Oprah gave a rousing speech & I agreed with everything she said about sexual assault on women. But she still has conservative, elitist Democratic Party politics. If she does decide to run for president I just want her to know she’ll have me on her tail since I’ll be running again. We have to end the control of US politics by the bankrupt duopoly of Republicrats & we have to change the character of the US government as an oppressor.
Insha Mushtaq stands for all Kashmiri children blinded & disabled by pellet guns
There have been several reports about this Kashmiri girl named Insha Mushtaq who was 15-years-old when she was blinded & disfigured by pellet munitions in July 2016 while in her family home. She represents the 1,562 mostly children & youth who were partially or fully blinded by pellet guns just in the last 6 months of 2016. Another 7,330 were injured by pellet guns &, though not blinded, suffered disfigurement & permanent disability, pain, & health problems because the pellets cannot all be removed from vital organs.
We know Insha’s story because Kashmiri media, Al Jazeera, & a documentary video reported on the many surgeries she endured to extract pellets & repair tissue. They also reported about the emotional turmoil Insha & her family went through in accepting her disability, learning how to deal with it, & helping her build a fruitful life. She was a girl who loved to read & that would surely become much harder. That Insha lives in a society dealing with thousands of young people blinded & disabled by occupying forces does not make those adjustments less traumatizing for any of those affected.
There is no inspirational silver-lining in disability. Being disabled makes things harder. But the disability rights movement has hammered home the understanding that disability does not render a person useless, immobile, inferior, nor is it a death sentence. It requires emotional transitions, major adjustments, physical accommodations & learning new ways of doing things. No one not disabled would be so cavalier as to dismiss how hard it it, especially for young people, to come to terms with the grief & loss of disability. That’s why disability rights have been so important in forging respect which does not include pity but also demands social services necessary for a good life.
Blinding & disabling Kashmiri young people is not accidental but an intentional military stratagem to exact maximum suffering & demoralize resistance to occupation. But we know the leading part played in social struggle by those with disability, including the Kashmiri struggle, the Arab Spring uprisings, the anti-austerity protests in Europe, the Palestinian struggle (where Ibrahim Abu Thuraya was a prominent activist despite the loss of both legs in an Israeli airstrike until an Israeli sniper fatally shot him), & the US fight against austerity cutbacks. They have been on the front lines, not sitting out the struggles for a better world.
The solidarity against sexual assault at the Golden Globe awards does not mean feminism has been hijacked by “neoliberal feminists.” Violence against women includes every class in society as the #MeToo movement has made quite clear. How that affects working class women or women in war, occupation, & genocide may be the most compelling concerns but feminism is an all-inclusive movement. No one owns it. It is an ideology that incorporates the liberation demands of all women, excluding any demands to demean, oppress, exploit others.
Oprah made a damn good speech & other actresses made strong & eloquent statements against sexual assault. They spoke for all of us. Even if we’ll never be invited to their parties except as cleaning ladies.
That mantra about not reading MSM because it lies does not grow less imbecilic with repetition. Media is by its nature tendentious & always has been. But everything they report is not a lie. It’s their interpretation where things fall apart. One reads it to get basic information & to understand the viewpoints promoted by those who run the world. One cannot hope to understand social & political reality without reading MSM from around the world along with other commentators. Reading it does not cause brain rot or exposure to infectious diseases. One has to learn how to read it critically, not as if it’s gospel truth.
People who repeat the banalities about MSM just don’t want others to know the important things that can be gleaned from reading it. Fascists & Assadist propagandists come to mind since MSM & fake news are their bête noire. As they want us to see it, everything wrong with the world is all about US regime-change & Israel. With that bias, they can support repressive regimes up the wazoo. And they do. The racism & anti-Semitism of that view should be evident: everything is the fault of Jews & nations other than the US & Israel have no agency but are mere puppets & victims. It doesn’t concede an inch to US & Israeli aggression to say the regimes in other countries, especially those with big militaries, play a role in history. More importantly, so do the peoples of those countries. Witness the Arab Spring.
The only way to make it through the Trump thing is to ridicule him & this comedian does it in spades.
https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=10159407939390521&id=773450520&pnref=story
Homeless in Iran
Homeless in Iran: the metrics to determine a society’s freedom are the number of homeless, the numbers unemployed, the quality of public education & healthcare, the quality of prisons. Apologists for the Iranian theocracy can blither about a US regime-change scenario but the roots of popular protest in Iran are inequality, not US-Israel subversion.
Without direction & leadership, the protests are unlikely to make substantial changes. But in the course of struggle, people learn what was wanting. Some draw the wrong conclusions. Social transformation involving contending forces, some of them armed to the teeth, is a monumental effort. But the irrepressible forces demanding freedom are the hope for all humanity.
(Photo tweeted by the Baghdad Post)
This is a wall with the names of Palestinian children killed in Israel’s 2014 bombing offensive of Gaza. Actually, there were at least 495 children killed so this is only just over half of them. Such a memorial gives immediacy & makes personal the devastating loss of life. Over 2,200 Palestinians were killed; 11,000 were wounded, including with permanent disabilities; 20,000 homes were destroyed & 500,000 people were displaced. Israel admits to 5,226 airstrikes over seven weeks in an area of 360 km² (139 sq. miles). Israeli citizens waved flags & watched all this sitting in lawn chairs sucking down beers in the hills of Sderot just a mile from the Gaza border.
Reality puts in perspective all the US-Israel malarkey about Palestinians obstructing peace talks. Support Palestinians by checking the label on every product you buy to make sure its country of origin is not Israel.
A Bangladeshi court just upheld a ruling by the Sheikh Hasina government banning Bangladeshi citizens from marrying Rohingya refugees. The ruling is of course intended to prevent refugees from acquiring citizenship through marriage. There would be no concerns about marriages for citizenship if the Sheikh Hasina government provided asylum with refugee rights to education, healthcare, employment & wasn’t threatening to forcibly repatriate refugees. Outlawing love & marriage is a profoundly undemocratic move but even smarmy Sheikh Hasina can’t stop love.
Cable news networks seem to exist only to keep US politics within the framework of the two major parties & political thinking entirely provincial, only concerned with US electoral politics. US wars & the attacks on the poor, children, elderly, disabled only come up as Democrat’s debater’s points against Republicans. If anything, news intended to be a stranglehold on political perspectives documents the bankruptcy of provincialism & the two-party system.
Hoping “The Greatest Showman” doesn’t win a damn thing at the movie award show tonight but it will because of the talents of Hugh Jackman. One of the traumas of my childhood was seeing a freak show at the circus featuring conjoined twins in a cage. The movie glorifies P.T. Barnum as a champion of the marginalized & disabled when he was a vicious, ruthless exploiter. The circus freak show went out of style in the 1960s to be replaced by talk shows that held people up for ridicule. Oprah began her career with one of those but soon morphed into a self-help guru which, believe me, was an advance over the freak show which was an ignominious part of entertainment history.