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Notes: 6 / 3 hours ago from golden-zephyr (originally from sallyjessyrofl)
So…
According to this article, and others the reason for the complaints on the “Gypsy Blood” documentary was due to scenes of animal cruelty. OK, this is obviously shit and gross and I can understand this. But why exactly does this make up the core of the complaints? Aren’t we missing the bigger picture?
Also worryingly, My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding was Ch4’s most watched programme in 2011. Which has attracted shittons of complaints among the Travelling community. If you think this hasn’t affected Travellers at all, Travellers Times now offers a media training course. So it seems that, in spite of its claims to try and offer a view into a “secret world”, Ch4 is simply harming relations between Travellers and non-Travellers. Rightly so, this course aims to equip Travellers with the skills to make and edit films of their own, how to be interviewed etc.
Channel 4 is profiting out of this heteroginization of an entire culture and peoples. There’s even a book out.
What I fail to understand is that, despite this whole talk of “secret worlds” (which has some basis in reality), there’s a variety of media created by Travellers about Travellers out there. There are theatre groups, historians, books and magazines.
But what point is there in watching it if you’re not able to laugh at a culture not your own, to rationalise and legitimise your own racism and to perpetuate ‘funny’ and inflated stereotypes?
/angry blog day
OMG so much THIS.
My bolding – something for us gadje to think about.
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Notes: 197 / 20 hours ago from mtfbutches (originally from charthebutcher)
I do not aspire in any way to look cis, act cis, or be perceived as cis.
Look at my face. I invite you to note the shadow on my chin. You are welcome to admire my bone structure as well as the bulge in front of my neck. Take time to enjoy the width of my shoulders and the size of my hands.
I do not find cis standards to be the measure or apex of beauty. I am visibly trans very intentionally. My body, as it is now and as it continues to develop, represents the highest ideal of beauty I have.
I am trans and I am fucking proud of it. I would not have it any other way.
(note: This is very much my experience and where I am at right now. I am not trying to represent or speak for anyone else.)
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Notes: 41 / 1 day ago from golden-zephyr (originally from superstarling)
This Uptown Gypsy Coat is in my size! But… $450. :(
beautiful piece, not sure what qualifies it as being a gypsy coat………
It’s a lovely coat—and I really, really want it.
The only thing ‘gypsy’ about this, would be if I wore it… otherwise, it’s just a very lovely and expensive coat.
Humm… i could eventually make one for you? ^^ You’d look grand in it!
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Notes: 123 / 1 day ago from sexismandthecityWhy Men Should Not be Pastors & Priests
10. A man’s place is in the army.
9. For men who have children, their duties might distract them from the responsibilities of being a parent.
8. Their physical build indicates that men are more suited to tasks such as chopping down trees and wrestling mountain lions. It would be “unnatural” for them to do other forms of work.
7. Man was created before woman. It is therefore obvious that man was a prototype. Thus, they represent an experiment, rather than the crowning achievement of creation.
6. Men are too emotional to be priests or pastors. This is easily demonstrated by their conduct at football games and watching basketball tournaments.
5. Some men are handsome; they will distract women worshipers.
4. To be ordained pastor is to nurture the congregation. But this is not a traditional male role. Rather, throughout history, women have been considered to be not only more skilled than men at nurturing, but also more frequently attracted to it. This makes them the obvious choice for ordination.
3. Men are overly prone to violence. No really manly man wants to settle disputes by any means other than by fighting about it. Thus, they would be poor role models, as well as being dangerously unstable in positions of leadership.
2. Men can still be involved in church activities, even without being ordained. They can sweep paths, repair the church roof, change the oil in the church vans, and maybe even lead the singing on Father’s Day. By confining themselves to such traditional male roles, they can still be vitally important in the life of the Church.
1. In the New Testament account, the person who betrayed Jesus was a man. Thus, his lack of faith and ensuing punishment stands as a symbol of the subordinated position that all men should take.
