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A statement from philosophers in response to the knife attack on the professor and students in a philosophy of gender course at the University of Waterloo this week, in which they “affirm our commitment to academic freedom, and condemn all uses of violence, intimidation, or derogation that attempt to undermine philosophical examinations of gender and sexuality” has been published and is open for signatures by other members of the philosophical community.
The statement was authored by Robin Dembroff (Yale), Justin Khoo (MIT), and L.A. Paul (Yale). It states:
The statement is posted here. Those interested in adding their name to the list of signatories can do so via this form.
The post Statement from Philosophy Professors & Graduate Students on University of Waterloo Attack first appeared on Daily Nous.
Three people were hospitalized following a knife attack that took place this afternoon in a University of Waterloo philosophy course. The suspect was arrested. No fatalities have been reported.
[original photo by Andrew Yang via UW Imprint, blurred]
The three victims, which include, according to the UW Imprint, the professor and two students, are in “non-life-threatening condition.”
The course meets in Hagey Hall, which is home to the university’s Department of Philosophy.
The UW Imprint reports that according to one student in the classroom when the attack took place, “a man of about 20-30 years of age entered the class and asked the professor what the class was about. The man closed the door, pulled two knives out of his backpack and proceeded to attack the professor. Students ran to the back of the class to exit out of the one class entrance.”
The University canceled classes in Hagey Hall for the remainder of the day but is expected to resume classes in the building tomorrow.
No charges against the suspect have been announced yet. The Waterloo Regional Police have said that “more information will be provided when available.”
UPDATES:
(a) The suspect has been identified as Geovanny Villalba-Aleman, age 24. He is a recent graduate of the university. He was charged with three counts of aggravated assault; four counts of assault with a weapon; two counts of possession of a weapon for a dangerous purpose; and mischief under $5,000, according to the National Post.
(b) The professor of the course, injured during the event, is associate professor of philosophy Katy Fulfer.
(c) “The accused targeted a gender-studies class and investigators believe this was a hate-motivated incident related to gender expression and gender identity,” Waterloo Regional Police wrote in a statement, according to CTV News.
(d) Global News reports on the account of the incident given by James Chow, a student who was in the classroom at the time of the attack:
He was in the second row of seating when he says a man with a backpack came into the room near the end of class and began to talk to the professor.
“He said to the teacher, ‘Oh, is this such and such psychology class?’ And the professor replied, ‘Oh no, you’re probably in the wrong class.’ Then he said, ‘Oh, what class is this?’ The professor replied, ‘This is a gender class’ or ‘philosophy of gender class.’”
Chow says the man asked if he could stay and the professor asked him to leave.
“While the man was listening to a reply, he put down his backpack in front of him at his feet, and he pulled out a knife. It still had like one of those sheaths or covers on it, like a plastic one.”
Upon hearing that it was a gender studies course, Chow says the man’s body language changed, as though he were “happy” to hear that he was in that class.
“The thing that disgusts me the most is this vile, mischievous smile that he had on his face and immediately the professor’s face just turned to like pure fear.”
Chow, who has been taking spring courses to catch up on prerequisites needed for his masters of philosophy, says his classmates began screaming as the suspect started to chase the professor down the middle of the classroom.“Our classroom is like a rectangle, but there’s only one entrance at the front where the man had entered and she ran to the back of the class. At this point, it was just pandemonium. Everyone was screaming.”
In the heat of the moment, Chow says he decided he needed to “at least attack him or injure him” so he says he threw a chair at the suspect as he cornered the professor in the back of the room. The professor was covering her face and screaming, Chow says.
“The next thing I know, I was running outside with a bunch of the other students and I was screaming to them like, ‘Get out of the building now.’”
The post Three Stabbed in Philosophy Course at Waterloo (multiple updates) first appeared on Daily Nous.
Kimberly Garza grew up going to the river, which depending on the day and her family’s mood could have meant the banks of one of a few bodies of water: the Frio, the Sabinal, or the Neuces. All three rivers are in close proximity to Garza’s hometown of Uvalde, Texas:
RIVERS ARE PLACES OF FORGETTING, of memory. But they are also places of healing.
