of recognizing the ways people are harmed by both interpersonal and state violence.

I find disgusting the ways the 30-something crowd who are peers of Saurav, well-established, paid to do anti-violence work, or teach race/gender/class issues as academics have responded. They do not speak for me.

So. This is a community that supposedly had to protect her. But privileged her abuser.

Disabled Bodies and Ableist Acceptance.

I think the combination of positive and negative reactions is worth noting, in light of Campbell’s writing on culture and disability. Mullins and Pistorius are admired for “overcoming” a perceived disability, and this admiration feels especially safe for people embedded in able-bodied culture because they are conventionally attractive in every other respect. But this is a story with which we only feel comfortable provided that it doesn’t present any kind of threat to our conventional categories of abled and disabled bodies. It is unacceptable for a disabled body to be better at what it does than an abled body. It is even slightly uncomfortable when a disabled body manages to be “just as good”.

After the images of Mullins and Pistorius, I also showed my students an image of speed skater Apollo Ohno:

[...]

Like the images of Mullins and Pistorius, Ohno’s body is explicitly being presented here as an attractive object. By most standards, Ohno is as able-bodied as one can get. But as I pointed out to my students, he manages this on the back of technology – on specially designed skates, in special aerodynamic suits, with the help of carefully balanced exercise and nutrition plans; almost no athlete is really “natural” anymore. But at least in part because of the closeness of his body to an able-bodied ideal, this presents no explicit threat to our categories. Ohno fits the accepted model of “human”. Who would look at him and doubt it? And if Mullins and Pistorius are perhaps not as close to that ideal, they at least fall into line with it, by virtue of the fact that they don’t explicitly question its legitimacy as an ideal – unless they seek to transcend it.

My point, in short, is this: we are uncomfortable with disabled bodies that question or trouble our accepted, hierarchical categories of abled and disabled, of human and non-human, of organic and machine. We are far more comfortable with them when they perform in such a way that they reinforce the supremacy of those categories. They become acceptable to us.

Here, in Colonialist Criticism & Culture, thatlitgirl quoted a segment of Chinua Achebe's essay, Colonialist Criticism:

Does it ever occur to these universities to try out their game of changing names of characters and places in an American novel, say, a Philip Roth or an Updike, and slotting in African names just to see how it works? But of course it would not occur to them. It would never occur to them to doubt the universality of their own literature. In the nature of things the work of a Western writer is automatically informed by universality. It is only others who must strain to achieve it. So-and-so’s work is universal; he has truly arrived! As though universality were some distant bend in the road which you may take if you travel out far enough in the direction of Europe or America, if you put adequate distance between yourself and your home. I should like to see the word ‘universal’ banned altogether from discussions of African literature until such a time as people cease to use it as a synonym for the narrow, self-serving parochialism of Europe, until their horizon extends to include all the world. If colonialist criticism were merely irritating one might doubt the justification of devoting a whole essay to it. But strange though it may sound some of its ideas and precepts do exert an influence on our writers, for it is a fact of our contemporary world that Europe’s powers of persuasion can be far in excess of the merit and value of her case. Take for instance the black writer who seizes on the theme that Africa’s past is a sadly inglorious one as though it were something new that had not already been ‘proved’ adequately for him. Colonialist critics will, of course, fall all over him in ecstatic and salivating admiration – which is neither unexpected nor particularly interesting. What is fascinating, however, is the tortuous logic and sophistry they will sometimes weave around a perfectly straightforward and natural enthusiasm. […]

The colonialist critic, unwilling to accept the validity of sensibilities other than is own, has made a particular point of dismissing the African novel. He has written lengthy articles to prove its non-existence largely on the grounds that the novel is a peculiarly Western genre, a fact which would interest us if our ambition was to write ‘Western’ novels. But, in any case, did not the black people in America, deprived of their own musical instruments, take the trumpet and the trombone and blow them as they had never been blown before, as indeed they were not designed to be blown? And the result, was it not jazz? Is any one going to say that this was a loss to the world or that those first Negro slaves who began to play around with the discarded instruments of their masters should have played waltzes and foxtrots? No! Let every people bring their gifts to the great festival of the world’s cultural harvest and mankind will be all the richer for the variety and distinctiveness of the offerings.

