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#constitutional process journals
soon-palestine · 4 months
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In a statement that was shared with The Nation, a group of 25 HLR editors expressed their concerns about the decision. “At a time when the Law Review was facing a public intimidation and harassment campaign, the journal’s leadership intervened to stop publication,” they wrote. “The body of editors—none of whom are Palestinian—voted to sustain that decision. We are unaware of any other solicited piece that has been revoked by the Law Review in this way. “ When asked for comment, the leadership of the Harvard Law Review referred The Nation to a message posted on the journal’s website. “Like every academic journal, the Harvard Law Review has rigorous editorial processes governing how it solicits, evaluates, and determines when and whether to publish a piece…” the note began. ”Last week, the full body met and deliberated over whether to publish a particular Blog piece that had been solicited by two editors. A substantial majority voted not to proceed with publication.” Today, The Nation is sharing the piece that the Harvard Law Review refused to run. Some may claim that the invocation of genocide, especially in Gaza, is fraught. But does one have to wait for a genocide to be successfully completed to name it? This logic contributes to the politics of denial. When it comes to Gaza, there is a sense of moral hypocrisy that undergirds Western epistemological approaches, one which mutes the ability to name the violence inflicted upon Palestinians. But naming injustice is crucial to claiming justice. If the international community takes its crimes seriously, then the discussion about the unfolding genocide in Gaza is not a matter of mere semantics. The UN Genocide Convention defines the crime of genocide as certain acts “committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.” These acts include “killing members of a protected group” or “causing serious bodily or mental harm” or “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.” Numerous statements made by top Israeli politicians affirm their intentions. There is a forming consensus among leading scholars in the field of genocide studies that “these statements could easily be construed as indicating a genocidal intent,” as Omer Bartov, an authority in the field, writes. More importantly, genocide is the material reality of Palestinians in Gaza: an entrapped, displaced, starved, water-deprived population of 2.3 million facing massive bombardments and a carnage in one of the most densely populated areas in the world. Over 11,000 people have already been killed. That is one person out of every 200 people in Gaza. Tens of thousands are injured, and over 45% of homes in Gaza have been destroyed. The United Nations Secretary General said that Gaza is becoming a “graveyard for children,” but a cessation of the carnage—a ceasefire—remains elusive. Israel continues to blatantly violate international law: dropping white phosphorus from the sky, dispersing death in all directions, shedding blood, shelling neighborhoods, striking schools, hospitals, and universities, bombing churches and mosques, wiping out families, and ethnically cleansing an entire region in both callous and systemic manner. What do you call this? The Center for Constitutional Rights issued a thorough, 44-page, factual and legal analysis, asserting that “there is a plausible and credible case that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian population in Gaza.” Raz Segal, a historian of the Holocaust and genocide studies, calls the situation in Gaza “a textbook case of Genocide unfolding in front of our eyes.”
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One investigation looked at four weeks of BBC One’s daytime coverage of Israel’s onslaught in Gaza starting from 7 October.  It found journalists drew on the words “murder”, “murderous”, “mass murder”, “brutal murder” and “merciless murder” a total of 52 times to refer to Israelis’ deaths – but never in relation to Palestinian deaths. So Israel can exaggerate or fabricate claims, paving the way for an unrelenting operation of ethnic cleansing, safe in the knowledge British media will sing from the same hymn sheet. “Erase them and their families. These animals can no longer live”. Those were the chilling words of advice from 95-year-old Israeli army reservist Ezra Yachin as Israeli forces prepared to invade Gaza. After the British media unambiguously asserted babies were beheaded, the genocidal intent from Israeli officials is likely to be perceived less as an extreme call for mass murder and more a justified response. The process of automatically regurgitating claims not only constitutes an abandonment of the basic principles of journalism – like fact checking, accuracy and objectivity – but also helps legitimise Israel’s violence.
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ridenwithbiden · 5 months
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A group of Democratic senators introduced a bill Thursday that would radically change the makeup of the Supreme Court, amid ongoing concerns over court ethics and its increasingly conservative makeup.
The legislation would appoint a new Supreme Court justice every two years, with that justice hearing every case for 18 years before stepping back from the bench and only hearing a “small number of constitutionally required cases.”
“The Supreme Court is facing a crisis of legitimacy that is exacerbated by radical decisions at odds with established legal precedent, ethical lapses of sitting justices, and politicization of the confirmation process,” Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) said in a statement.
“This crisis has eroded faith and confidence in our nation’s highest court. Fundamental reform is necessary to address this crisis and restore trust in the institution.”
Only the nine most recently appointed justices would hear appellate cases, which make up a bulk of the court’s work. All living justices would participate in a smaller subset of cases under the court’s “original jurisdiction,” such as disputes between states or with foreign officials.
The bill was introduced by Sens. Booker, Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) and Alex Padilla (D-Calif.), and it was co-sponsored by Sens. Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii), Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), Peter Welch (D-Vt.) and Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii).
Calls for Supreme Court reform grew louder this year after ProPublica revealed that Justice Clarence Thomas received hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of perks from conservative political donors. Further investigations have uncovered multiple significant and undisclosed gifts from politically connected friends over his time as a federal judge.
Justice Samuel Alito also took a luxury vacation paid for by an influential conservative donor while in the judiciary, another investigation found earlier this year.
The Senate Judiciary Committee advanced a bill earlier this year along party lines that would require the Supreme Court to create and abide by a code of ethics. Unlike lower courts, Supreme Court judges are not beholden to an official ethics code.
“An organized scheme by right-wing special interests to capture and control the Supreme Court, aided by gobs of billionaire dark money flowing through the confirmation process and judicial lobbying, has resulted in an unaccountable Court out of step with the American people,” Whitehouse said in a statement.
“Term limits and biennial appointments would make the Court more representative of the public and lower the stakes of each justice’s appointment, while preserving constitutional protections for judicial independence.
“As Congress considers multiple options to restore the integrity of this scandal-plagued Court, our term limits bill should be front and center as a potential solution,” he added.
Attempts to reform the Supreme Court have been denounced by both Republicans in Congress and by some members of the court, namely Thomas and Alito.
Alito argued earlier this year that Congress does not have the authority to force any reform on the court without a constitutional amendment.
“I know this is a controversial view, but I’m willing to say it,” Alito told The Wall Street Journal. “No provision in the Constitution gives them the authority to regulate the Supreme Court — period.”
But Whitehouse’s office argued in Wednesday’s statement that the Constitution allows Congress to regulate how the court handles appellate cases from lower courts. That’s why all justices would still weigh in on “original jurisdiction” cases, avoiding the constitutional hang-up.
Trust in the Supreme Court remains near all-time lows, according to national opinion polling. A Gallup poll last month found that just 41 percent of Americans approve of how the Supreme Court is doing its job, with 58 percent disapproving.
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“Doctor shopping.” Let’s talk about her.
