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homonationalist · 11 months

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At present, it is standard among practically all communities to fête the family as a bastion of relative safety from state persecution and market coercion, and as a space for nurturing subordinated cultural practices, languages, and traditions. But this is not enough of a reason to spare the family. Frustratedly, Hazel Carby stressed the fact (for the benefit of her white sisters) that many racially, economically, and patriarchally oppressed people cleave proudly and fervently to the family. She was right; nevertheless, as Kathi Weeks puts it: “the model of the nuclear family that has served subordinated groups as a fence against the state, society and capital is the very same white, settler, bourgeois, heterosexual, and patriarchal institution that was imposed by the state, society, and capital on the formerly enslaved, indigenous peoples, and waves of immigrants, all of whom continue to be at once in need of its meagre protections and marginalized by its legacies and prescriptions” (emphasis mine). The family is a shield that human beings have taken up, quite rightly, to survive a war. If we cannot countenance ever putting down that shield, perhaps we have forgotten that the war does not have to go on forever.

This is why Paul Gilroy remarked in his 1993 essay “It’s A Family Affair,” “even the best of this discourse of the familialization of politics is still a problem.” Gilroy is grappling with the reality that, in the United Kingdom as in the United States, the state’s constant disrespect of the Black home and transgression of Black households’ boundaries, as well as its disproportionate removal of Black children into the foster-care industry, understandably inspires an urgent anti-racist politics of “familialization” in defense of Black families. Both the British and American netherworlds of supposedly “broken” homes (milieus that are then exoticized, and seen as efflorescing creatively against all odds), have posed an obstinate threat to the legitimacy of the family regime simply by existing, Gilroy suggests. The paradox is that the “broken” remnant sustains the bourgeois regime insofar as it supplies the culture, inspiration, and oftentimes the surrogate care labor that allows the white household to imagine itself as whole. As a dialectician, “I want to have it both ways,” writes Gilroy, closing out his essay. “I want to be able to valorize what we can recover, but also to cite the disastrous consequences that follow when the family supplies the only symbols of political agency we can find in the culture and the only object upon which that agency can be seen to operate. Let us remind ourselves that there are other possibilities.

There are other possibilities! Traces of the desire for them can be found in Toni Cade (later Toni Cade Bambara)’s anthology The Black Woman, published in America in 1970, not long after the publication of the US labor secretariat’s “Moynihan report,” The Negro Family: The Case for National Action. The open season on the Black Matriarch was in full swing. And certainly not all of the anthology’s feminists, in their valiant effort to beat back societal anti-maternal sentiment (matrophobia) and the hatred of Black women specifically (more recently known as “misogynoir”), make the additional step of criticizing familism within their Black communities. But one or two contributors do flatly reject the notion that the family could ever be a part of Black (collective human) liberation. Kay Lindsey, in her piece “The Black Woman as a Woman,” lays out her analysis that: “If all white institutions with the exception of the family were destroyed, the state could also rise again, but Black rather than white.” In other words: the only way to ensure the destruction of the patriarchal state is for the institution of the family to be destroyed. “And I mean destroyed,” echoes the feminist women’s health center representative Pat Parker in 1980, in a speech she delivered at ¡Basta! Women’s Conference on Imperialism and Third World War in Oakland, California. Parker speaks in the name of The Black Women’s Revolutionary Council, among other organizations, and her wide- ranging statement (which addresses imperialism, the Klan, and movement- building) purposively ends with the family: “As long as women are bound by the nuclear family structure we cannot effectively move toward revolution. And if women don’t move, it will not happen.” The left, along with women especially of the upper and middle classes, “must give up ... undying loyalty to the nuclear family,” Parker charges. It is “the basic unit of capitalism and in order for us to move to revolution it has to be destroyed.”

Forty years later, the British writer Lola Olufemi is among those reminding us that there are other possibilities: “abolishing the family...” she tweets, “that’s light work. You’re crying over whether or not Engels said it when it’s been focal to black studies/black feminism for decades.” For Olufemi as for Parker and Lindsey, abolishing marriage, private property, white supremacy, and capitalism are projects that cannot be disentangled from one another. She is no lone voice, either. Annie Olaloku-Teriba, a British scholar of “Blackness” in theory and history, is another contemporary exponent of the rich Black family-abolitionist tradition Olufemi names. In 2021, Olaloku-Teriba surprised and unsettled some of her followers by publishing a thread animated by a commitment to the overthrow of “familial relations” as a key goal of her antipatriarchal socialism. These posts point to the striking absence of the child from contemporary theorizations of patriarchal domesticity, and criticize radicals’ reluctance to call mothers who “violently discipline [Black] boys into masculinity” patriarchal. “The adult/child relation is as central to patriarchy as ‘man’/‘woman,’” Olaloku-Teriba affirms: “The domination of the boy by the woman is a very routine and potent expression of patriarchal power.” These observations reopen horizons. What would it mean for Black caregivers (of all genders) not to fear the absence of family in the lives of Black children? What would it mean not to need the Black family?

Sophie Lewis in “Abolish Which Family?” from Abolish the Family: A Manifesto for Care and Liberation, 2022.

#sophie lewis #abolish the family #🌟#reading

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lilithism1848 · 7 months

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Atrocities US committed against ASIA

Between 1996-2006, The US has given money and weapons to royalist forces against the nepalese communists in the Nepalese civil war. ~18,000 people have died in the conflict. In 2002, after another civil war erupted, President George W. Bush pushed a bill through Congress authorizing $20 million in military aid to the Nepalese government.

In 1996, after receiving incredibly low approval ratings, the US helped elect Boris Yeltsin, an incompetent pro-capitalist independent, by giving him a $10 Billion dollar loan to finance a winning election. Rather than creating new enterprises, Yeltsin’s democratization led to international monopolies hijacking the former Soviet markets, arbitraging the huge difference between old domestic prices for Russian commodities and the prices prevailing on the world market. Much of the Yeltsin era was marked by widespread corruption, and as a result of persistent low oil and commodity prices during the 1990s, Russia suffered inflation, economic collapse and enormous political and social problems that affected Russia and the other former states of the USSR. Under Yeltsin, Between 1990 and 1994, life expectancy for Russian men and women fell from 64 and 74 years respectively to 58 and 71 years. The surge in mortality was “beyond the peacetime experience of industrialised countries”. While it was boom time for the new oligarchs, poverty and unemployment surged; prices were hiked dramatically; communities were devastated by deindustrialisation; and social protections were stripped away.

