Posts tagged with "Oppression"

March to Save Our Healthcare this Friday - NYC

By Ari | May 7, 08 05:01 PM

Every Teacher, Transit Worker, Librarian, and Public Worker will be impacted!
5/9 FRI, 4:30 pm - Protest: "March to Save Our Healthcare."

Join the fight to prevent GHI-HIP from converting to a for-profit company & jeopardizing the healthcare of 4 million policy holders, including 500,000 NYC workers (93% of the workforce) & retirees. Mainstream politicians & union leaders support the change, hoping to benefit from the nearly $3 billion windfall profits of such a sale. Help send a "no privatization" message to the NYS Sup't of Insurance & GHI-HIP. Bring friends & signs.

At Office of the NYS Superintendent of Insurance, 25 Beaver St
(4/5 to Bowling Green, J/M/Z to Broad St , R/W to Whitehall St,
1 to Rector St, 2/3 to Wall St, A/C to B'way-Nassau).

Info: (718) 869-2279, noprivatization-at-yahoo-dot-com (request flyer)
http://www.consumersunion.org/conv/
http://www.metrohealthcare.org/html/hcoa080116.html [video]
http://www.myspace.com/saveourhealthcare
http://going.com/saveourhealthcare
http://nyc.indymedia.org/en/2008/05/96895.html

Spread the word!

Day of Silence

By Ari | May 7, 08 02:23 PM

Check out GLSEN's new Day of Silence Blog, designed by Shirari Industries. This year's DOS fell on April 25th and drew record numbers of participants. Hundreds of thousands of students from more than 7,500 middle and high schools took a pledge of silence to bring attention to the bullying, name-calling, harassment and other violence that silences queer folks every day.

This year's DOS was held in remembrance of Lawrence King, a 15-year old California student who was shot and killed because of his sexuality and gender expression. We had the honor of designing a quick skin for Lawrence's MySpace page, another GLSEN project.

Save the date - the next DOS is on Friday, April 17, 2009. In the meantime, anyone can take action year-round to create safer schools and communities for queer youth. Visit GLSEN for information and ideas.

Voices: Queer Palestinian women

By Ari | May 7, 08 12:15 PM

My friends at freeDimensional have introduced me to ASWAT, an organization of Palestinian gay women based in Haifa. ASWAT (Arabic for "voices") provides a range of services and opportunities for interaction and support to queer Palestinian women, while raising public awareness and fostering tolerance in the greater community. They're online at aswatgroup.org.

Their words remind me of the awkward (but perhaps essential) position of Bayard Rustin, whose efforts in the American Civil Rights movement have been largely marginalized and/or "forgotten" because he was also a gay rights activist. ASWAT's working statement reads in part: "As long as we women participate in the struggle for national liberation, we are welcomed and our efforts are appreciated. The moment women want to focus their energies in establishing independence from the male occupation and structure, we are transformed instantly into enemies."

For yet more voices of feminist women, this time from Muslim women worldwide, many of them from Palestine, check out Sarah Husain's Voices of Resistance: Muslim Women on War, Faith, and Sexuality. And stay tuned to our blog here for more on Israel-Palestine - Shira and I are just back from a trip that included about 10 days in Haifa, and thanks to many Big Discussions there, have a much better understanding of the politics in question, which I hope we'll have time to comment on in a future blog post or two.

Nim Chimpsky, humans, and the animal family

By Ari | May 7, 08 10:53 AM

An activist friend of mine, Jesse Lokahi Heiwa, sent me a link to Chris Colin's The chimp who thought he was a boy, a Salon interview with Elizabeth Hess on her new biography, Nim Chimpsky: The Chimp Who Would Be Human. What a read. I was once interested in doing sign language research with primates, and today am very glad I didn't end up going that route. On the one hand you get this real sense of our connection with our ape cousins, and a new illumination of their personhood, but on the other, you can't really forge such a close (and arguably productive) relationship without harming the ape you're communicating with. Apes aren't meant to be pets, actors, research subjects, or companions to humans - they're evolved to hang out with other apes. The interview, and I'm sure the book, paint a very sad picture of how hurt Nim was when people stopped treating him like a human and started treating him like an ape again.

The article begins "Sometimes we're animals." Colin means it in the sense that what members of our species did to Nim was "bestial," inhumane (inhuman). But I think he's got it backwards. Humans are always animals; the other animals are our family, like it or not. We may try to "elevate" ourselves from their ranks, call human actions moral ones, and equate animals with lawless cruelty. But when we treat our cousins badly, our behavior isn't bestial but all too human. Only we set up research labs, and only we have the power to call the shots on our brothers' and sisters' lives with impunity. I think we need to spend more, not less, time thinking of ourselves as animals, and develop some empathy out of that connection.

