Speakers' Corner

Leader Of Loaded Gun March Compares Himself To Gandhi

Wed, 15 May 2013 11:18:03 -0400

Leader Of Loaded Gun March Compares Himself To Gandhi: think-progress: Worst comparison ever?

New App Lets You Boycott Koch Brothers, Monsanto And More By Scanning Your Shopping Cart - Forbes

Tue, 14 May 2013 19:49:05 -0400

New App Lets You Boycott Koch Brothers, Monsanto And More By Scanning Your Shopping Cart - Forbes

maymay: “Repeat Rape: How do they get away with it?”, Part 1 of...

Tue, 14 May 2013 16:48:45 -0400

It turns out that if you ask the right questions in just the right way, some men will actually tell you that they're rapists. They'll just…admit it.

The key is, don't use the word rape. Just ask them what they've done.

Researchers asked 1,882 men: "Have you ever tried to have oral sex with someone by using (or threatening to use) physical force—twisting their arm, holding them down, etc.—if they did not cooperate?"

and: "Have you ever had sexual intercourse with someone, even though they didn't want to, because they were too intoxicated to resist your advances?"

120 answered yes.

(That's rape.)

1,882 men…

120 rapists.

They admitted to a total of 483 rapes and attempted rapes. 483!

Whoa.

maymay:

“Repeat Rape: How do they get away with it?”, Part 1 of 2. (link to Part 2)

Sources:

College Men: Repeat Rape and Multiple Offending Among Undetected Rapists,Lisak and Miller, 2002 [PDF, 12 pages]

Navy Men: Lisak and Miller’s results were essentially duplicated in an even larger study (2,925 men): Reports of Rape Reperpetration by Newly Enlisted Male Navy Personnel, McWhorter, 2009 [PDF, 16 pages]

By dark-side-of-the-room, who writes:

These infogifs are provided RIGHTS-FREE for noncommercial purposes. Repost them anywhere. In fact, repost them EVERYWHERE. No need to credit. Link to the L&M study if possible.

Knowledge is a seed; sow it.

motherjones: Smart machines probably won’t kill us all—but...

Mon, 13 May 2013 14:49:52 -0400

motherjones:

Smart machines probably won’t kill us all—but they’ll definitely take our jobs, and sooner than you think. Read Kevin Drum’s latest, from the magazine.

Illustration by Roberto Parada

FBI surrounds house of Saudi student following sightings of him with pressure cooker pot, only to find he was cooking rice

Mon, 13 May 2013 14:49:35 -0400

FBI surrounds house of Saudi student following sightings of him with pressure cooker pot, only to...

April is the worst month

Tue, 02 Apr 2013 16:06:26 -0400

April is the worst month: crown-of-weeds: Hey, so, if you follow me, I have three really simple...

anarcho-queer: New York City Cops Will Arrest You For Carrying...

Thu, 07 Mar 2013 17:21:39 -0500

anarcho-queer:

New York City Cops Will Arrest You For Carrying Condoms

The woman asked Officer Hill why he was stopping her.

She wore jean shorts and a tight red shirt and had stood outdoors for half an hour. She’d had a conversation with a passing man. When Officer Hill searched her bag, he found a condom and $1.25.

He arrested her for “loitering for the purpose of prostitution.” On the supporting deposition, he filled in the blanks for what she was wearing and how many condoms she had.

When I read over the deposition in the PROS Network’s Public Health Crisis (PDF), a study of how the NYPD arrests folks for carrying condoms, I thought of all the tight shirts I’d worn while idling outside on delicious spring days. I thought, She sounds like me. She sounds like my friends.

The NYPD will arrest you for carrying condoms, but that depends entirely on who you are. If you’re a middle-class white girl like me, you’re probably safe. But say you’re a sex worker or a queer kid kicked out of your home. Say you’re a trans woman out for dinner with your boyfriend. Maybe you’ve been arrested as a sex worker before. Maybe some quota-filling cop thinks you look like a whore.

Then you’re not safe at all.

Like most laughably cruel tricks of the justice system, you probably wouldn’t know that you could be arrested for carrying condoms until it happened to you. Monica Gonzalez is a nurse and a grandmother. In 2008, Officer Sean Spencer arrested her for prostitution while she was on the way to the ER with an asthma attack. The condom he found on her turned out to be imaginary. Gonzalez sued the city after the charges were dropped. But if the condom were real, why should she have even been arrested at all?

Arrest is always violent. The NYPD may or may not break your ribs, but the process of arrest in America is still a man tying your hands behind your back at gunpoint and locking you in a cage. Holding cells are shit-encrusted boxes, often too crowded to sit down. Police can leave you there for three days; long enough to lose your job. If this seems obvious, I say it because the polite middle classes trivialize arrest. They talk about “keeping people off the streets.” They don’t realize that the constant threat of arrest is traumatic, unless it happens to them or their kids.