In the 1970s-80s, wikileaks cables revealed that the US covertly supported the Khmer Rouge in their fight against the Vietnamese communists. Annual support included an end total of ~$215M USD, food aid to 20-40k Khmer Rouge fighters, CIA advisors in several camps, and ammunition.

In December 1975, The US supplied the weaponry for the Indonesian invasion of East Timor. This incursion was launched the day after U.S. President Gerald Ford and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger had left Indonesia where they had given President Suharto permission to use American arms, which under U.S. law, could not be used for aggression. Daniel Moynihan, U.S. ambassador to the UN. said that the U.S. wanted “things to turn out as they did.” The result was an estimated 200,000 dead out of a population of 700,000. Sixteen years later, on November 12, 1991, two hundred and seventeen East Timorese protesters in Dili, many of them children, marching from a memorial service, were gunned down by Indonesian Kopassus shock troops who were headed by U.S.- trained commanders Prabowo Subianto (son in law of General Suharto) and Kiki Syahnakri. Trucks were seen dumping bodies into the sea.

In 1975 Australian Constitutional Crisis, the CIA helped topple the democratically elected, left-leaning government of Prime Minister Gough Whitlam, by telling Governor-General, John Kerr, a longtime CIA collaborator, to dissolve the Whitlam government.

In 2018 after the release of a suppressed ISC (International Scientific Commission) report, and the release of declassified CIA communications daily reports in 2020, it was revealed that the US used germ warfare in the Korean war, 2. Many of these attacks involved the dropping of insects or small mammals infected with viruses such as anthrax, plague, cholera, and encephalitis. After discovering evidence of germ warfare, China invited the ISC headed by famed British scientist Joseph Needham, to investigate, but the report was suppressed for over 70 years.

Between 1963 and 1973, The US dropped ~388,000 tons of napalm bombs in vietnam, compared to 32,357 tons used over three years in the Korean War, and 16,500 tons dropped on Japan in 1945. US also sprayed over 5 million acres with herbicide, in Operation Ranch Hand, in a 10 year campaign to deprive the vietnamese of food and vegetation cover.

In 1971 in Pakistan, an authoritarian state supported by the U.S., brutally invaded East Pakistan in the Indo-Pakistani war of 1971. The war ended after India, whose economy was staggering after admitting about 10 million refugees, invaded East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) and defeated the West Pakistani forces. The US gave W. pakistan 411 million provided to establish its armed forces which spent 80% of its budget on its military. 15 million in arms flowed into W. Pakistan during the war. Between 300,000 to 3 million civilians were killed, with 8-10 million refugees fleeing to India.

In 1970, In Cambodia, The CIA overthrows Prince Sihanouk, who is highly popular among Cambodians for keeping them out of the Vietnam War. He is replaced by CIA puppet Lon Nol, whose forces suppressed the large-scale popular demonstrations in favour of Sihanouk, resulting in several hundred deaths. This unpopular move strengthens once minor opposition parties like the Khmer Rouge (another CIA supported group), who achieve power in 1975 and massacres ~2.5 million people. The Khmer Rouge, under Pol Pot, carried out the Cambodian Genocide, which killed 1.5-2M people from 1975-1979.

In 1969, The US initiated a secret carpet bombing campaign in eastern Cambodia, called, Operation Menu, and Operation Freedom Deal in 1970. An estimated 40,000 - 150,000 civilians were killed. Nixon lied about this campaign, but was later exposed, and one of the things that lead to his impeachment.

US dropped large amounts of Agent Orange, an herbicide developed by monsanto and dow chemical for the department of defense, in vietnam. Its use, in particular the contaminant dioxin, causes multiple health problems, including cleft palate, mental disabilities, hernias, still births, poisoned breast milk, and extra fingers and toes, as well as destroying local species of plants and animals. The Red Cross of Vietnam estimates that up to 1 million people are disabled or have health problems due to Agent Orange.

US Troops killed between 347 and 504 unarmed civilians, including women, children, and infants, in South Vietnam on March, 1968, in the My Lai Massacre. Some of the women were gang-raped and their bodies mutilated. Soldiers set fire to huts, waiting for civilians to come out so they could shoot them. For 30 years, the three US servicemen who tried to halt the massacre and rescue the hiding civilians were shunned and denounced as traitors, even by congressmen.

In 1967, the CIA helped South Vietnamese agents identify and then murder alleged Viet Cong leaders operating in villages, in the Phoenix Program. By 1972, Phoenix operatives had executed between 26,000 and 41,000 suspected NLF operatives, informants and supporters.

In 1965, The CIA overthrew the democratically elected Indonesian leader Sukarno with a military coup. The CIA had been trying to eliminate Sukarno since 1957, using everything from attempted assassination to sexual intrigue, for nothing more than his declaring neutrality in the Cold War. His successor, General Suharto, aided by the CIA, massacred between 500,000 to 1 million civilians accused of being communist, in the Indonesian mass killings of 1965-66. The US continued to support Suharto throughout the 70s, supplying weapons and planes.

Between 1964 and 1973, American pilots flew 580,000 attack sorties over Laos, an average of one planeload of bombs every eight minutes for almost a decade. By the time the last US bombs fell in April 1973, a total of 2,093,100 tonnes of ordnance had rained down on this neutral country. To this day, Laos, a country of just 7 million people, retains the dubious accolade of being the most heavily bombed country in the world per capita.

From the 1960s onward, the US supported Filipino dictator Ferdinand Marcos. The US provided hundreds of millions of dollars in aid, which was crucial in buttressing Marcos’s rule over the years. The estimated number of persons that were executed and disappeared under President Fernando Marcos was over 100,000. After fleeing to hawaii, marco was suceeded by the widow of an opponent he assasinated, Corazon aquino.