The use of rivers and water in therapeutic practices is millennia old, employed by nearly every Indigenous culture known around the world. The term “river therapy” refers to the practice of swimming in a river or walking near one and drawing positive benefits and relief from the space and its elements. River sounds are used in relaxation training systems to soothe and calm people. Studies have shown that just listening to a river can alleviate stress.
The term “spa” derives from the Latin phrase sanitas per aquas—” health through water.”
UVALDE IS NO LONGER known for rivers but for tragedy. We are part of a terrible tradition of Texas towns with this fate, among places like Santa Fe, El Paso, Sutherland Springs, and Allen. Since the massacre of May 24, 2022—the murder of 19 children and two teachers at Robb Elementary—we have seen our unraveling, our sorrow and our rage, broadcast to the world. We have watched our town’s name, the names of our neighbors and families and friends, carried on a current farther away from us. We grieve, even today. Some part of Uvalde always will.
But the rivers are still here, the moments of respite in the waters around us.
I hope the healing is coming, too.
For many years now, I have been accused of “shaming” people for their sexual pastimes. This is in large part because of my criticisms of porn and the sex industry.
To be fair, I probably have written and said less than positive things about various kinks and fetishes, particularly of the violent nature. I’ve never been particularly shy about my view of men who need costumes, skits, creepy scenarios, or pornographic performances in order to get off. Your body is quite literally built to enjoy sex: just regular old penis in vagina sex. Now, of course, this “regular” sex is called “vanilla” in defense of the people who have conditioned their bodies and minds to need a bunch of bells and whistles just to do what nature intended, long before the invention of smart phones and Hentai. But requiring a silly costume or a near death experience for either you or the object of your ejaculation signals a problem to me.
While in the past porn was something you had to go out of your way to find, often in rather embarrassing ways — stealthily going into Red Hot Video after dark or purchasing a plastic-wrapped magazine from behind the counter at your local corner store — today, it is not only easily accessible, but unavoidable. You really can’t exist online without porn being pushed on you in one way or another — via porn bots in your comments or dms on social media, pop ups on torrent sites, or what is simply embedded into pop culture — music, movies, late night jokes, your fav Twitch streamers, etc.
It is far from taboo — rather, it is expected. Men will often tell women that any man who claims not to use porn is lying.
The overriding message is that porn is a normal — even healthy — part of men and boys’ lives. It is a long running joke in comedy films and locker rooms, but also something girls and young women expect to have to participate in. For the younger generations, “sending nudes” is part of dating, watching porn with your partner is recommended as a fun and sexy way to get in the mood, and performing pornographic scenarios in the bedroom is expected. For young women today, one’s social media feed is an opportunity to display one’s fuckability in exchange for validation from men and OnlyFans is viewed as little more than a side hustle.
Unfortunately, much of the fault lies with third wave feminism. Modern faux feminism embraced “sex work is work” as a mantra, insisting that porn and prostitution are just jobs “like any other.” Anyone who suggested these were not spaces of freedom, neutrality, or empowerment was guilty of “slut-shaming.”
The reality is, of course, that young women who get into the sex industry tend to get used up and spat out quickly, with little to show for it financially, but instead stuck with a lot of regret, often some trauma and additional mental health issues. The eternity of the internet becomes a lot more upsetting when there are videos of you at your most vulnerable out there for life. The lie told to young women by this industry-approved “feminism” is meant to empower them to feel proud of their choices but fails to tell them the truth: that some choices are harmful, even if you shroud them in a veneer of sexual liberation, and actual self-worth never comes from the superficial.
It isn’t, let’s be honest, sexually liberating to perform unpleasant, degrading, or painful sex acts with men who don’t care about you, that you would never engage in voluntarily. That’s someone else’s sex dream — not yours.
But while women often leave the sex industry with a heaping of shame, what of the consumer?
Men’s relationship to porn tends to leave out the woman factor. Odd, considering the whole point is meant to be the woman on the screen. But to the consumer, the question of how she got there, how she is being treated on set, whether or not she is in fact enjoying herself, or what mental, financial, or emotional state got her there is erased from path towards the main event: orgasm.
Considering the messages we are bombarded with — that porn is normal, a harmless fantasy, and a healthy release for men who can’t access the real thing — you would think men and boys (as I think we all know, most young men start watching at around 11 years old these days — sometimes earlier) would have let that old-fashioned shame go. But they haven’t.
