Deyshia Hargrave is an English teacher at Rene Rost Middle Schools in Vermilion
Parish, Louisiana; on Monday night, she attended a special meeting of
the local school board and, when called upon comment period, politely
asked why the board superintendants had voted themselves a raise while
the teachers in the school district have been subjected to a long-term
pay-freeze.
The superintendent ruled her question out of order and then a deputy
Abbeville city marshal who works in the parish schools dragged her out
of the room, put her in handcuffs and threw her to the floor while
chanting “stop resisting.”
The board of education says it won’t press charges against her. However,
the city is holding her on charges of “remaining after being forbidden”
and “resisting an officer.”
It gets better. The school board president can’t fucking handle himself in a goddamn interview, and was getting all pissy about the “threats and obscenities” his office has been getting thanks to “that stupid a** video” and whining about how “everyone wants to side with the poor little woman who got thrown out.”
Fucker actually says “She made a choice. She could have walked out and nothing would have happened.”
Of course, if you watch the video you will see that she was A) addressed by the board, B) still being spoken to by a board member at the same time the officer was trying to eject her, and C) she did in fact gather her things and walk out peacefully after the board member finished speaking to her.
If anyone else would like to give Vermilion School Board President Anthony Fontana’s office a call and maybe some fresh obscenities to complain about, their number is (337) 893-3973
So if this officer is working in the schools it makes me wonder how students are being treated.
“I want to give people social and financial empowerment, so eventually people who want to come out won’t be affected. They will have their own social security system. It won’t make a difference if they are disinherited.”
It is great that he’s doing this, but it’s very disingenuous for a British newspaper to publish this and discuss section 377 as part of the homophobic climate of India without also mentioning that section 377 originates from British colonial rule. To mention this out of context and talk about cultural reasons for homophobia alone, portrays Indian culture as inherently homophobic but doesn’t take accountability for the way which Britain enforced the conditions for that climate to occur.
Though, tbf, there has also been a swing toward use of behavior therapy to suppress tics in kids 😱
“oh, the thing you’re noticing where your kid comes home from school and tics a lot, that’s just because home and school are different environment”
uh, yeah… it’s because school is an environment where they have to suppress, and home isn’t. If it was static environmental things at home, you wouldn’t see the cluster of tics when a kid gets home.
Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) often find it difficult
to look others in the eyes. This avoidance has typically been
interpreted as a sign of social and personal indifference, but reports
from people with autism suggests otherwise. Many say that looking others
in the eye is uncomfortable or stressful for them – some will even say
that “it burns” – all of which points to a neurological cause. Now, a
team of investigators based at the Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging
at Massachusetts General Hospital has shed light on the brain
mechanisms involved in this behavior. They reported their findings in a Nature Scientific Reports paper.
“The
findings demonstrate that, contrary to what has been thought, the
apparent lack of interpersonal interest among people with autism is not
due to a lack of concern,” says Nouchine Hadjikhani, MD, PhD, director
of neurolimbic research in the Martinos Center and corresponding author
of the new study. “Rather, our results show that this behavior is a way
to decrease an unpleasant excessive arousal stemming from overactivation
in a particular part of the brain.”
The key to this research
lies in the brain’s subcortical system, which is responsible for the
natural orientation toward faces seen in newborns and is important later
for emotion perception. The subcortical system can be specifically
activated by eye contact, and previous work by Hadjikhani and colleagues
revealed that, among those with autism, it was oversensitive to effects
elicited by direct gaze and emotional expression. In the present study,
she took that observation further, asking what happens when those with
autism are compelled to look in the eyes of faces conveying different
emotions.
Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI),
Hadjikhani and colleagues measured differences in activation within the
face-processing components of the subcortical system in people with
autism and in control participants as they viewed faces either freely or
when constrained to viewing the eye-region. While activation of these
structures was similar for both groups exhibited during free viewing,
overactivation was observed in participants with autism when
concentrating on the eye-region. This was especially true with fearful
faces, though similar effects were observed when viewing happy, angry
and neutral faces.
