Racists trying to out-do each other. Warning: disgusting content

Racist White People March in Brownface at New Years Parade and Mock Black Lives Matter

In one of the blackest cities in the country, white people are trying to convince us all that Philadelphia’s minstrelsy-thick Mummers Parade is not racist by dressing in every color painted face they can get away with and verbally bullying #BlackLivesMatter protesters with insults and mudslinging rife with “the N word.” The racist backlash comes in response to the planned Philly Coalition for REAL Justice rally scheduled at the same time as the parade underway as of Friday morning. So far, three rally participants have been arrested, including two of its organizers.

Philadelphia’s Mummers Parade isn’t just vilely racist, it’s also misogynistic, too. “Wenches” have long been a comical element of the parade, almost always played by men.

http://usuncut.com/news/brownface-mummers-parade-mocks-blm-rally/

The GOP’s nipple ban: The war on women gets personal — and even more hateful — in New Hampshire

Abortion defenders in appeasement mode

I think this is so true.
From an article in Jacobin entitled, "Abortion without Apology"

“Abortion is health care,” is the cry today, and it’s weak. Compare this to the rallying cry of feminists who won us abortion rights in the first place: “Repeal all abortion laws.”
Reform vs. Repeal

The radical women’s liberation activists who first won legal abortion wanted to get rid of abortion laws entirely — a flier proposing the “model law” showed a blank page. It was this demand, backed by disruptive tactics, public truth-telling about criminal abortions, and class-action lawsuits aimed at invalidating existing statutes that got the ball rolling nationally.

Women’s liberationists were not afraid to attack the liberals who had been holding hearings for years on creating small loopholes in existing abortion laws, which in most states only allowed abortion if continuing the pregnancy would kill the woman. Reform bills languished in legislatures around the country in the late 1960s, occasionally passing, but only to allow the few women who could prove they had been raped, or were suicidal, to appeal to all-male panels of doctors and psychiatrists.

There are important lessons from these earlier movements. First, the abortion demand was part of the women’s liberation movement instead of standing as a single, isolated issue. Second, women demanded repeal, not reform, of laws that could be endlessly tinkered with. Third, the movement didn’t kowtow to the liberals who perennially assumed little could be done. Fourth, women’s experiences and desires — not triangulating policy organizations or experts — guided the movement.
...
The demand for abortion has had the most success when it’s been joined to larger goals of women’s liberation and is free of preemptive compromise. If we want to back the Supreme Court down this time, we need to quickly absorb the lessons of those past victories.

Did anyone see BBC "The Killing of Farkhunda" last night?

It happened back in March 2015, and this show was originally broadcast in August.
This is the woman who was beaten, kicked, stoned, and burned to death in Kabal, bec it was alleged she had burned a Koran.

It turns out she had not burned a Koran.
Now she is called a martyr and there is a plaque at the site of her death.

But nowhere in the program did anyone say,
"And if she HAD burned a Koran, would this have been ok?"

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06648bx

Sex and the Muslim Feminist

On refusing to equate sexual pleasure with freedom.

Instead of taking on the thorny business of how sex itself replicated patriarchy in complex ways, sex was made into a commodity.

The anointing of sex positive feminism has over time permitted the transformation of a deep and complex feminist movement into one that helps brand magazines and sell lingerie to women who can imagine themselves emancipated based on the consumption of sex. In becoming the central metaphor for liberation, it has eviscerated critiques of imperial overtures abroad and encouraged a deliberate deafness toward all the dialects of empowerment that do not translate themselves into its language. Its biggest casualty has been the stereotyping and exclusion of Muslim feminists, whose frontline struggles against terror, against religious obscurantism, and against the weight of patriarchal domination have all been relegated to a position of inferiority, based on their refusal to affirm that freedom essentially and centrally means the freedom to have sex.



https://newrepublic.com/article/123590/sex-and-the-muslim-feminist

The New Republic is mostly a neo-con magazine, but I think the article is very interesting....

Bernie Sanders - restoring liberalism to the Democratic Party?

Mapping Police Violence: New Study Shows Cops Have Killed At Least 1,152 in 2015

Arsonists blamed as 130 wildfires raze northern Spain natural parks

What evil heart would compel someone to do this?

At least 2,000 hectares (5,000 acres) of "extraordinary ecological value" has burned in the region over the past week, much of it located in two natural parks, it added in a statement.

"This threatens the present and future of Cantabria's landscape," the head of the regional government of Cantabria, Miguel Angel Revilla, said after visiting the site of one of the blazes.

He added that "99 percent" of the fires were deliberately set.

"There are arsonists, people with bad intentions who are taking advantage of weather conditions never seen before in Cantabria" to set fires, Revilla said.

Cantabria has since September received scant rainfall with average high temperatures of 23 degrees Celsius (73 degrees Fahrenheit), he said.

Harvard Medical Scientists Say Police Killings Should Be Recorded As Public Epidemic

Harvard researchers have called on US Public Health Agencies to consider police killings and police deaths public health issues. With that request, researches are also echoing numerous activists who are urging them to begin tracking the number of people killed by police.

The proposal was inspired by a year of continuous protests and public pressure from the #BlackLivesMatter movement, which stemmed from the murder of unarmed Michael Brown on August 9, 2014, and the consistent police murders and protests that have happened since.

As there are no official numbers, the best available data comes from independent news agencies like the Guardian (UK), who reported that 1,058 Americans have been killed by police in 2015. For African Americans, the number of law enforcement-related deaths per capita is twice as high as it is in the white population.

Their project, “The Counted” also indicates that US civilians are killed by police at an average of about three times a day. It includes cases of police who kill armed suspects, which many vocal police supporters consider justified without carefully examining the situation.


http://usuncut.com/black-lives-matter/harvard-medical-police-killings-public-epidemic/

Open letter to Rabbi Susan Talve from St. Louis Jews

(It's long - brief excerpt)

We are Jews who, like you, have been on the streets supporting justice for Mike Brown and actively working within our communities to end white supremacy and dismantle structural oppression. We commend your courageous and outspoken stand in support of Black struggle and many other social justice issues.

We are also Jews who stand with the indigenous people of Palestine who have been oppressed for more than 65 years by Zionist policies that privilege Jews over Palestinian Muslims and Christians, including near-daily assassinations, mass incarceration without charge, torture of children, collective punishment, demolitions of families’ homes, destruction of farmers’ olive groves and livelihoods, indiscriminate bombings, tear-gassing of entire villages, segregated roads and legal systems, and denial of access to holy sites, to name just some of Israel’s myriad apartheid policies.

For more than a year, we have struggled to reconcile your righteous stand on challenging U.S. domestic racism with your stated commitment to Zionism and defense of Israel. We have reached out to you, met with you, heard your requests to wait, and to give you more time and to understand how hard it is for you to reconsider your stance on Israel. We found hope when you opened your synagogue to an event by St. Louis Jewish Voice for Peace and in the positive response to our words by many of the members of your congregation. We have wanted to trust — and still want to believe — that you too can be an ally in challenging Israel’s system of racial oppression, which is itself a form of white supremacy, as you challenge white supremacy here in the U.S.


http://mondoweiss.net/2015/12/letter-talve-louis