עננים כבר זעים במרחק

Some facts about indigenous peoples around the world

selchieproductions:

Did you know that …

• the Amazon, which is home to the highest number of uncontacted tribes in the world, is cleared, not only to make way for cattle, but also to make way for soy farms? In the process, hundreds of indigenous peoples are either killed or displaced.
  
  
• Fair Trade often engages in cultural appropriation, and that the demand for ‘fair trade’ products on the European and American market leads to the production of one-single-crop farming, where an area is cleared in order to grow one single crop, such as coffee or bananas, and that this type of farming is unsustainable, leading to ecological disasters around the world?
  
  
• Earth Balance, a vegan substitute for butter, is made with palm oil. In order to produce palm oil, hundreds of acres of rainforests are cleared, leading to the extinction of Orang Utans, and the displacement of indigenous communities on Borneo?
  
  
• Brazilian Indians aren’t considered adults according to Brazilian law? This law, though old, was introduced so that Brazilian Indians could be denied the right to land ownership. 
  
  
• children of reindeer herding Saami weren’t allowed to attend Swedish normal schools until 1977? Until then, special nomadic schools, as well as boarding schools were created, where Saami children were taught to hide their indigenous heritage, and punished for speaking any of the Saami languages.
  
  
• the Australian government kidnapped Aboriginal children from their families well into the 1970’s in order to put them in foster care, and/or camps, where they were often used as cheap labour, and/or sexually abused?
  
  
• the Innu of Canada were forced into settlements by the Canadian government in the late 1970’s, and that they, as a result of loss of land, and cultural deprivation, have the highest rate of suicide in the world?
  
  
• 61% of the children under the age of 18 on the Pine Ridge  Indian Reservation live below the poverty level, and that 80% of the people living on the reserve are unemployed, vs. 10% in the rest of the country?
  
  
•  the population of the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation has the second lowest life expectancy in the Western hemisphere? 

(via awyeahmona)

imrunningmymouth:

A letter from an Oslo survivor. “Your actions worked against their purpose.”

promotingpeace:

Dear Anders Behring Breivik,

A lot of the friends I met at Utoya are dead and you are the perpetrator. You are the man who, by coincidence, didn’t kill me. I was lucky.

You might think that you have won. You might think that you have ruined something for the Labour Party and for people around the world who stand for a multicultural society by killing my friends and fellow party members.

Know that you have failed.

You haven’t only made the world stand together, you have set our souls on fire and should know we’ve never stood together as we do now. You talk about yourself as a hero, a knight. You are no hero. But you have created heroes. On that warm day in July in Utoya, you created some of the greatest heroes the world has seen, you unified people from all over the world. Black and white, man and woman, red and blue, Christians and Muslims.

You made your victims martyrs, immortals, and you have shown the world that when one person can show as much hatred as you have done, imagine how much love we can show when we stand together! People who I thought hated me have given me hugs on the street, people I haven’t been in contact with for years have written 300 to 400 words about how much it means to them that I survived. What can you say about that? Have you broken anything? On the contrary, you have united us.

You have killed my friends, but you haven’t killed our cause, our opinions, our right to express ourselves. Muslim women got hugs of sympathy from random Norwegian women on the street, and if your goal was to protect Europe from Islam, your actions worked against their purpose.

You deserve no thanks; your plan failed. A lot of people are angry, you are the most hated person in Norway. I am not angry. I do not fear you. You can’t touch us, we are greater than you. We do not answer evil with evil, as you wanted it. We fight evil with good. And we win.

~ Ivar Benjamin Østebø, aged 16.

Originally posted by Ivar Benjamin Østebø on his Facebook profile in Norwegian, translation by The Independent

With thanks to Basic Goodness.

awanderingjew:

The Exasperating Maleness of Long Novels

downlo:

Every author named in [“The Stockholm Syndrome Theory of Long Novels,”]….is male. In fact, of all the canonized books that fit the epic novel prototype—“sprawling,” panoramic works that attempt to Explain the Universe; doorstoppers with giant casts of characters, endlessly ramifying plots, and esoteric digressions about science, history, contemporary culture, and so on—I know of only one (arguable) example written by a woman. That would be Middlemarch. And even Middlemarch is pretty restrained: it can get tedious, but neither its plotting nor its pedantry ever spins out of control.

