Every search you make at GoodSearch generates a free donation of about one cent to an organization you can choose from among more than 24,000. These include the National Youth Rights Association, the Albany Free School (listed only as Free School), as well as four Sudbury-type schools: Alpine Valley School, Big Rock Sudbury School, The Clearwater School, and Hudson Valley Sudbury School.

(crossposted to ageinaction, antiageism, fuck_ageism and kyriarchy)

My parents treated me mostly, but not completely as an equal, and have formed my personality somewhat. Could someone please give me the kind of help a non-ageist adult would give their child, and help me become who I want to become? Of course, because I want to be equal, I am also ready to help these people or others, in this way or in others. Many thanks in advance!

(crossposted to _youthrights, ageinaction, antiageism, fuck_ageism, kyriarchy, and teenageriots)

I say this not because i think drugs are great, but because an examination of it reveals the prejudicial attitudes on which it is predicated, and because i am sickened to see the many lives that have been sacrificed on its altar.

The War on Drugs is predicated on the idea that drug use is indication of a "moral failing." Person X lives a somehow "degraded" life (and we can therefore pity or despise her) and "turns to drugs" to "escape the harshness of her life." Or, alternately, person Y is a bored suburbanite teenager "lured" to drug use, like sailors drawn to the rocks by the siren song, pressured into trying it by his peers ("if it weren't for that kid with funny hair and ex-hippie parents, my child would never have tried them").

This is the way drug use is portrayed by the malestream media, projecting this moralistic analysis from the safety of gated communities far from the 'iniquity' of urban life, and thus, presumably, far from anywhere drugs are commonly used or sold.

It is but one brick in a wall built to disguise an authoritarian kyriarchal agenda, a power grab by the elites of this society predicated on racism, classism and sexism. It is a bandage covering a festering wound and soaking up the pus without allowing efforts to heal it by addressing its cause: oppression and exploitation. The "Drug War" is a way of pretending that oligarchical collectivism and cronyism can exist in a civilized society, by othering the victims and labelling them immoral.

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crossposting to my journal and crossposting to kyriarchy

This morning i am wondering about sensitivity, and whether it is a good thing or a bad thing.

Being "too sensitive" can make it difficult or impossible to operate in society. I've gone through phases in my life where i was so sensitive i had to restrict what news, television, and movies i was exposed to. During those phases i felt as though i had a better understanding of what was going on the the world around me. But that understanding came at the price of being more affected by what it was that i was perceiving.

It's natural to turn to the "cruelty" of nature and suggest that being sensitive is a vice or decadence in a world where all around us predators are eating prey and survival favors the fittest. The hole in that argument though is that we as "observers" of "nature" view the world through the lens of our cultural values and so it is difficult to know how "cruel" nature truly is and how much of that is anthropomorphizing. This view of nature overlooks a large amount of cooperation that goes on which belies the "selfish gene" view. For example, animals will often adopt the orphaned young of another species.

A key point that i want to focus on is the popular notion that people have a choice about how sensitive they are. People who are "too sensitive" are blamed for taking offense or being hurt as if they can control these reactions. A modern strategy for coping with sensitivity is medicating anyone who complains -- medicalizing sensitivity as if it were a physical abrogation.

What this attitude really indicates is the degree to which people are willing and/or able to use strategies designed to desensitize themselves. Our culture bears many memetic stratgies for doing this: the conscious censor, deprecating and dehumanizing "humor", religious and philosophical ideologies that lend support to dehumanization, conceptual "othering" of people directly invovled with oppression, language and "common sense" that normalizes and thus renders invisible certain unjust agendas. Those of us who can apply these strategies of self-censorship and modify our behavior accordingly are those who fare best in our cannibalistic society.

Lemma. The degree to which we have to desensitize ourselves just to function in society is directly indicative of the level of injustice in our society.

The strategies that i mentioned above would not be necessary if nature afforded most of us the right level of sensitivity. My belief is that most of us start out "overly sensitive" and are socialized to berate ourselves for it or edit it from our awareness using various strategies. We do this because it is what we must do to survive in a society that traumatizes and oppresses us.

Emancipation begins with sensitivity, with the rebirth of naive awareness that our existence in the society we have constructed is filled with suffering.

At the same time, each of us as afflicted members of our society might have no choice but to participate in desensitization to some degree just to keep up our own individual sanity. Is a "happy medium" possible?

crossposted to my journal and crossposted to kyriarchy

What is "neurodiversity"?

I noticed this in the community info and I'm not sure what it means...

Coined by feminist theologian Elisabeth Schuessler Fiorenza, "kyriarchy" means "the domination of the lord, slave master, husband, the elite freeborn educated and propertied man over all wo/men and subaltern men." "Kyriarchal relations of domination are built on elite gender, race, class, and imperial domination as well as wo/men's dependency, subordination, and obedience."

The need for this community became apparent to me after a recent debate in feminist about whether or not rape experienced by men is a feminist issue.

When brought up in feminist space, this topic has the effect of changing the stream of discussion away from the oppression and experiences of women. Feminism is in large part for promoting women's views and experiences, and in that regard, it is not appropriate to discuss rape experienced by men there.

On the other hand, rape in any form is an expression of power, and therefore rape experienced by men is related to the patterns of domination illuminated by feminist discourse.

Rape might be experienced by a lesbian or bisexual woman at the hands of her female partner. Or it might be experienced by a child at the hands of an adult. Or it might be experienced by a prisoner, with the involvement of prison guards or officials. Or it might be experienced by a person with a developmental disability. Or it might be experienced by an illegal immigrant working and living in a hidden sweatshop.

Each of these patterns of rape carries a different set of nuances, but they share something in common: they are expressions of opportunistic violence against people in positions of vulnerability. Each act of rape makes manifest implicit and normalized multi-layered domination in society, and it perpetuates domination by spreading mass trauma throughout affected populations.

Historically, awareness of the effects of domination-enforcement patterns like rape has arisen in single-focus discussion spaces like forums for women or people of color. These spaces are the "front line" against oppression. kyriarchy is thus meant as a supplement, a place where cross-currents can be identified after they are articulated in critical single-focus forums.