https://www.yesmagazine.org/opinion/2022/06/30/abortion-indigenous-peoples-reproductive-health

The overturning of Roe v. Wade is part of a long legacy of American Christian values being forced on Indigenous communities. Indigenous peoples in the United States have only recently been able to assert their own religious ideas and practices. The American Indian Religious Freedom Act passed in 1978 after nearly 200 years of religious suppression by the United States government. This law guarantees that Indigenous people have a right to access religious sites, possess sacred objects, and have full freedom to worship and practice religious ceremonies. This includes reproductive health ceremonies.

Boarding schools run by Christian churches or the federal government also played a strong role in suppressing and criminalizing Native American cultures and religions. One impact that boarding schools had on Indigenous children and communities was loss of intergenerational cultural knowledge. The U.S. government is just beginning to address part of this history, as activists and members of Congress push for the passage of the Truth and Healing Commission on Indian Boarding School Policies Act.

Revitalization of Indigenous Knowledge

Though Indigenous communities deeply suffered from the intentional destruction of our cultures and religions, there has been a vibrant resurgence in traditional ecological knowledge in our communities, including reproductive health care practices.

Indigenous people are revitalizing coming-of-age ceremonies that mark when someone begins menstruation, including Ojibwe berry fasts, a year-long period in which young people abstain from eating berries and learn from their elders, and Hoopa Valley Tribal Flower Dance ceremonies, which Cutcha Risling Baldy, a professor of Native American studies at California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt, calls “a tangible, physical, spiritual and communal act of decolonization.” Indigenous doulas and cultural birthing practices are also on the rise, with collectives popping up throughout Canada and the U.S.

In the days since the Supreme Court decision, several states with large tribal and urban Indian communities, including North Dakota, South Dakota, Wyoming, Idaho, and Oklahoma, have passed or introduced laws that ban or severely restrict abortion. Indigenous people on reservations seeking medical abortions or contraceptive care already face barriers; medical abortions and even Plan B pills are rarely available on reservation Indian Health Service facilities, where many Native people receive health care. The recent decision to overturn Roe v. Wade will likely exacerbate these barriers to Western health care.

What remains to be seen is how the decision and resulting state laws that ban abortion will exacerbate barriers to utilizing traditional medicinal practices and Indigenous knowledge—and if this is a violation of Indigenous peoples’ centuries-old cultural and religious rights.

FKA twigs on learning to be the boss

"The Global North’s political economy relies on the oppression of the Global South in general and of Palestine in particular.

As academic and writer Patrick Higgins noted in late October: 'We’re seeing a blow against the US-led world system. Since, really post-World War II, but especially post-1970 or so, Israel has been the linchpin, the basket into which most of the American chips are put, in order to sustain broader control of West Asia.'

This historical reality places a profound obligation on those in the Global North who would seek to be in solidarity to seriously consider what strategies and tactics Palestinians are calling for in the struggle for liberation, sovereignty and safety.

Such calls to action do not include that we opine on Palestinians’ methods of resistance.

They do include that we understand the history and actuality of that resistance, do all we can to stop the ongoing provision of arms to the occupation, engage in boycott, divestment and sanctions, and fight back against the criminalization of those who support Palestine’s liberation from Zionist settler colonialism.

As Virginia Tech’s Bikrum Gill exhorted: 'Show no fear, no surrender, as you oppose those who support the US-Israeli genocide of Palestinians. Bring your institutions to crisis if their functioning requires silence or complicity.'"

The people who want Britney to stop "embarrassing herself" online when she posts dancing videos or scantily clad photos only see her as sick, not as a woman who may be trying to reclaim her personal expression after spending 13 years under the total control of others. In fact, given the reaction to her freely expressing herself, it's clear that people view a noncompliant woman as unhealthy, and neurodivergence itself as embarrassing. They wanted to "free" Britney, but only the version of her that they felt was palatable to them. 

A person with mental illnesses shouldn't have to measure up to arbitrary standards of respectability in order to deserve empathy. So what if she's mad? It doesn't make her any less deserving of freedom.

What Britney deserves is to be fully and openly mad and whatever else, instead of having to live with people casting their own projections of who they want her to be. She doesn't deserve to have her behaviour constantly dissected just because she's in the public eye. 

Just wanted to share an excerpt from this article where Esteban talks a little about the Concours Excellence Mecanique competition of Alpine. This interview was done during the Alpine PR event held in Madrid last December.

the number of people who have messaged me interested in the táin and which translation i've used: is anyone also interested in approx 50+ articles/chapters on early medieval ireland / sub-roman britain? because i have a google drive folder just sitting there that i need an excuse to organise.

marc márquez & obsession

forward to kafka's short stories, anne rice // credited to charles bukowski (disputed) // the unabridged journals of sylvia plath, sylvia plath // [x]

"After you, poetry will cease."

