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Monthly Archives: October 2011

Unionbusting at Qantas Causes Global Travel Nightmares

On Saturday, chaos erupted at airports across the world as Australian airline Qantas declared that it was grounding all flights ‘until further notice,’ stranding tens of thousands of travelers who scrambled to make alternate arrangements with no advance warning. Why, one might ask, would an airline do such a thing? Was there possibly a critical […]

Occupying Europe, when the colonizer reclaims wealth

I have a fondness for the spirit behind the Occupy movement. I suppose my fondness is based on potentials. The potential to change something, to move in a different direction, to create new forms of organization, to engage young people politically in ways that resonate with them. I guess I still like the idea of […]

Who Exactly IS The 1%?

There’s considerable confusion circulating over who is in the top 1% in the United States, with a constant barrage of numbers that seem to shift depending on source, agenda, and timing. These are often used as derails, and it’s easy to derail with arguments about how to define the top 1% in the United States, […]

Why do we need an Occupy Australia?

The Occupy movement – itself sparked by the Arab Spring and the indignado protests in Spain and Greece – has quick spread across the United States and other countries including my own beautiful, ugly, homeland of Australia. Many Australians have questioned the need for an Occupy movement of our own. In contrast to the US, […]

You Do Not Get Any Candy This Halloween, Sorry

Hey! U.S. readers: Who wants to be that awful neighbor who hands out pennies on Halloween? The one all the kids hate? You do, you do! Unfortunately. Because here’s the problem: due to some, er, choices made by the Hershey Candy Company, you basically cannot buy or eat candy now without accidentally funding the process […]

It’s All For A Cause, You Know: Breast Cancer, Pinkwashing, and Objectification

October, as many readers are no doubt aware, is ‘breast cancer awareness’ month in the United States. The tide of pink-branded products, courtesy of a campaign started in the early 1990s by the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation, might have been a tipoff. Of course, pink branding is also spilling over into other months […]

Come one, come all! Feminist and Social Justice blogging as performance and bloodshed

Master of puppets I’m pulling your strings Twisting your mind and smashing your dreams Blinded by me, you can’t see a thing Just call my name, ’cause I’ll hear you scream Master Master Metallica, Master of Puppets Introduction: in which I walk into the stage, with dimmed lights, and I explain my love of performance […]

Delicious linkspam

So we thought it was about time for another round-up of links of Things We’ve Done and various other things of interest on the internet by people who are not us but still pretty good. Sweet internet glory Sady’s been nominated for a Social Media Award by the Women’s Media Center.  You can go vote […]

“He’s a Fucking Maniac:” Rape, Black Metal, and the Fetishization of Illness

Content Warning: This post contains descriptions of sexual assault, extreme violence, and fetishized concepts of mental illness.  On January 10, music writer Christopher Weingarten encouraged metal fans to “throw [their] Leviathan and Twilight records in the trash.” Pitchfork’s metal critic, Brendan Stosuy, retweeted the invocation, endorsing it. Less than nine months later, on September 2, […]

On Blogging, Threats, and Silence

Content note: This post includes excerpts of threats and abusive language. I got my first rape threat as a blogger when I was on Blogspot, so new that I still had the default theme up and hadn’t even added anything to the sidebar. I can’t even remember the pseudonym I was using then, and I […]