Cornell Student Delivers Presentation In Underwear After Professor Criticizes Choice Of Clothes

By Pritha Paul
May 11, 2018 - ibtimes.com

A Cornell University student stripped down to her undergarments during a thesis presentation Saturday after her professor criticized her choice of clothes during one of the test runs of the presentation.

During a rehearsal of the presentation, Letitia Chai’s professor Rebekah Maggor asked whether the denim cutoff shorts she was wearing was appropriate for the occasion.

“The first thing that the professor said to me was ‘is that really what you would wear?” Chai wrote in a Facebook post about the incident. “The professor proceeded to tell me, in front of my whole class, that I was inviting the male gaze away from the content of my presentation and onto my body,” she wrote in a presently-deleted Facebook post on May 2.

She told the Cornell Sun she was “so taken aback that I didn’t really know how to respond.” While most of her peers in “Acting in Public: Performance in Everyday Life” class took her side, questioning Maggor’s perception of men, one of the students defended the professor’s remarks, saying Chai should dress more conservatively for the sake of morality.
Full Article : ibtimes.com

The racism and colorism that Banks alludes to in her commentary are real issues with a long history. However, her own (very recent) anti-black/African history overshadows the legitimacy of her concern of the systemic abuse of black women.

The approach also reminds me of the conversation on Bruno Mars and cultural appropriation. Like this commentary, the conversation on Mars put the onus of changing the system on him. It might be easier to focus the blame on individuals, but it is misplaced. We cannot expect these individuals to be activists* or anymore politically correct than most people. This does not mean they are merely victims with no role at all.

*Even activists can be more about lip service/appearance than actual change.

This is an example of how the best approach to affecting change is by working on oneself. http://www.rastaspeaks.com/Rasta/consciouschange.html

Some of the issues raised by Azealia Banks about colorism as it exists in the entertainment industry, including Hip Hop, is no secret: the industry demonstrably prefers light skin over black. As can be seen in most Hip Hop videos, Dark skin Blacks receive only token representation. It is quite possible that if Azealia Banks looked like a Beyoncé or a Rhianna, she would have been much more popular, and perhaps richer too. Those aspects of her comments are quite valid. Where she and I part ways is her demeaning of Cardi B to make these points.

In one of her responses, she spoke about Cardi B's use of facial contouring to appear attractive. But, why go there? Why bring up the way in which Cardi B speaks or her grammatical inaccuracies as though she should be silent?

In many respects, the media, with the complicity of Hip Hop culture, ensures that Brown skin, Light Skin and even White people are promoted over Dark-skin Blacks with more talent. If Azealia Banks and others are really concerned about who represents Black culture, then they should also look at what is being promoted within Black culture that contributes to these prejudices. Banks must also look at her own complicity in promoting Eurocentric values and ideas of beauty. We should examine the obvious weave hairstyles, skin bleaching and body augmentation that is now a trope in Hip Hop/Rap culture. None of this really encourages the appreciation of Dark-skin.

Highlighting these issues can encourage important discussions. However, attempting to shame someone because of their physical appearance or their lack of verbal dexterity to articulate in the manner of former colonisers, fuels all the wrong things that we should be fighting against.

Cardi B Deletes Her Instagram Account After Responding to Azealia Banks' Insults

By Mitchell Peters
May 12, 2018 - billboard.com

The feud between Cardi B and Azealia Banks has reignited -- and it's getting pretty messy.

During a visit to The Breakfast Club on Friday (May 11), the always outspoken Banks threw out some major insults about Cardi, calling her everything from an “illiterate, untalented rat” to a "caricature of a black woman."

“Two years ago, the conversation surrounding black women’s culture was really reaching an all-time high,” Banks told the radio show's hosts, referencing Beyonce's 2016 album, Lemonade. “There was just this really, really, really intelligent conversation going on nationally and then everything just kind of changed and then it was like Cardi B.”
Full Article : billboard.com


Azealia Banks Talks New Single, The State Of Female Rap, RZA, Donald Trump + More

Cardi B Deletes Instagram & Locks Twitter After Slamming Azealia Banks

By Kyle Eustice
May 12, 2018 - hiphopdx.com

Cardi B and Azealia Banks’ perceived beef just got taken up a notch. After Banks chided the “Bodak Yellow” rapper for her bad grammar and spelling during her Breakfast Club interview on Friday (May 11), Cardi responded to Banks’ comments on Twitter.

Cardi then deleted her Instagram and made her Twitter account private, seemingly fed up with the drama. But before she made her exit, Cardi sent out a barrage of tweets defending herself.