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Notes: 1573 / 1 day ago from blackbutshining (originally from stfuhypocrisy)Transgender People are Completely Banned From Boarding Airplanes in Canada
The shit hit the fan in the trans blogosphere last night, when it came to light that there is a disturbing new section in the Identity Screening Regulations used in airports throughout Canada. Simply put, Transgender People are Completely Banned From Boarding Airplanes in Canada.
The offending section of the regulations reads:
5.2 (1) An air carrier shall not transport a passenger if …
(c) the passenger does not appear to be of the gender indicated on the identification he or she presents;Although this obviously discriminatory smear of regulation did not come to significant public attention until very recently, it apparently came into effect on July 27th, 2011.
It is important to note that these regulations are not actually a piece of legislation, which would have had to pass through readings and votes in the House and Senate (which is probably why it went unnoticed until now). Rather, the Identity Screening Regulations are a set of rules implemented unilaterally by the Ministry of Transportation, as part of Canada’s so-called Passenger Protect, which is essentially the Canadian Federal Government’s equivalent to the U.S.’s “no-fly” list.
Minister of Transportation Denis Lebel is, of course, a federal Conservative MP appointed to the cabinet position by Stephen Harper.
So what does this mean? Well, in order to change the ‘sex’ designation on a Canadian Passport, the federal government requires proof that surgery has taken place, or will take place within one year. So for non-operative transgender persons, for gender nonconforming (genderqueer) persons, and for the vast majority of pre-operative transsexual persons, it is literally impossible to obtain proper travel documentation marked with the sex designation which “matches” the gender identity in which they live.
In the eyes of the honourable Minister of Transportation, that makes trans people unfit to fly in Canada.
It is interesting to note that this regulatory adjustment occurred immediately following the federal election in 2011. In the previous parliament, Bill C-389, a bill to amend the Human Rights Code to explicitly enshrine protections against discrimination for transgender people, had successfully passed in the House of Commons, only to die on the Senate floor when Harper declared a Federal Election (thereby dissolving parliament).
Is the timing of this disturbing and blatantly discriminatory regulatory adjustment merely a coincidence? That is up to you to decide. However, the negative impact on trans people is crystal clear, and we need to take action now.
What. The. Actual. Fuck?!
Now this needs a reblog.
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Notes: 1 / 4 days ago
The problem with Google’s new privacy policy
“In addition, we may replace past names associated with your Google Account so that you are represented consistently across all our services. If other users already have your email, or other information that identifies you, we may show them your publicly visible Google Profile information, such as your name and photo.”
How to instantly out uncountable numbers of people against their will.
Most of us have very valid reasons to use alternate names, including as a protection against discrimination, harrasment, or abusers. Automaticallycombining previously separate accounts exposes us to these things.
An extra problem is that there is no apparent way to contact google. Their “contact us” page offers no option to actually contact them: http://www.google.com/intl/en/contact/
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Notes: 87 / 4 days ago from lovebelikeawhirlwind (originally from arabstateofmind)
The Mizrahi Rejection of Zionism
At the center of the radical, post-Zionist Mizrahi critique is a deep feeling of victimization. The post-Zionist Mizrahi writers continue to live their parents’ insults and humiliations at the hands of the European Ashkenazi Jewish establishment that absorbed them in Israel after immigration. Discriminatory policies created a continuing social and economic gap between Mizrahim and Ashkenazim. These academics promote the view held by many young Mizrahim that discrimination did not end with their parents’ generation. The children—who, in large part, were born in Israel—continue to face discrimination and cope with social and economic handicaps.