The findings of the study support the
hypothesis of an imbalance between the brain’s excitatory and inhibitory
signaling networks in autism – excitatory refers to neurotransmitters
that stimulate the brain, while inhibitory refers to those that calm it
and provide equilibrium. Such an imbalance, likely the result of diverse
genetic and environmental causes, can strengthen excitatory signaling
in the subcortical circuitry involved in face perception. This in turn
can result in an abnormal reaction to eye contact, an aversion to direct
gaze and consequently abnormal development of the social brain.
In
revealing the underlying reasons for eye-avoidance, the study also
suggests more effective ways of engaging individuals with autism. “The
findings indicate that forcing children with autism to look into
someone’s eyes in behavioral therapy may create a lot of anxiety for
them,” says Hadjikhani, an associate professor of Radiology at Harvard
Medical School. “An approach involving slow habituation to eye contact
may help them overcome this overreaction and be able to handle eye
contact in the long run, thereby avoiding the cascading effects that
this eye-avoidance has on the development of the social brain.”
The
researchers are already planning to follow up the research. Hadjikhani
is now seeking funding for a study that will use magnetoencephalography
(MEG) together with eye-tracking and other behavioral tests to probe
more deeply the relationship between the subcortical system and eye
contact avoidance in autism.
“So now that neurotypical scientists have said so, can we stop forcing Autistic people to – For fuck’s sake.”
Aren’t there entire major cultures that don’t do eye contact? How do they explain the “development of the social brain” there?
I don’t mean to be unkind, but I don’t get how you can claim to “love books” and have a shelf full of Harry Potter and Jodi Picault. Have we created a nation of people who honestly believe that “reading” is one of their hobbies because they own a copy of The DaVinci Code? Where did we go wrong?
Your homework: Burn your books. All of them. If you think they’re good books, then burn everything else you have that you think is good. Don’t give them away, or donate them – that’s just moving the problem on to some other poor bastard.
Now populate your shelves with: William Faulkner; Vladimir Nabokov; Ernest Hemingway; Hunter S. Thompson; Kurt Vonnegut; Nikolai Gogol; Fyodor Dostoevsky; Frank Kafka; and that’s just for starters.
Come back to me for further recommendations when the fog has lifted from your brain.
I’d forgotten about this lovely reply to one of my photos from 7 years ago. Oh, literary snobbery, you haven’t changed much.
I’d forgotten about it too. I hope you’ve developed a love of literature in the last 7 years, or at least burned your copy of The DaVinci Code.
And what have we learned?
Never confuse “snobbery” or “elitism” for having standards. (If you don’t have any standards for yourself, then why should anyone else?)
Never confuse “popular” with “good”. (If every book on your bookshelf appeared on a best-seller list, how do you tell the difference?)
Learn to accept criticism, especially from people who have no investment in whether you take their advice or not. (If you find it difficult to accept criticism, you’re missing out on many opportunities to improve. Here are my book reviews. I might have got it all wrong. Please feel free to reblog any of them with any criticism you may have – let’s get a conversation going! I’ve also started a blog of simplified classics called Pretend You’ve Read. Please feel free to criticise anything you feel I got wrong there, too. Why not? Hone your reader’s instincts.)
Keep pushing forward. (Otherwise, what are you doing with your life?)
Always try to be a better version of yourself. (ditto)
Put your energy into creating things, making things and helping people, not into destroying things, taking things apart or trashing people. (I made that post with the sole intention of improving your life. I wasn’t try to upset you or make you feel bad or come across as “snobbery”. I was trying to help you understand what literature is, what it can do, and how you can cut yourself off a slice of that crazy action.)
A great way to learn to be a better version of yourself is to read literature. (I assume you understand this better than you did seven years ago. At least, I hope so!)
All from that one little post I reblogged from you 7 years ago.
Let’s be friends!
Well actually, my career in publishing and the book industry – which I hadn’t yet begun when I posted this – is down to my passion for all books, whether they’re deemed to be “literature” or not. The book industry is not sustained by holding onto the novels of dead white men, but by recognising that there are gems in all genres, and valuing all readers.
I personally love children’s books and YA. But I also ran a successful Classic Challenge for five years. (Don’t think that was anything to do with you, dear reader).