If you’re disabled you’ve probably heard of this before— if you haven’t, or you’re just unfamiliar in general, or an ableist who says this shit, let’s talk about it <3 because the definition has been overtaken and pissed on by more ableist bitches than the ones who demonized addiction within the medical field and caused this term to exist.
So, “doctor shopping” is actually originated from the people who oversee healthcare, which includes any non medical professionals who are involved in the process as well, like big pharma. It’s been defined (in medical related research journals, not just on social media/ the internet), as “a patient consultation with multiple physicians in a short time frame with the explicit intent to deceive them in order to obtain controlled substances.”
However, you hear in the community, from ableist ableds or even ableist disabled people who are like fucking rabid and frothing at the mouth, gnashing their teeth while flipping over the tiniest of pebbles to find “fakers”, (which is usually an AFAB person with multiple conditions that are followed by a slew of symptoms ranging in prevalence and severity, or someone that doesn’t “seem disabled” who becomes a target). So they call it “doctor shopping” when they see chronically ill or disabled people continue to advocate for themselves by going to countless appointments to try to find out what is causing their health to decline. They (ableists) think that by changing providers or continuing to pursue a diagnosis between multiple providers constitutes doctor shopping. It isn’t our desire, and it’s absolutely exhausting and painful when you’re left with no answers.
If I had not gone to the ER multiple times within two months, I would have died. The fluids kept me alive, and the medicine helped. My mom was preparing my dad for my death, and my fiancée was petrified of losing me because my condition continued to declined. But the entire time I was there, I was terrified of asking for medicine because I didn’t want to be labeled a drug seeker, especially because I’ve been open (for my safety) about using marijuana products. I was crying from how bad it was, my blood pressure was in stage two hypertension from the stress on my body.
They said it was, “nothing to worry about” when I saw my nutrition levels were low. My doctor wants a comprehensive metabolic panel because it is something to worry about because my symptoms were severe. And I had to see another doctor, but that facility ignored me for two months while my pcp and I tried working it out with them. They fucked around with my health for two fucking months. So I had to find a different person, and when I went to her she ordered a procedure, which meant a different facility, which means, yet again a different provider. I even had to go to a different hospital at one point for more tests.
Believe me, we don’t want to go to all of these appointments or see all of these doctors because, half of the time, even though there is something wrong with us, they don’t listen. We don’t want to go back and forth and get more medical trauma just for fun or for a silly little made up diagnosis competition bullshit.
People don’t change their doctors because they want to collect diagnoses like Pokémon, people do it because they want to live comfortably, or at the very least suffer less by finding some sort of direction to move towards to better their own health. I was literally preparing to die from medical neglect, because I did my absolute best and still, to this day, don’t have answers. If I hadn’t sought out more providers, I probably wouldn’t have been able to write this post. I’d be dead already.
This desperate desire to cherry pick what someone shares on the internet about their health and literally fucking stalk people on their social media accounts while looking for any sign that someone could potentially be faking their symptoms is, unfortunately, accepted due to disabled people hating themselves, and ableds hating disabled people. It’s that simple, in my mind.
Other peoples’ bodies, disabilities or symptoms are none of your fucking business, and, yes, this includes the things we decide to share. Disabled people share what we want to, and we live in our bodies 24/7. And some of you really need to sit the fuck down and shut the fuck up about how disabled people manage their health care.
I’m not saying there aren’t people who fake conditions, but I am saying that it’s far less than what you choose to believe. You say you want to protect “actually” disabled people by weeding out fakers, when all you’re doing is harming actually disabled people by playing Sick Olympics™️ and accusing them of faking when they’re just trying to seek out life saving treatment— which includes seeing multiple providers to dig deeper for a diagnosis, no matter how rare or outlandish you think it is. You don’t get a medal for harassing disabled people, you’re just a piece of shit.
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science-lover33 · 7 months
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The Human Microbiome: Your Body's Little Ecosystem
Within each of us exists a fantastic and complex microscopic universe known as the human microbiome. This ecosystem of microorganisms that inhabits our body plays a fundamental role in health and homeostasis. Today, we will fully explore this fascinating microbial world and its influence on our physiology.
What is the Human Microbiome?
The human microbiome is a profoundly intricate biological system integral to our health and well-being. This term, "the human microbiome," encompasses a diverse consortium of microorganisms that have firmly established themselves within and upon our bodies. This assemblage comprises a wide array of microorganisms, encompassing bacteria, viruses, fungi, and various other microbes, each with their specialized ecological niches within our anatomy.
Upon a deeper examination of the human microbiome, we uncover a meticulously organized distribution of these microorganisms. They do not merely coexist haphazardly within us; instead, they strategically colonize specific regions of our body. For instance, they form robust communities within the gastrointestinal tract, resulting in the gut harboring a densely populated microcosm. Similarly, they stake their claim on our skin, and even the respiratory tract serves as a habitat for these microbial entities.
The human microbiome's remarkable aspect lies in the intricate and dynamic interactions it maintains with our own organism. These microorganisms are not passive bystanders; they are active participants in the intricate orchestra of physiological processes. They exert influence over our digestion, bolster our immune system, and wield the potential to affect our mental and cognitive faculties. This complex web of symbiotic relationships between our human cells and these microorganisms constitutes an ever-evolving interplay that exerts a profound impact on our overall health.
The human microbiome is not a mere collection of microbes; it is an entire ecosystem nestled within us, a thriving and dynamic world with the potential to significantly modulate our health. Comprehending the intricacies and subtleties of this microscopic community represents an ongoing and critical pursuit in the realms of scientific and medical research, with profound implications for the fields of medicine and biology.
Solid Scientific Evidence
To support the importance of the human microbiome, here are three relevant scientific references:
Title: "The Human Microbiome: A Key Contributor to Health." Autores: Sender, R., Fuchs, S., & Milo, R. Revista: Journal of the American College of Nutrition, 2016. Abstract: This article reviews the role of the human microbiome in health and disease, highlighting its influence on digestion, immunity, and nutrient synthesis. It also emphasizes its contribution to metabolic and autoimmune diseases.
Títle: "The Human Microbiome: Gut Microbiota and Health." Autores: Marchesi, J. R., Adams, D. H., Fava, F., Hermes, G. D., Hirschfield, G. M., Hold, G., ... & Rook, G. A. Revista: The Journal of Infection, 2016. Abstract: This study focuses on the intestinal microbiota and its relationship with human health. Explore how alterations in the microbiome can contribute to gastrointestinal, inflammatory, and metabolic disorders.
Títle"The Skin Microbiome: Impact of Modern Environments on Skin Ecology, Barrier Integrity, and Systemic Immune Programming." Autores: Kong, H. H., Andersson, B., & Clavel, T. Revista: World Allergy Organization Journal, 2016. Summary: This article examines the skin microbiome's influence on skin health and immune response. It highlights how modern environmental factors can upset the microbial balance and affect the skin's health.
Future perspectives
Studying the human microbiome is a constantly evolving field that promises new therapeutic strategies and a deeper understanding of human health. As we continue to investigate this small ecosystem, doors are opening to personalized interventions to promote health and prevent disease.
