Sophianotloren

Like many of my LGBT peers and allies, I am grateful for the contributions made before and for the possibilities ahead. This summer, the Supreme Court acknowledged the humanity of LGBT individuals. And one of our pinnacle liberation symbols, New York City’s Stonewall Inn, the site of the 1969 Stonewall riots, was made a national […]

The title of this post is the title of one of my chapters in Out of Sight. Dissent has published an excerpt from the book to coincide with this evening’s Brooklyn event. I write a lot about food and food production in the book. Here’s a bit of it:

Here’s the thing about food: because it is so important to our lives and our health, it is one set of products where we can effectively resist the concealment of production. Eating is a profound, if everyday, experience that affects our health and our happiness. The explosive growth in farmers’ markets, concerns about genetically modified organisms, and fears of pesticides have challenged the industrial food complex, just not over its treatment of workers. Free-range chickens and cattle have become highly desirable and expensive products, both for taste and for health and safety concerns, but less so because of the workers injured and killed in the meatpacking plants.

We can see the current local food movement as a backlash against corporations’ efforts to hide their operations from us. We cannot control very much about our relationship to the larger economy. But regional food networks, with production ranging from rooftop gardens to large farms on the outskirts of cities, can bring a significant amount of food democracy back into cities while providing enormous environmental benefits compared to the current system. Eschewing monocultures for diversified food crops would cut down on the pesticides and herbicides needed, meaning less fertilizer, less pollution, and healthier rivers, lakes, and oceans as well as small farmers who could afford to live and farm without expensive chemicals.

But food movements also need to be justice movements and connect to bigger issues. If we are serious in thinking about a democratic food system, we have to support good working conditions throughout the food industry. It means we need to support farmworker and meatpacker unions. We have to end the tipped minimum wage and demand greater funding for OSHA and the FDA to inspect our food factories.

Ultimately, our food problems stem from the same lack of democracy that plagues our society. In our food system, animals are abused, workers die, waterways become polluted with animal waste, and wildlife dies. Yet most of us have no idea this is happening. If we can demand ethically produced food that allows consumers insight into food production, we can go far to reshape the world into a more just and sustainable place. Food corporations, from Monsanto to McDonald’s, hope this never happens.

The Rude Pundit gets it, dear conservatives. Lady parts are mysterious and difficult to sort out. Sometimes they're all up inside there and sometimes there are bits that are just hanging out there in the breeze. What the fuck is up with that, right? And as for what works for what things, which flaps and buttons are useable in sexual situations, where the hell the babies and pee come from, well, shit, there should probably be a freakin' guidebook. Besides, have you actually touched lady parts? They're all squishy and, if touched right, slick, like a hairless cat in the rain. Since we're supposed to fear that which we don't comprehend, of course you're gonna do everything you can to make sure that women can't enjoy their parts as much as men enjoy theirs. Of course you're gonna punish women for having parts that you don't understand. Of course, conservative women, you fear the pleasure in your parts or want to please your conservative men by punishing the poors so, hey, it's all good.

But listen: you don't have to. You don't have to keep making life a misery for women who haven't received the just rewards of capitalism. You don't have to get all ACORN on Planned Parenthood, whose only sin, it seems, is following the laws that you don't like.

You know what else is icky? Disembodied baby parts. Baby organs. Sliced up baby tissue. It's fucking gross, grosser even than a vagina. But so are all cut up human bodies. So when you see the latest video from fake organization Center for Medical Progress with its fake representative from a fake fetal tissue procurement firm, Biomax, looking at pieces of aborted fetuses from Planned Parenthood clinics, of course it's gonna be gross. The fake fucks who made it want you to be grossed out. They rejoice at how appalled you are. Medical science is not for the weak-stomached.