The radical Mizrahim who turned to post-Zionism tap into anger beyond the well-known complaints of past ill-treatment, including the maabarot, the squalid tent cities into which Mizrahim were placed upon arrival in Israel; the humiliation of Moroccan and other Mizrahi Jews when Israeli immigration authorities shaved their heads and sprayed their bodies with the pesticide DDT; the socialist elite’s enforced secularization; the destruction of traditional family structure, and the reduced status of the patriarch by years of poverty and sporadic unemployment. These Mizrahi intellectuals’ fury extends beyond even the state-sponsored kidnapping of Yemeni infants for adoption by Ashkenazi families who lost their children in the Holocaust. The real anger Sephardim feel nowadays, and upon which these Mizrahi post-Zionists seize, comes from the extent to which, in their view, the Zionist narrative denied, erased, and excluded their historical identity.
Some of the adherents of this new Israeli school of thought now equate Mizrahi grievances with those of Palestinians. In an article, “Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Jewish Victims,” a takeoff on Edward Said’s famous “Zionism from the Standpoint of its [Palestinian] Victims,” Ella Habiba-Shohat, an Iraqi-Israeli woman and one of the principal Mizrahi post-Zionist leaders, claims that, alongside the Palestinians, Mizrahi Jews are Zionism’s “other” victims. According to Shohat, Zionism is a white, Ashkenazi phenomenon, based on the denial of the Orient and the rights of both Mizrahi Jews and the Palestinians. Indeed, she argues, the conflict of East versus West, Arab versus Jew, and Palestinian versus Israeli exists not only between Israelis and Arabs but also within Israel between Ashkenazi and Mizrahi Jews.
This view contradicts the mainstream Zionist narrative, which maintains that Zionism saved Mizrahi Jews. According to this view, the Mizrahi Jews were devout Zionists who deeply wished to leave the Diaspora and return to Zion. Zionism saved these Mizrahim when persecution in their Arab and Iranian homelands intensified after Israel’s independence. It also rescued them from the backwardness of Arab society and introduced them to the technology and culture of the civilized world. Zionism helped them to overcome the disadvantages of the illiterate, despotic societies from which they came.
In contrast, post-Zionist Mizrahi writers believe that this official Zionist account is false and needs to be de-constructed. They maintain that the Mizrahim did not come from backward or primitive societies. Cities like Alexandria, Baghdad, and Istanbul were great metropolises of wealth and culture. Most Mizrahim had been exposed to Western culture and ideas since they came from countries once subject to British or French rule. The Mizrahim were also largely literate, if not highly educated. Most men and even some women could read the Torah.
The post-Zionist writers also attack the claim that the Mizrahi Jews longed to immigrate to Israel. In reality, they argue, as loyal residents of the Arab world, Zionism played a relatively minor role in the Mizrahi world-view. Despite the role that the longing for Zion played in their religious lives, they did not share the European-Zionist desire to leave the Diaspora. Even after the Holocaust, post-Zionist writers maintain, Mizrahi Jews remained largely opposed to Zionism and lived peacefully with their Arab neighbors. Yehouda Shenhav, professor of sociology and anthropology at Tel Aviv University, writes in his study of the Jews of Iraq that the Mizrahim were never really Zionists. Instead, he argues that the Ashkenazi establishment encouraged their immigration less to protect the Mizrahim and more to address its own need for cheap labor. Instead of saving the Mizrahi Jews, Zionism only ruthlessly displaced an entire community, Shenhav maintains, and removed its members’ right to determine their own future. Pursuing this logic to its end, he argues that Zionism cannot be considered a liberation movement for all Jews. It liberated European Jews but enslaved the Mizrahim who, like the Palestinians, are an abused Third World people suffering under the yoke of first world Ashkenazi oppressors.
One of the main complaints of this radical intellectual school is the belief that Zionism destroyed the Mizrahi sense of community and culture by forcing the adoption of new “Zionist” and “Israeli” identities so as to eradicate any threat of a Mizrahi-Arab alliance. This action not only destroyed the natural Arab-Jewish identity of the Mizrahim, these post-Zionists argue, but also sparked the Arab-Israeli conflict. Shiko Behar, a Mizrahi post-Zionist writer, asserts that identity in the Middle East today is shaped around post-colonial nationalism, not the religious division between Muslim and non-Muslim Arabs.