Starting in 1957, in the wake of the US-backed First Indochina War, The CIA carries out approximately one coup per year trying to nullify Laos’ democratic elections, specifically targeting the Pathet Lao, a leftist group with enough popular support to be a member of any coalition government, and perpetuating the 20 year Laotian civil war. In the late 50s, the CIA even creates an “Armee Clandestine” of Asian mercenaries to attack the Pathet Lao. After the CIA’s army suffers numerous defeats, the U.S. drops more bombs on Laos than all the U.S. bombs dropped in World War II. A quarter of all Laotians will eventually become refugees, many living in caves. This was later called a “secret war,” since it occurred at the same time as the Vietnam War, but got little press. Hundreds of thousands were killed.

In 1955, the CIA provided explosives, and aided KMT agents in an assassination attempt against the Chinese Premier, Zhou Enlai. KMT agents placed a time-bomb on the Air India aircraft, Kashmir Princess, which Zhou was supposed to take on his way to the Bandung Conference, an anti-imperialist meeting of Asian and African states, but he changed his travel plans at the last minute. Henry Kissinger denied US involvement, even though remains of a US detonator were found. 16 people were killed.

From 1955-1975, the US supported French colonialist interests in Vietnam, set up a puppet regime in Saigon to serve US interests, and later took part as a belligerent against North Vietnam in the Vietnam War. U.S. involvement escalated further following the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident, which was later found to be staged by Lyndon Johnson. The war exacted a huge human cost in terms of fatalities (see Vietnam War casualties). Estimates of the number of Vietnamese soldiers and civilians killed vary from 966,000 source to 3.8 million.source Some 240,000–300,000 Cambodians,source23 20,000–62,000 Laotians,4 and 58,220 U.S. service members also died in the conflict, with a further 1,626 missing in action. Unexploded bomb continue to kill civilians for years afterward.

In the summer of 1950 in South Korea, anticommunists aided by the US executed at least 100,000 people suspected of supporting communism, in the Bodo League Massacre. For four decades the South Korean government concealed this massacre. Survivors were forbidden by the government from revealing it, under suspicion of being communist sympathizers. Public revelation carried with it the threat of torture and death. During the 1990s and onwards, several corpses were excavated from mass graves, resulting in public awareness of the massacre.

In 1984, documents were released showing that Eisenhower authorized the use of atomic weapons on North Korea, should the communists renew the war in 1953. The 2,000 pages released show the high level of planning and the detail of discussion on possible use of these weapons, and Mr. Eisenhower’s interest in overcoming reluctance to use them.

In the beginning of the Korean war, US Troops killed ~300 South Korean civilians in the No Gun Ri massacre, revealing a theater-wide policy of firing on approaching refugee groups. Trapped refugees began piling up bodies as barricades and tried to dig into the ground to hide. Some managed to escape the first night, while U.S. troops turned searchlights on the tunnels and continued firing, said Chung Koo-ho, whose mother died shielding him and his sister. No apology has yet been issued.

The US intervened in the 1950-53 Korean Civil War, on the side of the south Koreans, in a proxy war between the US and china for supremacy in East Asia. South Korea reported some 373,599 civilian and 137,899 military deaths, the US with 34,000 killed, and China with 114,000 killed. Overall, the U.S. dropped 635,000 tons of bombs—including 32,557 tons of napalm—on Korea, more than they did during the whole Pacific campaign of World War II. The US killed an estimated 1/3rd of the north Korean people during the war. The Joint Chiefs of staff issued orders for the retaliatory bombing of the People’s republic of China, should south Korea be attacked. Deadly clashes have continued up to the present day.

From 1948-1949, the Jeju uprising was an insurgency taking place in the Korean province of Jeju island, followed by severe anticommunist suppression of the South Korean Labor Party in which 14-30,000 people were killed, or ~10% of the island’s population. Though atrocities were committed by both sides, the methods used by the South Korean government to suppress the rebels were especially cruel. On one occasion, American soldiers discovered the bodies of 97 people including children, killed by government forces. On another, American soldiers caught government police forces carrying out an execution of 76 villagers, including women and children. The US later entered the Korean civil war on the side of the South Koreans.

In 1949 during the resumed Chinese Civil War, the US supported the corrupt Kuomintang dictatorship of Chiang Kaishek to fight against the Chinese Communists, who had won the support of the vast majority of peasant-farmers and helped defeat the Japanese invasion. The US strongly supported the Kuomintang forces. Over 50,000 US Marines were sent to guard strategic sites, and 100,000 US troops were sent to Shandong. The US equipped and trained over 500,000 KMT troops, and transported KMT forces to occupy newly liberated zones as well as to contain Communist-controlled areas. American aid included substantial amounts of both new and surplus military supplies; additionally, loans worth hundreds of millions of dollars were made to the KMT. Within less than two years after the Sino-Japanese War, the KMT had received $4.43 billion from the US—most of which was military aid.

The U.S. installed Syngman Rhee,a conservative Korean exile, as President of South Korea in 1948. Rhee became a dictator on an anti-communist crusade, arresting and torturing suspected communists, brutally putting down rebellions, killing 100,000 people and vowing to take over North Korea. Rhee precipitated the outbreak of the Korean War and for the allied decision to invade North Korea once South Korea had been recaptured. He was finally forced to resign by mass student protests in 1960.

