10 Things Not to Say to a Lesbian

English: One of the symbols of German Women’s movement (from the 1970s) Deutsch: Ein Logo der deutschen Frauenbewegung (aus den 70er Jahren) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Anna Pulley | AlterNet | September 20, 2013

Like medieval German poetry, lesbians (and bisexuals, heteroflexibles, queers, pansexuals, and womyn-loving wimmin) are frequently misunderstood. Sure, you may have read about them in a Women’s Studies class, glimpsed them briefly on  Grey’s Anatomy, or in the plaster aisle at Home Depot, but it’s a rare thing indeed to experience lesbians in the wild. Who are these mythical beings? What do they wear now that hipsters have appropriated flannel? Is it true that lesbians move in together after the second date? What does Rachel Maddow have that I don’t? These are some of the questions you may have. While we generally abide by the school rule that there are no stupid questions, when it comes to queer women, sometimes there are stupid questions we’re tired of answering. You should avoid uttering the following statements if you’d like to steer clear of arguments, severe eye rolls, physical confrontations, and being equated with a cave person.

1. Who’s the “man” in this relationship?

Neither. Both. Only when it comes to killing the spiders. In most cases, the relationship in question involves two women: that’s what makes them lesbians. Even in butch/femme pairings, it’s insulting to assume that a queer relationship is imitating a straight one, especially under the rigid and outdated gender roles that the “man” question usually implies.

Possible comeback: “I don’t know. Who’s the man in yours?”

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One-Third of Americans Under 30 Have No Religion — How Will That Change the Country?

Cover via Amazon

Amelia Thomson-Deveaux | The American Prospect | AlterNet | September 19, 2013

In the two years leading up to his death this past February, the legal and political philosopher Ronald Dworkin was completing a slim volume with a weighty title.  Religion without God, which began as a series of lectures in 2011, set a lofty goal: to propose a “religious attitude” in the absence of belief. Dworkin’s objective was not just theological. The book, he hoped, would help lower the temperature in the past decade’s battle between a group of scientists and philosophers dubbed the New Atheists and an array of critics who have accused them of everything from Islamophobia to fundamentalism to heresy.

Although the New Atheists are part of a long and distinguished tradition, including (but not limited to) philosophers Friedrich Nietzsche, Ludwig Feuerbach, and Bertrand Russell, they are notable because they have made atheism a pop success in the U.S. Since the 2004 publication of Sam Harris’s post–September 11 polemic,  The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason, the kingpins of the movement—Richard Dawkins, the late Christopher Hitchens, Daniel C. Dennett, and A.C. Grayling, to name a few—have launched diatribes against God and belief. To them, religion is at best superfluous, at worst (in Hitchens’s words) “allied to racism and tribalism and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry, contemptuous of women and coercive toward children.” This zealous attitude has earned the New Atheists high-profile critics, including Lord Jonathan Sacks, the former chief rabbi of Great Britain, who recently wrote in a column for  The Spectator:

Where is there the remotest sense that [the New Atheists] have grappled with the real issues, which have nothing to do with science and the literal meaning of scripture and everything to do with the meaningfulness or otherwise of human life, the existence or non-existence of an objective moral order … and the ability or inability of society to survive without the rituals, narratives and shared practices that create and sustain the social bond?

For a religious leader like Sacks, who has staked his career on interfaith cooperation, the New Atheists’ antagonism is obnoxious. But it turns out all the public sparring may have been missing the point. Thanks to an even more seismic shift, nonbelievers in the U.S. are already leaving the New Atheists behind.

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Verizon’s Plan to Break the Internet

Verizon High Speed Internet (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Timothy Karr | Save the Internet | September 18, 2013

Verizon has a big plan for the Internet. And if that doesn’t worry you, it should.

The company is trying to overturn the Federal Communications Commission’s Open Internet Order, which prevents Internet service providers from blocking, throttling or otherwise discriminating against online content.