“Why is it that male rappers can speak how they want act how they want but people constantly bash me for it?” she began. “Why do i feel like i have to apologize for being who i am? talking how i talk and being what ya call “Ghetto” wtff. LEAVE ME ALONE!”
Full Article : hiphopdx.com

Nothing can compare with the U.S. “war on terror.”

By: Noam Chomsky - telesurtv.net
(This article was orginally published in 2015)

The nuclear deal reached between Iran and P5+1 was greeted with relief and optimism throughout the world, with striking exceptions: the U.S. and its closest regional allies, Israel and Saudi Arabia, which are consumed with visceral fear and hatred of all things Iranian. In the U.S, even sober commentary declares Iran to be “the gravest threat to world peace” and warns that we must be vigilant, given the exceptional gravity of the Iranian threat.

It is perhaps of some interest that the world sees the matter differently: it is the United States that is regarded as the gravest threat to world peace (WIN/Gallup). Far below in second place is Pakistan. Iran is ranked well below, along with Israel, North Korea, and Afghanistan.

It is worthwhile to explore the reasons for the concerns of the rejectionist triad. What exactly is the colossal threat of Iran?

The threat can hardly be military. U.S. intelligence years ago concluded that Iran has low military expenditures by regional standards and that its strategic doctrines are defensive, designed to deter aggression; and that “Iran’s nuclear program and its willingness to keep open the possibility of developing nuclear weapons is a central part of its deterrent strategy.”

Details are provided in an April study of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, which finds that the Arab Gulf States outspend Iran on military weaponry by a factor of almost 10 to 1. The qualitative difference is even greater. The Arab Gulf states have “some of the most advanced and effective weapons in the world [while] Iran has essentially been forced to live in the past, often relying on systems originally delivered at the time of the Shah,” which are virtually obsolete. The imbalance is of course even greater with Israel, which, along with the most advanced U.S. weaponry and its role as a virtual offshore military base of the global superpower, has a huge stock of nuclear weapons.

Nevertheless, there is deep concern about Iran’s aggression. In his letter to Congress to rally support for the deal, President Obama assured them that Washington “would unilaterally maintain economic pressure and deploy military options if needed to deter Iranian aggression,” the NY Times reported. Obama did not give examples of Iranian aggression, but there is one: in 1971, the U.S-backed Shah invaded two islands belonging to the United Arab Emirates, the only case in several hundred years.

Other concerns are Iran’s role as “the world’s leading supporter of terrorism,” primarily its support for Hezbollah and Hamas. Whatever one thinks about them or other beneficiaries of Iranian support, Iran hardly ranks high in support for terrorism worldwide, even within the Muslim world. Among Islamic states, Saudi Arabia is well in the lead as a sponsor of Islamic terror, not only by direct funding wealthy Saudis but even more by the missionary zeal with which the Saudis promulgate their Wahhabi-Salafi version of Islam. ISIS is an extremist offshoot of Saudi religious extremism and its fanning of jihadi flames.

In generation of Islamic terror, however, nothing can compare with the U.S. “war on terror,” which has helped to spread the plague from a small tribal area in Afghanistan-Pakistan to a vast region from West Africa to Southeast Asia. The invasion of Iraq alone escalated terror attacks by a factor of seven in the first year, well beyond even what had been predicted by intelligence agencies. Drone warfare against marginalized and oppressed tribal societies also elicits demands for revenge, as ample evidence indicates. And current plans are to increase drone flights by 50 percent, doubtless increasing the estimated 3000 or more killed.

No serious analyst believes that Iran would ever use a nuclear weapon, thus suffering instant destruction. There is however real concern that a nuclear weapon might fall into jihadi hands – not from Iran, where the threat is slight, but from U.S. ally Pakistan, where it is very real. Two leading Pakistani nuclear scientists, Pervez Hoodbhoy and Zia Mian, warn that increasing fears of “militants seizing nuclear weapons or materials and unleashing nuclear terrorism [have led to] the creation of a dedicated force of over 20,000 troops to guard nuclear facilities.” Furthermore, this force is not “immune to the problems associated with the units guarding regular military facilities,” which have frequently suffered attacks with “insider help.” In brief, the problem is real, and largely ignored, displaced by fevered fantasies concocted for other reasons.

Do Iranian leaders intend to develop nuclear weapons? Evidence is lacking today, but that they had such intentions in the past was asserted openly on the highest authority, which declared that Iran would develop nuclear weapons “certainly, and sooner than one thinks.” The father of Iran’s nuclear energy program and former head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization was confident that the leadership’s plan “was to build a nuclear bomb.” A CIA report also had “no doubt” that Iran would develop nuclear weapons if neighboring countries did (as they have).

