I'm doing some reassessing and research. Below is an excerpt from a piece I'm reading, and may be of interest to some of you:

Anti-Oppression 101: Alliance building, and tips for a liberatory organization

Working for Social Justice in Everything We Do

Confronting privilege or ways you’ve been duped because of a group you belong to is a complicated, lifelong process, but there are things you to can do to confront these issues head on. There is no comprehensive guide for how to be an ally, but here are some things we can all work toward:

Become an ally to yourself. If you can’t stand up for yourself, how are you going to stand up for anyone else?

Work with the perspective that social, economic and environmental issues are interconnected and interdependent. People currently have unequal access to clean and healthy food, air, water, homes and land. These are historic inequalities, and they continue to be largely based on race, class, gender and sexuality.

Understand and learn about systems of oppression and challenging the power structures which support those systems and create injustices.

Understand that we all have multiple and fluid identities. There are no pure cultures or identities. One’s gender, race, class or other identifier may change over time, or one person may embody multiple races, genders, cultures and ethnicities simultaneously. Don’t box people in. It’s suffocating. ( Read more... )

So we finally posted the updated Scans/NoScans Daily resources. We've split it into two posts, one plain and one annotated, to cater to different sorts of readers. The resources are longer and better organized this time around.

Scans: Quick links version
Scans: Annotated version

NoScans: Quick links version
NoScans: Annotated version

I'm considering doing reading lists, next time we update. (Hopefully some time from now, my god!) For example: a reading list on the MJ statuette controversy, a reading list on RaceFail09, a reading list on the Oracle-ableism debate, a reading list on DC Silver Age racefail, etc.

Good idea, or terrible idea?

Last night I talked about reporting Punch A Slut Week on Facebook. Sometime during the night, Facebook too the event down. \o/


Also, I can't recall if I linked to this article. Facebook’s Gone Rogue; It’s Time for an Open Alternative

Facebook has gone rogue, drunk on founder Mark Zuckerberg’s dreams of world domination. It’s time the rest of the web ecosystem recognizes this and works to replace it with something open and distributed.

Facebook used to be a place to share photos and thoughts with friends and family and maybe play a few stupid games that let you pretend you were a mafia don or a homesteader. It became a very useful way to connect with your friends, long-lost friends and family members. Even if you didn’t really want to keep up with them.

Soon everybody — including your uncle Louie and that guy you hated from your last job — had a profile.

And Facebook realized it owned the network.

Then Facebook decided to turn “your” profile page into your identity online — figuring, rightly, that there’s money and power in being the place where people define themselves. But to do that, the folks at Facebook had to make sure that the information you give it was public.

Read More

TeeJay Szabo is hosting National Punch A Slut In the Face Week.

If you have an account on Facebook, please report this event as a violation of FB's terms of service ("a direct call to violence"). It advocates violence against women and slut shaming - for lulz.

Catching up on email and comment notifications. Some of you can expect to be spammed.

Reading some things:

brihana25 writes about sexual misconduct at cons (the still ongoing imbroglio is in Supernatural, but the post is worth reading for everyone in fandom - context), and reminds us that victim-blaming is never acceptable.

Fandom, and the internet in general, is about as close to anarchy as you can get, and believe me when I say that's not a bad thing. No one knows who you are or where you live, and the opinions you hold and the things you do there don't follow you home. There are very few consequences for things done or said in fandom, and those consequences that do exist aren't really tangible.

Fandom sets your fantasies free and gives you a place and a peer group that you can talk freely about them without feeling the shame that the real world would bring down on you for them. Sex is celebrated, and the more the merrier. And in fandom, almost everybody's in to it. Those who aren't can just scroll on by.

But conventions aren't fandom proper. They are a hybrid of fandom and real life, and when those two things collide, they have a tendency to explode rather spectacularly.

If you go to a convention and you decide to bring your fandom fantasies to life, that is your own business. If you decide to seek out like-minded people to play your fantasy out with you, that's fine, too.

But if people who don't want to be there, who don't want to be part of that, get drawn into it on accident, they can't scroll past you. They can't hit the back button.

If their way out is blocked, even temporarily, even if it's not by you but by someone else you brought there? Then we have a problem.

Read More.


Also, Ableist Word Profile on disabledfeminists.com is a great 101 resource.

Hindus are upset over the depiction of their gods in "Hammer of the Gods" episode in the "Supernatural" TV series reportedly aired on April 22 and say that such trivialization of their sacred deities was disturbing.

Acclaimed Hindu statesman Rajan Zed, in a statement in Nevada (USA) today, said that Lord Ganesh and Goddess Kali were highly revered in Hinduism and such absurd depiction of them with no scriptural backing was hurtful to the devotees. Ganesh and Kali were meant to be worshiped in temples or home shrines and not to be thrown around loosely in re-imagined versions for dramatic effects in TV series.

Read More.

I don't buy arguments that the writers didn't know what they were doing. Of course they knew - that's why they came up with the idea of gods eating people in the first place. (Pagans + cannibalism = you know what the hell it equals!) They've extended it from ancient pagan gods, to those of contemporary world religions and of course they knew that people would be offended. They also knew that by throwing in some fights and a world turtle joke, a lot more people would laugh it off.

On the other hand, I don't think that they were deliberately tying to hurt people. They were ~pushing boundaries with their edgy humor. Rationalization, right? They knew people would be offended, but you know, it's just a tv series, and what's a little cannibalism between friends? We're writing fake!gods who eat people, so why should we research them thoroughly? La la la. That, I think is the thought process: We aren't trying to depict actual gods and goddesses, so why should we bother with accuracy?

I think... I think Stargate handled gods-as-people-exploiting-creatures better.

And it's funny. The episode was undeniably offensive, but I can see why they went there. It makes sense in their internal mythology. They'd already established that 'pagan gods' were actually creatures who fed off of humanity's devotion, and sometimes even its flesh. They'd already more or less established that the Abrahamic god was THE god. So it's easier from a storytelling perspective to make all contemporary gods into pagan gods. They don't have to deal with the issue of rival pantheons, or rival apocalypses. Not really. But that's an easy choice that leads to some bad - and hard to resolve - results. The better choice may have been to showcase an assembly of cannibal-gods from extinct religions. Another option was to introduce the gods earlier in the season, and treat them with some kind of narrative respect. Developed them as individual supporting characters. Or even developed the idea of pagan gods more thoroughly.

What do you think? How could they have maintained their "the gods are a sham! also, they eat people" thing, and not racefailed all over the place? Can that problematic trope be presented in a non-racist (albeit not unproblematic) way? Point me to some fiction where this was done really well.


Yes, this post was inspired by the numerous threads on the anonmeme.


Also, hey, speaking of the anonmeme - I fully anonfailed there the other day and asked for recs from the latest D/C exchange. None were forthcoming. Got any for me flist?