Knowledge is Power

I'll be honest with you, I hate war in all it's forms - Physical, psychological, spiritual.... emotional... environmental I hate war... And I hate having to struggle - I honestly do. Because I wish I had been born into a world when this is not necessary. This context of struggle and being a warrior and being a struggler has been forced on me by oppression. Otherwise I would have been a sculptor or a gardener, carpenter - you know, I would be free to be so much more... I guess being part of me or part of who I am, a part of what I do is being a warrior - A Reluctant Warrior, A Reluctant Struggler. But... I do it because I am Committed to Life. We can't avoid it. We can't run away from it because to do that is to be subservient... to devils, subservient to evil and so that the only way to live on this planet with any human dignity at the moment is to struggle. Committed to Life - Asssata Shakur - Asian Dub Foundation

[fajrarmy-blog]

The different legal systems under which Israelis and Palestinians are tried apply to children as well. As +972 has consistently documented, Palestinian children arrested by the Israeli army are treated by the military court system as “potential terrorists.” The visual below demonstrates what would happen should two 12-year-old boys, one Israeli and one Palestinian, get arrested for fighting. One would swiftly be brought before a judge, given access to a lawyer, tried and spared jail time. The other could face two years in jail without trial. 

By Michal Vexler, with the cooperation of Caabu – The Council for Arab-British Understanding

Visualizing Occupation: Children under Israel’s legal regime

[rockwriteon-deactivated20130325]

Nikki Giovanni, Revolutionary Dreams (found this article-from 1973 in a book i purchased at Strand)

[thedailywhat]

Dear Ann Coulter of the Day: After Ann Coulter referred to President Obama as a retard in a tweet during Monday night’s presidential debate, Special Olympics athlete and global messenger John Franklin Stephens penned her this open letter:

Dear Ann Coulter,  Come on Ms. Coulter, you aren’t dumb and you aren’t shallow. So why are you continually using a word like the R-word as an insult?  I’m a 30 year old man with Down syndrome who has struggled with the public’s perception that an intellectual disability means that I am dumb and shallow. I am not either of those things, but I do process information more slowly than the rest of you. In fact it has taken me all day to figure out how to respond to your use of the R-word last night.  I thought first of asking whether you meant to describe the President as someone who was bullied as a child by people like you, but rose above it to find a way to succeed in life as many of my fellow Special Olympians have.  Then I wondered if you meant to describe him as someone who has to struggle to be thoughtful about everything he says, as everyone else races from one snarkey sound bite to the next.  Finally, I wondered if you meant to degrade him as someone who is likely to receive bad health care, live in low grade housing with very little income and still manages to see life as a wonderful gift.  Because, Ms. Coulter, that is who we are – and much, much more.  After I saw your tweet, I realized you just wanted to belittle the President by linking him to people like me. You assumed that people would understand and accept that being linked to someone like me is an insult and you assumed you could get away with it and still appear on TV.  I have to wonder if you considered other hateful words but recoiled from the backlash.  Well, Ms. Coulter, you, and society, need to learn that being compared to people like me should be considered a badge of honor.  No one overcomes more than we do and still loves life so much.  Come join us someday at Special Olympics. See if you can walk away with your heart unchanged.  A friend you haven’t made yet, John Franklin Stephens Global Messenger Special Olympics Virginia

[specialolympicsblog]

[racialicious]

Whites are about 78% of the American public. According to Gallup, about 19% of whites were opposed to interracial marriage in 2007. That’s a pretty small minority of whites, but in total number, that’s something like 49 million people. There are only 69 million or so non-white people living in the U.S. That means that the number of whites who oppose interracial marriage is greater than all of any one U.S. racial minority group. Why are they so afraid? I believe what whites have to fear is white people. When white supremacy was challenged by the racial justice movements of the 1950s and ’60s, white elites pivoted from overt racism and co-opted the language and symbols, but not the substance, of racial justice. By doing so, they were able to position themselves as champions of a new colorblind code of civility that reduces structural racial injustice to an attitudinal problem. This enabled them to block attempts to reorganize unjust power relations while deflecting responsibility for continuing injustice on overt racists who were cast as ignorant, immoral, and backward. This move caused whiteness to fracture. The dominant faction of elites adopted a strategy of coded messaging and avoidance of obvious racial conflict, while using overt racists as a foil against which to position themselves as racial egalitarians. When whites are exposed as racists, their anger is in part a reaction to the fear that they will be cast out of the dominant faction of whites and marginalized along with old fashioned racists like the KKK. If you buy that, what we are up against, at least in part, is a factional fight among whites over how best to maintain supremacy. And for people of color to concede to that by avoiding direct attacks on racism is like cutting off our noses to spite our faces.

