Girls shouldn’t have their arms broken AT SCHOOL, BY THE POLICE OFFICERS, FOR DOING NOTHING
this is just another heartbreaking aspect of it all. school should be nurturing learning. you can’t nurture anything by breaking someone’s arm, and guess whose natural instinct to love learning has been shattered by some asshole with a power complex and a badge.
*cries*
The streets of San Francisco are lined with pear, plum and apple trees thanks to ‘guerilla grafters’ secretly grafting fruit-bearing scions onto ornamental, non-fruit bearing trees making fresh fruit free and available to everyone who wishes to pick some.
‘All you have to do is make a slit with a knife in a branch on the host tree, insert a branch from a fruit-bearing tree, and secure it with tape. Once it heals, it connects.“ – Tara Hui started the movement and has been grafting fruit branches to city trees for two years now.
How great would it be to see free fruit from guerilla grafters growing in your city? Want to start a trend?
http://inhabitat.com/guerrilla-grafters-secretly-graft-fruit-bearing-branches-onto-san-francisco-trees/
Here is a link to the original articlebiodiverseed do you have any thoughts on this?
I wrote a response to this the first time I saw it going around; I’m not ‘against’ it per se, but I think as it’s presented here, it’s really misguided. This is not to say there couldn’t be awesome applications.
Basically, ornamentals are planted by roadways for a reason, and people could be destroying public infrastructure and creating waste by doing this. Very few people want to eat roadside fruit, and even if they need free fruit, they shouldn’t have to pick it by the roadside, where it is covered in particulate emissions, and it might be embarrassing for them. At least do it in a park, or somewhere where it’s safer and more hygienic.
Grafting a vigorous heavy fruit-bearing branch onto a small ornamental (like a crabapple) also means the branch will require pruning and maintenance. A lot of these ‘guerrilla farming’ things are just about dumping seeds (or grafts) in a place, and then deliver no follow-through.
Anyways, that’s just my opinion. Your mileage may vary.
ETA: Wrong link in the first sentence, it’s corrected now
Sigh. People mean well.
If I’d tried to pick fruit off a tree by the side of the road as a kid, my mother would have worried that it was poisonous, or full of worms, or dirty, or polluted, or most definitely illegal. We were on food stamps at the time, so it’s not like we didn’t need it, but picking fruit from trees on the street was not going to happen. (We had two apple trees, as it happens. They were chock full of worms, every year. We certainly had no money for sprays. We did not eat them.) Picking fruit from street trees was just…not something we would have considered. It wasn’t pride. It was that this was not perceived as food.
It reminds me of “guerrilla gardening,” where people think that they’ll build a garden in an empty lot and then abandon it, claiming that local homeless people (usually not consulted) will take care of it. Well…I can’t swear that it’s never happened, but color me skeptical. Gardening requires a great deal of investment, in love and labor, and that you can just plunk plants down in beds and walk away and assume someone will step in with the know-how and the desire and the physical capacity to haul water from god-knows-where, strikes me as a trifle…ah…let me be kind and say “optimistic.” (I could be unkind and say a lot of other words, but I won’t.)
BUILDING a garden is the easy part. Really. It’s fun. It’s putting a plant in dirt (or hauling in the dirt in the first place) and saying “Look what I did!” It’s twenty bucks worth of starts at the store and ten bucks worth of 2x4s at Habitat and a couple bags of dirt and a warm glow of satisfaction.
Caring for the garden in the long term–the grim battle with weeds, the pests, the pruning, figuring out where the water’s coming from, basically, yes, the follow through…that’s gardening. The bits where it’s not always fun any more. The bits that don’t always come with the warm glow. The bits where you swear a lot. Look, I don’t particularly enjoy yanking out Japanese stiltgrass, but I do it because A) no one else will and B) I have the knowledge to know a weed from a food plant. Which, these days, is specialized knowledge.
The bit where people casually do a thing and then walk away forever, feeling a warm glow that they have Made The World A Better Place With Food Plants…sigh.
You don’t fix a food desert by grafting a street tree or planting squash in an empty lot. (Oh god! If only! I could save half the goddamn world singlehandedly if that was all it took!) There is an enormous gulf of education and skillset and care and even the culture of what constitutes food that has to be bridged. There is work that has nothing to do with moving dirt around.