Before the rise of modern Jewish and Arab nationalism, Mizrahim and Arabs could coexist without conflict because they all shared an Arab identity and only differed in their religious beliefs.In Zionist Israel, continues Behar, the Mizrahim could not be considered Arab-Jews even if their historical identity was more closely aligned with the Arab rather than Israeli identity. The Arab-Israeli conflict meant that the Mizrahim were forced to choose: either they were Jews, or they were Arabs. Mizrahim suffered communal schizophrenia because, for the first time since perhaps the time of the Caliph Harun ar-Rashid (763-809) when the Islamic caliph forced Jews to wear yellow patches, Arabism and Judaism were in conflict. Yet for this very reason, argues Behar, the Mizrahim—victimized by both Ashkenazi Zionism and the rise of Arab nationalism—are the key factor in solving the Arab-Israeli conflict. They alone can serve as the bridgehead into the Arab world since they, like the Palestinians, are refugees whose identity was destroyed.
(Taken from Post-Zionism and the Sephardi Question by Meyrav Wurmser)
This is a not-so popular side of the Zionist narrative that is rarely addressed outside of Jewish academia. Tensions between Mizrahim (and Sephardim) and Ashkenazi Jews still abound in Israel today. The Ethiopian Jews now join their ranks in that regard.
Yes, thank you! ALL OF THIS.
And there you are thinking you understand an issue pretty well, certainly better than almost anybody you know, and then you read something like this and get a whole extra layer of complexity and understanding on top of it. Thank you for writing and posting this.
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Notes: 402 / 4 days ago from loveandzombies (originally from ellengreer)
Please help support my documentary in progress!
Don’t Mine Me is a documentary in the making about uranium mining on the Navajo reservation in the Southwest United States. The health and environmental hazards of uranium mining have been affecting the Navajo population for years.
I am trying to raise the funds to be able to go back out west and film this documentary with a crew.
Please CLICK HERE to take a look, comment on the campaign, REBLOG, donate, even just share with others! Thanks!
fuck yeah. that is awesome.
signal boost
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Notes: 2 / 5 days ago from cannibalcomfort
Bright-field TEM image of a suspended graphene membrane. Its central part (bluish) is monolayer graphene. Electron diffraction images from different areas of the flake show that it is a single crystal without domains. We note scrolled top and bottom edges and a strongly folded region on the right. The typical distance between the golden bars is 500 nm. Credit to Jannik Meyer
pretty!
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Notes: 44 / 5 days ago from cctcdTalkin’ ‘Bout My S-S-S-Socialization
Excerpted from Natalie Reed’s blog:
Growing up amidst male socialization when one’s gender identity is not consistent with it is a horrifying and traumatic experience. Nothing about it is in any way a privilege, and one does not internalize or adapt to it in a manner at all similar to how a cis man does. Rather than it being a means through which one develops confidence and a sense of power and entitlement, eventually taking one’s vantage point for granted, it is instead a painful, self-erasing performance one has been forced to adopt. One has a constant inner checklist of the behaviours and mannerisms you’re supposed to display in order to avoid being seen as girly and consequently ridiculed or beaten up. Instead of gaining the benefits of being the “superior” class within our cultural gender dynamics, you’re instead experiencing an extremely harsh, constraining prison of gender’s unspoken rules and regulations. Instead of internalizing a sense of being the default, favoured, normal gender, you internalize scripts, shame, self-hatred and the need to police your own gender- police your expression, your personality, your interests, the ways in which you interact with others, anything that could end up with you getting “caught” and revealing how you’re not normal, you’re inferior, broken and wrong.
This is painfully accurate.
i am vegan, a sober addict, trans, a black swan, pan and poly, a redhead, a dragon, pagan, a freak, a lover, uncategorisable.
i am open to questions.
things i liked.
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