Would you like to learn more about this fascinating subject? Share your thoughts and questions in the comments!
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girderednerve · 4 months
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okay i am an old man at heart & am quickly tired out by videos but i am also a total sucker for participating in the cultural moment when it seems that there is one, so i have now watched about three hours of the hb*mberguy video about plagiarism. it's very annoying, actually, probably because i am an old man & none of the discussion of it i have seen shares my preoccupations & concerns
the problem i am having, & i acknowledge that this is perhaps resolved in the last hour of this four-hour-long youtube extravaganza, is that our intrepid investigator (he's very good at videos! not meant dismissively) declines to like, actually define plagiarism or look into what citation norms are or how they differ in different contexts. the proposed referents are journalists & academics, which is really funny to me because there are regular vicious arguments in both of these communities about what proper credit looks like & what it's meant to do, and both of these fields have been around as pretty established things for a few hundred years now (you could argue this point, especially regarding when precisely academia or journalism became recognizably modern). there have been a reasonable number of pretty high-profile arguments about what constitutes citation malpractice in both fields over the last few years, & there aren't necessarily neat conclusions (not referring to e.g. maura dykstra situation of obvious & widely agreed upon malpractice; i mean, people arguing about what the politics of citation are & what our responsibilities are—for example, academics regularly complain that journalists will consult them or read their work for a piece & then not cite them in it, journalists complain that academics will brush past their work when compiling bibliographies, academics across disciplines have several long-simmering differences of opinion about what kinds of politics one expresses with one's citations, journalists argue about credit & republication; i am not an academic or a journalist, so i am missing a lot!).
anyway setting these problems aside, there's the bigger issue that youtube videos as a rule are, i realize this is controversial, not academia and also not journalism. i don't think they are documentary filmmaking either, although our hbomb man is not particularly interested in the information culture of documentarians either. internet video is its own thing with its own information culture! but instead this is a video about how some people i have never heard of before on youtube did unethical stealing from other people i have mostly not heard of before, which i agree is not great but it does not seem to me like a four-hour emergency, probably because i am an old man who doesn't understand youtube. like, okay, we spent several lengthy minutes on what's going on with this illuminaughty person copying documentaries, but that argument felt to me weirdly both belabored & underdeveloped: yes, yes, we get it, the whole thing was lazily cribbed, i agree, that's really obnoxious, sure, okay, but like, do we have some articulation of what the line is? of what the norms are? because it seems to me like we kind of don't have a clear way that we handle citation in that space, by which i mean not just like 'APA format' or whatever but the substantive idea of referring to & building upon other people's intellectual work
please note here that i did not say 'intellectual property', because to me this is of course the elephant by the floral wallpaper. maybe it's in the last hour & i simply lack staying power! well-documented personal flaw! but in my experience, functional definitions of 'plagiarism' & theft of intellectual property arise only from disciplinary processes, either academic proceedings or legal ones, & each case is decided individually. more importantly as others have pointed out, when we make someone's ideas into legally codified property, they become alienable from their creator; intellectual property is a kind of enclosure of the commons. there's a reason i think that hguy's last video was about the ownership of a sound effect, & that he spent a lot of time being angry that someone else claimed the credit along with the legal ownership of/right to profit from the sound effect; the frustration with youtubers appropriating other people's work & the frustration with some bozo video game composer lying about how the "oof" got made are the same thing, but the thing is not "credit" or "rudeness" or "theft," it is the entire institution, i think, of intellectual property. not that there have never been reasonable claims made using intellectual property law, but come on almost none of this is the māori suit against lego, it's mostly corporate C&Ds and NDA'd artists stuck with non-competes. it's bleak! but we know how it happens, & it's not that some people are uncreative & moneygrubbing, so they look down on creatives (??), which has so far seemed to be the argument of this four-hour-long cultural moment
also i am still thinking about what kind of ideas & assumptions go into citation pratices, because i am a professional librarian (a bad one!), so i am professionally obliged to care about the set of skills referred to as 'information literacy' (the skills are real but i have like, mixed feelings about the framing, that's why scare quotes). if you are an academic librarian they will ask you to do 'information literacy,' and a lot of what they mean by that is 'tell students how to find sources for things & cite them properly,' which is, i think, kind of an interesting sleight of hand, in which a broad & powerful set of interpretive & analytical skills become [what is for many students] the dullest part of essay writing? but that's a problem with all of undergraduate education, basically. anyway if you talk to most students about citations they think they're onerous nonsense, and that plagiarism/'academic honesty' policies are arbitrary (& scary); they're not usually encouraged in any particular way to think about how citations are meant to function or what they're meant to do. i don't mean to disparage my colleagues in academic libraries; i am painting with a broad brush & anyway librarians usually have almost no input into course design or assignments.
it's disappointing how these information literacy discussions tend to go, though, because citations are interesting! they're also recent, in the grand scheme; the idea of telling us where you got some idea or other is very old, but the specifics of how & in what circumstances you're meant to do it aren't & they vary wildly by context. i often will tell people where i picked up whatever little factoid i am drolly recounting (sorry everyone) but that isn't particularly common in casual conversation. youtube videos are closer to a conversational register than they are to a documentary or a news article, much less an academic paper; i don't really know what to make of it, & i suspect this is part of why it is so easy to be a youtube personality who steals other people's work—it isn't really that youtube audiences are uniquely credulous & lazy, but that their expectations aren't the same. i guess i should note here that i do think you should cite things in a clear & easily followable manner, be honest about what is your own invention & what is borrowed from the work others, and avoid like. being a huge asshole. but to some degree i am bored by hearing about Some Guy Who Lies On Youtube, because my baseline assumption for most youtube videos is that they are not reliable & are probably trying to lie to me! i am not trying to be superior here that is an honest account of how i engage with anyone who appears to have a specialty lighting rig
i think continually & with affection of the late antique proliferation of the pseudo-somebody, and it seems to me now that the common modern practice of online (kindly) under-citation is a near-perfect inverse of the medieval approach, in which it was generally difficult to look things up and writers enhanced their authoritativeness by making referential claims to well-known authors. now it's usually easy to look things up & everybody wants to be an original thinker & an artist, so they don't cite. not me, though, i am just giving you here the garbled mash of things i've seen in posts & remember from my undergrad lectures eight years ago. i'm an idiot! but at least nobody here is making any money :)
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lamarseillasie · 6 months
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September 16th, 1789: 234 years ago, Jean-Paul Marat published the first issue of L'Ami Du Peuple
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L'Ami du Peuple, or, as it was called at the time it was founded, L'Ami Du Peuple ou Le Publiciste Parisien, was an active revolutionary newspaper and also one of the most absolutely fascinating and interesting pieces of the entire French Revolution, created and edited by Marat from September 1789.
