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Throw a Creative Mischief Party to Plan for the Next March or Rally
When you find out about the next rally or march, you may wonder how you can increase your impact. There is one thing you can always do, and it’s both easy and fun: throw a protest party to prep for the protest. By protest party, I don’t mean a kegger or a party with streamers…
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No Safe Spaces: A Poem by Fred Dodsworth
Standing midst the flames like wolves’ tongues surrounded by shattered lives, the sun sets in the East this time, a dark orange pallor casting its sickly shadow over dreams once offered. “It’s a republic if you can keep it…”
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#FridaysForTheFuture – A Kids Walkout Every Friday for the Climate
Today 13-year-old Alexandra Villasenor walked out of her school in NYC, answering the call of fellow youth activist Greta Thunberg, and conducted her own School Strike for Climate outside the United Nations Building. People talked to her, took pictures, encouraged her – until the NYPD removed her from the property. Undeterred, she relocated in front of…
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Good Queer Decolonial Fun: The She-Ra Reboot
Just like the old show, the new She-Ra is all about coalition-building towards decolonization, but it incorporates a lot of what folks have learned about organizing and hegemonic power over the last 25 years—even if its gloss is superficial, there’s definitely enough material in each episode to use as fodder in a “talking to your kids about capitalism” conversation.
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Direct Action: What to Do When Marching Isn’t Enough to Stop Injustice
The Internet is a buzz right now with talks of marching, should Rosenstein be fired by the Trump administration. I see two narratives around this: “we have to march!” and “marching isn’t enough—we need violent revolt!” The truth is that marching is merely symbolic. Marching doesn’t force anything, it is merely a show of force.…
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List of Human Rights Abuses at American Concentration Camps… Er, Detainment Centers
Editorial note: every time we tried to publish this list, new articles would be brought to our attention and the list just got longer and longer. So you can think of these as examples from the past month or so, because I needed to put a cap on it to finally publish this post. Examples…
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Are the American Immigrant Detainment Centers Concentration Camps?
What Is a Concentration Camp? Most dictionaries define “concentration camp” as a space for separating a politically undesirable group, usually with degraded living conditions. In this sense, the terms “concentration camp,” “internment camp” and “detainment center” are interchangeable. But the term “concentration camp” is politically charged because of its association with the Holocaust. Because Nazi…
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What Is Vaporwave?
Proving that culture is in everything humans touch, there’s this genre based on bland corporate music from the eighties like mall muzak, advertising jingles and computer sounds. Vaporwave is also an art movement. It’s remix culture centered on the bold geometric shapes, glitch art and clip art of the 1980s. It’s neon, especially pink, purple and aqua. But it is these things deconstructed; the music is slowed down, distorted, so the refrains from an earlier, more innocent time have a haunting effect.
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The Gotcha Game
There’s a game radicals, progressives, and liberals like to play. We are always looking for the turncoat in our midst. Did you catch someone confusing transsexual with transgender? Five points for you. Someone ignorantly, but not sarcastically, asks “what’s wrong with the phrase All Lives Matter,” 10 points for you. Sexist blonde joke? 4 points.
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Replacing Pavement with Gardens: Beyond Leftist Fundamentalism
It is early autumn and helicopters are circling the UC Berkeley campus as I write this. I can see them from my window. The tut-tut-tut of their propellers punctuate my thoughts. A few days ago, I rode my bike up to the university to use the library, and had to navigate through a swarm of media and security workers. An Alt Right speech was scheduled on campus that evening, but it was still several hours away. There were no protestors yet, but cable news teams were already milling all over the place, setting up their equipment, preparing their spins.
What's Stirring Beneath the Surface