You can call me Saba. (Side)blog for the (not always angry) thoughts of an angry woman (me)
203 posts
Thoughtsofanangrywoman - Im Angry - Tumblr Blog
“One of the most important things the [Black Panther] Party did was to make it really clear who the enemy was: not white people, but the capitalistic, imperialistic oppressors. They took the Black liberation struggle out of a national context and put it in an international context…. It was also clear to me that without a truly internationalist component nationalism was reactionary. There was nothing revolutionary about nationalism by itself-Hitler and Mussolini were nationalists. Any community seriously concerned with its own freedom has to be concerned about other peoples’ freedom as well. The victory of oppressed people anywhere in the world is a victory for Black people. Each time one of imperialism’s tentacles is cut off we are closer to liberation… Imperialism is an international system of exploitation, and we, as revolutionaries, need to be internationalists to defeat it.”
— Assata Shakur, “Assata: An Autobiography”
i went to a leftist festival last month and there was a panel dedicated to prostitution, why abolition is the only road to go for leftists and how to help and support prostituted women exiting the trade, and i keep thinking about that union organizer who said, "we hear more and more that 'sex work is work', but if that were true, then there'd be professional trainings leading to a qualification for prostitution, then there'd be prostitution diplomas, then high schoolers could send applications to follow those trainings and become prostitutes. but we all know that all these things don't exist, and if they did exist we would all recognize them for what they are: a grooming business encouraging pedophilia and violence against women and girls." and what she said later; "trade unions that argue that 'sex work is work' never engage in legal battles against pimps or brothel owners. they don't even recognize that pimps are the bosses of the prostitution market. "sex workers' trade unions" don't fight pimps because sex workers' unions don't represent the alleged "workers" (prostituted women), they represent the bosses: pimps."
and that made me think of what Kajsa Ekis Ekman said about the trade unions that consider prostitution to be work and prostituted women to be workers: they offer trainings about condom use and spend millions of dollars funding "worker peer education" about "safe sex".
So one again, it's prostituted women who are held responsible for the spreading and the prevention of STDs - not the johns, not the pimps. the prostituted women, many of them victims of sex trafficking. "As human trafficking expert Malka Marcovich has pointed out, this means a return to nineteenth-century ideals of hygiene, where the onus was “primarily on the women to take responsibility for the health of ‘the customer’, so diseases would not be spread to their families” (2007, p. 347)."
It's quite obvious to any trade union organizer that prostitution is not work and the sex trade can't be organized as a trade union. a few months ago, the biggest unions in my country (which included the traditional left-wing trade unions as well as students' unions) issued a paper condemning the 'sex work is work' narrative and the pimp lobbies got so mad about that because they know their strategy isn't working because leftists know what left-wing politics look like and they know women's liberation doesn't come from prostitution. Now it's interesting that the biggest voices of the "sex work is work" movement come from the USA, where the anticapitalist left doesn't exist. American liberals love to pass reactionary politics as revolutionary but not because they are stupid in their own country does it mean they should influence the actually left-wing labour movement in other countries, right?
😒 He's been replying to this shit for like a while now
The court also addressed the wider impacts of street harassment. “Sexually intimidating someone on the streets like that makes people feel unsafe and prevents them from being themselves in public,” it said. “Sexually intimidating behaviour often leads to adaptive behaviour. People go to other places or start dressing or behaving differently. Public life is affected.”
hmm, i wonder what that excerpt would look like if the court dared to acknowledge that street harassment is a form of male violence against women instead of couching it in gender-neutral terms about people in general. which people feel unsafe and start behaving differently? and which people are the cause? i guess we'll never know. it's all just gender-neutral people doing things to other gender-neutral people affecting public life in some vague way that has nothing to do with, say, enforcing a particular sex hierarchy that benefits some gender-neutral people over other gender-neutral people.
The West often claims to lead the way in women’s empowerment, but when it comes to education, especially in STEM, the Global South is leading in that sense. In Algeria, over 50% of engineering students are women, while in Egypt, women frequently pursue higher education in fields like medicine and engineering, often surpassing men. In Palestine, even amid genocide, women remain highly educated, using their knowledge as a form of resistance. Education is deeply valued across the Middle East, where literacy rates are among the highest globally. Iran stands out with a huge percentage of women in engineering, including female leaders in university departments, even under the constraints of the Islamic regime . Meanwhile, while Western women do pursue education, a huge gender gap in STEM remains, raising questions about the progressiveness of a society that often discourages women from entering these fields. In contrast, in the Global South, families prioritize higher education for their daughters. So, why does the West continue to disregard the achievements of women in these regions?