If you talk to men about their porn use, as I do quite often, most will tell you that the minute they orgasm, the sense of shame rolls in. It is often, I’m told, quite nauseating — a sense of disgust with oneself: “What have I just done, I am an animal” kind of thing.
You might chalk this up to shame around sex, as some attempt to, but that doesn’t make much sense. It’s not as though after having sex with one’s partner you feel a sense of regret. In fact, sex is (if done properly) the thing that bonds us and brings us closer in an intimate relationship or marriage.
I posed a question about porn-related shame in my Substack chat yesterday, curious to see what insight men might offer, asking:
“I want to hear from you (men, in particular): why do men feel ashamed of their porn use? Porn has been fully mainstreamed and normalized–we are told it’s nothing more than a harmless fantasy, perfectly natural, and even a healthy outlet that reduces male sexual violence (this is a myth, for the record), yet I hear over and over again that men and boys feel shame after masturbating to porn. Why? Be honest.”
A number of responses stood out. One man named Des told me that “A lot of men have some pretty confused attitudes towards arousal,” pointing out that “Boys can become aroused by the weirdest of things… including things that are taboo or otherwise ‘wrong.’” He went on to say:
“The thing that is especially personal to me, because I wasn’t especially ashamed of my interest in porn when I was younger, is the insidious, creeping increase in the ‘extremity’ of pornographic content. It took an experience of being traumatised by some video I stumbled upon in my search for something “new” to make me stop and withdraw from porn altogether. I used this experience as an opportunity to learn about the problems porn presents and to work through the residual feeling of shock and disgust from the awful video I saw.”
This made a lot of sense to me, considering what male friends have told me about their sense of shame around porn use. Essentially, the nature of internet porn is that it drags you deeper and deeper down evermore extreme and gruesome holes. You are fed videos you might not be seeking out, but masturbate to anyway, leaving you with the knowledge you just jerked off to “daddy-daughter” porn, “step-brother gives unsuspecting sister a surprise,” or some facial abuse video, wherein a young woman (and hopefully not an actual girl) is choked and violated until she is brutalized and crying.
If you didn’t feel shame around watching this kind of thing there would be something seriously wrong with you. Yet this is mainstream porn now. It’s not some niche fantasy. It is what will pop up should you end up on Pornhub crusing for something “normal,” whatever that means…
A man named Jacob said:
“Shame serves a social function. I don’t think you do feel shame unless you anticipate/experience social alienation. The excuses and justifications are just defenses of people who are hiding feelings of insecurity. Porn itself is marketed as ‘naughty,’ ‘taboo,’ and ‘barely legal.’ That it’s shameful/anti-social is part of the engine that drives its compulsive use. Perhaps counter-intuitively, I think if it really was normalized/mainstreamed to the point someone didn’t feel ashamed, i.e., still felt socially supported and connected, it would just become apparent that it’s not very satisfying or fulfilling. You’re punching a chemical reward button in the brain of a social animal that’s supposed to bring you closer to other humans. You need to feel disconnected first before porn provides any relief. It’s like the Rat City experiment. I don’t think men in really connected relationships would even want to use porn.”
I found this quite insightful. Sex is designed to bond us: our bodies release oxytocin, which is called the love hormone for a reason, bonding mothers with babies and couples with one another. If your body is producing oxytocin on account of watching porn, you’re bonding with a person who isn’t there, isn’t bonding with you, and in a way isn’t even real. You aren’t actually connecting with anyone. Instead, you’re training your brain to crave and seek out the scenarios and imagery you see in porn, which are often abusive or immoral, but also leave you lacking. You have the orgasm but the bond with another human doesn’t follow, so you end up feeling alone, empty, and isolated when you are meant to be feeling the opposite.
What follows is the addiction cycle, wherein you continue to seek the oxytocin, so use porn, get the rush, but then feel alone, empty, ashamed so must seek it out again.
In this context, the shame makes sense: you’re doing a thing that is meant to make you feel good but doesn’t in the long term, only for a blip. It’s never satisfying the thing it’s meant to satisfy.
But of course it isn’t only single, lonely men who use porn. Men with partners are avid users as well.