I have not moved on from Harry Potter or A Series of Unfortunate Events (maybe Dan Brown, but hey, it was seven years ago) and I wouldn’t have it any other way.
“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.” – Haruki Murakami
William Faulkner; Vladimir Nabokov; Ernest Hemingway; Hunter S.
Thompson; Kurt Vonnegut; Nikolai Gogol; Fyodor Dostoevsky; Frank Kafka.
Wow. White guys. So many white guys. They are the one true coming of all literature.
Wow. This guy. Telling OP that all her interests are trash and that she should burn them so she could learn about real literature. Then, seven years later, telling her he was doing it to improve her life.
This whole set of interactions is so new and different. It’s almost like it hasn’t happened a billion times in the last day. Wow.
Good grief. What a tool.
Don’t you know all good arguments start with “burn that book”?
Frank Kafka.
Frank.
The day someone tells me to burn books of any kind is the day I know that they are a moron who believes in censorship of individual taste and of FUN. The day that person only recommends books that are on any school syllabus and doesn’t branch out beyond them underscores the point with fifteen exclamation marks.
Probably my favorite is the fact that OP had 2 obvious Richard Dawkins books (The Selfish Gene and The Greatest Show on Earth) indicating a wide and well-nourished range of interests – from evolutionary biology to young adult fantasy to women’s fiction. (and how satisfying and beautiful is her bookshelf!!) I mean, the cure for a balanced literary diet is not “apply a small wodge of tedious historical men’s fiction following the same themes.”
Meanwhile, her self-appointed critic literally just has a list of dead white American/Russian men who wrote Gritty Literary Fiction About Sad Stuff during a narrow period of history. THEY’RE NOT EVEN THE PRETENTIOUS CLASSICS! THEY’RE NOT EVEN THE OBSCURE FARE!
I am actually a lot more accepting about people being snotty about Classics ™ because I accept that they’ve gone so deep that they probably don’t realize how much they need to decompress – they have lost their adaptations to surface life and normal human interaction, like those deepwater fish that you have to bring up slowly in your net, or they’ll burst. But imagine bringing yourself to be snobby about angsty men’s fiction written between 1800 and 2000.
(Also, Frank Kafka. We shouldn’t laugh)
I don’t know which is a richer irony: “Create, don’t destroy!” from someone whose criticism involved telling a stranger to burn her library, or “If every book on your bookshelf appeared on a best-seller list, how do you tell the difference?” from someone whose essential reading list is a Freshman Lit syllabus.
Here’s a better idea: Read what appeals to you, take it apart, put it back together, find out what makes it tick, revel in what you love about it, and don’t let anyone take it from you. And the OP is absolutely killing it. 🙂
I find it really disturbing when strangers pressure other people to uphold their own moral standards. And bang on about how you really need their criticism and if you don’t want it that’s a failing on your part. Who the fuck cares what you think about “pushing yourself to do better?” My “pushing myself” looks different than yours. Fuck off
Canada has become the first North American country to allow its citizens to identify as gender neutral on their passports.
Instead of identifying as male or female, citizens can opt for an ‘X’ on their passports and other government documents to indicate that they are non-binary.
Other countries who have made the move include Germany, Australia, and Pakistan.
What does identifying as genderless on your passport accomplish? What if literally ever person requested a passport like this? Why include sex on a passport at all if it is interchangeable with gender identity and thus meaningless? I don’t believe in discrimination against people based on how they chose to present themselves, but I wonder what is then point?
Vancouver-based filmmaker Joshua M. Ferguson, who uses the pronouns they/them, said in a statement that they will be applying to have the ‘X’ designation on their passport today.
Ferguson, who is from Ontario, was the first person in that province to apply for a non-binary birth certificate but they are still waiting for that to come through; they are also waiting to find out if BC will approve an ‘X’ on their health card and driver’s license.
“Non-binary people like me experience emotional distress and encounter difficult situations in public when our forms of identification do not match our gender identity and gender expression,” said Ferguson.
