Miscellaneous

Google opens up 200 years of news

The web-based tool allows users to explore existing digitised newspaper articles spanning the last 200 years and more recent online content.

…

“The goal here is to be able to explore history as it unfolded,” said Anurag Acharya, an engineer at Google and one of the team behind the project.

“It’s fascinating to see how people’s attitudes and emotions have changed through time.”

Access to such important primary documents as newspapers is a great boost to the study of history. Of course, it might also reveal that people in history were just as crazy and blind as people are now.

Politics

In Superstition isn’t the way, Angry Black Bitch has a revelation:

This bitch was driving along after lunch today…grooving to Stevie Wonder’s Very Superstitious , which was playing loud as hell in my Cabrio…and that shit made me think.

When you believe in things that you don’t understand, then you suffer .

Lawd, ain’t that the truth?

…

A bitch regularly volunteers in voter education and let me tell you…the masses are suffering from a severe lack of knowledge.

The removal of civics from the classroom was a bloody disaster for some and the political gold mine of the century for others.

And the belief in shit that you don’t understand is not limited by race, class, gender or location…and neither is the suffering that results.

Shakespeare’s Sister reminds us that Nothing we do matters if we don’t have fair elections:

“Malicious Code Can Be Easily Inserted into Voting Machine, Spread from One System to the Next, Resulting in Flipped Votes, and Stolen Elections…All Without a Trace Being Left Behind—Study Also Confirms that Voter Access Cards Can Be Created At Home to Defeat Security Protocols, Allowing Voters to Vote Multiple Times in a Single Election.”

Race

25 ways to tokenize or alienate a non-white person around you

1. walk up to that black girl you barely know in the co-op and say “what do you think of the new (insert hip-hop artist here) album.”

2. ask one of the only arabs in your community to write the article for your newspaper on the situation in palestine.
a) then, after they write it, take their research, re-write the article and sign your name to it.

3. in a big group of many activists, say “how can we bring more people of color into our struggle.”

An old link, but something that came to my attention recently. When Harry Potter Book 6 came out, one of the minor characters (that rabid fans had been obsessing over) who had previously not been described suddenly turned out to be black. Fangirls lost their damn minds.

Women

From Reappropriate:

Reuters is reporting that Madrid ‘s fashion week, a premiere fashion show, has stirred controversy by launching a ban on “overly thin” models, citing the promotion of unhealthy body image as leading to eating disorders like anorexia and bullemia.

…

Of course, what’s most fun about the article is not the ban on overly-thin models, but the modeling agencies’ response to the restriction. Cathy Gould of New York ‘s Elite modeling agency is quoted as coming to the defense of (get this) “gazelle-like” models:

“I think its outrageous, I understand they want to set this tone of healthy beautiful women, but what about discrimination against the model and what about the freedom of the designer[?]”

Bwahahaha!

Modern-day Lysistrata: Colombian gangsters face sex ban (via BBC News).

Wives and girlfriends of gang members in one of Colombia ‘s most violent cities have called a sex ban in a bid to get their men to give up the gun.

ETA: The folks on the Feminist LJ community discuss this issue and, in the process, remind me why I stopped reading that comm and almost stopped being a feminist.

At The Shape of a Mother women post their stories about body image and pregnancy and share images of during and port-pregnancy bodies. Very empowering.

Shakespeare Sister shares with us the story of a woman who came home to an intruder and killed the fucker before he could kill her. I need a t-shirt with her name on it.

I keep forgetting to add Bitch | Lab to my blogroll and pimp that excellent blog. Consider it done.

Another blog I love: Screaming Into the Void by the very intelligent Amananta. Recent posts you should check out:

“But Women Do it Too!”

Whether by nature or nurture, the uncomfortable truth remains that the above scenarios would be strange indeed for us to hear of, yet they are acted out by men all over the globe every single day. The vast majority of soldiers, terrorists, killers, rapists, wagers of war, kidnappers, traffickers in persons, executioners, gangsters, hunters for sport, and armed robbers are male. It is a pointless rhetorical argument to say that if women had equal rights they would act just the same – since we have no concrete evidence of any society in which women had equal rights and respect, and certainly no statistics on how women and men’s crimes compare in such a (mythical?) society, to argue that women are “just as” violent as men is a hypothesis with no evidence to back it.

Simple Rules for Women to Follow to Avoid Trouble

I’ve realized all us feminist crazies have been unnecessarily complicating things in our ridiculous calls for “freedom”, which will, of course, just make us miserable. All we have to do to ensure we ladies have a happy, healthy, calm, peaceful, and long life is follow the following ten simple, clear, and completely uncontradictory rules:

1. Assume any strange man is a potential rapist or murderer in order to protect ourselves because that’s just good common sense…

2. Never assume that a man could be misogynistic and violent until he actually beats the crap out of you or rapes you, because if we do treat men as is they are potentially violent we have proven we are just man-hating scum…

That one is definitely a must-read.

Sexual Assault / Rape / Violence Done to Women

First and foremost, the Carnival Against Sexual Violence 7 is now up at abyss2hope. Someone submitted my rape in media post (thanks, someone!) and there are many other excellent posts to read.

Lesbian Sexual Assault

Did you know that…

• women can be raped by other women?
• women can sexually assault other women?

Why don’t we hear more about this?
Because many people define rape as penetration by a penis, woman to woman rape is not acknowledged or is not taken seriously.

Via Women of Color Blog.

Brownfemipower also comments on the Suzanne Swift Investigation:

I’m wondering what “ending military sexual violence” really encompasses. Does it mean making sure that female soldiers can go to the bathroom without being raped? Or does it mean insuring that 14 year old brown girls aren’t raped then set on fire? Or that brown women will not be disappeared after they are raped in front of their families? Or that indigenous women will no longer be targetted for rape? Or that soldiers living in colonial outposts will stop raping local women? Or that brown school girls will be able to walk to school without being raped by soldiers? Or that grown brown men will not be reduced to sex toy status for underdeveloped U.S. soldiers? Or that rape will no longer be a way for overworked soldiers to relieve a little stress?

I found this essay on Broken Bodies – Broken Dreams : Violence Against Women Exposed about Female Genital Mutilation very hard to read. I made myself do it because it’s an important issue for me and because the practice needs to stop.

Remember how I hate Lifetime Original Movies? I also hate the Lifetime Movie Network. An example of why:

Do you prefer medical or legal dramas? Why choose? You get the best of both worlds with this flick. Ex-Angel Smith plays a doctor who is sexually assaulted outside her hospital. Shortly afterward, guess who ends up on her operating table — the rapist! You better scrub in for this surgery, because you’ll have to watch for yourself to see who survives.

WHAT?

Open Thread as well. Have at.