The fact so many women normalize this as nothing more than a harmless fantasy that has nothing to do with them has always baffled and troubled me. To start, those are real women and girls in the videos your partner is consuming — women and girls who are possibly being trafficked, abused, or raped. They are at very least mentally unwell, and are probably suffering physical consequences from what happens on porn sets as well. One would think you wouldn’t want your partner supporting the abuse and exploitation of women and girls, at least.
But beyond that, why on earth would you be ok with your partner “bonding” sexually with other women?? This doesn’t strike me as any different than cheating. Sure, you won’t end up with an STD, but your partner is engaging in sex acts with strange women regardless. Have a boundary. Come on. You deserve it.
Men in relationships, no matter how much they’ve told themselves porn is their right (After all, she’s not up for it all the time — what is he supposed to do while she’s tired or grouchy or out of town? Suffer?) must know, deep down, that jacking off to 18-year-olds in the basement is not a respectful or ethical act within a relationship. And because you’re probably hiding your porn use from your partner, knowing she won’t be happy about it, even if she is playing out-of-sight-out-of-mind, the porn use functions as an ever-growing mountain of lies, creating guilt — an emotion akin to shame. You might be hurting her, the person you claim to love; you’re hurting your own mental health and ability to connect sexually and otherwise in your relationship; plus you’re actually hurting a whole bunch of women and girls you don’t even know on the other side of the screen.
Not a great recipe for self-respect!
It’s almost like mantras can’t alter biology and people’s inherent sense of ethics. And it’s almost like these industries and ideologies are going out of their way to mindfuck you into being an unhealthy, unethical person so you’ll keep coming back.
Don’t let em.
The post There is a reason men feel shame about their porn use, and it’s time for them to pay attention appeared first on Feminist Current.
Guest post by María José Méndez
This post is part of a series on illicit economies, organized crime, and extra-legal actors and came out of an IGCC-sponsored conference hosted in October 2022 by the Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies at UC San Diego’s School of Global Policy and Strategy.
In 2019, a 19-year-old woman detonated a grenade on a public bus in an extortion attempt in Guatemala City. Three years later, another woman was arrested for trying to smuggle ammunition and cell phones into a maximum-security prison in Honduras.
Accounts of criminal violence tend to portray women as passive victims. There are good reasons for this. Women are abused daily by criminal groups, especially in Latin America, where they are being killed at record rates. In Central America, women are victimized by gangs when they refuse sexual advances or protect their children from recruitment. In Mexico, they are forced into sex work by drug cartels, and their mutilated bodies are displayed to send messages to rival groups and the state.
Considering this rampant victimization, how important is the role that women play in criminal violence and what drives their participation? My research delves into this question by studying women affiliated with MS-13 and Barrio 18 in Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador.
While women have long played an active role in armed conflict, comprising as much as 30 percent of militant movements worldwide, the discussion around women’s involvement in violence tends to ignore contexts of organized crime and why women choose to stay in violent organizations.
In Central America, women are increasingly taking on lethal activities within gangs. This trend is also evident in other countries where women’s engagement in violent crime is also growing and diversifying. In Mexico and Colombia, where the number of female prisoners has more than doubled in the past decade, women have assumed prominent positions in drug trafficking organizations, with some even serving as leaders of their own criminal enterprises.
Several of the women I spoke with participated in hired killings and attacks against local business owners unable or unwilling to pay extortions. One former gang member said she felt “stronger than men” when given these missions; another spoke about regaining a sense of control, which had been shattered by a traumatic experience of rape. For both, participation in violence was a way of asserting power and earning respect from fellow gang members. For others, it was simply a way of surviving. As one put it to me, “In Honduras [t]here are no jobs for us […] But you must work to survive. We survive from contract killings, extortions, drug sales and kidnappings.”
Women’s contributions to violence also manifest in indirect ways, as revealed in a series of 2018 confiscated letters. In these letters, an imprisoned Honduran gang leader asks his wife to serve as a communication bridge with those outside, and to fulfill his daily needs. Requests for logistical support intermingled with demands for basic items, such as boxers and bars of soap, and reminders to give him and his children physical and emotional warmth.
As with armed conflict, criminal violence is made possible by a gender-based division of labor, where women bear the brunt of logistical and caregiving tasks. Most of these activities revolve around Central American prisons, which have become important nodes of decision-making for extortion schemes.