Between 1946 and 1958, the US tested 23 nuclear devices at Bikini Atoll, using the native islanders and their land as guinea pigs for the effects of nuclear fallout. Significant fallout caused widespread radiological contamination in the area, and killed many islanders. A survivor stated, “What the Americans did was no accident. They came here and destroyed our land. They came to test the effects of a nuclear bomb on us. It was no accident.” Many of the islanders exposed were brought to the US Argonne National laboratory, to study the effects. Afterwards the islands proved unsuitable to sustaining life, resulting in starvation and requiring the residents to receive ongoing aid. Virtually all of the inhabitants showed acute symptoms of radiation syndrome, many developing thyroid cancers, Leukimia, miscarriages, stillborn and “jellyfish babies” (highly deformed) along with symptoms like hair falling out, and diahrrea. A handful were brought to the US for medical research and later returned, while others were evacuated to neighboring Islands. The US under LBJ prematurely returned the majority returned 3 years later, to further test how human beings absorb radiation from their food and environment. The islanders pleaded with the US to move them away from the islands, as it became clear that their children were developing deformities and radiation sickness. Radion levels were still unacceptable. The United States later paid the islanders and their descendants 25 million in compensation for damage caused by the nuclear testing program. A 2016 investigation found radiation levels on Bikini Atoll as high as 639 mrem yr−1, well above the established safety standard threshold for habitation of 100 mrem yr−1. Similar tests occurred elsewhere in the Marshall Islands during this time period. Due to the destruction of natural wealth, Kwajalein Atoll’s military installation and dislocation, the majority of natives currently live in extreme poverty, making less than 1$ a day. Those that have jobs, mostly work at the US military installation and resorts. Much of this is detailed in the documentary, The Coming War on China (2016).

After the Japanese surrender in 1945, Douglas MacArthur pardoned Unit 731, a Japanese biological experimentation center which performed human testing of biological agents against Chinese citizens. While a series of war tribunals and trials was organized, many of the high-ranking officials and doctors who devised and respectively performed the experiments were pardoned and never brought to justice. As many as 12,000 people, most of them Chinese, died in Unit 731 alone and many more died in other facilities, such as Unit 100 and in field experiments throughout Manchuria. One of the experimenters who killed many, microbiologist Shiro Ishii, later traveled to the US to advise on its bioweapons programs. In the final days of the Pacific War and in the face of imminent defeat, Japanese troops blew up the headquarters of Unit 731 in order to destroy evidence of the research done there. As part of the cover-up, Ishii ordered 150 remaining subjects killed.

In 1945 during the month-long Battle of Manila, the US in deciding whether to attack Manila (then under Japanese occupation) with ground troops, decided instead to use indiscriminate carpet-bombing, howitzers, and naval bombardment, killing an estimated 100,000 people. The casualty figures show the US’s regard for filipino civilian life: 1,010 Americans, 16,665 Japanese and 100,000 to 240,000 civilians were killed. Manila became, alongside Berlin, and Warsaw, one of the most devastated cities of WW2.

US Troops committed a number of rapes during the battle of Okinawa, and the subsequent occupation of Japan. There were 1,336 reported rapes during the first 10 days of the occupation of Kanagawa prefecture alone.1 American Occupation authorities imposed wide-ranging censorship on the Japanese media, including bans on covering many sensitive social issues and serious crimes such as rape committed by members of the Occupation forces.

From 1942 to 1945, the US military carried out a fire-bombing campaign of Japanese cities, killing between 200,000 and 900,000 civilians. One nighttime fire-bombing of Tokyo took 80,000 lives. During early August 1945, the US dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing ~130,000 civilians, and causing radiation damage which included birth defects and a variety of genetic diseases for decades to come. The justification for the civilian bombings has largely been debunked, as the entrance of Russia into the war had already started the surrender negotiations earlier in 1945. The US was aware of this, since it had broken the Japanese code and had been intercepting messages during for most of the year. The US ended up accepting a conditional surrender from Hirohito, against which was one of the stated aims of the civilian bombings. The dropping of the atomic bomb is therefore seen as a demonstration of US military supremacy, and the first major operation of the Cold War with Russia.

In 1918, the US took part in the allied intervention in the Russian civil war, sending 11,000 troops to the in the Arkhangelsk and Vladivostok regions to support the anti-bolshevik, monarchist, and largely anti-semitic White Forces.

In 1900 in China, the US was part of an Eight-Nation Alliance that brought 20,000 armed troops to China, to defeat the Imperial Chinese Army, in the the Boxer Rebellion, an anti-imperialist uprising.

In 1899, after a popular revolution in the Philippines to oust the Spanish imperialists, the US invaded and began the Phillipine-American war. The US military committed countless atrocities, leaving 200,000 Filipinos dead. Jacob H Smith killed between 2,500 to 50,000 civilians, His orders included, “kill everyone over the age of ten” and make the island “a howling wilderness.”

Throughout the 1800s, US settlers engaged in a genocide of native Hawaiians. The native population decreased from ~ 400k in 1789, to 40k by 1900, due to colonization and disease. In 1883, the US engineered the overthrow of Hawaii’s native monarch, Queen Lili’uokalani, by landing two companies of US marines in Honolulu. Due to the Queen’s desire “to avoid any collision of armed forces, and perhaps the loss of life” for her subjects and after some deliberation, at the urging of advisers and friends, the Queen ordered her forces to surrender. Hawaii was initially reconstituted as an independent republic, but the ultimate goal of the US was the annexation of the islands to the United States, which was finally accomplished in 1898. After this, the Hawaiian language was banned, English replaced it as the official language in all institutions and schools. The US finally apologized in 1993, but no land has been returned.

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mostlysignssomeportents · 1 year

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The real scandal is overclassification

The fact that every president and VP has a garage or filing cabinet or shoebox full of classified documents isn't (merely) evidence of political impunity - it's also the latest absurd turn in the long-running true scandal: the American epidemic of overclassification and excessive secrecy.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/30/i-come-to-a-land-downunder/#but-id-have-to-kill-you

Thousands of American bureaucrats have unilaterally classified tens of millions of unremarkable documents without any legitimate basis for shielding them from public view. Meanwhile, millions of people have "Top Secret clearance" and can view these documents, making a mockery of their supposed secrecy.