Prostitution is only a misdemeanor in New York, but a conviction will knock you off food stamps and out of subsidized housing. While society feigns wanting sex workers to change their profession, it does everything it can to keep them where they are. Most prostitution defendants plea bargain. Too broke and scared to fight, men and women agree to charges that will follow them for life.

There are two types of prostitution arrests. For “prostitution,” the officer has to witness you making an offer, but “loitering for the purposes of engaging in a prostitution offense” requires only circumstantial evidence. On the supporting depositions, officers answer a checklist. Were you standing in an area known for prostitution? According to Karina Claudio, a lead organizer at the community group Make the Road, these areas can be anywhere. Were you dressed provocatively? Did you speak to a guy? Were you standing next to someone who has been arrested for prostitution? Were you carrying condoms?

Claudio says, “There’s obviously a problem with a law so broad that if you are walking with a tight shirt in ‘a place where prostitution happens,’ you can be stopped. It’s like Russian roulette.”

And you’re far more likely to be stopped if you’re trans.

In a study conducted by Make the Road, 59 percent of their trans respondents had been stopped by the police. Cristina, a trans woman out clubbing with her boyfriend, was accused of prostitution when cops found condoms in her bra. Let’s just pause for a moment to imagine the groping that led to this discovery.

The cops refused to believe that her guy wasn’t a client. Claudio says, “This happens to our members for walking while trans. They’re going to stores, clubs, restaurants, and they get profiled as sex workers because of their gender identity and expression.”

That’s how you get arrested for carrying condoms when you’re not a sex worker. But, let’s say you are a sex worker. You’re carrying condoms to protect your health and that of your clients. You may have gotten the condoms from the city itself. New York distributes 40 million condoms a year. The city has its own condom brand, its logo spelled out in the bright letters they use to mark subway lines.

So, you’re arrested. The proof needed to lock you up is that you’re carrying one of these city-branded, city-distributed devices.

If the cops don’t arrest you, they have a habit of confiscating your condoms.

The PROS Network’s study is filled with gutting stories. A 37-year-old white woman in Coney Island says, “I was locked up because I had a condom. I wasn’t even prostituting. They took the condom.“ A gender queer Puerto Rican sex worker, 22, says, “I’m damned if I do, I’m damned if I don’t. I don’t want to get any disease, but I do want to make my money. Why do they take our condoms? Do they want us to die?”

How does something so egregious keep happening? Because sex workers don’t matter.

Sex workers matter. They matter to their friends and partners, their kids, their parents, their communities. But sex workers don’t matter to power, even if power is paying a sex worker to dress it up in diapers every Wednesday.

Horrors are acceptable when they’re not happening to the dominant class.

NInety percent of people who are stopped and frisked are of color. Because of the work of community organizations, the mainstream media finally reports that the NYPD has been filling their arrest quotas by searching for weed under black teenagers’ testicles. They now report that, in a Clean Halls building, you could be slammed up against the wall, or even arrested, because you didn’t carry your ID when you were dumping the trash. If drugs and weapons provide an excuse to harass men of color, then condoms do the same for queer folks and women.

LGBT civil rights and sex worker advocacy groups are fighting against the use of condoms as evidence. Mainstream feminism is not. A movement that rightly and vociferously fought pharmacists who refused to fill birth control prescriptions has remained largely silent about women being jailed for carrying another contraceptive.

Mainstream feminism might remember that the war on women always starts with the war on whores. Then, that category expands to include everyone but the white virgin tying her knees together in church. Until 1996, Ireland locked up unmarried moms and rape victims in Magdalene Laundries, where nuns worked them to death to cleanse their imaginary sins. The nuns built those Magdalene Laundries to imprison sex workers. Tens of thousands of women died within their walls, of every walk of life except the very wealthiest.

A bill to end the use of condoms as evidence was introduced in 1999. Health and civil rights organizations have been fighting to pass it ever since. Audacia Ray, founder of the sex workers activist organization the Red Umbrella Project says that while many politicians are supportive of the bill in private, they’re afraid to champion it publicly. They don’t want to be seen as pro-prostitution.

If you’re a New Yorker who thinks it’s wrong that folks are locked in cages for trying to protect themselves and their partners from HIV, you might give your state senator a call. No Condoms as Evidence has more details.

With sex workers, as with anyone, charity doesn’t change things. Solidarity does. Have you ever been outside on a sunny day, wearing shorts, a condom in your purse? Were you afraid of being arrested? Or were you a good woman? A member of the privileged class? Do you look away from official violence, until maybe, one day, it happens to you?

FACT: Tuition at public colleges and universities at a record high.

Thu, 07 Mar 2013 13:49:50 -0500

FACT: Tuition at public colleges and universities at a record high. : think-progress: While state...

Zimmerman drops ‘stand your ground’ defense in Trayvon Martin murder case

Wed, 06 Mar 2013 13:42:59 -0500

Zimmerman drops ‘stand your ground’ defense in Trayvon Martin murder case:...