The people who are making this sort of thing work build gardens, but then they teach people how to work them. They don’t just do it and walk away. They are better and kinder and more patient people than I am–I’m a crotchety middle-aged woman with an ancient beagle and I like humans better if there’s a keyboard between us. But those people, I think, are closer to saving the world than those of us who plant a thing and walk away and expect that someone else will pick up where we left off and then our work is done.
Brooklyn Public Library has the best post ever. Punk. The Man. Cuss words. Every i with a heart.
On Wednesday, the investigative news site the Intercept published a story based on a collection of 70 million call records taken from a database of Securus, a Dallas, Texas-based company that provides phone service to more than 2,200 prisons around the United States. The database, which the Intercept says was stolen from Securus by a hacker, shows that the company keeps records of every phone call made by the more than 1.2 million inmates who use the service in 37 states, including the time, phone numbers called, inmate names, and even the audio recordings of every call. Those records are routinely sold to law enforcement customers, according to the Intercept’s reporting, and most damningly, include inmate conversations with lawyers that are meant to be protected by the privacy of attorney-client privilege. “This reveals exactly how much surveillance is going on in the criminal justice system,” Jordan Smith, a co-author of the story, tells WIRED. “Many of these calls should never have been recorded in the first place.”
SecureDrop Leak Tool Produces a Massive Trove of Prison Docs | WIRED (via songscloset)
So there I was, enjoying the book, selling down for sleep… When the author, in the voice of the main character, used a derogative term for transgender people.
So that kinda put a crimp in reading that one.
“We are the granddaughters of all the witches you were never able to burn.” – Unknown* ?
*the original quote was from a Spanish language group, ‘Las insumisas de Lilith’ and then translated by Ruby Hamond’s Daily life article, ‘If being a witch means forging one’s own path, I too am a witch’
When I was first coming out as trans, I had a lot of internalized transmisogyny. I knew how negative society’s images of trans women were and I was convinced that I was somehow different. I was terrified of being seen as a man in a dress, so I just never wore dresses. In that respect it was rather convenient that I’m butch. I was not going to be – as another trans woman put it to me – “a masturbating freak in panties.” I internalized a list of norms and behaviors that I had to avoid in order to be taken seriously and seen as a real woman. This list of “don’t"s is more or less the autogynophilia diagnostic citeria.
Years later, after I had begun writing on transmisogyny I still had a lot of these messages internalized. I had a wake up moment when I was traveling and visiting a girlfriend. Her roommate came home after a difficult day and mentioned that she had gone clothes shopping to cheer herself up, and quickly showed off her new underwear and dresses, in particular one slinky sequined number. There was much oohing and aahing and her mood significantly improved.
About an hour later she came back out of her room and said that she was having a hard time doing her work for the evening because she was still depressed. My girlfriend sat her down and gave her some sage advice. "Just put you nice new dress on, as well as your fancy new underwear. It will make you feel sexy and you’ll feel better.” "Then what, just work while wearing it?“ “Yeah.”
Warnings had been popping into head the whole time but now alarm bells were going off. I so desperately wanted to warn them “Don’t do that! You’re directly admitting a connection between feminine clothing and sexual arousal and using that almost as if you’re self medicating! No one will take you seriously as a real woman, you’ll just be seen as some fetishist!” But I didn’t say that of course. Not only because it would have been very rude, but because they were cis women. No one is going to take away their womanhood for feeling sexy about lingerie and slinky dresses. This seems to be something cis women, particularly femmes, do all the time.
The bottom line is that the behavior classified as autogynophilia is normal female behavior. Charles Moser did a small study where he tried applying the criteria for it to cis women and found that 93% of cis women qualify as autogynophiles. So why are trans women subjected to this standard and often stigmatized, punished, or denied access to healthcare if they fit this criteria? And why is there no similar criteria for trans men?