— Scot Nakagawa, “Why ‘Racist’ Is Such A Powerful Word,” RaceFiles 10/18/12 (via racialicious)

[mothernaturenetwork]

Green Party in the White House? The U.S. Green Party’s presidential candidate for 2012 talks with MNN about her ‘Green New Deal,’ the politics of climate change, the challenges for third-party candidates and her quest to escape Ralph Nader’s shadow.

[theatlantic]

[nprfreshair]

A Map of the World Based on Book Publishing

When it comes to book publishing, not all countries are created equal, as this distorted map of the world by the International Publishers Association shows. […]

As you can see, places like the U.S., Europe, and parts of Asia are engorged in illustration of their strong publishing industries. Meanwhile, Africa and the Middle East are tiny slivers, meaning that the number of books published in those places is extremely low compared to the rest of the world.

The map demonstrates the way that books and the industry behind them reflect access to knowledge,” according to the creators of the report.

[Image: International Publishers Association]

[iamnotanobject]

[knowledge-power-blog]

Print, paste, pass along!

[idliketogettoknowwhoyouare-blog]

[knowledge-power-blog]

Anthony Black, Waiting For Superman

[knowledge-power-blog]

[knowhomo-deactivated20191124]

LGBTQ* Typography, Art and Posters You May Have Missed

Art posted during Gay Pride Weekend, Portland, Maine in late(r)-2000s

(Source: Down Is Not Up)

[vmr-blog]

Mitt Romney just cost himself the election: This video comes from mother jones- someone got ahold of footage from one of his private fundraisers, rambling about entitlements and the poor, saying in essence he doesn’t care about them.

Original story: http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2012/09/mitt-romney-bootlegs-clinging-to-the-47-percent-of-entitled-victims-silver-spoons-and-eastwood-talks-pm-note/

[saucefactory-deactivated2019103]

I’d shake my head in an appalled, disappointed fashion, but you can’t be disappointed in someone you never had any faith in, in the first place.

Oh, Romney.

I don’t even know what to say.

[nevheera]

WOW

How dare these American Citizens feel entitled to healthcare….food…. housing. How DARE they. 

[faruhanu]

Muslims In Libya Condemn Violence, Apologize To Americans

Buzzfeed

#of course the news won’t show this #no they’ll just keep stating over and over that the US is sending two warships to the area #because that is more important than showing Americans that not all Muslims are evil like they already believe#because that would be asking too much of the media

[the-original-dtwps]

i wish there weren’t apologies for this, though

son you don’t need to apologize

we been fuckin up y’all shit for days

no one with a lick of common sense blames those people or you

[knowledge-power-blog]

[3-ka]

In short, reverse discrimination is more than just a description of whites being harmed by affirmative action. It is a socially constructed, ideological package that contains an entire set of conservative attitudes about the state of race and gender relations today. It is a codeword for those angry whites who feel threatened by increased competition from people of color and women. Although reverse discrimination is seen as something real, it is actually a socially constructed interpretation of reality that exaggerates and misinterprets the problems that whites genuinely have.

“The Social Construction of Reverse Discrimination:  The Impact of Affirmative Action on Whites” was published in the Journal of Intergroup Relations, Volume XXXVIII, No. 4 Winter 2001/2002, pages 33 - 44.   (via 3-ka)

We read a book in my Race in the Context of Whiteness class called When Affirmative Action was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America by Ira Katznelson and I remember before we even read it my professor was talking about this idea of Affirmative Action being white and she said “Well, if Affirmative Action is getting benefits based on race, then white people have always had Affirmative Action”

It was definitely a BOOM moment

(via amberguessa)

[knowledge-power-blog]

[loveincolororg]

God has spoken!

[thegreg]

“During a speech a few months ago, Governor Romney even explained his energy policy this way: ‘You can’t drive a car with a windmill on it. That’s what he said about wind power. ‘You can’t drive a car with a windmill on it.’ I wonder if he actually tried that, I know he’s tied other things to his car.”

President Obama

Burn.

(via resurrecthobbes)

You could drive a car with a solar panel on it. And there’s probably a way to harness wind power from driving at high speeds. Of course learning how to do that would require investment in education and science, which are evil liberal values. Green energy: there are options!

But yeah. Siiiiick burn.

(via stfuconservatives)