This is hatred. Set someone apart. Make them “other.” Make them less than human.
This is where it leads. This is what it looks like.
This is a lynching. This is a hate crime.
Warning: The images and video below the fold are disturbing and violent.
Technorati Tags: anti-gay violence, current events, gay bashing, gay rights, jamaica, puppy, violence
After last week’s three part series, I’m a tad exhausted. I thought I’d take a break from blogging today, but then I saw a few items that I couldn’t let pass. The first is the news, via The Scientific Activist, is that Karl Rove is an “unbeliever.” At least that’s what Christopher Hitchens — who’s book God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything is hitting book stores — revealed in a New York Magazine interview. Karl Rove is an atheist.
Has anyone in the Bush administration confided in you about being an atheist?
Well, I don’t talk that much to them—maybe people think I do. I know something which is known to few but is not a secret. Karl Rove is not a believer, and he doesn’t shout it from the rooftops, but when asked, he answers quite honestly. I think the way he puts it is, “I’m not fortunate enough to be a person of faith.”
It gets better.
Technorati Tags: bush, current events, gay, karl rove, politics, religion
Crossposted from my EchoDitto blog.
Well, I don’t’ know if it can make you a “star.” But it’s getting easier, and a lot more fun, to create, remix, and experiment with video online. And with a presidential election gearing up, bloggers are asking both parties to make debate video accessible and editable on the web. The “remix” potential here is, to put it mildly, huge.
I don’t have a lot experience with video, but in the past month I’ve used video on my blog a few times, in a few different ways, and saw a leap in my traffic when people discovered my videos and linked to them. Not bad for a guy who doesn’t know much about video, which means if I can do it anyone can. You just have to know what to use.
Here’s what I did.
It’s been a long week, and I’ve done a lot of writing. So, you’ll pardon me if I’m a bit lazy on that front today. But I’m still on a video kick, so I thought I’d share some videos I found via YouTube while researching some posts from earlier this week. Enjoy.
Technorati Tags: culture, gender, masculinity, politics
It’s been quite a week for blogging here. At the start of the week, I didn’t expect to be writing about any of the stuff I actually did. Somewhere in the midst of all that writing, I managed to do some reading too, and Here’s some of the best stuff I read.
Bruce at Crablaw has post about how fascism starts, which covers an event I read about and had intended to blog about, but didn’t get a chance to.
When fascism takes over a society, fascism does not send every citizen/subject a certified letter noting the suspension of freedom of speech and of assembly and an option to opt out of the class of victimized slaves, as if it were a class action suit for an over charge on your cell phone bill.
And people tell me I am crazy and paranoid for being concerned about the rise of theocratic politics and an intrusive state.
Technorati Tags: blogs, current events, gender, hip-hop, music, homophobia, race, va tech, video, violence
I'm overdue for another blogroll update, what with so much happening in the news, and three or four more posts rattling around in my head. But, here are some new additions to the blogroll. Go check them out!
The Independent Bloggers Alliance
Technorati Tags: blogs
[This is the last of the series. See parts one and two for background.]
Not queer. Too queer. Not queer enough. It’s probably as maddening as it sounds, though in some ways I wouldn’t know this as well as the school shooters I’ve been writing about for the last couple of days. I’ve been queer. Too queer even, but never have I not been queer enough. That, in some ways, may be a saving grace that boys like the school shooters I’ve been writing about lack.
Returning to Kimmel’s essay for a moment, there’s a statement near the middle of it that came to mind when I started thinking about the triangulation that’s become the theme of this series of posts: not queer, too queer, and not queer enough.
I guess I must be on something of a video kick lately. While doing research for the last two posts, I stumbled upon The Columbine Navigator, which contains all kinds of information on Columbine gathered by author/journalist Dave Cullen, who researched and covered Columbine extensively. So,when he had this to say about a documentary called Zero Day, I decided to check it out.
I should be careful. There could be others that I have not seen. But this one is incredible. Chilling. I kept watching it, thinking, “Has this guy been reading my interview notes?” Captures the interplay between two Columbine-like killers in a chilling way, that may or may not be what Harris and Klebold did, but captures to emotions in a way that I thought was extraordinary. (Look for it on video/DVD. It may be hard to find, but it got nominated for an Independent Spirit Award this spring, so that might help.)
A quick trip to Google, and I found the movie on YouTube, in 10 parts. I’d just discovered the new video mix tool on Lycos, which will import videos from YouTube, Google Video, Yahoo Video and MySpace, and allow you to make a compilation or “mix.” So I created a mix of Zero Day.
Technorati Tags: columbine, crime, culture, current events, video, violence
It may have been suggested by an earlier post, but every since the earliest school shootings were reported, I’ve been interested in the stories and people behind them; in particular, the shooters. Every time another one happens, I find myself pouring over articles about the latest shootings and past shootings. This time was no different. I now have a folder in my RSS reader for the VA Tech shootings, which is starting to fill up with articles and posts.
But a couple of nights ago, I came across something I hadn’t thought about until now. I’d written earlier about the anti-gay bullying and harassment I’d experienced in school, and how as result I identified to some degree with the anger the school shooters obviously felt and some expressed. But it wasn’t until I stumbled across a website that suggested I had more in common with these guys than I thought.