In a context of “mano dura” policies of mass incarceration and state persecution, which have imposed heavy constraints on gang members’ movements since the early 2000s, women have become pivotal in maintaining the complex operations that coordinate between gang members. The women I spoke with acted as the “eyes and hands” of imprisoned gang members, providing support in the transportation of weapons, transmission of messages, record-keeping, and intelligence gathering.
Some of these activities provided unexpected windows for enhancing their entrepreneurial and leadership skills. For instance, one woman who worked for her husband, a Salvadoran gang leader, spoke about how she leveraged this activity to offer paid courier services for other gang members on her own initiative. This allowed her to better support her children and ailing mother.
Gang-affiliated women also supply the basic services and goods—food, clothing, emotional support, childcare, and so on—necessary to sustain gang members and therefore their capacity to engage in the work of violence. One former gang member, for example, related how she was able to commit fully to the gang’s illicit activities because her aunt cared for her one-year-old son.
Women’s role in criminal violence is more important than we often realize. To acknowledge this role, we need to challenge traditional gender stereotypes that reduce criminal violence to a male phenomenon. We also need to challenge a prevalent assumption in research on women and organized violence: that women’s participation in lethal activities is simply the result of male manipulation or submission to patriarchal authority. This means paying attention to how women are also driven by their own aspirations for status and well-being.
Recognizing women’s complex agency in criminal violence, including the different labors they perform and the gendered factors shaping their involvement, is essential for helping address the unprecedented levels of criminal lethality affecting regions like Latin America. As scholars have argued, a clear understanding of the full range of women’s participation in violence can yield effective policy that gives women access to peace initiatives.
María José Méndez is an assistant professor in the Political Science department at the University of Toronto.
I have never advocated political violence in any published writing or in any talk. You can read the talk I posted yesterday, for instance, and you will find no recommendation of left-wing political violence, indeed no mention of that possibility. Yet it inevitably happens, in Q&A sessions, that the topic comes up. The way it generally unfolds is that my listeners or readers observe that I make the following claims: the existing political system lacks democratic legitimacy; those in a position to wield institutional power are unresponsive to popular demands; and both major parties fully support police violence, with the Republicans growing ever more tolerant and even encouraging of vigilante violence. Hence, in order to reach the kind of goals I lay out, it seems like some form of political violence would be inevitable. So am I advocating political violence?
I personally do not intend to commit any political violence, nor would I encourage anyone else to do so. I’m at a loss, though, for why anyone considering such a thing would view me as an appropriate confidant or mentor. I am far from an activist. My praxis is objectively that of a middle-class liberal intellectual, and even on the level of individual choices and the various virtue-signals one tends to send, I am not particularly left-coded (e.g., I’m not a vegetarian or vegan).
In fact, I don’t want to be advocating anything at all — I want to undertake a purely analytic and diagnostic project. The problem is that contemporary academic culture will not allow me to do that. If I didn’t put down some kind of prescriptive agenda, people would simply hallucinate one on my behalf. So yes, I end Neoliberalism’s Demons by saying that we need to eliminate the market society in favor of a radically democratic planned economy. That’s the only way to make sure something like neoliberalism can never happen again. That’s the political goal that informs my analysis. It’s not “realistic,” but at least it’s explicitly stated, so I don’t have to bat away a bunch of phantom political agendas that people arbitrarily foist on me.
How do we get from here to there? I don’t know. I’m an idea guy. If we can get there by reading books and talking about them, then I should be among the leaders of the movement. If it takes something else, then maybe I can play more of a supporting role — ideally teaching classes, but maybe writing up some propaganda or even washing dishes or something.
My real agenda, my personal investment, for my intellectual project is that I want to figure out and share what I take to be the truth about our political situation, to the best of my ability. And as far as I can tell, the truth is that we are in a really, really bad position. The power of nonviolent resistance has been exhausted at this point. The media is too corrupt and the political class too brazen and arrogant to concede to popular demands, no matter how much we maintain the moral high ground. The electoral system continues to be a site of political blackmail rather than a venue for the public to influence the direction of public policy. No governing party in any major country seems to be at all serious about addressing the most urgent problems we face — and those problems are genuinely urgent.