The year 1789 was a relatively turbulent period for both Marat's career and the history of the Revolution. This can be seen simply by the number of projects that Marat began in a short space of time. In February, just two months after publishing his Offrande à la Patrie (1788), he published the Supplément à l'Offrande (1789). In March, he began to attend the sessions of the electoral assembly of his district, Carmes-Déchaussés, with great assiduity and was soon elected to the electoral committee. In August, he began publishing Le Moniteur Patriote and also published the Projet de déclaration des droits de l'homme et du citoyen suivi d'un Plan de constitution juste, sage et libre. Finally, in September, he published No. 1 of Le Publiciste Parisien, and consequently No. 5 of the then L'Ami Du Peuple ou Le Publiciste Parisien, which marked the birth of the famous Friend of the People, a character Marat would identify with until the last day of his life. It can be said that this newspaper came about when Marat found himself in a situation where he would have to produce and publish newspapers and pamphlets independently and without the approval of his colleagues. He proposed to the committee that it should have a press, which was apparently not accepted by the district.
More than just one of the many periodicals that existed during the course of the revolution, L'Ami du Peuple is a precious historical source of information and there is no doubt that it was important for the unfolding of revolutionary events. Not even Delisle de Sales, in his Essai sur le journalisme depuis 1735 jusqu'à l'an 1800 (1811), a work that expressed the author's deep aversion to the revolutionary process and especially to Marat, denies that L'Ami Du Peuple left a mark on the philosophical memory of the history of French journalism.
Albert Mathiez, in a summary of Gottschalk's Marat in the 1927 AHRF (pp. 599-602), makes an interesting comment on Marat's analysis in the context of revolutionary journalism:
"In my opinion, what makes Marat original among the journalists and statesmen of the Revolution has not been sufficiently appreciated by M. Gottschalk. (...) He was never naïve about the revolution that was taking place. From the first moment, he proclaimed that the proletarians - an expression he had already used in its current sense - would gain nothing. (...) No other revolutionary had the same degree of feeling that the proletariat was a class distinct from the bourgeoisie. (...) What always distinguished Marat, presented as an enlightened man, was the correctness of his vision, the total absence of candor, the profound and even pessimistic realism. Marat was not only one of the most determined and precocious republicans. He also did not conceive of the Republic except in the form of direct rule."
In addition to the abundant and impressive number of issues that were written (L'Ami du Peuple had almost 700 issues in total, not counting the pamphlets and later works), it is even more astonishing when we stop to consider that a large part of all the work produced by Marat during the five years of revolution was almost entirely uninterrupted, but mainly clandestine. He managed not to be prevented even by laws (such as the decree of March 9, 1793, which obliged members of the Convention who were newspaper editors to choose between legislation and journalism) from continuing to produce and publish his writings.
Today's date is important and significant for history - the history of journalism and the revolution, but especially and undoubtedly the history of Marat. L'Ami du Peuple was, above all, a character. He is a truly dedicated patriot, brave and fearless, who cares about his fellow citizens and the people. He is an important character for Marat because the two, at a certain point, become one. L'Ami du Peuple, who initially appears as the construction of a publicity strategy, quickly becomes a kind of romantic hero of the revolution, with whom Marat identifies and whom he also uses to continue ceaselessly defending what was right for him, what fit in with his very well-founded and observed political and social principles. The previous Marat, the Marat Man of the Enlightenment, physicist, doctor and experimenter, had a passion that managed to outshine all his other interests: politics, and of that there is no doubt. Marat found himself moved by this political passion a few times before the Revolution - Chains Of Slavery (1774), for example, which was written incessantly over just three months, with mainly political aims, is living proof of Marat's burning passion in this area - but none of the times he expressed his interest was as strong and as significant for him as the creation of L'Ami du Peuple, which signified Marat's definitive entry into the revolution. L'Ami du Peuple was important to Marat because it was through it that he was able to express and make his politics heard; because L'Ami du Peuple made Marat so passionately committed to a revolution that it gave him, definitively, a homeland: the France.
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History of legal Basquephobia
Iñigo Urrutia (1966, Jatabe-Maruri), together with Xabier Irujo, has analyzed the history of legal Basquephobia law by law and rule by rule. The result is the book Historia Jurídica de la Lengua Vasca (1789-2023). To Basque speakers on both sides of the border who are told that we are imposing Basque with every smallest step in favor of our language this work gives us a clear answer: the ones that have been imposed here, with great suffering and in violation of basic human rights, have been the French and the Spanish.
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In the last 230 years, how many laws have been passed in the states of France and Spain against the Basque language and the Basque people?
- There are thousands of rules. We have searched the Boletin Oficial del Estado and the former Gaceta, as they can be consulted easily on the internet. Those of the French State we have taken from the Official Journals and previous works on the history of minority languages and the legal history of French.
Are laws against the Basque language or against Basque people?
- This is a very good question, difficult to answer. Basque has always been the target of political power, but behind this there is a historical attitude against the nature of Basques. During constitutional periods, dictatorships, etc., it has always been a constant to oppose our language.
(...) Basque-speaking children who did not know French would suffer terribly - as happened to those who did not know Spanish in the South. Many, to the point of deciding not to pass on Basque to their children.
- We suffered a terrible deculturalization as a people. But on a personal level, from the point of view of freedom and rights, the situation would be dire. Go to a place, completely foreign to you, unable to talk to your friends, suffer punishments for wrongly using the official language, suffer bans, be labeled a traitor against the revolution... "What are we doing here?", many Basques said. International human rights law absolutely prohibits forced assimilation, and this was the case. The violation of human rights extended a lot in our history, in the South until the Republic period, and again during Francoism. Therefore, this genocidal policy against Basque, created during the French Revolution, has lasted until today, for almost 250 years. Basque is now a minority language, but 200 years ago it was the main language in a large part of the territory, so imagine what kind of transformation process the state has caused. However, it must be said that the structuring of the Spanish state has been very slow, that of France has been much stronger and more violent.
At the beginning of the 20th century, we also suffered from xenophobic attitudes against Basques, Bretons, Catalans, etc., for example, the French Minister of Education, Jules Ferry, literally said "the higher races have the duty to civilize the lower races". Did you find many of them?
- Yes, power encouraged this supremacism. Ferry also passed a long-standing language law. He believed that the French were on a different level and wanted to spread this idea through education, a huge attack on many communities. The negative impact of this is very high.
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During Francoism, persecution reached all levels. Basque names were banned from being registered in the registry, or the letters k, tx, and b were banned, forcing thousands of names, surnames, and toponyms to change from Basque spelling to Spanish. A century later, these are the laws that have left their mark.
