A friend emailed me a while back because she had received a Facebook invitation that was riddled with sexist notions. She had tried to explain the problems to the male who had written it, but found it difficult to express herself to him when she was so frustrated and the whole thing was written half-jokingly. […]

I hate Obama. I hate Democrats as much as Republicans. I hate electoral politics. My rage sits with me, fetid, like a growing abscess. I want so much to use this post as razor blade to lance it, and spray the pus all over you, leaving you so disgusted that you will share my hate.
I […]

I’ll just say this flat out: non-violence is a luxury of privlege.
You’ll say, “What about Ghandi? What about Martin Luther King?” Ghandi was operating in the context of imperial decline that was already well on its way due to violent resistances in other countries; King in the context of black militance.
I’d love to be a […]

Slow and steady–that’s how tyranny grabs at our throats, so we’re already blacking out by the time we realize we are being strangled. People always gawk at how well-intentioned and sane Germans allowed the Nazi Party to rise to such prominence. It was a slippery slope; consecutive decisions were fairly rational, but from beginning to […]

I shall make some attempt to offer a concise theory of oppression that has predictive power. To entertain this discussion, I take for granted that oppression in the United States is pervasive–manifesting in the various ‘isms–and shall offer no evidence to support this claim. My goal is not to validate the white supremacist capitalist patriarchy […]

We became aware of suffering. We knew we had to work to change things. The first step was learning. We read as much as we could, we started talking about how things could be different. We didn’t know what to do.
We became aware of power structures. We saw an opportunity to work towards change. We […]

There’s a pattern we can observe, it goes like this: naive enthusiasm, naive counter-enthusiasm, and wise release. Patriotism is foolish. Anti-Americanism is equally foolish. Nations seem to preclude some sort of world harmony, and yet to quest for their destruction is misguided.
Why celebrate the Fourth of July? The founders were intellectual elitists who forced their […]

There was a time when I was ignorant of oppression; a blissful childhood spent aloof to the suffering in the world. My eyes began to open in my adolescence, and my identity shifted. Naively, I thought we could use the system’s own channels to reform and ameliorate oppressive conditions. I slowly became disillusioned with this […]

The other night I parted ways with some friends and enjoyed a solo nine mile bike ride. Music kept my right ear company while my left listened for traffic.

And I had a thought. Ruminating on that Ironman post, I discovered a connection. I wrote about how weapons and systems of control can shrink the sphere […]

So, I just saw the new movie adaptation of Ironman. If one can look past the racism and sexism that Hollywood seems incapable of transcending, it offered a fairly intriguing story. The narrative is well-rounded, with enticing action sequences that are by no means the central focus of the movie. By the end, some important […]