You ought to know, though, that everything Planned Parenthood has done is legal. In fact, it's so fucking legal that a recently released document from Planned Parenthood shows that it changed language in the agreement with "Biomax" so that it would specifically comply with federal law. In fact, Planned Parenthood wanted to make very, very clear that it was not going to profit from the sale of fetal tissue: "The lawyers wrote that Biomax would cover only the cost of 'transportation, processing, preservation and storage' of the samples." That's a little more complicated than "Holy shitballs, those are baby parts." The statutes say you can make back your shipping and handling on the tissue. If you don't like the law, change it. But don't condemn people for following it to the letter.

You ought to know that we've been down this road before. Yeah, back in 2000, ABC's 20/20 ran a piece about a company in Kansas that sold fetal body parts to researchers. The anti-choice media was gleeful about it, and the man at the center of it, Miles Jones, was investigated by the FBI for eight years until they cleared him of any charges. Jones didn't violate a single law. So back to the drawing board for the anti-choice forces.

You ought to know, also, that this gets back to other debates, like research using fetal stem cells. Charging money for baby parts, even to cover expenses, is hard to comprehend for many people. Using baby parts to try to cure illnesses and genetic conditions seems like a pretty fucking noble pursuit to most of us. That context is left out of most of the hollering about baby brain markets or whatever. According to one doctor working to cure eye diseases, "Eye tissue from fetuses has played a crucial role in studies aimed at finding treatments for degenerative diseases of the retina that are a major cause of vision loss in people as they age." The same goes for things like muscular dystrophy.

You ought to know that fetal tissue is only harvested (yes, terrible word, but there it is) with permission from the woman who had the abortion. But that turns women getting abortions from tormented, depressed victims to beings with agency to make decisions about their bodies, women who understand their lady parts and know what they want to do with them, the very thing that the enemies of Planned Parenthood want to crush.

Finally, you ought to know that, if you defund Planned Parenthood, if you get rid of it, you will ensure there are more abortions, more teen pregnancies, and more suffering women, especially poor women, poor pregnant women who want to have healthy babies and who won't have access to the prenatal care that Planned Parenthood provides.Yeah, they help women give birth, too.  The words "planned" and "parenthood" don't just mean "abortion." In fact, they barely mean that.

You won't know any of this because the voices yelling loudest, like the desperate madman Rand Paul, trying to get some heat for his dying presidential campaign, don't want you to know or understand. They want to you to rise up, like the internet mob you are so easily whipped into joining, and blindly destroy that which they tell you to destroy, not even realizing that what you are destroying are not just lady parts, but the women who own them.

(Since we live in an era with irony illiteracy, the Rude Pundit would like to state that he loves vaginas in all their forms, from dainty closed rosebuds to full-bloom sunflowers.)

Independent Irish publisher Tramp Press requests that writers submitting manuscripts list their influences. Co-founder Sarah Davis-Goff had a suspicion that she was only seeing male names among the influencers, so she tallied up the influences of 100 submitters. Only 33 percent of the listed influences were women writers. Davis-Groff says:

If a writer lists two influences and they both happen to be male – well, fair enough. They never both happen to be female, though, and receiving list after list of five, seven, 10 or more male influences is disturbing. It points again to the larger issue in the industry: our habitual, unchecked dismissal of the experiences, viewpoints and brilliant work of women.

Related Posts:

• The Rumpus Interview with Daniel José Older
• The Saturday Rumpus Interview: Tamara Winfrey-Harris
• The Rumpus Interview with Susanne Paola Antonetta
• The Big Idea #10: Eula Biss
• The Pie Lady’s Manifesto

“I turned the computer on and began to write — all the details of our story, everything that still remained in my memory,” writes the author dubbed Elena Ferrante in her book My Brilliant Friend. This is how the narrator begins her four-part story about a lifelong friendship: with the fascinating concept of dumping out all of one’s memory. Is it possible? The group exhibition Memory Burn at bitforms gallery, curated by Chris Romero, explores the devices we use to record our lives as we confront mortality and death, and reveals the moments we document to be greatly different from those we just remember, for reasons we cannot control.

