August 8, 2007 • 6:44 pm 0
Our HAT Facebook group is now up and running, with 20 members so far!
So, I wish to have a Sydney Femmobolsho Gathering towards the end of this month, if we can get enough people willing to down margaritas somewhere with a sunny courtyard. The excuse is my birthday. Ooh, this means I can play with the Facebook Event thingy, doesn’t it?
Filed under: Uncategorized
July 28, 2007 • 7:43 pm 0
[Image credit: FPWA, via ANTaR]
ANTaR, Australians for Native Title and Reconciliation, is an independent network of organisations and individuals (mostly non-indigenous) working in support of justice for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in Australia.
Check out ANTaR’s Success Stories in Indigenous Health. From the foreword:
Not so many reports highlight the good news – the success stories that demonstrate that change for the better is possible and highlighting the active role that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples themselves are seizing in identifying and implementing solutions.
The success stories include a Cape York family well-being programme building community strength and resilience and combatting family violence, a Townsville mums and babies programme showing dramatic improvements in infant health, a Derby drop-in centre offering healthy meals to young people and nutrition education, a Yarra Valley community nutrition programme and community garden, a scholarship programme for Aboriginal people training to become healthcare workers, and programmes addressing drug use, sexual health, healthy housing, community violence and bullying, healing from trauma, chronic illness management, and lots more.
~~
[Image credit: William Santo, Gudjal Book of Animals]
The State Library of Queensland has launched a Virtual Books project. Right now there is a sampling of eight books, including three picture books designed by William Santo to help teach the Northern Queensland Gudjal language to children.
Filed under: Uncategorized
July 7, 2007 • 1:53 pm 0
From the ABC News, Police support Indigenous permit status quo: Reactions of indigenous people and local police to the Howard government’s plan to steal Aboriginal land and open it to “public scrutiny”. Criticism in this article centres around two issues. Firstly, that abolishing Aboriginal control over their own land opens the door to alcohol and drug runners, and others who wish to exploit the communities for their own gain. And secondly, that divesting Aboriginal people of their land has nothing whatsoever to do with the stated aim of the War On Child Abuse.
Filed under: Uncategorized
June 9, 2007 • 1:06 am 0
I had posted this as an update to this post, but I thought it deserved a post of its own.
Salon has taken up the story of the murky (until last week) relationship between the Oprah-advertised International Breastmilk Project and Prolacta.
Read the whole thing, but here’s one excerpt:
After May 31, however, IBMP will send 25 percent of all donations received to Africa, and 75 percent will be sold to Prolacta for $1 an ounce. What kind of profit margin does this mean for Prolacta? Potentially a motherlode. If, as Elster told me, the average donation runs around 180 ounces, then that would mean that 135 ounces (75 percent) “sold” to Prolacta would generate around $4,725 (at $35 an ounce) for the company, or about $3,890 after subtracting the expense of donor processing (about $700 per donor) and the cash payment to IBMP.
[...]
Is giving 45 ounces of breast milk at a cost of $135 to African babies really a good exchange rate for a commodity that can deliver $3,890 to a for-profit company?
Since this relationship between the IBMP and Prolacta first came to light months ago, you could count on the fingers of one hand the number of people who have been asking the difficult questions. We were shot down for being paranoid and mean-spirited. How dare anyone ask question of a charity feeding AIDS orphans in Africa? They’re completely buzzword-compliant! How dare we wonder whether Prolacta’s interest was strictly commercial? Every venture-capitalist-funded enterprise gets involved in AIDS orphan charities strictly out of the goodness of their venture-capitalist-funded corporate hearts of gold! Of course they’re not just interested in securing a dirt-cheap, plentiful supply of free milk from donor mothers who think their milk is feeding orphan babies. Of course they weren’t interested in lining their coffers while reaping all the benefits of free orphan-baby-feeding PR on Oprah!
Finally we have forced this partnership into public transparency, however much they dragged their feet and equivocated and hummed and hawed about it before they realised they were backed into a corner, sputtering and squinting in the spotlight of public questioning.
And that transparency can only be a good thing.
Filed under: Uncategorized
June 3, 2007 • 10:15 am 0
Our webhost’s server chucked a tanty, so Hoyden was down for at least several hours (I discovered the problem approx 2 hours ago). Anyway, our lovely and talented tech support have sorted it out, so we’re back.
As you were.
Filed under: Uncategorized
May 24, 2007 • 10:01 pm 0
Over on Larvatus Prodeo, people have been discussing the “invisible lesbians” in (or rather, not in) the press photo of Mary Cheney and Heather Poe’s brand new son.