GOP Congresswoman: I opposed the domestic violence bill because it protected too many groups

Tue, 05 Mar 2013 13:36:18 -0500

think-progress: Yes, really. Read her quote.

think-progress: Family: Openly gay mayoral candidate was...

Tue, 05 Mar 2013 08:40:04 -0500

think-progress:

Family: Openly gay mayoral candidate was beaten, set on fire and dumped near a river

Montana bill would literally give corporations the right to vote

Sat, 23 Feb 2013 11:20:48 -0500

Montana bill would literally give corporations the right to vote

Oklahoma legislature letting employers opt out of contraception coverage because "a woman's identity is in her ability to be a mother...and we are taking that from them"

Sat, 23 Feb 2013 09:38:11 -0500

Oklahoma legislature letting employers opt out of contraception coverage because "a woman's identity...

Photo

Sat, 23 Feb 2013 09:33:27 -0500

21 states will soon ban insurance coverage of abortion

Thu, 14 Feb 2013 18:45:15 -0500

21 states will soon ban insurance coverage of abortion

knowledgeequalsblackpower: reallyfoxnews: Fox News headlines...

Wed, 13 Feb 2013 18:03:39 -0500

knowledgeequalsblackpower:

reallyfoxnews:

Fox News headlines v. actual headlines: racism edition

The slave card?

publicshaming: Obama’s first State of the Union address of his second term! And…dammit to hell. NOT...

Wed, 13 Feb 2013 14:37:09 -0500

publicshaming: Obama’s first State of the Union address of his second term! And…dammit to hell. NOT...

robot-heart-politics: tierracita: TW: Black face,...

Wed, 13 Feb 2013 14:36:32 -0500

robot-heart-politics:

tierracita:

TW: Black face, racism

Immediate action needed!

Shirley Q Liquor, a black face drag queen, is coming to Portland, Oregon.

The Eagle bar, a local gay bar, is bringing Chuck Knipp who is better known as Shirley Q. Liquor. Chuck Knipp has openly deflected criticism and has gone as far as stating that he considers himself a facet in creating positive conversations around race and that is not denigrating black women but celebrating them.

Chuck Knipp is vile and his drag person is directly tied to a history of black face, minstrels shows, and a long American history of anti-black racism.

Folks of color, queer folks of color, white queers, and white folks are all coming together to demand that Eagle bar no longer bring Chuck Knipp to Portland. Many people across the country have come together to protest this drag act.

Folks have called in but the owners are refusing to cancel this show and community anecdotes have shown that the owners are racist, transphobic, desire controversy, and operate out of white male privilege.

This event is not an isolated instance and can not be de-contextualized from Portland politics and history. Recently there was this issue that prompted a long discussion around Portland racism but beyond that incident and this event there is a much larger context needed of Portland’s history of black politics and marginalization. It can not go unnoticed that both these incidents are taking place in a historically black neighborhood known as part of and near the “RedlIne district” that create exclusionary practices in regards to African Americans in Portland. These events are direct assault on people of color by white business gentrifying black neighborhoods. The irony is palatable.

Action is needed. Portland’s community of colors should not have to experience these daily aggression (both micro and macro) that clearly show no regard for folks of color in Portland.

Please call The Eagle directly at (503) 283-9734 or email The Eagle at michaelstalley@yahoo.com and ask them to cancel this event.

You can also go to the fb event directly and comment and witness the atrocious comments made by white Portland folks in defense of this event or go the Eagles FB page and comment.

Please spread far and wide and do not hesitate to call, comment, or email.

Portland folks of color, queers of color, need our solidarity and our action.

Please signal boost.

Are you fucking kidding me?

In case we aren’t all clear on who Shirley Q. Liquor is:

I learned that Shirley Q. Liquor is played by Texas comedian Chuck Knipp, who describes his drag character as “an inarticulate black welfare mother with 19 children.” Her fictional kids children have names like Orangello and Chlamydia and she also drives a Cadillac. Stereotypes abound! As I kept watching Shirley Q. Liquor’s videos, the tropes continue. Shirley is overweight, loud, and—everyone’s favorite—sassy.

- I’m Tired of Explaining Why I’m Offended by a Racist Drag Queen

No. This isn’t a “celebration” of black women. It’s an offensive, racist stereotype, and this shouldn’t be anywhere.

farhanist: If Israel were to lay down their guns tomorrow, there would be no war. If Palestine were...

Sat, 09 Feb 2013 01:54:43 -0500

farhanist: If Israel were to lay down their guns tomorrow, there would be no war. If Palestine were...

The 8 Senators who voted to block the Violence Against Women Act yesterday

Tue, 05 Feb 2013 13:01:58 -0500

The 8 Senators who voted to block the Violence Against Women Act yesterday: think-progress: It’s...