Vermont Commons: The Decay of Capitalism

By Ari | May 6, 08 11:05 AM

Richard Davis's short opinion piece, The Decay of Capitalism, sums up how I've been feeling about the state of world affairs for a long time. Back when I read (parts of) Marx's Capital in school, I remember this graph showing capitalism's inevitable crash - there are only so many workers and resources to exploit before you run out of room for profit and the whole thing has to come tumbling down. I think this article does a good job of tying it all together, from fuel prices to the mortgage crisis to the healthcare industry's problems: "How did we get to the point where we replaced ethical principles and a sense of common good with profits at any cost? It is the natural evolution of the capitalist system in societies without a soul."

Lest this post sound too depressing: let's not forget that people are (and have been for some time) constructing socialist alternatives all over the world. Read Zapatista Encuentro: Documents from the Encounter for Humanity and Against Neoliberalism, La Realidad, Mexico for just one glimpse of the new worlds being forged to take the place of the old.

Hawai'i Needs You: An open letter to the US left from the Hawaiian sovereignty movement

By Ari | Apr 13, 08 08:47 PM

The Nation has published an open letter from the Hawaiian sovereignty movement, addressed to us in the U.S. left: Hawai'i Needs You. We're with you, Hawai'i! Via Jesse Lokahi Heiwa of the Hawai'i Solidarity Committee.

For more info, meet some of the folks in the Hawaiian sovereignty movement:

My Feminist Review: Transgender Voices: Beyond Women and Men

By Ari | Apr 12, 08 01:13 PM

My review of Lori B. Girshick's Transgender Voices: Beyond Women and Men is up at Feminist Review. This was a really good one! I'm genderqueer and have read quite a bit on this subject, but I learned a lot. I loved reading the words of the people Lori interviewed for the book, and seeing their photos - I found it really made me care for all of them, identify with them, want to be in unity with them, to change things so we all have a safer, happier world to live in. Any book that can do that is a good book, I think.

Shirari Industries Bought by News Corp for 2.5 Million

By Shira | Apr 1, 08 12:22 PM

We were as surprised as I'm sure you are right now when Rupert Murdoch himself called us this morning to "make a deal." We know that News Corporation is on a mission to take over the world, one media entity at a time, but we're still not quite sure why he wants our little queer, vegan operation. He must be getting pretty close to owning the entire "long tail" and Shirari Industries is just another notch on the empire's belt.

Stay tuned for a dramatically redesigned site, starting with our tagline, which is now "let's be mean!" - it has a certain ring to it, don't you think?

...April Fools!!!

This is what happens when you move to the woods, part 2

By Ari | Mar 29, 08 11:06 AM

Yeek. The creepy Craig's List land postings aimed at hunters just don't end. Does this listing's conflation of snowmobiling, boating and skiing with killing deer, turkeys and fishes bother anyone else? On the one hand you have innocent fun running around in the outdoors (or, you know, polluting it with a snowmobile, but whatever), and on the other hand, you have hunting down a living being and violently extinguishing his life so you can eat his flesh and maybe stuff his skin so you can hang his dead body on your wall for posterity. That's "sport"? Seriously?

Anyway, using a list of free-living animals currently living on a piece of land as an incentive to folks who would like to come and kill them to come buy said land, is, in my opinion, disgusting and sad. Every time I see a listing like this one I want to buy the land just to save the animals from being killed off by some other buyer who's actually attracted to land listings like this one.

Earth Hour, Blackout Sabbath, and other symbols of sustainability

By Ari | Mar 29, 08 10:37 AM

Today I was happy to see Google blacked out in support of Earth Hour, tonight's hour of energy awareness (8pm - 9pm). Turn out your lights to participate, if you're into it.

However, reading about Earth Hour, I couldn't help but think Rufus Wainwright's Blackout Sabbath - 12 hours of no energy use at all, on the summer solstice, June 21, along with setting personal goals for sustainability - is a lot more hardcore. The World Wildlife Fund, who's behind Earth Hour, should have talked to Rufus and set their sights a little higher, pushed people a little harder!

On Rufus' short sample list of actions one can take for the environment, he even includes going vegan (my fingers are SO crossed right now that he'll join our vegan ranks... c'mon Rufus, you can do it...). Veganism is such an obvious step toward sustainability that it gets a little infuriating when I see Treehugger and WorldChanging and the like continually ignoring it as an option and suggesting people find "sustainable fisheries" and "happy meat", as if that solves much else besides making people feel a little better about oppressing animals.