There are, of course, messy and show-offish novels by women. I just can’t think of any that are revered as classics, or any female-authored classics that are eagerly defended for their self-indulgent passages. Put it this way: if a woman wrote Infinite Jest, you wouldn’t see reviewers applauding the footnotes. (In an otherwise excellent recent essay, Adam Kirsch argued that “a more disciplined, tactful writer would not have published a thousand pages of Infinite Jest….But then, a shapely, four-hundred-page version of Infinite Jest would not have been a cultural sensation….With Wallace, waste is of the essence of the scheme.” It’s also of the essence of bad writing. Who’s to say the book wouldn’t have won more fans without it? What’s wrong with shapeliness, anyway?)

When Zadie Smith dipped a toe in these waters, writing her debut novel in the expansive postmodernist mode, James Wood famously took her to task for perpetuating a style of “hysterical realism.” Smith called the criticism “painfully accurate”—an admission I have yet to hear from the other, male authors Wood cited, many of whose books run twice as long as White Teeth.

[…]

Women do write novels of great scope and learning, but these works tend to evoke vastness rather than literal-mindedly embodying it. I’m thinking of a book like Willa Cather’s My Ántonia, which tackles an epic-caliber subject—the settlement of the Midwest by pioneer families—but grounds it in prose so gorgeously spare it makes most poems seem bloated. Or Amy Bloom’s recent Away, a masterful historical novel that wears its research lightly, spanning two continents and conjuring a whole era in 250 pages.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that ‘big books’ authored by men tend to sprawl everywhere—much like a man sitting with his legs spread all the way out, taking up space. Women have been socialized to be small, subtle, and indirect. It’s no wonder the prose of female novelists tends to be more economical and evocative.

Perhaps this is true for our era, but it certainly hasn’t always been true.  Meet Madeleine de Scudéry, author of Artamène, ou le grand Cyrus, possibly the longest novel ever written.

ETA: I should clarify that while Scudéry and her colleagues wrote very long novels, they were also the recipients of male scorn, as most women authors throughout history have been.

(via astationaryjew)

I have found Prudence’s best advice column ever:

nanner:

erinburr:

Q. Frustrated with stay-at-home wife: I work full-time, and my wife stays home with our 18-month-old daughter. She is a wonderful, attentive mother and a good wife. She does the laundry, cooks dinner most nights, does the finances, prepares me a balanced lunch to take to work, and irons my clothes. I appreciate everything that she does. However, our house is generally a cluttered mess—clothes strewn about, books, papers, and various miscellany on the furniture. Sometimes the vacuum or a cup will sit in the middle of the floor for weeks. Before we had our daughter, she (justifiably) quit her previous job to stay home. Her housekeeping was the same then, too. I hate myself for it, but I resent her every time I trip over her shoes in the hallway or have to move a pile of books and mail to sit down on the couch. I have brought up the subject multiple times, but nothing changes. I feel stuck and am not sure what to do.

A: Since you didn’t mention that you have a physical disability which prevents you from picking up a cup off the floor or putting the vacuum cleaner in the closet, I’m stuck trying to figure out why you can’t spend some of your precious at-home time tidying up your house. Your wife may be a slob, but she’s an iron-your-shirts, make-your-lunch kind of slob, and how generous of you to rate her “good” in the wife department. Here’s a little experiment—tell your wife that you want her to have a day off to herself or be with friends. Then you watch your toddler for an entire Saturday, and see how much housework you get done. To relieve some of your wife’s burden, maybe you should invest in a monthly cleaning service. Or you could start running the vacuum instead of running your mouth.

followed immediately by:

Q. Men: Why do many women completely fail to understand male sexuality, and why do they think it is cool not to try?

A: Good point. And I enjoyed the accompanying photos of you looking at yourself in the mirror at the gym while holding your special part.

OH SNAP.

(via esmeweatherwax)