My people speak disapprovingly of an outsider whose wailing drowned the grief of the owners of the corpse. One last word to the owners. It is because our own critics have been somewhat hesitant in taking control of our own literary criticism (sometimes – let’s face it – for the good reason that we will not do the hard work that should equip us) that the task has fallen to others, some of whom (again we must admit) have been excellent and sensitive. And yet most of what remains to be done can best be tackled by ourselves, the owners. If we fall back, can we complain that others are rushing forward? A man who does not lick his lips, can he blame the harmattan for drying them?

It's crossedwires's fault for bringing this out of my memory.

Tim Bayliss and Frank Pembleton from Homicide: Life on the Street, people (also this is a scene from the movie, which I never watched; it has a lot of BIG spoilers, I didn't care.):

Nativos son interceptados en la Terminal de Ómnibus por la policía y llevados a cuartel militar.

So. This is what happens. A group of Indigenous people come to the capital and are intercepted by police and taken to a military facility. Because they arrived to protest.

Public Eye Awards.

Nominated:

Tepco
Against its better judgement, Tepco, Japan’s largest energy company, grossly neglected the structural safety of its atomic power plants in order to cut costs.

Samsung
In its factories, Samsung uses banned and highly-toxic substances without informing and protecting its workers. The result: cancer.

Barclays
Barclays, banking giant and the world’s fastest-growing food speculator, drives up global food prices at the expense of the poorest.

Vale
In the midst of Amazonas rainforest Vale is constructing the Belo-Monte-Dam. 40’000 people are suffering forced eviction.

Syngenta
Despite being banned in Europe Syngenta markets its herbicide Paraquat in the Global South. Thousands of farmers have already died due to the use of the product.

Freeport
For 45 years the US-mining corporation Freeport McMoran pollutes with its mine the environment in West Papua. Those who raise their voice get tortured or killed.

Vale is my personal favorite. But Freeport is a close second.

BELATED HAPPY BIRTHDAY, marina! I hope you had a wonderful day!

This happened here.

Now, save me from the assholery of the middle/high classed non-indigenous people I know and FB contacts (and non-contacts, there is this racist, UBER ANNOYING guy in my school who fancies himself an intellectual, believes is better than everyone, is SO ENTITLED that everyone has to heard him/ read him because he loves European culture and has an obsession with me reading every shit he writes, even when I already deleted him from my contacts, man, I just need to vent againts these kind of assholes because everybody in my rl LOVES THEM) who believe is THEIR RIGHT to have a park... without indigenous people. Because "indians make it dirty."

Of course, they don't care and won't move a finger about the racism, the classism, the awful conditions in which indigenous people live and how are abused in this country. But they want a park for themselves. And "Indians abuse of the park!" Even when most of these assholes won't even put a feet in that park in most of their lives. Mind you, they live in other cities and stuff.

Also. The Municipality PUT BARS in a public Park just to keep protesters away from it. Protesters who are indigenous people and Sin Techo who inhabit the park until someone from the government carry out their pledges. (Ans you imagine, middle classes are bothered that poor people are living in the park.)

Tumblr here: at lavienoire. (I don't even have a title, and still don't understand a lot of things. But I can see the pretty pics.)

And twitter here: @lavienoire.

I had a sudden epiphany about Penguindrum. And I know. It's genius. Thank me later.

( Spoilers for Mawaru Penguindrum. And for inane talk )

---

No. 6 novels are an amazing thing, they talk about social issues/inequalities like whoa, everyone has to read it (sadly, the anime doesn't stand a chance, mainly for its ending), etc., but now I just have to say that woman DID the research in a very different area:

( Spoilers for Vol. 1 quotation )

---

Rec me science fiction books, people.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY to the lovelies of telrunya and kaitou_marina! I wish you two the best, I hope you spend a beautiful day, I love you!

I hope this year turns WAY better than 2011 for you all!

I wish you the best. Seriously.