I don't think I'm going to participate in Earth Hour, but I do think I'll do Blackout Sabbath. I loved the blackout too, and I think it could be magic to spend that time making art about the earth and the future, or writing by (vegan!) candlelight about the times to come and how we can make it beautiful. I like setting goals for myself, and I like participating in consciousness-raising events like fasts and the like, because I like, well, raising my consciousness. These events are symbols, but important ones: They're fissures in the wall of separation we put up between our energy-consuming, self-centered, here-and-now lives - and the future, our children's future, the future of the earth. We don't like to look over there, to see what we're actually setting up for ourselves. If it takes an hour (or 12 hours) of reflection and awareness to really take a good look at what we're doing and how we can change, then that symbolic act is a very useful one.

But in the end, we need more than just temporary observances and symbolic acts, right? If you're out of a room for over two minutes, there shouldn't be a light on in there. If you've got appliances with power indicator lights on them that are plugged in all day, they're just sitting there sucking up energy, and should be unplugged until they're needed. If your home just doesn't stay cool in the summer or warm in the winter, maybe you need to fix your insulation so all of that energy doesn't just fly our the window. In every situation we have the power to make decisions that add to the problem, or that make the world a better place. There are easy little things we can all do every day, all day, to go beyond symbols and toward true sustainability. What do you do? And do symbols help, or distract from this larger, deeper movement?

"Conscious consumerism"

By Ari | Mar 16, 08 03:05 PM

A little while ago, Brooklyn activist/art collective Change You Want to See / Not an Alternative banned Raw Revolution products from their gallery space, issuing a kind of anti-greenwashing/consumerist manifesto along with the announcement: The Real (Raw) Revolution:

A line is here drawn against alternative capitalist products. Revolution is not a candy bar or an energy drink. Don't get us wrong, we recognize good intentions, but good intentions alone are no solution for avoiding the road to hell. All products that represent themselves as "sustainable solutions" are hereby banned from The Change You Want to See Gallery. Creating an economy where fairly traded, organic, vegan, healthy, (and even free) products are the norm rather than an anomaly is something we encourage. We believe however that to achieve this, a stand has to be taken against any commodity that is packaged as the embodiment of an alternative or a revolution. Consuming "Raw Revolution" will never be a meal replacement for actual revolution. Please... continue to invent, build, create, fight, force the limits of the capitalist system. Bring the results of your work to the Gallery, we want to and will continue to help you promote your work. However we will no longer provide a cover for a guerilla marketing campaign. If "false revolutionary", "fake alternative" "politically correct" "do-gooder" products are brought to the Gallery their packaging will be removed at the door.

(Via Stop Shopping Monitor)

Here's the video version:

I really dig the sentiment behind this move. We've been trying to figure out what we can possibly put in our own shop that would pass our ethical muster. We don't like using new materials or toxic art supplies. We don't want to ship things all over the place, requiring shipping suppplies and fuel as well as causing pollution. And we don't really like having money relationships with people anymore, either - though that's hard to avoid when you live in a capitalist society and sell your skills for a living. All of this rather limits what one can sell in a shop, if one decides to keep the shop at all.

There's such a fuzzy line between people working for social change and trying to make a living at the same time - and people who are more in it for the money, but who may do some good along the way. Where do you cross the line into exploitation, or are you always there, so long as you're participating in capitalism?

On the other side of this equation is consumerism of different sorts. In our ongoing efforts to reduce our impact we've found that there are certain things we've needed to buy that require shipping. You can find used books on alternative energy at a local bookstore, for example, but what about that washable shower curtain that requires no plastic liner (or other hard-to-find but highly efficient replacements for conventional housewares)? You'd think in our massive city we'd find it (and yes, if we were craftier, we'd make it), but no luck. But buying online from a company like Simple Family Living Homegoods or Gaiam has a broad impact (supporting capitalism; using packaging material; and polluting the air, using up fuel and clogging up a highway, during shipping). At what point does it make more sense to just buy a damn curtain that requires a liner, imperfect a solution though it might be?

I know we can't be perfect, but we can do our best to do the right thing for the planet and our neighbors. In the society we've set up for ourselves though, it can be hard to know what the "right" decision is.

UPDATE, 3.26.08
Lest I sound too negative about Simple Family Living Homegoods and Gaiam, I wanted to put in that these two companies - and Simple Family Living Homegoods in particular, which is much more indie than Gaiam - are both really great places to get things that will help you move toward a lower-impact life. Reusable, washable mesh produce bags will help you avoid using plastic ones, reusable cloth gift bags and handkerchiefs will help you avoid the use of wrapping supplies, soap nuts and a collapsible drying rack will help you avoid detergents and use less power when doing laundry, and so on. If you can't - or won't - make these things yourself, and if you can't find them locally (which is all too often the case, hence this post), these are indeed very good places to find them.

