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jasonhorton:

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More no pants

#TeamNoPants No pants is best pants.

Effective altruism reading material for busy people is a useful link-list for people who’d like a quick guide to the Effective Altruism (also called EA) movement.

Here’s a quote from an EA primer by Scott Siskind, which is included in the link-list:

But they are decidedly not natural when facing a decision about charitable giving. Most donors say they want to “help people”. If that’s true, they should try to distribute their resources to help people as much as possible. Most people don’t. In the “Buy A Brushstroke” campaign, eleven thousand British donors gave a total of ÂŁ550,000 to keep the famous painting “Blue Rigi” in a UK museum. If they had given that ÂŁ550,000 to buy better sanitation systems in African villages instead, the latest statistics suggest it would have saved the lives of about one thousand two hundred people from disease. Each individual $50 donation could have given a year of normal life back to a Third Worlder afflicted with a disabling condition like blindness or limb deformity..

Most of those 11,000 donors genuinely wanted to help people by preserving access to the original canvas of a beautiful painting. And most of those 11,000 donors, if you asked, would say that a thousand people’s lives are more important than a beautiful painting, original or no. But these people didn’t have the proper mental habits to realize that was the choice before them, and so a beautiful painting remains in a British museum and somewhere in the Third World a thousand people are dead.

If you are to “love your neighbor as yourself”, then you should be as careful in maximizing the benefit to others when donating to charity as you would be in maximizing the benefit to yourself when choosing purchases for a polar trek.

This is the sort of thing I find tremendously alienating, because it sets up supporting the arts, or supporting historic artifacts, as a bad thing. This is pretty common among EA rhetoric, I suspect because many EA people genuinely don’t care about art – especially “high” art – and think that people who do care are just preening for attention.

It’s true, of course, that money is fungible and therefore ten bucks donated to preserve a painting could instead have been used to protect three to six people from malaria for six years. But the same could also be said about the money spent on a video game, or on internet access, or on taking a trip, or eating out with friends, or on going to a movie, or anything else that EA folks might like doing. There isn’t an either-or choice between giving to help the needy and supporting the arts, any more than there’s an either-or choice between giving to help the needy and occasionally going out to a movie. Most people in a position to give to charity, can do both.

Unless the expectation is that 100% of every person’s money beyond the bare minimum needed for survival must be spent on saving lives, it seems weird that EA people often pick on the arts in particular. To be honest, this is the sort of thing that made me go “fuck EA!” when I first heard about it.

Nonetheless, I do like giving money to help people in need. And, given that this is one of my goals, I definitely want to give that money in a way that will be the most helpful possible. I think EA’s evidence-based approach is great, and I’m glad sites like The Life You Can Save and Givewell exist and can help me make decisions.

I don’t think I’d like it if EA guided everyone’s donations to charity. I don’t feel certain that the metrics they use are necessarily correct. Evidence-based is good, but sometimes evidence-based thinking is vulnerable to the streetlight effect. A scattershot approach, in which people use a zillion different approaches to deciding what charities to give to, is less vulnerable to the streetlight effect than a focused approach.

But in the real world, not everyone uses EA’s approach, and it’s not realistic to worry that everyone will. And so I find EA a useful and positive movement. And I do think that it’s a good idea for a large number of people (but short of everyone) to give to charity based on where their money can do the most good for the greatest number of people.

Anyway, as it happens, I’ve been put in charge of giving away $5000 to the charities of my choice. I was thinking of using The Life You Can Save’s Best Charities to Donate to page as a guide, probably giving the largest amounts to Against Malaria and to The Fistula Foundation, and smaller amounts to some other charities there. But I’d be interested in anyone’s else’s thoughts or suggestions.

More PROD3000.

empowerment is such a useless concept tbh.

your personal feelings on make-up really don’t matter when you’re talking about structural oppression. feminism doesn’t give a shit whether you are ~empowered~ from wearing eyeliner or not.

what feminism cares about is the fact that girls are pressured and groomed to wear make-up from their childhood on, that employers are less likely to hire you or pay you well if you don’t wear make-up, that the beauty industry is largely controlled by men and focused on making women feel insecure about their natural body so they can advance capitalism, that the beauty industry spends billions of dollars each year to contribute to the idea all girls are raised into that it’s only their looks that matter and give them worth.

i don’t think that wearing make-up or lingerie invalidates someone’s feminism, no. i do think that, regardless of your personal feelings on the matter, you have to be able to criticize make-up and femininity in general on a structural level though. you have to recognize that femininity is compulsory and imposed on women from the patriarchy. you have to recognize that women who don’t or can’t perform femininity the way it is dictated, especially disabled, lbpq+ and trans women and women of colour, are punished for it. and if you can’t do that because you’d rather cling to useless liberal concepts like empowerment then yes, that does invalidate your feminism.