"The Black female is assaulted in her tender years by all those common forces of nature at the same time that she is caught in the tripartite crossfire of male prejudice, white illogical hate and Black lack of power."
—Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
Senior White House figures privately told Israel that the U.S. would support its decision to ramp up military pressure against Hezbollah — even as the Biden administration publicly urged the Israeli government in recent weeks to curtail its strikes, according to American and Israeli officials. Presidential adviser Amos Hochstein and Brett McGurk, the White House coordinator for the Middle East, told top Israeli officials in recent weeks that the U.S. agreed with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s broad strategy to shift Israel’s military focus to the north against Hezbollah in order to convince the group to engage in diplomatic talks to end the conflict, the officials told POLITICO. Not everyone in the administration was on board with Israel’s shift, despite support inside the White House, the officials said. The decision to focus on Hezbollah sparked division within the U.S. government, drawing opposition from people inside the Pentagon, State Department and intelligence community who believed Israel’s move against the Iran-backed militia could drag American forces into yet another Middle East conflict.
just a quick reminder to share and donate to fidaa’s campaign @fidaa-family2
shes the mother of two young children, sila and muhammed. muhammed has been sick recently and sila needs to get vaccinated very soon but fidaa tells me the situation has been very difficult in gaza and the campaign has been slow lately.
I’m like one mental breakdown away from becoming a serial killer I swear to god
What this past year should have taught every "leftist" in the US is that unions in the US primarily serve Imperialism, and most skilled labor in the US will eventually end up serving this goal. They want a bigger cut of the imperial superprofits, not any actual worker's rights. Yes, even wobblies.
This is such a great example because it like, says the quiet part of American jobs being worth Palestinian lives out loud.
One day men are gonna be putting flowers in their hair and theyre gonna speak softly and be comfortable with open displays of affection for one another and they’re still gonna be violently oppressing and dominating women :+)
also like war happens for reasons. when the Americans massacred and raped civilians in Vietnam they did this because every villager was a potential communist or a sympathizer and if you threatened them with death and sexual violence they would be too afraid to help the communists because the costs were potentially too high. they did not do this for no reason, or because they were "evil" , they did it because it was intended to have implications and effects on the conflict. It obviously did not have the intended effects entirely, and Vietnam was liberated despite the Americans best efforts at terrorizing and subjugating its people. but the Americans were not committing war crimes against Vietnamese people for ethereal reasons stemming from the inate nature of good and evil but rather because they thought it would be an effective strategy to win a guerilla war and because they didn't see Vietnamese people as people
"why should I care about Africa"---> lives in a country that's upheld by the current and past exploitation and destabilization of Africa
In an alternate universe, societies that use oral tradition are coming out with studies proving that "documents", a primitive writing system used by various tribes in Europe to keep track of history, are actually very accurate despite common wisdom being that physical documents are so easy to destroy or forge that they couldn't possibly be relied on to contain any truth
Look, I had no interest in season 2 after a while anyway. It's very easy for me not to watch this shit. I know it's hard for women in Korea to trust any man in their lives. If you have no idea what the 4b movement is, I highly recommend looking into it.
Edit: to expand on the last point, I just mean look into the 4B movement to understand what women in Korea are experiencing and why they felt the need to create such extreme/"radical" feminist movements. And especially what is happening with digital sexual harassment. There's an epidemic of deep fake/AI p^rn, hidden cams, fake nudes, you name it - and much if it involving minors as young as elementary school age.
The skies of Gaza fill with shifting shapes on an early spring morning. At first they are barely visible, only specks soaring above central Gaza’s wetlands. Mandy Sirdah quickly raises her binoculars. “Storks!” she shouts excitedly. Close by, Lara Sirdah, her identical twin sister wearing matching clothes, grabs her long-focus camera and points it to the sky. “So many! So beautiful!” she cries out with joy as she snaps photos of hundreds of white storks flying in circles above her. Every spring, millions of birds set out from their wintering grounds in Africa and make their way north to Europe and Asia. At the intersection of three continents, the Middle East is an important stopover and one of the world’s busiest corridors for bird migration. Many of these birds fly over Gaza, an overcrowded coastal enclave often described as an “open-air prison.” The birds soar above more than two million people, most of them refugees whose families were forced to leave their villages in 1948 with the establishment of the State of Israel and have been unable to return. Concentrated in refugee camps, Palestinians in Gazahave also been confined by Israeli policies of military closure over many decades and a brutal air, sea and land blockade imposed since 2007. “Our movement is very restricted,” says Lara, who feels cut off from the rest of the world. “We wish we were birds so we could move freely.” Over the past years, birdwatching trips to the Strip’s wetlands, groves and fields have offered the twins a rare opportunity to escape the feeling of confinement. With their heads raised to the sky, they search for birds and dream of flight
Ok so my kid had an ear infection, right? As kids often do.