Like a distant memory, the work in this show is beautifully curated but not always the easiest to connect with. At the entrance of this Lower East Side gallery, which boasts lovely floor-to-ceiling windows, viewers encounter Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s piece “Level of Confidence” (2015) about the mass kidnapping of 43 students from the Ayotzinapa school in Iguala, Guerrero, Mexico. The viewer stands in front of a yearbook-like collection of photographs of the students, and steps onto two footprints that recall the moment before going through an airport metal detector. After that, a facial recognition detector scans the viewer’s face, attempting to match his or her facial features with one of the missing students.

This action always fails, of course, instead causing one to both recognize one’s own privilege (while experiencing up close creepy facial recognition technology) and the sadness of the families who continue to cope with the disappearance of their loved ones. If this piece is purchased, all proceeds will go directly to the families of the missing. It’s a heavy piece to start off an already complex exhibition, setting the tone for “memory” as a concept that brings up mixed emotions, a sense of loss, and a profoundly deep experience of mourning for the disappeared.

While that piece was searing, Andrea Wolf’s series Unsolicited Memories, Archival Exercises (2014) lingered. Mimicking the arbitrary experience of triggering memories, Wolf’s piece randomly projects found super 8 and 8mm films onto a stacked collection of Plexiglas cubes that actually look like enlarged ice cubes. These images, with their grainy and physical, filmic quality, flicker and shine onto the cubes, offering a fleeting, ephemeral quality, as if the images of people and hazy landscapes will soon escape and fade away, like gentle wisps from late-night memories.

In the Japanese artist duo exonemo’s “Body Paint,” a man’s face and white-painted torso are projected onto what appears to be a painting; it is entirely still save for the moving eyeballs that evoke a creepy painting in an old, haunted mansion. In the literal sense, this piece could discuss what it means to look for a memory, to be a fly on the wall  — the book Perks of Being a Wallflower comes to mind — but it’s also about being an everyman, about the sense of blending in as a blank face, body, canvas.

Angela Washko’s video “Womanhouse (Or: How to be a Virtuous Woman)” (2014) is part of the series Free Will Mode, which is made from the video game The Sims (year 2000 edition), where the user plays with, operates, and controls model humans in a virtual world. Washko’s chaotic world, however, is nothing like the game; here, women live alone in dangerous conditions, wandering about in confined spaces, and only speak when they need something like food, sleep, or a door through which to exit. Stoves burn, women take naps, and have nervous breakdowns, banging their heads against walls like rats in a cage. In one of the videos, a woman sits next to a pool that’s surrounded by Greek sculptures; inside the pool, men “swim” a few laps, drop under the water, then get up and perform this brief motion again and again. In this alternate Sims reality, everything is absurd and charming, maddening in its repetition.

In Sara Ludy’s series of .gifs Beaches (2014), she documents her vacation-like visit into the online virtual world Second Life by hanging some paradisiacal landscapes on the wall, accompanied by an audio installation of recordings from her “trip.” The internet is real life, and we’re living through screens whether we’re surfing the web or just vacationing in a second life, tropical environment. The concept is fascinating, but the actual imagery and sound don’t quite take you there; instead, Ludy’s project is more like a photo album of visual souvenirs from a trip that she took by herself to a virtual world. Similarly, Daniel Canogar’s large photograph “Enredos 1” (2007) which shows an array of people literally caught in the “network” — a series of wound wires and cords that dangle from some invisible ceiling — is a bit literal in its execution. But that’s OK — sometimes internet virtual life is pretty boring.