You can’t actually apply for a passport that says “X” yet because they can’t print them. You can, however, ask for an observation (which is like an official sticker correcting the error). Don’t fill out a new application/get new pictures. You do not need this for the observation. However, once the passports can be printed you will need to re-apply. This means you need to get new pictures and fill out a new application. I know all this because I tried to get a gender neutral passport this morning. If you have already gotten pictures – keep them. They’re good for six months.
Reblogging for that information.
I also wanted to comment on this:
Helen Kennedy, executive director of Egale Canada, an LGBT rights group, told the Globe and Mail that Canada should reconsider having gender markers on passports at all.
I agree here. The health cards in Ontario were changed and no longer have the marker on them. I absolutely believe there’s no reason to either declare your identity or declare what’s in your pants. (OHIP, who might ostensibly be the only organization that needs that information, has it on their files, and it doesn’t need to be on the health card – hence the change. So if they can do it, everyone can.)
People are identifiable by their photos. Adding the gender marker just means that whoever is identifying you will use societal expectations of what your gender is “supposed” to look like. Even if you look exactly like the picture on the ID, you can be turned away because someone has decided you don’t “look like” the gender and it’s “suspicious.” Better to take them off altogether.
In the aftermath of the torch-lit white supremacist rally at the University of Virginia, many white folks took to Twitter to express a combination of disgust and incredulity under the hashtag #ThisIsNotUs. Users argued that white supremacists violently protesting the planned removal of a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee “don’t represent our country.”
Their message was as clear as it was race- and class-based: White supremacy — and its cousin, white nationalism — represents a deep perversion of the values of respectable white, upper-middle-class and college-educated Americans. That is, it’s impossible to be both a white supremacist and a well-educated white American.
Such an assumption, however, is both dangerous and historically inaccurate. Contrary to popular belief, white supremacy has not gestated on the fringes of American politics. Rather, it has flourished as a social movement grounded in respectability politics and led by elites. Understanding this history is essential to eradicating the scourge of white supremacy and advancing more just political alternatives. Mischaracterizing its roots, history and latent political assumptions allows middle-class and college-educated white Americans to escape responsibility for extirpating this stain on our society.
Given this history, it should come as no surprise that the lead architects of the Charlottesville demonstration — Jason Kessler, Richard Spencer, Tim Gionet and Matthew Heimbach — aremiddle- to upper-middle-class, college-educated white men in their mid-20s to mid-30s. Spencer, in fact, is a former doctoral student in modern European intellectual history at Duke University. He has been described by the Southern Poverty Law Center as “a suit-and-tie version of the white supremacists of old, a kind of professional racist in khakis.”
But white supremacists of old were, in fact, the very same “suit-and-tie version.” In her 2015 book, “Ku-Klux: The Birth of the Klan During Reconstruction,” Elaine Frantz Parsons argues that “the men who first became Ku-Klux — Frank O. McCord, Richard Reed, John C. Lester, Calvin Jones, John Booker Kennedy, and James Crowe — presented themselves as elites and intellectuals, above and opposed to the violence of rough men.”
These were the well-educated elites of their day. Many founders of the Klan were property owners and most had assets exceeding $10,000. Two were attorneys and one was a real estate broker. One member, John Kennedy, had recently inherited $20,000 from his father, a figure equivalent to at least $500,000 today. Many were widely read and at least half had taken college classes.
While aggressive federal intervention helped to dismantle the 19th-century Klan, William J. Simmons resurrected it in 1915 in honor of the inaugural screening of “The Birth of a Nation,” D.W. Griffith’s cinematic tribute to the Klan. Simmons, who studied medicine at Johns Hopkins University for a short time and then served as a Methodist minister, launched what historians now refer to as “the second Klan” by setting fire to a wooden cross atop Stone Mountain on the outskirts of Atlanta.
The second Klan proved more popular than the first, with membership peaking at 4 million in the mid-1920s. With its membership composed disproportionately of middle-class individuals and families, leadership oriented many of the organization’s visible public activities toward festivals, pageants and social gatherings.
As Joshua Rothman writes in the Atlantic, “In some ways, it was this superficially innocuous Klan that was the most insidious of them all. Packaging its noxious ideology as traditional small-town values and wholesome fun, the Klan of the 1920s encouraged native-born white Americans to believe that bigotry, intimidation, harassment and extralegal violence were all perfectly compatible with, if not central to, patriotic respectability.”