All of this was under the Shah, the highest authority just quoted. That is, during the period when high U.S. officials – Cheney, Rumsfeld, Kissinger and others -- were urging the Shah to proceed with nuclear programs, and pressuring universities to accommodate these efforts. My own university, MIT, arranged to admit Iranian students to the nuclear engineering program over the very strong objections of the student body, but with comparably strong faculty support.

Opponents of the nuclear deal charge that it did not go far enough to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons. Some supporters agree that there should be additional measures, holding that “the whole of the Middle East must rid itself of weapons of mass destruction.” The author of these words, Iran’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Javad Zarif, adds that “Iran, in its national capacity and as current chairman of the Non-Aligned Movement, is prepared to work with the international community to achieve these goals.”

Minister Zarif was referring to the regular 5-year NPT review conference, which ended in failure in April when the U.S. once again blocked the efforts to move towards a WMD-free zone in the Middle East (joined this time by Canada and Britain), as Obama had in 2010.

A nuclear weapons-free zone in the Middle East is a straightforward way to address whatever threat Iran’s nuclear programs allegedly poses. And as these comments make clear, a great deal more is at stake in Washington’s continuing sabotage of the effort, protecting its Israeli client. This is not the only case when opportunities to end the alleged Iranian threat have been undermined by Washington, raising further questions about just what is actually at stake.

What then is the real threat of Iran that inspires such fear and fury? Recall the analysis of U.S. intelligence that Iran’s nuclear programs (with no effort to produce bombs, as far as intelligence can determine) are “a central part of its deterrent strategy.”

Who would be concerned by an Iranian deterrent? The answer is plain: the rogue states that rampage in the region. Far in the lead in this regard are the rejectionist triad. That is too obvious to review in the case of the U.S. and Israel. Saudi Arabia is joining the club with its invasion of Bahrain to suppress a reform movement there and now its murderous assault on Yemen, accelerating the humanitarian catastrophe there

For the United States, the characterization as a rogue state is familiar. Fifteen years ago, Samuel Huntington warned in Foreign Affairs that for much of the world the U.S. is “becoming the rogue superpower,” considered “the single greatest external threat to their societies.” His words were echoed shortly after by the president of the American Political Science Association, Robert Jervis, who observed that “In the eyes of much of the world, in fact, the prime rogue state today is the United States.” As we have seen, global opinion supports this judgment today by a substantial margin.

Furthermore, the mantle is worn with pride. That is the clear meaning of the insistence of the leadership and the political class, in media and commentary, that the U.S. reserves the right to resort to force if it determines, unilaterally, that Iran is violating some commitment. It is also a long-standing official stand of liberal Democrats, for example the Clinton Doctrine that the U.S. is entitled to resort to “unilateral use of military power” even for such purposes as to ensure “uninhibited access to key markets, energy supplies and strategic resources,” let alone alleged “security” or “humanitarian” concerns.

In his letter to Congress, cited earlier, Obama reiterated the doctrine that the U.S. will use force, unilaterally, as it chooses. And the doctrine is accepted with such unanimity that it elicited no comment. The same was true when Obama declares that the alternative to the nuclear agreement is war – meaning an attack by the U.S. or Israel. Who else contemplates such actions – in fact openly declares the intention to carry them out, if it chooses?

https://www.telesurtv.net/english/opinion/The-Nuclear-Deal-20150822-0003.html

No matter what is said about the strides that have been made regarding the treatment and value of women the actions within law and culture make liars of us. This problem seems insurmountable because the focus is on a symptom and not the actual illness which is White Supremacy. But the symptoms will persist and evolve because those who are affected are its biggest champions just like the Incels who call women sluts but hate those that won't submit to their advances.

It isn't a coincidence that they share the same language as the supermist or that they engage in 'slut shaping' and rape fantasy their frustration is with their inability to dominate what they have been told is their right to dominate. They don't simply want any kind of woman they want the thing they 'despise' they want a 'Stacy' that responds to them as if they were a 'Chad' with money and anything less simply won't do!

Why most black people are not wealthy

by Ramdath Jagessar



Photo : Ramdath Jagessar

It seems to be true that blacks in Trinidad are not wealthy, when compared to the Indians, the Syrians, Chinese, French creoles and even the Portuguese all around them.

Now it is true blacks have the vast majority of the jobs paid for by the state, the well paid, permanent, cost of living indexed government jobs for life, but is that wealth?

No, sir, good salary is not wealth, unless a portion of it is saved and used to acquire wealth in other areas than government jobs. Even blacks in the oil industry, the highest paying jobs in the country, are not considered to be wealthy.