In Sarah Rothberg’s “Memory/Place: My House” (2014–15) she takes a memory that would otherwise seem innocuous or uninteresting and makes it both physically and emotionally intense. By having viewers wear an Oculus virtual reality headset, she pulls from archival photographs from her childhood to create a tour through her family home. This is both a journey through someone else’s memory and a detached commentary on the nature of memory itself, which solidly ties up the show’s concept. The viewer sits in a cushy armchair that could actually have been in the artist’s family living room growing up and becomes a “player” in the artist’s memory, navigating around the constructed landscape using an arcade stick controller as if playing a game. But moving through the rooms is a weird, stilted, emotionally uncomfortable action — much like the process of mining one’s memory for a story, fact, or narrative. The piece — which can also physically nauseating — is a metaphor for such solitary self-reflection and the search for meaning in slices of memory.

Memory Burn continues at bitforms gallery (131 Allen St, Lower East Side, Manhattan) through August 16 .

Below is the full audio (with text) of my commentary originally recorded for WNYC's The Takeaway for a discussion about reconsidering the minimum wage, of which only a small portion was aired. It is available here now in its entirety.

Audio:

Text:

I think that wherever possible, we should look to permanently eliminate underlying causes instead of treating symptoms without end. When it comes to minimum wage laws, we're perpetually treating a symptom and not a cause. The problem we wish to solve is that employees aren't getting paid enough to work. So the government then has to step in and say, "Hey, employers, you can't pay less than this amount, and employees, you can't accept less than this amount."

Well, why do we need to do this? Why aren't people getting paid enough? What's the core issue? I think people aren't getting paid enough because they can't really ask for more out of fear of getting nothing at all. They have no individual bargaining power. All negotiating power is in the hands of those offering the jobs and not those looking for them. Outside of unions, we can't say "No" to the terms of employment offered by employers. As long as our primary concern is that of paying for our basic needs like food and rent, all we can really say is "Yes".

If an employer can pay less, they will. They will even pay nothing wherever possible. Just look at unpaid internships. And because people prefer to eat and live indoors, and anything is better than nothing, people accept wages that or too low or even zero (in combination with work experience) because it's all better than the alternative - nothing.

So really, what we need to do is create a better alternative than nothing. If everyone were to start with $1,000 per month as a right of citizenship, a universal basic income, that's enough money outside of work to cover our most basic living expenses. That means no one is desperate for money anymore. In fact, according to our own federal poverty guidelines, poverty would be effectively abolished, as long as every child also got around $300 a month, because the amount required to not live in poverty varies by household size.

Now consider how a wage negotiation would go with a basic income in existence. Suddenly, $7 an hour may no longer be enough. Why work for $7 an hour when you're already getting $1,000 every month as a starting point for being alive? Maybe in order for an employer to find people willing to say "Yes" to work now, they need to pay $15 an hour. Maybe one employer needs to only pay $5 hour now because it's a fun job, and another employer needs to pay $25 an hour because everyone hates that job. Even better, people can actually start sharing jobs. Maybe a job everyone hates can only get any one person to work ten hours a week at it, so instead of one person doing it 40 hours and hating it, 4 people do it for 10 hours and find it an entirely acceptable way to earn additional money.

This right here is possibly the best reason to go with basic income instead of a hodgepodge of minimum wage laws, earned income tax credits, welfare programs, food stamps, housing assistance, tax deductions, and all the rest. Because basic income provides an income floor, there's no longer any reason to keep any of these bureaucracy-filled ways of easing but never ending poverty. Instead, poverty would be gone. And because poverty is gone, all jobs have to either pay enough for people to accept them, or those jobs will be automated. If automated, no one has to do that job anymore. They can do something else instead.

They could do work in the gig economy, driving people for Uber, without all the desperation it involves now racing around trying to find enough riders to scrape by each month. People could even do entirely unpaid work like volunteering or open source programming. All sorts of doors become opened as options to walk through instead of traditional labor.