- The attacks against the anthroponymy of the names were very great, because of the spelling and so on. To give a few examples, they also banned Basque on ships, ordered the eradication of Basque phrases and words on matchboxes or went so far as to remove Basque inscriptions from tombstones. And there is a case, from Gernika, where the owners did not erase the Basque inscriptions on the tombstones, the fascist authorities covered them with concrete. Many things were prohibited by the rules, but many other things were made subject to military power. And of course, any activity against public order could be anything, including speaking Basque. Therefore, anything could be done against the conversations in Basque. They were somehow protected by the law. Penalties and fines were also daily. Speaking Basque had no legal protection and could be considered an act against public order. It must be remembered that in many places society was Basque at that time. In Donostia, for example, the Civic Guard was established, it was an organization that aimed to eradicate Basque from the streets. There were usually groups of four and the agents walked around without uniform. They were scattered through the streets, and if someone heard somebody speaking in Basque they told them to speak in Spanish. After that, however, another couple of agents would come closer and if they heard that the citizens were continuing in Basque, they would fine them or beat them, as it is documented. They were strategies to instill fear, so that people would stop speaking Basque in the street.
And in general, what would you highlight from your book?
- That there has been an assimilation process against us, but that the passion, desire and strength of our people to persevere is striking. Despite the laws, decrees, punishments etc. against the Basque language, our people have survived and this gives us a strong character. It proves that we are a nation that wants to own its future.
You start it with Raphael Lemkin's definition of genocide in The Axis Rule, and towards the end you say that [Spanish and French states] wanted to inflict a cultural genocide on the Basques. That's a big word.
- Yes, genocide is a big word, but the book makes clear that the policies against the Basque language have lasted for centuries and have been carried out by all political ideologies. The behavior against our language is not limited to a certain period: in the last 200 years, during constitutional periods, dictatorships, transitions, times of war... the systematic and legal oppression against the Basque language has been deepened. Lemkin's definition of genocide is perfectly met. My partner Xabier is presenting this book at US universities and speaks openly about this genocide.
Source
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Trans: Transgender Life Stories from South Africa edited by Ruth Morgan, Charl Marais and Joy Rosemary Wellbeloved
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Transgender life stories from South Africa takes the reader on a journey into the many worlds inhabited by transgender South Africans. The life stories recounted in this collection are both inspiring and compelling and reveal the courage and strength of each of the story tellers involved. The narratives detail the constant challenges of living in a country, that, despite its progressive Constitution, is still host to myriad prejudices and misunderstandings when it comes to trans people. With more than twenty original voices from the trans community in South Africa, the book is a journal of shared experiences for trans people and a fascinating point of departure for interested members of the general public. The contributors who 'transitioned, are transitioning or will transition', have all been actively involved in the process of making the book and have a great deal to say about their personal experiences of being transgender today. Their illuminating and touching life stories a
Mod opinion: I haven't heard of this book before, but it sounds fascinating and I hope to check it out at some point!
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Introduction
Most analysts and historians fail to understand that starting in the early 1980s, China had become a full fledged capitalist country. There are powerful US business interests including Big Pharma, major hi-tech companies, banking institutions which are firmly entrenched inside China. 
The United States has faithful “allies” within China’s business establishment as well as among academics, scientists, medical doctors who tend to be “pro-American”.
China’s Academy of Sciences (中国科学院), China’s business schools (e.g. Beijing, Dalian, Guangzhou) going back to the early 1980s have ties with Ivy League institutions. Many of them have joint MBA programs, e.g. Shanghai’s  Fudan University School of Management with MIT. Stanford has a campus in China as well an agreement with Beijing University, etc.  
Another example is Tsinghua University’s School of Journalism’s graduate program which is funded by Bloomberg together with several Wall Street banking institutions.
The interests of powerful Chinese business groups (specifically within the pharmaceutical industry) including China’s billionaires (Forbes List 2022, Forbes New Billionaires) are represented at the highest levels of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leadership.
Ironically, these US-China “business alliances” are in starch contrast to the ongoing US-NATO threats directed against the People’s Republic of China, not to mention the various US sponsored acts of destabilization of China’s national economy. 
Needless to say there are deep divisions within the CCP leadership. 
China and the Geopolitical Chessboard
While China currently plays an important and positive balancing role on the geopolitical chessboard, it is not a “socialist” Nation State. 
It is important that people on the Left who describe China as a socialist country take cognizance of the oppressive nature of China’s cheap labour export economy, established in the late 1970s at the outset of the post-Mao Era, in liaison with their US trading and Wall Street investment partners. 
Currently, more than one third of the PRC’s labour force are seasonal rural migrant workers who are used as cheap labour in China’s flourishing low wage export economy.
This process of internal migrant labor unfolded with the abolition of the People’s Commune in the 1983 Constitution, which was conducive to the demise of communal ownership coupled with the privatization of agricultural land.
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New clues to the nature of elusive dark matter
A team of international researchers, led by experts at the University of Adelaide, has uncovered further clues in the quest for insights into the nature of dark matter.
“Dark matter makes up 84 per cent of the matter in the universe but we know very little about it,” said Professor Anthony Thomas, Elder Professor of Physics, University of Adelaide.
“The existence of dark matter has been firmly established from its gravitational interactions, yet its precise nature continues to elude us despite the best efforts of physicists around the world.”
“The key to understanding this mystery could lie with the dark photon, a theoretical massive particle that may serve as a portal between the dark sector of particles and regular matter.”
Regular matter, of which we and our physical world are made up of, is far less abundant than dark matter: five times more dark matter exists than regular matter. Finding out more about dark matter is one of the greatest challenges for physicists around the world.
The dark photon is a hypothetical hidden sector particle, proposed as a force carrier similar to the photon of electromagnetism but potentially connected to dark matter. Testing existing theories about dark matter is one of the approaches that scientists such as Professor Thomas, along with colleagues Professor Martin White, Dr Xuangong Wang and Nicholas Hunt-Smith, who are members of the Australian Research Council (ARC) Centre of Excellence for Dark Matter Particle Physics, are pursuing in order to gain more clues into this elusive but highly important substance.
“In our latest study, we examine the potential effects that a dark photon could have on the complete set of experimental results from the deep inelastic scattering process,” said Professor Thomas.
Analysis of the by-products of the collisions of particles accelerated to extremely high energies gives scientists good evidence of the structure of the subatomic world and the laws of nature governing it.
In particle physics, deep inelastic scattering is the name given to a process used to probe the insides of hadrons (particularly the baryons, such as protons and neutrons), using electrons, muons and neutrinos.
“We have made use of the state-of-the-art Jefferson Lab Angular Momentum (JAM) parton distribution function global analysis framework, modifying the underlying theory to allow for the possibility of a dark photon,” said Professor Thomas.
“Our work shows that the dark photon hypothesis is preferred over the standard model hypothesis at a significance of 6.5 sigma, which constitutes evidence for a particle discovery.”
The team, which includes scientists from the University of Adelaide and colleagues at the Jefferson Laboratory in Virginia, USA, has published its findings in the Journal of High Energy Physics.
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saywhat-politics · 1 year
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Georgia Republican Congressman Drew Ferguson, who endorsed a Texas lawsuit questioning votes during the 2020 election, has been found to be voting in the wrong district.
An investigation by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution revealed that the GOP rep sold his home in Troup County, even though he moved from there back in April.
