Critical Review of "The Coming Insurrection"

Read it here.

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"A Culture of Indifference"

Feministing has an excellent post on the culture of indifference that enables a sexual assault epidemic to persist unchallenged at most US universities. I can confirm, from personal experience with how universities deal with these matters, that most all of the important points from the post are commonplace at many colleges. For example:

• Many times, victims drop out of school, while their alleged attackers graduate.
• Students deemed "responsible" for alleged sexual assaults on college campuses can face little or no consequence for their acts.
• 75 to 90 percent of total disciplinary actions that schools do report are minor.
• The full extent of campus sexual assault is often hidden by secret proceedings, shoddy record-keeping, and an indifferent bureaucracy.
  

All of these are facts that apply to virtually every university in the country. I and others at my undergraduate institution arrived at identical conclusions just based on circumstances particular to that university. It's appalling how widespread and uniform these problems are, and even more appalling how college administrations and student culture turns a blind eye to it.

I'm convinced that it is going to take direct action (be it civil disobedience or class-action legal attacks) of some kind to force (mostly male) administrators to take steps to stop institutionally-sanctioned rape at universities. Of course, this problem is much, much larger than universities and no doubt speaks to deep problems with our (sexist) legal system and culture (e.g. as the post notes: we have college newspapers printing pieces that blame rape victims and women's magazines spreading the myth of "gray rape.")

Something needs to be done, and we can't wait for university big wigs to take care of the problem.

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Fighting school-closings in Chicago

Article here.

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French General Strike

French workers down tools in general strike over handling of financial crisis

Action is first general strike in an industrialised nation since the start of the global economic turmoil

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Obligatory MLK-day Message from the Left

I wrote at least two pieces for newspapers on this topic (MLK has long since been appropriated, gentrified and his legacy stripped of its radical import, etc) while I was in college. Here are some of the recent additions (and older ones as well) that are worth reading:

• "The Martin Luther King they won't celebrate" - Brian Jones @ socialistworker.org
• "The Martin Luther King you don't see on TV" - Jeff Cohen @ FAIR
• "MLK: Christian core, Socialist Bedrock" - @ Solidarity
• "Unfinished Business: MLK in Memphis" - @ International Socialism (ISJ.org)
  

If you're in the mood for a chuckle, read the Heritage Foundation's MLK-day propaganda leaflet which pins MLK's "message" as "fundamentally conservative". Seems to make a lot of sense to me that someone advocating the abolition of Jim Crow and the momentous 1964 Voting Rights Act (not to mention radical redistribution of resources, expansion of the Great Society and an end to the imperialist war in Vietnam) was a staunch advocate of maintaining the status quo. Of course, that the Heritage Foundation could even lay claim to MLK with a straight face already speaks to the tremendous progress made in domesticating, whitewashing and depoliticizing the meaning of his life's work.

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40 Years since Mexico City Massacre

If you get a chance, read or listen to NPR's report on the 1968 Mexico City student massacre, which had its 40 year anniversary this year. Terrifying...

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