So I missed the debate and the Pilsen Interactive Media Project wrap-up, because I went over to Oakland for the opening night of Critical Resistance 10. I’m excited about the next two days of the conference, and I’ll make a more substantive post about it later.
Back in the city of fog, I hopped on my […]

Aternet posted an excellent article about the role of white privilege in the current presidential race. It can be hard for white folks to recognize privilege, precisely because we have it and consider it normal. The article does a good job of highlighting things we may have overlooked, for example:
White privilege is when you can claim that […]

McCain’s VP pick has been under fire recently for using her private Yahoo email account to conduct state business.
And while the rest of us were sitting around hoping for political backlash, Anonymous went out and did something about it. Remember them? That loose confederation of amateur hackers responsible for the attacks on Scientology earlier this year? […]

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 […]

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’m a chameleon. I’ll charm your parents, then make a quip about listless baby-boomers. I hate cops, but serve them lunch with a smile on my face. I engage people with third-wave feminist theory, then stay silent when folks cat-call. I slip easily into a hip-hop dialect, and drop it when I’m in someone’s office. […]

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 […]

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 […]