I’m often asked the same question, ‘what in your work comes from your own culture?’ As if I have a recipe and I can actually isolate the Arab ingredient, the woman ingredient, the Palestinian ingredient. People often expect tidy definitions of otherness, as if identity is something fixed and easily definable.
Childhood boredom is a special kind of boredom. It is a boredom full of dreams, a sort of projection into another place, into another reality. In adulthood boredom is made of repetition, it is the continuation of something from which we are no longer expecting any surprise.
Wisdom from Italo Calvino's Paris Review Interview, completed shortly before his death. Complement with Kierkegaard on boredom, psychoanalyst Adam Phillips on why the capacity for boredom is essential for a full life, and Susan Sontag on its creative purpose.
Couple with Calvino on digression as a hedge against death and his love-hate relationship with distraction and procrastination.
(via explore-blog)
This reminded me a lot of vulturechow.
(via against-machismo)
thank you. I definitely see this in the kids and remember it in my own childhood
(via vulturechow)
In the end there doesn’t have to be anyone who understands you. There just has to be someone who wants to.
May you soon accomplish your liberation from every form of violence and oppression. Long live the free revolutionary working women! Long live the Worldwide Socialist Revolution!
Kronstadt Radio broadcasts “greetings to the working women of the world” on Women Worker’s Day, March 8th, 1921.
This broadcast was made while under bombardment from heavy artillery.
(via class-struggle-anarchism)
When people say ‘This is my baby,’ they don’t always mean a baby. Sometimes they mean a dog.
You see, I want a lot.
Maybe I want it all:
the darkness of each endless fall,
the shimmering light of each ascent.
Not to know. Not to remember. With this one hope: That beyond the River Lethe, there is memory, healed.
Did the Zionists have the legal or moral right to invade Arab Palestine, uproot its Arab citizens from their homes and seize all Arab property for themselves just based on the “religious” claim that their forefathers lived there thousands of years ago? Only a thousand years ago the Moors lived in Spain. Would this give the Moors of today the legal and moral right to invade the Iberian Peninsula, drive out its Spanish citizens, and then set up a new Moroccan nation … where Spain used to be, as the European zionists have done to our Arab brothers and sisters in Palestine?…
In short the Zionist argument to justify Israel’s present occupation of Arab Palestine has no intelligent or legal basis in history … not even in their own religion.
In the News, Brown children matter when it is time to illustrate grief and suffering. The Brown bodies slaughtered and strewn on the streets of Chicago pepper our screens whenever CNN or the Nightly News decides to feature a segment on them. Yes, we want attention brought to these issues. But, can we do it in a way that respects the deceased? We do see White children on the screen when they go missing, or post-grief, when they have survived a trauma. And it’s usually a static photo from a happier time. In that context, images of White children are displayed with a consistency. To pull us in. To create empathy in our hearts. To keep us alert and on the lookout. White equals sympathy. What is the meaning of a deceased Brown child?
Much like fairy tales, there are two facets of horror. One is pro-institution, which is the most reprehensible type of fairy tale: Don’t wander into the woods, and always obey your parents. The other type of fairy tale is completely anarchic and antiestablishment.
This one time I was in Milan and I’m literally around multi-millionaires and billionaires at this dinner and Dita Von Teese gets on stage and she gets buck naked and she spins around in a big martini glass and everyone clapped for her. And it’s bullshit. It’s not fair that it’s OK for her to do it because she doing it for rich white people but you know I was in like, the hood, and I did what I had to do to survive… and I constantly get ridiculed.
But your solitude will be a support and a home for you, even in the midst of very unfamiliar circumstances, and from it you will find all your paths.
The curious case of Mustafa Mattan is as much a story of intra-racial division and anti-black racism within the Muslim population as it is a narrative about the neglected death of a young man seeking a better life far from home… Despite a few vocal critics, Mattan’s erasure in the discussion of Islamophobia in North America is evident. The exclusion of Mattan and Sheikh-Hussein perpetuates a harmful hierarchy that privileges Arab narratives and excludes black/African Muslims.