At the same time, a burgeoning elite-led eugenics movement helped to lend “scientific” support to cultural arguments in favor of white supremacy. In his 1916 bestseller “The Passing of the Great Race,” noted eugenicist Madison Grant — a Columbia Law School trained attorney — argued that whereas Northern European immigrants of the 19th century were “skilled, thrifty, and hardworking” just like native-born Americans, more recent immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe were “unskilled, ignorant, predominantly Catholic or Jewish” and ostensibly unassimilable.
Grant, among other eugenicists, was tapped as an expert to speak on the threat of “inferior stock” from Eastern and southern Europe and played a critical role as Congress debated provisions of the highly racially restrictive Immigration Act of 1924, which limited the influx of “dangerous” and “dysgenic” Italians, Arabs, Eastern European Jews, Asians and other not-fully-white “social inadequates.”
In 1920, Harry Laughlin — eminent eugenicist with a doctorate in cytology from Princeton — testified to the House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization that “the character of a nation is determined primarily by its racial qualities.” Laughlin’s sentiment captured the spirit of his time. During the 1920s, a number of immigration and legal reforms were based on scientific notions of immutable difference between races and the conviction that the purity of whiteness must be protected at all costs.
Against this historical backdrop, the hashtag #ThisIsNotUs belies the truth about the ubiquity of white supremacy and diminishes its centrality to the political architecture of the U.S. nation-state. Worse, #ThisIsNotUs fundamentally misdiagnoses its basic ideological aims and strategies as a social movement.
Far from an aberrational political ideology, suit-and-tie white supremacy (and lab-coat white supremacy, for that matter) has been central to how the United States refashions itself as a modern racial state still committed to white supremacy. To address and remedy this accumulation of historical baggage we must recall that white supremacy is not some aberrant fringe movement. Its most terrorizing element is its banality. Rejecting the idea of white supremacy as an embarrassing pathological appendage to an otherwise just and democratic body politic is the first step toward challenging its legitimacy in U.S. politics.
The Stanford prison experiment tapes were so stupid when I watched them in AP psych and so stupid when I watch this film about them. Literally they could’ve all sat and played cards and got $15 a day to tell ghost stories all day and be best friends. But masculinity and whiteness and power created this violent irrationality that positioned young ass men to be met with brutality and trauma and disrespect even when it was obviously taken too far. and it makes no sense. If someone put me in a room with Black girls and said I would get paid $90 a day (that’s the equivalent apparently) to be a prison guard, do you know how fast I’d be sitting with them and learning about them and exchanging Instagrams and like.. sleeping.. like what the fuck was the point of any of that…
My psych teacher introduced us to this study and literally before she showed us was like “don’t ever confuse a study based on one type of person (white men/boys) to be an example of an Everyman situation. There is strong evidence that if this was recreated with diversity, or even just with girls, that the results would have been drastically different. This is an example of bias and sexism in the medical research community.”
“Other, more subtle factors also shaped the experiment. It’s often said that the study participants were ordinary guys—and they were, indeed, determined to be “normal” and healthy by a battery of tests. But they were also a self-selected group who responded to a newspaper advertisement seeking volunteers for “a psychological study of prison life.” In a 2007 study, the psychologists Thomas Carnahan and Sam McFarland asked whether that wording itself may have stacked the odds. They recreated the original ad, and then ran a separate ad omitting the phrase “prison life.” They found that the people who responded to the two ads scored differently on a set of psychological tests. Those who thought that they would be participating in a prison study had significantly higher levels of aggressiveness, authoritarianism, Machiavellianism, narcissism, and social dominance, and they scored lower on measures of empathy and altruism.”
The thing about this study is that whether or not it’s generalizable to the public is debatable at best.
But it’s certainly generalizable to the population of people who tend to be drawn to prison system and law enforcement jobs because that’s exactly the demographics that tend to show up in those positions.