As I read, and wrote, all of the above, I kept going back to an essay by Michael Kimmel, “Masculinity as Homophobia.” So I wasn’t surprised to see Kimmel quoted in an old Washington Blade article, “‘Boy Code’ a factor in fatal school shootings?”. Kimmel’s focus is perhaps too specific, as masculinity is just one of many factors in these stories, but his remarks resonate with every story above.
The perpetrators of random school shootings since 1982, all boys, were “overconformists” to the popular notion that being a “real man” means aggressively defending your manhood when it is challenged, such as through prolonged bullying, said Michael Kimmel, a sociology professor at the State University of New York at Stony Brook.
And no weapon is more emasculating, or brandished more frequently on schoolyards across the country, than the homophobic rhetoric used to describe anything that makes a young man different from his male peers, Kimmel wrote in a June 2003 article for the journal American Behavioral Scientist.
“We found a striking pattern [while analyzing news] stories about the boys who committed the violence: nearly all had stories of being constantly bullied, beat up, and ‘gay-baited,’” Kimmel wrote.
“And most strikingly, it was not because they were gay — at least there is no evidence to suggest that any of them were gay — but because they were different from the other boys: shy, bookish, honor students, artistic, musical, theatrical, non-athletic, ‘geekish,’ or weird,” he continued.
Instead of the standard review of “what went wrong” with individual school shooters, the media, government researchers and society at-large must understand the roles standards of masculinity play in facilitating violent outbreaks by young men, Kimmel said in an interview for this article.
Of course, the stories of boys like Harris, Klebold, and Woodham, get a lot more attention than a story like what happened to Josh Belluardo.
I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised. I was actually kind of encouraged when I viewed the slideshow that accompanied this New York Times article about the the VA Tech shootings and the life of gunman Cho Seung-Hui, and saw the photo above with the following caption.
A stone remembering Cho Seung-Hui is included in the memorial to his 32 victims on the campus of Virginia Tech.
After my previous posts on the different ways we can choose to view this tragic event, that someone at VA Tech or in Blacksburg actually thought to include Cho in the memorial — actually took the time and effort to bring the stone to the memorial and place it where it was, to write his name, and leave flowers — was maybe a sign that at least some people were reaching beyond simply labeling Cho “evil” and separating him from the rest of humanity (safe in the knowledge that “he” is not “us” not is he of “us” or from “us”).
Alas, I was wrong. The stone was later removed.
Technorati Tags: crime, culture, current events, va tech
This feels like lazy blogging to me, but today is one of those days when life stands squarely in the way of blogging. I’ve got three more substantial posts in some phase of completion, but I won’t be able to do much writing until much later this evening. So, I fall back on the busy blogger’s best friend: the meme.
This one I borrowed from Karsh who borrowed it from Fave who borrowed it from someone else. And, because I kind of hate to go a day without posting something I’m borrowing it here.
I came across this post a few weeks ago via I Blame the Patriarchy, and linked to it back then. But something about the combination of the words and images stuck with me.
I call this continuum, a culture of domination, a multi-threaded mix of custom and practice, close at hand, in us and around us, that makes the bullying, victimhood and damage of domination seem natural and inevitable.
As evidence of this naturalisation, to bring it into awareness, I collect images of my local cultures of domination. Take a look at the selection of them below. I’ve found, as I hope you will, that rather than seeming to be a given, like the weather, by bringing them out into the light of day they become more susceptible to choice, interruption and confrontation. And less undermining of ‘living from love’.
I couldn’t resist remixing it somehow, so picked some of the pictures and text and I created this video at Jumpcut. I’m not sure how well it works (thus the late night post) but here it is.
Mendacity or veracity? The feedback on my post about the VA Tech gunman has gotten some interesting feedback. Maybe I’m wrong, crazy, or both. But I stumbled across these rather neglected pieces from Huffington Post (in the sense that most got just a smattering of comments, compared with the HufPo readership) that seem to be saying the same thing.
I was particularly struck by Linda Seeger’s “Practicing Compassion in the Face of Evil”. (Maybe it’s because she quotes some other guy named Terence.)
In many studies of these murderers, there is a common denominator – they were usually bullied and felt injustice, which simmered until it lashed out with an explosion of rage. They were profoundly alienated. One of the survivors of Columbine, Craig Scott, who was the brother of one of the first students to be murdered, Rachel Scott, travels around the country talking to students about compassion, care, speaking to the isolated and alienated. That means seeing the person who is different from us – whether culturally, or mentally, or psychologically, or in terms of class, race, gender – not as The Other, but as someone who is somewhat like us. Instead of saying “Nothing foreign is human to me” we learn to say “Nothing human is foreign to me.” We see some connection between their struggles and others – which usually is in degree, and in the action we take, but may not be so terribly different than our own moments of isolation and alienation. Craig believes, and has seen evidence, that some of these tragedies can be stopped through our recognition of alienation, and our determination to reach when we see it. Craig has become a friend of mine, and I have become quite convinced that he is right.
Then I read the other two.