Writing for The American Prospect, David Dayen crystallizes the incentives, problems and corruption that we should be paying to, and laments that instead, we're scoring cheap political points about the recklessness of presidents and ex-presidents, heavily salted with paranoid fantasies about the Danger to National Security (TM) posed by letting these docs escape the airless chambers of official secrecy:

https://prospect.org/politics/2023-01-30-president-classified-document-scandal/

Overclassification is a well-documented (ahem) problem, used by bureaucrats to cover up corruption, crimes and incompetence, as well as out of the lazy reflex to declare everything to be secret. This is abetted by members of the vast "Intelligence Community" who have rotated into the private sector and have a lucrative side-hustle as TV talking heads who spin spy-thriller fantasies about the risks of these paper broken arrows.

Dayen points to Senator Moynihan's 1997 report on "Protecting and Reducing Government Secrecy," and its conclusion that if you declare everything secret, then nothing ends up being truly secret. It's a brilliant, readable, devastating critique of official secrecy. Nothing has been done about its recommendations:

https://sgp.fas.org/library/moynihan/

In 2016, the House Oversight Committee concluded that 90% of classified documents should not be classified, the same figure that the DoD came up with in its own report, 60 years earlier:

https://oversight.house.gov/hearing/examining-costs-overclassification-transparency-security/

Meanwhile, the Information Security Oversight Office - which oversees classification - keeps ringing alarm bells about overclassification, with 50m+ documents being classified in a typical year. Rather than listen to the ISOO, Congress has cut its staff in half over the past decade. 620 ISOO employees oversee the three million Americans empowered to classify documents:

https://fas.org/irp/congress/2016_hr/overclass.pdf

In 2010, the Washington Post's Dana Priest and William Arkin took stock of the post-9/11 explosion in state secrets in their "Top Secret America" report: "No one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/top-secret-america/2010/07/19/hidden-world-growing-beyond-control-2/

Attempts to liberate classified docs using FOIA requests fail repeatedly, with US agencies returning heavily redacted documents, even blacking out a report on the plans of the "Group of the Martyr Ebenezer Scrooge [to hijack the Christmas Eve flight of] Prime Minister and Chief Courier S. Claus."

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/22/magazine/the-strange-politics-of-classified-information.html

As Dayen says, the talking point from ex-spooks on TV that "overclassification is no excuse for bad document handling," is the equivalent of the old saw that "mass shootings are not the time to talk about gun control." And yet, the press keeps buying it.

Take the Politico op-ed by an ex-FBI spook, who turned the fact that "a foreign leader might like turnip-flavored ice cream into a classifiable scenario," proving that there is no overclassification excuse too absurd to get an airing:

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/01/26/the-wrong-question-about-the-classified-documents-scandal-00079540

[Image ID: A photograph of the Military Records Center in Alexandria, Virginia. Displayed are some captured German records waiting to be boxed.]

#pluralistic #overclassification classified documents burn before reading fyeo state secrecy secrecy scandals partisanship #overclassification #classified documents #burn before reading #fyeo #state secrecy #secrecy #scandal #partisanship

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ausetkmt · 11 months

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CHRONOLOGY OF AMERICAN RACE RIOTS AND RACIAL VIOLENCE p-5

1961 May First Freedom Ride. 1962 Harlem Youth Opportunities Unlimited (HARYOU) is founded. Robert F. Williams publishes Negroes with Guns, exploring Williams’ philosophy of black self-defense. October Two die in riots when President John F. Kennedy sends troops to Oxford,Mississippi, to allow James Meredith to become the first African American student to register for classes at the University of Mississippi. 1963 Publication of The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin. Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM) is founded. April Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., writes his ‘‘Letter from Birmingham Jail.’’

June Civil rights leader Medgar Evers is assassinated in Mississippi. August March on Washington; Rev. King delivers his ‘‘I Have a Dream’’ speech before the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C.

September Four African American girls—Carol Denise McNair, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson, and Addie Mae Collins—are killed when a bomb explodes at theSixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. 1964 June–August Three Freedom Summer activists—James Earl Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner—are arrested in Philadelphia, Mississippi; their bodies are discovered six weeks later; white resistance to Freedom Summer activities leads to six deaths, numerous injuries and arrests, and property damage acrossMississippi. July President Lyndon Johnson signs the Civil Rights Act. New York City (Harlem) riot. Rochester, New York, riot. Brooklyn, New York, riot. August Riots in Jersey City, Paterson, and Elizabeth, New Jersey. Chicago, Illinois, riot. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, riot. 1965 February While participating in a civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, Jimmie Lee Jackson is shot by an Alabama state trooper. Malcolm X is assassinated while speaking in New York City. March Bloody Sunday march ends with civil rights marchers attacked and beaten by local lawmen at the Edmund Pettus Bridge outside Selma, Alabama. Lowndes County Freedom Organization (LCFO) is formed in Lowndes County,Alabama. First distribution of The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, better known as The Moynihan Report, which was written by Undersecretary of Labor Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Nathan Glazer. July Springfield, Massachusetts, riot. August Los Angeles (Watts), California, riot. 1965–1967 A series of northern urban riots occurring during these years, including disorders in the Watts section of Los Angeles, California (1965), Newark, New Jersey (1967), and Detroit, Michigan (1967), becomes known as the Long Hot Summer Riots. 1966 May Stokely Carmichael elected national director of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). June James Meredith is wounded by a sniper while walking from Memphis, Tennessee, to Jackson, Mississippi; Meredith’s March Against Fear is taken up by Martin Luther King, Jr., Stokely Carmichael, and others. July Cleveland, Ohio, riot. Murder of civil rights demonstrator Clarence Triggs in Bogalusa, Louisiana. September Dayton, Ohio, riot. San Francisco (Hunters Point), California, riot. October Black Panther Party (BPP) founded by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale. 1967