Wealth comes from private enterprise where the possible profits are not limited like salary jobs. Wealth comes from setting up your own business companies, even from farming and fishing where accumulation of wealth is possible.

Wealth is acquiring useful education that puts you into well paying jobs, or becoming an independent professional whose salary is not fixed.

To cut it short, wealth comes from taking materials or skills and adding value to the materials, or applying the skills in ways that are not limited to monthly or fortnightly salaries.

The real issue with black people is that they are not applying the paths to wealth in any serious way,  and are stuck in the salary road that makes you comfortable at best, but never wealthy.

A bigger issue is simply that blacks are so stupid they refuse to learn from their own experiences, and even worse, they refuse to learn from the experiences of others in the same environment when it comes to acquiring wealth.

Take the case of the Syrians, whom all agree have managed to become very wealthy in a remarkably short period of some 60 years, starting with no financial assets at all.  We all remember the Syrians from the fifties of the last century, WALKING from house to house with bolts of cloth to sell, later moving to bicycles and hand carts, opening little pathetic hardwares and tiny small businesses.

We knew them, went to school with them, and saw them moving up with lightning speed. Today the Syrians own massive businesses, are known as enterprising business people and educated professionals, and are said to have acquired fabulous property holdings and foreign currency.

What have black people learned from the success of their Syrian fellow citizens? Nothing in my book!  All black people could say is that the Syrians are corrupt, they are selling drugs, they are crooked business people - and that is worse than a bad joke. Why haven't black people imitated the Syrians in becoming very wealthy, without necessarily being corrupt, crooked drug dealers?

No big brainwork is needed to see that the Syrians work really hard, they save money, they don't believe in conspicuous consumption, they work to build up the family as a unit, they preserve their conservative culture, their family life, their way of sacrifice for the long term, their determination to educate themselves, their strategy of helping each other and their community, all the good stuff that black people don't have and have never had in Trinidad.

Even black people working for the Syrians in close contact with them daily appear to have learned nothing. They work for the Syrians their whole lives, then retire and collect a pension! As I said, they have learned nothing.

And by the way, the very qualities the Syrians have used in their rise upwards seem to be the same qualities many Indians have used to empower ourselves and acquire wealth over the last 100 years or so.  Yes, yes, black people have sat in school benches next to us Indians, have played cricket and football with us, have gone to university with us, but no they have not started businesses with us, have not become lawyers and doctors and computer professionals with us.

We Indians don't have to go to a party every Saturday night, our men don't all need to have a deputy, we don't have to spend all our income before the next payday, we don't leave fatherless children all round the block, our mothers sit down by the table each night to make sure the kids do their homework, we don't like the idea of living off credit cards and hire purchase. If we can't afford something we don't buy it, we plan for the rest of the year and next year too, not just until month end.   

But we don't tell those things to black people because they don't listen. They believe they have a better lifestyle than us, a better money style too than us cheapo Indians.

Black people know everything important already, so why do they have to learn anything from anybody?


http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:r1JFMwbS2RwJ:icdn.today/post/why-most-black-people-are-not-wealthy+&cd=3&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=tt&client=firefox-b-ab

‘Raw hatred’: why the 'incel' movement targets and terrorises women

By Zoe Williams
Wed 25 Apr 2018
Last modified on Thu 3 May 2018 - theguardian.com

The man accused of carrying out the Toronto van attack has alleged links to ‘involuntary celibate’ online communities. The language they use may be absurd, but the threat they pose could be deadly

When a van was driven on to a Toronto pavement on Tuesday, killing 10 people and injuring 15, police chief Mark Saunders said that, while the incident appeared to be a deliberate act, there was no evidence of terrorism. The public safety minister Ralph Goodale backed this up, deeming the event “not part of an organised terror plot”. Canada has rules about these things: to count as terrorism, the attacker must have a political, religious or social motivation, something beyond “wanting to terrorise”.

Why have the authorities been so fast to reject the idea of terrorism (taking as read that this may change; the tragedy is very fresh)? Shortly before the attack, a post appeared on the suspect’s Facebook profile, hailing the commencement of the “Incel Rebellion”, including the line “Private (Recruit) … Infantry 00010, wishing to speak to Sgt 4chan please. C23249161.” (“4chan is the main organising platform for the ‘alt-right’,” explains Mike Wendling, the author of Alt-Right: from 4Chan to the White House.)

There is a reluctance to ascribe to the “incel” movement anything so lofty as an “ideology” or credit it with any developed, connected thinking, partly because it is so bizarre in conception.