Technorati Tags: bullying, current events, iraq, politics, ptsd, va tech
(With a nod to Nezua, from whom I’m borrowing the title of this post.)
It had been in the back of my mind, as it always is after another school shooting hits the news. I thought of it for a second when I heard about the Virginia Tech shootings, but I pushed it into the back of my mind. Until yesterday, when a discussion on the LGBT listserv referenced a story about Cho Seung-Hui, the Virginia Tech shooter. By then, I’d read his plays, his mental health assessment, and seen his video manifesto, all of which brought up that uncomfortable feeling I’d been trying to repress since Tuesday.
Then I looked at the calendar and remembered what today was.
I was at work that morning, about 10:10 am EST, when Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold began their shooting rampage at Columbine. I wandered down to the conference room with several coworkers and watched the news reports on television. As I watched the video of students running from the school, and heard more and more about Harris and Klebold, I thought to myself, “I know why they’re doing it.”
I identified with them. I didn’t want to, but I did. I didn’t want to identify with Cho Seung-Hui either. But I did. Because though I didn’t know him, I knew something about him.
Technorati Tags: bullying, crime, culture, current events, education, politics, va tech
Via Peacebang and Preemptive Karma, I came across Jeff Jackoby’s op-ed entitled “Why We Need Religion”, and the first thing that came to mind when i read the title — to borrow a line from an old joke — was “What you mean ‘We’?”. Because, it seems to me anyway, that Jacoby just asked and answered precisely the wrong question. Instead of asking “Do we need religion?” perhaps it would be more effective to ask “Does everyone need religion?”
There’s a pretty good argument for answering that one in the negative if you take the recent popularity of atheist writers like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris as evidence. But just two paragraphs in, it’s hard to take Jacoby seriously when he employs the convenient fallacy that atheism is suddenly “in vogue.”
The Washington Express picked up on the introvert v. “troubled loner” post. Nice. But as an introvert, shouldn’t I be troubled by the attention?
On the heels of the Supreme Court’s decision on late-term abortions, David Kuo — a devout Christian who’s against legal abortion — posted a link to this moving story of how one family chose to deal with the news that their fetus had a genetic syndrome that causes numerous physical deformities, and is almost always fatal. With the support of family, church and community, they made the choice to carry the pregnancy to term. Their baby died 35 minutes after delivery.
It’s a touching story, and the family’s choices were clearly grounded to some degree in their religious beliefs. I respect that. They made the choice they thought was best for their family, and it wasn’t an easy choice to make. I’ve never been in their situation, and I’ll never be pregnant so I can’t know what it’s like to face that kind of news, or stand by a spouse facing that reality. However, as I listened to the Weatherford’s story, I couldn’t help thinking there’s another side that should be remembered as well.
Technorati Tags: choice, courts, feminism, politics, religion, supreme court
In the past two days, we’ve heard a lot about the Virginia Tech shooting, and about the gun man in particular. We’ve seen his video “manifesto,” read his plays, and even his mental health evaluation (PDF). Most of all, we’ve heard him described as a “troubled loner” over and over again. This description of him as an eccentric loner is pretty typical.
He often spoke in a whisper, if at all, refused to open up to teachers and classmates, and kept himself locked behind a facade of a hat, sunglasses and silence.
… Paul Kim, a senior English major, said Cho was so withdrawn on campus that he did not know “we had a Korean person who was in the English department and was male until I met him in class.”
“He never spoke a word,” Kim said. “Even when the professor asked questions, he never spoke. He constantly looked physically and emotionally down, like he was depressed. I had a strong feeling to talk to him on the first day of class, but I didn’t get to talk to him because he sat right beside the door, and as soon as class was over, he left.”
For Kim, one detail stood out. The classroom was rectangular. The class was split in half, with one half facing the other. “I always sat directly across, looking directly at him,” Kim said. “He never looked up.”
Cho was clearly a loner, and definitely troubled. But after hearing those two words together so often in the last couple of days, I feel the need to point out that “troubled” and “loner” are overlapping sets. Not all troubled persons are loners and not all loners are troubled. Most of us are just fine, thank you.
Technorati Tags: crime, mental health, introverts, va tech
OK. I plead guilty to this When I got my iPhone 4, I gave Parker my old iPhone 3G (with parental controls in place, phone service deactivated, everything restored to factory settings, history wiped clean, and internet access and the App Store on lockdown) to play games on, etc. But does that make me a “Scrooge”? Puh-leeze. An eight-year-old needs the latest iPhone?
It’s happening again. I’m getting that “I’ve got a book in me, if I can make time to write it,” feeling. Of course, that “if” is the big, and the deciding, factor.
I was never one of those who claim “there’s no such thing as bisexuality.” I’ve known too many bisexuals to buy that the “don’t exist.” So, I’m not surprised that a study now indicates there is too such a thing as bisexuality. In men, that is.
Apparently, it’s hard to build a successful television show around someone who’s (a) unlikeable and (b) had no discernible talent beyond reproducing.
It’s not that I don’t trust the guy, and maybe the whole Weinergate thing has me a little gun shy, but am I the only who thinks Obama tweeting for himself may not be the best idea?
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