Seriously, if you think poor, white, rural folk had the money to fly and drive to Charlottesville, pay for lodging and food and all other expenses to attend a Nazi rally, i don’t know what to tell you
These folk are probably professionals in cushy positions, business owners or public employees.
I’m a qpoc, This is what I’m talking about when white people straight wash POC.
@hijabby may I hop on this post to make a point? You’re quite a bit younger than me, which isn’t a problem or a bad thing, it just means you will have still been in kindergarten or not even born yet when the events I am about to discuss took place and given the nature of queer history, it’s totally possible I learned stuff that’s faded into ephemera for your generation.
QUEER WAS THE ACCEPTABLE, ACADEMIC TERM FOR “LGBTQIA” IN THE EARLY-TO-MID 2000s.
I took classes in Queer Literature. We discussed Queer History. Some of my professors–who were themselves gay, lesbian, and bisexual, mind you–referred to historical figures as queer on the basis that those figures did not exist in societies that had a modern-day understanding of sexuality, and so trying to box them into modern labels is an exercise in futility. I went to marches where we screamed “we’re here, we’re queer, we want our civil rights.”
All of this, by the way, spawns out of the Genderqueer and ACT UP movements of the 1990s; they’re the ones who invented the chant on which the above chant was based, the one you may have heard elsewhere: “we’re here, we’re queer, get over it.” I’m proud of my own part in queer history, but those people, the ones who created the AIDS quilt and the die-ins and the fierce demands for same-sex marriage so they could visit partners dying in the hospital, they’re the real heroes. And they called themselves queer.
And?
Most of them were not white.
I am. The radical activism of my generation looks very different from generations past because, I’m sorry to say, white queer folks sat back and let queer folks of color do the hard part, and then we grabbed the baton and charged over the first big finish line while the sportscasters talked about the stunning race we’d run. I’m not sorry to be an activist or to be working in my own generation, but I’m very deeply sorry that queer activism en masse has widely ignored the nonwhite, noncis people who got us where we are.
“Queer” has more uses than just being a slur that was reclaimed 30+ years ago. Queer is a useful term if, say, you’re 15 and you’re not sure if you’re asexual or a late bloomer, but you don’t want to just say “oh yeah, I’m gay/straight.” Queer is a useful term if, like me, you escaped a fundamentalist church and your whole life has been defined by strict labels, and you just want out. Queer is a useful term if you’re from a country where gender doesn’t fit a Western binary but you want a quick term to describe yourself to Western people.
And do you know what else queer is?
Queer is hated by TERFs because it encompasses trans people.
Because it embraces aroace people.
Because it says “you are here, you are welcome, you belong” to people who say “I know I’m not straight, but I don’t know what I AM.” What you are is queer, and queer is enough. Queer is the place you can sit, rest, and figure it out at your own pace.
TERFs started the narrative of “queer is only a slur, has never been anything else, and was never reclaimed and you should never ever say it ever” in order to gatekeep our community. When you try to deny this term, YOU ARE DOING THE WORK OF TERFS.
Queer is not a slur. Queer is a reclaimed word that is of huge help to people across the community, but most especially to our fellows who aren’t “just” LGB, and to the nonwhite members of our community who do not fit into the gender binary.
Stop. STOP. Stop listening to TERFs who pretend nothing of queer rights existed between 1880 and 2015. Stop being ahistorical and disenfranchising.
We’re here, we’re queer, get the fuck over it.
In addition to all of this, The Bi community in the 80s and 90s used Queer a lot as well because the word Bisexual was less tolerable so to still feel a part of the community they rightfully were a part of, they used Queer. Granted, this was when they were rallying and making sure people saw “Bisexual” on posters and pins but it made gay people uncomfortable and not every Bisexual could handle that.
So when I see things like “Q Slur” what it looks like is the active invalidation of lgbt+ people who find safe haven in a word that is all-encompassing without specification. When I was confused and having panic attacks over the fact no label fit me – Queer saved me.
I think people have a right to choose not to use a reclaimed word for themselves, marginalized people get that choice. But to demand NO one use it often comes with the implication of an unawareness to the history behind it and how our community fought tooth and nail for that word to be reclaimed for us to use – decades ago.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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