As they should – blaming victims is a crime! On Wednesday, hundreds of people in cities around Ireland protested victim blaming in the justice system’s handling of a sexual-assault case.
Category Archives: Viva!
A Look Inside the Tactics of Definers, Facebook’s Attack Dog
The opposition research firm had focused on the internet company’s competition. But ahead of a Senate hearing it had a new target: senators.
Neo-Nazis Have No First Amendment Right to Harassment, Judge Rules
A lawsuit against the publisher of the website Daily Stormer for unleashing an online “terror campaign” against a Jewish realtor can proceed.
How the Senate’s Structure Upholds White Male Dominance
true this
In last week’s midterm elections, Democratic and progressive political candidates flipped red House districts, key state legislative bodies, governors’ offices, and even Senate seats in Nevada and Arizona. We’ve elected one of the most diverse Congressional classes in history, with historic numbers of women and LGBTQ representatives, including the first Muslim and Native American women representatives.
Yet, despite many positive returns from the midterms, we were also forced to see how our government remains fundamentally structured around protecting and maintaining white patriarchy — particularly through the U.S. Senate.
Democratic candidates won seats in the House, but lost Senate seats in North Dakota, Missouri, Indiana, and possibly Florida for a net loss of one or two seats. In order for Democrats and progressive candidates to gain even a narrow Senate majority in the years to come, this would require them to win seats in every single traditionally blue or purple state, with zero margin of error.
That’s because the Senate’s structure fundamentally disadvantages progressive candidates by granting disproportionate power to conservative, majority-white, rural states that are vastly less populous. During the Constitutional convention back in 1787, equal political representation of the states in the Senate was demanded by small states and, along with the formation of the electoral college and the three-fifths compromise, helped to protect the interests of slave-owning regions of the country. And today, the Senate’s skewed representation gives voters in regions that are sorely lacking in immigrant communities or people of color decisive power to maintain a status quo of intolerance and misogyny, regardless of how broadly unpopular these ideologies and policies are to the rest of the country—and how much they harm people and women of color, immigrants, and marginalized people across the country.
In substantially more populous, Democratic states, diversity has driven a demand for progressive policies. Voters in these states are much more likely to vote for Democratic representatives because of their lived experiences—either their own oppression, or the experience of witnessing the oppression of members of their communities. Lived experience and empathy drive politics, and in states and regions that lack this diversity, which are given equal decision-making power and representation despite having anywhere from less than a quarter to half the populations of blue states, anti-choice, anti-immigration, and anti-LGBTQ representatives are consistently elected.
Los Angeles and New York City, which rank among the most diverse communities in the world, have double or triple the populations of entire states, including the Dakotas, Kansas, and West Virginia. And despite reductive, condescending narratives of these cities and other predominantly liberal coastal or western regions as “elitist,” unsaid numbers of disproportionately people of color in these areas live in poverty. The traditional narrative of the neglected working-class as white, male, and based in the Midwest utterly erases impoverished immigrant families and people of color in coastal areas.
Furthermore, voter suppression tactics that disproportionately occur in traditionally Republican states contribute to the GOP’s absolute hegemony in these states. Many notoriously red states do not lack for people of color, with sizable black constituencies in Southern states. Yet, despite how these constituencies traditionally support Democrats, voter suppression tactics in these regions erase and rob them of representation; voter ID and name match laws specifically and almost exclusively target black and Latinx voters. And despite how Democrats won big in the House, they would have won even bigger were it not for aggressive gerrymandering by the GOP.
Upon being elected, Senators representing states where many constituents have yet to so much as interact with an immigrant or person of color in their lives, proceed to slash key rights and protections of marginalized groups. The Republican-controlled Senate has voted to confirm a string of Trump administration officials who have gone on to weaken civil rights and criminal justice for people of color in the Justice Department and Education Department. The Senate has repeatedly jeopardized immigrants’ rights and ability to remain in this country with their families by sabotaging crucial reform attempts, all while threatening key protections of the Affordable Care Act that disproportionately allowed immigrants and black and Latinx people to access life-saving coverage for the first time. Additionally, the chamber has the power to confirm judges and Supreme Court justices who could gut human rights like abortion, health care access, and more, for marginalized people across the country, for generations to come.
Women of color also disproportionately suffer under the Senate’s disproportionate empowerment of Republicans, despite being more likely than any other bloc to vote for Democratic representation. For example, women of color who have experienced economic success are more likely than white women to attribute their success to access to birth control, and also comprise the majority of American women who seek abortion care. When Senators target funding for Planned Parenthood and reproductive health organizations, attack the Affordable Care Act and its protections of contraception access, and confirm anti-choice judges like Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, they are decisively targeting and punishing women of color.
They are decisively using their inflated electoral power to stall progress—and to prevent women, people of color, and all other marginalized groups from gaining equal status, autonomy, and recognition that white men have always had, through voter suppression tactics and disproportionate political empowerment of states that practice suppression. And the product of this power dynamic is a Senate that maintains white, male dominance as governance.
Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons
kozacy: In the heat of battle, photographer Horace Bristol…

