Tamb's Junkyard

weed and the radio

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Revolting Songs: Neo Muyanga

This installment of Stories about Music in Africa features South African musician and composer Neo Muyanga. Stories about Music in Africa is an ongoing project of the Pan African Space Station. Spe…

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Foreign Affairs: Unrest continues for a seventh day in former British colony

Latest Thailand English Online News

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How does it feel to be black in newly 'woke' America? Strange - and dizzying | Chase Quinn

For a long time we had to play by a certain rulebook – but now the rules have changed, and I’m still processing it

“I can still remember the times when I had to convince white people, even close friends, of the reality of racial prejudice and the insidious ways it showed up in my everyday life. I remember too, the exasperated sighs at my indignation, at my certainty that in any given room I was being overlooked or else targeted because I was black. My word, even then, wasn’t enough. Now, I can scarcely match their outrage. “

dedicated to the girl who 3 years ago asked me why i didn’t ‘just go back to india’, and 2 days ago, sent me an email recommending audre lorde...

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hi

ok then

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“whatever nature do, this house do”

incredible radio

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SADE/Helen Folasade Adu

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i love him

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A Tale of Two Gods | Novara Media

This Holocaust Memorial Day, trainee rabbi Lev Taylor asks us to remember both the millions who died and the false god for whom they were killed.

“In the world of the Third Reich, ethnic impurities and social deviations polluted Europe. Germany and its empire was in breach of its duty to be thoroughly white, Christian, patriarchal and heterosexual. Isolating the minorities was not enough to recompense for their transgressions. The minorities had to be destroyed in their entirety. Devout Nazis played their part to remove and destroy every blemish in their land.

Of course, such blemishes can never be fully removed. The sin of non-whiteness is too volatile and its terms too expansive. The god of nationalism is thoroughly empty, so no amount of flesh will ever fill him. He is insatiable. Modern fascists remind us that the nationalist god is still hungry for blood.”

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Scholars of mysticism are often mystics in their own right: Jeffrey Kripal

His excursions into ‘heretical’ areas like UFOs, the paranormal and psychic phenomenon have made him both an outlier in academics and a rock star in the spiritual and new age community

“Kripal’s memoir, Secret Body, is a distillation of his first six books. It was released last year to wide acclaim from the literary and academic community. In it he speaks out against another type of dogma: academic materialism. He writes, “From historical contextualism and constructivism, to Marxist, postcolonial, and feminist criticism,” we are led to believe that “nothing about the human being escapes or overflows the socially constructed body-ego and its local language games.”

Simply put, most academic methods just assume that human consciousness, and hence the ‘human being’ is nothing more than a product of firing neurons and biochemical processes, even though we have little idea of how consciousness emerges from brain matter.

He says that “academic methods just assume that a human being is fully explained as an embodied social and historical actor or physical ego — that ‘you’ are your name, your body, your family, your culture, your religion, your historical moment, your brain, and so on.”

But all the religions and mystical traditions, of course, argue against this position, affirming some kind of transcendence of the body, of history, of spacetime itself.‘”

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He comes with his four-wheelers and supporters – mostly Dalit and Muslim youths – who sit on the top of a car calmly, while also engaging in one-to-one conversations with every individual who comes to speak to him.

In a country where you get killed as a Dalit for putting your foot on the steps of a temple, where your hands are chopped off for touching a hand pump, where you are killed for keeping a moustache, Chandra Shekhar stood there on the steps of Jama Masjid, a holy space for Muslims, while hundreds of Muslim and Dalit youth together stood around, listening to him.

He came out of jail with a similar grand gesture amidst the crowd standing on top of a car, with a blue scarf and shades. He does not detach from the crowd, yet retains his presence of grand gestures almost like a big spectacle that opposes the caste notion of public and private space.

Most importantly, these gestures are not an end in itself, but also embrace and extend solidarity with other oppressed sections, especially to Muslims who are at the extreme receiving end of this ruling dispensation of BJP and RSS.

In contrast to the merit-laden tongue of caste, he uses crude, unrefined statements like, “Koi mere Musalman bhaiyon ko marne ayega, sabse pehle goli main khaunga". (Whoever comes to attack my Muslim brothers, I will take the first bullet.)

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Every time stories such as these come out, the usual platitudes of “encouraging more humane business practices,” or “this isn’t how the system is supposed to work,” are thrown around and people ask "how could this have happened?"

But of course it happened. It has happened before, it will happen again. It will keep happening so long as we continue to uphold an economic system that encourages and rewards exploitation and cost-cutting.