In that situation, with all formally legitimate means of political change cut off, my question — which I repeated quite forcefully in the Q&A for my talk on Milton Friedman at Wabash College — is what the powers that be think is going to happen. We are told that the human race is facing environmental ruin that will kill millions, and yet no one with the power to do anything actually does it. Is it not inevitable that someone will take matters into their own hands?
It does seem inevitable — but it largely isn’t happening. And that in itself is an aspect of our situation that I struggle to understand. It seems like in a world where people open fire into random crowds because they can’t get laid or drive into protestors because they’re worried the Jews are going to replace them, someone would get it into their heads to physically threaten the people destroying the world. Why aren’t they?
Maybe the problems seem simply too big, or the system too unassailable. (I’m presumably contributing to the latter in some small way with my buzz-killing analysis.) Maybe the record of the times that the left gave itself permission to use unlimited ultra-violence have disillusioned people — maybe that means so poisons the end as to render it unattainable. Or maybe everyone has decided, collectively, that if we can’t get it done via the institutional structures that happen to exist at this moment of history, then that’s a sign we shouldn’t do it. It works if you work it! And center-left parties can eke out small, largely symbolic gains that the right completely swamps, until our cities flood and our crops fail and millions upon millions of people die in unescapable heat waves.
What can we do as individuals in the face of this mass apathy and willful ignorance? Not fucking much! Not much at all. As the man says, the wrong life cannot be lived rightly — yet there is a certain duty to truth, a certain obligation to acknowledge it as the wrong life. But despite everything, despite the inauguration of Donald Trump, despite the fall of Roe v. Wade and the resulting rise of almost unimaginable misogynistic state violence, despite the fact that the weather is obviously unfixably permanently broken and half the country burns down every year — despite all that, there are a lot of people out there who really don’t see that it’s the wrong life, who in fact are offended that I would criticize the team they’ve chosen to back in the game of politics, a team that is surely made up of good people who are doing their best.
And to that, all I can say is: no. That’s the one ethical duty that I fully and unhypocritically live by. I don’t know what they will do with it — probably nothing. It will probably even make them dig in their heels and become even more apathetic and willfully ignorant, more attached to whichever team of ghouls and empty suits they’ve pathetically identified as fans of. But they can’t say no one ever told them.
Trust_In_The_Law
akotsko
After yesterdays's expulsion of two Tennessee state lawmakers — Rep. Justin Jones (D) and Rep. Justin Pearson (D) — for leading gun control rallies following the Nashville shooting, a third lawmaker involved in the demonstrations explains why she was spared the axe. — Read the rest
How does a parent answer a child’s questions about school shootings? For instance: Why does this keep happening? Will it happen to me? If it does, will I be OK? Writer Meg Conley, a mother of three, describes the agony of not having all the answers:
After the second shooting at East High School, we started talking about homeschooling. It’s not the first time we’ve had the conversation. But my kids love lunchtime, talking in the halls, learning new things from new teachers, school plays and after-school clubs. Being separated from those things during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic affected them in ways I still find frightening to contemplate. Forming community with people who are not part of their household is a vital part of their lives. There are just some things that can’t be replicated in the home.
One night in New York City, I sat in between my two oldest daughters as they watched their first Broadway play, Funny Girl. The play opened with Fanny Brice, played by Julie Benko, sitting in front of a mirror, looking at herself before she says, “Hello, gorgeous.” When she said those words, most of the audience knew what was coming, so they cheered. But my girls didn’t, so they politely clapped. I watched them watch the play, with wide eyes. By the end of the show, they loved Brice. They loved Benko. When she started to sing the reprise of “Don’t Rain on My Parade,” the girls understood what had been and what was coming. They cheered with everyone else. They became part of the community in that room.
We were wandering through the Met museum when my daughter got a text from another friend. It was just a link to a news story. Her middle school principal had gone to the media. There is a child at her school that was recently charged with attempted first-degree murder and illegal discharge of a firearm. That child doesn’t need incarceration; the child needs help. But teachers are not trained to give that help. The district rejected the school’s request that the student be moved to online schooling. Instead, the child goes to school every day and receives a daily pat down from untrained school staff before going to class. This student is on the same safety plan as the student who shot two deans before spring break. My daughter showed me the text and asked again, “What are we going to do?”