“

Aaron Clarey isn’t really a Mad Max fan.

This is pretty clear already given that his viral rant about Fury Road doesn’t betray much knowledge of the franchise at all—he doesn’t seem aware that “the director of Fury Road” he reviles is, in fact, George Miller, the director of the entire Mad Max franchise. He calls one of the most iconic Australian cultural exports of all time a “piece of American culture.” He boldly states “No one barks orders to Max!” when, in fact, all three previous Mad Max films feature Max taking orders from someone (Roger Ward’s Captain Fifi in Mad Max, Michael Preston’s Papagallo in The Road Warrior, Tina Turner’s Auntie Entity in Beyond Thunderdome).

But the single biggest sign Clarey doesn’t know the first damn thing about what George Miller or Mad Max is his triumphalist line: “When the shit hits the fan, it will be men like Mad Max who will be in charge.”

Mad Max isn’t in charge of anything throughout the Mad Max film franchise. Max is emphatically not the archetype of the badass hero who gets the girl, gets the crown, and rules as a patriarch over society as is his due. He’s a fucked-up loner who isn’t fit to live among civilized people; who begins each film alone, wounded, broken, and who ends each film in the same state or worse.
[…]
All the Mad Max films have had tragic endings, and if you don’t grasp that this is the tragedy at the heart of Mad Max (and the gritty Westerns and samurai films Mad Max emulates) then you don’t get Mad Max. If you think Max has an awesome life and we’re supposed to wish we were him, you really don’t get Mad Max.

”

-

Arthur Chu, ‘Mad Max’: How Men’s Rights Activists Killed the World

m r a s    j u s t    g o t   f u c k e n   d r a g g e d d d d d d d d 

(via theimprovfairytale)

Just thinking about how it often seems that taking measures to keep yourself safe is seen as evidence that you’re doing something “bad.”

Carrying condoms or other safe sex supplies on you? You’re obviously doing sex work, and those supplies are still used as evidence of your alleged “crime” in plenty of places.

Using encryption tools on your electronic devices? You’re obviously a terrorist or a violent child rapist (the two currently-trendy bogeymen endlessly hauled out to frighten people into giving away their rights and freedoms) and the fact that you’ve used those tools is often used as evidence of your alleged wrongdoing.

Keep your money in cash stashed somewhere instead of keeping it in a bank? Use a pre-paid cheapo phone, maybe even get one that (in the U.S.) isn’t locked to a specific mobile carrier? Both of those are frequently deemed “suspicious” and pointed to as obvious indicators that you’re up to no good.

You know what I hear in all of that? I hear the echoes of a (hypothetical) abusive partner saying “If you really loved me, you wouldn’t have any boundaries, and you wouldn’t hide anything from me, and you’d let me take care of everything for you! Just trust me!” And that raises all sorts of red flags…

Filed under: General

sandandglass:

TDS, May 26, 2015

Jon Stewart wonders why some Republicans are okay with big government when it comes to surveillance, but not when it comes to healthcare

On an international scale, New York City isn’t an especially old city, but in its history from the 17th century to today quite a lot has changed in its urban landscape. Old NYC, a project by software engineer Dan Vanderkam, launched last month with thousands of images from the New York Public Library (NYPL) mapped across the five boroughs.

Based on the NYPL’s 80,000 image collection Photographic Views of New York City, 1870s–1970s, Old NYC centers heavily on the 1920s to ’40s, with photographs by Percy Loomis Sperr. Vanderkam previously created an Old SF interactive map of photographs from the San Francisco Public Library, and Old NYC, created in collaboration with the NYPL, was an 18-month passion project.

Intersections are plotted with dots that pull up geotagged photographs along with captions captured with an optical scanner (thus there are some spelling errors which are being crowdsourced). Similar to digital mapping projects that utilize institutional data sets like Mapping Emotions in Victorian London from the Stanford Literary Lab or the NYPL’s own mapping projects of Brooklyn living rooms and Manhattan doors, it offers an accessible way to engage with an existing archive.

