Monthly Archives: February 2012

rape. definition and statistics. attorney general. fbi. police.

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Jus­tice Depart­ment Announces Major Step For­ward to Com­bat Rape

For many rape sur­vivors, today is an impor­tant day. It means that the dev­as­tat­ing vio­lence they suf­fered will now be counted in this nation’s crime sta­tis­tics. Attor­ney Gen­eral Holder announced today that the FBI will be chang­ing the def­i­n­i­tion of rape used to col­lect data from local law enforce­ment about these crimes. This data is pub­lished in the Uni­form Crime Report and is the nation’s main source of infor­ma­tion about crime trends. Con­tinue read­ing →

the hill. restructuring our nuclear force.

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rea­son over relics: restruc­tur­ing our nuclear force

In To End All Wars, his excel­lent his­tory of World War I, author Adam Hochschild recounts how pas­sion­ately some strate­gists defended the per­ceived essen­tial role of the horse cav­alry. In an era that war was to be dom­i­nated by the machine gun, artillery bom­bard­ments and the emer­gence of the tank, these strate­gists resisted any re-​evaluation of the role of cav­alry as heresy itself. In the face of all the evi­dence, they stub­bornly resisted change, and their blind devo­tion to the sta­tus quo cost their nation dearly.

You don’t have to look far to see a mod­ern day exam­ple of this type of thinking.

Last week, the Asso­ci­ated Press reported that Pres­i­dent Obama, as Com­man­der in Chief, has asked our mil­i­tary lead­er­ship to present him with a range of options for re-​structuring our nuclear forces. The AP fur­ther reported that the range of options runs from main­tain­ing “the sta­tus quo” to mak­ing sig­nif­i­cant changes that mod­ern­ize our strat­egy and force struc­ture to reflect cur­rent realities.

The AP story is likely to send the most ardent defend­ers of nuclear arms into a tizzy. They will no doubt trot out all of the usual, cliché lan­guage about appease­ment and uni­lat­eral disarmament.

realinterrobang. quotes. republicans vs women.

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real­in­ter­robang

Quotes, Please Help Me Clean My House Edition

excerpt

Catholic women remem­ber the woman in the pew next to them in church, drag­ging 13 chil­dren behind her, her hus­band dead or gone and no help at hand. They remem­ber the neigh­bor who died in child­birth because her doc­tor was bound by faith to save her baby at all costs. They remem­ber the rel­a­tive whose hus­band defied the hospital’s orders to make sure there were no more chil­dren, who suf­fered hor­ri­bly before the end. They remem­ber their own mis­car­riages, still­births, when God wanted them to have just one more baby, at the age of 45 in 1953. And those were the mar­ried women who wanted the chil­dren they had. Those were the ones doing it right, in the eyes of the more con­ser­v­a­tive bish­ops and mem­bers of the church. That was the fate due the good girls. I don’t need to go over what hap­pened to the bad ones, and what we remem­ber about them. So go ahead, tell those women that a con­dom is cause for excom­mu­ni­ca­tion. Tell those women that the great­est threat to their lib­erty is some other lady in their health plan get­ting the pill for free. Tell those women, who lost their sis­ters, who lost their aunts, who lost their moth­ers, who saw the women around them worn out and rubbed down to noth­ing, that they don’t have the right to pain­lessly, rea­son­ably ensure that they live to care for the fam­ily they want. Let’s have that fight. Let’s haul out all the arguments.

Let’s talk about how God really wants our infant mor­tal­ity rate to sky­rocket. Let’s talk about how many women, exactly, God wants dead. Let’s make adher­ence to a rule of the mod­ern world the be-​all and end-​all test of who is a true believer. That’s never gone hor­ri­bly wrong before. Let’s have that fight, because there’s no way it goes the way the bish­ops think it’s going to go.
 – Athenae, “War on the Mod­ern World,” First Draft

incite! courtney morris. why misogynists make great informants.