Publication of Black Power: The Politics of Liberation by Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton. May Civil rights worker Benjamin Brown is shot in the back during a student protest in Jackson, Mississippi. H. Rap Brown succeeds Stokely Carmichael as national director of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Texas Southern University riot (Houston, Texas). June Atlanta, Georgia, riot. Buffalo, New York, riot. Cincinnati, Ohio, riot. Boston, Massachusetts, riot. July Detroit, Michigan, riot. Newark, New Jersey, riot. 1968 Publication of Soul on Ice by Eldridge Cleaver. February During the so-called Orangeburg, South Carolina Massacre, three black college students are killed and twenty-seven others are injured in a confrontation with police on the adjoining campuses of South Carolina State College and Claflin College. March Kerner Commission Report is published. April Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., is assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee. President Lyndon Johnson signs the Civil Rights Act of 1968. Washington, D.C., riot. Cincinnati, Ohio, riot. August Antiwar protestors disrupt the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. 1969 May James Forman of the SNCC reads his Black Manifesto, which calls for monetary reparations for the crime of slavery, to the congregation of Riverside Church in New York; many in the congregation walk out in protest. July York, Pennsylvania, riot. 1970 May Two unarmed black students are shot and killed by police attempting to control civil rights demonstrators at Jackson State University in Mississippi. Augusta, Georgia, riot. July New Bedford, Massachusetts, riot. Asbury Park, New Jersey, riot. 1973 July So-called Dallas Disturbance results from community anger over the murder of a twelve-year-old Mexican-American boy by a Dallas police officer. 1975–1976 A series of antibusing riots rock Boston, Massachusetts, with the violence reaching a climax in April 1976. 1976 February Pensacola, Florida, riot. 1980 May Miami, Florida, riot. 1981 March Michael Donald, a black man, is beaten and murdered by Ku Klux Klan members in Mobile, Alabama. 1982 December Miami, Florida, riot. 1985 May Philadelphia police drop a bomb on MOVE headquarters, thereby starting a fire that consumed a city block. 1986 December Three black men are beaten and chased by a gang of white teenagers in Howard Beach, New York; one of the victims of the so-called Howard Beach Incident is killed while trying to flee from his attackers. 1987 February–April Tampa, Florida, riots. 1989 Release of Spike Lee’s film, Do the Right Thing. Representative John Conyers introduces the first reparations bill into Congress—the Commission to Study Reparation Proposals for African Americans Act; this and all subsequent reparations measures fail passage. August Murder of Yusef Hawkins, an African American student killed by Italian-American youths in Bensonhurst, New York. 1991 March Shooting in Los Angeles of an African American girl, fifteen-year-old Latasha Harlins, by a Korean woman who accused the girl of stealing. Los Angeles police officers are caught on videotape beating African American motorist Rodney King. 1992 April Los Angeles (Rodney King), California, riot. 1994 Survivors of the Rosewood, Florida, riot of 1923 receive reparations. February Standing trial for a third time, Byron de la Beckwith is convicted of murdering civil rights worker Medgar Evers in June 1963.

#CHRONOLOGY OF AMERICAN RACE RIOTS AND RACIAL VIOLENCE p-5

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blueiight · 8 months

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all of these posts that primarily blame women for misogyny sound like the moynihan report

#and we can also blame moynihan for another thing but ill get off my pulpit #yn.

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muddypolitics · 1 year

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(via Kyrsten Sinema's Rock Star Campaign Spending Possibly Less Ethical Than Clarence Thomas On Random Tuesday - Wonkette)

New York Post business reporter Lydia Moynihan dug into Sinema's campaign spending habits. (Apparently, Murdoch media is not showing Sinema the bipartisan centrist love.) What Moynihan uncovered is both hilarious and appalling.

Since 2021, Sinema has spent nearly $20,000 worth of campaign donations on wine-related expenses alone — dropping thousands at some of the most exclusive vineyards on the West Coast including Promontory Winery in Napa Valley, Auteur Winery in Sonoma and Argyle Winery in the Willamette Valley, according to election filings.

youtube

wow

#sinema #we are getting fleeced big time #grifting

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farfromhome999 · 5 months

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Some SIlly Rambly Notes on Foxy Brown

[WARNING: Mentions of SA]

The sexualization of Grier in this film is insane compared to today’s standards around revealing skin in film. The first time the audience sees her, she's in a see through fluffy orange night dress that she raises up to see her tiddies. I was shooketh. In this same scene though, we see her stash a gun in her bra, linking her sexuality to danger.

I AM. IN. LOOOOOOVE with Grier’s outfits in this movie. HOLY FUUUU-

Link, Foxy’s brother, was selling dope to try to answer the call of “all this ambition” that’s in him from seeing people in fancy homes with fancy lives. He’s upset because he doesn’t fit into any of the roles that may help him get there— he’s not smart enough to go into government, he’s not attractive enough to marry rich, etc. So he turns to drugs. This was such a hopeless moment. I almost felt bad for him. But then he decided to be an idiot.

When Link learns that Foxy’s boyfriend is still alive— a man the gang that’s after him has been looking for— he betrays his sister by giving the man up to save his own hide. Later in the film, when the gang members find Link, he tells them what Foxy is up to. One of the (white) men, upon hearing of Link’s actions up to that point, says, “That doesn’t make sense.” Another (white) man replies that “maybe those people don’t believe in family loyalty, Eddie.” This makes me think of the Moynihan report which discusses the ‘broken’ family structure of black families. It made me fume after having read Spillers’ response to it.

Foxy isn’t the only woman to use their sexuality to get what they want. The same goes for the leader of the gang, Ms. Carrie, and several of the smaller side characters who are similarly highly sexualized.

The film employs a lesbian to keep one of Foxy’s friends and accomplice at a bar. Foxy fights against a gaggle of women who are all readable as butch lesbians to get her accomplice away from them. This was the first time I’d seen such a depiction of people in the LGBTQ+ community. I’m really glad that we have better representation nowadays in the media.

Foxy telling a table full of men to “take care of the justice and. [she’ll] handle the revenge [herself]” because she’s the only one that wants to change things. This was a very starkly contrasted scene because it felt like Foxy was standing alone at the one end of the table with little back up.

Foxy as the Jezebel who lures the pilot of the plane to Mexico—where the gang is doing their next drug deal—in with her looks simply by sitting alone and twiddling her hair.

