iHollaback & Inti Maria Fight Street Harassment, Kick Ass

(note: this happened in 2011 but is still relevant)

Inti Maria is a hero who worked with this international campaign to track and map street harassment. She was publicly threatened by a journalist in Buenos Aires for her work. Amazingly, her organization (ihollaback.org) won a petition campaign against the journalist who threatened her and got him fired, after a lot of work. Their story is amazing:

As we weighed our options, I just kept coming back to one of our core organizational values: “we’ve got your back.” We needed a response that showed Inti Maria that we had her back, and showed all our site leaders that if this happened to them, we would have their backs too.

When the publication that Juan Terranova worked for – El Guardian – wouldn’t budge, Inti Maria, Violet, and Gaby worked with the incredible team at change.org to target the magazine’s two main advertisers. We organized another petition that put pressure on Fiat and Lacoste pull their advertising, and it was signed by over 1,700 people. In historic and precedent setting move for the Argentinean media, both companies pulled their advertising and publicly announced their disapproval of Terranova’s threat. Lacoste wrote, “our brand has suffered from being associated to comments we disapprove of.”

Juan was pretty mad about it, too. Apparently, he tried to claim that he wasn't a bad guy, and that his rape threat was only a misinterpreted attempt at "violent seduction." (source) Hmmm....

You can read the latest on what iHollaback is up to here: http://www.ihollaback.org/blog/category/a-week-in-our-shoes/

Suki Kim, Unsung Hero

This woman went UNDERCOVER into North Korea. She posed as a schoolteacher (she's actually a writer) and got accepted to teach at their top private school, where she reported on what life is like for their students. Kim wanted to humanize North Korea and show us where their next generation of leaders was coming  from. Suki Kim tells us that these kids were good people, but terrified every minute and made to turn on each other for survival:

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Now, isn't that pretty brave? And an interesting way to help improve the world's relations with North Korea? And have you heard about her in the mainstream news lately? Or, have you heard only negative stuff and drama about the Sony Pictures movie fiasco...

Suki Kim's book should be the real story.

Merry Police Elf Christmas State!

WPXI News says we should beware watchful idols like Elf on a Shelf, because it convinces our kids to accept a future "police state."

But... 

We already have a police state, don't we? Secret surveillance, journalists getting jailed, protestors getting teargassed, arrested and fined, and innocent civilians getting murdered in broad daylight with no legal consequence because it was the police who murdered them. How many more horrors do you need to have a police state?

Facebook Apology Misses the Point

So, Facebook has taken it upon itself to police identities and decide who is real and who is not allowed to exist. Yes, they only have domain over their social sphere but with Facebook being THE defining social media platform of our era, it's a huge handicap to be excluded from it.

Summary of the worrying news (along with my commentary):

Facebook's Chief Product Officer Chris Cox, defends the name policy that "affected" our LGBT community. Yes, we've been "affected" by their uneven enforcement of the policy that bans names they deem unreal or "not real enough." Facebook chose to support those who report non-gender-conforming accounts, or people who report someone's account as unreal in response to them not liking what their opponent said in an online debate. Meanwhile, plenty of fake-named accounts that look like everyday gender-conforming men and women and don't post controversial topics will never get banned from this policy.

Cox stood by the original "real name" policy — which Facebook says is not synonymous with requiring "legal" names. He said the rule helps Facebook stand out amid all the anonymity online and helps keep users safe from anonymous cyberbullying.

"With this input, we're already underway building better tools for "authenticating" the Sister Romas of the world while not opening up Facebook to bad actors." (Sister Roma is the famous Drag Queen shown above. When her Facebook account was threatened, she got her friend San Francisco City Supervisor David Campos to complain to Facebook, which is probably the only reason Facebook is even pretending to listen to the queer community on this issue.)

You heard it here first, folks. The way Facebook enforces their new name policy is meant to KEEP USERS SAFE FROM BULLYING.

It's not like any of us use aliases to protect ourselves from bullying, right? It's not like any women, transgender people or LGBQ folk have ever been threatened over something we published on the internet. It's especially not like people like Anita Sarkeesian are all over the news for exactly this sort of trouble.

Meanwhile, Ello is gaining 4,000 users per hour...

Some Facts About the Michael Brown Incident

While Michael Brown was deemed too dangerous to live, another man in Dallas set fires so that he could shoot police and firefighters who responded, and HE was taken into custody unharmed and perfectly alive. Spoiler alert: he was white. (source)

Fox News jumped to paint Michael Brown as a criminal for allegedly stealing cigars in this video, meanwhile the man who terrorized Dallas and shot multiple officers was given a chance to defend his reasons as NBC published an article painting him as a human who was making a respectable political statement.

The town of Ferguson, Missouri is 67 percent African-American. Their police force is over 96 percent white. (source)

This sort of thing happens often; 4 other unarmed black men were killed by police this month in the USA: Eric Garner(NY), John Crawford(OH), Ezell Ford(CA), and Dante Parker(CA) (source).

Black women and girls are also regularly killed by police, see the stories of Yvette Smith(TX), Eleanor Bumpurs(NY), Aiyana Stanley-Jones(MI), and Tarika Wilson(OH).

It happens even in "nice places": police officers have shot unarmed black men and women in Hollywood, Riverside (California), and Prince Georges County—a Maryland suburb known as the most affluent US county with an African-American majority. (source)

The ACLU sued to get a copy of Ferguson's police report covering the shooting, but it was "mostly blank" and did not contain any info like a description of the scene, quotes from eyewitnesses, names of the officers involved, or any other pieces of information normally found on such documents. (source)

German reporters covering the protests afterwards (it's international news) said that Ferguson officers were worse to deal with than covering conflict zones in Georgia, the Gaza strip, Kaliningrad/the Soviet Union, Iraq, Vietnam, China, and Cuba. Police here would not let them take any pictures and they got arrested. (source)

Ferguson police also threatened to kill American journalists covering the protests. (source)

Though the Grand Jury is not even sure they will charge Darren Wilson with anything, Darren Wilson has raised over $234,000 for his legal defense at Gofundme. Michael Brown's family has raised only $168,000. (source)

Our police force now has so much military gear that you can play the Cop or Solider? guessing game online.

A 14-year old in Lilburn, Georgia, was so bothered by our epidemic of police violence that he designed an app for it.

After that, Obama decided he also was alarmed and ordered a review of our militarized police system. Racism or race was not mentioned even once in the 1,382 word New York Times article covering his statement.