A useful series of musings on consent, seduction, and queerness in the realms of sex and politics; from the people at Crimethinc
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Wednesday, June 17, 2015
Teaching women self-defence still the best way to reduce sexual assaults: study
The four-year study tracked nearly 900 women at three Canadian universities, randomly selecting half to take the 12-hour “resistance” program, and compared them to a second group who received only brochures, similar to those available at a health clinic. One year later, the incidence of reported rape among women who took the program was 5.2 per cent, compared to 9.8 per cent in the control group; the gap in incidents of attempted rape was even wider.
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Tuesday, June 16, 2015
Thursday, June 11, 2015
What I Do Know: The Colonial Evisceration of Cindy Gladue
What I do know is that Cindy Gladue was not killed by an Indian man. Bradley Barton is a white man. I suppose, however, that Cindy Gladue’s case wouldn’t even be factored into this type of statistical analysis since, according to the courts, she wasn’t murdered at all.
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Are Beethoven’s African Origins Revealed By His Music?
There are two reasons he was careful to organize his image for posterity. First, he must have thought that the rumours and social pressures existing during his lifetime would continue immediately after his death. What would have happened if in the 19th Century, historiography had discovered this deception? The risk was that his music would no longer be played. He had spent his life convincing the public to believe that he had only European origins. After composing one of the most important monuments of the history of art and the human spirit, he wished above all that his work would be passed to posterity.
A second, more important reason exists: to play his music as he played it, to understand it, to hear it, so that it produced the same enchantment as when he played or led it when alive, one had to understand that an important part of the music education that he received in his childhood and early adolescence was an intimate knowledge of polyrhythmic science and art. And, he was a bit of a joker. He must have been amused to see that with the scores he had produced, interpreters were unable, and still are, to produce the same music that came out these texts when he played it. He often said, “It will take at least 50 years before my music is understood.” In actuality, his calculation was off by 150 years. Today, we realize that to play it properly, one has to understand that he had a dual identity. That he was also an African.
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Monday, June 08, 2015
Imagining the Cosmos: Utopians, Mystics, and the Popular Culture of Spaceflight in Revolutionary Russia
This essay investigates the explosive Soviet interest in space travel during the New Economic Policy (NEP) era of the 1920s, as expressed through amateur societies, the press, literature, painting, film, and other popular culture. In recovering an obscured history of the roots of Russian cosmonautics, it shows how the cause of space exploration in early twentieth-century Russia originally stemmed from two ideological strands: technological utopianism and the mystical occult tradition of Cosmism. The former (seemingly modern, urban, international, materialist) alternately clashed and meshed with the latter (superficially archaic, pastoral, Russian, spiritual), creating an often contradictory but urgent language of space enthusiasm. Cosmic activists, who saw themselves as part of a new Soviet intelligentsia, actively used both ideals to communicate their views directly to the public. The essay argues that despite superficial differences, technological utopianism and Cosmism shared much of the same iconography, language, and goals, particularly the imperative to transform and control the natural world. In other words, the modern rocket with its new Communist cosmonaut was conceived as much in a leap of faith as in a reach for reason.
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Sunday, June 07, 2015
The Idea of Muslim National Communism: On Mirsaid Sultan-Galiev
Not having any pretensions of giving an overview of all of Muslim national communism, I am interested here in someone who remains its major figure, the Tartar Bolshevik intellectual and militant Mirsaid Sultan-Galiev, whose first arrest was remarked upon by Trotsky in 1923, when he cited Kamenev’s words:
Do you remember the arrest of Sultan-Galiev? […] This was the first arrest of a prominent Party member made upon the initiative of Stalin […] That was Stalin’s first taste of blood.4
But let’s take things up from the beginning.
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Saturday, June 06, 2015
THOSE MYTHOLOGICAL MEN AND THEIR SACRED, SUPERSONIC FLYING TEMPLES
From this anxiety of imitation, it is a short step to seeking authenticity in texts from the past, even if one of those texts is itself a modern imitation. The effect is further magnified by a narrowly instrumental education, the shrinking of public debate, the subservience of media to business interests, the proliferation of social media, and an influential but alienated diaspora, especially in the United States, that seeks to find a glorious Hindu past that can be seen to have exceeded the very West upon which India’s recent success depends so heavily. When this past does not exist, it has to be created, often in less imaginative ways than the manner in which Sastry fashioned the V.S.