Old NYC is an excellent portal for just about any aspect of New York City history, with plenty of fun finds to stumble upon, such as whimsical 1930s Macy’s Thanksgiving parade balloons designed by Tony Sarg flying in Columbus Circle, a shadowy view below the old elevated train on the Bowery, and 1920s beachgoers at Coney Island. All of New York’s oldest museums are also present, from the Metropolitan Museum of Art to the American Museum of Natural History, with images from a time when top hats and bustles were not unusual attire for strolling the galleries. Below are some then-and-now comparisons of these museums via Old NYC.

Explore thousands of archive New York Public Library images at Old NYC.

If you’re an artist living in China, take some advice from the example of Dai Jianyong: don’t make potty jokes about the president.

According to AP, Jianyong posted Photoshopped pictures online showing President Xi Jinping with an exaggeratedly constipated expression. The artist dubbed it the “chrysanthemum face” in a hashtag — “chrysanthemum” being slang in China for anus.

Though Jianyong is a relatively obscure artist, the authorities took note. On May 26, while he was walking with his wife near their Shanghai home, 12 police officers arrested him for “creating a disturbance” online. If convicted, he could spend five years in prison.

Jianyong had posted similar photos of other people before, so at a glance, the Xi images don’t really seem that subversive — maybe just a little disrespectful. “It was just a playful thing he did,” said Judy Zhu, the artist’s wife. “I don’t think there was that much political intent behind it.”

But some online commentators saw in Xi’s doctored mustache an allusion to Adolf Hitler, even though it’s not exactly identical. That would align Jianyong with political activists who have taken to calling the president Xitele, a word that combines the two leaders’ names.

Whatever it was about Jianyong’s image that infuriated the Chinese officials censoring it, his story shows how difficult it is for contemporary Chinese artists to know what will or won’t send them to jail. That’s been especially the case under Xi, a hardliner who came to power in 2012.

“In general, the space for civil society to make their opinion public has become much harder under Xi Jinping, and that’s also true of artists,” Frances Eve, a researcher with  Chinese Human Rights Defenders, told the AP. “The government’s always made it a little unclear, but people who used to work as artists felt like they hadn’t crossed the lines. Now, people have been detained and have crossed that line they didn’t know was there.”

Countless artists have been antagonized under Xi’s presidency, including Ai Wei Wei, Guo Jian, Chen Guang, the Gao Brothers and many more who supported last year’s Umbrella Revolution. In December, the government announced it would begin sending artists to live and work in rural areas, a policy that uncomfortably echoed Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution.

It seems that as long as the president is in power, artists who don’t want to end up in a dark prison cell should stick to the kind of fuzzy, feel-good art he likes best, as explained in a chilling speech last year:

“Fine art works should be like sunshine from blue sky and breeze in spring that will inspire minds, warm hearts, cultivate taste and clean up undesirable work styles.”

In a 2011 article for Hyperallergic, An Xiao explained that memes in China can often have a subversive intent, like a “street art of the internet,” as they are harder to search and censure by the authorities. During the 2011 Beijing-Shanghai high speed railway train accident in Wenzhou, Chinese netizens made memes to respond to the incident. During the 25th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre last year, many Chinese in China and abroad commemorated the event with various memes.

There are two laws in Missouri that really go against each other.  The first is the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.  The second is Missouri’s 72 hour waiting period and “informed consent” law about abortion.  This problem is coming to a head.

A woman who belongs to the Satanic Temple wants an abortion.  She went to Planned Parenthood and filed an exemption form stating that the 72 hour waiting period places an undue burden on her religious beliefs.  Planned Parenthood rejected the exemption form based on Missouri’s 72 hour waiting period and “informed consent” law.  The woman, called Mary Doe in court documents, and the Satanists have filed suit over the denial.

In Missouri, and several other states, the waiting period has no medical or scientific basis.  It is merely a forced waiting period so the woman can digest the “informed consent” material they are forced to endure.  This material has no medical or scientific background or need either.  Most of the material is intended to make a woman feel guilty about her choice, thus forcing her to change her mind.

The Satanic Temple says that is a violation of the RFRA.  Spokesman Lucien Greaves says that “in our tenets, we hold that one should make decisions based on the best scientific evidence available and that a woman’s body – anyone’s body – are subject to ones own will.”  He claims that the state mandated material is not scientifically based, is nothing more than state-propaganda designed to sway an individual’s decision, and therefore is against their religion.

