I graduated from film school ten years ago. They were telling female students that women aren’t suited to be camera operators or cinematographers, because a million silly reasons starting with ‘the gear is too heavy’.
Every year when we went to a trade show, women would have trouble trying out the steadicams and body harnesses because they were all built to accommodate bodies without larger breasts and hips. And too heavy, or so the assistants claimed as they refused to let them try the gear out- but they sure accepted men of every body type, build and strength.
The women who graduated from the cinematography department had to fight through all that disparaging sexism and argue their right to be there constantly. You’re still gonna find a lot of men in the industry who think a female cinematographer or camera operator is unusual, atypical, and likely that she’s less capable because the job is really too taxing for her.
It’s not. What’s taxing is having to constantly be told that you’re not really fit for the job just because of your gender.
Municipal crews draped a black cloth over a statue of Edward Cornwallis in a downtown Halifax park Saturday as protesters gathered with a plan to remove the statue.
After a city truck arrived, crews informed the gathering they would shroud the monument as a sign of good faith.
Cheers went up from the crowd as the monument disappeared under its new veil. Some demonstrators chanted and raised their fists in the air as others drummed and sang. Afterward, people joined hands and slowly circled the statue.
CBC News reporters on the scene estimated there were about 150 people at the gathering.
Cornwallis, a governor of Nova Scotia, was a military officer who founded Halifax for the British in 1749. The same year, he issued the so-called scalping proclamation, offering a cash bounty to anyone who killed a Mi’kmaq person.
(FYI, what this article doesn’t mention is that there was a group of people there trying to disrupt things, one with a British flag, and one with a “Trump for President” T-Shirt.)
They should keep the statue of Cornwallis, because no one benefits from forgetting history, but build a bigger statue honoring local First Nations beside it.
the problem is we tend to build statues to honor people
there are better ways to remember history than to have a statue of a guy who called for the scalps of the Mi’kmaq people, yea?
let the first nations take turns taking him down with a hammer
Though, at least that door is usable for now, which is better than it was for a while there. It wasn’t wanting to open at all, which was extra convenient 😱
For the longest time I thought the whole “generation wars” stuff was kind of a tongue-in-cheek society-wide in-joke, like the Mandela Effect or “2016 is cursed”. You know, something that provides a useful framework occasionally, something it’s fun to suspend disbelief for once in a while, but that no one really takes seriously. “Oh, Boomers do X and Millennials do Y, damn kids get off my lawn, what’s the deal with airplane peanuts, etc.”
I’m now finding myself more and more weirded out by how incredibly, almost vitriolically seriously people on both “sides” seem to take the generational divide. It’s like watching people get really into astrology or Myers-Briggs, except people who are really into astrology or Myers-Briggs don’t usually write aggressive thinkpieces about how Capricorns are ruining the country. I’m seeing these incredibly long and detailed Tumblr posts about all the ways Millennials are Fundamentally Different from Boomers and how they Just Don’t Understand. Off Tumblr, media is more slanted in Boomers’ favor, but both “sides” (again, I hate using that word) totally uncritically ape the idea that generation gaps are absolute and inherent. All those viral rebuttals you see are just shifting which group comes out on top. There’s nothing complicating the idea of bullshit generation war in the first place.
As though Millennials are the first generation to be defined by political or economic instability! As though the Leave It to Beaver suburban nuclear family ideal Boomers are constantly accused of being stuck in was ever universal in any meaningful way, rather than an innovation of a very particular set of circumstances! You really think this is the first generation to live in tension with dying industries? Read up on the Panic of 1873 and the Great Railroad Strike of 1877. Industries boom and bust and become obsolete. Workers struggle to adjust and eventually migrate to new fields. I swear it’s like some of these thinkpiece authors think this is the first economic flux ever.
The idea that Americans lived in middle-class prosperity until Boomers screwed it all up and consigned Millennials to part-time jobs and delayed homeownership is laughable. It’s ahistorical, and it’s just plain erasure of the migrant workers and wage laborers and perpetual tenants in every generation. Working the same job for 60 years and buying a house by 30 is not the natural state of the world. It’s the case for some people in some very particular circumstances. Both sides of the Boomers vs. Millennials discourse seem to consistently forget this. On the one hand, you’ve got cranky Fox News types whining that kids just don’t try hard enough these days; on the other, you’ve got hipsters whining that no one’s ever had to have five roommates before. Both of these arguments assume that middle-class nuclear suburban living is the natural state of things and that anything else is somehow a perversion, and each side is blaming the other for perverting it.