Some people will then say this is paying people not to work. But that's actually what we're already doing. Right now, if you're receiving assistance, it will be pulled away with higher earnings. A better word would probably be yanked. That help is yanked away at steep rates, so steep that it's actually possible for someone without a job to earn $12,000 in benefits, get a job, and then earn $12,000 in income. So right now, work doesn't always pay, and we even pay others to make sure it doesn't pay, by monitoring those on assistance to make sure they either aren't working or report additional income. With a universal basic income, work would always pay. $12,000 would be a floor that no one would earn any amount below, and everyone would earn everything on top of. No job? You get $12,000. Got a job? You get $30,000 more for a total of $42,000.

With a basic income, everyone would get a raise. That also doesn't happen with policies like minimum wage, or tax credits like the home mortgage interest rate deduction. Those only affect certain portions of the population, and they certainly don't help the portion of the population unable to find a job. Meanwhile the programs for them, don't help them as much as we think they do. In Wyoming, 1% of those living below the federal poverty line receive temporary assistance for needy families. Food stamps tend to only last to the third week each month. Only 1 out of 4 people who qualify for housing assistance actually get it. Referring to our system as a safety net is actually very appropriate because it's full of holes.

There are no holes with a universal basic income. Everyone gets it. No questions asked. No forms to fill out. No classes to go to or middlemen to meet with. No stigma attached because everyone gets the same thing no matter how much is earned. Instead, some people just pay more in taxes than others, and those taxes can even be financial transaction taxes or carbon taxes or consumption taxes. Income taxes can actually even go down as a result for over 80% of all households, because a household of two adults and two kids could all together get the equivalent of a $32,000 refundable tax credit. So this idea that a basic income would have to raise everyone's income taxes is overblown. Some taxes would go up, but certainly not the taxes of the middle classes and below.

Minimum wage is a tool of a previous century. When we wield it now with technology as advanced as it is, we will only increase technological unemployment. Why pay someone $15 an hour, when touchscreen kiosks are enough to do the job more efficiently at a lower cost? Mandatory higher wages only help those with jobs, and many of these jobs are jobs people would refuse to take without sufficient pay. If people could refuse jobs that don't pay enough because they already have enough to get by, and the result would be that people either get paid more or no one has to do them anymore, why not immediately do this instead? Why not give people the ability to refuse jobs entirely, and instead pursue the work most important to them?

If we can do that, if we can use a 21st century tool like basic income instead, we can obviate the need for minimum wage laws and a whole lot of other needless things as well, up to and including the existence of poverty itself.

---

As long as we don't have universal basic income, we need minimum wages for those with jobs, and welfare for those who don't. As soon as we have universal basic income, such policies, along with poverty itself, become entirely unnecessary.

---

Like my blog? Please subscribe and also consider making a monthly pledge of support.

---

Help me create basic incomes and take the BIG Patreon Creator Pledge.

---

Subscribe to my blog | Follow me on Twitter | Like me on Facebook | Follow me on Tumblr

Since the aggressiveness of trolling has been noted several times in comments, I should probably make a statement rather than responding every time individually:

• We should be clear about some potential means of addressing the problem that are Not Happening Ever: Full moderation. Disemvoweling.  Anything that involves enormous amounts of uncompensated labor on the part of the writers.  I really hope this doesn’t require further explanation.
• I like Disqus, which would mitigate the problem substantially, but my understanding is that it would be impossible to switch without losing the old comment threads, which I’m reluctant to do.
• We could, at less cost, to a user approval system, but given the effects this would have on the quantity of comments I’m inclined to think it’s a cure that’s worse than the disease.  There would be many times when we could not approve a registration request in a timely manner.
• Finally — and I know I’m howling into the void here — it should be emphasized that we do not so much have a troll problem as a responding to trolls problem.  Trolling that does not generate a response does much less to derail threads and can also be deleted much more easily and without orphaning comments.  And, of course, the extraordinarily high response rate also incentivizes the trolling.  I can hardly blame our resident troll — when even the laziest, pro forma, and repetitive trolling can generate multiple responses before you’ve started to search Taki’s Magazine for your next cut n’ paste job, why wouldn’t you keep doing it?  Every once on a long while — particularly when the troll is trying a little and commits some heinous offense against the English language — troll-response threads can be funny, but then these aren’t the problem.  Much more commonly, the immediate responses to the trolling are just as witless as the trolling itself.  Look, I can’t tell people what to do.  If you think it’s really important to leave the 100th unfunny response to the 12th reposting of the Nazi party platform in a particular thread, I’m not going to stop you unless you do something else banworthy.  But don’t blame the troll for wrecking the thread, and certainly don’t suggest that I spend several hours a day to save you from yourself.