That puts the 72 hour waiting period and “informed consent” law in conflict with the RFRA.  The really weird part of this story is that the Hobby Lobby case at the Supreme Court opened the door for this conflict to happen.  In the Hobby Lobby case, Hobby Lobby argued that certain contraceptives were abortifacients.  They are not abortifacients, yet Hobby Lobby argued that they believe they were and therefore should not be forced to provide them in their health coverage.

The Supreme Court ruled in favor of Hobby Lobby.  In essence, the court ruled that even if the science does not support your claim, as long as you hold “deeply religious beliefs” about your argument, you are right.  Which brings us to the “informed consent” law in Missouri.

The Satanic Temple is saying that they believe that the material being forced upon women is not scientifically based and inaccurate.  Under the Hobby Lobby ruling, they only need argue they have a “deeply held religious belief” that the material is bogus and therefore, they are correct.

There have been other challenges to the waiting period laws that have failed.  However, this is the first one using the RFRA as a reason the waiting period laws are invalid.  I know that not many people are going to support the Satanic Temple.  However, it is a religion, whether or not you agree with them, and therefore should be protected under the RFRA as well.

The other sad part of the story is that the Satanic Temple cannot get a pro-bono lawyer to take up their case.  So, they are forced to look for donations to continue this case.  I am extremely surprised that the ACLU doesn’t take up the case.  So, I ask the ACLU to please explain why you aren’t taking up this case.

The ruling in this case has a lot of ramifications.  None of them, in my opinion, are positive for the Conservative Christian right who are behind these anti-abortion laws.  If the courts rule in favor of the Satanic Temple, what does that mean for everyone else?  Would these waiting period laws be stricken?  Probably not.  More likely, the state legislature would change the waiting period laws to remove any religious exemptions from them.

Taking that step would indicate that they really don’t believe in the RFRA they so dramatically scream about when it suits their desires.  It would also prove that they are only interested in forcing their beliefs on everyone else, religious freedom be damned.

If the court rules against the Satanic Temple, there would be a legitimate argument that the court is “defining what is religion and what isn’t.”  That would also be bad for everyone.  If the court rules that the Satanic Temple isn’t a real religion, which religion will be next?

Yes, this case is one that is worth watching. The arguments put forth by the state to defend their waiting period law will allow the world to see just how insincere they are about religious freedom.  It will open up the can of worms that prove their arguments about religious liberty is one-sided and hypocritical.

To be frank, I hope this turns out to be a real dilemma for the Christian right.  It will only accelerate the movement away from religion recent polls are indicating is happening.  Then, maybe, we can have legitimate discussions about our issues and not have religious bellicose drowning out potential solutions.

The question of whether oil giants seek to control the messages at museums they sponsor may have been answered.

The Guardian has obtained several emails exchanged between the Science Museum in London and Shell, which recently became the principal sponsor of the institution’s climate science gallery. They show the company repeatedly making demands about the museum’s exhibitions.

“Regards the rubbish archive project [an interactive exhibition examining the impact of waste on the environment], [redacted name] and I have some concerns on this exhibition particularly as it creates an opportunity for NGOs to talk about some of the issues that concern them around Shell’s operations,” reads one especially disturbing email sent by a Shell employee to a museum staffer on May 8, 2014.

It continues with the company seemingly insinuating it would like a say on which guests would attend a climate change conference at the institution. “Could you please share more information with us on the symposium event planned for September? As you know we receive a great deal of interest around our art sponsorships so need to ensure we do not proactively open up a debate on the topic. Will it be an invite only event?”

The email ends with the Shell representative asking whether the museum employee has spoken with Shell climate change adviser David Hone “to see if he would like to participate in the content refresh.”

The news comes just a couple months after 39 scientists published an open letter asking science museums to cut ties with climate change deniers. “We are deeply concerned by the links between museums of science and natural history with those who profit from fossil fuels or fund lobby groups that misrepresent climate science,” they wrote, going on to single out David Koch, who has donated millions to the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History and the American Museum of Natural History. In 2010, the New Yorker reported that a Smithsonian exhibition in the David H. Koch Hall of Human Origins had an erie anti-climate change message that “uncannily echo[ed] the Koch message.” A subsequent petition to kick Koch off the board of these two museums amassed more than 200,000 signatures.