As though young singles weren’t sharing rooms in boardinghouses in 1917. As though working-class fathers didn’t have to take whatever menial gigs came their way. I’m not saying that “natural” equals “good”, mind, and I’m certainly not saying people should stop complaining about economic inequality because the natural state is living ten to a bed in a tenement or something. I’m not talking about what’s ethical, I’m talking about what happened, and I’m talking about the ways that everyone involved in this discourse needs to step back and recalibrate. There is so much empathy to be found here. So much common ground. And that will never be remotely accomplished if we keep flinging ahistorical shit.
Oh my lord this. It makes me ill.
Mitch McConnell is not some nightmarish representation of your parents’ unholy id, guys.
Nor is your daughter jobless because she’s lazy, people.
i have no fucking clue what to even say about this like this is just absolutely stupefying
this is why i will always make fun of vegans
Chelsea Manning. Committed. Treason. She put American lives at risk. This is a fucking joke.
She exposed war crimes you fuck, including video of the US military killing journalists (some of whom were Americans to follow your point) and civilians including children, showed the awful conditions and tortue of the prisoners in Guantanamo (again including children as young as 13 and journalists), and revealed the civilian deathtoll from Iraq and Afghanistan to be in the 100,000’s
American lives are not inherently more valuable than any other. It is not treason to expose the crimes of your government; blind, obediant patriotism is much more harmful as it allowed the US to put even more of its citizens into a war zone to die.
Even then, none of what she leaked endangered a single troop on the ground as none of the files had anything to do with current military operations.
As Chris Hedges eloquently writes in his book Wages of Rebellion:
“Manning, if we had a functioning judiciary, would have been a witness for the prosecution against the war criminals she helped expose. She would not have been headed, bound and shackled, to the military prison at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.
But the government effectively shut down Manning’s defense team. The Army private was not permitted to argue that she had a moral and legal obligation under international law to defy military orders and to make public the war crimes she had uncovered. Because the documents that detailed the crimes, torture, and killing that Manning revealed were classified, they were barred from discussion in court, and so the fundamental issue of war crimes was effectively removed from the trial. Manning was forbidden to challenge the government’s unverified assertion that she had harmed national security.”
Some other things to consider:
*Manning was prevented from presenting her motives to the court- that could only be raised at the time of sentencing but we all know that’s too late
*The restrictions placed on her and her defense team prevented Manning from using the Nuremberg Principles in her favor – principles created post world war II by the United Nations to determine what constitutes war crimes
* Had she been able to appeal to the Nuremberg Principles she would have been set free since under them military orders do not exonerate you from committing war crimes
*Empirical evidence now shows that Manning’s actions did not harm the U.S.’s empire building, war-loving ways
So besides being innocent she was fucking shafted by this twisted, servile to the military industrial complex judiciary system we have that so many of us are proud of. This country is pathetic.
With what we currently have running the country, you’d better hope there are more Mannings.
what’s with the weird stigma that being closeted is okay but only if it would be physically unsafe for you to come out? coming out is YOUR business, if you know it would be fine & nothing would happen to you & nobody would care, but you don’t want to anyway, that’s your choice and it’s perfectly valid.
Also this is not binary. It can be physically safe, but endanger your job/education, your living situation, your professional or personal contacts. And sometimes you just don’t know if it does.
Do you ever just stop and think about how just being queer is immediately considered an action of deception and hiding? How weird is that, right? If a stranger walks into the room, suddenly I’m no longer out of the closet. I’ve taken no action to declare my identity one way or the other, but now I’m considered responsible for this stranger’s mis-assumption.
Coming out is continuous. You know that thing where two mirrors face each other and you can see infinite mirrors? Coming out is like walking down that mirror passage – there’s always another closet door after the one you’ve just opened, there’s always another person waiting to hold you responsible for their assumptions.
Fuck that noise. If it’s unsafe in any way for you to open the closet door, you don’t have to. If it’s completely and perfectly safe, you still don’t have to. You didn’t put that door there, you’re not responsible for anyone else’s judgments of you. Fuck that noise.
The only reason coming out exists as a concept is because society has codified heterosexuality as the default value. Then instead of recognizing the absence of information as a null i.e. no value, an unknown orientation, we treat the absence of information as confirmation of the default value. So unless otherwise specified, everyone is considered straight. And further if a non-straight individual doesn’t actively work to challenge the default, society holds them accountable and calls it “deception.” So I’ll reiterate from above- fuck that noise. Just because society has established a shitty set of assumptions doesn’t mean you have to play that game. Tell what you want to who you want and sleep well at night knowing you don’t owe anyone anything.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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