Also, too, they have the same initials (Someone was paid to write this).

You win a million Internet dollars if you can guess who makes these arguments without clicking on the link.

And believe me, you don’t want to get out of the boat.

Right from the start, when the Bill Cosby scandal surfaced, I knew it was not going to bode well for Hillary’s campaign, because young women today have a much lower threshold for tolerance of these matters . . . And Monica got nothing out of it. Bill Clinton used her. Hillary was away or inattentive, and he used Monica in the White House–and in the suite of the Oval Office, of all places. He couldn’t have taken her on some fancy trip? She never got the perks of being a mistress; she was there solely to service him.

Buying and keeping a domain that one will never use, with the hope that one day they will be emailed a high (often over inflated) offer for it for purchase.

rstevens:

Just accept that you’re going to be here a while.

http://www.dieselsweeties.com/archive/3868

memeguy-com:

Simpsons called it

five-bi-five:

cardozzza:

I love that babies ball their hands up into fists all the time

Baby you can’t even sit up yet, who are you gonna fight? I support it completely but who you going after? Who’s trying you?

capitalism

zombres:

#lines that make me laugh when i remember them at 3am

blackfairypresident:

“can men and women be just friends?”

yeah if you dont socialize boys from birth to only see women as sex partners/objects and normalize healthy non-sexual/romantic friendships between men and women

alex-v-hernandez

suckitdomitian:

mediamattersforamerica:

Conservatives insist race has nothing to do with their worldview … but sometimes the truth slips out.

davescheidt

Ippei Gyoubu es un fantástico ilustrador y diseñador gráfico japonés, que combina de una manera única la ilustración contemporánea japonesa y el mundo de los videojuegos.

El mismo Ippei Gyoubu denomina su estilo de ilustración como “Japanesque” combinando un toque de manga con otro tanto de pop art.

Ippei Gyoubu nació en 1974, el dibujo siempre fue su medio de expresión, tomando como base los dibujos animados y cómics que leía de niños.

Su carrera comienza cuando inicia a diseñar personajes  para una compañía de videojuegos, gracias a estas ilustraciones comenzó a ganarse un nombre dentro de la industria.El proceso de Ippei es el de dibujar sus bocetos o dummys para después escanearlas e ilustrarlas a nivel digital.

Los personajes de Ippei suelen ser chicas para denotar mas sensualidad, que el color sea más intenso, la composición sea mas armónica y la ilustración más detallada.

Con un estilo muy occidental para el publico oriental y bastante oriental para el occidente, Ippei Gyoubu queda en el punto perfecto de establecerse a nivel mundial gracias a su fantástico trabajo.

Si tu deseas conocer más acerca de Ippei Gyoubu te invito a dar clic en su página web para que conozcas mas de sus obras.

Página Web

 

Texto por: Ernesto Iniesta

Today’s Gender of the day is: the white purity of God

(source)

averagemedgirl:

love this scene 

korrastyle:

Sudden Clarity Korra

50shadesofgrell:

just-shower-thoughts:

If you rip a hole in a net, there’s actually fewer holes in it than it was before

A team of researchers from Osaka University recently fired the most powerful laser on the planet: a 2 petawatt pulse, that's 2 quadrillion watts, albeit for just one trillionth of a second. It's called the LFEX (Laser for Fast Ignition Experiments) a...