And in court last Monday, Verizon lawyer Helgi Walker made the company’s intentions all too clear, saying the company wants to prioritize those websites and services that are willing to shell out for better access. She also admitted that the company would like to block online content from those companies or individuals that don’t pay Verizon’s tolls.

In other words, Verizon wants to control your online experience and make the Internet more like cable TV, where your remote offers only the illusion of choice.

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Brisbane shows ‘true colours’ at Pride Rally

Cameron Atfield | Brisbane Times | September 21, 2013

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Brisbane Pride Rally 2013

Pride in Brisbane. Photo: Harrison Saragossi

They’re out, loud and proud.

But, despite the current political landscape, Saturday’s Brisbane Pride  Festival was anything but partisan.

With Brunswick Street closed off for the Pride Rally for the very first time,  a large crowd gathered in front of a massive rainbow flag hanging off the side  of the Empire Hotel for a rally and a 1.7-kilometre march down to a fair at New  Farm Park.

Pride Festival president Deeje Hancock estimated the rally started with about  800 people marching down Brunswick Street towards New Farm Park.

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Indian LGBTQ community publishes online magazine today

English: Shiva and Parvati, Tanjore Art Gallery, India Español: Shiva y Parvati, Tanjore Art Gallery, India (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Gay Star News | September 21, 2013

Indian LGBTQ blog and support group Gaysi Family have published a second volume of their ezine, the Gaysi Zine, released online today.

The 64-page magazine features original pieces from queer writers and excerpts from Australian journalist Benjamin Law’s book Adventures in Gaysia and fiction author Parvati Sharma.

‘Through a print magazine such as the Gaysi Zine, we are trying to reach out through offline spaces – institutions, libraries, bookstores and word-of-mouth social networks,’ said MJ, the founder of Gaysi Family who also bemoaned the fact there are still no queer print magazines published by the mainstream in India.

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US gay legal rights organization publishes guidelines to students who are bullied

English: Bullying on IRFE in March 5, 2007, the first class day. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

James Withers | Gay Star News | September 21, 2013

As the school year begins in the US, the gay rights group Lambda Legal has published a set of instructions for bullied students.

‘For a lot of LGBTQ students, those perceived to be LGBTQ and the friends of LGBTQ students, bullying is a serious reality,’ the group writes in the introduction to the guidelines.

‘But that doesn’t’t mean it can’t be stopped. You have a legal right to be who you are and to be safe.’

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Arkansas AG Approves Wording Of Proposed Initiative To Repeal Gay Marriage Ban

State Capitol, Little Rock, Arkansas (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

On Top Magazine | September 21, 2013

Arkansas Attorney General Dustin McDaniel on Thursday approved a proposed initiative to repeal the state’s gay marriage ban.

Arkansas for Equality submitted the proposal to repeal the state’s 2004 voter-approved constitutional amendment limiting marriage to heterosexual unions.

McDaniel noted in his opinion that the proposal would not legalize gay nuptials in Arkansas but would “revive the General Assembly’s authority to pass such laws related to same-sex marriage as it deems appropriate.”

Supporters must collect 78,133 valid signatures from registered voters by July 7, 2014 to qualify for next year’s general election.

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GLQ – A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies: The Athletic Issue

Georgetown University, Washington, DC, USA. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

GLQ – A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies

Volume 19   Number 4   2013

The Athletic Issue

http://www.dukeupress.edu/The-Athletic-Issue-GLQ/

 

     When a special issue of GLQ is themed The Athletic  Issue, by queer studies scholars, and arrives during the present extended  but passionate count-down to the equivocal 2014 Winter Olympic Games/Sochi  forthcoming in gay-inimicus Russia, one looks among the journal’s pages for  a connection if not some explicitly orienting opinions.