When The Atlanta Journal-Constitution tried reaching out to the congressman, they received no response.
His spokesperson said simply that he “was registered to vote in his hometown” and “is currently in the process of transitioning his residency.”
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psychologeek · 1 year
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Liminality (by any other name)
skill is the learned ability to act with determined results with good execution often within a given amount of time, energy, or both.
Life skills are abilities for adaptive and positive behavior that enable humans to deal effectively with the demands and challenges of life. The subject varies greatly depending on social norms and community expectations but skills that function for well-being and aid individuals to develop into active and productive members of their communities are considered as life skills.
..........
Liminal is an English adjective meaning "on the threshold", from Latin līmen, plural limina.
May refer to:
In anthropology, liminality is the quality of ambiguity or disorientation that occurs in the middle stage of a rite of passage, when participants no longer hold their pre-ritual status but have not yet begun the transition to the status they will hold when the rite is complete. During a rite's liminal stage, participants "stand at the threshold" between their previous way of structuring their identity, time, or community, and a new way (which completing the rite establishes). More recently, usage of the term has broadened to describe political and cultural change as well as rites. During liminal periods of all kinds, social hierarchies may be reversed or temporarily dissolved, continuity of tradition may become uncertain, and future outcomes once taken for granted may be thrown into doubt. The dissolution of order during liminality creates a fluid, malleable situation that enables new institutions and customs to become established. The term has also passed into popular usage and has been expanded to include liminoid experiences that are more relevant to post-industrial society.
Liminal beings are those that cannot easily be placed into a single category of existence.
liminal deity is a god or goddess in mythology who presides over thresholds, gates, or doorways; "a crosser of boundaries". These gods are believed to oversee a state of transition of some kind; such as, the old to the new, the unconscious to the conscious state, the familiar to the unknown.
Liminal spaces are the subject of an Internet aesthetic portraying empty or abandoned places that appear eerie, forlorn, and often surreal. Liminal spaces are commonly places of transition (pertaining to the concept of liminality) or of nostalgic appeal. Research from the Journal of Environmental Psychology has indicated that liminal spaces may appear eerie or strange because they fall into an uncanny valley of architecture and physical places.
Psychology:
Liminal experiences, feelings of abandonment (existentialism) associated with death, illness, disaster, etc. Existential thought bases itself fundamentally in the idea that one's identity is constituted neither by nature nor by culture, since to "exist" is precisely to constitute such an identity.
In Depth Psychology:
Jungians have often seen the individuation process of self-realization as taking place within a liminal space. "
Individuation can be seen as a "movement through liminal space and time, from disorientation to integration [...] What takes place in the dark phase of liminality is a process of breaking down [...] in the interest of 'making whole' one's meaning, purpose and sense of relatedness once more".
As an archetypal figure, "the trickster is a symbol of the liminal state itself, and of its permanent accessibility as a source of recreative power".
Jungian-based analytical psychology is also deeply rooted in the ideas of liminality. The idea of a 'container' or 'vessel' as a key player in the ritual process of psychotherapy has been noted by many and Carl Jung's objective was to provide a space he called "a temenos, a magic circle, a vessel, in which the transformation inherent in the patient's condition would be allowed to take place."
Jungians however have perhaps been most explicit about the "need to accord space, time and place for liminal feeling"—as well about the associated dangers, "two mistakes: we provide no ritual space at all in our lives [...] or we stay in it too long". Indeed, Jung's psychology has itself been described as "a form of 'permanent liminality' in which there is no need to return to social structure".
Please vote for a name! :)
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The Fulton County jail in Georgia could make history in the weeks ahead as the first institution to ever take a U.S. president's mugshot.
Driving The News: The local sheriff's office says it expects to book all 19 of those indicted this week on election-related charges — including former President Trump — at the notorious detention center, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported.
The Big Picture: Trump has thus far avoided having his mugshot taken in his three other cases.
• He now faces a historic four indictments and 91 criminal charges — while also running for the GOP nomination in the 2024 presidential election.
• The newest indictment, which relies on state-level racketeering charges, said Trump and 18 other defendants "knowingly and willfully joined a conspiracy to unlawfully change the outcome of the election in favor of Trump."
Why It Matters: Trump and other powerful figures included in the indictment now face the prospect of being processed at a rough and overcrowded jail in Atlanta.
• Those figures include former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani — who as a federal prosecutor went after mobsters under the same type of racketeering law.
Context: The Fulton County jail, known among locals as "Rice Street," has been plagued with reports of dangerous conditions and detainee deaths.
• In July, the U.S. Justice Department announced an investigation into conditions at the jail following the death of Lashawn Thompson, who was found covered in bugs and filth.
• "It's miserable. It's cold. It smells. It's just generally unpleasant," longtime defense attorney Robert G. Rubin said of the jail, per the New York Times.
• Officers are being prosecuted for using excessive force at the jail as well, the DOJ said.
Between The Lines: Trump's Georgia trial is also the first one that could be televised, as Georgia law requires cameras be allowed during judicial proceedings with a judge's approval.
• A judge would have to be presented with a compelling reason to bar cameras.
Reality Check: An official mugshot could also be a boon to Trump's reelection campaign.
• After his first arrest in April, his campaign fundraised with fake mugshot merch.
What's Next: District Attorney Fani Willis proposed a Mar. 4 start date for the Georgia trial, meaning it would start one day before Super Tuesday, when many U.S. states hold primary elections.
• The arraignment should take place the week of Sept. 5, Willis said in the court filing.
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Humans are Gross
Warning: this one is kinda gross, lol 
https://www.patreon.com/empyreaniris?fan_landing=true
https://starr-fall-knight-rise.tumblr.com/post/182501791735/master-post
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1jzEIdDAB4omdO2JcQVMObfrhLJ5kX4ONmSsLypM1ks0/edit?usp=sharing.\
An Open Letter to Humans
Humans are Gross
Published independently with my own funds - because I knew this one was never going to be allowed in any sort of reputable journal. 
Dr. Krill: Arcadia Dean of Medicine 
Humans are gross, we know this, this is not something that surprises anyone, or will surprise anyone in future generations to come. Humans, like all species from Earth, are a cesspit of diseases, viruses, and bacterial infections. They openly leak bodily fluid at any and all moments, and they are constantly shedding dead organic tissue. Not to mention that any and all human waste constitutes a level three biohazard, and even their blood must be incinerated with medical waste. It really is a miracle that none of you humans just straight up and die with the amount of ways that bacteria and other illnesses can enter the body.
But this paper I am writing isn’t simply about how passively nasty humans are, this paper is about how actively disgusting humans CHOOSE to be, with their little daily habits, and I feel that it is my duty to call each and every one of you out on this behavior.
Please avert your eyes at this moment if your stomach is easily turned, as I will not apologize for what follows.
Stop EATING your sheded organic tissue. STOP IT.