The final scene… just watch it: Foxy Brown (1974) End Of The Movie

#this is so all over the place #i'm really word vomiting #don't mind me #black cinema #pam grier #black tumblr #farfromhome999 #blaxploitation

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shirkers2018dirsanditan · 9 months

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also to suggest we have no way to conceive of mothers who "violently discipline [black] boys into masculinity" is also absurd when the Black Abusive Matriarch is quite a popular caricature in our society. she is a bona fide trope in both black and white media (for black media, some of the most notable are the brothers [2001] dir. gary hardwick, precious [2009] dir. lee daniels, and most famously, moonlight [2016] dir. barry jenkins). honestly the term "abusive" is redundant, as the Black Matriarch is an overwhelmingly negative trope, inherently characterized as overbearing, cruel, hypersexual, unmarried, and unbecoming due to her masculinized behavior. the Black Matriarch is largely, directly and indirectly, blamed for all of society's ills and the incompetency and maladaptation of black men. she was the star of the moynihan report. she loomed large during the welfare reform debates of the 90s. and even during the welfare debates of the 80s.

like I know annie teriba is british, but she was referencing bell hooks' in her tweets on that subject. there is no way she as a scholar of the diaspora is unfamiliar with the cultural baggage around the black mother as an archetype and societal construction. and fwiw, the Black Matriarch also looms large in british media. in small axe: the mangrove (2020) dir. steve mcqueen (see: barbara), small axe: education (2020) dir. steve mcqueen (see: kingsley's mother, though she's more sympathetic), bullet boy (2004) dir. saul dibb, gone too far (2014) dir. destiny ekaragha. it's also worth noting that similar tropes exist for asian and hispanic women, in both american and british society (regarding british asian women). see also: everything everywhere all at once (2022) dir. daniel kwan and daniel scheinert, real women have curves (2002) dir. patricia cordoso, bend it like beckham (2002) dir. gurinder chadha, crazy rich asians (2018) dir. jon m. chu, fresh off the boat (2015 - 2022), little english (2023) dir. pravesh kumar, and countless others

#now in many of those examples the mothers domineer over their daughters #but the trope is the same #again the arguably most reviled figure in our culture is the single mother of a young man #even more than single mothers of girls

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homonationalist · 11 months

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The Negro Family: The Case for National Action (from here on referred to as The Report), known in popular vernacular as The Moynihan Report (1965), celebrated its fiftieth anniversary in 2015. In 1965, amidst a backdrop of Black urban rebellion, Moynihan’s anxiety about the crumbling fabric of the negro family headed by the Black matriarch inspired his characterization of the black family as a “tangle of pathology.” Alongside the sociologist’s attempts to police and surveil unruly Black urban life through producing the ‘Black family’ as an object of knowledge and problem for national security, Moynihan also reaffirmed the family as the singular epistemic mode of knowing and regulating the self and American (or US) civil society. Moynihan affirmed for the United States that, “The family is the basic social unit of American life.”

Since The Report’s publication, Black scholars and activists have felt compelled to respond to The Report and its legacy that has marked Black single mothers, Black genders, sexualities and family formations as self (and nationally) destructive. Since its introduction into mainstream public discourse in 1965 the Black Matriarch has embedded itself in the US imaginary in an almost archetypal fashion. In fact it has become the primary discourse used to both imagine and speak about the ‘Black family’ specifically as a problem and thus an object of disquiet. Black academic ‘feminists’ and Black women activists have critiqued both Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s and Black bourgeois attempts to castigate Black female headed households as perverse and deviant. Black feminists have labored to illumine the ways that the “controlling image” of the Black matriarch forecloses upon the possibility of imagining viable non-nuclear family formations, vilifies Black single female sexual autonomy, reinforces an ethos of personal responsibility and disavows structural inequality making it almost impossible to imagine a politics of redistribution. To date, Black feminist and queer scholarship continues to propose Black matriarchal, non-heteropatriarchal and queer models of affirming Black family life in an attempt to counter the legacy of pathologization left by The Report.

However, after fifty years of ever-evolving and increasingly nuanced Black feminist responses to The Report, rarely do critiques and alternative modes of the Black filial interrogate the viability of the notion of the family itself. While, Black feminist responses to The Report and the discourse of Black matriarchy have argued for alternative forms of family, ranging from intergenerational, extended, non-sanguial, and queer; the family as a sociological unit and as a self evident and natural form of human organization persists. Even when Black and Black queer feminists call for alternatives to the the ‘normal family,’ these modifications and revisions to the family still retain attachments to the liberal humanistic concept of the filial as the organizing frame for legible Black collective life.

Black ‘feminist’ abolitionist responses that trouble the very concept of the family as a way of organizing Black life still remain unexamined and perhaps even “unthought.” In this essay, I argue that while most Black feminist and queer modes of critique exhibit a suspicion or ambivalence toward the family, the responses of Kay Lindsey (1970) and Hortense Spillers (1987) offer a distinctly abolitionist critique of the family. Unlike “suspicious” or reformist critiques, which tend to hold onto at least some aspects of the normative and liberal family model, the abolitionist frame organizing this essay opens up the possibility of naming and doing Black relations outside of the categories that currently name humanness. This essay focuses on Black abolitionist critiques that denaturalize the family as a normative and humanizing institution to which people should aspire to belong. More importantly, it opens up conversations about alternative modes of naming the self in relation to others outside of the Western humanist tradition.

Because of the ongoing disruption of Black sociality and the understanding that Black relations are under assault, the ‘Black family’ has taken on an almost sacred significance within Black social life due to its heralded role as a protective mechanism to Black vulnerability and violation. The Black praxis of family as an everyday lived experience has the potential to ground people, provide material and emotional support and affirm the spirit of many Black people who feel vulnerable in the world. For many, including myself, family helps make life livable amidst everyday enactments of antiblack violence. To be clear, this essay does not indulge in a nihilistic destruction of the family for the sake of Afro-pessimistic intellectual experimentation. Rather, it is precisely because of this need for and commitment to Black sociality as a dynamic and inventive practice that this essay presses toward otherwise modes of thinking and being with one another. This essay conscientiously attends to the ways that the western notion of the family functions as a site of violence and dehumanization that threatens to engulf Black sociality. While Black feminist, queer scholarship and creative work have called for a reimagining of the Black family on radically different terms (non patriarchal, egalitarian and queer) they often do not critique the family in ways that draw attention to the violent ways that the family emerges as a category of violent forms of humanism. I consider the possible abolition of the family (and Black family) because I fear that the institution crowds out the dynamic and emerging ways that Black people reimagine and invent new modes of relation.