It has meant, for instance, the destruction of books with perspectives on ancient India that the Hindu right finds unpalatable. In 2001, when the Delhi University historian D.N. Jha wrote, in The Myth of the Holy Cow, that the ancient Vedic people were eaters of beef, he and his publisher were threatened, subjected to demonstrations, ritual book burnings, calls for the book to be banned, and a court order preventing its distribution. Jha’s work was based on extensive archaeological and textual evidence, and his argument itself is widely accepted by professional historians in India and abroad, but it went against the Hindu right’s insistence that beef-eating was an evil brought into the subcontinent by Muslims (a process it is determined to reverse by force, as in a recent ban in the state of Maharashtra that makes possession of beef punishable by a five-year jail term). Similarly, when University of Chicago scholar Wendy Doniger published The Hindus: An Alternative History in 2009, the campaign against it ran all the way from the United States to India, where the book’s publishers, Penguin India, after a four-year legal battle, agreed to an out-of-court settlement that involved withdrawing all copies of the book and pulping them. Among the arguments against the book in the lawsuit initiated by Dina Nath Batra, founder of a Hindu right-wing educational organization and author of textbooks depicting ancient glories, like television and cars, was that “your approach is that of a woman hungry of sex.”
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Friday, June 05, 2015
The Deep State: Germany, Immigration, and the National Socialist Underground
A weakness of large parts of the “left” opposition and the radical Left becomes apparent: after the pogroms of the early ’90s many abandoned the working class as a revolutionary force. They could therefore only turn to “civil society” and thus ultimately the state as an ally against the Nazis. This ally supported fascist structures and helped to establish them, while at the same time it gave the left-wing opposition the opportunity to turn itself into a force supportive of the state. This fact paralyses many Antifa and other leftwing groups. Instead of naming the state’s role in the NSU complex, they focus on the investigation committees and the trial, they lose themselves in the details which are produced there. There were no significant movements on the streets when the NSU became public. All this allows the state apparatus to minimize the NSU – but many people still feel the horror.
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Ideology and Practices (publicautonomy.org)
Some examples? Let’s start with something — an opinion or claim — that is not ideology, even though it might seem to be. Here’s one: “Canada is a democratic society that treats its citizens fairly.”
It may be bullshit, but it’s not ideology. The ideology is this: that one barely notices the fact that there are “borders” instituted around “nation states,” and that one of these is “Canada”; that this “Canada” is “a society,” in the singular, rather than multiple societies, or multiple systems and structures some of which cross borders, etc.; that “countries” can be labelled “democratic,” rather than institutions or practices or specific decisions, so that the question of whether it is or isn’t democratic is a sort of total judgment, appealing to some unspoken but supposedly obvious criterion; that many of the people in the supposed “country” are “citizens,” while some are “non-citizens”; that the standard for treating “citizens” “fairly” will differ from the standard for treating “non-citizens” fairly. And so on. Ideology lies here, in this stew of unexamined obviousness. None of it is stated in the claim under consideration (“Canada is a democratic society that treats its citizens fairly”). But all of it is presupposed by that claim.
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Thursday, June 04, 2015
Grandstanding
grand·stand
??ran(d)?stand/
verb derogatory
gerund or present participle: grandstanding
seek to attract applause or favorable attention from spectators or the media.
“they accused him of political grandstanding”
Just saying: i think there is a connection between neocolonialism as the current phase of global relations, and grandstanding as a personal practice within the multicultural middle class. On all sides.
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Elon Musk’s growing empire is fueled by $4.9 billion in government subsidies
Tesla Motors Inc., SolarCity Corp. and Space Exploration Technologies Corp., known as SpaceX, together have benefited from an estimated $4.9 billion in government support, according to data compiled by The Times. The figure underscores a common theme running through his emerging empire: a public-private financing model underpinning long-shot start-ups.
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Un employé municipal sur deux en banlieue
Profession • % des employés qui ne résident pas à Montréal
Pompiers 82%
Policiers 81%
Contremaîtres 62%
Cadres 49%
Cols Bleus 48%
Professionnels 38%
Cols Blancs 32%
Brigadiers 5%
Total 49%
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