Some of that conversation seemed to frame the issue in a moral light — science museums should have integrity and reject money from those who don’t believe in global warming. That seemed unrealistic, as it would be impossible to police every source of money institutions receive. But the recent Guardian report shows that it’s not so much about showing which side you’re on, but about making sure you don’t end up being bribed into switching teams. It’s a purely pragmatic decision, as money rarely seems to come without those proverbial strings.

The Guardian did not publish the Science Museum’s email responses, so we don’t know whether it bowed to any of Shell’s requests. The institution defended itself Sunday, saying  that though it’s common for sponsors to make suggestions, it did not yield any editorial control to the oil company. “I can confirm that not a single change to an exhibition resulted from these email exchanges,” museum director Ian Blatchford said.

Regardless of the truth, it will be hard for people to fully believe that. By partnering with sponsors like Shell, the Science Museum and others like it have made themselves vulnerable to criticism, and informed visitors will always be scrutinizing its exhibitions for signs they took the bait.

micdotcom:

Watch: MTV just gave indigenous artists a huge platform — and finally, people are listening 

NEW ORLEANS — It’s astonishing that in 2015 a group exhibition of nine artists of color can still be impressive based on statistics and context alone. It is still rare that we see marginalized voices like these situated inside a contemporary art institution without also being used as a foil to the canonized arc of North American and Western European art history. EN MAS’: Carnival and Performance Art of the Caribbean, curated by Claire Tancons and Krista Thompson at the Contemporary Arts Center (CAC) New Orleans, aims to begin to correct this imbalance by placing the practices of the featured artists within a history of slavery, colonialism, and diaspora, instead of strictly in relation to a Eurocentric lineage of avant-gardes.

Tancons and Thompson commissioned nine artists to create new performances during the 2014 Caribbean Carnival season, and these works took place across the world: Nassau, Santiago de los Treinta Cabelleros, Port of Spain, Kingston, Fort-de-France, Brooklyn, London, and here in New Orleans. (John Beadle’s performance in Nassau, Bahamas, was pushed back to May 2015.) With the exceptions of Brooklyn and London, these cities are not traditionally thought of as art capitals, and the artists often used this to their advantage by bringing their work into the streets. For instance, Lorraine O’Grady’s “Looking for a Headdress” took the West Indian Day parade in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, as a subject and location. In a video, the artist narrates her search for an authentically Caribbean carnival headdress over shaky documentary footage from the parade and a slideshow of historical prints and documentation. O’Grady’s search ultimately remains unresolved.

Conversely, Hew Locke’s “Give and Take” brought the streets into Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall in the form of phalanx of performers who drummed and charged violently at predominantly white museumgoers. The performers carried shields emblazoned with photographs of townhouses in the London neighborhood of Notting Hill, whose Caribbean population has been rapidly pushed out over the past 25 years; its ongoing Carnival traditions have become heavily policed and regulated to maintain a perceived sense of order in this now majority-white area. By imitating the increased police presence in Notting Hill, Locke’s performance suggests a connection between the aggressive whiteness of museum spaces and the destructive whitewashing of neighborhoods as a result of gentrification.

At the CAC, Locke’s piece is presented through a display of the shields and masks worn by performers along with accompanying video documentation; this focus on costume carries through much of the show. Gia Wolff — who collaborated with Tancons on the canopy for the Tate Modern’s Up Hill Down Hall performance series last year — also designed the gallery for EN MAS’, using walls to create a space for each artist. Wolff’s design helps by pushing the viewer around the gallery, from installation to installation, creating a circular procession through the show.

EN MAS’ doesn’t include any actual performances during its run, which is odd for an exhibition that “considers a history of performance that does not take place on the stage or in the gallery but rather in the streets, addressing not the few but the many,” and this seems like a missed opportunity both to reach new audiences in New Orleans. The show instead focuses on more academic methods of documenting and presenting performance in exhibition spaces. Fortunately, it’s the alternating failures and successes of (re)presentation — on the part of both the curators and the artists — that make the exhibition exciting.