My two oldest girls went to see a preview of the new musical New York, New York with their dad that night. I stayed behind with their youngest sister. She’s too young for Broadway, but nearly old enough to be killed at school.
The grotesque irony of accusing @ThePosieParker of being a violent threat. I hope at very least this incident shows the world the truth about this movement. https://t.co/n1DQloKSse
— Meghan Murphy (@MeghanEMurphy) March 25, 2023
Kellie-Jay Keen (also known as Posie Parker), founder of Standing for Women, was to host her Let Women Speak event on Saturday morning in Auckland, but was met with a mob of protesters who pelted her with tomato juice and water, yelling, “fuck you cunt” and “go home Posie, go home.” Trans activists pushed down metal barriers to mob the 5’1” mother of four. Keen was forced to abandon the event, fearing for her life, and was escorted away through a crowd of deranged, screaming protesters by police and her security team.
Keen had been smeared as a Nazi in the country after a small group of men at her Melbourne event gave Nazi salutes. Keen had no association with these men, and said she doubts they were in fact neo-Nazis:
“All of this doesn’t make any sense, it feels really off. I mean, look in the UK. We had police impregnating animal rights campaigners. And we had those police infiltrating those groups. I don’t think it’s beyond the wits of anyone to think that either that was TRAs [trans rights activists] dressed up, or police, or, something was just off.”
When asked about the men giving Nazi salutes, she told The Herald:
“They’re absolutely not associated with me whatsoever. I absolutely abhor anything to do with Nazis. It’s preposterous they even exist in 2023.”
The executive director of Gender Minorities Aotearoa, a New Zealand trans organization, Ahi Wi-Hongi, said they are thrilled at the display of opposition to Keen’s event:
“People have really showed her that we don’t want that here, it’s not welcome. Perhaps she’s gonna pack up and leave — hopefully.
For us the takeaway is that people like her shouldn’t be allowed to come here and spread hateful views and carry out actions that result in people being harmed.”
The Let Women Speak gathering in Wellington planned for tomorrow has been cancelled as Keen’s security team say they cannot keep her safe from violence.
Wellington Mayor Tory Whanau said she “condemns the views and actions” espoused by Keen and that, “In Wellington we proudly celebrate and welcome diversity and inclusion of all members of our community.”
Members of the Rainbow Greens party had called for Keen to be blocked entry to New Zealand, saying she has a “longstanding track record of hateful speech and the incitement of violence towards trans and gender diverse people as well as other marginalized communities.”
“This is because it directly threatens the human rights and bodily integrity of people—in this case, our takatāpui, trans and gender-diverse communities. It is also because these networks of extremists are connected and reinforce one another.”
These kinds of comments offer a particularly glaring irony considering the very real threats women like Keen continue to face every time they attempt to speak publicly about the conflict between gender identity ideology and women’s rights.
Keen told The Daily Mail:
“I do feel like public enemy No 1 out here, genuinely I feel afraid. I am a hate figure. I didn’t realize how much women are hated by some parts of society before I came here. I feel like there are some great powers somewhere who don’t want women talking.
I can take being called a transphobe, but calling someone a Nazi? One of the politicians here called me a c***. They used rhyming slang of ‘dropkick and punt.
The war on women in these countries is absolutely frightening.
I have got to have a team of seven security guards out here with me. I genuinely do feel my life could be in danger sometimes.”
Meanwhile, Eliana Rubashkyn, the protester who threw juice on Keen explained:
“We have to stop the hate against our communities because the world is, right now. It feels like we are in the 1930s again.
New Zealand needs to stand up in front of the world and say this is not welcome here. We protect trans people.”
Rubashkyn told 1News the juice because represented the blood of “our people.”
“I want her to know that her words are blood.”
The post Kellie-Jay Keen is attacked and mobbed by trans activists in New Zealand appeared first on Feminist Current.