Tiffany Lethabo King from “Black 'Feminisms' and Pessimism: Abolishing Moynihan's Negro Family”

#tiffany lethabo king #black feminisms and pessimism #family abolition #🌟#reading

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disneytva · 2 years

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July 2022 Programming Highlights

Friday, July 1 Original Series – Episode Premiere on Disney Channel and Disney Junior Alice’s Wonderland Bakery “Meet the Tweedles/A Very Wonderland Wedding” (7:00-7:30 a.m. EDT on Disney Channel/4:00-4:30 p.m. EDT on Disney Junior) “Meet the Tweedles” – The Tweedles help Alice decide between becoming the royal baker or continuing at the bakery. *Vanessa Bayer (“I Love That For You”) and Bobby Moynihan (“Mr. Mayor”) guest star as Tweedle Do and Tweedle Don’t.

“A Very Wonderland Wedding” – When Alice agrees to bake a wedding cake, she must find a way to represent both the bride and groom. *Lamorne Morris (“New Girl”) and Broadway’s Ali Stroker guest star as Dandy and Daisy. TV-Y

Original Series – Episode Premiere on Disney Junior Eureka! “Pepper Power/Flickerwing Butterflies” (7:30-8:00 p.m. EDT) “Pepper Power” – Pepper’s boundless strength threatens to ruin Eureka’s invention.

“Flickerwing Butterflies” – Eureka and Roxy take a mother-daughter road trip to see the hatching of the flickerwing butterflies. TV-Y

Saturday, July 2 Original Series – Episode Premiere on Disney Channel The Ghost and Molly McGee “Scaring is Caring/All Night Plight” (9:30-10:00 a.m. EDT) “Scaring is Caring” – When Scratch is unable to scare the day before his report is due, Molly takes over his scares.

“All Night Plight” – Molly, Scratch and Libby try to stay up all night to see a rare comet. TV-Y7

Friday, July 8 Original Series – Episode Premiere on Disney Channel and Disney Junior Marvel’s Spidey and his Amazing Friends “Parade Panic/The Case of the Burgling Book Bandit” (8:30-9:00 a.m. EDT on Disney Channel/12:30-1:00 p.m. EDT on Disney Junior) “Parade Panic” – Team Spidey is honored with their own parade, but the villains band together to ruin everything.

“The Case of the Burgling Book Bandit” – When all the detective books in the library go missing, Team Spidey is on the case! TV-Y

Original Series – Episode Premiere on Disney Junior Eureka! “Epic Fail/Yes We Canyon!” (7:30-8:00 p.m. EDT) “Epic Fail” – Eureka tries to rid her father’s shop of some pesky pteros birds.

“Yes We Canyon!” – When Eureka’s friends try to claim a beautiful canyon, she helps by dividing it equally between them. TV-Y

Saturday, July 9 Original Series – Season One Finale on Disney Channel The Ghost and Molly McGee “The Jig is Up/Molly vs. The Ghost World” (9:30-10:00 a.m. EDT) “The Jig is Up” – When the Ghost Council discovers joy in Brighton, Scratch must keep Molly out of harm’s way.

“Molly vs. The Ghost World” – When Scratch is taken to the Ghost World for trial, Molly sets out to save him. TV-Y7

Saturday, July 16 Original Series – Episode Premiere on Disney Channel Big City Greens “DependaBill/The Delivernator” (9:30-10:00 a.m. EDT) “DependaBill” – Bill tries too hard to impress a neighbor. Tilly investigates a sock conspiracy.

“The Delivernator” – Cricket races against a robot to save his delivery job, while Gramma fights an ant infestation! TV-Y7

Friday, July 22

Original Series – Episode Premiere on Disney Junior Eureka! “Light at the End of the Cave/Kanga-Bird is the Word” (7:30-8:00 p.m. EDT) “Light at the End of the Cave” – When the friends explore a cave, the usually fearless Pepper admits she’s scared of the dark.

“Kanga-Bird is the Word” – Eureka’s friend KB can’t decide if he should jump with kangadons or fly with birds. *Jack McBrayer (“Wander Over Yonder”) guest stars as KB. TV-Y

Saturday, July 23 Original Series – Episode Premiere on Disney Channel Big City Greens “Listen Up!/Big Picture” (9:30-10:00 a.m. EDT) “Listen Up!” – Cricket loses his hearing and keeps it a secret from Bill.

“Big Picture” – The Greens go to a hipster drive-in movie, where Gloria proves her life is fun by taking the perfect Snap-A-Gram photo. TV-Y7

Friday, July 29

Original Series – Episode Premiere on Disney Junior Eureka! “What a Wheel!/Just Like Yurt” (7:30-8:00 p.m. EDT) “What a Wheel!” – Eureka is determined to turn her new invention into “a swing that pushes itself.”

“Just Like Yurt” – Barry’s drumming idol, Yurt, comes to town, and he is determined to impress her. *World-famous drummer Sheila E. guest stars as Yurt. TV-Y

Saturday, July 30 Original Series – Episode Premiere on Disney Channel Big City Greens “Rembo/Dirt Jar” (9:30-10:00 a.m. EDT) “Rembo” – Remy is determined to be a martial arts warrior after freezing in the face of danger.

“Dirt Jar” – Cricket’s missing dirt jar prompts the story of when the Greens left their country farm. TV-Y7

#Big City Greens #BCG #The Ghost And Molly McGee #Ghost And Molly McGee #The Curse Of Molly McGee #Curse Of Molly McGee #Eureka!#Spidey And His Amazing Friends #Spiderman #Disney's Eureka #Disney's Eureka!#Alice's Wonderland Bakery #Disney Channel #Disney Junior #Disney Jr

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