– A Peom By Nizar Qabbani, "Bilqis" (tr. from Arabic by Yasser Aman King Saud University, Saudi Arabia)

Nizar Qabbani was a Syrian poet and diplomat who was famous for his romantic, nationalist and feminist poetry. Balqis an Iraqi woman who was his second wife. On 15th December 1981, she died in a bomb blast in the Iraqi embassy in Beirut during the Lebanese Civil War. Her death depressed him deeply, and he spent most of his life in Europe after her death. The poem was reportedly written the same day Balqis passed away.

The Supreme Court handed down a decision on Wednesday which effectively gives Border Patrol agents who violate the Constitution total immunity from lawsuits seeking to hold them accountable.

Justice Clarence Thomas’s majority opinion in Egbert v. Boule, moreover, has implications that stretch far beyond the border. Egbert guts a seminal Supreme Court precedent, Bivens v. Six Unknown Named Agents (1971), which established that federal law enforcement officers who violate the Constitution may be individually sued — and potentially be required to compensate their victims for their illegal actions.

Egbert is a severe blow to the broader project of police accountability. While it does not target lawsuits against state law enforcement officers who violate the Constitution, it all but eliminates the public’s ability to sue border patrol officers — and possibly all federal officers — who commit similar violations.

In fairness, Egbert does indicate that people who believe their rights were violated by federal law enforcement may file a grievance with the law enforcement agency that employs the officer who allegedly violated the Constitution. But such grievances will be investigated by other law enforcement officers, and no court or other agency can review a law enforcement officer’s decision to exonerate a fellow officer.

And, perhaps most importantly, Egbert most likely shuts down a civil rights plaintiffs’ ability to be compensated if their rights are violated.

The Supreme Court is allowing Idaho to enforce its ban on gender-affirming care for transgender youth while lawsuits over the law proceed, reversing lower courts. The justices’ order Monday allows the state to put in a place a 2023 law that subjects physicians to up to 10 years in prison if they provide hormones, puberty blockers or other gender-affirming care to people under age 18. Under the court’s order, the two transgender teens who sued to challenge the law still will be able to obtain care

Idaho Attorney General Raúl Labrador said in a statement that the law “ensures children are not subjected to these life-altering drugs and procedures. Those suffering from gender dysphoria deserve love, support, and medical care rooted in biological reality. Denying the basic truth that boys and girls are biologically different hurts our kids.” Gender-affirming care for youth is supported by every major medical organization, including the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Psychiatric Association.

Follow the news. The Folkwang Museum's cancelling of Anaïs Duplan's exhibition (and still profiting from his work) is not the only institution overreacting preemptively in light of the current crackdown of israel-critical voices on a slippery slope to fascism.

These developments didn't just start with Hamas' attack on Israel of Octobre 7th:

But the political landscape is using its performative solidarity with Israel to restrict fundamental rights more and more especially with the rightwing parties heating up the migration debate again and the Ampel dropping all semblance of a backbone. And they aren't nearly done - keep in mind the upcoming elections where everyone wants a piece of AfD's fascism pie as they are projected to reach majority in three states.

“Most therians can easily relate to or understand mammalian shifts, being wolves, or cats, or foxes… even I can relate to it, having had wolf cameo shifts every so often… but very few know what it’s like to be a reptile, especially a snake. Long before I knew what a therian was, I believed strongly that I was a serpent. [...] I learned to work out these shifts and urges through my art work, and later, through learning to belly dance. [...] When I belly dance, it is a profound experience, because I work out that slithering motion, I work out a shift, where I feel beautiful and liberated, I become at once the snake and the snake charmer. [...] Most may see a pretty girl who dances really well, but to me, I am showing them what I feel inside through a beautiful, ancient, and ever-feminine art.”

- Excerpt from SerpentineZebra’s essay “Snake Eyes: Living as a Cobra Therian.” February 27, 2009. Read the full essay here.

bandguys will have you reading scholarly articles about bdsm with chronic pain

I just finished reading Esteban's interview in the new GP Racing magazine issue...if you think his High Performance interview was good, for me this one is better. More so because there was actually more discussion about his personality and how he uncompromising he is. I already had a hunch about how he is behind closed doors and this article basically confirms it.

They also talked about his training during the off season, his past and his future in F1. The article is really good and if you can or are able you can read it in the gp racing app (I only purchased the latest issue). But i'll add one excerpt that resonated with me:

I guess to me this story encapsulates just how hard their life (Esteban and his parents) was during his karting years.