Fight Military Recruitment in Schools

By Shira | Mar 1, 08 07:21 PM

The New York Coalition of Radical Educators (NYCoRE) have recently released a curriculum that helps teachers educate their students about military recruiting tactics. The goal is to empower students with concrete information and to make sure they know about alternative ways to access education and career-building tools after high-school.

Ari and I had the pleasure of designing the cover for Camouflaged: Investigating How the U.S. Military Affects You and Your Community, which you can preview and buy online through Lulu.com.

If you're a teacher who want to get involved, you should come to the meeting this week...

NYCoRE's Counter Recruitment Project Meeting
Thursday, March 6, 5:30-7:30
CUNY Graduate Center 34th St. & 5th Ave., Room 5489
Please bring ID

Topics of discussion include:

Bringing teachers together to develop a workshop for other teachers around unpacking military recruitment in New York City Schools and across the country
Outreach to bring teachers and administrators from Upper Manhattan neighborhoods to the workshop
Strategizing ways to share the ideas developed by New York City teachers in NYCoRE's recently released curricular guide Camouflaged
Developing ways to be a voice in the events acknowledging the anniversary of the war in Iraq

If you are interested in attending or getting involved, email Edwin at NYCoRE.

And here are some great videos about recruiting and the impact of war on veterans from Media That Matters: No Child, All That I Can Be and Night Visions

Loving mama earth, one day at a time

By Ari | Feb 16, 08 02:00 PM

There have been a lot of locavore for a year / vegan for a week / freegan for a month projects going on lately, usually resulting in a book or article. I worry that rather than inspiring lasting change, these sorts of projects frame these actions as extreme (and temporary, limited) experiments by extraordinary people. As Vegan Freak Radio says again and again, there's nothing extreme about living ethically and with compassion. Our individual actions do affect the future of our planet, and each of us has the power to reduce our negative impact and even make our impact a positive one.

I think the secret is to make changes at a pace that's sustainable. If you rush it and try to go vegan or zero-waste overnight, odds are, your plan will backfire. But if you can identify an area in which you want to improve your actions, make a change and see positive results, that change is more likely to be a lasting one - and you'll be more likely to go on to work on another thing you want to improve.

For example, by making small changes over a period of over a year, Shira and I have gone from throwing out a big bag of trash at least once a week, to throwing out a tiny bag of trash every two weeks or so. Where did all that trash go? Well, it wasn't "trash" in the first place - it was compost, recyclables, and reusables. And in many cases, because we've been working on reducing our consumerism and choosing items with less packaging, it no longer comes into our apartment in the first place. And this wasn't a temporary experiment - it's just what we're doing because we love our earth and want our future children to be able to enjoy it, too.

Want more perspective on why sorting your trash is worth the effort? Long before The Story of Stuff came Jorge Furtado's Ilha das Flores, a Brazilian documentary short that shows how one person's trash becomes another person's food. Here it is with English subtitles.

Here are some resources and groups working toward a zero-waste / low-impact future:

The art for this post is from a Shell ad that was pulled because it was deemed misleading - since Shell is, after all, an oil corporation and not an envrionmental activist organization. But damn did they make a pretty image - and they're right, don't throw anything away - there is no away!

Tofu and Soy Milk Explained, by Puppets

By Ari | Feb 4, 08 06:08 PM

(via invisible voices)

Simulated stupidity

By Ari | Feb 3, 08 02:05 PM

Recently I saw a big ad for EA's "Sim City Societies" that shows three (fake) people and the societies they've built, one of which is obviously meant to be an earthy crunchy green city and another that's insanely capitalist. Curious what options the game would actually give you (can you make a sustainable anarchist community, for example?), I checked out their site.

The game does seem flexible, poking fun at both capitalists and utopians and hinting at the idea of creating a balance. ("Mix and match societal values — productivity, prosperity, creativity, spirituality, authority, and knowledge — to determine the core attributes of your city... Witness the evolution of your city as its appearance and sounds adapt to reflect these values.") But right up at the top of the home page is a prominent "Learn more about alternative energy" link that leads to a BP-branded site explaining that this game is the result of a partnership between the oil company and EA.

While I appreciate that BP is apparently doing a lot of work in green energy development, and that this game will allow users to experiment with wind farms and other green technologies, this looks like a massive greenwashing campaign to me. BP paints itself here as a green energy company, with nary a whisper of its record as one of the ten worst corporations in the world.