The doctor scraped out a bit of earwax to have a better look inside.
I was sent a bill for $200 PER EAR for this 5 second procedure which I did not give permission for them to do.
That was key- they did not ASK me if they could do this "procedure". And, as I OWN a medical practice (it's me. The medical practice is me, sitting in my house on video calls) I knew to call them when this bill came in to be like "You did not obtain informed consent for this procedure, and it was not en emergency procedure. You had full ability to gain my consent and didn't. I'm not paying."
And the massive hospital who owned the bill said "yuh-huh you do have to pay."
And I said "I own a practice. I know these laws. I do not owe you money for this."
And they conducted an "internal review" and SURPRISE! Decided I totally owed them money and they had never done anything wrong ever.
And so I called my state's Attorney General office, and explained the situation because, as I mentioned, I know the law. The AG got in touch within a couple days to say they were taking the case and would send the massive hospital conglomerate a knock it off, guys letter.
Lo and Behold, today I have a letter where said hospital graciously has agreed to forfeit the payment.
"How not to get screwed over by companies" should be part of civics class.
Know your rights and know who to call when they're infringed on. This whole process cost me $0 and honestly less effort than I would have expected.
May this knowledge find its way to someone else who can use it.
"i just feel like boys are easier" -- parent who is going to emotionally neglect their amab kids
No bro sorry. I don't think it's cool or cunty that zendaya was trained to wear heels that she said were painful since she was 14. Sorry bro. I just don't.
The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books
Nicholas Dames has taught Literature Humanities, Columbia University’s required great-books course, since 1998. He loves the job, but it has changed. Over the past decade, students have become overwhelmed by the reading. College kids have never read everything they’re assigned, of course, but this feels different. Dames’s students now seem bewildered by the thought of finishing multiple books a semester. His colleagues have noticed the same problem. Many students no longer arrive at college—even at highly selective, elite colleges—prepared to read books.
This development puzzled Dames until one day during the fall 2022 semester, when a first-year student came to his office hours to share how challenging she had found the early assignments. Lit Hum often requires students to read a book, sometimes a very long and dense one, in just a week or two. But the student told Dames that, at her public high school, she had never been required to read an entire book. She had been assigned excerpts, poetry, and news articles, but not a single book cover to cover.
[...] Twenty years ago, Dames’s classes had no problem engaging in sophisticated discussions of Pride and Prejudice one week and Crime and Punishment the next. Now his students tell him up front that the reading load feels impossible. It’s not just the frenetic pace; they struggle to attend to small details while keeping track of the overall plot.
No comprehensive data exist on this trend, but the majority of the 33 professors I spoke with relayed similar experiences. Many had discussed the change at faculty meetings and in conversations with fellow instructors. [...] Daniel Shore, the chair of Georgetown’s English department, told me that his students have trouble staying focused on even a sonnet.
Failing to complete a 14-line poem without succumbing to distraction suggests one familiar explanation for the decline in reading aptitude: smartphones. Teenagers are constantly tempted by their devices, which inhibits their preparation for the rigors of college coursework—then they get to college, and the distractions keep flowing. “It’s changed expectations about what’s worthy of attention,” Daniel Willingham, a psychologist at UVA, told me. “Being bored has become unnatural.” Reading books, even for pleasure, can’t compete with TikTok, Instagram, YouTube. In 1976, about 40 percent of high-school seniors said they had read at least six books for fun in the previous year, compared with 11.5 percent who hadn’t read any. By 2022, those percentages had flipped.
[...] Mike Szkolka, a teacher and an administrator who has spent almost two decades in Boston and New York schools, told me that excerpts have replaced books across grade levels. “There’s no testing skill that can be related to … Can you sit down and read Tolstoy? ” he said. And if a skill is not easily measured, instructors and district leaders have little incentive to teach it. [...] The pandemic, which scrambled syllabi and moved coursework online, accelerated the shift away from teaching complete works.
[...] But it’s not clear that instructors can foster a love of reading by thinning out the syllabus. Some experts I spoke with attributed the decline of book reading to a shift in values rather than in skill sets. Students can still read books, they argue—they’re just choosing not to. Students today are far more concerned about their job prospects than they were in the past. Every year, they tell Howley that, despite enjoying what they learned in Lit Hum, they plan to instead get a degree in something more useful for their career.
[...] For years, Dames has asked his first-years about their favorite book. In the past, they cited books such as Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre. Now, he says, almost half of them cite young-adult books. Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson series seems to be a particular favorite.
Probably worrying that Israeli outlets are comfortable publishing this sort of thing in English