In the heat of battle, photographer Horace Bristol captured one of the most unique and erotic photos of WWII.
Bristol photographed a young crewman of a US Navy “Dumbo” PBY rescue mission, manning his gun after having stripped naked and jumped into the water of Rabaul Harbor to rescue a badly burned Marine pilot. The Marine was shot down while bombing the Japanese-held fortress of Rabaul.
“…we got a call to pick up an airman who was down in the Bay. The Japanese were shooting at him from the island, and when they saw us they started shooting at us. The man who was shot down was temporarily blinded, so one of our crew stripped off his clothes and jumped in to bring him aboard. He couldn’t have swum very well wearing his boots and clothes. As soon as we could, we took off. We weren’t waiting around for anybody to put on formal clothes. We were being shot at and wanted to get the hell out of there. The naked man got back into his position at his gun in the blister of the plane.”
“And well, there was his butt, and I had a camera. I mean I AM a historian.”
Facebook seeks to patent software for figuring out who lives together and profiling the household
Facebook Inc. is applying to patent software that it could use to create profiles of users’ households by making educated guesses about how many people live in the household, what their relationships to each other are, what interests they share and what electronic devices they use.
The system would…
New Yorkers Fear Using Public Benefits After Trump Threatens Policy Change
How cruel and inhuman can he be? We are finding out. It is wrong! It is evil.
As yet another wave of Trump-induced panic ripples through immigrant communities, some New Yorkers are opting out of food stamps, Medicaid, housing assistance, and other public benefits to which they’re legally entitled, out of fear that taking advantage of them will negatively impact their immigration status or that of a family member. [ more › ]
‘Moai are family’: Easter Island people to head to London to request statue back

Delegation from island, backed by Chilean government, will ask for return of statue British Museum acquired in 1869
Towering at the entrance of the British Museum’s Wellcome gallery is a 2.5-metre basalt statue from Easter Island. For indigenous Rapa Nui islanders, such statues – known as moai – carry the spirit of prominent ancestors and are considered the living incarnation of their relatives.
Next week, a delegation from the island – which has been part of Chile since 1888 and is officially known as Rapa Nui – will travel to London to request the moai’s return, emboldened by the backing of the Chilean government and the museum’s willingness to engage in talks for the first time since it acquired the statue in 1869.
Facebook told us it wasn’t a typical big, bad company. It is | Jessica Powell

The tech giant claimed to be bringing the world together for the benefit of humanity. The truth is far less palatable
Facebook, like so many companies in Silicon Valley, has always told us it was a different kind of company. Not so much a business really, but a social utility. That it was linking the world for the benefit of democracy, friendship and human connection.
Related: Facebook’s pretensions have turned it into a useful idiot of the right
John Kerry: ‘People are going to die because of the decision Trump made’

The former US secretary of state has looked on as Donald Trump has dismantled the Paris climate agreement. Now, 14 years after losing his presidential bid, he is considering another
To look back at the moment John Kerry entered US public life, addressing the Senate foreign relations committee on 22 April 1971, is to be struck by many things. There are the famous words, of course: “How do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam? How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?” There is the shock of dark, Beatles-inspired hair, the distinctly British-tinged accent. Above all, there is the self-possession. Even though, as he describes it in his new book, Every Day Is Extra, he had not realised he would be the only witness until he had walked in the door, breathless and young and late; even though he was describing a situation about which he was deeply angry, he did not hurry his delivery.
Perhaps – after the vivid pointlessness of months spent in Vietnam, captaining vulnerable “swift boats” up muddy rivers; after being shot at and experiencing the deaths of friends; after watching a wounded Vietnamese soldier bleed to death in a US medical tent, surrounded by well-meaning soldiers who could not give him the most basic words of comfort in his own language, in his own country – the committee held little fear. Perhaps it was his upbringing, as the son of a state department lawyer and a mother whose extended family owned estates in Brittany, France, and an island off Cape Cod in Massachusetts; as a boy who attended elite boarding schools in Switzerland and the US; as a young man who, while a competitive debater and athlete at Yale, once went to visit a girlfriend (Jackie Kennedy’s half-sister) and found himself sailing with JFK for an afternoon. Or perhaps, as he puts it in his publisher’s offices in London, eyes watchful, tired from jetlag and an appearance on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, it comes from “being a little kid on the train to Berlin, travelling home alone from school”, a kid who by eighth grade had attended seven schools. “It was just – survival. I am confident. I have a confidence about things.”
You must be logged in to post a comment.