Authoritarian assholes:
 

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’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 […]

It’s happening a lot more these days, this blurring of the lines between dystopian fantasies and the world I see around me. I used to absorb those works of fiction which let me bathe in the tragic absurdity of what the world could become. It might even have seemed remotely realistic, but it was still […]

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 […]

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 […]

Last Friday I took part in Chicago’s Critical Mass. Rain was expected and it was the first Mass of the summer, so we numbered in the hundreds rather than thousands. Those who road found gorgeous weather, only light rain, and high spirits all around.
Hundreds of cyclists riding in unison tend to block traffic out of […]