Cheney and Bush have all been carefully skirting press questions about their unbridled hypocrisy on The Lesbian Issue, vomiting up platitudes about how “Mary Cheney would be a ‘loving soul to her child’”, and about how the Cheneys Senior are “looking forward with eager anticipation to the arrival of their sixth grandchild”.
This led LP and sometime Hoyden About Town commenter Fiasco da Gama to say:
After all of the LOLcats here lately, all I could think of was Nirvana’s Nevermind album cover (you know, the one with the baby floating mid-pool) with the words INVISIBLE LESBIANS!!!!!1! tacked on in dodgy photoshop.
So, Fiasco, here ya go.
Filed under: Uncategorized
• 2:00 pm 0
A Flash animation of Tom Lehrer’s The Elements song.
It’s glorious.
Filed under: Uncategorized
May 12, 2007 • 8:41 pm 0
Linkalectable.
1. The First Carnival of Radical Feminists at Women’s Space. Heart grounds current-day radical feminism in the history of the movement, recalls the many achievements of radical feminism, and smacks down the dismissive dysperception that radfems are immersed in theory at the expense of action – and that theory isn’t action.
Headings include Women As a Colonized People; Immigrant Women as Colonized Women; Taking Our Bodies Back from Our Colonizers: Pornography, Prostitution, Rape and Sexual Violence; Colonizing of Our Bodies By Patriarchal Medicine; Mothers, Colonized; Partial Birth Abortion Ban; Radical Feminist Process; Radical Feminist Spirituality; Building a New and Woman-Centered World: “Comin a Time, Woman Ain’t Goin’ to Need No Man”; Government; and Beautiful. I’m not going to pick out highlights; it’s all worth reading. Bring coffee, a hanky, and your righteous fire.
2. A detained protester in Uganda speaks of conditions in prison for women and children.
Read the rest of this entry »
Filed under: Uncategorized
April 30, 2007 • 11:14 pm 0
Image Credit: Karen Wehrstein, Gliese 581c, uploaded by Phil Plait
The picture has nothing to do with the subject of the post, it’s just v. cool (follow the link).
Lindsay Bernstein, of Majikthise, has a post up talking of the effect of describing some Muslims (or some Christians) as “moderates”. Although the intent may be to distance some believers from extremists with fanatical goals, a side effect is that it casts the extremist stance as somehow also the orthodox view of that faith, so that jihadists or Christian Dominionists end up being able to cast other Muslims or other Christians as heretics and/or apostates instead of as fellow orthodox believers with different opinions.
The thing to remember is that claims of fundamentalism or orthodoxy are positioning statements for brands. We often treat claims of religious orthodoxy as if they were statements of fact rather than rhetorical devices.
Positioning your doctrine as the orthodoxy is a way to marginalize your competition. If we uncritically allow the most reactionary sects to claim the mantle of orthodoxy, we do the work of fundamentalists for them.
Lindsay’s post was in turn inspired by another post from Asma Khalid: Why I Am Not A Moderate Muslim. Both are very much worth reading.
Filed under: Uncategorized
April 18, 2007 • 4:46 am 0
I can’t help thinking that this whole brouhaha over O’Reilly’s proposed “Blogger’s Code” is begging to be re-jiggered along the lines of that “Don’t rape her” meme from a while back.
So, my draft Blog Reader’s Code:
* If a blogger has a “feminine” pseudonym – Don’t threaten to rape and kill her.
* If a blogger says something you don’t like – Don’t threaten to rape and kill her.
* If a blogger disagrees with you publicly – Don’t threaten to rape and kill her.
* If a blogger has a photograph of herself on her blog – Don’t threaten to rape and kill her.
* If a blogger lets slip some detail of her life, like her real name or city – Don’t track her down and threaten to rape and kill her.
* If a blogger allows anonymous comments on her blog – Don’t threaten to rape and kill her.
*If a blogger allows untraceable email addresses for her blog registration – Don’t threaten to rape and kill her.
*If a blogger has breasts – Don’t threaten to rape and kill her.
* If a blogger is a feminist – Don’t threaten to rape and kill her.
* If a blogger is successful in a traditionally-male field – Don’t threaten to rape and kill her.
* If a blogger isn’t online 24 hours a day to moderate comments – Don’t threaten to rape and kill her.
* If a blogger chooses not to use disemvowelling as a moderation strategy – Don’t threaten to rape and kill her.
* If a blogger doesn’t filter her email aggressively – Don’t threaten to rape and kill her.
* If you’re drumming up a vendetta against a blogger, and other people are agreeing and piling on to join your trollacious little campaign – Don’t threaten to rape and kill her.
* If a blogger doesn’t have a Civility Enforced badge on her blog – Don’t threaten to rape and kill her.
Again, add your own, as desired.
Filed under: Uncategorized