Standing for “involuntarily celibate”, the term was originally invented 20 years ago by a woman known only as Alana, who coined the term as a name for an online support forum for singles, basically a lonely hearts club. “It feels like being the scientist who figured out nuclear fission and then discovers it’s being used as a weapon for war,” she says, describing the feeling of watching it mutate into a Reddit muster point for violent misogyny.

It is part of the “manosphere”, but is distinguished from men’s rights activism by what Wendling – who is also the editor of BBC Trending, the broadcaster’s social media investigation unit – calls its “raw hatred. It is vile. It is just incredibly unhinged and separate from reality and completely raw.” It has some crossover with white supremacism, in the sense that its adherents hang out in the same online spaces and share some of the same terminology, but it is quite distinctive in its hate figures: Stacys (attractive women); Chads (attractive men); and Normies (people who aren’t incels, ie can find partners but aren’t necessarily attractive). Basically, incels cannot get laid and they violently loathe anyone who can.

Full Article : theguardian.com

I suspect that every case of extreme actions by a self-identified “incel” has different nuances, but at the core of it all is an unsettling detachment from self.

On one side we have a case of male entitlement,  as males think they are entitled to female bodies. It would thus follow that having sexual relationships with females is well within their human rights. And when denied this right, they are justified in retaliating.

In some cases it is an issue of white entitlement. Many whites do actually believe they are entitled to pretty much anything in this cosmos and beyond. Being white, male and extremely disconnected from self brings about a kind of violent, greedy, impatient entitlement. This has been displayed in history time and time again.

Another aspect in this is envy, which can be seen in how some of the self-identified ‘incels’  have terms for those who fit the white supremacy physical ideal (Chads and Stacys). Looking like “Chad” supposedly makes it easier to have relationships, including sexual ones. And this is true. But this is a result of a very flawed system, and of course, people’s lack of integrity. The “incel” wishes they were a Chad because then they could probably have sexual relations. Never mind that the idea of Chad is itself problematic.

Involuntary celibacy is not necessarily synonymous with lack of suitors. It is sometimes lack of desired suitors. The people deemed attractive within white supremacy - the Stacys. Because few are immune to this socialisation, one will find that the same system that marginalises people is the same system they are fighting to be recognised and approved by. Some people are simply blind to fat, short, non Western-looking people. This in a way makes the celibacy inflicted.

I have come across arguments that we are ‘sexual beings’, aimed to imply that we NEED and MUST have sex for our very basic day-to-day continuity. I was once personally convinced of this. So that even if the person ‘available’ to you is full of crap, one should tolerate it because you are a ‘sexual being’ that needs a sexual partner.

Another angle I think is worth pointing out is the offender’s history. In some of these cases, the offender has shown signs of violence prior to incidents carried out on a large scale. Be it towards themselves, others or both. What tends to happen is that the “loved” one choose not to report these cases. Timely intervention that could have prevented a repeat of similar or bigger magnitude is impeded.

Indeed, I think this is an issue of gross lack of self-knowledge, self-esteem and integrity.

What I initially thought was already said.

The article is weak because the writer failed to mention the role classism, sizeism, racism, colorism and other social inequities play in denying even whites sexual partners or their desired sexual partners. Even people’s desires are unfair to themselves, so a wealthy white may desire a certain type of partner and be terribly unhappy and violent because he or she cannot get what they want.

Most people’s desires have been poorly conditioned therefore even those who get sexual partners often remain unsatisfied. Where both males and females are conditioned to view ideal beauty based on a certain Eurocentric appearance, then most would consider some of the same limited number of model-type persons to be their ideal. There isn’t enough of them to go around. Money is a great attraction and since the patriarchal system made females dependant on males, many males are under pressure to demonstrate they are providers to get partners. However, males who are preferred by looks can get females to provide for them.  Generally, people enter relationships settling for others because they could not get who they fantasize. In more indigenous non-white cultures, relationships were based on both parties being able to provide. Beauty had a function.

White people react the worst when faced with societal pressures because of their strong feelings of entitlement. Although Blacks are denied the most, Blacks generally have more experience with these pressures and generally, do not have a sense of entitlement. Blacks are therefore less prone to such extreme behaviours as highlighted in the article (although some can ape poor white conduct). Many Blacks may also not react to societal pressures based on low self-worth. We see Blacks, like Kanye West, behaving rashly after becoming rich because they then crave white privilege and cannot make sense of not being abe to get it.

In the case of Whites who feel they cannot measure up economically, they are taught to first turn their anger on non-whites as the source of their problems. Non-whites, and more so Blacks remain the ultimate victims of White Privilege.