Most of us are raised to believe we will either find love in our first family (our family of origin), or, if not there, in the second family we are expected to form through committed romantic couplings, particularly those that lead to marriage and/or lifetime bondings. Many of us learn as children that friendship should never be seen as just as important as family ties. However, friendship is the place in which a great majority of us have our first glimpse of redemptive love and caring community. Learning to love in friendships empowers us in ways that enable us to bring this love to other interactions with family or with romantic bonds.
It doesn’t makes sense, and for that I rely on the Most Wise. It hurts and for that I know that God will not burden me more than I can handle. I know my brother, his wife, and his sister in law are together as ultimate winners. This life was only ever a test and they have passed with flying colors. They have won, and for that I rejoice. I am sincerely happy for each of them. I pray God grants the rest of us the patience to accept this. We live as Muslims to die as Muslims. May Allah enter them to the highest of paradise. May we be reunited with them. The burden is on us now. O people, they won! They won!
Muslims in the United States are more often the victims of ideological violence than the perpetrators of it.
According to the latest FBI statistics, there were more than 160 anti-Muslim hate crimes in 2013. Mosques and Islamic centers have been firebombed and vandalized; seven mosques were attacked during Ramadan alone in 2012. Several Muslims, or people thought to be Muslim, have been murdered or viciously attacked. In 2010, a white college student and self-described patriot tried to slash the throat of Bangladeshi cab driver Ahmed Sharif. The white supremacist who slaughtered six people in a Sikh temple in 2012 may have thought he was targeting Muslims. So, apparently, did Erika Menendez, the homeless New Yorker who pushed a man named Sunando Sen in front of a subway train that same year.
In most cases, the perpetrators have been disaffected, disaffiliated losers rather than part of any movement, but they’ve picked up broader currents of hatred and conspiracy theorizing… We don’t yet know if Hicks was driven by lonely fanaticism, but if he was, he’s not as much of an anomaly as he might at first appear. Explicitly atheist violence is unusual, but Hicks still fits the profile of the most common type of American terrorist: a white man with a weapon and a grudge
If we accept that autistic people are neurologically different rather than sick, the research goal changes from finding a cure to helping us achieve our best quality of life. Here are some ways we can do that:
We can remediate the crippling conditions that accompany autism. Anxiety, depression, seizure disorders, sleep disorders, and intestinal distress are the big ones, but there are more.
We can help autistic people organize their lives, manage their schedules, and regulate themselves in the face of sensory overload. Many of the things we ask for—like quiet spaces or calm lighting—are comforting to most anyone. But for us they are critical.
We can offer engineering solutions to the things autistic people can’t do naturally. Some formerly nonverbal autistics talk through handheld tablets, and make friends with computer assistants like Siri. We’re now seeing machines that read expressions even when we can’t. Computers can improve anyone’s quality of life, but we stand to benefit more than most from applied technology.
We can make life better for the autistic people who have major cognitive and functional challenges that today’s science can’t fix. We have a duty to make their lives better through applied technology. We owe it to our most disabled brothers and sisters to do all we can to ensure their security, safety, and comfort.
We’re Doing Autism Research All Wrong | MIT Technology Review (via brutereason)
omg are some NT researchers listening to autistic people?? about fucking time
(via theseerasures)
Don’t listen to 18 year old boys who
read Nietzsche and tell you life is pointless.
I don’t know about god, and I know we are
profligates all; thieves, checkout workers
crooked lawyers— with our wood chip wallpaper,
our TV dinners, our heartburn— but by god, if we didn’t see
horses, bows and hunters in the randomness
of the stars. Know that contempt is a kind
of cowardice. How easy it is to look upon
fellow man as a futile bunch of mortal cells
a fretwork of dark blood, bound for
some modern cancer. I’m bored by your boredom.
Despite it all; (the burning cars on the news,
the evening war, the prison complexes) I still maintain
what is more difficult and far nobler is to love defiantly
even though we live a hairsbreadth from oblivion
from cheap funeral parlour cremation. To pledge
yourself to the world’s newborn o of surprise—
a prolonged o of angel fish, ocean and aurora
the blue song of all that we loved but could not name.