I am fortunate, or perhaps unfortunate, it is hard to tell, not to have a gag reflex or the ability to vomit because if I did, this topic of discussion would certainly do it for me.
Autocannibalism 
The fact that this is EVEN A WORD in your language boggles my mind. You all know that cannibalism is to consume someone of your own species, and this word exists because there are plenty of creatures in nature that do this including at least one sentient species that I know of,, but autocannibalism is to consume YOURSELF, and humans HAVE A WORD FOR THIS.
Not only that, but this practice is actually quite common. A human will deny that they do it, but they are wrong. A list of these comes as follows.
Biting the inside of your cheek
Peeling AND EATING the skin off of their own peeling lips! Like what the shit! Just….. Moisturize, drink some water, STOP EATING yourself. THERE ARE BETTER ALTERNATIVES!
Dandriff…. I can’t… I can barely even articulate this one. W why…. Why would you do this? Why would you put that in your mouth! STOP IT stop it. You might as well just lick dust off the floor, it would be the same concept. 
Then there are some of you that eat hair!. I know this one is classified as a psychological condition but…. But you need to understand. HAIR can block your internal organs, and “I” may have to remove it SURGICALLY IN LARGE CLUMPS like pulling hair out of a drain only a million times worse. Please, please get help. I am begging you please. I know this one is not your fault but PLEASE. I have even see this behavior in non-disordered patients, specifically humans with long hair who suck on, or chew on the ends of their own hair. It's nasty, stop doing it, just stop it. 
Then there are those degenerate assholes out there eating their fingers. Yeah yeah granted most of the time it is simply the skin, or the callouses that build up on the side of the thumbs or the tips of the fingers from where they have picked at it before but still SOME OF THEM EAT IT. This one can also classify as a disorder if it’s bad enough, but MOST of the time it is regular ass humans who just EAT THEMSELVES ON OCCASION. 
Some of you fuckers eat scabs, you know who you are, and I am officially never looking you in the eye ever again you sick fuck. Not only is it disgusting, but you are actively interfering with the healing process, and as a doctor if I see you picking at your scabs. I WILL END YOU. 
Scratch and sniff….. Need I say more? If you have no idea what this means, then good for you, but for those of you that do know WHY???????
Popping pimples, and some of you assholes think it's fun or satisfying…. It's DISGUSTING
How about all of you assholes that pick your nose AND EAT IT! Mother of the architect himself, it can hardly get any worse than this can it????? The mucus and hair in the human nose is specifically designed to stop things from getting inside, but NO you are going to take it out and then ingest it another way….. I think I am going to spontaneously develop the ability to vomit.
Picking earwax from your ears…. And I am just going to let you think about what some people are going to do with that. I want you to sit and think about what you have done. Take a really good, long look at your life and WEEP.
Belly Button lint....
Did you know they once did a swab of a man’s bellybutton, and it came back with a specific bacteria/or fungus that only existed in certain parts of Japan…. This man had never been to japan….
Wash your bellybuttons! The fact that I have to instruct humans on the finer points of their own hygiene, is extraordinary. 
Toe jam 
Eye sand/ gunk after waking up
All the shit under your fingernails, which some of you sick bastards clean USING YOUR TEETH. You know what is probably under there!!!!???? Disease, the answer is disease. 
Some of you actively lick, your own wounds, and believe me I cannot stress then enough when I say the LAST THING in architects churning universe, you want to do is put a human mouth ANYWHERE NEAR an open wound
Now I can’t say that all humans do all of these things, some humans only do one or two of these things, and some humans do only parts of these things, maybe skipping the auto cannibalism. But I guarantee to you that any human you look at has at least one nasty habit that they won’t tell you about. In fact most humans will find the above actions very gross, and will likely refuse to admit such actions to other people though they actively participate.
Indeed, the only group of humans who I have found actively bragging about their nasty little habits are the humans that chew on their hands, and humans that lick their own wounds. For whatever reason some of these sick individuals see it as some sort of funny quirk that they like to eat themselves and spread disease over open wounds. 
-
- As the author, I have a bad habit of chewing on the sides of my thumbs, so, guilty as charged, and I thought Krill would be pissed about it. I have permanent callouses on my hands from this practice which ahs been going on for over a decade now, lol 
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tilda1954 · 6 months
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Grant as Aesthetic Evangelist
While researching Grant, her engagement with Watts House Project (WHP) and the subsequent grantLOVE "art philanthropy project" I came across a substantial body of work on socially engaged art including public or community art.
In particular, I've been influenced by the work of Grant Keser, current a professor of Art History at the University of California San Diego.
And within his body of work, I've been heavily influenced by an early article Kester published in the journal After-Image in 1995.
I have access to it through the Academic.edu website where Kester has posted it. I do not know if it is available elsewhere in the public domain.
Now, some of you may say that 1995 seems to early to apply to Grant's work. I would urge you to consider that despite calling herself a "civic artist" for many years, WHP is about as close as Grant has actually come to doing or being directly involved in socially engaged art. The roots of WHP lie in the work of Rick Lowe and his work at Project Row Houses starting in 1994, and his concept development for Watts House Project in 1996.
WHP was part of a groundswell of interest in new public art "
This "new genre" of public art tKING the form of interactive, community-based projects inspired by social issues." Kestor notes that it "might be more accurately named the new community art to the extent that questions raised by the interaction of the artist and particular, often urban, communities, have played a central role in its evolution. Further, this work tends to be less concerned with producing objects per se than with a process of collaboration, which is understood to produce certain pedagogical effects in the community." This interest was reflected in the changing funding mandates of major private foundations, for whom "community" has become the buzzword of the moment.
Although Arceneaux put WHP on hold for several years, I cannot forget Grant's claim that she recognized the necessity for WHP to become a non-profit to go after large grants - did she recognize the value of community and collaboration as buzz words that attract attention, approval, and money, and keep it going all these years later?
Grant herself does not actually interact with communities - she selects non-profits and projects that do so, and then donates items (or the profits from the sale of those products) to these groups. But the underlying connection remains at one remove:
"The new public art draws, both consciously and unconsciously, from the history of progressive urban reform. This is clear in its concern with ameliorating problems typically associated with the city (e.g. homelessness, gang culture, "at risk" youth, etc.), as well as in the relationship that the community-based public artist takes up with various constituencies and communities. Concepts such as "empowerment" and "participatory democracy" that found political expression during the 1960's in the policies and programs of the Office of Economic Opportunity or the National Welfare Rights movement, are re-emerging in the rhetoric of the community-based public artist.
When we look at the list of groups that benefited from Grant's grantLOVE activity we can see that, other than her own projects, or institutions that were directly benefiting her, she focuses almost exclusively on "problem" focused groups.
Grant speaks frequently of community, of creating community, or focusing love on one or more community, without ever clearly defining the term -- or making it clear how buying her merch can constitute community membership.