The United States supported a coup in Honduras in 2009. Fast forward a dozen years, and the Latin American country finally escaped the repressive thumb of far-right administrations when a leftist president — and the country’s first female head of state — was elected. She promised reform, including as it pertains to the mining sector, which has devastated portions of the country’s environment and used horrific violence to suppress its opponents. As Jared Olson details, however, hope soon faded:
They blocked the road with boulders and palm fronds. They unraveled a long canvas sign, bringing the vehicles to a stop — a traffic jam that would end up stretching for miles. Drivers stepped out into the oppressive August humidity, annoyed but not unaccustomed to this practice, one of the only ways poor Hondurans can get the outside world’s attention. Several dozen people, their faces wrapped in T-shirts or bandannas, some wielding rusty machetes, had closed off the only highway on the northern coast. It was the first protest against the Pinares mine — and the government’s failure to rein in its operations — since Castro came to power eight months before.
Things weren’t going well. That Castro’s campaign promises might not only go unfulfilled but betrayed was made clear that afternoon last August when, as a light rain fell, a truck of military police forced its way through the jeering crowd of protesters and past their blockade — to deliver drums of gasoline to the mine.
Since their creation in 2013, the military police have racked up a reputation for torture and extrajudicial killings as a part of its brutal Mano Dura, or iron fist, strategy against gangs. Though it earned them a modicum of popularity among those living in gang-controlled slums, they also became notorious for their indiscriminate violence against protesters, as well as the security they provided for extractive projects. They’ve faced accusations of working as gunmen in the drug trade and selling their services as assassins-for-hire. The unit was pushed by Juan Orlando Hernández, now facing trial in the United States for drug trafficking, while he was president of the Honduran congress, in his attempt to give the military power over the police — his “Praetorian Guard,” in the words of one critic.
Castro had been a critic of the unit before her election. But after a series of high-profile massacres last summer, she decided that — promises to demilitarize notwithstanding — the unit would be kept on the streets. And here they were, providing gasoline and armed security to a mining project mired in controversy and blood.
Mexico once cultivated a “special relationship” with death. But cultural globalization and rising violence is weakening that bond.
The post Death in Mexico Means Something Different Now appeared first on Public Books.
Enlarge (credit: GCShutter | E+)
Today, the Federal Communications Commission proposed rules to implement the Safe Connections Act, which President Joe Biden signed into law last December. Advocates consider the law a landmark move to stop tech abuse. Under the law, mobile service providers are required to help survivors of domestic abuse and sexual violence access resources and maintain critical lines of communication with friends, family, and support organizations.
Under the proposed rules, mobile service providers are required to separate a survivor’s line from a shared or family plan within two business days. Service providers must also “omit records of calls or text messages to certain hotlines from consumer-facing call and text message logs,” so that abusers cannot see when survivors are seeking help. Additionally, the FCC plans to launch a “Lifeline” program, providing emergency communications support for up to six months for survivors who can’t afford to pay for mobile services.
“These proposed rules would help survivors obtain separate service lines from shared accounts that include their abusers, protect the privacy of calls made by survivors to domestic abuse hotlines, and provide support for survivors who suffer from financial hardship through our affordability programs,” the FCC’s announcement said.
Yesterday the GOP called in former Twitter executives to try to make them admit that Twitter had been a hotbed of censorial socialists under the watch of libertarian Jack Dorsey. But AOC reminded everyone in the House yesterday that Twitter made a special effort to amplify then-President Trump's threats, incitements to violence, and racism. — Read the rest
“All I could do those days was stay in bed because my head was spinning from the painkillers."
The post “To Convey Love Through Sound”: A Jazz Musician’s Comeback in the Aftermath of a Hate Crime appeared first on Public Books.
Readers respond to Daniel Dylan Wray’s article about escaping the shadow of his abusive father
I was moved by Daniel Dylan Wray’s account of lone parenthood, domestic abuse and seeing his father for the first time across a courtroom (A moment that changed me, 1 February). I have a not dissimilar story, although I lived with my father, but I remember periods of parental separation as a welcome relief. In a similar Damascene moment, I went from angry teen to university, and, as a professor, I’m still there.
University was a door into another world. I fear that similar young people will not have a chance to experience those moments of relief, and support from public services, that I, and presumably Wray, enjoyed. The relentless attacks on financial and other support to lone parents, and the ensuing stigma, will make life almost impossible for families in similar situations today, as I outlined in the Guardian last year (Tories have shamed single parents and heaped financial pressure on them, 5 July 2022).
Prof Morag Treanor
Edinburgh
FreshRSS 