EN MAS’ excels when it departs from traditional photo and video documentation, favoring sculptures and multichannel video installations. Several of the artists successfully transform documentation into art objects themselves. Nicolás Dumit Estévez created “C Room” in his hometown of Santiago de los Treinta Caballeros, Dominican Republic, using a room at the Museu Folklórico Don Tomás Morel to help visitors indulge in the queerness of adornment, while enacting their fears, desires, and fantasies. The artist stockpiled local dollar-store finds and Carnival decorations and helped dress each visitor during private conversations. His installation at the CAC presents photographs and videos from the project inside of a booth, shrouded in glittering red streamers — a physical escape from the rest of the gallery.

Estévez’s “C Room” proposes ornamentation as a process of reassembling and reimagining identity, and the biggest thread connecting the performances in EN MAS’ is a dialogue between masquerade and otherness, whether that comes in the form of race, class, ethnicity, gender, or sexuality.

In “Positions + Power,” Marlon Griffith addressed the policing of middle- and working-class communities by reenvisioning a police watchtower — often omnipresent in communities of color during Carnival season — as an androgynous cyborg leading a procession through the streets of Port of Spain, Trinidad. Griffith’s “Overseer” was dressed in all black, stripped of the luscious celebratory color we usually associate with Carnival, and its flood light eyes swept back and forth, actively projecting a sense of fear into the streets. The artist used the form and tactics of the police to draw attention instead to a larger cultural fear of bodies that cannot easily be defined by gender, race, or class. At the CAC, the video documentation of Griffith’s performance is overshadowed by the sharply lit display of the costumes created for it, as well as a series of works Jamaican photographer Marlon James. Without knowing the details, these images seem to document a sci-fi invasion of the city and give the entire presentation an otherworldly quality.

Ebony G. Patterson similarly took back the streets by orchestrating a “bling funeral” — a tradition among urban working-class communities in Kingston, Jamaica, of a funeral procession involving heavily ornamented coffins — in the midst of the city’s largely middle- and upper-class Carnival celebrations. The guerrilla funeral served to memorialize the deaths of 72 people killed during a government raid on the largely poor Kingston neighborhood of Tivoli Gardens in 2010. Patterson’s colorful, oversized coffins tower over a multi-channel video installation at the CAC, suggesting that they could be paraded around at any moment. Like Griffith’s piece, the power of Patterson’s work is in its forceful reclamation of public space, echoed in both of their installations, which give the viewer a sense of the scale of the actual performances.

This connection to the original works is vital for making sense of what’s on display at the CAC. John Beadle’s delicate costumes cut from cardboard represent a performance that hadn’t yet occurred when the exhibition opened in March. The pieces are stunning, but there’s little information to contextualize how they relate to his performance or the cityscape of Nassau. They would have benefited from documentation of how they’re worn and activated.

The one local work, Cauleen Smith’s “H-E-L-L-O (Infra-Sound/Structure),” translates the famous musical sequence from Stephen Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind into a greeting for sites around New Orleans loaded with the histories of music and procession. Unfortunately, the film feels dry and distant, and fails to capture the energy of Mardi Gras or even the myriad festivals, Second Line parades, and jazz funerals that fill the city streets on a daily basis, indicating the ways in which EN MAS’ is limited by the walls of the CAC.

Still, New Orleans — a city largely ignored by the contemporary art world, save for during the triennial iterations of Prospect New Orleans — is perhaps the best site for an exhibition like this, free as it is from the white-washed expectations or historical baggage of a major museum in New York or Los Angeles. New Orleans’s colonial histories are much more evident throughout the city, and it is, of course, the center of Carnival celebrations in the United States. It seems a shame, though, that the exhibition didn’t open a few weeks earlier, during the revelry of Mardi Gras, in order to channel or to respond to that vibrancy. EN MAS’ does not and cannot capture the overwhelming energy of participation and community in the streets during Carnival, but it does serve as a moment to reflect on how artists, curators, and viewers can make sense of performance inside and outside of museum walls.

EN MAS’: Carnival and Performance Art of the Caribbean continues at the Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans through June 7. The exhibition will travel with Independent Curators International to several venues which have not yet been announced.

Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

OMG

What i say: I have anxiety
What most people think i said: I am awkward but cute awkward and shy.
What people assume: I am imagining illnesses to justify my lifestyle and personality.
What i actually mean: I live in a constant fear. I worry about the past, current or future situations, i have stomach and head pains all the time, tachycardia and awful panic attacks that include heart palpitations, and breathing problems. I suffer everyday and not only in "stressful situations". I think so much before i do something and eventually i don't do it at all, so people think i am lazy. I suffer from insomnia. I sweat to the idea of having to interact with people. I don't use the word anxiety to justify anything or to make myself look cool. It's a mental disorder, i have to live with it and find ways to control the symptoms. It is not a trend. Many people around the world actually suffer from this disorder. Accept those who have it and help them, don't judge them, don't joke about it. NEVER.