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by Court­ney Desiree Mor­ris
Court­ney Mor­ris is a writer and com­mu­nity orga­nizer liv­ing in Austin, TX and Blue­fields, Nicaragua.

pub­lished in makeshift mag­a­zine

via incite blog

Why Misog­y­nists Make Great Infor­mants: How Gen­der Vio­lence on the Left Enables State Vio­lence in Rad­i­cal Movements

excerpt

Maybe it isn’t that infor­mants are dif­fi­cult to spot but rather that we have col­lec­tively ignored the signs that give them away. To save our move­ments, we need to come to terms with the con­nec­tions between gen­der vio­lence, male priv­i­lege, and the strate­gies that infor­mants (and peo­ple who just act like them) use to desta­bi­lize rad­i­cal move­ments. Time and again het­ero­sex­ual men in rad­i­cal move­ments have been allowed to assert their priv­i­lege and sub­or­di­nate oth­ers. Despite all that we say to the con­trary, the fact is that rad­i­cal social move­ments and orga­ni­za­tions in the United States have refused to seri­ously address gen­der vio­lence [1] as a threat to the sur­vival of our strug­gles. We’ve treated misog­yny, homo­pho­bia, and het­ero­sex­ism as lesser evils — sec­ondary issues — that will even­tu­ally take care of them­selves or fade into the back­ground once the “real” issues — racism, the police, class inequal­ity, U.S. wars of aggres­sion — are resolved. There are seri­ous con­se­quences for choos­ing igno­rance. Misog­yny and homo­pho­bia are cen­tral to the repro­duc­tion of vio­lence in rad­i­cal activist com­mu­ni­ties. Scratch a misog­y­nist and you’ll find a homo­phobe. Scratch a lit­tle deeper and you might find the mak­ings of a future infor­mant (or some­one who just desta­bi­lizes move­ments like infor­mants do).

bio blog. teaching science. religious beliefs.

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bio blog

here be dragons

excerpt

How far should sci­en­tists, & those who com­mu­ni­cate about sci­ence, go in ‘push­ing’ against strongly-​held beliefs? (These could include cre­ation­ism, but also beliefs about ‘alter­na­tive ther­a­pies’ such as home­opa­thy & TCM.)
It is an area where care is needed, because if you ‘push’ so hard that peo­ple feel their ideas are threat­ened, they may become defen­sive & those ideas more entrenched. Neither’s a desir­able out­come from science’s point of view. On the other hand, in teach­ing about sci­ence, from time you actu­ally need to put stu­dents in an ‘uncom­fort­able’ place regard­ing their con­cep­tions about the world, if they’re to exam­ine those ques­tions crit­i­cally & per­haps reshape them in the light of the new knowl­edge they’ve acquired. (If that doesn’t hap­pen, then that new knowl­edge is likely to be learned only super­fi­cially — quickly gained & just as quickly forgotten.)

short story. patricia russo. gigantosaurus. mother doesn’t trust us anymore.

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found via alas a blog

gigan­tosaurus

mother doesn’t trust us anymore

excerpt

Mother doesn’t trust us any­more. She won’t let us leave the house. You just stay there where I can keep an eye on you, she says. No, you can’t go play in the yard. Don’t you move.

We’d noticed her start­ing to change a while ago. It wor­ried us. When had she become different?

Bicky said she hadn’t. He said Mother had always been spiny-​skinned, and the rest of us had just grown old enough to notice, was all. Besides which, she was teeter-​wobble in the head. Any­body with so many kids had to be, Bicky said. It was just a fact. We thought Bicky was full of kak, and Ver­rie told him so to his face. Mother had always been hug-​again, until recently. Ver­rie said he remem­bered tick­les and kisses. He looked at us, and we nod­ded. And what about the squeezie-​dolls, and the blan­kets cro­cheted out of for-​real unrav­eled sweaters? Only a few of us nod­ded that time. Ver­rie still had his blan­ket. It was yel­low part­way and a bluey-​gray the rest. Hill had one, too, but he had cut a hole in the mid­dle and used it as a pon­cho now. It looked stu­pid, because it didn’t even reach down to his belly-​button. Squeezie-​dolls were harder to remem­ber. Maybe Coy had had one. Maybe Nardo had bro­ken it.

You can’t be sen­ti­men­tal, Bicky said. We’re doing some­thing impor­tant. If Mother tries to stop us, we’re going to have to be hard.