Consider Kester's discussion of how this term is used by community artists:
The "community" in community-based public art often, although clearly not always, refers to individuals marked as culturally, economically, or socially different either from the artist or from the audience for the particular project. Typically these projects are assumed to be based on some degree of collaboration between the artist and a given subject or group of subjects (prisoners, the homeless, the urban poor, etc.) This "collaboration" might consist simply of a particular group (e.g. "the homeless"), functioning as the subject matter for a project, or it might extend to the artist somehow involving a given subject or group of subjects in the process of creative decision making..."
At the end of the day, Grant cannot escape being a privileged white woman. She is not even self-identified has being (or having been) a gender or sexuality-defined minority. What she can do is ally herself with different communities by proclaiming her intention to support them through donation or sales of her merch.
How does the artist connect to the community or communities they are depicting?
(I)n each of these often overlapping cases the "artist" is differentiated (or aesthetically "distanced") from the community as an enunciative channel, matrix, or catalyst. Each of these functions in turn implies a particular representational relationship of speaking "for," "through," "with," "about," or "on behalf of" other subjects whose own unity as a "community" is in turn the product of contingent processes of identification.
And here I cannot help but feel that Grant's selection of "LOVE" as her brand trademark, and her persistent linkage of Antigone (young woman standing up to authority) and "born to love, not to hate" from her fine art practice with her "philanthropic art project."
Kester then connects these developments in the art community to the sociological cultural theory of Pierre Bourdieu. Please forgive the semiotics.
"In his essay "Delegation and Political Fetishism" Pierre Bourdieu analyzes the problematic relationship that pertains between a given community and the "delegate" who chooses, or is chosen, to speak on its behalf.
Within the representational dynamic of community politics, Bourdieu warns, the contingency of the act of delegation is often "forgotten" and the delegate emerges, through a kind of "social magic," as a fetish, a "moral person" who has sacrificed all to become the literal embodiment of the community's will. We can observe something of this process in the rhetoric of community artists who position themselves as the vehicle for a kind of unmediated expressivity on the part of a given community
Here we may think back to Grant's stories of wanting to be moral, wanting to give back, but not wanting to damage her career or her economic well-being by donating to too many charity appeals. She has found a way to ally herself with the causes, to represent them (HOLA, Project Angel Food, etc.) without actually being a community member.
"The artist's ability to "exhibit" a given community in a project, performance, or image (an ability which is typically made possible by the artists' privileged relationship to the various institutions charged with public management of "communities" such as the homeless, the incarcerated, etc.), and the authority to take up an enunciative position that is sanctioned by that group's social experience."
Grant is not participating directly in the various good works she claims to be funding through her "pret a porter" items. But she is frequently associating with privileged institutions thanks to her funding activities.
"The signifying authority of the community artist is based on two points of ideological anchorage. First, their authority is understood to derive from the process of a pedagogically-based "collaboration". This is an "exchange," in which the artist, by surrendering some degree of their creative autonomy in negotiations with a given group over the production of a project is understood to have gained in return some authority to speak from the group's position or on their behalf. The second point of anchorage is founded on a moment of transference (usually some event in the artists' past), that establishes a moral equivalence between their position and that of the community."
Grant continues to describe herself as a "radical collaborator" despite the fact it has been years, perhaps a decade, since she has in fact collaborated with another artist or writer. She does, however, continual to harp on the importance of her childhood experiences i Mexico, and of her multilingual upbringings, as endowing her with some sort of special understanding of "the other" broadly defined.
Too often community artists imagine that the very real differences that exist between themselves and a given community can be transcended by a well-meaning rhetoric of aesthetic 'empowerment'.
Kester the discusses the influence of conservative political ideology on view of community, and how this relates to community artists. This is the "evangelical" element mentioned in his title - an underlying perspective on class, community and disadvantage where the artist becomes a sort of aesthetic missionary to raise up the community and the audience.
For the community artist "art" or the "aesthetic" plays the same role that "science" does for the reformer, it is a universally-applicable language that allows them to transcend the specificity of their own social and cultural positions and that sanctions their intervention in any given community.
Community art is typically centered around an exchange between an "artist" (who is understood to be "empowered," creatively, intellectually, symbolically, expressively, financially, institutionally, or otherwise), and a given subject who is defined a priori as "in need of" empowerment, access to creative/expressive skills, etc. Thus, the "community" in "community art" often, although clearly not always, refers to individuals marked as culturally, economically, or socially different either from the artist him or her self, or from the audience for the particular project. Obviously the institutional apparatus that administers and supports welfare is much larger than that which supports community art, but the growing interest among foundations in "community" issues is precisely such that the distinction between community art and welfare or social policy is in some cases quite fine.
Consider here Grant's frequent discussion of how important art is, but that not everyone can be an artist. Yes, they can enjoy it, but they shouldn't think they can be creator on the level of Grant.
Kester also discusses the replacement of state funding with private and philanthropic funding. "Artists are being placed in the position of providing alternatives to existing forms of social policy. To the extent that artists (consciously or not) subscribe to a set of ideas about poverty or disempowerment that are available to conservative cooptation they contribute to the dismantling of existing social policy (such as it is) and its replacement with a privatized notion of philanthropy and moral pedagogy.
Grant often talks about the need for artists to fund artists, or her resentment of the "strings" that come with grants from public sources, etc.
This section may also have some resonance when it comes to Grant:
"This universal (bourgeois) subject is able to enjoy all the privileges that are specific to their class membership, while at the same time claiming the moral authority to speak on behalf of those whose exploitation makes their own privilege possible. Within this system "others," (and for Victorian reform this would include slaves, "fallen women," the poor, heathens, etc.) become the necessary vehicles for the bourgeois subject's own spiritual evolution."
There is a "a persuasive cultural mythology, grounded in romanticism, in which the artist is imagined as a kind of trans-historical shaman who has ostensibly sundered themselves from all other social and cultural identities, privileges, and commitments. Freed of these bonds, the artist is able to identify themselves with any and all other subjects—the poor, the homeless, etc.—and further, is able to feel their oppression and to express their pain and moral outrage.""
Again, if you've been able to listen to Grant describe her personal and professional philosophy, this should sound familiar. I consider it possible that, in addition to the profit motive, Grant also derives considerable reputational and networking benefits from her grantLOVE activity.
So - the relevance, for me, is that Grant appears to have a) exploited the opportunity for attention from donors, media, and both the arts and academic communities in Los Angeles that the WHP and her related LOVE-branded fundraising gave her; b) adopted as her own the rhetoric and objectives of community or public art (without really becoming one herself) and relabeled it "civic art;" c) gained a reputation as a philanthropist by diverting a percentage of the income generated by her LLC (or by donating objects or "editions" produced under the LLC) that facilitated a transition from limited edition artwork to merchandising; d) compensated for limitations in her fine art career by maintaining a public profile based on her "art philanthropy" and personal philosophy.
Disclaimer: this is an academic exercise based on research and observation, not the result of any insider disclosures or direct contact with Grant or her "collaborators."
Let's take a closer look at the undiscussed element of her activities roughly 2010-2016 in the next section.
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