[Content Note: Sexual violence.]

Democratic candidate for president Senator Bernie Sanders appeared on Meet the Press this weekend, and host Chuck Todd asked him about his prolematic 1972 essay, which a campaign spokesperson had dismissed as "dark satire" and "stupid." Here's what Sanders had to say:

Todd: —found out what it's like to become a nationally, uh, recognized candidate for president and potentially a threat to somebody—a leaking of an essay you wrote in the '70s [Sanders chuckles] for an alternative weekly. Ah, your campaign described it as satire. I'll be honest with you, Senator Sanders, it's uncomfortable to read. The only excerpt I'm gonna put up is—you wrote this in February of '72; it was sort of a fantasy of men and women; you said: "A woman enjoys intercourse with her man—as she fantasizes being raped by three men simultaneously." Ah, your campaign described it as satire; can you explain this essay?

Sanders: Sure. Look, this is a piece of fiction that I wrote in nineteen seventy-two, I think. That was forty-three years ago. It was very poorly written, and, if you read it, what it was dealing with [was] gender stereotypes—why some men like to oppress women; why other women like to be submissive. You know, something like "Fifty Shades of Grey." Very poorly written, forty-three years ago. What I am focusing on right now are the issues impacting the American people today, and that's what I will continue to focus on, and what I think the American people want to hear—and, by the way, on broader issues, what I think when we talk about issues— Chuck, we need a lot more debates.

Todd: Right.

Sanders: In this campaign, I hope very much that we can begin with the Democratic candidates' debates as early as July, and have some Republicans in those debates as well.

Todd: All right!

So, it's either poorly-written satire or it was poorly-written fiction like Fifty Shades of Grey, just whatever description makes people STFU and move on to REAL ISSUES. Like including Republican candidates in Democratic debates, apparently.

I've seen some progressive supporters of Sanders praise his response as being rightly defiant of even being questioned about the essay. Here, for example, Sanders is described as "unapologetically strong" and his response "perfect." And I understand this interpretation, if you genuinely believe this is just a piece of shitty muckraking that doesn't matter.

But one of the things about shitty muckraking in political campaigns is that how candidates respond to it matters, even if one believes that the underlying issue doesn't.

And this was an opportunity for Sanders to respond in a way that conveys his current position on gender equality. He could have answered with the same strategy—pivoting to a more important issue—by saying something like: "Chuck, this essay was a poorly conceived attempt at addressing gender stereotypes that was terribly executed, but gender equality is still a relevant issue today. I wrote that essay forty-three years ago, and it's a pretty good example of how men often fail to speak sensitively and competently on women's issues. I've learned a lot in those intervening forty-three years, and my hope is that I'm a better advocate for women and gender equality now than I was then. If there's any takeaway from this, let it be that we needed then and need still for men to support women's equality with seriousness and thoughtfulness. There are real issues facing women today that we need to talk about, like..."

But, instead, Sanders chose to greet the question with nothing but contempt. His campaign has evidently calculated that it's better to dismiss feminist critics as oversensitive hysterics who don't understand how politics works and are taking the muckraking bait to distract from "real issues" than it would to be to alienate bros by being meaningfully accountable.

Or to disappear us altogether to suggest it's simply rightwingers who are objecting to the essay, pretending to care about women's issues in order to smear Sanders.

Which is precisely why I'm more angry about Sanders' response than I was about the essay. His response tells us something about his current priorities and sensitivities, and I don't like what we're being told.

I want to hear that Sanders understands his essay was problematic, not merely "poorly written." I want to hear that Sanders understands it was problematic even at the time, that the fact it was forty-three years ago doesn't situate it in a context in which there weren't women (and men) who were writing then, and long before, on gender inequality safely and sensitively. I want to hear that Sanders has learned something about how to advocate for women, not just behave as though it's taken as read that every man learns that with age (because they don't). I want to hear that Sanders understands the language and imagery used to discuss women's issues matters right now, and that it is a "real issue."