 

     Though not directly mentioning Sochi, such a  connection could be a manifesto by Matthew  Tinkcom (on p. 563, and partly quoted below), one of several  by authors collected under the title Queer Media Manifestos. And,  neatly, Matthew Tinkcom is associate professor at Georgetown  University, Washington DC — teaching in the Graduate Program in  Communication, Culture and Technology.      -sh, Sept. 20, 2013

It’s Called Dominant Culture For A Reason

 

     “The survival of queer people has always relied on  their ability to engage with different media — writing, cinema, TV, the  Internet — in ways that sustain us and give us life.  This is no small  matter in a social world predicated on violence against queers.

 

     “It’s worrisome, then, that the larger  corporatization of media — from the homogenized culture industry product to the  consolidated ownership of media enterprises to the echo chambers of social media  — has grave implications for how queers continue to participate in the sphere  of cultural production, consumption and its political dimensions.  I say  worrisome because the tendency here seems counterintuitive to what we may want  to think is going on:  the more things may look like they’re improving for  queer lives, the more we may be encountering more the subtle and nuanced forms  of hate-thought and the compulsion toward conformism that are part of the media  matrix.  Even as a handful of innovations for queers moves forward —  same-sex marriage, the nominal end of ‘don’t ask, don’t tell,’ queers in popular  media — we might be tempted to repress just how much the cultural sphere and  its mediations participate in the disavowal of deeply entrenched antagonisms  toward queers.  It might sound like a cliche, but when was the last time  you encountered a dominant piece of cultural production that really — really —  took seriously the sense of queer life beyond tolerable (or routine)  tokenism?”

Close the N.S.A.’s Back Doors

The seal of the U.S. National Security Agency. The first use was in September 1966, replacing an older seal which was used briefly. For more information, see here and here. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

THE EDITORIAL BOARD | New York Times | September 21, 2013

In 2006, a federal agency, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, helped build an international encryption system to help countries and industries fend off computer hacking and theft. Unbeknown to the many users of the system, a different government arm, the National Security Agency, secretly inserted a “back door” into the system that allowed federal spies to crack open any data that was encoded using its technology.

Documents leaked by Edward Snowden, the former N.S.A. contractor, make clear that the agency has never met an encryption system that it has not tried to penetrate. And it frequently tries to take the easy way out. Because modern cryptography can be so hard to break, even using the brute force of the agency’s powerful supercomputers, the agency prefers to collaborate with big software companies and cipher authors, getting hidden access built right into their systems.

The New York Times, The Guardian and ProPublica recently reported that the agency now has access to the codes that protect commerce and banking systems, trade secrets and medical records, and everyone’s e-mail and Internet chat messages, including virtual private networks. In some cases, the agency pressured companies to give it access; as The Guardian reported earlier this year, Microsoft provided access to Hotmail, Outlook.com, SkyDrive and Skype. According to some of the Snowden documents given to Der Spiegel, the N.S.A. also has access to the encryption protecting data on iPhones, Android and BlackBerry phones.

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Once Suicidal and Shipped Off, Now Battling Nevada Over Care

Jim Wilson/The New York Times

David Theisen, a homeless man at the center of a lawsuit against the State of Nevada, said, “Technically, they shouldn’t have been allowed to send me anywhere. They should have put me in a little room until I got better.” More Photos »

RICK LYMAN | New York Times | September 21, 2013

SAN FRANCISCO — David Theisen keeps his legal papers in a frayed yellow envelope in his tiny transients’ hotel room, a toilet down the hall, the covers of his beloved comic books, with titles like “Dark Mysteries” and “Vault of Horror,” lining the drab walls.

A lot has changed in the year and a half since Mr. Theisen, 52 and homeless, threatened to kill himself with a butcher knife and ended up in a Las Vegas psychiatric center. After one night, Mr. Theisen found himself on a bus to San Francisco, several sack lunches and a day’s worth of medication clutched in his lap.

“Technically, they shouldn’t have been allowed to send me anywhere,” Mr. Theisen said. “They should have put me in a little room until I got better.”

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