With BP so intimately involved in this game's development, my guess is that folks who want to set up oil-guzzling societies will be conveniently prevented from causing the oil spills and oil refinery explosions that characterize oil's real-world impact... which sort of negates the whole point of a game that supposedly serves as a mini experimental laboratory for various energy options, doesn't it?

Related: Games for Change: Serious Fun

Craft Magazine really wants you to buy things

By Ari | Feb 1, 08 06:49 PM

Craft Magazine rejected an article written by one of their regular contributors, Jean Railla. The piece, called “What Would Jesus Sell?”, asks some questions about crafting and consumerism that Craft apparently decided were too dangerous to publish. Fortunately, Murketing and MediaBistro have both taken up the slack and republished the piece themselves. Yay, you can read it! It's good:

Isn’t shopping, no matter how wonderfully crafty and politically correct still, well, shopping? Can you escape the so-called sin of consumerism by buying handmade? Isn’t the whole point of modern crafting Do It Yourself - not Buy from Someone Who is Doing It Themselves?

(Via Stop Shopping Monitor)

No more Alba Hawaiian lip balm for me

By Ari | Jan 29, 08 10:19 AM

Alba Pisses Me Off!!
Originally uploaded by Flower~

Alba's amazing vegan lip balm is about to become not vegan. They're adding beeswax! It's such a shame. I will miss the pineapple coconut deliciousness. If you too are an unhappy vegan, write them a letter.

Fortunately, there are a lot of other cruelty-free options available. (Merry Hempsters, Literati, Pussy Pucker Pots, Eco Lips, DIY...)

If you're not boycotting bee products yet, please read Why Honey is Not Vegan. For a glimpse into the world of industrial beekeeping, visit Honey Bee Insemination Service.

Love, death, and Heath

By Ari | Jan 28, 08 09:55 AM

I'm assuming folks have heard that Fred Phelps plans to picket Heath Ledger's funeral. Calling Heath's death "the best thing that ever happened to [his] family," Phelps believes that in making Brokeback Mountain, the actor sealed his fate in hell.

Fortunately, as with all of his actions, this stunt is just making Phelps and his ideas look more insane, while bringing out a groundswell of love and support from kinder, sweeter, more moral people.

It's strange to feel such a sense of connection with a celebrity you've never met, but I was genuinely saddened by the news of Heath's death, and Brokeback had a lot to do with it. Good bye, my fallen ally. Thank you for helping to bring gay cowboy love to the mainstream.

Angela Davis Tells It

By Shira | Jan 25, 08 03:33 PM

Earlier this week, on Martin Luther King Day, I happened upon an amazing speech that Angela Davis gave at Duke University in 2005. In an hour she manages to cover racism, homophobia, the war in Iraq, the prison industrial complex, media conglomeration and more (including some prescient shout-outs for Dennis Kucinich and Barack Obama).

Most importantly, Davis calls attention to the worldwide movement for social change, a network of people from around the globe, united in the belief that "Another World Is Possible." It turns out the World Social Forum, the largest annual convening of this movement of movements, is taking place right now, all around the world (in the past, it's been held in particular locations like Porte Alegre, Mumbai and Nairobe). The WSF site hosts an interactive Google map that you can search for actions in your area.

I found the Angela Davis speech on iTunes U, a pretty awesome section of the iTunes store where you can download free audio from various universities, including full courses. To find the speech, open iTunes, click on the store, click on "iTunes U" on the upper left side, then click on "Duke" in the universities list on the left, then on "Campus" in the topics list on the left, and then on "Martin Luther King Jr. Celebration" under Offices and Programs on the bottom. (Yes, it's really annoying that you can't bookmark or hyperlink things in iTunes,unless you know you don't mind installing AppleScripts.)

Does anyone out there know the deal on Shola Lynch's documentary Free Angela & All Political Prisoners? All I can find online is this video interview Shola did for AOL Black Voices about the project. I really want to see it, but I can't find any distribution info.

Ari and I are also working our way through the UC Berkeley class "Introduction to Nonviolence" with professor Michael Nagler. Just go to iTunes and do a search to find it. College without homework - woohoo!

This is what happens when you move to the woods

By Ari | Jan 10, 08 09:10 AM

Shira and I are planning a move to Ithaca, New York late next summer, and have been trawling Craig's List for cabins and the like. Earthy crunchy vegans like us aren't the only ones who dig the area; hunting-oriented listings like this are really common. Note that there are 76 acres of "forrest" being sold here, but the only photo is a fuzzy closeup of future hunting victims. Creeeeepy.

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