And the reason I want to hear these things is because the President of the United States will be contending with a Republican caucus, currently the majority in both houses of Congress, who are deeply hostile to women's issues. Who have tried to block the reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act. Who have tried to pass a dangerous abortion ban. Whose every economic policy, from indifference to the pay gap to the defunding of social services, will disproportionately affect poor women of color and their children. And ditto their social policies, from ENDA to immigration.

I want to know I can trust a progressive presidential candidate to take women's issues seriously. And women's concerns.

The fact that it is still controversial to ask a man to acknowledge that it's indecent, not just bad writing, to use sexual violence against women in a flippant and insensitive way is indicative of the fact that this shit does matter. That this is a real issue, today.

I expect more from progressive men. Asking them not to be wildly insensitive about sexual violence isn't some sort of unfair attack. It isn't an unfair expectation. It's the bare minimum of what we should want from male politicians.

I know, and I am glad, that Sanders has been solid on policy around women's issues during his tenure in the Senate. That is, as far as I'm concerned, the argument for why he should be accountable on this, rather than the argument for why he doesn't need to be.

There are times during campaigns when old garbage is dredged up, and I absolutely want candidates to respond with nothing but the contempt it deserves. This is not one of those times.

Above: Receiver of almost endless government benefits

The Massachusetts House passed an amendment last week ordering the state welfare office to conduct a study about using biometrics in order to crack down on welfare fraud. Now I have no theoretical problem with governments attempting to run programs efficiently, but once again, this is something intended to target the poor. While I don’t doubt that some welfare fraud exists, the amount of money involved in almost certainly small. Why not combine this with measures to ensure that corporations are also targeted to stop fraud and waste in their welfare programs? This is of course a rhetorical question–obviously the answer is power. The rich can abuse corporate welfare, pocketing tax breaks and then moving jobs away for instance, but the poor have to be punished to get their block of government cheese, Even in Massachusetts, the focus is on the latter form of welfare than the former, despite the former costing everyday people much more.

See also.

Anxious to see what happens next in Daredevil? In the future, you might have to endure an ad first. Netflix has confirmed to Cord Cutters News that it's publicly testing ads both before and after shows. What you see as a test subject varies in length...

Illinois artist Jiyong Lee uses a special glass technique called cold working to create his unusual segmented sculptures inspired by the growth of cells. The artworks, part of a series called Segmentation, are created without glass blowing or kilns, but instead through a labor-intensive process of cutting, sanding, laminating, and carving. Lee shares about his work via his artist statement:

The segmentation series is inspired by my fascination with science of cell, its division and the journey of growth that starts from a single cell and goes through a million divisions to become a life. I work with glass that has transparency and translucency, two qualities that serve as perfect metaphors for what is known and unknown about life science. The segmented, geometrical forms of my work represent cells, embryos, biological and molecular structures—each symbolizing the building blocks of life as well as the starting point of life. The uniquely refined translucent glass surfaces suggest the mysterious qualities of cells and, on a larger scale, the cloudiness of their futures. The Segmentation series is subtle and quiet yet structurally complex.

To be clear, the images you see here are photographs of Lee’s work and are not digital renderings. His extraordinary attention to use of color and translucency in each object creates surprising optical effects. You can learn a bit more about Lee’s work in the video below from the Corning Museum of Glass and see some of his recent sculptures at Duane Reed Gallery. (via Faith is Torment)

via http://feedly.com/index.html#category%2FINSPIRATIONS%20!!!

via http://www.likecool.com/Gear/Pic/GoPro%20circa%20the%201960s/GoPro-circa-the-1960s.jpg

Iranian artist Shirin Abedinirad explores issues of gender, sexuality and human compassion through her site-specific installations, performances, and conceptual fashion designs. Seen here are two recent public works, Evocation (Iran, 2013) and Heaven on Earth (Italy, 2014) that utilize mirrors in both an urban and rural desert setting to reflect the sky above, perhaps mimicking the color or form of water. Abedinirad studied under Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami and now splits her time between Tehran and Florence. You can see more of her work on her website and on Tumblr. (via Cross Connect)

malformalady:

Dracula Raven Orchid ‘Edgar’ (cross between ‘Dracula roezlii’ and ‘Dracula vampira), from the cloud forest of western Ecuador and Colombia, at elevations of 1800 to 2200 meters.

Photo credit: Eric Hunt

Anatomically correct