julieofthespirits

julieofthespirits, 2 months ago to random

In Mexico, the biggest transphobic ideologue is a woman named Laura Lecuona. We didn't interview her. We glitterbombed her. Then we glitterbombed her again. We exposed her when allied cis journalists infiltrated her private talks, not by asking for her side. We got her talk at the Guadalajara International Bookfair cancelled, then got Siglo XXI to cancel her book altogether. And despite a drastically higher level of physical violence faced by trans people than the US, we aren't facing the legislation you all are facing. So far, we've managed to stop it. Take some notes

julieofthespirits, 9 months ago to random

julieofthespirits, 2 months ago to random Spanish

Finally, someone writes about a point I've tried to be making for a while: leftist metalheads are really, really good at spotting cryptonazis

https://www.cjr.org/first_person/heavy-metal-capitol-spotting-nazis.php

julieofthespirits, 6 months ago to random Spanish

I was absolutely convinced that "the British Navy is firing all its Chinese laundrymen because it's afraid they might be PRC spies and instead of not having any racialized subaltern class doing their laundry, decided to replace them with Nepalese laundrymen" had to be fake news because that was too racist even for the British but no, it seems to be real

julieofthespirits, 1 year ago to random Spanish

Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating. - Simone Weil

julieofthespirits, 6 months ago to random Spanish

"College students gone woke" is the media narrative because they don't want to say that their critics also include Human Rights Watch, Oxfam, Médecins Sans Frontièrs, Amnesty International and the United Nations

julieofthespirits, 2 months ago to random Spanish

People are criticizing Eli Erlick for openly distributing hormones and puberty blockers to minors, even if they support what she does, because you're supposed to keep that kind of thing a secret. On the contrary: openly breaking bad laws in order to help other people is one of the best ways to force the state onto the defensive and it constitutes a form of propaganda. Marijuana legalization activists proudly smoke in public, abortion rights activists in places where it's criminalized will proudly boast of distributing misoprostol. Kill the cop inside your head who says you should keep something secret when you're not doing anything wrong

julieofthespirits, 2 months ago to random Spanish

Logging on to fedi

julieofthespirits, 2 months ago to random

In the past, sometimes Jude has been a little too liberal for me but he's really really right on here, really recommendable

"Chaya and Taylor, the “ally” and the “enemy,” represented two sides of the same baseline contempt for trans people. Both of them were equally determined to make sure that trans people did not become the focus of this story. Neither of them believed that trans people ought to be allowed to speak for themselves. Taylor Lorenz is not Chaya Raichik’s adversary. She is her collaborator, in a very successful joint project. Both of them set out to make bank and boost their brands on the back of a dead fucking kid."

I Don’t Care About Your Brand
https://jude-doyle.ghost.io/i-dont-care-about-your-brand/

julieofthespirits, 5 months ago to random Spanish

Queen

julieofthespirits, 6 months ago to random

Moms for Liberty organizer who is:

1. A dude
2. Who is a registered sex offender
3. Due to an incident from his time in the LaRouche movement

https://www.inquirer.com/politics/philadelphia/moms-for-liberty-philadelphia-pastor-sex-offender-20231120.html?utm_source=t.co&utm_campaign=edit_social_share_twitter_traffic&utm_medium=social&utm_content=&utm_term=&int_promo=

julieofthespirits, 7 months ago to random Spanish

Liberals underestimate the Nazi problem in Ukraine and tankies overestimate it but I think metalheads who are up to date on all the latest gossip have a pretty good handle on its exact dimensions

julieofthespirits, 2 months ago to random Spanish

In Ursula Biemann's Forest Law, a Sarayaku environmental activist talks about how they were only able to keep oil companies out of their territory because the government had never built highways into it, and so a military mobilization to defend the foreign oil concessions was thus impractical; even seemingly neutral infrastructure works can be used for extractivism

julieofthespirits, 3 months ago to random Spanish

Palestinian men and boys between the ages of 12 and 70 are stripped, cuffed, blindfolded and then loaded onto the backs of trucks to be taken for interrogation. Some have numbers written on their arms. Hundreds detained in Gaza have been transported to the desert prison of Ketziot, near the border with Egypt. Others have probably been taken to nearby military bases. Some men who were taken prisoner in Beit Lahiya were stripped and transported to fenced-off camps where for days they were tied up, beaten and tortured. Others have disappeared. The IDF has subsequently said that between 85 and 90 per cent of these detainees were civilians. Israeli forces have repeatedly raided UN schools and detained any men found inside. The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights documented an incident on 19 December when the Israeli army surrounded and then entered a building in the Remal neighbourhood of Gaza City. ‘The IDF allegedly separated the men from the women and children, and then shot and killed at least eleven of the men, mostly aged in their late twenties and early thirties, in front of their family members.’