It seems to me this is primarily about exerting the control doctors have over trans people to maintain male control over the sexuality of women. It encourages us to be sexually available to men and discourages us from having a sense of sexuality focused in ourselves or in other women. It sets up a pass/fail system so we are beholden to gatekeepers and must prove that we are the good kind of trans woman and not the bad kind. And it pits us against each other as enforcers of this system and keeps us divide so we cannot challenge the psychologists who create the rules of who can and cannot access transition. It’s no accident that one of the main proponents of using autogynophelia as a diagnosis was caught having sex with his patients, not informing them he was using their experiences in his research, and manipulating their testimony by granting/denying medical care based on whether or not they said they fit his model.
People who aren’t trans women: if you can read this all, you’ll have a much better understanding of some terrible shit we all learn about trans women
Trans women: this is really affirming
I do not fully understand the subject matter that is autogynophilia even after reading on it. I wish the OP had given an explanation of it as it would really help since it affects them so much.
The short version is that someone sat down and thought, “Hmmm, why is that some people are trans women?” and he pondered and pondered until he came up an idea that all trans women are just really really gay men who decide to live as women in order to have an easier time finding men to date (?!) or in order to get straight privilege (!?) or something like that.
Then someone said, “wait, but what about the trans women who are lesbian? What about the trans women who are bi? What about the trans women who are asexual.” So he sat and he pondered and he pondered. Finally he came to a conclusion:
“Aha!” he said. ”The first kind of trans women, I will call ‘homosexual transexuals.’” (which was really confusing because he wasn’t talking about lesbian trans women, but was misgendering trans women as being men, so he’s actually talking about people who he saw as gay men and using language that most people would consider bigoted or at least ignorant these days). “And any trans woman who is not exclusively attracted to men must have something really weird going on. If she’s attracted to women (or is asexual) then she must have a misguided attraction to women that is so strong that she fetishizes women to the point of wanting to be one. This attraction to self as woman shall be called auto-gyno-phile and it will describe the bizarre self-fertilization of a kink gone wrong. Such autogynophiles will be desperate to prove that they aren’t autogynophiles, so any trans woman who isn’t exclusively attracted to men but claims not to be an autogynophile must clearly be lying or in denial.”
In all seriousness, though. The idea was first invented by a guy named Blanchard but popularized by J Michael Bailey. And Bailey said such disgusting things such as that “homosexual transexuals” are “particularly well suited to prostitution,” and that “autogynophile transexuals” are freaks that need psychological help, not access to medical transition (okay in fairness, he tells a story about a student of his who said that, then he agrees with the student, but avoids ever claiming those words himself.)
And considering how ridiculous all this is, it might seem easy to dismiss. But in the recent DSM revision when there was a lot of pressure to remove or revise gender identity disorder, they made Blanchard the chair of the committee in charge of the process. And while they did revise gender identity disorder to address the stress and angst of gender dysphoria without making it a disorder to be trans, he managed to sneak “autogynophilia” into the new version of the DSM as a actual official diagnosis when it hadn’t been there before.
Women scientists made up 25% of the Pluto fly-by New Horizon team. Make sure you share this, because erasing women’s achievements in science and history is a tradition. Happens every day.
. http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/News-Center/News-Article.php?page=20150712
Drive like a woman!
The article is called, “Mike Huckabee wants to sell poor criminals into indentured servitude,” and it’s caused a little bit of an uproar and a lot of angry denials on the GOP side of things. This is particularly relevant because Jan Mickelson is considered an important radio talk host in Iowa, where the first round of delegates are selected.
Having sat through the relevant interviews, I want to say a couple of things:
1) Jan Mickelson is indeed the radio host who absolutely advocated slavery before. Specifically, he wants “illegals” to become property of the state in those words, so keep in mind that he’s got a history of advocating actual slavery. And:
2) Mike Huckabee, despite what The Blaze said in their article attempting to cover for Mr. Huckabee (wherein they accused people talking about this of spreading a “horrific lie”), was absolutely not laughing off Mr. Mickelson’s assertion that criminals should be made indentured servants. Mr. Mickelson has decided that prison is a “pagan” institution and concept, and is essentially trying to make slaves – or indentured servants, which is technically different but functionally not that much – out of people convicted of crimes. He really seems to be into the whole slavery thing, which I find quite disturbing.
Now, Mr. Huckabee did not use those “indentured servitude” words as Mr. Mickelson’s did. He’s not stupid enough to do that; he’s a politician with a career, after all. But he was entirely supportive of the concepts.