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n03/tom-stevenson/rubble-from-bone

julieofthespirits, 8 months ago to random Spanish

After years of work, I have finally finished my translation of NOBODY'S CAFÉ by Arqueles Vela, a classic of Mexico's postrevolutionary avantgarde and the first piece of experimental prose in all of Latin America. A playful study of the breakdown of identity under the effects of urban anomie. Tales of drawing room murders committed by men with multiple identities, automatic women, syndicalist mirrors and the café on the other side of life's secret door. I feel like it's the best work I've ever done, and I'm excited it'll soon be available in English

Illustration of El Café de Nadie from the magazine El Universal Ilustrado

julieofthespirits, 5 months ago to random Spanish

This is really damning. It turns out that the Israeli intelligence failure wasn't that Hamas was really good at keeping its plans secret, because the Israeli military knew for at least a year beforehand. Like the exact plan, down to the details

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/30/world/middleeast/israel-hamas-attack-intelligence.html

julieofthespirits, 9 months ago to random Spanish

One major aspect of transmisogyny is its focus on spectacular punishment: obviously not every trans woman is a good person, and anyone actually tuned in to intracommunity discourse is aware that we are all aware of that, we're famous for fighting amongst ourselves. That we have two trans federal deputies in Mexico and they hate each other so much they can't even be in the same room together is about par for the course. But whenever a trans woman is revealed to be a sex pest, it becomes international news and BBC journalists and Guardian columnists trip over themselves to report on the case - while cis men, who obviously make up the vast majority of sex pests, largely enjoy the comfort of anonymity unless they were already famous for something else

julieofthespirits, 5 months ago to random Spanish

Me and @NellaM have a text on the Mexican gender critical movement in this special issue of the Journal of Diversity and Gender Studies on the Varieties of Terfness, edited by Mauro Cabral. I haven't had time to read the rest of the texts yet but it looks spectacular, with other texts on Spain, Serbia, Russia, Italy, etc.

https://www.digest.ugent.be/

julieofthespirits, 4 months ago to Germany

So good that Namibia is calling out Germany on their shit, Germany is so proud of their having taken responsibility for the Holocaust but nothing on the other genocides they've done

Namibian Presidency on X: "Namibia rejects Germany’s Support of the Genocidal Intent of the Racist Israeli State against Innocent Civilians in Gaza On Namibian soil, #Germany committed the first genocide of the 20th century in 1904-1908, in which tens of thousands of innocent Namibians died in the most… https://t.co/ZxwWxLv8yt" / X
https://twitter.com/NamPresidency/status/1746259880871149956

julieofthespirits, 3 months ago to random Spanish

Activists in Oaxaca currently use the slogan "no es sequía es saqueo" (it's not drought it's pillage) and yet it is controversial on here to say that not only are social conflicts and mass movements of people in the Global South not the fault of climate change, but that blaming them on climate change plays an ideological role in masking their true origins

julieofthespirits, 3 months ago to random Spanish

I went to an exhibition on brutalism today and as it traced the style's evolution from social housing and public institutions to private universities and vacation homes, I couldn't help but think just how much "is brutalism good" is determined by whether poor people or rich people are using the buildings

julieofthespirits, 6 months ago to random Spanish

From the left, the best attempts to date to explain conservatives’ rigorous opposition to trans rights have largely highlighted the strain that trans identity places on the family unit. Writing in Parapraxis, Max Fox spelled out the tension: “In the crisis of children’s gender self-determination,” he writes, “the family is stripped of its pretension to cohere the totality of social meaning.” And it’s true that the anti-trans crusaders portray themselves as defenders of the family, particularly in their strategic use of the term “parental rights.” But if the organic tension between trans self-determination and family control over social life could have come to a head at any point, it’s not clear why political actors with deep pockets and meticulous plans for power chose to gin up moral outrage at the particular moment they did. In fact, the posture that Moms for Liberty and likeminded organizations adopt—defending the family—disguises the actual offensive maneuver that the right is undertaking. A close look at the anti-trans bills across the US demonstrates that the purpose of defending “parental rights” isn’t, in fact, to empower parents at all: it’s to disempower educators, health-care workers, and the other adults who make the lives of trans children more possible.

The strategic slippage at the heart of the anti-trans campaigns—from trans child to protective caretaker to adult worker—clarifies why and for what purpose the architects of the panic organized their crusade. The anti-trans panic is part of a calculated political campaign, assembling a coalition of disparate forces with overlapping interests and plans. Those plans include destabilizing bulwarks of working-class power, obliterating free and universal public education, privatizing critical elements of social life, reinforcing racial segregation, and pulverizing institutions that can and often do produce oppositional political consciousness. And, because our opponents know what they’re doing, it starts with attacks on organized workers.

https://www.nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/the-anti-trans-panic-and-the-crusade-against-teachers/

julieofthespirits, 8 months ago to random Spanish

One thing that a lot of cis people don't get about trans people is that, while it's true that there are a lot of us who have relatively comfortable lives, that that could also all end in an instant. We're not people who get second and third chances, and when we fall we fall all the way. I know trans women who, just a couple years ago were editing major news websites, but when they lost that job, ended up working the corner. And nothing against the corner, because it's always there to accept us when no one else will. But don't act surprise if you come for a trans woman's job or reputation and she fights back with teeth bared. We know what the stakes are

julieofthespirits, 1 month ago to random Spanish

On Trans Day of Visibility, the Mexico City government teargassed a crowd of trans protestors that included one federal deputy, even though she's in the ruling party herself. AMLO is homophobic, transphobic trash

https://twitter.com/MARIACLEMENTEMX/status/1774582208407228439

julieofthespirits, 2 months ago to random Spanish

Ojalá que sí

https://aristeguinoticias.com/2902/mexico/mexico-advierte-a-canada-que-tambien-podria-exigir-visas-a-canadienses/